If the widow of cartoonist Al Capp married actor Al Pacino, she’d be Mrs. Al Capp Pacino. Yes, everyone, it’s an Italian coffee joke. I know you people just love ’em. Speaking of coffee, it just so happens I’m not drinking any. I’m nervous enough already, thanks. I’m nervous because…
Rebuffed in previous attempts at closing down adult bookstores and movie theatres, Representative Leslie Whiting Johnson has reversed field and now says she wants to protect their customers. So the Mesa Republican is sponsoring legislation that would require testing of the machinery that shows dirty movies. Specifically, she wants the…
Two long-time friends recently decided to get married after seventeen years of dating. How this could happen in 1989 America is beyond me. But it did. The wedding was to be a major northern California to-do, attended by some two hundred of the bride and groom’s most intimate intimates, many…
An interviewer once asked Vladimir Nabokov: “What are the literary sins for which you could be answerable someday?” And Nabokov replied: “Of having spared in my books too many political fools and intellectual frauds.” I am, each morning, astonished by the Salman Rushdie story. Rushdie has written a virtually unreadable…
Richard Mallery is so smooth. He has the velvet touch. In a real estate deal, there’s no one who can touch him. Mallery is the slickest operator in the West. A senior partner at the powerhouse law firm of Snell & Wilmer, Mallery was a founding member of the Phoenix…
We sat in the foothills kitchen of Tracy Thomas as the nanny waited to take his infant son. After our cup of coffee, he would climb into his Mercedes and depart for the men’s grill at the Paradise Valley Country Club. It is a natural thing for a man who…
When is a deal with the Phoenix City Council not a deal? Apparently when the public finds out about it. Bonnie Bartak, aide to Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard, is unhappy New Times reported earlier this month that the city council had approved a deal with the owners of business properties…
Wearing his trademark pith helmet (with chin strap) and an oversize pair of sunglasses, Ulysses Horatio Penelopi Poindexter C. Mortimer Alewishus Hale Gammill II regularly drives his Model T along Central Avenue to his Rotary meeting in downtown Phoenix. The doors of the classic car he bounces along in are…
The 800 people who stormed into the Maryvale High School auditorium one June night in 1987 were outraged and insulted. They had just learned from this newspaper that for more than a decade, a suspiciously high number of children in their working-class part of town had died of cancer. Although…
It’s the cops who always are accusing judges of turning criminals loose on technicalities. These days, however, nine current and former Phoenix Police Department officers are smiling because a technicality may have gotten them off the hook. Not that Max Dunlap’s civil suit against the cops, filed in June 1982,…
As soon as it became clear a couple of months ago that Mayor Terry Goddard was abandoning the Municipal Center project, I phoned Ed Wundram. Wundram is the professional adviser who in 1985 oversaw our much-touted international design competition for a monumental building complex to house city government on the…
I recently came across the results of an Urban Institute study that set out to determine how much it costs to raise a child up to age eighteen. The numbers ranged from about $52,000 per poor child to $143,000 for a well-to-do one. Now that these figures have been released,…
One of the following charlatans will be the next governor of Arizona: David Hinchcliffe: He’s the double-domed thinker who introduced the resolution at the state Republican convention declaring this a Christian nation. He’d be perfect for a state packed to the borders with right-wing crazies. Jim Brock: The ASU baseball…
What is this? Some sort of fluke? How is it possible that Cousins could be the sweetest, tangiest romantic-comedy treat since Moonstruck? The film’s odds for success certainly don’t seem very high going in. It’s a Yank remake of a popular French comedy (1975’s acclaimed Cousin, Cousine), a subgenre reamed…
Abortion foes who are counting on the U.S. Supreme Court to make the practice illegal in Arizona may be rudely surprised. Last month, the nation’s high court agreed to review a Missouri law that restricts the right to abortion. Advocates on both sides of the issue believe the justices will…
To see Kim Sonderegger on-stage– her elegant face covered in layers of make-up, her slender body wrapped in net and tulle–you’d never think she was just a “grunt.” You might guess she used to prance around her parents’ living room, dreaming she was a prima ballerina. You might guess, from…
Most people who’ve had the misfortune of making my acquaintance are of the opinion that I am just another cynic hardened by living far too long as a city dweller. They couldn’t be more wrong. Just this past week I bought my fourth farm–specifically, my fourth Uncle Milton’s Giant Ant…
In the basement of the well-worn Kingman courthouse, the spectators who’ve arrived for the Clawson bail hearing are spilling out into the hall. As they wander around in the hall’s narrow dead end, their faces are alert for word from within the closet-sized courtroom that a way has been found…
Some thoughts about the Peter MacDonald hearings: I pick up my Arizona Republic each morning in the dark. I walk with it to the porch light. It is then that I’m able to see that Pat Murphy’s Republic staff has placed still another story about the Navajo tribal chairman on…
I’m not a Lute Olson fan. To me, any Sunday his University of Arizona team loses a basketball game on national TV is a fine one. I’ve nothing against the Wildcat players. Actually, they appear quite likable. They play very well, too. It’s Olson who gives me difficulty. He coaches…
I called Cameron and Heidi because I cannot imagine what it feels like to be an entirely likable person. I cannot imagine that the day will ever come when drill squads of military men will tramp across the TV screen and chant about me some version of, “We like Cameron…
The morning coffee had yet to complete the perk cycle when my three-year-old son hollered, “Daddy! Come look! Come look!” I get this request about 3,000 times a day. There was no reason to suspect I was being summoned to view anything more unusual than a Lego spaceship, a wooden-block…
