Tucson Weekly 06/02/2022

LAUGHING STOCK: WHERE TO FIND AN OPEN MIC

JUNE 2 - JUNE 8, 2022 • TUCSONWEEKLY.COM • FREE

A Survivor’s Story

Sidney Finkel lived through the Holocaust as a child. Today, he still bears witness to its horrors.

By Brian Smith TUCSON WEEDLY: Dispensary Wars

MUSIC: A Scoop of Spoon

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JUNE 2, 2022

JUNE 2, 2022

JUNE 2, 2022 | VOL. 37, NO. 22

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STAFF

CONTENTS CURRENTS

EDITOR’S NOTE

A Mighty Resilience THIS WEEK, TUCSON SALVAGE

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GOP ‘critical race theory’ ban would outlaw teaching about the alleged Buffalo shooters racist motivations

TUCSON SALVAGE

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Meet Holocaust survivor Sidney Finkel

LAUGHING STOCK

So many open mics!

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MUSIC

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columnist Brian Smith profiles Sidney Finkel, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor who now lives in Oro Valley. Finkel’s childhood was one of horror, seeing his family torn apart by Nazis and surviving a concentration camp.

Finkel has written books about his experience and now talks with schoolchildren about the experience. As Smith puts it, Finkel is “a living miracle, and a potent reminder of the peculiar resilience of human nature.” It’s a powerful read.

Elsewhere in the book this week: Columnist Tom Danehy reflects on how high school students have embraced dead recording artists; Dillon Rosenblatt of the Arizona Mirror looks at another front in the GOP’s ongoing war on teachers at the Arizona Legislature; UA School of Journalism student Carter Berg profiles Yasmynn Lopez, who is encouraging girls to get involved in the local skateboard scene; Laughing Stock columnist Linda Ray tells you where to find open mics these days; City Week editor Emily Dieckman tells you where to have a good time this week; music contributor Vincent Arrieta catches up with Spoon frontman Britt Daniel ahead of the Austin-based band’s upcoming appearance at the Rialto Theatre; XOXO columnist Xavier

ADMINISTRATION Steve T. Strickbine, Publisher Michael Hiatt, Vice President Tyler Vondrak, Associate Publisher, tyler@tucsonlocalmedia.com Claudine Sowards, Accounting, claudine@tucsonlocalmedia.com

Omar Otero rounds up all the live music coming your way; Tucson Weedly columnist David Abbott smokes out the details of a local feud between two dispensaries; and there’s the other usual good stuff scattered throughout our pages.

Finally, in the Another-Goodbye-To-Another-Good Friend Department: I’m sorry to say that this marks the last issue for Ryan Dyson, the designer who has been doing, among many other duties, the covers for Tucson Weekly for the last several years. Ryan has a sharp eye for design and a sly sense of humor, which shines in his work. I’ve worked with a lot of designers over the years and Ryan stands out as one of the very best. Anyone can toss an image on a cover and send it out into the world, but it’s rare to find someone who really uses the illustration to help tell the story. Ryan falls into the latter camp and I’ll miss our brainstorming sessions. Best of luck with everything in the future, Ryan!

Jim Nintzel Executive Editor Hear Nintz talk about how to howl in this town at 9:30 a.m. Wednesdays during the world-famous Frank Show on KLPX, 96.1 FM.

EDITORIAL Jim Nintzel, Executive Editor, jimn@tucsonlocalmedia.com Alexandra Pere, Staff Reporter, apere@timespublications.com Nicole Feltman, Staff Reporter, nfeltman@timespublications.com Katya Mendoza, Staff Reporter, kmendoza@tucsonlocalmedia.com Contributors: David Abbott, Rob Brezsny, Max Cannon, Rand Carlson, Tom Danehy, Emily Dieckman, Bob Grimm, Andy Mosier, Linda Ray, Margaret Regan, Will Shortz, Jen Sorensen, Clay Jones, Dan Savage PRODUCTION Courtney Oldham, Production Manager, tucsonproduction@timespublications.com Ryan Dyson, Graphic Designer, ryand@tucsonlocalmedia.com CIRCULATION Aaron Kolodny, Circulation, aaron@timeslocalmedia.com ADVERTISING TLMSales@TucsonLocalMedia.com Gary Tackett, Account Executive, gtackett@tucsonlocalmedia.com Kristin Chester, Account Executive, kristin@tucsonlocalmedia.com Candace Murray, Account Executive, candace@tucsonlocalmedia.com NATIONAL ADVERTISING Zac Reynolds Director of National Advertising Zac@TimesPublications.com Tucson Weekly® is published every Thursday by Times Media Group at 7225 N. Mona Lisa Rd., Ste. 125, Tucson, Arizona. Address all editorial, business and production correspondence to: Tucson Weekly, 7225 N. Mona Lisa Rd., Ste. 125, Tucson, Arizona 85741. Phone: (520) 797-4384, FAX (520) 575-8891. Member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN). The Tucson Weekly® and Best of Tucson® are registered trademarks of Times Media Group. Publisher has the right to refuse any advertisement at his or her discretion.

RANDOM SHOTS By Rand Carlson

Spoon’s Britt Daniel breaks down five of the band’s essential songs ahead of Tucson show

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Downtown Dispensary looks to expand

Cover image courtesy of 123rf.com / Photo of Sidney & Barbara Finkel by Brian Smith

Copyright: The entire contents of Tucson Weekly are Copyright Times Media Group No portion may be reproduced in whole or part by any means without the express written permission of the Publisher, Tucson Weekly, 7225 N. Mona Lisa Rd., Ste. 125, Tucson, AZ 85741.

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JUNE 2, 2022

DANEHY

KIDS THESE DAYS SURE DO LIKE TUPAC

By Tom Danehy, tucsoneditor@tucsonlocalmedia.com I REMEMBER THE DAY WHEN WE all found out that Elvis Presley had died. It was shocking, really, because he was relatively young and had regained a measure of success and prosperity. We wondered what could have happened. It couldn’t have been drugs because Richard Nixon himself had given Elvis a drug-fighting badge. And no one who gets a drug-fighting badge would turn around and use drugs. I mean, that would be like Newt Gingrich moralizing about Bill Clinton’s infidelity while Gingrich is fooling around with his secretary behind his cancer-stricken wife’s back.

Now seriously, who would do that?

This was 1977, so, of course, there was no internet, no 19,000 channels on cable and streaming, but there was still an incredible outpouring of emotion, most of it genuinely sad, but some of it snarky. Amid all the tributes and nostalgia and puzzled questions, one cynic would write of Elvis’s death: Good career move.

So it has certainly proven to be. And so it has also proven to be for many other artists taken from us too soon, or, in a couple cases, perhaps not soon enough. The passage of time has prompted the work of some

artists to be re-evaluated and/or further appreciated. For example, when Rolling Stone magazine updated its list of the Top 500 albums of all time, they replaced The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On.” A quick aside: I grew up (and I still remain) a funk/R&B/soul man, but I appreciated The Beatles’ early stuff, the finely crafted pop tunes. But when I heard “Sgt. Pepper,” I thought, “Not only are the Beatles high, so is everybody who likes this album.”

I coach girls’ basketball and girls’ tennis at a local high school. I have to show up right at the end of the school day so that practice can start on time. Walking from the parking lot to the gym, I see hundreds of kids heading for the buses or going to their after-school activities. The first day, something caught my eye. A kid was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Tupac Shakur on it. I found it somewhat strange, but then I saw another and another. Then one with Notorious B.I.G. and yet another with Tupac.

Maybe that day was hip-hop nostalgia

day at the school. Heck, maybe EVERY day was hip-hop nostalgia day. But while the kids were wearing stuff honoring people from a quarter-century ago, it was selective.

No Eminem, no Outkast, no Public Enemy.

Neither was there anything new. No Kendrick Lamar, no J. Cole, no Jack Harlow. I finally realized that the fashion trend is not just nostalgia day; it’s nostalgia for dead people—Tupac, Biggie, Selena, and Aaliyah.

Now, to be fair, a couple kids were wearing shirts with Ice Cube on them. He’s not dead, but his career is after those wack “Are We There Yet?” movies and his disastrous flirtation with the Trump Administration.

Tupac, Selena, and Aaliyah have been dead longer than they were alive. But the devotion these young people show for them is amazing. It’s not just a fashion statement.

It turned out that one of my players apparently has an entire closet full of Tupac shirts. I asked her what her favorite song of his was. She said “California Love,” but then quickly added “Changes.” She said that she was supposed to write a paper for one of her classes about a song that she found significant. She picked “Changes,” which Shakur had recorded in 1992, four years before his death and six years before the song was released as part of a posthumous greatest hits collection. I suggested that she go back and read the lyrics to “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and The Range. Stuff like: “Say, little boy, you can’t go where the

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others go, Because you don’t look like they do…”

Or, “Well they passed a law in ’64 to give who ain’t got a little more But it only goes so far.

Because the law don’t change another’s mind when all they see at the hiring time, Is the line on the color bar…”

That’s pretty good stuff. The kid wrote the paper, did a bunch of research and found out that Bruce Hornsby once helped NBA star Allen Iverson get out of prison.

So, you know how it is; she did all the research, so she put everything in the paper.

She gets the paper back and the teacher admonished her for buying into the “white savior” thing with Hornsby. My kid didn’t know what the whole “white savior” thing was, so I told her that a bunch of guilty white liberals went to a movie theater to see a documentary about kale or something, but, by mistake, they ended up watching Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side” and they felt horrible.

The kid asked me if she should change anything. I explained to her that it has nothing to do with Hornsby being white and everything to do with Tupac Shakur, at the age of 21(!), being insightful enough to use “The Way It Is” as a springboard to brilliance.

In the end, she whitewashed everything out about Hornsby, turned in half a paper, and got an “A.” That’s just the way it is. ■

JUNE 2, 2022

stamp out so-called “critical race theory” in public schools.

The legislation is one of several measures introduced in Arizona this year to capitalize on a nationwide GOP movement to demonize critical race theory GOP ‘critical race theory’ ban would outlaw teaching about the alleged Buffalo shooter’s — a high-level field of academic study about the ways in which racism has racist motivations become embedded in various aspects of society — and turn it into a catchall term for various race-related teachings, inBy Dillon Rosenblatt cluding instruction on “white privilege” tucsoneditor@tucsonlocalmedia.com and “anti-racism” curriculum.

There is no evidence that critical race UNDER LEGISLATION APPROVED theory is being taught in Arizona K-12 last week by Republicans in the Arizoschools — or even most college classna House of Representatives, teachers rooms. would not be allowed to explain to A similar law was approved last year their students that the mass murder in as part of the budget, but the Arizona a Buffalo grocery store was allegedlly Supreme Court ruled it and many other committed by a white supremacist who provisions were unconstitutionally targeted and killed Black people in a shoehorned into the annual spending largely Black neighborhood. The bill plan in order to get the necessary votes would punish teachers who mentioned from 16 Republican senators and 31 the shooter’s motives.

GOP representatives.

