One of the largest polka festivals in the country started in Ennis back in 1966, based on a dream (an idea actually) and the fact that people have loved to polka since the dance was born in 19th-century Czech culture. When you’re standing in Ennis, eating a kolache, watching couples…

People have odd ways of enjoying their hobbies. This guy I know is the only person I’ve ever met that gets excited when he hears a whistle blast and the guardrail comes down over the road. He springs out of the car, hoists a video camera to his bony shoulder…

I used to have a maroon plastic ukulele. I never learned to play “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” but it sure was a lot of fun to bring out at parties–invariably some drunk guy would start strumming and strolling around like some cat from the ’20s. The instrument met an untimely…

We all remember George Washington Carver’s work with peanuts–he invented 105 recipes employing peanuts, and made peanut-based cosmetics, dyes, paint and nitroglycerin. But Carver, born a slave in Missouri, deserves to be known for more than peanut butter, which he didn’t even actually invent. That organic salad you’re crunching is…

In times of trouble people turn to religion, and if you find yourself in the mood for a little religious shopping (and some pretty cool music) then head to the Global Sacred Music Celebration at the Unity Church in Dallas. It’s one of those international cultural festivals, except instead of…

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins claims to hate women but love phonetics, so when he hears Eliza Doolittle’s thick Cockney twang, singing, dancing and rain in Spain that stays mainly in the plain are guaranteed. You wouldn’t think that a musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s woman-molding play Pygmalion,…

If you’ve ever seen the movie Giant then you’ve already got a handle about how things go in Bryan Burrough’s new book The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. That movie was fiction (and James Dean’s last film) but all the stories that the…

When you put a baritone mouthpiece on a tenor saxophone and play the thing loud with a bluesy sound it’s known as the Texas tenor style. Lots of great musicians, including Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane played the tenor saxophone but the Texas tenor sound is distinctly original…

We thought that we’d left Sister Hazel and that song “All for You” way back in high school. Turns out we were wrong because the band’s still roaming the nation, putting out CDs and performing the songs from the 1997 album Somewhere More Familiar and all the albums they’ve put…

My uncle still talks about the night he saw a belly dancer fold a dollar bill with her stomach. But there’s more to belly dancing than, well, drool. There’s shimmying, shiny veils and bells and all kinds of neat stuff that focuses attention on and glorifies that oft-maligned section of…

You may think that you’ve seen all the good musicals ever created, but if you’ve never seen Thoroughly Modern Millie then you’ve got another think coming. The Repertory Theater Company is putting on a production of the Broadway show and it’s chock full of musical flapper fun. Adapted from the…

“In the beginnin’ there weren’t nothin’,” or so begins the backwoods biblical genesis of the world in the play Beautiful Star: An Appalachian Nativity. The WaterTower Theatre has a seasonal offering of a more hillbilly-ish variety this Christmas, presenting a play about the Reverend Ledbetter and his Open Heart Congregation…

So there’s this guitarist who was the first to use amplifiers, was friends with Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, and inspired and influenced the likes of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Eric Clapton calls him his Elvis. Also, he’s got a thing for polka dots. Do you need to…

Nuns are scary. They appear in movies, always looming over some child’s desk, ruler in hand, ready and willing to wreak havoc right out of a Catholic school nightmare. Thus nuns tend to make more appearances as scary costumes on Halloween rather than at Christmas (well, OK, I guess there…

The Gaylord Texan Resort (1501 Gaylord Trail in Grapevine) has the answer to the dread that cooking a Thanksgiving dinner awakens in us all (except Pilgrims–they had it covered). From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. you and your family, by reservation, will sit down to a traditional turkey dinner (or…

They’re doing The Marriage of Figaro! For those who groan at the mention of the word opera, let me just add to your misery by assuring you that Mozart did write it and it’s in Italian. I know, now you really don’t want to make the trek all the way…

Old Red’s getting into the spirit of things, though they’re doing it a little late by modern standards. After all, everybody else had their halls decked the day before Halloween. Better late than never as they always say–of course, we don’t know who they are exactly, but we’re told they…

People think of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as a decorous affair, with a lot of breeches-clad men gathered around a huge piece of paper, already posing for the commemorative portrait. Well, nothing is ever as neat as history would have it, and there’s no better way to…

What did women do during the political season before the 19th Amendment gave them a voice at the polls? Just because females couldn’t disappear into a voting booth and put their choice on the ballot doesn’t mean they did not make their political opinions known. They sure didn’t sit around…

We all have our dirty little secrets. Some people dress up in women’s clothes like J. Edgar Hoover; some people tell their vegetarian children that the cow they are eating is a soy burger. Some people just love Disney stuff. They’ve seen every movie; they’ve been to Disney World more…