So, about the city’s Arts and Culture District… To be clear, we don’t have one. Putting a sign in the broken asphalt of the area where you razed and eliminated spaces where non-art nonprofits once lived, and the only ethnic market in the community, which was a vibrant gathering place, to make up for pushing the Kimball Art Center off Main Street — well, there are no points for that. And the only authentic art in the area is in the twice-displaced Kimball Art Center, which resides in a rehabbed storage building in the corner of a parking lot with more broken asphalt, behind the Boneyard bar.

When The City lacked the vision to understand what then-Executive Director Robin Rankin of the Kimball Art Center had pulled out of a hat, the planning department just picked all the nits and kept denying modifications to the design code. For those of you new to town, wrap your pastels around this: We could have ended up with a full block on Park City’s Main Street where an amazing multistory but historically respectful, modern, functioning structure would have been created and appreciated. It was a competition created with local and national entries and the winner was the spectacular international architectural (firm of) rock star Bjarke Ingels. (If you want a sense of how powerful and smart his designs are, watch his TED Talk. Any of them.) The Kimball, tired of the ongoing, soul-crushing planning department denial game, took the big fat real estate offer waved in front of them and sold their block.

For years, the Sundance Institute has been the lost tribe looking for permanent space. Rory Murphy, Hank Louis and a host of other big thinkers helped to make room for the organization in the restored old mining spaces up at the Silver Star development decades ago. But over time, Sundance outgrew that. And there were rumblings that maybe all the pieces of Sundance Film history needed more space than the tiny resort over the hill could hold. There were conversations with Park City Institute about moving their offices from inside the theater and other rented spaces around town. The Canyons approached all three organizations, and there was a conversation about donated land there — pretty much where The Pendry now sits. For separate reasons, all three nonprofits knew that wouldn’t be a compatible space for them. 

Enter the city, looking to make “a statement “ with the backdoor entrance to Park City. All three groups could come together and share the space. PCI knew that wouldn’t be a fit for them. The Kimball and Sundance hired architects and spent thousands of dollars exploring the possibilities. But the designers/ architects the city brought to the table tried to be too many things to too many people. An outdoor performance space, affordable housing, artist studios, and food trucks (why those come up in every discussion about art spaces still mystifies me). And — wait for it — a new total transportation hub for city buses. It was a Pollock painting done by amateurs.

During Covid, city staff and some community members decided to create “activations” on the space with broken asphalt and no trees, and no barriers to traffic and noise. I felt so bad when I stopped by there one day to watch the young, very talented dancers from Ballet West trying to compete with the end-of-day traffic headed out of town on the busy adjoining road.

I suggested some of this during the start of Covid, but let’s try again.

Move the entire staff out of the city Marsac building and build them a new home. They outgrew that space ages ago. Many, many staffers already work in remote spaces, even outside of the city limits. Take that great historic space in Old Town, where we all love to congregate, and sell it, fairly, to an arts organization and put something with smart art happening inside that building — Sundance or the Kimball. Take over the parking lot space on the top level of China Bridge and put another art home there. Then take any more space you can grab and build affordable housing in the area. First priority should be given to folks who work on Main Street. And down in the no man’s (or creative woman’s) land in Prospector, put as much affordable housing as you can reasonably build. And make room for a Latinx market (again) and a modest transportation exchange and install some terrific outdoor art. Have a competition and encourage big thinkers who want to design for that.

And make certain there are no questions about the soil. We know we are an old mining town and that corner was also a railroad hub. Dirt and mining waste fell into the ground there.

But to keep trying to take this sow’s ear and make it into a designer bag is insulting to the time and energy of all the folks who want to see authentic art have a vibrant home here. Do not continue to waste precious resources on yet another version of an “arts district” on that busy intersection. We already have the museum and the beloved Egyptian Theatre on Main Street and a bunch of art galleries and great restaurants. Make Main Street car-free (keep the Trolley) and let the Prospector/Bonanza Park area develop into its own hip hood. Spend some money on activations there. That neighborhood deserves art and they will genuinely appreciate it.

I look forward to the new leadership in City Hall addressing this with all the creative talent and energy this community deserves. Take all the colors out of the box and see where we can use them any day of the week, including Sunday, in the Park…

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If you didn’t know Ira Sachs, the (mostly true) stories about him can sound apocryphal. Ira was a study in contrasts. His daughter Lynne’s movie, “Film About a Father Who,” premiered in 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival and is a great watch to understand pieces of the man.

Before I ever left Lake Tahoe in 1979 to move here, my good friend Nick Badami told me I must meet Ira. Nick owned Alpine Meadows ski resort and had recently purchased what later became known as Park City Mountain Resort. He convinced me I would be OK in the former mining town I’ve now called home more than half my life. “We even have a Holiday Inn now,” Nick offered. “Two stories!” Since we both loved grand old hotels in San Francisco, this was meant as both a joke and a nudge. “You need to meet the guy who built it, Ira Sachs.“

When Ira first came to town, he lived in a Winnebago in a parking lot near the Utah Coal and Lumber building. At the time, that building marked the end of Main Street and the start of a dirt road known as Easy Street. Even in the ‘70s, Ira looked like Albert Einstein, with his slightly wild hair and mustache. He was a developer, and he saw into the future about certain local projects while working with folks to build Holiday Inns in the northeast. He often invited friends from back east to come ski, and then he’d invite them to stay and help them figure out how they could.

One of those people was David Belz, who maintains The Shop yoga studio here in town. When David was four, Ira, and David’s dad, Paul, were scheduled to travel from Buffalo to Memphis with an interior designer and architect for a new hotel they were building. Before they left, Ira checked in with a girlfriend who decided she wanted to connect that night. So Ira stayed behind while David’s father and the others left on a light plane that crashed. All were killed. Ira would tell the story that his love of women kept him alive that day, so he just kept on loving them all through his life.

Ira was a sight on the slopes: wild hair flying, icicles clinging to his mustache, and a cassette player strapped to his chest so he could schuss to his favorite tunes. Years later, he would replace the heavy cassette player with a Walkman, and then ultimately a brick-size cell phone that would serve business deals he made while while on the chair lift.