Mesa Republican state Rep. Michelle Democrats warned that SB1412 would Udall said it would “not be appropriate” only exacerbate the years-long teacher to explain the motives behind those shortage in Arizona. Rep. Judy Schwiedeaths in Arizona classrooms. And bert, a Phoenix Democrat who is a legislation she championed, Senate Bill former teacher, said it would “have the 1412, would bar educators from teaching effect of driving those valuable teachers that casts “blame based on race, ethnicfrom our classroom.” And in the wake ity or sex” in all Arizona public schools. of the May 24 mass shooting at a Texas That, she said, would include instruction elementary school that claimed the lives on what happened in Buffalo. of 19 students and two teachers, poli“If a teacher can’t teach (history) cymakers should be working to thank without placing blame or judgment teachers and make their jobs easier, she on the basis of race, they shouldn’t be said. teaching,” Udall said during debate of Udall, a teacher who is running to the bill in the Arizona House of Reprebe the state superintendent of schools, sentatives. brushed off criticism from Democrats Teachers who violate that would and said the goal of barring instruction face discipline from the State Board of that a racial or ethnic group was inherEducation, and school districts could be ently superior is to ensure racist teachfined up to $5,000. ers aren’t teaching racism to children.

The proposal would apply to K-12 “I would like the members here to schools, community colleges and Ariimagine what would happen if one of us zona’s three universities: Arizona State was advocating for one of those things.

University, University of Arizona and We would probably get expelled from Northern Arizona University. It would the body advocating for those kinds of also seemingly apply to guest speakconcepts,” she explained. ers at any school and limit things like Recent history proves otherwise. In anti-racism training for teachers and 2018, former GOP Rep. David Stringer school employees. made a series of racist comments about Republicans portrayed the bill as a immigrants and Black people and racist way to ensure racist teachers can’t teach columns he wrote for the online news in Arizona classrooms. But the measure outlet he published were uncovered. is part of an effort by Republicans to

CURRENTS

GAG ORDER

While some prominent Republicans, including Gov. Doug Ducey, swiftly called on him to resign, his legislative colleagues were loath to punish him, much less expel him.

In early 2019, Stringer resigned after it became clear that his GOP colleagues would vote to expel him — but that only happened after the Phoenix New Times reported that he was charged with sex offenses involving young boys in Maryland in the early 1980s.

And this year, Republican legislators have shown they are unwilling to remove their colleagues for espousing racist and antisemitic views. State Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Flagstaff Republican, spoke to a white nationalist convention in February and posted antisemitic comments and images on social media.

But she was only censured by the Senate — and only for threatening retribution against her GOP colleagues.

After the Buffalo shooting, Rogers invoked a racist meme and accused the federal government of carrying out the shooting. She is facing an ethics investigation into her claim — which Republi-

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cans only backed after they rejected an attempt by Democrats to expel her.

Scottsdale Republican Rep. John Kavanagh took issue with Democrats “misrepresenting” the bill, claiming it “bans the promotion or advocacy of seven vile racist actions,” but not any explanation that comes along with uncomfortable topics that may come up in the classroom.

“We’re simply stopping people from advocating. We’re stopping white supremacists from teaching our children, Black supremacists or anybody who believes that race or ethnicity make somebody less of a person or more of a person,” he said.

The bill eventually passed 31-27. The bill was amended in the House, so it must return to the Senate for a final vote. If it wins approval on that vote, Ducey will decide whether it becomes law.

Ducey, who mentioned banning critical race theory as a priority in his State of the State address in January, is expected to sign it into law if it reaches his desk. ■

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CURRENTS

SHREDDING SISTERS Yasmynn Lopez is getting more girls on skateboards

By Carter Berg tucsoneditor@tucsonlocalmedia.com

YASMYNN LOPEZ DOESN’T FEEL happy until both feet are on a skateboard.

If it wasn’t for the Walmart skateboard her dad bought for Lopez when she was 15, she isn’t sure where she would be today. Lopez, now 32, is hoping to open that same door for other girls interested in skating.

“When I skateboard, I feel my most relaxed,” said Lopez, who goes by Y-Lo. “It has really helped me through some hard times. Like, if I’m ever stressing over work or personal shit, I just come out here with my girls and enjoy the vibe.”

Lopez, a Tucson native and avid skateboard enthusiast, has seen the Tucson skate scene grow from its humble beginnings of backyard rinks to several public skate parks being constructed throughout the city. For many local skaters like Lopez, the sport has become less of an act of rebellion and more of an act of communal therapy.

“I first started skateboarding when I was a teenager,” Lopez said. “My dad bought me a cheap skateboard from Walmart and said if I drop in like the rest of the boys do without falling, he would buy me a nicer skateboard. That same night I finished the bowl.”

Back then, things were different in the skateboarding world.

“There used to be fewer places to skate here in Tucson and the ones that were open were usually pretty packed with mostly dudes.”

Based on her own observations, Lopez says the number of children—especially girls—who have shown an interest in skateboarding has skyrocketed. Lopez attributes this change to a cultural shift in opinion towards girls enjoying traditionally male-dominated sports like skateboarding.

Lopez says the group of girls she skates with aims to make anyone feel comfortable at the skatepark regardless of age, gender or experience.

“I love seeing kids get on skateboards for the first time,” she said. “It’s such a fun thing to witness. I think the skate community here has really opened up to taking in beginners. I see them all the time now at the parks. When I was younger, a lot of older skaters were somewhat secretive about where/how they skate. Nowadays with so many public skate rinks and the Olympics showing skateboarding as a sport for the first time, it’s so much easier for a kid to get access to a skateboard.”

Since one of Lopez’s past jobs included working with kids, she’s often been given the opportunity to introduce the world of skateboarding to young minds.

Lopez also works part time at Mortal Skate Shop, where she builds, repairs and sells skateboards.

In 2017, Lopez and some of her friends created BABZ, a group of girls who skate together at various parks throughout Tucson. BABZ introduces both girls and women on how to get the basics down on a skateboard. BABZ also attends events centered around the Tucson skate scene, inviting anyone who may feel uneasy at a skatepark to join them.

Ciara Barraza, 23, has only been skating with BABZ for about a year and says her skills on a skateboard have tripled. Barraza, who was convinced by Lopez to learn skateboarding during the COVID-19 pandemic, had always been interested in learning how to skateboard but was reluctant to go to a skatepark alone.

“Learning how to skateboard is challenging as is,” Barraza said. “You honestly fall on your ass quite a lot. And when you fall on your ass in front of strangers, it hurts even more. But being around a good group of girls who you trust really makes the skatepark way less intimidat-

PHOTO BY CARTER BERG

Yasmynn Lopez: “When I skateboard, I feel my most relaxed.”

ing. I really wish I had a group like this when I was younger. If I did I probably wouldn’t be currently falling on my ass so much!”

Another member of BABZ, Aretha Raiwe, says her love for skateboarding has only grown since joining the group. Raiwe, who graduated from the University of Arizona in spring 2021, joined BABZ after wanting to learn how to skate in a safe, comfortable environment.

“I’ve only been skateboarding for about four years because there weren’t many skateparks where I grew up, let alone a group of skater girls,” Raiwe said. “A while back I visited my family in Lagos and I brought a skateboard

with me to give to my little cousins and their friends. Watching their faces light up when I showed them how to ride was priceless. I returned recently and needless to say they’ve developed a love for it. If I were to have a child in my responsibility, I would want them to try to skateboard. I think it builds necessary confidence early on.”

BABZ aims to break that barrier between gender and sport as well as welcome those who aren’t traditionally seen at a skatepark, be seen. Lopez says her love for skateboarding is too deep to see other people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable at the skatepark. “Skateboarding is a source of happiness.” ■

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Story & photos by Brian Smith

Meet Sidney Finkel Holocaust Survivor and Newly in Love IT IS A HOT THURSDAY MORNING in May and a 7th-grade social-studies class from Dodge Middle Magnet School gather around Sidney Finkel, a living, breathing survivor of the most merciless mass genocide in history.

His partner, 83-year-old Barbara Agee, stands near him, one moment attending to his appearance, tucking into his trousers the tail of his pressed white shirt, and another explaining to me how speaking events such as this one has no doubt extended the life of the 90-yearold man she adores.

They are inside the gated, tranquil courtyard of the Jewish History Museum, a skip from downtown Tucson.

To the right is the airy Holocaust center, a hush-inducing, well-appointed hall of edifying tributes and remembrances, honoring genocide survivors and liberators. It is where the too-often unspoken is spoken.

In the center is the synagogue (Arizona’s oldest, built 1910), the museum’s home, now an educational center, is a Tucson architectural marvel, a formidable Ely Blount design of arched windows, Greek revival and hand-carved interior patterns rescued from ruin in 1998.

The Holocaust center’s primary focus is on survivors, such as Finkel, who have made Southern Arizona home.

In comforting palo verde shade, moments before the kids step into the Holocaust center to watch a wrenching 35-minute documentary on Sidney’s life, you can see in their tender faces, their carriage, their politeness, the evidence of good mothers, that these kids, of various colors — a true microcosm of Tucson’s population — have little idea what it feels like to be a dead-eyed, hollowed-out soul of yourself as a pre-pubescent child.

They soon learn Sidney (born Sevek

Finkelstein) is a living miracle, and a potent reminder of the peculiar resilience of human nature, overcoming acute suffering and death, overcoming life-long traumas to arrive, finally, at a place of peace.

No, the kids don’t know, but can imagine from the film, what it feels like when German bombers fill the sky and blow up your neighborhood at 7 years old, people on fire, animals on fire. Losing your oldest sister, who was pregnant and smuggled out of a Jewish ghetto to a Polish Catholic hospital, only to be discovered by Nazis, who stormed in the hospital tossed the baby to its death, out the window, and murdered your recovering sister in a Jewish cemetery. How your parents unsuccessfully attempted to soothe you, while the world around you was literally a prison.

Or later to be torn away from your mother and she was crammed into a Nazi cattle-car train, with your other sister, who couldn’t bear to part from her, to a death-camp murder, telling you “You must be brave, son. You do everything you can to survive. You are our future.”

You “lucked out” because your much-older brother Isaac and dad Lieb had precious work permits that allowed them to stay alive a little longer as slave laborers in a factory, and you snuck in, because your older brother, who spoke perfect German, summoned life-risking bravery and bribed a guard who was whipping you, people’s blood and guts spilling around you.

To be so dehumanized by 12 years old, starving, forced to carry dead prisoners from their bunks and pile them up like lumber, as to be indifferent to the person you love most in the world, your father, who, when he discovers you after a painful separation, emaciated, neardeath in the Buchenwald concentration

Sidney at home with a picture of his mother, murdered by Nazis.

camp, gave you his last piece of bread.

You didn’t feel anything anymore, “incapable of feeling affection.’ That is the last time you see him alive. The guilt of that exchange haunts your entire life.

What the kids watching don’t learn is what it means to carry that same deadeyed survival instinct into years as a father who used alcohol to deaden childhood wounds. The survivor guilt of six million who did not, including parents, aunts, uncles, sisters. And to wait nearly 50 years to tell a family member the story? How does one forge formative relationships after all your early ones in life are taken away?

Sidney and Barbara enter the room before the film’s end. For Sidney, it is too painful to watch.

The two-dozen or so kids sit cross-

legged on the floor. They listened hard, so still during the screening, their shifts in positions are audible during quiet moments, and a few wipe tears. A teacher from the school weeps in back.

To their right, a gallery wall of faces, small photos of survivors in Southern Arizona with accompanying words about each. Too, photos of murdered relatives of the survivors. It’s a pictorial narrative that asks the eternal question: what might have been?

After the screening, Lori Shepherd, the museum’s executive director and host today, addresses the children with echoes of Elie Wiesel, “When you meet a witness, you become a witness.

Right?” She brings Sidney up to talk with the kids.

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TUCSON SALVAGE

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Sidney’s mere presence shifts plates of time to the present, from deep tragedy to something else entirely.

The kids surely have difficulty believing this old man from the film, standing before them, is the one who survived the unspeakable, six childhood years spent in Jewish ghettos/annexes and imprisoned at Czestochowa, Buchenwald, and Theresienstadt concentration camps. It is hard for anyone to imagine.

