Hey, Colorado Mills: I’m a sore loser and I want my $250

I spent a week capturing myself on Macbook-style film for Colorado Mills’ “Week of a Woman” photography contest earlier this month. Yesterday, I received a phone call yesterday letting me know that I did not win. In fact, no one did.  The contest was cancelled because of a lack of…

Get in the swing with PoeTreze IV

There’s poetry. And there’s a trapeze. Do you really need to know more about PoeTreze? An occasional cultural offering from the National Theatre Conservatory class of 2012 (its last, incidentally), PoeTreze swings in a way that regular poetry readings never do: in the spoken meter of high-grade performance poetry –…

Who Is That Masked Man?

When Ed Edmunds was in college in Greeley in 1978, he went to a costume contest and lost to a guy wearing a mask that he had painted himself. “So I thought, well, I’ll just make a mask or a whole costume that’ll win these costume contests,” says Edmunds with…

Monster Mash

Yeti. Bigfoot. Abominable Snowman. These are actually not interchangeable terms — yetis, for example, are specific to the Himalayas, while Bigfoot is an American beast — but clearly, humans have a fascination with all of the giant man-beasts that dwell in mountains. Hence, the American Mountaineering Museum’s annual Yeti Night…

What A Blast-Off

Usually when the Fantastic Hosts throw a party, it’s just for them and their friends, but as local artist and FH member Marie Vlasic points out, they also party in public every once in a while. This season’s “once in a while” is Forbidden Planet, a spectacular public Halloween soiree…

All That Glitters

In a couple of weeks, the gold-themed exhibition AU: Exchange, curated by Cortney Stell of the Philip J. Steele Gallery, will open at RedLine Gallery, featuring interpretations of the precious metal by RedLine resident artists. In preparation for the exhibit, RedLine is seizing Stell’s curatorial subject for a different take…

A Little Scary

Building dioramas is a time-honored tradition for kids of all ages, but as the dioramas get more complex, some of those kids lose sight of how to make them. Today and tomorrow at the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls and Toys, children will have a chance to learn how to…

Portrait of a Cereal Killer

The tiger has been acting a little strange lately, but so has the bear. In fact, neither of these characters, or any other cereal-promoting mascot, can be ruled out in the murder of the much-loved Tasty Flakes Rabbit, and it’s going to be up to you and a team of…

Scary Noises

Costumed hula-hoopers, dancers and singers join the Mile High Freedom Band today for two Halloween dance parties set to the tune of spooky orchestral mash-ups. The band, with more than fifty members, takes over the Sherman Street Event Center with live renditions of The Addams Family and Scooby-Doo theme songs,…

Bring Out Your Dead

For the third year in a row, Olinger Crown Hill Mortuary will hold its Día de los Muertos Cultural Celebration in the perfect setting: a cemetery. The event includes a children’s sugar-skull painting workshop, an exhibit of brightly colored altars made by local artists, dancing from Grupo Folklorico Sabor de…

Another Night of the Dead

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the catalyst for the zombie explosion, and to honor its pedigree, the Bug Theatre and Paper Cat Films have re-created it for the last four years as a hybrid stage-and-film performance. Since the film is public domain, they’ve tweaked a few…

The Spice of Life

It’s not a matter of whether there will be doll-on-doll rape in one of the short films at Hueso de Perro’s Halloweird II; it’s a matter of how much doll-on-doll rape there’ll be. “I’ve got this one with a Barbie-doll rape scene in it, and I’m not sure if I…

The Long Road Home

Los Angeles Times journalist Sonia Nazario won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for “Enrique’s Journey,” a remarkable piece of reporting for which she traveled with a young Honduran migrant as he made his way to the United States in search of a better life. And that’s just the story behind…

Children of the Corn

You know it’s really fall when the Corn Maze at the Chatfield outpost of the Denver Botanic Gardens opens for business. This year’s maze is designed to pay tribute to the work of Allan Houser; the current exhibit at the York Street gardens, Native Roots|Modern Form, is the seed from…

Down on the Farm

Anderson Farms’ thirty-acre corn maze, a main feature of its Fall Festival, depicts a horse-drawn corn planter next to a tractor-propelled planter — an homage to the Anderson Family’s hundred years of Colorado farming. Notes Rachelle Wegele, great-granddaughter of founder August Anderson, bringing so many people to the farm connects…

Mountain Highs

The Colorado Mountain Club convened its first official meeting on April 26, 1912, was instrumental in winning federal designation for Rocky Mountain National Park just three years later, and is now celebrating a century of shaping mountain conservation, education and recreation in Colorado. Get a sneak preview of the 2012…

A Special Kind of Guy

It was a pretty sweet score for film students at the University of Colorado at Boulder when the program landed Alex Cox, acclaimed director of such indie-punk staples as Sid & Nancy and Three Businessmen, to teach screenwriting and film production. Luckily for everyone else, CU’s International Film Series is…

Poe’s Woes At Byers-Evans

Take a second to imagine Edgar Allan Poe’s chamber, at whose door the Raven so famously tapped, and chances are what you’re picturing looks a lot like the Byers-Evans House. “The setting couldn’t be more perfect,” says Maggie Stillman, executive producer of the Byers-Evans House Theatre Company, which tonight hosts…

Enter A Different Zone

In 1959, mastermind Rod Serling introduced television audiences to another dimension: The Twilight Zone. Now, more than half a century later, the science-fiction series with a penchant for social commentary continues to inspire parodies and adaptations, from frequent references on The Simpsons to a full-length Steven Spielberg movie. The Theater…