When Michael Mason was younger, he and his friends used to cruise downtown Denver in their parents’ cars. “When you’re young, you want to get older, and when you’re older, you want to have the same feelings as when you were younger,” he says. As an engineer who lives in…
This is my first spring in a new home with a big yard, and I find the task at hand overwhelming. Please don’t ask me if my garden is xeric, native or alpine. I can hardly tell the difference between the weeds and the flowers. But that’s all going to…
This year, Denver is bringing Earth Day to the people. Its Earth Day Fair — which for the past few years was a small exhibition in the Webb Building for city employees — has been opened up to all residents and will be held in Civic Center Park. “It’s probably…
Not only is the Green Apple Festival a free outdoor concert with the Neville Brothers, Rose Hill Drive and the Benevento/Russo Duo, but it’s also going to be the largest Earth Day celebration in the history of the Front Range — thus making Denver part of the largest Earth Day…
When he was on the road, local standup comedian Christopher Cannon used to check out a lot of antiques malls. Often he would find a booth selling photographs. Stacked in a box were somebody’s memories, family photos of smiling moms and dads. He wondered who the people were and where…
Why create a “boatercross” that sends kayakers barreling down a snow-covered mountain course with banked corners, berms, rollers and jumps? Why not? In its third year at Monarch Mountain, Kayaks on Snow is the kind of event that just organically came to be. “Our home town, Salida, down the road,…
“Sassy, strong and relevant” is how the Urban Bush Women describe themselves. Since 1984, this New York City ensemble has sought to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories of the disenfranchised to light through dance. Their latest collaboration — in which they join the men of Compagnie Jant-Bi,…
Anybody can take a tour and be told what to think about a work of art. Alison Croney at the Museum of Contemporary Art would rather get adults — and their kids — thinking for themselves about what they see. Enter Smart Brunch Sundays. Every other week, Croney leads parents…
Bob White got into art by accident. He started a vinyl and CD business in 1998. In the process, he taught himself graphic design, and soon he’d replaced his original concept with a design company that did advertising for small businesses. As he snapped and edited more and more pictures,…
The non-profit sector in this country is a $1.3 trillion industry, and the world’s seventh-largest economy. It encompasses more than 1.5 million organizations — everything from museums and hospitals to think tanks and church charities. So what happens to grassroots groups when they enter the world of 501(c)3s? The authors…
Since feeling the first teases of spring, I’ve been trying to prepare myself to get back into my warm-weather routine of jogging outside. I’ve always been the kind of girl who exercises in old, gray sweatpants and T-shirts from my high-school tennis days, so most of that prep work is…
Because the Boulder International Fringe Festival is a 100-percent accessible and unjuried event, its organizers decided the only fair way to pick the participating artists would be to pull their names from a hat. But just because the Fringe lottery is random doesn’t mean it comes without fanfare. Tonight’s Big…
If you’ve never thought of frog embryos as a thing of art and beauty, then you’ve yet to check out the image captured by University of Colorado biology professor Mike Klymkowsky in the course of his research. That photo took seventh place in the 2007 Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition…
In June 1975, Howard and Virginia Morton got a call from the boss of their eighteen-year-old son, Guy, in Arizona. He said that Guy had hitchhiked to Phoenix to try to get back the deposit on a car he couldn’t afford, and never returned to work. A dozen years later,…
For more than eight years, Sharon Skiba waited behind locked doors. Her life had stopped on February 7, 1999 — the day her son and nine-year-old granddaughter disappeared. In the days and weeks and months that followed, the house she’d once been happy to share with them became her prison…
For their Asian pop-culture boutique, Andrew Novick and his wife, Janene Hurst, wanted a name that was too long and translated funny — like the nonsensical English phrases on Japanese T-shirts. Inspired by a plastic model of a dessert they spotted in the window of a Japanese cafe, they named…
Information is power, especially when navigating the intricacies of the law. Whether you’re stuck in a custody case, worried about a DUI or getting ready to sign a new lease, a little education can help. To that end, the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association and Colorado Free University present People’s Law…
Poets hate war, especially this one. And they all do readings that push their own anti-war agendas. But that’s often just one lone voice screaming into the wilderness. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have thirty voices screaming into the wilderness?” That thought, posed by local poet Wayne Gilbert, sparked fellow…
Colorado ACORN has a new weapon in its fight to end the foreclosure crisis. It’s still lobbying for tighter regulation of sub-prime lending and using direct action to get big lenders to change their practices. But today, the community organization is also bringing struggling borrowers face-to-face with the banks they…
It’s rare to see a film that so eloquently captures the worst and best of humanity, but War/Dance does it beautifully. Set in war-torn northern Uganda, the documentary follows the Patongo school, in the middle of a massive refugee camp, as its children prepare for a national music competition. We…
Bob Holme had a fantasy in mind when he came up with the idea for the Ruby Hill Rail Yard. He pictured some kid tearing up the Winter X Games ten years from now who wouldn’t have otherwise had a chance to start snowboarding. “To me, that would be the…
A “big beer” is not defined by the size of the mug or bottle, according to the experimental brewers and beer lovers behind the Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival that kicks off tonight in Vail. The “big” is for the alcohol content — a minimum of 7 percent by…
