Job Opportunity A south-side prole with a heavy Bridgeport twang, Teddy’s got WLUP on the box and a cell phone at his ear as he wheels us toward a spot in Uptown to pick up his penniless young pal Carl. A mysterious acquaintance of Teddy’s has offered them the chance to split $500 for a single night’s effort. Carl’s brought his work gloves, but the job turns out to be a good deal less demanding than he was led to believe....

So Many Men, So Little Time Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Leung quizzed his Internet partners on their age, location, weight, height, ethnicity, and preferred sexual position and carefully entered the data in a chart. He also kept a journal, recording his rapid progression from “Is there anything in the world better than having sex while doing a project?” to “SO SICK OF MY PROJECT....

It was nearly a decade ago that the Pansy Kings first swished their way onto the local performance scene. Creator Dave Awl brought together the poofiest of Chicago’s cognoscenti in October 1994 for The Pansy Kings’ Cotillion, an evening of songs, stories, videos, drag, finger snaps, and general mincing. That first outing was such a smash that the Pansy Kings followed it up two months later with their Holiday Pageant, which featured as a bonus Awl’s homemade wassail....

I recently read about a Lord Cornbury, appointed governor of New York in 1701, who was a transvestite. Can you verify this? –James Hickok Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First the lurid details. From Henry Moscow’s The Book of New York Firsts (1995): “One night during the early 1700s, a constable working for the British colony of New York arrested what he presumed was a prostitute walking along Broadway....

Cant Rhinoceros Theater Fetival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s one thing about motherhood: it lands you smack-dab in the middle of the land of the body. (And you don’t get out until your children let you–if then.) Many of the threads in Cant revolve around the body, especially the act of eating, and Magnus weaves them together with ease, segueing from a song about the “sweetness of the drug” to a stand-up bit in which she sticks her butt out at us and asks “How can it be that the bigger I get the more invisible I become?...

This week Facets Multimedia Center begins a 15-film retrospective on the Italian comedian Toto (1898-1967), whose popularity at the box office spanned three decades. His humor never translated that well overseas, but this bittersweet 1955 comedy is one of his more ambitious efforts, evoking the melancholy wisdom of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. A movie extra, Toto keeps disrupting the shoot (in a funny send-up of the Italian film studio Cinecitta) and then visits a psychiatrist, where flashbacks reveal his experiences as a resourceful survivor during and after World War II....

Baby Jane Dexter named her new show Making Every Moment Count well in advance of September 11–and though the sentiment has certainly gained new currency in the wake of that morning’s terrible events, in all likelihood the title reflects her response to a more personal experience of survival and regeneration. A star on New York’s bustling cabaret scene in the 1970s, Dexter dropped out for a decade to wrestle with depression, a turbulent relationship, professional uncertainty, and the loss of many friends to AIDS....

BRAD GOODE & LOUIS SMITH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the mid-80s, when baby-faced trumpeter Brad Goode graduated from college and arrived in Chicago, his easy command of the instrument and facility with mainstream styles made him a golden boy. By the time he left town nearly 15 years later, his music had become a little quirky, sometimes unpredictable, and even a bit baffling–side effects of a systematic method he’d developed to avoid the kind of riffy routine that can stunt an improviser’s growth....

Friday 10/4 – Thursday 10/10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Max Elbaum was managing editor at the leftist CrossRoads magazine in the mid-90s when he decided to write Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. “I was spending a lot of time interacting with veterans of the different left currents out of the 1960s and ’70s,” he explained to Chris Crass in the anarchist newspaper Onward recently....

“‘No’ is not a slogan,” says University of Chicago MFA candidate Jenny Roberts. “‘No’ just means no.” Last month her friend and fellow student Vesna Grbovic painted the word “No” three feet high on a wall at the U. of C.’s Midway Studios, then trained a video camera on it for 30 minutes. “‘No’ arose from discussions about the unbearable, irresponsible, and surreal political actions of the U.S. government–especially in regard to Iraq–and the difficulty of knowing how to act in response to it,” says Roberts....

Dear Ms. True, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thank you for the wonderful attention to Second City in the February 23, 2001, issue. However, I would like to clarify a few items in the Culture Club section of that issue: Mr. Neumann writes that our Toronto ensemble contains an ideal template of “Asians, Latinos, blacks, and whites.” Unfortunately, this has never been the case and it would be dishonest on our part to suggest it....

