Laugh, cry, and open your ears to this week’s best events. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 10/4: Irish comic Dylan Moran can sometimes come off as smug, but that’s just the demeanor he adopts when letting the audience in on a secret. Hear his thoughts on Trump and long-term relationships during his only Chicago stop at the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport). 8 PM, $43.55

International Mr. Leather (IML) invades Chicago this week, and while those in the Leather community are very familiar with this premier competition and conference, the uninitiated visitor might be pleasantly startled by the weekend’s conflux of well-built people in extravagant leather garments tooling around town. The band Judas Priest is also scheduled to play the Rosemont Theater on Saturday night, which is not part of the conference but could always result in some other leather-wearing visitors to Chicagoland....

The FX drama The Americans is a TV show about a couple of Soviet spies posing as American parents in the 1980s, the decade when my own family—newly arrived from the USSR—were doing what we could to become more or less what the protagonists are pretending to be. For me, watching it has always been a conundrum. On one hand, the period detail, actual Russian speech, and intriguing plot twists are entertaining; on the other, the depiction of the Russian characters and the dialogue the screenwriters have written for them are completely off....

This weekend, October 15 and 16, is one of the best of the entire Chicago year. That’s because it’s Open House Chicago, when hundreds of buildings in and around the city open their doors so that mere mortals like you can explore! I’ve already publicly declared my love for this wonderful annual event. Now here’s a list, arranged roughly from north to south, of some of the more interesting-looking of this year’s offerings....

Chicago Opera Theater Mary Ann Stewart and Ed Parks starting something they’ll regret in Thérèse Raquin It seemed like things were bleak enough in this Siberian deep freeze before Chicago Opera Theater brought composer Tobias Picker’s version of Thérèse Raquin to town. Given that, the cast does what it can. Tenor Matthew DiBattista, as Thérèse’s cuckolded husband, Camille, and baritone Ed Parks as his predatory friend, Laurent, deliver solid vocal performances; statuesque Mary Ann Stewart, in the title role, is more effective as actor than singer: her unremarkable soprano turns harsh on the high notes....

Tom Cruze/Sun-Times Media Now former Chicago State University president Wayne Watson Yesterday, upon the stair,I met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today,I wish, I wish he’d go away . . . Fifteen months ago, professor Phillip Beverly received a “cease and desist” letter from CSU. Beverly is chairman of the faculty senate; but he was written by general counsel Patrick Cage in his capacity of publisher of a blog, CSU Faculty Voice, that was highly unfriendly to Watson....

Alex Wild Still frightening after all these years Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That the news editor of Al Jazeera English has urged employees to continue leaking e-mails? —J.R. Jones • That you can earn $13,000 a year by selling your poop? —Aimee Levitt

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Jonathan Franzen on how climate change has affected conservation? —Tal Rosenberg • These notes toward improving the home video viewing experience? —Drew Hunt

We’re coming up on the Winter Solstice (the Farmer’s Almanac tells me that it’s at exactly 4:02 AM on Monday, December 21) so I hope all of you have been like the good little squirrels of the forest and depositing your acorns at the First Nutional Bank to get ready for hibernating in your treehouse this season. Things to read, listen to, or try out this weekend:

Few rappers sound as comfortable with introspection as Houston’s Emekwanem Ogugua Biosah Jr., aka Maxo Kream. Even the title of his recent second album, Brandon Banks (RCA/Big Persona/88 Classic), references his troubled past: his father, Emekwanem Ogugua Biosah Sr., ran scams under that name and spent much of Maxo’s childhood serving time on fraud charges. On “Bissonnet,” the 29-year-old rapper focuses on the effects this had on his adolescence, squeezing enough emotions to fill several chapters of a memoir into a couple of lucid, unflinching lines: “Police kickin’ in my door, threw my momma on the floor / HPD took my pops, I bought a heat, hit the block....

There’s an elevated floor behind the bar at Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio, the new pasta-forward restaurant from former Spiaggia executive chef Sarah Grueneberg, that looks bigger than the restaurant’s actual kitchen. While it plays host to a remarkable piece of stagecraft, it’s also integral to the food being served there. Grueneberg’s more traditional pastas include a wonderfully snappy pappardelle tossed in a duck ragu surprisingly busy with olives and parsnips. The star of the classic tortellini en brodo, meanwhile, is the brodo itself, in which bob mortadella-stuffed nuggets....