Sidney moves from a chair in the back, wearing a black ballcap that reads “WWII Holocaust Survivor,” and gray trousers. He takes the wireless mic and stands before the children, is self-effacing, jokes about himself. Introduces his partner Barbara, how they met on a dating site as very old people, and they play off each other like some classic Burns and Allen skit. The kids likely don’t realize Sidney employs humor to shift the room’s ominous sadnesses into another realm, one of redemption, hope, kindness. It is a sly move from an old storytelling master. It’s no wonder he got an honorary doctorate in literature from St. Xavier University in Chicago in 2011. A guy who earned his GED in his mid-50s. He tells the kids how he was saved by a German educator and teachers from a school in England just after liberation, he learned to read and write.

The kids pose thoughtful questions filled of wonderment and later take pictures with the man, group shots, selfies, even separate with his partner Barbara.

That kids want photos with Barbara is a surprise: “That’s never happened to me before,” she says.

Earlier, seated on a pew beside Barbara in the synagogue, Sidney told me the first stage of denial: “a psychologist told me at 14 to try to forget it. Everybody said that. Just forget it.”

Took him 50 years of holding in the worst human pains imaginable to finally let it out.

SIDNEY’S MEMOIR, SEVEK AND the Holocaust — The Boy Who Refused to Die, upon which the documentary is based, is a highly readable, heavily factchecked and well-edited chronicle of his early life as a Nazi prisoner and how he survived. He describes the closeness he felt to his family members. The smart,

compact writing, in the boy’s POV, does not dwell in sentimentality, or victimhood, nor use any kind of sympathy device. It doesn’t need to. It’s almost like he’s sharing his story around a campfire, albeit a grim one. Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel, author of Night, provided a cover blurb. The two were imprisoned in Buchenwald at the same time.

It is the same tone and manner he has expressed to assembled academics at universities, to young adults at museums and tributes, to middle-schoolers, to Air Force bases, all over Tucson, the country and world, since around 1994, after a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with his daughter and son.

By the end, the book becomes a kind of meditation on what the abominable experience of the Holocaust taught Sidney later in life; self-refection, gratefulness for family, a sense of acceptance, and kindness, with notes from his son Leon and granddaughter Rebecca.

He says the actual writing was fairly easy, “it just came out.” He adds, “I think even when an anti-Semite reads this book, they like him (Sevek), they’ll have a favorable viewpoint of Jews.”

He, and his family, worked hard getting the book out. “You have to talk to teachers, schools,” Sydney says. Such work paid off—with no big-publisher PR team, it earned great reviews in key places. It sold on reputation alone.

Schools around the country have read his book as a part of their curriculum, and Sidney reckons he’s sold close to 30,000 copies since first publication in 2006, an incredible number for what’s basically a self-released book. If a classroom can’t afford the books, sometimes he gives them away, or, say, a doctor friend will subsidize a school purchase.

His daughter Ruth has taken over management of the work, and Sidney will leave it to Ruth Finkel Wade and son Leon Finkel to carry on when he dies.

Another book, the just-released The Ones Who Remember — Second Generation Voices of the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster), a collection of essays by children of Holocaust survivors, was co-researched and compiled

by Sidney’s daughter Ruth, a retired Domino’s executive, who is now a speaker and docent at the Florida Holocaust Museum. She also assists her dad with his book and speaking engagements.

Barbara and Sidney entertaining kids inside the Jewish History Museum’s Holocaust Center.

The book features a beautifully written essay by her involving the emotional disconnects of growing up with a Holocaust-surviving father. It’s a lovely story of reclamation that makes the book worth seeking out.

A third tome, the excellent The School that Escaped the Nazis (PublicAffairs) which is released stateside next month

by British journalist and author Deborah Cadbury, tells the story of the co-educational boarding school, Bunce Court, which educated, among others, traumatized Jewish children who had survived concentration camps, or survived hiding in Nazi-controlled central Europe, and Sidney is featured.

A FEW DAYS AFTER THE FILM screening, in the quiet, cozy front patio of the couple’s immaculate three-bedroom home in Oro Valley, northwest of Tucson, Barbara sits adjacent to Sidney, in patio chairs. He works a stogie, which he holds close to his mouth, and peers over as he talks, as if he’s searching for something.

At 90, Sidney looks like what would result if one crossed Peter Pan with a nonagenarian bingo player on a winning streak. He is a savvy, smart guy, armed with a gentle charisma; routes to instant likeability. I can’t help but wonder if any of those qualities helped him skate through difficult situations earlier in life, or address the things difficult to psychologically absorb. He’s told me more than once that years ago he got over feeling like a victim.

“I never knew what the word ‘victim’ meant,” he says. “I just had to get on with my life to earn a living.”

Yet, just having the wherewithal to tell his story, after decades of keeping it to himself, affirmed his life. Too, his book, his lectures (there is even a school garden named after him in Arkansas) can translate into a kind of worthy hero figure, underpinned by unrelenting tragedy.

Sidney knows this, laughingly calls himself a “little c” (little celebrity) for having emerged as both an influential and necessary international speaker on the Holocaust. He enjoys the attention.

He has more than earned it; hell, he is more deserving of such than the vast majority of people pedestalized in our culture.

Barbara has witnessed this, favorable situations later in his life. Barbara tells a story of how Sidney scored a doctor’s appointment to treat a painful, ongoing case of acid-reflex, avoiding a monthslong wait by scanning a list of doctors and picking one with a Jewish name, and then explaining to that doctor he was a Holocaust survivor.

“I was flabbergasted,” Barbara says, with no hint of irony.

In person Sydney is kind, so accommodating as to make one almost nervous. He’s the same with teachers, students, museum workers, and among other Holocaust survivors.

His partner Barbara is too.

Theirs is a late-in-life new love, blossomed almost eight years ago after

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meeting each other online. It is not without the difficulties and personal navigation of two people, each saddled with their own baggage. “Here is Sidney,” Barbara says, “who spent most of his life married, and me, most of it spent single.” She adds, “I came with baggage.”

She looks to Sidney. “And he, of course, came with bigger baggage!”

Sidney chuckles along with that one.

She references the noticeable purple birthmark on her face, which made for a life of insecurity; as a girl she was taught to cover it with makeup, which led to a bigger idea that she had to cover things up to be accepted. Her birthmark is a bigger metaphor now: “I wanted to do more uncovering. The covering up early, had me uncover later in life.” She looks to Sidney, adds, “I wanted to uncover this intimate, close relationship.”

They reach over to each other. He kisses her hand.

“He’s knows my triggers now, and will often respect those things. When he could’ve hit the trigger he didn’t.”

Barbara winks at me several times in precise moments of candor. She’s cagey, curious and knowing, her sentences thoughtful, straightforward. She knows a lot more of the world around her, an accumulated wisdom, than she would ever reveal. She calls herself an “adventurer” to Sidney’s “homebody.” To hear her, it is understood that when moments in her life were not fun, they were interesting. She is shy, not a fan of attention.

Her voice is full-on grandmother, warming, almost musical in cadence, usually punctuated with a chuckle.

She has no children and endured one bad marriage back in the mid-’80s, which lasted a year. She was born in 1939, Mom was a teacher into the arts, Dad was a lumberman, “a high-bottom alcoholic.” They’d take the jeep out, go hunting, fishing, logging. Mom took her to plays. “I had an unusually broad childhood for being raised in a town of 5,000.”

She remembers Life Magazine pictures as a girl, “horrifying images of the Jewish side of the Holocaust.”

She soon read Viktor Frankl’s holocaust survivor tome Man’s Search for Meaning and it had a big impact.

“Never in her wildest dreams would I have imagined I’d be with a survivor of the holocaust,” she says.

Barbara talks about their differences

in value systems. She being the more diplomatic one. “Sidney, on the other hand,” she laughs, “says just what’s on his mind and sometimes that’s not very diplomatic.”

He nods, “Two rocks rubbing against each other until a diamond is made.”

Barbara earned a masters in nursing, with a focus on gerontology. Got into teaching as well as practicing lots of different kinds of nursing. Landed in Yuma, Arizona to teach, the UA in Tucson, NAU in Flagstaff, returned to Tucson (“I love to hike!”) for good around 1990 to teach and worked home health and hospice here.

The couple talk freely of their relationship, becomes witty banter.

“The gerontology helped with my sexuality,” Barbara says.

“I picked well!” Sidney interjects.

“My counselor does say we are very unusual,” she adds.

Sidney: “We made love on our first date!”

“No, not our first date!” Barbara, embarrassed, adds.

“Okay, maybe you’re right,” he laughs.

“But it was right away” “She doesn’t cook for me,” Sidney says. “For dinner I eat a hot dog and three pancakes.”

“He’s not a fan of greens,” Barbara adds, “and I am. He never has been since throwing up grass, which he ate to survive as a boy.”

A younger friend of Barbara’s had introduced her to OurTime dating site.

“I’m looking, thinking what do I want to do for the last part of my life,” Barbara says. “I guess I wanted a partner. But I didn’t need a partner.”

He went online, three different dating sites. “I was in Chicago talking to different ladies in Tucson. I had choices.

Barbara had all the qualities I loved. The way she spoke; she is highly intelligent.

When she feels something is wrong or right, she is probably right.”

“I don’t do too much fetch and carry for him,” Barbara grins, and looks at me.

“I wanted you to know that.”

Barbara had just completed a journey across the country when they met, living in a travel trailer. “I didn’t have a lot of money because I had an adventurous lifestyle.”

Even after they were a couple and Barbara moved in with Sidney, one CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

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woman from a dating site wouldn’t stop calling.

Barbara scoffs at the gall of the woman.

Sydney nods along.

The pair didn’t marry, didn’t see the point, instead call each other “lifetime partners.”

For outside approval, Sidney says, “My son Leon came for dinner. He’s a lawyer, and he gave me the thumbs up on Barbara. And if he wouldn’t have, I would’ve listened to him.” He pauses.

“Funny, a father listening to his son.”

Sidney has moments of long quiet depression, for which he takes supplements. He tells of clinched fists and tears in his eyes, and waiting for it to pass. He tells of things hanging on, his mother for whom he still “has great longing.”

“Sometimes I’m really brave enough to ask him what’s on his mind,” Barbara says. “Other times, I know later he will often offer it.”

The couple engage in gratitude meetings, just the two of them, and count the ways. They go on picnics.

“Sidney’s my big growth opportunity,” Barbara says.

He turns to her, says, “Can you tell when I’m depressed?”

She nods. “Hmm, hmmm.”

Love is work, regardless of wisdom, age. Each go to counseling, as Sydney has done for decades. A few times they visited each other’s counselors together.

A central question is how does one forge formative relationships after most of the early ones in childhood were taken away?

Sidney is still learning. For example, the separation anxiety. Barbara found it difficult to leave Sidney to go on trips.

Barbara is well-aware of lingering childhood abandonment traumas.

“I would think she was never coming back,” Sidney says. “I would say, ‘Why are you leaving me?”

“He could hardly believe I’d come back,” she adds.

There is a paragraph in Sidney’s book, where he is crammed into a death train “like sardines” en route to a concentration camp. He is separated from his father and brother, and in a fetal position, a boy, the first time he is ever truly alone in the world.

“Crippling fear entered my body,” he

writes, “fear that would stay with me for the rest of my life.”

He agrees with that now. “It hasn’t gotten easier,” he says. “I just deal with it better.”

