Welcome to the March RN&R! My list of concerns at the moment is long. I’m worried about the thousands of federal workers fired in the name of “efficiency.” There is indeed inefficiency in the government, of course, and I’m all for it being addressed, but I fear the sudden, sweeping layoffs will result in expenses that are higher than these workers’ wages were. The reduction in our ability to prepare for and address wildfires alone, with fewer people staffing our national lands, could easily yield astronomical costs.
I’m just as worried about the extreme polarization we’re experiencing in American politics, culture and life. It’s timely that in this month’s news section, Jimmy Boegle mentions that, well after longtime Nevada politician Barbara Vucanovich retired, she spoke with Dennis Myers, then the RN&R’s news editor, about politics in D.C., saying: “There’s just no cooperation. Nobody wants to get anything done. But it’s sad because it’s more of a battle than it is representing people and governing properly. They’re not doing that.”
That way back in 2013, and her words rang loud and clear to me as I read them today.
I’ve said this before—so many times that I’m definitely in broken-record territory here—but it bears repeating. When the news makes my stress levels peak, there is one surefire thing that keeps me in check: the fact that so many people in our community consistently do amazing things to help make life here better for us all.
Beverly Harry and her grassroots group, River Justice, sometimes spend their Sundays picking up trash around the Truckee River. Steve Funk and the all-volunteer team at KNVC 95.1 FM work hard to keep broadcasting music, news and emergency information in Carson City. Nico Gourdon, a restauranteur originally from France, serves traditional small plates, sweets and wines at his Fifth Street wine bar, Belleville. Kudos to all of these hardworking locals! You can read about them all, along with several more, in this issue.
LETTERS
Honor women veterans with Equal Rights Amendment
On Feb. 26, 2024, Gov. Joe Lombardo issued a proclamation that March is Women’s Military History Month in Nevada. Our current administration in Washington, D.C., does not acknowledge the inequities that women and minorities experience. In particular, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has old-fashioned views about women serving in the military, despite significant contributions of women like Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper and Nevada’s own service women and women veterans.
This is why we need the Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution, right now. According to Congressman Mark Amodei, the National Archive should not publish the ERA, since states failed to ratify it by the imposed deadline. He suggested that if we want the ERA, then Congress has to start all over again. Fine, then, let’s start over. I can’t think of a more apt member of the House than Congressman Amodei to reinitiate the process to add the ERA to our Constitution, because Nevada and Nevada’s women who serve and have served are crucial in the U.S. military. According to Gov. Lombardo’s 2023 proclamation of Women’s Military History Month, there
were upwards of 24,000 women veterans in Nevada as of 2023.
Contact Rep. Amodei (amodei.house.gov) and urging him to introduce a new bill to add the ERA to the Constitution.
Cynthia Cooper Reno
‘Negative coverage’ of Trump was deserved
Bruce Horn is outraged that “liberal media” puts out more negative coverage of Trump than he likes (Letters, RN&R, February 2025), but has nothing to say about right-wing media and their work to spin and propagandize for Trump. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I would have liked to see some balance in Mr. Horn’s complaint. And Mr. Horn ignores the fact that Trump, on an hourby-hour basis, does whatever he can to be the top headline in all media, even if it means doing or saying something he knows to be outlandish.
Mr. Horn says he is outraged that the media sometimes used the term “rape” when Trump was only found (liable for) “sexual assault.” But I wonder where Mr. Horn’s outrage is regarding the assault itself. Labels, it seems, are more important than the crime.
As for his claims about our justice system being weaponized against Trump, Mr. Horn ignores the role played by grand juries and juries
of peers which our forefathers cleverly built into our judicial system.
There are a lot of reasons to be outraged by the media, and I share some of that outrage, but what I heard from Mr. Horn appalls (and frightens) me more, because his one-sided outrage seems to have been shared by enough people that we now have a convicted felon as president. And we’re currently seeing executive orders and statements that display contempt for the rule of law and our Constitution while his party and followers not only aren’t outraged; they’re celebrating. I don’t understand the country I live in anymore.
Michel Rottmann Via RenoNR.com
Thanks for discussing discrimination
Excellent article (“Not a thing of the past: Lonnie Feemster on the long, slow process of overturning housing discrimination,” RN&R, February 2025). When I lived in Reno years ago, I worked with Lonnie on discrimination issues, since I fall in that pile. I am American Indian, French Basque and Mexican. At 70, I saw the most prejudice in Fallon. I grew up with two fountains in the park: one for whites, and one for Black/Indians. I drank from the white fountain that looked cleaner! Great story; keep educating.
Cynthia Oseguera Via RenoNR.com
—KRIS VAGNER krisv@renonr.com
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GUEST COMMENT BY
PAM CONBOY
Therapeutic psilocybin is inching toward legality
According to Mental Health America, more than 20% of U.S. adults—roughly 50 million people—are experiencing mental illness. Even worse, according to data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Nevada residents struggle with higher than average rates, yet are less likely to receive mental-health services.
Even when individuals do have access to mental-health care, our conventional medical system often relies on a “prescribe and park” approach, never truly getting to the root cause. We can do better than this.
We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. Psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms,” has demonstrated both a strong safety profile and powerful therapeutic potential. This led the Food and Drug Administration to grant it breakthrough therapy status—a designation that can expedite the development of certain drugs—in 2018 and 2019. Moreover, major academic institutions including Johns Hopkins, the University of California and others continue to invest in psychedelic research.
in 1970, followed by a United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances international ban on psychedelics in 1971. Since then, however Johns Hopkins has published more than 200 papers, making psilocybin the most extensively studied natural psychedelic substance.
High-quality research, compelling success stories and vocal advocates have renewed interest in and respect for our ancient plant medicines. Today, we are seeing a resurgence of scientific research and growing recognition from scientists, health-care practitioners and the general public regarding the potential for psilocybin and other entheogens to address deep-rooted psychological challenges.
Thanks to the work of progressive legislators and activists, Nevada is making progress toward expanded access to this powerful plant medicine.
STREETALK
Have you had a DNA test? Was there a surprise in the results?
Asked at the Downtown Reno Riverwalk
Allana S Foster Healer and hairdresser
BY DAVID ROBERT
I personally haven’t, but my parents have. We knew of our familial history through a genealogy search. On my dad’s side, we thought that my great-grandmother was Native American, but she tried to pass as white. The test came back with no Native American DNA. We found that perplexing. My mother’s test came back spot on—Native American and Mexican.
Despite need, evidence and countless personal stories of profound, durable transformation, most people who might benefit from psilocybin still lack access.
Psilocybin and its active metabolite, psilocin, are considered both psychedelics and entheogens—natural substances that induce non-ordinary, spiritual or mystical states. The chemical structure is similar to serotonin, our primary calming neurotransmitter. Psilocybin also influences dopamine, the brain’s main reward neurotransmitter, and glutamate, the primary excitatory neurotransmitter. Together, these biochemicals help regulate emotion, mood and other neuropsychiatric processes. Additionally, the mushrooms’ strong anti-inflammatory properties help manage stress. Psilocybin also supports balanced immune function through the activation of microglial and astrocyte cells in the brain.
Research also shows that psilocybin promotes neuronal growth and connectivity—a process known as neuroplasticity. While we experience high neuroplasticity in our youth—vital for learning and memory—factors such as age, trauma, poor lifestyle habits and genetics can hinder neuroplasticity later in life, which can trap us in negative thought patterns and habits.
Psilocybin- or psilocin-triggered neuroplasticity lends itself to beneficial perceptual shifts and emotional reprocessing. Despite its early promise as a therapeutic agent and its strong safety profile, psilocybin became stigmatized during the 1960s. This ultimately led the U.S. government to classify it as a Schedule I drug
In 2023, the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicines—led by Kate Cotter and Jon Dalton and backed by Sen. Rochelle Nguyen and Assemblymember Max Carter—were successful in their efforts to pass Senate Bill 242. Although the bill was originally intended to decriminalize the possession of less than four ounces of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, it instead led to a professional working group to investigate the clinical utility of this compound.
In December 2024, the task force in Nevada approved a report (yet to be published as of this writing) recommending that lawmakers establish a program to regulate access to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and consider lowering legal penalties for possession of entheogenic plants and fungi. It’s an encouraging step, but progress toward safe and legal access is a slow journey.
As of this writing, Oregon and Colorado are the only states that have decriminalized the use of psilocybin, but many other states and municipalities are considering similar legislation. Use exemptions outside of decriminalization do exist, however, for both medical research and the sincere, spiritual use of entheogenic substances under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993.
The federal RFRA legislation permits the use of psychedelic and entheogenic substances in spiritual practice, which is the basis for Reno-based Setas Seminary’s sacramental use of psilocybin. I am a co-founder of Setas Seminary, along with Leah Linder, a naturopathic physician. I can attest that our mission is a sincere one: to help people achieve whole mind-body wellness using a range of lifestyle tools, including psilocybin, within a genuinely supportive community.
Pam Conboy is a co-founder of Setas Seminary in Reno. Learn more at www.setasseminary.org.
Dan Orvik Pilot
No. I was never that curious about any results. It wouldn’t change the future that much for me. I’m not opposed to a test. Now that I think of it, it might be good to know about my heredity for health issues. It couldn’t hurt.
Jenna Hill Nail technician
I did the 23andMe test. My dad died when I was very young, and he was adopted, so I intended to find out about my paternal side. Mom always said that he was Italian and looked like a mob boss with dark hair, etc. The test confirmed that I was 38% Sicilian, but what surprised me with the test was that the remaining percentage was Polish! I had visited Poland before, and the people there looked like me, and I had this weird, at-home feeling there.
Kianna Magno Student
No. I understand the process, as I was a biochem student up at UNR. I would do it to find out about any possible diseases that my family may be prone to, and to find out about my ethnic origins. My family is from the Philippines, and the Philippines have been colonized so much over the years that it’d be interesting to know what ethnic groups are in my family. I guess that I may have some Japanese, Chinese and some Spanish blood in me. I think I might be in for a surprise.
Meagan Roach Salon owner
When I was younger, I wanted to be a geneticist. My family history can be traced back to the 1700s in America. I took a DNA test. I thought that it’d come back as Scots-Irish, but guess what? My test came back as mostly European, mixed American, Southeast Asian and East Asian! Pretty bizarre!
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
A rough start to 2025 for alternative newspapers
The first months of 2025 have not been kind to alternative newspapers, as three journalism stalwarts have announced major changes due to economic issues.
In February, Triad City Beat, which had served Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point, N.C., for 11 years, closed up shop. TCB put out a call for help late last year, asking readers for donations; they raised enough money to continue for a few more months, but not enough to sustain the operation.
“Despite the donations and the community support, there have been insurmountable obstacles to keeping the organization operational, including lack of a business leader and inadequate future funding,” managing editor Sayaka Matsuoka wrote on Jan. 31.
“Our co-founder and publisher, Brian Clarey, resigned from Triad City Beat earlier this month and is now working full-time for (the University of North Carolina Greensboro). He was tasked with making difficult life changes after a devastating car accident last year forced him to find a new job.”
Closer to home, the San Diego Reader published its last print edition, with zero fanfare, in February. The Reader will continue to publish online, founder and editor Jim
Holman told The San Diego Union-Tribune Holman cited the rising costs of printing and distributing the weekly print edition, which had been published since 1972, as contributing factors, but said the inevitable shift from print to digital was the primary reason.
“It’s just a technological, cultural shift you can’t deny and you can’t fight,” he told the Union-Tribune.
Finally, the Chicago Reader, which has been publishing for more than 53 years, is working its way out of a financial crisis that led to layoffs and pay cuts in mid-January. In a Jan. 14 announcement, the Reader said:
“A combination of financial losses, operational challenges, and external pressures has brought the Reader to an imminent risk of closure.”
in one-time donations as of Jan. 30.
The closure of TCB hit close to home for me, as the paper’s founder, Brian Clarey, started the paper just a year after I launched the RN&R’s current sister paper in Palm Springs, Calif., and we often used each other as sounding boards in our papers’ early years. I consider him and Sayaka to be friends. Similarly, I know some of the Chicago Reader folks very well.
Fortunately, the publication’s call for donations brought in enough support for the nonprofit newspaper to, as of now, continue publication and make progress on its “path forward.” In a Jan. 31 note to readers, publisher Amber Nettles said the Reader had gotten more than $125,000
| BY JIMMY BOEGLE
Here in Reno, it’s been five years since the RN&R suspended publication when the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns began. After a brief hiatus, the RN&R resumed limited publication online; under new ownership, we returned to print as a monthly with our June 2022 issue. We’re now 34 issues into our comeback, and we hope there will be many more to come.
I serve on the AAN Publishers board of directors with both Sayaka and Reader publisher Amber Nettles, and I’ve watched as they’ve tried valiantly to keep their figurative ships afloat.
I am also heartbroken for these cities. TCB’s final issue includes a couple dozen notes from readers who talked about how important the publication has been to them and their community. Readers of the San Diego Reader’s print edition who don’t consume news online will no longer have a source of vital information. And the mere thought of a Chicago without the Chicago Reader seems unfathomable, as it’s such an institution.
However, times are tough. Revenue is down for the first three issues of 2025 compared to last year, and the economy around us full of uncertainty (to make a massive understatement).
The RN&R is not in any sort of immediate financial jeopardy, but the trends aren’t exactly encouraging. Within a month or two, we’ll start a fundraising campaign, with the help of the wonderful locals who have expressed interest in helping us out, through our fiscal sponsor. The goal will be to raise enough money for us to hire a full-time publisher/fundraiser/revenue-generating employee.
The lesson here is one I’ve mentioned many times before in this space, and will likely mention many times again: Journalism—real reporting, quality writing and good editing— costs a LOT of time and money to produce and distribute. If you don’t support the media outlets you enjoy and value, they will die.
ON NEVADA BUSINESS
Answer these questions before launch
How good is your product? Who are your customers?
Last month, I discussed some of the “bleeding-edge” tech featured at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show—cool electronics and everything AI. For many companies, this event, which showcases new trends in tech and the latest startups from around the world, is supposed to be the road to validation.
Many startups bet their existences on results from the CES, where investors, distributors, customers and partners are all looking for that new-product magic. Incredible moments can occur here for founders and investors—moments that validate all of the hard work and sleepless nights. That validation can take a business from pre-revenue to revenue, and from revenue to growth.
