“There can only be one cunty girl tonight,” MC Angel Camacho taunts the Jingle Ball judges as they examine the five beautiful contestants in the category Femme Queen Everyday Realness. As the girls begin to strut, the throng of spectators huddles close to the edge of the dance floor at…
Rita Lipoff, eyes closed, willpower amped up, is preparing to cast a spell. The flame from a lavender-scented candle flickers over a blank sheet of white paper sprinkled with lavender, hibiscus, and cloves. Lipoff kneels before a glass table in the living room of her tidy, open-loft townhouse in Hollywood,…
At age 55 Shelley Rozolsky has experienced more medical crises than most people do in a lifetime. When she was 18 years old, doctors noticed a lump in her breast. They told her it was nothing to worry about unless the lump got bigger. It eventually did. The growth proved…
Used car dealers are not OK: I’ve just finished reading the fairy tale by Bob Norman that appeared in the January 18 issue, entitled: “Road Worriers.” It described the poor, misunderstood used-car dealers along State Road 7 (a.k.a. U.S. Highway 441). I know a man ain’t supposed to cry; however,…
Meet Skot Foreman, a 36-year-old Boca Raton native who once was a successful corporate banker with a stable (and sizable) income but gave it all up. These days he can make $100,000 in a single day. Or he can earn nothing in weeks. He owns an art gallery and deals…
Nova Southeastern University is a school that time forgot. The school has no gay-straight alliance. Take Back the Night, the antiviolence group that is standard fare on most college campuses, is absent. The Fort Lauderdale college even lacks a vibrant underground culture of hemp pants wearing, sweatshop-protesting kids. Instead most…
All aboard the Florida mystery tour: Mr. Dockery has the right idea, but the wrong technology (“Train in Vain,” Bob Whitby, January 25). The bullet train needs to be a MAG-LEV (magnetic levitation) train. The current development of the “bullet” train is long overdue. The status of research and design…
Article 10 of the Constitution of the State of Florida deals with all the legislative initiatives that don’t fit anywhere else. It’s the “Miscellaneous” section, and it’s where lawmakers put regulations about the militia, lotteries, marine net fishing, and the census. The newest addition to this slush pile arrived November…
Exhaust wafts from tailpipes and mingles with the acrid stench of sun-baked asphalt. It is a crossroads: In the middle of rush hour at the intersection of Broward Boulevard and Federal Highway, there’s a confluence of classes, a face-to-face exchange between rich and poor. Homeless Voice vendors are often seen…
After a car accident in 1994, Craig Riedesel languished for two and a half years with a herniated disk, cracked ribs, a broken arm, and worst of all, a nagging fear: “I thought I would never surf again,” he recalls. “All I wanted was my health back so I could…
Sittin’ on a cool ten mill: Hooray for the hoot and holler of Harvey Slavin (“The Man Who Wrote Too Much,” Emma Trelles, January 11). Can you please clone him and send him to Pembroke Pines? Perhaps he can retrieve a passive “dream park” that has been consigned to a…
From a distance Bob Dole didn’t quite look real. For one thing he was wearing makeup for the countless cameras that surrounded him in front of the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale on November 26. For another he was too far away from the assembled protesters for them to…
In a smoke-filled back dining room in Grady’s restaurant in Plantation, Emery “Fuzzy” Fazzini hunkers over a cheese-slathered, Mexican-style dish and plots his next move. A burly, gray-haired man who looks like a less-cuddly version of Burl Ives, Fazzini says his used-car dealership on State Road 7 in Plantation is…
My dinner with Kvetchnick? I would like to compliment Emma Trelles on a fair and balanced story about my letter-writing habits and thoughts (“The Man Who Wrote Too Much,” January 11). I would like to clear up a few things, though. First, with regard to the legal battle over my…
Before dawn, while the rest of the nine-to-five world huddles in bed, Harvey Slavin is already up and ready for action. He doesn’t jog, fish, or schlep himself to the sandy beach outside his oceanfront apartment building for an early swim. Slavin writes. Every day. And more often than not,…
Driving north on A1A from its intersection with Hallandale Beach Boulevard is like hacking through a micro-city under siege — by construction workers. While out-of-town SUVs attempt to squeeze into one lane, bulldozers churn rubble, and dust-caked men scurry about wearing white hardhats and earnest expressions. Contractors and their crews…
Hollywood politics is notoriously ugly, and thus enormously entertaining to watch. As long as you’re not one of the poor saps down there in the arena/cesspool, it’s all just good, dirty, sometimes offensive fun. As proof, Undercurrents points to last spring’s elections, particularly the tussle for incumbent Cathy Anderson’s city…
What, no jet packs? I have heard of the ridiculous, the inane, and the asinine; however, the rich English language needs another adjective to adequately describe the folly that is the Water Taxi (“Bekoff’s Bounty,” Emily Bliss, December 21). In Spanish, at least you can add “-isimo.” So, perhaps the…
Mark LaFontaine has the flu. He sniffles as he walks through his dining room, a hooded, red-and-blue terry-cloth robe swaddling his tall, athletic body. In Scooby-Doo slippers he pads to the back of the house and, after a few minutes, returns with his hands full. He unloads onto the dining…
Preston Tillman’s large, leathery hands flip through an old photo album. His milky brown eyes pore over grainy images of family and friends: photos that show his dark brown, close-cropped hair long before it turned stark white, photos that show small wooden and stucco houses built in the ’20s by…
What happens when you mix a First Amendmentquoting photographer on a deadline, a hotheaded cop, an armed federal agent, and a lot of chest-thumping? You get trouble, right here in the Venice of America. This scenario will be familiar to the dozen or so loyal Undercurrents readers. We’re speaking, of…
