Desert Companion - April 2019

INTERIORMOTIVES

SPRING HOME DESIGN

FOUR VERY DIFFERENT HOMES BROUGHT TO LIFE

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VOLUME 17 ISSUE 4 D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

April 13 NATURE

The animals of Bonnie Springs and our relation to the wild

By Erin Ryan

15 SENSE OF PLACE

Scanning the city from its margins

By Frank Johnson

18 PROFILE

Building a life while fighting to breathe

By Lonn M. Friend

46

LABORS OF LOVE

DINING

20

27

DOING GOOD

RETAIL THERAPY

24

29

ENVIRONMENT

ENTERTAINMENT

Clean the World converts soap to hope

By John M. Glionna

FEATURES

36

Why did the big new public lands bill offer so little for Nevada?

By Heidi Kyser

Varieties of passionate intent bring these four interior spaces to life

Products to give your modern devices some throwback flair

A wild new Strip show time-warps our critic to a debacle of the past

By Mike Weatherford

38 PROFILE

The owners of Coffinwood, a custom-coffin business — and playfully morbid attraction — in Pahrump, flirt with death in order to celebrate life

By Krista Diamond

Seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, and touching Las Vegas

By Dawn-Michelle Baude, Kim Foster, Andrew Kiraly, Veronica Klash, and Kim Foster

INTERIORMOTIVES

SPRING HOME DESIGN

FOUR VERY DIFFERENT HOMES BROUGHT TO LIFE

BY T H E PA S S I O N S O F T H E I R OW N E R S

69

EDITOR’S NOTE

PHOTOGRAPHY

Here we are now, entertain us — exhibits, concerts, shows, events, and miscellaneous chocho to fill your calendar

Christopher Smith

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8 | DESERT

As spring warms the valley, this stretch of Rainbow Boulevard will keep you cool

By Veronica Klash

DEPARTMENTS

THE CITY IN FIVE SENSES

10

37 DINING

57

( EXTRAS )

Meet a pizza chef with a century-old secret ingredient

By Sonja Swanson

APRIL 2019

LAS VEGAS IN

SOUND, SIGHT,TOUCH,

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SMELL

B R O A D W A Y

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ADVERTISING MANAGER Favian

Editor’s note

ALL THE FEELS L

as Vegas is a nexus of sensory extremes. In the middle of a broiling desert, we’ve got a string of air-conditioned Strip casinos boasting some of the world’s finest food, splashiest production shows, and, of course, row upon row of clamorous, glittering games of chance.

(As for smell, there’s Fremont Street. Ba-dum bum.) The observation that, wow, this place could like totally melt your medulla oblongata was the impetus behind this month’s feature story, “In the Realm of the Senses.” When we talk about what defines Southern Nevada as a place, we often default to tropes such as landscapes, buildings, statistics, and demographics. But how does it feel to live here, through the sights, sounds, and tastes that help define the soul of a metropolis? Gawd, that sounds like diaphanous poetic guff, but we really do drill down toward some answers. Writers Kim Foster, Dawn-Michelle Baude, T.R. Witcher, Veronica Klash, and I consider that question on p. 57. (As part of my assignment to consider the sense of sound, I spent time in a noise-absorbing chamber where, thankfully, no one could hear me whimper in dread.)

Our home design feature on p. 46, “Home Feels Advantage,” embodies a spectrum of extremes as well. We profile subjects whose home decor styles range from curated minimalism to riotous thriftstore eclecticism to personal art gallery — but each of them intrigues, challenges, and delights the senses in its own way. Home truly is a feeling.

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Dawn-Michelle Baude, Josh Bell, Cybele, Krista Diamond, Kim Foster, Lonn M. Friend, John M. Glionna, Melanie Hope, Matt Jacob, Frank Johnson, Jenessa Kenway, Veronica Klash, Stephanie Madrid, Chip Mosher, Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña, Lissa Townsend Rodgers, Erin Ryan, Sonja Swanson, Mike Weatherford, T.R. Witcher CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

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Desert Companion is published 12 times a year by Nevada Public Radio, 1289 S. Torrey Pines Dr., Las Vegas, NV 89146. It is available by subscription at desertcompanion.vegas, or as part of Nevada Public Radio membership. It is also distributed free at select locations in the Las Vegas Valley. All photos, artwork and ad designs printed are the sole property of Desert Companion and may not be duplicated or reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. The views of Desert Companion contributing writers are not necessarily the views of Desert Companion or Nevada Public Radio. Contact Tammy Willis for back issues, which are available for purchase for $7.95.

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D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

9 PEOPLE, ISSUES, OBJECTS, EVENTS, IDEAS, AND CURIOSITIES YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THIS MONTH

ONE | N AT U R E

Where the Wild Things Were

As Bonnie Springs gives way to luxury homes, the fate of its animals reflects our complicated relationship with the nonhuman world BY

Erin Ryan

A goat at the Bonnie Springs Ranch petting zoo surveys a changing Red Rock.

PHOTOGRAPHY M ikayla Whitmore

APRIL 2019

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he peacocks were gone. Not because of the freak snowstorm that had turned the grounds of Bonnie Springs Ranch to cold mud; the replica mining town’s exotic sentries had been moved to new homes, the place somehow odder without them on this February day. A few mallards lazed on the pond outside the saloon, no doubt missing the turtles already transferred to a refuge.

The nostalgic Old West attraction in the shadow of Red Rock Canyon was closing after six decades, making way for a development not involving wax pioneers and a mini railroad. And plans were snapping into place for the horses, goats, and sheep, for the wolves, deer, and ducks, for the emus, cavies, and lone serval that helped define its legacy.

“Each and every one of those animals are already accounted for to go to certain places … around here in Southern Nevada, in Pahrump, the Hesperia Zoo in CREATURE California,” attorney Bob Gronauer COMFORTS testified at the Feb. 19 meeting of Bonnie Springs’ the Clark County Planning Comanimals will mission. Gronauer, representing be re-homed before the developer Joel Laub, was assurresidential It’s a classic tableau of the Amering the commission that both the that would become the Las Vegas Valley, as development ican West: Humans fighting over property’s buyer and seller were settlers, railroad outfits, and Strip developers gets under way. space — and animals waiting to be trying to do right by the animals razed an ecosystem that’s deceptively rich. handed their fates. Coyotes can’t and environment in and around “I don’t think people even thought about step to the mic for public comment any more the 64 acres. The 20-home development the desert. There was this sense of, it’s the than Bonnie Springs’ beloved 98.25-percent has support from the Red Rock Citizens desert, you know?” says Mark Hall-Patton, wolf Tkai can.

Advisory Council as well as advocacy groups Clark County Museum system administrator Furry, scaled and feathered, these silent Save Red Rock and Friends of Red Rock and a valley dweller for the past 25 years. residents are bound to us, a species that Canyon, the latter declaring it “a new vision He’s familiar with the side effects of growth, considers them valuable one day and nuifor this very special place, one that respects and not just in Las Vegas. Hall-Patton points sances the next. In this case, it looks like a the past while setting it on a future path to his grandfather’s vineyard and orange happy ending for the animals. The Bonnie of economic and environmental viability.” groves becoming a subdivision in Southern Springs menagerie is being re-homed; and That last part concerns wild creatures California. “We do this no matter where we the developers have indicated they’ll try on the site, from butterfly populations are. We grow over the land, and whatever to preserve the integrity of a landscape bolstered by revegetation with native plants was there we take it away,” he says. that supports abundant wildlife. Southern to burros unimpeded by fences or perimeter Of the Clark County Museum’s 30 acres, Nevada isn’t unique in moving animals walls from drinking at restored springs.

10 remain creosote desert so people can see around so readily to suit human needs.

Despite such sensitivity to the area’s what this metropolis erased. Rabbits, coyBut our dynamic with them, both wild and natural feel and functions, the proposal otes, and quail keep watch, and Hall-Patton tame, is tied to our complicated relationship from Laub and partner Randall Jones has takes it as evidence that wildlife adapts with the desert. still met with some opposition. One of better than we think. “They find ways of the strongest protests at the commission working with us.” ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ meeting came from the state director of But for every adorable rodent tucked into the Center for Biological Diversity, Patrick a suburban trail, there’s a Peregrine falcon THE CONSERVATION ETHIC is rooted in the Donnelly. “It would really be killing the snatching one from a golf course. Boulder mid-1800s, when hunters and fishermen goose that has laid the golden egg for our City touts the bighorn sheep grazing Hemenrealized wildlife wasn’t unlimited and began economy here in Southern Nevada,” Donway Park, while Summerlin residents swamp organizing to protect wild places and resourcnelly said. The Clark County Commission Nextdoor with screeds about cat-eating es. What was so obvious in forests and rivers unanimously approved the development coyotes. Animals are genius opportunists, didn’t immediately translate in the desert March 20. (Attorneys for April Hopper, daughter of the ranch’s late founder, Bonnie Levinson, did not reply before press time; Hear more Las Vegans share personal memories of Bonnie Springs on developer Randall Jones did not respond “State of Nevada” at desertcompanion.com/hearmore to interview requests.)

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and valley developments offer what Doug Nielsen calls “pockets of habitat on steroids.”

And we love those animals — that is, as long as they’re the right ones.

“We create this attractive nuisance, but now we want to pick and choose who comes to that buffet,” says Nielsen, conservation education supervisor for the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s southern region.

“We have changed habitat so much, yet people like to say, we’re just gonna take us out of the equation. You can’t. … The thing that can change in that equation is us, our behavior. (Animals are) gonna go on doing what they’ve been programmed to do.” The key is accepting that we’re all right on top of wilderness. As in, bobcats have visited the Strip. ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ ❉ GOOGLE EARTH’S 1950 map of the valley hammers home how fast it grew to the corners. You can’t click to see what might have been, but it’s worth knowing Spring Mountain Ranch — the state park next to Bonnie Springs — was almost a subdivision. And that Summerlin could have extended all the way up to the visitor center of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

Getting people to appreciate the obvious splendor of these protected resources is easy. The Bureau of Land Management also oversees “general” lands in Southern Nevada, and that’s where rangers find the mattresses and jet skis. “People are like, it’s desert, and just throw it out there,” says BLM spokesman John Asselin, who thinks most offenders probably grew up here.

Maybe they’re drunk on the illusion of space. Asselin explains that, actually, uses are competing for a relatively small area of viable land. Take the barren-looking I-15 corridor just outside Las Vegas.

Why not channel growth there? Because off-roaders use that land, and if you move them, then you have to move some solar utility, and if you move that, it displaces desert tortoises, and …

Nature has its own chain of butterfly effects, one that connects disappearing habitat with pet bunnies dumped at local parks. And don’t forget our misguided selves, whether we’re dumping the bunnies or feeding them. Maybe we’re drunk on the illusion of separateness.

“Nothing that we do doesn’t disturb something,” Nielsen says, “and it’s really unrealistic to say, ‘Well, my house didn’t displace anything, but my neighbor’s did.’” ✦

TWO | S E N S E O F P L AC E

Magic in the East Even when you see it, you can’t explain how it happened BY

Frank Johnson

W

hen I was growing up on the East Side, but not up on the mountain where the houses have pools, the Strip was mostly a faraway monument. I could see some part of it from basically everywhere I went. It was where the planes full of people were going. At night, I could hear the party, could feel the woofers at the base of the boulevard knock and boom through the valley. I was born and raised on the East Side. Me and my homies spent our summers hooping and hustling, scraping together change to get 20-year-old Toyotas that didn’t run when we bought them and only started half the time, despite the numberless hours and Pic-a-Part replacements we’d put into them. We didn’t have the money for Strip casinos, and it was much harder to get away with drinking or smoking or fighting down there. So if there wasn’t a show at Jillian’s, we would go to “The View.”

The View is easily the best place in Las Vegas, without question. If you drive east to the end of Vegas Valley Drive, past East Career and Technical Academy, and stay on the road, eventually you can make a U-turn and park in front of the most brilliant show playing in Vegas. Even sweeter: It plays every night, APRIL 2019

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3

Deleted Vegas scenes from The Avengers: Endgame While Thanos parties at Omnia, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and 30 character actors steal Infinity Gauntlet in improbably complex heist Nye County sheriff allows Thor to use deadly magic hammer without undergoing background check At the Palms, Hulk takes selfie with Damien Hirst artwork of Aquaman in formaldehyde

ways had enough zeroes to make free. Up there, it’s like you the amounts seem fake, and if can see everything. After the Up here you see you drove on the 95 past Sam’s sun sets and the sky changes how none of it Town, you might see Ferraris and from cotton candy pinks and will ever make Lamborghinis, and someone was blues into her indigo gown, sense, probably getting that money. Just no one the valley puts on all of its never did to anybody. we knew. We were sure of that. shimmer. This is the way to So we took our MR-2s, Supras, experience Vegas: out in the and Civics up the dirt road as far quiet of the desert, at the base as our tires would let us. It was of the mountain where the sun like all we wanted was to get a good look first breaks over the valley each morning. at it, like if we could see it, we could make This city is impossible to know. It is sense of it. We could figure out how to get impossible to describe concisely, or with to the real Vegas, the one we had been told clarity. It demands poetry. It feels like at this we were supposed to be living in. point I should admit that I’m dissatisfied The View is spectacular. I love it more by most of the descriptions of Las Vegas I than the light show on Fremont I watched hear or read. They have too much Joe Pesci, as a boy from my mother’s shoulders, or too much Danny Ocean. Or there’s too Bellagio’s water show, or KÀ, because The much talk of the glow of the city and none View is the only performance that features of the expansive darkness through which the Reata Apartments where I grew up on the city’s lights have been strung. Vegas is Cheyenne and Walnut. Even Palace Station to me a blooming desert meadow spotted gets a solo as its sign flashes and fills, singing with sprouts of stucco and iron and glass. the city’s favorite melody in yellow light. Up It is Julia Roberts and my Tia Marda. It’s here you see how none of it will ever make gold and sand. sense, probably never did to anybody. No one At 16, all of my homies knew more than ever really knows what hand the city will deal we were supposed to. We knew that the city them. The cards change day to day. At 16, me was holding some of its cards. Our parents and my homies knew that. So we posted up all worked so much we never saw them, at The View and spoke to each other without most of them in casinos and resorts we ever taking our eyes off the flickering city. would point out while sitting on the back of We wanted to study its plays, memorize its someone’s car and sipping Corona out of a enchantments, find a way in. ✦ McDonald’s sweet tea cup. The jackpots al-

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PHOTOGRAPHY B rent Holmes

Wearing Hawaiian shirt and white hat, Dr. Strange asks concierge for directions to fear and loathing Raucous bachelorette party forces Captain America to strip down to shield Thanos keeps snapping fingers until no one’s left in line at Goodwich “But I really AM an Avenger,” Hawkeye pleads; bouncer rolls eyes

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Just Breathe FOUR | PROFILE

Battered by cystic fibrosis, Las Vegan Alexa Ciancimino battles for air with a little help from family and (sometimes famous) friends BY

S

Lonn M. Friend

nowflakes blanket car hoods like powdered sugar on this frosty evening in the gated Red Rock community where the Ciancimino clan resides. Papa Ken grills boneless, free-range chicken breasts as mama Michelle tosses an organic green salad and simmers the quinoa. Siblings Kevin and Leah fiddle with their iPhones as the fireplace flickers. At 7:30, 24-year-old Alexa arrives, dispensing toasty bear hugs. She’s the one everybody’s been waiting for, the life of the party whose life has been anything but a party. You’d never guess from her smile and radiant personality that Alexa has been fighting for air since she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a pulmonary disease, shortly after her second birthday.

“She had a serious symptom when she was 2,” Ken recalls. “A rectal prolapse — that was the red flag. Part of CF is bad digestion, acute constipation. One morning, she was straining to poop and pushed a section of her intestines out her butt.” Dad’s graphic depiction doesn’t faze anyone. This family is completely unfiltered. They express themselves openly, honestly. “This was a glaring symptom of pancreatic insufficiency,” Michelle adds.

