It’s mid-July, and you know what that means: holiday season. Between Bastille Day, Slovakian Independence Day, and Jesse Ventura’s birthday, you’ve got no shortage of reasons to celebrate this weekend. So pop the champagne and hop to it, Brooklyn!
• Mos Def isn’t the only New York rapper paying respects to Brooklyn. Jamaica, Queens native Q-Tip headlines the seventh annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival in DUMBO, where rap group The Stuyvesants hopefully will be performing from the group’s album, “Brooklyn’s Finest.”
• Cast anchor down in Brooklyn Heights this weekend for “Tug and Barge Week,” where musicians will serenade you as you kayak up the East River, catch a waterfront circus show, and witness the dissection of that most noble of cephalopods, the squid.
• Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou…Hindu? This weekend, one Brooklyn Heights theater troupe is bringing out the puppets, hijabs, and Middle Eastern dance numbers in its reinvention of Shakespeare’s timeless love story.
• It’s the annual Ezra Jack Keats Family Concert this Saturday, with Dan Zanes rocking the Prospect Park band shell with his signature brand of banjo-strumming, hip-shaking kids’ music. (Edgy.)
• Get your head out of the cloud! Check out these Brooklyn entrepreneurs who have put Fort Greene on the nation’s cutting edge with their shopkeeping, in-the-cloud technology. Business owners, we’re looking at you.
• First the egg cream, now this? Salt water taffy gets its artisanal treatment, with one Williamsburg confectioner serving up hand-pulled bits of the time-tested sweetmeat in coconut, cherry, and peppermint flavors. Work those gums!
• Put your foot (and fist) down on local crime with the help of this frustrated Bedford-Stuyvesant native, who’s empowering women with the conditioning and know-how to fend off the would-be muggers who have overrun pedestrian-friendly Fort Greene.
