With a little help from her crew, Wende Curtis realizes a landmark achievement.

"It’s been a long haul,” says Wende Curtis, whose Landmark Comedy Works has fallen almost laughably behind schedule. Just over a month prior to the grand opening, drywall dust covers the concrete floor, there isn’t a single bit of paint on the walls and a hard hat is still mandatory. In 43 days, all three floors of the 21,000-square-foot facility will be open for business although the place looks months away from completion.

You have to hand it to Curtis, who with sheer tenacity, “and a whole bunch of loans,” is nearing the end of a very long road. “We closed a year and 13 days late. We’re going to open about a year and three weeks late,” Curtis shouts as we wait for the third floor service elevator in the new club, the cacophony of hammers making it impossible to hear. “Some people have said to me that the fact I got this done at all is pretty amazing. But then again, I’ve never been much of a quitter.”

Growing up, I was always the bossy kid, the director,” says Curtis of her western Kansas upbringing where she spent her summer days producing beauty pageants with the other neighborhood girls. In 1975, her father moved the family to Aurora and bought an auto parts store on Brighton Boulevard, putting his 11-year-old daughter to work at a young age. “I was sweeping floors, cleaning really disgusting bathrooms and emptying trash,” she says. “It was gross. It was the dirtiest dirt I’d ever seen in my life. It was horrible but the best experience ever.”

After high school, Curtis moved to Fort Collins where she began as a business major at Colorado State, which Curtis says “was a retarded idea because what I really wanted to be was an actress, of course.” Following that brief stint in business school, she focused on her first loves: acting, directing and classical voice. During her last semester, Curtis took a job waitressing at the Fort Collins Comedy Works, a move that would prove to be the perfect fit for the 22-year-old. “I thought, oh my god, the business of show business. I decided that if I was going to have to wait tables …”

For the next seven years, she would work her way up the Comedy Works ranks. In the mid-90s, Curtis was tapped to open a second club in Aurora. “Ellen DeGeneres was my grand-opening act, and I was going to pay her $5,000 for four nights,” she says. The club never open its doors, but she had proven her worth. For the next fifteen years under the Comedy Works banner, Curtis would learn every aspect of the unforgiving business, from how to balance the finances to booking the right acts for the club. “She’s had this work ethic since she was a little kid, and she got that from her parents,” says comedian Lori Callahan, a Comedy Works regular who met Curtis in 1987. “It’s so cool to see her be so successful, because if she’s successful, then I’m successful. But I always joke with her; I knew her when she was a cocktail waitress.”

After turning around the Tampa, Florida, Comedy Works, a club that she says was “very much in trouble,” Curtis returned to Denver in 1998, taking over as manager for the Larimer Square Comedy Works. When the club’s parent company began selling off its assets in 2001, Curtis and two other partners purchased the 125-year-old basement lounge. In 2003, Curtis bought out her partners to become one of the few female comedy club owners in a male-dominated industry. “I realized I didn’t need partners. When you are the club, you don’t want anyone walking in and thinking they own the place.”

“She creates brilliance. By keeping the club open, she’s given Denver comics a voice, a stage to nurture and work on our acts,” says Callahan, who continues to perform regularly at the Larimer venue. “But she’s not going to let you pull all sorts of crap on her stage. She’s fair, but she wants quality. Comedy Works is an institution after all.”

Oh my god, they work so hard,” Curtis says, leading us through the various rooms of the sprawling three-story construction job that has men hanging from every rafter. As she is explaining the custom-made chandelier that will hang down into the first floor lobby, a young worker walks by us on a pair of construction stilts. Curtis stops mid-sentence and smiles. “You be careful up there,” she says.

This is the ease with which Wende Curtis runs her empire, a $3-million-a-year enterprise that she oversees with the personal attention of a mom-and-pop corner store. While we walk through the shell of what is set to become a very impressive, 500-seat showroom, one of the random hard-hatted men shouts from above: “Wende, I am so sorry about the Broncos game. I couldn’t find babysitters for my kids, so I gave your tickets to one of my guys.”

