Bread & Puppet Theater was unlike any other puppet show in the world. The puppets were massive affairs, used originally in the 1960s in New York City to celebrate events like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving with a puppetry display to rival all others. By 1970 the theater moved to Vermont,…
Most charity events raise money to help alleviate some form of suffering. This Saturday’s Black Heart Ball is no different, except that it also is a celebration of suffering — the fun kind, that is. Sponsored by LeatherWerks, the ball is the annual gala for the National Leather Association’s Florida…
Despite a novel-length list of writing credits and a 30-year career in the music business, perennial singer-songwriter John Hiatt has spent most of his career below the pop-culture radar. Though he continues to perform and record his own songs, those tunes are far more likely to become hits when reinterpreted…
The director of TV’s Boy Meets World and Pacific Blue is excited about his new film. He’s just finished Contempt starring Stephanie Zimbalist of Remington Steele and Gabrielle Carteris of Beverly Hills 90210. Another movie is already in the works, but the 30-year directing career has been put on hold…
Little more than a decade ago, Bob Ritchie was a Vanilla Ice clone who stole away from his whitewashed suburb to break-dance with the black kids in Mount Clemens, Michigan. He had a hairsbreadth more street cred than the high-school chess club before he started spinning at parties. And then…
The City of Hollywood does its best every year to accommodate those poor souls who can’t make it to the Big Easy for Fat Tuesday. So if you hunger for jambalaya, zydeco, or shouldering your way through a crowd to grab some flying beads, Mardi Gras Fiesta Tropicale is your…
Perhaps such perfectly swell holy days like Polish patron Saint Stanislaus’ day (April 11) or Lithuanian patroness Saint Cunegundes’ day (March 3) would have crossed into mainstream American culture if only those folks could have figured out what color to dye the beer. The backers of Saint Patrick’s Day had…
In the popular imagination, the year 1969 conjures up images of anti-Vietnam War protests, Woodstock, and other countercultural happenings. For Mark Silber, the seminal event of that year was the Stonewall Riots in New York City, which marked the birth of the modern gay-rights movement. Four years later Silber, an…
February is Black History Month, a time to celebrate and reflect on the contributions African-Americans have made to American culture. But instead of merely focusing on George Washington Carver’s peanut research or Philip Emeagwali’s invention of the Internet (that’s enough out of you, Al), the Broward County Library is taking…
Question: What do Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, George Wendt, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, John Candy, and Mike Myers have in common? Answer: All of them got their start with the Second City comedy troupe. Taking its name from the title of a New Yorker article by…
Ah, the dead of winter in South Florida, when temperatures plummet to the depths of briskness, and armored knights joust to the death in Quiet Waters Park. Well, OK, maybe not to the death. But joust they will at the ninth annual Florida Renaissance Festival, which begins Saturday. This year’s…
A jet-set philanthropic tradition makes its inaugural appearance in Broward County Friday night. The Cattle Barons’ Ball, one of several taking place across the United States, is one of the largest fundraisers for the American Cancer Society. Tickets range in price from $150 to $1000, but because the hard-core gala…
After a year of construction and a fundraising campaign that brought in $13 million, the Boca Raton Museum of Art reopens Wednesday, January 24, at its new location in the world’s pinkest upscale mall, Mizner Park. For the grand opening, organizers will kick things off with plenty of pomp and…
John Jackson, proprietor of the new The Around the World Art Village & Café in West Palm Beach, has always been a man with a vision. Back in 1989, that vision involved a series of small plastic tubes he called the Insider, which would be his contribution to the war…
Cirque du Soleil has become an international brand name by bringing theatricality to circus performance. Though it doesn’t yet have a standing engagement at Disney World or an IMAX movie, the DynamO Théâtre Company has built its own worldwide rep by doing the opposite: bringing such circus staples as gymnastics,…
Back in the 16th Century, when the Hapsburgs ruled most of Europe and got pretty much whatever they wanted, Archduke Maximilian, brother to Holy Roman Emperor Charles II, decided to breed Spanish horses in Austria. Critics said he didn’t know what he was talking about. The Arabian and Andalusian horses…
A comedian often has a tragic tale or two in his past. When life piles on the pathos, you either have to laugh or go mad. Some would say George Carlin has done both. If tragedy really does beget comedy, then Carlin is a natural. Born in 1937 to a…
If you managed to forget your New Year’s resolutions in that beery haze between the ball dropping in Times Square and that last, slurred chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” in the wee hours of the morning, allow us to suggest at least one new one: This year, I will stop…
