Event Menu

Threadgill's World Headquarters (301 W. Riverside, 472-9304) invites you to eat, drink, and enjoy great Austin music to benefit the out-of-work staff and rebuilding efforts of Mother's Cafe & Garden. The evening's menu will feature vegetarian specialties and a musical lineup including Geoff Kaiser, Redd Volkaert, and a rare local appearance by Eric Johnson. Tickets are $20 and are available online at www.frontgatetickets.com or at the restaurant, Sunday, April 1, 7pm.

Put on your dancing shoes and your eating pants, and immerse yourself in Cajun music and food at the 14th annual Louisiana Swamp Thing & Crawfish Festival. The good times will roll at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue, just across the street from the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum. The musical lineup includes 14 bands from Texas and Louisiana playing nonstop. The menu features 6,000 pounds of crawfish, as well as such Cajun specialties as seafood, gumbo, étouffée, jambalaya, and red beans and rice. There will be free zydeco dance lessons, shopping for fine arts and crafts, plus lots of big, bouncy inflatables for the kids. Plenty of convenient parking in nearby state lots. Tickets are $9 at the gate, and kids 10 and younger get in free. For more detailed information, go to www.roadwayevents.com. Gates open at 10:30am, and music goes until after 12mid, Saturday, March 31.

While you're driving in the Hill Country this weekend, appreciating the wildflowers, stop by Texas Hills Vineyard (830/868-2321, www.texashillsvineyard.com) for their free Foolish Foods and Fun Wines pairing event. They'll show you which wines to pair with such foolish foods as Spam, peanut butter, and wasabi peas. No April fooling! Saturday, March 31, 10am-5pm; Sunday, April 1, noon-5pm.

A perfect way to cap off the recent local celebration of Texas wines would be to watch the debut of the three-part PBS series The Wine Roads of Texas during the spring pledge drive on KLRU. The series is based on Chronicle wine writer Wes Marshall's book of the same name, the second edition of which should hit bookstores in mid-April; Thursday, April 5, 7:05pm.