Q I’m a married white guy in my 50s. My wife and I do some role-playing where I’m “Ted,” her real-life father. In her script, I yell at my “bad daughter” (my wife) over some infraction and send her to her room. Later on, I sneak in and tell her that she could “make Daddy very happy” if we were to do some “secret, special things” together. I usually end up fingering her still-virginal butt while “forcing” her to suck my dick....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » UPDATE—5 PM, 12-15-12: A school superintendent said today there was no indication that Nancy Lanza had ever worked at Sandy Hook elementary in any capacity. (Law enforcement officials had said yesterday she’d been a kindergarten teacher there.) Lanza, 52, apparently was slain by her son Adam not at the school but in her home, before he went to Sandy Hook, forced his way in, and shot children in two separate classrooms multiple times....

Jeffrey Hatcher’s 1998 play is based on an offbeat Twilight Zone-like premise: a mysterious woman in her early 30s, perhaps a Titanic survivor, is found nearly a century after the great ship sank. But Hatcher never manages to spin this premise into an interesting story. Instead he records in minute detail the various ways a secondary character, the obsessed grandson of one of the worthies killed on the Titanic, tries to prove the woman is a fraud....

QWhy am I such a slut? —Girl, Corrupted Don’t buy into the sexist double standards, GC. So long as your sex life isn’t negatively affecting your relationship(s), your health, your friendships, your family life, your classwork, or your career, GC, you aren’t doing anything wrong. Don’t let shitty, sexist people make you feel like you have to slap a shitty, sexist label on yourself for the crime of enjoying sex while female....

OUR LADY OF THE UNDERPASS Teatro Vista at the Greenhouse Theater The monologues are separated by clever choral recitations that bring to mind different types of prayer—intercession, confession, petition. (“Please, Mary Mother of God, may toilet paper be on sale this week.”) But Saracho is no smart-ass, interested only in wringing laughs from the phenomenon. She takes imaginative leaps to fill out the characters, who represent a wide spectrum of faith and unbelief....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH LEIF OVE ANDSNES In the absence of Riccardo Muti, who fainted and fell from the podium during a rehearsal two weeks ago, fracturing multiple bones in his face and jaw, the CSO has scrambled for replacement conductors. The good news is that the ebullient Gianandrea Noseda takes the reins for this program, though with an unfortunate change away from the unique music of Edgard Varese. Most important, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will still play Brahms’s glorious Piano Concerto no....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past couple of weeks my playlist has taken a turn for the bipolar, whipping back and forth between black metal (Mayhem, Spektr, the first Behemoth record) and some of the new wave of psychedelia (White Magic, MV & EE). It may be that I’ve just absorbed enough of each to start messing with my mental faculties, but I see a lot in common between the two styles....

Steve Leggat Jon Du of Taiwanese band Forests I had my midlife crisis about 20 years early. After interning at the Reader in 2009 and 2010, I moved in spring 2011 to Taipei, Taiwan, to work for Groupon—and after realizing that the Taiwanese work ethic was somewhat less humane than the Free Beer Friday style of good ol’ Groupon USA, I quit and joined two bands. Brash? Reckless? Yes and yes....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been a big supporter of Oozing Wound right from their beginnings early this year. Cacaw was one of my favorite Chicago bands ever, and though I was bummed at their unceremonious breakup in late 2011, I was beyond excited to see what would be next from the players involved. In about a month the world will be able to hear for itself, because Oozing Wound (whose lineup includes half of Cacaw) will put out their first release, a tape titled Vape and Pillage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who think science is boring probably haven’t heard of Improbable Research, a Massachusetts-based group that collects and conducts “improbable research”–research that “makes people laugh and then think.” Tonight from 8 to 10 PM at the Fairmont Hotel’s Moulin Rouge room (200 N. Columbus) they’ll be reviewing the past year’s research and Ig Nobel Prize winners, several of whom will give presentations....