“The body’s not getting its enzymes from the pancreas into the intestines to break down food. They did a sweat test on her, and she was diagnosed with CF. They measured the amount of salt on her skin, and they knew.

Devastating news because at that time, life expectancy for CF was mid 20s. It’s up to 36 now. The research and treatment continue to improve.” Since that day, the healthcare siege has been constant, relentless, expensive — but also, at times, fun.

“The medical maintenance began immediately with two lunch treatments per day,” Ken says. “We had these small rubber cups, used to call ’em bongos. Alexa would do her nebulizers (inhaling devices), and we’d do the bongos. We’d lay her on the floor, beat on her chest, beat on her back, put her up on our legs and ankles, beat on her sides, you know, play bongos, for 20 minutes. It was like playtime.

She didn’t know how sick she was, watching Sesame Street in her footsie pajamas.”

Ken earned his undergrad degree at Rutgers. Michelle went to Seton Hall Law School, where Ken then received his MBA. They married in 1990, and Alexa was born in New Jersey in April 1994. At age 7, Alexa showed physical signs it was time to relocate. “She had a propensity for mold, which caused mucus to

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build up in her lungs,” Ken says. “One of my oldest friends is rock guitarist Ricky Medlocke, from Blackfoot and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

He has bronchiectasis, a nongenetic form of CF that overproduces mucus. He lost a lung … (he) advised us to either get to the beach or to the desert. I couldn’t afford the Jersey Shore back then. So being that I was working with musicians and entertainers, Las Vegas was the call. New Year’s Eve 2001, three months after 9/11, I moved my music management/consulting business (here).”

Things were okay for Alexa for a few years, until her freshman year of high school. “I started suffering from this chronic cough.

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The following year, in 10th grade, my doctor put me on IV antibiotics for the first time.

I’d stay on ’em for three weeks, get off, and a couple days later, start coughing again.

I’d also developed these horrible allergies.

My numbers were off-the-chart bad. I was completely out of whack. High school was really tough, I was sick all the time. Missed a lot of classes. ... CF is weird, it changes, morphs into different ailments. I don’t have that chronic coughing and allergy issue anymore, but I’ve got other stuff.”

Alexa’s life ebbs and flows like any other twentysomething ’s, only with a couple of daily priorities that require absolute vigilance. “My everyday treatment is pretty intense,” she says. Like a treatment vest made especially for CF patients. Imagine doing this daily: “I put the vest part on for 30 minutes. It squeezes and shakes you, moving the mucus out of the bronchial tubes so you can cough it up. Every five minutes, it’ll turn off and you have to change the settings. Vibration gets harder and faster.

This and the nebulizer I do twice a day, every day. … I inhale four different medicines every morning. … In the middle of the day before I work out, I do just the nebulizer to open my airwaves. I like Pilates and indoor cycling for cardio but have to take two Advil before because my lungs hurt.”

Thanks to Dad’s business, Alexa has several famous “uncles,” such Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider (a Vegas resident), and Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer Steven Tyler. And despite her health challenges, she’s landed a couple of interesting gigs. In 2017, as personal assistant for Aerosmith manager Larry Rudolph, she was tasked to do research for Steven Tyler, who was studying to become an ordained minister. “Larry wanted Steven to marry him and his fianceé, Jennifer,” she recalls. “So I went online and studied about marriage certificates and ordination. I also booked travel, ran errands, took the dogs to the groomers, stuff like that. It was a cool job.” When Alexa was 12, another loving “uncle,” Barry Manilow, hosted two CF benefits on her behalf. He even brought her onstage to duet on “I Can’t Smile Without You.” “My dad has sent that YouTube clip to a thousand people,” she laughs.

As the family goes about its business — Michelle and Alexa manage an essential oil business, Leah is a hostess at Honey Salt, Kevin graduates from UNLV in May, and Ken is helping secure many of those high-profile Strip residencies — Alexa is taking life one breath at a time.

“I have 40 percent lung function right

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now,” she says. “It’s hard to have a social life with this disease. I wasn’t really mindful when I was younger, mostly frustrated, angry, and depressed at being sick all the time. I never went out. When I got older, part of maturing was that I truly began to understand CF and all its components.

There’s nothing like feeling better. Good enough to, like, go out to a movie. I am

interested in seeing the first ever CFthemed motion picture, Five Feet Apart, which is opening this month. I really liked The Fault in Our Stars and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. Hollywood is good at raising awareness on important life-and-death issues. Right?”

A Hollywood happy ending would be sweet, too. ✦

Bars of Hope FIVE | D O I N G G O O D

Thanks to the nonprofit Clean the World, the Strip’s discarded hotel soap helps prevent disease worldwide BY

I

John M. Glionna

t’s midday on a sunny Monday as Paul Brady pulls into a side lot at Caesars Palace, but he’s not heading anywhere near the valet parking guys. Instead, he maneuvers his lumbering delivery truck to a busy back-end loading dock, ready to make his regular pickup — a decidedly unheralded event that in its own small way is helping to make the world a healthier place.

As he walks into the bowels of the hotel-casino complex, a worker passes, pushing a cartload of dirty laundry. Brady grabs two large bins of hotel castoffs and rolls them toward his truck. Inside are bars of soap, some barely used, others that haven’t even been unwrapped. There are individual-sized bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and lotion, many of them 80 percent full. Brady takes them all, the logo on his lime-green T-shirt offering a hint of his task. Soap Squad, it reads.

Brady, 52, is part of an Orlando-based humanitarian effort called Clean the World, which for a decade has collected used hotel soap and body-care products for

S O A P : C H R I S T O P H E R S M I T H ; H O C K E Y : A P P H OT O / T O N Y G U T I E R R E Z

distribution in 147 countries — a way to help raise cleanliness standards of impoverished regions around the globe.

Since the Vegas facility opened in 2012, drivers like Brady have made rounds at as many as 47 local hotels on and off the Strip. Each month, Brady collects 12,000 pounds of bar soap and liquids otherwise destined for the trash bin. The material is then trucked to a 12,000-square-foot warehouse on Valley View Boulevard, where it is sanitized, recycled, and repackaged with a cheery Clean the World logo.

Worldwide, millions of poor children under the age of 5 — as many as 16,000 a day, Clean the World officials say — die from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea that the World Health Organization says are mostly preventable with proper daily hygiene.

Every time Brady hops up into his truck, the longtime Las Vegas resident, who loves pro wrestling and plays bass guitar in his spare time, feels unusually empowered. “Too many kids are dying every year from not being able to eat with clean hands,” he says. “They eat germs, and they get sick and quickly die from diarrhea and other diseases.

This program has been able to reduce many of those deaths. We’re having an impact, and it starts right here on the loading docks of these hotels.”

The effort was spearheaded by Shawn Seipler, a onetime e-commerce employee whose job took him nationwide. One night, while staying at a hotel in Minneapolis, a thought occurred: What happens to that bar of soap he’s used only once?

He called the front desk and asked. The answer shocked and angered him: All the hotel’s unused soap was thrown away.

Seipler began researching what was then an untold tale of needless waste in America. He discovered that 1 million bars of soap are thrown out each day by hotels and travelers in the U.S. The worldwide figure soars to 5 million. He learned about rebatching, the process of refurbishing used soap. Then Seipler developed a plan that would change his life and those of millions of others.

Along with a small group of friends and family, Seipler began a shoestring effort in a one-car garage in Orlando. With soap collected from a few local hotels, he learned how to melt down, sanitize, and repackage the leavings into an entirely new product.

“In the beginning, they used potato peelers to cut up the old bars,” says Sandie Beauchamp, the vice president of marketing for Clean the World.

“They hand-cut the new soap into bars.”

The idea has grown from there. Since 2009, Clean the World has sent 48 million bars of renovated soap to foreign countries and to homeless shelters across the U.S. The company has expanded from its first reprocessing plant in Orlando to launch others in Las Vegas, the Netherlands, and the Dominican Republic, usually in or near

6

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THE GOLDEN KNIGHTS ARE BACK IN THE PLAYOFFS. HOW FAR CAN THEY GO? THE VEGAS GOLDEN KNIGHTS

a combined 65 points in 137 playoff

didn’t just shred the expan-

games, they will have to produce on

sion-franchise record book during

the ice, and lead in the locker room.

their inaugural season, they wrote a

AND THE BIG GUNS. It’s not fair

second edition. But here’s the thing

to say that two players who rank

about wildly successful inaugural

second and third on the team in

years: They’re usually followed by

goals and points scored experienced

the dreaded sophomore slump.

a sophomore slump. But, except

And, sure enough, after the

for brief flashes, centers Johnathan

rookie-season Knights finished

Marchessault and Eric Karlsson

with 51 victories, 109 points, and

haven’t looked the way they did last

a Pacific Division title, the sopho-

year when they shouldered most of

more-season Knights were, by late

the Knights’ scoring burden. If Vegas

March, on pace for about 46 wins,

is going to successfully defend its

98 points, and a third-place finish

Western Conference championship,

in the Pacific. Still good enough for

these two will need to deliver like

a playoff berth, making the Knights

they did in last year’s playoffs, when

the first modern professional

they combined for 15 goals and 21

sports franchise to qualify for the postseason in its first

assists in 20 games.

THE POWER OF FLOWER.

two years of existence.

The biggest cliché in

Can this team make

playoff hockey is,

another deep playoff

“You’ll only go as far

run? Yes. But a lot

as a hot goaltender

needs to go right,

will take you.” But it’s a

including:

cliché because it’s true.

THE YOUNG GUNS MUST SHINE. Specifically, 23-yearold defenseman Shea Theodore

Thankfully for Knights fans, they have future Hall of Famer Marc-Andre Fleury

and 22-year-old right-winger Alex

between the pipes. While he was a

Tuck. Both were huge contributors

brick wall last spring, his second sea-

this season after coming up big in

son was more solid than spectacular.

last year’s playoffs. Beyond their

But if anyone knows how to elevate

impressive skills — Theodore had a

his game in the playoffs, it’s the own-

career-best 33 points through mid-

er of three Stanley Cup rings.

March, while Tuck had a team-lead-

DEFEND THE FORTRESS. Any

ing 48 — the duo’s energy and

visiting player or coach will tell

young legs will be vital this spring.

you: T-Mobile Arena is the most

THE HIRED GUNS, TOO. Most

intimidating venue in the NHL. It’s

general managers whose teams

going to need to be. Unlike last

reach the Stanley Cup finals would

year, every series this spring likely

hesitate to tinker with the roster. Not

will begin on the road. That means

George McPhee. He was aggressive

each game at T-Mobile — where the

in the offseason and at the trade

Knights were 58-23-6 through their

deadline, and the result was three

first 87 regular-season and playoff

talented veterans: Max Pacioretty,

games — will be a must-win.

Paul Stastny, and Mark Stone. With

Matt Jacob

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7 C U LT U R E

COMMON GROUND A new Nevada Arts Council program aims to cross the state’s urban/rural divide

CLEAN MACHINE At the Clean the World facility, products such as soap, lotion, and shampoo are sorted (top); the soap is shredded and sanitized (bottom right), and then reformed into new bars (far right).

THE NOTION THAT THERE ARE TWO very different Nevadas is most often represented politically, as a map depicting a giant wedge of red anchored by two pools of dense blue that denote the areas around Las Vegas and Reno. But beneath that map is a more structural dichotomy: Nevada has one of the nation’s most pronounced urban-rural divides. This has implications not only politically and economically, but artistically and culturally.

Exploring the latter is the point of a new initiative by the Nevada Arts Council. Modeled after a similar program in Kentucky, the Basin and Range Exchange will be a yearlong project bringing together some 50 civic leaders and representatives of arts organizations around the state — from Winnemucca as well as Las Vegas, from Ely as well as Reno. Their first get-together will be April 23-24 at the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah. (Until that first meeting, the council isn’t releasing the names of attendees.)

Participants will talk about shared concerns, the resources they do and don’t have, as well as what they do well. Not on the agenda? Red vs blue, says Michelle Patrick, a community arts development specialist with the arts council.

“Everyone is coming together because they love art,” she says. So they won’t spend a lot of time discussing biases. “They love what they do,” she adds.

“It speaks volumes about their commonality.”

Anyway, there are issues faced by urban and rural presenters. Cliquishness, for instance. “They’re both concerned about how to break down silos.” Other areas of potential overlap include logistics — parking, building access, entrance fees — as well as content.

Attendees will team up on projects to address common issues or take advantage of complementary strengths; several of the more promising ideas will be funded. “We don’t want a vanity project,” she says.

“We’re interested in impact.” Scott Dickensheets

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cities that are home to numerous hotels.

Clean the World funds its efforts by charging $6 per room annually to coordinate the collection of unwanted products from more than 5,000 U.S. clients, about 20 percent of the nation’s hotels, officials say.

The list includes all Walt Disney properties, most of the Las Vegas Strip, and dozens of hotels in New York and Chicago.

Some foreign hotels participate, too. Placards in each hotel room inform guests that their soap will have a second life.

The hotel fees are used to train housekeeping staff, repurpose the soap, and pay administrative costs. The Clean the World Foundation works with NGOs and charities such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army to distribute the repurposed soap in recipient countries.

The program has received support from U.S. health experts, such as the Centers for Disease Control. “This is a practical approach to provide a needed resource to mothers and children at very low cost, with the goal of reducing disease and improving health,” says Rob Quick, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC. Aaron Weatherly, manager of Clean the World’s Las Vegas facility, says the local rebatching process involves 7,000 volunteers each year. Much of the reprocessed soap is packaged into various hygiene kits that include toothbrushes, toothpaste, and hand sanitizer, which are sent to homeless shelters around the world.

The plastic bags are specialized for men, women, veterans, and children, whose kits include a Band-aid, crayons, and a coloring book. Volunteers often write notes with such messages as “We believe in you,” “You are amazing,” and “You are not alone.” The Las Vegas facility also uses the kits in a portable shower unit with four individual stalls it created to visit locations frequented by the homeless around the valley.

Brady said the soapy showers improve people’s quality of life. “You see these people after they walk out from taking a shower,” he says. “They feel better. They look better.”

On a recent weekday, the warehouse is buzzing with activity. Back from

D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

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CHRISTOPHER SMITH

As a member/owner, rates are better at non-profit Clark County Credit Union. We’ve been helping southern Nevadans, no matter their credit history, get the cars they want for over 65 years. his pickup run, Brady drives a forklift to move mammoth containers of used soap that weigh 1,000 pounds each.

At a nearby sorting table, a group of student volunteers works to separate soap and other bath products, dropping them into tubes that empty into containers on the floor below, like fishermen sorting their catch.

On one wall was a map of the world with the flags of different countries that receive the donations. On another wall was a poster showing an impoverished child, along with the phrase, “Cleanliness Should Not Be a Luxury.”

The entire warehouse smells much like a perfume factory, with its overwhelming fragrance of scented soap as Weatherly demonstrates how the rebatching process works with soap products that arrive from as far away as Texas.

After the soap is separated, workers wearing breathing masks load it into a series of machines, where it is ground down and sanitized. At this point, it looks like grated mozzarella cheese. Then it’s loaded into a third machine that adds water and shapes the hardening soap into individual-sized bars. Finally, the new soap slabs are machine-stamped with Clean the World’s logo and stacked into boxes for shipping.

