Desert Companion - April 2015

04 APRIL

15

BUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Tight-knit neighborhoods that give new meaning to “home improvement”

SPRING FASHION

LEISURE CLASS Like cats and dogs

This spring, ’60s swank gets a breezy upgrade

IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

POULTRY IN MOTION YARDBIRD’S SOUTHERN

THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE VALLEY’S STRAYS Actually, it is. Are we ready for STEM?

CUISINE TAKES FLIGHT

Another case of a Subaru going places others don’t.

The all-new 2015 Legacy® doesn’t follow. With industry-leading safety, it features available EyeSight® driver assist technology.* Combine that with the confidence of Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive at 36 mpg† and one of the most spacious interiors in its class, and you’ll find yourself feeling something very new. Love. It’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.

Legacy. It’s not just a sedan. It’s a Subaru. Well-equipped at $21,695

**

Subaru of Las Vegas 5385 West Sahara Avenue (702) 495-2100 Subaruoflasvegas.com Subaru, EyeSight and Legacy are registered trademarks. *Available on select 2015 models beginning Fall 2014. †EPA-estimated hwy fuel economy for 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i models. Actual mileage may vary. **MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and registration fees. Dealer sets actual price. 2015 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Limited pictured has an MSRP of $29,485.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

No other community in Las Vegas offers more options for living, and loving every minute of it.

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Your life.

Y o u r waY. Your stYle.

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Cadence isn’t just a collection of homes, it’s a true community. With jogging and bike paths, even a bike share program and free Wi-Fi in the parks. More than a dozen model homes from Ryland Homes and Woodside Homes are opening soon, with many more by Lennar and Richmond American Homes to follow. Visit the interactive Home Finding Center today and see what’s possible.

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Join us for a big community party celebrating the Grand Opening of Cadence on May 16.

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EDiTOR’S Note

Where goes the neighborhood?

S

o, who knows. Perhaps the great historic conflict defining humanity in the 21st century won’t be over global economic inequality or the soggy shakeout from climate change or privacy in an era of the commercial-military digital surveillance Googleplex. Perhaps the conflict will come down to the Facebook friend request on your smartphone and the block party outside.

Cyberspace was once a there. For years now, though, in our continually cloud-connected world of Fitbits and Apple Watches and the Internet of Things, we’ve been seamlessly stitching cyberspace to the fabric of everyday meat reality. I don’t mean to sound all glum and elegiac and, ugh, old. I love being addled by some sweet new tech, and can’t wait for the day when I get to use my own holographic gestural morphnet interface to track down and terminate my renegade android servants angry about their preprogrammed mortality. (The arrogance!) But in a world made flat and sleek by an ever-present, instantly communal, compelling virtual reality — a community at once global and utterly delocated — I wonder what will happen to our feeling for a sense of place, for the concrete, everyday immediacy that surrounds us. With one of our feet permanently planted in Skynet, where goes the neighborhood?

Totally overthinking things! But it was on my mind as we put together our “Good neighbor policy” feature (p.

67). The people we profile come from across the valley and from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from the rurals to the suburbs to the inner city. But they have one thing in common: a highly developed antenna devoted to what’s happening on their doorstep, a keen sense of place and presence that runs counter to what sometimes seems to be a creeping, collective benign apathy to the here and now. In this tour of the neighborhoods of the Las Vegas Valley, you’ll meet no-nonsense eastsiders determined to chase the drug Next dealers out of their condo complex; MOnth exurban villagers banding together Oh, the places to preserve the peace of their rural you’ll go — with our travel issue enclave; and, yes, suburbanites who

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remix the real and virtual, using social media to keep their bonds strong. There’s a crusty canard that says Vegas doesn’t have neighborhoods with character or history.

These people prove resoundingly otherwise.

Of course, I’d be a neandermook to deny that technology is an indispensable tool. Tech literacy is no longer the sole preserve of the elective Computers 101 class. In today’s education system, science, math, engineering and technology (buzzwordified: STEM) must be bread-andbutter topics if we want our children to thrive in the new economy, and a recent Brookings Institution report urges Nevada to get on the ball. How prepared are our schools to integrating STEM curricula into the classroom? We explore that question on p. 44.

Oh, and speaking of tech and cyberspace and social media and all that stuff I just kind of went off on: Be sure to check out the eye-popping refresh of the desertcompanion.com website! To be sure, we didn’t just pour the magazine into a prefab digital mold. Rather, it’s a strenuous rework that tightly knits our content together with that of Nevada Public Radio’s “KNPR’s State of Nevada” and all things NPR for easier, deeper and richer reading. And be sure to check the desertcompanion.com website often for news, perspectives and web-first features. Whether you’re a confirmed Luddite or a smartphone addict, we aim to celebrate a sense of place no matter the medium.

Andrew Kiraly editor

Follow Desert Companion www.facebook.com/DesertCompanion www.twitter.com/DesertCompanion

4 color process

® The will to do wonders®

® The will to do wonders®

HELPING PROMOTE THEIR

WELL-BEING Caesars Foundation’s commitment to help older individuals live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives translates into many diverse partnerships.

As such, we are pleased to announce a new collaboration with The Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and a first-of-its-kind Brain Health Registry. We hope to Keep Memory Alive with this tool to raise awareness and spur action regarding brain health.

facebook.com/CaesarsFoundation

@CaesarsFdn

April 2015

letters@desertcompanion.com

Vo lU m e 1 3 I s s u e 4

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Let’s think water: In a March story headlined “Real thirst,” Heidi Kyser reported on companies that bottle treated, alkalized Vegas tap water and sell it as a healthful drink, in particular the brand Real Water. The story noted that some scientists are skeptical about such health claims — and, as it turns out, so are some of the story’s readers. “If you wear a foil hat and hold a rabbit’s foot, it works!” Scot Rutledge responded on Facebook. Added Jasen Ono, “Placebo has a strong effect.” Heidi’s piece quoted a UNLV scientist dismissing Real Water’s claims of having negative ions: “There’s no such thing as negativeion water,” explained David Hatchett, chairman of the college’s chemistry department. “You have to have a positive ion to have a negative ion.” Real Water is owned by Brent Jones, a newly elected member of the Nevada Assembly, a body not widely thought to be a bastion of rigorous scientific thinking: “No wonder he and Michelle ‘cancer is a fungus’ Fiore are such good friends,” Rutledge added. “Or are they? I get confused.” Maybe some soothing brain water will clear things up a bit! Christa Shirley Eagleton notes, “I was recently at a ‘nutritional’ store and the sales people just would not stop pushing the alkaline water. All I thought was, If you’re pushing it THIS hard, then no one’s buying it, obviously.”

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend! Can We Get a Spotlight on Him? Boy, what a way to make a living: a throw of the dice will never abolish money, real money, the kind that communicates by clairvoyance. Real money tap dances in the dust of stars, water rights. Real money is magic & the magic is in the shoes until it’s not. Hal said it was history written by hustlers, carpetbaggers, but Hal’s been dead seven years (bad luck). Do you remember enough to forget? To shake your fist when you’re too old to shake your anything else? Hey gang, home means snowy-capped, the thousand yard stare of a ram, the slipper that you cram your foot into, glass be damned. When I was a kid, Channel 13 ended broadcast days with Simon & Garfunkel singing “The Sounds of Silence” over images of The Strip; “Wow, girl, you & the people bowed & prayed/to the neon god they’d made wrote a fan-tab- matched the shimmering mirage of mirages yet to come ulous article! & you never knew if the station thought this solemn Jorge and I both enjoyed or hilarious. A throw of the dice abolished by T it, laughed, and felt that signing off; signing off abolished by money’s magic. you explained the com- In the real dark night of the soul it’s always an infomercial. plex sport of climbing You’ve forgotten it. You’ve forgotten all about it until in a way that the general that wonderment of sullen searchers returns to teach it. public could understand Everyone remembers just enough for irrelevance, and appreciate.” — Rock colonists crushed by their own success. It’s a sucker bet. climbers Joanne and It never tires of paying off, playing out, going bust.

Jorge Urioste, in response From the dry depths, the glittering shipwreck, we fill our to “Stone Temple Zealots,” Heidi Kyser’s March feature on South- pockets, even though we’re naked. You think this is bad? ern Nevada’s rock-climbing community.

My mother still thinks I’m a poet in New York.

2

ROCK CLIMBERS AROUND THE WORLD FLOCK TO SOUTHERN NEVADA FOR ITS LEGENDARY CLIMBING. MANY SETTLE HERE TO PURSUE A LIFE AMONG THE ROCKS — A LIFE OF HUNGER, DANGER AND ECSTASY

stor y by

HEIDI K YSER

p hoto grap hy by

A ARON MAYES

Think back to the first time you went all the way west of town, to where Charleston Boulevard disappears into State Route 159, city giving way to wilderness, and you saw the rusty cliffs of Red Rock rising 3,000 feet over the vast expanse of beige scrub. To you, to me, to most of us, the curiosity about striped hills was probably satisfied motoring nearby, or maybe strolling casually into, the canyons; mostly, we take in the splendor at camera’s-length. From time to time, we may put a hand on a wall to sample its texture or secure our footing as we ascend a slot, mindful of the teetering stones under our feet. Eventually, though, we take the geology for granted.

It becomes scenery for a tourist trip around the loop, backdrop to a musical at Spring Mountain Ranch.

But we’re not rock climbers.

To these tribal adventurers, the Aztec sandstone of Red Rock is rare magic. Its densely compressed flanks are mounds of sediment heaved up from the primordial sea, sculpted by shifting winds and cemented over hundreds of millions of years. Red Rock’s many faces are distinguished by features climbers crave: gritty bumps and knobs good for hanging or tiptoeing onto; jutting overhangs called “roofs” that offer an inverted, gymnastic

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3

According to our Hot Studs of Literature calendar, April is Poetry Month. As regular readers of the Desert Companion blog know, we try to run a new poem every Wednesday.

Here’s one of the best of the recent bunch, contributed by Gregory Crosby, who holds adjunct positions at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Lehman College in New York City, but before that was a longtime fixture on the Vegas literary scene:

MARCH 2015

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April 2015

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Vo lU m e 1 3 I s s u e 0 4

Features 58 Spring

67 Good Neighbor

This season, the swingin’, swanky ’60s get a breezy upgrade that blends the sophisticated, the suave and the sexy.

Whoever said Vegas neighborhoods don’t have character or community must have never visited these. Meet six neighborhoods — from affluent to poor, from rural to suburban — that are getting together to build a better block for everyone.

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Policy

Robert John Kley

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Vo lU m e 1 3 I s s u e 0 4

24

34

56

departments All Things

34 community

51 Dining

75 The Guide

19 Politics Legislature

A scrappy challenge to the Animal Foundation highlights the rifts in LV’s animal community

By Heidi Kyser

52 The Dish Get

Enough culture to feed a family of 2 million for one month

Blarted?! The Wynn!

42 education

26 Profile The offerings are very multi at this cultural center

STEM education has emerged as a high priority in Nevada. But is the state ready for the next level?

By Sage Leehey

you ready for the White Thunder sauce?!

to feds: give us our land!

22 health Does med

pot need more testing?

24 zeit bites Who

28 STYLE Making

scents 30 streetwise The

Main event 32 Open topic areful who you shout C

at; it could be a playwright

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46 history Freedom of speech in Nevada: five close calls

By Stephen Bates

beyond the burrito with these five Mexican dishes 55 Eat this now Are

56 at first Bite

Yardbird meets high expectations with "truly inspired, somewhat experimental" cooking

80 End note Must kill spiders! Must not kill spiders! Notes on life and ambivalence

By Stacy J. Willis

on the cover David and Teresa Photography Robert John Kley

n o k i l l l a s v e g a s : b r e n t h o l m e s ; i l l u s t r a t i o n : g a r y m a r ; b i l l t o m i y a s u : b r e n t h o l m e s ; p o rk c h o p : s a b i n o rr

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Keep Your Landscape Healthy …and Your Weekends Free

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Mission Statement Desert Companion is the premier city magazine that celebrates the pursuits, passions and aspirations of Southern Nevadans. With awardwinning lifestyle journalism and design, Desert Companion does more than inform and entertain.

We spark dialogue, engage people and define the spirit of the Las Vegas Valley.

Publisher Melanie Cannon Associate Publisher Christine Kiely Editor Andrew Kiraly Art Director Christopher Smith deputy editor Scott Dickensheets senior designer Scott Lien staff writer Heidi Kyser

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Editorial: Andrew Kiraly, (702) 259-7856; andrew@desertcompanion.com

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Fax: (702) 258-5646 Advertising: Christine Kiely, (702) 259-7813; christine@desertcompanion.com

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Subscriptions: Chris Bitonti, (702) 259-7810; subscriptions@desertcompanion.com Website: www.desertcompanion.com 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. com, 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 Chris Bitonti for back issues, which are available for purchase for $7.95.

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Follow Desert Companion www.facebook.com/DesertCompanion www.twitter.com/DesertCompanion

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On February 19, more than 175 guests came out to honor the Desert Companion 2015 Best of the City winners at Land Rover Las Vegas.

The wine and beer were flowing, DW Bistro crafted some drool-worthy bites and guests snagged raffle prizes galore. With so much awesomeness in our city's confines, we look forward to another round of 'bests' next year.

More photos on

. For a full listing of upcoming events, go to desertcompanion.com

04 15

Smells like preen spirit page 30

D on’t fenc e me ou t!

politics

Gimme that dang land!

Behind the move to put federal acreage under state control B y S t e v e S e b e l i u s

I

t’s the map that galls them.

The map of Nevada, painted mostly red to depict how much of the state is owned or managed by the federal government. That scarlet is an indignity that they see every day on the windswept plains of their state.

They’re the ranchers, outdoorsmen, hunters, trappers and public officials who’ve been trying for decades to wrest the 81 percent of Nevada’s lands held by “the feds” into state, local or private hands.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Sagebrush Rebellion saw Western officials try to gain more control over federal lands in their states. Nevada — considered the heart of the rebellion — had been chafing under federal land ownership for decades before that.

In 1955, the Nevada Legislature sought to repeal a section in the ordinance portion of the state constitution that “forever disclaim(ed) all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.”

It was a legally meaningless act, however.

Court fights, state laws and other legal maneuverings didn’t do much to change the color on that irksome map, either. “I don’t want to say we’ve lost,” says state Sen. Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka.

I l lu s t r at i o n C h r i s M o r r i s

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ALL Things

politics

“But we certainly haven’t won.”

Now, led by Goicoechea — whose district stretches from the Idaho border all the way south to Primm — the state is advancing the ideals of the Sagebrush Rebellion on a new front: A formal resolution requesting the government turn over just 7.2 million acres — around 10 percent of federal holdings in Nevada — to state management.

Senate Joint Resolution 1, sponsored by Goicoechea and state Sen. Don Gustavson, R-Sparks, along with a handful of conservative Assembly members, is based on the work of the Nevada Land Management Task Force, authorized by the 2013 Legislature under a bill Goicoechea fought hard to pass.

The task force, headed by Elko County Commissioner Demar Dahl, met every month between June 2013 and August 2014 to study the idea of federal transfer of land to the state, and made several reports to an interim legislative committee. (The committee didn’t endorse the final report after its chairman, now-former Assemblyman Paul Aizley, D-Las Vegas, declined to hold a vote. As a result, Goicoechea introduced the resolution in this session of the Legislature.)

The 130-page report is heavy on details and promises: The state would gain title to certain lands, mostly designated for disposal already, excluding wilderness areas, National Conservation Areas, land controlled by federal agencies such as the Energy Department, Defense Department and environmentally sensitive land.

By managing these lands — including selling some off or exploiting them for oil, gas or mining — they say the state could generate enough money to cover the costs of owning the land, an estimated $26.8 million per year. (It turns out Nevada needs to hire more people; Utah has 66 employees to manage 3.4 million acres, Idaho 264 to look after 2.4 million. Nevada, now asking for more acreage than those states combined, has seven people on the job now, managing just 200,000 acres, according to the task force report.)

Critics say estimates of $56 million to $205.8 million per year in land-management revenue are wildly optimistic, based as they are on other states that have far

20

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more oil, gas and timber resources than Nevada, where revenue may have to come primarily through land sales. (The report itself says the “sale of select parcels to generate startup capital and repay debt” will be a priority.)

Lobbyist and conservationist Kyle Davis warns the numbers show the real intent behind the push for the state to take over is real estate. “For the most part, the intent is to sell every one of those acres,” he says. But the state should be careful what it wishes for; if Nevada actually got the 7.2 million acres, “It would bankrupt us,” Davis says.

