Best Heat Player 2000 | Alonzo Mourning | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Miami | Miami New Times
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Best Heat Player

Alonzo Mourning

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.

Best Place To Meet Single Men

The Home Depot

The best place is over near the lumber. All that fragrant wood is a kind of aphrodisiac in itself. The tool section, of course, is not bad either. Nor the paint area, especially because it can be a long wait in line to get that color mixed. Stay away from home lighting. Follow these simple rules and the chance of chatting up a man somewhat of your choice is good. For best results check in as often as possible during hurricane season. The thing is, some Home Depot locations are open 24 hours, and lots of people of the single persuasion like that freedom to shop at odd times before they drop, and this being Miami, the drop can occur well after midnight. Hanging out at the Depot night or day certainly beats dining out alone, and it's tons better than the gym. Can't tell the size of the board? Good reason to ask for a little help. The fluorescent lights in this store are deceiving: What is this color? Installing a ceiling fan can be tricky -- got any hints? Yes, these are icebreakers, but they often have the potential to lead up to the ideally interactive kicker that can lead you out of the store: With only two hands, how can you put that thing together? And of course: You're right, this deck chair is great. It's too bad my car is so small.

Best Weathercaster

Don Noe

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.

Best Alternative Medicine

East-West Health Alliance

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."

Best Cuban-League Baseball Player Living In Miami

Camilo Pascual

Pascual threw one of the sweetest curve balls in baseball history while playing for the Minnesota Twins from 1961 to 1966. The Reds, L.A. Dodgers, and Cleveland also made good use of his right arm, though only briefly. But before his stint in the American big leagues, Pascual played the game in Cuba, his native country, from 1953 to 1961. When he wasn't throwing for Los Elefantes de Cienfuegos or Los Tigres de Marianao, he pitched for the late lamented Washington Senators. (Check out the 1958 film version of Damn Yankees to see him throwing for Washington against the Yanks.) These days in Miami, where he's resided since 1960, he scouts Latin-American hopefuls for the Dodgers. At age 66 he's still living the béisbol dream.

Best Charity

Food for Life Network

It's pretty tough to argue with an outfit that feeds the HIV-positive among us. But throw in a few twists -- say, delivering groceries to those who are not ambulatory, providing foodstuffs to victims' families, and even catering home-cooked meals for those who are too sick to cook -- and you've got one dedicated charity. Indeed Food for Life Network not only nourishes, it nurtures. Through referral programs and its own nutritional services and counseling departments, the organization follows its clients to ensure they're not only fed but are proactive enough to tackle HIV before it balloons into AIDS. The group also sponsors fundraisers, events, and food drives to raise both community awareness and resources. So in the end, the thirteen-year-old Food for Life Network deserves kudos for more than cooking. It gets praise for persistence, perseverance, and very dedicated personnel.

Best Fish Tank

Seahorse Bar at Beach House Bal Harbour

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.

Best New Performance Space

lab6

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.

Best Sanctuary From The Fast Track

Simpson Park Hammock

Enter deep into this eight-acre native hardwood hammock and become a witness to the past in all its former glory, a time when banyan, pigeon plums, velvet seed, gumbo limbo, and Gulf licaria trees covered the Brickell area. The park has been undergoing restoration for several months (pesky foreign plants had threatened to wipe out the fragile native flora) and will reopen to the public this month. Here you can escape the concretized, high-stress world we've created and take respite in the world as it should be.

Best Local Artist

Edouard Duval-Carrié

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.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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