IN 1945, THE BRITISH government allowed a number of child WWII refugees into England. Sidney was luckily picked to attend Bunce Court in Kent, England, a private boarding school co-founded by heroic educator Anna Essinger.

Sidney arrived at the school as a Polish-speaking orphaned Nazi concentration-camp survivor, and the school saved his life. It is where he learned to be human again, gain insight to a few of the wonders of being a prepubescent kid. He arrived at boarding school not knowing the alphabet, and the curriculum inspired him to become an avid reader.

He regained some empathy.

The teachers would not give up on him.

“They loved me until I could love myself,” he says. “I learned English, it was wonderful.”

He was always near his big brother Isaac, until the day he boarded the ship to America. The Nazis could not take that away.

A surviving uncle in Chicago sent for him. He got his visa and arrived in 1951, filled with a sense of American promise.

He searched for such promise in ensuing years. “I didn’t have any home, lived a lodger in people’s homes. Rented a room.” He married, a union that bore two children, Ruth and Leon, and divorced.

He married again to Jean, which lasted well over 40 years. Jean had two young children, and the couple bore Lisa. Sidney now has five children and 10 grandchildren.

Jean was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago and 15 days later she was dead.

“Worst pain I ever knew,” Sidney says.

After long pause, he adds, “worse than the camps.”

He is proud of his children and grandchildren, pictures of them adorn their refrigerator, and he talks at length of their accomplishments.

Sidney offers brief, almost contrite-sounding responses when talking of his first-born children, from his first marriage, Leon and the elder Ruth. He was shut down, he was drinking. How it took nearly 50 years for him to come to grips with his personal history and share it first

with Ruth, then others. He got sober first, and he credits AA for saving his life there, allowing him to reach a point of self-reflection to figure out who the hell he was.

“I was in AA more than 40 years. The love and acceptance. That was the most influential thing in my life. All my friends were in AA. I would’ve lost all my kids. It gave me confidence to buy a building, to speak in front of people.

“Jean was instrumental in me joining AA. She was an alcoholic too who got sober before I did.”

He lived in Homewood-Flossmore area on Chicago’s southside. Sidney worked for the same company for 40 years, Polk Brothers appliances and electronics in Chicago, a manager. He was the oldest employee. “They gave $22,000 when they went out of business.” He’d also purchased an apartment building, for $200,000, and sold it 20 years later for double.

“I had obligations to both families.”

He and wife Jean chose Tucson because they loved it here, would split time with his home in Chicago, and his sister Lola had lived here, in this same house, until her death in 1999. Lola survived the Holocaust, but was beaten severely by Nazis and Sidney says, “was very troubled.” Her son, Luke, was born developmentally disabled at the tail-end of the war. “My brother-in-law rushed them to a hospital and saved their lives.”

Sidney is Luke’s guardian. He would often visit him in the Chicago care facility, “holidays, Christmastime,” until COVID curtailed their visits. Barbara fell in love with him too. She later produces a heart-bending book Luke created, including pictures of family and tributes to his favorite classical composers. “Luke is kind of a savant, especially with classical music.”

Sidney also receives a German pension.

“The German government has been very good to survivors,” he says. “It isn’t much, less than Social Security, but it really helps.” That included lump sums a few times in his life, and a monthly stipend.

He’s been receiving for decades, after much paperwork and a proof process.

“We have to write in, notarized letters to let them know Sidney is still alive,” Barbara says.

BARBARA STEPS INSIDE THE house and returns with pictures of Sidney’s wife Jean, taken in Chicago.

“When I first got together with him,” she says, “it almost felt like Jean was there with me. Helping me. It felt supportive.”

He talks of his bladder cancer, which he’s had for seven years, and which forces him to excuse himself several times in conversation to the bathroom.

“The doctor says,” Barbara adds, while Sidney is stepped away, “he will probably die of something else besides the cancer.”

Sidney returns to his perch, relights the cigar, and knows exactly what was said, “If I died today, I would be good. I made it to 90!” Yet Sidney appears to be acutely aware of his own mortality. “She’ll be fine,” he adds. “When I die the house is hers forever.” (“He says that a lot,” 83-year-old Barbara tells me later on a phone chat.

“I don’t have strong feelings about that.

We’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlives me!”)

“This is the happiest time of my life,” Sidney adds. “We have enough money, we have everything America can offer.” He learned to swim at age 70, the couple hits the pool a few times a week.

“It wasn’t all bell and whistles. We’ve grown to really love each other,” Barbara pauses, “I didn’t want all the bells and whistles. That’s just exhausting.”

Sidney nods.

She adds, “I never thought I’d be a grandma,” to which Sidney says, “My family loves you.”

AT THE END OF SIDNEY’S FILM, he is inside the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, one of two visits where he appeared as an honored guest, and speaker, on Nazi liberation anniversaries. He is standing in the grim spot where he last saw his father alive. He prays out loud to him, surrounded by family.

“Here I am with your grandchildren …

I can see you smiling, how happy you are to see that I survived and you have these wonderful grandchildren.”

Before our afternoon ends, Sidney offers, “I didn’t think that much of myself.” A moment passes, he adds, “If there was no Holocaust I would’ve done great things.”

Barbara is aghast, and she says to him, “Look at all the great things you’ve done!”

JUNE 2, 2022

Jewish nun, and especially her sassy, cholo prostitute, Elena Sanchez, were featured for years on the monthly Hotel Congress series, Retro Game Show. Elena Sanchez also often stars and creates custom material for comedy roasts. In April, she ribbed Tucson attorney and comedian Elliott Glicksman at an awards presentation where he was recognized by Step Up to Justice for his work representing crime victims.

Fernandez also performs with Glicksman and comedian Nancy Stanley, who produces The Estrogen Hour benefit comedy show, in the Arroyo Café Radio Hour, an annual fundraiser hosted at The Rialto Theatre by cartoonist and comedian David Fitzsimmons. And she emcees as well as creates customized standup sets for other benefits.

So when she talks about changes she’s seen in Tucson comedy, she knows, deeply, COURTESY PHOTO whereof she speaks. “It’s different, now,” she A kitty at the El Jefe Cat Lounge. says, and she’s made that change a personal priority. With Mo Urban and Amber Frame, she has started a weekly open mic, Lady Ha Ha, for women and LGBTQA+ . It’s every What’s next? The Tanque Verde Swap Meet?

Wednesday at 7 p.m. at The Rock.

The Pennington Street Garage?

“Lady Ha Ha is a comedy open mic for folks marginalized (in the world of comeawarded for the best crazy cat lady costume. dy). “All genres of comedy are welcome, not just stand-up,” she says. “For 20 years I

By Linda Ray Fernandez’ comedy persona can be was taught that you have to be competitive. tucsoneditor@tucsonlocalmedia.com summed up in one word: Gonzo! Like that You have to be cutthroat. You have to get cat that’s into everything. Whether it’s CONNOR HANNAH MAY HAVE improv, standup, hosting or, especially, wind- as much stage time as you can. You have to just stab anyone in the back, do whatever it been the first to lead Tucson comedians out ing up a show, she jumps on every risk and takes. And one day I woke up, I was like, wait of bars and into wide open spaces. Late in revels even in the falls. a minute. Imagine how much better I would the last decade he started an open mic in the In her professional life, she is a death be as a, as a comedian if somebody told alcohol-free Kava Bar. doula. That does seem at odds with her me I was doing a good job, or I was funny, In the Tanque Verde area, 420-friendly high-energy, often ribald comedy life. anything positive.”

Harambe Café & Social Club hosts a couple According to the website of the National Now she and her partners have their own of regular open mics and has begun hosting End-Of-Life Doula Alliance, in her day job booked shows in recent months. At $20, tick- she “provide(s) a non-medical, holistic sup- audience of people who are never seen anywhere else, and they behave like a communiets are steep for the market, but they include port and comfort to the dying person and ty, supporting and enjoying each other. The CBD treats. their family.” Something about that dichotfeel is almost akin to that of a Montessori In April, long-time open-mic’er, occaomy, full force comedy faces down death, sional showman and entirely likeable host might evoke a smile. But obviously, it’s more class. Everyone is friendly and busy creating, Ernie Celaya started a mic at Spark Project complicated than that and sadly different for looking for something new to share.

“There is zero competition,” she says. “I Collective, a collaborative space shared by everyone. literally took the model I was taught and tattoo and body-piercing artist, massage Certification as a death doula is a fairly flipped it upside down. We’re going to have therapists and a practitioner of metaphysirecent thing for Fernandez. But her experia model based on safety, support, encourcal arts, among others. ence with Tucson comedy stretches back agement, and creativity.

Try anything you Now comes Lady Ha Ha Comedy, run by decades. want on stage as long as it’s comedy. But no longtime comic about town Priscilla FernanShe says she started telling jokes at Laff’s misogyny, no hate speech, period. I want to dez and her sidekicks Mo Urban and Amber Comedy Caffe around 2005. “I got started Frame, to blow the scene wide open with an with Dan Soder (a UA grad and touring co- see more people that look like me on stage.

I want to see more older women, people that intimate comedy show for 35 cats. Of course, median best known for his part in Billions) are black, that are gay, that are trans. I want they’re calling it Kitty Ha Ha. and Aaron Panther, Chad Lehrman. We to see more kinds of people in comedy.”

The cats are awaiting adoption, and were all writing together. About two years Fernandez encourages craziness, too, parmeanwhile taking cuddles at El Jefe Cat later, I started doing improv with Not Burnt ticularly at the end of a show. She celebrates Lounge, 3025 N. Campbell Ave., suite 141.

Out Just Unscrewed until 2014.” the unfurling of any freak flag.

Human seating is limited to 30. Tickets are Fernandez credits her improv training “I really want to focus on doing comedy $18 via eljefecatlounge.com/reservations. for the wildly popular character comedy with marginalized people and creating a BYO beverages and snacks. A prize will be she’s plied for years. Her Sister Shalom, a

LAUGHING STOCK

supportive space,” she says. “I’m encouraging other people to do characters because it was so much fun for me.”

As an example, she mentions local favorite Kathy Hedrick, “She gets up there and is so nasty and cringy that we all are obsessed with her. She knows (that some people think) she’s wildly inappropriate. How do you get more vulnerable than that?

“I do cringe comedy, too,” she says. “I’m very irreverent and I like to push the boundaries. People sometimes cringe at that, you know? That’s not my crowd.”

Fortunately, she and others are now able to find all different crowds in Tucson’s many and varied outlets for local comedians.

L

HIN AUG G S

TOCK

COMEDY FOR THE PEOPLE

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Lady HA HA

COMEDY AND METAPHYSICS, BECAUSE OF COURSE. Ernie Celaya was a fixture on the Tucson comedy scene for years, showing up regularly at Laff’s and an under-the-radar mic run by top local comic Pauly Casillas at Mr. Heads. Celaya finally gave up three years ago.

Then one day, he read a Facebook post announcing a new open mic at Spark Project Collective, close to his neighborhood at 4433 E Broadway Blvd. Celaya was drawn to the place because, he says, “They’re really community-driven. They’re a nonprofit organization and they help autistic kids.

“It was their very first comedy open mic,” he says. “Chris Carlone organized it and it was going to be his first time. I told him I’d done comedy before. Did he want me to host it? And he said, ‘Sure.’ And I loved it because I got more stage time.”