Thank you very much for sending a reviewer to my show, “Local Comedian: A Show About a Comedian Doing a Show About a Comedian Doing a Show.” I understand it was a quick turnaround for you to get it into the paper [August 9], and I appreciate the effort. Unfortunately, Ms. [Kim] Wilson seems to have had trouble understanding my show. Let me illustrate my points using her review. “Brad Steuernagel’s solo effort is yet another example of a grossly underprepared improv-school graduate renting a space and stringing together an hour’s worth of lame, disconnected gags with a smidgen of material that has actual comic potential....

Reedist Gebhard Ullmann weds the German fascination with order to the anarchic impulses of post-60s American jazz to make music that moves like clockwork even in its most chaotic moments. The 45-year-old, who focuses on tenor and soprano sax and bass clarinet, shuttles between New York and Berlin, where he applies this concept in half a dozen very different bands–among them a clarinet trio (represented by a new Leo Records release, the aptly named Translucent Tones), a New York quartet called Basement Research, featuring the well-regarded young saxist Tony Malaby, and the fascinating Ta Lam Zehn, a ten-piece reed band with three bass clarinets, a baritone sax, and an accordion....

“I have a different look every year,” says art deco collector Steve Starr. “If you go out in the world and even if you know everything and don’t have style, nobody will talk to you. Style is the culmination of everything inside of you.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starr, owner of the vintage boutique Steve Starr Studios, has a personal collection of over 950 photos of icons of style, such as Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, and Greer Garson....

“Maybe I just have a short attention span,” says 23-year-old entrepreneur Jenny McCoy, “but I feel like I’m into everything and I want to do it all.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She landed a job as assistant pastry chef at Gordon almost immediately after graduating from the culinary arts program at Kendall College in Evanston. She stayed for nearly a year, until the restaurant closed, then moved on to Blackbird, Charlie Trotter’s, the Park Hyatt, and Bittersweet bakery....

Vocalist Leon McNeal has fronted bands on the south and west sides for the better part of 30 years, but he remains virtually unknown elsewhere in the city. On last year’s Love Is a Gamble (Rose), a rough-hewn production that consists mostly of 12-bar blues set to a standard shuffle or goosed with funk, McNeal seems heavily influenced by the teen-oriented “soft soul” sound that evolved in Chicago in the 60s....

Clarence “Little Scotty” Scott has spent most of his life straddling the worlds of blues, gospel, and R & B. Born in 1945, he was severely disfigured by a fire in his home in Florence, South Carolina, when he was a teenager; afterward he found refuge in church as well as in local juke joints, fighting through his self-consciousness by sitting in on vocals whenever bands let him. During the mid-60s he was in New York City, where he performed at R & B clubs, garnered a “Certificate to Preach” from a Brooklyn Baptist church, and–he claims–pimped at a Midtown massage parlor....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The San Francisco Chronicle reported last month that the new dogcatcher for San Mateo County will be paid $250,000 a year, more than twice what San Francisco’s dogcatcher earns and more than the salaries of California governor Gray Davis and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Overreactions Latest Rights In June, Detroit police arrested five suspects in the robbery of a McDonald’s restaurant after one of the men tossed his bandanna out the window of the getaway car, where it snagged on the radio antenna and acted as an identifying flag for police in pursuit…....

Theater District Television hasn’t done nearly as well by gay characters, however, particularly in network programming. I can’t say that this is the impetus for longtime television writer-producer Richard Kramer’s first stage effort, Theater District, now making its world premiere in About Face Theatre’s sprightly production, directed by Eric Rosen. What is apparent in this flawed but often enjoyable 90-minute piece is that Kramer has a keen desire to explore the complexities and difficulties of family life today–at least as it’s experienced by well-heeled, well-educated, almost impossibly clever Manhattanites....

This quintet of Welsh electro-punks was one of the last finds by Alan McGee’s revered indie label, Creation Records, which released the Super Furry Animals’ first three albums to great critical acclaim in the late 90s. After the label folded in 1999, the band drew inward with Mwng, a self-released collection of ten songs in its native tongue; inexpensively recorded, it made a substantial profit (a first for the group), nearly broke into the British top ten, and won praise from Welsh members of parliament....