Looks like Philadelphia Magazine is on to us.

Open this month's issue to Brooke De La Villanova's High Society column in the "Pulse" section, and here's what you'll find:

High Society: February 2010

By Brooke De la Villanova

How I love artsy people! Restaurant glamour-puss Audrey Claire threw a launch party that drew power couple Sharon Pinkenson and Joe Weiss, legal eagle Bernie Munley, entrepreneur David Grasso, Memphis Flats developer Greg Hill, Fringe-y Nick Stuccio, and Stephen Starr, among others. Being launched: Feastival, which despite its Seinfeldian name promises to be delish. On September 15th, 25 top chefs will whip up edgy fare in Northern Liberties to raise money for the edgy Live Arts and Philly Fringe festivals. Bon appetit, munchkins. ....

"High Society", indeed. For more info on this star-studded evening, Click Here!

>>>Weirdest publicity break ever? Well, not really, but pretty cool: Melissa Dunphy talks to the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog about The Gonzales Cantata. Meet the cast and video preview here; half-price ($10) preview tonight at The Rotunda, 7:00 pm.

>>>Crazy coverage in City Paper, starting today!

>>>The role of women in theater (not as actors, but in the institution, you see) has been much in the news and hotly debated this summer. In Philadelphia Weekly, J. Cooper Robb has a great story on the slew of great work by or featuring women in this year's festival.

>>>Among Philadelphia Weekly's weekend picks: Festival Bar opens tomorrow, kids! Well, 21-and-ups, anyway. Check back later today for pics of this year's bar-space-in-progress as we get ready for a packed house tomorrow night. They can't turn me away, because I gotta cover it, but you should get there early.

>>>The Festival imports performers from Poland, sure, but did you know we also import them from Montgomery County?

>>>Rep Radio, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite area podcasts. The latest features EgoPo's Company and folks from Monday night's final Philly Fringe previews: Crooked House, Katie and Pitark, The Gonzales Contata, Mr. Harry, Pumpernickel and Marmalade and Shakesploitation II: Iambic Boogaloo.

>>>Lindsay Harris-Friel runs down her picks at Phawker. I'm actually going to four of the six shows Lindsay selects. Who is this person, who knows my aesthetics?

>>>Oops, Geoff Sobelle's appearance on Fox29's "Good Day Philadelphia" got bumped to tomorrow, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 am.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by Matt Dunphy.

>>>Whoa! Check out danceJournal.org's Live Arts/Fringe readers' recommendations. Send a text from your mobile phone to 87884, begin your message with @wif6862, and your suggestions for the Festival will cycle through this crazy Flash animation they have up.

>>>Howard Shapiro has a big piece in the Inquirer on how our relationship with cold hard cash has emerged as a theme running through much of this year's Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe.

>>>The Baltimore Sun, the paper of record for our scrappy neighbor to the south, wants to send its people our way on a day trip, and Philly2Philly picks the Festival as one of the top cultural events of the fall.

>>>Put the kids to bed! This week, Rep Radio is adult content all the way. Includes a segment on 4PLAY, which features a short play from our very own Information Manager and Copywriter Emeritus, Josh McIlvain!

>>>Double whoa! Geoff Sobelle (Welcome to Yuba City)is scheduled to be on Fox29's "Good Day Philadelphia" to talk about the "Turn Your Cell Phone On!" campaign. Via cell phone ranking, audience members give you the straight dope, live, while they're at the show. Hey performers, the pressure's on! (But we know you'll deliver.)

--Nicholas Gilewicz

So, I'm out of the office for like maybe 30 hours, and look what happens:

>>>Metro features Teenager: Anne Frank. We covered this Philly Fringe show a little while back, as it's in one of our favorite 2009 Fringe venues: the rooftop of Parkway House on Ben Franklin Parkway, with a panoramic view of the Philly skyline.

>>>At the Daily News, Lauren Friedman gives us two slants on the same Festival: first, Live Arts shows like STORE, Welcome to Yuba City, and FATEBOOK enliven spaces that were previously underutilized or vacant, and second, you know we're all internationalist up in here, with shows like Operetta, Mortal Engine, and small metal objects.

>>>We do like to be cosmopolitan (ask Nick Stuccio about his travels some day), but we don't forget our deep regional roots. Philly-based picks from centraljersey.com: Pig Iron's Welcome to Yuba City, Lucidity Suitcase International's Off the Grid (not part of Fringe, but hey, it'll be good) and MICROWORLD(s) Part #1, and New Paradise Laboratories's FATEBOOK, which nobody can stop talking about, including director Whit MacLaughlin and Philadelphia Weekly writer J. Cooper Robb.

>>>Speaking of those regional roots: uwishunu plugs the Fringe production Wawapalooza 3: The Dark Roast, a tribute to and humorous poke at many things Philly, according to Eric Balchunas.

>>>Big Inquirer feature from Wendy Rosenfeld, aka Drama Queen, on Welcome to Yuba City. Aw, she also plugs this little blog here in the same post. Thanks Wendy!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

For your edification:

>>>The Chestnut Hill Local profiles Judy Freed, who's performing solo show Food Fight on September 5 and 6 during Philly Fringe.

