In 1970 every teenager knew what the Beatles looked like, including Wendy Glomb, who happened to be walking her schnauzer when a long black limo pulled into our driveway. The only eyewitness to his arrival, she apparently sprinted home to inform her friends that George Harrison had chosen to celebrate Thanksgiving in Englewood, New Jersey. My parents hadn’t told us who was coming for dinner. They were sure we would break their confidence....

By Tony Boylan The lone exception was Tom Woolley, the hotel restaurant manager who had conceived the stunt, which was described in the Savannah Morning News as “a new milestone in Irish shenanigans.” From the superfluous helicopter, where he sat with Miss Georgia and Miss Savannah, Woolley saw the dye form a sort of zebra pattern in the water before being washed away in the tide. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The last year has been hell on big business in ways we hear of on a daily basis, and perhaps it’s true that what’s bad for Enron, WorldCom, Andersen, et al is bad for the country. But how about small business? How has the downturn affected neighborhood storekeepers who do their own books and don’t use surveys to determine customer satisfaction? We asked these south-side proprietors if they’d been affected by the fallout from September 11....

LABRADFORD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The title of Labradford’s sixth and latest album, Fixed::Context (Kranky), is a bit misleading: since 1992, when Mark Nelson and Carter Brown formed the group in Richmond, Virginia, its personnel, instrumentation, and milieu have all changed. In its early days the band blended ringing guitars, whispered vocals, grinding tape loops, and thick analog synthesizer textures to create an ominous sound that couldn’t have been more out of step with the straightforward guitar-bass-drums approach that dominated the D....

The 12 songs on the Lids’ self-titled debut, new on Rip Off Records, tear by in less than 19 minutes, but even that quick dose of this Atlanta band’s bratty sock-hop punk is enough to make the sky look bluer. All of a sudden it seems like a good thing that America is breeding an endless supply of restless teenagers, cranking ’em through soul-crushing public schools and dead-end jobs, and selling ’em porn, cigarettes, and liquor....

For years friends, knowing of my interest in autobiography and biography, told me that I should check out the collection of master improviser and Annoyance Theatre founding member Susan Messing. Each time I ran into her she urged me to come over, and when I finally called her to do just that she immediately screamed, “Get your beautiful white ass over here fast because all these books are going into boxes!...

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In June the Associated Press reported on Bolivia’s annual Tinku festivals–pre-Columbian ritual celebrations held by the country’s high plains Indians, intended to settle feuds and secure better crops in the coming year. The largest occurs on a midnight in early May in the town of Macha; men from several nearby villages, dressed in native war garb, gather to drink and dance and whip each other with braided leather thongs, and soon the festival turns into a bloody brawl that often results in at least one death....

It’s a clever idea: send up Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs with an evening of works set to or inspired by the voice of the next generation, Bob Dylan. Dancer-choreographers Selene Carter and Robbie Cook invited their collaborators to riff on Dylan–his themes, his time, his words or music. And since Dylan’s output is more eclectic than Sinatra’s, “Nine Bob Dylan Songs” is harder to categorize than its namesake. A partial preview showed a range of approaches so broad that the common thread almost disappears....

Monika Treut met Yvonne Bezerra de Mello a few years ago, through mutual friends in New York City. “Upon meeting her I knew I had to make a film about her,” says Treut, whose previous films have examined the lives of sexual nonconformists. Treut says she was immediately taken with de Mello’s courage and complexity: educated at the Sorbonne and the wife of a wealthy businessman, de Mello has spent 20 years working with poor children in Rio de Janeiro....

A morning sprinkle that turned into a steady afternoon drizzle prevented the Cubs from being one-hit for the second straight day Saturday. When the game was called at 12:05 PM, the Cubs had not lost 9-0. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Manager Don Baylor was hesitant to blame the weather for another nonvictory. “It’s hard to string together a lot of base hits when the tarp’s down, but these guys need to find a way,” said the man they call Groove....

