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BEST MIAMI HERALD WRITER

Fred Grimm

Grimm displays a willingness to actually leave his desk, unlike some columnists we know. And as far as we've seen, he has never wasted column space writing about the comments generated by his last column. No, Grimm goes down to city hall and rummages through files. He visits the boulevard where protesters marched, and he witnesses the sentencing hearing from the courtroom. Such shoe-leather reporting informs Grimm's intelligent opinions on the news of the moment. Generally warm and funny, Grimm can definitely be prickly on occasion, and appropriately so. His subjects are as far-ranging as cockfighting, black-market plastic surgery, failed shopping malls, swingers clubs, and the tasteless campaign of "Pete the Fireman" Iriardi, an obscure political candidate who attempted to exploit a 9/11 heroism he completely fabricated. Grimm makes all these issues (and many others) relevant to his readers. In his eyes, South Florida is the most interesting, crazy place in the country. He is, of course, right about that.

BEST BLACK-BOX PRODUCTION

audiovideo

Juggerknot Theatre Company

What's the difference between a black box and a full theater? Size, yes. The first is much more intimate. But in the right hands a black-box experience becomes something entirely new. Like when a director decides to ignore the confines of a stage and work with the space as a whole. Like when homegrown writer/director Michael John Garces decides to use Juggerknot's Biscayne Boulevard box for his one-act audiovideo, which blew away just about everything else produced in this town. The other half of the show, land, as well as most stuff performed at Juggerknot, was top-notch, but audiovideo stands alone. We didn't watch actors on a stage. We watched two teenage boys move around our literal and metaphorical basement as they discussed what to do with a lost sex videotape they had made. The directing was so tight, the acting so skilled (bravo to Oscar Isaac and David Perez), the dialogue so clever (the speech is often fragmentary, the boys finish each others' sentences, or let physical acts do the talking) that the audience was left wondering just exactly what they had seen -- that was not simply theater, was it? No, it was simply great.

BEST MIAMI HERALD CASANOVA

Tyler Bridges

Somehow we missed that particular issue of Caretas, the respected Peruvian newsweekly, the one in which it reported that Peruvian congresswoman Cecilia Tait was pregnant with a child conceived with the cooperation of Miami Herald reporter Tyler Bridges. But there it was in Joan Fleischman's "Talk of Our Town" column, in the very paper that employs Bridges. "He looks like Richard Gere but with green eyes," Tait told Caretas. Seriously? Tyler Bridges? The same Tyler Bridges who, in a Herald opinion piece, pondered the eerie similarities between his life and that of the late John F. Kennedy, Jr.? (Sample: "John John went to Brown. I went to Stanford.") More recently Bridges shared with readers his experiences preparing for and running a marathon. Surely he won't keep us waiting too long for the details of his long-distance political liaison. We'll be patient -- and maybe nervous.

BEST LOCALLY PRODUCED STAGE COMEDY

Here in My Car

Mad Cat Productions

Miami Light Project's Light Box Theatre

The trick of a successful comedy is to walk the fine line between life and art, which the local acting troupe Mad Cat did so humorously in their third production, Here in My Car. It cleverly combined a bit of Melrose Place with a healthy dose of The Real World and plunked it down in Miami. This original piece, penned by Ivonne Azurdia and Paul Tei, was a series of vignettes that connected the loves and lives of eleven Miamians. All the action took place in an early-Eighties model Honda, an artifice that gave the piece cohesiveness and a dramatic starting and finishing point. The two writers, approximately ten years apart in age, brought an interesting blend of decades to the writing: references to Paul McCartney and Wings and Less Than Zero spliced with talk of Green Day and Blink-182. What kept Here in My Car from being a narcissistic, "Hey! A Play About Me and My Friends!" production was Tei's excellent direction and the Mad Cats themselves, one of the most spontaneous and adventurous group of actors Miami has to offer.

BEST PARKING GARAGE

Seventeenth Street at Convention Center Drive

Miami Beach

You don't have to live in South Beach to be painfully aware of the fact that finding a place to park your car qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. Keep this garage in mind next time you're about to lose your mind in the quest for parking. Owned by the City of Miami Beach, the Seventeenth Street garage could not be more conveniently located. It's an easy walk to the Jackie Gleason Theater, the convention center, Lincoln Road, and only five short blocks from the beach. It's open 24 hours a day and has space for a whopping 1460 vehicles. The dollar-per-hour rate (maximum eight hours) is quite reasonable. On special-event days it's a flat rate of five dollars. According to city officials, the garage opened 25 years ago, but a thorough renovation in 1996 expanded the facility and spruced it up considerably. You can almost always count on finding a space there, shielded from the blazing sun and close to where you want to go.

