In less than five months, the tea dance has become an institution. Or at least as much of an institution as anything can be in the mercurial world of South Beach. Initially held at Aqua, the restaurant in the Winter Haven Hotel on Ocean Drive at Fourteenth Street, the tea…
What a glorious day to take the kids for a motorcycle ride to the park! The sun was high and the sky clear of the thunderous rain clouds that had darkened and drenched Miami for a day and a half. South Florida’s bikers participating in the “Beach Bash Poker Run”…
When Conchy Bretos was recently fired as executive director of the Dade County Commission on the Status of Women, a brief uproar ensued. The dismissal of the one-time county commission candidate prompted three days of headlines and a critical editorial in the Miami Herald. The Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs…
Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo is speaking about the need to obliterate the memories of time lost — specifically, the two decades he spent in Cuban prisons. “You’re constantly taking me back to jail and I need to erase that,” he tells his interviewer, film director Jorge Ulla. It’s one thing to…
The playground. You remember it, don’t you? Swing set. Jungle gym. Slide. Dirt. Asphalt basketball court with a weather-beaten hoop, chain net rusted and broken. Shattered bottles everywhere. Maybe a tennis court or a baseball diamond nearby. Sorry, old sport. These are the Nineties. The playground, as you knew it,…
They still flock by the thousands to Mallory Square to catch the sunset, but in Key West there is no more Full Moon. For sixteen years a legendary late-night haven for the Conch town’s rogues and writers, the Full Moon Saloon closed for good on July 19. “We had as…
Several months ago, the architectural highlight of the homeless encampment on Watson Island was a room with a porch, constructed four feet off the ground among the limbs of a tree on the shore of Biscayne Bay. The dwelling was a clever little house wrought from an assortment of salvaged…
For 34 years Lillie C. Evans Elementary had been an all-black school. That changed last year when thirteen Anglo and eighteen Hispanic students, as well as nearly a dozen suburban black children, volunteered to be bused to the Liberty City school of more than 700. Some of the children came…
Teetering on her high heels, Kathy Schafer has come to have a great problem solved by an even greater man. A silver lame handbag slung over her flower-print dress, the 85-year-old Miamian has endured a half an hour in the sweltering heat of Ellis Rubin’s carport. “I’d come to the…
It isn’t unusual for total strangers to stroll unannounced into Stephen Larue’s workplace and take off their clothes right in front of him, sometimes down to the very last stitch. In fact, at times Stephen Larue’s office is filled with hundreds of completely naked people — talking, laughing, eating, drinking,…
Payroll for the twenty highest-paid Florida Marlins (as of the All-Star break) Bryan Harvey:$4.125 mill. Benito Santiago:$3.4 mill. Gary Sheffield:$3.11 mill. Orestes Destrade:$2 mill. Junior Felix:$1.25 mill. Henry Cotto:$900,000 Jack Armstrong:$854,545 Walt Weiss:$825,000 Charlie Hough:$800,000 Cris Carpenter:$725,000 Luis Aquino:$685,000 Jim Corsi:$375,000 Rich Rodriguez:$265,000 Chris Hammond:$260,000 Joe Klink:$200,000 Bret Barberie:$190,000 Ryan…
Innocence wasn’t an issue. Of course he was innocent. The question, in his mind, was how best to exact his revenge, and on whom. This nightmare was the sophisticated plot of a small cadre of disgruntled underlings, a dirty dozen he’d knocked from their pedestals and made accountable for their…
Professional psychic Patricia Marks and I are sitting in the spotless living room of her house on Bird Road in West Dade. Clad in a colorful print housedress, her brown hair pulled back, she’s telling me I’m intuitive (which I think is good) but that I’m too softhearted (which I…
Ask any number of people in Miami Springs about the Curtiss mansion and they will tell you, quite adamantly, that they are determined to do whatever is required to save the last surviving home of Glenn Curtiss. After all, Curtiss was the aviation giant who built the world’s first “flying…
Expansion team. What expansion team? That’s what the Florida Marlins had most of baseball thinking during the first half of the season. Sweeping the Pirates. Locking the Mets in the cellar. Flirting with .500. Until their seven-game slide into July, the teal men were the talk of the majors. While…
As fourth-term Democratic Rep. David Skaggs walked to the podium on the evening of July 1, he was still bristling over the events of the past few hours. Cuban American politics had arrived with a vengeance in the halls of Congress, and it had just cost Skaggs’s Colorado district $23…
Local dealers and users call them rophies, ropies, roopies, roofies, ruffies, loops, wheels, and circles. Roche, the company that developed the drug, calls it Narcozep, Rohipnol, Roipnol, and Rohypnol, depending on where the one- and two-milligram tablets are sold. Chemists call it flunitrazepam, a sedative similar to Valium that is…
The six little wood-framed paintings, modestly Impressionist in style, depict a street scene, a shady lakeside park, historical monuments. They are glimpses of Odessa, a port city of two million on the Black Sea. They hang in Alvaro and Ludmilla Alba’s sparsely furnished living room in Little Havana. Alvaro Alba,…
The moment of truth had arrived, and attorney Karen Gievers was losing her grip. Her voice was cracking. Her eyes kept misting over. Much to the astonishment of lawyers and laymen alike, her questions were barely coherent. And those that did make sense were being summarily overruled by the judge…
One of the things that distinguishes South Florida’s music scene from, say, Seattle’s, is that our bands do not have an identifiable sound, like grunge. The women making the music at our original rock venues have little in common beyond geographical proximity. Ponder the following: “I don’t know if spit…
“We’re creating our own history,” offers Helaine Blum, manager of promising local rock band Black Janet. She is trying to explain what sets South Florida’s rock music scene apart from other cities’, and in particular why she and so many other local women have taken up the cause. “Because of…
What drives seemingly intelligent and enlightened human beings to whack golf balls off the fantails of ocean liners? A momentary feeling of liberation as the dimpled sphere soars unimpeded toward the infinite? A symbolic and finite deep-sixing of worldly problems? The comforting knowledge that this is a water hazard you…
