"Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! No-oh-oh-oh!" Standing alone in a soundproof room, a grown man is imitating a sick car. Other adults watch through a small window, listening, coaching, judging. The five people assembled in the small recording studio and control room are making a sixty-second radio commercial for...
Roaming tourists with minicams. Well-preserved older women resembling TV psychiatrists. Tables of young, upwardly mobile people dressed in suits and ties, cocktail sheaths, gold jewelry and French braids. Out-of-town businessmen relaxing in plaid shirts and Levi's Dockers after a hard day of conferencing in Phoenix. As evening falls, these are...
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...
In late May, only weeks after announcing record losses for a second straight quarter, America West Airlines chairman Ed Beauvais boasted to nationwide airport executives meeting at the Phoenician resort that the airline would soon expand service into Mexico. As one onlooker put it, "The most disturbing thing about Beauvais'...
I'll be honest with you. Normally, I don't eat breakfast. I get up, drink something hot, and when my stomach starts interfering with my work or fun, I give it something just large enough to keep it quiet until its next meal. Sometimes that's lunch. Sometimes that's dinner. This is...
When cowboy-movie star Tom Mix "bought the farm" in a fatal 1940 car accident, he also left a farm behind--thousands of acres of grazing land south of Phoenix and a white adobe house. A half-century later, the "old Tom Mix house," as it is still called, is the newest branch...
In one verse of his tune "Wild Rain," Tempe solo musician Joe Myers sings the line, "Tripped and fell, I do that well." Myers thinks that one small lyric sums up his whole life, or at least the part of it he calls "doing the art thing." On a smaller...
PLUNGING SOUTH down Dysart Road from Glendale Avenue, into the great wide nothingness of the West Valley, everything is rubble and scorn. It is about five miles from the Circle K on Glendale Avenue to the Whataburger on Van Buren, past the faux oasis of Litchfield Park, with its palm...
It's an autumn afternoon in downtown Tempe. The sun is clear and strong and there's a breeze kicking around the aromatic remnants of the previous night's rain. Business is brisk at the Coffee Plantation. The Tempe hot spot is cluttered with the usual crowd--students, artists, the fashionably underemployed and the...
I first came to Phoenix in late September, and I had three days to find a place to live before returning back East to get my stuff and move out here permanently. I stayed with my friend, Wes, the only person in town I knew, in his apartment on University...
Original Pancake House, 6840 East Camelback, Scottsdale, 946-4902. Breakfast hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. All my holiday eating is behind me. Literally. You can't miss it. Noshing on Chex party mix, gorging on turkey dressing and washing it all down with eggnog is not the way...
Bssghetti, 1656 South Alma School, Mesa, 820-8080. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Saturday, 4:30 to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m. Uh-oh. It's Christmas-vacation time. Time for lots of family togetherness. Lots and lots of...
Beef Eaters Restaurant, 300 West Camelback, Phoenix, 264-3838. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday brunch, 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Sunday dinner, noon to 8 p.m. America has seen quite a few changes since John F. Kennedy occupied the White House. Back then,...
House of Tricks, 114 East Seventh Street, Tempe, 968-1114. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Dinner, Tuesday through Saturday, 4 to 9 p.m. It's amazing what insights you can get when you're strapped into a dentist's chair. For the past few weeks, I've been undergoing treatment...
Consider it a dress rehearsal. On the night a dining accomplice and I check out the Theater Terrace Cafe in the Hyatt Regency Hotel Phoenix, we are neither going to nor coming from a play at the Herberger Theater. No, it is early evening and we are cultural lowbrows. All...
Saigon Healthy Cuisine, 820 South Mill, Tempe, 967-4199. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Everyone except Middle Eastern potentates sitting on large oil reserves gets strapped for cash once in a while. Recently, not through choice, I was forced to ponder the problem of...
John Mitchell's clothing store in downtown Superior is suspended in time. Three-piece suits hang in neat rows. Stacks of shirts rest on a display table. The cash register sits on a counter near the front door. The store looks open for business, but it's not. Mitchell's was an anchor on...
