Rock, Pop, Etc. AVENTURA, TEGO CALDERONA Sat 9/20, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence. 312-666-6667 or 312-559-1212. JIMMY DAMON performs at a celebration for the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Professional Basketball League, which features dinner and speakers. Sat 9/20, 6 PM, Hyatt Regency O’Hare, 9300 W. Bryn Mawr, Rosemont. 801-450-7882. FRIENDS FOREVER Fri 9/26, 9 PM, Buddy, 1542 N. Milwaukee. 773-342-7332. RON HAWKING performs “His Way: A Tribute to the Man and His Music” (Frank Sinatra tribute)....

Triple Crown is a casual Chinatown restaurant with an extensive menu of regional specialties, all of which can be ordered in tasting portions after 10 PM. The family dinners, served with steamed rice and dessert, are a particularly good value and allow you to taste a variety of dishes. The overriding flavors here are garlic and ginger and everything is salty, calling for wines that haven’t yet mellowed with age. The consulting expert on this trip was master sommelier Joseph Spellman, formerly with Charlie Trotter’s and currently with Paterno Imports....

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Will Act for Food, at WNEP Theater and Short Shakespeare! “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Shakespeare’s craziest comedy can take a directorial licking and keep on ticking, as both of these productions prove. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Will Act for Food director Daniel Shea reimagines the play as a Twilight Zone episode, with Micah Bernier as Rod Serling as Puck–darkly ruminating through clouds of cigarette smoke about “what fools these mortals be” and “how quick bright things come to confusion”–and a set by Robb Rabito that references the spinning hypnotic wheel from the TV show’s opening credits....

Markus Raetz But what’s most interesting about Raetz’s work is the way it configures the viewer’s perception as an ongoing process. In her foreword to the small catalog, Arts Club director Kathy S. Cottong writes that “experiencing a Raetz work is akin to experiencing Zen enlightenment, the moment of knowledge….Look too closely and it is gone.” Walking around a piece can suddenly cause an image to crystallize, then fade away, underlining the fragility of all imagery, even of knowledge....

Until recently the 1,500 dresses, scarves, hats, trousers, raincoats, petticoats, and polyester leisure suits that make up the Fashion Columbia Study Collection were “in boxes, bags, and various closets,” says longtime Columbia College instructor (and acting curator) Avis Moeller. That didn’t necessarily interfere with the items’ use, she explains. “Ours is not a museum that preserves. Ours is, as they say in England, a handling collection”–which teachers and students in Columbia’s fashion design and retail management programs can look at, turn inside out, sketch, or measure....

Hughie Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O’Neill’s most famous articulation of this worldview is The Iceman Cometh. Shortly after he finished it in 1939 and just after completing his other bleak masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in 1941, he composed a seemingly slight one-act, Hughie, that’s essentially an hour-long character study. But true to form, O’Neill envisioned Hughie as part of a cycle (called “By Way of Orbit”) made up of works in which two characters would discuss a recently deceased person, whose name would be the play’s title....

OCTOBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Next year’s presidential election and the 20th anniversary of the election of Chicago’s first African-American mayor are the springboards for an exploration of the current racial and political climate at this weekend’s two-day symposium, Harold Washington: His Legacy, Our Future. Today’s speakers include Source editor-at-large Akiba Solomon, Pulitzer-winning journalist Leon Dash, U.S. congressman John Conyers, DePaul political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres, and In These Times publisher Jeff Epton (the son of Washington’s Republican opponent, Bernard Epton)....

Curated by Kathryn Hixson, this show of 44 works by Armenian artists, mostly paintings, encompasses a wide range of modern styles, including abstract expressionism and a Magritte-like surrealism. The most interesting pieces also incorporate Armenian content. Armenia converted to Christianity in the fourth century, and several painters appear to be influenced by its long tradition of manuscript illumination. At the center of Arthur Sarkissian’s Christmas #1 is a traditional Nativity image, copied from an early Flemish oil painting but silk-screened in purple....

Bob Andrews’s career in the music business started out as a lark. While the Nashville native was toiling away at a drum shop for seven bucks an hour, his friend Ken Coomer was drumming for alt-country heroes Uncle Tupelo. “I saw that Ken was having a good time on the road all of the time, and I thought it might be cool to do that, to travel around,” says Andrews. “So I bullshitted my way in....

