Julia Thiel Cantaloupe cocktail #1: extra foam edition Last week I bought a cantaloupe and promptly forgot about it until several days later, when the ripeness that had made me choose it in the first place was threatening to approach rotten. Fortunately I had a friend coming over for drinks that evening, so I turned to the internet for cocktail recipes involving cantaloupe. I eliminated ones that called for cantaloupe juice because juicing sounded like a lot of work, and one for a cantaloupe margarita that seemed to use way too much lime juice (it didn’t have very good reviews either)....

Well, this comes as a surprise. In a season that will go on to featureMamma Mia!, Little Shop of Horrors, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, at a suburban theater where the usual nonmusicals are chestnuts like The Gin Game and Deathtrap, somebody thought to revive Tennessee Williams’s wonderfully lurid 1955 drama of family dysfunction, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The cat of the title is Maggie, wife of former football hero Brick and daughter-in-law to the formidable Big Daddy, self-made man, whose Mississippi Delta farm holdings comprise, as he loves to say, “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile....

Challenged by Nandini Khaund of the app Craft Cocktail to make a drink with dandelion, Burlington bartender Sean Patrick Riley got, in his words, “esoteric,” perusing Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine. It’s a “great book about summer,” Riley said, and that, in combination with the “soul-crushing winter” we’ve had, inspired him to shoot for something in between. He was after “a springlike cocktail, earthy, with lots of botanicals.” He kept things simple at the end as well, garnishing with a lemon peel and, in lieu of a dandelion head, a flower petal....

Dave Rempis is an indefatigable concert organizer and bandleader. While his activities are essential to Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene, they aren’t entirely altruistic; they create multiple opportunities for him to play his alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones. Since he formed Triage with drummer Tim Daisy and bassist Gordon Lewis (later replaced by Jason Ajemian) 21 years ago, Rempis has thrived in improvising trios with collaborators who project musical identities as distinct and uncompromising as his own....

Courtesy of Closed Sessions Alex Wiley and Kembe X Local rapper Alex Wiley has been on a bit of a tear lately. He released four songs last week, and just yesterday he dropped “Know Normal,” an electrifying track recorded with his buddy and Village cohort Kembe X. Wiley hooked me with the rapid rapping at the beginning of “Know Normal,” which unfolds into a strangely alluring melody as it progresses....

ABC FAMILY/Ron Tom Miguel Pinzon, Jennie Garth, and Tori Spelling need to get a clue. Now that we’re pretty sure we’re getting a summer, it would be a shame to waste any of these precious, sun-filled hours watching TV, right? That is, aside from making sure to DVR the final season of True Blood, or keeping an eye out for the return of Masters of Sex or Pretty Little Liars....

108 E. Superior 312-337-2888 peninsula.com/chicago Runner-Up The Drake

Brigid Gallagher www.bgallagherphotos.com @CleChiCtq Runner-Up Greg Inda

Uncle Vanya Goodman Theatre www.goodmantheatre.org/season/1617-Season/Uncle-Vanya Runner-Up Picnic

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 4/18: Kelsie Huff hosts Open Books and Laugh at the Laugh Factory (3175 N. Broadway), a fund-raiser for Open Books featuring stand-up from Reena Calm, Lainie Lenertz, Tom Wisdom, Rebecca V. O’Neal, and more. 8 PM Thu 4/20: During the Black Scholars Salon at Rebuild Foundation (6760 S. Stony Island) Theaster Gates hosts Thelma Golden of Harlem’s Studio Museum for a discussion of her experience growing a black museum and the challenge of institutionality in black cultural spaces....

Indecent is more of a known quantity for me, inasmuch as I saw the version that ran on Broadway last year. In it, Vogel revisits the relatively obscure but wildly resonant history of a play: Sholem Asch’s The God of Vengeance. The sensational tale of a Jewish brothel keeper whose daughter falls for one of his prostitutes, Vengeance was such a succes de scandale in Europe that Asch brought it first to the Yiddish theaters of New York and then, in English translation, to Broadway....

Since singer-songwriter David Bazan dissolved his most popular band, Pedro the Lion, in 2005 he’s continued to make the kind of intimate, self-questioning indie rock that Pedro was known for, just operating under his own name. Pedro material has stuck around in Bazan’s performances too, albeit mostly in small doses—he’s been known to incorporate a track or two into the frequent solo acoustic living-room tours he’s made since 2009. (These intimate shows take place in galleries and even in the homes of strangers who open their doors to small groups of fellow fans....

Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • This characteristically droll Pete Wells review of Señor Frog’s? —Philip Montoro • About the gang of strippers that drugged Wall Street assholes and maxed out their credit cards? —Aimee Levitt

Chicago Craft Beer Week is back, and it’s as overwhelming as ever: the first night alone features more than two dozen tap takeovers, beer dinners, special releases, and other events. The length of CCBW has actually been scaled back slightly, to eight days (May 18-25)—down from the week and a half that’s been the norm for the past several years—but the events still number in the hundreds. Many perennial favorites, like Beer Under Glass, Goose Island’s Battle of the Breweries Dodgeball Tournament, and the Northwest Side Craft Beer Ride, remain unchanged (and are still good bets)....

The trailer for American Ultra promised something like The Bourne Identity by way of Pineapple Express, with an aimless stoner (Jesse Eisenberg) discovering that he’s really a CIA-programmed killing machine with amnesia. That is in fact the plot, but the mood is far more melancholy than the trailer conveyed. American Ultra isn’t an exuberant action comedy like Pineapple, but rather a downbeat suspense film with jokey elements. (Screenwriter Max Landis is the son of director John Landis, and his ambitious, if unsuccessful, mix of tones suggests an update of his father’s noble failure Into the Night....

Chicago River Canoe & Kayak 3400 N. Rockwell Runner-Up Wateriders – Chicago River Kayak Tours and Rentals

5024 N. Sheridan 773-728-5511 bigchicks.com Runner-Up Berlin

East Room 2354 N. Milwaukee Runner-Up Bottom Lounge

Labor Day weekend has arrived (finally!). Sleep in, graze during a long brunch, then head out to some the recommended goings-on about town. In addition to the Chicago Jazz Festival and North Coast Music Festival, here are some of our other favorites happening during the holiday weekend: Mon 9/4: At Herold, an all-women cast perform iO’s (1501 N. Kingsbury) signature long-form improv style the Harold, in which an opening abstract scene inspires more grounded scenes that tell recurring stories throughout the roughly half-hour-long set....