Things are really popping everywhere. Pop around at Pride in the CLE celebrating tolerance and pride, the maestro Carl Baldassarre conducting his classic rock orchestra to help feed our neighbors, a walk on the sunny side at Little Italy’s Art Walk and Walk All Over Waterloo and Art By The Falls in Chagrin. Pop into an early Juneteenth in Akron, Uncommon Sounds at the old Convivium 33, native plants at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes & Mulberry Creek Herb Farm, Cleveland Ballet’s ChoreoLab at Near West Theatre, Bob Frank and friends at the Bainbridge Swing Dance, a play in Chagrin about the lingering effects of the Holocaust, a trash pickup at Big Creek & Rocky River watersheds, and Family Fishing Day at Rockefeller Park Lagoon. Everyone seems to be popping off.
Pop music is as popular as ever. And it’s free at Wade Oval Wednesdays, of course, but now also Music at Market Square on the first Thursdays of the month, the East Shore Park Club concert series every other Thursday thru 9/10, the Lakewood Front Porch Concerts on Fridays thru 7/17, and the Ben Franklin Community Garden series on the 1st & 3rd Saturdays each month, and Larchmere rocks the blocks. Pop out and find out.
We can’t define The Numbers Band as pop, rock, jazz or blues, but Jason Pruffer’s documentary film, 15 years in the making, may get close. We spoke with Pruffer and band leader Robert Kidney in our latest CoolCleveland VIDEO. Artist Liz Maugans pens a CoolCleveland CULTURATI column on how artists create habit trails or desire paths that cut across our built terrain as “new navigators” envisioning where our city really wants to go. Cut your own path and blow this pop stand.
-Thomas Mulready