Hunter Rand, Getting Back into Comedy and Dealing with his Mom

Hunter Rand, the cofounder of the local Eddy Westin and Company multimedia boutique, picked up the microphone recently for the first time in years at a community event, at the Holland Project put on by Hawah Ahmad, a local Washoe County Commission District 3 candidate. 

Rand did comedy throughout his previous collegiate career, doing a lot of standup with the UNR-based Wolf Pack Comedy Club. As he put it, he had the opportunity to go further with a full-time career having worked with BET and MTV as well as opening for other comedians. However, he said he chose college over comedy due to the societal pressure. 

Rand said he doesn’t regret the decision and still has love for the art form. He said that he rags on his mom quite a bit. 

He recited an instance where she came to one of his sets without him knowing she was there; he essentially roasted her the entire time, only to have her throw a shoe at him. He said they didn’t talk for a year afterwards. 

Rand includes a lot in his sets, one being his heritage.

“There’s a lot of stigma attached to stereotypes and I was afraid of that stigma, and now I openly embrace it. I’m proud to be Dutch-Indonesian, I’m Indish … I’m proud of my heritage,” Rand said. 

As for what pays the bills, Rand initially worked for a while as an intern at the Nevada Women’s Basketball team managing their social media, before becoming their director of social media. He then turned to teaching video production to high school students for two years. 

Discovering teaching was not for him, he then cofounded Eddy Westin and Company doing everything from design to website building. 

Why the Ahmad event to relaunch his career?

With the local campaign season in full swing, and an array of candidates to choose from, Rand said: “Don't vote for people simply because of your party, you should vote for people because you actually believe in them, and all of these local candidates put their phone numbers on their website. You should call them and figure out who’s going to advocate for you.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Matthew Berrey

Mo Oetjen, a Reno Renaissance Woman, from Throwing TDs to Giving Back and Making Music

Coming into unknown territory is always risky and terrifying. Change is inevitable in our lives, but it is always so scary. Making the leap into a foreign concept is tough for any individual to tackle, quite literally in this sense.

Mo Oetjen, 38, plays quarterback for the Nevada Storm, which is Nevada’s only women’s tackle football team. Nevada Storm moved up from D3 to D2 over the course of the past couple of years and are the reigning champions of D2 of the Women’s Football Alliance.

“I didn’t know it was a thing until somebody told me,” Oetjen said. “I was at a restaurant and someone came up and said ‘you should try out for the women’s tackle football team’ and I was like, what?”

Oetjen grew up here in Reno and graduated from Reno High School. She went to go play softball at Feather River college before going to play in Michigan for Concordia University for her last two years in college where she also got her bachelor’s in psychology. 

She has worked at a Coral elementary school as a student mentor since February and before that, she worked for a foster care agency and a day treatment center for at-risk teens for 15 years called Koinonia. 

She lived with a single mother growing up while her mom also raised her sister and brother. Dad was still in the picture, but she only got to see him every other weekend. They had moved around a lot in the Reno area growing up. Oetjen didn’t get to see a lot of her mother growing up as she worked multiple jobs to keep her and her siblings afloat. 

However, Oetjen has no plans of leaving the 775 anytime soon. She has even started her own clothing company called “Ease the Soul”.

“I like Reno and my family’s here so that’s probably a big motivator for me to stay,” Oetjen said.

Oetjen had never played football before as the only sports she has known how to play were softball and basketball. 

“I just threw the ball around with the boys,” Oetjen said.

As of now, the league doesn’t have enough funding and the women have to pay to play. It’s been slowly growing over the years with fan outreach. She tried out when she was 33 and made the team and has since found a love/hate relationship where she sees the brighter pastures of playing such a difficult sport. 

“Football is amazing, sports can teach you so much about life,” Oetjen said. “It helps you become a better person. There are so many rules that move over to your actual life. Playing football, the difficulty of football really helps grow a human being. I’ve never played in a sport that’s so difficult, maybe because I didn’t get to start when I was a little kid. Softball I started when I was 5 and I played it until I was 22 at the serious level, so like I could play that with my eyes closed. Then coming out to football, I’ve never played it, I didn’t know all the rules. I mean I watch it, but I don’t know the game and it’s a lot more work and intense than I would’ve thought.”

In her first year with Nevada Storm, she was very confused by the culture shock. She used to be scared to go to practice because she felt like she didn’t know a lot of the hardships that come with football. She started off as a wide receiver and cornerback before she moved into the quarterback position which brought on a whole new set of challenges with learning the playbook, reading the defenses, moving up in the pocket, recognizing blitzes, etc. 

“It’s pushed me through a lot, but there’s a lot of times you don’t want to keep playing because you’re like this is so much, but I also think that’s the positive because it pushes you past your limits, it pushes your body, it helps me want to stay in shape because I’m not younger. It’s kept me in amazing shape the last 3 or 4 years,” Oetjen said.

At the time of writing this, Nevada Storm is 2-0 and hopes to win another championship this year.

“We have a really good team of women, we are like a family,” Oetjen said. “It’s given me that and people being so supportive in our community, the support from our community has been huge. A lot of people that find out we have a football team get really supportive about it. I want the little girls to know that they can play those sports, for me it’s just fun. But I want to open it up so that they can make money hopefully one day like NFL players do. So it’s about me finding ways to open it up for the next generation.”

As if football isn’t enough to satisfy her, Oetjen is also a rapper. She wrote poetry a lot as a kid. In 9th grade, she and one of her friends started rapping back and forth with one another and decided that they wanted to record it. They recorded all their raps onto cassette tapes. Once she went off to college to play softball, music took to the sidelines, but once she was over that she decided to get back into it. 

“I would say my favorite part of it is writing, and performing,” Oetjen said.

She has performed a bunch of shows, and she recently opened up at the Knitting Factory for E-40. She also opened up for other hip-hop legends such as Kurupt and Dogg Pound. She’s done a bunch of shows around the west coast in places such as Las Vegas and Oregon.

Oetjen hasn’t released any official music in seven years due to the fact that her football schedule consumes her entire life. She has still been recording and making music herself and with other artists. She has enough material to where she wants to put out an album soon. Music has been on and off, but when the pandemic hit she got really back into it. She has been attending a few open mics at Virginia Street Brewhouse. 

“2Pac is my favorite rapper, he’s just inspirational for anyone,” Oetjen said. “He can speak to anyone and his music has lived on for years and I think he’ll continue. He was such a strong speaker and just wanted things to change. People like that are just inspirations to me, just anyone that can go through really hard situations and come out on top and still live in the positive. It’s so easy to get knocked down and become a part of the negative.”

While Tupac Shakur might be her biggest musical influence, her mom is the one who lights the fire in her to take life by the horns and accomplish the amazing heights she has reached.

“My biggest inspiration is my mom, she’s been through a ton and has always stayed strong and pushed through,” Oetjen said. “She’s always been super empathetic towards people even though she’s been through a crazy amount of trauma and difficulties in life and just never losing that care or love for humanity.”

When Oetjen was six years old she faced an untimely tragedy when her grandfather was murdered. 

“That was probably one of the hardest things to deal with and as a kid, you don’t really understand what’s going on and you have all these fears and anxieties that you can’t rationalize with,” Oetjen said. “It affected my entire family and my mom started an outreach program for victims of violent crimes. I did a lot of speaking as a kid on that. I think it was amazing I’m so glad that I did those things, and I don’t think I realized how big of an impact it did have on me. But I think it made me stronger and I was able to share my story with people who were able to help me in those times.”

She didn’t fully understand it at the time when her mom pulled them all into the room. It’s hard for a kid to grapple with something as tragic as that. Now Oetjen has been making to sure to invest back into the community in helping troubled youth and trying to give them the right tools so they can succeed.

“It’s really hard, but it’s very rewarding,” Oetjen said. “I love that I can build a relationship with the kids that’s probably my favorite part because if you don’t have a relationship then their probably not going to want to listen to you or take anything that you have to say seriously. When I worked at Koinonia a lot of the kids were troubled youth and had been through a lot of trauma so they’re not going to trust you, I mean it would take a year sometimes for them to believe that you care about them.”
Koinonia is a family service foster care system, where their main goal is to put kids through therapy, help with school, social skills, and dinner. Kids get referred there by therapists, court, or parents. It’s all about the rehabilitation of kids. She still keeps in contact with over 75% of the kids. She has no desire to have children of her own as she doesn’t feel the need since she works with kids and has been almost everyday for the past 15 years. 

She even fostered a high school student for a year and half. The girl didn’t have anywhere to go so Oetjen decided to take her in and help her finish out high school. 

For her future plans, Oetjen is thinking about getting her masters in counseling so she can further spread her wings in that field. 

“I want to find exactly what I want to do in life like I love working with kids and at-risk kids who need extra help or people in general that need help,” Oetjen said. “I just want to make things easier for those I can help. I care about the community so I’m just trying to find where I can fit in with that.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

From Dealing with Graves’ Disease and Mental Illness Local Musician DANKAA Perseveres

When we are born, we are signing up for the things that come with being human. We unintentionally sign a spiritual waiver that we will experience a lot of joy, heartbreak, tough times, and depressing moments that will shape the person we end up becoming and embracing. Being a human entails that we will all have our own unique experience that makes us stand out amongst a large group of people with who we share a lot of physical similarities, but ultimately, what’s inside is very different.

Life has this funny and cruel way of challenging us for a variety of different reasons and causes. For some, it is more traumatic and life enduring than others, but we as humans are all destined for some sort of struggle as we try and navigate and try to fulfill our purpose.

Going through your childhood, for the most part, you have this sense of hope and uplifting energy that the world is yours to take on and concur with. However, after a divorce and watching your support system change and diminish is tough to grapple with for any child. It can change our perception of love and what the norm of a relationship is supposed to look like.

Then what if you acquire a life altering disease that makes you question if your life is even worth living?

This was the reality that Danika Brown, 20, also known as her stage name DANKAA, had to face and overcome. When she was 13 years old, her body started to eat away at itself. She would sleep for a few days at a time then build the strength to go shower, eat, and get the school work that she had missed, and then would go back asleep for a couple of days. This was a vicious cycle that would go on for 3 years straight. 

“I got this disease when I was 13 called Graves’ disease and I went to sleep for 3 years,” DANKAA said. “I was asleep from the time I was 13 all the way until I was 16. Basically, my body was eating itself and it couldn’t properly distribute energy from any part of my body. So, I kind of just laid there for 3 years and went to sleep.”

It was a depressing period for DANKAA where she didn’t feel like she could do anything. She was 6 foot and weighed 99 pounds. After three years, she got her thyroid taken out and was put on synthetic hormones that she will have to be on to regulate her body for the rest of her life. After going through the procedure, she finally felt whole again.

“All of a sudden I woke up and I was able to be a human again and live in the world and I feel like that really drives me as a human being and everything I do because I understand what it’s like to not be able to live and now that I’m awake. Everything I do, I do it to the fullest,” DANKAA said. 

From Alaska to Edmonds

DANKAA grew up in Anchorage, Alaska with her mom, little sister, and dad. Once her parents split her mom found a new guy. Just when things were already bad dealing with a divorce and her disease, she says her stepdad was just more fuel to the fire. She explains he was very abusive, physically towards her mom and little sister. She watched her happy and hippie-like mother lose all the joy and become miserable. She remembers he was also verbally abusive and created a toxic environment in the house. They were together for eight long years before her mother left him and DANKAA finally got the version of her mom back that she had been missing and longing for.

“Honestly it’s been so inspiring just watching her break away from the toxicity that like a narcissistic person can have on you and watching her grow into a better version of herself,” DANKAA said. “She’s so strong and awesome and glowing now.”

After dealing with her dark upbringing, she found a passion for volleyball. It was one of the few things that brought her some sort of light in her life, that she would move out of Anchorage when she was 18 to Edmonds Community College in Washington with a scholarship. She quickly rose to captain, All-American, and was nationally ranked. 

Then just as she seemed to find her purpose and fulfillment, another dark chapter was just beginning to unveil itself before her very eyes.

The Beginning of a Long Road

In September of 2020, something dark and twisted started happening to DANKAA. She started to hear demon-like voices in her head.

“It was like my brain was tapped into a radio station that wasn’t me and it wasn’t my head,” DANKAA said. “It was like an incessant dialogue of just all these different things talking to one another all the time. They started out pretty light, but I went through some traumatic things, and in those traumatic things happening the voices turned very dark and self-inflicting. Literally from November 2020 all the way to May 2021, I’m not even  exaggerating every single second of every single day there was a voice in my head and it was so dark and it would be like ‘kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself.’ Like every second of every day.”

As the thoughts became too much to bear and ignore, DANKAA started having severe panic attacks.

“The minute I woke up and heard the voice I would just be shaking and sobbing because I was just like, ‘I like myself, I don’t want to die’ but after it just went on for so long I was just like maybe there’s a reason it’s telling me that,” DANKAA said.

She was supposed to move on to the next level in her volleyball career and play Division 1, but the voices were ultimately a hurdle she couldn’t overcome or move around. Every time she would step onto the court, she would have a panic attack and couldn’t get her mind focused as the thoughts had her in a deadly chokehold.

The day before the final game of her sophomore season, she checked herself into a mental hospital as she tried to find any hope of getting control of her mind back. She felt she was very close to caving into the thoughts and doing something very harmful to herself.

Mental illness unfortunately runs in her family. Her dad goes through his own issues as well as her little sister, who first tried to kill herself when she was 11 and has since tried several more times.

“Having dealt with my sister trying to kill herself a bunch of times I just understood that I needed to reach out and get help because I didn’t want to hurt the people who love me in my life like that,” DANKAA said. 

She says her time at the mental hospital didn’t do anything to really help her situation. She got out four days later and was all alone in Seattle. The voices still had hunkered into her head and gave themselves a place to stay and she didn’t think they had any desire to leave, so she had to drop out of college and stop playing volleyball to go be with her family in Alaska. 

She moved back with the family for a few months hoping they could rid her of her pain and the mental beating she was taking. 

“I was just like I don’t want to just keep crying in front of my family nonstop every day so I went back to Seattle,” DANKAA said. “I partied my f***ing brains out while literally doing every toxic behavior, maniac whatever I could to distract myself.”

After a couple of months of partying to find ways to cope through escapism, she found her way to Reno to live with her cousin. 

How DANKAA Found ‘Coping Skills’ 

Other than volleyball, DANKAA had found a new passion for music. Out of nowhere, music just started to erupt from her body. She started recording into her voice memos by herself in her closest. She was reluctant and shy to share with people that she started making music. It all started in the summer of 2020 as she was still playing volleyball and going through her mental health troubles.

