Pulling Events into a custom page table

[vb_guru]

I have users entering events and these events are showing up in the calendar. What I would like to do is pull these events from the database into a table on a custom VB page. Being able to sort the table by any table heading/column would be great. However, I am not sure how to do this in the VB brand of PHP and MySQL. I could do it in native PHP/MYSQL but it seems like a better idea to use VB code. Also I would like to know the minimum number of templates I need to pull. I have seen this listed on several [how to create your own custom pages] but am not sure what I need to do in this situation.

// #################### PRE-CACHE TEMPLATES AND DATA ######################
// get special phrase groups
$phrasegroups = array();

// get special data templates from the datastore
$specialtemplates = array();

// pre-cache templates used by all actions
$globaltemplates = array( );

// pre-cache templates used by specific actions
$actiontemplates = array();

[vb_guru]

Any help?????