Add the Meadows Museum to my list of great, free educational destinations for this kids this summer. The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University will be offering hands-on activities, gallery games, performances by Mexico 2000 Ballet Folklorico and light refreshments along with a chance to view their special exhibition, Modern Mexican Painting from the Andres Blaisten Collection. (It makes my heart melt every time I look at the poster because that black cat is a ringer for my little Toby who is no doubt busy making mischief of one type or another as I write this.) It's happening Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas. 214-769-2516.

The DMA is also hosting First Tuesdays tomorrow and the amazing BooksmArt program Saturday, Latino Cultural Center presents a children's theater performance of Los Payasos de la Esperanza (Clowns of Hope) by Teatro Flor Candela at Target Second Saturdays this Saturday, kids are encouraged to wear red for a color-themed day at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and create cloth puppets at the Sid Richardson Museum, both on Wednesday.

Plus there's more free fun planned all summer long from these museums and the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Crow Collection of Asian Art. You can get the details in my Family Fun lead. Know of any others? Send them my way and I'll update!

PHOTO: (top) The Black Cat from the Modern Mexican Painting exhibit at Meadows Museum (bottom) My Toby with his cuddle monkey -- can you see the resemblance?

I'm flying out to New York Monday for one of my favorite trips of the year: Book Expo America (or BEA), the publishing industry's annual showcase for new books, new authors, and, in recent years, rampant hand-wringing over the state of the book world.

We go to BEA for a coupe of reasons. It's a great opportunity to interview authors and bank feature stories for you to read later in the year as titles make their way to bookshelves digital and three dimensional. Just as important, the event provides an overview of trends and potential highlights to watch for in the coming months.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director Jaap van Zweden has received the Netherlands' 2012 Edison Award for Opera Recording for his live recording of Wagner's Parsifal, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Radio Choir and the Latvija State Male Choir, on the Challenge Classics label. The jury praised the "simplicity and purity" of the performance, recorded live in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

The cast in the concert performance included Klaus Florian Vogt (Parsifal), Katarina Dalayman (Kundry), Robert Holl (Gurnemanz) and Falk Struckmann (Amfortas). The recording is available on CD and as an MP3 download.

Inaugurated in 1960, the Edison Awards are the Netherlands' most prestigious recording prizes, comparable to the Grammy Awards in the U.S.

Scott Cantrell

If there's one thing you can say about both Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee, aside from the fact that both have won many awards and have landed on many best-seller lists, it's that neither of them is your "typical" Christian fiction writer.

Both have written very dark stories with controversial themes: Dekker, a former missionary kid who grew up amongst cannibals in the jungles of Indonesia, often writes about serial killers in a brutal, twisted fashion. Lee has delved into the touchy subject of demons and will soon take us into the mind of Judas, betrayer of Jesus. Both have been accused of "going too far" by some of their readership. Similarly, both have been criticized for using too much sensuality in their fiction, which in Dekker's case actually resulted in his book Immanuel's Veins being banned in Holland for being "too sensual" for the Christians in the country.

So, in many ways, it seems only natural that the two would be united to write The Books of Mortals, a trilogy of novels set in a post-apocalyptic world in which everybody is dead - they just don't realize it. The second book, Mortal, releases this month, and both authors will be coming to Arlington on June 11 as part of their book tour.

Fort Worth's Jubilee Theatre hosts a New Works Festival on June 15-17. The kick-off event on Friday, June 15, at 7 p.m. is open to the public: The winner of a contest for top new script will be announced, then given a spotlight reading. Out of submissions by 67 writers from 22 states, the finalists are Mama's Baby by Tommy Bryant of Bristol, Tenn.; Sweep N Slide by R. Lee Spivey of Fort Worth; Willie and Sam by Joe Dimiceli of Landsdale, Pa.; Sisters by Bradley Candie of Atlanta, Ga.; and My Father's House by Derrick Grant of Frisco.

