Letters
Ritalin Roundtable I found your article on Ritalin [“Ritalin on Trial,” by Michael Berryhill, January 4] to be very interesting. However, I am very disappointed that the article seemed to only cover those cases where Ritalin was improperly prescribed, or the problem was misdiagnosed. I hate to think that by…
Press Picks
thursday january 25 Playing the Game: How to Win at Office Politics Seminars are getting more daring. This workshop, from Robert F. Sarmiento, Ph.D., is about successful professional game playing. Most people, Sarmiento says, know that office politics have more to do with success than performance, “but often we refuse…
Ghetto Do-Gooders
Around the Fifth Ward they call it the circle. It’s not a gang or a posse. It’s not some hoodoo religion, empowerment philosophy or activist movement. The circle is love — tough love, at times. It’s a refuge from the realities of the street, and yet it’s all those realities…
Static
As some doors close, others open… Evidently, The Edge is calling it quits at the end of the month, following its younger acoustic cousin, The Edge Unplugged, up to nightclub heaven’s pearly gates. Reason? Money, for the most part. It appears the people at Walter’s Ice House made Edge owner…
Sound Check
For decades, America has been described as a melting pot; lately, some dissenters have begun describing it as more of a tossed salad. Ammunition for both sides of that argument can be found in our roots-music heritage. Sounds from around the world have found a home in the U.S., and…
Old-Fashioned Lust Songs
Time for all the hipsters to come clean. You’re driving down the interstate, channel surfing the radio with one hand, balancing a beverage with the other, steering with your knees and searching for that one tune that will propel you to the next gas station. Nothing seems right. Then out…
Harmonica Half-Pint
Think of Brody Buster as the Macaulay Culkin of the blues. He’s young and talented; he’s an almost overnight sensation; he’s aw-shucks cute; he’s got an impressive work ethic and a mature outlook; and he has just as much fun as Culkin hamming it up with Jay Leno on the…
Family Affairs
They’re within four blocks of each other in an area of town gorged with Vietnamese eateries; they’re both family-run operations. Their menus are similar, each boasting more than 150 offerings. Even the cooking methods don’t vary dramatically between the two restaurants. If I were presented with a plate of cha…
An Artist’s Life, and Love
When La Boheme premiered 100 years ago, it was set during the reign of King Louis Philippe, who ruled France from 1830 to 1848. Though time has passed in the real world, in the world of La Boheme it has tended to stay the mid-1800s. For its new production, though,…
Autentica!
A well-tanned, mustachioed star of the Mexican screen, Andres Garcia routinely thrills viewers across the Americas with his cinematic exploits. But even Garcia, who plies his trade in Spanish-language action films, may be startled by the scope of his latest success: his personal testimony is credited with turning a nasty-looking…
Well Constructed
Sometimes, one element in a production is so far superior to all others that it throws everything out of whack. The playwright might outdistance the company; the company might leave the playwright in the theatrical dust. The director might be more perceptive than the crew; an actor might be so…
Hotel Hell
Sometimes, patience reaps rich rewards. Take the January 18 meeting to dissect the two proposals to build a 1,000-room hotel next to the George R. Brown Convention Center. You might wonder what would compensate for having to watch a herd of lawyers lead City Council on a seven-hour forced march…
Autopsy
On August 4, 1986, an ambulance was dispatched to 9109 Laura Koppe in northeast Houston, where emergency medical workers found an unconscious 17-month-old named Joshua Kibble. The toddler’s 14-year-old mother, Claudette Kibble, explained that he was an epileptic who had suffered a seizure while she was bathing him. Seventeen hours…
Death and Doubts
Given the long and not always glorious tradition of death-row melodramas, not to mention the unabashed and frequently expressed liberalism of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, you may walk into Dead Man Walking with the cocksure assurance of someone who knows exactly what to expect. If you do so, it…
Say It with Flowers
Christian Slater and Mary Stuart Masterson are fine actors — in Masterson’s case, sometimes an inspired one — who tend to do their best work in serious dramas and dark comedies. For all their talent and versatility, however, neither springs to mind immediately as an old-fashioned romantic movie lead. Indeed,…
Bitter Harvest
His brothers and sisters weren’t too pleased with the way Alton Arnic looked as he lay in his casket before his December 1994 funeral. But there wasn’t much the mortician could have done about it. The 55-year-old Arnic had been riding a Metro bus to his job at Goodwill Industries…
The Insider
Devolution There were plenty of heads shaking after the funeral and memorial services for Barbara Jordan, and most of them were set in motion by the grandstanding of Sheila Jackson Lee, the current holder of Jordan’s old congressional seat. Not only did Lee seize the occasion of Jordan’s death to…
Forecast: Raining Stadiums
Poor Bud Adams. What a terrible sense of timing. If he’d only kept quiet until after Bob Lanier’s re-election was safely assured, instead of bad-mouthing the mayor and storming off to Nashville in a huff. Then he, too, might be in line for a brand-new stadium somewhere in Houston, with…