Yes, it’s really that pink. And Wednesday it will be fizzier. On Wed 6/5 Northdown Cafe & Taproom hosts its second yearly Lions, Tigers & Beers benefit for a nonprofit no-kill big-cat rescue center in Sandstone, Minnesota, called the Wildcat Sanctuary. It provides spacious habitats for its animals—not just lions and tigers but also cougars, jaguars, lynxes, bobcats, caracals, servals, and more—but don’t get any ideas about visiting, because it’s not open to the public....

Table, Donkey and Stick is the restaurant reborn from the much-admired Bonsoiree after Shin Thompson—in order to ready a forthcoming West Loop Asian spot—handed the reins over to Top Cheftestant Beverly Kim for a short, pricey, ill-fated experiment in prix fixe Korean. The preserved meats in that first category—dubbed wanderteller (“hiker’s plate”)—are excellent and among the most beautifully arranged in town: a lineup that includes folds of bloodred smoked venison tenderloin with cherry mostarda, iron-rich coins of firm blood sausage, and thin sheets of concentrically stuffed pheasant galantine seasoned with coffee and fennel....

New Too Paul Fehribach, former chef at Schubas’ Harmony Grill, has taken the space long home to trapped-in-amber Augie’s diner and turned it into an airy, minimalist dining room distinguished by floor-to-ceiling windows and wrought-iron chandeliers. Like those chandeliers, the menu gives a little wave to the French Quarter. The cocktail list is full of hurricanes and nicely balanced Sazeracs—including one with absinthe—and the menu includes crawfish croquettes, etouffee, and a rich and smoky gumbo with chicken and andouille....

QI am a 28-year-old straight girl two years into my first marriage. New job, new home, and new city 1,200 miles from my closest friends. It was really lonely at first, not knowing anyone nearby. Plus, Hubby is far less social than I am, and has not gone out of his way to help us make any friends to hang out with. He’s happiest at home on the couch, in front of a good movie, which is how we spend a lot of our time....

QI’m a woman who wants to be spanked. But I’m overweight and self-conscious. Men who like to spank women like to spank petite women. Sometimes I’ll search kinky personal sites or other online forums and find someone who might want to spank me. But I get scared and I back out. Most recently, I’ve been talking to a trucker who stops at rest stops along his routes around the country and meets with/spanks women....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The February 3 passing of Red Shoe Diaries creator Zalman King sounded a death knell for a certain type of American pornography. With the wildfire spread of hardcore clips online, there no longer seems to be a market for the genteel, plot-based softcore in which he specialized. A few generations from now, maybe someone will make a House of Pleasures-style re-creation of King’s antiquated 1990s eroticism—for now, Red Shoe Diaries DVDs go for about $10 each on eBay....

At the start of Danai Gurira‘s ambitious, arduous new drama, The Convert, a 15-year-old African girl named Jekesai is poised to take a leap from the frying pan into the fire. What a shame that Gurira leaves her to simmer for such a long time first. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s 1895, and we’re in Salisbury, the British outpost that will eventually become Harare, present-day capital of Zimbabwe....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All spring, I’ve been telling anyone who cares (which is hardly anyone) that the Anaheim Ducks will win the Stanley Cup. It pains me to be right, since the Ducks just eliminated the Detroit Red Wings, and I’m such a huge Detroit fan I even bleed red. Here’s the irony in the Ducks’ success: the team started its life in 1993 as the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, a Disney-owned tie-in to the youth hockey flick....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks ago the city announced a few highlights of the upcoming concert season in Millennium Park, but overshadowing that news was what was missing: the invaluable Music Without Borders series was toast. The city just announced the full schedule for the summer, and this time a second great series is missing: the eclectic lunchtime concerts that took place seven days a week Monday through Friday....

A sample Ming Mecca game If you’re the type of hands-on engineering geek whose favorite pastimes involve complicated schematics and skilfully wielding a soldering iron, it’s likely that you’ve tried your hand at one of the two most popular engineer-geek hobbies of the past few years: building synthesizers out of Eurorack components and hacking old video game systems. Both have obvious appeal to the type of person who spent his childhood deconstructing household appliances to see how they work, just with a slightly different focus depending on whether your particular set of personal obsessions is geared more toward obscure Japan-only video games or the collected works of Giorgio Moroder....

