An ’80s prom ensemble. A vintage wedding dress. Pin-up attire. Retro T-shirts. Grandma sweaters of the highest caliber.

Diane Allison’s vintage clothing store Anteak Booteek, located at 7070 W. 38th Ave., along Wheat Ridge’s main drag, is packed to the gills with clothes from all subcultures and decades.

As a diehard thrifter, Allison’s store brings me to my knees — which I’ve learned is advantageous, as she keeps cool shoes tucked below the racks.

“It’s a great place to be immersed in a wonderland,” Allison said. “It’s all things fantastic and colorful and prints. I just want it to spark curiosity and joy and creativity.”

Allison is a true clothing connoisseur, amassing her impressive collection of high-quality apparel over decades. She has pieces dating back as far as 1890 and gets a thrill out of helping you find exactly what you never knew you needed.

Some of my favorite wardrobe pieces have been triumphantly plucked from Anteak Booteek’s racks while Allison and store manager Frankie (a gray-faced Chihuahua) hype me up. If you shop ’till you drop and need a pick-me-up, I recommend stopping at nearby Get Rights for a pastry, pizza slice or sandwich.

Allison grew up in Wheat Ridge and fell in love with thrifting in junior high when she wanted her fashion sense to project “kooky.”

Once a year, Wheat Ridge High School’s art club took a field trip to New York which is where Allison found salvation in  thrift store called Antique Boutique — the namesake inspiration for the store she’d open in 2024 after her basement grew impassable with her clothing collection.

Allison sources her materials from estate sales, thrift stores, garage sales and folks who bring her vintage finds to sell.

“It’s like a treasure hunt when you find something,” Allison said. “I just like to quietly treasure and marvel when I’ve found something good.”

Whether you’re in search of a fun Halloween costume, clothing from a certain time period or unique pieces to spruce up your wardrobe, Anteak Booteek is a favorite stop for me.

Head on in and try something on. Allison might even ask to snap a photo of you in your new duds to post on her Instagram account, @AnteakBooteek. (I recommend following for fun outfit inspiration)

Denver has a few dishes the city is known for — the sugar steak at Bastien’s, bison frybread tacos, El Taco de Mexico’s green chile-smothered burritos, the sopapillas at Casa Bonita — but a surprising seafood dish is becoming a fast-rising star in the Mile High City’s culinary scene: the tostada de toro at Michelin-starred Mezcaleria Alma, the next-door little sister to slightly more famous Alma Fonda Fina.

Made with smashed avocado, charred habanero aioli, dry-aged toro (AKA fatty tuna) that’s sliced to order, sesame chile oil and an almost comically thick blanket of diced chives on a freshly pressed and fried house-made tortilla, this $23 dish is more than memorable. It’s last meal-worthy.

“I would say 50% of people that order that dish order it again before they even finish it,” chef Johnny Curiel said in a . And I believe him, because I’ve done just that — twice.

Have you ever loved a restaurant’s dish so much that you order it as both a starter and dessert every time you dine there? This kind of adoration is worthy of a great romance novel, so consider this my official love letter to a perfect Mexico City-inspired bite.

On paper, it almost feels like this tostada shouldn’t work. With four fatty components (avocado, aioli, the toro and a puddle of chile oil, never mind the fried tortilla), you’d think it would feel overwhelmingly rich, but it’s got a hit of acid from accompanying lime, plus smokiness and heat from the chile in the aioli and oil, that cuts right through the fattiness.

And then comes a burst of verdant, bright, aromatic freshness from the blanket of chives: 30 grams per tostada, Curiel says. With an average of 55 tostadas coming out of this kitchen every dinner service, that’s around 4 lbs. of chives per day. No small feat for such a tiny (and notoriously laborious to dice) herb.

When asked if such a beloved dish — that’s so popular he conceded to Bon Appétit that the restaurant can likely never take it off the menu — feels more like a blessing or a curse, Curiel waxes poetic about his love for tostadas, which have “always been one of my favorite things to eat in Mexico,” he said.

