On Saturday, Sept. 27, the 21st annual National Public Lands Day takes place. It is a one-day volunteer effort for public lands.


Last year, more than 175,000 volunteers and visitors celebrated at 2,237 public land sites in the 50 states, Guam and Puerto Rico. Volunteers:

Collected an estimated 23,000 pounds of invasive plants
Built and maintained an estimated 1,500 miles of trails
Planted an estimated 100,000 trees, shrubs and other native plants
Removed an estimated 500 tons of trash from trails and other places
Contributed an estimated $18 million through volunteer services to improve public lands across the country

To find out more about National Public Lands Day, visit publiclandsday.org. 

The Humane Society of Southern Arizona presents Savannah
Reference No. 778001, 2 Years Old, Doberman Mix, Female


Savannah is a beautiful, elegant sweetheart who loves to make you smile. It’s hard to believe that Savannah was found as an emaciated stray in March and has been patiently waiting for a home at the Humane Society ever since. This staff and volunteer favorite adores her human pals but she can be a little picky about her canine companions. Savannah would be perfectly happy as the only pet, but she’s open to meeting any easygoing dogs who wouldn't mind allowing her to be Queen of the household. Savannah would be delighted to introduce herself to you in hopes that you’ll fall in love with her charming personality and gentle demeanor. Won’t you give Savannah the chance to steal your heart? HSSA is located at 3450 N. Kelvin Blvd. 

The Arizona Newspaper Association had the annual meeting last night, handing out the Better Newspaper Awards for excellence in state-wide journalism. A solid showing for the Weekly, highlighted by Jim Nintzel's deserving win for Journalist of the the Year in the non-daily category. In our non-daily circulation greater than 10,000 category, Mari Herreras racked up a bunch of honors with two wins for Best News Story (1st for "Solitary Justice,", 3rd for "Seeking Justice") plus a 2nd place for Best Investigative Reporting ("Fighting for Mom") and a shared 2nd place for Best News Feature Story with Chelo Grubb ("Drag Power"). Margaret Regan also took home a well-deserved 1st place honor for Best Column, Feature or Criticism for her arts coverage.

Other honors for the Weekly staff (past and present):

General Excellence, 1st place

Editorial Page Excellence, 1st place

Page Design Excellence, 1st place

Newspaper Online Site/Webpage, 1st place

Community Service/Journalistic Achievement, 1st place

Special Section, Newspaper Supplement or Magazine, 1st place

Reporting and Newswriting Excellence, 2nd place

Best News Story (Todd Miller, "Border Patrolled Youth"), 2nd place

Best Sports Column, 3rd place

Wins for our Tucson Local Media colleagues:

The Explorer, Newspaper Online Site/Webpage, 2nd place

The Explorer, General Excellence, 2nd place

The Explorer, Special Section, Newspaper Supplement or Magazine, 3rd place

The Explorer, Editorial Page Excellence, 3rd place

The Explorer, Best Use of Photography, 3rd place

The Explorer, JD Fitzgerald, Best News Photograph, 2nd place

The Explorer, Randy Metcalf, Best Sports Photograph, 3rd place

The Explorer, Randy Metcalf, Best Feature Photograph, 3rd place

The Explorer, JD Fitzgerald, Best Feature Photo Layout, 1st place

The Explorer, Randy Metcalf, Best Feature Photo Layout, 2nd place

Inside Tucson Business, Hillary Davis, Enterprise Reporting, 2nd place

Congrats, everyone.

I'm still working my way through the education discussion at the Thursday night debate between Fred DuVal and Doug Ducey in Tucson. Here's the biggest educational gaffe of the night, made by Ducey. It's one of those classic "When I was a boy" blunders. He was talking about how today's schools in Arizona and across the country are under-performing compared to schools in other countries, and he compared them to the wonderful schools America's K-12 youth attended back when.

"Anyone that’s my age in this audience or older grew up in an America that was number one in the world in K-12 education, and so far and away number one, we didn’t know who number two was."

Ducey graduated high school in 1986, so his "We're Number One!" glory days were the 1980s. Those were his happy-go-lucky teen years, so he probably didn't read the Reagan White House document, A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983, when he was a freshman. [NOTE: Ducey graduated college, not high school, in 1986, which means his high school graduation rate was probably 1982, a year before A Nation at Risk was published but part of the time the report is referring to. I regret the error.] It didn't exactly trumpet the excellence of our schools. Quite the opposite. In its early paragraphs, the report said:

The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

Things got even more dire in the next sentence.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the schools Ducey attended which, according to him, were "so far and away number one, we didn’t know who number two was."

