Although the decision to move to Dallas well-informed, I am still continually surprised by this place.
Exploring downtown Dallas in summer
The crowd at the March Gay Bingo / Resource Center Event at Station 4 in Dallas.
Best Week Ever posts are a summary of the past week
You’ll need plenty of water (and a shower) if you are outside for more than a few minutes. This translates shorter dog walks and a lot of laundry.
When we try to become more ambitious with the dog walks, we quickly regret it. Even our walks from Oak Lawn to downtown Dallas get dicey after 11 a.m.
We started the evening with the mean girls at Alexandre’s cocktail lounge.
The mean girls are actually retirement-age men who park themselves at the bar in the afternoon and insult each other into the evening.
Statler: “Did Jack get a haircut?”
Waldorf: “No, it’s just falling out.”
Statler: “Can you hold your head up? You look like a turtle!”
Statler: “You guys are being nice for once. I’m suspicious. Is it my shirt?”
Waldorf: “No, that shirt is nice. It actually fits you for once.”
Well, first I saw the bicycle cops near the Katy Trail.
Then I saw the tired-looking newswoman and the photographer.
A reporter at the scene of a suicide near Katy Trail.
I followed their gaze to the middle of the park, where a bunch of detectives and officers stood around a tarp that covered the body.
I turn 30 in a few weeks.
Making a big fuss about birthdays as an adult feels gauche – I am not one of those exhausting people who celebrates a “birthday month,” but this birthday feels more significant because my 20’s are over.
There is no anxiety about exiting my 20’s – I have very little in common with people who are in their early 20’s and most of my role models did their best work well after 30…which is a lengthy way of saying that I am going to properly celebrate this birthday without regrets.
Notifications lit up my cellphone like a Christmas tree this morning – a gunman killed at least 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, and everyone was either sharing the news story or asking whether we lost anyone.
After confirming that our friends in Orlando were alive, we monitored the climbing death toll on our phones while walking the dogs through downtown Dallas. There were more than a dozen bicycle cops on the Katy Trail, and a few nervous security guards at Klyde Warren Park.
Later we brunched in the gayborhood while discussing escape plans for each gay club – would we climb on the roof from S4’s second floor balcony? Is there a back exit door at Havana’s? Would gay guys run to their cars and get guns? (This is Texas, after all.)
The morbid emergency planning was broken by a swarm of people who flooded the Oak Lawn bars. There were cocktails, uncomfortable laughs, and armed security guards. We were uneasy, but still out and supporting each other.
Increased police presence in Oak Lawn after the Pulse nightclub shootings.
The memorial in front of the Centrum building.
Back in law school, this blog had a week-in-review series of posts called “Best Week Ever.”
These posts were weekly summaries for readers that did not keep with the blog on a daily basis.
Best Week Ever posts were also great place to stick small updates that did not necessarily merit a standalone post. At the risk of losing all interesting updates to Facebook, I have brought back the weekly summaries. This is the first one.
So what happened last week?
Ingrid in a flower-filled forest clearing.
We visited the Great Trinity Forest as part of an advertising campaign for Stanley. This “urban park” boasts 6,000 acres of neglected flood lands located near downtown Dallas.
I am not suggesting that we almost died on our trip to the Great Trinity Forest, but let’s just say that it was not totally safe.
It was pretty, at first.
…and what a Memorial Day Weekend we had…
We started the week with a drag pageant, and we ended the week with one too!
Yesterday, the Rose Room hosted the Miss Dallas FFI drag pageant and it was… colorful.
A contestant for Miss Dallas FFI at Large.
A very yellow look for the Dallas FFI “creative” drag competition.
I am a huge history geek, which is why history was one of my totally practical undergraduate majors.
When I first moved to Miami for high school, I enrolled in a History of South Florida night course at Miami-Dade College. The class allowed me to orient myself in my new city through the stories behind its neighborhoods. (It also turned me into an obnoxious trivia-box for friends and family.)
Michael and I spent the evening learning more about Dallas history by watching documentaries from the Building Community Workshop – a local nonprofit “community design center.”
BC has a “Neighborhood Stories” project, which consists of well-produced short films about Dallas neighborhoods.
Here are the three documentaries that we watched:
The first documentary covers two areas of South Dallas called Bon Ton and Ideal. These adjacent neighborhoods were built on undesirable tracts of land that Dallas reserved for black residents.
The conditions in Bon Ton were shocking bad – we had to keep reminding ourselves that the pictures were from the 1950’s, and not the 1850’s.
Flooding in Dallas’s Bon Ton neighborhood.
The Bon Ton neighborhood was in the flood plain of the Trinity River, and many of the houses lacked plumbing and electricity. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bon Ton had the nickname “Bomb Town” because white residents literally blew up the houses of black people who moved too far outside of the neighborhood.
A map of the Bombings which led to naming the neighborhood “Bomb Town.”
New highways left only a single point of entry into the Bon Ton neighborhood and effectively walled it off from the rest of the city.
In the 1970’s, Bon Ton and Ideal became drug-ravaged and largely vacant. The documentary highlights the work of local residents who formed community groups to drive the drug dealers out, and then lobbied the city to rebuild the neighborhood after devastating floods.
I have attended many gay bar employee drag shows, but this was by far the most entertaining. The event was hosted by Anesta Roches and one of our favorite bartender as “Peaches.”
There were inventive costumes, high-glamour, a bearded queen, and a lot of surprisingly good live singing by the employees who normally host the Round-Up’s karaoke nights.
