Scene in Passing: Scent of jars and dancing with the stars

Another smattering of potpourri comes your way today, the second straight column sending along snippets from the passing scene.

Potpourri is a mixture of dried flowers, herbs and spices in a jar providing scent for a particular space; in this space, however, it’s a metaphorical method of sending along short items to spice things up a bit. Herewith a few whimsies or semi-serious stuff for you to sniff at awhile.

Let’s start with the scent of a woman, as in “Scent of a Woman,” a 1990s film that featured Al Pacino in an Academy Award-winning performance of a blind mover/shaker, mentor and rake. Mayor Robert Crowell, using that movie’s Tango scene for inspiration, will bid for a bit of scene-stealing at Saturday evening’s 7 p.m. event called Dancing with the Stars at the Carson High School gymnasium.

The fundraiser for Western Nevada College nursing students won’t feature just the mayor and his spouse, Susan, tripping the light fantastic. It also is supposed to find Adele’s Charlie Abowd, Sheriff Ken Furlong and Supervisor Jim Shirk on hand to be on their feet, hopefully tripping no one in the process. Whether a recent arm problem for the sheriff keeps him off his feet is an open question,

Those twinkle-toes trappings will come hard on the heels of Thursday’s decision-making meeting on proposed city capital-improvement projects and a city sales-tax hike. Some of the projects are new, but some bedrock projects in the proposal have been around, in one form or another, almost since Pacino’s character was displaying dancing and driving triumphs over visual impairment.

It will be intriguing to see if the imminent decision by the Board of Supervisors brings changes and victory or defeat for project proponents. This is no time to smell up this space with any hint of how the columnist penning these words might feel about the plan, particularly given that bedrock projects predate this writer’s move here. Suffice to say it’s the board’s call. Reminder: four votes are needed for approval.

Carson City’s Shelly Aldean, chairwoman of the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) governing board, in a report to the Board of Supervisors on which she used to serve, said a new panel has been formed to explore ways to enhance rates of compliance with some best management practices at the lake. She said she and Clem Shute of California were selected to serve as the representatives on that new subcommittee.

Just to keep our potpourri and scent of a woman theme going, let’s end all this by opining that it stinks Aldean isn’t among the local stars asked to show their dance floor moves on Saturday night.