If you want to be like James climbing inside his giant peach and finding a magical odyssey, head to 34th annual Palisade Peach Festival. It’s a guaranteed adventure in fuzzy-fruit consumption. “Without a doubt, we’re the biggest peach growers west of the Mississippi,” says Jeannine Opfal, executive director of the…
Legend has it that more than 2,000 years ago, Chu Yuan, a poet, warrior and loyal aide to a Chinese emperor, was banished after the ruler died. Chu Yuan could not win favor in the new court, so one day, in despair, he threw himself into the Mi Lo River…
“Our State Fair is a great state fair. It’s the best state fair in our state.” The title song to “State Fair,” a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, may have been written about Iowa in the 1940s, but the lyrics definitely apply to the 2002 Colorado State Fair as well. The…
Wonder what the bent-over group combing the hills of the San Juan mountains around Telluride at dawn is doing? Hunting mushrooms, of course. “Hunting for mushrooms at daybreak has a lot of spiritual meaning,” says Manny Salzman, organizer of the 22nd annual Telluride Mushroom Festival. “At that time of day,…
Ein Prosit der Gemutlichkeit! What exactly does it mean? It’s hard to translate, but the German expression sums up Oktoberfest on Larimer Square: oompah, beer and lederhosen. “It basically means ‘warmth and happiness,'” says Kirsten Becker, a spokesperson for the Larimer Arts Association, the nonprofit group that produces the September…
If you ever complain that there aren’t enough bathrooms on the 16th Street Mall, then Handyman Mania is the festival for you. On September 21 and 22, teams of professional contractors and amateur handymen will turn Skyline Park into Denver’s largest outhouse. “The Battle of the Bathrooms” features tool-belt-wearing enthusiasts…
You may have cheered for brave little guys and girls mutton-busting at the rodeo, or watched dog racing at Mile High Greyhound Park, but chances are pretty good that you’re never seen ostriches saddled up and racing around a ring. That sporty void can be filled when the Rocky Mountain…
Well-known and widely respected Denver sculptor Charles Parson (whom everyone knows as “Chuck”) is the subject of a powerful solo at Artyard, Time eventually comes up green, again, and the show is jam-packed with riveting sculptures and intriguing mixed-media drawings. This new work — all of it done in the…
I have been hugely resistant to Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning play, Wit. I sat dry-eyed during the last moments of the Denver Center production last year as sniffling, Kleenex fumbling and stifled sobs broke out all around me. I was mildly seduced by the recent HBO version starring Emma Thompson, but…
Promethean Theatre deserves a lot of credit for tackling Cymbeline. Despite moments of humor, insight and beauty, it is, in terms of plot, one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. It’s as if he’d taken bits and pieces of action from half his other works — Othello’s jealousy, the parent-doomed love…
It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into eighteen languages, with no less than six million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation — an unsavory proposition. He succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in an atomic flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn…
Part high school mixer and part high-powered cocktail party, the Layoff Lounge is a monthly networking event designed to get Denver’s laid-off workers back on their feet. “It helps people make connections,” says Tracy Laswell Williams, the Denver director of the Los Angeles-based company. “And it gets nonworking people out…
Not everyone can expect to find a tyrannosaurus buried in the backyard, but if you ask Denver Museum of Nature & Science paleontologist Kirk Johnson, it’s, well, possible…if you live along the Front Range. And it has happened. “We have fossils with street addresses here,” Johnson explains. “Colorado has some…
Where can you take a glass-blowing class, buy a painting, look at books and get your bike fixed, too? The Other Side Arts, a nonprofit community center that offers a new twist on one-stop shopping. “We really wanted to give up-and-coming artists an opportunity to show their work, while also…
It’s hard to remember that the Capitol Hill People’s Fair, which has grown so huge and cumbersome over the last 31 years, is actually a fair for the people. But this year’s event returns to its populist roots in a small way by shining a spotlight on one of peopledom’s…
When landscape architect John Ludwig first opened his South Broadway garden shop Birdsall on a part-time basis in 1988, he envisioned it as Denver’s answer to Smith & Hawken, the upscale Mill Valley enterprise that broke in as a mail-order business before opening its first outlet in 1985. Just as…
When this column began at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form…
Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp is a genuine visionary. Over the fifteen years that he’s run the museum, he’s made so many brilliant decisions that it would be impossible to list them all here. Among his greatest accomplishments is surelythe flawless way he handled the hiring of an architect…
Heading south out of Denver on University Boulevard is quite an experience. It’s sort of like an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous — minus the famous part. There’s one swanky neighborhood after another, and they come together amorphously to form would-be towns such as Cherry Hills Village…
From the moment you enter the LIDA Project’s theater space, your attention is focused on the set: a large square of earth that dwarfs the seats surrounding it on all four sides. Clearly representing a city lot, it reminded me of the bomb sites found all over London when I…
Victor Hugo called grief “a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched,” and anyone who has ever found himself touching the sleeve of his father’s favorite jacket on the day after his funeral, or gazing at the toy-strewn floor in a dead child’s playroom, or surveying the carnage on…
