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It’s pretty hard to impress a cat. They are notoriously apathetic and play by their own rules. Only something as complex as a laser or as simple as a can of tuna will keep their attention, and even that is fleeting. So what happens when a group of stand-ups try to perform comedy to a room full of cats? The monthly comedy show “Just Kitten Around” at Windy Kitty Cat Cafe in Bucktown is technically geared toward humans—guests have 30 minutes to play with the cats before the stand-up begins....

After Cook County Jail emerged as an epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis this month, with one inmate dead and more than 275 infected, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court seeking the immediate release of medically at-risk people. On April 9, a federal judge rejected the request for releasing prisoners but ordered Cook County sheriff Thomas Dart to improve sanitation and carry out new social distancing measures in the overcrowded facility....

Melis Sönmez is the founder and director of Bright Side, an online magazine dedicated to telling the stories of creative immigrants living in the United States. With her small team, composed of herself, a writing volunteer, a social media volunteer, and a design partner, she hopes to empower immigrants and educate American citizens about the obstacles that they must overcome to live in this country. She’s starting at the grassroots level with her newest project, titled “From Immigrants,” a series of cards featuring vibrant artwork and brief anecdotes from immigrants that Sönmez will leave in various public spaces across Chicago....

On February 20, Michael Dedmon opened Evanston’s newest music store, Black Squirrel Records. Dedmon is a dedicated record fiend who began buying up entire collections a decade ago, and so far all of Black Squirrel’s stock has come directly from his personal holdings. The store’s inventory includes rock, reggae, electronic music, jazz, soul, country, blues, and world music. Dedmon says a neighbor of his owns the 450-square-foot storefront at 1620 Greenleaf Street, and he’s wanted to open a record store there for a few years....

Fox gave Disney a run for its money when it released the 1997 animated feature film Anastasia, about an amnesiac orphan who might be the lost daughter of the last czar of Russia. With a winning formula of cute animal sidekicks, catchy musical numbers, and a quest for identity, Anastasia tapped into every girl’s presumed desire to be a princess and find romance. The 2017 musical, with book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, nixes the sidekicks and turns up the Russian revolutionary history a notch for a visually stunning family-friendly show with few surprises....

Hot “G” Dog hotgdog.com During Hot Doug’s waning days last summer and fall, when lovers of encased meats mourned by waiting in nine-hour lines, it was hard to tell which aspect of the Hot Doug’s experience they would miss more, the specialty sausages and duck-fat fries or Doug Sohn’s genial presence. But now at least the sausages and fries are back, thanks to Juan Carlos and Octavio Garcia, two brothers who worked on the line at Hot Doug’s for most of its existence and who, earlier this year, received Sohn’s blessing to open up their own hot dog stand....

Divvy divvybikes.com Its pedal-powered technology stretches back two centuries, but like the latest, hottest gadget, Divvy has in two years gone from “Will anyone use it?” to “Does anyone not?” It’s not just that unlimited rides are much cheaper on Divvy ($75 for a year) than the el ($100 for just a month). The three-speed bikes are also minutes faster than the elevated trains, according to a study by the urban transportation site Transitized of the top 1,000 Divvy journeys....

Billy Helmkamp, 43, co-owns the Whistler (which he opened in 2008 with Rob Brenner) and Sleeping Village (opened in 2018 with Brenner and former Whistler bartender Eric Henry). He’s been a major player in the Logan Square Arts Festival for most of its history and serves on the board of I Am Logan Square, the nonprofit that organizes it. (If this summer’s fest happens, it’ll be as smaller events, on a scale deemed safe by public-health authorities....

Listening to Chelsea Wolfe is like watching a fog roll in and wondering if a storm will follow; her music provokes an uncanny feeling that combines mystifying beauty and deep anxiety. The singer-songwriter has spent much of the past few years on the road, touring in support of 2015’s Abyss and 2017’s Hiss Spun, both of which are heavily influenced by industrial rock and doom metal. Her recent sixth studio album, Birth of Violence (Sargent House), has a calmer presence, but it’s no less unsettling....

I’d made a habit of visiting Bandcamp multiple times per week, if not per day, long before Bandcamp Fridays became a thing. (For those days, the digital-music retailer has been passing along its usual cut of sales to independent musicians and labels struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic.) One of my favorite Bandcamp finds of the past eight months is Anomia by OK Cool, the Chicago duo of Bridget Stiebris and Haley Bloomquist....

