SEPTEMBER 8-14, 2022 | FREE! DISNEY Pinocchio’s nose grows again on the (small) screen PAGEWRESTLING30 Know before you go see WWE at the Spokane Arena PAGE 24 HOW LAST-CHANCE HOUSING IN DOWNTOWN SPOKANE TOOK THE LIFE OUT OF 19 PEOPLE OVER SIX YEARS SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORT BY DANIEL WALTERS PAGE 14
Think you can’t open your own restaurant? Yes, you can. You want to go from passion to profession. We’re here to help make it happen. Because at Washington Trust Bank, we believe you can do anything you set your mind to. Visit watrust.com to get started.
— TED S. McGREGOR JR., publisher
Riis’ career came to mind as we worked on this week’s cover story, “HAUNTED ROOMS.” Starting with three shocking heat dome-related deaths in late June and early July of 2021, our senior investigative reporter Daniel Walters started digging. Over the course of a year, he learned more about the victims’ lives and, via public records requests, their living conditions. Since March, under the title “Out of Reach,” we’ve been covering all as pects of our housing crisis, ranging from growing homlessness to young work ing families that can’t find a place to live. Daniel’s story takes the measure of this moment, showing that for too many, even those “lucky” enough to stay out of homelessness by finding a modest unit, the challenges don’t stop.
O ne of the giants of American journalism was Danish immigrant Jacob Riis, who came to America penniless, often homeless and always at the mercy of strangers. He survived the cruelty and suffering of the tenements of New York City, where new arrivals lived in squalid conditions. His early struggles informed his later work as a beat reporter and pioneering photojournalist, covering New York’s police and the life of what he called the “The Other Half” — also the name of the book he wrote that awakened society to the urgent need for reforms. And Riis’ work did lead to progress, often from his powerful friend Teddy Roosevelt. “The slum,” Riis once said, “is the measure of civilization.”
INSIDEPUBLISHER’SNOTE
CULTURECOVERNEWSCOMMENTSTORY 241485 38343027EVENTSMUSICSCREENFOOD I SAW BULLETINGREENYOUZONEBOARD VOL. 29, NO. 48 | COVER PHOTO: YOUNG KWAK BULGARIAN BITES PAGE 27 THANK YOU, TEACHERS PAGE 6 ’90s EMO IS BACK! PAGE 34 IT’S THEIR TURN PAGE 26 SPOKANE • SOUTH HILL SOUTH HILL 2607 S. Southeast Blvd, B210, Spokane, WA SmileSourceSpokane.com 509-242-3078 Comprehensive Local Dental Experts New Patient Special Off er Mention You Saw Our Ad in The Inlander As a new patient and receive either a Free Sonicare toothbrush, or $100 off your fi rst treatment We provide jobs for former refugees in Spokane! Our thrift store has over 10,000 square feet of quality items at great prices. Furniture, clothing, shoes, home goods, books, electronics, and more! 919 E Trent Ave • gnthrift.com Mon-Sat 10am-7pm / Sun 10am-5pm DONATE TODAY EXIT 282 UNIVERSITYGONZAGA habi t a t-s p o kane .o r g (509) 5 3 4 -25 52 Habi t a t + YO U Eve ry d o n ati o n e m p owe rs fa m i li e s t o a c hi eve t he ir d re ams th rou g h a o rdabl e hom e own e rshi p y our g i ft w i ll be m atc h ed ! FAMILIESWETOGETHER,AREKEEPINGCLOSE. Thank you for choosing to donate to Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Inland Northwest. Your gift keeps families together and strong so they can focus on what matters most—their children. rmhcinlandnw.org/35years Since opening its original House in 1987, Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Inland Northwest now has three locations to provide a “Home-Away-From-Home” to 64 families each night in the Inland Northwest. Celebrate with us. DONATE SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 3 474240 THE INLANDER is a locally owned, independent newspaper founded on Oct. 20, 1993. Please recycle THE INLANDER after you’re done with it. One copy free per person per week; extra copies are $1 each (call x226). For ADVERTISING information, email advertising@inlander.com. To have a SUBSCRIPTION mailed to you, call x210 ($50 per year). To find one of our more than 1,000 NEWSRACKS where you can pick up a paper free every Thursday, call x226 or email frankd@ inlander.com. THE INLANDER is a member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and is published at least twice per month. All contents of this newspaper are protected by United States copyright law. © 2022, Inland Publications, Inc. INLANDER 1227 W. Summit Parkway, Spokane, WA 99201 PHONE: 509-325-0634 EMAIL: info@inlander.com SPOKANE • EASTERN WASHINGTON • NORTH IDAHO • INLANDER.COM
4 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 SCORPIONS: ROCK BELIEVER WORLD TOUR Thursday, October 13 Spokane Arena IN THIS MOMENT: 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY TOUR Saturday, October 1 The Podium IRON MAIDEN: LEGACY OF THE BEAST WORLD TOUR Friday, September 30 Spokane Arena
TELL THE WORLD HOW YOU FEEL TELL THE WORLD HOW YOU FEEL CONNECT WITH CRUSHYOUR VENT ALLRAGEYOUR SHARE JOY & THANKSGIVE
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 5 COMMENTSTAFFDIRECTORY PHONE: 509-325-0634 Ted S. McGregor Jr. (tedm@inlander.com) PUBLISHER Jer McGregor (x224) GENERAL MANAGER EDITORIAL Chey Scott (x225) ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Derek Harrison (x248) CREATIVE DIRECTOR Seth Sommerfeld (x250) MUSIC & SCREEN EDITOR Samantha Wohlfeil (x234) BREAKING NEWS EDITOR Daniel Walters (x263) SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Madison Pearson (x218) LISTINGS EDITOR Nate Sanford (x282), Carrie Scozzaro (x232) STAFF WRITERS Chris Frisella COPY CHIEF Young Kwak, Erick Doxey PHOTOGRAPHERS Chiana McInelly INTERN Josh Bell, Will Maupin, Tara Roberts CONTRIBUTORS ADVERTISING Kristi Gotzian (x215) ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Carolyn Padgham (x214), Autumn Potts (x251) SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Jeanne Inman (x235), Tracy Menasco (x260), Claire Price (x217), Stephanie Grinols (x216), Skyler Strahl (x247) ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Kristina Smith (x223) EVENT & SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER Colleen Bell-Craig (x212), McKenna Fuhrman (x242) ADVERTISING ASSISTANTS PRODUCTION Tom Stover (x265) PRODUCTION MANAGER Ali Blackwood (x228) CREATIVE LEAD & MARKETING MANAGER Derrick King (x238) SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER Todd Goodner (x231) GRAPHIC DESIGNER OPERATIONS Dee Ann Cook (x211) BUSINESS MANAGER Kristin Wagner (x210) ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE CIRCULATION Frank DeCaro (x226) CIRCULATION MANAGER Travis Beck (x237) CIRCULATION SUPERVISOR
The rent went up like $200 in one year. BRAIDEN MARKHAM I’ve had pretty good experiences. I just had a roommate who wouldn’t do his dishes for three months. But that’s classic.
INTERVIEWS BY NATE SANFORD 9/2/2022, PIG OUT IN THE PARK
They charged us every month for what was called “poo prints” for dogs. Paw prints? Poo prints.
JOSH JOHNSTON
KATE STEELE
HAVE YOU EVER HAD A REALLY BAD APARTMENT EXPERIENCE?
SAM LUSE One time I lived in an apartment… There was a single walkup area and we shared the hallway. And one day I walked up there and I found a severed cat’s paw in the hallway. And my wife and I were like, ‘Hello, what now?’ And so anyways, it was there that night… and it was gone the next morning. And I had talked to my neighbor prior to that. But once that happened, I never talked to him again. Submit your I Saw You, Cheers or Jeers at Inlander.com/ISawYou Read them on page 88
We just got out of a lease with this luxury [air quotes] apartment complex in the Valley… it just was not that great and they charged us a bunch of money, took our deposit.
JEFFERY TAMIETTI
My mom’s also an Idaho teacher, and I’ve had the joy of watching her make third grade and kindergarten magical for hundreds of kids. I can’t bring myself to narrow down my kids’ incredible teach ers, so I’ll just add all of them to this list, along with their incred ible school librarian, who has patiently kept my sons supplied with all three billion Wings of Fire and Warriors books.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 7
T hough I rarely see the good folks of the Latah County Library in person, I’m thankful for them every day. I struggle to comfortably hold a paper book for very long anymore due to my disability. But my library’s digital book cata log is enormous and growing, so I can still access as many books as I can read. For all the great teachers and librarians in my life I didn’t mention: If you stumble across this column, know that you’re on the list, Andtoo.toall the Idaho teachers and librarians who are feeling defeated: I’m sorry you’re anyone’s villain. I’m sorry you have to defend the best things you do against people who have no interest in understanding them. On the tough days, remember there are so many people out there who each could make a list like mine, and you’d be on it. n Tara Roberts is a writer and educator who lives in Moscow with her husband, sons and poodle. Her novel Wild and Dis tant Seas is forthcoming from Norton in 2024. Follow her on Twitter @tarabethidaho.
The list of teachers and librarians who impacted the author’s life is endless.
303 Spokane Ave, Cd’A • 208 664-2131 rungefurniture.com FREE LOCAL DELIVERY • FINANCING AVAILABLE • LOW PRICE GUARANTEE WIN A $750 IN-STORE CREDIT TO RUNGE FURNITURE ENTER IN STORE OR ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE All entries must be received by Sept 30, 2022 at 12 midnight RELAXEAT SLEEPSITEVERYTHING IN STORE ON SALE NOW YEARS ANNIVERSARY SALE at the MAC FINAL WEEKEND – CLOSES SEPT 11 Buy tickets in advance at northwestmuseum.org DreamWorks Dragons © 2022 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
My mom’s also an Idaho teacher, and I’ve had the joy of watching her make third grade and kindergarten magical for hundreds of kids.
My favorite high school English teacher — who also happens to be my dad — introduced me to Henry David Thoreau and N. Scott Momaday and taught me how to give a presentation without panicking (which turns out to be a handy skill now that I’m teaching, too).
The money at the center of the debate comes from civil asset forfeiture, a controversial tool that gives law en forcement the power to seize cash and other assets from people suspected of criminal activity — even if they aren’t convicted of a crime. All police have to do is show prob able cause that the property was either used to facilitate a drug deal or acquired with proceeds from selling drugs.
The ordinance received a lot of blowback from police at the time. With Beggs’ proposed amendment on the ho rizon, the department worries its hands will be further tied.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Proponents of civil forfeiture argue that it takes away criminals’ financial incentive and provides revenue to offset the significant costs incurred by fighting criminal activity.
Spokane police Capt. Thomas Hendren says he thinks the forfeiture fund is valuable because it uses money from “those that have been profiting off the mis ery of our citizens” instead of taxpayers money.
I n most Washington cities, police chiefs are able to spend the money they seize from people suspected of drug crimes with broad discretion. But in Spokane, a 2017 ordinance requires that the City Council and police chief agree on how the money is spent. This year, the two parties are having trouble doing that.The
The City Council’s progressive majority is OK with funding those things, but they’d also like to see the money go toward youth anti-drug education, which they see as a more effective tool in combating the drug epidemic. They argue that years of drug buys and dealer arrests have done little to stop the flow of drugs, and that the root causes of the crisis need to be addressed.
On Aug. 29, Council President Breean Beggs — always one for compromise — proposed an amendment that would require that the department’s drug forfeiture money be spent equally on those two endeavors. If the cops want $100,000 for confidential informants, they’ll also have to put $100,000 toward youth drug education.
The current balance of the department’s drug forfei ture account is $625,692. That’s pretty small compared to the overall police budget, which mostly comes from the city’s general fund. But Brian Kelly, an associate profes sor of economics at Seattle University who has published research on civil forfeiture, says departments are often more attracted to forfeiture money because it is more flexible and not as bogged down in municipal red tape.
Spokane Police Department wants to continue using the money for confidential informant payments, drug buys and new undercover vehicles. The drug crisis is out of control, they say, and the people pushing poison into the community need to be taken off the streets.
...continued on page 10 8 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
Police aren’t happy about that and worry the decision will bankrupt the account.
Spokane police seize thousands of dollars each year — City Council wants to change how they spend it
The proposed amendment would change how the Spokane Police Department spends money in their state drug forfeiture account. The department has other forfei ture accounts that are significantly smaller and funded by other types of crime. There’s also a forfeiture account for joint federal operations that is subject to different rules.
In Spokane, the department’s forfeiture spending is already constrained by the 2017 ordinance, which Beggs sponsored in collaboration with then-City Council mem ber Mike Fagan.
“It’s become kind of contentious because it’s using the money in a way that we have not typically ever used it before,” says Spokane police Maj. Michael McNab.
EDUCATION ENFORCEMENT?OR
BY NATE SANFORD Along with cash, in recent years the Spokane Police Department has seized men’s watches, gift cards, a Darth Vader luggage set, two houses, more than 30 cars and a toilet.
Opponents of civil forfeiture argue that the practice incentivizes policing for profit, disproportionately harms low-income communities and gives law enforcement extrajudicial authority to what can amount to stealing people’s property. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit, gives Washington’s civil forfeiture laws a Dminus rating — one of the lowest in the country.
A CONTROVERSIAL PRACTICE
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 9
“After a seizure of property, people in Washington have 45 days to claim it. After that, cases sometimes drag on for months, even years.”
WILL THE POT RUN DRY?
CONTINUED... watches, rings, an amplifier, miscellaneous gift cards, a camcorder, a Darth Vader luggage set, a bag of silver and foreign coins, two houses, drill bits, a handheld saw and a toilet. That last one was sold at an auction in 2020 for $22.50. As required by law, the state got $2.25 — 10 percent of the toilet money.
McNab says the City Council has been receiving quarterly reports for about two years — ever since he’s been in his current position. When asked what happened before he took the position, McNab acknowledges the reports weren’t sent. “That was a fairly new law,” McNab says. “We had a staffing shortage at the executive level, and we just weren’t able to get on top of those in time.”
Beggs is skeptical. The Blake decision went into effect in February 2021. The department’s argument doesn’t make sense, Beggs says, because the department’s forfeiture account has already taken in $261,749 this year. That’s on track to be the second-highest year on record. Those numbers come from historical civil forfeiture data that was produced in response to a public records request from the Inlander and later presented to the City Council at an Aug. 29 public safety committee meeting.
GUNS, CASH, CARS — AND A TOILET
“It’s so we can watch football” McNab deadpans when asked about the TV by the Inlander. McNab quickly clarifies he’s joking. The TV is mounted on a wall near his office and used by the department for mission briefings and intelligence displays, he says.
Hendren says the numbers are high this year because there’s a gap between when the property is seized and when it can be deposited into the account. After a seizure of property, people in Washington have 45 days to claim it. After that, cases sometimes drag on for months, even years, Hendren says. A closer analysis of the numbers adds a bit of nuance to the argument. According to reports from the State Treasurer’s Office, Spokane police saw $227,039 in gross proceeds for drug forfeitures in the first quarter of 2022. That means the money was deposited in the first quarter of 2022 — not seized. If you break it all down by the year it was seized, a little over half that sum came from seizures that occurred after the Blake decision. The rest came from cash and assets seized between 2016 and 2021.
In 2021, Spokane police seized a 65-inch Samsung TV valued at $727 and kept it for their own use.
Quarterly forfeiture reports obtained by the Inlander via a records request from the Washington State Trea surer’s Office show that most of the stuff Spokane police seize is what you’d expect from drug activity — things like cash, guns, money counters and grow lights. Since 2020, Spokane police have sold 29 seized cars at auctions. They’ve opted to keep three for themselves.
“There’s no motivation for us to do any of that; we’re paid well,” McNab says.
“EDUCATION OR ENFORCEMENT?,”
NEWS | LAW ENFORCEMENT 10 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
Under the 2017 ordinance, Spokane police are required to give the City Council quarterly reports on the source of their civil forfeiture funds. That hasn’t always happened. Beggs tells the Inlander that the department only started reg ularly sending reports in recent years after the City Coun cil began pushing the issue of youth anti-drug education. This is backed up by a March 2021 letter from Council member Lori Kinnear, who wrote that a lack of quarterly reports was leading to a “gap in communication and joint planning for the innovative use of forfeiture funds.”
Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl and others in the de partment stress that they support youth anti-drug educa tion as a concept; they just worry that the forfeiture fund doesn’t have enough money to fund it. They claim that the statewide legislation and Blake v Washington — a Wash ington Supreme Court decision that effectively decriminal ized some types of minor drug possession — have reduced the amount of drug busts police do, which by extension is leading to less money entering the forfeiture account.
Beggs says that the original ordinance “had no teeth to it.” He hopes to change that with his proposed amend ment, which says the department is not allowed to spend forfeiture funds in a given quarter until a written report from the same quarter in the previous year has been submitted to City Council.
