A Heartbreaking Ruling

Joe Dugan’s rarely one to complain, but his life has taken on a crushing monotony. For almost five years, the retired steelworker has spent most of his waking hours tending to his wife of 34 years, Sarah. Sarah Dugan is a virtual vegetable, the result of a November 1990 heart…

Countdown to Indictment?

With bankruptcy hearings on one side, and a federal criminal indictment looming ever closer on the other, Arizona Governor J. Fife Symington III’s future lies largely in the hands of his Washington, D.C., criminal defense attorney, John M. Dowd. During the next 30 to 45 days, Dowd is expected to…

Flashes

For Crying Out Dowd! Governor Fife Symington’s attorney, John M. Dowd, is the focus of a stinging story in The National Law Journal. Dowd represents Symington in a federal criminal probe of the governor’s finances. He also defended Symington against a federal suit stemming from the failure of Southwest Savings…

Fear and Loafing

Do you ever wonder what the substantial business people of the Valley think of a bankrupt fakir like Fife Symington? Take some top executive at Intel. Some guy who makes several hundred grand a year and is responsible for a couple of hundred million dollars of business. A guy who’s…

Historic Misconduct

He is beginning to act peculiar in public. Governor Fife Symington is now comparing himself to – are you sitting down? – Thomas Jefferson. On Saturday, he made the comparison in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, saying that both he and Jefferson were men of great political…

That Darn Cathouse!

While visiting Nevada earlier this year, 69-year-old Don Phelan did something some men only dream of. Flush from a recent inheritance, the Mesa retiree spent ten days cavorting with prostitutes in one of that state’s legal whorehouses. Five months later, he’s still sore. Plenty sore. That lingering discomfort has less…

Shelter Skelter

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, The Open Door Shelter must be a rest stop along the way. It’s supposed to be a place where battered women and their children can find safe haven. Instead, the Phoenix shelter, which raked in $417,000 in donations in 1994,…

Open Door, Open Accounts

To retain its nonprofit status, The Open Door Shelter is required to report its income and expenditures to the Internal Revenue Service every year. Beyond that, the organization has no accountability to anyone except its board of directors. And that can be dangerous, charity watchdogs warn. Rick Moyers, a spokesman…

Sworded Behavior

Lord Mikolaj Alexis Vasilko looks as if he’s going to vomit. He’s fallen to his knees after getting hit in the crotch with a rattan sword, and his face turns several shades of red before he finally collapses in a heap on the grass field. A small crowd gathers to…

Pic Hits for the week

Info:Category:Calendar Edition:Print 10/19/1995 Pic Hits for the week By Clay McNear thursday october 19 Arizona State Fair: The annual corn-dog carnival opens Thursday and continues through November 5 at the fairgrounds, bounded by McDowell Road and Encanto Boulevard between 17th and 19th avenues. Along with the usual attractions–midway rides and…

Kid Pics for the week

at the fair Thunder Lagoon Kids ActiviTIKI HUT: KPNX-TV, Channel 12, hosts this exhibit from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at Arizona State Fair. A variety of activities is planned, including coloring projects and animal shows, all with an eye toward educating kids about saving the rain forest and…

Soviet’s Choice

The 1926 masterpiece Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin), the second feature of a wise-ass 27-year-old Soviet director named Sergei Eisenstein, is one of those works whose effect on modern culture almost can’t be overstated. Although Eisenstein already had experimented with the technique he called “montage” in his 1924 debut feature,…

“A” Bomb

The theme of The Scarlet Letter is hypocrisy, and the new film version of this classic never embodies its theme more strikingly than in one of its opening titles: “Freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Yeah, right. Douglas Day Stewart’s script has wildly altered Hawthorne’s plot, to be…

Bone Voyage

Thee Pitt’s “Again,” 14620 North Cave Creek Road, Phoenix, 996-PITT (7488). Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 8 p.m. For some men, it’s the flowery whiff of Chanel No. 5. For others, it’s…

Second Helpings

Running Wilder: The 120 miles between Phoenix and Tucson have to be the most uninteresting stretch of landscape in the state. The drive goes a lot more quickly, however, if you know a meal at Janos awaits you at the end of the road. This beautiful restaurant, set in a…

Strange Interlude

Theater Works has scored solidly with a winning production of John Guare’s darkly deranged comedy The House of Blue Leaves. Guare is the author of two pieces I have admired very much, the film Atlantic City and the play and film Six Degrees of Separation. But despite two acclaimed New…

Looming Large

If I can only have a dress made from Junichi Arai’s fluid stainless steel fabric in time for Halloween, I can go to the big party as Queen of the Martians. The arresting fabric, which moves like mercury in the hand and could have come straight out of some secret…

Phish Tale

Phish Heads, Phish Heads, stoned and tripping Phish Heads. Phish Heads, Phish Heads, having their fun. My brain’s still shrouded in a pleasant purple haze from the Phish show at Compton Terrace on October 11, but I’m happy to report that the Deadhead demographic has apparently made a smooth transition…

Cowboys From Hell

Eddie Spaghetti is homesick. At the mere mention of Arizona, his voice goes limp as his mind hearkens to happy childhood memories. Like the other members of the Seattle-based hillbilly hard-core band Supersuckers, Spaghetti was born and raised in Arizona. Along with original guitarists Dan Bolton and Ron Heathman and…

Model Trane

When John Coltrane regularly gigged at the New York City jazz mecca Birdland in the early ’60s, a young comedian who hung out at the club learned to mimic the sax player–his stage mannerisms, his facial tics, even the sound of his horn. One night, the comic and Coltrane’s band…

Recordings

Red Hot Chili Peppers One Hot Minute(Warner Bros.) The serrano boys have peeled the tube socks off their dicks and pulled on their thinking caps for this fire dance of an album–easily the band’s best since it put funk/punk on the map in 1985 with Freaky Styley. Four years back,…

Letters

This Is Your Fife Regarding that Fife Symington fellow (“Paying the Piper,” John Dougherty, October 5). . . . Tro da bum out! Robert H. Stone Phoenix Hey! Just think if the governor ended up in Joe Arpaio’s jail! He would have to eat all that baloney he’s been feeding…