I always tell early-stage founders: “No idea for a product or service company is a bad one, as long as you can get someone to buy it twice.” Why twice? Because the first purchase could be a mistake. We’ve all bought something that turned out not to be of value. The second buy is a vote of confidence.
Suppose your new product is a one-time buy, such as a new AI vacuum cleaner like the ones previewed at CES. How do you get the second buy for validation? It happens when your first buyer tells their best friend, or when your first B2B customer tells their vendor to contact you. As a founder, you always remember your first customer—and likely the second, too, because after that point, everything usually changes.
In my January column, I focused on trade show tips, tricks and hacks. The trade show is where your customers will be. The problem for many of the companies at CES, however, is that they don’t know who the customer really is. They won’t, can’t and don’t know how to take leads, prioritize them and then follow up appropriately. Only around 6% of U.S. companies end up believing they got their money’s worth at trade shows.
For most early-stage companies, the road to validation is long and hard. The trade show is an expensive gambit if you’ve had no sales yet. This is because you don’t know if you’ve identified your ideal customers. Even if you have, is your message right? Will it attract these customers? Do you adequately express why they should do business with you instead of the competition? These concepts are huge in starting a new biz.
I’m often contacted to help bail out a founder who has buried themself in a rabbit hole, having built a product or service that nobody wants. They often haven’t talked to any customers, partners, experts or distrib-
| BY MATT WESTFIELD
Before you send a new product to the production line, it’s critical to get a sense of whether that product is actually appealing to customers. The custom-shaped promotional paper clip is one example of a product that early testers loved. Image/courtesy of Matt Westfield
utors before being hypnotized by the prospect of being the next big thing. First-time founders tend to get drunk on their own visons and jump ahead into a dreamworld of a prosperous future, without reality. Reality is gaining early validation. They often spin ahead to building their “solution” before gaining critical, independent, objective analysis from various parties. My companies have been formed in many sectors— custom paperclips, software, landscape design/ build, and international market consulting. All of my companies over the last 35 years have been built in concert with customers and partners as early as possible. When we came up with the custom paperclip idea, it was crazy— and potentially expensive, because we had to manufacture and ship the products from China before we ever sold anything.
So, what did we do before spending money on the wrong stuff? We gathered a bunch of professional reps from the promotional-products industry and showed them a bunch of mockups. We showed them one of the most recognized logos in the world—a red Coke bottle, but as a paperclip mockup. We beckoned them to tell us the truth and not blow smoke up our asses. We didn’t mind getting our feelings hurt, because that’s a lot cheaper than going to market on the false premise that the market will embrace us and our cool new product.
What did we find out in those early meetings in 2006? We found out that it was a great idea. We found out that they had never seen anything
like our custom paperclips. We learned an important truth—in the promotional products industry, the sweet spot is less than $5. That tidbit from the experts was gold for us. It was likely one reason the company took off and grew for the next several years, until the recession. (That story is for a different column!)
As soon as we launched, we were a hit. Repeat customers kept placing orders, and the referrals kept coming in, too. There is no easier sale in business than the repeat customer or the referral sale. This foundational premise is the essence of a sustainable business: Get customers to keep on coming back.
It all begins with truly finding the real value of your product or service, at the right price for the right customer, before you spend all of the time and money to build something that no one wants. Market change, political change, environmental change and competitive change can all affect a business and its relevance. But to launch, you need to engage early and often, listening honestly to what the experts and the customers are telling you.
Don’t let your ego piss your life savings into an abyss of business failure. Build what they want, not what you think they want. In business, anytime we say, “Well, maybe …” or, “I think …” it means we don’t know, and we need to find out—with verification—before we make a move. These tips work in any business, in any sector.
Good luck building your company in 2025!
Good pay
Be a crucial part of the RN&R team
If you have reliable transportation and are interested, email jimmyb@renonr.com for details!
UPFRONT
UNR researchers develop new sorghum strains
Scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno, have developed new varieties of sorghum that are bred to withstand Nevada’s arid climate and Reno’s short growing season—but future work is in jeopardy due to President Trump’s spending cuts.
Sorghum is a cousin to corn that originated in Africa. It is a grain widely used as livestock feed, especially in Asia and Africa. It is also eaten by humans and is sometimes an ingredient in gluten-free beer.
Melinda Yerka is a plant breeder, geneticist and an associate professor at UNR’s Department of Agriculture, Veterinary and Rangeland Studies. She and her colleagues collaborate with sorghum breeders at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Kenya so her sorghum varieties can reach developing nations. She specializes in developing new varieties that are adaptable to Nevada’s dry climate— and similar climates elsewhere—as opposed to studying varieties of sorghum that thrive elsewhere and trying to make them thrive here. She also develops strains that can be widely bred, and studies sorghum varieties primarily from California, Texas, Kansas and sub-Saharan Africa.
Yerka and her team have developed 200 new varieties of sorghum. If that sounds like a high number, Yerka explained that, in her field, that’s the norm. A wide cross-section of samples helps scientists identify genes in the plants that control traits they want to duplicate for arid-climate farming.
Yerka said that UNR is working toward becoming a lead institution for sorghum development and research under the guidance of Bill Payne, dean of the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources. This is getting more difficult, however, as President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders cut funds to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency that financially supports Yerka’s work.
“We are all in turmoil,” she said. “No one can apply for grants.”
The USDA’s grant portals are closed, and UNR scientists had received no updates on when they may reopen as of this writing. Yerka said this has had an immobilizing and demoralizing effect on the entire department.
—Leah Wigren
Supply and demand
Nevada eases policies to help reduce soaring egg prices and shortages
How long will we be paying a relative arm and a leg for eggs? That remains unknown.
Why are we paying a relative arm and a leg for eggs? The primary culprit is the bird flu.
The state Legislature and the Nevada Department of Agriculture (NDA) have taken steps to increase Nevada’s egg supply, in an effort to lower costs. The department announced on Feb.19 that State Quarantine Officer Director J.J. Goicoechea has temporarily suspended Nevada’s cagefree egg law, effective Feb 20.
The cage-free egg law, which passed in 2021 and went to effect in 2022, requires that all eggs sold in Nevada are sourced from cage-free hens. “Cage-free” means the hens are in an enclosure and free to roam, with a total space of at least one square foot per hen.
“Both egg producers and animal welfare advocates agree that this is the right thing to do,” said Assemblymember Howard Watts at the time.
During the current legislative session, Nevada passed Assembly Bill 171, which allows the temporary suspension of cagefree regulations for up to 120 days in emer-
gencies; Gov. Joe Lombardo signed the bill into law on Feb. 13. Other states with cage-free egg laws have similar allowances for emergency exceptions on the books as well.
“Nevada does not have any commercial poultry operations,” Goicoechea clarified. “Eggs sold in Nevada are sourced from other states.”
What will change?
Under the newly eased regulations, Nevadans will see two primary changes:
• For now, eggs sourced from “conventional” (i.e., not cage-free) producers are eligible for sale.
• Retail stores may now sell Grade B eggs. “Grade B eggs meet all the same food safety guidelines; the main difference between Grade A and B is color, size and shape,” said Goicoechea. Until now, Grade B eggs from cage-free producers were typically sold to bakeries and restaurants in Nevada, but not in retail stores.
“In addition, Nevadans with backyard flocks are encouraged to obtain a producer certificate from the NDA in order to sell eggs at farmers’ markets and co-ops,” Goicoechea said.
However, Nicole Sallaberry, local food and sustainability director for Great Basin Community Food Co-op, doesn’t believe that many
| BY KRIS VAGNER
Under newly eased state restrictions, Grade B eggs will soon be available in Nevada retail stores. Until now, they were typically available to restaurants, but not retailers.
backyard-flock keepers in Nevada are likely to become certified in short order.
“We love to work with local people, but going from supplying your family and your neighbors with eggs to selling a small amount to a little grocery store is quite a jump,” Sallaberry said. “For example, 12 to 60 dozen eggs per week is something larger stores might not deal with, but our food co-op does. We would need them to ramp up their production and also be in it for the long game. Farming and ranching is a full-time business with daily duties that some people just don’t want to do over the long run.”
Sallaberry added that she thinks keeping backyard flocks for eggs is generally a great idea, and she wanted any backyard producers who do rise to the challenge of certification to know that the co-op is particularly in need of duck eggs.
What else is contributing to the shortage?
The cage-free flock in December totaled 120.3 million birds—38.7% of the national flock— said Goicoechea, citing USDA data. “After 36 outbreaks in nine states, 7.8 million hens in cage-free systems have been lost.”
Goicoechea said recent changes in state laws have contributed to the egg shortage.
“State regulations requiring cage-free egg production in places like California and Massachusetts are also playing a role,” said Goicoechea. “As farms transition to meet these requirements, production challenges and distribution bottlenecks have emerged.”
Cage-free egg laws also went into effect in 2022 in Massachusetts and California.
What else do I need to know about the bird flu?
Bird flu cases have occurred in Nevada, but not at poultry farms. Dairy cattle in Nye County were found to be infected in December 2024, and dairy cattle in Fallon were infected in January. That’s also where the state’s first—and only, as of this writing—human case has been found. This flu is far less harmful to cattle than it is to birds, and the CDC currently ranks its risk to humans as “low.”
Nevada was among the first states to start testing milk for bird flu, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture brief.
“Consumers should begin to see an increase in egg availability at grocery stores in the next 30 days or so, with hopes of relief in pricing thereafter,” Goicoechea said.
Cleaning up the community
Beverly Harry of the grassroots group River Justice gave instructions to around 150 volunteers at the River Justice Community-Wide Clean-Up on Sunday, Feb. 23.
The volunteers met in the parking lot of the Second Street Walmart, then broke off into groups to pick up trash on three sections of the Truckee River, as well as a section of Wells Avenue, and an area near Roller Kingdom at Valley Road and Seventh Street. Beverly and her daughter, Autumn Harry, have been organizing the cleanups since 2021.
Beverly estimated later that the group picked up around 40 cubic yards of trash, including four five-gallon buckets of glass near John Champion Park. The disposal is funded by donations and the Truckee River Fund.
“Our goal with River Justice also is to work with the folks who are living along the river,” Beverly said. “We make sure that we’re in communication with the unhoused people. … There are pets who live along the river, too, that need resources and that need food.”
The volunteers carried plastic bags of dog food and cat food with them to distribute as they cleaned.
To learn about future River Justice cleanup events, follow Beverly and Autumn on Instagram. Their handles are @ cornmush_girl and @numu_wanderer.
—Kris Vagner
Photo by David Robert
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A Mushroom Church in Reno?
Psilocybin is considered both a psychedelic and an entheogen—a natural substance that induces non-ordinary, spiritual, or mystical states. The chemical structure is similar to serotonin, our primary calming neurotransmitter. But it also influences dopamine, the brain's main reward neurotransmitter, and glutamate, the primary excitatory neurotransmitter. Together, these biochemicals help regulate mood, memory, and cognition. Additionally, mushrooms’ strong anti-inflammatory properties influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which helps manage stress and regulate hormones.
Research also shows that psilocybin "disintegrates" habituated brain networks, creating a state of high neural entropy. This restructuring allows for new thought patterns and perspectives by promoting neuronal growth and connectivity—a process known as neuroplasticity. Despite its early promise as a therapeutic agent and its strong safety profile, the U.S. government classified psilocybin as a Schedule I drug in 1970 followed by the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances’ international ban on psychedelics in 1971. Today, however, we are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance with even the FDA conferring “breakthrough status” (2017|2018) for psilocybin. This shift has ushered in an era of focused research across many of our country’s most prestigious academic and medical institutions. Despite limited regulated access, use exemptions outside of legalization do exist for both medical research and the sincere, spiritual use of entheogenic substances under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993.
It is the RFRA-protection of sincere spiritual practice which supports Setas Seminary’s responsible use of sacrament. But it is just one of the tools we use on our collective journey toward whole wellness and genuine integration with the divine source. Free and open to all adults, we warmly welcome you to become a member of our supportive spiritual community.
PICTURED: OUR MOBILE CATIO!
When a grandmother went to Congress
UNR’s Special Collections and University Archives department displays a trove of items from the Barbara Vucanovich collection
When members of my generation of Northern Nevadans think of Congress, the first name that comes to mind is probably Barbara Vucanovich.
Barbara Farrell was born in New Jersey in 1921, and she came to Northern Nevada in 1949 for the most old-school Reno reason possible: She wanted a quick divorce from her first husband. What was supposed to be a short stay in the divorce capital of the world turned into a lifetime, when she met Kenneth Dillon, an attorney involved in Republican politics; they fell in love. They married in 1950 and had five children.
After Dillon’s death in 1964, she was working on then-Lt. Gov. Paul Laxalt’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign when she met a gentleman by the name of George Vucanovich; the two married a year later. As Laxalt’s political star rose—he was elected governor in 1966, and to the U.S. Senate in 1974—she at times continued to work with him, and became his district director after he was elected to the U.S. Senate. When Nevada received a second congressional seat after the 1980 Census, Laxalt encouraged her to run in 1982.
She took his advice. Her campaign motto: “What Congress needs is a tough grandmother.” She won, becoming the first
Barbara Vucanovich with US Air Force pilot Lt. Col. Roger Riggs, preparing for F-16 Falcon flight, Aug. 16, 1985 (cropped). Photographer unidentified. Barbara F. Vucanovich Papers, 96-54_12_19.
ranging from documents to campaign materials, posters and even license plates.
“She apparently got a custom license plate for every Congress that she was in,” Olson said. Olson said the true magic of the exhibition comes from the photographs.
“I knew from her memoir that congressional delegation work was something that she was really interested in,” Olson said. “She served at such an interesting moment in geopolitics, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first democratic elections in Nicaragua. We thought those would be really interesting things to highlight with the photographs that we had. She traveled to central Europe a couple of times, both before and after the Berlin Wall came down. There are some great photographs of the Berlin Wall. There are also some photographs of her visiting Chernobyl in 1995, where they were still talking about what happened in 1986 with the explosion.”
Olson said one of her favorite photos in the exhibit is a picture of Vucanovich with a fighter pilot.
