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Over the past few years, Chicago hip-hop duo Mother Nature have become so thoroughly embedded in several overlapping scenes that it could feel like they were always playing a show. And when the weather heated up, they sometimes got gigs bigger than any one scene: Subterranean booked them for Wicker Park Fest twice in a row, they won a spot on North Coast Music Festival’s 2018 lineup, and last year they played an unofficial Pitchfork afterparty organized by multimedia outlet AMFM....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Biiri by Nihiloxica Music in South Shore There’s great energy in South Shore right now musically, between weekly shows at the Quarry on 75th, the Universal Alley Jazz Jams off 71st (summer months only, unfortunately), and community-level initiatives—this summer I got to see Dee Alexander at one block party and a fantastic youth band, Urban Aspirations, at another....

Inclusion of full and frequent nudity is so vital to the gay throuple drama Afterglow that, according to playwright S. Asher Gelman, a production’s failure to include it “will result in legal action.” In the case of Pride Films & Plays’s current staging, Gelman should feel comfortable putting that cease and desist letter back in his drawer. Be it silently bathing in the background, laying on a massage table, or sitting around a bed postcoital, director David Zak’s handsome cast spends almost as much time onstage stripped down to their skivvies as not....

Q: I’ve been in a relationship with a wonderful guy for the past year. The only problem is that he works with a girl he used to fuck. It wasn’t just sex—they would go on dates and even went on vacation together. He kept this little “detail” to himself for six full months before giving himself away by mistake. He then apologized, said he hadn’t told me so that I wouldn’t worry for no reason, and that he no longer has any feelings for her whatsoever....

The third installment of this annual event organized by saxophonist Dave Rempis, also the longtime programmer of the Thursday-evening improvised-music series at Elastic, shifts gears from its predecessors. In the first two iterations, a single musician (reedists Tony Malaby and Silke Eberhard, respectively) visited the city to engage in workshops and performances with local players. This year Rempis has invited six stylistically diverse musicians from the east coast and midwest, some of whom he worked with on his 2017 Lattice solo project, to participate in ad hoc groupings and workshops with Chicago players....

A lottery for those who want to live in the newly revamped Lathrop on the north side is now open for nearly 100 affordable housing units set to be unveiled starting this summer. Affordable housing units are intended for those making 80 percent of area median income or less. But there is also a floor to how little households can make to qualify. The federal government judges housing to be affordable if paying for it does not claim more than 30 percent of a family’s income....

Q: Perhaps you’re not the best person to ask, being a cis white man, but as a queer woman of color, the election had an extremely detrimental effect on my relationships with my white partners. I love and care for them, but looking at those results has me wondering why the fuck they didn’t do better in reaching out to their shitty relatives. I’m sick of living at the whim of white America....

Sarom Sieng did not want her daughter trapped in the church kitchen, cooking curry and egg rolls her whole life. That’s where they’ve launched Mona Bella Catering, a union of the Khmer cooking skills that the mother brought from Cambodia and the technical skills the daughter brought from the trenches of a major catering operation. Sieng made money sewing hospital gowns but eventually started cooking meals for other Cambodian families, and then later for baptisms, weddings, and other church events....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. The “round house,” as Frank calls it, was designed for the family by avant-garde architect Bruce Alonzo Goff and completed in 1955. “The Garvey house was a surreal oasis,” Frank recalls. “It was an incredible psychedelic environment....

Q: I’m a female in my late 20s. I broke up with a toxic ex about a year ago and I’ve been walking around (my house!) thinking I was over it. I never missed him and rarely thought about him. A brief backstory: In the final months of us living together, we started having more discussions about children and making a lifelong commitment. He told me he wanted both, yet at this exact time his moderate depression became more severe and he refused to get help....

June 14 marks a turning point in the history of Chicago’s LGBTQ rights movement—one worth remembering in the wake of Sunday’s mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in American history. According to historian John D’Emilio’s account of the protest, demonstrators carried signs that read “Anita is McCarthy in drag,”—a reference to Communist scaremonger Joseph McCarthy—and “God drinks wine, not orange juice.” Progress always provokes backlash....

