ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

part 3 of 3 Best Experience for Those Who Take Walking for Granted "Spokespeople" Children's Museum of Denver 2121 Children's Museum Dr. Strap yourself into a wheelchair and play ball at the Children's Museum's "Spokespeople" exhibit. Just try to. There's nothing better than firsthand experience in maneuvering around corners and...
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part 3 of 3
Best Experience for Those Who Take Walking for Granted
“Spokespeople”
Children’s Museum of Denver
2121 Children’s Museum Dr.

Strap yourself into a wheelchair and play ball at the Children’s Museum’s “Spokespeople” exhibit. Just try to. There’s nothing better than firsthand experience in maneuvering around corners and backing up to make you appreciate the skill involved in living every day with a disability. It’s a great experience for kids–and an even better one for some adults we know.

Best Place for Kids to Rock Out
Colorado School of Mines Museum
16th and Maple streets, Golden

The antique ore car out front is kept stocked with free rock and mineral samples the school doesn’t need anymore, and the rule inside is that if it’s not under glass, you can touch it. That’s why on any given day you can find kids crawling under tables in search of dinosaur fossils, gemstones and other geological wonders at the School of Mines’ display hall, the repository for all the mineral collections owned by the State of Colorado. Minor miners will find a 600-pound chunk of pure copper from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a walk-in cave, an underground-mine-light collection donated by the state’s former chief coal-mine inspector, and what may be the world’s best specimen of vanadinite, an orangy-brown mineral from Morocco. The admission fee is really rockin’: It’s free.

Best Rock
“Alma King” Rhodochrosite crystal
Denver Museum of Natural History
2001 Colorado Blvd.

The museum became the proud parent of the six-inch, five-and-a-half-pound “Alma King” last fall, after Golden rock collectors Bryan and Kathryn Lees discovered it in Colorado’s Sweet Home Mine–which is, along with sites in South Africa and Peru, one of the best places to find rhodochrosite in the world. The glowing red crystal, embedded on a crystallized quartz matrix, is the largest known specimen in the world, so it’s quite a coup for the museum’s Coors Gem and Mineral Hall, where the rock will permanently reside. According to Bryan Lees, “The Alma King is to the mineral world what the Mona Lisa is to the art world.” Now if we could only tell what it was thinking.

Best Fun in the Dark
Candlelight Tours
Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys
1880 Gaylord St.

What could be more Christmasy than a museum that looks like fallout from the Nutcracker Suite? The Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys houses antique toys and rare dolls, all of which seem quite ready to jump up and start dancing, especially when seen by flickering candlelight. Chamber music and fancy goodies (sugar plums?) round out the annual tours, making them a popular item with adults and dreamy-eyed kids.

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Best Christmas Festival
Georgetown
Georgetown’s got gingerbread to spare–the pretty mountain town’s lacy Victorian homes make it the perfect place for an old-fashioned Christmas right out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. So it follows that the festival held here every December would feature all the nostalgic trappings: roasted chestnuts, sleigh rides, strolling carolers, wassail at the Hamill House Museum, a children’s Santa Lucia procession and a decidedly European St. Nicholas (the kind who wears velvet robes and a holly wreath) to oversee the proceedings. Be sure to wear comfortable boots–it’s a winter wanderland.

Best People’s Arts Festival
Denver Black Arts Festival
Held in July in the western meadows of City Park, the Black Arts Festival is dedicated to much more than a good time–though you can certainly have one there. Appreciation of culture is the festival’s focus: There’s a model Nigerian village, a food court where a mouth-watering smell wafts off barbecue grills, educational pavilions for both children and elders, Afrocentric art, a community parade and, God bless it, a gospel music stage. Check that out and you will see the light.

Best New-Age Arts Festival
Renaissance Festival
Boulder Central Park

Is your idea of an outdoor arts festival a mass public jostle, complete with sunburn? Or do you prefer one that encourages people to get in touch with themselves, rather than with the people passing by? Well, where else but in Boulder would you ever find such a thing? The New Renaissance Fest, held Labor Day weekend in Boulder Central Park, features solar-powered stages, booths touting alternative technology, holistic health practices, spiritual inner direction, psychics and a Women’s Moon Hut, which must be the ultimate coffee klatch for ladies. The only rule: Leave your cynicism at the door. Peace, man.

