Arts & Entertainment

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 girlhood to recount how she was molested by a favorite uncle, the drama requires actors to portray fully fleshed people (Li'l Bit and Uncle Peck), as well as a Greek chorus of family members and secondary characters. The excellent Caldwell Theatre Company cast featured Kim Cozort and David Forsyth as the protagonists, both of whom gave subtly multifaceted and complex performances. Supporting them, and acting with much broader strokes, were the magnificent Dan Leonard, Jessica K. Peterson, and Viki Boyle. Director Kenneth Kay couldn't have asked for happier chemistry or more galvanic talent. And neither could we.

A South Florida native who rocks, singer/songwriter DeNisco has been playing guitar since childhood and performing professionally for thirteen years. Now living in Dania Beach, she's a regular on Miami-Dade stages. Riding the wake of her first CD, 1995's On My Way (which garnered two Billboard songwriting awards for the ditties "I Belong with You" and "Mystic Tune"), she's now pushing her latest release, Winds of a Dream. A six-song disc she simply calls "pop-orientated acoustic rock," it's a perfect platform for her to showcase a clear, touching, sometimes raspy voice. You can catch DeNisco performing in local clubs about four times a week. Sometimes it's just her and a guitar. Other times she's with her full band. No matter who she's with, you won't be able to resist the rock or the voice.

No other Miami frontman can carry you through a tune like Endo's Gil Bitton. First, understand the jet-fueled rock Endo belts out lands somewhere between Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit. Second, realize Bitton puts everything he has into a performance, prowling the stage and gesticulating to each break-neck beat, delving deep into his diaphragm for a sound that pushes the band's already aggressive music to a new-found intensity. After a set he's spent -- drenched in sweat and exhausted. Bitton's energetic presence and distinct voice have helped Endo create a bit of a stir around the country. Late last year New York's Concrete Management began to represent the group (in addition to famed clients Ministry and Pantera). Impressed as well were the folks at the very-selective South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, who invited the band to perform this past March. Judging by the recent release of Endo's second album, the rousing Evolve, featuring Bitton's searing vocals, who knows what the future will bring?

This welcoming second-floor rabbit warren of rooms located in the heart of downtown Miami was ahead of the pack in the area's renaissance. In fact it's still way ahead of everyone else. Opened in the late Nineties by David Haskin, the Wallflower was strictly art based at first, with the occasional cultural gathering. The art exhibitions -- sculpture, paintings, and what-have-you displayed and dispersed throughout the various spaces -- continue. But as a music-listening venue, the Wallflower began to bloom in early 1999 when Flash, former funkfinder at Lincoln Road's defunct Funktional Funk, assumed the programming and managing reins. Since then the place, so desolate and deserted from the outside at night, has come alive inside every weekend showcasing a who's who of talent in several genres. Spoken word events occur on a monthly basis. Workshops devoted to holistic health are plentiful too. But it's the performances by nearly every local band active in Miami -- Sixo, Swivel Stick, the Square Egg, Mantra, and the Gabe Dixon Band, to name a few -- that really draw crowds. The six-buck cover buys entry into an all-ages show, sans alcohol. Coffee, tea, juices, and healthy snacks are served. Smoking is allowed -- in one room. Music aficionados can purchase CDs on the premises or settle on the comfy furniture, watching or listening from almost anywhere. Just about the entire gallery is wired for video and sound. And the sounds, well, they're the best reason of all to be there.

Forget everything you've heard about Lynyrd Skynyrd's snarling Floridian frontman dying in a fiery 1977 plane crash. He's alive and well, just as pissed off as ever about the sorely maligned Southern Man, and presently heading up local outfit the Holy Rollin' Hellfires. That Dixie-steeped flavor of old is still there, complete with stinging, barbed-wirelike guitar work and a country blues sense of twang. But it's been accelerated, dragged through the punk-rock blender, and come out the other end angrily distorted. Of course as anyone who's seen the Hellfires perform live can tell you, it's best not to spend too much time analyzing the group's sonic spin on white-trash harmonics. Instead stand back. Way back. Lead singer Billy McKelvy has some novel ideas about breaking down that fourth wall, and his impassioned growling, howling, and frantic arm-flailing isn't always safely confined to the stage. Rock and roll may have become a spent cultural force in Miami, but the sight of its death throes can be an impressive thing to behold.

Music by the light of the moon -- an intoxicating combination. Certainly something that's gone on forever and a day. But on a regular basis in Miami? Apparently not. That is until 1995, when Barnacle State Historic Site park manager Terry Coulliette and friends dreamed up the idea for the Barnacle Under Moonlight concert series. The idea: Once a month, on or near the full moon (except during July and August), host a concert on the expansive back lawn of the charming Vernacular-style house built on five acres of waterfront property in 1891 by Coconut Grove pioneer Ralph Middleton Munroe. A serene setting, which calls for relaxed sounds. Various acts have been in the folk or blues vein, such as Ukrainian bandurist Yarko, local pair Outta d'Blues, and eclectic acoustic duo Tammerlin. A Celtic thing happens in honor of St. Patrick's Day, and the Top Brass Quintet plays Christmas carols in December. Florida songster Grant Livingston, the first musician ever to perform there, now traditionally closes the series each year. Listeners are invited to lounge on blankets or chairs, have a picnic, and frolic in the grass as long as they fork over five bucks (kids under age ten get in free) and leave their pets at home. Another thing they can't bring along: booze. But that's okay. The moonlight, music, and atmosphere are more than enough to make them drunk.

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 than many thought. First, it lived up to its promise to show alternative movies. At least two screens per week show foreign or gay-theme films, or films that otherwise might not have unspooled here. Second, the theaters themselves are comfortable: medium-size rooms, plush seats, and good views from every one of them (so often not the case at a megaplex). Parking hasn't been a problem, either; in fact you can often find a spot right on Alton Road, just a block away. There is a good selection of food, a café, even an outdoor patio and balcony, and absolutely no loud video arcade anywhere on the premises. Finally, before or after the movie you can stroll down the street that, while it has lost much of its counterculture vibe, remains Miami-Dade's most people-friendly urban area.

The usual kudos go to perennial winner Fusión Latina at WDNA-FM (88.9), but for those whose tastes are not exclusively tropical, the University of Miami's Invasión Latina with Liliana Rodriguez is the only outlet in town for Latin alternative music. The vibe is very late-night-in-the-dormitory, with Liliana laying out groovy new tracks for her friends and whooping with joy as she hands out concert tickets. That the rock, hip-hop, ska, reggae, R&B, and electronica of a whole hemisphere is confined to a spare three hours per week on a Monday night on a student station is a testament to the sad state of Latin pop radio in Miami. DJ Liliana does her best to pack in a far-ranging set of tunes while interviewing visiting musicians and plugging upcoming live shows. French-born iconoclast Manu Chau's philosophical neo-son brushes elbows with the Chilean group La Ley's electro hip-hop and the Colombian pablum pop of Shakira. The breadth of the material to cover in such a limited time makes it impossible for this "invasion" to provide any more than a sample of burgeoning developments on the Latin scene. The show does a great service for local acts, however, exposing listeners to the latest from favorites such as Fulano and Volumen Cero.

As hip-hop continues down its path toward world domination, cash registers ringing loudly all the way, it seems in increasing danger of calcifying. For more and more up-and-coming rappers, pursuing their art often appears simply to be a matter of choosing a role: Gangsta thug? Macked-out pimp? Or smooth balladeer? Pick your category, don its stereotypical wardrobe -- and often its just-as-formalized set of musical rules -- and voilà! Instant rap star! All of which makes the aesthetic flowering of Lee Williams such a welcome breath of fresh air. From his hysterically surreal choice of tattoos (yes, that's a World Wildlife Federation panda emblazoned on his right pec) to his inventive, humor-laced, and honey-voiced flow (one that draws equally upon Q-Tip and Gil Scott-Heron), Williams is evolving into an original. And with his new multiculti live outfit, the Square Egg, churning out the music behind him (no rote programmed beats here, thank you), he looks fully primed to head off in whatever unique direction he wants. We'll most definitely be along for the ride.

There's an easy way to weed out the musical heavyweights from the merely mediocre. Regular songwriters craft works about love, loss, and universal experiences. Boring. True visionaries turn their attention to more pressing matters: their own trials in the spotlight. Witness the navel-gazing tunes of Van Morrison ("The Story of Them"), the Beatles ("The Ballad of John and Yoko"), and, of course, that pop titan Ricky Nelson ("Garden Party"). To those illustrious ranks add the Trash Monkeys, who have not just one song dealing with the ongoing tribulations of, well, Trash Monkey-dom, but a half-dozen. Of course the band's concerns are a little more downmarket than hordes of groupies, intrusive TV cameras, and piles of cash. As singer Lloyd Johnson croons over a stumbling acoustic lurch, if you enter the "Casa de Trash," be sure to mind the exposed wiring and don't forget to carefully hide your stash. Oh yeah, try not to step on the blow-up doll either. "Casa de Trash" is just one of the many country-inflected odes the group recorded back in the late Eighties, only now rescued from samizdat cassette editions and enshrined on the Pass Out CD. Elsewhere there's the cowpunk dirge "Puppies, Puppies, Puppies" (delivered in a milk-curdling faux-Scottish accent, of course), the fuzzed-out jauntiness of "Clairvoyant Housewife" (the bouncily twee theme song to one of the many bizarre sitcoms that seem to exist only in the band's collective mind), and the Merle Haggard-on-ludes ballad "Hamburger Girl" (a heartfelt tribute to the greasy spoons of South Florida). Finally compiled for a public audience, Pass Out stands as a gloriously whacked tribute to creative genius left out in the Miami sun a little too long. It's also thankfully still a work in progress; the second half of the CD contains new songs from the recently reformed Trash Monkeys. If anything they seem even more deranged with the passage of time. Long may they stagger.

