Las Vegas Weekly

To see Jenny Arata perform is to fear for her life. And yours, depending on where you’re sitting.

Jenny is Absinthe’s acrobatic roller skater. She performs on a circular, two-meter-wide platform with her husband Victor, who swings Jenny around and around at death-defying speeds. She holds onto his neck, with her feet.

Jenny comes from badass blood: Her dad was a colonel in the Soviet military, but she chose the more artistic route. She’s been doing acrobatics her whole life, and after she fell in love with Victor (a sixth-generation circus performer), he taught her to skate.

Is she worried about falling? “Well, of course it pops into my head before each performance. But I trust my husband with my life, so falling doesn’t worry me. I know he’ll do everything possible to keep me safe.” —RICK LAX

Legs planted, hips jutting toward the audience, Sarah Lowe makes a crack about balls, gives her crotch a good grab and punctuates her sentence with a deep “yo.” Ah, the other improvisers at the Onyx Theatre seem to think in unison, she’s a dude.

A dance captain and swing for Jersey Boys at the Palazzo, Lowe is an onstage powerhouse who oozes confidence and humor whether she’s improvising at the Onyx on a Monday night or in LA working on The Apple Sisters, a trio of gals with a tightly tuned variety show and podcast set in 1943. The award-winning show, in which Lowe plays a sister who thinks she’s dating God, is fully hilarious, spiked with raunchy jokes filtered through a retro lens.

“We’re less Sarah Silverman, more Lucille Ball,” Lowe says. The Apple Sisters also occasionally feature her improviser husband Matt Donnelly, celebrity guest stars like Olivia Wilde and a character named Tippity Tappity the Tape Worm. “He’s just a friendly worm,” Lowe laughs. “He just wants to help you be thin.” —SARAH FELDBERG

It isn’t difficult to figure out why Carla Pellegrino has been so successful as one of Las Vegas’ only female celebrity chefs. She’s stunningly beautiful, no doubt about that. But Carla’s strengths in a traditionally male-dominated field go way beyond looks. The woman is a force of nature—you either see things her way or get out of the way.

“I have a lot of passion for whatever it is that I’m doing,” she says. “I take over everything. I’m OCD, always in people’s faces.” She attributes her hard-driving nature to her heritage: “I was born in Rio; I’m Italian, Portuguese and Brazilian. My great-grandmother was French. If you drop me in the sea, I would never die. Everybody would drown but me!”

She’s also made her business all about family, bringing her sister and brother-in-law along to help her run Bratalian near Anthem. But the biggest secret of her success? “My accent,” she says, laughing. —KEN MILLER

Don’t get us wrong, Karla Washington’s achievements are worthy of much praise. The 41-year-old returning student is president of the UNLV student chapter of the National Society of Minorities in Hospitality, coordinator for Peers Advocating Anti-Violence Education at the school’s women’s center, presidential student ambassador and student government senator for the hotel college.

Still, the best part about this single mother is that she isn’t an army-of-one badass. She is the beneficiary of other badasses—the employer who first gave her the incentive to get a degree, the counselors who helped her find scholarships, the on-campus preschool staff that watches her daughter.

Washington is a testament to how far a little kindness can go in one disadvantaged person’s life, which is why she vows to one day start her own non-profit. In the meantime, she’ll focus on her own daughter, Kennedy, of whom she says, “She is 10 times what I am. She’s the reason I do everything.” —APRIL CORBIN

The whole time I’m interviewing Amanda Bingson, I’m grateful for how amazingly sweet she is. After all, this woman could kick my ass.

Entering her senior year at UNLV, Bingson crushes records in her chosen sport, the hammer throw. She’s this year’s UNLV Sportswoman of the Year, ranked fourth in the nation, and a likely Olympic contender.

But as intimidating as she is on the field, Bingson has a, well, amazingly sweet side to her. She volunteers at Silverado High School, her alma mater, to gets kids interested in track and field (the hammer throw is too dangerous for high schoolers, so Bingson helps out with shot put and discus).

