You don’t have to have kids to do this one (althoug a kid-centered talent show will have a very different flavor than one that mostly involves college students or adults), but it’s a great way of bringing together your friends and enjoying some low cost entertainment.

Most adults have picked up one or two things they can do that they enjoy showing off. Some of them are great singers, or can play instruments they rarely get to whip out any more, or they juggle and do magic tricks. Some dance, some can do amazing Yoga things, some have learned to recite poetry beautifully or breathe fire.

If you don’t have space in your yard or apartment complex to host a talent show, many parks have gazeebos or ampatheaters you can use. Send out an email to all your friends and invite them to show up, ask them what they’d like to perform, and then let it rip. If you have kids involved, see how many of them you can get to write their own plays to put on. Try to keep everyone’s performances down to about 5 minutes, that way everyone gets a turn, and if one of your friends is convinced they’re a brilliant singer and happens to be tone deaf, it will at least be over soon.

You will be amazed at the things your friends are capable of. If you are very organized, have some spare time, and are perhaps a little crafty (or you have crafty friends who’s ideas of fun do not include getting up in front of people to juggle), you can make little prizes and prize categories to give to your friends as awards. I’d strongly suggest you try to come up with as many awards as there will be participants, or have paper plates with glitter on them and write in what award they’ll be getting mid-performance.

It might also be a good idea to have people shout out what award others should get during the applause. That will really depend on your group, as it would only take one person with a slightly mean sense of humor to ruin that tradition.

If this is a real success for you, you could even do themed talent shows- Shakespeare would be a fertile theme, or faries, or science fiction, or steampunk… if your group would work with a different theme, go for that, too! My Dad is a theater teacher and perhaps, if I did one of these when he was in town, he could run a little free workshop on acting. Perhaps one of your friends is a voice coach, a dance instructor, or is just good at teaching people and is really good at juggling.

I like to mix talent shows with potlucks, since they tend to be a little long, and food helps keep the atmosphere festive.

To make sure your talent show goes smoothly and everyone leaves feeling good:

1. Make sure everyone knows this is for fun. Keep a good mix of ages and don’t let prima donnas, of the five or twenty-five year old variety, ruin the fun for other people.

2. Have a way to manage hecklers in place before hand. Some people like creating things, and others like criticizing and dragging other people down. Your friends probably aren’t professional performers and if one bravely and nervously steps up to sing, it would be horrible if some boor who should have been cheering her on shouted something nasty.

If there’s more than 20 people involved, assign someone to be a “bouncer” and if someone’s saying things that are rude, hurtful, or mean, have the bouncer go and gently tell them that this is supposed to be fun and that behavior is innapropriate. As a note, I’ve never had a problem with this with my friends, but there’s usually someone else who shows up who isn’t hip to the group dynamic that pulls this- a friends new boyfriend, a kid’s parent where the child is a friend of our kids, etc. Gentle correction usually solves this, but you’ll probably be busy with other things, so it’s a good idea to have someone else on the look out. If you ask for bouncers and explain why in your broadcast e-mail invite, chances are that will engeneer a great, positive atmosphere for everyone. Friendly talent shows like this are a great place to remind people that sometimes, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all is true.

3. Make sure that everyone cheers when someone is finished. This is a group dynamic issue- in some groups this is going to happen no matter what you try to do to stop it, in others you’ll have to prod a bit. You want to make sure that your friends feel good after they perform, though, so clap like a madwoman!

4. Don’t let it run too long or too late. Let the kids go earlier if you’re running a mixed-age talent show, so that their parents can take them home if they get tired or cranky. Don’t try to force the kids to watch, and try to make sure there’s something else they can run around and do. Kids have short attention spans, and some of them will only be interested in performing their bit, then running off.

5. Make sure that there are plenty of drinks, food, and places to go to the bathroom available. A shortage of any of these can cause people to get cranky, and I’ve seen bathroom space shortage + small children + adults with beer = disaster.

6. Figure out early on if this is going to be a booze-friendly event, and if you want it to be BYOB. It’s not better or worse one way or the other, but it does change the flavor of the event.