For his part, Goicoechea acknowledges the estimates may be high, but he says he’s confident the program will cover its costs. “I believe we can show we can manage these lands at a profit,” he says.

And as an added sweetener, the money that isn’t used to pay for land management is supposed to be used for public education, mental health programs, senior and veterans programs and preservation of endangered species.

Davis warns some of the lands identified by the report are still critical environmental areas, development of which could have negative consequences. Like other critics, he decries the possibility of losing acreage currently open to the public for recreation in order for the state to profit.

And with the state budget under perpetual stress, he says he’s concerned land sales could be seen as easy budget fix.

But there’s an even more basic question: Why? Why would the federal government turn land over to the state to sell, when it could just as easily earn those same profits for itself? “How realistic is this?” Davis asks.

On that, there may be a rare point of agreement. “The feds clearly don’t want to,” Goicoechea admits. “It’s clearly a matter of equity: Why should the federal government own 80 percent of Nevada?”

But while he says a Republican Congress is more likely to look with favor on Nevada’s request, he admits it’s possible the federal government could continue to ignore the state’s resolutions. “This is, I think, a reasonable approach,” Goicoechea says. “If we can’t get this done now, we’re dead. And dead is not a good place to be.”

But if the state can prove that it can handle 7.2 million acres, then perhaps the federal government will give more land in the future, Goicoechea said. (The report contemplates future transfers beyond the initial acreage.)

But reason is sometimes tough to come by in these debates, as the nation saw in April 2014 when rancher Cliven Bundy declared a “range war” when Bureau of Land Management officers moved to enforce court orders to round up cattle Bundy had allowed to illegally graze on public land for more than 20 years. That clarion call brought heavily armed militia members to Bundy’s Bunkerville ranch, and could easily have ended in bloodshed had the BLM not retreated.

The anger and frustration felt by Bundy and his supporters at federal management of public lands was evident at a hearing on SRJ 1, where some witnesses declared the federal government in violation of promises to turn over all public lands to the state.

It underlies obviously unconstitutional legislation such as Assembly Bill 283 by Sparks Republican Ira Hansen, which seeks to truncate the authority of some federal agents to enforce laws on public lands. It echoes in remarks like those of conservative lobbyist Janine Hansen, who said at the hearing for SJR 1, “It’s time Nevada stopped being a territory of the federal government and stepped up to be a full state like those east of Colorado.”

But whether undergirded by fanciful legal theories or modern-day resentment at federal control of most of the state or even a good-faith belief that the state could manage the land better than the federal government, it all comes back to that red-stained map, a map that some in the state want to start changing, precisely like their Sagebrush Rebel forebears of three decades ago.

Others see a darker side to that rebellion, however. In the February issue of Harper’s, journalist Christopher Ketcham quotes historian Bernard DeVoto. “The push for state ownership of public lands was part of a larger ideological struggle, DeVoto concluded, ‘only one part of an unceasing, many-sided effort to discredit all conservation bureaus of the government, to discredit conservation itself.”

We our employee volunteers!

Cox Communications employees volunteered more than 13,000 HOURS in our community in 2014, helping to improve the lives of others through the support of education, families, children and diversity partnerships.

ALL Things

health

policy

Budding issue As medical marijuana dispensaries prepare to open, critics wonder if we’ve done enough science B y H e i d i K ys e r

T

he laws are passed, the licenses divvied and the storefronts leased.

With dispensaries set to open soon, the public appears sold on marijuana’s medicinal benefits. But what do we really know about its side effects?

For instance, two recent studies have connected regular marijuana use to long-term memory loss and bipolar disorder. While both teams described their findings as preliminary, the caveat does little to lighten the impact of their conclusions. Manic mood swings and the loss of mental faculties are no joke.

“With the movement to decriminalize marijuana, we need more research to understand its effect on the brain,” says Matthew Smith, the psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor who led the memory-loss study at Northwestern University. (The bipolar study was conducted at Warwick Medical School.)

Yet the federal government’s listing of marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic — a controlled substance with no accepted medical use — has dampened the kind of research Smith calls for.

Thus, the advent of medical marijuana in 23 states, including Nevada, presents a novel problem. Adults are free to harm themselves, with over-the-counter or prescribed substances, provided purveyors give adequate warning of possible consequences. Add minors to the mix, and it gets murkier. Who would be held responsible if a child given marijuana as a medicine today suffered brain damage 20 years hence? His parents? The doctor?

The dispensary owner?

Such questions birthed the FDA-required drug disclaimers. The government has to cover its bases in matters of public health … and liability. But medical marijua-

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na is coming to market outside the usual bounds of testing and approval. To some, it’s a case of the public will forcing rapid change on a slow-moving system.

Not everyone’s on the bandwagon. “I believe medical marijuana is really a lie at this time,” says Dave Marlon, president of Solutions Recovery, a mental-health facility in Las Vegas. “There is no FDA-approved dosage for marijuana that you smoke.”

Marlon believes the MMJ rush is a cover for recreational use — and a dangerous one. He doesn’t object to adults smoking a joint before dinner any more than he does to them having a glass of whiskey afterward. The difference is that alcohol comes with a warning label — the result of a large body of scientific testing — while medical marijuana is being pushed as beneficial on uninformed consumers.

The anti-MMJ Marlon finds a surprising ally in the call for scientific testing: Aseem Sappal, provost and dean of faculty of pot college Oaksterdam University.

“Standardized warning labels are something we need to do,” Sappal says.

“It probably won’t happen until things change federally, or until the substance is reclassified or declassified. Only then can I see that happening on a national level, and until then, you will have issues — one state may regulate it well; another may not.”

Nevada’s regulations have gotten the thumbs-up from industry insiders in other states, says Pam Graber, information and education officer for the medical marijuana program in Carson City. The pertinent

Say no: Dave Marlon argues MMJ is “a lie at this time.”

law includes pages on required safety warnings that cover addiction, health risks and more.

The law also calls for a medical marijuana research program to be established at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, but the program wasn’t funded. “Unfortunately,” says UNSOM Senior Associate Dean for Research James Kenyon, “the provision did not address the complexity of clinical research and the administrative and regulatory barriers to conducting quality research into the efficacy of a federally controlled substance.”

Like Sappal, Kenyon is referring to marijuana’s Schedule 1 listing which, insiders say, spooks most research institutions that receive federal money. Three U.S. senators recently made a move toward solving that problem — a bill they introduced would move the drug to Schedule II, the list that includes oxycodone and morphine. But Sappal and others believe the DEA, FDA and Big Pharma have too much money at stake.

But it’s one step closer to what Marlon would like to see. “Criminalization of small amounts of marijuana and incarceration as a result of that is wrong,” he says. “So fixing that makes sense. Doing double-blind studies that get published in peer-reviewed journals makes sense. The state government saying it’s medicinal, when most of it isn’t? I don’t think that’s helpful.”

P h oto g r a p h y B R E N T HOL M E S

E M A G ON!

Yo u n g io n a l s Profess hT & ig T r iv ia n g in k r o w neT

O

n March 19, McMullan’s Irish Pub hosted Nevada Public Radio and United Way's

Young Philanthropists Society for a lively evening of trivia - giving eight teams of eight the chance to participate in a competitive (yet friendly) trivia contest for the right to be called champion!

Check out more photos on

. Stay up-to-date on all events at nevadapublicradio.org.

ALL Things

zeit bites The Breakdown

Private Vegas by the numbers

'toon town confidential

If superheroes lived in Vegas ...

210-plus: Books set in Las Vegas, according to Goodreads.com Private Vegas : One of the newest, by best-seller James Patterson (described by Vanity Fair as “the Henry Ford of books”) and Maxine Paetro Eudora Welty: Once said, “Fiction depends for its life on place,” meaning the action and characters should be organic to the setting 361: Pages in Private Vegas 45: Pages in Private Vegas devoted to Vegas 6: Pages in which main character Jack Morgan is actually in Las Vegas No. 2: Where Private Vegas debuted on the New York Times best-seller list Okay, this seems kinda VegasY: For

WIZARD WORLD COMIC CON

April 24-26, Las Vegas Convention Center, wizardworld.com Expected guests include Norman Reedus, Emily Kinney and David Morrissey of The Walking Dead; Elvira; Robert Englund of Nightmare on Elm Street; Tom Felton from the Harry Potter movies; and others.

$294,038 and your signature on a waiver, you can have a copy of Private Vegas fitted with an actual bomb for selfdestructing. Also included is a helicopter flight to a dormant volcano; the services of a bomb squad; a five-course meal with Patterson; and a pair of gold binoculars.

“Just #&%@! shoot me”: Eudora Welty Chantal Corcoran & Scott Dickensheets

Deleted scenes from Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2* What footage, shot at Wynn Las Vegas, didn’t make the final movie by Scott Dickensheets

Blart bumps Segway into Michelle Fiore; Second Amendment hilarity ensues

Blart jams nightstick through priceless Picasso; asks Wynn, “Pi-what-o?”

Fat-shamed while patrolling daypool, sobbing Blart peppersprays Robin Leach.

Eye-melting hilarity ensues

Blart rises to supervisory job, hogs all tips

Mistakenly assuming that “European” sunbathing means “poolside schnitzel,” Blart barges into topless area yelling, “I’m here to hork some pork!” Hilarious PG-13 semi-nudity ensues

*Opens April 17; it’s reportedly the first commercial film Steve Wynn has let shoot in his namesake resort.

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Blart mistakes bidet for tiny water fountain

When Elaine Wynn mentions Francis Bacon, Blart asks, “Do you mean the 16th-century English philosopher who’s been called ‘the father of empiricism,’ or the 20th-century artist known for his intense, hallucinatory style?” Then shoots own foot

I LLUSTRAT I ON g a ry m a r

and so on. The idea in this conversation is to come at this artwork from different perspectives. We have no script, so it’s gonna go where it’s gonna go.”

… THE STATURE OF CITY

Protecting City

O

n a map, the emptier parts of Lincoln and Nye counties look like the tail end of nowhere.

Not so. From petroglyphs to the area’s distinctive basin-and-range geology, there’s enough there to prompt a preservation movement that includes legislation

by Sen. Harry Reid to set aside more than 1,200 square miles. The resource inventory includes art: the massive, decades-in-the-making, rumored-to-benearly-finished City project by Michael Heizer. A vast collection of built forms that allude to both modernity and ancient monuments, it’s already famous enough that Reid predicts its opening will increase tourism a “million-fold.”

So art supporters have joined the effort.

On April 7, Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and critic Dave Hickey, will talk about Heizer, City, the nature of time and more, at 6 p.m. in the Cabaret Jazz room of The Smith Center ( free).

Desert Companion recently spoke to Govan about …

… THE EVENT “We’re going to have a conversation about the nature of time and preservation.

I come from a museum, where we think a lot about art preservation over millennia.

Dave is someone who’s been engaged mostly in the art of the new — he talks a lot about change and the avant garde

“I’ll be honest, I think it’s one of the greatest American artworks, if not international artworks, that’s ever been made.

“What people are going to find is that it’s a landmark in many, many ways. Obviously in the landscape, but also in art history — he’s at the highest level of thinking about the fact that we live in a time that’s very much about the new, and technology and industry and all that; but that we still have a foot in our ancient human history of monuments and earlier civilizations.”

… CITY AND THE MEANING OF TIME “You can almost think there are these three markers of time there. Working backward, there is the very new, the fact that he is engaged in high-tech engineering, and is very knowledgeable about everything from mining to highway building to concrete mixtures. And then there’s this ancient civilization aspect, which is that human beings have been building for millennia. And then there’s the geologic time of the basin and range, which extends back beyond human time. This aspect of time is something that can be experienced very uniquely with the combination of the natural environment and this artwork.”

… HOW HEIZER HELPED CHANGE SCULPTURE “Extremely radical is his use of negative space. The other great work that’s in Nevada, “Double Negative” (pictured, a cleft cut into cliffs on either side of a ravine), is about a negative space as much as a positive space.

That’s a real invention of Michael Heizer, the idea of a monumental absence. If you look at other monuments that have been built since, there are many other artists and architects now who have absorbed that vocabulary into the history of sculpture and architecture.” Scott Dickensheets

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(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

April 2015

DesertCompanion.com

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ALL Things

people

profile

Patrick Gaffey & Erika Borges Winchester Cultural Center

W

hen Patrick Gaffey first encountered Bishr Hijazi’s Arab Ensemble, it consisted of Hijazi, playing the oud, and three percussionists. “You could see that he could use somebody who could play a little bit more legato,” says Gaffey, the county cultural-program supervisor who runs the Winchester Cultural Center. “We asked him if he’d like somebody who played a violin, and he said, ‘Who?’” Gaffey and his associate, Cultural Specialist Erika Borges, suggested Laraine Kaizer, a member of the Las Vegas Philharmonic. Hijazi had his doubts. Could a classical musician improvise as much as Arabic music required? “The first concert they played together,” Gaffey says, “he only had her play on three tunes. And afterward he said, ‘If I had any idea how fast she was going to pick this up, I would have had her play on everything.” “And now she does,” Borges adds.

Clearly it takes a certain amount of improvisation to run a cultural center, too. “We’re kind of feeling our way along,” is how Gaffey describes his programming philosophy. “We came up with the idea that there are so many performers in this town who are stellar examples of any kind of music. We just try to be a little bit of everything. We try to present music for people who really love music.” The result has been a gamut that’s included jazz bands, Asian throat singers, Meshuggina Klezmorim and Russians who play crystal instruments.

It’s not just music. Clark County’s only full-service arts facility (though it does curate visual arts exhibits in the Government Center rotunda) has hosted, among many programs, a ballet about women of the Mexican Revolution, the Colombian comedy Se Vende una Burra (Sold a Mule), lively Day of the Dead celebrations and speakers such as the Review-Journal’s Norm Clark and historian Michael Green.

“I’m really impressed,” Green says of Winchester. “Gaffey really brings in a diverse group of artists and presenters, and I think it’s valuable for the community — and for a sense of community.”

An unexpected programming strength?

Spanish-language theater. “Hispanics are a huge part of our audience,” Gaffey

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explains. Whereas his early attempts to encourage traditional theater didn’t pan out, five Latino companies have made Winchester home, and it’s “going great guns.” Indeed, he doesn’t know of another venue doing it. These productions included the seventh-annual Spanish language Vagina Monologues. Dubious that it would draw, he was pleasantly surprised when it packed the place: “These Spanish-language theater companies have just amazed me with their ability to pull in audiences.” Director Stacy Mendoza is riding the crest of this wave.

She staged a Humberto Robles play that the author saw on video, leading him to offer her the chance to do a complete cycle of his works at reduced royalties.

(This year’s offering was Ni Princessa ni

Esclava in January.)

“We’ve been working with five Mexican folkloric dance companies,” Gaffey says, “and they tend to fill the house every time.”

The cultural center took the initiative of forming a band called Circle the World. Its members are Lin Hong Li, who plays 10 instruments — mostly Chinese folk ones — Gary Haleamau, “who’s actually a hero back in Hawaii,” and his son Curran, who plays bass, blues pianist Junior Brantley, a former sideman of Stevie Ray Vaughan, plus drummer Charles Bel Azzi.

“Chinese music doesn’t even use the same system of notation as Western music does,” Gaffey explains, adding that the concert drew fans from across the spectrum “and they were all blown away.

My favorite thing was Junior made a gesture to Lin Hong and broke into a (blues) solo on her pipa,” a four-stringed, Chinese instrument. “Man, can she play it. She sounds like Jimi Hendrix sometimes.”

Whether it’s the 9,000 participants in the center’s annual Day of the Dead celebration, opera buffs in the house for a Mad Men-inspired production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti or a capacity crowd floored by the cross-cultural exchange of Circle the World, “they feel this is their home away from home,” Borges says. “It’s a place where people come to embrace their culture and other cultures.” –David McKee

P h oto g r a p h y C h ec ko S a lg a d o / f O C ALcHRO M E

April 2015 april

DesertCompanion.com

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ALL Things

style

You scent me There’s something in the air. Must be this spring’s must-have scents

Lanvin Arpege Eclat d’Arpege Pretty Face eau de parfum Key notes: green tea leaves, peach tree leaves, peonies, lilac, Sicilian lemons, amber. $77, Nordstrom in the Fashion Show Mall

By Christie Moeller

Spring has sprung, and so has the annual release of new fragrances from top-name perfumers. This year’s trends feature natural notes that come straight from the kitchen — rhubarb, tea and mint. Smell the magic.

