Ten cool things to do in Tucson this weekend (September 28-October 1)

The idea that the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" would one day return becomes a reality Thursday night.

In honor of the occasion, Martin Drug Co., 300 E. Congress St., plans to celebrate the "biggest and gayest reunion ever" with a Tucson launch party from 5 p.m.-11 p.m. 

The event will feature specialty cocktails inspired by the cast, highlights from past shows and a screening of the episode on more than 20 wide-screen televisions. 

Everyone attending is in the running to win prizes, including a trip to Los Angeles to see a live taping, a selfie with a cast cutout and a welcome drink. 

The event is 21 and older and admission is $5. More information can be found here. 

Tucson Lesbian and Gay Alliance is pulling out all the stops for the 40th anniversary of Pride in the Desert this weekend. 

Among the Pride pre-parties and after-parties happening up and down North Fourth and on Congress, the celebration will feature two majors events:

— A Pride on Parade on Friday that runs along Fourth Avenue starting at 7 p.m. 

and

— A special Pride in the Park, 40th anniversary edition from noon to 9 at the Reid Park bandshell. Pride in the Park features "local, regional and national entertainers, drag shows and other entertainment," according to the Pride website. 

If nonstop tabletop gaming is your thing, then RinCon 2017 is the place for you this weekend. 

The gamers convention, set to be held at Sheraton Tucson Hotel and Suites, 5151 E. Grant Road, will include people playing a range of games for all ages and skill levels.  

(Get all the little details here).  

The event runs Friday through Sunday. 

The Great Tucson Beer Fest will surely have some Oktoberfest-style offerings as it showcases the best beers from 55 breweries representing Arizona and beyond. 

Here is the Star's story from the pages of Caliente:

More than 3,000 people are expected to attend the 31st annual Great Tucson Beer Festival at Kino Sports North Complex, 2817 E. Ajo Way, Sept. 30.

After more than three decades in existence, the fest has become a tried-and-true tradition for Tucson’s beer-drinking community and one of the first big events of a busy fall/winter season that includes several major music festivals, film festivals, Tucson Meet Yourself and the All Souls Procession.

More than 55 breweries from across the country, including a healthy helping from Arizona, will be on site and serving samples.

Tucson’s own Barrio Brewing, Black Rock Brewing, Nimbus, Sentinel Peak and Dillinger Brewing are all slated to attend.

Huss Brewing and Uncle Bear’s from the Phoenix area, Mother Road Brewing from Flagstaff, Prescott Brewing and Old Bisbee Brewing also are participating.

The evening — which starts at 6 p.m. for general admission ticketholders — will feature live music from the tribute band 80s and Gentlemen, comedy, games and food trucks, including BurgerRito and Kababeque Xpress.

It also happens to serve a greater purpose: The Great Tucson Beer Festival and its sister festivals in Phoenix and Flagstaff are the primary fundraising events for Sun Sounds of Arizona, an organization that provides audio access to magazines, newspapers and books for people who can’t read due to disabilities.

Operating out of recording/broadcasting studios on Tucson’s east side, Sun Sounds’ local affiliate works with a small army of nearly 100 volunteers to help provide content to listeners 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The money raised from the beer festival helps to make that happen.

“It goes to rent, utilities, equipment, broadcasting fees, things like that” said Tucson station manager Murry Everson. “It is a very significant amount.”

Everson said the festival has evolved along with the ever-expanding number of breweries that have popped up over the last decade, both locally and nationally.

“Craft beer has really blossomed,” he said. “In Tucson, especially. It has really boomed.”

Attendees of the beer fest will receive 24 tickets for the price of admission, each ticket allowing for a different 3-ounce pour from a participating brewery.

“You used to just deal with the main distributors, the mainline beers,” Everson said. “Now you deal with all the little guys, all kinds of beer.”

The 31st Annual Great Tucson Beer Festival

Benefiting: Sun Sounds of Arizona. 

Where: Kino Sports North Complex, located at 2817 E. Ajo Way.

