Playing to the Cheap Seats Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mendoza, who’s 28, went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in conducting from Butler University and a master’s from the University of New Mexico. He came to Chicago in 2003 as a finalist for a conducting job at the University of Chicago; he wasn’t hired but decided to stick around anyway, attending a lot of local performances and sizing up the scene....

I was in a relationship in high school with a girl from the time we were 14 until we were 16. During that time we made a lot of sex tapes together. We both enjoyed watching them. We’ve remained friends, and she kept some of the tapes and I kept some, only for our private viewing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What’s more, thanks to Paris Hilton, Colin Farrell, the ugly dude from Limp Bizkit, the even uglier Kid Rock, and the Christian rocker/eager cocksuckee from Creed, young people view making porn tapes as mildly kinky fun and/or a good career move....

SECOND CITY UNHINGED, Second City E.T.C. The Tuesday-night lineup of “Second City Unhinged” features improv combos whose players abandon too much to the anarchy of improvisation. A surefire test of a troupe is how well the performers adhere to the all-important audience suggestion. As directed by Peter Gwinn, P.O.V. is a problematic long-form improvisation despite the skills of its six players. The suggestion was “slow driving,” a potentially fertile premise–highway hazards might have been compared to psychological problems....

Sinbad, now almost 50, is still wearing outfits that were embarrassing back when he was wearing them in the 80s. But his stand-up was and still is plain ol’ funny. Born David Adkins, the six-foot-five-inch comedian grew up in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and went to college on a basketball scholarship. In 1985 he was a stand-up finalist on Star Search, a gig that landed him a role on the short-lived Redd Foxx Show in 1986....

You can keep your bleak Beckettian tramps. For real existential terror I’ll take a bourgeois domestic drama like this one by British playwright William Nicholson. Alice is a demanding, insistent know-it-all who recites poetry, attends mass, and sees every conversation as a matter of her side vs. “rot.” Edward is a quiet, accommodating teacher with a fondness for crossword puzzles. Days before their 33rd anniversary, Edward rears up and tells Alice he’s leaving her for another woman....

The tiny bride-to-be sitting in Rashida Balogun’s high-backed chair is in trouble and she knows it. She waits with her eyes shut, hands folded tightly in her lap, one kitten heel tapping against the chair leg. Rashida frowns into her upturned face and then, obviously irritated, turns to wipe rubbing alcohol over her tweezers and scissors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A set of thin brushes stands in a vase on the corner of her table, next to a hand mirror and some tubes that look like oil paints....

Ron Howard is an exemplar of honorable mediocrity. His films are conventional and stuffed with cliches, but their nice-guy liberalism is more sincere and nuanced than their tropes would lead one to expect. In his better efforts—Night Shift, Far and Away, Parenthood, The Paper, and now Cinderella Man—the sense of conviction is so passionate that the truth behind the cliches periodically emerges. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is Howard’s first feature since the award-winning A Beautiful Mind, and the storytelling is fluid and gripping....

There’s just something about cussing puppets–and this improvised puppet show by the Atticus Finch ensemble suggests bitter, rejected prototypes of Elmo, Chewbacca, McGruff the Crime Dog, and Crank Yankers/Muppets characters ganging up in a dark alley off Sesame Street. But the troupe’s nine members exceed the old, easy laugh of vulgar-talking innocents: after tutorials from professional puppeteers and a few months of practice, they display sophisticated physical control as they wield the puppets from behind the curtains of a bilevel ministage....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Nemtusak clearly misrepresents our production in three statements from his review. First, he refers to the “painfully cartoonish accent” of one of the actors, which I can only imagine is a reference to my wife, Luda Jameson, a member of the cast who was born and raised in Russia, but has spent the past eight years in Chicago and has, as a result, a rather unique voice....

Back in the 80s, the decade of my coming-of-age, we used to come here on a regular basis when it was the original Exit. We were very into punk and new wave. I had purple hair one week, pink the next. The dance floor was in the back of the old Exit–there was a sunken square pit with tall tables and barstools all around it. So we were having a typical night here, spending a lot of time dancing, having several drinks, and sampling our hallucinogenics when my friend Patti, who was notorious for hauling around a bag of gag gifts, decided to stuff these fake rubber boogers up her nose....

Alissa Simon calls her one-woman film services company Cine Qua Non, and the play on the Latin for some indispensable thing is apt. The Lincoln Park-based firm offers one-stop shopping for the film festival and nonprofit circuits which rely on the kind of work Simon does: consulting, programming, research and documentation, and event planning. Although she annually travels the globe to discover new movies, secure exhibition rights, sit on juries, and shepherd filmmakers through such far-flung outposts of cinemania as Thailand and Transylvania, Simon is plying her expertise locally this weekend–a program of Israeli documentaries she curated in conjunction with the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV kicks off a four-city tour on Sunday at Facets Cinematheque....

