Assorted ramblings from the world of entertainment:

• Youngstown’s The Vindys start its cross-country tour on Saturday with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, but there’s still an opportunity to see the band close-ish this summer.

The third date on the 22-city run, which starts in New Jersey and ends Aug. 16 in Airway Heights, Washington, is Wednesday at MGM Northfield Park outside of Cleveland.

Local audiences are used to seeing The Vindys on big stages. The group has headlined at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre twice and played with the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra at Powers Auditorium in the spring. But this tour will be the biggest national exposure yet for the local favorites.

In an interview in March when the tour was announced, lead singer Jackie Popovec told me, “We get to play the Beacon Theater in New York, the Paramount Theater in Denver,” Popovec said. “We get to play Las Vegas at the Palms Resort Casino. We’re going to be in front of an amazing fan base that is loyal to Pat, and I imagine we’re going to pick up so many new fans. We had to make it work.”

The core trio of Popovec and guitar players John Anthony and Rick Deak will be joined by Nathan Anthony, keyboards; Brendan Burke, bass; and Owen Davis, drums, on the road (no horn section).

The Vindys go on at 7:30 p.m. at MGM Northfield Park. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster, but only a few remain.

For those who can’t get tickets, there still is some good news. According to the press release issued Tuesday, the band will be releasing some new music later this month.

• Along with episodes of “The Bear” (only two left to see from season three), I watched the documentary “Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple” on Max over the weekend.

My love of Van Zandt, both with Bruce Springsteen and leading his own Disciples of Soul, has been well-documented in these pages. I’m definitely the target audience for this.

Even though I thought 155 minutes was excessive — a doc on a Springsteen sideman doesn’t need to be as long as a Springsteen concert — “Disciple” is a fun watch, particularly the first two-thirds.

The early footage of Van Zandt playing with Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes in Asbury Park (occasionally with Springsteen joining them) is wonderful, and the deep dive into the “Sun City” recording and the Artists United Against Apartheid effort that Van Zandt organized is filled with fascinating details.

For local content, there’s a quick glimpse of Girard native and Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators, who is seen in some of the recording studio footage during the sessions for “Sun City.”

And the non-musician who gets the most screen time in the film may be John F. Kennedy High School graduate and filmmaker Chris Columbus, who grew up in Champion.

Columbus is an uber fan of both Van Zandt and Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes — the Jukes appear in “Adventures in Babysitting,” his first directorial effort, and Van Zandt worked on music for Columbus’ “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” and “Nine Months.”

* Last week I wrote about the house tour by Tim Quirk and Jay Blumenfield, longtime friends who play together in Too Much Joy and Wonderlick.

I went to Sunday’s show on Youngstown’s South Side. I can’t say I was surprised how much I enjoyed it – I expected it to be good – but I was shocked how different the vibe was, even compared to seeing an act perform in a tiny but more traditional venue.

Except for a couple of songs with backing tracks that played through a portable speaker, Quirk and Blumenfield performed without amplification, just two voices and one guitar (occasionally two). At times they would step down off of the back porch to get closer to the couple dozen folks watching them and sing in a voice barely above a whisper.

The intimacy of the performance made me hear the songs — mostly Wonderlick tunes with a couple TMJ chestnuts sprinkled in – in a completely different way.

It was a great experience.