In recent years, Spokane police have also seized men’s
You’ll sometimes hear horror stories from other parts of the coun try about law enforcement seizing items and keeping them for personal use. McNab says that doesn’t happen in Spokane, and that any property they opt to retain is exclusively used for law enforcement purposes.
LEGISLATIVE INTENT Washington state’s forfeiture law says that property retained by police in drug enforcement activity has to be used “exclusively for the expansion and improvement of controlled substances related law enforcement activity.” Spokane police think that line specifically refers to law enforce ment activity and argue that youth anti-drug education falls outside the requirements. Beggs says he thinks that argument is a “complete red her ring” and that drug education absolutely falls under the defini tion. He notes that police had indicated earlier in the year that they were OK with spending just $25,000 of drug forfeiture money on anti-drug education. If Beggs’ amendment passes, it’s still unclear which commu nity anti-drug groups the money would go toward. Beggs says the council would put out a request for proposals from community organizations that focus on lived experience and peer mentoring. “This could make a huge difference out there,” Beggs says. “And frankly, I think it’s more effective than buying drugs and chasing drug dealers around.” The amendment will come to a vote on Sept. 19. n nates@inlander.com
LOOK FOR IT ON OCTOBERSTANDS18 ADVERTISE YOUR LOCAL BUSINESS: advertising@inlander.com • 509.325.0634 ext 215 YOUR SHOPPINGNEIGHBORHOODLOCALGUIDE SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 11
Funding things with forfeiture money is difficult, Hendren says, because the amount of money coming into the account var ies wildly each year. Hendren says the current forfeiture numbers are still rough and that he can’t comment on specifics, but as whole, he says they’re trending downwards. It might take years before the full financial impact of the Blake decision to make its way to the forfeiture account, but it will happen, he says. Kelly, the Seattle University professor, notes that the legalization of marijuana did cause a minor reduction in the amount of forfeiture money departments brought in.
FOLLOW US ON @ 509INC
Lutz has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the health district and Clark as an individual. That case, which has been moved to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, could ask a judge to determine whether Lutz was improperly fired. n
Clark’s time leading the health district saw mass resignations of experienced leaders in the organization, with the pressures of the pandemic and conflicts with management driving many to leave. While a “culture of fear” was already present at the district under prior leaders, many told the Inlander that things got worse under Clark’s leadership. In one incident, Clark called the police to investigate who on her staff had recorded a staff meeting, after the Inlander reported on two leaders in the organization getting fired and escorted out of the building in December.
Clark has already left her role with the health district for a job in another state, and the agreement closes out a state investigation that would have determined whether Clark illegally fired former health officer Dr. Bob Lutz. Clark and Lutz met on Oct. 29, 2020, when Lutz says Clark immedi ately fired him without providing a tivebeenmaintainedmunitythedisciplinaryimprovementperformanceplanorotheraction.Aftermeetingandcombacklash,ClarkthatLutzhadplacedonadministraleave.However,the
Case Closed Amelia Clark agrees not to return to leadership role with the Spokane Regional Health District in order to close investigation BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL Amelia Clark
Inland Northwest Opera Presents: LA TRAVIATA Fri., Sept. 9 at 7:30pm Sun., Sept. 11 at 3pm Masterworks 1: FANTASTIQUE!
Peter Rivera’s CELEBRATE SYMPHONY and his 40 piece R&B Orchestra Fri., Sept. 23 at 7pm Emporium Presents HOME FREE: ROAD SWEET ROAD TOUR Sat., Sept. 24 at 7:30pm Champions of Magic: THE WORLDWIDE WONDERS TOUR 2022 Sun., Sept. 25 at 4pm Mills Entertainment Presents THERESA CAPUTO LIVE! THE EXPERIENCE Thurs., Sept. 29 at 7:30pm Experience the Spokane Symphony in the industrial setting of the Wonder Building. Music Director James Lowe will take you on a musical journey as you experience the orchestra up close and personal. Visuals and lighting will move you through the symphonic sounds of Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, György Ligeti, Jessie Montgomery and more. Grab a beer and burger and experience the symphony in a new and exciting way. General$Tickets:29Admission
James Lowe, conductor with Natasha Paremski, piano Sat., Sept. 17 at 7:30pm Sun., Sept. 18 at 3pm MASTERWORKS & MIMOSAS Sat., Sept. 17 at 10am
NEWS | PUBLIC HEALTH
Clark had been set to go before an administrative law judge from the Office of Administrative Hearings in September before the stipulated agreement with the state health board was filed this month. The agreement closed out the case without the judge deciding the legal issues in question, instead noting “respondent will not accept an appointment as the administrative officer” at Spokane Regional Health District in the future.
Symphony Sessions AN IMMERSIVE MUSIC EXPERIENCE THURS SEPT 22 2022 BuildingThe8:30PMWonder SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 13
SEPTEMBER AT THE FOX! Box Office 624-1200 SpokaneSymphony.org | FoxTheaterSpokane.org
Inlander obtained an email show ing that the local health board’s attorney notified board members on the evening of Oct. 29 to let them know that Clark had terminated Lutz. Under Washington state law, an administrative officer may not singlehandedly fire the health officer. Instead, the local health board needs to hold a hearing, allowing both sides to make their case before the board would vote to terminate the health officer or not.
Spokane’s health board did meet a week after that October 2020 conversation between Clark and Lutz, and the board voted to fire Lutz in an 8-4 split. But before that meeting took place, citizens had already filed complaints about Clark’s apparent firing of Lutz, asking the state health board to take action.
A melia Clark, who, until this month, was the administrative officer of the Spokane Regional Health District, reached an agreement with the Washington State Board of Health to never again hold the top leadership position at the district.
YOUNG
DEATH AT THE DOOR
PHOTO
The New Washington was originally built in 1910, when Spokane’s population tripled in a decade. Over the next 100 years, these sorts of units became a crucial part of Spokane’s unofficial safety net. KWAK
37914 SOUTH NUKWALQW • WORLEY, IDAHO 83876 1 800-523-2464 • CDACASINO.COM CASINO | HOTEL | DINING SPA | CHAMPIONSHIP GOLF WELCOME HOME. King of the Cage TONIGHT AT 7 PM | $50 & UP The ultima te MMA s h o wdown r eturns to C o eur d’Alene Cas ino! On Thursda y, September 8 TH fighters will duke it o ut to se e who’s crowne d King o f the Cage . Watch the region’s b e s t fighters compete including Tylor SiJohn, Jon Rizo , Cameron Robin e tte, Dakota Schnall, Jose Ferr eri a nd Josh Richm o n d . Entertainment Series TICKETS ON SALE NOW! Purchase tickets at cdacasino.com, the Casino Box Office, or through the CDA Casino App. Call 1 800-523-2464 for more details. SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 15 WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE 19 DEAD FOUND OVER SIX YEARS AT SPOKANE’S WOLFE AND NEW APARTMENTSWASHINGTON BY DANIEL WALTERS T
...continued
“If we don’t see certain people at least once a day, we go check on them,” says Michael Davis, a tenant at the New Washington sinceFrom2017.May 2016 to August 2021, public records requested and reviewed by the Inlander show that police have found 19 dead bodies in these two apartment buildings. There’ve been victims of heat — but also victims of heart disease, drug overdoses, emphy sema, alcoholism and, in one case, murder. For all the focus on the hundreds at the Camp Hope encampment or the dozens sleeping on sidewalks in downtown Spokane, life-and-death struggles also unfold behind closed doors in places like the New Washington and Wolfe apartments, with about 70 units combined. They’ve become the closets where, for decades, Spokane has shoved out of sight some of society’s most difficult problems — poverty, mental illness, drug addiction and even sex crimes.
Looking for witnesses, Spokane Police Officer Josh Stewart knocks on one of the hall’s other doors, causing the unlatched door to swing open, revealing a second victim: Andre Pharr is lying on his side on a bare mattress, a box fan blowing full speed at his face. It wasn’t enough. The window is only open a crack. There’s no air conditioner. Hunt was 68. Pharr was 36. Both had been recently suffering from dehydration, living in units without sinks or bathrooms. The police chaplain hands the officers bottles of water. Just 400 feet to the southeast, at the Wolfe Apartments — another complex owned by the same man, Jason Wolfe — another dead body is found less than 36 hours later. When police enter Deanna Farwell’s second-floor unit at the Wolfe, Shannon, the yappy brown-and-black dachshund-Chihua hua mix that Farwell raised from a puppy, is there to greet them. But the dog’s owner — the tiny 64-year-old grandmother — is dead, found sitting in a chair in the 97-degree heat. Between June 26 and July 2, 2021, the Pacific Northwest was hit with an unprecedented heat wave. The National Weather Service called it a “heat dome,” and it settled over the region like a blast furnace in the sky and would not budge. For seven days, it was the worst heat wave to hit Spokane in nearly a century, with its highest-ever temperature of 109 set on June 29. Robert Hunt, Andre Pharr and Deanna Farwell all died from that heat, but each had a preexisting condition: deep poverty. All three died in two apartment buildings that tenants have decried as so beset by pests, disrepair and disorder as to be unliv able. Tenants in both low-income apartment complexes are so used to death, they’ve built it into their routine.
on next page
he heat killed Robert Hunt last summer. But it had help. It’s about 10 in the morning on June 30, 2021, when the cops finally arrive at the New Washington apartment building on West Second Avenue, across from the Big Dipper. Even that early, the apartment is a furnace — with the stagnant air in the hallways soaring to 100 degrees. Hunt had been vomiting the night before.
It was a housing crisis that created apartments like the Wolfe and the New Washington in the first place. The New Washington was originally built in 1910; the Wolfe in 1896 (“new building, new furniture, new bedding,” advertising of the time blared). That’s when Spo kane’s population exploded, tripling in size in a single decade. More than 150 dorm-style, single-room occupancy apartment buildings — tenements and flophouses with names like the Otis and the Alberta — were built to handle the surge. And over the next 100 years, these sorts of units became a crucial part of Spokane’s unofficial safety net... Read the entire story at inlander.com
YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
The owner, Wolfe, for all his flaws, has been willing to rent to some tenants almost no one else would — and to offer them a price low enough that almost no one else could match. Last year, Davis’ rent went up 8 percent, from $415 to $450, but for Spokane, that price is nearly unbeatable.
The original owner of the Wolfe (below) and New Washington, Linda Wolfe-Dawidjan, was given a Carl Maxey Racial Justice Women of Achievement award in 2003; her son Jason Wolfe now owns both.
“The way things have been there,” Davis says, “you never know who’s next.”
Back in August 2020, he’d been hired by the New Washington’s management to clean and repaint Apartment C9 after the death of its resident directly above his unit. “I know his name was the same as mine — Michael,” he says.
By the time police found him, his body had turned black and bloated. Fluid bubbles had pooled underneath his arms, ankles and “Youstomach.could look at the floor and see blood and everything was all over the place,” Davis says. Like many of those who die alone in the New Washington, the smell was what alerted tenants to Rizzio’s death. Some cops, Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl tells the Inlander, put a smear of Vicks VapoRub under their noses to mask the stench when dealing with a dead body. Once Davis lugged out the furniture, the stench grew even stronger.“Something rotten. Putrid,” Davis says. “All the smell settled at the floor. After I got to the floor part, I couldn’t do it.” Davis got a mask from the manager’s office — one of those cheap COVID masks — but it didn’t help. Davis tried to clean in bursts, scraping up the dried blood, retreating when he couldn’t stand the stench anymore. They added bleach, trying to kill the bacteria.“The bleach?” Davis says. “With the dead body fluids? Didn’t mix.”In most apartment buildings, professionals — who have the equipment and expertise to deal with the biohazards left by dead bodies — would have taken care of this. But that’s usually not how things work here. By last fall, Davis says, after only four years in the 43-unit apartment complex, he says he knew 10 people who’d died in the New Washington apartments. Like some people can list the presidents in order, Davis can name the tenants who’ve died in his apartment building. “One was just out of the blue — that was really weird — was Dennis,” Davis says.
OUT OF HARDREACHTOHOUSE
And while they’re repeatedly referred to as places of “last resort” for struggling tenants before they end up on the street, they’re just as often places of first hope — the first apartment some tenants have as they’re leaving homelessness. The trouble is, current and former tenants tell the Inlander, hope can rot into a kind of despair that can kill you.
Michael Rizzio, an Army veteran, hadn’t been seen for at least four days, and the stage of decomposition suggested he might have been dead even longer.
Dennis Bernard Michelbook, 62. One of the apartment’s other tenants had assaulted Michelbook three days earlier, but it was a methamphetamine overdose that killed him. When the police entered the apartment, mice skittered over a detective’s feet. “Then was Amber,” Davis adds. Amber Raquel Brigman, 33. The sister of Davis’ girlfriend at the time. He knows how much Brigman struggled with mental health, how hard her family fought to try to help her. “There was Sean, who was on A Floor,” Davis recalls. “Then Troy. And then Floyd.” Sean Shepherd, 53, collapsed in the shared bathroom. He’d suffered from seizures and had been complaining about leg cramps before he died. Warren Troy Plowden, 54, died of heart disease, exacerbated by meth use. Floyd William Hammond, 70, died in September 2020 on his bed. Empty wine containers were in the trash bin. “Then the last two, from the heat,” Davis says. “Bob and Andre.”Davis doesn’t want to go the same way. “I was not going to be one of those statistics,” Davis says. “Up in that damn building, in a room, stiff.”
“DEATH AT THE DOOR,” CONTINUED...
GHOSTS Sometimes Davis says he can feel something in the halls of the New Washington. He’ll be in the communal kitchen late at night and feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up without warning. “I jump and turn — and nobody’s there,” Davis says. “All the deaths that have been there, sometimes you can get a… presence. You can sense something.” That might sound like a cliche about old buildings being haunted, but to Davis it seems more that, in a place like this, the loss and suffering accumulates like mildew. Death seeps into the floorboards.Andthat, as Davis knows firsthand, is not just a metaphor.
“Out of Reach” is the Inlander’s occasional series investigating why finding a home, or even an affordable rental, has increasingly become out of reach in the Inland Northwest — and what we can do about it. Follow the series at inlander.com/housing.
DEATHS AT THE WOLFE July 7, 2016: Jeffrey P. Walker, 52 Sept. 27, 2017: George F. Rendell, 72 March 8, 2020: William D. Isaacs, 49 May 20, 2020: Wilbur Tankersley, 35 April 4, 2021: Gary Collins, 56 July 1, 2021: Deanna Farwell, 64 Aug. 8, 2021: Mark Roberts, 65 DEATHS AT THE NEW WASHINGTON May 20, 2016: Peter Savala, 62 Oct. 26, 2016: Daniel Cunningham, 56 July 16, 2018: William Ersland, 59 Aug. 14, 2018: Talisa L. Buffington, 24 Dec. 11, 2019: Dennis B. Michelbook, 62 Feb. 19, 2019: Amber R. Brigman, 33 March 23, 2020: Sean Shepherd, 53 Aug. 5, 2020: Michael A. Rizzio, 61 Sept. 9, 2020: Floyd Hammond, 70 Dec. 16, 2020: Warren T. Plowden, 54 June 30, 2021: Robert Hunt, 68 June 30, 2021: Andre Pharr, 36
As recently as 2016, the leases of the New Washington and the Wolfe apartments explicitly banned air conditioners and other items, like fans, from being used at all. The leases don’t mention anything about air conditioners today.
RETAINS EVEN MORE HEAT. IF IT’S 80 AT YOUR HOUSE, IT’S 90 DOWNTOWN.” ...continued on next page
THE HEAT
Now Trembley’s wedding anniversary is forever associated with her grandma’s death, and when the one-year mark hit earlier this summer the weight of her grandma’s loss hit all over again. “I feel her death was preventable,” she says. IT
“THE ENTIRE DOWNTOWN IS COVERED IN ASPHALT, CONCRETE, BRICKS, AND
But the building itself could also have contributed to the deaths during last year’s heat wave: Old buildings with little in the way of insulation can trap heat overnight, particularly in small rooms with windows that have trouble opening and closing. The buildings didn’t have fans in the hallways, much less central air. And without sinks in the room, dehydration was that much easier. The tenants themselves were also particularly vulnerable. The average lifespan of a chronically homeless person, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, is only 50. Many tenants here spent big chunks of their lives homeless. The issue is psychological as much as physical, says longtime homelessness activist Dave Bilsland. “They get so depressed, they don’t want to go do anything,” Bilsland says. “You don’t have the sense to get the hell out. You’re going to sit there and die.” A witness told police that Pharr had broken down in tears the day before his death, possibly lamenting the death of his mother. These tragedies ripple outward. New Washington tenant Talisa Buffington died of an overdose in 2018, leaving her 1-yearold child to grow up without her birth mother. Deanna Farwell had 11 granddaughters. One of them, Brit tany Trembley, got married on June 27, 2021, and desperately wanted her grandma to be at her wedding. But Farwell didn’t have money for transportation. Four days later, Farwell died in the Wolfe.“The first three months, I couldn’t go through her things,” Trembley says. Even Shannon, Farwell’s little dog, didn’t make it to Christ mas, Trembley says. She thinks the dog was too depressed about the death of her owner — didn’t want to drink, didn’t want to eat.
