“Estrogen Fest 2005: Changing the Rules!” runs 5/11-6/5 at the Storefront Theater in the Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, 66 E. Randolph. Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Prop Thtr, this annual showcase of women’s performance features artists in the fields of theater, spoken word, poetry, dance, and music. The festival consists of two alternating programs of short works. Program A, “History, Fantasy, and Myth,” previews Wed 5/11, 7:30 PM, and opens Fri 5/13, running through 6/4: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 5 PM....

The Deardorff folding wooden view camera is a relic of a time when precision tools were made by hand, one at a time. The cameras were built to last, and thousands of them are still in use or in collections. The manufacturer, L.F. Deardorff & Sons Photographic Equipment, usually turned out only around 300 of the cameras a year in its near-west-side factories, and since the company went out of business in 1988 they’ve become something of a cult item....

Formerly a latex-wearing, fire-breathing club kid–he quit after burning half his face–27-year-old clothing designer Geoffrey Mac moved four years ago at the suggestion of a squeamish landlord. “We have a line of latex, so I have a lot of fetish clients, and a lot of freaks were coming in at two in the morning wanting an outfit,” he says. The landlord offered him a Pilsen loft that had once housed a garment manufacturer, and 2,500 square feet of raw space was hard to turn down....

In America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues With African Americans (Warner Books), Harvard African and African-American studies chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. tackles an issue long debated within the black community: how to bridge the gap between its haves and have-nots. The book attempts to answer the question through interviews with 44 Americans across the political and economic spectrum, from celebrities like Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, and Alicia Keys to unknowns like Lura and Chris, a biracial couple in Birmingham, Alabama....

Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@chicagoreader.com. Christkindlmarket Chicago Inspired by the German Christmas Market in Nuremberg, this 11th annual event features hand-blown ornaments, handmade toys, nutcrackers, cuckoo clocks, delicate laces, scarves, sweaters, and jewelry from around the world. Gluhwein, a hot spiced red wine, will be served in signature mugs. German and other European delicacies will also be available....

Box scores tell you how a baseball team has done. Stock listings tell you how a stock has performed. But I’ve never seen a mechanism indicating whether weathermen have any idea what they’re talking about. Does anyone keep track of how accurate they are? —Steven Goldberg, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you’d imagine, advances in weather prediction closely follow advances in technology and communications....

Choreographer Julia Rhoads pursues the ineffable in her new multimedia work, Lulu Sleeps. Looking at such common dream motifs as flying, falling, being chased, being unprepared while onstage or during an exam, and experiencing the decay of one’s own body, Rhoads divides her 75-minute piece into sections but allows the themes to bleed into one another, capturing the quicksilver experience of dreaming. Her choreography may be funny, grotesque, or lyrically beautiful, but it never tells a story–not even a nonlinear one....

Lead Story Scientific Precision Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » NASA announced in October it was retiring its last KC-135 aircraft; the plane’s specialty was making extremely steep dives to create a zero-gravity environment for research and astronaut training. An official told reporters that over the years the plane’s crews had cleaned up at least 285 gallons of passengers’ vomit. Cameron Miller, 19, of Alexandria, Louisiana, was arrested Christmas Day on four counts of attempted murder; he allegedly fired a shotgun at a pickup truck carrying his mother, stepfather, and stepbrothers because he’d wanted cash for Christmas but got only CDs....

I’m wary of putting a Critic’s Choice button on anything I write about ORTHRELM, for fear that someone will take that recommendation to mean I’m recommending them for everybody. There’s no middle ground with these guys–in my experience anyone who isn’t fascinated by this stuff finds it completely unendurable. Mick Barr (of the equally alien duo Crom-Tech) and Josh Blair need nothing more than a guitar and a drum kit to distill everything that’s most exhilaratingly obnoxious about repetitive minimalism and arty, highly technical metal into a crisp, blindingly bright sheet of sound whose layers of detail shift and deepen as you listen, the way patterns come out in a TV screen filled with snow....

