George Piper Dances First-rate companies and choreographers understand the language of contemporary culture as well as of dance. As two recent programs demonstrated, dance forms from modern to ballet can use TV and film references to help audiences notice how the world moves. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It opened with William Forsythe’s 1984 quartet Steptext, set–if somewhat erratically–to a Bach chaconne. The piece begins in total silence as a single dancer moves into a spotlight, plants his feet, and does a solo with arms and torso alone....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Researchers at Syracuse University reported in December that different species of bats tend to exhibit an inverse relationship between brain size and testicle size. In November two bureaucrats with the U.S. Veterans Affairs department in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, were charged with accepting kickbacks on governmental purchase of red tape. (The tape is used to deter tampering with prescription medications....

Ken Bowden, a technology consultant, and Jim Nemeth, a technical writer, are a gay couple who share a two-story house on West Balmoral in Forest Glen, a tidy neighborhood near Foster and Cicero. In mid-July they painted two panels of six-foot fencing Pepto-Bismol pink and propped them up against their existing fence facing the side door of their neighbors, John Vasilopulos and his elderly mother, Kanella, or Kay. Bowden says that the Vasilopuloses had displayed “a deep hatred of gays” and had “harassed and taunted us every single day this summer....

Three years ago Michael Patrick Thornton marched in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, downed a couple Guinnesses at the Irish American Heritage Center, and picked up a snack at Taco Bell to take to a friend’s house. “And then, bang!” he says. “Five minutes into a taco, it felt like an entire football team was standing on my neck in high heels.” When aspirin didn’t relieve the pain, friends took him to the emergency room at Resurrection Hospital....

NQuita Mitos | Tanya Saracho A.’s new play consists of monologues by three multidimensional Mexican-American women. A frustrated mother flees her husband. A girl with no self-esteem tries to be optimistic about her relationship. And in the most complicated monologue, an unlikable young woman denies her family and ethnicity and rebels against the identity imposed on her by others. Each role is performed by a different actress on Thursday and Friday, but on Saturday and Sunday Saracho plays all three characters, adeptly shifting her voice to differentiate them....

Noble Fool Theatricals’ seventh Gina Oswald parody of Osmond-esque holiday specials falls a bit flat despite its witty original carols and Patricia Musker’s unfailing ability to work a room as diva Oswald–even a roomful of sleepy (turkey-bloated?) suburbanites. This year’s premise is admittedly tired: Gina gets Scrooged after announcing plans to leave her holiday show for a Vegas gig. But music director Bonnie Shadrake’s cleverness and the clear-as-silver-bells ensemble keep us going in between jokes needing polish and supporting characters mired in cliche (despite Debra Watassek’s and Adam Hummel’s lively performances as a stage mother and a gay stylist)....

One of the great joys of baseball, Harry Caray used to say, is its unpredictability. White Sox fans have felt that joy this season. Accustomed to the team’s hard-hitting ways, which can be traced from the Frank Thomas era back to the Winnin’ Ugly 1983 team and beyond to the ’77 South Side Hit Men, most fans tended to be skeptical about the shift by general manager Ken Williams and manager Ozzie Guillen to a roster built around pitching and defense....

Lydia R. Diamond’s new play juggles issues of race, sex, and class, maintaining high stakes while indulging every opportunity for humor. The daughter of a legendary black academic meets her boyfriend’s affluent African-American family at their swank Martha’s Vineyard digs. Before long it comes out that she once hooked up with his doctor brother, who’s brought his rich white activist girlfriend home at the same time, generating a whole series of hilariously awkward confrontations....

By day, Chad Lewis of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is an unassuming grant writer for a nonprofit organization. By night and weekend, he’s Chad Lewis, PI, one of a handful of paranormal investigators in the state. Lewis, 29, logged roughly 30,000 miles last year crisscrossing Wisconsin to inspect everything from alleged haunted houses and crop circles to reports of vampires, werewolves, and spaceships. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lewis, who received his master’s degree in applied psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2002 after completing a thesis on paranormal perception, takes his work as seriously as Fox Mulder ever did....

