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Hundreds of the city’s restaurants and bars offer outdoor dining while they can. Here we’ve selected some of the notable spots among them; for more alfresco drinking and dining, see our bar guide. Birchwood Kitchen | Wicker Park | $ There’s not a cheap shortcut to be found at this ambitious sandwich shop: here the words local and sustainable have real meaning. The brunch menu has items such as croque madame and Belgian waffles, and burger nights are offered out back from Tuesday through Friday....

Recently I had a chance to watch the 1939 MGM tearjerker Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with Robert Donat aging 60 years as a shy, gentle teacher at an English boarding school. The movie was beloved in its day—Donat won an Oscar for his performance—and it still seems to crystallize the feelings many have for their old teachers. Mr. Chipping is too humble and selfless to advance in his profession, and his wife dies in childbirth, leaving him alone....

thursday10 Thursday10 Bobby Conn Jessica Lea Mayfield Friday11 The Church The Eternals Gang of Four Saturday12 Frank FairfieldInterpolCedric Wilson sunday13 Frank Fairfield Jeannie Holliday Pacifica Quartet monday14 Trey Songz Robyn tuesday15 Deerhoof Wednesday16 Max Bemis THE CHURCH You could say that this Australian quartet, formed in 1980, took a long time to hit their stride—or you could say that they’ve hit plenty of strides over the years, and probably aren’t done evolving yet....

Tonight a portion of your tab at a whole bunch of Chicago restaurants goes toward the HIV/AIDS support organization Dining Out For Life. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friday night at 7:30 Ghetto Gourmet hosts another secret dinner “in a very very special place near Southside.” The menu includes “Forbidden Empanadas: ground pork, granny smith apples, and dried cherries w/ truffled onion jelly,” “roasted chicken, rice, and cassava w/ chipotle peanut marinade, wrapped in banana leaf,” and more....

Here’s how one veteran police officer—a longtime watch commander—is preparing for potential NATO and G8 protesters: The activist group Adbusters has called for 50,000 people to hit the Chicago streets, while the online hacker group Anonymous recently said it hopes to demonstrate in Chicago for the entire month of May. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City officials have mostly been mum about their preparations, except to stress in background briefings that they’ll be ready....

The Buddha’s birthday is celebrated on the eighth day of the fourth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. Or sometimes on the 15th day. Or on the second Sunday in May. Or on April 8. It all varies by country. So maybe Truc Lam Buddhist Temple is hedging its bets by keeping the “Happy Birthday Buddha” sign up year-round. Or if you believe Nathan Buone, one of the children who was hanging out at the temple last week and serving as an unofficial tour guide, the temple administrators put the banner up and just forgot to take it down....

It’s been nearly a month since I stumbled upon a lovely and lackadaisical jam from Boston bedroom-pop musician Emily Reo called “Happy Birthday” and I’m still stuck on it all these weeks later. Reo carefully layers her winsome and wistful voice atop a washed-out piano melody, a simple drum pattern that drags ever so slightly, and what sounds like a delicately plucked banjo, and the results are mesmerizing; Reo’s multitracked vocals gives her singing a strange robotic quality that comes across as alien at certain points, but she delivers her lines with so much heart you can practically feel her pulse....

QI’m a 24-year-old woman who just ended a five-year relationship. It sucked. I cried. It was my first breakup, so I’ve felt totally insane for the last three months. Now I’m in the dating world, and I go out with people only to find that we have no physical chemistry. My mother says, “You’re just picky.” How am I supposed to enter my slutty years if I rarely have a physical connection with someone?...

When Beast On the Moon premiered in 1995, the word “jihad” was not entrenched in the vocabulary of most Americans, “ethnic cleansing” was a likewise unfamiliar concept, and “holocaust” usually referred to the Nazi scourge. But the genocidal atrocity invoked by playwright Richard Kalinoski is the wholesale slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks back in 1915. His play recounts the struggle of two orphaned survivors to find peace, if not happiness, amid the shards of childhoods shattered by violence and the indelible memories of their murdered families....

Imagine a version of ice hockey where the players wear regular shoes instead of skates. You’ll need to picture a dozen people running around on an ice rink, trying to hit a ball the size of a softball (16-inch, of course) with sticks that sort of resemble brooms without the bristles—and occasionally falling flat as their feet go out from under them. I’ve never been able to muster much enthusiasm for watching sports, but the fact that once broomball players get some momentum it’s impossible for them to change direction makes for pretty entertaining viewing....

