Some people are power shoppers. They’re the palm pilot-brains with impeccable budgeting skills and the remarkable ability to remember which store has the lowest price on which item. The most irritating thing about them is this: They’ve finished all their holiday shopping for the year and are preparing their lists…

Jake Brady and Wiley Deluce met in a bar in Alma in the 1880s and became fast friends. In fact, they became partners — and not in the “Hold it right there, partner” sense. The cowboy protagonists in part-time South Park resident Dave Brown’s Golden Feather Series of gay westerns,…

Most people, alas, don’t even know what a bialy is, let alone how good a proper one tastes. A rarefied peasant cousin of the bagel, the bialy gets its culinary oomph from what goes where the hole goes in a bagel: a fragrant layer of shredded onion, sometimes accompanied by…

Every artist has a shtick. For photographer Michael Lichter, it’s the biker lifestyle, a milieu he’s gone with, like the wind, for over twenty years — that is, when he’s not designing annual reports or doing other commercial work for large corporations, the bread and butter of his professional life…

Paola Gianturco is a Bay Area marketing and communications consultant and educator. Her friend Toby Tuttle, with whom Gianturco once worked at the nation’s first women-owned advertising agency, shares responsibilities with her husband in their Evergreen-based investment banking company. Together, these high-powered entrepreneurial women seem far-removed from the dirt-poor women…

If you think the instrumentally correct Academy of Ancient Music — an English ensemble formed in 1973 to reproduce, as truly as possible, the voice of early music as it sounded in its day — is a serious and stodgy crew, give it a rest. Orchestra member David Carter –…

Under its many-layered, controversial and stolidly postmodern roof, the Denver Central Library houses many treasures. But one of the most fascinating — a vast collection of historical photographic images of the West — may also carry the lowest profile, though the library, which maintains a remarkable digitized collection of over…

Colorado is booming, and so are its mystery authors, although nobody seems to have a solid clue as to what causes detective fiction to thrive in the Rockies. “It’s the air,” claims Boulder wordsmith Margaret Coel. A general growth in the state’s population has something to do with it, along…

Artists are an independent lot — they expose and capture their views in visual terms, giving tangible shape to what might seem, at first, like crazy ideas. Crazy, anyway, to an accountant. But when an artist marries another artist, there’s a rare symbiosis, a respect and understanding of process, built…

Local choreographer Deborah Reshotko spends a lot of time working with ordinary citizens to create community-building performances. Intermingling art and real life is clearly her thing, but her latest project is a bit different: A collaboration with New York dancer Martha Bowers under the auspices of an NEA Millennium Project…

When Longmont painter Rick Stoner starts snapping photos in an alley, some people get suspicious. They wonder if he’s an FBI agent, or a surveyor for the city setting them up for a property-tax hike. They wonder if he’s a plain old snoop. But nothing could be further from the…

Art’s truest underground — skateboard art — is part of a thriving industry that nobody’s ever heard of. But now it’s the subject of an exhibition illuminating a genre that rarely even sees the light of day, let alone a mass following. Or so it would seem. The result of…

Success is a burden for Kinky Friedman. Initially famous for leading the Texas Jewboys, an irreverent combo remembered for knocking country music on its rear with such memorable tunes as They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore and Put Our Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,…

Pagans just want to be understood. So Pagan Pride Day is no joke to them; rather, it’s an opportunity not only to support one another, but also to share the wealth. And if it seems weird for Colorado’s event, which occurs in conjunction with the international version, to take place…

Come on over to Susan Wick’s place. The Crayola-hued walls are her palette, and the rest of the stuff — Wick’s stuff, to be precise — is subject to her whimsy, and it all rambles through the upstairs gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Everyday Ideas Entertain Me: A…

There’s nothing like a fine, melodramatic oater flickering on the big screen to make you feel young again. Makes you want to don chaps and spurs and a Roy Rogers chapeau and ride the range with laconic Gary Cooper and heroic John Wayne, don’t it? Now, thanks to Denver Art…

The childlike joy felt when something green pops through the earth where a seed’s been planted is about as basic as burping. We’ve all been there. Many of us will be there again. But when the pure art of gardening — a kind of introspective, personal thing — intermingles with…

These days, Denver homebuyers fall into two categories: the rich, and the filthy rich. Everyone else has to buy a home in Aurora, or Arkansas, or Englewood — like me, for instance. Last December my family moved into a modest brick Tudor, circa 1931, that came with all the quirks…

There are countless reasons to visit the Metro State College of Denver Center for Visual Arts’ new exhibit spotlighting twentieth-century Colorado women artists, decade by decade. As gallery director Sally Perisho points out, one major goal for the show is “to paint a clear picture of how these women struggled…

Debra Ginsberg has actually spoken to the two people in the country who didn’t wait tables at some time in their lives. The rest of us, she surmises, must have stooped to delivering dishes for a living somewhere down the line, lending a cozy insider’s sense of belonging to all…

Denver’s Society for the Advancement of Poetics has an inside joke: “We’re just a bunch of SAPs,” quips society founder John Munson, a poet and former railroad engineer who now works as an investigator for law firms. But it’s all in good faith. Munson and friends formed the group in…

The wee and sprightly mandolin, cousin to the workhorse guitar much as the piccolo is cousin to the flute, has a migrant nature. Though the typical American sees one and immediately thinks of bluegrass, a mandolin is actually an instrument stoked by centuries-old traditions, the strains of which have worked…