As the machines roar and the soap undergoes its humanitarian metamorphosis, the 42-year-old Weatherly looks on like a proud sports coach. “I’m not just here collecting a paycheck,” he says proudly. “I’m here on a mission that’s helping to save lives — to supply the world’s poor and its children with the soap they need to prevent hygiene-related illnesses.” He bends down to pick up a piece of pre-recycled soap. “That’s why I get out of bed in the morning, to live out that mission.” ✦

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N

Missing the Bus

evadans who watch public lands legislation may have ref lexively joined in the near-universal applause that accompanied the recent passage of the Natural Resources Management Act. After all, it was truly bipartisan legislation, clearing the U.S. Senate 92-8 on February 12, and the House of Representatives 363-63 two weeks later, then earning President Trump’s signature in March. It was a rare environmental win in the Trump era, yet one that appeased many other factions as well, from hunters to rural developers. And it was widely hailed as a “sweeping” package of bills that had something for everyone, from sea to shining sea. … Except Nevada? Notwithstanding two technical fixes to pre-existing land management plans — one in Lincoln County and the other in Storey County — there was nothing in the omnibus bill’s 265 pages that was specifically for the Silver State. It would designate 1.3 million acres of wilderness for protection in California, New Mexico,

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EIGHT | E N V I R O N M E N T

Why does a big public lands bill have so little for Nevada?

BY

Heidi Kyser

Oregon, and Utah; zero in Nevada. It would create five new national monuments across the country, yet do nothing to fix the limbo that Gold Butte National Monument has been stuck in since former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended it for ambiguous reductions in December 2017. And it would set aside land for solar development and an airport expansion in La Paz County, Arizona, and Custer County, South Dakota, but not take up the land-management plan

that Clark County proposed last year.

Why? It’s complicated. The main factors, insiders say, are as follows.

Because Senator Harry Reid is no longer in office. This is, perhaps, the most tempting explanation, as it invokes a House of Cards-style political intrigue in which Nevada falls out of favor following the retirement of its most powerful politician.

The truth is less romantic. Pull up a Nevada map that’s color-coded by jurisdiction/ownership, and you’ll see that the privately owned and locally managed splotches stand out as surprisingly small compared to the vast swaths of federal land, which account for more than 80 percent of the state. Clark County, home to morre than two-thirds of the state’s residents, has visibly less developable land than Northern Nevada.

During Reid’s 34 years in Washington, he pursued a deliberate plan to expand the land available for development around Las Vegas while balancing that with the need for conservation, says Bret Birdsong,

D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

a UNLV law professor who was an Interior Department deputy solicitor under President Obama.

“Reid would go through, county by county,” Birdsong says, “and look at public lands bills in a comprehensive way.”

Although there are plenty of Nevada congressmen and women who subscribe to Reid’s view, several are fairly new to their offices, and none has, so far, pursued this issue with the same organized vigor as King Harry.

A N D R E A S S E LT E R / U N S P L A S H . C O M

Because legislating is hard, slow, and tedious. Birdsong describes omnibus public lands bills like the current one — and the last one, which passed in 2009 — using a very Schoolhouse Rock analogy: Imagine a bus that’s going around picking up passengers.

In order for a bill to get on the bus, everyone has to agree it’s ready, and all its details have to be worked out. Nevada may have missed the bus due to the simple reason that it had no bills ready to go. “(The measures in the act) are bills that have been in the process for years, a decade in one case,” says Jocelyn Torres, Nevada program director for the Conservation Lands Foundation. “Once something has been introduced, it takes a couple years to get it together. It’s a long process. I think this package is just clearing the queue of bills that have been sitting in Congress.

And because they’re so hard to move on their own, doing them as a package made sense.”

Torres doesn’t see the lack of Nevada-specific legislation as a problem; on the contrary, she says, having people’s desks cleared of lingering pieces of old legislation frees them up to consider new issues. Like Gold Butte, say, or the Clark County public lands proposal.

Because Gold Butte is Gold Butte. Gold Butte National Monument can’t catch a break. Just when all the big stakeholders got behind bicameral federal legislation to make it a national conservation area, the Bundy standoff turned it into a lightning rod for Sagebrush Rebellion 2.0. Just when it looked like Obama had saved the day by using the Antiquities Act to declare it a national monument, Trump was elected, Zinke was appointed, and Gold Butte was under the microscope, along with many other protected areas.

With the monument in limbo, and former Senator Dean Heller on the opposition’s side, it wasn’t a likely candidate for the kind of bipartisan bill that made it onto the bus, so to speak.

But supporters are busy on a workaround, legislation that would solidify national monuments as declared through the Antiquities Act. Because Clark County ’s proposal wasn’t ready. Last summer, Clark County had a public hearing on its plan to withdraw more than 30,000 acres of public land around the periphery of Las Vegas for development. The plan — which was introduced under the guise of potential federal legislation, in the hope it would be picked up and introduced by someone from Nevada’s congressional delegation — drew wide criticism. Clark County didn’t make an expert available to comment on the status of the plan, but observers believe the plan simply missed the bus this time around.

Conservation-minded Nevadans can take heart in this: They, along with all Americans, did get something in the Natural Resources Management Act: the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This 55-year-old program provides for the creation of public spaces using funds from offshore oil and gas extraction. It has benefitted every state (and many counties) with cultural and recreational resources ranging from city parks to national parks. It expired in September 2018, and the legislation to restart it had been languishing since. The current omnibus bill includes a provision to permanently reauthorize it, though funding is a separate hurdle that’s expected to be tackled later. Boulder City, which had applied to use LWCF funds for a railroad museum, will be among the first in line to apply. ✦

NINE | A P R I L I S P O E T R Y M O N T H

Any Old Day Across the table We take our hands together— For no one knows the hour or the day.

Still, a summer morning gathers strength due west.

Here is our desert city, tied to a crane-necked lover Whose shut eyes twitch with visions of the good life.

This Las Vegas, her blue angel in the bone yard; Veiled tranquil gaze, no longer in need Of rehearsal. Svelte mastery, Like a shadow cast by momentum, May be found leaning against faded ironworks, Venerated plaster, chips of paint.

Outside we sit in sight of towering reflecting pools, Like magnifying glass. We don’t wait for fires To catch, but interlace fingers and ask— How will we answer The relentless bribe Offered us today?

Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña APRIL 2019

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R E TA I L T H E R A P Y

M ODERN TECH, THROWBACK STYLE It’s back to the future with products that combine modern technology with retro cool BY

Scott Dickensheets and Stephanie Madrid

APRIL 2019

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1. RECORD RUNNER (previous page) This cute little fella — totes adorbs, as they put it in old-timey times — drives in circles on your LPs, pumping the music through a Bluetooth speaker. $79.99, stokyoworld.com 2. RETRO SPEAKER Play the latest sounds through a speaker that harks back to the halcyon days when families gathered around the radio. $135, muzenaudio.com 3. POLAROID SOCIALMATIC CAMERA Take instant photos just like your grandparents did when they were hipsters. $299, polaroid.com 4. GRAMOPHONE SPEAKER This lithe beaut, which plays music from your phone, recalls the classic Victrola; all that’s missing is a digital dog staring at it. $279, gramovox.com 5. QUERKYWRITER KEYBOARD Click, click, click!

Feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald tapping out The Pretty Good Gatsby with this throwback keyboard for your tablet. $249, querkywriter.com

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D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

Seeing Double EXHIBIT

The eye-opening history of stereoscopic photography

T H I N K B A C K T O the Viewmaster 3-D photo toy you surely clicked through as a kid; then look at the item below, one of the earliest iterations of a 3-D viewer, more than a century old. Now, imagine the narrative of technological advancement that connects the two. That’s one compelling facet of the exhibit Personal Space: Stereoscopic Nevada at the Nevada Humanities office in ArtSquare (April 4-May 29; reception and talk April 4, 7p). Perhaps more surprising, according to photographer Bryan McCormick, who spent two years assembling the instruments and images on display, is the local historical story entwined with the physical one. “Each distinct period of technological change in devices has corresponded with changes in how Nevada was seen by the world; from Western wilderness, mining-boom state, the engineering marvel of the Hoover Dam, tourist destinations, and the spectacle of Las Vegas.” Although the title Personal Space alludes to the intimacy of the 3-D viewing experience — “It’s like your own private theater,” McCormick says — it’s the complexities of historical depiction that he finds most fascinating. However purely documentary 19th-century stereoscopic photos may seem in retrospect, they were largely promotional, commissioned by railroads, and sometimes fraudulent (local indigenous people photographed wearing the dress of plains Indians to make the images more popular). Fortunately, McCormick intends to spend a lot of time in the gallery, explaining these intricacies and demonstrating the equipment to visitors. For more, see nevadahumanities.org Scott Dickensheets

E N T E R TA I N M E N T | CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

THEN AND NOW

For those with long memories, the Excalibur’s new show, Fuerza Bruta, will bring to mind a (short-lived) blast from the past BY

Mike Weatherford

M

illennials, you will hear it said, don’t want to sit and watch a show. They want to be the show. When someone in casino entertainment says that, I think of De La Guarda.

Show producers have chased an elusive fusion of nightclub culture and “immersive theater” since late 2000, when they had that very thing sitting out back of The Rio. The Argentinian troupe De La Guarda brought an edgy mix of acrobatics and abstract theater to its warehouse theater. Performers climbed the walls around the audience and swung over their heads on harnesses. Sometimes, audience members got scooped up and carried along for the ride. Eventually, it erupted into a big dance party.

“If you could have just waited another five years,” I tell co-creator Diqui James now, and he laughs.

“I hope that’s not going to happen now,” he says at a press preview of his new venture, Fuerza Bruta, a direct descendent of De La Guarda that’s now ensconced in a big top in front of the Excalibur. “I hope the young clubbing audiences are going to notice now that we have a show for them.”

Whether or not they turn out, the Electric Daisy Carnival crowd will at least understand Fuerza Bruta. Electronic dance music culture and the wordless antics of Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group provide a context that didn’t exist in October APRIL 2019

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puter-synced colors inside the big top, which seems bigger inside than it does from Las Vegas Boulevard, dwarfed by The Excalibur.

And now we have the vocabulary to describe it. The opening sequence? “Cirque meets Blue Man.” Five characters in white powder wigs and red Revolutionary War waistcoats, pounding drums on a two-story Hollywood Squares scaffold, become a fusion of those Las Vegas staples. Later, giant billowing fabric rolls out over our heads, before inflating into a laser-projection dome. If this troupe hadn’t waited 18 years to come back to town, we might not have seen a similar effect in Cirque’s Love.

But Fuerza Bruta sports at least one thing we haven’t seen: a clear, above-ground swimming pool. Way above ground, as we peer through clear Lucite to see the women of the 12-member troupe splash and slide above us — their writhing silhouettes a James Bond credit sequence come to life, as the pool eventually lowers to within touching distance of the audience.

De La Guarda was “more like throwing

C O U R T E S Y F U E R Z A B R U TA

But some minor babysitting 2000. Casino shows then skewed WATER emergency — the specifics are lost toward variety performers updatWORLD Fuerza to time — called me away, and I had ing the classic-Vegas tradition — Bruta’s to come back the next night. And Wayne Newton, the Scintas, Clint performers that night? The warehouse space Holmes — and were light on splash in the transparent was nearly empty and seemed chilly avant-garde theater that whipped swimming and creepy; more like a haunted up indoor wind and rain storms to pool. house attraction where you were punch the symbolism of Argentina’s trapped in the middle. Two young repressive military junta and “dirty Asian women shielded themselves war” of the 1970s. behind their dates. No surprise the show Studio 54 had staked out ground for caran just 10 months. sino-based nightclubs. But musically, the (The U.S. partners managed to recover.

MGM Grand nightspot was still old-school Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller were disco and radio pop. It would be a few years fresh from the Broadway hit Rent and would before the likes of LAX and Pure would later bring Avenue Q to Wynn Las Vegas. wrench the club scene from the baby boomSeller would go on to produce a little show ers and hand it over to star DJs working in called Hamilton.) their own genre of EDM. This time, opening-night guests of FuerDe La Guarda got off to a rip-roaring start za Bruta were treated to Bud Light and big on opening night. The vodka was flowing, plastic cups brimming with House Wine. literally, through a moonshiner’s still coil, But no one was intimidated. If De La Guarfrozen in a block of ice. When the first perda was lo-fi black-and-white, Fuerza Bruta former burst through what turned out to is digital Technicolor. Technology is compact be a drop ceiling made of paper, the well-lunow, and the new show explodes with combricated crowd howled in rapture.

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our bodies into the air,” says James, the creative and artistic director. Now, “the action comes from the machinery. ...

The water moves the performer, or there they are here in this huge dome which inflates, and the performer plays with it and the audience at the same time.

We still have this primitive language, combining with technology of nowadays.”

The audience is invited to shift around as playing areas transform within the space, following the struggle of a white disco-suited everyman (Bruno Lopez Aragon) pushing his way along a treadmill to get ... somewhere. Gone are the menacing echoes of military terrorism.

This seems more of a Pink Floyd “Us and Them” attempt to break free of the confines of everyday life. Our white-suited Bee Gee eventually smashes through a wall of banker’s boxes and takes flight. Young people who may represent office drones pulverize a similar stack of banker’s boxes to unleash confetti, turning their work space into a dance floor. “Everything is political,” James says, “but what we do is not specifically political.”

Another tie to De La Guarda is the brief running time: The whole thing’s over in an hour. And if it seems a little “clubby” for a 7 p.m. start, there’s no testing of fractured attention spans. And no question that it’s immersive. The finale offers the willing a chance to dance in the shower of a rain curtain.

And while this invited-night crowd represented a vast age range of industry folk and “influencers,” the biggest change since 2000 was universal, and constant. Millennials may or may not want to be this show, but they — and a lot of others — certainly want to film it. I can’t remember how many BlackBerrys I saw at De La Guarda. But even if it’s funny that an experience isn’t real these days unless it’s captured and shared, the battalion of hoisted phones suggests Fuerza Bruta should never have to pay for social media. If De La Guarda struggled to explain itself — to answer the inevitable question of “What’s it all about?” — those fielding the same questions about Fuerza Bruta can simply redirect inquiries to YouTube.✦

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FILM

The Accidental Documentarian

Pulling stories from serendipitous encounters, Robin Greenspun’s films — including the new one debuting at the Las Vegas Film Festival — shed light on unseen lives BY

Josh Bell

“I

04 28 32 | D E S E R T

LAS VEGAS FILM FESTIVAL through May 5. Various venues. lvff.com

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have basically lucked into every film that I’ve made,” says Robin Greenspun, whose latest documentary, The Zen Speaker: Breaking the Silence, premieres at this year’s Las Vegas Film Festival. A longtime fixture in local media and philanthropy, Greenspun embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker with 2015’s Semicolon: The Adventures of Ostomy Girl, telling the story of Dana Marshall-Bernstein’s struggle with Crohn’s disease. That film came about after a discussion between Greenspun and her friend Cari Marshall, Dana’s mother, who made an offhand comment about following her daughter around with a camera. Greenspun turned it into a feature film. The impetus for Greenspun’s second film, 2017’s Are You Really My Friend?, was a similarly serendipitous conversation with artist Tanja Hollander, whose Facebook-inspired photo series is the film’s main focus. “You open your mouth at the right or wrong time, depending on how you look at it, and that’s what happens,” Greenspun says. “All of a sudden you’re making documentaries.”

Greenspun was inspired to work on The Zen Speaker after seeing local political activist and business consultant Amy Ayoub speak at a luncheon, discussing her experiences as a victim of sex trafficking nearly 40 years ago.

“To say the least, I was blown away,” Greenspun says. “I just felt like this is a story that people need to hear about.

Because when you think of people being trafficked, Amy Ayoub is not the person you think of.” Greenspun reached out to Ayoub on Facebook, PHOTOGRAPH

Aaron Mayes

M AT H E W S : S Y B E A N / U N I V E R S I T Y O F P U G E T S O U N D ; S T E I N : W I K I C O M M O N S

D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

and the two started discussing the possibility of turning Ayoub’s story into a documentary film. “It took us a long time to really talk through the direction that this film was going to go in,” Greenspun says. “And it took a long time for her to decide how much of her story she wanted to tell.”

