How a winning culture of players and passionate fans built a championship team
+ IN THIS ISSUE | WHY ISN’T AMERICA’S MOUNTAIN A SKI MECCA? | ONSTAGE: NEW PLAYS CHRONICLE THE COVID-19 YEARS | ARTIST FINDS INSPIRATION IN POP CULTURE BARGAIN BIN | WHY STYLE STILL MATTERS (EVEN HERE) | UNKIND CUTS TO CO
A Pikes Peak Media
one of the ‘kilted hooligans’
PUBLISHER
Francis J. Zankowski
EDITORIAL
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Ben Trollinger
REPORTERS Noel Black, Cannon Taylor and Andrew Rogers
CONTRIBUTORS
Kathryn Eastburn, Lauren Ciborowski, Bob Falcone, Rob Brezny, Kandace Lytle and Tiffany Wismer
America’s Mountain never became the next resort mecca
Cymon Padilla in True North Art Gallery | Credit: Cannon Taylor
Tiffany Wismer
Courtesy: Tiffany Wismer
Shane Lory | Courtesy: Shane Lory
How Colorado Springs won much more than a championship PITCH PERFECT
by NOEL BLACK • noel.black@ppmc.live
Ben Currie was in a bad place in 2021. In his mid-20s and fresh out of the military, he found himself unmoored.
“I was in the lowest part of my life.”
The military, even if it wasn’t the career he wanted long term, had grounded him, given his life structure and meaning. But after he left, things came unraveled, and quickly.
Then COVID-19 hit. Stuck in his childhood home in Philadelphia, his mental health began to deteriorate even further.
Though he didn’t go into specifics, Currie did say, “The two people I had truly loved told me I needed to change.”
Sometimes internal transformation requires a fresh start, a change in setting. Currie knew a few people in Colorado Springs,
where he’d been stationed for a time at Fort Carson. So, he packed his things and came west. He got a job at Target working the overnight shift and slept on an air mattress in a friend’s spare room.
Then one afternoon, a friend invited him to a Switchbacks soccer game.
Currie was already familiar with soccer culture. His grandparents were from England, and they were supporters of the South London Premiere League club Crystal Palace, and in England, you support the team your parents and grandparents support.
Currie didn’t expect much from the Switchbacks. This was Colorado Springs, after all, not the English Premier League. But he went to a few games at the windy old stadium on Barnes Road and Tutt Boulevard just a few months before the new Weidner
Field was set to open in the spring of 2021. For many who went to the games at that time, it was a safe way to get out, be around other people, have fun and not worry about COVID. He had a good time, nothing special. But he was curious about the new stadium set to open the following spring and got a ticket for the home opener in March. When he arrived, he ran into a few of the Trailheads, the fan club, and was invited to join them in the south stands, where they bang on drums, scream chants through megaphones and set off blue smoke bombs when the Switchbacks score.
Currie was hooked immediately — the yelling and the chaos and, more than anything, the camaraderie unlocked something in him. He became one of the “kilted hooligans” — a small group of superfans
that wear kilts and jerseys, dye their hair and paint their faces in the Switchbacks’ trademark cyan and black.
“I think a lot of it is the community,” he says. “I’ll be the first to admit that getting into the team was a lot of personal journey stuff. But even seeing the way it’s grown, seeing all these new people, and the way they show up for a game, then two, then five, then 10, and then they’re season ticket types. ... It helped me center myself again and find a peaceful middle ground with my chaotic heart.”
Over the next three years, says Currie, the journey of the Switchbacks from a mid-table team to their move to the new stadium, their playoff runs and, finally, the USL championship, mirrored his own journey back from isolation and depression.
Ben Currie, one of the “Kilted Hooligans” in the south stands at Weidner Field. |
Courtesy: Tommy Helvenstine
He’ll be the first to admit that he’s not the kind of person “to go casually into stuff,” but he’s not alone in his feeling that the Switchbacks — Colorado Springs’ first professional sports team — have profoundly shifted the culture of a city that has long been divided ideologically around political wedge issues. And when they won the USL Championship in front of a sold-out crowd of 8,000 and a TV viewing audience of almost half a million last November, Colorado Springs won something much bigger than a championship.
I don’t say any of this lightly. I, too, became a Switchbacks fan when Weidner Field opened in 2021. I’ve lived in this city for most of my life, and, at least since the early-’90s, it’s often been divided ideologically over any number of issues (take your pick). For many, the Switchbacks opened a door to change all that.
OUR CITY, OUR TEAM
It’s hard to believe that the Ragain family weren’t “soccer people” when they decided to buy a United Soccer League (USL) franchise in 2013. It was just a promising business opportunity.
“It was really an outgrowth of the success and growth of sports in America,” says Nick Ragain, who was president of the club up until a month ago, when it was announced that Weidner Apartment Homes, a longtime partner, had become sole owner for an undisclosed amount.
Sports in America are, almost without saying, ridiculously popular. Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League are the big four, and they’ve dominated in major urban markets and on television for decades.
But the professional market has shown huge opportunities for growth with less-popular sports and in smaller markets over the past 20 years. There’s been a surging interest in women’s professional sports. Players like Angel Reese, A’ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark have popularized the WNBA.
Then there’s Major League Soccer (MLS), which was founded in 1993 with 10 teams in major markets in advance of the 1994 World Cup, which was held in the United States. It arose a decade after the North American Soccer League folded in 1984.
Despite soccer being the most popular sport worldwide, and despite the growth of MLS over the past 30 years, it still hasn’t reached anything close to the popularity of American football or basketball. Even
with the arrival of global soccer megastar Leo Messi at MLS’ Inter Miami in 2023, the league, which can only be watched behind a paywall on Apple TV+, still has relatively anemic ratings compared with far more popular American sports. Consensus is that these teams just can’t compete for fan attention with the big four leagues in those major markets.
Enter: The United Soccer League.
Created in 2011 from the ashes of two other minor professional and semi-professional American soccer leagues, the USL saw an opportunity to grow professional soccer in midsize American markets that had never had professional sports teams before. Soccer culture in other countries is often based on fierce local community pride, and almost every
town has one (see: “Welcome to Wrexham”).
And it was in that spirit that the USL saw an opportunity to build professional soccer clubs outside the major markets in cities like San Antonio, Texas; Monterrey, California; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Hartford, Connecticut; and Colorado Springs.
“It’s more like college football; it’s tribal,” says Brad Estes, who was named president of The Switchbacks shortly after Weidner took over the club last month. “It’s where you grew up, and that’s who you cheer for.”
Estes spent five years helping build soccer culture with Louisville FC, which has won the USL Championship twice since relocating from Orlando in 2014. He also oversaw the construction of Lynn Family Stadium, another soccer-specific arena in Louisville that
opened in 2020 to great success.
Estes thinks the popularity of soccer will only grow with the return of the World Cup to North America in 2026 and the rise of American stars like Christian Pulisic.
There’s a long way to go, and significant cultural challenges that soccer faces as a sport in U.S. and Canadian markets. But the growth of the sport in smaller markets only builds buy-in nationwide.
In the meantime, it’s all about growing the sport and the league. And to grow the league, they need more stadiums like Weidner Field.
THEY BUILT IT, AND THEY CAME
The Ragain family knew when they bought the USL franchise in 2013 that they’d need a stadium. Though they weren’t soccer people, they were definitely stadium people.
M-E Engineering, which was founded by Ed Ragain and his former partner, Allen Tochihara, has been part of the construction of stadiums ranging from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas to the renovation of Madison Square Garden in New York. They specialize in mechanical, electrical, lighting and technological engineering. And for years before they founded the Switchbacks, they’d had their own front row seat to what made professional teams successful, and it was always the stadium.
“It was stadium or bust for us,” says Nick Ragain. “If we didn’t get a stadium, we would’ve pulled the plug.”
While the team provides the identity and the draw, the stadium provides the experience and the infrastructure for the team to be a successful business. Anyone who saw the Switchbacks at what’s now called Martin E. Ragain Stadium at Barnes Road and Tutt Boulevard could tell you the difference. The locker rooms were in portable trailers, concessions were in tents, the stands were aluminum bleachers you’d find at a high school game, and the wind …
“I f there was weather coming through, it was coming right down that ridgeline, and it was going to hammer the stadium,” Nick Ragain says.
BUT THEY HAD A PLAN.
The Ragains knew that Colorado Springs was an ideal market. It already had a vision to build on the history of the city as a destination for health, the military and the Olympics to grow its sports culture.
Laura Neumann, vice president of advoca-
Head Coach James Chambers and Sporting Director Stephen Hogan | Courtesy: The Switchbacks.
Former Switchbacks midfielder Jairo Henriquez’s game-winning bicycle kick against Sacramento on September 23, 2023. | Courtesy: The Switchbacks.
“The team was going to need a bigger, bolder stadium,” says Neumann. “They needed the ability to have a community gathering place. And the Ragain family was the engine, the fuel that drove it.”
The Ragains also knew they needed to be closer to downtown. The sprawling, 200-square-mile city presented a huge challenge for the club in its early days.
“We had very few people west of I-25 that were season ticket members,” says Nick Ragain.
Along with Weidner Apartment Homes, they bought the 4.9 acres downtown at Cimmaron and Sahwatch streets, where a planned shopping complex had fallen through during the 2008 stock market crash. Weidner committed to build a large apartment complex at the south end, and the Ragains oversaw the design of the stadium.
dium was finished, it wasn’t until Burke left for MLS team Houston Dynamo and coach James “Chambo” Chambers took over at the beginning of 2024 — the Switchbacks’ 10th season — that things began to fully gel.
Chambers played professionally in Ireland and Scotland and then came to the U.S., where he finished his career with Bethlehem Steel FC in the Philadelphia Union club system. When he was done playing, he began coaching at the youth level and moved up through the Union’s system as a coach. Several players on the current Switchbacks squad played with or were coached by Chambers in Philly.
When asked what kind of team he wanted to build for that season, Chambers was clear that he wanted good people and good professionals, and in that order.
cy and public policy for Weidner Apartment Homes, which became sole owner of the Switchbacks shortly after the new year in 2025, was chief of staff for Colorado Springs Mayor Steve Bach in 2012, when the state of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade had created a competitive, $120 million community grant opportunity through the Regional Tourism Act for projects that would increase out-ofstate visitors.
Doug Price, president and CEO of Visit Colorado Springs, says that Colorado Springs was struggling in the wake of the 2008 market crash and the recession that followed.
“The streetlights were out. We weren’t watering our parks,” he says.
