Fresh City Cooks

We already love that the Denver Public Library’s changing, themed, free Fresh City Life programs always include a cooking series from season to season, offering culinary tips, demonstrations and samples for every local closet gourmet worth a dash of salt. Fittingly, in a fledgling new year marked by the need…

Wall Paper

Master printer, teacher, artist, retailer – Patricia Branstead is all these things, but since she relocated here from Steamboat Springs and opened her tiny but fabulous emporium of handmade papers and printing supplies, Kozo (a Best of Denver winner last year), her focus seems to have been on building the…

FM magazine brings on the future at the hi-dive

New Year’s Eve means the future is almost here, and to welcome that sci-fi time yet to come, FM magazine and Automatica Media are bringing The Future Party to the hi-dive and Sputnik tonight. “The future is our theme,” explains FM’s Tuyet Nguyen. “I suppose it sort of plays into…

Start the party early at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret

  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve and you’re stuck in that mid-holiday rut? Whether you’re hoping to celebrate early and avoid the NYE debauch or just want to dig yourself out of the house, a glitzy night of Broadway standards, delivered by a crack cast at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret, might be…

A Frosty-Free Christmas

You gotta have music at Christmas, because it ain’t Christmas without it. But you, like most everyone else, have already decided that you might explode if you hear even one more rendition of “Frosty the Snowman,” anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Relax. There are holiday music programs for every taste this time…

Gather ‘Round the Tree

“Even the poorest cottage welcomed the festive season with green decorations of bay and holly — the cheerful fire glanced its rays through the lattice, inviting the passenger to raise the latch, and join the gossip knot huddled around the hearth, beguiling the long evening with legendary jokes and oft-told…

Talking Shop

Into the rush of the holiday season, some sorrow must fall: I just got the news that local bead-sprite Joy Barrett is closing her Studio Bead boutique in Highlands Square at the end of the month. “I thought that the shop might be a platform for building something bigger —…

Feats of Clay

The PlatteForum formula — teaming a professional artist with at-risk youth to build a unique art show that showcases the work of all — never seems to go wrong. Without losing a beat, PlatteForum’s Judy Anderson finds artists who are not only enormously talented, but who also inspire in rare…

Slinging Mud

Muddy Waters on the Platte, better known simply as Muddy’s, first opened its coffeehouse/bookstore/theater in the block of 15th and Platte Streets in the late ’70s. In a time that was intrinsically different from our modern era, whether you looked at it from the left or the right, Muddy’s was…

Carry a Torch for Christmas

In these parts, Christmas on the slopes always has a nice ring: the powder, the icicles, the lights and the nightlife – they’re all part of the total holiday experience that Colorado’s mountain resorts work overtime to help create. But there’s nothing more spectacular than a torchlight parade down a…

Today’s Night & Day featured event: Trog de Lights turns back on

Susan Henderson wears many hats, and you could say that at least one of them is a lampshade. That’s because the third-generation Denverite and Fuller Sotheby’s broker sells lamps in her spare time. And not just any lamps, but magnificent antique ones that she imports from South America, though they’re mostly European…

Dear Diaries

The holiday season is rife with traditions: trimming the tree, kissing under the mistletoe, sitting through The Nutcracker for the umpteenth time, and for the ultra-hip of Denver, reserving a seat once again for The SantaLand Diaries, the Bug Theatre’s annual staging of the David Sedaris yarn about his stint…

Choices for the Chosen

Being Jewish, I do suffer from a touch of that inevitable holiday-season alienation. But I can always count on the Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative’s annual Judaica Show, currently in progress, to make me feel at home in the midst of a sea of Christmas trees and creches. Absolutely the…

The Nature of Things

Love music, but don’t believe in Santa? What about that rigmarole about the manger and the three kings? Is that nothing more than a good yarn to you? Sound Circle feels your pain. Once a year, the 21-voice Boulder women’s a cappella ensemble riffs on the seasonal themes brought forth…

Out of the Closet

It is so: Sometimes grown women in the 21st century like to dress up like grown women from the turn of the last century, all decked out in frilly, bell-shaped gowns and modest, lace-fringed blouses, with layered petticoats, satin hair bows, parasols, kneesocks and, oh, maybe a pink wig topped…

Say A Little Prayer

Eric Matelski, artist and self-proclaimed “art pimp,” is effusive when touting the Wax Burner Prayer Candle Art Show, a group-show concept first tried out in Chicago last fall and now making its second appearance here in Denver, featuring more than 120 works in all. But he was into prayer candles…

Give Peace a Chance

Some think a dove flies over the holiday season: It’s the time of year when we think about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, and we really mean it. Julie Davis and her friends at the Swallow Hill Music Association picked up on that peace-and-love vibe several years ago…

Today’s Night & Day featured event: Blonde Venus at Fresh City Life

You can’t fault Chris Loffelmacher for being sweet on Marlene Dietrich: Her timeless, leggy androgynous beauty and sultry singing voice (not to mention the cruelly sexy German accent) still ring chimes for plenty of folks, a truth that Loffelmacher, director of the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life series, clearly took to…