Fairy Amusing

Speaking as someone who was terrified of the telephone when I was a child because I couldn’t understand how the voices of people I knew could get trapped in this black plastic thing, I am very grateful to Buntport Theater Company for explaining how a television works: Little fairy people…

Healthy Acting

Last Summer at Bluefish Cove starts out well enough: A timidly conventional housewife, Eva, stumbles unaware into a secluded seaside resort that has become a lesbian summer retreat. Lusty Lil meets Eva on the beach and, before realizing Eva is straight, invites her to a party. Later, the other guests…

Lotsa Luck

William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hangdog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…

Au Revoir

Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie/film-fest crowd into enemy camps. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and dead-eye…

Upper Middle Earth

You know how it’s often the ones we love whose flaws are most apparent? Well, when it comes to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I am smitten. This film is a miracle, an extravaganza equal to its predecessors and in some ways more stunning. It…

Flick Pick

The third Longmont Film Festival gets under way Thursday, December 18, with Ernst Lubitsch’s heartwarming 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner and continues through Saturday, December 20, with Billy Wilder’s favorite Some Like It Hot (recently acclaimed by the American Film Institute as the best Hollywood comedy ever made),…

Raise the Jolly Roger

Arrrrrr! Just in case you hadn’t noticed, pirates are in this year. But you won’t run into Johnny Depp or any other lonely peg-legged seafarin’ brigands at the 24th Anniversary Group Show, which opens on Friday, December 19, at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis, one of the oldest cooperative galleries…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, December 18 Go ahead, take a break. The season won’t freeze and crack right down the middle if you ignore it for a few minutes, and you’ll feel all the better for it. You can avoid the crowds, the traffic and the noise, but — oh, well — not…

Beat-the-Clock Shopping

Naughty, naughty. You’ve been so busy — sleeping off the Thanksgiving turkey, gorging on Christmas cookies, festooning your house in a blinding tangle of watt-wasting holiday lights, wearing a lampshade at the office party — that you completely forgot to shop. It’s okay. Read the following, take a deep breath,…

Warm Fuzzies

Pick up a pair of knitting needles and get down to business with Knit for the Homeless, a campaign to collect handmade hats, scarves and gloves for the underprivileged.”I get the chills when I think about it,” says Shellie Lubowitz, owner of the Shivering Sheep & Coppélia’s Needlepoint. “To me,…

Ice Mountain

SUN, 12/21 They might not be hitting double axels or triple salchows, but the Summit Figure Skating Club promises to wow winter visitors with Christmas on Ice, Copper Mountain’s version of the Ice Capades led by former professional figure skater Jennifer Bradley.”It’s a Christmas medley with both group numbers and…

Mini Cinema

TUES, 12/23 For you movie fans worried that your baby’s arrival means a life trapped at home, condemned to watch reruns of Teletubbies, fear not. Madstone Theaters in Tamarac Square has come up with a brilliant plan to let you have your baby and your media, too.Starting this morning, the…

Take Your Best Shot

A hundred bottles of tequila at the bar, a hundred bottles of tequila.Jesse Morreale and Chris Swank, the folks behind Nobody in Particular Presents, and three new partners have given Capitol Hill/City Park residents reason to sing. A hundred and four reasons, to be exact, which is the number of…

Celebrate Solstice

For most people, the winter solstice marks the shortest day of the year, a gloomy occasion when the sun goes down early and total darkness ensues. For others, the winter solstice marks the longest night of the year, a cause for raucous celebration and fanfare.The people behind the 18th Annual…

New Year’s Eve Guide

New Year’s Eve. Does any other holiday carry with it such high hopes — and does any other holiday smash expectations as flat? A river of disillusionment — and vomit — ran through the submissions for our first “My Worst New Year’s Eve” essay contest. Our readers recounted horrible parties,…

Diamond in the Rough

For most Americans, November 22 is a national day of mourning, but for me it is a day that will live in infamy. It was the day that Ray first said, “Guess what?” “What, Ray?” Looking smug. “Neil Diamond is coming to the Pepsi Center New Year’s Eve.” I, of…

The Impossible Journey

It was New Year’s Eve in the late 1980s. The previous few days’ winter weather had brought over a foot of snow to the metro area. I was in my senior year of high school. As was a popular party option back then, some friends had rented a few hotel…

On the Road

Several years ago, three of us took off on a road trip to Ft. Lauderdale. We started after Christmas and had no deadlines. The first day, we made it to Trinidad. We never drove more than 300 miles a day. We each took turns driving our hundred miles, then we’d…

Target Practice

Okay, first off, I travel a lot, and I like that. Lots of temp jobs all over the country. So I stopped off at a friend’s place in Arkansas between jobs, and it turned out the girl he was living with had this brother Alan who could play guitar. That…

Happy Birthday

My birthday is New Year’s Day — the perfect opportunity for my awful then-husband to pull out all the stops and make New Year’s Eve a royal nightmare. He managed to get drunk before we got to the club at 9 p.m. He was already acting feisty, and by 9:30…

1995 in D-Town

I had graduated college a little over a year and a half previous and had just been laid off from my temporary dead-end job. So it was with a CU-Boulder liberal arts degree. I was living in the mountains about an hour away from my college friends and had consequently…

Feline Incest and Decongestants

I don’t remember the exact year. I know that I was in college at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. There was a party. There was a new dress. There was the promise of romance with another member of the theater arts department (I was a theater major, with a…