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Healdsburg
April 10, 2026

Top 5 Local Stories of 2024

Inside a hot air ballon
There’s a tradition in the news biz, at year’s end, of retracing all the major stories that unfolded during the 12 months prior. It feels like a healthy exercise—an opportunity to zoom out and let the bigger picture sink in, free from the frantic 24-hour news cycle (or, weekly in our case). It’s also a great reminder, though small-town life can seem humdrum, that we’re surrounded at all times by modern-day lore and legend...

Healdsburg comes full circle for Abel De Luna

Architects illustrations courtesy of Goring & Straja
Sunday, May 18, will mark a significant milestone in Healdsburg history. Abel De Luna, the city’s first Hispanic mayor during his city council term 49 years ago, will return to town, along with farmworkers rights legend Dolores Huerta. The purpose is the renaming of...

Roots in the community

Kelly and Noah Dorrance
The proprietors of BloodRoot Wines, Kelly and Noah Dorrance, have been organizing an annual music and wine festival called The Ramble as a fundraiser benefitting  GIFFORDS, a national organization dedicated to preventing gun violence.

Healdsburg soccer team follows veteran coach

Healdsburg boys soccer
Their current record is 4-4-3 (one could say they tie a lot of games), but the league season has yet to begin. The cagey coach Herbert Lemus admits he frontloaded the schedule to give his team the experience they’d need...

Measure O Defeat Shows Split City

When the sound and the fury, the smoke and the flames dispersed, Measure O went down to a definitive defeat, roughly at a 60-40 split. Clearly this was not what the Healdsburg City Council intended when in June they rationalized themselves into putting it on the General Election ballot.

Klezmatics return to Healdsburg for the Holidays

The Klezmatics
Topo, in Fiddler on the Roof, was a Klezmer musician, “schlepping his way from shtetl to shtetl… a distinctive image of pre-war Jewish life in the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe,” according to worldmusic.net.

Gym, Theater Dedicated to Drew Esquivel

Friends of Drew Esquivel
Perhaps for the first time in its young life, the new Drew Esquivel Hall on the Healdsburg High School campus boasted a bleacher full of fans—wrestling fans, drama fans, fans of the school district and of Drew Esquivel himself—all come to recognize the dedication...

Setting the Stage for the Holidays

Decorating the tree
This year’s Merry Healdsburg party is, surprisingly, only the fourth for this still-fresh city celebration, though the tradition of a tree-lighting the first week of December is much older. But it used to be a quieter affair—maybe the Community Band would play a program of holiday music from the gazebo stage or something, but the glamor and the glitz of Merry Healdsburg didn’t start until 2021...

Healdsburg in bloom with art this weekend

Healdsburg Arts Festival in the Plaza
The Healdsburg Plaza will once again be transformed into an expansive open-air gallery of sculpture, metalwork, glass art and painting—not just oils, but watercolor, acrylic, chalk and anything else that can make a two-dimensional space come alive. There will be fabric arts, woodworkers, ceramics and a hatmaker, some new to Healdsburg but many return participants, in the Healdsburg Arts Festival, 2025.

New Year Happenings, January 1-8, 2026

Girl and Tree
Ease into the new year with the “NOT King Cole” trio, playing without a drummer and featuring tunes from the golden age of jazz. At the Spirit Bar, 6-9pm Saturdays.
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Arts & Entertainment

North Mississipi Allstars

Blues from the Hill Country 

“Modern Mississippi music.” If you ask singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Luther Dickinson to define what the North Mississippi Allstars (NMA) create, that’s the answer he’ll give. It’s the path he and his brother Cody have been traveling down ever since NMA dropped their 2000 debut, Shake Hands with Shorty, and one the band members will share when they hit the LBC stage on May 9.
Kelly and Noah Dorrance

Roots in the community

Actors pretending to drive

On the road again