All Dressed Up

Grab your skis, silly costumes and thinking caps, because the New Belgium Loveland Scavenger Hunt presents the perfect opportunity to have fun for a great cause. “When you can get people dressed up in costume and acting silly and letting go of anything that usually holds them back, it turns…

Hard Times

People are facing hard times these days, and tonight’s production of A Little Frayed at the Edge features characters navigating tough circumstances that take them to the edge of despair and determination — something many of us can relate to. “These are stories that might be about the life of…

Grandfather Knows Best

Jack A. Weil was the oldest still-working CEO in the country when he passed away last summer at the age of 107 – and the founder of Rockmount Ranch Wear hasn’t quit working yet. Cleaning up the store at 1626 Wazee Street last month, his granddaughter-in-law came across a manifesto…

Be An Angel

Sandy Widener, Westword’s original managing editor, was a force of nature, a ball of unstoppable energy – never more so than when she took to rollerblading along the Cherry Creek bike path. Today’s second annual Parr-Widener Scholarship Walk-Run, a benefit for graduates of the East High School A+ Angels mentor…

Fantasy Land

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, who work collaboratively as Kahn + Selesnick, have made a name for themselves by creating works meant to document phony historical events. Their current offering, Eisbergfreistadt, which roughly translates as “free floating iceberg,” is loosely based on an actual iceberg that struck a Baltic port…

Popular Mechanics

CORE New Art Space member Mark Penner-Howell will celebrate his second show in the CORE fold with the March 26 debut of Too Big to Fail: Handsome Paintings for Ugly Times, a sophomore display of his big, bright paintings satirizing popular culture. Reminiscent of some new painting coming out of…

Androids Dream

When Simon Zalkind first met Paul Gillis in the ’80s, he was immediately enamored of the unpretentious artist’s work, with its dreamlike take on our times, its Zap Comix imagery, robotic figures and surreal symbolism. “I was taken with how smart and funny he was, while working through a set…

Get Lucky

I went to Ireland last fall with realistic expectations: good music, strong whiskey, great beer and green landscapes. What I didn’t expect was much in the way of food. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the grub wasn’t just the atrocious smoked butt and cabbage with boiled potatoes that…

A Real Road Movie

Ashes of American Flags, Wilco’s live concert film and documentary, portrays a reality that is almost the antithesis of the typical glamorized rock-and-roll road picture. In the place of sex-crazed groupies and stylized drug-binge montages, we see the band icing up sore limbs and necks after strenuous performances, eating chips…

Sherer Genius

Think you don’t know how to make things? Once you’ve met Wiley Sherer, the resident jack-of-all-trades at the TACtile Textile Art Center, that outlook will change forever. Every Friday from 5 to 7 p.m., Sherer hosts DYIFri, a free, drop-in workshop series with changing projects created from ordinary materials. Sherer…

Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!

As a women’s studies professor, Elissa Auther was frustrated by narrow, stuffy discussions that never engaged anyone outside of academia. So last year she founded Feminism & Co., a Lab at Belmar series that brings a campy, irreverent style and creative performances to critical debates on women’s issues. The series’…

Dynamic Dynasty

The Tang Dynasty, which ruled over China from 618 to 906 A.D., is considered by many scholars to be the acme of progress and prosperity in that nation’s history. Tang Concubines tells the story of two women – both concubines — who helped shape the Tang Dynasty, but their similarities…

Flick Pick

Ballerina, a documentary that premieres at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, March 27, may not be an especially daring piece of work, but its subject matter is so fascinating that the results are regularly compelling anyway. Director Bertrand Normand’s look at Russia’s Kirov Ballet is primarily a celebration, and the five…

War of the Words

Poetry is not all old-fashioned hearts and flowers. As delivered by members of the Slam Nuba Team, poetry is vital, thoroughly modern and not remotely well-behaved. See for yourself tonight, when National Poetry Month gets off to an invigorating start Friday at Slam Nuba Team Slam Off 2009, at Crossroads…

Get Shorty

The nightly news is unremittingly gloomy, and it just seems to get worse every day, which is why we need something to cheer us up — something fun and artsy, like the 18th annual Aspen Shortsfest. The five-day film festival starts today and features a variety of shorts, from Academy…

A Stitch in Time

The Tony-nominated musical Quilters began its run 26 years ago when the Denver Center Theatre Company breathed life into the production. “Even though Quilters wasn’t the first production we did, it was one of the first world premieres, and certainly the first premiere to go on to critical success,” says…

High on the Hog

If you are free through April 4 and have an extra $1,000 lying around, you might want to load up the Escalade and drive up I-70 for the nineteenth annual Taste of Vail. The four-day event, featuring thirty chefs and fifty winemakers, will consist of a variety of tastings, classes,…

Auto Pilots

Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns: When the Denver Auto Show opens to the public April 1 at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street, GM will be touting new Corvettes and Cadillac station wagons for 2010, while Chrysler pushes out its all-electric Town & Country EV wagon and…

Sean Kelly

During the early ’90s, the Samples helped put Colorado on the map. Led by gifted pop songwriter Sean Kelly, the band signed with a locally based label, What Are Records? (W.A.R.), toured incessantly from coast to coast, released a slew of albums, endured a series of personnel and business changes,…

Single File

It’s tough staying punk-rock. Although the ideal itself has never officially been defined, die-hard supporters of the genre have long claimed that to be a true punk-rocker, you must shun mainstream music and always remain a dark, oily stain on its bright shiny surface. What if, in spite of a…

Laura Gibson

Laura Gibson’s smoky warble and elegant, jazzy phrasing will probably have you thinking Feist in fairly short order, but the Oregon indie-folk singer-songwriter has her own mesmerizing vibe going on – more the soundtrack to a sepia-toned Dust Bowl documentary than a contemporary Parisian café (or iPod commercial). Her unruffled…

Everybody’s a Star

As Earth Day approaches and everyone and their ninety-year-old grandmothers seem to be getting into the chip-in-and-be-green act, the time is ripe for WeeCycle, a local nonprofit started by attorneys, friends and fellow moms Jayme Ritchie and Sunny Heydorn to collect gently used and new baby gear for the children…