Even though the biggest movies in the last few months have been "American Pie 2," "Rush Hour 2," "Jurassic Park 3" and "Planet of the Apes," people really do want to see something new.

I know this because people are swarming to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival — one of up to 27 Fringe Festivals worldwide that showcase live acts not approved by any artistic jury. Every seat was taken at the shows I saw one weekend. And the most hopeful, inspiring thing about that is that a lot of those shows reeked. Badly.

It's unfair to name these productions. But at one kids' show, the performers asked the audience for a suggestion, then ignored it.

In another show — a confusing, ineptly acted experimental piece — audience members farther back than the fourth row couldn't see half of what the actors did. (One actress, by the way, was credited not only as a producer of the show, but as "transportation"; production experience is all well and good, but small theater groups endow particularly high honors upon those who own a station wagon.)

As for the first show I saw, I'll leave out the details, but it was bad, and it involved puppets.

Nonetheless, the houses for all these shows were packed.

The attraction is that anything can happen. Fringe acts tend to be extremely original — sometimes because the artists are trying to do something original, sometimes because the artists are trying to do something unoriginal, and they're bad at it. There's a play about a saint, a dance piece called "My Mother's Eyeball," and no, I did not manage to catch the version of Anton Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" performed in the nude and in Hungarian. But I tried.

The rest of the year, though, local actors complain how hard it is to get audiences. People don't leave their houses after a certain point in their lives, particularly when they have kids.

For the first couple of years after having a baby, people pretty much stay indoors. And when they finally crawl back out into the sunlight, they can't do anything spontaneous for awhile. You never hear the parents of a 6-year-old say, "Let's go see if the lesbian Armenian bongo players are any good, then maybe watch a guy drive nails up his nose." Plans by parents go more like, "Let's feed the kids pudding. That should kill the rest of the week."

Anything else seems like a project — to get a baby-sitter, drive into the city and find parking just to see some big, pukey old thing by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Wouldn't it be soooooo much easier to stay home and watch "The Sopranos"? Amost everybody says "The Sopranos" is good. Why not just watch "The Sopranos"?

This helps explain why audience members for live shows during the regular season tend to be in their 20s and early 30s. Beyond that, older theater-goers usually are wearing the sort of artsy accouterment that tells you they used to go out drinking with Jack Kerouac.

But others will come if they know there's something to see. The Philadelphia Fringe Festival has tripled in size since it started in 1997. Worldwide, since they first began on the outside "fringes" of the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland in 1947, fringe shows have popped up in New York, Minneapolis, Orlando, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and countless points across Canada.

And sooner or later, you do see something truly good. Last Wednesday, I walked into a nearly empty warehouse theater for a one-woman show called "Contagious," and for the same price I paid for the bad puppet show, a high-strung actress named Eileen O'Connor described the gauntlet of fear and mortality she passed through when quarantined for tuberculosis. It was funny, it was intelligent, it broke my heart.

And by the time you read this, she will have gone back to New York. Even the cabaret space where she performed is set to be torn down within a year.

Maybe that's what people like best of all about the fringe shows, good or bad: We'll never see them again. That's how we know that, at long last, we have seen something unique.