Thursday, August 20th, 2026 - Three VERY different Saturdays to pick from this week. We want to know where you will be going. Reply with one word: TRUCKS, or MARKET, or TURTLES? What will it be?
Plus: sixty-four hatchlings went the wrong way on Friday night, and Harry and Meghan made a Girl Scout cookie documentary.đđđ
Stuff You Wonât Want To Miss This Week:
â TOP PICK THIS WEEK: TONIGHT - 7pm | Squeeze with Adam Ant and Haircut 100 at Hard Rock Live. Three British bands from the same five year stretch, on one stage, on the night Squeeze marks fifty years together. Tickets start at $65. If you owned any of these records, this bill is not coming back around.
TONIGHT - 8pm | Eureka Day at Island City Stage, Wilton Manors. The Tony winner about a private school board trying to talk its way through a measles outbreak. It is a comedy right up until it is not. Runs Thursdays through Sundays into September, in a room small enough that you can see everyone squirm.
TONIGHT - 6 to 9pm | Food Truck Frenzy at Brian Piccolo Sports Park, Cooper City. Broward County Parks rotates this one around the county on Thursdays, so the lineup changes with the park. Bring a chair, it is a field not a food hall.
TONIGHT - 7 to 9pm | Live Music at the Hollywood Beach Theatre. Free bands on the Broadwalk, three nights running through Saturday. There is room to dance and nobody minds if you do not.
Friday Night - 8 to 10pm | Sea turtle hatchling release at Anne Kolb Nature Center, Hollywood. Browardâs conservation program runs these Wednesday and Friday nights through the end of August, and then the season is done for the year. You watch hatchlings that were dug out of a nest make the last few feet to the water.
TONIGHT | Dine Out Lauderdale food tour, Lauderdale By The Sea. The restaurant-months program runs through September, and the walking tours are the part people forget about. You eat your way down a street instead of sitting in one room.
Friday Night - 8pm | Old Townâs Backyard Jam, Pompano Beach. The monthly outdoor concert in Pompanoâs old downtown, free, with food on site. This one came in from a reader in July and it has produced every month since.
Friday Night - 9pm | Club 90âs presents MJ Night at Revolution Live. A full night of Michael Jackson, hits through deep cuts, 18 and up. $23 to $35.
Friday Night - 8pm | ArtsPark Movie Night: Cars, Downtown Hollywood. Free outdoor movie at the Young Circle amphitheater. Grass, a screen, and nobody checking whether you brought your own snacks.
Friday Morning - 9am | Sale of the Year, Spectacular, Miami Shores. An in-person warehouse estate sale that opens Friday and keeps going. Worth the drive if you like getting there before the dealers do.
Opens Saturday | Cookie Queens at Savor Cinema. The Girl Scout cookie documentary that won the audience award at SXSW, produced by Harry and Meghan, which is a sentence that reads like a joke and is not. Runs through Aug 30.
Saturday and Sunday | Monster Jam at Amerant Bank Arena, Sunrise. Trucks the size of a garage, indoors, extremely loud. Tickets move for this one and the good seats go first.
Saturday Morning - 10am to 2pm | Pompano Beach Fire Rescueâs 100 Year Anniversary at the Sample-McDougald House. A century of the cityâs fire department, marked at Pompanoâs 1916 house museum. The kind of local anniversary that happens once and that nobody outside city hall hears about.
Saturday Afternoon - 3 to 7pm | Flamingo Flea at Marina Village. Beachside market with a food hall, a DJ, and the two story boat bar. Small makers, not resellers, which is the whole point of this one.
Saturday Night - 7pm | STILL ALIVE, a Pearl Jam tribute at Revolution Live, with a Foo Fighters tribute opening. $23 to $27.
Saturday Afternoon - 4 to 9pm | Ukrainian Cultural Fest, West Palm Beach. Food, music and dance on the downtown waterfront. Out of county, but there is nothing else like it in South Florida this month.
Saturday Night - 6 to 10pm | West Palm Beach Beer Festival at Bryant Park. Fifth year, on the water, and far enough north that you should decide about the drive before you decide about the beer.
Saturday Afternoon - 2 to 6pm | Rock the Plaza, Boynton Beach. Free live music in a strip plaza parking lot, which sounds unpromising and is consistently better than it sounds.
Saturday | Introduction to Clay, wheel throwing at Bailey Contemporary Arts, Pompano. One of a handful of weekend studio classes at BaCA. Registration required and the wheel classes fill first.
Sunday - 11am to 4pm | Sunny Side Up Market at the Historic Stranahan House. Local makers, bakers and growers set up on the lawn of the oldest surviving house in Fort Lauderdale. Yoga and a sound bowl at 11, market from noon, live music 1 to 3. Free, on the New River, and the house itself is worth the walk around.
Sunday Afternoon - 12:30pm | Weston distressed estate sale. Live auction plus an in-person sale: luxury watches, fine art, high jewelry. Distressed sales are where the pricing gets strange.
Tuesday - 5 to 8:30pm | Tasty Tuesdays at Sunset Cove Amphitheater, Boca Raton. Food truck rally with live music from 5:30. Out of county, but it is the reliable weeknight one.
Wednesday | Community Bingo Night at the E. Pat Larkins Center, Pompano. Free bingo with prizes. Included because Pompano is chronically under-covered in our roundup, not because it is glamorous.
Thursday and Saturday | Watercolor and colored pencil classes at Bailey Contemporary Arts, Pompano.
Huizenga Happenings:
Saturday Morning - 9am | FTL Free Workout Saturdays at Huizenga Park. Free hour in the park downtown. Ran in the Aug 13 issue and keeps drawing.
Tuesday Night - 6:30pm | Huizenga Park Two Mile Run Club. Free weekly two miles from the park, downtown loop. Two miles is short enough that nobody gets dropped.
Tuesday - 6pm | Sunset Yoga with Las Olas Yoga Studio, Huizenga Park.
Wednesday Night - 6:30pm | Think and Drink Trivia at Huizenga Park. Free trivia outdoors downtown. Teams form on the spot if you show up alone.
Thursdays - 5:30 to 7:30pm | Yappy Hour at The Dog Spot, Huizenga Park. Dogs, drinks, downtown.
Friday - 6:30pm | Zumba by Domingo, Huizenga Park. Free class outdoors, 12 and up.
Sunday Morning - 9am | Pilates in the Park with Doug Banker, Huizenga Park.
SAVE THESE DATES:
Thursday, Aug 27 · 10am to 2pm | Job News South Florida Job Fair at Amerant Bank Arena. Multi-industry hiring event with the Miami Dolphins, City of Sunrise, CareerSource Broward, Boca Raton Police and the armed services in the room. Free, but register.
Friday, Aug 28 · 6 to 8pm | Riverwalk Chocolate & Whiskey Tasting at the Fort Lauderdale Womanâs Club. Six whiskeys, six chocolate pairings from Kilwins Las Olas, a gift bag, and somebody explaining why any of it works. $60 in advance, $75 at the door if there is a door. 21 and up.
Friday, Aug 28 | Fort Lauderdale United FC v Brooklyn FC at Beyond Bancard Field. The second home match of the season for South Floridaâs only pro womenâs club. The stadium is small enough that you can actually hear the bench banter.
Friday, Aug 28 · 5 to 10pm | Party in Paradise, Delrayâs tribute to Jimmy Buffett at Old School Square. Floridaâs official Jimmy Buffett Day, done properly: two tribute acts, a limbo contest, a costume contest, and margaritas. Free if you bring a lawn chair, $50 for the VIP tent.
Island Time:
Friday, Aug 28 · 5 to 8pm | A Taste of Trinidad & Tobago at the Inverrary Community Center, Lauderhill. Roti from Joyâs, Tabanka, Singhâs and Kingâs, steelpan, tassa drumming, and soca from Shelly Sweetshells. Free.
Saturday, Aug 29 · 6 to 10pm | Trinidad & Tobago Independence Celebration at Vizcaya Park, Miramar. The bigger of the two independence events this weekend, on the Saturday, in Miramar.
