As Beau O’Reilly’s new play opens, it’s raining onstage–huge sprinkling cans suspended from the ceiling inundate a cluster of umbrella-clutching citizens. One of them, a teenager listening to Lou Reed’s “Vicious” (the source of the play’s misquoted title) on her Walkman, collides with a bus. Later, in a honky-tonk bar, a web of connections develops. A forest ranger once assaulted by someone wearing a bear mask meets a runaway wife. Her therapist sister’s clients include the ursine thug as well as a cheerful bag lady and a disabled novelist....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two teams of Canadian engineers are building small passenger rockets (one team, Canadian Arrow, has begun seeking astronauts for a 2003 launch) in hopes of winning the X Prize–a $10 million award for the first vehicle to carry three people at least 62 miles into space, then repeat the flight within two weeks. Such rockets are the Cessnas of the space industry, costing $3 to $5 million and generally measuring only 20 to 30 feet long....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Florida Times-Union reported in March that police in Jacksonville, Florida, had arrested 19-year-old Robert Eric Denney after linking his DNA to the scene of a 1998 murder. Despite close surveillance, Denney repeatedly foiled officers’ attempts to procure a DNA sample, refusing a glass of water, putting a cigarette butt in his pocket rather than discarding it, and declining to lick-seal an envelope....

Orlando “Maraca” Valle is one of Cuba’s greatest Latin-jazz flute players, as evidenced by his work in the legendary Irakere and on solo albums like 1996’s Havana Calling (Qbadisc). But his effervescent talent is matched by his business acumen. When the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon took off in the late 90s, Valle quickly got in on the action: he began to make music for the dancers instead of the listeners, delving into the son tradition that gave birth to Latin jazz....

Many times when underground stars go solo, their experimental, self-indulgent wank-offs seem designed to test the loyalty of their fans. (Azita Youssefi and Kathleen Hanna, I’m lookin’ at you.) That’s not the way it has to be, though, as demonstrated by the innocent and sincere music of Paradise Island, aka Jenny Hoyston, who sings and plays trumpet in Erase Errata. Her first release, a seven-inch on Dim Mak, sounds like she decided to record three off-the-cuff songs on a boom box one lonely night....

Last December director Steve Walker was looking for actors who could break-dance for Factory Chicago’s production of Poppin’ and Lockdown, a viciously plastic tribute to early-80s rapsploitation flicks, when he saw Derrick Nelson and Danny Belrose bust a few moves in Defiant Theatre’s Sci-Fi Action Movie in Space Prison. He grabbed them to play rival dance captains; 33-year-old Nelson, cast as head villain, was psyched at first to make a full-on break-dancing comeback....

PROJECT 9 FEATURING BILLY HARPER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Billy Harper approaches the tenor saxophone the way his Methodist minister grandfather might have approached the pulpit: he thunders and cajoles with messianic zeal, and as he sings praises he swings like hell. Along with Jan Garbarek and George Adams, the Houston-born Harper was one of a troika of 70s tenor men who managed to craft unique styles under the influence of John Coltrane....

Barrel of Monkeys retains its foolproof central conceit for this new evening of short plays by Chicago Public School students, grades three through six. Performed by a troupe of adult hipsters and cheerfully produced with the shabby budget of a Charlie Brown Christmas pageant, the resulting madcap hour has the broadest appeal of any play I’ve ever seen. (Most grown-up writers would be envious.) Director Halena Kays is greatly aided by Jonathan Mastro’s excellent musical direction, and the class-clown performers boast talent matched only by their altruism, and abandon matched only by their expertise....

I’ll get right to the point. Why is the Islamic world so backward and ignorant? A thousand years ago, we hear, Arab culture put Europe in the shade, with great achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and architecture. Now it all seems to have boiled down to sadists and fanatics. I know this is a lot to explain in a column where they don’t even let you jump to an inside page, Cecil, but give it a whiz: Where did our Muslim brothers go wrong?...

What is the deal with cousins marrying each other? In most states it’s against the law. Yet where I am working, in a West African francophone country, there is a saying, “Cousins are made for cousins.” Is this practice really genetically unsound, or is that just an American old wives’ tale? –Jay Davidson, Peace Corps volunteer, Mauritania Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The U....

