Gulf Coast Calendar: Azalea Bloom Out, OBA Festival of Art and More Around Mobile and Baldwin County March 6-12, 2019

Azalea season is peaking across the Gulf Coast, and the first full week of March brings art festivals, history lectures, a Mardi Gras litter cleanup and free health screenings. Here’s what’s happening around Mobile and Baldwin County March 6-12, 2019.

It is the week when the region’s calendar turns. Carnival has ended, the azaleas are at their showiest, and the Gulf Coast’s institutions — from Bellingrath Gardens to the History Museum of Mobile — move their programs into the mild weather that makes outdoor and downtown events possible before the summer heat arrives.

Festivals and seasonal highlights

The OBA Festival of Art takes over Orange Beach March 9-10 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with more than 100 artists, live art demos, music and food trucks. Admission is free, with $5 all-day shuttle parking at the Orange Beach Sportsplex.

The weekend festival has grown into one of the fastest-growing art fairs on the Alabama coast, and the shuttle arrangement keeps the immediate event grounds walkable — visitors park once at the Sportsplex and ride in, which families with young children tend to appreciate after a day of browsing the artist booths.

Bellingrath Gardens’ Azalea Bloom Out runs through the month, with some 250,000 azaleas blooming across the 65-acre estate daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; the gardens post regular updates on its Azalea Watch page.

The Bloom Out is the Mobile area’s signature horticultural event. Bellingrath’s collection, planted across the estate that Walter and Bessie Bellingrath built along the Fowl River, peaks in waves through March, and the Azalea Watch page lets visitors time their trips to the color — a useful tool in a season when a week of warm nights can move the peak forward by days.

History and learning

Baldwin County Genealogical Society hosts avocation archaeologist Harry A. King on “Preserving the Indian Trade Canal” Saturday at 10 a.m. at Foley Public Library, free to the public. King’s subject reaches back to the trade routes that moved goods across Baldwin County long before the county’s railroad towns were plotted, and the society’s free Saturday sessions are the standard entry point for Baldwin residents tracing family lines or local land histories.

Fairhope Public Library continues its local history series Thursday at 6 p.m. with Zach Sierke’s “The Story of Clay in Fairhope,” and the Fairhope Museum of History’s Thursday tea features longtime Dogwood Trail director Jo Ann Broadus.

The two Fairhope events make Thursday the town’s unofficial local-history evening. Sierke’s talk covers the pottery tradition that grew out of the Eastern Shore’s clay deposits, while the museum’s tea — a decades-old Fairhope institution — turns this week to the Dogwood Trail, the pageant and court that has crowned Fairhope’s spring for generations.

Author and photographer Glenn Wills presents his documentation of Alabama’s disappearing places Tuesday, March 12, at Moorer/Spring Hill Library, and Spring Hill College’s Christus Lecture Series welcomes Rev. Dr. Kara N. Slade for two talks March 14-15 at Byrne Memorial Hall.

Wills’ photography documents the gas stations, schools, signs and storefronts vanishing from Alabama’s rural landscapes, work that has made his books a record of what the state is losing to time and demolition. The Christus lectures, meanwhile, bring a visiting theologian to the Spring Hill campus each year, and Slade’s two-evening format allows for both a public lecture and a deeper seminar-style session.

Mobile’s Ben May Main Library is hosting a retrospective of original Maurice Sendak works — the artist behind “Where the Wild Things Are” — through March 25, and USA’s Laidlaw Performing Arts Center offers a free concert by singer-songwriter and novelist Josh Ritter on Thursday night.

The Sendak exhibition is a rare chance to see the original art rather than the printed pages, and it gives the downtown library one of its highest-profile shows in years. Ritter’s stop at Laidlaw pairs two of his trades — the novelist touring behind a book and the songwriter touring behind a catalog — and free admission makes it one of the week’s easiest tickets.

“Parading through Time,” the History Museum of Mobile’s four-century tour of Carnival traditions, remains open through April 20. The exhibition traces the city’s Carnival story from its colonial beginnings to the modern mystic societies, and it is the museum’s answer to the question every Mobile child eventually asks — how old is Mardi Gras here, really?

