Way to blow it, Zac Crain. You spent years pissing off local bands as this paper’s music editor, and now that you’ve announced your mayoral candidacy in Dallas, you might expect them to come rushing back with open arms and cheerful votes. Time heals all wounds, right? Well, a certain…
Ah, further proof that parents should never, never, ever meddle in their offsprings’ love lives: The Fantasticks. Now I’m not saying that I have experience in this arena. I would never discuss, for example, how my mother tried to hook me up with a prom date through her Wichita Falls…
Those of you who know downtown Dallas only during the work week probably think that a bike tour downtown is something less than a good idea. It’s about as smart, maybe, as sewing your own parachute or chucking a tiger under the chin and saying, “Him’s a big kitty, isn’t…
If you live in Grand Prairie and are rudely awakened Saturday morning by what sounds like an earthquake or a crashing jetliner, don’t be afraid. That’s just the sound of morons revving their motorcycle engines (They’re trying to tell you how big their ding-dongs are). And these aren’t your average…
What would Thomas Jefferson do if he ran things today? Faced with Congressional deadlock, he would found a new party—he did start the Democratic Party after all. Illegal immigration? He would buy Mexico. After the Louisiana Purchase that’s no big deal. WMDs? Send Lewis and Clark to look for them…
Running wild through the streets has a lot of appeal. Imagine running wild through the jungle. Better yet, imagine your kids running wild through the jungle. Oh, wait, that’s fifth grade. Never mind. The Fort Worth Zoo, which beats the Dallas Zoo by a mile, gets two-leggers moving fast in…
I don’t fish but can spend a happy afternoon ogling tackle in a sporting goods store. Don’t do woodworking, but that tool section at Home Depot? I’m the kid in a candy store. Guns, auto parts, camping equipment, electronics—hell, sewing machines—it’s all the same. You may know someone similar. We…
Street fairs are a great excuse to eat meat on a stick while bargaining for some hemp jewelry. When the weather’s nice, the crowds aren’t too pushy and there’s no line at the funnel cakes booth, nothing can beat an hour of strolling down a blocked-off street perusing the wares…
At 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Saturday, May 6, the Texas Radio Theatre Company presents T Minus X: Stories of Tomorrow. If you’re like me, you’re trying to figure out what a Radio Theatre Company is. It’s the art of live audio theatre, minus the visual elements you’d find…
For those who think poverty is a choice, allow me to recommend the book Nickel and Dimed, in which the author, a journalist named Barbara Ehrenreich, works as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart clerk to prove that poverty is not the result of…
With Hairspray, John Waters wrote and directed his first PG-rated film (a step down from his earlier X-ratings), tackling issues of teen angst, racial turmoil and true love all in one combed-out/teased-up package. Then Broadway took over and made the beehives bigger and the dance numbers more spectacular. What remained…
Historians believe the Mayans, one of the earliest recorded civilizations in North and Central America, originally grew and developed the cacao leaf, the precursor to cocoa. For that, Spanish explorers thanked them with pain, disease and destruction. Mmm, sweet chocolate! Celebrate the ancient Mayan discovery with the True History of…
According to his Web site, pop artist Peter Max was born in Germany and grew up in Shanghai, where he lived in a “pagoda-style house situated amidst a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh temple and a Viennese cafe.” When he was 10, Peter and his family “traveled across the vast expanse…
According to his Web site, pop artist Peter Max was born in Germany and grew up in Shanghai, where he lived in a “pagoda-style house situated amidst a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh temple and a Viennese cafe.” When he was 10, Peter and his family “traveled across the vast expanse…
If my kid was a little older, I might take him out to the Little Legends Storytime at Ameriquest Field on Thursday at 10 a.m. for a “fun-filled journey into the magical world of baseball!” As it is, my kid can barely walk, so he probably wouldn’t appreciate it. But…
Teen and ‘tween girls spend a lot of time daydreaming about boys. I spent many years doing it myself. One object of my affection: a super-cute older guy in my church youth group named David Hopkins. Also a daydreamer is Emily Edison, whose creator—that very same David Hopkins (What’s up,…
On the surface, Suzi Matthews’ most recent exhibition of collage work, small clone, seems innocuous enough. She cuts up numbers from her dad’s company’s catalogs and glues them back together in pretty patterns. If you need artsy-fartsy validation for why this is cool, then consider this: Her dad made guitar…
Once, this guy I dated called me “a big bag of apathy.” I would have been pretty offended had I actually taken the time to care, but like many people, I’m often too lazy and/or selfish to think about it. To make me pay attention, it takes greatness (or lots…
In Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, 1996’s Walking and Talking, the writer-director warmly portrayed an adult female friendship, nudging at emotional issues without resorting to shtick or melodrama. Five years later, Holofcener’s Lovely and Amazing attempted to do the same for a family of women but with wildly different results: Virtually…
For most of January 2005, Michael Keaton was on the road pimping White Noise, the psychological thriller in which he stared at TV screens and pretended to be scared of static. Little wonder, then, that Keaton spent most of that couch time selling not his big-studio comeback but his tiny-budgeted…
Lesley Dill Dill combines a variety of material–horsehair, wire, thread, tea, glue, ribbon, paper, felt, organza–to create work that is at once precious and weird. The wall-scaled “Blonde Push” brings to mind the enormous fringy brushes of a car wash without the whim and froth of suds. Long strands of…
The Crucible Arthur Miller’s most-produced play feels more relevant than ever. Sure, we get the old references to the McCarthy witch hunts in the parable, but now the drama resounds with echoes of “the war on terrorism” and even the horrors of Abu Ghraib in its story of witchcraft and…
