- In this special edition of "aRTeffects", the mesmerizing process of chain stitch embroidery.

(whimsical music) - I really love seeing it come together and the way the stitches overlap and the colors and, it's my favorite part of the process.

- [Beth] What it takes to get a laugh.

- [Dave] As a stand-up comic, I wanna connect with the audience, and I want them to connect with me.

That's what I feel like the intimacy of stand-up comedy is, and what makes stand-up comedy different, I mean, it's more intimate than improv.

- [Beth] The art of fly tying.

(relaxing music) - We, as close as we can, imitate the natural insect that lives in the river.

- It's all ahead on this 2021 award-winner edition of "aRTeffects".

(letter swooshing) (energetic music) - [Announcer] Funding for "aRTeffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidimarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Myers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members, and by- - Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and welcome to "aRTeffects".

This year, the "aRTeffects" series won a Silver Telly Award and three individual segments each won a Communicator Award of Excellence.

We're celebrating by showing you our winning stories and stick around after each one to hear from the producers and the artists involved.

For our first segment, meet Tina Vines.

After earning her degree in Apparel Design, this artist came across an antique chain stitch embroidery machine, and hasn't looked back.

(playful music) - [Tina] My name is Tina vines, and I do chain stitch embroidery.

- I got interested initially in embroidery because I'm into vintage clothing and I love, especially, western wear, kind of forties, fifties era, in particular, and I noticed the embroidery on western wear, and I thought, "What is that?

I can tell it's not done by hand.

Is that a special machine?"

So I looked into it and I noticed that all of the pieces have so much chain stitch embroidery on them.

It was, like, such beautiful work that I wanted to learn how to do it.

Chain stitch embroidery is made up of just one single stitch, it's a chain, and you use that to make up all these designs, so the fill is the same stitch as the outline.

It's just, the fill is overlapped in a circular motion and the fill would be like a straight stitch.

One of the most common materials that I use is other people's clothing.

(whimsical music) - People send me jackets, suits, and I embroider them for them.

I love when someone allows me to design and do something that looks like the styles that inspired me to do this in the first place, so, super traditional, kind of western, or just very vintage looking, whether that's, like, a car club jacket or a letterman jacket.

That's my favorite, is when I get to make it look really old.

When you wouldn't know, if you found it, if it was original or not, that's kind of my goal.

When I go to make a purse, for example, I first start with a rough sketch of the basic design that I'm gonna do.

And then I make a more refined sketch that I actually use more as a template for the embroidery.

I choose the fabric, cut out the fabric, and then I choose the threads, the colors.

I really love this sage green that I use for a lot of the cactus that I do, and it's like the perfect color, it looks great with everything.

(button clicks) (machine humming) The machine that I use is 100-year-old antique machine.

Sometimes people assume that a newer machine would work better, but it's the complete opposite.

The older machines are so sturdy and so reliable and they just give the stitch that no other machine can make.

(machine stitching) I love the feel of it.

I love the sounds of it.

(machine stitching) I love working on it.

(machine stitching) When I'm actually using the machine, I'm doing a lot of multitasking.

I'm using the handle with my right hand.

I have my left hand on top, which I'm kind of steadying the fabric.

And then with my foot, I'm operating the pedal, which makes the motor of the machine move.

There's a spool of thread underneath.

It comes up, and the needle is shaped kind of like a fish hook, so it loops the thread as it comes up, and it just pulls it, and pulls it, and pulls it into this chain.

And that is just a straight stitch, it's just looping in a straight line, unless I'm moving the handle underneath.

As I'm turning the handle, the stitches are overlapping in a circle, so, it's a hand-operated way of, kind of, drawing with a machine.

When I found the chain stitch embroidery, I felt like it was finally the perfect match of all of the things I love.

I just feel really lucky that I get do something that's very specific and unique and special to me that other people enjoy as well.

(whimsical music intensifies) - We just watched Tina Vines create her beautiful chain stitch art.

My name is Rebecca Cronon and I produced this segment in 2019.

