Matt D. holds up his Magners Comedy Festival trophy, won this past weekend in Boston.

Cambridge comedian Matt D. has to update his bio: He won the Magners Comedy Festival last weekend.

The festival ran Wednesday through Sunday at five venues throughout Boston, bringing to town names such as Colin Quinn and Marc Maron (for a public recording of his “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast) and making some new ones — namely that of Matt D., who is soon off to Glasgow, Scotland, courtesy of the hard cider company to compete in the Glasgow International Comedy Festival starting March 15.

Onstage, Matt D. typically presents himself as mopey and nearly withdrawn, approaching the microphone with a sullen hesitancy that makes his acerbic one-liners land with deadly impact, then retreating to resign himself to part with another. His jokes often give a twist to a common phrase or situation: “Personally, I prefer gummy Pepsi bottles” was a recent offering. Or: “One of my plants just died after a long battle with me being lazy.”

The comedian (who accepted his trophy in a T-shirt with a flying pig design) spent several tweets thanking people who congratulated him and being generally modest (sample boast: “Thanks to Magners USA for throwing a great festival! Amazing experience. Also Nick’s Comedy Stop and Mottley’s Comedy for hosting the shows!”) prompting fellow comedian Ted Pettingell to tell him, “You already won, you can stop being nice.”

While Matt D. is a mainstay at local clubs such as the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square, his next show is Thursday at Foxwoods in Connecticut, the start of a three-night stand at its Comix Club. On Feb. 8, he’s back at ImprovBoston in Central Square.

Raj Sivaraman, another Cambridge comedian, offered his congratulations for the Magners win in the form of a suggestion.

“Hopefully he will use the prize money to buy a new shirt,” Sivaraman tweeted.

“Hope,” by Hannah Ashe, will be among the photographs on display through March in The Fay Chandler Gallery.

Also showing are self-portraits in graphite, such as this one by Arjun Joyce, and works including “Moroccan Red” by Youssef Eddafali.

For those inclined to look at art and complain, “My kid could have done that,” here’s an art exhibit where they probably did. But with the high level of instruction and accomplishment in the Art Department of Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, that’s hardly an insult.

The “Creativity is Alive!” exhibit at The Fay Chandler Gallery opened Monday and runs through March 2, with a reception with the artists Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Work on view includes photographs by students in classes taught by Debi Milligan and Archy LaSalle; ceramic pieces from a class taught by John Gould; jewelry created by students of Bianca Hegre; and drawings from the “Foundations of Art: Self-Portraits” class taught by Elizabeth Menges.

“All portraits were drawn by students in graphite from photograph or mirror. This was the most challenging project for them because it involved a high level of technical skill and forced them to draw what they saw instead of using the symbols in their head,” Menges said, giving a sense of how seriously the school takes its teaching. “This amount of analysis and close observation helped them notice the beautiful eccentricities of each of their faces, and created a new level of comfort with themselves and their drawing abilities.”

Hours for the exhibit are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The gallery is at 20 Sacramento St., in the Agassiz neighborhood near the Porter Square T stop on the red line. For information, click here.

This post took significant amounts of information from a press release.

A dancer sweeps around the stage in Callie Chapman’s politically charged “Left,” coming to Harvard Square’s Oberon on Sunday and Monday. (Photo: Khristophe Diaz)

The dance coming to Harvard Square’s Oberon this weekend is distinctly international in flavor, but it’s the trans-Atlantic troupe expandance with a work showing what happens when rock ’n’ roll meets yoga, while it’s Somerville’s Zoé Dance Company performing a piece about Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship. (Irish dance artist Ailish Claffey contributes a third piece “inspired by Ireland’s rugged beauty, unyielding land and the harsh realities that face its people.”)

“With the economy in a rut, it’s nice to know you can find art created to make you think, feel and see the beauty again,” the creators say, noting tickets for $25 or less and calling the night full of “ambitious and diverse dance works that will enliven your spirit.”

Zoé Dance describes choreographer Callie Chapman’s politically charged “Left” as a “thought-provoking and physically stunning new contemporary dance,” and there’s backup for the boast. Dance critic Iris Fanger called it some of the year’s best:

The Zoé Dance Company hit all the right moves with “Left” — a passionate response to the repression caused by dictatorships. This program is one reason to watch the talent bubbling up from the smaller dance companies.