On Saturday, June 16, a musical commissioned by the theater gets a private reading: Black Spurs, with words by Jubilee playwright-in-residence Celeste Bedford Walker and music by Ron Hasley. The show will get a full production during the upcoming season, Dec. 1-30. Then on Sunday, June 17, Walker will lead a playwriting master class from 1 to 4 p.m. Info: jubileetheatre.org.

Lawson Taitte

The AT&T Performing Arts Center and CBS 11 are co-hosting a Tony Awards ceremony-watching party at the Winspear Opera House on the evening of Sunday, June 10. There are door prizes and prizes for costumes, too. Even the parking fee in the lot under the Winspear is lowered to $5. It's free, but you have to RSVP at attpac.or.

The Dallas Theater Center and Studio Movie Grill (Royal Dallas location) are co-hosting a stage and screen singalong of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" on Tuesday evening, June 5. You can meet cast members of the upcoming DTC show, get your picture taken with them, ask questions...and then watch the movie version and sing along with the live cast, who'll be watching with you. It's all free. Details after the jump.

George Getschow, he who holds the title of "Conference Director and Writer-in-Residence" for the esteemed Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, reminds us that the deadline for their annual contests is approaching on June 11.

First, some particulars from George's email, and then, an opinion from me:

Submissions of narratives, essays and book manuscripts (requirement is simply one chapter and a 1- to 3-page chapter-by-chapter synopsis) are due June 11. It has to be "original" work; that is, you can't submit work that's been previously published.

Full details are posted here. Note that first-place winners get $3,000, and the manuscript winner gets a book contract.

Greetings to all you representatives of some 320 orchestra and various orchestra-related businesses!

During your four days in Dallas, you'll get to hear the area's top two orchestras in one of the world's greatest concert halls. But when you decide you can't handle one more session on fundraising, or dealing with cranky boards or whatever, I hope you'll get out and explore some of the city's other offerings. I'll be adding suggestions each day.

If you're expecting the Dallas of "Dallas," you'll be in for some surprises. Because the population of the area has exploded in the last 25 years or so--it's now the fastest-growing metro area in the country--few of the people you'll meet are natives. The old-fashioned, thick Texas drawl is an endangered species. Big hair survives on only a very few women of a certain age.

Meanwhile, both Fort Worth and Dallas have been making major investments in their downtowns--and in arts facilities. Dallas' Arts District, where the Meyerson Symphony Center is located, has one of the world's largest concentration of buildings designed by major international architects. But more on that in a subsequent installment...

Just when it seemed that a new theater company hadn't popped up for a long while, two new ones make their debuts the same evening, Friday. Outcry Theatre, which attracted some attention with its entry in the recent Out of the Loop Festival, offers its first stand-alone production with the area premiere of Itamar Moses' The Four of Us. A group of recent Southern Methodist University graduates calling themselves Best Revenge Productions is mounting a new look at Jean Genet's The Maids.

Outcry performs at the Studio Theater attached to WaterTower Theatre in Addison. Its phone number is 972-836-7206. Best Revenge will be at the Green Zone in Dallas. Call 407-731-6364.

- Lawson Taitte

Having crossed the Memorial Day rubicon into June, most of us are still working on our seasonal reading lists. As in, gathering stacks of books to keep us company at the beach, or in the cabin, or simply to serve as insulation from the globally-warmed period of incineration some in Texas call "summer."

Whatever the weather, you certainly will find good reading ahead this summer. (Here is where I link to the many fine book reviews at dallasnews.com/books. )

But while you reach for the sunscreen, publishers are thinking about sweater weather and putting the finishing touches on their fall releases. And it's already shaping up to be quite a fall for some of Texas' best-known writers. Here's a few that are on my radar:

Contact Improv is hard to explain to someone who has never done it, but let me try.

Contact Improv: Improvisational dance with a partner. You aren't supposed to use a word in its definition, are you?

Contact Improv: Working with a partner to make up dance as you go. That still sounds like you get to create a plan and there is no planning involved.