Saturday, Aug 29 · 6 to 9pm | Art Fest at Thrive Art District. Last Saturday of the month, every month, in the arts district on the northwest side. Original work, small vendors, and the artists standing next to what they made.
Featured Fort Lauderdale
Sixty-Four Baby Turtles Went the Wrong Way
A nest hatched on Fort Lauderdale beach last Friday. Sixty-four hatchlings dug their way up through the sand, got their bearings, and set off away from the water.
They were heading for a hotel.
A volunteer filmed it. The video went around, people got loud about it, and the Beach House Fort Lauderdale at 505 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard spent the weekend as the least popular building in the city. All sixty-four turtles were collected by hand and carried to the ocean. The resort has since reached out to the group that rescued them.
Here is the part worth understanding, because it is not really about one hotel.
A hatchling has exactly one instinct when it reaches the surface: go toward the brightest horizon. That rule worked for as long as there have been turtles and beaches, because the brightest thing on a dark beach is the open sky over the water. It is not a decision the turtle makes. It is closer to a reflex.
Then we built a wall of light behind them, and the rule stopped working.
Fort Lauderdale has an ordinance about this. No lights visible from the beach between March and October, fines up to $500 a day. About 35% of city businesses actually comply. County-wide it is worse. The volunteer group that runs the night patrols puts roughly two thirds of coastal properties out of compliance, with Hallandale Beach the worst of them, averaging 17 visible lights per property.
So the county built a workaround.
Nova Southeastern has run Browardâs sea turtle program for more than thirty years, on contract, across 24 miles of beach. Every morning from March through October, before sunrise, staff ride the sand on ATVs reading the previous nightâs tracks. They can tell a real nest from a false crawl. They stake it, log it, sweep the crawl marks away so nothing else follows them in, and come back to it for the next two months.
On the stretches where the lighting is worst, they put a cage over it.
That is the thing almost nobody knows. A restraining cage goes over the nest before the eggs are due. Its ocean-facing door is opened at dawn and shut again at dusk. Somebody checks it through the night. When the hatchlings come up, the cage holds them, so instead of setting off toward A1A they wait in a box on the beach until a person with a permit walks them down to the waterline and lets them go.
That is the hatchling release. The one you can book at Anne Kolb. The one that sells out. The one that is, genuinely, lovely to watch.
It is a rescue operation with tickets.
None of that is an argument against going. Go. It costs very little, there are only a few nights left in the season, and watching something that small make a run at the Atlantic will fix your whole week. Only about one in a thousand of them lives to grow up, which makes it feel less like a photo opportunity and more like seeing someone off at the airport.
Just know what you are looking at. The cage is not part of the plan. It is a patch. The actual fix is a light switch, on a building, belonging to somebody who has not flipped it.
Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program · releases run at Anne Kolb Nature Center, Hollywood, on set nights through the end of August. Pre-registration and a ticket required: (954) 357-5161.
So... You Think You Know South Florida
You probably already know⊠Chase Stadium as the place the soccer team played until this year, before they moved down to the new place in Miami.
What you might not know is⊠what used to stand on that exact patch of ground. It was Lockhart Stadium, and from 1977 it was home to the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, and the roster reads like somebody made it up.
Gerd MĂŒller played there. The man who scored the winning goal in the 1974 World Cup final. So did George Best. So did Gordon Banks, the England goalkeeper who made what people still call the greatest save in the history of the sport, off a PelĂ© header in 1970.
And here is the part that should stop you.
Banks was playing with one eye.
He lost the sight in his right eye in a car crash in 1972. It ended his career in England. He came to Fort Lauderdale in 1977, played 26 games, let in 29 goals, which was the best defensive record in the entire league, and was voted Goalkeeper of the Year.
Half blind. In a car park off Commercial Boulevard. Best in the country.
