Oobleck has a busy weekend!

Company member Dave Buchen co-curates the opening weekend of the Banners & Cranks Festival of Cantastoria at Links Hall — featuring Bread & Puppet, Claire Dolan, Blair Thomas, and more .

He follows that up on Monday with The Wine Cycle — a special Oobleck cantastoria performance at the Hideout with company member ““Chris Schoen.**

Redmoon closes The Cabinet , by Oobleck company member Mickle Maher and featuring the voice of Oobleck company member Colm O’Reilly.

Mickle’s Spirits to Enforce — which Oobleck premiered in 2003 — opens this weekend in Milwaukee in a production by the Youngblood Theatre , running through May 9.

And audiences just have three more weekends to catch company member Guy Massey, who “gives a nuanced and meticulous performance” (says the Chicago Tribune) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Gift Theatre Company .

Sylvia Drake, of the podcast I Just Got Here, talks with Mickle Maher about Faustus, the Strangerer, the Hunchback Singspiel, theater-as-origami, and the fundamental weirdness of asking people to sit quietly in a dark room listening to other people talk for an hour or more. Highly entertaining!

The Soup and Bread Cookbook, edited by Martha Bayne and featuring recipes from Oobleck regulars and irregulars Guy Massey, Kristin Basta, Chris Schoen, and David Kodeski, as well as a plethora of other Chicago writers, cooks, artists, and musicians, hit the streets this week.

Drawn from recipes provided during the three-month run of Soup and Bread, a fundraiser for the Greater Chicago Food Depository organized by Martha at the Hideout over the winter of 2009, the cookbook’s a great collection of 60 soups, breads, and miscellaneous baked goods. But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what Hugh Amano, proprietor of the excellent Food on the Dole has to say.

“The book is a significant document on the importance of food and community. It isn’t glitzy, nor are there any celebrity chef endorsements. It’s a super-local (is there any bar more local than The Hideout?) source of lore about and recipes for real food (what is more real than soup or bread?). It’s a book of genuine people from all angles of life sharing food and recipes with each other in an effort to help more others yet. As put forth by Martha, Soup and Bread is “an ‘everybody wins’ type of project”. And the cookbook is a beautifully designed, thoughtful extension of that.”

The book’s available for $20 at the Hideout, and at Renegade Handmade, Swim Cafe, Green Grocer Chicago, and Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand, the city-run grocery devoted to local, sustainable food and food products.

Don’t want to leave the house? The internet is here to help. Just click the PayPal link in the sidebar here and one will be shipped straight to your home for an additional $2 surcharge.

From the Oobleckisphere:

On Wednesday, October 7, the lovely and charming Diana Slickman and cabaret host David Kodeski cohost Veggie Bingo at the Hideout. Come out and win prizes ranging from a a jar of honey gleaned from the bees atop City Hall to a bag of fresh vegetables from Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks. There may be some peculiarly Oobleckian prizes as well.

Proceeds from each night of Veggie Bingo go to help fund local community gardens and urban agricultural ventures; this week’s beneficiary is Videnovich Farms. It’s from 6 to 8 PM at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, and cards are $1 a pop, or 6 for $5.

“This (Too Much Light) was the most exciting thing in Chicago
theater- this and Theater Oobleck’s, “The Spy Threw His Voice.” Those
two things blew me away.”

So sayeth Stephen Colbert, in an interview conducted by NeoFut intern Willy Applebaum, posted yesterday on John Pierson’s blog documenting the checkered history of the NeoFuturists, and (by inevitable extension) the Chicago fringe in general. Keep scrolling down for fantastically detailed interviews with Oobleck regular Diana Slickman and irregulars Heather Riordan and Scott Hermes.