Strung Out

Loosely based on High Fidelity, a 1989 documentary (not to be confused with the comedy of the same name) about the Guarneri Quartet, Curious Theatre’s production of OPUS provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the personal and professional lives of a world-famous quartet on the eve of a White House performance…

The more things change, the more they stay the same at Don’s

A great big glass garage door, open for warm weather, facing Sixth Avenue; more booths and tables with stools; a back-patio-length green paint job, aluminum roof and industrial heater; high-def flat-screen televisions and Golden Tee and Silver Strike video games; touch-screen point-of-sale registers; clean bathrooms with space to stretch out,…

Coming and Going

Max Silverman, protagonist in Vintage Theatre’s production of The Goodbye People, knows he’s going to die. Soon. But before he does, he’s going to resurrect his Coney Island hot dog stand, closed for twenty years. At least that’s his plan. His daughter, Shirley, a fledging television-commercial actress with a new…

Dirt Don’t Hurt

Food justice, says Adam Brock, project manager for the GrowHaus, a non-profit urban farm and market in Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, is about “making good, clean, fair food accessible to everyone, not just people who can afford to shop at Whole Foods.” This zinger seems especially relevant for denizens of Elyria-Swansea…

Ride the Lightning

Like the history of hooch, Max Watman’s new book, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, is complicated and unabashedly dynamic. “It’s a hard book to sell,” Watman admits, “but I think that’s what makes it fun. There’s as much true crime as there is foodie exploit…

Zio Romolo’s Alley Bar

I like to go out and get blotto as much as the next self-respect-less drunk. I do not, however, like having to piece together whole portions of benders using leftover evidence and eyewitness accounts. Yet this is exactly my fate the morning after spending a solid six hours at Zio…

Windy City Antics

When improv hotshot and Bovine Metropolis player Justin Franzen began the weekly J&K Fun Hour (with Kerstin Caldwell) at the Mercury Cafe more than a month ago, his goal was to give Denver an independent long-form evening in a bar setting similar to what he had in the back room…

Getting down with the mojitos at Root Down

I’m almost never in a hurry to get drunk. Drunk is somewhere I often end up, yeah, but whenever I rush to get there, I miss all the great stops along the way — stops like More Talkative Than Usual, Can’t Stop Smiling and So Happy to Be Here (regardless…

French-Fried Art

Here’s the thing about doing an art show that celebrates potatoes: Inevitably, a handful of creatives will try to involve McDonald’s french fries in their pieces. Which is great, except that McDonald’s fries simply will not adhere to any surface for an entire month. “It’s amazing,” says Crissy Robinette, executive…

Super Bowl, Super Party

Unlike other parties, which regularly occur in gathering places of all shapes and sizes, Super Bowl parties happen almost exclusively in the home. The television as a necessary party apparatus partially explains this phenomenon, though there’s never enough couch space, and Jenny always makes her Mexican layer dip with olives,…

Beer Pong Goes Big

Wanna play beer bong in public? Easy: No fewer than four organizations and two dozen bars make that happen almost any night of the week. Wanna win the $1,100-plus entry into the 2011 World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas? Then you’ll need to join the Gingperial Beer Pong…

Roll out the Brown Barrel — you’ll have a barrel of fun

The telephone at the Brown Barrel Tavern is ringing, but owner Bob Lyons pays it no mind. He’s mid-conversation with the only guy at the bar under forty, something about sub-floors and plastic sheeting and mold. He finishes filling two mugs of $2.25 Budweiser and eventually gets around to picking…

Forget The Rules With These Not-So-Good Girls

Millions of people have read The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right — the 1995 bestseller that encourages women to “rarely return his calls” and “wear sheer black pantyhose and hike up your skirt” — and every one of them has an opinion. Some who choose…

Bounce With Me

It takes me less than five minutes to soak through the front of my T-shirt, but I can’t stop. With my hair clumped together and plastered to my forehead, I jump, jump, jump, bounce, roll, drop, fall, jump, jump. Sometimes I bound straight up and down ten or twelve times…

Drinking whisky is a risky business at Pints Pub

Cinderblock sober and with a few moments to mull, I could probably sound intelligent on the subject of whiskey — on the differences between bourbon, scotch, single-malt, straight, blended, Kentucky, Tennessee, Irish, Canadian, Japanese, etc., as well as why it’s sometimes spelled with an ‘e’ and other times not. My…

Heebonism Hedonism

Woe was the Jew on the Christmas Eve of old, the lonely, left-out Jew with a $1.25 scoop of fried rice and a $10 ticket to Whatever Disney’s Shilling. But not since 2007, when Heebonism made its debut in Denver, has that young(ish), probably (though not necessarily) single Jew had…

Get Schnockered in Jolly Style

Bar crawls are tough to plan. Some people do it by selecting all the spots in advance, contacting the bars to arrange drink specials and then inviting all of their friends. Some don’t. But these crawls are notoriously unsuccessful because the route sucks, the drink specials don’t materialize, friends bail…

Chilling at the Pepsi Center’s Tuaca Chill Zone

Though the NBA is my least-favorite spectator sport, I always accept free tickets, especially when those tickets are in the nineteenth row and accompanied by a free ride. With my initial investment at $0 and my transportation on lockdown, the financial anal rape of an $8 beer (after tip) feels…

Beating the Drumsticks

When the Broncos face off against the New York Giants tonight, it will be the first time since 1963 — and only the third time ever — that Denver has hosted a Thanksgiving game. And that’s awesome. Significantly less awesome, the Donkeys have never won a Thanksgiving game at home…

Sinfully Smooth

When C.V. Howe, speaker of the brewhouse for the “beer geeks gone berserk” at Boulder’s Avery Brewing, talks about “big beer,” he’s talking about “beer with intense, bold flavor, something that is immediately at odds with the traditional notion of what the average American has been taught beer is supposed…

Angels Among Us

Keith L. Hatten, artistic director for Shadow Theatre Company, cites two very important experiences as inspiration for his direction of Christmas of the Angels. The first is hearing his office manager tell the story of being rescued from the 97th floor of the World Trade Center’s second tower by a…