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Rock, Pop, etc. CHICAGO A CAPPELLA performs American popular songs in a program called “Stormy Weather.” Sat 3/2, 8 PM, Unity Temple, 875 Lake, Oak Park. Sat 3/9, 8 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton. Sun 3/10, 7:30 PM, Lutkin Hall, Northwestern University, 700 University, Evanston. 773-755-1628 or 800-746-4969. JEFF DEYO BAND Sat 3/9, 7 PM, Ozinga Chapel, Trinity Christian College, 6601 W. College Dr., Palos Heights. 800-965-9324. GO-GO’S, DUVALL Wed 3/6, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N....

When Al Harris made an unscheduled guest appearance with the Sons of Blues at last year’s Chicago Blues Festival, an international audience learned what habitues of Maxwell Street, the now-defunct Delta Fish Market at Jackson and Kedzie, and neighborhood joints like Mr. Tee’s have known for years: that he’s a charismatic, soulful singer and showman who can warm up a stage or bring down the house, and whose range encompasses everything from 12-bar Chicago blues to deep soul to contemporary R & B....

It wasn’t easy growing up outside of Toledo for Korean siblings Agnes Hong and Peter Mah. “Our friends weren’t familiar with Korean food,” says 29-year-old Mah, owner of the recently opened Andersonville restaurant Jin Ju. “It was embarrassing when they’d open the refrigerator and see kimchi and say ‘Ooh, what’s that? And what’s that smell?’” Their parents emigrated from Korea in 1971 and did everything in their power to assimilate the kids into American culture in terms of language, dress, and activities, but mealtime still involved dishes like pajon (scallion pancake), dak gan jang (fried chicken wings in a caramelized sweet-spicy sauce), miyuk (seaweed soup with mussels), and o jinga bokum (sauteed squid with hot green chili peppers and onions)....

Friday 1/24 – Thursday 1/30 25 SATURDAY To help its 100-odd members write mystery stories with the bite of truth, the local lit group Sisters in Crime brings in expert speakers to address everything from hostage situations and tactical operations to forensic dentistry. Today at 11 AM representatives from the Plainfield police and fire departments will discuss All You Ever Wanted to Know About Arson and Were Afraid to Ask. The free event takes place at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, 7419 W....

Friday 1/11 – Thursday 1/17 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 12 SATURDAY According to professional hypnotist Evan Gollrad, when the world peanut market became glutted around the turn of the 20th century, farmers asked agronomist George Washington Carver to come up with some new uses for the legume. Carver sat down upon the sandy soil and asked the peanut in his hand, “What are you good for besides eating?...

Friday 10/24 – Thursday 10/30 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)....

Friday 10/10 – Thursday 10/16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “There are a lot of poker books out there,” says Jake Austen, “but they’re all about how to win in Vegas, and have a lot of math and stuff.” Austen, publisher of the zine Roctober and producer of the cable access show Chic-a-Go-Go, put together A Friendly Game of Poker: 52 Takes on the Neighborhood Game after the idea was tossed out by the host of his regular game–Chicago Review Press editor Yuval Taylor....

Send in the clowns–but keep the kids away. This festival of clowning features adult-oriented shows by local and visiting artists, along with a “clown jam” and workshops. Running through April 15 and featuring two to three shows a night, it’s the first edition of what organizers hope will be an annual event. All performances take place at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Admission is $10 per show (except where noted otherwise below); a four-admission pass costs $30....

Susan Marshall & Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sleeping Beauty opens with startling postmodern clanging and the sound of thunderous feet. These turn out to belong to the piece’s seven dancers, arrayed casually in shorts and judo robes. Sleeping Beauty herself (the superb Kristen Hollinsworth) is dressed in dance trunks and a T-shirt, defeating any romantic notion of the heroine, and her movements are equally off-kilter: quite a bit of her time is spent facedown, butt up, in a position like yoga’s downward-facing dog....

