This question concerns both sex and etiquette: How much privacy can one reasonably expect while engaging in consensual sex in a sex club? While visiting one of those open-to-the-public establishments that cater to men who want to get off with other men, I saw an uptight but openly gay prig who is a member of my social circle. I shared this fact with a straight friend while dishing the dirt over cocktails....

My boyfriend of one year phoned me to tell me he almost cheated on me. An old girlfriend invited him back to her house. The only reason he didn’t, he said, was because he had too much homework (we are both university students), not because he loved me too much to do such a thing. Then he asked what I would have done if he had cheated on me. I told him that I would have dumped him–a response he found harsh....

I have a serious problem. I am pregnant with a boy. At first my husband and I were in agreement that we would not circumcise him. I have read that the foreskin is comparable to a clit–it houses all the nerves that make sex more pleasurable. But now my husband says he has changed his mind based on brief conversations he had with two people. One woman said that when she saw her ex-boyfriend’s uncircumcised penis it was a deal killer....

‘Tis now officially the season to consume, and whoever glued shut 200-some locks at that strip mall in Louisiana last weekend is my new hero. But if donating to charity in the names of loved ones this year just doesn’t feel right, the least you can do is fork over your cash to companies that seem to give a hoot what happens to the world when they concoct an internationally successful brand of cosmetics, for instance, or manufacture T-shirts by the millions....

VULGAR BOATMEN 1/3, SCHUBAS Now based in Indianapolis, this long-running indie cult band (members of which went on to form the Silos, the Mary Janes, the Gentle Readers, and the Mysteries of Life) exists largely in theory. But several times a year its members get together to play their bittersweet crunchy twang for a crowd that knows all the words and aches to imagine a world where individual heartbreak still matters....

New Suit With Jordan Bridges, Marisa Coughlan, Heather Donahue, Dan Hedaya, Mark Setlock, Benito Martinez, Charles Rocket, and Paul McCrane. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s an obvious premise, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Francois Velle directs this farce without any of the glibness that scriptwriter Craig Sherman is attacking. The characters are all recognizable studio types, and some of them are quite funny....

Original Pirate Material (Vice/Atlantic), the debut of 22-year-old two-step garage MC Mike Skinner, aka the Streets, may be the most quotable album of the year. Skinner was born in Birmingham, England, and currently lives in London; he gets a lot of mileage (or kilometrage, I guess) from his Englishness, tossing off lines such as “Raised as a northern star / With a London underground travel card,” “Sex, drugs, and on the dole,” “‘Round here we say birds, not bitches,” and–his statement of purpose–“This is the day in the life of a geezer....

Each autumn, before a single class is held, all University of Chicago freshmen spend an entire week in orientation. I passed much of the first day standing in line. At the front of one long line, a smiling upperclassman handed me a canvas bag. Inside the bag were pencils and coupons and class schedules and the like, a silver whistle to blow in case you were attacked, and information on the fabulous jobs we could all expect upon graduation....

Fed up with the disrespectful treatment accorded to Rom music and musicians in his homeland, the superb Bulgarian saxophonist Yuri Yunakov moved to New York in 1994. He’s remained a leading exponent of Rom wedding music–a high-speed, odd-metered style infused with the energy of rock and the instrumental fluidity of jazz. During the communist era and for some years after the revolution of 1989, the Bulgarian government tried to suppress it as part of a campaign to cleanse the culture of Rom influences....

On her last album Amy Allison sang, “Sad girl, I’ve always been a sad girl,” and she hasn’t brightened up much on her new follow-up, No Frills Friend (Diesel Only). The daughter of jazz-blues singer and pianist Mose Allison seems to find endless inspiration in loss and longing, whether she’s struggling to break free of a failed relationship in “Hanging on a Moment” (“No matter where I go or what I do / I just can’t seem to get away from you”) or begging an ex not to leave in “Say It Isn’t So....

23 FRIDAY Before he died in 1997, Chicago imagist Roger Brown willed his studio and home–and the contents therein–to the School of the Art Institute. Among other things, the Roger Brown Study Collection at 1926 N. Halsted boasts an impressive array of artwork (including imagist, folk, and outsider art), furniture, textiles, and travel souvenirs, plus an archive of Brown’s work and personal effects, including his ’67 Mustang (in the garage). Brown and the building’s previous inhabitants are the inspiration for the new exhibition 1926–The History of the Space Before the Space, which includes site-specific work by Lisa Stone, Garrett Eakin, John Kurtich, Sarah Feinstein, Jeanne Lambin, Mary Richards, Rebecca Targ, Steven Juras, and Steven Hendricks....