But owner Jason Wolfe, in a brief interview, says that, today, when it gets hot, air conditioners are encouraged — though he wants tenants to get permission first — and he doesn’t charge extra for electricity. “We always go up there and tell them when the heat is high, that they need to get fans, air conditioning or go down to some of these cooling centers,” Wolfe says.
At first he tried using fans.
Wolfe suggests downtown itself plays a big part of the prob lem.“The entire downtown is covered in asphalt, concrete, bricks, and it retains even more heat,” Wolfe says. “If it’s 80 at your house, it’s 90 downtown.”
$1,000! BLOOMSDAY FINISHER SHIRT DESIGN CONTEST Everyone can participate contest details bloomsdayrun.orgat Winner receives$1,000! Submission Deadline: FRIday, SEPTember 16TH SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 17
“I had a fan in every direction, one in every corner,” Davis says.In 2019, he lasted that way for about a month, until he couldn’t take it anymore. He got an air conditioner for himself, working out a payment plan with a friend.
“I found that it is not a reputable place,” she says. “In fact, it is as shady as eff.”
Especially now in a housing crisis, for many finding a place to live — any place — can be a long, hard road. Vicki Anderson, who moved into her apartment at the Wolfe with her then-teenage son Justice in 2017, recalls that feeling of accomplishment that comes with lining up a new place. “I’m proud of myself. I got my boy a place to go. I accom plished something,” Vicki Anderson recalls feeling. “I sit down on the blanket… All of a sudden I felt something crawling on me.” Bedbugs. And there were cockroaches, spiders and mice, too. For anyone struggling with addiction, like Vicki, it was hardly the best place to quit. “We would walk down the walkways, and there would be people just, like, passed out on the floor with needles next to them,” Justice recalls. “It was obvious they were doing dope.” Police reports, meanwhile, show that the apartments were rife with mental illness — at times, police wrote, some tenants didn’t seem to understand the questions officers were asking or met them with a blank stare. “Nobody warned you how many crazy people were there,” VickiBothsays.Justice and Vicki Anderson recall being disturbed by seeing a man holding an ice cream cone filled with feces in the hallway.Social science researchers say that some types of mental illness, when combined with drug addictions, can manifest in violence. Yet they also caution that people with mental illness are much more likely to be victimized by violence than those without mental illness.
Wilbur Tankersley’s mental challenges led to a tragedy at the Wolfe Apartments. His family is still trying to make sense of it all.
Seavey McMullin grabs her own cast-iron skillet and walks out into the street. And as hard as she can, she smashes the skillet into the asphalt — over and over and over again — almost a recreation of the kind of violence that killed her son. And yet, at the end of it, her skillet is barely damaged. She can’t fathom the kind of force Walker must have used. But there’s something else she doesn’t quite understand: Why she doesn’t hate Walker.
“Wilbur was very close to God,” she says. “As close as he could be.” And that, at least, gives her comfort.
“He’s not suffering with schizophrenia any more. He’s not struggling to find a place,” Seavey McMullin says of her son. “He’s in a better place.”When cops arrive, they find a spatter of Wilbur Tankersley’s blood is splashed across the victim’s Bible. They drop the book into an evidence bag and place it in property storage.
18 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 WORST ENEMIES
TRAPPED Jose Trejo, attorney with the Northwest Justice Project, a legal aid program, says there have been many complaints about places like the Wolfe and the New Washington in the past. But most tenants haven’t wanted to mount a formal legal challenge unless they had someplace else to go. They didn’t want to risk retaliation.
Valerie Seavey McMullin’s son Wilbur struggled with his mental health. She thought his new apartment would help — in less than a month, he was dead.
The alternative — homelessness — is brutal, as Monica Tittle knows.“I’ve been assaulted. I saw a man’s eye get put out,” Tittle says, describing her time spent homeless. “You learn to sleep dur ing the day if you’re female.” So when she was able to use Goodwill’s Housing and Es sential Need program funds to get an apartment at the New Washington in 2017, she jumped at it. But she quickly learned why there were spots available. “My door wouldn’t even close completely,” Tittle says. “It wouldn’t shut. Nothin’. It wouldn’t latch. It would just pop open.”
“DEATH AT THE DOOR,” CONTINUED... ...continued on page 20 OUT OF REACH
— DANIEL WALTERS
Walker confessed, directly to the police: “I beat a man’s head with a skillet until his soul left his body.”Walker’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Leslie, reads a message to the Inlander from a doctor who de termined “with a fair amount of confidence” that Walker had schizophrenia too. You can have all the facts, but that doesn’t mean you understand. In dozens of ways, Seavey McMullin and her family try to make sense of whatTheyhappened.seekout justice. The family wants Walker to go on trial. They sit in a room with Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell and beg for one. But Walker takes a plea instead, get ting 22 years in prison. The family is devastated. They go to the scene of the crime. But the people manning the door at the Wolfe won’t let Seavey McMullin or her family see where Tanker sley was killed, she says. He doesn’t have anything in his room left to collect. “They said they threw everything in the gar bage,” Seavey McMullin says. “And I said, ‘Well, can I go get it out of the garbage?’ They said, ‘No, the garbage already came.’”
If Davis was out in the hall, he could sometimes hear the scraping and screeching sound from Tittle’s room as she dragged an entertainment center cabinet — furniture left behind by a prior occupant — to block the door to protect herself at night. She had a good reason to be worried. She had dated a domes tic abuser, with a long record of violence and threats. On New Year’s Eve, on the last day of 2017, she says he attacked her.
“I got up to go to the bathroom, early in the morning, I opened the door, he was standing there,” says Tittle, who told police that her former boyfriend clutched her throat and pushed her to the bed.
She knows that her son loved to draw — abstract drawings, but brimming with meaning. She doesn’t care if those drawings are covered in blood. She finds it devastating that they were thrownTheaway.family conducts their own sort of inves tigation. A childhood friend comes to Spokane and stakes out the Wolfe, watching it all day. He strikes up a conversation with the tenants, trying to figure out what he can learn about the place. Seavey McMullin digs in, too.
“I think it’s weird,” Seavey McMullin says. “You think I’d be angry. You’d think I’d want to hurt him — you think I’d… but I had nothing. There was nothing.” She seeks meaning in her faith: Maybe this was mercy. Maybe God spared her the burden of that kind of anger on top of that grief.
YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
Just weeks after Wilbur Tankersley, a man with schizophre nia, got a room at the Wolfe, in 2020, he was murdered during a confrontation with another tenant. Anderson herself says she had her own mental breakdown while living at the Wolfe — she ended up at what she calls the “crazy house” at Sacred Heart Medical Center. “Living there really messed with your mental health,” An derson says of the Wolfe. “I wouldn’t even send my worst enemy there.”
The cast iron frying pan is found in the garbage can in the shared kitchen, shattered into pieces and covered in the blood of Valerie Seavey Mc Mullin’s son. It was May 2020. Wilbur Tankersley had been out of rehab for three weeks. But McMullin hadn’t visited her son yet, and she had no idea that he’s running out of time; his grandparents told her that they haven’t “seen him that happy in forever.”Wilbur had lived on his own once before, back during a three-year stint when he was still taking his meds. But the medication made him feel less human, less normal, so he quit taking them — and he went downhill. Wilbur was 18 when he was first diagnosed with schizophrenia. But two years ago, he once again had a spot to call his own — a room in downtown Spokane at a place called the Wolfe Apartments. “We thought it was a great, reputable place,” Seavey McMullin says. A better place than rehab, a better place than the House of Charity or Union Gospel Mission, and certainly better than the street. “He was constantly trying to sleep in a sleep ing bag downtown, and he was arrested several times for that,” Seavey McMullin says. But just a few weeks after moving into the Wolfe Apartments in 2020, he was murdered. Cameron Walker, another 24-year-old tenant at the Wolfe, had called 911 on Tankersley for being disorderly. Tankersley, other witnesses said, appeared to be having a mental crisis, talking to himself, saying threatening things, even striking a pipe against a wall. But Walker was the one who actually got violent. There’s little question about what happened.
“A BETTER PLACE”
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 19
...continued on page
VintageisbecauseArtwearspokanedowntown explore downtown downtownspokane.orgat Do It with Soul | 112 S Cedar To advertise in the next issue, contact: advertising@inlander.com509.325.0634ext.215 Health HomeFood Family People Living Well in the Inland Northwest Spokane home incorporates classic design elements for modern family four Page 28 Healthy and Delish! The Power of PTOs Page 22 APerfectFit HOME Adaptable FREE OCTOBER NOVEMBER 2021 Spokanehomenature-mindedinfusedlegends Blending Art and E Earth arth Health Food Everybody Loves Pie!Reimagining your childhood home Home Again 20 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
The details sprawl across multiple pages: Wa ter pours into the building through a large hole in the roof when it rains, they wrote. The frame on their door was basically nonexistent from having been kicked in so many times. He could see “used needles, human excrement and trash” thrown by other tenants on the roof outside.
But in 2018 the New Washington did have working fire sprinklers, and despite all the other deferred maintenance, the fire sprinklers did work on that July night. “The fire sprinklers saved the building,” the arson investigator wrote.
It wasn’t the first time the city had received a slew of complaints about the New Washington — and it wouldn’t be the last.
OUT
Garcia worried that without power, the smoke detector wouldn’t work and the gaping holes between the floors in the building could allow a fire to rapidly spread from floor to floor. Murray warned that he had one only exit from his hallway and that shoddy electrical work had increased the fire risk.
And when Tittle described the conditions of her apartment, how her doors didn’t even lock, Burke felt that was something she could address. She and her council assistant organized an expedition of city staffers, council members and assistants, and nonprofit employees, to walk through the New Washington apartments in February of 2018. Ceiling tiles were missing. A big hole in the bathroom floor had been crudely covered with plywood. Open wires were sticking out of outlets. A Vietnam vet told them he’d lived in the unit for a month, in midwinter, without heat or electricity.
Six months later, the tenant in the unit directly next to where Hanson and Murray had lived — a sex offender with mental health and drug abuse issues — became angry that he was being evicted and vowed revenge. At 1 am on July 28, 2018, he stuck his cigarette lighter on his bedsheet and set it on fire. Back in 1999, an arson at downtown’s Mars Hotel and Casino had consumed the entire Fairmont apartment complex next door. Without power or heat, the pipes at the Mars had burst, so the sprinklers at the Mars wouldn’t work. The ensuing inferno spread to the housing next door, leaving 108 low-income tenants homeless.
A week after James Murray and Michael Hanson moved into the New Washington apart ments in December 2017, Murray sent the city Code Enforcement staff an extensive complaint about the “Entirebuilding.building is horribly disgusting,” he wrote, describing the lack of heat, perpetually clogged toilets and sinks, and the pest infesta tions, only to get bounced around from depart ment to department without accomplishing anything.Sothe same day that Burke and other officials toured the New Washington, Murray and Hanson filed a lawsuit, suing owner Jason Wolfe over the “third-world, unsafe, and unsanitary” living condi tions, and naming the city for allowing them.
Spokane code enforcement supervisor Luis Garcia concluded the units “would not meet the minimum provisions established in a property maintenance code,” citing the lack of sanitary fa cilities. But it also wasn’t wasn’t bad enough that the city would be forced to shut it down, he said.
FIGHTING BACK
All this fretting wasn’t just theoretical.
“DEATH AT THE DOOR,” CONTINUED... 22
Simultaneously, two other tenants were waging a similar war from the inside.
Monica Tittle marched down to City Hall in 2018, blowing the whistle on conditions in her New Washington apartment. DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO OF REACH
“He would grab me by the larynx so hard, I couldn’t get air in or out,” she tells the Inlander “If I wanted to speak or I needed anything, I needed to raise my hand.” She also tells police that the man punched her in the face, in the back of the head. She tells them she passed out at some point, but that he told her “if I made a single sound, he’d kill me.” But after hours, she had a chance to escape. He let her go to the bathroom by herself, and she bolted for her neighbor Amber Brigman’s room — when Brigman was still alive — where she finally was able to call 911. Her assailant was arrested. Tittle got a re straining order. And she went further — she went to City Hall. Late, after a City Council meeting, she shared her account of experiencing assault at the New Washington with then-Councilwoman Kate Burke and her assistant. “She was shaken to the core,” Burke recalls. “It made a woman’s already extended trauma from being houseless even more traumatic.”
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 21 Cold Drinks & Great Food 509-401-8050 1335 W. Summit Parkway, Spokane Make your reservation at molespokane.com
THEABOUTAUTHOR Daniel Walters is the Inlander’s Se nior Investigative Reporter. Since 2008, Walters has followed houseflippers sniffing out foreclosures during the recession, explored the dramatic economic disparity between the swanky Kendall Yards and the struggling West Central neighborhood that borders it, and revealed how residents of another low-income apartment complex — the Commercial Building — were booted out for a BluRay company led by a con artist.
But even that has sparked a flurry of neigh borhood opposition — furious residents who are horrified at the impacts of Spokane’s widespread homelessness and believe building supportive housing for them in their area will just make thingsSomeworse.have found better housing. Tittle — who says she was booted from her apartment after giving Burke and others a tour — is now living in the Ridpath, where she finally has her own air conditioner. Things are better. Others, like Davis, are still looking, worrying what hap pens if they lose their subsidies and end up back on the“Whatstreets.am I going to do?” he told the Inlander last year. “I can’t go back out there.”
“DEATH AT THE DOOR,” CONTINUED... OUT OF REACH built more than 600 units of “permanent support ive housing,” low-income housing for chronically homeless individuals and families.
But for 19 former tenants of the Wolfe and the New Washington, it’s too late. When the Inlander mentions the name of Gary Collins, 56, the news that he died last year in his room at the Wolfe devastates Vicki Anderson, a former ten ant of the Wolfe.
LAST RESORT
“Gary was the only decent person there,” she says through tears. “He used to ride the train. He would tell me stories about riding the train.”
One tenant told police that Collins was only a day away from moving out. But Anderson says that Collins always believed, never giving up hope that things were about to turn around.
“Gary would always say he was going to move out,” Anderson says. “But he didn’t have money to move out, and they knew it.” n
Still, Catholic Charities is hoping to buy the Quality Inn on Sunset Hill and turn it into 87 apartments, coupled with its own team of therapists, doctors, cooks and employment ser vice staffers — aiming to help exactly the sort of people who have struggled at the Wolfe and the New“We’reWashington.goingto have like 30 people out at this one site working with these 100 residents to help them move forward in their lives,” Mallahan says.
The problem is that homelessness, thanks to Spokane’s lack of available housing overall, is sky rocketing far faster. So is the severity of homeless ness: Goodwill is seeing people with a far greater array of serious issues than before.
Last year, Tacoma’s KNKX Public Radio managed to figure out what happened to some of the residents who were displaced when the Merkle Hotel — the last single-room occupancy apartment complex left in Tacoma — shuttered its doors in 2018. Of the 12 former tenants tracked down, five had already died. In the last decade, it’s not that a ton of the housing for the extremely low-income has disap peared, says Jonathan Mallahan, vice president of housing for Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington.“Thenumber of people housed successfully has gone up fantastically since the 2000s,” says Mallahan. Just in the last 11 years, he notes, Catholic Charities and other nonprofits have
Inlander.com/GetListed
Deadline is one week prior to publication SUBMIT YOUR EVENT DETAILS for listings in the print & online editions of the Inlander.
The Inlander asks Tittle and Davis if they think it’d be better if the Wolfe and New Washington apartments were just parking lots. They answer in unison:“Yeah.” But the problem is obvious. The number of residents at Camp Hope — a homeless encamp ment in Spokane — has continued to explode in size, from roughly 100 residents to over 600 by July. Trembley, the granddaughter of the woman who died of heat exposure in the Wolfe, says she knows families who’ve ended up there due to the high costs of rent. But there’s a reason even Burke, who was often more than happy to mount quixotic crusades on behalf of the poor and the homeless on council, didn’t fight to tear the New Wash ington or Wolfe down. There’s nowhere for the displaced to go.
