I really love this new video on Tucson Meet Yourself, probably because it's one of my favorite Tucson events to share with friends and my son. Every year is a different experience for us because my son experiences it differently as he grows older—what foods he's more willing to try, what crafts he's interested in and what music he wants to sit and listen to.

This year's festival in downtown's El Presidio Park is from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, and Saturday, Oct. 12, and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 13.

To honor the festival's 40th anniversary, UA Special Collections is doing a retrospective exhibit, 40 Years of Tucson Meet Yourself, at 1510 E. University Blvd. through Jan. 10, 2014.

See the interview with Bob Diaz below:

I recently returned from spending most of the summer in the South of France. Namely, the exquisite and utterly incomparable region of Provence.

My days were spent frolicking through endless fields of lavender, wandering aimlessly through art museums and slipping into azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Evenings were passed cheersing aperitifs and tasting heavenly Provencal cuisine at hole-in-the wall bistros. Warm, salty-aired, starry nights fell while we sat at the table, finishing off copious amounts of world class wine (oh god, that wine!) and prattling on with locals about whatever came to mind until the morning crickets began to chirp. All in traditional French fashion, of course.

Needless to say, ever since returning to Tucson I have had a little trouble filling the hole in my heart that living in Provence has left me with.

However, I may have found just thing to indulge my culture cravings.

Linguistics professor Adrienne Lehrer, author of Wine and Conversation, will be hosting an event this Saturday at the Raices Taller Art Gallery that is reminiscent of how I spent of most of my nights while traveling along the French Rivera: Drinking wine and talking about it. As a keynote lecturer for an international conference on the language of food and wine, she'll be there to sip and chat about the wine you're drinking.

As part of the evening, professional dancers Kimi Eisele and Katie Rutterer will take the stage to put on original performances and Professor of Philosophy Keith Lehrer will be around to talk art, dance and the etheric self (if talking wine is, for some odd reason, not your thing).

Thanks to the fine people of Arizona Theatre Company, we have passes good for two tickets to any show remaining in the run of Importance of Being Earnest, which runs at the Temple of Music and Art until October 5. Want to win one? Just enter at our Free Stuff page and cross your fingers. The contest closes Monday at midnight and we'll inform winners via email.

If you don't win, tickets are available online.

Good luck!

Buena Vista Social Club alumni Omara Portuondo, Guajiro Mirabal, Barbarito Torres and Eliades Ochoa return to the stage to perform with La Orquestra Buena Vista Social Club, a 13-piece group including a new generation of musicians, will perform Saturday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. in Centennial Hall. Fans will be able to hear some of their most famous songs like "Chan Chan," "El Carretero" and many other classics.

“I am very happy to be back with the public in the United States, I have done a lot of tours and the public has always been great, they know all our songs and are always welcoming,” said Eliades Ochoa, an original member and one of the founders of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Opening for them will be jazz pianist, Roberto Fonseca, a highly acclaimed, well respected musician from Havana.

“He is a very talented young man; what makes him great is that he can play variety of music. He is a complete artist,” Ochoa said.

Tickets are $45, $43, $40, $37, $30 with discounts. For information about the concert call (520) 621-3341 or go online to uapresents.org.

Eliades Ochoa had a few moments to talk to the Tucson Weekly:

What is the difference or similarities to the new generation of members in the Buena Vista Social Club?
The new generation in Buena Vista Social Club plays peninsular Cuban music. They come to us at a young age but they have a deep knowledge of the music of peninsular Cuban music and want to be there playing this music with the Buena Vista Social Club.

What is your favorite type of music and why?
Son cubano. I am sonero, my life is the countryside (the fields and land), I was born in the fields and will die there. (A style of music that originated in Cuba and gained worldwide popularity in the 1930s. Son combines elements of Spanish canción and the Spanish guitar with African rhythms and percussion instruments of Bantu and Arará origin.)

If you were not performing and playing music what would you be doing instead?
I think I was meant to be born as an artist and if I weren’t meant to be playing music, it would be better that I was never born. So if I wasn’t playing music, I don’t know what I would be doing.

If you are not playing music what are you doing?
I visit with my friends. I read a lot. I am like any other person.

What is your favorite song to play while on tour?
That’s hard; I love all the songs.

Many people compare you to Johnny Cash, does that bother you?
It is something beautiful; he is an artist of the world. I think when one is compared to another artist of quality whose music has made it around the world and brings joy to others is beautiful and to be compared to him I value a lot.

What is the most popular music in Cuba right now?
The youth is listening to a lot of a Reggeaton.

Did you like the documentary made by Wim Wenders about the Buena Vista Club and why?
Yeah, of course. It was very beautiful and it made us be even more well known around the world. Now wherever we go people recognize us and because of that we are all very thankful for the documentary.

Many Cuban artist have left Cuba but you have decided not to leave why?
Many artists do leave and they go travel the world, work and do whatever this is where I feel comfortable.

What kind of legacy do you hope the Buena Vista Club Leave behind?
I hope that we are known to have always played the best possibly could at our concerts and that we always gave the best to our fans, that we celebrated our public because they were always their for us. We did it all with lots of love.

