1. Carrie Fisher is still Wishful Drinking, and thank god. The show opens in Chicago at the Bank of America Theatre next week, and chock full of juicy details from Fisher’s very full life. In fact, a preview story in TimeOut Chicago includes the sentence, “A decade later, her daughter’s father left her for a man.”

2. The Beats continues to run at 16th Street Theater, with performances on Thursday and Friday followed by at Q&A. The play unsurprisingly follows the stories of visionaries like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Live jazz by Grant Stromeck and Doug Lofstrom. When it ran last winter, Kelly Kleiman called it “a thrilling immersion in the headwaters of contemporary American culture.”

3. Glen Ellyn’s New Philharmonic starts the new season (the 35th) with “Joy! Beethoven” this weekend. It’s not your usual fare; there will be performances by guests like Michelle Areyzaga (soprano), Denise Gamez (mezzo), John Sumners (tenor) and Corey Crider (baritone), all joined by the Northwest Indiana Symphony Chorus. Tickets are resonably priced, depending of course, on what you consider reasonable (around $38).

4. Red Orchid has Becky Shaw, about a blind date that goes very, very wrong. “I was interested in the scenario of a disastrous first date,” writer Gina Gionfriddo told the Sun-Times. “How, when something is important to you, a simple thing like a wrong dress can shift the power in the room out of your favor.” Gionfriddo has written extensively for television, but apparently wasn’t getting an outlet for “existential-philosophical things.”

5. Deanna Isaacs at the Reader had some harsh words about yesterday’s “Paint the Town RED Day.” “you can dip your hand in red paint, slap it on a giant canvas, and help make painter Mark Rothko — who hung out in the dark, winced when his paintings were shown, and didn’t want to be a commodity — roll in his grave,” wrote Isaacs.

Questions? Tips? Email kdries@wbez.org.