Thursday April 22 Especially on Earth Day, the Lookout Mountain Nature Center, 910 Colorow Row, Golden, is an exhibit in itself. The building, which opened late in 1997, is constructed entirely of earth-sustaining materials, from the recycled boxcar planks used for its shiny hardwood floors to the bathroom tiles made…

Richard Lewis is dying, but he’s a happy man. For once, something makes sense. “Being in middle age now, the truth of the matter is, you can’t escape that feeling of seeing the end of the line,” Lewis says. “I really live each day now, enjoy my life more now,…

Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro has always striven to be more than a theater. It’s a grassroots arts resource, and everyone connected with it seems to extend a metaphorical hand to the neighborhood. When a play premieres there, it’s a fundraising party; when it throws a film festival, as it…

Thursday April 15 How do you pass tax day and manage to remain perfectly calm? Well, first of all, not everyone waits until the last minute, tearing their hair out over a rat’s nest of receipts as the clock ticks ominously in the background. Some of us are already looking…

When local theater producer/director donnie l. betts decided over a year ago to resurrect Richard Durham’s 1940s radio drama, Destination Freedom, a trailblazing weekly program that told true stories of African-American heroes, he knew he was taking a chance: It was radio, a moldy medium at best, and therefore a…

They’re the forgotten group, and it’s no surprise so many of them end up on the street: When you’re poor and stuck between the ages of 14 and 24, few service organizations want to deal with your headstrong, uncute and hopelessly unreformed ways. Unless you’re lucky enough, that is, to…

Thursday April 8 My how Tommy, Chuckie, Angelica and the rest of the precocious gang from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats have grown! They’re six feet tall, larger than life and every bit as kidlike as the small-screen versions in Rugrats–A Live Adventure, a new touring stage show that captures the Rugrat ethos…

Thursday April 1 Ha, ha–you’re no fool. At least you won’t be once you’ve read local author Jamie Grenney’s Pranks 101: The Complete Guide to Practical Jokes from cover to cover. A cheeky tome covering everything from basic short-sheeting to Saran Wrap on the toilet seat, the self-published book is…

Suppose you hopped into a shiny new Volkswagen Beetle one day and set off for a month-long road trip through the heartland of America. Say that the Beetle was covered with words. And maybe the words were actually magnetic poetry tiles, stuck right there on the side of the Bug,…

Thursday March 25 In an age when there’s an art walk each month to suit every taste, you have to figure the time is ripe for an Art-Walk-Your-Dog-&-Coffee event that puts out the welcome mat not just for you but for the family pooch, too. Three businesses at the intersection…

Back in a dark corner of America’s post-war baby boom, a small contingent of kids grew up in a manner directly counteractive to the suburban ethos that ruled through the ’50s and ’60s. They’re known as the “red diaper babies”; their parents were left-thinkers active in the civil-rights movement and…

Calling Don Becker a “writer/performer” seems hopelessly euphemistic, though it’s the term he uses himself. Middle-aged, one-armed and equal parts angry, loony, poetic and raucously funny, the onetime Denver stand-up comic turned performance artist has plenty of surprises on his creative hot plate. That includes Danger, Will Robinson, a work…

Journalist David McCumber headed up to Montana to become a ranch hand–from scratch–with a book deal already in hand. But the resulting experience left him with far more than material for a manuscript. McCumber’s memoir, The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch, the story of how, at the age…

Thursday March 18 Everything and anything on wheels will roll into Currigan Exhibition Hall, 1324 Champa St., this week for the All West Auto Fest, a four-day collectors’ extravaganza that gets under way this evening from 6 to 11. This is the show for customizers, featuring a beautiful Pandora’s engine…

Thursday March 11 It’s a fundraiser that makes it so easy to give, you’ll hardly know you’re doing it. Here’s the deal: All you have to do is go out to eat. Nearly 100 metro-area restaurants will participate in today’s Dining Out for Life event by donating 25 percent of…

You’re walking in the damp, warm woods, through patches of sunlight melting into shadows, when you see something ghostly rustling there among the leaves. It’s the product of an unspeakable atrocity–a lynching. But when you realize that the lifeless form swinging there was once a woman, you’re horrified all over…

Out-of-body, out of your mind–that’s the typical cynical response to any mention of the elusive out-of-body experience. Still, there are persistent folks out there who say there’s nothing enchanted, new-agey or just plain nuts about OBEs at all. Four of those folks, all published authors on the subject and firm…

We usually think of scientists as a pretty dry and serious bunch. But a new exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History, Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, based on Alaskan artist Ray Troll’s slightly weird vision of evolution, proves that even paleontologists–folks who spend their lives digging up and labeling…

Humor is the great curative potion for pain. It’s a concept we’re all familiar with, and it’s something Canadian director David Adkin has mulled over for a long time. In making his film We’re Funny That Way, featuring eleven gay and lesbian comedians speaking their minds on and off stage…

Thursday March 4 The wonderful world of radar guns and livestock scales comes alive today during something a little bit different–a Colorado Measurement Standards Open House. It’s being thrown in celebration of National Weights and Measures Week, which commemorates the March 2, 1799, passing of the first weights and measures…

Thursday February 25 There are damn few throat singers in the world, let alone Tuvans–all of which serves to make an appearance by Huun-Huur Tu: Throat Singers of Tuva even more rare and wonderful than it already is. The Tuvan troupe, Eastern horsemen who hail from a remote area near…

Shaun Landry’s story is completely believable. An actress first, but one with funny pretensions, the native of Chicago’s South Side worked her way up the theatrical comedy ranks–once upon a time–to find herself a waitress at Bennigan’s. “Improv comedy was all done by white guys predominantly from the suburbs,” she…