The last time this town saw Charlton Heston — the living, breathing movie star, or what passes for him these days — was less than two weeks after the shootings at Columbine High School, when the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Denver. Moses came down from the…
It’s a dinner party waiting to happen, but where is the dinner? The silver urn centerpiece sprouts black ostrich feathers instead of flowers. The high-rent china is stacked five pieces deep, and in each soup bowl some wise-ass butler has placed a man’s necktie, neatly folded, rather than soup. The…
Many old-timers believe that radio’s golden age took place during the ’30s and ’40s, when high-quality dramas, serials and variety shows filled the schedule and television had not yet taken hold of the popular imagination. Baby boomers, meanwhile, are generally divided over whether the medium was at its best during…
Their amazing quarterback stands 5′ 11″ and weighs 185 — which makes him three inches taller and ten pounds heavier than their top running back. They call older men “sir,” get straight A’s in calculus and would no sooner cheap-shot an opponent than fly a Mig for Iraq. In the…
Raining on His Parade A sorry development: I was disgusted by everything I read in Alan Prendergast’s October 3 “Viva Las Villa!” Even if all of the developers at the Parade of Homes were on the up and up, the excessive displays — too much living space, too much water,…
John Losasso still recalls the dark mornings when his father would rouse him from bed at 3 a.m. The sleepy schoolboy was just ten, but his dad needed help making deliveries, so he was pressed into service. The elder Losasso was a produce peddler who drove a horse-drawn wagon through…
For much of the past decade, Columbus Day has been tense in Denver. Parading Italian-Americans have been confronted by Native American protesters and their allies, hundreds of people have been arrested, and animosity between the two groups has grown. This year promises more of the same. The Columbus Day parade…
Back in 1998, the dot-com wave was at its peak, and it seemed like money — big money — would flow forever. Chris Sword, then 29, had just moved to Denver from Detroit for his job with Lincoln-Mercury and was living in corporate housing down in the Denver Tech Center…
Mad magazine couldn’t come up with a better prank than what’s now posted on the http://coloradicals.org Web site. While Denver police chief Gerry Whitman scrounges through detectives’ drawers at the DPD’s so-called Intelligence Bureau, trying to round up every last scrap of paper testifying to the bureau’s surveillance of civilians,…
“I’m not here for me,” the man in the waiting room says. “I’m here with my friend. He needs a job. He’s talking to someone about a job in one of those offices. Maybe I should be in there,” he says nervously, twisting a little in his chair. Recently laid…
When measured by circulation, Denver’s MediaNews Group is the seventh-largest newspaper company in these United States, with a roster of more than 120 publications topped by the Denver Post. But until recent years, MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton, who put together this sprawling enterprise and watches over its day-to-day operation, received…
The only sticking point in the romance, Andi remembers, occurred last spring when KC showed up in Moab with a brand-new cherry-red Avalanche. A Chevy Avalanche. “When I saw him show up with it, I thought it was a rental,” she says. “I couldn’t believe he’d buy a Chevy.” KC…
Trick or Treatment Courting disaster: I very much enjoyed Stuart Steers’s “Looking for a Fix,” in the September 26 issue. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats certain groups within it — children, women and sick people in particular. When it comes to the disease…
Suppose, for a moment, that you’re in the market for a seven-figure custom house. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just a little something for the missus and the wee tykes, now that you’ve outgrown that quaint pied-à-terre downtown. Something different, something fresh. Something to make your friends weep with envy. Seeking…
The man behind the wheel of the forty-foot passenger bus sits and waits for 9:12 a.m., the minute that he’s scheduled to pull out of a stop at Seventh and Water streets. But on this recent Tuesday morning, he also waits for some kind of clue as to what, exactly,…
For the first time in a long while, the workplace culture at the Denver Botanic Gardens is looking rosy. After more than two years of high turnover and management problems, DBG executive director Brinsley Burbidge has stepped down, and employees wasted no time in toasting his departure. Staff members heard…
Judging from those whopping ads that popped up this week in dailies across Qwest’s service area, the bumpy ride of the telecom’s “Ride the Light” slogan has come to an abrupt halt. From here on out, Qwest’s slogan will be “Spirit of Service.” But given the current lineup of Qwest…
“I don’t see her,” says the security guard standing across the street from the Black Hawk Casino by Hyatt. “Where is this goddess supposed to be? In the light-colored rock? Wait — maybe I can see her, a little. Looks like someone laying down with a big stomach and her…
The Denver Post was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its treatment of the Columbine High School shootings and wound up as the lead dog in a joint operating agreement with the Rocky Mountain News — but in recent years, the paper has been seen by many observers as flabby, boring…
The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary — which should know better — defines “baseball” as “a game played with a wooden bat and a hard ball by two teams of nine players each…the object of the game being to make as many runs as possible within nine innings of…
Cell Hell He’s got our number: I’m here to say thank you for Patricia Calhoun’s “A Hard Cell” observations in the September 26 issue. I, too, believe cell phones are a menace to our societal well-being. Bravo to Calhoun for putting her beliefs in print and on the air via…
Meredith Behm is a drug addict. When it’s time to get high, she disappears from her job, says goodbye to her mother, kisses her daughter as she drops her off at school, and vanishes for days. She winds up wherever the drugs are. During most of the past two years,…