“I’m glad people love it,” Curiel said. “It����ap become a staple of our menu because it represents what Mezcaleria Alma is all about.”

Mezcaleria Alma, 2550 15th St. Open 3-11 p.m. daily. highly recommended.

Charlie Brown sits to my right in my home office. His Lisa Frank-inspired appearance is a bit deceiving, as he doesn’t look cheerful. He’s tangled on one side and balding on the other. It’s time for him to meet the clippers.

Speedy and Bonnie are having a prolific summer. Bonnie has found a sunny spot in the living room and is growing by the minute, while Speedy is chilling with the cool kids. Despite an accidental fall he sustained during the spring, Speedy is recovering remarkably. They’ve been making babies like crazy.

For a “parent” like me, taking care of these three and their dozens of siblings is a full-time job. In case you bypassed this article’s headline, I’m writing about my plants. Luckily, there’s a place that makes being a plant parent easier.

The in Five Points has a plant propagation library in the lobby, where people from the community can donate clippings and cuttings, water and propagation setups, while others can take them home to nurture in their own homes, and possibly donate their own clippings down the road.

Charlie, my indoor , looks better when it meets the shears. Clipping it makes for a bushy appearance, covering up its bald spot. Speedy and Bonnie, my green and , respectively, are shooting out little spiderettes and flowers. Bonnie has produced nearly 20 babies alone.

In July, my , Caraval, had a repotting mishap in which its roots snapped off the vine. The devastating loss made for multiple cuttings and a mission to start over.

But not all was lost. I placed the clippings and spiderettes in plastic cups or glass containers with water and sometimes plant enzymes to sprout roots. Then I loaded them into a recycled box and transported them to Blair-Caldwell.

I found out about the propagation library through and a from January. Spearheaded by center employee Kaye Johnson, the library has been growing as more visitors have donated planty friends and can take them home to keep. So far, I have donated 30 clippings this year, with more to come. Besides spider plants, Swedish ivy and philodendrons, I’ve added and even a branch. I also have parts of a large succulent collection I wish to add.

Donations are not required to take home a plant from the library. If you want a green friend without shelling out big bucks, you can select a plant among those available for free. I picked up a wishlist plant, in June.

As the propagation library has grown, so has the community surrounding it. Last month, Blair-Caldwell hosted a plant swap featuring a Q&A session. The library is also accepting glass donations to contain water clippings. Grab mason and pasta sauce jars and old vessels to house plants.

The propagation library is available during regular Blair-Caldwell hours. When bringing donations or selecting a plant, visit the front desk first for assistance.

My heart sank as I clicked through online photos of a flood at Denver’s Squire Lounge on July 31: kegs of beer submerged in frothy muck; a drum and paint cans and cardboard boxes piled haphazardly; a pond of brown water submerging the corner of East Colfax Avenue and Williams Street.

It wasn’t the first flood prompted by heavy rains, but it was the worst Sudhir Kudva has seen in his 22 years of co-owning it, he said . He and longtime bartender Cam Omlid blamed the ongoing Bus Rapid Transit construction project for the severity, joining a chorus of business owners and citizens who have bemoaned the BRT’s effects since it started more than two years ago.

“What they did by covering up the storm drains and pulling out the hard clay soil around the building and replacing it with soil cells, has made the building uninhabitable during a rainstorm,” he wrote. “We, at worst, used to get about 2-3 inches of water in the basement.

“Last night’s storm wasn’t even in the top 50 worst rain events we have had, but we had over THREE FEET of water in the basement,” he continued. “Took out our water heater, walk-in cooler, liquor and anything else we had in the basement.”

For now, The Squire’s owners and employees must figure out how to clean up (note: it reopened for business this week). But whatever they do, Denver can scarcely afford to lose any more Colfax history. The Squire has, for better and worse, been a bastion of that gritty culture for decades, serving cheap beer and shots to diverse and often hard-luck clientele while hosting punk-rock comedy and music that has helped birth some of Denver’s best entertainers.