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Best Festival Food Experience
Cherry Blossom Festival
Sakura Square

There are plenty of reasons to come downtown and visit the summertime Cherry Blossom Festival, not the least of which is the chance to visit a Buddhist temple and learn more about a culture that’s had roots in Colorado for decades. Ah, but what about the food? Head to the temple’s gym, set up with long family-style dining tables and ringed with booths slinging succulent yakitori (skewered barbecued chicken, to the uninitiated), yakisoba (the same thing, with a side of buckwheat noodles and sauteed vegetables), traditional sushi, Japanese beer on tap and bean-paste sweets. Everyone chips in–grandmas and wee kids alike–assembling platters as you watch, ferrying food from the kitchen in giant woks that could double as small swimming pools, and graciously supplying the tables with complimentary green tea. We’re talking home cookin’.

Best Arts Festival Cleanup
Cherry Creek Arts Festival
The Cherry Creek Arts Festival doesn’t really need any introduction–it already attracts hundreds of thousands of people to peruse pretty classy artwork on the pretty classy streets of Cherry Creek North every July. But take a moment to imagine the amount of trash such a crowd might leave behind, and then consider this: Only 7 percent of last year’s garbage was sent to a landfill. The rest was sorted for recycling, including leftover eats, which went to charity. The International Festivals Association was so impressed it honored the Creek fest by naming it the “Best Environmental Program” in the world. As far as we know, though, none of the festival’s artwork has ever ended up in a dumpster.

Best Free Entertainment
Community Concerts
Scientific and Cultural Facilities District

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Here’s evidence of what the Science and Cultural Facilities District, its polar-bear emblem and the tax dollars behind both is all about: free outdoor family concerts held in parks throughout the area. Local talent appears on stages from Littleton to Northglenn on lazy summer evenings, offering a gamut of music from bluegrass to jazz. Next time your tight budget tempts you to park the kids in front of the TV for entertainment, remember this.

Readers’ choice: 16th Street Mall

Best Storyteller
Opalanga Pugh
Pugh draws inspiration from the griots, or oral historians, she encountered long ago as an exchange student in West Africa. Because of their influence, she’s much more than a storyteller, infusing her performances with an enthusiasm for folklore and family histories and encouraging her listeners to find out who they are and where they came from. Pugh’s philosophy: “Turn off the TV and turn on the Tell-A-Vision”–advice any child, and a great many adults, would do well to follow (especially now that The Simpsons is in summer reruns).

Best Ethnic Dance Group
Grupo Tlaloc
Patricia Sigalia’s Aztec dance troupe Grupo Tlaloc turns heads wherever it goes, drawing oohs and aahs with magnificent feathered headdresses and authentic costuming worn by historically correct dancers. Study trips to Mexico ensure that these Aztecs look, move and sound like the real, extinct thing. But we believe that’s the only sacrifice they’ve had to make.

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Best Art Classes for Kids
Museum of Outdoor Arts
7600 E. Orchard Rd., Englewood

In the first place, the Museum of Outdoor Arts is a great cultural romp for people of any age–its wall-less expanses, spread around the Denver Tech Center area and dotted with sculptures, are instantly inviting to picnickers and art lovers alike. But its artist-taught children’s programs–from afternoon and Saturday workshops during the school year to a full array of half- and full-day classes, sculpture intensives and week-long camps during the summer–take the MOA concept to its limit. Budding artists even get a taste of the real world; student works are regularly featured in revolving museum exhibits.

Best Way to Bug Your Kid
“Backyard Monsters: The World of Insects”
Denver Museum of Natural History

The “Backyard Monsters” show was nothing short of spectacular, with monstrous robotic insects and arachnids, including a black widow spider, carpenter ants, a leggy praying mantis and other flying fellows the size of two basketball players, all placed fetchingly around every corner of the exhibit. Aside from simply being really impressive, it gave one a new appreciation for scorpions.

