I missed Soul Surfer, about the female surfer whose arm was bitten off by a shark. Take that, James Franco!

My favorite film was Waking Lions, directed by Allison Otto, from which I learned that a Colorado woman, Shannon Galpin, had sold her house to found Mountain2Mountain, which “invests in the world’s most underutilitzed resource: women and girls on the fringe.” The movie portrayed her adventures in Afghanistan.

Galpin has visited women in Afghan prisons (some of whom are victims of rape but were charged with adultery), supported a school for the deaf in Kabul, trained women in midwifery in rural areas (where male doctors are not allowed to see women under any circumstances), ridden her bike in rural areas (many people in Afghanistan consider it obscene for girls and women to ride bikes) because she hopes midwives might be able to travel that way, and has supported education and training in critical thinking for women and girls.

For a long time I had wanted to go to Afghanistan but was under the mistaken impression that you couldn’t just go, that you had to get permission from the military or something. Galpin said no, that there were even people who went as tourists to Afghanistan. That gives me hope that someday I’ll be able to go. I spent so many years of my life following what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan, when hardly anyone in the United States had heard of the Taliban, that I would like to go there now that it’s safer and see what’s happening.

Mountain2Mountain also contributes to Beyond the 11th’s programs for widows. Beyond the 11th was founded by 2 American women widowed by September 11 who decided to help women in Afghanistan widowed by that country’s 30 years of war. Beyond Belief, the film by Beth Murphy telling the story of their organization, focused much more on the lives of the two American founders but also included emotional footage of their trip to Afghanistan and their relationship with an Italian aid worker who was kidnapped.

The film I was looking forward to most, Pink Saris, was the most disappointing. It may have had something to do with the structure of the film, which was essentially a collection of vignettes. The director, Kim Longinotto, has been directing documentaries since 1982, and that may be her style.

But I think the real problem for me was my disillionment with the founder of the Gulabi Gang, Sampat Pal Devi, whom I had read about and believed to be a defender of women’s rights in rural India. But in this movie, most of her work involved disputes with families abusing their daughters-in-law, and her solution most often was to yell at the family and then send the woman back.

It seems to me she could have spent that energy forming a women’s cooperative and could have used donations to buy a piece of land where these women could live and farm. Perhaps that is completely unrealistic.

There was nothing in the movie about the Gulabi Gang, that is, the group of women who wear the pink saris. They were shown from time to time, but their purpose was not explained.

I hope that you will check out these movies, especially Waking Lions, and attend the gala put on by Mountain2Mountain on April 28 at the Denver Museum of Art. “Streets of Afghanistan: A Cultural Exhibition,” will be showing.

I realized later I could have sat down at our table at Casa Bonita and eaten “dinner” (my taco salad was a relatively safe choice), talked more to our dinner companions, and then taken photographs afterward. Probably, I would have gotten the same quality photographs without bouncing up and down like a Jill-in-the-Box. But I had just bought a new camera 5 days earlier, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

It was a humbling experience. My new Canon 60D is a great camera, but the limits of its flash were fairly apparent at Casa Bonita. The pop-up flash wasn’t powerful enough for the dark interior. It worked well enough for members of the mariachi band, who stood close to our table.
But it didn’t work so well when I tried to capture the acts near the waterfall.

Those two photos had to be lightened up considerably, even after I bumped up the ISO to about 1,000.

Taking a photo from behind the waterfall gives some sense of the size of the place.

I think that the waterfall is behind the tower shown here. Our seats were on the top level, and there is at least 1 other level, possibly 2—I can’t remember. I know that we entered the restaurant, stood in this line, which reminds me of the security line at DIA,

and then walked up a ramp to get to our seats (right by the waterfall).

I wonder how much money Casa Bonita makes in an evening. There’s no reason to linger over dinner, but it’s worthwhile to hang around to watch more acts like this magician, buy cotton candy or toys, and play games in the arcade. One of our companions goes every year for her birthday. I can’t see myself going that often, but I would go back with a better flash and more time to concentrate on photography.

