Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A memorial service for Apple Tree Theatre founder Eileen Boevers will be held this Thursday, January 15, at the Highland Park Community House, 1991 Sheridan Road, time yet to be determined. Boevers, 68, died January 11, after a long battle with cancer. She started Apple Tree (named for the street on which she lived) in 1983, as the professional performance sibling to the successful theater school for kids she’d been running since 1970....

Wikimedia Commons Goya has his say on mental illness Since President Obama delivered his remarks responding to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, there’s been talk about a national conversation on race. Let’s be clear about what Obama did and didn’t call for. “There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race,” he said. “I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have....

Evan Vucci/ AP Photos Veterans Day, originally known as Armistice Day, commemorates the end of World War I in 1918. Germany lost, a resolution it was hard for Germans to get their minds around, as the guns that fell silent were all on foreign soil. A war that began as a snappy invasion of Belgium and France expected to settle matters in a few weeks turned into an endless slog Germany was unprepared for, and then into even worse....

John Torres’s last day alive was a lot like all the other days he’d spent in the past eight months, serving on the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The 25-year-old army reservist, who worked an administrative job as a “load planner,” organizing supply movements, bought some DVDs, made and then canceled plans to get a massage, played video soccer with a buddy—Argentina versus Mexico—and talked about celebrating his friend’s birthday the next day with dinner....

John McMullen Leslie Stella Teenagers face a lot of challenges, but Bud Hess has more than most. He’s prone to disabling panic attacks. He has anxiety disorder. He’s clinically depressed. He’s under the care of a psychiatrist. He’s slight of stature. He’s constantly bullied and humiliated. He’s smart but not a good student. He’s called racist names. And he’s not even really a “Bud.” His Iranian-American father had his name changed from Badi Hessamizadeh, in the hope that Badi would fit in better at his new school....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The matter before presiding criminal court Judge Paul Biebel was a request by Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan to hand off five Burge-related cases to Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez. Attorneys and advocates for the defendants in the cases fiercely oppose the move. Alvarez’s office says it’s deferring to Biebel. It’s expected that Biebel’s decision will also establish who’s responsible for Burge-related cases that may emerge in the future....

There’s a mess of local mixtapes dropping in the next couple weeks I’ve been waiting to add to my regular listening rotation, such as Lil Chris’s Money Talks, ShowYouSuck’s One Man Pizza Party 4, and Lucki Ecks’s Alternative Trap. Right now I’m stuck on the latest full-length from Evanston-reared MC Probcause, The Recipe Volume 2, and it’s looking like the mixtape is going to stick around in my playlist cycle....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All you need is a little soul. Well, maybe a lot of soul, and a dance-off, and girl groups too. You get all of them at the Hideout, where New York DJ Jonathan Toubin brings his “recession-friendly” Soul Clap & Dance Off to Chicago. Girl Group, who covers songs by—well, I’m sure you can guess—opens. Two of my favorite things, Batman and boobs, team up tonight for Holy Bouncing Boobies: A Batman Burlesque at Gorilla Tango Theatre in Skokie at 9 PM....

Dating under false pretense can be pretty disastrous. You go into a relationship with an open-mind but preconceived notions surface and inch by inch the mind starts to close as you zero in on the person. It can leave you jumping to conclusions, associating the person with a past failure(s), wondering what’s in store and how long the trip will last. Then there is that non-existent perfect person that has been created and modified over the years....

On his new Dressed Up for the Letdown (Secretly Canadian), pop throwback Richard Swift continues to curdle Brill Building sweetness with the cynicism, if not the substance, of Randy Newman. In fairness, he may suspect that his lyrics aren’t all they could be–the CD booklet provides only fragments of them, often crossed out or otherwise obscured–but he does get in some good lines, often at his own expense (“I played your heart, but I broke two strings”; “Sorry, Mr....

