FRI 2/13 Okay, don’t get mad, but Meg Ryan is not a member of Just the Funny, Miami’s rollicking group of improvisational actors and sketch comedians. This is important to keep in mind during the troupe’s upcoming performance of How We First Met, a Valentine’s Day show celebrating those first-encounter…

FRI 2/6 Not since Prince has an artist embraced the color purple. But Barney, that cuddly singing and dancing dinosaur, has an excuse for his purple power: He was born with it. Barney’s Colorful World Tour is taking the country by storm. In fact the show’s producers have been responsible…

THU 1/29 The Florida Center for the Literary Arts opens its writers’ residency and lecture series with a not-necessarily-politically-correct discourse. Prolific, award-winning author Francine Prose will lecture on “Scent of a Woman’s Ink: Why Women are Still Being Read Differently from Men.” When her original essay on the subject appeared…

SUN 1/25 Fine art museums are not child-friendly. Curious little hands and clumsy little feet have no place near million-dollar canvases. Not to mention the tendency of 20th-century art to be shocking, if not completely vulgar or prurient — which is a shame because many modern artists derived inspiration from…

FRI 1/16 Some wimp requests information about John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos on an Internet bulletin board. “I want to see this movie but I want to know what I should watch out for, how gross it is … please help!” A reply is posted: “You’ll see the following: Divine…

THU 1/8 Country roads that disappear through Carolina tobacco fields, silos looming over a prairie, tractors kicking up dust on a hot summer day. This is the world evoked in the songs of folksinger Dana Robinson, the West Coast native who homesteaded in Vermont before settling down in the heart…

THU 1/1 The holidays in South Florida can get weird. A longing for sleigh bells can burn a melancholy pang into your sun-tanning bliss. What’s Christmas without snow? Young folks who crave respite from the interminable warmth can find it at the Miami Seaquarium’s Winter Kids’ Fest. The event offers…

WED 12/31 The thrill is definitely still there when it comes to 78-year-old master blues guitarist B.B. King. In a career that spans 6 decades over worlds from the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s to South Beach today, blues music’s regal ambassador has accomplished more than just about any other…

Pantomime. For many Americans the very word elicits frightening memories of silent, pale, black-clad street performers terrorizing little children with wild gesticulations. However, obnoxious mimers represent only a small minority in the history of the theatrical art that has existed in some form or another since antiquity. In the United…

THU 12/18 Venevision International Theater’s production of Kvetch: The Art of Complaining calls for an end to whining. The play gets a Spanish translation, which turns it into El Arte De Quejarse. Either way it is a sharp-tongued comedy, written by British actor and playwright Stephen Berkhoff, whose mastery of…

FRI 12/12 Everyone is familiar with the World Trade Center collapse and the vast number of people who died as a result. But how many know that after the year or so of cleanup, all that remained in the 70-foot hole in the ground was the buildings’ foundation? Architect Daniel…

THU 12/4 The holidays can be a feast of tension, aggravation, and reopening family wounds, so it’s no wonder that among the most beloved traditions of the season is taking the kids out for a little escapist entertainment. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is a wintery tale meant to…

It was the best of times; the streets seething with idealists, organizers, stinky dreadlocked youth, real-live Communists, and Montanans. It was the worst of times; rows of little men and women swaddled in riot gear playing “superhero.” It was a dangerous circus of the absurd, a fabulous spectacle that eclipsed…

SAT 11/22 Whether children know her as Princess Aurora, Briar Rose, or just plain ol’ Sleeping Beauty, this ancient fairy tale has never failed to enchant them, especially in a live theater setting. The story is very old. Scholars believe it to have origins in the Volsunga Sagas and Arthurian…

SUN 11/16 The first and probably last Argentine rock star, the man who reinvented the hotel-trashing role reserved for the very few, Charly García (below), will be in town for Rock En Miami II at noon at Bayfront Park (401 Biscayne Blvd.). He’ll bring his band, which will mean lots…

All punk rock ever wanted to do was return music and art to the people. Despite the apparent lack of skills and shocking results, these “musicians” were talented innovators with a desperate need to revolutionize various genres gone static in the 1970s. Too bad only a few enlightened people “got…

THUR 11/6 Cultural wasteland. Culturally deprived. Culturally backward. We’ve all heard the knocks about the level of aesthetic goings-on in Miami. How aware, we wonder, are those naysayers of the fact that in 1973, the county decided to set aside 1.5 percent of the construction cost of all new county…

WED 11/5 You already know the little yellow mousecar. The VW Beetle with attached ears and tail? It was likely the first car you ever wanted to drive until you reached puberty and realized it was only an ad for pest extermination. Thankfully, postmodern irony allows you to fall in…

SAT 11/1 Since the early days of flying machines, Man has enjoyed marveling at the ridiculous ways experimental aircraft can crash and disintegrate. But why sit and watch archival biplane footage when one can view sillier contraptions plunge into the sea just down the street? Flügtag, which means “flying day”…

FRI 10/24 1970s B-movie queen Linda Blair got her start modeling as a baby. Who would have thought that some years later she’d be spitting up torrents of green puke and pulling a 360 with her cranium? Brooke Shields, eternal starlet, also began her career as the Ivory Snow baby…

THUR 10/23 Picking up its cues from the civil rights movement, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, organized by a broad coalition of union-friendly groups and one cerebral celeb, recently launched a reform campaign targeting laws hurtful to new arrivals. Three weeks ago dozens of activist-laden buses departed from various American…

There is no way of knowing at press time what the fate of the Marlins will be. We tried consulting Miss Cleo, but she’s been impossible to track since entering the FBI witness protection program. As you read this, scores of fly-by-night Marlins fans, newly christened by the glow of…