Price and a group of local leaders that included Bob Cope, Bach’s head of economic development at that time; Chris Jenkins and Jeff Finn from Norwood Development; Stephannie Finley-Fortune from UCCS; and Laura Neumann got together and came up with a plan.
They called their bid “City for Champions” (C4C) and proposed to build the now-completed Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the United States Air Force Academy Visitor Center, the William J. Hybl Sports Medicine and Performance Center at UCCS and a nonspecific downtown sports and event center that most at the time thought would be a baseball field for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox. And they won.
After the baseball stadium idea fell through, the Ragains came forward with their idea for a soccer stadium.
But building a small, state-of-the-art stadium alone wasn’t enough. Weidner and the Ragains wanted to signal to the community that it was more than just a soccer venue. They wanted the whole city to feel that the stadium and the team belonged to them. So Dean Weidner gave an additional $4.3 million to fabricate the already-iconic “Epicenter” — the giant polished ball with the LED-rimmed rings around it that sits at the entrance.
All told, Weidner Field cost $43 million to build — an amount that Nick Ragain says would be $120 million today.
“We wanted the community to take ownership of it,” says Ragain. “Without the community taking ownership of it, we had very little chance of success. When they do take ownership, there’s pride. And when there’s pride, there’s an opportunity with a sport people aren’t used to.”
GOOD PERSON. GOOD PROFESSIONAL. AND IN THAT ORDER.
Having a beautiful stadium with an elevated concourse, good concessions, television-quality lighting, professional locker rooms, a massive video board and the first-of-its-kind “corkonut” turf field (artificial turf underlaid with shredded coconut and infilled with shredded cork instead of far-more-toxic rubber) are all fine and good, but the Ragains knew that to truly bring everything and everyone together they’d need to deliver a championship team. Even if people weren’t already soccer fans, a championship could help create them.
Though they made it to the playoffs under head coach and general manager Brendan Burke for the first two seasons after the sta-
In many ways, a player’s technical abilities are the easy part to scout, says sporting director Stephen Hogan. Stats in all sports on every player are widely available these days, and it’s easier than ever to sort players according to the skills you need. But figuring out who’s going to fit into the team and fit into the culture of the locker room is far more difficult and, in many ways, more important.
“Maybe they haven't been the best player in the world in their environment for whatever reason, which is natural — that happens,” says Chambers. “But how were they around the place? Were they a good teammate? Were they applying themselves on a daily basis? Are they a good professional? Are they a good person? ... Some players really enjoy that. Some players don't like it, and it's not for them, but we've spent a long time getting the culture right.”
The Switchbacks have been home to some of the USL’s most dazzling players over the past three years. Hadji Barry scored 25 goals in 2022 to win the USL’s Golden Boot award. He also commanded the largest transfer fee in USL history when he moved to the Egyptian club Future FC in the middle of the 2023 season. Michee Ngalina had blinding speed on the flanks and a surgical touch in front of goal. Romario Williams was a force up the middle. And who could forget the 6-foot-4inch Aaron “Beowulf” Wheeler, who’d lumber onto the field as a super-sub in the final minutes, often to knock in a game-winning, or game-saving, header.
But Chambers’ team at the beginning of the ’23-’24 season had a far more collective presence. Team captain Matt Mahoney and midfielder Zach Zandi, both of whom knew Chambers from their time in Philadelphia,
were the anchors. There were new additions, like the hard-charging and creative Norwegian Jonas Fjeldberg and the clinical Japanese technician Yosuke Hanya on the wings. There was Ronaldo Damus, a fleet-footed and diminutive Haitian striker who could shake off defenders with the sudden explosiveness of a startled cat. The legendary Salvadoran national team player Jairo Henriquez, who scored the USL goal of the season the year prior with a bicycle kick for the ages against El Paso Locomotive, held down the midfield; and the towering Mexican goalkeeper Christian Herrera kept the net. If there was one player who represented coach Chambers’ culture more than any other, it was Juan Tejada, a 5-foot-7-inch (the same height as Messi) Panamanian with a mop of curly black hair and a countenance full of infectious joy for the game. Though he didn’t often start, and struggled to contribute goals early on, he was the talisman, and the fans would erupt whenever he took the field.
Things looked bleak at the beginning of the season as they dropped their first five games. But that culture of cohesiveness that Chambers and technical director Stephen Hogan had so deliberately and carefully created paid off and carried them through the string of early defeats.
“I never for one moment felt that the players weren't trying to apply themselves in the right manner,” says Chambers, who says he “got a couple of things wrong at the start of the season.”
Things looked they might get even worse in Game 6 against Indy Eleven, when defender Wahab Ackwei got sent off with a red card. But they managed to draw and get a point.
“I think if we don't get the point there with
Laura Neumann, Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy, announcing purchase of The Switchbacks. | Courtesy: The Switchbacks.
Outgoing Switchbacks President Nick Ragain | Courtesy: The Switchbacks.
the work that we put in the previous two weeks, maybe we feel a little bit more sorry for ourselves.”
The Switchbacks went on a run from there, winning back their confidence. And though the season was far from perfect, they stayed focused and resilient, gaining momentum as the playoffs neared.
By the time they got to the final with the new franchise team FC Rhode Island, winning homefield advantage along the way (which is no small advantage at 6,035 feet, making Weidner Field the highest professional pitch in the U.S.), their victory seemed assured. Every player was firing, and that “good” glue, that character manifested as Juan Tejada scored the game winner in the opening minutes for their eventual 3-0 victory.
The Switchbacks’ commitment to building not just a team but a culture and a community paid off.
Chambers is quick to point out that last season’s championship is in the past, and that being defending champs paints a target on their backs that could make this season even more difficult. It keeps him and his team focused, humble.
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS, ACTUALLY
What the whole Switchbacks organization has accomplished in the community over the past 10 years is so much more than the silver cup. It has transformed this city and many of the people in it. It has changed lives — lives like Ben Currie’s. It’s given people hope and joy and a point of pride on which to hang the supporter scarves that Ziggy, the mountain goat mascot, throws into the stands at halftime.
Doug Price looks back on the 12 years since they
who didn’t think we could pull it off. To me, the city proved it could work with public-private partnerships to a point where we made a lot of people believe that Colorado Springs could step up and accomplish this.”
Nick Ragain says that when he invites friends, they’ll often say they aren’t soccer fans, to which he replies: “I’m not asking you to a soccer match; I’m asking you to a community event!”
If you haven’t been to a game, you should go. Maybe you’ll see Ben Currie with his red (or pink or blue) hair bouncing in a cloud of blue smoke, screaming from the top of his kilt. (Actually, you’ll definitely see Ben Currie!)
“It’s been incredible. Every single meaningful connection that I’ve made with somebody in the past five years circles back to the Switchbacks in some way,” says Currie. “Some of my best friends now I’ve met from the Switchbacks. Business connections, every single meaningful thing in my life now circles back to the stadium. Eventually every single thing all comes back to Weidner. It’s not a community for me, it’s the community.”
Maybe you’ll see me. I’ll be there with Jason or Tony — both friends I made through soccer. We watch the games together while our teenagers wander the concourse the way kids used to wander the mall, asking cute people for their phone numbers, looking up at the field every once in a while when the crowd explodes after a goal, taking selfies in the mirrored “Epicenter” ball.
Maybe you’ll watch the sunset — they’re often gorgeous from the east stands! Maybe you’ll stay for the fireworks. Maybe you’ll come back or bring a friend. Maybe you’ll even love the game. It doesn’t matter. It’s a place in common that we’ve never had here before — something
FOR SOCCER NERDS ONLY
USL Division 1 soccer is coming soon, and promotion/relegation may not be far behind
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for Division 1 Soccer in the U.S. — the highest professional level — is that Major League Soccer has not adopted the widely accepted system of league promotion and relegation.
Promotion and relegation is a kind of carrot-and-stick system that rewards success and punishes failure in multitiered professional leagues. It’s used in England, Europe, South America and much of Africa.
In England, for example, there are five leagues — The Premier League, EFL Championship, EFL League, EFL League Two and the National League. Every year, the top three teams in each of the bottom four leagues have the opportunity to promote to the league above them if they are among the top three teams, while the bottom three teams must relegate to the league below.
This promotion/relegation (pro/rel) system is a big part of what adds drama and compelling storylines to the sport of soccer. Imagine if the NFL had a second or third tier of teams, and the bottom teams, rather than winning the highest draft picks as a reward for landing at the bottom of the standings, would get kicked down to a lower league, while another team would come up to replace them.
The stakes are much higher at the bottom in pro/rel, which is part of why owners in the MLS haven’t wanted to adopt it in the U.S. If you own a major market team that drops down into the second division, you stand to lose a lot of money, including TV rights, ticket and merchandise sales, etc.
But some fans think this is one of the biggest reasons soccer hasn’t caught on as much here, why major market franchises don’t make bigger investments in their clubs and why top players from the United States would rather play in Europe’s top leagues.
Christian Pulisic, arguably the best American player and the star of the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT), moved to Germany as a teenager, where he played for Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga before moving to Chelsea in England’s Premiere League, and then AC Milan in Italy’s Serie A.
European football has gained in popularity in the United States since cable and satellite TV services began to offer coverage of select games in the ’90s and early 2000s. Then, networks like ESPN expanded coverage. And now, like with any sport, you can watch almost any game in Europe’s top leagues if you have the right streaming app.
When the USL Championship League started out as a Division 2 league here in the U.S., it was loosely affiliated with MLS (Division 1) in ways that looked on the surface much like farm teams for Major League Baseball (think the now-defunct Colorado Springs Sky Sox and their relationship with the Colorado Rockies). But USL teams were always privately owned franchises, and as the league grew, says Nick Ragain, outgoing president of the Switchbacks, MLS didn’t want to invest in the USL in ways that owners needed.
MLS now has its own Division 2 league called MLS Next, which functions much more like baseball farm teams, but they operate out of the same markets as their Division 1 teams. For example, Colorado Rapids II play at Denver University.
And though USL does not currently have a system of promotion and relegation, it recently announced that U.S. Soccer sanctioned a USL Division 1 league in markets of one million or more that have, or are willing to build, 15,000-seat stadiums. They hope to launch in 2027 and would compete indirectly, at first, with MLS. Cities like Detroit, Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, Sacramento, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and, possibly, Colorado Springs.
But Weidner Field currently only has 8,000 seats, and it’s unclear where the boundaries of our “market” would be drawn (Colorado Springs has a population of roughly half a million, but El Paso County has a population of nearly 750,000, and what about Pueblo?).
