Best Music Festival for Kids 2011 | Hoodstock, Hoodlums Music and Movies | People & Places | Phoenix
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Best Music Festival for Kids

Hoodstock, Hoodlums Music and Movies

Here's a little secret: The guys who run the music store next to Changing Hands in Tempe call themselves hoodlums — and maybe they look like it, just a little — but really, they're old softies. Just check them out each spring when they throw a weekend-long music festival, aptly named Hoodstock. Fans pack the tiny store to catch local bands like Dry River Yacht Club and Psych 101 taking the even tinier stage to play their hearts out for charity, specifically the education intervention program at a nearby elementary school. The owners and festival volunteers spend weeks having the school kids paint record albums, which hang on the walls, available for sale. It's a great fundraising idea — who's not going to come down to buy their kid's record and spend a few bucks (a percentage of Hoodlums' sales go to the charity all weekend) while they're at it? Just be sure you get there early to buy your child's creation; last year, there were tears when a stranger snatched up a particularly good-looking album just an hour into the festival, before Mom and Dad could make it down to make the purchase. Best part of this festival: No matter where your kids go to school, this is a great way to introduce them to local indie rock in a family-friendly atmosphere.

Best Theater Festival

Phoenix Fringe Festival

We love that this alternative-theater festival spotlights the kind of awesome small-budget gems you'd find showing at a Greenwich Village playhouse, which is welcome relief from the recycled Neil Simon snoozers and jukebox musicals Phoenix is known for inviting. This year's event was also rife with Arizona premières, including Steven Fales' Confessions of a Mormon Boy (originally directed by Tony Award-winner Jack Hofsiss), which follows a drug-addicted, excommunicated Mormon dad as he attempts to get his shit together, and The Fall of June Bloom, written and performed in part by an Australian woman battling dementia. The fact that the latter show was rehearsed entirely via Skype is an indication of just how cutting-edge the festival is. Toss in a play about four people finding themselves during the apocalypse and Van Rockwell's Oppressed, which chronicled a breakup from the dude's point of view, and you have a series of short plays that kicks the habit of sitting through The Sound of Music one more bloody time.

Best Concert Series

Pinnacle Presbyterian Church

Way out in the desert near Cave Creek sits this bastion of the Christian faith and a congregation about 1,400-strong. Sure, Pinnacle Presbyterian offers the usual Sunday-morning fare and other "normal" church stuff. But there's much more: For more than a decade now, the church has offered an annual series of surprisingly eclectic musical concerts that draw a surprisingly eclectic crowd. We have seen (and heard) world-class Brazilian musicians, the Seattle-based Groove for Thought (a jazz vocal ensemble), the Broadway Showstoppers crew, as well as old standbys the Phoenix Boys Choir and Phoenix Symphony. The sound system is impeccable. Church musical director Brent Hylton ought to be proud of what he's built.

Best Gospel Treasure

Reverend Louis Overstreet

In 1938, Reverend Louis Overstreet heard the voice of God, and it told him to buy a guitar. From that moment on, Overstreet made his way as a gospel singer, belting out heavy, blues-inspired music while preaching on street corners. In July 1961, Overstreet and family found themselves in Phoenix, playing outside a nightclub called Trotter's Inn, on Broadway Road. Overstreet decided to start a church in Phoenix, founding St. Luke's Powerhouse Church of God in Christ in South Phoenix. He recorded an album there, featuring his four sons and his nearly psychedelic approach to gospel music. Ahoolie Records eventually issued the records on CD, and, last year, Portland-based roots music label Mississippi Records re-issued the album on vinyl to thunderous acclaim from critics who actually heard it. Overstreet's church still stands in Phoenix, enduring like the album he recorded there.

Best Obnoxious Display of Patriotism

KOOL 94.5 FM

Considering the lack of a serious military presence here, it's sometimes surprising just how enthusiastic Phoenix gets about the good ol' U.S. of A. For a clear example, just tune into KOOL 94.5 FM at noon. For some reason, the station, which plays a classic hits format with a strong '70s bent (think: Phil Collins' "Sussudio") plays "The Star-Spangled Banner" every day at high noon. It's not, like, some special version, either. Nope, it's the standard sort you'd expect to hear played on an old cassette tape at a middle school basketball game. It's a pretty good gimmick, though. While our national anthem is not the sort of thing most people would seek out for their listening pleasure, wouldn't you feel a little guilty flipping the channel? How could you, what with our brave boys over there in Eye-Rack fighting to keep us free from Saddam Hussein (deceased) and Osama bin Laden (deceased). Freedom ain't free, you know, so keep it locked on KOOL-FM for this obnoxious display of patriotism — followed immediately by some useful information pertaining to the sale of high-quality, modestly priced used automobiles.

