Oh, Oprah, just when we were becoming annoyed with your television empire, that book club, and your political backslapping, we love you all over again. Your steady hand in guiding Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple onto Broadway in 2005, and finally toward the stage at Gammage Auditorium,…

The Sweetest Swing in Baseball is a comedy for smart people. Funny girl Neda Tavassoli playfully chews the scenery, portraying the play’s protagonist, Dana Fielding, as a famous but paranoid artist who ends up in an institution after attempting suicide over a failed exhibition and the loss of her lover…

Sure, we look good without a bra and we’re sexually aggressive, but stacked up against the girls in Russ Meyer’s films, we’re just pasty faced nuns pulling on our rosary beads. Midnite Movie Mamacita, the grand dame of Grindhouse Redux, screens the porn impresario’s last great skin flicks, the Fellini-esque…

We loved Donnie Brasco and GoodFellas, and after leaving the theater, we’d purse our lips like made men. So when the organized-crime book Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob surfaced, we were hooked like fishes that sleep well at night. The author, Bob Delaney, was a fresh-faced state trooper in…

Tight-Shirt Guy says, “Dude, the AZ Strong Beer Festival is February 16. Whoa, paaar-tay.” As Beer Purist Guy pontificates about 6.5 percent alcohol content and exotic hops and barleys, Tight-Shirt Guy shrugs and says, “Hey, we’re gonna meet chicks, right?” Jerry Gantt, executive director of the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild…

Don’t tell our boyfriend, but we think “GGG” means “good game of golf.” Head down, steady eye, pull the wood, and swoop down hard for the connection and then the release. It’s like kinky sex, but with better scorekeeping. Beginning at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, January 31, fans and celebs alike…

Your mate bounds into the room, somersaults over the couch, and yells, “Honey, I got us tickets to the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, on February 3! Let’s spend the weekend!” From here, it can go two ways — you’re either thrilled and join in the celebratory dance or you…

Your jaw will hang open, barely attached by its thin wire of muscle and vein, when you listen to Eugene S. Robinson spitting out words like that Pavlovian pit bull Spalding Gray as he recounts his many impassioned interviews with hardened cons, CIA operatives, and cage fighters. A competitive fighter…

On VH1’s date-a-hairball hit Rock of Love, the tucked-and-tied-together bag of straw that is Poison frontman Bret Michaels whispers, “Only one of you will be my rock of love.” Criminy, the last time we said anything so inane we were 9 and forced to choose between an aggie and a…

Bookended by two of our more illustrious ex-lovers, we contemplate the cyclical circumstances that brought us to this particular bar rail. For ages, the tiny Chez Nous Cocktail Lounge – steeped in velvety darkness and dangerous liaisons — stood guard against formulaic nightlife at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and…

We’re glad we don’t have it rough like underground-comic-book schlub Harvey Pekar, with his two divorces and bout with cancer, but as he says in the autobiographical film American Splendor, “Hey, man, every day’s a brand-new deal, right? Just keep on working and something’s bound to turn up.” Harvey seems…

Ever since our daddy made sure we included Roger Staubach in our nightly childhood prayers, we’ve been a sports junkie. Then, as a teenager growing up on the northside, we’d sneak into Turf Paradise to watch the magnificent thoroughbreds pound dirt until security threw us out. Now that we’re old…

Never mind the bollocks, Jeeves. Snatch up your y-fronts and bend a leg over to the Steel Horse Saloon for a proper invasion of vintage British and European motorcycles. The 13th annual British and European Bike Show & Swap Meet only runs for four hours, so there’s no time for…

Yippee-ki-yay! The Arizona National Livestock Show presents its 59th annual critter competition with more than 2,000 cream-of-the-crop cattle, ewes, horses, and swine from across the nation, all primped and primed by idealistic 4-H and FFAers. Is the competition cutthroat? It will be for the “winners” of the climactic Junior Market…

Local theater director Joseph Benesh won’t go so far as to say there’ll be nudity in the underground production The Bobo Theatre Project: A Lullaby Jubilee in 3 Acts, but he and his partners in aesthetic crime do hope to make people squirm in their seats. The Project is the…

While our lame ass sits at home reading crime novels and waiting for the phone to ring, somewhere in this city of immolation Susana is carefully choosing a skin-tight outfit to rival any high school bleacher slut for her Travesty Show. She of the golden cowgirl hat, trembling lamé bikini…

While our lame ass sits at home reading crime novels and waiting for the phone to ring, somewhere in this city of immolation Susana is carefully choosing a skin-tight outfit to rival any high school bleacher slut for her Travesty Show. She of the golden cowgirl hat, trembling lamé bikini…

Hey, you got your hiking in my karaoke! The two have more in common than you think. Both take some amount of courage and correct breathing techniques, not to mention appropriately stylish outfits. So break out those sassy stilettos you got at REI, ’cause someone over at Estrella Mountain Regional…

Howard Stern can make or break you. If you’re the band Gloritone, you lose credibility, but if you’re Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge, the Stern connection can nab you millions of brand-new, like-minded listeners. The Absorbent One was dropped from Clear Channel in 2004 and picked up by…

Lonely whistle of a distant freight train becomes a shrieking, pumping metal coffin driven by a wild-eyed, sharp-fanged conductor spinning a stand-up bass guitar. That, more of less, is the spirit of rockabilly, a product of the 1950s that was pivotal in the history of American popular music, with the…