Making its debut so soon after the demise of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago, this brand-new project seems to challenge the notion that the Windy City isn’t hospitable to events of this kind. Producers John T. Mills and James Ellis hope to succeed where others have failed by offering a more sharply defined image implied by the word “fringe,” more concentrated programming, a special outreach to family audiences with a weekend “Kids’ Fringe” (marked KF in daily listings below), low prices, and the inclusion of Chicago artists alongside visitors from around the English-speaking world....

THE MESMERIST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whatever else she was, Blavatsky wasn’t a dreary old drudge. But that’s how she comes off in Ara Watson’s pedestrian play The Mesmerist, which ineffectually dramatizes Hodgson’s 1884 investigation of Blavatsky. Watson simply fritters away one of the most interesting incidents in the long, scandal-ridden history of occultism: Blavatsky’s story has the intriguing potential to be a mystery about mysteries....

I hope you can help me with this one–most of my friends think I’m crazy. I am convinced my physical presence has the ability to make streetlights burn out. On an average night walking through a parking lot, at least one or two streetlights will go out when I approach, then regain their luminous state after I have passed. Could there be some sort of electrochemical imbalance in my body that causes this to happen?...

Is there any basis to the stereotype that some homosexuals lisp? My sister, the lesbian, says it is cultural. What is the root of this? –J.I., Oak Park, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We did get some substantive responses by E-mail, to the effect that while lisping was a baseless stereotype perpetuated by clueless straights (typical joke: “Which way to the Staten Island ferry?...

The Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, now in its 12th year, highlights shorts as well as features by women, including documentary, animated, narrative, and experimental works. Tickets for individual programs at Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, are $6, $5 for Women In the Director’s Chair members and students and senior citizens with a valid ID; tickets at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, are $5 for Women in the Director’s Chair members and the general public, $3 for Film Center members; festival passes are also available....

Winter Pageant Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last weekend, in the midst of bitter cold, persistent wind, and thickening snow, the Logan Square community celebrated the coming of spring at Redmoon’s Winter Pageant. Chicago’s most prolific people’s theater has staged this spectacle yearly since 1991, using large, inventive puppets; a circus orchestra chanting and moaning out vocals and playful harmonies; and a growing group of artists, families, and Logan Square residents....

AN EVENING IN OLD TOWN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jim Post did not gain his reputation as the longest-working musician in town by knuckling under to scenic or biological mishaps. So when 40 fans turned out on New Year’s night–traditionally one of the slowest for show business–to see him at the bunkerlike studio at Centre East in An Evening in Old Town, what did it matter that the fixtures from the defunct, venerated Earl of Old Town club and the coffee from the Bean Counter Cafe that were to evoke the early-60s boho scene had failed to materialize?...

Friday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re just dying to hear what the American Suicide Foundation is going to say at its benefit debate tonight, Can Suicide Be Rational? The group says its aim is to promote suicide prevention through research and education; at tonight’s debate, hosted by the foundation’s midwestern division, a spectrum of local doctors will tackle the dos and don’ts of self-destruction from ethical, religious, medical, and personal-care points of view....

The third annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs from Wednesday through next Sunday, August 14 through 18, at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. Tickets for all programs are $5, with the exception of the opening-night feature, which is $15, and the 11:15 pm Saturday program, which is $10; a $50 pass will admit you to all festival screenings and events, and a $20 pass will admit you to five regular programs....

Recast from a previous incarnation as Death of Samantha, a seminal, strangely compelling Cleveland rock band that put out four records during the last half of the 80s, Cobra Verde arrive as veterans of their town’s newly reinvigorated scene. Named after a Werner Herzog film and led by precocious John Petkovic, an overwrought frontman with a penchant for exploiting rock-star conventions to humorous effect, Cobra Verde traffic in terse, gritty hard rock, leaving behind both their old sound (psychedelia, Pere Ubu-ish experimentalism, and glam) and their old drummer, Steve-O (who was better suited to comedy than timekeeping)....

Sara Risk The introduction of chance into art making–exemplified in the work of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage–is a method for reducing the artist’s role. More modest alternatives to the old goal of aesthetically perfect self-contained art in which every part is in its proper place and the whole is confidently endowed with some version of truth are things that have an offhand, even imperfect look at first; other artists simply appropriate images....