Tina Vines has since moved from Reno to the Los Angeles area.

Tina joins us now from her home.

Tina, nice to see you again.

- Hi.

How are you?

- Doing well, thank you.

So tell us, what do you remember most from our filming experience, when we showed up at your home, invaded your workspace, and got to capture your amazing experience of your chain stitch art?

What do you remember most?

- I guess I just remember the experience of actually explaining what I do, and showing it, and kind of thinking about how to do that in a way that made sense.

I'm used to, kind of, working by myself in my little workspace, so explaining it and talking about it was new, and also, it was just super fun to have, you know, the crew in there and it was a tight squeeze.

I personally, also just love it because the way the video was shot and edited, really showcased my work in such a way that it makes it easy to explain, and so, sometimes it's kind of a go-to, even for me, to show people, if they ask me, what I do.

It's such a great little clip of exactly what I do.

So I love it for that.

- That's fantastic, we're happy to hear that.

So since you've moved to the Los Angeles area, I'm sure that you still keep tabs on what's happening in the Reno Sparks area.

From your point of view, how do you think "aRTeffects" plays a role in the arts and culture scene, here in the area?

- Well, I actually was just thinking about how I got in touch with you guys, and it was through other artists in the community, in Reno, people recommending other people, and that's what I think is so special about Reno and just the arts culture and community there.

I think "aRTeffects" is perfect for showcasing all of those people, and we just kind of all become a little family, which is so great.

- Absolutely, it is great.

Well, we really appreciate your time today and speaking with us and we hope that you stay in touch with us, as well.

Thank you.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- And you can learn more about Tina Vines by following her on Instagram @tina _vines.

And now, we returned to Beth, who will introduce the next award-winning segment.

- For our next award-winning segment, take a moment to imagine standing in front of a room full of strangers, all staring at you, and you need to make them laugh.

That's the job of the stand-up comedian.

Though experienced stand-ups make it look easy, it's not as simple as you might think.

- My mom offered me a peach, the fuzz had become a full beard.

- I'm your appetizer to your dessert over there.

- I'm working some stuff out up here in high school is one of those things.

(upbeat music) - Well stand-up, basically, is the art form of taking the everyday mundane and trying to make it into a joke, trying to take normal behaviors and put another spin on 'em, where people find a way to laugh about just ordinary things.

- The whole point of it is to make people laugh, using your pain, your observations, your life, and thoughts that you've had.

- As a stand-up comic, I want to connect with the audience and I want them to connect with me.

That's what I feel like the intimacy of stand-up comedy is, and what makes stand-up comedy different, I mean, it's more intimate than the improv, or a funny play, or a funny movie.

That's how my career goes, "Saturday Night Live," all-you-can-eat riblets, that's- - One of the misconceptions that stand-up comics try to make the misconception, is that we are just coming off the top of our heads.

- "Oh, so you just kind of make it up as you go, when you get on stage?"

or "Tell me a joke."

They just think you're just walking around.

There's a conception, you're either super sad and "Oh, I hear you guys are all depressed."

If you're doing your craft properly, it looks like you're just coming off the top of your head.

(playful music) - When I first started, my life was different.

I had a brand new baby, and I was married to a different woman, and I worked in food service a lot.

And so a lot of the material came from that, just hearing somebody's crazy story, or having a crazy customer.

I have so much stuff written on the back of keynote tickets, you know, in a crayon or on an Applebee's napkin, when I worked at Applebee's, and so many little ideas, and then I would sit down and set aside time to try to take those and make them into jokes and I wrote all of my jokes out word-for-word.

It's valuable to go back to that stuff, because what I knew about writing comedy 15 years ago is not as evolved as what I know now.

So something that I wrote down 15 years ago that never worked, might work now because I know how to write better than I did 15 years ago.

- I ride a motorcycle.

Do you know that the motorcycle guys do that thing when they pass each other?

You've all seen that, where they do this thing, right?

It's cool.

I've only been riding for four years.

I hate doing that thing.

It scares me to death.

