Dianne Tramutola-Lawson no longer slings French verbs for a living, but the former Lincoln High language instructor still has the occasional teacherly impulse. As she boards the bus in southeast Denver on a sodden, foggy November morning–her bus, mind you, chartered with a personal check for $500–she can’t resist addressing…
Snow biz: Revenues fell last year at the Winter Park ski resort. But more troubling to the corporation that runs the place might be the continued interest in its operations by Denver city auditor Don Mares. Though Denver has ceded day-to-day control of its mountain wonderland to the bluebloods at…
When the Ash Grove Recreation Center “For People Over 50” in southeast Denver closed on September 4, the 1,200 seniors who relied on the facility were told they’d have a new recreation center within a few weeks. They heard the same promise in October. And in November. But the seniors…
Pile your bowl high with Flutie Flakes and get a load of this. Among the thirty National Football League quarterbacks who held starting jobs at the beginning of September, eighteen are, for one reason or another, out of the picture right now. In San Diego, errant Washington State rookie Ryan…
Lucero’s is the kind of place you have to be looking for to find, which is understandable, since there are no signs on the building, unless you count the black spray-painted scribble of a street gang. Which most people don’t. Instead, most people follow their noses, which lead them along…
No Paean, No Gain Regarding Robin Chotzinoff’s “What’s Your Status?” in the November 12 issue: Just another paean of praise for Chotzinoff and her talent for deflating the pompous (the New York Times, for instance), for reporting with accuracy and compassion (the farmers she asked the Times’s absurd question about…
The Sunday worship service at Christ of the Canyons church in the small southern Colorado town of Cokedale took a decidedly secular turn one morning this past August. A process server came into the church and tried to deliver papers to Dave Groubert, a church elder who also runs a…
Back in late October, Gary Boyce didn’t seem like a man headed for a whipping. Settling into a red leather chair in his “Denver office”–the boardroom-swank Churchill Room at the Brown Palace–Boyce was the picture of cowboy calm while discussing the two initiatives he and his water-development company, Stockman’s Water,…
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease eats holes in your brain and causes you to stagger, twitch, cry out in your sleep, lose control of your bodily functions, go mad and die. The disease may have been hidden in a hamburger you ate in Europe ten years ago, a corneal transplant or your own…
The City of Glendale got ripped last April by bar and strip club owners who felt that the city was trying to put them out of business with strict live-entertainment ordinances. Amid calls for Mayor Joe Rice’s head, a group called the Glendale Tea Party dispatched strippers to register voters…
Politics makes strange bedfellows: Since Colorado Democratic chair Phil Perrington shut down his party’s party relatively early (who could blame him, after a TV reporter didn’t understand Perrington’s “Dewey” reference when he alluded to Harry Truman’s come-from-behind surprise 1948 victory?), for real election-night antics you had to head south to…
Win SOme, Lose Some Talk about sore losers! Patricia Calhoun needs to get over herself: The Broncos got their new stadium fair and square (“Let Us Pray,” November 5). Just because Calhoun is out of step with the majority of Denver-area voters (what a surprise!), she wants to play the…
Prepare yourself. I’m about to drop some impressive names. Well, two of them, anyway. 1. Jane Smiley. Author of A Thousand Acres and Moo. Famous writer and writing professor. 2. The New York Times. I am too old to be overly impressed by two such symbols of the writing world…
Leon is late, as usual, and Lloyd is early, as usual, and they both know this about each other, but it seldom changes their estimated times of arrival. This is the way they are, and they seem to like it fine. When the ex-con meets the corporate executive, which is…
The Lakewood office where Dr. Mary Hansen practices psychology has just two rooms. The tiny, mauve-toned waiting room holds four plain chairs and a table covered with issues of Reader’s Digest, Woman’s Day and a recent Esquire, with Mr. Rogers on the cover. There’s no receptionist asking clients to fill…
With all the sympathy recently being enjoyed by VAIL as a result of the apparent torching of four of its mountain-top facilities, it is easy to forget what a 900-pound gorilla the corporate snow park really is. Already the largest ski resort on the continent, VAIL is eager to add…
Coors Booing Co.: The streets of Key West were packed over Halloween weekend with revelers celebrating the Coors Light FantasyFest. What’s the Golden-based brewer doing hosting what was once South Florida’s most raucous (read: public nudity and even sex!) gay event? Proving that it’s a company exhibiting “corporate leftism” and…
To your typical Cheesecake Factory patron, these cops are almost invisible. But for the street people who use the 16th Street Mall as their living room, the off-duty police who periodically cruise down the mall’s “buses only” lane are an irritating part of the furniture. The officers putt up and…
Among the grand heroics and tragic disturbances of humankind, the performance of a baseball team is a puny thing. But it looms awfully large right now for a lot of people. Why, just the other night, in a saloon that shall remain nameless, I witnessed a bar-pounding, drink-spilling, shoulder-shoving exchange…
Prairie Home Companion After reading Patricia Calhoun’s “Little Grouse on the Prairie,” I don’t know what to hope for. If the stadium vote is jeopardized because of the legislature’s greedy addition of Park Meadows and Lone Tree’s commercial area, that’s good. But if it means that we have to go…
“As with all weak people, the criticism and backbiting by reporters occurred only during office gossip. After this, they all proceeded to genuflect in print for a rich man or politician. They had no access to public funds, the most stolen article in all of crime…they constantly perpetrated the worse…
The first in a string of thirteen murders in Aurora that began Labor Day weekend barely made a ripple in Denver–six execution-style homicides the next day guaranteed that. But that first murder made headlines in Mexico and destroyed a family’s nine-year-old dream of building a life in the United States…
