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…
The Vietnam War had been over for a year or two, and I was working as a cab driver. Because I didn’t have much seniority, I had to drive nights, weekends and holidays. I was hoping that driving on New Year’s Eve would at least mean I’d get good tips…
It was last call at the bar up the street from my shitty apartment, and I had just decided to quit smoking cigarettes. “Quit kidding yourself, man,” Paul said, shaping the cherry of his non-filtered cigarette on the side of the black plastic ashtray between us. “How many times have…
The date December 31, 2002, shall go down in my personal history as the most loathsome, despicable excuse for fun that I have ever experienced. All had been going well with our plans. My husband’s sister, brother-in-law and his adult niece and nephew were in town from Houston, and they…
New Year’s Eve 1997 just happened to be my wedding day, the day that should have been the best day of my life but ended up being one of the worst. My day starts with breakfast with my mother and sister ecstatic about my magical, candle-lit evening wedding. Lunch is…
My worst New Year’s Eve was in 1968, when I was 22 years old, a young, naive, trusting, believing, hopeful, fresh-from-the-country married mother of three little ones. Going out for New Year’s Eve had never been possible for me. My spouse had never been home with us on that holiday…
My best New Year’s Eve was in 1970, after a bitter divorce from a cruel and loveless man. Left with nothing but my three children to care for, I felt as if my love life was over at the age of 24. My only goal was to raise my children…
Okay, so I’m kicking around Rome in late December 1999 with this ex-pat friend-of-a-friend, Bryan Geraghty, whose mom has an apartment there and whose mom happens to be gone for the holiday so we can crash at her apartment right around New Year’s Eve. Geraghty’s mom got a divorce at…
It’s 8 p.m. on the eve of the new millennium, and Becky is begging me to stay. She’s the sister of my best friend’s girlfriend, and I’m helping decorate her table with candy corn and those annoying little glitter stars as I explain to her my New Year’s history. I’d…
I recently made my way to the fifth floor of the Denver Art Museum, and once again, I was struck by its spare and stunning beauty. The galleries on that floor, home to the Asian art collection, are bathed in golden light and filled with exquisite paintings, prints, sculptures, pottery,…
Bobbi Walker, director of Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955), has paired abstract sculptures by Colorado artist Jerry Wingren with abstract paintings by California artist Jung Choi in the handsome Silent Dialogue. Despite the fact that Wingren’s sculptures have very little in common with Choi’s paintings, the show…
The Nomad Theatre’s Belle and the Beast is the quintessential children’s fairy tale. It’s got all the requisite sweetness and magic; it even brings just a hint of Cinderella to the well-known story of the enchanted prince and the innocent young woman who frees him from his beastly carapace. The…
It doesn’t matter how much it’s quoted, kitschified, read at Christmas gatherings or adapted for stage and screen, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol manages to preserve its benevolent power. I like to think that’s because something in us responds to the idea of simple kindness replacing coldness in one businessman’s…
This being the end of the year, and since none of the people I wanted to write about this week felt it necessary to return any of my calls, from the leftover heap comes this collection of random topics I considered tackling this year but lost interest in after 200…
On its surface, Jose Padilha’s absorbing documentary Bus 174 shows us how a homeless 21-year-old named Sandro Rosa de Nascimento hijacked a city bus in Rio de Janeiro on July 12, 2000, how he took eleven passengers hostage at gunpoint and became the raving centerpiece of a five-hour urban drama…
Sorrow sprouts wings and flies in Jim Sheridan’s radiant new film In America, which pits the pain and grief of unimaginable loss against the resilience of the human heart. In this semi-autobiographical tale from the writer-director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, a working-class Irish…
As an alternative to the conventional wisdom emanating from the Pentagon and the White House, Robert Greenwald’s scalding documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War makes for powerful and provocative viewing. As an antidote to the notion that American patriotism consists, in toto, of endorsing any preemptive foreign…
The interior of the old Federal Theater can be pretty chilly this time of year, but the action on stage this coming Wednesday promises to be plenty hot. Over the past several years, the monthly Stories for All Seasons series has featured some of the state’s best authors reading their…
Thursday, December 11 The tooth-and-claw battle to find a warmer, cozier holiday shopping experience will get a bit tamer this weekend. Put your feet up (figuratively, of course) and travel through a sale of sumptuous wearables at the Gypsies Collection Trunk Show, featuring gypsy-style clothing from designers and artisans around…
Through his Coke-bottle lenses, Mark Mothersbaugh sees “a beautiful world.” Sketching ironic illustrations of political idioms, suicide bombings and war on the back of postcards, the Devo frontman stays true to the band’s “Spudboy” cyber-cynicism in his most recent touring art show, HomeFront Invasion! “HomeFront Invasion! refers to the images…
What do you do when even the funky stores all start to look alike? For some shoppers out there, that dreadful moment when sweet eclecticism degenerates into a marketing ploy could signal the end of life as you know it. But for the moment, you can put away the smelling…
SUN, 12/14 Author Michael Shapiro is pure Brooklyn. A man of his borough through and through (though he no longer lives there), the fifty-something journalist speaks thick Brooklynese punctuated by a flurry of exclamation points, and his enthusiasm for the Brooklyn he grew up in — the fabled blue-collar Brooklyn…
