Week of Aug. 16, 2023

From the editor’s desk

Students who don’t have the means to buy new school clothing and other things needed for classes can feel out of place. Reno’s Project 150 boutique offers help to nearly 3,500 homeless, displaced and disadvantaged students in more than 30 high schools in Northern Nevada, Jason Sarna reports.

Starting a business is a journey that can be long, harsh, monotonous and lonely, notes Matt Westfield in On Nevada Business. For help, Westfield points local entrepreneurs to BizAssembly.org, a 12-year-old “founders helping founders” organization that provides advice about weathering the challenges of making startups sustainable.

The Reno Chalk Art and Music Festival is returning to the west parking lot of the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa Aug. 25-27. The event, Matt King reports, showcases hundreds of fascinating displays of sidewalk chalk art, with competitions, music, vendors and a kids’ zone.

Theater scribe Jessica Santina checks out the Sierra School of Performing Arts’ production of The Addams Family musical, and finds a show packed with local talent—even if the script is a bit over-long—at beautiful Bartley Ranch.

The dog days of summer are still sizzling, so outdoors writer Maggie Nichols suggests an escape to a cool mountain lake that’s not Tahoe. Stampede Reservoir, she writes, is a hidden gem of fun, shade and solitude just up the mountain from the Truckee Meadows.

In our latest Streetalk, inquiring photographer David Robert asks folks about the best and worst smells encountered in Reno-Sparks. Cannabis buds, babies, Reno’s alleys, the Truckee River and the airport were mentioned—not all favorably.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a vampire flick based on a small passage in Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel, is one of the better takes on vampire lore in modern cinema, according to Bob Grimm. The movie, he notes, is “foreboding; it’s creepy; it’s gross; and, most importantly, it is often quite scary.” Our movie reviewer wasn’t impressed with Heart of Stone, in which Gal Gadot plays a secret agent trying to save the planet. The movie, he writes, is “muddled, boring and completely undeserving” of the talented Wonder Woman star.

For a lot of you, this is your first RN&R newsletter, after voting in our Best of Northern Nevada poll. The results will be announced at 8 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 1. In the meantime, welcome!

I’ll see you in the funny papers.

Take care,

—Frank X. Mullen, Editor