Plow & Hearth

Sunday June 27th, 2021

Chicago
@The Cynthia Woods
Mitchell Pavilion

The Woodlands


Sunday 6/27/2021 6:30 PM

Growing out of several Chicago-area bands in the late 1960s, the original line-up consisted of Peter Cetera on bass, Terry Kath on guitar, Robert Lamm on keyboards, Lee Loughnane on trumpet, James Pankow on trombone, Walter Parazaider on woodwinds, and Danny Seraphine on drums. Cetera, Kath, and Lamm shared lead vocal duties. Laudir de Oliveira joined the band as a percussionist and second drummer in 1974. Kath died in 1978, and was replaced by several guitarists in succession. Bill Champlin joined in 1981, providing vocals, keyboards, and rhythm guitar. Cetera left the band in 1985 and was replaced by Jason Scheff. Seraphine left in 1990, and was replaced by Tris Imboden. The band's lineup has been more fluid since 2000, but keyboardist Robert Lamm and the entire horn section of Loughnane, Pankow, and Parazaider have remained constant members.

Robert Lamm – keyboards, lead vocals (1967–present)
Lee Loughnane – trumpet, flugelhorn, backing vocals (1967–present)
James Pankow – trombone, backing vocals (1967–present)
Walter Parazaider – saxophones, flute, clarinet, backing vocals (1967–present; retired from touring since 2017)
Keith Howland – guitar, backing vocals (1995–present)
Lou Pardini – keyboards, lead vocals (2009–present; touring substitute in 1999 and 2007)
Walfredo Reyes Jr. – drums (2018–present); percussion (2012–2018)
Ray Herrmann – saxophones, flute, clarinet, backing vocals (2016-present; touring substitute 2005–2016)
Neil Donell – lead vocals, acoustic guitar (2018–present)
Brett Simons – bass, backing vocals (2018–present)
Ramon "Ray" Yslas – percussion (2018–present)

The Cynthia Woods
Mitchell Pavilion
2005 Lake Robbins Dr.
The Woodlands, TX 77380
Directions (Map)

(281) 364-3010

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Divas - Lucia Mendez Rocio Banquells
Dulce & Manoella Torres
@Houston Arena Theatre


Sunday 6/27/2021 7:00 PM

Houston Arena Theatre
Arena Towers
7326 Southwest Fwy
Houston, TX 77074
Directions (Map)
(713) 772-5900


Cle

2301 Main St
Houston, TX 77002
Directions (Map)
Phone: (713) 684-2253

Sunday, June 27th 2021
2021 Pre Colombian Rumba

Traders Village Houston is proud to present the 5th Annual Pre-Colombian Rumba , there will be lots of prizes, games and fun activities!

This family friendly event will include lots of fun, music, dancing, prize, and surprises, all with a South American flair!

Walter’s Suhr Mango Punch will be performing all the spicy latin jams on stage, from salsa to merengue and from top 40 to bachata!

Enjoy bargains galore with over 1,500 dealers, rides for kids, state fair foods, and more! Admission is free and parking is only $5.00 per car. Traders Village, 7979 N. Eldridge Road, 3/10 south of Hwy. 290.
Directions (Map)

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Weekend Event
editor@weekendhouston.net

It's Free

Ms. Shirleen from
The Christi Show
@The Improv

Sunday 6/27/2021 1:00 PM


Christianee (pronounced Chris-tee-knee) Porter also known as The Christi Show is a proud native of Little Rock, Arkansas who currently resides in Atlanta Georgia. She is an entertainer that loves to act, sing, rap, and dance. In 2013, she decided to do Stand-Up Comedy. Christianee enjoyed performing on stage but became exhausted from fighting for a spot on the stage. She decided to start making Improv videos online as different characters. In July 2016, her character Ms. Shirleen went viral, and she started traveling the country performing Stand-Up comedy and singing as her. She has been seen on TVOne Sisters’ Circle and Fox’s Right This Minute. She will be featured in Tyler Perry’s upcoming film “Madea’s Family Funeral” in 2018. Christianee’s life is proof that sometimes your dreams can come true by simply changing your approach to achieving them.

The Improv
7620 Katy Freeway Space
455 Houston, TX 77024
Directions

Buy tickets over the phone:
713-333-8800

 Christopher Titus
@The Improv

Sunday 6/27/2021 7:30 PM

Employing what he's labeled 'hard funny,' Christopher Titus, star and creator of the former Fox television show, "Titus," has released nine ninety-minute albums in over the years. Known for leaving no stone un turned, especially within his own life and family, Titus takes his audience on a 90-minute ride that will leave them exhausted from laughter. To see one of Christopher Titus' shows, is to know him, and love him.

