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Last fall choreographer and multimedia artist Ann Carlson started sifting through thousands of archival images from the Chicago Historical Society and other sources for her new site-specific project, Night Light. Eventually, Carlson and two local researchers settled on nine photos “where the place can be identified,” she says. “Sometimes it’s ridiculously obvious, like the lions at the Art Institute.” The piece, in which dancers will re-create the series of photographs shot at various sites around downtown between 1890 and 1990, will be viewed in the context of a walking tour, with the dancers wearing period costumes–all in gray scale–and standing stock-still on the spots where the photographs were originally snapped....

With fire shooting from his mouth, Johnny Meah steps onto the stage and into character. But nothing in this act reveals Meah’s current claim to fame: he is a respected painter whose banners of sideshow performers hang in such places as the Smithsonian, the Barnum Museum in Westport, Connecticut, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, where he’s going through the paces tonight. At 63, he’s at the top of his game....

Natural Affection, North Lakeside Players, at the North Lakeside Cultural Center. Director Sara Rosen deserves some sort of prize for mounting the least heartwarming Christmas play in the English language. William Inge’s overlooked drama–it tanked on Broadway in 1963 and has never before been produced locally–condenses two days in the hardscrabble life of resourceful Sue into an Arthur Miller-like stew of frustrated ambitions. Residing in a tiny Chicago apartment with her commitment-shy slacker boyfriend Bernie, she’s suddenly confronted by the son she gave up for adoption, now a teenage juvenile delinquent on Christmas holiday from reform school....

The portraits on the wall at Bowmanville’s Leadway Bar range from an elaborate feathered peacock’s head on top of a business-suited torso to a fat-lipped gangster wearing a cocked fedora to a caricature of Bart Simpson. Most are unframed; they were done by customers using the paper, paint, and easels set out in the bar’s makeshift studio. Owner Frank Ciucur sells the pieces for $10 a pop, but he doesn’t pocket the money....

Lead Stories William R. Macera was reelected mayor of Johnston, Rhode Island, despite being found in a car that police said reeked of marijuana smoke in October; he narrowly edged out write-in candidate Louis L. Vinagro Jr., who had been arrested hours before the election for threatening the state official inspecting his waste-hauling business. Paroled felon Bobby Banks, 20, elected to the New Bern, North Carolina, soil conservation board, was later arrested for having illegally registered to vote....

“I stage photos based on things I’ve seen,” says Evanston artist Iris Binor. “It’s a repetitious process. If I were to come into a room I wanted to use, I would measure all the furniture, remake everything, and then put it in a photo that would most likely be remade again. It takes me a very long time to have a completed project.” Binor moved around a lot as a child and says she often feels like “a visitor from planet Zoloft” observing life around her....

Singer-songwriter-nondoctor Tony Rogers is back with his self-help tunefest. Singing songs, spouting slogans, and making plentiful Gen-X references (I counted 29–that’s one every 3.1 minutes), Dr. Tony demystifies the Mars/Venus divide and pontificates that one is, in fact, the loneliest number. (Look what happened when David Lee Roth went solo–not pretty.) No passive affair, the evening calls for honest disclosure–audience members fill out preshow questionnaires, from which Rogers reads aloud and names names–and “full-assed” singing along....

One recent afternoon Michael Roper, proprietor and barman at Andersonville beer bar the Hopleaf, was entertaining a question that has troubled the belly of many a Chicago nighthawk: How is it that a first-rate city with world-class culinary aspirations can be so second-rate when it comes to late-night grub? “Midwestern values,” Roper said, clearing a plate that seconds ago held a meaty portion of duck leg confit. “Most city people here don’t eat late....

Revolving Door Policy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Minor, a native of Flint, Michigan, who’s performed with Second City Detroit, Second City E.T.C., and Second City Toronto, left the company on good terms, lured away to join the cast of HBO’s Mr. Show. Since then he’s worked on a handful of television shows, including The Martin Short Show, The Daily Show, and Saturday Night Live....

Architect Dan Wheeler thinks bad buildings are worth a closer look. For example, “There’s a building at the corner of Congress and Dearborn that’s just a pure exhibition of commercial gluttony. There’s no ground-floor level. It does nothing to engage with the street; it sprays granite about to make up for its lack of design.” The new Dearborn Center on the northeast corner of Dearborn and Adams is equally dismal. “Its heavily tinted glass appears lifeless,” he says, “making the structure into a deadweight, preventing the transparency [of the] Inland Steel Building nearby, or Mies’s buildings....