Colt and Gray is almost the complete opposite of Casa Bonita. The former is a small restaurant on an urban street in Denver’s Central Platte Valley neighborhood. It focuses on local, lovingly prepared food, and its bar features “mixologists” and locally made liquor such as the Leopold Brothers’ products shown here. Its dinner menu includes the category “Offal.” There is one similarity, though, between CB and C&G: it’s fun to sit at the bar and watch the bartenders in action.

So far, I’ve had the Spaniard, the Martinez with Old Tom Gin (spilled on me by an overly vigorous bartender, who promptly replaced it with a mix of tequila and mezcal and spicy vermouth), and the Fernet cocktail. Todd has had the Fancy-Free, which like the Fernet is on the current cocktails menu. But my favorite drink by far came after I requested a drink with chocolate. What I got in the absence of chocolate in the bar was a mixture of Root liqueur, Upslope Brown Ale, Bourbon bitters, and a whole egg. It was luscious, growing sweeter toward the bottom. It also caused the most annoying photo-incident of the night, because I had great difficulty getting the flash to focus. I finally managed it, but Todd was not happy about the strobe-light effect. And I was not happy when I went to edit this picture and discovered the white balance was set to tungsten (I had forgotten to change it to AWB after taking pictures at Casa Bonita). Thank goodness for RAW files.

I’ve been served one dinner at Colt and Gray (on an earlier visit) and lots of snacks. This burger was cooked properly (that is, I asked for medium and got a burger that was pink inside), but the real star of the meal was the broccoli with rosemary anchovy dressing. Broccoli is not my favorite vegetable, unless it’s grilled and has this salty dressing poured on it. Then I could eat it all day.

The gougeres crusted with blue cheese were nice enough, warm and bready, but I wasn’t as impressed by them as I expected to be.

What I wanted from Colt and Gray that night (besides something to wash the taste of Casa Bonita food out of my mouth) was a sweet, and the rich drink didn’t change that. I ordered the sticky toffee pudding with bourbon ice cream. The sticky toffee lived up to its name, but the best part of the dessert was the whiskey-flavored ice cream. Colt and Gray is a Denver restaurant to visit again and again, for dinner or for snacks and drinks. As Todd said on our first visit, “It’s a good day when you get grease stains all over your notebook.”

Its patio, which faces Elizabeth Street on one side and East High School across Colfax on another, is a shady, pleasant place to meet with friends on a warm afternoon.

The food was beautiful. The BLT came on thick, crusty, slightly greasy bread, and the avocado aioli made that standby a little more interesting. I ate half of it plus the greens and saved the other half for later.

Todd’s fries looked hand-cut and were accented with a sauce that tasted like Chinese mustard. I didn’t taste the tacos, but he said the smell reminded him of the food at Buena Vida, a restaurant on Half Moon Bay in North Akumal, Mexico. We ate there several times in 2004 and 2007, and their ceviche was particularly good. He found the chipotle mayo on the tacos to be a bit weird and unnecessary.

Our waiter seemed to have had a late night, judging from his red eyes, but the service was fine, if not wildly speedy.

While we were finishing our meal, we noticed several women wearing pink turning the corner at Elizabeth. Since it was the weekend Todd’s mother was doing the Relay for Life, we asked them if they were participating. They told us they were training for a 3-day walk from Colorado Mills Mall to Denver and that they had walked 18 miles today.

***

This just in: Literary Death Match tonight! Somebody go and tell me whether it was fun.

The Mile High Business Alliance, a nonprofit I first encountered last fall, organized the small festival. There were businesses there from all over Denver, from Moss Pink flora and botanicals in Park Hill to Dragonfly Eco Goods in Highlands. I was happy to see that Bixa, located at Colfax and Vine (the purple store), is still in business. All these stores sell unique, locally made products, like these cloth substitutes for sandwich bags (SnackTaxi) from Dragonfly.

