Anna and Elsa have had millions of parents the world over in their death grips for well over a year now, and there’s little end in sight. Perhaps you’ll recall the Great Merch Freeze-Out of 2014, when parents forked over hundreds of dollars to asshole eBayers for under-manufactured Anna dolls?…

Here in the South, odds are you’ll end up at a crawfish boil at some point: It’s a rite of spring, an excuse to drink a lot of beer and a place where eating to excess is encouraged. In other words, Google a short tutorial on how to eat the…

Maximizing nights out is the best. Once kids are corralled, the house is panic-cleaned for the sitter’s arrival and grown-ups are scrubbed of lingering baby snot and dog fur, getting out of the house becomes a race to cram in all of the fun times. Usually, there’s time for dinner…

March is not going out like a lamb this year, not if the ladies of La Divina Productions have anything to do with it. They’re planning on wrapping the month up with a big bang during the Spring Fling Burlesque Revue, at 9 p.m. Friday. Their fevered tribute to the…

Adulthood is largely overrated, with a few exceptions. Those make up a short list, to be sure, but high up is the ability to eat dessert whenever you damn will please. You don’t have to finish your broccoli or behave yourself at the dinner table. You can act like a…

Sometimes, in certain parts of Dallas that have been largely spared bulldozer-happy redevelopment, you can almost imagine what this city might have been like at the beginning of the 20th century. Squint hard enough at Fair Park, and in sections of Deep Ellum and Oak Cliff, and there are enough…

Puccini’s La Bohème was, in its day, the opera equivalent of a cinematic tearjerker à la Steel Magnolias or A Walk to Remember. It wasn’t especially highbrow, but it attracted crowds due to its simple, sweet, hankie-wringing plot — and still remains one of the most frequently performed and most…

There are people in this world who are diehard runners. Those people don’t make excuses like “It’s too cold outside to run” or “The wind makes my hair frizzy” or “My kid is too big to be strapped in a stroller while I run for two hours.” They get out…

“The Red Shoes” is the singularly most messed-up fairy tale in Hans Christian Andersen’s oeuvre; reading it as a 5-year-old is a pretty horrifying experience that will not only stunt any inclination toward shoe hoarding, but also burn into your head a long-lasting image of a pair of bright red…

Loris Gréaud’s new exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary (161 Glass St.) will largely be a surprise. There are whispers that The Unplayed Notes Museum will include images of clouds, blown glass made of sand from hourglasses and a film with a sex scene captured with thermal photography, but the rest…

It’s the time of year when we curl up under a blanket, get out our flashlights, and tell terrifying tales of drunken revelers puking on our front lawns and of grown women squatting to urinate in a Chipotle parking lot. That’s right — the annual frightfest known as St. Patrick’s…

Mining 1960s television for camp is in no way a difficult task. Think of the possibilities: a drag version of Bewitched, with the most splendid version of Endora ever; a Green Acres reboot where you take a fashionable, urban gay couple and move ’em out to the sticks; a Brady…

It’s springtime in Dallas, a time of year heralded by the omnipresent specter of Pete Delkus, a rash of patio brunching, and the annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre. Out of the Loop always kicks off the seasonal theater season with a bang, featuring a juried…

The last time the British imported a satirical examination of the workplace, we were all smitten by Pam and Jim and the clueless Michael Scott. Bull, despite also being a British import that strips away the layers of corporate culture, will not impart any such warm and fuzzies. It’s cold,…

This Saturday you’ll see green everywhere: in your pint of warm beer, on your bar tab, being flung from parade floats in the form of plastic beads, and on the faces of sorority girls who’ve been drinking since 8 a.m. It’s once again time for the Dallas St. Patrick’s Parade…

Comparisons with Office Space are inevitable, but Buzzard lacks the romanticism of Mike Judge’s comedy classic about sticking it to the man. Things Buzzard also lacks: a moral center, warm fuzzies, redemption. What it does have in spades is a lead character so punk rock, so amoral, so emotionally bereft…

For kids, spring break is a time of possibility: a week respite from the drudgery of homework and bedtime routines. It’s a rallying cry for those whose spirits have been dampened by the cold days of February — a harbinger of fun that doesn’t concern itself with layers of puffy,…

I had my first “aha” moment in math class when I made a realization about the relationship between parts and wholes. Suddenly the visual and the mathematical merged for me, and it changed my perspective on my homework. I was no longer laboring through addition and multiplication of fractions —…

The point in our lives when we get the most exposure to great works of literature is the point in our lives when we least give a shit. In the high school and early college years, lit is something that stands between you and your social life — you get…

What keeps Dallas alive and vital is not the giant retail centers, the towering glass office-buildings perched on freeway frontage, or the teeming roadways that connect them. Those things create revenue, and revenue pays for more concrete and glass and roadway. But the true lifeblood of the city — the…

A classic and searing Nina Simone song from 1964 summed up the civil rights struggles in the Deep South pretty succinctly: “Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee’s made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn.” Local playwright Jonathan Norton riffs on Simone’s indictment of the state in…

References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot is a play that’s every bit as surreal as its title would have you believe: Melting clocks are in short supply, but the talking moon and scandalous relationship between a kitty and a coyote more than make up for that. They also make…