“That’s ok,” she yells back. “At least someone used them.”

As the downtown Comedy Works has grown in popularity, proprietors along Larimer have reaped the benefits. The comedy club brings an estimated 2,000 people a week to the blooming LoDo block, each with money to spend. A couple with two tickets to a big-name act might have happy hour drinks at Mynt, dinner at Rioja and then head out to the clubs after the show. According to Heidi McMillen, who was hired a little over a year ago to book corporate and social events for the new club, “The biggest question going in was how to put everything together so momma could have a piece of that pie too.”

In an effort to create an all-inclusive venue for the suburban family, Curtis says she had to step out of her box entirely. “Trust me,” she says. “I live in a very small underground box.” The original location was a two-story building that the Landmark developers had intended to be a Tattered Cover. “I always knew when I expanded that I wanted to do food and a lounge for those moms and dads who used to be my customers, but now they can’t get downtown like they used to. I wanted to capture more of their night but still have them home to relieve the babysitter and be in bed by 10:30.”

Curtis has incorporated every inch of the building’s 21,000 square feet to ensure that customers who have tickets to an evening show can make an evening out of the experience. To the right of the lobby on the first floor is Lila B., a martini lounge named after her fraternal grandmother Lila Beatrice, which will serve small plates and appetizers and be used as a gathering place before shows. “I think Grandma would like to have a sexy martini lounge named after her,” she says. “Don’tcha think?”

Up a flight of stairs from the main lobby is Lucy, the Southern-inspired restaurant named after Curtis’ two-year-old French bulldog, who she calls her “four-legged child.” Curtis wanted to pay homage to her childhood in Kansas but wanted to make the food relevant like “the restaurants I like to eat at.” She hired New York City chef Micah Perfit, who has been on the payroll since July 2007 to help with the design of the menu and the kitchen, which will provide everything from the fried jalapeño poppers in the showroom to the kosher cuisine for Bar Mitzvahs in the elegant Curtis Ballroom.

“In the original deal, I was buying the whole building but renting out the top floor for a high-end sports bar,” says Curtis of the impromptu addition to the club. “When they fell out, I said, I want it myself to build a ballroom. Now it’s my favorite room of them all. It’s all pretty sexy, but the ballroom is the sexiest. I could live up here. And Lucy would love it.”

The showroom proved to be the biggest challenge Curtis faced in designing the facility. Comedians across the country revere the downtown Comedy Works, referring to the physicality of the performance space — the low ceilings and the tight audience seating — as the nirvana of comedy. “People are packed in really tight,” says Nancy Norton, a 17-year veteran of the Denver comedy scene. “You really feel the crowd’s energy. If you start at the Comedy Works and then head out into the world, you find yourself stunned.”

“I wanted to keep the intimacy of the downtown room with this gigantic beautiful space here,” Curtis says. “We kept the low ceilings and kept the mezzanine as low as code would let us. It’s not just this big, barren space; this vacuum; this barn. I wish the stage were a little higher, but we couldn’t do that because of building code either.”

The sheer enormity of the project is impossible to describe. On a busy Friday night, Curtis estimates that between the ballroom, private dining rooms, the stadium-style showroom, Lucy and Lila B., the Landmark Comedy Works could have 1,000 customers eating, drinking, dancing and laughing. Employees will cover every inch of the facility, pouring cocktails and toting food. Dozens of waitresses will take orders while a slew of comedians will keep audiences in stitches. And yet, one woman will sit amid the chaos, a tenacious visionary who says, “when someone tells me that I can’t do something, it just makes me want it more.”

And as I am overwhelmed by the facts, figures, the cost of steel and construction delays, Curtis focuses my attention on a small collection of tile in an unfinished bathroom. “The color you see there is called Grape Jelly,” she tells me. “And I absolutely love it.”

