Look it up in the dictionary," sighed the anonymous woman in the back row, her voice flavored with a trace of contempt. Her timing was perfect. For two tedious, temper-fraying hours last week, the nine-member multicultural committee of the Broward County HIV Health Services Planning Council had been arguing, of...
With a mentholated cough drop in his mouth, Frank Veltri sits at his old kitchen table in his old house in old Plantation. Beside him, on a table full of files and city papers, are five or six tightly twisted wrappers, the vestiges of the lozenges he's already consumed. Veltri's...
The cuffs of Thomas Baron's green shirt are buttoned, but he seems to be mentally rolling up his sleeves. His eyes flash indignation, his speech quickens, he leans forward. Baron is ready to do legal battle with Big Brother. Actually, the defendant named in the lawsuit Baron is expected to...
For film buffs, these are almost two weeks of sheer pleasure: the 16th annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from 15 countries. Naturally, Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks...
Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find...
In the courtroom of Judge Robert W. Lee sit the past six presidents of the International Village Association. They are all gray-haired and a bit stoop-shouldered. They are mostly transplanted Jewish northerners. They all talk a tad too loud. They have a combined age of close to 450. Yet all...
So when did a holiday celebration like the boat parade turn into a commercial venture equal to the Super Bowl? We now count 62 sponsors of this mega-extravaganza. There are so many benefactors lined up hoping to get their names before the half-million attendees that the event organizers had to...
Lyle Lovett Step Inside This House (MCA/Curb) Lyle Lovett, the wry Texas songwriter whose deadpan wit and unmistakable hairdo have brought him attention from beyond the prairie, plays songs written by musicians from his home state on his new double CD, Step Inside This House. With an all-star backup band...
"When the doctor said I couldn't play volleyball anymore, I had to decide what I was going to do with my life," explains Tiziana Zanelli of Fort Lauderdale. The Italian native played professional volleyball for three years before bad knees forced her to quit. So, at age 21, she turned...
The Neville Brothers Live at Tipitina's (1982) (Rhino) Before they became the mere soundtrack for the increasingly treacly solo career of vocalist and Linda Ronstadt collaborator Aaron Neville, the Neville Brothers were the embodiment of New Orleans' vast music history -- from the second-line shimmy of Professor Longhair and the...
When damsels with golden ring curls find themselves tied to railroad trestles by mustachioed villains -- or, in the case of Little Mary Sunshine, strapped to a tree by a vicious Indian -- most audience members know that the lady in peril will be rescued momentarily, either by the entire...
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug's Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the secret...
Lhasa La Llorona (Atlantic) Like seasoned songsters more than twice her age, Lhasa evokes an idyllic past that's tucked away in the folds of our collective musical consciousness. Borrowing from the vocal styles of jazz singers, cabaret divas, and traditional balladeers, the 25-year-old, Mexican-American singer brings to mind the likes...
The difference between being a drug addict and a Straight Dope addict is that I can only get an occasional fix of the Straight Dope. You make me laugh hard enough to put the pain out of my head that the ruptured disks in my back are causing me. Monday...
Looking west from this tiny airstrip tucked into the northwest corner of Palm Beach County, the horizon appears as a long, flat-topped ridge stretching north and south as far as the eye can see. At its closest, it approaches to within three-quarters of a mile of the airstrip's lone runway;...
When a play's title is The Adjustment, chances are the playwright will be suggesting a monumental shift in attitude or perspective on the part of one or more characters. In Michael T. Folie's new work, recently opened at the Florida Stage, tiny adjustments also occur. The play is set in...
A faint but unmistakable electrical hum was in the air when I stepped into the Boca Raton Museum of Art to see "Richard Anuszkiewicz: Retrospective." The buzz no doubt came from the air conditioning or lighting system, but it could just as easily have been generated by Anuszkiewicz's work, which...
The past year has been filled with good films... interesting films... worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term "great" might be applied. Most years have at least...
Michal Rovner couldn't control the chaos and strife she grew up with in Israel: terrorist attacks, Arab-Israeli warfare, the detachment of a people living among enemies. Born in Tel Aviv in 1957, the 41-year-old artist eventually turned that sense of powerlessness and displacement into the driving force of her career...
Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon Over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He's playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he's playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig's 1995 Broadway hit Moon Over Buffalo, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in...
DreamWorks' grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses -- a Sunday-school filmstrip written ultralarge and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti's...
The centerpiece of "Red Grooms: Moby Dick Meets the New York Public Library," now on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, is so dauntingly enormous that I couldn't help thinking of the line used to promote this past summer's flop Godzilla: "Size matters." Just how...