Gaby Gabriel is best known as the long-time leader of the house orchestra at the Fontainebleau Hilton's Club Tropigala on Miami Beach. The exuberant Cuba-born singer/percussionist has developed a musical repertoire to match the diversity of his audiences, which range from Latin-American tourists to sunbirds and celebrities. But Gabriel hasn't done much recording. Until last year, when Miami's powerhouse car dealer Gus Machado offered to sponsor sessions at Hialeah's Sound Booth Recording Studio. Gabriel gathered some of the best singers and players he knows, many recently arrived from Cuba. (He is constantly besieged with calls from musicians all over the world looking to break into Miami's music scene.) Con Alma y Vida was in production most of 1999 and released in January 2000. It sounds great, a mix of original and established songs and Puerto Rican and Cuban styles. Gabriel's duet with Cubana Ilumin de Leon on José Luis Perales's "Una Locura" is beautiful. The CD was a big hit on the Internet music site mp3.com; one cut, "Cafe con Leche," stayed on the Top 10 for weeks and now is in the Top 30. Makes us wonder why the local salsa stations won't play it.

If ever an album title seemed appropriate, it's Ischemic Strokes, the moniker Phoenecia slapped on its most recent collection, which gathered up kindred souls recording for their own Schematic label and placed them alongside the duo's own skittering, frazzled creations. After all, an ischemic stroke -- a sudden, sharp cutoff of the blood supply to an internal organ -- aptly ascribes the flavor of the music Romulo Del Castillo and Josh Kay fashion as Phoenecia: beats that reject a metronome lockstep in favor of an epileptic fit; manic buzzes and frantic clicks that evoke a computer's motherboard melting down; and an overall aural quality akin to the sound of plugging one too many power cords into an electrical outlet. 2001's Hal would most definitely approve. Of course there are hundreds of budding mad scientists all tweaking dance music into strange new forms. What elevates Phoenecia is its uniquely visceral "machines come alive" vibe. The sounds may not always be pleasant, but like a highway car wreck, it's hard to resist slowing down for a gander.

Drawing from a stock of blues standards, William "Max" Maxwell lends Miami Beach's Lincoln Road a touch of cultural credibility. Many the fashion-savvy beachcomber ignores this "old school" busker while he haunts the stretch between Lenox Avenue and Alton Road. Sitting on a milk crate and thumping away on his electric guitar, it seems Max only gets his fair share of attention when the rare fan passes by. Those in the know recognize old gems penned by bluesmen Charles Brown and Big Bill Broonzy. Max plays on, living the blues. "You real pretty," he sings to the neon lights and the passersby, "but you gonna die some day."

Mike Gerber works the piano as if he had begun playing in the womb. Actually he took to the instrument when he was just two and a half years old. Nearly 50 years later, the keyboardist (blind since birth) never ceases to wow audiences when he attacks the ivories. After devoting his youth to performing classical music around his native St. Louis, Gerber discovered jazz in his late teens and developed a love for improvisation that flourishes today. A mainstay in the South Florida jazz community, where he's played on and off (but mostly on) since 1969, Gerber is admired for his dazzling, speedy bursts. Although a bout with hearing loss in the late Nineties slowed his career a bit, he is back on track working toward a master's degree in jazz studies at Florida International University. In addition to his schoolwork, Gerber keeps busy gigging in area clubs such as the Van Dyke Café and hitting the occasional concert or jazz festival across North America.

Face it, this is a recording-company town. When bands sit down to play, they're more likely to be laying tracks for a CD or mugging for a television camera than working a late-night crowd. Live music is less likely to waft through smoke-filled rooms in Miami than it is to bounce off scorching pavement at festivals designed for labels to show off artists to massive crowds of Latin-music consumers. Lucky for us this live-music-limbo has one very audible benefit: the mariachis, Los Mora Arraiga. Four brothers and four sisters between the ages of 21 and 35, the youthful mariachis from Monterrey have offered an updated take on the traditional Mexican sound for the past twelve years. The family has recorded with heavyweights such as opera singer Placido Domingo and singer-songwriter Shakira; shared the stage with acts as diverse as salsa legend Celia Cruz and Mexican experimental rockers Café Tacuba; and have been featured on television shows from Sabado Gigante to Sesame Street. All this fame and fortune does not keep Los Mora Arraiga out of earshot for the humble folk, however. The siblings regale the locals at festivals, theme parks, Native American reservations, resorts, condominium associations, and cruise ships. Suited up in leopard print sombreros, tight psychedelic shirts, or sophisticated white suits, Levi, David, Tete, Judith, Al, Edith, Pepe, and Meredith each play at least seven instruments, sing, tap dance, and deliver what they call an "audiovisual extravaganza" you don't want to miss.

Get ready for a little Cuban chemistry with Grupo Nostalgia. The Latin jam ensemble that won New Times's award for Best Latin Band in 1996 and 1998 has completely transformed itself. The nucleus remains bassist and band director Omar Hernandez. Circling around him for the past few years have been conguero Eduardo Rodriguez, guitarist and singer-songwriter Heriberto Rey, and dazzling pianist Michel Diaz. Long-time frontman and scalawag Luis Bofil split from the group, as did portly percussionist Eddy "Conga" Jimenez. Despite these losses the effervescent crew doubled in size. Café Nostalgia owner Pepe Horta's swell new digs on Miami Beach served as a catalyst to permanently bind the band with old friends who sat in frequently during the Little Havana days. Mellow bassist Mandy Gonzalez, reedlike flautist Mercedes Aval, and vibrant vocalist Viviana Pintado, all of whom used to drop in after gigs with Albita, are now fixtures on the more expansive stage. Saxophonist Juan "Petaca" Silveira and vocalist-percussionist Angel Arce, one of the "Patuti Twins," defected to the group from Manolín's outfit on the Cuban salsero's first trip to Miami. The biggest change of all was brought about by the two new singers. Dashing Nelson Trebejo, formerly with Orchestra Reve, whips the crowd into a frenzy while the sweet-faced newcomer Monica Sierra croons ballads full of soul. Grupo Nostalgia proves the rule: The more dramatic the chemical transformation, the hotter the reaction.

One by one 50 musical acts -- that's right, more than 4 dozen -- alighted Tobacco Road's upstairs stage from 9:30 p.m. until past 3:30 a.m. for this starry-eyed, six-hour extravaganza. The show's loving creator was Jeff Rollason, musical son of former Miami City Manager Frank Rollason. Once known as the Space Cowboy, Rollason shines on with a simpler moniker: Jeff. His three parades in 1999 will go down in Miami's local rock history, perhaps, as a trio of shooting asteroids near the end of the first millennium. With a cosmic magnetism few possess, Jeff attracted almost everyone in town who fancies himself or herself a rocker. Not only did he convince them to show up, but to limit themselves to just one song (with a few exceptions). Onetime Holy Terror frontman Rob Elba, perhaps conscientiously, preferred to fill most of his precious moments yappin' between the clappin', reinforcing the notion that although rock and roll will never die, it is tough for even the most persistent souls to make a living at it. Happy to see so many old friends in the room, Elba nevertheless lamented, "How many of us have really made serious money doing this? I mean serious money?" No one listening above the din offered any names. "Either we all really suck," Elba continued, "or life is not fair." One comrade in guitars yelled, "Those two possibilities are not mutually exclusive!" In sum 'twas a memorable night in a roomful of wistful, whimsical musicians, without whom the live rock scene in Miami would fade to dark like a white dwarf burning out over the dark side of the moon.

Musicians around town often complain that Miami's reputation as little more than an international playground makes it difficult for them to play styles that depart from the tourist-oriented mainstream. It's certainly true in the local jazz scene, a genre that has a tough time, commercially speaking, almost anywhere in America. All of which makes Steve Malagodi's long-running The Modern School of Modern Jazz and More such a treasure. This two-hour smorgasbord of avant-garde artists following their muses (wherever they may take them) isn't just a great radio show by Miami standards; it's a great radio show, period. In fact you'll be hard-pressed to find many of the jazz staples regularly programmed here -- from seminal Art Ensemble of Chicago cuts to the latest from Ken Vandermark -- on the FM dial anywhere else in the nation. Sure the witching-hour time slot (Saturdays from midnight to 2:00 a.m.) isn't always convenient, but it does foster the illusion that you've stumbled across some wonderful radio secret, perhaps being broadcast from an offshore ship straight into your living room.

With WDNA-FM's Steve Radzi laying his Reggae Beat to rest after nearly twenty years, the Caribbean radio crown safely belongs to Clint O'Neil, who has provided the tropical soundtrack of choice for night owls since 1979. Aside from those gravel-voiced Bob Marley-show IDs (recorded back in the late Seventies, when Marley frequently dropped by the studio for some hangtime with O'Neil), what raises this program above the Jamaican-centered competition on several local pirate stations is its unabashed variety. Tuesday through Friday from 1:00 to 5:00 a.m., and Saturday from 1:00 to 7:00 a.m., you'll hear the latest dancehall out of Kingston, but O'Neil is just as likely to launch into a set of vintage roots reggae -- not to mention soca, calypso, or any of the other island music that gives this late-night treasure its apt name.