Maybe it’s not as gritty as it used to be: it opened around 1950, but enjoyed a handsome renovation as recently as the late 2010s. And yet, stepping into the Squire Lounge still feels like doing a shot (or two) of concentrated Colfax, no chaser. The white-walled exterior and people-watching patio conceal a brick cavern of humid mischief, and an unvarnished gateway into Denver’s rapidly disappearing past. There are no $20 cocktails here, no VIP booths, and no trendy theme that will look embarrassingly stale in five years.

Rather, it’s a cheap and fascinating night out, provided you don’t mind Colfax being Colfax. It was the perfect place to hold an open-mic comedy night — my first occasion to go in the mid-to-late 2000s — and a unique spot to mingle with the DIY artists and hipsters and weirdos who percolated up from it. Packed, hazy late nights that had the smack of legend to them in hindsight. It’s easy to imagine Jack Kerouac hanging out there — had he visited 70 or so years after “On the Road” was published.

True, any city has its churn, and Denver’s boom-and-bust culture seems frustratingly unshakeable at times. But culture hounds can still feel the instability of our dive-bar pillars. Carioca Cafe (a.k.a. Bar Bar) was demolished in July. Every new bar that opens seems more niche and less casual than the last. Mocktails? CBD drinks? Quiet reflection? Yawn.

The Squire welcomes all, however light their wallets. It’s not a tourist magnet or a noisy sports hall or pretentious coastal concept. It’s a dive, and one that needs as much fresh air as any other to stay afloat. I’m past my days of dropping by there regularly, as when I lived a couple of blocks away and regularly wrote about the place. But I’m tempted now to rouse a sandbag brigade.

How else to protect this island of realness amid the rising tide of construction, gentrification and high costs for small business owners? I don’t have solutions, but I do know that Denver needs the Squire as much as it needs us.

The Squire Lounge is located at 1800 E. Colfax Ave. in Denver, and open 4 p.m.-2 a.m. Monday-Friday, and 2 p.m.-2 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Visit for more details.

If you’ve never heard of the game called cribbage, you’d be excused. Unlike chess or checkers or even backgammon, it doesn’t hold much of a place in modern culture. The question I often get when I play at a bar or brewery is, “What is that?”

But that doesn’t mean it����ap not popular. About 10 million people play cribbage in the United States, . The statistics don’t say how many of those people were taught by a grandparent, but it����ap probably pretty high. Cribbage is that kind of game.

Invented in England in the 1600s, according to Wikipedia anyway, it consists of a regular deck of cards and a board with holes in it, where people move pegs as they earn points. Depending on how many tracks there are on a board, you can play with up to four people, either individually or in teams. The goal is to get to 121 points before the other player or players. It was, and remains, a popular game on naval ships, in firehouses and other places where long hours need to be filled.

I didn’t learn how to play from my own grandparents, but the friend who taught me the game learned it from his. And my wife learned how to play from hers. Cribbage is very popular in the Midwest, but I’ve met people from all over who play.

I’ve been playing for more than 30 years, and I’m still not very good, as cribbage involves mathematical probabilities when it comes to what cards might turn up – and I don’t do math well. There’s also a decent amount of strategy. Luck, of course, often has the final say in any game.

But I still love playing. I love it so much, in fact, that my wife and I now own upward of a dozen cribbage boards. One features the Denver Broncos logo while another is shaped like a snowboard, and a third is an actual table. There are also three tiny travel boards (one has a Jeep logo from the 1970s), a four-player board made in the 1960s, a board made from a deer antler, one made from Hawaiian koa wood, and another made from walrus tusk in Alaska.

The biggest, though, is a 3D representation of the Maroon Bells that my daughter bought on Etsy and gave to me. It����ap really cool.

The sheer breadth and depth of cribbage board styles is mind-boggling. You can find one made of just about any material, in any shape and depicting almost any kind of subject matter. , for instance, who uses multi-colored resin to make circular boards. One has the Colorado state flag on it. Others are in the shapes of different states.