Have an event? LISTED!GET
REGISTRATION: cascade.org/summit Oct 3 TAMARS@CASCADE.ORG Scholarships$100Available & Spokane Community CollegeJoin us workshopsfor nearrollingwalking,biking,tonetworking&improveandyou 22 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 Trejo, the Northwest Justice Project attorney, took over the lawsuit on behalf of Murray and Hanson. And, ultimately, he gives credit to Wolfe — there were some significant improvements made, like some of the big holes being plugged up. “Everything was going good, we’d remodeled a whole bunch of stuff,” Wolfe says. But then COVID hit. “They told us we were not allowed to evict. We had to sit there and let people not pay rent,” Wolfe says. “For over two years, I had over 20 people that just refused to pay.”And at the end of the eviction moratorium, the rules had changed to make evictions more expensive and time-consuming. “We had to pay to get these people out,” Wolfe says. And that meant raising rents. There have been some reforms. Goodwill tells the Inlander they’ve instituted a new inspec tion process through their Housing and Essential Need program — ensuring housing quality before they’re able to subsidize new tenants in apartment complexes like the New Washington or the Wolfe. But ultimately, the reason these two apart ment buildings have been so affordable is because they’ve been awful places to live. If they were better, rents would be higher or there would be heavy competition for available spots. It’s eco nomics, brutal but simple. The good news is, if you look up at those windows at the Wolfe and New Washington apartments today, you see the windows speckled with air conditioners.
* O er good for non-STCU loans only. The 1% cash back o er is limited to $500 per loan. E ective August 1 through December 31, 2022. Recipient is responsible for all taxes related to bonus payments. Loans subject to approval. Rates and terms of your STCU loan may depend on the creditworthiness of the applicant and model year of vehicle. No limit on the number of loans re nanced. Hear us out: What if your loans paid you? 1% cash is back! Re nance your non-STCU auto, boat, or recreational vehicle and get up to $500 back per loan.* To learn more or to apply, scan the QR code, go to stcu.org/cashback, visit any STCU branch location, or call (509) 326-1954. SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 23
“REAL” ENTERTAINMENT
he last few years have been absolutely wild for World Wrestling Entertainment. The biggest pro wrestling company in the world saw a viable new competitor show up (All Elite Wrestling) for the first time since the early ’00s, had to perform in empty arenas due to COVID and saw the man behind the company’s rise to a billion-dollar entertainment property, Vince McMahon, leave the family business in shame after revelations that he’d been paying off ex-employees to keep quiet about unseemly sexual coercion. That all seems like a recipe for disaster, but the past few months — since McMahon stepped down and his son-in-law (and former world champ) Triple H took over the creative planning side of the business — have actually seen some of the freshest WWE programming in years. There’s been an infusion of new talent to the roster and storylines that seem less like the hamster wheel of sameold, same-old, which makes WWE’s upcoming stop in Spokane for “Saturday Night’s Main Event” a much more intriguing prospect to check out. Here are a few basics the uninitiated attendee should know before heading to the land of body slams.
•
• spokanearena.com • 509-279-7000 Stars
The stop at Spokane Arena will be what’s known in wrestling parlance as a “house show,” a non-televised product (unlike WWE’s weekly FOX and USA programs Smackdown and Raw) only intended to play to the live fans in the Arena. This has both positives and negatives worth noting.On the negative side, don’t expect any storyline pro gression, title changes or major surprises. WWE stories are told through the televised medium, so the house shows are mainly matchups where existing feuds can play out without resolving in a way that would leave weekly viewers in the dark. Also, the house show just uses talent from one of the TV programs (in Spokane’s case, Smack down), and not everyone shows up for all the house shows due to the grind that is WWE’s schedule and the wear it puts on wrestlers’ bodies. So don’t expect Roman Reigns or Raw stars like AJ Styles, Becky Lynch, Rey Mysterio, Bianca Belair or Seth Rollins to attend. That said, house shows are pretty much all-action events. Without the need to progress storylines, there aren’t long promos that drag. And without the cameras on, the wrestlers are free to be a little more loose and free-wheeling, often interacting with the crowd more and never having to stall for commercial breaks. The setting really allows the best in-ring performers to flourish. And there are plenty of talented Smackdown names scheduled to be on the card (which is always subject to last-minute changes): Drew McIntyre, the Usos, Sami Zayn, Liz Morgan, Shinsuke Nakamura, Gunther, Ronda Rousey, Happy Corbin and more.
HOUSE SHOW VIBES
T
• All ages • Spokane Arena • 720
Catch up on the latest from the pro wrestling juggernaut before “Saturday Night’s Main Event” stops in Spokane BY SETH SOMMERFELD
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Everyone older than a preteen is aware that pro wrestling is scripted entertain ment, not an actual competitive sport. That’s why we like it The UFC and boxing already exist if you want to watch actual fighting. The great thing about the WWE is that it offers athletic displays of gymnastic grace and brute power while everyone is trying to not hurt each other, all while the matches are propelled by actual thought-out storylines with exaggerated drama and a surprising amount of comedy. We go to pro wrestling for an entertainment spectacle, not a sporting contest.
“Saturday Night’s Main Event” won’t just be a chance to see amazing athleticism and in-ring storytelling on display. It’s a chance to get on the ground floor of a new era of WWE. n WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event Sat, Sept. 10 at 7:30 pm $22-$117 W. Mallon Ave. of the WWE (left to right): Ronda Rousey, Gunther, and the Usos.
•
24 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
SPORTS WWE FOR BEGINNERS
NEW ERA As previously mentioned, Triple H taking over WWE creative has been a shot of adrenaline in what had become a stale product. He presided over the best run of pro wrestling in recent years when he was in charge of WWE’s developmental brand NXT during the “Black & Gold” era (roughly 2015-2020), when NXT routinely put on shows that blew main roster WWE out of the water with elite-level in-ring action and storylines that actually got fans invested. The hope is that he’ll carry that magic over to the bigger spotlight, and so far he’s been leaning that direction (including rehiring many NXT stars that McMahon had fired).
Call Today 509 • 926 • www.pmcmoney.com1755 AvailableLoans New FixLandCommercialConstructionPropertyDevelopment&Flip Free Admission! SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 25
As a nonprofit, the theater company continues to run solely on donations and with help from volunteers.
CULTURE | DIGEST
ONE DAY TRANSFORMATION
JOHN LEGEND, Legend. The gifted soulful pianist and singersongwriter unleashes another barrage of songs to make hearts melt on this double album.
BY MADISON PEARSON
Occasionally a shadow actor prompts a line or takes someone by the hand to lead them off into the wings. Carroll says that the shadow actors’ main goal is to blend into the background most of the time and let their partners take the reins.
26 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
“Toby and I were a package deal. If I was hired for a production, they knew Toby was going to be there helping in any way that he could,” says Carroll, execu tive director of the nonprofit My Turn Theater.
When Wendy Carroll began taking her son Toby to various productions she was involved in, she noticed his interest in the stage begin to blossom.
FULL-TIME PERFORMER
THE BUZZ BIN
THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST
“After a while, I knew he was wondering when he would get a turn on stage,” she adds. “That’s where the idea came from.” That idea was to create a theater company for people with disabilities and/or special needs. Toby has autism along with some other physical disabilities, but that never stopped him from pursuing his dream to perform.
My Turn Theater ensures actors with special needs get their time in the spotlight
They all have great relationships on and off the stage.”Rehearsals for the company’s upcoming production of Guys & Dolls look like nothing out of the ordinary.
J.Lo aka Jennifer Lopez aka Mrs. (Ben) Affleck is having a moment. Again. With 30 years in the biz, this former In Living Color “fly girl” has had a lot of moments as a dancer, singer, actress and even as producer. But it’s her 2019 SuperBowl halftime appearance that prompted the title of Netflix’s new biopic, HALFTIME. The movie is a referendum on the social and political issues of the day, issues that intersect the Venn diagram of a Bronx-born Puerto Rican who has been dissed more than once throughout her career — she was the first-ever performer to be asked to co-host a halftime show — and soldiered on. This is a modern-day Horatio Alger story with lots of glam and glitz, behind-the-scenes interviews and footage, and an inspiring message to rise above and work even harder to achieve your dreams. (CARRIE SCOZZARO)
TAKING TURNS
“During every rehearsal we see miracles that the audience will never know about,” she says. “I’ve had parents tell me that their child has started speaking more often, that their reading fluency has improved.
Netflix’s new renovation show INSTANT DREAM HOME shows just how completely a single home can be transformed in just 12 hours if you have enough people, proper planning, and, we can guess, the massive budget of a streaming service. With tear-jerking stories of families who’ve given back to their com munities at the heart of each surprise renovation, the single-day home flips are as emotional as they are impressive. Orange is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks hosts alongside a team of four almost-too-attractive-to-be-believable project managers who plan everything from landscaping and new siding to flooring, furniture, kitchens and more. The show keeps you hooked with each feel-good surprise as you find yourself cheering for solu tions to every unexpected problem. (SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL)
Noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online Sept. 9: BUILT TO SPILL, When The Wind Forgets Your Name. Idaho’s great est musical export delivers more guitar-shredding indie rock jams with the aid of Doug Martsch’s Bra zilian pals from the band Oruã.
KANE BROWN, Different Man. The singer who rose from viral sen sation to country superstar, by adding a little R&B mix, looks for even more crossover success on his third LP. (SETH SOMMERFELD)
Carroll started Out of the Shadows Theater in 2016, with the first four productions staged in Coeur d’Alene.In2019, Carroll and her son relocated to Spokane, hoping to bring opportunity for special needs actors to the city’s thriving theater scene while Out of the Shad ows continues to do the same in Coeur d’Alene. “When things started to look up after COVID, I started making plans for My Turn in full force,” Car roll says. “I just noticed a need for people with special needs to get their chance, and I wanted to be able to give them that opportunity in Spokane.” My Turn Theater has a unique way of making sure that their actors feel comfortable and confident when they’re“Eachonstage.actor has their own shadow actor,” says Carroll. “The shadow actors learn all of the [main] actor’s lines and blocking, but also act as their friend.
Some actors carry scripts while others have set theirs aside, everyone is singing along to Frank Loesser’s lyr ics, and the director, Trudy Rogers, interjects intermit tently with advice and helpful tips.
A ll forms of art allow for emotional expression, but theater may be the most physically expres sive of all.
After Guys & Dolls performs this month at the Bing Crosby Theater, Carroll plans on seeking out more actors, volunteers and venues for future productions.
Carroll says My Turn is always looking for volunteers to be shadow actors or stage crew. “We’re planning on two musicals a year from here on out,” she says. “We want to be able to continue teaching and showing audiences to recognize ability over disability.” n Guys & Dolls • Sept. 9-11, Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm and Sun at 2 pm • $20 suggested donation • Bing Crosby Theater • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • myturntheater.com • 509-227-7638 Carroll CHIANA McINELLY PHOTO
My own son started reading at a seventh or eighth grade level once he got a script in his hands.”
Wendy
“Everyone is really nice and happy there is a different cuisine in the area,” says Dimitar Gerov, who opened the Border Stop this spring with wife Heather Gerova. Bulgarian cuisine is different, yet as part of the Balkan region, it’s also familiar. Bulgaria’s eastern flank sits on the Black Sea, with Turkey, Greece and North Macedonia to the south, so some of the flavors on the Border Stop’s menu remind of Mediterranean food. Serbia and Roma nia are to the west and north of Bulgaria, respectively, however, lending Slavic elements to the cuisine, too.
Black ceilings, resin-topped tables with a swirly design, dim lighting, faux plants, and jazz from an overhead speaker create a soothing ambiance. There’s a television behind the bar but instead of the cacophony of sporting events, it displays magnificent mountain scenes in a continuous loop.
the Balkans
next page Bringing
YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
Banitsa, which is баница in Bulgarian, combines flaky phyllo pastry dough, Bulgarian yogurt, eggs and feta, Gerova explains. It’s so labor-intensive, she makes it much smaller than how it would traditionally be served, pairing it in the sampler plate with garlic bread, lutenitsa and sarma, the Bulgarian answer to Greek dolmades or stuffed grape leaves.
...continued
T he Border Stop is located above A1 Smoke Shop in a space the prior owners used as a cigar shop and wine bar. Despite the unusual location, the eatery’s interior is cozy and inviting. A half wall in the main dining and bar area overlooks the smoke shop below, but it’s not intrusive.
The Border Stop introduces diners to Bulgarian food and culture from Stateline, Idaho
BY CARRIE SCOZZARO on Dimitar Gerov and Heather Gerova welcome diners to the Border Stop.
The princessa ($8-$12), for example, is one of several open-face baked sandwiches that might show up on a typical Bulgarian breakfast menu or a street vendor’s cart. The Classic ($12) features seasoned pork, beef and onion, with sharp white cheddar cheese, while the Balkan ($11) includes salami, sharp white cheddar, Bulgarian seasoning and lutenitsa, a thick condiment of tomatoes and roasted red peppers. “Lutenitsa will differ in different regions and in differ ent households, each family having their own recipe they pass down to generations,” Gerov says. The red peppers he’s used to are called piperka and have sweet, nutty notes similar to a Spanish piquillo, but with more heat. Gerov regularly imports ingredients to capture the authenticity of Bulgarian cuisine he grew up with. For example, he brings in organic Bulgarian feta cheese made the “old school way,” and features it on top of the garlic bread ($7), in the shopska salad ($10.50) with cucumber, kalamata olives, tomatoes and bell peppers, and in banitsa, a cheese-filled savory pie only available in the sampler plate ($13).
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 27
OPENING S tateline, Idaho, is a blip on the travel radar, with fewer than 40 residents, numerous gas stations and several entertainment venues — a strip club, biker bar, country and western dance hall, and racetrack — contributing to the border town’s raucous reputation. It’s the last place one might expect to see a restaurant serving French-inspired crepes and authentic Bulgarian food, but that’s what you’ll find at The Border Stop.
28 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 FOOD | OPENING
Shop),
“We sell what we like to eat,” Gerov says. n
The couple, who relocated to Liberty Lake in 2019, tried but haven’t quite mastered baba’s recipe for Bulgarian yogurt, Gerov says. Al though it’s similar to Greek yogurt, it’s tangier, he adds, and Bulgarians serve it with everything.
The Border Stop serves nearly two dozen sweet and savory crepes. Some are combinationsfamiliarlike the Cubano ($12) with Swiss cheese, ham and dill pickles, the chicken shawarma ($14) with Middle AlmostchoppedEastern-spicedchicken,ortheElvis($11)with banana, peanut butter and honey. Others reflect more unusual ingredients like the house-made cream and oreo cookie crepe ($12).
The Border Stop • 7200 W. Seltice Way, #2 (inside A1 Smoke Post Falls • Open Wed-Fri noon-8 pm, Sat 10 am-8 pm, Sun 10 am-5 pm • theborderstop.com • 208-619-6856 up at Inlander.com/newsletter. Bulgarian cheese.
“Yogurt is a huge deal in Bulgarian culture as you can imagine with its history,” he adds.
The restaurant’s Facebook page is a good place to check for events and the latest food specials like kebapche or grilled Bulgarian kebabs ($10.50) or terrator, a cold soup with Bulgarian yogurt, cucumber and dill ($5).
The shopska salad features imported
“BRINGING THE BALKANS,” CONTINUED... ENTRÉE Get the scoop on local food news with our weekly Entrée newsletter. Sign
Fun fact: Bulgarian scientist Stamen Grig orov is credited with the discovery of lactobacillus bulgaricus, the bacterium that naturally and magi cally transforms milk into yogurt. Baba might be the originator of most recipes on Border Stop’s menu, but Dimitar’s mother is the inspiration for the crepes.
YOUNG KWAK PHOTO The Alzheimer’s Association Walk to End Alzheimer’s® is full of flowers, each carried by someone committed to ending the disease. It’s time to add your flower to the fight. Take the first step and register today! 2022 Walk to End Alzheimer's Media Sponsor MOSES LAKE • SAT 9/17 COEUR D’ALENE • SAT 10/1 SPOKANE • SAT 10/8 1.800.272.3900 | alz.org/walk SEPTEMBER 11TH, 11AM - 2PM WWW.ARBORCREST.COM | 509.927.9463 | AGES 21+ ONLY CLASSIC CAR SHOW IMPORTANT NOTICE This event does not allow the admission of individuals under the age of 21 years old. This applies to event attendees & owners participating in the show. The Arbor Crest Annual Classic Car Show makes its long awaited return this September! Come enjoy classics of the new and old generation of automobiles at the Cliff House Estate, you won’t want to miss out on the action!
G erova does much of the cooking at Border Stop, having learned from the source: Dimitar’s mother and his grandmother, or baba. No one writes anything down, says Gerova, so she videotaped the Gerov matriarchy in their home“[Dimitar]kitchen. said I went through Grandma’s cooking school,” says Heather, who met Dimitar in her native Alaska.