Working with her regular co-producer and editor Chris DeFranco, Greenspun crafted a film that addresses a larger social issue through one woman’s story. “It’s a personal story about Amy, and about what she has been able to do to find her purpose in life in spite of everything that she went through,” Greenspun says. She hopes that, like Semicolon (which received extensive distribution on the educational circuit), The Zen Speaker can open audience’s eyes about a subject many people are not aware of.

“There are wonderful opportunities for people to see this, to really get an understanding (that) this is not just something that happens overseas,” she says.

The film’s journey will begin at LVFF, where it will join another documentary with local connections, Sundance favorite Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary. This year the festival returns to venues Downtown, along with the Brenden Theatres at the Palms, and once again partners with CineVegas, the now-dormant festival that Greenspun helped found and run from 1998 to 2009. The CineVegas name has been incorporated as a brand within LVFF, and former CineVegas programmer Mike Plante serves as LVFF’s captain of strategy, while Greenspun remains CineVegas president. “It’s this ethereal thing out there that people still talk about fondly,” she says of CineVegas.

“We’re dedicated to not letting that go away.”

After three films, Greenspun is firmly established as a documentarian, and whether she’ll luck into any more stories, she’s deeply satisfied with the ones she’s told so far. “The women involved in the films that I’ve been making are so empowering,” she says. “Their bravery for allowing me to tell their stories (is) pretty astonishing. I don’t know if I could do it with my own story, but I am very grateful that they allow me to do it with theirs.” ✦

THE

Hot Seat (Lecture)

(Theater)

COLIN POWELL’S SPEECH

OUR TOWN MAJESTIC REPERTORY

UNLV’S BARRICK MUSEUM

(Opera)

27

ARTSQUARE THEATRE

If you know your Lost Generation, you know that the number 27 refers to 27 Rue du Fleurus, the address in Paris of American expat writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. It’s where they hosted their mythical salons, through which trooped most of the cultural figures of the mid20th century.

This is the milieu of the five-act 27, created by composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek. Jointly produced by Opera Las Vegas and Cockroach Theatre, it’s directed

by Daz Weller.

April 26-May 5, various times, $25, cockroach theatre.com

We know what you’re thinking: Not that creaky Thornton Wilder classic! As it happens, that’s also what Majestic Rep artistic director Troy Heard is thinking.

Listen up: “Our Town is traditionally presented on a proscenium stage with minimal scenery, which was groundbreaking 80 years ago,” he says. “Majestic’s immersive approach is to convert our space into a small-town social hall, with the cast in contemporary clothing sharing a potluck supper with the audience as the story unfolds all around them.” And if you get a post-October 1 vibe from it, too, that’s not unintentional. April

This is a talk about a speech — specifically, Colin Powell’s 2003 address to the U.N. Security Council, in which he insisted that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.”

This, infamously, turned out not to be true, to Powell’s lasting chagrin. Jeffrey J. Matthews, a professor in the business and leadership program at the University of Puget Sound, discusses Powell’s speech, its failures, and ramifications. April 4, 7:30p, free, unlv.edu/calendar

11-May 5, various times, $35, majesticrepertory. com

(Art)

PAIUTE EXHIBIT CLARK COUNTY MUSEUM

The full exhibit title is The Beauty of Purpose: Utilitarian Arts of the Paiute People, and it neatly describes the show’s dynamic: “The baskets, arrowheads, stone artifacts, and other native Paiute crafts that are admired for their beauty and artistry today … were created for specific uses.” To what was once pure function, time and cultural change have now assigned aesthetic values. April 5-August 12 (opening reception April 5 at 5p), clarkcountynv.gov/museum

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Unmatched Academic Results

THE

Hot Seat (Music)

UNLV JAZZ CONCERT CLARK COUNTY LIBRARY

Spring is a perfect time to submerge yourself in jazz, and, for quality, it’s hard to beat the groovin’, swingin’, beboppin’, hard-playing students of UNLV’s nationally recognized jazz program. April 10, 7p, free, Clark County Library, lvccld.org

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This is the concluding event of The Believer Festival — the only ticketed event of the festival that wasn’t sold out at press time. Look at this lineup: comedian Tig Notaro,

worldly journalist Masha Gessen, TV creator Jill Soloway (above), Black Lives Matter co-founder Janaya Khan, and more.

The theme of this year’s festival is “La Frontera,” and this promises to be an evening exploring borders of many kinds. April 27, 8p, $15, believer festival.org

Hanif Abdurraqib The acclaimed poet and cultural critic will offer “Mixtape,” a multivalent talk and performance about music, backed up by a band of local musicians. April 8, 7p, free, the Writer’s Block, RSVP at blackmountaininstitute.org

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Yukon Pizza has a special 122-year-old ingredient BY

A

Sonja Swanson

lex White grew up with some pretty special breakfasts: Pancakes and waffles made with his family’s heirloom sourdough starter, passed down through five generations from his great-great-grandpa Gilbert, whom White says started it in the Yukon Territory in 1827. When White left home in Reno to attend UNLV for film school in 2007, his dad handed him his very own Mason jar of the family sourdough. And now White is using that sourdough for pizza.

It all started in college, when White would host casual pizza parties for friends, tossing in his sourdough starter. Then he had his first taste of Neapolitan-style pizza at Settebello in Henderson. “It was this ‘aha’ moment,” he says. “I want to actually try to figure out

how to do this the best that you can do it.”

A few years later, he says, he got to the point where his pizza was what he’d hoped it would be, and Yukon Pizza was born. Today, White hosts frequent pop-ups and catering events around the valley.

A Neapolitan-style pizza is pretty different from your typical New York slice. For one, the crust is very light and thin. “It’s not a crispy style crust; it’s more a wet kind of foldable crust,” White says. The toppings are generally pretty simple, the pizza itself is fairly small (“It’s kind of a personal-size pizza”), and you’ll often find plush, blistery bubbles along the edges from the intense heat of the wood-fired ovens they’re cooked in.

The oven part is key: Wood-fired pizza ovens can reach well into the 900-degree

Information at yukonpizza.com.

EAT THIS NOW: CAULIFLOWER SHAWARMA POTS

Most Las Vegans, I wager, will never taste a pita sandwich from a Cairo food cart. Any of us, however, can order from the Egyptian street food section of POTs’ all-vegan menu. The star of that section is the pita sandwich with a cruciferous vegetable where the chicken should be. The cauliflower gives it meaty bulk. A light dusting of savory breading gives it an earthy crunch. And the labna dressing, salata baladi (like cucumber pico de gallo), and arugula toppings round it out with creamy, peppery crunch. Everything about this dish is perfect, except maybe… the price. It’s not outrageous at $7.99, but that’s with no sides, and the fries — a must-have — are an extra $5.99. Still, if you’re the type who appreciates fresh-baked pita bread and hand-chopped vegetables, you’ll find it well worth the $15 tab. 1745 S. Rainbow Blvd., potslv.com Heidi Kyser

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S H AWA R M A , I C E C R E A M : B R E N T H O L M E S ; P I Z Z A : C O U R T E S Y A L E X W H I T E

Pies with a Past DINING

Fahrenheit range, meaning a Neapolitan pizza will cook to perfection in 90 seconds or less (a Roman-style pizza cooks a little longer at a lower heat). That high-heat bake also means that most home cooks aren’t going to be able to do Neapolitan-style at home.

All of this might sound pretty intense, but there’s more on the list — and there’s even an organization based in Naples that can bestow a VPN (Verace Pizza Napoletana, or “true Neapolitan pizza”) certification on pizzerias that meet their standards.

But for all his pizza prowess, White will never be able to get a VPN certification, thanks to the one ingredient that makes his pizza special: his sourdough starter.

VPN pizzerias must use commercially produced yeast. A sourdough starter, in contrast, contains generations of wild yeast cultivated from the air in a bubbly, gooey mixture. “It’s a little more involved process, and it’s also much more reactive to the environment you’re in,” White says. He’ll make adjustments to the recipe according to the humidity, temperature, and weather.

The starter gives the crust just a hint of sourdough’s tart profile. And in the case of the White family’s sourdough, its 122 years of care and feeding have given it a little something extra.

“It’s pretty hard to find 100-plus-year-old sourdoughs that are as readily available as mine,” White says. “It’s got more maturity to the sourness — some young sourdoughs will be much more punchy, or sour sour.” You get the sense, too, that you’re tasting a little bit of Western history: This is a sourdough that came from a mining camp in the Yukon Territory, weathered an earthquake in Seattle, traveled through San Francisco, L.A., Reno and, now, Las Vegas. Whether you care about the backstory or not, you’re getting a delicious pie: It’s cheese and tomato married on a light and airy crust, overlaid with bright basil and a touch of woodsmoke. You can’t help but think great-great-grandpa Gilbert would approve. ✦

D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

DESSERT

tition separating the prep area

TASTE THE RAINBOW

from the dining area. The smell of vanilla teases you to guess whether its source is baking waffle cones or the candied toppings. In other words, there’s a lot to keep you occupied while you wait for

Rainbow Boulevard, that is, home to a robust group of cool ice cream shops BY

your nitrogen-frozen ice cream to be prepared from scratch.

But your patience will be

Veronica Klash

rewarded, particularly if you’ve selected one of the specialties.

Each Signature Creation

The short stretch of Rainbow Boulevard between the 215 Beltway and Windmill Lane is a smorgasbord of cuisines and cafés. Among them are seven — that’s right, seven — ice cream parlors. The reason they’re all able to coexist is that they offer distinct adventures. In the name of journalistic research, I tried five of them in the span of three days. You’re welcome.

features a balanced mix of creamy, crunchy, and coated.

The Cookie Monster Signature Creation, for example, would do its namesake proud. The blue ice cream base tastes like a chocolate-chip cookie, not cookie dough, an important distinction achieved due to a Ube (purple yam) ice cream at Asia Creamery.

proprietary blend. Science has never tasted this good.

7325 S. Rainbow Blvd., creamistry.com

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APRIL 2019

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38

PROFILE

LIFE AND DEATH (MOSTLY LIFE) The reaping isn’t so grim at Bryan and Dusty Schoening’s Coffinwood, where the custom coffins, hearses, and other deathly touches are really about being more alive BY

Krista Diamond

T

he first questions are always why. Why make custom coffins? Why collect hearses? Why build a pet cemetery in front of your house?

Why do it in Pahrump, a desert outpost best known for its casinos and brothels?

The cynical observer might assume that the inspiration behind Bryan and Dusty Schoening’s business, Coffin It Up, and their home, fittingly called Coffinwood, is something sinister. This was the case with one man who, after hearing about Coffinwood, drove all the way from Texas to tell the couple how sacrilegious their business was.

“He was ready to pick a fight,” Dusty says. “And then we gave him a tour, we answered all his questions, we invited him in. And then he said, ‘I am very sorry.

I had a very bad preformed opinion about you guys.’”

Many visitors to Coffinwood take a similar emotional journey — minus the rage-fueled road trip from Texas — when experiencing the place for the first time.

Located on the way to Death Valley National Park, Coffinwood occupies a patch of dusty land with views of the snowy Spring Mountains. It’s isolated from the Walmart, gas stations, and abandoned castle-themed strip club in the center of town. Beyond the “Coffinwood” sign at the gate, you can see a tidy pet cemetery, white coffins on the porch of a modest home, and 11 hearses glinting in the sun. Maybe it’s the

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SIX FEET WONDERS Left, one of the Schoenings’ hearses, named Doom, in front of their business.

Right, Dusty and Bryan beneath their coffin-shaped gazebo.

middle-of-nowhere location, maybe it’s all the reminders of death, but it’s easy to see why some people react with fear. However, what’s behind that gate isn’t the start of a horror movie; it’s something even more surprising: a place that feels very much alive.

On a warm day in late winter, Bryan and Dusty hold hands as they make their way through the headstones and hearses in their front yard. Dusty has waist-length silver hair and bright eyes that light up when she talks about her gardens of black flowers that will soon bloom. Bryan has a quiet presence and an endearing habit of describing very specific and unusual hobbies in the way one might talk about a love of baseball or going to the movies (“I listen to a lot of haunted-house music,” he’ll later casually mention.).

Before the Schoenings started Coffin It

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographer Name

D E S E R T C O M P A N I O N .V E G A S

Up, before they built Coffinwood, before they moved to Pahrump, they bonded over a love of animals and a shared interest in the macabre.

They met in California at a protest against a circus that was under fire for elephant abuse.

They spent the day demonstrating, then went to a Black Flag concert. Eventually, they married and settled in Oregon.

A carpenter by trade, Bryan built his first coffin years later at the request of his then teenage daughter, who wanted to jump out of one at a Halloween party.

“I found out with that first coffin that they just aren’t that easy to build,” Bryan says.

“It’s not a casket. It’s not a four-sided box.

It’s actually a six-sided hexagonal shape. I got pretty addicted to making those, and I cut that one all by hand. We still have it.”

In 1997, two days after Christmas, Bryan’s parents and the family dog were killed by a drunk driver.

“Everyone has to experience one of those phone calls,” Bryan says. “It throws even the strongest mind into a tailspin. Then you get your parents’ possessions back, and the people who were supposed to have taken care of that stole rings. You find out about human frailty and how disagreeable people can be at times, and it’s an ugly thing. Then you go into the funeral homes and you have a car salesman, basically, who says, ‘Well, we know you can only afford this, but it’s your mom, doesn’t she deserve a little bit better than that?’”

“You’re grieving, you’re out of your mind,

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PROFILE you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re saying,” Dusty says.

“You’re just going to sign the papers and get it done because you have to deal with all these things you didn’t plan on.”

“And then you find out that the hearse is $500,” Bryan adds. “Oh, you want someone to speak at the funeral? That’s another charge. And charge after charge. It’s a money-making industry.” After presiding over his parents’ celebration of life, Bryan found an idea amidst the grief. He and Dusty created Coffin It Up in Oregon in 2000. In 2005, they moved to Pahrump.

“We used to always come here for vacation because we have a habit of living in cold places,” Dusty says. “Our birthdays are in February, so we would take our vacations from work and come to Death Valley for our birthday week. We decided that if we ever moved, we would live here.”

The two purchased a home in Pahrump, set up their business, and created Coffinwood. “We’ve always had something in our front yard no matter where we lived,” Bryan says. “We’ve always had a couple of headstones. You decorate for Halloween and never take it down.”

TOMB IT MAY CONCERN The cemetery at Coffin It Up is home to beloved pets that have passed on — as well as living local wildlife from toads to tortoises.

Since 2005, the property has grown to accommodate the hearses — several of which Dusty enjoys taking on occasional jaunts into Death Valley — as well as a host of coffin-shaped artifacts and a pet cemetery. One gravestone serves as a tribute to Stoney, an elephant that performed at the Luxor but died in 1994 as a result of neglect. Often, Bryan will make coffins for deceased cats, dogs, even fish. The property is also a place where living animals thrive. Coffinwood was certified as a wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation, and is home to a large population of toads, desert iguanas, lizards, and a tortoise. At night, walkways are blackened with hatches of toads devouring bugs.

The heart of the operation is Bryan’s shop, where he creates all the bespoke coffin-themed items — including jewelry, purses, desk clocks, coffee tables, and luggage — along with actual coffins. Lately, many customers are more interested in coffin jewelry and grave-related paintings than full-sized coffins, so there is no average number of coffins that the couple can count on selling each year. These days, the industry has been shifting toward cremation, so Bryan has adapted by learning how to make coff-urns for holding cremains.

“I know how to calculate by the person’s size how big of a coff-urn I need to make,” Bryan says. “I make them out of recycled

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Since establishing Coffin It Up in Pahrump, Bryan has built coffins for Jonathan Davis of Korn, Jeff Hanneman of Slayer, and a number of filmmakers, psychiatrists, and other folks who appreciate the artistry of coffins and coffin-shaped goods. Bryan especially likes working with obsidian. In his spare time, he paints.

“Every artist has a message that they’re trying to put out, and mine is to enjoy the day, to seize the day, as they say,” he says.

