Daniel Alpert spent the last year shooting Mother Maker, a documentary about the Chicago Doula Project, which matches childbirth coaches with single, teenage, expectant mothers on the city’s west and south sides. Members of the communities they serve, the doulas guide their charges through pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and hang around afterward to get them on track for good parenting. They spend eight months with each mother, beginning four months prior to her delivery date....

It’s funny, isn’t it, how college athletic teams tend to maintain a consistent character from year to year, despite the steady turnover of players, and more often than not despite even a change of head coach. Under Mike Krzyzewski, Duke’s basketball team always seems capably confident. Michigan is, in all its sports, ever uppity, winning just enough championships to sustain its fans’ false pride. (The attitude of Michigan alumni toward the rest of the Big Ten seems to be “At least we’ve won a few....

Black songwriter Andy Razaf isn’t as well-known as Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and other white lyricists of his era. But such Razaf creations as “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Black and Blue,” and “My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More” earned him the admiration of his Caucasian colleagues, who regarded him as “an expert translator of uptown black experience,” according to Barry Singer in his 1992 Razaf biography, Black and Blue....

A 60-Minute History of Humankind, Neo-Futurists. The title may suggest the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s reliable brand of sophomoric pastiche. But writer-director Andy Bayiates deserves credit for choosing a more challenging path through the bloody thickets of human history. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this prime-time Neo-Futurist offering, Bayiates and choreographer Genevra Gallo represent Homo sapiens as perpetually caught between God and mammon. Some moments along the way sag, and some relevant material is left out even by the show’s own ridiculous standards of abridgment (Bayiates allowed himself a generous two hours in last year’s 43 Plays for 43 Presidents)....

Disorder in the court! “There is no outcome research comparing the consequences of child-custody placement decisions based on expert testimony to those without expert guidance,” write Thomas Gionis and Anthony Zito Jr. of Chicago’s John Marshall Law School, in the Southern Illinois University Law Journal (Fall 2002). “Further, lawyers who regularly work with mental-health professional experts in child-custody cases commonly are not impressed with their expertise, and often do not regard their input as helpful in reaching appropriate child-custody determination....

The Empire Brass has recorded an astonishing variety of music, from popular tunes to the standard concert repertoire, from ancient times through the 20th century. Lately its members have been focusing on their own arrangements of orchestral works. The only remaining founder of the quintet is trumpeter Rolf Smedvig, who recorded what I consider the finest version of Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto and who makes everything the quintet plays seem relaxed and natural....

The sidewalk was jammed with people in front of the new H&M store on Michigan Avenue just after noon last Friday. Some had waited since 10:15 in a line that snaked around the block to get into the Swedish chain’s newest store on opening day. The downtown location will serve as the midwest flagship of H&M, known for stocking trendy clothes at impossibly low prices. “Are they celebrating this store?” a woman in a sari asked, gesturing toward the sign wavers....

It’s not that Gillian Welch has shaken her obsession with American roots music–on her fourth album, Soul Journey (released in June on Acony), she’s kept her rustic sound, and in some ways her plaintive use of repetition owes more to blues structures than anything she’s ever done. But now she’s drawing her subject matter from her own past, not someone else’s. “Oh my mother was just a girl of 17,” she sings on “No One Knows My Name,” a rumination on the biological parents she’s never known....

After four years of breaking their instruments (and their bones) onstage, teen spaz band XBXRX called it quits in March 2002, when the bassist joined the navy in a failed attempt to impress a girl. (The group’s re-formed since with Weasel Walter, aka the Old Guy With the Credit Card, on drums.) During that downtime, XBXRX singer Chris Touchton, aka Vice Cooler, and a friend who goes by 900 Dix formed the fake gay boy band Hawnay Troof....

By David Harrell Fifty-seven years ago Papafio, one of five sons and six daughters, was born in Amanokrom, Ghana, a tiny village 30 miles east of Accra, the capital. His father grew corn, cassava, and plantains; his mother sold some of the food at the local market. Their sturdy brick house, built by Papafio’s grandfather, sheltered an extended family–as many as 30 people spent the night, along with several sheep and goats....