Reading, Riding, Arithmetic Griffith’s a former options trader who’d had previous brushes with journalism, and his latest began on the el. “I was taking the Ravenswood and I had nothing to read. So I started digging through my wallet and found an old Jewel receipt, and started checking prices for want of anything else to do.” It was a pathetically desperate act, and it got him thinking. Last September, bankrolled by some marketing work and bartending he’d been doing, he launched Transit Times, a free monthly that’s not merely a few intellectual cuts above a supermarket receipt but umpteen....

ROSALIE SORRELS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Catch one morsel of Rosalie Sorrels’s voice and you know you’re in the presence of a person of real substance. She’s 62 but has the hipness and youth of a woman for whom age is inconsequential. Sorrels split her Idaho home at 19, married and had five kids, then divorced and took her children on the road with her while she traveled the country as a folksinger....

Skewered in the Tribune For the last word on what reduced Eisendrath to a pathetic mound of jelly, Collins turned to an intimate. It was hubris, said Mary Baim with unimpeachable objectivity. Baim knows Eisendrath better than just about anybody does, having observed him closely in 1991 when she ran against him for alderman. Since his easy reelection in that race doesn’t fit the theory of Eisendrath as a parvenu whose career turned to ashes, Collins properly brushed over it....

SYMPHONY OF THE SHORES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Famous of course for his Mission: Impossible theme, the Argentinean-born Lalo Schifrin doesn’t quite belong in the pantheon of film composers Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Henry Mancini. But he’s definitely second echelon, a prolific, adroit tunesmith who’s always ready to churn out atmospheric materials for Hollywood blockbusters and TV series. His eclectic style reflects a background that includes taking classes in Paris with Messiaen and playing piano and arranging for Dizzy Gillespie’s band....

There were two conventions at the Marriott O’Hare over Labor Day weekend. The hotel was full of casually dressed young mothers and fathers and their well-nourished babies, who were attending a convention of the Illinois La Leche League. Tucked away in a side room were about 300 Jews who spent World War II exiled in Shanghai; it was their fifth reunion since 1980. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jewish culture thrived in Shanghai: there was a Viennese light-opera troupe, a Jewish radio station, and 26 publications, including medical journals in German, English, and Chinese....

We thought we had seen the last of them, these images of Michael Jordan at play: palming the ball and faking a pass over an opponent’s head, teasing him as if he were a kitten; ball in hand, facing away from the basket, arching his back as if he wanted it scratched; leaping, hanging in the air to get a shot off, his legs splayed yet asymmetrically balanced, like the pieces of a Calder mobile; prowling pantherlike on defense; shifting with a stutter step from a calm, erect dribble into a drive down the lane, tongue wagging all the while; and of course dunking, arm out front, ball in hand, and some unfortunate running along below like a boy trying to chase a rain cloud....

What If She’d Gone to the Papers? “I would have told her to do exactly what she did–go to the proper authorities,” Vernon Jarrett told me. Jarrett’s the former Sun-Times columnist who excoriated Reynolds when he was the darling of the downtown media. “I couldn’t see any publication taking a chance on that sort of innuendo. It would have to be supported by some kind of reportage on legal action.”...

For the better part of the last 25 years–ever since he joined Herbie Hancock’s bands in the early 70s, having already spent a decade playing with such California stalwarts as Bobby Hutcherson and the Crusaders–Buster Williams has practically defined the role of the modern jazz bass. After Charles Mingus and then Scott LaFaro began to free the instrument from its traditional timekeeping function, bassists like Eddie Gomez and Stanley Clarke headed off in another direction, turning the instrument essentially into another front-line melodist rather than a supporting fundament of the jazz combo....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But let’s see what INFORMATION we can salvage from Mr. Langer’s third-grade tirade . . . One need only glance at these sparse, poisonous scrawlings and immediately words LEAP off the page: “imbecilic,” “pomposity,” “exploitation,” “sophomoric”–all the trappings and effete-just-add-water-sound-bytes and anal eruptions of the ASPIRING SNOB; hideous cliches: “chewing up more scenery than a termite colony,” “subtle as a kick in the nuts,” and the true RED FLAG of the fatuous, thesaurus-wielding pseudointellectual–an obscure reference to Hobbes....