A Cooper-Young book club, mudpies at the Botanic Garden, and ninety-eight degrees

Hey Memphis 👋 It's Monday. Sunny and 98, down to 79 overnight, with a heat advisory up from noon to 8 PM — August is going out exactly the way August came in, and it clearly has no intention of apologizing for it. Indoor plans age well today.

☀️ Today in Memphis

Fair warning: the music rooms are dark tonight. We checked Hi Tone, Growlers, Hernando's, the Deli, Meddlesome and Crosstown, and Lafayette's is closed Mondays outright. So this is a Monday for the other kind of night out.

Chicago Stepping with Ray — Levi Library, 3676 S. 3rd St., 2–3:30 PM, free. Stepping is a partner dance with deep roots in Black social clubs, and Ray has turned it into a standing Monday group — smooth, sociable, and a genuinely good excuse to move for ninety minutes in the air conditioning. Walk in. Details

Encore Hour — the Broadway Club at the Orpheum, 203 S. Main St., 5:30 PM, free admission. The Orpheum opens its upstairs lounge to anyone who wants to walk in: $5 beer, $7 wine, and — one day early, entirely on purpose — a $9.01 cocktail. Details

Memphis Advanced Toastmasters — 5884 Stage Rd., Bartlett, 6–7:30 PM. A public-speaking club meeting on a suburb city calendar almost nobody outside Bartlett ever opens. If that's been on your list since roughly 2019, it meets tonight. Details

Monday Night Trivia at Flyway — Flyway Brewing, 598 Monroe Ave., 7–9 PM. Every Monday, in the Edge District, in a room with air conditioning and beer in it. The sort of thing you only find out about by knowing somebody — so now you know somebody. Details

Dear Readers book club — CYCA office, 2298 Young Ave., 7 PM. Cooper-Young's neighborhood book club is on Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, about a young woman in a small Irish village in the early nineties. The library doesn't have copies — Burke's does, and the neighborhood gets a discount there. This one lives entirely on the association's Instagram and reaches no calendar at all. Details

👶 With the kids

Mudpie Mondays — Memphis Botanic Garden, 750 Cherry Rd., 10 AM–12 PM, free with Garden admission. Kids make mudpies out of whatever the garden hands them, on the Guest House patio in My Big Backyard. Outdoors, but done by noon — which today is the entire trick. Details

Bad Art Night — Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, 3030 Poplar Ave., 4–5 PM, free, ages 8 to 12. Odd prompts, a pile of supplies, and books about artists who ignored the rules, all pointed at the most gloriously awful masterpiece in the room. Registration is required. Details

LEGO Club — Burch Library, Collierville, 5–6:30 PM, free, all ages. Ninety minutes and a mountain of LEGO in the Storytelling Room. No registration, no sign-up sheet, and the pieces stay at the library. Details

Want the whole verified list, updated daily? It lives at heymemphis.co/events.

📰 The Rundown

The Belmont Grill served its last day Saturday, just short of forty-two years on Poplar. The ninety-year-old building needs expensive work and has been sold to a commercial real estate firm. Owner Jeff Anderson is pointedly not calling it an ending: "It's hard to say if this is going to be the end of the Belmont Grill. For some reason, I don't think this is the final chapter." The room was a general store, Louie's, Sir Robert's and the Half Shell before it was the Belmont, so the odds are on his side. (via Memphis Flyer)

901 Day is tomorrow, and the city is handing it to you on purpose. The City's own announcement says it "will not program official events on Sept. 1" — the plan is for restaurants, bars, shops, churches and neighborhoods to throw their own thing, and for the rest of us to go spend the day in them. There is no schedule to follow. That's the point. (via City of Memphis)

A mechanical bull is coming to Wolfchase. 8D Rodeo Bar & Thrill is taking space at 2760 N. Germantown Pkwy. with a bull in an inflatable arena, a twelve-seat motion cinema and a menu that runs to funnel cakes. Owner Tiffany Edwards ran it at Oak Court for ten years; there's no opening date yet. (via WhatNow Memphis)

🍽️ Food & Drink

Four dollars, medal winners only. WISEACRE runs Medal Mondays from 4 to 10 at 2783 Broad Ave. — $4 pints, and the list is exactly the beers with hardware: Tiny Bomb, Sky Dog, Sky Dog Amber and Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest in August is its own kind of statement, and at 98 degrees we're not going to argue with it. Details

🎟️ Looking Ahead

Taste of the District presale ends today. The Medical District's food night is Tuesday, October 6, 4 to 6 at Medical District Park — samples from dozens of local kitchens. The organizers put it plainly: presale pricing ends August 31, and standard rates start after that. Details

The Metal Museum is coming back. Grand opening celebration Saturday, September 5 by RSVP, and the doors open to everybody Friday, September 11. Times and prices aren't posted yet — when they are, we'll have them. Details

The Redbirds come home on 901 Day. Durham at AutoZone Park tomorrow, first pitch 6:45 — the start of a six-game home stand, which means baseball downtown every night this week. Details

🏡 Community Corner

Tomorrow is the one day a year the city officially has no plan. We asked what your corner of town is doing for 901 Day, and we're holding whatever comes in for tomorrow — on the day itself, where it's actually useful.

Which means there's still time. If your bar, shop, church, block or brewery is doing something for the 1st, hit reply today and we'll put it in front of 1,900 Memphians tomorrow morning.

The tip line never closes — a pop-up, a band, a Monday night we missed — no gatekeeping — send it to hey@heymemphis.co.

That's it for today — see you tomorrow at 6.

— Josh