Billy Siegenfeld’s new sextet, Sorrows of Unison Dancing, shows the upbeat choreographer in as downhearted a mood as I’ve seen him. To Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and variations by Christian Cherry, he depicts an emotional universe offering only dispiriting and limited alternatives: One can try to dance in perfect unison with others, which is both impossible and boring, creating disaffection. Or one can dance alone, which tends to create anger....

Second City alums Maribeth Monroe and Kirk Hanley bring back their comic examination of wedding rituals, changing little besides the title (formerly Standing on Ceremony) and the running time (now a tight 75 minutes). While other shows in the wedding-angst genre–Tony and Tina’s…, My Big Fat Greek…–focus on the wedding “stars” and their family issues, Hanley and Monroe play a couple merely invited to a cousin’s ceremony, delving into the well-known but seldom mentioned phenomenon of guest anxiety....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June a man who suffered serious brain damage when he was hit by lightning in the parking lot of Cincinnati’s Kings Island amusement park filed a lawsuit against the park. According to the man’s lawyer, Drake Ebner, the park has a “duty of ordinary care” to warn its patrons against heading out to their cars when a thunderstorm is approaching....

Dear Chicago Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have a small beef about the July 25 Culture Club item “And Speaking of Poets….” As the founder of the organization that represents one of the 26 poets nominated for state poet laureate, I found it disappointing that Deanna Isaacs took a gossip-column attitude with the information she had and that she said the following: “If Lisel Mueller won’t bite, the buzz favors Li-Young Lee....

Once a week for the past two years, Mark Struzynski and about 13 friends have gotten together to play a little poker. Before this, Struzynski, a painter who runs an art space called the Green Room Gallery in the front of his Milwaukee Avenue loft, wasn’t much of a gambler. But his friends Samantha Peale and John Welter had caught the bug in James McManus’s class on the literature and science of poker at the School of the Art Institute, and they passed it on to him....

This second annual showcase of one-person performances features more than 40 pieces, ranging from stand-up comedy acts to theatrical monologues and one-person plays. The festival runs through March 22. Shows take place at the Athenaeum Theatre, third-floor studio, 2936 N. Southport, 312-902-1500; Playground Theater, 3341 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3793; and WNEP Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-755-1693. Ticket prices for individual programs are $12; “all access” passes cost $75. In addition to the performances, interdisciplinary artist Rachel Rosenthal will lead a performance workshop on the festival’s closing weekend....

Landscape of the Body Now a failed production is an entirely different matter. You can learn more from some failed productions than you can from any number of good ones. Take Hamlet, of which it’s possible to argue that all productions are failed since the play is too vast to be contained by one director’s interpretation. I remember seeing a version in which all the elements conspired to make Claudius far more vivid than the protagonist....

The White Sox’ annual Dog Day Afternoon promotion used to take place, appropriately enough, in the dog days of summer. But this year they held it on the second Saturday home date of the season, a day that turned out to be barely fit for man or beast. The Sox weren’t about to waste the promotion on a summer weekend, when the Comiskey Park bleachers fill with sun worshipers; better to bring the dog aficionados to a game that might otherwise produce a paltry crowd....

Sweetback Stabbers? Things have turned sour at Sweetback Productions. Founders Kelly Anchors and her husband, Michael Mc-Kune, have been thrown out of the company they launched in 1994 by a board of directors made up of their very best friends. The friends–coartistic director David Cerda, managing director Steve Hickson, and husband-and-wife production team Pauline Pang and Richard Lambert–say Anchors is brilliant and they love her, but none of them wants to work with her anymore....

The curators of this engaging group show, Duncan MacKenzie and Shannon Stratton, argue that the “transcendent” visions of past landscape artists such as Turner are no longer possible in a world that’s been “stripmined, overdeveloped, amusementparked.” MacKenzie’s miniature sculpture Model for Communal Gathering is a patch of grass jammed with cars and people that has a junkyard-chaos charm. Stratton’s more poetic Wish You Were Here–a wall collage of an alpine scene in paper, cellophane, vinyl, and white tape, out of which poke black plastic cutouts of evergreens–makes an almost Japanese use of uncluttered space....