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Carisa Barreca carisabarreca.com Runner-Up: Caroline Neff

District Chicago Vintage Quest Finalists: Scout, Jayson Home, Alapash New Home, Cassona Home Furnishings and Accessories

Chris Buddy Mi Primo Filipino Who’s next:Rivera has challenged Rachel Rodeghiero of Trenchermen to create a cocktail with pork stock.

The queendom of drag is vast and diverse: There are comedy queens and look queens and insult queens and pageant queens, goth queens and dancing queens and lip synch assassin queens. And then there is Norwood Park’s Alexis Hex, who has carved out a singular genre as a knitting/crocheting/macrame-ing witch drag queen whose magic often involves transforming yarn into one-of-a-kind creations ranging from wall-hangings to fitted dresses to tiny toy birds....

Q: I was dumped in August by a guy I was seeing for ten months. He told me that he wants to work on himself and “needs to be selfish” right now. Since then, we have spoken every day, shared numerous dinners, and gone on hikes. Our friendship is killing me. With him I hold it together. Away from him I cry all the time. I’ve started seeing a therapist and I’m on medication....

Art Shay moved into the pine-green split-level house in a subdivision in Deerfield in 1958 with his wife, Florence, and the first four of their five children. As the kids grew up and left home, Shay’s collection of his own photos, in print, negative, and slide form, expanded from the basement darkroom to fill the house’s bottom level, then three of the four bedrooms (the fourth, where Shay sleeps, is full of books), and finally to make serious inroads into the living room, dining room, and kitchen....

Parson’s Chicken & Fish Piccolo Sogno Finalists: Stone Fox Bar & Restuarant, Mia Francesca’s, Saint Lou’s Assembly

The Cal-Sag Trail calsagtrail.org, @calsagtrail There’s been a fair amount of gloating lately over the fact that the recently opened Bloomingdale Trail, a 2.7-mile elevated rails-to-trails conversion on the near northwest side, is nearly twice as long as New York’s much-touted High Line. But down in the southwest suburbs, just outside Chicago’s city limits, the longest urban trail project in the midwest is under way. On June 6—the same day the Bloomingdale Trail opened—there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first half of the Cal-Sag Trail, which currently stretches from Lemont to Alsip....

Early to Bed Pleasure Chest Finalists: Taboo Tabou, Egor’s Dungeon

Black Oak Tattoo Deluxe Tattoo Finalists: Speakeasy Custom Tattoo, Copperplate Tattoo

The number one question CBD Kratom cofounder Dafna Revah hears at her stores is “Will I get high from this?”—and her customers are looking for the answer to be “no.” “No one ever complained that we were a vape shop, but now there’s so many more people interested in coming in and referring people,” Fisher said. “We get a lot more people who are just interested, like ‘Tell me more, I want to understand....

I first heard the music of San Diego native Abjo, aka Abraham Joseph, when I stumbled on his 2014 Soulection White Label EP. A nearly perfect hybrid of fractured beat making and laid-back R&B that simultaneously glides and staggers, it remains one of my favorite releases of the decade. Though Abjo has continued to put out new material since then, he fell under my radar, and I mostly lost touch—which was my mistake, because checking in half a decade later confirms that he’s still great....

Earlier this year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences faced a torrent of criticism when, for the second season in a row, it nominated only white actors and actresses in the four performing categories. Academy voters looking to address that imbalance this year will be all over Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, an intimate and haunting drama about a poor, fatherless African-American kid growing up in the closet in the predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood of Miami....

Michael Gebert Grilled pork banh mi at CoCo Several years ago I was in Santa Cruz, California, and discovered something I hadn’t expected to see anywhere this side of Saigon: fast-food banh mi chains. But if you thought about it, the Vietnamese-French fusion sandwich, with its crusty baguette, Asian meats (paté or grilled), and crunchy fresh vegetables, was a perfect candidate for taking off as a more exotic substitute for Subway....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 6, 2016. Have a wonderful weekend. Chicago Teachers Union comes up with revenue proposals instead of setting strike date Instead of setting a strike date, Chicago Teachers Union delegates proposed a revenue-recovery plan Wednesday. The union is asking Chicago Public Schools and the City Council to consider using tax revenue and tax increment financing (TIF) surplus money to help fund the schools and prevent budget cuts....

Rosario Zavala Lucia Pane Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Baha’i follower Lucia Pane. Baha’i don’t drink or do drugs, and we believe in waiting to have sex until marriage. Homosexuality—that’s a loaded question. It’s between that person and God, and it’s not our place to judge. I have many friends who identify themselves as being homosexual, and they are lovely people....

Hamilton Les Misérables Finalists: Six, Come from Away Musical, Tootsie

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. Older strips are archived here.

Once you’re done picking at your Thanksgiving leftovers, get out this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sun 11/27: Mark Toland hosts Be Happy, a “forget-about-the-election” variety show at the Public House Theatre (3914 N. Clark) featuring magic, mind reading, and comedy. 8 PM

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....