Plays, Picnics, Parties and More Events This Week

A few holiday events to check out if you didn’t get invited to any barbecues and parades scare you: Every Memorial Day, the Massachusetts Military Heroes organization plants a Garden of Flags — 37,000 of them — in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common. Boston Veterans’ Services presents a free Honor and Tribute concert in Christopher Columbus Park. The Cambridge Fallen Heroes Tour commemorates veterans and their families with 10 stops including Cambridge Common, Memorial Church, Harvard Yard, and the Old Burying Ground. (Various times and prices, all ages)

The MFA celebrates the holiday with a free open house featuring a concert by the U.S. Coast Guard Band, performance art, films and an Extreme Dancesport workshop. Just know that it isn’t lesson about dancing to Extreme’s “More than Words” because the only way to dance to that song is to ironically hold a lighter in the air. (All day, FREE, all ages)

Whether you missed out on Boston Calling or you went and now you can’t imagine seeing a show with only two or three bands instead of ten, check out the last day of Club Passim’s biannual campfire. festival. The event celebrates Boston’s music scene and develops new talent with band and solo sets, songwriters swapping tunes “in the round,” and even audience members pulled on stage to play. Probably just other musician friends though, not you, so don’t bother doing vocal warm-up exercises before the show. (12 p.m., $10, all ages)

The former U.S. Treasury Secretary stops by First Parish Church in Cambridge to discuss his new book, “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.” It’s also your chance to see Geithner’s gigantic head in person and ask if kids you used to make fun of it. “Hey, whaddya got in that giant head? A big, giant brain? Why dontcha go learn a lot about finance and make a lot of money, bighead!” (7 p.m., $35, FREE)

Financial Crisis Flashback Week continues with New Repertory Theatre’s production of “Imagining Madoff.” The play imagines jailhouse conversations between Bernie Madoff and Solomon Galkin, a poet and Holocaust survivor. The two banter about women, baseball, the Talmud, human decency, kindness, Tim Geithner’s giant head, and the story of Abraham and Isaac, (7:30 p.m., $36, all ages)

A benefit for MassBike, the cycling film festival at Arlington’s Regent Theatre presents 11 short films featuring two-wheeled travels around the globe. Because you should probably carbo-load for all that sitting and watching people exercise, a pre-show social hour includes a cookie showcase with offerings from local bakeries. If you think it’s impossible to make a great movie about cycling, well, what about “E.T.”? (6 p.m., $10, all ages)

Who doesn’t love a nice picnic? It’s the original “al fresco” dining. The only thing is you have to make the food yourself, which is tough because all you know how to make is frozen pizzas and ramen noodles but those aren’t really picnic foods. The Bring Your Own Blanket picnic on Cambridge Common solves that problem by offering a menu of local spring options from Somerville caterers Cuisine en Locale. (6 p.m., $50, all ages)

Anytime one of the New Orleans jazz musicians featured on HBO’s dearly departed “Treme” comes to town, we’re going to let you know. Trumpet master Kermit Ruffins brings his Barbecue Swingers band to Brighton Music Hall for a guaranteed good time. I follow Kermit on Twitter and he likes to end almost every tweet with “WE PARTYING” and some number of exclamation points, depending on how excited he is to party that night. (8 p.m., $27.50, 18+)

Photo credit: Susie Widak/Creative Commons

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This article was provided by our content partner, The Boston Calendar.