Can't Miss It: Thursday
STREET LIFE: Pioneer Square's Flatcolor Gallery has the Can't Miss exhibition of the month. Kicking off tonight with August's First Thursday Artwalk is Flatcolor's presentation of three national graffiti artists with a bevy of beautiful street style displays. First is Bay area's Bigfoot, a nature loving artist and skateboard designer. Bigfoot started by writing his name on the streets of San Francisco and now he's moved on to respectable artforms, working with Strangeco, The North Face, Hurley, et al. North Carolina's Chip7 is a sort of abstact scifi artist whose compositions call to mind chaotic and colorful future cartoon lands. The third artist, El Kamino, is a graffiti painter from Virginia. Meditating on nature and technology, El Kamino, like Bigfoot, uses the organic against the constructed, often with striking effect. The show is also presented by The Art of Storytelling.
5:00 p.m. // Flatcolor Gallery 528 1st AVE S // Free
BACK TO THE FUTURE: Raising a child - could there be a more challenging, more harrowing, more important act than that? Millions of parents and teachers do it every day, yet one person stands out as a true inspiration. Rafe Esquith is a fifth grade teacher at Hobart Elementary school. His best selling book Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire showed how Esquith's teaching methods have helped thousands of students in a tough neighborhood learn to maximize their potential. His new book, Lighting Their Fires: How Parents and Teachers Can Raise Extraordinary Kids in a Mixed-Up, Muddled-Up, Shook-Up World (Penguin), seeks to help parents and teachers learn how to help their children become extraordinary. Revolving around the story of taking five kids to a Dodgers baseball game, the book focuses on a variety of virtues such as punctuality, decision making skills, selflessness, humility, and focus. Esquith is lauded as one of the most passionate and involved teachers in America. He speaks in Seattle tonight.
7:00 p.m. // Seattle Central Library // Free
YANKEE DOODLE: Playwright and sometime Seattleite Steven Dietz is back at ACT Theatre with his political barroom thriller, Yankee Tavern. It's the second Dietz production in three years to make its way to ACT's stage after 2008's Becky's New Car, which proved to be another in a long line of Dietz successes. Yankee Tavern takes place in a New York dive bar five years after 9/11. A mysterious person with a list of silly conspiracy theories blows a young couple's mind when his seemingly harmless ideas turn into dangerous revelations. Dietz'z plays are always thoughtful and well written, modern yet rooted in the strongest realities. Yankee Tavern should be no exception.
7:30 p.m. // ACT Theatre // $10-$55