Delia's arrival in Miami one year ago is the stuff of fairy tales. Once upon a time on a tropical island, there was a lovely young woman with a voice like a precious instrument. She sang so beautifully that in 1991 she won the prestigious OTI prize for Latin music, awarded by Ibero-American Television. But the island's evil dictator did not like her winning song, "Si Todos Saben de Ti," about a man whose bad deeds everyone knows. After barring her from radio and television, the dictator banished her to Belize. Like magic, a cousin from Florida found her there, singing and tending bar in an obscure hotel. Being a kind man with a considerable fortune made in construction, he brought Delia, her family, and her band to Miami. He bought a nightclub on Miami Beach, so the group would have a place to play. Now Delia's versatile voice enchants audiences in venues all over town. She belts out salsa and Cuban country at her cousin's club, the Mojito Room. She gives thanks to her saint, Babalu Aye, at the Fontainebleau's Club Tropigala. And she serenades quiet romantics with trova and feeling at the Coral Way club Radical. Her technical virtuosity and easygoing stage manner ensure her listeners get an earful of happily ever after.

After watching Trick Daddy's last album, www.thug.com, go gold, and seeing his leering mug plastered all over MTV, the Box, and BET, it's safe to say Miami's hip-hop scene has definitely found life after Luke. Not that Trick Daddy himself sounds too happy about his newfound fame and fortune: On his most recent release, Book of Thugs, when he's not snapping at so-called friends and lovers looking for a free ride on his coattails, he's railing at America at large for its unwillingness to see members of the black community as anything beyond subhuman, no matter how high on the socioeconomic ladder they may climb. He's not exactly breaking any new ground here (no less than three of the album's songs feature the word 'ho in the title), but as long as he keeps setting his gripes and fierce tales of ghetto-ology to these infectiously head-nodding grooves and post-bass beats, we're more than happy to stifle any wishes for a kinder, gentler Trick Daddy.

Among the warehouses just west of Biscayne Boulevard and north of the Design District lives birdman (a.k.a. Sean Gould). Since graduating in 1987 from Clemson University with an English degree, the six-foot-four blond-haired Gould has been honing the art of what he calls "urban pioneering." What this amounts to: moving into a blighted or barren city landscape and launching a homegrown rock club. The latest incarnation is the musical compound he now inhabits at 6720 NE Fourth Ave. He calls it birdneststudio. Since December 1999 Gould has been manning the mixing board and playing MC during live recording sessions of local rock bands at the warehouse. Birdneststudio is at once a recording facility, a rehearsal space, a live venue, and a home. Gould got the impresario bug while working with old-school production and engineering legend Tom Dowd, whom he met during a 1995 recording project in Miami. With area rock venues in short supply, birdman's base of operations keeps the embers of local talent smoldering.

In a city of conga players, bell clangers, and maracas shakers, Brazilian percussionist Claudio Silva stands apart. The largest country in Latin America, Brazil also boasts the greatest number of percussion instruments, from the Amazonian rattle to the booming surdo of the samba schools. Silva dominates them all. The versatile musician got his start at the age of twelve, playing Afro-Brazilian folk music in his native Rio de Janeiro. Since then he has been an important figure on the Brazilian bossa nova and jazz scene in the United States, recording with heavyweights such as Bob Moses, David Byrne, John Zorn, and Gil Santos. He lends his talented hands to Miami musicians Angela Patua and Orlando Landinho when not touring with his own jazz ensemble, named for the famous Brazilian tamborim player Esgoleba. Silva came to the United States in 1978, playing regularly in clubs like the Blue Note in New York City and Café Brasil in New Orleans before settling permanently in Miami in 1994. His accomplishments in jazz have not taken him away from the more popular traditions. He founded the first samba school in the United States in New York City's Lower East Side and this past April debuted with a new samba band, So Samba, at the Carna Bay Brazilian festival at Bayfront Park.

Once again Rat Bastard's cacophonous collective Laundry Room Squelchers are tops in Miami noise. Not that there aren't other noise artists doing notable things, such as Monotract, which performed to a packed house with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore at the Knitting Factory in New York City. But no one wants to destroy rock and roll more than Rat Bastard and his pack of merry Squelchers. And this year the crew has done wonders to bring its special brand of musical deconstruction to the public. Not only do the Squelchers continue to hold court at Churchill's Hideaway every Thursday night (where Rat has produced noise under one moniker or another for nearly a decade and a half), but they also released a new disc, Drunker Than Pollard. Named in tribute to Guided by Voices frontman and Bastard buddy Robert Pollard, the CD-ROM album is a subtle 36 hours (that's right, a day and a half) of noise. If that weren't enough, Rat showcases some of the strangest sounds ever broadcast from midnight to 2:00 a.m. each Sunday during eyeQradio.com's Laundry Room show. The generous Bastard wanted to share his "music" firsthand with the rest of the nation, so recently the Squelchers (all six guitarists and a percussionist) embarked on a two-week tour, clearing bars and shattering eardrums coast to coast.

Since 1989 the "mystic thunder" of Loray Mistik has boomed all over town. Led by Papaloko (Jude Thegenus), the self-crowned king of vodou pop, this ten-piece band mixes traditional vodou rhythms with West African percussion, rock and roll, blues, and hip-hop. A painter, political commentator, and cultural promoter as well as band leader, Thegenus instituted the full-moon drumming circle on Miami Beach in 1992. His Papaloko persona joined the Drum Society to release the independently produced CD Full Moon Energy in 1996, a haunting assortment of West African rhythms from Yorubaland. With Loray Mistik Papaloko released Ti Moun Yo in 1998, a collection of politically inflected tunes addressing issues ranging from the plight of children in Haiti to police brutality against black men in the United States. The hardest-working band in the Haitian roots business, Loray Mistik is a festival favorite, playing at events from Metrozoo's Feast with the Beasts to Calle Ocho to a roots fest in Trinidad. Their righteous rasin sound currently reverberates on weekend nights through the elegantly revamped Power Studios.

Principal singer/songwriter Todd Thompson and his bandmates guitarist Sean Edelson, drummer Ari Schantz, and bassist Brad Berman maintain a busy schedule performing their insightful tunes, an array of pleasant rock melodies combined with deft lyric writing. A favorite among South Florida's live-music fans, the foursome emerged victorious against several other local groups in the Lucky Strike Band-to-Band Combat competition recently held in Miami. Listen to their debut CD Greetings from Lemon City. Songs such as the up-tempo "Killing Mr. Watson," the jazzy "I'm Okay," and the moving ballad "No Roof But Heaven" will climb out of the stereo and give you instant insight as to why the Bomb is a blast of a pop outfit.

It was 1997 and the lawn around the cosmic house of rock was shaggy and rife with worn-out musical monikers. But bassist and songwriter Chris DeAngelis (formerly of The No, Raw B. Jae and The Liquid Funk, and The Whistling Tin Heads) was determined to find a fresh one for a new ensemble. He had his work cut out for him. Sharp and focused as a machete blade, he mowed through hundreds of band names, maybe more. Our rockological botanist then painstakingly classified the specimens into lexicological piles. There were bands named after colors, numbers, ordinary objects, historical events, and famous people. Others derived from puns or double-entendres. Some contained the words band or brothers or even deliberate misspellings. And there were many more. With the yard thus denuded into a tabula rasalike state, he began to dig and soon struck pay dirt. "We wanted a name that was bombastic yet self-deprecating, with slight comic-book-hero overtones," DeAngelis explains. "It needed to be a name that reflected the humorous, offbeat attitude of the songs we play." He also wanted the first word to begin with A, "because when folks go to a record store, they usually start browsing at the beginning of the alphabet." He notes one downside to the band's nona-syllabic handle: "Drunk people sometimes have trouble remembering it."

How the planet's greatest living Latin-jazz flutist made it in and out of town with barely a passing notice is one of those mysteries peculiar to South Florida. Indeed late this past winter Dave Valentin, woodwind-player extraordinaire, ascended the stage of Miami Beach's Van Dyke Café for two nights of soul-altering performances. During the February 27 and February 28 evening gigs, Valentin's musicianship propelled local talents Don Wilner (bass), James Martin (drums), and Mike Orta (piano) to higher levels of play. Switching back and forth between a variety of different flutes, both wooden and metallic, the Puerto Rican Bronx native offered his audience something closer to a quasi-religious cleansing than a passive listening experience. Valentin, who incorporated Afro-Cuban Yoruba chants to his introductions of classics like Mongo Santamaria's "Afro-Blue," whipped the typically sedate Van Dyke crowd into a whooping and hollering frenzy.

Miami: heat, entropy, and the concomitant disintegration of form. We love it. Want to love it more? Try a little dramatic tension. Have some bona fide sonic structure with your sweltering decomposition, and meet the people who can give it to you. For the steamy drive home, tune in to WTMI's The Open Road, weekday afternoons 3:00 until 7:00 p.m. Hosted by baritone vocalist Mark Hart, it is the show to put on to keep a cool and thoughtful head, especially if your air conditioner is busted. Broadcast from various locations about town, the Road not only doles out a daily dose of the tradition's staples, it also showcases interviews with South Florida's classical talent. Deborah Voigt, soprano for the Florida Grand Opera; Judy Drucker, director of the Concert Association of Florida; and world-famous baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky have been recent guests.

