What do you call someone who throws darts? A darter? Our dictionary says that darters are long-necked birds like the
water turkey. But you can bet that the dart-throwers who’ll assemble for the Dallas Open Dart Classic at the Royal
Coach Inn June 17-19 are no turkeys. They like to think of themselves as artists – hence, “dartists.” For
reflections on the art of darts, see David Dillon’s story on p. 39; for information on the tournament, see p. 41.
Two broadway sensations get premiere performances in Dallas this month. Equus, the shattering psychological
drama, will be presented at the Dallas Theater Center starting May 31. The witty satirical musical Candide
gets its first production in Dallas by the Dallas Repertory Theatre, starting June 16. For ticket information
see p. 34.
The lighter side of the Dallas Symphony is its summer pops series that takes place in a big tent in the NorthPark
parking lot, starting June 8. “Summertop” this year features evenings in Paris, nights on the Danube, and visits by
Mel Torme, Ethel Merman, Burt Ba-charach and Sammy Davis, Jr. For information see p. 46.
Don’t miss the deadline for D Magazine’s “Celebrate Your City” photo contest – 5 p.m., Friday, June 17.
Contest rules are on page 76 of our May issue, or you can pick up information at either of the Cooter’s Village
Camera Shops in Highland Park Village or Old Town. We’ll publish the winning photographs in the August 1977 issue.
Old King Tut made New President Carter merry recently. Unfortunately, the show of Tut’s treasures is passing us by
(the closest it comes to Dallas-Fort Worth is New Orleans, where you can see it next fall). But the Dallas Museum is
trying to fill the gap with a special exhibition, The Face of Egypt, which opens June 14 at the Museum, and
features tours, lec-i tures, and slide shows designed to introduce Egyptian art to Dallasites.
So the kids are out of school and into your hair? You can still give yourself a break while they’re learning
something this summer, if you take advantage of the programs for children offered by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts,
the YWCA, the Junior Players Guild, the Fort Worth Symphony, and the Dallas Health and Science Museum. For details,
see “Kidstuff” on p. 50.
Books
To Live and Die in Dixie
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at
all.” That’s the exhortation to Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Quentin’s response
comes many pages of tortured narrative later:
“You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”
Despite Quentin’s advice, that compulsion to tell about the South continues. That we are flooded with books and
articles and TV shows about the South surely has something to do with Jimmy Carter, and possibly with the hyping of
the “Sunbelt” (a word that’s beginning to grate on me almost as badly as “Metro-plex”). The South, God help us, has
become a media scene.
why eise would publishers bother with books as bad as The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians
(Doubleday, $10)? David Leon Chandler’s book reads like a Ph. D. thesis without – despite its title – a thesis.
For though it purports to be “a revisionist history.” there is little more to its history than rehash, and though it
purports to demonstrate a “natural” superiority, it documents only cunning manipulation of circumstances. Chandler
resuscitates William S. White’s old glorifications of the Senate “Club,” grows fairly rhapsodic about Huey Long and
John Stennis, then tries to retreat from chauvinism with an unsympathetic portrait of Jim Eastland that never quite
explains how a man described as “narrow-minded, arbitrary, arrogant, bigoted, and vindictive” can also be “a master
of backroom politics, winning over his members by persuasion and bargain.”
Jimmy Carter is only an epilogue to Chandler’s book, which was written in 1975, but was obviously hustled out on the
heels of Carter’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. How else to explain the sloppy editing, not only in the loose and
rambling structure but in the inattention to English usage – “phenomenon” is used as a plural noun – and in
jaw-dropping generalizations like “the North has behaved villainously toward . . . the white South”? Nothing in it
is as concise, as cogent, and as provocative on the subject it purports to treat as this passage from Richard
Reeves’ Convention (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10):
At the Alabama delegation party on Sunday night, Ray Jenkins, the editorial page editor of the Alabama Journal,
a persistent and perceptive Wallace critic, said: ” . . . The only real difference between Wallace and Carter is
fifteen years. They both started out in politics as opportunists with slight liberal inclinations. The only way for
Wallace to get elected governor in 1962 was as a segregationist, but that made it impossible for him to command real
nationwide support. By the time Carter become governor of Georgia in 1970, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Rights Act had made it possible to get elected in the South without mortgaging your future to the rednecks. The
person Jimmy Carter has to thank is not George Wallace – it’s Lyndon Johnson.”
Reeves is a hotshot political reporter, and he and a hungry team of young reporters have put together a profile of
the 1976 Democratic National Convention that should be devoured by everyone interested in political and media
gossip. Convention is not about the South, though it is in part about Southerners – Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Miss
Lillian, Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan, a memorable North Carolina delegate named Mazie Woodruff, and (for the
especial delectation of Dallas readers) Bob Strauss – in bemused encounter with New York City. But Convention, by
detailing the events in decadent old New York that led to the election of the first President ever from the Deep
South reverberates ironically with this passage from one of the most powerful of recent novels about the South:
Virginia is neither North nor South but both and neither. … An island between . . . the defunct befouled and
collapsing North and the corrupt thriving and Jesus-hollering South. The Northerner is at heart a pornographer. He
is an abstract mind with a genital attached. His soul is at Harvard, a large abstract locked-in sterile university
whose motto is truth but which has not discovered an important truth in a hundred years. His body lives on
Forty-Second Street. . . . The Southerner started out a skeptical Jeffersonian and became a crooked Christian …
the New Southerner . . . is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week. He calls on Jesus and
steals, he’s in business, he’s in politics.