Carlone runs The Four of Wands, an enterprise offering Tarot and oil readings, spiritual counseling, chakra balancing and shamanic Reiki, also incorporating crystals and singing bowl. The Four of Wands is part of the Spark Project Collective, a group that also includes tattoo, piercing and permaCONTINUED ON PAGE 23

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First Friday Shorts. This one is exciting! For years, the Loft has hosted a monthly short film contest, in which anyone can submit a short film under 15 minutes to have it played on the big screen. The catch? Each film is guaranteed to only play for three minutes, and then the audience can call for the hosts to strike the dreaded gong and stop the film. Or they can let it play if they like it. It’s a raucous celebration of local filmmakers, some of whom get gonged and return to a later First Friday with a reworked masterpiece. Bridgitte Thum of KXCI is the perfect host. The monthly grand prize is $200, and at the annual showdown between each month’s winner, the grand prize is $1,000. 9 p.m.

Friday, June 3. Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd. $8 GA. Dario’s Urban BBQ. The first in a new series of dining events, this five-course, paired dining experience is brought to you by HUB Executive Chef Dario Hernandez. And who doesn’t love a BBQ tapas party? Check out five individual tapas stations where staff will serve you food and give you the lowdown, pairing each one with a cocktail, beer or mocktail. TFQ Jazz is providing live music for this mouthwatering night full of smoked and grilled dishes in lovely downtown Tucson. 7 p.m. Thursday, June 9. 300 E. Congress Street’s hidden courtyard. $80 (includes service charge and free parking).

Music Under the Stars. Another week, another concert in the park. You won’t hear us complaining! This week, Tucson Pops brings us a selection by the likes of Sousa, Grieg, Brahms and many more.

You’ll even hear orchestral takes on hits like “Bohemian Rhapsody” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man.” Vocalist Armen Dirtadian, who has been singing all over the Old Pueblo for more than 40 years, is this week’s special guest artist. 7 p.m. Sunday, June 5. DeMeester Outdoor Performance Center in Reid Park, 900 S. Randolph Way.

Kingfisher Road Trip: Southwest Week. You know summer has arrived when the Kingfisher launches its summer road trip series, in which each week features a new regional menu. They’re kicking off the 29th year of this culinary celebration with their Southwest menu, presented by Chef Jim Murphy. Seafood albondigas, baked gulf oysters, guaymas shrimp, venison stew, chocolate flan and a Sonoran spritz will have your mouth watering and your brain thinking, “You know, summer in Tucson is actually really nice!” Kingfisher is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Menu available through June 11. Kingfisher Bar & Grill, 2564 E. Grant Road.

by Emily Dieckman Drag Queen Story Hour at MOCA. Drag culture is fun and boisterous and fabulous. So are the best childhoods. These two worlds come together this weekend when Lil Miss Hot Mess does a special reading of her latest picture book, “If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It.” This sing-along book with a drag twist teaches kids a bit about this fantastically fun culture, and books will be available for purchase as well. 11 a.m. to noon. Saturday, June 4. Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, 265 S. Church Ave. Free, with museum admission waived for event attendees as well.

How to Make an American Son. From Honduran-born Mando’s perspective, it’s inconvenient that the downturn of his cleaning empire is coinciding exactly with the need to rein in his spoiled, American-born son Orlando. From Orlando’s perspective, he’s suddenly being asked to handle way too much at once, including the future of his father’s entire enterprise. The newest Arizona Theatre Company show asks what happens with the promise of the American Dream collides with the realities of immigration. June 4 to 25, with shows at 7:30 p.m. or 2 p.m. Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. Preview shows through June 9 are $25 to $58. Shows opening night an onward are $40 to $7.

Chillin’ at the Chul. We’ve been trying to deny it here in our house, but the truth is that it’s starting to get hot. Any opportunity to stay cool other than by sitting pantsless in front of the air conditioner at your own house is a treasure. Which makes this first-ever summer series at Tohono Chul a great one! In the shade of their mature trees, things are about 10 degrees cooler. You can stroll through the gardens eating Sonoran hot dogs, street tacos or griddled corn, and drinking alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks. This week’s live music provided by DJ Humbleianess. 5 to 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays June 3 through Sept. 3. Tohono Chul, 7366 Paseo del Norte. $15 adults, $13 seniors/military/student, $6 kids 5 to 12.

Encaustic Art Exhibit. Encaustic art is basically painting with colored hot wax.

Some of the best-known encaustic art works are the Fayum funeral portraits back from the first and second centuries AD, but it’s enjoyed a resurgence in the past 30 years or so, since new tech has made it easier (hello hotplates!) Come see some of this vibrant and fascinating art by local artists in this partnership between Roche Tissue Diagnostics and SAACA. The night also features refreshments, live music and gallery tours. 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 8. Roche Tissue Diagnostics – Ventana Gallery, 1910 E. Innovation Park Dr. Free, but register in advance at saaca.org/ventanagallery.

Discovery Nights at the Children’s Museum. Bring the kids on down for a night full of fun bilingual programming blending both arts and sciences. Kids will love the interactive science experiments, such as a cloud in a bottle, robot hands and oobleck (from the Dr. Seuss book).

Budding artists will love the nebula spin art, pumpkin playdough and something called a sound sandwich. And everyone will love bilingual storytime! Oh, to be a kid in a children’s museum, where the world is your oyster and everything is exciting. 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, June 2.

Children’s Museum Tucson, 200 S. Sixth Ave. Free.

JUNE 2, 2022

MUSIC

Spoon W/ special guest Geese Friday, June 3 Rialto Theatre $36-$49 + Taxes and Fees Tickets available at Ticketmaster.com and the Rialto Theatre Box Office More info at Rialtotheatre.com

COURTESY PHOTO

Spoon

DIG IN

Spoon’s Britt Daniel breaks down five of the band’s essential songs ahead of Tucson show

By Vincent Arrieta Special to Tucson Local Media

ON THE EERIE CLOSING TITLE TRACK TO Spoon’s latest album Lucifer on the Sofa, frontman Britt Daniel sings “Now you’re thinking ‘bout turquoise.” Is that turn of phrase a nod to Bob Dylan? After all, Dylan’s 1976 travelogue “Isis” features the lyric: “I was thinkin’ about turquoise, I was thinkin’ about gold.”

“Maybe,” Daniel says laughing. “I think that probably snuck in there somewhere. It’s not something that I was thinking about directly. But it was a one of those things where later I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I can connect the dots.’”

Ahead of Spoon’s upcoming tour, including a stop at Tucson’s Rialto Theatre on Friday, June 3 at 8 p.m. with special guest Geese, Britt Daniel was relaxing in his Austin when Tucson Local Media caught up with him. While the song in question can easily be interpreted as either a lament of a failed relationship or a snapshot of loneliness amid the COVID-19 lockdown, Daniel goes on to say of “Lucifer on the Sofa” that it was written in April of 2020 at the height of the panic surrounding the initial lockdown, after a majority of the record had already been written. “I don’t think it could have been written any other time, really,” he says. “That kind of perspective.”

Here’s what he had to say about five of Spoon’s most essential songs: “The Mystery Zone” from Transference “I wrote that one in Portland. I had a house for the first time. I never lived alone in a house before, and suddenly I could afford one. I had just seen I just seen Chuck Berry play in St. Louis. He was 80 years old and was doing duck walks. Several times during the show he stopped and read little bits of lyrics or poetry that he wrote as a kid. One of them had a had something about a faraway place and building a house, and that became a sort of jumping off point for ‘The Mystery Zone.’ A house in a faraway place.”

“Wild” from Lucifer on the Sofa “It had been suggested to me that I tried doing some co-writing. It’s something I’ve never really done. I’ve done co-writing with bandmates, but not with people outside the band. [Jack Antonoff] was suggested, we got together, and he was the guy that by far I thought like, ‘Well, OK, he’s providing something that I wouldn’t normally do.’ And we were working fast. We kind of came up with chords, he put down a bass line, and I hummed a melody, and that was as far as we got that day. And then the melody I hummed didn’t end up being what I used. Years later, I finally got it together to write the words for that song during lockdown.”

“Us” from Hot Thoughts “‘Us’ has got a lot to do with that song ‘Pink Up.’ I recorded Ted Taforo playing sax on ‘Pink Up,’ and it was so good.

After he left that day, I listened back with no instruments and just his sax and I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be its own song. And I thought it would be a cool thing to have this sort of theme that runs through the record where you hear it here and then you hear it again at the end. It was sort of a special recording session for me.”

“New York Kiss” from They Want My Soul “I wrote that one in Austin in the same one-bedroom apartment that I wrote ‘The Way We Get By,’ ‘Small Stakes’ and all those of that era. I think I wrote it during the time of writing Gimme Fiction, and Jim and I disagreed on how to present it. I wanted to have sort of a dance beat. Jim didn’t want to do it. And I said, ‘Fine, I’ll save it for later.’

And we didn’t end up recording it for another 10 years or something. It was Alex [Fischel] that came up with all those great keys that sound like Eurythmics at the top of it. That’s a very Alex keyboard line, sort of a repeating three notes thing. He’s great at that.”

“Everything Hits at Once” from Girls Can Tell “I wrote that one after I moved back [to Austin] from New York. I kind of bonded with [producer] Mike McCarthy when I was in New York and he said, ‘Let’s go back to Austin where life is much cheaper and let’s finish up this record.’ We recorded a few more songs, which were ‘1020am,’ ‘Believing is Art,’ and ‘Everything Hits at Once.’ I remember thinking it was a really great melody and it was a total break from anything we’d done before. Like if you listen to ‘Everything that’s at Once’ and compare it to the album before, A Series of Sneaks, it’s like, it’s so different, you know? And I love that. So, we leaned into that. That’s why it ended up being the first song on that record because it was a show of, ‘OK, look what else we can do.’ It was just a whole new world.” ■

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SATURDAY, JUNE 4

By Xavier Omar Otero tucsonweekly@tucsonlocalmedia.com

MARK YOUR CALENDARS… THURSDAY, JUNE 2 Bearing scars they won’t allow anyone to see, Phoenician electric folksters The Senators write a manifesto declaring aims in “This Old War.” To which, Sonoran soul singer Carlos Arazate opines. “Sometimes I want to break glass, instead of the glass breaking me.” He adds, “Democracy is ugly, and broken glass is a symptom of a larger problem that society doesn’t want to reconcile.” At Club Congress…

Early evening, baladista Salvador Duran serenades on the Hotel Congress Plaza… The artful, jazz guitar-driven sounds of the Matt Mitchell Trio usher the descent into the Late Night. At The Century Room… Purveyors of the blues. Featuring ace guitarist Johnny Blommer and Steven Jonas on harp, Porch Rockers mete out a punchy repertoire of blues, jump and swing. At Monterey Court…

Opti Club: A downtown dance scene institution returns. alice.km and Hot Leather Disco are behind the decks. At Club Congress…

FRIDAY, JUNE 3 Wild. One of the most endearing indie rock bands of their generation, Spoon return with Lucifer on the Sofa (2022).

An album on which frontman Britt Daniel confronts the Adversary. Not a fiendish Lucifer overseeing torture throughout the Nine Circles of Hell, but more a slothful Belphegor smoking a blunt dissipating on the couch. “That

COURTESY PHOTO

Sophia Rankin.

character staring at me was really a part of myself,” Daniel tells Pitchfork. “It’s that inability to move forward and get past bitterness or loneliness.” Written and recorded in Texas before and amid the pandemic, eschewing endless overdubbing, the album captures the sound of a band playing together in real time, making music that feels less lonely. At Rialto Theater… Danger. You are entering the World of Wonk. Like a runaway locomotive, English dubstep producer/DJ Monxx (né Josh Carling) plows the “Wonk Train” headlong into the dubstep abyss. At Gentle Ben’s… Reaching far beyond their folk roots, on Too Close To The Riptide (2021), Sophia Rankin & The Sound explore themes of love, mourning, new beginnings and acceptance.