“It was an emotional outlet for me,” DANKAA said. 

DANKAA dropped her first song in September of 2020 and it got 10,000 streams and she was getting a lot of positive feedback from a wide range of people. 

She used to be very shy and insecure about her music, but over the course of time, she has grown very confident in her ability to make music and claims herself as an artist. 

Since coming here to Reno, DANKAA didn’t know anybody here. It wasn’t until some guy messaged her on the dating app Hinge, that she was going to find a group of people whom she would belong. My friend DJ Stanton, who also goes by his stage name Scuba DEEJ, had sent her a message, but not a typical message someone would receive on a dating app. He saw that she made music and listened to her song, “In My Nature”. Scuba was enthralled by the song. I remember when he called me freaking out about this new artist he found that lived here and he wanted her to make music with them. 

Connecting with Other Musicians with their Own Struggles

Scuba asked her if she wanted to come to a studio session, that he and the Reno group Shift the Wave, a group I’m a part of, were having and an immediate bond was formed.  

“I met you guys and genuinely it was so inspiring  and in hearing Gip and everything he had gone through, I was like ‘Ok, I’m going to get good’,” DANKAA said.

I covered a story on my friend Jordan Gipson, J Gip, who had a dark past with his mental health that made him try to take his life on multiple occasions. DANKAA shared that meeting him and talking to him about his struggles was very helpful for her wanting to get the help she needed. 

In October is when DANKAA decided to go back to Alaska and try and get her mental health where it needed to be. She was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was put on lamotrigine, which is a mood stabilizer and the voices finally stopped. 

“But I literally remember one distinctive day where I woke up and I was like ‘they’re not there!’,” DANKAA said. “Once I got the medication I could finally breathe and be a human again… I still definitely have my good and my bad days, but I’m not stuck in the darkness anymore. I do understand that when I am feeling sad and when those things are happening that they’re only temporary now and that they’re not forever. There is a light waiting for me.”

“Reno is probably the best thing to ever happen for me. I’ve been given opportunities I could ever imagine if I was in a different city. Also, Reno is a city that’s full of artists and creative people. Everyone really supports everyone here and I think that’s awesome.”

A New Song and Video

DANKAA recently released a new song and video with Reggaeton artist Aghen called, “Animal Lovers” and the song has been played on some national radio stations. She is going on tour with the artist,Jazzy Jane in the coming weeks. She is currently working on her album titled, “Make Music, Don’t Kill Yourself” a direct homage to the troubles she has gone through over the recent years. 

“Writing [music] is just what makes me feel ok and it gives me a place to organize all my thoughts and make them feel a little less chaotic in my head,” DANKAA said. “I just really hope in being so vulnerable and sharing those things with the world that people will feel a little less alone.”

Family Bonds

DANKAA makes music that is very heartfelt and displays who she embodies. “My favorite song I’ve ever made is ‘Coping Skills’,” DANKAA said. “I made it the first day I got out of the hospital on my bedroom floor for about six hours and I’ll never re-record that song because it is so raw and 100 percent on how I was feeling that day and that period of my life. The messages I have received from people that have heard that song that felt a little less alone, it meant the world to me.”

She has a very good relationship with her parents to this day as she is very open about her mental health to them. “I am very close with my sister,” DANKAA said. “I love her so much. I understand her and she understands me more than anyone in this world ever will. But it just sucks because she still hasn’t found her light at the end of the tunnel yet, but I hope to be like an inspiration to for her and everything I’m doing just to show her that you can.

“Above anything else with my music, I just want the platform where I can reach so many different types of people who are going through so many different things in life and I just want to project this message of love and oneness and coming together with everyone I interact with and with those who see me perform and those who hear my music. I just want everyone to know that they’re loved and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” 

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

Local Drag House Haus of Valoure Creates Space for More Inclusivity

A Rich History With Renewed Opportunities

In the past few years, the art of drag has had much more exposure than ever largely due to the visibility of drag competition shows like Rupaul’s Drag Race and The Boulet Brother’s Dragula. With more visibility comes more people interested in the art form, and Reno is no exception. 

The Biggest Little City has a long history with drag performers. It’s a hub for the non-profit organization The Silver Dollar Court which started in 1976 and still functions today as a donating entity to various charities. 

Back in the 80s and 90s, it used to be that the only way you could engage with a community of drag performers was through such organizations like the SDC or through various pageants put on around the country. While that can still be the case, the advent of social media has led to an explosion of people accessing both the art form and the communities of people engaging with it. 

This has been the case in Reno, where there are now several drag shows happening both during the week and throughout the weekend, including many performers coming from a variety of groups in the area. 

One such group is the Haus of Valoure. They are a drag house made up of Latina queens, having only formed a year or so ago.

“I believe drag is for anyone and there’s so many forms in drag, there’s no yes or no in drag. All the baby queens I think they should just be out there and explore their gayness.” -Xitanya Valoure @xitanya_v who has been a part of the house from the beginning, who spoke on the subject of their Latin identity within the greater drag scene in Reno.  Photo by: Matthew Berrey

A House of Latina Queens

“We are a house of Latina queens, so we are pretty diverse when it comes to what we perform, it can be something in English, something in Spanish. I think a lot of the queens here in Reno, or anywhere in general forget where they come from, and so performing something in Spanish is also very nice and rewarding to see, especially from someone outside of drag, at least that’s what I’ve been told,” Xitanya Valoure said. 

Her house mom Deevina feels the same way although emphasized that it’s just an aspect of their drag and not the whole story. 

“We just add that to our drag. It’s not necessarily something that identifies us, because you know we don’t want to be ‘Oh, the Latinas’… at the end of the day we love what we do and it doesn’t really affect the whole part of us being Latinas because we just love drag itself,” she said. 

When asked whether or not having that Latin based performance within the community is important, she said, “Oh one-hundred percent. Yeah definitely because it’s showing how proud we are of our roots, and also how we aren’t shying away from doing other things like our own music, our own language just because somebody else might not like it… It's good because it’s giving some representation out there that this is what we are doing, this is what we are capable of doing and what we enjoy doing.” 

“For me, the way I see it I shouldn’t have to do anything or explain myself as in like why I do things a certain way, we’re all here living life only once, we get to do what we like what we enjoy without having to stop it because somebody else might not be okay with it.” -Deevina Valoure @deevina.belicia photo by: Matthew Berrey

Bringing the Community to Shows

In the short time the house has been putting shows together, they have shown to be a large force in getting a lot of Hispanic and Latinx people out to their shows. 

“We bring out a lot of the Latino crowd, and that’s not our focus but it’s very nice to have that crowd feel welcomed. And that’s what we want, we want everybody to feel welcomed,” Xitanya said.  

According to the latest 2020 Census data, the Hispanic and Latinx community in the greater Northern Nevada Region is hovering around 24 percent. As the community increases, so does the importance of representation of that community especially within these kinds of queer spaces. 

Within Latinx culture and communities, the experience of queer Latinx people can be difficult in part due to the idea of machismo, which is the idea of strong and aggressive masculine pride. 

For Zamantha Amourosa, creating this drag identity is in a way a rejection of it: “In the Latin culture, being feminine is already looked down upon so I think that’s something that we really try to attack within our community, and I mean there’s been plenty of opportunities for us as well, as far as participating in events that focus around the Latinx culture.” 

“I’m a big fan of everyone, drag is a way for you to express yourself and basically take control of that femininity that people put you down for. Whenever I see someone getting into drag I always cheer them on because it’s something that… I mean it’s helped me gain more confidence and make me a happier person, so just seeing them get into that type of mindset and putting themselves in that type of environment I’m always here for.” -Zamantha Amourosa Valoure @zamanthaxamourosa photo by: Matthew Berrey

A Welcoming Space

Having a space that is welcoming and encouraging for anybody to engage with is incredibly important, especially for queer people today. Apart from bringing out the Latinx community and bringing more diversity to the drag scene here, the Haus of Valoure just wants to highlight the art of drag and make a more welcoming place for all who want to enjoy it. 

“If you’re thinking about doing it, do it. Because honestly like I mean even though you’re in Reno you still get opportunities out here, if you ever want to do events you can reach out to any of us and we’d be more than happy to bring anyone on and get them started with shows and things like that,” Zamantha added.

Reporting and Photos by Matthew Berrey for Our Town Reno

SUP: Comforting the Community with Smiles and Soup Through the Pandemic

A Humble Beginning

Homemade soups, sandwiches, and salads– does it get any better than that? For the owners of the popular Midtown dining experience known as Süp, the answer is a firm no. 

Coming from a background of food service- including both private cheffing and restaurant business- Christian and Kasey Christensen were eager to start up the grills and start stirring soups at a restaurant of their own. 

Süp was established in August 2007 by the wife and husband duo. Süp’s rotating soup menu offers a plethora of unique choices, personifying cultures and places through taste; but perhaps, it is best described with four words: the ultimate comfort food. 

The food isn’t the only part of the Süp experience that brings about a sense of warmth and comfort to every person who enters their doors. Even on the chilliest of northern Nevada days, the people running the restaurant are bound to bring a smile to your face and a good meal to your table. 

A picture of one of the indoor dining areas available at Süp. The family business started with less than ten tables at a smaller location, and have now moved to the expanding and growing Midtown district.  The new space has given the owners and employees at the restaurant a chance to welcome over one hundred people at a time, and new ways to order food for the average consumer. 

Operating a Business in a Pandemic

The first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 virus triggered nationwide stay-at-home orders, leaving employees to navigate unemployment and business owners attempting to continue operations in a way that kept their staff healthy. For Kasey, her employees’ safety was priority over anything else.

“As far as work goes, we were able to keep everybody healthy, which was the biggest and most important thing for us,” says Kasey. “So, we changed everything, we didn’t do any indoor dining for almost a year. I talked with the staff a lot and I wanted them to feel most comfortable with what we were doing, and so I kept doing my best to gauge where they were at and we did what was going to be safest for them.” 

Closed from March to May in 2020, Süp was no different than the rest of the world as they waited for further guidance on how to respond to the transmission of the new Coronavirus. “There was this really huge place of not understanding and our staff is the most important thing to us, and wanting to keep them safe, we didn’t really know how to make that happen in the beginning. So, we kind of took a step back and until we figured out what to do and how to operate safely,” Kasey details.

The effects of the pandemic were indiscriminate, and further exacerbated hurdles many people were already facing. Kasey was no exception. “My dad had passed away literally one month before COVID had shut everything down and so my mom was living with us. We wanted to protect her health and we also wanted to protect the health of all of our employees too, and there were just so many unknowns, so we closed for two months total.” 

As cases slowed down and the world began to re-open, Kasey and her husband broke out a new game plan.

“We followed all CDC and local government guidelines with mask wearing and sanitation practices, as well as trying to keep minimal staff on at all times. We tried to make sure that the same staff were working together so that if someone did become sick we could try to track who had come into contact with them,” Kasey recounts.

“Luckily, all of those precautions really helped and kept a lot of our team safe. I have had no employee-to-employee transmission throughout [the last two years], which was really amazing.” 

A photo of Süp’s outdoor dining area. It consists of a deck that has a canopy that helps maintain cool or warm weather for outdoor guests, twinkle lights, and patio heaters. Photo by Chloe Cross. 

Taking Care of Soup-er Staff

Kasey and Christian not only placed the comfort of their team at the forefront of decision-making, but they also went as far as to alleviate food insecurity for their staff while the restaurant was shut down.

The couple launched a campaign where the proceeds from gift card purchases went towards groceries and necessary goods for their staff.

“We did weekly groceries for the staff in those two months we were closed. Each week we’d buy toilet paper as we had access to stuff through our vendors that they didn’t have access to. I mean, no one was able to find toilet paper. So we got things like that and we would do big grocery bags each week with some meats, some vegetables, some dry goods and things like that.” Without her staff, Kasey says, they wouldn’t have a business. 

“We wanted to try to figure out how to take care of them,” Kasey says. 

Süp employees working in the kitchen, with a back door that temporarily served as a pick up window for take-out orders. As the business has transitioned back to in-person dining, they now have parking spaces reserved for curbside pickup, a new point-of-sales system, and accessible online ordering. Photo by Chloe Cross.

Connecting with Staff and the Community

When speaking about her staff, Kasey couldn't help but get emotional as her eyes gleamed with pride. 

“We get one life, and so how you spend your time is really important. To think that people spend part of their time working with us is just the most magical and humbling thing. The fact that people spend part of their time working with us is the greatest honor of my career and life, honestly.” 

Throughout the whole interview, Kasey could not speak to the success of her business without crediting the work of her staff. The passion, energy, and compassion of her staff is integral to Süp’s mission of connecting with the community.

Kasey talked a bit about what she looks for in a team member, “I go off of gut a lot, I’m all about trusting gut and spirit and there’s feelings you get when you meet someone that tell you if they have potential, maybe they don’t have much restaurant experience but if I see that they’re eager or passionate about this then everything else is totally trainable.” 

A photo of two Süp employees in the kitchen, taken in 2020 right after the restaurant reopened for take out orders. At this point, COVID-19 precautions were in full swing. Photo courtesy of Kasey and Christian Christensen.

Taking Care of Each Other

Kasey says that in the fast paced world of counter service, it is quintessential to have positive and friendly employees that can not only take care of their customers, but each other.

“I really look for individuals who stand out for being confident and for being friendly and kind first and foremost; the rest of it? Well we’ll be able to figure it all out as long as they’re willing to learn and be able to admit mistakes. I think admitting when we’re wrong is a big part of growth and being the best we can be.”

The relationship the owners of Süp have with their employees is collaborative and honest, as they rely on their staff for daily insights on how to grow the business and make it better each and every day.

“I used to wait on every table and take every order, and now almost 15 years in I don’t have to play that role anymore,” says Kasey, “but I have a team of folks that do, so their insight into what they see and what they experience is invaluable. I mean its just… I can’t do anything without it. So I take their input into how we run things and how we operate and the importance of that really can’t be overstated.” 

Süp is about people before anything else. Connecting people, showing gratitude for people, and creating love and support for everyone involved.

Süp is located off of South Virginia street, sharing a block with numerous other local businesses. 

A Network of Community Collaboration

Kasey and Christian have worked to maintain relationships with their fellow business owners through mentorship and a web of collaboration.

Süp gets all of their bakery items from local business Rounds, and their coffee from The Hub, also local. The quality of their product is vital to their mission, and working with local sources helps preserve that dining experience.