Thus spake Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, titular anti-hero of Walker Percy’s Lancelot (Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
$8.95). Though I think Percy’s latest novel a failure – Lancelot’s savage indignation soon becomes tiresome – it is
the failure of a first-rate writer. Percy believes firmly in the Apocalypse, and his protagonists have been
slouching toward it for four novels as the humor of his works grows blacker and bitterer.
Lancelot assaults the New South’s greed and its willingness to be exploited, symbolizing its prostitution by
the Lamar family’s ancestral home, Belle Isle, surrounded by oil refineries, overrun by tourists, and invaded by a
Hollywood crew, one of whom has cuckolded Lancelot. Lancelot’s sexual jealousy is not really motive enough for his
actions, an immolation of the corrupted house and its supposed corruptors, but that’s in part because Lancelot is
obsessed by the notion of sin – or rather by the absence of sin in a world dominated, as he sees it, by
pornographers and crooked Christians. He taunts the priest who visits him in the asylum, “In times when nobody is
interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? . . . A new proof of
God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!”
The obsession with sin and with purification by fire suggests many sources, but since Percy is a Southerner, scion
of a patrician Mississippi family, Faulkner – the Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August –
looms among his precursors. Actually, Percy has succeeded where many of his Southern contemporaries have failed,
in throwing off the heavy weight of Faulknerian rhetoric. (Oh, he occasionally lapses into it: in the passage above,
“the defunct befouled and collapsing North” has the old Faulknerian cadence, but for the most part he steers clear.)
Lancelot reminds me less of Faulkner than of D.H. Lawrence; Lancelot’s Apocalypse and his vision of a New
Jerusalem of righteous, pure, Spartan colonists in the Shenandoah valley is straight from D.H. Lawrence.
As for Faulkner, the posthumous publication industry keeps grinding on. Joseph Blotner, who gave us a whopping (and
virtually unreadable) two-volume “official” biography several years ago, has recently edited Selected Letters of
William Faulkner (Random House, $15). When Faulkner spoke for himself, as in the classroom sessions at the
University of Virginia, he usually spoke a lot of nonsense, reinforcing D.H. Lawrence’s dictum, “Don’t trust the
novelist; trust his tale” – in other words, the reader is usually a better judge of what the book’s about than the
fellow who wrote it. But Faulkner’s letters are refreshingly free of commentary on his own – or anybody else’s –
works. In fact, he usually claims that he doesn’t have copies of his books, or has forgotten them. These letters are
mostly about money – or the lack of it. The attentive reader, however, can track the author through the several
stages of his progress toward success and celebrity.
Why does one read other people’s letters, anyway? In the case of a writer like Faulkner, one might read them for
clues about how genius germinates – even in a very informally-educated resident of a small and barely literate
Mississippi town. Well, you won’t find out, because even Faulkner didn’t know – as he admits in a letter to a friend
written in 1953:
Now I realize what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone
literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I dont know where it came from. I dont know why God or
gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false mod-esty: it is simply
amazement. I wonder if you have ever had that thought about the work and the country man whom you know as Bill
Faulkner – what little connection there seems to be between them. . .
Yet it is in letters like this one that one senses the essential Faulkner, the well of consciousness into which the
experiences of an entire county sank and were reproduced as art. Meanwhile in other letters one glimpses a struggle
for survival as dogged as Lena Grove’s; a contempt for his own parasitic, ne’er-do-well, shabby genteel family as
bitter as Jason Compson’s; a sensibility as wounded by outrageous fortune as Quentin Compson’s when he cries out
about the South at the end of Absalom, Absalom!: “I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”
The question of the mystery of genius also arises in the case of Disfarmer (Addison House, $22.50), an
absolutely fascinating book of photographs, made by the only portrait photographer in the hamlet of Heber Springs.
Arkansas, in the Thirties and Forties. As Julia Scully’s eloquent text explains, Disfarmer was a solitary eccentric
whose real name was Meyer, though he claimed that he had been plopped down in the Meyer household by a tornado when
he was an infant. He cut himself off from kinfolks, taught himself to be a photographer, and set up shop in Heber
Springs. His portraits of small town people are shattering and it’s tempting to try to dismiss them with
comparisons: Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Diane Arbus’ photographs of grotesques are the closest analogies.
But Disfarmer’s camera simply recorded what people in Heber Springs looked like: freckles, warts, scars, scabs,
beauty, deformity, tenderness, diffidence, camaraderie, exuberance, stoicism, all the effects of hard labor, lost
hopes, innocence, experience, pride, sorrow, and love. The book tells a great deal about the South too. “They
endured,” Faulkner wrote about Dilsey and her kind. So did Heber Springs.
