The Year in Film
This past year will not be remembered as a vintage one for movies — or even, judging from recent trade paper reports, for the movie industry — but if it was not the best of times, it was also by no means the worst of times. Indeed, if you looked…
Camp Vamp
Mel Brooks has said that he sees his new Dracula: Dead and Loving It as a companion piece to his Young Frankenstein. That’s giving himself a lot to live up to; his satire of Son of Frankenstein, as spoof or simply as comedy, is one of the funniest movies ever…
After him, the deluge
Here it comes: two years of non-stop positioning and posturing by all the contenders and pretenders to the throne.And in politics, as they say, two years is an eternity. Positioned for the TV crews in front of a fireplace mantle decked with holly boughs and pine cones, Lee P. Brown…
The Insider
The Unwelcome Christmas Guest Plaintiff’s lawyer Richard Mithoff annually throws one of the most lavish Christmas parties in Houston, taking up most of a floor at the posh Ritz-Carlton. He sometimes gets uninvited guests at the loosely regulated, boisterous affair, but this year he was given a real surprise. As…
Lil’ Stevie’s Year in Review
Perhaps 1995 was not your year. Maybe you missed out on the run-up to the 5,000 Dow, or possibly the Oilers’ impending departure has left your life without shape or purpose. You may even have suffered the misfortune of having your job “restructured” right out of existence, or perhaps it…
The Passions of Privatization
The battle over who gets to collect Harris County’s delinquent taxes continues to escalate like a Balkan skirmish. Ever since Commissioners Court decided to privatize the lucrative collections business last May, County Attorney Mike Driscoll has been doing battle with the commissioners and the firm they selected for the job,…
Stinkin’ Diet
At Baylor College of Medicine, in the behavioral medicine research center, Dr. John Foreyt was holding a cookie. It was a dark chocolate chocolate-chip cookie, and he fingered it lovingly and gazed at it with longing. He was about to shove it into his mouth, when, with the discipline of…
Letters
Also Known as Tim Fleck… For several years now, I have enjoyed reading your newspaper and have found no real reason to doubt its accuracy — until today. The report by staff writer Tom Fleck [The Insider, December 14] that my name, in bold letters, is David Mosier is most…
Press Picks
thursday december 28 Holiday Sampler Tour Thursday is always a free day at the Museum of Fine Arts, and this evening there’s a special tour to boot. Education director Beth B. Schneider will escort economically minded art fans around. Her talk and tour will cover the highlights of the permanent…
Home with the Blues
On June 19, there was a fish fry at the Savoy Ice House on Dowling Street in the Third Ward. The occasion, of course, was Juneteenth, and the band playing on the sidewalk was making a joyful noise. Joe Hughes, standing in with some old friends, growled and shouted his…
Molly’s Resolution
To stay at the top of her game, Molly Elswick has had to play it pretty tough. Slipping into her Miss Molly persona on-stage night after night, she’s talked the talk and walked the walk while carefully forging a respectable career on the blues-rock circuit. But now, poised on the…
Guit-in’ Down
Junior Brown’s trademark is his purity, a hard-line, country way of doing things that, curious as it sounds, has earned the 43-year-old Ernest Tubb disciple the status of one of Texas’ more endearing crossover phenomenons. “It takes a long time to figure out what your style is,” Brown says. “I’ve…
Going for the Gold
Every evening, when the late shift shows up, the Medical Center begins to look like an outpost of Manila. For reasons that, to me at least, are not perfectly clear, the night crew that keeps the Center going, from doctors down to the lowest support personnel, all seem to have…
Making a Killing
After two-year-old Renee Goode died while attending a slumber party at her father’s Brazoria County home in January 1994, investigators were at a loss for answers. The toddler hadn’t been ill prior to her death, so state law required that an autopsy be conducted to determine how she had died…