When thirteen-year-old LeAnn Rimes entered the pop consciousness years ago with the hit song “Blue,” she was just a little country girl with a big voice, pure as good corn liquor. But Rimes has grown up, as evidenced by the skin she’s showing in videos and photo shoots these days,…
Rachel Simring sits down at a linoleum-lined table at Pete’s University Cafe and does something she wouldn’t do last spring: She speaks. In late 2002, after doctors found a cyst on her vocal cords, she entered a period of veritable silence that lasted for the better part of a year…
Amid the nourishing chaos of city life, we urban dwellers find ourselves brain-deep in startling juxtapositions. Mid-morning one Tuesday, a formation of squawking geese sweeps its shadow across a used-bookstore window, dimming the dog-eared covers of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. An instant later,…
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the show that transforms sloth-like macho men into burgeoning metrosexuals, received the seal of approval from American television audiences this year. But the male makeover is hardly a new phenomenon: Christopher Gradford, a cosmetologist, drag queen and owner of Studio Lites, has been beautifying…
It can be difficult to find pantyhose that fit properly when you’re a 6’2″, 220-pound hunk with lumberjack legs and large, flat feet. This is a problem that Bill has learned to live with — just one of the many sacrifices a girl-in-training must make for beauty. “Sometimes I’ll use…
It used to take Jimmy West roughly three days to set up the two-ton P.A. system he built from scratch when he first started working as a soundman in Denver. Most of the venues that hired him, from legit clubs to underground warehouses, had systems that were puny or non-existent…
Mary Flower wasn’t among the artists featured in Martin Scorsese’s recent cinematic homage to the blues, but several of her heroes were. Flower, a disciple of blues architects including Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson, has honed her own Piedmont-style perfection over the past decade. A former folkie who took…
The structure of public funding for mental-health care changed dramatically in 1995, when Colorado moved from a fee-for-service system and began to operate on a managed-care model. Eight mental-health assessment and service agencies, known as MHASAs, were contracted by the state to provide mental-health services to Medicaid recipients, while seventeen…
For David Mallamo, fantasy has always been kinder than reality. At fifteen, with scruffy brown hair and glasses, he resembles his hero, Harry Potter — a boy who’s abused by his family but finds power and adventure in an alternate world. Now living in his tenth home since birth, David…
The old rock-and-roll cliche dictates that aspiring musicians head to New York or Los Angeles if they’re halfway serious about taking a shot at the bigtime. But when Melissa Ivey officially reached adulthood, she fled the oversaturated Southern California scene and headed to Denver, where she’s been plugging and gigging…
Carla Bozulich has always been a country girl at heart. You just had to look — or listen — through the fuzz and distortion to notice. As the leader of the Los Angeles artcore combo the Geraldine Fibbers, Bozulich colored many of her own compositions with country underpinnings, adding pedal…
The radioactive vomit will not spew fast enough for Ed Edmunds. Standing in the showroom of Distortions Unlimited, the Greeley gore factory he operates with his wife, Marsha, Edmunds is assessing an animatronic sculpture he calls “The Puker,” a life-sized model of a guy barfing into a vat of toxic…
The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School put guns at the center of the public scope. But the Second Amendment has long been a loaded issue in Colorado, from decades-old debates over safe storage to a more recent battle over the gun-show “loophole.” And the Colorado Legislature’s passage this year…
Don Robinson has a surprisingly gentle manner for a guy who spends so much time around firepower. Red-haired and friendly faced, he resembles Ned Flanders more than John Rambo. Aside from a patch on his shirt, Robinson’s well-worn hands provide the only outward clue to his profession as a range…
It’s a beautiful Wednesday in October, bright and cloudless, and the Cherry Creek Shooting Center is packed at noon. Smelling equally of gun smoke and dirt, the small, dusty range rings with the sounds of artillery — metallic pings from dislodged shells; pops and hisses from semi-automatic Glock pistols and…
Of the 4,000 critters that scamper, slither, swing and swim at the Denver Zoo every day, a tan mutt named Bodie may be the least exotic. The approximately one-and-a-half-year-old collie/Labrador mix is a domestic counterpart of the ringtailed lemurs, hippos, Asiatic bears, vultures, clown fish and macaws that share his…
THURS, 10/2 In the early scenes of Gus Edwards’s Louie and Ophelia, the title characters are crazy about each other. By the final scene, though, they’ve nearly driven each other nuts — and have come to terms with some of the psychic demons that hinder their ability to love. Louie…
All of Denver was starstruck in August when director John Sayles announced that much of his next feature film, Silver City, would be shot in town. Suddenly, this celebrity-starved city could count an actual Hollywood big shot as a local resident, albeit a temporary one. Better yet, the Sayles production…
More than twenty years after scoring his big break, Kelly Reno remains Colorado’s most famous contribution to the firmament of child stars. Reno was thirteen years old in 1979 when his cattle-ranching parents, Bud and Ruth, responded to an open audition call for The Black Stallion. Reno got the job,…
The first clue that Matthew Helms is not your average thirteen-year-old boy lies atop his pre-pubescent head. Long, flowing and cut with rough bangs that fall unevenly over dark blue eyes, his blond hair cascades over shoulders that are strong and toned, an anomaly of adolescent physiology. Another clue. Clues…
It’s been seven years since we’ve heard from Evan Dando, who once lent the Lemonheads a perpetually stoned swagger as well as an affinity for ’60s-flecked guitar pop. During that time, he got hitched, fought — and often lost — a battle with the bottle and eventually got around to…
Wildwood Flower’s liner notes are reason enough to recommend the final recording by June Carter Cash, who died unexpectedly from complications of heart surgery in April. Penned by stepdaughter and songwriter Rosanne Cash, they eulogize Carter Cash as a uniquely talented and loving mother and musician who for nearly forty…
