How did they expect to survive reality TV anyway?

Jon and Kate were just the latest in a long line of people who somehow thought they were special enough to overcome the deleterious forces of reality fame.

AC/DC’s performance Friday at a near-capacity United Center didn’t significantly deviate from its successful two-night stand last fall at Allstate Arena. Then again, there’s little reason to tweak time-honored consistency and tradition.

Would you be alarmed if you spotted a strange-looking man wearing black sweat pants and a couple of raincoats wandering in the rain in your front yard?

Olympic champion figure skater Scott Hamilton is returning to the ice. The gold medal-winner is making a comeback after a five-year hiatus, during which he was treated for a pituitary gland tumor.

“That was … awesome! That was so … good, you guys are all pregnant,” joked Blink-182 guitarist/singer Tom DeLonge in an expletive-filled moment during the trio’s sold-out show Saturday at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre. Yes, everyone has to grow up at some point, and while Blink-182’s last record pointed to a matured outlook in songwriting and lyrics, its show was also a reminder that adulthood doesn’t mean you have to take everything so seriously.

The beloved musical “My Fair Lady,” most people think, is about the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl whose life is transformed after she learns to elongate her vowels in “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain .” In fact, class mobility comes naturally and easily to Eliza. Like George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” the play that inspired Broadway’s Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, “My Fair Lady” is really about the transformation of Henry Higgins, Eliza’s initially cruel mentor.

Conlon conducts Verdi’s tragedy at Ravinia with Hvorostovsky in lead role

The concert version of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” that concluded the summer residency of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia on Saturday night was a classy addition to the festival’s long and fabled operatic history.

It has been the summer of dueling ninth symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler, courtesy of the Chicago Symphony and Grant Park Orchestras, with their respective choruses.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The first-time director and cast of unknowns of the acclaimed sci-fi thriller “District 9 ” have given Hollywood a late-summer box-office boost.