Lobal warming: It was just a year ago that Colorado lost one of its living legends--T.D. Lingo, the Fifties folksinger known as "The Drifter" who won a bagful of money on Groucho Marx's TV show and used it to buy the top of Laughing Coyote Mountain outside Black Hawk. There he established his Dormant Brain Research Laboratory and proceeded to do some, well, unusual research into the workings of the human brain--much of it from a hot tub where he would drink a six-pack of Coors every Saturday night and further his theories as to how multiple orgasms could activate the dormant portions of the human brain.
Anything for science.
After Lingo's death, the status of the lab was uncertain; boardmembers of Adventure Trails--the nonprofit group that ran the place--worried they'd be banned from the property while the courts searched for heirs of the man originally known as Paul Lezchuk. "To everyone's surprise," says Lingo disciple and Denver musician Neil Slade, the search turned up two sons, neither of whom wanted anything to do with the almost 300-acre property. As a result, Lingo's brother has given the board permission to use the site for this summer's brain camps, and Slade got custody of most of Lingo's papers--including his Self-Transcendence Workbook, which Slade hopes to publish this fall.
In the meantime, Slade has regained possession of the brain of Lingo's favorite University of Chicago professor. Slade uses it as a mascot for his band, the Brain Revolutionaries (just out: their CD Amygdala Brainbites). "Anytime we do anything, the brain is there," he says. And that included a recent yard sale, whose billing as a "brain sale" was draw enough for TV stations on a slow day. "My mother gave me hell for it," Slade says.
But as Lingo might have said: Mind over mother.
Airport '94: At last! A Denver International Airport story with a conclusion--and a happy ending at that. Several months ago (two DIA-opening postponements ago, in fact) Denver Post reporter Alan Katz was researching a story on the length of cab rides to the new airport when nature called. He asked the cabbie to pull over--and immediately was popped by a Denver cop for "urinating in public," not that there was any public to witness the event on deserted, twelve-mile-long Pena Boulevard. Katz contested the misdemeanor ticket as a matter of principle and last week emerged from court victorious, all charges dropped.
The next time the Nuggets make the playoffs, Mayor Wellington Webb might want to disguise himself before he sits in the stands (a Larry Miller mask, maybe?). The night before he missed his May 3 wake-up call for Good Morning America, Webb was at the game. And two weeks later, when the mayor was scheduled as the honored guest at Knight Fundamental's graduation, last-minute regrets had him called away to New York on "urgent airport business"--but when a disappointed parent turned on the TV that night, there Hizzoner was again, caught courtside by the cameras in Salt Lake City.
The best moment in the drippy When a Man Loves a Woman comes as pilot and enabler-of-alcoholic-wife Andy Garcia flies an America West plane through a storm into Denver and lands at what looks like a finished new airport--inspiring a burst of applause not just from his erstwhile passengers, but from Denver audiences as well.
