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Lauren Halsey’s emajendat with Erykah Badu — Hollywood Bowl

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Lauren Halsey’s emajendat with Erykah Badu — Hollywood Bowl

Sep 29, 2026 Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Av…

Somebody takes a space that was never built with you in mind and turns it into a living room. There is a feeling that produces, and it is the entire proposition here. Lauren Halsey grew up in South Central making sculpture out of what the neighborhood left behind: hair salon signs, corner store receipts, the visual language of blocks that do not get gallery shows. Now she takes the whole Bowl. Not just the stage. The grounds, the walkways, the air. Erykah Badu headlines. DJ Pee .Wee, which is Anderson .Paak when he is behind the decks instead of in front of them, opens alongside the Charles Gaines Collective with Black Nile. But music is only one layer. Activations open earlier: miniature golf, ping-pong, roller skating, airbrush stations, the Bowl reassembled as a block party with better acoustics. Halsey calls it emajendat, and the staging is maximalist and technicolor and built to feel like stepping inside one of her pieces. Bring a picnic and the people who will understand why this matters.

Monterey Jazz Festival 2026 - Monterey, CA

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🌎 Nation's Best

Monterey Jazz Festival 2026 - Monterey, CA

Sep 25 – Sep 27, 2026 Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 …

The fog rolls in at night and the whole crowd wraps itself in jackets and blankets without missing a note - that is the tell that you are somewhere the music has been happening continuously since before your parents were born. The Monterey Jazz Festival is the oldest continuously running jazz festival in the world, held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds since 1958. Nearly seven decades of outdoor jazz on the bay. The experience is one of productive wandering: you build your own schedule across five stages spread through the fairgrounds, stumbling into performances you did not plan and discovering artists you will listen to for the rest of your life. Evenings at the main arena carry the weight of history - the musicians who have played here include Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billie Holiday. The daytime has a wine-country ease: Thai and Jamaican food stalls, local Monterey County wines poured at on-site tastings, and a crowd ranging from jazz scholars to families simply drawn in by a beautiful September weekend on the California coast. If you love music discovery and the pleasure of something with genuine cultural history, Monterey Jazz is worth every dollar. The Grounds Pass is the insider move - it gives access to all five stages and most artists, and the unexpected discoveries in the smaller tents are often the sets people remember longest. This is not for anyone who needs a massive headliner to justify a weekend; it is for people who understand that the best music experiences are the ones nobody planned. A few practical notes: bring layers, because Monterey evenings can drop into the 50s even in September - veterans pack a waterproof jacket, gloves, and a stadium seat cushion for the concrete bleachers. Use the remote parking lots and the free festival shuttle instead of trying to park close. The venue is cashless, so load a card before you go. Food lines move quickly in early afternoon but back up at dinner. Download the free festival app before you arrive and use the My Lineup feature to avoid schedule conflicts. What Monterey represents is rare in American culture: a living institution. Nearly seventy years of continuous programming makes this not just a festival but a timestamp - every year it runs, the art form gets another year of documentation, and attending in 2026 means adding yourself to that record. Tickets and full lineup at montereyjazzfestival.org.

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Abbot Kinney Festival

Sep 27, 2026 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291

A street you love can change without you. Abbot Kinney lost its festival in 2024, lost it again in 2025, and the block kept getting more expensive in the meantime — which is exactly why the people who have been here longest are treating its return as a verdict. For one free afternoon the entire mile closes to cars and opens to everything else. Three hundred and fifty vendors. The food trucks of a city that takes food trucks unreasonably seriously. Music stages, beer gardens, kids rides and a whole KidsQuad stage, and the particular Venice mix of artists and skaters and families pouring onto the same stretch of pavement at once. Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, on the last Sunday of September, free to walk in. Go with somebody who remembers the old version of this street. Let them tell you what used to be in every storefront, and let them be a little bit right.

Ocean Way Festival 2026 — Santa Monica Beach

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Ocean Way Festival 2026 — Santa Monica Beach

Sep 26, 2026 Santa Monica State Beach, 1550 Pac…

The sand is still warm when the sun drops behind the pier and the stage lights start catching the salt in the air. A first chord hits differently when you are barefoot and the Pacific is fifty feet behind you. This is Goldenvoice's first run at a beachside festival here — two stages built directly on the sand with the pier deck working as a third — and the debut lineup reads like a playlist somebody assembled to impress a person they like. The Killers and Jack White anchor one day alongside Sublime and Alvvays; Olivia Dean, Khruangbin, Durand Jones & the Indications, and Hiatus Kaiyote pull the other one somewhere softer. SG Lewis, Hot Chip DJs, BLOND:ISH, and Poolside fill the golden-hour gaps. The footprint runs from the pier down toward Bay Street: walkable between stages without missing a transition, wide enough that the crowd can breathe. All ages. Go with whoever you would want standing beside you when the sun goes down.

