When I was living in California, back in the early '90s, the competition for waitressing jobs was tough; the aspiring actors, singers, and dancers had more experience than I did. So when I was offered a position at Ricco's, a new Italian joint, I broke a cardinal rule by taking...
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an "elevated" realm beyond the movie pages, it's Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols' picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere...
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986's Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987's Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (1993's Naked, 1996's Secrets & Lies). The...
Leave it to a bunch of grown-up skate rats to turn a dance club into a part-time skateboard park. And leave it to club management to turn the concept into a marketing tool. "When you walk into a club, you think how cool it would be to combine that music...
Taja Sevelle Toys of Vanity (550 Music) It's been nearly a decade since The Guy They Used To Call Prince gave Taja Sevelle a record deal. Rather than attending college, the young Minneapolis native moved to Los Angeles, released a self-titled debut, and suffered the misfortune of having her single,...
For those who question whether Fort Lauderdale has the visionary leadership to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, consider the results when the city's finest minds, its boldest thinkers, gathered to discuss the future of Fort Lauderdale beach. In November the city convened a "Vision Workshop" where 130 "invited...
Throughout her 24-year tenure as a police officer with the Village of North Palm Beach, Lt. Cynthia Hawes has heard dozens of accounts and read as many reports alleging that the force's top-level officers have repeatedly committed sordid and potentially criminal acts. More recently, in sworn, tape-recorded testimony, Hawes herself...
When the phone hadn't sounded by 9 a.m., Gail Krasnow expected the worst. It was a practiced ritual, this daily phone call, born of a life-and-death struggle between mother and son that had continued for fourteen years. She could have given up on Michael years before. She could have tried...
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back -- they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio's property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-'90s, the English company Working Title Films...
To the untrained ear, it might not have been apparent that a civil-rights protest was under way last September 29 during the second-period string orchestra class at the School for the Performing Arts at Dillard High. As usual the students unpacked and tuned their instruments, locked eyes upon the conductor's...
White tigers, blinking neon lights, dancing showgirls, Siegfried & Roy, a tower or two emblazoned with the name "Trump" -- you're not going to find them in Riviera Beach. While it's true that the SunCruz V is, in essence, a floating casino, the boat's home base is no Las Vegas...
Any other time of the year, finding Fort Lauderdale Stadium is tricky. Crouched in the southeast corner of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, it's obscured from the view of those driving down Commercial Boulevard by Lockhart Stadium, where the Fort Lauderdale Strikers used to play professional soccer. But during spring training,...
If you're wearing condoms for protection from AIDS -- or insisting your partner wear one -- there's something Peter Duesberg wants you to know: You're wasting your time. Sure, prophylactics protect you from sexually transmitted diseases; it's just that AIDS isn't one of them, according to the molecular and cell...
People say Crease sound like Offspring. Others claim they mimic Bad Religion. A few listeners hear Foo Fighters-esque tones. Hell, even drummer Eric Dorigo has a hard time labeling the sound. "I would call our sound.... Well, its not really punk or metal," he says. "It's kind of a mixture."...
Last month, Broward County commissioners reluctantly gave the Unisys Corporation $21 million to manage a computer project so risky one commissioner described it as going "into the abyss." State Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell could certainly understand their fear. At the time, he was poring over stacks of documents in Tallahassee,...
Linda Smith Preference: Selected Songs, 19871991 (Harriet) Spare, honest, perceptive, and passionate in a peculiarly subdued way, singer-songwriter Linda Smith's deceptively simple songs seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe. No fake earnestness. No calculatedly naive idealism. No artifice whatsoever. These nineteen tracks, recorded at Smith's Baltimore...
The problem with "Sandro Chia: New Work" is not the art itself, some of which is quite impressive, but its presentation. The show, which runs through March 15 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, feels haphazard, thrown together, as if someone had hastily put up some pictures in the...
By the light of a full moon, Big Cypress Swamp seems far closer to the world of dreams than to that of everyday experience. The trees -- thin-trunked, ruler-straight slash pines and skeletal, twisted pond cypress -- stand above moon-silvered palmettos like eerie, silent sentinels. The ground is uncertain, a...
Having to wait for one month out of the year to buy candy hearts with cute sayings imprinted on them is no big deal. After all, those hard little wafers have lost much of their appeal now that they're more likely to break my aging molars than attract a valentine...
Sax player Eric Allison, looking casual yet distinguished in a black jacket, a light-gray collarless shirt with the top button opened, and dark gray slacks, is in a good mood. Heading toward an outdoor table for a pre-gig meal at Sterling Worth Cafe in Plantation, where he is scheduled to...
Roni Size and Reprazent Newforms (Mercury) Mainstream America got its first real taste of electronica from Prodigy, the British group that took a rather obscure form of electronic dance music and made it accessible by adding familiar rap/punk vocals (and a familiar rap/punk image). The result was this past summer's...
I just read your column about Circus Peanuts (January 1). In all seriousness, I happen to like Circus Peanuts. I really do. I'm not kidding. Just thought you should know that there is someone in the world who actually likes the things. -- Brian, via the Internet I wholeheartedly (and...