I was also happy to see a new Local Flavor Guide, to Lower Highland or LoHi, just northwest of downtown Denver across the South Platte River. Lower Highland, or just plain Highland, signifying a hill overlooking the river, runs into the trendy Highlands neighborhood, which is not to be confused with cookie-cutter suburb Highlands Ranch down south. Got it?

I was even more happy to get free Mexican chocolate ice cream from Little Man Ice Cream, which coincidentally, is located in LoHi.

I’m curious. Do you think LoHi is a stupid name?

We had visited 10 bars/restaurants at this point, including The Shoppe, one of our earliest stops.

Apparently the autofocus in my camera thought it was a good idea to focus on his fingernails. Or maybe I just don’t know how to use focus lock.

In the category of “torturing my husband with his favorite foods when he’s at work and can’t get them,” I present this picture of Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs, where we each got lemonade (house-made) and half a dog.

***

Feeling sad that you missed it? Go to LoDo Bites instead on August 18. I seem to recall hearing about similar festivals in Uptown and Highlands, though I can’t recall the details at the moment. I will post more information when I get it.

I was late for my haircut in the shinier part of Uptown. I didn’t linger on Capitol Hill, did not approach him, but I remembered that on

This same corner, a year ago a stranger asked me to have a beer.

I walked a couple of miles Saturday, from Broadway and Champa to Colfax and Vine (east of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Denver), as detailed in Tuesday’s post. SAME Café was my destination. It’s been getting some national publicity lately from NBC, which reminded me I still hadn’t eaten there.

SAME, which stands for “So All May Eat,” serves lunch for whatever patrons want to pay or an hour’s labor. When I arrived Saturday afternoon, I saw people who looked as if they might be homeless and others who didn’t. The three people behind the counter smiled and served food with alacrity. I shared a table with a group of twenty-somethings raving over the pizza with black beans and corn. My own meal, a green salad with carrot-ginger soup, was fresh but not wildly tasty, though the lemon-coated shortbread cookie helped make up for it.

Then I went to Bixa across the street and bought some fair trade tea.

The highlight of my Saturday, though, was the ride on the 15 bus (the adopter’s name is “William Tell”). After tromping back west on Colfax, I caught the bus and settled in to read my friend Sybil’s new novel. A white man with a huge black suitcase clutched to his front took up more than his share of the handicapped seats. He complained about the white guy in the wheelchair running over everyone’s feet, and my seatmate made a soft but pointed remark about his suitcase. Then the real fun began. Two black women were trying to get people to open the windows so they could get a little air on this warm day.

They called out, “Wheelchair guy, can you open that window?”

To my amazement, he stood up, clutching the vertical bar, and wrestled with the latch, but it was bolted shut.

“That’s OK, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” they said. He sat back down.

Then one of them started talking about choking some woman who had pissed her off.

“Some people just deserve it, you know?”

The white woman in the seat behind me, who had taken one look at me when she got on and decided I would not be her bus companion for this trip, told them she loved them. They were startled, as you might expect. Then she urged them to get strong with the Lord. They were noncommittal.

“There are some crazy people on this bus,” she added as a parting shot (though I’m sure she didn’t mean this mean in the trench coat).

Any good bus stories? Please share in the comments.

Church bells rang out across the Golden Triangle last Wednesday as I walked up Bannock toward the Native American Trading Company, and my conversation there did seem like a blessing.

I think Robin Riddel Lima, who has been operating the trading company with her husband Jack since 1983, knows all there is to know about the Golden Triangle. And I also learned quite a bit from Kevin Gramer, director of the Byers-Evans House Museum across the street. Both of them gave generously of their time, even though it was obvious I wasn’t there to buy art, and he needed to talk to Robin about a meeting.

The corner of 13th and Bannock, where the trading company takes up two former houses (we were conversing in what used to be the courtyard between them), is a center of art and history. Camera Obscura Gallery is around the corner, the Byers-Evans House across the street features an exhibit of photographs by the former’s octogenarian owner, and the Denver Art Museum‘s North Building looms castle-like over both.