That’s No Way to Treat a Lady Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two of the sculpted hands had been damaged; one had had all its digits chopped off. Some pieces were picked up by a sharp-eyed pedestrian and brought to the Art Institute early last year, but conservator Barbara Hall says that the sculpture was beyond the point where she could do anything. “It looked like someone kept taking a sledgehammer to it,” says Park District historian Julia Bachrach, who’s shepherding the reinstallation....

Hot Doug’s At Hot Doug’s Sohn, a graduate of Kendall College’s culinary school and a onetime caterer, had elevated the humble tube steak to a cuisine if not quite haute at least respectable. He offered Polishes, brats, Thuringers, andouille, and Chicago-style dogs, dressed and cooked to customer preference–whether char-grilled, deep-fried, steamed, or fried then grilled. He featured daily gourmet specials and a “game of the week” sausage–gator, boar, rattlesnake, rabbit, duck, or kangaroo....

Friday 12 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LOCKS This show is a benefit for Dax Pierson of the Bay Area group Subtle, who was paralyzed from the chest down in a tour-van accident in February–he’s still in a rehab center near Houston, and though he has insurance, it’s only defrayed a tiny fraction of the cost of his $30,000 motorized wheelchair. Headliners Tortoise are the big-money attraction here, but it’s worth showing up right at ten to see Locks, the local duo of Patrick Scott and Theo Katsaounis (in other words, Weather minus Roby Newton, who’s moved to Baltimore)....

Avant-garde artist Omar Sangare brings quite the eclectic package to the stage. Half-Polish, half-Malian, he studied at the Theater Academy in Warsaw and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford and has published two books of poetry and a short-story collection. A teacher and journalist in Poland, the physically striking Sangare is also a performer of astonishing control and grace who most recently put his multifarious otherness to good use in a critically acclaimed turn as Othello in New York in 2002....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks to Reader webmaster Whet Moser, here’s a scene from Welles’s Don Quixote, preceded by a few comments from me from an upcoming interview, “Unseen Orson Welles.” As I mention in the last chapter of my book, contrary to the claim of some Italian critics that this sequence is derived from the attack on several windmills in Part 1, Chapter 8 of the Cervantes novel, I think it can be traced more plausibly back to Quixote’s attack on a puppet theater in Part 2, Chapter 26—although, as with other scenes in Welles’s film, it’s a very free adaptation....

THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS | Mario Acevedo | Rayo | Former infantryman Mario Acevedo manages to seamlessly blend several genres in his smooth, wryly funny debut novel. Nymphos starts off as a war thriller: enlisted grunt Felix Gomez is just trying to survive in Iraq when he mistakenly shoots a civilian girl who bleeds to death before his eyes. Overcome with guilt, he allows an Iraqi vampire to turn him into one of the undead as punishment....

At Duke’s Drive-In, a hut in a block-long parking lot at 81st and Harlem in Bridgeview, the regulars know that a “beef sweet, dry and fry” is a sandwich with sweet peppers, a little gravy, and a side of fries. A “beef hot and juicy” is the opposite. This is common to all Italian beef stands, says Bill Humphrey, a Chicago firefighter who manages the place for his mother-in-law (his father-in-law, Duke Ziegler, ran the place for 28 years before he died of a heart attack in 2003)....

Get those cheesehead jokes out of your system now, because while the Great Wisconsin Cheese Festival may take place a scant 20 miles from the Packers’ home turf, there’s more going on here than funny hats. Launched in 1988 with a taste test in which the pride of Wisconsin handily took top honors against an upstart from New York, this annual three-day celebration features cheese-curd-eating contests for both local dignitaries and fairgoers, cheese-carving demos, a cheesecake competition, a parade, and free tastings of the many spreads, curds, and chunks submitted by 20 or so regional producers....

saturday6 monday8 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » sausage with black lentils, risotto with house-cured bacon, pasta with a wild boar Bolognese, and pork chops from Gunthorp Farms. Apparently, and perhaps thankfully, there’s no pig in the dessert, an almond cake with wine-poached pears and vanilla gelato. a 6:30 PM, Osteria Via Stato, 620 N. State, 312-642-8450, $69. –Julia Thiel Music journalist Mitch Myers, nephew of poet Shel Silverstein, reads from his book The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock & Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling as part of the Old Town School series Spin Night....