Health and community

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s South Eastern Regional Conference mobile mammography unit offers free breast cancer screenings Saturday starting at 8 a.m. at the Arthur J. Outlaw Convention Center; scheduling is available online or by phone.

The mobile unit brings screening directly to the conference, removing the scheduling and travel barriers that keep many women from regular mammograms. Health screenings offered in conjunction with the sorority’s regional gatherings have become one of the more effective outreach models on the Gulf Coast, and organizers encourage early sign-ups because slots fill quickly.

USA Children’s & Women’s Hospital holds a free family baby expo Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m., with hospital tours, exhibitors and door prizes, and the U.S. Census Bureau is recruiting temporary part-time workers for the 2020 count across southwest Alabama at an average of $17 per hour.

The baby expo gives expecting parents a walkthrough of the hospital before delivery day — tours, car seat checks, and the hospital’s maternity exhibitors under one roof — while the Census recruitment signal is worth noting for job seekers: the 2020 count will require hundreds of temporary workers across the region, and early recruiting is how the Bureau builds its applicant pool.

Hats & Heels Inc.’s lupus support group meets the third Saturday at Providence Hospital, and the Heart & Soul Book Club gathers the fourth Saturday at Mobile West Regional Library.

Both groups are standing monthly fixtures — the lupus support group offering patients and caregivers a regular meeting point, the book club anchoring the West Regional Library’s community programming — and both welcome new members who find them through listings like this one.

Arts, food and fun

Bragg-Mitchell Mansion hosts two events: a “Little Mermaid” tea with Mobile Ballet dancers Saturday ($12, limited seating) and a spring tea Friday, March 15, benefiting restoration of the 1855 mansion.

The two teas serve the mansion’s dual mission. The “Little Mermaid” tea puts Mobile Ballet dancers in character among the tables for the youngest guests, while the March 15 spring tea raises money for the ongoing restoration of the antebellum house itself — one of the Gulf Coast’s most photographed landmarks, and a structure whose upkeep never stops needing donors.

Members of Mobile Opera’s “Il Tabarro” cast perform selections Sunday at Ben May Main Library.

The library performance is a preview by design: opera companies have long brought excerpts to public venues ahead of a full production, giving audiences a no-cost, low-pressure introduction to the show before opening night. Puccini’s “Il Tabarro,” set on a barge on the Seine, is the darkest and most atmospheric of his one-act operas, and Sunday’s selections will give Mobile listeners a first hearing of the cast.

The Funky Monkey 5K and Fun Run runs Saturday at 8 a.m. at USA’s Mitternight-area bell tower — with Mobile’s biggest banana split waiting at the finish line — and Touch a Truck returns to Hank Aaron Stadium on March 16 ($20 per car), supporting pediatric cancer research at USA Health Mitchell Cancer Institute and Adoption Rocks.

The Funky Monkey’s banana-split finish has made it a favorite for families and first-time 5K runners, and the campus bell-tower start keeps the course flat and fast. Touch a Truck, the day after, turns the Hank Aaron Stadium parking lot into a hands-on fleet of fire engines, loaders and dump trucks, with the $20 per-car admission split between pediatric cancer research and Adoption Rocks.

Gulf Coast Classic youth baseball and softball tournaments play March 11-28 at the Gulf Shores Sportsplex, Baldwin Bone & Joint’s “Many More Miles” shoe drive continues through March 23, and Mobile Baykeeper leads a post-Mardi Gras cleanup of One Mile Creek on Saturday morning to clear holiday litter from local waterways.

The Gulf Coast Classic brings traveling youth teams — and their families — to Baldwin County for more than two weeks of tournament play, one of the Sportsplex’s biggest bookings of the spring. The shoe drive collects gently used athletic shoes for redistribution, and Baykeeper’s One Mile Creek cleanup attacks the less glamorous aftermath of Carnival season: the beads, cups and packaging that end up in Mobile’s streams and flow, eventually, into the bay.

Between the festival grounds, the lecture halls and the creek banks, the week offers a full cross-section of the Gulf Coast’s civic life — and a reminder that the region’s busiest season, culturally speaking, begins the moment the last float comes off the route.