When: General admission entry starts at 6 p.m. VIP entry starts at 4 p.m. 

Admission: $35 general admission in advance through azbeer.com online; $70 for VIP. VIP ticketholders will receive a full meal, wine, hard liquor samples, ice cream and gifts. Admission is $10 more at the gate. 

Learn more: azbeer.com

The Oro Valley Music Festival will bring big-name artists to the Tucson area this weekend. Here is the rundown from the pages of Caliente:

The Golf Club at Vistoso will host its third annual Oro Valley Music Festival this weekend, with headliners Lee Brice and Train.

And what started as a way to bring the community around the golf course back together after a tumultuous period under the golf club’s previous owners has evolved into an economic boom for the area ... and the beginnings of what has fast become a destination music festival.

“We’re getting a lot more people from Phoneix, San Diego, Vegas,” said Rich Elias, the club’s general manager. “We never anticipated it to be the event it turned into. We thought we would bring in a couple of local bands and put on a barbecue.”

But once the club partnered with the Tucson I Heart Radio stations — the country station 97.1 The Bull and the pop station My 92.9 — the little community event became a big community party.

The lineup every year has featured local acts, including Oro Valley’s own Kaylor Cox, who performed her first true career concert at last year’s festival.

She returns to open the festival Saturday, Sept. 30, on a lineup anchored by Lee Brice. Others on the country bill include Jana Kramer and Michael Ray.

Day 2, Sunday, Oct. 1, features headliner Train and reggae-rock-rapper Michael Franti & Spearhead.

“I’m so excited for people at the Oro Valley Music Festival who were there last year to see my improvement,” said Cox, 20, who in the year since the 2016 festival has opened shows for big name country artists such as Kane Brown, the Eli Young Band and country diva Martina McBride at Fox Tucson Theatre. “Even my band, we’re so much tighter and so much more confident. I just feel so comfortable on stage.”

If the numbers grow as organizers anticipate, Cox could be standing before an audience of at least 7,000 — the number who attended the country day last year — when she takes the stage at 1:30 p.m. Saturday. Doors open at 12:30 p.m. each day and the festival continues until 9:30 p.m. on Saturday and 9 p.m. on Sunday, Elias said.

Attendance on the pop music day last year was 5,000 and Elias said he expects that number will jump this year, as well.

“What we’re most pleased about is that the artists we’re bringing in are great for all ages. The range of customer that we feel like we cater to is literally 15 to 65,” Elias said. “There’s something for everybody here.”

Elias said the festival is having an economic impact on Oro Valley largely driven by out-of-town visitors who make a weekend out of the event. During the first festival, which was only one day, area hotels and restaurants racked up $4.2 million in sales. The impact grew to $6 million last year, when the festival was expanded to two days.

In addition to Saturday’s show, Cox will perform several small gigs this fall before moving to Nashville at year’s end to work with Tucson native Troy Olson, a respected Nashville songwriter.

- Cathalena E. Burch

The light in Tucson, the mountains and the desert, have long called to artists.

For most of the time, they create behind closed doors. But a few times a year, they throw those doors open and invite the public in to look at the art, ask questions and get insights into the creative process.

That’s what will happen over the next two weekends. More than 200 artists are participating in the Fall Open Studio Tour, sponsored by the Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance and the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.

It’s a chance to see jewelry, paintings, textiles, ceramics — the mediums are vast, as is the talent.

On the first weekend, Sept. 30-Oct. 1, artists north of River Road will open their studios from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. During the same hours, Oct. 7-8, artists south of River will welcome visitors.

Among those you’ll meet the first weekend: Neil Weinstein who creates graceful figure sculptures in terracotta and bronze; Ron Tuuri who makes stunning landscape photographs, and Dragana Skrepnik, whose abstract landscape oils burst with color.

On the second weekend, you can wander through Crane Day’s studio, packed with stunning handwoven pieces, study Joyce Jaden’s intricate basket weaving, or feast your eyes on Jacqueline Chanda’s small oils and ceramic sculptures.

