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THE COOK GOODMAN THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The incident—along with Gladys’s cuisine and the intense memories it evoked—inspired The Cook, which explores the volumes of history and emotion hinted at in Gladys’s terse response. Premiered in 2003 at the Hispanic off-Broadway theater Intar (where Machado became artistic director in 2004), the richly flavored drama is now receiving its Chicago premiere at the Goodman in a fine staging highlighted by Karen Aldridge’s charismatic lead performance....

QI’m a male sub looking for porn videos catering to a femme dom audience. I’m not talking about porn directed by men for submissive men, but porn targeting the appetites of the dominatrix. I’m not looking for soft-core bondage pictures of men or any other gay porn. I am looking for hetero femme dom porn videos aimed at women, with well-groomed male slaves. I’m not looking for yet another video of penis torture and/or anal rape, where the female “dom” inevitably gives her slave a blow job....

QI love my wife. We’ve been married ten years. Young punk-rock love turned into adult debt-ridden love. She’s been there for me, helps me achieve my goals, all that. But she’s let herself go, while I’ve gotten myself into better shape. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When almost any girl you see is hotter to you than your wife… what the fuck do you do?...

On her early records, Scout Niblett came on like the Cat Power of the British seaside–same mumbling drawl, though not as beaten down by living–but she managed to carve out her own niche on her last record, Kidnapped by Neptune (Too Pure, 2005). Her sultry mooning was replaced with a nervous energy, as if she were finally possessed of her own ideas and couldn’t wait to share them. The title track has the feel of a happy accident, a jam that quickly turned into a song, but Niblett is forceful as she lopes along, strumming a guitar over some crooked drums, knowing she’s onto something sharp....

There’s a reason you’ve never had a shrimp meatball. On paper, the bar’s selection of craft cocktails is limited but attractive. In practice, it’s a pretty one-note menu—and that note is sweet. The Scarlet Harlot, J. Rocco’s take on an old-fashioned, is made with bourbon (sweet), blood orange (also pretty sweet), and Meletti Amaro (cinnamony sweet, like a wad of Big Red gum). It was the color of fruit punch when it arrived at the table, which was a bad sign....

TALKING PICTURES GOODMAN THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The constancy of change underpins much of Foote’s work, which is now being celebrated at the Goodman Theatre with a festival of four of his plays. (Foote is also a screenwriter with credits that include To Kill a Mockingbird, and Tender Mercies.) The Trip to Bountiful—his 1953 teleplay, turned into a 1985 film starring Geraldine Page—opens on the Goodman’s main stage next month, in time for the playwright’s 92nd birthday....

A MIGHTY HEART sss Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Adapted from the memoir by Pearl’s widow, A Mighty Heart functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known. Mariane Pearl was pregnant when the couple flew to Karachi, Pakistan, in December 2001. As South Asia bureau chief for the Journal, Danny was following up on the arrest of would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and exploring a possible link between Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence....

Haunted Places Dream Reapers Haunted House A high-tech haunted house with 22 rooms and more than 40 actors. Through 10/31: Wed-Thu 7-10 PM, Fri-Sat 7-11 PM, Sun 7-10 PM, 1945 Cornell, Melrose Park, dreamreapers.com, $16, $30 VIP. The END? Evil Never Dies A haunted house hosted by the Lombard Jaycees. A free matinee for kids with games, prizes, and candy is Sat 10/30 from noon to 4 PM. Through 10/31: Wed-Thu 7:30-10:30 PM, Fri-Sat 7:30-11:30 PM, Sun 7:30-10:30 PM, 10/31 7:30-11:30 PM, 141 S....

In his previous crusade, north-side activist Tom Tresser went up against the political, cultural, media, and civic elite of Chicago as he fought against bringing the 2016 Olympic games to town. For an encore, Tresser is trying to get city officials to tell the truth about how they spend your property taxes. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He is, of course, talking about the city’s tax increment financing scam....

Leor Galil Chrissy Murderbot is not an international rapper. South by Southwest is a festival that has international pull, but the coverage tends to skew toward English-language acts, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. There are the marquee names dropping by the fest in order to stay in the picture (Justin Timberlake, anyone?) during a time that’s meant to spotlight up-and-coming musicians, and even the groups filling the role of “buzz band to watch” tend to be acts that have been getting attention prior to SXSW....

