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Parked cabs line the curbs outside Baba Palace, a 24-hour Pakistani-Indian restaurant on the corner of Chicago and Orleans. A large sign in the window promises a Meal Deal for $4.50. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Malik estimates that 80 percent of his clientele is cabbies, but Baba Palace, which has a spiffy Web site (www.babapalace.com), is hardly a well-kept secret. There are other customers, mostly men–students looking for food that reminds them of home, a businessman who got hooked 11 years ago when he was a student, a software developer from out of town who’s used the Internet to find local restaurants serving halal meat....

The third annual Children’s Humanities Festival runs 10/29-11/10. 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. Following is the schedule through 11/3; a complete schedule is available at www.chicagoreader.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Animation Station!...

“A lawyer who represents himself,” the adage goes, “has a fool for a client,” but Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo may not have heard that one. As the Neptunes, Williams and Hugo have spent the last five years turning dry, stuttering rhythms, beeping synth lines, and retrofitted soul vocals into a torrent of hits for Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, and No Doubt, among many, many others. But being the biggest production team in the world seemingly wasn’t enough for them, and in 2000 they formed the group NERD with their old friend Shae Haley....

Paula Scrofano as a villainous queen bent on sabotaging her son’s marital chances by imposing impossible tests on his would-be brides brings a needed flourish to Ray Frewen’s colorful but spark-deprived production. We know it’s a lightweight musical comedy, but the characters shouldn’t. Too often the love stories here play out predictably, with little genuine ardor. Individual characters satisfy, however: Sean Fortunato’s delightful nebbish of a prince; Kristen Freilich’s goofy, likable, pea-hating princess; Brian Herriott’s dashing rogue knight; and Pegah Kadkhodaian’s sympathetic knocked-up lady....

The Doctor’s Dilemma Consider his 1906 foray into medical ethics, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Its opening passages put as many as six doctors in a room, where they discuss the latest fashions in treatment. The newly knighted Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a serious researcher whose latest breakthrough helps antibodies combat the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. Ridgeon’s pal, Cutler Walpole, performs fad surgeries for the carriage trade, excising a fictitious organ called the nuciform sac....

Friday 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SUFJAN STEVENS For all his greater musical sophistication, the temptation to compare Sufjan Stevens’s album Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty) to Songs About the Land of Lincoln by locals Illinois First! is pretty much overwhelming: both derived lyrical inspiration from books (Stevens from the writings of Carl Sandburg and others, Illinois First! from the textbook Discovering Illinois); both feature grand histories of entire towns (Stevens does Jacksonville and Illinois First!...

New Yorker William Basinski has been involved in music for more than two decades–he’s played saxophone in a variety of experimental contexts and helps run Arcadia, a Brooklyn performance space. But his greatest acclaim has come in the last few years, as a rash of releases from Raster-Noton, Die Stadt, and his own 2062 label have collected his gorgeous ambient music. The records are relatively new, but much of the music on them was made in the early 80s, when Basinski began experimenting with tape loops; some pieces are lovely collages that mix bits of Muzak with shortwave radio static, while others are built on layers of terse piano parts....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and the Czech Center New York, this retrospective series on writer-director Pavel Juracek runs Friday through Thursday, April 9 through 15, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-9075. Programs marked with an * are highly recommended. SATURDAY, APRIL 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Martin Sulik sifts through Juracek’s mordant and voluminous diaries to create this impressionistic 2003 portrait of an artist continually on the verge of cracking up....

Get rich quick–no financing needed. “The lure of ‘quick dollars,’ according to [west-side charter-school teacher Toni] Billingsley, was one of the most crucial issues facing the kids she taught,” writes Gregory Michie in Teacher Magazine (May). “‘They see kids their age who aren’t even in school making big money,’ she explained. ‘So they’re thinking, “You’re telling me to stick with this school thing, which means I have to not only finish grammar school and high school, but also possibly college if I want a career....

Portastatic | Be Still Please (Merge) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Portastatic’s ninth full-length, Be Still Please, takes no part in this noxious mythology–it’s a record about getting older, about being a husband, a father, and an American, but it plunges forward into the challenges, fears, blessings, and joys inherent to grown-up family life. It’s a strange album for its earnestness and honesty, but also because front man Mac McCaughan seems to be hitting a hot streak 21 years into his career–this is his 23rd album, counting releases by his bands Superchunk and Bricks....