NOVEMBER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Eat at home and get there early remain the two best tips for enjoying the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, which finishes up a 12-day run this weekend at the Allstate Arena before moving on to Chicago’s United Center. Three Ring Adventure, the interactive show that starts an hour before the main performance, is a must-see, offering first-rate clowning and the chance to get a wet, powerful smooch from Asia the elephant....

You’ve given your blood and donated your money, now (especially if you’re moving October 1) you want to send all that other stuff you don’t need. Well, New York doesn’t want it and neither does Washington, but people in Chicago need it as much as they ever did. You can leave it in the alley for the Dumpster divers, but another method of distribution to the poor that’s almost as direct is through local charities....

Calvin Krime veteran and Sean Na Na main man Sean Tillman keeps some distance from his sexy-sleazebag alter ego–he insists that the Ron Jeremy look-alike getting his ya-yas out onstage is his “brother,” Harold Martin Tillman. On his two albums as Har Mar, and especially the new You Can Feel Me (on the Warners pseudoindie Record Collection), Tillman elegantly mimics and mocks the come-ons of the hip-hop cocksman and the smoove R & B lover....

The latest in an ongoing series of screenings that intersperse live music with independent video (and film transferred to video). At least half of these 23 provocative works offer genuinely incisive critiques of current culture: J.J. Sedelmaier’s animation Heteroy (1999) features three singing Christians who advocate conversion therapy for gay men (“Thank you for keeping my anus clean”); one of them becomes a superhero when conventional propaganda fails. In Pigskin Orgasm (2000), Jennifer and Amber Cluck accompany a montage of potentially homoerotic touching from TV sportscasts with a song about being “in love with a guy who’s afraid to use his charms....

The last couple of months I’ve been getting annoyed because they’ve stopped carrying some of the items that I would typically pick up. One evening after work I’m walking around and the first two items on my list were not there. By the third I was like, “They’d better have my meatless meatballs or I’m going to go nuts.” Sure enough, no meatless meatballs. I lost it and went looking for somebody who works here....

“I wish somebody would pay me what they pay a psychologist,” says Mary-Ann Parisi, owner of the Knitter’s Niche yarn shop on Southport just north of Belmont. People’s personal problems have a way of getting tangled up in their handwork. One time a man came in and asked for help with a sweater he was knitting. Under Parisi’s questioning he admitted it was for an ex-girlfriend. When a woman tried to buy cashmere to make a sweater for a guy she’d gone on one date with, Parisi’s assistant Lauren Sanchez refused to sell it to her....

Rory Block Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By definition, blues revivalists preserve ways of playing that have fallen out of popular favor; paradoxically, for their efforts they’re often accused of turning the music into a lifeless museum piece. But even the stodgiest purist would hesitate to level that charge at Rory Block: she inhabits her material with an obsessive commitment, whether picking lacy Piedmont-style filigrees or beating on the body of her guitar and popping the bass strings against its neck like a Delta bluesman of the 30s....

The sports-talk radio hosts are fond of speculating on whether “Good Frank” or “Bad Frank” will show up this year. That is, will Frank Thomas have an MVP-caliber campaign, as he had annually through 1997 and again in 2000, or a disappointing season like the ones in 1998 and ’99, and then last year when he was injured? Thomas’s leadership qualities are often questioned in the media, but for better or worse, the way the White Sox play as a team has reflected the uneven, all-or-nothing quality of his career....

STEPHEN MALKMUS & THE JICKS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Irony has long been a liability for Stephen Malkmus, and now it’s verging on a debilitating illness. Hook for hook Stephen Malkmus, the first solo album from the former Pavement front man, might be the strongest thing he’s ever done. His melodies are indelible, from the breezy, marimba-kissed “Phantasies” to the Lennon-esque lilt of “Vague Space,” and they can magically make clunky-looking lines like “You’re such monumental slime / Let the punishment fit the crime / We’ll tie you to a chair / The house music will blare / And turn your ears into a medicinal jelly” (from “Jo Jo’s Jacket”) come out smooth as butter....