Bond NO.9 High Line eau de parfum Key notes: zesty rhubarb, prairie grazing weed, purple love grass, citrusy bergamot and Lady Jane tulips. $220 (1.7 ounces) and $280 (3.3 ounces), Nordstrom in the Fashion Show Mall

Jo Malone white jasmine and mint cologne Key notes: mint leaf, heirloom jasmine and mate tea leaf. $120, Neiman Marcus in the Fashion Show

Atelier Cedrat Enivrant - Cologne Absolue Key notes: mint, Moroccan cedrate, lime, bergamot and juniper berries. $180, Neiman Marcus in the Fashion Show Mall

Kilian Sophie Matisse art edition bamboo harmony eau de parfum Key notes: white tea leaves, bergamot, bigarade and neroli. $195, Saks Fifth Avenue in the Fashion Show Mall

28

Tom Ford Mandarino Di Amalfi eau de parfum Key notes: mint, jasmine, orange blossom and thyme. $135, Sephora in the Grand Canal Shoppes, Forum Shops, Miracle Mile Shoppes and Town Square

Bulgari White Tea eau parfumée Key notes: white tea, artemisia leaves, ambrette, white pepper, musk and woody amber. $65, Sephora in the Grand Canal Shoppes, Forum Shops, Miracle Mile Shoppes and Town Square

Black Mountain Institute Presents

T H E I N AU G U R A L J I M R O G E R S CO N T R A R I A N L E C T U R E

WALTER

MOSLEY HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 7PM UNLV STUDENT UNION BALLROOM

T

he Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute is proud to welcome Walter Mosley to deliver the inaugural Jim Rogers Contrarian Lecture. Presented every other year, this series invites a celebrated writer and intellectual to offer a “contrarian” view on an issue of contemporary importance. This year, Walter Mosley will address the subject of higher education. Best known as the creator of the Easy Rawlins mystery series (Devil in a Blue Dress, Rose Gold), Walter Mosley is a prolific writer of more than forty-three books. His oeuvre includes literary fiction and nonfiction, science fiction, drama, political monographs, a young adult novel, and a graphic novel. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

t h i s e v e n t i s f r e e a n d u n t i c k e t e d. a l l a r e w e lc o m e . m o r e i n f o r m at i o n at b l a c k m o u n ta i n i n s t i t u t e .o r g

Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter

BLA

OUNTAIN



ALL Things

explore

streetwise

In the Main stream

2

7

Change is the only constant on this funky, hyper-local street B y K r i s t y To t t e n

L

uxury intersects hard-nosed

9

Retro Vegas

unsentimental auto lots and bail

3

bondsmen mingle with vintage

they live it. The shop started as a

shops and high-end home decor.

hobby but morphed into a full-time

necessity on Main Street, where

Owners Bill Johnson and Marc

5

Comstock don’t just love retro,

The unlikely mix tells a story of

biz that requires constant scouring

transformation on one of Las Vegas’

for classic Vegas decor. The space is

oldest streets.

a time capsule filled with mid-mod

Exile on Main Street

pink 1960s kitchen, and lamps, art

living room and dining sets, a pastel

1

What good is a badass vintage

and ashtrays aplenty. 1131 S. Main St.,

guitar if it’s not hanging from a

702-384-2700

well-dressed body? Roxie and Jesse Amoroso, owners of Cowtown

Buffalo Exchange

cater to those about to rock. “I feel

4

like fashion and music go hand and

on the block, and the only national

hand,” Roxie says. “And I figured

chain. The new- and recycled-fash-

if my husband and I thought of it

ion depot moved from the university

Guitars, opened Exile last year to

This Tucson-headquartered clothing store is the new kid

1

that way, other musicians would,

area, bringing funky clothing, impos-

too.” The shop carries men’s and

sibly hip clerks and increased foot

women’s clothing, such as Levi’s

traffic to Main Street. 1209 S. Main

bar has been recognized nation-

use of question marks. Medusa’s

bell bottoms, band tees, boots and,

St., 702-791-3960

ally and regularly hosts live music,

collectibles is open Monday through

most important, vintage designer handbags. 1007 S. Main St., 702823-3957

5

themed parties and trivia. 1218 S.

Saturday, “10 a.m. to ?” — and the

Main St., 702-685-9645

clock shop next door keeps the

Viva Frida! This festive Mexican restaurant loves selfie-queen

same hours Sunday. Pop in to see

Patina Decor

Prior to Makers & Finders’ soft

its folk-artsy vibe. The dining spot

7

launch in November, the only

draws a mix of artists, business

furniture alongside ladylike clothing

Makers & Finders

2

Casa Don Juan

Frida Kahlo, and Downtowners love

restored gas pumps, vending ma-

Patina showcases beautiful,

chines and clocks of all kinds. 1310 S.

statement-making vintage

Main St., 702-384-8463

Clay Arts Vegas

beverages to be found on South

people and, recently, Vice President

and accessories, often adorned with

Main were boozy ones. The coffee

Joe Biden. 1204 S. Main St., 702-

sequins and baubles. Our favorites:

shop and Latin eatery serves café

384-8070

gilded Pabst Blue Ribbon beer

9

snifters and a large, gold, geometric

where people of all ages and abili-

staples bagels and lox and turkey clubs alongside arepas, empana-

Velveteen Rabbit

chorizo. 1120 S. Main St. #110, 702-

6

586-8255

and its distinctive ambiance, Velve-

das and fusion dishes loaded with

Known for seasonal cocktails,

Las Vegans and tourists alike. The

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elephant-head wall hanging. 1300 S.

ties can learn — "More than a studio

Main St. #140

where you will make just cups

JJC Clocks & Antiques

Jakubowski. They also showcase

an equally impressive beer list

teen Rabbit has become a go-to for

Clay Arts is an art gallery, a ceramics shop and a classroom

and bowls," says co-owner Peter

8

Main Street’s business-hours

visiting artists. 1511 S. Main St.,

placards are unique for their

702-375-4147

P h oto g r a p h y B R E N T HOL M E S

ALL Things

open topic

discomfort zone

Sir, there’s no need to shout But sometimes you raise your voice anyway — and occasionally karma is on the other end of the line B y C o r e y L e v i ta n

I

am generally a calm person. I mean, don’t you dare check with my wife about that. But I will concede to a distinct lack of calm whenever I have to call customer support. I’m not proud of going all Joe Pesci from Goodfellas on these poor anonymous souls doing their crappy jobs for AT&T, BofA and 1800FLOWERS. But the 35-minute holds, the multiple disconnections following the 35-minute holds, having

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to repeat my name and last four of my social eight times, all combine to drive me beyond the boundaries of not raising my voice like a lunatic. And the anger is cumulative, building up over multiple calls until I’m inevitably conversing with the reason for every problem I’ve had since the fifth-grade playground.

Cox Communications was the target of a particularly heinous tantrum I threw in the summer of 2011. I had just been fired from my job at the Review-Journal, so I wasn’t in the chipperest of moods to start with.

And my favorite means of escapism, pay-per-view, kept crapping out during broadcasts I couldn’t ever finish yet always got charged full price for. Cox had already sent two repair guys to tell me there was no problem they could find and that I must be mistaken (read: trying to scam free pay-per-view movies). So I got on the phone with some customer support guy. Among the many unmentionables I mentioned during that tirade was something about Cox not being an entirely inappropriate name for their company. (I told you I’m not proud of this.)

I’ll get back to Cox shortly. First, I need to bring up Ernest Hemmings, easily one of the most creative playwrights working in Las Vegas.

Hemmings, 40, writes, directs and stars in sketch-based multimedia plays, under the name TSTMRKT, that fuse a deep social conviction with a fetish for ’50s pop culture and a sadistic sense of humor. I first encountered him while writing a story for the RJ about a 2011 play Hemmings directed, Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them, at the College of Southern Nevada. He struck me as so hysterically different, we joked off the record for a half-hour after our phone interview ended. (In the thousands of

I LLUSTRAT I ON He r n a n Va l enc i a

Better hearing.

Better living.

Was that you?, he asked. OF COURSE THAT WAS ME! He already knew my unmistakable, helium-tinged man-boy voice. Besides, my full name was on the screen in front of him. interviews I have conducted, this was the only time that happened.) I added Hemmings on Facebook and immediately enjoyed his real-life show as he cracked about the weirdness of being a black convert to Judaism (“neither side wants me now”) and a broke-ass dad with joint custody (“just got mugged by a giraffe — @ Toys ‘R’ Us”).

My Cox tirade resulted in another discount for the corrupted pay-perview programs I ordered and another tech-service order, for which I had to be home “sometime between 11 and 3.” As I hung up to decompress, one of those little square message windows popped up on my Facebook page. “Was that just you I talked to?” it asked. The message came from Ernest Hemmings. He was the Cox operator. Suddenly, I felt I was in a scene from one of Hemmings’ plays. What were the odds of this actually happening? All I could think was how perfect this was, that karma really does work, and that everyone who ever called me an asshole was correct. My belief in the acceptability of tantrums under certain conditions had cost me this new friendship with a rare creative soulmate. Hemmings was such a better man than me, however, that he felt the need to offer me plausible deniability: Was that you?, he asked. OF COURSE THAT WAS ME! He already knew my unmistakable, helium-tinged man-boy voice, and, besides, my full name was on the screen in front of him.

I avoided Hemmings for a long time after that, out of the deep shame that motivates so much of my behavior. I also avoided 800 numbers and, frankly, mirrors. I played my rant over and over in my head, suddenly seeing all the operators I had eviscerated over the years as the working-class people with families that they were the whole time.

For his part, Hemmings joked with me about it. It was no big deal to him,

he said. He continued commenting on my Facebook statuses, and he even invited me to his latest birthday party, at which I regaled all the other attendees with this humiliating story. On Dec. 19, I took my wife to see Ernest’s latest play, JFKFC, at the Scullery Theatre.

He offered to comp me tickets, but I insisted on paying. Please, it’s the least I could do. The slapsticky tour de force, co-starring the lovely and talented Breon Jenay and painstakingly synced to a backdrop of video and audio effects, featured a battle with a sentient Siri app that cracked up the audience but unhinged my jaw. Hemmings’ character yelled into his phone, using many of the same words and phrases I had. I recognized “$&**!” and “*&(%#!” And derivations of “Cox” were in there, too.

Was I in a scene from one of Hemmings’ plays after all? I obviously have a complex about this. Still, watching Hemmings lose it into a phone with such a familiar, inappropriate ferocity was unbearable. My wife even elbowed me to ask why I wasn’t laughing.

By the time the sketch arrived at its karmic climax, it was like an intervention: Siri called the cops and had Hemmings’ character arrested. The charge? Verbal abuse.

After the performance, I had to ask, despite my wife being adamant about bolting home. (Screw the thoughtful babysitting friends we promised to relieve at 10 p.m. Nothing trumps the guilt-confirmation impulse to an obsessive-compulsive Jew.) “I wasn’t thinking about that in particular,” Hemmings said as I heaved a 60-pound audio mixer out of the Scullery, across the street and into his car, powered solely by relentless remorse.

“In particular,” huh?

Regardless, I no longer yell at customer service people. Well, I try not to.

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April 2015

DesertCompanion.com

33

Community

The Death of Killing Could a scrappy animal advocacy group’s contractual coup hasten a new era in animal control for Southern Nevada? B y H e i d i K ys e r

I

f you’ve seen a 10-year-old, 18-pound black-and-white English cocker spaniel with fear issues, call me. When the dog was at the Lied Animal Shelter, which is operated by municipal contractor the Animal Foundation, she was given the name Cindy Lou and ID No. A830787. I wanted to adopt her, but she’s not there anymore, and shelter operators say they can't tell me where she went.

I learned about Cindy Lou on a rescue group’s Facebook page. I had lost my own 13-year-old salt-and-pepper cocker, Aja, a little more than a year earlier and didn’t think I was ready to commit to another pet. But after hearing from a friend how rewarding it could be to adopt a senior

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dog, I scanned a couple spaniel rescues’ Facebook pages looking for one. That’s when I saw Cindy Lou. I went to the Animal Foundation’s website, entered the ID number and there she was, peering back at me with her head cocked, silky black ears slightly perked. I showed the photo to my husband. “Go get her now,” he said.

We went to Lied the following day. But when I gave the worker in the dog-adoption area Cindy Lou’s ID number, she informed us curtly that the dog was “on hold” and not up for adoption. She rebuffed my questions, pointing me instead to the many other dogs that were available. Later that day, an Animal Foundation worker named Ryan called and told

Pet cause: Jennifer me that Cindy Lou and Bryce Henderhad behavior issues son, founders of No and was still being Kill Las Vegas, rally evaluated.

Knowsupport for their bid ing that the Animal to assume local aniFoundation euthamal-shelter services. nizes nonadoptable animals, I told Ryan that I’d fostered many dogs, including a couple with behavior issues. I’d be happy, I said, to work with Cindy Lou. I could cover medical expenses, if needed. The following day, he called to tell me she was being “released to rescue” because of her issues. Citing protocol, he said he couldn’t tell me which rescue she’d go to, but he'd pass along my information.

P h oto g r a p h y b r e n t h o l m e s

There was nothing else he could do for me. On Monday, March 16, Cindy Lou’s profile disappeared from the Animal Foundation website. No rescue organization contacted me about her.

It’s a coincidence that, during the same time, I was reporting this story about the conflict brewing between the Animal Foundation and animal advocacy group No Kill Las Vegas over municipal sheltering services. I expected to simply go to Lied and come home with a dog. But my personal story dovetailed unexpectedly with the news story, illustrating the kind of problem No Kill and its supporters say they have with the Animal Foundation. Are there logical reasons to keep a behavior-challenged animal out of the hands of even the best-meaning potential adopter? Sure. Are there plenty of other animals in need of help? Definitely. But the lack of a resolution left me unsure of Cindy Lou's fate.

A 6-to-1 vote at the March 17 meeting of the Clark County Commission put an end to No Kill Las Vegas’ brief but fierce attempt to wrest the county’s $1.7 million annual animal-shelter services contract from the Animal Foundation’s control. But in the months leading up to that decision, NKLV rallied impressive public support for its cause. As story after story like mine of Cindy Lou surfaced — pets with minor health problems being put down, breed-specific rescue groups given preferential access to lists of adoptees — political leaders began to see that many constituents aren’t happy.

The Animal Foundation may have gotten the contract, but the fight for fewer euthanized pets in the valley feels far from over.

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A

t a coffee shop near Bryce Henderson’s day job, where he sells memberships to a car repair history database, he recounts his own Cindy Lou-type tales from the time he and his wife, Jennifer Henderson, were involved with the Animal Foundation. He smiles as he remembers how happily it all started. Soon after the pair of animal-lovers moved here in 2008, they began looking for opportunities to help the valley’s huge homeless pet population. That year, Clark County alone impounded 17,843

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community animals; 10,757 of them were euthanized.

One now-famous dog avoided this fate: Arbor, the Hendersons’ black border collie mix. Bryce recalls coming home from work one day to find a painting in the living room. “Jennifer said Arbor had done it, and I didn’t believe her,” he says. “Then, she showed me the video.” Soon, the world would see Arbor paint. Jennifer, described by her husband as a “stay-at-home dogmom,” started a Facebook page under the name Go Vegas Dog and began posting photos and videos of the amazing things she taught Arbor to do. It caught fire. The dog appeared on Good Morning America and in newspapers around the world. Arbor has garnered 550,000 Facebook followers — more than artist Gerhard Richter.

The Hendersons leveraged their dog’s talents for animal causes. They used Arbor’s television appearances to highlight the value of rescues. They used her social media to help owners find lost pets.

Through her, they partnered with the Animal Foundation to promote its adoptable animals and events. One such event, though, was the beginning of the end of that partnership. Bryce Henderson recalls: “We fostered a dog, Zeke, for (the Animal Foundation’s) 2013 Best in Show fundraiser, and we really bonded with the dog. We knew all the dogs had to be returned for the show, but we thought maybe they’d make an exception. So we talked to Andy (Bischel), their director of development, and he said, ‘No, no exceptions.

The dog’s coming back here. You can bid on him at the show.’ … Here we are, willing to provide a good home for Zeke, and we’ve already been fostering him. But that wasn’t important to them. They wanted Zeke to be in the show and try to get as much money for him as possible. We even said we’d make a large donation — I can’t remember how much exactly. But they weren’t interested.”

