This week's highlights

Six Nutcrackers, eight Nativities, and seven Christmas Carols: Your complete guide to holiday theater
by Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet
The holidays are a time of cherished traditions, and for many families, those traditions include a theater outing. Local theaters are mounting a dizzying array of holiday shows this November and December-but most of them are variations on a few standard plots. You've got your Nativity stories, you've got your Nutcrackers, you've got your Christmas Carols, and you've got your Santa stories; in each category, there are options ranging from the reverently traditional to the completely outlandish.

Saving the Victoria Theater and getting on board LRT in St. Paul
by Mary Thoemke, TC Daily Planet
The train is coming, and one group of Frogtown and Summit-University residents and business owners is fired up to prepare for the arrival of light rail transit (LRT) on University Avenue in St. Paul. The group, organized mainly through Facebook and the e-Democracy Forum met October 21 at Rondo Community Outreach Library, with the assistance of the District 7 Thomas-Dale Planning Council and the District 8 Summit-University Planning Council.

Faces and dollar signs: The human impact of General Assistance Medical Care cuts
by Nora Leinen, TC Daily Planet
On Wednesday night, the line for dinner outside of St. Stephen's Shelter in south Minneapolis is just beginning to grow as the sun goes down and the temperature drops.

Break a leg...but do it at the audition, not on your way there: Learning the ropes at the Twin Cities Actor Expo
by Sheila Regan, TC Daily Planet
Nearly 300 actors, models, and others interested in making it in the entertainment "biz" showed up at Hotel Ivy on October 24 for the Twin Cities Actor Expo, a one-day networking event for the Twin Cities entertainment industry. Attendees had a chance to mingle with casting directors and agents, attend seminars on the business of acting, and browse vendor booths exhibiting everything from nutritional supplements to legal help for actors.

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK | Commenting on comments
by Mary Turck, TC Daily Planet
From Margaret Reinhardt: "Sometimes I think that newspapers have lost their way given the competition with other news sources particularly television. Newspapers have always had something that TV news doesn't: the opportunity for readers to provide feedback via commentaries, letters to the editors, and op-ed pieces. Along comes online newspapers with a quick way to allow feedback, and publishers are back in the game of attracting readers. Indeed reader comments are popular, but are they the right thing to do?"

The new neuroscience, right speech and the news
by Douglas McGill, TC Daily Planet
One of the mysteries of our present predicament vis a vis the increasingly acrid mist of verbiage known as the news media, is that everyone knows that the media is busted but no one knows exactly how or why.

Women's Night Out—with an international flavor
by Sheila Regan, TC Daily Planet
More than 100 women who live and work in the Cedar-Riverside area celebrated "Women's Night Out" on October 24 at the Brian Coyle Center, an event designed for women in the community to get to know each other and build community. Neighbors, service workers, and girls mingled, sampled different kinds of ethnic food, and were entertained by a fashion show and open mic in the event, now in its fourth year.

Close calls in dark corners: Questions about Minneapolis bike trail's safety
by Karen Hollish, TC Daily Planet
It was close to 10:30 on a Friday night when cyclist Allison Thoele's regular ride home turned ugly. As she headed north on the paved trail that parallels the Hiawatha Avenue light-rail line, Thoele, 28, spied three shadowy figures lurking up ahead.

THEATER | Elijah's Wake at Open Eye: A taut emotional tightrope
by Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet
Elijah's Wake runs just over an hour, and it's paying Michael Sommers's creation a compliment to say that you probably wouldn't want it to last much longer. The acclaimed 2003 work by Open Eye Figure Theatre, now being reprised at the company's storefront space in the Phillips neighborhood, is a bracing cocktail of macabre puppetry and convincingly desperate acting; it's visually rich, but it's also unremittingly challenging both intellectually and emotionally.

NEW IN BLOGS

MN BUDGET BITES | Pawlenty undermines public debate on the budget
by Christina Wessel • Governor Pawlenty has announced a proposed constitutional amendment to limit state spending to the amount of revenues that were brought in the door during the previous two-year budget cycle. This proposal would limit the flexibility of policymakers to respond to changing circumstances and maintain funding for such areas as schools, health care and services that help the unemployed get back to work. And it also reacts to a non-issue in Minnesota - there is no taxpayer revolt or out-of-control spending in our state.

GROWTH AND JUSTICE | Been there, dumped that: Colorado's lessons lost on Pawlenty
by Charlie Quimby • As both a Minnesota and Colorado taxpayer, I've watched in dismay as my adopted state slouches closer to my home state in matters of budgets and taxation. So far, I've kept my residence and income taxes here, but if the gap closes further, I'll have less reason to resist the tug of family, mountains and milder weather in the west.

BLUESTEM PRAIRIE | Larson goes from chili champed to chump
by Sally Jo Sorensen • Claiming a need to spend more time with his family, chili cook-off kingpin Merle Larson has withdrawn from Saturday night's Senate District 29/30 Chili Cook-off at the IBEW Hall south of Rochester. The revelation rocked the hyper-competitive world of rural Democratic chili contests.

TC JEWFOLK | Meet the authors of "Jewish Cooking Bootcamp"
by Sarah Rice • If you've ever thought, "Oh God, how am I going to do this?" about entertaining for the holidays - any holiday at all - there's a new cookbook you might be interested in: Jewish Cooking Boot Camp: The Modern Girl's Guide to Cooking Like a Jewish Grandmother.

PRESSVILLE | Bilek ponders the future of books—and his bookshop
by Nora Cassidy • In the age of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, Jerry Bilek is one of a dying breed of independent booksellers. He is the owner of Monkey See, Monkey Read, an independent new and used bookstore in downtown Northfield. "I am trying to figure a way to survive," he says.