More Treats To Try
We donât let just anyone sponsor this newsletter. Hereâs who âmade the cutâ this week:
The Florida Renaissance Festival is once again hosting its Acting & Dance Workshops. You can attend as a Member or just $5 per workshop if you want to try it out. Classes from now until October. Use this page to register
The new school year is starting up. Lots of excitement for the first days of school. But if it is not feeling right for your family, you might want to look at something very different and totally worth it.
SAVE THE DATE. Founding Families Fall Festival. Stranahan House. September 25th. Email director@stranahanhouse.org for sponsorship opportunities.
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Quote Of The Week
âIf more information was the answer, then weâd all be billionaires with perfect abs.â ~ Derek Sivers
Derek Sivers is an author of philosophy and entrepreneurship (founding CD Baby in the early days of internet sales), known for his surprising quotable insights and pithy succinct writing style. Formerly a musician, programmer, TED speaker, and circus clown.
Flotsam & Jetsam
This section of the newsletter (Flotsam & Jetsam being a nautical term) always covers something interesting found from the world-wide webs, but not necessarily local.
The rest of the newsletter is local by nature. We talk about whatâs happening downtown, in Fort Lauderdale, the Greater Fort Lauderdale area, and South Florida. Hereâs a story that isnât local in origin⊠until it is.
Sugata Mitra is famous for his âhole in the wallâ experiments where he placed a computer in some of the poorest communities, and then observed what children did together as they got access to unlimited learning.
It also happens that Sugataâs work (including his âgrannies in the cloudâ) experiments were a major inspiration for the start of the Acton Network over 15 years ago. We (Acton Fort Lauderdale and the purveyors of this newsletter) are part of that Network, so this article hit differently for us.
It also happens that Sugata is talking about one of the topics that seems to be in the news and on peoplesâ minds these days - and that is what is going to happen in a world where AI is easily available to anyone, anywhere, and anytime.
AI is not replacing teachers. It is exposing what schools forgot to teach
The argument that Mitra is making, is one that is central to what we do each day at Acton. He says âArtificial intelligence is not destroying education. It is revealing a problem education has managed to ignore for decades: too many schools still confuse the delivery of information with the cultivation of thought.â
You can read more from the full article here. Iâm curious. What do you think the future holds in a world of AI? Are you feeling hopeful or guarded?
Word Play Of The Week
âDamn The Torpedoes.â
In the Civil War, floating naval mines were known as âtorpedoesâ and the famous phrase meant to go forth, with courage.
Admiral David Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5, 1864. His lead monitor Tecumseh hit a mine and sank in minutes, and he ordered the fleet straight through the minefield anyway. ~ âSource
âUnder-The-Radarâ Openings Job Board
Lots of folks offering cool positions here locally. Maybe thereâs one for you or a friend?
Divers for underwater boat bottom cleaning, Broward County. You scrub hulls. Underwater. All day. In a city with 300 miles of canals, somebody has to, and it is a real trade with real hours.
Senior Custom Millwork Cabinetmaker, Coconut Creek. Senior level, which means somebody wants a person who has done this for twenty years and is willing to pay for it.
Locksmith and locksmith apprentice, Broward. The apprentice half is the interesting half. A licensed trade you can still get into without a degree, and almost nobody advertises the entry point.
Dance teachers, Pompano Beach. Hip hop, ballet, tap, jazz, musical theatre and cheer, all at once. If you have one of those in your history and have wondered what to do with it on a Tuesday night, this is it.
Marine manufacturing helper, entry level, Dania Beach. No experience asked for. Dania Beach is where a surprising amount of the boat industry actually gets built, and this is the door into it.
Job News South Florida Job Fair, Thursday Aug 27, 10am to 2pm, Amerant Bank Arena. The Miami Dolphins, City of Sunrise, CareerSource Broward, Boca Raton Police, the Army and the Navy, all in one room. Free, but register.
Visitor Services Associate, Bonnet House Museum & Gardens. First face anyone sees at the 1920s beachfront estate with the monkeys and the orchid house. If you have ever wanted a reason to be there on a weekday, this is it.
Do you have a listing you would like to place here for next week? Hit reply and let us know.
Lastly⊠One Big Idea For Your Week
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