Dispatches from our Chicagoan in Hollywood, Liz Crokin.

If e-Harmony and “The Bachelor” are how people find love today, than Barbie Adler’s methods are rooted in classic matchmaking. She’s out to connect real people — not anonymous profiles — ready to go the distance. “People are busier now than ever,” Adler says. “We have our heads in our phones. Mr. or Mrs. Right could be walking right by you and you wouldn’t even notice.”

Kristin Cavallari rolls through Chicago’s Studio Paris nightclub on a Saturday morning wearing sky-high heels and — without hesitating — climbs up onto a windowsill. But the former reality TV star isn’t holding court over the party scene she once famously frequented — she’s here for a Splash cover shoot. It’s one of the only things that could bring her downtown nowadays. “I was here a few weeks ago for my birthday,” she says. “It was 2 a.m., and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so tired.’ That’s when I realized that this part of my life was behind me.”

If the past few years of Bill Caswell’s life sound like the stuff of movie scripts, that’s because they are. From 2004 to 2009, the University of Chicago business school graduate crunched numbers as an investment banker. But after hours and on the weekends, he retreated to the suburbs to tinker with cars in the garage of his mom’s Kenilworth home. In June 2009, the recession provided him with the perfect excuse to hang up his suit and focus on his passion full time. Caswell bought a $500 clunker on Craigslist, fixed it up, entered the World Rally Championship, where he raced against professionals driving cars worth nearly a half a million dollars — and finished third.

Dispatches from our Chicagoan in Hollywood, Liz Crokin

If the past few years of Bill Caswell’s life sound like the stuff of movie scripts, that’s because they are. From 2004 to 2009, the University of Chicago business school graduate crunched numbers as an investment banker. But after hours and on the weekends, he retreated to the suburbs to tinker with cars in the garage of his mom’s Kenilworth home. In June 2009, the recession provided him with the perfect excuse to hang up his suit and focus on his passion full time. Caswell bought a $500 clunker on Craigslist, fixed it up, entered the World Rally Championship, where he raced against professionals driving cars worth nearly a half a million dollars — and finished third.

Jenny McCarthy’s in the bathtub at her Fulton River District apartment, circulating a mountain of bubbles with her hands. It’s an appropriate setting for the longtime star: As she gears up for the launch of “The Jenny McCarthy Show” Friday at 9:30 p.m. on VH1, McCarthy, 40, is ready to come clean. “The thing is, I couldn’t have done a talk show before now, because I needed to go through my own life experiences,” she says. “I can’t fake anything, nor does the audience want that. I’m going into the show saying, ‘Here’s me, here’s all of me.’ I am smart, I am dumb, I am secure, I am insecure. I’m all of those things, and hopefully people will see that.”

Leonardo DiCaprio recently told a German newspaper that he’s taking a break from acting. “I’m a little bit drained,” the “Django Unchained” star told Bild. “I am now going to take a long, long break. I’ve done three films in two years and I’m just worn out.” Despite what he says, I hear it’s not just that he’s tired. Sources close to the actor tell me that he also wants to focus on his personal life. “Leo wants to go out and hit the town and travel to exotic places with his friends and date,” a source said.

Thanks to the undying support of its avid fan base, NBC’s cult hit “Community” is finally returning to network television. And Chicago native Danny Pudi — who plays socially awkward student Abed Nadir — is thrilled to be back. “It’s the fourth season of a show that I don’t think anyone expected to last four seasons,” he jokes. The pop culture reference-packed comedy, now gearing up for its Feb. 7 premiere after an almost yearlong hiatus, follows the shenanigans of an idiosyncratic seven-person study group at Greendale Community College. “The core of our show is a bunch of people doing really absurd things,” says Pudi, whose character is possibly the most absurd of them all (imagine an Indian Rain Man with a sense of humor and compulsion to make every moment cinematic). This season, the gang will enter their senior year at the not-so-elite educational institution, dealing with new levels of craziness as they head toward graduation and, possibly, the end of the study group.

If you recall noticing an in-love couple get kicked out of City Hall just over a year ago, chances are it was Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez. “I proposed at City Hall because it was the first place I ever saw her,” says Gilford, 30, who met his actor wife while filming a TV movie in Chicago — a romantic meeting point for the couple, who both hail from here (Gilford is from Evanston, Sanchez grew up in Carol Stream). “But after I proposed, we were hugging each other, telling each other ‘I love you,’ and the security guard came over and said, ‘I don’t know what you guys are doing, but you can’t do it here. Take it somewhere else.’ ” Despite the rocky start to their engagement, the wedding went off without a hitch: The couple tied the knot on Dec. 29 in Northern California, and after a two-week honeymoon in Asia and 36 hours at their home in Los Angeles, they’re currently residing in Miami, where Sanchez is filming the A&E series, “The Glades.”