The Improv
7620 Katy Freeway Space
455 Houston, TX 77024
Directions

Buy tickets over the phone:
713-333-8800

American Aquarium
@The Heights Theatre

Sunday 6/27/2021 8:00 PM

“Country music was the voice of the people. It wasn’t always the prettiest voice, but it was an honest voice,” says American Aquarium founder and frontman BJ Barham. “I think that’s where country music has lost its way.” He pauses, then adds, North Carolina accent thick and voice steady: “I operate in the dark shadows of what we don’t want to talk about in the South.”

These days, those shadows are tall and wide, making it hard to recognize a neighbor, family–– even yourself. On American Aquarium’s new album Lamentations, Barham shines light on dark American corners with heartbreaking conversations, long looks in the mirror, and empathetic questions, all through songwriting that is clear without sacrificing its poetry, and direct without losing its humanity. “As a songwriter, my number one job is to observe and then translate what I observe into a song, a story, a lesson,” Barham says. “I’d be doing myself and the listener a huge disservice if I didn’t talk about the things I see, which is a country, divided.”

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As much as Barham appreciates an indignant protest song or one-sided anthem, he isn’t writing them. Instead, on Lamentations he’s making the political personal, reaching out to humanize folks with opposing viewpoints, and offering dignity instead of demonizing. The result is the strongest writing of Barham’s already stout career. “I’m still very much standing up for what I believe in––I don’t think anyone can question what side of the aisle I stand on,” he says. “But hopefully people listen and at least try to understand why their Sunday School teacher wears a Trump hat.”

I wanted to write about a broken America and all the things that lead a human being to doubting something.


Barham has built a fiercely devoted fanbase hundreds of thousands strong, fortified with 15 years of sold-out American Aquarium shows across the country and Europe. The band’s 2018 release Things Change strode confidently into that distinct territory where rock-and-roll and politics meet, prompting Rolling Stone to announce Barham “earns every bit of his Southern Springsteen cred.” In 2019, the American Aquarium lineup also shifted again: Shane Boeker remains on guitar, and bassist Alden Hedges, keys player Rhett Huffman, pedal steel ace Neil Jones, and drummer Ryan Van Fleet joined the group.

A beloved live band known for consistently playing at least 200-250 dates a year, American Aquarium chose to be more selective in 2019, winnowing the schedule to 92 shows. For Barham, sober for six years now, is a dad to a toddler and still happily married, the adjustment was a must. “We’re learning how to balance being in our mid-30s and being rock-and-rollers,” he says. “Being home was the most rewarding experience. It allowed me to be creative and write about things that really matter.”

Lamentations reflects that elevated focus. Barham, who is no longer religious but was raised Southern Baptist, wrote down the word “lamentations” in 2018, and knew it’d be his next album title before he’d written a single song for the record. He felt an anchoring connection to the word itself––defined as “the passionate expression of grief or sorrow”––but also to the Old Testament book in the Bible. “Lamentations is one of the few books in the Bible where there’s this doubt of God––this guy, crying out to the heavens, like, Why? If you love us so much, why did you let Jerusalem fall to Babylon?” Barham says. “I saw a direct correlation between that and a Southern man today who voted for Trump. I wanted to write about a broken America and all the things that lead a human being to doubting something. Every song on this record touches on something a little different.”


The Heights Theatre

339 W 19th St.
Houston TX 77008
Directions (Map)

Weekend Sunday Reads

Pop Celebrity Culture Read

Wendy Williams
Dishes the Dirt


The daytime gossip queen has tussled with P. Diddy, Whitney Houston, and Tupac Shakur. But her own private life can be as messy as the celebrity dramas she skewers.

By Michael Schulman
New Yorker.com


Wendy Williams sat on a plush red sofa facing a trio of L.E.D. screens, each of which showed a man who was vying to enter her tumultuous, open-book life. It was a February episode of her syndicated talk show, and the segment, “Date Wendy,” was the culmination of a monthlong search.

Williams had on a tousled blond wig, yellow sneakers, and a stretchy patterned dress. “My hands are sweaty,” she had confided earlier, during the daily monologue that she calls “Hot Topics.” Met with reassuring applause, she suddenly teared up, and, as a stagehand proffered a Wonder Woman tissue box, she confessed, “No, I’m teary because I can’t believe I have a show.”

