This gallery started with a peek into the Torch Club’s “green” room, located down a few stairs back behind the stage and hidden from public view. Between sets at a Ray Copeland Band show, I caught singer Marilyn Woods on a piano bench looking at some video and I snapped a couple of photos before going back out to the bar area.

We asked readers to submit their picks for the Capital Region’s top entrepreneurs —and you answered. Our editorial team vetted almost 100 nominations, looking for innovative business ideas, interesting backstories, unique products and services and that ineffable “it” factor. And here they are…

Full of electrolytes, this drink supports light to strenuous activity levels, repleting and rehydrating the body without excess sugars and calories.

Hustling by itself may have a negative connotation, but co-opting the term seems to mirror the millennial tendency to reclaim edgy words.

As a Core Member of the National New Play Network, the B Street Theatre has produced over 100 new works in the last 30 years. However, out-of-the-box ideas like the New Comedies Festival underline the need for theaters to continue evolving to meet shifting customer demands.

Alexander Suelto has always been inspired by street art. As a teenager coming of age in Stockton in the ‘90s, he admired the local graffiti artists whose art brought the city to life. Back then, street art was widely stigmatized.

Follow Randy Brink around Papa Murphy’s Park before a Sacramento Republic FC match and you’ll start counting how many different ways fans can say hi.

Not far from the historic district of Folsom, inside a quiet strip mall, a ballroom dance studio has set the stage for a timid 13-year-old to find her groove, retirees to reinvigorate their marriages, and a widower and a divorcee to find love. It’s also helped owner Kate Gonzalez prove to her parents that the arts can become a lucrative career.

One in five adults in this country will experience a diagnosable mental illness during their lifetime. Here, in Sacramento County, an estimated 300,000 residents are living with mental illness, which impacts every ethnic, racial, cultural, economic, religious, gender, sexual orientation and age group.

When Leo Hickman returned in 2003 from an eight-month tour in Kuwait as a combat engineer in the U.S. Air Force, he wanted a way to spread peace. With no idea how, he set out on a journey of self-discovery and backpacked through 27 countries.