“No, I’m very, very serious. Very serious. We need to reduce the population of the world by at least two thirds.” This is your convention, so don’t you feel good to look out and see all these people here? “What would that have to do with anything? I am not…
He’s so shy he doesn’t grant interviews, but these days his rugged Yankee mug is on Phoenix TV more than Lee Iacocca’s. Peter Coors, head of the Colorado-based Coors brewing empire and scion of one of the most powerful families in the mountain West, has taken to the airwaves. His…
In the Big Scheme, a poetry reading by an ASU professor normally wouldn’t rank as a major event. But when the poet is Norman Dubie, and it’s his first public reading in a decade, and he plans to read from his newest book, well . . . “This reading is…
For a guy trying to make a splash in the relaxation business, Jim Eisenman lives with a lot of stress. To start with, he runs what appears to be the Valley’s only flotation-tank business. During these hours, Eisenman and his wife provide frantic professionals with a few minutes of soothing…
Every night, without fail, my five-year-old son stalks me down for a goodnight kiss. What’s nice about this ritual, other than the smooch itself, is that it’s something he’s wanted to do ever since he could muster a pucker. At bedtime, we have to fire up the cattle prod to…
For the past two weeks, we’ve seen what is quite possibly the most magnificent hoax in Phoenix Suns history unfold. I refer, of course, to the mysterious ailments of three key players. These injuries were contracted with the statistical predictability of a triple lightning strike. They defy belief. Yet with…
Prior to the mysterious rash of injuries, “Your Phoenix Suns,” as announcer Al McCoy always calls them, were riding high. Before Kevin Johnson, Tom Chambers, and Dan Majerle were struck down by mysterious ailments, McCoy boasted that this was a team playing what he kept referring to as “Phoenix Suns…
HOW TO GET BABY FOOD INSIDE A BABYIN 25 EASY STEPS More indispensable survival tips culled from Dr. Dad’s Baby-Owner’s Manual ($24.95; Meetda Press). 1. Accept the grim fact that all babies will eat dirt, rug lint and old bug carcasses and like it, yet very often the little animals…
Maybe Gail Simmons and her neighbors in northeast Phoenix wouldn’t have been so surprised–and so angry–if her city councilmember, Skip Rimsza, had just answered her question the way a pol might in, say, Chicago: “Of course we’re gonna draw up districts to keep ourselves in power, lady. Whaddaya think we…
He was standing by the stack of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes, staring ahead, eyes glazed, face pock-marked and wan, mouth slightly open. Later he was around the corner, with his shock of white hair and a Macy’s shopping bag. And then he was in another room, with two women, one…
The last time Karen Finley performed in the Valley, she used a teddy bear to sponge her torso with raw eggs before sprinkling herself with multicolored glitter. The time before that, she slathered canned yams onto her bare butt and used shredded beets as a gruesome metaphor for menstrual discharge…
December 3, 1989, began as Armando Saldate’s day off, but proved to be one of the most momentous of his twenty-year career. “It was a very long Sunday,” the former Phoenix homicide detective says. “Two murder confessions and a poor little guy’s body out in the desert.” Saldate’s seven-page account…
Turn on your TV at 9 o’clock next Tuesday morning. You’ve got your Sally Jessy Raphael. You’ve got your Regis and Kathie Lee. And over on Channel 45, you’ve got your Tom Tabback. Who? Actually, the big question may be: What? You see, The Tom Tabback Show is a talk…
The prisoner’s dream starts with such promise. “They’re letting me out and I’m going to meet Christopher,” Debbie Milke says. “He’s alive! I’m free!” Suddenly, the dream becomes a nightmare. “The only way we’ll be together is if we get attached by handcuff. Forever. That’s the only way he’ll stay…
In an era when sub-.500 baseball pitchers get million-dollar contracts, it makes sense that a peanut vendor has a publicist. In his own field, Rick “The Peanut Man” Kaminski–ace bag-tosser for the Seattle Mariners, Seahawks, and SuperSonics–is no borderline player. He’s the franchise, a superstar. An MVP. Last month, Full…
Grassy knoll. Warren Commission. Zapruder footage. Hard to believe, but my generation’s buzz words are now another generation’s U.S. History assignment. And some people evidently haven’t been paying as much attention to their homework as they should have. Or so I discovered after I recently agreed to play the chauffeur…
Hugh Ennis likes a good joke. Especially when it has a cop theme. Take the toy police car resting near his window at the Liquor Department, for instance. Like the slapstick autos that zoom around a circus ring, this one looks as though a squad of battery-powered minicop-clowns will tumble…
Ernie Holden remembers the time he drove his hot rod into a gas station to fill it up. The car was a 1964 El Camino, a beast dating from the days when gas was cheap and engines were big, and its 350 cubic inches put out more than 300 horsepower…
Only 3 percent of Valley residents place “a great deal” of trust in the Arizona State Legislature. Just 16 percent of new governor J. Fife Symington’s constituents trust him the same way. Also down at 16 percent on the trust meter is the Arizona Republic, a daily newspaper. Slightly more…
If three strikes are out, Arizona has finally touched the bottom of the barrel. First, there was Evan Mecham, whose eccentricities became such a cause celebre that the Arizona State Legislature voted him out of the governor’s office after a lengthy impeachment trial that enthralled the entire nation. Mecham was…
For months we’ve been bombarded by puff pieces about General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf, the general with the 170 IQ, has been certified by the Newspaper Publishers of America as the hero of The War That Saved the Emir of Kuwait and his 350 Wives. After President Bush telephoned Schwarzkopf…
They haven’t got much in common on the surface. Candice Nagel, a second-term legislator before she resigned last month, drives home along the Dreamy Draw in a white Mazda convertible and parks in the driveway of a Paradise Valley house that is massive, uninteresting and crammed onto a lot so…