Incensed, the Hendersons took to Go Vegas Dog’s social media and encouraged Best in Show attendees to withhold applause for Zeke so as to minimize bids on him. As their post made the rounds of the rescue community, outraged members began pestering the Animal Foundation and event sponsor Zappos. The Animal Foun-

dation’s spokewsoman, Meghan Scheibe, says Zeke had already been promoted as a show participant, which is why he needed to be in the show. But the Foundation worked with the Hendersons and Zappos to make sure they got the dog, she says.

And in the end, they did.

The incident characterizes the hardcharging approach of No Kill Las Vegas, which the Hendersons went on to found in January 2014. The previous November, after the Animal Foundation had banned them from further volunteering at Lied, they’d joined with Animal Help Alliance to stage a protest of euthanasia policies at the shelter. AHA founder Dori Gilbert expected a couple dozen people at the protest, Bryce says; he and Jennifer put the word out to their network and 400 showed up.

“We had a rally, we raised awareness, and people felt really empowered,” he says, “I think because so many in the community had given up. They felt like there was nothing they could do against the Animal Foundation. … So, about a month after that, we filed the paperwork to be a nonprofit (business) in the state of Nevada.” (NKLV has applied for, but not yet received, 501(c)3 tax-exempt status.)

NKLV began with the intention to bring about change at Lied, Bryce says.

Their demands were simple: more cooperation with rescue groups, more transparency with the public, less-stringent criteria for deeming pets “adoptable,” and better marketing and promotion of those pets — all with the goal of saving more animals’ lives.

But soon after forming, NKLV learned that the Animal Foundation’s municipal animal services contract was up for renewal in June 2015. The group shifted its focus to replacing the Animal Foundation with an organization that would implement a no-kill approach. Their marketing prowess, coupled with the easy sell of their vision, garnered widespread support. During public comment at the March 17 Clark County Commission meeting, NKLV volunteer Ginny Schwartz held up a fistful of papers saying they contained the signatures of 12,800 locals who supported the cause.

But what is it they’re supporting, exactly? What does a no-kill community look like, and what would it take for Southern Nevada to get there?

The 90 percent

T

he Animal Foundation has tried going no-kill before. The last attempt culminated in overcrowding at Lied, a disease outbreak and the mass euthanasia of more than 1,000 animals in 2007. The foundation’s board of directors called in outside experts to help clean up the mess, and a management turnover ensued (the board remained largely intact). Assistant Clark County Manager Christine Robinson was hired as executive director.

As she and her new team struggled to get a handle on pet overpopulation — aggravated by the housing crisis and economic recession — the number of homeless animals being destroyed each year soared, from 10,757 in 2008 to 14,869 in 2011 for Clark County alone.

The 2007 incident made an indelible first impression of no-kill on the minds of many locals, who still see it as an unattainable goal pursued by hoarders and fanatics. But animal welfare experts insist that elsewhere the practice has evolved beyond that. Groups like NKLV today embrace a definition of no-kill that allows for euthanizing animals too sick or too vicious to responsibly be sent home with families.

“Several groups have analyzed the national data and found that, on average, the pets that can’t or shouldn’t be adopted out represent about 10 percent of the total population,” says Diane Blankenburg, CEO and principal consultant of the Humane Network, based in Reno. Blankenburg and her business partner Bonney Brown left the Nevada Humane Society in 2013 after helping to lead Washoe County’s no-kill effort for six years. During that time, the life-saving rate rose from around 70 percent to more than 90 percent, where they kept it for four years.

But a shelter can’t reach this goal alone, says Holly Sizemore, director of national community programs and services for

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community

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Best Friends Animal Society, which runs a no-kill sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, and advocates for an end to pet homelessness nationwide.

“When the government commits, when the public commits, when other organizations commit — and then they all come together to determine where the gaps are and how each one can fill them — that’s when no-kill happens,” Sizemore says.

For instance, in Reno’s case, the Nevada Humane Society was backed up by progressive municipal animal-control policies that the county marketed and enforced effectively. Blankenburg says Washoe County implemented programs such as a mandatory pet ID with technology that allowed workers to look up pets and return them to owners while still in the field, greatly reducing shelter intakes.

“The way we look at it, on a simplistic level,” Blankenburg says, “is that you want to decrease the number coming in and increase the number going out alive.”

The first part of this equation is the municipalities’ responsibility, and Southern Nevada is way behind other metropolitan areas in this regard, Sizemore says. Clark County funds shelter services at an annual rate of $7 per household, according to a Best Friends study. That’s lower than Albuquerque ($27 per household), Los Angeles ($12), Salt Lake County ($29) and San Antonio ($20) — all of which have much higher life-saving rates than Clark County’s dismal 49 percent (Salt Lake’s is 92 percent).

During the Feb. 17 and March 17 county commission hearings on the Animal Foundation’s contract extension, commissioners listened to hours of testimony by dozens of citizens, rallied once again to action by NKLV. They expressed outrage over the current modus operandi and a desire to move toward a no-kill future. Between the two sessions, commission chair Steve Sisolak called a meeting between NKLV and the Animal Foundation in hopes they’d find common ground; Best Friends and the Humane Network mediated. By the end of the March 17 discussion, the commission seemed more open to NKLV’s ideas. Commissioner

Tom Collins was shocked that a proposed, potentially 20-year contract with the Animal Foundation might have been signed without a public vetting if NKLV hadn’t objected to it; Commissioner Susan Brager questioned closed lists, such as the one Cindy Lou was on, and other practices that could cloud the Animal Foundation’s accountability. Addressing the problem of public investment, Sisolak said, “As we have resources available, we should start trying to allocate them to assist with adoption. I think that would be beneficial to the entire community. I think we need to put more money toward spay and neuter.”

So, many in the community are on board with no-kill ideals. The attitude of the County Commission indicates public officials may be coming around. The last piece left in the puzzle, then, is the shelter.

Tipping the scale

F

or a quiet spot to talk, Animal Foundation Director of Operations Carly Scholten chooses the break room in the modular building on the Lied campus where the Animal Foundation has its offices. The floor creaks as she weaves between stacks of file boxes and pet supplies piled around cubicles. “Would you like one?” she asks, as we take a seat on either side of an oval kitchen table holding a plate of tangerines.

The past year of NKLV’s anti-Animal Foundation campaign — the relentless onslaught of public criticism, accusations of corruption and greed — are only hinted at around the corners of Scholten’s steady brown eyes. Though her background is in shelter management, she conducts herself more like a well-polished public-service provider, unpacking arcane policy with the ease of a utility manager or systems engineer.

Scholten says the Animal Foundation has a good working relationship with some 70 local rescue groups, and the shelter’s overall statistical trends show it’s moving in the right direction. Intake and euthanasia totals have dropped — by 28 percent and 53 percent, respectively, from 2010 to 2014 — and around three-quarters of the dogs checked in at Lied check out alive, either

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community through adoption, rescue or return home.

(Unadoptable feral cats, a huge problem in the valley, spike overall euthanasia rates, the Animal Foundation says.)

“Of the 11 things listed that the No Kill Advocacy Center says a shelter has to do to be no-kill, we’re doing 10,” Scholten says. “The only one we don’t do is a trap-neuter-release program for feral cats, and we’re looking into that. … Unfortunately, at this time, euthanasia is used as a means of animal control in Las Vegas. It will be, I’m afraid, until we can reduce intakes enough to tip the scale.”

But to get to the heart of why the Animal Foundation deserves to keep its contract with Clark County, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, Scholten notes a technical distinction: “One effort we made was to clarify the difference between the services that the Animal Foundation provides through our government partners and those that we provide as a nonprofit.”

The municipalities have an interlocal agreement to use the same provider for what we’ll call stray animal services here, for simplicity’s sake. Then, each one has a contract with the Animal Foundation to provide those services: basically, impounding animals collected by municipal employees or turned in at Lied. Those animals may be held for various time periods — for instance, 72 hours for lost pets.

“During that time, they’re sheltering them, doing vet checks, having their behavior team work with them and determining what the best outcome is for those animals,” says Jason Allswang, code enforcement administrator for Clark County. “They’re taken in, their picture is taken, they’re put on the website and people can check them.”

Once the hold is over, the animals essentially become the property of the Animal Foundation. At this point, Scholten says, the municipal services cease and what we’ll call nonprofit services begin.

Paid for by donations, grants and other fundraising, these services end with either euthanasia or adoption. Those that await the second fate have to be housed and cared for in the meantime.

Making their case before the County Commission, Scholten and Animal

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Gimme shelter: Carly Scholten says more strays leave the Animal Foundation alive now.

Foundation Executive Director Christine Robinson stressed this point: The municipalities fund only stray services; the foundation foots the bill for everything else, through fundraising, grants and revenue (though it has asked the cities and county for $13 million to upgrade and expand its degenerating Lied facility). The contractor owes its clients an accounting of what happens to the animals they transfer to its care, but the care itself is the purview of the foundation, not the municipalities.

“The issues and concerns — and maybe disagreements — seem to focus on what happens after the legal hold,” Scholten says. “And that’s funded by nonprofit dollars. That has nothing to do with the services we provide through the government.”

NKLV and other Animal Foundation critics argue there’s no way the contractor can draw an absolute line between

publicly and privately funded services, such as veterinary care that may begin during intake and continue until adoption. More importantly, though, they say it gives the foundation exclusive control over the conduit between the public pound and the pet community. Any rescue that wants to help a pet at Lied, Southern Nevada’s only open-admission shelter, has to go through the foundation.

Even Scholten admits the situation is not ideal. “If there was another organization that was able to manage the high-volume intakes that even just the county contract would require (14,000 animals per year), and then after that provide the life-saving services that we provide, we believe that would be a better option for this community,” she says. “Research shows that communities with multiple intake and hold facilities have higher live-release rates.”

Five more years

B

etween the February and March Clark County Commission meetings, NKLV raced to assemble its own bid to take over the county’s animal shelter contract. The group’s board hired an executive director formerly with Best Friends and a director of operations formerly with the Animal Foundation. Bryce Henderson says they had the promise of a land lease and facility design from local developer Carl Thomas, and he estimated the operation could be up and running with $5.4 million in one year.

But when push came to shove, the group couldn’t demonstrate it had the chops to manage a huge public-service contract. Responding to Commissioner Lawrence Weekly’s question about how much money NKLV had in the bank, Henderson said, “$25,000.” Commissioner Mary Beth Scow asked what would

happen to the animals, if NKLV were given the contract, in the year it would take to get up and running, and Henderson didn’t have a clear plan.

All commissioners but Collins voted to give the contract to the Animal Foundation.

Yet NKLV considers it a win. When the county commission finished hashing out the Animal Foundation’s proposal, it was reduced from one 10-year contract with two five-year renewal options, to one five-year contract with three fiveyear renewals. The commission required that the foundation hold a public meeting each year to collect feedback. And it called for the creation of a stakeholder committee to monitor community issues, such as adoption policies.

“We’re very happy,” Henderson said.

“And I want to buy Tom Collins a beer.”

He added that NKLV would build on its momentum by opening an adoption center, and hopefully the Animal Foundation

would work with it.

“Yes, absolutely, we want to work with them,” said Scholten, who was relieved the whole thing was over. “In the end, we all want the same thing: fewer animals being euthanized in our community.”

As for Cindy Lou, Scholten says she went to a rescue on March 14. Scholten stands by her staff ’s handling of the high-risk dog and says that, unfortunately, rescue groups don’t want their information shared with the public. She adds that the Animal Foundation is looking for an appropriate way to share all animals’ outcomes publicly, but hasn’t found the right technology yet.

“I completely understand your concern, based on all the things that have been said about us in the past year,” she says. “It’s not that we want to hide anything. Our focus is on practices and procedures that help keep the ones we still have alive.”

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education

Full STEAM ahead: Kids learn about science and tech at Green Valley Library.

It’s not rocket science Actually, it kind of is. STEM education is all the rage — and as important as ever. Are our schools ready to shape tomorrow’s scientists and engineers? B y Sage Leehey

O

ur education system has got a serious case of STEM fever.

STEM? STEM is the latest buzzword in education. It stands for science, technology, engineering and math, but the zeal it inspires among educators and economists borders on the religious. And for good reason: In a world that’s increasingly driven by tech, from smartphones to self-driving cars to social media, STEM education is considered the brainy boot camp for the skilled workforce we’ll need tomorrow

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— actually, the workforce we need today.

But it’s not just about teaching third-graders how to code or mentoring middle-schoolers in a robot competition. STEM is a philosophy of education as much as pedagogy.

“They’re not just learning math out of a textbook, but they’re learning math by applying it to a problem in a project that they’re working on, whether it’s building bottle rockets or growing plants and seeing how they respond to different conditions,” explains Jessica A. Lee,

lead author on a November Brookings Mountain West and Brookings Institution report, “Cracking the Code on STEM: A People Strategy for Nevada’s Economy,” about the importance of STEM training and education for Nevada’s economic future. “When it’s done really well, it’s really just bringing everything together, and that helps students realize what the point is.”

Never mind the economic future. Actually, STEM education (and its arts-inclusive sister, STEAM) is important for Nevada’s economic present. And though local educators are making small but promising steps toward building 21st-century curricula rich with science and math, it looks like we’ve got some way to go before achieving liftoff.

Green shoots

S

ome of the valley’s forays into STEM are happening well outside the traditional classroom. Take Green Valley library, where on a typical Saturday

P h oto g r a p h y B r e n t H o l m e s

you might see a roomful of kids making their own circuit boards. Green Valley Library Manager Stephen Platt put together the class series, called Generation STEAM Presents, with Bill Tomiyasu of local makerspace SYN Shop.

The hands-on classes offered at various Henderson-area libraries teach problem-solving and analytical thinking, and cover everything from renewable energy and electronics to physics and aeronautics. And, perhaps surprisingly, art.

“If you want to make something cool, you have to have the artistic aspect to it as well,” Tomiyasu explains. “The artistic angle gets kids interested in it because if you’re just learning facts and figures of a particular area in math, you would never know how to take that math and put it to something more creative, like launching a rocket into space.”

Private schools are also instituting large-scale STEM and STEAM programs on their campuses. The Henderson International School, for example, began integrating a STEM curriculum into its classrooms two years ago and integrating STEAM this school year. It manifests in lessons about things as simple as gardening — but these lessons go well beyond watching seedlings sprout.

The children plant seeds in a clear container, measuring their growth and documenting it with drawings, descriptions and iPad photos. They also “dissect” some seeds to learn more about them, and watch the landscaper plan an irrigation system for the garden. Students as young as 3 or 4 are being exposed to integrated, hands-on learning that includes basic engineering and real-life applications through lessons like these.

Henderson International School Principal Chris Besylko says they’ve seen achievement and enthusiasm rise with the launch of more STEM and STEAM lessons at the school. “It’s a lot more than just memorizing a bunch of vocabulary words in science for an assessment or learning a bunch of algorithms in math class and applying them,” Besylko says. “(The hands-on learning) makes the experience that much more meaningful, and it really builds the curiosity, the

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education

critical thinking skills, design thinking skills, resilience, perseverance, all those things we want our children to have.”

Blinded by science

T

he Clark County School District is also working to bring more STEM and STEAM into classrooms throughout the district. Eldorado High School is starting a program on video game technology and web design, and the district has struck an agreement with Code.org to allow more schools to offer coding courses. There will be teacher training this summer on com-

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Scientific methods: SYN Shop's Bill Tomiyasu, left, and Green Valley Library's Stephen Platt teach STEM.

puter programming to help make these courses available throughout the district. And of course, there are science- and tech-oriented magnet schools throughout the district with star programs from engineering at Rancho to medicine at Western.

But are the teachers ready to take it to the next level? Much of the district’s focus is on training teachers — that is, teaching teachers to teach STEM — a lot of which happens in the education department at UNLV. Currently, there are no UNLV classes focusing solely on STEM or

STEAM teaching; rather, it’s blended with other courses as a method of math and science instruction. Taking a cue from other colleges, Micah Stohlmann, assistant professor in UNLV’s Department of Teaching and Learning, says he’s interested in starting conversations with other departments at UNLV — such as, you guessed it, the science and math departments — to collaborate in the classroom in order to cross-fertilize their wisdom and methods.

“There is a benefit to it just because you get to hear from the science people about

more of the science content and then math people are able to teach that content better. They kind of draw on each other’s knowledge that way,” he says.

Because there aren’t any state STEM standards, the school district doesn’t provide STEM-centric professional development for teachers. However, says Mary Pike, the director of science, health and physical education within the school district’s Instructional Design and Professional Learning division, teachers in the career and technical education programs in engineering, biotechnology and computer science programs do attend professional development courses tailored to their specialties. As part of their core training, they also attend summer classes offered by nonprofit Project Lead the Way. The classes are free for teachers and paid for by the school district.

