In 2013, self-described “doom funk” septet Gramps the Vamp won the Reader‘s Best of Chicago audience poll for Best New Band, and it looks like y’all were on the right track. Gossip Wolf has somehow missed them completely—until now! Their self-­titled 2014 debut album is full of spooky, sample-­laden, Afrobeat-­inflected grooves with a dark, cinematic vibe—they’d make a fine soundtrack for a scary sci-fi film full of nattily dressed actors fleeing for their lives....

In 1979, when Oak Park resident Kris Lenzo was a 19-year-old college sophomore, an accident at his summer job put him in the ICU for two weeks, sick with a high fever. Two weeks later, both of his legs had to be amputated. Since 2005, he’s been coaching at the Everybody Can Dance workshop in Oak Park, where both disabled and nondisabled participants collaborate to explore their bodies and movement....

Dances are made in time and space, a minute or an hour in a dancer’s life never to be seen again. Dances do not last—they have to be made new each time and evaporate as they are appearing. Today, small freedoms—moving, gathering, and connecting—have been restricted to limit the movement of a virus that, whether we want to admit it or not, is showing us just how connected we are. Katherine Disenhof...

On October 10, the day local hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive turned ten, it launched Fake Shore Dive (that’s right, “dive”), a pop-up bar in the same Wicker Park storefront previously home to Riot Fest’s temporary restaurant—and before that the Saved by the Bell diner, Saved by the Max. Fake Shore Dive stayed open for three nights, and in that time many big-name Chicago hip-hop players stopped in to thank the site for championing the local scene when few others paid it much attention—among them Chance the Rapper, Twista, and Bump J....

A global pandemic isn’t the best time to be hooking up with random strangers, so if you’re looking for some vicarious erotic thrills, Pride Films And Plays’s Five Encounters on a Site Called Craigslist will satisfy your desire. It will also make you consider how casual hookups impact your emotional well-being as playwright Sam Ward recounts his personal experiences with the now-shuttered personals section of Craigslist. As a bisexual twentysomething coming to terms with his sexuality, Ward learns a lot about himself through this mixed bag of flings, and his script makes audience members a part of the action with a heavy amount of interaction....

Marc Acito’s jumpy, effortful play is, charitably, children’s theater for adults, which makes sense, since it’s tangentially based on Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s picture book And Tango Makes Three. Its main characters are two anthropomorphized animal couples—Silo and Roy, the famous male penguins in Central Park Zoo that pair-bonded and parented, and Pale Male and Lola, the equally famous red-tailed hawks that nested atop Paula Zahn’s Manhattan co-op—but their problems (jealousy, infidelity, anticapitalist angst, internalized homophobia) are decidedly grown-up....

Gossip Wolf has never bought into the theory that punk gets better when it has a bigoted, incompetent Republican administration to rail against. (And Americans certainly didn’t consider that when they flushed the current one!) But in case you feel like cherry-picking supporting evidence, Chicago hardcore band Wrong War provided some on Election Day in the form of their anvil-heavy debut LP, Fixed Against Forever. The veteran crew—former Ottawa and Current singer Matt Weeks, guitarist Patrick Keenan, bassist Dave Pawlowski, and drummer Dan Smith—retch up a projectile of feral, rumbling riffs that delivers a hearty “fuck you” to the Trump era....

Q: My only child is 16 years old. He was curious about sex from a very young age and very open with me, so his interest in sexual matters gave me ample opportunity to talk with him about safety and consent. He went through a cross-dressing phase when he was small—mostly wanting to wear nail polish and try on mascara. I felt like I navigated those waters pretty well, but his father made attempts to squelch those impulses....

The moral implications of Drunk Shakespeare, in which a performer gets deliberately plastered before attempting a major role in Macbeth, may feel a bit troubling. But concerns about liver damage aside, the recently opened Chicago version of this show (created by Scott Griffin and director David Hudson) that’s now in its fifth year in New York brings together a murderers’ row of comedic talent to what is essentially Comedy Central’s Drunk History with a literary twist—served on the rocks, straight up, and with many disgusting variations in between....

