Consider the Thursday Night Tripleheader

Dear Friends,

July finds us deep in the throws of a plague of phenomenal music. It is absolutely criminal that we must face so many daunting choices for entertainment each evening, and so much of it is devilishly free. I abhor this situation, and I’m tired of suffering from FOMS (Fear Of Missing Something). This Thursday features an extraordinarily cruel spate of options, and I feel as though the only way to combat this conundrum is by attempting to see as much as humanly possible. Therefore, I invite you to entertain the Thursday Night Tripleheader.

The best part of this exciting endeavor is that the music won’t cost you one red cent. Sadly, we’re only scratching the surface of Thursday’s free musical delights, and if anyone has devised an inexpensive way to stop time, please get in touch because I’d also like to catch Man Man at East River Park, Kronos Quartet with Luminescent Orchestrii at Celebrate Brooklyn, as well as Credence Clearwater Revisited, Mountain, and John Sebastian at Asser Levy Seaside Park in Coney Island.

But I digress…back to the tripleheader at hand.

Any successful tripleheader begins with a plan and advance scouting, so if you follow this schedule, all your Thursday evening dreams will come true:

5:00 PM – Get way downtown (or send a proxy on your behalf) to Castle Clinton, where tickets will be distributed for that evening’s Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra’s tribute to Sly & the Family Stone. I don’t know how long it will take for these tickets to be distributed, but the venue only holds about 750.

6:00 PM – Get thee up to Union Square, where Freaks’ fav Buzz Universe will be headlining Summer in the Square for an hour set of Latin-tinged, butt-shakin’ grooves.

6:35 PM – Depart Union Square with expediency and get on the 4/5 to Bowling Green. This should get us to the show just in time.

7:00 PM – Arrive at Castle Clinton for Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra’s tribute to Sly & the Family Stone. Yeah, we’ll be in the back, but that’s fine because we’ll want to dance. If you want to sit down during a Sly & The Family Stone Tribute, please do not consider doing the Thursday Night Tripleheader, rather you should go straight to the city morgue because you are probably dead.

8:30ish PM – The show ends. We have grooved with the best of ‘em, but we’re just getting warmed up. Unfortunately, we have no time to socialize, chit-chat, or even wave goodbye. We are on a mission, and we need to make like Christopher Cross and run…run like the wind! We’ll be getting our asses uptown to Lincoln Center post-haste. Hopstop says both the 1 train and a cab will each take 36 minutes, so we’ll gauge the weather, consult our astrologists, and decide on a transportation method and GO, BABY GO!

9:00ish PM – We arrive at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Swing to catch the last hour of the Ponderosa Stomp’s presentation of Get Down! This bill features some funky-ass performers, including William Bell, Harvey Scales, and The Bobettes, with The Bo-Keys. Do you doubt the awesome funk power of this lineup? Well, after you listen to the clips on this link, ye shall doubt no more:

http://new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/the-get-down

10:00 PM – The show ends. We just did 3 shows in 4 hours and traveled all over Manhattan. But it’s only 10:00… Could there be a quadruple header in our future?....