category: Somerville

125 Halloween Events (for Grown-ups) around Boston

By: - Thursday, Oct 27, 2016 - 10:10am

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Kids get one night to party on Halloween — you get all week. (Image source.)

What’s the difference between Halloween as a kid and Halloween as an adult? There’s alcohol, for one thing. And more creative costumes. But most importantly: Halloween as a kid lasted one day, but now you get at least three or four nights to party. Here’s our ultimate list of everything happening over Halloweekend in Boston. 
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Things to do in Boston: Sept. 29 to Oct. 5

By: - Wednesday, Sep 28, 2016 - 6:57pm
tbc__newsletterPhoto by Wenjie Qiao | Creative Commons

October gets a lot of love as the best month of the year in Boston, so get out and enjoy the weather, the festivals, and our sports teams just owning everyone. Here’s everything going on around the city this week.

* If you’ve never seen the Chicken Slacks play a Thursday night at the Cantab, what are you even doing here, man. What concerts are you going to, artists you heard on the radio? Come on. The band celebrates its 11th anniversary of holding it down in Central Square with a combination of old school funk/R&B and strong mixed drinks that are guaranteed to get you out on the dance floor. 9.29. 9:30p. $6

* The HUBweek festival keeps rolling this week (like a wheel, get it, wheels have hubs) showcasing Boston’s innovation, creativity, and ability to throw a pretty good party when we need to. The week’s biggest social event, Celebrate Boston takes over six floors of the WeWork South Station building Thursday for the kind of not-stuffy night where you won’t feel bad for partying a little at a networking event or for networking a little at a party. Then the festival wraps up Saturday with a warehouse party in the South End featuring Brew the Charles, which is exactly what you’re afraid it is: six local breweries making beer from the Charles River. It’s filtered by a water tech company in Newton, so you can take a big sip and say “I love that dirty water!” and you’ll really mean it. 9.29 + 10.1. Various times, prices

* The fall edition of ArtWeek Boston is back with ten days of mostly free events (yeah that’s more than a week, give ‘em a break they’re artists not mathematicians). The festivities kick off at Thursday’s free Party on the Greenway, a block party meets nighttime arts festival featuring one-of-a-kind musical performances at Rings Fountain, food trucks, games, artistic activations and more. ArtWeek events begin Friday, check the website or the list below for more events. 9.29. 6p. FREE

* If you stopped at the phrase “artistic activations” in that last sentence and wondered if that was just a fancy way to say “art” then yeah, basically. It’s like the neighborhood is a gift card on the shelf before you bring it to the cashier (the artist) and they swipe it (make art) so it’s not worthless anymore. Artists are activating Franklin Park for Saturday’s Franklin Park Art Grove with sculptural installation, music, performance, and dance. And food, because who doesn’t love a picnic on a nice fall Saturday. 10.1. 12p. FREE

* It’s getting to be that time of year when we scare ourselves on purpose, at least a kind of superficial scare that temporarily takes our minds off the existential dread that plagues us all. The Imaginary Beasts ensemble’s production of Angela Carter’s ‘The Fall River Axe Murderers’ at the BCA Black Box Theatre takes a closer look at the tale of Lizzie Borden, Fall River’s second most famous resident, after Emeril. 10.1 to 10.22. Various times. $24

* Yeah, when I was a teen, Emeril was that dude. Sure he didn’t have tattoos or a drug problem like cool chefs, but he made cooking look fun. And now I cook myself restaurant quality meals almost every night. Why am I talking about food right now? Because (segue alert) the Globe’s Let’s Talk About Food festival serves up a day-long smorgasbord of fine food, cooking demonstrations and discussions Saturday in Copley Square. Let’s talk about food, baby! / Let’s talk about umami / Let’s talk about all the gouda, the bad…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. 10.1. 9a. FREE

* If you like barbecue, or you’re at least barbecurious, this one’s for you: East Cambridge’s Smoke This Rib Fest pits (get it, barbecue pits) some of the city’s cue-masters for the title of best ribs in town. There’s also live music from Ali McGuirk, Roy Sludge Trio, Vapors of Morphine and more. Lately when something starts going well for me, I’ll say “Oh yeah, now we’re cooking with gas.” I highly recommend it, except at the barbecue festival where cooking on a gas grill is a total amateur move. 10.2. 12p. $25 tasting ticket or pay as you go

