Letters to the Editor

The Party’s Over The light stuff: Getting my Westword on Wednesday night is always one of the highlights of the week. I only wish you could have devoted even more pages to your April 29 cover story, Julie Jargon’s “The Importance of Being Holly.” We really didn’t get into Holly…

The Importance of Being Holly

Holly Kylberg needs no introduction, but a friend offers one anyway: “This is Holly. Isn’t she fabulous?” Fabulous is right. Just don’t tell her that unless you want to make her blush, because Holly may be a bold name, but she’s also shy, even humble. The 38-year-old balks at the…

The Inner Sanctum

I have gone where no one has gone before: into the closet of Denver’s most stylish woman, Holly Kylberg. This was no easy feat. It took weeks of begging before she would allow me to tread in so private a realm. Few people have even been inside Holly’s house, so…

Slumming It

Any good investigative story about a socialite requires getting said socialite out of her element. And so we’re going on a dive-bar tour, beginning at Don’s Club Tavern. Ever fashion-conscious, Holly asks what she should wear. “Not an evening gown, I hope,” she says. No, I tell her, jeans will…

A Few of Holly’s Favorite Things

Who or what is your favorite . . . Fashion Designer (local and national): Locally, my dear friend, the incredibly talented Gabriel Conroy. Nationally, it varies, but currently I have a fixation on Gucci, particularly Tom Ford’s last collections. Celebrity icon: When I was young, Elly May Clampett, from the…

The Can Man Cometh

Carlton Wayne Stewart has never played the stock market, but he watches it every day. So he can tell you that, at the moment, the market value of a pound of aluminum is roughly 46 cents, or $1,000 a ton, making it the most valuable of all reclaimable scrap metals…

Follow That Story

Stephanie Huff was a runner. When she was in a place she didn’t like, she’d run. When she was in trouble, she’d run. But earlier this month, during a sentencing hearing for two separate crimes, Stephanie finally realized that she could no longer outrun her problems — or her past…

Off Limits

Although it’s still spring, northwest Denver is already harvesting a bumper crop of bickering. Seeds of dissension have been sown all over the neighborhood, in plots linking entities as diverse as community gardens, Wal-Mart, T-Mobile and…Clay Aiken? Last Friday night, Laura Altschul, T-Mobile director of national siting policy, sat shaking…

The Message

In many journalism circles, “leak” is a dirty word. It wasn’t always so. In 1971, the New York Times was hailed by much of the press — and a sizable portion of the public — for its decision to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, and Daniel Ellsberg,…

Rallying With God

Almost two decades ago, as she was recovering from yet one more painful shoulder surgery, Andrea Jaeger had a dream. “I was in a wide-open field,” she recounts. “Groups of people were gathering around, calmly conversing.” When she began to leave, she continues, “my stepping away from the crowd caused…

Letters to the Editor

Zoot Allure The kids are alright: I just finished reading “The Next Stage,” Laura Bond’s April 22 article on the Zoot Suit Riots production at North High School. I wanted to thank you for the article. It was such a nice surprise to read something positive about the students at…

The Next Stage

A cloudless spring day in northwest Denver. JOSÉ MERCADO is standing in the doorway of a small brick house on Zuni Street, trying to convince an eighty-year-old woman to let him into her basement. That’s where he believes he’ll find the woman’s seventeen-year-old grandson, ERNEST APODACA. JOSÉ: Would you mind…

The Young Man and the Lake

I first fished the Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in 2003, but it was an end-of-season tease, and the fish were hardened and crafty. I had dreamed about plying these waters since I was a kid reading In Fisherman. Now, after a winter of waiting, I was going to get…

Follow That Story

The people behind the Denver Tent City Initiative are getting restless. They’ve been working on their proposal to create a tent city here since last summer, but progress seems stalled in committee. So when the group met again last Saturday at the St. Francis Center, some members were ready to…

Off Limits

Hometown-girl-made-good Gale Norton was back in Denver this past weekend to preside over a ceremony at which the Army officially turned over 5,000 acres of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to the Department of the Interior. Norton, Colorado’s former attorney general, grew up a few miles from the arsenal, once known…

The Message

Damon Cain, managing editor for presentation and design at the Denver Post, minces no words when describing the broadsheet he was hired to upgrade. When he first saw the paper, he says, “I thought it had visual problems with every turn of the page.” Thank goodness he noticed and is…

Do You Believe?

Walk into any local saloon or opium den this week and you’re sure to run into the guy. The guy who’s been there from the beginning. The guy who’s been there from the beginning and never lost hope. The guy who never lost hope and always kept his season tickets…

Letters to the Editor

A Tents Situation Homeless is where the heart is: Amy Haimerl’s “Pitching Tents,” in the April 15 issue, was a thought-provoking, well-written article by a woman who chose not to make it an article about the politics of Denver’s homeless population, but rather chose to put a human face on…

Pitching Tents

It’s dark and rainy outside, but in here it’s warm. Keith has just put another piece of scavenged wood in the stove, and the fire’s popping brightly, illuminating the surrounding faces. Ed, Dog Dave, Tim, JP, Shaun, Mark. A train whistle cuts through the incessant sound of rain beating on…

Gimme Shelter

Although Portland’s Dignity Village is by far the most prominent — and vocal — tent city in the United States, a handful of other cities have also harbored such communities, with varying degrees of success. Seattle is already on its third tent city in a decade. The first, Tent City…

Fire Sale

In Denver, a pack of Camels runs about three bucks; in New York City, smokers pay at least $7.50. The discrepancy is because Colorado still charges just twenty cents in tax on a pack, while New York raised its rates from that to $1.50 in July 2002. If the backers…

Follow That Story

Nathanael Justin McIntosh, the 28-year-old man accused of shaking his infant daughter to death, was sentenced to ten years in prison on March 29 after accepting a plea bargain. Justin had been caring for three-month-old Jasmine Danae on November 29, 2002, while the baby’s mother, Caleena Burch, then twenty, crashed…