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There are Latin clubs where you can dance salsa, and then there's Club Vivo, a dark, warehouse-ish, large box that's more of a meeting spot for South Americans. Whether it's a World Cup game or a Los Auténticos Decadentes concert, Vivo provides a safe space to let your flags fly. You can count on finding empanadas for sale on Argentine cumbia night — when you can bust out soccer chants like you have Messi-specific Tourette's. The drinks are overpriced like they're denominated in pesos, not dollars, but the club upstairs knows the real Latin songs we want to hear, so we're drunk enough on nostalgia.

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Great artistic experiences walk a fine line between avant-garde and laughably artsy. Ochre House has always been on point. Its theater productions are original, boundlessly creative, well-produced small wonders that leave audiences as pensive as they are delighted for a good few months after a show. Founder Matthew Posey is a courageous art conspirator who's long enriched the cultural scene through Ochre House's oddball characters, strikingly original plays and locally grown music and theatrical talent. The Exposition Avenue theater is a nook of uncompromising art in a vast landscape of commercialized entertainment. That alone is worth the ticket, but there's also a "donate what you can" night.

Nonprofit Dallas Summer Musicals has brought the best of New York's marquees to Dallas since 1941, so it only made sense that a year ago the company changed its name to Broadway Dallas. With recent productions such as Moulin Rouge and Pretty Woman, the organization brings the lights, action and super-nasal singing of musical theater to places such as the Winspear Opera House and Fair Park. Give your regards to Broadway right at home.

It seems that every influencer is in cahoots with the airline industry to get you flying like a bat outta hell anywhere away from your couch. But we really just want to know what's nearby, so we can have some attainable goals for realistic day trips we're actually going to take. Not that a treehouse hotel in Bali doesn't sound nice; we just know ourselves. That's why blogger My Curly Adventures is such a spirit guide. She knows the best stays, pools, events and natural beauty spots near and far from North Texas. If you're looking for the nearest turquoise-water oasis or the "weirdest" things to do, she has the map to these Texas treasures.

Downtown McKinney is absolutely charming. Among its cookie shops, record shop and vintage shops is a big comic book store with a wide-open space large enough to fit your enthusiasm for all things nerdville. The shop has a well-stocked selection of board games, anime books, posters and comics to entertain every type of cool geek out there. Our favorite thing, though, is the long mezzanine overlooking the store, which offers seating so you can get lost in your fantasy of choice.

Noah Ferche

Here's one fantasy we don't share with one another enough: the game shows on which we'd love to participate. Not everyone needs to be Jeopardy smart. Some of those clues are unnecessarily convoluted, and those who can guess when the price is right just might be far more financially intelligent. Whatever your personal skills, show them off with a group at Game Show Battle Rooms. Yes, this is something Michael Scott would totally force on his Dunder-Mifflin staff as a (cringe) team-building exercise, but we only wish we could spend the workday this way. Or, bring your relatives and get ahead of the Thanksgiving fights by starting the family feud early.

Courtesy of Dallas Opera

Opera can sometimes seem like an excuse for rich people to dress up and take a really fancy nap. And while the most moving of arias and fanciful costumes are worth the splurge, there's a whole lot of "what's happening" in between the breathtaking moments if you don't speak Italian. Or German. Or is it Elvish? Wagner's Das Rheingold, performed by the Dallas Opera in February, is part of the composer's four-opera Ring Cycle series. The Dallas Opera delivered the "visual magic" it aimed for with an inarguably spectacular production.

Thanks to Dallas' efforts to preserve jazz education — look to Booker T. Washington High School or the University of North Texas' music programs — the city isn't short on talented brass players. Yet Quamon Fowler still stands out as a saxophone player with his 25-plus-years of hitting jazz notes right in the soul. The musician, teacher and bandleader has released seven albums and won third place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 2008, and he continues to melt the ear off listeners with the Quamon Fowler Quartet. He's as smooth as it gets.

Most Instagram makeup accounts are fun to look at, but Bailey Turfitt's craft is on another level entirely. The artist creates photography collections that pop on Instagram's feed as they would hanging on any art gallery. With accomplished special effects, makeup skills and an ability to turn a self-portrait into a dynamic theatrical still, her account is nothing short of mesmerizing and feels more like a great bit of performance art in 2D.

Dean Terry's mad brainchild, the experimental theater collective Therefore, made a comeback this year with AT&T Performing Art Center's Elevator Project series. The play Poems for Broken Screens was an intermedia collection of skits that delve deeply into digital existentialism, much like its 2018 predecessor, The Alexa Dialogues. The high-tech components of the show are just as masterful as its flesh-and-bone actors, including Abel Flores and Hilly Holsonback, and its impressive original music. The result was a too-real analysis of the ways technology exposes the best and worst of us.

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