Week of Aug. 2, 2023

From the editor’s desk

For 30 years, federal agencies and many museums ignored a federal law requiring that Native American human remains and artifacts looted from graves be returned to tribes. In Nevada, the bones of ancestors are being repatriated, and the federal government is about to announce law changes intended to expedite the process of bringing those ancient relatives home.

Reporter Zoe Dixon spent an evening at Sparks’ El Rancho Drive-in and discovered that although the technology has changed, the experience of watching movies in cars and under the stars is much the same as it ever was.

Maude Ballinger’s Taste of the Town points the way to this month’s rib and brew fests, and dishes out the latest news on restaurant openings and closings in Northern Nevada. In other cuisine-related news, the Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance is teaming up with Food Truck Fridays to provide free bike valet and free bike maintenance services at the event held each week at Idlewild Park.

In a dramatic twist, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival is taking a break from the Bard with a production of the Little Shop of Horrors, Jessica Santina reports. Thou must feed me, Seymour!

Stewart Joiner Davis, 11, of Reno, who first sang on stage as a toddler, has since performed in 15 musical theater productions in Northern Nevada and California. The Swope Middle School student recently sang his way to victory in the Oscar Hammerstein Museum and Theatre Education Center’s 2023 International Solo Contest.

Arts maven Kris Vagner profiles Asa Kennedy, who teaches teens the craft of designing murals. It’s not an academic exercise; the students in his recent Nevada Museum of Art class made their ideas come to life on a wall of Midtown Antiques on Virginia Street.

Bob Grimm was looking for a cinematic thrill ride in Haunted Mansion to match the theme-park attraction of the same name, but was disappointed. The flick, he writes, is uneven, with some great parts and some stinkers, but it has plenty of “Easter eggs” for hard-core Disney fans. Grimm had a better time watching Talk to Me, a movie about demonic possession that he says is a “creepy, sometimes funny and sometimes downright horrifying take on the possession horror genre.”

For a DJ like Sol Rising, it’s all about transcendent, spiritual and uplifting music that is light and groovy, writes Matt King in our latest Lucky 13. The DJ is scheduled to perform Aug. 13 at the Tahoe Yoga Festival at Heavenly Mountain Resort.

In his publisher’s column, Jimmy Boegle reflects on the RN&R’s first 15 months back in print, our work so far, and a potential plan to make the newspaper a nonprofit entity so that our community coverage will be sustainable in the years ahead. If you’re an RN&R super-fan, we need you! My latest Editor’s Note, meanwhile, takes aim at the folks who regularly show up at local public meetings spewing fear and hate, dressed up as concerns about “morality.”

August offers a cornucopia of astronomical treats, reports Robert Victor, including two “super” moons and the Perseid Meteor shower, which reaches its peak in the predawn darkness hours of Aug. 13.

I’ll see you in the funny papers.

Take care,

—Frank X. Mullen, Editor