Don Hedeker, leader of the long-running Polkaholics and probably Chicago’s most vocal polka advocate, blames his obsession on a lack of closet space. For years Hedeker and his wife, Vera Gavrilovic, were devoted thrift shoppers, scouring the racks and bringing home armloads of clothing every weekend. By the mid-90s they realized they had to stop–there was nowhere to put vintage duds. But Hedeker missed scavenging, so he decided to concentrate on something he didn’t have to keep in a closet: old LPs....

By Michael Miner “Naked, with menstrual blood dribbling down her legs, she performed a series of humiliating tasks,” Marlan reported. “Following commands given by correctional officers, the women opened their mouths, lifted their breasts, and ran their hands through their hair. Then, Townsend says, they had to spread their buttocks and bend and squat while coughing….Townsend says two others bled onto the floor as well, and that two women in the group were vomiting....

Katherine Chronis slipped out of her dress one recent afternoon on the corner of Crosby and Division and then strolled eastward, wearing nothing but jelly sandals and a necklace. Within moments, a girl roaming about in front of one of Cabrini-Green’s remaining high-rises began spreading the news: “That lady’s naked! That lady’s naked!” Peals of laughter erupted from some of the people within earshot. Others poked their heads out apartment windows....

It’s a warm morning in Roscoe Village, and the Guatemalan restaurant El Tinajon has not yet opened for lunch. Owner Olga Pezzarossi’s four grandchildren–Daniella, Pablo Antonio, Nathan, and Anthony–are lined up at a table, eating fried plantains, black beans, corn chips, melon, and eggs. Olga’s mother, Adelaina, is polishing glass vases filled with fuchsia, orange, and aqua flowers while two of Olga’s daughters, Wendy de Borde and Karina Bastidas, adjust the tables for lunch....

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I like to think of this company as one big evolving nontraditional family. With all the emphasis placed on continuity and heritage by artistic director Judith Jamison, that’s no accident. There are lots of relatively new choreographers on the troupe’s upcoming program, but all have a strong commitment to the past, to exploring and interpreting not only the Ailey family but the history of black culture in America....

Anyone with the right equipment and enough free time can create a new song out of bits and pieces of existing music–for proof, look no further than the recent glut of “mash-up” bootleg remix MP3s. But it takes real panache to get the balance right between familiar and obscure, between ready-made associations and new feelings. No record I can remember gets that balance righter than Since I Left You (Sire), the debut full-length from the Australian quintet the Avalanches (and the best album released in America last year)....

Allan Schnaiberg used to think that recycling could lead us to the promised land. He thought it offered not just environmental benefits (by reducing the amount of garbage going to landfills and incinerators), but also economic benefits (by allowing people in a community to make money from waste) and equity benefits (by providing decent jobs for poor people in a community). He saw these benefits as mutually reinforcing, and he thought that if all three Es–environment, economics, and equity–could be achieved at once, recycling could help people realize that all three are equally important and not in conflict....

Jon-Antony Sinclair began stitching bits of food together to make fashion several years ago, but he found that certain ideas didn’t translate well to the runway. In an early exhibition of his edible designs, the licorice slacks he created for a groom’s wedding outfit kept falling apart. So Sinclair sent the bride out solo in her meringue wedding dress–carrying a Styrofoam head adorned with the groom’s toffee hat. “People loved it,” he says....

The focal point of Def Harmonic’s recent Travel Suggestions (Wobblyhead) is meant to be the jazz-slinky delivery of rappers Jason Todd and Lunaversol (think Digable Planets), but by far the most interesting thing about the record is Todd’s crisp, austere production. By mixing tough programmed breakbeats with live bass lines and a steady flow of varied coloristic samples, Def Harmonic manages to retain a traditional hip-hop feel while borrowing flourishes from chill-out-room denizens like Kruder & Dorfmeister....

November 2 be damned: we can laugh again thanks to this delightfully dysfunctional duo. Seth Thomas is the brainy, patient black brother and Paul Thomas (no relation) his lunkheaded, not-so-silent white sidekick. Their crackerjack hour includes a ghetto version of Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on first?” routine, a film shoot ruined by a white actor too squeamish to say the “N” word, and takeoffs on Bible retreats, basketball coaches who rant at fifth graders, and the different experiences that African-American and white soldiers have during the same war....