The Bulls right now play a form of basketball that reminds one of Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king assigned to roll a boulder, again and again, to the top of a hill for eternity. Though the Bulls continue to have the worst record in the National Basketball Association, entering this workweek at 6-30, it’s simply not true that they show no signs of progress. The Bulls show signs of progress in almost every game....

Was J. Edgar Hoover’s cross-dressing an urban legend or a fact? Are there any pictures of him in drag? Where are they if there are/were any? I have never been able to find any info on this except small references in conspiracy books. –Cate Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One more example of how the oligarchs plot to keep the truth from us, you’re thinking–not that this is something you necessarily want to see covered in sixth grade social studies....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Representatives of the Salem Baptist Church, including Reverend James Meeks, have made public presentations of the current status of the project at two well-publicized meetings held here in Pullman. The first, last November, was attended by 125 Pullman residents, and the second, this month, was attended by 160 of them. I have no way of knowing how many of those present opposed the project because no poll was taken at either meeting....

In late October, on the New York uberblog Gawker, a young writer named Jessa Crispin became the latest target of author and critic Dale Peck’s famously vicious verbal abuse. Peck, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile, is perhaps best known for his starring role in an ongoing lit-world debate over harsh reviews, or “snark,” which many say began when he kicked off his June 2002 New Republic review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil with the fighting words “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation....

In January 2000, when Susan Aurinko resolved to open a gallery, she expected to spend the next year preparing a business plan and lining up artists. But when the right West Loop space presented itself a month later she grabbed it and hit the ground running, hosting Flatfile Photography Gallery’s first opening that April. “I had no idea about what I was doing,” she says. “I only knew I wanted to show emerging artists and students, and I wanted to have lots of flat files ....

Attention all perverts: have you been aching for the chance to lick dirty boots, whip a slave, receive an enthusiastic rim job, make out with a father figure, wield a knife in bed, urinate on a stranger, choke a partner, or get gang-banged from behind? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Porn Shot, a group of 12 Art Institute students-turned-pornographers, is holding auditions for their debut project, which they hope will be a nationally distributed video featuring the best takes....

John Caird and Paul Gordon’s musical version of Charlotte Bronte’s novel captures its incidents and tone, but the score is repetitive and the lyrics range from anachronistic to clunky. Circle Theatre makes the most of what it’s got: a heartthrob Rochester (Mark Pera) who sings like a dream, Darrelyn Marx in a delightful comic turn as Mrs. Fairfax, and Bob Knuth’s set and Kurt Ottinger’s lighting–so fully realized that when the bedroom catches fire you look for the exits....

Pianist Kenny Wayne came of age in Los Angeles in the late 50s, when the smooth, jazz-tinged style of blues artists like Lloyd Glenn and Charles Brown was still popular on the west coast. He also cites as influences Kansas City swingers like Jay McShann, as well as New Orleans R & B pioneers such as Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. His upcoming Night & Day album, Blues Carry Me Home, is a winningly low-key outing on which the pianist combines contemporary influences (free-form impressionism on the intro to the title track, burbling pop funk on “Wine, Beer, and Whiskey”) with old-school boogie and jump-blues elements....

Four years ago Mayor Daley promised to put a park on the west side of State Street between Congress and Harrison–an opening in all the concrete and congestion. Today the neighborhood is still congested, but the city has decided to ditch the park–and is entertaining a proposal to build a 30-story, 226-unit condominium complex on the site. “That’s quite a switch,” says Kate Miles, a resident of the area. “I think everyone wants to know how plans for a park turned into a 30-story tower....

RANDY WESTON’S AFRICAN RHYTHMS & THE MASTER GNAWA MUSICIANS OF MOROCCO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the late 60s and early 70s, jazz musicians popularized Albert Ayler’s notion that “music is the healing force of the universe”–which puts them about four centuries behind the Gnawa people of Morocco. The Gnawa believe that all human beings resonate to one of ten colors, each associated with a family of spirits and represented by a specific note; by playing these notes they hope to evoke purifying vibrational responses in their listeners....