When Barry Fey sold his interest in the concert firm that bore his name late last summer, a lot of his competitors figured that, career-wise, he was as good as dead–but the old cuss won’t lie down. Since then, the man who was Denver’s most successful, and most feared, promoter…
It’s a typical morning for Essie Garrett, in that she ran the five miles to her job at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, where she has been in charge of the refrigeration department for fifteen years. As usual, she’ll run back home at the end of the day, her backpack…
1977: Colorado is in the grip of a severe drought, yet permits for construction of new homes top 20,000 annually, to better accommodate the thousands of immigrants inspired by John Denver’s lyrical vision of the state (1973’s “Rocky Mountain High”) and James Michener’s bestselling novel Centennial (which celebrates the state…
It seems impossible–doesn’t it?–that on the first day, he was terrible. Facing the Pittsburgh Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium, he completed just one of eight passes for a measly fourteen yards. He got sacked, hard, four times, and by game’s end looked like a deer in the headlights. Because those…
Clarissa Pinkola Estes is thinking about what story she would tell to residents of Denver in 1998. She settles on “Stone Soup,” an ancient tale–but not an ancient idea. The people are starving–for soulfulness, for spirit–and they shut their doors and live behind them, and what little they have they…
Noel Cunningham is almost too good to be true. The owner of two of the town’s best restaurants, Strings and 240 Union, and the driving force behind several charities that have raised more than a million dollars in Denver, Cunningham is one of the few people in the back-stabbing, chef-eat-chef…
Denver’s art scene has witnessed momentous changes over the last twenty years, including the establishment of a contemporary-art department at the Denver Art Museum and the tremendous expansion of both public and commercial gallery scenes. But the most important development was the rise of the alternative spaces, which grew into…
He lurks in the bad dreams of hungry prosecutors and hidebound judges, a caped avenger in bolo tie and maroon beret. The cameras catch him exiting the courtroom in the eye of the media whirlwind, a feisty bantamweight with a large voice–a voice so thunderous when raised in outrage that…
December 31, 1997, 6 p.m.: The Merc fills slowly at first, but you can already feel the heady air of celebration wafting through the murky dining room, with its darkly polished honky-tonk bar, fringed dancing-girl lamps and Dede LaRue’s neon-encircled papier-mache circus animals crashing through walls. People nest in the…
Against all odds, Bob Cote finds himself in a suspended state of grace. “How else to explain why I’m here?” he wonders. “It’s been a series of miracles.” More than merely being here, though, these days Cote, the ex-alcoholic president of Step 13, a shelter for homeless men on the…
The December 1979 opening of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ first production was billed as the “Dawn of the Denver Decade.” The DCPA was going to make Denver the Rocky Mountain entertainment equivalent of New York City, with touring productions of Broadway plays and musicals sharing the complex…
Depending on how you measure these things, Westword was born late one night in a college newspaper office, when starting a weekly seemed like a much better idea than typing a resume and finding a real job, or at a rugby game in Washington Park, where the vigor of the…
The Hype Report Alan Prendergast’s January 22 article, “City of Hype,” claims that “no other city in the world has to put up with so much drivel in the name of sports journalism.” While I agree that it is ridiculous bordering on the offensive, I lived in Los Angeles for…
When filming begins this week on The Closer, Tom Selleck’s mid-season replacement show, the California set will be littered with Colorado memorabilia. That’s because the sitcom is the first TV show since Dynasty supposedly set in Denver, and Selleck, an advertising-agency guy, hangs out at a LoDo sports bar filled…
In Colorado, property-tax bills are due April 30; if they are not paid, the landowner receives a delinquent tax notice a few months later. In Denver, which has approximately 171,000 separate pieces of taxable property, about 10,000 people–just under 6 percent–were late on their payments and received such a notice…
Smiling, frosted-haired matrons, their teeth capped in orange and blue. A naked man in a barrel making a heartfelt plea for playoff tickets. Nightly weather bulletins on the field conditions in Kansas City or Pittsburgh, pre-empting the local snow report. If it all sounds vaguely familiar, then consider yourself a…
Eleven years ago, Bronco Vance Johnson was ready to explode into the national consciousness. A cocky little wide receiver known for his pigtails, flashy lifestyle, motormouth and allegedly artistic drawings, he parlayed the Super Bowl hoopla into an appearance on the Joan Rivers Show, during which “The Vance,” as he…
Mildred Bennett was born to royalty. She is the child of a Russian czar–the proof, she tells you, being a birthmark on her back. George Washington is her grandfather. One of her husbands was the king of Spain; she was the queen. A second husband was a king of France,…
No bull: On Tuesday, animal-rights activists–the Vegetarian Society of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Animal Defense Fund–hung what they’d promised would be a “huge” banner, but which more closely resembled a bath towel, off the 15th Street overpass to protest the Stock Show’s cruelty to animals. Their action lasted exactly…
Fred Elbel spends his days as a mild-mannered Littleton computer consultant and his nights in what he describes as an epic struggle. “It’s a war,” Elbel says, “and I’m caught up in one of the biggest battles.” Elbel’s enemy is unsolicited electronic mail, and he’s one of several local residents–including…
When the Jefferson County district attorney’s office went after a dozen bookies from a Golden boiler-room sports-betting operation last year, the defendants contended they weren’t doing anything different from those who operate supposedly legal offshore sports-betting lines advertised on Denver radio and in newspapers. Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hall, who…
An unusual marriage of convenience between a northern Colorado environmental group and loggers could end in divorce quicker than you can say “Timber!” For the moment, however, the two sides, which have butted heads many times in the past, are united in protest against the way the U.S. Forest Service…
