Photo by Jeff Newton Raven Valdes

The Party Priestess: Raven Valdes

She would get asked the same thing over and over, whenever the weekend approached. Her girlfriends, guys she knew, all of them wanted hints, recommendations. A few thousand questions in, Raven Valdes had an epiphany.

“Everyone wanted to know, ‘Hey, Raven, what are you doing tonight? Is there anything good going on?’” she recalls. “I guess I became sort of a directory people went to. Where to go? What to do? Then I guess it kind of took off.”

“Kind of took off” is as close to an understatement as you’ll get from the owner of Raven Events, the divorced mother of a 9-year-old boy who’s taken her knack for finding a good time and become one of the Valley’s premier event planners and party promoters. Valdes’ plunging necklines, ink-black mane, bulging guest lists and neon energy level all scream a single word.

“Fun,” she says. “All I bring people is fun. I don’t sell them anything except fun. There’s never a conflict of interest with me. If it’s a Raven event, you know it’ll be nothing but fun.”

Sophisticated, business-casual fun – that’s been Valdes’ forte since going pro as a social queen bee in 2004. While her competition focuses on 20-something college kids, Valdes, 49, has found a niche with fun-seekers in their 30s, 40s and up – including a 94-year-old who’s been attending her bashes of late. Raven’s strategy? Don’t make people drive too far (she favors venues like Jilly’s and the Crown Room in Scottsdale, along with Trax and Phase 54 in Tempe), give them great music and great food (she’ll bring in DJs and caterers, if need be) and spread the word like crazy.

Valdes markets events digitally, e-mailing calendars and invites to a database of more than 10,000 Valley professionals. Their loyalty ensures a mob scene whenever she throws a charity ball, New Year’s theme party or happy hour business mixer. At the center of each bash, there’s Raven, big hair and megawatt grin, a Texas-born military brat who’s lived all over the United States but has found a home and a few thousand friends here in Phoenix.

“This is my passion, and I’m good at it,” she says. “I get a lot of reward just sitting back and watching the connections take place.”

The Spastress: Lisa Kasanicky

Lisa Kasanicky wants you to relax. After all, a big part of life depends on it. The “flirting with 40” soul behind ArizonaSpaGirls.com has fashioned a career in the place where tranquility and self-care meet commerce and journalism. Her Website, founded in 2002, specializes in ferreting out the cheapest spa deals in town, offering comprehensive listings to health and wellness spots, and giving “how to” advice on living a balanced life.

It’s this last part, the practical side of the dotcom, that Kasanicky sees as the prime driver behind her success. “The whole ‘me time’ thing was getting on my nerves,” she says. “What was irking me about the idea was no one ever said how to do it.… I think we fill that niche a little bit.”

If that seems like an excessively straightforward approach, well, know this: Before becoming “Spa Girl,” Kasanicky spent her career as a “hardcore” technical writer. Then, in her late 20s, Kasanicky was leveled by the suicide of her mother, a woman she describes as “a beauty queen” entranced by plastic surgery. The daughter’s voice descends toward sadness. “I’m always watching out for those women,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to feel so bad that they lose hope.”

Nowadays Kasanicky uses the Internet, TV and any media she can get her hands on to spread the word about the balanced life, from inexpensive massage deals and high-end days of pampering to do-it-yourself recipes for body scrubs and facial masks to recommendations for volunteering and charity work to lift the spirit. The site is even teaming up with a new reality makeover show coming to Phoenix.

Sure, there’s a certain amount of spa sampling involved for Kasanicky and her “Spa Boy” husband, Chaz, but nothing too glamorous. At least nothing that lives up to people’s imaginations when they meet Spa Girl face to face.

“People say, ‘Oh, that must be so cool,’” Kasanicky says. “I’m like yeah, no, it’s not so cool. I’ve still gotta go home and clean the toilets.”

Mr. Green: Jonathan Fink

Let’s get the jokey stereotyping out of the way first. Yes, Jonathan Fink has a business card from ASU that says “University Sustainability Officer,” and yes, he holds the director’s slot at the school’s Global Institute of Sustainability.

So yeah, Fink’s pretty into this whole green thing, even if that means walking up University Drive in Tempe to Sacks to grab lunch while toting his own used to-go cup.

“I actually have, like, six Styrofoam cups stacked up in my office,” Fink says. “Whenever I remember, I bring one of my cups over there.”

Consider that habit the least the 56-year-old Ph.D. in geology can do, a small gesture in a workday spent pondering and preaching the most a state university and society at-large can do to protect the environment. How does Fink describe the concept of sustainability, a movement suddenly so en vogue that ASU President Michael Crow not only embraced it but created a post to spearhead the effort, a job Fink took on last summer after a decade as ASU’s vice president of research and economic affairs?

