Nick’s Pit Stop doesn’t go out of its way to cater to the police. There are no wall hooks to accommodate the gray Kevlar vests–most officers either keep them on or hang them over the backs of the red vinyl dinette chairs. And finding a parking space can be tough, even for a marked car. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The main attraction at Nick’s is chicken–charbroiled three-pound birds split down the middle and seasoned with a citrus marinade and a signature 15-spice rub....

RHONDA VINCENT & THE RAGE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Singer and mandolinist Rhonda Vincent, 38, has been playing bluegrass music since she was six, starting in her family’s band, the Sally Mountain Show, in Kirksville, Missouri. In the mid-80s she was hired by aging Nashville mainstay Jim Ed Brown (of “Pop a Top” fame) and after six months with him she embarked on a solo career, signing with the bluegrass indie Rebel Records....

Hospital wards are terrifying places, as anyone who’s spent time in them knows. Unfortunately for director Kairol Rosenthal, she has. And when she and dancer Asimina Chremos were scouting out the Chicago Cultural Center’s nooks and crannies to create a piece for “Site Unseen,” an evening of site-specific performances and installations, the sterile yet dingy industrial kitchen behind Preston Bradley Hall reminded them of hospitals. Chremos is the work’s virtual soloist, playing Patient X, though there are also two male orderlies and a female receptionist who ushers the audience in and seats them on risers so they look down slightly on the performance area–a metal table....

BONGZILLA 9/12, FIRESIDE BOWL These veterans of both Milwaukee Metalfest and Weedstock seem to be getting more and more versatile–on their most recent album, Gateway (Relapse, 2002), their Sabbath-Surfers sound feels lighter on its feet, less dogged than previously. The subject matter, however, is unrelenting (see “Weed Thumb,” “Sunnshine Green,” “Keefmaster”–the last a shuffling, pounding monster of a track), earning them the parental-warning badge of honor the hard way, with no hint of sex or violence and practically no cussing....

The 22nd annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, continues Friday through Sunday, March 21 through 23. Screenings are at WIDC Theater, 941 W. Lawrence; LaSalle Theatre, LaSalle Bank, 4901 W. Irving Park; School of the Art Institute Auditorium, Columbus Drive at Jackson; and Hayes Investment Center, 4859 S. Wabash. Tickets are $8, $6 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair....

The countertenor is making a comeback. A new generation of interpreters has begun to overcome the weirdness factor and familiarize audiences with a kind of singing that resembles a falsetto yet most certainly is not. Three such singers will be in town over the next few weeks–Andreas Scholl, in a recital at the University of Chicago, and David Daniels and Bejun Mehta, in Lyric Opera’s production of Handel’s Partenope. Now in his mid-30s, the German-born Scholl started singing at age seven in his hometown choir; he eventually found his “head voice,” an alto generated from above the chest and distinct from the baritone of his speaking voice....

On Chicago Avenue in Austin, among the vacant storefronts and businesses like Deno’s Hair Kingdom, S.B.M. Beef Inc., and Yoo’s Supermarket, hang a series of vivid acrylic four-by-six signs. An orange-and-white one reads “Black mothers proud to be” in large letters. The smaller text below says, “I’m showing them what a real role model is. If you can believe it, achieve it. Do what you got to do.” The opposite side carries another message: “They think that I am more than what I am....

Underground Love: The Poetry of Harold Norse, Erotic and Not Norse has always delighted as much in dishing dirt as in dactyls and spondees. Auden not only gave piss-poor blow jobs, Norse gleefully told the San Francisco Weekly a few years ago, he had a small penis and stole Norse’s boyfriend. His 1989 autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, is packed with similarly salacious tidbits. Marlon Brando hit on him at a party....

Friday 11/28 – Thursday 12/4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 29 SATURDAY In her seemingly chaotic performance piece Reno–Rebel Without a Pause: Unrestrained Reflections on September 11th, monologuist Reno–who lived five blocks from the World Trade Center–examines the meaning of patriotism after 9/11. Few targets escape her trademark blunt, caustic honesty: everyone from George Bush and Rudy Giuliani to herself and her fellow “nouvelle refugees of Tribecistan” comes in for a skewering....

