BEST OF ORLANDO® NOMINATION BALLOT IS OPEN THROUGH MAY 6!

Apr 7-13, 1999

Apr 7-13, 1999 / Vol. 15 / No. 14

Let your freak flag fly

Some people just don’t know how special they are. As she stood in the boiling heat outside International Drive’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not Orlando Odditorium, the first entrant in last Saturday’s promotional “freak-off” worried aloud that the personal attribute she planned to display wasn’t quite bizarre enough for the highly publicized event. “What is…

Steve Schneider

Control group

The American ideal is virginity until about age 26. That’s the $80 million message resonating, with variable fidelity, across 48 states including Florida. For the first time, federal money is paying for educational programs that promote celibacy until marriage. Florida has received more than $2.2 million for such an effort, and nearly $200,000 of that…

Ericson, Edward Jr.

The drug deal

Those who read Henry Pierson Curtis’ front-page piece on the Colombian heroin trade in the March 28 Sentinel were left with clear impressions. (1) Colombia’s existence as a center of drug smuggling is partly a hardware problem: U.S.-supplied helicopters can’t fly high enough to reach the poppy fields. (2) The Colombian drug trade has strong…

Orlando Weekly Staff

So sewer me!

The Florida Home Builders Association has a bill home buyers will like a lot — until five or 10 years from now, when they’ll probably have to spend thousands to hook to sewer lines. The bill, waiting for a vote in the Florida House, would stop the Department of Community Affairs from reviewing plans for…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Gods and moshers

Catholic officials in Brazil attribute the recent 250 percent increase in church attendance to the popularity of priest Marcelo Rossi, 31, a singer and former aerobics instructor described by his young female parishioners as a “hunk.” His high-energy stadium masses regularly draw 20,000 worshipers. According to a March Chicago Tribune story, Father Rossi’s services use…

Chuck Shepherd

Making â??living wageâ?? a reality

An ancient Asian proverb says, “When spiders unite, they can tie down a tiger.” Well, one of the most menacing tigers in our country is the low-wage policy of both big business and government, which are using everything from corporate downsizing to global trade deals like NAFTA to hold down the paychecks of working-class families.…

Jim Hightower

Base instincts

If one must do the difficult work of bearing witness to history, it’s hard to imagine a better place to do it than from high in the back of the grandstand at Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano. It is the bottom of the eighth inning of the Baltimore Orioles’ exhibition game against the Cuban national team, the…

Tom Scocca

A bum wrap

Drivers racing in their cars along Mills Avenue through the eclectic Virginia-Mills retail district may be forgiven the oversight; after all, jumbled window displays can make it hard to single out any one item, even though when you see it, it’s hard to believe, and even harder to forget. But there it is, just inside…

Jeff Truesdell

Race against time

Harry T. Moore died three years too soon. Had his 1951 murder occurred after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, his name might have been first among the martyrs of the civil-rights movement. Indeed, the still-unsolved killing of the state’s NAACP coordinator in a Christmas-day bombing of his Mims home transformed Moore…

Jeff Truesdell

Colorful, comfortable Caribbean

There’s no doubt that Caribbean food is hot – as in trendy and sizzling on the palate. The challenge is to find authentic Caribbean fare so far inland from the source. With no fake parrots, silk palm trees or waiters scurrying around in shorts and Nikes, Gossip’s Caribbean Restaurant, on West Church Street, comfortably maintains…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Royal intrigue

Once upon a time, indulging in Thai cuisine was an exotic foray into the unknown, but now Thai restaurants can be found on just about every main drag in town. What’s next? McThai drive-throughs with satay nuggets and curry value-meals? Thankfully, much more originality and attention to detail are in evidence at Royal Thai, which…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Dance-hall daze

You have to hand it to director Doug Liman. Whenever a nightclubbing culture springs up, he’s there with a film that’s destined to become its “Saturday Night Fever.” What “Fever” was to the disco boom, so was Liman’s 1996 “Swingers” to the lounge revival that swept Los Angeles (and later the country): a character-driven exploration…

Steve Schneider

Distinctive name, distinctive subs

Seen one sub, seen ’em all? Then you haven’t met the chicken teriyaki creation at new Quizno’s Subs in Winter Park. Anything but ho-hum, the sandwich is juiced up with teriyaki sauce, pineapple strips and Catalina dressing. If you prefer old standards, you can have them, too — hot meatball and classic Italian subs are…

Colleen Moore

Rock vs. country in animal benefit

On Saturday, it’s a rock benefit; on Sunday, the show goes country: This weekend’s Pet Rocks Concert at Seminole Greyhound Park, a two-day benefit for the ailing Seminole County Humane Society (still recovering from a 1993 fire), could be seen as a competition between animal lovers, with organizers expecting a bigger turnout by the country…

Billy Manes

Killer clarinetist aids local debut

People write music for the clarinet because of its tonal qualities and a wide range of sonic possibilities that lead from deep, woody depths to light, feathery heights. It was the instrument of choice for such major jazz players as Sidney Bechet, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman — folks whose fluid fingering and mellifluous way…

Garaud MacTaggart

Skate expectations

There are a lot of careers out there — sports marketing, cryptozoology, talk-show host — that just were never thrown out to us in high school on career day. One of them was Roller Derby queen. If it had been, I might have tossed away my cigarettes and my copy of “Kafka’s Greatest Hits” and…

Liz Langley

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