HAMILTON, Ohio — With 15 to 20 concerts each year, many of them free, RiversEdge is becoming a popular attraction for the city of Hamilton.

"I think it's already proven to be a good investment," said Adam Helms, director of the city's Resident Services Department and promoter for the RiversEdge concert series. "With the Marcum Apartments across the street now and Marcum Park right behind us it's beautiful. The live music has really helped Hamilton grow."

But Helms said the venue's physical limitation is holding the city back from building on that momentum.

"We had a rain storm come through last week, and literally nothing on the stage was dry," he said. "It was all wet."

Hamilton has created a rough sketch of what a new roof for RiversEdge could look like. Helms said it would cost around $800,000 to build and an additional $500,000 to replace its existing sound system.

Both were possible improvements that Helms presented at a special city council meeting last week as officials look for ideas on spending $33 million in federal coronavirus relief money.

"We miss out on some great opportunities," Helms said. "It's hard for us to front the money for the talent or take the risks when the show may or may not happen."

Currently, if a paid show is rained out, the city is stuck paying the bill for the band and refunding tickets.

Helms said a larger roof and bigger stage would protect performers and their equipment. In turn, that would allow RiversEdge to attract big-name acts while avoiding weather issues.

"Hamilton is a great place for acts to come," said Dan Bates, president and CEO of the Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce. "And we're getting more and more larger acts and bigger names, but we still have to, I think, probably court the larger acts."

Bates said bigger shows would mean more people in downtown Hamilton supporting local businesses and perhaps discovering something new.

"Definitely anytime you get people in the downtown area walking around, I think they discover things they had no idea were here and it makes them want to come back," he said.

The city is still gathering ideas and proposals for spending its portion of the federal coronavirus relief money before finalizing any specific projects.

An Ohio woman was reunited with her long-lost cat on Thursday, five and a half years after his initial disappearance. He’d been on a journey of over a thousand miles in the meantime — and he traveled another thousand on his way back.

The owner, Margaret Burcham, said she had resigned herself to never seeing Bernie, a fluffy cream-colored tabby, again. He disappeared from her Florence, Kentucky home in 2015, and her search for him afterward never produced any leads.

“I looked, and I called the shelters and finally just kind of accepted that he was never coming back,” she said.

Until February, when a shelter picked him up in Waco, Texas — 1,080 miles away from Dayton, Ohio, where Burcham now lives.

Volunteers at Heart of Texas Lost and Found Pets assumed the clean, healthy cat must belong to a local family, so they checked his microchip. It sent them back to Burcham.

"How often does something like this happen?” she said Thursday. “Just amazing, and all the way in Texas."

The next question for everyone involved: How would Bernie get back to Ohio? Brandi Neth, a Heart of Texas volunteer, was heading northeast anyway and agreed to ferry him home.

The handoff was Thursday afternoon — Burcham showed up in a sequined mask, and Neth put Bernie back in her arms for the first time in years.

“To be able to come visit my family and bring somebody along and give them the joy of having their animal back, it just makes the trip that much worth it,” Neth said.

No one involved has any idea how Bernie made the journey from Kentucky to Texas the first time. He’s certainly not telling.

“That's what I want to know,” Burcham said. Then, addressing the cat snuggled in her arms: “We need to talk."

CINCINNATI — On Friday, for the first time in 14 months, Music Hall hosted a choral performance with audience members in the same room.

The Cincinnati May Festival had run uninterrupted for decades before COVID-19 forced organizers to cancel it in 2020. Associate chorus director Matthew Swanson said he and the performers were overjoyed to return in 2021 — even with smaller audiences, masks for singers and performances streaming concurrently online for unvaccinated or anxious music-lovers.

“It’s just a joy to be making music together, particularly choral music and vocal music, with others and with the Cincinnati audience that we love,” Swanson said. "Not just being here on the stage in Music Hall, but being here on the stage and looking out at audience members, which is an unmatched experience and part of what makes live performance a community endeavor."

With five performances over two weekends, organizers hope to give audience members a chance to watch in person without worrying about large crowds.

But even if they choose to stay home and watch remotely, chorus director Robert Porco is happy that the festival returned.

“It’s even more special, in a way, because I’ve been here over 30 years, and for every year I’ve been here, there was a May Festival,” he said. "I know that we are one of the few major choruses in America that is actually singing with an audience — so it's a bold step, I think, but I agreed to it because I was convinced that it was safe."