Of course, not everyone has a grandparent to teach them. So, there are a few different cribbage clubs around metro Denver, as well as phone apps that will teach you the rules. Once you feel confident, buy a cool board and join the 10 million other fans.

Summer is the best time to dine out in Denver, when farm-to-table restaurants become abundant with fresh Colorado produce such as Rocky Ford melons, Olathe sweet corn and Palisade peaches.

The soufflé with fresh garden herbs at , cast-iron cornbread with Colorado honey butter at , Cart-Driver’s famous , summer squash fritters at — some of Denver’s most iconic dishes can be found on menus across the city right now.

One of Denver’s most underrated new farm-to-table spots is tucked away in a surprising location: the vintage saloon-style at , a 16-room boutique hotel in Capitol Hill’s George Schleier Mansion.

In the little carriage house behind the mansion, you’ll find , specializing in wood-fired sourdough pizza topped with fresh, local vegetables on a menu so seasonal, it changes almost completely every week.

On a recent visit, we marveled over Rocky Ford cantaloupe wedges topped with crispy coppa, habanero vinaigrette and Urfa chile ($14) and a potato pizza topped with aged cheddar, caramelized onion, Basque peppers and potatoes from Boulder’s ($26). The potatoes, confited in olive oil and garlic until achingly rich and melty, played so beautifully with the sweet onion and spicy bite from the pickled peppers, and it’s all showcased in an impossibly crispy, 48-hour fermented dough that’s wood-fired at around 650-700 degrees.

Monarch is a two-man operation run by chef Justin Freeman (Somebody People, The Greenwich) and Daniel Matthews (owner of Wash Park barber shop Dark Rose Club), but everything about this spot — from the attentive service to the thoughtful ingredient sourcing and ultra-seasonal menu — makes us feel confident that big things are coming in this small space.

And if the pizza isn’t enticing enough, Urban Cowboy’s cocktail program punches far above its weight class. The Lavish Habits — gin or vodka with coconut cream, orange blossom, celery bitters, lemon and lime topped with a sprig of fresh dill, $15 — is my new favorite summer cocktail. What’s not to love?

Monarch at Urban Cowboy Public House, 1665 N. Grant St., . Open 4-10 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday-Thursday, 4-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 

The moment that I found out I had to cut gluten from my diet, my heart sank.

It was a Friday afternoon last May and I had recently started working with a nutritionist to address some longstanding gastrointestinal issues. The results of my GI Map test suggested I had a gluten sensitivity. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.

Not only are bread and pasta my favorite food groups, I have been a beer journalist for more than a decade. It seemed incredibly unfair that I would have to give up all my favorite things and even more than that — what would become of my career?

Perhaps seeing the horror on my face, my nutritionist encouraged me to try living gluten-free for just one month to see if it made a difference in how I felt. I committed, hesitantly, and left our meeting to eat a piece of leftover pizza, giving myself until the end of the weekend to start detoxing.

Since going gluten-free more than two months ago, I’ve learned a lot about myself and my eating habits. For one, I miss beer a lot. Of all the things I’ve had to refrain from consuming, beer is by far the hardest to resist.

So when I realized that cans from had traveled from the Golden-based brewery to my local liquor store on the Western Slope, I was beyond stoked.

Opened in 2016, Holidaily Brewing Co. makes certified gluten-free beers using alternative grains, such as buckwheat and millet. Recipes like the Favorite Blonde Ale and Fat Randy’s IPA enable people who are allergic to gluten or reducing their intake to indulge in beers with similar body and carbonation as those that use barley.

That may not sound like too much to ask, but when founder Karen Hertz first decided to start the brewery more than a decade ago, choices for celiac and gluten-intolerant drinkers were slim. Most gluten-free beers at the time were made with sorghum syrup, which did little to satisfy beer drinkers’ palates, she said.

“These beers were really thin, they had a really weird aftertaste. It just didn’t taste great,” Hertz said. “That got me looking into ingredients — like, why do these suck so bad?”

For Hertz, starting Holidaily Brewing Co. was a deeply personal endeavor. In 2007, she was diagnosed with melanoma, and the following year, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Hertz treated — and defeated — both by undergoing surgery and radiation. Doctors then advised her to work with a nutritionist in hopes of addressing underlying causes.