"Everything we do is made in house from scratch: all of our sauces are stocks, we roast our turkeys, we try to buy organic as much as possible and we source locally when we can with farm goods," Kasey shares. "We took all the good stuff from this farm to table movement but did it in a way that is quick and easily accessible for folks so it doesn't feel so far away and hopefully fits within a realistic budget,” she said.

This model also helps to reduce the restaurant's carbon footprint, preserves the quality of the products they serve, and invests directly back into the community.

Co-owner and founder, Kasey Christensen as she sits down for her interview with our reporters. She started her business with her husband, Christian, in 2007. Photo by Chloe Cross.

Cookies and Neighbor Solidarity

Kasey spoke of fellow business owners Haley and Jessie, who own the breakfast joint Two Chicks, which lives on the same block as Süp. 

“When Two Chicks first opened we kind of mentored them because we had been in the game for a moment and Haley and Jesse have now helped mentor me through rough times.” Kasey’s advice for any local business owner is to be open to relying on those around you. “Just constantly learning and being a support system for the others around you, the more you let the competition part of it go and the more you just work together and collaborate, I just feel there is such power behind that.” 

If you’ve ever dined at Süp before, you know every meal comes equipped with a small, chocolate chip cookie. 

As with many of the other trademarks of the Süp dining experience, these cookies have a story behind them. 

“So Christian's family is from Denmark and his Nono,” Christian’s grandmother, “used to make all these cookies every Christmas. She would have all of these people over to her house and they would make cookies together. When we got married we used that cookie as a little gift to each of the guests, with a little recipe card and their name at the table. So it was his Nono’s cookie, then our wedding cookie, and then it became our Süp cookie.” 

Naturally, this was a lot of cookies to make in one day. As their business expanded, they began sourcing their cookies from Rounds Bakery. However, the spirit of Nono’s cookie is preserved with every meal served. 

A char grilled steak baguette with tomato bisque soup. Each sandwich is served with a mini chocolate chip cookie and cranberry salad. Photos by Vanessa Ribeiro. 

Unique Touches

The restaurant incorporates other unique touches that contribute to the dining experiences of their customers, with the revolving soup menu being a huge part of their business’s brand, as well as local Reno street signs as markers for customer’s orders. 

This dining model was a product of intentional reflection of businesses that Kasey and Christian enjoyed dining at. 

“We used to live in Colorado and there was a place there where they did a bunch of soups per day and living there we loved that concept of like multiple soups, it was really awesome, because there’s not really a lot of soup places,” says Kasey. 

“But we knew we wanted sandwiches and salads and stuff like that, while also maintaining that fast counter service style. Both Christen and I had worked in fancier fine-dining table service restaurants so we wanted something that was quick but still brought all of the good things that came with that farm-to-table dining experience.” That very model was accepted by the Reno community with welcoming arms, with Süp now maintaining a faithful and growing customer base. 

Before the pandemic shut down all non-essential businesses, Kasey and Christian had plans to move to a second location. But “with so much weight in the world” it was difficult to move forward, says Kasey. 

Striking a Balance

Kasey said a large part of how she has been able to cope through this pandemic has been through balance; learning to prioritize the things that make her happy and being able to step back when needed. 

“I think with my dad being ill and then COVID hitting it was just so much that I really couldn’t…. It was hard to function, and trying to figure how to maneuver through this world so stepping back was really an important step,” she shares.

With the restaurant business requiring speed and efficiency, it can be difficult to strike that balance in a meaningful way. “I don’t know, it’s like there’s always this voice that’s like ‘come on, more, do, hustle, become, be’ and sometimes it’s okay to just…be.” 

Kasey says that despite COVID changing their plans, that she and Christian have still been experiencing tremendous loyalty from their customers.  

“I’m so grateful for all the community support we get through all of our customers, it’s just been huge throughout this whole [pandemic]. We serve soup which is comfort food, so for a pandemic nothing sounds better than, ya know, grilled cheese and a tomato bisque.” 

Kasey says that while their plans for a second location have been delayed, that is not to say there won’t be one in the future. However, for the time being, she was going to focus on her staff, herself, and her family. 

“To be honest coming off this last fall, I was rough, I was feeling real down. The end of COVID was harder than the beginning for me, just because of the longevity of it and with the omicron strain having so many people being ill and sick, and just this heaviness in the world. I felt like, with coming out of such a tumultuous time and feeling so unsure of things, people were just looking for a little sense of normalcy.”

The whole team at Süp is proud of the way they have been able to serve and connect with the community throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, however long it lasts.

Our Town Reno reporting by Chloe Cross and Vanessa Ribeiro

Noelia Calvillo, an Empath Spoken Word Poet Writing about Inflictions

At 15, Noelia Calvillo started curating her poems for her first poetry book, Inflictions, and three years later it was independently published to Amazon. In her collection of poems, Calvillo shares her experiences as a queer woman of color, and recounts her battles with mental illness, heartbreak and loss.

“I feel like a lot of the topics I talk about, a lot of people don’t talk about … deeply,” Calvillo said, attributing that as her motivation to publish.

Calvillo calls herself an empath, and has felt the pain of others on a personal level. She hopes that Inflictions can be a source that shows her readers that they are not alone in the deep emotions they may feel.

“If you are reading this, I hope you enjoy it and take it seriously,” Calvillo wrote at the beginning of her book. “My first experience with love is printed on the pages of this book, cherish it in a way no one else has.”

The process of publishing wasn’t an easy one. Calvillo is not well versed with technology, and spent three weeks editing the pdf files for her book until it was ready.

“It still isn’t perfect, but it was good enough,” Calvillo said in regards to the tedious process of continuously editing her files.

Even before publishing, the three years spent writing was difficult for her. Calvillo draws inspiration from emotional pain that she feels in her life. If there’s nothing to note, or if something is too much for her to even talk about, she has difficulties putting pen to paper.

Her affinity towards writing darker pieces is what inspired the title of her book, Inflictions.

“The root word is infliction and that means to inflict [pain],” Calvillo said. Her book is a collection of painful moments recounted into poetry, so she went with the plural version of the word.

While the themes are dark, Calvillo feels a great sense of accomplishment because being published is something she has always wanted. However, that feeling is accompanied with fear.

Calvillo believes that most people, after sharing their work, would feel fear of judgment, but that wasn’t what she feared.

“I was scared that someone with a greater following or more popularity, would steal my work and claim it as their own,” Calvillo said. “And people would believe them because of their social standing and influence.

Calvillo has also felt disappointed. She believes that her work is deserving of more recognition and praise.

Despite this, Calvillo isn’t disheartened by the current lack of attention to her work. She isn’t finished yet, and acknowledges that this book is just the beginning for her.

“I believe in divine timing,” Calvillo said. “I know [recognition] will come to me when the time is right.”

Reporting by Lynn Lazaro for Our Town Reno

Greg Gilmore and the Fever Dreams Taking Hold with Premonition

Getting through the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown was a super challenging and unique experience for everyone. Filled with so much uncertainty and fear, we were all wondering what the future was going to hold and when the grass was finally going to look greener on the other side.

Greg Gilmore and the Fever Dreams were in the studio getting ready to record their debut album. As lockdown happened, they slept in a recording studio in Sacramento and fleshed out good material for their record. 

This band consists of Greg Gilmore, 33, lead vocalist, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist, Brendon Lund, the bassist, who used to play for Buster Blue, a local Reno band that had quite the notoriety. Then you have Jorge Pulido-Rubio, the lead guitarist and the newest member of the band, Jeff Knight, the drummer, and Adam Landis, who plays the keys.

Today I sit with the namesake Greg Gilmore to talk about the band, his own musical journey, and what he looks to do with this band to make them stand out.

Gilmore grew up in Bishop and moved to Reno when he was 19. While according to him, the most eventful day of the year in Bishop is Mule Day, he did say that it is a very pretty city and did like it there. He got his first guitar when he was 12 and started taking it seriously when he was 16. Gilmore moved here to pursue music with some friends. He no longer plays with them anymore.

Since moving to Reno, Gilmore is now on his fourth band and has worked on a variety of projects over the years. He felt the transition was pretty seamless as the music community here in Reno is very welcoming and easy to move around in. Gilmore is holding the flashlight.

The Beatles were the foundation that Gilmore heard as a kid that pushed his love for music to new heights. 

“I would refuse to listen to anything else until I was about 12,” Gilmore said. “My folks would put anything else on and I would have a temper tantrum. But then I started to get into Tom Petty and into more contemporary stuff like the White Stripes. [I’m] a big Jack White fan.”

Music inspires us all in certain ways and has many different purposes in our lives, whether it be making us happy, dancing, or helping us get out of a hard time. Artists always have a deep connection with the art at hand.

“It’s a really expressive, therapeutic type of a thing, at least for me and hopefully the listener as well,” Gilmore said. “If you can do something that makes people feel better about themselves, it’s a good thing. It’s hard to do and especially needed these days.”

Gilmore shares that his music is directly inspired by his life experiences, but doesn’t make it super specific in hopes of it being more relatable to the listener who may be going through some similar tribulations. One’s therapy could be another one’s realization in their own situation. 

Over the years Gilmore’s progression as an artist has changed drastically with the wealth of life experiences he has gone through. One of his first bands, The Canes, was heavily influenced by Nirvana, which resulted in a more disjointed, abstract sound. His last group Silver focused more on creating a vibe and worked more on song structure. He now focuses more on song cohesiveness and making music that he would prefer to listen to.

“Usually I bring in a soft skeleton and then we just flush it out until it becomes a full arrangement,” Gilmore said. “We work together on the arrangements for the most part, but usually I’ll have the verse and the chorus, and the brigdes written.”

The band’s debut album will be getting an official release May 7th. They have vinyl, CD, and cassette preorders available on their website right now. A review of their album is being planned for on Our Town Reno prior to the release. 

Gilmore has played with all members of the band for five-six years except for Pulido-Rubio, who joined when the band transitioned from Silver to Greg Gilmore and the Fever Dreams. As Silver, they had put out a couple of EPs until the lead guitarist quit and that’s when Pulido-Rubio fit in like a glove with the other members. 

Another reason for the name switch was the difficulty of finding the band under the name Silver as there were many bands and artists that used the term in their name. However, there is now only one sole Greg Gilmore on Spotify, and the band has been rolling with the name ever since. 

Gilmore shared that coming out of COVID lockdown that everyone became more of homebodies and have a more difficult time going out.

In regard to how this band is different from his past bands, Gilmore shared that the song writing is more of the same as he is still the one doing it. When Pulido-Rubio joined, it opened up a new sound for the band, specifically an alternative indie sound. Which is where the band has shifted most of its sound, but the band likes to touch multiple genres such as rock, folk, pop, dance and country. 

The band has only played three shows that were outdoors, but haven’t done any proper venue shows. They do have a release show for their new album at Cyprus on May 7th. They’re excited to get this band some recognition as they build up their new brand and first record. 

Gilmore also has been working on his own solo efforts. At the end of last year, he was going through a tough time with a break up and went up to Montana to take care of sister who had been sick for a while. He found it to be a necessary escape from reality.

For the three months he was up in Montana, Gilmore started working on one of his most personal and adventurous package of music to date. He started listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, specifically, his album “Nebraska,” which was directly recorded on a Tascam PortaStudio with a pair of Shure SM57s.

Gilmore was very inspired by this so he went to the only music pawn shop in the area and got a great deal on a tape recorder and started working on his new solo album that he hopes to release by the end of this year. He only plans on using a guitar, a harmonica, and a couple of microphones for the making of it. Gilmore’s intention was to prove to himself that he could make a solo project and used it as a therapeutic release for the troubles that were coming into his life. 

“I love recording, and I love production,” Gilmore said. “My least favorite thing is all the business nonsense. The bookings, the emails, and you know shaking people down for money.”

When I asked him if they had a manager, Gilmore said: “I mostly take care of anything. I’m bit obsessive about that kind of stuff. I do all of our album art. I do all of our art direction for our photos. I do all the booking and the scheduling. Scheduling is the worst thing about bands, getting everyone scheduled together. Everyone’s got personal lives I get it, you know. It’s just tough to juggle all that stuff and it can drive you a little bonkers, but it’s usually worth it.”

Our Town Reno Music Reporting by Jaden Urban

Flamingos in the Tree, from Freshmen in Dorm Rooms to Indie Basement Pop

With a name as interesting and off the wall as “Flamingos in the Tree” the band is bound to make some otherworldly music, which if you check out their music it’s definitely the case. 

When moving to a whole new city, officially being on your own can be quite a scary and growing journey, especially during your college years when it feels like the world’s rug is getting ready to be swept out from under you.  Music and creating a band can create an outlet for the change you are going through.

Flamingos in the Tree consist of four such members, Daniel Escovar, vocalist and guitarist, Jarvis Humlick, drummer, Spencer Thomas, and James Pizzo. Only Escovar and Humlick were able to show up for the interview.

They have been in a band for four years and started in the dorms of Argenta for their freshman year. They had met in the common space through the dorms. The band formed almost instantly once the members met each other. They decided to unite as a band even though they really didn’t know each other. Most bands, especially local bands, form a tightly bonded friendship then become a band, but this was a counter result. The guys ended up forming this bond through the stressors and environment that are created once you form a musical group. 

Each of the members all moved to Reno from different spots around the West Coast to come to school at UNR. Humlick is from the Tahoe area, Escovar is from L.A., and the other two are from Roseville and Las Vegas. 

Given that the band didn’t have anything specific to build off of for a name they had to resort to different options. The name was birthed from a random name generator, which first came out as “Hounds in the Tree”. The band knew their music didn’t represent the aggressiveness or high energy that comes with hounds. They knew they had to come up with an animal they felt represented their brand and message the best. 

“We were like flamingos, flamingos are cool,” Escovar said. “Pink is a cool color and then we were like alright, Flamingos in the Tree. I mean we have our own meaning, but we want to leave it up to interpretation.”

The band slowly started to form when Escovar and Thomas had this fire of creative energy and wanted to start building larger instrumental compositions. The two lived across the hall from each other and a constant back and forth started to flourish where they would run to each other’s room to share what new creation or idea they had come up with.

“We had a long point where we only played music together,” Escovar said. “But it definitely grew once we started playing more shows and as we started rehearsing a lot more we really started to find a friendship. The friendship and camaraderie really grows through the music as we feel ourselves progress as musicians we feel the friendship grow as well.” 

The band had an immediate chemistry that birthed so formlessly that it was inevitable that these guys were supposed to play with each other. The band each recognized their own strengths and how they helped elevate each other to a higher level. They’ve also been supportive of each other as students.

