Diversions >>

• Best Movie Theater
  Regal South Beach Cinema
  There was much trepidation about the coming of this monster movie theater to our much-treasured Road. Would this cold and corporate megaplex shoveling out Hollywood hits put an end to any remaining pretense of funkiness that the mall had? Surprise: The Regal on South Beach has fit in more snug... More >>
• Best Salsa Scene
  Salsa Lovers Dance Studio
  It all began here in 1993: salsa classes on Monday and Wednesday nights at the spacious and charmingly down-at-the-heels Blue Banquet Hall. By now the place is packed four nights a week, and Salsa Lovers is a huge enterprise, having expanded to two more locations. But the West Miami-Dade scene... More >>
• Best Locally Produced Play
  Quills
  In many American political plays, a guy (it's usually a guy) comes onstage and talks. The set, the costumes, the lighting -- they're all window dressing, which helps to explain the sorry state of political drama. Doug Wright's 1995 work Quills, however, dissects the issues of censorship... More >>
• Best Solo Show
  Judith Delgado as Diana Vreeland
  In a season fraught with top-drawer solo performances (Charles Nelson Reilly in Life of Reilly, Kathleen Turner in Tallulah, Melinda Lopez in Medianoche, and Jean Stapleton in Eleanor: Her Secret Journey), Judith Delgado towered over all. Playing fashion diva Diana Vreeland, the actress... More >>
• Best Ride
  ElectroWave shuttle
  In a county with woefully slim public-transportation options, Miami Beach planners looked out their windows, past the backed-up traffic at the stoplights, and saw the future. It was pretty, environmentally friendly, and didn't cost a lot. The ElectroWave shuttle buses premiered two years ago and... More >>
• Best Dance Studio
  In Motion Dance Center North
  Last year's winner got even better this year. In Motion Dance Center expanded from its base on Bird Road and is now contributing to the Biscayne Boulevard renaissance with a new studio in a quaint converted house. Local dancers finally get the facilities they deserve, with high ceilings, exposed... More >>
• Best TV Station
  WJAN-TV (Channel 41)
  Remember WAMI, the overly hyped television-station startup? The one with the glamorous sidewalk studios on Lincoln Road? The one that was going to revolutionize TV by returning it to its extremely local roots? The City Was Their Studio or something like that? As anyone who has spent any time in... More >>
• Best Panthers Player
  Pavel Bure
  He slept with Anna Kournikova. That alone is enough. His incredible talent, his prolific goal-scoring, his All-Star game MVP award? The fact that he's the most dominant athlete in his sport? Just icing on the cake. He slept with Anna Kournikova. More >>
• Best Miami Fusion Player
  Eric Wynalda
  Relatively new to the Fusion, he's already making a contribution both as a playmaker and a scorer. Indeed Captain Wynalda could very well be labeled Captain Wonderful by season's end if he continues to fulfill his reputation as the highest goal-scorer in Major League Soccer. One drawback, of... More >>
• Best Local Writer
  Judith Berke
  Shy and retiring, poet Judith Berke doesn't always come to mind in this era of feted writers receiving gargantuan prizes. Yet her work epitomizes our region, not as a visitor or as a tourist, but as a long-time resident. In "Vizcaya," from her book White Morning, Berke brings us wisdom from... More >>
• Best Indoor Playground
  Adventurer's Cove
  Aye, matey, it's truly an indoor playground designed just for the wee ones. In fact kids over the height of 42 inches are restricted from entering (parents are permitted; strollers are not). The centerpiece is a play pirate ship, complete with slide (instead of plank) and ship's wheel. "Leaping"... More >>
• Best Spanish-Language Radio Personality
  Maria Elvira Salazar
  In the often strident world of Cuban radio, locutores regularly inject the airways with a daily dose of their self-serving agendas in the name of el exilio. Maria Elvira Salazar is an antidote to the inflammatory diatribes that blare from AM frequencies. She is la moderadora (the moderator) on... More >>
• Best Proof That Losers Do Indeed Get Lucky Sometimes
  Jimmy Johnson failed as the Miami Dolphins head coach. His best friend, Dave Wannstedt, failed as the head coach of the Chicago Bears. So why was Johnson allowed to handpick Wannstedt as the Dolphins new head coach? Good question. More >>
• Best Ongoing Astonishment
  Ed Jovanovski for Pavel Bure
  Pavel Bure is amazing. Good god, the Russian Rocket is the best player in the world right now, the most exciting and prolific scorer in the game, the All-Star game MVP, a strong candidate for league MVP, a reason all by himself to drive to godforsaken Sunrise to watch the Panthers play. And as... More >>
• Best Radio Station
  WQBA-AM (1140)
  WQBA is no longer La Cubanísima. If nothing else this is a clear indication that someone has finally figured out that the majority of Miami's Spanish-speaking citizens is not obsessed with Fidel Castro. The formatting changes that began in late 1997 -- after the giant Hispanic... More >>
• Best Haitian Bookstore
  Libreri Mapou