Since the 1960s the Chicago Department of Public Health has been taking temperatures, administering vaccines, and providing prenatal care to Chicago residents who have nowhere else to turn for health care. That may be about to change, and the prospect has some residents and health-care advocates feeling more than a little queasy. He also says the move makes sense because the city and county already have partnerships with Saint Anthony’s. For the past four years the hospital’s midwives have staffed the South Lawndale clinic, and most of the clinic’s patients deliver their babies at the hospital (women who want their tubes tied at the time of delivery are sent to Cook County Hospital)....

Singer Joey Ramone, bassist Dee Dee Ramone, and guitarist Johnny Ramone have died in such quick succession that their demise almost seems staged, as if some celestial voice had counted off “1–2–3–4!” This profile by Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields follows the punk pioneers from their early days as glue-sniffing losers in Queens to their epochal debut at CBGB in 1974 and through their 22-year career as one of the world’s most beloved and influential rock bands....

Guild to Red Streak: Not So Fast “We thought the whole paper should be guild,” says business reporter Bob Mutter, chairman of the Sun-Times’s guild unit. “We were willing to give them a certain amount of time, but they asked for spring. It really didn’t get terribly unpleasant, but it probably was just about to. We were overly patient, but our patience was wearing very thin.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

How Nasty Things Spread Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This interested me enormously. At the beginning of October I’d never heard of Clostridium difficile–or “C diff,” as nurses call it. But then my mother in Saint Louis contracted the infection–in a clean, cheery Lutheran convalescent home far from the squalor of socialized medicine–and died. My sister, who lives in Vancouver and isn’t an ardent foe of Canada’s health system, arrived in Saint Louis with a packet of information on C....

The Bad Plus These Are the Vistas (Columbia) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » None of the recent half-assed, self-conscious simulations of jazz–from Hancock’s flaccid covers of familiar R & B and rock songs to the marriage of jazz elements and club beats brokered by European acts such as St. Germain and Bugge Wesseltoft–has managed to increase the music’s paltry slice of the marketplace, and with good reason....

The grace and coherence that mark Laura Veirs’s fourth album, Carbon Glacier (Nonesuch), were hard-won: it took five years and two flawed albums for the Seattle singer-songwriter to fulfill her early promise. On last year’s Troubled by the Fire Veirs’s lyrics began to shift from trite to sharply observed, and her music underwent similar improvements. That album’s adventurous sonic aesthetic, thanks to producer Tucker Martine and the atmospheric contributions of guitarist Bill Frisell, helped Veirs move well past her folk and country roots....

Now one of Chicago’s most widely respected house producers and DJs, Mark Grant made his reputation in the mid- to late 90s as an artist on the Cajual label. Though he released a few solo sides, he did his best-known work either as a collaborator–recording “Dancin’” with label head Cajmere (under the name Chicago Connection) and “Revival” and “Psychotic Pimpin’” with Braxton Holmes–or as a remixer, on tracks like Green Velvet’s “Answering Machine” and Glenn Underground’s “House Music Will Never Die....

Edward Weston: When I first looked at reproductions of Edward Weston’s prints almost 30 years ago, I found them inert and dull, skillful but lifeless. And I figured that since Weston himself had published these black-and-white photos in books, I’d given them an adequate viewing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Subtleties of texture and tone are the first thing that set the prints apart....

Pilsen, My Pilsen Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t seen Juan Ramirez’s new film Israel in Exile, but I am looking forward to it. I did however take notice of Mr. Helbig’s comment “the cinematographer makes even the mundane streets of Pilsen look gorgeous” [Movies, Section Two, May 4]. Well, thank goodness for the cinematographer making our neighborhood look gorgeous! Has Mr. Helbig ever been to Pilsen?...

The Auditorium’s “Ovations!” series specializes in concert versions of seldom revived musicals, and few musicals are more seldom revived than this 1968 Broadway hit, penned by songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David and playwright Neil Simon. Based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, it tells the now undeniably dated story of a corporate climber who lends his apartment to his bosses for their extramarital trysts with female underlings. As early as 1970–when the show first played Chicago, at the Shubert–its slick sound and smirky sexual humor struck some critics as passe in comparison to the candor and rock ‘n’ roll rowdiness of Hair, and Bacharach never wrote for Broadway again....

I find applying stinging nettles to my body highly pleasurable. I’ve tried the Web for more information, but either I get herbalist pages or, when searching the words “nettles” and “fetish” together, I get directed to S-M-type pages. I don’t really go for that. Can you direct me somewhere where I can get advice? Are there any long-term dangers in exposing my “delicate areas” to the little green temptresses? Best of Chicago voting is live now....