Citizens Warehouse, on Sixth Street just west of Stone Avenue, is a hotbed of creativity. Etherton Gallery is celebrating 21 of the artists who use the warehouse as studio space with Citizens Warehouse Artists, a show continuing through Sept. 12. The gallery is throwing an opening reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, June 20, at 135 S. Sixth Ave. More details at Etherton's website.

It’s pretty hot right now. So, any chance for a laugh, one that isn’t caused by manic dehydration, is to be cherished. Luckily for us, comedian and all around funny lady Jen Kirkman is coming to Congress this Friday.

Kirkman utilizes self-analyzation and observations on society to create stand up that is easily relatable and humble. Her brand of comedy has her put herself completely on the line, giving her ego up to the audience and landing successfully. It works, because many of us are way too consumed with stubborn pride to say what’s on our minds. It feels good to laugh at ourselves with the safety of an entertainer as an outlet.

Kirkman says establishing confidence and respect with an audience plays a big part in making someone laugh.

“They are kind of in your hands, and if you treat them like they’re idiots and you’re rude they won’t laugh at you,” she says. “They want to know that you’ve got this, that they are in the palm of your hands and you are confident. I think there has to be a lot of humility in trying to make people laugh. You can’t think you are doing some big, powerful thing, otherwise people will feel like you’re condescending.”

This rapport with the crowd and her pride free confessions of personal, laughable experiences translates effortlessly to her latest achievement, a comedy special on Netflix called, “I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine).”

The 78 minute special is comprised of everything she has been doing on the road for the last few years.

“I didn’t have to do anything differently,” she says. “One day I showed up and just like any other show there was a camera. I wore a lot more makeup then I would normally wear on stage.”

Netflix was an attractive outlet to Kirkman because it offered her freedoms most cable television couldn’t touch.

“I was lucky that I knew Netflix was interested," she says. " I always knew that I wanted to do a special that was not going to be on the kind of cable that has commercials, that doesn’t let you be in control of the editing. That’s why I wanted to work with them. I feel like comedy, when you’re doing it in a night club or comedy club, you can swear, there’s no commercial break and it’s about having a great time. It’s sort of a place where grownups talk about things you don’t talk about in high society. When comedy specials are on television they are all cleaned up and nice and I don’t really understand why that’s funny.”

Spend enough time in Tucson’s music scene and you will start to hear the term “the Tucson sound.” It comes straight from the musicians’ mouths, from the fans, from the reviews and is embedded in our long history of musicality.

What does it mean exactly? Well, like any other classification or genre identifier, there is no one right answer. Tucson sound, is maybe best described as music which embodies the preserving spirit of dwellers in a desert environment, which from the start appeared so inhabitable. Maybe it speaks to a certain mysticism that permeates beneath the hot sands. Maybe it is influence drawn from country, Latin music and desert rock.

Though the answer is subjective, many of Tucson’s die hard music enthusiasts can speak to what this sound has meant to them. Nostalgia is a reoccurring theme.

Club Congress, 311 East Congress St., has long cultivated a space to showcase the unique voice of Tucson artists and kind of stands as a museum documenting the search for this “sound.” The historic venue will take that niche and turn it literal with their upcoming “Tucson Rock n Roll Museum” exhibit.

The vision for the collection is to pay tribute to Tucson’s music history over the past half century, through the help of the community who was a part of it.

Congress is reaching out to this city’s musicians and fans for rock and roll memorabilia to include in the community driven museum. The guidelines are light and they are welcoming posters, photographs, newspaper clips and videos which help tell the story of “the sound.”

"It was totally gnarly," Dara Silverman, playwright and actor for the Agile Rascal troupe, says, "It was really rough."

Her group of seven cyclists and actors primarily from the Bay Area found, while bike touring their play from Encinitas to Tucson, that riding in the desert isn't easy in June. They started off carrying all of their set and props on their bikes with them, but quickly found they had to "make sacrifices" in order to get to their destination.

"We kept lightening the load and modifying how far we went every day. We were getting up at 2 and 4 in the morning, taking showers roadside with a solar shower and drinking lots of water," Silverman adds.

Now on the outskirts of Tucson, Silverman and her Agile Rascal team have already found parallels between their journey and the radical play that they will be performing at BICAS on Saturday, June 13. The play, titled "Sunlight on the Brink," centers around a gas station in the southwest during a time when a catastrophic drought forced a mass evacuation of the western states. The gas station attendant watches and waits as people move from one side of the country to another. However, Silverman says the donation-funded production has found the troupe at several southwestern gas stations already.

"We wrote the play with the intention of it overlapping with our trip, but I didn't know at the time how much I'd be living off gas station food along the way," Silverman says, jokingly.

"It wasn't meant to be but it's really become an experiment in taking care of each other," she says. "It's been intense."