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Mariachi USA Festival

Sep 26, 2026 $35+ The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 222…

The moment a full mariachi hits that first blast of trumpet and violin, something in the chest goes tight and warm at once. Mariachi USA is the longest-running and most revered mariachi event in the world, and its San Diego edition brings four nonstop hours of puro mariachi, ballet folklorico, and a fireworks finale to the Rady Shell on the downtown waterfront. This is culture as celebration, generations of families together on a warm September night, the bay glittering behind the stage. Saturday, September 26, 2026, the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, San Diego. Bring your parents, bring your kids, wear something that lets you dance in your seat, and come feel the goosebumps only live mariachi can raise. Whether it is in your blood or brand new to you, this one moves you.

Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-N-Fire 2026 — Pechanga Arena San Diego

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Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-N-Fire 2026 — Pechanga Arena San Diego

Sep 26, 2026 3500 Sports Arena Blvd, San Diego,…

The floor shakes before you see them. That low-frequency rumble your kid hears first, the one that turns their whole body into a tuning fork, before the wheels clear the tunnel and the crowd becomes a single roar. Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live brings the Glow-N-Fire show to Pechanga Arena San Diego for three performances across September 26–27, 2026 — and this is not the polite, sit-down version of anything. Mega Wrex, Tiger Shark, Bone Shaker, Bigfoot, and the all-new Rhinomite tear across a neon-lit arena floor while the Hot Wheels Freestyle Motocross team throws gravity out the window above them. The transforming robot is back, bigger than whatever your kid imagined. Three showtimes: Saturday at 11:30 AM and 6:30 PM, Sunday at 1:30 PM. Tickets start around $48 through AXS or Ticketmaster. Pechanga Arena, 3500 Sports Arena Blvd, San Diego, CA 92110. Kids pricing available at every show. This is the one where they grab your arm and don’t let go.

Pasadena Chalk Festival 2026 — Brookside Park

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Pasadena Chalk Festival 2026 — Brookside Park

Sep 26, 2026 Free Brookside Park, 360 N Arroyo Blvd,…

Five hundred artists on their hands and knees in the sun, turning a parking lot into a museum that will exist for two days and then be gone. Nobody warns you how good it actually is. These are not sidewalk doodles — they are full-scale reproductions of Renaissance paintings, original portraits that take sixteen hours of kneeling to finish, optical illusions engineered specifically to break a phone camera. What a gallery can never give you is that it happens in front of you: chalk dust on somebody's fingers, a face emerging out of blank asphalt across an afternoon while you keep circling back to check on it. Then within a week the whole thing washes away, and the impermanence is not a flaw in the festival, it is the argument. Free, in Brookside Park, and it funds arts programs for kids who need them. Go early enough to watch something appear.

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Chula Vista ArtFest 2026

Sep 26, 2026 276 Fourth Avenue, Chula Vista, CA…

Most art festivals feel like walking through somebody else's mood board. This one feels like walking into a neighbor's garage on the day they finally let you see what they have been working on. The lawn and plaza outside City Hall fill with South Bay artists who show almost nowhere else — painters, muralists, sculptors, mixed-media people whose work carries the specific texture of a region that knows it has been overlooked and stopped caring about being noticed. It is not juried. There are no tiny wine glasses. The distance between the person who made the thing and the person looking at it is a handshake, which is the entire difference. Live music fills the gaps between conversations, and the food is the kind that only turns up at a South Bay block party. Free, outdoors, afternoon into evening. Go buy something small from somebody who lives near you.