Cut Flowers Lawrence’s stint working in a flower shop in the late 80s inspired the play’s setting: the back room of Benson’s, a large white-owned floral business. The play covers a single day in the life of six black men who work in close quarters, invisible to the white customers and clerks out front, preparing fresh flowers for display. The flowers must be cut upon arrival–otherwise they die quickly. Cutting gives them new life....

Madam/Sir: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Drake’s “perfect god” may exist and it may not; this is a subject that can be (and has been) debated forever. What is not perfect is Mr. Drake’s Catholic church, a bastion of misogyny, homophobia, war against “those who do not believe,” exploitation of the poor, and–most recently viewed in many people’s minds–as a watershed of sexual abuse of children....

Taj Mahal hasn’t had the hardscrabble life of a stereotypical bluesman: born Henry Saint Claire Fredericks, he was raised in a middle-class family in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in the mid-60s earned a BA in agriculture and animal husbandry at UMass Amherst. But he spent his adolescence immersed in recordings by the likes of Son House and Howlin’ Wolf, and in college he started his first band–a blues and R & B outfit called Taj Mahal & the Elektras....

The Half-Jewish Book: A Celebration, by Daniel Klein and Freke Vuijst (Villard, $22.95). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Representative quote: “It doesn’t matter if the Jewish parent is observant or not….It also doesn’t matter in which–if any–religion the person was brought up or what religion he has chosen to follow. In other words, a person is half-Jewish if half of his genetic/cultural makeup is Jewish and half is not....

If a more interesting and entertaining Hollywood movie than Down With Love has come along this year, I’ve missed it. Down With Love—which has already closed in Chicago—is entertaining thanks to Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake’s clever script, Peyton Reed’s mainly assured direction, inventive production and costume design, a musical number behind the final credits I’d happily swap all of Chicago for, and even a miscast Renee Zellweger pulling off a difficult climactic monologue....

This show has a premise so simple but packed with possibility it could pass for one of the original Spolin theater games, which provide the foundation for 95 percent of all Chicago-style improv. Here an ensemble improvises a one-act about a recently deceased fictional person, played by the loser of a quick game of musical chairs at the top of the show. He or she begins the evening with a short monologue reflecting on the person’s life, and everything afterward flows from this soliloquy....

A dense and subtle masterpiece from Iran (1989, 97 min.) by the highly talented Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), this documentary–or is it pseudodocumentary?–follows the trial of an unemployed film buff in Tehran who impersonated acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Marriage of the Blessed, Gabbeh, Kandahar) and became intimate with a well-to-do family while pretending to prepare a film that was to feature them. To complicate matters further, Kiarostami persuades all the major people involved to reenact what happened, finally bringing the real Makhmalbaf together with his impersonator for a highly emotional exchange....

DANE RICHESON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a child in Ohio, Dane Richeson tried to imitate the jazz drummers he heard on his parents’ records; by watching National Geographic specials on TV he became fascinated with non-Western drumming traditions. Today he’s one of the most versatile percussionists in the country, sort of a cross between spirited classical experimenter Evelyn Glennie and self-made ethnomusicologist Mickey Hart....

Rose Sacharski sits behind a counter watching a wave of customers float into her Hala Kahiki South Seas Shop in River Grove. The gift shop–the only one of its kind in the midwest–is part of the Hala Kahiki tavern, which Rose, who’s now 77, and her late husband, Stanley, opened in 1966. The merchandise includes a coconut bra and a wreath made of Hawaiian wood roses and brown koa sea pods....

The Grant Park Chorus may not be the best chorus in town–I’d give the nod to its counterpart at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–but it’s staffed with some of the area’s more experienced singers, including Diane Ragains, William Watson, and Edward Zelnis. And, like the Grant Park Orchestra, its fluid roster (more than 90 members) contains a Lyric Opera contingent, which may account for its markedly theatrical bent. Since last summer the chorus has been under the direction of Christopher Bell, a Belfast-born, Edinburgh-educated choirmaster-conductor who’s gained an estimable reputation in the British Isles....