If you're left with plenty of those free or otherwise Odile-inspired sandbags, the City of Tucson is happy to take them back:

HOW TO DISPOSE OF SANDBAGS - Residents who no longer want to keep sandbags distributed earlier this week, in preparation of severe weather, can return the bags to the parking lot of the Ward 5 Council Office, at 4300 S. Park Ave. The drop-off location opened today at 10 a.m., and will remain open until Friday, Sept. 26 at 5 p.m. Staff from the City of Tucson Department of Transportation Streets and Maintenance Division will collect the sandbags at the end of each work day. Staff will not be on hand to collect sandbags from residents. Signs are posted in the parking lot to indicate the location for people to drop off sandbags.

If you have two feet, then the show at the Rialto (318 E. Congress St.) tonight, Friday, Sept. 19 is going to make them happy, with maybe the only things missing is a newspaper-lined table piled with crayfish, potatoes and corn; and a hurricane poured in a tall glass.

Doors open at 7 p.m. and show starts at 8 p.m. with New Orleans R&B legend Marcia Ball and Zydeco roots musician Terrance Simien. Tickets for the all ages show are $16.50 to $30.

I love the ring-true description the Rialto shared on its website: "Her music mixes equal parts simmering soul fervor and rollicking Crescent City piano."

Marcia Ball's new release, The Tattooed Lady and the Alligator Man is described "With raucous horns punctuating Ball’s legendary piano pounding and emotional, melodic vocals, the new CD mixes Ball’s New Orleans R&B, swampy Louisiana ballads, and jumping, Tex-Mex flavored zydeco into a one-of-a-kind musical gumbo, a sound she has been perfecting over the course of her four-decade career."

Simien is all about challenging stereotypes we have of Zydeco music. Tucson — you must go tonight.

8th generation Louisiana Creole has been shattering the myths about what his indigenous Zydeco roots music is and is not. Leading his Zydeco Experience band, Simien has become one of the most respected and accomplished artists in American roots music today. He and his band mates have performed over 7000 concerts, toured millions of miles to over 45 countries during their eventful career.

In solidarity with the New York City Peoples’ Climate March, Occupy Tucson organized a Tucson Peoples’ Climate March, with workshops on Saturday, Sept. 20, at the Sam Lena Library in South Tucson at 1606 S. Sixth Avenue and the Global Justice Center, 225 E 26th St.

Library workshop schedule:

9 a.m. - Resilient Communities - Margo Newhouse and Grace Rich
10 a.m. - Citizen's Climate Lobby - Ron Proctor
11 a.m. - Moving from Protest to Action - Dave Ewoldt
12 Noon - Climate Change and Citizens United - Lee Stanfield
12:45 - 1:30 p.m. - Lunch Break
2 p.m. - Leave Your Car - Take the Bus - Maria Cadaxa
2 p.m. - Coal, Oil, Nuclear & Gas vs Solar and Energy Efficiency - Russell Lowes
3 p.m. - About Electric Vehicles - Dave Gebert
After the workshops, at the Global Justice Center, 225 E. 26th St.:
4 p.m. - Sign Making - Some markers, paint, brushes, poster board, cardboard will be available, or bring your own.

A march is Sunday, Sept. 21, starting at 9 a.m. from the parking lot on the north side of the Himmel Library, 1035 North Treat Ave., ending at the parking lot behind Bookmans Sports Exchange, 3330 East Speedway Blvd. There “Tucson Plugs In,” sponsored by the Tucson Electric Vehicle Association, will have an electric vehicle event with tabling by local climate and energy groups.

Lots of talk about education at the Thursday night debate between Fred DuVal and Doug Ducey in Tucson. It was scattered throughout the 90 minute forum. I'm working my way through the tape I made of the event, but I want to spotlight the boldest educational proposal of the night. It came from DuVal, about attracting more and better teachers to Arizona schools.

"I would go to the Board of Regents and say, any student who graduates in the top third from our universities and goes into teaching and stays for five years ought to have their student loans relieved. It is wrong for our smart students to leave university with a debt load that means they can’t make a responsible economic choice to go into teaching. We want the best of our students to go into teaching, because it’s the most important thing we do."

College grads can into teaching with its modest salary and not have to worry about a significant chunk of their paychecks going toward paying off loans every month. If they stick around for five years, their loans are forgiven. It's a terrific incentive for any college graduate with a desire to teach.

Focusing on the top third of the graduating class can have the dual role of encouraging prospective teachers to work harder in college so they can make it into the loan forgiveness group, and encouraging the best and brightest graduates to spend at least five years in the classroom. Some may leave before year six, but that's still five good years they've given to Arizona's children. Others will get hooked on the pleasures and challenges of the classroom, or decide to move up to the administrative level. It's a win-win all the way around.

