Elayne LeTraunik has tried many times to start a successful theater company. In 1978 she and her husband, Kenneth, founded a community theater in Hoffman Estates called Theatre Northwest. In 1983 they helped launch Goose Island Theatre in a Chicago storefront but bowed out after two years. She started Red Hen Productions in 1997 and installed the company in a 50-seat Andersonville space last year, after struggling for two years to get the building up to code....

Rock, Pop, Etc. BARENAKED LADIES, LIZ PHAIR, JASON MRAZ perform at “Miracle on State Street V” (a portion of proceeds benefits La Rabida Children’s Hospital & Research Center). Sold out. Sat 12/6, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-263-1138 or 312-902-1500. CASTRATION DJ, JOHN CIBA, COUGHS, ARCADE, AUDREYS perform at a party for the Movieside Film Festival. Fri 12/12, 8 PM, Acme Art Space, 1741 N. Western. 773-856-5220. DEL SOULS Free in-store performance....

Any improvising musician, no matter how creative, inevitably winds up reusing favorite licks and techniques, and the members of Tri-Dim–Swedish guitarist David Stackenas and two Norwegians, reedist Hakon Kornstad and percussionist Ingar Zach–are no exception. That said, it’s remarkable how different the group’s most recent album, 2 of 2 (Sofa, 2002), is from its 2000 debut, Tri-Dimprovisations (BP). In the earlier work fragments of crackling, concentrated energy are held at a distance from one another by the mutually repelling forces generated by the splintery, scratchy playing....

By Ben Joravsky In December Ronnis announced that she was retiring, and class members say they were told by Warren Park officials that she wouldn’t be replaced. It was hardly front-page news–few people outside the class even knew about it. But Morin and her classmates were upset. “The Park District supervisor decided that because they needed to cut 10 percent from the budget, she would cut the seniors’ program–because her priority is kids,” she says....

Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To describe as “simplistic” the belief that Arafat turned on the violence after Camp David turns a blind eye to the facts themselves, irrespective of how “simplistic” they may seem to be to Rowley. According to all official American accounts, Arafat walked away from the negotiating table after being offered virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem....

The hip-hop underground is chock full of wordy bastards. Coincidentally or not, lots of them are white, and lots of them have taste in beats so austere they make Mobb Deep sound like Fatboy Slim. Like many such MCs, Buck 65 (ne Richard Terfry) could probably pass for a spoken-word artist or stand-up comic if he wanted, though he’s actually got as much street cred as you can muster in Nova Scotia–his college radio show kick-started the Halifax hip-hop scene in the early 90s....

The dry spell we’re experiencing this spring may have an upside: it will limit run-ins between man and beaver. The most notorious city beavers in recent history lived in Jackson Park, where three years ago they gnawed up about 75 trees on Wooded Island, a bird-watching hot spot in the park’s lagoon. Birders raised a ruckus, and in an agreement with the Chicago Park District, a DeKalb wildlife control specialist named Rob Erickson trapped the 13 animals responsible and moved them to an undisclosed location in northern Cook County....

Last Thursday evening, a half dozen Loyola students huddled around a picnic table on their Rogers Park campus, eating lentils and rice out of disposable bowls. They’d pitched two giant tents and a third smaller one in the grassy area next to Mertz Residence Hall, and a makeshift chicken-wire fence marked the edge of their campsite. When they were done with dinner, a couple of them tried to get a fire going in a large metal garbage can while someone else handed out cups of sparkling lemonade....

Soprano Erie Mills, a Granite City native trained at the University of Illinois, hit a career high two summers ago singing the lead in the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s revival of Dominick Argento’s Dickens adaptation, Miss Havisham’s Fire. A New York Times reviewer noted that “her vocal bravura can work hand in glove with variety of color and expression.” Mills’s talent was evident more than two decades ago, when she had a minor role in the Lyric Opera’s production of Love for Three Oranges; in the early 80s, she also appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at Grant Park....