To be invited to an Ira party once he moved into the Stag Lodge was a test of one’s ability to pivot. The first unit he owned quickly became too small for his large life, so he sold it to his buddy Cheech Marin (of “Up In Smoke” fame). His second unit was filled with artifacts from his travels, mostly those to Bali. When it came time to sell that place, he listed it for somewhere around $3.2 million, or $3 million if the buyer kept all the furniture he had no desire to pack.

I remember one winter break when my then 20-year old son, Randy, was home visiting during his sophomore year of college. We visited Ira and encountered the usual suspects, plus some extra imports on account of the holidays. Someone put on a George Strait record, and Ira told Randy to go ask the blonde across the room to dance. My formerly awkward son agreed, and I watched the young man do a fine Texas two-step and know all the words to the song as he spun the laughing woman around. When he came back to me smiling, I asked what they had talked about. He said, “She told me I have great hair.” It was my turn to smile. I replied, “When the L’Oréal spokesperson compliments your hair, you take that.”

Then there is the story about Ira driving Hunter S. Thompson to Vegas for the National Police Convention on Narcotics. It came when I offered to grab him a glass of wine. He politely refused, explaining that he didn’t drink and shocking me in the process given all the other things he regularly and openly ingested. Ira explained he’d once been driving Hunter across a few states to the convention and that he was drunk most of the way. He stopped to get out and fill the gas tank in Vegas and fell down and broke his leg. “I stopped drinking after that.“ This summer, when a production crew was in town to shoot a film about Hunter S. Thompson, I asked Ira’s son, Evan, for a photo of the two rascals together so that I could show the cast. It was fun to pass along. 

Ira was also the guy who organized his friends to chip in money and buy sleeping bags for homeless folks in Salt Lake City, and he did it for years. They would even deliver them. I looked for his business card when I heard he had died because it had some quintessential quotes. Luckily, David Belz remembered the ones I forgot, such as, “Appear Less. Be More.” Ira lived other mantras, including “Chop wood, carry water.” It is a saying he interpreted to mean, stay committed to the process and always be prepared. He lived it so exactly that once, when a Park City school bus traveling back from a field trip broke down, Ira drove into Park City to get water and then shuttled it back out for the kids while they awaited rescue on the side of the highway.

When Ira smiled and his mustache turned up and he’d utter, “Yeah,” he beamed. I’d like to think, writing this on a day with snow falling from an early November sky, it means Uncle Ira is skiing the heavens with arms spread wide and poles held high, like so many of his extraordinary Sundays in the Park…

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Nancy Hunts(wo)man, as she would occasionally call herself, and I met somewhere some time ago. She always wore the name and always kept her own attitude. We’ve been laughing loud, sharing adventures, and moving at full-throttle speed along deeply connected paths for some time. Our separate circles of friends barely overlapped, but our connections are innumerable. Together, we celebrated independent film, our adult children, and stories about each other’s growing and evolving grandchildren. Spirituality explored in the outdoors,  in radically different ways, anchored many of our most significant conversations. Music in a cacophony of notes, books of all stripes, brilliant theater, smart speakers, beautiful dancers, and cranes—- those prehistoric long-legged, magical, slightly comical, creatures… And of course politics as we explored care for the planet and the creatures on it, the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies, freedom to love whomever you might, and that — with any luck — you might just find someone to love deeply.

Nancy found love once and then again, a year after COVID started. A mutual friend of hers and Ken’s, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, introduced them. And then two typically reserved humans bound themselves in love and life and married after five whirlwind months of courtship. 

At that point, Nancy’s cancer was an inconvenient truth, but nothing that limited their spirit or adventure. And oh the places they went! To her family ranch in the Tetons, his business interests in Texas, the east coast for a bike trip, the west coast to see her family of origin, Europe, the Galapagos, Zion National Park for a Utah symphony concert, back to the Tetons for the crane festival just this month…

Last Thursday, Nancy and Ken and their children who had gathered from other states went out to dinner to celebrate the couple’s one-year wedding anniversary. And then on Friday, Nancy took her leave. My feisty, full-throttle friend left last Friday night, but not without wringing every single bit of life from her embattled body and the universe in the time she was given.

Nancy leaves behind daughter Merodean and her son Stewart, both from her marriage to industrialist and real estate developer Blaine Huntsman who passed away about a decade ago. They had eloped where she was living at the time in Oregon. Nancy would offer sometimes in a cheeky way that she was “the second wife,” one who enjoyed a lasting relationship with her stepchildren and their children, each of whom shared the other love in Nancy’s life – Fox Creek Ranch in the Tetons. Her greatest pride was an almost-20-year project restoring Fox Creek to a place where fish swim easily and in great numbers once again— approximately 420 trout per mile at the beginning now up to a staggering 3,867 according to the Teton Regional Land Trust that presently stewards the land. Eliminating the cattle eventually proved the key that allowed so many more of God’s creatures to return to the waterway. A fly fisher herself, Nancy urged not long ago, “When you speak of this — and you will — please say I was proudest of having returned that habitat to its natural state where native species could live freely.” In repairing the waterway for fish, her work also reengaged birds that thrive on a spring creek — redwing blackbirds, bald eagles, horned owls, trumpeter swans, and the sandhill cranes that forever fascinated her — as well as moose and the namesake fox. 

We were both Californians. I spent 19 years in the Bay Area and then a decade in Tahoe. Nancy hailed from Crescent City, a community so far north it was almost more Oregon than California. We spoke often of our different Californias and we mostly only missed Dungeness crab. Nancy left after college to take a job in Japan, and she worked there in finance as one of very few American women. She loved her time in the Far East. The elegance, refinement, and gentleness of her spirit were informed greatly by those post grad years. Sundance Film Festival, the Utah Symphony, and other visual, performing, and literary arts were also lifelong loves of Nancy’s. Her home is a remarkable mix of mountain sensibility and Asian refinement. 

In spring this year, Nancy, Ken and I spent a few nights visiting the area around Boulder Mountain Lodge in Boulder, Utah. The lodge’s restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill, wasn’t yet open, but it’s angelic owners, Blake and Jenn, delivered us a meal, so Nancy could have a taste of the award-winning place.

