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During a recent performance at the Lion’s Lair, vocalist/griot Gil Scott-Heron preceded his musical set with an extended riff about, among other things, a media scenario in which virtually everything has a price tag. “Now you hear, ‘The weather is brought to you by…'” he said. Grinning, he added, “Motherfucker…

“Out at Home,” by Patricia Calhoun, March 9, 2000 My heart goes out to Loi Nguyen, the subject of Patricia Calhoun’s March 9 “Out at Home.” We all make mistakes when we are young, and he has owned up to them and paid the price — seven years behind bars!…

The Shooting At night, the parking lot outside the King Soopers at Iliff Avenue and Buckley Road in Aurora is a flat field of black asphalt. Thousands of white parking stripes lie useless, while the neon signs above the closed shops next to the food castle cast a fuzzy light…

For years, Jan Pacheco led a quiet life as a Pueblo homemaker, raising two sons and counting on her husband Howard’s job in the huge steel mill that looms over the south side of town to pay the family’s bills. The Pachecos enjoyed their comfortable home near City Park and…

The last time Mike Quintana made the papers, he wanted to run for Denver City Council. He didn’t. But just as it seemed like the Graffiti Avenger’s fifteen minutes of fame were up, he has settled in for a lawsuit against the city over an incident in which he says…

People either love them or hate them. And according to the lovers, the haters have spent the last year and a half getting rid of as many Colorado prairie dogs as possible. In July 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would consider listing the black-tailed prairie…

Intellectually, I know that the earth thaws from the outside in, but my gut feeling tells me it works the other way. Even when the visible part of the city is frozen into hard cubes, I like to imagine that something alive is running through its core, keeping things moving…

Suite irony: Anyone who didn’t read the program after they sat down at the Downtown Denver Partnership’s annual awards ceremony last week was in for a stunner later that evening. The DDP, whose black-tie shindig on March 1 attracted about 850 people, bestowed one of its awards on the Adam’s…

Finally, it has come to pass. On March 6, Texas’s Clear Channel Communications announced that 72 of the 125 or so radio stations it must divest as a result of its early-October merger with another Texas-based broadcasting colossus, AMFM, have been sold. Since that total includes five of the six…

Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Hold, Please,” in the March 2 issue: Why don’t you guys interview some of the US West employees and write an article exposing Sol Trujillo for the schmuck that he truly is? Everyone I have talked to seems to think that he shelled out the company, stripped…

Patrick Gourley arrives at the Infectious Diseases Clinic on the fifth floor of the old city hospital and walks into his cramped office, which includes both a desk and an examination table. Gourley, head of nursing at the clinic, pulls a small, clear plastic container out of his purse, sighs…

For more than twenty years, Edie Bryan has been an advocate of alternative means of transportation — formerly as a Lakewood city councilwoman and RTD boardmember, and most recently as the chairwoman of the Colorado Rail Advisory Committee. But now that Colorado has elected a governor who wants bigger and…

ere are some terms commonly associated with the word “potato”: French-fried, mashed, Mister, scalloped, baked, Dan Quayle. Here is one that is not: embezzled. Colorado ranks sixth of all states in the nation in potato production. Seventy-five trucks a day rumble out of the San Luis Valley alone during harvest…

“Hi, my name is Mick,” reads a mailer sent to voters in Glendale last week. “My owner, Mike Dunafon, is running for Glendale Mayor, please vote for him because he won’t be a good mayor, he’ll be a GREAT Mayor! Besides, he loves animals!” OK, so the pooch is no…

Bear country: Flush with pride over the success of its Y2K @ DIA promotional flashlights (“Press Released,” February 24), the public-relations staff at Denver International Airport moved on to its next moneymaking gig on Monday by selling $20 commemorative Air Bears as part of its fifth-anniversary “celebration.” True to bear…

Those who know Viviane Le Courtois-Mitchell have come to expect those moments when she reaches into a garbage pail, plucks out a crusty banana peel — and frames it. Last November, for instance, she squeaked open her refrigerator door, rummaged around and, in the back by the bread and veggies,…

At last week’s Grammy presentation, Jennifer Lopez turned plenty of heads — and caused others to become engorged, thanks to a practically nonexistent dress that seemingly defied every law of Newtonian physics. (How come there’s never a stiff breeze when you need one?) But she’s hardly the only current pop…

“Curtins!,” by Robin Chotzinoff, February 24, 2000 Maxine Munt — what a wonderful woman! Thank you for Robin Chotzinoff’s “Curtains!” last week. Although I left Denver long ago, I was still saddened to read that Maxine had died, but made glad as I remembered everything that the Changing Scene –…

It was all over in three minutes. At 1:47 p.m. on September 29, 1999, a Denver SWAT team, acting on information contained in a fatally flawed search warrant, burst through the front door of 3738 High Street. At 1:50 p.m., Ismael Mena lay dead on the floor of his bedroom,…

The man on the phone says he doesn’t want anyone to know his name. He may wind up being the star witness in a police perjury trial, but right now he doesn’t need to have his name in the newspaper. That stuff can get you killed. Still, it takes only…

Two weeks ago, Barbara Walton received the kind of phone call that quickens a curator’s heart. Having worked at the Denver Public Library for the past fifteen years, she’d already amassed an impressive collection of programs and posters relating to community theaters in Denver, some dating back to the 1800s…