It, expandance’s “Rock Om” and “Cnoic Chlaonta” by Claffey and expandance choreographer Alicia Chistofi-Walshe have two-and-a-half-hour performances at Oberon at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, with tickets going for $25 for table seats, $20 for general admission and $18 for students, seniors and Boston Dance Alliance members.

There’s also an hour-and-a-half free performance scheduled for 6 p.m. Friday giving people a chance to meet the dancers and choreographers, see improvised dance and nosh on wine and cheese. The location is to be announced.

For information about the Friday performance, e-mail Zoé Dance here. For information about the Sunday and Monday performances, or to buy tickets, click here.

Mindy Kaling talks with reporters at the 2009 Screen Actors Guild awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. (Photo: Kristin Dos Santos)

She’s conquered standup comedy and become a star on NBC’s “The Office.” She’s written books (including a funny memoir, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”) and plays (“Matt & Ben,” about Cantabrigians Matt Damon and Ben Affleck). She’s been in movies (including “No Strings Attached” and this year’s “The Five-Year Engagement”), was even just named a best-dressed by Nylon magazine — and now she’s on the menu at Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers in Harvard Square.

Alongside “The People’s Republic of Cambridge,” a burger topped with cole slaw and Russian dressing and “The Skip Gates,” a teriyaki burger with grilled pineapple and onion rings is “The Mindy Kaling”: a burger topped with guacamole and pineapple-jalapeno relish with baked beans. Now, to the layperson, that may sound confusing and potentially disgusting, but to a native Cantabrigian such as Kaling — born in 1979 as Vera Chokalingam — it’s an honor.

Stonehill College student and Kaling fan Kelsey Finigan went to Mr. Bartley’s on Friday night and had a Mindy Kaling, so new it’s only on the “Happy New Year” menu. And she tweeted it.

“So honored to have a namesake burger at Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square,” Kaling tweeted an hour later. “And next to Ray Allen’s!” (A Ray Allen is a comparatively normal burger. It has grilled peppers and dijon mustard.)

“Love this place,” Kaling said. And in reaction to a comment that the Harvard Square institution has the best onion rings: “I KNOW, THE BEST.”

The Mindy Kaling is only being tried out by Mr. Bartley’s, workers said Saturday. If enough people order it, it’ll make it to the permanent menu.

Cambridge native Sophie Flack, after years as a ballerina, is now an artist, Columbia University student and, most significantly, novelist who is set to give a reading Tuesday in Porter Square. (Photo: Zach Klein)

The nexus of a very specific kind of cool arrives at Porter Square Books on Tuesday: Sophie Flack will be reading from her “Bunheads,” about a New York ballerina — as Flack was until 2009 — victorious in a tough profession who faces a crisis after falling in love. Bloggers and reviewers adore the book not only for the storytelling, but for the authenticity, and a beautiful native ballerina-turned-author-and-artist-and-Columbia University student is probably a pretty good pull for a city with more than its fair share of dance companies and instruction.

Her career started in Cambridge, too, although she was raised in Watertown and her formal dance training started at the Boston Ballet School. From her official bio:

“Her first encounter with the performing arts was at age 3 when she played a pig in a local production of ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ Her next theatrical accomplishment was playing a reed in her kindergarten production of ‘Oklahoma.’”

Then there’s the fact that although The Boston Globe reported in October that Flack’s young adult novel had been optioned for television, what is apparently a totally different “Bunheads” is the next project for Amy Sherman-Palladino. Her six seasons (but no movie) of the fast-talking dramedy “Gilmore Girls” — a seventh season was made without her — is probably the only thing that could make Cantabrigians want to move to Connecticut, even if she did let one of the main characters visit Harvard before passing it up for Yale. (When another character isn’t accepted to Harvard, she explains how she’s going to fake it for her parents: “I’ll get an apartment in Cambridge, buy a Harvard sweatshirt, talk about Mira Sorvino a lot. It’s doable.”)

Finally, there’s the casting of Sutton Foster in the lead role of “Bunheads,” which is so far only a pilot for the ABC Family cable channel. People who don’t spend a lot of time at Broadway musicals will probably know Foster best from her three-episode stint playing Coco, Bret’s sign-holding girlfriend, on the HBO series “Flight of the Conchords.”