Nevada woman elected to Congress, and went on to serve seven terms before retiring in 1997.
The life of Vucanovich is the subject of an exhibit assembled by the University of Nevada, Reno, Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives department. Nevada’s Silver Lady: Barbara Vucanovich and Nevada Women in Politics opened last fall and will be on display through May on the third floor of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center on the UNR campus.
The exhibit was curated by Elspeth Olson, an assistant professor and the outreach and public services archivist for Special Collections and University Archives. Olson said the university has intended to do a Vucanovich exhibit since UNR received her papers—which consisted of about 150 boxes of materials—several years after Vucanovich’s passing in 2013.
“Political collections are quite large,” Olson said. “Doing exhibits can be quite an undertaking, and for a number of reasons—partly to do with the pandemic and then the university’s sesquicentennial celebrations—this was the first open slot we had to put it up. Luckily, I had her memoir to go off of, to give me a framework. … The memoir was fundamental, because it told me what Congresswoman Vucanovich thought was important about her career.”
The exhibit includes a variety of items,
“I really love that photo,” she said. “I love how wide they’re both grinning. Her story about getting to ride in that fighter jet is pretty funny in the memoir. She got to pilot it for about, I think, three seconds before things went completely haywire, and they took over the controls again.”
In part to put Vucanovich’s career in the proper context, the exhibit also includes a timeline of women in Nevada politics.
“Our history department was founded by Anne Martin, who was a prominent women’s suffrage activist and the first woman in the country to run for the (U.S.) Senate back in 1918,” Olson said. “… I wanted to place Barbara Vucanovich within that timeline. It’s a sample of women who have served in elected office who are represented in our collections, starting with Anne Martin, and going all the way to the current congressional delegation”—which, today, is mostly female.
Olson said she was “really taken” by the relationship Vucanovich had with her husband, George.
“I am really inspired by the supportive relationship they had with each other, and the way he was able to be welcomed into an extant family, which had already lost a father,” she said. “He would show up to her rallies wearing a name tag that just said, ‘The Husband.’ We have one of the name tags.”
Olson grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and came to UNR about five years ago.
“Over the year-plus of working on this exhibit, when I’ve mentioned that I was working on
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BY JIMMY BOEGLE
this, more often than not, people would smile and have some story to tell about meeting Barbara Vucanovich in person,” Olson said. “The intimacy of the politics here is something that seems really special.”
Vucanovich was a staunch conservative, for the most part, although she supported equal pay and equal treatment for women in the work force, and fought for funding for early cancer screenings, as well as cancer treatment and research (after surviving breast cancer early in her congressional career). After her retirement, she bemoaned the increasingly polarized and contentious environment in Washington, D.C. In 2013, she told the RN&R’s Dennis Myers: “There’s just no cooperation. Nobody wants to get anything done. But it’s sad because it’s more of a battle than it is representing people and governing properly. They’re not doing that.”
Polarization has only gotten worse in the 12 years since Vucanovich said that. I asked Olson if she had today’s political climate in mind as she curated the exhibit.
“I was selecting materials when there were so many student protests last year, and I was definitely aware of that,” she said. “I was definitely thinking carefully about what we were putting on display, regarding congressional delegation work especially. It’s not to censor; it’s just, ‘Are these conversations that I want to get into in this setting?’ You always have to think about your audience.”
Shortly after the Nevada’s Silver Lady exhibit ends in May, the Special Collections and University Archives department will open an exhibit on Reno Little Theater, to celebrate the organization’s 90th season. Olson said it’s important for the university to hold exhibits like these.
“I think that in our increasingly digital culture, people lose track of the ‘thingness’ of things,” Olson said. “I run classes for the archives, and one of the things that I encourage our students to think about is the items as objects. It’s not just words on a page. If a book falls open at specific pages, that tells you something about how it’s been used. If you see wear and tear on it in certain ways, or kids’ doodles on it, it connects you as well. … Archives have a reputation for being very gatekeeper-y, and we’re really trying to break that down. We are a publicly accessible resource. At least half of our users are not university-affiliated. We are trying to get ourselves incorporated into more and more of the curriculum here at UNR. I fully believe the archives are for every discipline, not just history students.”
Nevada’s Silver Lady: Barbara Vucanovich and Nevada Women in Politics will be on display through May on the third floor of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center on the UNR campus. For more information, visit library.unr.edu/ places/special-collections.
| BY KRIS VAGNER
Echoes of the past
As Japanese Americans prepare to share stories of World War II internment, one wonders if the past is in danger of repeating
Richard de Queiroz was a teenager in Los Angeles in February 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring that “all persons deemed a threat to national security” be removed from the West Coast.
Richard’s father was from Mexico, and his maternal grandparents were from Japan. His ancestry meant he was a “threat,” according to the government. He was about to become one of more than 120,000 people in the U.S. of Japanese descent to be incarcerated in World War II internment camps.
Richard and his family were sent to the Granada War Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, in Granada, Colo. He was interned there for two years, from
ages 15 to 17. He had a girlfriend there. After she left the camp for a school in Connecticut, Richard wrote her letters.
Alan de Queiroz, Richard’s son, has those letters today.
“It was almost like summer camp or something,” Alan said. “As a kid, that’s the impression I had from him. … If you read them, there’s actually nothing in there that would indicate there’s anything unusual going on.”
For example, Richard wrote to his girlfriend about going to dances and buying records in a nearby town.
“But then every once in a while, some things come up,” said Alan. “There’s one letter where he talks about how some of his friends feel like they have no place in this country. Other
Richard de Queiroz was a Los Angeles teenager when the United States entered World War II. He’s seen here at an internment camp in Colorado, where he spent two years. His story is among those that will be discussed at a March 12 remembrance event at the Nevada Museum of Art. Photo/ courtesy of Alan de Queiroz
things that he said later made it clear that it had actually scarred him pretty deeply.”
Richard told Alan that he distrusted the country, and that he thought something similar to the incarceration of Japanese residents could happen again—if not to the Japanese, then to some other group.
Alan, along with three other locals of Japanese heritage, will gather at the Nevada Museum of Art to discuss the stories of Richard and others who were incarcerated in the camps. Among the reasons for the gathering are to recognize the 83rd anniversary of FDR’s order, and to honor the people affected by it.
“The bigger point is to remember in general that it’s this ongoing struggle,” said Alan. “It’s not like suddenly prejudice has disappeared or something. I think of the day of remembrance as a time to recognize the need to fight oppression of all kinds, not just mistreatment of im-
migrants, but also mistreatment of many other groups, whether they’re defined by ethnicity, race, religion or gender identity.”
He added that such mistreatment feels more prominent now than it has in recent years, citing President Trump’s often-repeated false claim that “other countries are emptying out their prisons and insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.”
Alan hears in Trump’s claim the echoes of the fed’s assertion that Japanese Americans were in cahoots with Japan during WWII. “There’s actually no evidence that that was happening,” he said.
Nevada Humanities and the Japanese American Citizens League present The Power of Stories: Remembering Japanese American Incarceration, featuring Alan de Queiroz; Nancy Mattson, whose parents were interned in Arizona; Meredith Oda, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno; and Rhoda Kealoha Thalman, a board member of the Japanese American Citizens League. The event takes place from 6 to 8 p.m., Wednesday, March 12, at the Nevada Museum of Art, at 160 W. Liberty St., in Reno. Admission is free, but registration is required. To learn more or register, visit www.nevadahumanities.org.
What’s the buzz?
Scientists surveying Nevada’s bee population are seeking volunteers
If Nevada’s bumble bees went extinct, what would the local ecosystem look like? This is a question the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas is trying to answer, and its organizers are calling for volunteers to help.
The main job of a bumble bee is pollination. That helps local flora reproduce, and the flora provide homes and food for a variety of animals; in turn, larger animals get food to survive, and the effects bloom from there. Currently, there are four species in Nevada that are of conservation concern: the Western bumble bee, Suckley’s cuckoo bumble bee, the American bumble bee, and the Morrison bumble bee. The threats to their populations include climate change, disease, pesticide use and competition from commercial bees.
For the second year, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is running the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas—a
study that collects information about bumble bee habitats in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada—to better understand and protect the region’s bumble bees. This research program is the first of its kind in Nevada, as the state’s size and remoteness have made it difficult for researchers to gather information.
“It takes a lot of work to get coverage,” said Amy Dolan, a conservation biologist who works for Xerces. She noted that studies typically involve small parties (like universities or researchers) going out to one specific region, making it difficult to cover enough territory to fully understand bees.
“That’s partly what the atlas is trying to do—evenly survey this whole area to figure out, well, where are the bee species now, and what habitats are they relying on, and what flowers are they using to help to survive in these conditions?” Dolan said. “It’s just helping us figure out where they are, and what
they’re using, so that we can help land managers make evidence-based decisions on how to manage lands with pollinators in mind.”
The organization is calling on volunteers to help run this study. Volunteers don’t need a background in ecology or entomology, but do need to commit to a training session and two 45-minute surveys of a 50-square-kilometer area. The training, Dolan said, is to ensure volunteers understand the research protocol so that they can collect reliable data.
Local knowledge is one of the most important things volunteers can bring to the study (along with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn). The organizers are not from Nevada, so they aren’t necessarily familiar with our landscape. Locals may know better where to look for flowers.
Dolan said there is still much to learn about bees. That suits her just fine; the mysteries of the bug world made her fall in love with entomology in the first place.
| BY HELENA GUGLIELMINO
Bee count participants practice survey protocols during a July 2024 workshop at the pollinator garden in Rancho San Rafael Regional Park. Photo courtesy of the Xerces Society and Amy Dolan
“It’s this beautiful area of science ... things that every ecosystem relies on and people tend to overlook,” she said.
She spent most of her career as a science teacher in middle and high school. The school at which she taught in Arizona brought in an entomologist to lead a biology elective.
“My students loved that,” she said. “But apparently, I loved it more.”
The experience inspired her to go back to school and get a master’s degree in entomology. For her master’s project, she focused on insects associated with huckleberry plants. Bumble bees are the main pollinators of these plants.
“And then that started my deep dive into falling in love with bumble bees,” Dolan said. “They can be so diverse—like, shiny blue and shiny purple, and just crazy colors and shapes and sizes. They’re awesome.”
Some years after she finished her degree, she found a posting for the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas coordinator job. “Multiple people said it sounded like I wrote that job description for myself, because it’s all these things that I really enjoy doing in the Mountain West—these beautiful landscapes that I love exploring,” she said.
Dolan said volunteers might find anywhere from one to 30 bumble bees while conducting their field work. Volunteers can expect to explore a space the size of two football fields to search for bumblebees for 45 minutes. She said groups can break up the time, so that if three people split the area, they each survey for 15 minutes. Volunteers capture every bumblebee they see during that time in a net, put it into a vile, and then put that vile on ice.
“It sounds weird, but it doesn’t hurt the bumblebees,” she said. The ice “knocks out” the bees, so that at the end of the 45-minute search time, you can take close photos of each. As the bees warm up, they regain mobility and fly away. Volunteers are asked to record the habitat, including the flowers or plants on which they found the bees. Dolan estimates that surveying and record-taking should take about two hours. Volunteers commit to conducting two surveys over the summer.
For more information about volunteering for the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas, contact Amy Dolan at amy.dolan@xerces.org, or visit the Xerces website at www. bumblebeeatlas.org/pages/mountain-states to sign up for the next training webinar, which takes place at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 11.
Planets and Bright Stars in Evening Mid-Twilight
For March, 2025
ASTRONOMY
This sky chart is drawn for latitude 40 degrees north, but may be used in continental U.S. and southern Canada.
March’s evening sky chart.
Illustration/Robert D. Miller
north during any other time in darkness hours during the current 18.6-year cycle of the wobbling of its orbit, or “lunar nodes regression.”
During evening twilight on March 6 and 7, the moon passes within 12° south of overhead from Reno. Early on Friday morning, the moon sets far toward the northwest after 2 a.m. from Reno.
March 7: At dusk, the 65 percent gibbous moon appears about two-thirds of the way from Jupiter toward Mars. Mercury reaches greatest elongation, 18° from the sun, tonight, and is 7° to the lower left of Venus. Mercury still shines brightly at magnitude. -0.5, but will fade more than a magnitude to +0.6 by March 12.
March 8: At dusk, the 75 percent moon appears 2° to the north of Mars and about 5° from the “Twin” stars, Pollux and Castor. Daylight saving time begins on Sunday morning, which makes for later clock times for sunrise and sunset.
March 9: At dusk, the 84 percent moon is about one-third of the way from Mars toward Regulus, heart of Leo, the Lion.
March 10: Venus is 20° to the upper right of the setting sun. Through binoculars and telescopes, it displays a crescent 6 percent illuminated, nearly 56 arcseconds across.
March 11: Regulus is 3° to the lower right of the 95 percent moon early this evening, with two days to go until full.
March skies
The month brings spring, Ramadan, a total lunar eclipse, and much more
March 2025 features Venus transitioning from the evening to the morning sky, with a bit of overlap; the year’s best evening appearance of Mercury; Jupiter and Mars against stellar backgrounds; the moon’s maximum northern and southern excursions, a kind of phenomenon observed at Stonehenge; and a total eclipse of the moon!
Saturday, March 1: Did you spot the first crescent moon in twilight early last evening (Feb. 28), 18° to the lower left of Venus and just 2° to the lower left of Mercury? As the first visible moon of this lunar month, last night’s 2 percent, 26-hour crescent marked the beginning of the month of Ramadan on the Islamic calendar. This evening, spectacular sights await: In the west, brilliant Venus (magnitude -4.8) is 6° to the upper right of a 6 percent crescent moon, and Mercury (magnitude -1.0) is 11° to the moon’s lower
right. While sky is still bright, binoculars will show Venus is itself a crescent, 14 percent full and 50 arcseconds across. High in the southwest as it darkens, find bright Jupiter (magnitude -2.3) with Aldebaran and the Hyades cluster 5°-10° below. High in the east, Mars (magnitude -0.3) forms a nearly isosceles triangle with Pollux and Castor, about 7° from each.
March 4: At nightfall, find the Pleiades star cluster within 7° to the upper left of the 33 percent moon, and 5.7-magnitude Uranus 4.5° to the lower left of the moon and 8° to the lower left of Pleiades.
