Building Bridges

It’s appropriate, says Judy Anderson, that the PlatteForum arts and education project stands at the base of the Millennium Bridge. According to the artist and executive director, the nine-month-old initiative is all about connections. “It’s a working collaboration with the community,” Anderson explains. “Arts. Education. Youth. Everything we do is…

Gospel Truth

Here’s the thing about Sunday brunch at Pierre’s Supper Club: From the outside, the place, at 2157 Downing Street, looks closed. Sure, this fifty-year-old Denver institution can still pack ’em in on Friday and Saturday nights, but on Sunday afternoons — when you would think a supper club should be…

Freedom Fleet

FRI, 7/4 Ron Cavill, an investment advisor from Genesee, wants to make some noise on the Fourth of July. So he’ll hop on his purple 1500cc Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad and join hundreds of friends and fellow motorheads as they roll into the second annual Liberty Ride n’ Rod. Participants, who…

Rack ‘Em Up

TUES, 7/8 Where’s the last place your mother wanted to catch you hanging out on a summer evening? No contest: It was the pool hall, where boys became men (and girls became sharks) while racking them up in the back-room murk. The game of billiards comes with twenty tons of…

Continental Cycles

FRI, 7/4 Tai Beldock of Denver’s Erico Motorsports wants the U.S. to give equal time to European motorcycles. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival, she says, eschews the Harley’s stylish overseas cousins with its all-Harley “Art on Two Wheels” display. So her faction decided to put on its own show, Moto…

Time Tripping

SUN, 7/6 Do you remember your first Grateful Dead concert? The one you went to before Jerry got really tired and grizzled? Maybe you’re having a hard time remembering after the concoction of mind erasers you took that day, but it wouldn’t have been a real Dead concert otherwise, right?…

Dumb and Dumber

On the morning of Thursday, June 12, Mayor Wellington Webb and First Lady Wilma Webb, among a host of political and art world luminaries, dedicated the most expensive sculpture ever erected in Denver, “The Dancers,” by international art star Jonathan Borofsky. The public was invited to the event, and I…

Artbeat

The commercial strip that lines Tennyson Street in northwest Denver has changed a lot over the last few years. Whereas once it was a collection of thrift shops and laundromats, it is now home to loft buildings, coffee shops and specialty stores. In the last category are Metro Frame Works…

Unfulfilling Will

I really wanted to be a lot more amused by The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) than I was. Some of the bits were clever, and the three appealing actors — Keith Hershman, C.J. Hosier and Eric Mather — worked so damn hard. Sadly, the audience was tiny on…

Film Flam

Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana is essentially a one-joke play. Fortunately, the joke is so savage, and it’s taken to such outrageous and unthinkable lengths, that the result is a startling and original evening of theater. It doesn’t hurt that the dialogue is always inventive and sometimes downright lunatic, or…

Dead to Rights

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk-radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for comparing…

The Young Girl and the Sea

Once in a while, a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…

Fallen Angels

As the Columbia Pictures logo looms large on the screen until its torch becomes the focal point, we find ourselves in what appears to be a tent full of sweaty medieval warriors forging axes. We have to wonder: Did they already make another Scorpion King movie and not tell us?…

Flick Pick

Norma Desmond would love it. This summer, the Chautauqua Silent Film Series will once more bring to Boulder a broad array of classics from Hollywood’s silent era, along with a touch of vintage Fritz Lang, complete with live musical accompaniment. If some rude blabbermouth in the row behind you disturbs…

Loose Lips

“I’ve never thought of my own show as raunchy,” hard-edged comic Sandra Bernhard says by phone from her office in L.A. “I’ve always thought of it as pretty reflective of our times. There’s always sexuality and stuff that I think is relevant. And I still have deep concerns about our…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, June 26 There’s nothing in the world quite like shmoozing and boozing lakeside at sunset. It’s a stolen pleasure offered annually at Sunset in the Park, a unique outdoor fundraiser for the ALS Association. The benefit, which features a cocktail buffet and auction, is especially poignant in 2003, which…

In the Fridge

In 1998, a group of Colorado College students got together to put on a play called Quixote, a retelling of Cervantes’s famous tale, with chalkboard and erasers. They later toured it to fringe festivals in Philadelphia and in Canada. After graduating, they created a piece based on James Thurber’s short…

Japanese Culture Blooms

SAT, 6/28 Pink and white cherry blossoms no longer line the banks of Cherry Creek, but that doesn’t stop Denver’s Japanese-American community from celebrating its culture each June at the annual Sakura Matsuri, otherwise known as the Cherry Blossom Festival. Now in its 31st year, Denver’s Cherry Blossom Festival takes…

Yikes! Bikes!

FRI, 6/27 Robbie Morales’s crucial transformation took place when he was thirteen, astride a banana-seat bicycle. The Long Island teen popped a wheelie, and the move — front tire airborne, merely decorative — quickly became his passion. Soon baseball faded in favor of a new sport, BMX bicycle competition. The…

Circus Saga

TUES, 7/1 For children, the life-sized elephant puppet may be the highlight of Walden Family Playhouse’s Toby and the Big Top. But adults will be amazed by the sense of nostalgia for an old-time circus re-created by internationally accomplished artists. “We’re kind of re-creating the turn-of-the-century circus that stopped a…

Feel Like Roamin’?

SAT, 6/28 Can’t afford a European adventure this summer? Here’s how to enjoy a Roman holiday without ever leaving the comfort of your own scrappy little American city: Be transported by Sargent and Italy, a traveling exhibit from the Los Angeles County Museum and Italy’s Ferrara Arte Museum that opens…

Kick Astral

Comets on Fire rescramble reality SUN, 6/29 Do you remember that one time Alice Cooper was a guest star on The Jetsons? No? How about when your MC5 Kick Out the Jams eight-track got twisted up in your stereo and started playing backward, forward and sideways all at the same…