What to do, what to do?
Another weekend on its way, and maybe your soundtrack for it is gonna be provided by some of the gloriously thrashing sprawl of Chaos in Tejas … but maybe you’ve come down with some strange, seven-day allergy to live music, because, hell, if there are bacteria out there that are capable of devouring a person’s flesh, then who knows what sort of mere allergies one might contage in these environmentally disruptive times?
Okay, so let’s look elsewhere than the music scene …
You like, what? You like comedy?
Well, there’s the whole local stand-up scene, of course, and the improv scene, and the sketch scene … so you’re pretty much drowning in options every week in this town. But this weekend, it’s even better than usual – for improv and sketch, certainly. That’s because one of the main improv venues in town, The Hideout, is doing a 43-Hour Improv Marathon, in which eight performers will, by themselves or with others, commit their extemporaneous antics nonstop for two days and two nights. So you could catch the action near the beginning of this madness and witness some damn fine improv; and then maybe return to check out the last few shows and witness some (potentially) still damn fine improv performed by people who might be slightly drooling or liable to tump over apropos of not much more than gravity. We’re gluttons for others’ clever, self-imposed deliriums, so we recommend an All-Marathon Pass …
And, ah, maybe you have children? Because it seems like there’s a lot of those breeding shenanigans going on lately, doesn’t it? But, no, maybe you’ve already had kids for a while, and maybe those kids are older than, say, six or so? Because there are a plethora of kid-friendly things to do in the ATX, as always … but we want to point out five options that are a little beyond the same-old same-old Hallmarky activities that result in boring adults. Yeah, we compiled the list more than ten years ago, but that just means it’s a classic and no less relevant to today’s parents & their restless rugrats …
Kids or not, there’s a cool thing going on at Co-Lab this weekend. (You know that Co-Lab’s an art venue for exhibitions, installations, and performances, right? Run by Sean Gaulager and his sharp new haircut?) An artist named Calder Kamin is building birdnests by threading choice bits of found material through pre-made artificial structures, simultaneously creating new art and new avian habitats. Hell of an interesting installation about the world of feathery synanthropes, we bet, but what’s even better is that Kamin’s conducting a nest-building workshop at Co-Lab on Sunday afternoon.
Fly now, dear reader, fly to your weekend of fun!
This article appears in May 25 • 2012.