Displaying fields from a node reference

Hello! Hoping someone can steer me in the correct direction with what I am trying to do. I'm building a site for a social group I am involved with. After reading a few drupal books and going through all the examples, I seem to know just enough to know drupal can do just about anything, but not sure how to actually do all of it! So here is my situation:

1) I have created an Event content type
2) I have also created a Venue content type
3) I have created on the Event content type a Node Reference field that allows the author to select a venue.

That was fairly easy and works as it was intended. The venue title (name) shows up on the Event node, you can click it and it takes you to the appropriate Venue node.

The Venue node has the following fields: name, website, phone, address (using the simple google maps module to display a google map of the location), and notes (body).

Ideally, I don't want users to see the Venue page 1) because I'd like us to be able to put notes in there that we might not want public and 2) because users have short attention spans and it would just be easier if the necessary info (name, website, phone and address(map)) showed up on the Event node itself.

I have searched for some way to allow the author to select the Venue and then it all shows up on the Event node, but I have not seen any type of module that can accomplish that (I looked at the Entity Reference module, but that didn't seem to work). The only other thing I could think of would be to make a custom template file for the event node that would not display the reference node, but instead use it to grab the appropriate fields and display them. That seems like it might be the most logical method, but while I know PHP, I'm still learning how the Drupal programming works (have a book, but haven't started it yet).

So any ideas?

Additionally, is it possible on a reference node field to have an 'Add new' button or something? IE if the venue does not appear in the list, have an Add New button that will let the author create a new Venue node?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.