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It was a happy hunting ground to native Indians before 19th-century white settlers laid claim to this fertile strip along the Des Plaines, Du Page, Illinois, and Kankakee rivers. Their influx spawned farms, mines, and–linking Chicago to myriad little towns and the American west–the Illinois & Michigan Canal. To one degree or another, all remain: the I&M Canal is now a National Heritage Corridor, the deep pits of the old strip mines have become man-made recreational lakes, and surviving farm fields crouch beside the “petrochemical plants, electrical generating stations, quarries, and numerous manufacturing plants [that] dot the nearby landscape,” as a visitor’s brochure states, touting the area’s “rich variety of resources....

Lincoln McGraw-Beauchamp is standing in almost the exact center of the room, greeting his guests. He is a big black man; his approximate six-and-a-half feet and 280 pounds are hard to miss in the small gallery at Water Tower’s Rizzoli bookstore. There is a patch of tan fuzz in the middle of the black fuzz, covering his head and face, and his tan jacket and pants match it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeffrey Petkovich and Peter DeBernardi rode a “10-foot metal container” over Niagara Falls in September, making them the eighth and ninth survivors in history, to “show these kids there’s a lot better things for kids to do than be on the brink of dope.” American lecturer John Dolan, 40, was arrested at the Dublin airport in January for carrying a hollowed-out book containing a live flare, which would emit a flame when ignited....

“He Wants Every Body,” the audition notices read. “Thirty-nine people of all sizes, shapes and colors are needed. Dance experience preferred but not required. . . . Nudity, as a poetic statement of the body, will be used in this piece.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the notices, the crowd at Columbia College’s Dance Center on this midwinter Saturday afternoon is only slightly more heterogeneous than the usual dance class....

What does one of America’s leading troubadours do when he settles down? If he’s Jim Post, and he lands in the storybook town of Galena, Illinois, he truly digs in. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Post’s legendary wanderlust has been subdued in Galena by a hilltop home, a beloved wife, and a newfound sense of community, his restless muse has been ghost hunting, digging into the abandoned mines that once provided 80 percent of the nation’s lead and turned Galena into Illinois’ first frontier boomtown....

Liberace has come to be synonymous with a certain brand of popular entertainment long on corn, heavy on hokum, frothing over with spectacle, and usually featuring an overornamented, shamelessly extroverted male odalisque. Little Richard comes to mind, as well as the latter-day Elvis Presley and the Elton John of the early 70s–all of them decorated like Christmas trees and about the same size. Little Wladziu Valentino Liberace from West Allis, Wisconsin, was the original, though, turning the piano lessons forced on him by a doting mother and a frustrated classical-musician father into an empire of ego and excess that makes Donald Trump look like Mahatma Gandhi....

Our Man at the Tribune “As one of last weekend’s editors put it: ‘I didn’t even know this was anything important.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Do me a favor,” said Kneeland. “Don’t invent some role and criticize me for not fulfilling that role. This has not been the Dick Harwood job, where he sort of is separate from everything and sharpshoots. I don’t think I would be as effective if I were doing just that....

“SOLIDARNOSC,” proclaims the sign out front. “Illinois Division Polish American Congress, Mutual Aid Association, Social Service Center.” Saturday-afternoon traffic streams by steadily here on Milwaukee north of Foster. Animated conversations in Polish, incomprehensible to me, halt abruptly in the front office when I enter to inquire about the Miss Polonaise Competition. A woman politely directs me to a room toward the back, where the eight judges are settling into white leather chairs....

I sprawl on a futon in the living room of a small, spotless apartment in Evanston, and a pretty woman in her 40s covers me with a lightweight blue blanket and tells me to breathe. “Listen to how I’m breathing,” she says, inhaling deep and loud–and then exhaling with the same force and sound. “When you get to the end of the exhale, don’t wait a beat to inhale again. Ignore your instinct to wait that beat....

SOMETHING UNSPOKEN The situation in Home Free! is human, all right, and as personal as hemorrhoids. Lawrence and Joanna Brown are brother and sister, living together in a happy and interdependent state of incest–Larry is afraid to go outside their apartment, and Joanna, who’s less agoraphobic, has no fewer shingles loose on her roof than her brother. They amuse themselves with show-and-tell games, give each other little gifts, make fun of the grown-ups who believe Joanna’s stories about her “husband,” scold imaginary children, and do everything they can to ignore the practical problems involved in having a very real baby together....