Humlick graduated from UNR last December with a major in biochemistry. Humlick is passionate about two things: music and science, so going to school for biochemistry and being in a band worked perfectly for him. Escovar is currently getting his political science degree because while he also has a passion for music, he has a big passion for learning and writing as well. Both decided to stay in school and graduate because they enjoy it, and to have a safety net if music didn’t ultimately work out financially for them.

“Short term we want to be able to play music and live off the expenses, I like traveling,” Escovar said. “We’re going on tour June 10 and it’ll be nice that we’ll be making money for that and then send it into the tour so we’ll be traveling for free… We don’t really book anymore. People will just text us and ask if we want to play.”

The two said that the release of their first song, “Thorned Rose” was the big leap that helped propel them to a larger audience. They claim that it’s a song that really defines who they are and their sound. 

Humlick the drummer is also a Laboratory Technician with the City of Reno. “Performing live is just a blast,” Humlick said. “Not only are you feeding off the energy of the crowd, but also each other. At this point, we’ve been playing with each other for so long that we know each other’s idiosyncrasies. I can just look over at Dan [Escovar] and shoot him a little look or a little wink and then we’ll do something at the end of the song.”

“It is kind of like a therapy you just get to vent and be honest with yourself when you’re creating and you also get to live in the moment like when we’re all playing as a group,” Escovar said. “It’s hard to think about the past or the future while we’re playing.”

The two shared how going to LA was quite an inspiration. It showed them that things were becoming much more real and the idea of making it in the industry started to grow stronger. Playing for a new crowd and a new environment was very refreshing. 

The Reno rock/indie scene has a very close bond with one another. Escovar and Humlick shared how they have a good relationship with a lot of the bands and are open to playing shows and recording songs with just about anyone.

“I love the culture that has sprouted from Reno post-COVID,” Escovar said.

The band just released a new single titled, “Toes” which is available on all streaming platforms. They are also set to play at the Biggest Little Festival on April 30. Their tour starts on June 10 with the release of their new album also happening on the same day. 

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

From Fallon to Reno to an Album, the Evolution of the Will Shamberger Band

From the time that I’ve started covering local bands and musicians here in Reno, you see a large range of variety from genre to genre. From the Hip-Hop scene to the Hardcore scene to the Indie scene to the Alternative scene and to the Rock and Roll scene, it has all been a unique experience. 

One experience that has really stood out to me the most, is the Will Shamberger Band. From their goofy personalities to their mind-boggling performances, this is a band that demands your attention if you are in the same vicinity as them.

“It’s cool to get together and make noise,” Shamberger said. “The amount of bulls*** you go through together being in a band whether it be showing up and being like, ‘Are we getting paid?’ ‘Well I don’t know’ or picking up and lifting all of our heavy s***. Once you’re there and you play it makes it all so much worth it. It trumps every band thing.”

“It just feels f***ing good, there’s not a way to say more harmfully than that, it’s fun,” Stone said. “It’s great just like playing a sport or whatever people do.”

“Especially with people who you feel like click, you play well together with,” Marrow added. “{Like when} y’all finish a song together on the same note and you look around like ‘We nailed that.” 

“We all come from different musical backgrounds,” Gomes said. “So when the music is made, Will being the principal songwriter and kind of the guy who has the ideas and lays down the foundation of what it is. We get to do the fun stuff and come up with, ‘Ok that sounds cool. What can we do something that is different from then I heard it, but is still palpable and everyone’s cool with it.’ I think that’s the funnest thing for me.”

The guys carry a one of kind stage experience when you see them live. With Stone passionately banging on his drums to Marrow’s calm and slight rhythmic motions while he strums the bass to Gomes going crazy on the guitar playing like a madman who is playing guitar for the last time to Shamberger cathartically singing every ounce of his heart out. 

While the band has been only officially together for about two years now, there is a lot of history with how the guys came together to have the time of their lives doing it is what they love the most.  

Shamberger and Gomes have known each other for about 12 years, but they’ve been friends for about 8 years. The two have always done music, they just did it separately. The two, sort of, had a little “beef” because they each played for the two different bands at their high school in Fallon. Mind you, it was the two only bands at the school. Eventually, things would subside as the two had respect for one another. They started to jam together and a chemistry started to form. They had a group early on where Shamberger played drums and Gomes played the guitar.

Shamberger also really liked the original band that Jesse was a part of in Fallon. He had followed them closely then started to gain a friendship with Marrow when Marrow started to go into the coffee shop where he worked at the time. After a while of gaining that friendship, Stone also got a job at the same coffee shop that Shamberger was working at. They had an issue holding a drummer down in the newly formed group as the band claims the first one had a “chicken adventure” that made them leave and the other one apparently had better things to do than spend his time in the band. The band claims that there are no hard feelings with them and that they think they’re great people. Stone had mentioned to Shamberger that he’s a drummer when he had heard that they needed a new one, which made Shamberger want him in the band, and Stone fit like a glove. 

“I wouldn’t say we were the most musical band,” Gomes said in regards to past band formations. “Besides Will, Will being the songwriter and the principle guy as the namesake. It kind of starts with what Will does. At least for as long as the duration of this band and what we do. We’re kind of like, what does Will have going on and we look at what does and then we go, ‘Ok that sounds sick, let’s see what we can figure out with that.”

After the band had officially come together, they did a bunch of shows in their hometown of Fallon to get things started. Recently they have done a ton of shows in Reno. In the past 9 months they’ve played over 20 shows here in the 775. They even just had their first show in California for this band this past weekend. 

The band had a tour and a bunch of shows lined up before COVID, however, due to the pandemic, they weren’t able to make a lot of those shows work. Fallon's restrictions during COVID weren’t super intense so they were still able to pick up a few shows to play during the pandemic. 

While the pandemic might’ve been damaging in a lot of ways, it somehow brought the band even closer and tightly connected than before. “It was what it was,” Gomes said. “But then you just pick your s*** back up and do it again.” 

“When COVID hit, like us just as a band kind of shifted gears and we started practicing like every week nonstop for like a year straight,” Marrow said. “We got way tighter and way better. It really honed us into the band that we are now and I look back at those practices very fondly.” 

“Like quarantine sucked, but we definitely made the most of it,” Stone said. “We had a lot of fun practicing.”

The band described how they don’t do it for the money. They simply do it for the joy that the music brings them. When talking to one of his friends, Gomes had been asked why he puts up with all the troubles that music can cause. Gomes turns to the guy, who is a cowboy and he asks well do you do it for the money, the guy immediately understood what he was meaning. The cowboy explained to him that he didn’t cowboy for the money, he cowboyed for the sole reason of that is what brought him joy and happiness and he was willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that. 

“Never needed a better explanation than that,” Gomes said. “I mean if I don't make any money, you can bet I’m going to play guitar. At the end of the day, I need to play some jams. Out of everything in this world that’s all I want to do. Music has taught me the best values and the best life lessons that I’ve ever had in this world and if I can even just be a part of that for somebody here.”

New music and goals are on the horizon for the band, who hope to get an album out this year.

“Our short-term goal is to finish our album,” Shamberger said. “Our long-term goal is to just play music for as long as we like to or as long as people would like us to.” 

The members shared the differences in the creative process when playing live versus recording for a studio version of a song/record. 

“It’s different and sort of new for us,” Shamberger said. “I think it’s super rad just to see how they turn out. It’ll always be a different song, it will forever be a different song every time we record it, but it’s cool to hear it in a way where it’s like no this is the song now.”

“Live we are a little loosey-goosey,” Stone said. “We like to improv and stuff. When we record we definitely do it differently because it’s like how many stops can we pull out.”

The band recorded their last EP where each band member would take turns doing their parts to each song for the entire EP. They would work on multiple songs at a time. Now for their new album, the band doesn’t stop working on a song until it is pretty much completely finished and the band agrees that it is a way better process. 

“As far as the words are concerned and the meaning behind that, Will is kind of the focal point behind that,” Gomes said. “I’m biased because I’ve been doing this with Will for quite some time, but no Will just has an excellent brain for the stuff I like to hear. I’m not a smart guy, but I’ll tell you, his words move me. I would be hard pressed to say that they don’t move anybody else. So, with that, the different songs that he writes I feel bad sometimes because I just bring the sprinkles on top of it, so I’m like am I doing too much here or not enough like what should we do. Having a cornerstone is something that you can’t really put a price on.”

“For me as a guitar player, I like to shred, I like to get weird…,” Gomes said. “But at the end of the day the s*** that really moves you, especially when it comes to what I do on the instrument or what anyone else does on the instrument, it’s the stuff that really connects with you on another level. That’s not superficial. It’s not like ‘Oh that was a hot show’ or ‘That was sick because they played their instruments well’ like naw. It connected with you on another level you just think about it later. Will’s music always did that with me even when I didn’t even have any contact with Will.”

The band has no regrets in the two years they have been learning with one another. They have this bond and chemistry that is immediately felt upon the first time either meeting them or seeing them. If you get a chance check out one of their shows if you can.

“We have a good time,” Gomes said. “These are my brothers. We have fun doing this. There’s no point in doing this if you can’t get some enjoyment out of it if you can’t get a rise out of it. We have a good time, every time… We love Reno,” Charlie said. “We love to play in Reno. We love that we have an audience here, and very happy to have an audience here because we come from nowhere.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

Seven Ply Mag, Local Skateboarders Dropping a New Zine with a Bang

When a hiatus is taken on something, a lot of people think to themselves, “Well is it over?” “What happened?” “Did they just quit?” When an organization, musician, celebrity, influencer takes a break from producing content, we as the consumers always assume the worst. 

Like right now, we have no idea if Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean are ever going to release new music because we haven’t heard from them for about half a decade now. 

However, where we consumers fault is we often fail to look at the creators of the content as regular human beings. We put them on a pedestal, but these curators are just like you and me. They’re just you’re average collection of atoms trying to find their joy and purpose until their time here on this Earth comes to a close.

On March 9th, the company Seven Ply Mag hosted a release event with four live bands. Bands included were the Will Shamberger Band, poorsport., Flawless Victory, and Blind Fortune, which fortunately I got to see an entire set where the cops didn’t get called like for a previous Our Town Reno story. 

The event hosted a release of Seven Ply Mag’s third issue of their skateboarding magazine which features Skateboard photography, abstract art pieces, and an interview. 

There are three main people who run the magazine. The first is Nick Felton who takes a lot of the photos for the zine and helps out with editing and production. The second is Jordan Carlson, who is the editor in chief. Last, but certainly not least, is Alan Chou who is the creative director and co-editor in chief. 

Chou recently joined the group after the second issue, so this is their first release all together. It’s safe to say that they were impressed with the turnout.  “It’s just crazy,” Felton said. “I think we’re just stoked right now on the turnout and how everything turned out.”

“Crazy that this many people came out on a Wednesday Night,” Chou added.

“[It’s] pretty solid,” Carlson said. “It definitely shows the support for local bands and for local projects. The support from the community, no matter what day of the week it is they still came out here which is pretty sick.”

Seven Ply had a pretty long hiatus that lasted almost two years. The crew had a lot of personal turmoil and family issues that needed to be dealt with before even thinking of starting another issue. The crew values making unique and “hand-made” work and that’s simply not something that can just be rushed overnight. The gang waited until the smoke settled in their personal life so they could really dedicate their vision and their craft to stepping up their game from the second issue. 

“Every few months we would go and look at it and be like what the f*** are we doing,” Chou said. “[We’d] change it up, we would all look it with three different eyes and at different times, and didn’t know what we were doing. Then we all three got together and we finally we’re like ‘oh I agree on the layout and like pictures and like what’s in and what’s out.’ So, it was sick when us three finally got all of our eyes on it together.”

“The hardest part is there’s a lot of preparation when getting ready to put on a show, not to mention doing the show itself,” Carlson said. “Which Nick did an amazing job setting things up and finding a venue and communicating with the bands and having to take photos whenever necessary. We sometimes would meet for six hours in the evening just to be able to get to a consensus just on what shirts we want to buy, you know those days do add up. It does take a long time to try and get everything produced for it.”

“It was quite the process to get this one done just with everything that was going on,” Felton said. “Like for the first two issues it was just me and Jordan, but then Alan came in during the second premiere and he was like, ‘Yo, let me help out in any way that I can’. Then he became the third part of Seven Ply, which helped tremendously and I felt like that was a big part of getting this issue going too. He was there making sure we were doing stuff. He was making sure me and Jordan weren’t like bickering because it’s easy to think, ‘well my idea is better’ and it’s good to have that third person help bring this project together.”

“To keep it short and sweet we are just really stoked to put this out because we put a lot of hard work into it and we’re stoked so hard to see the outcome. Hopefully, it’s a big success, so we can keep doing this thing,” Felton said.

They plan on releasing more magazines and hosting more events throughout the rest of the year and keeping their foot on the pedal. Colton Templeton also played a huge role in bringing the magazine together, and the guys are very appreciative of him. 

“If it wasn’t for all of us putting in the equal amount of effort then it wouldn’t have happened,” Felton said. “That was a big part of this one was all of us coming together to do what we needed to do and saying what we need to say even if it wasn’t easy.”

This was the first Seven Ply event that included live bands. The last event took place a Mira Loma Skatepark on Go Skate Day, and the crew thought adding in live bands would bring a stronger sense of community. 

“We just wanted it to be a full-blown local event, you know bring the local bands, we’re kind of helping them out, putting this on and they’re kind of helping us bringing their crowd,” Felton said. “We just want to keep Reno tight-knit, it doesn’t just go for skateboarding. We’re all like very into the music scene, whether the genre you know it’s cool we’re kind of genre-mashing with the lineup.”

“Everyone in Reno is all about supporting local, so it’s amazing that we have one of the sickest scenes, music, art, skateboarding, whatever else,” Chou said. “We have the sickest scene out there for sure.

Frank Ayala did a lot of the art for this issue and the Seven Ply crew gave him a huge shoutout for the work he put in. 

While you can’t currently purchase anything to support Seven Ply if you didn’t go to the event, they are working on getting a website up and running and are working on building a stronger social media presence. If you want to stay tuned to see when their next event is going to happen or when the website goes live, make sure to follow them on their Instagram @sevenplymag.

“We’re just hoping to make it apparent that we’re here to stay, we’re not going anywhere,” Felton said. “We were gone for a while, but like Alan said in the intro of the mag, ‘We’re back baby!’ and we’re gonna keep that vibe going for the rest of the year.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

88STRAIT, a Rising Star, Balancing High School, Music, Mental Health and a Fast Food Job

High School is a strange time for everybody. It’s our first true test of our identity and our first set of challenges where we start to figure out what it is we wish for our life and our journey we have to take to get there. We go through our first loves, first heartbreaks, grow out of our childhood friendships, make new discoveries, and make memories that we will tell to our kids and grandkids for the next few decades.

