Maybe it was Sam Gentry’s idea of a spring cleaning. Or perhaps, given his recent appointment as executive director of the Miami-Dade Community College Foundation, it was Gentry’s attempt at making a memorable first impression. Whatever the motivation, the casualties piled up quickly on the afternoon of Friday, March 23,…
Duke Ellington Allegro Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington are entries in Allegro’s Cocktail Hour series of double-shot tributes to mid-twentieth-century musical giants. Attractively, if sparsely, packaged musical icebreakers for the novice listener, the two-CD sets are an intoxicating (and, just under $18, affordable) introduction to some of the sweetest sounds…
The first-floor lounge of the Radisson Deauville Resort Hotel is precisely the kind of place one would expect to find the cocktail set. Fifty blocks north of bustling South Beach, this gem of postwar-modern design features a sprawling lobby of sweeping curves and giant columns. Behind the bar the large…
The horses at Hialeah Park are running effortlessly this morning. From the grandstand they resemble a merry-go-round, seemingly rising, then dipping, as they move along the far rail. Coming out of the last turn, they reach for one final burst to carry them to the finish. Seven weeks before the…
I’ve worked with the Jordanaires and D.J. Fontana,” says Elvis Presley, naming his long-time back-up vocalists and drummer. Throwing his head back and curling his lip in the lobby of Fort Lauderdale’s Sunrise Musical Theatre on January 21, he adds, “I’ve even worked for Elvis Presley Enterprises.” All this may…
Juan Galan has always known that people get a great education at Miami-Dade Community College. Galan graduated from the college in 1963 before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in administration from George Washington University. A prominent businessman…
8:20 a.m. A woman, outfitted from head to toe in T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, fanny pack, floppy denim hat, and sunglasses stands on a manicured front lawn in Miami Shores. Balancing unsteadily on the balls of her feet, she cranes her neck and tries to steal a peek into the house…
Clinging to a busy stretch of U.S. 1 just south of Red Road, Fox’s Sherron Inn is a one-for-the-road roadhouse, a nightcap paradise. Little flashing bulbs beckon to me as soon as I walk through the door, leading me to the jukebox: a shapely late-Sixties model carved out of steel…
Legend has it that a couple of hundred years ago, a Scotsman traveling through England was condemned to death for carrying what the local authorities considered an instrument of insurrection. They were talking about his bagpipes, of all things. How skittish can the British be, you ask? Consider that bagpipes…
I’m having a dark moment. It’s Friday night, and I’m in the Roof Top Lounge on the eighth floor of the Howard Johnson Hotel on Alton Road. Dark is good. I go to dark places when I want to be alone and drink, when I don’t want to pack my…
When he decided this past Monday to allow ballot recounts by hand, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks ensured that the political madness engulfing South Florida would rage on. For a few days at least, the future would be known: Lots of people would be examining lots of ballots. One…
North Bay Village boasts a long tradition of colorful characters, controversy, and power grabs. In the Sixties the small community on Biscayne Bay was a favorite meeting place for organized-crime figures. In the Eighties its police department was regarded as a haven for rogue cops even before three of its…
The past month or so hasn’t been good for the local film scene. The death of the venerable Alliance Cinema in South Beach was a decided blow to independent film programming in South Florida. Combined with a few months without much film festival activity or many special screenings, the area’s…
Three inches. That’s all that separates Stanley Whitman from perfection. For now. Whitman is standing on the second floor of his Bal Harbour Shops — he built the mall, he owns it — observing his latest improvement project, an expansion of the walkways delivering shoppers from the parking garage into…
The Tower Theater, with its beautifully subtle curves and its three-million-dollar facelift, waits on Calle Ocho, all made up with nowhere to go. Or anyone to take her there. City officials have allowed the recently restored Art Deco theater to deteriorate into a two-dollar movie house featuring second-run rejects like…
Used to be that if you didn’t receive your newspaper, you’d phone up your delivery boy. He’d ride over on a Schwinn, apologize for the inconvenience, and give you the day’s edition. Then he’d ring your doorbell the next morning to make sure you were happy. True, this kind of…
“Have you seen the Pedro Pan story in today’s Times?” Lourdes Blanco asked Sandra Luckow back in January 1998. Intrigued, the Queens-based filmmaker grabbed a copy of New York’s paper of record. What she found was a cold war, cloak-and-dagger story about priests and American government agencies working together in…
Beginning with its title — the indeterminate-sounding At Midnight and a Half — Marite Ugas and Mariana Rondon’s film cultivates a preoccupation with suspended states (a preoccupation suggested even more forcefully by the curiously circular syntax of the Spanish title, A La Media Noche y Media). Alienated lovers, lost children,…
The writer Willa Cather once speculated that the modern world came into existence in 1922 or thereabouts. Marisa Sistach’s El Cometa (The Comet) makes a better case for 1910. The film tells the story of two Mexican revolutions — one political, the other cultural — simultaneously evolving that year. The…
In his award-winning memoir of life in the Middle East, journalist Thomas L. Friedman compares Beirut to a Skinner box, the maze apparatus mice are forced to navigate in psychology experiments. For Friedman, Beirut (the capital of Old World disorder) possessed a particular and brutal capacity for conditioning its inhabitants…
