Today, a walk through the cheerful and elegant shops and restaurants of Larimer Square and environs divulges little of the area’s seedier past, when brick storefronts from the Belle Epoque era either sat boarded up or served as fleabag hotels, cheap bars and homeless missions. But Denver’s Skid Row —…

As kids, we all have our dreams. Tim Flynn’s was to own a hardware store. Not so long ago, Flynn came across a photo of himself as an eight-year-old, standing before a hand-painted sign that brightly declared “Timmy Flynn’s Hardware Store,” and the whole fantasy came back to him. It…

Considering that “all the world’s a stage,” it no longer seems the least bit far-fetched for Boulder’s time-honored Colorado Shakespeare Festival to toss a musical about American folk legend Woody Guthrie into its summer mix. No matter that Brooklyn and the Dust Bowl were both way more than a stone’s…

If you think there’s something inherently wrong with laughing on a full stomach, stop right here. Tonight’s Standup Comedy and Dinner Shows at the Gorilla Room in Littleton is not for you. On second thought… Here’s the haps: Chow down on a four-course gorge that includes a chicken marsala entree,…

There’s something ever so glorious about watching a movie from a lawn chair under the stars, caressed by the breeze and lit by moonshine while the little kids giggle and the big ones cuddle and smooch. It’s good, and it’s usually free, and it almost doesn’t matter what the movie…

One of the darker points in the history of cultural relations in America, the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 — an altercation between uniformed sailors and zoot-suit clad Angeleno Mexican-Americans, or pachucos — clearly concluded on an unfair note. Not one of the sailors who came ashore…

There is no fair description of what goes on at an iron pour. Sure, there are flames and sparks and glowing molten metal, seen through an aura of smoldering heat and acrid smoke, but heck, you’ve really just gotta be there. Even among the esoteric milieu of sculptors working in…

From early settlements along the banks of Cherry Creek to present-day enclaves, Denver’s African-American community has grown right alongside the Mile High City, sharing in its history every step of the way. That journey, speckled with tales of businessmen and Buffalo Soldiers, tap dancers, doctors, musicians and entrepreneurs, unfolds in…

Suppose you, living in Denver, had the opportunity to put on a play, a really good play — not here, but in the picturesque and remote town of Baltimore, West County Cork, Ireland. You’d do it, wouldn’t you? You’d toss all caution to the sprightly wind and go. That’s what…

If Happenings bled glitz and brought art to the people, then Street Works rose from the gutters, and the people often had to be lucky enough to find them. Perhaps that’s why the latter isn’t as well remembered in Sixties lore: The conceptual-art performances of a group of poets and…

As a nomadic single mother who worked in theater when she could, Breckenridge actor Murphy Funkhouser knows a thing or two about baggage: She’s been on the road, lived out of a suitcase and dumped a lot of old clothes by the road in her lifetime, so much so that…

Dawn Williams Boyd is one powerhouse of an artist. Even articulate PlatteForum director Judy Anderson, whose enthusiasm for the gallery’s changing menu of resident artists never falters, seems to be rendered nearly speechless by her estimation for Boyd: “Dawn is accomplishing an enormous amount of work,” she says simply –…

A desire to “enlighten the gringos to the idea that Muslim women are not shrouded creatures” led Boulder author Jennifer Heath to write a book called The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women Of Islam. In turn, that led her to further explore the politics and history of the veil…

I was raised a spelling geek, consumed from a very young age with word derivations, spelling-bee protocol and other tricks of the trade. It came in handy in the eighth grade, when I won a ten-inch black-and-white television for taking second place in the Colorado-Wyoming bee; it was handed to…

Fresh City Life’s Audrey Sprenger, the nomadic Kerouac scholar who’s somehow found herself staying in one place long enough to share the programming saddle of the Denver Public Library’s innovative free cultural series, just can’t say enough about New York artist (and personal friend) Ed Adler, whose visual pantheon includes…

Judy Hagler’s Translations Gallery is turning a corner — literally — by swapping locations within the ArtDistrict on Santa Fe. Troubled by the lackluster exterior of her old spot, Hagler opted for a venue with an artsier urban façade and showroom, at 855 Inca Street; she’ll celebrate the move tonight…

I’m far from being the perfect mom. I work full-time, I no longer love to cook, and my house looks like Ground Zero, only worse. Clearly, a new book called The Woman Who Is Always Tan and Has a Flat Stomach (and Other Annoying People) was written just for me…

Call it what you like: Populuxe, Doo-Wop, Coffee Shop Modern, Jet Age, Space Age. The mid-century Southern California architectural style, with its ski-jump roofs, starbursts and kidney-shaped signs, is still all Googie to me. Named for the jet-age lines of John Lautner’s famous 1949 Googie’s coffee shop at the corner…

A lot of women need to be kicked out of their houses this time of year, like mama bears from their dens, and forced to put on makeup, buy new outfits and rejoin the real world. The only difference is that unlike the bears, who’ve been hibernating and emerge skinny…

Artist Sherri Lynn Wood likes to say that her Mantra Trailer is “parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism and propaganda.” Inspired early on by slogan-swathed church signboards she encountered throughout the South, the interactive traveling meditation chamber with a recording studio inside bears a rotating series of watchwords on…

A visitation of things both “wild” and “Western” couldn’t possibly be complete without a style element, so the concept of the Fresh City Life exhibit I Wanna Be a Cowboy, and You Can Be My Cowgirl, which opens today at the Denver Central Library, was a dead-on no-brainer for Fresh…

In Pueblo mythology, the Corn Mother is the ultimate earth mother: Like the corn she emulates, this deity dies and is renewed again and again, carrying in her kernel the very secret of life. She’s not unlike the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, which returns annually (CHAC’s just turned thirty)…