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Indian Food Festival Los Angeles 2026

Sep 26, 2026 The Compound Event Center, 17337 V…

Somewhere in your memory a smell is waiting — cumin blooming in hot oil, or naan pulled off a tandoor so fast the edges are still crackling — and it unlocks an entire afternoon you had forgotten you owned. That is not nostalgia. That is a language your body speaks when your mouth cannot. This is that smell at full volume, outdoors, for thousands of people at once. Chaat vendors, biryani stalls, dosa griddles running all afternoon, chai strong enough to wake up your ancestors. DJs run Bollywood and bhangra while the crowd drifts between food stations and booths selling everything from handmade jewelry to imported spices. Radio5 built it for the people who grew up eating with their hands, and equally for the people who wish they had. The bar is free-flowing. The shopping is curated. The kid running past you with a mango lassi mustache is having the single best day of their life. Honestly, so are you.

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San Diego VegFest 2026 — Balboa Park

Sep 26, 2026 Free Balboa Park, Presidents Way Lawn, …

You already know exactly who you would text about this. The friend who quietly orders the mushroom plate at every restaurant and never makes it weird. They have been waiting for a day that feels like theirs without having to defend it to anybody. Over a hundred exhibitors on the lawn in Balboa Park, the whole thing running on the quiet confidence that the food is the argument and no pamphlet is required. Local restaurants previewing seasonal menus, wellness brands, animal sanctuaries, and the small-batch hot sauce vendor who is about to permanently alter your relationship with cauliflower. Speakers cover nutrition, sustainability, and the actual economics of plant-based agriculture. Kids get their own zone. Dogs are not merely allowed, they are wanted. Presidents Way Lawn in Balboa Park, free to walk in, with free parking over at Inspiration Point. Bring an appetite and the willingness to discover that the person next to you makes the best jackfruit tacos you have ever had.

Somerset Vineyard Grape Stomp 2026 — Temecula Wine Country

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Somerset Vineyard Grape Stomp 2026 — Temecula Wine Country

Sep 26, 2026 Somerset Vineyards & Winery, 36601…

You take off your shoes, climb into a barrel of grapes, and stomp. Your team of four has twenty minutes. The juice splashes up your calves. Someone is keeping score. You are laughing harder than you've laughed in months. The 8th Annual Somerset Vineyard Grape Stomp runs September 26, 2026 from 1 PM to 5 PM in Temecula Wine Country. Teams of four compete in old-fashioned grape stomping while a live DJ keeps the energy up and wine and sangria keep the participants loose. Food trucks handle the rest. The afterparty band plays until the sun sets behind the vines. Somerset Vineyards & Winery, 36601 De Portola Rd, Temecula, CA 92592. Teams: $250-$285. Check somersetvineyard.com. This is the Temecula day trip you actually remember. Send it to the three people who'd make your team.

Kustom Invasion Car Show 2026 — Embarcadero Marina Park, San Diego

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Kustom Invasion Car Show 2026 — Embarcadero Marina Park, San Diego

Sep 26, 2026 Free Embarcadero Marina Park North, 400…

Three coats of candy apple, a hundred hours of pinstriping, and a trunk of hydraulics your dad helped you wire when you were sixteen. Nobody paid you for any of it. Nobody asked you to. You did it because the car is how you sign your name. This is not a concours show with velvet rope and judging criteria written by people who have never turned a wrench. The builder stands next to the build, and the story behind it runs as detailed as the paint. Lowriders, hot rods, classics, trucks, and bikes lined up with San Diego Bay behind them and the Coronado Bridge framing every photograph anybody takes. Somewhere in that crowd is a fourteen-year-old watching a '64 Impala lay frame for the first time and having the most important automotive moment of their life. Music, food, vendors, nothing at the gate. Bring the person who taught you what a good line looks like. They will not stop talking. Let them.

Cruisin' Grand Escondido 2026 — Friday Night Classic Car Cruise

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Cruisin' Grand Escondido 2026 — Friday Night Classic Car Cruise

Sep 25, 2026 W Grand Ave, Escondido, CA 92025

Five hundred chrome-heavy machines line Grand Avenue every Friday evening in Escondido, and the street closes down so completely that the only traffic is foot traffic and the low rumble of engines cooling off. Cruisin' Grand is the weekly ritual that turns downtown Escondido into a living museum of pre-1974 American iron — hot rods, muscle cars, customs, vintage trucks parked bumper to bumper while their owners stand with hoods up and stories ready. The restaurants along Grand stay open late, feeding the crowd that drifts between paint jobs and patios. Nobody charges admission. Weekly awards go to five selected cars, chosen not by a panel but by the kind of authority that only comes from knowing what a numbers-matching engine sounds like. This runs every Friday through September 25, 4pm to 9pm. Street closures on Maple, Broadway, Kalmia, and Juniper from Second Ave to Valley Parkway. Park in the downtown garages and walk — the earlier you arrive, the more you see rolling in. Free.