March 5: Venus is 26° to the upper right of the setting sun tonight, and with optical aid shows a crescent 10 percent full and 52 arcseconds across. At nightfall, find Jupiter 7° from a fat, 44 percent crescent moon nearing first quarter phase, and 5.7° from Aldebaran.
March 6: Tonight, the moon appears farther
March 13: Tonight there will be a total eclipse of the moon. The moon begins to enter the umbra, or circular dark central core of Earth’s shadow, at 10:09 p.m. The umbral shadow will appear very dark at first, but as more of the moon becomes immersed in shadow, colors should become noticeable. By 11:26 p.m., the moon is completely within the umbra, and the total eclipse begins. It is around this time, and again when the moon starts to emerge from the umbra at the end of total eclipse at 12:32 a.m., when the greatest range of colors is likely to be seen. The eclipse is likely to appear darkest at deepest eclipse at 11:59 p.m., when the Earth passes closest to the center of Earth’s shadow. The umbral eclipse ends at 1:48 a.m., as the moon leaves the umbra.
March 14: The moon, just past full, rises within an hour after sunset. Three hours after sunset, look for Spica 18° to the lower left of the moon.
March 15: The moon rises within two hours after sunset. Three hours after sunset, look for Spica about 6° to the lower left of the moon. By an hour before sunrise on Sunday, the moon will appear within 4° to the lower right of Spica.
March 17: An hour before sunrise, the 91 percent moon appears 8° to the left of Spica. At sunset, Venus is nearly 12° to the sun’s upper right and displays a crescent only 2 percent full and nearly one arcminute across, easily resolved in binoculars.
March 20: Spring begins at 2:01 a.m. today
| BY ROBERT VICTOR
in Earth’s northern hemisphere, as the sun shines directly overhead on the Earth’s equator. An hour before sunrise, the 69 percent moon appears 2° to the lower right of Antares, heart of the Scorpion.
March 22: This morning’s southeastern moonrise (2:52 a.m., or 4.1 hours before sunrise in Reno) is the southernmost in the 18.6-year cycle of the varying inclination of the moon’s orbit to Earth’s equatorial plane. The 49 percent moon passes due south only 21° up from Reno at 7:14 a.m., 16 minutes after sunrise.
Venus passes inferior conjunction around 6 p.m., when it’s just 8.4° to the north-northwest of the sun. Block the sun with a building, and if the sky is very clear, you may be able to spot the 1 percent Venus crescent with telescope or binoculars to the upper right of the sun. Venus is now at its closest to Earth; the time required for its reflected light to reach Earth is 2.33 minutes.
March 27: This is your last chance this month to catch the moon in the morning sky. About 35 minutes before sunrise, look between the east and the east-southeast for a 5 percent crescent moon. About 21° to the left and a little north of east, look for Venus. Binoculars and telescopes show it’s still a crescent, now 2 percent full.
March 29: The moon is new this morning at 3:58 a.m. Here’s a chance to catch the young, thinnest crescent moon you’ve ever seen. If you use binoculars or a telescope and have perfect sky conditions and an unobstructed horizon, look about 25 minutes after sunset, about 2° or 3° above the horizon, 9°or 10° north of west, for a hairline-thin crescent. From Reno, it will be 15.8 hours old and 8.5° from the sun. The crescent will be very delicate, with breaks where lunar limb features cast shadows long enough to interrupt the crescent. This marks the end of Ramadan.
March 30: Tonight through April 2, the moon climbs higher in the west nightly, and traverses the zodiacal constellations Aries and Taurus, through which the sun will follow this spring.
March 31: This evening the 11 percent crescent moon is nearly 12° to the lower right of the Pleiades. The sixth-magnitude planet Uranus is about 7° from each, south of a line joining them. In coming evenings, watch the moon pass by two bright planets and five bright zodiacal stars, in order from west to east: Aldebaran, Jupiter, Castor, Pollux, Mars, Regulus and Spica. These events, and other gatherings of the moon, planets and stars, are illustrated on the Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar. For $12 per year, subscribers receive quarterly mailings, each containing three monthly issues; learn more at www.abramsplanetarium.org/skycalendar.
Robert Victor originated the Abrams Planetarium monthly Sky Calendar in October 1968 and still helps produce an occasional issue. He enjoys being outdoors sharing the beauty of the night sky and other wonders of nature.
Stereographic Projection Map by Robert D. Miller
Deneb
Randall Lorenz is an Air Force veteran from Chicago who has lived in Reno since 1993. In 2016, he had a heart attack that led to triple-bypass surgery. The following year, he decided to take a 23andMe DNA test through the Healthy Nevada Project to learn about any other diseases and health risks to which he might be genetically predisposed.
Lorenz’s father died of leukemia in 1970. His mother suffered from multiple sclerosis, and, he said, “all of the family members I grew up with were dead and gone by 1980”—so he was baffled when his results showed no indications of the illnesses that had afflicted his family. The report ran counter to everything Lorenz thought he knew about himself.
This led him to discover, at the age of 66, that the parents he grew up with were not his biological parents. He had been adopted.
“That report was not me,” Lorenz said. “It said I was Croatian, Slovenian and Scottish. But my father was German; he fled from Germany, and my mother was from England, and they met in Chicago.”
The surnames in his DNA report—Cvetan, Taylor, Raitt, Starkweather, Ragan and Ensign—did not match what he believed to be his family’s surnames, either, which were Lorenz, Brown, Mosley and Fellens. The information in Lorenz’s DNA report upended his life, and he fell into a depression.
“I became very suicidal at that point,
because I didn’t understand anything,” he said. “And there was nobody around. I was completely on my own.”
LIBRARIAN TO THE RESCUE
Lorenz was attending Truckee Meadows Community College at the time, which led him to meet exactly the right person—TMCC research librarian Suzanne Malek, who had just begun building the school’s genealogy library, and had started teaching a genealogy class on Fridays that was open to the public. Lorenz joined the class and began working with Malek to uncover clues about his perplexing genealogy.
Malek’s own interest in genealogy began after her mother’s passing. She realized she had no one left to ask about her family’s history, as her father had already died. She joined genealogy groups and spent her days off at various genealogy libraries in Southern California.
started working at TMCC, the library director challenged the staff to come up with ways to increase traffic to the library on Fridays.
After Malek proposed the genealogy library and class, the director supported the idea and provided her with a bit of seed money.
At first, Malek’s class, the TMCC Open Genealogy Lab, drew only five or six attendees, but it grew over time, eventually outgrowing the small classroom in which it was held. The library offered Malek a much larger space upstairs with 50 computer stations to accommodate the increasing demand.
“ Imagine being 28 and getting a call from a 66-year-old stranger saying, ‘I want to know how we’re related; I want to meet you.’ ”
— Randall Lorenz
When Malek moved to Reno eight years ago, she was surprised to find no local genealogy groups or a dedicated library. When she
When the pandemic hit, Malek, of course, had to move the class online. The class has remained on Zoom, because it is accessible to many more participants there.
“Anyone with an internet connection can join,” Malek said. “I’ve had people from Canada, Florida, Wisconsin—all over.”
She began recording her Zoom sessions and posting them on YouTube, where she has 137 weeks of classes available for anyone to watch.
“When Randall came to me seven years ago, he wanted to know why his DNA results
didn’t match his reality,” Malek said. “We soon discovered his parents weren’t his biological parents, which opened the possibility he had been adopted. It became a class project to find his birth parents.”
FINDING HIS FAMILY
In early November 2017, Lorenz got a match on Ancestry.com with a 28-year-old woman named Jerica Starkweather from Boise, Idaho. He found her phone number and gave her a call.
“Imagine being 28 and getting a call from a 66-year-old stranger saying, ‘I want to know how we’re related; I want to meet you,’” Lorenz said. “She wasn’t very receptive. She said, ‘Who the hell are you, and what makes you think we’re related?’” Lorenz explained, “Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t know about you, and three hours ago, I found out we’re related. I’d really like to know how.”
Though skeptical, Jerica called him back after checking Ancestry.com herself. “Who the hell are you?” Lorenz remembered her asking again. “I have a closer relationship with you than most of my own family!”
Later, Lorenz spoke to Jerica’s mother, Valerie Starkweather, who was equally distrustful. When Lorenz discovered a mitochondrial connection with a woman named Margaret Klenk, he asked Valerie, “Who is Margaret?” Lorenz said there was silence before Valerie responded: “That’s my mother’s sister.”
Lorenz told Valerie they could have the same mother. “There’s no way,” she said.
After their call, Valerie ordered seven Ancestry.com DNA tests for her family. The
day after Christmas, Lorenz saw the results: He was closely related to Valerie’s family. The last test showed Valerie shared more than 1,900 centimorgans (a unit for measuring genetic linkage) with him—she was indeed his biological sister.
Lorenz soon traveled to Boise to meet Jerica. “That was the first time I met anyone I was actually related to,” he said. “When my niece walked in, we just looked at each other, embraced, and talked about everything.”
He remembered Jerica telling her mother: “Grandma is here. He talks like her; he walks like her; he breathes like her. Everything he does is identical to Grandma.”
A few months later, Lorenz flew to Tampa, Fla., to meet his sister, Valerie, for the first time. “She was in shock,” he said. “I looked and acted just like her mother.”
Valerie’s mother, Agnes (Cvetan) Hansen, agreed to take a DNA test a few months later, and it confirmed she was Lorenz’s biological mother. Valerie told Lorenz he needed to go meet her. Hansen was 89 years old at the time and was living in a senior home in Sandy, Utah. Almost immediately, Lorenz drove to Utah with his wife, Linda. “My sister, who was very adamant about me meeting my mother, had things arranged,” he said.
Valerie’s son, Arion—who was in the apartment with his grandmother when Lorenz and Linda arrived to help facilitate the meeting— answered the door. When he stepped aside, Lorenz saw his biological mother for the first time. He introduced himself and said, “I sent you a letter a couple months ago. I know we’re related, and I’d like to know more.”
Hansen agreed to talk with Lorenz, Linda
and Arion outside of her apartment in the family meeting area.
“We sat down, and it was very light, nothing serious; I couldn’t get anything out of her,” Lorenz said. To give Lorenz and his mother a moment alone, Linda said she needed a drink of water, and Arion escorted her to the apartment. As soon as they were out of earshot, Hansen admitted that she was Lorenz’s biological mother—he was her first born, and she had been forced to give him up for adoption. She told him his father was a truck driver from Chicago named Russell Emerson Taylor who she’d been dating for a short while before unexpectedly getting pregnant.
Before Arion and Linda came back, Lorenz quickly told his mother, “Agnes, I really appreciate this. I really wanted to know the truth. Thank you. I promise I will never call you again. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just grateful for being able to meet you.”
Tears welled up in Hansen’s eyes and she said, “I had to give you up once. I never want to lose you again,” Lorenz recalled.
After their first meeting, Lorenz talked to his mother on a weekly basis. He got to see her six more times and celebrated her 90th birthday with her before she passed away.
“It was wonderful,” he said. “She died knowing that I love her.”
ILLEGAL ADOPTIONS PROLIFERATED
Because Lorenz’s mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, her seven brothers and sisters forced her to give him up in what he said was “a gray-market adop-
tion”—a private adoption arranged outside of the legal adoption process. From his original birth certificate, Lorenz discovered he was born at SouthTown Hospital in Chicago, which he said was a facility for unwed mothers.
Gray-market adoptions were big business in the early and mid-20th century. Notable cases include Dr. Thomas Hicks in Georgia, who illegally sold more than 200 babies in the 1950s and ’60s. Hicks often sold the babies of unwed, pregnant women to couples who wanted children. A three-part documentary series on Hicks called Taken at Birth is available on Hulu and Apple TV+. Another participant in the illegal adoption industry was Georgia Tann, a social worker who operated Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an orphanage which was a front for her adoption scheme in which she illegally sold more than 5,000 babies between 1920 and 1950. According to Lorenz, Tann successfully got the government
to seal adoptees’ birth records.
“I didn’t have the right to know anything about me thanks to her,” Lorenz said.
“ The further you go back in time, the less open families were about so-called family secrets, whether it’s an adoption or an out-ofwedlock birth . ”
— Suzanne Malek research librarian, Truckee Meadows CommunityCollege
Tann died of cancer while she was being investigated and was never brought to justice. Only 15 states currently allow adult adoptees the unrestricted right to access their original, pre-adoption birth records. Nevada is not among them. In November 2020, Lorenz was finally able to access his original birth certificate after filing a petition with the state of Illinois to open his sealed adoption file. The father’s name on his birth certificate was listed as “Burton Cvetan,” which Lorenz said was the name of his mother’s brother, who had died shortly after she became pregnant.
“She didn’t want to give out the father’s name, so that was the name she gave, and nobody questioned it,” he said.
ADVOCATING FOR ADOPTEES
Since finding out the truth, Lorenz has made advocating for his fellow adoptees one of his life goals. He is adamant that adoptees should know as early as possible that they are adopted.
“They need to know who their biological family is,” he said. “They need to know everything.”
Through support groups such as Fireside Adoptees, Lorenz has met many other adoptees. “They’re in such pain,” he said. “And their stories are almost identical to mine.”
Adoptees can carry trauma and stress stemming from their adoptions throughout their lives. Lorenz himself currently suffers from insomnia that he believes is induced by his post-traumatic stress as an adoptee.
Malek attested to Lorenz’s advocacy for adoptees. “He’s become an incredible advocate for adopted children’s rights—whether they be children or whether they be adults,” she said. “… He’s now a counselor for several different local and international online adoption groups.”
Lorenz is working to get legislation passed in Nevada that would give adoptees access to their records. “I’ve already gone down to talk to our Legislature (previously). I’m getting
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Above: As Lorenz researched his family history, he compiled six neatly organized binders to pass along to his daughter and her children. "If I haven't captured it somewhere, all of this is gone forever," he said.
