Gardening isn’t just for old, rich women and their retired husbands anymore. The do-it-yourself trend embraces home gardens with lively gurus in the media who demonstrate how to turn a brownish-green canvas of a yard into something special. And more of you have yards these days, since mortgage loans with…
Thursday, June 3 When we first heard of Classical Acting Company’s choice for their season finale, we got the creeps, chills and what Mom would call the heebie-jeebies. Then we learned that Georges Feydeau’s A Flea In Her Ear is not actually about an aurally tormenting insect. The play is…
Anthony Michael Hall talks of The Struggle, the decade-long odyssey during which he auditioned for everything and got only the occasional something. Some of it was primo stuff, a small role in a good adaptation of a great play (Six Degrees of Separation) or the chance to play Bill Gates…
6/5 Of all the rapid-fire, frantic gum-chewing, prayer-thought-pleas we’ve had during airplane takeoffs, we’ve never once wondered, “What forces of physics and other sciences allow this giant hunk of metal and many, many hunks of humans and all their bulging suitcases to take flight?” Or even, “What inspired the Wright…
6/4 We don’t know a whole lot about Scottish traditions around here. We know they wear skirts, which are called kilts but look very much like man dresses regardless of the name. We also know they play the bagpipes. Other than that, everything we’ve learned came from movies. We never…
6/5 So many milestones in life are celebrated early on: 16 years marks increased freedom, 18 heralds an ascension into adulthood and 21 promises the legal right to make a fool of oneself in public. After that, it’s a slippery slide into ageism, crises and, most deplorably, routines. Too young…
6/9 You’ve watched way too much Friends if you can name which stage performance freaks the pants off Chandler. (Zero points if you answered the naked Kathleen Turner in The Graduate.) The correct answer is Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance, since, as Chandler frighteningly explains, it seems that “his…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess, playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie, a collection of 11 shorts made over the past two decades, to be a movie at all. It began…
I once heard a theory that there are really only two dozen or so stock narratives, all contained in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For example: Adventurers/thieves find treasure, then kill one another while each tries to grab the gelt for himself (“The Pardoner’s Tale” and, more recently, The Treasure of the…
Barnyard Betsy Odom makes life on the farm wholly surreal and extra-terrestrial. Odom uses everyday materials–duct, masking and reflective tape, papier maché, plastic, Styrofoam, latex wall paint and Astroturf–to sculpt a landscape more inflected by the wonderland of Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice than Rudy’s Farm of sausage fame. Strolling a…
Pump Boys and Dinettes Check your cynicism at the door, settle in at one of the comfy tables and order a cold drink to enjoy this musical that’s as light as a butter-flake biscuit. The waitressing Cupp sisters (Jenny Thurman, Arianna Movassagh) and their friends (Willy Welch, Gary Floyd, John…
The old adage about strangers with candy holds true for metal-faced freaks with movie passes. Taking treats from either will end in disaster. And who said horror films can’t offer life lessons? While we can’t even begin to describe the résumé of Italian horror great Dario Argento, we’ll just say…
Thursday, May 27 We see the homeless every day, but we don’t really see them. We avoid eye contact, walking to lunch downtown, trying to find our cars in Deep Ellum, pumping our tanks full with $24 of gas. We play a game of keep away. It’s time to take…
Texas Stadium will be the place to be on Saturday afternoon, and there won’t be a football team in sight. Still, the Redneck Cowboys vs. the Parrot Heads game should be quite entertaining to watch before Jimmy Buffett, George Strait and Alan Jackson share a triple bill that evening. Some…
5/28 A little can do a lot. For example, our office is pooling cash to bribe a co-worker to perm his hair. And, in the same vein–only nicer, more mature and useful–there’s 500 Inc., a nonprofit organization founded in 1965 when 500 individuals pledged $10 each to raise money for…
5/29 We don’t see too many black cowboys in our travels. Granted, we also don’t run into Latino, Asian or even Caucasian cowboys very often, but we’re pretty sure that the one thing rarer than an African-American cowboy is an African-American cowboy in a rodeo. Yes, they’re out there and…
5/29 Some people are ugly. There’s no way around it. Big noses, too-pale complexions, chins that bottom out at the sternum–God was cruel to these people. Beauty will elude them no matter their pursuit. Then there are the average-looking ones. These people, with the help of makeup, a good haircut…
5/30 On one end of the country-music spectrum, there’s the glossy sheen of Nashville’s Music Row, the scene that gave Garth Brooks a headset and allowed Faith Hill to become a Stepford wife. On the other end, there’s the dusty, rough-around-the-edges grit of the Texas country movement. These guys have…
5/25 Why is it that the most traumatic tales make the best stories, especially the ones with a sacrificial ending? And why do they perpetually involve an exotic but tormented virgin (insert misunderstood maiden for slight variation) and a soldier (insert young and dashing man of nobility with a heart…
5/20 My experience with art has been limited. It’s not that I don’t appreciate fine work. It’s more that I don’t get around to appreciating fine work. Believe me, I have the ability to appreciate in me. (It stays in me most of the time, but what can you do?)…
5/21 The naysayers have turned into yay!-sayers; the cynics, into True Believers. Here we are, barely into May, and already the experts who wrote off Your Texas Rangers have penciled them into the playoffs. The Anaheim Angels might have something to say about it yet, but the Rangers may devil…