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Best Star-Gazing
Andy Garcia, Gabrielle Anwar
When the cast and crew of Miramax Films’ crime thriller Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead were shooting in town last August, local rubberneckers got an eyeful of the handsome Garcia and the ravishing Anwar at the Casino Cabaret in Five Points (renamed the Silver Naked Lady for the film), the Bluebird Theater and half a dozen other Denver locations. The picture, in which Garcia plays a reformed mobster trying to do one last job for his boss–and in which dozens of local extras vied to get their mugs in the frame–is set for a September release.

Best Campus Film Series
International Film Series
University of Colorado, Boulder

Following the death last October of Virgil Grillo, the linchpin of CU’s film-studies program, the entire thing nearly collapsed. But now film’s up and running again at CU, and Muenzinger Auditorium is once more the site of Wednesday-through-Sunday screenings. Films by Fassbinder, Greenaway and Warhol were featured recently, as well as Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” and even more exotic fare from Iran and Korea. Tickets are still $3.50. Coming attractions: Baraka, Oleanna and To Live.

Best Movie Theater Concessions
Landmark Theaters (Mayan, Esquire, Chez Artiste)
Denver’s art houses have long featured Peaberry’s coffees, Celestial Seasonings iced teas, a tony selection of European chocolate bars and fresh popcorn with real butter. So what’s new? How about corn popped in a health-conscious canola oil that actually tastes good. Or Java Gems–espresso beans dipped in milk chocolate. Or the brand-new “Devil Girl Choco-Bar,” named for the notorious R. Crumb cartoon character. “Eat me,” she advises on the label; “It’s Bad for You.” Hip marches on.

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Best Movie Theater (Classic)
Esquire
590 Downing St.

This old favorite, which opened as the Hiawatha in the 1920s, might be old hat were it not for its brand-new, $30,000 Sony Dynamic Digital Sound system, featuring eight tracks and left- and right-hand Surround. If you saw the Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved or The Madness of King George here, you know what we’re talking about. There are 450 seats in the main auditorium downstairs, 150 in the far less admirable balcony house.

Best Movie Theaters (High-Tech)
Mann Bowles Crossing 12
8035 W. Bowles Ave., Littleton

There’s not much to praise in today’s soulless shoebox theaters, but all twelve houses in this six-month-old multiplex at the back of the Bowles Crossing Shopping Center feature Universal’s DTS Sound, refined by the Lucas THX process. The handicap-access ramps in front of the building are state-of-the-art, and each theater has not only wheelchair spaces mid-orchestra, but regular floor seating for companions of wheelchair patrons, as well. The two lobby-length concession stands accommodate 24 serving stations, which cuts down on the waiting time. Houses range from 175 to 400 seats. Nice curtains, too.

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Best Second-Run-Movie Theater
The Oriental
4335 W. 44th Ave.

The balcony remains closed inside this 640-seat northwest Denver classic built in 1922, but at least the doors are open again following many years of darkness. After one brief revival venture failed last fall, locally owned Tankersley Enterprises took over the Oriental just before Christmas. For $3.50 you can see played-out hits like Forrest Gump, The Lion King or Pulp Fiction amid homey splendor. And the nachos at the concession stand aren’t bad. Coming this summer: matinees seven days a week.

Readers’ choice: Bear Valley Super-Saver Cinema

Best Locally Produced Film
The Secret of Roan Inish
Jones Entertainment Group, a division of Englewood-based Jones Intercable, struck gold early in the year with this Irish charmer about a little girl (Jeni Courtney) who discovers her family’s most enchanting secrets–a little brother afloat in his cradle and a mythical creature that’s half-woman, half-seal–when she goes to live with her salt-of-the-earth grandparents (Mick Lally and Eileen Colgan). John Sayles’s biggest commercial hit has played well across the country since February.

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Best Pre- or Post-Movie Watering Spot
Mel’s Bar and Grill
235 Fillmore St.

Hard by the Cherry Creek and Colorado Plaza multiplexes, this lively and polished restaurant and boite is the creation of Melvyn and Jane Master, charming Englishpersons both. They turn out a beautiful bowl of polenta soup, a great hamburger and fabulous fish, as well as pouring a very nice glass of wine from their own vineyard in Provence. The crowd is sophisticated, the pianist knows his stuff and the chow is first-rate. Mel’s is just the place to chew over the latest Tarantino or Eastwood masterpiece.

