thursday august 6 The most popular characters on kids’ TV are no longer turtles, purple dinosaurs, or color-coordinated crime fighters. They’re babies, stars of Nickelodeon’s Emmy Award-winning cartoon Rugrats, and they’re tops with the grade school set. The show’s star, Tommy, a brave, diaper-clad one-year-old, leads the talking tots through…

Johnny Calderin and Cesar Hernandez-Canton wanted to put the glamour back in going to the movies. So they did what any self-respecting cineastes would do: They bought their own theater, the Alcazar Cinematheque in Coral Gables, which they rechristened the Absinthe House Cinematheque. Calderin, age 23, and Hernandez-Canton, age 25,…

To dance the rumba you don’t have to wear a flouncy skirt or a shirt with big old puffy sleeves. You don’t have to be learned in Santeria. You don’t even need an ounce of Cuban blood. You just need a little bit of rhythm, assures Elena Garcia, a former…

thursday july 30 When famous writer Wilkie Walker is stricken with depression, devoted wife Jenny takes him to Key West for a change of pace. What follows is pure chaos as the couple mixes in with local loonies. So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie’s latest offering; her other works…

The word detachment has never been part of Cesar Becerra’s vocabulary. Until now. Becerra, a 25-year-old local historian known for his celebrations and newsletters honoring everything from the centennial of Miami to the 50th anniversary of Everglades National Park to the 40th anniversary of Frankie’s Pizza in Westchester, is also…

thursday july 23 “It’s always merengue, merengue, merengue,” laments Miami-based Dominican artist Charo Oquet, who is bent on letting local audiences know there is more to her native culture than that hyperactive Latin-radio sound. The third annual Dominican Youth Arts Festival features a performance by musicians from the Dominican Republic…

For the serious soccer fan nothing compares to the excitement of the World Cup, but that event occurs only once every four years. Fans who now find themselves in withdrawal after France’s victory will be relieved to know that South Florida is fast becoming a soccer mecca. Broward has the…

thursday july 16 Difficult to believe, perhaps, but wooden, one-note actor Sam Shepard is considered to be among the most influential playwrights of his era. The author of works such as The Tooth of Crime, Buried Child, Fool for Love, and True West, Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize in 1979…

thursday july 9 In 1947 twenty-year-old Antonio Carlos Jobim left behind his dreams of becoming an architect and opted for a career in music. Vocalist, composer, arranger, pianist, guitarist, and one of the founding fathers (along with Jo‹o Gilberto and Vinicius de Mor‹es) of the bossa nova movement, Jobim became…

“So much of what we are all about is what we see.” This according to Judith Ann Graham, a professional image consultant and a member of the Association of Image Consultants International, a nonprofit organization made up of men and women who specialize in working with individuals, groups, or corporations…

“The minute a man puts on a dress, something very theatrical happens. It’s funny.” So says visual artist David Rohn in explaining his latest creation: the pilot episode for the very theatrical Adora Adora, a television sitcom he wrote, directed, and in which he has a minor acting role. The…

thursday july 2 Tonight at 8:30 the Wolfsonian-FIU presents the finale of its Florida on Film series, and the closing flick is a classic: Where the Boys Are. Boys and girls alike will have a blast at the Hotel Astor (956 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), which is hosting the event…

Give the hippie-dippie music fest Woodstock a Nineties spin and the result would be raves, all-night concerts catalyzed by hypnotic electronic music and mind-bending light shows and tempered by a prevailing sense of tranquillity, which is often induced and sustained by drugs. Usually held at sprawling outdoor venues whose locations…

By day Rosie Gordon-Wallace is a sales representative for the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical company. By night she’s an aspiring writer and a tireless promoter working to help her comrades in art who just can’t get a break. “The artists really just want to do their work,” notes Gordon-Wallace, who speaks…

thursday june 25 Launched from New York nocturnal haunts such as Save the Robots, the Palladium, and the Limelight to mixmaster-extraordinaire status, DJ Këoki lands at Groove Jet (323 23rd St., Miami Beach) tonight at 11:00 to show off his beat-heavy and hauntingly sampled brand of electronica. He’ll spin tunes…

Think Parrot Jungle and you naturally imagine birds (and maybe bird droppings). A cockatoo riding a bicycle on a high wire, an Amazon parrot counting out loud, and other winged wonders rolling around on tiny skates. But the 62-year-old attraction contains more than just squawking technicolor avian daredevils. Two years…

thursday june 18 Attention all you hep cats and the rest who take to heart Duke Ellington’s 1932 tune “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The band Seven Foot Politic is riding the swing-ska-rock wave, popularized by Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, into…

Sun, surf, sand, and classical music. Four things you don’t necessarily think of together. But Florida Philharmonic conductor James Judd doesn’t think the way most people do. For the second year in a row, the maestro has been a guiding force behind the second annual Beethoven by the Beach, a…

“It’s like eating a great meal: You don’t always like every single thing on your plate, but you’ve got to taste everything, and you might like it.” So says Sheldon Schwartz, director of the Florida Dance Association, referring to the mind-boggling variety of offerings that constitute the Florida Dance Festival,…

thursday june 11 Even though Masterpiece Theater is on hiatus for the summer, you can still satisfy your craving for a cinematic period piece at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) during Views of Merchant-Ivory: Three Continents, Fourteen Films. This festival, which began last week, highlights some of…