Denver, CO
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” puts the audience in the Loop at the Denver Center | Theater review
![“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” puts the audience in the Loop at the Denver Center | Theater review](https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/TDP-Z-FE02SATYA1.jpg?w=1024&h=685)
The Denver Center is a-humming.
In the theater company’s largest house, Emma Woodhouse — to her own gentle comeuppance — is winking her way through Kate Hamill’s delightful adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” (See if before it closes Sunday.) Downstairs in the Singleton Theatre, things are positively loopy. Or rather brilliantly looping, as a young, Latina music-maker sets about crafting a mixed tape of her life in the hip-hop-influenced “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?,” directed by Matt Dickson. It runs through June 2.
So convincing is Satya Chávez (who uses the pronoun “they”) in the role of “Bee” Quijada that the audience is likely to assume it’s their life as the fourth child of Salvadoran immigrants that will be recounted for the next fleet, entertaining 80 minutes. It’s not; it’s writer-performer Brian Quijada’s.
Chávez’s intimacy with Quijada’s story might have been earned during the time they spent working (along with Nygel D. Robinson) on the concert series “Songs from the Border” at Colorado Spring’s Fine Arts Center during its 2021-22 season. But the vibrant poignancy and tangible intimacy that Chávez created with the opening-night audience feels very much their own.
Chávez skillfully utilizes the tools of hip-hop and spoken word for the show’s layering of sounds and, more vitally, personal and cultural history: rap’s diving and arcing rhymes, an iPad with a Bluetooth connection, four loopers, and her voice. But Chavez, a talented musician, also plays a keyboard, guitar, ukulele, guitarron, bass, caña, a harmonica and more. And they sing.
Oh, how they sing, warmly, wittily, sometimes plaintively. Chavez punctuates parts of the storytelling with a wordless refrain that soars and wails — just a little — during its exploration of belonging.
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” takes its title from the question a 9-year-old Bee asks her elementary school teacher during lessons on Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. Defying the reigning black-white dialectic of the nation, little Bee wonders about her place as a brown kid, the child of immigrants, in this American life. Bee and her next oldest brother, Marvin, were born in the U.S. Older brothers Fernando and Roberto were born in El Salvador.
The show is disarmingly personable and cleverly participatory as it goes from Bee’s conception and birth (their time in mom’s womb is bathed in red light) to her childhood living first in a trailer park outside of Chicago and then in a suburban neighborhood adjacent to Highland Park, with its large Jewish community.
They share their love of Michael Jackson, an early role model — until he started to tarnish his reputation by what seemed to be a drastic repudiation of his skin color. But they find their emotional place when they become involved in theater.
Chavez wears a monochrome outfit, a richer shade of army fatigues. They begin at a breakneck pace, then find a lively cadence of trust and familiarity, at times teasing the audience with the sly rapport of a lounge singer.
The production design of the show feels like a departure for the theater company, not in quality but in tone. The set by Tanya Orellana (who also created the costumes) and Pablo Santiago’s playful and geometric lighting design recreate the spare intimacy of a black box theater that can also offer a neon-lit portal into Bee’s past. How far back it goes speaks to (and reverberates, thanks to Alex Billman’s sound design) the show’s joys and imagination.
There’s ample sweetness to this journey and little argumentativeness in Quijada’s script — until there needs to be, when nagging quandaries about belonging boil over. Because “Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” is a theater geek’s coming-of-age saga, Bee had described theater as their church. Late in the show, they take us there, to an ongoing, rancorous national conversation about immigration in which immigrants bear the brunt of ire.
And so, Bee takes an extended moment to preach a gospel of inclusion, one inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, but also confesses the kind of hurt and disappointment that comes from witnessing a nation fail its ideals. The nation may falter in moving toward a better and welcoming future, but Bee doesn’t.
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” began with Bee telling us that she popped the question to her beloved, who is Austrian and Swiss, in Mexico. It ends with an expansive answer to the question of the title.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelance writer who specializes in theater and film.