The shrill whistle, the rumble of the engine rolling down the tracks. It's 8:00 on a Sunday night. Ted Grossman takes his usual seat as conductor of the Night Train on WLRN. As he has every week for 25 years, Grossman leads a four-hour journey through his deep collection of vintage jazz recordings. There's no chronological restriction to what he'll play -- he might spin a tune from the 1920s followed by a track released in 1989 -- but WWII-era music dominates. Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and perhaps Bing Crosby as Dick Tracy in a radio play culled from Grossman's archive of Armed Forces Radio Services broadcasts. In his distinctive foggy voice, and with his awesome selection of crooners and swing stylists, Grossman reminds his loyal listeners that not all musical memories in this town emanate from Havana.

Whether playing a Gershwin song or Madonna's latest hit, pianist and singer Nathaniel Reed is always in tune with his audience. Perched atop the one-foot-high stage at the Piccadilly, Reed's baby grand piano faces the restaurant's main entrance. The entertainer, who can be heard weeknights from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m., often punctuates his many sets with greetings to new and familiar faces. No musician in Miami is more adept at handling a request than Reed, whose playlist pretty much spans all of the Twentieth Century. His musical experience also is wide-ranging. Although not inclined to speak of it, Reed is a polished veteran who has sung with Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, and other notable talents. That breezy chatter you will hear between songs, accompanied by an irrepressible Louis Armstrong-like enthusiasm, is the product of years of hard work as an L.A. studio musician and a brief stint as a Caribbean cruise-ship piano man. Many is the patron moved to dance when Reed digs into his stockpile of R&B classics and begins swaying his head from side to side while stomping his feet to the rhythm. Saturday nights, beginning at 7:30 p.m., catch him at da Ermanno ristorante, 6927 Biscayne Blvd.

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 has a festive, nightclubby quality all its own, and it just keeps getting hotter (sometimes literally; the AC is erratic). Monday through Thursday a large and varied crowd descends on the hall, everyone from senior citizens to families to middle-school students, though the 20- to 30-year-old crowd dominates. The sheer energy generated by hundreds of slaves to the salsa rhythm is irresistible. Some people skip the classes and instead hang out, flirt, or practice moves with a partner. Between classes (three levels, each one hour long, beginning at 7:00 p.m.) the DJ spins a "practice song," and a gigantic circle of couples fills the entire main dance floor, so big the instructors have to call out the turns on a microphone. Oscar D'Leon blares from the speakers, and pretty soon everyone's in a whirl -- dile que no, dame una, hips going and fondillos shaking, abrázala, abanico, arms rising and feet pivoting, montaña, balsero, and sometimes the lights will dim and the tacky disco balls will turn. For seven dollars (price per lesson) you get all this, and you might even learn the paseo por el parque.

Turntablist extraordinaire and reigning DMC champ DJ Craze dropped by the home studio of Edgar Farinas (a.k.a. Push Button Objects). The end result is this abstract meeting of the hip-hop minds: an odd blend of off-kilter beats suffused in a crunchy timbre that attains a head-nodding forward motion almost in spite of itself. With so many elements floating in and out of the mix (a windshield-vibrating bass line, a disembodied bellowing Guru vocal, Craze's own frenetic vinyl scratching), songs like "Behavior" and "I Can't Understand You" shouldn't cohere. But like the best experimental electronic sounds coming out of South Florida these days, Farinas and Craze don't just reveal their hometown influences; they transcend them.

"I gave you Quaaludes/I held your cock/We spoke in diphthongs/ Clubnite!" Update the drug of choice in this bitter early Eighties anthem from West Palm Beach punkettes Sheer Smegma, and it's clear some things haven't changed in South Florida's nightclub scene. "Clubnite" is just one of dozens of singles released by Floridian punk outfits in the darkest days of the Reagan era, artifacts from a time when looking weird and sounding weirder were solid bets for getting your ass kicked, rather than being a good musical career move. Some mysterious soul over at the La Republica Libertariano de Florida label (don't bother looking for a phone number) has thoughtfully gathered up twenty of these forgotten obscurities, blown the dust from their grooves, and lovingly pressed them up as a bootleg album under the appropriate moniker Killed by Florida. Appropriate because, with the notable exception of the Eat and the Trash Monkeys (whose members can still be found haunting the stage at Churchill's) and Charlie Pickett (last spotted practicing -- ahem -- law), most of the bands compiled here literally have been destroyed by their home state, their members missing in action. But boy did they know how to kick up a racket. Whether you hear the Front's "Immigration Report" as a finely nuanced satire on the Mariel boatlift or as puerile thrashing; whether you hear the Essential's "Turn Off Your Radio" as a trenchant critique of blandness on the FM dial or as an anguished cry for a skilled mental-health professional, it's hard not to want to throw on a battered leather jacket and hit the pit -- at least for old time's sake.

Whatever you do, don't refer to saxophonist Keshavan Maslak as an avant-garde musician. "You know what an avant-garde musician is?" scoffs Maslak. "It's somebody who's starving!" That may be the reason Maslak finally bailed on his adopted home of New York City in 1986 -- despite a résumé of playing that read like a who's who of that city's left-field music scene, jamming with figures ranging from John Zorn and Philip Glass to Rashied Ali and Sam Rivers -- and headed for South Florida. To signify the break, he even adopted a new name (the purposely show-bizesque Kenny Millions). Still, Manhattan's loss is our gain, and you can now easily find Maslak ensconced in the corner of his own pan-Asian restaurant, Hollywood's Sushi Blues Café, happily honking away in a blues mode. For an earful of Maslak's famed outside jazz playing, be prepared to travel: He reserves that facet of his muse primarily for out-of-town gigs and high-profile European festivals. "People come to my restaurant to eat and relax," he wryly explains, not to turn their brains inside out. For that the curious are advised to take a listen to last year's Without Kuryokhin, a live tribute to departed friend and master pianist Sergey Kuryokhin. Recorded in Russia alongside Japanese turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, the album showcases the two musicians bouncing ideas back and forth, trading squealing licks and trilling notes, and ultimately expanding the boundaries of jazz and (better whisper it) avant-garde sonic exploration. It's thrilling stuff: challenging at times, never academic, always engaging. Maybe one day this massive talent will give audiences in his own back yard a little taste.

The fallen in search of a strong dose of that old-time religion should skedaddle posthaste to a particular stretch of strip mall in Hialeah. It's there on most Saturday afternoons, near the corner of East Tenth Avenue and NW 62nd Street, outside the Flamingo Plaza, that you'll find James Kendrick. Respectfully bow your head as he straps on his accordion, assembles his back-up singers, and then proceeds to summon the Holy Spirit. Musicologists might scratch their heads over just where Kendrick picked up his blissfully singular take on the gospel (the accordion isn't exactly a staple of the genre), though a looping flourish with which he often ends songs sounds vaguely New Orleans-ish. When Kendrick hits his stride, however, forcefully pumping away and soulfully imploring, "I want to talk to you, Lord!" the only real response is: "Amen, brother!" Should a particularly loud truck rumble by, well, just sing along a little louder. And, hey, don't forget the collection plate.

Latin rock veteran Pepe Alva and his band Alma Raymi ("soul celebration" in Quechuan) spent much of the past year in the studio, working on the follow-up album to 1997's Pa' Mostrarte Mi Amor (MATT Entertainment). With a new disc tentatively titled Comprometida (Engaged), Alva makes a bid for the big time, hiring top-flight producers and stellar New York session musicians to bolster his local six-piece ensemble. On Comprometida the rock-and-Andean-rhythm fusion Alva and his brother Carlos have experimented with since 1990 is carried into the mainstream. "Our music has a little more attitude now," Alva says. "At the same time, it's a little more commercial." While many of Alva's tunes could be anybody's altrock, other songs emanate a distinctive sound thanks to Peruvian instruments such as the quena, the Andean flute; charango, the world's smallest guitar; and zampoña, bamboo panpipes, which the Incas used as a form of communication. Listen for the new songs at Latin-rock hot spots the Grill and Club Millennium.

Chances are if you've heard any of the big-name Jamaican toasters or crooners in concert here, then you've heard Hal Anthony and his Millennium Band backing them up. The ensemble of choice for visiting vocalists holds up quite well on its own. Playing regularly for the past two years at South Florida venues such as Bayside in Miami and Alligator Alley in Sunrise, the six-piece outfit brings on real roots reggae with two keyboards, drums, bass, and two guitars. The group mixes soul-stirring original tunes like the praise song "Blessings" with innovative arrangements of reggae standards. A recent tour took the Millennial sound to 44 U.S. states and a number of Caribbean islands. The recent release of their CD Cool It means fans still can groove to the righteous rockers even when the band is out of town. Always true to the roots philosophy, the members of the Millennium Band say their motivation to play comes not from money but from love for their listeners, which is why we love them, too.

While the rest of the free world consumed itself in the anticipatory hype over Star Wars: Episode One -- The Phantom Menace late last spring, the precocious members of the New World Symphony staged a more twisted salute to the glories of Chewbacca: an opera. Transposing sections of John Williams's original Star Wars score on to their own chosen instrumentation, the ever-so-proper stage of the Lincoln Theatre suddenly became host to a wide range of oboe-playing aliens and a very imposing Darth Vader (no Michael Tilson Thomas jokes, please). Frankly by the time the NWS got to the "death star" scene, it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the audience or the musicians themselves. One thing's for sure, after watching a brace of finely choreographed bassoon-blowing Stormtroopers bring down the house (while gliding on rollerskates no less), anything further from George Lucas is bound to be anticlimactic.