It’s hard not to like a band featuring a bassist named Disco and a guitarist who calls himself the Rock and Roll Indian, and it’s even harder when they’re writing songs this willfully weird and irresistibly catchy. The Detroit quintet Electric Six (Disco, Indian, singer Dick Valentine, drummer M, and guitarist Surge Joebot) started out as the Wildbunch in the mid-90s with the new-wavy single “I Lost Control (of My Rock & Roll)....

You don’t have to be Irish (or drunk) to appreciate the shenanigans in Noble Fool’s improvised musical memorial, conceived and directed by Jack Bronis. But you should come prepared to play along. Boisterous as ever in their ninth season, the show’s ale-quaffing villagers pay homage to fallen friend Flanagan with stories and folk tunes based mostly on audience suggestions–a treacherous tightrope to walk, particularly after a few pints. Their success depends largely on viewer enthusiasm....

One morning last summer, filmmaker Edith Edit brought her crew to the north side to shoot a scene for her new movie, Dominatrix Waitrix. It featured two actresses making out in front of a building just across the street from Zephyr restaurant. “Of course we were late,” she says. “When we got there it was in the middle of brunch hour, and there were families across the street. Someone called the cops....

Genius at Work But journalism is both. Good reporters are dogged and curious, and because stories don’t fall in their laps they’re expected to be ingenious too. The best go beyond ingenuity. Judy Havemann is a Post editor I’ve known for years, and when I asked her to comment on Boo she E-mailed me this: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Havemann was describing two Boo stories that had popped into her mind as she wrote me....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January a 51-year-old woman calling herself “Mrs. B” picketed the Roman Catholic diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, wearing a black ski mask and carrying a sign reading “The Bishop Forgot My Exorcism.” She believes that between 1993 and 1999 she was possessed by as many as ten demons, and though she appealed to six dioceses in three states, none provided her with an exorcist–which she characterizes as “unpardonable neglect....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an April story in the New York Daily News, a former assistant to Dr. Thomas Fahey has accused the prominent cancer surgeon of loaning out blood samples from the late Terrence Cardinal Cooke of New York City, who died in 1983 of leukemia, so that Catholic parishioners could pray over them as saintly relics. The assistant, who had been dismissed by Fahey, was being deposed in a lawsuit when he made the allegation....

Bobby Bare Jr. The rest of the album is even less impressive. Wilson’s been praised as more “rootsy” than Shania Twain or Faith Hill–and she is, for what that’s worth. But to me her poppy power-chord hooks and cheesy pseudo-rebellious choruses (“Hell, yeah!”) don’t recall Loretta Lynn or even Tanya Tucker so much as the bottom-drawer hair metal that was all over MTV in Wilson’s youth. Her hit single, “Redneck Woman,” is almost but not quite as cheeky as “Smokin’ in the Boys Room....

10 In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one. –Abbas Kiarostami in an interview Kiarostami’s 10, opening this week at the Music Box, may well represent one of these disjunctions, for in it he seems to have abandoned much of what he’s done best in terms of visual composition, richness of detail in sound and image, diversity of characters and landscapes, and storytelling....

Sally Timms is a chameleon: the way she sings depends on the musical environment behind her. On Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos (1999), recorded with Chicago alt-country pals, her singing had a lullaby sweetness, self-assured and with a gentle twang. But she doesn’t sound nearly so comforting on the new In the World of Him (Touch and Go), an album of songs written by men (excepting her own “Little Tommy Tucker”)....

Variety is this company’s aim: its annual concert features five pieces by five choreographers. New to Chicago is David Berkey’s The Waiting Game, a quartet whose structure–a solo, a duet, and another solo–suggests first someone alone and longing for love, then a happy couple together, then someone alone again. Berkey died this fall at age 53; the final tune here, the poignant “Where Do You Start?,” is full of loss, longing, and regret....