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Best Concert

Neil Young

Heading in with a mix of hope and skepticism, we weren't exactly sure what to expect from Neil Young's high-dollar solo performance June 7 at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Would we get an hour and a half of classic Neil? Or an hour and a half of Greendale (which is what we got the last time Neil rolled through town in 2003)? Thankfully, it was the former, with plenty of classics interspersed with a smattering of new material. He even brought out Old Black, his trusty '53 Gibson Les Paul, for solo electric performances of "Ohio," "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down By The River," which rivaled anything the DSO has ever played in the building for sheer volume and power. It's one of those shows that will stay with the people who witnessed it for years to come, and if you weren't there, you should definitely still be kicking yourself.

Best Place for a Street Festival

Bishop Arts District

Thanks to an incredibly energetic bunch of neighborhood advocates, particularly Go Oak Cliff and Bike Friendly Oak Cliff, the Bishop Arts District has become the best place to go for a festival. Even better, they're the kind of creative, exciting, invigorating fests that make you proud to live in the 'hood. It seems like just about every month there's some kind of reason to dance in the streets, whether it's an art crawl, a homebrew festival, a Mardi Gras parade or the wildly successful Bastille Day party. Better yet, there's usually some kind of civics lesson, whether it's the Better Block Project showing how code changes could make livable, walkable urbanism possible or the emphasis on bicycling at the Tyler Street Block Party and Bike-In Movie. Thankfully, the political undertones don't get in the way of a good time.

READERS' PICK BEST THEATER COMPANY

Theatre Three

Andy+Hanson
In+Theatre+Three%27s+dueling+farces%2C+%3Ci%3EHouse%3C/i%3E+and+%3Ci%3EGarden%3C/i%3E%2C+Emily+Gray%2C+Kerry+Cole+%28center%29+and+J.+Brent+Alford+swap+beds+and+barbs.
Theatre Three

READERS' PICK BEST MEXICAN RESTAURANT

Mi Cocina

Mi Cocina

Best Media Harassment

Pete's Tweets @wfaaweather

WFAA chief meteorologist Pete Delkus is behind one of DFW's most popular twitter accounts, @wfaaweather.com, with more than 10,000 faithful followers. Sure, it's great to see accurate forecasts pop up in your twitter feed—it got really exciting during February's "Snowmageddon," especially—but mostly it's just satisfying to give the man a friendly ribbing whenever he misses the mark. He's a good sport about it, though he will lecture you on your potty mouth, so keep it clean while you're keeping him honest. Wait a second...is that rain we hear? Dammit Delkus!!!

Best Links For IM-ing Coworkers

Good At Internet

There's something really satisfying about sending a laugh through the office cubicle farm. And when a friend directed us toward the local blog Good At Internet, we knew we'd hit gold. The site features graphic and/or idea mash-ups...which means our descriptions won't do them a bit of justice. "Herve VillaChe" features the Fantasy Island star's face on Che's portrait. "Guinnessis" is a pint of executive-rock draught. "Weird Owl"? Guess. "Conway Twitter," "Ben Folds Laundry" and "Rhett Midler" are especially good. But "Danzig with the Stars"? Brilliant. And it's all totally appropriate fodder for sending to coworkers while they're on conference calls or sitting around a big meeting needing to keep their shit together. Why? Because the entire site was born of the 9-to-5. Graphic artists Aaron White and Jordan Roberts come up with the ideas while riffing off one another during smoke breaks at work (said breaks probably directly account for the entry featuring the pack of cigs with Bob Seger on the carton entitled "Segerettes").

Best Daily Newspaper Columnist

Katie Fairbank, "Problem Solver"

First, some definitions. Daily newspaper: We only have one in this burg. Newspaper columnist: A newspaper writer who manages to get out of his/her bathrobe at least once a year to do some useful reporting. Point is, we've already narrowed the field. But of what we have to work with, Katie Fairbank, author of The Dallas Morning News' "Problem Solver" column, is way at the top. Whether it's a guy who can't get Oncor to answer the phone during a power outage or somebody trying to get her whole family vaccinated for yellow fever, Fairbank always comes up with much more than a solution. Her writing is so clear and reporting so thorough that it's fun to read her column even if you never ever in your whole life plan to get vaccinated for yellow fever. Her items deal with problems on a broad spectrum of life and provide interesting little vignettes from the lives of real people...as opposed to the lives of columnists (you know who you are).

Best Theater Fundraiser

Broadway Our WayUptown Players

Dallas' top musical comedy stars come together every year for this gender-flipping revue that raises funds for Uptown Players. Men sing Broadway anthems written for female characters; women sing the men's songs. So you get a much darker jailhouse scene from Chicago and a sidesplitting version of "The Game" from Damn Yankees. Among the talented actors who perform in this annual extravaganza (scheduled next for May 2011) are B.J. Cleveland, Coy Covington, Sara Shelby-Martin, Denise Lee, Natalie King and Linda Leonard, all veteran pros on the DFW musical theater scene. What began as a one-night-only show many years ago is now a two-weekend event that plays to sold-out crowds and standing O's.

