1. St. Patrick Swayze Day at The Centennial
It’s easy to paint a mural of Patrick Swayze’s perfect face on your wall. It’s a whole lot harder to find new way to celebrate St. Patrick year after year, but that’s exactly what they do at The Centennial.
Every year, on the weekend closest to Swayze’s Aug. 18 birthday, The Nations bar (and really the neighborhood) goes all out in celebration of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” 1991. You can watch Swayze movies on every screen, all day long. You can hear the utterly exceptional Dirty Dancing soundtrack at least five times in its entirety. You can enjoy a parade of increasingly creative Swayze costumes, with an informal winner being crowned if any rises to Vida levels of fabulous. And most importantly, you can snag the absolute best limited-edition swag in town. This year, I’d wager the hot item will be the Swayze/Elliott ’24 election tee, so get there close to the noon open time to grab one.
Not since Isbell/Prine has there been such a universally approved ticket
The event has picked up steam every year since its 2017 inception, with 2022 seeing the addition of the Swayze Classic run. Managed entirely by locals who simply love The Centennial event, the fun run raised more than $4,000 in its first two years for pancreatic cancer research. (That’s the horrid disease that took the star of Toto’s “Rosanna” music video from us.)
The run has become so popular, in fact, that registration is already closed for 2024! However, I’d wager no one in the neighbor-led group is going to stop you from donning your best ’80s gear, showing up at the eminently reasonable 10:15 a.m. start time, and tagging along in the back as they blast Swayze-movie soundtracks from a portable speaker on their trek around The Nations.
2. Soul Music on Sunday Night With WNXP's Dan Digs
Shouting out your local NPR station for news is not revolutionary. All informed Nashvillians have 90.3 WPLN saved in their car, or a podcast like This Is Nashville downloaded to their phone. But if you’re not turning to NPR’s sister station 91.1 for music, you’re missing out.
Like YoCo 96.7, the mix on WNXP is eclectic. One minute you’re hearing an ’80s classic from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the next it’s Toro y Moi’s latest chillwave track. (Sidebar: Kudos to whoever named the instantly enticing “chillwave” music, a genre that channels ’70s and ’80s pop but mixes in dreamy, psychedelic sounds. Put that on, throw me in a lounge chair, and pass me some shades and a cold drink.)
But an easy point of entry for this station is the Sunday evening broadcast. From 5 to 7 p.m. each week, Dan Digs plays “electronic soul, leftfield indie, experimental beats, uptempo house grooves, and global sounds.” Do I know what all of that is? Heck no. Do I like it when I hear it? Absolutely.
If you’re a new-soul neophyte like me, the show will introduce you to artists like Knomad Spock, whose neo-folk sound is chill enough to cook dinner to but weird enough to keep you alert and interested.
If you’re an expert, you’ll enjoy in-depth interviews with artists like Sampha, who Dan chatted with about everything from covering artists like Al Green and Semisonic to Sampha’s dad’s secret CD stash in a footstool.
If you’re a lover of classic soul, you’ll get a bit of that too. While it’s not explicitly spelled out by the station, I think they keep spinning soul past the 7 p.m. cutoff, and it’s always great for a couple Shazams. This week I was thrilled to add “Until I Lost You” by March Wind and a bunch of Deanie Parker to my STAX mix.
3. Soft Serve at Star Rover Sound
There are some desserts you never outgrow. Boxed confetti cake. A Bomb Pop at the pool. Warm chocolate pie and pink-peppermint-stick ice cream. But no dessert is more iconic than soft serve. And nowhere is doing it better than Star Rover Sound.
The steak-dinner spot is known for live music, tasty fries and a wedge salad with buttermilk-dill dressing and butter-fried croutons that Sinatra would sign off on. But the pièce de résistance is vanilla soft serve with brown-butter saltine crunch, a drizzle of olive oil and Maldon salt.
The soft serve is rich and creamy, and the crunchy toppings and flakes of sea salt are perfectly offset by the glossy drizzle of olive oil. It’s a nostalgic dessert, all grown up, that still has all the charm of the original.
4. Cellphone E.R. in Bellevue
It’s not really summer until someone drowns an iPhone, and my husband attempted it in a kiddie pool Sunday. The phone was still working after it got dunked, but I suggested he put it in rice to “dry it out fully.” At that point, a grain of rice got stuck in the charging port, rendering the phone unchargeable and permanently dead.
Luckily, my husband already knew where to go: Cellphone E.R. The small shop sits in a Bellevue strip mall between a Sir Pizza and a hair salon. It has no website and a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since 2016. Why? Because this guy is fixing phones, and he doesn’t need your silly SEO to make a buck doing it.
The dude — whose name neither my husband nor most people on Google know, though a few believe it’s Don — dismantled the phone, dried it out (it was soaked inside, so rice wasn’t wholly stupid), fixed the speaker (the earpiece wouldn’t go louder than a whisper), and repaired the charging port (for a second time since he’d already fixed that once before). And he did all this in a few hours, on a Sunday afternoon, for $75. What’s more, to show how well the speaker was now working, he pulled up and blasted Adele’s “Hello” video. Iconic proof of top-notch service.
In a time when a new iPhone can run you almost a grand and a dead one can hold your life hostage, a dude like Don (?) is a good one to know.
5. ‘Promote the Vote’ Happy Hour With Civic Tennessee
If anything can put a nail in the coffin of summer, it’s when polls open for an election year. Luckily, some Nashville restaurants are helping you take the edge off that fact while getting you primed for the polls.
The happy-hour tour is sponsored by organizations like Civic Tennessee, Organize Tennessee and Rise & Shine, as well as Bearded Iris Brewing. At each event, volunteers will:
Register new voters
Check and update registration for past voters
Give you all the information you need to successfully vote (election dates, polling locations, what you need to bring)
But the most revolutionary part is that these are nonpartisan events. That means they don’t care who you vote for — they just care that you do.
