Mostly I’m just excited that this is the weekend before the nice long Memorial Day weekend. Let’s get moving.
Friday
How we know it’s officially summer: ‘Til Midnight at the Nasher is back. Wolfgang Puck and his general chokehold on the Arts District forbids you from bringing your own picnic, so your food choices are kind of limited, but do bring your party pants. Air Review is playing, and then they’ll screen Life of Pi. It’s free, too, which means you can splurge on Samar for an actual human-sized dinner.
Meanwhile, if you didn’t make it Homegrown Fest in Main Street Garden last weekend, the Fort Worth Music Festival kicks off two days of bands and beer this afternoon at at the Panther Island Pavilion. Worth sneaking out of work early? Obviously. Our music critic, Christopher Mosley, writes a bit about the fest’s line up over on FrontRow:
The Fort Worth Music Festival quite ambitiously tackles everything from a mariachi act (Mariachi Quetzal); to a New Orleans brass combo (Dirty Dozen Brass Band); to the somehow still hip indie act, The Walkmen. The decision to throw jazz in with current popular music is a respectably risky one, though Fort Worth’s rich jazz history has always given it a one-up on looking down its nose a little at the rest of North Texas. Which is fine with me, since Ornette Coleman was born there, and he should really have an entire jazz and avant-garde festival named in his honor.
Look, all I want is for the Old 97’s to play “New Kid” in honor of my precious Veronica Mars movie.
Saturday
If you are very good at poker, have some extra cash hidden in your sock drawer, and admire murdered United States sniper Chris Kyle and the work he was doing with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, here’s a fundraiser for you. Poker for PTSD benefits his Heroes Foundation, which hopes to build a gym in a veteran’s association named in his honor. Each ticket gets you food, drink, and a seat at the table.
Dallas Comic Con continues Saturday afternoon, which brings me to a story. In early high school, I adored a lesser known actor named Ioan Gruffudd. He played the swashbuckling-but-morally-upright part of Royal Navy officer Horatio Hornblower in the circa 1998 A&E adaptation of C.S. Forester’s historical fiction about the Napoleonic Wars. But since not everyone was as obsessed with Hornblower as I was, you probably know him from Fantastic Four. He’ll be around Saturday, along with William Shatner and Nathan Fillion (Castle, Firefly, Dr. Horrible, Buffy).
Online tickets sales are closed, so you have to try your luck at the box office. There’s also a whole area dedicated to small press comics, where you might just find a new favorite.
Sunday
If you’ve ever thought about starting a brewery in the back of your closet, listen up. These 50 or so folks competing in this year’s Brew Riot home brew competition have met or exceeded great fermentations and now all you have to do is drink a bunch of beer, hang out in Bishop Arts, and judge their craft. This is not hard.
Just to make things even more fun, though, you can participate in the “1.1 Brew Run” before the festival official starts. It’s running, but with beer, which makes me think the running part might be okay. But you must pre-register online for this, because you can’t just show up Sunday for a sudsy jog.
For more to do this weekend, go here.