Best Drive-In
East Drive-In Theater
12800 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora

In another year or two, the last vestiges of America’s once-prosperous outdoor movie-viewing life may be lost forever to soaring real estate prices. But for now our perennial local winner remains a winner–for the heat in its corn dogs, the shimmer of its pastel neon and the happy variety of the clientele out there on the plains leading to Kansas. Most of the hanging window speakers still work, and here the double feature remains a time-honored tradition. Just lay off the horn for once, willya?

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Best Movie Double Bill
Andre, The Client
Movie One Kipling Cinema 6
We thought it was a John Grisham novel about professional wrestling.

Best Local Theater Production
Six Degrees of Separation
Theatre on Broadway

The stunning regional premiere of John Guare’s lively social comedy took up the ancient theme of brotherhood and respon-sibility in fully contemporary terms, finding a new way to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Director Steven Tangedal designed a superb set and found the best acting and design team to do this fine play justice, opening up one of those rare vistas of understanding about our culture and ourselves.

Readers’ choice: Phantom of the Opera

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Best Local Shakespearean Revival
Cardenio
Thanks to Lakewood’s Glenbridge Publishing, a long-lost play supposedly by William Shakespeare turned up in Colorado this year. In his recent book, author Charles Hamilton makes a case (complete with handwriting analysis) for Cardenio–which is reprinted in the tome–being the Shakespeare play that was performed for royalty in 1612 and known at the time as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy. We’re not sure know how the Elizabethans liked it, but Cardenio was a hit at its debut reading in Denver this year.

Best Season for a Theater Company
CityStage Ensemble
Led by artistic director Dan Hiester, CityStage is more socially and politically inclined than most local troupes, and it just keeps getting better. Particularly notable this year were the ensemble’s splendid production of Moliere’s Tartuffe and its wonderful adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man. But even the dated and perverse Marat/Sade was an intelligent, gripping and significant event.

Best Performance by an Actor
James Gale
Ad Hoc Theater Company

Gale blustered and raged as the title character in Ad Hoc’s production of King Lear, but he did it without sacrificing delicate nuances of feeling. As Shakespeare’s old king more “sinned against than sinning” began to face his flaws and the consequences of his unbridled pride and moral blindness, Gale unlocked the doors of despair so gradually and convincingly that we had to follow him through.

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Best Performance by an Actress
Deborah Persoff
Theatre on Broadway

The most outstanding role a woman could have hoped for this year was as Ouisa, the highly cultured yet ditzy art dealer of John Guare’s hip comedy Six Degrees of Separation. As a comic actress, Persoff mastered the perfect tone of intelligence and imbecility that the part requires. And as a dramatic actress, she reached inward to her own wellspring of maternal feeling and social consciousness. Every word felt authentic, insightful and new.

Best Supporting Actor
Erik Tieze
Compass Theatre Company

A recent immigrant to Denver from New York, Tieze is one of the best things to happen to this city’s theater scene–ever. Everything he does is riveting, and in the Compass production of Hamlet, he gave Laertes genuine familial feeling and boyish impetuousness, a new revelation of the character. Tieze’s performance as the faltering Lieutenant Swift in Industrial Arts’ Nebraska was likewise revelatory and original.

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Best Supporting Actress
Mia Todd
Compass Theatre Company

The wonderfully versatile Todd’s delicate reading of Ophelia in Hamlet was absolutely authentic–a superb, fragile, natural performance in which she allowed glimpses of impotent anger to surface through the sorrow. Like Erik Tieze, she also stood out in Industrial Arts’ Nebraska, playing a more substantial role as a spiteful, coarse woman betrayed by her husband and embittered by the experience. Todd seethed and glistened with nasty rage–and turned to ice before our eyes.

