In May 2001 composer Stacy Garrop was at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, working on an orchestral piece she called Shadow. Garrop, who teaches composition at Roosevelt University, was only 31, but she’d already won numerous prizes for her compositions, and they were being played more often around the country. She calls it a watershed year. Toward the end of her month at Yaddo she left for two days to attend a performance of one of her chamber pieces in New York City, and while she was there she ran into someone who reminded her of the first person she’d ever fallen in love with....

On “Beaten Down,” from Mecca Normal’s 1986 debut, singer Jean Smith describes how time erodes youthful ideals, but she holds out hope in the last verse: “Maybe some of us will and some of us won’t be beaten down.” Since then Smith and guitarist David Lester have endured rising and falling fortunes: in the mid-90s the duo were hailed as riot grrrl godparents, but in 1997, after their Who Shot Elvis?...

I came here with three of my buddies and I’d forgot my ID. I lived only a few blocks away, so I ran back to get it. When I got back the guy at the door was like, “This is a phony ID.” He finally let me in after giving me a really hard time. We were at the bar getting drinks when he walked over to us and asked me for more ID....

Last year I was the first-prize winner of the Jambalaya Cook-Off Festival here. I can’t take all the credit–it was myself and my friend Phil Ridarelli. We went to the contest the year before and thought we could do better. I’d never really made jambalaya before. Jambalaya is everything leftover in the kitchen, and you put it into a pot and make it all together. It’s a dish that comes from New Orleans....

It was my first date with my boyfriend Noah and we came here. It was really jammed, and we headed toward the back to the really small room where they have that little couchy thing. There was some sort of birthday party going on, and the room was packed with maybe 30 people, but we squeezed in. Everyone was being super festive, and we started talking to people. They were asking, “How do you know Michelle?...

Mary Stuart “A single death is a tragedy,” Joseph Stalin once observed. “A million deaths is a statistic.” But after the horrific events of September 11, with the threat of more carnage to come, plays about the deaths of royals in centuries past present some problems. With so many innocents slaughtered so close to home, it’s hard to feel sorry for two supremely self-involved monarchs like Mary Stuart and Richard II, particularly given the appalling lack of judgment both rulers demonstrated....

It took me a while to figure out what’s odd about Trisha Brown’s ensemble piece Rapture to Leon James, dedicated to a famous lindy hopper at the Savoy Ballroom in the late 30s. Set to a score by jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, Brown’s choreography celebrates American popular dance–tap, jitterbug, even minstrelsy and square dance–without ever actually reproducing it. It’s as if aliens had come to earth, watched a performance of West Side Story, then made up their own version, complete with the symmetries and hierarchies of musical theater but entirely lacking in emotional and narrative content....

Almost since the day Simeon Career Academy opened, parents and students on the far south side have been pleading with the school board to shut it down. The board opened the high school in 1964 in an abandoned Kroger warehouse at 82nd and Vincennes. Board officials assured the community the site was temporary–they were going to build a brand-new school soon. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, one year turned into two, then three, then ten....

Adam Lee Miller, an art-school grad from Detroit who used to play bass in punk bands, went over to the dark side after one group kicked him out for bringing synths to practice. He started playing solo in 1994, under the name Artificial Material, and after a verbal agreement with Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label fell through, he started his own imprint, Ersatz Audio. In 1996 he formed the short-lived but influential neo-electro duo Le Car with Ian Clark (now of Perspects); when they broke up, he went back to performing alone....

Friday 11/8 – Thursday 11/14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Chicago police officer Scott Fortino went back to school for photography in 1998, some of his classmates at UIC loved his work, but others took issue with his methods. “In the course of a day of work, I enter and exit all types of places,” he says. “If I find a place interesting, I’ll make arrangements to return [and take pictures]....

Friday 4/11 – Thursday 4/17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I remember being a kid on the playground and saying, ‘You’re such a Yoko Ono,’” says Kristin Van Loon of the Minneapolis-based Hijack dance company. “It’s wild that a little kid was aware of her being the bitch that broke up the Beatles, which is how people knew her.” Many years later, however, after doing some research on the Fluxus artist, she and Hijack coartistic director Arwen Wilder became fans....