I will literally see the other headlight coming and start to pee a little bit- because I'm so frightened that I have to take my hand off the handlebar, right?

So the guy's coming, right, and I'm seeing that headlight and I'm like, "Oh God, I don't want to do this."

(imitates motorcycle rumbling) (audience laughing) And I literally almost crash every time.

And the worst thing is when you misjudge the headlight and it's like a 14-year-old girl on a scooter, and she's like, "You suck."

(audience laughing) - Sometimes you just say something, people laugh, and you remember it, and you try to recreate that moment for an audience.

So you can't say it exactly as you did in conversation, you have to reword it, create the setting, within a couple of seconds, on stage, which is hard to do.

Sometimes you have to shorten it, sometimes you have to make it a little longer for the audience to get it, More often than not, I get on stage with a topic, and I just talk about it.

As I'm talking about it, I'll come up with things, someone will laugh at something, and I'll remember what they laughed at, and I'll focus on that next time I go up and talk about that subject.

And I'll kinda just build off of that until I create something.

No, if I got super powers, I would immediately become a super villain and I would be charging people to give other people diarrhea.

(audience chuckles) Like, if somebody needed to take out Superman, I could take him out for like two hours.

- Sometimes you just see a little nugget of just a mundane occurrence and that spawns you into a whole topic.

Like, I saw this guy the other day and he was doing the whole thing where he's tapping the slot machine and rubbing it, and then I got to this whole thing about being a germaphobe and, you know, how I'm the exact opposite of that, and now that, hopefully, builds into a chunk of five minutes.

All this based on this guy doing this crazy, you know, gambling voodoo.

- And every time I'm in Reno, Vegas, Laughlin, there's always that one person sitting at a slot machine, playing their heart out, wearing the surgical mask, I call it the "gauze for a cause."

(audience laughing) And that's awesome, you're getting out there, you're living your life, you're trying to enjoy yourself, but if you need a surgical mask to filter the very air you breathe, probably sitting at a smoke-filled casino, sucking in secondhand Marlboro, shoving $100 Ben Franklin bacteria bombs into the wheel of influenza slot machine, not your best choice.

If your bingo numbers are H1, N1- (audience laughing) you need to gamble online.

(audience laughing) (upbeat music) - [Bar staff] You guys ready for another comic?

- [Audience Member] Yessir!

- [Bar staff] Now this guy's one of my favorites.

His name is Bryant Tarpley.

(audience cheering and clapping) - [Bryant] We are in, in Alturas Bar, in Reno, Nevada, and we're about to do an open mic, tonight.

An open mic is a place for almost any artist to, like, practice their craft in front of an audience.

Comedy open mic audiences are the hardest group to perform in front of, especially at a bar like this, where half the audience is facing the alcohol and not the stage.

Pros of an open mic is it's a place where you can just try out stuff and learn if something works.

Cons are, it's hard to get the audience's attention, and it's hard to judge if something would work in front of a larger crowd or a crowd that's specifically there to see stand-up.

A lot of times, they're not there to see comedy, and it's, kind of, just a surprise thing, like, "Surprise, we're gonna tell jokes about our families."

So, I think there's a lot more cons than there are pros, but it's something you have to do in order to get good enough to do real shows and something you have to do to get ready for 'em.

I was told that I actually might have a drinking problem, and I didn't believe people when they said that, except that, when I got bed bugs in my house, they all died of alcohol poisoning.

(crowd laughing) Might be something to that, then.

(light airy music) Stand-up comedy is a form of art.

Every comedian's either a writer, who performs their own material, or a performer, who writes their own material.

So, it's two art forms that you're doing at the same time.

- The art comes when you make it something that comes from in here.

When I've shared a joke about my depression, or my anxiety, and the crowd laughs and I go, "Oh, we connected right there."

- [Marc] One art form, I think, that brings so many different people together, is stand-up.

Gender, sexual orientation, religion, politics, it's all moot.

We get in a room, and if you can make a disparate group of people get together and laugh, I think that's a good thing in this day and age.

I think we need more of that.

