With biker babes and lots of leather, the sixteenth annual Ladies Run of Colorado roars into tiny Fairplay July 13-14. The yearly festival celebrates some of the finest scooter ladies around. With a population of about 650 people, Fairplay will be overrun, if not run over, when the 3,000 participants…
If a halftime show is your favorite part of a football game, consider the Drums Along the Rockies your warmup for the fall season. One of the nation’s most recognized drum-corps competitions, the 32nd annual Drums Along the Rockies is hosted by Denver’s own Blue Knights Drum and Bugle Corps…
If you want to be like James climbing inside his giant peach and finding a magical odyssey, head to 34th annual Palisade Peach Festival. It’s a guaranteed adventure in fuzzy-fruit consumption. “Without a doubt, we’re the biggest peach growers west of the Mississippi,” says Jeannine Opfal, executive director of the…
Legend has it that more than 2,000 years ago, Chu Yuan, a poet, warrior and loyal aide to a Chinese emperor, was banished after the ruler died. Chu Yuan could not win favor in the new court, so one day, in despair, he threw himself into the Mi Lo River…
“Our State Fair is a great state fair. It’s the best state fair in our state.” The title song to “State Fair,” a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, may have been written about Iowa in the 1940s, but the lyrics definitely apply to the 2002 Colorado State Fair as well. The…
Wonder what the bent-over group combing the hills of the San Juan mountains around Telluride at dawn is doing? Hunting mushrooms, of course. “Hunting for mushrooms at daybreak has a lot of spiritual meaning,” says Manny Salzman, organizer of the 22nd annual Telluride Mushroom Festival. “At that time of day,…
Ein Prosit der Gemutlichkeit! What exactly does it mean? It’s hard to translate, but the German expression sums up Oktoberfest on Larimer Square: oompah, beer and lederhosen. “It basically means ‘warmth and happiness,'” says Kirsten Becker, a spokesperson for the Larimer Arts Association, the nonprofit group that produces the September…
If you ever complain that there aren’t enough bathrooms on the 16th Street Mall, then Handyman Mania is the festival for you. On September 21 and 22, teams of professional contractors and amateur handymen will turn Skyline Park into Denver’s largest outhouse. “The Battle of the Bathrooms” features tool-belt-wearing enthusiasts…
You may have cheered for brave little guys and girls mutton-busting at the rodeo, or watched dog racing at Mile High Greyhound Park, but chances are pretty good that you’re never seen ostriches saddled up and racing around a ring. That sporty void can be filled when the Rocky Mountain…
When this column began at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he’d blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much–loud enough so Foxx,…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
Only a couple of months ago, it looked as though Donald Miller had a publishing home run on his hands–a thoughtful, exhilarating, inclusive book about World War II scheduled to hit stores just as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers was finishing its critically lauded run on HBO…
There cannot be man, woman, child or beast alive who does not know that on November 6, Fox will debut its new series 24. Long before the fall season was to begin, it had already been appointed the most anticipated and beloved show of the year–by critics who had seen…
