Best Chorus Girl 2010 | Katharine Gentsch | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Chorus Girl

Katharine Gentsch

If you attended any musical theater productions in or around Dallas over the past 12 months, you probably saw 21-year-old SMU theater major Katharine Gentsch singing and dancing somewhere just behind the lead actors. Since September 2009, she has appeared in a remarkable string of shows: as a "Hot Box Girl" in Guys and Dolls at WaterTower Theatre, in the chorus of Breathe at Uptown Players, playing the little sister in Sanders Family Christmas at the Bath House Cultural Center (a role she'll reprise this fall), singing and dancing in Lyric Stage's Showboat, in Bye Bye Birdie at Richland College and in a different, professional production of the same show at Lyric, hoofing it in Uptown's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and in Garland Summer Musicals' 42nd Street, and most recently in Lyric's big-budget My Fair Lady. When she's not onstage, Gentsch is tweeting about how much she loves musicals. One day soon she'll get that starring role, but until then save a little applause for the pretty redhead just out of the spotlight.

Best New Arts Event

Free Night of Theater

Presented last fall by The City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Theatre Communications Group, the Free Night of Theater launched a national program to bring new audiences to live theater performances. Thousands took up the offers of free tickets from Kitchen Dog Theater, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the Eisemann Center, Rover Dramawerks, Teatro Dallas, Dallas Children's Theater, Dallas Theater Center and Shakespeare Dallas, plus a dozen others. The generous cooperation of these arts organizations raised awareness of this city's great theater companies and allowed many new audience members to experience the excitement of professional live theater for the first time.

Best Hero

Dan Stark, The Good Guys

His biggest career accomplishment? Saving the governor's kidnapped son all the way back in 1985. And, OK, maybe he's been riding that train about 25 years too long at this point. But the fact remains: Dan Stark is a goddamn hero, folks. And it's not just his mustache, his always-present aviator shades, his sweet 1979 Trans Am or the fact that he lives in a trailer in the shadow of the Fair Park Ferris wheel that does the trick. No, it's that somehow, against all odds, Stark and his straight-laced partner Jack Bailey, despite being pinned with petty crime investigation after petty crime investigation, manage to bust big-time punk after big-time punk—and at a clip of about once a week, no less! It's impressive to say the least. Add in the fact that he does this while bedding female witnesses left and right—while drinking on the job—and, really, that's a man worth decorating. The guy's already had one TV movie made in his honor. At this point, he deserves a ridiculously highly rated TV series. Maybe on Fox?

READERS' PICK BEST BLOG

The Unticket

The Unticket

READERS' PICK BEST TV NEWS SHOW

WFAA Channel 8 News

WFAA Channel 8 News

Best Lawsuit

Ross Perot Jr. vs. Mark Cuban

Conventional wisdom holds that rich guys don't like to air their dirty laundry in public, which is likely why the descendants of H.L. Hunt settled their family feud on the courthouse steps in May. It's also why we relished the opportunity to view the dirty laundry filed by billionaire Ross Perot Jr. against billionaire Mark Cuban in the form of a civil case that alleged Cuban had racked up so much debt during the nine years he has been running the Dallas Mavericks ($270 million) that he had basically run the team into the ground. Perot claimed that Cuban's bad management had jeopardized the 5 percent minority interest Perot, through his Hillwood Properties, still retains in the Mavs. Claiming that the Mavs were nearly bankrupted by Mark Cuban seemed about as likely as saying that the Rangers weren't nearly bankrupted by Tom Hicks. Although Perot did his talking through lawyers, Cuban took his case to the Internet and e-mailed various press outlets, telling them that the lawsuit was an act of desperation on the part of Perot, who had lost big on his Victory Park development. No matter the right and wrong of it, the public was given a glimpse of rich guys getting all shitty with each other. And the prospect of watching how the rich play hardball remains as the lawsuit takes on age and animosity.

Best Make-Out Spot

The AT&T Telephone Pole-Climbing Training Grounds

Sure, a classy dinner, a bottle of wine and a movie says "romance," but it's not exactly the stuff of sweeping love songs. No heartbroken musician out there pens tunes about the time they had the fish at Central 214 and rented The Proposal. A song-worthy kiss comes with hints of danger, apprehension and excitement. Your heart will go pitter-patter with both love and adrenaline when you make a late-night run at climbing the fence of AT&T's telephone pole-climbing training ground at the corner of Bryan and Fitzhugh in East Dallas with the object of your affection. The barbed-wire is easily conquered with a thick flannel blanket, and there are plenty of footholds at the northwest corner of the compound. We're not saying it's like taking candy from a baby, but we are saying that maybe we know a girl who did this in a mini-skirt, unscathed. And once you've shown your prowess at trespassing vertically, getting horizontal is the easy part.

Best Wizard Gathering

Texas Pinball Festival

The Texas Pinball Festival will celebrate its 18th annual event this March, proving that even in the age of Wii and PlayStation, people still appreciate the craftsmanship and tactile experience of their favorite arcade games. A flat fee gets you in the door for unlimited play on a plethora of machines—for a much heftier fee, you can even take some of them home. You'll see machines you thought you'd never see again, from cool, vintage '70s Playboy and Capt. Fantastic games to those based on best-forgotten '90s films like Demolition Man ("Featuring Academy Awards Winning Actress Sandra Bullock!"). And if the pinball isn't enough, the people watching is amazing—whether it's the hardcore competition players or the blinking light salesmen or the drunk middle-aged couples down from Oklahoma, hoping to rekindle a little of that teenage feeling with a sweet multiball or two.

Best Fishing Store

Barlow's Tackle Shop

Dallas used to be dotted with little bait and tackle stores where you could acquire a little bit of equipment and a whole bunch of information just by stopping in. Now, of course, the huge category-killers like Bass Pro Shops and Academy have driven most of the mom-and-pops out of business. One of the interesting exceptions to that rule is Barlow's, just south of Arapaho Road on the southbound service drive of Central Expressway in Richardson. Barlow's maintains a serious Web presence, selling specialized bait and equipment to guides and dedicated fishermen. Maybe that's what allows them to keep the retail store open. However they do it, their store is a great place to pick up inside scoop on area lakes from Texoma to Fork. The people behind the counter know what's biting, where and on what. Sometimes you don't even have to ask. Just slouch around and keep your ears open, because somebody else is always up there trying to pick up some secrets.

Best Bureaucrat

Gary Fitzsimmons

No small matter, balancing the public's right to a free and open judiciary against the privacy rights of the litigants who play within its courtrooms. But Dallas County District Clerk Gary Fitzsimmons has spent much of his public career trying to strike that balance. On July 26, he made court records available over the Internet, initially releasing more than 13 million images to the public. Currently the dockets of 10 criminal courts, eight civil courts and all seven family courts can be viewed online. Documents for the remaining courts will be available by year's end. This may be a boon to the media but not so much to those litigants who object to public disclosure of private matters. To assist in these privacy concerns, individuals can request that their Social Security numbers be redacted from documents and certain records—those not required by law to remain public—may be restricted. Lawyers and the media will have access to all documents save those sealed or made confidential by law. Tricky business, maintaining some semblance of privacy in an electronic world. But Fitzsimmons seems bent on trying to get it right.

Best Of Dallas®

Best Of

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