Best Christmas Spirit

Sepanek Home

Phoenix is usually proud of its winter weather, especially on those pleasantly balmy days when the rest of the country is snowshoeing to work. Well, except for a few weeks in December, around the time that elves, failed real estate developers, and their respective guardian angels take over our televisions. That's when you can sense that the city gets a little self-conscious about our snowlessness. Phoenix actually has a climate not unlike Bethlehem, where the first Christmas was celebrated by dark-skinned Semitic people, but that's of little comfort when we're inundated with the Yuletide rituals that blond-haired, blue-eyed Germanic heathens grafted onto the saintly celebration. So, yes, Phoenix has to work extra hard to get into the Christmas spirit. Which is probably why so many houses are lit up like Sky Harbor around the holidays. No one does it up better than Lee and Patricia Sepanek. The Sepanek display uses 250,000 blinking lights, many hung impossibly high on the palm trees towering over their home in a middle-class neighborhood south of Camelback and 44th Streets. The real show requires more than a drive-by. Toy trains, real snowfall, a hot cocoa stand, and enough animatronics to shame Walt Disney himself make this a must-see attraction. Yes, there are computer-controlled music systems at many other tacky and totally overdone holiday home displays, but detail on every inch of the Sepanek property really makes this house stand above the others. Keep an eye out for Santa and/or a dog dressed as Santa.

Best Glimpse of Wonderland

"Curiouser and Curiouser," Arizona Science Center

No need to be wary of the large eye watching you walk through the lobby of the Arizona Science Center; the huge lens is the latest collaborative and interactive piece by local artists Mary Lucking and David Tinapple. "Curiouser and Curiouser" borrows its name from Alice in Wonderland. It invites visitors to peer at each other through a giant telescope/microscope that juts out of the center's ceiling, and at the current exhibition through a smaller telescope on the lobby floor. The artwork was commissioned by the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture and fabricated by Magnum Architectural Inc. Thanks to Lucking and Tinapple, we can all feel very huge, and then very tiny — a very wonderland feeling, indeed.

Best Urban Legend

UFO crash site, Dreamy Draw Recreation Area

When it comes to Phoenix's best urban legend, folks tend to forget the facts and just love the lore. The lore: In October 1947, there was a UFO crash in what is now the Dreamy Draw Recreation Area. Two men named Silas Newton and "Dr. Gee" claimed to have pulled alien bodies from the wreckage and stored them in a freezer until the U.S. Army picked them up. The Dreamy Draw Dam was then built over the crash site, to cover it up. The facts: Aside from a couple of niche books on UFOs, there's no documentation of an alien crash at Dreamy Draw, and no wreckage from the crash has ever surfaced. Newton and "Gee" were exposed as con men (the former was even investigated by the FBI for his business dealings), and the dam was not built to cover anything up, but for the same reason any dam is built: to prevent flooding to the surrounding neighborhoods. Also, the dam wasn't constructed until 1973, which would make it the worst (and most tardy) structural cover-up ever. Still, it's kind of fun to hike Dreamy Draw and imagine there are little green men buried beneath the dam.

Best Keeper of Secrets

Mountain Vault

Are you a jewel thief or a gold smuggler looking for a hush-hush place to stash your purloined goods? Then steer your getaway car to the Mountain Vault, a high-tech (and super-secretive) storage facility that's drilled directly into the side of a mountain in north central Phoenix. How do we know it's so secretive? Because not only did they refuse to let us take pictures of the site, they wouldn't even answer the most basic questions about the facility. So, instead, we'll tell you what is known about this exotic private strong room. Naturally climate-controlled, thanks to the thick rock walls, the vault itself is tucked behind a 6,000-pound steel door and protected 24-7 by an armed guard housed inside a bulletproof station. More important, unlike a traditional bank safety deposit box, which can be seized by law enforcement or even "frozen" during a legal dispute, what happens inside the Mountain Vault stays in the Mountain Vault. Nice.

Best Underground Haunting

Main Street Tunnels in Mesa

And you thought the East Valley was so staid. Think again. Business owners along Mesa's Main Street have reported knickknacks falling off shelves and mysterious items being found in basement storage areas. The row of vintage brick buildings sits atop a series of tunnels rumored to have been used for bootlegging alcohol during Prohibition. Most of the connecting tunnels have long since crumbled or been walled off, but visiting paranormal investigators such as Tucson's Wailing Bainsidhe group have detected unusual heat readings and ghostly orbs in the basement areas that remain.

So speak kindly of our new favorite Valley 'burb — we don't want to disturb anyone's otherworldly peace.To hear a haunted tale from Evermore Nevermore employees, visit www. phoenixnewtimes.com/bestof2011.

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