Art by Aaron Henderson and Ted Coffey
MainEvent
Of its free quarterly Gallery Crawls, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s summer installment is the busiest, and surely the most humid. The three dozen venues featuring visual art and live music, free yoga classes and more are both indoors and out — the latter including the popular Summer Night Market, with indie vendors of food, music, jewelry, crafts and more. New exhibits include Wood Street Galleries’ interactive La Cour des Miracles, where Bill Vorn and Louis-Philippe Demers’ robots portray “fake” humans like “The Harrassing Machine” and “The Heretic Machine.” SPACE has group show Cataloguing Pattern (pictured). And The Takeaway: Made With Love fills the second floor of 937 Liberty Ave. with “nearly 100 amateur artworks hand-picked from thrift-store collections” (and available to lucky visitors via free lottery, per curator Robert Raczka, a frequent CP contributor). Other highlights include sound artist Richard Iamuuri’s live performance of the original score to his multimedia work Mars Is Underwater, at the Trust Arts Education Center. The July 11 Crawl is capped by the six-venue CrawlAfterDark. These ticketed events include the CONSOL Energy Cosmopolitan Pittsburgh party, with performances and more, at the August Wilson Center, and Electric Slidez: PowerPoint Karaoke Throwdown. The latter is Arcade Comedy Theater’s competition for improvisers, comics and public speakers giving PowerPoint presentations for slides they’ve never seen before. Bill O’Driscoll Crawl: 5:30-10 p.m. (free). CrawlAfterDark starts at 7 p.m. (ticket prices vary). Fri., July 11. Downtown. 412-456-6666 or www.trustarts.org
free beer. Bill O’Driscoll 7 p.m. 1449 Potomac Ave., Dormont. $10. 412-563-0368 or ww.thehollywooddormont.org
+ SAT., JULY 12 {SHOWCASE} Despite the queer community’s big gains in recent years in civil rights and more, expressly queer voices in mainstream
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{COMEDY} Chicksburg Presents: The Wild Women of Comedy Showcase promises a no-holds-barred night of standup, with a focus on local comics. The line-up includes Christina Let’s Build Mcneese (who organized the show), Eye Holla, Samantha Bentley, Molly Sharrow, Olivia Grace Traini, Abby Denton and more. The well-populated program also features male comics including Derek Minto and Ed Bailey. The perhaps unlikely venue is the International Children’s Art Gallery, in Bloomfield. BO 9 p.m. 5020 Penn Ave., Bloomfield. $5. 412-290-9652
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food-preservation techniques as canning, fermentation and drying. You can even grade the instructor when you sample some of the preserves made by Hooper and his staff at Legume. BO 6:30 p.m. 7101 Hamilton Ave., Homewood. Free. 412-242-3598 or www.eastendfood.coop
{TALK} The rise in edible gardens and urban farming has sparked new interest in food preservation, as well. How else to make the harvest last all year? Tonight, one of the city’s best-known restaurateurs offers An Overview of Food Preservation at Home, an East End Food Co-op program at the Carnegie Library’s Homewood branch. Trevett Hooper, of Legume restaurant, will cover such simple
+ THU., JULY 17 {WORDS} “Missed the surgery / made the recovery,” writes Wendy Scott in “Traveling.” “70 on 17 / 80
on 76 / to stand / your arm resting on mine / as you shuffle. / You say pull me up. / No, I say, tuck your feet / push yourself up / with your hands. / Like the nurse / I stand / just out of reach.” Scott, Pittsburghbased author of the recent collection Soon I Will Build an Ark, reads at tonight’s installment of Versify, at the East End Book Exchange. Joining her are poets Rachel Mennies, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, and Emily Mohn-Slate. BO 7 p.m. 4754 Liberty Ave., Bloomfield. Free. 412-224-2847
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TBS sitcom Sullivan & Son is in its third season, and so is the Sullivan & Son Comedy Tour. Local native Steve Byrne stars in the series, set in the South Side neighborhood bar his character runs. But on the national tour, Byrne shares the marquee with on-screen co-stars Owen Benjamin, Ahmed Ahmed and Roy Wood Jr. Wood, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, has come to appreciate Pittsburgh cuisine. “Every Primanti Brothers sandwich should come with a dude rubbing your belly at the end of it, telling you, ‘Life is gonna be OK. I know you just stuffed your face.’” A native of Birmingham, Ala., he says no college-football fans are more passionate than the ones back home: “There’s nothing funnier than watching two fans of Alabama and Auburn argue over a school that neither one of them had the grades to get into.” And he notes that the Sullivan & Son tour isn’t pure standup: “We definitely come out [as a group] and we’re very much interacting with the crowd for the entire back end of the show,” he says. “That’s what I’m most excited about.” For more from the interview, see www.pghcitypaper.com. Bill O’Driscoll 8 p.m. Rex Theater, 1602 E. Carson St., South Side. $18-20 (18 and over). 412-381-6811 or www.rextheater.com
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The What Is Butch campaign calls itself “the first national traveling fashion-show movement to [offer] dominant lesbians, masculine-of-center persons, queer, androgynous and transmenbodied models a place on the runway and JULY 12 a show to call their The Th h Wild Wil Wi ild ld own.” The I-Dentify: Women All-Butch Fashion of Comedy Show is the PittsShowcase burgh iteration, with help from the Garden of Peace Project. Tonight’s event at The Andy Warhol Museum spotlights 10 menswear/androgynousinspired designers. There’s a live DJ and more, red-carpet entry included. BO 7:30 p.m. music and arts spaces remain (show at 9 p.m.). 117 Sandusky rare. So Rhinestone Steel is St., North Side. $15-25 ($45 back. This annual, all-day queer VIP). www.gardenofpeace music and performance festival project.org fills the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination with artists {MUSIC} from Pittsburgh and around The Pittsburgh New Music the country. In the spotlight Ensemble has performed today are Majorheavy, a works by many adventuresome collaboration between singer/ composers during its 38 guitarist Roopa, DJ/drummer years of existence, including innovators like John Cage and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Taafe Zwilich. PNME’s new season opens tonight at City Theatre. Among the pieces being performed are Vinko Globokar’s “Corporel,” wherein a shirtless percussionist uses his own body as an instrument, and Martin Bresnick’s “The Lost Traveler.” Also on the program is Kevin Puts’ “Living Frescoes.” DW 8 p.m. Also 8 p.m. Sat., July 12. 1300 Bingham St., South Side. $12.50-25. 412431-2489 or www.pnme.org
Vex, Chicago’s Lezerection, Pittsburgh’s Vanessa German and more. Mexico-born, Chicago-based Sofia Moreno is a multimedia and performance artist. Joy KMT and Bekezela Mguni are the local performance poets of Testify. And Rainbow in the Dark, a “queerdo” variety show, features performers including SSTR, Little Debbie and Gay Orphans. BO 3 p.m.-1 a.m. 5006 Penn Ave., Bloomfield. $10-20. www.rhine stonesteel.com
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