As South Beach slowly filled with New Year's Eve revelers looking to ring in the millennium underneath a glitter ball, a far more curious spectacle was unfolding deep within the Everglades swamp. There, on a swath of semidry land inside the Seminole Indian Reservation, nearly 80,000 folks from across America converged for an old-fashioned campout-cum-rock fest, complete with an on-site radio station to remind them not to feed the alligators. The soundtrack (and the magnetic draw that saw a virtual city appear overnight on a scrubby field) was the little cult phenomenon that could, Vermont's premier improvisatory neohippie outfit, Phish. While news choppers buzzed overhead and newspaper critics scratched their brows, Phish's devout fans gleefully settled in for two days of Little Feat-style guitar play and whimsical freeform jamming. A Porta Potti even was rolled out onto the stage to enable a midnight-to-dawn uninterrupted set, a supreme test of endurance. After all, what better way was there for a jam band to properly christen the century turnover? Pundits may have argued over the concert's cultural significance and made tiresome Woodstock references, but Phish's flock was much more concerned with boogying.

Live blues seems rather common in South Florida clubs. Blues on the radio is another story. Jazz DJs such as WDNA's Frank Consola, WLRN's Len Pace, and WTMI's China Valles occasionally spin the blues, but full shows are sparse. WDNA's weekly program Portraits in Blue is a bright star in a dark sky. Portraits (Monday from 11:00 a.m. to noon) devotes its entire hour to a single artist's music. Brief, often poignant, biographical information about the artist also is included throughout a set of tunes spanning the musician's career. Informative and entertaining, Portraits is produced in New Jersey. Too bad. Let's hope more local radio programmers take note and follow suit with shows of their own.

Saturday night, eyes bleary, rain slapping hard on your car. You turn up your radio to hear her silky narration, the aural equivalent of hot chocolate during a snowstorm. Although Fields, who studied broadcasting and journalism in college, makes her living as an Associated Press reporter, she confesses, "Radio was always my love." Since 1995 on WLRN, her sultry jazz selections and intimate intonations have conveyed that romance, wooing listeners and providing a cozy respite from the elements. Hear her 8:00 p.m. until midnight Saturdays.

Many a fan of local Latin pop band Rock'n Son have heard tunes in the group's repertoire played by other musicians. That's because the band's keyboardist and writer, Raul del Sol, still has a soft spot for songs he has peddled to other artists. During Rock'n Son's live sets, which begin at 10:00 Thursday evenings at Starfish, you might hear ballads like "Encuentro" and "Diferencias," both recorded on Spanish-language rocker Amaury Gutierrez's latest album. Francisco Cespedes, Chayanne, and even Jamaican pop sensation Beenie Man also have tapped del Sol's gifts for composition and arrangement. While love often is del Sol's subject, his music recalls the confections of the troubadour-style Cuban nueva trova movement of the Sixties. He writes polished, apolitical folk rock with a tropical feel.

Few local bands were ever more misunderstood, or more hated in certain quarters, than Harry Pussy, whose squalling feedback-drenched performances managed to clear rooms across Miami for a memorable chunk of the mid-Nineties. The more this no-wave trio was feted elsewhere -- saluted onstage by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, spotlighted by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore during his guest-VJ slot on MTV -- the more South Floridians scratched their heads and passed the Tylenol. Which may have been apropos. As the band attacked its instruments during (interminable for some) fifteen-minute sets, the message often seemed to be: "We suffered for our art; now it's your turn!" Harry Pussy launched its final sonic assault in May 1997 at Churchill's. That parting shot has been enshrined in its entirety on this posthumously released live album. Aside from capturing the outfit in all its shrieking glory, the record also serves as a welcome reminder that not everybody's creative response to our burg's fabled sun and surf is "Don't worry. Be happy."

In 1979 Victor Manuel Casanova left Peru with a group of musicians for a tour of the United States that never ended. Over the past twenty years, this Afro-Peruvian singer, guitarist, and caja or "box" player, has performed for Miami's ever-growing Peruvian population. A petite man with dark skin and a powerful voice, Chocolatin often exclaims with pride for his race and national origin. He learned to sing and play largely from his family during childhood, beginning a career that has spanned nearly three decades. He has mastered an array of international standards and Peruvian favorites, including "La Flor de Canela" ("Cinnamon Flower") by the Andean nation's most beloved composer Chabuca Grande. The rich tones of Chocolatin can be heard every Saturday at the Peruvian Grill in Kendall.

Some say the Bahamians built Miami. Early immigrants, they laid down the first roads and then laid out the towels and sheets for the area's first tourists. The drums and horns of Bahamian junkanoo music certainly have marched willy-nilly through the Miami soundscape since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In Overtown Bahamian migrants founded the Sunshine Junkanoo Band in 1957 under the direction of Bruce Beneby. In 1993 former Sunshiners Langston Longley, David Dean, and Eddie Clark recruited more recent arrivals to create the Bahamas Junkanoo Review, which invades public school classrooms with whistles and bells, plays for tourists at hotels, and livens up nearly every local parade. The tireless Longley and his whistle-blowing, foot-stomping crew move back and forth between Miami and our nearest neighbors, taking with them the most brilliant costumes and latest Bahamian beats.

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 through the trials of the Marquis de Sade. It's a play of ideas, driving home the notion that you can't get rid of art you don't like merely by destroying its author. But it's also a play of images. In the exquisitely designed Florida Stage production, Jim Fulton's lighting design reproduced the Marquis's naughty writing as luminescent streaks across the theater walls. Allen D. Cornell's inventive turntable set gave rise to multiple arresting scenes, not the least of which was the yanking out of the Marquis's tongue. Suzette Pare's costumes smartly outfitted the small-minded denizens of nineteenth-century France as well as the increasingly-more-disrobed Sade. And Scott Burgess's sound design created an asylumwide orgy we could "see," though it happened off-stage. At the helm was artistic director Louis Tyrrell, whose fluid hand and wicked sense of humor proved to be assets the Marquis would have loved.

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 delivered a performance that lived up to Vreeland's motto: "Give 'em what they didn't know they wanted." Vreeland's life story garnered 1996 Drama Desk and Obie awards for creators Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson when Wilson starred in it. Elizabeth Ashley did the honors when the national tour passed through South Florida in 1998. Nonetheless Delgado, a genius at transforming herself, turned the tastemaker and long-time Vogue editor into something of her own (and director Joseph Adler's) making. Even the actress's elegant, oversize hands conspired to become a perfect physical match for Vreeland's elegant, larger-than-life personality. It was a performance that reached out and grabbed us by our lapels.

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 have proven to be a wonderfully hassle-free way to navigate the often congested streets of South Beach. And a good thing was recently improved: In April the routes were expanded to cover more city blocks north of the original South Pointe-to-Seventeenth Street loop. Plus the fleet grew from seven to eleven vehicles, and payment options were increased (you can now use your parking debit card to pay the 25-cent fare). The shuttles are completely electric, with propane-powered air-conditioning units. "We are the only all-electric transit system in the country," exclaims Judy Evans, executive director of Miami Beach Transportation Management Association. "We've become a model for other cities."

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 beams, a wide expanse of mirror, and an enormous floor. Offerings range from staples such as ballet, modern, and jazz to West African, hip-hop, contact improvisation, and the posture-enhancing Pilates technique. During off-hours In Motion instructors and local choreographers use the studio as a rehearsal space for upcoming performances, commercials, and music videos.

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 this town knows, the real Miami is not South Beach glitz but rather a gritty Hialeah warehouse, like the one from which Channel 41 continues to broadcast handcrafted, exceedingly local, often wonderful programming, absent the self-absorbed fanfare. A Oscuras pero Encendidos (In the Dark but Turned On) is a typical success story. A riskier, sloppier, often more fun variant of the Late Show with David Letterman, A Oscuras proves that young affluent Latins will watch Spanish-language television. With puppets and spokesmodels and strippers and an opera-singing, keyboard-playing sidekick, A Oscuras is fun, irreverent, and perfectly Miami. WAMI should take notice -- if WAMI is still on the air.

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.

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 course, is that Wynalda is known to be weak in the knees -- literally. His multiple surgeries and lengthy recoveries cause some fans concern. But we're confident his joints will not only survive the season, they'll see us through victory after victory.

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 another time that is no less valid today: "Under here/are the runaway slaves, and the Indians./On their sides, listening./White now. Almost completely white."

Or in "The Shell": "We hadn't seen a shell on this beach for years./If an Indian had come by/it would have been no less strange -- /and we would give him the shell/and he would give us the beach/and we would think/for a while we owned it."

Even when Berke is not speaking directly about Florida, she evokes it when penning lines like this: "How lovely, to lie under the/rushing out of the leaves/of the mangos, to nibble the grass/even if it's bitter, and look up at the stars/even if there are none...." Berke's Miami is the true, original homestead, just as she is a poet who remains true to herself and the art of poetry.

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" dolphins are scattered over the floor and make for great climbing toys. Go during any holiday season, and the playground is complemented by a miniature train the kids love to ride (for $1.50 a shot). All the romping and riding may not be restful for you, but for toddlers it's a good break from boring shopping.

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 her noon talk show Polos Opuestos, one of the few Cuban-radio talk shows in which individuals on opposite sides of a controversy go head-to-head without getting into a screaming match. Where else can you hear Sylvia Iriondo, president of Mothers Against Repression, have a sensible discussion with Marcelino Millares from the Cuban Center for Democracy? Salazar guides the live discussions with sometimes slanted questions, yet nonetheless gives both sides equal time to respond. Even comments from callers are handled reasonably by Salazar.

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.

