In Tim Burton’s recent big-screen biography of Ed Wood, actor Johnny Depp re-created key scenes from several of that Grade Z movie director’s masterworks from the 1950s: In the climactic flying-saucer attack that highlights Plan 9 From Outer Space, flaming paper plates dangling from fishing poles strafe a papier-mch model…
Basically, Debra Colbert and Joanne Lee got tired of waiting until February. February is Black Heritage Month, and that’s when most of the bookstores would bring out the stuff by current African-American authors other than Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan and Alice Walker and Bebe Moore Campbell. There’d be little…
Rudman Flees, Sparks Fly Anyone who has driven through east Phoenix in the last year has seen Roger Rudman’s handiwork. He’s the guy who posted those horrendous signs urging voters to “Recall Rebecca Macbeth.” Macbeth is a justice of the peace and Rudman’s estranged lover. Rudman put up the signs…
“Ah, Phoenix,” a New York contractor told a Valley colleague during a professional conference last year. “Nice place. But don’t drink the water.” Phoenix’s water system, it seems, is the talk of bored water and waste-water contractors everywhere. The Best Run City in the World is also the last major…
It’s Friday night at Scottsdale Stadium. Michael Jordan walks up the dugout steps at 6:41 p.m. As he reaches the top step, Jordan looks around the stands as if to count the house. When Jordan ruled the National Basketball Association and led the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive titles, he…
While Tempe attorney Barbara Ross was preparing to represent a client in a civil trial, her former husband was busy, too. He was quietly convincing a Maricopa County Superior Court judge that Ross had suffered a serious relapse of mental illness. She was, the ex-husband contended in mid-July, unfit to…
Jane White’s house is a noisy place, and not just because of the cars zipping past on the new, improved Pima Road, barely 50 feet from her front door. The phone rings constantly, and the caller is usually somebody with something to tell her about freeways, or about meetings about…
Several victims of the Valley’s fallen “King of Probate” may get some financial satisfaction in the next several weeks. Bonding companies are expected to cut checks totaling about $800,000 to the heirs of 14 estates that were plundered by Mesa attorney Wayne Elmer Legg and his sidekick, Webber Mackey. The…
Tried earlier this year for pruning her spouse’s privates with a carving knife, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. But thanks to a just-released porno docudrama inspired by the case, it’s husband John Wayne Bobbitt who’s not exactly playing with, ahem, a full dick. “Now, for…
Here are some things you ought to know about Congressman Jon Kyl, that passionless and aloof candidate of the Republican ultraright, before you vote to send him to the United States Senate. Kyl represents everything that is detestable about the current political state of affairs in Washington, D.C. Like his…
The cars seem remarkably new for a university parking lot. There are no bikes or beaters, no VW buses with bumper stickers that read “Honk if something falls off.” These are shiny Tauruses and Sentras, the sensible cars of people with jobs. The cars’ owners are middle-aged middle managers, white-collar…
Benita Venegas shuts her dark eyes and considers something for several seconds. The 16-year-old fixes her inquisitor with a mournful expression. Suddenly, she pounds her left fist into her chest and releases a haunting, high-pitched wail. She whirls to face her foster mother, Ellen White, a Paradise Valley woman in…
It’s less than a month before the election. Do you know who your school-board candidates are? While the silver-spoon governor and the chubby grocer are busy trying to be “the education candidate” and former state senators Lela Alston and Lisa Graham battle for the primarily bureaucratic position of state superintendent…
Say Cheezy! State legislator Sue Grace caught a familiar sight, glancing up from her microphone at a candidates’ forum last week. It was Becky Fenger. And her camera. A bit of history: Fenger, who unsuccessfully challeged Grace in September’s Republican primary for the House of Representatives seat in District 24,…
The chairs in the dirt yard are draped with children openly eyeing me. They are too young and innocent to bother masking their curiosity. When their mother talks, they are quiet. “I don’t raise my kids that the police are some kind of Officer Friendly. I tell these children the…
An hour before the game started, Richard Dumas was out on the court, chewing gum and blowing gingerly on his hands to warm them up. He was always one of the first players out of the dressing room. His hair was cut very short. His eyes always seemed so wide…
Fred Linch leans forward. He glances down at his favorite breakfast of bacon, eggs and a toasted bagel. He sits at an outdoor table at Scott’s Generations Delicatessen. If Linch stares straight ahead, he can see the entire shopping-center parking lot at Seventh Street and Missouri. At 6:30 in the…
Perhaps it’s only an illusion brought on by overfrequent moviegoing, but it sometimes seems as if good movies tend to arrive in swarms. One slogs through months of scrounging what merit one can find out of dull movies, and then suddenly there come, all within a few weeks’ time, Quiz…
The race to lead the nation’s eighth-largest city has been so quiet that Skip Rimsza was able to undergo and recover from triple-bypass surgery this summer without missing a beat on the campaign trail. Rimsza, who represented north-central Phoenix on the city council until March, when he resigned to run…
The steer and the guy on horseback seem to burst from the gate at exactly the same time, but if you know charreria and have trained your eye on the action, you’ve seen the anxious horse fidgeting in place at the door, the spring of the wooden gate, the charro…
“Here we go!” exclaims Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams, cutting a yellow ribbon and watching it flutter to her feet. Ribbon cuttings come with the mayoral turf, but Williams’ wielding of the ceremonial scissors last Saturday at a north Phoenix manufacturing plant was spiced with irony. For the past six months,…
These are troubled times for University of Arizona astronomers. Their 15-year effort to build a $200 million, seven-telescope observatory atop Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona is in jeopardy. Environmentalists hope to prevail soon in a long and bitter battle to keep the project out of 470 acres of old-growth spruce…
