One evening last December a Pakistani man, still shivering from the winter chill, slid into a booth at a quiet restaurant on Devon with his eight-year-old daughter. When the curry and rice arrived he ate slowly, his six-three frame hunched over the table, and half listened as the girl prattled on about friends, school, and life as the new kid on the block. The dark circles under his eyes reached to the frames of his glasses, and he moved wearily for a man of 43....

The last thing I would’ve expected to see on a Friday night at Crobar was a roomful of tie-wearing business dudes booty-humping to Candyman. But there they were, shirts tucked in and gyrating en masse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what I got to see later that evening more than made up for missing out on the holiday hijinks. VH1 was holding an open casting call for a forthcoming reality show called American Guys, where “wholesome, attractive guys with big personalities” will become part of a traveling male strip troupe....

Ask Maria Jaimes what makes her Logan Square bar so popular, and she’ll tell you about the homemade buffet she sets out every Tuesday night. “The young people from the neighborhood, they tell each other, ‘Go by the Whirlaway, Maria makes good food for free,’” she explains. In many ways the Whirlaway is Maria. It’s impossible to walk in and not meet her–she rushes to the door to hug regulars and makes a point of introducing herself to newcomers....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In November federal judge Robert H. Hodges Jr. ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice must pay its attorneys overtime–which for close to two decades it has openly denied them, in violation of federal law. (The department estimates that its lawyers currently work overtime hours worth $40 million a year.) The attorneys who brought the suit claim that a tacit “standing order” required them to put in more than 40 hours a week, but the department disputes this, saying its employees work overtime out of “dedication and professionalism”–though it admits it maintains two sets of time sheets, one to determine pay and one to track actual work done on cases....

OUTKAST, LUDACRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On their brilliant fourth album, Stankonia (LaFace), Atlanta’s Outkast have knocked down the walls that were supposed to keep hip-hop pure. Extending well beyond the yin and yang of Big Boi’s articulate player pose and Andre 3000’s thoughtful spirituality, they’ve steeped the music in a heady brew of George Clinton fantasia, Sly Stone precision, and Prince pastiche....

Pride’s Crossing, Famous Door Theatre Company, at the Theatre Building. A strong ensemble carries this production through the script’s difficulties, notably playwright Tina Howe’s failure to resolve her central question: why would the unconventional Mabel Tidings, the first woman to swim from England to France, be so disastrously conventional in her choice of a husband? Howe portrays clearly the suffocating New England environment in which Tidings (well played by Hanna Dworkin) was raised, but at pivotal moments she flinches from depicting the ugliest aspects of that society, including hidden alcoholism and wife beating as well as not-so-hidden anti-Semitism....

In the summer of 1937 Leon Despres, then 29 years old, went with his wife, Marian, on a three-week vacation to Mexico. A lawyer friend, Albert Goldman, had asked them to deliver a letter and some clothing to one of his clients, Leon Trotsky. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After they arrived in Mexico the Despres went to the house to deliver the letter and clothing....

Take a word of advice from a doctoral student of communications at an Ivy League university: if you want your message to stick, you need to repeat it over and over and over. The reactionaries in our government certainly understand this. We progressives also need to embrace this strategy to get our message out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for “santorum,” clearly buttfuckers everywhere were aching for a word to describe the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex....

Trombonist Steve Swell has loved Roswell Rudd’s slip-horn work since he first heard it, at 15, and playing in the occasional quartet with his idol after the once reclusive Rudd made his mid-90s comeback seemed to inspire him all over again. Swell already had a great bluesy, braying sound and a knack for punchy phrasing, but when he blew through town for a 3030 gig with his BrassWood Trio last spring, his articulation was dazzling, and it’s just as good on the trio’s recent Still in Movement (on CIMP, a label Swell records for often these days)....

Sunday In The Park With George, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. In the illuminating vest-pocket revivals that director Gary Griffin and musical director Thomas Murray have done of Pacific Overtures for Chicago Shakespeare Theater and My Fair Lady for Court Theatre, they dispensed with lavish design to focus instead on textual nuance. But this 1984 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine–a fictionalized account of the creation of pointillist Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte–proves that sometimes size does matter....