“The Wendy Williams Show,” taped live in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is in its twelfth season, an eternity in daytime years. It averages more than a million live viewers a day, with hundreds of thousands more catching up online. Its audience—“Wendy watchers,” in the show’s parlance—regards the fifty-six-year-old hostess as an ultra-fabulous, in-the-know gal pal. Williams came to prominence as a radio jock, and she has a talent for talking to millions of people (her viewership is mostly female, but she also has a big gay following) and making them feel like they’re on a dishy phone call with a friend. “Traditionally, for women at home, watching a daytime-TV show is ‘me time,’ ” Alexandra Jewett, a programming executive at Debmar-Mercury, the show’s production company, told me. “It’s a very intimate experience.”
. . . more @New Yorker.com

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

By Megan Molteni
WIRED.com

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.


Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.


Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

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Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

 . . .read more @WIRED.com


Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years
How the fruit got a bad rap from the beginning.

by K. Annabelle Smith
Smithsonian.com

In the late 1700s, a large percentage of Europeans feared the tomato.

A nickname for the fruit was the “poison apple” because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them, but the truth of the matter was that wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the fruit would leach lead from the plate, resulting in many deaths from lead poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time; the tomato was picked as the culprit.

Around 1880, with the invention of the pizza in Naples, the tomato grew widespread in popularity in Europe. But there’s a little more to the story behind the misunderstood fruit’s stint of unpopularity in England and America, as Andrew F. Smith details in his The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery. The tomato didn’t get blamed just for what was really lead poisoning. Before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified as a deadly nightshade, a poisonous family of Solanaceae plants that contain toxins called tropane alkaloids.

One of the earliest-known European references to the food was made by the Italian herbalist, Pietro Andrae Matthioli, who first classified the “golden apple” as a nightshade and a mandrake—a category of food known as an aphrodisiac. The mandrake has a history that dates back to the Old Testament; it is referenced twice as the Hebrew word dudaim, which roughly translates to “love apple.”

. . . more @Smithsonian.com

On the Link Between Great Thinking
and Obsessive Walking
From Charles Darwin to Toni Morrison, Jeremy DeSilva Looks at
Our Need to Move

Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent almost five years traveling the world on the Beagle recording observations that produced some of the most important scientific insights ever made. But he was in his twenties then, embarking on a privileged, 19th-century naturalist’s version of backpacking around Europe during a gap year. After returning home in 1836, he never again stepped foot outside the British Isles.

He avoided conferences, parties, and large gatherings. They made him anxious and exacerbated an illness that plagued much of his adult life. Instead, he passed his days at Down House, his quiet home almost twenty miles southeast of London, doing most of his writing in the study. He occasionally entertained a visitor or two but preferred to correspond with the world by letter. He installed a mirror in his study so he could glance up from his work to see the mailman coming up the road—the 19th-century version of hitting the refresh button on email.

.. . more @Literary Hub.com

Weekend Sunday Read

Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful Letter to Van Gogh on How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns

By Maria Popova
From Brain Pickings

“Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion.”

 These patterns of belief — about who we are, about who others are, about how the world works — come to shape our behavior, which in turn shapes our reality, creating a loop that calls to mind physicist David Bohm’s enduring wisdom: “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”

“Feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them,” the great psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom wrote in his magnificent meditation on uncertainty and our search for meaning. But as our terror of losing control compels us to grasp for order and certainty, we all too often end up creating patterns that ultimately don’t serve us, then repeat those patterns under the illusion of control.


To keep repeating a baleful pattern without recognizing that we are caught in its loop is one of life’s greatest tragedies; to recognize it but feel helpless in breaking it is one of our greatest trials; to transcend the fear of uncertainty, which undergirds all such patterns of belief and behavior, is a supreme triumph.



"But as our terror of losing control compels us to grasp for order and certainty, we all too often end up creating patterns that ultimately don’t serve us, then repeat those patterns under the illusion of control."


That triumphant transcendence of the pattern is what novelist Nicole Krauss explores in an exquisite response to Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 letter to his brother about fear and risk-taking. Her piece is part of an exhibition by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in which twenty-three contemporary artists and writers respond to the letters of Van Gogh in paintings, sculptures, letters, poems, photographs, and videos.
 . . .more @Brian Pickings.com


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