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After the woman had finished her lecsó sandwich, cherry turnover, and choco-spice latte, she asked if she could take a nap on the couch. Lecsó, a paprika-stained Hungarian stew of lard-sauteed peppers and tomatoes, doesn’t typically appear on a sandwich. But it is typically consumed with bread, as it is with Finom’s slightly more traditional expression of it, served in a mini Le Creuset crock, crowned with a sel gris-sprinkled sunny-side up egg....

Summer finally feels like it’s in gear, and there’s a lot happening around town on this first weekend of June. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 6/4-Sun 6/5: Redheads unite in Highwood Park (17 Highwood) in suburban Highwood for Redhead Days Chicago, a weekend of food trucks, live music, and red-themed cocktails. Don’t miss the annual Carrot Cake Throwdown on Saturday afternoon, when North Shore chefs—from eateries like Taste on Chestnut and Nothing Bundt Cakes—compete in a carrot cake cook-off....

Inside Out, the latest Disney-Pixar coproduction, feels like a clever educational short stretched to feature length. It has plenty to teach viewers about the workings of the human mind (writers Josh Cooley, Meg LeFauve, and Pete Docter reportedly spent years researching the subject), and it employs an array of imaginative strategies to make those lessons palatable to a wide audience. Most of the film takes place inside the brain of Riley, an 11-year-old girl; the principal characters are anthropomorphized versions of the five emotional states that govern her personality—joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust....

For better or worse, the American indie-rock touring circuit is clogged with fabled acts celebrating some kind of anniversary. But a nostalgia trip wasn’t what multidisciplinary Chicago artist Tim Kinsella had in mind for Joan of Arc, the band he fronts, which is often categorized as “indie rock” even though it’s deeply experimental in practice. So how does a group that makes what Kinsella describes as “music for no audience” ring in two decades of existence?...

Q: I’m a 56-year-old heterosexual man, and I’ve lived with ALS for the past six years. I am either in a wheelchair or in a hospital bed, and I have very little motor ability in my limbs. Like most or all male ALS patients, I still have full sensory ability, including a fully functioning penis. Are there safe websites or groups I can connect with that deal with helping paralytics like me find people who are interested in hooking up?...

Emo legends Cap’n Jazz haven’t played since 2010, but they aren’t entirely dead—at least not according to a source close to the band (who prefers to remain anonymous because he enjoys “a sniff of espionage”). Cap’n Jazz has received a few offers to play shows, and the dudes are wrestling with the “cost/benefit ratio of saying yes to them.” If they do play, there will likely be a new face in the band: Gossip Wolf’s source expects Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil, Forgetters) to replace Davey von Bohlen (Promise Ring, Maritime) on guitar and backing vocals....

Paige Wynne Radio Advertising Inc. Along Peterson Avenue on the city’s northwest side sits a succession of relatively pristine, albeit aging, examples of garden-variety midcentury modern architecture. Among these mostly commercial properties, 3312 W. Peterson is unique: a building displaying 1960s design elements still occupied by a business straight out of the mid-20th century. “People that are coming in for job interviews walk up and kind of question [the building]....

Reading Daniel Immerwahr’s latest book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, feels like an exercise in pulling back a carefully maintained curtain. Immerwahr, a Chicago-based historian and Northwestern University professor, spares no crucial details in his survey of the history of the United States outside the 50 states. Through a sweeping examination of American colonialism past and present, including now-states Alaska and Hawaii, former holdings such as the Philippines, and enduring territories like Puerto Rico, Immerwahr paints a picture of imperialism as an intractable force in American history from the very beginning....

A broken bookshelf puts her in contact with Abel, the night janitor, whose ethnic coding she initially interprets as Mexico Mexican. It takes a very funny, slow­-building bit during which she assails him with Spanish before she realizes she’s wrong: he’s California Mexican, in fact, with a stubborn prole traditionalist streak.

The Black Ensemble Theater has long been a reliable destination for original, larger-than-life biographical musicals about larger-than-life artistic icons. Next year, upon the completion of a 150-seat studio theater space in its building in Uptown, members of the company’s Black Playwrights Initiative will have a new outlet for experimental and dramatic works intended to resonate on a more intimate and more personal scale. “It’s going to be hot,” she says with a laugh....