“I couldn’t understand how a healthy 30-year-old with zero family history was getting back-to-back cancer,” Hertz said. Turns out, gluten was the culprit.

Her transition to a gluten-free life sounded strikingly similar to mine. There were decent replacements for some things, and there were foods that Hertz could live without. And then there were things like beer, which “seemed like a really big barrier to feeling normal,” she said. As a native Coloradan and former Coors Brewing Co. employee, the beverage was ingrained in her lifestyle.

“The beauty of beer is moderation to me. I didn’t want to be the vodka queen at the tailgate party. I really wanted to be able to have beers with my friends,” Hertz said. “That kept coming up as a social issue and feeling awkward and feeling left out.”

That cemented her ambition to reinvent what gluten-free beer could be. Hertz started working with in northern Colorado, which malts gluten-free grains including millet, buckwheat, quinoa, oats, rice and corn, to pinpoint which best mimicked barley. She landed on a combination of buckwheat and millet that today serves as the base of each beer Holidaily makes.

Getting the taste and mouthfeel right out the gate was imperative, Hertz said. That’s why she hired Wayne Burns, who had previously brewed for Bell’s Brewery and Wynkoop Brewing Co. and would go on to open his own spot, the now-closed Burn Family Artisan Ales, to develop what became the first recipes.

“I knew that if we were going to put anything gluten-free on the market, we had one chance. If someone’s going to give a gluten-free beer a try, it has to be good or they’re never going to drink it again. Because there’s already this stigma around gluten-free,” she said.

That strategy appears to have paid off. At a time when , Holidaily is thriving. In 2021, the brewery made 3,434 barrels of beer for drinkers in Colorado and four other states. This year, Hertz said production will hit 7,000 barrels — an increase of 104% in five years — and Holidaily now distributes to 13 states in the U.S.

Hertz attributes the company’s growth, simply, to supply and demand. Of the approximately 9,500 existing craft breweries, a fraction are dedicated to making gluten-free beer. Hertz estimates it’s about a dozen companies. At the same time, the number of people who are reducing their gluten intake is rising.

An estimated 3 million Americans are affected by celiac disease, according to the . Millions more are believed to be gluten-intolerant or have a gluten sensitivity — as many as 1 in 20 U.S. residents, .

Since the beginning, Hertz’s mission has been to get beer to people who can’t have it. That����ap proved a worthwhile goal not only for the company’s growth, but also for the personal stories that come along with it. Hertz said visitors to the Golden taproom have started crying when they see 14 different options on tap that they can drink.

Holidaily’s distributed retail selection is more modest with five different packaged options, but drinkers in Colorado usually get access to newer innovations before they go to other states. The , which hit store shelves in May, is a flavorful new addition to the lineup that competes with the likes of other hazy beers on the market. And the , also released in May, is a 4.5% ABV beer apt for pairing with hot summer days spent outdoors.

I know because I’ve tried them both on my recent quest to live a happy gluten-free life. Next, I plan to try Holidaily’s , a luxury of flavor diversity in a traditionally slim pickings category.

As Hertz looks toward the future, she’s optimistic that the now 10-year-old Holidaily can be part of a broader effort to renew consumer interest in beer after many difficult years for the industry.

“We have fun brands and fit into a beer category, but also a ‘better for you’ category, which I think intrigues a younger generation. We have a cool story, we’re a woman-owned brand. I think all that plays into Holidaily getting to help be a part of bringing people back to beer,” she said.

Few sights are more welcome to hungry people than a 24-hour taco stand after a night on the town. Metro Denver has a few of these, but I was first introduced to the concept in San Diego, where there is a particular style of Cali-Mex cuisine that still doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Examples include enormous hand-held burritos stuffed with everything from grilled carne asada to smoky adobada-marinated pork to simple lard-flavored refried beans with heaps of guacamole. One distinct aspect of San Diego-style burritos is that many also include French fries. Then there are the fish tacos and burritos that come with fresh lime, avocado, salsa and cilantro.