Opposite top: Randall Lorenz first met his biological mother, Agnes Hansen, when she was in her late 80s. Before Agnes died, Randall celebrated her 90th birthday with her at an Italian restaurant in Salt Lake City, along with his biological niece, Jerica Starkweather. Photos/David Robert
RENO’S GRANDEST ENTERTAINMENT LINEUP
The Tenors Mar 1
Dream Theater Mar 2
Whitney Cummings Mar 7
Palomazo Norteño Mar 8
Killswitch Engage Mar 14
E-40 with Snow Tha Product Mar 15
Justin Moore Mar 20
Tesla Mar 22
Killer Queen Mar 23
Cypress Hill with Reno Phil Apr 4
Bullet For My Valentine & Trivium Apr 5
Hollywood Undead & Tech N9ne Apr 6
Meshuggah Apr 10
Kraftwerk Apr 11
Steel Panther Apr 12
Jordan Davis Apr 13
Naruto: The Symphonic Experience Apr 16
Yachtley Crew Apr 18
Tony Hinchcliffe Apr 19
Kraftwerk Apr 21
RAIN: A Tribute to the Beatles Apr 24
Morrissey Apr 26
Sevendust Apr 27
Nikki Glaser May 2
Brett Young May 3
Yelawolf May 9
Billy Currington May 16
Lord Huron May 22
Eden Muñoz May 30
Drive-By Truckers & Deer Tick Jun 8
St. Paul & The Broken Bones Jun 19
Felipe Esparza June 13
Adam Ray July 12
Brit Floyd ft Alan Parsons July 15 & 16
Alison Krauss & Union Station
July 18
David Foster with Chris Botti July 22
Maoli July 22
Dropkick Murphys & Bad Religion
July 26
Bailey Zimmerman Sept 12
Ninja Kidz Oct 26
Wanna be newsy?
also veterans, including two who fought in the American Revolution. In 2024, he was issued a Sons of the American Revolution certificate.
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things together, and I will be going down and meeting with the legislators again this session,” he said.
NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S GENEALOGY
Malek’s weekly TMCC Open Genealogy Lab class on Zoom has blossomed into a supportive, thriving community of genealogists. Malek would like more locals to use the library’s wealth of genealogy resources.
“We have so many services here for it,” she said. “I offer free one-onone consultations online, run my Friday class, and provide access to an entire genealogy collection upstairs. We also have public databases and an email list anyone can join. I send out invitations for my class every week.”
“ If
you
Photo/David Robert
themselves while researching their family histories.
“I’ve had people who found out that their grandparents were not their grandparents, and there are a lot of adoptions,” she said. “The further you go back in time, the less open families were about so-called family secrets, whether it’s an adoption or an out-of-wedlock birth.”
Genealogy is like a game of “Telephone,” Malek said, citing research showing that by the third generation, family stories become so distorted that they no longer resemble reality.
don’t
record your family history, those stories will be gone in three generations . ” — Suzanne Malek research librarian, Truckee Meadows CommunityCollege
Genealogy is easier than ever, thanks to technological advances. DNA testing through companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com have made it much easier for people to identify relatives and find potential genetic matches in large DNA databases.
“It’s not your grandma’s genealogy anymore,” Malek said. “In the past, your great aunt or grandma had to write letters to archives on the East Coast and wait for responses. Now, with AI, DNA testing and online databases, finding family history records is much simpler. It just takes dedication.”
Malek said it’s common for people in her class to learn something unexpected about
“If you don’t record your family history, those stories will be gone in three generations,” she said.
She urges everyone to research and preserve their family histories. “Everyone has a living library within themselves—a lifetime of memories. Whether you’re 19 or 90, those memories are lost when that person dies. I encourage people to either write a book, create an e-book or upload their research to an online database.”
Malek advises starting your family history work as soon as possible. “Many say they’ll do it when they retire. No, do it now. Even 10 minutes a day is enough to begin.”
To Lorenz, Malek’s work has been a lifeline.
“Suzanne saved my life,” he said, “I was suicidal, and she didn’t know. I was one of the first people to join her class, and I’ve been there every week since. I promote it all the time, because it’s such an incredible resource—and it’s all free.”
For more information about the TMCC Open Genealogy Lab, visit: libguides.tmcc.edu/c.php?g=606579.
Lorenz, an Air Force veteran who worked as a helicopter mechanic for much of his career, learned in recent years that several members of his biological family were
Remember when...
to
Inez
A visual homage to David Lynch
Artist Angie Terrell brings ‘Twin Peaks’ to Pitch Black Printing Co.
Reno artist Angie Terrell’s latest project takes a deep dive into the strange, surreal world of Twin Peaks—paying homage to both the show and its creator, director David Lynch, who died in January.
The exhibition, Twin Peaks: Season One, showcases Terrell’s acrylic paintings and tattoo flash sheets, along with portraits inspired by the characters from Lynch’s iconic TV series about the mysterious murder of teenager Laura Palmer and the FBI agent sent to investigate the strange town—and townsfolk—surrounding the crime. Terrell discussed her artistic journey, her connection to the Reno art scene, her apprentice-
ship at Seven Swans Tattoo, and how the work of David Lynch has influenced her creative process.
How did you first get into art, and how has your career evolved since then?
I’ve always been interested in art. I think I really wanted to become an artist because there was a girl in my class in second-grade who was really good at drawing, and I was so jealous, because I couldn’t even draw a stick figure. So I started working really hard to try to draw as well as she did, and I just never stopped.
I took a lot of art classes all through school, and then I got a bachelor’s in painting from UNR.
I’ve just been doing art stuff ever since—whatever I can get my hands on. I also enjoy printmaking, and I run a small letterpress out of my garage. I’m even apprenticing to be a tattoo artist, because I wanted to know how to do all of it.
Where did your love for Twin Peaks come from specifically?
I have always loved David Lynch. He’s such a weird enigma, and I didn’t start watching Twin Peaks until my mid 20s. I was dating someone who lent me a VHS set before it was even available to stream.
At first, I thought, “This is some stupid show
| BY MATT BIEKER
Murdered teenager Laura Palmer is among the Twin Peaks characters that Angie Terrell pays homage to in her current show.
from the ’90s,” but once I started watching, I thought, “This is so weird, and I love it!” I’ve been captivated by it ever since. I probably watched that show once a year, at least.
Why was making an homage to Twin Peaks so central to your new show?
I’m a big fan of Twin Peaks, and I’ve done a lot of fan art. As an art teacher, I often do portraiture alongside my students to show them techniques. I always pick characters from Twin Peaks, and my students find it funny, because they think I’m obsessed with it—which, I guess I am. They don’t know what (the show) is, so they get really curious.
The first time I did a portrait of someone recognizable—I can’t even remember who it was—there was some sort of thing going on where they didn’t like him. … There’s some sort of drama around this guy who I was painting, and I was just like, “Oh my god, this is too much.” So, the next time, I was like, “All right, I’m going to paint agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks, and he’s played by Kyle MacLachlan.” And then they were like, “What’s Twin Peaks?’” And I’m like, “Oh, it’s a really weird show from the ’90s, and I cannot tell you to watch it, because you’re too young, but it’s a good show.” So, this way, I was just painting an anonymous person to them, but it was fun for me.
How did you build the current art show? Was it just the portraits you had previously, or did the concept evolve over time? I had three Twin Peaks portraits I’d already done, and then when I was approached to do this show, I thought, “OK, I can make more.” I was also working on some flash sheets for my tattoo apprenticeship, and they fit into the show, too. It was killing two birds with one stone. I was doing my apprenticeship homework, but also making art.
What’s your process for creating these portraits? How long does it take to complete one? For this show, I start by finding a good reference photo and then use Photoshop to map out the shadows and highlights. I transfer that map onto wood or canvas, then block in the shadows and skin tones. The process can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the complexity. One triptych I did, with Laura Palmer and her family, took about two to three months. My process, in a broader sense, is sketching a lot while listening to an audiobook, podcast, music or TV show I’ve watched a million times. Then, when a sketch sparks something in me, I research good reference photos and make that sketch into something more workable.
How did you react to the news of David Lynch’s death?
I was really sad. I haven’t felt this sad about a celebrity passing since Hunter S. Thompson or Robin Williams. Lynch was a huge influence on me, both artistically and philosophically.
I think sometimes when you look at people’s art, and you really like it, it’s because their lives or their philosophies kind of line up with your own, and also add clarity to what you’re thinking. David Lynch said so many things that when I hear them, I’m like, “Oh my God. That’s the thing I was thinking that I couldn’t put into words.”
After he died, his daughter shared one of her favorite quotes from him: “Focus on the donut, not the hole,” and it’s a thing I’ve kind of been saying ever since. It’s such a silly saying, but when you think about it, it’s like, yeah, focus on the big picture and not what’s missing. It’s such a weirdly deep but funny sentiment. And I think that’s where he really is amazing; he would say these things that were super deep and meaningful—(yet) they would be so silly.
With the addition of the new show, your teaching career, and now your tattoo apprenticeship, do you feel like you’re where you want to be in your artistic career right now?
About a year ago, I felt like I was in a bit of a rut. Some personal stuff was going on, and I couldn’t come up with any ideas that felt like “me.” You know, I just sort of lost the plot a little bit. … (One) way that David Lynch kind of inspires me is I like to make art that’s kind of dark and moody and spooky maybe, but also kind of funny. And I was just like, man, I lost
whatever it was that was driving that.
And then my friend who owns the tattoo (shop) that I’m apprenticing at posted something, and I was like, “Hey, do you need a shop girl?” And she was like, “Do you want to learn how to tattoo?” And I was like, “Yes, I totally do.”
I wanted to so bad when I was younger, but I had a child pretty young and had to kind of put that on the back burner. I figured it was never happening, and I just wanted to learn something. I hadn’t learned any new art forms or any skills, and I hadn’t been hanging out with artists a lot, so I was like, this will definitely help me kickstart whatever that is, I’m sure. And it has. I feel really inspired, and it’s been great.
Do you have any long-term goals for your artistic career you’re currently working toward? I’m kind of just going wherever it takes me, honestly. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I hope that I can do some cool tattoos and stuff, and I’ve made some really great friends and, like, I don’t know—it’s beautiful. I’m happy where I am now, and I want to keep going with it.
I think David Lynch would be proud of that. His whole ethos was about making art for art’s sake. Yeah, and if people don’t like it, screw them.
Twin Peaks: Season One is on display at Pitch Black Printing Co., 700 E. Fourth St., through Wednesday, March 19. You can find more of Angie Terrell’s work at instagram.com/Fish_ Flower_Press.
Angie Terrell's exhibition Twin Peaks: Season One includes portraits of some of the unusual characters from the cult television show.
Learning to love
Arian Katsimbras distills a harrowing childhood into tender poetry
Poet and writer Arian Katsimbras grew up in the mobile homes of Washoe Valley from the ages of 5 to 15.
“(It was) a very distinct kind of poverty (in the ’90s) that is not necessarily present there anymore,” Katsimbras said. “If you go out there now, all the mobile homes I grew up in are gone. The land has been bought up and parceled out to big investors.”
Katsimbras’ debut poetry collection, The Wonder Years, published in 2023, details his harrowing, lonely, beautiful childhood in Washoe Valley.
“It was a wild, wild place at that time,” he said. “It was free, boundless and endlessly dangerous. … I do see it as beautiful, and I love it for what it’s worth, but it was a lawless place. I imagine all of us kids riding around on our Big Wheels like fucking cowboys on horses.”
The unbridled freedom was a lot of fun for Katsimbras as a kid, but the prevailing sensation of his childhood was a deep and profound loneliness.
“I wasn’t really alone, but I felt a deep absence,” he said. “I know now what that absence was, which is love—the parental love and affection that I craved.”
One Christmas Eve when Katsimbras was
in fifth-grade, his life became a nightmare. That night, his mother left, and his stepfather tried to kill himself, leaving Katsimbras to basically raise his 6-month-old brother.
“I grew up fighting a lot; we all did,” Katsimbras said. “Violence became its own form of rhetoric. That’s how you dealt with everything; it’s how you brokered deals, solved disagreements—that’s how you dealt with conflict.”
His family was friends with a Hells Angels family who lived in an old, dilapidated Queen Anne Victorian-style house.
“It happened a couple of times—on a Sunday, we went over there, and the parents got hammered and did speed and barbecued, and they sent us kids out into the dirt lot, and they bet on us to box,” he said. “We had to beat the shit out of each other. It hurt me deeply. And you could see it—I don’t know if the parents could see it—but you could see that neither of us boys wanted to hurt each other. You want to love each other as kids, but we had to fight like men in sixth-grade. We had to make each other bleed.”
In an act of tenderness to counter that forced violence, he would always bring the other boys wildflowers the next day, he said.
Katsimbras was always deeply sensitive—“a sucker for art,” he said, but because of the expectations of rigid masculinity, he grew up with
Arian Katsimbras said one of the goals of his collection of poems, The Wonder Years, was to turn the violence he experienced during childhood into something beautiful.
Photo/David Robert
images in my head of me walking down these unpaved dirt roads in the middle of winter by myself. It was lonely, but it was a good teacher. The valley was a good teacher.”
Washoe Valley, and the landscape of the West in general, are embodied as a character in the book with agency and desires. Life in the Nevada high desert is precarious—the threat of wildfires, droughts and flash floods are ever-present for the people, plants and animals who lurch through the hardscrabble business of survival. Katsimbras captures the quiet magnificence concealed in the stark, muted landscape: “The Black Crowned Night Heron / too, lulled to sleep by a quarter moon, thirsting / Outside the windows, a coyote chews a ghost- / bleached bone in a desert that reaches into nothing.”
Like a flower sprouting out of an endless sea of cruel concrete, Katsimbras’ poems reveal that there is still love, tenderness and wonder to be found even in the most nightmarish of circumstances.
what he called “the devastation of not being able to enact, articulate or embody what felt true to me, which turned me into something deeply hard. Being a man—a boy—in that community, the last thing that you could do is show anything that was remotely effeminate.
“I’ve always been eminently aware of the way that I embody masculinity or embody the male form,” Katsimbras said. “It often surprises people that I love flowers more than anything in the world. People are like, ‘How are you shaped the way that you are, sound the way that you do, present the way that you present, but you’re also delicate in these ways?’”
The Wonder Years is an irreverent title, because on the surface, there’s nothing wonderous. Point blank: This book is brutal. Essentially, it is about two things: “Turning all the otherwise mundane violence into something beautiful, and confronting the masculinity I found so repugnant in my childhood,” Katsimbras said. His poems show that there are other ways to be a man; you can be tender and delicate and loving.