If the Division 1 league is successful, USL would hope to implement promotion and relegation among its lower divisions, including the Division 2 USL Championship league that the Switchbacks won last year. Would that mean that the Switchbacks might promote to Division 1 soccer if they win the league? We’ll have to wait and see.
SITES UNSEEN
By JOHN HARNER
Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a column from John Harner, professor of geography at University of Colorado Colorado Springs and the author of “Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs.” In each installment, Harner will explore the hidden, “relict” history of our fair city. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Ah, Colorado — mountains, fresh air, sunshine and, of course, skiing! And Colorado Springs, a major player in the Colorado ski industry … or not. With the massive Pikes Peak fourteener at our doorsteps, why isn’t our city renowned for skiing? Such a popular pastime, with potentially robust
The ski mecca that wasn’t
Why America’s Mountain never lifted off as a resort destination
economic rewards, creates a seemingly great opportunity. And yet, apart from Nordic skiers on cross-country trails or backcountry skiers willing to hike or skin up the mountain for one downhill reward, America’s Mountain is not a ski mecca.
The obvious reason for this absence is the lack of sufficient snow. The Pikes Peak massif sits isolated from the rest of the high country, where most snow falls before reaching us. But of course, for decades now ski resorts have not been constrained to the vagaries of natural snowfall and instead supplement that resource with snow-making devices that lay a thick base to last all winter. Why not on Pikes Peak? Well, it has been tried. There were seven different ski runs operating on Pikes Peak at one time or another between 1924 and 1991. Skiing began in the state through the influence of Scandinavian immigrants, initially as a spectator sport around ski jumping and Nordic races. Competitions held in the 1920s fanned interest among urban residents and incorporated the sport into the local winter culture, with Steamboat Springs an early leader in winter activities. The first-ever ski meet on Pikes Peak took place April 6, 1924, at a location called Cascade Hill on the Pikes Peak Highway, two miles from the toll gate. It was an amateur ski jump contest, open to the public, which led to enthusiasts organizing
the Pikes Peak Ski Club. Another group of Colorado Springs residents dabbled in ski jumping on the north slopes of Pikes Peak in the early 1920s. Their first course, called “Suicide Hill,” was a steep and treacherous run, so these early pioneers found a new spot nearby on the Silver Spruce Ranch near Edlowe, a stop on the Midland Terminal Railroad just west of Woodland Park near today’s Edlowe Road. They formed the Silver Spruce Ski Club in 1928 and hosted cross-country and ski jumping tournaments at the site.
During the 1930s, rather than being mere spectators, skiers sought active recreational experiences. The Pikes Peak Ski Club cleared two downhill trails at Glen Cove, Mile Marker 11 on the Pikes Peak Highway, with a steep half-mile trail through the timber and a second, shorter loop connecting from the upper cove to the lower.
to finance infrastructure, and this new facility opened in the early 1950s. The site operated on weekends only and served the local Colorado Springs residents. Initially using three rope tows, the club later added a poma lift and then a double poma in 1980. It advertised a 1,500-foot run with 500-foot vertical drop. However, like the previous sites on Pikes Peak, snow was unreliable, and increasingly, the larger resorts in the high country drew away traffic. Ski Pikes Peak stayed open until 1984, and the runs are still visible on the north slope of Pikes Peak.
Three other small sites ran mom-and-pop
Initially, skiers walked up the hill at Glen Cove, until the club built a rope tow using an old automobile chassis and engine. This tow seemed to be running by December 1936, which would make it the first rope tow in operation in the state and perhaps all of the Western United States. The first annual tournament of the Pikes Peak Ski Club was held in 1937, where 30 skiers entered slalom and downhill races, and the site hosted ski jumping championships using the old Edlowe site. The ski club gained popularity, increasing to over 300 members, with nearly 20,000 skiers in the 1938-39 season.
Skiing slowed on Pikes Peak during World War II, with only troops from Camp Carson and Peterson Airfield using the facilities, but after the war, skiing resumed at Glen Cove and continued into the early 1950s. Seeking a site more protected from the wind to further develop local opportunities, advocates worked to clear trails at Elk Park, about a mile below Glen Cove. The Pikes Peak Ski Corp. formed as a nonprofit
local operations on the west side of Pikes Peak. The Tenderfoot ski area, built by the Cripple Creek Ski Club, operated from 1948-1956 about two miles east of Cripple Creek. The facility had a T-bar and two rope tows, five trails ranging from expert to novice, with a small lodge at the base that included rentals and lessons. The Holiday Hills site opened in 1962 after owners Harlan and Kay Nimrod opened runs to the public that they had first built for their kids. Located between Edlowe and Catamount, they operated until 1972, with reportedly up to 500 skiers per weekend. The facility used one J-bar and three rope tows on nine runs, with an A-frame lodge to sell chili and hot dogs. At one time, they entered into a contract with the Air Force Academy to operate a ski school for cadets. Finally, the Rainbow Valley Ranch Ski Area advertised as a year-round mountain resort and winter sports area on state Highway 67, five miles south of Divide. Their motto was “The St. Moritz of America,” offering two miles of
Ski Pikes Peak trail map, circa 1970 | Courtesy: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum
THE BEST VIEW: EVERY SHOW,
Recovering the Lost Years
Colorado short-play festival commemorates five years of the COVID-19 pandemic
by CANNON TAYLOR • cannon.taylor@ppmc.live
March 18, 2020, was my 18th birthday and the day Gov. Jared Polis closed schools in Colorado.
I don’t remember much about the day itself, beyond a cake of chocolate, strawberries and cream. There’s a video of my family singing “Happy Birthday” before I blow out the candles. The sound is supportive yet strained. We had forced the elephant in the room into a faraway cupboard.
When I share that I’m class of 2020, people shove misplaced sympathy on me. I didn’t mind the loss of senior prom because I don’t like to dance. Virtual learning was a breeze because my teachers were more focused on the news than grading. COVID-19 affected most people far worse than it did me, and already, it feels like a footnote in my life.
But when I spoke with playwright Kaily Anderson about her script “Eighteen,” there was a soft-spoken,
tender-hearted quality to her voice that fished something somber from the depths of my heart and pulled it up into my throat.
“Eighteen” follows a high schooler quarantined on the eve of her 18th birthday, reflecting on her transition to adulthood. It’s inspired by Anderson’s experiences working as a theater teacher at Rangeview High School in Aurora.
“Students were taking classes from their homes, so suddenly, I got to meet a lot of pets and siblings and parents. I saw them in their cars. I remember one of my students worked at Waffle House at the time, and she would always come to class from Waffle House,” recalled Anderson. “Their home lives became their total lives, and for some students, that was relaxing and fine, and for some students, that was not always the most comfortable place for them.”
IF YOU GO
WHEN: Thursday, March 13, through Sunday, March 23
WHERE: Millibo Art Theatre, 1626 S. Tejon St. WEBSITE: themat.org
better suit her students’ needs.
“I was always a pretty serious teacher before that,” Anderson said. “I became a lot more community-minded, a lot more socially minded. With everything happening in the world, I saw that maybe we needed to adjust, as adults, and provide students a different support than we ever had before.”
“Eighteen” is one of six scripts by Colorado playwrights being staged at Millibo Art Theatre’s “The Lost Years,” a short play festival commemorating five years of the
As Anderson created podcast and video productions of plays with her class, she was adapting her pedagogy to
Cam Eickmeyer at the Millibo Art Theatre | Credit: Ben Trollinger
“My great-grandfather, at the time, was moving bodies, and he never wanted to talk about it, ever. [My grandmother] knew that he did that, and if she talked to him, he would shut down,” Eickmeyer shared.
“‘Grapes of Wrath’ is one of the preeminent novels about the Great Depression, but I can’t tell you a title that specifically talked about the Spanish Flu, which was the last gigantic pandemic that happened in our country. It’s like no one ever stopped to reflect on it. They just wanted to move on.”
Given that many of us don’t talk about the COVID-19 pandemic anymore, “The Lost Years” is the perfect opportunity to ensure our stories and art from that period are carried into future generations.
Although the playwrights’ personal emotions and experiences surrounding COVID-19 were varied, the scripts skew toward comedy.
Eickmeyer’s pandemic experience began with the nerve-racking home birth of his daughter in April 2020. His script, “Stay Calm and Panic,” is a rapid-fire satire of the politics, consumerism and misinformation that ran rampant in 2020. Amazon packages litter the stage as two friends panic about buying toilet paper and injecting bleach. One of the friends — described in the script as “a bit on the ‘it’s 5G’ train
when it comes to the pandemic” — complains about their rights being trampled on, including the right to get drunk at a theme park and vomit on a child.
Colorado Springs playwright Richard Sebastian-Coleman spent lockdown reconnecting with his sister, who was meant to live with him for only a few months before joining the Peace Corps. He wrote a “Rocky” parody called “Cocky,” pitting a personification of COVID-19 against both bat and human opponents. As an environmental engineer, SebastianColeman was able to maintain a level-headed, bird’s-eye-view of the outbreak. “Cocky” is born from his frustration with people who viewed health regulations as personal attacks instead of preventive safety measures.
Joyce Fontana, a retired nurse practitioner from Durango, volunteered in administering COVID-19 vaccines. She felt a mixture of guilt and relief that she wasn’t working in health care full time during the pandemic. Fontana spent much of her time hiking, and her script, “Foot Traffic,” finds humor in the ways Coloradans approached masked and socially distanced outdoor recreation. One of Fontana’s hikers suits up in a Hazmat suit, while another, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, hikes maskless to soak in the fresh air.
Denver playwright Nicolette Vajtay’s grandmother, born in 1918, died in 2020. Her funeral was attended in-person by 10 loved ones, while others, including Vajtay, streamed the service from home.
Vajtay wrote “Here Comes the Sun,” an almost operatic monologue performed by an elderly woman with long COVID. Much like Vajtay — who also had long COVID — the woman finds health and rejuvenation in the warmth of the solstice.
Colorado Springs’ Seth Palmer Harris wrote “Week One,” a backand-forth between roommates passing through time at vastly different speeds. Harris spent much of lockdown reflecting on the Theater of Cruelty, conceptualized by French artist Antonin Artaud. Artaud’s theory was that if theater were a more immersive, visceral and even traumatizing experience, it might change its audiences for the better in the same way an epidemic can.
“[Artaud] writes a whole chapter [in “Theatre and Its Double”] on the effect of the plague coming into a medieval town,” Harris explained. “For those, often few, who survived that, it completely changed them. The miser would become much more generous. The person who was always melancholic became more cheerful. They had this new lease on life because they had, together, survived this horrible experience.”
