Seconds after the anchor chain tumbles into Biscayne Bay, two women on the sun deck strip down to thong bikinis and start lubing their bare breasts with coconut oil. A surfer dude in laser-green swim trunks cuts the air with a rebel yell and somersaults from the top of the...
Jose Milton became nearly a half-million dollars richer on June 20. The well-heeled Coral Gables contractor didn't win the lottery, cash in an exceptionally prescient stock investment, cut a lucrative real estate deal, or come into a windfall inheritance. Like thousands of his fellow Dade Countians, Milton simply appealed the...
Good morning, class. Today we'll be studying the laws of probability. Let's begin our lesson with a word problem that will help you understand the basic concept. Pretend we're making a movie. We want to calculate the likelihood that our movie will be a dog. Here's our picture's premise: A...
In May 1993, on her last day of work at the Miami Herald, Tracie Cone's colleagues gathered to bid her farewell. During her six years at the Herald, Cone had become one of the paper's rising stars, her talents having led her to a coveted position as a feature writer...
The two young moguls perched over mozzarella cheese sticks and iced teas at a Hallandale Denny's are trying to explain why their business idea is going to sell to South Florida, perhaps the entire state, maybe even beyond. Their product: beer. By definition a festive beverage. On the other side...
There was a time when almost any hip person could discuss, in impressively minute detail, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and the dense tangle of conspiracy theory that has sprouted around it. As the decades roll on, and more people grow up who don't remember where they were...
In five months as a criminal court judge in Dade County, Henry Ferro has come to expect days filled with mayhem. His overcrowded docket reads like a True Crime index: assaults, drug deals, sex battery, and all varieties of theft. But nothing could prepare the jurist for the sight that...
So maybe you're sick of the snowbound Canadian winters. Maybe it's time to swoop south, like the geese. And maybe, just maybe, that Cuban Ministry of Tourism brochure A the one with blue sea lapping at unspoiled beaches and the lights of Old Havana twinkling A is beginning to look...
Miami, fashionable and fickle, a game of chance and improbability, a whimsical yet deadly postmodern landscape, kind of disgusting but kind of fun, too. You're up, you're down, you don't know where the hell you are. Ocean Drive magazine throwing a party at The Forge with Jacques and Pascal, the...
Life with Mikey is one of those execrable exercises in sitcom sentimentality that leaves even the uncritical viewer with one question: What were they thinking? Let's be charitable. Maybe the filmmakers were inspired by Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose, but the only way they could obtain financing was to cast...
At first people just stare. Then come the whispers. Then, invariably, they ask Gemma Stafford the question: "Are those real?" What they mean is: "Could those huge, curved monstrosities truly be your own?" If Stafford hears it once a day, she hears it a dozen times. "Yes, these are my...
On the other side of the world water swirls counterclockwise down the drain, animals carry their offspring in pouches, and a left-handed slide guitarist plays a right-handed guitar from over top of the neck using his index finger. "The first guitar I was given," says southpaw strummer Dave Hole in...
Two years ago on the day after Easter, Anne Lanzetta, once the mother of six children, now the mother of none, decided to end her life. She was watching soap operas at the time, drunk on vodka. A pack of single-edge razors, purchased from the drugstore down the street, sat...
An ever-growing beast lurks deep within the Miami-Dade Public Library's main branch downtown. Hatched there in 1986, it has been pulsing with life ever since. But while the creature dwells within the walls of the library, it is not of the library. The creature has a name. It is the...
Rene Rodriguez is a punk. Not the scowling, pierced, and tattoed kind; the Herald staff writer and film reviewer looks more like Opie Taylor than Sid Vicious. No, Rodriguez's punkdom slashes deeper than nipple rings, jackboots, and the other affectations of the fashionably disaffected. Rather, he's one of the far...
Far be it from me to whine about how tough my job is. I learned long ago that there aren't many folks sympathetic to complaints from a guy who sits around all day watching movies and getting paid for it. Suffice it to say if it was that easy, everyone...
Carlos Herrera stands in the family room of his Kendall home, encircled by the hauntingly vacant stares of more than two dozen dead animals. Herrera killed each of them -- deer, elk, caribou, moose, impala, buffalo. Twenty-eight animals in all, their heads cut off and stuffed, their eyes replaced with...
It's a sunny afternoon. You're out strolling along Washington Avenue, dodging the tanned in-line skaters as they dart among knots of oblivious models, model wanna-be's, and shirtless muscle boys in Daisy Dukes and combat boots. As you approach the South Beach Pub near Seventh Street, you look up and notice...
In the late Thirties, William "Tallahassee" Dranes, an obscure Panhandle blues singer, sat awake in a shotgun shack and mused about the weather. It was so hot that summer that birds fell out of the sky completely cooked. So hot that parking lots melted and poured down streets, carrying children...
Late evening was bleeding into early night when we passed 140th Street and pulled off Biscayne Boulevard into the semicircular driveway of the Miami Moon Motel ("efficiencies, color TV, air conditioning") in scenic North Miami Beach. A hand-written sign on the front door of the office instructed visitors to knock...
In 1992, the Year of the Woman, Madonna was hailed as a shrewd businesswoman (which she is, despite what you may think of her). Barbra Streisand was acknowledged to be a powerful political ally. And Cindy Crawford broke the bonds of silent beauty to become what she believes is a...
Tomas Garcia Fuste is not running for office, and he's no pop star. Still, when he goes to lunch at Victor's Cafe, it takes him about twenty minutes to make the journey from valet parking to his table. So many people, so much homage. Fuste, ¨c centsmo andas? Oye, Fuste,...