While watching a recent matinee of "JAGUAR!," the Latina Dance Theater Project’s production at ZUZI! Theater at the Historic YWCA, I’m struck that maybe the only way to tell this story, this complicated mess of a true story about the death of the jaguar named Macho B, is in a magical realism style, really an easily digestable folktale.

That's what playwright Dawn Costello Sellers has crafted here with beautiful direction from Eva Tessler, showing us that when man meddles with nature, not only does it create a complicated mess and tragedy, but it also compromises our own survival, both physically and spiritually.

The true tale took place in 2009, when a biologist with the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project set a snare trap in the Atascosa Mountains west of Nogales and north of the border in hopes of trapping a male jaguar, using female jaguar feces to attract him. The elusive jaguar, an animal not seen in the area since the mid-'90s, had been photographed and with that egos and politics went to work and the bureaucracy meant to protect Macho B, failed—failed big time.

The female feces worked, Macho B was caught in the snare—the animal panicked and severely injured himself unable to break free. Biologists found him, drugged him with Telazol and put a radio collar on him. The jaguar, hypothermic and injured, died days later. It took investigations from several agencies and the guilty conscious of one of the biologists involved, to get an idea of what really happened—the careless crusade to tag this jaguar for glory.

In "Jaguar!," the same story is told, but through the eyes of Moon (Avis Judd), who protects Macho B (Christopher Johnson) and loves him with all her heart. There's also a little girl, Maya (Milta Ortiz), who happens to love nature, but just a little too much. She's us—the human who explores, catches and collects—sometimes holding in her hands just a little too tightly. Moon lectures Maya, who eventually dreams of finding jaguar. We watch Maya grow up to become a biologist, hired to work with the biologist and his assistant on the hunt for Macho B (played by Brian Taraz and Tenoch Gomez, respectively).

Together this cast deftly tells the story of Macho B as if telling us the same folktale that's been told over and over again over the centuries about jaguar—how much humankind has loved and worshiped him, and his mystery and power. Moon helps with this, too: When she wears her mask, she is the storyteller and without the mask, she is our conscious that deep down feels pained with every wrong, reminding us, or really Maya, to be better, and reminding her precious jaguar to be careful. After all, "people aren't always the brightest."

In a conversation between Moon and Maya is the obvious, such foolish people we are: "I can't see in the desert without you," Maya tells Moon. "You can't see in the desert with me," Moon answers.

By the end of the play, the lessons are clear and Maya is transformed—emotionally and physically—just like we should be or at least should have been once we heard the full true tale of Macho B, sacrificed for needless scientific glory and a broken system.

I have to say that watching Judd as Moon, with Oritz playing Maya and Johnson as Macho B, is delightful. They are perfect in their roles. Joining them are three coati played by Yvonne Montoya, Sherry Mulholland and Anjelina Mendibles, who dance and play with jaguar—mischief makers who share the desert with Macho B, and live in fear and love of him. Nannette Robinson also does beautiful aerial work as Moon hanging sky, the evening stars as her backdrop.

The matinee I caught was a school-day production, the audience a large group of middle school students from Palo Verde Middle School, who seemed to enjoy the production and had great questions for the cast and crew at the end of the show. But what's unique about this play, is this storytelling method Seller's uses, and I could see a younger set of kids easily letting go and entering Maya's world, a world they love and know that comes with their own desires to catch butterflies and poke at lizards, all with curiosity and sometimes love. At the end, they'd understand the injustice deftly.

Then there's us who know better at this point. Have we completely given up on being transformed? Are we so jaded now that nature has no place in our hearts? "Jaguar!" is a mirror for us, a folktale that needs to become part of our consciousness in order for us to finally do what's right: Protect what we have left and allow the transformation of a new world to take place.

The Latina Dance Theater Project has given Tucson a gift, a beautifully crafted play about what we did to Macho B that left us with profound lessons. Keeping Macho B's memory alive, well, maybe that's the only way we'll finally learn.

This is the show's closing weekend, tonight and tomorrow, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the 738 N. 5th Ave. theater. For more info, go to jaguarplay.com.

The day after the DuVal/Ducey debate in Tucson seems like a good time to air this. Ann-Eve Pedersen, parent of a TUSD student, president of the Arizona Education Network and my co-host on Education: The Rest of the Story, put together a segment "thanking" Doug Ducey for helping to put Arizona near the bottom of the nation's per-student funding list.