The 2012 season at Trained Eye Arts Center will begin with this festival highlighting local female talents in art, music and other forms of entertainment. Proceeds will benefit Babbs and Planned Parenthood. Visit website for more information.

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures presents this exhibit of diverse items. From beetle-wing necklaces to iPods, it features personal accessories and explores their practical, decorative, and social roles around the world. Exhibit can be viewed Tuesday – Friday, 9 am, – 4:30 pm; Saturday & Sunday, 1 – 4:30 pm, and will be in place until July 1.

The Little 500 is the biggest intramural event on the IU campus and the largest collegiate bike race in the United States. Riders compete in four-person teams in separate races for men and women around a quarter-mile cinder track.

More than 25,000 people attend the races every year, with the proceeds used for working student scholarships at IU. The 2011 races allowed the Student Foundation to give away more than $35,000 in scholarships.

Purchase tickets on ticketmaster.com

Professor Xiaobing Tang, Professor of Comparative Literature and Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, University of Michigan will present a lecture a lecture about the different dimensions of art in China with specific attention to contemporary printmakers and their work. Professor Tang’s specialty is twentieth-century Chinese literature and visual arts with a particular interest in literary and artistic modernisms, the avant-garde, and cultural politics.

Clifford Odets’ classic play, “Waiting for Lefty,” was called one of the most thorough, trenchant jobs in the school of revolutionary drama by critic Brooks Atkinson when first produced in 1935. At the time Odets was writing, the top 10% income shares accounted for around 45% of the nation’s total wages, compared with today’s top decile making nearly 50% of the nation’s wages. Is it time for another revolution? Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center’s Artistic Director, Paul Daily, directs this first-ever Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington student production.

April 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21

A reception to follow the lecture of Xiaobing Tang.

Professor Xiaobing Tang, Professor of Comparative Literature and Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies, University of Michigan will present a lecture a lecture about the different dimensions of art in China with specific attention to contemporary printmakers and their work. Professor Tang’s specialty is twentieth-century Chinese literature and visual arts with a particular interest in literary and artistic modernisms, the avant-garde, and cultural politics.

Ushers are needed for the show “Three Views of the Same Object” at the Bloomington Playwrights Project, on April 19, 20 and 21.

Ushers are responsible for greeting patrons and handing out playbills at the door before the performance. Please try to arrive by 45 minutes before showtime (7:15 p.m. for most 8 p.m. show times) and check in with the box office attendant at the door. He/she will give you programs/ playbills to distribute to patrons at the door.

Ushers are invited to take a complimentary seat to see the show (if show does not sell out), but you don’t have to watch the show if you don’t want to. After the show, we ask our ushers to clean up the seats after the patrons empty out of the house, picking up stray food wrappers or discarded programs /playbills and depositing them in the marked containers. That’s it. Quite simple really.

Most volunteer ushers decide to dress business casual, but straight casual is fine too. Minimum age is 13.

Great music and desserts to die for! Join Kaia for an intimate evening of great world music as part of the Blue Room concert series. Only 50 seats available. Free refreshments at intermission. Reservations recommended; contact Carolyn VandeWiele at 812-320-9920. Doors open 7pm. See www.KaiaSing.com for directions.

The Charles Dickens Bicentennial Celebration celebrates Dickens’s birth, 200 years ago, bringing together a roster of local and international performers and little-seen and –heard Dickensian treasures: Dr. Philip Carli, world-famous silent film pianist and composer, accompanying both rare archival Dickens film shorts and select luminaries of the IU Opera School in a unique reconstruction of Dickens’s opera of 1836, The Village Coquettes, directed by Alison Mero; Cardinal Stage star Ken Farrell, performing the public reading with which Dickens “electrified” his audiences in 1868, “Sikes and Nancy”; show producers David “Limelight” Francis and “Professor” Joss Marsh at the Magic lantern with slides that inspired Dickens’s imagination, and the story that resulted, A Christmas Carol; and much, much more.

Clifford Odets’ classic play, “Waiting for Lefty,” was called one of the most thorough, trenchant jobs in the school of revolutionary drama by critic Brooks Atkinson when first produced in 1935. At the time Odets was writing, the top 10% income shares accounted for around 45% of the nation’s total wages, compared with today’s top decile making nearly 50% of the nation’s wages. Is it time for another revolution? Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center’s Artistic Director, Paul Daily, directs this first-ever Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington student production.

April 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21