Contact Improv: Dancing without a plan while maintaining contact with at least one other person. I think that about does it. If it sounds odd, but I've peaked your interest, then I've done my job.

Peter Doroshenko, the director of Dallas Contemporary, is fond of saying that what he runs is "not your grandmother's art museum." Contemporary has imported Shepard Fairey to draw murals on the walls of inner-city neighborhoods, and its community outreach serves as a model for other institutions. But the art inside its 38,000-square-foot space is pretty special, too, as evidenced by Zoe Crosher's "Mae Wested," otherwise known as the Michelle duBois Project. It is, in the artist's words, "inspired by the impossibility of knowing one's self through photographs, even after an endless accumulation of images."

- Michael Granberry

Through August at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St. at Riverfront, Dallas. Free. 214-821-2522. dallascontemporary.org.

Just when it seemed that we hadn't had a new theater company pop up for a long while, two new ones make their debuts the same evening, June 8. Outcry Theatre (which attracted some attention with its recent entry in the recent Out of the Loop Festival) offers its first stand-alone production with the area premiere of Itamar Moses' "The Four of Us." (That's the play that attracted gossip in New York because of its quasi-autobiographical account of the rivalry between two old friends who are writers.) A group of recent SMU grads calling themselves Best Revenge Productions is mounting a new look at Jean Genet's modern classic "The Maids."

Outcry performs at the Studio Theater attached to WaterTower Theatre. Its phone number is 972-836-7206. Best Revenge will be at the Green Zone. Call 407-731-6364.

Fort Worth's Jubilee Theatre hosts a New Works Festival June 15-17. The kick-off event on Friday, June 15, at 7 p.m. is open to the public: The winner of a contest for top new script will be announced, then given a spotlight reading. Out of submissions by 67 writers from 22 states, the finalists are "Mama's Baby" by Tommy Bryant of Bristol, Tenn.; "Sweep N Slide" by R. Lee Spivey of Fort Worth; "Willie and Sam" by Joe Dimiceli of Landsdale, Pa.; "Sisters" by Bradley Candie of Atlanta, Ga.; and ""My Father's House" by Derrick Grant of Frisco.

On Saturday there will be a private reading of a musical commissioned by the theater, "Black Spurs," with words by Jubilee playwright-in-residence Celeste Bedford Walker and music by Ron Hasley. The show will get a full production during the upcoming season, Dec. 1-30. Then on Sunday, June 17, Walker will lead a play-writing master class from 1 to 4 p.m. Go to jubileetheatre.org for details.

Dallas playwright Matthew J. Edwards' "Written in Time" is having its world premiere by Rover Dramawerks at the Cox Building Playhouse in Plano through June 9. After the performance on this Friday, June 1, he's be doing a Q&A after the show. Go to www.roverdramawerks.com for more information.

For those who missed John Leguizamo's one-man show "Tales from a Ghetto Klown" at the Majestic Theatre earlier this season -- or if you just want to see it again -- you can look for it on PBS. It's scheduled for July 13.

This year's Orange Prize for fiction, awarded annually to year's best novel written in English by a woman, has been given to Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles.

Dallas readers might recall her -- she was featured by Arts & Letters Live in March, and in our review, Bryan Woolley called it a "brilliant first novel," concluding: "Even for a scholar of Greek literature, which Miller is, rewriting the Western world's first and greatest war novel is an awesome task to undertake. That she did it with such grace, style and suspense is astonishing." You can read the whole review here.

Due to inclement weather, and the forecast of more to come, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra has cancelled Wednesday's Community Concert at Kidd Springs Park. No rain site is available. The concert will not be rescheduled.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has canceled tonight's outdoor Community Concert at Kidd Springs Park because of inclement weather. According to the DSO's site, there's no rain site for this one and the concert will not be rescheduled.

Photo: The picture's from a 2008 Exall Park concert. It's by William Deshazer.