“Remember in middle school when you would send a flower or a candygram to someone? It’s like that,” explains Casey Cross about LUPEC Denver’s Crush Party No. 5. Except sub out the awkward adolescence, sterile classrooms and juvenile messages for drunken adulthood, a dark rock club with a dance-party attitude,…
I moved to Denver in 2005, so I never had the privilege of knowing the original Skylark Lounge — the one that lived for sixty years at 58 Broadway, where Barry’s on Broadway currently does its damnedest to live up to a legend — but I’ve always understood that no…
Sample one of Denver’s best dive bars at 8 p.m. Thursday, November 5, when Club 404, 404 Broadway, hosts a launch party for Westword Drunk of the Week columnist Drew Bixby’s Denver’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Mile High City. A true dive can’t be manufactured. It…
Genuine tequila is a remarkable product. Why? Blue agave. “It’s not like a grape or a field of wheat, where you’ll most likely get a crop every year,” explains Brian Selbitschka, bar manager at Boulder’s Zolo Southwestern Grill. No, the blue agave plant only reaches harvest maturity after eight to…
By its second year, the Denver Zombie Crawl had become one of the biggest zombie-walk events in the country, says founder Daniel Newman — and he hopes that this year, the Crawl’s fourth, it will be deemed the biggest in the world. But while Seattle currently holds the fancy-pants Guinness…
When Arizona tattoo artist Hollis Cantrell set the Guinness World Record for Fastest Tattoo Artist in November 2008 with 801 “AZ”-design tattoos in 24 hours, he issued a challenge: “I want them to look in the Guinness Book at my record,” he was quoted as saying, “and the next fucking…
Any ol’ bar, from snazzy to seedy, can offer $2 cans of PBR and still make more than a 300 percent profit on even the most egregious retail thirty-pack price; in Denver, plenty do, though often just during happy hour. The Squeaky Bean, however, is different. In a lot of…
How many reasons do you need to attend the Monday Night Football Locker Room Bash — the inaugural event benefiting the National Sports Center for the Disabled (NSCD) that invites super fans to watch tonight’s Broncos away game from inside the visiting team locker room? Let’s see: You’re inside the…
Probably best known for her Jane Austen mystery series, local author Stephanie Barron (who also publishes under the pen name Francine Matthews, though her birth name is Francine Stephanie Barron) is back in the literary limelight with the critically lauded English period novel The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia…
“Whenever I’m asked, ‘Who makes you laugh?’ or ‘Who would you pay to see?’ I don’t hesitate for a moment,” wrote George Carlin shortly before his death. “Lewis Black! He’s got it all: brains, balls and chops. And he sees through all the bullshit.” Carlin was just one in a…
Jennifer Mahnken, now treasurer of the Rocky Mountain Dart Association, remembers taking third in an open tournament and walking away with a “decent amount of money” even though she’d only played darts for a year or so. “It really just depends on the draw and how good of a day…
I’m an Equal Opportunity Imbiber, which means that any time friends want to get drunk and watch sports, I’m down, because sozzled sports fans are second to none when it comes to energy and enthusiasm — even if my enthusiasm is for alcohol and everyone else’s for the game. The…
I’ve always thought of Hamburger Mary’s as a place for burgers rather than beers. This is partially because I’m a breeder (and a married one at that), and Mary’s is a gay bar with a packed calendar of drag-show and Cycle Sluts Bingo entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with…
“Oh, we have to leave,” Brian says, not thirty seconds after stumbling into Swanky’s and finding me alone at the bar. “Immediately.” Brian is wearing a vintage Chicago Bears sweater, the white version of the blue one Mike Ditka sports in the now-infamous middle-finger photo. Swanky’s is a Green Pay…
Hey there, Unpublished Fiction Writer. Yeah, you with the vintage typewriter and dog-eared copy of Robert Brewer’s 2009 Writer’s Market: Whatsa matter, pal? Got more rejection letters than pages in that manuscript? Having nightmares where everyone in your life says, “It’s not right for me,” even out of context? What…
When Bette Davis agreed to play the second-fiddle role of Maggie Cutler in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), she was at the height of her career. But she’d been playing “a pile of mean, nasty characters and wanted some good press,” says Chris Loffelmacher, director of cultural programming…
The combination of liquor licenses and life’s errands has always struck me as clever. In college, I used to frequent a laundromat with a full bar; while grocery shopping, I’ve been known to crack open a near beer while slugging down the aisles. If I wanted to drink during a…
I don’t believe in ghosts. When my wife tells me about presences she’s seen and felt in the middle of the night, I tell her she was dreaming. When she tells me we can’t buy an attractive house in Five Points because a woman who committed suicide there decades ago…
Sometimes you wander into a neighborhood joint and find the stools occupied by a gaggle of sleepy, surly, set-in-their-ways regulars all too ready to give your sudden presence the dreaded stink-eye. “Who the fuck are you?” their silence and stares say, “and what the fuck are you doing in here?”…
Inside Len & Bill’s Lounge (2301 South Broadway), time has seemingly stopped. And I’m not just saying that because it’s a lazy way of describing how run-down everything is. When I wander in on an enervated afternoon, cop a lean on the creaky wooden bar and watch as John, the…
“This here’s an Indian hangout,” Gary reveals to me and three friends just a few minutes after we’ve bellied up to the bar he’s tending. Although there are no Native Americans present right now, he says that during the March PowWow, the owner brings in three bouncers at night just…
Eighty-two year-old JoAnn Turner, who bought the Rustic Tavern (5126 West 29th Avenue) with her husband 52 years ago and continues to oversee its daily operations, is showing me her photo albums. There’s so-and-so: His dog got hit by a car and we buried it out back. There’s Uncle Fred:…
