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Monica Burke, a former employee of the St. Vrain Valley School District, was sentenced on Friday, August 25, to twenty months in prison for kicking, punching, verbally abusing and spraying Lysol in the face of a twenty-year-old, student with severe autism.

In 2008, I got married and moved into a house in the quiet Harvey Park neighborhood in southwest Denver. One of the neighbors on my block was an odd woman with a penchant for French bulldogs; she had a few too many to be on the legal side of dog ownership in Denver, but they were small and quiet and I didn’t think much of it. At the time, she had six dogs.

A video of thirteen-year-old Denver East High School cheerleader Ally Wakefield being forced into the splits position while crying out in agony has gone viral on a cat-playing-piano, double-rainbow, Numa-Numa-guy level. The story is still developing at this writing, and it presents something of a dilemma for our Schmuck of the Week department, since choosing only one schmuck in this situation is virtually impossible. But right now, the likeliest nominees are cheer coaches Ozell Williams and Mariah Cladis, two East High administrators and a Denver Public Schools official who’ve been put on leave amid the ongoing investigation, and all of us, for our fascination with images that could well violate the Geneva Conventions rules against torture.

One of the most acclaimed current series on Netflix is GLOW, a fictionalized look behind the scenes at Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, an 1980s-vintage made-for-television creation that became a cult favorite and not-so-guilty pleasure for a generation of viewers. But Susan Phelan doesn’t need to watch the show, because she lived it for real. Before becoming an on-air traffic reporter for a slew of high-profile Denver-Boulder radio stations, including KOA, KBCO, KBPI and The Fox, as well as a badass bassist for bands such as Ryan Chrys and The Rough Cuts, she appeared on Powerful Women of Wrestling, aka POWW, a GLOW spin-off of sorts that also spawned a syndicated TV program enjoying a second life on YouTube.

Denver Go Topless Day 2017, a rally and parade along the 16th Street Mall, is scheduled to take place on Saturday, August 26. Details are below. Plenty of first-timers are expected to join the gathering, which celebrates equality and demonstrates against the idea that it’s okay for men to appear topless in public but either distasteful or (in some locations) illegal for women to do likewise. With that in mind, Mia Jean, a longtime DGTD organizer who served as our guide for last year’s edition, offers her thoughts on the get-together as a whole and what marchers should or shouldn’t do if they want to reflect the true spirit of an event that’s predicted to draw more than the 1,000 folks fellow planner Matt Wilson says participated in 2016.