When pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet joins conductor Charles Dutoit and the CSO this week he’ll be playing the kind of music he plays best–French and Romantic, in this case Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and Liszt’s Totentanz. Each of these is the shortest piano concerto by its composer as well as the darkest and most dramatic. The Ravel, the only one-handed concerto that’s made it into the standard repertory, is as much about the orchestra as it is about the piano....

When eternity is not enough. From the Washington Times (July 5): “A forthcoming study for the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, a group based in Chicago, found that celibacy and loneliness were the main reasons why a sample of 72 priests, most of them younger, had left the church since 1992. Many also felt a lack of appreciation.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » according to Dahlia Lithwick, reporting on the Supreme Court’s year in Slate (July 6): “This virtuous, self-denying paragon of judicial restraint has gorged and stuffed itself on constitutional cheesecake, somehow all the while insisting that it’s on a diet....

Watching Karen Nelson conduct a workshop for some dozen performers, I could see why the words “laboratory” and “chemistry” are often used in regard to movement improvisation: individuals possessed of all kinds of physical and emotional variables are thrown together in situations with no predetermined path or outcome. On the simplest physical level, the projection and roundness of a woman’s hip will affect the way it acts as a fulcrum for the rest of her body....

Haven’t yet read Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery: The American Version? Really! Epstein says his book documents “the spread of snobbery after the fall of the WASPocracy,” which began in the late 1960s “when the style page replaced the society page in the daily newspaper.” The new snobbery is even more rampant than the old, Epstein says, expressing itself in the schools one’s children attend (is that new?), one’s politics, and, in general, the degree to which one is “with it....

It’s not often you can say a dance company is performing a genuine service. But the Joffrey Ballet is doing just that with its reconstructions of Vaslav Nijinsky’s unique and prescient works: The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring. They were universally reviled when they were first performed, even by his collaborators–neither Debussy, the composer for the first two pieces, nor Stravinsky, from whom the Rite of Spring score was specially commissioned, made any secret of the fact he disliked Nijinsky’s choreography....

Montreal choreographer Edouard Lock, who formed his company under the name Lock-Danseurs in 1980, gained an international reputation in 1985 with the Bessie-winning Human Sex. But U.S. audiences have had few opportunities to see his groundbreaking choreography, a combination of modern and pointe dance that doesn’t really fit any of the usual categories. Amelia–the evening-length piece La La La Human Steps is performing here, premiered in Prague in 2002–is said to be based on an encounter Lock had with a transvestite 25 years ago....

When I am soft, my cock is tiny. Yet when I am hard, it is long and thick. I have asked girlfriends about this and none has ever seen such a change. In your vast experience with male organs, what can you tell me about growth? –Wiped Out Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Many factors, such as stress level, play a role in the quality and quantity of people’s feces,” said Dr....

The tribulations of married life have been mined again and again in the theater. And this new musical, produced by Second City Theatricals, covers much of the same territory as plays like I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. But Sex and the Second City is belly-laugh funny. Its sparse character development doesn’t even matter, and there’s enough of a plot to keep things moving along. In these finely honed sketches, directed by Ron West, the battleground of love is captured with sharp wit, as divorcing spouses (Katie Caussin and Brian Gallivan) try to make it through the obligatory couples couseling....

Six months ago Chicago didn’t have a single Bikram, or “hot yoga,” studio, where the temperature hovers around 105 degrees. Now there are three. Choudhury, a former amateur weight lifting champ partial to gold jewelry and Rolls-Royces, developed a 26-posture sequence that’s performed in front of mirrors, a physical fitness approach that he claims can cure everything from heart disease to multiple sclerosis. He believes it to be the only “true” yoga, although the Bikram teachers I spoke with don’t adhere to this view and–at least verbally–support other schools of yoga....

Those who write about baseball for a living tend to forget that for many fans the sport serves not as a source of inspiration or edification but simply as an escape. They go out to the ballpark not just to enjoy the game and the players and the grandstand camaraderie, but to get away from it all for an afternoon or evening. The game’s leisurely pace lends itself to that purpose....

The Reporter’s Future She wasn’t that much browner: “I won’t repeat some of the jokes and comments people make around me because they assume I won’t be offended,” she says. But she felt apart. “Like any black person would tell you, that is a key part of their identity–this is obviously a key part of my identity. More than getting the message that I’m inferior or stupid or violent–some of the messages that dark-skinned people get–is this sense that I’m different, this feeling that I’m an outsider, that I’m in a special category....

