If you have ever wondered "who plays a tuba?" — and who hasn't? — you will be able to find an answer, or hundreds of them, Saturday at the venerable and exquisite Palmer House Hilton, where some 400 tuba-playing people will gather with their instruments to make beautiful noise.

Anyone driving along the roads in southwestern Michigan can still see a number of large billboards that feature a photo of Richard Ruby and advertise his services as an attorney. But as devoted as Mr. Ruby was to the legal profession, these billboards represent but one chapter in an active...

Monday night in the coach house of the extraordinary Glessner House, William Tyre stood behind a podium and spoke to the hundred or so people who had come in from the cold and were sitting in chairs along the walls and standing in the middle of the ancient room. They listened to Tyre talk about...

Music is a large part of the holiday scene, of course, and so it was a bit strange to be standing on Michigan Avenue two Saturdays ago amid the mob that grows larger every year to experience the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival and listening to Hlengiwe Mkhwanazi atop a float singing a short...

One of the final films in the long and passionate career of moviemaker Jerry Blumenthal was 2010's "Prisoner of Her Past." It has aired more than 500 times on television stations in more than 140 markets, has toured the world and continues to play in theaters and at universities.

As anyone who watched her before, during and after her four tumultuous years as mayor of the city of Chicago would know, Jane Byrne was great theater: unpredictable, comic, dramatic.

Consider the naked man, standing on a small platform in Bottle & Bottega, a cozy and handsome BYOB painting studio in the Lakeview neighborhood. It is 7 p.m. on a Friday and there are 42 sets of eyes fixed on the naked man, the eyes of women who have gathered and will over the next couple of...

The suburb of Burr Ridge was founded in 1956, when Dennis DeYoung was a tiny 9-year-old boy living in the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland, fooling around with an accordion and dreaming some sort of musical dreams.