“Love is more than skin-deep, but hey, skin is the first layer. It’s hard to completely ignore.” With such hardworking talent, it’s unlikely they won’t land with their hands on the keyboard. So a quick observation about one writer, Harold Henderson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A search of the [20-year online] archive makes clear his output. A search of “Harold Henderson” brings up 1,405 hits: cover features, inside features, restaurant boxes, City Files, calendar sidebars, Field & Streets, These Parts, essays, years in review, Critic’s Choices, Snips, Our Towns, and perhaps summing up, Miscellany....

Lisa Loomer’s energetic, funny, yet heartbreaking tragicomedy about a Latina nanny and her employer, first produced in LA two years ago, is dazzling in this joint Teatro Vista-American Theater Company production, directed by Cecilie Keenan. The employer, Nancy, is a wealthy entertainment lawyer who wants to treat her baby’s caregiver, Ana, as a member of the family. But Ana, a married immigrant, has a son of her own, unbeknownst to Nancy....

Even in a staged reading ShawChicago does a great job of giving lively personalities to George Bernard Shaw’s rich characters. Alyson Green brims with idealistic hope and conviction as Major Barbara, a woman bent on saving souls via the Salvation Army. As her tough-minded mother, Kate Young is a force of nature and Shavian wit, and Tony Dobrowolski is equally engaging as Barbara’s scoundrel father, a millionaire munitions manufacturer. Belinda Bremner and Terence Gallagher are also fun as cynical sinners playing at being saved by the major....

Lead Story Preemptive War Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August ice cream truck driver Markus Miller, 29, was arrested in Enid, Oklahoma, after he wrapped up an altercation with an 18-year-old customer by allegedly pulling out his handgun and firing two shots at the woman’s feet, one of which fragmented and hit her collarbone. And in July police in Grahamstown, South Africa, were looking for a soccer referee after he ended a confrontation with a coach whose player he’d yellow-carded by pulling out a gun and shooting him dead....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February a national nonprofit organization of yoga instructors and enthusiasts filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against celebrity yogi Bikram Choudhury (creator of the trendy Bikram style), challenging his right to trademark yoga positions and harass independent studios with threats of exorbitant fines. They claim yoga is a 5,000-year-old tradition and can’t be owned; he counters that he’s copyrighted only his special sequence of positions, not the positions themselves....

This “convergence of Chicago artists,” presented by Performing Arts Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs through April 18. The avant-garde showcase features some of the city’s most adventurous artists working in the disciplines of theater, performance, circus arts, storytelling, dance, music, video, and sound and installation art. All activities take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, on the main stage and in the Lobby studio; the sprawling arts complex also hosts installations in other spaces....

“When I was young I was alone a lot, and art was a place I could escape to,” writes artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel in the introduction to a 2003 overview of his work. “What I wanted to do was find some kind of place where my imagination could not be stopped.” He’s found that place in his third feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed 1997 memoir by former French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who at age 43 suffered a stroke that left him almost completely paralyzed....

On Saint Etienne’s latest, Tales From Turnpike House (Savoy Jazz), the band has virtually swung to its stylistic apogee: once a club-ready dance-floor band with a gift for melody, they’re now a full-fledged pop group (and a superb one at that) with some dancey elements. In exchanging song production for songwriting their sound became more organic–fewer drum machines and synths, more acoustic instrumentation–which suits Turnpike House, a concept album illustrating an average day in the life of the house’s suburban London working-class inhabitants....

When the splendid and underappreciated saxist Sonny Fortune played at Jazz Showcase in 2003, he drew from his 2000 album In the Spirit of John Coltrane, throwing himself into a full-tilt reexamination of his relationship to his primary inspiration. For Continuum, recorded later that year for his Sound Reason label, Fortune paid homage to saxist Wayne Shorter and percussionist Mongo Santamaria, with whom Fortune played in the late 60s. Those were just two of the certifiable legends who’ve benefited from Fortune’s contributions....

Ever since her first novel, Falling, a nuanced tale of a suicidal young woman attending the fictional Chicago University, published 20 years ago, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer has drawn inspiration from an ever-widening pool of material. Buffalo Afternoon deals with the struggles of returning Vietnam vets; The Snow Fox is a medieval samurai love saga; The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat is told from the perspective of a beloved pet (and is much better than it sounds)....