Top: Diane and Jeremy Reeves stand in the doorway with their five children in 2020. | Credit: Lauren McKenzie
“The Lost Years” will feature other COVID-19-inspired art, including photography slideshows by Colorado Springs’ Allison Daniell and Lauren McKenzie.
Daniell started carrying a camera with her in 2020 to capture a unique moment in time and mentally process the pandemic.
“I learned how much we need each other, that we really were not designed to be that independent of one another, how even the strangers I see at the park or in the grocery store make me feel like I’m not alone in the world,” Daniell said.
A
The Mattison family, whose eldest daughter is immunocompromised. “Seeing others come together to help protect my daughter and others like her has been extremely uplifting,” said her mother, Nicole. | Credit:
McKenzie conducted donation-based photoshoots of people on their porches in the early months of lockdown. She captured it all: COVID babies, beloved pets, high school graduates and immunocompromised people who hadn’t seen outside contact in months.
“As photographers, we’re doing what we do,” McKenzie said. “My work is something that feels safe to me, and comfortable and familiar. It gives me purpose.”
Both collections were archived by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. See more of Daniell and McKenzie’s photography at csindy.com.
Clockwise from top left: Corie Urban, registered nurse at Centura Health |
Cymon Padilla creates constellations from art history and pop culture
by CANNON TAYLOR • cannon.taylor@ppmc.live
The clay backsides of a green humanoid and orange pony are all the viewer sees of children’s television characters Gumby and Pokey. The friends look onto a pile-up of polar ice copied from a painting by 19th century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. A message is painted in an 8-bit font: “ITS GOING TO BE OK. BUT ITS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT.” The line comes from an internet meme of a sad dog in a lawn chair, half-submerged underwater.
Colorado Springs-raised artist Cymon Padilla’s bittersweet “Rückenfigur” is just the tip of the iceberg in the “Constellations” exhibit.
One painting shows a wallpaper pattern of McRibs with “Hell Is Real” overlaid in a generic vaporwave font. The message comes from a billboard in Ohio, erected in 2004, that’s become a beloved landmark and subject of mockery.
Another shows Tom and Jerry chasing each other next to a woman inserting a contact lens. The colors are all shades of blue, but if you photograph the painting and invert the colors using your phone, you’ll discover the painting’s true hue. Like many of Padilla’s pieces, “Contact” is an artistic cyborg, adapting traditional oil painting to a digital age by integrating technology
Cymon Padilla in True North Art Gallery | Credit: Cannon Taylor
“Dazzle” | Credit: Cymon Padilla
into the creative process.
Padilla begins a piece by scavenging for scraps on the internet. Then, he collages them in GIMP, a graphics editor like Photoshop. Once the digitized image is completed, Padilla projects, sketches and paints it onto the canvas.
“I think a lot about what they call the flat ontology of the internet, where history, current events, culture, everything is kind of flattened out on the scroll,” Padilla said. “You can scroll through and see whatever’s happening in Gaza, and then a dancing video. Everything’s collapsed into this one flat plane. I try to think of canvas in the same way — collapsing history, pop culture, all these things on the flatness of the canvas.”
Providing inspiration for many of Padilla’s latest pieces were the porcelain figurines of cats and dogs found in the dregs of eBay listings.
“The images that I find of the figurines, they come from auction sites,” Padilla explained. “They’re not for fine art purposes. They’re not supposed to be aesthetic. I like to take those images from that context of a marketplace and make a piece of fine art out of it.”
Padilla usually sets the animal figurines against striking patterns. One painting sets a shiny Dalmatian against the black-andwhite stripes of dazzle camouflage, which was painted on British Royal Navy ships during World War I to confuse German submarines. Two other paintings position gray figurines against artist Damien Hirst’s signature rainbow spots.
The references to art history don’t stop there. There’s a version of Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” a duct-taped banana that, despite satirizing the art market, sold for $6.2 million. Padilla’s take is modeled on an Artforum magazine cover and uses trompe-l’oeil to make little details — chewed-up gum, a Lisa Frank sticker and a ladybug — pop with a 3D effect.
Another of Padilla’s paintings is modeled on Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors.” Holbein’s 16th-century original shows a pair of diplomats standing with an array of scientific instruments. A stretched, anamorphic skull haunts the bottom-center of the canvas, while an obscured crucifix adorns the top-left.
Padilla’s ambassadors are two cars crashing into each other. The skull is replaced with a rose, and where the crucifix should be is a tiny version of Finn from
“Adventure Time.”
Even Padilla couldn’t tell you what half of his paintings mean. That’s what makes them constellations — faint connections between distant stars in the flat expanse of night.
IF YOU GO
“Constellations”
by Cymon Padilla
WHEN: First Friday opening, March 7 (4-8 p.m.) through Friday, March 28
WHERE: Auric Gallery, 125 E. Boulder St.
HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m.
WEBSITE: auricgallery.com
“Rückenfigur” | Credit: Cymon Padilla
Take a photo of “Contact” and invert the colors using your phone. | Credit: Cymon Padilla
| March 8-March 23
CANNON TAYLOR
BY
COMPILED
3 WILDERMISS THERAPY
Wednesday, March 19, The Black Sheep, 2106 E.Platte Ave., 8 p.m. blacksheeprocks.com
Founded in Denver and now based in Nashville, the members of Wildermiss create indie tunes influenced by everything from melancholy lo-fi to bouncy jazz to soaring pop-punk. It’s the bit tersweet soundtrack to a coming-of-age film Wildermiss provide a few fan reviews in their Spotify bio, one of which compares their vibe to the “Twilight” soundtrack. (That’s a compliment, if you couldn’t tell. The “Twilight” soundtrack, unlike the movie, is phenomenal.)
7OTHERWORLDLY ORDINARY
Friday, March 7 through Friday, March 28, Surface Gallery, 2752 W. Colorado Ave. Times vary. surfacegallerycos.com
Surface Gallery’s two March exhibits find the otherworldly in the ordinary. In “Gypsum,” Ben Bires paints the White Sands National Park in New Mexico, the landscape of an alien planet untouched by humans. In “Ordinary Hours,” Ashley Andersen finds holiness in daily rituals, creating paintings and drawings from cleaning products, wood and Dutch gold-leaf, and sculptures of ordinary objects behind frosted panels. The exhibits open on March 7, 5-9 p.m. Artist talks will be held on March 20 at 5:30 p.m.
growly vocal delivery will erupt into a shriek as leaden guitar riffs and earthquake drums thump out the beat. Suddenly, the sound will melt into synthetic hi-hats and boosting bass. The two genres are locked in embrace. The flow and clever lyrics are consistently rap-informed, and the metal heaviness never gets lost in translation.
4
ODD SQUAD
Saturday, March 8, What’s Left Records 2217 E. Platte Ave., 7:30 p.m. whatsleftrec.com
Someone in a banana costume plays the digeridoo. An opera singer performs “Bodies” by Drowning Pool. A dancer teaches a math equation. These are just a few of the sights that have graced The Odd Show in its many years in the Pikes Peak region. It’s a variety show for the weird, each performer trying something bizarre and out of their comfort zone. “There’s a lot of vulnerability, some awkward moments,” said organizer Yves Sturdevant, “but it all adds up to a very great night.”
PARTY TILL THE ASTEROID COMES
Friday, March 21 through Sunday, March 23, Colorado Springs Event Center, 3960 Palmer Park Blvd. Times vary. jurassicquest.com/ upcoming-events
“I am very normal about dinosaurs,” said no one, ever. Whether you’re a normie “Jurassic Park” fan or an enthusiast of scientifically accurate dinosaurs (feathers and all), Jurassic Quest is the party from 66 million years ago you were born to witness. Dig for fossils, meet a baby Triceratops and try not to cry in fear when you’re in the shadow of an animatronic Spinosaurus. The event is clearly marketed towards young kids, but what’s stopping an adult from attending on their own? The answer is “Nothing,” if you can break past your self-imposed limits.
12
SPARKLING WIT
Thursday, March 13, Lulu’s Downtown, 32 S. Tejon St., 7 p.m. lulusmusic.co
The first thing you’ll notice attending a set by comedian Jamie Shriner is her fashion sense. It looks like a rabid unicorn foamed all over the venue. A self-described fusion of Bo Burnham and Jenna Marbles, Shriner’s humor is like marmite infused with edible glitter. If you’re a veteran theater kid, you’ll probably be cackling all night. But if you aren’t down for a series of impromptu raps about everything from cows to Ms. Frizzle, avoid at all costs.
Courtesy: Vultures
THE SHEARN DIMENSION
Through Saturday, March 15, Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery at Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave. Times vary. gocadigital.org
Coloradan artist Patrick Shearn creates large-scale public art instillations that create a sense of wonder. His CV is impressive, to say the least: the Coachella astronaut, puppets that appeared in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and an instillation commissioned by the State of Berlin to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He’s worked in visual effects on films like “Jurassic Park,” “Fight Club” and “Interview with the Vampire.” Shearn’s latest exhibit, “Psycullescence: A Garden of Imagination” is probably inspired by a vacation to another dimension he isn’t telling us about. Dazzling palm trees sprout from black rocks in the shape of oysters, an archway is adorned with what looks like orange Silly String and a halo of clouds hovers overhead. Be sure to visit Shearn’s dimension before it leaves Colorado Springs.
Thursday, March 13 through Sunday, March 23, Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater at Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave. Times vary. entcenterforthearts.org
You’ll laugh your head off at playwright David Adjmi’s fast-paced, contemporary take on the tale of Marie Antoinette. The choreographed dances to 1980s pop hits and the towering wigs are well worth the price of admission.
“The hair and the couture is all there, but with a beautiful human twist that makes us see the story anew,” said director Max Shulman.
“We are presented with a person caught in the tumult of history and the victim of revolutionary change that so often forgets the individual as the world blasts forward toward new ways of living.”
Credit: Bobby Hughes, courtesy Auric Gallery
9 AURIC ARTS
Friday, March 7 through Friday, March 28, Auric Gallery, 125 E. Boulder St. Times vary. auricgallery.com
Auric Gallery is featuring four exhibits in the month of March. First is Chris Loud’s “The Mundane, the Unexpected, and the Extraordinary.” Loud uses abstract color and composition to convey everything from a simple lemon to a harrowing 18th-century shipwreck. Second is Bobby Hughes’ “To Be Human: The Wreckage,” devastating yet colorful interpretations of negative emotions. Next is Greg Johnson’s “Artifact,” aluminum sculptures resembling abstract architecture. The fourth exhibit is Cymon Padilla’s “Constellations,” which you can read more about on page 16.