All of the contestants at the 2016 Round-up Saloon employee drag pageant.
As a charity pageant, the expectations were very low – most employee pageants are half-assed comedy events featuring a lot of burly guys in Goodwill dresses. That is why we were pleasantly surprised by the effort that everyone put into their looks and acts.
It is around 8 a.m. and I am walking the dogs near the Highland Park Whole Foods.
I come across an older woman in a track suit.
Blanche Devereaux: “Are those your dogs?”
Me (Taking off my headphones): “Pardon me?”
Blanche : “The dogs. Are they yours?”
Me: “Um, yes…”
Blanche: “Well they are just lovely! Have a good morning walk.”
Blanche then gets into a waiting town car.
Later that day, I tell one of my neighbors about the encounter, and she is horrified.
Jill: “That’s terrible!”
Me: “Why? She was perfectly nice, I just thought it was an odd question…”
Jill: “You know that’s a microaggression, right? She thought you were a dog walker!”
Me: “That’s hilarious, and strangely appropriate for the neighborhood.”
I came across an editorial about first world problems a strange neighborhood zoning fight involving a mansion-turned-wedding-venue and its neighbors.
Here’s the gist:
Around the same time that Highland Park was getting started in the early 1900’s, some of Dallas’s richest residents built houses on Swiss Avenue.
Swiss Avenue had unique zoning rules, such as each house had to cost at least $10,000 and had to be built for the intended families (no spec homes.) Swiss Avenue was also the first paved street in the city of Dallas and offered private trolley service to the residents.
By the 1970’s, the original tenants were gone and the neighborhood was in decline. One of the organizations that fought to keep the mansions from being subdivided was the Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation, which bought a mansion at 5500 Swiss, known as the “Aldredge House.”
To keep the house running, the Foundation turned their mansion into a wedding venue. The neighborhood then rebounded, the mansions were restored, and the new residents complained about the raucous parties at the Aldredge House.
Then a shitstorm ensued.
The article about the Aldredge House made us curious, so we decided to take very long dog walk to Swiss Avenue and see what it was about.
A large house on Swiss Avenue.
The wide tree-lined Swiss Avenue.
There are certain stereotypes associated with Texas – and particularly Dallas – such as Instagram-famous cheerleaders, oil rigs, and cowboys everywhere.
I try really hard to dispel these stereotypes and convince my friends that Dallas is a modern, progressive, and huge city (instead of a country backwater).
…and then I spend my weekend cowboy boot shopping for a rodeo.
We went to the Texas Gay Rodeo Association‘s Rodeo & Music Festival last Saturday. It was held at Texas Horse Park, which I’ve never been to before.
It was my first time at the rodeo, which reminded me of that epic Pepsi scene from Mommie Dearest:
The rodeo and boot-shopping experience was a tad less dramatic than that, but still fun.
Some fancy baby blue cowboy boots at the Mesquite Boot Barn store.
Some pretty colorful green neon cowboy boots at Mesquite’s Boot Barn.
Neon cowboy boots at Boot Barn in Mesquite, Texas.
Opening ceremonies at the 2016 Dallas Gay Rodeo
Things started at the Fort Worth Stockyards because Michael had never been before (despite living in DFW for 7 years now!)
The Stockyards are always priceless people-watching, and certainly didn’t disappoint this time.
The most bored and miserable looking longhorn cow that I have seen, with the Texas historical museum in the back.
Artery cloggers at the Stockyards – who said we had to wait for the State Fair?
An ominous warning that this may be the last longhorn you take a photo with.
We spent our time chowing down on Gardein and watching TV.
This is what 29 looks like.
One of the best things about the new apartment is that we have HBO Go, which means that I finally got an opportunity to watch the Beyonce On The Run Tour special.
The timing for my Beyonce binge was perfect because she’s apparently going to release a new video album/TV special/whatever-the-hell soon:
I am so excited.
This must be how diehard Apple fans feel when a new product is about to be launched.
However, the brooding preview video looks like the silly clips that preceded Rihanna’s ANTI album.
She’s this nice slightly older woman, and she is usually in the middle of an oddball conversation when I walk into the store.
We had a bit of an awkward conversation the other day –
Barista: “So is that your partner outside?”
Me: “Yep!”
Barista: “Do you live together?”
Me: “Not yet, but he’s moving in next week.”
Barista: “You guys sure move fast. Is it because you can get gay married now?”
Me: “I think it has more to do with leases being up.”
We ran into some interesting graffiti while hiking through the Trinity River Park.
The Trinity River wraps around downtown Dallas and is more like a glorified creek that covers a massive flood plain anytime it rains.
There are also plans to develop the flood plain into one of the world’s largest parks, but right now most parts are just unsafe urban wild land.
The portion of the park closest to downtown is safer because it is not wooded, but rather a massive open field with the river/creek running through it. That is where we walked the dogs recently and came across some pretty interesting street art.
Here are the pics!
Street art of air balloons under the Trinity River bridge
Graffiti under the Trinity River Bridge
Graffiti that borrows characters from Super Mario
We recently explored the Dallas Design District and ran across a massive Playboy Bunny sign.
This Richard Phillips creation was funded by the magazine and originally installed in Marfa, Texas. The town and Departmenrt of Transportation viewed it as an advertisement and ordered it hauled away.
The 40-foot statue reappeared in 2014 on Riverfront Boulevard in the Design District. Apparently Dallas is less opposed to advertisements than our artsy West Texas counterparts.