“I want to help kids get involved in track, because sports really turned my life around. I used to get into trouble,” she says. Given what she’s achieved, and how she’s inspired others, it’s hard to argue with her. Not that I ever would. —KEN MILLER

The nightlife industry has a reputation of being an unrepentant boys’ club—but don’t tell that to Megan Gaver. The East Coast transplant just approaching her one-year anniversary in Las Vegas has been working in clubs since age 17, rising quickly through the ranks of nightlife impresario Steve Lewis’ New York empire before she could even drink at the venues she marketed and promoted.

Today, Gaver, who also has a law degree from Rutgers, puts that experience to work at Tao Group’s über-hot Cosmopolitan nightclub Marquee, a venue she credits with convincing her to leave New York for the desert. “You just walk into the club and it just clicks,” she says. “There’ve been so many crazy nights that it starts being normal.”

The fast-paced nightlife industry fits Gaver, who says it helped her grow up quick and learn to handle high-stress situations that would make less-seasoned clubworkers shudder. Not Gaver. She’s the blonde badass directing traffic, right at home amid the mayhem. —SARAH FELDBERG

“Someone told me girls don’t play bass,” says CoCo Jenkins, reminiscing about dabbling in piano and mastering cello because girls apparently do play those instruments. Then her high school jazz band’s bassist got mono, and Jenkins got her chance. Now 23, she owns the bassline in local “hip-hop/funk/soul experience” Rhyme N Rhythm, which recently got exposure on MTV’s The Real World. She shares the stage with explosively talented “brothers,” but it’s hard to miss the 5-foot-tall bombshell coolly working the liquid-black Fender Aerodyne.

The bass is the backbone of every band, its licks the framework for every song, though many listeners never realize. “It’s really annoying, actually. But bass is not a showy instrument,” says Jenkins, who imparts such wisdom to musical hopefuls through Girls Rock Vegas camp. Even more annoying is being told her skills are surprising, given her exterior. “I’m just a bass player,” she says, “who happens to be a girl.” —ERIN RYAN

Nevada is the driest state in the nation, with a metropolitan area of 2 million people and 40 million tourists annually sucking water from the shrinking Colorado River in the middle of a drought. We also have the smallest allotment of the seven states that tap the Colorado, a deal made in 1922, and we need water to quench the aftermath of our arrogant, rapacious growth. Water is gold here. Water alone determines our future.

At the center of all of this is a controversial woman wielding a lot of power: Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District and Southern Nevada Water Authority. She preaches conservation and has successfully reduced Valley water use despite growth. Still, critics accuse her of favoring developers and spending too much money.

She also leads the argument to pipe in groundwater from rural Nevada while ranchers and environmentalists scream. Her latest idea? Pipe Midwest floodwaters into Las Vegas. Mulroy is undoubtedly one of the most powerful women in Nevada. —KRISTEN PETERSON

Vangie Bisquera-Golda is not a ballerina, but she can strap on pointe shoes and nail a double pirouette. She never formally trained in any style. Dance was “a passion, a love … always in the blood.”

At 26, she joined Culture Shock Las Vegas, a non-profit that involves youth in street dance as an alternative to drugs and violence. The group was soon in danger of dissolving as leading members chased bigger dreams, from backing up Madonna and Michael Jackson onstage to choreographing onscreen. So Bisquera-Golda gave up her own shot as a performer to keep alive what mattered to her as a person.

More than a decade later, the 43-year-old mom is still executive director of CSLV as well as a full-time educational computer strategist for Clark County. That’s a lot of influence on the next generation. “I have a beautiful family,” she says, adding that she’s still working on her headspin. —ERIN RYAN

In the middle of our interview, Dr. Florence Jameson steps out to deliver a baby. Bringing life into the world is a fraction of her work, which is focused on saving lives by restoring health and hope.

An obstetrician-gynecologist who has served Las Vegas for nearly 30 years, she also provides free care for female juvenile offenders and founded Volunteers in Medicine of Southern Nevada. The non-profit’s flagship free clinic opened in Paradise Park last year and has since provided 3,600 visits for uninsured patients.

Trying to calculate the value of donated labs, x-rays and medication, as well as hours given by 670 volunteers, makes your head spin—especially considering Jameson is determined to open a Downtown site, with the goal of caring for 50,000 people a year, one at a time. “It isn’t about great numbers,” she says. “Like Mother Teresa said: ‘It’s about doing small things with great love.’” —ERIN RYAN