Bridesmaid’s Bash
So I’m sitting in the snug confines of the Houston Skyline Theatre along with the rest of the packed crowd, enjoying The Gypsy Theatre Company’s modestly entertaining production of Five Women Wearing the Same Dress — Alan Ball’s modestly entertaining comedy-drama about the goings-on of five bridesmaids who aren’t terribly…
Stage Notes
Alley-goers who expected to see Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed next week — it had been set for a May 20-27 run — can lower their expectations: the show is off. The reason, according to the Alley, is “scheduling conflicts.” But Susan Sontag doesn’t exactly see it that way. “I’m…
War Games
With their latest offering, the post-Cold War thriller Crimson Tide, the creative team of director Tony Scott and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have followed their signature recipe of “fast pace, fancy visuals” that worked so well in their previous efforts, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop 2. Unfortunately,…
First, There Was a Mountain
In The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, But Came Down a Mountain, the titular Englishman is Hugh Grant, and Grant makes of his role another genial, non-threatening romantic leading-man turn. But the movie is more than just a vehicle for Grant’s low-key charms. He may be the bankable star,…
A decade of struggles for sexual equality means that male prisoners today are having to answer to female jailers.
It’s lunchtime in Huntsville’s Goree prison unit, and the warden wants to see the cafeteria. Goree, which holds about 1,000 inmates, is a prison-world showcase: airy, renovated, with masses of windows and the best food in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Goree also went co-ed last year, making it…
No Way Home
Sheree Ford was on her way to pick up her three-year-old son one Sunday evening last July when she had an encounter with neighborhood-oriented policing, Texas City-style. Ford’s son was with his grandmother, who lives in South Acres, a predominantly African-American area of Texas City. It was important that Ford…
Looney and Liedtke For the Defense (Almost)
Saul C. Looney and J. Brent Liedtke run a two-man law practice out of a seventh-floor suite in an office building in far west Houston. Looney has been a lawyer for less than five years, having taken his degree from South Texas College of Law in 1990 after quitting a…
Letters
Upset Tummy Thank you for dining in my restaurant for lunch and dinner. [Cafe, “Plus ea Change,” by Alison Cook, April 20] I trust your stomach felt much better after eating fettuccine Alfredo than mine did after reading your vicious article. I wonder how a person such as yourself, whose…
Press Picks
thusday may 18 Olivia Allen-Arrington By day, she’s known as Mrs. Arrington, a fitting form of address for a third-grade teacher, but on the weekends the school marm and mother of three steps out, on-stage. In 1990, Allen-Arrington first tried selling five minutes of comedy to an audience. She did…
Taste of Texas
“This is the Rick’s of the Houston food world,” declared my friend as she scanned the wide-open limestone spaces of Rancho Tejas on a recent noon. Everywhere in this swank new Post Oak meat palace were guys, guys and more guys: clad in white dress shirts, yammering into cellular phones,…
Diner’s Notebook
New Yorkers (or at least New Yorkers of a certain class) are different from you and me. Not just because they’re shamelessly contentious, or because they bulldoze each other out of the way with Darwinian ferocity in pursuit of rush-hour taxicabs. They’re different because they drink fresh pomegranate-juice margaritas and…
What Is It Good For?
There are, to be fair, two kinds of nostalgia acts: those that suck really hard, and those that don’t. The former category includes a slew of one-hit wonders and even once legitimate bands who’ve been rescued from obscurity and banished to musical hell by a phone call from some desperate,…
Power Surge
Five years ago, Tesla — perhaps the only band extant named for a scientist, this one being Nikolai Tesla, the father of alternating current — became an unlikely multi-platinum success story when their version of the Five Man Electrical Band’s song “Signs” was a sudden, and surprise, hit single and…
Rotation
Bobby Byrd On the Move (I Can’t Get Enough) JB Horns I Like It Like That Instinct Last year, longtime James Brown sideman and co-composer Bobby Byrd released On the Move (I Can’t Get Enough) and the JB Horns came out with I Like It Like That. Though these are…
Rock and Roll Royalty
Gina Haley has a great idea: the fresh faced, delicately freckled singer/songwriter suggests we meet at the Hard Rock Cafe on Kirby Drive. It will make for a terrific photo opportunity, she says. The high concept hamburger joint has some memorabilia from her father, the man who first introduced mainstream…