– Charles Matthews
Bestsellers
The following information on what’s hot in Dallas bookshops is compiled with the aid of The Bookseller, Willow Creek
Shopping Center, 9811 N Central Expwy; Brentano’s, 451 NorthPark Center; Cokes-bury, 1910 Main; Taylor’s Books.
Preston Center East, and the Dallas Public Library.
Blood and Money. Thomas Thompson (Doubleday, $10,95). Superbly told story of the John Hill murder case, which
still has the Houston gossip lines buzzing.
Passages. Gail Sheehy (Dutton, $10,95). Non-fiction study of the crisis periods adults typically pass
through.
Your Erroneous Zones. Wayne W. Dyer (Funk & Wagnalls, $6.95). A New York psychologist’s report on “unhealthy
behavior patterns.”
Falconer, John Cheever (Random House. $7 95). The new novel by the author of The Wapshot Chronicle.
(Reviewed in May issue.)
Oliver’s Story, Erich Segal (Harper & Row, $7.95). Oliver without Jenny (sob!).
The Rich Are Different, Susan Howatch (Simon & Schuster. $11. 50). Romantic-historical stuff by the author of
Penmarric.
Illusions, Richard Bach (Delacorte. $6.95). Mystical maunderings by the creator of the most famous seagull in
liturature.
Majesty, Robert Lacey (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.50). Biography of Queen Elizabeth II.
A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion (Simon & Schuster. $8 95) Novel about a woman caught up in emotional
conflicts amid the social revolution of a Central American country. (Reviewed in May issue.)
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough (Harper & Row. $10. 95). Family saga set in Australia.
The Dallas Junior League Cookbook (Taylor.$8 95). A perennial potboiler.
Theater
Is Preston Jones Being Killed with Kindness?
If anything is clear at this early point in Preston Jones’ career as a dramatist, it is that he is neither a
new O’Neill nor in any way the immediate salvation of the American theater, but simply a gifted regional playwright
who has had a few works produced on Broadway. The temptation to grant him eminence has been strong – certainly we
have no overabundance of great playwrights – but it can hardly be good, either for Jones or for the local or
national theater. The critics, columnists, and interviewers who continue to come in legions to praise Jones may very
well bury him instead, overwhelm him, blind both him and his colleagues to the true strengths and weaknesses of his
work and lead them both to careless or premature ventures. That this may already be happening was suggested by the
Dallas Theater Center’s most recent staging of one of his scripts; the much-heralded premiere of his new comedy
Santa Fe Sunshine gave us something that was neither entirely new nor much of a comedy.
This two-act portrait of a Santa Fe artists’ colony is not exactly a new play; Jones has kept drafts of the play in
his desk for a few years, working on it irregularly between other engagements, and this may have contributed to its
loose, haphazard structure. At any rate, there is hardly any sense of orderly movement to the play’s action; it
begins with sculptor Gino Bruno completing a new piece and ends just after a party celebrating its unveiling;
between those two points about all that occurs is the random introduction of a few other characters. The only scene
in which anything substantial happens is the party itself, in which, as the participants gradually arrive, Jones
bounces them raucously off one another, building toward the uncovering of the sculpture.
Jones has always had a tendency, it appears, to conceive his characters first and then to cast about for a suitable
form in which to display them. Sometimes, as in this case, the mechanics of dramatic construction elude him. What is
surprising about Santa Fe Sunshine, though, is the underlying tone of the play. In his previous works, Jones
has viewed his characters with a generous compassion even when they have been foolish or pitiful; he has understood
their more or less desperate struggles and more or less futile longings too well to condemn them outright; and he
has been enough of a craftsman in the presentation of them to persuade us to share his attitude. But here both the
craftsmanship and the compassion seem to have failed. Jones does not, evidently, have a facility for comic
invention: in this play he resorts to the rather shallow trick of setting up each new character as a target and
trying to get laughs by having the others insult him.
Jones compounds the problem with his conclusion: Bruno’s sculpture proves to be a great failure (though the thing is
by no means monstrously bad – only silly), and Jones asks first, in all seriousness, that we be genuinely moved by
Bruno’s disappointment and then, contrarily, that we be merely amused when he capitalizes on a sudden chance to sell
it in a tourist trap. Jones masquerades Bruno’s hollow, cynical opportunism, not very effectively, as good plain
fun. But it’s hardly the stuff of which comedy is made.
The DTC company strove valiantly enough to sustain a comic spirit, but director John Logan seemed to be no more
anxious to avoid inconsistencies in the staging than was Jones in the writing. Randy Moore, as a painter who
extravagantly hates practically everything, managed to be continually delightful by remaining within the confines of
a comic type and never taking the role as a serious character study. Michael Scudday, on the other hand, was
evidently encouraged to play Lyman Cotswald first as an earnest writer, then as a pretentious writer, and finally as
an outlandish, deluded bohemian. Logan approached the rest of the characters in much the same way as Cotswald, with
the result that the play seemed, in the end, to be little more than a jumble of innocuous good humor and bleak
satire.
