Leroy Percy Years in the Making (Reckless Abandon Music) Somebody took a ball-peen hammer and shattered Leroy Percy’s heart into so many pieces they’re still finding parts as far north as Pinnacle Peak Road and down south along the banks of the Gila River. Luckily for Phoenicians, the local singer-songwriter…
In 1987, Derrick Lee was selling roofs in Huntington Beach, California. He had no interest in politics. But he had this unemployed roommate. One day Lee noticed some help-wanted ads for paid petition circulators — the folks you see outside the library and the supermarket who ask you to sign…
Here are the texts of key initiatives for which organizers are seeking signatures in Arizona. With the exception of Healthy Arizona 2, Lee Petition Management is working for all of them. The texts were obtained from the secretary of state. English Language Education for Children in Public Schools Requires that…
At long last, Ralph Brekan felt like he’d entered the world of professional film production. Granted, it was just a cheesy commercial for an oil company, but after years of making home movies in his backyard, this gig was the real deal. Brekan, then an 18-year-old film student at Scottsdale…
Marketing consultant Marty Baird didn’t know what to expect when he interviewed for a job at Hi-Health Supermart Corporation in 1996. Mainly, he wasn’t sure if Sy Chalpin, the founder and president of the Arizona-based health food store chain, would want him as a consultant or a full-time employee. But…
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
Village Voices The article “Hood Winked” (Edward Lebow, March 30) is a wake-up call. However, has anyone taken the time to stop moaning and groaning about what the city won’t do, and post fliers around the “neighborhoods” asking for volunteers to clean up their own neighborhoods? It only takes one…
I admit it. I’ve gone to cockfights. I’ve bet on which rooster would kill the other, and I’ve exulted in every flashing, bloodletting stroke of my chosen chicken’s blade. Allow me to explain myself. Part of the allure is the wagering, men and women shouting odds and waving cash. Part…
Power Hungry One day this week, the Flash and about a dozen other peons were waiting patiently for a table at Crazy Jim’s restaurant downtown during the lunch-hour rush. One party of four, however, swept in and was immediately waved to a table. That was Mayor Skippy Rimsza and friends,…
There are women in tattered cotton shawls who kneel outside the border crossing station in Nogales, Sonora, to sell jigsaw puzzle maps of the continental United States. The maps, cut into 50 cardboard pieces shaped like states, are made in China. One of these maps has traveled from China to…
“Mexico sucks!” Under normal barroom conditions — particularly in a southern-Arizona beer joint heavily populated with Hispanics — them’s fightin’ words. But as the anti-nationalist proclamation echoes through Tucson’s Wildcat House on a recent Sunday afternoon, them’s more like wrestlin’ words. “Butt-biting midgets,” “masked Mexican wrestlers,” “marauding mat maidens.” For…
Francisca Montoya hugs a framed, autographed photo to her chest as shouts of “Si se puede” and “Viva la causa” ring through the afternoon air. “Yes, we can,” and “Long live the cause” were rallying cries of the farmworker movement, and Cesar Estrada Chávez was its founder. Montoya’s beloved photo…
I remember chatting with Angel Carbajal in a strip club outside Corpus Christi, Texas, in the spring of 1997. The club’s owner — a fan of Angel’s famous boxing brother, Michael — had unlocked his sprawling establishment for an after-hours party, a celebration of Michael’s 10th-round knockout of Scotty “The…
Burning Questions The article “Danger to Children” (Paul Rubin, March 23) was the most moving and disturbing I’ve read since moving here last year. As a mother of three, it devastated me to think of what the children went through. Yes, I feel that their mother was wronged by the…
The sparsely attended bankruptcy-fraud trial of former governor J. Fife Symington III grinds along. Most days, the only observer who is not a lawyer or a journalist is an old guy with a crew cut sitting on Symington’s side of the room, seemingly offering moral support to the ex-governor. His…
Kiss Your Butte Goodbye The next target on the downtown Tempe development agenda: “A” Mountain, a.k.a. Tempe Butte. The construction, proposed by MCW Holdings and embraced by city officials, involves dynamiting a sizable chunk of ASU’s beloved hillock to accommodate more retail stores, living space and movie theaters at the…
Last August, about 30 residents of Central City South, a few city officials and some interested outsiders gathered in the steamy summer heat at the Valley Christian Center at 13th Avenue and Hadley Street to hear what the city planned to do about this neighborhood in need of help. Stuck…
Thirty-five people who suspect they’re descended from aliens are walking through Indian ruins on a Saturday night. They’re following Marcia Schafer, a petite 41-year-old Phoenix author and business consultant. Schafer leads her group down a trail that’s adjacent to the Pueblo Grande Museum on East Washington Street. The dirt gives…
The alien ancestry theory is wildly complex, extremely bizarre and fills just enough holes in evolutionary theory to have won its modest share of proponents. The theory’s influence extends from sci-fi movies such as Mission to Mars and Stargate to effecting the very real debate over rain-erosion tests that suggest…
The day Laura Bernstein was stabbed, kicked and left to die on a Mill Avenue sidewalk, the Tempe Daily News ran a front-page photo of a new police car. In a staged shot typical of small-town newspapers more than 30 years ago, two officers were shown “inspecting” the spanking new…
The Case for Shredding First Amendment groupies are passing stones over a judicial order that a reporter surrender his notes. This startling news is made even juicier by the fact that some of the people who are demanding to see the notes are reporters themselves. If you’re guessing that any…
Bathhouse Blues David Holthouse’s vivid description of a gay bathhouse (“Slippery Chute,” March 16) questions why it is treated differently by the city than heterosexual sex clubs. Gay men meet in bars, bathhouses, bushes and bookstores because we’re not permitted to meet in schools, churches and living rooms. We’re not…