Look for rotating local breweries on tap, says Gerov, and the “occasionally skunky Pilsner from Europe,” plus more German beers before Ok toberfest. The wine list is modest — a few from France and New Zealand — with more bottles being added slowly. Outside, the Border Stop includes a patio and occasional live music.
“For the crepes we use mom’s recipe,” Gerov says. It’s a family secret and includes “a little of this and a little of that,” he says.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 29
The same goes for all of the CGI creations that Pinocchio encounters on his various misadventures. Carlo Col lodi’s 1883 novel has been adapted nu merous times with numerous approaches, many of which embrace the potentially dark and disturbing elements. But Zemeckis’ film isn’t meant to be dark and disturbing, and it follows the established Disney plot, rather than re turning to Collodi’s original story. The result is the worst of both worlds, a movie that captures none of the wonder and joy of the 1940 film while also failing to update or reassess it in any worthwhile way.
BY JOSH BELL STIFF A
WHAT
Silvestri and Glen Ballard to join Disney staples “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “I’ve Got No Strings,” and there’s a new female character for Pinocchio to briefly befriend when he’s abducted to join the traveling puppet show run by the tyrannical Stromboli (Giuseppe Battis ton). These are minor additions to a movie that otherwise dutifully recreates its predecessor, often verbatim. But choices that made sense in 1940 can be baf fling and misguided in 2022. Pinocchio and his mischievous pal Lampwick (Lewin Lloyd) no longer drink beer or smoke cigars, at least, but Lampwick still dresses and talks like a 1940s movie street urchin. It’s become a cliché to cast Hanks as be loved patriarchal figures (he even played Walt Disney himself in Saving Mr. Banks), and his performance here is competent but bland. Gordon-Levitt puts on a bizarre voice somewhere between the original Jiminy’s Cliff Edwards and Don Knotts, making the bumbling mentor even more grating. Ainsworth captures Pinocchio’s wide-eyed simple-mindedness, and while the harsh moralizing of the 1940 movie is toned down, the message is still strangely scolding. When the lovely animated classic is just a click away on Disney+, there’s no reason to watch this version instead. n
Pinocchio is the latest soulless live-remake from the Disney factory
REVIEW
PINOCCHIO Rated DirectedPGby Robert Zemeckis Starring Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hanks Streaming on Disney+
30 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
aybe at one time there was some artistic ambi tion to Disney’s live-action remakes of its classic animated films, but that time has long passed. The more successful these movies have become, the more rigidly formulaic they’ve gotten, reproducing every element of their source material with a plastic, modern sheen. That’s how director Robert Zemeckis approaches the latest Disney retread, his live-action and CGI version of 1940’s Pinocchio, which was the second-ever Disney animated feature film. Zemeckis has long been a filmmaker who pays more attention to technology than to storytelling, and with Pinocchio, he recalls some of the uncanny valley horrors of his motion-capture movies Beowulf and The Polar Express Pinocchio reunites Zemeckis with his Polar Express star Tom Hanks, but it’s not exactly a fruitful reunion for the fre quent collaborators (who also worked together on Forrest Gump and Cast Away). Hanks plays one of the only fully human-looking characters in the movie, the woodcarver Geppetto, who longs for a child to relieve his loneliness. Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz add a bit of tragic backstory for Geppetto, who now has a dead wife and son, perhaps so he seems like less of a creepy old man. As in the 1940 movie, Geppetto’s wish for his wooden marionette Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to come to life is granted by the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), who instructs Pinocchio to learn honesty, bravery and selflessness so that he can become a real boy. To that end, she empowers talking insect Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to become Pi nocchio’s conscience, although he does a pretty poor job of guiding the annoyingly naïve puppet. Pinocchio and Jiminy are rendered as photo-realistic CGI versions of their original handdrawn animated designs, making them off-putting and grotesque rather than expressive and whimsical.
“I’m a real bore... errr... boy!”
M
There are a couple of forgettable new songs by Alan
GET READY FOR EVER.WINTERBESTYOUR It’s time to get stoked for snow! With the shortest drive from Spokane, seven-day-a-week operations, and awesome terrain for every ability, Mt. Spokane is the ultimate place to get your turns in each winter. BUY NOW! SEASON PASS SUMMER SALE ENDS ON SEPTEMBER 13. WWW.MTSPOKANE.COMPARKSNOWBOARD&SKISPOKANE.MT SUN-THU 12PM-11PM FRI-SAT 12PM - 12:30AM 524 W MAIN AVE, DOWNTOWN SPOKANE THEPURGATORY.COM WHISKEYWEEKLY FULLFLIGHTSMENUWEEKLY SPECIALS OVER 640 WHISKEYS ON THE WALL CHECK OUT OUR WHISKEY CLUB A TRULY UNIQUE WHISKEY & RESTAURANT EXPERIENCE A TRULY UNIQUE WHISKEY & RESTAURANT EXPERIENCEEXPERIENCE
ALSO OPENING BARBARIAN When a woman arrives at an Airbnb to find it’s double booked and a strange man is already there, things seem uneasy. When she discovers what’s in the basement, the true horror begins. Rated R BEAUTIFUL BLUE EYES In his final film role, Roy Scheider potrays a retired cop seeking re venge against an elderly man he believes to be the Nazi who killed his family during World War II. Not Rated BRAHMASTRA PART 1: SHIVA The start of a MCU-like universe rooted in Indian mythology (the Astraverse), the action follows a man named Shiva who has firewielding powers. He must learn to harness and fight with his divine abilities to protect the one he loves. Not rated THE GOOD BOSS In this Spanish comedy that skew ers the corporate world, a factory owner (Javier Bardem) who des perately wants to win an award for excellence must deal with dis tracted managers, fired workers protesting, inappropriate intern relations and more. Not Rated At the Magic Lantern MEDIEVAL Ben Foster stars as famed Czech general and 14th-century battle leg end Jan Žižka, who must choose be tween following orders and fighting for justice as nobles battle for power in an unstable Holy Roman Empire. Rated R LIFEMARK A faith-forward Evangelical film, Lifemark follows a teen who feels ashamed that he was adopted. Un expectedly, he reconnects with his birth mother. Not Rated UNFAVORABLE ODDS Things get messy when a business man bets his playboy pal that he can’t actually get any woman he wants — and decides to test the theory by betting the lothario he can’t steal the affections of his wife. Rated PG-13
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 31
Dante faces some difficult circumstances when Randal suffers a serious heart attack, just as Smith himself did in 2018. Newly reminded of his own mortality, Randal decides to finally do something with his life, dedicating himself to making a movie based on his experiences at the Quick Stop. Essentially, Randal decides to make Clerks, complete with verbatim recreations of many scenes from the original movie, with the originalNeveractors.mind that Clerks makes no sense as a movie about middle-aged regret, rather than twentysomething angst. The movie within the movie gives Smith an excuse to wallow in nos talgia, while making occasional self-deprecating jokes about his own shortcomings as a director. It’s a haphazard account of micro-budget film making, though, which Smith depicted more lovingly in 2008’s underrated Zack and Miri Make a PornoO’Halloran. and Anderson, who have rarely acted outside of Smith-adjacent projects, retain their chemistry as friends, but they’re not up to selling the blatant sappiness of the movie’s final third. Trevor Fehrman, who returns from Clerks II as the duo’s irritatingly ear nest sidekick Elias, hasn’t acted on screen since 2006, and his presence is just as awkward. Jason Mewes and Smith are a reliable comedy duo as weed dealers Jay and Silent Bob, although they get in on the uncomfortable emotional outpourings, too.
32 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
lerks should never have been a franchise. Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut film is a smallscale comedy about two friends working dead-end jobs in adjacent retail stores, dealing with annoying customers and taking stock of their lives. It became an indie film sensation after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, launching Smith’s career as a major new filmmak ing voice alongside the likes of Quentin Taran tino and Robert Rodriguez. Except Smith never broke into the main stream the same way some of his peers did, and much of his career has been spent remixing and rehashing those same original characters and storylines. At this point, Smith exists in a wholly insular world, making movies almost exclusively for his existing fanbase, which he’s cultivated via a media empire of podcasts and live appearances. In that context, Clerks III is the equivalent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a long-awaited return to the cinematic universe’s beloved origin. Smith values his devotees, so Clerks III is full of fan service, from the reheated banter between lifelong friends Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) to the cameos from Smith’s podcasting partners to the references to other Smith movies. It often feels like a love letter by Smith, to Smith, and it’s remarkably sentimental for a movie about a pair of man-children making dick Followingjokes.theevents of 2006’s Clerks II, Dante and Randal have spent the last 16 years as coowners of the Quick Stop convenience store in their hometown of Leonardo, New Jersey. Smith immediately establishes that Dante’s love interest from the last movie, the near-saintly Becky (Ro sario Dawson), has died, along with their unborn daughter, which is a rather morbid way to begin an ostensible comedy. It’s not because Dawson is too busy or too famous to appear in a Clerks se quel, though: She’s still in the movie, as a spectral vision who guides Dante in his life choices.
BY JOSH BELL
Kevin Smith creates a tribute to himself in the self-satisfied Clerks III
SCREEN | REVIEW
There are funny moments in Clerks III, which relies much less on conspicuously vulgar shock value than Clerks II did, but they’re largely out weighed by the smug, disingenuous self-regard. Smith closes the movie by giving a literal speech over the end credits, like he’s accepting some lifetime achievement Oscar he’ll never actually receive. Like the rest of the movie, it’s a loving tribute to a legacy that probably should have been left alone. n
CLERKS III Rated DirectedR by Kevin Smith Starring Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Trevor Fehrman
The Clerks Awaken
C
Screening at Regal Cinemas, Sept. 13-18 at 7 pm Even Clerks diehards didn’t need three movies of Randal and Dante.
PAGE 36 RUNAWAY LEMONADE • SEPT 14 • ZOLA /RUNAWAYLEMONADE MOVIE TIMES Every Theater. Every Movie. All in one place. by Time, by Theater, or SEARCHABLEMovie 25 W Main Ave #125 • MagicLanternOnMain.com MAGIC LANTERN THEATER FOR SHOWTIMES: 509-209-2383 or MAGICLANTERNONMAIN.COMFORPRIVATERESERVATIONSEMAIL:magiclanternevents@gmail.com TICKETS: $10-11 FRI, SEPT 9 TH - THU, SEPT 15TH NOW SHOWING: THE GOOD BOSS, PHANTOM OF THE OPEN; FIRE OF LOVE; HALLELUJAH; MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON; MY DONKEY MY LOVER AND I NOW SERVING BEER & WINE RENT OUR THEATER FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT!
It's called a linear accelerator, and it's used to treat cancer at MultiCare's Comprehensive Cancer Center. It's noninvasive, precision radiation capable of treating tumors anywhere in the body. What it can't do is provide emergency childcare. Which is why, along with precision cancer treatment, MultiCare partners with Vanessa Behan, giving parents a safe place to bring their children in a time of stress. Because healthy communities need more than health care. See how we're supporting communities at multicare.org. We're here for you.
MultiCare�
WE CAN TREAT CANCER WI TH RADIATION BEAMS THE WID TH OF A HAIR. WE CAN ALSO HELP YOU FIND CHILDCARE.
INLANDER: What made this the right time to do another Sunny Day Real Estate reunion?
HOERNER: We’ve actually been working on a re union since probably 2017. And we got really close... and then COVID happened. That sort of put the kibosh on it for a couple of years. The tour’s looking great; the band is looking great. So it’s the right time. I’m knocking on wood as I say this, but so far it looks good and everybody’s healthy. All the
L
BY SETH SOMMERFELD Dan Hoerner preps for the Sunny Day Real Estate tour in his Spokane home.
DAWSON SMITH PHOTO
34 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 Q&A REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO
ong before emo became mainstream parlance, Sunny Day Real Estate was setting some of the template for what the genre would become. While not the first band to define the genre (see: acts that emerged from the D.C. hardcore punk scene like Rites of Spring), the Seattle group made a few touchstone albums for the style in the form of 1994’s Diary (which Rolling Stone ranked as the greatest emo album of all time) and 1995’s self-titled LP (nicknamed Pink, for its monochrome albumOriginallycover). composed of guitarist/singer Jeremy Enigk, guitarist/backup vocalist (and Spokane native) Dan Hoerner, bassist Nate Mendel (who would go on to be Foo Fighters longtime bassist) and drummer Wil liam Goldsmith, Sunny Day crafted a sonic palette that blended soft swirling melodicism, angst-filled punk fury and extremely emotionally charged confessional lyricism expressed via Enigk’s falsetto tenderness and Hoerner’s gruffer edge. But the band broke up before its sophomore album was even released, long before emo became a major rock genre. Still the band’s influence resonated for decades. While the group has had a couple runion stints, their latest rein carnation (sans Mendel) looks like their chance to finally bask in some limelight. Before embarking on a major tour, Sunny Day Real Estate heads to the extremely cozy con fines of the Big Dipper for a warm-up show on Sept. 10. It’s a natural fit for the band, as Hoerner lives in town and just so happens to be the venue’s owner. (The show sold out so quickly that tickets were gone before I even heard about it, and I’m literally the music editor for The Inlander.) Before Sunny Day Real Estate works out the kinks at the Dipper, we chatted with Hoerner about what keeps him coming back to Sunny Day, the band’s legacy and owning a local venue.
EMOSunny Day Real Estate guitarist Dan Hoerner discusses his band’s reunion, being an emo legend, and owning the Big Dipper
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 35 shows are selling really well or sold out. It looks like this is probably going to be the biggest tour we’ve ever done. We’re all really excited. I think this is going to be a very fun one. What keeps you guys coming back to Sunny Day after all these years?
•
It’s gonna be really fun, too. It sold out in just minutes, and I know literally like 99 percent of the names on the list of people who bought the ticket. So it’s just gonna be a bunch of friends and family getting together and sending Sunny Day off on a big ol’ tour for a couple of months.
What led to having the warm-up show at the Big Dipper?
It’s just amazing how the Dipper has grown into what it is. Very, very rocky start. The first couple of years were really hard. I don’t know anything about booking. None of us did. We just were kids who wanted to save the broken down old venue from being turned into a parking lot. And I had played one of my very first shows there a million years ago. So it was kind of a sentimental thing for us and just something fun that we wanted to try and do. The Dipper has a big advantage I think over a lot of small music venues, especially in Spokane, because there’s really not a lot to go around here in Spokane. We know who the big players are, and they vacuum up most of the oxygen in the room. But the Dipper can do any thing. We can book like a really eclectic mix of things — from really great acts to like a kid who’s having their first show. Local bands will often have their first show at the Big Dipper. That’s kind of what it’s for. We can survive and make money off of all of that: parties, quinceañeras, weddings, plays, movie screenings. We’re not locked into any kind of genre. We don’t have to be cool. We can book anything.
As someone who owns a venue, how would you assess the current state of the Spokane music scene?
I consider myself to be a friend of most of the bands that would probably be considered to be the biggest bands in Spokane... which is not real ly a huge amount of people. Spokane has a pretty small scene. You’ve got Kadabra — anything that Garrett Zanol does is going to be amazing. He’s been with the Dipper since the very beginning. He’s incredibly talented and charismatic. When Sunny Day plays on the 10th, we’re going to have Deer, the Smokes, and Itchy Kitty open. I think Itchy Kitty is one of the all-time great Spokane bands, and they’ve been hav ing great success of late. Those are some of the most talented people that you’re ever going to be around. They’re closer to me than family. I couldn’t possibly love them any more. My wife, Dawson — she’s the heart and soul of the Big Dip per — took a couple of pictures of me practicing a few days ago, trying to get ready for the Sunny Day shows. And on the wall is this huge poster of Naomi from Itchy Kitty on it. So they’re like right there with me in my most sacred space. So I think the state of the scene is that there are incredible geniuses here, but it’s also Spokane. Historically, it has kind of an upper limit to what’s possible here. So that’s always the challenge.Idolove Spokane. I mean, I choose to live here. I was born and raised here and come from a family that’s been in Spokane for many genera tions. So as a Spokanite I feel like I’ve earned the right to sort of lovingly mock the little town. n
Jeez. That’s just like the hugest favor to me from Jeremy and William. I can never pay the guys back for doing this. We always like to play a little icebreaker show just to kind of get on stage and get the feel for it. So we were lucky because I own the Big Dipper. So we can just like set up there for a few days and practice on stage and kind of get used to that feeling.
Do you have any favorite songs to play?
How is it going with the Big Dipper in general?
Sunny Day Real Estate, Itchy Kitty, The Smokes, Deer • Sat, Sept. 10 at 8 pm • Sold out All ages The Big Dipper S. Washington St.
