Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to an August report in the Washington Post, women in Kenya are now openly defying a tradition they’ve long hated: the requirement that a newly widowed woman pay to have sex with the village’s “cleanser” to dispel evil spirits before she can attend her husband’s funeral or remarry. Cleansing is low-status work, and often a dullard or drunkard will end up with the job–the cleanser in the town of Gangre, an unkempt alcoholic the women call “the terrorist,” reflected, “It’s not bad for me since I get to be with the beautiful ladies…....

If there were a griot laureate of Chicago, the position would probably belong to Oscar Brown Jr. Brown speaks for the African-American everyman. In his lyrics and poems his themes include the bittersweet joys of fatherhood (“Dat Dere,” written for his son, the late Oscar “Bobo” Brown III, when Bobo was a boy), the battle of the sexes (“The Snake,” “Ladiesman”), the horrors of ghetto life (the searing “Chant of the Welfare Mothers”), and the legacy of slavery (“Forty Acres and a Mule”)....

I am an attractive 25-year-old female, and I often fantasize about having sex with two men at once. The guys I’ve dated wouldn’t even consider it. But perhaps it is best to do this with strangers in case you feel like it was a huge mistake afterward and never want to see them again. I am thinking about taking an ad out in a local paper, but what about safety? The boys might get carried away, and I doubt the police would be sympathetic when they learned I was fucking two strangers I’d only just met in a hotel room....

Born Thomas LaBeff in rural Arkansas in 1935, roots-rock legend Sleepy LaBeef sang in church as a child. At home he listened to recordings by gospel pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and he absorbed plenty of blues and hillbilly music while selling watermelons in the street with his father. In the mid-50s he moved to Houston and began playing honky-tonks; he also cut some sides for XERF, the famous million-watt “outlaw” radio station that broadcast from across the Mexican border....

As a devoted baseball fan, I’ve been getting through the winter on rations of Bill James’s newly updated Historical Baseball Abstract, a gift I received at Christmas. But in all of that book’s accounts of the sometimes malicious, more often weak-willed and sycophantic boobery of the commissioner’s office, I have yet to see anything as stupid, as misguided, and as damaging to the sport as Bud Selig’s idea of “contraction,” of eliminating at least two and perhaps as many as four major-league baseball teams....

Driving back to Chicago after Christmas, I stopped at a fast-food restaurant in the suburban outskirts and looked up from my burger to see a kid standing in line wearing a number 8 Cade McNown Bears jersey. There was this season’s Bears resurgence in a nutshell; while 34 Walter Payton jerseys and 51 Dick Butkus jerseys are fashion fixtures around here, it’s been a while since a local kid has wanted to wear the jersey of an active Bear....

The Oakland duo who call themselves the Coup have been churning out bouncy, funky, politically charged hip-hop since the early 90s to little notice, but thanks to the intended cover art for their fourth and latest album, Party Music (75 Ark), newshounds the world over know who they are: a doctored photo pictured MC and producer Boots Riley with his finger on the button of a detonator, blowing up the World Trade Center....

When Across a Crowded Room–a roundup of music by Richard Rodgers–played in Chicago last summer, Reader critic Neil Tesser noted a paradox that made the show especially welcome: Rodgers’s versatility contributed to his relative obscurity. His centennial last year spurred new interest in the composer, but before that he “seldom topped anyone’s list in discussions of the great 20th-century songwriters,” Tesser wrote, in spite of having written more than 900 songs, including “several dozen of the best-loved tunes in the American popular repertoire....

Most comedy revues devote a portion of the program to topical subjects, but ¡Salsation! gives even facile premises intelligence and insight. In a quiz show entitled “Who Wants to Be an American Citizen?” the prizes include visa extensions and green cards, and in “Judge Booty” the bench comments on the marital dissatisfaction caused by mainstream icons. Barrio standards of beauty are later mocked in two musical numbers, “Fantasia Latin Man” and “Hoochie Mama,” the latter performed by the “Wetback Street Boyz....

Since being tagged one of ten new artists to watch by Rolling Stone in January, this motley two-year-old Gotham trio–singer Karen O, guitarist Nick Zinner, and drummer Brian Chase, who also plays in the Seconds–has been riding a wave of hype that’s soon to rival the Strokes’. The uproar is largely based on the five songs that comprise the group’s self-released eponymously titled debut, a weird, exhilarating mix of arty apathy and a deep and enthusiastic understanding of rock ‘n’ roll verities....