The Bradleyville plays and A Place on the Magdalena Flats demonstrate that Jones is a talented writer of
compelling naturalistic dramas. It appears likely from Santa Fe Sunshine that he is not a writer of comedies.
There’s no need to insist that he should be. or to pretend, like some members of the local press, that he is.
– John Branch
Openings
Dallas Theater Center. Equus, May 31 through July 2. Tue-Fri at 8 p.m., Sat at 5 and 8:30 p.m. Tickets
$5.25-$6.75. 3636 Turtle Creek/526-8857.
Dallas Summer Musicals. Came/ot, with Rock Hudson, June 7-19. June 21-26. The Ginger Rogers Show.
8:15 Tue-Sat. 2:30 Sat & Sun matinee. Tickets $3-12. available at State Fair Box Office. 603I Brookshire,
691-7200 All performances at Slate Fair Music Hall in Fair Park.
Dallas Repertory Theatre. Candide opens June 16 and closes July 17 Fri and Sat at 8:15 p.m., Sun 3
p.m. $4.50. NorthPark Hall/369-8966.
Casa Manana. May 30-June 11, Shenandoah; June 13-25, Gigi; June 27-July 9, My Fair Lady.
8:15 p.m. nightly, with 2:30 p.m. Sat matinee. $6.50 Mon-Thu, $7.50 Fri and Sat, $5 50 Sat matinee. 3101 W
Lancaster. Fort Worth/(819)332-9319.
Fort Worth Community Theatre. The Sunshine Boys, June 2-4 and 8-11 at 8:15 p.m. and June 5 at 2:15
p.m. $3.50 Fri and Sat, $3 other days, $2 students. 3505 W Lancaster/(817)738-6509.
Theatre Three. Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. June 1-July 10. Wed-Sat 8:30 p.m., Sun at 2:30 and 7 p.m.
$5 weekdays. $6 weekends, $4 Sun matinee. 2800 Routh in the Quadrangle/748-5191.
Haymarket Theatre. The Tale of Brer Rabbit, a live theater production. June 8-25. Wednesdays at 10.30
a.m. and 3 p.m., Saturdays at 3 p.m. $2 general; group rates available Kathy Burks marionettes through June.
David and Goliath. Thur. Fri. and Sat at 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 1 p.m. $1. Olla Podrida/233-1958.
Dance
A New Manager for the Dallas Ballet
For John Bedford, the new general manager of the Dallas Ballet, “coming to Dallas is coming home.” An
Oklaho-man. he studied technical theater, art history, playwriting and music on his way to degrees from O.U. His
wife, Jo Rowan, danced with the old Dallas Civic Ballet in the Sixties. Like many native Southwes-terners,
especially dancers, he views the region as a fertile place for the growth of dance companies and as a more livable
environment than New York, traditionally the nation’s dance center. He speaks highly of Dallas’ “rare combination of
sophistication and personal temperament,” of the openness of people and space, of the potential of the Dallas Ballet
to become the most distinguished company in the Southwest.
Bedford, who assumed his new position in February, came here with an impressive list of credits as varied as it is
long. Most recently the Acting Executive Director of the Maryland Arts Council, Bedford was in Baltimore for five
years as manager of the Maryland Ballet and the Baltimore Symphony. Previously, he did lighting design for Broadway
musicals, juvenile roles in the Mummer’s Theatre in Oklahoma City, drum and bugle corps management for the Navy in
San Diego, and horn playing at Juilliard. He is, as they say, eclectic.
Bedford is calm, articulate, insightful: he sees where the Dallas Ballet is and where it should be going and has, in
his short tenure, begun to make it the professional company which it has nominally been for two seasons. It is no
secret that the arts are big business, and that arts management is a complicated, essential part of the increasingly
difficult task of bringing music, drama, and dance before the public. Keeping a company solvent is the sine qua
non of artistic excellence; merit and genius will not, by themselves, spell success.
He has already begun to change the company, especially in those small ways not immediately obvious to outsiders, and
visible in performances only by the increased satisfaction which dancers communicate to their audiences. Bedford
talks of “the effects of environment on the psychology of people. “He has worked, some-times single-handedly, to
renovate the decaying splendor of the former Dallas Women’s Club on Rawlins which is the company’s rented home.
“Trying to gar-nerenergy that is already there,” Bedford stepped in and undertook a major cleanup campaign. Although
the building has superb studio space, there are bad dressing areas and no showers for the dancers. Major water
damage and broken windows increase the depressing sense of dilapidation. As an exemplary beginning, Bedford painted
his own office, separated the business area, which was previously little more than a corridor, from the rehearsal
space, convinced Bernard-Fain to donate carpeting for part of the building, and encouraged the parents of students
from the Ballet Academy to contribute time and money for cleaning and painting.
Birgit Nilsson once said, in regard to a Met strike: “When the birdies are unhappy they won’t sing.” Dancers haven’t
really had such choices in the past. Bedford has arranged to have the dancers – there are now 11 on full contract –
paid weekly instead of biweekly. He personally accompanied the group on its first extra-regional tour, to West
Virginia, and made sure they were, individually and collectively, on time. He has solicited medical care, much of it
donated, which the dancers didn’t have before. In next year’s programs, he will print pictures of the players
alongside their biographies, and he will insist that they be referred to by last names. “Little things make good
management,” he says quietly.
