I love drinking stories. I love them so much that in 2011 I created the Blackout Diaries, a live weekly show in a Chicago barroom, where comedians, writers, and tipplers of all tolerance levels share true tales of carousing—and the often hilarious, sometimes harrowing misadventures that result. The format was once described as “a reverse AA meeting,” and I think that pretty well sums it up. What follows is a curated selection of some of the most fondly remembered stories from the show’s first five years....

He is Godzilla in a Big Ten college cap—consuming, fucking, and/or fucking up everything in his path. He shovels hot wings and the boozy contents of red plastic cups into his gaping maw with abandon, punctuating each conquest with a guttural roar. Like our pussy grabber in chief Donald Trump, he’s fluent in “locker-room talk” and is obsessed with winning (or the appearance thereof), with dominion over all, no matter how base or trivial, and by any means necessary....

Chicago’s Riot Fest runs Friday through Sunday, September 16 through 18, entering its fifth year as a multiday outdoor event. Riot Fest has changed a lot since 2012, when it spent only two of its three days in Humboldt Park and about 50 bands played on three stages. Since 2013 the festival has been entirely outdoors: that year it booked roughly 80 bands on five stages, and in 2014 it expanded aggressively, hosting more than 100 bands on eight stages and taking up much more of Humboldt Park....

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. Taxi Driver on Netflix Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool in tandem with What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix Landlords talking on Zoom What we’re eating: v

Deanna Isaacs Chicago Botanic Garden Some things won’t wait: the Chicago Botanic Garden’s bulb garden is having a moment, right now. Catch it and that 17th-century Dutch financial bubble will begin to make sense. More info on the garden here.

Representatives from the local nonprofit Rape Victim Advocates were also on hand to counsel survivors, although none came forward. “Known sexual predators will be asked to not participate in our show,” he says. “As a mentor to a lot of poets who come up through YCA and Louder Than a Bomb, I feel like it’s my responsibility to look out for those youths.”

Jenna Roxy and the Church of Modern Love (Sat 8/20, noon): One of the workshop productions, this tale of a cough syrup cult was represented by two songs that shared the same driving feel and dense, intense language; cast member Sophia Shrand put her solo—”Too Drunk to Be 15″—over nicely. Pen (Fri 8/26, 6 PM): Speaking of putting things over, Jenna Schoppe brought big comic energy to the bridezilla joke that is “Happy Fucking Day,” a song from Leo Schwartz and D....

Q: I’m a 19-year-old girl who was dumped a few months ago. My partner found out he didn’t like my body when we were having sex for the first time and he told me right after. We were actually still in bed naked when he told me. He kept cuddling me to make me feel a bit better but it still hurt to hear. Other than slight doubts about genitals and my face (I have Asian features and having my face and living in a Western country isn’t always easy), I didn’t go into that experience expecting to be rejected....

Julia Thiel Zoe Schor’s geoduck popcorn, created for her Key Ingredient challenge Now in its third year, the Key Ingredient Cook-Off—featuring 22 chefs from our James Beard award-winning series, Key Ingredient—lands at the Lacuna Artist Lofts on Friday. As with Key Ingredient, the cook-off will challenge each chef to cook with a specific ingredient; this year’s ingredients are cactus, coffee, sun-dried tomatoes, and chia seeds—plus one secret ingredient that we haven’t announced yet (all previously featured in Key Ingredient)....

Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits, revealed this morning at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, are a breath of fresh air. At the unveiling, Obama said he admired how Wiley’s work “challenge[s] our conventional views of power and privilege,” and indeed this floral portrait seems like a provocation in the present presidential era, where Trump sees the office as an excuse to perform a cartoonish brand of masculinity. Wow quite a presidential portrait Obama pic....

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. What we’re indulging in: My NuMed order with a disposable vape and lavender bath salts thanks to the advice of a fellow Reader staffer. What we’re eating: The Loyalist burger Steak and paratha with bearnaise sauce Chicken-n-Spice Wazwan What we’re still playing:...

Welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for Thursday, December 1, 2016. New York Times reporters reflect on covering Chicago’s violence over Memorial Day weekend In an article for the New York Times‘s Times Insider feature, a team of Chicago- and New York-based reporters for the paper reflect on their time covering on the gun violence in Chicago over the notoriously bloody Memorial Day weekend, during which 69 people were shot. The team, which has already published moving chronicles of victims Precious Land and Veronica Lopez, promises that more stories will be forthcoming: “That weekend, we went wide....

Painted banners hang long and low from the rafters of the Pulaski Park Field House, and when the music begins with a noise like a siren, the dancers flicker in and out of view through them, as animals in a thicket or words obscured by censorship bars. They are jointed and joined, mechanical and organic, as they emerge and retreat from view, in groupings that create dependencies through the tensions of push and pull that pulse within and beyond the self....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is former FBI agent Shahna Richman, 48, who’s now the owner and CEO of Richman Forensic & Security Consulting. I’m now fully retired in good standing from the FBI, and I own a forensic and security consulting company. The bulk of my work is large-scale event security planning. Clients hire me to design, plan, and execute security services for their events....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 8/10: Tour DePaul Art Museum’s (935 W. Fullerton) exhibitions “Poor Traits” and “Eye Owe You!” with the museum’s director, Julie Rodrigues Widholm, and the artist herself, Barbara Rossi. Stick around for a screening of the documentary Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, in which Rossi appears. 6 PM

When I read year-end “best of” lists, I wonder if I’m living in a different world than the critics who write them. I love Kendrick Lamar as much as the next sentient being, but when I think back on the music of 2017, Damn doesn’t loom as large in my mind as it seems to in everyone else’s (at least judging by its appearance at or near the top of almost every list)....

In 1957 the BBC commissioned its employee Daphne Oram to create a score for a television version of the French play Amphitryon 38. Hired in 1943 as a 17-year-old junior program engineer, Oram had become a music-studio manager in the early 50s—she was a talented and adventurous composer, as well as one of the network’s biggest advocates for the futuristic sounds it called “radiophonics.” For Amphitryon 38 she used electronic and music-concrète techniques, and when the program aired in March 1958 her work became the first completely synthetic score to appear on television....

Ruggles of Red Gap For the past few weeks, the Music Box has been running a special weekend matinee series dedicated to the Marx Brothers. This weekend it’s screening the great Duck Soup, which is not only their best film but also one of director Leo McCarey’s finest comedic displays. Duck Soup is just about the only Marx Brothers film I can really stomach, so I focused this top five on McCarey, a great director famous for his screwball comedies....

Nothing has made me feel quite as old and irrelevant as my 15-year-old son telling me he hates the Beatles. He insists that their music is simplistic, boring, and unlistenable; he’d rather listen to current-day genre-bending experimental groups such as clipping., Watsky, and Igorrr. But if the Fab Four are no longer cutting-edge, no one told Chicago rockers Thee Casual Hex (not to be confused with Seattle postpunk band Casual Hex)....