The Fern Room at the Garfield Park Conservatory My favorite exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry has nothing to do with science and precious little to do with industry. Jollyball, located just past the ticket collectors on the first floor, is a gigantic, self-starting pinball machine dedicated to promoting Swiss travel. After the ritual ka-chunk, a silver ball emerges from a hotel and starts to roll energetically about the tour-bus-sized contraption, doing things a silver ball might do if it were a tourist in Switzerland–riding ski lifts, passing an outsize fondue bowl, being magnetically integrated into a loudly ticking clock....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s been a few years since I’ve checked out the Oxford American’s annual music issue, but this year’s installment seems as good as any I’ve ever seen. There are a couple of lengthier pieces—Sean Wilentz on the making of Blonde on Blonde, Bill Wasik on the reality of online music marketing (with North Carolina indie rock band the Annuals as the test case)—but the bulk of the issue consists of shorter profiles and meditations on the 26 artists included on the accompanying CD, which is unusually strong....

Kennedy Greenrod might never have had a musical career were it not for his older sisters–or more specifically his sisters’ boyfriends. “The first music I was really exposed to as a kid was Elvis Presley,” he says. “I remember my family went on holiday to Morocco and my sister met this French teddy boy, with whom she had a brief affair, and he really turned me on to rockabilly and early rock ‘n’ roll....

When Orson Welles’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938, panic ensued: many radio listeners missed the disclaimer and believed Martians really were invading. In this entertaining but uneven late-night show, writer-performers Cary Cronholm, David Petitti, Wayne Graham, and Thea Lux depict people’s desperation, ill-fated heroism, and opportunism in comic and dramatic sketches using the Welles recording. Though the serious scenes lack intensity, the actors get subdued laughs whenever the script comically exploits the period, from the way that people talked to the patronizing view of women....

Aspiring writer-producer Rob Federighi was visiting Chicago three years ago when he bought a newspaper from a StreetWise vendor and walked away wondering what the man’s story was. Federighi, a commercial real estate broker who grew up in the western suburbs, was living in Los Angeles at the time, hustling his sitcom scripts and game show concepts. As he mused about the vendor (was he from Chicago? did he have a family?...

Dorian Oscar Wilde was the preeminent satirist of Victorian society, but his stories and plays endure because their dilemmas still resonate. No writer dramatized the pleasures and pitfalls of secrecy more powerfully than he did. Wilde–whose career was ruined when his homosexuality came to light in 1895–saw the need to hide one’s secret self as a fundamental aspect of the human condition; his characters go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their true natures....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ballo is accepting recipe submissions for its second annual meatball contest, “Just Roll With It,” through September 15. The challenge is to top the restaurant’s own “Mama’s Meatballs,” and 10 finalists will compete in a cook-off on October 14 for the grand prize, a trip for two to Napa Valley. Slow Food Chicago hosts high tea this Sunday at 3:30 at Angel Food Bakery, with treats made from from stone fruits provided by Seedling....

Hans Bellmer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bellmer–a leftist who was born in 1902 in Kattowitz (then part of Germany)–quit his advertising work at the start of the Third Reich, saying that no one should support the new regime, and retreated to private art making in his apartment. Because his figures were often distorted or dismembered, the photographs he created could not have been exhibited in Germany under the Nazis, who cultivated kitschy images of healthy people....

Books about food, I’ve started to believe, are really self-help books in disguise–primers on personal growth for those who wouldn’t be caught dead with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Each maps a path to happiness: master every challenge, cherish your friends, trust your instincts, respect the natural world. Reading Anthony Bourdain, one message drowns out all others: “Eat the cobra heart!” As the title of his latest book implies, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (Bloomsbury) corrals previously published miscellany to broadcast his philosophy: take risks, seize the day, grab life by the tits!...

Trumpeter Avishai Cohen–not to be confused with the Israeli bassist of the same name–is part of a recent flowering of Israeli musicians in New York who transcend boundaries of geography and style. He’s an in-demand sideman, performing with everyone from sophisticated pop singer Keren Ann to pianist Jason Lindner, but he really shines on his own new album, After the Big Rain (Anzic), revealing an aesthetic that recalls the polyglot work of Don Cherry if not exactly his sound....

On her 1997 debut, Trailer Park, Beth Orton made a splash by merging elegant folk-pop and electronic beats. The album’s success soon attracted well-known collaborators like Dr. John, Ben Harper, and Emmylou Harris, but though Orton followed pretty much the same template, the fussy arrangements on her next two records turned her into a middle-of-the-road coffee-shop chanteuse. Smartly, she breaks away from that sound on her new Comfort of Strangers (Astralwerks), emphasizing the naked beauty of her tunes and her raw, vulnerable singing, even leaving the dry cracks in her upper register intact....