You could call Patrick Wilkins’s solo exhibition at Extase a sausage party—but his punny ceramic wieners are just a taste of this show’s irreverent joy. “Indiscriminate Sincerity” includes 16 hot dog sculptures divided into two sets of eight that flank both sides of a converted closet in the Humboldt Park apartment gallery. Each is painted brick red (save for two that are unpredictably gold) and features a unique face with an exaggerated expression: one threatening the viewer with kisses from elastic lips, for example; another with eyes bulging like a cartoon wolf and an open mouth revealing two tiny rows of teeth....

The seed of this year’s Bar Issue was a deceptively simple question: Who the hell is Danny, anyway? All sorts of improbable tales have been uttered by booze-loosened lips about the unseen namesake of Danny’s Tavern, that unlikely drinking destination nestled in a two-flat on a largely residential Bucktown street. Perhaps the most enduring story of the bunch I heard was the one about how, back in the 80s, a notorious party animal named Danny hosted so many liquor-soaked bashes at his shabby residence that the city eventually threw up its hands and granted him a tavern license, if only to allow inspectors (and police) to more easily keep tabs on the place....

“I found a new job,” I told my boyfriend at the beginning of last summer. “As an online girlfriend. Part cam-girl, part therapist.” I signed on to MyGirlFund, a “social networking” site that advertises the chance to meet “sexy, interesting girls you won’t find anywhere else.” Its tagline: “The girl next door is now online. Connect with a virtual girlfriend.” I set up a profile that looked much like a MySpace page from the early 2000s, if MySpace were covered in pink and hearts....

Gio.tto/Shutterstock Did your genes make you do it? What a relief to see that some serious scientific work is being done on the perplexing question of why, why, why women would ever be unfaithful to their husbands. For females, however, he says there have never been any “clear evolutionary benefits.” So what possibly could have motivated the 10 to 15 percent of wives who confided to NORC (the research center at the University of Chicago) that they “actually cheat on their partners”?...

Have you ever wanted to see a police car set on fire? You may soon have the chance to, albeit the car in question is made of pulped paper. Artist Adela Goldbard’s “The Last Judgment/El Juicio Final,” on view through October 10 at Gallery 400, features papier-mache set pieces mirroring iconic symbols of the Little Village neighborhood—both good and bad. The exhibition combines the history of Mexican effigy-burning traditions with the complexity of carnival to delve into the challenges facing the neighborhood of Little Village today, complete with a flame-filled finale....

Primrose Green Over the past few years we’ve watched Ryley Walker blossom from a little kid shredding bizzaro free jazz noise-rock in warehouses into a skilled and sensitive fingerstyle-folk prodigy, and this week his upcoming second LP was announced. It’s coming at the end of March via Dead Oceans Records, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Primrose Green,” a preview of that LP of the same name. Walker has been crafting beautifully intricate and rich folk for a while now, but this time around he’s better than ever: the song oozes with soul and unbelievable melodies, and the band of top-notch players backing him up—this lineup includes virtuoso drummer Frank Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwich—are beyond smooth and in-the-pocket....

Here’s a way of crossing off a few naughty names on your Christmas list: Shop Sensual, an erotic pop-up shop happening at Reunion studio in Humboldt Park from Friday to Sunday. Organized by designer Leah Ball and photographer Chelsea Ross of Feminist as Fuck, and Kristen Kaza of No Small Plans Productions and Slo ‘Mo Party, Shop Sensual will be offering sexy creations by more than a dozen local artists and designers— Leah Ball herself, Noelia Towers, Claire Arctander, Silk Shaman, Morgan Reed Jewelry, Gnat Glitter Kink, Mano Y Metal by Desiree Guzman, Remix by Giselle Wasfie, Humboldt House, Cities in Dust, Emma Alamo, and Solid Air by Taylor Mauch....

Here’s some of the events we recommend for your weekend: Sat 10/21: Chicago-bred stand-up Chris Redd and iO Theater alum Luke Null, two of the new additions to the Saturday Night Live cast, headline this week’s Paper Machete, the “salon in a saloon” hosted by Reader contributor Christopher Piatt. Comedians, writers, and storytellers discuss the week in pop culture and politics at the Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway). 3 PM, free

Muntu’s ambitions are vast, both in terms of space and time. Helmed by executive director Sekou Tepaka Lunda Conde, the 47-year-old South Shore-based company aims at nothing less than preserving and perpetuating the endless, intricate polycultural “African aesthetic,” be it manifested in Nubian dance or Zulu drumming or the ancient folklore of griots whose names have been lost to history. Conde uses music and movement to take Muntu’s audiences and dance students across continents and through centuries....

