Little Grouse on the Prairie High school is indeed hell, as Patricia Calhoun points out in her May 20 column, “Pomp and Circumstances.” Although nothing excuses the shootings at Columbine, I am sure that that high school, like Kiowa High School and all other high schools, had no shortage of…
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…
Abigail needs all ten fingers to count the drugs she’s done in her seventeen years. “So I went from pot to alcohol…but then in the course of like two years, I started going into crystal meth, cocaine, ecstasy, GHB…What else have I done?” “Special K?” Her boyfriend, Reid, prompts her…
Indiana Jones sits at a desk in his Evergreen home, typing his memoirs. In this particularly outrageous and harrowing chapter, he is chasing illegal duck hunters through soup-thick fog in a small boat, when unexpectedly–crash! He hurtles into the side of a larger vessel. He’s thrown backward into the water,…
With John Elway finally acknowledging that he’s become too creaky for football, the Broncos find themselves in the unfamiliar position of having to gamble on a new quarterback. It won’t be the first time that Pat Bowlen has tried his hand at a game of chance. But here’s hoping the…
Westword writers and editors took home 31 writing awards–eleven of them first-place prizes–from last week’s Colorado Society of Professional Journalists banquet. The SPJ contest is the only one in the state in which Westword is allowed to compete against Colorado’s largest dailies. “Hitting Them Where They Live,” Westword’s series on…
Bob Appel is an early-morning kind of guy. A two-time state truck-driving champion who’s been hauling freight for Roadway Express for nineteen years, he usually slips behind the wheel of his orange-and-blue semi a little after 3 a.m. On this morning, April 15, a monsoon of snow is falling, the…
By far, attorney Kenneth S. Kramer was the best-dressed man inside Denver’s small-claims court on May 12. Wearing a finely tailored brown suit with crisp lines and sharp corners, the bespectacled Kramer sat high in his chair and waited patiently. Behind him sat a lanky cowboy in faded blue jeans…
Outside the St. Francis Center, a day shelter a few blocks from Coors Field, it seems as if the Colorado Rockies are drafting employees from the area’s minor leagues. Among the crowd of down-on-their-lucks milling around out front, a handful are resplendent in the green-and-purple windbreakers that have been the…
Pointing the finger: Since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold rudely took their own lives after mowing down twelve other students and a teacher at Columbine High, thereby denying Americans of their right to revenge, it seems that everyone is looking for someone or something to hold responsible. The blame game…
That’s Right Hey, Dan: Your response to the fat couple with the lackluster sex life was no better or worse than most of the mainstream media’s information about fat people…which is to say, it was incorrect, unhelpful and silly. I’m a happy, healthy fat chick. My boyfriend is a happy,…
High school is hell. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, memories of high school’s peculiar institutional hells keep surfacing across the country, across class lines: memories of cutthroat cliques, of ruthless climbers, of clawing for credentials. And that’s just the adults. This Saturday, the Kiowa High School class of…
Bill of Sale Wow–Alan Prendergast and Stuart Steers did a great job with their special report on about Bill Owens (“This State for Sale,” May 13). Who is this guy, anyway? I still regularly confer with staunch Repubs back in Colorado, even though I’m more…uh, er, undecided. I thought moving…
Mary MacLean is trying to explain what she does for a living and how she does it, but her friend Debi Lind keeps finishing her sentences. “When you learn a discipline, the discipline takes over the conscious mind,” Mary says. “Which leaves the unconscious mind free. And then it just…”…
Sid Lindauer’s family has been ranching in western Colorado for three generations, fighting winter storms, brushfires and outbreaks of disease, but never worrying much about what went on in the state legislature. Until now. The area around Lindauer’s ranch just outside Parachute is dotted with natural-gas wells, part of a…
Jeff Conn is an urban hunter. Each weekday morning at 7:15, Conn bounces down the seven steps from his home in Alamo Placita Park and starts walking to his job in downtown Denver. The walk–the hunt–will take precisely 25 minutes. “I bet we don’t see anything today” Conn says. “Wouldn’t…
Larry Mizel, the home builder who once spent his days worrying about criminal cases being built against executives in his company, is back on Colorado’s A list. A regular on the social circuit, Mizel has been feted at fundraising dinners and was even made an honorary dean by the University…
Like most of his fellow road warriors, Bill Owens has spent too much of his life stuck in traffic, usually during what passes for rush hour in the Denver metroplex. When he lived in southeast Aurora, his daily crawl on I-25 to downtown took an agonizing 30 to 45 minutes–and…
The night belonged to the captains of industry. They arrived in all their fin de siecle glory, disgorged from stretch limos and sleek foreign sedans, each with a freshly pressed tuxedo on his back and an elaborately coiffed spouse on one arm. They made their way to the Plaza Ballroom…
Michael Robert Grainger, who in April 1998 pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter in the death of his wife, was considered for parole last week and rejected. He will, however, be recommended for placement in Boulder County Treatment Center; it will be six to eight weeks before the final decision on…
In the first day of each semester, West High School teacher Alan Chimento hands his social studies students a twelve-page guide called “Activism 101.” This is your world, it says. You can do something to change it. Now go out there and create your reality. The guide explains how to…
Heeling power: Volunteers began packing up the Columbine shrines at Clement Park Monday. But debris from peripheral damage keeps piling up, and it’s getting deep. Also on Monday, the White House held its warm-and-fuzzy summit on youth violence, during which President Bill Clinton begged the entertainment industry to clean up…
