My friends: So much is happening! We have been wanting to tell you all about it, but you know that kind of “so much is happening” where, well…so much is happening that you don’t have time to check in as much as you’d like? That’s where we’re at. And to conserve our time as much as yours, we’ll get right into it. It being This Weekend, Sure to be Something Else.

1. GRAND OPENING OF THE LIBERTY STREET ROBOT SUPPLY & REPAIR.

If you have happened by 826michigan lately, you may have noticed that we have had people working on our robot store seven days a week, all hours of the day and night. Robots are being built, products are being assembled, things are happening. We have blinking/rotating robots, the Is Your Little Sister a Robot Test Kit, the full line of Better Bot’s Brand Robot Parts, t-shirts, and more, as well as an under-construction Memory Extractor (Finally! You can put your fondest childhood memories onto a Nostalgia Chip and implant it in your robot!).

Saturday, May 17, we’ll have people all around Ann Arbor in robot costumes (Anyone can do it! Make your own costume, hit the streets: you will not, for once, be the ONLY person in a robot suit!). At 7pm, the robots will converge at the Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair for a Robot Dance Off and our student will perform a puppet show. We’ll turn on the caps-lock for this: THIS EVENT IS NOT TO BE MISSED.

2. ANN ARBOR BOOK FESTIVAL!

The festival will be packed with robots, for sure, so that reason alone should bring you out. While you are there, please stop by the Hussey Stage in the Michigan League at 5pm. As many of you know, we have been working with theater students from Community High to adapt Hemingway’s short stories into plays. Anne Heinz and Anne-Marie Roberts have been working tirelessly with this team of brilliant thespians, and this one-time-only performance is not to be missed! Hope to see you there (preferably in a robot costume)!

Many thanks to the Michigan Humanities Council for making this workshop possible!

And, of course, stop by our booth and say hello. We’ll also have the chapbooks from the other part of our Great Michigan Reads project. Ryan Howard spend three Saturdays with eight amazing high school students discussing Hemingway’s life and work, hiking, and canoeing as they worked through The Nick Adams Stories. A sample of the writing that came out of that workshop will be available at our booth!

SEE YOU SATURDAY (HOPEFULLY IN A ROBOT COSTUME). ONWARD ROBOTS!