Right now Bedford is looking for a company manager to relieve him of production responsibilities. “Hiring me was a
commitment on the part of the directors to moving the ballet into an organization of regional distinction,” he says,
but he also has control over the school and all aspects of company work. What he would like to do is concentrate on
the internal movement of the company, and on conditions for the dancers; most important, to develop a company with
its own stars, to bring attention to them not as a background or corps for out-of-town celebrities. “Dallas will
remain a star town as long as you present them with an either-or choice,” he claims. As a remedy he wants to spend
less money on visiting artists. This may, he admits, result in a slight initial decline in attendance, but he’s
hopeful that in three to five years, with better salaries for the dancers, and performances without guest artists,
the company will develop artistically and the audiences will know and appreciate it. It’s important to keep dancers
here, to prevent their being lured away by offers from other large city companies.
So far the company is doing well. It has $12,500 earned income from the 1975-76 season, and will net about $40,000
this year, keeping in the black at a time when most companies are operating at a deficit. Next year, Bedford wants
the company to do at least one performance a week somewhere: the dancers will have 26-week contracts which, in
addition to their work with the Chicago Lyric Opera (good for as much as four months) and whatever private teaching
they do, should make their incomes respectable, if not exactly princely.
Meanwhile, the Ballet is engaged in a fund drive to raise salaries and to sponsor a new production of Le Sucre du
Printemps next April. Skibine’s new ballet will appear with Les Saves and one other production. Other
plans for 1977-78 include the perennial December Nutcracker; a March production which may feature Nureyev and
Friends, or maybe the Dallas Ballet all by itself; and for a season opener, two performances of James Clouser’s rock
ballet, Caliban, premiered last year in Houston and well-received by audiences (who refused to leave after
the final curtain) and critics. For the production, Clouser will combine dancers from the Dallas and Houston
Ballets, and rock group St. Elmo’s Fire, which composed and played the score. An expansive stage design at the
Convention Center will allow the audience to surround the dancers and, after the ballet is finished, to join them
for dancing of a different sort.
John Bedford is an energetic and organized man. It was disappointing, therefore, that the ballet’s Spring Gala this
year inspired the same old nagging doubts about the company’s effectiveness. The company is struggling to find
proper vehicles for good dancers; one real cause for hope, I think, is the maturity and poise of Karen Travis, and
the growth of Marcella Shannon, Cyndi Jones, and DeAnne Tomlinson. The men are still less effective, a curious fact
when one realizes that the Southwest is a training ground for male dancers, many of whom are snatched away by other
companies. Kirt Hathaway can dance well when he loses his nervousness and sharpens his musical sense.
Still, the only ballet which was interesting choreographically, a restaging of Petipa’s Raymonda Pas de Dix,
was the least well danced. Either the dancers were suffering from opening night jitters, or they had not
properly warmed up, but the delicacy and wit of the ballet were not apparent until mid-way through, when Jones and
Tomlinson did a sparkling fourth variation. By the end. Travis was beginning to endow her role with the right amount
of mock-Oriental sultriness and archness.
In the other ballets, the dancers were simply not allowed to go about their proper business. Stuart Hodes’ Shape
of Light is a busy piece of perpetual motion, rather like a circus, which showed sculpted images always melting
away, diversity without individuation, and collaboration rather than real partnering. The crime of the evening was
The Merry Widow, a dated, tiresome attempt at “story” ballet, a genre which is. at best, hard to do
convincingly. Jacques D’ Amboise and Kay Mazzo, from the New York City Ballet, brought their professional presences
to roles which were in no way adequate to their gifts; everyone seemed to be trying, unsuccessfully, to enjoy the
Viennese froth.
Now that John Bedford has begun to shape the company into a real enterprise, we must hope that the artistic
direction and the final product will be commensurate with the gifts of the dancers, and with what the audience
wants. But what does Dallas want? Perhaps, as Bedford says, it is impressed with stars. Maybe something is to
be learned from the fact that on opening night, the Music Hall was about half-filled. Great art will create the
taste by which it is to be enjoyed; not even in Dallas will attractive packaging continue to suffice to glamorize a
second-rate object.
– Willard Spiegelman
Performances
SMU Dance Division. Non-credit workshop classes, 2-3 p.m. June 6-July 8. Tuition varies according to style of
dance Registration by June 5: Dance Preparatory Department. Meadows School of the Arts. SMU. Dallas 75275. 692-3119
or 692-3146.
Sports
Making a Stab at Darts
I’m in the middle of Walter Cronkite when my buddy Monroe calls to ask if I want to throw some darts.
“Never threw a dart in my life,” I reply. “How ’bout a little pool?”
“Darts improve the old hand-eye coordination. Broaden the mind.”
“Ping-pong, maybe?”
“Meet me at The Quiet Man and I’ll show you the scene.
