Remember how awesome the Candy Land board game was? My siblings and I loved it so much, we played it even after the box fell apart and most of the cards were lost. My goal in life was to be Queen Frostine when I grew up. (NOT that goody-goody Princess…
I’m not much of a guitar player. Worse, I’m an embarrassingly bad air-guitar player…mostly because, despite my lack of actual guitar skills, I still try to feign expertise at actual playing when I get around to faking it. It’s bad: I twiddle my fingertips as I slide my hand up…
Accountants and civil servants seem to be unlikely action stars. But everyone has a hot button, and in the play Unnecessary Farce, an accountant goes to heroic lengths to catch and confront her arch-nemesis: an embezzling mayor. The comedic cast converges in two adjoining hotel rooms and enlists two rookie…
Oregon’s Deschutes Brewery joins up with Victory Tavern, 3030 Olive St., Thursday for a four-course beer tasting dinner, with a special menu prepared by Victory Tavern chef Jim Oetting. Dishes include chicken skewers paired with an India pale ale, buffalo brochette paired with an amber ale and, oddly enough, a…
After struggling through a horrible time in his life, playwright Mark-Brian Sonna wrote a dark comedy based on his horrifying experience. Persistence in Memory features a “Man” dealing with the cleaning lady from hell, while simultaneously trying to purge some haunting memories. For the first time, Sonna is playing the…
When I see movie trailers, I usually have one of the following reactions: -“Never, no matter how desperate for entertainment I am, will I see that fucking movie.” -“Pretty sure I can skip that one.” -“Yeah, I’ll see that.” -“I wish I was about to see that instead of the…
Long before he was famous for being a freaky, drunk-driving filmmaker obsessed with dead languages and gore, Mel Gibson was just another small-time Australian actor. He had enough rugged good looks and rugged acting chops to be cast as the title character in 1979’s Mad Max. Unfortunately, when released in…
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has been around in some form since 1884. This was back when this country only had 38 states and everyone loved circus clowns. These days, it seems like there’s a clown hater around every corner, and for the life of me I can’t…
You could use some baseball. At least that’s what the Rangers’ ad campaign keeps telling you. So do yourself a favor and head to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington to catch a glimpse of a young team trying to stay afloat in the AL West race. With a lineup powered by…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City—if “pleasure” is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman franchise, Batman…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA—not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So I…
For decades, Larry McMurtry has kept the same daily ritual. Most mornings, he feeds sheet after sheet of paper into his Hermes 3000 typewriter. He’ll write for hours. But his routine was interrupted by a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in the early ’90s that left him shattered and…
Dallas will always be saddled with the reputation of being the city where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. By the same token, director Oliver Stone will always be saddled with the reputation for being an eccentric, conspiracy theory obsessed, confrontational whack-job. But there’s the rub, because those qualities are exactly…
So, we’re five years into this dash for oil we call the Iraq War, and it seems at least a portion of the public finally seems to be catching up with the facts–there were no WMDs, no credible link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda has ever been established,…
Rapper POS, of Minneapolis’ Doomtree collective, has one of the most interesting bios in hip-hop. He started in the punk scene as a guitarist and singer, initially hating but eventually accepting hip-hop as an art form. He still straddles the line between the two worlds, using electric guitars and hard-hitting…
Group hugs have always left me smushed and gasping for breath–part of being short, I suppose. I never felt like everyone got their fare share of hug; there was always that one guy on the back end who just sort of leaned onto the group without really getting a good…
Here’s the thing they won’t say at the Mayborn Literary Conference: Print journalism is dead, or dying, or most charitably, the forum for an incredibly shrinking job market. Nor will they say that of the dozens of starry-eyed UNT grad students in the audience, only a small handful will ever…
The 11th annual Blazing Saddles Duathlon is almost upon us. For most of us the words “Blazing Saddles” conjure up images of a group of cowboys eating buckets of baked beans and cracking off farts around a campfire. So what in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin’ on…
It’s surprising that Christianity didn’t embrace the idea of evolution decades ago. Though they claim God is immutable, the church has had to constantly revamp its beliefs–evolve, that is–to remain in mainstream society. No, church, women are not the witch-vessels of Satan. No, the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth…
We live in a society obsessed with biography; a culture that expects an A&E special detailing the lives led by our politicians, movie stars and musicians. Biographies are breathlessly laid out before Barbara Walters on “news” specials and shown in marathon blocks on a channel devoted to the genre. Even…
One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish. You’re a smart kid, bet you can figure out what rhymes there. Now try another. Seuss. Noise. Truce. Voice. Do what now? It surely can’t be that easy. “Seuss,” as in the good Dr., means to be paired with truce, no? No,…
There are some movie match-ups that transcend the screen and enter our everlasting consciousness. Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. In the 2003 flick Cheaper by the Dozen, Steve Martin and Ashton Kutcher appear together for the first time. And while…
