The first annual Indie Boots Theatre Festival, produced by the arts company Mudgeonsoul, has a unifying theme: Rebecca, the title character in each of nine short plays, whom organizers chose as a prompt to encourage writers to come up with stories about women. The full lineup, ranging from rom-com to absurdist critique, will run each of three nights in a 95-minute block. In Spenser Davis’s Rebecca Says Be Cool, Rebecca helps calm Eric’s nerves before his blind date with Nate....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shirley Coleman, alderman of the 16th Ward, is in a tough reelection campaign. She’s been dogged by allegations that she flip-flopped on the big-box minimum-wage ordinance under pressure from Mayor Daley and that she took money from a friend who was involved in an aborted development deal in the ward. “Despite what has been written, I have not sold out my community,” Coleman told me last week....

Ten years ago the Chicago Tribune took on a couple of fleaspecks with predictable results. The Trib had just introduced the adolescent tab it called RedEye to Chicago’s sagging newspaper market, and the market didn’t open its arms. The resistance was critical (“flaunts its inconsequence,” I wrote), competitive (The Sun-Times threw together a tab called Red Streak and shoved it out the door to sow confusion), economic (the 50 cents the Tribune originally asked turned out to be 50 cents more than anyone was willing to pay), and even legal....

During the 2011 mayoral campaign, I kept hearing a refrain from voters, especially relatively well-to-do north-siders: a tough town needs a tough guy for its mayor. He took away a promised teachers’ pay hike, lengthened the school day without providing much in the way of new resources, cussed out the head of the teachers’ union, instigated a teachers’ strike, all but eliminated teacher tenure, closed 50 schools, and then, having promised a fresh new start, implemented a new round of budget cuts that cut 1,500 jobs and left principals scrambling....

4:15 PM: Willis Earl Beal. That Reader piece on him a year ago captured the enduring awesomeness of lo-fi freaky antifolk. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 5:00 PM: At this point start tweeting about how stoked I am for Dirty Projectors, a band that frequently makes me feel as if I am experiencing music for the first time. 8:20 PM: Skip Purity Ring because it sounds like Christian birth control, then sort of lazily half-listen to Feist and maybe remember that time I defused a Thanksgiving crisis at my house by playing Feist for my mom and aunt from a laptop in the kitchen....

I’ve been hearing about the annual Oak Park Micro Brew Review for years, but this year is the first time I’ve made it, and it’s well worth the (very easy) ride out on the Green Line. The whole thing is well-organized, not too crowded, and offers a ton of mostly local brews, plus some good food for sale. The one thing I could wish for is more dump buckets. I don’t know if it has something to do with being a zero waste event, but unlike other beer tastings I’ve been to, there were no buckets in the booths in which to dump the beer you didn’t want to finish (emptying your tasting glass, of course, being the only way you can get more beer)....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Citing studies showing people tend to trust other people with physical features like their own, the software company Intopii introduced a new online service during the run-up to Finnish parliamentary elections in March: users could upload photos of themselves to the Intopii site and have a facial-recognition program identify the candidate they most resembled. Also: in the election Jyrki Kasvi, the incumbent representative from Uusimaa and a big Star Trek fan, successfully defended his seat; among the information at his own site is a statement of his political philosophy translated into Klingon....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The headline pictured was the first in a nine-part series (followed by another series filed from “Otter Holler, Appalachia, USA”) by Tribune reporter Norma Lee Browning in March of 1957 on Appalachians in Chicago. I can’t just repost the entire first article in the series, a masterpiece of noirish, lurid yellow journalism, but it’s worth quoting at length:...

It’s taken 20 years for Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville to lose the reductionist “10 Women Who ROCK” lists it came swaddled in and finally become appreciated as a great record in the broader context of the music of the time. In recent years it’s become a touchstone for teenage feminists on Tumblr, retro-obsessed 90s revivalists, and the wave of raw singer-songwriters (male and female) following Kurt Vile and Ty Segall....

Not many Chicago writers would mind being mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Algren, but Rick Kogan read the Sunday Tribune and was bewildered. Here was drama critic Chris Jones writing about Rachel Shteir’s now notorious review of three Chicago books, published the week before in the New York Times. Shteir had made a bizarrely overstated case against the city, and Kogan belonged to the multitude that didn’t think much of it....

