“Quadriplegics envy paraplegics. You think, ‘Man, they’ve got it made,'” painter Chuck Close once said about his paralyzed life. Close’s comment was his weigh-in about living a relative existence when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It’s also a reflection that would have been lost on the paralyzed artist portrayed in…

Regardless of the damage done by David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries and Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa, the wide-eyed hope inspired by Santa lives on. Tots dressed in their holiday best still ritually queue up with their haggard parents to create the kind of endearing memories that will later fuel pre-rehab…

When Athol Fugard is in town, he has the well-earned ability to suck the air out of any other plays competing with him on any given night. In his Exits and Entrances, which opened last week at Florida Stage, although the septuagenarian South African playwright/icon isn’t here in body, he’s…

Eccentric Julliard dance instructor Tobi keeps his toenail clippings in a jar on a shelf in his living room, along with his books and board games. His cheaply furnished, lonely apartment filled with bric-a-brac lies at a remote northern edge of Manhattan, where he laments he doesn’t even have control…

The Council Oak weathered Hurricane Wilma just fine. This tree, a historic meeting place for Seminole Indians dispersed after 19th-century Indian wars, is still standing broad at the southeast corner of Stirling Road and State Road 7, flanked by a bingo parlor and a discount cigarette shop and just south…

You´d think the narrow genre of sports-on-stage would include loads of basketball entries, especially since b-ball squads consist of playwright-friendly five-player rosters. It seems, though, that Jason Miller´s creepy 1972 That Championship Season is about all you get. On the surface, That Championship Season promises the sweet unspooling of youthful…

In the small New England college town of David Wiltse’s A Marriage Minuet, which opened at Florida Stage last week, egocentric male novelists suffer from a limited number of venues to rant about Hemingway or flirt with woman fans. Yes, college lecture halls are good for expounding on art, and…

Saint Therese of Lisieux, whose Catholic feast day was celebrated October 1, is the patron saint of missionaries, aviators, orphans, tuberculosis patients, and, most recently, of AIDS sufferers, which is fine coincidence for the Public Theatre’s production of Larry Kramer’s 1985 autobiographical play, The Normal Heart. The Normal Heart, like…

So when does charisma and charm switch to malevolence and menace? That’s the turning point you’re waiting for when you sit down to Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. It doesn’t take long to get there. But once you do, the wave-like motion between these opposing alliterations will continue cycling throughout…

Phillies and Fish meet for three FRI 9/16 With just over two weeks left in the regular season, the National League Wild Card race has turned into a five-team game of musical chairs. The standings shuffle more than Jack McKeon, and there’s no telling which team will end up with…

Even though South Beach is well-known for its annual Thanksgiving White Party, it doesn’t actually own the color white. Wait, is white a color? Regardless, nobody owns it. As such, party-promoting guru Gary Santis, known for running clubs Warsaw, Coliseum, and the Saint, has organized the first White Fort Lauderdale,…

A play called If We Are Women in a place called the Women’s Theatre Project? Shocking but true. What sounds like scary Lifetime television, though, is actually entirely satisfying, even if you happen to sport one of those crazy penis things. It’s so satisfying that you should be prepared to…

Talley’s Folly, now at Stage Door Theatre in Coral Springs, might just qualify as audience abuse. OK, so it’s not like they took your money, sat you down, whacked you upside the head with a blunt instrument, and then sent you whimpering back to your car. But, all things considered,…

Bruce Bruce is a funny man, so big that one “Bruce” just isn’t enough. If you don’t believe this, check him out in his role as the Popeye’s chicken spokesman via Internet (or “the Internets,” if you’re Dubya) at www.popeyes.com. Wearing a purple suit, the man resembles Violet Beauregard in…

And have some java too THU 7/28 Getting your drink on around Fort Lauderdale’s Himmarshee Village doesn’t necessarily mean downing Jack and Cokes all night and dancing to booty music (though that is loads of fun). Sometimes that drink is nothing more than a latte at Brew Urban Café (209…

Once upon a time, in a Big Apple on the verge of Disney-fication by Rudy Giuliani, Times Square was a sometimes seedy neighborhood where pre-Internet gay hustlers earned their rent the old-fashioned way, by selling sex in sleazy peep-show booths. In the early 1990s, when he wrote Trafficking in Broken…

The annual Perrier French Film Festival is the antithesis of the blockbuster American summer movie season. Its nose-thumbing, post-Bastille Day assertion goes something like this: “Take this, you silly, special-effects Fantastic Four-loving, Bewitched-retreading, Herbie the Love Bug-revving American Tom Cruise-worshipers, because we’re going to open a can of Truffaut on…

Like all establishments on Dixie Highway in Boca Raton, the Hideout Bar & Grill faces the railroad tracks. The Hideout is the only establishment, however, whose sign promises, “You were never here.” Inside, every night, Pabst Blue Ribbon is on tap, as is Guinness ($4 a pint), and the air…

Word to your bank account FRI 7/15 As Flavor Flav and Vanilla Ice can tell you, it’s a shame to sell millions of records, then squander your fortune and end up on The Surreal Life. Better to play your cards like Russell Simmons, who made his money in hip-hop and…

With a lover’s wish THU 7/7 Those paper-crazy folks at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens (4000 Morikami Park Rd., Delray Beach) must have stock in Georgia-Pacific. If they’re not creating giant origami animals to raise awareness about Florida’s endangered species, then they’re hanging paper cranes from Christmas trees in…