Chris Beamon, a pudgy, freckle-faced 13-year-old boy, nestles beside his mother on the living-room couch. For the next few minutes, mother and son play out a scene that, if scripted for a TV sitcom, could pass as one of those requisite moments of domestic tranquility. Mom strokes a tuft of…
The map on the wall at Luke’s sporting goods is as overrun with boldly colored lines as a New York City subway map. Orange, red, green, blue, they intersect and collide in a web covering most of Dallas County. This laminated dream, produced by a couple of slick consulting companies…
Art lovers Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit. Maybe the folks at Deep Ellum Center for the Arts are really, really good sports. Whatever motivated them, we here at the Dallas Observer would like to thank DECA for not pressing charges against two of the paper’s advertising staff who undecked DECA’s…
Jeff Swaney has been doing business in Deep Ellum for a long time, since the area was little more than abandoned warehouses and starving artists. Swaney and his then-partner Steve Clohessy began hosting parties in the old Clearview Blind building on Elm Street in the mid-1980s, eventually turning it into…
Played in Quebec City in front of as many as 13,000 screaming French Canadians, the International Pee Wee Hockey World Championship is one of the sport’s biggest tournaments. Top-notch teams fly in from Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and other hockey powerhouses. Over the years, many of the National Hockey…
Colt Perryman went missing on a school field trip. It was 18 hours before his father was notified.
Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sounds as exuberant as a schoolboy winning his first science fair when he talks about all the media attention garnered by his team’s latest study on Gulf War Syndrome — results of which unequivocally point to…
After six months of apparent drift, the case of the vanished atheist came abruptly to life last week when a federal grand jury in Austin indicted Gary Karr, a Michigan handyman, on conspiracy charges of kidnapping, extortion, and robbery. The five-count indictment — the first against anyone in connection with…
Buzz’s holiday gift guide The desperate hours are approaching. The holiday is almost here, and Buzz still doesn’t know what to get Mrs. Buzz for Christmas. She asked for a vacuum cleaner, but Buzz knows a marital test when we see one, and there’s no way we’re dumb enough to…
Do you know TITAS? The Dallas-based arts organization has brought avant-garde dance and theater performers from around the world to North Texas, but many people don’t know the name. Maybe TITAS needs an American Express card, recognized around the world. If not a card, then perhaps a sizeable grant from…
Arlington taxi driver Eric Owusu always said he felt safe driving his cab, provided he steered clear of Dallas and Fort Worth, two cities the London-raised cabbie deemed hazardous. Unfortunately, he could do little to save himself when danger found him on a suburban street on St. Patrick’s Day 1996…
On November 29, Linda Dennis sent Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk a letter containing what may well be the last and weirdest claim made against the city this century. Dennis, a Dallas native whose family has deep roots in the city, announced she was formally claiming an eighth of an acre…
This space to let Federal prosecutors are challenging defense attorneys’ efforts to introduce the results of a lie-detector test into evidence in city council member Al Lipscomb’s bribery trial, The Dallas Morning News reports. The prosecutors apparently don’t think polygraph exams make good evidence. Buzz wonders, have they talked with…
Even by graveyard standards, the Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie is a desolate place, littered with decaying tree branches and beer cans and stray dogs that piss on tombstones. On this clear, crisp November morning, the sun seems to shine around the cemetery without ever making it through the…
A Texas A&M University student belts out commands like a Marine drill instructor. His crew of 10 college kids in storm-trooper helmets plays the most macabre game of pickup sticks imaginable. The crew grabs a heavy log, about eight inches in diameter and eight feet tall, lying several yards away…
This Is How We Do It” blares on the sound system, its driving rhythm pumping up the already fevered crowd. Preteens in their Tommy Hilfiger uniforms and fluorescent-colored skates sail across the polished maple floor, shrieking as they pick up speed, giggling as they watch their parents fall. Older siblings…
When Sandora Cooper told an old family friend that she wanted to sublease a restaurant during breakfast time to dish up chicken and waffles to commuters, the friend warned Cooper that her plan would never work. The problem wasn’t with the menu. Cooper’s friend, Elizabeth Wilson, had served the Harlem…
Exhibit D Back when men were men, women were women, and lawyers were blessedly fewer in number, newspaper editors and reporters who offended the mighty in print stood a good chance of getting a horsewhipping. Now we’re more likely to get sued. This is yet another sign of the decline…
Until about five years ago, there lived a grasping old man with an enormous appetite for pretty young women. His name was J. Howard Marshall II, and for many years, he lived respectably in Houston, doing something dull with oil. At last, he diversified his interests. He is chiefly remembered…
I could have spent the entire weekend posting from the film side of the annual spring-break multimedia orgy South by Southwest, which wraps up Sunday; God knows there are dozens, if not hundreds, of pasty-faced folks doing that very thing after every panel, after every screening, after every party. But…
Just south of downtown sits the Ervay Theater, the former home of Jack Ruby’s nightclub the Silver Spur. It’s only appropriate that attorney Bobby Goldstein has turned this venerable old joint into his office, a building now strewn with the carcasses of behemoth oak desks, tables, and leather chairs. One…
In 31 years, Kay Baker rose from a job as a teenage sales clerk at a J.C. Penney store in Oklahoma City to become one of the retail giant’s top-ranking female executives. Her fall from Penney’s corporate headquarters in Plano would take only days. It was a swift end for…
