JULY
1 Pool party! Even if the pool doesn’t have any, um, water in it. The indie-rock favorites Illinois, Man Man, and Dengue Fever play McCarren Park Pool, in Brooklyn.
2 They call it “theatrobatics.” The Spiegeltent, at the Seaport, presents La Vie, a Montreal show that’s part theater, part aerial acrobatics. You know, theatrobatics.
3 Lindyhop at Lincoln Center plaza during Midsummer Night Swing’s Big Band Tuesday.
4 Celebrate America’s independence with Canadian indie rockers the New Pornographers in Battery Park.
5 Brooklyn’s Latin-surf-popsters Chicha Libre cross the river to play Joe’s Pub.
6 Try to squeeze into Bryant Park to hear Norah Jones; then cool down at a late screening of Joshua, the indie thriller about the perfect Manhattan family gone wrong.
7 Artisans and experts at the American Cheese Summit go way beyond Kraft, at the East Village’s Neighborhood Preservation Center.
8 MoMA’s Sunday Summergarden series starts among the Serras, with performers from Jazz at Lincoln Center and Juilliard.
9 Patti LuPone. Gypsy. City Center. Need we say more?
10 Fables de la Fontaine, an interpretation of works by the poet, opens the Lincoln Center Festival. But then there’s the Summer Play Festival of offbeat works about love and laundry (Unfold Me) and auto racing (Vrooommm! A NAScomedy).
11 Explore the fog of another war at David Epstein’s Surface to Air, about a family whose son’s remains return from Vietnam long after his death, at Symphony Space.
12 Meet li’l socialites at the Met’s Young Members Party, for well-heeled 21- to 35-year-olds, in the museum’s European-sculpture court and roof garden.
13 Think of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in theaters now, as a refresher course for next week’s final Potter book.
14 Off with a buck-and-wing: It’s the final day of the Tap City Festival at the Duke on 42nd Street.
15 At Bronx Zoo’s The Great Return: The Astor Court Renaissance, the sea lions and monkeys move back into their lovely renovated home.
16 Can one say a twee throwback combo might “rock”? If so, the Decemberists will rock SummerStage, with Grizzly Bear and Land of Talk.
17 The NY Philharmonic’s Concerts in the Parks wrap up with a night of Strauss and more on the Great Lawn. 8 p.m.; best to arrive by 6.
18 MoMA’s Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–1932 shows off the handsome buildings of the early U.S.S.R.
19 The flamboyant, glammy Detroit rockers Electric Six play aboard the Temptress, leaving from 41st Street on the West Side.
20 A multiplex traffic jam: Adam Sandler’s gay-marriage comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry; John Travolta in drag in Hairspray; Sunshine, about a space crew that has to reignite the sun; and Natalie Portman in Goya’s Ghosts, as the artist’s mistress. All open.
21 A full day at Coney: The Siren Music Festival brings in Williamsburg duo Matt and Kim plus the seasoned New York Dolls. Then stay for a showing of the deathless 1988 film Killer Klowns From Outer Space.
22 Cheer for someone far fitter than you, at the New York City Triathlon.
23 Restaurant Week starts: Five days of $24.07 lunches and $35 dinners (see list at nycvisit.com).
24 Add to your list of beach reads The Complete Stories of David Malouf, a collection of tales set mainly in Australia, and Ruth Rendell’s mysterious, elegant The Water’s Lovely.
25 Bassist Pablo Aslan’s Avantango headlines the first day of the JPMorgan Chase Latino Cultural Festival, at Queens Theatre in the Park.
26 BAM brings in the Memphis harmonica master James Cotton for a free concert at Metrotech.
27 The Simpsons Movie finally arrives, eighteen seasons in. Shouldn’t Lisa be in college by now?
28 Rage Against the Machine, Wu-Tang Clan, and Public Enemy open the Rock the Bells hip-hop festival over two days.
29 Shakespeare in the other park: Hudson Warehouse stages As You Like It at 89th Street and Riverside.
30 Please forget the Sean Penn remake. See 1949’s All the King’s Men, at dusk in Bryant Park.
31 Mostly Mozart starts with a week focusing on … Beethoven. (They did say mostly.)
AUGUST
1 Take me out to the ferry: The Staten Island Yankees play the Oneonta Tigers at 7 p.m.
2 Lincoln Center Out of Doors throws its arms open to the Upper West Side, bringing Puerto Rican civil-rights icon Roy Brown together with Arlo Guthrie to Damrosch Park.
3 Who’s mightier, the killing machine or the lady satirist? Matt Damon reprises his android-hitman role in The Bourne Ultimatum, and the far-too-dewy Anne Hathaway plays a feisty young Miss Austen in Becoming Jane.