13 GET YOUR GROOVE ON
Saturday, March 15, The Antlers Hotel, 4 S. Cascade Ave., 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. coloradorecordshow.com
Vinyl record collecting an esoteric hobby. You might not understand the appeal of tediously flipping through stacks of cardboard in search of one elusive record. You might prefer picking from various albums on a streaming service, making a playlist and hitting shuffle. Listening to a vinyl record has its appeal, though — it’s found sitting cross-legged on the floor, admiring the art on a gatefold cover, listening to the seamless transitions from one song to the next.
2
ARMADILLO LOVE
Thursday, March 6 through Sunday, March 16, Studio West Gallery at PPSC Downtown Campus, 22 N. Sierra Madre St.. Times vary. springs.ludus.com/index.php
“Arnie’s Love Mix” is a collaboration between Pikes Peak State College and Springs Ensemble Theatre, bringing you a mixtape of local art about love. The 11 plays, one film, one dance, nine poems and five songs explore love in all its forms: parental love, elderly love, love in the time of robots and more. Music will be performed by local folk musician Bryse Taylor. The night is rated PG-13 for some adult language and situations. “I’m desperate to get back to our roots of valuing other humans and caring for them,” said organizer Sarah Sheppard Shaver. “This is my love letter to this community.”
6 SPACE FOR ALL
Saturday, March 8, Doherty High School, 4515 Barnes Road, 1:30 p.m. rmwfilm.org/ film-in-the-community
In 1961, Captain Ed Dwight was the first African American to join the Aerospace Research Pilot School. Although he proceeded to the second phase of the program, he was never selected to be an astronaut. Dwight later became a sculptor, and in 2024, he finally went to space at 90 years old, becoming the oldest person to do so. The stories of Dwight and other Black astronauts are told in documentary “The Space Race.” Rocky Mountain Women’s Film is hosting a free screening, after which Dwight will be available for a Q&A. Registration is required.
10 AROUND THE GLOBE
Saturday, March 8, Broadmoor World Arena, 3185 Venetucci Blvd., 2 p.m. broadmoorworldarena.com
The most fun I’ve ever had at a basketball game was watching the Harlem Globetrotters. Basketballs are treated like hacky sacks and the dunks are non-stop. It’s basketball for those of us with fried attention spans. The team was founded in 1926, and since then has named ten honorary members, including Whoopi Goldberg, Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis (can you imagine him dribbling in that cassock?).
Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16, Pikes Peak Center, 190 S. Cascade Ave. Times vary. csphilharmonic.org Composer Antonín Dvořàk’s
Courtesy: The Black Sheep
Courtesy: Yves Sturdevant
Courtesy: Harlem Globetrotters
Courtesy: Hollyann McCann
Courtesy: SemiFiction
Ronald McNair |
Courtesy: National Geographic
Courtesy: Colorado Springs Philharmonic
Credit: Wes Magyar. Courtesy: GOCA
Credit: Ben Bires. Courtesy: Surface Gallery
Courtesy: UCCS Theatre & Dance
5 LET THEM EAT CAKE
Spring Museum Exhibitions
ARTS&CULTURE .
DIKEOU, DIKEOU VERY MUCH
W.I.P.
IT
By LAUREN CIBOROWSKI
Idon’t know about you, but I love me some good clickbait, especially of the travel variety. So, when a recent scroll through Instagram suggested a “hidden art gallery” in Denver, I knew I had to give it a try. And so, one recent wintry afternoon found three of us with a Jamba Juice to our left, a ramen place to our right, the war-torn construction zone that is Denver’s 16th Street Mall mere feet behind us — and before us at the correct address was… an… office building? Peering through the dusty window, a sign on a stand directed us to call for entry. The polite woman on the phone further directed us to find the Dikeou Collection (pronounced “dick you”) on the door roster and ring for entrance. We were buzzed in and took the world’s most leisurely elevator to the fifth floor, emerging into a fluorescent-lit hallway lined with … donation boxes? Hoo boy. This was going to be interesting.
The hallway had dozens of doors. Two of them to the right were cracked, and filled with construction equipment saws, extension cords, you name it. And before us stretched a seemingly endless array of donation boxes of the museum variety. You know, the clear acrylic boxes with a money slot on top of a pedestal? That kind. Each was different and seemed to come from a different artistic institution.
Three other visitors had apparently come in right before us, and they seemed as confused as we were. Then a docent (?) hurriedly whisked past us, mumbling quickly that the exhibit began down the hallway and to the right and that we were actually standing at the end. It took me a minute to figure out what he was saying, but eventually we found ourselves in a large room filled with … garage doors? I mean. I shouldn’t question it. Literally, they were garage doors. No placards on the wall, just several large, metal, industrial doors of some kind. To my utter mortification, my husband and our friend then tried to open several of them, the loud, grating noise echoing through the mostly vacant space. Now on the one hand, I’m firmly
opposed to touching any art in a museum, no matter if it’s “art” or art; but on the other hand … no one exactly rushed in to stop them.
I quickly distanced myself from the delinquents I had come in with and fled to another room. Which had … an artificial floral arrangement …? Oh, geez, I really need to stop ending every sentence with a question. But boy, was this a puzzler.
The nook in question held a dusty, waist-height arrangement of fake flowers and ferns and palms.
And it kept going. A former walk-in safe held an exhibition of matchbooks. Another room had business cards neatly mounted with tacks from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Next was an office, presumably of the woman who had answered the phone. One bookshelf in the office contained a display of coins, which she told us were free for the taking as long as we distributed them into the many aforementioned donation boxes in the hallway. Further on, rather disturbingly, was a small, white room with a white porch swing mounted just a foot away from and facing a wall, purposefully unusable. Next, a room with an industrial-grade meat slicer and paper plates covered in writing of what I presume were vegetarian sentiments. And then a room with dirty rags covering the floor and door jamb corners. A room filled with very old looking chairs, each labeled with the name of a pope. A room with a mirror and a table with empty vases with pictures of the same vases with flowers on the walls. A room with tin ceiling tiles on the floor. And so on and so forth, like you do.
So what exactly was this? I’m not sure I’m the person to tell you, since I left with more questions than answers. But technically, this was a retrospective exhibit of artist Devon Dikeou’s work called “Mid-Career Smear,” curated by Cortney Lane Stell. Dikeou is quite acclaimed, from the looks of her CV, and has been producing art since the late 80s if not longer.
Often, friends kindly assume that, as a former gallery owner, I have some sort of brilliant take on art, and so my friend that day asked if I had ever shown work like that when I had a gallery. That’s a resounding no, I explained, because I tried to show work both that I loved and that I thought would sell so that I could make the gallery rent. And that, friends, is the beauty of a museum versus a gallery: however perplexing the work may be, it doesn’t need to sell, and so the viewer may simply wander and think whatever thoughts they would like to think. And so we did.
You need art. Art needs you.
Lauren Ciborowski writes about the arts and music in every issue. W.I.P. stands for Works in Progress.
BEST BITES
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Tony’s Downtown Bar
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Edelweiss
For 55 years Edelweiss has brought Bavaria to Colorado Springs! Using fresh ingredients, the menu invites you to visit Germany. Voted Gold Best German, Silver Dessert Menu, and Bronze Best Patio by Indy readers! Reservations and the menu can be found online at EdelweissRest.com
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MUSIC
Triple Take:
The Band: Primus
Shane’s musical journey began at just 13 years old, when his uncle took him to a venue in downtown Houston to experience Primus live. That night, the prog rock outfit hit him like a lightning bolt. He felt a part of something larger, the crowd’s energy surging through him, and for the first time, he was confronted with the wild, unruly nature of experimental rock that crossed genres into funk and metal. He had no idea who Primus was at the time, but it didn’t matter. Teenage Shane was in his lost boy era; the youngest one in the crowd finding himself trying to fit in — donning a Hollister tee, fingerless gloves and spiked belt. That night, he embraced a new identity, one that was untamed and completely himself. His journey into becoming less mainstream and more individualistic began.
PATCHWORK JACK
EXPLORING THREE INFLUENCES ON SHANE LORY OF
by KANDACE LYTLE
Shane Lory, local singer-songwriter of the everevolving band Patchwork Jack, looks the part — working behind the bar at Lulu’s, a shaggy-haired, talented troubadour with a honey-eyed gaze. He dresses with a sense of creative expression that illuminates his artistic purpose, love of comfort, need for freedom and individuality with a rugged, travel-worn lifestyle. There’s an artistic sensibility in everything Shane does. As a vocalist, Shane carries the raw, rebellious energy of his love for punk rock with the soul-soaked honesty of folk music, and inside lies a deep, reflective core, much like Blaze Foley, where lyrics are unflinchingly personal and often soaked in heartache and longing.
Shane’s journey in the Springs singer-songwriter scene continues to unfold, with his musical identity ever-shifting and growing. Currently, Patchwork Jack is recording a collaborative album with the Flying Pig Orchestra, exploring dystopian folklore through the lens of his fellow folksy farmer friends. It’s music about building the world you want to live in, a celebration of freedom and creation in a time of uncertainty.
Patchwork Jack is set to release their first full-length album and embark on a tour this fall. The band, known for its eclectic mix of musical genres, performed several shows last month, including a performance at Oskar Blues and at Lulu’s Downtown for a solo matinee.
The Song: “Jesus Does the Dishes” by Wingnut Dishwashers Union
Patchwork Jack’s sound has been shaped by Shane’s evolution from pop-punk into a broader range of genres, including folk, country and Texan honky-tonk. His first musical awakenings were shaped by his love for underground music, and in high school and college, he was searching for something more than just youthful rebellion. He found inspiration in songs like “Jesus Does the Dishes” by Wingnut Dishwashers Union, a punk anthem that turned the mundane act of doing dishes into a metaphor for postrevolutionary existence. The song was a precursor to Shane’s later exploration of folk and country, which he would eventually discover with a deeper emotional resonance.
The Album: Live at the Austin Outhouse by Blaze Foley
Albums like Live at the Austin Outhouse by Blaze Foley and the works of John Prine became touchstones in Shane’s musical evolution. As a singer-songwriter discovering his own talent, his lyrics shifted from the cryptic and metaphorical world of emo to a simpler, more honest approach. It was the raw, unpolished honesty of Blaze Foley’s outlaw country and Prine’s heartfelt, wry brand of folk that ultimately shaped Shane and Patchwork Jack’s current sound. Gone were the layers of coolness or unnecessary complexity.
