A couple of months ago, Zo Frechette led a writing workshop for a group of creative teenagers. They worked on novels, kept journals, turned their life stories into memoirs and proudly read their poems and short stories aloud. At the end of the class, the instructor felt as though she’d…
FRI, 2/4 When Josh Levy was studying music and art at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, he noticed that his creativity and focus heightened when he worked around other people. Years later, while teaching at a summer arts school for children in New…
Afeni Shakur is still giddy from the call she received last week: Tupac: Resurrection, a documentary film about her famous son, had been nominated for an Academy Award. “We’re still screaming,” Afeni says via telephone. “All we ever wanted was for Tupac to have the opportunity to tell his story…
The control booth at Globalsound Recording Studio in Broomfield rings with artillery fire as the sounds of rockets exploding and rounds firing from AK-47 and M-16 rifles boom through the speakers. In the vacuum of the studio, soundproofed and windowless, it’s a violent, percussive wall of noise. “That’s freakin’ scary,”…
FRI, 1/21 Colorado aesthetes, mark your PDAs: Here comes another extracurricular activity for the creative class. Tonight, the Colorado Theatre Guild introduces Theatre Night Out, a nomadic tour of area venues and productions held on the third Friday of every month. Taking a cue from the wildly successful First Friday…
Denver cut a strange psychological profile this past year, as schizo as a Colorado winter. The Nuggets filled the Pepsi Center, and the Broncos fumbled. Suburbia got hip, and Colfax got somewhat civilized. It was a good year for the young and upwardly mobile, and a bad year for homeless…
Christmas is coming, and Meggie Sobel is holding court in the food court at FlatIron Crossing, a chattering alley where weary consumers, strung out from the hunt, commiserate over plates of fluorescent food. Sipping an Orange Julius at a table near the customer-service desk, Sobel talks to a crimson-haired woman…
THURS, 12/16 If I had an alter ego, she would be sporty. Very sporty. Extreme-sports sporty. I’d snowboard (very sporty for a Colorado native who’s never hit a slope). I’d parasail. I’d skydive. Hell, I’d be able to just play a game of softball without shrieking like a schoolgirl whenever…
Growing up, I spent at least twenty Decembers covered with pine needles and sticky with sap, working my family’s Christmas-tree lot in Scottsdale, Arizona. Even today, the lot is a much loved, and missed, part of my childhood, one that’s inextricably linked to my concept of Christmas. I try not…
FRI, 11/26 I tend to be a surreptitious shopper, sliding quietly through stores like a sylph on a mission, waiting for an item to communicate with me telepathically: “Here I am. Just what you need.” What I don’t need is help, and I don’t want it, either. Beware, shoptenders. Just…
THUR, 11/18 José Mercado knew his second big show at North High School was gonna have to be good. Last year, the actor and educator elevated North’s theater department with Zoot Suit Riots, a larger-than-life production that made stars of its student actors. After nearly selling out the Temple Buell…
Inside a crowded East High School classroom, Imani Latif is teaching women how to talk to the men in their lives about love, sex and HIV. The 13th Annual Colorado Women of Color Conference on HIV & AIDS is under way, and Latif and about twenty African-American women have gathered…
The belt buckles on the dance floor at Tequila Rosa’s shine as brightly as the mirrored ball that hangs overhead, sending fractured prisms of light onto the couples dancing to Mexican disco. Two men spin in mad concentric circles, around and around and around the floor, now and then tilting…
THURS, 10/28 So it’s a Thursday night, and you’ve got some extra green burning a hole in your pocket. What is there to do? Well, if you’re in a culinary frame of mind, you can drop that dough at the Too Many Chefs in the Kitchen dinner and fundraiser for…
THURS, 10/14 When John Patrick Shanley’s play Dirty Story debuted in New York in 2003, the playwright chose to forgo the standard playbill biography. Rather than mention Shanley’s Oscar for the Moonstruck screenplay or numerous other accolades, the profile read, “John resides on Earth, in America, a country where the…
There’s a strange pantomime going on inside the basement of a Capitol Hill high-rise: A group of eight grown men are pretending to sing in unison. As their mouths move, their chins and chests lift and fall as if in song. But there’s no sound coming from anything but a…
TUES, 10/5 Composer Tan Dun unites sounds from Western classical music, nature and the East in Water Passion After St. Matthew. The acclaimed composer’s composition will fill Gates Concert Hall at the University of Denver at 7:30 p.m. tonight. Dun, who won multiple awards for the score of Crouching Tiger,…
Home/Life: 121 kids from 11 cities photograph their world is the harvest of a global photography project. In 2002, homeless children in cities around the world — including Nairobi, Moscow, Jakarta, New Delhi, Johannesburg, Paris and New York — were dispatched to their cities’ streets armed with digital cameras and…
Anne Landman is addicted to cigarettes. She’s never actually smoked a whole one, but she can’t stop thinking about them: how they’re made, how they’re marketed, what’s in them, who buys them, who makes sure they’ll always be for sale. “People think I’m obsessed, a one-issue person,” Landman says. “It’s…
In early September 2001, Don Goede made an absent-minded choice that brought tragedy into his small Brooklyn apartment: He left his windows open before leaving town. As he sat with relatives in Colorado Springs a few days later and watched the World Trade Center implode, the debris of the disaster…
When Hunter Weeks’s mom was in the Peace Corps, she traveled Africa by thumb, hitching across the Sahara Desert with just a girlfriend and a map. That was the mid-’60s, a decade before her son — and heir to her wanderlust — was born in Scottsdale, Arizona. “That was her…
There are no crystal pitchers of lemon-lime water or misty bottles of lavender spritz in the student-run Emily Griffith Opportunity Salon. The spartan space is housed on the third floor of a nondescript building at 1250 Welton Street, just a tease-comb’s throw from the Denver Diner and the new jail…