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My Hero Academia in Concert

Sep 25, 2026 3801 Mission Inn Avenue, Fox Perfo…

Nobody warns you about the swell in your chest when the theme hits and a character decides to go beyond what they can survive. Now put a live orchestra a few feet in front of you and let an entire room have that at the same time. That is the whole proposition. The Fox is an old theater with the acoustics of a place built before anyone thought about amplifying anything, which means the brass arrives in your ribs rather than your ears. The crowd comes dressed as the people they wish they were brave enough to be, and by the second half nobody is self-conscious about it anymore. All ages, and every person needs a ticket regardless of age, so the kids get counted like everyone else, which is right, because they are the ones who cry first. Mission Inn Avenue in Riverside, doors in the evening. Go with whoever you watched the finale with. Do not go alone.

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Ghostbusters In Concert

Sep 24, 2026 $45+ Cerritos Center for the Performing…

Who you gonna call? Everybody, apparently, because there's a special magic to watching a movie you love on a giant screen while a live orchestra plays every note of the score in real time. Ghostbusters In Concert pairs the 1984 comedy classic with a full ensemble performing Elmer Bernstein's music and Ray Parker Jr.'s inescapable theme, and the effect is pure joy: the jokes land, the proton packs whir, and the whole room sings the chorus without a shred of irony. Thursday, September 24, 2026, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Bring the kids who've never seen it and the adults who've seen it fifty times. It's family-friendly, gorgeously performed, and a genuinely fresh way to experience a film you thought you knew by heart. Come get slimed, the classy way.

L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market 2026 — Paramount Pictures Studios

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L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market 2026 — Paramount Pictures Studios

Sep 22, 2026 5555 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA …

The gate opens and you're walking onto a backlot that made movies for a hundred years, except tonight the set is real and the stars are the people behind the pass-through windows. The seventh annual L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market takes over Paramount Pictures Studios on Monday, September 22, 2026 — one ticket unlocking unlimited tastings and drinks from over 120 of Los Angeles' most obsessive restaurants, all of them cooking like they know every other kitchen in the room is watching. This is the night the city's food scene stops being a map and becomes a single room. The chefs you've read about are three feet away, plating something they've been testing for weeks. The ones you haven't read about are the reason you'll leave rethinking everything. Fiesta Friday Night Market runs 8 PM to 11 PM, 21+ only. Paramount Pictures Studios, 5555 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Tickets at lafoodbowl.com. The dress code is whatever you wear when you're about to eat more than you planned.

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Disney's Beauty and the Beast

Sep 22, 2026 $45+ Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 60…

A whole generation learned what a musical could be from a dancing teapot and a candelabra, and most of them never fully recovered. Put it on a real stage with a full orchestra swelling underneath Be Our Guest, and watch those same people — grown now, frequently with kids of their own — turn into puddles in the dark. This is grand, gold-drenched, family-first Broadway with no apology for any of it: the ballroom, the enchanted castle, the yellow gown lit so it reads from the back row of the hall. The touring production has the scale to actually deliver that ballroom, which is the moment everything hinges on and the one cheap productions always get wrong. Segerstrom in Costa Mesa is an easy stop off the freeway near the mall. Make it a first big theater night for a small person, or go entirely for yourself. Some stories really are worth telling as a tale as old as time.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Grand Opening Weekend 2026

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Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — Grand Opening Weekend 2026

Sep 22, 2026 Exposition Park, 1025 N Figueroa S…

Whatever art shaped you was probably not hanging in a museum. It was a comic strip page, a storyboard, a paperback cover, a frame of animation you rewound until the tape wore thin — and some part of you always knew that counted, with nowhere to point. Now there is somewhere. George Lucas spent decades buying that work, forty thousand pieces of it, and then built an argument in Exposition Park: that Rockwell belongs near Monet, that a Miyazaki storyboard deserves the reverence given a Rembrandt sketch, that narrative art has earned a building instead of an apology. The opening galleries hold more than a thousand works across dozens of rooms, inside a structure by MAD Architects that rises out of the ground like it landed there. It opens in September in Exposition Park, next door to the Natural History Museum and the Science Center, and children get in free. Take the kid who draws in the margins of everything. Let them see what that turns into.

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