The Golden Triangle Museum District (GTMD) claims eight museums extending all the way over to Pearl, which most people would consider to be in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Robin said the police station nearby might be turning into a police museum, raising the total to nine. Boundaries for the triangle depend on who you’re talking to—Denver Infill sets its northern boundary at 12th Avenue, the Golden Triangle Association extends it farther north to Colfax (15th Avenue), and the GTMD extends it east to Grant and even to Pearl at its northeastern edge.

Robin and Kevin and I talked for quite a while, about her favorite gallery (Gallery 1261); about First Friday art walks in the Golden Triangle, which have been going on for more than a decade; about how she didn’t think there were any more empty storefronts in GT than in other parts of Denver; about how the last 3 years have been the best in the 20-year history of the Byers-Evans House.

She even knew the name of the mysterious red building with construction fencing all around it: the Evans School, named for the same family that lived in the Byers-Evans House. (When she and her husband opened the Native American Trading Company, two sisters were still living in that house. One of them had helped established the Denver Artists’ Club in the 1890s, which eventually became the Denver Art Museum.)

Finally, I let Robin and Kevin talk to each other, stopping to admire the large, gray-haired storyteller doll displayed near the stair rail that Robin designed. (I was asked not to take pictures of items for sale in the store.) After Kevin left, Robin showed me into the locked section of the store where they keep the most precious items: rugs, photographs by Edward Curtis (two were of Hollywood starlets, the others from his series “The North American Indian”), large pots, a cape (she said it was Apache, I believe), and many other lovely old things.

She told me the Native American Trading Company was the fifth-largest dealer of Edward Curtis photographs in the country and had sold two of his collections.

Friday was serendipitous: the week before Christmas had been cold, snowy; I was stir-crazy. But Friday was warm enough to walk around without a coat in the early afternoon.

I started out at Bixa, a small shop at Colfax and Vine in what used to be the red-light district of Denver. Colfax still has its gritty parts but has cleaned itself up enormously since I moved here in the late 1980s.

The first item that caught my eye in Bixa was a clock made from recycled computer parts, and I asked Charles, who owns the store with his partner Darrel, “Did Carol Baum make that clock?”

I met Carol when we were planning Artful ReCreations for Eco-Cycle; she was one of the featured artists. So I felt right at home in Bixa, with its rugs braided from grocery store bags and its colorful purses fashioned from candy wrappers into all shapes and sizes. Charles said the staff generally don’t recognize the candy wrappers the purses are made from; he thinks they come from other countries.

Bixa is Artful ReCreations 24/7 and then some.

My favorite items in the stores were those made by a Denver artist using acupuncture needles: necklaces, earrings, little storage boxes. I almost bought the creation below, whose silver patterns resemble embroidery but are actually needles coaxed into various shapes.

I bought some organic, fair trade Assam tea there, and had a long discussion with Charles about green teas with that toasted flavor—you know what I mean? I love that flavor. And about Intelligent Nutrients, Horst Rechelbacher’s new company. He founded Aveda back in the day and decided to start up a new cosmetics company after he saw what Estee Lauder did to his baby. Motto: “Everything we put in and on our bodies must be nutritious and safe.” So Intelligent Nutrients products use “organic food ingredients.”

You bought some “organic” lotion? Sorry, there is no organic standard for cosmetics in the United States. “Organic” means something only when you’re talking about food—which makes Rechelbacher’s solution ingenious, I guess.

If I had wanted, I could have stayed until closing talking to Charles. He knows a lot more than I do about recycled and organic products.

But I had to get a move on. I said good-bye to Valentina, the shop mascot; snapped a picture of SAME Café (So All May Eat), which closes at 2 pm most days (open all day Saturday); and headed to the African and American Trading Company, just a block west of City Park.

African and American Trading Company

I walked in, and a voice greeted me from among the shelves of baskets and dolls. John Henderson was sitting in the back corner of the small shop, talking with his friend Harold Brewer. I introduced myself, and the second wonderful conversation of my Friday began.

