When is it time to say goodbye?
Entertainment Columns
Death Valley Ranch, the remote Moorish-styled mansion in Death Valley National Park better known as Scotty’s Castle, continues to fascinate visitors as it has for more than 85 years. Located in Grapevine Canyon, the ranch served as a vacation retreat for wealthy Chicago businessman Albert Johnson and his wife, Bessie. Introduced to the desert in the early 1900s by Walter Scott, a colorful character known as Death Valley Scotty, the Johnsons developed a campsite, then decided to build a grand house. Construction began in 1924, but was never completed. The Johnsons provided the funds and Scotty the notoriety.
It would be like realizing in the operating room that your surgeon is Patrick Dempsey. Or that the attorney standing between you and death row is Andy Griffith.
Hal Prince didn’t spot them, or else he might have thought he was at a “Star Trek” convention — or even a “Star Trek” parallel universe.
You know the burger’s gone uptown when the fast-food chains start duking it out over who’s got the bigger, better, juicier — Black Angus! — version of this iconic food that holds a rightfully exalted place in the American culinary pantheon.
Bet big and maybe you can win big. But sometimes you can bet small and last eight years on the Strip.
It’s definitely soup weather, although somehow lobster bisque doesn’t seem like soup but like something more — more luxurious, more satisfying. And available, for requesting reader David Ewart, who’s looking for it frozen or canned.
The nostalgic scenes of the family trek to the woods to cut the holiday tree exist only on Christmas cards for most urban Americans. The closest they come to that festive expedition is a trip to the temporarily forested tree lots that spring up seasonally in every American city. The tradition survives, however, in areas where private tree plantations allow cutting and on portions of forested public lands where tree cutters pay small fees for limited number of trees.
It’s almost enough to make you stop believin’.
Louie Anderson based much of his comedy career on his large family. But he will spend much of his Thanksgiving on Las Vegas Boulevard, at Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada.
Impressionists tend to bill themselves as men of “1,000 Voices” or variations thereof. Frank Caliendo would need a big billboard to fit, “Man of A Dozen Voices He Does Really Well.”
Remember when happy-hour food was free? And pretty much amounted to a chafing dish filled with lukewarm frozen ravioli, or a tray of Ritz crackers and some chunks of white-trash cheese?
Heidi’s Picks is a weekly selection of restaurant suggestions from Review-Journal critic Heidi Knapp Rinella.
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