After nineteen years and a remarkable international expansion, pastor Stan Burgett’s Passion Play of Denver is really, in every way, the little Passion Play that could, a full-time non-profit business preoccupied with the stuff of miracles. Though sister productions have popped up under Burgett’s aegis as near as Las Vegas…

Schizophrenic musical cult figure and street artist Wesley Willis, all 300-plus pounds of him, had a photographic memory and a penchant for immortalizing celebrities he admired in idiosyncratic song. He always greeted people with a signature head-butt (for fans, it was a badge of honor to receive one) and topped…

Shopping at the light and airy Room is like visiting the loft of your most stylish friend: You wish everything could be magically transported to your own home. “This furniture really strikes a chord,” says owner Merlin Parker, who opened Room two months ago. “Everybody who comes in here seems…

WED, 3/24 Tracy Turnblad has big ambition and a bigger bouffant. It’s 1962, and the tubby Turnblad dreams of dancing on TV’s Corny Collins Show, but when she splits hairs with the program’s most popular pre-pubescent starlet, she’s tossed into a teenage tangle that could crush her curls and squash…

WED, 3/24 Get down and dirty this afternoon at a lecture and chisme with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of The Dirty Girls Social Club. “I’m going to talk about the dangers of stereotyping, because I think everyone is stereotyped,” says Valdes-Rodriguez, a former reporter for both the Los Angeles Times and…

Perhaps the biggest complaint about Mayor Hicklenlooper’s first choice for the recently announced, fledgling One Book, One Denver campaign — Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River — is that it’s too easy, a bestseller chosen for its appeal to a wide literary palate. And besides, how does a small-town yarn…

SUN, 3/7 John Leguizamo has never been afraid to make audiences squirm. As the Latino comic once said, “That’s my philosophy: Offend them all equally. You know we all have something wrong with us!” Leguizamo blasts into town to share his hilarious characters, jarring life commentary and personal anecdotes in…

FRI, 3/5 Tom Quinn Kumpf believes in fairies. He’s even had an encounter with one, and like any native Irishman raised to take for granted the mythology of the land, he has no doubt about what happened. It’s just one of many intriguing stories in the Boulder-based Irish-American photographer’s new…

TUES, 3/9 Slurp some slippery suckers during tonight’s sixth annual Oyster Eating Competition at the Boulder Jax Fish House, where competitors with stomachs of steel will down as many raw oysters on the half shell as possible in ninety seconds. “We’ve seen people pack oysters into a pint glass and…

Christine Lavin is a storyteller. She naturally breaks into stories as she talks: about baking, about the airport, about her New York home, about chance encounters. Her talky tales answer questions or illustrate other vignettes. It’s what she does for a living, and the words bubble out of her spontaneously,…

WED, 3/3 T. Coraghessan Boyle is everywhere these days. His latest novel, Drop City, a finalist for last year’s National Book Award, has just appeared in paperback. He has a short story in the current issue of Harper’s and another in an upcoming New Yorker. A new novel, The Inner…

TUES, 3/2 I can read in red. I can read in blue. I can read in pickle color, too. — Dr. Seuss, from I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! This one’s a real no-brainer. When you consider how many children have learned to read with help from the Cat…

To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Beatles’ invasion of America and Denver, cruise down to the historic Brown Palace Hotel (where the lads stayed after playing at Red Rocks on August 26, 1964) for a special Beatlemania Overnight Package. “There was a line of people three deep all the…

SUN, 2/22 As if the success of her Stories on Stage series — a delightful on-stage pairing of top-notch actors with fabulous snippets from the literary world — weren’t enough, SOS founder and executive director Norma Brown saw an untapped audience out there and decided to go after it. A…

THURS, 2/19 After a ten-year absence from the Colorado History Museum, the 10th Mountain Division: Soldiers on Skis exhibit marches back into the spotlight today, retooled and ready for another tour of duty. “This is an important part of Colorado’s history, so we felt it was important to update it,”…

SAT, 2/21 What’s that flying through the air? Holy coffeecake, it’s a bunch of Danes! And they’re great: The National Danish Performance Team, an international gymnastic touring group in town this week as returning guests of the City of Aurora, is electric. That’s the enthusiastic word from Alan Herron of…

FRI, 2/13 Delbert McClinton has never gone out of style, partly because he’s never really been in style. Consider that “Givin’ It Up for Your Love,” his biggest commercial success, was only the 58th- most-popular song of 1981, trailing behind such works of genius as Gino Vanelli’s “Living Inside Myself,”…

FRI, 2/13 Linda Eastman McCartney, who died of cancer in 1998, became famous as a shutterbug of the ’60s rock pantheon. She was already on a roll before she met Paul McCartney at a 1967 photo shoot; her first break as a photographer came in the form of an invitation…

FRI, 2/13 Nobody knows more about love among the animals than zookeepers, whose livelihoods rely to some extent on successful sex in captivity. “Ninety percent of the animals you see in zoos were actually born in zoos,” notes Denver Zoo spokeswoman Suzanne Balog. So if Leo and Leona aren’t getting…

SAT, 2/7 The word “ballet” often conjures up images of traditional Degas-like ballerinas in pretty pirouettes, but the Colorado Ballet will defy convention tonight when it tosses out the tutus and presents Rodeo/Rubies/A Little Love. The tippy-toed triptych will guide patrons through a post-modern plié of contemporary ballet. “We love…

WED, 2/11 Michael Heralda is a Los Angeles-based storyteller, musician and poet dedicated to reviving and reinterpreting stories of the ancient Aztecs. The indigenous people ruled large parts of Mexico before their conquest at the hands of Hern´n Cortés in 1521. Heralda will weave his Aztec Stories and ballads together…

SAT, 2/7 Will the speaker yield to a two-part question? Is it true that if a black hole’s mass is more than a billion times that of the sun, the tidal gravitational forces are weak enough that a star could pass across the Event Horizon without shredding? And, if so,…