Thursday, June 23 Having already fully covered the landscape of non-fiction in a scorching trio of documentary/ memoirs about his own life and the experiences of illegals on the Mexican borders, author Luis Alberto Urrea now turns his poetic pen to fiction, applying gorgeous prose to a new epic novel…
Saddled with a painfully useless degree in creative writing and an apocryphal career path, I started working at Penny Lane in 2002, after seeing a handwritten sign taped to the front door advertising for a barista. I knew that the legendary Boulder coffeehouse would provide the perfect environment for shunning…
SAT, 6/25 Ever dreamed of bumping into a porn star and buying her (or him) a drink? Well, tonight’s your chance, at the Pleasure’s Second Annual Adult Film Star Ball, being held at La Bohme Gentleman’s Cabaret, 1443 Stout Street. “I think it’s going to be a crazy, crazy night,”…
THURS, 6/23 Bulls, horses and lassos are rarely the images conjured up when folks discuss high school sports. But some 300 teenage cowpokes think it’ll take just about eight seconds — the length of most bull rides — to change that concept when they compete in the Colorado State High…
SAT, 6/25 How exactly do you outfit a dog in drag? Do you dress him up like a cat? Do you put Fifi in a muscle tee, squeeze Buster the boxer into a tutu? Anything goes, say organizers of the Dogs in Drag competition at this year’s PrideFest. So feel…
THURS, 6/23 Comic Dave Attell offers this philosophical stumper: “Which would you rather have: A butler, an ice sculpture of your own ass, a baby pool full of Skittles, or $100?” “Huh?” I reply, wondering if this question was actually rhetorical. “C’mon man! The 100 bucks!” exults Attell over the…
Although its roots go back almost a century, to the World War I-era work of Marcel Duchamp, only in the past thirty or so years has conceptual art become a common approach. Today the Denver area has many proponents of conceptualism; key among them is John McEnroe, currently the subject…
There are so many talented representational painters in the area, it’s a wonder that no curator of some local museum or art center has thought to put a group of them together in a show. The next best thing might be a duet, which is essentially what’s shoehorned into the…
Alden Mason, Kimberlee Sullivan, and Lorey Hobbs. The changing of the seasons from spring to summer is what inspired William Biety, director of the Sandy Carson Gallery, to put together three solos, each comprising nature-based abstractions. Alden Mason marks the debut of the Washington artist, who is represented in this…
Topdog/Underdog features two brothers in a dingy, inner-city room. Lincoln and Booth — their names were given to them by their feckless father as a joke — tell tall tales, spar and play tricks on each other. For a while their bickering seems lighthearted and affectionate. Lincoln, an expert at…
Summer Lovin’, at Heritage Square Music Hall, is a string of songs held together with a thin thread of plot. A traveling troupe arrives at an old theater planning to stage a play, only to discover that the place is closed while the theater board contemplates converting it into an…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
DC Comics has kept its superheroes locked in a fortress of solitude for almost a decade, forcing the likes of Superman and Batman to warm the bench while longtime rival Marvel Comics’ Spider-man, the Hulk, the X-Men and Blade galloped up and down the playing field. Not counting Catwoman, which…
Not many people saw Lost and Delirious, the 2001 boarding-school drama about two girls in obsessive love, and that was probably for the best. Yes, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) made a stunning androgynous rebel, but she couldn’t rescue the film from its unctuous self-importance. My Summer of Love, a bewitching…
Michael Wranovics’s well-meant documentary Up for Grabs, about the absurd legal battle over the ownership of the baseball Barry Bonds hit for his season-record 73rd home run back in 2001, is instantly overshadowed by other events: the steroids scandal, the allegations of Bonds’s apparent mistress, the possibility that his career…
Ah, Father’s Day, when all patriarchs become Clark Griswold on vacation and all filial conversations become sentimental diatribes: “Enjoy this, kids. Someday when you have families of your own, you’ll wish you had several hours together in the back of a cop car like this, just to sit and talk.”…
Thursday, June 16 Nobody can say for sure where the Food Network’s hit program Iron Chef is filmed. Conventional wisdom suggests that the show is put together in studios in Los Angeles or New York, but it’s possible that it’s actually filmed in Japan, with chefs flown in from all…
Lisa Olken has never eaten menudo. She’s a guera (“white girl”) who doesn’t speak Spanish and has never been south of the border. The traditions involved in quinceañeras and Mexican weddings and funerals are foreign to her. But that didn’t stop her from producing, directing, writing and editing La Raza…
THURS, 6/16 Remember Rumpelstiltskin, that funny little fairy-tale guy who taught the miller’s daughter to spin gold from straw? Well, Rumpel’s not the only one with those powers. Dumpster-diving sisters Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young didn’t get an assist from a tiny man, but they did have a remarkable…
THURS, 6/16 I am not a Sporty Spice. I don’t voluntarily play, attend or view any sporting event unless coerced by friends or a date, and not without the promise of a generous supply of alcohol. When I hear the word “golf,” my first thought is usually of windmills and…
SAT, 6/18 For most kids, summer isn’t over until their bucket of sidewalk chalk is reduced to unusable nubs. You might think you’ve outgrown the pleasure of creating powdery masterpieces on cement, but the third annual KeyBank La Piazza dell’Arte on Larimer Square will prove you wrong. “It’s all about…
FRI, 6/17 Arcos Azules Theatre company is confronting the same publicity dilemma faced by other troupes that have staged Shopping and Fucking, Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play. Posters make generous use of asterisks to lessen the initial shock value of the title of this adults-only work. But the play itself pulls…
