She stepped quickly to the witness stand. She raised her right hand. She swore to tell the truth. So began the main event in the murder trial of Krystal Voss — the much-anticipated moment when the accused took the stand to tell her own story. Wearing a lavender blouse and…
“He is not of the Christ,” says Jose Hidalgo, gesturing wildly at Bill, the panhandler he’s competing with at the intersection of Alameda Avenue and Santa Fe Drive. “He does not believe. He is not polite.” To illustrate his point, Jose hails a nearby Julian Electric truck and tells the…
For a while, it looked like Bada Bing was going Bada Bust. Just a few hours after Westword’s November 11 “Bada Bing, Bada Boom!” hit the stands, the Denver escort agency’s website was down, with users rerouted to www.mindyourownbusiness.com. Elsewhere in cyberspace, flame wars erupted on two popular forums for…
Hyung Soo Pak’s rage earned him a one-way ticket to the other side of the world. The 22-year-old sleeps away most of his days at a detention center in Aurora. Incarceration bores the hell out of Pak, who’s classified as a criminal alien. An expedited deportation is his only hope…
Cliff, Kiss, Cigarette, explains Dylan Ward, “is a story about danger, risk and coming of age in a fucked-up world.” At seventeen, playwright Ward has barely come of age himself, and he took plenty of risks staging his ambitious work at the LIDA Project experimental-theater space earlier this month, including…
The nasty tenor of the recently concluded campaign didn’t leave Bob Newman with an unpleasant aftertaste. Politically speaking, the former Marine gunnery sergeant turned Clear Channel radio host found the results of the 2004 vote to be downright inspirational. “I realized about noon on the Wednesday after the election that…
Most Nuggets fans can’t read tea leaves, but they’re pretty good with injury reports. Either way, universal health care will be critical to the immediate fortunes of a team that leaped into the season full of newfound hopes and dreams but quickly found its baby-blue ass in a 2-5 sling…
A Word to the Wives The evil that men do: As an AIDS activist and AIDS educator, I would like to applaud Westword for publishing Laura Bond’s “A Grim Prognosis” in the November 18 issue. I have seen the typical profile of a person with AIDS or HIV change from…
The belt buckles on the dance floor at Tequila Rosa’s shine as brightly as the mirrored ball that hangs overhead, sending fractured prisms of light onto the couples dancing to Mexican disco. Two men spin in mad concentric circles, around and around and around the floor, now and then tilting…
Inside a crowded East High School classroom, Imani Latif is teaching women how to talk to the men in their lives about love, sex and HIV. The 13th Annual Colorado Women of Color Conference on HIV & AIDS is under way, and Latif and about twenty African-American women have gathered…
Boulder High students provoked a talk-radio frenzy, not to mention a visit from the Secret Service, when one of the acts at a school-sponsored talent show proposed to perform as the Taliband. To defuse this ludicrous controversy, the fledgling musicians ultimately changed their group’s appellation to Coalition of the Willing,…
The capture of Ricky Eugene Bailey just before midnight on Friday, November 5, was good news for the Denver Police Department. After all, Bailey, 46, is suspected of committing over twenty robberies since early October, and because he sports a memorable nickname — the “Raspy Robber,” in acknowledgement of his…
Initial reports pegged Rick Bobbitt’s stunt at last month’s Santa Fe Air Show as a relatively easy maneuver called a hammerhead. A former Navy aviator, current United Airlines flight officer and experienced aerobatic competitor, the 46-year-old Parker resident was certainly qualified to perform the trick. The International Aerobatic Club gave…
Bada Company Boom and bust: The time following this November’s election was exhausting, and for once Denver’s liberal weekly was no help, choosing to run in the November 11 issue David Holthouse’s “Bada Bing, Bada Boom!,” a piece full of incredibly tired ideas about women (i.e. there’s something fascinating about…
In a strip-mall sports bar near the Denver Tech Center, the Halloween party is getting a little scary. A snowy-haired gent who’s costumed as a flasher, with a massive plastic phallus dangling beneath his raincoat, is dirty-dancing to “Play That Funky Music” with a hottie in a black leather Catwoman…
Until two years ago, Marcia Simmons thought of herself as a pretty lucky woman. She wasn’t fabulously rich, but she did have what mattered to her: an adoring husband, a nice home, and comfortable sums tucked away in mutual funds, retirement accounts and savings bonds for her kids’ education. She…
Colorado lawmakers heading into the State Capitol last Thursday morning for post-election caucus meetings were hastily redirected to the building’s side entrances by a power-washing custodial crew, out cleaning up the evidence of some free-speech activity by disgruntled voters who’d splattered the Capitol’s front facade with several dozen eggs. Two…
Around 5 a.m. the morning after another wacky election, 9News’s Gary Shapiro expressed delight at being rid of political ads for the season. Smiling co-anchor Gregg Moss added that viewers should expect a lot more station promos in the days ahead. Ordinarily, this prospect would have struck me as singularly…
That pointy brown thing that turns up in the U.S. of A. every autumn is a football — a fact that has escaped most of Colorado’s major colleges and universities this year and has dawned only occasionally on the Emperor of Invesco, Mike Shanahan. Herewith five ways of looking at…
We’ll Drink to That! Thirst amendment: “Through a Glass, Darkly,” your special drinking report in the November 4 issue, was the only thing that got me through the dark days of last week. Now there’s even more reason to drink! Larry Peterson Denver Moral majority: Westword’s celebration of drinking was…
They’ll Drink to That Foam, foam on the range: Denver’s long and liquid history. By Patricia Calhoun Before it toasted Denver as the “Drunkest Big City in America,” Men’s Health studied the number of drunk-driving arrests in the country’s 101 largest metro areas, as well as the number of alcohol-related…
Just a week before the election, David Hakala, the first Coloradan to sue a telemarketer for violating the “do not call” list, unveiled his latest public service: the No Political Calls List. “I got my first robo-call from a politician — the Colorado Republican Party — on October 12, slamming…
