Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Somewhere in all the historic hairdo magazines is that one article that will remind Ethel Gomez how to build a beehive. Here, under the candy dish? There, by the invoice for the faux Titanic jewelry sitting in the display case next to the Kewpie dolls that double as air fresheners?…

The Gang’s All Here

Attitude is everything, these kids agree. Although they can’t prevent cops from stopping them–they accept that–they know that too much attitude can make all the difference after you’re pulled over for some minor thing, but really for “driving while brown” or “driving while black.” Juan Hernandez made the mistake of…

Letters

Nuts to That! Talk about crazy! I never thought I’d see the day when bleeding-heart liberal Patricia Calhoun would bleed for a Republican, much less Tom Tancredo (“Crazy for You,” December 3). Coloradans should be proud of their new congressman, not just because he’s man enough to admit his weakness,…

Hell on Wheels

June 5, 1998 “What you have,” begins attorney Derry Rice, “is a sixteen-year-old, a new driver from a nice family, driving on Broadway and Highlands Ranch Parkway.” The first driver–we’ll call her Pam–and the second driver, another sixteen-year-old we’ll call Cynthia, are both turning left onto northbound Broadway. While turning,…

Jailbait

Every inmate in the Denver County Jail wants to get to 22. As director of jails John Simonet walks through the cell blocks, he’s stopped several times by convicts begging to move. “I gotta get down to the deuce-deuce,” says one convict being held in a tank with fifty other…

Off Limits

Mr. Tancredo goes to Washington: Like the 39 other new members of the House of Representatives, Colorado Sixth District representative-elect Tom Tancredo lined up last week to choose an office. The incoming freshmen–17 Republicans, 23 Democrats –are the lowest men and women on the totem pole and get to pick…

Remember When

Alzheimer’s research is advancing so rapidly that scientists expect to understand the cause of the disease within the next five years. But that’s still in the future. Alzheimer’s patients have already lost much of their past. Family Health West, a small nonprofit nursing home in western Colorado, tries to re-create…

White Man’s Burden

Robert Cunningham, who is white, remembers when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his yard. Now he has launched a personal crusade: He wants to get fliers apologizing for slavery into the hands of all Colorado slave descendants. “It’s like building a field and getting two teams to…

Say It Ain’t So, Joe

Joe DiMaggio is dying. The most graceful center-fielder ever to play baseball, one of the game’s finest hitters and a fathomless mystery for six decades, is lying in a Hollywood, Florida, hospital, a couple of miles from the major-league spring training site where he first materialized in 1936. Characteristically, no…

Crazy for You

Tom Tancredo is sitting in the cigar bar at the Brown Palace, puffing on a stogie. The congressman-elect from Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District should be on top of the world: After besting five other Republicans to take the primary nomination in August, a month ago he beat Democrat Henry Strauss,…

Letters

By Hooker by Crook My friend and I passed through Denver and happened to read part one of “Trial and Tribulations,” Steve Jackson’s article on Joanne Cordova. I just read part two, from the November 26 issue, on the Internet. I am writing to offer high praise to Steve Jackson…

A Bird in the Hand

Skittish, tough, this bird is a bullet of feather and bone. Under the shadowy canopy of a high pine forest, it hurls itself from a tree like a two-pound smart bomb, crimson eyes trained on its airborne prey. Midair, it flips, overtaking a smaller bird from below, then forks its…

Off Limits

Beat the clock: No sooner had Denver Post publisher Ryan McKibben announced his imminent departure (he’s outta there November 30) than speculation started regarding when editor Dennis Britton will be disappeared. A Westword pool lays heavy odds on just after the first of the year–and we aren’t the only ones…

Fly Me

Planning your next trip out of Denver International Airport? Here’s some helpful advice: Log on to the Web site www.denverairport.com. You won’t find any information on how to get to Terminal B or where to find a rental car. But you will get to see plenty of tits. “Yes, I’m…

Trial and Tribulations, Part Two

Amy Johnson and her fiance, Jason Sosebe, left their home shortly after six on the morning of May 17, 1997, heading down Old Hughesville Road toward Highway 119. As their truck rounded a corner, they saw a blue minivan with Wyoming plates parked on the wrong side of the road,…

Follow the Bouncing Ball

The rules of life don’t change much. Never buy loose diamonds from a man in lizard-skin cowboy boots. Remain faithful to your beloved. At a mile and an eighth, always consider Eddie Delahoussaye’s horse. Once past the age of twelve, never, ever request an autograph–not from John Elway, not from…

The Beater Goes On

It is always at the least practical time–with black-ice season just around the corner, with kids requiring hauling to school activities, with a heightened awareness of passenger safety–that anyone who is truly hooked on motorcycles suddenly needs a fix. I want a new bike, and I want it now. Although…

Letters

Giving Thanks This Thanksgiving I will remember Patricia Calhoun and everyone else who can see through the various parasitic cons, dupes, stooges and pimps. The dictionary definitions of “freedom” and “equality” do not say anything about exceptions and duplicity. Freedom is not being sheep, lockstep parrots, puppets or ventriloquists’ dummies…

Thank God for Small Flavors

As Tuesday’s sunrise spread vintage Broncos colors across downtown, it looked like a city transformed. Which, of course, it is. From the bluff alongside I-25, you now gaze over hundreds of housing units popping up in the Platte Valley, the almost-finished facade of Ocean Journey and the cranes carrying pieces…

A Drunkard’s Dream

Bob Bettenberg’s stories–and there are a lot of them–have the tempo and anticipation of a joke building toward a punchline, the sentences clipped and the narrative always in the present tense: “Guy walks into a bar…” Except in Bettenberg’s case, that is how the stories actually begin, and they are…

Trial and Tribulations

Conversations stopped and heads turned as Joanne Cordova walked a along the fifth-floor corridor of the Jefferson County courthouse. She smiled at those who met her gaze, though she was trembling inside. She’d seen them nudge each other, thought she knew what they whispered as she passed. Used to be…

You’re Under Arrest, Sir

The Denver Police Department wants its officers to start being more polite. After a slew of complaints about cops using ethnic slurs and intimidating language, the department drafted a new regulation for its updated October operations manual. The one-sentence regulation, labeled RR-138, reads: “Officers shall not use any language or…