Tim’s Picks: A 7-11 edition
Sixth & South, Wabash Riverfest, skate park pop-up, live music and the Mosey. Ideas for your Greater Lafayette weekend.
Thanks to this edition’s sponsor, Purdue Convocations, presenting their 2024-2025 Season. All tickets for theater, music and national Broadway tours are now on sale to the general public and Friends of Convocations at convocations.org/buy. Purdue Convocations presents its 122nd Season with a lineup of innovative projects and performances from around the world. The 2024-2025 Convos Season includes the 29th West Lafayette Global Fest, award-winning jazz and chamber musicians, a curricular integration theater residency, thought-provoking lectures, family-friendly engagements and award-winning Broadway musicals and major attractions in Elliott Hall of Music, including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert, Dear Evan Hansen, TINA – The Tina Turner Musical, Hadestown, Pretty Woman: The Musical and Chicago. Place your Friends of Convos order by July 12 to get the best seats! Renew or Join & ORDER TODAY!
It’s Thursday, and we’re back with five suggestions, and one bonus cut, for your Greater Lafayette week …
By Tim Brouk / For Based in Lafayette
Sixth & South, 6-10 p.m. Friday, July 12, MatchBOX Studios, 17 S. Sixth St., Lafayette — MatchBOX coworking studio is a community force in entrepreneurism and small business development. Dozens of area start-ups got their start-up in the walls of the sleek, creativity-inducing MatchBOX workspaces. To help keep that momentum going for all Greater Lafayette to benefit from, the Sixth & South fundraising event returns to the corner of, yes, Sixth and South streets to celebrate the space while raising funds and interest for the next big small business idea. Organizers will have a plethora of entertainment for its supporters — the return of local soul-funk group Ebony and the Ruckus, an auction, food, drink and sweets from McCord Candies. Other local businesses will get in on the fun: Pour your own candle with Flora Candle Company after some ax-throwing with The Spinning Axe, escape rooms with Mission: Breakout Lafayette and a petting zoo with Columbian Park Zoo. $50. Tickets. (Tickets also include free entry for an afterparty, starting at 10 p.m., at The Spot, 409 S. Fourth St. in Lafayette. On tap there: DJ sets by Karabella and Kyle Robert Paquin.)
For more on the work done at MatchBOX Studios, check this Q&A from April 2024 at the 10th anniversary:
Wabash Riverfest, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, July 13, Tapawingo Park, West Lafayette — Organized by the Wabash River Enhancement Corporation, the Wabash Riverfest returns as the reigning champion of community events that celebrate the Wabash River. While the canoe races are the main course of Riverfest, activities onshore celebrate and honor the Wabash as the waterway that brought early settlers to the area centuries ago. The celebration will include art, live music and expertise on local flora and fauna. There’s also the Waterdrop 5K, children’s activities, canoeing lessons and a kayak of interesting areas of the river. The Wabash must be celebrated. The waterway helped put Lafayette on the map and grow from canoes to steamships to outboard motors. Today, the river is primarily used for recreation and fishing but every time you cross the John T. Myers Pedestrian Bridge, drink in the serenity of the Mighty Wabash. It’s free. Details and schedules here.
Cocaine Culture, Seventh Crown, End of the Line, The Green Leaves and Demon King, 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 12, North End Pub, 2100 Elmwood Ave., Lafayette — How did Muncie blackened death metal Cocaine Culture celebrate July 4? By releasing its new single, “Resin Breath,” of course. While the band is feeling some high times lately, Cocaine Culture is not stoner metal. Most of the songs are of the dark and brutal variety, which the band will bring when it rocks Lafayette as part of a big Doom Room summer bash. Also on the card will be Seventh Crown, a hardcore band from Fort Wayne; End of the Line, a Chicago metal trio; Fort Wayne death metal combo The Green Leaves and Demon King, a technical black metal three-piece from Nashville, Tennessee. Each attendee will get a free Hot Wheels car to enter the return of Doom Room’s treadmill racing. Competitors place their toy car onto the “track” and the last one left standing as the treadmill’s speed increases is the winner of a prize. $10.
Dawn Hively and the Wildcat Creek Boys, 8 p.m. Saturday, July 13, 6th Street Dive, 827 N. Sixth St., Lafayette — Lafayette singer-songwriter Dawn Hively is back to gigging with new music and band. Hively promised a set of original rock and indie songs as well as “iconic” covers ranging from the 1980s-2000s. She will be flanked by half of Blends, bassist Mathew Anderson and Joshua Fulton on drums, as the Wildcat Creek Boys. It will be interesting to hear how a full band sounds in the new 6th Street Dive.
Pop-up skate park event and skate competition, 1 p.m. Sunday, July 14, Crosser Sports Complex, 2200 Breckenridge St., Lafayette— Keeping the momentum built in 2023, Greg Simpson, the unstoppable one-man skateboard-promoting juggernaut, will host his fourth pop-up skate event, complete with ramps, rails and a trick competition where the winner will roll out with $500. More prizes will go to runners-up. The event is festive with eats and caffeine from Smitty Bread and Eleventh House. Local artist Angela Vinson from Lala Gallery will be selling new works as well. Beats by DJ Circle T. All wheels are welcome, according to Simpson. “I am so excited to see the community bond together with a shared goal of having a safe, fun and well-designed park for local skaters, scooterers, in-line skaters and roller skaters.” Donations and proceeds from this event will be collected by Simpson Skates LLC to eventually help fund a skatepark to be managed by the city of Lafayette, expected to come to fruition in a couple years.
BONUS CUT: And don’t forget to Mosey Down Main Street, 6-11 p.m. Saturday in downtown Lafayette. For band and vendor lineups, click the map below:
Tim Brouk is a longtime arts and entertainment reporter. He writes here (almost) weekly, tracking things to do for Based in Lafayette.
Thanks, again, to this edition’s sponsor, Purdue Convocations, presenting their 2024-2025 season. All tickets for theater, music and national Broadway tours are now on sale to the general public and Friends of Convocations at convocations.org/buy.
Thank you for supporting Based in Lafayette, an independent, local reporting project. Free and full-ride subscription options are ready for you here.
Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.