“This isn’t done out of a sense of charity,” Fries insists. “It’s part of my art practice…. How could someone say this isn’t performance art when as soon as a bag comes in I put it away?”

These ruthless rollers, these terminators in tutus, achieved the fiercest display of athletic prowess in booty shorts and fishnets that I have ever witnessed.

The menu features such “hardcore” items as the “Death Sentence,” a bacon double-cheeseburger with caramelized onions, and the “Prison Shank,” a series of “succulent marinated steak skewers” with a cucumber salad on the side. Alas: No finger bowls.

Yet in his younger days he explored, crawled through Chicago and found its gems. He declares, humorously, that the two favorite things in his life are “jazz and steaks.” Chicago, he admits, is rewarding in both regards.

The glitzy emerald marquee on Broadway declares this a haven for live, unfiltered jazz. Sandwiched between the twenty-four-hour Broadway Grill and the post-fraternity Crew, the Green Mill transmits a confidently out-of-place elegance into the Uptown evening, doing so with a verdant sign that makes it seem natural.

The bravest will laugh self-consciously upon being called “bitch” by the woman at the cash register, order a “fucking chardog,” and then retreat, an heroic conqueror, to the half-giggling fanfare of her flip cronies.

I watched the gentleman to my right pass his time with a RedEye Sudoku as one of the Banana-Clipped on my left enjoyed a Big Gulp with such zeal that I feared for the straw. This must be some kind of joke.

For a smaller theater, a major intersection in the culturally unspoiled Pilsen is a kind of Xanadu. For most of the tenants of the Podmajersky spaces surrounding Eighteenth and Halsted, the same is true: Accessibility and, for lack of a less eyebrow-raising term, existential authenticity are non-combative assets here.

While NBC’s admen should have waltzed into one of any number of mega-churches in the United States and announced a network-television retelling of David and Saul, they peddled the show to the so-called “cultural tastemakers,” who were to “spread the word to the masses” by marketing the curio of a modern monarchy.