Two weeks ago, Barbara Walton received the kind of phone call that quickens a curator’s heart. Having worked at the Denver Public Library for the past fifteen years, she’d already amassed an impressive collection of programs and posters relating to community theaters in Denver, some dating back to the 1800s…

One of my favorite unreal images of love is the newlywed husband and wife relaxing amid half-unpacked boxes — obviously taking a break from moving into their very first cheap apartment, even though it has hardwood floors and a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Both are wearing beautifully…

I’ve been calling Ask-A-Nurse (at 303-777-NURS) almost since the moment the service was hooked up in 1987. These days the program is known as Centura Health Advisor, and registered nurses man the phones from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. But in the early days, you could call in the middle…

Downtown Golden’s Foss Drug began the new year in a shambles — the Patty Cake Break Cake display jammed into a crevice next to the Ride the Champion coin-operated horse, the magazine racks rumpled and picked over, the basement full of Y2K water no one ever bought. And while the…

The man speaks slooow and LOUD, as if to a person who doesn’t know her hearing aids have failed. “It’s just stuff I have,” he says. “And now I’m getting rid of it. We’re moving.” “But how do you happen to have three glass jewelry display cases?” I ask. “At…

Max Levin died on August 25, 1892, one month before Rose Hill Cemetery began keeping records. Although the details of what killed Max have faded from memory, it’s easy to imagine what happened immediately after he died. The chevra kaddisha, the sacred society of Jewish men who consider preparation of…

Perhaps the most wonderful thing, Cheryl Bailey thinks, is that phones are ringing all over the hotel, but none of the calls are for her. In the three resort kitchens, dishes are piling up, but they’re not her mess. She’s so far from that workaday life — the one in…

My favorite memories are typewritten. In 1970, I pasted this paragraph, with attached fantasies, into my journal: I never went any further with The Night of the Owl, but it seemed permissible to give myself a review in the New York Times, because after all, I didn’t just write; I…

“Colorado Studios announces the launch of the first sitcom to be produced in Colorado and is kicking off a search for the pilot script…Anyone, anywhere, is invited to submit a script…Any kind of sitcom will be considered — there are no limits…There are no specified target audience demographics.” — actual…

Russell Enloe’s father, the electrician, was baffled by the fluorescent-light decision. “He came in and saw us ripping them down,” Russell remembers, “and he said, ‘Don’t do it! They’re so cheap to run!'” A few hours later, the landlord came by to point out that the storefront at 46 Broadway…

Mystery writer Dolores Johnson may have made a fatal mistake the first time she decided to invent a gruesome death rather than rely on inspiration from a real dry cleaner. “The idea,” she remembers, “was a body found on a conveyor belt in the morning when the dry-cleaning shop opens…

I’m instantly awake and driven to purchase. Pot holders. Deck paint. Sturdy overalls, size 2T. Disposable rubber gloves, the 75-pair pack. Sunny Delite juice drink. A-point-and-shoot camera. Things I’ve never seen before but that are so ingenious — and such a bargain! — that I must have them. Now. So…

Juliet Draper stands at the bottom of a five-story tower constructed of steel girders, a spectator…for now. She’s wearing the bottom half of the protective gear she uses at work as a firefighter in Colorado Springs. Counting the air canister worn on her back, the heavy boots and the insulated,…

The night before her deportation hearing, Magali Brunson drank a few glasses of wine with her landlady, two of her landlady’s three daughters, the grandmother of those daughters, an old friend of the landlady’s family from back home in Nebraska, and several female friends who’d stopped by to find out…

Unit 500 of the Denver Dry Lofts will be complete in sixty days and then, if you have a million-three, you can have it all: Four-thousand square feet indoors and four thousand out on a roof garden dotted with fountains and French doors. Since most of the indoor space is…

Over two decades after his death, everyone remains obsessed with Elvis Presley. Not to be fascinated with the man seems downright un-American. But our fascination has elicited so many facts about the King that these days it’s nearly impossible to be an Elvis generalist. The field is too crowded with…

In spring, John Starnes, better known as the Garden Doctor, is exhilarated whenever he isn’t exhausted. Daily, the UPS man brings him roses from all over the country. Weekly, he visits a long list of landscaping clients. Nightly, he sits at his computer, drawing up plans for his yearly tour…

The only things certain in life are death and taxes. At the Hospice of Metro Denver’s Aurora Care Center, the days leading up to April 15 went by peacefully and, for the most part, quietly, but death was still in the neighborhood, and some twenty patients, men and women, all…

Once again, Colorado Swine Day is upon us, with its ceaseless rounds of pomp and ceremony, and– No. Let’s try that again. Colorado Swine Day dawns bright and cloudless, the sort of spring day that sets the sourest of pusses to purrin’. “Why, fry me up a half-pound of bacon,…

Jefferson County’s first synagogue ever is a ranch house located between a nursing home and a vet’s office in Evergreen. “It was built in 1962,” says congregation president David Froman, the man who galvanized members to raise enough money to buy the building. “At this point, we could turn it…

The Old Ladies’ Board Adventure Team (OLBAT) will now come to order. If you are male, have always been athletic and wish to catch big air while riding faster than common sense would indicate you should, this is not your meeting. All you 26-year-olds? Who smoke cigarettes on the chairlift?…