So I make my way along Knox Street, sidestepping members of the cosmetic motorcycle crowd, and find Monroe waiting
at the bar with two mugs of Schlitz Dark. We toast darting and all the other participant sports and then step over
to the board, which is hanging at an odd angle to the wall. I pick up three plastic darts, the kind that usually
turn up in Christmas stockings, and start loosening up.
“You’ll ruin your arm with those,” Monroe warns, and hands me a set of perfectly-balanced, 26-gram, tungsten-loaded
specials. Some people prefer nickel-silver, he explains, or even regular brass, but he swears by tungsten-loaded.
I rear back and nearly put the first one through the back of the board.”Easy does it,” my buddy laughs.I take
something off the next throw and hit a light bulb.”Tough darts,” hollers some guy in the back. I remove my jacket,
which means that now I can hit the board as often as I miss.Monroe buys another round of Schlitz Dark and we’re
ready for my first game of 301.”Remember, nearest the bull starts, butit takes a double to begin chalking.”
I stare at him blankly. “That’s scoring to you,” he explains.
Naturally he shoots the bull, and while I’m still working on my first double he goes out.
“Tough darts,” I say sportingly.
“No, good darts.”
We push on to Eton Run on McKinney, which at 8:00 is deserted except for Dave, the owner, his dog Muff, who’s
sitting at the bar drinking beer from a plastic dish, and a couple throwing at a board in the far corner. The girl
looks sharp but the guy is throwing with a wild sidearm motion that reminds me of Louis Tiant.
“I could beat him at least,” I whisper to Monroe.
“Good, because we’ve just challenged them.”
“We’ve what?”
“Just a friendly game. Couple of beers. I want to break you in gradually.”
Monroe hits the bull again and runs up a 76. I follow with a 58 and we’re off. Twenty two darts and the game is
over. We clink two mugs of Schlitz Dark, and I pour a little in Muffs dish to show him what a gracious winner I
am.
“Now for the big time,” Monroe says, motioning me towards the car. We zip out Cedar Springs, past clusters of leggy
hookers – “No thanks, sweetheart. My buddy and I have our evening all planned.” – and pull up at Pub One, which I’ve
heard beforehand is the Yankee Stadium of Dallas Dartdom.
I could have figured it out for myself. About ten boards, each one framed and softly lit like a piece of fine art.
Thick carpet on the floor, and everything so quiet and low-key that you could hear a flight drop. A real
aficionado’s paradise. I hang back next to the door just in case Monroe decides to issue a challenge. Instead, he
introduces me to a petite girl in a green mini who promptly grabs my thumb and bends it back almost to my wrist.
“What the hell was that for?” I scream to Monroe.
“The darter’s handshake. Makes you feel right at home, doesn’t it?”
No Schlitz Dark here so I order a Coors, flip through the back issues of Dart Dope that are lying on the bar,
and in general try to soak up the ambience. It’s league night so there are probably 100 people in the pub. Most eyes
are on one board, however, where a slender fellow in a flowered shirt (mums or geraniums) seems to be doing a ballet
at the line. An entrechat, followed by a triple 20. Pas de chat right and a double 19. The guy’s unbeatable.
“Now, that boy’s got the killer instinct,” the guy next to me says.
“Really cleans up on the novices?” I ask nervously.
“Not much hustling in darts, pal, except when the boys come down from Chicago and Kansas City. Then you might see a
few $500 games. Mostly, though, things are pretty civilized. Chivalric almost.”
I feel a bit better, but not so good that I’m willing to hang around for more than one beer. Monroe is already
getting that competitive gleam in his eye, and besides I suspect that the girl in the mini is after my other
thumb.
“Thanks for not challenging in there,” I tell Monroe once we’re safely back in the car.
“I was saving you for the NFL,” he replies coldly.
I finger the $12.60 in my pocket and remind him that it has to last me another week. He grins.
The NFL sits underneath Lucas B & B Restaurant on Oak Lawn, where I’ve watched many a sunrise over steak ard eggs or
a plate of grilled liver.
“Sure you wouldn’t like some grilled liver before we start?” I ask.
Monroe pushes me through a door into a pub that is straight out of an old Greer Garson movie. Dark paneling, thick
carpets, coats of arms everywhere. Very tweedy.
“We’re playing C and S next game,” Monroe tells me a moment later.
I know this is the big time because we don’t order two Schlitz Darks.
C turns out to be a short, tuberous fellow with a mustache that never quite came in. His teammate S, on the other
hand, is muscular, slick-haired, shifty-eyed. He oozes killer instinct. Back in grade school I could vomit on cue.
but I suspect that no one here would fall for that one.
We throw first. Monroe hits 46 and I hit 40. Not a bad start. C matches my 40 and then S, oily and condescending,
slips past us with an 84. I follow Monroe’s 55 with a 19, which tells me that the glory days of Eton Run are over.
After five throws both teams need 60 to go out. For the first time I check the out board, which tells me that I need
a double 20, double 10. I could just as easily have run a four-minute mile. My first dart bounces off the paneling,
the second sticks limply in the 5, and the third strikes a wire and veers off into the crowd. I’ve got more points
on the floor than the board.
