Gulf Coast Calendar: Chili Cook-Off, Senior Bowl Week and More Around Mobile and Baldwin County Jan. 16-22, 2019

Mardi Gras season is ramping up and football is in the air as south Alabama rolls through the third week of January. Here’s what’s on the calendar around Mobile and Baldwin County for Jan. 16-22, 2019 — a stretch that layers the first parade-season energy of the year over Martin Luther King Jr. remembrances, Senior Bowl week and a busy slate of community events on both sides of the bay.

Community Highlights

The Mobile Police Department’s Chili Cook-Off — postponed until Saturday, April 13 — was originally set for Cathedral Square, with teams of officers competing for bragging rights in the shadow of the Cathedral-Basilica downtown. Tickets benefit the Mobile Law Enforcement Foundation and MPD’s Crime Prevention Unit, the department’s community-policing arm. The postponement moves the event out of January’s chill and into spring, when Cathedral Square’s oak-shaded lawn is one of downtown’s favorite gathering places.

Bay Minette’s Civic Center hosts a Veterans Job Expo Thursday from 9 a.m. to noon, with more than 45 employers from health care, industrial, hospitality and retail recruiting veteran and civilian job seekers alike. The event taps Baldwin County’s status as one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama, where new industry along the I-65 corridor has created a persistent demand for workers of every skill level. Job seekers should bring resumes and dress for on-the-spot conversations; veterans services organizations typically staff such expos to help with benefits questions as well.

Mobile United leads an MLK Day of Service on Saturday morning with cleanups of One Mile Creek and Three Mile Creek meeting at Tricentennial Park, plus an Eslava Creek Canal crew. The waterways are the focus of a long-running community effort to restore Mobile’s urban streams, which thread through historic neighborhoods before feeding Mobile Bay. Volunteers should expect boots-on work — trash removal, debris clearing and invasive-plant control — in the spirit of a holiday weekend devoted to service rather than a day off.

GulfQuest hosts Coastal Fashion Week 2019 Saturday at 8 p.m., showcasing Gulf Coast designers and boutiques inside the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico on the riverfront. The venue makes for an unusual runway: the museum’s ship-shaped building overlooking the Mobile River has become a favorite spot for organizations looking for a signature setting.

The Abba Shrine Craft & Antique Show runs Saturday and Sunday ($3 admission), drawing dealers and browsers from across the central Gulf Coast to one of the area’s most reliable winter shopping weekends. Shrine events like this one fund the Shriners’ children’s hospital network, and the Mobile temple’s show has built a loyal following among collectors hunting for furniture, glassware, coins and Southern memorabilia.

Serda Brewing launches Wintzell’s Oyster Stout Friday night with oysters by the dozen and live music, a collaboration that pairs one of Mobile’s craft breweries with the city’s most famous oyster institution. Wintzell’s Oyster House has been shucking on Dauphin Street since 1938, and the stout brewed with its namesake bivalves is a characteristically Gulf Coast take on the style — briny, dark and built for a January night on an unheated patio.

Best-selling author Marie Benedict discusses her Hedy Lamarr novel “The Only Woman in the Room” at West Regional Library Friday afternoon. Benedict’s novels rescue remarkable women from the footnotes of history, and Lamarr’s story is among the most striking: a Vienna-born film star who fled her studio-bound career and, in her off-hours, co-invented frequency-hopping technology that anticipated modern wireless communications. Library talks like this one draw some of the largest crowds on the Mobile Public Library calendar, and early arrival is wise.

The Baldwin Writers Group meets Saturday at Daphne Library with novelist Carrie Dalby, offering Eastern Shore writers a session with a working author. The group has long served Baldwin County’s amateur and professional writers alike, and sessions with published novelists give members a look at the craft and business of getting a book out the door.

The Historic Oakleigh House opens a behind-the-scenes tour Thursday at 5:30 p.m. covering 185 years of the property ($10), a rare chance to see portions of the antebellum house museum beyond the standard route. Oakleigh, built in 1833, is Mobile’s signature historic house, a T-shaped Greek Revival mansion whose outbuildings and grounds tell the story of the city’s cotton-era economy and the generations who lived and worked there.

