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BETWEEN DAYLIGHT AND BOONVILLE Of course, Williams has set himself a difficult task: to write an accurate, interesting slice of life set in the coal-mining region of southern Indiana. He focuses on three frustrated miners’ wives, who wait at home, raising the kids and trying to keep their sanity by gabbing the day away. Williams’s choice of details feels right–the magazines the women read (supermarket tabloids), the things they talk about (television, their husbands, their inchoate sense of being stifled living in the middle of nowhere), even the way they keep one ear vigilantly cocked for explosions coming from the nearby strip mine....

BLACK HEROES IN THE HALL OF FAME Griffin Theater Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame is more than just a blitz course in black history. It is a pageant, its material interpreted lavishly through music, dance, and drama. An onstage chorus bridges the diverse segments, creating a parade through time and space. For example, after the eight kings of Africa have been introduced, they dance together to the reggae song “War” (sung by Errol Hines, who plays Haile Selassie)....

Friday 22 Sunday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years ago producer Rae Schiff was asked by the now-defunct Limelight to throw a little night-before-Christmas bash for Jews; she came up with the Oy Vay Alternative to Christmas Eve, which attracted about 1,000 revelers. The holiday extravaganza continues at the Cairo with its traditional fur fashion show (featuring trader R.J. Abrams and dirty dancers Richard and Phyllis Schwartz, among others), art exhibit (huge paintings by Montana Morrison, featuring her interpretations of Hollywood movies), and music by the Soul Invaders....

Friday 30 And finally, for those who want to keep an eye on the travails of Nicaragua’s now-deposed Sandinistas, there’s another film, this one a 45-minute documentary by Chicagoan Bob Hercules. Did They Buy It?: Nicaragua’s 1990 Elections is a look at the recent vote through the eyes of U.S. journalists covering the story. The movie premieres tonight at the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union Hall, 333 S. Ashland. It’s $5, and starts at 8 PM....

REAL LIFE–STORIES FROM THE REAL WORLD Carmela Rago’s new show would be great on the radio. Not that Rago–a waif of a woman–doesn’t have considerable stage presence, an admirable way with space, and even a nice ironic nod and wink. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rago’s tightly woven, tense monologue is actually undercut by her presence. The monologue itself is a desperate, nervous cry for assistance carefully wrapped in propriety....

BEEHIVE Well, after all, isn’t that part of rock and roll? When you think of the most intense arguments you’ve had, weren’t many of them about pop music? — who’s a better singer than who, who’s cuter, who’s more sensitive? Some of the nitpicking about Beehive just shows how well it’s achieved its goal — to evoke the spirit of 60s rock. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Featuring a cast of six women — three white, three black — Beehive traces the evolution of 60s pop from the rigidly controlled girl groups to the anarchic androgyny of Janis Joplin, and shows how it parallels the coming of age of the generation of women born in or around 1950....

It’s called a composers’ orchestra, but a principal attraction of this 17-piece crew is its terrific soloists. About two decades ago, when Europe was getting into its jazz renaissance, London was home to a group of extraordinary players who took the discoveries of the free-jazz revolution to logical and illogical extremes. Bassist-composer Barry Guy, a virtuoso sound explorer, formed the London Jazz Composers Orchestra in 1970 to capture and exhibit all this wild activity....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The station was decrepit but it worked. It just had too few passengers. Closing it saved a ticket agent’s salary, speeded up the schedule and helped solve the problem of delayed trains. And at the same time was only a little less convenient for bus transfer passengers. Why, once in a blue moon those pencil-pusher fossils in the Merchandise Mart do come up with a sensible idea!...

PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE ’90S Gene Walsh’s Wooff, Wooff, Wooff is the wackiest of the wacky. A young man on a park bench meets a weird old man who insists on sitting in the exact middle of the bench in the middle of the park at midday on the summer solstice. He says he wants to restore his equilibrium. He then calls the young man a dog. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

SMELLING A RAT What this experiment demonstrated was that a feeble script can support only a limited amount of intelligence and ingenuity. Some actors did give such inventive performances that they actually propped up the material–or at least their portions of it. But even with outstanding performances by the whole cast, the inherent weaknesses of the play eventually caused the production to collapse. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Famous Door Theatre Company seems to be conducting a similar experiment....