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 he flies around the rink, firing stunning slap shots into the net, it's impossible not to recall that the Panthers acquired him in exchange for ... Ed Jovanovski. Swapping a problematic defenseman for Bure is the best trade the Panthers will ever make. It's the best trade any front office in any sport could possibly make. As a front-office maneuver, the trade rivals any of the athletic miracles Bure pulls off on the ice.

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 Broadcasting Corporation (HBC) acquired WQBA and three other Miami stations -- have by now resulted in a much more pleasant listening experience. Yes, it's still a hard-line exile station at heart, and Ninoska Perez Castellon, la cubanaza herself, is still holding forth on Ninoska a la Una, comparing Fidel to Hitler (she's good enough to get away with it). But at least you don't have to hear this all day long, as you do on that bastion of bombast, Radio Mambí, which HBC bought along with WQBA but left untouched. Veteran Cuban-American broadcasters Agustin Acosta and Bernadette Pardo remain popular news-talk hosts on WQBA, but other personalities who never even mention Castro have been well received. For example the "Plant Doctor," Jesus Ramos, provides excellent gardening advice. The sports coverage is good, too, including but not limited to live broadcasts of Marlins and Dolphins games.

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 photos of folkloric dancers and musicians cover the walls, while frequent readings and panel discussions at the cultural center upstairs stimulate the intellect. With more than 3000 titles in French, Kreyol, and English, Libreri Mapou has been the center of Haitian literary culture in Miami since 1986. For those looking to learn any of the above languages, Mapou has a large section dedicated to dictionaries and grammar books. Newspapers from Port-au-Prince, Paris, Miami, and New York City keep readers up to date on the latest news from the island and across the Haitian diaspora. Sociological studies and historical tomes take the long view on Haiti's often turbulent society. More fanciful readers might turn to the book of folk tales retold in Kreyol by bookstore owner Jan Mapou, or leaf through one of the many naughty novels on the front table by Haitian-Canadian Dany Laferriere, author of How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. No wonder so many of the most creative minds in Miami make Libreri Mapou a frequent stop.

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 between Havana and Miami, the play stakes a claim in the dramatic territory of Samuel Beckett, with its evocative language, startling visual imagery, and existential concerns. Cruz's portrayal of the trio that escapes from Cuba is both literal and metaphorical. Less a political play than a statement about yearning, A Bicycle Country is capable of transcending the narrow politics of 1999 and 2000 and becoming a work that can shed light on any group of desperate people. Which is exactly what great art is supposed to do.

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 Sally Bowles in New Theatre's I Am a Camera, Morgan's onstage time clocked in at less than fifteen minutes. Nonetheless from her first entrance, she carried a universe of subtext with her. On a larger scale, Morgan's ensemble role in One Flea Spare, also at New Theatre, demonstrated her ability to hoist an entire play, even one as prickly, poetic, impressionistic, and director-driven as this Obie winner. Courageous and inventive, she consistently reaches into dangerous territory with her acting, leaving safer routes for less-daring performers. And that's always a thrill to watch.

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 "mini-Cooperstown." Hanging on the walls of his Westchester home are autographed photos of each and every baseball hall-of-famer. Mounted on plaques are images of America's best players and obscure Cuban peloteros from the island's professional leagues of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, each emblazoned with the player's name, the seasons he played, and his achievements -- from the incomparable Sandy Koufax to that master of versatility Martin Dihigo, the only Cuban inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. Monfort's collection is a multiethnic treasure trove of rarities, some of which still are boxed up in his closet. He owns a 1932 photo of a young Joe DiMaggio eating spaghetti at the kitchen table, and the wedding portrait of famed Cuban baseball manager Adolfo Luque. In Miami baseball circles, the 70-year-old Monfort is considered both wise man and historian. He says he's just a fan. Although he does lend items to special exhibitions, Monfort's collection remains private, for the time being. Maybe someday we'll have a Cooperstown by the bay.

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 University of Virginia), articulate (a rarity among anchors in these parts), and quick-witted (even rarer). When Rae joined the station in 1995, it was immediately apparent she was someone who could make an impact. The only thing standing in her way were the pinheads who manage Channel 4. They refused to promote her. Only after she made it clear she was ready to leave the station did they move her into the anchor slot with Steve Wolford, a pleasant enough fellow but hardly a reason to stay up late. Rae, on the other hand, is more than enough reason to lose a little sleep.

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 the right to drive up to Jacksonville and get punked. Remember that Chargers game where a crappy San Diego squad kept the Dolphins offense out of the end zone all afternoon, but couldn't stop Mare from dropping 4 field goals on them? Remember how he set an NFL record during the regular season with 39 field goals? Mare is a restricted free agent. Let's hope Dave Wannstedt keeps him around as an insurance policy during Year One of the Fiedler/Huard Era. Three points are better than none, after all.

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 floor. His shot blocking remains incredible. And though he's a little undersize to play center, he can use his foot speed to drive on bigger, slower guys while his strength allows him to hang with them on defense. He's really, really good. Unfortunately he can't win a championship all by himself. But then, neither could Michael Jordan.

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 (Irene), and Channel 10's first-string weatherman will still tell you exactly what you need to know without embellishment or hand-wringing. Last hurricane season he literally was calm before and during the storm, especially in the category 5 hysteria surrounding Hurricane Floyd. And he isn't doing a smarmy empathy act like some weatherdudes we know. A veteran of 21 years in South Florida and a certified meteorologist, he's always the consummate pro: Noe glitz, Noe nonsense, Noe contest.

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 and skilled healers who incorporate conventional and alternative medicine within both Eastern and Western traditions. Acupuncture physician and herbalist Lori Alexandra Bell received her early training in China and has wide experience diagnosing nonphysical causes of illness and treating immune-system diseases. Santiago Sifre, acupuncture physician and herbalist, specializes in pain management, sports injuries, and neurological disorders. Cora Lira is billed as a "holistic chiropractor," and her approach indeed goes deeper than spinal adjustments, even to the body's cellular memories. Lesley Anne Gilbert is a massage therapist who concentrates on deep-tissue massage for neuromuscular "re-education."

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 downing water. Kudos to the hotel's owners, the Rubell family, for deciding against stocking the tank with the other animals also known as sea horses -- walruses.

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 traffic in the wacky and disturbing, often inviting dancers and other conspirators to make this space more than just a gallery. The outdoor stairs leading from the exhibition space on the ground floor to the performance loft upstairs make the surrounding neighborhood part of the show. As more conservative elements attempt to make Calle Ocho and its environs ever friendlier for tourists, count on lab6 to keep the street alienating -- but in a good way.

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 sirens and snakewomen that float in an ethereal sea of green across the atrium above their heads. Earlier this year art enthusiasts who visited the two-day show in the now-demolished Espirito Santo Bank building on Brickell found a strong political statement among the sand and sequins of the Haitian-born artist's "INS cemetery." While Duval-Carrié plays an important role in populating Miami's public spaces with sensuous and socially significant images, his worldwide reputation brings much needed prestige to our local visual culture. In collections and exhibitions from Port-au-Prince to Paris, from São Paulo to New York, Duval-Carrié's body of work challenges the limiting characterization of Caribbean-influenced art as "primitive" or "naive" without ever losing sight of the profound resources provided him by Haitian history and popular culture.

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 floors and murals of roseate spoonbills, the other with a lofty ceiling and impressive fireplaces. If you're planning a medium-size wedding, reception, quince, or graduation party, this place beats the hell out of any top-of-the-strip-mall joint, and has more of a rustic, Old Florida touch than your fancy-schmantzy hotel ballrooms.

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 exile community, as well as Latin-American and European tourists. Did we say "drag queen?" Beg your pardon. Mariloly and entertainers of his ilk prefer to be called transformists or gender illusionists. However you refer to this dramatic form, Mariloly (actor Danilo Dominguez) is a powerhouse of honed talent. At the Teatro's "Midnight Follies," the cross-dressing review that runs Saturdays at midnight and Sundays at 9:15 p.m., he does a lot more than lip-synch his favorite tunes. As emcee he is as quick with a comeback as Don Rickles, yet as stylish in his delivery as Marlene Dietrich. Slightly bowed legs notwithstanding, Mariloly is always the woman Latin girls wish they could be.

"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 started." It's a database of every Catholic church in the United States, listing the times of every mass at each church, a map to the church, and a link to the church Website if there is one. Hummel's own site is as simple as a paper bag, yet his mission is increasingly challenging. After six years of operation, the database has grown to include 22,000 churches. Working out of his Key Largo home, Hummel and four volunteers make about 2000 changes to the database every month. "We get about 200,000 inquiries a year, so there is a need," he notes. "And an awful lot of nice kind words are showered down on us for doing it. So it has been worth it."

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 full of the fruits of one local rich-guy-collector's aggressive, Deco-tinged whimsy. Indeed at Micky Wolfson's Wolfsonian, the twelve-inch torpedo cigarette lighter sits not far from the obelisk celebrating the signing of the Uruguayan constitution, which is itself only a few steps from a poster circa 1938 celebrating "Modern German Architecture." The place is so charming it will surprise you at first, rattling your sense of humor and making you smile before you realize it is a rich and scholarly collection of grace and strength. It's a serious museum that focuses on international art, design, and propaganda during the period 1885-1945. But it's also a lot of fun, and that's practically un-American. More like South Floridian. More Miamian. (Note to the fellas: Ask the guards on the sixth floor to show you the giraffes and monkeys on display in the ladies' room; they'll escort you in.)

