News

If it seems like a buck doesn’t buy as much of a booty-shaking good time as it used to during stripper night at your favorite local gay bar, you’re right. Denver police have warned bar owners that their go-go boys had better fill in their cracks or face the consequences…

The anonymous message showed up in the voice mail of World Class Limousine last month. “It’s good you run black cars,” the caller said, “because you’re going to need them for the funeral.” “I expected some flak over this, but not to this extent,” says Major Marcks, the operator of…

Let them drink Guinness No matter how hard Coors Brewing Company tries to clean up its act, the Golden-based business just can’t catch a break. Having successfully smoothed over angry unions, environmentalists, people of color and gays, Coors has now irritated the Irish — a hard-drinking population that a brewery…

I’m instantly awake and driven to purchase. Pot holders. Deck paint. Sturdy overalls, size 2T. Disposable rubber gloves, the 75-pair pack. Sunny Delite juice drink. A-point-and-shoot camera. Things I’ve never seen before but that are so ingenious — and such a bargain! — that I must have them. Now. So…

Denver Post sportswriter Adam Schefter is among this town’s most prominent Denver Broncos reporters/commentators. In addition to getting plenty of inches in the Post’s sports section during pigskin season, Schefter appears regularly on KOA and is a permanent part of KUSA-TV/ Channel 9’s team. But while such extracurricular gigs have…

It’s going to be a long, cold winter at the El Vado apartments. The complex was originally a motel, built in the 1940s on the site of a former gold and silver mill in the canyon linking Boulder and Nederland; in 1975, El Vado was converted into nine apartments. A…

The Bobolink — named for a small brown and white bird that frequents the area — is a bucolic trail meandering alongside Boulder Creek. In the marshy water near the trail’s head stand tall yellow narcissus or, later in the year, bulrushes with their hard, brown bottle-brush tops. Farther along,…

Lindsey Kuhn, a left-handed artist, can’t feel the fingers on his left hand. Yet he stands in the middle of his lower-downtown workshop — a 1,200-square-foot abandoned warehouse at Park Avenue and Market Street — and downright laughs at the thought of his drawing hand going on the blink. He…

A couple of doors down from a packed bingo hall and past the recliner store in an Arvada strip mall, a line of teenagers dressed in black braves the pouring rain while waiting to enter the Rising Phoenix. The air inside is choked with smoke from clove cigarettes. Girls strut…

The Denver Tennis Club’s 4.5 men’s team was marching inexorably toward a second straight national championship, when suddenly, in the middle of the Colorado district championship tournament last month… “It’s the revenge of the nerds,” snarls Larry Gabler, the team’s coach. “It had everything to do with them wanting me…

Editor’s note: Last Friday, legendary Denver Rocky Mountain News gossip columnist Norm! Clarke announced his departure from this toddling town for the neon jungle of Las Vegas. The next day, several notes on cocktail napkins, allegedly scribbled by Norm! himself, were brought to our office by a Sing!Sing washroom attendant…

Snitch nationIt’s easy to rat someone out these days — hotlines abound for reporting everything from drunk driving to drug dealers. In fact, two hotlines inspired by the Columbine killings made their debut on the same day (with more to come). The first, backed by Mayor Wellington Webb, is the…

Previous Westword article

“The Heat Is On,”


October 22, 1998

These chile sellers have fire in their souls.

Bob Visotcky, who was recently profiled in this space (“The Man You Hate to Love,” August 26), continues to be among the hottest topics on the Denver radio rumor mill, in part because of the many hirings and firings at six local stations he oversees for Dallas-based AMFM Inc. Keeping…

Bruce Chopnik drinks Coors beer. Under normal circumstances, that’s not a big deal — hell, lots of men drink Coors — but Bruce Chopnik is also International Mr. Leather. He earned his title fair and square at a pageant in Chicago earlier this year by scoring high on the question-and-answer…

Martin Ramirez stands behind a counter at the Botanica y Yerberia Caridad del Cobre, beneath six rattlesnake skins and beside a display case filled with nearly 300 oils and even more perfumes and colognes, all neatly organized by category: potions, lotions, baths, washes, herbs and oils. Eight-ounce bottles of “Quita…

The Colfax Center Deli enjoyed a brisk business during its three years at 1245 East Colfax. Located just south of Columbia Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital and across the street from the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition (CCDC), the deli and its owners, Michael Roberts and Daniel Dufresne, got…

Lieutenant Kurt Williams likes the way things used to be. As a career narc for the Denver Police Department, he used to be a member of the unofficial drug-cop association known as the Kilo Club. The club was the cops’ way to identify drug-enforcement superstars. If an officer could make…

Wedding bells may ring again at the Redstone Castle, thanks to a group of investors who kept the historic mansion from being sold at an August 29 auction and saved its legacy as a hotel and bed-and-breakfast. Colorado Summit Partners, a Denver company that designs and builds custom mountain homes,…

When your professional title is “lactation consultant,” things are tough enough. But for Laraine Lockhart Borman, director of the Mother’s Milk Bank in Denver, the names get worse. “We’ve been called ‘lactitions’ and ‘lactaters’ — every variation of those words,” Lockhart Borman says. But there’s one more title that really…