At first glance, Mei-Ling Hopgood’s Lucky Girl smacks of Oprah. And Hopgood’s 2009 memoir, about traveling back to China as an adult to reunite with the birth parents who gave her up for adoption, might well have descended into the touchy-feely had it not been for the hard-core chops the…
SpongeBob SquarePants has a bad rap. Overzealous merchandisers mis-market him as a canary-colored bath toy. Educators and many parents – who in most cases have never watched the show — vilify him. But kids (and grown-ups who dig pop culture and social satire) get the idealistic naif from Bikini Bottom…
Suppose for a sec that Robert Horry, on the morning of May 14, 2007, had looked in the mirror and said, “Today, I’m not going to be a total dick.” True to his nature, though, Horry decked Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash during the waning seconds of that night’s…
Oh, great. Another chance to be humbled by a Manning on national TV. The Arizona Cardinals can look at their prime-time game against the Giants in New York on Sunday that way, or they can view it as another golden opportunity to — sigh — prove their Super Bowl run was no fluke,…
We were born on the wrong side of the tracks in Yahoo, Texas, and have spent every subsequent day trying to live it down. We drink wine, appreciate art, have offspring who say “please” and “thank you,” and drive a girlie-man hybrid car to help the environment. For 49 weeks…
For a place with an overall IQ of about 32 – to judge by all the shotgun-toting boobs sporting Sheriff Joe bumper stickers – Phoenix has an ace literary scene. Many of those same redneck yahoos who try to run you off the road every morning run amok in the…
Though it’s a legit PGA Tour stop, fall’s Frys.com Open is kind of a weak-sister stepchild to its overwhelmingly popular winter kin, the FBR Open. But that’s not a bad thing – at least for true fans of the sport, for whom the Frys tourney offers up-close-and-personal access to the…
1: Officially – and a mite pompously for people who deal with swine – it’s the Arizona Exposition & State Fair. 2: The State F . . . er, Expo opens at noon Friday, October 16, and continues through November 8. It’s closed Mondays. 3: Admission on opening day is…
Having sweated and sniped through a few 5Ks in our time, we admire folks who run for the hell of it. 20K types? Forget about it. These are people who just like pain, heaping helpings of it. The misery-in-Mizuno contingent will be out in force for the annual South Mountain…
Three years ago, Suns fans considered Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers their personal bitches. Two years ago, D-Backers openly lampooned the hapless, pre-Joe Torre L.A. Dodgers. Last year, Arizona Cardinals fans noisily pooh-poohed the antics of the San Francisco 49ers and the team’s head coach, Mike Singletary, who dropped his…
Last fall’s inaugural Cancer Treatment Centers of America Tennis Championships overcame the dubious moniker (sponsorship is important, but please) and setting (hell and gone in a boondock Phoenix suburb) with a whiz-bang championship match for the ages: John McEnroe took down Todd Martin in an old-fashioned barn-burner, 3-6, 7-6, 11-9…
The most petrified we’ve ever been was on the stroke of midnight one bitter Christmas Eve, reading the final delicious syllables of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. King kept his ghoulish, cheesy masterwork locked in a trunk for years, believing it was too macabre for publication. The parting line is an…
For a place with an overall IQ of about 32 – to judge by all the shotgun-toting boobs sporting Sheriff Joe bumper stickers – Phoenix has an ace literary scene. Many of those same redneck yahoos who try to run you off the road every morning run amok in the…
Why couldn’t our college professors have been as boss as Jillian McDonald, namesake of ASU Art Museum’s latest too-cool-for-school residency, “Social Studies Project 5 — Jillian McDonald: Alone Together in the Dark”? Our dubious profs always wore twee elbow patches and looked like they’d just fallen off the couch after…
No offense to good intentions, but most fundraisers aimed at stamping out social ills are, by definition, no fun. Phoenix’s AIDS Walk, a benefit for 16 AIDS/HIV service nonprofits, itself benefits greatly from its proximity and relationship to one of the city’s truly convivial affairs, the Rainbows Festival & Street…
The Rainbows Festival & Street Fair is sweet in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It’s feel-good but non-saccharine, communal but non-violent. No death metal. No gangsta rap. Maybe a few show tunes sprinkled in amid the playfully bawdy main-stage performances of local drag aces Freddy Prinze Charming and Sisterzz…
For a place with an overall IQ of about 32 – to judge by all the shotgun-toting boobs sporting Sheriff Joe bumper stickers – Phoenix has an ace literary scene. Many of those same redneck yahoos who try to run you off the road every morning run amok in the…
There’s a reason baseball has plummeted to third place in the national-pastime sweepstakes. In a word: ennui. In a few more: great, shrieking, tedious torpor. This is true of most places in this year’s drama-challenged MLB, but nowhere so much as Phoenix, where the 2009 Arizona Diamondbacks have suffered through…
Last April 20, while the East Valley Tribune was – somewhat shockingly, but happily so – pocketing a rare local Pulitzer Prize for its Joe Arpaio/Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office reportage, reporters Julie Cart and Bettina Boxall of the Los Angeles Times were celebrating their own Pulitzer win for a series…
Even after the Arizona Cardinals came within 157 seconds of carting home the Lombardi Trophy last February, some naysayers continued to label the Cards the worst Super Bowl team of all time. Were they right? Well, the Redbirds haven’t done much to naysay the naysayers since, losing all four preseason…
The Arizona Diamondbacks have nothing left to lose this year, so here are a couple of achievable goals we think they should aim for going into this weekend’s series against the Colorado Rockies: 1) get the hell out of the cellar, which is an embarrassment to all the fans who’ve…
Reese Witherspoon in 2001’s Legally Blonde (the movie) proved that raw star power can sometimes trump barefaced marketing. You wanted to hate the high-concept affair – you really, really wanted to – but in the end, Witherspoon’s winning portrayal of poor little rich girl Elle Woods made it impossible to…