  Recorded compas music from St. Andre's Record Store across the street fills this shop in the heart of Little Haiti, often accompanied by the live drumming of percussion students or the rehearsals of the dance company Sosyete Koukouy out back. Paintings by Haitian artists and larger-than-life... More >>
• Best New Play
  A Bicycle Country
  Nilo Cruz's haunting A Bicycle Country, a play about three Cuban balseros, arrived at the Florida Stage just a few weeks after boat boy Elian Gonzalez was rescued off the Fort Lauderdale coast. Here's betting it will be remembered long after young Elian grows up. Set in Cuba and in the waters... More >>
• Best Supporting Player
  Lisa Morgan
  Actress Lisa Morgan is a great supporting player in the sense that, no matter how she's cast, she magnificently supports the interests of theatergoers, directors, fellow actors, and playwrights. Last season she appeared most notably in two shows. As the twittery, resolute mother of the flapper... More >>
• Best Baseball Memorabilia
  Charles Monfort
  Monfort's passion for baseball has its roots in Cuba, his homeland. As a ten-year-old kid, he began collecting mementos from his favorite teams and players. Later he embraced America's baseball heroes as well. Today he can boast of a private collection he accurately refers to as his... More >>
• Best TV News Anchor
  Angela Rae
  In little more than a year, Angela Rae has helped turned WFOR from a ratings joke into a serious contender. In the last ratings period, Channel 4 was the number-one station at 11:00 p.m., an advance largely owing to Rae's presence at the anchor desk. She is bright (packing a law degree from the... More >>
• Best Dolphins Player
  Olindo Mare
  Of all the blame for the sham of a disaster of a debacle in Jacksonville that ended this mind-numbingly disappointing Dolphins season, none can be laid at the golden right foot of the team's kicker. In fact if it hadn't been for good ol' No. 10, the Fins wouldn't have won enough games to earn... More >>
• Best Heat Player
  Alonzo Mourning
  Alonzo Mourning is so good it's dangerously easy to take him for granted. The All-Star center was the NBA's defensive player of the year in 1999. He has diversified his offensive game, making his midrange jumper more reliable while improving his post-up skills. He rebounds well. He runs the... More >>
• Best Weathercaster
  Don Noe
  You know, the funny thing about Don Noe is that you can't really tell by looking at him how bad the weather is. The screen behind him could be showing a sunny summer day with light chop on the bay, or a huge killer hurricane that might hit us (Floyd), or a not-so-big hurricane that will hit us... More >>
• Best Alternative Medicine
  East-West Health Alliance
  All those new-age clichés about nurturing and caring and sensing energies and auras? They apply here, but it's the real thing. East-West is not a huge, bustling operation; the office is intimate and tranquil. You will not find every specialty under the sun here, but you will find gifted... More >>
• Best Fish Tank
  Seahorse Bar at Beach House Bal Harbour
  The bar's name blatantly announces what placidly swims in the showcase aquarium: live sea horses. The gracefully curved creatures add whimsy to the long, narrow lounge and give new meaning to the term captive audience. The tiny fish bedazzle barflies who are gulping martinis as if they were... More >>
• Best New Performance Space
  lab6
  From postmodern tributes to the Cuban orisha Babalu Aye to the monthly "hood crawl" through Little Havana, the artists at lab6 have taken up a kind of anti-gentrification of Little Havana. Never content to confine art to the walls, visual artists Carlos Suarez de Jesus and Vivian Marthell... More >>
• Best Local Artist
  Edouard Duval-Carrié
  Since moving to Miami in 1992, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Edouard Duval-Carrié has forged some of the city's most enduring symbols. Ailing souls in the waiting room of Overtown's Jefferson Reeves Health Center can find temporary relief in the artist's renderings of vodou... More >>
• Best Banquet Hall
  Coral Gables Woman's Club
  This venerable coral-rock edifice is on the National Register of Historic Places, and deservedly so. Built in 1935, it features numerous stately bas-reliefs on its pockmarked walls, and a fountain alive with sculpted sea creatures. Indoors the club has two large meeting halls, one with terrazzo... More >>
• Best Drag Queen
  Mariloly
  For millennia men have made an art of impersonating women in the theater. For the past fourteen years at Teatro de Bellas Artes in Little Havana, Mariloly has continued the tradition. This Spanish-speaking diva plies his craft far from the clubs of Miami Beach on a stage patronized by Miami's... More >>
• Best Locally Generated Website
  MassTimes.org
  "We had a daughter in Boston. We used to visit her on the weekends," says Bob Hummel, the man behind the Website called MassTimes.org. "It was a monthly trip, and it went on for four or five years. We were always in the struggle of finding [Catholic] masses, and that's how it all kind of got... More >>
• Best Museum
  The Wolfsonian-FIU
