While the Girls Are Away

Poor Matthew Taylor. When Linda Klein and Barbara Gehring, his mates from the improv comedy group A.C.E., hit the big time with their long-running show Girls Only, Taylor was left twiddling his thumbs, right? Wrong. At Klein’s suggestion, he began to compile a cascade of wonderfully expressed personal stories and…

Blonde Ambition

Confession time: Every time Legally Blonde, the 2001 Reese Witherspoon/Selma Blair/Luke Wilson vehicle airs on television, I settle down with a bowl of popcorn and lose myself in the world of sorority queen Elle Woods, who enrolls in Harvard Law School to win back a boyfriend who doesn’t think she’s…

Get in the Game

Fabulous prizes! Ridiculous questions! Even more ridiculous tasks! Why settle for watching a game show on TV when you can watch it — and participate — live and in person? At Sexual Tension, Denver’s own weekly live game-show event, you can join hosts Princess and Fred, pick a team to…

Parties and Politics

Sniffed at as a mere caricaturist in his own time and buried in a pauper’s grave, the realist artist Honoré Daumier was a keen satirist and sociopolitical observer of Parisian life in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as a prolific master lithographer whose works paint a lively picture of that…

Laugh Long and Prosper

Improv makes us laugh, but real comedy aficionados know there’s a lot more structure holding up what seems to be something so marvelously off-the-cuff. Improv comes in many forms — it’s not all Whose Line Is It Anyway?, wham, bam, thank you ma’am — and in the case of Bovine…

Beer Pong Goes Big

Wanna play beer bong in public? Easy: No fewer than four organizations and two dozen bars make that happen almost any night of the week. Wanna win the $1,100-plus entry into the 2011 World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas? Then you’ll need to join the Gingperial Beer Pong…

Tea Time

“Tea is really the world’s drink,” says Kate Ashley, spokeswoman for the Denver Montclair International School. Hence the popularity of the school’s annual World Tea Fair, which runs from 2 to 5 p.m. today. “It’s a very easy visual of seeing different cultures coming together in the same room in…

A Short Night’s Journey

The Buntport Theater Company has taken on plenty of literary figures and playwrights over the years, from Shakespeare to Kafka, cross-pollinating the work of the greats with their own quirky brand. The latest is Eugene O’Neill, whom we meet in the hospital, recovering from an appendectomy and formulating the plot…

About Face

Examples of portraiture, from the sixteenth-century work of Bernardo Buontalenti through contemporary pieces by Bill Amundson, Richard Phillips and Chuck Close, are on display in a Denver Art Museum exhibit called Face to Face. “Following drawing through four centuries of art, these wonderful examples of the portrait in some cases…

Signs of the Times

Formerly a sculptor of wild papier-mâché cowboys and bikers, longtime Lakewood resident Al Orahood switched somewhere along the way to painting. But even working in a new medium, Orahood still chose a workingman’s subject: the weathered neon signs of West Colfax Avenue, the ones that announce such run-down and evocative…

Plains, Spoken

When the Denver Center Theatre Company premiered Plainsong last year, they had a hit on their hands with author Kent Haruf’s laid-back look at small-town life on the eastern plains of Colorado. That bodes well for this year’s world-premiere staging of Eventide, Haruf’s second yarn set in the fictitious community…

Hats Off to These Chefs

A culinary red carpet of superstar kitchen magicians will stir the pot in Beaver Creek Village during the Beaver Creek Master Chef Classic, which begins today for a three-day gustatory blowout. “It’s a great showing of national, international and local Beaver Creek chefs that get to share a lot of…

Jamaica’s got a ski cross team

There’s a good chance Errol Kerr has heard all the bobsled jokes before. The mid-90s flick Cool Runnings did wonders for popularity of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled crew, and in a way he’s following in the footsteps of the four-man team. Kerr, who has a Jamaican father and an American…

Could Vail Resorts buy Whistler?

What if an Epic Pass got you access to Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Breckenridge, Arapahoe Basin and Whistler? A Vail Daily report suggests Vail Resorts acquiring Whistler — it’s largest competitor — isn’t as far fetched as it might sound…

Ski Tuning, Part 3: Waxing strategies explained

In the third episode of a four-part series on home ski tuning technique, Matt Hupperts of the Edgeworks discusses waxing strategies. Ski waxes vary wildly in price, from $15 for basic waxes to over $100 for performance waxes. While those high-priced waxes may seem like an indulgence, for skiers looking…

Boulder climbers summit Nepali peak, make killer film

Boulder climbers Renan Ozturk and Corey Richards just bagged a new route on 21,320-foot Tawoche in Nepal — a mighty feat in any case, but this time made worse by crumbly rock and 36 hours without water. Even so, they managed to safely tag the summit and make this video…

Top 10 Winter Olympics scandals and screw-ups

It’s looking like the Vancouver Winter Olympics already has a scandal — a bad real-estate loan might leave the city on the hook for a cool billion — plus two fuck-ups — NBC is set to lose $200 million (Conan’s $45 billion buyout is kinda pitiful in comparison) and the…

Ski Tuning, Part 2: Sharpen those edges

Yesterday we kicked off the first of a four-part series on tuning your skis at home, talking about vice grips and base repair. Of course, that’s only the first part in getting the most out of your boards…