Hello, hello! Warm spring greetings to the whole damn clan. I had a dream Friday night that Healdsburg legend Don Hyde, founder of the Raven Theater and my country neighbor growing up, was reading my newsletter and told me I needed to make it more exciting and tabloidy. He also suggested I rename it “Hollywood Simone’s Madcap Healdsburg Mud Rag” or something of that nature. And y’all should know I take dreams pretty seriously, in my life as a Carl Jung fangirl and general enthusiast of the psychic and astral realms. So I’ll try to embody some of that nice, sleazy mud-rag spirit in today’s newsletter (while keeping my journalistic integrity about me, of course!) as we cover jazz like…

BTW! If you love seeing Hollywood Simone’s Madcap Healdsburg Mud Rag in your inbox each week, why not share it around with other community members who might love it, too? You can send them this link to subscribe — or just forward them a copy of the newsletter, and they can click the link themselves. Because we all deserve to stay informed and enlightened about what’s happening locally… every last one of us. 🪷

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock — and indeed, that might have been a smart place to hide last week — a surge of bizarrely high March temps just shattered a bunch of heat records in our area. These were the records set at the spot where federal weather officials keep records in Santa Rosa: 90 degrees on Tuesday (beating the previous record of 87 degrees on the same day in 1996), 89 degrees on Wednesday (beating 84 degrees in 2010), 92 on Thursday (beating 83 in 2004, and setting the all-time record high for the month of March), 91 on Friday (beating 84 in 2004) and 86 on Saturday (tying 86 in 1926). The rest of California, too, has been withering under the same beating sun. Most notably, down in the Coachella Valley, a mercury surge of 108 degrees last Wednesday reportedly hit the “all-time U.S. high for winter heat.” This, while another leg of the very same weather system dumped dangerous amounts of rain on the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian islands… where I happen to be headed on an Alaska Airlines plane as I write these very words you’re reading. 🌺

Phew! What a way to ring in the spring season. Here in Northern Sonoma County, as the hot Spring Equinox sun rose last Friday morning, hordes of Russian River Brewing Company fans braved the heat to wait hours in line for a cold one at the 22nd annual “Pliny the Younger” triple IPA drop, held at the company’s two brewpubs in Santa Rosa and Windsor. One grizzled diehard in line told the Press Democrat: “We’ve had every kind of weather over the last 20 years, including drenching rain, and this is definitely the warmest. But I don’t mind. Pliny release day is just like Christmas.” Mele Kalikimaka, everybody! To celebrate, here’s the full National Weather Service forecast for Healdsburg this week… which is definitely looking cooler than the last, but we’ve still got some solid heat on tap.