Paul Fielding remembers the moment his antenna rose on this racetrack business. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the end of a long holiday weekend. The Dallas city councilman was at home in North Dallas, dredging leaves out of his swimming pool. He had taken his cordless phone outside and,...
All movie fans have a filmmaker they latch onto, take to heart, and enthusiastically root for. Their triumphs make you euphoric and their failures make you surly and sad, and once you're plugged into the thrill of following their careers, the emergence of each new work is simultaneously thrilling and...
It was supposed to be a night of good cheer and celebration. Some 50 people associated with the USA Film Festival--board members, staffers, trustees, and assorted supporters and hangers-on--had gathered December 15 at the Highland Park home of trustee Dan Owen for a combination holiday party and board meeting. The...
Every October, Trammell Crow, the legendary Dallas real estate developer, hosts a camp-out for rich and powerful men at his East Texas farm. Crow, now 80, invites about 150 businessmen and government leaders. His guests have included former president Gerald Ford, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Dallas Cowboys...
Restaurateurs have one goal. Not to cook the finest food, but to make a living. To do that, they have to make you want to eat at their place. And not just once--simply because it serves the trendiest cuisine or is owned by the sexiest athletes. The trick is, they...
Inside its modest confines, Direct Hit Records resembles most any independent record store: CDs, new and used, line one wall; and used LPs and seven-inch singles sit in a bin smack in the middle of the store, facing another wall of new records. Near the store's entrance, a rack displays...
Presumed ignorant Excitement is building at Buzz as the O.J. Simpson trial approaches. Forget the 12 jurors in L.A.; we'll have our eye on the Arlington 10. In one of the more creative Simpson-trial media excesses to date, the Arlington edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has selected a group...
Lots of people donate their bodies to science. But most of them wait until after they're dead. Not Charlie Procter. For five months earlier this year, the 45-year-old petroleum engineer allowed nurses to probe and prick him dozens of times while drilling for blood; underwent several bone-density sonagram tests forcing...
thursday december 8 Big Fat Christmas Goose: Fort Worth's Hip Pocket Theatre serves up one of its reliable grab bags of dance, movement, music, and lighting effects, an original production which manages to yoke the Christmas tradition to American culture and still leave all that stifling mega-bucks commercialism behind. They've...
At about 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Edie Brickell--dressed in a brown leather jacket, a striped T-shirt, black jeans, and old K-Swiss tennis shoes, looking less like the famous wife of a pop-music icon and more like the good ol' Edie of Prophet Bars and 500 Cafes past--loitered outside Trees, basking in...
Louise Elam sat on the floor next to a copy machine last Thursday morning, trying her best to fish a jammed piece of paper out of a document feeder with a pair of scissors. Elam, her terra cotta-colored pantsuit rumpled after only two hours at work, jabbed at the copier...
Caveman rock Seeing Dinosaur Jr. live can hardly be described as an exciting experience: after all, what's so interesting about seeing a guy who moves and looks like Snuffleupagus sling a guitar around? Yet for Generation Alternative Nation, hearing is believing, as it convulses in feverish fits of violent moshing...
thursday november 24 Turkey Trot, Save the Turkey, and Baby Doll's Thanksgiving: The organizers of the 1994 YMCA Turkey Trot advertise it as "Dallas' Way To Begin Thanksgiving," which implies that most of us are in better physical shape than we really are. For 27 years now the Turkey Trot,...
Sheesh. Sest lah vye, Mabel. I'll say one thing for the results of Tuesday's plebiscite: it is sure as hell going to be interesting for the next couple of years. What an utterly fabulous cast of characters. Strom Thurmond, 92, chairman of Armed Services. Jesse Helms, chair of Foreign Relations...
By 1989, Earline Jackson recalls, the convoys were rumbling down old highway 75, trailing behind them that awful smell. They'd line up at the gate to Skyline Landfill--dozens of trucks from God knows where--dumping ton after ton of trash in the tiny burg of Ferris. Residents of the little town...
The San Francisco publishers of STEAM magazine are in an uproar over a waggish letter from Fort Worth police Chief Thomas Windham. The national gay and bisexual-oriented publication, which reaches about 45,000 readers each month, prints a directory of the best places around the country for public sex. A copy...
Although playwright David Mamet swears he wrote Oleanna before the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, you can't help but feel the same bitter resentments and frustrated rage drifting out of Mamet's two-character drama that turned Hill's testimony into a kind of national catharsis. Mamet is aiming to achieve that same kind...
Delvin Gray watches as two stray mutts--one black, one gray--circle a trash can in a small South Dallas park beside a pond. Gray's six-month-old son, Julius, sleeps soundly in his lap. It is dusk now, and so quiet in the park, so peaceful, you can almost hear the baby's breath...
Sitting at his modest desk at City Hall last Wednesday, Tracy Pounders couldn't help but smile as he spoke. It wasn't the pictures of his six-year-old daughter and two-month-old son that were making him feel warm all over. It wasn't the compact disc of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that was filling...
Joe Butcher, the lead singer and guitar player for UFOFU, leans on the microphone and asks the Club Clearview audience if they would prefer a Gordon Lightfoot or a Buzzcocks cover song. It is close to the end of the night's set, and almost everyone is grinning with something that...