Best City-Backed Rave

Electric Daisy Carnival

Just one week after California-based party promotion company Insomniac made its Electric Daisy Carnival debut in Texas with a well-attended (some 11,000 purchased tickets), gorgeously presented (the art installations around the fest's Fair Park offering were enough to make even the drug-free trip out), city of Dallas-backed offering, all hell broke out at the fest's Southern California version, which has a 17-year history. More than 200 left the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum-hosted festival injured and more than 100 concertgoers were taken to the hospital. Thankfully, that wasn't the case in the Dallas edition, which instead felt more like a free-love hipster affair soundtracked to electronica than anything else. To their credit, the folks at Insomniac have already hired a consulting agency to make sure that instances like that one never happen again, so here's hoping the California crises don't make Dallas officials balk at the thought of bringing this party back to town. Because make no mistake, it was a party—one of the most memorable ones of the year. And when you can enjoy a rave like this—and without taking drugs, like we did—it must be a good time.

Glee Club

Glee Club

For 30 years, the hundreds of members of the Turtle Creek Chorale have sung for the love of singing. Its an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization. Its 200 or so singers, all men, pay dues to be part of the group whose mission is to entertain, educate, unite and uplift our audiences and members through music that is distinguished for its innovation, diversity and artistic excellence. Besides concerts, they donate a combined 100,000 hours to rehearsals and service projects and to performing more than 50 benefit shows each year. They are Dallas largest and loudest glee club, part of a long tradition of all-male singing clubs that harkens back to the 1700s, when men in Europes German-speaking countries gathered in small groups to sing short songs called glees and catches. The popularity of glee clubs spread to England and then to the Ivy League colleges in the United States in the 1800s. Thanks to the TV series Glee, interest in group and choral singing has had a sudden resurgence, which has boosted interest in and the audience for big choirs like the Turtle Creek Chorale.

This year the chorale will perform its 31st season of formal concerts at the Meyerson Symphony Center, beginning with A Night for Peace at 8 p.m. October 18. That event is part of the Chorales Partners in Harmony program started seven years ago to reach out to churches. There are now 44 religious institutions affiliated with the chorale. (The latest to join is Congregation Shearith Israel.) The first joint concert of the season will feature the Turtle Creek Chorale, the SMU Meadows Chorale, Dallas Wind Symphony, Lay Family Organ and more than 300 singers in a mass choir performing peace anthems by Bach, Mendelssohn and Moses Hogan.

Big shows are nothing new for the chorale, which performs a series of standing-room-only Christmas concerts at the Meyerson every year. They have played sold-out concerts in Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin and Prague, and made two appearances at Carnegie Hall. Other milestones in the chorales recent history are the Texas premier of Night Passage, a one-act opera based on the arrest of Oscar Wilde; and the premiere of the TCC-commissioned work, Our Better Angels, composed by Andrea Clearfield with text by Robert Espindola.

The chorale also achieved another first recently with its co-performance with the United States Army Chorus. This event was the first time a gay-centric chorus has appeared with a U.S. military music ensemble. The chorale has recorded 36 CDs and several DVDs. There are concert videos on YouTube and they have been the subject of a couple of documentary films, including the poignant KERA-produced film After Goodbye: An AIDS Story, chronicling the impact of HIV-AIDS on the friends, families and members of the chorale. To date, the group has lost more than 200 members to HIV-AIDS since the 1980s.

Though the chorale is styled as a gay-friendly organization, conductor and artistic director Dr. Jonathan Palant prefers not to refer to it as a gay mens chorus. Being gay is not a requirement for membership and there are straight men in the group, Palant says. The group operates with no political agenda, though of course we have beliefs for equality and basic civil and human rights, says the conductor.

However Palant defines it, the all-male chorale membership is full of couples, many of whom met at rehearsals, and there are not a few ex-partners who met in the chorale, broke up and still sing on the same stage together.

Whats so special about the chorale is that its so much more than a chorusits a family, says Palant, who has a doctorate in choral conducting from the University of Michigan. It has become a sanctuary for many members who have been ostracized from their families, or who live far away from them. We are like brothers. It is, in many ways, a fraternity.

Among the singers currently in the chorale, only a few have been there since the beginning. Palant says theres about a 50 percent turnover in membership every three or four years, a natural progression given the transient nature of todays job market. The group did hold a reunion in its 25th year, gathering all the past conductors and as many chorus members as they could round up.

If theres a challenge for the future of the chorale, it is finding new ways to outdo ourselves, Palant says. In Dallas, its a constant struggle to top our last performance. Financially, however, theyre in good shape, finishing last season with a six-figure surplus on a $1 million annual budget. One way theyre saving money is by using social mediaTwitter and Facebookto do free marketing. Palant estimates more than 70 percent of current ticket sales are spurred by e-mail blasts, Facebook and Twitter posts, and online mentions by sites such as Dallas-based Gay List Daily. Going into the new season, Palant frets a little about increasing competition for the arts dollar in the Dallas Arts District. Competition for those disposable consumer dollars is greater now than ever, he says, but we have an ever-growing arts culture in this city, so its a wonderful problem to have.

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