The go-to spots typically end in “…berto,” as in Alberto’s, Rigoberto’s and Roberto’s.

Sure, these same dishes can be found in Colorado and just about anywhere else, in some form, but there is a magic that simply hasn’t been replicated. Maybe it����ap in the cooking technique or the specific ingredients, or maybe it����ap just the sense of place. Whatever it is, San Diego-style Mexican or Cali-Mex food is hard to find in Denver – surprising in a world where we can have just about everything at our fingertips.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. In particular, I’ve searched for rolled tacos, or more specifically, three (or five) rolled tacos with guacamole and cheese.

In San Diego, they are a staple of every taco shop, and it����ap almost impossible to leave without a Styrofoam plateful – even if you’ve also ordered something else. Corn tortillas filled with beef, tightly rolled and fried, they are almost entirely covered in guac and melted cheddar. Small plastic containers of red salsa (rarely green) complete the picture.

But here, rolled tacos are few and far between. Some restaurants serve them, but they are often loosely rolled, closer to flautas or made from flour tortillas. Or worse yet, overcooked to the point of not even being able to crack them open with your teeth.

The closest I’ve found come from Raliberto’s Mexican Food, which has two locations, including the one I went to at 4020 Wadsworth Blvd. in Wheat Ridge; Taco Star, with multiple metro Denver locations, including the one I visited at 6151 E. Colfax Ave.; and Viva! Burrito, 6990 Leetsdale Dr.

All helped to sate the cravings, but none quite lived up to expectations.

Don’t get me wrong. I love all aspects of Colorado’s Mexican food scene, from the upscale versions of regional cuisine found at places like La Diabla Pozole y Mezcal, Alma Fona Fina, and Xiquita, to the Colo-Mex classics like Tacos Jalisco, El Taco de Mexico and La Fiesta. And of course I love green chile.

But there is something about those San Diego taco stands that I’ll just have to keep dreaming about.

We used to be . So why have so many of us forgotten practical solutions to the bugs of modern technology?

I use “we” because this was me a couple of weeks ago: on the couch, remote in hand, scrolling through Netflix’s latest offerings for a movie as the clock neared midnight. One carousel of options bled into another, until I finally settled on a mid-series episode of “Breaking Bad” because, well, I had already seen the entire show three times through and was starting to get sleepy.

But there are better — and cheaper — ways to watch movies from home. It takes a digital TV antenna, the kind one can find at hardware or retail stores for about $20. Hook it up to the television, mount it high on the wall or roof and scan for channels. Then flip to channel 26: it’s Movies!

Fox Corporation and Weigel Broadcasting launched the Movies! network in 2013, offering round-the-clock programming of films from the 20th century. It is transmitted in Denver through a low-powered digital station that broadcasts in grainy, standard definition. The westerns, noirs, dramas, action movies and comedies of yesteryear screened on Movies! are so unpredictable, so hit-or-miss, yet mostly always admirable as the products of bygone eras of film.

It’s the offbeat, occasionally off-putting cousin of Turner Classic Movies, with commercial interruptions.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have class. My last couple of peeks dropped me in the middle of the salacious 1954 noir “Mildred Pierce,” starring Joan Crawford; the steamy “Key Largo” from 1948, with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and a memorable Edward G. Robinson; and “A Stolen Life” from 1946, in which Bette Davis plays twins through impressive special effects for the period.

The channel designates special time slots throughout the week to specific movie stars: Audrey Hepburn, Robert Redford, Roy Scheider. It’s how, one Saturday morning, I caught “The Seven-Ups” (1973), starring Scheider as a brazen NYPD detective. A lengthy car chase building up to the movie’s climax riveted me, all roaring engines, screeching brakes and vintage shots of cars speeding through New York City thoroughfares. The action felt fresh and urgent. New York City looked iconic in its grey splendor. “The Seven-Ups” would’ve likely remained in the film vault for me had this channel not screened it.