Katsimbras said the loneliness of his childhood created in him a sense of restlessness and a curiosity.
“I always walked around in a sense of wonder,” he said. That sense of wonder seems to be the basis of his artistic sensibilities. “I hold these
The essence of The Wonder Years, which is a deep desire for love to emerge in that harsh place, is encapsulated in the final poem, “Boyhood With Low Hum From the Burn Field.” Away from the violent patriarchal plight of poverty of the mobile homes, “further out still in a mid-day insomniac sagebrush field,” two boys share a tender moment “where / skin learns how it’s skin,” and “two boys hold a rabbit skull and each other’s / sunlicked ribs, miniatures of their fathers / in cupped hands; both resemble trembling.”
In the poem, Katsimbras steps directly into his boyhood and presents a moment of “proximal hope amidst the calamity and skittery fears that marked the lives of boys raised by men who were raised by hammers.” This moment of tenderness and innocence shared between these boys ends the book with a glint of love in the sea of brutality: “I learned to love amongst bones and wreckage. / I arranged my bones around love and wreckage. / I became wreckage, wreckage, wreckage, on and on.” The love born from the wreckage is a kind of rebirth which gestures to the vistas beyond the valley, to the love and protection to be found, just beyond.
Katsimbras is currently working on his second collection of poetry. “I have a tentative title. … You want to hear it?” he asked with a mischievous smile. “It’s called Bummerville.”
Learn more at www.instagram.com/ arian_katsimbras.
FILM & TV
Funny horror
After starting strong, ‘The Monkey’ falters—but it’s still worth a watch; ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ is a sluggish slog
The Monkey, the latest in a string of strong recent horror offerings, starts off so well that it would be fair to think director/screenplay writer Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) might have a true classic in the making.
Unfortunately, the great start is followed by a second half of diminishing returns—but The Monkey is still worth watching.
When The Monkey works, it really works. The film is based on a short story written by the one and only Stephen King, and Perkins captures that weird, otherworldly vibe of King’s best works. The film is odd, surreal and really funny when it’s clicking.
It’s also really gross, and the gore effects are a mixed bag. While some of the onscreen mayhem looks credible, the film suffers from some of the worst CGI since that awful prequel to The Thing
Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery in their younger versions) are living with their mom after their dad (Adam Scott in a funny cameo) disappears. Their mom (the very funny Tatiana Maslany) deals with the horrors of raising young boys on her own, often shouting out directions from
the kitchen while trying to make them increasingly complicated snacks.
They find an old trinket from their dad, a world-traveling pilot: a drumming monkey toy that looks evil from the start. When the key is turned, the monkey drums—and people in the vicinity die horrible, messy and somewhat comical deaths.
As grown-ups, Hal and Bill (both played by Theo James) are haunted by their monkey-toy killing pasts. No matter what they do, and no matter what kind of destruction they try to bring upon the monkey, the thing reforms and finds them. When the brothers start weaponizing the monkey to target people, including each other, things understandably get out of hand.
The film’s start is gangbusters, with hilarious dialogue and creative character endings. There’s a funeral scene in this movie that made me laugh so loud that people turned to look at me. (I kind of hate when that happens, but it happens.) The tone of the first half is so solid, and so funny, that it proves impossible to maintain.
The second half heads in a silly, somewhat tedious direction that plays upon father-son relationships. Hal has a young son, Petey (Colin O’Brien); Hal is divorced and fighting with Petey’s stepfather (a funny Elijah Wood) for custody. Apart from the hilarious moments with Wood, this subplot drags the film down a bit.
It all leads up to an apocalyptic ending that reminds a bit of films like King’s The Mist, and
A scene from The Monkey.
Perkins doesn’t quite nail the landing. There’s one particular joke in the closing minutes that should’ve been hilarious, but it winds up landing with a loud thud because of its rushed timing.
The performances are admirable throughout, with Convery especially good playing twins. I had no idea Convery was playing both brothers until well into the movie, when I discovered James was also playing both brothers. James does fine as the older brothers, but it’s Convery who is the most convincing as two separate characters. That earns Mr. Convery a gold star.
I still think Perkins is on his way to becoming one of our best horror directors. The Monkey is uneven, but it has some powerfully good momentum at times, and shows what Perkins is capable of—while also showing some of his procedural flaws. I got the sense that perhaps the movie needed a little more time to gestate. Perkins is turning out films at a rapid pace; He might want to think about slowing down.
In fact, a rare end-credits preview shows Perkins has another horror film coming soon: Keeper is already in post-production and due for release later this year.
The Marvel folks were looking to right their ship with Captain America: Brave New World They were so determined that they signed on Mr. Franchise, Harrison Ford, to play a key role. Hey, if he can take seemingly every other movie franchise to the next level with his presence, he can do the same for Marvel, right?
BY BOB GRIMM
Nope. This will not be the movie that gets things rolling again. It’s a flatliner of a movie—dull, unattractive and sluggish. Alas, the presence of Ford did as much for this movie as it did for The Expendables 3 and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
In Avengers: Endgame, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) did some time-traveling and wound up an old dude who handed his shield off to Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie). That was followed by a Disney+ TV show (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and now Mackie is officially taking over the mantle of Captain America on the big screen.
Mackie deserves so much more than this.
Director Julius Onah and his writers came up with the idea of basically making this a sequel to The Incredible Hulk, the 2008 movie that starred Edward Norton in the starring role and the late William Hurt as Gen. Thaddeus Ross, aka Thunderbolt. The Incredible Hulk was an OK movie, but that was 17 years ago, and a lot has happened since then in the land of Marvel. It seems like a strange place to start.
Stepping in for Hurt to play Ross is Ford; he’s now the president of the United States, redeemed and elected to the top post in the land after some egregious, seemingly unforgivable and treasonous missteps. (Sound familiar?) He survives an assassination attempt (Sound familiar?) and eventually winds up becoming a big, raging, RED Republican version of the Hulk.
Don’t get too excited about the Hulk part. While it is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film, it’s tacked on at the end, feels rushed, and is the very definition of anticlimactic. Ford
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Anthony Mackie in Captain America: Brave New World.
doesn’t really like to play bad guys, and this one is rumored to have had reshoots. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those involved making him less evil. The ending feels way out of place and cloying.
The political intrigue in this film is hampered in that, well, it lacks intrigue. The movie seems scared of itself, and so, in the end, it really doesn’t say anything. It almost sets up something dark and interesting, but then hides under a rock and looks for a feel-good ending with blue skies and cherry blossoms.
While the Hulk effects are OK, much of this film looks like total shit, with shitty, shitty CGI. Also—and I guess this makes me old school—but I prefer Captain America grounded and running around with occasional long jumps rather than having a uniform equipped to fly. Captain America is just a blue-suited version of Falcon in this incarnation. The flying and action sequences are poorly rendered and badly edited. It’s a mess.
Man, it’s a bummer to see Tim Blake Nelson, a terrific character actor, buried in goofy makeup and delivering hammy bad-guy dialogue. He reprises the role of Samuel Sterns from, yes, The Incredible Hulk, and his brain has swelled up like the Martians in Mars Attacks! If you care at all about what’s happening in this movie before you see it (and you probably will, despite my warnings), watch The Incredible Hulk first.
Ford is OK here, doing his normal grumbly guy routine. Mackie does his best to bring a leaden script to life. The failures of this movie do not reside in the performances.
I suppose this is all building up to something. The film speaks of reforming the Avengers, and Avengers movies are indeed slated for the future, so the Marvel beat will go on—but, damn, it needs to have a better beat than this dreck.
If the Scream franchise hadn’t been revived a few years ago, perhaps Heart Eyes would land better. As it stands, this slasher feels like flat-out plagiarism.
This is yet another Scooby-Doolike murder mystery where Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox would feel right at home. And the killer itself, a hodgepodge of Friday the 13th’s Jason and the creepy clown from the Terrifier series, is a mere copycat.
However, the film is nearly saved by the central performances from Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding as two wisecracking, competing members of an ad agency who find themselves mistaken as a couple by the Heart Eyes killer. They spend much of the film running away from the serial killer, who has chosen the city of Seattle as the latest target. Both, especially Holt, make the proceedings fun enough that I almost could have gotten away with a mild recommendation. Almost.
I can tell you that Heart Eyes fell flat in my half-filled theater. Reactions to the onscreen carnage were timid, at best. I was among those yawning.
Director Josh Ruben attempts something a little tonally different by heavily leaning into the comic ridiculousness of the plot at times. But the film also falls into common scare tropes and sometimes feels like a subpar slasher taking itself too seriously, with no new ideas to offer. While I enjoyed some of the comedy elements, the film still felt very uneven and in search of a true genre identity.
I would pay to see Holt and Gooding (who has, in fact, co-starred in the last two Scream movies and is in the upcoming one) pair up in another movie—as long as it’s not another Heart Eyes adventure.
This is just a below-average Friday the 13th reboot masquerading as something new.
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Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding in Heart Eyes.
THE DISH
Lily Doolin
Proprietor of Faded Apron catering
| BY DAVID RODRIGUEZ
Lily Doolin graduated from the culinary program at Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island in 2018. She then worked in a fine-dining restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, and as a sports nutritionist for University of Alabama athletics. In 2021, she established Faded Apron, a private-chef and catering service based in Minden that mostly serves clients in South Lake Tahoe. Her goal is to create “meaningful food”—rustic cuisine made using as much local produce and meat as possible. Doolin’s cooking is sometimes inspired by life in the Sierra. For example, she loves to ski, so her menus might include apres-ski classics like fondue or charcuterie. You can learn more at www. fadedapron.co.
What’s the best thing you’ve eaten locally in the last month?
The Royce burger with fries at The Royce in Reno. It simply is the best burger in town.
Your kitchen is on fire.
(Metaphorically!) What are you cooking?
Salad! It gets such a bad rap, but I find that the creativity is endless. I make it a full meal with lots of textures and flavors.
Who is/was your strongest culinary influence?
Growing up, it was Giada De Laurentiis. I loved her warm personality, style and simple yet flavorful Italian dishes. Now it is Erin French of The Lost Kitchen. She makes rustic, seasonal and beautiful food.
What is your go-to midnight snack?
A bowl of cereal with cold milk, probably Chex or corn flakes.
Which local restaurant deserves more attention, and why?
Tangerine Bistro in Truckee and Smoke Door in Kings Beach. I love that they are bringing cultural cuisine to Lake Tahoe, and they both have delicious food and a cozy, inviting atmosphere.
How does food contribute to our community?
Food has the ability to bring people together. When you share a meal with someone, you foster a connection. This “breaking of bread” allows for a deeper understanding of people, and one of my favorite parts about being a private chef is watching people’s walls come down after cooking them a meal.
What is the most unusual thing in your refrigerator right now?
Duck fat. It makes the best crispy potatoes!
Please share your favorite food memory from growing up.
It’s from our family cottage in Ontario, Canada. We always had an open door, and friends would stroll up on their bikes and join in for dinner. Whether it was freshly caught perch or buttered sweet summer corn, there was always something seasonal and delicious on the table.
What is the one kitchen tool you can’t live without?
A Microplane. I love it for fresh zest, grating garlic, or a light dusting of cheese.
If you could have dinner at any restaurant in the world tonight, where would it be and why there?
I’ve always wanted to try Rolo’s in New York City. I love a neighborhood restaurant with a woodfire grill, and Rolo’s seems like amazing food!
Department of
and the
March 7-16
Redfield Proscenium Theatre
Church Fine Arts
University of Nevada, Reno
TASTE OF THE TOWN TASTE OF THE TOWN Happenings
Team Whiskey, a local brand known for combining apparel, whiskey tasting and sports, is hosting its second Team Whiskey Bonanza at the Reno-Sparks Livestock Events Center, at 1350 N. Wells Ave., from noon to 9 p.m., Saturday, April 5. The event will feature whiskey tastings, outdoor sports activities, 50-plus vendors, line-dancing instruction, a DJ and live music by North 40 Band. Founded in 2019 by Kevin and Justin Stang, the company launched the Team Whiskey Cancer Foundation in 2022 to financially assist families who have a loved one receiving cancer treatment. Tickets start at $45 without whiskey, and $65 with whiskey. For tickets and information, visit teamwhiskeybonanza.com.
Openings
Smith and River, at 50 N. Sierra St., in Reno, closed on Feb. 15; owners Colin and Mary Beth Smith said they would focus on their Roundabout Group businesses. In its place will be Toro Bravo, a new effort from Sergio Romero of La Condesa Eatery, and Rene Preciado from Mexcal Reno. Watch for it to open sometime in March.
Fast-casual franchise Dave’s Hot Chicken opened at The Outlets at Legends, at 1565 E. Lincoln Way, in Sparks, on Feb. 7. Known for its spicy chicken, the restaurant chain expanded rapidly across the country since its founding in 2017, with the Sparks spot being its first foray into Northern Nevada. Patrons are required to sign a waiver if they go for the spiciest pepper option—reaper. Learn more at daveshotchicken.com.
Also new to The Outlets as of Feb. 7 is 7-Spices Indian restaurant and tap house. Featuring curries, biryani dosas and tandoori-style entrees, 7-Spices’ menu showcases a variety of traditional South Asian dishes. The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday-Sunday and is located at 1180 Scheels Drive, Suite B-115. See the full menu at www.7spicesindiancuisine.com.
LIQUID CONVERSATIONS
Keeping the drinks flowing
Local beverage purveyors are battling inflation and other business challenges
Since the beginning of the year, we have lost some beloved Reno beverage destinations to closures—Imbib Custom Brews, The Loving Cup and Cafe Capello, just to name a few.
| BY MICHAEL MOBERLY
Food prices have risen over the last year, and coffee prices are at an all-time high. “We always had slow and busy times, but now it feels like the frequency between those times has increased,” said Graeson Leach, owner of Midnight Coffee Roasting. Photo/David Robert
much more than just the cost of goods and staffing that play a role in pricing,” Sornson said. “Insurance is incredibly expensive; rent, utilities and everything else continue to increase.”
Graeson Leach owns Midnight Coffee Roasting, with locations in downtown Reno and Midtown. Leach spends about 90 hours a week working, either behind the counter or roasting coffee. His Midtown location features food, beer and coffee drinks.
