Week of Nov. 30, 2022

From the editor’s desk

Putting the Donner Party into a Christmas story may seem like setting a Walton’s Holiday Special in a Siberian gulag. (John Boy meets Stalin in a Santa suit?) But wait! Our tale gives readers a peek inside the entrapped pioneers’ snowbound shelters on a Sierra mountaintop on Dec. 25, 1846, and conjures the voices of those doomed pioneers. That day, spring seemed an impossible dream, but a ray of hope shined through the darkness inside one family’s shanty. In my Editor’s Note, I explain my long attachment to those unfortunate emigrants.

Coping with the Yuletide season also is the theme of Reno Little Theater’s holiday production, How to Survive Your Family at Christmas, a new comedy that explores the angst of going home for the holidays—where, despite everything, your family loves you anyway.

The usual flood of visitors is expected in the Biggest Little City this holiday season, but over time, downtown Reno has devolved from being a core of community activity to a place that many locals avoid. The results of a “placemaking” survey focus on why that is—and the reasons are no surprise to longtime residents.

After the nation’s (and Nevada’s) clown car full of election deniers crashed and burned in the midterms, nearly all of those candidates and their backers abandoned their unfounded allegations of voter fraud—with one notable local exception.

Music maven Matt King profiles Grahame Lesh, son of the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, who has made a name for himself with his band Midnight North. The San Francisco-based group, performing soon at the Cypress, has been crafting a folk-rock sound that expands at times into funk jams, country tales and blues rock.

In his Publisher’s Note, Jimmy Boegle takes a look back at the RN&R’s rebirth after the ravages of the pandemic and plots a course for the future of the newspaper, in print and online.

Kris Vagner’s Art of the State column focuses on new tenants at the Reno Public Market who offer original artworks amid the retailers and eateries in what formerly was Shoppers Square.

In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg tells the story of how he became a filmmaker and the family dramas that helped fuel familial themes in his movies. Reviewer Bob Grimm says the autobiographical flick is Spielberg’s “second masterpiece in a row after last year’s West Side Story.” Grimm also gives a high rating to Bones and All, a coming-of-age horror story which involves—wait for it—a love story and an underground society of cannibals.

All the planets will line up in the December skies to bid farewell to 2022 as a crescent moon presides over the Christmas holiday, stargazer Robert Victor reports.

Thieves on Nov. 1 made off with fiberglass statues of a mother sheep and her lamb from the Basque heritage area at Rancho San Rafael Park in Reno, where the pair have delighted children for 15 years. Secret Witness is offering a $750 reward; ewe may keep your eyes peeled for the lost lambs.

These stories and many more are featured in our December print issue, now on the stands at markets, shops and other venues across Northern Nevada.

I’ll see you in the funny papers.

Take care,

—Frank X. Mullen, Editor