On Saturday, April 18, Brad Singer was in Tucson. The owner of the Zia Record Exchange chain had driven down for the annual Tucson music awards club crawl, universally known as the TAMMIES. Although he was a bit run-down from a persistent cold, Singer knew that he needed to be...
Lights Out Tony Ortega's refreshingly sober and objective investigation into the "Phoenix Lights" was in the best journalistic tradition--confronting the differences between what we would like to believe versus what the facts show ("The Hack and the Quack," March 5). Unfortunately, the other Valley media are listening more to their...
Joe Valiente, 27, professional rapper, takes a long hit from a short joint and peels back a window curtain in the rear lounge of his luxury tour bus. Ten feet away, on a grimy sidewalk in downtown El Paso, a line forms along the brick edifice of Club 101. Whooosh...
Club 411? Try Club 9-1-1 "Pimp 'n' Ho night" was the advertised theme at Club 411 in Tempe on May 17. "Bust a Cap night" was more like it. Here's the haps, culled from Tempe PD reports and witness accounts. Shortly before closing, patron Troy Ware--presumably dressed as a pimp,...
thursday may 14 Can you handle cowboy charm first thing in the morning? My hat's off to you, pardner. You'll probably want to check out Marshall Trimble at the Scottsdale Mayor and City Council Breakfast. The "Will Rogers of Arizona" spins yarns following a continental breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Thursday,...
thursday april 23 Food and music--Ida Guillory has mastered both, which means she's mastered at least two of the best things in this life. Better known as Queen Ida of Queen Ida and the Zydeco Band, the Grammy Award-winning accordionist holds a Creole cooking demonstration and buffet dinner at 6...
thursday april 30 The title character of The Tale of Teeka is a goose--Maurice, the narrator of Michel Marc Bouchard's children's play, presented by the French-Canadian troupe Les Deux Mondes, tells the tragic story of his relationship with the bird. The play, presented in association with the Governor's Call to...
thursday may 7 One of the state's largest amateur sporting events, the 1998 Arizona Special Olympics Summer Games showcases the athletic prowess of some 2,000 developmentally disabled adults and children in a variety of Olympic-style competitions, held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, mostly in and around Sun Angel...
Faieza Alyas was fixing her husband, Amir, breakfast of lentil soup and crackers when she learned that the Phoenix police considered them criminals. The day--Monday, September 29, 1997--had started typically for the Iraq-born couple and their two sons, Christian, 15, and Brandon, 11. The north Phoenix family arose early, with...
Thursday April 9 Cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, unrequited sexual longings--in case anyone supposed that these were new concerns of the theater, proof to the contrary is offered by Twelfth Night; or What You Will (the only subtitle Shakespeare ever provided for one of his plays). Southwest Shakespeare Company concludes its season...
thursday april 16 "You guys got baseball now!" says Tom Paxton, by phone, of the Valley. "I'll have to remember to do some baseball songs. I've got one called 'My Favorite Spring' that I'll have to do." Paxton, the legendary Pete Seeger protege best known, perhaps, for "Goin' to the...
ObaChine, Biltmore Fashion Park, 24th Street and Camelback, Phoenix, 955-9653. Hours: Lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., seven days a week; Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. Americans are obsessed with race. We're obsessed with ethnicity. We're obsessed with gender. But...
thursday march 12 "Spiritscapes": Cynthia Woody Gallery, 4151 North Marshall Way in Scottsdale, presents this display of the collage-style works of Benedictine monk turned artist Jerome Tupa. "If you've ever contemplated the lay of the land," remarks the artist, "this exhibit talks to the lay of the spirit, produced in...
thursday march 5 Robert Schimmel: The Phoenix-based comic, currently touring in support of his ironically titled CD Robert Schimmel Comes Clean, talks frankly about sex and other social taboos, in the tradition of Carlin, Pryor and Bruce. He performs at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday,...
Paradise Bar & Grill, 401 South Mill, Tempe, 829-0606. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Life in a university town can be incredibly appealing. Anyone who has ever wandered off-campus in Ann Arbor, Berkeley or Madison...
One of the first times I saw Big Pete Pearson and the Blues Sevilles was at Char's Has the Blues, the club on North Seventh Avenue. I was chasing shots of Jack Daniel's with ice-cold Rolling Rocks. At one point during the performance, Big Pete disappeared from view. But the...
thursday february 12 Desdemona--A Play About a Handkerchief: This "deconstruction" of Shakespeare's Othello by playwright Paula Vogel posits the Moor's hapless wife as a "spoiled and self-centered" pill who "struts around like a sorority queen reveling in her tales of sexual conquest; ever mindful that the one man she hasn't...
thursday february 5 The Old 97's/The Gourds: Both of these Texas outfits crank out curious, likable hybrids of folk, country and rock. The 97's, based in Dallas, are touring behind their Elektra release Too Far to Care. As for the Austin-based Gourds, any band that titles a song "I Ate...
Some people can maintain their composure in a burning skyscraper. But the average record-company exec, faced with a few months of flagging album sales, is liable to run naked through the nearest strip mall, brandishing an AK47 and screaming threats in some twisted form of pig Latin. So, in 1997,...
thursday january 15 Discover Stars on Ice: Kristi Yamaguchi, Scott Hamilton, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Kurt Browning, Katarina Witt, Paul Wylie, Brian Orser and other superstars of the thermally challenged set take the ice, under the direction of Sandra Bezic and Michael Seibert, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, January 15, at America West...
thursday january 29 Phoenix Symphony: Though his songs remain widely popular with performers, composer Kurt Weill is one of the relatively unsung--in the other sense of the term--geniuses of 20th-century music. He was even dissed, posthumously, by his longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht. Weill's stinging, brilliant work is featured in this...
thursday december 18 Baby, It's Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; ZooLights; "Wild Winter Nights": The City of Phoenix's free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix's other major display, Ahwatukee's bounteous, white-lights-only...