Monroe rallies with a double 20, then gets careless and throws a double 18. Bust! C manages an even 30, leaving S
with an easy out. He slinks up to the line, slips his cuff down his wrist, and then with infuriating aplomb throws a
triple 10 with his first dart.
Good-bye MacDonald’s. Good-bye Taco Bell.
Around me people are whooping and clapping. I show my disappointment by kicking the carpet several times, then look
over at Monroe, who’s scowling.
“Good darts,” I say cheerily.
“No, tough darts! Tough darts!”
I just found out that there’s a big darts tournament this month. One thousand dartists, throwing their hearts out at
the Royal Coach Inn, July 17, 18, 19. You go. I couldn’t stand the tension.
– David Dillon
Sports
Games and Matches
Baseball/Texas Rangers. Arlington Stadium. 7.35 p.m. Tickets: reserved $5, $5.50, and $6; general $2
adults, $1 50 children. 265-3331.
June 1 & 2 vs. Boston Red Sox
June 3,4,5 vs. Milwaukee Brewers
June 6 & 7 vs. New York Yankees
June 8 & 9 vs. Chicago White Sox
June 17,18, 19 vs. Seattle Mariners (double-header June 17, 5:35 p.m. )
Darts/Dallas Open Dart Classic. A thousand American, Canadian, and British dartists compete for
$15,000 prize money. Entry fees $7.50-$10. 8 p.m. June 17. all day June 18 & 19. Royal Coach Inn, 3800 W Northwest
Hwy. To enter, write P.O. Box 19404, Dallas 75219 or call 522-0997 after 6 p.m.
Rodeo/Mesquife Championship Rodeo. Every Fri & Sat Apr through Sept at 8 p.m. Off LBJ at Military Pkwy
exit. Box seats $4, grandstands $3 adults, $1.50 children. For tickets and information, call 285-8777.
Soccer/Dallas Tornado. Ownby Stadium, SMU. 8 p.m. Tickets $3-$7. 750-0900.
June 2 vs. Seattle Sounders
June 11 vs. Team Hawaii
June 18 vs. Washington Diplomats
June 23 vs. Minnesota Kicks
Music
Classy Jazz at the Bagatelle
A good way to get Woody Herman, one of Paul Guerrero’s former bosses, hopping mad, is to tell him about the thousand
dollar stereo on which you have been listening to his records. “Records!” comes the reply. “Why the hell don’t you
come out and see us?”
Come out, indeed. For all its seeming adaptability to records, the kind of small-ensemble, intimate jazz the Paul
Guerrero Trio plays comes most alive in a club – the kind of club which is rare in Dallas. There are the
Recovery Room, Maxine Kent’s, and a few others. For the Guerrero Trio and singer Jeanne Maxwell, home is a small
rectangle of dim lighting and soft chairs called the Bagatelle.
Guerrero is a native, an alumnus of North Texas State (he played on the first lab band album ever released), has
taught at SMU and North Texas, and now teaches percussion and theory at Rich-land. In the late Fifties he played
with Dick and Kiz Harp, whose 90th Floor was a haven for lovers of quiet jazz. He toured with Woody Herman and
others.
The road is a tiring life, however, and musicians no doubt grow weary of hearing that they should find a club, have
a nice place to play, and do what they like. It is a fine idea, but club managers have one idea of what makes good
music, musicians another. Guerrero has played plenty of rooms under adverse conditions. Many times, he says, “the
room caters to what the manager wants to hear. It’s not how well the group can perform, or how well the group can
bring people in to hear what they do best.” Pity the poor musician who, to make his daily bread, must churn out
treacly jazz versions of “Musk-rat Love.” It is enough to drive a body to rock and roll, which is what Guerrero
tried for a couple of years. “I thought I had just gotten tired of being a jazz musician,” he said in a recent
broadcast interview. “I wanted to do something else, be in rock. We did that, nothing but the Top Forty.” It didn’t
work. “What I wanted to do was play jazz music.”
Fortunately, when Leo Meyer built the Bagatelle at One Energy Square in Dallas in 1974, he hired Guerrero to open
the room. The trio, or various permutations of its members (Guerrero on drums, Charlie Prawdzik on piano, Bruce Lett
playing bass and Jeanne Maxwell singing) have been there ever since. “We’ve got a terrific arrangement with the
manager,” Guerrero says. “He knows that we love jazz and that it’s the kind of music we can perform best. It comes
out better than if we try to do someone else’s music. The customers come in to hear what we can do, and they
seem to enjoy it.”
The trio plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, while on Tuesday and Wednesday Prawdzik and the smooth, sultry
Maxwell play a duet. As a rule, Thursday nights are the best for catching the maximum amount of music filtered
through the minimum amount of crowd noise. Saturdays are too noisy, though the crowded Saturdays did not happen
overnight. According to one habitue, when the club first opened much of the crowd was drawn from the Bagatelle’s
diners, who would peer curiously into this darkened refuge of clinking glasses and cool jazz. Many of those intrepid
pioneers were lured in by the magnetic pull of Jeanne Maxwell. When you hear her positively seductive rendition of
“That’s All,” the casual assurance with which she handles “Gone With the Wind,” or the sly humor of Blossom Dearie’s
“I’m Hip” (“I’m so hip I even call my girlfriend ’man’”), it’s hard to believe that seven years ago she had never
heard of, let alone heard, the jazz singers to whom she might be compared today. When she fell in with Guerrero she
brought a natural jazz style, as if her unmolded talent was just looking for a form. When she tears through a song
like “Don’t Get Scared,” one is certain that she has found it.