The harsh surroundings getting to Tucson for the show also mirror the play's major themes, which deal with the preciousness of life and water as well as human's interconnectivity with the environment. Silverman says to keep the play light, as it is a family-friendly comedy, the use of "wacky" characters like sea creatures and the Internet come into play. Overall, though, she says wants the play's message to be up for interpretation.

"I think art asks questions," she says. "Anything where you can just say the meaning, then you can say the meaning and that’s it."

While the play itself only uses bikes as props in some scenes, Silverman and Agile Rascal will be biking across the country for a three month tour with their play "Sunlight on the Brink." You can see the only Tucson performance of the play on Saturday, June 13 at BICAS (44 W. Sixth St.) beginning at 8 p.m. Remember to bring money to donate, too, so Silverman and her crew can stop eating at gas stations.

Local, resale fashion favorite, Buffalo Exchange, is welcoming a new member to their family-run business. The clothing store, which started in Tucson in 1974, fulfills their commitment to environmental conciseness by recycling clothes from one fashionista to another. Like their physical locations, their sister store, The Vintage Buffalo, also offers customers used clothing for reasonable prices.

The Vintage Buffalo is their new, online fashion boutique, specializing in vintage finds from our past. The pieces do not, like the stores, come from customers for trade or cash. They are instead carefully curated by a buying team spread throughout the United States. These skilled searchers utilize their eye for fashion to look through estate sales, flea markets and antique fairs for one of a kind looks.

Marketing Director Stephanie Lew says creating an online collection was a logical route for Buffalo to take.

“We’ve seen this is where the resale industry is going and we wanted to be a part of it,” she says. “While there are plenty of vintage resale stores online, we wanted to create a vintage store with a unique collection.”

The collection includes dresses from the '40s to '70s, tops, bottoms, “world culture pieces,” southwestern styles, decor, jewelry and accessories.

“Customers are offered one of kind and rare styles you won’t find in your average vintage store,” says Lew. “While prices reflect the value of the pieces, The Vintage Buffalo has worked hard to make sure they won’t break the bank.”

The Vintage Buffalo team will add new items to the website weekly to supply customers with a constantly revolving door of special pieces colored with the looks of our past.

To browse through the collection and find your next look, visit thevintagebuffalo.com. You can follow them on Instagram @thevintagebuffalo for promotions and new arrivals. Currently, shipping is not offered outside the U.S. or to Alaska and Hawaii.

"At the time I was laid off, bankrupt and so I just said 'fuck it, I'm throwing parties for a living." To really boil it down, that's how Jared McKinley started his annual celebration of a very specific style of music—the Yacht Rock Party. Though his party throwing efforts resulted in planning many events like the Glitter Ball, Underwear Party and several other one-time one-offs, the Yacht Rock Party is still going strong after five years and McKinley largely attributes it to the music.

"When it started, there was a lot of wanky club music in Tucson's nightlife scene," he says, "and there still is."

As an alternative, the Yacht Rock Party celebrates music that sprung from the "cocaine drenched '70s" to a time when folks were looking to "smooth out the edges."

"That's why it makes sense in summer here. We're all looking to smooth out some edges," McKinley says.

You can expect tunes from acts like Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Ambrosia, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Starbuck and more from DJs Ben Beshaw and E__Rupt. Dirty P and the Thunderchiefs will also be performing some smooth rock jams. Admittedly, though, this isn't a genre most people own up to liking. Even McKinley says it took him, and his party co-founder Kenny Stewart, some time to warm up to it.

"Kenny and I were having a conversation about music while watching yacht rock videos on YouTube and laughing," he says. "I grew up hating that music. The Ramones and KISS were all I cared about."

The six-month-old LGBTQ health and wellness center Living Out Loud is hosting a forum with representatives of the Tucson Police Department to discuss violence against LGBTQ people in the city and what can be done to prevent it.

"Our trans members are constantly being harassed at the bus stop and while riding the bus. One was even strangled," says Letty Fields, one of the center's therapists. "Episodes occur on the street, and most of our trans folks will not go out after dark alone."

Kent Burbank of the Pima County Attorney's Office put Fields in touch with TPD Capt. Mike Gillooly, commander for the midtown district, and Capt. Carla Johnson, who is the GLBT liaison for TPD. 

"They were both very concerned and jumped at the chance to come and talk at LOL. Mostly, they will talk about keeping safe, filing a police report, reporting harassment and other issue’s that might come up like how to deal with Sun Tran drivers," she says. 

LOL, part of CODAC Behavioral Health Services, has been open since December. It began offering most of its services in the spring. 

Here's a little bit of what I wrote about the clinic in January:

All staff and volunteers are LGBTQI-identified and allies who have worked with the community. Some of them will be transferring to LOL from the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation and other CODAC facilities.

The LOL center is filling up a huge gap of health needs in the community.

For many LGBTQI people in the region, fear of discrimination or a health provider's lack of knowledge for how to care for them–this is especially true for transgender and gender nonconforming patients–is what has been keeping them from even going to the doctor.

