If all goes according to plan, we’ll be spending Friday and Saturday night guarding the entrance to the screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and quizzing each ticket holder thusly: “Stop! Who approacheth the Door of the Theater must answer me these questions three, ere the other side…

Thursday, December 25 The inaugural use of our just-turned-17 drivers license was to see Hagfish at Trees, and it was a defining moment in our rocker girlhood. Despite the fishnets and purple hair, we still blushed when singer George Reagan tossed us a lit cigarette fresh from his lips and…

There are many symbols for this time of year. There’s the Nativity for religious Christmas, and Santa and Rudolph for secular Christmas. A menorah for Hanukkah, and–according to Friends–there’s the Hanukkah Armadillo who delights kids with tales of the Festival of Lights. Kwanzaa and Los Posados have candles and light,…

Thursday, December 11 It’s a Wonderful Life’s famous quote, “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings,” should give you a pretty good example of the kind of sound effects the Ameristage Players will be using during the group’s 1940s-style live radio performance of the holiday classic. We…

It’s every rocker girl’s wet dream: She meets her beloved rock star, gives him the songs she wrote for him, sings one with him and becomes an honorary member of the band. Too bad it only happens in fantasies…and movies. Because Elvis Costello totally needs a girl Attraction, er, female…

Thursday, November 27 We’ll let you in on a little secret. The Fort Worth Zoo is open on Thanksgiving Day from noon to 4 p.m. You can put the turkey in the oven, spend the day at the zoo and return home in time for dinner and football. No, we…

Think Tiki music, and you’ll think young. You’ll think hip. You’ll think 20-something guy who buys his vintage flower-print shirts at Ahab Bowen and classic brushed-steel cocktail shaker at Metro Retro. You don’t think 60-something, balding, trumpet-playing, Shriner-pledging grandfather. But we first heard of Tiki from our Poppy, who played…

Thursday, November 13 Some people quote The Simpsons; other people do Reality Bites. We’ve got Morrissey. But this time we promise it’s fitting. We swear on our plastic sleeve-covered vinyl copy of Hatful of Hollow. When Morrissey croons, “In our lifetime those who kill, the newsworld hands them stardom,” we…

New York performance artist Annie Murdock is the daughter of Robert Murdock, the former curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and since graduating from Wesleyan University she’s been studying in New York and Oaxaca and working with paper sculpture artist Lesley Dill. So you could say…

Thursday, October 30 To us, Halloween’s scare factor has nothing on El Da de los Muertos celebrations. While All Hallow’s Eve offers the chance to scream and run from fake ghosts in haunted houses, the Day of the Dead is asking real ghosts–the souls of departed loved ones–to return home…

Of all the things Timothy Leary was famous for–experimenting with LSD, being asked to leave his professorship at Harvard, getting arrested for pot possession, breaking out of prison, getting sent back to prison, experimenting with LSD, running with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, promoting…

Many of the 1960s protest singers used those warbly voices to spread their opinions. But rather than convincing, we’ve always found them so annoying that a plane ticket to the nearest front line didn’t sound like such a bad option in comparison. But then we’ve always been the “catch more…

Thursday, October 16 If someone had asked us just a few days ago what “throatsinging” was, we’d have claimed it was when someone can say the entire alphabet while belching. While we still don’t know how it’s done, we do know that throatsinging originated in the tiny Autonomous Republic of…

Thursday, October 2 Without high school marching band, we might never have known the glory of “You Can Call Me Al” and “Crocodile Rock.” But thanks to our state-funded training, we can now delight fellow restaurant patrons with our sing-a-long renditions to the Muzak. And it helped in other ways,…

Four years ago, we never would have imagined that corn dogs could have been any less appetizing than they are in their natural state. There’s that tough, chewy skin that proves they were fried at some point; a slightly sweet batter that’s a little soggy; and, inside, a lukewarm pink,…

Thursday, September 18 We like to think of Would I Lie to You? as the Jewish version of Tootsie. But instead of learning how to walk in heels and pluck eyebrows, the protagonist has to learn how to wear a yarmulke and find out what happens at a bris. In…

Thursday, September 4 Our favorite board games from childhood involved brightly colored mats and cute little place markers. We loved Candyland. But we wouldn’t call it art. The Mexican children’s game called Loteria, however, appears in visual art, but–in addition to being colorful–it has meaning behind it, with cards marked…

We always imagine juvenile jail to be like either the orphanage scenes in Annie or like Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock. Basically, there was lots of singing and dancing. We never did get the chance to find out the truth, possibly because we were upper middle class and really boring. We…

Thursday, July 24 We actually like it when people from other countries think Texans all ride horses, own ranches and wear cowboy hats. It’s more intriguing than saying one lives in an apartment, drives an economy car and wears Gap khakis. But for a real glimpse at a Texas that…

Our problem with Romeo and Juliet has never been muddling through the now-obsolete Elizabethan dialect. Nor is it the overacting that usually accompanies it. It’s not even the men in tights. Our problem is more fundamental. It’s plot. We just want to scream: Hello, you’re teen-agers. You’re not in love…