Femme Boost, at the Playground, through July 25. If you can’t find some facet of your own personality in Femme Boost, a program of two one-woman shows, you should at least see attributes of friends and family. Jenny Hagel in “Not So Fresh” combines sarcastic relationship songs (which would benefit from more varied accompaniment) with satirical monologues offering clever takes on conventional wisdom. In one tune, a stalker describes what constitutes a crush, while another features Hagel’s mother asking about her social life, a segment enhanced by slyly subtitled slides of Hagel’s dating history....

The softer side of Frida Kahlo is on exhibit at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, where an array of over 100 works by prominent 20th-century Mexican artists goes on display today. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The paintings are from the Gelman Collection, which is widely considered one of the five most important private collections of Mexican modern art, and so the exhibit is something of a coup for the Pilsen museum....

The Gore Gore Girls’ lineup has changed three times since they started out in 1996, but the Detroit band’s commitment to trashy garage rock has remained constant. Named for B-movie king Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1972 bloodfest (reportedly the admiration is mutual), the Girls were formed by guitarist-songwriter Amy Surdu and now-departed bassist Paula Regalado; their two short albums–2000’s Strange Girls and the recently released Up All Night (both on Get Hip)–are sharp amalgams of 60s R & B and Stooges-style protopunk....

On a quiet Sunday morning near Racine and Belmont, a man in chinos rolls a plush baby carriage past a block of condos. Across the street, over a row of hedges, looms a fiberglass moose. A group of guys in green-and-gold getups rounds the corner. One of them sports a football helmet. They spot someone in a number four jersey. “Hey, Favre!” they yell. They don’t know this person, but they all high-five the stranger before entering Will’s Northwoods Tavern and Supper Club, a Packer bar....

Gustavo Aguilar is a silent preacher. After work and on weekends, he dons a robe, grabs a large cross, and parades through the streets dressed as Jesus. Aguilar doesn’t proselytize unless he’s approached. This is partly out of respect for others–he realizes that not everyone he encounters will be in the mood for a sermon–and partly because he thinks a bullhorn is unnecessary. In his view, a Jesus costume–like the golden arches–is enough to lure people in....

Keralee Froebel became entranced by the Lady of Guadalupe in the early 90s while living in Santa Fe down the block from the Santuario de Guadalupe, the oldest such shrine in the country. “I feel like there’s a distinct energy to the Virgin Mary,” says the Pilsen artist. “I really connected with her.” On a 1991 trip to Mexico City, she joined the thousands of pilgrims visiting the Basilica de Guadalupe, built on the spot where the virgin allegedly appeared to an Indian peasant and left her image emblazoned on his cape....

A decade ago Karol Verson was working at a Jewish senior center in Chicago when an elderly man wandered into the office with a battered paper portfolio under his arm. “Listen,” she recalls him saying, “I found this in my basement. Does anybody here want it?” The portfolio contained 14 old woodcuts, most of them in pretty good shape. Verson thought the prints were interesting, so she took them. She didn’t catch the man’s name, and she never saw him again....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a June report from the Associated Press, more and more chickens are being kept as pets in suburban homes. Among the anecdotes offered as evidence: A wife and mother in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, keeps nine chickens, which she says are “aesthetically pleasing,” even “cool.” A woman in Cedar Hill, Missouri, has raised 38 chickens as pets over the past decade, and says “the best part” has been “knowing them as individuals....

Paul Chan begins his 2003 video Baghdad in No Particular Order with a title reading “order particular no in Baghdad”–a clear signal that he intends to provide an alternative perspective on Iraq to that offered by the nightly news. Chan spent nearly four weeks in the Iraqi capital last winter as part of the Iraq Peace Team, a group organized by Voices in the Wilderness to protest the imminent war. The Iraqis he met there face his camera in the casual, friendly manner of relatives and neighbors showing off in a home video....

Sunday, December 1, 600 block of South State, 8:15 PM. Theft. Police observed 33-year-old male pushing city garbage receptacle down street. Offender told police he’d taken can from address on 1800 block of South Indiana in order to collect “junk.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Monday, December 2, 5300 block of South Ellis, 4 PM. Burglary. Victim reported two containers of frozen concentrate stolen from freezer while she was on vacation....