BEST CULTURAL CHALLENGE

"Buenos dias" in the morning. "Buenos tardes" in the afternoon. "Buenas noches" after the sun goes down, just before they lock up the store for the night. "¿Como andas?" "¿Como andamaos?" "¿Que pasó?" The list runs through your head every time you go for a newspaper. The fates have placed you in Little Havana and you're okay with it. In fact you like it, how real the neighborhood feels, how different it seems from everywhere else in America you've lived. Unfortunately you don't speak Spanish -- at all. Or at least not more than a few words. You're painfully monolingual, though you keep trying. Every day you buy your paper at the neighborhood bodega, the one with the shrine to San Lazaro burning near the cash register. Every day you wave and say hello to the butcher. He's 92 years old, you're told. He sits there every day, liver spots sprinkled over his face, all his hair gone. Plastic-wrapped hams and strange-looking cheeses mummify in a cooler. "¡Hola!" he says to you one morning. You do know that one and respond in kind. The next day, when you see him, you smile and prepare for a similar exchange. "¿Como andas?" he asks. What?!? What are you supposed to say to that? You head home and flip through a Spanish dictionary. You call a friend and ask for an appropriate reply. By the next morning you're smarter. But so is he, sitting behind his meat cooler, eating cheese off a cracker. "¿Que tal, mi amigo?" he calls out, reaching over the cooler to warmly grasp your hand. You stare at him blankly, frozen in fear. ¿Que tal? Where the hell did that come from? You mumble something, "Bien" probably, grab your paper and scurry back to your dictionary. Tomorrow you'll be ready.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Paul Tei

Black Sheep

Florida Stage

As Max, a spoiled rich kid turned film critic, Tei turned in an over-the-top performance that stole the show, no small feat in a very strong cast and very strong play. But Tei's done it before, in the fabulous Popcorn last year at GableStage and other productions around town. It was time, however, for Tei to break mold and this year he did, pushing into new emotional territory in his own Mad Cat company's dark tale, Portrait, and as the tortured, sarcastic, vodka-swilling Sergio in New Theatre's Smithereens. Yet Tei's ability to wring humor out of twisted situations is one of his best assets, and as the terminally juvenile Max he did just that, giving South Florida a genuine treat.

BEST PROMOTER OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Beth Boone

The Miami Light Project, a nonprofit cultural arts organization founded by Janine Gross and Caren Rabbino, gained a solid reputation soon after its debut in 1989. Today it is best known for bringing to Miami performances by renowned contemporary music, dance, and theater artists. Miami Light also commissions new works and provides an outlet for Miami's own avant-garde performing artists. In this town, however, unfettered artistic expression has been a complicated affair, particularly when Cuban nationals are involved. By the time Beth Boone became executive director of Miami Light, in May 1998, the complications had gained national notoriety, facilitated by a county law severely restricting the circumstances under which Cuban artists could appear here. Despite very real risks to her organization's financial health, in May 2000 Boone and Miami Light joined with the ACLU and several others in successfully challenging the so-called Cuba ordinance in federal court. With the law on her side, Boone proceeded to introduce Miami to a glittering array of Cuban artists. In just the past twelve months she's sponsored performances by Grupo Vocal Desandann, Los Fakires, and the legendary Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. But Miami Light has a much broader mission. Under Boone's guidance, in the past year alone we've had the opportunity to see Philip Glass and Foday Musa Suso, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, and Miami's own Teo Castellanos as he created his one-man hit NE 2nd Avenue. That's the kind of cultural kaleidoscope that makes living in Miami worthwhile.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Brenda Thomas

Bee-luther-hatchee

Florida Stage

Thomas was outstanding as Libby Price, a world-weary black woman adrift in the Southern racial struggles of the Sixties in this interesting production. ("Bee-luther-hatchee" is early twentieth-century African-American slang for a faraway, damnable place, the next station after the stop for Hell.) This was the New York-based actress's first stop in South Florida, and her emotionally compelling work was a model of simplicity and clarity, and left an indelible mark on the memory. With more such roles, maybe we'll be fortunate enough to see more of Thomas on our stages.

BEST PLACE TO COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

John C. Gifford Arboretum

On the University of Miami campus it is possible to take a short walk in the woods and end up on what seems like a tour of the globe. Founded in 1947, the Gifford arboretum was named for the first graduate forester in the U.S., a UM professor and expert on tropical woods. At one time there were more than 500 species here, but in the Seventies and Eighties the collection suffered from neglect and a few were lost. Then, as bulldozers prepared to carve more parking lots out of the campus's north end, local activist Kathy Gaubatz stepped in and saved the place from ruin. The collection, which now includes about 450 species, has been renovated and inked in on the university's master plan. The plants are being retagged and a new checklist of the holdings compiled. It is a little-known sanctuary, and according to director Carol Horvitz, a UM biology professor, one of the few places in South Florida to find a fully labeled grouping of more than 90 percent of the 130 species of shrubs and trees native to the area. From a box by the parking lot, pick up a brochure and begin a self-guided tour through thirteen families of tropical and subtropical plants, including palms, figs, hardwoods, and ornamentals. The trail is well marked, the plants all wear tags bearing their common and Latin names, and benches here and there invite repose and reflection. Note the handsome lignum vitae tree, planted more than 50 years ago.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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