At Club Congress… Performing a selection of songs from The Great Lady Day (2011), vocalist Sheryl Ann Mckinley sings Billie Holiday. At The Century Room… Afterwards, DJ Carl Hanni spins vinyl from across the jazz spectrum well past midnight. Late Night Lounge… Strains of swampy, jazz inflected blues rock shall waft through the night air.

Southbound Pilot are at Monterey Court…

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David Bromberg Quintet.

“Seeing ghosts, everywhere, and my life disappear, but I am not scared.” With one foot in the real world and the other in an enchanted dimension, neo-soul/folk singer Amos Lee returns with Dreamland (2022). Holding up a mirror to his lifelong struggles with anxiety, isolation and fear, Lee tells SongwriterUniverse about “Worry No More,” the album’s lead single: “My depression started when I was really young. It’s been its own journey. A lot of times, it can be a chronic thing. It doesn’t necessarily go away.

A huge part is trying to find that door. What’s your way out? It’s something different for everyone. For me, the door has always been music.” At Fox Tucson Theatre… With the release of his 1971 self-titled album, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, David Bromberg emerged as a wunderkind of American roots music. Tucson Jazz Festival presents David Bromberg Quintet. At Rialto Theater…

“Improvisational compositions meld together into auditory waves of fuzz, delay and modulation and every emotion under the Sonoran Desert sun.” Tucson abstract expressionists La Cerca commemorate A Nice Sweet Getaway (2020), their fifth release. At Club Congress… We won’t back down. Taking their name from the Egyptian sun god, nu metalists Ra formed circa 1996. After years fraught with trials and triumphs, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, marked a turning point. The magnitude of devastation and loss had a profound impact on frontman Sahaj Ticotin.

Reinvigorated, Ra dove headlong in pursuit of a dream.

After a fateful performance at Boston’s Nemo Fest (2002), in front of an audience of 18, undaunted, an enthusiast in the crowd passed along a copy of the band’s demo to wellknown radio personality Mistress Carrie at WKVB (107.3 FM). The request line lit up like Christmas. A short time later, Ra signed with Universal Music Group. At The Rock…

Performing “Phoenix 99”—originally released on 7” vinyl in 1987—and two sets of material from the band’s catalog, venerated Tucson jangle-poppers River Roses are at Saint Charles Tavern… “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.” Paying homage to one of the most influential folk duos of our time, Homeward Bound: A Tribute to Simon & Garfunkel are at The Gaslight Music Hall - Oro Valley… Electronic pop producer/songwriter and LGBTQ activist Sharkk Heartt unveils “How to Love,” her latest video. At Groundworks…

Singer-songwriter Carra “Mamma Coal” Stasney & Alvin Blaine perform traditional country and roots music. At MotoSonora Brewing Company… Tucson’s ambassadors of the Great Swing Era, The Wholly Cats Swing Club (featuring vocalist Julie Buck) preserve the music of Benny Goodman. At The Century Room… Van Hagar? Not for these guys. Mean Streets is a tribute to David Lee Roth-era Van Halen. At Encore… Meaner than a pack of junkyard dogs.

The Tirebiters (comprised of Tucson vets Steve Grams, Gary Mackender and Lex Browning) along with The McCallion Band (who perform original Americana and rock ‘n’ roll executed with joyful, punkish abandon) hold sway at Monterey Court… “Making cathartic indie pop for weirdos, outcasts, queer folks, and anyone else who needs it,” Chateau Chateau make an in-store appearance to perform and sign copies of their debut release, Grow Up (2022, Kill Rock Stars). At Zia Records…

JUNE 2, 2022

SUNDAY, JUNE 5 Tucson Jazz Festival presents the legendary Herb Alpert and his wife, Grammy award-winning vocalist Lani Hall performing an eclectic mix of American standards, Brazilian jazz, some Beatles, classic Tijuana Brass and Brazil ’66 songs. At Rialto Theatre… After the show, the Max Goldschmid Quartet host the Herb Alpert Afterparty. At The Century Room… With decades of musical experience, these longtime Tucson musicians billow embers to flame.

Southern Arizona Blues and Heritage Foundation presents Grams & Krieger. Congress Cookout. At Hotel Congress…

A conjurer, who manifests at times as a penitent. Although this sinner’s sacrament may not be altar wine, his lyrics are pointedly confessional. Singer-songwriter Joe Peña and guitarist/pedal steelist Joe Novelli make storm clouds swell. At Che’s Lounge (patio)... Looking for all ages, family fun? “This is it!” DJ Herm laces up the skates, so as to glide behind the turntables, for the yacht rock edition of Spinnin’ Wheels: An outdoor roller disco & dance party. At MSA Annex…

MONDAY, JUNE 6 Dance with abandon. Club Whutever DJs bring cool to a hot Tucson night. At Tap Room Patio…

TUESDAY, JUNE 7 On Lucas Acid (2018), frontperson/lyricist Chris Martinez came out as a transgender woman. The result: An unflinchingly ferocious album of trans anthems with a glitch-laden industrial edge. “The biggest difference was just being able to write freely, openly and honestly,” says Martinez.

“Once you come out there’s a whole host of issues that you don’t really consider. This record has a lot of that in there.”

Pioneers in noise rap, Moodie Black are at Club Congress…

It’s a Bluegrass Jamboree. Canyon Currents and Cadillac Mountain dish out traditional Applachian sounds. Just try to keep your feet from tapping. At The Gaslight Music Hall - Oro Valley… Swathed in patches of blue and fitfully an eerie sun-scorched melancholia, alt. country/folkies Tammy West & The Culprits bring their latest release, Little Saint (2021), to Monterey Court…

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 HuffPost refers to award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Venuti as “a soul-stirring maestro.”

The Ultima Zone: A full-spectrum music, visual and sound experience. At Solar Culture Gallery… Honing his particular brand of high-octane Americana and outlaw country in the rough and tumble honky-tonks of California, Mark Insley & the Broken Angels perform material from his latest album, Ten Cent Redemption (2020). At Monterey Court…

In Memoriam: Al Foul (August 23, 1971 – May 25, 2022) A beloved figure on the Tucson music scene, Al Foul (aka Alan Lewis Curtis) died on Wednesday, May 25, 2022, after a protracted battle with cancer.

Foul performed solo, as a one-man band, and as leader of small ensembles, creating primitive folk rock, drawing from the underbelly of the tattered American Dream.

Musician Naïm Amor (who often performed with Foul) notes, “I would say Al is a man who truly followed his dream. He built his own ways, his life, his music.”

As a restless young man, embracing self-determination, Foul left his hometown of Boston, leaving behind his blue-collar heritage for the freedom of the open road.

Eventually, the “Tequila Taxi” (a beloved Chevy Bel Air) found its way to Tucson. Where it parked, and stayed for a while.

In an interview with Tucson Weekly’s Brian Smith, Foul reflected, “In a weird way, I’m living the life that my father should’ve lived: I was going to be a rocker. I wasn’t going to stay in the same place. I wasn’t going to work a shit job.”

Author/chanteuse Marianne Dissard wrote in a memoir, “I never knew Al to play Wordle (maybe he did and unsurprisingly excelled at it—he had his ways with words, one of the finest lyricists this town has ever known). I met him pre-internet. Most evenings that summer, I’d shuffle down Convent Avenue, crack open an old wooden door wheezing fragrant swampy air, and tumble into one of Al’s bottomless Barrio Viejo soirées. Stylish down to his choice of social games, he’d be holding court (for a mix-and-match posse of ex-cons, Circle K fiends, and heat-seeking foreigners), bent over a tattered Mexican oilcloth lined with dominoes (and bits of Rizla paper), the ancient game’s stakes fluctuating as wildly (with each knock on the door) as the stack of Schlitz in the fridge. Al’s domino effect.”

His devoted wife Hannah Levin recalls, “He roared when he died at sunset last night. Not a metaphor. Like a lion. My love.”

Al Foul was 50 years old.

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JUNE 2, 2022

DISPENSARY WARS

After winning an administrative battle, Downtown Dispensary can expand its operations

By David Abbott tucsoneditor@tucsonlocalmedia.com THE LATEST CHAPTER OF A long-simmering feud between two local cannabis heavyweights in Tucson played out in Tucson’s Board of Adjustments last week, as a previous zoning decision was successfully appealed by Downtown Dispensary owner Moe Asnani.

Now that the board has decided that the dispensary falls within its recently updated Unified Development Code, Downtown Dispensary is set to take advantage of the 10,000 square feet of allowable space for marijuana retail businesses and will expand its footprint at 221 E. Sixth Street.

On May 25, the Board of Adjustments voted 4-2 in deciding that Santa Theresa Tile Works, across the street from the dispensary, is not in fact a K-12 school despite holding art classes for Imago Dei Middle School, a “small, independent, tuition-free private school” founded in 2006 that offers Episcopalian education for low-income kids in grades 5-8.

With that hurdle out of the way, and with a caveat of ongoing litigation between Asnani and Prime Leaf co-owner and former Tucson councilmember Michael Crawford, Downtown Dispensary can move forward with an expansion plan in the works since the advent of the COVID pandemic.

“I’m pleased,” Asnani said in the days following the decision. “We have been paying rent on that whole space since late 2019. This has been a very, very expensive and time-consuming situation.”

Asnani said Downtown Dispensary has only been able to use about 3,400 square feet of the nearly 14,000-square-feet interior of the building as a licensed cannabis business.

The appeal was the result of a denial of the expansion application Asnani filed last year.

After submitting and resubmitting the

application twice between July and October, the application was initially denied on Dec. 6, 2021.

On March 18, Zoning Administrator Elisa Hamblin released her final determination that Santa Theresa Tile Works “does meet the definition of a private school; and that the expansion of the marijuana dispensary does not comply with” the city’s updated UDC. On April 15, Downtown Dispensary attorney Jesse Callahan, of Phoenix-based May, Potenza, Baran & Gillespie, filed a request for appeal, claiming that Santa Theresa Tile Works is not a school and the zoning determination was “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.”

During the course of DT’s application process, Crawford was in contact with Hamblin, letting her know that in his opinion, the application should be denied. Two of his emails ended with the phrase “Karma is alive and well.”

“Imago Dei Middle School operates and teaches classes 100ft from the Downtown Dispensary,” he wrote in more than one email to Hamblin. “They have been doing so for years and continue to do so.”

In December, Crawford purchased the building that houses Santa Theresa Tile Works.

In February, Asnani filed a lawsuit in Pima County Superior Court against Crawford, The Prime Leaf and Santa Theresa Tile Works, according to a timeline Asnani shared with the mayor and city council in a May 22 email.

Last week’s appeal was heard in a virtual meeting attended by dozens of Downtown Dispensary employees. Crawford was the only member of the public in attendance supporting the denial of the application.

After an executive session of the board, Callahan gave a nearly hour-long presentation with a PowerPoint slideshow with photos of the outside of the Tile Works building and the Royal Room, a bar that shares the building, as well as photos of classes featuring people enjoying what’s

presumed to be alcoholic beverages as they practiced art.

From insurance to sprinkler systems to a lack of school crossing signs, Callahan and members of the public shredded the concept that Tile Works qualifies as a school.

Callahan questioned how Hamblin came to her decision, suggesting she was overly influenced by Crawford, who he misidentified as Prime Leaf’s CEO. “How did Ms. Hamblin suddenly become the first person at the City of Tucson to start thinking of Tile Works art studio as a school?” Callahan asked. “Her conclusion certainly seems strange and unsupportable to us.”