This noisy, confused 90-minute show about the history of the fool has no discernible themes and rarely any humor. Conceived by John Pierson and written by him and the other six performers, it consists of many apparently unrelated vignettes. The only elements unifying the piece are the plastic milk crates the performers too often wear on their heads: you can’t see their faces, and what they say is muffled and unintelligible....

Cecil, always enjoy your column, however you’ve got this “airplane and conveyor belt business” absolutely wrong. . . . –strafe, via the Straight Dope Message Board Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I knew this was going to happen. Everyone else, forgive me. This week’s column is for the geeks. Here’s the original question, as encountered online: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer)....

While attending a Nancy Drew conference this weekend, I heard the strangest story. In discussing the influence of orientalism on early Nancy Drew cover art (really), one speaker related an anecdote the cover artist used to tell. Apparently a group of Eskimos were brought to a New York City museum in the 1930s. They were cruelly put on display so that visitors could feed them raw fish for a small charge....

Trumpeter Wallace Roney has spent most of his career deflecting the complaint that he too closely mirrors his model, Miles Davis–an odd criticism given that Davis’s music is still relevant and virtually no one else concentrates on his seminal mid-60s playing style. On Roney’s most recent album, last year’s Prototype (HighNote), he incorporated electronic instruments–an innovation associated with Davis–and though the concept could’ve provided more grist for his critics, I imagine the music itself silenced them....

The first City Council meeting after Mayor Daley’s long, hot summer began with a prayer. And not just any clergyman was brought in for the job. It was the Reverend B. Herbert Martin Sr., once chair of the CHA and president of the Chicago NAACP, pastor to Mayor Harold Washington, and the controversial racial “healer” who in 1998 testified in court on behalf of one of the white teenagers who beat 13-year-old Lenard Clark nearly to death for biking in their neighborhood while black....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The son of a Turkish diplomat, Ertegun made a return on some investment capital in 1947 that helped him build a music empire that was nearly as diverse as Rome at its height. He presided over an era when recorded music exploded into a cutthroat capitalist industry that breaks hearts like bubble wrap. “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams,” sigh generations of hopefuls (some of whom even realize that they’re quoting Yeats), and the music biz laughs cruelly....

Greasy Joan & Company offers a powerful modern-dress rendition of Sophocles’ drama–a potent examination of liberty versus obedience, individual rights versus the good of the state, political ideology versus divine law. When Antigone’s brother is killed in a civil war, the king of Thebes declares the dead warrior a traitor and forbids his burial; Antigone defies the royal decree, though she knows she’ll face a death sentence. Director Julieanne Ehre, working from a trim adaptation by Irish writer Brendan Kennelly, makes the work resonate in a world where politicians cling to power by manipulating public anxiety....

Wassup Rockers Wassup Rockers, Clark’s latest exercise in teen anthropology, follows the misadventures of seven Latino skaters as they make their way from South Central to Beverly Hills and back again. It’s the least impressive of the Clark features I’ve seen (not including Ken Park, which has never been released in the U.S.), but its flaws are illuminating. Clark first made a name for himself with the photo book Tulsa (1971), whose moody portraits of thieves and junkies influenced Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Bridges almost never fail suddenly and by themselves; I can only find two such examples in the last twenty-five years. Usually they fail from events like earthquakes, floods, barge collisions, gas tankers catching fire under them, and such, or partly and slowly enough to close them before people or trains go in the drink. So while we should obviously do a good post-mortem on the pieces and history of this one to learn what we can, we will probably not find out how to avoid a lot of social cost in the future....

Charlotte Russe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For many of us high-low dressing means doing the bulk of our shopping at Forever 21 and Target so we can afford that rare Stella McCartney jacket (even on sale) or those exquisite Chie Mihara pumps. Must-have designer pieces aren’t likely to get more accessible any time soon, but the good news is that now there’s even more interesting inexpensive stuff to fill the gaps between them....

When Sam was born he was chubby and round, with slits for eyes. We called him Baby Buddha. But as he’s gotten older he’s started to look less and less Asian. His hair has grown curly and brown with red highlights like his mother’s. He actually has a bridge on his nose, something I didn’t enjoy until I reached my teens. His face has grown longer, his eyes wider. Cars are becoming sparser, and suburban sprawl has surrendered to advancing grids of soybean and corn....