One thing I tell people, you know, you might pay to come and laugh at a comedy club, but laughter's free the rest of the time, so.

- Hi, I'm Guinivere Clark, the producer behind the stand-up comedy segment you just watched.

I'm here now with Dave Mencarelli, one of the comedians from that segment.

Dave, how are you?

- I'm doing great.

It's fun to see that segment again, I enjoyed doing that so much.

- Yeah, it's a really fun segment, and it was really fun to put together.

We filmed you a few times.

We filmed you once at the Laugh Factory and then another time at your home.

What was that filming process like for you?

- I loved it.

Most of us that are doing stand-up are somewhat... maybe narcissist is too strong and too negative a connotation, but we love the attention, so, getting to see myself on TV, performing at the Laugh Factory here in Reno, was great, and then, having the opportunity to sit with you, where I'm comfortable, in my home and just kind of go through the process and tell some stories, I just really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed the whole process.

- Yeah, that's great, I'm glad we were able to do that.

I also want to say that I really appreciate you making some PG-13 jokes, because probably my biggest difficulty putting together the segment, was choosing PBS-appropriate jokes to put in the segment, so thank you so much for doing that.

- You're welcome, and it's something that I've thought about the whole 20-plus years that I've been doing it, is what's appropriate for what venue and, you know, everybody has a different style and a different way of saying things or phrasing things, and you can clean up some of the wording, you know, some of the words that you use or the phrases that you use with innuendo and euphemisms.

I have worked hard to try to do that when it needs to be done, so I appreciate you saying that.

- Oh, well, I appreciate you doing it.

Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

I really appreciate it.

- Oh, listen, congratulations.

You did such a great job with that segment.

On a personal note, I'm glad that we got to put it on TV again.

My parents are so impressed every time I'm on PBS, so.

(Dave chuckles) - That's great, and thank you so much for the kind words.

I really appreciate it.

- Oh, my pleasure.

- You can find Dave on Twitter @davegmencarelli.

Find the other comedians as well @laughwithmarc.com and @bryanttarpley on Twitter.

Now, back to Beth.

- For our final segment, meet Reno-based fly fishing guide, Mike Anderson, and learn about the craft of fly tying.

Also, enjoy the solitude of the Truckee River and see the culture of fly fishermen as they observe the fish and their prey, in order to design the perfect fly.

(relaxing music) - For most anglers, fly fishing is an escape.

Being on the river, forgetting about work, forgetting about bills, and being able to encounter some amazing fish while being in a beautiful place, surrounded by, you know, great settings is one of the draws for fly fishing.

Flies are imitations of insects that are actually waterborne.

That's the fish's main food source, are insects.

So what we do is we use natural and synthetic materials like hare's ear, or sometimes even rubber or plastic.

And we, as close as we can, imitate the natural insect that lives in the river.

So, when we go into tying a specific fly, the first thing I'm gonna do is think about its size, its shape, what I'm actually imitating when it comes to the natural insect.

My process would start by selecting the hook, selecting whether it needs to be heavy, or if it needs to float.

So, I would take the corresponding hook to the size of the insect I'm trying to imitate, and I would clamp that into my vice, which is just a contraption that holds the hook steady for you.

Once the hook is in the vice, I would grab thread.

Typically, I would match the thread color to the insect color.

So I'd start my thread down the shank of the fly, which is the top part of the hook.

I would start by then stacking materials, creating a tail, and then, say, like the thorax of the bug.

If it's a subsurface fly, if it's what we call a nymph, I would put some type of weight on it.

If it's a dry fly or a fly that sits on the surface of the water, I would typically use some type of, like, a deer hair or something that has some floatability to it, and then finishing with the head of the fly.

Typically, what we would do on a normal day when we come down to the river is, we would take a small, knit-meshed net, and we would siphon the water, and that would show us what's actually present in the water, and then our flies would correspond to the size and shape of whatever insect is predominantly in the water.

(relaxing music increases) When you're tying flies, one of the best feelings that you can get is to tie, just a fly, and then catch a fish on it.

