Over a century ago, you could buy almost anything in that area of Denver that would later be known as LoDo — a house, a horse, a whore. And even in the neighborhood’s darkest days — the ’60s, when the skid-row pawnshops were scraped off and turned into parking lots…
Thursday, July 15 Swallows return to Capistrano every year, but it’s the BirdHaus Bash that returns like a migratory flock to the Denver Botanic Gardens each summer. This year’s birdhouse auction, the tenth, comes to roost tonight from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the gardens. Some 200 fanciful entries –…
Okay, so I was up on the roof the other night with my friend Glen, and we’re just laying there — sharing a case of tallboys, talkin’ about tractor pulls and tacos and whatnot — when all of a sudden, we see this light. Brighter than the headlights on my…
SAT, 7/17 Many Christmas mornings from my childhood stand out, but one occupies a special place. That vivid year, after the presents were opened and the stockings pilfered, we turned our attention to our beloved pets. The dogs found their way to their Yule bones as our curious cats began…
SAT, 7/17 Dodgeball, a “sport” that school boards have been trying to remove from the curriculum for years because it’s allegedly demeaning, is hot these days. From Ben Stiller’s Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story to the Game Show Network’s Extreme Dodgeball, the game’s a hit — although not among teens…
FRI, 7/16 “I became an architect because my girlfriend told me she wouldn’t marry a forest ranger,” recalls University of Denver architect emeritus Cab Childress. So he gave up scouting in the woods of Florida in favor of the drawing board and slide rule that his mother had given him…
THURS, 7/15 Dramatist Martin Moran was twelve when he began a sexual relationship with an older man he’d met two years earlier at a church camp outside Estes Park. The former Denver resident shares what he calls “that collision where a young, Catholic boy is suddenly in the arms of…
Behold what is, in theory, the thinking person’s ideal summer blockbuster. King Arthur features some of the planet’s most beautiful people, dressed way sexily, gallantly galloping and bashing each other with all manner of implements amid lush vistas and robustly appointed sets. Add an intriguing historical pedigree and apparently unprecedented…
Anchorman, co-written by its star, Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in a random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie…
When Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday back in 1940, he had no idea that his sublime newspaper-world comedy would one day become a treasured relic, lovingly rescued and preserved by the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress. But it has, along with many other great movies from…
There is no stranger subgenre of sci-fi/horror B-movies than Mexican-wrestling-themed sci-fi/horror B-movies, and there was no greater star of these cinematic joyrides than Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata (Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask). Born Rodolfo Guzman Huerta in 1917 in Tulancigo, Hidalgo, Mexico, Santo made his ring debut…
Thursday, July 8 For those wondering what, exactly, summer tastes like, the Chaverim have an answer. Tonight, this new group of young leaders at the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center, 350 South Dahlia Street, presents A Taste of Summer, offering the community a chance to get outside and celebrate…
Robert E. Evans draws on his legacy to create his present. When the distinguished Five Points resident strolls down the street, people stop to say hello. And though he has plenty of friends, Evans says things haven’t always been so easy: “I felt alone a lot in my childhood because…
FRI, 7/9 The Mars Hill Cafe is not really a cafe, and it doesn’t have much to do with the Red Planet — although the Highland church that hosts it does sit on a hilltop. Instead of the intergalactic eatery its name connotes, Mars Hill is a Friday-evening gathering that…
The desire to just get wet can be overwhelming in this usually arid state. Yet not everyone wants to swallow a mouthful of chlorine — or worse — at the local pool. And relatively few Coloradans have the chance to grab big water on such world-class rides as the Arkansas…
WED, 7/14 More often than not, we Americans get our news in increasingly attention-deficit- disorder-friendly ways. Sound bites, Internet-server headlines and bits of information flashed across the bottom of television screens are the means by which most of us learn what is going on in the world today. A Cliff’s…
THURS, 7/8 “Vulgar, raunchy, sacrilegious, disrespectful and pornographic,” are just a few of the epithets that playwright David K. Johnson uses to describe his new musical, Lady Sublime & the Fantesticles. “Hopefully, we are going to shock some people,” he says of the comedy, which opens tonight at 7:30 p.m…
There’s a magnificent retrospective at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art devoted to the work of the late John David Rigsby, who was a major powerhouse in Colorado’s art scene. Dots, Blobs and Angels surveys more than forty years’ worth of the remarkable artist’s paintings and sculptures. The year 1993 was…
There’s a great new gallery called weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) that just opened this past spring. It’s located across the street from Ironton, in the industrial neighborhood north of downtown. Unlike most of the businesses around here — including Ironton — weilworks is housed in its own custom-designed structure,…
cadence. Here’s a delicious irony: Many artists who explore the “cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is demonstrated in cadence, at the Space Gallery. The important show begins with…
South Pacific is so filled with terrific music — beautiful love songs like “Some Enchanted Evening,” “This Nearly Was Mine” and the haunting “Bali Ha’i,” lively comic songs like “A Cockeyed Optimist,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” — that…
There are a lot of people who wouldn’t dream of attending an opera. They think of operas as outdated, frequented by the old, rich and pretentious, and featuring incomprehensible plots, elaborate costumes and scenery, great washes of sentiment, fat people pouring out endless arias, and dead people who inexplicably get…