High School gives us structure and routine which we learn to work in our daily lives. Homework and classwork shows us the importance of work ethic. While it doesn’t tell our whole story, it is a very notable chapter in our book of life. 

Quentin Strait, who goes by his stage name, 88STRAIT,  has been making a lot of waves recently here in the local Reno scene. The name 88STRAIT came from the significance of 88 being an angel number that supports joy, happiness, wealth and blessings.

He is a senior at Reno High School and has faced many challenges throughout his seventeen years on this Earth. He currently works long hours at Cane’s while maintaining a 2.9 GPA, and trying to find anytime he can to focus on music. Wednesdays are his only true day off. 

“I’m really just a kid making music,” he said during a recent interview. “I’ve been doing this for five years now. I’m a singer, songwriter, producer, and audio engineer. I kind of produce all my own stuff. I really enjoy making music.”

“Most of the time when I’m recording songs, I’ll do it just because I’m feeling really sad,” 88 said. “That was originally why I started making music because I was sad. I needed an outlet and it just turned into something crazy. A lot of my songs are sad so I just kind of record my thoughts into that.” Photo by Ashton Hlade with permission to use.

After stretches of intense sadness that led to musical creation but also started to seem abnormal, 88 felt something wasn’t right. 

“Yeah, I go through a lot of mental health issues,” 88 said. “I’ve been going to therapy for like nine months now. Nine months ago is when I really started to open up to people about it, I’ve been suffering for at least four to five years. I’ve disregarded it or just didn’t see it fully and how bad it was affecting me until last spring when I was overworking myself. I was working like 45 hours a week with school. And just throwing a girlfriend in the mix... I pretty much had a week-long mental breakdown. Deep personalization and deep realization, it was just that constantly. Constant panic attacks and like crying at random times. It was getting so bad and I was having breakdowns at school constantly.”

One day he had a breakdown in class and rushed to the bathroom. When he got back to the classroom the teacher asked if he was ok, but 88 started breaking down crying to him. The teacher suggested that he should talk to a counselor. 88 said recent therapy sessions have helped, but his mental health is still pretty bad. He sees slight improvement which he is grateful for.

“I’m starting to see improvements even if it’s only at certain times,” 88 said. “Certain times are worse than others. Music has been definitely helping me a lot. Without it, I don’t even think I’d be right now honestly.”

88 just dropped off a new EP and one of the songs on it is called, “I Know You’re Bad For Me”. He says he has been sitting on the song for a while and was waiting for the right time to release it.  On Feb. 25th, 88 released a five song EP titled, “Text Me When You Hear This”.  Photo of EP cover by Ashton Hlade with permission to use.

88STRAIT performed for the first time in December at the Holland Project. He had been trying to get booked there for a while, and was ecstatic when he finally got a booking there. A lot of nerves and stress started to arise as the show date was coming up. It was his first performance so of course the butterflies in his stomach felt like they were going to rip through his stomach tissue. However, once he got a couple songs in, he started to feel really comfortable on stage and his nerves disappeared. He loved the way people who had never heard his music were really vibing with it. After the show, he said the adrenaline rush was crazy. He loved interacting with the crowd after the show with people who hadn’t heard his music before and listening to how they thought of the show.

88 creates very complex sonic structures that you don’t hear emulated very often. The production on his songs are very experimental and almost hypnotic. You would think the process would be very challenging for him, but it actually comes very authentically

“Honestly it just comes very naturally to me,” 88 said. “I definitely put a lot of thought into my music, and the vibe and energy of it. For the most part, I don’t want to say I don’t think about it too much, but it just comes very naturally to me. When I’m creating something I try to envision it with other genres. I really incorporate a lot of different genres into my music.”

He includes genres such as edm, hyperpop, emo-rap, trap, dubstep, drum and bass, etc. Whatever comes to his mind. He shared with me that he recently made a emo-rap, hyperpop and drill song. He showed it to one of his friends and they said it was unlike anything they had ever heard before. 

“This EP is completely inspired by my sadness and what I have to go through on a daily basis and you know my past realtionships,” 88 said of his published work released last month. “It’s completely self-produced and I was in some pretty dark places when I wrote all these songs. The fifth track specifically it’s called ‘Lifes a GIft’ and I wrote that in November and I was at a point in my life where it felt like nothing good could happen and everything that could happen, happened in the worst way possible and I was getting so tired of it. I didn’t really know how to cope with it other than just making a song about it… The title of it, ‘Life’s a Gift’ is pretty ironic because at this time it didn’t feel like life was a gift it felt like life was just a burden and just a hell, just a prison. It’s some of my best work, definitely check it out because those songs are going to make you feel things you probably haven’t felt before.”

88 currently has over 11k monthly listeners on Spotify and doesn’t have any plans on stopping soon. His main goal is to make a living off music and then it’s only up from there for him. He can’t wait to perform again. His current goal once he graduates is to take a full gap year and focus all his attention on really blowing up in musical terms.

Our Town Reno Music reporting by Jaden Urban

After Years in the Making, Kidvika and LeQ Bring their “West Yet”

West Coast Hip-Hop has shaped an entire generation and is an important chapter in the history of music.

With acts such as N.W.A, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, E-40, Mac Dre, and many more, the West Coast sound is very distinct with its use of funk samples and hard-hitting drums and synths. It is also what inspired David Jarrett, who goes by his rapper name Kidvika, and Reed Lequerica, who goes by his producer name LeQ, with the creation of their new album, “The West Yet”.

Kidvika and LeQ are Reno Hip-Hop artists who have been collaborating with one another for four years. Kidvika got his stage name from his middle name, Kawika, and LeQ got his producer name from shortening his last name. They met over Instagram and an immediate chemistry and friendship was formed. They had never met each other even though they went to the same high school. 

The dynamic duo started working together endlessly and have continued that connection over the years, and now it’s as strong and tight as a fitted t-shirt on a bodybuilder. 

“I think people will be surprised,” Kidvika said. “I always wanted to be diverse. I’ve always wanted to be different. Getting into West Coast [music] was foreign to me.”

“Finally, for four years now we have been talking about dropping a project,” LeQ said. “We’ve come a long way from where we started and how we sounded. It’s just crazy. The first album I produced, I wanted to make sure it was complete.” 

In September 2021 is when the new album was identified as something the two wanted to tackle together. From that drive, the album’s only single, “Find That” was born. It was the very first song made for the eight-track album. There were many different versions of the song made until Kidvika finally found his new sound and new direction with the delivery of his voice.

“After Find That that’s when we were like yeah we’re putting together something here,” LeQ said. 

“We locked in for like a month straight, every weekend,” Kidvika said. “I changed my voice for the first time, I used to be higher pitched,” Kidvika said. “I started to use my regular voice.” Kidvika and LeQ have made many songs together and even dropped a three-song EP in 2020 titled Push Me. However, they knew that was only the beginning.

“Compared to what we have now, that’s not it,” LeQ said. 

In April 2021, the artists spent time in L.A. and worked at Saticoy and Omar’s Room which have housed some of Hip-Hop’s biggest musicians. The atmosphere of being in the sunny skies and the land of opportunity is what drove LeQ and Kidvika to step their game up.  

They gave high praise to Blxst for the inspiration of this album. Both of them loved his music and his sound. LeQ really found a love for the production that Blxst made since he’s both a rapper and producer. 

Kidvika mixed and mastered the entire album. He revised the mixes multiple times on each song on the album.

“Mixing this … was hard,” Kidvika said. “It was hard for me because we were working on the time limit, but at the same time, I’ve never mixed this well before. I wanted this to sound perfect, perfect.

The intro song Bring It Up was the one that Kidvika felt the best about recording. LeQ and Kidvika were on Facetime while LeQ was making the beat and everything just flowed so naturally. It was the second song made for the album. To counter, the hardest song for Kidvika to make was, “Baby” the final song recorded for the album. It took him over a month to finetune and get the first verse to sound exactly how he wanted it. The album was finally finished recording Jan 22. 

At a recent Holland Project performance in Reno.

After planning out months in advance of how they wanted to promote and market the album, it’s finally here. The guys are very excited about the reception the album is going to receive.

“For me it’s to showcase, one, how good we’ve gotten,” Kidvika said. “It’s a whole new sound, and it doesn’t sound bad… I want people to respond well with every song, but honestly, I just want to people at least like one song. I want someone to relate to one of the songs off the album to where they will download it and put it on their playlist.”

“A lot of people here in Reno don’t make that West Coast sound,” LeQ said. “We want to touch as many ears as we can.”  The album is available here, and is accessible on all platforms.

Our Town Reno Music Reporting by Jaden Urban

Meh, From a Forced Marriage to Becoming a Local Henna Hand Artist

Meh’s Origin Stories

Behind the Facebook and Instagram page called Reno Henna there is Meh, a 30-year-old Bangladeshi woman who came to Reno in 1997 as a young child.

“I like to consider myself as a Bangladeshi American,” she says. “I was born in Bangladesh, but was raised in America, in Reno. So I think I'm a little more American than Bangladeshi, I'm not sure.”

Born to a strict Bangladeshi Muslim household, her parents often did not allow her to go outside and play.

‘When I asked them for Henna cones, they would buy it for me, that's something I can do in my room or inside, just practice…when I wanted to play with my friends and they wanted to go outside, I would tell them, ‘Hey, I'll do some Henna and you stay inside we'll do this together.’ And I got them to stay and we would play inside and I would do their henna. And so that way I started practicing and I would just do it on myself all the time just to spend time,” she explained on how restrictions led to creativity. 

She explains her name and says it s Al-Mehbuba which translates to ‘‘the beloved’’ in Arabic. “But when we immigrated to America, I had to have a first and last name, so it was split into Al, first name and Mehbuba, last name. Same goes for my brothers, Al Mehadi (the peace) and Al Mehtab (the moon). Imagine receiving a phone call in our household where they ask for Al, but all three of our names are Al and the callers can't pronounce any of our last names and they would have to go through the first three letters to finally find out who they're calling about,” Meh laughed. 

“I had it flipped to [my] first name Mehbuba, from [my] last name Al in school because I hate being called Al. My older brother did the same. That's where Meh comes from. I didn't want to be called Al in school and Mehbuba was too difficult to say for everyone, so my 6th grade teacher stopped at Meh and said she couldn't pronounce anymore and would call me Meh (May). I love my name, the meaning behind it and everything about it and I wish more people would take the time to understand it and pronounce it. But I also understand how difficult it can be and have accepted my nickname that was forced on me to accommodate Americans at such a young age. I made sure to name my children small syllable names so it can be pronounced and not shortened. Some still have difficulty with it but no nicknames so far with them,” she said of some of the challenges of multiculturalism.

Initially Looking for Extra Income

For those who are not familiar with it, Henna is a plant-based dye created from the Henna tree, scientifically known as Lawsonia inermis. It contains a natural coloring pigment which is often used for temporary body art, hair color, and to dye skin, fingernails or even fabric. Though it was widely used in Ancient Egypt it became most popular in South Asia. It is also known as “Mehndi” in some countries. A person’s body temperature along with the atmospheric humidity often helps in darkening the color and some south Asian bridal traditions have superstitious beliefs attached to it. The color is further darkened by the use of sugar concentrated water or clove oil to make it more long lasting on the arms and legs especially for wedding purposes.

Meh started her side business as a Henna artist about four years ago.

“I had a part-time job and was looking for some extra income…that was when Reno was becoming a bigger city with a lot of festivals. There's just a lot of events that go on in downtown, especially during the summer. And so I figured that maybe I can start doing it professionally to make that extra income and be a part of the community,” she said.

Since then she has put up her stalls at various events, including rodeos and cook-offs. She also takes part in birthday parties and shows up in her attire which consists of colorful traditional lehenga, beautiful dresses from south Asia or sarees. She says it is the “cutest thing” when little children or girls walk past her and exclaim, ‘Is she a princess’ when they see her. 

Meh describes Henna to be a “poor person's business because in India and Bangladesh and the Middle East and Africa, we have Henna plants in our backyard and it's free, we just make a paste out of it.” However, for her own wedding when she was looking for Henna artists, as part of the tradition for the bride to be applying it on her big day, she found it to be very expensive. 

“It's actually extortion, charging $500 for an arm…so I wanted to go against that and make it affordable,” she says. "“I don't want it to become a rich person's business. I want it to be affordable to anyone who wants it. So if they want a simple flower, if a child wants it, I'm not gonna charge more than five dollars for that. So what if I can't live off of it. It's more of a fulfilling part-time job that I do, but it's also for others to be able to afford it and experience it. This is  something that comes from my culture as well. I can't hear the words from a mom saying I don't have money.If I hear a mom say that, I say, just come on over. It's fine.”

Covid definitely hit her small word-of-mouth in person business because she was initially unable to touch someone’s hand or draw on their palms but Meh says that unlike other winters she has had quite a few clients this season. 

Not Afraid to Innovate

Meh does not specifically stick to motifs like flowers or leaves as per traditional Henna designs but has also engaged in experimenting with the art. She often goes into drawing skulls, skeletons and spiders during Halloween or just other designs like corsets and dreamcatchers. In traditional Bangladeshi or Indian weddings she has to mostly cater to the demands of the client while adhering to cultural aspects and hiding the name of the groom in the design drawn on the bride’s hand. However, she shares that her American clients are often as “happy” with a simple drawing of a heart. 

“Americans are just so grateful...they sit right in front of me and they're like, ‘oh, is this okay? Like, is this gonna offend anyone?’ You don't have to do the designs that you normally do. They're very cautious and they're very respectful of our culture and what we've brought in. And I really appreciate that, but it's not something that one should fear whatsoever. Like Henna in the end is art. And whether you're doing it for your wedding or whether you just want a Disney princess for your daughter, I think that it should be appreciated and that a five year old, if that's all she wants, then let her have that happiness, no matter if she's American or Indian or not,” she said.

Apart from being a Henna artist Meh is also a mother of an 11-year-old daughter Arisha, and a one-year-old son Ayaan. She is currently pursuing general studies at TMCC and is a mentor in literacy programs with AmeriCorps. She dreams of having a career in the medical field eventually, she told me, while preparing a plate of nachos for her family.

Meh was married off at the very young age of fifteen, forcefully by her father, through an arranged marriage where she says she dealt with marital abuse. She gave birth to her daughter from her first husband when she was 19. Though she met her current husband Emerson at the age of 17, she was only able to settle with him in 2018, five years after she ended ties with her first husband.

