This is a story about Jeff O’Leary trying to write a paper about the Crocker Rocker conspiracy. He’s probably working on it right now. His Metro State class, Advanced Creative Writing, is–or ought to be–a place where hackneyed phrases like “This is a story about…” are not tolerated. But such…
The Team knows how to tantalize a twelve-year-old. “Don’t be trying any of this at home, kids. What you are about to see is very, very dangerous. We don’t even do what Trey Tally does–breaking concrete and ice with his head! So don’t you try it!” Trey Tally’s nickname is…
It’s a typical morning for Essie Garrett, in that she ran the five miles to her job at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, where she has been in charge of the refrigeration department for fifteen years. As usual, she’ll run back home at the end of the day, her backpack…
Warning: If you are under thirty, unbelievably gorgeous, hip and charming, a wine taster and wearer of a 100 percent cotton T-shirt in basic white or black–or if you desperately want to be any of the above–the following food-related opinions will mean nothing to you. What you want is a…
The New York Deli News is housed in a classic California Coffee Shop structure, with windows reaching boldly for the early-1960s sky’s-the-limit sky. Nevertheless, it’s the kind of restaurant that seems to have been around forever. I know for a fact I ate here when I was four or five,…
A few weeks ago I awoke dogged by a beautiful fantasy. This was it: Every day precisely at noon, I would rise from my typewriter, don my fedora, slip a detective novel into my suit pocket and head over to the Union Station lunch counter, where a sneering counter boy…
So many of the dreamy things attributed to childhood are a crock. The innocence, for instance, or “the carefree days of…” A popular parenting cliche is: “What are you complaining about? You’ll never have it this good again.” But all of this is just plain wrong. It’s hard and weird…
Cafe Brazil has always been a curveball to throw at someone from out of town. It’s particularly fun when visitors assume there’s not much to eat in Denver other than big haunches of elk–and then they stumble into the turquoise-and-salmon-pink cinder-block interior of this tiny northwest Denver bistro. Order them…
The line of tap dancers stretches out in front of the mirror in the basement studio. There is some sort of confusion over the rehearsal hats–a motley assortment of battered New Year’s Eve party bowlers. You’re supposed to take them off and put them back on–on the beat. This is…
Last week Richard Sharkey and Maurice Dominguez got a heater going outdoors and hoped the weather would hold, because there’s no point in working with adobe in the snow or rain: The mud never stops being mud. The elements cause enough damage after an adobe structure is complete, as is…
“Leather, it lasts,” says Manuel Montoya, who runs the repair shop at Colorado Saddlery. “A Western saddle is a beautiful thing.” It is also a remarkably durable thing. A true Western saddle’s tree is still made of Ponderosa pine covered with sewn-on rawhide; its most basic parts–horn, stirrups, cantle–are all…
Religion has a few simple benefits. By regularly attending a place of worship, one gains not only a sense of deep, abiding faith, but a clearer understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Families that observe religious traditions together make it through tough times together. So I hear, and…
Suppose you’re the mother of the bride. You have a role to play and you want to dress the part, but you just can’t surrender to the Barbara Bush mold from which the typical Mother-of-the-Bride dress is cast. Well, how about slipping into this stretch-lace number with panels of petticoating,…
At Roll-O-Rama, roller-skating is confined to precise, two-hour sessions. If you arrive early, clutching your brushed aluminum roller-skate case–the one that contains actual four-cornered skates, as opposed to in-lines–you will just have to cool your heels. In the foyer, the ticket window has a plywood panel shoved across its opening,…
In Lyle Johnston’s lone beehive, a drowsy clump of bees staggers across a plastic honeycomb frame. They are in a semi-dormant state, more concerned with survival than with honey or the current queen. A warm, un-wintery buzz hums from the hive, which sits near a grove of old cottonwoods at…
A few weeks ago Stanton Stegner took over a small warehouse at the corner of 22nd and Curtis Streets, where an auto-parts supply store used to be. Using his 1969 Ford van and a flatbed trailer, he systematically began depositing sculptures made from old chrome bumpers and scrap steel around…
Charlie Papazian likes to say that he is just a regular pie guy, but his vision for the future is well worth heeding. Twenty years ago he had an intuition about beer. At the time, he recalls, Bud and Coors were the reigning brews. So Papazian, who thought beer should…
Enter MRS. GILCHRIST (a middle-school drama teacher, snapping fingers in “showbiz” style). MRS. GILCHRIST: Students, wake up! I need to see action! I need to see movement! Scene: It is 7:20 a.m. at the Flood Middle School auditorium in Englewood. Rehearsal will last exactly 45 minutes. This is no time…
Gramma Blake is not alive to see the drunken woman staggering up Gregory Street, her slot-machine earnings clinking in her fanny pack. Gramma Blake never did like this sort of thing. In the 1930s she would stomp down from her house on Blake Hill and into a Black Hawk bar…
The other Staabs are in the restaurant business. Twenty-nine-year-old Gary likes his critters much older–and colder. He is a paleo-reconstructionist, which means, in extremely introductory terms, that he builds big models of dinosaurs, using real bones and fossils to guide him. There are others who do this type of work,…
At Ted Nugent’s Kamp for Kids in the Michigan woods last week, you had two choices. You could get a bow and arrow and hunt deer, elk, bear or what Nugent called “a great big Commie Russian hog.” You could gut it out, haul it home and help feed your…
Southwest Plaza has, like, fifteen entrances, and that’s not counting the downstairs at Sears where you go in next to the Die-Hard batteries and radial tires. As if. As if you would ever go to the mall to buy a tire. The fourteen-year-old girls who live in my neighborhood will…
