A lot of ground gets covered here: 13 young actors tell 14 true tales in 75 minutes, offering an invigoratingly detailed, richly energetic cross section of the gay and lesbian community. This oral-history crazy quilt is derived from more than 100 interviews with Chicagoans of all ages, races, and gender identities, and About Face’s enterprising teens prove that good listeners make good witnesses. Against Logan Kibens’s brilliant video backdrop, Megan Carney’s warmly directed show features memories of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when Reagan’s closeted aides seemed to go from the closet to the clinic in record time....

Back to the Future In the Tribune newsroom, he hopes. “This means turning a small part of the Tribune into a very aggressive newswriting and gathering operation,” he says. “For the most part, it’s not going to affect how people do their jobs as journalists here. The diligence and expertise remain where the Tribune’s value is, and that you can’t get in the way of. But it will speed up immensely the idea of how quickly you have to get the news out....

My Life So Far Those old enough to remember 1975 with any sort of clarity may still identify Fonda with her tireless work as a cheerleader for the early women’s movement, but the image of Fonda that’s etched on the boomer cortex tends to be either the space vixen Barbarella or her alter ego, cannon-straddling Hanoi Jane. And us youngsters are stuck with a vision of her in a striped leotard, smiling, her frosted brown cloud of hair so perfect as she bounced, kicked, and crunched....

The third annual Children’s Humanities Festival continues through 11/9. All programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door, unless otherwise noted. Students and educators are admitted free, but reservations are required. Tickets are available by phone at 312-494-9509 or online at chfestival.org. Call 312-661-1028 for more information. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Circus Las Marionetas de la Esquina present a musical puppet circus in Spanish....

First a book, then a movie, then a play by James Reach, this tale of two mentally ill teens healed by love is now officially a chestnut. The attitudes and therapeutic approaches it invokes are more than 40 years old and way outmoded. Anybody intending to revive it ought to think hard about how, why, and whether to do so. The folks at Lincoln Square Theater clearly haven’t. Director Kristina Schramm offers an update here and there–turning the play’s resident satyromaniac, for instance, into a 21st-century thug (albeit one who gets off singing Cole Porter)....

Tommy Rapley’s inventive new dance-theater adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray updates the action to 1980s America–think Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for “Relax.” Rapley and coauthor Ben Lobpries have paraphrased or trimmed most of Wilde’s literate prose, replacing it with distinctly un-Wildean lines like “Wow! Is that really what I look like?” and “He’s so hot. Is he queer?...

Instead of Eat, the Asbestos Theatre Project is performing three unnamed “plays” (really more like scenes) that explore whether redemption is possible when human beings inhabit such profane bodies. The fluid Kate Teichman and the cringing Stephen Mosblech put themselves through various forms of agonized contortion, which are hard to watch if sometimes interesting. But in the end the works could really use a narrative and/or stronger, better-developed ideas. Also on the bill is Jayita Bhattacharya’s tedious …Should We Put It Out?...

Though she just turned 20 in April, Alex White is already a six-year veteran of the local garage-rock scene. Her thundering vocals are as instantly recognizable as her fiery red hair and matching Rickenbacker guitar, and later this month her first solo album, Miss Alex White and the Red Orchestra, comes out on the tastemaking LA label In the Red. But for all the breaks that’ve gone her way, her career has been shaped largely by tragedy: each of her two previous bands ended with the sudden death of a friend....

The first time I visited Anders Nilsen’s Humboldt Park apartment, back in the spring, he had only two pieces of art up in his living room. One was a Polaroid portrait of his late fiancee, Cheryl Weaver. The other was a large print from a series of photos she’d shot out the window of the treetops across the street. Weaver was an artist, and when she lived here, shooting the park through the seasons was an ongoing project....