What is cool about this is mainly that the television “Bunheads” is sure to raise awareness of Flack’s novel even more … and with a whole different demographic than getting to second base with actor Josh Charles at the Emmys.

Anyway, this all starts with Flack, who reads at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the store, 25 White St. in the Porter Square Shopping Center.

“The theater is incredibly excited to host 100 First Jokes and offer such a unique opportunity for audiences to see the entire standup community in one night,” Managing Director Zach Ward said. “Two shows, two hosts, 100 comics, 100 first jokes. It’s going to be amazing.”

The first show features Bethany Van Delft, Dan Boulger, Kelly MacFarland, Dana Jay Bein, Jenny Zigrino, Maria Ciampa, Michelle Barbera, Paul D’Angelo, Rick Jenkins, Shawn Carter, Tony Moschetto, Val Kappa and Wes Hazard, among others.

The second show features Jim Lauletta,  Andrea Henry, Andrew Mayer, Dan Crohn, Kate Ghiloni, Lamont Price, Matt D, Mehran, Rick Canavan, Steve Macone, Tony V and Will Noonan.

The shows will be hosted by Bein and Matt D.

Tickets are $5 in advance and $10 at the door. Shows are at 7 and 9 p.m. ImprovBoston is at 40 Prospect Street. Tickets are available online at improvboston.com or by phone at (617) 576.1253.

This post was written from a press release.

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling’s musical and visual obsession with the television show “The Prisoner” has won a spot in a Time top 10 list. (Photo: Kelly Davidson)

Time, in its online The Top 10 Everything of 2011, gives local band Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling the No. 6 spot for “Top 10 Creative Videos” for a music video that is also a scene-by-scene re-creation of the opening of the cult television spy show “The Prisoner.”

The two-person band — husband and wife Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola — did not take years to track down sets and props on a lark; Cacciola and Epstein are obsessed with “The Prisoner” and their two albums and live shows are virtually all homage to it, with Cacciola screaming hoarsely and pounding drums and Epstein teetering around the stage in a tussle with an abused bass. (They also do a terrific cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan.”) Even the band’s name is taken from an episode of the the show.

The video was at 24,604 hits on YouTube as of late Thursday, a figure sure to surge since the Time posting, but it is already a well-traveled clip. In September, four months after its posting, Cacciola and Epstein said fans of “The Prisoner”from around the world had expressed awe at their accomplishment.

The video’s director, Theodore Cormey, wouldn’t tell Time the cost of the video, saying only: “I’ve know independent features made for less than for these three minutes.”

(The video, for the band’s song, “Episode 1: The Arrival,” is actually 4 minutes, 28 seconds long if you include the surprisingly entertaining credits that roll for about 33 percent of the total running length.)

Harvard historian Ezra Vogel discusses his “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” in a video posted on YouTube.

The lifetimes of Deng Xiaoping and Toscanini overlapped for more than a half-century, but it’s a good bet they never met until now.

That is, Toscanini’s ice cream, in Central Square, is hosting Harvard historian Ezra Vogel, whose weighty “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2011) is drawing equally weighty reviews from media including The New York Times and the U.K. Independent, at 6 p.m. Monday. Toscanini’s is at 899 Main St.

Deng, the somewhat faceless successor to Mao Zedong, is known for transforming China into an economic powerhouse during his roughly two decades of leadership and presiding over the bloodshed ending the Tiananmen Square movement for Democracy in 1989. Vogel’s tome is drawing attention not just for its topic, but for the fact that despite its topic “most of Deng’s life and career takes up only a quarter of Vogel’s 714 pages of narrative,” as the Times notes, and a sympathetic tone summed up in the author’s defining question: “Did any other leader in the 20th century do more to improve the lives of so many?”

While as a topic for an ice cream shop book signing “Deng” makes somewhat less sense than having in Jeff Potter for his “Cooking for Geeks,” it reflects the eclectic interests and circle of friends of founder Gus Rancatore — and makes some sense in the hometown of Harvard (where Vogel is Henry Ford II research professor of the social sciences, emeritus) and where the Chinese-speaking population has grown from 3.7 percent of the population a decade ago to 4.1 percent in last year’s U.S. Census.

And, after all, ice cream is yet another thing quite China can claim to have invented.