Emerson Avecedo is a law enforcement officer who is African American, Native American and also Hispanic.

“My one-year-old is actually African American, he's Hispanic, he's Native American and he's Asian. So, I get to check all those boxes for him,” Meh says. “I've lived a lot in these last 30 years.” Meh said she would write a book someday and share her journey with many other women like her who might have been  forced to be in a difficult marriage, as an inspiration to recover and find new wings.

Our Town Reno reporting by Kingkini Sengupta

Upcoming Benefit Concert Inspires to Help Those Struggling in the Community

One of the more recent support groups to establish itself in northern Nevada, Family Soup Mutual Aid (FSMA) will be hosting the “Our Streets Benefit Concert” on March 9th at Dead Ringer Analog Bar on E 4th street. Tickets are $10 for four live bands, two DJs, an online local art auction, and access to two food trucks, Reno Pink Taco Truck and Hey Hey’s Fried Chicken. Doors will open at 7 p.m.

The organization also meets every Tuesday at 5 pm at the Believe Plaza downtown to deliver hot food, winter gear, hygiene packs, and other donations to those in need. All proceeds from the Dead Ringer event will funnel into those kinds of supplies and needs. Ever since they started a few months ago they haven’t missed a Tuesday.

“It’s a bummer that us as organizers and activists in this area who are genuinely working-class people, who have had to struggle with poverty especially now in Reno with the changes over the past couple of years and the aggressive gentrification of this city, it’s f*** up that we have to do this,” Anagapesis said. “The people who are doing what we are doing, the other organizers, activists, and advocates … are doing it at a financial deficit and a labor deficit. Everybody’s exhausted. We are a very new mutual aid organization and we are already straight up tapped bro, but we’re doing it. We’re already going to be tired, might as well do something good with our exhaustion and our rage.”

Part of her anger stems from the hostile architecture, often benches you can’s lie down on, or boulders to prevent people from gathering in public spaces, she keeps seeing around Reno, which she calls “antihuman.”

“Let’s make ourselves present and bring the people back where they should be,” Russell said. “There’s a lot of connection and a lot of community behind it… We are always trying to get money from other people, that’s why we’re doing this show so we can start putting in more funds into this so we can boost this up.”

“It’s our wealth, we are all working-class people that are redistributing the things we worked really hard for, to give it back to the community where it should be,” Anagapesis said. “It should be in the hands of the working-class people, in the hands of those that are the lifeblood of this city, not the elites. The elites aren’t doing shit for us, they are quite literally backtracking all progress these activists and advocates have been doing.”

During a snowstorm this winter, they were able to raise $2,000 in less than 48 hours to acquire tarps and clothes for those whose shelters were getting destroyed.  In regard to how the donations are dispersed, it is first-come, first-serve. Now you would think this would cause some issues, but Russell and Anagapesis assured me that the houseless community is quite strong and look out for one another. They even grab some for their friends that can’t risk losing their spot or leaving their belongings, as life on the streets is full of precarious situations.

The mutual aid group prides itself on being a leaderless organization that gives everyone a say. It’s either all hands in or all hands out. There are about 15 of them in a group message where they plot and plan their next venture.

“Every week we have been growing it’s so impressive,” Russell said. “Each week there’s a new face. Every week is bigger, every week is a new milestone. You don’t even realize you’re going to hit that milestone until it’s directly in front of you.”

This will be their first time hosting a benefit concert. Some of the bands on the billing that have participated in benefit concerts have helped them ease into this uncharted territory. The Truckee Meadows John Brown Gun Club will be present for security.

I was able to sit down with at least one member from each of the bands that are performing at the show.

Pussy Velour is a local rock and roll group that started in October. With zero hesitation they decided to join the Dead Ringer event once they heard the word benefit. 

“We want to bring rock and roll to masses,” Wolfgang Hendrix, the lead singer of Pussy Velour said. “Music’s meant for everybody and everyone should enjoy it. We want as many people to get to the show so we can make an actual impact and really help out those in need.”

The band also expresses their frustration with how the houseless population has been treated. 

“The resources in our town for the houseless population here is horrible,” Bobby Enzenberger, bassist for the band said. “It’s embarrassing. Any little thing we can do, this is very easy for us to do, but I’ve heard we’ve been able to bring a lot of support to them [Family Soup Mutual Aid]. It feels good.”

“Mutual aid is one of the most important things you can do for your community,” Clair Monteith, guitarist for the band said. “It’s very easy for us to step up, so we’re going to. I wish our council felt the same way.”

“Step up or step off really,” Wolfgang adds.

Kevin Montoya, aka Felipendejo, a punk experimental one-man band, loops drums and does guitar, vocals, and keys live. He wants to get other people to express themselves in any way possible, even if it’s not through music.

Kevin Montoya (above) has done benefit concerts before and thinks this one will have a great turnout.

“I hope they keep doing what they’re doing to get stuff for the less fortunate, get some clothes and get some donations and spread the love,” Montoya said.

Evan Lantto from Cruel Ultimatum describes his first band as, “Dorky, hardcore, middle-aged crisis nonsense I suppose.” 

While this is his first band, everyone else has a bunch of experience and has been in countless bands. Simply, Lantto’s only goal is to have fun. 

“I was a houseless person, and tend to be from time to time and any time you get to make music and it helps somebody out it’s a good thing,” Lantto said. “It’s excellent… Benefits are something I’m familiar with and enjoy.”

Evan Lantto from Cruel Ultimatum (left) and Skylar Lash from Action Bastard (right) who let other musicians know about the benefit as well.

Lantto has done some benefit concerts in the past and has worked with fundraising when he used to work in the gaming industry. He even once hosted a show for one of his friend's mom that was dying of cancer. He’s very excited about the turnout of this next concert.

“I want to put on the gnarliest show, all bands involved can, and also want to help people out,” Lantto said. “Houseless individuals have been particularly targeted and neglected especially during quarantine and with the deconstruction of their tent cities. I want to put on entertainment for as many people as possible and I want to help as many people as possible and help them get to the basic human rights that they deserve.”

Lantto believes FSMA is a great organization and knows they are doing great things for the community.

“I think this organization is excellent. I think Nicole and everybody involved is spectacular. I think the show is not something to be missed. Anybody that can show up should, it’s for an excellent cause and it’s worthwhile.”

Skylar Lash, a member of Action Bastard says his band plays “a lot of stupid music for the people of Reno” and describes the music as “a bunch of people blowing duck calls into buckets of water.” 

In all actuality, it’s an afrobeat band that incorporates noise music into it. Lash has played for over 20 years. Music has always played a pivotal role in his life.

“The ability to let my mind stop freaking out on itself all the time and get that sense of catharsis of I’m no longer needing to think about the trials and tribulations I have in my life or the people that rely on me or the people I think rely on me,” Lash said. “When I play music I let go of all of that and I become the conduit for it, it’s not even really me making the music anymore it just comes through me.”

He used to be worried about how his music could sell, but now he says he no longer cares and can truly just express himself to the fullest. 

Lash had zero hesitation to join along for the ride as well as he wants to help in any way that he can. He says he has a good relationship and trust with the people who are working for Family Soup Mutual Aid. The big thing he hopes to accomplish with the show is to inspire.

“I hope that regardless if the concert goes off well or not, [if] the meaning of intention is noticed by others in the community and maybe other venues who put all these kind of shows on, maybe [the ones that] hamstring artists that they book to play and take advantage of them,” he said. “What we’re doing is a benefit for people who have only been taken advantage of and I would like this to be a beautiful stepping stone in having the live music and performance art community, that is so alive and well in Reno even though they've been hamstrung by what has happened over the past few years, to take notice that it is worthwhile and maybe you don’t make money hand over fist like you'd expect when you book an artist. But you allow them to bring people out of the woodwork and support people who probably can’t even afford to pay for a ticket to go to some of our shows.”

“This is not something we are doing for profit because we profit off it every day, so why can’t we give a day here or there to give back,” Lash concluded. “No one is really doing it and if anything, more than anything I hope that this show opens some other business owners' and venue owners' eyes to seeing how impactful this can be.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Jaden Urban

From High School Friends to Successful Local Reno Band: Charity Kiss is Only Getting Started

For each Charity Kiss member, there is a musical progression, through instruments and influences. Before he picked up a microphone or guitar Patrick Hansen learned the Ukulele when he was 15 to impress girls. 

“I realized how easy it was to get girls when you play an instrument,” Hansen says half-jokingly. “I started singing and enjoyed it more and more. Then I learned guitar because I wanted to learn a real instrument. It’s hard to play Ukulele in front of a giant crowd… Ever since then I’ve playing and singing trying to write songs.”

Noah Linker expressed how much music has impacted his life and how it created the person who he is today.

“Basically, I’ve been pretty into music my entire life,” Linker said. “I was introduced to the Beatles at a very young age. It was very dangerous because I just fell in love to the music and everything before I even knew anything about what it was. Ever since then I just wanted to be a musician. So around age nine I got my first guitar and just been playing and playing ever since then. Played in a few other bands in high school. But now I’ve ended up here writing with Charity Kiss, writing with myself and yeah, the journey has just begun.” 

Wyatt Ziegler, who is filling in for the bassist while Hendriks is in Canada is still fairly new to the music scene. “I actually started doing music stuff fairly recently, probably when I was 18, I’m 21 now so it’s been about three years,” Ziegler said. “I grew up loving music I never really played anything specifically, but when I went up to college I was in the search for something more. So I picked up a guitar started learning how to record and here we are.”

Nate Drum became a product of his biggest musical influences.

“A big part of the reason I started playing drums is because my last name is Drum,” Drum said. “I thought it would be funny. Also, growing up I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin and watching John Bonham, Neil Peart, all those guys, Tommy Lee. Anytime I was watching a video of the bands playing I was obsessed with watching the drummers and so I’ve always been kind of attracted to that.” 

Sitting the band down together for an interview was quite the experience. As soon as I greeted them I got this strong sense of humility and felt a very welcoming and joyful presence. There was no ego or looking bored at the time wondering when they could get in-and-out of the interview as soon as possible.  

Watching the members interact with one another you could tell that they had a cohesion like a brotherhood. Witty jokes and backhanded remarks fly by, but they really add character to who the band is. 

What peaked my interest about the band was I remembered most of the members because I went to high school with them at Spanish Springs High School. At the time their name was Color T.V. and it was only comprised of Drum, Hendriks, and Hansen. They performed one time during one of our pep rallies and the crowd was going crazy and they sounded really good. I had never gone and checked them out as I was really only listening to rap music at the time. Their band was the talk of the entire school. 

In regard to how Color T.V. started, Hansen claims there wasn’t much serious intent behind it initially.

“We were just like, ‘Hey it’s fun to jam’ and then we wanted to play our own songs so we started making our own songs,” Hansen said. “From there the dream started growing and people actually liked us more than we thought and we were like oh this weird.”

After high school Hansen went on a mission trip to Panama and the band stopped making music. When Hansen returned, it was time to put the needle back down.

“When I got back from Panama we decided that we wanted to make a go of it again and be more serious with this next venture we’re trying,” Hansen said. “We decided on a new name and bringing in a new member with Noah, would kind of set the tone for what we wanted to do. Like we were no longer the old local band that was fun to go see in the backyard. We are Charity Kiss, a real band that we’re trying to do real things with.”

The birth of the name came from when Hendriks, Hansen, and Drum were up in a cabin. They had been trying to figure out a new name. They found a book called “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. In the book there was a sentence that said “the kiss of charity”. Drum had initially offered that as the name for the new band, but shifted the words around to Charity Kiss. Hansen and Hendriks loved it. 

While the band has been able to form a good following here in Reno, the band’s ultimate goal is to relocate to Los Angeles.

“We’ve established a lot here in Reno and we love it here,” Ziegler said. “But the scene is pretty small and we want to get to a place where we can reach more people. But home base will always be Reno, we love Reno here too. We just think there might something more we can hit in LA.”

“We didn’t realize there was all these different scenes in all these cities across the country,” Linker said. “Being in Reno forever, it’s up and down for a while.”

Another reason why the band wants to relocate in L.A. is to have a house where they can all lock in and focus on music together all the time. Other goals for the collective is to engage more on social media, try and reach more people, and make more music. 

“We just try to chase the passion of music,” Hansen said. “The goal is to always be writing something new. Not have every song sound, not to bash on Green Day, but you know every song is the same and you’re like ‘Oh they have a system down.’”

The band also wants to release a bunch of songs that they have performed, but people can’t listen to it through their streaming provider of choice. When it comes to releasing music, it can be very challenging for them because they have to account for five different perspectives and opinions on how the song should sound. It also makes it hard with Hendriks out of the country right now.

On Feb 14 they released, “Polka Dot Girl” which is a two-song pack also including the song, “What I Like About You”. Polka Dot Girl was one of the first songs the band made and they have performed it for over a year. You can check out “Polka Dot Girl” and their other music here: linktr.ee/CharityKiss

Our Town Reno Music Reporting by Jaden Urban

My First Experience at a Punk Show with Blind Fortune Headlining in a Garage

Intrigued and Willing

Going to my first punk rock show in a garage was an experience unlike anything I have ever gone through. As a music connoisseur, I’ve seen at least over a hundred different artists live. From genres such as Hip-Hop, R&B, Alternative, EDM, and Pop. However I had never been to an aggressive rock, punk, or garage rock type show.

The band, Blind Fortune, had been on my radar for a long time as I heard and knew of them through friends of friends. I had been really intrigued by their style and music for some time and looked for the opportunity to go to one of the shows and sit down with the band to pick their brains. 

I had seen that they had a billing lined up and knew some of my friends that were going to the show. I decided that this was the right time to give myself this experience to try something new out. 

Let’s Get Some Movement

As soon as the show starts, with everyone standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the tightly packed garage, it’s an experience unlike any other before. At this point I’m standing two feet away from the lead singer for the first band, Crossing Point. There’s a lot of vibrant colors and personalities in the garage, with each band having their names spray painted on wooden boards hanging on top of the garage door. 

The first lead vocalist dedicates the song to his brother who sadly took his own life. The vocalist cathartically sings his heart out before saying, “Let’s get some movement.” At the time I had no idea what that meant before I watched the mosh pit open right in front of my eyes and people starting moshing together.

