THE MONSTER SHOW Last November Owens made something of a splash in Chicago’s performance-art world with his Traumarama. Every Wednesday that month his self-proclaimed “celebration of wounds of everyday life” began with a gruesome slide show of gunshot wounds, hand and head injuries, and other bloody physical injuries. This was followed by a series of original performances by Chicago artists (among them Steve Jones, Alan Tollefson, Karen Johnson, and John Spear) on the same theme....

Virtual Reality is the first interactive comedy show with a decidedly cyberpunk sensibility. It’s performed by the Upright Citizens Brigade, a comedy troupe trained in improvisation but willing to take the form places even the bold Annoyance Theatre has not gone before. The hour-long show is based on the premise that it’s a demonstration in “virtual reality,” that computer technology that simulates three-dimensional environments, developed at MIT’s media lob, among other places, and hyped by Timothy Leary....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » El Teatro de la Esperanza, the bilingual-bicultural all-Latino California theatrical troupe founded in 1970, has performed throughout this country and Europe, offering its unique perspective on Hispanic life in America. Today’s show is Teo’s Final Spin: Bullet Dancing in Times of War, about a young Hispanic’s search for identity as he travels to Central America. Written by Eulalio Cervantes (no relation to Miguel), it will be performed at 12:30 in the Illinois Room of the University of Illinois’ Chicago Circle Center, 750 S....

Concertante di Chicago, an unusual chamber ensemble in that it performs without a conductor, seems to thrive on the kind of engrossing esprit de corps characteristic of the best string quartets. It also typically brings a strong sense of musical coherence and continuity to its concerts–take the season opener. The four pieces are each eminent examples of Viennese classicism by themselves; yet performed back-to-back they’ll certainly provide a heightened appreciation of the famous style’s turning points....

JOFFREY BALLET This year the Joffrey has revived Bronislava Nijinska’s Les noces (“The Wedding”), and its inclusion on a program at the Auditorium with her brother Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’apres-midi d’un faune (1912) and Sacre made for a serious evening indeed. Les noces has been revived periodically since it premiered in Paris in 1923, so it hasn’t caused the same kind of sensation as the revival of Nijinsky’s Sacre, which hadn’t been seen for more than 70 years....

Let’s face it–Elkhart is not the sort of place people generally go for vacation. This is a hard-working and prosperous city that residents go from for vacation–and many of them go in recreational vehicles, the county’s main product. Elkhart County has been a national center for the construction of travel trailers, motor homes, and mobile homes (called “manufactured housing” around here) since area factories started turning out prefab houses during World War II....

THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST With William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis, Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers, Ed Begley Jr., and Bill Pullman. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since Manhattan a decade ago, in which Woody Allen redid the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights in order to invert and defuse its powerful dynamics (by scaling down the feeling in the huge close-ups of the hero), emotional impotence has been something of a badge of authenticity in the “serious” American cinema....

Some observations for the end of a very cool August: Last weekend, as a suitable finale to our chilly summer, the Rare Bird Alert reported a possible sighting of a black-backed woodpecker in Lake Forest. The black-backed is a bird of the boreal forest rarely seen even as far south as Green Bay. There have been only nine records in the Chicago area since 1955, and all the previous sightings were winter birds or late-winter birds that lingered into spring....

J.J. Johnson’s return to public performance has something of a mythic quality. Johnson, who was the first to adapt the bebop innovations of Parker and Gillespie to the trombone, had long held a legendary position in modern jazz anyway; and because he was there almost at the beginning, his name–not to mention his cool, dry sound and slipstream technique–seemed carved into jazz history. But in the late 60s Johnson disappeared from jazz, moving to Los Angeles to become a successful composer for film and TV....

Cindy Salach, boho in her black sweater, black tights, faded gray cutoffs, and short blond hair with two-inch black roots, walks down from her seat in the auditorium, steps up to the mike, flashes a quick smile, and says, “I’m going to read some love letters from second grade and fourth grade, sixth grade and high school. The first letter is from second grade. I know it by heart. ‘Dear Cindy, Kevin and Doug think you’re fat....

