South Alabama Community Events Roundup: February 12-18, 2020

A Valentine’s Week Packed With Dances, Mysteries and Mardi Gras

Valentine’s Week and Mardi Gras season collide across Mobile and Baldwin counties over the next seven days, with dinner dances, mystery theatres, author events and one parade running in reverse. The stretch from February 12 through February 18, 2020 may be the busiest week of the winter on the Alabama Gulf Coast calendar, pairing romance-themed evenings with the final push of carnival festivities before the weekend. Whether the plan is an evening of swing dancing, a murder mystery over dinner or a history lecture on a weekday afternoon, the two-county area offers a packed slate. Here are the week’s highlights.

Romance on the Water and the Dance Floor

The Mobile Big Band Society hosts its Valentine Dinner on Wednesday, Feb. 12, from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel, with a catered dinner, reserved seating and swing dancing. The society has long been a fixture of the Mobile swing scene, keeping big-band music alive for dancers who grew up with it and newcomers discovering it for the first time. The Riverview Plaza, overlooking the Mobile River downtown, gives the event the kind of grand ballroom setting the music was written for. Reserved seating means couples can claim a table for the whole evening rather than arriving early to stake out floor space.

The Azalea Ballroom Dance Club holds its Valentine dance the same evening at Dreamland Skate Center, with foxtrot lessons at 6 p.m. The club is one of the area’s longest-running social dance organizations, and its lessons before each dance have become a low-pressure way for beginners to try partner dancing without committing to a full class series. Dreamland, a mainstay of Mobile-area recreation for generations, converts its floor for the evening. Dancers who want to make a full night of ballroom can, in theory, work in both venues given the short drive between downtown and the skate center.

Perdido Queen Cruises runs a Valentine’s Day murder mystery cruise Thursday, Feb. 13, with dinner by Dauphins, plus a jazz brunch cruise Sunday featuring the Dauphin Street Stompers. The Perdido Queen operates out of the wharf at The Wharf at Orange Beach, and its themed cruises have built a following on the Alabama Gulf Coast by combining a short harbor outing with dinner theater or live music. A murder mystery puts the entertainment in the hands of a costumed cast, with passengers invited to play along as detectives before the culprit is revealed. The Sunday jazz brunch, with the Dauphin Street Stompers aboard, gives the weekend a traditional New Orleans-flavored sendoff as Mardi Gras weekend approaches.

Shows and Stage

The Crescent Theater stages its Rocky Horror Valentine’s Show Friday, Feb. 14, at 11 p.m., pairing the cult classic film with a live cast and audience participation. The Crescent, the small art-house cinema tucked into the LoDa entertainment district, has made midnight-style screenings a signature offering, and its Rocky Horror presentations draw costumed regulars who know every callback line. First-timers are typically welcomed with the traditional prop bags and a quick primer on when to shout, when to throw rice and when to dance the Time Warp. An 11 p.m. curtain on Valentine’s Day itself makes the screening an alternative date night for couples less interested in candlelight than in Fish Net stockings and sweet transvestites.

Hoodrat Skate Co. in Foley hosts a Valentine’s party and hip hop show that night with Oni Mask, Neighborsthroughthewall and Teejae Harrison. The Foley skate shop has become an unlikely hub for the south Baldwin County underground music scene, converting its space for all-ages shows that give younger audiences live music without a drive to Mobile or Pensacola. The lineup mixes regional hip hop acts with local openers, and the Valentine’s framing gives the show a playful holiday theme. For teenagers and college students in Foley, Robertsdale and Summerdale, it is one of the few live options of the weekend.

The Playhouse in the Park presents “The Miracle Worker” on Feb. 15-16 and Feb. 21-22, with tickets from $14. The choice of material is fitting for the Mobile area, since the play tells the story of Helen Keller, who was born in Tuscumbia in northwest Alabama, and her teacher Annie Sullivan. The Playhouse in the Park, operating from its stage in Mobile’s Municipal Park, has spent decades training young performers and staging family-friendly productions at accessible prices. The two-weekend run gives audiences two chances to catch the show, and the $14 starting ticket keeps it within reach for school groups and families.

The Detectives Mystery Dinner Theatre serves up “A Decent Proposal” Saturday at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear. The troupe has built a Gulf Coast following with interactive whodunits staged between dinner courses, seating audience members among the suspects and letting them interrogate the cast before guessing the culprit. The Grand Hotel, the historic resort on Mobile Bay’s eastern shore that now flies the Marriott flag, provides a suitably elegant backdrop for an evening of comic intrigue.

Authors and History

Alabama’s Authors Day comes to Historic Blakeley State Park on Saturday, Feb. 15, spotlighting Gulf Coast writers. The park, one of the largest in the state system, preserves the site of the town of Blakeley, which rivaled Mobile in the 1820s before fading away, along with the battlefield where one of the Civil War’s last major engagements was fought in April 1865. Its setting on the Tensaw Delta makes it a natural fit for a literary gathering devoted to writers whose work grows out of the coastal landscape. The event pairs book signings and readings with the chance to walk the ground that much of that writing describes.