The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations (Irdial-Discs) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I first heard The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, my thoughts ran immediately to poor, lonesome 2X2L. The four-CD set is a mind-boggling collection of dispassionate, disembodied voices reading lists of numbers and sometimes letters in many languages, over crashing waves of lush, unfiltered radio static, occasionally accompanied by perky robotic musical themes borrowed from hell’s own ice cream truck....

Words on the Street, DMG Productions, at Donny’s Skybox Theatre. An anthology resulting from six weeks of collective development, this evening features songs, sketches, improv games, and poetry from 18 artists seeking to share an African-American perspective on the human experience. For the most part, director Claudia M. Wallace and ensemble keep things light and loose. Each three to five minutes we meet a new set of quirky characters: a quartet of catfighting choir ladies vying for a handsome deacon’s attention; a barber (Jason Ball) who sees racism in everything (he views millionaire sports stars as slaves and Colin Powell as “the biggest house nigger this country’s ever seen”); a blond anchorwoman for North Shore News (Robin Thede) wistfully longing–Little Mermaid style–to be part of the hood; and a ventriloquist act featuring a debate over the size and prowess of the dummy’s woody....

It was shortly after midnight on December 23. I passed the cozy homes lining my Ukrainian Village block, looking for a berth for my car. Needless to say, here, as in all neighborhoods, winter storms have depleted the parking by fully a third so parking is hard to come by. What spots remained were staked by a broken garden chair, a heap of crates, each vacancy held for the neighbor who’d dug it out, then-what?...

The Callaways call their cabaret act Sibling Revelry, and the punning title works both ways: they sing up a storm, and they tweak their supposed sisterly envy. (At one point they go so far as to whip out velvet-lined cases filled with the various Manhattan cabaret awards each has won.) Ann is by far the better known of the two, largely because she wrote and sang the theme for the sitcom The Nanny, a song far more sophisticated than the show’s humor; she’s also issued several high-profile discs that straddle cabaret and jazz....

I enjoyed this week’s write-up of the Hopleaf, a neighborhood favorite [“On Tap at the Hopleaf,” Section Two, September 12]. Unfortunately, in calling it an “Andersonville beer bar,” the Reader puts it in the wrong neighborhood. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Everyone wants to think they’re in Andersonville, yet on every map I’ve seen this trendy fragment of Edgewater begins at Foster and ends at Bryn Mawr....

Byther Smith’s emotionally intense, somewhat elemental blues style reflects the hardscrabble life he’s led. Born in Monticello, Mississippi, in 1932, he lost both his parents when he was still a toddler, and shortly thereafter one of his sisters died in a fire. As a young man he boxed and did manual labor, but once he moved to Chicago in 1957, he hit the south-side blues circuit and soon started recording. In the mid-80s he toured overseas for the first time, and 1988’s Housefire (Razor) expanded his international reputation....

Friday 10/11 – Thursday 10/17 In 1978, when a group of dancers signed the lease on a room in Link’s Hall, the rent was about $250 a month and there wasn’t much in Wrigleyville besides the ballpark. “We rented the space to create our pieces and to teach some classes,” says Charlie Vernon, one of the founders. “At that time there was MoMing [Dance and Arts Center], but they didn’t have enough space to take care of everybody....

Jamie O’Reilly’s childhood sounds like the premise for a Technicolor-drenched 1950s Hollywood musical: a powerful Irish-American, Shakespearean actor father revered in the local theatrical community, a radiant, silver-voiced diva of a mother, and a brood of 14 singing children, each more talented than the next. Put them in a small town in northern Illinois, where they cheerfully perform concerts for needy families and are surprised when the neediest turns out to be their own....

Gary Ambler was feeling great when he got off the el at Austin about 3 AM on July 27. A downstate actor and co-artistic director of a new theater company, Faces Like Swords, Ambler had been out with friends who’d come to see him perform that night. Faces Like Swords was doing Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in a six-week run at the Chopin Theatre studio on Division. It was the company’s first attempt to make a mark in Chicago’s competitive theater scene, and now, three weekends in, they’d hit the sweet spot: a couple of great reviews had just come out....