>>>Comic Vs. Audience talks to Sixth Borough about taking their Philly brand of humor to Chicago and Milwaukee. Timejawn will be at the Fringe.

>>>Culturebot has a brief interview with the artistic director of Elevator Repair Service, John Collins. He directed Gatz, which I caught at Live Arts in 2007, and which is one of the best plays I've ever seen, anywhere.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

Photo by James Domingo

This is a little bit insider-y, but thanks to Critical Mass at City Paper for plugging Karina Kacala's great volunteer profiles! I think our in was the last profile about one of City Paper's former interns (who, should you read it, does a LOT around town). And of course, I'm glad to see Festival volunteers get a few more props—their work really drives the day-to-day success of all the shows.

--Nicholas Gilewicz

This here Festival blog isn't the only awesome institutional journalism game in town. Darnelle Radford promised recently that Rep Radio would be back soon, and so it is! Produced by Represented Theatre Company (where Darnell's the producing artistic director), it's a series of podcasts looking at the Philadelphia theater scene, hosted by Chris Morse.

I missed the podcasts when they were in beta earlier this year, but those shows are still online. To catch up, click here to download the MP3s or subscribe to the podcast. I'm pretty excited that there's a regular aural dose of thoughtful coverage of Philadelphia theater - I can't think of anything else like it in town!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

>>>Our freaking awesome virtual program guide is now available on our website. You know how a lot of those virtual print publications are crappy? Ours isn't! If you can't wait to flip through your print copy, you can browse through all the shows right now.

>>>Speaking of us, David Cote of Time Out New York is offering nine ways to fix New York theater. Number 4? Make Fringe NYC to look more like, well, Philly. From Cote: "We've knocked the [NYC] Fringe for being trivial and craptastic, but it's not funny anymore: time for FringeNYC to grow up and curate a quality international festival at the center of its amateur orgy. Best example: the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival." In case you're concerned, the Philly Fringe side of the Festival is anything but trivial and craptastic. Check out the great Fringe stories we've reported so far. Or look at our freaking awesome virtual program guide!

>>>At Drama Queen, Wendy Rosenfeld digs into the ongoing online performance that, for now, is FATEBOOK.

>>>Whoa, check this out: Did you know that Deutschlandradio Kultur reported on the kate watson-wallace/anonymous bodies fundraiser and how Philadelphia artists and organizations are working to deal with the difficult financial landscape right now? Quotes Kate, our own Nick Stuccio, and Philadanco's Joan Myers Brown in a brief and interesting look at issues facing the performance scene here. Or at least as far as I can tell. My German is only OK, and all of the online translators spit out copy like they have aphasia.

>>>Hey writers: the deadline for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts individual artist fellowships is August 3. Categories this year include "scriptworks," which is for playwrights and screenwriters. This is money for just being awesome, so go over to their site and set up your CueRate stuff and get your act together. Then visit the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance website to learn how to save arts and culture funding in Pennsylvania, which, in case you didn't know, is about to be zeroed out of the budget. In which case, no grants for you. So get cracking!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

>>>The New York Times's Charles Isherwood continues his love for all things related to Pig Iron with his review of machines machines machines machines machines machines machines. As does the SundayArts blog from New York's excellent PBS affiliate WNET. And TheaterMania, too. If you can't go to HERE to see the show, check out the video preview.

>>>Mad respect for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which, on the heels of its brilliantly curated Cezanne exhibit, took the Golden Lion award at the Venice Bienniale. A survey of Bruce Nauman, Topological Gardens occupies a both a pavilion site and two university spaces elsewhere in the city. ArtsJournal has a short piece up, with a pic. The United States hasn't won the Golden Lion, given to the best national exhibition, since 1990. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

>>>And congrats to Shirley Herz, Broadway publicist nonpareil with Philadelphia origins. She won a special-honor Tony on Sunday night; the AP reports that she's the first publicist to ever receive the award. Bravo!

--Nicholas Gilewicz

>>>Chunky Move, who's bringing the innovative, strange, and elegant Mortal Engine to Live Arts this fall, has a cool show scheduled for Saturday (read about it in The Age). Titled Moving One Hundred, they're using 100 volunteers to take over Melbourne's Federation Square for two massive dance performances. You might be asking yourself: Why are they telling me about a show in Australia that I can't possibly make? The answer: our Melbourne correspondent (we're worldwide like that) is going to deliver a report and series of pics from square. If you do happen to be there, go check it out and say hi for us.

>>>Carolyn Huckabay continues to interview nEW festival performers on City Paper's The Clog. New post: Jaamil Olawale Kososko (The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009: Philadelphia; STORE).

>>>You know that one way or another you're going to end up watching some portion of the 2009 Tony Awards on Sunday night. Among other reasons: they're hosted by NPH, or Neal Patrick Harris, to those of you who haven't seen the Harold and Kumar movies 1,000 times. John Chattman interviews him for HuffPost. And while I'm not the biggest fan of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Serenity, Dollhouse), I do encourage you to watch NPH's star turn in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Produced during the writers' strike a couple years back as an Internet-only feature, it's freaking hilarious. Anyway, Tonys are Sunday night at 8:00 pm on CBS.

--Nicholas Gilewicz