QI’m an actor in New York City. A lot of people think actors are whores, but last week I almost became one. I responded to a casting call for a film project called “Sniff.” The ad—on Playbill‘s website—called for two male actors to film a short scene. The pay was $100 for a day’s work. I was e-mailed the scene to study. It starts with two male roommates chatting on a couch....

Krissy Vanderwarker is–to be polite about it–a little bummed. She’s been waiting three years for her date with Mr. Marmalade and wasn’t expecting to have to share him. As artistic director of Dog & Pony Theatre Company, which prides itself on staging local premieres, Vanderwarker had been chasing the Noah Haidle play–about a precocious four-year-old and her problematic imaginary companion, Mr. Marmalade–ever since Orange County’s South Coast Repertory first performed it in 2004....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week Atlas Brewing, in partnership with Letherbee Distillers, released a new stout called Baskerville. Brewed with milk sugar and centennial hops, it’s designed to pair with Letherbee’s Malort, which Robert Haynes developed with Letherbee head honcho Brent Engel last year to serve at the Violet Hour (Haynes, formerly beverage director at the Violet Hour, is now in the process of launching the new bar Analogue)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday singular folksinger and onetime Chicagoan Josephine Foster released a new album called Blood Rushing (Fire). These days Foster lives in Cádiz, Spain, with her partner, guitarist Victor Herrero, but to make the new album she returned to her native Colorado, where she and Herrero were joined by Paz Lenchantin (the Entrance Band), Ben Trimble, and Heather Troste (A Hawk and a Hacksaw)....

The cover of Segue’s Pacifica I caught Andy Stott’s set at Lincoln Hall late last night in a somewhat somnambulant state, atypically out late on a Sunday night. But it turned out that that was the best way to listen to Stott’s music, a mostly uninterrupted stream of midtempo bass throbs coated in thick layers of gristle and detritus. His 2012 LP Luxury Problems was one of my favorites of the year, an album where gorgeous female vocals (courtesy of Alison Skidmore, Stott’s piano teacher) jut into rushes of cavernous low-end bumps....

Julia Thiel The brews When I first interviewed brothers Jesse Edwin Evans and Samuel Evans almost two years ago, their in-the-works brewery was called New Chicago Brewing Company; they were then in the process of moving into the Plant, a former meatpacking facility in Back of the Yards that was (and is) being turned into a vertical farm. A year later, when they moved out of the Plant for parts unknown, they’d changed their name to New Chicago Beer Company....

I recently suffered a seemingly irreparable rift with a new pair of knee-high Coach riding boots. The right one literally split on me—at O’Hare. I’d just checked my bag, had worked my way to the front of security, quickly debooted, and was about to slip my stockinged foot back into the smooth leather lining when something went badly wrong. The lining tore in such a way that my heel was caught in the seam, which created a kind of sling....

Like bison in Yellowstone, architecture is what draws outsiders to Pullman—of the 900 or so brick homes that old George P. built for his railroad town, almost all remain standing in what’s today a quiet, bucolic little neighborhood. This spring the National Park Service was investigating the idea of turning Pullman into a national park, which would make it the second in Illinois, after Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield. It’s an intriguing concept that’d highlight both Pullman’s architecture (those old houses, the famous factory clock tower) and its history—as the site of, among many other things, the founding of the nation’s first African-American labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters....

The Gene Siskel Film Center’s (164 N. State) annual Black Harvest festival wraps up this week with several new programs. Hilla Medallia’s After the Storm documents a New York theater group’s trip to New Orleans to help stage a local musical production in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson’s Slaying Goliath looks at a fifth-grade Harlem basketball team plagued with internal problems as it travels to Florida for the Association of African Universities National Championships (Fri 8/28 and Tue 9/1, 6:15 PM)....

Not bad–a little foggy, getting over a cold . . . I think the vocalist actually gives a better performance than Kid Rock. Yeah, the comments have been nasty, haven’t they . . . In general, people feel misled, I assume? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I had to reread the part about the cover song being five spots ahead of the original a couple of times before it sank in....