Shane Lory | Courtesy: Shane Lory
The Nostalgia Remains the Same
Exploring a rock and roll legacy in Becoming Led Zeppelin
by KANDACE LYTLE
When I heard about the release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, I thought of the perfect person to invite to a screening — my buddy, Paulie, a fellow Led Head in his 60s whose twenty-year-old son, Aidan, an accomplished guitarist, recently got into Berklee College of Music by playing “The Rain Song.” Paulie and I became instant friends at a weekly Thursday night dinner due to our shared love of classic rock. We’ve spent many evenings playing and singing Zeppelin tunes and frequently see the local cover band in the Springs, Zeppelin Alive. So, when we entered the theater and saw people of all ages, excited to share their love of Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham, I couldn’t help but think, what is it about Led Zeppelin that continues to bring people of all ages together?
Released on Feb. 7 in IMAX, Becoming Led Zeppelin offers an intimate look into the origins of one of rock-and-roll's most iconic bands. The documentary takes viewers on a journey through the early lives of the band members, blending current interviews with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, as well as a never-before-heard interview with the late John Bonham. It's the first authorized documentary about the group, offering rare, behind-the-scenes access to the band's rise to fame and new insight into
the cultural phenomenon they became. Experiencing the film in maximalist IMAX gives generations of fans who never had the privilege the experience of seeing the band live.
From a young age, I’ve felt a deep longing to have lived in the 1960s and 1970s — the loss of opportunity to ever see my favorite band in concert before I was even born is something I will forever grieve. Led Zeppelin has been a soundtrack to moments and milstones: Middle school drop-off with my dad; packing to go off to college and every move since; my first and only tattoo. Songs that introduced me to one of my favorite trilogies of all time, Lord of the Rings, with songs like “Ramble On” and “Misty Mountain Hop.” In high school, I drove a 1976 Pontiac Firebird Formula, complete with a Led Zeppelin sticker on the back windshield. I always felt I was born too late. I dreamed of being in my early 20s in 1969 — the year of Woodstock and the release of Led Zeppelin’s first two albums. This era is the focus of the second half of the documentary and well worth viewing in IMAX due to the visceral effects of both the sound quality and footage of entire songs, most specifically, a room full of eager concertgoers shaking it to “Rock and Roll;” everyone in the theater was having a hard time sitting still, heads bobbing and legs bouncing, with a collective clap after the performance.
The film dives deep into the kismet that allowed these four distinct talents to unite at just the right moment. Each member shares previously unseen mementos: first drafts of lyrics, receipts from their studio sessions and sheet music with marked-up notes. One of the most emotional moments in the documentary occurs when the surviving members listen to previously unreleased material from Bonham. The shots of them reflecting on their time with Bonzo are deeply moving and reveal the bond they all shared. The doc is not just about the music, though — it’s also a
reflection on their cultural legacy and how they overcame the skepticism of critics. In particular, the band’s sophomore album Led Zeppelin II serves as a key turning point. When it was released on Oct. 22, 1969, it proved that Zeppelin wasn’t just a one-hit wonder or a novelty act. Despite harsh criticism of their debut album from outlets like Rolling Stone, the success of Zeppelin II firmly established the band as one of the greatest rock bands in history. The trio of surviving members — Plant, Page, and Jones — share their pride in overcoming that early backlash and affirming their place in the annals of rock. The documentary serves as the first chapter in what many fans hope will be followed by another that explores their later work. It carefully lays the foundation of Led Zeppelin’s story, stopping just as the band begins to soar. Becoming Led Zeppelin leaves viewers eager for the next installment, as the band’s journey is far from over. With their musical roots firmly planted, this documentary ensures that their legend will only continue to grow. Today, it’s hard to walk around Colorado Springs without seeing someone in Zeppelin garb; no matter their age, race, gender or socioeconomic status, a shared love of these virtuosos for their iconic lyrics, blending of genres and ability to deliver timeless performances keeps their music and cultural influence as relevant in 2025 and it was in 1969.
A live performance featured in Becoming Led Zeppelin | Courtesy: Sony Pictures Classics
Becoming Led Zeppelin, a new doc featuring all living band members. | Courtesy: Sony Pictures Classics
| Courtesy: Sony Pictures Classics
March 7 - March 20 | 25
MUSIC .
Autumnal plays Lulu’s Downtown on March 6. | Courtesy: Autumnal
Local Live Music, March 6 through March 19
THURSDAY, MARCH 6
Autumnal, Shop Dog, Your Jack | Folk. Lulu’s Downtown. 32 S. Tejon St. 8 p.m.
Sydney Sprague, Pony, Silver & Gold | Indie. Vultures. 2100 E. Platte Ave. 7:30 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19
Wildermiss, The Drawn Out, Frail Talk | Indie rock. The Black Sheep. 2106 E. Platte Ave. 8 p.m.
It’s Calvin Klein, Daddy
By TIFFANY WISMER
Iwas 17 years old. My friends and I were going out to a party, and we had spent a lot of time crafting the perfect outfits for our adventure. It was the 90s, and we’d visited Hot Topic earlier that day. Someone (not me) may have been wearing a pair of vinyl pants.
Finally ready, we came down the stairs to show my mom, with pride, what we had done. I realized even before she spoke that, somewhere, somehow, I’d made a grievous error. Her eyebrows nearly left her face.
“Why are you wearing that?”
Please now picture that scene in Clueless, where Cher’s father complains about her tiny white date dress. I gave my mother a puzzled pout. It was cute… wasn’t it? Unlike Cher, I didn’t have Calvin Klein’s good name, or Cher’s sense of style, to defend me. I changed into something else.
It’s possible my mother’s question was tattooed on my brain that night because now every time I look at people’s clothes I wonder: why are you wearing that?
Turns out there are many reasons why. Many good reasons, and bad reasons, and odd reasons, and delightful reasons. These reasons range from ridiculously shallow to depths that border on mythological. We dress because of pop culture, sentiment, ceremony, nostalgia. We dress to honor a person or
THE DRESS CODE
a history that is dear to us. We dress for convenience, practicality. We dress so that we will be noticed. We dress so that we will not be noticed. This is happening all over the world. Literally everywhere. And I find that fascinating. Every nation, every religion, every family or social group, and ultimately every individual human, has its own spoken or unspoken dress code. In this column, I hope to uncover the stories we are telling through what we wear.
In a recent interview on The Who What Wear Podcast, fashion designer Rachel Scott connected how we dress with how we speak. “I've always been obsessed with language, and I think that's really how I even view fashion, really,” she said. “The clothes that we wear are like our vocabulary.”
When you choose to put on a vintage t-shirt or a suit or a pair of Crocs, what are you saying? Are you intentionally saying something? Unintentionally?
What is it? Most of us overthink, worrying about how others will perceive us, and our sense of style dissolves into blandness. It’s like agreeing with everyone you meet just to get along with them. Like word choices, fashion choices are active, passive, shy, bold, rebellious, or codependent. Maybe my mom’s question will haunt you now, like it does me (sorry). But really… Why are you wearing that?
For me, the point is that I don’t have to think much. I just kinda have a uniform that just works for me. It consists of this hat, which was a graduation present from an aunt. When my father passed away she took on a mentoring role, and when I graduated with my PhD in Math she gave me this hat. Before that I was never a hat person and now I wear it almost every day. This dress shirt. And I also have a coat which was also a gift from an aunt, on a different side. And these dress pants that I can also climb in or dance in. And that’s about it. That’s my daily thing. I’ve been told that I have “the Oppenheimer look” and I don’t know how I feel about that.
Tiffany Wismer is the owner of Luna’s Sustainable Fashion Boutique. In every issue, she will investigate the driving forces behind fashion in our city, and the narratives and values that are communicated through style.
Joseph Rennie
FASHION PLATE
Joseph Rennie | Credit: Tiffany Wismer
trails with two small tows for beginners and children, along with other winter activities and lodging for 50. The site opened in the late 1950s and operated into the early 1960s.
By the mid-1960s, skiing had become Colorado’s marquee attraction. Colorado Springs’ marquee resort, naturally, got in on the action. Ski Broadmoor officially opened in 1959, with two runs cut along the base of Cheyenne Mountain, just southwest of the Broadmoor Hotel. Ski Broadmoor was one of the first facilities in the state to use artificial-snow-making machines. It also offered lighted runs for night skiing and a ski lodge with a restaurant and cocktail lounge, sundeck and full rental and repair shop. But even with the snow-making machines, conditions were difficult to maintain. The site was run by the Broadmoor until 1986, after which the city leased it for two years, then the Vail Corp. leased it and kept operations running from 1988-1991, when it finally closed.
By the early 1950s, state and local tourism interests were busily constructing the image of Colorado’s high country as a vacationland. Promoters learned from Aspen, the early and highly successful ski town, that there was money to be made by exploiting the unique qualities of place. Towns adopted the ski industry and tourism as mainstays of the local economy, along the way branding images that consumers could attach to place, perhaps best exemplified by Vail, a fabricated Bavarian village. The
HISTORY.
corporate ski industry made huge profits as land developers, so the new ski resorts hosted lodges, condos, hotels, restaurants and all sorts of entertainment that created a new type of vacation experience. Large, corporate ski resorts today dominate the industry and attract thousands from around the world each year. Small, local runs could not compete, and Colorado Springs was left in the cold.
Although skiing contributes little to the contemporary Colorado Springs economy, the creative destruction of capitalism leads to perpetual innovation. One day, skiing on Pikes Peak might make a comeback, not as competition to the giant ski resorts in the high country, but as a local theme park and training site. All one would need is a terrain park with rails, jumps and perhaps a small half-pipe, along with some groomed runs. Families could bring kids to learn to ski, parents could sip a brew or cocktail while the kids play, teens could hang out under the lights at night or on weekends, schools could run physical education classes at the site — why not? Of course, water rights would be a nightmare to negotiate for snow production, but there are plenty of crafty water lawyers in the state. There have been several efforts to market small terrain parks and night skiing to Denver residents in the foothills along I-70, and there has been repeated rumor of entrepreneurs considering new sites for similar parks on the slopes of Pikes Peak. Maybe one day Ski Pikes Peak will again be a local attraction!
Ski Broadmoor | Courtesy: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum
BOOKS .
Getting into the heads of troubled characters
An interview with Colorado author Jon Bassoff
By KATHRYN EASTBURN • Rocky Mountain Reader •
The Memory Ward, to be released March 4, is Colorado author Jon Bassoff’s tenth novel. His first was published just a little over a decade ago. With the expansive range among his books, Bassoff surprises regular fans and draws in new ones. His ninth novel, Beneath Cruel Waters, is probably his most conventional—a moody, dark psychological investigation into a troubled family’s history and its connection with a murdered man in small-town Colorado. The Memory Ward, described by some as a psychological thriller, walks the line of identity, trauma, what’s real and what’s not real in the outwardly normal life of a mail carrier. Our reviewer admired its slow build and the book’s seamless trajectory from weird to scary.
ka, I’ve loved reading these stories. The story “Save Me, Stranger” was a continuous revelation to me, like a set of Russian nested dolls, opening up with more and more perspectives. This story gave me hope. Life isn’t always pretty but we can affect change, all of us, in our own ways. Can you tell me a bit about the impetus for the story?
