Garrison Keillor–public radio personality, sage of Lake Wobegon, and successful writer–is a performer, these days, grown increasingly stale. Back in the early 1980s, as A Prairie Home Companion moved from cult favorite to broad popularity, Keillor’s blend of gentle satire and wistful illuminations seemed attractive and unique. But repetition leads to death, and in American Radio Company, his present Saturday-evening variety show, the same old cute menu has become tired and cliched–more tales from the town that time forgot, more little jokes about Minnesotans and New Yorkers, more good-timey songs and skits–all served up by a host who’s lately shown signs of restiveness....

If you don’t mind, I prefer a ballot. National Pork Producers Council director of retail merchandising Joe Leathers: “My advice to consumers today is to vote early and vote often with their forks this fall.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nobody will vote for me if I do what they want! James H. Lewis of the Chicago Urban League, writing in favor of the education amendment to the state constitution in Catalyst (October): “Elected officials trap themselves into offering better government for less, then find it almost impossible to support any tax increase, even for things their constituents clearly support....

THE ROMANTIC VISION OF CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH This otherness is perhaps less surprising in light of the fact that Friedrich, who was born in 1774 and died in 1840, is generally regarded as the greatest German Romantic painter. Friedrich lived most of his life in Dresden and was acquainted with and admired by Goethe and Schopenhauer; but his reputation, though once great, was already declining in his own lifetime, only to be reborn in our century....

ENSEMBLE ESPANOL In two alternating programs, Ensemble Espanol exhibits some spirited dancing in a setting more accessible than flamenco’s native Adalusia. The company, under the direction of Dame Libby Komaiko Fleming (she was awarded her title by King Juan Carlos I in 1982), has been in residence at Northeastern Illinois University since 1976. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The guest artists, many in return engagements, are particularly strong this year....

For once, a Hollywood entertainment that lives up to all of its advance hype. Set in Tinseltown in 1947, this zany detective story follows the efforts of gumshoe Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) to clear the name of cartoon character Roger Rabbit when the latter becomes the main suspect in a murder case. The movie, which combines live-action and animation with breathtaking wizardry, was coproduced by the studios of Disney and Spielberg, and although Robert Zemeckis is the director, and the script is by Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman (based on a novel by Gary K....

Last fall, Barbara Lazarus Metz put out a call for mail art. The response has filled the window of Chicago Book Works with an array of postcards, foldouts, altered envelopes, rubber-stamped messages, and other objects having one thing in common: they were sent through the mail. Metz, founder and director of Artists Book Works, says, “We asked for entries of all sizes dealing with the topic ‘Winter in Chicago.’ People mailed things in from all over the world, and we kept with the unwritten law of mail art: you exhibit everything you get....

MARCH Friday 27 If you’re a good hand at the lathe, or want to learn to be, the Chicagoland Woodworking Show is for you. You can attend some of the two-and-a-half hour seminars–$40 a throw, on everything from router technique to building decks and gazebos–or just check out the products and the smaller-scale workshops, today from noon to 7, Saturday from 10 to 6, and Sunday from 10 to 5 in the north hall of the Odeum Sports and Expo Center, 1033 N....

Films and videotapes from more than 25 countries will be screened at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, October 18, through Sunday, October 20. Single tickets are $5 for aduIts, $3 for children and Facets members; a pass good for four films is $15 for adults, $10 for children. For more information call 281-9075. SHORTS FOR YOUNGER Live-action and animated shorts from England, Canada, Switzerland, India, and the U.S. (10:00 am)...

Comiskey Park, Our Laughable Landmark Hot Type is also in their corner. So when Peter Bynoe, the executive director of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, found himself unable to discuss the “Field of Dreams” concept with a straight face, we took it personally. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bynoe scoffed at Malkin and Knipstein for throwing a new idea in his way “at the 11th hour....

Roaming the neighborhood on a lonely, aimless Sunday, I stopped to buy a newspaper at the Loyola train station. Through the window I saw a small number of people standing transfixed, particularly a young woman who had covered her mouth with one hand and was pointing in wonder with the other. I turned and that’s when I saw him, the man everyone was looking at, the man who was dancing, dancing, dancing, all by himself, spinning along Sheridan Road in slow, exuberant circles, his narrow face gleaming with sweat, and I swear to God I’ve never seen a human being dance like him....

