Yesterday afternoon, a small crowd carried picnic blankets and low beach chairs into the quarry section of Lower Dracena Park to watch a free production of Richard III. Two nights from now, with no set list and no admission line, the same hillside will offer something rarer: a meteor shower peaking under a completely dark, moonless sky. One event just marked its fifth appearance since 2019, four of those years in a row. The other will not happen again like this for a long time. The coincidence that they land in the same week says something about how this town's calendar actually works, and it is worth paying attention to before the week is over.
Five years in the quarry
Sunday's performance, staged by the Vallejo Shakespeare Group in the quarry area next to Dracena Park's grove of dawn redwoods, marked the fifth appearance of the company in Piedmont since it started coming here in 2019. The format never really changes: free admission, picnic-style seating on the lawn, leashed dogs welcome, parking scarce enough that the city's own notice recommends walking or biking instead.
| Year | Production |
|---|---|
| 2019 | Henry V |
| 2023 | Hamlet |
| 2024 | The Winter's Tale |
| 2025 | As You Like It |
| 2026 | Richard III |
That gap between 2019 and 2023 is its own small piece of local history, and the fact that the company has been invited back four times since says the arrangement works for both sides. Questions about the event go to the city's own Parks and Project Manager, Nancy Kent, not a private promoter. This is a town-run tradition, and it behaves like one: quiet, recurring, no reason to advertise loudly because the people who show up already know where to find it.
A three-week-old experiment three blocks away
Compare that to Food Truck Friday, which did not exist before this July. The first event ran at Piedmont Park on July 17, with Chick-N-Go, Cousins Maine Lobster Truck, Bay Area Halal Eats, Crazy Empanadas, and Kona Ice parked on the grass while DJ Kev handled the music. The Recreation Department billed it as the start of something new rather than a one-time trial, and the city has since confirmed three more dates for later this year, though as of this writing they have not been announced.
That is a genuinely different kind of civic gesture than the Shakespeare series. One is a multi-year institution with a fixed address and a known contact person. The other is three weeks old, still finding its shape, and depends on whether enough people show up this summer to justify doing it again next summer. Piedmont Park sits at 711 Highland Avenue, close enough to Dracena Park that a resident could walk between the two locations without getting in a car, which is exactly the kind of geographic compression that makes this town's outdoor calendar denser than its two square miles would suggest.
The same week, something rarer overhead
Here is the part that has nothing to do with city programming at all. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night of August 12 into the early morning of August 13, and this year that peak lines up almost exactly with a new moon. NASA's own summer skywatching post notes that the new moon phase will keep the sky dark through the peak, and EarthSky's forecast puts the astronomical maximum at 14:53 UTC on August 13, meaning the predawn hours of both August 12 and 13 are the window to actually watch.
Under those conditions, NASA estimates viewers could see 50 to 100 meteors an hour in a genuinely dark location. That number only means something next to its baseline: most years, a bright moon washes out all but the strongest meteors, cutting visible counts well below that range. A moonless Perseid peak does not happen every August. This is one of the better ones in recent memory, and it happens to fall in the same calendar week as the Shakespeare performance, on the same hillside where a crowd gathered on picnic blankets three days earlier.
Where that actually matters if you live here
Piedmont's elevation above the Oakland flatlands is not usually framed as an amenity, but for one week in August it functions like one. The same hills that give Dracena Park and the streets above it a clear view also put a little more distance between a backyard telescope and the ambient glow of the flatter parts of the East Bay. You do not need to drive to Mount Diablo this year. NASA's guidance is to start watching after midnight and stay out through dawn, with the hours right before sunrise on August 13 offering the best combination of a high radiant and a completely dark sky. An open lawn away from a porch light, which describes a fair number of Piedmont's own front yards, will do the job.
The friction that comes with all of it
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Piedmont Unified's notice on school travel routes went out this month as campuses prepare to reopen, and it specifically shifts the primary pickup and drop-off zone for Havens Elementary to Highland Avenue, with a crossing guard assisting students and secondary zones remaining available on Oakland and Vista. The Piedmont Police Department plans to station staff at the Bonita and Oakland intersection during the first week back to help with the transition.
Highland Avenue is also the address for Piedmont Park, where Food Truck Friday sets up its trucks. For one week, the same short stretch of road is doing double duty: shuttling elementary students through morning drop-off and hosting a Friday evening crowd looking for dinner from a truck window. That overlap is a small but real piece of local knowledge, the kind that only shows up if you are paying attention to how compact this town's street grid actually is.
What's already on the calendar once the nights cool off
The same park cluster keeps recurring through the fall. Piedmont's own 2026 fall activity guide lists a Movie in the Park screening of Elio, sponsored by the Piedmont Cub Scouts, for Friday, September 25 at 7:15pm at Piedmont Park. Two days later, on Sunday, September 27 from 11am to 3pm, the same park hosts the Harvest Festival, with a farmers market, food trucks, a carnival, a jazz festival, and an edibles contest.
That is four distinct kinds of public gathering, a Shakespeare tradition, a food truck experiment, a Cub Scout movie night, and a harvest festival, all routed through two parks within walking distance of each other. Few towns this size manage that kind of density without either overprogramming their public space or letting it sit empty most of the year. Piedmont does neither. It runs a few things well, adds one new thing at a time, and lets the calendar prove itself before committing further.
That is a small, specific fact about how this place operates, and it is easy to miss if you only ever check the city's events page the week something happens. This week, it happens to include a meteor shower that will not look this good again for a while.
If you already call Piedmont home and find yourself wondering what any of this means for the value of the house you are standing in while you watch the sky, that is a different conversation, and one Ann Newton Cane has with Piedmont homeowners regularly. Request a Confidential Home Valuation whenever you are ready to have it.