Which brings up the biggest obstacle to upgrading the way we teach science and math: money.

STEM sticker shock

I

s the current slate of STEM training and education enough for the kind of growth predicted for Nevada in the Brookings report? Not even close.

“There’s definitely a need for more STEM curriculum,” says UNLV’s Stohlmann. “That’s one thing that’s trying to be developed just because the inclusion of engineering in K through 12 education is relatively new. With that focus, there is a need for well-developed and researched STEM curriculum.”

One of the obstacles is, of course, money. Indeed, talk is cheap, but STEM is pricey. STEM and STEAM classes often cost more than other ones because of their hands-on nature and special materials. According to the school district, at the low end, a computer-aided drafting and design class costs about $80,000 for equipment, software and training; the average class in agricultural science and skilled and technical sciences costs around $200,000 to equip; mechanical tech and computer-integrated manufacturing programs can cost upwards of $500,000 to equip. STEM training for

Project Lead the Way certification costs from $20,000 to $25,000 per teacher.

Fortunately, a few organizations outside the public school system are working to generate money for STEM and STEAM education. Non-profit Gathering Genius: Nevada STEM Coalition has been working since 2006 to improve STEM education into the state. For instance, the group has raised money for various events that have brought stakeholders together to help pass the 2013 Senate Bill 345, which created the Nevada STEM Advisory Council.

We … need … brains

S

o why all this fuss about STEM? Because Nevada’s already facing a shortage of these skilled workers — particularly in business information technology ecosystems and health and medical services — and the longer we wait, the farther we fall behind.

“Looking at those target industries that the state economic development folks have really zeroed in on as growth areas, they’re going to need a certain kind of workforce, and the systems now aren’t in place to really help prepare people for those jobs,” says the Brookings Institution’s Lee. “So it’s about getting people ready for that next generation of jobs that’s going to be coming up very soon.”

Even now, many of these STEM jobs are available in Nevada, but companies are having problems getting the positions filled. According to the Brookings report, “while 70 percent of job openings in these two sectors require STEM knowledge, less than half require a fouryear degree (though the most in-demand positions in IT do tend to require one).

And yet job posting data reveal that open positions take longer to fill in these two industries than in others, which suggests that employers are keen to hire but struggle to find qualified workers.”

When hired, those workers are well-rewarded. STEM jobs also typically pay more than non-STEM jobs. Individuals with a four-year degree in STEM occupations within the state’s target industries earn about $77,000, where oth-

ers with similar education in non-STEM jobs within the same industries earn about $51,800, according to the report.

“There are a lot of really good, well-paying (STEM) jobs that people can get with just a year or two of training after high school,” says Lee. “That is an important component of this, too. It’s not just for college grads.”

The Brookings report ultimately proposes a two-pronged approach to getting Nevada STEM-ready: on the public side, aligning education’s goals and industry’s needs — and asking some tough questions about the state of our school system. On the civic side, Brookings floats the idea of a statewide STEM marketing campaign, creating internships to give Nevadans the work experience they need and, says Lee, “just generally supporting new innovative approaches to education, whether it’s different classroom tools or curricula or public charter schools, just keeping all options on the table and really supporting what works best for different communities.”

That civic component serves as a reminder that a lot of the education process — even STEM education — happens outside the classroom, and would-be “teachers” are everywhere. Besylko points out that teachers at Henderson International School encourage their students to work with STEAM and STEM at home.

“We’ve challenged kids with their families sitting at the dinner table with popsicle sticks and rubber bands and marshmallows, to try to build a catapult without instructions,” he says.

Platt and Tomiyasu’s Generation STEAM Presents class series at Green Valley Library is aimed at kids aged 8 to 17, but they’ve seen parents learn just as much from the classes, and they frequently hear stories about families who continue to mess around with the gadgets and challenges at home. Some parents have even volunteered to teach a class. Talk about being blinded by science.

“Once these classes are over,” says Platt, “I hope this is just the beginning.”

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HISTORY

The truth will out Over the years, angry politicians, entertainers and bankers have tried to silence Nevada journalists — thankfully, with little success B y S t e p h e n B at e s

“E

very citizen may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects being responsible for the abuse of that right,” the people of Nevada declared in their 1864 constitution. (Punctuation in the hastily drafted document is spotty.)

It sounded good on paper, at least. In the century and a half since, journalists have been hauled into Nevada courts and charged with rights-abuse for covering everything from public corruption to canned beans. Here are five noteworthy — and sometimes complicated — cases that, thankfully, affirmed freedom of the press.

The tale of the teenage editor: Thompson v. Powning (1880)

A

few years after the Civil War, a 16-year-old orphan named Christopher Columbus Powning voyaged from Wisconsin to the new town of Reno.

There, according to the Historic Reno Preservation Society, Powning became editor of the Nevada State Journal while still in his teens. A few years later, he was the defendant in one of the first libel cases to reach the Nevada Supreme Court.

The case arose when the Journal reported that one Deacon Parkinson had administered a “tongue-lashing” to Wil-

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liam Thompson, a former state senator Powning wrote that he himself disbefrom Washoe. The deacon, according to lieved it. To keep readers fully informed, the Journal, had castigated Thompson as the Journal reprinted the tongue-lashing a bribe-taking, gold-stealing “scoundrel,” item as well as Thompson’s libel comalongside “many other sweet reflections plaint. Thompson then amended his suit on the gentleman.” to charge a new libel: the publication of Thompson sued the Journal, demand- his complaint. ing $10,000 to compensate for the damAfter Powning won at trial, Thompson age to his public standing. The Truckee appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Republican — like the Journal, evidently The justices reversed the judgment and not a fan of the ex-senator — remarked of ordered a new trial because of flawed jury his reputation: “Outsiders think it worth instructions. (What happened after that about fifteen cents.”

— whether the case got retried, settled, or For his part, Powning dismissed the dropped — is unknown.) In analyzing the offending article as featherweight gos- issues, the state supreme court laid down sip that nobody took seriously. Indeed, a couple of rules of enduring importance.

I l lu st r at i o n C h r i s m o r r i s

The justices rejected Powning’s defense that, in their words, he had published the Thompson tidbit “as a matter of gossip, without his knowing, or inquiring, whether it was true or false. It was considered as a sort of joke that nobody would pay any attention to, etc.” Editors, the justices admonished, “are responsible for whatever appears in their paper.”

But the court handed Powning a victory in concluding that the Journal hadn’t libeled Thompson anew by publishing his court complaint. “The public has a right to know what takes place in a court of justice,” the justices said, so newspapers are free to publish details of judicial goings-on “unless the proceedings are of an immoral, blasphemous, or indecent character.” Christopher Columbus Powning had struck a blow for freedom of the press.

You can’t erase the past: Montesano v. Donrey Media Group (1983)

U

nder the “right to be forgotten,” Europeans can petition courts to disinfect their online reputations. Judges will order search engines to delete links to damning but accurate websites if the material is “no longer relevant ... in the light of the time” elapsed since a crime, scandal or other untoward incident.

American courts haven’t been so hospitable to those who want to move beyond the past, as Ronald K. Montesano discovered.

As a teen in the mid-1950s, Montesano had a couple of brushes with the law. In 1955, when he was 17, he was a passenger in a car that struck a police officer on a motorcycle. The cop was killed, and Montesano ran off. Though he wasn’t the driver, fleeing the scene was enough to land Montesano in the State Industrial School at Elko for several weeks. Then at 19, he was convicted of felony marijuana possession and sentenced to two years in prison.

Flash forward to 1978. Another officer got killed, this one shot by a suspect. The Las Vegas Review-Journal summarized earlier incidents in which local police had died in the line of duty. The paper recounted the hit-and-run from 1955,

identified Montesano, and noted his subsequent marijuana conviction.

Montesano sued for invasion of privacy. He argued, in the Nevada Supreme Court’s words, that he had “returned to the private, lawful and unexciting life led by the great bulk of the community.”

Accordingly, “the facts and circumstances surrounding his crimes and his identity are no longer matters of legitimate public concern.”

Montesano was a sympathetic plaintiff.

He had played a minor role in a crime more than two decades earlier. The 1955 hit-and-run had only tangential relevance to the 1978 shooting murder, and his subsequent pot conviction had no relevance at all. All in all, the RJ mention seemed gratuitous. Had Montesano won, though, anybody writing history would have to hesitate before using public records to chronicle past misdeeds.

The district court dismissed the case before trial. On appeal, two justices said the lower court had erred; Montesano deserved his day in court. One justice stressed the public interest in helping juvenile offenders become law-abiding citizens, and suggested that wrongdoing of Montesano’s type ought to fade from public memory: “Major incidents may bring lasting notoriety to some criminals, but most criminal incidents are of public interest for a short while only, and then slip into obscurity.” In cases of the latter type, “publication of the ex-offender’s name serves no useful purpose.”

But the majority of Nevada Supreme Court justices held that Montesano didn’t have a valid case. “The killing of police officers is a subject of grave public interest,” the justices said, and the history of earlier fatalities was of “equal legitimate public interest.” Although the paper could have omitted Montesano’s name, using it “contributed constructively to the impact of the article” by adding “specificity and credibility.” A reasonable juror, the court concluded, was bound to conclude that the article, including Montesano’s name, was a matter of “legitimate public concern.” Bottom line: Nevadans can’t escape the past.

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HISTORY The mad Midnight Idol: Newton v. NBC (1991)

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I

n 1980, NBC News reported that Wayne Newton had connections to mobsters — connections, according to the network, that he hadn’t fully disclosed to gaming regulators as he tried to buy the Aladdin Resort and Casino. Newton sued NBC for libel.

NBC’s lawyer, First Amendment superstar Floyd Abrams, figured the Las Vegas trial was unwinnable, given Newton’s stature among locals. He was right. After a 37-day trial, the jury ruled for Newton and awarded him what at the time was the largest libel judgment ever against an American press outlet: $22.8 million. The judge reduced it to a still-whopping $5.2 million.

Abrams headed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. There, he argued that the court must scrutinize the jurors’ factual conclusions with particular care, given their all-but-certain bias in favor of a local celebrity.

The Ninth Circuit agreed. As a key precedent, the court discussed the landmark 1964 libel case New York Times v. Sullivan. At issue was a Times ad that charged Alabama officials with unleashing a “wave of terror” against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other nonviolent civil rights demonstrators. An official from Montgomery, Alabama, sued the Times for libel, and a local jury awarded him $500,000. The Supreme Court reversed the judgment and expanded the scope of First Amendment protections in libel cases.

Unflatteringly, Ninth Circuit judges likened the segregationists of Alabama to the Wayne Newtonians of Las Vegas.

Each case, the court said, raised “the danger that First Amendment values will be subverted by a local jury biased in favor of a prominent local public figure against an alien speaker who criticizes that local hero.” The court concluded that the First Amendment protected NBC’s coverage.

Despite his victory on appeal, Floyd Abrams did lose the largest libel case ever in Las Vegas. In his memoir Speaking Freely, Abrams makes no secret of his distaste for the city. His view, he says, matches that of the writer Otto Friedrich: Las Vegas “is what hell might be like if hell had been planned and built by New York gangsters.”

Shoulda bean there: Pegasus v. Reno Newspapers (2002)

I

n 1999, the Reno Gazette-Journal launched an all-out crusade against a culinary shortcut: the use of packaged ingredients in Mexican restaurants. After publishing several articles and reviews on the theme, the paper reviewed a Sparks eatery, Salsa Dave’s. The reviewer charged that all the food “came out of some sort of package.” As she was paying her lunch check, she added, she spied a can of beans in the kitchen.

Salsa Dave’s sued for libel. The owner testified that he faithfully served fresh beans, not canned ones. Yes, they kept a few cans on hand for emergencies — if, say, the kitchen ran out of fresh beans on an unexpectedly busy night. But they would never serve canned beans at lunch, when the reviewer had dined there. Salsa Dave’s further maintained that the emergency cans were stored on a shelf that couldn’t be seen from anyplace near the cash register.

The judge concluded that Salsa Dave’s hadn’t been libeled under any reasonable interpretation of the evidence, so no trial was necessary. On appeal, the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. “There is no such thing as a false idea,” the justices said, quoting the U.S. Supreme Court. The reviewer’s statement that everything came out of a package expressed not a fact but an idea — the idea that everything tasted as if it came out of a package. No libel there.

The assertion that the reviewer had seen a can of beans “presents a closer issue,” the court said. In the view of one justice, the bean-spotting claim was “not an opinion, but a cold hard fact that gives credibility to the harsh opinions stated.”

Jurors should hear testimony from the restaurant owner and the reviewer, evaluate the conflicting accounts, and decide who was telling the truth.

But the court’s majority disagreed.

Parsing closely, those justices explained that the review didn’t explicitly say that Salsa Dave’s served canned beans, only that there were canned beans in the kitchen — and that was true, whether the reviewer saw them or not.

Bad news for restaurants; good news

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for restaurant critics. Assessing Pegasus and similar cases from across the country, the UMKC Law Review concluded that a restaurateur’s odds of winning a libel suit against a hostile reviewer “are very bleak indeed.”

Chilling effect: Aspen Financial Services v. Eighth Judicial District Court (2013)

I

n 2011, Dana Gentry, a reporter for KSNV Channel 3 in Las Vegas, faced every journalist’s nightmare: a subpoena.

Under Nevada law, journalists can refuse to testify about information they obtain in their “professional capacity.” It’s among the most comprehensive shield laws in the country, but lawyers for Aspen Financial Services discovered a potential loophole. Although Gentry had produced damaging stories about the company, Aspen’s lawyers said they didn’t want to ask about her reporting.

Instead, they wanted to interrogate her about relationships with people suing Aspen. (Gentry was a witness, not a party to the suit.) In particular, they wanted to plumb the motivations of her coverage by finding out if she was being bribed, extorted or both.

If this was a loophole, it was a gaping one. Anyone indignant over news coverage could subpoena reporters, allege that they might be on the take, and start rummaging through bank records. Facing such a threat to family privacy, some journalists might steer clear of exposés involving litigious figures.

For the sake of First Amendment principle, Gentry was willing to go to jail. Fortunately for her, though, the Nevada Supreme Court saw through Aspen’s gambit.

Maybe the company wasn’t seeking notes or testimony about her coverage, the court said, but that coverage was the sole reason for the subpoena: Aspen was trying “to affirm its suspicions about Gentry’s motivation for producing those news stories.”

If Gentry hadn’t written about Aspen, Aspen wouldn’t have subpoenaed her. Accordingly, the shield law applied.

Those seeking judicial weapons for intimidating Nevada journalists will have to look elsewhere.

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The Dish 52 eat this now 55

04 15

on the plate 55 at first bite 56

Our c i ty's be st sp ots to eat & drink

Motion of the ocean: Aguachile verde at Mariscos Playa Escondida

P hoto g ra p h y By SABIN ORR

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Dining out

Not no taco: Right, a panucho from Frank & Fina’s Cocina; below, seafood molcajete from Mariscos Playa Escondida

THE DISH

Taste for the border Street tacos are so ayer. Try huaraches, panuchos, alambres and other lively, lesser-known specialties of Mexico made right here B y T o v i n L a pa n

W

ith the explosive growth of the valley’s Hispanic population in the past two decades, options for Mexican food have exploded, too. Sure, you know about tasty street tacos and salsa-smothered enchiladas, but what about huaraches and panuchos? If you’re limiting yourself to tried and true Mexican standards, you’re missing out on the regional specialties begging to be explored on menus around the city.

In Mexico, you’d have to criss-cross the country, from the bucolic beaches of Baja to the cenote-pocked terrain

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of the Yucatán, to try these specialties in their places of origin. Here, you just might have to hop on the 215 Beltway for a few exits to sample these five restaurants and their signature regional delicacies.

Panucho

at Frank and Fina’s Cocina In the Yucatán Peninsula, regional pride rules. Billboards on the freeway declare: This isn’t Mexico, It’s the Yucatán, and the cuisine of the area is distinct, featuring Mayan elements as well as Caribbean, Spanish and African influences. Frank and Fina’s specializes in Yucatecan cooking. One such creation is panuchos, tortillas fried with black beans in between them, then topped with cheese, achiote chicken, lettuce, pickled onions and avocado.

Stacked high, it stretches the limits of the average jaw, but the full-bite combination is fantastic. The spice of the chicken couples well with the cheese and avocado, and the tortilla adds texture and crunch.