Seeing examples of corporate welfare in other cities and states also helped answer a question I used to hear all the time. “Ben,” they’d say, “this TIF stuff sounds bad, but don’t other cities do the same thing?” People were particularly obsessed with New York City. As though, if New New York’s wasting money like we’re wasting money, then somehow it’s not so bad that we’re wasting money.

Sometime next month, Action Boyz podcast subscribers will listen to comedians Jon Gabrus, Ben Rodgers, and Ryan Stanger give a warmly received, nearly three-hour play-by-play breakdown of the 1985 Chuck Norris cop flick Code of Silence to a packed Chicago ballroom. And when they hear those three improvisers and friends perform a tsunami of inspired riffs, impressions, and inside jokes, in all likelihood, those subscribers will be listening alone. Over at the bar, someone has left out a cardboard box of red buttons with the words “janitor” and “kisses for Stanger” emblazoned on them, nods to recurring jokes about the show’s listenership (“Who is cleaning all the middle schools?...

If you think the album title The Much Much How How and I is whimsical and amusing, you’ll probably love the fey, fabulous, and hokey music of its creator, London composer and multi-instrumentalist Cosmo Sheldrake. On his 2018 full-length debut, released by Transgressive Records, Sheldrake doesn’t quite attain the cracked genius of oddball predecessors such as Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson, but he never defaults to the worst excesses of Paul McCartney either....

Natalie Hoffmann is best known as a vocalist and guitarist with Memphis noise-punk band Nots, but in Optic Sink, her new project with percussionist Ben Bauermeister, she trades quirky, garagey rock for stripped-back, electronics-heavy postpunk exploration. In recent years Hoffmann has been dealing with a creative block triggered by losing two loved ones, but she reconnected with her musical voice during a residency at Memphis multidisciplinary arts center Crosstown Arts. Ruminating on grief, pain, and freedoms both personal and political, she sketched out the album’s stark, synth-driven songs largely on her own, before joining forces with Bauermeister....

ARTIST: Jake Keenum SHOW: Sophagus, Swells, Cado San, and Energy Vision at the Burlington on Tue 9/17 MORE INFO: energyvision.bandcamp.com

We spend at least 40 hours a week next to them and countless more rehashing our interactions, but how well do we really know our coworkers? Laura and the Sea, a Rivendell Theatre Ensemble world premiere by Kate Tarker, directed by Devon de Mayo, examines both the false sense of closeness and utter disconnection that can come with close proximity of desks, not hearts and minds. After Laura (Tara Mallen) commits suicide at a company outing, her colleagues at a small travel agency start a cringeworthy memorial blog that serves as a sharp, Office Space-style satire of what mourning has become in the digital age....

W hen Rolling Stone profiled transgender Against Me! singer­songwriter Laura Jane Grace in September the piece included a photo of the musician, topless and reclined in a half-full bathtub, her face and breasts emerging from beneath the water. Grace’s ex-wife, Chicago visual artist and Hide front woman Heather Gabel, had a number of issues with the article—among them the narrow approach to gender it took, the flawed portrayal of her separation from Grace in 2013, and the aforementioned image of her ex, which was uncensored despite the magazine’s long history of obscuring women’s nipples in salacious pictures....

Brick by Brick” is a new yearlong exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Its subject? Legos! The show connects the childhood activity of playing with the toy bricks with serious subjects like physics and architecture through replicas of iconic buildings, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, One World Trade Center, the Hoover Dam, Cinderella’s Disney World castle, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House in southwestern Pennsylvania, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Saint Louis’s Gateway Arch, and the Colosseum, among others....

Memory is an abstraction. It holds our entire history, but how much of that is our ‘real’ story? And what stories do we tell ourselves about this story? —Monica J. Brown, Artist’s Statement It’s an epic mission: YOMHN gave birth to Zilpha in 1830 in North Carolina. After that, four generations were born in Tennessee: Zilpha’s daughter Parthena, in 1861; Parthena’s daughter Ora, in 1891; Ora’s daughter Grace, in 1910; and Grace’s daughter Flora, in 1925....