❤️ What's happening this weekend in the 757

Good morning, 757!

The clocks fell back on Sunday, so the sun now clocks out around five and the whole region drives home in the dark. Fair trade, honestly. November is when Hampton Roads is quietly at its best, and this particular weekend has stacked itself around Veterans Day on Wednesday without really being asked to.

So here is how we would spend it. If you have a kid who treats volume as a personality trait, Monster Jam is four separate shows at the Hampton Coliseum and twenty dollars gets you into one of them. If you moved here this year and still do not really know anybody, Friday's speed-friending night in Norfolk is the least awkward version of that we have seen, because everyone in the room has already admitted why they came. And if you have somebody in the family who served, Fort Monroe plants more than three hundred flags in Continental Park on Saturday morning and leaves them standing for a week.

Here's what we've got:

Let's get to it.

— Josh

☀️ Helios at ODU puts Luke Jerram's inflatable sun, lit from inside and scaled 1:200 million, on 43rd Street for its first North American stop. Friday and Saturday only, 5 to 9 p.m., free.

🐱 NekoCon turns 28 this year under the theme The Rise of Purrzilla, which tells you most of what you need to know. Panels, performances and tabletop at the Hampton Roads Convention Center, 9 a.m. Friday through 4 p.m. Sunday. $45 kids 8-12, $75 weekend.

🚙 Monster Jam brings twelve-thousand-pound trucks to the Hampton Coliseum for four shows: Friday at 7 p.m., a Saturday doubleheader at noon and 6 p.m., and Sunday at 1 p.m. Tickets start at $20 for one show.

🏮 The Winter Lantern Festival opens at Jamestown Settlement with the grounds lit red, white and blue for the country's 250th. Nightly 5:30 to 10 p.m., last entry 9 p.m. Free under 3, $18 entry, and it runs into January.

🐈 The Virginia Cat Festival fills the Greater Williamsburg Sports and Event Center with a vendor hall called the MarCATplace, adoptions through two local rescues, and a Costume Purr-ade. Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. $18.35 child, $34.34 adult.

🏖️ Virginia Beach Jeep Fest runs Jeeps through a sand obstacle course at 26th Street while the expo fills the Boardwalk from 29th south, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. all three days. Watching costs nothing.

🔥 The Lighting of the Cressets sets iron baskets of burning fatwood down Duke of Gloucester Street with strolling musicians working the crowd. Friday and Saturday, 6 to 9 p.m., and you do not need a Colonial Williamsburg ticket.

Cops, firefighters, EMTs, nurses and ex-military doing stand-up about the job, from the people who made Bored Teachers. A room full of people who already get the punchline.

Speed dating, except nobody is dating. One hour of structured rounds, then a social hour, and the whole premise is that everybody there came to meet people.

The shops of The Alley run a vintage and antique night market on 19th Street, with food, drinks and the ViBe district doing its first-Friday thing around it.

The Joint Base Langley-Eustis Honor Guard plants more than three hundred small flags in Continental Park, and they stay up for a week afterward. Exhibits, living history and food trucks around it.

A community ofrenda built with marigolds, candles, photographs and sugar skulls, plus stations for making paper marigolds and masks. Food trucks outside.

The Spartans host NCCU with a military and first responders appreciation promotion attached to the game. Noon kickoff, which is the civilized way to do a football Saturday.

An hour of Hill House Blend tea with scones, sweets and finger sandwiches on tiered trays, inside a house on North Street that turns two hundred this year.

A ranger walks you out at dusk and calls for the three owls that actually live there: eastern screech, barred, and great horned. Whether they answer is their business.

Twenty-five-plus years of Maryland riff rock, with Slomosa and Blood Vulture opening. The NorVa crowd treats this band as a civic institution.

Two hundred artisans across six blocks of downtown Williamsburg, a main stage lineup, food trucks and a beverage garden on the fountain lawn. Well behaved pets welcome, which they put in writing.

Produce, makers and food trucks set up along the Intracoastal Waterway at Battlefield Park South. Small, local, and right on the water.

Skeeta G headlines a fundraiser night at Cozzy's. The club does not say on the page which cause it benefits, so ask at the door if that matters to you.

Send the Monster Jam line to whoever is out of ideas for a loud seven-year-old, and send the Sunday list to the friend who works every Saturday and always asks what is still open.

Three things that run on a standing schedule, for anyone tired of hearing about an event the same week it happens. Our list this week is a garden, a jam and a bird walk. If you run a weekly thing that is not in a taproom, reply and tell us about it.

🌱 TEAM FRED at the Fred Heutte Center is the garden's core volunteer crew, working Ghent beds every Saturday morning. No gardening experience needed, borrow their gloves and tools, and stay an hour or stay the whole time. Next one is Saturday, November 7, 9 a.m. to noon.

🪕 Tidewater Bluegrass Society's Thursday jam fills the Roosevelt Area Civic League hall on Mona Avenue in Norfolk. The society lists this one as active and prints a contact, Chris Robertson at (757) 737-1155, if you want to ask what to bring before you walk in. Next one is tonight, Thursday, November 5, 7 to 9 p.m.

🦅 Hampton Roads Bird Club Sunday walk meets in the parking lot behind the Newport News Park ranger station on the first and third Sunday of the month, and the club posts what it saw afterward, species by species. Next one is Sunday, November 15, 7 a.m.

🍺 Afterglow Brewing is taking the former Bold Mariner building on East Ocean View Avenue for a second Norfolk location, with a full kitchen this time and a target of early 2027.

🎬 Norfolk's Riverview Theater is back on the market at $2.75 million after a restoration attempt fell through, and the broker thinks the empty lot next door is what finally sells it.

🍽️ Eleven local food businesses finished Norfolk's free Bon Appétit training program on October 30 and can now cater city events, Beignets and Brew among them.

☕ Anonymous Coffee turned one in New Town with a ribbon cutting on Courthouse Street, and has sent $500 of customer round-ups to NAMI Virginia.

📞 The York-Poquoson Sheriff's Office started a free daily automated check-in call for seniors on November 1, and after three missed calls in a row a deputy is sent to the door.

Thank you for reading The 757 Current!

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— Josh