Even with a healthy appreciation for the arts and a career that puts me in close proximity to them — not to mention a cousin who’s an accomplished professional ballerina — I can’t say I clamor for a night at the ballet.

Among the not-so-favorite memories from high school, standing in front of the class to deliver a presentation ranks right up there. Remember, the clammy palms, racing heart, dry throat and jumbled nerves?

A smattering of butterflies have flitted through my yard this spring, loitering briefly around the lantana and aloe stalks before moving on to lusher landscapes. Those fleeting backyard glimpses are nothing compared to the up-close and personal look you get at hundreds of butterflies inside The Marshall Butterfly Pavilion at Desert Botanical Garden.

There are restaurants that slash prices on margaritas or invite a mariachi band for Cinco de Mayo - and then there are restaurants that go a little nuts.

On May 5, 1862, a rag-tag force of vastly outnumbered Mexican soldiers held off well-provisioned French troops backed by heavy artillery in a battle to defend Mexican sovereignty.

They may be so commonplace they’re unappreciated, so simple they fail to activate the saliva glands at first sight, but in our book it’s hard to go wrong with chips and salsa.

The road to Florence isn’t long when country music stars are in town. People flock from the East Valley to the Country Thunder music festival, spurring the question: What else is there to see in Florence? It didn’t take long to find an answer — alpacas.

Practically a childhood right of passage, “A Wrinkle in Time” is a book a lot of adults can credit with sparking a love for science fiction and fantasy — or at least introducing words like “mitochondria” and “tesseract” to their vocabulary. Whether you want to acquaint your own kids with the beloved story or just take a trip down memory lane, you can see the stage adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s 1963 Newbery Medal-winning book in Tempe.

Just about everyone has them — family stories. Yours may be a sweet account of how Grandpa proposed to Gram, or only a whisper of something bad that happened that no one ever seems to want to talk about.

Weekends are made for moving a little slower, taking time to enjoy oneself and reconnect with whatever’s been put on the back burner during a hectic work week.

Food trucks have been popular for some time now in the Valley, but on April 13 a new class of diner will get to partake of the trend.

It may be a “tale as old as time,” but "Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” will never feel old hat to generations of new children or eternal fans of romance and fairytales.

Armando Adrian-López doesn’t farm anymore, but he still looks to the natural world for inspiration and materials, using corn husks, dried flowers and found objects to create fantastical winged and horned creatures.

Children will listen to other children in a way they don’t to adults, says Bobb Cooper — and he’s hoping an awful lot of them get to do just that over the next two weeks.

Downtown Chandler’s nice most anytime, but it’ll be a particularly good spot to while away a few hours April 5-6.

It may not be as mainstream a form of expression these days as, say, Instagram, but poetry, that old-fashioned art of arranging language to create an emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm, is alive and well.

EastValleyTribune.com/Get Out's Mandy Zajac and Stephanie Perrault share ideas on weekend fun in the Valley of the Sun!