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Bailiwick Repertory and the Lesbian Theatre Initiative have teamed up to present the first edition of what they hope will be an annual multidisciplinary lesbian-centered arts fest April 5-May 4 at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont. The event features theater, poetry, comedy, stage combat, and music; participants include artists from around the country as well as Chicago. Individual ticket prices are shown below; a festival pass costs $50. In addition to the shows, the festival is sponsoring workshops on performance techniques taught by Cin Salach and Bev Spangler Saturdays at noon from April 6 through May 4; admission is $10 or “pay what you can” at the door....

Light is the subject of this group show of 21 works by eight artists, and some of the best pieces invoke natural light inside the sunless gallery. Bill Gerhard’s five works titled after colors look like stripe paintings, but their delicate, airy hues were created by exposing colored paper to the sun for varying numbers of weeks–Red has four different shades, from deep red to nearly yellow. To create her huge wall and floor painting Wrong Cathedral, Paola Cabal made a scale model of the gallery that restored windows that had been blocked up and installed it just outside the gallery....

Looking for the Bicycle Thief No one had ever stolen a police bike before. “We’re working on this now,” Sergeant Joe Andruzzi, who heads the bicycle unit, told the Sun-Times. “We are definitely following through on some information we have.” The paper concluded, “Andruzzi said officers were spreading word among bicycle messengers because they might spot the [bikes] on the street.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At that point, Morell says, two other officers pulled up on their bikes....

Lead Stories In September in Edmonton, Alberta, 56-year-old Robert Rozenhart won his seven-year lawsuit against Skier’s Sportshop, recovering damages for injuries he’d suffered on his first in-line skating attempt. The store’s staff had reassured Rozenhart that in-line skates worked a lot like ice skates, and when his instructor was late, he insisted (over employee protests) on venturing out on his own; he was on a downhill slope when he realized he did not know how to stop....

Roger Ahlgrim has nothing but respect for his profession. In the early 1900s his grandfather ran a storefront funeral parlor on the south side of Chicago, and in 1956 his father moved the business to Elmhurst. Ahlgrim and his two brothers followed in their father’s footsteps, and Ahlgrim & Sons opened four more branches–in Schaumburg, Streamwood, Lake Zurich, and Palatine. Ahlgrim is chief funeral director at the Palatine branch, a job that requires a certain amount of sobriety and decorum....

He has a dollar in his pocket, just enough to pay the tolls back to Joliet. It’s all his wife let him carry tonight. She has his credit cards, checkbook, and ATM card. He’s signed the house over to her too. His job as a heavy equipment salesman takes him all over the suburbs, so he’s always driving past racetracks and offtrack betting parlors. He can’t risk doing that with money in his pocket....

Elvis Presley’s singles for Sun Records in 1954 and ’55 may have introduced the most celebrated voice in rock ‘n’ roll history, but it shared the grooves with another one, equally bright and innovative: Presley would never again enjoy (or permit) anything quite like the creative dialogue he carried on with guitarist Scotty Moore. Moore was playing in a country band called the Starlight Wranglers when producer Sam Phillips asked him and bassist Bill Black to accompany the 19-year-old Presley in his recording audition, and the group spirit behind the Sun sessions was reflected by the credit on the original labels: “Elvis Presley, Scotty, and Bill....

The opening game of the baseball season is a cause for celebration. It’s a tribal ritual signaling the arrival of spring; the outcome of the game is almost inconsequential, as there are 161 more to follow. The opening game of the NFL season, however, is not just the beginning of the football year and the start of fall; it also dictates in large measure how successful a team will be. With only 16 games in the regular season, a team that starts 0-2 and especially 0-3 can all but write itself off, and that possibility leads directly from an opening loss....

MARVIN TATE’S D-SETTLEMENT 1/5, SCHUBAS Marvin Tate has been a fixture on the Chicago poetry scene since the early 90s, and has made a name for himself in New York as well, appearing at A-list venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and with A-list stars like Amiri Baraka. Like Baraka, he knows the rewards and frustrations of moving as a poet among musicians and has struggled with how best to integrate himself as an instrument into a band–in his case a cookin’ 11-piece funk orchestra....

J. DAVIS TRIO 6/21, MARTYRS’; 6/22, ST. HEDWIG STREET FEST This local hip-hop outfit–a quartet, not a trio–makes its backing tracks the hard way, getting their grooves mostly from real bass and drums. Ron of Japan’s trumpet skitters around them, but competes only slightly with rapper Nerd Stuart’s lucid poetry, which would give these guys an edge even if they used samples. This is a release party for their second album, The New No....

