The first official weekend of spring is gonna be a wet one, but don't let that keep you from the start of the U District Cherry Blossom Festival, Georgetown Bites & Sites, or Seattle's French Fest, or the SISCA International Nowruz Celebration. For more ideas, check out our top event picks of the week.

FRIDAY

READINGS & TALKS

Lit Lounge: The People's Art | A Prose and Poetry Salon
Columbia City hangout The Station understands that the best way to decompress from a long week is with an event that feels like a bit of a '90s throwback: A prose and poetry reading at a coffee shop. Writer and TEDx orator Jodi-Ann Burey's Lit Lounge pops up each month with readings of published works and pieces in progress. This month, readers include Luther Hughes, author of A Shiver in the Leaves and co-host of The Poet Salon podcast, and E.J. Koh, who was named one of the city's most influential people by Seattle Magazine. I'm excited to hear from formidable poet Anastacia-Reneé, whose funky, feminist collection Side Notes from the Archivist: Poems illuminated Black femme culture through coming-of-age poems set in '80s Philly. LINDSAY COSTELLO
(The Station Columbia City, Columbia City, $10)

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First Things First: I'm writing this whole thing today without having watched the Severance finale so none of you better spoil shit. That goes for the entire internet, too. I'm out here dodging land mines for you and I want you to know that. 

Public Education in the Balance: Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday calling to dismantle the U.S. Education Department. He believes the Education Department, which Congress created in 1979 to help ensure equal access to education, is "wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology." Trump would rather return control of education to the states, however it's unclear under that model how the billions of dollars overseen by the Education Department would be distributed. Under this administration? I could only assume it would be badly. While Trump made the order, it's likely impossible to dismantle the Education Department without an act of Congress. Unfortunately, our Congress seems to be made of senseless freaks, so we'll see what happens.  

A few months ago, a friend and I went to see Wicked at SIFF Downtown. We were in good spirits, as only two former theater kids about to see three hours of musical theater can be. We crammed chocolate popcorn into our maws and joked that the directive to silence our phones did not specify no singing, but the mood was somewhat soured by what followed: an ad for Kaiser Permanente, featuring a woman talking about her positive birth experience. It seemed like an oddly sunny framing coming from Kaiser, which is shutting down its midwifery practice as part of an all too common national trend away from pregnancy care.

“It makes me not ever want to have a baby,” I said. “Me neither,” my friend replied.

Get your wallets ready for this week’s ticket drops! Big changes are in store for this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party. The Godfather of Punk Iggy Pop has announced a show at Marymoor Park this summer. Plus, LA-based celebrity chef Roy Choi will chat about his forthcoming cookbook at Fremont Abbey. Read on for details on those and other newly announced events, plus some news you can use.

ON SALE FRIDAY, MARCH 21

MUSIC

311: Unity Tour 2025
Marymoor Park (Wed Aug 13)

Avi Kaplan
The Crocodile (Tues June 10)

Billie Marten
The Crocodile (Tues Sept 16)

Lazy Cow Bakery
The vegan Fremont cafe and bakery, which recently had a change in ownership, stocks plant-based versions of the original Dubai chocolate bar from the small woman-owned business Magic Bites.
Fremont

The Stranger should buy the Uncle Sam Billboard in Chehalis. It has a history. It can't be missed. It's up for sale. The founder of the billboard, Alfred Hamilton, died some 25 years ago, and the sign's cranky, ultra-conservative messages were occasionally maintained, at least according to Wikipedia, by the grandson of the original crank. Though the billboard lost much of its quirky force over the years, some citizens in Chehalis were so fed up with it (bad for tourism) they attempted, in 2020, to have the whole damn thing torn down or challenged with a "[megasized] welcome sign." The statements (none of which are related to reality, and many of which bordered on the surreal—"Non-communist straw for sale"), however, continued, but now in drips. The most recent message, "How many Americans will we leave behind in Ukraine," has been up for ages. 

You can now own Washington's famously weird-looking Uncle Sam for $2.5 million. And by "you," I mean the paper I work for, The Stranger. We could put on the billboard the kind of messages that would make old Hamilton turn forever in his grave. "Drag Queens Make America Great!" Or: "When Will Affirmative Action for White Men End? It's Been Going On For Like Ages."