STEP 2 REVIEW Although Jim Henson created the Muppets, he always shared the credit with his collaborator Frank Oz, better known as the voice of Bert, Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and many other Muppets. “Frank is the one who makes the Muppets funny,” Henson would say. And he was not being unduly modest, for he recognized that the success of the Muppets was due not just to their comical appearance, but also to the witty way they were animated....

MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based on a 1938 book by Richard Atwater, a University of Chicago professor and columnist for the Chicago Evening Post, and his wife Florence, Mr. Popper’s Penguins concerns a mild-mannered housepainter who dreams of adventures in far-off lands; he’s especially enamored of the antarctic travels of “Admiral Drake,” as the Atwaters named their stand-in for polar explorer Richard Byrd....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Having seen Charles Eshelman’s photo of the sneering, technocratic face of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority executive director, Peter Bynoe, which was used to introduce Michael Miner’s Hot Type for August 10; and recalling every obstacle that this one man has placed in the way of White Sox fans who have labored, in vain it would appear, to save Comiskey Park from the wrecker’s ball; and noting, too, the fact that for all his dedication to the project of staving off every attempt to save Comiskey Park, Bynoe has enjoyed the prestige of title, material compensation, and, finally, a ticket into the elite club of sports franchise owners, all of which have been awarded to him by the powers-that-be in the sports industry for a job well-done; I couldn’t help but recall some words from James Aronson’s essay in the Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers....

. . . SOME UNFINISHED CHAOS . . . . . . Some Unfinished Chaos . . . has a major gestalt problem. Playwright Evan Blake has created two potentially interesting characters inspired by short-story master Raymond Carver and poet Tess Gallagher, who lived together for several years before Carver died of lung cancer. In the play, Eric Wittenger is a writer living off the fame of his only novel, published 17 years earlier, and Jessamyn Tyler is an attractive young woman just out of college who worships him....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As Bryan Miller notes and McCarter acknowledges, many of us did feel betrayed by a fund-raising effort that promised to maintain the station’s standards, only to quickly resort to “canned” commercial messages of questionable taste. A further sense of alienation was created when subscribers to Chicago discovered that the WFMT listings which they believed they had already paid for had been removed from the magazine, and would now cost them an additional $40 per year....

This pairing of Delta traditionalist David “Honeyboy” Edwards with underrecognized Chicago harmonica master Mad Dog Lester Davenport promises to be the kind of unpretentious celebration of half a century of tradition that modern Chicago blues seldom delivers. Guitarist Edwards was taught by seminal masters like Robert Johnson, Joe Williams, and Tommy Johnson; his playing retains the quirky, unpredictable timing of the traditional Delta bluesman and his voice is imbued with the harsh vibrato of his roots....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whereas I enjoyed much the piece and found it to be a fairly good attempt to describe the Sturdy Beggars unique Renaissance Festival comedy act and the classic Mud Show, I must take exception with one particular mildly annoying and frequent misconception: The Sturdy and Bedlum Beggars do nothing akin to “wrestling” in the mud. There has been no mud-wrestling schtick in the show since ’83....

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This classic children’s book by Roald Dahl is wildly imaginative. It begins with James’s mother and father getting eaten by a rhinoceros. Sent to live with his aunts Sponge and Spiker, James is delivered from his misery by a queer little man who gives him a bag full of bits of crocodile tongues, which, after James spills them, enlarge everything they touch, including insects in the grass and a peach on the tree above him....

Sometimes the factors that condemn a musician to obscurity are beyond understanding. Jimmy Burns has been on the Chicago music scene for over 30 years, starting with close-harmony doo-wop groups in the 50s, and developing a repertoire ranging from the Delta blues of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup to the mellow, gospel-tinged classics of Sam Cooke. Although his tendency to approach everything on the same even, measured emotional keel lends a “human jukebox” feel to some of his performances, his sure-fingered technical proficiency, his warm and deeply expressive voice, and his elegant sense of onstage professionalism should have earned him much wider recognition than he’s received....

The world knows Muddy Waters as the godfather of postwar Chicago blues, but his role as leader of some of the music’s most influential bands has been less acknowledged. This tribute brings together sidemen representing nearly his entire Chicago career, spanning almost four decades. Jimmy Rogers, his legendary guitarist from the late 40s and early 50s, will be featured along with drummer S.P. Leary, who helped forge the classic Chicago sound, and Pinetop Perkins, the Mississippi barrelhouse veteran whose lithe pianistics graced Muddy’s bands in the 1970s....