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 of two players in Donald Margulies' Collected Stories, a smaller, more intimate drama that showed off her style as a miniaturist. Her character, Ruth, is a middle-age college professor whose star is fading just as that of her protégé, Lisa, is on the rise. The play is not exactly subtle in the ways it deals with issues of artistic appropriation. Nesbit, on the other hand, is a master of small moments. In this performance, as usual, her brilliance shone through in her line readings, the precision of her inflections, the way her character, becoming increasingly ill, seemed to fade away in front of our eyes. For these reasons discerning theatergoers only want to see more of her.

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 use of colors," as she likes to say. She also is fond of expressionistic human figures, be they of paint, clay, or stone. Giant ceramic totem poles were among the items standing on the polished concrete floor earlier this year. The renderings inside her walls can range from photorealistic to Rothkoesque. How does she decide what works to display? "What I love," Facchini answers in her Portuguese-tinged English. She also favors "strong" works with intense emotion. In an exhibition titled "Everything but Modern," she assembled sculptures and paintings by artists working in two very different places: Bulgaria (Krum Damianov and Svetlin Russev) and South Beach (Gregory Herman, Robert Fitzgerald, and Seth Bernard Minkin). Despite the radical difference in location, some of the pieces were uncannily similar, as if their creators came from the same strange universe. This unusual geographical mix suggests dramatic possibilities for future shows. Facchini has the capability to bring in heavyweight artists from far away. Damianov, for example, was commissioned to do a large outdoor sculpture for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and the Bulgarian countryside bears many of his monumental creations. Unlike many local galleries presenting interesting art (such as Locust Projects, Dorsch Gallery, and lab6), you don't need an appointment at Facchini's 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 note of the mall anchors: NikeTown, GameWorks, the Virgin Records megastore that frequently hosts teen icons such as Ricky Martin and Britney Spears. Add it all together and it's practically impossible not to lose, um, we mean ditch, the kids for a few hours, if not permanently. Throw in some funds, maybe a roll of quarters, or hell, just relinquish the credit card and send those ever-growing feet to NikeTown, and you've bought yourself a free afternoon. What you do with it is up to you. But we wouldn't recommend dining at Sweet Donna's or Wilderness Grill, two eateries at which it's pretty darn difficult not to run into the very kids you just jettisoned.

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. Instead of continuing to ply his trade in a lower-echelon league, Askins decided simply to chill out in Miami. Why? Because he has a guaranteed 1.75 million clams coming in from the Heat this year, that's why. The New York Knicks offered him a ten-day contract at one point, but he turned it down. Who can blame him? Would you rather chase Latrell Sprewell for a week in practice or take lunch at Soyka with Johnny Dread -- and still get paid? Yeah, thought so.

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 breeding alligators since they were an endangered species. There was a time when owner John Hudson released the reptiles into the swamp when they were big enough to take care of themselves (say, three feet or so). Now that they've rebounded throughout Florida, alligators are bred here to be turned into tasty fried nuggets and expensive shoes, not to mention a tourist destination. Despite the commercial aspects of the place, it's still fascinating to tour the breeding ponds, filled with fourteen-footers, and visit the hatcheries and grow-out pens. The latter are where you'll find the wee ones, which have teeny teeth and are cute enough to briefly be considered as pets. Tamp down that urge, but do take the opportunity to plant one on the little smiley face, the only time you're likely to encounter a gator when it's safe to do so.

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 undiscovered master." And Bill Moyers described Shine's nonfiction narrative of his father's sudden illness and demise a "marvelous, moving, and memorable account of what is hard to explain and impossible to escape." Beyond compelling subject matter, it is deft storytelling with endearing lines like, "We both suffer from what I call Dick Van Patten disease, the most profound characteristics being a fat face and skinny legs," that draws readers into Shine's first book, which was featured on Public Radio International's This American Life this past January. It may seem irreverent to describe a book about a parent's death as entertaining, but as Shine notes in the epigraph (a quote from La Rouchefoucald): "One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun." Thus everything surrounding the pink elephant in the hospital room becomes a lightning rod for Shine's sidesplitting ("He looks like Neil Young going to an early-bird dinner....") and truthful ("A doctor's minute is the antithesis of a New York minute") observations about losing someone you love.

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 stereo is fine. It's just broadcasting the basso profundo voice of trusty disc jockey Freddy Cruz. Host of the station's nighttime love-song serenade The Quiet Storm, Cruz has been unleashing his sultry Spanish accent over the Hot 105 airwaves for the past fifteen years. Back in 1985 the show was heard 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. on weekdays. A loyal listening public has made the station number two in the market for the 25-to-54 age category, and now the people get five stormy hours of music per night during the week (8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.) and a special old-school edition on Sunday (8:00 to 11:00 p.m.). After a hard evening on the air, what's a radio personality to do? Why get a day job, of course! For a while Cruz's inimitable pipes could be heard in two languages. After a few years on Spanish-radio WCMQ-FM (92.3), he became the production director for the Spanish Broadcasting System, a local chain of FM radio stations. When does he sleep? He claims to get five hours per night. "People hear me on the radio so relaxed but I'm really hyper," he notes. "I like to stay busy. I like to work." Not that he has to do much of that when guiding his listeners through the storm. In 1985 he spun records on turntables, then moved on to using CDs and tapes. Now thanks to computers, music is brought forth at the touch of a button. Fine by Cruz, who gets more time to take on-air dedications, growl song titles, and chat with the folks at home. "I love it," says the deep-voiced DJ about his long-time job. "The listeners are so loyal. I talk to people who started listening fifteen years ago and now they have kids; some even have grandchildren. I feel like I'm in their living room. I'm part of their family."

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 made an easy transition to broadcasting. In 1988 he won an Emmy for his coverage of the Olympics in Seoul. He joined Channel 10 nearly eight years ago as the host of Sports Monday. Now as sports director and anchor, Cefalo's smooth delivery and wealth of experience have proven a boon to South Florida sports fans. Just as expected Cefalo brought the proper poignancy to Marino's departure without letting the team's management off the hook for sloppy handling of the transition.

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 here today and shut down by the Federal Communications Commission tomorrow, it's hard to discern just what is going on. But our antenna detects a trend, albeit nascent, toward purist piracy. We especially like the nighttime spinning on 101.9 FM, because the DJs on this frequency seem to be more interested in airing their beloved Haitian compas than getting people to show up at someone's dance party for ten bucks a head. Okay, once in a while the Kreyol-speaking announcers might plug an event or store, but they do so far less than our allegedly commercial-free public radio station, WLRN-FM (91.3), which runs full-fledged ads disguised as corporate underwriting. We've also witnessed such low-key pirates on 94.5 FM, where they let the hip-hop speak for itself without interruption, sometimes for hours at a time. It is our humble hope that other unlicensed broadcasters will stop squandering the chance to create a true alternative to the oppressive and unimpressive state of commercial radio in South Florida.

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 of times we've gotten out of a jam by giving a dear friend or relative the "Pig Face Specialty Lapel Pin" ($4.95) or the double-locking steel handcuffs ($18). As door prizes at dinner parties, we've often distributed wallet-size cards inscribed with the Pledge of Allegiance, room for a signature, and the phrase "I am a card-carrying American" (available in packs of 100 for only $5). Our favorite gift, though, is the "Honor Membership in the Citizens Task Force for Civil Defense Preparedness." It comes with a six-point star nestled in a black-leather wallet and has been issued "in response to the threat against our nation by terrorist states." From the brochure: "I am sure you are aware that Iraq has produced enough poison gas to kill every man, woman, and child on Earth! And that other nations are also involved in terrorist threats against the United States. In addition to our mission to aid the families of police officers killed in the line of duty, we also have as a mission to promote civil defense preparedness. The purpose of this membership star, identification card, and leather wallet is to identify members in good standing who, when called upon by local police, will offer their assistance in an emergency. From the simple task of making phone calls to people in need to offering aid in any natural or manmade disaster.... Understand that the badge does not imply or grant you any police powers. It certifies that you are an Honor Member who may be willing, if called upon by local police, to assist them in an emergency. (Most states, in fact, have laws that require a citizen, when called upon, to assist any peace officer in an emergency.) This star and wallet may help to identify you as a person willing to assist during such a time." The cost is only $75, and it comes with "a preaddressed enrollment in a course that we highly recommend: Emergency Response to Terrorism Self-Study. It is FREE and you can attain a certificate of training by completing the test at the end of the course."

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 fanatic, that would be Baron Sherer, the fair-haired young man orchestrating the whole shebang: taking tickets, hunching over the projector, often painstakingly splicing together the reels. It's obviously a labor of love for Sherer, with the only real payoff being the sheer joy of turning audiences on to his own personal faves and latest cinematic discoveries. And like the best film series, Cinema Vortex most definitely is an extension of its curator -- Sherer's brain unspooling before a flickering light. That means plenty of vintage film noir, lost classics of the American New Wave like Point Blank, as well as offbeat foreign flicks such as last year's Made in Hong Kong and Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 dystopian portrait Alphaville. The common denominator is simply good taste and the unspoken realization that you won't see any of these movies anywhere else in Miami.

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 Roquefort-Bartlett pear salad is called "The French Kiss." In addition to the menu, you've got owner Tim Hogle, self-confessed "dentist to the stars." Then there's the Tantric décor, designed to stimulate all five senses (not to mention a little below-the-waist action): living grass carpet, marble-backed waterfall, Indian sculptures, and incense that burns like the eternal light. Stir together a mix of celebrities like Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio, Whitney Houston, and Courtney Love, all of whom have lent their own notorious reps to the place. Then charge as much as you can get away with -- say, $20 for a seared foie gras appetizer, or $46 for a veal steak, or $14 for a wedge of flourless chocolate cake. Voilà! The ideal tourist trap. The saving grace? Chef Willis Loughhead's cuisine is almost worth the hype.