Rock, Pop, etc. BLINK 182, GREEN DAY Sat 6/15, 6:30 PM, Tweeter Center, I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park. 708-614-1616 or 312-559-1212. JENNIFER CHADA, JOAN CURTO, LUCIA SPINA Cabaret concert under the direction of Scott Williams; benefit for Playhouse 111. Fri 6/7 and Sat 6/8, 8 PM, Playhouse 111, 111 N. Hale, Wheaton. 630-260-1820. EVAN DANDO, CHRIS BROKAW, VIA TANIA 18 & over show. Fri 6/7, 9 PM, Park West, 322 W....

Always Together, French Theatre of Chicago, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Before the iron curtain fell in 1989, life in Romania was dark both figuratively, under the harsh regime of dictator Ceausescu, and literally: there were no streetlights at night. Director Anne-Bernadette Weiner has brought that darkness to the stage in her adaptation of Anca Visdei’s play about two Romanian sisters, living apart for 18 years when one seeks asylum in Switzerland....

Friday 12 October At 75, Shohei Imamura offers one of his most ribald films–possibly his daffiest–to date: a well-told fantasy about a young woman in a fishing village on the Noto peninsula (The Eel’s Misa Shimizu) with a strange physical condition that essentially turns her into a sexual geyser when she’s aroused. She gets involved with a middle-aged businessman (The Eel’s Koji Yakusho, also a familiar lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa films) who loses his job and wife, then turns up in the village looking for a golden Buddha stolen from a Kyoto temple that’s said to be in the young woman’s house....

Do broadcasters pay to use the airwaves? Half of Americans polled in 1999 believed, falsely, that they do–a real problem for groups lobbying to require broadcasters to pay their debt to the public by giving political candidates free airtime (“Political Standard,” newsletter of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, April). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The airline crisis has presented passenger trains with an opportunity so great that even Amtrak can’t screw it up,” Chicago attorney and Amtrak Reform Council member James Coston told the Ohio Association of Rail Passengers May 11....

For the annual happening he calls Crepuscule, AACM reedist, composer, and fabulist Douglas Ewart combines a dizzying array of elements into a jazz-centric hybrid of harvest festival and Renaissance Faire: to recommend it, I suspect, I only have to describe it. To create this free-floating gestalt of creative activity, which wends its way through a park to celebrate the coming of autumn, Ewart enlists more than 50 artists–musicians, painters, poets, sculptors, puppeteers, belly dancers, practitioners of tai chi and capoeira–and, in a less formal sense, the audience....

The bluegrass-heavy sound track from the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? topped Billboard’s country chart for 26 weeks, selling more than four million copies. As a result, veteran bluegrass and old-timey performers like Ralph Stanley are achieving new recognition from a broader audience, as are upstarts like Gillian Welch, and mainstream country stars like Patty Loveless and Dolly Parton are delving into their mountain roots. And hard-core bluegrass musicians like Del McCoury and James King, who never stopped plugging away for the true believers, have been pumping out new recordings at a record pace to take advantage of the interest as well....

Over the past few weeks key aides to Mayor Daley have been working behind the scenes to help turn the long-abandoned South Side Masonic Temple, at 64th and Green in Englewood, into a school. At the same time lawyers for the city have been in housing court demanding that the building be demolished. In 1997 school officials began looking for a new site, which is how they found themselves in Englewood, visiting the Masonic Temple....

Handsome Family Hits the Road Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rennie grew up in New York State, but she felt drawn to New Mexico as well. “I tell everybody the reason I decided to move was one night I was getting out of my car in Wicker Park, and walking to my apartment I saw this rat run across the street,” she says. “Instead of the usual, ‘Eww, rat’ feeling, I said, ‘Oh, it’s an animal....

I am writing this letter in response to Kelly Kleiman’s review of the “Equal Footing/Equal Earing” festival which was printed on June 21, 2002. First, Kleiman devoted her entire opening paragraph to an outdated understanding of the “downtown” New York dance scene. For some reason Kleiman would like to draw a relationship between cutting-edge performance taking place downtown in both New York and Chicago. It would have taken a short conversation with the curators to realize that there was no meaning behind bringing this experimental concert to downtown Chicago, other than the venue happens to be downtown....

LOUIS HAYES QUINTET FEATURING CECIL McBEE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The lineup drummer Louis Hayes brings to Chicago is almost identical to the one on his most recent recording, the terrific Quintessential Lou (TCB), and it sounds like it really belongs to someone else–namely Horace Silver, whose band Hayes joined as a precocious teenager in 1956. But Hayes isn’t stealing from his old boss so much as showing off a well-earned credential: he had almost as much to do with the considerable success of Silver’s mid-50s quintet as the bandleader himself....