Says Fink: “The description that I use is that sustainability is the environmental movement of the ’60s with the acknowledgment that the economy and social well-being are important too.”

Building that “three-legged stool” has Fink carpentering together not only a university of more than 50,000 but corporate interests like Wal-Mart and Starbucks, academic institutions like Harvard and Stanford, government bodies of all sorts, international partners like the city of Beijing and Cambridge University, and a whole bunch of idealist hippies.

Fink, a volcano specialist by trade and a father of two who started his undergrad work back in 1969, has a Baby Boomer’s fondness for the last group, those campus radicals whom he came of age around back in the day. Still, he tempers their “corporate America is evil” passion with a healthy dose of realism.

“If there isn’t a way to make money out of doing the right thing,” he explains, “it’s not going to happen. I’d like to think that the planet will improve because of sheer idealism, but I know that’s not true.”

Just like it’s true that a professor can drive a Toyota Prius, fret about his carbon footprint and reuse his Styrofoam cups, and still be a polluter. Fink’s guilty pleasure? No, not the occasional Humvee ride across the desert. But he does fly from place to place on business and for pleasure.

Damn jet planes and their CO2 emissions.

“What can I say?” Fink asks. “I fly a lot. I’m just not willing to give that up.”

The Voice: Dennis Rowland

Growing up in the house in Detroit, there was always music. His mother tinkling the piano keys before choir practice. His Uncle Thomas singing to him in his rich baritone. The Rowland family was a singing bunch, and Dennis Rowland was no exception. Not at first, anyway. Exceptional came later.

Exceptional is what landed Dennis Rowland in the Herberger Theater Hall of Fame in 2007. And got him gigs at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center and the Sydney Opera House. Exceptional gave Rowland the chance to share the stage with Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald and “Little Miss Sassy,” Sarah Vaughan.

You get the idea. Rowland, a Phoenix resident for two decades, has a voice made for jazz. His voice and his style have taken him all sorts of places, including the most exceptional place of all – the seven years he spent as the front man for Count Basie.

“He was a true gentlemen,” says Rowland of Basie. “He knew what he wanted from his band and the band knew what he wanted and they gave it to him. He didn’t say much in terms of righting and wronging, but when he said something, it was the gospel.”

Rowland settled in the Valley not long after Basie passed away in 1984. Rare is the venue in town he hasn’t played in between stints on the road. This past year, for example, took him to Germany, Moscow and Lithuania. It’s also taken him to Taylor’s Café, the Phoenician and the Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale.

“I like stages, sound and light,” Rowland says. “I’m just not a dive guy. Can’t play the dives.”

Which isn’t to say every gig has been of the standing room variety with adoring crowds 65,000 strong, like the sea of humanity Rowland sang for at the Chicago Jazz Festival. The smallest gig he’s ever played? Rowland laughs at the memories.

“Oh, there are several that are gonna vie for that title, I’ll tell you that right now.”

No matter – it’s a living and has been for Rowland’s entire adult life. The voice that has taken him around the world still takes audiences places they’d never get to otherwise.

“When the music sounds right and the band is playing well – kicking ass – I’m on fire,” Rowland says. “That’s when it’s all good.”

The Museum Marm: Kathy Eastman

 The title sounds so impressive: Curator of Education at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa. You picture the tiny woman before you wrangling dinosaur fossils or spinning campfire tales about the disappearance of the Hohokams. Then Kathy Eastman launches into a story about one of her best days at work.

She was leading a discussion with a group of school kids, as she remembers it. Suddenly, a hand shot up. One little boy had a question.

“He wanted to know, if bats always hang upside down to sleep, how do they poop?” Eastman shakes her head and cracks up. “That was cool. No adult would ever raise their hand and ask a question like that.”

True, just as it takes a special sort of adult to answer a question like that. Eastman, 54, seems born to the task: An animal lover (she owns two turtles and three birds) who grew up on a ranch in Montana, the mother of a college-age son holds a bachelor’s degree in zoology along with master’s degrees in veterinary parasitology and health services administration. After years as a lab researcher – too solitary for her taste – she joined the museum in 2002 and became its education guru two years ago.

Now Eastman has all the company she can handle: Each year, upwards of 120,000 visitors trek past Dinosaur Mountain, the largest dinosaur exhibit west of the Mississippi, and take in the museum’s three-story indoor waterfall and newest star attraction, “Elvis” the alligator.

“People like coming in and looking at him,” Eastman says. “He just sits here on his rock. He’s a big hit.”

Speaking of big hits, Eastman’s creation for springtime should prove popular with youngsters. She’s curating P.S.I. That’s Poop Scene Investigator, in case you’re still pondering that bat question.

“We’ll have sloth scat and all sorts of interesting stuff,” she says. “You don’t want to underestimate what you can learn from poop.”