SPORTS & RECREATION Readers’ Choice: Cubs Best High School Team Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For entertainment value and sheer competition at the high school level, there’s no beating Public League hoops. At that point the debate begins; it’s why they play the games, after all. The city championship remains a highly coveted title, even though it no longer produces an instant slot in the Elite Eight of the state tournament....

The Reader’s Choice: Eye Spy Optical Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glasses can be expensive, even before you get to the bits that help you see, and Eye Spy isn’t the first shop to try if you’re looking for a deal. But we’re talking about something that you might be wearing on your face 18 hours a day, and if you want a statement of personal style and not simply a medical device, you’re in the right place....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was going through my MySpace friend requests today, and after clearing out the dozens of hot chicks asking me to check out their webcams I came across this nasty little treat: a mysterious black metal band from Ohio by the not-really-metal-on-first-glance-but-if-you-think-about-it-it’s-actually-pretty-metal name of Boot. (Or BOOT, as they—or possibly just he—prefer to style it.) There’s been a running trend in black metal recently of recording as lo-fi as possible without producing a tape full of static—like early Sebadoh, if you replace passive-aggressiveness with flat-out bloodlust—and the two cuts on Boot’s MySpace sound like they were recorded on a four-track with distortion on everything....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Luna’s mother, Gloria Barrios, a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak English, journeyed from her home in Chicago to Texas last week, hoping that the air force, which says an investigation is ongoing, might finally be able to give her some answers. Barrios was accompanied by two people she’d brought along to translate for her. One of them, Ann Wright, a 29-year veteran of the army and reserves who’s written on violence against women in the military, told Lydersen in July that the military is failing to adequately investigate the deaths of a number of servicewomen despite having reason to suspect they were raped and murdered....

I have a friend who nearly planted his face in a pile of corned beef hash during a late dinner at Stephanie Izard’s Little Goat. For him, the restorative powers of this and other greasy-good, massively portioned, amplified American diner classics (and mutant innovations) came several bourbons too late, and his wingwoman quickly ushered him out the door before he nodded into the crab dip. This left the rest of us with a daunting task....

Big things happening under this sign When DryHop brewpub threw a preopening party on Saturday, June 8, it sold 300 growler fills and 300 tasting flights to an estimated 400 guests in just two hours. When I visited on Saturday, June 15, two days after DryHop formally opened, I showed up around 3 PM, hoping to squeak in between the lunch and dinner crowds—but there was no “between.” The 3,000-square-foot space at 3155 N....

AP Photo/Darron Cummings Guan Tianlang, 14, of China, acknowledges the cheers after sinking a birdie putt on the 18th green at the Masters. To his left is a playing partner today, 61-year-old Ben Crenshaw. Guan Tianlang, 14 and-a-half, birdied the 18th hole this afternoon to finish with a one-over-par 73 in the first round of the Masters at Augusta National. He’s seven shots off the lead and three behind Tiger Woods, but he’s in position to make tomorrow’s cut....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raghavan Iyer, author of the cookbook 660 Curries, presents Curried Culinary History, covering 6,000 years of spices in India, Saturday at 10 at the Chicago History Museum. There will also be a sampling of several of Iyer’s curries ($5; 708-788-0338 or rsvpchc@yahoo.com). Afterward he’ll be at Marigold for a 12:30 PM book signing and four-course lunch with wine pairings; among the dishes are kadhai paneer with spring vegetables and lamb in a Kashmiri curry ($65)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » John Boctor, a Coptic Orthodox Christian, was living in Eygpt when his friend and boss, also a Coptic Christian, married a Muslim woman, who then converted to Christianity. The couple was threatened by Muslim fundamentalists, for whom such a conversion is a capital crime, and when the police offered no help they went into hiding. Boctor then “began receiving telephone threats from people who demanded to know [his friends’] whereabouts and threatened to cut his throat if he did not tell them…....

This group’s new Live in Montreal, recorded in 2005, captures the first time its members–flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Harrison Bankhead, and drummer Hamid Drake–performed as a trio. That’s astonishing, not just because they’ve collaborated so often in other groupings over the decades, but because on the CD they sound like they’ve spent years absorbing the material (four collective improvisations and two Mitchell originals), hovering together in that sweet spot between detailed lyricism and airy spontaneity....