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The festival will return for the second weekend on Friday.

Here are a few of the high and low points of Sunday’s action, which included Post Malone and Megan Thee Stallion on the main Coachella stage.

THE HIGHS

Short lines getting into the Empire Polo Club

Maybe it was that Travis Scott went past the 1 a.m. curfew to end Saturday and the crowds were sleeping in Sunday morning. Or it could be that the fatigue of two days under that sometimes irritating Coachella Valley sun had caught up to festivalgoers. Either way, the lines were noticeably shorter getting into the festival site once the gates opened on Sunday.

For those of us who were there, it was a welcoming sight. On both Friday and Saturday, the lines were lengthy, though crowds moved through security checks fairly quickly.

Yet, it’s been a few decades since I thought much about him. So it caught my eye when he popped up in the headlines. Stamos (still handsome at 61) is living proof that no good deed goes unpunished. 

The actor had the audacity to emcee an April 5 charity event for health care workers – get this – at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida. 

I know, right?

The left’s intolerance is well-documented (torching Teslas, anyone?), but the outrage and horror directed at Stamos for merely attending an event at Trump’s property startled even me. 

He died in Lima, Peru, surrounded by his family and “at peace,” his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a well-known political commentator, said on X.

“His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” his son wrote in a statement.

A leading light in the 20th-century Latin American literature boom, Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010 for works like “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “Death in the Andes,” and “The War of the End of the World.”

Constructor: CJ Tan

Editor: Amanda Rafkin

What I Learned from Today’s Puzzle

• HATER (40A: “___’s Anthem” (Infinity Song tune with the lyric “I would rather sit and criticize”) “HATER’s Anthem” is a 2023 song by the soft rock / R&B band Infinity Song. The song begins with the lines, “I love the way it feels to be a HATER / Something so sweet about thinkin’ that I’m better…”
• HOODIE (61A: Sweatshirt aka a bunny hug) Today I learned that a hooded sweatshirt, aka a HOODIE, is also known as a bunny hug. The use of the term bunny hug to refer to a HOODIE traces its roots to Saskatchewan, Canada, though the exact origin of the term is unclear.
• KEKE (53D: “One of Them Days” star Palmer) One of Them Days is a movie released in January of this year. It stars KEKE Palmer and SZA as friends and roommates who need to scramble to get the money to pay their rent and avoid eviction.

Marsh died “peacefully in bed” on Sunday at her London home due to complications of dementia, the actress’s close friend, filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, told The New York Times and The Guardian.

“You could say we were very close for 60 years,” Lindsay-Hogg told The Guardian. “She was as wise and funny as anyone I ever met, as well as being very pretty and kind, and talented as both an actress and writer. An instinctively empathetic person who was loved by everyone who met her.”

Marsh’s agent also confirmed her death to the BBC.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Marsh and Lindsay-Hogg for comment.

Born in July 1934, Marsh began her film and television career in the late 1940s with a series of background roles in movies. In the following years, the actress graduated to guest roles in several TV series, including “Omnibus,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Danger Man” and “I Spy.”

The Top 24 singers no longer look dead on their feet after putting in the work to make it through Hollywood Week. And they’ve made it far enough into the competition to be part of the show’s annual tradition of overt cross-promotional marketing efforts at Disney’s Aulani Resort.

On Sunday night, half of the remaining contestants put the advice they received from artist-in-residence Jelly Roll and mentor Ashanti to use. And for the first time, the aspiring stars sang for the audience’s vote as judges Luke Bryan, Lionel Richie and Carrie Underwood gave verbal pats on the back.

Of the dozen performances, nearly all knocked it out of the park. Here were the top moments from “American Idol” Episode 8.

Catch up on last week: Jelly Roll mentors as judges make questionable choices for Top 24

Jelly Roll and Luke Bryan admit contestants’ covers were better than their original songs

The stars of John Hughes’ ’80s coming-of-age classic — Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy — reunited on Saturday at the C2E2 convention in Chicago for the first full cast reunion in 40 years.

“I feel really very emotional,” Ringwald, 57, told the crowd, jokingly adding that it was Estevez’s first appearance at a reunion. “We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout anymore because he’s here. I feel really moved that we’re all together.”

While addressing his absence from past reunions, Estevez, 62, said the anniversary get-together “was something that finally I felt I needed to do just for myself.” He also noted the fittingness of reuniting in the Windy City, where “The Breakfast Club” was filmed.

“It’s obviously the 40th anniversary, and it just felt like it was time,” Estevez explained. “Somebody told me that Molly said, ‘Well, does Emilio just not like us?’ And that broke my heart. And (I went), ‘No, of course, I love all of them.’ And that just made sense, so here I am.”

So when Pedro Pascal laid down his Roman sword for Joel’s rubber-grip revolver in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” the rugged actor admits he wasn’t entirely ready to rumble.

That’s a big deal as Pascal, 50, portrays the LeBron James of killing zombies (known as the “infected”) in the TV adaptation of the popular post-apocalyptic video game. Yet, series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann weren’t too bothered when Pascal gave his war wound update.

“I came in very injured,” Pascal tells USA TODAY during a joint interview with co-star Bella Ramsey. “And I remember Craig Mazin telling me, ‘Well, that’s certainly appropriate for where Joel is at. The more broken you are, the more right it is for Joel.’”

Wearing reading glasses and hiding a hand injury, Joel lives up to his banged-up billing in the Season 2 premiere of the Emmy-winning series (Sundays, 9 ET/PT on HBO and Max) that shot Pascal into leading-man superstardom. Tasked with bureaucratic jobs in the relative safety of the walled Wyoming compound, Joel cedes the warrior stage to emerging forces like his surrogate daughter Ellie (Ramsey) and her best friend Dina (series newcomer Isabela Merced).