Equal Opportunity Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Middleton says his personal tale is “just one of those old, ordinary stories–about maturation and growing up and accepting self–but the living of it was not ordinary, nor is it for anybody who has to go through that, even today.” Still, “the issue has always been, What does this have to do with how I do my job?...

Andy Warhol’s name was so often attached to narrative films by Paul Morrissey (Andy Warhol’s Flesh, Andy Warhol’s Trash, etc) that some viewers might be surprised at the rawness and randomness of the films Warhol directed himself. This Chicago Filmmakers program, which collects three of his earliest works, reveals his aesthetic debt to composer John Cage: the director doesn’t seem to be directing anyone, and his camera passively observes everything from slight body movements to a kinky threesome....

When it comes to hip-hop, Chicago gets no respect. The speedy run-on vocal style that Cleveland’s Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rode to platinum in 1994 was invented at least three years earlier by Twista and Do or Die, Chicago acts who hover below the mainstream radar even today. Despite his underground rep, Common’s career didn’t blossom until he moved to Brooklyn. And the most humiliating development of all came with the success of Nelly’s Country Grammar in 2000, when Saint Louis, not Chicago, became the city to put midwestern hip-hop on the map....

An underground turntablist might seem like a strange opening act for Guns N’ Roses, but this San Franciscan knows a thing or two about rocking an arena–he’s worked the decks for the Beastie Boys’ live shows since 1998. (He’s the title DJ in “Three MC’s and One DJ,” from Hello Nasty.) Scratch wonks know him as a founding member of the Bay Area DJ crew the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, who won the annual DMC World DJ contest so many times they were forced to retire from competition....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Patrol Car Hit by Flying Outhouse,” which appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in October. Wisconsin state trooper Rich Vanko’s squad car was damaged when a truck carrying portable toilets lost one along Interstate 90. (He’d pulled over to help a stranded motorist and wasn’t in the vehicle.) And “Shatner Frozen Horse-Semen Suit Dismissed,” which ran in the Herald-Leader of Lexington, Kentucky, in July....

If the now-kaput XFL was football for mooks–a tawdry, sensationalistic, bastard son of the original sport that I called mookball–the Arena Football League is for people who simply can’t get enough football. It’s another bastard son, resembling basketball in its pacing and tempo, but it keeps the sideshow elements–the cheerleaders and fireworks–in their proper place. Played indoors on a 50-yard field that fits within an 85-foot-wide hockey rink, with eight-yard end zones and heavily padded boards, it favors quickness and agility over size and speed....

The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful, Northlight Theatre. Odd that 15 years after his death from AIDS, gay fringe-theater pioneer Charles Ludlam should be best remembered for this mainstream crowd pleaser. Premiered by Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1984, Irma Vep pays homage to and lampoons gothic thrillers. On a secluded English estate called Mandacrest (comically realized by set designers Richard and Jacqueline Penrod as an Edward Gorey pop-up book), an aristocrat is haunted by his dead–or perhaps undead–first wife, his frightened new bride, their spooky housekeeper, a vampire, a werewolf, a reincarnated Egyptian princess, and other mainstays of the genre....

The Rocky Horror Show, Stage Two Theatre Company, at the Estonian House. The Rocky Horror Show is the campy 1973 musical that inspired the 1975 cult film. The plot, for those who don’t already know it, involves a young, clean-cut midwestern couple (David Tibble and Sarah B. Lukey in this production) whose car breaks down one night outside the home of the sweet, depraved transvestite Frank-N-Furter (an excellently slinky Joel Hoover); Frank takes apart their sexual mores in an entertaining, over-the-top way that combines elements of science fiction, comic books, and drag shows....

TOLJA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Granted, with the advent of new drug therapies, fear of HIV has subsided among both gays and straights. Granted also, this new study involves only slightly less guesswork than the one I based my original conclusion on. Still, to the extent that your higher cortical functions are engaged when you’re about to have sex, understanding how different behaviors affect your chance of getting HIV may reduce your risk of getting other sexually transmitted diseases....