“I like to remind people to treasure what they have at the moment.”

Margaret Meyer of Lubbock, Texas recently surprised her husband, Gerry, with one of Bryan’s custom-painted saw blades. At first glance, the image appears as a simple depiction of their home in Tucson, set against a glowing night sky. But if you look closer, you see a coffin on the moon’s surface and skeletal faces rising from the desert shadows. The gift came seven years after the couple visited Coffinwood in 2011.

“We were extremely impressed with both Dusty and Bryan when we met,” says Gerry, who kept in touch with them by email. “They

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go about their daily lives without pretense and are truly kind people.”

Gerry and Margaret hung the saw blade in their living room and consider it their most prized possession. “The coffin is acceptance of death, which leads to the acceptance of life,” Gerry says. “The coffin reminds us that we all share the same fate, so why not help our fellow travelers in this journey to the end instead of wasting our short existence on this Earth with anger and hate?”

Bryan and Dusty aren’t quite sure how most of their customers find them. They have a website, but they don’t advertise, aren’t on social media, and prefer flip-phones to smartphones. Early on in their time in Pahrump, they stopped by the town’s tourism board with brochures and were turned away.

“They looked at it and said, ‘I don’t think this is the kind of message we want to send.

I don’t think this is a good representation of Pahrump,’” Dusty recalls. “So I’m like, all we have here is brothels and casinos, but we’re not desirable? They weren’t really about it, but that’s okay.”

Coffinwood may fly under the radar most of the year in Pahrump, but come Christmas, the home is a popular attraction. Each year,

Bryan creates elaborate light displays set to a punk or metal soundtrack.

“We really don’t celebrate Christmas,” he says. “But I always try to make the Christmas decorations big because that’s when my parents got killed.”

After enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, locals will drive over to watch Bryan begin decorating. Once the holiday season is underway, they’ll return on cool desert evenings to see the spectacle. “We have people lined up on the street,” Dusty says. “They park their cars. They watch the lights. We had people dancing out there this past year.”

Outside of Christmastime, most of Coffinwood’s visitors come from out of state and out of the country. The site is featured in German and Italian tourism books, and is a popular destination for travelers with a predilection for seeking out strange attractions. Occasionally a Coffin It Up customer will order a custom coffin and then embark on a road trip to fetch it. Others stop by just to see the property.

“We have no less than five people a day take pictures under the Coffinwood sign,” Dusty says. “For the area, that’s a lot of people. We have people come in motor

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homes. We have people come dressed up like they know they’re coming here. We’ve had gypsies, gothic people doing photo shoots.”

Coffinwood isn’t just a tourist destination for people who are fascinated by death; it’s also a place for couples beginning a life together. After a pair of self-described vampires from Las Vegas asked Bryan to marry them at a Pahrump funeral home, the phone started ringing. A surprising number of couples were eager to get married by a coffin-maker.

“Per Pahrump, you can only do so many weddings,” Dusty says. “They didn’t want it to turn into a Vegas thing, so they said we had to be a church to perform more than three weddings a year.” In 2005, Bryan and Dusty began the six-month process of establishing Coffinwood as a church. They also built a coffin-shaped gazebo for weddings. In 2006, the Church of the Coffin was legally certified by the State of Nevada.

“They sent people out here and checked us out because they thought we were something nefarious that they didn’t want a part of,” Dusty says. “They found out that we were the opposite of that, so they gave us our license. Now Bryan is a minister and the church is legal.”

The Church of the Coffin performs a handful of weddings a year. Vow renewals are more popular. Prior to the legalization of gay marriage, their church was the site of numerous commitment ceremonies. “It’s a lot of fun,” Bryan says. “A lot of tears.”

Since the birth of Coffinwood, it’s become a place where death isn’t an abstract, scary thing that looms in the future, but a very real, tangible, six-sided object made out of mahogany that serves as a reminder to live. For the Schoenings, that’s what Coffin It Up and Coffinwood are about, and if the individuals who purchase coffins from them are any indication, they’re not alone.

Sitting in her darkened living room, surrounded by life-size skeletons that wait like a congregation in the pews of a church, Dusty remembers a Pahrump man who drove to Coffinwood one day, laid on the floor, and said, “Measure me.”

With the care of a craftsman, Bryan got his exact dimensions and listened as the man described the design he imagined for the vessel that would carry him to the afterlife.

When the appointment was over, the man left, relieved and smiling.

“He was just so happy to take it home and have it,” Dusty says. “Knowing that when the time came, he would be able to be sent off in what he wanted. Exactly, precisely what he wanted.” ✦

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HOME FEELS A D VA N TA G E Whether they showcase art, light, space, or eclectic finds, these four homes celebrate their owners’ passions and pastimes

SPACES WE LOVE Four writers consider their favorite public spaces, from Downtown courtyards to Strip attractions

PATRICK DUFFY

Home Is Where the Art Is

Patrick Duffy’s art-filled two-story home in Spanish Oaks is like three exclamation points in an email: effusive and upbeat, unabashed in its enthusiasm, wanting you to share the joy. We’re not kidding about “art-filled,” either; you will search in vain for a flat

surface, vertical or horizontal, that doesn’t display artwork of one kind or another. In the bathrooms, yes; atop the bedroom dresser, of course; on the wall above the microwave — you needn’t ask.

This is clearly not primarily about a collector showcasing his canny investments. (His eye-roll is almost audible when the subject of “investment” comes up; he likens the prospects of making a killing selling art to winning Powerball.) No, this home is a statement about living amid beauty.

“It really illuminates my day,” he says. “My day begins on a different note because of the way we live than if we lived in a stark minimalist house.”

Duffy’s passion for art isn’t channeled through one easily identified

PHOTOGRAPHY

CHRISTOPHER SMITH

aesthetic. Or two or three. His collecting habits, informed by research but guided by passion, are omnivorous. Name an art style and he’ll have it. “The one thing I always start with is the visceral,” he says of choosing art. “Boom! It hits there first, then it goes up to whatever I have churning upstairs — which these days isn’t much (laughs) — and then the two come together.” As happened recently when he bought 100 watercolors of food APRIL 2019

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by a Reno artist after seeing a few of them in an exhibit. Duffy was floored. “I just

when, where, why, the artist’s name, how

had to live with all of them,” he says. He’s still figuring out where to hang them.

much.” And because it’s an international

He’s arranged his hundreds of pieces in a refreshingly non-hierarchical fashion:

collection, this daily infusion of memories

Just inside the front door, the stairs to the open loft curve past a vivid painting by

whisks him around the world: Belgium,

local artist Wendy Kveck, which overlooks a work by Jim freaking Dine. “Each of

London, Reykjavik, upstate New York, La-

these pieces somehow have to talk to each other,” he says, “even if they’re from

guna Beach. As he says, “I’m able to travel

different neighborhoods, different continents, different time periods.” So, in

through these pieces.” Scott Dickensheets

an upstairs sitting room, a giant hyperrealist painting of a face is engaged in an ongoing energy exchange with a large, neo-expressionist painting of a face across the way; it’s almost palpable. Such arrangements are “absolutely intuitive. And it really only happens at the moment I decide.”

All this dialoguing includes him, too. “When I go down

THREE ELEMENTS MAKE A GREAT PUBLIC SPACE. Enclosure.

to get my coffee, every piece I pass, I remember the

Delight. And a view. While large public spaces are not a Vegas specialty, there are small spots here and there if you know where to look. Top of the list? The courtyard of the Mission-style Fifth Street School. Completed in 1936, the handsome, low-slung

SPACES WE LOVE

schoolhouse (now a cultural center for the city and a design outpost for UNLV) is the gem of Downtown.

Steps from Las Vegas Boulevard, mere blocks from

The Courtyard at the Historic Fifth Street School

Fremont, but worlds apart, the school’s courtyard is a remarkably calm and sensual place. It’s framed by a palette of white walls, red roof tiles and red wood columns; the west wall of the courtyard features a fountain marked with green and blue tile. Bistro lights and trees fill out the rest of the space. Surely it’s the best spot in town for a cozy wedding.

The materials are delightful — rich and textured. It’s a place that

invites you to touch its surfaces and to take a few slow, luxurious breaths. Best of all, no one is trying to sell you anything. There’s nothing to do here but recharge your spirit. You might have to get creative to find a place to sit (the ledge of the fountain, nearby stairs), but the courtyard quickly energizes you.

As for the view? There’s no neon here, true. No majestic mountains or desertscapes. But face east, and the brilliant, louvered canopy of the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse stands tall over the courtyard, a silent sentinel connecting you back to the grandeur of Las Vegas. T.R. Witcher APRIL 2019

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KIM BAVINGTON

A Radiant Place for a Moment of Zen

Kim Bavington’s home is rarely without chaos.

she says before reflecting on a short and

A mother of two and owner of Art Classes for

miserable period of time she spent living in

Kids, her home is a constant conglomeration

Paris. “It’s gray like nine months out of the

of rowdy children and chatting parents.

year, you don’t have any wide-open spaces.

This makes the tranquilizing nature of

I was depressed.”

her indoor atrium, located just feet from

The serene setup is accentuated by a

the entryway, seem all the more incongruous — but it serves a purpose much

bamboo tree, growing tall and healthy de-

more significant than simple aesthetic value. “We live in this super-busy world

spite being in the desert, and by the bright

where we’re never taking down time,” she says. “It’s nice to have a calm, zen

red mobile she bought more than 20 years

environment. People usually come in here to just have a chill-out moment.”

ago, which she is quick to assure isn’t a real

Teaching art to kids, however rewarding, seems like a job lacking many op-

Alexander Calder, though it looks like one.

portunities to achieve that zen. Thankfully, along with the other charms of her

“I’m really passionate about art, but I’m

home — the vintage furniture and idiosyncratic art (including a 10-foot mural

really passionate about architecture,” she

painted by her children) — the atrium’s neutral walls and landscape embody

says. She gestures to the original blueprint

her focus on life: light, color, and space.

of the house, now framed on her wall.

“What I do for a living … light, color, and space are a big part of what I preach,”

Built in 1963, the home’s architects had visions well ahead of their time. The indoor atrium was their way of bringing outdoor elements inside, in a way that opens up the home and merges modern art with classic nature — and now, years later, subliminally brings together Bavington’s upbeat personality and passion for art in the perfect space. Stephanie Madrid

GOING ON A GONDOLA RIDE in Las Vegas is so cheesy — but so good. I’ve visited Italy, so when I moved here, my inclination was to snub the Venetian as a Disneyland substitute.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what it is, but it does this really well. Heading through the crowd at the mini Piazza San Marco, my eye lands on a replica of the famous Venice clock tower, resplendent with Roman numerals circling bronzed zodiacs ticking time beneath the balconette holding a Virgin Mary statue. On the shelf above, a copy of the winged lion of Venice surveys approvingly as a petit comédie-Italienne commences upon the small stage below. Actors in motley and royal dress, one on stilts, juggle, dance, and sing in Italian, recalling 17th-century street performances.

As we slide down the canal, passing lion-shaped fountainheads, kissing for luck under bridges, the sonorous Italian ballads of our gondolier, Tino, surround us, completing the fantasy. Strangers walking by pause to listen; for a moment, we are all caught up in the Italian enchantment. Gliding by ornate quatrefoils windows, beneath the glowing “sky,” you are immersed in a moving Italian painting.

In May, The Venetian turns 20. With casinos moving away from travel-destination themes, who’s to say how much longer this faux Italian experience will be around. If you have never indulged your gondola urge, this almost-Italy moment will satisfy cravings for amore. Jenessa Kenway

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SPACES WE LOVE

Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian

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SARA ORTIZ AND STEVE SIWINSKI

Mid-Century Minimalism With a Personal Touch

“I’m always editing; I edit everything,” Sara

spot here. Fun fact: Sara says there’s a closet

Ortiz says, sitting in the carefully edited living

full of artwork that isn’t hung because they

room of her Palm Springs-style home near

both can’t agree on it.

Midtown. A mental habit of refined selection

Yet for all this severe selectivity, the effect

is useful in her day job as program manager

isn’t at all aloof or fastidious; the essentialism

for the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black

is warmed by neon and natural light, and by

Mountain Institute, where she curates — that

the expectation of sociability cued subtly by

tiresome word! — cultural events.

the absence of a TV and other technologies

You will be tempted to say she and her partner Steve Siwinski curate their

of distraction. You instinctively grasp that

home, too. Look at this room: Not a molecule out of place, everything — including

if you’re lucky enough to be edited into this

emptiness — carefully chosen and assigned its role in this performance of mid-

room, it’s to engage with others. It is, to quote

mod minimalism. One end of the room glows with the neon sign from a defunct

one recent visitor, “rad.”

erotica bookstore, Desert Books — “Sara likes books, and I like the desert; it’s

A similar aesthetic is at play elsewhere in

perfect,” Steve says brightly. On the old-school patterned floor, period furniture is

the house: neon brightens the guestroom

arrayed around the space-age lines of an Adrian Pearsall coffee table. That orange

and kitchen, a neatly organized, not over-

wallpaper? Original. Historical continuity matters to these two.

stuffed bookshelf jazzes up the office.

But curating isn’t quite the right word for the dynamic of this space; no, editing

The pair goes to great lengths to en-

is better, with its firmer connotation of unremitting subtraction. You can almost

sure the period appropriateness of their

hear the disappointed sighs of every knickknack and kitschy doodad denied a

home. Vintage stores and yard sales are

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de rigueur. “We’re lucky to live in a city that came of age in the midcentury time,”

WITH

Steve says. Now that those original homes and furnishings are falling to the next generation, excellent pieces show up on the secondhand market. A story about that coffee table: “We were driving through a neighborhood yard sale,” Steve says, “and we decided to go down one last street. We drove by this house, and I saw the edge of an Adrian Pearsall table and knew exactly what it was. I pulled over so fast I almost didn’t put the car in park.”

“You didn’t put the car in park!” Sara corrects.

A wonderful addition to their home, they got it for a bargain $300 — totally worth the brush with death.

ITS

OFFERINGS

OF

ORCHESTRA CONCERTS, Broad-

SPACES WE LOVE

Smith Center Lobby

way shows, and other big-name performers, The Smith Center has done much to burnish Las Vegas’ cultural bona fides — but the lift to a higher cultural plane begins in the lobby, from its polished marble floors to its shimmering chandeliers. If The Smith Center’s exterior is reminiscent of the Hoover Dam, the interior evokes a luxury ocean liner of the art deco era. The curving staircases are designed for intermission grand entrances, and the soaring sculpture of an angel reminds audiences that all art begins with inspiration.

Lissa Townsend Rodgers

Scott Dickensheets

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THERE ARE FEW PLACES I SPEND MORE TIME than the gym.

SPACES WE LOVE

UNLV Student Recreation and Wellness Center

At heart I’m an anti-gym-rat — but biking, hiking, or running outdoors every day isn’t an option here. And besides, the real reason I fell in love with this gym is the pool. With its half-dozen 25-yard lap lanes, vaulted ceiling, and window walls, it’s nicer than the pool in any other gym 15 minutes from my house. But over the years I’ve fallen in love with the rest of the SRWC, too. The squeak of sneakers on the glossed wood courts and the echoes from a pickup game take me back to my childhood YMCA. The SRWC’s architects — DMJM Design of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Hastings & Chivetta of St. Louis, Missouri — blended these nostalgia-promoting elements into a highly functional layout that puts nearly every available activity within sight of the central foyer. A third-floor loft serves as a running track that overlooks the second floor, where the weight room, dance studios, and office space are arrayed around a spiral staircase. The bottom floor holds not just the pool, courts, and cardio room, but also restaurants and the student wellness center.

Everything feels like it’s easily within reach. I can’t help but believe this is intentional, as it lowers the psychological barrier of sticking with a fitness regimen.

Sure, it’s humbling to be surrounded by co-eds in the prime of their life when I’m struggling to shoulder press 25 pounds.

