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It doesn’t really matter if you’re part of a starry-eyed couple or a cynical single; this Valentine’s Day weekend is full of events for the everyone from the hopeless romantic to the just plain hopeless. You can choose from more than 40 shindigs in our complete list of Valentine’s Day events, but here are our 12 favorite options (including a shameless plug for our annual Anti-Valentine’s Day party): I’ll Do Anything to See Boobs Tonight: A Valentine’s Burlesque Cabaret At the stroke of midnight, the Gorilla Tango Burlesque Geek Girls are all set to perform Valentine’s Day-themed solos and group numbers....

“I always think of this coat and vest combination as being almost ‘ninja’ in feeling,” says Jenene Ravesloot, who was photographed while shopping at the Target store on Peterson Avenue in West Ridge. The 76-year-old poet was eager to show the intricate embroidery of her Danny Mansmith pieces—certainly not the only fun items in her wardrobe. “I do think it is important to dress with flair and a sense of humor,” she says....

Those are the words of the late, great Wanda Kurek, proprietress of Stanley’s, the 84-year-old tavern that is the last remaining holdout of Back of the Yards’ Whiskey Row, the once-bustling strip of Ashland Avenue that slaked the thirst of thousands of stockyard workers. When I wrote about Wanda in 2008, she was an 84-year-old spitfire who reigned behind the bar with a sharp tongue. By all accounts she still was at age 95, when she fractured her pelvis walking down the basement stairs....

Primrose Green Over the past few years we’ve watched Ryley Walker blossom from a little kid shredding bizzaro free jazz noise-rock in warehouses into a skilled and sensitive fingerstyle-folk prodigy, and this week his upcoming second LP was announced. It’s coming at the end of March via Dead Oceans Records, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Primrose Green,” a preview of that LP of the same name. Walker has been crafting beautifully intricate and rich folk for a while now, but this time around he’s better than ever: the song oozes with soul and unbelievable melodies, and the band of top-notch players backing him up—this lineup includes virtuoso drummer Frank Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwich—are beyond smooth and in-the-pocket....

Here’s a way of crossing off a few naughty names on your Christmas list: Shop Sensual, an erotic pop-up shop happening at Reunion studio in Humboldt Park from Friday to Sunday. Organized by designer Leah Ball and photographer Chelsea Ross of Feminist as Fuck, and Kristen Kaza of No Small Plans Productions and Slo ‘Mo Party, Shop Sensual will be offering sexy creations by more than a dozen local artists and designers— Leah Ball herself, Noelia Towers, Claire Arctander, Silk Shaman, Morgan Reed Jewelry, Gnat Glitter Kink, Mano Y Metal by Desiree Guzman, Remix by Giselle Wasfie, Humboldt House, Cities in Dust, Emma Alamo, and Solid Air by Taylor Mauch....

Muntu’s ambitions are vast, both in terms of space and time. Helmed by executive director Sekou Tepaka Lunda Conde, the 47-year-old South Shore-based company aims at nothing less than preserving and perpetuating the endless, intricate polycultural “African aesthetic,” be it manifested in Nubian dance or Zulu drumming or the ancient folklore of griots whose names have been lost to history. Conde uses music and movement to take Muntu’s audiences and dance students across continents and through centuries....

I try not to show any emotion when I attend plays as a critic and not just an audience member, but I couldn’t help but shed some tears during the Chicago premiere of Donja R. Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds, a romantic drama about two enslaved Black men who find love and home in each other as the Civil War rages on. Produced by First Floor Theater and directed by Mikael Burke, the play is the first in a trilogy that explores the forgotten stories of Black queers, as their existence has been largely erased by history....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 6, 2017. 14 Chicago Public Schools high school football teams disappeared in 2017 Fourteen Chicago Public Schools high schools, including Whitney Young Magnet High School, dropped their football teams and programs in 2017 as enrollment continues to decline at neighborhood high schools, according to the Tribune. Reporter John Keilman profiles the football program at Englewood’s Robeson High School, which CPS is planning to close at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, and how it positively affects students....

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp One of the current programs at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films is “Behind the Convent Walls: Bad Habits and Naughty Nuns,” a pretty self-explanatory series that collects subversive films about nuns falling prey to temptations of the flesh. Programmer Daniel Frankel has selected some trashy “nunsploitation” fare, including Jess Franco’s Les Démons as well as some comedies (Sister Act, Nasty Habits). Among the more prestigious selections are Jacques Rivette’s New Wave feature The Nun and the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger joint Black Narcissus, one of the lauded British filmmaking duo’s most lush Technicolor marvels....

As luck would have it, the most expedient way to describe vanguard camp comic and longtime Hell in a Handbag collaborator Ed Jones to the uninitiated might just be “imagine Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, only ten times Mrs. Garrett-ier.” So it’s an added bonus that this Halloween musical parody by David Cerda (score by Cerda and Andrew Milliken), which smuggles coke, ritualistic goat slaughter, and dry humping into the all-girls Eastland boarding school, gives Jones an opportunity to pay drag homage to his sister in spirit....