Performance art used to be a serious business, full of straight-faced artists acting out tedious rituals in front of aesthetic puritans too hip to crack a smile. But ironically, as the pessimism that once mainly existed only in the art world has bubbled into the mainstream, comedy, albeit dark comedy, has become permissible in performance, making brief appearances in the work of even the hippest performers. Club Lower Links is inaugurating its “Out-of-Towners Series” with a pair of New York performance artists who are not ashamed to leaven their work with comedy....

It’s tempting to call this low-budget, independently made feature by Chicago stand-up comic Greg Glienna (who directed and cowrote the script) the ultimate worst-case-scenario comedy. Glienna plays an unassuming young man in advertising who drives from Chicago to Indiana with his fiancee (Jacqueline Cahill) to meet her folks (Dick Galloway and Carol Whelan) and sister (Mary Ruth Clarke, Glienna’s cowriter). What follows is a cascade of nightmares that may not always make you laugh but will impress you with the singularity of Glienna’s dark approach....

MR. INBETWEEN Mr. Inbetween always seems about to collapse. Performers constantly bump into each other in this playful, mysterious, charming dance-theater piece, running in and out of doors for no apparent reason and never quite seeming to know what is supposed to happen next. Chaos always threatens, but Timothy Buckley, the piece’s creator, and the Buster King Dance Club keep this chaos volatile and yet skillfully under control. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Do music and politics mix? “Oh yes, definitely,” says Frank Abbinanti with a forcefulness that belies his mild-mannered demeanor. “Incorporating political consciousness into music is extremely important. A composer should illuminate the problems of the world–otherwise he or she would just be a mere entertainer. And we have plenty of those nowadays.” For most of the past decade the Chicago native has practiced what he preached in his sizable body of work....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Howard DeYoung, owner of the Radio Shack in Dorr, Michigan, was arrested in July on charges that he had secretly videotaped his young female employees’ sexual activities after encouraging them to use the store after hours for meeting their boyfriends. DeYoung was contemplating selling his store because, he said, “It’s pretty hard to get somebody to come work for me right now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To begin with, how dare these people accost me in public to tell me that I am going to burn in hell because I don’t have the same beliefs that they do? They probably don’t realize that they are insulting MY beliefs when they do that. A lot of people seem to think that their religious beliefs entitle them to lambaste anyone who holds different views....

The last time the Slugs played Schubas, everything came together–the natural warmth of the room, with its ornate wood proscenium; the good-natured friendliness of the typical Slugs crowd; and the band itself, an almost casually proficient threesome. Leader Dag Juhlin has a lanky, offhand charisma, and the band–with brother Gregg on bass and Mike Halston on drums–plays it tight but easy: sometimes they crack up mid-song, and jokes, some of them right over the heads of the audience, abound (“As Kevin Cronin once said, ‘Last song, people’”)....

Most people have never been able to play any instrument at any age like Stephane Grappelli plays the violin–one of the hardest instruments–at the age of 83. But Grappelli’s age is not really an issue here (except maybe to gerontologists and archivists) What counts is that he has somehow managed to retain the heavily filigreed technique, the quietly insistent rhythmic bounce, and the sound, as light and full as a vintage chardonnay, that appears on his earliest records from the 1930s....

Most frequently requested kitchen color in the midwest, according to a recent survey by the National Kitchen & Bath Association: almond. Color nobody anywhere, ever, asks for in their kitchen: gray. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m sorry, Fishkin, but we’ve decided that you have a great future in some field other than sales. Evanston “intuitive training consultant” Ruth Berger’s instructions on how to sort sales leads: “Place the leads face down on a table....

Real-life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges play Jack and Frank Baker, a second-rate cocktail-lounge piano duo with staying power who hire Susie Diamond, a sexy vocalist (Michelle Pfeiffer), to beef up their act, in the impressive directorial debut of screenwriter Steve Kloves (Racing With the Moon), who also wrote the script. Frank is the square brother who handles the business–he’s married, with kids, and not very musically inspired; Jack is remote, relatively irresponsible, and gifted–he plays jazz in his spare time and sounds like a leaner version of Bill Evans (his piano solos are dubbed by Dave Grusin, the film’s music director, and the dubbing is for the most part expertly done)....