Many primary care clinic questionnaires don't even include questions relating to gender identity and sexual orientation.

An October 2010 survey by the National Transgender Discrimination Survey and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says that out of more than 7,000 LGBTQI people surveyed, close to 30 percent postponed visiting the doctor and that same number reported being harassed at a health center. Half of them said they ended up having to teach the doctors and health providers about transgender care and 19 percent said they were refused care due to their transgender and gender nonconforming status.

The LGBTQ-TPD forum is happening Friday, June 12 from 1 to 2 p.m. at the LOL clinic, 3130 E. Broadway Blvd. For more information, visit the event's Facebook page.

Who doesn’t love a celebration? Every year there are holidays promising us holiday pay at work, an excuse for bad behavior, free booze, food and family time, of course. We know the staples. Each store gives us at least two months’ notice of Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

You know what you never see holiday displays in Target for? Worldwide Knit and Crotchet in Public Day. Oh, you didn’t know June 13 was set aside to make scarfs for the whole world to see? Thanks to an internet black hole, which cruelly tossed me from Tweet, to video, to Reddit comments, I learned I have missed out on some seriously amazing holidays my whole life.

There are at least three unofficial holidays a day. They are sometimes sweet, mostly strange and often defy logic. Don’t lose out on experiencing these special days. Here are my picks for the best holidays in this wacky and wonderful week.

June 7-13: National Body Piercing Week
This is by far one of the more normal sounding things being celebrated this week. From June 7 to 13, give your body piercings some love, because it is all about the jewelry we like to put in our faces and belly buttons. This celebration of studs and hoops comes from a really legitimate source, the Internet. Who named this week? Why is this week significant in the world of piercings? Who started this thing? Apparently no one knows. So, there are no National Body Piercing Week sales or parades I can think of but hey, somebody is getting pierced somewhere right? Go ahead and treat yourselves.

Honorable mentions:
End Mountain Top Removal Week
Bed Bug Awareness Week

June 8: Upsy Daisy Day
What a shame we didn’t know about Upsy Daisy Day just a little bit sooner. This holiday is dedicated to waking up with a smile on your face. Creator Stephanie West Allen declared this an unofficial holiday in 2003 with the hope to remind us all to laugh, smile, be happy and be positive. It’s all pretty sweet and as far as missing out on this one, I’m really just more focused on declaring my own holiday right now. If Allen can make a happy day, I’m sure I can make a Free Pen Day.

Attention movie/Blythe Danner/Sam Elliott fans: We've got a few passes to see "I'll See You in my Dreams" and you should take 'em. 

Each pass admits two people, and the passes can be used at any of the Century Theatres showings in town between today (Monday!) and Thursday, June 11. 

We'll give the tickets away today and tomorrow. You have to be able to pick the tickets up at our office on the Northwest side. We close at 5 p.m. every day.

The movie currently has a pretty solid rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's some details on the film, from Rotten Tomatoes as well:

MOVIE INFO
In this vibrant, funny, and heartfelt film, a widow and former songstress discovers that life can begin anew at any age. With the support of three loyal girlfriends (June Squibb, Rhea Perlman, and Mary Kay Place), Carol (Blythe Danner) decides to embrace the world, embarking on an unlikely friendship with her pool maintenance man (Martin Starr), pursuing a new love interest (Sam Elliott), and reconnecting with her daughter (Malin Akerman). C) Bleecker Street

Rating: PG-13 (for sexual material, drug use and brief strong language)
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Directed By: Brett Haley
Written By: Brett Haley, Marc Basch
In Theaters: May 15, 2015 Limited
Box Office: $1.9M
Runtime: 1 hr. 35 min.
Bleecker Street

It was a hot summer day on the farm in 1986 when, then-farmer Charles D. Thompson Jr. would have his first experience with the border of Mexico. Farming was in Thompson’s blood, becoming the first Thompson to graduate from college he quickly continued his grandfather’s profession in agriculture. After years working as a leader in the organic farming movement, he found himself with a big blackberry crop and little time to make his deliveries.

Acting on a suggestion from a friend, he enlisted the help of five men from the Nayarit state of Mexico who worked for a friend at a chicken processing plant. Though he spoke little Spanish at the time, he would remember those conversations for the rest of his life.  

“They saved my blackberries that afternoon, and that day their stories began to change me forever,” he said. “I began to need to answer questions their lives raised about immigration and globalization, questions that became more important than continuing to be an organic grower.”

Thompson went full throttle in his pursuit of making a difference in the lives of the thousands of small farmers and people living with border issues every day. He and his wife sold their farm, he gained his Ph.D and went on to become a professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University.

In his 15 years at Duke he has taught courses on farm workers, agriculture, immigration and the U.S./Mexican border. He has published six books and created four films all covering his community activism and topics of expertise.