So Las Vegas isn’t exactly known as a bookish town. Don’t tell that to Ann DeVere.

It’s typical for kids to sing songs in kindergarten classrooms to help the learning process along. You already know this well — can you recite the alphabet without getting the “ABC” song in your head? Kim Glover knows this particularly well.

At-risk kids with ballet dreams find support — and life-changing opportunities — at Nevada Ballet Theatre’s Future Dance program I’ve twice seen Ariel Triunfo dance. The first time was three years ago, when Nevada Ballet Theatre’s 2010 summer intensive classes were wrapping up and the parents of so many ballerinas gathered in Nevada Ballet Theatre’s large Studio B to watch the session’s concluding performance.

The Titanic at Carmine’s An appropriate name for a dish that will sink to the bottom of your belly. The signature dessert at this Italian-American institution is basically a banana split on steroids: Hot brownies are smothered with scoops of ice cream, whipped cream, hot fudge, chopped fruit and cookies.

Set aside the sushi menu. The valley’s new wave of Japanese cuisine boasts rich curries, exotic tapas and deep-fried everything Japanese food in Las Vegas has been about much more than sushi for some time now.

“It was the first and best performance I’ve ever seen.” That’s what a grade-schooler wrote after attending one of the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s Youth Concert Series shows, an annual, five-day tear of concerts at The Smith Center that treats valley fourth- and fifth-graders to what is often their first taste of orchestral music — for many, their first soul-stirring communion with performed music as vigorous, vitalizing art.

On January 1, I’ll have been out of a Nevada business euphemistically called “the gaming industry” for five years. I am not retired, mind you.

Is it us, or is there a little bit of cultural renaissance going on up in here? The Smith Center is hitting its stride, the downtown arts scene is sizzling with fresh energy, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute continues to serve up big brains and thinky discussions, and it seems there’s now a nosh festival for every food group. But for us, the strongest evidence is in the pages ahead, where we packed more than 75 must-go events this season, from concerts and plays to festivals and discussions.

Beneath a cardboard facade, this conceptual artist explores romance, pop culture and feminism In January, a young Las Vegas artist named Lauren Adkins married a cardboard cutout of a dreamy Twilight vampire — actual chapel and ceremony, real well-wishers and reception — and called it art. Now: Does that make you go, Hmm …, the ellipsis suggesting an openness to such a nontraditional idea of art? Or did you go, WTF?, because, you know, WTF? Adkins’ project, “Love Is Overtaking Me” (her graduate thesis at UNLV, by the way) was about several things: the contested nature of female fandom, the allure of romantic escapism, the grip that pop culture has on our lives.

This innovative duo enriches local theater and turns nightlife spots into sensory playgrounds We’re inside the Loman household — that stifling box of middle-class dreams gone sour in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. And then we’re not.