In 1967, when Scott Walker was 24, he quit his band the Walker Brothers at the height of their fame–on their final tour the supporting acts were Cat Stevens, Engelbert Humperdinck, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Walker had always seemed uneasy with his role as a teen idol, and by tearing himself away from his adoring public to pursue an interior vision, he became a textbook example of the existential rock star....

Center Point, IN The EFRC has been operating since 1991, when Taft moved to Center Point with two tigers and a leopard. It’s now home to 200 cats on 110 acres. Taft doesn’t advertise, but word of mouth brings him around 7,000 visitors a year, most of them kids on school trips. There aren’t many other reasons to visit Center Point, a sleepy place 240 miles southeast of Chicago that’s like a ghost town–the main drag has a boarded-up general store and antique shop, a diner with no patrons....

Japanese choreographer Toru Shimazaki seems to be aiming for artful artlessness in Bardo, created for Hubbard Street’s “Global Tapestry” program. The choreography is purposely unpolished and a little odd, but during a rehearsal he insists that it be given the right tone. “It’s not acting,” he says. Instead he talks about seeing one’s own movement in the mind’s eye, of setting the mind and the movement in opposition. To get the centered stagger backward that he wants in one phrase, he asks the dancers to think about the way a rock musician confidently thrusts his pelvis forward....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to police, 36-year-old Rosalean Walker of Manhattan went to a multiplex theater in Jersey City, New Jersey, in December with her boyfriend and her 11-year-old son. When the grown-ups’ movie (In the Mix) ended, the boyfriend went into the theater where the son was watching the much longer Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire but soon reported back to Walker that he couldn’t find him, and they left....

For Thomas Martin, the MC, DJ, and producer known as Thaione Davis, 1917 was a very good year: it marked the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, the beginning of the black migration to the cities of the north, and the earliest African-American solidarity marches. The title of his new disc, Situation Renaissance: 1917 Edition, alludes to this pivotal year, when much of what we now know as African-American culture was born–and its release heralds another kind of birth for Martin....

My Friend Leonard If you’ve read Frey’s 2003 debut, the best-selling rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces, you’re already acquainted with his shtick. He has unshackled himself from what most of us understand to be the rules of sentence structure and grammar. He alternates terse broken sentences with loquacious run-ons, and scorns quotation marks, colons, semicolons, adverbs, parentheses, and adjectives–stylistic tics that surely have Strunk and White spinning in their graves....

Dear Readers: I’m proud to finally present my long-delayed column devoted to advice for Girls Also Longing and other 15-year-olds. What do the women who read Savage Love know now that they wish they’d known then? You can read all about it below. Here’s a pearl of wisdom I wish someone had shared with me: Just because a guy wants to fuck you doesn’t necessarily mean he likes you. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn’t it?...

As crops throughout the midwest withered during the drought of 1936, the Chicago Tribune reported on one plant untroubled by the lack of water. “When we stopped to look at the test plot where the hemp is growing, we wanted to doff our straw hat and give this plant a little applause,” wrote reporter Robert Becker. “It has grown remarkably in spite of intense heat and drouth [sic]. In fact, one of the boys was saying that during the week of the most severe heat the hemp kept pushing its head to the blazing sun....

Brian Bedford is certainly the world’s premiere performer of Moliere in English–and perhaps his finest interpreter in any language. He not only acts in but directs this pair of one-acts presented by Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The evening showcases his range as a performer: in The School for Husbands he plays a stiff, humorless pedant, all lugubrious virtue and fatuous self-righteousness, while in The Imaginary Cuckold he’s a rowdy bumpkin. One man is actually betrayed and the other merely imagines himself to be, but they’re both clueless....

Kevin Tihista hasn’t slept for two days. A pensive, doleful-looking 36-year-old, he appears drawn and tired as he sips a beer at a quiet bar near his Roscoe Village apartment. “I’ve been up all night working,” he explains. “Writing.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since 2000 he’s released three solo albums credited to Kevin Tihista’s Red Terror, including his most recent, Wake Up Captain (Parasol)....