Rick Bonino

After two criminal trials and a best-selling book, it might seem everybody with a story to tell about Kevin Coe has been heard from. But there’s one man who’s been following Coe’s civil commitment trial online from his home in Monroe, Wash., who is speaking out publicly for the first time.

You can take the picnic out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the picnic – not entirely, anyway. Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic will again serve up a heaping helping of Lone Star-style sounds.

John Marshall and Lynne Feller-Marshall love music, hot springs and each other. All of those factors combine on their new CD under the group name Paradox, featuring Spokane Symphony principal players Lynne on bassoon and John on cello.

"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" Spokane Civic Theatre's Main Stage, Thursday night

Award-winning Portland author Craig Lesley is best known for his novels and short stories. But on Friday at Auntie's Bookstore, he'll read from his new nonfiction book, a memoir. "Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood" (St. Martin's Press, 368 pages, $24.95) recounts Lesley's experience as foster father to an alcohol-damaged Indian child, which prompts him to seek out his own father – a shell-shocked World War II veteran who abandoned him as a young boy.

The Spokane Jazz Orchestra has been seeing a new woman. Women, actually. There's the sultry balladeer. The bluesy belter. The bebopping scat singer. The Brazilian bossa lady. The '70s songbird.

It was a birthday party and a homecoming celebration all rolled into one big ball of smoking-hot jazz. The Spokane Jazz Orchestra kicked off its 30th season Friday night at The Met by bringing singer/pianist Diane Schuur back to town for the first time in 23 years.

Discriminating drinkers now have another option for good, locally brewed beer. Another new brewpub? No, the oldest one in the Inland Northwest: T.W. Fisher's in Coeur d'Alene, which shows signs of emerging from an extended slump. Fisher's, the first brewpub in Idaho, opened in 1987 to immediate success. Its flagship Centennial Pale Ale won a gold medal at the 1988 Great American Beer Festival, the annual Olympics of brewing.

Ladle it up online.

As a Michigan alumnus who's lived in Spokane for the past 20 years, I've had friends ask, in all seriousness, who I'll be rooting for in the Rose Bowl. After all, they reason, isn't my allegiance divided between my native turf and my adopted home? They just don't get it. Loyalty to the Wolverines - with their unusual mascot, even more unusual helmets, massive stadium, infectious fight song and proud tradition - isn't something you lose over time, like a Midwestern accent. Once a maize-and-blue-blood, always a maize-and-blue-blood.

Spokane's Kelli Cler and Carol Missamore will serve samples of recipes from their new cookbook, "Simply Done," and autograph books Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. at Hastings Books, Music & Video in the Spokane Valley, 15312 E. Sprague. The book, aimed at busy working mothers like Cler and Missamore themselves, contains easy recipes that rely largely on supermarket convenience products. It sells for $14.95.

Let's face it: Sooner or later, you're going to have to start planning that Thanksgiving menu. Wouldn't it be great if you could just call up a professional chef and have them do the thinking for you? Well, now you can, sort of. Shady Brook Farms' toll-free Dial-A-Chef holiday hotline has recorded messages from nine leading American chefs about everything from marinades and ethnic touches for turkey to side dish and leftover suggestions.

The name comes from the circular gouges glaciers carved into mountainsides thousands of years ago. The brewing process comes from a method favored by Bavarian and Bohemian brewers hundreds of years ago. The beer comes from a small industrial park in Prosser, Wash., starting seven months ago.

Too busy to think about cooking right now? That's OK. If you want to save this section until Saturday or Sunday, we'll understand. Not surprisingly, more than half (56 percent) of the people polled for the National Pork Producers Council say they spend more time preparing meals on weekends than they do on weekdays.

How do you really separate the men from the boys, and the women from the girls? The proof is in the pudding - Jell-O fat-free pudding snacks, that is. We served the rocky road and chocolate versions at a special back-to-school session of The Spokesman-Review's reader food panel that included several youngsters. The adults were none too impressed, but the kids gobbled it up, particularly the younger ones. Ah, the sweet days of youth.

Think of it as home brewing - in someone else's home. Custom Brewing of Spokane is the city's first "brew on premise" (BOP for short) where people can come in and make beer. Its owners hope to receive final licensing approval and open this week. "Spokane is in for a new experience," says majority owner Bob Gress, a Pullman nurse anesthetist and beer lover. The BOP movement began in Canada as a way to avoid excessively high liquor taxes. There are about 60 BOPs in the United States; most opened in the past year or two. Gress, 50, a former Spokane resident, always enjoyed drinking good beer. He began brewing a couple of years ago when a friend who had moved to Idaho introduced him to the Brewworks, a BOP in Boise. Early this year, he and partner Mark Steffan, 45, a Spokane home builder, decided to give the business a try themselves.

The liverwurst reaction