I absolutely adore Andrea Dworkin. But before you dive into her writing, let me give you a little warning first: You’ll never look at pictures of naked women the same way again. I’m not just talking about porn. Go to an art museum and, if you’re fresh off Dworkin, you might be the least fun person there. Klimt, Collier, Modigliani, Gaugin—your ability to love their depictions of nudity might be among the casualties of your reading. And there will almost certainly be others: Dworkin could compromise your enjoyment of movies like Babygirl, your willingness to perform certain sex acts, or your ability to tolerate certain types of people.

Dworkin knew her work had this power. She described herself as “not the fun kind” of feminist.  During her lifetime, others had far less kind things to say. Hustler published antisemitic and homophobic cartoons of her, and she was famous for being fat, frizzy-haired, unadorned, and overalled. She struggled to find publishers; once published, her work was generally ignored by the mainstream press; she felt (and largely was) estranged from mainstream feminists. Many people know her best for claiming that all sex is rape—which is something she never said. She has, like many other second-wave feminists, been more caricatured than read.

Some of the best coffee shops in Seattle are tiny—just a few sets of tables and chairs, not a lot of wiggle room. Yet there you are, barging in with your giant-ass stroller that you refuse to leave outside when coming in to get some coffee. You loudly push tables and chairs out of your way (using the stroller!), you bump into people who are standing in line or sitting and enjoying their coffee, and then giggle, “Whoops!” as though you didn’t just assault them with your SUV-sized baby-carrying machine.

WEDNESDAY 3/19  

reBLOOM: A Spring Group Show

(VISUAL ART) Buzzy Ballard gallery Get Nice has decided that spring has sprung, equinox be damned. Their latest group show, reBLOOM, opened on March 8 for the Ballard Art Walk, featuring a bouquet of fresh artworks by over 20 artists. I'm excited to see pieces by Brandon Vosika, whose painting graced the cover of The Stranger's Fall Arts + Performance issue, and Portland-grown painter-illustrator Ryan Bubnis, among many other local and further-flung faves. Can't make it to the gallery? You can peep the seasonal works online, too. (Get Nice Gallery, daily through April 6, 5–9 pm, free, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

Rising inflation, surging poverty, and the looming threat of mass unemployment—are we reliving the 1930s, or glimpsing America's future in the 2030s?

At the federal level, it's clear who is driving the chaos and distress through program cuts and job losses.

Good morning! And welcome to the last full day of winter. Tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, which means we get 12 hours of daylight, and the promise of 9 p.m. sunsets in our future. But for today it’s still winter, and we get the same weather as yesterday: highs in the low 50s, a little rainy. The usual Winter Special.

Welcome Party: Yesterday, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams came back to Earth. After a botched test flight left them stuck in the International Space Station for more than nine months, their capsule splashed down in the Gulf of America Mexico, off the coast of Tallahassee. According to the AP, Wilmore and Williams spent 286 days in space—278 days longer than anticipated. They circled Earth 4,576 times and traveled 121 million miles. When they landed, the astronauts were greeted by a pod of dolphins—which almost makes up for the fact that they had to come back to…all the rest of this.

Earlier this month, we did a slightly deeper dive into what's up with Council President Sara Nelson’s sudden interest in reviving a failed plan to rezone SoDo for residential housing. Is it about adding housing? Or is it a giveaway to a billionaire friend?  

Either way, at today’s full council meeting, she got her wish. A motion from District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss to delay consideration of the bill until the council’s July 15 meeting failed 6-3, garnering support only from District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle and District 8 Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck. After debating a whole raft of amendments, the bill passed council 6-3, with only Kettle, Rinck, and Strauss opposing, the latter with an emphatic “absolutely not.”

The birthday party/launch party for Ry Armstrong’s mayoral campaign last week promised to be “the most fun political event” I had ever attended. 

It isn't at every one of these things that a drag queen mistakes flimsy stage panels at Here-After for a solid wall, leans back on them mid-strip tease and nearly knocks them helter-skelter. They wobbled and she froze, standing stick straight with her hands clasped to her face. This got a laugh, so with a grin she resumed, slipping gold sequined fabric over her ankles like it'd gone off without a hitch. It wasn’t a packed room, but attendees filled at least three quarters of the seats. Standing at a podium in an emerald green jumpsuit, Armstrong asked the crowd to look at the people beside them.