Alderman Scott Waguespack sat for a portrait recently at Jim Newberry's Bucktown studio.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

If you’re not doing anything the evening of March 19, you might consider a visit to the Johalla Projects Gallery in Wicker Park for the opening of the “Aldermen Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists” show.
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Bernard Beck performing a scene from “Number of People,” which was written by his daughter.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Six years ago, the playwright Emilie Beck was home with a colicky baby and a mounting sense of disconnection from the rest of the world when she read about an exchange between President George W. Bush and Bob Woodward, the author and journalist.
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Amy Morton, who is directing “Awake and Sing!” at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, is uncomfortable with all of the trimmings that come with acting in films.
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative

Amy Morton has a role in “Up in the Air,” one of the year’s most lauded films, sharing the screen — and her character’s wellspring of acerbity — with none other than George Clooney.

And yet, as the film and its stars continue to rack up nominations and the Hollywood awards season reaches its frenetic climax, Ms. Morton is 2,000 miles away, directing regional theater and hunkering down against a particularly brutal blast of Midwestern winter weather. She couldn’t be happier.

“Am I going to the awards shows?” Ms. Morton, an Oak Park native who played Mr. Clooney’s sister Kara, said, shaking her head as if warding off an incipient nightmare. “No, thank God.”
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Restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Tru and Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

Chicago has long attracted ambitious immigrants from all corners of the world. World champion bakers from tiny Alsatian villages are not usually among them.

Pierre Zimmermann may well be the first when he arrives in August to join the faculty of Chicago’s French Pastry School. Mr. Zimmermann stands out in the tightly-knit and highly competitive international baking scene as the latest in four generations of his family who have run a boulangerie-patisserie in Schnersheim.
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Brian Dennehy, in “Krapp's Last Tape,” said he enjoyed the play's “dark, sardonic humor of life.”
Bonnie Trafalet/Chicago News Cooperative

When Brian Dennehy steps onto the stage at the Goodman Theatre and launches into his bravura portrayal of Erie Smith, the washed-up hustler at the heart of Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie,” you sense that you are watching a man who is very much at home.

That is hardly surprising, given how much of his life Mr. Dennehy has spent treading the floorboards of the world’s stages, and this stage in particular. In the 25 years since his Chicago theater debut, Mr. Dennehy, 71, has become a fixture at the Goodman. And while he continues to call his native Connecticut home, in many ways he has come to represent the thriving theater culture in his adopted city.
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Anna Shteynshleyger, with her photo “Elisha,” at her exhibition at the University of Chicago.
Heather Stone/Chicago News Cooperative

If outsider status were the sole prerequisite for artistic success, Anna Shteynshleyger would be the most important artist of her time. As it is, she is not doing too badly: she is a rising star in the elite world of contemporary art photography.

Ms. Shteynshleyger’s life has been largely defined by her separateness: as an immigrant in America, a religious Jew in the art world, a single parent in the Orthodox Jewish community. She has adapted by becoming a keen observer — the quintessential voyeur, whose photographs, some of which are on display at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, reflect both a cool detachment and a quiet yearning.
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Eddie Pickens Jr. helps run Marvin's Soul Food restaurant, where the feeling reminds customers of their country childhoods.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

Lunching on greens and cornbread, the dignified church ladies huddled around a table at Marvin’s Soul Food restaurant on Cicero Avenue. They talked about corrupt politics, a wayward society and the truth of the Bible.

“If you’ve got a problem,” Sadie Coleman said with a disarming wink, “we’ll solve it for you.”

Dressed in Sunday church finery and fashionable hats, these devout Baptist women looked decades younger than their ages, 70s and 80s — evidence, it seemed, of virtuous living.
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Twice a month, Ava Zeligson stands in front of 55 strangers and, with her infectious enthusiasm, explains why each of them can make a difference in the battle against Chicago’s deeply entrenched illiteracy rate.

Ms. Zeligson is the volunteer coordinator for Open Books, the latest addition to the city’s crowded field of literacy organizations. The fact that nearly everyone who attends an Open Books orientation session goes on to volunteer is testament, at least in part, to her powers of persuasion. The fact that anyone shows up in the first place shows the wide appeal of Open Books’ mission and its relentlessly upbeat, cheerfully aggressive approach to voluntary recruitment.
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Greg Pasenko is turning a former sports bar on West North Avenue into Club Blujazz.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Surveying the chaos at 1540 West North Avenue, it is hard to believe this former sports bar will soon be a sleek new jazz club.

Up front sits a half-built stage. Piles of new and old wood, along with pipes and conduits tagged for disposal, litter the dust-scuffed floor. In back are strewn five big-screen plasma TVs and various kitchen devices.

“You can’t believe how much progress we’ve made in just two weeks,” Greg Pasenko, the 60-year-old co-proprietor, said a few days into the new year.
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Along Devon Avenue, on the city's North Side, smells of Indian and Pakistani spices blend with the different languages
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

Abdul Kagdi looked up from his Koran with a stare as frigid as the winter breeze swirling outside his 110-220 Volts Electronics shop. “I only have a few minutes,” he said, his courtesy overcoming his irritation at being interrupted. “I’m praying.”

Mr. Kagdi’s shop is located at one of Chicago’s more unusual street corners. Neighbors who inhabit the red and yellow brick walk-up apartments that surround the store come largely from an area of the world that fights over the Kashmir Valley, which lies in the middle of the rivalry between India and Pakistan and where people of different religions attack and kill one another.
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