Return of a Continental Drifter Even within the Chicago music scene, where a healthy work ethic is expected, reedist and composer Scott Rosenberg had a reputation as a busy, busy guy. He moved to Chicago in August 1999, and by early 2001 he was improvising with local and visiting artists, putting on concerts in a Ukrainian Village coach house (dubbed the Brick House), and writing music for and organizing three distinct groups....

A couple years ago Sue Boydston decided to tear down her garage. Traffic had decreased since her husband, Bob, died of cancer in December 1999. Bob Boyd, as he was professionally known, was the rhythm guitarist of the popular country-and-western trio the Sundowners, who between 1959 and 1989 played five nights a week at the various incarnations of the Bar R R Ranch in the Loop. When the Sundowners weren’t gigging, they could often be found in Bob’s garage....

Truth in Advertising I wasn’t asking questions because the ad tempted me, though if I were younger it might. I was asking because a suspicious reader had conducted a Web search and then written us, “It seems this organization is a secular cult whose leader is on trial in Denmark.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Michael Durham, a London-based freelance reporter, tells me he’s been covering Tvind since the mid-90s....

Major Barbara In Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw spells out his views about war and religion in fire-and-brimstone terms that would do the Salvation Army credit. Christmas aside, the play could hardly be more timely. Its assaults on sanctimonious organized religions and on the notion that adversity builds character seem aimed directly at the Bush administration, which makes indifference to the poor a fine art while loudly professing its Christian virtues....

Where Is the Love? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What they are is a nonfunded nonprofit that over the last two years has put on 16 different play readings at Sulzer, with over 60 actors participating. The library, at 4455 N. Lincoln, a block from Hissong’s home, was a good venue–“clean, well located, with parking”–and they were able to book space there (first a meeting room, then the auditorium) for a couple of afternoons and two evenings a month, eight months out of the year, without charge....

“After Nam he lost himself, / not trusting his hands / with loved ones,” Yusef Komunyakaa writes in “Losses,” a poem from Dien Cai Dau (1988), one of several books in which he looks back on his time as an army combat correspondent in Vietnam. Ironically perhaps, it was after ‘Nam that Komunyakaa found himself, turning from journalism to a more exacting search for truth in poetry. He’s never given in to bitterness or settled for moral ambiguity; in a more recent poem like “Pepper” he can righteously berate a strung out Art Pepper for a racist crack while remaining firm in his love of the “hint of Africa / still inside your alto....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Sarah Downey wrote this same story for the Tribune in 1998 (as she points out in her article), why is she rehashing this “old news” today (five years later), and why is the Reader running it on page one like it was some hushed-up crime, only recently discovered? This incident received a ton of publicity and notoriety when it occurred; a number of people were disciplined by the Chicago Police Department after this incident occurred....

Bailiwick Repertory’s 14th annual showcase of projects by emerging directors, coordinated by Jason Palmer, features programs of three or four short plays. The scripts run the gamut from selections by Romulus Linney, David Mamet, Thornton Wilder, William Saroyan, Heiner Muller, and Tennessee Williams to new works. The fest runs through June 19 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. Performances are Mondays-Wednesdays at 7:30 PM. Tickets are $10; there is no late seating and only five-minute intermissions....

BRASSY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, Muffin Spencer emigrated to the UK in search of rock, moving from her native New Hampshire to Manchester in 1985–while her older brother Jon was in New York starting Pussy Galore. After a decade of bartending, trying to play music in the narrowly fashionable town, and watching her brother become an indie-rock icon, Muffin hooked up with guitarist Stefan Gordon, drummer Jonny Barrington (aka turntablist DJ Swett), and eventually bassist Karen Frost (Spencer insisted on a second woman) to form Brassy....

The most popular herbicide in the world doesn’t kill frogs–it just makes them, er, unable to reproduce. That’s the word from a paper published in the April 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Atrazine, the herbicide in question, doesn’t accumulate in the environment or in the food chain and so has long been thought safe. But as little as one part of atrazine in ten billion parts water has now been found to have disquieting effects on African clawed frogs: “Up to 20% of the animals (16-20%) had multiple gonads (up to 6 in a single animal) or were hermaphrodites (with multiple testes and ovaries)....