The Andrews Sisters, who rose to mega-stardom during the World War II Big Band era, were the Dixie Chicks of their time. That is, if you first replace the Chicks’ antiwar sentiment with patriotism and then add an unbridled popularity no girl group since the Andrews Sisters has ever quite…

For Independence Day, you can stay home to watch the television broadcast from the Washington Mall with Barry “Veteran Actor” Bostwick introducing a Star Wars musical tribute by the National Symphony Orchestra. Yikes. Or you can go out and get messy. It’s your choice. That’s what Independence Day is all…

Culture clash always makes for great comedy. It’s fun to poke fun at ourselves through archetypes colliding on stage and screen. The resulting yin-yang battles have well-known, usually entertaining results, like neat freak Felix versus slob Oscar or straight-acting gay Will versus nelly gay Jack. In his engagingly cute Modern…

In August, comedian John Heffron won Last Comic Standing 2, for which the Detroit native received a half-hour Comedy Central special and a growing number of quizzical do I know you? looks from people on the street. Since then, Heffron’s been on a perpetual tour, with only a day or…

It takes a lot of practice to be spontaneous. That’s the first thing you learn when you’re in a good improvisational comedy show. Improv isn’t just acting. It’s a sport, with its own skill sets and formal vocabularies. It takes a lot of training to make improv look so sweetly…

In the astro-geek subculture, operating the projector of a planetarium holds the same cachet that driving the Zamboni between periods of a hockey game holds in the cult of the ice rink. At the Buehler Planetarium on Broward Community College’s main campus in Davie, that projector privilege rests upon the…

Talk trash — and pick some up too SAT 6/11 What would you do if Shamu busted into your house and dumped raw sewage in your living room? Or if SpongeBob SquarePants got drunk, scattered a case of empty beer cans in your front yard, and started doing donuts on…

How many vacation days do you get? SAT 6/4 Tourists and cameras. They go together like hairy Europeans and teeny man-bikinis. But it wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, pirates could describe the beauty of French Polynesia to their families in England only by sketching a picture. Pioneers who…

Where does inspiration for war literature come from? Well, mull over this recent comment reported by National Public Radio from a jaded U. S. Army sergeant stationed in Baghdad: “When I get off of patrol, I sit around base and smoke a lot of cigarettes. Then, I try to think…

Memorialize your weekend at the Hard Rock Hotel SAT 5/28 There’s something for everyone at the Memorial Day weekend celebration held by the Seminole Paradise, the block of shops, bars, and restaurants at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (1 Seminole Way, Hollywood). For the kids, bounce houses and…

Deerfield’s Beach Blowout, which started eight years ago to prepare folks for hurricane season (think shutter displays and storm checklists), has since morphed into a weekend-long testosterone fest of hardy coed lifeguard and firefighter competitions. No, it doesn’t pit lifeguards against firefighters. Dream on, soft-porn people. During Friday’s lifeguard competitions,…

Before AIDS was about drug therapy cocktails or the wholesale devastation of sub-Saharan Africa, it was about the mysterious absence of loved ones spirited away by a sudden plague. Adding to the anguish of those early AIDS years was the fact that our infected loved ones, more often than not,…

Some of our northern brothers consider South Florida vacations to be trips to paradise. They fill up on ice cream at Jaxson’s in Dania Beach, drive their Le Cars slowly toward the Hollywood Broadwalk, lather coconut oil onto their bodies, and then squirm into their thongs. Yum — baked Québecois…

The Gore Gore Girls know a woman’s work is never done FRI 5/6 A milling clash of attendees piled into the dark, littered space, holding cigarettes over their heads to avoid burning others. A line of fans stretched around the length of the plaza’s closed storefronts, waiting impatiently to fork…

Slightly Stoopid is da kind band, brah! TUE 5/3 California’s Slightly Stoopid pulls influences that read like most seasoned potheads’ record collections. There are hefty pinches of ska, punk, reggae, roots, acoustic rock, and hip-hop in between some of the shake and seeds — i.e., that Frampton Comes Alive album…

Wherefore art the popcorn? THU 4/21 If you thought Santa Claus was in for a serious case of writers’ cramp from responding to all his mail, you should see how many letters a day are addressed “Dear Juliet” — to the fictional heroine of Romeo & Juliet fame. A farmer…

Says, “We are the gumbo” SAT 4/16 B.B. King once sang, “The blues had a baby, and they named it rock ‘n’ roll…” He wasn’t suggesting that the blues had unprotected sex — he was just layin’ down a metaphor. So what’s the progeny of blues and a cooking show?…

The art of Timmy Tatts SAT 4/16 Even when he was 6 years old, Timmy Tatts (a.k.a. Tim Sellers) was scribbling cartoons and caricatures on notebooks and blackboards — to the dismay of many uptight teachers. Now, Timmy spends the days putting ink to skin as a tattoo artist; in…

THU 4/7 It takes balls to be a drag queen. But with a little duct tape, that’ll be the dong and short of it. Seriously, though, photographer J.W. Calcaterra (a.k.a. Pompano Bill) has amassed quite a pile of pictures of drag queens. Now 79, Calcaterra served in the Navy during…

THU 3/31 According to the website www.globalsecurity.org, the largest organized religion in Cuba is the Roman Catholic Church. “Officially,” it says, “Cuba has been an atheist state for most of the Castro era. In 1962, the government of Fidel Castro seized and shut down more than 400 Catholic schools, charging…

SAT 4/2 Attention, all crawdaddies ‘n’ mommies — here comes crawfish stew, crawfish kebabs, and crawfish étouffée. In Bubba-speak, it’s time to come out for a big taste of the Big Easy at the First Annual Palm Beach Cajun Blues Crawfish Festival from 3 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Meyer…