It’s hard to find the good news in David Orr’s TIF report for 2007, which the independent-minded Cook County clerk released last week. The bad news begins with the bottom line: the city’s tax increment financing districts sucked up $555 million in property taxes last year, up 11 percent from the $500 million they took in 2006. All in all TIFs have pocketed well over $1 billion in the last two years, diverting money from schools, parks, police, and your wallet....

The television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is the chronicle of a precocious young woman, a child of relative wealth and an aspiring writer, who along with three close friends explores the emotional contours of twentysomething life in Brooklyn, New York. It has been alternately lauded and mocked for its frank approach to gender, body type, and sex. Exploitation looked to be the show’s spirit at its premiere last August, but somewhere along the line that began to seem less of an inevitability....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Howard Wolinsky Howard Wolinsky is one of Chicago’s most experienced medical writers. He worked that beat for about 15 years at the Sun-Times, cowrote a muckraking book on the American Medical Association, and now teaches at Medill and freelances. After the Boston marathon bombing, Chicago Medicine, a monthly magazine published by the Chicago Medical Society, assigned Wolinsky and another writer to examine emergency preparedness in Chicago. Eric Beck, medical director of the city’s emergency medical services system, suggested some doctors he ought to talk to....

Nate Harrison’s “Can I Get an Amen?” has been around for a little while, but I just ran across it again the other day and it’s still fascinating. It’s supposed to be part of an art installation that “attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free,’” but it’s actually better on its own as a documentary. Its subject is a short drum break in an otherwise obscure 60s funk track by the Winstons called “Amen, Brother” that has been sampled hundreds of times....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In late March a young Toronto trio called BadBadNotGood stirred up some jazz-world Internet controversy thanks to a Now Toronto feature filled with the sort of button-pushing comments that are wholly to be expected from kids in their late teens. Peter Hum of the Ottawa Citizen was the first to dig into the story and reply in detail, and in no time it blew up....

Walk into Herman Roberts’s south-side home, built for his mother in 1965, and the first thing you see are the photographs lining the walls of his living room. He has dozens if not hundreds, including pictures of musicians James Brown, Sarah Vaughan, Jackie Wilson, Dinah Washington, Bill Doggett, and Billy Eckstine; athletes Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; political and civil-rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Harold Washington, and Jimmy Carter; comedians Dick Gregory, Slappy White, Nipsey Russell, and Stepin Fetchit; and author James Baldwin....

Fri 10/11: Sarah Jarosz at Old Town School of Folk Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sarah Jarosz, a 22-year-old bluegrass and folk singer and mandolinist, is playing an all-ages show at the Old Town School. “Some of Jarosz’s lyrics have a cosmic streak, but her dynamic arrangements and adaptations of traditional forms keep the music grounded—whether it’s the rippling mountain soul and message of self-empowerment in ‘Fuel the Fire’ or the acid twang of Dan Dugmore’s electric guitar puncturing the ambling folk of the romantic reverie ‘Mile on the Moon,’” writes Peter Margasak....

I’m not sure what felt stranger—sitting in a bar at 9 AM or sitting in a bar with no cigarette smoke. Or maybe it was that I was sitting in a smoke-free Chicago bar at 9 AM to watch soccer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soccer is one thing, but who am I to argue with the appeal of catching a little beer buzz in the morning?...

Peter Shaffer’s 1973 psychological drama examines Alan Strang, a tortured teenager whose erotic, quasi-religious fascination with horses ends in violence. Currently enjoying a successful West End revival starring Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe (whose nude scenes have caused a lucrative stir), the play is long and overblown but can exert an eerie power in the right production. In Joe Stead’s simple, reverent staging for the Actors Workshop Theatre, performed in a tiny space, the cast works wonders....

Over the next two days, a glance out your window or one lonely ride on the el may make it seem like the entire city has shut down to celebrate the mythical duo of baby Jesus and Saint Nick. Well, it’s just not true. Whether you’re trying to avoid Christmas cheer, need somewhere to drag your family, or simply want to have a meal, there are plenty of ways to avoid cabin fever during the midweek holiday break....