Whenever I run into references to Ben Franklin I’m struck by what an absolute stud he was. He discovered electricity, founded the postal system, had a passel of kids, hit the French like Jerry Lewis, and published Poor Richard’s almanac. How much of this is hype and how much is the truth? The other founding fathers seem to get much more play even though they look like chumps in comparison. Why?...

After being inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year and issuing yet another greatest-hits collection, Blondie has hit the road on what’s being promoted as the group’s final tour. It might be cliche to say that all the recent attention has highlighted just how timeless their music is, but when they’re pop-perfect they are bulletproof. Songs like “Atomic,” “Call Me,” and their cover of “Hanging on the Telephone” are part of the DNA of any self-respecting music fan, let alone anyone who ever had even a mild new-wave phase....

Gustav Mahler saw the poems in the German folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn as expressing the essence of nature and life, and he found the perfect musical language for many of them. Eleven of the songs he loosely grouped into a cycle under the same title will be performed here by German baritone Matthias Goerne, who’s ideal for this music. A student of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, he has a stunningly beautiful voice and great artistry, delivering interpretations that have made him one of the top lieder singers of our time....

The cinema of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is populated not so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences—souls, if you will. This is a trait he shares with other masters of portraiture, including Robert Bresson, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Demy, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tourneur. It’s not a religious predilection but rather a humanist, spiritual, and aesthetic tendency. What carries these mysterious souls, and us along with them, isn’t stories—though untold or partially told stories pervade all six of Costa’s features....

Fountains of Wayne front man Adam Schlesinger is as skilled a pop formalist as they come, as evidenced by his Oscar-nominated title track for That Thing You Do! and more recently the spot-on faux-80s new-wave material he wrote for Music and Lyrics. But his facility with genre can also be a liability in his own band’s music, at times crossing the line between formalistic and formulaic. The band clearly hit it out of the park with “Stacy’s Mom,” from 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers, showing that the Fountains can indeed transcend their sometimes too-evenhanded songwriting to deliver a bluntly enjoyable radio confection....

There’s a peculiar tango being danced in the 32nd Ward committeeman’s race. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Waguespack won last spring, edging out the remnants of the 32nd Ward organization formerly controlled by Dan Rostenkowski and retiring committeeman Terry Gabinski, supporters in the know urged him to run for the position. But soon after being sworn in, Waguespack announced that he had no plans to....

Like a desiccated blossom fluttering from the pages of a dusty leather-bound tome, Blindfaith Theatre’s exquisite staging of stories and poems by Chicago expatriate Edward Gorey wafts back onstage, perfectly preserved despite a three-year hiatus. All the players from the 2003 cast are back, and if anything their characterizations are better than before, like well-worn raiments trained to the shapes of their wearers. Jill van Brussel’s costumes and William Crowley’s set and props, a riot of black-and-white blazonry, place things firmly in the vaguely turn-of-the-century, vaguely Atlantic-rim realm where Gorey’s dissipated gentry amble toward their gruesome, comically inevitable ends....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All right, no snickering … but what is it about Milla Jovovich as cartoon action hero? I mean, what does she have that, say, Parker Posey doesn’t—who’s obviously no action diva but still came to mind in the middle of Resident Evil: Extinction, for the patented “drop dead, you idiot” baleful stare, the hint of a smirk along an ever so slightly dropsical lower-lip line....

Yes **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Sally Potter With Simon Abkarian, Joan Allen, Shirley Henderson, Sam Neill, Wil Johnson, Gary Lewis, Raymond Waring, and Stephanie Leonidas Yes is a post-9/11 love story, set chiefly in London, about a passionate adulterous affair between an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen), who’s unhappily married to an English politician, and a somewhat younger Lebanese cook (Simon Abkarian), who’s unmarried and used to work as a surgeon in Beirut....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tamara Tootle, formerly a phys ed teacher at Ernest Ward Middle School in Pensacola, Florida, was arrested on bribery charges in April; according to authorities, in 2004 and 2005 she’d offered her students a deal in which anyone who didn’t want to participate in gym class could pay her a dollar a day and receive a perfect grade without ever suiting up, and about 150 kids took her up on it....