Night & Day
Thursday October 8 Anyone who ever fantasized as a youngster about the person they would become and who their soul mate would be can identify with Julie Padilla’s one-woman comedy, You Don’t Look Mexican. Padilla plays Maria, a young Mexican-American woman who once dreamed of marrying a tall, handsome Mexican…
Hot Plate
The waiter at Cazadores (12323 Kingsride, 465-9377) was no help at all. “What do you recommend?” I asked. “Senor,” he said, “I recommend everything.” Not much use when the menu you’re holding is voluminous. Or appears to be. When examined more closely, much of it consisted of a set of…
Static
Big mouth strikes again… It was too good to be true. A phone call conceding defeat; a broken, bitter DJ out of a job once again — and before he could even mutter a single insult in Houston. Without question, the voice on my answering machine was that of John…
Dish
As Dacapo’s Turns In the beginning (in 1994) there was Dacapo’s Cafe in the Heights. It was, and is, a cozy bakery-cum-deli, the brainchild of four partners: twins Lisa and Teresa Biggerstaff, and Leticia Guzman and Kirk Graham. Within a year, a customer who fell in love with Lisa Biggerstaff’s…
Clubland
To hear some of the more underground night owls tell it, you’d think Club Some — Emo’s infamous after-hours alter ego — has sold out. Not quite, says co-owner Neil Heller. “In essence, the crowd hasn’t changed at all,” says Heller, who founded the club seven years ago. “It’s always…
PatiencePays
In a city where several storied blues guitarists still play gigs regularly on local stages, eastside resident Sherman Robertson remains relatively obscure. And, in a sense, he has no one but himself to blame. Since the early 1980s, he has only occasionally performed on local stages, mainly at special events…
Teddy Remembered
Houston lost one of its most affable and musical native sons when bluesman Teddy “Cry Cry” Reynolds died of complications of cancer and other health problems in the early morning hours of October 1. Born in the Third Ward in 1931, Reynolds began his career as house pianist at the…
Four-Letter Friends
“Because it’s memorable,” says singer/guitarist Tim Prudhomme when questioned about why anyone would name his band after a loathsome expletive designed to make any good mother’s skin crawl. Go ahead: Say the San Francisco (by way of New York City) band’s name aloud in public and see where it gets…
Man or Monster?
Whoever would’ve thought Barbra Streisand was such a Rob Zombie fan? When Babs wanted those pesky paparazzi to keep away from her recent wedding, her tactic was to spray them with aural artillery fire courtesy of Rob’s band, White Zombie. Luckily for her, a bevy of SoCal metal heads didn’t…
Rotation
Lyle Lovett Step Inside This House Curb/MCA Alternate title: Step Inside Lyle’s Aesthetic. All things considered, the Houston-area resident’s two-CD salute to his Texas singer/songwriter influences is a welcoming invitation into the very frame and foundation of his artistic structure. Lovett has consistently spoken in interviews of those who inspired…
Bright Blues
The Ensemble Theatre has gotten its ’98’99 season off to a very steamy start with Blues for an Alabama Sky. Even with its rather inexplicable title, Pearl Cleage’s script about five folks living in Harlem during the early 1930s is smart, sexy and — best of all — thought-provoking. The…
Winning Combinations
Fusion continues to gather steam, so much of it that I can see the day when the passion for seeing compatibilities where, very often, none exist, will blow up in the faces of its most enthusiastic practitioners. Fusion can work — we can all cite examples — but all too…
The Overlooked Abstractionist
Artist Lynn Randolph makes it her business to be furious, always, about something, and the night of Dorothy Hood’s opening at the Lawndale Art & Performance Center was no exception. “I’m furious,” she announced the minute I walked in. With what you might call learned caution, I asked why. “Well,”…
Airhead Journalism Alert!
With its premiere issue, the glossy giveaway City Moves — Houston’s Y2K Magazine has already secured a prominent place in the annals of the town’s zany media ventures. Not only does the monthly publication style itself a “cybermag” without listing a web page, its versatile associate publisher and editor-in-chief Shel…
Seeking the Cure
This Saturday and Sunday, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston holds three screenings of a film that’s a mystery, a detective story and a documentary — as well as a tragedy and a triumph of the spirit. Aptly, Rachel’s Daughters debuts not far from the Texas Medical Center and its…
And the Winner Is
In today’s world of Rambo litigation, in which lawyers fight to the death over every pretrial motion and discovery request, it’s not often when a relatively minor traffic accident results in a lightning-quick six-figure settlement. But the company that runs Metro’s privatized bus routes moved with alarming alacrity recently to…
Affairs of the Tart
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
Letters
Resignation Call As a family law practitioner in the family courts, I am nauseated at the gross and unprofessional conduct of Judge Galik [“No, No, Annette!,” by Tim Fleck, October 1]. I call for her immediate resignation. She is totally unfit to be a family court judge. A family court…
Breaking the Blue Code of Silence
The chauffeur-driven black Ford Expedition glides north on the Hardy Toll Road, against the grain of Monday-morning rush-hour traffic. Inside, the police chief of the fourth-largest city in the United States is explaining why his mother never baked him a birthday cake. In a squeaky falsetto, Clarence Bradford imitates his…
News of the Weird
Lead Stories *And Perrier and bowls of red M&Ms: When authorities raided a cockfighting operation near Gadsden, Alabama, in July, they found not only a restaurant and 250-seat theater for patrons but two air-conditioned trailers in which the roosters hung out before their matches; one trailer offered piped-in country music…
Making It Right
If this were Hollywood, the story line would be clear — an unassuming, straight-arrow black man gets wrongly arrested and accused of theft on the campus of a wealthy private college; he beats the rap, sues to clear his name and is vindicated. But Jessie Phillips, a 44-year-old county worker,…
Living Room Atrocities
Okay, truth time: If the front page of your morning newspaper offers you a choice between a new piece of Monica Lewinsky dirt and a massacre in Serbia, which do you read first? And honestly: Do you ever get around to reading that Serbian story? Will you study the photos…
Death Be Not Pricey
One fine day, when the sun was surely breaking through the clouds, he came down from the heavens to save us — one good man unto a land of death and despair. The first thing he did was to go to Quik Pics and order calling cards. They gave him…
Touchdowns of the Heart
Is your husband coming home late at night with the scent of White Diamonds on his collar? Are you in love with your sister’s husband? Should you marry your longtime boyfriend even if he won’t get a job? For the answers to these and other dilemmas of the heart, turn…
Crushing the Opposition
For more than four years, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar has been waiting for her day in court, where she hopes to prove that her employer, Baylor College of Medicine, conspired with a private biotechnology company to steal the commercial rights to a contraceptive technique patented by the scientist in 1991. During…