![]() Best Happy Hour, South Phoenix Amano Pizza Bistro.Best Happy Hour, Central Phoenix Fez Restaurant and Urban Bar.Best Place to Drink Pabst Blue Ribbon Old Skool 50 Cent PBR Night.Best Local Beer for a Novice Drinker Papago Brewing Company's Orange Blossom.Best Bottled Beer Selection Taste of Tops.Best White Sangria La Bocca Urban Pizzeria & Wine Bar. ![]() Best Red Sangria Rita's Kitchen at Camelback Inn.Best Old-School Martini Seamus McCaffrey's.Best Karaoke with a Live Band "I'm with the Band" on Mondays at Blue Martini Lounge.What's better than that? (Sorry, pal, but you'll still have to carry those old pizza boxes out to the trash yourself.) Do good and avoid being buried alive in your junk. (Don't forget to photograph your donated items first - pesky IRS.) We can't tell you how many lousy garage sales we threw, or how many times we tried to shove microwaves and old TVs in a compact car to drive cross town to another thrift store, 'til a friend tipped us off to this wonderful cause, which operates day programs for developmentally disabled adults - along with a damn good thrift store. Presto - junk gone, handy receipt left in its place for a tax deduction. On the appointed date, we know we'll come home to an empty porch. Then we dial up the Arc and choose a day (once in a while, they are booked on our day of choice, but not typically, and they're always super-nice). Every six weeks or so, we load our porch high with all kinds of junk - the kind of stuff that's useless to us (Who needs a third pie tin, or size 2T pants when the kid's been a 5T for six months?) but might suit someone else. That's how often we manage to make a pile of stuff to give away. We didn't have to look up the phone number for the Arc of Tempe Thrift Store. You can buy CDs anywhere, but it's a rare place that can make you feel like part of the local music community, and Hoodlums is such a place. In that way, Hoodlums has followed the path of its next-door neighbor, Changing Hands Bookstore, becoming a treasure to the Valley. They've even held a few micro music festivals. Hoodlums isn't just a place to pick up silver slivers of plastic and old concert posters it's a meeting place that always goes the extra step toward engaging customers as a community, whether it's staging a seemingly unending string of signings, small shows, art shows, or screenings of music-related movies. ![]() Hoodlums excels not because it has the biggest selection or the choicest obscurities - it's solid, but not spectacular, in that regard - but because it's the best version of what we think a record store needs to be in an evolving marketplace deeply affected by the steady march toward digital-only distribution. There are a lot of great record stores of varying degrees of indieness in metro Phoenix.
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