Not too long ago, Nancy wanted me to come and porch-sit. We enjoyed her beverage of choice — gin and tonic — on her deck. She expressed great dismay at the new golf course being put in at Promontory given the state of water in the west. A terrific golfer herself, she chose her words carefully. “It is excessive,” Nancy said.

We held our own mini film festival this winter online at her home, the same home in which she’d hosted Sundance filmmakers and volunteers for years. She was both an accomplished pianist and a talented cook, a voracious reader of books and viewer of movies, political enthusiast and devotee of former Parkite Phyllis Robinson’s Tandem chocolates. 

Ken, her “prince,” as Nancy called him, loved her deeply and completely with eyes wide open to their numbered days. But a full heart counts only moments. Nancy’s passing is a blow to Ken, who hoped there would be more time. But time is a thief, and the alchemy that allowed numbered days to stretch and suspend, warp and shift, these past 18 months snapped back harshly for all of us all with Nancy’s passing. The kindness, curiosity, intelligence, and extreme generosity of spirit that connected the rest of us in overlapping orbits around Nancy’s sun remains.  

We will keep sharing sunsets, laughter, and stories of our shared lives as we reengage to honor our friend. We’ll find places in nature and crank up piano concertos and pour ourselves gin and tonics and toast the cranes and the fish. As Ram Dass says, we are all just walking each other home. We should all be so lucky and so present as to do so with Nancy’s grace and her full-throttle living even a few of our days, including Sundays in our Park…

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I don’t remember any actual time and place when I moved here in the late ’70s that I met Blair. He was just that guy working to create a low-power local radio station. His wife, Becky, worked for the other newspaper down the street, cleverly called The Newspaper. Meanwhile, in my same neighborhood, Susan Finnegan and her husband and kids became friends, and their kids became babysitters for my kids. We decided everyone didn’t need to own all of their own stuff in a small town, so we shared a lawnmower. Nobody had giant lawns in Park Meadows; nothing much grew, and certainly no one had sprinklers here in the early ’80s. 

When Blair made the radio station happen, it was an amazement. Suddenly we were all connected! The music wasn’t canned mainstream stuff, but rather the flavor of each DJ who brought into the studio their very own records and spun them on a turntable. Real news was delivered daily with local newsmakers. And by 1985, when Starship launched the song “We Built This City,” we were pretty sure it was all about us.

At some point, Susan and Jim split, and so did Becky and Blair. And then it was Blair and Susan building the NPR affiliate with grassroots parking-lot fundraisers and handwritten thank-you notes. On the news hour, with Blair’s cigarette-and-scotch-rubbed voice crackling, you knew there were ashes falling on the soundboard as he spoke. He was one of the smartest humans I ever knew. Blair could see around corners and into other galaxies. He was a genius at getting the resorts to help pay for equipment for the station because it helped them with their communications.

When I became editor of this paper in the mid ’80s, Blair became my mentor rather than my competitor. We shared news stories and took turns on who would break something of great interest. And if we had serious reasons for not taking on a story first, we let the other make it theirs. Like the time someone in my office was accused of date rape with one of my reporters… I asked Blair to break that once the court docs were public. It was a huge story that lasted for months, and Blair handled it with a tougher hand so we could handle it internally. The station taking the lead was a measure of grace.

It is hard to imagine, but folks just didn’t go out to dinner all that much back then. There were very few restaurants and, other than a lemon-squeezed slice at the always open Red Banjo Pizza parlor, the other places like Adolph’s and The Claimjumper were mostly kind of fancy. So we ate together in different people’s modest homes. Blair and Susan, reporter Rick Brough, and City Manager Arlene Loble would sometimes be at my table with City Attorney Tom Clyde and Police Chief Frank Bell. I had to borrow chairs from the neighbors.

When I found the business of being an editor overwhelming, Blair would remind me the job was hard but critical work. He would coach me on being tougher on spreading out and expanding our coverage. He was generous in his support . And in his criticism… Everyone in town in those years has a story about the time Blair interviewed them and how scared they were. He did his homework every damn time, and if you had not done yours… Well, you would never show up unprepared again. Blair knew where the bones were buried all the way back to the dinosaurs, and he saw into the future about water rights, land use,  school bonds, ice rinks, and the Olympics.

Somewhere in the 2000s after he had left the station, Blair and Susan showed up to a costume party for some nonprofit event, and they had crossdressed. It was clever and fun and unlike all the usual stiffs in their sameness. And I remember someone saying, “Blair makes a fine looking woman.” After Blair had left the station, he and Susan started traveling out of town more. They had a place in Florida. And Blair started to dress as Blaire more frequently, not in dresses, but with softer shirts and different slacks and longer hair and eventually an earring. It was gradual. And then one day he showed up at our Rotary Club as she. And she brought with her wife Susan and also the director of a Utah organization supporting transgender individuals to help explain what Blair had undertaken, thoughtfully, over years to become Blaire. It was classic B using the opportunity to both educate and entertain us. There were facts and slides and later there was a conversation about her surgery shared with the club. It was incredibly brave. And informative. And transformative.

Blaire called every couple of months during peak pandemic periods to ask me questions about the “old days.” She was writing a book about it all, about us all, about “the way we were.” The Redford stuff, the bond elections, the Sears Roebuck heir, the BVD underwear heir and how they carved out two mountain ski resorts in one small town with totally different clientele. The part that always remained most fascinating to me was how very hard it was for Blaire to have started the radio station in the first place and what impossible odds were against her in gaining the license and then the equipment.

Nan Noaker — who worked at KPCW, then became editor of this paper, and worked in tandem with Blaire in the news world for 20-plus years — said that what Blaire did was create a network for community and news before those concepts were even understood. And outside of the newsroom, Blaire would create a network and a community that many may never fully understand, but today see the fruits of inside a town striving for inclusivity and a local government championing equity. And the enduring legacy of KPCW — It is the stuff of dreams and scrappy, brilliant, tireless humans who committed to finding the truth in everything, including themselves.

