I’m entering that odd time called menopause and have been told that doing Kegel exercises will help strengthen my uterus so that I don’t have “leakage” in my older age. So, while faithfully doing said exercises, I wondered if MEN have problems as they get older and if they can strengthen their own appendages. Can they? Or is this just another case of urethra envy on my part? –Judy Wright, Atlanta...

This friend of mine is taking a homeopathic remedy for a cold. He explained that it’s “the vibration of the molecules of the plant” that is the active remedy here. What’s up with this? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Homeopathy was founded by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843). He enunciated what remain today the guiding principles of homeopathic medicine, the foremost of which is the Law of Similars: if a large amount of medicine produces a given symptom, then a small amount of the medicine will stimulate the body to combat that symptom....

Trouble With a Capital T Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Music Man’s top box-office price of $64.50 is lower than Equity shows like Kiss Me Kate, which has a top ticket price of $75, says Chicago Theatre manager Jim Hirsch. “Last year the Chicago Theatre paid out over $1 million to union employees,” Hirsch says. “This was the only Music Man offered to us, and we felt the people of Chicago would want to see it....

In September 2001 independent filmmakers Jay Rosenblatt and Caveh Zahedi invited 150 colleagues to address the recent terror attacks, and though none of these 13 videos culled from the project is superb on its own, the mix of perspectives encourages us to think analytically about our own responses and the sources of the terrorists’ hatred. The opening video, Frazer Bradshaw’s The End of Summer, presents static suburban images, eerily empty of people, while in voice-over a little girl tries to understand the events of 9/11....

Smart, stylish, and funny, these 20 videos by Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas use surprising shifts in imagery or perspective to critique the media and the blandness of bourgeois life. Most are from her series “Dormimundo” (“sleep world”), which she calls “a documentary about the discomfort of being Mexican” in “a country of masquerades, of moral dislocations, of American dreams made of cardboard sets.” In Natural Instincts (1999) a billboard on a mundane Mexican street mysteriously lights up with a movie of a futuristic hair makeover; later the street is filled with dancing blonds....

Photographer Richard Younker grew up in the kitchen of his father’s downtown Chicago restaurant, watching and listening to the Irish, German, African-American, and Hispanic workers who made the place tick. As an adult, he used a camera to capture the people he saw, taking it into the city’s ethnic neighborhoods and toughest streets. For Younker, this was a continuing revelation: he saw people’s lives “etched into their faces” and says he heard poetry when they spoke....

The second installment of Bailiwick Repertory’s 2003 showcase of emerging directors focuses on new productions based on other sources. (The first segment of the festival, “Chicago Works,” ran in February; a gay- and lesbian-themed series is planned for June.) “In Adaptation/Translation” runs April 7-23 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. Performances take place Mondays-Wednesdays at 7:30 PM; each evening features three or four short plays. Tickets are $10 per evening; a pass costs $25....

Friday 9/19 – Thursday 9/25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After the assassination of Chilean president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet’s army herded some 12,000 political prisoners into the country’s largest sports stadium, Santiago’s Estadio Nacional. Over the next two months at least 7,000 people were tortured and several hundred were killed there. Carmen Luz Parot’s 2001 film, National Stadium, combines interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses with archival footage from the era following the coup....

Born in 1943, Neal Samors enjoyed an idyllic Rogers Park youth, playing ball in the alley behind his apartment building and seeing movies at the Granada Theatre. When he married in 1969, he and his wife settled on Farwell Avenue, just blocks from his childhood home. But after their daughter was born in 1975, they moved to Niles in search of a house with a yard, and eventually landed in Buffalo Grove....

Updated September 8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In past years the hopes of Chicago baseball fans had already crashed into a mangled heap by September and a new Bears campaign never failed to bring with it a sunny, Old Style-fueled optimism. Not this time. As Tom Waddle reported for Fox News Sunday night, “Playing from behind is not the strength of this Bears team....

Given her special place in the religion of roots music–she’s high priestess in the Gram Parsons memorial chapel–it was preordained that when Emmylou Harris collaborated with producer Daniel Lanois on 1995’s Wrecking Ball the more puritan elements of the congregation would protest. Scolds of that ilk never take historical context or services rendered into account: Harris held aloft the torch of tradition when it counted, during the Urban Cowboy dark ages; in today’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?...

