Sat., July 4, 8:30pm

Auditorium Shores , South First at Lady Bird Lake

Keep your head down this Saturday. There’s going to be a lot of ordnance whizzing through the air. You might even want to just wet your clothes down before you go outside … oh, wait a minute … you won’t have to – at 100-plus degrees your clothes should be soaked shortly after you step outside. July through September in Austin is just one long wet T-shirt contest anyway, so if you’re a little bashful about showing off your b(m)oobs, you might try sporting something synthetic – some sort of petroleum-based fiber that claims to “wick away the moisture.” Question is: Away to where? All that sweat isn’t exactly itching to hop into the atmosphere. It seems much happier forming a rivulet down your ass crack. In fact, if anything “wicks away the moisture,” it’s gravity. Synthetic fabrics treat moisture like an ugly baby. They just keep passing it along hoping they’re not the one that ends up holding it. Even if you do drop some coin on some space age sportswear, you’ll still probably be rocking a matching pair of underarm crescents at the very least. After all, this ain’t Phoenix, a place where people can live their entire lives without ever knowing what it feels like to actually sweat. If it’s summertime in Austin and you’re outside and not sweating, there’s a really good chance that you’re dead … or perhaps reincarnated as a dog. Either way, that’s particularly bad news this weekend because dogs tend to be skittish around fireworks, and dead people, though unfazed by sudden loud noises, are pretty much useless for anything other than holding the punk steady and being easy scapegoats for smelly farts. You’re better off sweating buckets. Besides, it’s the popular thing to do. Just make sure to replenish your fluids, even if it takes a hose and a funnel to keep up. Hey, nobody’s forcing you to bong beer (even though sometimes your frat brothers make you feel that way). You could be a rebel and throw in an occasional can of sparkling water. You’d get the same gnarly burp, torrential pee stream, and tepid, flat, backwash finish, plus maybe save yourself that bangin' headache the next morning. Still, if you choose to inhale nothing but Natty Light through a tube all day, that’s your business (Anheuser-Busch isn’t going to complain either). Sure, it will decimate your motor skills and analytical-reasoning ability (remember the $634 you spent on fireworks last year?), but beer-bonging is one of those inalienable American rights you have to exercise to keep from losing – sort of like chain-smoking and Roman candle fights. It’s also an irrefutably efficient form of beverage delivery, and no one loves efficiency more than Americans – well, except Germans, who love beer and efficiency perhaps too much. That’s a dangerous combination, especially when you combine it with fireworks, which is a good reason to turn over the pyrotechnics to sober professionals. This Saturday pretty much every hamlet and bedroom community of Austin is throwing some sort of fireworks display, so you should only have to stumble out onto your front lawn to enjoy the show. Here in Austin, your best bet is to bus it down to Auditorium Shores, where conductor Peter Bay and the Austin Symphony will be blowing it up right along with the fireworks with their stirring rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture accompanied by 75-millimeter howitzer cannons from the Texas National Guard Salute Battery. Sounds awesome, right? OK, but there’s one catch: If you bring your beer bong, you need to keep it on the downlow, because alcohol and glass containers aren’t allowed in the park.