The Fairhope Museum of History hosts Eastern Shore Art Center director Bryant Whelan at its Thursday tea, continuing the museum’s tradition of pairing its afternoon gatherings with speakers on the arts and history that shape Baldwin County. Fairhope’s single-tax colony origins and its century-long identity as an artists’ haven make the museum a natural venue for a conversation about the Eastern Shore’s creative economy, and the Eastern Shore Art Center — a few blocks away in downtown Fairhope — anchors that tradition with galleries and year-round education programs.

The Mobile County Health Department offers $10 rabies shots at the city animal shelter Saturday, a low-cost clinic aimed at getting more of the area’s dogs and cats current on vaccinations. Rabies vaccination is required by law in Alabama, and mobile clinics like this one remove the cost barrier that keeps some pet owners away from private veterinary offices. The city shelter, which handles Mobile’s stray and surrendered animals, uses the clinics to reconnect residents with vaccination and licensing services.

Civic groups are busy all week. The Mobile County Democrats meet Wednesday at West Mobile Regional Library, the Mobile Republican Party gathers Monday at Westminster Presbyterian Church, and the Mobile Deanery holds its winter meeting Tuesday. With municipal, county and state elections on the 2020 horizon and party reorganization under way after the midterms, January meetings are where local parties set their calendars — and where anyone curious about getting involved in the year’s political work can show up and find a role.

Football Season’s Last Whistle

The week belongs to the Senior Bowl, the college all-star game that has called Mobile home since 1951. The week’s practices draw hundreds of NFL coaches, scouts and executives to the Port City — every team in the league sends evaluators — and the game itself caps the schedule at Ladd-Peebles Stadium. For Mobile, Senior Bowl week is a January economic engine: hotel rooms fill, restaurants add tables, and the week’s charity events connect the game’s national profile to local causes.

The event has deepened its local footprint over the years, moving practices and media events to venues around the city and expanding community programming alongside the football schedule. Mardi Gras krewes, meanwhile, are in their final weeks of preparation, with parades set to begin rolling in the coming weeks and masked riders stocking up on MoonPies, beads and cups for the season ahead.

Arts, Music and Museums Through the Week

The calendar’s art offerings continue across the week, from gallery openings downtown to museum programming on both sides of Mobile Bay. January is a buildup month for the region’s arts organizations: the Mardi Gras season brings tourists and locals alike into the historic districts, and museums and galleries schedule their winter exhibitions to catch the foot traffic that parades generate. GulfQuest, the maritime museum, the History Museum of Mobile and the many small galleries along Dauphin Street all benefit from the seasonal swell.

Live music remains a weeklong constant in Mobile and Baldwin County, from the Serda Brewing stage to the regular rooms along Dauphin Street and the Eastern Shore’s restaurant venues. The third week of January traditionally splits its audience between the last college football weekend of the season and the first parade nights, and venues program accordingly — booking acts that can pull a Senior Bowl crowd one night and a krewe party the next.

Service organizations, meanwhile, use the MLK weekend as a recruiting moment. Mobile United’s creek cleanups, the shelter’s rabies clinic and the veterans’ expo all share a common thread: they are entry points for residents who want a hands-on role in the community without a long-term commitment. The cleanup crews that gather at Tricentennial Park on a January morning typically include students earning service hours, neighborhood association members and kayakers who use the creeks and want them cleaner.

For planners, the takeaway is that south Alabama’s mid-January has become a genuine season of its own — no longer the dead zone between the holidays and Mardi Gras, but a stretch packed with reasons to get out. The week of Jan. 16-22, 2019, manages to cover professional football scouting, riverfront fashion, Shrine antiques, civil-rights service work, a brewery-oyster house collaboration and a book talk about a Hollywood inventor. That range, in seven days, is a fair snapshot of what Mobile and Baldwin County offer: a Gulf Coast culture that runs on festivals, water, history and football, often all at the same time.

Residents looking to attend any of the week’s events should confirm times and locations with the hosting organizations, as January weather and postponements — as the chili cook-off’s move to April demonstrates — can shift even the best-laid plans. Admission charges are noted where they apply, and several of the week’s biggest draws, including the creek cleanups and the veterans’ expo, remain free to the public.