• bigdipperevents.com • 509-863-8098 SAGEMONOPHONICS:MOTELTOUR WITH GUESTS GA-20 & KENDRA MORRIS WHO’S BAD: THRILLER NIGHTS THE MICHAELULTIMATEJACKSONEXPERIENCE LEONID & FRIENDS: WORLD’SCHICAGOGREATESTTRIBUTEJAKESHIMABUKURO JACKSONFEATURINGWALDHOFF & JUSTIN KAWIKA YOUNG SUNDAY, SEP 25 FRIDAY, OCT 28 SUNDAY, OCT 30 WEDNESDAY, DEC 14 SEE OUR OTHER EVENTS AT SBLENTERTAINMENT.COM AT
•
Thirty years we’ve been together now. And we’ve just grown into really nice friendships that have stood the test of time and stood up through a lot of turbulence over the years. We are very emo people, so we definitely have had a lot of bumpy parts of the ride. But I think that at the end of the day we’ve always just been brothers and friends, and the music itself just keeps drawing us back. I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but I think Sunny Day has made some pretty good songs and a couple of pretty OK albums, so it’s fun to keep coming back to it. It’s really fun to play. And I love that people still care about it all these years later. It’s fun to see my friends in bigger bands that have gone on to huge success that still kind look fondly back at Sunny Day as maybe a partial influence on what they’re doing. Sunny Day just seems to kind of persist. It’s like you didn’t tend your garden for 10 years and when you come back it’s all full of amazing fruits and vegetables. It makes me happy that it seems to make other people happy. What is it like seeing albums like Diary turn into these seminal, hugely influential albums after the fact? It’s always amazingly humbling. I’m such a fan of music myself. Like, I love My Chemical Romance. And to know that those guys love Sunny Day, it’s so humbling. I don’t take any kind of credit. Nobody in Sunny Day is like, “We’re architects of emo!” We laugh at the concept. We know that music is just a river, and we’re just like a leaf in the stream. I can point to The Edge or Bob Stinson or any number of hundreds of guitar players that influ enced me and made me want to write the way I write. So we just know that it’s all a continuum. But it’s just funny that emo has gotten and stayed so popular over the last 20+ years. So it’s fun to have a couple of albums that are consid ered to be cornerstones of the genre. At the end of the day, we just feel lucky to have been able to make the songs that we made. And we’re still trying to write songs too. I think we’ve always just approached it like, “Well, if we can write one more song, that’s cool. If not, that’s fine, too.”
It’s so fun to play “In Circles,” because the second I start my riff, everybody loses their shit. And it’s fun to see that reaction.
• 171
J
J J KNITTING FACTORY, CHVRCHES, CAFUNÉ Oct. 2, 8 pm.
J SPOKANE COUNTY FAIR & EXPO CENTER, Nelly, Sep. 15, 7 pm.
J
ALL AGES SHOW
Thursday, 09/8 ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS, Ed Shaw BRICK WEST BREWING CO., Kyle Richard J CALVARY SPOKANE, Jordan Feliz, Jonathan Traylor CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM, Weathered Shepherds LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Nattali Rize THE MASON JAR, Keva Shull NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO, Bret Michaels, Jimmie Allen PINE STREET PLAZA, Dan Maher J QQ SUSHI & KITCHEN, Just Plain Darin ZOLA, Desperate8s Friday, 09/9
J J SPOKANE COUNTY FAIR & EXPO CENTER, Elle King
J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Matt Mitchell Music Co.: Ramona Album Release Show, Oct. 8, 8 pm.
J = THE THIS
INLANDER RECOMMENDS
J J THE BIG DIPPER, The Queers, Teenage Bottlerocket, Oct. 18, 7:30 pm.
I
J EICHARDT’S PUB, Monday Blues Jam with John Firshi RED ROOM LOUNGE, Open Mic Night SPOKANE COUNTY FAIR & EXPO CENTER, Cole Swindell Tuesday, 9/13
SHOW
J HORSE (CDA), JamShack J KNITTING FACTORY, Dirty Honey, Dorothy, Mac Saturn LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Shawn Stratte, Hannah Siglin J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Ron Kieper THE RIDLER PIANO BAR, Just Plain Darin SPOKANE EAGLES LODGE, Stagecoach West J J SRD MUSIC FEST, SRD Fest V: Howlin’ at the Harvest Moon TRANCHE, Stonesy Saturday, 09/10
J J THE BIG DIPPER, Sunny Day Real Estate, Itchy Kitty, The Smokes, Deer
J J KNITTING FACTORY, The Front Bottoms, The Joy Formidable, Mobley, Sep. 30, 8 pm.
J J KNITTING FACTORY, Phanto gram, GLU, Nov. 12, 8 pm.
DARK FOLK KATACOMBS
COEUR D’ALENE CITY PARK, The Rhythm Dawgs BAR & GRILL, Shuffle Dawgs LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Amigo the Devil, Katacombs
J =
36 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 MUSIC | SOUND ADVICE INDIE ROCK KORN, EVANESCENCE, P.O.D.
BRICK WEST BREWING CO., West End Summer Series: DJ Unifest CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Kenny James Miller Band IRON
J J TELEPORT VINTAGE + CO., Teleport Block Party, Sep. 17, 11 am-7 pm.
J KENDALL YARDS, Brad Keeler, Dawna Stafford, Bill Compher J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Dwayne Parsons RED ROOM LOUNGE, The Roomates
Coming Up ...
J J SPOKANE ARENA, Korn, Evanescence, P.O.D. ZOLA, Lucas Brown & Friends Wednesday, 9/14
J J THE PODIUM, A Day to Remem ber, The Used, Movements, Oct. 14, 6 pm.
— SETH SOMMERFELD KoRn, Evanescence, P.O.D • Tue, Sept. 13 at 5:30 pm • $30-$125 • All ages • Spokane Arena • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • spokanearena.com • 509-279-7000 K aterina Kiranos has arrived on the musical scene to haunt our dreams like a smokey specter delivering missives in breathy whispers in the dark of night. As Kata combs, she crafts dark folk songs with country overtones that lean more into the menacing bull skull territory and dusty wastelands than anything that would make listeners say “Yee haw!” Her 2022 debut EP You Will Not packs in the haunting melodies, incorporating her adept skills as a pianist and plenty of enchanting Spanish lyricism, a nod to Kiranos’ heritage. Indulge in the ominous sonic atmosphere when Katcombs opens up for Amigo the Devil. — SETH SOMMERFELD Amigo the Devil, Katacombs • Tue, Sept. 13 at 8 pm • $20 • 21+ • Lucky You Lounge • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • luckyyoulounge.com
CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Too Slim and the Taildraggers, The John Frishi Project IRON HORSE (CDA), JamShack J KNITTING FACTORY, Tab Benoit J LIVE AT ANDRE’S, Michelle Malone LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Noche de Verano Sin Ti (Bad Bunny Night) J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Scott Reid J RIVER CITY LANES, Karaoke with Rich J ROCKET MARKET, Bluff Around The Edges J J SRD MUSIC FEST, SRD Fest V: Howlin’ at the Harvest Moon TRANCHE, Daniel Faller ZOLA, Blake Braley Sunday, 9/11 CREST WINE CELLARS, Nu Jack City J THE BIG DIPPER, Lilith., Stubborn Will, Hilltop Rats, Last Point J LIVE AT ANDRE’S, Shawn Mullins LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Caitlyn Smith J J SRD MUSIC FEST, SRD Fest V: Howlin’ at the Harvest Moon Monday, 9/12
J J SPOKANE ARENA, The Smash ing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Poppy, Nov. 9, 6:30 pm.
f you happened to be a metal kid around the time I was in high school (early 2000s), boy do I have a tour for you! KoRn and Evanescence are co-headlining the Spokane Arena and bringing along P.O.D. for the ride. As a progenitor of nu metal, KoRn has maintained a level of raw heavy energy that kept their fans coming back and prevented them from ever being a punchline like some of their contem poraries. While the peak of nu metal might’ve been short, KoRn has longevity, putting out 11 albums that charted in the top 10. In an era of heavy bro energy in metal, Evanescence’s Amy Lee cut through the noise with a fierce grace that helped her become an icon for goth girls. P.O.D.’s Christian nu metal also had its moment in the spotlight with hits like “Alive” and “Youth of the Nation.” So dust off those overly baggy JNCO jeans and get ready for a rocking night.
LITZ’S
J J KNITTING FACTORY, The Flam ing Lips, Nov. 13, 8 pm.
ZOLA, Runaway Lemonade
ARBOR
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 37 MUSIC | VENUES 219 LOUNGE • 219 N. First Ave., Sandpoint • 208-263-5673 ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-927-9463 BABY BAR • 827 W. First Ave. • 509-847-1234 BARRISTER WINERY • 1213 W. Railroad Ave. • 509-465-3591 BEE’S KNEES WHISKY BAR • 1324 W. Lancaster Rd.., Hayden • 208-758-0558 BERSERK • 125 S. Stevens St. • 509-315-5101 THE BIG DIPPER • 171 S. Washington St. • 509-863-8098 BIGFOOT PUB • 9115 N. Division St. • 509-467-9638 BING CROSBY THEATER • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-227-7638 BLACK DIAMOND • 9614 E. Sprague Ave. • 509891-8357 BOLO’S BAR & GRILL • 116 S. Best Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-891-8995 BOOMERS CLASSIC ROCK BAR • 18219 E. Appleway Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-368-9847 BUCER’S COFFEEHOUSE PUB • 201 S. Main St., Moscow • 208-596-0887 THE BULL HEAD • 10211 S. Electric St., Four Lakes • 509-838-9717 CHAN’S RED DRAGON • 1406 W. Third Ave. • 509-838-6688 COEUR D’ALENE CASINO • 37914 S. Nukwalqw St., Worley • 800-523-2464 COEUR D’ALENE CELLARS • 3890 N. Schreiber Way, Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-2336 CRUISERS BAR & GRILL • 6105 W Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-446-7154 CURLEY’S HAUSER JUNCTION • 26433 W. Hwy. 53, Post Falls • 208-773-5816 EICHARDT’S PUB • 212 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-263-4005 FIRST INTERSTATE CENTER FOR THE ARTS • 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. • 509-279-7000 FOX THEATER • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-624-1200 IRON HORSE • 407 E. Sherman, Coeur d’Alene • 208-667-7314 IRON HORSE BAR & GRILL • 11105 E. Sprague Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-926-8411 JOHN’S ALLEY • 114 E. Sixth St., Moscow • 208-883-7662 KNITTING FACTORY • 911 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-244-3279 LEFTBANK WINE BAR • 108 N. Washington St. • 509-315-8623 LUCKY YOU LOUNGE • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • 509-474-0511 MARYHILL WINERY • 1303 W. Summit Pkwy. • 509-443-3832 THE MASON JAR • 101 F St., Cheney • 509-359-8052 MAX AT MIRABEAU • 1100 N. Sullivan Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-922-6252 MILLIE’S • 28441 Hwy 57, Priest Lake • 208-443-0510 MOOSE LOUNGE • 401 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-7901 MOOTSY’S • 406 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-1570 NASHVILLE NORTH • 6361 W. Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-457-9128 NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO • 100 N. Hayford Rd., Airway Heights • 877-871-6772 NYNE BAR & BISTRO • 232 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-474-1621 PEND D’OREILLE WINERY • 301 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-265-8545 THE PODIUM • 511 W. Dean Ave. • 509-279-7000 POST FALLS BREWING CO. • 112 N. Spokane St., Post Falls • 208-773-7301 RAZZLE’S BAR & GRILL • 10325 N. Government Way, Hayden • 208-635-5874 RED ROOM LOUNGE • 521 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-7613 THE RIDLER PIANO BAR • 718 W. Riverside Ave. • 509-822-7938 SEASONS OF COEUR D’ALENE • 1004 S. Perry St. • 208-664-8008 SPOKANE ARENA • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • 509-279-7000 SOUTH PERRY LANTERN • 12303 E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-473-9098 STEAM PLANT • 159 S. Lincoln St. • 509-777-3900 STORMIN’ NORMAN’S SHIPFACED SALOON • 12303 E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-862-4852 TRANCHE • 705 Berney Dr., Wall Walla • 509-526-3500 ZOLA • 22 W. Main Ave. • 509-624-2416
Opera is divisive — people either like it or don’t; however, there’s no denying the amount of time, dedication and absolute raw talent that goes into an opera performance. And live opera is a unique spectacle that deserves to be seen by all. Luckily, Inland Northwest Opera is dedicated to bringing incredible opera performances to the region. Its update of Verdi’s tragic love story La Traviata is set in 1920s Hollywood, where a starlet is led astray by the means of love. While the show is sung exclusively in Italian, don’t worry, su pertitles are provided to ensure the audience can wrap their heads around this eternal love story. Dress up in your finest opera-going clothes, feel fancy and cheer on the absolute powerhouse singers on stage at the Fox Theater.
COMMUNITY MORE THAN FAIR
INK! Print Rally • Sat, Sept. 10 from 1-7 pm • Free • All ages • Emerge • 119 N. Second St., Coeur d’Alene • emergecda.com • 208-930-1876
It never gets old, that moment when you realize a ginormous piece of road equipment is going to actually roll over some one’s artwork. Except it’s not their artwork; the steamroller helps make the artwork by rolling over a piece of wood carved and covered in ink. That leads to the second best moment of INK! Print Rally — when the sheet is lifted off the inked wood to reveal a really cool (and really big) print. Most of the action takes place in the parking lot outside of Emerge, so while you’re waiting for the big reveal, have a beverage or a bite to eat at one of the food trucks and groove to DJ Brentano. Or pop inside and check out Emerge’s latest art exhibition. You can even try some printmaking yourself and yes, kids are welcome, too, at this sixth annual event that feels like a festive end-of-summer art-themed block party.
— CARRIE SCOZZARO
MUSIC HIGH NOTES
— MADISON PEARSON La Traviata • Fri, Sept. 9 at 7:30 pm and Sun, Sept. 11 at 3 pm • $25-$92 • Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox •1001 W. Sprague Ave. • inlandnwopera.com • 509-6324-1200
There isn’t one single reason to go to the fair… there are lots of them. Go for the corndogs, cotton candy and other fair food you’ve been craving all year. Root for the rodeo riders, cringe at every crunched car during the demolition derby, and sing along to any number of live performances from Cole Swindell (Sept. 12) to Nelly (Sept. 15). Pig races, illusionists, the high dive show, the carnival rides, the buildings full of interesting exhibits and tons of critters to check out, plus the kids standing by proudly having poured their hearts into raising them. See neighbors and old friends (and make new ones). Bring the whole family (except the family pooch) to this beloved community event. That’s our Spokane Interstate Fair.
38 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
— CARRIE SCOZZARO Spokane County Interstate Fair • Fri, Sept. 9 through Sun, Sept. 18, hours vary • $10-$13 • All ages • Spokane County Fair & Expo Center, 404 N. Havana St. • spokanecounty.org/4606/InterstateFair • 509-477-1766
VISUAL ARTS HOW THEY ROLL
SEPTEMBER IS CHILDHOOD CANCER AWARENESS MONTH
— CHEY SCOTT Hiawatha Full Moon Night Ride • Sat, Sept. 10 from 8-11:30 pm • $40-$65 • Ages 13+ • Hiawatha East Trailhead • I-90 Exit 5, Montana • ridethehi awatha.com/events • 208-744-1234
In 2021, Community Cancer Fund committed a $3 million gift to Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Inland Northwest (RMHC) for the construction and completion of the new $14.5 million North House on their Spokane Family Campus. The addition of the North House has more than doubled RMHC’s ability to serve families in Spokane. Due to the growth and advancements in our medical community, increases in pediatric specialists, and the region’s population growth, there are more families than ever seeking treatment and care for their children in the Inland Northwest. These houses provide the convenience of a comfortable room and warm bed, a home-cooked meal, support, and compassion – all while keeping families whose children are seriously ill or injured close to area hospitals. Our partnership with RMHC is just one of the many ways that Community Cancer Fund is battling cancer in our community. Learn more about our local fight against cancer at CommunityCancerFund.org
Spokane has an amazing, rich history thanks to the Native American tribes that inhabited this land long before white settlers set up camp. Dr. David Beine is taking local history buffs on a guided tour of our city that highlights historical sites related to Chief Spokane Garry. Spokane Garry was a Native leader of the Middle Spokane tribe and also acted as a liaison between white settlers and American Indian tribes in Eastern Washington. His life and legacy live on through parks that bear his name, along with Drumheller Springs, where he taught eager students, and Greenwood Cemetery, his final resting place. If history gets you pumped, you can find more details in the link below.
GET LISTED! Submit events online priorneedgetlisted@inlander.com.emailInlander.com/getlistedatorrelevantdetailstoWethedetailsoneweektoourpublicationdate.
