Walk in my shoes I just got home from a rough day in the classroom. Earlier this morning, I attended a meeting about the tests that we’ll be giving to students in our Pre-K to 3 school. We teachers have been under immense pressure from the district regarding the new…
Nearly a hundred lawyers filled the Routh Street Brewery’s private party room one hot evening last summer. The faux rustic setting — hewn limestone walls, antler-trimmed cabinets, and weathered rafters — echoed with the clink of beer steins, the hum of conversation. In attendance were many of the city’s top…
In Sharon Boyd’s Net world, a scruffy cast of characters mumbles and bumbles its way through every aspect of the city’s affairs. There’s “You Go To Hell” Kirk, “Mayor Pre-Tend” Poss, “Send Me Some Money” Loza, “Princess Velveeta” Lill, “Pretty Barbara” Mallory Caraway, “Brain-Dead” Thornton-Reese. The cartoonish fools act in…
Working homicide for the last 20 years, Dallas Detective Jesse Briseno was all too familiar with the pattern — a dead body, a thorough investigation, and an air-tight case, yet the prime suspect gets away with murder. Too often that murderer was a Mexican national living and killing in Dallas…
Author, author Chris Beamon, the Ponder seventh-grader who landed in the pokey in Denton County last fall after writing a Halloween essay that described shooting a teacher and students, has moved beyond Big Chief notebooks to having his work appear in a tonier rag, Harper’s magazine. (True quote from a…
Rudy V is a voice. Soft, warm, throaty, the cadence so deliberate and sensual, you’d think this man was born to tell bedtime stories. The naughty kind. When you hear that voice rolling over the airwaves, you envision a playboy. And if that is where your imagination takes you, you…
Bobby Wightman-Cervantes insists on explaining himself, purposefully slowing the rapid-fire patter of his New York twang to make himself understood. Yes, just two years ago, he ran for Dallas County district judge as the first openly gay Republican to seek that office. And yes, he is now running for the…
On the grass in front of the Dallas Independent School District headquarters last week, a small group of school support staff workers protested before an almost equally large gaggle of reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen. About 10 workers and their children, members of Local 100 of the Service Employees International…
By-buyout D magazine got at least this much right about columnist John Anders’ split from The Dallas Morning News: He left behind a high salary from the daily, and he’s moving with his wife, News columnist Helen Bryant, to Austin. The question, which D purports to answer in its March…
Some six months ago, the inmates confined inside the Carswell federal prison in south Fort Worth got a rare glimmer of hope when they were presented with a unique proposition: If an artist could come to the prison and teach them, they were asked, what type of artist-teacher would they…
Jailbreak Thanks to Mark Donald for letting me whip him up into an empathetic froth so he, too, came to the defense of my clients (“Gimme shelter,” February 10). The women from Yugoslavia in the Dallas County jail were released the same afternoon that his article was published in the…
Leavin’ on a jet plane Just a note to let you know that I have always looked forward to reading anything written by Christina Rees (“Cheers and tallyho,” February 17). I’m sure it comes as no surprise that the Dallas visual-art scene is in short supply of writers who inject…
The city’s ordinance governing topless clubs is a joke. But Bachman Lake-area residents are determined to get rid of the clubs by any means necessary.
Tim Lott stood before a seething crowd of East Dallas homeowners and residents of the Roseland Homes public housing project, trying to show them the big picture. In one hand he held a diagram of the Dallas Housing Authority’s plan for a new and improved Roseland. In the other he…
Southwest Airlines, rated last month by Fortune magazine as the nation’s second-best place to work, may be less than gay-friendly. Both gay and straight employees of the Dallas-based airline were outraged in December when a vitriolic letter in the company pilots union newsletter blasted a corporate proposal to offer domestic-partner…
Mission improbable OK, class, here’s another Buzz pop quiz: Give us three words that best describe The Dallas Morning News’ editorial content without using a synonym for “boring.” Time’s up. The correct answer, according to the daily’s recent in-house editorial newsletter News news — kindly faxed to us from an…
“I don’t want my money back,” Alejandra says, closing her front door and locking it. The lock makes a metallic clank that echoes through this spare Dallas apartment adorned with framed prayers and family portraits. “I just want these people to stay away from me.” Alejandra has lived peaceably, but…
Just as rotten From what I can tell by this week’s article by Jim Schutze titled “To the rotten core” (February 3), the Dallas Observer brand of journalism is alive and well. Mr. Schutze’s “reporting” of my testimony in Mr. Lipscomb’s trial is totally inaccurate and a complete fabrication. I’m…
For Roosevelt Holiday, the “bat cave” reference was just a night-shift cop’s feeble attempt at humor. A 43-year-old Dallas police officer, Holiday used jokes to soothe the jumpy nerves of new recruits he once trained to patrol predominantly minority neighborhoods in southern Dallas. Often the trainees were white. Holiday is…
Fred Curchack is performing cunnilingus. In front of a live audience. Actually, DJ Pollochek, an obscure experimental theater artist, is going down on Serena, the veiled dancer at a sleazy subterranean strip joint called Club X. Both characters are being played by Curchack, a slightly less obscure experimental theater artist…
If it wasn’t for bad luck, as the song goes, Gerald Peters wouldn’t have no luck at all. The well-known art dealer with galleries in Dallas, Santa Fe, and New York City was recently forced to refund $5 million for a collection of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings he sold to Kansas…
In the venerated legal directory Martindale-Hubbell, North Dallas lawyer David A. Schiller appears to lead a flourishing practice. Even though the 36-year-old Louisiana native graduated from the South Texas College of Law just four and a half years ago, according to his directory entry, Schiller now operates his own shop…