Living out and proud in a coastal queer mecca full of historic gayborhoods, vocally supportive senators, and Hamburger Mary’s locations is one thing; learning to love yourself in rural America can be another. For writer and performer Scott Bradley, embracing himself and his upbringing after returning as an adult to his roots in Iowa (he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) meant reckoning with the ghosts and self-doubts from which he thought he’d long escaped....

Ten years ago a friend came down with cholera after eating a malevolent oyster at Katsu. It happens. Despite this unfortunate event, the unassuming sushi bar on an unfashionable far-north-side street—which closes it doors at the end of the month after nearly 30 years in the business—remained in regular rotation among my pal’s favorite restaurants. That’s because Katsu was the best in the city—and I’ll fight anyone who says any different....

The summer after high school, I delivered bagels in the mornings, leaving the south side for work at 4:30 AM, when the entire city remained idled in sleep. Except maybe for Santiago, who’d been boiling and baking the bagels since midnight. The Bagel Nosh was on the Rush Street of 1989, not the red-light district that predated me but also far from the Rush Street of Barneys and Madewell today. I’d pull into the dark alley behind the delicatessen and flicker the headlights for several minutes, alerting dozens of potbellied rats that it was time for them to leap from the Dumpsters and disappear....

A chance meeting at the corner of Clark and Winnemac. A one-woman show at iO Theater. A viral short film filled with local improvisers. In an alchemic combination, these quintessential Chicago events catapulted prolific Chicago comedian Abby McEnany into the national spotlight. Among subplots addressing mental illness, suicidal ideation, and sizeism head-on, moments of hilarity emerge, from a therapist dying midsession to a bitchy coworker buying Abby a large, plot-critical tub of almonds....

Peter Holderness / Sun-Times Alderman Danny Solis (above) says Governor Bruce Rauner is pretty friendly for a “conservative, right-wing Republican.” Governor Bruce Rauner scheduled time to meet with Chicago alderman Danny Solis on Friday, January 23, just a week and a half after he was inaugurated. When Rauner asked Solis for his input, the alderman says he advised him not to attack President Obama’s immigration reforms, as other GOP governors have done....

1. Cabaret is a landmark. When it opened in 1967 it was arguably the first Broadway hit to deal with subject matter that had been repressed, or at least buried, by the trauma of World War II and the Holocaust. The show needs the chaotic, sexy, self-destructive Sally Bowles. She is Cabaret‘s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or rather, its Manic Pixie Nightmare Girlfriend. Without her the narrator-protagonist would be just a depressed and depressing cipher sitting alone in his room, typing out a novel no one will ever read....

When I learned The L Word was set for a reboot, unlike many queer folks, I felt nothing. Hear me out: the first season is not well developed–even the biggest of The L Word stans couldn’t and still can’t make it through season one. There were not enough storylines engaging Black queer experiences, and in my teen years I happened to find queer community on Tumblr and representation on YouTube shows like Studville that provided me more onscreen examples of same-gender loving folks....

There’s a remarkably blasé editorial in Tuesday’s Tribune on the latest Hillary Clinton e-mail furor. Faced with some 650,000 e-mails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop, some of them supposedly relevant to the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail that he’d called off months ago, FBI director James Comey was “caught in a vise,” says the Tribune. The Trib editorial notes that “some observers” say there’s an “unwritten pact” requiring the feds to keep their mouths shut about investigations involving office seekers 60 days before their elections....

The last fun party I went to was Dumpling Wars 2020 in late February at Marz Community Brewing. I was a judge for the contest, which was jam-packed with people inhaling momos, mandu, khinkali, and soup dumplings. There was a popular vote on the 20 contestants, and the judges picked their own favorite. After minimal debate we decided that best in show was a black-squid-ink empanadilla stuffed with wild boar chorizo, perched in the bowl of a spoon atop a crumble of cured egg yolk with salsa brava and manchego aioli....