Gas Attack This canard–the “blood libel” that Jews drain the blood of murdered Christians for their rituals–has haunted Jews for centuries and has been traced back at least as far as the cult of William of Norwich, a 12-year-old supposedly murdered before Passover on March 22, 1144. Not a century since has been free of similar accusations. Levendel and Hoshen are highly willful people. He’s the author of Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for the Truth of Vichy, which describes his search for the killers of his mother, who died in southern France in 1944 and his discovery that French collaborators were heavily involved....

James Moody’s puckish persona and penchant for bad puns would seem to argue against his status as an elder statesman of jazz, but there’s no disputing his place in music history. Known primarily for his tenor sax but also an incisive altoist, Moody, who turned 78 this year, was already an adept of the nascent bebop idiom when he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1947. Two years later he recorded a bright, beautifully balanced tenor solo to the chestnut “I’m in the Mood for Love....

Wendall Greene Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wendall Greene takes place in Archetype–sorry, Arkansas, where single mom Cindy is so desperate to change her life she’s prepared to believe that cardsharp Cooch will sweep her off to Vegas just as soon as his luck changes. Her son Jimmy expresses his own desperation by seeking out the company of the title character, a mostly silent black man reputed to have done something unspecified to young boys....

Let’s Make a Deal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She at least understands that the deal is what it’s all about. As a graduate student in arts and media management at Columbia College four years ago, Womack drafted a thesis on how independent filmmakers could jump-start their careers. “People were still thinking there’d be this huge distribution outlet for independent film on the Internet, with audiences downloading movies on their computers,” she says....

It isn’t easy to make music that sounds ancient without seeming like you’re trying to deny you were born in the 20th century. Among the few who’ve pulled it off are Glaswegian Richard Youngs and New Zealander Alastair Galbraith; Matt De Gennaro earned the right to be counted in their number when he released his first solo CD, Under the Sun, last winter. He’s previously collaborated with Galbraith; their explorations of the acoustic properties of various spaces (mostly museums) via rosined piano wires strung between the walls have yielded three CDs of droning “wire music” that would make any Tony Conrad fan happy....

What I really like about this place is that it’s a very quiet, plush sort of atmosphere, very dark, and you can have a conversation. It reminds me of my favorite bar, which happens to be in Melbourne, Australia. The Night Cat is in an old movie theater. They took the snack bar and turned it into a real bar and then dropped the ceiling down and tore down all the walls and extended it so it’s like one huge lobby....

In some ways it’s a pity that Melora Creager and her troupe of corseted cellists have been saddled with the “goth” tag, since there’s hardly a more direct way to ensure disparagement by the cultural gatekeepers. But it doesn’t seem to bother her much, and it shouldn’t: she’s got nothing to prove and a sweetly creepy sensibility that’s as “experimental” as anything else out there clinging to a pop skeleton with bloody fingernails....

Sailing From the Moon, Smoke & Mirrors Productions, at the Viaduct Theater. There’s not much new in Nick Jones’s new play about twentysomethings struggling to get laid–and find meaning in doing so. George reads philosophy, maintains his virginity, and fantasizes about female purity. Then he falls for tough girl Jamie, who wears a T-shirt announcing “Fuck” and is in love with smarmy, pretentious, unfaithful Charles. Their various pairings and unpairings play out in George’s stereotypically messy apartment or in the neighborhood coffeehouse, imparting a Friends-like quality to the evening....

I got married young (I’m 22 now). Within six months of the wedding, my wife put on 50 pounds, stopped wearing makeup, and decided that she would no longer engage in any sex act besides vaginal, missionary intercourse. She will accept oral sex but refuses to return the favor. When we were dating she did all sorts of delightful things and put a lot more effort into her personal appearance. Can you say “bait and switch”?...

I’m a 16-year-old girl with a 17-year-old boyfriend. My boyfriend is religious and strongly against sex before marriage (vaginal, anal, or even oral). Recently our making out has lead to “dry humping.” I’ve heard all sorts of things from peers and teen magazines about what can happen when a guy ejaculates in this situation, and I would like to know just how far semen can travel and through what, if any, fabrics....

Over the past ten years, the Second City comedy franchise has sought to diversify by developing farm teams of color. This Theater on the Lake production is a “best of” revue featuring sketches developed by such spin-off troupes, punctuated by piquant improv. Second City…in Color doesn’t quite make it through the evening without mentioning the back of the bus, but it does include droll, provocative pieces that provide relief from threadbare scenarios featuring poor but proud black folk, who maintain their dignity though they have only roaches to eat for dinner....