Lynn Becker’s “Stop the Blandness!” (January 17) raises, seemingly half inadvertently, fundamental questions with respect to both the causes and the possible solutions of Chicago’s increasing glut of nondescript blob architecture. “Would anybody be moving back to the city if the only view out their window were of buildings like their own? No–people come back to be able to look out their window and see that defining skyline.” The key variables here are (1) what people is he talking about?...

Local Infinities’ new show uses candle wax–300 pounds of it, according to a press release–as the matrix for an intriguing, smart, wholly accessible meditation on creative identity, power, transformation, and sacrifice. The nearly wordless piece begins with both Local Infinities cofounders onstage. Meghan Strell plays Wax, covered head to toe in ivory paraffin, standing perfectly still on a pedestal like a latter-day Galatea. Meanwhile Charlie Levin throws hot wax on a sheet of Plexiglas and begins painting what turns out to be a creation myth....

Jay-Z But what product he’s churned out. Time was, nobody could match Jay’s reinvigorating touch with a been-there-done-that idea. When he’s on, the man can work miracles of lyrical novelty while never straying from his favorite subject–how great it is to be Jay-Z. His rhymes bristle with unexpected metric shifts that never jar against the track–he navigates the rhythmic nuances of his 1998 hit “Can I Get A…” with unflappable calm while Timbaland’s stuttering beats reduce guest artists Amil and Ja Rule to hapless braying....

Battles of the Righteous A terrifying revelation of September 11 was that America had been attacked in the name of Allah. It’s especially frightening to recognize that someone not only wants to kill you but thinks killing you will serve his god, and I have wondered if a calculation was made in Washington that there was no way to defeat those Islamic “evildoers” that spared their theology. The mainstream press might write quizzically of Bush’s evangelism, but Falsani observes that “there’s a Christian conservative press that thinks it’s great that he’s speaking the truth and it’s about time....

Why can’t I get WGEM on cable? The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and the League of Women Voters of Illinois have asked commercial TV stations to air five-minute nightly candidate forums during the 30 days leading up to the March 21 Illinois primary and the November 7 general election. So far just one station in the state has agreed to do so–WGEM, in downstate Quincy. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

With her throaty trill, floppy hat, and accordion-and-violin accompaniment, Chicago’s Claudia Hommel plays the role of chanteuse-boulevardiere to the hilt. It’s not Piaf, though, nor Dietrich or Garland that she’s modeling herself on; instead, Hommel’s glassy tone and blithe celebrations of life make her seem a latter-day female counterpart to Maurice Chevalier, the quintessential French entertainer who successfully made the transition from the cabarets of early-20th-century Paris to the Broadway stage and Hollywood....

European Union Film Festival Lasting only 65 minutes, Erick Zonca’s lean and purposeful 1999 second feature (after The Dreamlife of Angels) confirms his talent while pointing it in a somewhat different direction. He continues to focus on the lower economic strata, but this time he explores the progress of a baker’s assistant who decides to join a band of thieves. The results are gripping. (JR) (6:00) Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute inaugurates its new location at 164 N. State with a 24-hour marathon of films shot or set in Chicago, beginning Friday, June 1, 6:00. Tickets for individual screenings in the marathon are $5, $3 for Film Center members. The series continues Saturday, June 2, 8:00, through Saturday, June 23; tickets for these screenings are $7, $3 for members. For more information call 312-846-2800....

For three years Rey Colon had been one of the YMCA’s rising executive stars. He was widely praised for, among other things, overseeing the construction of the Y’s new branch in Logan Square. Then on August 16 the Y abruptly fired him. By almost all accounts, the aldermanic campaign of 1995 was mean and nasty, even by Chicago standards. And like all great ward fights, it continued after the election was over....

Christine L. Craig is a woman with a mission: she wants to see her father, harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, granted his rightful place in the pantheon of country music greats. Bailey, who died in 1982 at the age of 82, is the only major figure from the early days of the Grand Ole Opry who hasn’t been inducted into Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame. It’s Craig’s opinion, and that of many others, that Bailey’s exclusion from the hall would count as a glaring historical omission even if he hadn’t also been the first black star of a musical idiom generally understood to be a white thing....