“In the last year, we’ve seen more consistent volatility in sales,” Leach said. “We always had slow and busy times, but now it feels like the frequency between those times has increased—especially downtown.”
In the three years that his downtown branch has been open, 15 businesses have closed around it. “Losing that community and those people hurts everyone,” Leach said.
Leach continued: “I wish more people understood just how low-margin coffee is, but more than that, just how low the average ticket price can be.” In December, coffee futures prices rose to more than $3.30 per pound, breaking a 47-year-old record, and in January the price rose further, to $3.77.
Lake Tahoe AleWorX, specializing in woodfired pizza, salads and craft beer, opened its third location on Jan. 30 at 324 E. Fourth St., in the former Record Street Brewing Space; AleWorX is also running the space’s live entertainment venue, The Alpine Reno. Founder Luca Genasci stated in a press release that the new location is about “community and creating a space for people to gather, celebrate and connect.” AleWorX offers weekend brunch options ranging from continued on next page
For many reasons, the beverage industry is dealing with more turbulence than it has in decades, outside of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. It’s not just Reno enduring this rocky terrain. In 2023, IWSR, a global beverage research company, recorded a 2% decline in the volume of spirits sold. This was the first decline in nearly 30 years. Most of the bars and restaurants affected by the decline in alcohol sales are small, locally owned businesses: Nine in 10 restaurants have fewer than 50 employees, and seven in 10 restaurants are single-unit operations, according to National Restaurant Association data.
With drinks trending downward, and multiple local businesses closing in the first part of 2025, I chatted about Reno’s current landscape with a couple of folks who serve us every day.
Derek Sornson is the co-owner of Dubs Sports Lounge in downtown Reno, open since April 2024, serving classic sports-bar fare and showcasing the best sports entertainment. He was also one of the founders
of Vistro, the delivery/takeout-only restaurant that shuttered last year.
“In the past year, overall, the business has been more challenging,” Sornson told me. “The price of everything has gone up.”
At a sports bar, patrons generally expect happy-hour deals and reasonably priced beers—but rising food prices affect not only the groceries you buy, but also the cost of goods for bars and restaurants. In January, food prices increased 0.4% over the previous month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That same report also shows that food prices are 2.5% higher than 12 months ago—and up 31 percent since 2019. Meanwhile, Gallup polls from 1992-2024 show that in the U.S., where beer traditionally has been the most preferred alcoholic beverage, only 34% of people now prefer beer. This is an all-time low—down from a high of 47% in the early 1990s. According to the National Restaurant Association, at full-service restaurants, alcohol accounts for about 21% of total sales.
Sornson and the team at Dubs do their best to keep their costs at or below industry standards, but he said he still loses money because of the costs he cannot control. The price of chicken wings is not the only volatile price that affects the bottom line of a bar or restaurant.
“I wish people understood that there is so
As for ticket prices: It takes about 25 sales of Midnight Coffee Roasting’s best-selling drink, the “shaken brown sugar,” to equal the same revenue as five 12-ounce bags of roasted coffee. “So you may look at a coffee shop full of people and a line to the door,” Leach said, “but the item mix and average ticket of those customers are important to understand.”
How do you stay positive when the price for everything you sell increases, and businesses close around you? “A small business, coffee or otherwise, is nothing without the community around it,” Leach said. “Because of our events, wholesale relationships and general customer service, we have a community that I’m willing to sacrifice for every single day, and I’m so proud of that and thankful for them.”
Said Sornson: “As long as I can truly say to myself that I am doing everything in my power to run a successful restaurant and bar, then I can be happy with myself and keep a positive mindset.”
That is the heart of small businesses: People doing everything they can to create a product of which they are proud. Right now, the deck is stacked against small business owners more than it has been in a long time, and at the heart of most of these endeavors are people working their hardest to bring something to our community—and for that, I am grateful.
French connections
Belleville offers a well-selected wine list, small plates and specialty groceries
Belleville is a French word that translates to “beautiful town.” This is what Nico Gourdon named his wine bar as a tribute to Reno, a city he views as his “belleville” because of the people, the mountains and the lifestyle of the West.
“I wanted to create a European lifestyle experience,” Gourdon said.
When he moved to Reno six years ago, he fell in love with the town but noticed a lack of quality lifestyle dining options. “Where do people go to eat—you know, outside of the casinos and Taco Bell and places like that?” he asked. He said he did not mean to insult Reno or its people—but he did want to share a new level of sophistication with his new town.
Gourdon, originally from Provence, France, has worked all over the world, always perfecting his food, beverage and hospitality skills. He worked at the prestigious Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland and a Michelin-star restaurant in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, Gourdon and friend/collaborator Benoit Rablat—the celebrated restauranteur and a fellow Frenchman—dreamed of a place like Belleville.
“Benoit and I were roommates in L.A.,” Gourdon said. “He now owns a couple of restaurants in Miami with his wife, Sandy. Benoit helped with the menu, which is based mostly on home cooking, and Sandy helped design the space.”
The décor touches include rich colors, textures and bluebirds. “These are the blue mountain birds found in Lake Tahoe, and in the spring, they come and visit on the patio; it is a very Miami thing,” said Gourdon.
Belleville’s bird prints are custom art pieces in which the birds have zebra patterns on their legs, leopard patterns on their beaks, and a sagebrush flower crown—a nod to the state flower of Nevada.
“(Reno) is so masculine, and we know it’s a cowboy town,” Gourdon said, explaining the decorating scheme. “I want Belleville to be somewhere where people, specifically women, can come by themselves and feel safe.” He said that about 80% of his customers are women.
Gourdon described the food and beverage choices this way: “The wine is not overpowering. The wine is not over-rich. The same thing with our food; it’s not over-rich. It’s not over-sweet. It’s well-balanced. The food is mostly based on home cooking, which makes us completely
| BY STEVE NOEL
Nico Gourdon—originally from Provence, France—has worked in hospitality all over the world. He brings a tightly curated menu to his downtown-Reno-adjacent wine bar, Belleville.
Photo/David Robert
unique from anywhere you go in Reno.”
Many of the items are based on family recipes, and all of them have been designed to provide an experience similar to that of a wine bar in Paris, Milan London, or somewhere close to Gourdon’s heart—Provence. Items range from homemade black-olive tapenade to Alaskan king crab legs. Want a cheese plate or charcuterie board? Got it. Desserts? Belleville has you covered, from chocolate truffles to French apple tarts. The dishes are small plates—large enough to share, yet small enough not to overfill you. They are designed so you will slow down, breathe and enjoy life.
As Gourdon said, “You don’t come here to drink alcohol; you don’t come here to feed yourself; you come here to have an experience. Enjoy your wine, and I will do the work for you to have this experience. … You don’t have to pay more for the experience. You don’t have to know wine for the experience. You don’t have to feel uneducated about hospitality or anything like that. (We’re) just going to create that for you.”
A word of warning: If you don’t like new taste experiences, Belleville may not be the best place for you. Expect pairing suggestions, wines swapped out for something you might like better, and wines that you will not find anywhere else in town.
Belleville avoids house wines and doesn’t downgrade the wine quality for happy hour. “It’s actually a real happy hour in the sense of you get a real discount from the wine list,” Gourdon said. The current tasting menu lists 24 wines by the glass and 48 by the bottle, from eight different countries and 19 distinct wine regions. They include an alcohol-free Müller-Thurgau from Germany.
Belleville also offers a selection of French food items for purchase to go that include jams, mustards, chocolates and foie gras. Gourdon said it’s the only place in Reno where you can get butter from Brittany.
He plans to open a shop next to Beloved’s Bakery in the Reno Public Market, hopefully by summer. “It’s going to be a wine store and sell French produce like we have here, but multiply that number by 10,” he said. He also plans to sell grab-and-go cheese and charcuterie, and host a wine club and tasting events. I highly recommend you visit Belleville. Bring your curiosity—and be ready for a true taste experience.
Belleville Wine Bar is located at 400 W. Fifth St., Suite 101, in Reno. Learn more at www. instagram.com/bellevillewinebar.
TASTE OF THE TOWN TASTE OF THE TOWN
continued from Page 22 egg-based dishes to sweet breakfast favorites and hearty sandwiches. Learn more at laketahoealeworx.com/reno.
Bone Appetit Bar-b-Que Grill is now open at 675 N. McCarran Blvd., in Sparks. Launched by owner Kim Daniels as a food truck in Las Vegas eight years ago, Bone Appetit arrived in Reno in 2021 as a food truck, and then moved into Reno Public Market in 2023. After a successful run, Bone Appetit moved to become a standalone restaurant with an emphasis on catering. Check out boneappetitcatering. com for hours and contact information. Boar’s Nest Saloon is the newest bar to occupy the space at 601 W. Second St. in Reno. Open every day from noon until midnight, this retro dive bar boasts a pool table, and poker and keno machines. An old-fashioned jukebox befits the vintage atmosphere. Bar-goers can stop by for happy hour Monday-Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. and can enjoy the $6 beer and shot combo. Learn more at www. boarsnestsaloon.com.
Virginia City has welcomed two new restaurants since the start of the year. Lost Seoul Saloon and Hi Me Cafe are the new residents of 5 N. C St. Lost Seoul brings Korean-American fusion cuisine to the historic town for the first time. The menu features chicken and beef bowls, burgers, wings and fried rice dishes. At the same address is Hi Me Cafe, a boba and ramen shop that also functions as an event space. For more information, visit www.lostseoulsaloon.com and www. instagram.com/himecafe_.
Closings
Bibo Coffee Company has closed its location at 75 Foothill Road, in South Reno; the other two locations remain open. Wienerschnitzel and Chavelita’s Cocina Mexicana, both on Mill Street, closed at the end of January due to the Regional Transportation Commission’s street-widening project.
Sabrina’s West Street Kitchen closed on Feb. 8; the owner announced on social media that after eight years, it was “time for me to pass the torch, and for me to embrace a new chapter in life.”
Grafted Whiskey & Wine Bar on Rancharrah Parkway has closed. However, owners Jade and Chad Bogan are still running their nonprofit, Grafted Kitchen, to provide culinary training to at-risk teens and young adults. Learn more at graftedkitchen.com.
Have local food, drink or restaurant news? Email foodnews@renonr.com.
—Alex Cubbon
MUSICBEAT
Tune from trees
‘The Sacrifice of Prometheus,’ commissioned by the Reno Phil, was inspired by Great Basin National Park—and partially composed by bristlecone pines
Nevada’s co-state tree, the bristlecone pine, inspired—and even helped compose—a piece of classical music.
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus,” a classical-music epic by 2023 Great Basin National Park artist-in-residence Marko Bajzer, will make its world debut at the Reno Philharmonic’s performances on Saturday and Sunday, March 22 and 23. The piece is a musical exploration of Great Basin National Park’s species and sights, which inspired melodies, tempos and key changes. A large portion of the piece is dedicated to the bristlecone pine—and some of the bristlecones even created melodies.
During a recent phone interview with Bajzer, he talked about how he fell in love with national parks.
“I grew up in Minnesota, and my parents were from Croatia, so we only did the whole ‘road trip to the national park’ type of thing once in my childhood, because we spent a lot of time, energy and money going back to Croatia to visit family,” Bajzer said. “I was always really involved in music, went to music school, and ended up in San Francisco. In 2017, I was bequeathed my mom’s old car—which is this 2006 Toyota Matrix that I still have—but in order to get it, I had to do this convoluted
exchange where I flew to Omaha, Neb.; picked up my brother-in-law’s parents’ old car; drove that to Washington, D.C.; swapped that out for my mom’s old car; and drove that all the way back to San Francisco. I was like, ‘Let’s make a trip out of it.’
“I stopped at several national parks, and just the sense of space, and nature, and being alone in the outdoors was really eye-opening, and just set my life on a very different course. It made me think of and realize three things that most people don’t often experience much of these days: silence, darkness and solitude. When you’re on your own for two weeks driving across the country, you get a lot of that. … It really was impactful. As soon as I got back to California, I was looking up to see what national parks were nearby, and I have been obsessed with national parks ever since.”
Some parks feature artists-in-residence programs, typically a two-to-four-week experience during which a creative is able to explore a park, and artistically express the ways in which nature inspires them. Artists and national parks have a long and fascinating history.
“In those first surveying expeditions in the West, in northwest Wyoming, the Hayden Expedition in 1871, in addition to all the cooks and hunters and biologists and geologists, they also had a painter and a photographer,” Bajzer
said. “Congress bought one of these paintings for $10,000 in 1871, of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which was in the halls of Congress until the ’50s, and now it’s in a museum somewhere. It was really these paintings and these photographs that inspired the congressmen to establish the world’s first national park.”
Bajzer said he’s always felt moved by musical pieces inspired by the beauty of the outdoors.
“Listening to pieces of music that were written about specific geographic terrains have been some of the most cathartic and emotional and fulfilling experiences of my life,” he said. “Listening to a piece that is literally written about a sunrise, while watching a sunrise, is a really different experience than listening to it just in a concert hall, or at home.”
Bajzer set out to craft a nature-inspired musical opus—a “large symphonic suite where each movement, or each little piece, is inspired by a different national park,” he said. “An orchestra could play one of them, or put two or three together, or play the whole thing, which I’m hoping will be eight to 10 in total. It would be a celebration of, not only nature in America, but also American values. … The idea of the national park was a product of Americans’ experiences, so it really is a celebration of all of those things.”
|
BY MATT KING
Marko Bajzer used electrodes to craft melodies from bristlecone pine trees’ currents.
Bajzer has been an artist-in-residence at Lassen Volcanic, Great Basin, Joshua Tree, and Voyageurs national parks. He explained that the process, although rewarding, is time-consuming.
“From my initial conceptions to the piece— applying for the residency, to getting the residency, to doing the residency, to making contact with an orchestra, to convincing them to plan it on their program, and then for them to actually perform it and get a recording—that all is a four-year process,” he said. “That process … is in different stages for each of these parks. It’s certainly an exercise in delayed gratification, and I’m very excited to be getting to hear what this piece sounds like.”
The piece is named after Prometheus, a nearly 5,000-year-old bristlecone pine that was cut down in 1964.