Chinese-American violinist Jason Kao Hwang has carved out an enviable niche for himself in the new-music scene: a veteran of groups and recordings led by luminaries like Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, Joe McPhee, and Myra Melford, he’s come to symbolize musical marriages of East and West. In this trio with Bay Area saxist Francis Wong and local bassist Tatsu Aoki, as on previous recordings with his Far East Side Band, Hwang draws on traditions from China, Japan, and Korea, transforming his inspiration into something only partly Asian–and sometimes only partly terrestrial....

Mohammed Reza Shajarian, widely considered the greatest singer of Iranian classical music today, is the center of this immodestly named group; his intense vocals can be both gorgeous and sorrowful, calm ruminations or soaring, melismatic declamations. Hossein Alizadeh is a virtuoso of the tar–a dry, twangy lute–as well as a prolific and skilled composer who’s written classical pieces and sound tracks for noted Iranian films like Gabbeh and A Time for Drunken Horses....

Here’s an improbable second chance in as many months to hear African taraab music performed live. At the World Music Festival in September the sprawling Culture Musical Club made its U.S. debut, showcasing Zanzibar taraab, a thrilling Arabic-sounding strain dominated by majestic strings. Taraab from Mombasa, a large Kenyan island city on the Indian Ocean, has a different sound–more stripped-down and finely detailed–and the four members of Mombasa Musical Party playing here are all revered veterans of the style....

I met this guy here, and that’s not necessarily my thing. I tend to have my guard up at a bar or a club–I’m not there for the hook-up scene. But this guy was so superfabulous we ended up dating for a little while. I was so infatuated. I thought he was a total hottie–a hyperawesome, attractive guy. Everything was going fantastic, but then we went from 100 mph to 0 without any explanation whatsoever....

As much as I love my regular crowd, sometimes going to the same old places and seeing the same old people can tire a girl out. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The new 5,000-square-foot addition smelled like fresh polyurethane–they’d literally just put away the ladders–and there were plaster-dust footprints all over the floor, but it was still the perfect kind of place for a weeknight, cozy like Danny’s and polished like Rodan, with warm Asian-inspired decor, plenty of low seating, and a come-as-you-are door policy, trashed sneakers welcome....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And earlier this week he reportedly pulled aside one of the aldermen and warned him that his political career would suffer as a result. Alderman Howard Brookins Jr., alderman of the 21st Ward, said the mayor told him that he may blow his chance to win the Democratic primary for Cook County state’s attorney if he continued to push for publicizing the cop list....

I’m a 26-year-old hetero male, and I recently started hooking up with a new girl. She’s very cute and smart, and I’m really attracted to her. During a recent make-out session she informed me that she has HPV, the STD that causes genital warts. From what I’ve read, condoms don’t necessarily mean you’re safe. I’ve been sexually active for a number of years, and I’ve had unprotected sex with other partners....

Nurtured by the Baltimore house scene, which also produced Philly’s Hollertronix, and venerated for explosive, booty-shaking 12-inches like “Put That Pussy on Me,” Spank Rock have finally released their long-awaited full-length debut, YoYoYoYoYoYo (Big Dada). And like walking into the middle of a room and dumping a Ziploc full of coke on the coffee table, it’s a certifiable party starter. The record’s voracious, genre-smashing, funky-times-ten production–courtesy of programmer Armani XXXchange and cut creators Christopher Rockswell and Ronnie Darko, the group’s newest member–owes as much to 2 Live Crew, dirty south, and D....

Buster Keaton was never one of Hollywood’s biggest stars; even in his heyday he was eclipsed by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, and his two greatest films, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr., both tanked at the box office. But the restoration of his silent classics for a series of video boxes in the mid-90s has spurred an explosion of interest in his work, and for the second year in a row the Silent Film Society of Chicago has chosen his work to open its annual summer festival....

Talk Ain’t Cheap Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Public Square, initially launched as the chilly-sounding Center for Public Intellectuals, is meant to bridge the gap between theorists and political action. While Lee’s husband, Marc Ewing, rode his tech company, Red Hat, up the e-stock bubble with prices as high as $267 per share before a split (it’s now trading at about $12), she was completing a dissertation in German studies that had her itching to bring society and its thinkers together....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless....