As far as Michelle Valdez is concerned, the crowd waiting to take Elitch Gardens’ newest thrill ride may have already had their minds erased. A fight that erupted Sunday, May 18, while people stood in a three-hour-long line for the Mind Eraser roller coaster left Valdez’s eleven-year-old daughter Savannah lying…
At the small Colorado Springs offices of Bereavement: A Magazine of Hope and Healing, the excitement started last year, when a writer for the prime-time show Promised Land placed a call to publisher Andrea Gambill. The television drama is a spinoff of the surprise CBS hit Touched by an Angel…
At age 37 but looking younger, Michael Garcia, a former schoolboy baseball and football player, keeps in shape by working out four days a week. Two of those days he trains at a nearby dojo, where he refines his skills in tae kwon do, a Korean martial art he has…
The peculiarities of the national pastime are, at the present time, running amok, like drunks loose in the outfield. Rupert Murdoch, the Aussie media glutton who swallows newspapers, TV networks and movie studios the way fans at the ballpark eat peanuts, now proposes to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers and…
Memorial Day once marked the start of the summer tourist season at the Lace House. But on this Memorial Day, it was difficult to remember what the historic landmark looked like back in the olden days. Back, say, in the olden days of six years ago, when the renovated Victorian…
Through a Glass, Dorkly Regarding Tony Perez-Giese’s “Look Out, Sin City!” in the May 22 issue: What are people in Commerce City thinking? (If, in fact, people in Commerce City can think.) Putting strippers behind Plexiglas? What’s the fun in that? Why don’t they just cover the gals with Teflon?…
Bill Potts gets along with just about everybody. Still, there was a woman at an art show in Boulder who managed to curl his lip. A sculptor who carves vivid, exaggerated figures and tableaux out of wood–athletes, jazz musicians, street scenes, historic events, dinosaurs, you name it–Potts isn’t entirely comfortable…
On Mother’s Day, families across the country gathered together to thank Mom for all her love and sacrifices. In Denver, flamboyant socialite Judi Wolf drove over to her mother’s house in order to take the elderly woman back to “a party” at Judi’s expansive digs in Cherry Hills. But Letty…
Westword writers and editors took home fourteen writing awards at the Colorado Society of Professional Journalists banquet last week at the Brown Palace Hotel. The newspaper received three top prizes in the competition, in which Westword competes against the state’s largest dailies. Staff writer Steve Jackson won in business features…
Years of promoting an air-cargo development at Denver International Airport are about to bear freight for Denver millionaire L.C. “Cal” Fulenwider III. And the public is helping carry the bags. The Denver real estate baron and his family already own an estimated 7,500 acres in the area surrounding DIA. Now…
Oh, shut up, already: Apparently mistaking The Hill for Kent State–and the People’s Republic of Boulder for Tiananmen Square–Boulder Police Chief Tom Koby suggested to the Boulder Planet last week that his officers “would have been justified in killing some of these young people” who rioted for the right to…
Like an Old West marshal fixated on vice, police captain Mary Wamsley set Lakewood straight and is now determined to clean up Commerce City–whether it wants to be clean or not. Over the past two years Wamsley and sister officer Dea Aragon have zeroed in on the only four sex…
Renee Polreis sat on the floor, her back against the sofa, as her son David clambered onto the couch behind her. It was about their eighth trip to the office of Greeley psychologist Byron Norton, who’d begun seeing the pair after Polreis complained that the two-year-old boy, whom she’d adopted…
Having checked with the proprietors of Manhattan’s major nightclubs, opium dens and appliance-repair shops, we have some news: Deep Blue didn’t paint the town red after blowing away Garry Kasparov in the recent Super Bowl II of Chess. Blue didn’t call room service. Didn’t pop a magnum of Dom Perignon…
One day this spring, J.T. Colfax crossed the line. He’s been on the edge before. The time he papered a New York City wall with stock shots of actors who’d been cut at an audition and labeled them “rejects.” Colfax made the New York news with that one. The time…
A Mutant Point I was struck by the volume of mindless, vitriolic mail from slavering mutants published by Westword in the May 15 issue. Hey, this is our paper! If you militant hatemongers don’t want to get your sensibilities in an uproar, I suggest you return to your regular reading…i.e.,…
In February 1994, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Local 7, got a second chance. The previous spring the state’s largest labor organization had made a bid to unionize the Alamosa City Market’s one hundred or so grocery workers. But Local 7 had lost the 1993 campaign for new…
Buying a box of crackers at a supermarket in Grand Junction would ordinarily be uneventful. But these days even a humble cracker is the stuff of controversy, as the City Market checkout clerk is happy to explain. “I never got sick from eating them,” she reassures an anxious customer. “The…
Abortion doctor Warren Hern is used to seeing protesters outside his Boulder clinic. He just doesn’t expect them to come from the pro-choice ranks. In April, Bill Baird, a nationally known abortion-rights activist, and Margie Wait, the Colorado state director of American Atheists, picketed Hern’s Boulder Abortion Clinic. They claimed…
Here’s a brainteaser for you: A half-dozen thugs chase down and beat up repo man Robert Bradbury, who’s confiscated their tow truck. They stomp on him and punch him–leaving him with a cracked rib and a concussion–before taking back their truck and racing off. Concerned citizen Andrea Anders, a 31-year-old…
Hoping to cash in on the “American dream of home ownership” with minimal effort, a Littleton company is holding an essay contest to give away a $150,000 house. There’s just one catch: The house doesn’t exist–and neither does the $150,000. In a scheme that has already drawn the attention of…
It was a deal only a utility could dream up: The state would give US West $25 million to help extend the company’s network throughout Colorado’s public schools, locking up a lucrative market. And the phone giant almost got away with it. Earlier this year, Governor Roy Romer announced that…