Blaire loved a good, multi-layered, decades-in-the making-story, and she wrote a terrific one in her life lived boldly and authentically. If you were lucky enough to know Blaire Feulner, tell a great story and raise a glass to her this Sunday in the Park…

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Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about adolescent sex. We spend a great deal of time and money here wanting our students to have the very best tools, from footballs to flutes. We make certain the kids are alright and have personal hygiene kits available at school, and free lunch programs. We have classes of students — hell an entire school — that are bilingual. We even have exchange programs to other countries. So wanting students to have access to and discussion groups for the best literature of our times seems pretty elementarily critical.

There was an alert sent out a few months ago to the membership of the PEN literary society when Davis county, here in Utah, banned a record number of books: 52 — with 32 more under review. PEN sent us the highest alert over this ban. Because banning books is always about more than what is between the covers.

Sherman Alexie’s memoir “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” makes lots of banned lists. Not because he attacks life on The Rez , which he does (and he carefully mined his years growing up on the Cour d’Alene Reservation in Idaho), but he also addresses some of the universal emotions of a 14-year-old male. Understanding what is happening to your body as it goes thru puberty is one of the threads through his award-winning book. Park City audiences were introduced to Alexie the year the Eccles Center opened, but not for his book; he hadn’t even written “Indian” yet ( which is the term he prefers to Native American) . What he had co-written ( with Chris Eyre) and produced and starred in, was an independent film that played at Sundance Film Festival in 1998. “Smoke Signals” was fresh and funny and the critics and judges loved it. It won the Filmmakers Trophy AND the audience award and it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Pretty heady stuff.

A few years later, I booked Alexie to speak at the Eccles Center. He was a fresh voice on the planet and I had had a brush with him at Sundance and knew he was irreverent — my favorite kind of human. And he had a new book, “Indian.” I thought it would be great for our joint-use mission between the schools and the community to bring him to town. Before the show I offered to take Sherman to dinner — we often paid performers a per diem and they foraged for their meals but that was different if you were, say, a band traveling with other band members. He was solo. I took him to a nice restaurant on Main Street where he pushed back on every conversation I tried to introduce. He accused me of being a soft liberal with big ideas but no real experience, say, about the Indian condition on The Rez. I pushed back because I had been traveling twice a year to The Navajo Rez to help the elders there. We got along better after I explained that.

Once onstage, he was outrageous about well-meaning liberals ( most of the audience) and about President George W. Bush in his flight suit on the carrier of that ship declaring a war was over that clearly was not. The audience laughed for over an hour and also had their privilege checked. Having his book banned in so many places was almost a badge of honor for Alexie: it proved his premise that we white folks didn’t want raw experiences shared, only highly varnished images of how we wanted to imagine other cultures.

Around that year the Eccles Center opened, the Park City School District brought a speaker in for an assembly, just for staff, to the start the school year.  I remember Superintendent Nancy De Ford being pleased she had a space where all the teachers and administrators could gather together for the first time ever for inspiration. I don’t remember the speaker’s name but I very clearly remember pieces of his talk. He started out talking about a truckload of blueberries being delivered to a restaurant each day and they just had to use the blueberries that got dumped ther. Some were misshapen, not yet ripe, overly ripe, green maybe, but very few were ready and perfect that day to work with. The baker just had to use what was delivered, day after day.

He said teachers had the same predicament, each day a different truckload of kids gets dropped at their door in a variety of different conditions. Kids come to school hungry or abused or tired or mentally ill or scared or sad. And on different days, different kids assume different behaviors. And the teacher simply has to work with what shows up. Every day. Every damn day. So while we think the things our kids are exposed to are in our control, well, they never were.

Did you first learn from your parents about the wonder of birth because your cat had kittens? Or did some ill-informed or more sophisticated kid tell you what went where and when and how? It doesn’t matter anymore how YOU learned about sex because kids now learn from their devices or another kid’s device if theirs is blocked. They learn from all the sexual content and context on mainstream television, on the internet, in song lyrics, on T-shirts. Where they don’t learn in Utah is in the classroom, because sex education is no longer taught here.

Thanks to Planned Parenthood of Utah and the years of work by Annabel Sheinberg of that organization, kids can learn at free after-school classes, held off site, all over the state of Utah. It was a fact that Cecile Richards, founder of Planned Parenthood, highlighted just this week in her talk as part of the Wasatch Speaker series hosted by Intermountain Health Care. It is crucial our young people get equal and accurate information — she emphasized that over and over. Which brings us back to the bushel/truckload of blueberries showing up each morning in all our classrooms.

We have no idea how they arrived at their desks, hungry, tired, afraid, self- conscious, awkward, confident, arrogant, joyful, or just weird. Regardless, they will all shape shift before the week is out. Delivering information in written form for students to read at their own pace in their own place is one of the great gifts a teacher can offer and one of the lifelong pleasures a student can learn. Banning information from inquiring minds only forces them to look elsewhere for answers they aren’t likely to directly ask of their parents. Let’s spend less time and energy on banning award-winning books and more time on providing a healthy atmosphere to mature. One blueberry at a time. Even not on school days, maybe just on a Sunday in our Park…

The post Teri Orr: Let’s talk about adolescent sex appeared first on Park Record.

The heaviness arrived uninvited this week. It doesn’t have a name yet, and I don’t think it is exclusively mine. There wasn’t an incident or a moment I can point to where things shifted, but they did.

And then came the sinking news out of the southeast: Mother Nature tossing back what I imagine to be her mane of thick, curly red hair and raining down her wrath, huffing and puffing and blowing palm trees, utility poles, and houses down with equal disregard. And as cruel as the destruction is, it all feels understandable given our disregard for Mother Nature and our slow moving efforts to combat climate change.

There are global organizations that have worked for some time to bring awareness to the greed and waste destroying the planet. The new King of England has long been a proponent of paying attention to planet Earth. And in 2020, his son William created a new, global award with David Attenborough whereby five winners receive one million dollars each to address climate change.

Now, Duke of Cambridge William and his wife, Duchess Kate, will be in Boston, home of the Kennedy library, in December for the Earthshot Prize. The event will also include Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. The prize name was inspired by President Kennedy’s moonshot vision 60 years ago. It promises 50 solutions by 2030 for restoration and protection of nature, air cleanliness, ocean revival, waste-free living, and climate action.