The events are free. Go to openstudiotours.com for details and locations on all the artists participating.

- Kathleen Allen

Since starting their duo in 1996, Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and American guitarist Dennis Cahill have set out to deconstruct traditional Irish music with pioneering arrangements that the New York Times said stripped “old reels and jigs to their essence, leaving space between the notes for harmonics and whispered blue notes.”

“The duo skips the flash of more familiar Celtic music in favor of a sparser, more intuitive approach,” the Times opined just three years after the pair started making music together.

Fast-forward 20 years and Cahill and Hayes, based out of Chicago, are still garnering enviable reviews:

• “Their performances have a kind of spirited abandonment that quickly has the audience transported,” the Independent of Ireland wrote.
• “Before today, I couldn’t remember a concert since the late Paco de Lucia performed at the Savannah Music Festival in 2012 where I felt so enveloped in the consuming presence and pure genius of a complete master of his instrument,” critic Jim Morekis wrote in the weekly Connect Savannah arts mag.
• “Make no mistake — Martin Hayes is the most innovative and influential fiddler on the Irish scene today. He and guitarist Dennis Cahill deconstruct Irish melodies in revolutionary ways, opening them up for modern sensibilities in much the same way Miles Davis did with jazz or Eric Clapton did with the blues,” wrote The Boston Globe.

Tucson can see for itself if the duo lives up to the hype when they perform with the In Concert series on Sunday, Oct. 1. The concert at the Berger Performing Arts Center, 1200 W. Speedway, starts at 7.

About the pair: By the time he was 16, fiddler Hayes, a product of County Clare, Ireland, had won a half-dozen All-Ireland fiddle championships, earning him the respect of his fellow Irish musicians who largely regard him as one of the country’s foremost musicians of any genre. He was taught by his father, a renowned Irish musician in his own right, who imbued in his son the idea of musical feeling, Hayes said in written comments.

“Music had to have feeling or it was nothing,” he said.

Cahill was born into Chicago’s Irish community, the child of parents from County Kerry, Ireland. After studying classical guitar at Chicago Music College and playing in folk, rock and blues bands, he arrived at Irish music.

Put the pair’s backgrounds together and you get a fresh approach to traditional Irish music that opens the genre to vastly diverse audiences.

The duo has performed around the globe, headlining such prestigious stages as Lincoln Center, the Royal Albert Hall and the Sydney Opera House. They also have collaborated with other contemporary artists, including jazz guitar great Bill Frisell and the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Tickets for their Tucson show, presented by In Concert, are $25 for adults, $23 for seniors in advance at inconcerttucson.com or at Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave.; or the Folk Shop, 2525 N. Campbell. Tickets at the door are $28, $26 for seniors. 770-3690.

- Cathalena E. Burch

It’s not every day you get the chance to cuddle with a cockroach. But at the Arizona Insect Festival Oct. 1, you can do just that — while seated on cockroach-shaped cushions, to boot.

This Joy of Cockroaches booth is just one of more than 20 at the University of Arizona’s Department of Entomology’s seventh annual Insect Festival. The festival will include panels, speed talks, hands-on activities, vendors and exhibits from scientists and local organizations.

As many as 6,000 have attended in the past and are expected this year, says Cara Gibson, director of the festival and assistant professor in the UA’s Department of Entomology. She has been involved with the event since 2012.

Attendees will be treated to bugs that are common, as well as uncommon.

“Our planet is mostly insects that we know of; that’s a huge range of diversity,” Gibson says.

“So there’s a few pest ones that we always think about, but there’s all these other ones that are involved in critical roles that help make life on earth possible.”

Gibson says she thinks that while some people may come to the festival out of that same kind of curiosity that draws them to a circus, people’s attitudes are changing about insects.

“More and more it’s becoming kind of a badge of honor to be understanding and to be more of a steward of our natural environment, and I think that’s part of all the education that’s gone on, in terms of recycling and understanding our planet better,” she says.

