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TEATIME AT GOLGOTHA PROP THTR WHERE Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston But unlike the plays in the Rhino fest, which are often never seen again, the works in the New Play festival sometimes move on to productions in other cities. Now in its tenth year, Prop’s fest is tied in to the National New Play Network, which feeds scripts to its 20 member theaters around the country. And both full productions this year–Mark Chrisler’s intelligent, thrilling Teatime at Golgotha and Kestutis Nakas’s Railroad Backward–are rewarding, bringing history, myth, and hallucination into fruitful collision....

I woke up one day last week and saw what looked to be a miracle on the front page of the business section in my Chicago Tribune, home-delivered as always. Call me jaded. Call me a skeptic. Call me Ben if you insist. But I could not believe that anyone—much less a big corporate operation—would give up so much money unless they had a metaphorical gun to their head. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Since adding the infectious chart-topper “I Just Want Some Skank” to the Reader‘s interactive jukebox a couple of weeks back, I’ve been working through the Circle Jerks’ inimitable catalog of 80s SoCal hardcore punk. And while record shopping in Madison last week, I was lucky enough to come across a vinyl copy of Wonderful, the band’s fourth studio album, and one maybe not held in the same regard as punk staples like Group Sex and Wild in the Streets (though it more than deserves to be)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nah Right just posted the cover art for the first three books to be released under 50 Cent’s new G-Unit Books imprint. Word about his unlikely publishing venture with MTV/Pocket Books came last year (extremely bad pun alert) following their success with his autobiography, From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens. I can’t find anything solid on how much involvement the New York Times bestselling author has had in writing the books, but from the covers it appears that he’s being listed as co-author on all three....

Two and a half years ago I gave birth to our twins and that changed everything. Brian is now a stay-at-home dad, which is hard, rewarding work. I’m the main breadwinner in the family, which is hard, rewarding work. We don’t have the energy to hang out and spend hours cooking one meal, and we try to eat together as a family, which means dinner early. But it was my birthday recently, and when I got home from work the kids were dressed up—it’s more usual to find Annabelle dressed in a striking layered ensemble of her own choosing and Oliver sporting his preference of a diaper and T-shirt....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I consider this act unfathomable — a tragic misjudgment by two people, Draper and Petty, whom I respect. I suppose they have a vision of tomorrow’s Reader they think True is wrong for. Change is in the air — design consultant Ron Reason has just finished helping Creative Loafing’s Atlanta paper overhaul itself, and he’s due in Chicago in a few weeks to add his two cents here....

My girlfriend and I live in an apartment that doesn’t allow pets, a sad fact that actively works against our strong desire to adopt a dog. Luckily there’s the dog run at Wicker Park, which is frequented by friendly canines and their equally friendly (and, more importantly, sympathetic) owners, who don’t seem to mind the strange people in the corner goofing around with dogs that aren’t theirs. We first encountered the place a couple years ago while spending an afternoon with some friends, another couple who had just adopted an energetic shepherd mix that went by the unfortunate name of Scooby....

Michael Gebert Kevin Hickey at the Duck Inn in Bridgeport The Duck Inn, a tavern and restaurant in Bridgeport that opened last week, is the latest place from Rockit Ranch, the restaurant and bar group led by TV personality and symbol-of-the-party-lifestyle Billy Dec. The Duck Inn is also the culmination of some lifelong dreams and ambitions for chef Kevin Hickey: owning a restaurant on the very street where he grew up in Bridgeport, named for a place his great-grandmother owned during the Depression, that’s rooted in his family’s history in one of Chicago’s most insular enclaves, the ancient power base of our Irish rulers....

You don’t have to leave home to discover new things. The Joffrey Ballet, for instance, reveals a whole new side of itself when it takes to the streets in Alexander Ekman’s Episode 31, a company premiere at this year’s Chicago Dancing Festival. Created in 2011 for Juilliard students, Episode 31 opens with a video of flash mob-like Joffrey dancers overrunning the el and the pavement. The piece itself exudes tribal energy—think hip-hop and Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring—as 17 dancers break into stamps, spasmodic twitching, all sorts of tipping and tossing, and yelling....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A Storm of Light have a band name that sounds like the title of a Neurosis album, which is fitting considering that the guy at the center of the group, Josh Graham, used to do Neurosis’s visuals and was until recently in Red Sparowes, who started out on Neurot Recordings. This project takes Neurosis-derived atmospheric metal, slows it down to sub-doom tempos, and adds some proggy space-outs....