QI’m a 67-year-old woman, almost 68, who’s been married four times—once widowed (with three kids in their 40s who’ve turned out pretty well), divorced three times. I recently met someone online: he’s 48, a wealthy, educated man with two boys, 12 and 14. He lives the cuckoldt lifestyle and is looking for a woman to marry who would participate in and enjoy this with him. He says he “craves and needs” this lifestyle, and from what he’s said so far, his boys have been trained from an early age also to live this lifestyle and would require that the woman he marries include them in all ways....

On the elevator ride to the seventh floor of the Four Seasons, there’s just enough time to react to the framed advertisement for Allium, the profound casualization of the hotel’s erstwhile Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant: a close-up on a pair of pretty lips and set of straight white teeth about to chomp into a raw red onion. Allium is the genus to which onions and other perennial bulbous plants belong. “Chicago” is derived from the Miami-Illinois Indian word for “stinking onion....

And that was hardly the end of the matter. In July, after Billy Ocasio resigned to go to work for Governor Pat Quinn, Mayor Daley announced that he was naming Maldonado the 26th Ward’s new alderman. This set off alarms with the residents of the 1700 block of North Monticello. Since aldermen generally have final say over land-use matters in their wards, Maldonado’s appointment meant that he was now the person he would have to go through to enact the zoning change he wanted....

Bill Arnett, improv performer and teacher at iO Theater, finds he is not alone thanks to: The Kates Would you like some cupcakes with your comedy? Then head on down to the Book Cellar for a package deal of heavenly baked goods and uproarious live performances from one of the best comedy groups in town, the Kates. Led by local comedians Kelsie Huff and Amy Sumpter, this exclusively female troupe puts on a show twice monthly—every second Friday at 8 PM and last Saturday at 7 PM—with acts that vary from clowning to stand-up to outrageous song-and-dance routines....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last week I finally managed to round up several friends to help me taste the five bottles I had (2009 to 2013). The beer is brewed by Unibroue exclusively for Trader Joe’s and released each fall. A dark ale brewed with spices, it’s bottle conditioned, which means that it’s bottled with live yeast that consume the sugars and carbonate the beer over time....

Tumblr might seem like a pretty innocuous Web platform—like a more media-rich Twitter, it allows users to share photos, videos, text, links, audio, and quotes, plus follow other users doing the same thing. But it’s already being accused of heinous crimes against culture. On March 20 former Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef wrote a well-argued piece for the A.V. Club explaining what he sees as Tumblr’s negative effects on musicians—including an uptick in faddishness in the indie-rock world, which once imagined itself above such things....

Plus: Reviews of Bangers & Lace and Blokes & Birds If you can get past those inconveniences, you’ll encounter a formidable kitchen. After finishing some grilled greens and crusty bread soaked in an anchovy slurry, followed by toothy pappardelle pasta with a sort of cheesy Bolognese sauce, I realized that this wasn’t at all the Italianized pub fare I’d expected. Of course, celebrating the essential flavor of fresh, good ingredients is as central to the Italian kitchen as to the sushi bar, and purity of flavor needn’t mean austerity....

When the Sun-Times decided to shrink its payroll in 1998 by firing Washington reporter Basil Talbott, former senator Paul Simon and future governor Rod Blagojevich both protested publicly, and Jesse Jackson called the editor of the paper. Jackson told me afterward, “I wanted for the record for him to consider the moral consequence, the precedent. Honor has to count. Morality has to count. Longevity has to count. And I think the broader community should realize that in some sense none of us are secure if the best years of our lives are thrown away with the mark of a pen....

QMy younger brother and I are close. He came out of the closet last year, although it wasn’t much of a surprise because everyone knew he was gay since forever. Everyone is happy he’s out because it kind of takes the elephant out of the room, and our immediate and extended family are all really supportive. But for the last six to nine months or so, he’s been really depressed about not ever having had a boyfriend....

Rapper, producer, and Mississippi native Big K.R.I.T. has a reputation as a serious artist, working in the David Banner tradition of uniting the South’s legacy of social activism with its history of nasty-ass rap beats. “All Gold Everything” rapper Trinidad James is held in considerably lower esteem by listeners who prefer their rap music conscious. In fact, he gets accused of peddling a modern style of minstrelsy fairly frequently. So when K....