I don’t have any family on the East Coast that was in the path of Hurricane Ian, but so many of my dear friends do. O n Wednesday night and Thursday morning, there was a flurry of messages and alerts and an urging of senior parents to evacuate. So far, all are safe.

Driving this week, I was stuck in traffic long enough to hear a long-form NPR report about the catastrophic developments on the Colorado River. The waterway has dipped dangerously and increasingly the last few years and revealed lost towns, caves, long forgotten archeological sites, and even dead bodies in Lake Mead. Lake Mead is, of course, near Las Vegas, and the speculation about the bodies is as great as the speculation as to whether the manmade lake ought be refilled.

That same report explained that the Colorado River flows through seven states and is the primary water source for 40 million people in our part of the West. Let that sink in for a minute. Forty. Million. People.

When I travel, I love feeling untethered, able to shift and end up in a place other than my original destination. But right now, I feel a heaviness. A sadness. There is another shift afoot, and it feels as though decades of conversation have done little to stop the journey to the place where we have arrived globally and in Park City.

Too many risk averse, uninspired leaders, too few inspired/inspiring people, too few resources and too few risk-takers. The result is tens of millions of people now untethered and an economic disparity that seems ineradicable.

I tuned in to discover a similar battle between enabled haves and wayward have-nots playing out during part of our city Planning Commission Wednesday evening. It was a confusing mulligan stew of developers, commissioners, and public voices lobbying in different ways for and against affordable housing, height exceptions, parking covenants, square-footage increases, and all the rest.

While I am a big fan of the principal ideas to create more affordable housing, I am lost in the overlapping and conflicting codes and restrictions and variances and conditional uses. It’s easy to drown in the uninspired details and forget what the soul of a building, inside the spirit of a neighborhood, could be. 

I wonder how we both pause and refocus as a global community and the microcosm that is Park City. These issues of declining resources and affordability are urgent, critical, and interrelated. We haven’t done a very good job of caring for our natural resources or creating projects that build community in an equitable and inclusive way. We can no longer treat individual projects as isolated puzzle pieces that will somehow magically fit together one day. They aren’t, and they can’t.

So every planning commissioner, project developer, and city/county planner needs to flap their wings or rent a small plane and fly over town. Observe how emotionally connected we still are but how few metaphorical and physical paths there are to connect our commercial and residential hubs. Piecemeal planning has resulted in a divided Park City with full-time residents battling nightly renters, friends fighting over parking and employees spending their wages just to arrive at their jobs.

We can no longer approve or deny projects without a clear understanding of who we are in this very moment and how we want future generations to be thriving here in 60 years. The land is connected, the resources too. There is no city /county/ state /country division that works anymore. We have just one planet we share as our home.

For starters, we need to identify and listen to the big thinkers, the ones who will help us move past the cycle of futility and emerge as a creative, smart, and hopeful community again. Maybe there is a visionary donor who wants to fund some Prize for Big Thinkers in Our Town. Or maybe we invite the bold and the brave among us to speak their ideas in an authentic open forum.

And if this all sounds a little insane, to be clear, our current behaviors have reached a point of insanity. I don’t know exactly where next steps appear that make authentic sense because nothing much makes sense to me this Sunday in our Park.

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When Andy Bernhard became publisher of The Park Record- without having graduated from J school – he inherited a editor a little more than six months into the job who had a matching (lack of) journalistic credentials. For the next seven years we would learn from each other how to care for the community treasure of a 100 year old weekly newspaper -the oldest paper in continuous publication west of the Mississippi.

Andy became the publisher during a red-hot winter week. I had been editor for about six months. He came from D.C. and he had previously been selling newspaper ads in Salt Lake after driving a cab in the D.C. area- while working on securing his stock broker license. His brother’s company had bought a newspaper group that included The Park Record. He was asked to step in. He arrived during the week I caused a bit of a firestorm. The first one.

I had written a piece about the sleazy drill teams costumes worn in all the other regions of Region 9 sports except Park City. I had a son playing football, basketball and soccer. My daughter was a cheerleader. I attended most of their events and was dismayed at the outfits the young women (not in Park City) were wearing. One mother from Heber had told me it cost her over $2,000 a year (in the 80’s!) to make sure her daughter had all the sparkles she needed. I may have gone a titch too far in saying their outfits made them look like the only game they were interested in was the oldest one… as seen from the backseat of a dingo-balled Chevy.

The first call Andy took the morning that column appeared was from an irate Jack Dozier, the crusty high school principal and quiet real estate developer.

So young girls and their advisors from all over the state decided to picket me in the parking lot of The Record offices. The local authorities thought they would use the event to stage riot incident training. There were fire engines in the parking lot and men with (unseen) guns on the roof. It was about as overblown as the column had been. I remember Andy being on the phone with his brother, Peter, and asking what he should do and Peter saying- just let it play out. And so it did. We went down to the parking lot and faced the angry mob. One young girl asked if I had ever been in the backseat of a Chevy.

I started to say no, it was a Dodge Rambler, but I held my tongue. 

No sequins were injured in the exchange.

And that’s the way we began. For the next seven action-packed years that’s pretty much how things continued. Things would go along in a natural fashion of births and deaths and city, county, and school board elections. I would write editorials that angered folks and Andy would be forced to defend the paper’s right/ duty to have strong opinions.

We crossed most often over the desires of advertisers who thought their business changes were worthy of news. I remember the first luxury brand hotel insisting the redecorating of their hotel in fine fabrics was a front page story. And they had promised the advertising department big bucks in a long term contract if they made the front page. They did not make the front page. We developed a marketplace section where such soft stories could find a place.

And we were the paper of record. So all kinds of legal notices came to us and if you read those carefully you find nuggets of news. Subdivisions being proposed. School bonds being floated. Bankruptcies on approach. It used to be the old saying in journalism was – most people only appear in the paper twice- when they are born and when they die. I don’t remember when birth announcements stopped being a thing and deaths are now handled by an outside service and you pay by the word to share your loss.