He went on to say she “did not reach (her) conclusion of her own research,” but was “told to take that position” by Crawford and called her thought processes “mental gymnastics.”

A Freedom of Information Act request to the City by Callahan contained the emails, and through them, he determined that “the Downtown Dispensary discovered that its competitor instigated this entire charade to delay my client’s operations and harm its business.”

For her part, Hamblin denied being influenced by Crawford.

“If you choose to review those emails yourself, you will see that I have been very courteous to Mr. Crawford as he emailed me a few times,” she said. “I proceeded to do my review for the case in question outside of any influence of Mr. Crawford.”

Members of the board were quick to come to her defense.

Ward 3 board member Lee Pagni said he did not appreciate what he perceived to be Callahan’s “assertion that this is something in the zoning administrators character.”

“I would appreciate if you would just leave conspiracy theories about why this happened out of the conversation, and just deal with the facts,” he said. “The idea that an administrator or someone would do this maliciously, I think, is really unjust.”

When it came time for Crawford to speak, he took issue with the “disparaging remarks” regarding his motives and the work of Hamblin, but then said one of his main motivations was a response to a similar incident that happened with Asnani in the year leading to the opening of Prime Leaf’s second location on Park Avenue.

KARMA ON PARK AVENUE “Right when we were getting our Certificate of Occupancy, Mr. Asnani had his employee, through the same law firm representing him here today, file a complaint with zoning, saying we improperly did that,” Crawford said.

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In April 2019, Callahan filed a request for a Zoning Administrator Determination on behalf of Rashad J. Stocker to overturn the city’s approval of the dispensary, claiming the location was too close to a Buddhist church and a residential treatment facility, violating Tucson’s previous UDC regarding marijuana dispensaries.

As it turns out, the “Buddhist Center” was the Drikung Dzogchen Center of Arizona, a private residence adorned with Buddhist decorations that hosts weekly meditations and is sometimes an AirBnB. The Board of Adjustments determined it was not a church and several council members as well as former mayor Jonathan Rothschild took issue with a flier that was circulating claiming that “Buddhism is not a religion in the city of Tucson.”

The board also determined that COPE, the alleged rehabilitation facility, did not meet the qualifications of a licensed “residential substance abuse diagnostic and treatment facility,” and gave Prime Leaf 2 the go-ahead.

Once the City gave its okay, Crawford says Asnani then filed a complaint with the state claiming there was a school within the 500-foot setback, but the state also okayed the location.

In all, Crawford says it cost Prime Leaf a year of time and $1 million over the delay.

The dispensary eventually opened during the pandemic shutdown in August 2020.

Litigation is still underway between Asnani and Crawford, so it does not look like things are going to calm down between the two in the near future.

BOARD APPROVES APPEAL Ultimately, Downtown Dispensary won the appeal and Asnani hopes that soon he will be able to throw open the doors of a bigger facility with more product available for both medical patients and recreational customers.

“I just think (Crawford’s) misdirecting his energy,” he said. “They denied us on technicalities, but at this point, let’s just get it over with.”

Crawford was not happy with the decision and said the board acted unilaterally when it overrode Hamblin’s decision by not considering the facts of the case.

“I think this sets a bad example,” the former council member said in a subsequent interview. “The board of adjustment vote was completely improper. Their job was to determine whether or not the examiner acted arbitrarily and she followed the letter of the law.” ■

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Hana Green Valley. 1732 W. Duval Commerce Point Place 289-8030 Open: Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Harvest of Tucson . 2734 East Grant Road 314-9420; askme@harvestinc.com; Harvestofaz.com Open: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., daily Nature Med. 5390 W. Ina Road 620-9123; naturemedaz.com Open: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., daily The Prime Leaf Two locations: 4220 E. Speedway Blvd.

1525 N. Park Ave. 44-PRIME; theprimeleaf.com Open: Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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112 S. Kolb Road 886-1003; medicalmarijuanaoftucson.com Open: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., daily Green Med Wellness Center. 6464 E. Tanque Verde Road, 85712. (520) 886-2484 Open: Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Satuday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. greenmedwellness.com

JUNE 2, 2022

SAVAGE LOVE EXPENSED WITH

By Dan Savage, mail@savagelove.net

I’m a 31-year-old queer person living in Europe. I recently met a 46-year-old man.

We were visiting the same city for work and met on an app and went on a series of amazing dates. We have a lot of similar interests and work in parallel fields. Now we’re planning a trip to see each other. It’s partly a work trip for him, but we will take a vacation together after the work part of the trip for him is over. To get to the point… he makes a lot more money than I do. He has offered to cover as much of the costs as he needs to. I feel like I’m out of my league here! I really like him and he seems to really like me but I’m struggling to fight feeling like this is a “Daddy and His Boy” situation. Do I need to fight that feeling or lean into it? It’s not a dynamic he said he wants. I don’t mind if we agree that’s what we are doing. But I don’t want to fall into a Daddy/Boy dynamic accidentally because of money and “status.”

How do I date him like I would someone closer to my age and income?

—Knowing Economic Position Tenuous If the Daddy/boy dynamic isn’t something you want (if it doesn’t turn you on and/or you worry it’ll make things weird), and it isn’t something he wants (assuming he didn’t just say that because he thought it was what you wanted to hear), then you definitely shouldn’t “lean into it.” Instead, you should handle the expense of this trip the same way committed couples with large income disparities split the rent. If you were making $50K a year and he was making $150K a year and you wanted to move in together but weren’t ready to merge your finances, you should pay a quarter of the rent and he would pay three quarters of the rent.

Same should go for utilities, food, and other expenses.

But you’re not moving in together, KEPT, you’re just going on a vacation, so things can be a little looser. If you can afford to fly coach and he wants to fly first class, he should cover the difference between coach and first-class fares. If he wants to cover the hotel (a major expense), you should cover meals — maybe not all of them, particularly if he wants to eat in fancy places, but enough of them that it will be clear to you, to him, to your waiter, and to the angels and saints watching from heaven that you aren’t a kept boy. (Nothing will make you feel less “kept” than pulling out your own credit card.)

And the first part of the trip is for busi-

ness and he would presumably be going with or without you, KEPT, you shouldn’t feel guilty about not paying for meals or the hotel on that leg — a hotel room he would be staying in with or without you, meals he would be putting on his expense account with or without you — but maybe treat him to a surprise excursion on that leg of the trip that you can afford.

(Assuming either of you wants to leave your hotel room at this stage of your relationship.)

The kind of disparities you describe — in ages, incomes, and the stages of your respective careers — are something almost all couples have faced — or in the case of income and career advancement, something most couples eventually face.

But don’t spend too much time thinking about how you’re going to make this work over the long-term; you just met, you really liked each other, and you’re both willing to travel long distances to keep seeing each other. That should be your focus right now, KEPT. If he wasn’t comfortable covering most of the expenses, he wouldn’t have offered to do that. He could’ve spent his vacation time in the city where you live instead.

Of course, there’s a chance it was a trick offer — he offered to cover the expense of the trip expecting you would turn it down — and he’s going to punish you in some passive-aggressive way for taking him up on it. If that happens, well, you can go back to dating boys closer to your age and tax bracket and/or well-off guys who don’t play games.

I’m a single and kinky gay man, doing mainly vanilla dating at the moment.

Recently, I got dumped by a guy because I fessed up to being kinky. I also told him I believe in God. I realize that might appear contradictory, but I don’t see why both can’t coexist. He told me he can’t date anyone who’s sexually deviant who also believes in “fairies at the bottom of the garden.” Both were equally problematic for him: my belief in God and my kinks.

I wasn’t expecting to be both kink-shamed and God-shamed in the same breath. Are there such things as kinky Christians?

Where can I find my tribe?

—Frustrated About Insultingly Terminating Hookup One of the kinkiest guys I ever met — dungeon-in-his-basement kinky, flogyou-until-you-are-screaming kinky — was an episcopal priest. So yeah, FAITH,

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He gets it, NHG. The awkwardness he’s creating between you and his girlfriendof-the-moment — the awkwardness you see as unnecessary and avoidable — is exactly what he wants. Introducing you as his ex makes things awkward with his current, and his current girlfriend’s intuitive sense that he’s either intentionally or thoughtlessly making things awkward makes him a less appealing partner. He doesn’t want a commitment or anything long-term, and instead of being honest about that, he’s weaponizing your existence to erect barriers between him and whoever he’s dating at the moment. He may not be doing it knowingly, but he’s doing it just the same, and it’s a shitty thing to do to a friend.

And the next time he does it, NHG, object and object loudly: “Don’t be ridiculous! I was NEVER your girlfriend!” there are kinky Christians out there. But instead of sitting at home alone wondering where your tribe is, get out there and find your tribe. Get on kinky dating apps, go to leather/fetish events, date some non-vanilla guy, make some non-vanilla friends. If you find a welcoming tribe and it turns out you’re the only believer, so long as no one judges or shames you, FAITH, join that tribe. If you meet guys who have a problem with your faith, they don’t get to be a part of your tribe.

As for the guy who called you a sexual deviant… what the hell does he think he is? Without deviation from the norm, there wouldn’t be “normal” gay guys for that asshole to date at all. Some of us may deviate more than others, FAITH, but that’s as true for gay people as it is for straight people.

A man I very casually “dated” for ONE MONTH more than FIFTEEN YEARS AGO — a man I have maintained a friendship with ever since — tells his new girlfriends that I am his “ex-girlfriend.”

This disclosure causes a lot of unnecessary awkwardness between whoever his current girlfriend might be and me. I’ve told him he shouldn’t do that because I was never officially his girlfriend. For 99.999% of the time I’ve known him, we’ve been friends, compared to the .001% of the time when we were very casually dating.

He says he doesn’t want to lie?!? But it’s not a lie to say we are friends! I hate the awkwardness that it causes between me and the women he dates now. They never have a chance to get to know and trust me. Help me explain this to him so he finally gets it!

—Never His Girlfriend

Hey, Everybody: The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant denomination in the United States, has always been terrible. It was founded in 1845 by supporters of slavery and the organization is racist to its core still.

Leaders, churches, and preachers in the Southern Baptist Convention have also been the loudest anti-gay voices in the country for decades, and lately they’ve been loudly promoting the lie that gay and trans people — by simply existing — are somehow grooming children. Well, it turns out the groomers were in the building all along. In their buildings, in their megachurches, in their leadership — and they weren’t waving rainbow flags or reading from “Heather Has Two Mommies.” They were waving Confederate battle flags and reading from Leviticus.

A blockbuster report released last week documents decades of sexual abuse committed by pastors and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. The same preachers who were accusing gays and lesbians of ‘coming for your kids’ were the ones coming for your kids. And in them. As with all power-obsessed social conservatives, as with all Trumpers (and the Southern Baptist Convention is now a Trump property), every accusation — of corruption, of rigged elections, of sexual abuse — is an admission of guilt. questions@savagelove.net Listen to Dan on the Savage Lovecast.

Follow Dan on Twitter @FakeDanSavage.

Columns, podcasts, books, merch and more at savage.love.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

By Rob Brezsny. Go to RealAstrology.com to check out Rob Brezsny’s EXPANDED WEEKLY HOROSCOPE 1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700 $1.99 per minute. 18 and over. Touchtone phone required.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Who loves the truth better than you Aries people? Who has the greatest potential to speak the real story in every situation, even when it requires extra courage? Who has more fun than you in discovering and defining and expressing the raw facts? In my Book of Life, you Rams are radiant beacons of candor—the people I go to when I need accuracy and honesty. And all I’m saying here will be especially crucial in the coming weeks.

