All the world's a stage, a famous writer once said, and we're simply players on it. We have our exits and entrances, taking on many roles throughout our lives. The stage we play on today is Over-the-Rhine, the oldest, most abused and most misunderstood neighborhood in Greater Cincinnati. A cast of thousands awaits.  

The neighborhood's professional theater companies (Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, Know Theatre of Cincinnati and New Stage Collective) had a thrilling year artistically in 2008. They offered shows that spoke to issues of the day, and they brought tens of thousands of visitors to Over-the-Rhine, most of them the young professional types city leaders seem to covet. For their track record of serving Over-the-Rhine, their dedication to thought-provoking artistic work and their perseverance in face of economic difficulties and general apathy from the powers-that-be, CityBeat names Know's Jason Bruffy, New Stage's Alan Patrick Kenny of Collective and ETC's Lynn Meyers our 2008 Persons of the Year.  

Some days you feel new and invigorated, and on other days the world conspires to remind you how old you're getting. Barack Obama's inauguration and first week in office fuel the first set of feelings. This week's issue of CityBeat, in a strange way, makes my bones creak a little. Or maybe that's just the snow and ice. Our lead story in the Film section is a report from the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the 15th consecutive year CityBeat has put coverage of Sundance on the cover — every January of the paper's existence.   

As the Bushes clear out of the White House and the Obamas move in, it's easy to get caught up in the euphoria of a new era dawning. But if President Obama truly wants to bring about real change in America, as he's long promised, he needs to address the helplessness so many of us feel about our lives and the world around us. Applying the nation's laws to everyone (including CEOs, investment bankers and ex-presidents and vice presidents) would be a good start.  

Inauguration Day is finally upon us, fittingly coming at the end of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Given the anticipation so many of us have about Barack Obama’s presidency, Tuesday truly will be the Day the Earth Stood Still. Do we still have the energy to get excited one more time about Barack Obama becoming the President of the United States? I say we should try.   

The First Unitarian Church hosts African American Family History: A Pathway to Racial Reconciliation, a panel discussion of the Rev. William Henry Grey Carter, who in the 1920s founded the country’s first African-American Unitarian congregation in the West End. Carter’s church was shunned by Cincinnati’s white Unitarians, including First Unitarian Church in Avondale — a fact the current church leadership has tried to redress since 2001, when it hosted a Carter Family Reconciliation Service and began a Carter Memorial Fund to stabilize housing and offer school scholarships in low-income neighborhoods. Saturday’s panel discussion begins at 12:30 p.m. in the Museum Center’s Reakirt Auditorium, followed by a reception with the panelists and access to the Cincinnati History Museum’s Race exhibition.  

CityBeat says 'goodbye' and 'good luck' to a longtime department head, Art Director Sean Hughes. He joined the paper just a few months after our founding in 1994, fresh out of grad school, and quickly took control of the paper's design and production flow. It's not a stretch to say that his calm demeanor in the center of the weekly hurricane blown up by editorial and ad sales was the rock on which CityBeat was built.   

Coming into 2008, my priority as CityBeat editor was implementing our “refreshment” project, with new features, an updated cover look, section fronts that made our opinion columns more prominent and a redesigned Web site. My priority as the organization’s lead editorial voice was to help get a Democrat elected president.  

I feel tiny and insignificant as I see new developments with the federal government's bailout of failing corporations. After hearing government officials comment daily about committing billions of dollars to this company and that industry, I'm numb. The amount of money being thrown around is impossible to comprehend, as is the fact that it's my money and your money and — most importantly — our unborn grandchildren’s money. Yet we have no say in how it’s being spent.   

Editor's Note: It's common knowledge that local law enforcement has been monitoring telephone and e-mail correspondence in and out of CityBeat. A transcript of phone calls between Editor John Fox (whose real surname, the police have surprisingly discovered, is Foxojevich) and his assistant has been leaked to CityBeat. In the interest of full transparency, we reprint a portion of the conversations here. Warning: The transcript contains profanity.