QI met this girl on an “adult” Web site, and we’re supposed to meet. We first exchanged a few e-mails on the service, and then we got each other’s screen names. Then we chatted over IM twice, just the basic small talk, before exchanging numbers. It was on the phone that she told me about her rape fantasy: she’s always fantasized about being kidnapped by a stranger from a public place like the grocery store, held in a dark room over the weekend, and forced to do whatever her captor wants....

Q I read your column every week, mostly out of abstract interest. My thoughts reading your advice are usually some variation on “Wow, that’s a lot of work to do just to have a sex life.” So after reading you, I came to the conclusion that I was asexual. I liked this conclusion, as it was a sexual identity that made sense for me. A It should come as no shock to someone who reads my column every week—or any other advice column—that there are lots of people out there who want to be in relationships but don’t particularly want to have sex....

The Justice Department represents federal officials when they’re sued over how they’ve performed their duties, and when former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was sued by two American civilians in 2006, Justice replied that Rumsfeld’s conduct was not for the courts to judge. This was just one of the arguments for cutting Rumsfeld loose. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 2006 Vance and Ertel were working for Shield Group Security, a firm providing security services in Iraq during the war....

Critics always catch hell for spoiling a movie’s surprises, and this acidic two-hander by writer-director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men) is such a narrative onion that I can barely recount the premise without diminishing your enjoyment of the story. Suffice it to say that, one morning around lunchtime, the beautiful young Velvet (Alice Eve) receives an unexpected and quite unwelcome visit from the caustic, middle-aged Fred (Stanley Tucci), and the two characters rake over their shared past as the threat of violence steadily grows....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Looking at the ingredient list–sparkling water, citric acid, natural flavor, citrus pectin, aspartame, and a bunch of preservatives, dyes, and vitamins–it’s not hard to see why. Nothing in this stuff has ever come near any real fruit as far as I can tell. One coworker described its taste as “synthetic,” while another who’s particularly sensitive to aspartame thought it had an aftertaste of burned plastic....

Our Town Lookingglass Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like his equally misunderstood friend Robert Frost, Wilder wasn’t as cuddly as he’s come to seem. The play’s three acts—covering daily life, marriage, and death over the course of a dozen quiet years—present a pleasant enough picture of turn-of-the-century small-town America, with its fundamentally decent inhabitants and moonlit, heliotrope-scented evenings. But darker currents glide beneath....

Before he called a meeting of the City Council’s special events committee to order on December 6, Walter Burnett Jr., the chairman, imparted a piece of political insight to his embattled colleague Nicholas Sposato. Burnett is easy to underestimate. Apart from the figure he cuts—he’s a compact 5-6, wears brainy wire-rimmed glasses, and, when he can ditch the suit, favors the leather-jacket-and-turtleneck ensemble of an early 70s Donny Hathaway—Burnett often seems part of the indistinguishable mass of Chicago aldermen who go along with whatever the mayor wants, whichever mayor is in office....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard from Bogota’s mysterious Las Malas Amistades (“the Bad Friends”), but this Colombian group’s recordings have also tested my patience—they might follow a moment of delicate beauty and soul with something clunky and inept. The group consists of four visual artists, and for them music seems to be a diversion; their songs feel casual and intimate, and the 28 on their latest album, Maleza (Honest Jon’s), were recorded in the home of member Humberto Junca over a two-year period....

Scofflaw chef Mickey Neely was inspired to create this delectable behemoth in tribute to the stacked “supertortas” served at Pilsen’s Doña Torta Chilanga. Depending on whom you ask, the name means “groovy” or “sexy lady,” but either way, the former Longman & Eagle cook combines the meats from his three on-menu sandwiches into this utterly depraved nine-deck monstrosity containing braised brisket, lard-fried pork belly, and roasted pork loin, plus pork jus, white bean puree, pimenton aioli, butter, avocado, lettuce, tomatoes, sriracha, cilantro, whole-grain mustard, creme fraiche, pickled cauliflower, pickled red onion, and chicken liver mousse—all on a toasted telera from nearby Panaderia La Estrella....

“Lookit, he caught it right on your head!” screamed Pierce’s wife, Gloria, in the living room of the Pierces’ home in southwest-suburban Lemont. Pierce shook his head and laughed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pierce was among the most durable pitchers of his era, throwing more than 200 innings season after season. Buehrle is matching that. Pierce was popular with both fans and teammates, as is Buehrle....