Flush with the conviction of a lived faith, some of the paintings in the Art Institute’s magnificent “Himalayas” show are as fine as any art now on view in Chicago. Three of the best are Tibetan. The dazzling detail of the 12th-century Scenes From the Life of Buddha Shakyamuni gives it a map-of-the-world completeness. The central Buddha, whose smile is neither happy nor amused, is surrounded by vignettes of his life encased in a symmetrical framework that’s like a transcendent form organizing the vagaries of daily existence....

It was in 1990 that Gregg Bassett had his first close encounter with a squirrel, when she pressed her nose against his back porch window. “I was never the same after that,” he says. Squirrels began approaching cautiously when he and his wife, Kathy, took their evening walks. Bassett coaxed one squirrel to take a nut from his hand, and eventually a squirrel he named GG–short for “Gray Girl”–began taking peanuts from his mouth....

Chicago is a city that is very proud of its blues music heritage, so much so that our unofficial anthem is the blues tune “Sweet Home Chicago.” Our tourist and convention trade guides thousands of travelers to our several blues clubs and through several blues-themed business meetings. As a local cameraman, I shoot plenty of these various doings every year. Blues music is big business, and the city of Chicago knows this very well....

If you missed The Optimists during its run in Wilmette last fall, here’s another chance to see it. Jacky Comforty, an Evanston comedy writer, took up documentary filmmaking in order to tell this story about the fate of Bulgarian Jews in World War II, and spent more than a decade working on it. While The Optimists–cowritten by his wife, Lisa–can occasionally look like any family-history video, the tale is extraordinary even in the genre of Holocaust history....

Choreographer Ashley Roland has a knack for the striking solo. Formerly a member of Momix and a cofounder of ISO Dance and BodyVox, she has the ability to take an image and run with it, as she demonstrated in Captain Tenacity–a solo involving a superhero and Velcro that’s become a favorite among River North viewers. Now the company adds Roland’s Beat to its repertoire. Set to Evan Solot’s percussive music, it features a woman in a metallic costume whose abrupt, rapid movements seem both animalistic and mechanical....

Once or twice a week in his Oak Park home, Kris Lenzo slides out of his wheelchair and scoots downstairs to the basement. Once there, he wiggles into and laces up a pair of pants designed for trapeze artists, then uses his muscular arms to climb to the top of a six-foot-tall wooden apparatus–essentially a plank rigged onto a scaffold. His wife, Sheri, or his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Natalie, straps him in....

It’s about time our gay communities got stirred up over something more controversial than the right to enter into imitations of heterosexual marriage. And you couldn’t ask for a juicier controversy than the one swirling around Mississippi drag performer Charles Knipp, aka Shirley Q. Liquor. On her ever changing Web site, her numerous CDs, and her syndicated radio spots (heard on some 900 stations), Liquor embodies every appalling stereotype of the trash-talking, perpetually put-upon African-American welfare mother raising her 19 “chirrun....

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s final collaboration is also one of their most interesting. In this “spectacle in nine scenes,” as Weill called it, the Threepenny Opera creators relate the story of two sisters–or two halves of the same person–who set out to earn the money to build a home for their impoverished family in rural Louisiana....

This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though side interests periodically distract them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird)....

A depressed multimillionaire, Victor, bent on starving to death in a restaurant catering only to him is at the center of Michael Hollinger’s play. But John Coriell’s disaffected portrayal works only when Victor quotes Hemingway, not when he tells his own life story. Aimlessly pacing the stage and stumbling over some lines, Coriell lacks the charisma that would explain the cafe staff’s loving loyalty. It falls to the supporting actors to give the show flavor, and director Lauren Golanty sometimes pushes the farce too hard....

The Hypocrites’ Sean Graney has always been good at coaxing great drama out of difficult texts. Even when he’s tackling outright nonsense, like Sam Shepard’s crazy one-act Action, he usually finds the right cast and the right rhythms to transform words on a page into powerful theater. And when Graney’s working with a strong play, as he did last winter when he directed Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1933 tragedy Blood Wedding, the result is pure gold....