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Crafty Beaver Andersonville Kitchen & Bath Showroom Finalists: Wade Brothers Carpentry LLC, Power Plumbing & Sewer Contractor Inc.

Second City iO Chicago Finalists: Annoyance Theater, Logan Square Improv

Let’s face it, only a few of us have relationships that call for a complete stranger installing a plaque at the site where we had our first kiss a la Barack and Michelle’s monument at 53rd and Dorchester, the former site of a Baskin-Robbins that they reportedly visited on their first date. But plenty of us can point directly to venues, restaurants, and perhaps even neighborhoods that are forever tainted in our minds by memories of love gone very wrong....

Chicago postpunk four-piece the Knees dropped their first single, “Round and Round,” three years ago; on the A side the band balance a terse, tightly wound melody with a smidgen of garage feedback, while the entropic B side, “Distribution,” displays their fondness for noise. Since then, the Knees have released new music at a trickle. Their debut EP, August’s Posture (Born Yesterday), is their first new material since the June 2018 single “Stammer,” which Brooklyn-based label Two Syllable also included on May’s Chicago Cassette Compilation: Volume 3....

A good rule for making plays full of gratuitous deaths into comedies is to flesh the victims out as little as possible. When this show’s villainous hero, Monty D’Ysquith-Navarro, played by Andres Enriquez, engineers the remorseless killing of all eight members of the D’Ysquith family who stand in the way of his becoming the next Earl of Highhurst, it should feel like the mowing down of quaint little cardboard dolls. And it does....

Numerous prominent hip-hop artists have emerged from Chicago: Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, Common, Chief Keef, Vic Mensa, Psalm One, and Mick Jenkins (to name a few). And yet a feature-length, comprehensive documentary about the history of the local hip-hop scene has yet to come to fruition. The team behind Midway: The Story of Chicago Hip-Hop hopes to change that. Meanwhile, the Midway team is working with the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago to archive music, photographs, videos, posters, and other materials as a means to educate audiences about Chicago’s hip-hop culture....

My earliest memory of playing games involves cards. In a cabin in the woods, my grandma Dorothy taught me war (the easiest and most endless game), then gin, cribbage, and most importantly, solitaire. How wild, I thought as a four-year-old, to have a game you can play all by yourself! I was, at the time, an only child, and my only friend was my small black cat, Doodle. Having games to play alone suddenly opened up a whole world of entertainment that filled the void when my cat was sick and tired of our tea parties....

I f the art gig ever stalls, Chinese dissident and global activist Ai Weiwei could give stand-up comedy a try. The acerbic humor that’s a primary driver of much of his art was on display during an appearance at the Auditorium Theatre last week. Ai Weiwei: They use chemicals. I worry about that every time I have a cup of tea. The Chinese just put you in a secret place. Why did he become an artist?...

If you want a sense of what Janine Nabers‘s Welcome to Jesus aspires to be—its ideal Platonic form—take a look at the Jordan Peele movie Get Out. The two productions have an awful lot in common—except that, where Get Out is a nasty-great piece of satire, there’s not much reason to come to Jesus, running now at American Theater Company. Out of the woods and into this misery walks Him (yes, that’s as much of a name as he gets), a mysterious black teen who, it happens, can throw a football hard, far, and accurately....

First he marinated the kidneys in oil with dried chiles, herbs, garlic, and spices. “I was thinking of how with wine you get descriptors like ‘barnyard,’” he says. “Working on a farm growing up, ‘barnyard’ had these hay and urine connotations, horse shit—I thought about how you twist something off-putting into something romantic.” A few months back, a bartender at the restaurant made a cocktail with hay-infused mescal, and Trahan used some of that to make borracho bean puree with kidney beans (“because that’s kind of funny”)....

Brownie Scout – GTI G6 – Verano Finalists: MAC – Grassroots, Mag Landrace – Verano

Esther Garcia at Butterfat butterfatstudios.com Tie with: Patrick Cornolo at Speakeasy Custom Tattoo speakeasycustomtattoo.com

Argentine string band Che Apalache play “Latingrass,” which might at first seem like a sterile hybrid, but even a few minutes of listening to this four-piece are enough to demonstrate how beautifully Latin folk and bluegrass sounds can intertwine. Multi-instrumentalist and North Carolina native Joe Troop is a music teacher in Buenos Aires, and in 2018 he explained the group’s genesis to Bluegrass Today: the Appalachian folk style wasn’t popular in his adopted city when he arrived in 2010, but the instruments used to make it were....

Though the Bard wrote Hamlet sometime on the cusp of the 17th century, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s minimal, grayscale revival has plenty to say about contemporary masculinity and race. With Black men as both King and Prince Hamlet, this particular production draws upon the concept of a legacy interrupted and destroyed by racialized violence. The show begins with a son singing at his father’s grave while his mother, a woman of color, gets intimate with a white man....

Last week I skipped an installment of this column to sit with others and process, to mourn and celebrate the lives of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and the hundreds of others injured or killed in incidents involving law enforcement officers. I worried about social distancing while supporting demonstrators and marchers. I listened to a lot of music. Thank you, Teshika, for this work and for helping me pay tribute to Big Floyd....

In 2006, the artist Alberto Aguilar decided to let go of his studio. “I don’t like things that throw off being free,” he says. “And not having a studio is, for me, being very free, to not have to make things in that designated space. To think of any of these spaces as a place to make things.” Aguilar grew up in Cicero, where his parents owned a small grocery store called La Grande....

Welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for Thursday, May 19, 2016. Mark Kirk calls Donald Trump a “river boat gamble”Senator Mark Kirk has reservations about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump but still supports him, Kirk told USA Today. Kirk, facing a heated reelection race against U.S. House member Tammy Duckworth, called the controversial real estate magnate a “river boat gamble” but said his own national security expertise would be an asset to a President Trump....

ACLU of Illinois Assata’s Daughters Finalists: Chi-Town Pitties, Inc., BYP100

Eve L. Ewing Megan Kirby Finalist: Tim Seeley

Chicago Dance Supply Motion Unlimited Finalists: All About Dance