A Swiss Rebel: Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) Bonstein’s film documents the eventful and tragic life of an outspoken woman, but it also raises questions about the Swiss past. Since the mid-90s, Switzerland has become the subject of international debate because of its economic and political policies during the Nazi era, and it still fights the image of greedy bankers and financiers coldly profiting from war and genocide. In her day Schwarzenbach provided Swiss readers with a critical worldview–one honed on the sociopolitical realities she encountered in the Middle East, the U....

Playwright Ted Tally imagines what life was like for explorer Robert Falcon Scott and four other Englishmen who died while returning from the south pole in 1912. In this BackStage Theatre Company production of Tally’s 1977 play, Scott experiences a lot of hallucinations of his wife in a bad wig and his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, speaking in an absurd Yakov Smirnoff accent. Other than these missteps, director Brandon Bruce has staged a solid, gripping drama about men battling nature and what it means to be a member of a team....

Every autumn, I buy a gallon of apple cider from Quig’s Orchard in Mundelein. Quig’s has been pressing for half a century, since a time when Lake County was as Up North as Wisconsin, but these days the orchard is an island of apple trees beleaguered by the aluminum tide of subdivisions. I go for their unpasteurized cider. It’s the virgin juice, with none of the flavor or impurities boiled away....

I would like to know two answers. First, I would like to know how those swamis lie on a bed of nails, and I would also like to know how they do that weird rope trick thing. –Anonymous Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The trick, when you think about it, is obvious. You’d impale yourself if you put all your weight on a single nail, but it’s a different story when your weight is spread across hundreds....

“In the name of Cyprus, repeat solemnly: / No husband, no lover, no nookie for me.” So swear the women of Athens near the beginning of Drue Robinson Hagan’s new translation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, as they vow to withhold sex until their men put an end to the Peloponnesian War. “My shapely legs I will keep shut tight,” they continue. “And though he’ll try splitting them night after night / I’ll not give in when he starts to pant / Nothing but nothing will I to him grant....

Tough Act to Follow Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Founded in 1979 by Meade Palidofsky and other aspiring playwrights, Chicago Dramatists Workshop had survived by being all things to all people. Part social club, part writing school, part non-Equity company, it offered writing courses, guest lecturers, play contests, staged readings, workshop productions, and showcase productions of one-acts. By the mid-90s it was beginning to buckle under the weight of its own schedule, and Stanton, a director involved in the readings and workshop productions, began attending the organization’s board meetings....

Presented by the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, this ambitious four-day conference “explores the poetics and politics of ‘independent’ cinema in 1960s and 1970s Japan,” with papers and panel discussions featuring some of this country’s best scholars of Japanese cinema. It also includes screenings of films that “contested dominant narratives of Japan’s first modern century, frequently in reflexive forms that put narrative itself into question.” All films are in Japanese with subtitles, and all screenings take place at the center, room 306 in Cobb Hall, 5811 S....

Though he works in the relatively small and isolated jazz community of Madison, Wisconsin, reedist Anders Svanoe has nonetheless managed to find several like-minded musicians–such as the quartet Tomato Box, which originally included Svanoe–with whom to develop his mainstream-to-jet-stream approach to improvisation. He’s even found a bona fide mentor–none other than Roscoe Mitchell, a cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, who now lives in the Madison area and regularly works out with Svanoe on everything from Bach etudes to postfreedom duets....

The fourth edition of this annual celebration of the art of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and abroad. Current and former Chicagoans include members and alumni of the Second City, ComedySportz, the Upright Citizens Brigade, Schadenfreude, Annoyance Productions, and ImprovOlympic. In addition to the performances there’ll be discussions, forums, workshops, and a minifestival of improvised “movies.” Slotnick Katz & Lehr Best of Chicago voting is live now....

NOVEMBER 22 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Big Time Sarah” Streeter will perform tonight in a benefit for Evanston-based BEHIV (Better Existence With HIV), which provides preventive education and finds shelter and health care for people with HIV/AIDS. Streeter, born in Coldwater, Mississippi, and raised on Chicago’s south side, jumped from gospel singer to club performer at age 14. She delivers a raunchy, old-fashioned electric blues that gets the audience going....