Five Events to Make Your Weekend Fun

Srsly: What good is sitting alone in your room?

Even when life isn’t a cabaret, precisely, you know a city like Austin always has a plethora of options ready for your amusement and edification, right?

And so that’s what we’re pointing to right now: Five diverse things we think would make your weekend better. Five things that will engage you more deeply with a few of the many vibrant communities forming this urban hub you’re already a part of. Five things to check out, citizen, maybe after you’ve wracked your mind on the holiday-skewering snark of Pikamas.

Yes, don’t forget that there’s more – much more – everywhere.
But here’s five picks for your consideration, including two for this very night:

1. DUE EAST The East Austin Studio Tour is the annual visual-arts event in the ATX, fomented and engineered by the seemingly tireless savants of Big Medium. And it’s coming up next week. But this thing here, ah, this is the kickoff party for the whole tour, a Thursday-night soirée replete with fancy food and drink and glitz and glamor and, you know, art. Trust us: You haven’t properly rubbed elbows with anyone until you’ve rubbed some of these creative, paint-stained, X-Acto-scarred, installation-wounded elbows at the Due EAST celebration.

2. BEARDED LADY: DEAR BEER If that Due EAST hullaballoo is beyond your budget or just too crowded for your somewhat agoraphobic art-loving sensibilities, this party’s also happening on Thursday night – and if you haven’t realized what heights of creative goodness a screenprinting studio can achieve, then you’ve never been to Bearded Lady before and seen the gallery & local shop there, the artwork on display among the screening rigs and worktables. And this Thursday’s got the opening reception for Ryan Duggan and Elizabeth Kovach’s homage to vintage beer-advertising ephemera, so that’s a definite hopsy-grainy bonus right there.

3. WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE You need no introduction to this podcasted phenomenon, right? Which is why Saturday’s live show at the Paramount is probably already sold out by now. But! There’s the book of Welcome to Night Vale, too, and creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are presenting and signing it at BookPeople on Friday night. So you might want to check the website there and grab yourself a spot in line. Just … be careful of that one tall guy with the twitching hand near the entrance: He’s rumored to be on assignment from some government agency spoken of only in whispers.

4. BOY, HOWDY! This town has an overflowing wealth of improv shows almost every night of the week – purveyed by the same top talents who also run Austin’s popular improv schools, of course – but right now we’re most excited by the Hideout’s homage to those 1960s TV shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke and, yes, even The Big Valley. Want to enjoy a Saturday night show created totally on-the-spot, about “a family of clean-cut cowboys and cowgirls fighting for love, land, and liberty against smooth-talkin’ city folk and backwater bandits”? You bet your sweet little spurs you do, podner. Get your tickets right here.

5. THE ZIGGY DO When Andrea Ariel Dance Theatre throws a David Bowie-inspired fundraiser with Ziggy Stardust cocktails and Soundpainting performances and previews of their upcoming shows and live music by the Super Creeps, we’re glad it’s early on a Sunday night – because, after this rockin’ shindig, we’re gonna need to crash until the get-your-ass-back-to-work alarm goes off way too soon on Monday morning.