If you’ve tried this, or have tips or questions, please comment!

This works best during warmer months, but I can see it being really romantic during the winter with a warm blanket and some yummy soup in thermoses, too.

Picnicking is under used, really. There’s a ritual that goes along with it that’s so satisfying, from packing up a nice lunch and a blanket, to taking your sweety to one of your favorite romantic spots, or to a new place that’s a total surprise. You get to spend time outside, in the shade, enjoying nature. You can do a quick picknick surprise lunch with your sweetie or a friend who has an hour long lunch at work, or you can arrange for a leisurely event on a weekend, a romantic picknick, or even a family picknick. It’s cheaper than restaurant dining and it leaves you with much stronger and better memories, so picknicking is definately more bang for your buck. It’s also a great way to socialize with other families with kids, because the short humans will go run around and leave the adults mostly alone for conversation.

Picknicks are also a great way of jazzing up a long run of boring, cheap food. Nothing makes a couple of bananas and some sandwiches fun like a change of scenery, and if the troops are starting to complain from beans and rice all the time, it’s a good way of getting some more milage out of your cheap eats.

You may also want to think of doing a weekly picknick night where you bring out all the leftovers of the following week. Since my family is forced to live by the “eat it if it’s on your plate” rule, they might enjoy being able to pick and choose for a day. However, we rarely have leftovers since we take them with us to work as our cheap lunches!

Here are some tips to make sure your picknick is so successful you’ll want to do many more.

1. Bring a blanket and have a tarp in your car, just in case. Sometimes the ground is wet, or there are other issues. A tarp is waterproof, and a blanket on top is soft and fuzzy. If you plan on picknicking a lot you might want to buy some cheap remnant flannel on sale and sew or glue it to the top of your tarp, that way the blanket won’t slide off if you are on a hill.

2. Bring some bug spray. I use herbal bug repellant, but I’m a hippy. Nothing will ruin a picknick as fast as being swarmed by mosquitos. A citranella candle might be in order, too.

3. If you and your loved ones are pasty pale, like me, make sure you have sunscreen on hand.

4.Don’t worry about buying a picknick basket. Everything fits into one of the low, rectangular laundry hampers that I’ve got, and it’s easy to haul it all around that way.

5. Don’t be afraid to bring a couple of books for the adults if you are going with kids. Frizbees are good to amuse kids, and perhaps if you are bringing a dog, a couple of tennis balls would be in order, too.

6. If you have kids with you, try to find a park with bathrooms or some place you can make them wash their hands. If all else fails, instead of buying expensive steralizing gels, you can bring a squirt bottle with a mix of soap and water in it.

Many museums, zoos, and other local attractions have free days. It’s very much worth checking out. A google search for “(the name of your city) free day”. Just putting that in for my city I found a free ballet performance from the third best ballet troupe in the US, free yoga lessons, free dance classes, and an all day bicycling festival. I also found a blog, http://www.keepingaustinfree.com, which updates with a free event daily.

Even if you don’t live in a place which is as hopping of a cultural center as Austin (which is why I live here), there is still plenty of cool, free stuff to do in most towns, but perhaps not daily. A few good places to check for good, free events:

• Local universities. Most of them have student and professor recitals that range from very good to amazing, that are free to the public, as well as lectures and other events. Some of the events, if they aren’t free, are very cheap. Every semester there’s music, art shows, paintings, and musicals and most of them are really quite good.
• Local museums. It’s a rare museum that does not have one free day a month, and many of them have one free day a week.
• Art galleries arrange art walks. Check out what’s going on locally, and you can usually wander around a dozen galleries and enjoy looking at art without anyone hassling you about buying anything, because they’re busy. It’s also a great place to people watch.
• Your local performance centers for the fine arts will also usually have free days. Check out the symphony, the opera, and the ballet.

These cultural centers offer free days for two reasons. One, they are hoping to bring more people in who might get hooked on their programs and join their centers, and two, most of them have a vauge feeling of unease excluding people who can’t afford to pay, so it’s a great way of democratizing access to the fine and performing arts. In some cities, government funding is also based on having a certain number of free days (since everyone contributed tax money), or the free days are sponsored by a corporation. This also means if you don’t have money to spend on entertainment because you’re working on your other financial goals, you can still enjoy the best your city has to offer!