Orlando Court Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who know Woolf primarily from the intense domestic introversion of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse may well be startled at how much fun she has deconstructing the arts of the historian and the biographer here. Getting it all across onstage—particularly given the novel’s scant dialogue—is a challenge only partly met by Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation, and Ruhl makes some cuts fans of the book may find lamentable....

On August 15, 1914, Julian Carlton hacked seven people to death in rural Wisconsin and tried to conceal the deed by setting fire to the house. Caught on the scene, he drank acid and died before trial. It was big news then, and it’s still news 93 years later, because Carlton’s victims included the paramour of 47-year-old starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the burned building was Wright’s controversial studio/love nest, Taliesin....

What a morning: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drove to the Walgreens clinic (didn’t know such a thing existed, but it seems clever) because my wife had a possible case of strep, and the student care clinic said to come in on Monday. Which is not the first time she’s been told to ride it out over a weekend; the last time, it was a broken arm....

The young man from Sudan walks up to the counter at Edgewater’s Kukulu Market and places a half-foot stack of spongy injera on the counter. Among the seven varieties of the tangy fermented flatbread for sale in the tiny store that day, he says he likes this one best, because it’s made with the most teff flour, milled from the tiny grain native to the Ethiopian highlands. A few minutes later a woman buys a stack of the same variety, for the same reason....

Agon Trilogy Dream Theatre 556 W. 18th 773-552-8616 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jeremy Menekseoglu’s ingenious, blood-curdling, nervy overhaul of one of the greatest works of Western theater, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, would be an extraordinary accomplishment for any playwright. But the fact that Menekseoglu created all this vastness for the tiny, fringy Dream Theatre in Pilsen makes it mind-blowing. The three parts, Agamemnon, Electra, and Orestes, follow the cursed House of Atreus, focusing primarily on two women whose sufferings are truly mythic: Cassandra, the clairvoyant Trojan princess taken as a prize of war by King Agamemnon, and Electra, Agamemnon’s unloved, matricidal daughter....

I have a music stand in my kitchen that I use to prop up books and recipes within eyeshot when I’m cooking. It’s made of sturdy, heavy metal, but even so it tends to accumulate so many grease-stained papers and swollen tomes that at any given time walking through the room will set it tilting and swaying like a drunken crane. It’s certainly no match for the Yellow Pages-size cookbooks that publishers release every year around this time, apparently leveling whole forests in the process....

In the second act of All the Fame of Lofty Deeds, Mark Guarino’s homage to the music and art of Jon Langford, the title character tells a smarmy rock journalist/horse (stay with me), “You’re going to write a piece that in no way represents the people and places my stories come from.” Which is funny, because that’s exactly what Guarino has done in this ambitious but disappointing production from the House Theatre of Chicago....

In the early 80s, Black Flag drove to Miami. Their style of Hello Kitty t shirts and cutoff jeans forced the Miami Beach punxes of the era to doff their leather jackets and mohawks in favor of fuggit apparel that the rest of the youth culture only caught onto like 5 months ago. Fast forward to 2006, when Animal Collective and GangGang Dance played at the Vagabond in midtown, because bands only come to Miami when galleries pay their way in December for Art Basel; Animal Collective is now alternative Miami’s favorite band....

In December 2006, two new rock musicals opened on Broadway three days apart. One was Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening, based on the 1891 drama by German expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind—a dark study of teen alienation featuring suicide, rape, and abortion. The other was High Fidelity by David Lindsay-Abaire, Tom Kitt, and Amanda Green: a lightweight comedy adapted from Nick Hornby’s 1995 best seller and the popular movie it spawned, about a thirtysomething record store owner named Rob who tries to win back the heart of the woman who dumped him....

Gatekeeper‘s new Optimus Maximus sounds like murder. That’s not to say it’s bad, or even that it’s the kind of aggressive, testosterone-heavy music that seems to actually want to kill you. But all the flavors of synthesizer on the EP—minor-key arpeggios of emulated strings, analog sine-wave groans, washes of white noise—evoke the heyday of the slasher flick in the late 70s and early 80s, when masked maniacs roamed shadowy streets, Ouija boards not only worked but inevitably summoned nameless evils, and vividly red fake blood was spilled by the gallon....