Barring divine intervention, the 90-year-old reigning sovereign of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II, will eventually die, and her eldest son, Prince Charles (currently 68), will ascend the throne—assuming, of course, that he’s not also dead by then, which would be just his luck. In King Charles III, Brit playwright Mike Bartlett imagines a less than orderly succession. Best known to American audiences as Sir Anthony Strallan from Downton Abbey, Robert Bathurst neatly embodies the dignified confusion of an honorable but crucially limited man who requires a hell of an awakening before he’ll understand his place in the world....

Lifted Bells couldn’t have picked a better time to release their first EP than 2013, when “emo revival” had become an indie-rock buzzword. Now the local underground supergroup—made up of exacting musicians from spritely fourth-wave emo acts (including Options, Stay Ahead of the Weather, and Their/They’re/There) and second-wave heartthrob Bob Nanna (of Braid and Hey Mercedes)—have finally polished off their debut album, Minor Tantrums (Run For Cover), which they celebrate tonight....

A Saturday evening spent tooling around and looking for a place to get a decent steak at the last minute is usually destined to end with a stop at the nearest Whole Foods and a session over a hot cast-iron pan. Unless, of course, you’re downtown. Case in point: a smoked-trout Caesar salad made of finely chopped endive, with roasted grapes as a garnish. It’s crunchy, creamy, and tasty, but so far from being an actual Caesar that it practically amounts to false advertising....

Born in London to a Jamaican mother and a Greek father, singer and guitarist Lianne La Havas takes inspiration from both branches of her family tree and beyond, finessing diverse influences into charming, sophisticated, and often heady alt-pop. She made her full-length debut with 2012’s acoustic guitar-driven Is Your Love Big Enough? and then slipped into something more electric on her 2015 follow-up, Green & Gold. Her new self-titled album is the first she’s produced on her own with her band, and its songs of love, loss, and personal growth continue her eclectic pop streak—it’s accessible yet hard to pin down....

A month after she released her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski ran out of LPs. In November 2014, the Brooklyn-­based singer-songwriter (full name Mitski Miyawaki) had pressed the record in an edition of 500 via Double Double Whammy, a small label run by friends from SUNY Purchase, where she’d studied composition. Though by December Mitski had aired the album’s songs in venues as prestigious as the Knitting Factory in New York City, neither she nor her label realized what kind of demand she’d created....

As the pandemic disrupted the comic book industry in April 2020, Devil’s Due Comics founder Josh Blaylock could see changes on the horizon. Creators previously resistant to experimenting with technology or crowdfunding sites suddenly needed income as publishers called for “pencils down.” For the modern comic book creator, the number of those routes alone can be overwhelming. One path is creating an independent webcomic. Another is taking three completed issues to a publisher like Image Comics....

On last year’s Six Easy Pieces (Odin), the long-running Scandinavian freebop quintet Atomic truly settled into life with drummer Hans Hulbækmo, who replaced founding percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love in 2014. As anyone who’s ever experienced the volcanic, shape-shifting work of Nilssen-Love can imagine, he left some massive shoes to fill. Hulbækmo wisely made no effort to replicate his predecessor’s presence, opting instead for a more gentle, swing-oriented approach. Compared to his first release with Atomic, 2015’s Lucidity (Jazzland Recordings), he definitely sounds more unified with the band on the latest....

Duane Hall/Chicago Sun-Times Women at Daley Plaza during the Women’s Strike on August 26, 1970. Mary Jean Collins moved to Chicago in 1968 and immediately joined the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Everything was happening,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “Everything was exploding. It was so much fun to be on the ground floor and starting an organization that was attacking everything.” Dore hopes that when She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opens at the Music Box tomorrow, Chicagoans will know who Mary Jean Collins is....

One of the strangest parts of this extremely strange year for me was that for roughly six weeks, between the end of September and the aftermath of the election, I was completely unable to read a book for pleasure. Instead of losing myself in another world, or in someone else’s brain, which is the reason I usually read, I kept groping for my phone to check the news. There was too much happening and too much to be anxious about....

In 2017, members of Chicago’s Theatre Y made an extraordinary excursion, walking across Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile route that fellow pilgrims have taken for centuries. Starting on the French border and ending in Finisterre (or “the end of the world” in Latin), it inspired the creation of The Camino Project, a mini pilgrimage through Bucktown and Humboldt Park, directed by Melissa Lorraine, written and conceived by Evan Hill, and choreographed by Dénes Döbrei and Heni Varga....