The centerpiece of the Blakeley program is a cruise to Bayou Canot, site of both the 1993 Sunset Limited derailment and the Clotilda’s 1860 arrival. The bayou, a winding stretch of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta north of the park, is where the schooner Clotilda brought the last known group of enslaved Africans to the United States, smuggling 110 captive people up the river decades after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed. It is also where the Amtrak Sunset Limited derailed into the water in September 1993, killing 47 people in one of the deadliest rail accidents in American history. Few places in Alabama carry so much concentrated history, and the guided cruise gives visitors a view of it from the water.

Bestselling author Patti Callahan leads a free historical fiction writing class Thursday, Feb. 13, at USA’s Faculty Club ahead of a reading for the Southern Writers’ Workshop. Callahan, a Fairhope-area novelist whose historical fiction has spent time on national bestseller lists, has become one of the Gulf Coast’s most prominent literary exports. The Thursday class offers aspiring writers a rare chance to hear how a working novelist researches and structures historical material. The weekend reading that follows connects the class to the broader Southern Writers’ Workshop community that the university hosts.

At Bellingrath’s Winter Wednesdays on Feb. 19, historian John Sledge discusses “The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History,” and the History Museum of Mobile welcomes Carnival curator Cart Blackwell for a Learning Lunch lecture on the architecture of Carnival. Sledge, a longtime Mobile Register and Press-Register book editor and author of several books on the region’s maritime past, is a natural draw at the Bellingrath Gardens and Home estate along the Fowl River. Winter Wednesdays give garden visitors a midweek reason to come out during the quieter season, when camellias rather than azaleas carry the color. Blackwell’s Learning Lunch at the museum downtown, meanwhile, turns the lens on Mardi Gras itself, examining how the floats, dens and parade architecture of Mobile’s carnival tradition came to be built the way they are.

Mardi Gras Twist

The Mystics of Time add a wrinkle to the 2020 parade season: the mystic society will run its parade route backwards on Saturday, Feb. 22, a first-of-its-kind reversal for the fire-breathing krewe. The Mystics of Time, founded in 1948 and known for the dragon motif and flame effects that give the krewe its name, parades through downtown Mobile during carnival season. Running the route in reverse changes the experience for regular parade-goers, who will see the procession arrive from the opposite direction and pass familiar landmarks in a new order. The krewe billed the move as a way to refresh the tradition without changing what the parade is.

For carnival newcomers, the reversal is a reminder of how deeply Mobile identifies with the season. The city’s mystic societies date to the early 18th century, predating the better-known New Orleans celebrations, and the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday fill downtown with parades, balls and street parties. Saturday, Feb. 22 falls in the middle of that final stretch, when the parade calendar is at its densest and hotel rooms downtown fill up fast.

Museums, Exhibits and Ongoing Draws

Ongoing draws include free Thursday admission for Mobile County residents at the Mobile Museum of Art, the Excelsior Band exhibit at USA’s McCall Library through February, “Ancient Rome” at the History Museum of Mobile through April 5 and “Dinosaurs Around the World” at the Exploreum through May 10. The free-Thursday policy at the museum in Langan Park has made its collection of American, Asian and African art one of the most accessible cultural outings in the county, and it is worth remembering for any Thursday on the calendar, not just this week.

The Excelsior Band exhibit at the University of South Alabama’s McCall Library honors an institution that may be older than the city’s carnival societies themselves. The Excelsior Band, founded in 1883, has marched in Mobile Mardi Gras parades for well over a century and remains one of the oldest continuously operating African American marching bands in the country. The library’s exhibit gathers photographs, instruments and memorabilia from that long run, and February’s closing date gives visitors a limited window to see it.

At the History Museum of Mobile, “Ancient Rome” brings artifacts from the classical world to the old Southern Market building, where they will remain through April 5. Across downtown at the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center, “Dinosaurs Around the World” keeps its animatronic menagerie on view through May 10, giving families with young children a reliable rainy-day destination through the spring. Both exhibits anchor the museum district alongside the Learning Lunch series, which continues through the year.

On the Run in Gulf Shores

The Sea Turtle Half Marathon and Sweetheart 5K return to The Hangout in Gulf Shores on Feb. 15, with all proceeds benefiting coastal charities including Camp Rap-A-Hope and Share the Beach. The Hangout, the beachfront restaurant and entertainment venue at the foot of State Highway 59, has become the gathering point for the Gulf Shores running community, and its winter races take advantage of the cooler months when the beach crowds thin out. The half marathon course runs along the island’s roads and paths, while the 5K offers a shorter option for casual runners and walkers.

The charitable beneficiaries give the race a distinctly coastal purpose. Camp Rap-A-Hope serves children with cancer and their families from across the Gulf Coast region at no cost, hosting weeklong sessions and family weekends. Share the Beach, Alabama’s sea turtle conservation program, organizes volunteers each summer to patrol the beaches, mark nests and protect hatchlings of the loggerhead and other turtles that nest along the Alabama shore. Runners who cross the finish line on Feb. 15 are directly funding both causes, and the Sweetheart timing gives the event its Valentine’s theme.

With the parades, dances, shows, races and lectures on top of each other, the week of Feb. 12-18 stands out even by the standards of a region that treats February as high season. Residents who want to sample more than one category can plan an itinerary that runs from a Thursday writing class to a Saturday morning half marathon to a Saturday night mystery dinner, with a backwards parade waiting the following weekend.