House music was still fueling the first wave of British raves when the Chosen Few DJ crew put on the first House Music Reunion Picnic. Now in its 20th year, the daylong event aims to capture the spirit and sound of an era widely considered house’s glory days; as the name suggests, the mood is more like a family reunion than a rave. Headliners and Chosen Few mainstays Jesse Saunders, Wayne Williams, and Tony Hatchett have been spinning records and producing tracks for three decades; they specialize in material that plays up house’s roots in soul and R & B, paying tribute to the disco styles that birthed the form as well as the diva-fied soulful house that helped break the style globally in the 90s....

Music Flesh Hungry Dog Show Most days the Jackhammer (see GLBTQ) is a pretty serious gay bar—Thursdays through Sundays it opens a men-only annex called the Hole, which has a dress code that’s sometimes more of an undress code (Friday is “shirts off” and on Saturday the order of the evening is leather, rubber, underwear, or uniform). But one Friday of every month it also hosts a variety showcase called the Flesh Hungry Dog Show that’s usually almost all live music....

Everyone’s always talking about how great home-field advantage is in sports, but how important is it really? The mindless stats everyone repeats about how NFL teams with home-field advantage do better in the playoffs drive me crazy—the teams earned home-field advantage because they’re better already! Also, are home-field advantages different in different sports? —Doc, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m telling you, geniuses have sweated over this stuff....

What does it say that two restaurants specializing in the relatively obscure food of the far reaches of northeastern China have opened within a month—within blocks of each other, no less? This hasn’t even happened in Chinatown, but in neighboring Bridgeport, where there’s been quite a bit of demographic spillover but hardly the wall-to-wall restaurant density of the Chinatown Square mall. And Tony Hu has nothing to do with it....

Jack Dunphy drove his 16-year-old fist into the face of the kid who was sitting on him and felt the nose give way under his knuckles. Hot red drops freckled his face and then the weight was gone from his chest. He got up and ran. He didn’t run home. He ran to the tracks that bisected his little hometown and, when a freight train finally slowed at the Willow Street crossing, scrambled into an empty boxcar....

Now that the strike is over and teachers are back in school, it’s a good time to visit the story of David Corral, the UNO charter school teacher summarily fired after he notified officials of a “mock rape” in the boys’ locker room. His first year at UNO went so well that Rangel signed him to another one-year contract, raising his salary to $52,000. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Silent Film Society of Chicago begins its summer festival tonight with the Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy (1928), which screens at 8 PM at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, with live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. Programs are every Friday night through the third week of August, and as usual the schedule is a combination of the usual suspects (Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality on August 1, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on August 8) and lesser known titles for the buffs (Children of Divorce with Clara Bow and Gary Cooper on July 25, Raoul Walsh’s Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson on August 15)....

When “Duke” Wellington Reiter rode into town last August, to take the reins at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, some of the locals got a little nervous. A Harvard-trained architect, and also an artist, Reiter had spent five years as dean of Arizona State University’s college of design, in Phoenix, where he’d made a name for himself by lassoing a big pile of money and clearing away a speck of history to build an urban campus (or what passes for urban in those parts)....

Until about a month ago, I had never in my 31 years drunk a cup of coffee. I’d sipped, I’d brewed, I’d sat in dank basement coffeehouses chain-smoking for hours with friends. But never a proper cup. I’ve always maintained fond memories of the faint morning scent of boiling water passing through low-grade robusta beans—my dad downed that dreck every morning—but drinking the equivalent of what tasted like a stomped-on pile of damp leaves has always struck me as pretty objectionable....

“This budget will mark the third year in a row that we have balanced the city’s finances without raising property, sales, or gasoline taxes.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mayor conveniently ignores one small, expensive fact—that in addition to what’s in the official city budget, hundreds of millions of property tax dollars are scooped up each year by the tax increment financing program....