There is no doubt that Curtis is as influential as it gets in the comedy club world. Comedians swear by her fierce dedication to the art and her ability to recognize talent. Yet she remains humble about her level of involvement in her own success. “What makes a good comedy club? Common sense. I say it’s common sense, but I see a lot of goofballs in this business that don’t get it. Without the comedians, I serve high-priced drinks and greasy bar food. What am I without them? It has to be right for them first, and the rest will fall into place.”

Through Comedy Works Entertainment, Curtis plays a small part in the development of comedians, but it’s her approachability and her willingness to give stage time to enthusiastic young comedians that sets her apart from other club owners. “Wende’s been a great contribution to the comedy world,” says comedian Kathleen Madigan, who has known Curtis for 20 years. “She took the chance on female comics like myself and Wanda Sykes at a time when we were constantly hearing no from other owners. That and she only supports comics that have talent, which we appreciate.”

“Wende is a role model to me,” says Eva Magdalenski, a shining example of Curtis’ handiwork, a young woman who began her Comedy Works career as an intern and now handles media relations for the club. “When we first met, I knew immediately that she was someone I could learn a lot from.”

Although the Landmark grand opening is scheduled for October 10, the days leading up to the event will be marked with special charity nights to benefit nonprofits such as Colorado Youth for a Change. This summer, many local comedians donated their talents for a tornado-relief benefit for the town of Windsor. Curtis, who is open with the media about her ongoing battle with an eating disorder, says giving back is a huge part of her success. “I think it’s a good thing that I spilled the beans. If there is anything I can do to help someone else, if they look at me and think I have the perfect life, let me tell you, I’ve had my own struggles.”

What sets Wende apart is her deep love of people,” adds McMillen, who says Curtis offered to help with the co-pay when her husband recently broke his arm. “She doesn’t just care about her employees or the club; she cares about our families. We’re a year late in this project. I’ve been on her payroll since the beginning, and we don’t have the revenue from this club yet to pay our salaries, but never once has she thought about letting us go. It’s not about the money; she has good people and wants to hold onto them. That speaks loudly to her character and integrity.”

Stephanie McHugh is a local comedian who cut her teeth performing at Comedy Works and was recently a semifinalist in Nick At Night’s Funniest Mom competition. “I have two kids,” she says, “and recently their schedules changed with their dad and myself, which affected the nights I could perform. Wende gives me the first spot, so I can go downtown, do some comedy and make it back home to get the kids to bed.”

That sincerity, that ease of spirit and understanding, is what sets Curtis apart from her contemporaries in the industry. Talk to anyone employed under the Comedy Works banner — from the cocktail waitress trying to make ends meet to local headlining comedians — and they’ll tell you this is a family. “We have bartenders and waitresses who have been here for more than 20 years, which is unheard of in our industry,” says marketing director Susan Collyar who has worked for Curtis since 1993. “We all work together and play together, and even when the young’uns move on to other opportunities in life, they always seem to come back home.”

Hundreds, if not thousands, of people owe a piece of their livelihood to Curtis, who stands on the balcony of her incomplete club, looking out on the Rocky Mountain horizon. “It’ll be amazing to see where we are in five years, but I’d like my life back eventually,” she unexpectedly says with a mischievous smile. “I had no idea I would ever end up owning a comedy club. I just worked hard and liked what I did. It was fun, and no one else seemed to be doing it right. I was 22 when I started, and it’s been 22 years since, but maybe in another 22, I can sell this pile of rocks.”

***

Wende Curtis’ Clothing and Jewelry:
Mariel on Larimer Square
Lucy’s clothing: Dog Savvy
Hair: Rodger Garcia and Marcheta Clemens, Bang Salon
Makeup: Aldo Celeste and Chanda Swanson, glo skincare
Special Thanks to:
The Landmark Residences
Kitchen Table Cooking School and Culinary Goods
Vino 100