WORN GROOVES Steger’s last full-length solo work, Rented Movies, used the metaphor of a tired comedy routine to examine the loneliness of a certain “underground” gay scene. In Worn Grooves he builds on that theme by playfully postulating love as a rut. The metaphor is charmingly obvious in the opening moments of the piece, as Steger, dressed in white as a generic Arab and with generic Middle Eastern music droning in the background, recounts a story a friend told him “in strictest confidence” as if it were his own....

The technique of Matt “Guitar” Murphy is one of the true wonders of the blues world: impossibly fast an light-fingered one minute, ecstatically raw-edged and metallic the next. He’s lent his dexterous fret work to stylists as diverse as Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Slim, and James Cotton, and in recent years he’s been leading his own band: he’s liable to charge through a swingmg version of a bebop standard like “Billie’s Bounce,” a grinding Memphis-style shuffle, and a cacophonous round of free-form improvisation within the course of a single opening set, and his bandmates usually match him note for note....

One year ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, Mayor Harold Washington slumped to the floor of his City Hall office. At the peak of his political power, he was dead. But others are unyielding. “I can’t point to any kind of lasting successful initiative,” said alderman and now mayoral candidate Ed Burke, Washington’s still implacable foe. “I think it was just another chapter in Chicago’s history that opened and closed with a great deal of media attention but had little or no lasting impact on Chicago....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can best describe the play this way: Imagine six stereotypical, middle-class, middle-aged mothers and housewives. If we employ a little armchair psychology, we might suppose their individuality and personal goals have been subverted by the “American” Dream. Then they go to one of those three-week “find your inner child” seminars, and they discover they have a common Native American ancestry....

The most important stories in music this year all concerned the industry. Nineteen ninety-one was a financial disaster for the record companies–sales were off about 10 percent across the board–and they moved in typical fashion to identify the problems. Was the $4 billion-a-year monolith worried about the decline in the CD catalog sales that have been welfaring the major labels for years? Concerned about how relative outsiders–David Geffen, say, or Charles Koppelman–managed to find and promote multimillion-selling artists (Nirvana and Wilson Phillips are two recent examples) right under the majors’ noses?...

Hey, kids, let’s put on a show! That’s been the motif in innumerable showcases of young talent over the years, from Mickey and Judy musicals to Fame. The show the performers in Sarafina! put on is a matter of life and death. Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela’s musical-within-a-musical recounts the slaughter of Soweto schoolchildren in 1976 and the systematic brutalization of young blacks under South Africa’s “state of emergency” rules of the 1980s....

The more things change…In preliminary excavations for a new campground at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, archaeologist Mark J. Lynott and colleagues unearthed artifacts showing that “people camped for short periods of time in this area for the last three thousand years” (Singing Sands Almanac, Summer). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “While plenty of people make money from art-related activities and the American public consumes the by-products as ‘Culture,’ artists are doing their historic thing: starving and praying for fame,” writes Montana painter Karen Kitchel in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner (June/Summer)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beneath these two seemingly contrary positions lies a very solid consensus, all the more remarkable for its inscrutability. Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that the bashers and revelers tend to agree that Woodstock was the culmination of something–a poorly defined something, wrongly thought to be synonymous with the “spirit” of the ’60s, and having virtually died with the death of that decade a few months later, certainly buried no later than the date of the final U....

Whatever you do, don’t try to tell Peggy Byas that her home is in the projects. She lives on the tenth floor of a CHA high rise at 706 E. 39th St. (officially known as Pershing Road); she might have called it “the projects” when she moved in 22 years ago, but not now. Past management of the agency–eight managing directors between 1983 and 1988–has been such that the CHA does not even know how many people live in its 38,685 housing units, but it’s safe to say that if they were separately incorporated they would constitute the second largest city in Illinois....

A CHRISTMAS DANCE FOR JOHNNIE MAE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s Christmas Eve and poor Johnnie Mae, once a talented tap dancer, has been confined to her wheelchair for ten years. Her husband, Cliff, is a philanderer and a compulsive gambler. Many times, we are told, he has gambled away the furniture, and this is one of those times. He has also gambled away Johnnie Mae’s soul....