What exactly Tav Falco is I’m not sure. He certainly is an aficionado of southern muck rock, and he fronts a band, Panther Burns, that plays a potent, eerily corporeal strain of mucked-up rockabilly (muckabilly?). But he’s also at least part performance artist (he used to call himself Tubeman and play blues classics on police whistle and chain saw) and a serious student of the blues (he was a video chronicler of Delta blues and now records things like unreleased demos of artists you’ve never heard of)....

Eat my message. Target Marketing, quoted in the Progressive (August 1990), describes the patented process developed by Chicago’s Viskase Corporation, which has developed a way “to print messages on the frank casings it manufactures, using an edible food material.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Congratulations! You will soon be paying for a town hall and fire station for a village of 400 people in Bowdre Township in eastern Illinois, as part of the grossly overextended Illinois “civic center” program....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Allow me to tell you why Where is not a “little tourist sheet,” thus sharing with you our actual position as a respectable, successful and major magazine publisher. Where is a chain of magazines, published in four countries–U.S.A., Canada, Australia and England. In the United States, Where is published in eleven cities; Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Phoenix, St....

July 3, 1990. Three hundred local doctors today declared that they will defy the Illinois legislature and perform illegal abortions on demand. The legislature recently banned most abortions, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 decision that legalized the procedure. Allied clergy, led by Rabbi Gary Gerson of Oak Park Temple, issued a statement of their own. It said, “The clergy have been at the forefront since the 60s in the struggle to obtain women’s right to choose abortion and in actually assisting women in need....

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mozart seems to have failed every time he tried to write a purely serious opera. A straight comedy like The Abduction From the Seraglio comes off well enough, but works like Idomeneo are rather flat. Mozart’s greatest efforts all fall into a peculiar area where ideas that are meant to be taken in deadly earnest are contrasted with and even illustrated by actions that range from droll to slapstick....

Aaron Kramer still remembers a dog he met on the bike trip he took last year. “She was this wonderful part Lab, part pit bull dog who would do amazing things like take a coconut, tear the husk off, get down to the coconut, chew on it until she could open it up, drink the milk, and then eat the insides.” He met the dog and its owner on a beach in Brunswick, Georgia, and a few months later he met up with them again in the Florida Keys....

DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE Wilkie began Duck, Duck, Goose, playing at the Live Bait Theater through November 1, with a monologue, “Enough,” that provides a sort of window on the rest of her work. She has an eye for the odd, funny details of life, and allows them to emerge naturally in the telling. In this monologue, mostly in her own voice, she explains what “big enough” means to her using various examples....

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s praised everywhere as the quintessential Polish dance, but the polka is really Czech in origin. During the 1800s, when the polka became popular, Poles were dancing the mazurka. You can argue the point, or you can have some fun today when the International Polka Festival kicks off with 14 of the best polka bands in the land, including Grammy winners Eddie Blazonczyk’s Versatones and Lenny Gomulka’s Chicago Push....

The idea came to Thom Clark in the early 1970s–he was young (in his early 20s), involved in the anti-Vietnam War peace movement, and working in the Loop. He didn’t think it up himself: “A local group, I think with church sponsorship, was doing research, looking at the investment patterns of local banks,” he recalls. The idea was to see which bank contributed least to an immoral war. Today you can judge your bank or savings and loan by its annual Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) statement, which it is required to make available to anyone who asks....

Mating season is on, and Pete Dring has been on the lookout for the white-tailed doe with the broken leg. She’s been limping around for months, ever since she was struck by a car while crossing Willow Springs Road. If she can’t, as Dring puts it, “support a hot buck on only one leg,” then she probably won’t be strong enough to survive the winter. So far she’s been able to find some food, probably left by the children who spot her in the woods....