I try not to show any emotion when I attend plays as a critic and not just an audience member, but I couldn’t help but shed some tears during the Chicago premiere of Donja R. Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds, a romantic drama about two enslaved Black men who find love and home in each other as the Civil War rages on. Produced by First Floor Theater and directed by Mikael Burke, the play is the first in a trilogy that explores the forgotten stories of Black queers, as their existence has been largely erased by history....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 6, 2017. 14 Chicago Public Schools high school football teams disappeared in 2017 Fourteen Chicago Public Schools high schools, including Whitney Young Magnet High School, dropped their football teams and programs in 2017 as enrollment continues to decline at neighborhood high schools, according to the Tribune. Reporter John Keilman profiles the football program at Englewood’s Robeson High School, which CPS is planning to close at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, and how it positively affects students....

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp One of the current programs at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films is “Behind the Convent Walls: Bad Habits and Naughty Nuns,” a pretty self-explanatory series that collects subversive films about nuns falling prey to temptations of the flesh. Programmer Daniel Frankel has selected some trashy “nunsploitation” fare, including Jess Franco’s Les Démons as well as some comedies (Sister Act, Nasty Habits). Among the more prestigious selections are Jacques Rivette’s New Wave feature The Nun and the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger joint Black Narcissus, one of the lauded British filmmaking duo’s most lush Technicolor marvels....

As luck would have it, the most expedient way to describe vanguard camp comic and longtime Hell in a Handbag collaborator Ed Jones to the uninitiated might just be “imagine Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, only ten times Mrs. Garrett-ier.” So it’s an added bonus that this Halloween musical parody by David Cerda (score by Cerda and Andrew Milliken), which smuggles coke, ritualistic goat slaughter, and dry humping into the all-girls Eastland boarding school, gives Jones an opportunity to pay drag homage to his sister in spirit....

In a lot of ways, Ellen Gates Starr High School in Logan Square isn’t much different from other CPS neighborhood schools. Enrollment and funding are down, and the school is on probation: the results of standardized tests from this year, currently in session, will determine whether it stays open. Teachers know they’re in danger of layoffs, and that the news will probably arrive in an e-mail in the middle of a school day....

As espoused by its most ardent practitioners, improvisational theater is most pure when executed as a meandering long-form odyssey—a rare variety of comedic entertainment that is neither funny nor entertaining. Improv is why Judd Apatow comedies are a half hour too long and contain an additional hour of outtakes in which performer dudes vaguely grope for a punch line. Vague groping being the hallmark of improv performer dudes both on- and offstage....

Female comedy group the Kates got their name from the unconventional venue in which they debuted, Kate the Great’s Book Emporium in Edgewater. At the time, it was just stand-up comedian Kelsie Huff running the operation: she recruited her female friends to perform comedy (mostly stand-up, but occasionally improv and sketch) and tell stories at indie bookstores across the city. Now, nine years later, they put on regular events at the Book Cellar, have hit more conventional stages like the Laugh Factory, and have built up a roster of more than 500 women who are involved both in front of and behind the scenes, including a core unit of nine female producers....

The TV news reporter kept asking everyone the same stupid question: “So, what are you doing here?” Crass, perhaps, but so is our culture’s obsession with performative courtship, the kind in which two parties bludgeon each other with cloying romantic gestures like, well, riding a 200-foot-tall pink-hued ode to true love. That thought didn’t occur to me until later, because when you’re busy chatting up a bunch of randoms on a Ferris wheel in hopes of finding the One, it impairs everything beyond a conversation-heart level of thinking....

Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images Becky Sauerbrunn (number four in blue) is going to the Women’s World Cup. Elizabeth Nusslein Heibel gave birth to 13 children and died in 1898 at the age of 46. Her husband, Peter Heibel, had come to America from Germany with an eighth-grade education when he was 22; he’d wrangled cattle in Texas, run a tavern on the Saint Louis levee, and founded a prospering box company in the same city....

In 1918 less than 40 miles north of Chicago, an insidious illness killed twice the number of naval personnel in two months than combat did during the entire First World War. The so-called Spanish influenza swept through Great Lakes Naval Training Station “like the Black Plague,” recalled Martin Birkham, a YMCA volunteer at the training station. The hard choices made at Great Lakes should haunt us today. The Great Lakes Naval Revue, which included budding comedian Benjamin Kubelsky (later known as Jack Benny), played the midwest theatrical circuit to popular acclaim....

Jesus Lizard at Metro 12/9/2017