Best Season for an Actress
Roslyn Washington
Eulipions

In The Trials and Tribulations of Staggerlee Booker T. Brown, Washington was doublecast as Sweet Thing, a slut with principles, and Bertha Butt, a slut without principles who moonlighted as the Devil’s henchwoman. She brought so much caustic wit and sophisticated style to both roles that she anchored the whole show. After a moving performance as the narrator in Eulipions’ Black Nativity, she went on to be the still point of the turning world in Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery. The quiet dignity of her Big Mama was the steadying force in the young protagonist’s life–and a powerful moral presence in ours.

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Best Director
Dan Hiester
CityStage Ensemble

Hiester’s sleek direction was the driving force behind CityStage’s breathless, bright production of Tartuffe. The actors moved gracefully about the small stage at Jack’s Theater as if they had all the space in the world, the comic timing was flawless and every action splendidly suited Hiester’s intense interpretation of Moliere’s classic comedy about religious hypocrisy. Best of all, the casting was superb.

Best Two Planks and a Scarf Theater Company
Compass Theatre Company
Compass chooses simply not to use scenery, designing sets that consist of nothing more than a raked stage and a piece of cloth draped across the back. And what you don’t see won’t hurt you. Once an audience has arrived, the Compass cast members provide splendid bare-bones performances. The group’s best assets are Christopher Selbie and Joey Wishnia–the best Hamlet and the most adorable Polonius ever to hit the Denver boards.

Best Comic Performance
Terry Burnsed
CityStage Ensemble

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In the title role of Tartuffe, Burnsed gave Moliere’s sycophantic hypocrite moments of sincerity–moments when he actually appears to believe what he’s saying himself. Those brief moments then blossomed into manipulative lies, especially when Burnsed’s Tartuffe tried to rationalize his own appetites, giving way to such bleak darkness that the character’s antics were as scary as they were hilarious.

Best One-Act By a Local Playwright
Ralph’s Play
Pat Mahoney

Mahoney created an eccentric and engrossing little microcosm in his story about a sailor and a barkeep who meet and discover their destiny as future writing partners. There was so much mad truth to the odd little tale staged at the RiverTree Theater, so much of the world impinging on the action of the two captivating misfits, that the unlikeliest elements of the story were the most appealing–and believable. The only trouble? Mahoney’s charmer didn’t go on even longer.

Best Ensemble Performance
Eulipions
African-American culture was the subject of Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, a story about a twelve-year-old girl and the eight “Big Mamas” who raise her. But the themes were universal. The play’s wise women had their own methods of healing–way outside the mainstream of medical practice–and somehow the play itself had a similarly healing effect on the viewer. Director Dwayne Carrington expertly orchestrated the ensemble cast, using African music and dance to underscore the women’s personal histories and emphasizing details of dress and movement that ultimately shone light on the little girl’s American heritage as well. The whole evening shook up complacencies.

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Best Musical
Ain’t Misbehavin’
Eulipions

The music of Thomas “Fats” Waller is gutsy, wise and full of heart–and the grand old man would have been delighted with the quality of this Eulipions production. Ain’t Misbehavin’ was a celebration of Waller’s birthday (he would have been ninety this past year), and director Buddy Butler kept up a party mood, moving his performers down into the audience, demanding participation and eliciting peals of laughter. Without benefit of dialogue, Butler and his cast created a unified work–a history of Waller’s music that spoke volumes about the changing realities of American culture.

Best Children’s Theater Production
What Really Happened Once Upon a Time
Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities

Pamela Clifton’s play defended the real victims of many a bedtime story–the wolves. The local playwright pictured the wolves of “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Riding Hood” as noble creatures, misunderstood and indicted out of prejudice rather than proof. A mild little lesson about not judging others too quickly and an even milder message about how wolves have been slandered gave even very little kids something to think about in this show. Mercifully, the in-jokes and clever repartee amused all of the adults in the audience, as well–and the original music by Martha Yordy fit perfectly.

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Best One-Man Show
The Education of Walter Kaufmann
Denver Center Theatre Company

Writer/performer Kevin Kling’s The Education of Walter Kaufmann was controversial because his central metaphor had a lot to do with cannibalism. But those with no appetite for the playwright’s lavish banquet missed the point. Kling creates his special brand of one-man theater out of the raw material of his own life, spicing it with honest-to-God insights from the world’s top literary and scientific geniuses. The result here was new myth–a story that tingled your spine, challenged your assumptions and tickled your wit.

