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Urszula Dudziak leads a band of robots. Where most groups feature a pianist, she uses a harmonizer to turn notes of her voice into full chords and an octave divider to extend her already impressive range of roughly five octaves. Instead of a drummer, she employs a digital-delay unit, with which she can overdub her own voice or juggle the parts to create pulse and polyrhythmic accompaniment. But describing the technological wizardry beggars the real force and artistry of the Polish-born Dudziak, who unfailingly makes something musical out of it all....

One minute, it seems, Billy Childs was stuffing electric-piano fills into holes in Freddie Hubbard’s music; you turn around and–surprise–he’s writing his own good tunes, he’s put together a solid quartet, and he’s soloing with the easy power of a young Herbie Hancock. In the last year and a half, thanks to two head-turning albums under his own name, Childs has emerged as an especially engaging neo-bopper: his grasp of and respect for traditional elements are obvious, but his ability to stir in modern spices–California cool pop, Philly funk, synthesizers, authentic Latin rhythms–lifts him out of the pack....

Guitarist Byther “Smitty” Smith is a genial, soft-spoken man whose mild disposition turns to fire when he hits the bandstand. His fretwork is distinguished by a keening fierceness, and he roars out his lyrics with a passionate intensity that sometimes borders on the frightening. Like Otis Rush, Smitty is especially adept at wringing every last ounce of agony from a minor-key blues, but the difference between the two is instructive: where Rush evokes a feeling of nightmarish terror with his quivering screams, Smitty sings as if he’s trying to force back the fires of hell....

Steve Dean is a lean man with a mustache, a ready grin, and a polite and comfortably down-home way of speaking. He’s dressed, on a Scott-and-Amundsen kind of day, in a heavy brown jacket and overalls (the sort duck hunters favored in the days before the invention of Day-Glo orange) and a Pioneer Seed Corn hat and gloves (“You buy the corn, they give you the hat”). His face is lined beyond his 41 years, but there’s a boyish spring to his step....

If Allen Seidner weren’t such a sound sleeper, he might have heard the sirens that warn Evanston car owners that snow is failing so hard they must move their cars off the street. If they don’t move their cars, they’ll be towed away. By the time he had scurried outside, his car–a two-door, five-speed 1981 Mazda 626 LX, silver on the outside, light blue inside, with a sunroof, power steering, power brakes, and power side-view mirrors–was almost on the tow truck’s hook....

HYENA So when the lights came up and Nick, a seriously disturbed teenager, gave a troubled and angry monologue about how he hated his life–“I don’t like the real world anymore”–you could almost hear all 50-plus brains in the tiny Shakespeare Street Theater humming with the same thought: “I guess he’s going to kill himself.” And that was that: we all knew where the play was going and how it was going to get there....

Once in a while, you walk into a club and find something that so exceeds your expectations, you remember why you keep going back into clubs in the first place. There’s an excitement steaming off the bandstand, a supercharged atmosphere–just what you’d have found if you wandered into Oz about six weeks ago, when keyboardist Jim Trompeter debuted this quartet. Trompeter, who was part of the Miami Sound Machine before returning to his jazz roots a year or two ago, is a ferocious improviser....

“More people are killed by bee stings every year than shark attacks,” Jessica Esslinger told a crowd of families from the northwest suburbs. “Basically, sharks have no interest in people–they don’t like the taste of people. On the rare occasions they do attack people, most of the victims survive. It’s always a case of mistaken identity when sharks attack humans. A shark may mistake a person for a sick fish or an aquatic mammal....

Lead Story A Navy Department employee newsletter reported in July that Bea Perry, a secretary with a Navy unit in Washington, D.C., commutes to work daily from her home in Trenton, New Jersey–171 miles away. She hits the road at 2:30 AM to make it to her desk by 6:30. She has been making the same commute for 25 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a performance art presentation at the University of Maryland in September student Jessica True, 23, placed a “hex” on the fraternity system, as a bastion of race and gender privilege, by dressing as what she called “The 100 Percent Domesticated Vagina....

SUMMER AND SMOKE Touchstone Theatre at the Halsted Theatre Centre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play revolves around two characters who have failed to achieve this tricky reconciliation. Alma, whose father is a minister and whose mother is mentally unstable, grew up contemptuous of carnal desires, giving priority to spiritual impulses. She compares the soul to a Gothic cathedral, with its arched doorways, vaulted ceilings, and mighty spires “all reaching up to something beyond attainment!...

Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg play a well-to-do southern lady and her servant in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement in the mid-50s; Richard Pearce directed from a script by John Cork. Thanks to good dialogue and meticulous research involving the place and period, this is a much more creditable and authentic job than either Mississippi Burning or Driving Miss Daisy, and the self-congratulatory tone of the aforementioned films is kept to a relative minimum–although one regrets the degree to which the focus gradually shifts from Goldberg’s character to Spacek’s, a well meaning white liberal....

THE SECRET RAPTURE David Hare’s The Secret Rapture doesn’t look much at all like Stead’s Christ. Set in modern London and laid out like a modish melodrama, detailing the love lives and work loads of two sisters and their alcoholic, newly widowed stepmother, The Secret Rapture would seem to owe more to Terence Rattigan than to Saint Mark. But the two works are conceptual kin. Hare’s premise is like Stead’s, adjusted for time and place and satirical thrust: what if Christ came back to visit Margaret Thatcher’s London?...

Last weekend, in our circle, two questions were asked more than any others. One was, “What’s wrong with the Bears?” The other, “What’s wrong with the Bulls?” As the Bulls played only their first and second games of the season on Friday and Saturday, this reflects how absurdly high expectations are this year; nothing short of the National Basketball Association championship will do. Yet the Bulls have two rookies on the roster, and a third–now on the bench with an injury–who probably will come back to shake things up just when everyone else is settling into a nice groove....

A couple years ago a friend of mine who owns a small recording studio mentioned that a client wanted to record a bunch of different subliminal messages on separate tracks and then mix them all down into one hodgepodge under ocean waves or some other masking sound. The idea was that the unconscious mind could sort out and soak up all this knowledge, reprogramming your brain for better golf scores, better relationships, an end to smoking or procrastination, financial independence, enhanced sex, and anything else they felt like including....

Where’s the Chaos? The Sun-Times swallowed this whole. Where has institutional memory gone? The 1968 west-side riot, which brought 12,000 Army troops and 6,000 National Guardsmen into the streets, led to nine deaths, 500 injuries, and more than 2,000 arrests. Entire blocks were in flames. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the police have their own rhetoric to answer for. Early Sunday, another west-side desk sergeant, David Catalano, apparently told a Reuters editor in New York, “It’s just been a madhouse....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And look, Bryan Miller, at WTTW’s schedule, before you genuflect and adulate. We have Bradshaw competing with the Giants and the Cubs. Bradshaw, a nice enough advice-giver, is one of many WTTW populizers of feelings. We remember L.B., the Squeeze Artist. His motto seemed to be: Everyone is your main squeeze. He burbled over with love, put us all on the Yellow Brick Road to hugs and kisses....

PRECIOUS SONS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set on the south side of Chicago, the play focuses on a lower-middle-class family, the Smalls (the name recalls Arthur Miller’s decision to name the hero of his Death of a Salesman Loman–low man). Fred, the father, seems a loutish but lovable truck driver, a man’s man who likes to roughhouse with his sons and toss sexy jokes at his wife Bea (“With an ass like that, Chicago doesn’t need a moon!...

The federal Endangered Species Act requires the government to protect endangered species from extinction. At first glance you might think this is a good thing for an endangered species act to do. The Tribune’s beef against the act is “that it does not regard humans as a species in their own right, with their own place in the environment.” Leaving aside the interesting choice of pronouns (“their own place”? why not “our own place”?...

One day in the late winter of 1981, while perusing a book, I read: “TIME IS MONEY: You’re wasting my time. This gadget will save you hours. How do you spend your time these days? You need to budget your time. . . . I bought the book, and within a matter of weeks was seeing metaphors everywhere. I remember listening to a baseball game on the radio and being stunned by how often the announcer dramatized the game in terms of death....

Jim Tobin wants to make the members of the Illinois General Assembly more responsible for their actions when it comes to raising revenues. He thinks he’s got the vehicle in the Tax Accountability Amendment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If this had been law last year, it would have stopped the June 30 tax massacre,” says Tobin. “In one day the General Assembly raised the income tax 20 percent for two years, raised the gasoline tax six cents a gallon to 19 cents, created a new sales tax on computer software, raised the cigarette tax 50 percent, gave themselves a $6,000 pay raise, and doubled Jim Thompson’s pension to $79,500 a year....