But I like to think I’m setting an example by showing up, week after week, as freshmen come and seniors go. Heidi Kyser

DAZ WELLER AND TOBY ALLEN

A Constantly Changing Tableau of Repurposed Beauty

Daz Weller has a thing for chairs. Oh, wait, he clarifies: He has a thing for beautiful chairs.

Now the artistic director of Cockroach Theatre, Weller doesn’t have much time to

“I love this bird chair, the black one,” he

indulge his passion. Still, his new role has

says, gesturing toward one of many seats in his

led him to snag certain irresistible things.

and husband Toby Allen’s living room. “Have

Just in case they could serve as set pieces

a sit in it. It’s so comfortable, it swallows you,

… someday. (He’s got two full storage units,

and you can kind of rock in it, and it’s got a

one for himself, and one for the theater.)

little wing for each of the kids” — Weller and

Is it ever too much for Allen, who de-

Allen’s 6-year-old twins — “so they can come and sit and you can read to them.”

scribes himself as the more left-brained

In the room there’s also a B&B Italia metropolitan chair that Weller estimates

of the couple?

is worth a few thousand dollars but which he got for a hundred bucks at a casino

“I have the utmost faith in Daz and what

auction; and a bulbous tongue chair made of aluminum strips that’s based on one

he attaches to, or doesn’t, or thinks is worth

in New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum, another auction steal; and another chair

moving on,” he says. “I love the fact that

and couch designed by Kettal — all collected from auctions, estate sales, Craigslist,

the place changes all the time. I joke about

thrift stores, dumpsters, pretty much any secondhand source that’s got good stuff.

coming home from work and not knowing

And Weller’s obsession extends way beyond chairs. In the eight years since

whose house I’m in, but it’s great. It keeps

the couple moved into the single-story spread in Rancho Nevada Estates, he’s packed it with unique, well-designed furniture and art pieces. He’s got an eye for valuable items and experience flipping good buys.

“I used to do it back home when I was an actor in Australia — just kind of go to auctions and pick stuff I like and sell what I didn’t want to keep,” he says.

life varied.”

Still, he admits: “Over the years, we’ve gotten to the point sometimes where we’re just like, ‘We can’t have another chair in the house.’” Heidi Kyser APRIL 2019

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IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES

Illustrations By

KRISTINA COLLANTES

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{ ON H E A R ING }

GLORIOUS NOISE That sound I’m hearing is me

By A N D R E W K I R A L Y

’ve been thinking lately about how quiet ATMs are. You get, like, what, a muted, perfunctory beep at the end when they spit your card back at you. What does their reticence mean? The idea, I guess, is discretion and privacy. But maybe there’s a little embarrassment in their quietness, too, a shadow of our furtive shame complexes about money and self-worth.

Contrast that with the sound of casinos. Broadly, it’s the same idea: These are machines of transaction. Except at casinos, of course, the withdrawals are going the other way.

And because of that, their entire sound profile is colorized and saturated as a form of camouflage. The constant and continual dings, blips, and chimes of a casino are distractive little dopamine hits, celebratory jingles of reception, acknowledgment, and reinforcement not far removed from email notifications and text bubbles that say: You’ve got mail. You are recognized. You are loved. Keep feeding me.

I can and will, given the chance, suck you dry. Keep feeding me. The attention-demanding regime of today’s ubiquitous drizzle of smartphone jangles and ringtones was innovated

by Las Vegas casinos decades ago, long before we all began carrying emotional slot machines in our pockets.

There are other soundscapes in Las Vegas that reveal something about our city’s underlying character and illuminate my evolving attitude toward it. One of my favorites is Red Rock. Well, it’s not a favorite. It’s one of the most fruitfully problematic to me. When I was younger, I had this neurotically idealistic conviction that any excursion into a natural area had to be completely devoid of urban noise — that an absence of such noise ratified the area as natural. The proof, I suspect, would serve as some bulwark of hope against the inexorable creep of human despoilment.

I’d hike deep into a trail at Red Rock, constantly pricking up my ears, sampling the noise levels: No, no, this will not do, I still hear the faint whoosh of cars on the loop, I hear the Dopplering buzz of a plane, the chep-chep-chep of a helicopter.

I’d become blind and deaf to the beauty around me because I was obsessed with some notion of purity. I’d leave Red Rock feeling angry and cheated instead of relaxed and refreshed. It wasn’t long before I started to get burned out on resentment and sanctimonious unhappiness, and I realized I’d have to

I

come to a more measured view, if only for the sake of sanity; I think this is conventionally known as growing up. Now I consider the sound of Red Rock — the static churr of wind in the trees, the birdsong, the distant whisper of traffic on the 159, even the shouts of some loudmouth assholes snapping selfies on the cliffs — as a phenomenal unit you can’t parse or particularize. It’s just what nature sounds like in the 21st century on a crowded, cranky planet; it’s the sound of how Vegas does nature. This embrace of perceived opposites as a tensive whole may be some deceptive yin-yang woo-woo I’m bullshitting myself with, but, whatever, it’s really helped me chill out about some things that I’d otherwise let drive me crazy.

But old neuroses die hard. I still have this sort of FWB thing going on with misbegotten notions of purity and the extremes it can imply; I still have a penchant for the monolithic and unilateral, for things that are just so completely one thing, and through their insistent singularity offer some promise of an answer. I recently learned that UNLV’s engineering college has an anechoic chamber — an almost totally sound-absorptive room. Its walls are made of one-foot thick masonry brick filled with grout, which are covered in 42-inch fiberglass wedges. The room even has its own separate, springy foundation to isolate it from the vibrations of other buildings. The chamber is used to study sound design in a controlled environment, but it doesn’t exactly look scientific. With its cascading ziggurat walls, yellow workshop glare, and scent of sawdust, it feels more like a secret ritual murder lair designed by M.C. Escher. Its description as an “acoustically dead” space is apt on more than one level.

The engineering professor in charge of the chamber, Douglas Reynolds, was amused by my request to spend some time alone in the room.

“We’ll see how long you can stand it,” he said in that be-careful-what-you-wish-for tone, explaining in so many words that extended exposure to a complete absence of sonic information might be too much of a mindfreak for me.

“Your brain is programmed to process information 24-7.

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this conversation in the actual chamber, and it’s already weird.

Our voices are eerily crisp and attenuated. The papery, desiccated sound coming from our mouths are the crumbs and bones left over after the walls have devoured most of it.

He agrees to leave me alone in the room for five or so minutes. The big door swings shut, quiet as snowfall. The complete absence of sound is immediately palpable as what feels like an insistent thumblike pressure on my eardrums, but it’s actually the constructively imagined palpability of a complete void of pressure, of vital information, so what I’m actually experiencing is the feeling of my ears and a good part of my brain being suddenly, punitively, belligerently starved.

It is not peaceful or even quiet as we know it. It feels like my entire psyche is a fingernail scraping against a chalkboard. With that feeling, because of that feeling, I sense an ominous quaver of piano somewhere inside me — the beginnings of a panic attack — which certainly isn’t helped by the fact that this is a room of such fearsome, carnivorous sonic vacancy that I can hear my own pulse.

Five minutes stretches like a timeless funhouse mirror into okay yeah I get it now I’ve had enough. I smile and give a vampy shrug when Reynolds opens the door, but my brain is screaming for food, water, air — for stimulation. I feel a need to flee. I’m relieved to be outside. I gorge on glorious noise on the walk back to my car, and I’m mentally murmuring hellos to all of it: Hello, footsteps on hallway tile, hello, ambient hum of building, hello, doors chocking and chuffing, hello, students chattering and typing.

Hello, air, hello, birds, hello, cars.

Hello, Las Vegas.

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{ ON SIGH T }

NOW YOU SEE Just looking isn’t the same as really seeing

By D A W N - M I C H E L L E B A U D E

illions of tourists come to Las Vegas to look — to marvel at the sensory dynamo that is the Strip. They point at the glassy tureen atop the Stratosphere, “ooh” in unison in front of the Bellagio’s undulating fountains, and gawp at scantily clad women who want both to look and to be looked at. When tourists leave, they top off their Instagram accounts and tell their friends that they’ve “seen” Las Vegas, but they haven’t. All they’ve done is look at the Strip.

To look is not the same activity as to see, although both verbs describe sensory data perceived by the eyes. Looking preserves the separation between the subject and object, so that a visitor, say, from Iqaluit, remains at a slight remove as she walks through the Flamingo poker room. She might notice the tables rimmed by players guarding their cards, perhaps even register towers of chips erected upon the felted green, but there’s nothing at stake for her. Unless she snaps a photo, only a vague impression of a room with people will dawdle in her mind, if it doesn’t vanish altogether. The visitor looked, but she didn’t see.

To see is a more substantive proposition, involving perceptions of greater specificity on the one hand and a conscious connection to the stimulus on the other. For example, seeing includes awareness of details, such as the poker dealer’s gem-encrusted fingernails, the small jade Buddha perched upon a chip tower, or the man sporting a Cardinals cap seated at the table nearest check-in. The man gazes at the visitor from Iqaluit, and they exchange a lingering smile. Now the visitor is no longer looking: She’s seeing. Her attention is happily engaged, along with her emotions. Her visual perceptions are more attentive and, consequently, more memorable. She notices the man’s Cardinals cap. She thinks the jade Buddha is cute.

Truly seeing Las Vegas is difficult because the city’s focal point, the Strip, is largely designed to be looked at rather than seen. It pulses, glows, and pixilates with the promise of an extraordinary experience just out of reach, teetering on the verge of capture.

Connection to any one stimulus is abandoned for the next as a profusion of visual data inundates perception. The clamoring competition among lights, architecture, signage, décor, art, staging, traffic, panel trucks, and meandering crowds creates pitched excitement and expectation. Cash flows as visitors pay — one way or another — to move from wonder to wonder. Looking, rather than seeing, is good for business.

Seeing takes time. It takes stillness. Some philosophers contend that it takes silence, or at least quiet. Since these qualities are in scant supply on the Strip, to see the city of Las Vegas requires leaving the casinos temporarily behind. Perusing antique stores in the Arts District, contemplating installations at UNLV’s Barrick Museum, standing in line at Trader Joe’s or a noodle shop in Chinatown, taking in the view at Springs Preserve’s Divine Café — now we can begin to see some of the people who call Las Vegas home and a fraction of the places they frequent. If seeing is linked to understanding, as many philosophers over the centuries have proposed, then to stroll through Sunset Park or to visit a Clark County library is to connect candidly with the city and learn how its citizens go about their day-to-day lives.

The more carefully Las Vegas is observed, the greater the viewer’s conscious engagement, and the more the city reveals its fascinating, complex social fabric, as imperfect as it may be. To see demands a willingness to be changed by the truth of what you take in. While no investment is necessary to look at the Strip — open

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eyes, receive visual pleasure — actually seeing Las Vegas entails moral responsibility. The city has no shortage of ills: the barefoot young woman dressed only in a slip digging through a Maryland Parkway trashcan, the derelict buildings on Fremont smothered in garbage, the effect of housing developments on the migration of bighorn sheep in the southeast Valley. While planned neighborhoods with LEED ratings and xeriscape gardening are easy on the eyes, the parts of the city plagued by poverty, homelessness, drugs. and trafficking need to be fully seen, too. Seeing them is the first step to remedying them.

Seeing Las Vegas with greater clarity also requires contextualizing the city’s trajectory in history, from Helen Stewart’s homey ur-casino, where travelers camped and played cards 130 years ago, to the postmodern crescendo of exotic, themed casino-resorts at the turn of the last century, to the screen-clad, boxy behemoths that steal the show today. Strip-centric souvenirs of Las Vegas’ modern history populate the city’s museums, but our deepest roots are in the Mojave. The Spring Mountains ringing the Valley are a treasure trove of environmental, geo{ ON SM EL L } logical, and archeological data. Sacred canyons decorated with petroglyphs border urban sprawl, their artworks evading hikers who look but don’t see.

It takes careful observation to find the traces that Native American tribes and ancient Paleo-Indians left behind centuries, if not millennia, ago. Is that pecked Nothing brings you closer — to people, circle a doodle? A breast? A raindrop? to a city — than a scent An eye? To see the petroglyphs and muse

By V E R O N I C A K L A S H on their messages is to apprehend the continuity of civilization in the valley to which we belong. y eyes are closed. I’m holding a sleek, smooth, heart-shaped While looking is characterized by chocolate between my thumb, index, and middle fingers. I bring detachment, seeing is above all an it up to my nose and inhale. While filling my lungs to capacity, I emotional experience. For thousands do my best to resist popping the whole thing in my mouth to feel it melt on my of years, philosophers have argued tongue. My thumb grazes the flat bottom of the confection, releasing a tart that the most vital emotion of all — citrus aroma that enhances the dark cocoa notes from the first breath. I imagine love — enters through the eyes, giving running through an orchard on a sunny day and plunging a skinny silver fork rise to enduring ideas such as “love at into a perfect slice of frothy key lime pie. My thrall is broken by the shrieking first sight” and the related notion that of children, and I chastise myself for choosing the wrong tasting experience eyes are “windows unto the soul.” The at Ethel M Chocolates. The one I didn’t book pairs a wine with each chocolate. viewer’s connection with a smiling Scent is intimacy. To know another person’s smell is to add them to an evpoker player in a Cardinals cap or even er-changing roster of microscopic molecules that stimulate the odor receptors a barrel cactus in full bloom arouses in high in our nasal cavity. But it goes deeper than that. Think of your mother’s her feelings of pleasure and affection. perfume. Or the essence that clings to your significant other’s shirt. Or the smell Perhaps in some cases, to really and truly of your child’s skin as she sleeps. Of all our senses, scent is the most inextricable see something is not only to glimpse its from memory. Thus it is the most emotionally resonant and subjective of senses. identity but also to discover its charm Smell allows us to pull into our bodies what makes another person unique.

— and to fall, even briefly, in love.

This intimacy isn’t reserved for people alone; understanding a place also From a quiet outcrop in the Spring happens high in your nasal cavity. Though, as a city that chooses to be everything Mountains, Las Vegas appears luminous to everyone, there isn’t one scent that captures Las Vegas. To know, to love this in the early evening, the Strip sparkling city means knowing and loving myriad aromas. against the scalloped backdrop of The first that springs to mind is the ubiquitous casino smell, although even high-desert mountains and a depthless within this narrow category there are strata. Upon entering a certain Fremont sky. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s Street casino, which will remain nameless, a friend remarked on the overwhelmbeautiful.

INHALING INTIMACY

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ing cigarette scent. To her, it was an undesirable indicator of the property’s age and possible neglect.

To me, after more than a decade of frequenting such older establishments for delightful dinners with my in-laws, the smell marked comfort and familiarity. In my mind, this essence (reviled by many) had been earned by the casino over years of faithfully servicing loyal customers whose waistline is full and whose hairline is not. Not an easy or glamorous feat.

Down the road, yet worlds away, Strip casinos and their scent programs tell a different story.

Dina Marie Zemke, assistant professor at UNLV’s William F. Harrah College of Hospitality, who has researched “the relationships between the servicescape and people,” shared some insights.

According to Zemke, Mandalay Bay was the first property to introduce a signature ambient scent as part of a branding effort, around 1999. The coconut and floral notes suggested not only suntan oil but a slew of positive associations.

Zemke explained that “a proper scenting program will provide a noticeable fragrance when someone enters the space, but humans should acclimate to the scent … in about 15 minutes.

If you can still smell the scent after 15 minutes, the property runs the risk of creating a negative response, since even very pleasant scents become offensive if they are too strong.” This is familiar to anyone who has walked within a square mile of an Abercrombie and Fitch store.

Our city, however, offers much more than dueling casino scents. As dispensaries crop up all over town, the earthy, bittersweet aroma of pot coupled with lavender or citrus cleaners spreads throughout the valley.