Bassoff’s fiction is hard to categorize. Author Christopher Ransom said, “…there’s nothing else like it out there. Part mystery, part heartland crime, part horror … Let’s call it nouveau-noir Americana,” a characterization that made Bassoff chuckle.
He’ll be promoting The Memory Ward at events at the Boulder Bookstore on March 7, at Romero’s in Lafayette on March 12, at Bricks in Longmont on March 13 and at the Tattered Cover on Colfax in Denver on March 28. He’ll head to Austin and Seattle for events in April.
Rocky Mountain Reader caught up with Bassoff at his Longmont home last week and talked to him about being a teacher—he teaches English at Longmont High School—a writer and a reader.
RMR: As a public school teacher of high school students, are you concerned about AI, social media influences and trends in diminishing reading among young people?
JB: Yes, I worry about these things. Of course, there are always great students every year who are good readers. But in general, smart phones have captured the attention and shortened the attention span of a lot of kids. I see students in 11thand 12th grade who say they’ve never read an entire book.
RMR: What do your students think about you being a published author?
JB: They don’t think that much about it. Most of my stuff is inappropriate for that age group, but I did have a student who found a book of mine in a used bookstore and read it. She came up to me afterward and said, “Mr. Bassoff, I’ll never look at you the same.” That made me really happy.
RMR: Were you one of those kids who always wanted to be a writer, back when you were in high school?
JB: No, I didn’t write in high school, not creatively. Then I
went to college and still wasn’t much interested in writing until I came across a book by this midwestern writer, Jim Thompson, who wrote noir thrillers, and that was it for me. He wrote from the point of view of a psychotic person and I thought, that’s interesting; I could do that. That was when my interest in the narrator began to grow. I like thinking about who’s telling the story and how they’re telling it. That’s what’s interesting to me.
RMR: How did the idea of The Memory Ward come to you? Did you know the whole story before you began writing it or does the character or an image carry you along a path of discovery?
JB: I know the whole story before I begin. I do a lot of planning and plotting, finding where the characters’ lives intersect, that kind of thing. I know a writer who says he starts with a single image and lets the book grow out of it but I can’t do it that way. I did have an image in mind, though, of someone peeling back the wallpaper and seeing what was behind it.
RMR: Who are your favorite writers? What do you like to read?
JB: I admire writers who have interesting narrators, unreliable narrators. I like southern gothic writers, Flannery O’Connor, some of Faulkner. I like Kazuo Ishiguro. But my biggest influence was Jim Thompson who wrote some fantastic books back in the 1940s and ‘50s. When I first read The Killer Inside Me, I decided I wanted to write a novel. It was unlike anything I’d read before. The first book I wrote was a blatant rip-off of that book. [That book has not been published.]
RMR: You’re so prolific, basically a book a year, and you teach full-time. How do you get so much done?
JB: I’m a pretty disciplined person. I write whenever I have a chance, and having summers off helps. I get a lot done then. But if you think about it, we have more time than we think. If you write 1,500 words a week for a year you’ve got enough words for a novel. Anybody can find the time to do that. You just have to want to do it and sit down and do it.
RMR: Your books often are referred to as thrillers or horror though they don’t necessarily fall neatly into those genres. Why do people love horror? True crime? Warped psychological thrillers? What’s the appeal?
JB: It’s a great question, and it’s probably different for different people. I think there’s something to be said for the roller coaster analogy, a way to get an adrenaline rush without actually putting ourselves at risk. But I also think that we all have that curiosity about violence, about evil, and this is a way to explore that. For me, the people I trust the least are those who never admit to any of this darkness, any bad thoughts. Their marriages are perfect, their children are perfect, their lives are perfect. Those are the ones I really worry about. Meanwhile, those who are honest enough to explore some of that darkness tend to be more open minded and empathetic. Or maybe that’s just the people I’ve met. But
horror has also become kind of a comfort food for me. When my wife wants to relax, she watches romantic comedies. When I want to relax, I watch gore from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It works for both of us.
RMR: What’s next for you?
JB: Right now, one of my books, The Drive-Thru Crematorium is in pre-production for a movie. We’ve got a lot of the financing in place as well as the director and line producer and all that stuff. They still need to cast. But I’ve been close several times, so I don’t get too excited yet. As someone once told me, in publishing it’s always no, no, no, no until it’s yes. In the movie industry, it’s always yes, yes, yes, yes until it’s no. Another one of my books, The Disassembled Man, is also being shopped around. I wrote the screenplays for both of them. Adapting your own novel for film is kind of nice. You get to really trim things down to make it lean and mean. I’m not sure how I would do writing an original screenplay though.
RMR: Anything else you want to say to give readers a sense of what you’re up to with The Memory Ward?
JB: I’m doing quite a few live events, which is always fun. Writing can be such a lonely profession, so I look forward to connecting with people and seeing their faces. Plus, like most writers, I’m insecure and need that validation.
RMR: Why does literature matter at this moment in American history?
JB: I tend not to go about writing political novels, but I think our politics is always evident in what we write. And with the people in power so antagonistic to those who create, I think it’s more important than ever to keep writing and creating art and making music. I don’t think I could bear to live in a world without it.
Kathryn Eastburn is a longtime Colorado journalist. She cofounded the Colorado Springs Independent in the early 1990s and is the published author of two books of nonfiction. She has taught journalism at The Colorado College and creative nonfiction writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. When she’s not writing or editing, she can be found in the garden getting dirt between her toes. n
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THE MAYHEM OF GOVERNMENT (UN)SPENDING
By BOB
For the first time in this country’s history, scores of federal government employees, many of them in their probationary periods, are being, or have been, fired. In addition, the planned hiring of seasonal workers for the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service has been put on hold, with either job offers being rescinded or seasonal and temporary positions just not being posted.
These jobs, which have been funded, approved and allocated by both houses of Congress through the normal legislative process, are upending not only the work of these and other federal agencies, but also the lives of the fired employees and their families. These are people who often travel seasonally from one national park or U.S. forest to another, often hoping to eventually work themselves into a fulltime career and the stability it brings to them and the sites where they work.
All of this is being done in the name of “eliminating waste” in the federal government by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a department that didn’t exist before Jan. 20 and was created without any legislative action.
If you ask the average person on the street, they will likely tell you that they think the federal government is overly large, entangled in far too much red tape and probably spends too much money on things it can do without. However, the best way to trim a budget, to cut down on spending, is much like the average person does with their own finances: With a scalpel, not with a chain saw. It is best done by careful analysis of spending, and
cutting the things, both large and small, that give you the least return for the money spent.
So, how do these cuts affect our national parks? Seasonal and temporary employees are usually the people hired during busy tourist seasons to manage increases in visitation. These are the people who manage campgrounds, empty trash cans, perform trail and building maintenance, man visitors center desks and entry points, perform interpretation and education duties, and public safety functions such as firefighting, search and rescue and law enforcement. While it appears — so far — that public safety employees have been exempted from cuts and hiring freezes, the elimination of the other positions will potentially have far-reaching effects to both the visitors’ experience, safety and the environment at national parks. Trash won’t get picked up, lines to enter parks could be longer, damaged trails may not get repaired, and there could be fewer staff members to answer questions at visitors centers, monitor traffic and perform a host of other duties. These other functions may either fall to what few employees are left — causing them to take time from their actual jobs, which could include investigating crimes or performing fire prevention activities.
Getting information regarding what cuts have been made at specific National Parks has proven impossible. Requests I made via email to the public information officers at Rocky Mountain, Great Sand Dunes and Mesa Verde national parks were all met with replies directing me to the NPS headquarters media office in Washington, D.C. A request made there, asking what positions had been cut, what seasonal positions had been eliminated, and how it would affect the visitors’ experiences at those parks was met with silence, as of the writing of this column, days after the request was made.
However, you don’t have to look far for indications that cuts are having some negative effects. On Feb. 14, Yosemite National Park announced on its Facebook page that it was delaying the opening of five of its campgrounds until July 14.
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, the closest NPS site to Colorado Springs, announced on its Facebook page
Feb. 20 that the visitors center, main trailhead parking lot and restroom facilities will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, due to a lack of staffing. Saguaro National Park in Arizona announced on their Facebook page on Feb. 20 that its visitor centers will be closed on Mondays. All this is happening just before the traditional busy spring break season in the state.
Massive cuts in funding and manpower are not only affecting the National Park Service. The U.S. Forest Service, which had already seen a freeze on all seasonal hiring for 2025, has apparently also suffered additional cuts, and those cuts are affecting not only the agency itself but the nonprofits that work with them. In an email announcement sent on Feb. 10, Colorado Springs-based Rocky Mountain Field Institute announced it was pausing its search for an executive director “due to recent uncertainty surrounding federal funding.” And in Oregon, the Siskiyou Mountain Club, which helps manage 400 miles of backcountry trails, announced on its Facebook page on Feb.19 that it “lost a $320,000 agreement that had been signed for work in the Marble Mountain Wilderness. Another $50,000 for work on the [Pacific Crest Trail] went up in smoke.”
The seemingly careless and haphazard way that cuts and firings are being made
to the agencies that manage our public lands and parks fail to take into account the important work that these employees do to keep order and maintain the lands’ intrinsic value. Whether the public will stand idly by while the situation may descend into mayhem remains to be seen. All may not be lost, however. At the very least, follow the Leave No Trace 7 Principles (lnt.org/why/7-principles), and clean up after yourself. Maybe take your trash home with you instead of cramming it into an overflowing trash can. Consider volunteering in your favorite park (assuming they have someone to manage volunteers) and give the staff a helping hand.
Just because our government is inducing mayhem doesn’t mean we have to sit by and not try to mitigate the effects.
Be Good. Do Good Things. Leave No Trace.
Bob “Hiking Bob” Falcone is a retired career firefighter, USAF veteran, an accomplished photographer and 30-year resident of Colorado Springs. He has served on boards and committees for city, county and state parks in the Pikes Peak region, and spends much of this time hiking 800 or more miles each year, looking for new places and trails to visit, often with his canine sidekick Coal.
