Yes, we understand that few people are going to run out and drop twenty bucks on a sandwich. But the lobster-salad sandwich at the Ship Tavern is well worth the price. Essentially a lobster roll, it loads what must be half a Maine lobster, perfectly cooked, onto a homemade brioche roll, and binds everything together with a thin mayonnaise that tastes handmade. Take your time savoring your sandwich in one of the corner booths at the Ship Tavern, a venerable, if somewhat unseaworthy of late, institution in the Brown Palace. You've paid for the privilege.

Hot rod culture lives in Golden! From May until October, every first Saturday of the month, classic-car enthusiasts and John Milner wannabes roll up their sleeves and rev up their old cherry wheels to cruise up and down Golden Road. The action begins at 6 p.m. near an overcrowded Sonic Drive-In parking lot at 17191 South Golden Road; then, around 7:30, there's a group cruise into downtown Golden, with DJ Van Jeffries doing his Wolfman Jack from a van. Go on: Rediscover your inner Curt.

What's much more fun than watching American Idol every week? Trying to become the British Bulldog's Rock Idol. Competitors had to choose songs from such categories as "'90s" and "female vocalists." With the Bulldog's buy-one-get-one-free drafts and well drinks, there were plenty of people in the audience for the would-be Rock Idols to entertain, and in this competition, singing was second place to entertaining. Will Rock Idol return for a second season? Let's hope the folks at the British Bulldog are up for another round.

Gene Gillette held the stage with complete authority in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a crazed, cathartic bloodbath of a play dominated by scenes of torture, murder and dismemberment. As the psychotic Padraic, unhinged by the death of his cat, he was dopey, sentimental and terrifying, and you believed he was capable of every violent act attributed to him — and a good deal more.

Everyone's bigger than life in Tennessee Williams's melodrama about familial battles in the hot, lurid South, and everyone talks nonstop, but Brick is required to say very little for a long, long time. Chris Reid made the character complex and multi-dimensional, so that his extended silences pulsed with feeling and thought — and when he exploded, everything around him went white, like the landscape during a lightning flash. His Brick was cruel and cowardly, passionate, tormented and subtle, with a quietly twisted sense of humor. A deeply felt and resonant performance.

In Soul Survivor, Vincent C. Robinson clearly had a great time portraying the Devil as he attempted to win the soul of a quiet, rational man already quite happy with his life. He swaggered, teased and seduced the audience, uttered tee-hees of laughter that were both sinister and self-mocking, mugged, grimaced and, at one point, broke into an outrageous triumphal dance — and the audience enjoyed every moment just as much as he did.

Seymour is a nerdy soul who's faced with a Faustian bargain when he finds and tends a man-eating plant that offers him money, prestige and the love of Seymour's beautiful co-worker, Audrey — but only if Seymour keeps feeding it flesh. It's a ridiculous premise that fuels a goofy show, but Brandon Dill, an expressive actor with a strong voice, actually made you feel for the guy.

Jim Hunt has turned in some fine performances over the years, but in The Gin Game, his portrayal of an angry, agitated, aging man was his best yet — deep and committed, with every thought and emotion given its due. In the Paragon Theatre production, it was fascinating just watching the conflicting feelings traveling across his face, heart-rending to see this bluff, hale man fighting the increasing decrepitude of his own body with profoundly ill grace.

The old lady of My Old Lady comes with the dignified Paris apartment the protagonist has inherited and has to share with her until she dies. Now in her nineties — and with no intention of going anytime soon — the woman has led a life of culture and adventure, was for many decades the mistress of the protagonist's father, and can't understand why he's being such a big American baby about it. Neither could the audience, when Patty Mintz Figel brought this woman to wise and enchanting life.

Cordelia is utterly demented, way out in la-la land most of the time. But there's one marvelous moment in Squall when she's forced into something approaching sanity. It happens when the supposedly sane woman she's been stalking seems to flip into madness, and in a sudden reversal, Cordelia tries to comfort her. This is a role that's hard to play and could easily become monotonous to watch, but Karen LaMoureaux's performance in the Modern Muse production was so honest, naked, sad and frightening that we remembered it long after the play was over.