  In a city whose international image is often, and sometimes wrongly, drawn by hypesters peddling simplistic images of hot-pink flamingos, drag queens, scheming thugs, and hysterical politicians, it is somehow not surprising to find that the best museum in town is a South Beach warehouse packed... More >>
• Best Actress
  Pat Nesbit
  Pat Nesbit is the sort of performer whose work finds its way to the foreground even if she's part of an ensemble, as she was in 1998's The Last Night of Ballyhoo at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. This past season South Florida audiences were lucky to see her at the Caldwell Theatre Company as one... More >>
• Best Ensemble Cast
  Caldwell Theatre Company's How I Learned to Drive
  Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive is not an easy play to sit through. Incest, alcoholism, self-destruction, and probing questions about the nature of love are the subjects it takes on. Told through the eyes of Li'l Bit, a woman who looks back at her youth and... More >>
• Best Art Gallery (1 Comment)
  Silvana Facchini Gallery
  Step into this 7400-square-foot space and you are assured an intense visual experience with a mood somewhere between SoHo and Sofia, Bulgaria. Facchini, a São Paulo native, opened her Design District gallery in November 1999. She seems to have a taste for large paintings with an "elegant... More >>
• Best Place To Ditch The Kids For A Few Hours
  The Shops at Sunset Place
  Keep in mind that this behemoth contains more than 502,000 square feet of retail space. Then consider the multitude of twists and turns it takes to find your way from one location to another -- say, from the parking garage to the IMAX theater. (Did M.C. Escher design this place?) Finally take... More >>
• Best Heat Player Emeritus
  Keith Askins
  The lanky swingman has been a Heater his entire professional career, mostly lingering at the end of the bench but hanging around because of his defense, rebounding, occasional three-pointers, and perpetual hustle. To make room for some younger players, Pat Riley cut Askins before this season.... More >>
• Best Place To Kiss A Baby Alligator
  Everglades Alligator Farm
  Forget all your nightmares about big toothy beasts that threaten pets and small children from back-yard canals. Alligators can actually be quite cuddly -- at least newly hatched babies are. Don't believe it? Find out for yourself at this alligator farm and airboat attraction, which has been... More >>
• Best Book By A Local Author
  Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die: Five Brothers Reunite to Say Goodbye
  In a year when a slew of noteworthy writers, including MacArthur Foundation Fellow Campbell McGrath, Carl Hiaasen, Les Standiford, Vicki Hendricks, and Marjorie Klein published books, this selection was no small task. A customer review on Amazon.com calls veteran reporter T.M. Shine "an... More >>
• Best FM Radio Personality
  Freddy Cruz
  As you roll down the highway in your car, the radio blasts the last few notes of the Commodores' sappy hit "Three Times a Lady." Suddenly your speakers begin to rattle. You turn down the volume, fiddle with the bass, adjust the treble. Nothing works. That hum is still there. Not to worry: Your... More >>
• Best Sportscaster
  Jimmy Cefalo
  South Florida sports icon Dan Marino retires. It's a no-brainer who we want to see cover the biggest sports story in years. Jimmy Cefalo is not just another sportscaster; he's also a former Dolphin himself. He even roomed with Marino while a receiver for the team. When he retired in 1985, he... More >>
• Best New Broadcasting Trend
  Noncommercial pirate radio
  The Miami area once had several renegade stations that eschewed advertising, including The Womb (107.1 FM) and SupaRadio (104.7 FM). But a federal assault on unlicensed broadcasters squelched them and many other pirates in 1998. In the secretive underworld of pirate radio, where stations are... More >>
• Best Local Defense Against Terrorism
  Call us old-fashioned patriots, but we do all our gift buying at the American Federation of Police and Concerned Citizens. This nonprofit operates out of the American Police Hall of Fame (the Biscayne Boulevard building with the cop car climbing its façade). We can't tell you the number... More >>
• Best Repertory Film Series
  Cinema Vortex
  How to tell Miami's film buffs from our town's film fanatics? Simple. The buffs can be found on Sunday afternoons inside the Alliance Cinema, forsaking a day at the beach for two hours in a darkened room, blissfully soaking up that week's Cinema Vortex selection. As for Miami's premier film... More >>
• Best Tourist Trap
  Tantra
  Sex sells, and Tantra is well aware of it. You could even call this restaurant self-aware, the play toward sensuality is so over-the-top. That's why the cuisine has been labeled "aphrodisiac," and dishes have been given fanciful names: A tomato salad is called the "Love Apple" and a... More >>
• Best Local Erotic Website
  www.chersangels.com
  This slickly produced site offers much more than just a peek at a nubile young blonde lounging around her Miami Beach apartment in Victoria's Secret lingerie, with friends who are likewise scantily clad. This is South Beach pixilated. It's about time America's Sodom and Gomorrah had its own Web... More >>
• Best Graffiti Mural
  The Boardroom
