MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24
DRINKS If you’re carrying “Dry January” into February, try some booze-free cocktails at Coconut Club in an event that will highlight several restaurants’ non-alcoholic offerings. Sample the drinks, vote for your favorite, and try several hors d’oeuvres; a portion of the night’s proceeds will benefit Ben’s Friends, which supports hospitality professionals in sobriety. $50, 7 PM.
FOOD Have a high tolerance for spicy food? Head to Taco Rock’s first “Flammin Hot Poppers Challenge” where you can compete to eat as many jalapeño pepper poppers as possible (one at a time!) in a ten-minute span, with no other food or beverage. The winner will walk away with $100 in cash; second and third place will get gift cards to Taco Rock, presumably to spend immediately on some kind of cooling drinks. $10 to participate (free to spectate), 7:30 PM.
COMEDY Funnyman Rob Schneider went from Saturday Night Live (The Richmeister, makin’ copies!) to film (The Hot Chick), but he still does stand-up comedy. See him at the Improv on Monday and Tuesday nights for the first time since 2014. Through February 25. $40.
MUSEUMS The storied National Children’s Museum will reopen downtown in Woodrow Wilson Plaza on Monday after a lengthy hiatus. Expect a 30-foot slide, a slime wheel, a SpongeBob room, and more at this fun science center. If you remember jumping around the bubble room when you were a kid, no fear—it’s returning, too. Opening February 24. $10.95 admission for adults and children older than 1.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25
CELEBRATE Celebrate Fat Tuesday and New Orleans at the Mardi Gras Extravaganza at Union Market’s Dock 5. Join chefs David Guas (Bayou Bakery) and Spike Mendelsohn for Southern food in this all-you-can-eat-drink-and-dance night that will also feature a hurricane cocktail competition and live music. $50, 6 PM.
LECTURE Photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva documents the communities along the Northern Sea Route in the Russian Arctic with work that captures their lives and challenges with the current political state and climate changes. She will speak about her photography at the National Geographic Museum. $25, 7:30 PM.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26
FILM In the 2019 film Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive, a Jerusalem native copes with his hometown’s history by offering “Terror Tours” to tourists. While taking visitors to bombing sites of the 1990s and 2000s, he meets an ex-Jerusalemite who challenges him to try to heal from this trauma. This dark comedy will screen at The Avalon. $13, 8 PM.
BOOKS Emily Hale, the longtime muse and pen pal of poet T.S. Eliot, donated his letters to Princeton University’s Library, which opened them in January, fifty years after her death. In anticipation of the publication of more than one thousand(!) letters, author Sara Fitzgerald penned a novel about the pair’s mysterious and secretive relationship in The Poet’s Girl. Fitzgerald will speak about Hale and Eliot at One More Page. Free, 7 PM.
