It’s hard to escape the good vibrations at the Louisville offices of Sounds True, a distributor of spoken-word tapes that has recently branched out into music. The company health-insurance plan covers acupuncture, massage therapy, even mountain bikes. A pack of dogs roams the premises. Incense burns. Feelings count. “We won’t…
Promoters describe the city-subsidized Casino Cabaret nightclub in Five Points as the “home of Denver’s finest jazz.” In recent weeks, however, the club in the heart of a black business district has instead been home to hordes of white teenagers at all-night rave dance parties. A recent rave with 500…
One day this past August, fourteen-year-old Justin Gilman of Colorado Springs asked his friends to set him on fire. So the teenagers got some gasoline from the local 7-Eleven and soaked Gilman’s blue jeans with it. Gilman lay down on the grass in the backyard of a friend’s home, and…
A horse is a horse, of course, but it’s what comes out of the horse that’s bugging Ted Robinson. The Wheat Ridge resident lives next door to Kim and Curt Fear and their 22-year-old mare. And though the horse’s name is Song, these days Robinson is the one singing the…
Outside the Eulipions Cultural Center in Capitol Hill, a mostly black crowd is waiting to hear Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who’s in the middle of a ninety-city tour of the United States. The scene out front is like a festival: Candidates for elected office pass out fliers alongside…
Single mother Dana Gonzales moved five times around the Denver metro area with her young son Nathan between 1993 and 1995. With each move, says Gonzales, she was trying to provide a better life for herself and her son. But Nathan’s father, Anthony Wetmore, saw something else in Gonzales’s itinerant…
Denver’s first 1,000-room hotel, the expanded Adam’s Mark, is supposed to help revitalize the upper end of downtown and make Denver a major convention destination. But those who are first in line to reap the financial benefits of the publicly subsidized project–the subcontractors who actually did the work–claim they’re being…
Down the tree-lined streets of the Hill in Boulder, where many of the University of Colorado’s fraternities are located, you can see the signs of an uneasy cease-fire in the booze war between CU frat boys and Boulder police. In the quiet blocks around the Greek houses, people walk their…
Flight attendant Joanne Berg-Goehl figured she’d hear from the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s office about why her ex-husband’s child-support payments had dropped off. Last year he was threatened with jail time if he didn’t pay her $1,000 immediately. Berg-Goehl got that money, thanks to a check processed by a company…
The tango fanatics are easy to spot on a recent weekday night at the Washington Park Grill; they’re the ones crowding around a makeshift dance floor they’ve created by shoving a few tables out of the way. Already the room is buzzing, and the women, many of them older and…
For years, the City of Denver’s seven golf courses have watched newer, more challenging venues in the suburbs hook players and put a divot in Denver’s bottom line. But now it looks as though the city’s courses might finally break par. At the end of last year, former South Suburban…
In the alley between Josephine and York streets near Cheesman Park, hipsters are assembling, engines are being goosed, and blue smoke is rising into the overcast air. Denver’s scooter chicks are ready to rumble. Behind a dowdy gray Victorian, a dozen self-consciously cool women in their twenties are gathering around…
Once upon a time a great big angel made its way from Pueblo to Loveland. But everybody didn’t live happily ever after. In fact, the 1,000-pound, white terra-cotta angel was strapped to a thick mattress on a flatbed trailer and hauled back to Pueblo, and Polly and Dallas Hansen are…
Chuck Corry is an ex-Marine and a Buddhist, which means he doesn’t want people telling him not to swear and he doesn’t want people telling him to act like a Christian. Nor does he appreciate people firing him. And two years ago, he claims, he lost his consulting job with…
The future looks bleak for what is perhaps the most unloved courthouse in Colorado. Empty for a decade now, the ninety-year-old Arapahoe County Courthouse sits on the east side of downtown Littleton, hemmed in by a jail and a decrepit office building and partially hidden by an asbestos-tainted addition. Aside…
Even though the refurbished Casino Cabaret nightclub in Five Points doesn’t have a liquor license, it still serves alcohol at its series of jazz concerts. How? By having the nonprofit Denver Black Arts Festival obtain special-event liquor licenses from the state liquor division. Such licenses enable nonprofits to sell alcohol…
Thom Lancy joined the Air Force straight out of Denver’s George Washington High School because he wanted to see the world. “I like adventure,” he says. “I’d rather be launching F-14s off of aircraft carriers than working at McDonald’s.” As it turns out, he didn’t launch any Tomcats. He guarded…
Financial consultant Richard Daniel has been on the receiving end of more than $30,000 in city contracts the past few years, including the job of selecting a developer to build Denver’s controversial eighth municipal golf course at Green Valley Ranch near Denver International Airport. At the same time, Daniel, who…
Patrick Robb’s business philosophy is as unambiguous as the army tanks parked outside his small South Denver home. Taxpayers, he argues, spent a fortune bankrolling the fiercesome weapons of the Cold War. Now that the war is over, it’s time to get some back. “I look at it this way,”…
The Denver City Council chambers, resplendent in white and gold, are nearly empty the night of May 15 as the seven members of the Public Safety Review Commission file in, businesslike, for their monthly meeting. There is the feeling that the commission, which reviews citizen complaints of police misconduct, is…
None of the regulars at the Trackside Bar on the outskirts of Holly has seen the Virgin Mary on Yolanda Tarango’s bedroom wall. Most have seen the TV reports, though. A few even saw the news helicopter land. And no one is shy about throwing their two cents in. “I…
The Rushing family’s mobile home stands alone off U.S. 34 on the arid plains southeast of Greeley. Speeding past on the two-lane highway, motorists are likely to miss the trailer. They’re equally likely to miss the town, identified by a solitary highway sign as Dearfield. As has always been the…