The whole world needs concentrated doses of your authenticity. Now read this pep talk from Aries philosopher St. Catherine of Siena: “Let the truth be your delight; let it always be in your mouth, and proclaim it when it is needed. Proclaim it lovingly and to everyone, especially those you love with a special love—but with a certain congeniality.”

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Before the 20th century, you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread that was already sliced into thin pieces.

Then in 1912, the American inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder developed a slicing machine. But all his work, including the blueprints and the machine prototypes, was destroyed in a fire. He had to seek new funding and begin again. Sixteen years later, his innovation was finally ready for broad public use. Within five years, most of the bread in the US was sold sliced.

What does this have to do with you? I am picking up an Otto Frederick Rohwedder vibe when I turn my visions to you, Taurus.

I suspect that in the coming months, you, too, will fulfill a postponed dream.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): A blogger named Sweetlikeacherry reminds us, “Some epiphanies are only possible when you put away your phone and go completely offline for a while.” She adds that sometimes you also need to at least partially avoid your phone and the internet if you hope to incubate new visions of the future and unlock important discoveries in your creative work and summon your untamed genius.

According to my astrological analysis, all these possibilities are especially likely and necessary for you in the coming weeks. I trust you will carry out the necessary liberations to take full advantage.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Poet Carolyn Kizer (1925–2014) won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry. She was smart! But when she was young and still studying her craft in college, a professor objected to one of her poems. He said, “You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic.” Kizer was incensed at such ignorance. She testified, “I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.” Judging from the astrological omens, I suspect you may have

comparable showdowns headed your way. I advise you to be like Kizer. You are the only one who truly knows the proper subjects of your quest. No one else has the right or the insight to tell you what your work (or play) should be about.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo author James Baldwin said it wasn’t often “that two people can laugh and make love, too—make love because they are laughing and laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.” Your assignment, Leo, is to be the exception to Baldwin’s rule during the coming weeks.

According to my analysis of the astrological omens, there’s a high possibility that interesting eros can converge with humorous fun in a glorious synergy. You will have a knack for conjuring up ribald encounters and jovial orgasms. Your intuition will guide you to shed the solemnity from your bliss and replace it with sunny, carefree cheer.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I’m worried you will over-indulge in your pursuit of perfection during the coming weeks. It’s fine to be exquisitely skillful and masterful; I hope you do that. But if you get obsessed with flawlessness, you will risk undoing your good intentions. As an antidote, I offer you two pieces of advice. The first is from actor and activist Jane Fonda. She said, “We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole.” The second counsel is from philosopher and psychologist William James, who wrote, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Author Mustafa Mahmoud described the signs of love between two people: 1. feeling a comfortable familiarity; 2. having no urge or need to lie; 3. being natural, not trying to be different from who one is; 4. having little or no possibility of being embarrassed in front of the other person; 5. experiencing silence as delicious, not alienating; 6. enjoying the act of listening to the other person.

I bring these pointers to your attention, Libra, because the coming months will be a favorable time to define and redefine your understandings about the signs of love.

How do you feel about Mahmoud’s ideas?

Are there any more you would like to add?

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “We do not love each other without changing each other,” wrote author Madeleine L’Engle. Meditate on that gem, Scorpio. Now is a perfect time for you and your loved ones to acknowledge, honor, and celebrate the ways your love has changed each other. It may be true

that some transformations have been less than ideal. If that’s the case, the coming weeks will be a favorable time to correct those trends. As for the positive changes that you and your allies have stimulated in each other: I hope you will name them and pledge to keep doing more of that good work.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other,” wrote Sagittarian novelist Jane Austen. Sagittarian politician Stacey Abrams said, “From the moment I enter a room, I am clear about how I intend to be treated and how I intend to engage.”

You’ll be wise to cultivate those attitudes in the next seven weeks, Sagittarius. It’s high time for you to raise your self-respect in ways that inspire others to elevate their appreciation and regard for you.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In 1963, Jim Munro and Alice Munro founded Munro’s Books, a store in Victoria, British Columbia.

After being on the job for a few months, Alice found she was not impressed with many of the products they sold. “I can write better books than this,” she told Jim. Five years later, she published her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. Fourteen books later, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Will the coming months bring your equivalent of Alice Munro’s pivotal resolution? I suspect they could.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “True love for

Comics

whatever you are doing is the answer to everything,” proclaimed performance artist Marina Abramovic. Amen to that righteous attitude! I hope you will embrace it in the coming weeks. I hope your heart and imagination will reveal all you need to know to bring tender fresh streams of true love to the essential activities of your life. Now is an excellent time to redefine the meaning of the word “love” so it applies to all your relationships and pursuits.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): A homeless woman in a wheelchair stopped where I was sitting outside a café. She was pushing her belongings in a small shopping cart.

“Would you like to go dancing?” she said to me. “There’s a nearby park that has a great grassy dance floor.” “Maybe another day,” I told her. “My energy is low. I’ve had a lot of personal challenges lately.” I’m sure the expression on my face was less-thanebullient. “Cheer up, mister,” she told me.

“I’m psychic, and I can tell you for sure that you will live a long life and have many more fine adventures. I’ll be in the park if you change your mind.” My mood instantly brightened. “Thanks!” I yelled toward her as she rolled away. Now I predict that you, Pisces, will have comparable experiences in the coming days. Are you willing to welcome uplifting surprises?

Homework: If there were a clone of you, what alternate life might they be living?

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ACROSS Thumbnail, e.g.

6 “No worries” 11 Guts 12 Wordle, e.g., in 2022 13 Lies ahead 14 What’s in the stars 16 Titular Disney protagonist of 1942 17 Ranch dressing?

18 Boxer’s warning 19 Hosp. hookups 21 Letters before an alternate name 22 Adding purpose?

24 Backing 25 How many reprimands are issued 27 “Double Fantasy” Grammy winner 28 Many attachments 30 Postponed 31 ___ B’rith 32 Novelist Jennifer 33 Enlightenment, in Buddhism 34 Hamilton producers?

35 Illinois city that was the first home of the Chicago Bears 37 Send beyond the baseline of a tennis court, say 39 Plans for some seniors, in brief 40 Kid 41 It begins with “In the beginning …”

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44 Video game with a

“rosebud” cheat code that grants free money 47 :-O 48 Potato-stuffed pastries 50 Struggle 51 Zippo 53 When el Día de los Reyes is celebrated 54 Pole, e.g.

55 Utah’s ___ Canyon 56 Flavor 57 Home to Caesar’s palace 58 2018 Literature Nobelist Tokarczuk 59 Do nothing 60 Mating call?

DOWN

Part of a sun salutation, in yoga 2 Title with an apostrophe 3 Outs 4 Cut the small talk 5 “Grey’s Anatomy” settings, in brief 6 ___ factor 7 Concept in Reaganomics 8 Walk like you own the place 9 Princess in L. Frank Baum books 10 Handles discreetly 13 Trim 15 Seismologist’s concern 18 Hung open 20 Title for Don Quixote 1

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43 Biblical mount 44 Pulsate 45 Only U.S. city bordered

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46 Nitrogen, on the

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49 46-Down, in French 52 Filmmaker ___ Lily

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54 Honorific from Sanskrit

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nent make-up services, and a shop vending related body ornaments and books. Spark also runs a small event and meeting space nearby. That’s where the comedy open mics are held.

Celaya says it makes sense for places like Spark, Kava Bar and Harambe to host comedy shows because a lot of people, including a share of comics, are seeking out friends and friendly places that don’t involve alcohol.

He says he’s had as many as 15 comedians show up, even on a night when other mics were available to them. The fact that they get 10 minutes on stage is a major attraction.

Stage time is the exchequer of local comedy. But Celaya knows that to build audience, Spark needs to settle on predictable dates for the mics. Right now, it’s once a month on either a Friday or Saturday, with the next one scheduled for Friday, June 10. He suggests that interested people friend him on Facebook for updates.

As for his own comedy, Celaya says that being prepared is not his strong suit, but he has the perfect outlook for keeping comedy an enjoyable hobby. “I’m a little more of a spontaneous guy. I try to interact and just be myself and hope it’s good enough. And if it’s not, then that’s too bad.

I’m not gonna give up on it.”

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WEDNESDAY 6 p.m. signup, 7 p.m. start, The Rock, 136 N. Park Ave., Priscilla Fernandez, Mo Urban host.

6:30 p.m. signup, 7 p.m. start. The Screening Room, 127 E. Congress, Chris Quinn hosts.

THURSDAY 6:45 p.m. writing workshop and signup, 8 p.m. start, Laff’s Comedy Caffe, 2900 E. Broadway Blvd., Casey Bynum hosts.

Alternating Thursday, next mics: 06/02, 06/19; 8 p.m. signup, 8:30 p.m. start, Tucson Improv Movement, 414 E. Ninth St., Jennifer Blanco Thomas and Kurt Lueders host.

FRIDAY 6:30 p.m. signup, 7 p.m. start, The Kava Bar, 4376 E. Speedway Blvd., Connor Hannah hosts.

Friday After Dark booked mic, second Fridays, apply via unscrewedtheater.org/fad/, 9 p.m. start, Unscrewed Theater, 4500 E. Speedway Blvd. #39, Cy Barlow and Allana Erickson-Lopez host. Lineup TBA. SATURDAY 5:30 p.m. signup, 6 p.m. start, The Music Box, 6951 E. 22nd St., Tony Bruhn hosts.

SUNDAY First Sundays, 7 p.m. signup, 8 p.m. start, Arte Bella (420 friendly), 340 N. Fourth Ave., Joey G hosts.

MONDAY First and second Mondays, 7 p.m. signup, 8 p.m. start, The Mint, 3540 E. Grant Road, Joey G hosts.

THE WEEKEND A Big Wet Throbbing Queer Comedy Show! sounds like just the thing to start off Pride Month. Tucson Improv Movement promises all that at 9 p.m., Saturday, June 4.

Tickets are $7 at the door or at tucsonimprov.com.

TIM Director Justin Lukasewicz says that TIM members have worked for a month to come up with “the zaniest, over the top, improv comedy show Tucson has ever seen.”

El Jefe Cat Lounge (eljefecatlounge.com/reservations) Friday, June 3, 7 p.m., 21+, $18, limited seating; BYO beverages and snacks. Lineup: Amie Gabusi, Eden Nault, Kathie Hedrick, Kyle Verville, Mo Urban, Priscilla Fernandez, all of them cat owners.

Laff’s Comedy Caffe (laffstucson.com) Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4, 8 and 10:30 p.m., Los Angeles raunch comic Michael Malone; $15 - $20.

COURTESY PHOTO

Eddie Celaya

OPEN MICS Go ahead, jump in! You know you’re funny, and you know you’ve always wanted to try. Or maybe dare a friend. A surprising number of comics start out that way. Try all the mics because folks tell us there’s one for everybody.

The Screening Room (screeningroomdowntown.com) Saturday, June 4, 9 p.m. Lineup: San Francisco nerd comic Ryan Goodcase with Autumn Horvat, Matt Ziemak, Chris Quinn, Drake Belt, Carl Medina and Anthony Jenkins; $10, $7 on Eventbrite.com Unscrewed Theater (unscrewedtheatre.org) Friday, June 3, 7:30 p.m., From the Top, a clean improvised Broadway musical; Saturday, June 4, 7:30 p.m., clean house team Not Burnt Out Just Unscrewed; $5 kids, $8 adults, in person or online.

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