Mr. Henderson is an importer of goods from Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Iceland, and England. For thirty years he’s been indulging his “hobby” because he likes to meet interesting people. He told me all about his trip to South Africa, the gold miners (both men and women) who descend 11,000 feet into the earth to do their job, the times he was mistaken for a Zulu, and the South Africans who were so excited to meet American blacks because they’d only seen them in the movies.

When he found out I was from Kansas City (he’s from Wichita), he told me about the restaurant on the Country Club Plaza he visited in 1951. They wanted to serve him in their kitchen, but he said he wasn’t that hungry.

What struck me first were the tiny Zulu baskets, some of them called “oops” baskets, for “out of the ordinary production system,” and made by girls who are learning basket weaving so that they can make a living when they’re grown up. The baskets are made by hand from Ilala palm and bark and grasses and natural dyes. Some baskets are woven so tightly they can hold beer. Women do most of the weaving in the Zulu Kingdom, as far as I could tell, but men now weave baskets from telephone wire; the one I saw in the store was bright orange and blue.

I really wanted to take home some of the dolls below (those with woolen capes are initiation dolls for girls), but I settled for 3 baskets.

I told Mr. Henderson my review would appear on December 23rd. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, I hope his friend with the Internet connection will leave a comment here correcting it.

The African and American Trading Company will be open until 6 on the 23rd and from 8 am to noon on Christmas Eve.

I’ve found other bloggers, like Writer Dad and In Other Words, who have made me feel welcome. I hope to meet many people in the blogosphere who will learn about Denver through my eyes and words.

But sometimes while writing this blog, I’ve felt the way I did today, wandering around the Uptown neighborhood, wondering why 17th Street didn’t have any benches along the street. Where’s a girl supposed to sit down and write?

Uptown (there’s a map at Denver Infill; go to “Center City Districts” and click on the section marked “Uptown”) is my subject for October. I’ll post on other subjects (including MonHaibuns), but Tuesdays and Thursdays will be devoted to this neighborhood, north of Capitol Hill and east of downtown Denver.

Uptown is off the beaten path for tourists, a little gritty, and bounded on its southern side by Colfax, formerly a notorious red light district.*

So while I was perched on a planter today (because of the lack of pedestrian-friendly seating street-side), I was thinking of how much this area reminds me of living in DC after college. (Luckily, Denver’s not the murder capital of the country, as DC was back then.)

The mix of restaurants and shops with residences took me back to living at 70th and Holmes in Kansas City or up Wisconsin Avenue from Georgetown in DC. You could walk a few blocks and find something to do, people to watch. The spectacle of urban living—or at least eating: In Kansas City, as a child, I’d walk to Friedson’s and get a chocolate coke. In DC, I’d walk to the American Café and get cheesecake.

I can do that now, of course, in Broomfield—walk to Starbucks, Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli, Noodles & Company, Massage Envy, Face Logic…yeah, chains. Useful, reliable.

Or, as I like to say, SSE. Same shit everywhere.

Uptown, although in transition, in the process of gentrification, is not SSE. (It has a lot of one-way streets, too. I wonder if there’s a correlation?)

It retains many a parking lot built in the 1970s, when Denver planners decided all these houses dating from the Gilded Age should be torn down to make spaces for the automobile. All over downtown Denver, in a nice bit of poetic justice, those lots are being turned into new housing, but plenty of eyesores are left in other parts of the city.

I tried to find a park where I could sit down in the shade, but there are not many in the western part of Uptown. For refuge I sought out Illegal Grounds, a spacious coffeehouse on 17th Avenue. I entered through a lovely patio and hid in the back, where the voices of other patrons and the jazz were unobtrusive. I called my husband and told him I might not be home for dinner; it depended on whether I could get out of this oh-so-comfortable chair in time to catch the bus.

And I suggested we visit the Uptown Lofts next door and see if we liked the floor plan.