This isn’t really a party, but I couldn’t think of any other thing to call it.

My brilliant, amazing, multi-talented (and yes, very sexy) friend Edward Martin III mentioned doing this in a coffee shop with friends, and then I did it with friends and it was, indeed awesome.

The rules of the game are simple. You get together a group of brilliant friends who write- NaNoWriMo freaks, people who just need a kick in the ass to finish their play, or even friends that just have a paper to write. You set a timer for anywhere between one and five minutes. Whoever writes the most wins. Whoever writes the least has to buy the next round of coffee, or if you’re hosting this at your house (as I tend to), the looser has to go to the kitchen and assemble the next stack of snacks, do some dishes, or refill everyone’s drink.

The idea is to make loosing mildly annoying but not embarrasing or bad- some people, after all, just aren’t super fast writers, and some people tend to write slow but really good stuff. If you’re creative (and of course, if you are doing something like this, you are not only creative and brilliant but good at supporting your creative, brilliant friends) you can do all kinds of fun variations during rounds.

You can do 55 word or smaller stories, like Edward’s fantastic tiny stories, you can fill a hat with all kinds of fun things to write about- a heroine named Penelope Pinnochle who is deathly afraid of radishes. Giant snails with machine guns. Brewing beer on the moon. First contact with an alien species who’s hard tech is much better than ours but who have no concept of medicine. Cats figuring out how to read captioned pictures on the internet and starting a revolution- I’m sure you’ll come up with ones that are even better.

Spend 2-5 minutes writing these little short stories, when the timer is done everyone shares, the person with the best story wins and the person who chickens out and won’t share their story looses and has to arrange for snacks and refills.

This is fun, cheap, and a great way to explode writers block.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). The scope of the topics is amazingly broad, and there are over 200 of the worlds most interesting speakers giving fascinating speeches, all available for free on TED.com.

One of the things that can make hosting a gathering a little awkward is if your friends don’t know each other, or have little in common. If you send out an e-mail with a list of 5 TED talks, and ask for people to watch them before hand, everyone in the room is guaranteed to have something interesting to talk about. The discussions can get lively, and it helps shy people open up a bit to know that they will have a conversational back stop coming into a room full of people they don’t know.

TED is interesting people doing interesting things, and one of the great things about it is that it tends to ignite people’s passions and imaginations. If you feel like you’re in a bit of a rut, hosting a TED talk discussion can be a great way to get some fresh energy into your social group. There’s also resources on TED.com for local meetups, so you can invite other people who are interested in your topics to show up, which can be a great way to meet interesting people.

While the ideas can be complex, the language of TED talks tends to be fairly simple, as there are many people at the conference for whom English is a second language, so depending on the kid, this might be something your children can participate in as well.

You can combine this with a potluck, a bbq, a pool party- it’s something interesting to add to the invitation to another event, as well as something that can stand on it’s own.

I keep mentioning that there are inexpensive ways to bring more genuine fun, joy, and pleasure into your life without having to spend a lot of money, and I was asked to put my money where my mouth was. How, exactly, DO you go about bringing more pleasure and warmth into your life while spending less, or no money? This month I’m going to highlight 31 things that I have either done, or should do, to have fun. Most of these involve getting together with friends. I’m going to try to keep these fairly general, and they are designed for a group of adults with perhaps one or two fairly mature 8+ year old kids involved, and the list does, admittedly, skew towards creative nerds, which comprises about 90% of my circle of friends. If you’ve got more kids, or your friends aren’t the creative or nerdy type, you might need to tweak some of these.

I challenge you to try at least one of these fun, cheap, community building events this month. I bet you’ll discover that you see more of your friends and people you love, you laugh a lot, and you have a great time. You’ll be so busy spending quality time with the amazing people in your life and having fun you won’t have the spare time to spend money!

Let me know which one you try and how it works out!