I am neither a student nor a staff/faculty member of our local university, so I'm out of luck, but if you fall into one of those categories, you should head over to Centennial Hall (from 9 am to 7 pm) or the UA Bookstore in the Student Union (from 10 am to 6 pm) and grab some heavily discounted tickets for the forthcoming season of shows from UApresents. The sale is today, only at those locations and there are assorted limits, but the opportunity to get student tickets for $10 or staff tickets for $15 is probably too good to pass up. There are a bunch of shows worth seeing over the next eight months from jazz legend Arturo Sandoval to bluegrass mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, but if you're looking to get tickets to only one show, my vote might be Jonathan Batiste, an incredible New Orleans jazz pianist performing a series of shows at Club Congress in November. Go get some tickets, UA folk! Culture and sophistication are what separate you from the lawless drunken hordes up north!

Promotion in Tucson is impossible to predict.

Some events are bandied about through press releases, billboards and other attempts to reach the public far in advance of the actual event itself. Then there are those that seem to swoop into town completely unannounced considering the lack of pimping that's done to get people interested in coming out.

On that note, a show of hands for how many people were aware the Mrs. America pageant was going to be here next week? Yeah, me neither.

It wasn't until our esteemed web troll leader here at Weekly World Central, Dan Gibson, pointed it out to me (in the midst of what I now realize was some backhanded compliments related to me being a Mr. Mom) that I had any idea 51 married women representing every state and political compound were descending on the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort next Monday and Wednesday.

According to what I could find on the sparse Mrs. America Web site — which at least has been updated more recently than the event's Facebook page — the pageant has been held since the late 1970s.

It's been held in Tucson for eight years, but has gotten minimal local coverage. Other than the obligatory slide shows that one media outlet considers all the rage, that is.

This might not help the pageant's cause:

This year's Arizona delegate is Brooke Nelson, a mother of three from Gilbert. She's bidding to be the first winner from here since Tucsonan Diane Tucker took home the crown in 2006.

Mrs. America is not to be confused with Miss America, Miss USA or any other pageants devoted to "emphasizing that America’s 70 million married woman are extraordinarily beautiful, poised, articulate and versatile." The other ones don't have the nuptial requirement, and I don't think most Miss America or Miss USA participants have kids.

Which means they can't be called (again, h/t Dan Gibson) MILVFs. Or, Moms I'd Like to Vote For.

Tickets are still available for both the preliminary (Monday night) and final (Wednesday) rounds, according to the Mrs. America site. They can be ordered online - tagline: seeing the event is just a PayPal click away! - if that's your thing.

Today, in cool things found on the Internet, artist Andrew Hayes has created a new use for old books: damn wicked metal sculpture.

According to Hayes, his metal work allows for the books that he's repurposed to tell "a new story":

The book is a seductive object to hold and smell and run your fingers through. I am drawn to books for many reasons; however, the content of the book does not enter my work. The pages allow me to achieve a form, surface, and texture that are appealing to me. The book as an object is full of fact and story. I take my sensory appreciation for the book as a material and employ the use of metal to create a new form, and hopefully a new story.

Phoenix filmmaker Bea Quiz'em took this time-lapse video of Angel Diaz working on the the Carlos La Madrid mural near the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Sixth Street west of Plus that we wrote about this week. La Madrid's family was there from beginning to end:

Yes, I have big love for Odyssey Storytelling and have presented a few stories there, albeit mostly sappy mom stuff about my son and another night right after the Jan. 8 tragedy. Plus, I plan to participate in the Dec. 5 evening appropriately titled, "Big Bad Words: The B*tch Show," but here's a somewhat tardy Thursday night recommendation — head over there tonight, at 7 p.m. for "Saved by the Bell: School Stories."

There are some interesting folks that curator Lori Riegel has put together for the evening, but what I want to know is what in the world is Tucson Unified School District governing board member Mark Stegeman going to talk about? Perhaps Riegel, a University High School graduate who seemed so darn grateful for Stegeman championing the proposal that her school get its own building during last year's hearings on school closures, asked the controversial school board member to talk about the successes at UHS or maybe he has a notebook full of prose about the number of times he's been called a racist (I think he keeps count).

At any rate, it is likely to be an eventful night of storytelling at Fluxx Studios & Gallery, 416 E. 9th St. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and there's a $7 cover.

Other storytellers include Richard Feinburg, director for community outreach for the Foundation for Cardiovascular Heart Health series; local artist Simon Donovan; music teacher Julie Unger Zorn; former schoolteacher, administrator, and PCC governing board member, Georgia Brousseau; and University High teacher John Hosmer.

• Huffington Post
• Barbie Got Back?

But, to this point, it seems very few people actually considered what Barbie would look like with realistic proportions.

Enter Nickolay Lamm:

He's created a "normal"-sized Barbie, made to show us more realistic proportions of American women. He transferred CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention) measurements of an average 19-year-old woman to make the 3-D model, then used photoshop to liken the doll to a Barbie. "If we criticize skinny models, we should at least be open to the possibility that Barbie may negatively influence young girls as well," says Lamm. "If there's even a small chance of Barbie in its present form negatively influencing girls, and if Barbie looks good as an average-sized woman in America, what's stopping Mattel from making one?"

Honestly, that's a fairly good lookin' doll. I mean, it's even got a butt that Sir Mix-A-Lot would love.

Well done, Mr. Lamm.

[h/t: Dangerous Minds]