Though we spend most of our traveling time ensconced in our cars’ smell bubble, we know that parts of town smell differently: Summerlin, where the air is crisp yet rife with the essence of yoga pants and scrutiny, versus Downtown, where the air is exciting but one can’t avoid clouds of cloying cotton candy vape mixed with urine essence. There’s also the unmistakable desert smell, the one that blooms most right before the rain.

Zemke highlighted a new trend in hospitality — no scent. It is my fervent hope that this trend does not catch on. I want to close my eyes and let my imagination run free. I want to close my eyes and still know exactly where I am. Because without smell, how do you arrive at intimacy?

How do you get to love?

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{ ON TOUCH }

FEEL THE REAL Nothing connects you to the world like touching it

By T . R . W I T C H E R

o think about Las Vegas and the five senses is to think, primarily, about sight. This makes sense, because the sights are so extraordinary. The Strip, our permanent World’s Fair, resplendent in its uncountable lights and retina-buzzing rivers of neon and LEDs. Or the crimson slash of Red Rock Canyon. Or the panoply of desert browns that grow dull or sparkling, washed-out or saturated, based on the time of day.

But this is shortsighted. Sight is about dreams. Spectacular, remote, always reminding us that what we see is out there, not quite a part of us. The real idea about Las Vegas is deeper. It is about touch.

Touch is the fantasy of access. Nearness. The point where dreams threaten, if only for a moment, to become real. Touch is about feeling the cards or dice in your hand, rubbing them, massaging them, hoping to impart some … intentionality to them. It’s about the varied surfaces of a restaurant that you want to run your hand across — the texture of a marble bar or wood table at a beloved restaurant or bar. It’s about the bodies you draw close to in a nightclub — the promise of what happens here stays here begins with objects of desire that you want to touch and (if you’re lucky) that want to touch you. The soft, velvet-like curtains that guard the entrance to Marquee, or the plush couches at the Chandelier Bar invite the body to enjoy the ride.

Las Vegas presents itself as both of hard surfaces — the skin of a palm tree, rugged rocks and boulders, hard soil — and soft ones. It’s a city filled with luxurious interiors, luxurious brands, luxurious bodies, all offering the promise, and occasionally, if luck or money or charisma are on your side, the reality of touch. Which is to say, reality. The Cosmopolitan and, especially, CityCenter are a buffet of tactile inputs — acrylic panels that feel like candy, reassuringly dense leather arm rests on slot machines, cool, faceted metals, slick tiles, sumptuous fabrics on the walls, imperial concrete columns, the elegant, pockmarked travertine of Henry Moore’s sculpture.

The architect Juhani Pallasmaa, in his book The Eyes of the Skin, notes that, “The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand.”

That’s Las Vegas — the city that seduces the stroking of the hand.

Our skin is our largest organ, sensitive to sunlight, heat, motion, pain, vibration, pressure. It’s also unbelievably tactile. According

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to a University of California-San Diego study, our sense of touch is refined enough to feel the difference between surfaces that differ by just a single layer of molecules.

The modern world feels as though touch is not important. Our world, our technology, is about the elasticity of space and time, and therefore the malleability of human societies and human identity itself. The internet, the smartphone, TV, radio — the telecommunications revolution. We are caught between the promise of that malleability — a siren’s song of complete mastery of identity, where every social hierarchy is a presumed impediment to human happiness, where self-actualization means expressing your multivalent selves in any way, shape, or form you choose and at any moment. Author Seymour Krim called this the desire to “multiply ourselves, to integrate all the identities and action-fantasies we have experienced.”

Yet this only works (if it works at all) when we are in control; the world, with its relentless flows of capital and innovation and people, is perpetually shifting, and often we feel powerless to those forces that make and remake human lives.

It feels like media input, every screen or podcast or app, offers to dematerialize and transport us to different places and times and states of being.

(This is not a new phenomenon, by the way. Marshall McLuhan, in an old Playboy interview, noted that in pre-literate societies, “the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses.”)

So touch is the sense that is trying to lead us back to a more embodied, holistic engagement with ourselves, each other, and the world.

Touch roots us very particularly to a place and time. It gathers in the energies of the world, a universe of fluctuating times and spaces, and concentrates them. It concentrates us, plants us, allows us to feel alive.

And it is a discerning sense. You can see or hear hundreds of different inputs simultaneously. With touch, there’s only a few. It’s deliberate. It’s conscious. It’s intentional.

You can feel the luxuriousness of Crystals in its smooth, curving wood forms, or its subtly serrated titanium panels, which resemble up-close the precision of a pinstriped suit. But then take a seat at lovely little garden spot inside — the seating surface is like sitting on Scrabble tiles. The rocks and plants are lovely to behold, until you touch them and realize they’re plastic. Touch, somehow, doesn’t lie.

Touch still feels analog. For now. What made Apple (briefly) the first trillion-dollar company? No products are more pleasurable to the touch.

It’s the touch that forms the bond, that weird sense of intimacy we get with the products we spend so much time lusting after.

But the touch of mass-produced objects, no matter how subtle, is a secondary concern. How do we improve our ability to touch each other?

We arrange our cities largely to mitigate the chances of much interaction with other human beings — and I’m introverted enough to get this. I was at a conference the other week where we were encouraged at one point to get up and stretch. Then we were extolled to hug the person to either side of us. This last was, obviously, a joke, and so we laughed.

A friend of mine recently reminded me that the purpose of human beings is to support life. Touch is the most direct route to that end. Babies need touch to flourish. So do the rest of us. In the end, it’s touch that makes Las Vegas my home. It’s not the mythologies of risk and fantasy, failure or striking it big. Las Vegas is real to me because the people I love the most are here. The opportunity to touch them and to be touched by them.

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{ ON TA ST E }

TASTING MEMORY Even the humblest foods can carry a lifetime of meaning

By K I M F O S T E R

Mrs. Bun: What have you got, then?

Waitress: Well there’s egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam; Spam Spam, Spam, egg and Spam ...

— “Spam,” Monty Python, 1970 affi, my 7-year-old son, is lounging on the couch, playing Zelda on his Nintendo Switch, lobbing chunks of Spam into his mouth.

Raffi loves Spam. Because back when he lived with his biological parents, before they lost him to foster care and adoption, they kept him alive on it. I message Jason, his first dad.

He jokingly admits it’s all his fault. “I eat Vienna sausages and Spam out of the can all the time,” he tells me, as I watch my son in his underpants, a bare leg slung over the arm of the couch, eating straight out of the can.

Spam, the famous mystery meat, is a canned loaf of pork and ham, with a potato starch binder, a little sugar, and a preservative. It comes in many iterations — jalapeño, garlic and tocino, cheese, bacon, chorizo, light, low-salt; the list is endless.

Most of us either love it or despise it. I mean, it’s pink, for God’s sake. It forces you to have an opinion. It comes out of the can in a gloriously fatty, gelatinous brick. It is salty and sweet and porky and so good fried, the edges brown and crunchy and oily. And in our house, Spam is one of my son’s connections to his bio family. To his earlier life. He wants Spam in his life the way he wants them in his life.

That’s the power of taste.

This makes evolutionary sense. Strong and emotional food memories helped us survive.

Back on the savannah, sketchy food — the wrong berry, a spoiled antelope carcass — could kill you.

Memories of pain and discomfort kept you from making mistakes again.

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The opposite also happens. Tastes can make wonderfully positive and powerful memories. The Spam hits Raffi’s tongue, and his taste-bud cells send out messages to the insular cortex, and the smell blasts his olfactory bulb, which sits super close to the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub, and from there, memories and taste and smell are all intertwined. One chunk of Spam, for Raffi, feels like home. And connection. It is that intense.

And Raffi is hardly alone.

Spam might be considered lowbrow. It might be mocked and disregarded by the oldest of my kids. But it is, arguably, the taste that binds our diverse Las Vegas community. Spam taste-memories cross experiences, ethnicities, race, social and economic class, and childhood upbringings. Rock climbers have it in their dusty vans at Red Rock. Indigenous people on remote rural reservations depend on Spam for those long periods between trips into town.

And preppers, drawn to Spam’s wicked shelf-life, store it in Mojave bomb shelters and underground pantries. One prepper swore he’d eaten Spam 10 years past its “best by” date.

“It was fine!” he assured me.

Even the most ardent non-cooks can cook with it.

“My mother was a terrible cook,” one friend messaged me.

“We actually looked forward to sliced Spam with onions. It was one of her best recipes!”

Yet it also has enough Vegas sex appeal to enjoy at a bar, playing the slots. The hip eastside Starboard Tack cocktail lounge offers a riff on the Merienda sandwich — grilled Spam, pimento cheese, and spicy adobo pickles, served on squishy Filipino rolls.

Indeed, Vegas Filipinos are big Spam fans, and have been since canned meat came to the Philippines as World War II rations. A friend talks about her mom dredging chunks of Spam in brown sugar, frying, and serving them with eggs and Japanese rice, the sweetness a contrast to the infamous saltiness of the Spam.

And Danela, the Filipino server at Pokemon: Poke Bowls & Sushi Burritos, on Valley View and Spring Mountain, has a bunch of Spam stories. We got to talking about their Spam Burrito, a mish-mosh of Japanese, Mexican, and Pacific Island influences that includes Spam, egg, crab, greens, pineapple, fried onions, and teriyaki mayo wrapped in nori.

Danela told me Spam is a luxury item in the Philippines. It’s expensive. “If you made a Spam dish for your guests,” she told me, “they would be very happy.”

In local Japanese homes, cooks make goya chanpuru, a bitter melon stir-fry well known in Okinawan cuisine. It’s simple to make — bitter melon slices, a special hard form of Okinawan tofu, Spam, and eggs. The bitter taste of the vegetable is the perfect pairing for the salty, fatty Spam. “Restaurants try to make it fancy with pork chunks,” one Henderson mom told me, “but it’s better as it’s originally intended, with Spam, because that’s how I remember it.”

Budae-jjigae, known as “army stew,” is still made in local Korean kitchens. It came into existence during the Korean war, when starving Koreans were forced to sift through American army base trash for scraps. For a budae-jjigae, think enoki mushrooms, silken tofu, spring onions, garlic, kimchi, and red pepper powder, alongside army-base cast-offs like baked

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beans, Spam, hot dogs, and slices of American cheese.

If you are a Korean granddaughter, you might remember the taste of budae-jjigae as simple comfort, but if you are a great-grandmother who lived in Korea during the war, the taste-memory might be one of fear and deprivation. Same dish, powerfully different memory-evoking tastes.

At Roy Choi’s Best Friend at Park MGM, that plays out in real-time. Jake Leslie, Best Friend’s GM, explains that when large Korean families eat itaewon, Choi’s take on buddae-jjigae, they often have different experiences along generational lines.

Younger Koreans love the thick, stewy mix of greens, corned beef hash, sausage, fish cakes, Spam, lil’ smokies, grocery store ramen, and herbs in a scorching but comforting tomato-based sauce.

But older Koreans remember it as soup, not stew. Ingredients cooked in water or broth. Meager, not hearty. Taste-memory is so critical to how we experience food.

Buddae-jjigae is also an excellent example of how cooking food can be a transgressive and revolutionary act. A cook can take food borne of war and hardship, poverty, and struggle, reinvent it, raise it up, and turn it into something that reflects the cook and the eater. Every happy family meal with Spam redefines it and creates new generations of taste-memories. As I write this, I realize Spam is a lot like Vegas itself — born of hardship and struggle and made into something beautiful, loved by many, looked down on by snobs, misunderstood by naysayers.

Perhaps it’s Hawaiians who have the most enduring taste-memories of Spam, and have done some of the most beautiful and defiant things with it. Hawaiian restaurants offer iconic dishes like musubi, a spin on onigiri that puts a cooked slice of Spam on rice, held together with a piece of nori.

You can order your Spam Musubi at a casino restaurant, like Aloha Specialties in the California, or a smaller, no-frills eatery like Island Style on Sahara, or with kimchi at Pacific Island Taste on Charleston. There is Loco Moco, rice and Spam smothered in brown gravy, topped with a runny fried egg, at Born and Raised. There’s the Green Eggs and Spam at Served in Henderson, eggs fried in green Thai butter and grilled Spam with garlic rice. And there’s Hawaiian-inspired Spam in coffee shops like Vesta, with its Hawaiian Benedict Sandwich: a runny egg, cheddar, and Spam topped with Sriracha hollandaise; and the Mahalo Special at PublicUs, two farm eggs over Portuguese Sausage Spam with rice and house-made kimchi.

Here on the Ninth Island, Spam brings a special taste memory.

As with my son, Raffi, it’s of a first home. “OMG! Where do I start?” asks local artist Eddie Canumay. “Some people think Hawaii’s Spam obsession is a joke. But it’s for real.”

Eddie talked about Spam saimin, a Spam-laden noodle soup that is even on some Hawaiian McDonald’s menus, as well as fried-Spam sandwiches, and the one dish that reminds him of home more than any other — diced Spam, fried with canned peas and carrots, in tomato sauce, and served over Japanese white rice. His father made this dish for him his whole life, Eddie tells me, mixing talk of food with memories of growing up and island life, all inseparable “Spam,” he says, “reminds me of home and my childhood.”

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MARKETPLACE SHOPS • DINING • GOODS Jaguar Land Rover Las Vegas RANGE ROVER EVOQUE DESIGNED TO STAND OUT. With its striking lines, muscular shoulder and tapered roof, Range Rover Evoque set itself apart from its contemporaries. Whether discovering hidden parts of town or being seen in all the right places, it’s always ready for action. Striking the perfect balance between distinctive exterior design, a contoured cabin, capability and performance, the vehicle defines contemporary city life. To experience the 2019 Range Rover Evoque for yourself, visit Jaguar Land Rover Las Vegas for a test drive today.

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Chickpeas Mediterranean Café A Mediterranean Fusion Restaurant serving Beef, Chicken and Lamb Kabobs as well as Vegan and Vegetarian dishes. Catering to the medical, pharmaceutical and business communities. Winner of the “Top 10 Caterers in Las Vegas” on ezcater.com 6110 W. Flamingo Road 702-405-6067 www.chickpeaslv.com

Table 34 Featuring Chef Wes Kendrick’s contemporary American cuisine including fresh fish, wild game, duck and lamb, Certified Angus Beef and comfort food classics.

Conveniently located off the 215 and Warm Springs. Serving dinner Tuesday - Saturday and Lunch Monday - Friday.

600 E Warm Springs Road 702-263-0034

Boulder City Art Guild’s 34th Annual Spring Fine Arts & Craft Show Located near historic areas in the “Town that built Hoover Dam.” Family and friends can stroll through a pleasant park while enjoying unique works of art.

Saturday April 13 & Sunday April 14, 9am-4pm, Bicentennial Park 999 Colorado Street BCAG is a nonprofit corporation Advertisement

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APRIL 9 Journey through Jazz

The Guide ▼

ART THROUGH APRIL 28 Infinity Mirrored Room — Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity and Narcissus Garden

Artist Yayoi Kusama’s two installations offer unique wonderlands of lights and reflections where guests become part of the artwork. 10A–7:30P, $15. Locals night every Wed 5–7P, $11. Fine Art Gallery at Bellagio, bellagio.com

THROUGH MAY 5 National Geographic Presents Earth Explorers

Six themed and immersive environments teach numerous ways that technology and ingenuity help make and document explorers' discoveries.

9A–5P, free with paid admission or membership.

Origen Museum at Springs Preserve, springspreserve.org

▼

Priscilla Fowler Gallery 300 S. Main Street #110 www.priscillafowler.com 719-371-5640

MUSIC APRIL 5 Jack and the Beanstalk

Opera Las Vegas

returns with another fast-paced, family-friendly show guaranteed to delight children of all ages. 4P, free. Jewel Box Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 5 André Mehmari Like the masters who precede him — Bach, Beethoven, Chopin — Brazilian pianist Mehmari is equal parts composer, improviser, and keyboard virtuoso. 7P, free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 7 The Young Artists Orchestra presents the Music of West Side Story

Featuring music from Leonard Bernstein’s classic show. 2P, $40– $60. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 7 Dvořák Project

The UNLV Symphony Orchestra performs, conducted by Taras Krysa.

