5 Free & Cheap Events This Week

As important as it is to support the local arts scene, it’s also important that you have a damn good time while doing it. If you’re still working out whether you’re more into experimental theater or visual art, it can be difficult to drop a bunch of cash on something…

Two One-Act Plays Wrestle With Race Relations

The Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts is presenting two one-act plays with social commentary on the very timely topic of race relations. Director Rockne Ragsdale wrote the first play, Guilty or Not Here I Come, in 1979 when he was just 22-years-old. This is the first time it…

Chef Anthony Van Camp Brings Back a Sweet Guilty Pleasure on TV

When Ser Steak and Spirits’ executive chef was updating the restaurant’s dessert menu, he thought kicking it old school was the best bet. For whatever reason, the Millionaire Pie disappeared from the menu, but after much popular demand, the chef felt it was time to bring it back. “Why come…

Favio Moreno Puts His Artistic Faith in Color

Favio Moreno is constantly losing his religion. It’s always falling out of his wallet. Well, the catholic prayer cards his mother is always giving him. “My wallet is full of these little cards of religious iconography and credit cards,” he says. “Although I don’t subscribe to religion, I still feel…

5 Art Exhibitions to See This Weekend

Phantom Eye There is a phenomenon known as “phantom limb,” which describes the experience of some amputees who continue to sense a missing arm or leg. Scientifically, it’s related to muscle memory, but it’s a poignant illustration of how our minds sometimes cope with loss by imagining the continued existence…

In Romance Gemma Bovery, the Lead Aches for Tragedy

A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature. Or films: Here’s a French film thick…

People 2015: SMU’s Kate Canales Aims to Engineer Creativity

In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz.  Kate Canales is a problem solver. The current problem she’s working out? Building a master’s in design and innovation, the first of its kind, at…

People 2015: vickie washington: Still a Sensation After All These Years

In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz. She spells her names with lowercase letters, but actor-director-teacher vickie washington has enjoyed a capital career in theater. Born in Dallas, raised in Hamilton Park…

9 Podcasts to Listen to Right Now

Podcasts are having a moment. Thanks in no small part to Serial, which of course exists in no small part thanks to This American Life, which reignited oral storytelling in a big way. There is no end to the kinds of podcasts popping up all over the Internet these days. Comedians…

But We’d Already Given Up on the Arts District, Right?

Last week news broke that the Dallas Symphony Foundation sold land at the corner of Pearl Street and Woodall Rodgers Freeway — a half-acre plot of bright green grass underneath a firetruck red Mark di Suvero sculpture. It’s one of the shockingly few examples of public art in the purported…

The Nance Swishes Back to Burlesque and a Dark Moment in Gay History

Without actor B.J. Cleveland at the ready, Uptown Players could not have produced Douglas Carter Beane’s marvelous dark comedy The Nan ce. Cleveland is one of Dallas theater’s most versatile veterans, the sort of all-around, locally revered professional who bounces into leading roles in comedies, musicals, children’s shows and, too…

5 Free & Cheap Culture Events This Week

Now that it’s summer, it’s hard to want to do anything other than the daily grind, followed by quick dipping your sorrows in a pool after downing a bunch of beer. Even though the temperatures are higher, it’s still important that you get your culture on this summer, even if…

Reality Stars, Exes To Compete In Celebrity Bartender Throwdown

Local celebrities are fun. And bartending competitions are super fun because it involves alcohol and tossing of cups and yelling “Get me a double vodka soda” over a loud karaoke rendition of “Uptown Funk You Up.” But the official Celebrity Bartender Throwdown at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Snuffer’s in Addison…