With the oppressive pseudo-summer turning back to comfortable spring for a few days before summer actually begins, Bostonist's thoughts are turning to the weekend and to upcoming holidays and events. (Ordinarily, we would say that the beginning of summer is a good reason to celebrate, but we have the impression that everyone's pretty much fed up with summer for now.) If you work in Suffolk County, you probably have Friday off in honor of Bunker Hill Day, which commemorates, oddly, a loss by the revolutionary army to the hated redcoats. Why do we celebrate a loss? Well, for the same reason that Bostonist's softball team thinks fondly of the game three weeks ago in which we were defeated 17-12: it was a close loss and showed we could actually play (unlike our other three losses, which featured the invocation of the mercy rule). The Battle of Bunker Hill (which, as third-grade history teachers are surely reminding us right now, was actually fought on Breed's Hill) showed the British that the Americans had some fight in them and were not going to be easily defeated. (It was also the occasion on which General William Prescott is said to have advised his troops, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," which is somehow evocative of underdog toughness.) If that strikes you as insufficient motivation for a day off, you clearly aren't well acquainted with Boston's special relationship with paid holidays.
Picture: "The Battle of Bunker Hill," by Howard Pyle (1888)
Even though Bunker Hill Weekend, the annual parade and celebration for the anniversary of that famous battle, has already happened, there will be plenty of other opportunities for revelry this weekend: Sunday is Juneteenth, a holiday initially meant to celebrate the abolition of slavery in Texas (Union troops brought news of the Emancipation Proclamation to (former) slaves in Galveston, Tex., on June 19, 1865), but now more widespread and devoted to celebrating black history, achievements, and community. Although the Supreme Judicial Court (ever the engine of social change) abolished slavery in Massachusetts on July 8, 1783 (making Mass. the first state to do so), there will be Juneteenth celebrations and events here in the Commonwealth as well. Among these are the Roxbury Homecoming Picnic in Franklin Park (Saturday, 11:00 to dusk), a celebration at the Children's Museum with music, food, and art projects (Sunday, 11:00 - 4:00), a walking tour of Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge with visits to the graves of some of the prominent and pioneering African-Americans buried there (Sunday, 2:00 p.m.), and a concert at the Brazilian Cultural Center by Zili, which the Globe describes as an ensemble "featuring dance and roots music of the African Diaspora" (Friday, 10:00 p.m.).
We don't know if the Cambridge River Festival, which happens on Saturday, is meant to coincide with Juneteenth (the next day), Bunker Hill Day (the previous day), or Argentinian Flag Day (Monday, June 20), but it promises to be a good time. Staged along the Charles from the Larz Anderson bridge (the one nearest Harvard Square) to the Western Ave. bridge, the festival includes local arts and crafts, food, and loads of music and dance. In a move Bostonist especially likes, the music is divided among three stages, based more or less on genre (there's a kids' stage, a jazz/blues stage, and a rock/R&B/that-noisy-stuff-the-young-folks-are-listening-to-these-days stage). To download a document with more details, including the list of bands, click here (why doesn't the Cambridge Arts Council just put all this info on a web page? We don't know).
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