Tristan und Isolde That’s Wagner for you–the most perverse, willful, and magical figure in the history of music. Tristan isn’t so much an opera as a conjuring trick. Everything about it that seems most off-putting–its vagueness, its plotlessness, its cardboard characters, its Twilight Zone setting–is a deliberate tactic. Wagner’s other operas demonstrate that he was perfectly capable of contriving sturdy plots and creating vivid characters and settings; the world of Die Meistersinger, for instance, is so realistic you can practically calculate the barometric pressure....

I Am My Own Wife About Face Theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps these tryouts will plant seeds for more significant works later. But to earn an audience’s trust, the organizers need to avoid the kind of misleading marketing that taints I Am My Own Wife, the only show with a lengthy run. Although festival brochures and newspaper ads identify three other shows as low-priced workshops, nothing would suggest to a paying audience member that the $20 I Am My Own Wife is anything but a finished work—that is, until you open your program to discover that it too is being workshopped....

Although he hails from deep blues territory (he was born Leroy Perryman in Vance, Mississippi, in 1945, and grew up in nearby Clarksdale, where he performed locally before moving to Chicago in ’66), L-Roy’s gravelly baritone and ebullient stage presence call to mind Kansas City-style jazz shouters like Big Joe Turner and soul sophisticates like Lou Rawls and Jerry Butler. When he hits the stage the line between sincerity and showmanship dissolves; his ample repertoire of vocal tricks and techniques–lugubrious vibrato, glissandos, dips, soaring upper-register wails, and aching, tight-throated ascents–embellishes rather than masks his earnestness....

“For a given graphic situation, I quest after its color G-spot,” says John Phillips. “I want to push pleasure buttons in the viewer.” Phillips–whose retrospective of 36 mostly abstract paintings and drawings is showing at the Columbia College A + D Gallery–also aims for a balance “somewhere between reverence and irreverence.” In Having Little Heart Attacks for You, pink biomorphic forms are connected like sausages on strings by wavy lines that vary from light to dark red....

In the electronic music world Marcus Schmickler is a real Renaissance man. Under the name Pluramon, the Cologne resident has developed a thoroughly modern take on Krautrock, stretching a colorful blend of treated electric guitar and digital noise over hugely propulsive drumming–provided in part by former Can percussionist Jaki Liebezeit. He’s also a member of the laptop-oriented electroacoustic ensemble MIMEO, composes experimental electronic pieces of symphonic depth under the names Wabi Sabi and Sator Rotas, has gone head-to-head with the blisteringly fast German analog synth improviser Thomas Lehn, and briefly dabbled in minimalist techno....

Maryville’s Mole? She denies it. “I certainly didn’t tell him what to do, who to talk to and who not to talk to, what words to use, how to sit, how to talk, how to show confidence, how to relate to people, how to get your point across,” she says. “No, I didn’t do that with him. Nor would I. I wouldn’t do that with anyone out there. The only ones I’ve talked to on that level were the kids....

Formed a couple years ago by cellist and composer William Raynovich, the Maverick Ensemble scored last summer with a festival here and in Urbana highlighting the music of avant-gardist Christian Wolff. Two of the three Chicago concerts in this year’s edition–there will be four more downstate–focus on electronic-music pioneer James Tenney. In the early 60s Tenney worked a day job at Bell Labs, devising computer programs for synthesizing sounds, and his pieces from that period are fascinating experiments with tone, noise, pitch, and statistical processes, reflecting the influence of Varese and Cage....

SI KAHN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Folksinger Si Kahn wears his politics on his sleeve. A lifelong civil rights and labor activist, he’s written so many populist anthems–including standards like “Gone, Gonna Rise Again” and “Mississippi Summer”–that a handful of his set lists could double as a union organizer’s chapbook. Proceeds from his records and concerts benefit Grassroots Leadership, a social-justice advocacy group he founded in the 70s....

On the weekends Eddie Cortes, a resident of Portage Park, goes shopping with his family. “My wife and I have two small children,” he says, “and they love to read–we’re blessed with that.” But in the retail district near his house–the so-called Six Corners at Irving Park, Cicero, and Milwaukee–Cortes complains, “there’s no place to eat, and there’s certainly no place to buy books. That pisses me off. I can’t spend my tax dollars where I live and work....