The first reporter I hired in my first month at the paper in 1987 was Sena Taylor. She had just graduated from the J school at the University of Utah. Jan Wilking was the publisher who hired me and though I didn’t figure out until later he was shaping the paper to sell it- he was. He said I could hire whoever I wanted but he asked I interview his friend’s daughter. His friend, was the legendary Sam Taylor who ran the Moab Times independent paper. Sena was smart and eager and I knew she would make me smarter. And she did. She became editor when I left.

The two of us were a lot for Andy. We pushed back at any kind of direction, authority, and reason. Andy knew how to push us to the point we tried to always do our best work. And that work was still on typewriters and then learning those strange box computers. There would be a weekly “story meeting” and Andy would sit with us while each reporter weighed in on the stories we planned for the week. But we were in the news business so the stories we planned often fell on the cutting room floor when real news landed in our laps. There were fires and murders and politics and drug busts.

And then there was the standoff for weeks at the Singer/ Swapp farm in Marion, Utah. It became so large, a national story, CNN sent its first truck to Utah to cover something. Sena wrote a series of brilliant stories about that time that was fused with splinter religious beliefs and the wild west and law enforcement.

Every year when the Utah Press Association awards were held we gathered to see how we stacked up against other papers in the state. And when time after time we came home with fistfuls of first place plaques Andy was proud of each of us and the reputation of the paper. We added color for the first time ever and the front page photo was for the World Cup ski races. Andy helped push for that and he knew -once you added color you didn’t take it back out. It would be an added expense.

When he would come to the door of my office and ask “Do you have a minute?” I knew it was never good. I would go into his office and he would shut the door and tell me how he was getting beat up for yet another front page story I had written. And we spent a long time slugging out what was journalism and what was advertising and how to maintain the integrity of the 100 plus year old paper. I did not make his job easy. And when Sena followed me as editor, she did not either. But we each learned how to stay in our lanes and Andy gave us the space and the grace to do the job in the very best we knew how to do. And he supported us in our failures.

Eventually I left to write a book. Sena left to move back to Moab and work at the family paper there. And Nan Noaker, who I had hired right before I left, eventually became editor for all the years after. She won endless awards and grew the paper in critical ways. She was followed by Bubba Brown who left a few months ago for a job in Salt Lake City after holding the paper together during COVID.

And all that time- all that time- Andy sat at his desk in his office with the unobstructed view of the Park City Ski Area and the mountains. There might still be a bottle in the bottom drawer of that desk. And the same couch is there we all sat on for “conversations” about the shape of the news. Andy had a pretty impossible job and he did it by accepting the “on the job training” that happened every damn day there. He has more than earned time to enjoy his Grands and his wife and unplugging from news and newsmakers. I expect he will find many, many, many more days to find fish -on and off all the Sundays in all the Parks…Godspeed Andy.  

The post Teri Orr: All the news that fits the print… appeared first on Park Record.

I wish I had some sweet or even saucy story about …that time I met the Queen, but alas, I do not.

The closest I get is a faded photo I found this summer in my great move after 42 years in one house. It was tucked in a box I had not opened since I packed it up in February of 1979 and moved here from California.

It included photos from a trip I took at age 16 to Europe. It was the standard trip of “see 12 countries in 14 days” or something like that.

We saw the classic ruins and still-standing castles and great museums and ate fabulous Italian food. At a beach, I wore what was a rather American prudish two-piece I discovered, hardly a bikini by comparison.

Like so many who are young and travel to England, I wanted to see The Palace and The Queen and The Changing of The Guard. It was the mid-60s, and the British invasion had started in music and art and all things wild- much wilder than we yet were in the states.

So when I came across the photo of that very, very young (and so very immature in hindsight) 16-year-old, I stopped. The girl in the navy blue Burberry trench coat with a silk kerchief in a triangle on her head tied under her chin, is mostly a stranger now. I looked terrified of the Buckingham Palace guard. I don’t remember being terrified at all, but I do remember feeling a kind of awe.

I also knew I would never show the photo to my mother. She thought all things British were phony. Un-American. Her depth of disdain for those things she didn’t understand or had never experienced was endless. I had arranged to attend the high school trip without her assistance. She happily signed the consent form to have me gone for two weeks of her summer.

I digress.

The last time I was at Buckingham Palace was entirely different. It was in the summer of 2019. With no clue that only months away, the entire world would be in a lockdown never before seen.

My travel buddies – two gay men from Palm Springs and a woman from the Bay Area who works with a lot of fabulous emerging and established talent, were all headed to the TED conference in Scotland that summer.

They had suggested we tag on some pre-game days to the trip, see some plays and eat some yummy food in London. Rick had found an exhibit we should see of Da Vinci’s original sketches and letters and drawings at a gallery inside Buckingham Palace.

We arrived early and spent hours there—just hours. And when we set out to wander down the street and find a place for a treat, the heavens opened up, and it poured warm summer rain.

We arrived giggling, sopping wet, and went inside the bar in the boys’ hotel. It was the gayest of gay places. Velvets and tassels and silks and stripes and plaids and all the things. All the things. “Da-da, dat, dat, da-ya”…I hummed from the King’s song from Hamilton.

And when the rain lifted, we proceeded to walk -as if- as if we were aged Sloane Rangers checking out the tiny shops and food purveyors. I loved that they knew London well and shared it with me. It was an entirely different way to see it; to see the Palace as an adult this time. It was grand.

My mother had been gone almost half a dozen years at that point- long enough- I no longer heard her disgust at my joy of being in the shadow of The Queen. (And yes, we had been told she was in residence at Balmoral, but, still…somehow- her essence was there for us/ for me.)

When I saw the news blast, the Queen was in a serious way this Thursday morning, I stopped- just as I have all my years for shootings and assassinations and attempted overthrows of the government in this country. I watched on the television in real-time as the family raced to her beloved summer home – her happy place all her long life- Balmoral. A private country residence not owned by the monarchy but by the person. By her.

It seemed so fitting if she were passing, she would be there. And then I watched as the news officially came- she was gone. She and my mother were about the same age. And I was born the year she became Queen. I had never made that connection until today.