“The state of Nevada is a blip in its existence,” Bajzer said. “Unfortunately, it was inadvertently cut down in the 1960s, and that is what greatly accelerated efforts to turn the Snake Range into a national park. When I’m thinking about which parks I want to use for this project, I’m thinking about which parks I can tell a story with, especially using sounds from the park.”
Great Basin’s endless night skies are another inspiration for the piece.
“It has some of the darkest night skies in the country, because it is in the middle of nowhere,” Bajzer said. “It has the National Park Service’s only research-grade telescope, which is this really cool little building, and it is really neat. They have a big astronomy festival every September, and astronomy talks several nights a week.”
Bajzer walked me through the narrative of the musical movement.
“Visitors are camping and awakened in the middle of the night, and pop out of their tent to see this amazing night sky, with all these stars in the Milky Way, and meteors and satellites and the kind of wonders of the night sky,” he said. “Then there’s this internal voice in the wind that whispers, beckoning them into the forest. They’re exploring the forest until they get into this grove of ancient bristlecone pines—and if you’ve ever been to a bristlecone grove, they’re these otherworldly places. … Our unnamed protagonist eventually comes across the stump of Prometheus, which is still there. … Once our protagonist gets to this spot, there’s this overwhelming emotion, and then the voice says to them, ‘What have you done to me?’ This voice in the wind was the ghost of Prometheus, so it’s a reflection on conservation.”
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus” explores the ways in which losing one of the oldest known organisms impacted the environment.
“We did learn a lot about the world’s climate
through studying Prometheus,” Bajzer said. “… This national park is a product of the sacrifice of Prometheus, which will enable all of the other bristlecone pines to hopefully live even longer than that, assuming climate change doesn’t kill everybody and everything before then. It asks a lot of tough questions, because there are some good things that came from that—but is solving a crisis that we ourselves created something to celebrate? Do we need to destroy part of an environment in order to save it? There are these tough questions that we’re going to keep bumping into as we continue living on this Earth.”
Baizer selected the bass oboe for the voice of Prometheus’ ghost.
“It’s not a very common instrument,” said Bajzer. “… As far as I can tell, this will be the first piece to be performed in the United States that is for solo bass oboe and full orchestra. It has this bizarre and esoteric and inscrutable tone quality that was just perfect for being the ghost of a 5,000-year-old tree.”
Bristlecone pine trees deserve some composition credit, as Bajzer used electrodes to craft melodies from the trees’ currents.
“You can hook up electrodes to plants, and as the plant is photosynthesizing and growing and moving water and nutrients around, the degree to which it’s a conductor of electricity is changing,” he said. “… You can take those changes and then map that onto a wave and turn that into a sound wave, so that’s what I’ve done with some of the bristlecone pines in Great Basin National Park. It gives me pitches and rhythms, which then I turn into sounds. A lot of the musical motifs in the piece arrived from these recordings. I have several hours of bristlecone pine recordings … and I picked out a dozen or so little excerpts from that, and those are what made it into the piece. That technique of using plants to get music from them, in combination with a full orchestra, is the first time that has been done, as far as I know.”
Bajzer said he hopes “The Sacrifice of Prometheus” will help create connections.
“For people in rural Nevada to hear music about and to see this large work of art about their backyard and their home is really special,” Bajzer said. “A big part of the point of this is to connect orchestras and parks and communities in a way that is a win-win-win for everybody involved.”
“The Sacrifice of Prometheus” will be performed, with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, op. 73 “Emperor,” and Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, March 22; and 4 p.m., Sunday, March 23, at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, 100 S. Virginia St., in Reno. Tickets start at $43.50, with discounts. For tickets or more information, visit renophil.com.
MUSICBEAT
Changing Tahoe’s tune
Conductor James Rawie launches the new Tahoe Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus
When conductor James Rawie entered adulthood in the mid-1960s, he, like many people in the arts, believed he’d embark on a career unrelated to the arts. Despite having played trumpet since age 10, singing in professional choruses and growing up with a piano-prodigy mother, he entered college at the University of California, Irvine, as a psychobiology major, with plans to go to medical school.
Back then, if you’d have told him he would end up starting the Tahoe Philharmonic in 2024, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
But then he had an epiphany. He re-enrolled at UC Irvine, started all over and completed an undergraduate degree in music, and later earned a master’s in orchestral conducting at SUNY Stony Brook in New York. He led orchestras in Puerto Rico for 30 years—while also enjoying a multitude of athletic pursuits, from scuba diving to bicycle racing and triathlons—before he and his wife, Nancy, settled in Lake Tahoe, a different sort of outdoor playground, to begin a new chapter in their lives.
Here, Rawie began a 19-year stint leading a classical music organization called the Tahoe Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, aka TOCCATA. Last year, Rawie moved on, and the couple established the Tahoe Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, a nonprofit that brings classical music, primarily sacred works featuring choral performances, to the Lake Tahoe, Carson City, Carson Valley and Reno areas.
In Rawie’s 20th year as a Tahoe-based artistic director and conductor, Tahoe Philharmonic launched its first season, with
eight scheduled productions, in January. Shows are planned for spring, summer, fall and the holiday season that showcase symphonic choral works of a sacred nature, in cathedrals and churches—intimate settings where, Rawie said, they were meant to be heard due to their natural acoustic benefits.
“All the major composers, Bach and Beethoven and Mozart … they wrote their music to be played in churches,” said Valerie Forte, a member of the Tahoe Philharmonic board. “It was the churches that paid the musicians, so being back in churches, where you get the best sound, makes perfect sense.”
Rawie said he is following in the footsteps of his mentor, renowned conductor Robert Shaw, leader of the Robert Shaw Chorale, as well as famed German conductor Helmuth Rilling, in incorporating a chorus into symphonic performances. “My mission, my gift, is to be a symphonic choral director,” Rawie said. “Of the eight shows we’ll do throughout the year, six of
| BY JESSICA SANTINA
James Rawie is the conductor of the Tahoe Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus.
them will involve a chorus. That is unusual, and it gives us kind of a niche that others don’t fit.”
Rawie is proud that the Tahoe Philharmonic will aim to go where the people are, doing multiple performances of each production, in varying locations, to increase accessibility. For example, its April performance of St. Matthew’s Passion and The Messiah—An Easter Celebration will take place at churches in Carson City, South Lake Tahoe, Reno and Incline Village.
“We take our productions to churches that are big enough to fit 60 to 90 performers …. to keep classical music alive in places where it otherwise may not be found,” he said. “Most people from these areas will not drive out of town to see a concert, but if there’s classical music in your town, many people will come to it if you make it affordable.” Rawie said base ticket prices start at $30.
“Our mission is to keep classical music alive, and the only way to do that is to take it to the people,” he said.
Additionally, the Tahoe Phil will perform occasionally in homes, which are the settings for fundraising events, such as a February show at Zephyr Cove which featured stunning Tahoe views as well as food and drink. And in spring 2026, the group—including musicians, singers and loyal fans—will travel to Croatia for performances in centuries-old cathedrals around the country.
“It’s music that just touches your soul,” Forte said.
The Tahoe Philharmonic is scheduled to perform on Saturday, April 12, at the Shepherd of the Sierra Lutheran Church in Carson City; Sunday, April 13, at Our Lady of Tahoe Catholic Church in South Lake Tahoe; Tuesday, April 15, Saint Thomas Aquinas Cathedral in Reno; and Wednesday, April 16, at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Incline Village. To learn more, visit www.tahoe-philharmonic.com.
| BY MATT JONES JONESIN'
CROSSWORD
It’s 2025—3x15, squared. By Matt Jones
Short but not sweet
Heavenly ring
Nice name?
Miami University location
Dry as a bone
Totally mad
Country that’s officially the “Most Serene Republic”
Former small iPods
MM
Stadium cheer 23. The whole thing
THE LUCKY 13
Dylon Hinchey
Guitarist/singer of Deficit Space, performing at the Holland Project on Sunday, March 16
Find the answers in the “About” section at RenoNR.com!
Deficit Space pushes indie/alternative rock to a dreamy and ethereal edge. Guitarist/singer Dylon Hinchey’s monotone vocals reverberate throughout the band’s music. Twinkly, delay-heavy guitar lines craft a soundscape that is otherworldly, while driving bass and drums bring the sound back down to Earth, into the indie/ alt realm. For more information, check out www.instagram.com/deficitspace. The band is set to perform at the Holland Project on Sunday, March 16, opening up for NVM and Slow Joy. For more information, visit hollandreno.org. (Photo by David Robert)
What was the first concert you attended?
A band called Dreamers in Sacramento. I was a bit older than most attending a first show would probably be, but ever since then, I’ve been hooked!
What was the first album you owned?
The first CD I remember getting was One-X by Three Days Grace when I was maybe 8 or 9 as a birthday present. I heard them on the radio and wouldn’t stop talking about how cool I thought their music was, so my aunt got my brother and me that CD!
What bands are you listening to right now? All kinds! I love a lot of the music coming out of Reno at the moment (shout-out Frank Futility, Worm Shot, Bug Bath, all of the bands). Aside from that, I’ve been
| BY MATT KING
listening to Big Thief, Rainbow City Park, Softcult, some Bob Dylan, and I’m always listening to Alkaline Trio!
What artist, genre or musical trend does everyone love, but you don’t get? I’m going to get some heat for this, especially being involved in the Reno scene, but I am not a big hardcore guy. I’m also petrified of mosh pits. I respect everyone who loves to mosh and listen to hardcore, but it’s a little intense for me!
What musical act, current or defunct, would you most like to see perform live? Black Sabbath or just seeing Ozzy would be incredible!
What’s your favorite musical guilty pleasure? I’m a sucker for early 2000s pop punk.
What’s your favorite music venue?
Holland Project here in Reno! Of all the different venues I’ve gone to, nothing really beats that very tight-knit and personal vibe that you can get with bands that come to Holland, and it’s such a good communal space.
What’s the one song lyric you can’t get out of your head? “Rearview mirror, reckless mind.” from the Tigers Jaw song “Bullet.”
What band or artist changed your life? How? Last Dinosaurs really is the band that made me want to make music. They were introduced to me back in high school by my friend, and now my drummer, Sam. I’ve gone to see them live twice and even have a tattoo of one of their song’s logos. Listening to them just flipped a switch in my brain that made me really want to make music and be in a band.
You have one question to ask one musician. What’s the question, and who are you asking? I would ask Tom DeLonge about his alien and UFO knowledge.
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Something off of Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park probably, maybe “In the End.” Another one of my earliest musical memories is my dad playing that CD in his car, so it seems fitting to end on that.
Figurative gun to your head, what is your favorite album of all time? Peripheral Vision by Turnover!
What song should everyone listen to right now? “Chalk” by Rainbow City Park.
15 MINUTES
Steve Funk
General manager at Carson City’s KNVC 95.1 FM
Steve Funk, the general manager at KNVC 95.1 FM, Carson City Community Media, has been around Northern Nevada for a long time. He moved here in the late ’60s and graduated from Carson High School in the same year that Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973. He went on tour with a professional band that summer, and then returned home to study broadcast journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. He worked at several local radio stations including KUNR, the University of Nevada, Reno’s NPR affiliate; and KTHX, “The X,” Reno’s late, lamented and legendary alternative-rock station. Funk retired and began volunteering for the independent, all-volunteer, nonprofit community radio station KNVC FM 95.1 in Carson City, where he is now the general manager. He still plays music with his friends in the blues band the Wabuska Yachting Club— “to keep my sanity in these crazy times,” he said. KNVC operates from the historic Adams House in Carson City, which is owned by Carson Tahoe Hospital. The house is for sale, and KNVC has launched a capital campaign to raise funds to purchase it. To donate or to learn more, visit knvc.org. (Photo by Pete Rezac)
What is KNVC’s history?
The radio station has been broadcasting 24 hours a day since March of 2017 from our studios in the historic Adams House, located at 990 N. Minnesota St., in Carson City. It’s a 103-year-old craftsman style structure built in 1922 by local family man Dewitt Adams from a Sears and Roebuck catalog kit.
What is the station’s focus?
Well, since our first broadcast in 2017, we’ve built a volunteer community of more than 50 creators who contribute locally oriented news, perspective and music-discovery programming in diverse styles and genres. We air family-friendly programs about science, philosophy, arts, popular culture, food and music, as well Indigenous news and culture, and programming for other marginalized populations. KNVC is also the (Federal Communications Commission)-designated public safety emergency alert system broadcast center for the Carson/ Minden/Gardnerville region, and we sit in the communications chair on the local emergency planning committee with all regional first responders.
| BY DAVID ROBERT
Tell me about the most interesting or surprising thing that’s happened at the station under your watch.
The most surprising thing is the way this community embraces this eclectic little radio station. The world of community radio is a stunning reminder of what radio was originally designed to do, and that is connect with people on a really personal level, sharing culture, and celebrating the good works of local nonprofits, the business community and local government. I get beautiful letters and emails, and when I am out and about, I hear personal stories from listeners. The support we receive is a gift that I can’t even put words to. It’s just off the charts.
Tell me about the capital campaign and fundraising efforts to buy the Adams House.
We learned late last year that our tenancy in the Adams House is at risk, as our landlord, the Carson-Tahoe Hospital Foundation—whom we thank for allowing us the space to incubate this community resource—must sell the historic house and property. Home means Nevada, right? Well, this is our home, so we’ve decided to take on this challenge and, with the love and support of the citizenry, to purchase the building if we can raise the funds. We are busy at it, but only have until the end of June to get it done! We’re gaining financial support from many quarters— like personal connections with community-minded givers and groups, on-air appeals and a “Buy the House” GoFundMe campaign. $450,000 is a huge lift for a small nonprofit in a small town, but this region is full of folks with big hearts and big aspirations for a better-connected, stronger and more resilient community for their families and generations to come. We’re building this thing for the future, and we have big dreams, and are willing to do the work. I hope everyone can see the future and wants to be a part of it.
THE COUNTDOWN TO THE EGGSTRAVAGANZA HAS BEGUN
Tickets go on sale Friday, March 21 | Event on April 19–20
Spring is just around the corner, and with it comes one of our favorite annual traditions — the Easter Eggstravaganza! Bring the whole family for the ultimate, fun-filled Easter adventure, including:
Tickets sell fast — hop to your calendar and mark it for March 21! Scan or visit CarsonRailroadMuseum.org to buy tickets.
