Tall ships, big bugs, and more to do this weekend

Are you staying in town this Memorial Day weekend? Good, because there is a weirdly irresistible range of things to do and see this weekend.

To get things started on Thursday night, head to PHIT at the Adrienne to check out For My People (7pm). This improvised comedy game show “tests your cultural aptitude” and promises to make you feel uncomfortable. And also laugh. In this hourlong show, two groups of marginalized people (represented by a team of comedians who have “agreed to reduce their cultures to monoliths”) face off. Then, the winning team faces The White Dudes.

Teams answer to host Kat Mosley, a Philly comic, who will decide the matchups based on the cultural arguments currently on her Facebook feed. Contestants reveal prejudices, triggers, and inequalities on stage in real time, for a thoughtful, funny, and educational experience.

The art of basketball

Have you been to iMPeRFeCT Gallery in Germantown yet? Cofounders Rocio Cabello and Renny Molenaar have been building a small but vibrant community arts hub for several years. Their mission is a gallery space with unheard-of freedom for exhibiting artists, and their latest opening, Take Charge, is the first solo exhibition for Temple grad Jeremy John Kaplan.

The show explores the intersection of art and sports through the imagery of basketball, with cyanotypes, assemblage, found photographs, and installations that draw “parallels between the practicing athlete and the artist.” It’s running May 26 through June 23, with an opening reception on Saturday from 6 to 9pm.

Sail away (to Penn’s Landing)

Even if you’re not heading to the shore this weekend, commune with nautical life at the annual Tall Ships Waterfront Festival, happening Friday through Monday at the Great Plaza at Penn’s Landing, with many majestic ships docked at Penn’s Landing Marina.

Get a ticket to enter the family-friendly festival, with close-up views of the vessels, activities, and live entertainment (all festival tickets also include free admission to Independence Seaport Museum), or you can get an affordable upgrade with timed tickets to board the ships for self-guided tours. The festival runs 11am to 7pm daily.

The fleet includes vessels from New England to Bermuda and beyond. You can board the Gazela, a fishing vessel built in Portugal at the turn of the 20th century. She’s been a Philly boat since 1971, after ferrying tens of thousands of pounds of salt cod over nearly 70 years at sea. Since then, she’s had a side gig appearing in several major movies, including Interview with the Vampire. There’s also the Kalmar Nyckel, a recreation of a 17th-century Dutch pinnace that saw service as an armed merchant ship and a Swedish naval and colonial ship. Or discover the When and If, a schooner commissioned by General George S. Patton in 1939. He died in 1945 and never got to realize his postwar dream of sailing around the world with his wife, Bea. Current owner Doug Hazlitt (a ship-restoration expert) and his crew still hope to carry out Patton’s will, using the repurposed vessel in an international education program for sailing apprentices. You can preview each ship and get your tour tickets here.

For the bug-lovers you love

At this week’s preview for the Xtreme Bugs exhibition at the Academy of Natural Sciences, president and CEO Scott Cooper said that “if insects disappeared, our world would collapse” in very short order. This show helps us to appreciate these incredibly diverse and numerous rock stars of evolution by turning them into animatronic giants so you can see every hair, mandible, antenna, and eye up close.

By the way, did you know that the beetle (AKA the scientific order Coleoptera) not only boasts the greatest number of species within the insect kingdom but outnumbers all species, period? According to Academy entomologists, if every species on Earth sent one representative to stand in a huge line (from the blue whale to the norovirus), every fifth creature in that line would be some kind of beetle. They’re well represented in this exhibit.

The same company behind Dinosaurs Unearthed fashioned these outsized bugs, including cicadas, ladybugs, ants, bees, spiders, and scorpions. They move, hiss, click, and whir inside dramatic dioramas. We must be frank: the bedbug display is not for everyone. In fact, one might wonder how and why it was possibly conceived and then put on view for Philadelphians, many of whom, it must be owned, live in a perpetual state of low-grade trauma relating to bedbugs. Maybe we just need some education. Xtreme Bugs opens to the public on Saturday, May 26.

Above: No, you didn't shrink. That ant just got a lot bigger. (Photo by Alaina Mabaso.)