Next Forest Hills ‘Picnic in the Park’ concert is July 31st

What are you doing the last Friday in July? We recommend packing a picnic dinner and heading over to Forest Hills Park for a free all-ages concert.

Bob Perilla’s Big Hillbilly Bluegrass will perform at the park’s amphitheater starting at 6:00 p.m., Friday, July 31st. The music will wrap up by 7:30. The band has performed at the White House, the Kennedy Center and with State Department delegations around the world. Big Hillbilly Bluegrass also had a cameo in the Chris Rock feature film “Head of State.”

Your host for this free, all-ages show is Friends of Forest Hills Playground, the local non-profit that helps oversee the park’s care and maintenance. FoFHP was heavily involved in the redesign of the new park, working alongside ANC 3F04 Commissioner Sally Gresham and the Department of Parks and Recreation. FoFHP made certain to create a “community circle” with picnic benches, shade structures and performance space with an electrical outlet for the very purpose of hosting these types of community events.

FoFHP also organizes the playground’s well-attended and long-established Halloween Party. Judging from the response to the first summer concert in the park in June, we expect this series to become another wonderful annual tradition.

“Kindie-rock” singer Marsha Goodman-Wood performed at the June show.

The third concert in the series, on Friday, August 28th will feature the rock, blues, soul and Motown sound of Downwire.

Please look for the FoFHP information table at the event, and stop by to learn more about the concert series, sign up to be a FoFHP member, enter your kids in a contest to design new Forest Hills Playground t-shirts – or just to say hello!

Hard at work on t-shirt designs.

FoFHP board members Marelise Voss and Julia Rosenthal at the June information table.

For park news and more information about upcoming events, please follow Friends of Forest Hills Playground on Facebook and on Twitter.

And because we’d like to keep our park clean, please look around after your picnic and pick up any stray trash.

Now, about the July 31st performer: International veterans of stage, screen and television, Bob Perilla’s Big Hillbilly Bluegrass performance highlights include a screen appearance in Chris Rock’s “Head of State,” a live television gig with Earl Scruggs, multiple Kennedy Center concerts and a residence at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. At the request of the U.S. Department of State, “Big Hillbilly Bluegrass” has toured Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the Dominican Republic over the past several years, thus crowning BHB as America’s defacto Bluegrass Ambassadors. Their recordings have achieved widespread critical acclaim.