  With the number of legal works of graffiti in the area increasing, the results have been larger projects done in plain view. The Boardroom is one of these pieces. Easily visible to traffic traveling north on NW 27th Avenue, the mural is a purist's dream. Measuring about 12 feet by 55 feet, The... More >>
• Best Place To Watch The Fight
  Miami Jai Alai Fronton
  Say it's a fight. A really big fight. The kind of fight everybody wants to see. You can watch it at home, courtesy of pay-per-view, for no less than $50. Or you can go to a bar, where the cover charge can set you back $15, $20, or more. Or you can go to Miami Jai Alai. The struggling fronton... More >>
• Best Actor
  William Metzo
  There's not a huge demand in the theater for naked middle-age men, but don't blame actor William Metzo. As the Marquis de Sade in the magnificent Florida Stage production of Doug Wright's play Quills, Metzo gave a performance that required him to 1) stop speaking after the first act (since the... More >>
• Best Locally Produced Musical
  Finian's Rainbow
  Last fall the average playgoer had to wonder: Did we really need a revival of Finian's Rainbow? Despite a glut of Broadway revivals in New York, the Coconut Grove Playhouse certainly made a good case for the 1947 classic by Fred Saidy and E.Y. Harburg, whose familiar songs ("How Are Things in... More >>
• Best Film Festival
  Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
  It is every day, or so it seems, that a pedestrian film festival takes over a screen or two in Miami. It isn't every day that an innovative, complete, professional, lively, and good one grabs our attention. The first gay and lesbian festival last year was a surprising success. The second one,... More >>
• Best Marlins Player
  Mike Lowell
  After naming third baseman Mike Lowell player of the year in their minor league system for 1997, New York Yankees muckety-mucks traded him to the Marlins before the 1999 season. The Cuban-American righty repaid the team by smacking a grand-slam home run last August 9, one of a record five grand... More >>
• Best Hurricanes Football Player
  Santana Moss
  What quarterback Ken Dorsey says about senior wide receiver Santana Moss: "Santana is one of the greatest athletes around, and as a quarterback, it's nice to know he's out there. He can jump, run, catch, and he ignites the team. If you throw anywhere near him, he'll go up and do anything he can... More >>
• Best Boxing Figure To Die In The Past Twelve Months
  Beau Jack
  Beau Jack, born Sidney Walker in Augusta, Georgia, was one of the most exciting fighters in the world during the Forties, a time many consider boxing's golden age. He fought the best part of his 112 professional matches before sellout crowds in Madison Square Garden, winning and losing the... More >>
• Best AM Radio Personality
  George Rodriguez
  As the neilrogers.com Website counts down the seconds until the expiration of Uncle Neil's contract with QAM, it is time to look to the future. Neil's numerous, well-deserved vacations and seemingly even more numerous gastrointestinal ailments (insert fart noise here) have given his second... More >>
• Best Spot To Show Off Your Ride
  Fuddruckers
  As the sun sets on the first Saturday of every month, gearheads transform this burger joint's parking lot into a sea of iron, a celebration of America's love affair with the automobile. Rebuilt Detroit muscle cars shine like new. Chromed Harley-Davidson motorcycles gurgle and roar. Modern... More >>
• Best Career Move
  Leonard Hamilton
  After taking the University of Miami's men's basketball team to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA tournament (the most successful season in the program's history), Hamilton had the opportunity to bolt to Georgia Tech, a school with a longer basketball tradition in a stronger basketball conference.... More >>
• Best Trade
  Radek Dvorak for Mike Vernon
  Panthers general manager Bryan Murray knows how to cut a deal, as he proved last year with the acquisition of Pavel Bure. This year he executed another shrewd move by swapping Radek Dvorak for Mike Vernon. In some ways the exchange looked less than sweet. Dvorak is young, fast, and talented.... More >>
• Best Theater For Drama
  GableStage
  The newly created GableStage arrived with a bang on the staid landscape of South Florida theater last season. To be precise the company started off with a muscular production of David Hare's Skylight, only to follow it up with the most compelling combination of programs and performances in the... More >>
• Best Theater Road Show
  The Gin Game
  There's plenty of choice horseflesh in South Florida each winter, but the most appealing thoroughbreds to pass through the region were Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The two arrived as part of the National Actors Theatre's touring production of The Gin Game, directed by Charles Nelson Reilly.... More >>
• Best Local Sports Coach
  Jim Morris
  So Miami had this one coach with interesting hair, who is a legend, who succeeded a legend, then didn't succeed. Miami still has this other coach with interesting hair, who is a legend, who succeeded a very nice man named Alvin Gentry, but this guy hasn't succeeded either. Granted it's tough to... More >>