“Deconstructing a men’s suit” was Marisa Cheung’s agenda when she cut up a brown suit coat she found in a Wisconsin thrift store and added a ruffled underskirt of Pellon interfacing, a stiff material usually used to reinforce cuffs and collars. She says she modeled her garment after the plumage of male peacocks and can imagine a “cute, successful businesswoman” wearing her exploding creation. Cheung and her School of the Art Institute classmates in Art History 5681: Defining 20th-Century Dress spent the semester exploring identity and personal style, drawing swatches of theory from everyone from Hume to Derrida in an attempt to blur the line between fashion and fine art....

Desserts 101 In previous sessions the students have learned to make French cakes and biscuits, breakfast pastries, ice creams, and candies. They’ve worked for weeks with every form of chocolate–even spraying it with a gun. When they graduate in a few more weeks, they’ll have certificates from one of the most respected specialty culinary schools in the country and entree to well-paid work in a demanding field. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Chills Chills fans have had to put up with almost 20 years of excuses. If only Martin Phillipps had been able to keep a band together, instead of going through 14 configurations in the group’s first 12 years. If only drummer Martyn Bull hadn’t died of leukemia in 1983, just as things were starting to take off. If only the mix of their first album, 1988’s delicate Brave Words, hadn’t sounded so odd....

Peter Stephens: Paris-Buffalo, 1900-2003 Peter Stephens’s 15 paintings and works on paper at Zolla/Lieberman are based on photographs that have a certain grandeur and are distanced by time: Eugene Atget’s turn-of-the-century documentations of France’s monuments and parks and painterly photographs by Wilbur Porterfield, an Atget contemporary who lived in Buffalo, New York. Atget 06-06 shows a grand outdoor stairway leading to an upper level where one imagines a promenade with cafes....

I really enjoy Jim McNeely’s piano work. Now there’s a sentiment you don’t hear expressed too often–not because McNeely’s no good as a pianist, but because he’s best known as a composer and arranger for jazz orchestra. His writing–first for the Mel Lewis Orchestra in the 80s, then for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and most recently as chief conductor (and de facto composer in residence) of the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra–challenges the listener without abandoning swing or melody, and his achievements in this field have all but eclipsed his playing....

In the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster, Dave Mustaine sits on the band’s therapy couch and reveals that he wished one of his mates would’ve helped pry the bottle from his hand back when he was the lead guitarist. Instead, Metallica kicked him to the curb in 1983 and dissed him in public for two decades. But Mustaine didn’t need those pricks then and he doesn’t need them now: in his own band, Megadeth, he’s kept the pedal to the metal while Metallica’s slowed to a geriatric pace....

Mohammed Haroon’s throat was cut in the wee hours of April 16, as he sat behind the wheel of his taxicab. “He was a good friend of mine,” said a guest in the studio, Raja Khan, of the Chicago Professional Taxicab Drivers Association. “We’d always go to [the Near North restaurant] Zaiqa and pray together late at night. He was a good father, and I love him so….I cannot explain how this person is good, hardworking for his family and how anyone can take someone’s life for nothing....

I read your article on Don “Waterdog” Edwards with interest [January 12]. It is very well written and certainly captures the essence of how drugs can destroy a human life. But I am afraid that the article does both pool and Chris’s Billiards a disservice. I’m concerned that readers might infer that this is also what pool can and will do. I am president of the Oliva Women’s Pool League, which has played there every Tuesday night since the original “Chris” opened it....

In Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s roman a clef script, Suzie has gathered a motley assemblage of self-important cultural elites for drinks, debate, and highfalutin eats post 9/11. This play might have worn out its welcome before the second course, but director Jason Loewith keeps the verbal balls in the air so well that even this clever work’s facile aspects don’t puncture its delights. It’s fun to see a gifted ensemble dig into the script, especially a fabulous Wendy Robie as Suzie and Joseph Wycoff and Doug McDade as blowhards based on Christopher Hitchens and Tom Clancy....

Shante’s Reality Check, Michelle D. Ivy Productions, at the Athenaeum Theatre. “Remember, you can always walk away,” state both the program and the poster for this play about domestic abuse, and it’s obvious that this show is meant to be empowering. But Michelle D. Ivy’s original script is uninspiring. Instead of focusing on one central abusive relationship, Shante’s Reality Check casts a wide net. We meet Shante (played by Ivy, who also directs) and her one-dimensional boyfriend Tyrone, plus Shante’s bickering friends, her mother, Tyrone’s buddies, and other fleeting figures–all of them providing opportunities for the play to hit the kind of unsurprising plot points we might expect from an after-school special....