5 Things

Are you ready for some football? How about starting a business? How about seeing something cool and different? How about improving yourself in many ways? No? What about food trucks, ready for them? I thought so.

July 25, 2013; 6:47 AM • by Susan Howson

Looking for things to do with the smaller versions of yourself? Fire up the family wagon and take a looksee at 5 Things for Families.

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1. Redskins Training Camp walkthroughs and spectatin’

The Redskins are here! The Redskins are here! I don’t know a lot about football, but that training camp they whipped up looks pretty snazzy. Quite the place to watch someone throw the ol’ pigskin around, am I right? Huge backslaps to us all! Starting TODAY, you can spend zero dollars to gaze lovingly at the Team Closest to Us as they beef up, stay nimble, and otherwise delight you with their pigskin antics (sorry, “pigskin” is the only football slang I know). Just don’t create any traffic jams on Leigh Street, pigskins, because some of us pigskins have movies to watch. Happy pigskinning!

  • Thursday, July 25th – Friday, August 16th • see the full schedule here
  • Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Center, 2401 W. Leigh Street
  • Free

2. RVA Startup Weekend

If you’ve got an idea for a business but are stalled on just how to get it off the ground, Startup Weekend sounds like the most ridiculously useful thing you could ever do. One of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is accepting criticism, no matter how constructive. It’s your baby and you want people to be wowed by your idea, which you also want to preserve in its original form. But you MUST listen to reason, man, and accept the advice of your peers, who only want you to succeed in a burst of glory. If it’s good for you, it’s good for the city, so use this opportunity to finally bring your idea to fruition.

  • Friday, July 26th – Sunday, July 28th • see site for full schedule
  • CRT/Tanaka (see site for other venues), 101 W. Commerce Road
  • $99

3. Exquisite Corpses

I have learned more things by researching this event than I have all year. 1) Exquisite corpse is just a parlor game made popular by the Surrealists, who apparently did a lot of sitting around in parlors, drawing gleefully together like small children. Adorable. It’s borrowed from the poetry/story game of starting a sentence and handing it over to someone else to finish without knowing the whole of what you wrote. Only it’s with HUMAN BODIES (as drawn on paper). 2) Devised theatre is like improv, only you don’t see it evolve. You just witness the final result. This performance by TheatreLAB is rumored to be incredibly evocative and maybe even PROvocative–with emotions running from one end of the spectrum to the other. This is definitely my pick for doing something different this weekend.1

  • Saturday, July 27th and Sunday, July 28th • 8:00 PM
  • Dogtown Dance Theatre, 109 W. 15th Street
  • $10 in advance, $15 at the door (some discounts available)

4. Boost!

SMV’s new permanent exhibit focuses on jumpstarting every dang thing about you, from your physical energy to your mental capacity to your creative potential. It’s high tech, with its own iPhone app to complement the experience, and promises hours of exciting enjoyment for parents, kids, parents-and-kids, or people who are neither of the above. They’ve even got a nice little football component to align with the Training Camp mayhem in their same hood. Go see some guys throw the whaddyacallit, and then report back to SMV to learn how it all works. Pretty neat! But, I warn you, SMV, those 1985 exhibits from my childhood better still be there when I go try it out!

  • Daily • see site for times
  • Science Museum of Virginia, 2500 W. Broad Street
  • Free with admission

5. Richmond Kickers Food Truck Fest & match Vs. VSI Tampa Bay

The Kickers return to Richmond this weekend to remind everyone how real men play football.2 Come out to City Stadium to see our dapper gents play the evil, evil VSI Tampa Bay FC. In return, the Kickers will provide not only a great display of sportsmanship and sweaty excitement, they’ve rallied the food trucks again for your grazing pleasure. Poll: If I wrote a Pixar movie called Food Trucks, would your kid force you to see it 500 times and insist on buying up all the merchandise? Because it’d be really fun to develop the Pizza Tonight character (Italian brick oven themed truck with a moustache) as well as Monique’s Crepes (a reprise of the feather duster from Beauty and the Beast).

  • Sunday, July 28th • 5:00 PM
  • City Stadium, 3201 Maplewood Avenue
  • $7 for children, $12 for adults

Future Things

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Footnotes

  1. 3) I am terribly embarrassed, but I was unaware of how cool Dogtown Dance Theatre is. If you’re a fellow sucker for dance performances with an interest in learning some cool skills yourself, check out their site for available classes and upcoming events. ↩
  2. Disclaimer: You are all very manly. ↩

photo by Anne Aurelia Lewis

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Susan Howson

Susan Howson is managing editor for this very website. She writes THE BEST bios.

July 25, 2013 6:47 AM 6

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