Join CityBeat in helping the local economy this holiday season. Pledge to spend your shopping dollars at locally owned and operated businesses this year. With your support, we can make a difference in the economic health of our community.

Hey, let's all celebrate L. Ron Hubbard for the holidays! If that idea makes you do a double-take, well, Know Theater is ready to prove that it's possible. With a cast of nine kids, ages 11 to 16, they're offering this show, a 2004 Off Broadway hit, for the holidays. Songs include, "Hey, It's a Happy Day!," "Mr. Auditor" and "L. Ron Hubbard," a song that debates what the L. stands for. Along the journey, famous Scientologists make cameo appearances. Through Dec. 28.

n 2006, Cincinnati Punk Pop band Close to Home lost their original bassist, Bradly Andress, to cancer. The band was just getting started and already garnering national attention when Andress passed away but the band vowed to not let their dreams die with their friend. The band headlines this Friday’s Winterfest 2008 show at the Madison Theater. The massive, all-ages event starts at 4:30 p.m. and features oodles of local bands, including Bottom Line, The Upset Victory, Black Veil Brides and many, many others. $8.

Ralph Lauren, along with every WASP-engendered, suburban-circumscribed good-taste notion of the good life, gets it in the eye in Carlton Scott Sturgill’s finely crafted and very funny show, Afterlifestyle, at the Art Academy of Cincinnati's Pearlman Gallery, 1212 Jackson St. in Over-the-Rhine, now through Dec.12. The Ralph Lauren lifestyle, so commercially viable, seems to Sturgill akin to a quiet death by boredom. Sturgill’s versions of Ralph Lauren magazine ads show the models with closed eyes – already they have succumbed. He is perhaps the first artist ever to employ paint chips for satiric ends and, in another neat turn, he recycles Ralph Lauren shirts into handsome funereal flower arrangements. Death, anyone? Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Friday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

This weekend in the campus’ own Patricia Corbett Theater, we can look forward to CCM’s Fall Dance Concert featuring a four-work program that could have been christened “Ballet with a Twist.” This term’s production offers a pair of romantic classical ballet works restaged by CCM faculty alongside an untitled contemporary ballet piece from Assistant Professor of Dance Michael Tevlin, set to Dvorak’s Piano Trio Opus 19. Visiting guest artist Hannah Baumgarten of Miami, Fla.’s Dance Now! Ensemble has choreographed the bill’s most modern piece, “Invisible Cities—the sacred cult of beauty.” The music? Nine Inch Nails and Doumé Castanet. The twist? It’s sultry, jazzy moves on pointe. $10; $5 non-UC students; free for UC students. Through Sunday.

In her brand-new exhibition, Supplemental Ornament, at the Weston Art Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts, Murphy-Price presents sculptures and prints that simultaneously focus and exaggerate the relationship between our internal identities and the selected accoutrements that extend our personalities into an array of surrounding decorative objects. All the work on display has been made since she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2005. She now resides in Bloomington, Ind. Simultaneous with her show the Weston also is displaying, through Jan. 10, sculpture by Dietrich Wagner of Erie, Pa., and Pixel paintings by Cincinnati’s Jimi Jones. Tuesday-Sunday.

So it’s the holidays and you want to go to the theater but you really don’t care much for all the good cheer and midnight ghosts. What to do? I recommend Twelfth Night at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (CSC). I think it’s Shakespeare’s wittiest and most charming comedy, one of those twisted-up mistaken identity pieces that’s romantic, hilarious and beautifully resolved. It also offers a set of comic characters — Sir Toby Belch, a spiritual cousin of the rabble-rousing Falstaff, and Malvolio, a stuffy, self-important servant who gets a major comeuppance — who will keep you smiling through an entire evening of theater. The story has been transported to the 1920s in the United States and utilizes an “anything goes” attitude from the early years of the Prohibition era. Through Jan. 4. $20-$26.

For a holiday show that will delight kids and adults while teaching a lesson that’s totally palatable at the same time, it’s nice to know that Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) is back with another musical fairytale by Joe McDonough and David Kisor. ETC has done this one before (in 1998 and 2003), but Lynn Meyers and her cast work hard to revamp each production, always finding fresh ways to bring humor, joy and a meaningful message to the stage. Through Jan. 4. $16-$38.

You’ll have to forgive Rich Vos if he seems just a little tired. Though divorced, he remains a devoted father, spending as much time as he can with his two girls. It’s not easy, as he now has a baby with second wife, comedian Bonnie MacFarlane. His job keeps him on the road quite a bit but for Vos stand-up comedy was really the only vocation open to him. He took to the stage after, as he puts it, “failing at everything else. I went up the first time and I died like an animal.” Undaunted, he pressed on. “I got back up on stage whenever I got the chance. I just kept doing it, and eventually I got a little better and little better.” Today he’s a headlining comic and was a finalist on the first and third seasons of Last Comic Standing. Rich Vos performs at Go Bananas Thursday-Sunday. $10-$15.

This is the 18th year for the Cincinnati Playhouse's excellent adaptation featuring Bruce Cromer as Scrooge. He's been in the show since 1997, playing Bob Cratchitt for eight years; he's now in his fourth season as the lead penny-pincher. A very physical actor, Cromer is funny and touching. Opens Dec. 4 and runs through Dec. 30. Tickets are $20-$43, but the Playhouse offers unsold seats for half-price on the day of performance.

The wonderful light boxes of Matthew Shelton are on display at Northside’s NVISION (4577 Hamilton Ave.) beginning with an opening reception from 6-10 p.m. Friday featuring music by DJMCMLXXIII. Shelton’s technique for making light boxes evolved from a method that involves first incorporating photographs, then poking countless holes into mirror board. The effect is similar to tin-punch art, which can be used to make lanterns. Shelton attaches small pieces of color gels to the mirror board. When held up to a light source the effect is stunning. Tiny jewel-like rays of color shine through. Images such as the Vegetation Goddess resemble Aztec art. Some of his shapes could be mandalas or an Aztec calendar. His work will remain on display until Feb. 1, 2009. Opening reception: 7-10 p.m. Friday.

Gary Gaffney's exhibit at Meyers Gallery uses collages that ocus on central figures, surrounded by little scraps of information that raise notions of science, philosophy, spirituality, and the truthful potential of art. In Gaffney’s diagrammatic collages, juxtapositions of cosmology, ornithology and human biology surprise and delight. Little galaxies jut out of toenails; the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing, and both seem to be cavorting with sparrows. But these glyphic arrangements are more like launching pads and instruction manuals to better access transcendence. The artwork is what potentially happens if you utilize the collages as poetic guides. The exhibition runs through Friday, with a closing reception on Thursday from 5-7 p.m.