* The idea of combining music with visuals in a planetarium has been around for decades, probably ever since the first time someone got high and realized it would be even cooler if they were playing Pink Floyd in there instead of an astronomy lecture. Sunday’s special ArtWeek presentation of SubSpace: Prince at the Museum of Science fuses the sounds of one of music’s greatest icons with stunning and inventive visuals on the dome of the Charles Hayden Planetarium. 10.2. 6p. $12

More events that don’t suck:

 

33 Free Summer ’16 Festivals around Boston

By: - Wednesday, Jun 29, 2016 - 12:17pm

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We’re rounding up Boston’s best free summer events to keep your calendar — and your wallet — full, starting with all our favorite free summer festivals: Street fairs, cultural celebrations, and outdoor music and arts fests. Sure, you have to pay for food and drinks, but just walking through and soaking up the festival atmosphere? That’s as free as the air we breathe, brother.

[ABOVE PHOTO BY @YAYITSYANAN]

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125 Halloween Events (for Grown-ups) around Boston

By: - Thursday, Oct 22, 2015 - 1:38am

buscostume
Kids get one night to party on Halloween — you get all week. (Image source.)

Great news! Halloween falls on a Saturday this year. Even better news? We’re still partying for the whole week. Dress up in a different costume every night (or wear the same one over and over, nobody cares) to as many costume parties, band tribute shows, and horror movie marathons as you can handle.

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Free Fallin’: 150+ FREE Boston Events to Make Your Autumn Awesome

By: - Thursday, Sep 17, 2015 - 4:30pm
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Photo by Robbie Shade

You’ve been wiping the sweat off your brow and dreaming of fall weather for most of the last month, and now it’s finally here. So throw on a cozy sweater and feel the leaves crunch under your feet on your way to one of Boston’s many street fairs, artists’ open studios, university lectures, the first-ever HUBWeek festival, and so much more. Oh, and all of these events are FREE to attend, because those pumpkin spice lattes aren’t going to pay for themselves, and no, the guy whose weird name is written on your cup instead of yours isn’t going to pitch in, either. (more…)

This week’s Boston events: Festivals in the fields, streets, islands and more

By: - Thursday, Aug 6, 2015 - 5:26pm

tumblr_nsf61lCHMn1ucxwpfo2_1280Photo credit: Aeronaut Brewing Company/Four Star Farms

There’s so much going on around Boston, I’m just going to get right into it, no time for jokes. (Just kidding, there’s always time for jokes.) (Otherwise how will I make people like me?) (Yes everyone needs to like me I was born broken and only the constant outward validation of my self-worth can make me feel whole again.) On to this week’s events! (more…)

Dance parties in the street, Free Fun Fridays, and more events this week

By: - Thursday, Jun 25, 2015 - 4:19pm

danceparty2017bykyleklein

We really are spoiled here in the summers, and I don’t just mean because we get so used to warm weather that the air conditioning in a chilly restaurant feels worse than all of February’s blizzards combined. I mean because there’s so much stuff to do. This week Cambridge throws down on Mass Ave, Everett gets a new craft distillery, and the Museum of Science explains the, um, science, behind Pixar movies. (more…)

Giant typewriters, sculpture races, and more Boston events this week

By: - Thursday, Jun 4, 2015 - 1:02pm
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(Photo credit: People’s Sculpture Racing)

Don’t let the April-ish weather we’ve been getting keep you from all of the summer-themed parties this week, because summer is just a state of mind, anyways: A mind in a drunk enough state that instead of listening when your body parts say they’re freezing it’s like “Shut up, torso, we’ll put a shirt on when it’s snowing.”

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200 Things To Do in Boston in April

By: - Thursday, Apr 2, 2015 - 1:21pm
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Photo by leecullivan on Flickr (Creative Commons license)

You did it, Boston. You survived another endless winter. Except it did end, finally, and now you can go outside without making sure you brought your Chapstick and cradling your phone to your bosom to preserve its battery life. Throw on a hoodie, maybe a light jacket, and check out some of these 200 events happening in April, possibly Boston’s greatest month of the year (that T.S. Eliot was full of crap).

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Startup Hot Seat, Simpsons trivia, and more events in Boston this week

By: - Monday, Mar 9, 2015 - 1:24pm

11041888_928139107219862_3538398924616442903_o(Photo credit: Daniel Levy/Allston Village Main Streets)

Celebrate Women’s History Month this week with events recognizing women in business, the arts, and sure why not, on The Simpsons: Lisa is the show’s smartest character and Marge functions as its moral center, yeah she’s kind of a wet blanket but guys need that wet blanket around to put out the fires from our wacky schemes and general incompetence. (more…)