All the British invasion stuff with the Beatles and Twiggy and fashions and pomp was thrilling to me while growing up. It was a silly time.

Listening and watching Anderson Cooper covering this story and his giggling like a girl at some of the funny stories about the Queen, was just delicious.

What happens now? To the memory of a woman who came into power when Winston Churchill was prime minister? The amount of history and mystery of the monarchy she lived and created when she took the crown at just 25 years old?

I mean, really, no offense to any of you who might be there now, but …does anyone know anything about the planet and their place on it when they are 25 years old? Let alone how to run all the countries under the umbrella of the United Kingdom.

Was her obvious disdain for the messy marriage of Charles and Diana something I bristled at? Sure.

And when Diana died, I wanted her to drop the royal façade. But she did what she thought best for her son and her grandsons and her country.

And at the end of that year, with other family divorces and troubles made public, she had the grace and the cheekiness to call the year annus horribilis -an expression I have borrowed on more than one occasion.

Her political savvy, level-headedness and love of Corgis and family and country will be parsed in the days ahead. She was smart and kind and loved the outdoors and (most of) her family.

She served her country all of her adult life. We have Presidents for two terms at the most- eight years- and that seems plenty with most every single president.

To imagine 70 years of governance is more than even the most ambitious American official would ever wish on themselves. Let alone on a national stage, which, of course, is also an international one.

In the days and weeks and months and even years ahead, we will watch the origami of the unfolding and refolding of this latest edition of the British form of government and see if all the pomp under the circumstances is endurable.

Personally, I hope the costumed/uniform guards get to stay at the Palace. And may the Commonwealth now address how best to adapt to the crises in so many of the countries under their rule.

God bless (the essence) of The Queen. And all sing a hardy chorus of…God Save The King. All the days, even this very Sunday in this emancipated -across the pond -Park…

The post Teri Orr: Heavy is the head the crown. . . rests on appeared first on Park Record.

The first half of my drive up to Ruth’s ranch was boring- I-15 in Idaho. After I reached Montana, I stuck to surface roads, followed rivers, and hopped the Continental Divide repeatedly. It was a stunning late summer day. About an hour out, Ruth called, and directions got a little wonky. When I reached her road, I said I was within ten minutes. And when I drove into the gates and over to the ranch house, I saw that the rest of the women were waiting to leave in a little Mule/4×4/ vehicle. I parked, and Ruth said -jump in. I did- right in front, and we were off. And then, after a quick lesson at the first gate we had to open and close, I became the gatekeeper for all the rest.

Ruth showed us the Jefferson River- where it curved, where the best fishing hole in it is, the spotted egrets and sandhill cranes. That was before we saw the eagle land on the bare tree branch and watch us, watch him. We greeted the cattle she let run on her land. They are owned by the guy next door -a writer, producer, and filmmaker who has attended Sundance more than once.

When we arrived back at the house, the other women took off for their lodgings down the road. Ruth and I caught up on her wide porch with beverages and apples. The sun set long before we had finished our conversation. I slept seamlessly.

Ruth runs her own ranch with little help. She is about a decade my senior. I was in awe.

She suggested I check out Butte the next day. I was smitten with the grand Victorian mansions of brick and stone in the Copper Capitol of the world when those homes were built.

I had been warned -many streets were closed for the filming of Yellowstone 1923. Helen Mirren was in residence – ditto Harrison Ford- stars of this episodic prequel. Ruth had suggested a little café I easily found for a late lunch. When two young couples walked in – dressed in the clothes you would wear if you were from Hollywood and thought this is what western folks wear- I was pretty certain I had spotted actors.

When I went to the counter to pay for my lunch, they were there. The tallest handsome young man wearing jeans with creases in them and perfectly coifed hair, did a quarter turn and just said –hello. I have spent enough time in The Business; I know that pose. I said-  Hi back and added- are you visiting? He looked surprised and said – Working, actually. Ah, I said, Yellowstone? And he looked surprised and said, why yes. I said I was from Park City, and we had been ground zero for the series. He said, Wow! I am headed to Park City for a little work when I leave here. And I just smiled.

Dinner was back at the ranch with the four women from the night before and the addition of Ruth’s neighbor- married to the film guy but a rock star creator of a medical device she gave birth to after she couldn’t get women the help they needed when she ran a kinda hotline.

Also in attendance was a Butte philanthropist and fundraiser who helped create the Orphan Girl Children’s Theater and was the force behind the recent community swimming facility. A maker of good trouble. Oh, and Helen M had leased out her apartment for her movie stay.

And finally, the woman who grew up in Divide, Montana, on a ranch outside of Butte and was a part of the team in 2005 that won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work-Atoms for Peace- in Iran (Persia, she is quick to add, is still what the proud people call that land.)

The women from the mule ride the day before had united decades ago at Stanford -when as med students, they all had issues with the male head of their department. It was enough to keep them together all these decades. Through the requisite marriages, births, deaths and charity work literally around the world.

Work in Africa and China and the Middle East. Work in fixing fistulas for women raped in war zones and in helping transgender humans get the plumbing right. And, of course, the chainsaw-wielding heart surgeon who runs the Search and Rescue unit with her twin doc sister in La Jolla- were simply inspiring.

When the sharing circled around the room, I ended up last to tell my story. When I started with my children’s clothing store at Tahoe, the woman who lives next to Ruth said, Wait! YOU owned Ruffle and Ruffnecks? And before I could answer, she said, I worked in the tiny movie theatre next to your store when I was in high school.

And she went on to work in the un-doctor part of medicine and then created a medical device. And is married to the cowboy next door, who is in film. They had been to the Eccles, here, repeatedly for films during Sundance. Sometimes there are so few degrees of separation.

I drove to Helena the next day, the capital of Montana, and saw the Charlie Russell art gallery with art hanging so raw, up close with no glass. I did not touch those oils, but I did breathe them in. There was a very hip pottery collaborative on the outskirts of town for decades, so I stopped there.

Ruth and I spent the last night back on the porch, watching the day end and the animals settle in. In the morning, we said our no-nonsense goodbyes. I knew the way. I would be back, and soon it would be Sundance, and she would be in Park City.