I know mosh pits get a bad reputation as some say it’s just an excuse to beat up on each other, and from my experiences, sometimes that is definitely the case. In this sense, it had a different feeling to it. As I watched everyone in the pit push, throw elbows and punch each other while the blaring rock music was playing with every drum beat equating to my heartbeat, I got a sense of free-spiritedness. The people in-and-out of the mosh pit seemed so alive and in the moment, a strong sense of youthfulness and the idea that we are here for a good time not a long time. Rebelling against the system and society’s expectations of what we can and can’t do. No one was trying to pretend to be someone they’re not. Everyone was fully expressing themselves to the absolute fullest. 

As the show goes on, the culture shock starts to fade and I start to really get into the music. Mind you, I have heard punk music, but only on a handful of occasions. As for each time the amp shrieks I start anticipating the next song that’s about to be played. The atmosphere of us all standing in a little house garage with a staircase, right behind us that is just as packed with the side door barely being able to close sounds crazy, but it actually heightens the show as you feel more of a closeness and connection with everyone in  the crowd and with the bands. 

A Sober, Straight Edge Event Interrupted

The bands that played were Crossing Point, blanket., Mira Loma, Ego Trip, and headlining, Blind Fortune. While I came specifically to see Blind Fortune, the other bands definitely didn’t disappoint. Each band brought their own style and performance style to the show, it didn’t feel as if I watched the same bands over and over again. The band, blanket, had only practiced together four times with this being their first show. 

After each band played there was a 15 minute intermission where everyone would go stand in the backyard while the bands would set up their stage for performance. It was a straight edge event so there was no alcohol or drugs allowed at the house. Everyone was sober the entire time. 

After all the other bands, Blind Fortune looks to close out what had been a pretty good night. The anticipation builds as they have built a great reputation for their live shows. As the performance begins everyone is very involved and into the music. They did a cover of a song that I didn’t know, but it seemed that everyone in the garage knew it word for word. Once they were playing their third song, red and blue lights started appearing from the top of the garage window.

The lights turned on as someone said, “We gotta shut down, they said if we don’t leave we have to start writing tickets.” 

Everyone starts piling out of the garage while I stick around and wait to steal some of the band’s time for an interview.

This photo of the event sparked lots of comments on our Instagram, related to COVID and other community comments.

Meeting Blind Fortune

Briefly before the interview starts I sit and formally meet everyone and immediately you get the sense that these guys had all been friends for some time as they were laughing and joking at each other. 

The band is made up of five members. Cooper Conway, 19, who plays bass and has been playing for 8 years. He’s been in a couple bands before this, but this one he’s really excited about.

The next is Blake Boswell, 23. His friends call him “Bozy.” He is the lead singer and started just in May of last year.  “It’s all new to me. [It’s] super sick, I love it,” Bozy said. 

Tyler Nelson is the drummer for the band. He has been a drummer for five to six years. He was born and raised in Reno, and grew up with the other band members.

Manning Gray, who plays guitar, likes to skate, hang out with his friends, write songs, and play shows.

Conner Bannistor, 20, another guitarist who has been playing for four years also grew up in Reno.

“[I’m] super stoked on Blind Fortune,” Bannistor said. “This new project is crazy, it’s cool seeing everything come together. Every song becoming more solid in what we want our sound to be.”

Even though the show that night was cut short. The band expressed how well the night turned out for the other bands. It was three of the four opening bands’ performing for the first. The band also expressed how much live shows meant to them. 

“We all love the support and giving back support,” Bozy said. “It's super sick to see people all come together as one. There’s no outcast, there's nobody that feels alone and that’s one thing we really aspire for because we’ve been those outcasts, those guys getting kicked out… We are stoked for the future, it’s always gonna be a blind fortune, everything that comes with. Gotta love it.”

The DIY Scene

Conway’s favorite part about performing is the crowd, standing on top of amps, and watching his friends jam out. Bozy loves singing along with the crowd as he says, “Everyone here kills it. Can’t wait for the next one.” Nelson likes the intimacy of the shows and Gray doubles down on that and talks about how good the DIY scene here in Reno is. The DIY scene means that the shows are usually set up without any sort of venue or promoters and are thrown at people’s house. 

“Definitely more stoked on the DIY scene and playing more shows just because the DIY scene in it of itself is more intimate you know there’s so much love and so much support,” Bannistor said. “All of our support comes from each other, so it’s sick to see it evolve. It’s sick when new people come into the scene and like Manning was saying when there’s a spot where we can actually put on a show ourselves, it’s nuts you know. Seeing all your friends beat the crap out of each other with a smile on their face right in front of your face.”

Before Blind Fortune there was a band named Anapathic, but it didn’t last. Nelson, Conway and Bannistor were in the band. After it didn’t work out they started something new. That’s when they came up with the name.

“For the name, we just threw around names until it felt right,” Nelson said. “Every day we play a show it finds its meaning. People come to shows and that in it of itself is a blind fortune. You don’t know what you’re walking into. Most of us grew up together. [We] started music in our ways and then just put it all together.”

“Blind Fortune stuck out because it felt so much more better, you know what I mean,” Bannistor said. “It’s a blind fortune in it of itself. One band broke up so a new one could form.”

Better than 9 to 5

When talking about goals for the band, Bozy talked about how since they are all skaters, they’re on the road constantly and that’s where he is happiest. 

“That’s always felt like home,” he said. “For me, my goal, our goal, if we can just be on the road all the time and seeing all the love out there. [Seeing] new places, pretty places, you know there’s always somewhere to go. I love it. I just want to be on the road.”

Conway’s end goal is focused on doing something music related no matter what it is.

“I’ve wanted to be a musician since I was a child,” Conway said. “I’ve always, I don’t know, I’ve felt that’s always been something I am good at. You know I can work, I can go to a 9-5, but at the end of the day I know I am good at music. I fully realized that during COVID and I know I can do this, so my end goal is to just find a career whether it be a roadie, sound engineering, or in a badass band.”

Nelson and Gray expressed how the artistry of creating music matters to them and they hope it reaches listeners as well. 

“Starting this music and thinking about an end goal is kinda tricky,” Nelson said. “You know the goal has always been evolving. First it was write a song and then play a show and now it’s come to like set up a tour and go through with it. For an end goal you know I just want to, you know, the fulfillment to play every show. That fulfillment in being a musician is what I crave. I think dancing around the world and sharing our sound, getting other people to dance to it is my end goal, however that happens.”

“My end goal in music and with Blind Fortune is, you know when you see a band cover a song of a band that’s no longer together and everyone gets so excited that the band is playing that cover, and everyone’s singing the words so excited because that song means so much to them,” Gray said. “It means so much to them, makes them feel something because it reminds them maybe of a time in their life and it takes them back and makes them relive those feelings and like reflect on them. So, maybe my goal would be for my music to have the kind of effect on people where if someone else played my song it would have that much joy to them as if we were playing it and for it to mean something.”

Music has always been therapeutic to a lot of people and it holds a lot of emotional weight for a lot of people. 

“There’s no other feeling like writing a song with your best friends and being like good, ‘Holy crap that sounded so good’ that stoke is like the ultimate stoke, it’s the best stoke I’ve ever felt, it's the hardest stoke i’ve ever felt,” Bannistor said. “Music’s always meant a lot to me, meant a lot to all of us. I’ve felt so alone sometimes you know the only thing that I can relate to was a song. It helps me navigate my emotions. Like what Manning was saying being able to do that for other people is also like the end goal. Making something for people to relate to when they can’t relate to anything else.”

The band is planning on doing more shows and tours throughout the year and look to get more involved in clothing. Follow them on their Instagram @blind.fortune for more updates on new shows, merch, and music. Check out their latest ep here: linktr.ee/Blindfortune

Our Town Reno Music Reporting by Jaden Urban

J Gip Turning Towards Rap to Save His Life and Tell "Psych Ward Stories"

Anxiety, Football and Thousands of Listens on Soundcloud

Entering Peg’s Glorified Ham n Eggs is a welcoming feeling, with the aroma of coffee and bacon that fills the atmosphere and the service that helps enlighten the time we spend there. One of those working there, as part of several jobs he holds, with a and larger than life bright personality, is Jordan Gipson, also a talented musician, but with a dark, difficult past.

“Summer 2019, two weeks after my birthday, my birthday is July 23,” Gipson said, “I went to Vegas and I came back from a trip. I was working at Peg’s and that’s when everything really hit me.”

Rewind a few years before, and it seems everything externally was fine, from sports to a new path in music.

Gipson was a football player during his time at Damonte Ranch High School and would go on to play college at the University of La Verne. Football was his biggest passion at the time until one day his roommate asked him if he wanted to get on a song with him. Gipson was a little skeptical as he had just rapped for fun and freestyled, but figured he might as well give it a try. 

Once the song they made was released, it ended up getting 14 thousand views on Soundcloud. 

“The more I got into music, the less football became my passion,” Gipson said. “I decided to quit football and move back to Reno and just started doing music.”  After some time of creating and crafting his own sound, like a drug, Gipson became an addict that couldn’t get enough of the doses of serotonin that music would give him.

“It’s like scoring a touchdown when you make a good song or are performing on stage,” Gipson said. “It’s that ultimate feeling that gives you satisfaction.”

Making music gave him an outlet to express himself creatively and therapeutically. Gipson was going through a battle that he didn’t know would wash over him and nearly drown his life and mind over the coming years. During his senior year of high school, Gipson had been dealing with depression and anxiety throughout the entire year. 

“I’d have anxiety attacks in class. There would be times I couldn’t get out of bed. There was times like that, but it was nothing compared to what I have now,” said Gipson.

A screengrab from some of his recent Instagram activity @jordan_javon

The Night is Always Darkest before Dawn

After just coming back from Vegas after his 2019 birthday and walking into work, Gipson felt good, but something was off. Something in his mind wasn’t all there. Now we all have come into work with a foggy or a light-headed mind, but something about this was strange. 

As Gipson is working these random, horrific thoughts keep coming in-and-out of his head. The thoughts are out of control, but Gipson didn’t understand why they were happening. He was hoping it was just a bad day. Throughout the day he couldn’t eat and would throw up everything that he tried to put down. He was very confused and scared at what was happening to him. 

When Gipson got home he was praying that he could just sleep it off and that everything would be better. However, when we awoke from what felt like a nightmare the day before, it was slowly coming to be his new harsh reality that he was going to face as the thoughts still remained in his head day after day. 

After a few days, things got worse as Gipson felt like his mind was transferring to another dimension. To the point where you can’t describe or show it to anybody who hasn’t seen this other world. This world creates terrible thoughts and illusions about our current reality. Gipson was thinking everyone could see this world and hear what was going on in his head. He thought everyone despised him and looked down on him, so much so that he thought they wanted him to take his life.

The pressure was weighing down on Gipson and was making him crumble like a rock that degrades to sand. At this point, he says he didn’t want to live life anymore.

Gipson grabbed his microphone cord as he thought it could represent a symbol for him and tied a noose around his neck in his closet. Before he decides to go through with it, he calls his best friend, Trever Schryer, to tell him he loves him and how much he has meant to him. A final goodbye to his lifelong childhood buddy.

As Gipson awaits his final seconds, he puts the cord around his neck, hopeless that life has anymore to offer and makes the final descent into ridding himself of all the pain and suffering. Gipson hangs there in the closet watching slowly as everything turns black. Watching as the happy and upbeat person that he was, fade away into an abyss.

Before he could see his final seconds one of his best friends, Ryan Riggle picks him up and intercepts his voyage to the afterlife as Riggle screams for his girlfriend to grab a knife to cut Gipson down. Riggle cuts Gipson down and throws him on the bed.

The Hospital Experience

Gipson is rushed to the hospital. He hasn’t slept for three days. He has had no food and no water. At this point his mind is still living in this other dimension, the dimension is known as psychosis. Psychosis is where people lose connection with reality and have hallucinations and delusions about everything.

Gipson lays there on the bed as his family is sitting next to him. They’re begging him to hold on for him and his family. They want him to think about the good times.

“While I’m thinking they’re saying think about the good times, in my mind, I’m thinking they want me to die,” Gipson said. “So, I’m like this is my mission right now.”

They made Gipson stay the night and as he was in the psychiatric unit, he found a pen. Without hesitation he started stabbing himself in the neck, about six or seven times until someone tackled him. As Gipson’s hands are covered in blood and there’s blood everywhere a bunch of workers grab him and put him in a bed. Gipson felt his life was fading away on that hospital bed, but the workers just put him to sleep where he was unconscious for three days. 

When he finally woke up, he still felt very psychotic to the point that when they were letting him walk around, Gipson tried to jump out of a window. Ultimately, he couldn’t break the glass as the glass acted as a backboard keeping him inbounds in the game of life. 

After a couple of days, the terror of this harsh reality still enveloped Gipson’s head, but his aunt was trying to help guide him out of it. His aunt offered a healthy perspective to Gipson because she also suffers from mental illness disorders. He says she helped him come out of his psychosis.

Once Gipson was feeling a little better he stayed in a little room at Saint Mary’s where there were four people watching him at all times whether he was showering, eating or sleeping. After a few days, when the hospital thought Gipson was doing better they released him and he went home. But when he thought this might’ve been the end of a scary movie, the opening credits hadn’t even started yet. 

The Rough Road that Follows After

“The next year was torture of intrusive thoughts, pain and suffering and depression,” Gipson said. “Not being able to leave [my] bed. Going job-to-job because I didn’t want to work because I was too scared to go outside. Hurting my family members because I’m in pain and a pain to deal with. And then it all caught up with me again.” 

Gipson had become addicted to a prescription drug called Ativan, which is kind of like Xanax. One day he decided to take 12 of them and wash them down with five Truly Hard Seltzers. He then drove to his friends house down the street and they could tell something was off. Gipson left the house after only being there for about five minutes. He has no memory of driving to and from his friend’s house. It wasn’t until he started texting his girlfriend at the time, Haley Beyer that someone noticed he wasn’t okay. Gipson was speaking gibberish and wasn’t making any sense, she got worried and headed straight over to his house.  

“I thought I was gonna die that day just because I took so many pills,” Gipson said. “I thought mixing it with the alcohol that I would just pass out.”

Gipson was rushed back again to the hospital for a night before being transferred to Reno Behavioral Healthcare Hospital.

After a week in that hospital, Gipson was released and returned home.

“I spent a week in a psych ward,” Gipson said. “I’m still doing pretty bad, but my friends, they want to move into a house. I’m living in my mom’s house at the time. My friends were like, ‘Jordan come move into this house with us. It’s gonna be good, it’ll get you better’... That house really helped me a lot just moving in with my friends.” 

