A jazz great with significant ties to the area makes a return appearance at Davenport's Redstone Room on October 21, with chanteuse, composer, and music educator Semenya McCord performing with her quartet in Polyrhythms' Third Sunday Jazz Workshop & Matinée Series, the concert event also featuring Boston-based pianist Frank Wilkins and a tribute to legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Heroic women, both fictional and real, will be celebrated in the Putnam Museum & Science Center's avidly anticipated Literary Heroines: Their Times, Their Fashions – an October 13 through January 4 exhibition notable not only for its breadth of clothing and period items from the museum's permanent collection, but for being the rare area exhibit that isn't making a local appearance as part of a larger national or international tour. As Putnam President and CEO Kim Findlay says, “We didn't find it – we created it.”

From October 11 through 21, the worlds of literature, radio, and theatre will blend when Moline's Black Box Theatre presents director Lora Adams' War of the Worlds: A Radio Play – a reenactment of Orson Welles' legendary 1938 radio program whose five-man cast both reproduces the tale's radio-show context and enacts the story's throngs of interviewers, experts, eyewitnesses, government officials, and military leaders.

The beloved tale of a pig, a spider, and a timeless storybook friendship kicks off Davenport Junior Theatre's 67th season with the October 13 through 21 presentation of Charlotte's Web, the 1952 children's book by E.B. White now being brought to stage life in a colorful, fun-filled production involving more than 40 students from 11 different area cities.