Julia Thiel Pisco sour (sort of) Last weekend I had friends over for dinner and decided to make sorbet for dessert, finally using an ice cream maker gifted to me last fall by a friend who was moving away. I read through dozens of recipes—so many possibilities!—for strawberry, lemon, lime, basil, pepper, and a plethora of other sorbets. I was hoping that Stanley’s would still have Meyer lemons in stock since they seemed to be popular for making sorbet, but no such luck....

As Waylon Jennings once sang, ladies love outlaws, and judging by the enduring appeal of the outlaw trope in pop culture—especially in music—ladies aren’t the only ones. Rock ‘n’ roll and its many offshoots glorify the highwayman, the gunslinger, the lone warrior. In hip-hop and heavy metal alike, fans love to hear good songs about bad people, or about good people who’ve made bad decisions­—and Riot Fest provides plenty of opportunities....

Courtesy Second City Second City’s Neighborhood Tour Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Courtesy City of Chicago Bodies in Urban Space Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader’s daily Agenda page.

Courtesy the band Preservation Hall Jazz Band Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Andy Samberg hosted Saturday Night Live‘s finale. The 39th season of Saturday Night Live ended as it began—with a former cast member front and center as host. The Tina Fey-Andy Samberg sandwich (with a little Jimmy Fallon mustard in the middle for good measure) may have been in part to anchor this season of major transition. With heavy hitters Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis gone, a pair of new Weekend Update hosts behind the desk after Seth Meyers’s February departure, and a total of eight new cast member by season’s end, the direction of the show was up in the air....

In its ninth year, the Chicago Fringe Festival shrinks from two weeks to one. Time will tell if this is a meaningful return to its roots (the first ran for only five days), a temporary aberration, or a harbinger of its imminent demise. Hildegard of Bingen Musical Glenview’s With a Machete Productions debuts its tuneful take on the 12th-century mystic, composer, and natural scientist, written by the duo behind the company’s catchy Church of Modern Love....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Sunny Akhigbe, 44, bodybuilder, fitness model, trainer, and actor. I started working and training at a YMCA in LaPorte, Indiana. My body started transforming. People started saying, “Why don’t you go compete?” I said, “What does that mean?” I never heard about it. So I started training heavily and eating right, and I went to compete....

Unheralded Chicago music-biz veteran Willie Barney died of heart failure on Monday, February 20, at age 89. Born in Arkansas in 1927, he’s best known as the founder of west-side institution Barney’s One Stop and Record Shop, which he opened in 1953 as Barney’s Swing Shop. His career in music began rather modestly, according to his son, Ray: “He borrowed $300 from his family and started selling records out of the trunk of his car....

“For what’s the sound of the world out there / Those crunching noises pervading the air?” sings the title character of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in the show’s first-act finale. He then answers his own question with relish: “It’s man devouring man, my dear / And who are we to deny it in here?” When he directed the premiere of Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd on Broadway in 1979, director Harold Prince emphasized the saga’s potential for political commentary: his epic-scale production, which played at Chicago’s Arie Crown Theater in 1981, employed a sprawling network of catwalks and girders to evoke the story’s industrial-revolution setting....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

You won’t find very much visible wall space at Miishkooki gallery in Skokie this month. Artist Tim Kerr has used nearly every inch available in the venue to hang his colorful acrylic portraits—tributes to his heroes, which include figures as varied as bluesman Mance Lipscomb, photographer Walker Evans, and activist Fred Hampton—for his solo show “Your Name Here.” Kerr has included many Chicagoans, among them Ernie Banks, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Dawoud Bey, and Vivian Maier....

F for Fake This week the Gene Siskel Film Center screens a brand new DCP print of Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation, Othello. Scanned from the controversial 1992 restoration that toyed with the film’s sound design, this 2K digital version is said to retain the film’s visual qualities, which is encouraging considering how many subpar digital versions of classic movies are currently exhibited. As fate would have it, Othello is one of two Welles blind spots I need to remedy (the other being his TV movie The Immortal Story), and though I’d have liked to have seen this infamous 1992 version in the flesh, I’m excited nonetheless to finally catch up with what “may well be the greatest Shakespeare film,” according to Jonathan Rosenbaum....

48 Hrs. Tomorrow, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films screens Walter Hill’s The Warriors, the cult classic that’s gradually become a classic in general, a cornerstone of American genre filmmaking whose influence is as far reaching as anything in the canon. Alas, a lofty reputation doesn’t precede all of Hill’s work. He’s made some very bland and forgettable movies—Brewster’s Millions, yeesh—but at his best he’s as personal, emotional, and intellectual as any other great American auteur....

The members of Boston’s Bent Knee came together in 2009 while attending the Berklee College of Music, and there’s no question that the wildly ambitious sextet absorbed a lot of lessons and ideas while in school. As heard on its forthcoming fourth album, Land Animal (due June 23 from InsideOut Music), the group melds styles with breathless precision, putting a sparkling pop veneer on its elegant prog-rock grooves, thanks largely to the rangy vocals of keyboardist Courtney Swain....

Scott Herring is not a hoarder. He watches shows like Hoarders with the same appalled fascination as the rest of us. But Herring is also an English professor who specializes in American cultural studies, which means it’s his job to think about why shows like Hoarders appall and fascinate Americans to the degree that they do, and how hoarding has become transformed in the eyes of the public from an eccentricity to a mental disorder....

The Incredible Hank In the fictional city of Sandicago, superheroes and supervillains are running rampant. All except Hank, who would rather be the world’s greatest file clerk than even admit to possessing any special powers, much less use them to fight bad guys. But when his loudmouth superhero-wannabe boss, Carl, shoots the city’s greatest supervillain, Dr. Manticle, Hank is forced to step in and save the day. What makes this hour-long comedy from New Millennium Theatre Company work is that it’s sincere without being cloying and self-referential without being smug....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “There’s one Statesville character who has a huge, huge following. His name is Fluffy. He’s got a straitjacket with all the chains, a canvas mask with eyeholes, a big stitched-shut grin, and stringy black hair. He was a disturbed child, and he was left alone in an abandoned asylum and ate stuffed animals, and that’s why they call him Fluffy....

Keith Ian Polakoff Suzan Hanson, Nmon Ford: The bond is erotic in COT’s Macbeth. Sometimes, when a work is seldom produced, there are reasons. And COT is using Bloch’s own English translation of the Edmond Fleg libretto (originally in French), which is too choppy to do the Bard justice, even when it quotes him. Performances continue tonight and this weekend.