“I got on the right medications. I found the right psychiatrist who truly knew what I was going through because a lot of psychiatrists, a lot of them were confused with what I was going through and thought I was a little crazy. When I found the right psychiatrist they told me that many people go through what I go through, I was very relieved. They put me on the right medications, so I think that was the first step.” 

The Journey Back

Gipson moved into the house in South Reno with some of his friends and ended up getting a job at MYNT dispensary where he packages marijuana. He said that the job helped improve his social skills. Ultimately, it was his relationship with his girlfriend, now ex-girlfriend, and mom that really helped.

“I just wanna shout out to my ex-girlfriend Haley,” Gipson said. “She was there every step of the way. Out of anybody, I appreciate her and my mom the most.”

After the suffering that Gipson endured over the course of the past two years, things started to trend upwards. He started going out more and expanding his social circle and he was on the right medication. Although he still struggles with his mental health, some days are better than others. He has no plan on ending his life as he has so much to live for and accomplish. 

Recently, Gipson, who goes by his rapper name, J Gip has been making and releasing a ton of music solo and with a group of his friends in a group called, Shift the Wave. Shift the Wave recently had a concert at Holland Project in December and are currently releasing a new song every Wednesday for the coming months. (Find their music here: linktr.ee/shiftthewave)

At the concert, Gipson got to perform his song, “Psych Ward Stories” for the first time. The song details his mental health struggles and tells the story of the time when he was at the psych ward. 

“It was very humbling,” Gipson said. “I have performed a lot, but I have never felt a type of emotion like when performing. I was holding back tears. I know people were listening to the story. My friends knew what I went through and I had my friends in their feels. Just sharing my story to so many people, it was hard for me to hold back the tears and emotions, but I’m so happy I did and I know I'm going to perform that song again to get my story out.” (The song is available on Apple Music and Spotify)

At the end of the day, Gipson loves creating music and expressing himself artistically. It is one of his best ways to cope with his mental health.

“The music man,” Gipson said. “I just kept making music throughout all of it…It just lets me get my emotions out and tell my story you know. So, I don’t have to hold it in and hold these thoughts in all the time. The music makes me express myself and makes me feel less crazy knowing I can put art into this or something back into the world. Maybe one day people will listen to down the road when I’m long gone and they’ll still feel like and be like ‘wow, like this really resonates with me’. I don’t think I would be here without the music.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours in English, Spanish. Learn more here.

Call 800-273-8255 for any urgent situation.

Reporting by Jaden Urban who is also a member of Shift the Wave

Entering the World of Our Local Spoken Word Collective

An Initiation at UNR

The first time I ever witnessed a spoken word poetry performance in person was in 2017, in one of my English classes at the University of Nevada, Reno. Under the harsh lights of a university classroom, a female student had come in to invite us to join Wolf Speaks UNR, a spoken word poetry club.

The poem she performed was from the point of view of Black mothers and their experiences in the United States. Her words gripped my heart, and tears welled up in my eyes. Each spoken word performance that I’ve seen since has touched me in the same way.

I didn’t know it then, but Wolf Speaks was associated with a larger organization called Spoken Views Collective. The next time I saw a performance would be at one of their events in November 2021.

The show was called Insomnia. It headlined the winner of Season 15 America’s Got Talent, Brandon Leake. Leake hosted a one man spoken word play with local poets as opening acts. These poets included SaMoura Horsley, a founding member of Wolf Speaks UNR; Jessie James Ziegler, an active member of the Spoken Views Collective, and Sana Sana, a local artist.

Each performer had their own topics that they spoke on. It ranged from growing up in the ever changing landscape of Northern Nevada to the experiences of people of color.

When a powerful line reached the audience, they would respond with snapping fingers or hums of appreciation. In the silent moments when a poet would pause, I could hear the sniffling of those moved to tears.

“I think it is healing,” Iain Watson, the founder and director of the Spoken Views Collective said in regards to spoken word. “When people share, I think it really opens up the idea that you’re not alone.”

Watson believes that sharing the vulnerabilities of your heart through poetry creates connections between the performer and their audience. 

“Sometimes you get into those dark spaces [in your mind] and … you find the shame in yourself. … But when people talk about those things, you’re like ‘Geez, I went through the same exact thing, and that person’s talking about it,” Iain Watson, the founder and director of the Spoken Views Collective, said.

The very beginnings of the collective

The collective wasn’t even a thought in his mind when Watson, and his co-founder Tony Walker started planning an event called Spoken Views in 2006.

“We were like hip hop artists- mainly rapping, but we also had a deep love for spoken word poetry,” Watson said. Inspired by Def Poetry Jam, and noticing the missing poetry scene in Reno, they started planning.

The event was held at Se7en Tea House and Bar on the commercial floor of Arlington Towers in 2007. The business has since closed, but Watson still remembers it fondly.

“They kind of offered us to do an open-mic there, or like a little performance,” Watson recalled. The event featured a mixture of poetry and music that he and his friends performed.

The event went well. Watson and a group of friends involved in poetry started building the collective from there.

“We were just kind of feeling the community out,” Watson said. They went into other venues to perform, and eventually decided to start hosting open-mics in different venues.

After hosting a few open-mics, the collective found a permanent home at The Holland Project.

“I almost want to say [we ended up at The Holland] eight to nine years ago because again, Facebook reminds me of this stuff,” Watson laughed.

There was a time when Watson was doing everything for the collective. He was in charge of promoting, opening the doors, and closing down venues.

“Unfortunately, the other founder hasn’t been involved in the collective for quite a while,” Watson said. He defined it as a falling out, but was hesitant to go into details. “I was doing every single thing for a few years,” Watson explained. “Until some people in the collective started stepping up.”

Watson has come to realize that his aspirations are bigger than he can manage. As an elementary school teacher, and caretaker to his father, he is learning to take a step back.

“I really came to a realization that I can’t rely on the poets to do other jobs, you know; because ultimately they’re doing what they’re doing with our collective because they love poetry,” Watson elaborated.

A Revolving Door of Poets and New Ideas

Watson wants to print a quarterly zine for the collective, and he’s inspired by bigger poetry communities in Los Angeles. “The collective is, you know, it’s really weird,” Watson said. “It’s a very big revolving door.”

While Watson wants the collective to grow, there comes a point when powerful poets in the collective leave, or some only stay involved for a year. “I believe it kind of- in a way- hurts us a little bit,” Watson said. He believes that those poets could make a big impact in the community, if the collective could get them into more venues.

Despite this, Watson is happy to see members who have been there from the beginning and newer members that want to be more involved. The Spoken Views Collective is currently attempting to reach out to high school students. In the past, they’ve worked with students who went on to create Wolf Speaks at the university.

“I really love to see that … people grow and then kind of create their own little facet, you know; but still under the Spoken Views umbrella,” Watson said.

One of Watson’s goals for the youth program is to send students to one of the biggest poetry slam youth competitions: Brave New Voices. They were able to send six students to one of their competitions in Washington D.C. in 2016.

“We finally got Reno on the map to do that,” Watson said. It was a huge undertaking for the collective and required hard work and an enormous amount of fundraising. “I think it really opens up avenues for students,” Watson said. Many students that the collective has worked with continue to write and perform poetry.

Including Horsley, Ming Li Wu went to Washington D.C. in 2016. Wu has performed at a TEDx event in Reno and had their poetry featured by the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition.

“They find their voice and they find the people that are [like-minded]. It creates like a family, you know,” Watson said. “I always call this, a family; the collective, a family.”

Our Town Reno reporting by Lynn Lazaro

James Carden, A Comedian on the Rebound With Warnings about Fentanyl

For James Carden, 35, his dark comedy sets in Reno have repeatedly been linked to heroin. Talking about heroin is part of his routine, and using was part of his “coping mechanism” until very recently.  Now he’s resolute in turning the corner, and being serious about warning others and the community of disturbing trends, including more and more deadly fentanyl blended into the highly addictive drug. 

Carden started using heroin as a teenager.  “I would just kind of, you know, go through life, like kind of coasting, like I would have some accomplishments and then relapse and like hit rock bottom again.”

He had gotten clean for a while, but as he started to get success in his comedy career out west from his previous base in Montana, he got really nervous and relapsed.  

In Reno, where he moved several years ago, he used to coordinate and host open mic nights, including at the Dead Ringer Analog Bar where he also bartended.

“I’ve just been pretty much all around here,” he told Our Town Reno during a recent interview. “It's really hard to get into like the Laugh Factory and stuff like that, but that would be an ultimate goal of mine to do that.”

But his heroin use, while he used it for material, ultimately got him fired and living on the streets, even before he was unemployed. Getting displaced and higher rents also led to his downward spiral. 

“I was just floating around it. I was kind of sleeping at my job, you know, sleeping on the couches there, being a problem, sleeping in people's cars or like RVs and stuff. When I first moved here, I moved to Center Street and then they tore down my house.”

In Reno, he explained it’s also harder and harder to buy heroin which isn’t mixed in with fentanyl, making it much more dangerous. Fentanyl infused product, he explained, is easier and cheaper to come by, but with huge risks. 

 “Generally a lot of people smoke heroin cause you can't die from smoking. I don't wanna say you can't, but generally, like that's not something that you have to be worried about when you're smoking, you know, you're probably more likely to die in the car crash to go get it before smoking it. But now like with fentanyl, they take fentanyl and then they'll take whatever you would cut with heroin, and so it seems like heroin, but it's not, it's very nefarious and more addicting and scary. I know a couple dealers that will tell you if it's fentanyl or not fentanyl in the beginning, they would do that. And now it's just, everybody's being very sneaky. They're not being honest with the drugs. It's really starting to kill people and like, you can die from it.”

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid also used for pain treatment. Most fentanyl overdoses are believed to be from illegally made fentanyl. According to local law enforcement officials, and statistics they’ve recently released, more than 200 people died of drug overdoses in northern Nevada last year, with over 50 of them due to fentanyl.

To save himself, Carden says he recently went through detox at Well Care. He says he realized his path was getting out of control.  “I started to just really lose everybody in my life and opportunities. I went from like, just like smoking to starting to inject, especially the fentanyl stuff. Like when you do that, you're gonna be dead. And I think, it just started to scare the people around me. I think if you're gonna have detox, you need to go somewhere like Well Care where you see how dark it is and what your future will hold if you continue.”

Along with being off heroin, his comedy career is now on the rebound, with an appearance coming up January 27th at Joe Comedy at the Polo Lounge. He’s off the streets, living with friends. “They've been helping me out because they can see the change that I'm making, as long as I'm just keeping my end of the bargain. I'm very lucky to have that.” 

He would also like to give back and help make Reno’s comedy scene become more inclusive. “A lot of people are kind of nervous about comedy and we need to just be like, hey, this is fun. And like, this would be a fun place to go. I would like to see, more of everybody, right, all demographics and content wise, I've been to shows where it's very misogynistic and I can see why women are kind of like, ‘oh, this sucks, this is uncomfortable.’”

He likes Reno but wouldn’t mind people being more supportive of each other rather than so competitive and negative. “Real friends, here, you can count 'em on one hand. People really need to just stop talking behind people’s backs and just really be supportive. I think everybody in Reno has an addiction or we wouldn't still be here. I mean, it's a 24-hour gambling town and I think we project a lot of our insecurities onto other people that we feel like are lower than us and that we always need somebody to kind of be better than, and I think we need to just realize we're all one.”

Our Town Reno reporting, January 2022

Hannah Hartley, with an Eye on the Hoop and Keeping our Environment Green

Home Means Nevada

At 5’11’’ freshman Hannah Hartley aims to make threes for the Nevada women’s basketball. But as eager as she is about basketball, it competes with how passionate she is about the environment, which she calls the most valuable resource. 

Hartley, born and raised in Reno, graduated from Galena High School in 2021. A three-sport athlete in high school, Hartley was most passionate about basketball and decided to pursue it in college. With multiple offers from Division II and III schools, Hartley made an easy decision to attend college in her hometown to play Division I basketball as a walk-on.

“Attending Nevada gave me the opportunity to play a sport I love for my hometown team and for a coaching staff that I love,” Hartley said during a recent interview with Our Town Reno.

Silver and blue runs deep in the Hartley family blood. Not only was the combination of athletics and academics a selling point for Hartley, but the familial ties also had an impact. Attending Nevada made Hartley a third-generation Nevada student following her grandmother, parents, two aunts, and uncle. Her father, Chad Hartley, served as Nevada’s associate athletic director for strategic communications from 2006 to 2021. 

Nevada is extremely important to my family,” Hartley said. “Much of my family attended the University and my parents both have close ties to the athletic department, which is one reason why playing here is so important to me. Being able to play at a school that has had such a big impact on my family means the world to me,” Hartley said. 

Hannah stands next to her parents, Chad and Shannon, at her high school graduation in 2021. Photo provided by: Hannah Hartley’s Instagram (@hannahhartley33)

Eager about the Environment 

Hartley is majoring in environmental studies with the hopes of pursuing a career as an environmental researcher. She chose this major as a chance to give back to the community that means so much to her. 

“Our environment is the most important resource we have and we must find ways to protect it as best as we can,” Hartley said. “I feel that I have a very strong connection to the Reno-Tahoe area, and I want to do what I can to protect it, and I feel that studying environmental science here is how I can begin to do that.” 

The outdoorsy aspect of Reno has always been of interest to Hartley, which is why it is so important to dedicate her major to the environment. What better place to do so than in the city that fueled her passion for the environment that surrounded her growing up.

“Attending Nevada gave me the opportunity to study the major I was most interested in,
Hartley said. “I am very happy that I get to study something that I am so passionate about, while playing the sport that I love.” 

Going, Going, Green 

The famous ‘Keep Tahoe Blue’ stickers that can be found on numerous car bumpers around the Reno-Tahoe area was a motivator to get Hartley involved with protecting the environment. 

“Growing up in Reno, I would always see Keep Tahoe Blue stickers,” Hartley said. “​​I feel like they have had an influence on why environmental science is so important for me.” 

Off the court, Hartley dedicates her time to volunteering for community clean-up projects around the area as well. 
“I have helped organize and participate in several park clean ups in the Reno area,” she detailed.  

Hartley attributes a lot of her passion for the environment with whom she spends time around the most. Growing up exploring the area influenced Hartley to pursue a degree that would allow her to protect the area she has always called home. 

“Since I was young, I would hike and spend lots of time outdoors with my family,” Hartley said. “Many of my friends and my parents' friends are passionate about protecting the Reno-Tahoe area. I feel like they have had an influence on why environmental science is so important for me and growing up around people who cared about the environment and want to protect it was very impactful for me.” 

Reporting by Cayley Dishion and Montana Lloyd shared with Our Town Reno