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 presence. Happily this is no sleazy porn site, nor is it a classless voyeur site with cameras placed in a sorority-house bathroom. Cher shares herself in a teasingly erotic yet tasteful manner. It's a virtual jaunt about town with beautiful girls as they relax on sunny beaches or party in dim nightclubs (links are provided to many of the Beach's club and restaurant Websites). All for only ten dollars per month. Some lonely soul in Minnesota is very thankful. Cher obviously enjoys being the star of her own show. Cameras record her movements in her living room; she's contemplating a bedroom cam as well. A gracious hostess, she makes a point of e-mailing her admirers in real time. Believe it or not, Cher was a mortgage-banker trainee before she realized she could make more money broadcasting her life and tapping into the South Beach obsession with skin and sun.

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 Boardroom demonstrates skills in three-dimensional drawing and old-school balloon lettering of artists' tags yet maintains a unified vision as a collaborative work. The Dam Graffiti Crew, which created the mural, includes Ultra, Reuz, Gwiz, Kedz, Elex, Freek, Threat, Task, and Furious. (They prefer to be known only by their tag.) The mural is a self-portrait of the group, featuring cartoonlike renderings of the members seated at a boardroom table. Dressed in military uniforms and blue suits in the painting, they strike various poses of concern and urgency. One slams a fist on the table, another jams down an index finger. Closer inspection of the table reveals that it is made up of the twisted and elongated three letters of the crew's name, "Dam." Above the nine seated individuals hover the artists' names in that baroque calligraphy, the literal and figurative signature of this urban art form.

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 will let you in for one measly dollar. Not only does that include a whole evening of jai alai betting action, it also covers the fight, shown on dozens of screens, with cheap beer flowing everywhere. Part with $5 and they'll let you ride the elevator upstairs to the Courtview Club. Eat a surprisingly decent prime-rib dinner if you want (the meal, with salad and dessert, costs only $11) while you watch your own private television. If Felix Trinidad is fighting, though, you'll probably want to catch the bout downstairs in the large banquet room, surrounded by hundreds of passionate Puerto Rican fans. When Tito wins, jump and scream and dance and shout with glee. If not for the fighter, then at least for the bargain.

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 Marquis is relieved of his tongue by church authorities hoping to stop him from writing erotica) and 2) strip down to his bare essentials. What Metzo displayed was a professional confidence and talent that proves he needs no costume. It's a tribute to the strength of his acting that Metzo's Sade seemed more vulnerable without his wig than without his pants. In this play about the importance of defending art against censorship, Metzo makes an indelible case for great acting.

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 Glocca Morra?" and "Old Devil Moon") are just two good reasons to revisit this story of a man, a woman, a leprechaun, and a battle against racism. Starring Austin Pendleton, the great Brian Murray, and a ferociously talented chorus, and featuring a book updated by Peter Stone, the Grove's Rainbow rose over one of the most exquisite examples of stage design you'd ever want to see. (Kudos to Loren Sherman's rainbow of pastel bed sheets, Phil Monat's effervescent lighting, and Marguerite Derricks's choreography.) It also served to remind us that there's always a place for an old-fashioned musical with a great score and a timeless anti-bigotry statement. Things are great in Glocca Morra, indeed.

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, held in April, proves it has depth and stamina. The best thing about this festival is that while it has offered topnotch international fare, it also feels local. The Miami mixture of vibrant gay and Latin cultures is unique, and the festival reflects that. Experimental films, mainstream films, films that dealt with being gay in Latin America, with being gay in Miami, shorts, features, documentaries -- all got an airing in an atmosphere that felt fresh and progressive. Just as the Miami International Film Festival brought out a cultural community many thought didn't exist, so too is the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival fostering a community intent on offering a higher aesthetic to our area. Sure there was some celluloid fluff; in that sense gay crowd pleasers are no different from their straight counterparts. But there also were profound, moving, even shocking entries, the kind of stuff you might not see elsewhere again -- hey, just what a film festival is supposed to deliver. Maybe the most exciting hours this year were produced by the inspired decision to show the excellent British television show Queer As Folk in three movie-length segments. When you hear a packed house laugh, boo, cheer, cry, and applaud over witty, sexy, intelligent film, you know you've landed a seat in the right festival.

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 slams he and his teammates hit in that game. Lowell, who graduated from Coral Gables High School and Florida International University, has power, speed, and style. And he has guts. He sat out two months last year with testicular cancer and won the Tony Conigliaro Award for overcoming adversity. This spring he came roaring back, batting .300 and leading the team to a better start than anyone expected.

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 to come down with the ball. It takes a great play by the guy guarding him to stop him." What a guy guarding him says about Santana Moss: "Moss is real good," admits Syracuse cornerback Will Allen. "He has agility and speed. The stuff he does isn't necessarily hard, but he's so fast that you have to honor his deep cuts. I played all right against him, but you have to be at the top of your game to stop him completely." Moss is the defending Big East champion in the 60-meter dash. He can leap 42 inches into the sky. He's a certain first-round draft pick. By deciding to come back for his senior season, he earns a legitimate shot at the Heisman Trophy. "Without Santana Moss on this team, it would be a big loss," Dorsey says. "He is a really gifted and special athlete."

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 lightweight title twice (record: 83-24-5). Jack lived his last 44 years in Miami, where he operated a shoeshine stand in the Fontainebleau Hotel and later trained fighters and managed Miami Beach's famed Fifth Street Gym. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991, and this past December an Associated Press panel voted him one of the top ten lightweights of the century. In his last years, afflicted with Parkinson's disease, Jack was toasted at gala banquets and sweet-science affairs around the nation, where he traveled with the help of his long-time friend, Miami boxing historian Hank Kaplan. Jack died at age 79 on February 9, 2000, in a Miami nursing home. "Goodbye, Beau Jack," New York Daily News sportswriter Bill Gallo wistfully concluded in a column eulogizing the fierce-punching brawler. "They don't hardly make fighters like you anymore."

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 banana ample opportunity to work on his own shtick. Our verdict: Whenever the Old Man steps down, Rodriguez is ready to step in. Although his delivery may be a bit too low-key, his wit, improvisational ability, and Everyman appeal make for good talk radio. He nearly always riffs on topics that strike a chord with callers: women's feet, drinking games, cops, and of course, his forays into Broward County's swingers' club scene (though, as he often points out, he hasn't actually "swung"). If no one happens to call in, that's cool. He'll just play Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" -- all nine minutes of it -- until someone phones and begs him to stop. Also, as a thoroughly Americanized Cuban American, he's the perfect guy to bridge the cultural chasm between Miami-Dade and Broward. So if Neil is God, and George came from Cuba as a child (unconfirmed reports say dolphins may have been involved), that would make George ... well, a worthy successor at least.

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 Japanese speedsters stand inches from the pavement. Owners swarm the blacktop to spy on the competition, listen to the latest motor gossip, and boast about their gleaming chariots. The crowd spans the ages: old folks recalling their youth, youngsters beaming with pride, kids dreaming of their first day behind the wheel. If you're passionate about the horseless carriage, this place is your mecca.

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. He chose to remain as head coach of the Hurricanes basketball program he built from an afterthought into a perennial contender in the Big East. We don't mind saying this was the right decision. Here's hoping Hamilton, a stand-up guy in addition to being a great coach, sticks around until he can bring UM men's hoops to the legendary status of the school's football and baseball squads.

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. Since the trade he became a star on the Rangers' best offensive line. Vernon, in contrast, is a 37-year-old goalie who had been languishing as the backup in San Jose. But as Murray calculated, Vernon has a strong upside. In Detroit he twice played in the Stanley Cup finals, once winning the playoff MVP award. After arriving in Sunrise, he capably filled in for injured starting goalie Trevor Kidd, so capably, in fact, that he effectively outshone him. Vernon is always strongest in the playoffs. And in hockey, one offensive superstar and a hot goalie can win a championship. Thanks to Murray's maneuvering, the Panthers had both Bure and Vernon. Pretty sweet indeed. Now if only Murray had found a defense...

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 region. Ranging from the familiar (Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) to the spanking new (Patrick Marber's Closer, in its first production outside New York), artistic director Joseph Adler's choices of material, production standards, and the crackerjack performances he gets out of his actors are consistently engaging and becoming more exciting all the time.

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. This sentimental piffle of a play by D.L. Coburn won the Pulitzer for drama in 1977, but it's the actors who have aged well. They portrayed Weller (Durning) and Fonsia (Harris), two geezers abandoned by their families and dumped into a second-rate nursing home. Blending their disparate acting styles into a kind of demonic waltz (imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), Harris and Durning turned all dramatic expectations on their heads. In their hands even a piece of dramatic dross can seem like gold.

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 make any judgments about Jim Morris's hair, seeing as he wears a hat to work and all. But in 1993 he did succeed a legend by the name of Ron Fraser, who had led the University of Miami Hurricanes baseball team to two national championships during his legendary career. The proverbial tough act to follow. But Morris has pulled it off, skippering Bobby Hill, Mike Neu, Kevin Brown, and company to the program's first College World Series championship since 1985 (earning his second Collegiate Baseball National Coach of the Year award in the process). UM baseball: under new management, but the legend continues.