“HIKING BOB” FALCONE
Credit: Adobe Stock
Origins of a Legend: Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata
Presented by EPIC and the Ent Center for the Arts at
UCCS
On March 28, experience Leonard Bernstein’s early brilliance with Origins of a Legend: Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata. Acclaimed clarinetist Sergei Vassiliev, praised as “flawless” (The Colorado Springs Gazette), joins pianist Andrew Staupe, known for his “immaculate artistry” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Witness Bernstein’s transformation from student to master in this evocative piece.
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HOROSCOPES.
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The world’s darkest material is Vantablack. This superblack coating absorbs 99.96% of visible light, creating a visual void. It has many practical applications, like improving the operation of telescopes, infrared cameras, and solar panels. I propose we make Vantablack your symbol of power in the coming weeks. It will signify that an apparent void or absence in your life might actually be a fertile opportunity. An ostensible emptiness may be full of potential.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Among their many sensational qualities, rivers have the power to create through demolition and revision. Over the centuries, they erode rock and earth, making canyons and valleys. Their slow and steady transformative energy can be an inspiration to you in the coming months, Taurus. You, too, will be able to accomplish wonders through the strength of your relentless persistence — and through your resolute insistence that some old approaches will need to be eliminated to make way for new dispensations.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Centuries before European sailors ventured across the seas, Polynesians were making wide-ranging voyages around the South Pacific. Their navigations didn’t use compasses or sextants, but relied on analyzing ocean swells, star configurations, cloud formations, bird movements, and wind patterns. I bring their genius to your attention, Gemini, because I believe you are gaining access to new ways to read and understand your environment. Subtleties that weren’t previously clear to you are becoming so. Your perceptual powers seem to be growing, and so is your sensitivity to clues from below the visible surface of things. Your intuition is synergizing with your logical mind.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): The Maeslant Barrier is a gigantic, movable barricade designed to prevent the flooding of the Dutch port of Rotterdam. It’s deployed when storms generate surges that need to be repelled. I think we all need metaphorical versions of this protective fortification, with its balance of unstinting vigilance and timely flexibility. Do you have such psychic structures in place, Cancerian? Now would be a good time to ensure that you have them and they’re working properly. A key factor, as you mull over the prospect I’m suggesting, is knowing that you don’t need to keep all your defenses raised to the max at all times. Rather, you need to sense when it’s crucial to assert limits and boundaries — and when it’s safe and right to allow the flow of connection and opportunity.
and spread diseases that affect livestock. Yet starlings also create the breathtakingly beautiful marvel known as a murmuration. They make mesmerizing, ever-shifting patterns in the sky while moving as one cohesive unit. We all have starling-like phenomena in our lives — people, situations, and experiences that arouse deeply paradoxical responses, that we both enjoy and disapprove of. According to my analysis, the coming weeks will be prime time to transform and evolve your relationships with these things. It’s unwise to sustain the status quo. I’m not necessarily advising you to banish them—simply to change your connection.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Buildings and walls in the old Incan city of Machu Picchu feature monumental stone blocks that fit together precisely. You can't slip a piece of paper between them. Most are irregularly shaped and weigh many tons. Whoever constructed these prodigious structures benefited from massive amounts of ingenuity and patience. I invite you to summon some of the same blend of diligence and brilliance as you work on your growing masterpiece in the coming weeks and months. My prediction: What you create in 2025 will last a very long time.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Bioluminescence is light emitted from living creatures. They don’t reflect the light of the sun or moon, but produce it themselves. Fireflies do it, and so do glow-worms and certain fungi. If you go to Puerto Rico’s Mosquito Bay, you may also spy the glimmer of marine plankton known as dinoflagellates. The best time to see them show what they can do is on a cloudy night during a new moon, when the deep murk reveals their full power. I believe their glory is a good metaphor for you in the coming days. Your beauty will be most visible and your illumination most valuable when the darkness is at a peak.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn-born Shah Jahan I was the Emperor of Hindustan from 1628 to 1658. During his reign, he commissioned the Taj Mahal, a magnificent garden and building complex to honor his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. This spectacular “jewel of Islamic art” is still a major tourist attraction. In the spirit of Shah Jahan’s adoration, I invite you to dream and scheme about expressing your devotion to what you love. What stirs your heart and nourishes your soul? Find tangible ways to celebrate and fortify your deepest passions.
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LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The authentic alchemists of medieval times were not foolishly hoping to transmute literal lead and other cheap metals into literal gold. In fact, their goal was to change the wounded, ignorant, unripe qualities of their psyches into beautiful, radiant aspects. The coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to do such magic. Life will provide you with help and inspiration as you try to brighten your shadows. We all need to do this challenging work, Leo! Now is one of your periodic chances to do it really well.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Cosmic rhythms are authorizing you to be extra demanding in the coming days—as long as you are not frivolous, rude, or unreasonable. You have permission to ask for bigger and better privileges that you have previously felt were beyond your grasp. You should assume you have finally earned rights you had not fully earned before now. My advice is to be discerning about how you wield this extra power. Don’t waste it on trivial or petty matters. Use it to generate significant adjustments that will change your life for the better.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In North America, starlings are an invasive species introduced from Europe in the 19th century. They are problematic, competing with native species for resources. They can damage crops
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Over 2,100 years ago, Greek scientists created an analog computer that could track astronomical movements and events decades in advance. Referred to now as the Antikythera mechanism, it was a unique, groundbreaking invention. Similar machines didn’t appear again until Europe in the 14th century. If it’s OK with you, I will compare you with the Antikythera mechanism. Why? You are often ahead of your time with your innovative approaches. People may regard you as complex, inscrutable, or unusual, when in fact you are simply alert for and homing in on future developments. These qualities of yours will be especially needed in the coming weeks and months.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): No cars drove through London’s streets in 1868. That invention was still years away. But the roads were crammed with pedestrians and horses. To improve safety amidst the heavy traffic, a mechanical traffic light was installed — the first in the world. But it had a breakdown a month later, injured a police officer, and was discontinued. Traffic lights didn’t become common for 50 years after that. I believe your imminent innovations will have better luck and good timing, Pisces. Unlike the premature traffic signal, your creations and improvements will have the right context to succeed. Don’t be shy about pushing your good ideas! They could revamp the daily routine.
Est. 1910
PUZZLES!
News of the WEIRD
BY THE EDITORS AT ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
IT’S COME TO THIS
Visitors to the Chengdu Snow Village in the Sichun province of China were left with a “bad impression” of the tourist attraction in early February, Reuters reported. Because of unseasonably warm weather, project coordinators had to improvise the “snowy” atmosphere, stapling cotton sheets to the rooftops and scattering white sand, cotton batting and soapy water to simulate snow throughout the property. Snow Village organizers said entry fees would be refunded, and the village has closed.
IT’S
A MYSTERY
Investigators in Munich, Germany, are stumped by the sudden appearance of more than 1,000 small stickers on grave markers in three different cemeteries, the Associated Press reported. The stickers feature a QR code that, when scanned, reveals the name of the person in the grave and the location within the cemetery. “The stickers were put both on decades-old gravestones and very new graves that so far only have a wooden cross,” said police spokesperson Christian Drexler. Police are investigating property damage as well, because when removed, the stickers leave discoloration.
IT’S
GOOD TO HAVE A HOBBY
Clem Reinkemeyer, 87, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has an unusual collection — and now he has a Guinness World Record. United Press International reported on Feb. 17 that Reinkemeyer’s collection of 8,882 bricks includes a Roman brick from 100 A.D. and a sidewalk brick made in a facility where the Pentagon now stands. “What appealed to me about bricks is they have names and you can trace them back historically to places,” he said. Some of the most valuable ones are those with misspellings. “I think Oklahoma has a history for the most misspelled bricks,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
SPACE TRASH
Officials at Poland’s space agency POLSA are examining debris that fell onto the premises of a business in Komorniki on Feb. 19, Reuters reported, to determine whether it originated from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Later that day, an “identical” container was found about 19 miles away in a forest. POLSA said it has been monitoring the flight of the Falcon 9, which launched on Feb. 1 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and “will verify the object with SpaceX.” News outlets in Poland reported that flashes were seen in the sky on the morning of Feb. 19.
RECENT ALARMING HEADLINES
Residents of Godstone High Street in Surrey, England, may be out of their homes for months after a huge sinkhole opened up on Feb. 17, the BBC reported. Two sections of the road caved in, causing
people in 30 homes to be evacuated. “We’ll be looking to completely rebuild the road,” said Surrey County Council’s Matt Furniss. “It’s currently stable, it isn’t growing anymore.” Local business owners are concerned about how the closure will affect them. Shane Fry of DD Services said it would be “a trialling few months for us.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE
The SS United States, which has been docked and deteriorating at a Philadelphia port since 1976, started its 18-day passage to Alabama on Feb. 19, NBC10-TV reported. The ocean liner, in service from 1952 to 1969, holds the record for fastest eastbound and westbound trans-Atlantic crossings, but on this final journey, it will be towed at 5 knots (or about 6 miles per hour). In Alabama, it will be stripped of its innards — furniture, engine room equipment, cables and flooring — and then will be moved to Okaloosa County, Florida, where it will be sunk offshore and turned into a scuba-diving destination. Capt. Joseph Farrell, a ship-sinking and reef expert, said the sinking will be “a final chapter for the last allAmerican-made, American-flagged ocean liner.”
REPEAT OFFENDER
For the second time in a month, a teenager in the Bronx has been charged with trying to take a subway train for a joyride on Feb. 18, Pix11-TV reported. Police said the 15-year-old tried to operate the No. 2 train from the Prospect Avenue station. He was arrested in late January with a group of kids who drove the R train in Brooklyn. He was charged with reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing.
THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS
In the aftermath of the wildfires in California, at least two residents have returned to their homes only to find new and unwelcome tenants, the Los Angeles Times reported. Homeowner Sean Lorenzini evacuated during the Eaton fire, and upon his return found a black bear sleeping in the crawlspace under his home and lounging by the pool during the day. The large bear seems to be foraging in neighbors’ trash bins and is probably behind an attack on a neighbor’s pet goat, Lorenzini said. “It’s definitely not moving," he said. He’s hoping to get the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to help after they relocated a 525-pound bear at the end of January. In that case, the Altadena-area bear was lured into a trap with peanut butter and rotisserie chicken, then moved to Angeles National Forest. The wildlife agency told Lorenzini that after his bear is removed, he’ll need to seal up the crawlspace, as it will probably try to return. “I know we’re encroaching on their territory,” Lorenzini said of the bear, “so I’m sympathetic to that. But at the same time ... I’m exposed if anyone gets hurt. This is a wild animal.”
