Free Ice Cream, Man; Tourette Awareness Month; WFMU Record Fair; Survivor's Mark Burnett?ro;”Live!; Drunk Horse; The Blind Boys of Alabama

The free cone promotion is easy to take advantage of, and hard to miss: lines will be 20 times their normal length at every Ben & Jerry's in the city. From noon on, just wait at any store for 15 minutes like you normally do in Starbucks and you'll get one free cone. There's even entertainment?according to Ed Peistrup, Ben & Jerry's spokesguy, "A steel drum band is playing outside the shop in Times Square from 4 to 6 p.m."

Meanwhile, under the Queensboro bridge, the righteously proportioned Bridgemarket Food Emporium (405 E. 59th St. at 1st Ave., 752-5836) hosts Harrison, a man who professionally tastes Edy's ice cream, from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Harrison will speak about the summer's hot new flavors (caramel is in) and tell onlookers how they can bring their ice cream ideas to Edy's, which debuts 15 flavors a year. Mr. Harrison is a pro. His taste buds are insured for a million dollars and he has tasted more than 180 million gallons of ice cream.

"Too bad it was all Edy's ice cream," continues Ben & Jerry's mouthpiece Ed, who claims the companies didn't intentionally schedule their events for the same Wednesday. I'm not getting involved.

...In preparation for Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month (May 15 to June 15) Marlin Jim Eisenreich is leading two events for children with Tourette's and their parents over the weekend. On Saturday, he takes 150 families to a Mets-Diamondbacks game courtesy of the Mets, which is a stretch for cheap-ass owner Fred Wilpon. And Sunday at noon, he is the keynote speaker at a Tourette's brunch in the Heisman Room of the Downtown Athletic Club (28 Washington St., betw. Greenwich & West Sts., 425-7000). Tourette's is, of course, an inherited neurobiological disorder marked by involuntary twitching and vocal tics. If you or someone in your family has been diagnosed with ADD, hyperactivity or sinusitis (which can cause similar tics), it might really be Tourette's and you should head to the weekend events for support and free food.

...On the other hand, if you're a compulsive record collector, there's absolutely no help for you. You might as well indulge in the WFMU Spring Record Fair, running Friday to Sunday at the Metropolitan Pavilion (125 W. 18th St. betw. 6th & 7th Aves., 463-0071). As in years past, the Fair brings out more than 100 dealers from around the world to push unusual, hard-to-find LPs by soul, psychedelia, jazz and electronica artists. DJs Chris T., Belinda and Hova, Laura Cantrell, Bill Kelly, Brian Turner, Diane Kamikaze and Glen Jones will perform their respective shows live from the fair, with Turner hosting a set from local retro dudes Oneida. Two Boots Pizza, pricey as always, will be on hand for those who like to spend $10 on two slices and a soda.

Admission to the Fair is five dollars per day, with the hours being Friday, 7-10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. If you're truly warped, $20 will get you a weekend-long pass and let you in on Friday at 4 p.m., a full three hours before the general public. That means you can snap up all the records that the plebes don't even deserve to look at. WFMU is intermittently interesting at 91.1 on your radio dial.

...Don't you love reality tv? I hear top-heavy Survivor 2 bartender Kimmi on the radio, and I think it's so sweet that random shlubs are getting the perks of highly paid actors and actresses. It's long overdue, considering the ridiculous body images that the actors/actresses have thrown at us for the past 70 years. Hopefully we're entering an America where movie stars are permanently out of work, fat middle-aged gay nudists do car commercials and the right to be famous is up there with free speech and Internet porn.

In this new world, Mary-Ellis Bunim, Jonathan Murray and Mark Burnett will be legends, pioneers, visionaries. Bunim and Murray brought reality tv to cable a decade before the rush with 1992's Real World, while Burnett found the formula?real people, top-notch production values and a competitive environment?that turned Survivor into the biggest television phenomenon since I Love Lucy. They'll all be on hand at the Museum of Television & Radio (25 W. 52nd St., betw. 5th & 6th Aves., 621-6800) this Monday for a seminar on "An American Family to Survivor: What Is Reality on Television?" The talk starts at 6:30 as part of the museum's 2001 Television Documentary Festival. Tickets are $10.

...Beefing up the number of surprisingly good rock CDs released this year (look for Opeth's Blackwater Park and the Gotohells' Rock 'n' Roll America), Tanning Salon/Biblical Proportions by Drunk Horse features two mini-concept albums on one disc. The first four tracks (Tanning Salon) tackle American consumerism, while the last seven (Biblical Proportions) talk about God, Cain, the 500 loaves and so on. Singer/guitarist Eli Eckert explains in classic rock fashion:

"It [the album] was just like this thing that we were doing... We had a lot of songs, and the songs that we were picking out just seemed to fit into these two different categories, and it just seemed like a nice way to package it."

Drunk Horse sounds like ZZ Top vs. the Doors, with inoffensive vocals and great dual-guitar interplay. They come to Brownies (169 Ave A., betw. 10th & 11th Sts., 420-8392) this Monday and Tuesday with instrumental metal act the Fucking Champs at 10 p.m. each night; tickets are $10.

...Drunk Horse has been together since 1997. The Blind Boys of Alabama have been gigging in one form or another since 1937. They make an appearance this Tuesday at the Bottom Line (15 W. 4th St. at Mercer St., 228-6300). Band leader Clarence Fountain has two shows planned, where he will orchestrate gospel with the group he conceived of as a preteen at the Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega, AL. Yes, all members of the band are sightless.

Christened the Happy Land Jubilee Singers upon their inception, the Blind Boys changed their name to compete with the Five Blind Boys from Mississippi, whose successful run on gospel circuits in the 50s set up a fierce rivalry. There were even epic "Blind Boy Battles," in which Clarence Fountain would compete mano-a-mano with lead Mississippi Blind Boy Archie Brownlee, sending concertgoers into religious frenzies that required medical attention.

Having survived rock, punk, rap and the accidental shooting death of original lead singer Vel Bozman Traylor ("He always liked to play with guns," says Fountain), the Blind Boys found unprecedented success in the 90s, when they toured with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Al Green. Now, riding their 1995 live effort I Brought Him with Me, they come to New York for two days (on Monday, they do Letterman). The Bottom Line shows are Tuesday at 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Tickets are $25.