Driving home, I was loving the off-roads, and then I saw the sign for Yellowstone. I drove into the Lodge area to grab an ice cream and Old Faithful was being just that. I saw bison, more eagles and fisher people catching fish on The Madison.

I ended up in Jackson around 5 pm. Tired and considering a sleepover. But it was Friday night in a resort town, and I knew the odds. I found an off-site Mexican place, ate well and kept driving. Until about Kemmerer – the sun was setting, and I considered getting a room. I decided I would reconsider at Evanston. About 20 minutes and now in the middle, of the middle of nowhere, I had listened to all the bad radio possible.

I wished for human contact. So my phone rang. It was my craziest Park City friend of 40 years. I told him my circumstances. He decided to talk me home-like I was some pilot with no controls left, talking to the tower.

And for nearly two hours he talked to me about “woke “ culture and local politics and art and hope and disaster scenarios and all the right stuff to keep me alert. We hung up when I pulled into my driveway.

It had been my most excellent adventure in such a long time. It had been a lifetime in the making. I returned to my new home in my same hood grateful for another Sunday in this Park…

The post Teri Orr: Part two: A river runs through us appeared first on Park Record.

The sandhill cranes are my wake-up call. Instead of their daytime primal squawks, they have a kind of purring sound at dawn. It is the time when the mist is still on the river, and the first light is hitting the trees, which are already speaking of fall.

This trip to Montana had been decades in the making. An open invitation I could never seem to make work until I worked less. And it included a dinner with some of the smartest, kindest, most accomplished women I have ever crossed paths with.

I only knew two of the women prior to our evening, and it would have been enough – but the dinner with nine of us – was as spectacular as the summer storm that blew in with crashing clouds and electric pink zagged skies and buckets of warm rain.

It wasn’t my first time in Montana- there was that time in the summer of 1998. I had started on a trip to shake off the end -really The End -of a bad romance/engagement that had been on and off for a decade. So I got in my car and decided to go to Cody, Wyoming and see the Buffalo Bill museum.

And then I kept driving to and then thru Yellowstone. There was a night -maybe two- in Chico Hot Springs in Montana. And then at Glacier National Park, where I discovered the artist, Charlie Russell, had done the painting around the fireplace at McDonald Lodge. I stayed there a night and kept driving to Banff for a few days and then finally Lake Louise.

On the trip home, I was coming back thru Montana on my way to pass into Yellowstone again. I remembered the time that had been my actual first time in Montana -in the mid-’80s. I was invited to join some folks for Mayor Hal Taylor’s big birthday party in Ennis. A bunch of folks decided to join the party – Mac and Ann McQuoid and Ted Warr and David and JoAnne Krajeski and, I think, Dean Barrett.

It was a blast.

I remember going into a saloon with Hal, and there was a strange metal contraption on the wall. A giant metal circle and a huge chain hanging off it and a kinda giant lynchpin attached. I asked Hal what that was called. He told me it was a bull cinch. And I said I didn’t understand. “Well, you put that metal circle around the bull’s testicles and attach that chain to a tree with that pin and it is a cinch that bull isn’t going anywhere.”

Nothing like a greenhorn to mess with…

 I was thinking of that story and the Blue Moon Saloon in Cameron, Montana, that Hal had taken me to the day before his party started. I had ordered a glass of Chablis. I was laughed off the bar stool. The bartender stared me down. “We got Jack. Jack straight. Jack rocks. With water and with a Coke- if you must. We don’t have any wussy wine in here.”

On the heartbreak-healing drive home – ten years later- I remembered there was a Park City bartender I had had a crush on for ages who now worked in the summers at the Blue Moon. I decided I would stop there and figure out where to stay in The Park. He was there when I walked in, and I said- “I know the rules- Jack with ice- please.” And he laughed.

Ten years had passed, and now lots of folks wanted wine -it had been added to the menu. We caught up- he was surprised to see me -so far from home. When I told him I was headed into The Park for the night, he said they had been sold out all week. He said there were some fishing cabins in the back- and I was welcome to one of those. I randomly remembered Stein Eriksen also had a home somewhere in the spectacular fishing area.

But I didn’t trust myself. I still had my crush, it turned out, and I was fragile in the heart, so I drove to The Park – well, West Yellowstone, and stayed in one of the divey-est places EVER! And I always wondered if I had made the wrong call.

This trip involved a horse ranch that is 200 acres on the Jefferson River outside of Whitehall, Montana. My friend, who also has a place in Park City, has been a volunteer at Sundance for decades. It was how we met – in the box office- the year the Eccles Center opened in 1998, and she was helping out.

She had a dinner party the next year and invited the most interesting collection of humans she knew at the festival -volunteers and filmmakers and secondhomeowners alike. And she has done that every year since.

When Ruth acquired this ranch on the river, she invited me up to visit. She had women from all walks of life she put together for a dinner each year. But my work world was even busier in the summers in those days, and I just could never break free at the right time.

This year, when she was planning her gathering after two years of COVID-induced isolation, I said- Yes. And she gathered up a few local rock stars and some imported ones, and we had a dinner that became a telling of tales of how each of these women had struggled to overcome life challenges and professional obstacles to achieve all that they had.

I was in awe.

They are- as a friend once said of women of a certain age- the Girls with the Grandmother faces. And they are not what you expect- like a Nobel Prize winner for her teamwork in ’05 (or was it ‘06?) called Atoms for Peace. She is from Butte, has lived all over the world and now lives again in Butte.

Or the groundbreaking urologist who has been doing gender reassignment surgery since the beginning of the procedures and the heart surgeon who is also the head of search and rescue in La Jolla, and well, there just isn’t room for all the interconnecting stories.

Yes, the Taylor Sheridan work, Yellowstone 1923 ( it was just renamed, after first being called, Yellowstone 1932 because the Depression started 10 years earlier in Montana) is being filmed here, and I did encounter some of those folks when I went into Butte one day.

There are just so many Montana stories it will need a Park Two to explain this adventure that happened way out of all the Parks and not even on a single Sunday…

The post Teri Orr: Saddle up for the story… (part one) appeared first on Park Record.