Riding the Hiawatha Trail through the rocky mountains of Idaho’s Panhandle is, without question, an Inland Northwest bucket-list activity. From the 1.66mile tunnel at the beginning to the towering wooden train trestles stretching across deep canyons, the Hiawatha traverses a former rail line that’s now exclusively open to cyclists. Now that the 2022 season is coming to a close, the trail (operated by nearby Lookout Pass resort), is offering a special nighttime ride. If you plan to go, don’t wait to make reservations (required), because this event is likely to sell out. You’ll also need to pack a headlamp and extra bike light to illuminate the trail, although each staggered group of 12 to 18 riders will also be led by a designated guide. Rental bikes, helmets and lights are available if you don’t have your own, and a shuttle bus takes riders back up to the trailhead parking lot. Get all the need-to-know details at the link below.
COMMUNITY GUIDING GARRY
OCTOBER-BREASTNOVEMBER-LUNG
OUTDOORS NIGHT RIDERS
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 39
— MADISON PEARSON Spokane Garry: A Historical Expedition • Sat, Sept. 10 from 9 am-1 pm • $50 • Register online at spokanerec.org
JUST GET COZY
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
SPOKANE:CHEERSPRAYFORRAIN
OBSESSED MUCH Is it possible for the mainstream media to be any more obsessed with Trump? Seriously, whether it’s Jonathan Carl, Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Maddow, Lemon... For four years, each and every day, all I heard was, “can’t wait for Trump to be out of there.” Well, he’s out, he’s been out, coming up on two years. Yet, all we hear from Biden, “MAGA this, MAGA that;” same from Jean-Pierre. Why is there NEVER any scrutiny directed at Biden? He was the one who was going to unite everyone. No more hateful rhetoric, reaching across the aisle, the adult in the room... Anyone remember all those promises? Yeah, epic fail in every department. Under Biden, soaring gas prices, violent crime, inflation, border crisis, fentanyl poisonings, attacks on police...the list is endless. But hey, no more mean tweets. RUFF, RUFF! The shouts of wolf ring out. A wolf-crier sneaked past Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the primary, and others gave Rep. Dan Newhouse a scare. One is running for auditor, to oversee our county elections. Wolf-criers are on the ballot all over the country and the loudest of them all will likely run for president. In Kansas, abortion opponents have begun going door to door to harass voters, believing — or pretending to believe — that there was something hinky in the state’s overwhelming vote in favor of abortion rights. Wolf! Wolf! The cries go on, with nary a paw print in sight.
40 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
JEERS
CMR’S LATEST CLOWN HALL GATHERING Drove by the Designated IQ Destruction Site and noticed only two vehicles in the parking lot: a Limo and a VW Bug.
RAT RACE RANT I’m sad about what’s happening to Spokane. I grew up here, and I always loved how friendly and easygoing this town has always been. Over the last few years, it’s changed so much. So many people are moving here thinking they’ve discovered this secret town, and they yammer on about how much better it is here than the big city they moved from. I get where they’re coming from though. The big city exodus is happening for a reason. I wouldn’t want to live in an overpopulated, expensive, crime-ridden city either. Everyone deserves to be safe and happy.
Camp Hope is a waking nightmare. ... So for those who have recently moved here because you found this secret refuge of a town called Spokane, please remember a lot of us who’ve lived here our whole lives are grieving the loss of the old Spokane we loved so much.
MACHO COMACHO RALLIES HIS MAGA ROBOTS Cheers to wannabe President Macho Comacho aka Donald Trump for spewing hateful hyperbole at his most recent MAGA rally. Macho Man wasted no time in proving that the REAL president was absolutely right, that Trump’s vile and violent speech encourages attacks against anyone he labels as his “enemy.” Trump’s paranoid fantasies and narcissistic hallucinations may make him perfect for a starring role in a remake of “Idiocracy,” but in real life his MAGA cult has morphed into a clear and present danger to the Republic.
NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content. H I S E B S E N S I M K A A N T A G E O N E C R O W D N O R C A R I B S A S S A D G R A T E D G R A T E D A N S T B I R D S N E C L I Z A E I N E L O C A L L O C A L N T S T R A Y A I M S A T A S I D E A S I D E E N B L O C B U R S A B S H I R E S H I R E S L G B T R C A S I S A G F O R C E L E W R E T I N A R E T I N A I G L O O U S E R I D P E R C U E R S N I V E N S P W N H Y D R A K N E A D A S S THIS WEEK'S ANSWERS SOUND OFF 1. Visit Inlander.com/isawyou by 3 pm Monday. 2. Pick a category (I Saw You, You Saw Me, Cheers or Jeers). 3. Provide basic info: your name and email (so we know you’re real). 4. To connect via I Saw You, provide a non-identifying email to be included with your submission — like “petals327@yahoo.com,” not “j.smith@comcast.net.” “ Wolf! Wolf! The cries go on, with nary a paw print in sight. ”
What makes me so sad is that Spokane is changing into a bigger unsafe and crowded city, and there’s nothing I can do about it. What once were safe and quiet neighborhood streets to walk or drive on are now filled with people speeding, cutting pedestrians or each other off, riding each other’s a$$, acting aggressive and unsafe. There’s garbage everywhere.
In the middle of that night the wind passed on and left the land quiet. The dust-filled air muffled sound more completely than fog does. The people, lying in their beds, heard the wind stop. They awakened when the rushing wind was gone. They lay quietly and listened deep into the stillness. Then the roosters crowed, and their voices were muffled, and the people stirred restlessly in their beds and wanted the morning. They knew it would take a long time for the dust to settle out of the air. In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees.
Want to give a shout out to the guy in the black truck who was rocking Metallica on Ash and Francis. Pulled next to him and started singing along, he gave me a WTF look for about two seconds before he realized I was fully rocking out with him. DOESNT MATTER WHAT YOU SEE OR INTO IT YOU READ YOU CAN DO IT YOUR OWN WAY IF IT’S DONE JUST HOW I SAY — his delight made my week!
ROAD PROJECTS The road project at Dartford Rd in the county was supposed to be done Aug. 15, 2022, which is what the sign said. What a joke. even the detour to Wandmere Rd is not done. What are these people doing? You don’t see anybody out there working. If I didn’t do my job, I would be fired, so why aren’t these people doing the job of finishing the roads? Where are the county officials? They could at least be making sure these companies they hire to do the work on these roads are working. When I called to complain about the work not being done, the lady hung up on me. Come on — it doesn’t take two years to finish the project.
Getting comfortable with change is something that takes practice. And since we’ve all certainly had a lot of practice in recent years, we should pretty much be experts at this point. I’ve learned that while change can most certainly induce fear, there’s no real choice but to acknowledge the fear and then move on forward — probably best described as “name it and tame it.”
FAITH IN HUMANITY RESTORED Thank you to whoever turned our phone in to the lost and found at Pig Out in the Park (near the skating ribbon) on Sunday afternoon. It was probably the group of young people who were sitting near us in the shade next to the river. We appreciate your kindness. May the universe shower you with good karma.
ON LOSING ROE VS WADE Right to Life = Right to Rape. What a victory! What a great day for domineering men! Even better for “incels.” Rape is back on the menu, boys! Back to the caveman days, the entitlement of Might is Right! With no access to help or control of their own bodies, women can be forced to carry the progeny of violent, cruel, hateful, misogynistic males. Now the “incels” (involuntary celibates) can control their own reproductive desires! Rape kits (rarely tested) further victimize the victims. The women forced to keep the children of these crimes are conveniently put aside for men’s purposes. ... God, love, and motherhood are but a fiction. Victims are helped to a lifetime of trauma, misery and suffering while the criminals are allowed a long, safe and free life thanks to “statute of limitations” laws and their lack of capacity for empathy. Women, all that we have remaining are our votes for our voices. Please participate accordingly if you care to be autonomous in our changing world. n
STUPID PEOPLE This is for all the people who complain about restaurants taking too long when they’re understaffed. Either apply for a job and help them out or keep your damn mouths shut!!!
SAFARI A fast-paced, short-form im prov show. Saturdays from 7:30-9 pm. $8. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com
A public meeting to ex plore how Washington can navigate the intersection of substance use disorder and the criminal justice system in light of the 2021 Blake decision Sep. 14, 5 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5336)
A car show featuring about 60 classic and newer cars along Cannon Street in Browne’s Addition. Also features live music, beer garden, food vendors and awards. Sep. 10, 12-8 pm. Free. Browne’s Addition, West Spo kane. mybrownesaddition.org
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 41 EVENTS | CALENDAR ...continued on page 46 sweetAmbrosiapotato DININGBITEEVERYBEHINDOUT The Inlander’s annual Dining Out issue is on its way! Showcasing local restaurants and their favorite fall menu items, this can’t-miss guide has everything you need to plan a season of delicious dining! FOR INFORMATION ON PROMOTING YOUR FALL MENU, CONTACT: advertising@inlander.com RESERVE YOUR SPACE BY SEPTEMBER 29TH BITEEVERY Spreading “Aloha” with every bite! Fabulous catering options! 909 S Grand Blvd, 509.747.7737 HANG10BBQ.COM COMING SOON! UNIQUE EVENTS SPACES PERFECT FOR YOUR NEXT CELEBRATION! Reserve today! niki@goodwingroupco.com or 509-869-6595 BEST EVENT LOCATIONS IN SPOKANE! South neighborhoodHillsjointservingUpscaleGastropubfare Downtown'sbestkeptsecret.Greathappyhour deals. Pre-prohibition era craft cocktails. Award winning local SPOKANE VALLEY’S NEWEST THEANSWERTOWHATTHE Friendly Staff. Amazing UnbeatableEats.Happy Hour. SPOKANE’SBESTCATERING.ANYSIZE.ANYBUDGET. BARNWOOD SOCIALBRICKWEST BREWING CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM 15 TAQUERIA 14 THE ELK PUBLIC HOUSE AN URBAN KITCHEN 1617 LITTLE EURO/OLDLORDLOGANEUROPEANTAVERNSTANLEY’S 1718 NORTHERNREMEDY KITCHEN SATAYAND BISTRO & LOUNGE 1919 VERSALIA PIZZA VIEUX CARRE NOLA KITCHENACT 15 DINING OUT 2021 GUIDE NORTHERNSOCIAL TRASHY TIKTOK TREND BOND IS BACK 19 MGK HITS THE PAVILION 22 OCTOBER7-13,2021 HARDNEWS,SERIOUSFUNSINCE1993 Chefs take us behind the scenes in their kitchens PULLOUT INSIDE INLANDER tenderloin Poivre WildSageBistro Dining OutDining Out 2415 N. Government Way, Ste 2 | Cd’A (208) 765-8596 PRE-LOVED BOOKS TIMELESS ADVENTURES VA509-288-9940heididuty.com2022SPOKANESTANDDOWN Contact us for Volunteer Opportunities/Business Sponsorships SERVE OUR AMERICAN HEROES DONATE TO SUPPORT LOCAL VETERANS OCTOBER 15TH • 10:00-15:00 The Salvation Army • 222 E Indiana Ave, Spokane
TAYLOR TOMLINSON Taylor has ap peared on Conan for her stand-up com edy and has two Netflix specials. Sep. 9-11. $40; sold out. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedy club.com (509-318-9998)
This threenight comedy extravaganza stars Brian Regan, Josh Johnson, Andrew Sleight er, Kristin Key, Landry, Grant Lyon, Mon ica Nevi and Alvin Williams. Sept. 8-10, Thu from 6-9 pm, Fri from 7-9 pm, Sat from 2-5 pm and 7-9 pm. $20. Idaho Central Credit Union Arena at University of Idaho, Moscow. moscowcomedy.com
JOE “MR. D” DOMBROWSKI Dom browski is a comedian, teacher, actor and public speaker based out of Seat tle. Sep. 8-9, 7:30 pm and Sep. 10, 7:30 & 10:30 pm. $25-$35. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedy club.com (509-318-9998)
SPOKANE YOUNG PROFESSION ALS NETWORKING EVENT Connect with other professionals while enjoy ing views from the rooftop of the M building. Includes appetizers and adult beverages. Sep. 15, 5:30-7:30 pm. $15. The M Building, 612 W. Main Ave. spo kaneyp.org (509-456-6017)
VINTAGE PRINT GRAND OPENING Chris Bovey’s brick-and-mortar Vintage Print location’s grand opening. Includes free ice cream from The Scoop, free burgers from Dick’s and a free T-shirt with a $100 purchase. Sep. 16-18, 12-9 pm. Free. Vintage Print + Neon, 914 W. Garland Ave. facebook.com/vintage print.us
51ST ANNUAL ODESSA DEUTSCH ESFEST This annual event includes authentic German food, a Biergarten, live music, a parade, street vendors and much more. Sept. 15-18. Free. Odessa, Wash. deutschesfest.net
BIRTHDAY & ANNIVERSARY CELE BRATION
LIONEL HAMPTON SCHOOL OF MU SIC FUNDRAISING GALA
HOWLING AT HAMILTON
Kids are in vited to learn about fire safety and become junior firefighters. Sep. 11, 12-2 pm. Free. River Park Square, 808 W. Main Ave. downtownspokane.org
SK BALL A one-of-a-kind barn dance featuring live music, line dancing, bar becue, cornhole, a silent auction and more to benefit the Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Inland NW. Sep. 9, 5-10 pm. $150. CenterPlace Regional Event Center, 2426 N. Discovery Place Dr. rmhcinlandnw.org (509-230-0957)
SPOKANE COUNTY INTERSTATE FAIR
AMERICANS & THE HOLOCAUST
THE MOVING WALL A Vietnam veter ans memorial wall with over 58,000 names of veterans. Sep. 15-19. Free. Pavillion Park, 727 N. Molter Rd. gal lantguards.com (509-755-6726)
The 2022 interstate fair features carni val games, rides, livestock shows, live music and food vendors. Sept. 9-18, times vary. See website for full sched ule of events. Sep. 9-18, times vary. $10$13. Spokane County Fair & Expo Cen ter, 404 N. Havana. spokanecounty.org
CHOREOGRAPHED BALLROOM DANCE LESSONS
An evening of net working and socializing. Bring ideas for a more vibrant and exciting downtown. Live music, small bites and a swag bag included. Sep. 9, 5-8 pm. Free. Down town Spokane. downtownspokane.org
COMMUNITY MEETING ABOUT BLAKE DESCISION
MALDEN-PINE COMMUNITY REVIVAL
COMEDY
An afternoon of food, games and con versation. Activities include cornhole, a bike clinic, live music and door prizes. During the open mic, guests are invited to share their talent, or to bring a relic that survived the fire and tell its story. At Community Park at the corner of More land and Ash, downtown Malden. Sep. 11, 2-5 pm. Free. pccrltro@gmail.com
JIMMY DORE Dore is the star of sev eral Comedy Central specials, author of the bestseller “Your Country Is Just Not That Into You,” host of a weekly ra dio show in LA and on-air host for The Young Turks. Sep. 14, 7 pm. $35-$45. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com
MICHAEL GLATZMAIER The Spokanebased comedian specializes in improvi sation and musical comedy. Sep. 8, 7:30 pm. $12-$18. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com MOSCOW COMEDY FEST
RON WHITE Ron “Tater Salad” White is a classic storyteller; relaying tales from from childhood in small-town Texas, to stories of his daily life and more. Sep. 10, 7:30 pm. $49-$99. Northern Quest Resort & Casino, 100 N. Hayford Rd. northernquest.com (509-481-2800)
This 9th annual event features fashion, beauty, lifestyle and health resources for women. Register online to attend. Sep. 10, 10 am-4 pm. Free. CenterPlace Regional Event Cen ter, 2426 N. Discovery Place Dr. wom enshealthandbeautyexpo.com
An evening learning dances and new steps, then performing them on the floor. Partner strongly sug gested. No experience necessary. Sep. 12, 7-9 pm. Free. Western Dance Center, 1901 N. Sullivan Rd. SquareDanceSpo kane.org (509-329-8825)
COMEDY NIGHT: DRINK ‘N DEBATE This nationally touring comedy event pits comedians in an alcohol-fueled debate where anything can happen. 21+. Sep. 10, 8-9:30 pm. $12. Black Diamond, 9614 E. Sprague Ave. fb.me/ e/29gwTcLk5 (562-544-4612)
SPOKANE GARRY: A HISTORICAL EXPEDITION Dr. David Beine guides an expedition to historical sites around the Spokane region related to Chief Spo kane Garry. Registration required. Sep. 10, 9 am-1 pm. $50. spokanerec.org
COMMUNITY
A unique look at strange details and unconventional stories surround ing Spokane’s wealthy mining mogul Amasa Campbell, his wife Grace and their daughter Helen. Sep. 15 and Oct. 20, 6-7 pm. $15-$20. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org
ALLEY POP-UP
An immersive arts expe rience that also includes a vendor faire, music festival and food trucks. Sep. 9, 5-9 pm. Free. Runge Furniture, 303 E. Spokane Ave., Coeur d’Alene. facebook. com/thewavybunch (208-920-1856)
CAMPBELL HOUSE DARK HISTORY TOURS
Spark Cen tral transforms into an invention lab for kids to explore, code or build some thing from their imagination. Sep. 9, 3:30-5:30 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org
An all-improvised par ody of Trial of the Century. Sept. 7-28, Wed at 7:30 pm. $8. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland. bluedoortheater.com
This traveling exhibit from the U.S. Holo caust Memorial Museum examines the motives, pressures and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Na zism, war and genocide in Europe dur ing the 1930s and 40s. Located on the third floor of the Foley Center Library. Mon-Fri from 3-8 pm; Sat-Sun from 1-5 pm through Oct. 7. Free. Gonzaga Uni versity, 502 E. Boone Ave. gonazga.edu
JESSIMAE PELUSO
HOT ROD BLUES
The stand-up comedian and TV personality is best known for appearing on MTV’s Girl Code. Sep. 15, 7:30 pm. $22-$30. Spo kane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com
BENEFIT
HOWLING MOON NIGHT MARKET & STREET FAIR
INVENTION CONNECTION
SPOKANE WOMEN’S HEALTH & BEAUTY EXPO
A celebration of com munity and ecological restoration along Missouri Flat Creek near Downtown Pullman in a landscape transformed by native plants, music and poetry. Sep. 11 and Sep. 18, 11 am-1 pm. Free. wsu.edu (509-332-9600)
SPOKANE AUDUBON SOCIETY
The evening includes a shrimp boil dinner, a pingpong ball raffle and a silent auc tion. Sep. 10, 6:30 pm. By donation. Cutter Theatre, 302 Park St., Metaline Falls, Wash. cuttertheatre.com
TRIAL & ERROR
An evening featuring performances including jazz, vocal ensembles, wind and string en sembles, a catered dinner and silent auction. Sep. 16, 6-8 pm. $30-$225. Mader Farm, 13506 Hillside Rd. uidaho. edu/music (208-885-6231)
JUNIOR FIRE ACADEMY
CUTTER THEATRE FUNDRAISER
TYLER BOEH Laugh while raising mon ey to rehabilitate injured and orphaned wildlife in North Idaho. Sep. 10, 7 pm. $25-$35. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org (208-263-9191)
On the last day of the season before the pools are drained for winter, local dogs can take a swim. Dogs must be fully vacci nated and friendly. Sep. 11, 1-6 pm. $15. Hamilton-Lowe Aquatics Center, 830 N. Mountain View Rod. humanesocietyof thepalouse.org (208-883-1166)
A Xe rces Society education and outreach ambassador presents information about conserving pollinators. Sep. 14, 7-8:30 pm. Free. Online; details at audubonspokane.org (509-993-2085)
Celebrate Mudgy and Millie’s 14th birthday and Coeur d’Alene Public Library’s 15th anniversary with author Susan Nipp. Sep. 10, 10 am-2 pm. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org
IN FLOWER COMMUNITY: POEMS & MUSICAL IMPROVISATION FOR NA TIVE PLANTS
The Hot Sugar brand from Spokane Valley’s Grow Op Farms has a line of THC-infused granulated sugar products that can be easily swapped for regular sugar in a cookie or brownie recipe. Northwest Cannabis Solutions’ line of Chewee’s caramels pair wonderfully with apples and can be melted into homemade or store-bought cara mel, with a simple formula of one dose per apple mixed into the regular caramel.