There are other Yucatecan specialties on the menu, too, including cochinita pibil, pork slow-roasted in a banana leaf and served with pickled onions. Scoop a bit of both into a tortilla for a deep and vibrant DIY taco. 4175 S. Grand Canyon Drive, 702-579-3017

Torta Ahogada

at El Birotazo “Tapatios,” natives of the city of Guadalajara, will feel right at home at El Birotazo. The owners hail from the “City of Roses,” and the walls are adorned with memorabilia from the city’s most popular soccer club, Chivas de Guadalajara. The torta ahogada, or drowned sandwich, is to Guadalajara what the cheesesteak is to Philadelphia. It’s made with pork stuffed into a crunchyon-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside sour roll called a bolillo. The entire sandwich is then immersed in spicy chile de arbol salsa, and sometimes the inside of the bread is spread with a light coating of refried beans. Swimming in a pool of

salsa, the sandwich is served with lime and onions, which are marinated in an even spicier salsa. The original torta ahogada packs a picante punch, perfect for remedying a head cold or a rough hangover, but the heat level can be adjusted upon request. 4262 E. Charleston Blvd., 702-888-0858

Ceviche

at Mariscos Playa Escondida Playa Escondida, or “hidden beach,” is an apt name for this seafood restaurant tucked into a corner of a strip mall at East Charleston and Maryland Parkway. The restaurant is small and hard to find, but this is the spot for Mexican-style seafood — particularly those beachside shacks selling the freshest selections, from spicy shrimp cocktails to grilled whole fish.

Try the ceviche, which is fresh fish, shrimp or octopus marinated in lime and spices. The acid in the marinade “cooks” the fish, turning it opaque and firm without the use of heat. One bite into the cool, citrusy concoction layered on top of a crunchy tostada with slices of avocado and some hot sauce, a Corona with lime as accompaniment, and you’ll be transported to Mexico’s Pacific coast. Playa Escondida also offers aguachile, a type of ceviche with pulverized chile, and a bit more kick.

The house specialty, shrimp empanadas packed with garlic, cilantro and onions, is also a dish you must not miss.

1203 E. Charleston Blvd., 702-906-1124

Art Festival OF HENDERSON

Enchiladas de Mole

at Las Cazuelas Las Cazuelas chef/owner Manuel Avendaño and his wife specialize in the cuisine of their hometown, the colonial city of Puebla. One of Mexico’s iconic recipes, mole poblano, comes from Puebla, and Las Cazuelas mixes up a master version of the dish. Shredded chicken is wrapped in a tortilla and then drenched in the mole poblano sauce and topped with cotija cheese, white onion and sesame seeds. The mole, an elaborate sauce made from

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Dining out chocolate, cinnamon, coriander, garlic and many other spices and ingredients, is superbly balanced, not too thick and heavy with just the right blend of spices to complement the signature flavor of unsweetened chocolate.

Other specialties served up by Avendaño include chanclas, sliced rolls stuffed with shredded chicken and topped with a chipotle sauce, and molletes, an open-faced roll with refried beans and mozzarella cheese served with pico de gallo. 9711 S. Eastern Ave., 702-837-0204

Huarache

at Los Antojos The door to Los Antojos reads “Welcome to Mexico City,” and the walls are festooned with various maps of the country’s capital. Owner Adriana Martinez and chef Carmen Tuiz are

both from Mexico City, and the menu does everything in the style of the metropolis, including deep-fried quesadillas. One of the Mexico City specialties customers come in for is the huarache, a thick oval tortilla topped with beans, two types of salsa, cheese and your choice of meat, such as carne asada. “Huarache” refers to a type of sandal, and the food got its name because of the oval tortilla’s resemblance to the footwear. It’s cheap, it’s comforting and it’s delicious.

Other specialties you won’t find in every Mexican joint include pambazos, a sub roll in adobo sauce filled with potatoes, cheese and Spanish sausage; alambres, slices of steak grilled with bacon, onions and bell peppers; and cecina adobada, pork steak marinated in adobo sauce with rice and beans. 2520 S. Eastern Ave., 702-457-3505

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on the plate

Upcoming foodie events you don’t want to miss

HOT PLATE

Eat this now!

White Thunder sauce at Billy's Bar-B-Que

4115 South Grand Canyon Drive #100, 702-445-7764, billysbbq.vegas In the world of barbecue sauces, Alabama White is among the more obscure. This regional specialty from the northern reaches of The Cotton State is based on — stay with me now — mayonnaise. To those only familiar with red sauces such as the St. Louis style, this concoction sounds like culinary anathema. But really, think about mayo on a roast beef sandwich — it’s a familiar combo. At the new Billy’s Bar-B-Que off of West Flamingo, it’s called White Thunder, and it mixes the condiment with vinegar and various spices (the namesake owner won’t tell me which). It has some zing, but also a creaminess and goes great on sliced brisket, pulled pork or even chicken. Drizzle a bit on a Heavenly Hog (a bun filled with pork shoulder and cabbage slaw) or a trio of Billy’s smoked meat tacos. Greg Thilmont

w h i t e t h u n d e r s au c e : b r e n t h o l m e s

Pork Belly Bao Bun at 8 Noodle Bar

Red Rock Resort, 702-797-7012 Chef Andy Vu gives the traditional gua bao, or steamed bun, a modern spin at Red Rock’s new wallet-friendly noodle joint. Expect luscious squares of pork belly, shellacked with hoisin glaze and tucked into fluffy steamed pillows of dough — a standard assemblage until the fixings come into play. Black radish, peppery wasabi sprouts, and a sunny dose of yuzu bring life to these rich, pig-stuffed pockets of goodness. It’s the best pan-Asian snack west of Chinatown. Debbie Lee

“BOOZE & BITES” PAIRING DINNER AT BRAND STEAKHOUSE APRIL 22 In this second installment of the “Booze & Bites” pairing dinner series at the Monte Carlo. foodies will enjoy a five-course dinner at BRAND Steakhouse paired with award-winning Terlato wines. Some of the dishes featured in this dinner include grilled octopus with squid ink pappardelle wild boar sugo, paired with Chateau De Sancerre sancerre; 60-day kobe with dry-aged sirloin, bleu cheese mousse and poached pear, paired with Chimney Rock cabernet sauvignon; and caramel popcorn crème brûlée, paired with Sandeman Founders Reserve port. 6:30p. $75. 702-730-7010 Vegas Uncork’d

by Bon Appétit April 23-26 Now in its ninth year, Vegas Uncork’d

by Bon Appétit, a celebration of wine and spirits, returns to ARIA, Bellagio, Caesars Palace and MGM Grand, featuring a roster of tastings, demonstrations and meet-and-greets.

A few of the headliners include chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Gordon Ramsay, Julian Serrano, François Payard, Masa Takayama, Michael Mina, and Guy Savoy. Highlight events include a Master Series brunch with Border Grill’s Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, a farm-to-table party at Sage, and, the centerpiece, the Grand Tasting at Caesars Palace. $110$330. , vegasuncorkd.com NEW VISTA COMMUNITY WINE WALK APRIL 25 Showcasing a variety of food and wine throughout Town Square, the walk will feature 20 different wines, from whites to reds, for sampling from high-profile purveyors such as Southern Wine & Spirits Nevada and Lee’s Discount Liquor. Other stations will feature sake, beer and cocktails.

Organized by New Vista Community, a local charity committed to providing equal opportunities and support to intellectually challenged people of all ages so that they may experience life to the fullest. 7-10p. $25. Town Square, winewalklv.com

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Dining out at FIRST Bite

Bird is the word Southern style and flavor come in every (gravy-slathered! deep-fried!) bite at Yardbird B y M i t c h e ll W i lb u r n

A

fertile field doesn’t lay fallow for long. When the spot in Restaurant Row linking the Venetian to Palazzo became vacant, a stranger came to town — a stranger to us, anyway. The 50 Eggs restaurant group is well known in the Miami area for its hip, conceptual American South soul and everything Southern, with a and South East Asian restaurants. Their front-porch, hot-summer-night kind of marquee title: Yardbird. Bringing that aesthetic. And though it’s clearly a corMiama-area hit to one of the most prime porate theme, it does manage to draw pieces of real estate on the Strip is a big you in with its pickle jars, bare wood, move that bespeaks a strong confidence vintage bulbs and slideshows of Southin the brand. ern musicians (including a few of Elvis).

They have reason for that confidence — They do the Mason jar thing, of course, and we have reason for high expectations: but I couldn’t imagine anyone running Yardbird was named “Best New Restau- a place so thematically Southern would rant” by Bon Appétit, was a James Beard pass up the chance for them.

Awards semi-finalist for Best New RestauOn the menu: a Southern vibe through rant, an honoree on Southern Living Mag- and through, with some welcome riffs. azine’s list of the South’s Best Fried Chick- They take classics and shuffle them en, and so on. But this is no copy-paste around, transposing new techniques operation. For their executive chef at the and ingredients as they see fit. Some Vegas restaurant, they wrangled Todd dishes only loosely cling to their definiHarrington, the man responsible for turn- tion, like the Fried Green Tomato BLT. ing around the Downtown Grand. They A big slab of house-smoked pork belly, opened with a basic copy of the Miami cornmeal-dusted fried green tomato, menu, but they brought in Harall sandwiching their own rington to give an interpretive pimento cheese. An interYardbird twist to their style. Already, esting combo of Southern Southern he’s been sliding original dish- Table & Bar ingredients, and one could es into the menu, which is a say it has a similar profile The Venetian 702-983-1805 good sign they’re comfortable of a BLT — but, regardless runchickenrun.com with allowing some creative of its pedigree, it’s a fine slack in the reins. and satisfying dish.

HOURS The space is a kind of Dis- Mon-Thu 11a-4p; As for Yardbird’s signaneyland tribute to the blues, ture item, yes, they’ve got 4:30p-12a

Fowl plays: Above, Chicken ’n’ Watermelon ’n’ Waffles; right, tomahawk pork chop; below, fried green tomato BLT

their birds down to a science. Pasture-raised quality meat, brined for 27 hours in an equally sweet and salty solution, breaded and then pressure-fried (and we see the true nature of the game here) in 100 percent lard. It’s a hot contender for just about the finest way to enjoy chicken. But heck, you could take a copy of Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger, brine it for 27 hours and pressure fry it in lard, and it would probably be not half bad. Doing it with a fresh chicken will definitely be worth the $26 for a half-bird.

That is, if they’re frying them to-order, as one would hope, especially with glorious feasts such as the $36 “Chicken ’n’ Watermelon ’n’ Waffles.”

Aside from the pressure fryer, the runner-up beauty queen of this kitchen is the smoker. Four dishes come out of this baby: barbecue chicken, St. Louis ribs, bone marrow, and the 18-ounce tomahawk pork chop. While fried chicken may be Yardbird’s titular dish, it would be a disservice to call it a mere “fried chicken restaurant.” Dishes like the bone marrow exemplify how this is far from the cornsyrup-and-white bread training wheels Southern food that you’d find in, well, the

Fri-Sun 11a-4:30p; 4:30p-2a

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South. Some dishes almost seem disguised as something nondescript, like the pork croquette that happens to be almost like a head cheese, with a black-eyed pea succotash in a PBR jus. The dessert selection is not to be overlooked either, touting such treasures as fried Oreos, a giant whoopee pie, and a cake with bacon-based frosting and bourbon caramel.

The charm to Yardbird may partially be the cutesy Southern vibe, but the replay value is in its truly inspired, somewhat experimental cuisine. Like all experiments, some ideas might not take off, like a brunch menu Benedict with a bit more Hollandaise than needed, or a take on Salisbury Steak that overlooks the importance of a substantial structural integrity of the groundround. But, it’s worlds better for there to be a menu under the strong control of an excited kitchen team, regardless of a hiccup here or there, than to have the corporate higher-ups throw in a lackey to march lockstep with a “proven” flagship menu. The hope is that this philosophy becomes carved into the slab at Yardbird, and it becomes one among the many in Vegas we can count on to deliver an evolving, engaging menu with each season and spark of inspiration.

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Administered by Nevada State Treasurer

Good Good neighbor policy These six neighborhoods — affluent, poor, urban, rural — couldn’t be more different. But they do have one thing in common: a can-do desire to make life better on the block

p hoto grap hy by

Bill Hughes

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”

It was clear that the neighborhood was affected by the recession and was visibly in a state of transition.

Paradise palms

Clay and Denise Heximer They moved to Paradise Palms to bring some stylish love to a formerly fab neighborhood

W

hen Clay and Denise Heximer bought their dream house in 2010, a midcentury-modern split level on a cul-de-sac in the heart of Paradise Palms, they were surrounded by exactly the kind of neighborhood they always wanted. Built by developer Irwin Molasky in the early 1960s, Paradise Palms was Las Vegas’ first master-planned community, and its golf course-adjacent, Palms Springs-inspired homes designed by famed architects Dan Palmer and William Krisel attracted such residents such as Johnny Carson, Debbie Reynolds and Bobby Darin.

By the time the Heximers moved in, however, the neighborhood was significantly less fabulous than during its 1960s heyday. Suburban sprawl and the housing crisis had taken their toll on Paradise Palms. Foreclosed, vacant houses dotted the landscape. Crime was becoming a problem. And the sense of community Clay and Denise sought was virtually nonexistent.

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“It was clear that the neighborhood was affected by the recession and was visibly in a state of transition,” says Heximer.

Not content to let such a classic Vegas neighborhood slip any further into blight, the Heximers decided to get proactive. They

held a Neighborhood Watch meeting at their house with just a handful of neighbors and a police officer present. “He said the best way to fight crime was to get to know your neighbors and to have monthly Neighborhood Watch meetings,” says Heximer.

“Clay and Denise were the spark,” says Dan Stafford, a Las Vegas native who lives in a Paradise Palms house originally owned by his grandparents.

“They saw there needed to be some kind of a binding between neighbors. They put up the Paradise Palms website. They created the Facebook group.”

Activity on that Facebook group, currently about 240 mem-

bers strong, shows how active the Paradise Palms community is now, with residents sharing home renovation photos, reporting suspicious activity, trading maintenance tips and generally kvetching just the way Stafford’s grandparents likely did 40 years ago. The monthly Neighborhood Watch meetings evolved into the Paradise Palms Social Club, whose roving cocktail parties are hosted at a different resident’s house each month, inspired by the monthly Flamingo Club mixers hosted by residents in various downtown neighborhoods.

“I’m sure everyone was a little nervous at the first get-together,” Clay said, “but Jack LeVine (of VeryVintageVegas.com) brought some great Paradise Palms photos from the early ’60s that were able to get strangers to talk to one another. From there, the Social Club grew and grew. As of right now we are booked to 2017. There is definitely a strong and obvious pride of ownership here.” Pj Perez

Naked City

Daylily Orduno This high school senior stuck around to help the troubled neighborhood where she grew up

T

he Stratosphere’s shadow stretches long but not very wide over Naked City.

From outside the neighborhood looking in, it’s a sprawl of one- and two-story stucco and cinderblock apartment buildings north of Sahara Avenue between Industrial Road and Las Vegas Boulevard. Poverty and hopelessness have a counterbalance in the form of the Stupak

Community Center, however, and in residents such as center volunteer Daylily Orduno. The new center, built in 2010, replaced its older namesake that once stood across the street, where a well-maintained park with a playground and small soccer field now exists.

Orduno, 18, is living testimony to the positive effects of The Neighborhood Partners

Fund, a City of Las Vegas grant program that annually awards up to $5,000 to neighborhood associations for improvements.

The Valley High School senior now volunteers at the Stupak Center — named for the late, colorful Stratosphere co-founder, Bob Stupak — in the afternoons, helping supervise pre-teens with working parents.

“I guess it’s mostly so I could give back to the community since it has helped me too,” she says of her volunteering efforts.

“But wanting to help the kids is more of the thing. I know of the struggles they’re going through because I’ve gone through them.

I want them to know that there is a better possible life for them.

They could do it. Obviously they have to work for it, but it’s out there.”

Orduno has lived in the neighborhood with her father and siblings for most of her life.

She experienced it before NPF grants, when street gang activity made it safer to stay indoors.

“In my opinion, just because I live somewhere that is low-income or has really high crime rates doesn’t mean I’m going to turn out that way,” she says. “I feel like because of that I strive to do better, and I work harder for that.”

At the center, kids get instruction on healthy eating and fitness now, and access to better nutrition. Under the guidance of youth activities coordinator Sherry Alexander and the Police Athletic League, hikes to Red Rock and Lake Mead as well as a three-day camping trip

to Mount Charleston were organized. Students who can’t afford fees that accompany interscholastic competition were able to join a community swim team that took first place in a meet.

