Best of Boulder East County: Entertainment Staff Picks

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Best Race
LONGMONT KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE

Every July at Longmont Reservoir, every crazy person who knows some other crazy people forms a team to enter this bizarrest of races. At the race, teams dress up as anything from pharaohs to ducks and climb aboard their equally odd-themed vessels. The only rule in the Longmont Kinetic Sculpture Race is that these contraptions must be people-powered and designed to travel over land, mud and water. Sure, most of them sink, but that’s half the fun. Drinking beer while they sink is the other half.

Place for Watching Birds of Prey
ALL OVER EAST COUNTY

One
of the most amazing things about East Boulder County is its incredible
variety and numbers of hawks and eagles. In the last few years, the
numbers have exploded. It’s not unusual to see several bald eagles
searching the same ponds at the same time looking for an easy snack, or a
group of red tail, roughlegged or night hawks soaring above a field
watching for movement below. And with all the little critters running
around on the open farm lands, it’s not even that rare to see a prairie
dog or bunny taking that last ride through the sky, back legs a kickin’.
We like to think they’re just excited to be so high off the ground, but
that’s probably not the case. Either way, when it comes to East County
entertainment of the natural kind, this is about as good as it gets.

Best Television-to-Stage Adaptation
THEATER COMPANY OF LAFAYETTE’S ‘TWILIGHT ZONE: LIVE! ON STAGE!’
Mary Miller Theater, 300 E. Simpson St., Lafayette, 720-209-2154

At its peak, The Twilight Zone presented
a thinking person’s science fiction, mixing outlandish scenarios with
tough ethical questions. But the thing is, television was still a
relatively new medium at the time the show aired. No one had quite
figured out how to exploit the format’s abilities to their fullest
potential yet. So early television, including The Twilight Zone, often comes off like a play. Editing is minimal, actors go on extended monologues — there just wasn’t much precedent for what The Twilight Zone was trying to accomplish, so Rod Serling and his writers looked to the stage. However, that means that The Twilight Zone was
ripe for a theater adaptation, which is something the Theater Company
of Lafayette realized almost a decade ago. The company’s annual Twilight Zone: Live! On Stage! is
one of the most entertaining shows of the year, and the tiny company
always manages to transport into you into another dimension. A dimension
not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous
land whose boundaries are that of imagination — the Twilight Zone.