One of the best field trips of my high-school career in the Chicago ‘burbs was to the city’s Briar Street Theatre to see the Blue Man Group. I don’t remember details of the show any longer, just the sensory overload. Neon and black light. Drumming, lots of drumming. And the…
The story goes like this: When reporters in New York asked Molly Brown to what she attributed surviving the Titanic disaster, she replied, “Typical Brown luck. We’re unsinkable.” And while Molly Brown will always be remembered best for her unsinkability, her life story goes far beyond that ill-fated voyage. This…
A pool party with cheap, good beer to benefit charity sounds like a recipe for success — assuming the weather holds out. And Starwood Hotels’ Susan Stiff has to believe it will, because the Buck a Beer Cool Pool Party at the Four Points by Sheraton Denver Southeast has come…
The Rwanda case is the most interesting case in the world,” says University of Denver adjunct law professor David Akerson. “It’s unbelievable: 800,000 killed in ninety days. Six times the rate of the German genocide. Still, you lose sight of the fact that they’re individual people being killed. That’s 800,000…
Anyone who’s sat through An Inconvenient Truth knows that a PowerPoint presentation — no matter how disturbing the facts — isn’t all that compelling. That’s why EcoArts, a Boulder nonprofit, combines world-renowned scientists with artists to create projects that are both scientifically accurate and moving. This summer, EcoArts invited the…
“It’s snowing right now. It has been since about three o’clock yesterday,” Kristin Lee, marketing manager at Arapahoe Basin, said from her office last week. A-Basin is the only ski area still open, and it expects to stay open into June this year. Even the new Montezuma Bowl, which was…
Colorado’s own TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, exists to illuminate what curator and founder Christopher May calls the truest form of cinema: the experimental. On May 23, TIE brings the old guard of the avant-garde to a one-night-only screening in the Tears McFarlane Mansion in Cheesman Park. Super-8 Summer…
Mayor John Hickenlooper is all about the green: He has an initiative to plant a million trees by 2025, a leafy jacket and his Greenprint Denver plan to prove it. But students on the Auraria campus are trying to one-up him by building the largest solar-energy project on a college…
Jean-François Duclos couldn’t mask a snide chuckle when I mistakenly referred to pétanque as a sport. “It’s more like an outdoor activity,” the executive director of Alliance Française said in his thick French accent. When I then asked him if this game — in which players toss shiny steel balls…
For years, Quiznos has wooed us into eating its toasted subs through wacky entertainment instead of boring sales pitches. We laughed when the fat lady got hit with the tranquilizer dart, looked on with civic pride when a fellow Denverite starred in a Super Bowl commercial — sans pants –…
The Classic Italian sub is a glorious mountain of salami, pepperoni, capicola, ham and mozzarella piled high between two thick slices of fresh-baked bread. The cheese is soft and gooey, and the bread’s corners have a perfect, light crunch. Mmm, mmm, toasty. The Classic Italian has been on the Quiznos…
It was only after National Guardsman Ryan Kelly returned from flying Black Hawk helicopters in Iraq that reading about the policy of rendition — when U.S. prisoners of war are transferred to the custody of a third party, with fewer restrictions on torture — inspired him to write rendition. “It’s…
“Money can be pretty serious,” says Lynn Grasberg. “How’s that for an understatement?” The musical comedienne knows there are some issues people need to laugh about, and money is certainly one of them. Tonight at Laughing All the Way to the Bank, she’s sure to help you forget about your…
In Brenda Denton’s younger days, she’d been Denver’s queen of punk — a bad-ass, bar-fighting feminist with a Mohawk, torn jeans and a spiked leather jacket. At 38, she’d traded in the leather jacket for a pantsuit and settled into the life of a serious student. The lover of film…
When Veronica Montoya first met students with the Denver Center for International Studies, a Denver Public Schools magnet program for grades six through twelve, she was so impressed, she wished she could go back to high school. “I’m vicariously living through them,” she says. That was four years ago. The…
When the Glenlivet was looking for a new way to market its Scotch whiskey, brand director Andy Nash led a brainstorming session asking his team to think of the other best things to come out of Scotland. The answer was golf, and the resulting promotion sounds like a helluva fun…
When local artist Peter Illig started scouring estate sales to feed his obsession for vintage stereos, it gave his promoter girlfriend an idea for a new event. “It’s sort of like a cross between a vintage guitar show, a record show, an electronics flea market, an old audio store and…
When Harry Dale gives a PowerPoint presentation on the I-70 corridor, it’s always riddled with photos of traffic jams and disturbing figures about the construction and environmental impacts of highway widening. He throws in some amusing cartoons. One shows cars stopped in traffic before an enormous “We apologize for the…
Call it a Colorado rite of passage, or penance for getting to live in such a beautiful place. Either way, it’s a familiar weekly ritual. You fly west at eighty miles per hour past Genesee, mapping out your runs for the day, dreaming of fresh powder and short lines. Then…
Stefan Veltri says the indoor-football experience is like watching an NFL game on a postage stamp. “It’s fast,” he says. “It’s the fastest game you’ll ever see.” And it’s rough, too, adds the assistant general manager for the Colorado Ice. “These guys are out to blast each other.” The Ice,…
Peggy Markel was one of the first people to bring the slow-food movement to the United States. It started in Italy, where the Boulder resident designs and directs culinary tours. Italians saw fast food taking over America and wanted to protect their trattorias and mom-and-pop restaurants from being overrun by…
For Amanda Rea, balancing creativity with making a living has not been easy. The fiction writer has had to juggle multiple low-paying jobs, sometimes getting up at 4 a.m. to write. When she moved to Denver, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop helped her create a writing routine. Today she’ll join in…
