This is the funniest small-group sketch show I’ve seen all year. Jet Eveleth and Holly Laurent, improv instructors and members of long-running I.O. house team the Reckoning, have taken their first crack at writing in a show loosely representing episodes from a fictional 80s sitcom, “I Live Next Door to Horses.” Playing everyone from kids to geriatrics, British socialites to American soldiers, the two adopt distinct voices, mannerisms, and attitudes to create characters, at once esoteric and identifiable, that appear to spring from deeply personal takes on humanity....

Ken Ludwig’s tender Depression-era farce centers on a hungry “dogsbody” understudy, Max, who craves opera’s limelight. A plucky, lovable impostor, he wins fame and love because of a cascading series of calamities in Cleveland. And under Justin Amellio’s direction for the One Theatre Company, the hotel doors bang big-time (a knob burst off on opening night). The casting is cunning, the energy rambunctious–and that’s a problem. This loud show becomes claustrophobic: instead of being pulled in, you pull back....

Why hasn’t Non Phixion put out an album of originals since its 2002 debut, The Future Is Now? Well, their songs are so thick with antigovernment suspicion–“They got a file on every rap group,” Ill Bill asserts on “The CIA Is Trying to Kill Me”–that I wouldn’t be shocked to hear they’re afraid some federal agency would seize it. The three MCs in the New York group–Ill Bill, Sabac, and Goretex–all put out solo records last year, but the only Non Phixion disc of recent vintage is The Green CD/DVD (Uncle Howie), a stopgap assortment of unreleased tracks, B sides, and freestyles....

Like most people who haven’t listened to much Christian rock, I associate it primarily with smug power ballads about a loving God. But there is actually such a thing as Christian metalcore, and this Georgia band’s rep with the kids is at least as much about their sound as their relationship with Jesus. You could be forgiven for not realizing Norma Jean is a Christian band at all; the lyrics are usually incomprehensible, and even on the page they’re pretty ambiguous....

Great story that Michael Miner wrote in the current edition [“How Safe Are We?” August 5] concerning the lack of media coverage over the lack of terrorism preparedness. In Chicago, as in all major cities, only cosmetic and superficial steps are being taken in response to possible terror attacks against urban mass transit and other targets. After the London bombings I seriously wondered what city Mayor Daley and Superintendent Cline were talking about....

I am a 25-year-old SWM who lives in a large apartment complex. Over the past several months the woman who lives upstairs from me has fallen into the habit of coming downstairs once or twice a week and giving me a blow job. She seems fairly normal, and is about ten years older than me. She doesn’t want to go out on dates, and she doesn’t expect me to reciprocate. We don’t even really talk that much....

APOLLO SUNSHINE 1/9, SUBTERRANEAN These three Bostonians hit the bull’s-eye when they named the band: their debut, Katonah (SpinArt), is high Apollonian prog without pretension, art rock without a dour, dark, or attitudinal moment. It’s not that the layers and layers of effervescent sweetness–summer-rain piano, guitars pealing like church bells, whole choirsful of healthy young voices–don’t have their charm, but the cynic in me wants to see a trio try and pull all this shit off live....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the long run, the new alliance that finds the Tribune taking over home delivery of the Sun-Times and ten suburban Sun-Times Media Group titles is supposed to be worth millions of dollars to each company. In the short run, overextended routes, lost drivers, missing sections, and missed deliveries have created consternation in both camps. And at the Tribune, one shrewd business move collided with another – the decision last year to outsource subscriber services to a call center in Manila....

Ron West and Phil Swann’s musical satire of Shakespeare’s play, subtitled “The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet,” dares to voice all the questions readers and viewers have ever wanted to bring up but were afraid to ask. Why is Romeo so emotional? Why don’t we ever see Rosaline, the girl Romeo was utterly obsessed with before Juliet? Why does Mercutio talk so strangely? And what exactly are the Capulets and Montagues fighting about anyway?...

Every once in a while you have an experience in your own hometown that’s so far from your personal reality that you feel like you’re in a foreign country. It happened to me a couple Thursdays ago at the Victor Hotel, when I stumbled into a benefit called Bar AIDS. Forty-seven clubs and bars were donating between 30 and 50 percent of the night’s proceeds to AIDSCare, a nonprofit that provides shelter, nutritional counseling, alternative healing therapies, and other kinds of support to underprivileged people with HIV or AIDS, and the Victor was participating....