When Yolanda Castillo was a little girl in Belize, she learned to make hudut baruru by laboriously pounding green and ripened boiled plantains in a deep, carved wooden mortar with a long wooden pestle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The West African castaways escaped from the slavers and integrated with the islanders, a mix of Arawak and Carib peoples. When British colonists showed up on Saint Vincent in 1763, the “Black Caribs,” as the Brits called the Garifuna, resisted alongside French settlers for decades, eventually surrendering in 1796....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. (The American Civil War is another example.) The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they’re convinced the alternative is worse. Meanwhile the winners, who might earlier have accepted a compromise peace, become so maddened by the refusal of their enemies to stop fighting that they see no reason to settle for anything less than absolute victory....

Robert K. O’Daniell/AP Roger Ebert In 2007, I reviewed an off-Loop production called Siskel & Ebert Save Chicago. In this goofy little Factory Theater spoof of James Bond flicks, suave superagent Gene Siskel and his pudgy sidekick Ebert defeat a plot to take over Chicago by Oprah Winfrey, Richard Roeper, and Mancow Muller. Roger himself attended the performance and was—or at least seemed—vastly amused. I was surprised, considering that his friend Siskel had actually died eight years earlier; the joke in the play was that Siskel had only been cryogenically frozen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That group, which featured Parker and a succession of drummers (Marc Edwards, Whit Dickey, Susie Ibarra, and Guillermo Brown), was distinguished by pianist Matthew Shipp, an imposing improviser who prodded Ware to monumental heights. Together they created wildly dense fabrics of sound–brooding, roiling, violent–whose twin coils of improvisation were so packed with melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas that each performance left the listener both exhausted and exhilarated....

The “energetically American, French-influenced” Henri is more than an elegant follow-up to its boisterous neighboring sibling, the Gage. It’s a smart kick in the dangling prairie oysters of gastropubbery: chandeliers, Laguiole knives, velvet walls (with faux gator skin in the bathroom), salt and pepper shakers, ballotines, bouillabaisse, and escargots de Bourgogne? I’m pretty sure owner Billy Lawless wheels in the gray Gold Coast nobility that occasionally collects here on nights when the elevator ride up to Everest would inflame the gout....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday the New York Times brought its obfuscatory editorial approach to swearwords to a hilarious and confusing new level when it made a detour around the word cocksuckers so long that it described the epithet (or, uh, compliment, depending on your POV) as an adjective. The context, inevitably, was a trend piece about the fedora-wearing (seriously) interlopers who are so angering residents of Montauk, New York, that one was moved to post a “diatribe” to the website diehipster....

The most recent numbers from Public Policy Polling: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Quinn gets way more press than any other Illinois candidate, but it tends to be negative, in part because the state’s so screwed up. This, I think, greatly overshadows Brady’s candidacy, which combined with being from downstate means he’s still a relative unknown, despite (because of?) being the least worst campaigner....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Scott Walker, Bish Bosch The most challenging avant-garde pop album of the year is full of dizzyingly dissonant tones of unknown origin, painfully pregnant pauses, and the gravitational pull of Scott Walker’s disconcertingly intense personality. But it’s also packed with fart jokes, bitchy insults directed at unnamed targets, and unexpected references to heavy metal and dubstep—it’s as entertaining as it is unsettling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I didn’t listen to much from young composer and musician Jonathan Chen, who graduated from Northwestern with a master’s in violin performance in 1999, until after he left Chicago in 2004. But since then I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the consistency and rigor of his work. He’s occasionally sent me pieces of music from Middletown, Connecticut, from Karlsruhe, Germany, and most recently from Athens, Georgia–all places he’s lived since leaving....

Q&A Thu 12/11, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, $25, 18+. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am a big fan of how Kubrick used music. He just understood it so well. You watch the opening of 2001, 14 or 15 minutes, there is no dialogue. He just totally got it. I also really enjoyed the Jonny Greenwood music in There Will Be Blood....