Getting Out, Synergy Therapy Theatre, at the North Lakeside Cultural Center. In a stark, peeling white basement, with the audience a mere four feet from the action, there’s literally no room for artifice or stage tricks. It’s a near perfect metaphor for playwright Marsha Norman’s heroine, Arlene (Melissa Van Kersen), as she tries to rebuild her life and banish old demons after an eight-year prison sentence. Norman, who based the play on her work with disturbed adolescents, powerfully juxtaposes the story of Arlene’s reintroduction to society with flashbacks to her violent childhood (Michelle Goltzman plays Arlene’s younger self)....

By Ben Joravsky Ironically, Walsh once seemed destined for a similar career, having left the classroom in the 70s to work for the union’s national office. In 1991 she returned to Chicago to work for the local union’s research center. But in 1995 she went back to the front lines–she now teaches eighth grade at a school on the southwest side–where she’s been ever since. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

In 1997, Patricia Rosemoor went to Cook County Jail. She says she’ll never forget the 12-foot fences topped with razor wire, the sniper towers, the metal detectors, the long lines of people waiting to be processed, and the din of the inmates in the two-story cell blocks. “It left me with the impression I would never want to be there as an inmate in my entire life.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“To understand the average Chicago streetscape,” says poet Campbell McGrath, “you have to understand why Chicago is here. To understand why Chicago is here means you have to understand all of American history, but that’s not even enough because it’s the whole history of political capitalism that accounts for America and also the history of various ideas that made it to America, and what’s an idea, anyway?” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Jerome Gastaldi: Bridges to Freedom Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Californian born there in 1945, Gastaldi began the mixed-media Resurrection of Fear just after the second plane hit the World Trade Center; two thick black lines in his maze of colors and shapes suggest the planes’ trajectories, crossing large areas of the canvas before abruptly changing direction at points marked by red. While several figures seem imprisoned in the mess and thus stable, much of the rest of the composition plays at the boundary of chaos....

Katalin Rodriguez Zamiar is routinely punched, kicked, and thrown around, and sometimes the consequences are dire. Detailing a recent surgical procedure she underwent to repair structural damage to her spine, she was sanguine. “It was noninvasive laser surgery. They inserted some needles and a camera,” she says. “I have a very high threshold for pain, and sometimes that works to my disadvantage.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She grew up on the near north side, near Chicago and Wells....

Reeling 2002, the 21st Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, runs Friday, July 26, through Thursday, August 8. Screenings this week are at the Music Box and Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark. Advance tickets can be purchased at Chicago Filmmakers 10 to 6 weekdays, noon to 5 Saturday; same-day tickets are available only at the venue box office. Tickets are $8, $7 for screenings at Chicago Filmmakers, and $6 for screenings before 5 PM....

Tony Adler, my man, a million thanks to you for straightening out me and thousands of other Reader readers on the truth about Emmett Till’s murder in your recent review of the Pegasus Players’ The State of Mississippi…and the Face of Emmett Till [“A Mother of a Problem,” September 19]. Yep, as you state so well: “The simple fact that Mobley [Emmett Till’s mother] is telling her own story here ought to put us on our guard, however scrupulous she may actually have been…....

I read your advice to the 17-year-old HARD, telling him to avoid a threesome because his “gut” told him not to do it. Maybe gay men are regularly given the chance to pick and choose threesomes, but young HARD won’t be so lucky. Being a heterosexual male, I can speak from actual experience–and regret. I had a youthful opportunity to have a threesome with two gorgeous, if somewhat twisted, dorm mates....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. BAD EXAMPLES Free concert. Friday, 1 PM, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E....

I’m still not sure why Dutch jazz musicians can so easily and gracefully reconcile reverence and iconoclasm, but in the case of a record like Colors (Bik Bent Braam, 2002), the latest from the trio led by pianist Michiel Braam, I’m less interested in cause than effect. Colors was inspired by the 1967 album of the same name, on which Chicago “word jazz” legend Ken Nordine performed 34 impressionistic poems corresponding to the mood or feeling of 34 colors....