Growing up in a large Italian family it felt like food was the center of everything, not to mention a cure all. Feeling a cold coming on? Have some gravy and meatballs. Someone in the family got engaged? Start filling the cannoli. Have a bad scar that just won’t seem to fade? Some salami will do the trick. Freddy’s Pizzeria in Cicero is no exception to the classic Italian mentality that food, where more is always better, can instantly cure all and satisfy everyone’s appetite....

A friend of mine has a treasured box of recipes handwritten on index cards by her great-aunt Della. I’ve sat in her kitchen while she juiced lemons for Della’s lemon chess pie and whipped egg whites for Della’s meringue. If there were a fire, she sometimes says, it would be the first thing she’d save (besides the cats). Which is all well and good for housewives 150 years ago, but doesn’t help me much....

A light heart characterizes all four works on the Joffrey Ballet’s “American Legends” program. The teasing Son of Chamber Symphony (2012), for instance, is part of what choreographer Stanton Welch calls his “funky classical” canon. A Chicago premiere, commissioned by the Joffrey and named for the John Adams music to which it’s set, Son pays homage to classical ballet by flashing iconic gestures and phrases, then transforming them—respectfully, Welch says, though he takes a radical approach to the tutu, showing the “ladies’ legs all the way to the hip....

Mark Steuer, chef of the yet-to-open restaurant the Bedford, challenged Stephanie Izard of Girl & the Goat to come up with a recipe using confectioners’ sugar for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She’d been craving red meat, so she picked up “a couple of big-ass steaks” at the butcher across the street and made a rub for them using confectioners’ sugar and spices....

If you haven’t paid attention to the many, many records put out by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and (to a lesser extent) Ray Price over the past decade, this show might seem like one of those propped-up oldies extravaganzas you get at Star Plaza, where nostalgic fans gather to watch a group long past its prime dutifully revive its back catalog. These three stars might be playing to the old-timers with their new collaboration, Last of the Breed (Lost Highway), but it’s terrific listening to them rip through the country songbook all the same....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Gebert: Your books come up so often when I talk with chefs about how they got into the business of making food—if you’re a chef in your 30s, then The French Laundry Cookbook, which you wrote with Thomas Keller in 1999, probably hit you at a pretty pivotal moment in your development. And I feel like you helped make the broader audience receptive to thinking about how chefs think about things....

I ‘ve been looking over the list of plays presented by Goodman Theatre’s New Stages initiative since its inception ten years ago. Pretty impressive. The roughly annual festival offers staged readings and—since 2011—workshop productions of new work by interesting playwrights, and some of the free performances have that retrospective shoulda-been-there mystique theatergoers both love and dread. Just for example: the 2005 New Stages featured an early look at Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated first third of a trilogy by Quiara Alegría Hudes (who went on to win a Pulitzer for the next third, Water by the Spoonful); 2006 saw The Brothers Size from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s great “The Brother/Sister Plays“; and the 2007 edition gave us Lynn Nottage’s devastating (and, yes, Pulitzer-winning) Ruined....

When I was ten years old I was already smoking marijuana and cigarettes. Age 15, I was introduced to syrup, which was codeine, and I was snorting brown dope—we called it Mexican Mud. Then freebasing cocaine. Junior year [at Lindblom Math & Science Academy] I got pregnant. I went to school for one semester my senior year before I dropped out. When I got pregnant, I didn’t use anything. I stopped smoking everything and had my son....

I didn’t think I’d need to hang a press badge around my neck last week when I headed to a faculty senate meeting at Northeastern Illinois University, about a proposed policy that would restrict free speech on campus. I just threw a pen and notebook in a bag and caught a ride to the northwest-side campus, where I’d been a student myself back in the late 1960s—when free speech was erupting all over and federal agents were infiltrating student clubs....

In the Neighborhood Mohammad Islam and Malika Ameen, the married couple in the kitchen at Aigre Doux, have celebrity chef pedigrees (the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Jean Georges, Balthazar, Craft), and the promise of their restaurant earned it blurbs in glossy magazines months before it opened. Given the boldface print, it’s gratifying and somewhat surprising to discover that the food isn’t crying for attention: it’s simple, elegant, and good, full stop....