The last time Karen Finley performed in the Valley, she used a teddy bear to sponge her torso with raw eggs before sprinkling herself with multicolored glitter. The time before that, she slathered canned yams onto her bare butt and used shredded beets as a gruesome metaphor for menstrual discharge…
December 3, 1989, began as Armando Saldate’s day off, but proved to be one of the most momentous of his twenty-year career. “It was a very long Sunday,” the former Phoenix homicide detective says. “Two murder confessions and a poor little guy’s body out in the desert.” Saldate’s seven-page account…
Turn on your TV at 9 o’clock next Tuesday morning. You’ve got your Sally Jessy Raphael. You’ve got your Regis and Kathie Lee. And over on Channel 45, you’ve got your Tom Tabback. Who? Actually, the big question may be: What? You see, The Tom Tabback Show is a talk…
The prisoner’s dream starts with such promise. “They’re letting me out and I’m going to meet Christopher,” Debbie Milke says. “He’s alive! I’m free!” Suddenly, the dream becomes a nightmare. “The only way we’ll be together is if we get attached by handcuff. Forever. That’s the only way he’ll stay…
In an era when sub-.500 baseball pitchers get million-dollar contracts, it makes sense that a peanut vendor has a publicist. In his own field, Rick “The Peanut Man” Kaminski–ace bag-tosser for the Seattle Mariners, Seahawks, and SuperSonics–is no borderline player. He’s the franchise, a superstar. An MVP. Last month, Full…
Grassy knoll. Warren Commission. Zapruder footage. Hard to believe, but my generation’s buzz words are now another generation’s U.S. History assignment. And some people evidently haven’t been paying as much attention to their homework as they should have. Or so I discovered after I recently agreed to play the chauffeur…
Hugh Ennis likes a good joke. Especially when it has a cop theme. Take the toy police car resting near his window at the Liquor Department, for instance. Like the slapstick autos that zoom around a circus ring, this one looks as though a squad of battery-powered minicop-clowns will tumble…
Ernie Holden remembers the time he drove his hot rod into a gas station to fill it up. The car was a 1964 El Camino, a beast dating from the days when gas was cheap and engines were big, and its 350 cubic inches put out more than 300 horsepower…
Only 3 percent of Valley residents place “a great deal” of trust in the Arizona State Legislature. Just 16 percent of new governor J. Fife Symington’s constituents trust him the same way. Also down at 16 percent on the trust meter is the Arizona Republic, a daily newspaper. Slightly more…
If three strikes are out, Arizona has finally touched the bottom of the barrel. First, there was Evan Mecham, whose eccentricities became such a cause celebre that the Arizona State Legislature voted him out of the governor’s office after a lengthy impeachment trial that enthralled the entire nation. Mecham was…
For months we’ve been bombarded by puff pieces about General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf, the general with the 170 IQ, has been certified by the Newspaper Publishers of America as the hero of The War That Saved the Emir of Kuwait and his 350 Wives. After President Bush telephoned Schwarzkopf…
They haven’t got much in common on the surface. Candice Nagel, a second-term legislator before she resigned last month, drives home along the Dreamy Draw in a white Mazda convertible and parks in the driveway of a Paradise Valley house that is massive, uninteresting and crammed onto a lot so…
Bodacious mail-order products for teens with money to burn, lagging popularity, weasels for parents and a loose grasp of reality. HOOVER HICKEY-QUICK. Face it, dudes and dudettes. Nothing says “sex appeal” quite like a neck covered with bright purple “love bites.” But how do you get them if you’re an…
Editor’s note: On February 23, New Times sent staff writer Darrin Hostetler to Saudi Arabia to cover the Gulf War. Shortly after his arrival, Hostetler gained access to Kuwait City and witnessed the final days of Operation Desert Storm. Hostetler is the only Arizona reporter covering the liberation of Kuwait…
As a Republican candidate for governor, Fife Symington often pledged to voters that he would trim state government if elected governor. Describing his plans in the jargon of Formula One racing, he talked of making a downsized, streamlined, fast-paced government “perform.” After less than a month as governor, however, Symington…
The owners of a burning backyard in the White Mountains finally have moved out of the danger zone, after two years of battling one of Arizona’s most expensive and least-publicized toxic disasters. Art and Lynn Shupe and two of their neighbors recently reached an out- of-court settlement with paper giant…
The local chapter of Little Criminals Who Luck Out was inadvertently started about four years ago. It works like this: You’re a fourteen- year-old kid who burglarizes a house and gets locked up in Adobe Mountain, a state prison for juveniles. After promising to be a good kid, you’re paroled…
During one of those postcollege years when young men flounder around not knowing what to do next, Allen had a job in a laundry. This was in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, Allen would add up long columns of figures–shirts and trousers, cleaned and pressed–and put a…
Did Jim Morrison meet his maker in a Paris bathtub in 1971? Or did the rock star really learn of a top-secret plan to kill him, causing him to fake his own death and forcing him to hide out in a Spanish monastery, where he actually died of natural causes…
My five-year-old son calls it “chicken pops,” as if it were a new poultry-flavored brand of breakfast cereal. But the truth is, chicken pox is worse than that. If you can imagine such horror. The nastiest aspect of this contagious kiddie disease is not that it makes your children look…
In 1989 Garth Brooks had a song called “Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old.” It was about a rodeo cowboy, and one of the lines went, “a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze/Seem to be the only friends I’ve left at all.” Bill Taylor…
Where else would Hollywood go to shoot a movie titled The Vagrant? Phoenix, the setting for enough downbeat titles to program an all-existential film festival, is again playing host to makers of movieland magic and/or muck. The Vagrant came to town last week. Production trucks, lights, cameras, actors–even a few…