Best Two-Person Show
Parallel Lives
Jack’s Theater

Based on The Kathy and Mo Show, by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, this feminist sketch comedy ripped and roared through the tribulations and delights of fifteen characters, all of them played with symbiotic hilarity by Kimmy Gamble and Denise Perry. From a bizarre revisionist creation myth to a contemporary cowboy bar, Parallel Lives explored women’s lives and the war between the sexes with wry goodwill, reminding us that you can mock human pretensions without despising human beings.

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Best Experimental Play
Star Fever
Denver Center Theatre Company

People in Eastern Europe have seen a lot of absurd human behavior of late–and it took someone from that volatile corner of the world to bring the postwar Theater of the Absurd into the present. Czech director Pavel M. Dobrusky, who has an ongoing artistic relationship with the Denver Center, pulled off that neat trick with Star Fever, a play full of comic inventions and riffs on seemingly pointless human activities. Loosely based on The Bacchae, by Euripides, Dobrusky’s work undertook the dissection of contemporary celebrity worship–and the evils of television–in wholly modern terms.

Best Alternative Theater Piece
The Home Medical Shopping Network
The Bug Performance and Media Art Center

This innovative performance piece was weird, funny and bugged out, taking on the business of medicine and the inanity of cable TV, ridiculing them both, and then good-naturedly including us all in the satire. The Home Medical Shopping Network wasn’t the sort of show to appeal to everyone, but the multimedia event was full of rage, high spirits, dark implications, nasty innuendos and great wit.

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Best Slam-Bangin’ Poets
Colorado Slam Team
Poets aren’t wimps. And they don’t lounge around, secluded on velvet couches, etching tepid verse with feather pens. If you need proof of that, just go to a poetry slam, where words fly through the air with athletic force. The literary sport has become so popular that a National Poetry Slam Festival was organized last year in Asheville, North Carolina. And we sent our own healthy crew (Benjamin Porter-Lewis, Henry Alarmclock, John Wright and Devin Scheimberg) to spew language with the best in the nation. When the dust settled, our boys had placed eighth in a field of 24 teams. It could have been verse.

Best Poetry Series
Toads in the Garden
The Daily Grind Coffee House

The series known as Toads in the Garden happens every Thursday night at the Daily Grind Coffee House in the Auraria campus’s Tivoli Student Union. Hosted by Poiesis newsletter editor Catherine O’Neill–who ought to know what’s what and who’s who in the local poetry world–it features both open readings and accomplished, often published, guest readers. The series has a subtle clout lacking in other similar ventures. And drive. And stamina. It’s the beat place to meet.

Best Unexpected Collection of Phillip K. Dick Books
The Black Pearl
1665 Pearl St.

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The Black Pearl, a relative newcomer on the coffeehouse scene, is not only full of beans, but it also has an impressive collection of first-edition Phillip K. Dick books. For that matter, Dick was something of a black pearl himself–the sci-fi author, who spent considerable time in Colorado, was known for his dark, polished tales.

Best ‘Zine
Rollerderby
Bestiality. Transsexuality. Cute guys. In her controversial mega-‘zine Rollerderby, ex-Suckdog matron Lisa Crystal Carver touches on (fondles?) these and other unseemly topics with a fearless, puerile, scary wit. In fact, if they weren’t so gosh-darn funny, most of the articles could be dismissed as run-of-the-mill porn. If you’re easily offended, you’ll want to stay as far away from this publication as possible. But if you get a kick out of the scummy side of the human psyche, give it a read. We promise you won’t go to hell for it later.

Best Way to Learn Colorado History
The Colorado Prospector
Do you ever wonder what Colorado newspapers had to say about particular events back when men were men and editors were as likely as the piano player to get shot? The editor of the Colorado Prospector certainly hopes so. This Parker-based paper reprints articles from newspaper archives, with each issue devoted to a particular subject–politics, settlers and, of course, gunfights, everyone’s favorite Wild West pastime. Our most wanted: a recent issue filled with articles about the 1860 capture and trial of “Pikes Peak desperado” James A. Gordon.

end of part 3

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