4 You don’t really want to see Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod or Disney’s Underdog, do you? Classical Theatre of Harlem does Romeo and Juliet in Marcus Garvey Park.
5 Shaolin kung fu! Boat races! Twangy Chinese music! Get on the 7 train to Flushing for the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, and do it before the dumpling-eating contest gets messy.
6 Brazooka (not a mix of gum and lingerie but a band) brings its brassy Brazilian sound to Café Wha?
7 Enough procrastinating: Time to wake up early and get in line. The Public’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens in the park tonight.
8 Funny-eighties-musicians alert! They Might Be Giants play the last of five shows at Bowery Ballroom, and Biz Markie plays a free gig with DJ Lovebug Starski in Jackie Robinson Park.
9 Daft Punk brings da French funk to Keyspan Park.
10 Sixteen days, 200 companies, 1,300 shows: the tenth annual Fringe Festival fills up twenty theaters with camp, amateur fun, and maybe, just maybe, the next great American play.
11 Remember when the Yankees didn’t struggle to stay in second place, as the Museum of the City of New York hosts “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” its family-friendly tour of The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947–1957. At the end, kids can design their own baseball cards.
12 Eerily perfect vintage cars roll off their trailers at the Hudson River Yacht Club for its Summer Classics Car Show. Hands off that chrome, bud.
13 The only way to further dramatize the experience of sniffling your way through Casablanca is to do it with hundreds of jaded New Yorkers in Bryant Park.
14 Sneak away from the office for a lunch-hour injection of high-octane gospel from commanding contralto Marie Knight, appearing at the Grace Building Plaza in conjunction with ICP’s “Let Your Motto Be Resistance” exhibition.
15 New York’s great contemporary choreographer meets Vienna’s great—and notoriously undanceable—prodigy when Mark Morris presents Mozart Dances, an evening-length rhapsody of emotion and virtuosity.
16 Grab your board, slap on some zinc, and get to Brick, New Jersey, for the No Flat Earth kids’ surf contest. (Or just bring a towel to sit and watch ’em shred.)
17 At the box office, sci-fi vs. fairy tale: A bionic Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig star in The Invasion, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Christina Ricci plays a princess with a pig’s snout whose parents must work double-time to find her a Prince Charming in the candy-colored Penelope.
18 Indulge your inner Missourian, and don’t tell your cardiologist: Pack a plastic bib and finger-wipes for the Hudson Valley Ribfest in New Paltz.
19 The Grammy- and MacArthur-genius-grant-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov brings his 86-minute maximalist masterpiece commemorating Bach, La Pasión según San Marcos, to the Rose Theater.
20 Psycho in Bryant Park. Bring your mother.
21 Take advantage of the U.S. Open’s early-round free tickets to watch the up-and-comers (seeded tournament play, and paid admission, begins on August 27).
22 The Washington Post proved that only one D.C. straphanger recognized the violin prodigy Joshua Bell when he went undercover as a subway busker. So now you’ll actually have to pay $40 to hear him, at Avery Fisher Hall.
23 The Circle Line—sure it’s touristy, but in a good way—hosts blues guitarist Martin Sexton for the final gig in its floating-concert series.
24 Novelist, leftist, and (in The Coast of Utopia) nineteenth-century aristocrat-anarchist Ethan Hawke premieres The Hottest State, the film he wrote and directed from his novel, starring the toothsome Mark Webber. (Want to feel old? Hawke and Laura Linney play his parents.)
25 Bird really does live: The fifteenth-annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival celebrates the great sax man with two days of free concerts in Harlem and the East Village, where Parker worked and lived.
26 Dance lovers of every size and stripe converge on the Lawn at Battery Park, where Jonathan Hollander’s Downtown Dance Festival celebrates its 26th year of free outdoor dance, from pliés to tango.
27 Ars longa, vita brevis, except when it’s not so longa: The very-Zen artist Tenzing Rigdol is at the Rubin Museum, where he’ll be exercising the ancient Tibetan art of sand painting on the theater floor—and the whole shebang is slated for ritual destruction come September 3.
28 Because the image of Shirley MacLaine working as an elevator operator—in severe Salvation Army–style uniform—is a perfect wormhole to a lost New York, catch Billy Wilder’s The Apartment at River to River.
29 Tom Harrell—one of the greatest living jazz trumpeters, and a schizophrenic who uses music to manage his illness—brings his masterful quintet to the Village Vanguard.
30 Quick-quick-slow or quick-quick-quick? Even Mayor Bloomberg feels the salsa beat, having declared this the official New York Salsa Congress weekend in 2005. There’ll be 45 workshops over four nights at the New York Hilton.
31 Drink summer down to the lees at the Brooklyn Museum, where the new exhibition of Caribbean art allows you to imagine a world of eternal sunshine.