How much is the good name of WFAA-TV Channel 8 worth? Apparently, not even six figures. The going price appears to be $30,000, or at least that’s what environmental activist Jim Schermbeck was told when he complained to Channel 8 management about an advertisement that the station is airing in…
I really did think my interest in Michael Irvin was over. I’d attended his trial day after day with three dozen other reporters from around the country. I’d heard more than I ever wanted to know about the drugs and the girls and the vibrating sex toys. I’d marveled, along…
Ditch the cummerbunds Good timing, Dallas Observer! I just had received an invitation to this year’s Black Tie event–complete with a set of postcards for me to mail to others in order to increase ticket sales. After reading your article [“Black Tie winners,” July 25], I decided to decline on…
At a certain point in the evening, the DJ at the Legendary Crystal Chandelier likes to play some of those mesmerizing catastrophe videos. Images of ships capsizing in high seas, extreme skiers cartwheeling down sheer cliffs, speedboat crashes, bungee cord failures, funny-car wrecks, and other snippets of mayhem flash up…
Sheldon Pearl is edgy. As the new school year draws near, the East Dallas teen-ager can’t seem to shake the anxiety that knots his neck muscles and clutches at his stomach. He tried to keep calm during the summer, spending several weeks, as he has in the past, looking after…
When last we checked in with Mica England and Ceslie Armstrong, founders of defunct Vary magazine [“Vary messy business,” August 1], both women were strenuously defending their reputations against a Dallas County Court-issued judgment ordering them to pay nearly $40,000 to a graphic designer who claimed he was never paid…
Virtually every popular source of personal financial advice repeats the retirement mantra of the 1990s–sock money away in some form of tax-sheltered plan, like a 401(k). Nobody talks about what happens if the boss decides to sink the retirement fund into a speculative piece of flood-plain land, and then sues…
Comeback kid It’s got to be the most amazing public-relations coup since Mike Tyson’s comeback. Dallas-based country singer Ty Herndon is surfing a tide of popularity with the release of his second album, Living in a Moment, and his career couldn’t look brighter. Hard to believe a short year ago…
Black Tie dilettanti Brava! Ann Zimmerman. Thanks for putting into print what I, as well as many others, have been saying for years [“Black tie winners,” July 25]. As a gay man, I am not surprised–and no less outraged–at how the Black Tie Dinner operates. Elitism knows no sexual orientation…
For more than an hour now, the nice Jewish doctor from New Jersey has stood before a group of 17 people in the sunlit Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in Carrollton, explaining why he–a urologist whose sole claim to fame is a cure for female incontinence–should be the man to replace…
A gray granite marker put up by the Texas Historical Society stands in a weed-choked field a dozen miles west of Tyler. It is the only reminder of what happened here. If Ruth Smith had her way, the world would know about the betrayal and murder of the legendary Cherokee…
For nearly a year, Dallas graphic designer Steve Cox tried to collect what he was owed for helping produce Vary, a fat and glossy–though very short-lived–magazine featuring high-fashion photo spreads, interviews with supermodels and famous chefs, and slick writing on raves, body piercing, and all manner of pop culture trends…
X’s and Big O’s With a nod to Spy, Buzz offers the world’s first separated at birth advertisement. On the left, an ad from Texas Monthly for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Grapefest, a wine festival so overwhelmingly wholesome it includes “activities for the whole family.” On the right, we have…
An incentive clause? Regarding Laura Miller’s exceptional piece [“The dope bowl,” July 18]: Once a “player” signs a contract involving millions of dollars in exchange for jockstrap-clad performances on a playing field, the “player” immediately becomes a role model–like it or not. It is extremely doubtful that professional sports contracts…
For all those years of battle, one war story stands out. The Scrabble board was tight, so tight. But after 10 minutes of tournament play, Michael Chitwood had his opponent right where he wanted her: stuck and grasping for a place to go. No matter that the gray-haired woman across…
Sorry excuse for “sorry” District Judge Manny Alvarez told The Dallas Morning News that Michael Irvin’s apology “seemed sincere.” The News itself referred to the now-famous apology as “profuse.” Is Buzz the only one around here who spent enough hard time in the fourth grade to know a crossed-fingers-behind-the-back “I’m…
Don Maison was worried. As president of AIDS Services of Dallas, the only local agency providing housing to indigent persons suffering from the HIV virus, Maison this spring found himself facing two problems. The waiting list for his agency’s handsomely renovated garden apartments in Oak Cliff was growing. And the…
Touchy, touchy Regarding Mary Brown Malouf’s reluctantly favorable review of Vitto’s restaurant in Oak Cliff [“Cliff hanger,” July 11]: Having been born and raised in Oak Cliff, I was amused to see that the North Dallas paranoia, fear, and blatant prejudice against Oak Cliff is still alive and sick. I…
For months, Lincoln High School’s librarian, Helen “Bobbie” Welsh, had struggled to operate a four-person library with the help of a single assistant. The stress had begun to take its toll:She was suffering from debilitating back and neck spasms and bouts of anxiety. But on February 19, 1996, things got…
Gee, could it have been…the lesbian sex show? Or was it all those previous sex parties? The cocaine-laced marijuana these folks liked to smoke? Or the strip search of Rachelle Smith–the one where Michael Irvin ordered someone to explore her orifices for microphones right before he told her what to…
As much as state District Judge Manny Alvarez loved the press coverage he got from presiding over the year’s hottest celeb trial, he didn’t much like press people. Apparently, if the camera isn’t trained on the judge’s indisputably cute face, the media just isn’t doing much of anything that’s important…
It’s almost noon on a hot Saturday morning in July, and the professional photographer who volunteered to teach Artist Thornton’s photography workshop at the South Dallas Cultural Center is more than an hour late. A roomful of about 20 eager youngsters, many clutching rolls of photographic negatives, stare expectantly at…