“Please come meet Ezra and have ice cream, coffee or tea,” Rancatore said Sunday.

Copies of the book will be available.

Food Will Win the War is scheduled to play The Middle East on Sunday. (Photo: Nicole Cordier)

The name of Brooklyn band Food Will Win the War will tickle the memory of some disparate groups: For those around during World War I and II, it was a slogan used to inspire food production and conservation; for those who read The Onion’s AV Club site, it was a winner of “The Worst Band Names Of ’07” along with such greats as Gay Witch Abortion, The Hobbits of the Shire and Doofgoblin (which played on the same bill with Food Will Win the War in Charlottesville, N.C.).

But unlike Butt Stomach and Harmonica Lewinsky, Food Will Win the War is still around — in fact, is playing The Middle East on Sunday because it is touring behind the release of a new album, “A False Sense of Warmth” — and gathering great reviews.

Interview magazine touts its “dreamy pop sounds mixed with complex human emotions” in the November issue. Time Out New York calls the music “quietly elegant … with a moody intellectual streak.” And Michael Brodeur said in a Boston Phoenix review from just over three years ago that “Missing NYC’s Food Will Win the War would be a big mistake — especially if you like smooth, smoky, fine-tined, scaled-down fare à la Elliott Smith or Erlend Øye.”

If you believe Brodeur, the six-piece band (variously described as “alt-country” and influenced by Elliott Smith, The Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel and the Pixies) plays late Sunday at The Middle East Upstairs, 472 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, with 8 p.m. openers Kelley McFarling and Tallahassee, a Boston band claiming it is “without a doubt the only band fronted by a former NFL offensive lineman who gave up that life to pursue music.”

The album is on sale on iTunes or at Armageddon Shop, 12 Eliot St., Harvard Square.

Food Will Win the War’s Rob Ward recommends buying tickets ahead of time by clicking here.

Students rehearse “Hairspray,” the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School’s December musical. (Photo: Larry Aaronson)

More than 100 students at Cambridge Rindge & Latin auditioned for acting, singing and dancing roles in the high school’s December musical comedy, “Hairspray,” setting two records, said director Monica Murray: It’s the largest response ever and the most students of colors attending tryouts than ever before.

“Not only is this the largest ensemble ever attempted,” said Murray, noting its cast of 62 students and tech crew of 15. “I’ve never experienced such deep and sustained enthusiasm from students.”

This can be credited in part to the popularity of the show, which, in production at well over 100 U.S. high schools, is currently the most popular high school drama production. But “Hairspray” was also chosen because of its civil rights themes by educators determined to tap into the student body’s vast pool of talent and showcase its diversity.

The theatrical book, adapted by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan from the film of the same name by John Waters, tells the fictional story of Tracy Turnblad, a sweet, naive, white teenager in working-class East Baltimore circa 1962 who dares to cross the color line, make friends with “negro kids” and rally them to force a local television station to integrate its all-white “American Bandstand”-like dance show. Tracy’s guide to the world of black teen culture is her classmate, Seaweed J. Stubbs, who invites the clueless Tracy to his mother’s exclusively black record store, where he and friends hang out afternoons to dance to R&B and soul music. Tracy is delighted: “Being invited places by ‘colored people’! It feels so hip!”

“The play creates a series of relationships where at least one character, Turnblad, represents ‘the other,’ or a marginalized group. There’s initially internal and external tension and oppression, which evolves to acceptance and then resolves with liberation or social impact. These are classic identity-development journeys around interracial couples, body size/image, class, gender roles, and it’s all happening on the backdrop of civil rights involvement,” said Ed Byrne, CRLS’ diversity counselor.

The parallels to contemporary television shows such as “American Idol” and “America’s Got Talent” are obvious, suggesting why the play resonates with so many teenage Americans.

The exhausting rehearsal schedule — students have rigorous singing, dancing and acting routines to practice daily — hint at an enthralling production and one likely to sell out of its $5 tickets.

There will be five shows in the school’s recently renovated Fitzgerald Theatre. Show times are Dec. 1, 2, and 3 at 7 p.m., with two matinee performances Dec. 3 and 4 at 2 p.m. There will be a “talkback” with the cast immediately after the final matinee.

To buy tickets, click here. The Fitzgerald Theatre is at the high school at 459 Broadway.