One of the most popular booths at the festival has been the Joy of Roaches. People line up for the chance to cozy up with a Madagascar hissing cockroach on the cockroach-shaped cushions Gibson sewed herself in 2012.

“People are much more accustomed to snuggling a puppy, so the idea you can snuggle a cockroach just sounds weird,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity to learn more about this group that has so much more to offer than” a chance to smack a roach on the kitchen counter.

Although the cockroaches may steal the spotlight, they won’t be the only insects at the festival. Gibson estimates there will be thousands of live insects there, ranging from aquatic ones to those who call the saguaros home. Many of these insects will be at the Life in Miniature booth, which features examples “the size of a freckle on the back of your hand,” Gibson says.

“You can have so many insects in such a small area that it makes it fun to display because you can have this kind of thriving city of bugs,” she says.

The festival will also feature stinging insects in containers for attendees to view up close and personal at the Stings ’N Things booth. It is manned by UA adjunct faculty Justin Schmidt, who has made researching stinging insects his whole career. Festival attendees can observe velvet ants, centipedes, harvester ants and scorpions and will have the chance to touch tarantulas.

“It’s amazing just to see the joy and awe on a kid’s eyes and expression the first time he actually holds a tarantula, and they’re just so brave and so proud,” Schmidt says. “It really makes your day when you see kids like that.”

Schmidt adds he wants people to understand what stinging insects do and why they do it so one can appreciate them without getting in trouble.

“As long you don’t really threaten them, you can see these are wonderfully beneficial animals, and we should all share in the joy of having them in our environment,” he says.

The festival has had an impact on some of the children who have attended.

“In 2011, we had a lot of kiddos that came, and they were barely walking, and now some of those same kiddos come to the event, but they’re volunteering with the scientists, side by side,” Gibson says. “So they’re embedded in communicating the science to their community, and it’s just so powerful for everyone. It’s great for the scientists to be able to teach it to the community members that then can turn around and teach it to other community members.”

One such kiddo is 9-year-old Eduardo Guzman, who first visited the festival four years ago.

At age 2, he got his first pet tarantula. At 4, he toured the insect collection at the UA. Later, at a UA entomology camp, he was invited to volunteer at the festival. He has been a volunteer every year since, working with arachnids.

Eduardo, who now has eight tarantulas and one giant hairy scorpion, likes volunteering at the festival because he gets to handle the arachnids and be with entomologists.

What’s his favorite thing about insects?

“Just that they’re probably going to be around longer than humans,” he says. “I just like how they look, and they’re cool.”

If you go:

When: 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1.

Where: University of Arizona’s Environment and Natural Resources Building 2, 1064 E. Lowell Street, just north of East Sixth Street and immediately to the west of the Sixth Street Parking Garage. The garage is free on Sunday.

Cost: Free

Information: arizonainsectfestival.com

- Ava Garcia, Special to the Arizona Daily Star

Ludmila Pawlowska has been immersed in art her whole life.

She has done textile design, magazine illustration, painting, sculpture.The natural world had been the focus in her works.

But her mother’s death in 1997 launched her into a spiritual journey.

Her “Icons in Transformation” is one of the fruits of that journey.

The exhibit of more than 100 pieces has traveled the world and settles into St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church on Oct. 1.

Pawlowska was born in Kazakhstan, where her Soviet dissident parents were exiled.

It was there that she found a refuge in art. At 15, she moved to Moscow to study. Eventually she married and moved to Sweden.

Her mother died while visiting Pawlowska.The death was a blow to her. Searching, the artist began to travel. It was in the icons in Russian monasteries that she found purpose and inspiration.

They “were like a window to God,” she says on her website.

Pawlowska’s medium is varied: encaustic painting, installation and sculpture, collage. The exhibit also includes traditional Russian icons, which were her initial inspiration.

