Feb. 22 To: Jamie, Jonathan From: Fred Re: Dave’s World/Miami trip Just back from Miami and wanted to write these notes while I’m still fresh on it, so bear with me. Kind of a bizarre trip — but nothing life-threatening. To answer a few openers: Dave’s house is nice. Real…
Dave Barry has a network TV show. So what? That’s what we thought, until we received a mysterious package. “I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THIS.” That’s how the typewritten note began. The note, in turn, came clipped to a bundle of papers we received a couple of weeks ago. Whoever…
Does the pantheon of civil rights pioneers have room for an earnest, pasty-faced nurse who wants to work hard and save lives? Will MLK, the Woman Suffragettes, and the Stonewall combatants slide over a little and let Bruce Wheatley in? Two years ago Wheatley changed careers and became a licensed…
The way they’ve done South Florida, a guy like Andy Anderson learns to take his communions with nature where he can find them, even if it means spidering his pickup truck down a steep, grassy knoll at a treacherous angle, or breaching barbed wire barricades, or dealing face-to-face with the…
If you listen carefully as you lie in bed tonight, and if the wind is blowing just right, you may be able to hear an extraordinary chorus of animal noises drifting in from south Broward County. Not the usual nocturnal screeching and caterwauling of the wild, but the joyous sounds…
Georgina Otero Lee drives a big green van for a living. She transports handicapped people around Dade County. Lately Lee has been driving with a suspended drivers license and is due to appear in court this Thursday on a careless-driving charge. Just one more nut on Miami’s chock-full roads? That…
About a dozen Metro-Dade Department of Corrections officers, most in their uniforms of forest green pants and light green shirts, were bunched together in the small waiting area outside the courtroom on the eighth floor of the Dade County Courthouse. Sitting, standing, leaning, talking, chortling. All at that very moment…
An aspiring bail bondsman must take an 80-hour certification course and a 20-hour correspondence course, and pass a state examination, to become licensed by the State of Florida. Even then he or she can’t open for business until signing a contract with an insurance company, which gives the bondsman authority…
Trivia question: What do the black Gibson Flying V guitar with gold hardware on which Jimi Hendrix played “Red House” on Rainbow Bridge; an empty sleeping pill bottle filled at Schwab’s pharmacy on May 5, 1961, by Marilyn Monroe; a pen-and-ink self-portrait of John Lennon masturbating; Madonna’s wedding dress from…
GUNS! UZIS! AMMO! South Florida’s largest selection of assault systems.” “CENTERFOLD MODELS! Available 24 hours for personal escort services. Discreet. Professional. Credit cards accepted.” “SEXY WONDERS! Corsets. Garters. Adult toys beyond imagination.” These are just a few of the temptations beckoning those who have been finger-walking through Southern Bell’s Greater…
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…
