Back in the Pleistocene era (that is, 1986), I spent a few months living downtown in the now-gone Herman Crown Center, a Roosevelt University residence hall that also sheltered students from Columbia College Chicago (where I was enrolled) and the School of the Art Institute. (The building was torn down to make room for Roosevelt’s big expensive blue tower many years later.) The dorm was right around the corner from the Fine Arts Building and what was then the Fine Arts movie theater, a four-screen complex that showed a variety of art films and independent releases....

“A guy walks into a bar . . . , ” or so goes the familiar joke setup that works because guys are always walking into bars. Except in Rebecca Gilman’s Twilight Bowl, now playing through March 10 at the Goodman Theatre, the token guy never enters the scene. Over the course of the show’s 90-minute running time, not one man makes an appearance onstage—or even so much as issues a cue backstage....

The Ladies’ Room, at least in name, calls to mind an everlasting ladies’ night, designed to draw women into a meat-market bar scene with discounted drinks. But that’s far from what Fat Rice chefs Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo have delivered with their new cocktail lounge in the restaurant’s former waiting room—they’re interested in a more international flavor of sleaze. The bar is inspired by the gambling dens of Macau’s red-light district a century ago, places where hookers and drugs were easy to come by....

The Salts, a dance/music shindig presented by local arts collective the Inconvenience, is an exuberant mess—something the Chicago performance scene can always use more of. That scene all but vanished by the new millennium, and The Salts isn’t likely to revive it. Nothing here exists between the cracks: Kilmurray’s choreography is almost pure, audience-friendly dance (with the occasional monologue thrown in), and the live music is performed before and after the dance concert, creating no cross-pollination....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

On Friday, January 2, an online label called Vaporcake debuted with a digital split by its two founders, experimental artists Vapor Lanes (aka Aroon Karuna, a former Chicagoan) and the Kendal Mintcake (aka Thom Soriano). The release went up shortly after noon on Bandcamp, and within ten minutes it was “out of print.” Karuna and Soriano had limited the number of downloads to ten, after which they removed the music from Bandcamp and deleted it from their hard drives....

However, it’s challenging to go through all the spiritual advisors with the many options out there and know which one is the real deal. This is why we’ve taken the time to compile a list of the best online psychic reading services that feature professional, verified advisors who are experts in their field. From all these options provided both free and paid, we’ll help you find a medium you can connect with....

The fine French drama Marguerite fictionalizes the life of American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, whose vocal performances of classical arias, beginning in private music clubs and culminating in a 1944 recital at Carnegie Hall, have earned her a large and respectful entry in the encyclopedia of bad. “She clucked and squawked, trumpeted and quavered,” reports a 1957 story in Coronet magazine. “She couldn’t carry a tune. Her sense of rhythm was uncertain....

At the elevator pitch-level, Philips Dawkins’s world-premiere romantic melan-comedy is such a harmonious coupling of playwright and subject matter that I suspect it may have been preordained by the universe. Dawkins—a young author who is fluent in the parlance of contemporary LGBTQA experiences and issues—looks back at the real-life affair between Tennessee Williams and William Inge and imagines their encounters on the eve and the aftermath of Williams’s first hit, The Glass Menagerie....

On the afternoon of the April 1 pandemic press conference, Governor J.B. Pritzker said, “We’re doing our best to take care of our seniors, our children, people who are in our care. Our number one concern is the welfare of the people who are in our care.” Later that same day, Pritzker quietly issued an emergency order granting Illinois nursing homes and hospitals a broad swath of legal immunities for injuries or deaths from negligence....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Ono, Red Summer (had tickets to their show that had been scheduled for Friday, May 1 at the Empty Bottle; bought their CD on Bandcamp instead) Greg Dulli, Random Desire (was supposed to see him at Metro on April 25; hoping the September resheduled date can happen) Lucinda Williams, Good Souls Better Angels Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke talking Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” from The Ben Joravsky Show podcast early last month What we’re drinking:...

Festival of Life Union Park’s annual festival celebrates the lifestyle, heritage, and cultures of the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. The four-day festival also includes music, arts and crafts, food and drinks, three-on-three soccer tournaments, and more. Fri 7/1-Mon 7/4: noon-10 PM, Lake and Ashland, festivaloflife.biz, $15-$25 single day pass, $45-$100 four-day pass. Frontier Days Festival The Wallflowers, Plain White T’s, and American English take the stage at Recreation Park....

Michelle Kranicke, director of Zephyr Dance, and architect David Sundry have been creative collaborators for years in addition to being married. But their partnership took a significant step forward last year with the establishment of their West Town space Site/less. As part of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, they’re premiering their latest, On Notice, at Site/less in October. Sundry’s environment takes center stage with green-screen runways upon which “fabricated personas” are projected....

When asked about medical cannabis cards in a postlegalization state, cannabis-friendly doctor Rahul Khare said there are two different stories to be told: before the coronavirus pandemic and after. Now that recreational adult use of cannabis is legal in Illinois, he’s seen people emboldened to finally get their medical cards. “I hear that a lot. It’s like, ‘Oh, I know I’ve been using this medically but I just never wanted to get my card....

I’m trying hard not to hate Kate Bolick because she’s beautiful. But there she is, on the cover of her new book/ode to the single woman, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, perched on the edge of an antique velvet sofa with a cup of tea in a patterned china cup—how spinstery!—dressed in a cocktail dress and heels with her hair in long, glossy auburn waves, like in a shampoo ad....

Metric Coffee Probat roaster at Metric Coffee Yesterday I ran an interview with Darko Arandjelovic and Xavier Alexander of Metric Coffee in Chicago, which just won a Good Food Award, given in San Francisco to artisanal food businesses of note. On and off I spoke with them for well over an hour, and a half hour of that was devoted to Arandjelovic telling me all the twists and turns of procuring and restoring a 1960s German-made, cast-iron roaster....

Ready or not, welcome to 2018—the year that the hottest emerging entertainer is a 26-year-old man who wears a yellow headband and goes by the nickname Ninja. His job? Broadcasting himself playing video games in the basement of his suburban Chicago house. This once-in-a-lifetime surge of mainstream fame isn’t all the result of dumb luck. Blevins has been served well by a combination of superior hand-eye coordination, onscreen charisma, and dogged perseverance....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Evelyn From the Internets videos on YouTube What we’re drinking: v

If I’d read Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Basic) during the joyously fat-and-sugar-filled holiday season, when everything smells like butter and vanilla and you can’t go anywhere without being offered a cookie, I probably wouldn’t have been very receptive to Wilson’s central argument. “Eating well is a skill,” she writes. “We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age.” But now it’s January, season of self-improvement, and we’re no longer supposed to enjoy anything we put in our mouths....

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election left Lauren Goldstein shaken and worried, like many others. A junior at Northwestern at the time, she was studying abroad in Copenhagen. When she woke up the morning after the election, she says, “I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me and my generation of women.” She wanted to do something to empower her generation, and while she was trying to decide what that would be, she remembered interviewing women in the food industry for the Northwestern chapter of Spoon University, a food publication written by college students....