If you spend many nights at Beauty Bar in West Town or East Room in Logan Square, you’ve probably seen or heard about Chris Mojekwu, aka Mojek. The producer spins at the occasional late-night party, and there’s rarely a week when you won’t see his name on a flyer hanging somewhere. The variety of events at which he’s appeared speaks to the breadth of Chicago’s intermingling scenes—and of Mojek’s artistic palette....

Update 9/23/2019: This show has been cancelled. Please contact the venue for information about pre-purchased tickets. Vocalist Frank Carter split with British hardcore outfit Gallows in 2011 over creative differences, and when he launched his band Pure Love that same year, it was obvious that he was less interested in punk and more into aggressive, melody-forward rock ’n’ roll. But with Carter’s current project, Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, launched in 2015, the lines between genres are much less clear....

Q: I’m a straight man who’s been dating a woman for not quite four months. In the beginning things were light. But things started to get heavy quickly. Two weeks in she revealed her very serious abandonment issues and then began asking me whether I really loved her and demanding reassurance that I wasn’t going anywhere and she wouldn’t be “just a single chapter” in my life. After a month, I met her seven-year-old son, her parents, and her ex....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, June 21, 2016. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia heading new Commission on Social Innovation Former mayoral candidate and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia has a new role: chairing the county board’s new Commission on Social Innovation. The new commission is hoping to enlist “businesses with a social purpose” to partner with government and nonprofit organizations to help residents in poverty. Some of the plans include redeveloping abandoned areas, tackling the problem of food deserts, and improving the Port of Chicago....

James Beard Foundation Donnie Madia accepting his Outstanding Restaurateur award from Lidia Bastianich We invited the food world (well, of America anyway) to honor our hot chefs and restaurants, and we wound up paying tribute to restaurant owners instead. But that’s not a bad thing. Last night’s James Beard Foundation Awards, held at Lyric Opera in the first installment of a three-year stop in Chicago, reminded us that just as we often overlook the producers of movies in favor of the directors, our restaurant scene is at least as much the work of entrepreneurs seeking to fill (or create) a market niche, as it is the work of chefs seeking to put their vision on the plate....

Brian Kersey/Getty Images Mark Kirk is having a Don Imus moment. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About the Louisiana inmate who is waiting to see if he’ll be freed after 43 years in solitary confinement? —Mick Dumke • And these responses from female scientists to Tim Hunt’s sexist comments? —Sue Kwong

Oopey Mason Photography The gang was still bright eyed and bushy tailed at hour ten. It’s safe to say that when I agreed to sit in the iO Theater for 12 straight hours for this past Saturday’s Hijinks Fest I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Heck, the performers couldn’t even predict what was going to happen since they’d never done anything like it before. But somehow, there we were, all standing and laughing and reeking ever so slightly of cheap beer on a Sunday morning....

Eagles of Death Metal, Thelma and the Sleaze at Metro, May 25, 2016

Obtaining medical marijuana in Illinois has been anything but easy in the two and a half years since the Medical Cannabis Pilot Program was put in place. But a bill that would expand the program and address many of its current shortcomings is making its way to Governor Bruce Rauner, who has indicated that he intends to sign it. The most surprising change affects the way patients get prescriptions. Physicians are no longer required to recommend medical marijuana for patients with qualifying conditions—something, as the Reader reported back in April, that 82 percent of doctors in Illinois have been unwilling to do....

As 2015 came to a close, prolific local MC Chris Crack dropped Jacked Tape Too: Jimi Hendrix of Rap as part of his freestyle mixtape series. It includes “Bamboo in the Treehouse,” which lifts its sloshed-sounding soul instrumental from “Lumber in the Condo” on Vic Spencer‘s great 2015 album The Cost of Victory. Before launching into his freestyle, Crack makes a few passing shout-outs, including one to Spencer: “Vic, what up....

When I saw the press release from the Chicago Teachers Union announcing that city treasurer Kurt Summer had endorsed their litigation against big banks and interest-rate swaps, I thought it was a joke. But this is no joke. “To be honest, there are some folks on my team who were worried by the optics of this,” says Summers. “My perspective is consistent. The issue is fiduciary. It’s important to the well being of the city....