Observer's Unofficial Visitors Guide to Dallas Stuff or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Super Bowl

Be Our Guests

We're Getting the Hell Out Anyway

On behalf of the Host Committee For Pimping Out the Super Bowl, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to Dallas. It seems as though we have been waiting forever for you (and your debit cards) to get here. That's right, we expect to make a killing. Why else do you think we agreed to let 200,000 strangers storm the city, eat our food, drink our wine and shop our malls if we didn't expect to make a fast buck in the bargain? By our best estimates, you will be pumping an additional half a billion into the local economy. And that's just from lap dances alone.

Dallas is a city chock-full of many intriguing and wonderful sites. Unfortunately most of them are in Fort Worth. Our city is known by many names, some of which you might hear during your stay: Big D, Three Forks, City of Hate, the Metroplex, Jonestown, Unfair Park and The City That Debbie Did.

If you have just negotiated your way through the concrete jungle we affectionately call DFW International Airport and are taking a cab into the city proper, don't fret about the fare-gouging from your driver. He'll be the last taxi you'll be able to hail while you're here.

So relax: Your safety is our first concern. The Dallas City Council has gone to great lengths to cleanse the city streets of rapists, robbers, murderers, batterers, drug dealers, prostitutes, panhandlers and perpetual pot smokers—and those are just ex-Dallas Cowboys. That's not to say that some con artist might not try to pull a fast one to get into your pockets. Where did you say you were staying again? The Dallas Convention Center Hotel?

Right about now you may be asking yourself the same question that every Dallasite asks daily. Why exactly am I here? Sure, it's Super Bowl Weekend, but where is the raw desert beauty, the mountains, the beaches? Oh, we just used that as wallpaper on our website.

There's no reason for you to get all caught up in our origin myth—that Dallas was settled by misguided pioneers too proud to ask for directions to Austin—you're only in town for a few days. Truth is, there's a very reasonable explanation for why you're here: Jerry Jones willed it so.

The Dallas Cowboys owner, general manager and persona non greata built a monument to his money, and the result is the billion dollar state-of-the-art Cowboys Stadium—which somebody has to pay for. Jones' marketing genius lies in his ability to recoup his investment; and he sure can't do it from the way his football team played this year. So beware, you Cheeseheads and Terrible Towelers, he is turning to you and superfans just like you. Not only will he sell out his 100,000-plus seat stadium, he's setting up video screens outside the stadium so you can watch the game on TV just like a billion other viewers worldwide. Only you're paying 200 bucks a pop for the privilege of just standing there.

But don't think about the thousands you've spent on tickets and parking or the several hundred more you'll pay downing cheap beer and eating artery-clogging nachos. Indulge the fantasy. This is America. You have the inalienable right to file for personal bankruptcy once every eight years, just like every other citizen—anchor births included.

Within these pages, you will gain access to the secrets of the city, the Dallas you won't read about in official visitor's guides (like the Observer's "Big Game in Big D" supplement in this issue). No, this is not the Dallas you imagined from years of watching Larry Hagman doing his best Jerry Jones impersonation on the '80s prime-time series Dallas; we like to think of it as the Dallas you'd see if they made a reality TV show about the city on Bravo: Keeping Up With the Kardashians Who Sleep with Dallas Cowboys.

So enjoy our fair-weather city, where the blondes are made from bottles and the boobs are made from Dr. Ronald Friedman, if you can afford him. We know the bars will be packed, the hotels overbooked, the restaurants reserved beyond capacity. But here, take the keys to our city anyway—just lock up before you leave. As for us on the Host Committee, we just rented you our two-bedroom condo in Uptown for 1,500 bucks a night, and we're going to Disney World.

Mark Donald

Chairman, Host Committee