It's seriously so cool.

You feel like you're sustainable, like, you know, the zombie apocalypse could come by and you'd be fine.

You can catch fish.

And that is even amplified way and it's a fly pattern that you create of your own.

So you go out, you see a bug and you start throwing materials together, and then you take that out, and it works.

That's one of the coolest feelings for fly fishing and fly tying.

Woo hoo!

It's something that you can truly master.

It's something that you can really dive into deep detail of, the certain bug, the certain time of year, the certain hatch, and you really feel like you can almost predict where the fish are gonna be, what they're gonna eat, when they're going to eat.

(water rushing) I think fly fishermen tying their own flies, is a trend that we see growing.

It's something that more and more people are getting into because there are certain aspects to tying flies, especially the weights of the fly, or, like, the silhouette of the fly, that, when you buy it commercially, may not be appropriate for what we use on the Truckee River.

When you're looking for materials to tie with, your local fly shop is your best bet to find those materials, because, the nice thing about having a local fly shop is you have the local knowledge of the river, so, you have the materials that best suit the Truckee River, Pyramid Lake, and all of our surrounding area fisheries.

The culture of fly fishermen is dynamic.

It ranges from the guy who will show you a spot, to tell you everything, what fly, to the guy who's a little more guarded, he's not gonna tell you where he was fishing, what spot he had, but more often than not, fly fishermen are very open and willing to share where they were, what fly they were using, what they were catching.

One thing that's really nice about the community that we have here in Reno, is that it's a very fun atmosphere.

A lot of people are just here to have a good time, be outside, encounter some of the amazing fish that we have on the Truckee River.

Woo!

(laughing) So really is like a family, you know, you really do have a lot in common with people through fly fishing, through the community.

(tail swishing) (water running) - Hello, I'm Martin Szillat, the producer of that segment that we just watched that gave us a glimpse into the world of fly fishing, and I'm joined now with Mike Anderson.

How are you, Mike?

- Good, Martin, how're you doing?

- I'm great.

Let's talk about the day we went out and filmed you fishing along the river.

What was that experience like for you?

- You know, one of my favorite things about fly fishing is not just having the ability to take people out fishing, but these fun experiences of being able to teach and be able to talk about the thing that I have, you know, a strong passion for.

So, it was fun, it was exciting.

Maybe a little nerve wracking, but, yeah, it was a good time.

- Yeah, thanks, and it was a extra bonus having you catch that fish, and I was glad I was able to have my camera pointed at you when you happened to be catching that fish, too.

- [Mike] No pressure on my part, but I was very happy to get that fish on.

- So, I got a question for you.

How does it feel to be the subject featured in an award-winning segment?

- You know, it's cool, it's kinda surreal.

One thing that, when I started guiding, I never really thought would happen, would just be, like, notoriety.

People, you know, knowing who I am.

I thought it was gonna be a pretty anonymous job, but, to be honest, it's kind of the opposite, you know, having the experience that I have and being only one of a few that can actually do it, it's interesting to walk down the street and be noticed, to be realized, and yeah, it's cool.

It's fun.

(chuckling) - Great.

Well, Mike, thanks a lot for taking part in that segment, you gave us a lot of great information and really helped people who don't know anything about fly fishing understand, you know, how the mind of a fly fisherman works, and that was really nice of you to do.

You can find out more about Mike at renoflyshop.com.

And now, let's return to Beth.

- On behalf of all the producers, we want to thank you for watching "aRTeffects" over the past six years, as we produced more than 200 episodes of this award-winning series.

We're looking forward to bringing you even more.

And that wraps it up for this 2021 award-winning edition of "aRTeffects".

For more arts and culture, and to watch past episodes, visit pbsreno.org/arteffects.

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan.

Thanks for watching.

- Funding for "aRTeffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli, the June S. Wisham Estate, Carol Franc Buck, Merrill and Lebo Newman, Heidimarie Rochlin, Meg and Dillard Meyers, the annual contributions of PBS Reno members, and by- (playful music)