This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe, coproduced by Curious Theatre Branch and Prop Thtr, runs through 11/4. This year features two full-length trilogies, “The Madelyn Trilogy” by Beau O’Reilly and the “Danger Face Trilogy” by Idris Goodwin. Admission is $15 or “pay what you can,” except where noted. Performances take place at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, and the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, and elsewhere as noted below....

I decided at 12 years old that pregnancy was not something I wanted to worry about. Now, at the ripe age of 26, I’m still a virgin. I exchanged oral favors with my past boyfriends, none of whom lasted more than three months. Approximately half said they wanted more; the other half were only settling for me until someone better came along. At 19 I came to think it was a form of leading men on to date them while giving them no chance of sleeping with me until some arbitrary future date when I was ready to have kids....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Although ‘Blade Runner,’ with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on....

More than just a human jukebox, Ron Hawking brings as much appreciation as impersonation to his Rat Pack impressions, especially of Frank Sinatra. As in the eight-year hit His Way, Hawking’s earlier musical memory album, his songs here are energized by a terrific band and a female backup duo. Paying the highest compliment–imitation–to the singers who shaped him, Hawking obligingly delivers the voices and moves, if not bodies and souls, of Bobby Darin, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, and Frankie Valli....

Robert Essenhigh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State, has written an essay disputing the idea that human activity is causing global warming. He is part of an academic group that opposes the Kyoto treaty. Although I have a PhD in physical organic chemistry and have done some work in environmental areas, I cannot dismiss his arguments out of hand. Is Professor Essenhigh right and can we all go out and buy SUVs?...

CHICAGO HAS PRODUCED some of our greatest comedians, and only New York rivals the breadth of Chicago’s comedy scene. Whether you’re looking for standup, sketch comedy, or improvisation, you can find it here, and most of it’s reasonably inexpensive. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JONATHAN PITTS Back in the 80s Pitts wrote and distributed what’s become a legendary improv guide, An Improvised Almanac, which is chock-full of pithy maxims like “Don’t deny” and “Heighten the reality....

After a barrage of television ads asking whether Illinoisans have “had enough” of Governor Rod Blagojevich or can fathom what Republican challenger Judy Baar Topinka is thinking, a slight majority of voters polled by the Tribune this month concluded that they’re not happy with either candidate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The centerpiece of Whitney’s campaign is a plan to make the state income tax more progressive and broaden the sales tax to include services, using the new revenue to eliminate the state’s persistent budget deficit (which is forecast to continue even with a strong economy), increase funding for education, and reduce local property taxes....

Filmmakers Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic plunged into Haiti’s most desperate, dangerous slum in February 2004, as President Aristide was losing his grip on power, and came back with a powerful human story about two brothers on the wrong side of history. Gang leaders in Port-au-Prince’s squalid Cite Soleil district, 2Pac and Bily came to enjoy unlimited power and prestige after Aristide enlisted them and their soldiers to brutalize his political opposition....

The Reader’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Caviar from Tsar Nicoulai is harvested from sustainably farmed white sturgeon. A one-ounce jar of its Select California Estate Osetra—endorsed by the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller—serves two. a$89 at tsarnicoulai.com. Grass-fed beef is lower in saturated fat and higher in beneficial omega-3 fatty acids than conventional corn-fed beef, and it’s better for the environment too. Bill Kurtis’s Tallgrass Beef, which supplies picky restaurants like Lula Cafe and Bistro Campagne, offers several gift packages for the home cook, including the Steak Sampler and the Connoisseur Grill Pack....

The Michigan Fiber Festival ain’t about Metamucil. Instead, think sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, rabbits, and a bit of silk, cotton, and flax. More than 100 vendors, most based on small farms in Michigan, will be selling fibers in all forms, from raw fleece to finished yarn. (A common sight at the fair is women walking back to their minivans carrying garbage bags full of roving–washed and carded wool ready to be spun....