IF YOU GO
“Where Did We Sit on the Bus?” Written by Brian Quijada. Additional compositions by Satya Chávez. Directed by Matt Dickson. Featuring Satya Chávez. At the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Through June 1. For tickets and info: 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org.
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Denver, CO
SUV stolen in Denver with foster kittens inside
![SUV stolen in Denver with foster kittens inside](https://kdvr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2024/06/Car-stolen-with-kittens-inside-Capitol-Hill-Denver-.jpg?w=1280)
DENVER (KDVR) — A Colorado cat rescue group is scrambling after its co-founder said two foster kittens were stolen, along with the vehicle they were sitting in, on Monday morning in Denver.
Kris Meding, co-founder of Colorado Feline Foster Rescue, said the foster kittens were sitting inside a “socializing pouch” inside a sport utility vehicle, on Washington Street between 11th and 12th avenues. She said the foster parent had started the vehicle and briefly stepped away.
Within a few moments, the vehicle and kittens were gone.
“Stepped out of the car for a minute to grab something else, came back and the car was gone with her purse, her phone and the kittens in it,” Meding said.
The vehicle is a 2005 Toyota 4Runner, license plate BQAX60. Meding said both felines are chipped and were rescued from Carlsbad, New Mexico.
She said the foster parent has filed a report with the Denver Police Department.
Colorado Feline Foster Rescue has 170 cats in foster homes. Currently, the all-volunteer organization has 90-100 foster families. Last year, the group adopted out 1,200 cats.
For more information, please contact info@coloradofelinefosterrescue.org or call 303-888-7238.
Denver, CO
Over 400 flights delayed Tuesday amid high winds at Denver International Airport
![Over 400 flights delayed Tuesday amid high winds at Denver International Airport](https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/TDP-L-DIA-wind-RJS-3433.jpg?w=1024&h=679)
More than 400 flights were delayed Tuesday afternoon at Denver International Airport as high winds blew across the area, according to flight tracking data from FlightAware.
There were 406 flights delayed and five canceled as of 5:20 p.m. as wind gusts at the airport hit 43 mph, according to the National Weather Service. Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., 70 flights were delayed and one was canceled, according to live flight tracking by FlightAware’s Misery Map.
United, Alaska Airlines, Southwest, Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Key Lime Air, SkyWest, WestJet, American Airlines and Air Canada all had delayed or canceled flights.
Southwest had nearly half of the delayed flights, with 168 delays and one cancellation. United delayed 128 flights, according to FlightAware.
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Denver, CO
Did you know: Almost $1 million in coins pass through the Denver Mint every day
![Did you know: Almost $1 million in coins pass through the Denver Mint every day](https://kdvr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2024/06/AP070815050276.jpg?w=1280)
DENVER (KDVR) – From the outside, the Denver Mint may be just another two-story government office across from Civic Center Park. But inside the Cherokee Street building, staff and machinery are busy pressing metal coils into millions of coins per day.
According to the Mint, it’s one of two facilities responsible for making circulating coins in the United States – making it a huge part of the nation’s coin flow.
According to Tom Fesing with the Denver Mint, the facility produces roughly 4.5 million coins every 24 hours. Fesing estimates that about $750,000 to $1 million has gone through the facility each day this year.
That said, the Mint can’t exactly predict how much is going to be produced throughout the year as the number of coins depends on the orders the Mint receives monthly from the central bank, the Federal Reserve System, Fesing said.
Despite the millions of dollars in coins passing through, Fesing said the coin with the lowest value, the penny, has historically had the most production.
Those numbers depend on how many coins are needed for cash transactions in the economy, according to Fesing.
“When someone gets back a cent in change, what happens to them? They usually end up in piggy banks, or in a jar, and they’re not introduced into circulation as fast as, let’s say, a quarter or a dime,” Fesing said.
While the Mint can’t predict the numbers for the end of this year, it has produced almost 1.3 billion coins this year, with almost 800 million being pennies. In 2023, the Mint produced around 5.65 billion coins for the entire year.
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