Zane Johnston gestures toward the .38-caliber pistol he carries in a worn leather holster on his hip and says, “The Bureau of Rec thinks I carry this for them. But I don’t. I carry it for varmints.” In Johnston’s book, a varmint is only a small notch above the U.S…
On first hearing, the tale sounds like a standard-issue urban legend. Guy goes to Vegas. Guy meets hooker. Guy gets fleeced. But there are elements to this particular version of the old story that saved it from Jan Brunvand’s heap of mythological scraps. (Brunvand, a professor at the University of…
If a part-time Maricopa County judge has his way, chronic shoplifter Rhonda Mecham will have a much harder time satisfying her confessed “habit” in the future. That’s because of an unusual sentencing provision that pro tem Superior Court Judge Joel Thompson says he designed to notify area retailers about Mecham’s…
“It looks like no man’s land here,” says Alisa Gray as she peers through the razor-wire fence at 21st Avenue south of McDowell Road. On one side of the street, storage tanks for an asphalt plant drip and percolate; I-10 whizzes overhead, held up by giant pillars. Beneath the expressway:…
The man in the Mazda RX-7 pulled over to the side of the road and waited. For almost 14 years, John Carpenter had prayed this day wouldn’t come. It was about 6 a.m. on June 1, 1992, in the south Los Angeles suburb of Carson. Carpenter, then 63, had been…
Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do. Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization–often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave–to come up with what we like…
Bob Emerick sat down recently for a heart-to-heart with his 11-year-old daughter, Leslie. “She really wanted to know why I am leaving Arizona,” says Emerick, former director of the now-defunct sex-offender treatment and assessment program at Phoenix Memorial Hospital. “I told her, ‘You know what I do. Part of my…
On January 14, 1990, at about 12:50 a.m., someone bombed Carl Ritter’s car in the driveway of his Tempe home. “It sounded like someone had fired a double-barrel shotgun,” Ritter says. “It woke up the entire neighborhood; people were starting to come out of their houses.” The rear wheels of…
Richard Lessner, the Arizona Republic editorial writer who inflamed Hurricane Andrew survivors in Florida when his victim-bashing column was reprinted there, has resigned under fire. Lessner walked out on Tuesday rather than accept a demotion to religion writer, a position he held when he joined the Republic in 1981, Lessner…
Everything that could have gone wrong did. The puppeteer hadn’t shown up. Instead of the five or six friends Lee Breuer was expecting, an audience of 35 adults and children had materialized. He wanted to cancel the performance but was told he couldn’t. So he addressed the audience, warning parents…
When writers write books, they’re published as they’ve written them. Photographers’ photographs are displayed as they’ve printed them. But playwrights and their plays, which require middlemen, are at the mercy of the actors and directors who produce them. The Terry Earp Festival at the 7th Street Theatre complex features five…
Anne Coe is a captivating conversationalist. Her passion for environmental issues is evident in her dialogue and in her artwork, and she can hold forth for hours on aspects of life in the desert you’ve never considered before. Too bad her paintings are so lousy. Coe’s current exhibition, on display…
Artist Linda Mundwiler used to collect pieces of dead birds. Today she gathers lists of stupid questions about her art instead. Among her favorites are: Do you ever paint the tender moments?” Do you do a lot of drugs before you paint?” Don’t you ever paint in earth tones?” (Her…
It’s just before midnight on a Saturday evening, and Rose Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a 25-foot mural outside her downtown Phoenix art studio. Inside, Johnson’s studio-mate, Anne Thompson, is displaying glass etchings and mixed-media paintings. Around the corner, at arty hangout Metropophobobia, a group of volunteers is…
Canadian artist ManWoman is accustomed to giddy questions about his peculiar name. He responds politely when asked how he’s listed in the telephone book (“ManWoman”); whether his friends call him Man (“No, because then strangers would have to call me Mr. Woman”); and what his mother calls him (Nothing: “She…
In the world of academia, where many things are taken quite seriously, Gus Edwards is like a breath of fresh air. He talks about how as a kid in the Caribbean he was inspired to acting by Sidney Poitier. Was it the chance to… prove that blacks were as capable…
Just when we thought the people at Actors Lab Arizona were going to change their name to the Six Women With Brain Death–or Expiring Minds Want to Know Theatre Company, they closed their long-running revival of their biggest hit ever. But they announced–you guessed it–another revival. This time it’s a…
Lee Breuer is pretty sure that if he gathered together 1,700 press agents, gave them each a copy of his bio and asked them to write an ending to his story, not one of them would place him in a Phoenix suburb, teaching interdisciplinary theatre art on a university campus…
Jaime Ituarte visited New York City for the first time last year. Before he went, his friends gave him the standard tourist warnings about crime. In Ituarte’s case, such advice was even more important because he is legally blind. Still, he says, he could recognize dangerous neighborhoods. “They smelled like…
In her 1944 oil painting “Arizona,” Dorothea Tanning stands at the edge of a cliff. She’s surrounded by the spires, buttes and mesas of the red rock country around Sedona. Only here, the rocks are blue and green in the eerie, ambiguous light of early dawn. You can’t see the…
Phoenix gave performance artist Frank Moore and his Chero Company a pleasant surprise on October 5 by showing up in record numbers for his controversial “Passions Play” at Gallery X. Eighty people doesn’t sound like a lot, but Moore is a self-described “spastic,” palsied from the neck down and unable…
Marilyn Butler remembers reading the handwriting on the wall. It was early 1989, and she was putting together an invitational show of landscape paintings at the gallery she owned in Santa Monica. She called a neighboring gallery to borrow one of its pieces. Such intergallery borrowings are common in the…