3P, $10. Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV, unlv.edu

Led by saxophonist and UNLV assistant professor Adam Schroeder, the concert is an all-ages jazz showcase in an interactive and educational setting. 7P, free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 10 UNLV Jazz Concert Series: Contemporary Jazz Ensemble

The internationally recognized program highlights its most talented musicians. 7P, free.

Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 12 Carol Albert

The chart-topping contemporary jazz vocalist and keyboardist is touring behind her upcoming album. 7P, $35–$55. Myron’s Cabaret Jazz at The Smith Center, the smithcenter.com

APRIL 12–13 Pulsing Stars

UNLV Percussion performs with lighting designed by the UNLV Moving Light Lab. 7:30P, $10. Black Box Theatre at Alta Ham Fine Arts at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 13 MJ Déjà Vu — a Michael Jackson Tribute Concert Justin Dean salutes the King of Pop with performances of his legendary hits. 7P, $20. Starbright Theatre at Sun City Summerlin, scsai.com

APRIL 15 Zion's Youth Symphony & Chorus Presents Seasons Featuring David Archuleta

from throughout the valley perform with the platinum-selling singer’s works. 5P and 7P, $10–$100.

Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 18 Las Vegas Philharmonic Spotlight III: The Harmony of 14 Strings

Members of the orchestra perform the works of Paganini, Franck, and others.

7:30P, $70. Troesh Studio Theater at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 19 Michelle Johnson Presents: A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald

A celebration of the First Lady of Song, presented with a ten-piece band. 8P, $25–$40. Myron’s Cabaret Jazz at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 20 Vegas Showstoppers: The Best of Vegas Then and Now

Entertainers from leading Las Vegas shows present a tribute to the history of Vegas showbiz, 7P, $20. Starbright Theatre at Sun City Summerlin, scsai.com

APRIL 24 Chamber Chorale — Home Concert

The UNLV Chamber Chorale returns from their annual spring tour to present musical gems

by Josquin des Prez, Jacob Handl, David Brunner, and Eric Whitacre.

7:30P, $10. Lee and Thomas Beam Music Center at UNLV, unlv.edu

Young musicians APRIL 2019

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The Guide APRIL 24 Spring Concert II

The UNLV Symphony Orchestra performs, conducted by Taras Krysa. 7:30P, $10.

Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 26 Clark County Children's Choir: Spring Festival

The Clark County Children's Choir performs in its spring festival.

6:30P, free.

Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 26 Desert Rose Festival & Concert

A full day of choral workshops for high school choir students culminates in a performance of the university choirs and the Silverado High School Madrigals as guest artists. 7:30P, $10.

Lee and Thomas Beam Music Center at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 27–28 Erich Bergen

The star of television’s Madame Secretary and the Las Vegas production of Jersey Boys performs selections from the Great American Songbook as well as contemporary hits. Sat 7P; Sun 2P, $39–$69.

Myron’s Cabaret Jazz at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 27 Swing It Girls Traveling Roadshow

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The three vocalists sing about their recent trip across the United States, backed by a sixpiece band. 7P, $20. Starbright Theatre at Sun City Summerlin, scsai.com

APRIL 29 Las Vegas Youth Orchestras

Five separate ensembles with members ranging in age from 8 to18 perform musical favorites. 6P, $25–$45. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

MAY 3 Stars & Stripes

The UNLV Opera Theater presents an evening filled with scenes from American operas.

7:30P, $10. Lee and Thomas Beam Music Center at UNLV, unlv.edu

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THEATER & COMEDY THROUGH APRIL 7 Sweat

In Reading, Pa., there’s talk of union lock-outs, massive lay-offs, and jobs going overseas. As rumors become reality, a group of lifelong friends gather at their local bar to joke and blow off steam while struggling to stand together as everything else falls apart. Thu–Sat 8P; Sun 2P, $20–$25.

Cockroach Theatre, 1025 First St. #110, cockroachtheatre. com

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APRIL 2019

APRIL 5–14 The Pillowman

Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state, is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town. Thu–Sat 7P; Sun 2P, $12; $10 students and seniors.

APRIL 11–MAY 5 Our Town

Thornton Wilder’s classic is performed in an immersive setting.

Thu–Sat, 7:30P; Sun, 4:30P, $35-$45. Majestic Repertory Theatre, majesticrepertory. com

APRIL 13 No-Foolin’ Live Comedy with LVIP

The Las Vegas Improvisational Players is a family-friendly show with musical and short-form improv all made up by suggestions from the audience. 7P, $10; $5 kids/military.

Show Creators Studio, 4455 W. Sunset Road, lvimprov.com

APRIL 18–24 The Play that Goes Wrong

The acclaimed Broadway comedy about a murder mystery show that goes horribly awry.

Thu–Sun, 7:30P; Sat and Sun, 2P, $29–$117. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

MAY 3–12 Legally Blonde Based on the blockbuster movie, this fabulously fun musical adaptation follows the adventures of west coast sorority girl, Elle Woods. Fri–Sat 7:30P; Sun 2P, $28. Judy Bayley Theatre at UNLV, unlv.edu

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DANCE APRIL 6 Simply Ballroom

The Southern Utah University Ballroom Dance Company will treat audiences to breath-taking lifts, beautiful costumes, and a variety of ballroom dances including samba, waltz, chacha, foxtrot, and paso doble. 2P, free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 12 Dance Showcase

Dancers in school programs from around the county perform at this annual showcase sponsored by the Clark County School District Secondary Fine Arts Division.

6:30P, free.

Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 12 Currents by Mayumana

This Israel-based group mixes music, acrobatics, and technology for a unique show. 7:30P, $29–$95. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 25–28 Harmonious Motions

A collection of works choreographed by the Bachelor of Fine Arts majors in dance performance and choreography.

Thu–Sat 7:30P; Sat–Sun 2:30P, $18. Dance Studio One at Alta Ham Fine Arts at UNLV, unlv.edu

MAY 3–4 Dance Recital

Gotta Dance presents an evening of mixed-dance forms. Fri 7P; Sat 2P, $10–$15. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

MAY 3–5 Alice (in Wonderland): Nevada Ballet Theatre

This journey through Lewis Carrol’s classic incorporates dance styles both classic and modern. Fri– Sat 7:30P; Sat–Sun 2P, $29–$139.

Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

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DISCUSSIONS & READINGS APRIL 3 An Evening with Annie Leibovitz

Leibovitz began her career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in 1970, and her pictures have appeared regularly on magazine covers ever since.

7:30P, free (tickets required). Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV, unlv.edu

APRIL 26 Story SLAM

April’s theme is “Debt,” but don’t let the theme get in the way of a good story! Tell or listen to five-minute personal stories.

7:30P, $10. The Center for Science & Wonder, 1651 E. Sunset Road, lasvegasstory slam@gmail.com

APRIL 29 Bristlecone Storytelling Festival

Clark County School District 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students perform the art of storytelling. 5:30P, free. Auditorium at Windmill Library, lvccld.org

MAY 2 How Jay Sarno’s Wild Life Changed Las Vegas

David G. Schwartz, director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, examines the creator of Caesars Palace and Circus Circus. 7P, free. Jewel Box Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

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FAMILY & FESTIVALS APRIL 12 Annual Egg Scramble

Surprise-filled eggs, games, and more! Please bring your own basket to store your eggs.

5P, free. Helen Meyer Community Center, 4525 New Forrest Drive, clarkcountynv.gov

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APRIL 13 Egg Run

roach Theatre offers 20-minute vignettes, multiple food trucks offer mouth-watering dining, and booths of all sorts offer one-of-a-kind items. 5–11P, free.

1025 First St., ffflv.org

APRIL 13 Family Music Fest

APRIL 19 Egg Dive

Easter egg hunt for all ages, with varied times per age range. 9:30A, $5. Desert Breeze Park, 8275 Spring Mountain Road, clarkcountynv.gov

Celebrate all things music with crafts, story time, a puppet show, and performances by Mr. Joey and the Sugar Free Allstars. Food trucks will be available for your dining pleasure.

10:30A–3P, free.

Windmill Library, lvccld.org

APRIL 13 Egg Hunt

There will be egg hunts, crafts, a bounce house, and more! Please bring baskets to collect eggs. Ages 3–12.

11:00A, free. Bob Price Recreation Center, 2050 Bonnie Lane, clarkcountynv.gov

APRIL 13 Beats & Brunch

An afternoon of yoga, bottomless mimosas, music, bowling, and more!

Entertainers include Soul State, Disco Lemonade, Vegas Flow Arts, and Music for the People.

18+ only. 11A, $15.

Brooklyn Bowl at The Linq, brooklynbowl.com

APRIL 13 The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster’s classic children’s book comes to life in this musical production.

11A, $19.95. Troesh Studio Theater at The Smith Center, thesmithcenter.com

APRIL 16 First Friday

From crafts to food to everything in-between, this is the place to celebrate all things artsy. Cock-

Be prepared to get wet as we follow Peter Cottontail’s trail in and around the pool and enjoy games, crafts, prizes, an egg dive, and learning water safety tips. 1P, $5. Desert Breeze Aquatic Facility, 8275 Spring Mountain Road, clarkcountynv.gov

Les Misérables on Masterpiece Sundays at 9 p.m. beginning April 14

APRIL 20 Children’s Festival

This year’s theme is “Children in Nature,” and the park will transformed into a lively playland for children, focusing on the natural world.

Bring extra money for food and crafts.

10A, free.

Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, 3130 S. McLeod Drive, clarkcountynv.gov

APRIL 21 E Ho’opili Kākou in the Park

A day of fellowship celebrating the music, food, and culture of Hawai’i including slack-key guitar. 12P, free. Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, 3130 S. McLeod Drive, clarkcountynv.gov

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story

Tuesdays, April 9 and 16 at 9 p.m.

Monday, April 1 at 10 p.m.

APRIL 27 Día del Niño

Hours of fun for children of all ages including clowns and magicians, cooking demos, face painting, a petting zoo, live entertainment, food and drink, arts and crafts. 12–5P, $6; children 2 and under and members free. Springs Preserve, springspreserve.org

NOVA: Saving the Dead Sea Wednesday, April 24 at 9 p.m.

Korea: The Never-Ending War Monday, April 29 at 9 p.m.

Trusted. Valued. Essential. • 702.799.1010 • VegasPBS.org APRIL 2019

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END NOTE

APRIL 1, 1933: Rufus T. Firefly, “grouchy Marxist” owner of the Freedonia Hotel on Fremont Street, announces his candidacy to become “Nevada’s ducky education governor.” He says, “Teachers are our secular nuns and should be paid accordingly. They need to get into a habit of working for peanuts.”

APRIL 2, 2010: No joke: To pacify schoolteachers for their lack of wage increases for several years, Gov. Jim Gibbons has placed donation boxes at DMV offices around the state to raise funds for them. In two months’ time he collects $261, or less than 1 cent per teacher for a two-year raise.

APRIL 3, 1956: Marie Paden, dubbed “Lady Godiva sans equine,” has been picked up by police for causing a major traffic jam Downtown when she went out for an evening stroll in the nude to buy a newspaper.

APRIL 4, 1931: Service stations have reduced gas prices to 18 cents a gallon, 16 cents for bootleg gas, during the “Vegas Gas Wars.”

APRIL 5, 1969: Tourist Alvin Glasby, 35, is injured by a falling nude showgirl, called “a living chandelier,” at the Stardust Lido.

APRIL 6, 1953: Experimental live mice and monkeys are flown on drones directly into a “perilous puffball cloud” from the latest nuclear blast at the Nevada Test Site.

APRIL 7, 1924: To protect the area from a virulent strain of hoof-and-mouth disease infecting livestock in California, armed guards have been placed on all roads leading into Clark County.

APRIL 8, 1910: A local ad touts, “KOW KURE is the only medicine in the world for cows only, especially for barrenness,

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY Droll, odd, poignant, and awkward moments from the many Aprils of Las Vegas history BY

Chip Mosher

retained afterbirth, or sore udders.”

APRIL 9, 1907: J.O. McIntosh of the Arizona Club has taken out the first wholesale liquor license in town, bragging he has “a carload of whiskey en route from Kentucky.”

APRIL 10, 1969: Mrs. Arden Johnson is leading a group of 200 women to break through the gender barrier by legally forcing casinos to hire female blackjack dealers.

APRIL 11, 2003: A witness in a Detroit trial has testified that terrorists there have been planning to destroy “the City of Satan,” also known as Las Vegas.

APRIL 12, 1932: Carmen Guzman, “the adult jealous love-sick killer of a local 15-year-old school girl,” is gunned down following a 36-hour manhunt.

APRIL 13, 2010: Morris Jeppson, 87, an officer on the Enola Gay in 1945 who had helped arm the first atomic bomb ever dropped on another country, has passed away in Las Vegas.

He once summed up his role in history with this: “If there hadn’t been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima.”

Sources: Las Vegas Age; Las Vegas Morning Tribune; Las Vegas Review-Journal; Las Vegas Sun

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APRIL 2019

APRIL 14, 1907: A race riot breaks out between 20 Austrians and Mexicans in James Kinney’s Saloon, “mortally wounding two.”

APRIL 15, 1971: The black community is expected to boycott schools if the local, lopsided integration plan is enacted, “requiring black youngsters to be bused out of their neighborhoods for 12 of their 13 years in public education.”

APRIL 16, 1953: Henderson, Nevada, with 7,508 residents, is officially decreed “a city,” signed into law by, well, District Court Judge A.S. Henderson.

APRIL 17, 1956: The skeleton of Nevada’s first reported serial killer, Queho, “a half-breed Pueblo Indian” who terrorized this area between 1900 and 1930, disappears from the Helldorado Parade’s popular artifact display near Fifth Street and Bonanza Road.

APRIL 18, 2005: With a .32 caliber handgun tucked in her bra, Mabel Murray, “a hooker-harrassing foul-mouth” who tolerates neither prostitutes nor drug dealers near her iconic Downtown store, Trudi Furs n’ Leathers, is, after 50 years, finally leaving the unsavory Stewart Avenue neighborhood for greener pastures.

APRIL 19, 1933: Egged on by the Clark County Taxpayers Association, the school board cuts teacher salaries by 10 percent.

APRIL 20: 2005: At 1 a.m., two terrified girls, a teenager and her 11-year-old cousin, are trapped for 80 minutes in 60 mph winds on the “Insanity,” a thrill ride hanging 64 feet out from the Stratosphere, 900 feet above the Strip.

APRIL 21, 2005: Anna Ayala, 39, suspected of sneaking a severed human finger into her chili at Wendy’s then threatening to sue the company, is arrested at her home here.

APRIL 22, 1909: The Vegas Gun Club, “a live organization for a worthy purpose,” is formed.

APRIL 23: 1992: Veteran black activist Leonard Mason, who once said “Westside Las Vegans cannot have political power until they have economic power,” dies at age 50.

APRIL 24, 1950: Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn opens with headlining ventriloquist act Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy, to a crowd including known members of the Mob. APRIL 25, 2009: The World Clown Association convention is in town.

APRIL 26: 1988: A group of racist skinheads vows to bring law and order back to Vegas.

APRIL 27, 1992: The incidence of child abuse in Nevada is up 23 percent from the previous year.

APRIL 28, 1988: It’s reported that, this past week at UNLV, H-Bomb inventor Edward Teller said he believes in more nuclear bomb testing.

APRIL 29, 1973: Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston, is playing at the Parkway Theater.

APRIL 30, 2019: Following their creation in an atomic puffball cloud experiment 66 years ago, huge man-eating mice-monkeys have been mutating and mating in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas. And they are coming out for dinner soon. No joke. Poisson d’avril!

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