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The first time I walked through the neonatal-intensive-care unit three years ago, I felt like I was back in biology lab in junior high school–back with the frogs on every desk, the sickening smell of formaldehyde, the urge to vomit, and the desire to flee from something dark and cruel that passed for “science.” Though I was 25 years older and a professional I found myself reeling with the old but familiar panic and nausea as I scanned this room packed full of tables and boxes....

“Don’t tell me pregnant women can’t get a safety belt around their waist,” said Jim, patting his stomach, a large protuberance threatening to pop the bottom button of his shirt. “I’m 279 pounds–down from 394. I’ve been pregnant all my life and I wear a safety belt. You strap it under the belly, and if there’s a sudden stop, the baby can’t slip out ’cause it’s held in tight.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

NATURAL HOSTAGES at Cafe Voltaire Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This simple story allows playwright Bryn Magnus to bring together a wild mix of ridiculous yet curiously familiar characters, all of whose lives are more or less centered around ascending the hill. There are Meta and Nathan Gorgey (Marianne Fieber and Mark Comiskey), “the honeymooningest couple in the world,” who have successfully avoided consummating their marriage for two years in the hopes of becoming famous comedians and being invited up....

FEMME FATALE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He follows her in his cab, but she won’t go for a ride with him. He gets her in the cab and tries to get her to spill the beans, but she won’t tell him what he wants to hear. She escapes. He tracks her down. They return to the scene of the crime. There’s a gun, a razor blade, and a wardrobe of slinky lingerie....

MIAMI BLUES Q&A I have less of an aversion to the cop-movie genre per se than to what this genre has become. Both subgenres cited above have tended to support the law-and-order social agenda promulgated by Reagan and Bush, which presents cops not merely as the defenders of the law, but also as the upholders of the status quo and the only thing standing between middle-class tranquillity and chaos. They may not always be impeccable law abiders themselves, but their own imperfections are generally viewed as secondary to the necessary and honorable tasks they perform, which usually amount to “wiping out scum....

Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” is best known as the singer who originally recorded “Time Is On My Side” (the flip side to the hit “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is [Will Understand]” on Imperial in 1964), but her legacy extends far beyond that. Quite simply, she’s one of the major architects of the modern New Orleans R & B sound: her voice soars ecstatically above a tight, horn-laden backing, with equal amounts of gospel passion and bluesy intensity....

Eileen Myles begins her solo piece Leaving New York by telling how she got there: “I hopped on an Amtrak to New York in the early 70s….I thought, ‘Well, I’ll be a poet. What could be more foolish and obscure?’” pause. “I became a lesbian.” Then, in a dryly casual tone that occasionally spoofs the self-consciousness of her medium (“You can tell I’m using the space,” she drawls as she takes a long walk around the room), this street-scene Sappho uses her deadpan delivery and knack for relating observed detail to capture, wittily and often affectingly, a life lived moment by moment....

An afternoon in Pilsen: The blast of gunning motors rumbles downstreet and catches me from behind. Riding my bicycle home from work, I don’t look back. The motorcycles have followed me, turning from Ashland west onto Blue Island, and now they seem to be gaining on me in bursts, lurching forward and backing down, the ripping treble of acceleration alternating with the bass expulsion of their exhausts. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Rudolfo Naranjo, 49, died of a heart attack as he was cleaning out a safe in the middle of robbing the Bill Miller Bar-B-Q restaurant in San Antonio in August. His two accomplices dragged him toward the back door and yelled for employees to call an ambulance but then decided to leave Naranjo behind and flee with their $60 booty. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Herbert G....

Lead Story Five businessmen near Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, were charged in July with endangering swimmers by dumping high-potency chlorine tablets into the ocean in order to reduce the high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, publicity about which was interfering with tourism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A driver for the Vogel Disposal Company, trying to avoid a collision near Akron in April, slammed on his brakes even though he knew that his cargo–300 gallons of human waste–would ooze to the front of the truck, over the cab, and onto the highway....

“You’re a technician, you don’t hear the screams.” Chicago artist Jo Aerne took this quote from a Vietnam vet she heard on a radio talk show and had it copied on a stack of black four-by-five-inch stickers in plain white Helvetica lettering. This is just one of about 100 sticker designs she’s been handing out this year; she intends her terse messages to turn up in unexpected places. “You’re going down the street to buy your diet yogurt, and you see this fact,” she says....

CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER The sampler is supposed to offer its choreographers feedback–a discussion with the artists follows each performance. Even more important, it gives them the chance to stage a work they may still be mulling over. Not that there was anything unpolished about this evening–the dancing, lighting, music, and costuming were all remarkably finished. But the sampler is a genuine middle ground between fooling around in one’s studio and mounting a full evening of works....

The ads describe them as flamenco guitarists, but that tells only part of the story. While the music of Spain is a strong component of their sound, so are rhythms and harmonies from Peru and Mexico, the sensibilities of Cuba and the Caribbean (Jorge Strunz is from Costa Rica), and reedy melodies born (as was Ardeshir Farah) in Iran. “Insofar as flamenco uses Middle Eastern and Latin American influences, it was a natural way for us to relate,” says Strunz, and whatever the rationale, relate they do: Strunz & Farah’s several albums brim with impressively matched melody lines and solo exchanges best suited to the Fourth of July....

Let’s hope it was fast food. The state Department of Professional Regulation suspended the license of a downstate dentist for two weeks and put him on one year’s probation “after he left his dental office to get something to eat, leaving a patient in the dental chair who was in pain.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes we can. “I went around talking to all the aldermen about planning for the neighborhoods,” former city planning commissioner Elizabeth Hollander tells Inland Architect (September/October 1989)....

I was told my local hospital was home to one of the nation’s leading experts in, catch this, penile fractures. This has me worried, Cecil. How might it happen that I would, you know, break it? Is this a hazard of everyday life? Are there any preventive measures I might take? –M. Toulouse-Lautrec, Hyde Park Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil has heard about some stupid injuries in his day, but penile fracture takes the cake....

In politics it may have been the Year of the Woman, but in television it’s been more like the Year of the Jewish Guy. They’re everywhere. The impetus behind this explosion of Jewishness should be fairly obvious. It is often said that film is a director’s medium, stage is an actor’s, and television is the province of producers. Just as most art is at its root about the life of the artist, the Jewish explosion on television is about the people who make television shows....

It’s been more than 30 years since New York DJ Alan Freed christened Bo Diddley’s audacious music “rock ‘n’ roll,” but Bo’s classic style sounds as fresh and liberating as ever. Diddley combined an ear for tradition with a razor-sharp urban wit and devilish irreverence; he adapted the hip street slang and signifying of 50s black America and laid it over his trademark “Diddley beat” (an elaboration on the folk “hambone” rhythm), creating subversive, militant music that terrified middle-class traditionalists and jazz sophisticates alike....

Quiet and peaceful–that’s about the only way to describe the corner of Carpenter and Polk on a sunny summer day. In April they closed it. They had to. After nearly five months of vandalism, taunts, and other acts of intimidation from their neighbors, they felt they had no choice. “They urinate in the street and in the hallways,” one shopkeeper recently told the West Side Times newspaper about some people at a shelter in Pilsen....

This is a weird combination, though not a bad one. The Del-Lords play a generic brand of all-American rock, the kind that is often associated with Bruce Springsteen and the sound tracks of commercials for beer. In fact, a very bad beer company offered these boys a lot of bucks to pose with their product and mouth carefully scripted homilies about integrity and other heartfelt topics. Though the group badly needed the money, they declined the offer, and, if nothing else, that reinforces the impression I get from their fine albums: they play this stuff because they thoroughly believe in it, and they take the implied responsibilities of their belief seriously....

They’ve come a long way, baby, flaunting their contradictions time and time again. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band–which was named for its home venue (and in fact comprises just eight blissfully meshed players)–started by resurrecting the traditional New Orleans brass-band format. But even as these guys provided the model for the 1980s revival of that sound, they were taking it far beyond its roots. For years, they’ve applied the idiom’s second-line rhythm and ancient instrumentation–tuba, not bass fiddle, and separate snare and bass drummers–to modern material (from bebop to Stevie Wonder); they’ve also opened up their ranks to guest artists from Branford Marsalis to Elvis Costello....