No One Asked Me But… (November 3, 2021)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… It’s fall in Moapa Valley and all is right with the world. Halloween is over and the kids came to the door with their demand for loot. There were ghost, hobgoblins, and super-heroes which is a great sign that things are returning to normal.

Another great sign of normality is that the Pomegranate Arts Festival, that traces its roots to an Art Festival instituted many years ago by the great western artist and art teacher Max Bunnell, is returning after a two-year COVID driven hiatus.

The traditional Pomegranate Art Festival, sponsored by the Moapa Valley Art Guild, will once again be in session at the Clark County Fairgrounds in Logandale. Admission and parking are free and it is a great way to spend a day in the valley.

Artists, artisans, and craftsmen will have their work on display and, for the most part, for sale from 9 am – 5:30pm on Friday, Nov. 5; and from 9am – 4pm on Saturday, Nov. 6.

The artists, craftsmen, and artisans have been saving up for two years to display and place their work on sale. Over 100 of them have acquired booths to display their wares. There will be hourly raffles as well as art activities for the children. There will be homemade pomegranate jelly, jams, candies as well pomegranates freshly harvested throughout the valley on sale.

Entertainment on the Plaza Stage will include: Rick Houston and Alicia Houston Silva who are a featured at many of our local events and are always enjoyable entertainers. The Nelson Family Bluegrass Band will perform, and, yes, Dusty our deal is still on I will give you a dollar if you will play. Various choirs will perform for your enjoyment including the Grant Bowler Elementary School Honor Choir, the Moapa Valley High School Choir, and the GO EXCEL Academy Singers. For those with a little more classical taste The James and Phina Strings Duo will perform. Local Cowboy poets will recite some original and some classic cowboy poetry for your enjoyment.

A number of dance groups will be there including: Kountry Kickers Line Dancers, the Muddy River Cloggers, and Clark Country Parks and Rec. Dancers. Along those same lines, The Moapa Valley

Tumbling team will be there. This is just some of the entertainment that comes with your free admission to the Pomegranate Arts Festival.

Right at a dozen food venders have committed to being there so there is no reason to bring a lunch or dinner. These food vendors include: Absolutely Nuts, Aunt Addie’s Soda Wagon, Fired- up Creations, Fruitzle, Fund Food Factory, Great Basin Cooking Co, Iwalani’s Hawaiian Grill, Kuppa Joe, Overton Senior Center Eats, Papa Gyros, Sub Zero Ice Cream and Yogurt, and the Twisted Lemon. If you can’t find something to your liking you aren’t trying hard enough.

With the threatened national shortage of Christmas gift availability, due to supply chain issues, the Festival with all its booths will give you a great opportunity to find a special unique Christmas gift without the Walmart label. There will be homemade jewelry, cutlery, artwork, woodwork and a couple of local authors will be offering their books. There will quilts and other handwork by dedicated artisan available. Stop by my booth and have a chat, I will see you at the Festival.

No one asked me but… Let me state clearly that I love the Pomegranate Festival, but not so much the pomegranate itself. Even though they are mentioned in the Old Testament ten different times, if you had asked me I would have told you, I never heard of a pomegranate before moving to Moapa Valley.

That may say more for my lack of Biblical study than the pomegranate. They were used for decorating the robes of the high priest as well as the pillars of the temple built by Solomon. In the Song of Solomon, the great wise king speaks of a spiced pomegranate wine which he enjoyed. I have never seen pomegranate wine on sale at the festival. I saw syrup, jellies, jams, chocolates, and juice, but no wine.
I have a theory about regional foods like crawfish in the south, oysters on the coasts, squirrel in the Ozark Mountains, and pomegranates in Nevada.

While my southern kin revel in their crawfish, it’s a bug and I believe if they could get lobster, they would never again eat crawfish.

Why anyone would eat an oyster is beyond me; it looks like something sneezed out of a buffalo’s nose.
The very thought of a roasted squirrel brings unpleasant images from the movie Deliverance flooding to my mind. The squirrel is a rodent, a rat with a fuzzy tail. If the hillbilly could get anything else to eat, the squirrel would lose a natural enemy. Have you ever seen squirrel on a gourmet dinner menu? I think not.

This brings me to the pomegranate. This is a rock growing on a tree. I refuse to eat crab because I will not work that hard to get a bite of food. This rule is true also of the pomegranate. The strawberry or raspberry you pick and you eat. The pomegranate you fight the tree for them, then get out a sledgehammer and try to remove the outside cover, and if successful, you get to spend the next hour trying to extract a number of small berries. I know local enthusiast have devised a number of ingenious ways to extract the berry and the juice, but if they had planted strawberries instead of pomegranates, they would have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble.

We will miss the ribs from Sugar’s that were barbequed with a pomegranate sauce. Some of our group will even miss the pomegranate salad dressing. Not me, I stayed loyal to the good old blue cheese dressing. Yes! I know blue cheese dressing is made from moldy cheese.

In typical Sugar’s fashion, we would order four meals for six adults and feed all to the breaking point. Four of us would eat ribs for dinner the next day, and I finished the ribs off in a sandwich for lunch. Just a side note I miss my “Turkey Tuesday” call from Sugar’s as well.

All that being said, come and join the Moapa Valley community in a great two days of festivities.

Thought of the day… After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual “food” out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps. 
– Miss Piggy