The two-story center has had a positive effect on the surrounding streets as well, where Orduno says signs of gangs have diminished considerably.

“Viewing something nice in a community that’s not all that great of a place helps them see that they can find something good even if everyone around them tells them its bad,” she says of her neighbors, adding that she intends to return to Naked City after serving in the Marines. “It has helped a lot.”

Matt Kelemen

”

I know of the struggles they’re going through because I’ve gone through them.

I want them to know that there is a better possible life for them.

They could do it.

Obviously they have to work for it, but it’s out there.

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Anthem

Michael Herrera

and the Coventry Homes association Social media is the virtual glue that brings this suburban community together in real life

A

lmost 50 people crammed into Michael Herrera’s living room for the inaugural Coventry Neighborhood Watch in 2003. It suggested to the local firefighter and family man that he wasn’t alone in his yearning for a stronger sense of community. During the years following the watch group’s formation, Herrera collected emails and maintained a communication chain in effort to foster neighborliness, but that didn’t quite do the trick. Then, in 2009, he created a Coventry Neighborhood Watch Facebook page and, suddenly, the 1,124-home subdivision started to

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feel a lot smaller — in a good way.

“It’s (now) very much like a community you might see back East, where everybody knows everybody,” says Lynette Ship.

Ship moved into the Anthem suburb in 2011, when there were already 300 neighbors on the page. Facebook made it easy for her family to make friends and get involved. Today, she’s one of three administrators who manage the page, which has grown to be 760 friends strong and averages 10 friend requests per week.

Beyond keeping folks informed of Neighborhood Watch activity,

the page works like a community bulletin board announcing movies in the park, spring flings, baseball outings and more. And event attendance is growing, too. Last year’s wine walk concluded with dinner for 150, on a cordoned-off

”

What it takes is a small group of very hardworking people who want to see it succeed.

cul de sac, as compared to the 60 wine enthusiasts who walked and sipped in the first year.

“There’s no magic,” says Ship.

“What it takes is a small group of very hardworking people who want to see it succeed.” She points to Herrera and his tireless watch group.

But Herrera credits the entire neighborhood. “We collect donations from each other and get volunteers from the community to host these events. The HOA isn’t paying for everything. It’s actually people taking a stake in their community, so they feel like a part of it.”

Nearly a dozen sub-pages have developed from the original, including a moms’ group, a fitness club, a poker club, a gardening club, and three different bunko groups. Even Coventry’s dogs and cats are better off. In the past six months, a dozen pets have been reunited with their owners, thanks to timely posted pics. They warn each other of coyote sightings, too.

“And we keep an eye on each other’s kids,” says Ship. Plus, when folks are looking for babysitters, tools or a cup of sugar, Coventry’s residents can post online and get a steady stream of neighborly offers.

The group also pays forward this community spirit they’ve worked so hard to foster, anonymously adopting families from less fortunate neighborhoods at Christmas time. They organize fundraisers for their favorite charities, too. Out of this virtual social media tool have come some very real — and positive — results. Chantal Corcoran

”

Blue Diamond

Friends of Red Rock

They banded together to preserve the peace in their rural town. Along the way, the big city next door took up the fight, too

T

o city dwellers on the neon-lit side of Blue Diamond Hill, the small burg nestled in the western crux of the 159 might seem a bit eerie at night.

So quiet, so dark. But to the 300 residents of Blue Diamond, it’s a peace worth fighting for — as is the family-friendly atmosphere that permeates the school, library, park, theater and swimming pool in the former gyp-

sum-mine company town. “It’s so nice to have good people around you who know and watch out for each other,” says Heather Fisher, who’s raising four kids there. “We celebrate every holiday together. The store has regulars who sit on the front porch and have coffee together.”

A decade ago, a trucker shattered this tranquil tab-

Instead of being a little town against a big developer, it became everyone who loves the canyon getting together to preserve its natural setting.

leau when he hit Metro police officer Don Albietz, who was riding his bike on the 159. His fellow Blue Diamond residents sprang into action, raising funds for the devastated family.

After eight days in a coma, Albietz died, but the community channeled its grief into something positive: SaveRedRock. com. Fisher founded the site to promote safety for recreationists through lower speed limits, but it became a rallying point for anything that might threaten the area’s serenity — most notably Jim Rhodes’ planned

high-density development on the defunct mine property.

“It was a 30-year construction project that would have introduced 45,000 car trips a day through the canyon,” Fisher says. “It started out that Blue Diamond was the watchdog for Red Rock, but it turned out that everybody in Vegas realized it would affect them, because they need a place to escape. So, instead of being a little town against a big developer, it became everyone who loves the canyon getting together to preserve its natural setting.”

Former state Sen. Justin Jones, whose kids attended school in Blue Diamond and whose district included the area, has remained active in negotiating a compromise with Rhodes since losing his seat in the 2014 elections. “The county made it clear that the project would be cost-prohibitive (because of required infrastructure),” Jones says. “We joined forces with Rhodes to press the BLM for a land-swap in the legislature.

For the last couple months, things have been on hold, as the BLM has focused on its Resource Management Plan, but we’re keeping our eye on it.”

Meanwhile, the community is keeping its eyes on the BLM, which has included parts of Red Rock in a proposed “disposal area,” meaning they’d be open to development. “Red Rock is not disposable,” Fisher says, echoing a protest refrain. “It’s too sensitive to sell. You couldn’t develop it without impacting the tourism industry here.” Heidi Kyser

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”

Green Valley south

Gary and Rachelle Carter

In a city where they say no one knows their neighbors, the people of Cottage Drive pull together to defy the stereotype

B

efore: a dense plant profusion, impossible for man or dog to get through. A jungle! “You couldn’t even see the patio,” Rachelle Carter says.

After: a backyard as clean and spare as a Hemingway sentence.

Look, you can see the fence now.

Carter is shuffling through snapshots of neighbor Rich Lively’s wildly overgrown backyard; cleaning it out was the most recent group project on Cologne Drive, an older, settled street in Green Valley South.

Medically ailing and getting up there in years, Lively was unable to maintain his yard himself. So his neighbors pitched in to handle it for him. First the front yard, then, about a year ago, that monster of a backyard. “His dog couldn’t even go out into it,” Rachelle says, still amazed.

What a job that was! Somewhere north of a hundred trash bags got filled, and Cologne Drive chipped in to hire a fiveman work crew to help with the heavy work. (Even some residents who were out of town kicked in.) Took two garbage

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trucks to haul everything away, they say. It wasn’t all hard stuff, though; small gestures frequently abounded. Neighbors often provided Lively food or groceries. From Craigslist, Rachelle, a retired flight attendant, and her husband, Gary, an environmental engineer, bought him a walker and, later, a motorized chair. Lively died not long ago, but the Carters and the others at least know they made his home stretch a lot more livable.

That’s par for the neighborhood course, it seems. “We watch out for each other,” resident Joe Cotterman told a local paper during the backyard cleanup. Sick neighbors are brought meals. Your tree blows down while you’re on vacation, someone will help deal with it so you needn’t rush home. Police officers swing by for biannual Neighborhood Watch meetings, and the residents maintain a street-wide email list so everyone’s up to date on the neighborhood’s comings and goings.

Some areas bond when residents rally around a cause, or

If you have people who get along, who look out for each other, you take a little more pride in the place you live.

We don’t intrude on each other’s space, but we’re there when needed.

respond to calamity or share cultural or ethnic similarities.

Nothing so overt in this case.

Nor does everyone block-party around margaritas on Friday night. Neither fortressed in solitude nor up in each others’ business, the people of Cologne Drive have struck the sort of fine balance so often said to be lacking in sterile, suburban Las Vegas: old-fashioned

neighborliness spiked with bouts of above-average decency. That is, the sort of dynamic that any neighborhood can pull off, whether or not its residents have some other compelling reason to pull together.

Gary Carter credits it to the age of the neighborhood — and of the residents. Most are long-timers, some the original occupants of the 1980s-era homes. When they scouted the area 12 years ago before buying their house, Gary recalls, “It looked like people cared for their homes.” The people are settled, invested — not only in their properties, but also in their neighbors.

“If you have people who get along,” Gary says, “who look out for each other, you take a little more pride in the place you live.

We don’t intrude on each other’s space, but we’re there when needed.” Scott Dickensheets

East Las Vegas

Victoria Bridges-Hudson and the Crossroads I homeowners association

When crime and drugs threatened their condo complex, they rallied to shed some light on the situation

L

as Vegas was in the grip of a foreclosure-fueled recession, and Crossroads I — a sleepy residential island of condos amid eastside bars, convenience stores and laundromats — bubbled with symptoms.

Squatters, drug dealers and prostitutes had infested the 128-unit complex on Stewart and Lamb.

Yeah, infested. They had actually turned the vacant units into warrens where they hid out or brazenly ran their trade; they’d even smashed holes in the walls between condos for quick escape routes when the cops arrived on a call. Cars were routinely sto-

len, not to mention the mail. Still, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. The condo owners’ association board was practically dead; they couldn’t meet half the time because they couldn’t get quorum. With no voice to speak up, no opposition to say

”

You can’t let people walk all over you. If I see something wrong, I’m going to say something, and that’s my stance.

enough already, Crossroads I was just another bad neighborhood.

The perfect time for Victoria Bridges-Hudson to show up in 2010. She was in the middle of a divorce and eyeing retirement from her career as an administrator at the state women’s prison. Not exactly the place for a new start, but that’s just what Bridges-Hudson made of it as she settled into the community.

“I was determined to take the trash out,” says Bridges-Hudson, now vice president of the Crossroads I homeowners association. “You can’t let people walk all over you. If I see something

wrong, I’m going to say something, and that’s my stance.”

If you’re imagining BridgesHudson grabbing bad guys by their scruffs and tossing them to the curb, it’s not quite that gritty. The steps she took were small but significant. She used her vacation days to take classes offered by the state ombudsman on how to run a board. Working with Joan Phillips, Crossroads I’s community association manager, she breathed new life into the association. “It took a lot of recruiting to not just get a board that could have quorum, but one that shared common goals,” says Phillips. Bridges-Hudson also helped start a Neighborhood Watch program, and kindled a proactive relationship with the local police.

And then things really took off.

When she learned of neighborhood improvement grants provided by the City of Las Vegas, Bridges-Hudson plunged into the paperwork. In 2013, Crossroads I landed $3,500 from the City of Las Vegas to buy and install security cameras. In 2014, it was awarded a $4,400 grant to improve the area’s lighting.

Crime’s been dropping since.

“Making this a more welcoming place gives me a sense of purpose,” says Bridges-Hudson.

Whereas once the drug-dealer warrens were the sketchy emblem of a condo community in disrepair, today a point of pride for the community is a colorful mural stretching along the south wall of the complex, painted by area teens in a youth-empowerment program.

To Bridges-Hudson, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come — step by gradual step. She says, “It’s all the little things you do that can have a greater impact, eventually.” Andrew Kiraly

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your Arts+Entertainment calendar for april

All month Allison Streater Winchester Gallery

18 Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo The Joint It’s 2015 — is love still a battlefield? I mean, it’s been 32 years; you’d think someone would’ve won by now. There’s only one way to find out: seeing this show. 8p, $39.50-$175, hardrockhotel.com

Thwarted desire is the theme of Streater’s mixed-media collages: Models clipped from fashion catalogs — where their clothing and surroundings represented a lifestyle the artist can’t afford — are placed into settings based more closely on Streater’s own life.

702-455-7340

24 11

Mr. Burns Art Square Theater Anne Washburn’s dark comedy mashes up the fall of civilization, the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons, the evolution of pop culture into mythology and the enduring power of live theater.

Through May 10, $16-$20, cockroachtheatre.com

23 Paul Koudounaris The Writer’s Block He sees dead people — that is, corpses and skeletons used in cultural rituals. And photographs them. And puts those photographs in books, like last month’s Memento Mori. And goes around with a slideshow of those photographs and talks about them. 7p, 1020 Fremont St., thewritersblock.org

Great Las Vegas Festival of Beer Downtown Said to be Nevada’s largest craft-beer festival, with 300 beers from 100 brewer … what? We had you at “craft beer”? Well, you GO, Barney Gumble!

3-7p, Fremont East Entertainment District, $30 and up (with $40 early entry and $75 VIP tickets), greatvegasbeer. com

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THE GUIDE ART

CELEBRATING LIFE! 2015 MASTER’S EXHIBIT THROUGH APRIL 22, WED-FRI 12:30-9P; SAT 9A-6P Featuring work by artists who have won three or more awards in the juried Celebrating Life! art exhibits over the past 15 years. Each artist will show several works in the predominant medium they have mastered. Charleston Heights Arts Center, 800 S. Brush St., 702-229-1012

CHOCOLATE: THE EXHIBITION

THROUGH MAY 3 Interactive exhibits reveal the plant, products and mystique of chocolate throughout the ages in science, history and popular culture.

Examine chocolate’s role throughout history and how mass production of chocolate bars fueled the Industrial Revolution. Free with general admission. Springs Preserve

CAR SHOW

THROUGH MAY 8 Artists Justin Favela and Sean Slattery will collaborate to create an indoor car show featuring three new, life-size recreations, including one built piñata-style. Free. Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery, clarkcountynv.gov

IN HONOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE 2015 EXHIBIT

THROUGH MAY 28, MON-THU 7A-5:30P Artwork in various media celebrates African American Month and beyond. Free. Las Vegas City Hall Chamber Gallery, 702-229-1012

SPRINGS PRESERVE PHOTO CONTEST EXHIBITION

THROUGH JUNE 21, 10A-6P This year’s theme was “Celebrations and Traditions” when the challenge went out to professional, amateur and youth photographers throughout the valley. Come see the results of the sixth-annual juried photo contest. Free with regular admission. Big Springs Gallery at Springs Preserve

DANCE

THE KAHURANGI MAORI DANCE THEATRE OF NEW ZEALAND APRIL 27, 7P Demonstrating the history and fabric of

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Maori life, Kahurangi, which translates to “cloak from heaven,” will perform a collection of vibrant traditional Maori cultural offerings that date back to the 10th century. The group bridges the past and present with genealogical chants, martial arts techniques and songs that spring from cultural pride and personal conviction. Free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

MUSIC

UNLV COMMUNITY BAND IN CONCERT

APRIL 7, 7:30P Part of the UNLV concert series. Anthony LaBounty, Conductor. Adults $10, Students/ staff/military/seniors, $8. UNLV Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall, 702-895-2787

GRADUATE COMBO AND GUITAR ENSEMBLE

APRIL 8, 7P The best student musicians from UNLV gather to offer a rousing concert sure to please. Free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

NEW HORIZONS

APRIL 9, 6:30P The Las Vegas Youth Orchestras & Symphonic Band season finale concert featuring students from across the valley. The Concerto Competition winner will perform a solo piece highlighted in the Philharmonic group. All graduating seniors will be recognized for their participation. $10-$40.

Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

THE MUSIC OF AARON RAMSEY AND CHICK COREA

APRIL 11, 4P Firenze String Quartet accompanies composer/drummer Aaron Ramsey, bassist Geoff Neuman and pianist Otto Ehling. Ramsey’s electronica trio Vertex3 includes violinists Rebecca Sabine and De Ann Letourneau performing Ramsey’s compositions and works by pianist Chick Corea with the quartet of Sabine and Geri Thompson, violins; Letourneau, viola and Moonlight Tran, cello. $10 advance, $12 concert day. Winchester Cultural Center, clarkcountynv.gov

VINTAGE VEGAS LIVE!

APRIL 11, 7P Art Vargas embodies the energy and excitement of Sammy Davis Jr., the flair of Bobby Darin and Louis Prima, and the

cool of Frank Sinatra. His 90-minute show features a live band and femme fatale songstress Laura Shaffer, who embodies the glamour of golden-era Hollywood. $18.

Starbright Theater at Sun City Summerlin, suncity-summerlin.com/starbrighttheatre

BRASIL GUITAR DUO

APRIL 15, 8P João Luiz and Douglas Lora perform a seamless blend of traditional and Brazilian works. Part of the Allegro Guitar Series at UNLV. $40. UNLV Performing Arts Center, pac.unlv.edu

THE ODYSSEY: A FOLK OPERA

APRIL 16, 7:30P Chicago-based musician Joe Goodkin performs an original 30-minute one-man musical interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey and leads a conversation about the timeless themes of the original poem and its creation. UNLV Barrick Museum Auditorium, unlv.edu/event/odyssey-folk-opera-joe-goodkin

RAMSEY LEWIS TRIO

APRIL 17-18, 7P Composer, pianist and jazz legend Lewis has been referred to as “the great performer,” a title reflecting his performance style and musical selections which display his early gospel playing and classical training along with his love of jazz and other musical forms. $45-$79. Cabaret Jazz at The Smith Center

AN EVENING WITH BRUCE HORNSBY

APRIL 18, 7:30P Hornsby’s work displays a creative iconoclasm that’s been a constant in the artist’s two-and-a-half decade recording career.