Friday 14 BUZZCOCKS A half decade back the Buzzcocks’ legacy was being cheapened everywhere, and for critics the job was simple and depressing: just explain how the current strain of pop punk was dumber, clumsier, and frattier than the original. Well, times have changed: All is now emo, and weren’t those the days? As for Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle’s long-running franchise, it’s fittingly slowed and wizened on the recent Flat-Pack Philosophy (Cooking Vinyl)....

The members of this San Francisco duo were only in their early 20s when they released their 2004 debut, The Throes, which made their scary-old-man Americana act seem a bit presumptuous. But halfway through the second song I gave in and just let myself be impressed by the prodigiousness of their talent. Adam Stephens and Tyson Vogel sound a hundred years older on Two Gallants’ second album, What the Toll Tells (Saddle Creek)–their ever intensifying murder ballads, prison songs, and heartbreak howls are so convincing the two could be mediums possessed by hungry ghosts....

This is a sweet, solid retelling of Neil Simon’s story about an attorney and his free-spirited bride adjusting to marriage in a tiny Greenwich Village walk-up. Committing 100 percent to every wacky moment, each actor brings a distinctive energy to the mix. Rod Thomas as husband Paul plays dependable straight man to Elizabeth Ledo’s Corie, who’s like Tinker Bell on crystal meth, channeling her megawattage into euphoria, despair, and rage. Playing Corie’s mother, Peggy Roeder reveals unfailing comic instincts as a woman swept off her sensible shoes by the charismatic (and lecherous and broke) upstairs neighbor (Jim McCance)....

Nazarlik The Aksoys, who opened their little mom-and-pop in late June, only make cig kofte by special order, partly because it’s so much work to prepare, but also because it has a short shelf life. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Depending on the amount he’s making, Aksoy might knead the mixture for one to two hours, which “cooks” it. “The spices have to become one with the meat,” explains the Aksoys’ 20-year-old daughter, Secil....

We are writing to thank you for running the insightful and well-researched cover story “How to Win the War on Drugs,” by Jeffrey Felshman, in your April 1 issue. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Statistics and stories like the ones in this article make it obvious that the war we need to fight is for saving people’s lives. From 1970 to 2001 the Illinois prison population increased by more than 500 percent; nonviolent drug offenses account for 40 percent of those entering prison annually....

On Wednesday, August 31, the Jazz Institute of Chicago holds its 22nd annual club tour from 6 PM to midnight. Promotional buttons (which include admission and transportation) can be purchased at the clubs for $20 in advance or $25 the night of the event. Buses arrive outside each club every 15 minutes and travel four routes: North (Green Mill, Old Town School, Green Dolphin Street, Pops for Champagne), Central (Andy’s, Joe’s Be-Bop Cafe, Backroom, Jazz Showcase), South Loop (Cotton Club, Velvet Lounge, HotHouse, Buddy Guy’s Legends), and South (Linda’s Lounge, Lee’s Unleaded Blues, Bernice Twilight Zone)....

I started teaching high school freshmen three years ago, when I was 23. I was closer in age and culture to most of my students than I was to the other teachers. That first year I bonded with a lot of the students, in particular with a small group of boys on the basketball team I coached. A couple of these boys developed crushes on me–as any horny, normal teenager would on a mildly attractive teacher....

Blueblood, Price $5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Summertime,” the second track on the band’s first proper full-length, Raw Yang, is three minutes of 60s jangle with a flow that stalls and stutters, playing off the intentional awkwardness of early punks like the Modern Lovers the same way Elvis Costello did on his first couple records. The album came out in July on the local label Fresh Produce, and the first time I heard “Summertime” its melody was what caught my attention....

Despite the success of her label, Thrill Jockey founder Bettina Richards isn’t exactly a wealthy woman. “I peaked at 21 or so in terms of paychecks,” she says. In the late 80s and early 90s she worked as an A and R rep for Atlantic in New York, where she earned enough to save a respectable chunk of the seed money she’d later use to start Thrill Jockey. But if not every endeavor since then has been a moneymaker, well, there are other rewards....

Moral Disorder and Other Stories | Margaret Atwood | Doubleday | Margaret Atwood is pissed off at the state of world affairs. Or so I thought based on “The Bad News,” the first of 11 intertwining stories, which dives through a wormhole from an aging couple’s breakfast over the papers to life in a Roman colony besieged by barbarians who “prefer to invade on beautiful days.” But it’s a bait and switch: rather than political allegory, the rest of this slender volume is relentlessly domestic and carries with it much of the monotony of household chores....