In a lot of ways, Ellen Gates Starr High School in Logan Square isn’t much different from other CPS neighborhood schools. Enrollment and funding are down, and the school is on probation: the results of standardized tests from this year, currently in session, will determine whether it stays open. Teachers know they’re in danger of layoffs, and that the news will probably arrive in an e-mail in the middle of a school day....

Female comedy group the Kates got their name from the unconventional venue in which they debuted, Kate the Great’s Book Emporium in Edgewater. At the time, it was just stand-up comedian Kelsie Huff running the operation: she recruited her female friends to perform comedy (mostly stand-up, but occasionally improv and sketch) and tell stories at indie bookstores across the city. Now, nine years later, they put on regular events at the Book Cellar, have hit more conventional stages like the Laugh Factory, and have built up a roster of more than 500 women who are involved both in front of and behind the scenes, including a core unit of nine female producers....

The TV news reporter kept asking everyone the same stupid question: “So, what are you doing here?” Crass, perhaps, but so is our culture’s obsession with performative courtship, the kind in which two parties bludgeon each other with cloying romantic gestures like, well, riding a 200-foot-tall pink-hued ode to true love. That thought didn’t occur to me until later, because when you’re busy chatting up a bunch of randoms on a Ferris wheel in hopes of finding the One, it impairs everything beyond a conversation-heart level of thinking....

Atorina Zomaya was raised in a close-knit Assyrian American family in Rogers Park that revolved around food. “Pretty much everything was homemade—breads, yogurt, cheeses—according to ancient family recipes,” she says. “After learning more about the recipes that were recorded on these clay tablets, I realized not much has changed in modern Assyrian food culture,” notes Zomaya. But Assyrian cuisine has one key ingredient that sets it apart from the rest of the Middle East: alcohol, found in the wine, wheat beer, and anise- flavored arak, brewed and distilled since ancient times....

Correction: This article has been amended to correctly reflect the date of the Stonewall uprising. It took place June 28, 1969, not July 28. Behind the pageantry and the appletinis, drag has always been a radical act. History tends to credit white activists for the gay liberation movement, but people of color in cha-cha heels were among those who took the first stand. In the early morning of June 28, 1969, police raided Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, but quickly lost the upper hand when the bar’s queer patrons began to fight back....

Dam-Funk on the cover of the STFU EP Dam-Funk hasn’t been inactive since he dropped his double-disc debut Toeachizown (Stones Throw) in 2009—there’s been a collection of rarities (2010’s Adolescent Funk), a collaboration with Slave drummer Steve Arringon (2013’s Higher), and a famous collaboration with Snoop Dogg (last year’s 7 Days of Funk, and I cannot call him Snoopzilla). But he has yet to release a follow-up to Toeachizown, which is a two-hour monorail ride of retrofuturistic funk that bridges George Clinton, boogie, DJ Quik, and the LA beat scene....

Chicagoland singer-songwriter and composer Daniel Knox has been busy this year, even without the outlet of touring. He hasn’t played an in-person concert since a date at Union Hall in Brooklyn in early March—a subsequent spring tour supporting formerly Chicagoan duo the Handsome Family in Scandinavia and the UK was postponed due to COVID-19 (and has been rescheduled for spring 2021, fingers crossed). In February Knox released the tribute album Half Heart: Songs From Twin Peaks through his own H....

Had Jafar Panahi not already used the title The Mirror in 1997, he could have applied it to any of the four features he’s made this decade. The Iranian director appears as himself in all four—This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015), and now 3 Faces (2018)—effectively turning the camera on himself as a sort-of mirror. It would be shortsighted, though, to reduce these works with the label of autobiography....

Zach Condon debuted his indie-folk project Beirut in 2005, and though he expanded it from a solo project to a full-fledged band in 2006, he’s continued to work with the same building blocks that made his earliest bedroom recordings so beguiling: sparse ukulele strumming, ornate horn arrangements influenced by eastern European folk music, and arresting vocals that strike a balance between heavenly and funereal. The most noticeable musical evolution on Beirut’s brand-new fifth album, Gallipoli (4AD), is the addition of synthetic, waterlogged Farfisa notes, which open the title track....

Soul and gospel legend Mavis Staples opened her set on Friday at the Pitchfork Music Festival with an Alfred Hitchcock-esque “Good evening,” then proclaimed that she came to bring “joy, happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations.” Hopkins has played in bands that have covered Staples’s music, so she knows it well. “I want that hot summer day where everybody’s upset about the government and the way that the world is,” she said, “and she comes out and just sings protest music in the way that only she can and somehow soothes and activates people at the same time....