American Blues Theater’s Chicago premiere of ensemble member Rick Cleveland’s 2015 play, about the April 27, 1994, meeting of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton at former president Richard Nixon’s funeral—the first time in history five U.S. presidents had met together at a public event—would make a great field trip for a high school class in American history. The play packs five great character studies into one itty-bitty (90-minute) show and is full of fun facts that might give you an edge on an AP exam: for example, the nugget that Gerald Ford, best known for his 1974 pardoning of Nixon, kept a quotation from a 1915 U....

And just like that, Frankie Cosmos—otherwise known as Greta Kline, and otherwise tied to an obligatory footnote, given that her parents are Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—released her third studio full-length in four years. Though the brand-new Vessel is the biggest record to date for the 24-year-old lo-fi indie darling, featuring an even fuller band sound than 2016’s Next Thing—as well as a proper knighting from Sub Pop—Kline continues to write the same flickering, aching pop songs that regularly come in under two minutes in length....

When Ussanee “Au” Sanmueangchin moved to Berwyn nine years ago to study English, she missed the taste of sticky rice and black beans in sweet coconut milk. She grew up eating this dessert in Bangkok, but in Chicago khao niao thua dam was nowhere to be found. She asked her mother for help, and found some recipes online, but it just wasn’t the same. De Pinha developed a number of now classic desserts based on Portuguese antecedents, such as khanom mo kaeng, an eggy coconut milk and wheat flour custard topped with crispy fried shallots; and foi thong: golden threads of yolk boiled in syrup, one of nine “auspicious” sweets served on special occasions....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Chicago police used a conference room in the Trump hotel during the Women’s March The Trump International Hotel and Tower in River North provided the Chicago Police Department with a complimentary conference room for officers who patrolled the Women’s March Saturday, according to the Tribune. But there was no special message intended. The room was used for a police roll call because of its “central location,” according to CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, and it’s “fairly standard practice” for companies to donate space for police use during large events....

Michael Gebert Sushi takes the cake this year on Chicago‘s list. In a food-media world where 90 percent of what’s written are listicles and the remaining ten percent seems to be Dennis Lee making us sorry we asked, there’s one list that still has the solemnity of tradition to lend it a certain amount of gravitas. Of course I mean Eater’s “The 21 Hottest Burgers in Chicago 2015”! Alas, the article wasn’t quite what I expected (“With a surface temperature of ten million degrees and the gravitational pull of Saturn, Oxheart & Truncheon’s Plasma State burger is capable of reversing the flow of time and proving that P ≠ NP”)....

Rapper-producer Ill Legit belongs to a class of locals who are more seasoned than most rappers grabbing headlines and who are underground by choice. They’ve got an affection for samples that impart a sense of history into their music, and for retro sounds and beats that have the kind of heft weightlifters aspire to handle. Ill Legit’s latest project is a collaboration with Awdazcate, a linchpin of that same underground Chicago hip-hop circle....

Aleksandrabojar/Wikimedia Commons New sobriquet: “Arsenic and Old Lace” Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That if Bruce Rauner’s budget is approved we’re likely to see fare increases and longer wait times for CTA, Metra, and Pace? —Tal Rosenberg • That a band of intellectual vandals has spray-painted “Kant is a moron,” along with a flower and a heart, on the philosopher’s house in Kaliningrad, Russia?...

Keith Hale/Sun-Times Media Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About why journalists at online publications don’t unionize? —Tal Rosenberg

Let’s get right to the important stuff: the hot fashion tip from EXPO Chicago 2019, the big international modern and contemporary art fair underway this weekend at Navy Pier, is knee-highs. Acquiring the Souliers piece would set you back a cool $22,000. But ten bucks will get you another Edelman offering, a big, bright, tissue paper blossom pulled from Borderlines, a wall of blooms mounted by CASE Art Fund, a nonprofit founded by Edelman and Anette Skuggeda last year....