The clink of glasses. The murmur of the crowd. The smell of newsprint and cigarettes. The pregnant pauses. The flecks of spittle arcing through the smoky air toward a waiting microphone. The creak of stretching similes. The rumble of mixed metaphors. The thud of thematic anvils. The screams of tortured...
"Ladies, we've got a special treat for you tonight," the DJ's voice bounds over the crowd. "He's won our Sunday-night amateur strip contest more times than any other contestant. Please welcome... Bernie!" As the first bars of Jerry Lee Lewis's "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" trumpet through LaBare's sound system,...
Congratulations are in order for Pompano Beach Mayor Bill Griffin, who recently landed a new job at a huge, Dallas-based firm called Turner Construction. You may not have heard about the new gig, since Griffin hasn't talked about it publicly, but it's a very big deal. Turner has offices in...
The dozen shoes that protrude from beneath Clarence Kelley's bed are neatly lined up, like cars at a dealership. First there are the patent-leather ones that cover his ankles, then the gray, plastic loafers with chrome buckles, then the aging blue sneakers with yellow stripes, and so on. Across the...
If Sax on the Beach fails, the newly opened music bar will be just another Miami jazz dream deferred, like Arthur's (which featured big names in the 1980s) and the cozy, if empty, Champagnes on 79th Street that closed months ago. This gin joint in the lobby of Bay Parc...
On an overcast, oppressively muggy mid-August afternoon at John Prince Park in Lake Worth, the "Racial Holy War" seems far away indeed. As I sit at a picnic table under a pavilion by the bank of a stagnant creek that meanders through the park and empties into Lake Osborne, six...
By the 1970 release of Vintage Violence, John Cale had been deeply involved in the creation of albums that shook the world to its very core (as a performer on the first two Velvet Underground albums, as producer/multi-instrumentalist on Nico's Marble Index, and as producer of the Stooges' first album)...
The first time I meet Stephanie, the only part of her I see is her hand. Its knobby digits poke through the slats of the cheap blinds that cover the window of her room at the Travel Budget Inn Motel on Federal Highway in Hollywood. The hand appears for a...
Meet Skot Foreman, a 36-year-old Boca Raton native who once was a successful corporate banker with a stable (and sizable) income but gave it all up. These days he can make $100,000 in a single day. Or he can earn nothing in weeks. He owns an art gallery and deals...
People make much of first impressions. You either believe in them or don't, trust them or not. They're always wrong, or they're always right. You should base your judgments on them, or you shouldn't. Why doesn't anyone debate the merits of last impressions? When it comes to restaurants, these are...
A recent article in The New York Times' dining section, entitled "Navigating the Bar When It's Three Drinkers Deep," offers the following advice on how to get a drink: "Seek out the shortest people and get behind them -- same strategy as at a rock concert. Wave a large wad...
Arthur Keys, two friends, and half a dozen children stand under a melting afternoon sun beside a canal in the western reaches of Broward County, watching the water. Tea-color but transparent, the water's surface is unruffled by wind. Fish appear in small schools close to the bank -- tiny, almost...
I cannot for the life of me remember the first time I watched Jeopardy! I do remember a few games of Trivial Pursuit in which I mopped the floor with my family, my friends, and my family's neighbors, who used to be their friends until one night I whooped a...
Who's the Broward teacher who works only about 18 weeks a year and doesn't teach but gets a $48,266 annual salary? Hint: He gets lots of paid time off because he has other employment at the state capitol doing another job -- which pays him an additional salary, this one...
There's a pile of 34 shoes just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell's comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the 17 people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell's living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall...
I've heard of people under general anesthetic who become physically paralyzed but remain mentally alert. They feel the surgeon's scalpel but are helpless and unable even to blink an eye or make a sound. Could you give me the straight dope on this phenomenon? -- Pandora, via the Internet It...
Tat-a-tat-tat. Herman Klurfeld taps his coffee table with the tips of his shoes, an audible punctuation that mimics the famous ellipses he and Walter Winchell used to separate items in nationally syndicated newspaper columns more than 30 years ago. Winchell -- arguably the most popular and influential journalist from the...
Did the Celts really celebrate a holiday by building a huge, hollow man out of wicker, filling the man with prisoners, then lighting the thing on fire? Or instead are they the victims of really bad Roman press? If true, this really sets a high bar for judging a tough...
A few slivers of sunlight slice the cloud of dust that hangs above his bed. Joseph stirs beneath the sheets, heaves himself out of bed, and stumbles into the living room, where his mother is waiting for him to drive her to work. For the last four and a half...
A sign of one community's growing power arrived last week with gold-embossed dignity, a formal announcement on the formation of "STEINSMITH, HIRSCHY & CO., GAY CONSULTANTS." The firm, specializing in helping political candidates reach gay voters, is headed by long-time activist Gary Steinsmith, past president of the Dolphin Democratic Club,...
Michael Brasfield became Fort Lauderdale's police chief in the summer of 1995 after a 30-year law-enforcement career in Seattle. In a deposition last December, he answered a seemingly bizarre question about his first days on the job in Broward County. The question was whether he had ever been accused of...
