One minute it was Kansas, the next Oz and then Denver … and suddenly – bango! – we stood in a stark, elegant dining room circa 1955.
Mixing contexts is often a dangerous business, especially when you’re sleep deprived. I was 200 pages into Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” an airport paperback buy, but I had just spent the past three hours at the Buell Theatre catching the regional premiere of the musical “Wicked.” All mixed up in my head were Glenda – “Ga-linda” – and the not-so-Wicked Witch of the West, along with Charlotte, Jojo and Hoyt from the novel. And poor pathetic Adam.
The night before I was in New York City, and life was easier. Basic principles reigned: Red Bull, bacon and eggs, and a cab that took me from Manhattan to Brooklyn at 6 a.m. and then onto LaGuardia for a 9 a.m. flight. I could count the hours of sleep from the previous 48 hours on one hand, the same hand that still throbbed from holding Wolfe’s verbose tome at just the right angle in the plane.
In real life, my mom and I gunned out of the theater at the Denver Center, always a bit of a gantlet with the post- theater freak-out, when I noticed that everyone was rushing past a well-dressed gentleman standing silently next to a curiously open, unmarked door between the Buell and the new Ellie Caulkins Opera House.
A quick glance in led to municipal-looking stairs leading down to the gorgeous, sprawling dining room of Kevin Taylor’s at the Opera House with room for dancing, cocktailing and probably trick-horse training. The room was massive, elegant and sexy, simple and unpretentious.
The latest in Taylor’s high- end dining empire, Kevin Taylor’s at the Opera House (1106 14th St., 303-640-1012) looks the greatest. Icelike hardwoods lead up to cement walls holding bold, human-sized frames encasing elaborate opera costumes. It’s the ’50s all over again, complete with carved- out ceilings and a sizable bandstand. Stars are embedded into the ceiling, and suddenly clarity sweeps over the room. We stood and breathed in the nostalgic beauty of the room. And then, instead of hitting the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show, we went to sleep.
Staff writer Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
