For the lovers and romantics at heart, it's not a bad idea to start your Garden Grove summer on historic Main Street. Rummage at Paris's Antiques & Collectibles (12936 Main St., 714-534-0248) and The Charity Shop (12946 Main St., 714-636-3206), two stops where curious minds can browse and sift through records, VHS tapes and other ornate curios. Paris's Antiques offers the typical furniture and chandeliers, but the Charity Shop—owned by mother and son Rosie and Jordan Avila—attracts a younger, more creative mind, with its attractive décor and art gracing the walls. It's also more organized and kinky. Beyond serving as a thrift store, on certain weeknights, you can look forward to a shop show or a movie night. In the rear of the shop, local artists take up studio space to create art that will eventually be shown in a special show there. And for you artists-to-be, there's a weekly figure-drawing class for the low price of $10.
Garden Grove also has the good fortune of having Little Saigon and Little Seoul within its city limits, and the two communities meet at Tastea (10189 Westminster Ave., 714-539-1832; www.tastea.net) for tall, delicious smoothies made from fresh fruit and Asian tea fused together—it's a multiculti brain freeze! And the city that holds a strawberry festival despite getting rid of all of its strawberry fields makes up for such culture trashing by hosting the Shakespeare Orange County theater company at the Garden Grove Amphitheater (12762 Main St.; shakespeareoc.org). On this summer's schedule: A Midsummer Saturday Night's Fever Dream, which is woven with disco music; George M. Cohan's The Tavern; and Romeo and Juliet, co-produced by the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association to procure more ethnic diversity in the Bard outside Othello and Shylock.
Aimee Murillo is calendar editor and frequently covers film and previously contributed to the OCW’s long-running fashion column, Trendzilla. Don’t ask her what her favorite movie is unless you want to hear her lengthy defense of Showgirls.