The works, she says on her website, “do not realistically represent any events or figures; rather they make sentiments and feelings visible or a moment of truth life. They can interpret subjects in their own way by using a wide plethora of colors, ranging from dark drama to the poetry of spherical light or just in intensive minimalist red/blue.”

Her galleries of choice as this exhibit has traveled have been churches and cathedrals.

“To those whose artistic appreciation is based on Western values, icons can seem strange, primitive or even ugly,” she said when the exhibit was at the Liverpool Cathedral in England.

“With just a few notes of explanation and using the sacred space at a cathedral, however, we may begin to see with the heart rather than mind, and discover in the icon a guide and instructor to the spiritual life.”

Icons in Transformation opens with a free Gala Celebration with the artist from 5-8 p.m. Oct. 1 at St. Philip’s, 4440 N. Campbell Ave. The exhibit continues through Jan. 7. Information: 299-6421 or stphilipstucson.org

- Kathleen Allen

Erik Estrada, the 1980s TV hunk and multiple-time “Sexiest Man Alive” cover boy, is loving his newest role: game show host.

But you won’t find him tossing out trivia questions or pitting family against family on the Game Show Network.

He’ll be doing it live at a casino near you, including Casino del Sol, 5655 W. Valencia Road, on Sunday, Oct. 1.

Estrada is hosting “America’s Greatest Game Shows Live,” in which contestants compete in games inspired by the classic TV game shows including “Name That Tune” — their version is “Name That Song” — and “The Newlywed Game” — here it’s “The Not-So Newlywed Game.”

Contestants are selected in a drawing from among casino regulars who swiped their player’s cards at the casino from Aug. 1 to Oct. 1. You don’t have to have a player’s card or swipe one to attend as a spectator, though, casino officials said.

“It’s so much fun. You will laugh and laugh and laugh, and it’s easy to win,” Estrada said from his home in California last week, then segued to ultimate game show pitchman mode.

“People have the opportunity to play. Everybody in the house will win something, but someone in the house will get the chance to play for the $100,000 grand prize!” he said. There is $35,000 in prize money up for grabs at the Casino del Sol competition.

He’s given away the $100,000 grand prize just once in the three years he’s hosted the show at casinos around the country after taking over for game show hosting legend Bob Barker.

“I love giving it away. It’s so much fun,” said Estrada, the 68-year-old father of three whose 17-year-old daughter still lives at home. “People will have a good time, that’s for sure.”

All that money at stake aside, Estrada admits one of his favorite aspects of hosting “America’s Greatest Game Shows Live” is what happens on stage.

“You never know what people are going to say on stage, and it’s live” said Estrada, who played California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer Frank “Ponch” Poncherello in the late 1970s-early ’80s TV series “CHiPs.”

One time, a not-so newlywed bride was asked to compare her groom in the romance department to a burger: Is he a Quarter-Pounder? Big Mac? Or where is the beef?

We can’t repeat her answer in a “family-friendly newspaper,” but suffice it to say it got some booming laughs.

“You gotta figure, there’s 1,200 people in my audience. There’s a roar,” said Estrada, who over the years turned his TV cop gig into a real-life law enforcement stint complete with finishing police academy training in 2008 and serving with the Muncie (Indiana) Police Department.

“Greatest American Game Shows Live” is a fully produced show, with special effects and plenty of bells and whistles, the host said.

“There’s a lot to it,” he said. “And I have a good time doing it at my age. It’s like going to your house on a Saturday and playing some games. It’s a piece of cake for me; I totally enjoy it.”

This is not the first time Estrada has been to Tucson, but it is his first big public appearance. His other Tucson appearances have been at private and corporate events, he said.

What: America's Greatest Game Shows Live with host Erik Estrada.

When: 11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 1.

Where: Casino del Sol Conference Center, 5655 W. Valencia Road.

Cost: Admission is free, but only people who swiped their Casino del Sol players card between from Aug. 1 to Oct. 1 are eligible to become contestants. 

Details: casinodelsol.com

- Cathalena E. Burch