Air metal star rocks fest
Bret Michaels, lead singer of ’80s arena metal group Poison and star of the VH1 reality dating show Rock of Love will be performing songs from his solo career as well as favorites from Poison such as Every Rose Has Its Thorn at Marc’s Great American Rib Cook-Off at 6 p.m. Monday at Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica in Cleveland.
Tickets are $8 with admission to the Rib Cook-Off and $52 for reserved seating. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster outlets, by phone at 800-745-3000 and online at www.livenation.com.
Memorial Day Flea Market
Looking for some treasures? With more than 1,000 outdoor vendors, the Hartville Marketplace and Flea Market could be just the place to shop.
Wear good walking shoes and try not to bump into the other 30,000 expected customers.
The Hartville Marketplace building will open at 6 a.m. on Monday for early bird breakfast. Indoor shops and outdoor vendors open two hours later, at 8 a.m.
For more information, visit www.hartvillemarketplace.com/memorial-day-flea-market.
Liz and Dick on Big Screen
If you want to get some classic-movie relief from the sun, Cinemark ends its recent replay of the 1963 epic Cleopatra with a showing at 2 p.m. today. The movie is as famous for what was happening off-camera as on, since this was the movie that brought together Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
They shed their respective spouses on their way to a long and stormy romance that included marriage, divorce, remarriage and re-divorce. Burton’s diaries once described a Taylor tirade accusing Burton of, among other things, “drunkenness (true), mendacity (true), being boring (true), infidelity (untrue), killing myself fairly quickly (true), pride envy avarice (all true), being ugly (true) [and] having once been handsome (untrue).” Doesn’t that sound like a fun couple?
Oh, yeah, the movie. Taylor is the title character, Burton is Mark Antony and Rex Harrison is Julius Caesar. Running about four hours, it sprawls, it’s excessive — and in its way it is a Hollywood landmark. A 50th-anniversary Blu-ray set arrives on Tuesday.
Plant for hunger
Memorial Day is the traditional time for putting in a vegetable garden. This year, why not consider planting an extra row for your neighbors in need?
Plant a Row for the Hungry, a program administered by the Garden Writers Association, encourages backyard gardeners to designate a row in their gardens for hunger relief. Locally, the program is coordinated by the Beacon Journal and the Akron Canton Regional Foodbank.
Participating is as easy as planting a little extra. When harvest time comes, you can drop off your bounty at one of several drop-off sites in the area, which will be listed each Saturday in the Beacon Journal’s Home section.
The food bank will distribute the fresh produce to the soup kitchens, food pantries and other hunger-relief organizations it serves.
More information is in the Plant a Row section of www.gardenwriters.org.
Visit a lemonade stand
From now through June 8, Alex’s Lemonade Stands will be cropping up all over the Akron area as part of Lemonade Days.
The stands help to raise money for research into childhood cancer.
Founded by Alex Scott in 2004, the national event grew out of Alex’s front yard lemonade stand, and is held every year in June.
For a complete listing of local stands, visit www.ohio.com/blogs/lisa.