On Thursday and Friday nights, the forces of flamenco are unleashed at Tapas Papa Frita. The guitar slashes, the vocalist wails. At the center of the stage, the dancer pounds his heels and claps his hands. The customers–who come for the blood-red wine, the little plates of marinated mushrooms, the…
Margaret Lochhead walks toward the lake in Phoenix’s Encanto Park with her bread bag, on her way to feed the ducks. She’s been doing it for years on Sunday mornings–ever since her childhood when she set free her pet duck at the park. Along the way to the lake, Lochhead…
You may remember Barnett Lotstein from the Ev Mecham saga. He was the cocky little guy from the Attorney General’s Office who failed to convince a jury in 1988 that the quirky ex-governor was guilty of anything more than stupidity. As boss of the attorney general’s major fraud section, the…
The first battle of Operation Desert Bull began two weeks ago when Phoenix television stations aired a short clip of Terry Goddard in his naval reserve uniform. Fife Symington reacted angrily, accusing his opponent in the governor’s race of taking advantage of Persian Gulf patriotism. “I’m not wearing a uniform,”…
Don Moon is not an easy man to intimidate. Physically, he is only slightly smaller than a grizzly bear. Within state political circles, Moon, a Phoenix attorney, is considered shrewd and streetwise. But when a cop tipped him that he was the target of a vendetta by a local Hispanic…
It’s odd about the people you remember best. I came into this business before Don Larsen pitched his perfect game for the New York Yankees and before John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I have encountered an uncommon assortment of characters, but I don’t stake any claim to fame…
The battle over Peter Arnett and his reporting from Saddam Hussein’s capital of Baghdad will not go away. Turn on any local talk show these days and you will hear outraged citizens accusing Arnett and CNN of being naive dupes for the enemy line of propaganda. Some think Arnett has…
The television in the saloon was tuned to CNN as the first wave of American bombers struck Baghdad. The crowd, mostly men, gathered in front of the screen erupted with shouts of joy and pumped the air with their fists, woofing encouragement in the style popularized on the Arsenio Hall…
This morning, my son told me that he and his pal Brian are planning to build a time machine so they can zap themselves back to prehistory and cavort with the dinosaurs. Should they succeed, I’m going to ask him to drop me off in my own childhood. Nothing against…
When he talks about why little children might be dying of cancer, Dr. Jonathan Buckley speaks gently, as though he’s delivering a speech about petunias to a gardening club. But Buckley’s recent speech on the mysterious Maryvale cancer cluster had a not-so-gentle message: To have credibility, a cancer study must…
Jesse Garcia is trying to explain why he was in the wrong car, on the wrong street, with the wrong pal, on that steamy afternoon last July. “Very bad luck,” says the 22-year-old Phoenix native. “I wish I didn’t have that day off. I wish I never was on that…
Water farming is quickly becoming the Valley cities’ version of the pet rock–an Eighties fad that just doesn’t cut it in the Nineties. No water will ever be transferred out of southwestern Arizona and perpetually thirsty cities like Phoenix and Scottsdale will eventually sell their rural land holdings, rural lawmakers…
So you slapped some plastic covers onto your electric outlets, then congratulated yourself for childproofing your home. Right? Well, think again, pal. Making a house safe for crawling, inquisitive, orally fixated rugsters is no fifty-cent, two-minute proposition. To do the job correctly, you’ll need a crane, a jackhammer, some explosives,…
Sue Appleberry waits anxiously. The war protest rally will begin in minutes. Never before has she made a speech in public. She feels her stomach tightening as her turn to take the microphone nears. Her speech had been carefully prepared the night before. But now she has been told there…
Maybe presidents shouldn’t be permitted to watch movies–at least not in times of military crisis. During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s favorite film was Patton, a movie about the daring Army general who overcame all odds in World War II by rescuing American troops trapped in the Battle of the…
When Donna Davis strolled through the secluded campus of Oak Creek Ranch School near Sedona, her heart was finally at rest. That March day in 1989, she thought she’d found a boarding school where her fifteen-year-old daughter Erin could escape all the temptations of the big-city high school she was…
Louis Rhodes is a tomahto in a tomato world, a conservative who defends liberals, a flag-waver who defends flag-burners. He is the state’s pre-eminent defender of people with contrarian views–even when those views are contrary to his own. For the past eleven-and-a-half years, Rhodes has been executive director of the…
Miss Manners, the 1920s bible of Victorian etiquette for polite society, is quite clear on the subject of money. “Never discuss money at the dinner table or in public, and especially not with strangers. Discussion of the ~`haves’ and `have-nots’: those who have met with fortune and those who have…
It took a war with Iraq to do it, but I’ve forgotten all about the sins of Senators Dennis DeConcini and John McCain. These days, I spend every spare moment staring into my television set, watching the war on CNN. “The War in the Gulf,” as television calls it, has…
It’s a paradox. You try to instill in your child a deep, abiding respect for truth and honesty. You strive to establish a firm base of mutual trust. Yet you can look the kid straight in the eye and tell him that when his teeth fall out, he should put…
Onetime child actor Butch Patrick, best known to three generations of TV viewers as little Eddie Munster, thoughtfully examines an old publicity photo. Taken some 25 years ago, the shot features Patrick in a typical Munsteresque pose of the period: Decked out in wolfboy makeup and clad in his trademark…
There were lots of clever signs at the January 15 antiwar rally at the Federal building in downtown Phoenix. The crowd of 500 that had gathered by sunset, just a few hours before the U.S. government’s deadline for Iraq to leave Kuwait, still hoped that war would be averted. In…