The songs in Bollywood musicals are usually recorded by faceless playback singers and lip-synched by actors. But 33-year-old playback singer Sonu Nigam is a face: he’s released his own pop albums, acted in movies, and hosted shows on TV and radio. He’s known for matching his baritone to a variety of actors and moods; recent hits include the melancholy duets “Mere Haath Mein” (“When My Hand Is in Yours”) from Fanaa and “Tumhi Dekho Na” (“See It Yourself”) from Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna....

Ricky Fante Van Hunt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The January 2000 release of the second D’Angelo album, Voodoo (Virgin), unofficially kicked off a movement that had been percolating for a number of years–and that’s if you ignore Prince and forgotten voices like Terence Trent D’Arby, who presaged many of its musical concerns by a decade or two. While Voodoo wasn’t the first soul album to acknowledge the ubiquity of hip-hop, it was arguably the first to make sense of it without being shackled by its instrumental limitations....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So how silly is it gasbagging about a movie you haven’t seen based on a book you haven’t read? Since that’s approximately where I’m at vis-a-vis Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel of no particular distinction, at least if you trust what the literary rags tell you. But already we’ve been inundated from all sides as the national release date approaches (11/9), and preliminary impressions have been formed....

Eight years ago Sean Sheridan and his wife, Trina, opened the Wooden Spoon, a storefront kitchenware shop at 5047 N. Clark. Now they wonder whether they can continue to stay afloat. It’s not that business is bad–“quite the contrary, it’s bustling,” Sheridan says. But property taxes are killing them. “We’re looking at our taxes going up almost $5,000 next year–that’s almost doubling,” says Sheridan. “We look at these bills and we think, how can anyone make it?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Up a tree. In Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman’s character gets stuck in an old red oak overlooking her family’s Long Island seaside property. The symbolism’s patent, the character’s anxiety palpable—yet considerably more emerges from the physical world itself, in the comfortable pulpy textures of the trunk, the spread of the branches, the beckoning oceanic view: equal parts terror and transport, intimacy and infinity, with a radiant blue envelope of sky and water that seems to go on forever....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Loser: Cook County commissioner William Beavers. The self-proclaimed “hog with the big nuts” thought his daughter Darcel’s election as Seventh Ward alderman was in the bag. Then he realized that Jackson had secured every billboard around, saturating the south side. Sandi Jackson went on to trounce Darcel Beavers. Winners: Ducks and geese. Critics of alderman Joe Moore’s foie gras ban vowed to overturn it, but the legislation never advanced....

I went to a hockey game and a knitting circle broke out. The roar had been replaced by the snore. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hawks fans used to erupt at the outset, screaming, whistling, and clapping through the national anthem. But throughout the first period the UC was so quiet that even in its upper reaches one could clearly hear the tap of sticks on ice as players called for passes or shouted to teammates....

Two of the plays in Pegasus Players’ 20th annual showcase are surprising and textured. The strength of Mikal McLendon’s Writing Your Tragedy, directed by Tiffany Trent, is the very real, very raw dialogue among siblings who react to their father’s death by pulling further apart. And Brian Tasch’s An Evening With the Living Dead, directed by Alex Levy, is a spot-on Scream-style zombie parody with a wise undercurrent of social commentary....

This week the second Chicago International Documentary Festival will screen Mark Brian Smith’s fascinating Overnight, which chronicles the precipitous rise and fall of indie filmmaker Troy Duffy. A blue-collar kid from Boston and a giant in his own mind, Duffy hit the jackpot in March 1997 when Harvey Weinstein, the fabled cochairman of Miramax Films, bought Duffy’s script for a post-Tarantino shoot-’em-up called The Boondock Saints and proclaimed him “a unique, exciting new voice in American movies....

The ninth annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, runs Friday, April 1, through Thursday, April 14, with screenings at the Film Center. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members; for more information call 312-846-2600. Following is program information for April 1 through 7; a full festival schedule is available online at www.chicagoreader.com....