For every surprise discovery, however, there are one or more duds.

Some of those duds would file nicely in a “so bad it’s good” category. I saw Frank Sinatra in the only movie he directed, 1965’s “None but the Brave,” whose anti-war message was bogged down by poor acting and stage sets. Then I watched Tom Hanks in one of his earliest film roles in the comedy “Bachelor Party” (1984), full of groan-inducing dialogue. (When someone asks Hanks’ character who he is, he replies, “Bond. James Bond.” Gag.)

Others are just plain offensive when seen through modern eyes, serving as reminders of the rampant whitewashing of the early film industry. One period movie, whose name I can’t remember, had actors in makeup playing the roles of Asian characters. “None but the Brave” was lauded at the time for using a Japanese cast for the roles of Japanese soldiers. The inclusion mattered. It wasn’t always that way.

But the truly bad flicks are few and far between. Take it from someone who has watched broadcast television since middle school, and has seen it devolve from general programming to dusty reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” and new shows with names like “Police,” “Ambulance” and “Fire.” While viewing audiences have migrated away from broadcast television to streaming services, the offerings on some of those platforms aren’t any better. Sometimes the act of scrolling up and down, left and right on a streaming app’s home page can sound more interesting than any of the digital titles on the shelf.

The movies on Movies! are usually worth your time. If you think otherwise, at least you’ll have an antenna to watch live sports, award ceremonies and dating competitions without the fear of a stream buffering or crashing. No subscription necessary.

Shane Endsley can feel the weight of the Denver Municipal Band’s history, and that only motivates him to carry it higher.

The son of former DMB director Gerald Endsley, who led the band from the mid-1990s through his death in 2015, the younger Endsley is a nationally touring trumpet player and director of education and outreach for the band. Along with current , Endsley is still pushing forward an elastic, accomplished group that’s playing more than 20 free shows this year in addition to school visits and other performances.

That includes a free, at 6 p.m., another nonprofit that itself is celebrating 40 years. Amid that, Endsley remains one of those rare music lifers that offers a link to the past while pushing the next generation of musicians forward. And he’s a dad himself.

“They are musicians, too,” he said of his son, 17, and daughter, 20. “They’re really good, but it’s not their focus. They didn’t zero in on it like I did when I was a kid.”

Endsley, like his father, began playing music before he turned 10 and was performing on stage by his teens. He made his bow with DMB at age 17, and has since toured and recorded widely, including with Grammy-winning names such as Ani DiFranco and Jason Mraz. The 51-year-old is also a lecturer in and coordinator of the school’s innovative studio and performance space at 800 Kalamath St. in Denver.

In other words, a busy dude. Did we mention his wife’s also a professional musician?

Along with the decades he’s put into his craft, he’s always encouraging new recruits.

“If you’re willing to take time and work at it, it feels attainable for everybody,” he said. “Don’t get too discouraged by somebody who’s rocketing ahead of you, because we all learn at different paces.”The

Denver Municipal Band is evidence of lifelong music love in general. They play as a 40-piece concert band, 20-piece jazz band, and contract act for show bands, a brass quintet or smaller ensembles, according to their website. “Because of our flexibility, we play everything — orchestral, rock, soul, and funk,” they wrote.

DMB’s relatively modest, $200,000 annual budget is cobbled from a variety of funding sources, but donations continue to play a huge role in its underpinning. That’s especially important since many of the musicians play in other top-notch groups such as the Colorado Symphony, Colorado Ballet, Central City Opera, Denver Brass, and the Queen City Jazz Band. They need to make a living, and while you may be shocked to hear this, the local performing arts scene isn’t exactly the most lucrative gig out there.

Band members carry the soul of Denver, and they haven’t dropped the ball. For its free, July 4 and 5 shows at Washington Park and Cheesman Park, respectively, they’re playing Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” alongside a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, amid other tunes.

“It’s going to be really powerful for right now,” he said. “With everything going on in politics and in this country, it’s a really patriotic statement, and we’re proud of Joe Martin for programming it.”

See more shows from Denver Municipal Band at .