His performance will offer a glimpse of a restless spirit who continues to push forward into exciting new musical terrain. $32$99. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

HENDERSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

APRIL 19, 2P The valley’s top student musicians perform at the orchestra’s annual Young Artists Concert. Free. Henderson Pavilion, 200 S. Green Valley Parkway, hendersonlive.com

CINEMUS MAXIMUS

APRIL 23, 7:30P Concert by the UNLV Wind Orchestra conducted by Thomas G. Leslie. Guest

Conductors: Dr. Zane S. Douglass, UNLV Instructor of Conducting. Adults $10, Students/staff/military/seniors, $8.

UNLV Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall, 702-895-2787

TRIO DI AMICI

APRIL 25, 2P Traditional folk music of Italy played by Gary Queen on mandolin, Joe Cairo on accordion and John Falbo on guitar. $10 advance; $12 concert day. Winchester Cultural Center, clarkcountynv.gov

Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

MASTERWORKS V: 100 YEARS OF MUSIC

APRIL 25, 7:30P Music Director, Donato Cabrera, completes his first Masterworks Series with a program featuring composers over a one hundred-year span including the stunning keyboard showcase of Rachmaninoff’s 24 variations based on Paganini’s Caprices for violin to be performed by thrilling young pianist Joyce Yang. $26-$94. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

Mondays at 10 p.m., April 6, 13, 20 Wolf Hall on Masterpiece

Nature: Animal Homes

Sundays at 10 p.m., premiering April 5

Wednesdays at 8 p.m., April 8, 15, 22

Sacred Wonders of Britain

NOVA: Invisible Universe Revealed

Thursdays at 8 p.m., April 16, 23, 30

Wednesday, April 22 at 9 p.m.

RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA

APRIL 28-MAY 3, TUE-SUN 7:30P; SAT-SUN 2P The musical from the creators of The Sound of Music and South Pacific that’s delighting audiences with its contemporary take on the classic tale. $39-$139.

Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

THEATER

THE BUCKET SHOW EVERY WED 10P Paul Mattingly (Second City) and Matt Donnelly (former writer for Penn & Teller) offer up improv at its finest. You call the shots for everything from long form to singing games. Free - donations go in the buckets at the end of the show. Scullery Theater, 150 Las Vegas Blvd. N., mattand mattingly.com

NOVA: Invisible Universe Revealed

DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB

EVERY THU 9:30P Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Learn more about the weirdest jobs in the valley in this talk-show-like format where the director interviews the special guest while improv actors recreate the hilarious workplace stories in the background. Created by Second City alumni Derek and Natalie Shipman. $10. Onyx Theatre, onyxtheatre.com

Last Days in Vietnam: American Experience Tuesday, April 28 at 9 p.m.

Visit VegasPBS.org today to see the complete schedule.

3050 E. Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, NV 89121 • 702-799-1010 April 2015

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THE GUIDE IVY + BEAN THE MUSICAL

APRIL 15, 6P Based on The New York Times best-selling children’s book series by author Annie Barrows and illustrator Sophie Blackall, this is the story of an unexpected friendship between two very different second graders. $12.95$19.95. Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

LECTURES, SPEAKERS AND PANELS

NORIE SATO ART LECTURE

APRIL 1, 6:30P Sato has been active in the Seattle art scene since the ’70s, creating sculptures and two-dimensional works that utilize a wide variety of materials. Her works are located throughout the country, and she received the 2014 Public Art Network Award in recognition of her contributions to the public art community. Free. Historic Fifth Street School, 401 S. Fourth St., 702-229-3515

HOW JAY SARNO’S WILD LIFE CHANGED LAS VEGAS

APRIL 2, 7P Through his casinos, Sarno completely changed ideas of how Las Vegas should operate, opening the door for the “what happens in Vegas” era of adult fantasy. Historian David G. Schwartz examines Sarno’s life and brings to light just how he ended up in Las Vegas and how profound his influence on his adopted hometown has been. Free. Jewel Box Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

POP-UP! POETRY

APRIL 3, 5-11P The Vegas Valley’s best poets from the most honored and newest local venues will take the stage and set streets ablaze with the excitement and relevance of the word.

In collaboration with First Friday. Free.

Nevada Humanities offices at Art Square, lasvegaspoets.org

ART PRACTICE: MEMORY, MYTH AND STORYTELLING

APRIL 6, 7:30P Branden Koch will present an evening of storytelling with humorous anecdotes and contradictory relationships as they relate to memory, myth and artistic practice. The artist will include images of his work. Free.

UNLV Barrick Museum Auditorium, unlv.edu/event/art-practice-memorymyth-and-storytelling

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LUCK AND THE SILVER STATE: THE HISTORY OF NEVADA

APRIL 9, 7P Historian Michael S. Green will discuss his new book, Nevada: A History of the Silver State, which details the state’s past, from the arrival of early European explorers, predominance of mining in the 1800s, rise of world-class tourism in the twentieth century and the significant role that luck plays in the state’s growth. Free. Jewel Box Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

TO FORGIVE BUT NOT FORGET: SAUDI ARABIA AND MIDDLE EAST IN THE AGE OF ISIS

APRIL 9, 7:30P The rise of ISIS presents an acute challenge for both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Sean Foley, Associate professor of history, Middle Tennessee State University will discuss their responses that could determine the success of the US-led coalition against ISIS. Free. UNLV Barrick Museum Auditorium, unlv.edu/event/forgive-not-forgetsaudi-arabia-and-middle-east

DAN CORSON ART LECTURE

APRIL 16, 6:30P Corson’s projects have ranged from complex rail stations and busy public intersections to quiet interpretive buildings, meditation chambers and galleries. Corson’s work is infused with drama, passion and layered meanings and often engages the public as co-creators within his environments. Free. Historic Fifth Street School, 401 S. Fourth St., dancorson.com

AN EVENING WITH GARRISON KEILLOR

April 16, 7:30P With a wonderful, dry sense of humor, Garrison Keillor, the acclaimed host of A Prairie Home Companion, captivates audiences using his unique blend of comedy, class, charisma and wisdom. $29-$99.

Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center

HOWARD HUGHES: FOOTPRINTS IN THE DESERT SAND

APRIL 17, 12P A Chautauqua presentation by Brian Kral. For many Nevadans, the puzzle of Howard Hughes begins with a late-night

arrival at the Desert Inn Hotel in 1966, and ends four years later with his secret departure. However, is that his involvement in Nevada began as early as the 1940s. Free. Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse Jury Room, 333 Las Vegas Blvd. N., artslasvegas.org

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH CELEBRATION

APRIL 17, 7:30P Enjoy a “Poetry Super Sampler,” featuring some of the best in talent from around the Las Vegas Valley. A diverse group of poets will present their various works in a format that is sure to please poetry lovers in all walks of life. Adults only.

Free. West Las Vegas Library Theatre, artslasvegas.org

AN EVENING WITH MARIE LU

APRIL 21, 7P Lu, New York Times best-selling author of the Legend series, will discuss the art of writing and her books, including her recently released novel, The Young Elites, in this Q&A session. A book signing and reception will follow the talk.

Free. Main Theater at Clark County Library, lvccld.org

EMERGING WRITERS SERIES: RICHARD SIKEN

APRIL 30, 7P Siken is a poet, painter, filmmaker and an editor at Spork Press. Join him for a reading and discussion about his debut poetry collection, which won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Free. UNLV Greenspun Hall Auditorium, blackmountain institute.org

FAMILY & FESTIVALS

PINOY PRIDE FESTIVAL

APRIL 3-4, 11-12A; APRIL 5, 11A-10P This Filipino cultural event showcasing the rich history and culture of the Philippines will feature authentic food, craft vendors and entertainment as well as traditional carnival rides and games. Locally based artists, comedians, dance and musical groups will perform each night. $8-$15, Sun. free. DLVEC, dlvec.com

HOP & SHOP: EASTER EGG HUNT AND FAMILY FESTIVAL

APRIL 4, 10A-5P Free Easter egg hunts will take place

every 10 minutes during morning and afternoon sessions for children ages 1-10.

Registration will be located in the valet roundabout next to I Heart Burgers and Yard House and is required for participation. Egg hunts will be limited to 50 kids per hunt. The Easter Bunny will be on hand for photos. Please have children bring their own baskets to carry their treats. Free. Town Square, mytownsquarelasvegas.com

CRAZY SPOKES

APRIL 11, 9A-2P Pedal in Henderson’s bike-friendly environment as part of a rolling carnival of fun.

The event features two organized rides and a fitness festival at the park. 25-mile bike ride, $20-$30 adults, $10-$15 children; 6-mile family fun ride, $5 per participant.

Mission Hills Park, bikehenderson.org

ROX IN SOX CHILDREN’S MUSIC FESTIVAL

APRIL 11, 10A-3P A festival of children’s music and reading featuring kindie music artists Alphabet Rockers, Recess Monkey, Aaron Nigel Smith and Las Vegas Family Puppet Theatre. Come for a fun-filled day of entertainment and family-friendly activities.

Refreshments will be available for sale from several food truck vendors. Sammy Davis Jr. Festival Plaza in Lorenzi Park, 720 Twin Lakes Drive, artslasvegas.org

THE FESTIVAL OF COMMUNITIES

APRIL 11, 12-5P Community members, families and kids are invited to participate in live music, dancing, readings, and performances. The event includes international food tastings, booths with displays of art and culture, balloon art, face painting and much more.

UNLV Alumni Walk, unlv.edu/event/festi val-communities

GREAT VEGAS FESTIVAL OF BEER

APRIL 11, 3-7P For the fifth consecutive year, beer enthusiasts will take over Downtown Las Vegas for an afternoon filled with more than 300 brews from more than 100 different breweries. This year will introduce even more culinary and entertainment elements through the festival’s Gastropub and BrewLogic seminars to enhance guests’ experience. There will be a cider station, live entertainment, silent disco, human arcade

and more! Must be 21+. $40-$55. Fremont East, greatvegasbeer.com

CADILLAC THROUGH THE YEARS

APRIL 12, 11A- 5P Join Findlay Cadillac and The Las Vegas Cadillac & LaSalle Club for a display of Cadillac vehicles from the past several decades. More than 60 Cadillacs will be on display, plus live music and raffles.

Free. Town Square, mytownsquare lasvegas.com

SUS·TAIN·A·BLE: A THREE-DAY GUIDE TO LIVING GREEN IN LAS VEGAS

APRIL 17-19 Discover helpful tips and tactics for living green in Las Vegas during the weekend-long event to celebrate Earth Day. Each day will feature different activities and educational tools to reduce your carbon footprint. Town Square, mytown squarelasvegas

HENDERSON HERITAGE PARADE & FESTIVAL

APRIL 18, 9A-7P Join the city for its special birthday celebration chronicling more than six decades of Henderson history. Bring the family to enjoy a parade, car show, live entertainment and full-on festival!

Henderson Events Plaza, 200 Water St., hendersonlive.com

VEGAS UNCORK’D

APRIL 23-26 The most anticipated foodie event of the year is bigger than ever with dozens of one-of-a-kind meals. To mark its 9th year, the famed resorts of Las Vegas have assembled an unparalleled national collection of celebrity chefs, master sommeliers and cutting-edge mixologists. $110-$330 depending on event. Aria, Bellagio, Caesars Palace, MGM Grand, vegasuncorked.com

22ND ANNUAL CLARK COUNTY INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S FESTIVAL

APRIL 18, 10A-3P Exotic animals from Roos ’n’ More highlight this event with dance and music performances, arts and crafts, clown workshops, percussion workshops, storytelling and carnival games while performers stroll

the park. Includes a rock climbing wall, historic battles, pony rides and food and drink. Free; fee for some rides and vendors. Winchester Cultural Center, clarkcountynv.gov

WACKY WORLD OF SPORTS

MAY 2, 8A-8P Clark County Parks & Recreation brings you a full day of oddball athletic competition featuring human derby races, reverse kickball, broom ball, bubble soccer, mud volleyball and a human foosball tournament.

As part of the fun, there will also be kids’ games, a bounce house, zip line, climbing walls and food trucks on-site. Must be over 18 and in good health to participate in team sports. $100 team registration. Sunset Park, clarkcountynv.gov/parks

FUNDRAISERS

UNLVINO

APRIL 16-18 Celebrating more than 40 years of hospitality excellence, UNLVino invites guests to “take a sip for scholarship” by offering three evenings of events, including Bubble-Licious, Sake Fever and the Grand Tasting. Benefits UNLV’s William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration. $100-$150 The Venetian, Red Rock, Paris, unlvtickets.com

AIDS WALK LAS VEGAS

APRIL 19, 8A The 25th annual AIDS Walk Las Vegas is Southern Nevada’s largest event to support the fight against HIV/AIDS. Form your teams now, because this year Penn & Teller have offered to match your fundraising when it gets over $250! Plus, there are plenty of great prizes and extra events around the walk. $25-$500. Town Square, afanlv.org

METAMORPHOSIS: AN ECO-FASHION EVENT

APRIL 23, 5P Enjoy a night of fashion while making a positive impact in the community. The runway will feature looks constructed by fashion designers from sustainable fabrics, locally-produced wares or repurposed materials. Proceeds benefit the Springs Preserve Foundation. $75-$150. Desert Living Center at Springs Preserve

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END NOTE

Spring bugs me

By Stacy J. Willis

W

hen something goes bump in the night, I leap into action. I do not cower. I’m filled with an abundance of adrenaline that I’ve been trying to free myself of for decades. As a child, my father would answer the call of bogeymen, but in the many years since, I’ve been quick to bolt out of bed and grab a weapon — a pewter candleholder, the pointy-nosed clothes iron, the hardback version of the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness, whatever’s handy — and stalk the hell out of the noise-maker.

In those moments I have zero doubt that I could destroy an intruder with Happiness, bullets be damned. To date, this drama has only gone as far as Act One, probably because my general aura of Navy Seal-ishness works like a force field around the house.

Sadly, I don’t have the same precision attack instincts for insects. I’m mightily afraid of them. Pretty much all insects.

When a bug shows up in the house, my adrenaline explodes into a cloud of fear, and the Dalai Lama bugs out. I don’t trust their size and speed; I can’t comprehend their ghoulish exoskeletons; I’m allergic to bee stings and therefore reasonably deduce that all bugs can asphyxiate me, so I get a head start by hyperventilating when they approach. Worse, I know that where there’s one bug, there are a dozen more hiding nearby, ready to rush me and take over the world. They’ve been lying in wait not just all winter but since the Big Bang, and they outnumber us by zillions. They sit around deep underground and in trees and walls and laugh at our insecticides and our flyswatters and plot the demise of the human race. Someday, we will answer to cockroaches.

I’ve seen foreshadowing galore. Not long ago, I saw a spider on a wall in the

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house, experienced the near-fatal rise of adrenaline and yelled for my partner to come get it. What happened next changed my life. When she squished it with a flipflop, hundreds of baby spiders came running out of — off of? — the dying spider, covering our floor and half of the wall in what can only be described as a TrojanHorse-style invasion of arachnids. I ran for the can of Raid, and she began pounding them with the flip-flop, and in the fog of war, I exterminated babies. When it was over, their little corpses littered the living room, and when we should’ve been celebrating victory or at least high-fiving our survival, we were instead overcome with shame. What had we done? They were babies! We began the mournful process of sweeping up their sad eight-legged corpses. In the dark of night, I lay awake

Googling, “Do spiders feel pain?”

I love spring. I love the desert. I trust that I still wield the corners of Happiness deftly enough to scare off the bogeyman.

But I also know that with the blooming of flowers comes a new generation of stealthy insects. In my rational mind I fully appreciate their role in the ecosystem, and in the months since arachnopocalypse, I’ve made every effort not to kill anything so willy-nilly. I’ve also tried really hard to erase that experience from my memory, where instead it grows like an anthill. Still, I’ve begun to admire the artful webs in the corners of the porch outside, if not the ones in my head, and I’ve become weirdly interested in scientific research about the central nervous systems of insects. Of my own nervous system, however, there is no news.

Still vigilant.

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