42 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022
HIGH CUISINE Cooking and baking with cannabis can seem daunting if you’ve never made an infused butter, sugar or tincture before, but that shouldn’t keep you out of the kitchen. There are some easy shortcuts available for those who are culinarily challenged but curious.
SIMPLE BUT LITERAL Fear not, those of you who want to experience fall through cannabis but also want to get straight to the point with it. Harmony Farms, a pesticide-free grower from the Olympia area, has a concentrate cartridge known as Autumn Blend. It’s relatively high-potency for oil at 81 percent THC. It’s a no-nonsense vape that will get you where you want to be, or higher if you’re not careful. Plus, with “autumn” in the name it’s easy to make the associa tion stick with you for the whole time you’re stoned.
BATH TIME During the sweltering heat of summer, the bathtub is an often forgotten part of one’s home. Rejuvenating cold showers take top billing over relaxing hot baths, especially when temperatures hover in the 80s well after sunset. But as the evenings cool, the allure of warm water returns. So why not kick the relaxation of a bath up with a bomb, specifically a cannabis-infused bath bomb?
BY WILL MAUPIN W
Seasonally Stoned Heighten your fall into autumn with these three cannabis products
While they won’t get you high in the traditional sense, an infused bath does allow your body to absorb cannabinoids through your skin, which produces a body high that can be pain-killing, relaxing and mildly sedat ing. Adding other salts and fragrances can increase the spa-like feel of your experience. Pro tip: even if it is still warm outside, you won’t regret having a heater going when you get out of the bath. n Take your favorite seasonal treats to the next level with Hot Sugar or Chewee’s caramels — both made locally.
PRODUCTS
ith Labor Day in the rear view mirror, cool weather enthusiasts around the Inland Northwest are happily adding layers to their wardrobe before heading out to sip pumpkin spice lattes. Caffeine, however, isn’t the only drug that pivots well as summer turns into autumn. Cannabis users can also embrace the progression into crisp nights and crunchy leaves with some autumnal takes on their drug of choice. Here are three fun ways to get seasonal when you get stoned this fall.
ANNIVERSARY SALE 10 FLOWER 3.5G FLOWER 28G REG $ SALE $ REG $ SALE $ REG $ SALE $ *WHILE SUPPLIES LAST Silver Series Solstice Root Down Silver9015HellavatedSeriesLil’Ray’s60358121421610BuddiesLazer Delectable DabsTrichomeTrichomePioneerLiftedExtractsSquaresExtractsRootDownCrystalSolsticeDelugeCeresClear1726110159610 1725 187266 2842 2030 4060 20301015 2640 1421 & 22SPECIALCONCENTRATESCARTRIDGESEDIBLESPREROLLSREGULARSALEPRICESALE ITEM: ANY 6 BEVERAGES 40% OFF 66% OFF ALL APEX BRANDED BATTERIES SEPTEMBER 22ND-23RD 1325 N DIVISION ST SUITE 103 SPOKANE, WA *WHILE SUPPLIES LAST. 30% OFF THE ENTIRE SHOP 30% OFF PARAPHERNALIAALL SPOKANEMOSES LAKEOTIS ORCHARDSAPEXCANNABIS.COM
GREENZONE 44 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 Marijuana use increases the risk lowerof grades droppingand out of Talkschool.withyour kids. GET THE FACTS learnaboutmarijuanawa.orgat TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT SUNDAY 20% OFF YOUR TOTAL PURCHASE OF EITHER 28G FLOWER, 7G CONCENTRATES, 7G VAPE CARTS 15% OFF VETERANS & SENIORS MUNCHIE MONDAY 20% OFF EDIBLES DOOBIE TUESDAY 20% OFF PREROLLS, 25% OFF ACCESSORIES WAX WEDNESDAY 20% OFF CONCENTRATES, CARTS & INFUSED PREROLL BOGO THURSDAY BUY ONE REGULARLY PRICED ITEM, GET ONE 25% OFF (EQUAL OR LOWER PRICE) FLOWER FRIDAY 20% OFF PREMIUM FLOWER EIGHTHS SHATTERDAY SATURDAY 25% OFF CONCENTRATES, CARTS & INFUSED PREROLL Some Exclusions May Apply Sale Items Excluded WARNING: This product has intoxicating affects and may be habit forming. Smoking is hazardous to your health. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. Should not be used by women that are pregnant or breast feeding. Marijuana products may be purchased or possessed only by persons 21 years of age or older. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination and judgement. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. NEW DAILY DEALS JUST IN TIME FOR SUMMER <<ORDER ONLINE509.919.3467 // 9107 N Country Homes Blvd #13 // spokanegreenleaf.com OPEN MON-SAT 8am-11pm SUN 8am-10pm TAKING DEBIT CARDS! MONSUNOPEN9AM9PM 1515 S L YONS R D . A IRWAY H EIGHTS S UITE 509-244-8363B EXCLUDES ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO PRODUCTS PAGESELECTIONNEW!DEALSDAILY50%OFFALWAYS20%OFFKRATOMALLDAYEVERYDAYCHECKOUTOURWEBFORDAILYDEALS We are practicing social distancing. There may be a small wait. Thank you for your understanding. WE OPENARE! THURSDAY SALE 20% OFF ANY PRICEDREGULARITEMWarning: This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Smoking is hazardous to your health. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. Should not be used by women that are pregnant or breast feeding. For USE only by adults 21 and older. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination and judgement. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Sun-Thur 8am-10pm • Fri-Sat 8am-11pm | 2424 N. Monroe St • (509) 919-3470 greenhand DAILY SPECIALS OPEN EVERY DAY! DAYSVENDOREVERYFRIDAY EARLY BIRD MONDAY 811AM 20% Off (excludes all pre-rolls) TOP SHELF TUESDAY 20% Off WAX WEDNESDAY 20% Off concentrates $20 or more PREROLL THURSDAY $1 off packs of 4 or less, 20% off 5 or more FEATURED VENDOR FRIDAY 20% off featured vendor SELFCARE SATURDAY 20% Off CBD & Wellness SNACK SUNDAY 20% Off Edibles & Drinkables To Advertise Contact: 509.325.0634 ext. 215, advertising@inlander.com Rea ch Nea rly *2018 Media Audit INLANDER’S GREEN ZONE • GREEN ZONE GIFTS 64,000 Inlander readers that have BOUGHT OR USED CANNABIS in the past year and live in Eastern WA.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 45 SATIVASISTERS.COM #TrentAndUniversity Everyone is 21+ Welcome WARNING: This product has intoxicating affects and may be habit forming. Smoking is hazardous to your health. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. Should not be used by women that are pregnant or breast feeding. For USE only by adults 21 and older. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination and judgement. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. DISCOUNT DAYS!!! 20% OFF EVERY WEEK 2829 N. Market | Corner of Market & Cleveland | 509.315.8223 | Mon-Thu 8am-10pm • Fri-Sat 8am-11pm • Sun 9am-9pm Sha erdays! MONDAYSMUNCHIE&MAMAJ’S 10% OFF EDIBLESALL TOP CONCENTRATESSHELF10%TUESDAYSSHELFOFFTOPFLOWERWAXYWEDNESDAY15%OFF(ExcludesHashRosin)TERPTHURSDAYS10%OFFHASHROSINFRIDAYFLOWER10%OFFALLFLOWERSHATTERDAY20%OFFALLCONCENTRATESSTOCKUPSUNDAYS10%OFFALLJOINTS&DRINKS This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination, and judgement. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. For use only by adults twenty-one and older. Keep out of the reach of children. Open Mon-Sun 8am-12am 2720 E 29th Ave, Spokane thevaultcannabis.com/spokane509.315.9262 YOU’RE GANJA HAVE A GOOD TIME SEPTEMBER DEALS 30% OFF SELECT COMPANIES DAILY
4. Buddy1. He/him/____of“The Beverly Hillbillies” 9. Carol Kane’s role on “Taxi” 14. Leaf-cutter, e.g. 15. Time to take first steps, maybe 16. Stand too close to 17. Neither here ____ there 18. West Indies people 19. Syrian president whom Obama called on to resign in 2011 20. The children’s movie classification really irked 23. Replypeople?to a ques. 24. Danny’s gang in “Grease” 25. Japanese tech giant 26. Minnelli of “Cabaret” 27. Mozart’s “____ Kleine 28. BusNachtmusik”orsubway option for people on a diet? 31. Some Windows systems 32. It might come with breakfast in 35. Oblique34. Targetsbed comment heard on one half of a 45 record? 38. As a 41. Pricklywholeplant parts 42. They can be sculpted and 45. Newchiseledstaff members who aren’t fuzzy-looking in the least? 48. Community celebrated in June, in 50. Ariana49. SomebriefHDTVsGrande’s “God ____ 51. ExperienceWoman” of riding a roller 53. ____coasterZealand, Muppet known for 54. Acnefish-throwingcreamingredient’s eye part? 57. Aptly named cooler brand 59. Log-in component 61. Offstage60. Apiece helpers 62. Sue Ann ____, Betty White’s role on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” 63. Utterly defeat, to gamers 64. Many-headed monster of 65. Work,mythas 66. Pompousdoughperson DOWN 2. Out1. Surf of this world? 3. Tries 6. “Bon”5. Icy4. “Gollyhardgee!”masstimein France 7. Legal term that’s French for “on a bench” 8. Snapple competitor 9. Whole 11. Artworks10. Auditingheaporg.made of tiles 12. December celebration since 1966 13. Common recipe step 15. Got 100% on 21. Quattro preceder 22. Treat whose name means, literally, “flash of lightning” 26. Capital of Togo 29. “____28. Chap Como Va” (1971 Santana hit) 30. Pot 32. Generalcovers____ chicken 33. “Say You, Say Me” singer 35. Golden or pale drinks 36. He’s next to Teddy on Mount 37. NotRushmoretobe trusted, slangily 38. German immunologist and “Magic bullet” developer Paul 42. General40. Rumbled39. Menschwho defeated Antony and 43. AirerCleopatraofmany public affairs 44. Bear’sprogrammesWall Street partner 46. “My performance was awful!” 47. Trail mix fruit 48. Whole bunch 51. Use a pepper mill 52. DEA agents, e.g. 54. Parks who took a seat to take a stand 55. Campbell of “Scream” 58. The56. RegionBoston Bruins retired his #4 in 1979 ACROSS 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 15 16 18 19 21 22 23 25 26 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 “LO-CAL” ANSWERSTHISWEEK’SONISAWYOUS PHONE:(509)444-7355 E-MAIL:BulletinBoard@Inlander.com BUYING Estate Contents / Household Goods See abesdiscount.com or 509-939-9996 CA$H CA$H CA$H NOW for Diabetic Strips Must be unopened & unexpired Free pick up & delivery We buy most brands Call dmrxsupply25@yahoo.com941-623-7092 MENTION THIS AD AND RECEIVE: 50% Off set up on set up on TPM 20% OFF one-time service TOTAL PEST MANAGEMENT PROGRAM WORRY FREE PEST CONTROL AS LOW AS $19 95 PER MONTH 208-714-4970 • 509-327-3700 • edenspokane.com to advertise: 444-SELL LOOK FOR THE GET 1,000AvailableINLANDERYOURINSIDEatmorethanlocationsthroughouttheInlandNorthwest. Do you need help with chronic pain or fatigue? Or struggle with Anxiety or Depression? Using my intuitive gi s, I am able to help shi these issues so you can feel healthier and happier. ENERGYSESSIONSHEALINGSESSIONS For more information or to book a session go to: www.AnnieBryceson.com 509-280-1504 GENERAL ADMINISTRATION MANAGER at RA Pearson Company d/b/a Pearson Packaging Systems, FT Spokane, WA. Resp for strategic opportunity scouting & planning w/leadership team. Resp for fin stmnts; US GAAP fin stmnts; direct acctng team; P&L forecasts; legal matters & disputes; incl. rltd to subsidiaries; oversee IT; negotiate leases. Limited & periodic domestic travel. REQS: BS accounting, finance, bus or closely rltd field; CPA designation or fde; 8 yrs exp as Fin Mgr, Acctng Mgr or closely rltd; 3 yrs work in prog. leadership role w/in privately held, fam-owned or controlled company; 5 yrs exp w/ERP sys; 2 yrs exp w/intl transactions incl. withholding & VAT; proficient w/PC using MS software; contract negotiation exp w/sales & legal sta ; exp motivating, leading, & growing teams. Exp. may be gained concurrently. Apply by email to: jobs@pearsonpkg.com Subscribe at Inlander.com/newsletter A weekly email for food lovers SEPTEMBER 8, 2022 INLANDER 47
CASINO | HOTEL | DINING | SPA | CHAMPIONSHIP GOLF 37914 SOUTH NUKWALQW • WORLEY, IDAHO 83876 • 1 800-523-2464 • CDACASINO.COM WELCOME HOME. Play where the big winners play. 40 Winners of $2,000 Cash! FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 TH | 7 PM – 9 PM Like big bucks? Play at Coeur d’Alene Casino to earn entries into the $80,000 Buck Yeah Giveaway and you could be one of 40 winners to bag $2,000 in cash! On September 30TH , between 7 pm and 9 pm, we’ll electronically draw 40 tickets. The 40 winners will each receive $2,000 in cash—Buck Yeah! Play your favorite video gaming machines starting on September 1ST to earn entries into the giveaway. Get one entry for every 500 points earned while playing with your Coeur Rewards card. See the Coeur Rewards booth, CDA Casino app or cdacasino.com for promotional rules. Reward Your Play!