One outgrowth of the steady gig at the Bagatelle was the group’s first record (“the first of many,” according to
Guerrero). Jazz Jazzin’ is available at the Bagatelle, and doing quite well.
There is something infectiously easygoing and comfortable about the Bagatelle arrangement. An up-tempo, cooking
ensemble piece might give way to a beautiful Prawdzik solo. Maxwell sits next to the piano almost nose-to-nose with
the couples who manage to squeeze dance space out of the area in front of the band The Bagatelle lacks only one
feature associated with small jazz clubs. “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” is a great ballad, but as an atmospheric effect
it’s dismal. The Bagatelle provides enough ventilation that the only smokin’ the audience need worry about goes on
onstage. And that is good, because it’s a listener’s club, and a listener’s band. Treat your ears.
– Glenn Mitchell
Concerts
Venetian Room. Lena Horne, June 11-18. Mon-Thu 8:30 & 11 p.m.; Fri & Sat 9 & 11:30 p.m. Reservations
required. Fairmont Hotel. 748-5454.
Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Free park concerts at 8 p.m. June 2, Samuell-Grand Park; June 3. Glen-dale Park,
June 4. Northaven Park. June 5. Rever-chon Park (4 p.m.); June 3, Akard Street Mall (12:15 p.m.)
Summertop. Special guest performers with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. June 8-July 17 Series tickets $15-$60
General admission $5. Tickets at DSO box office in Titche’s NorthPark, Dallas Federal Savings & Loan branches, or by
calling 692-0203
June 8 Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’77, 8:45 p.m.
June 9 Bob McGrath of Sesame Street, 11 a.m.
June 10 Ethel Merman, 8:45 p.m.
June 11 To be announced.
June 12 Henry Mancini, 8:45 p.m.
June 15 Lynn Anderson. 8:45 p.m.
June 17 Mel Torme, 8:45 p.m.
June 18 John Davidson. 8 & 10:30 p.m.
June 19 Doc Severinsen, 8:45 p.m.
June 22 An Evening in Paris. 8:45 p.m.
June 23 Erich Kunzel, 11 a.m.
June 24 Burt Bacharach, 8:45 p.m.
June 25 To be announced.
June 26 Sammy Davis Jr., 8 45 p.m.
June 29 A Night on the Danube. Erich Kunzel, 8 45 p.m.
June 30 Dallas Theater Centers Mime Troup, 11 a.m.
Movies
Woody Allen Makes a Winner
Annie Hall is terrific. Or rather it’s terrific if you’ve reached a certain age, had a certain kind of education,
nursed a certain set of insecurities, seen a lot of a certain kind of films, and lived in certain cities. What
people who have always lived in suburbia, are sexually uninhibited, who haven’t been exposed to Freud,
existentialism, Bergman and Fellini, and think Woody Allen is kind of creepy will make of this film I don’t know. I
don’t much care, either.
Some people, who relish the crude and wacky early Woody Allen films like Bananas or Take the Money and
Run, will hate it. That’s not our Woody, the nebbish with the Rabelaisian streak, they’ll say. I don’t care
about them, either.
All I know is that Woody Allen’s movie got into my head the way all good movies do, so that when I walked out of the
theater I found I was thinking, feeling, and reacting like Woody Allen. I suspect women find themselves thinking,
feeling, and reacting like Diane Keaton, too. And that’s a large measure of the success of this film – that it makes
two so quirky and unglamorous types so appealing. It’s one thing to walk out of a film feeling like Clark Gable or
Cary Grant or Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn. But Woody Allen or Diane Keaton?
Annie Hall is, I think, the romantic comedy of the Seventies – just as It Happened One Night was
the romantic comedy of the Thirties, Adam’s Rib of the Forties, Sabrina of the Fifties, The
Graduate of the Sixties, films that both explore and help explode the sexual myths of the era. That the lovers
in the film are Allen and Keaton – instead of Gable and Colbert or Tracy and Hepburn or even Dustin Hoffman and
Katharine Ross – says a lot.
When a film is as good as this one is, there’s a strong temptation to over-praise it. Annie Hall is not a
masterpiece – if by masterpiece we mean Rules of the Game or Potemkin. What it is, quite simply, is a well-made
film, the kind of movie that all movies ought to try to be: professional, competent, technically satisfying, and
good, serious fun. Everyone concerned with it gives it their best: Woody, Diane, and Tony Roberts in their
performances, Gordon Willis in his cinematography, Woody and Marshall Brickman in their screenplay, and Woody again
in his direction. It makes most of the recent Hollywood fare look cheap and shoddy. When it is satiric, Annie Hall
shows up the shrillness of Network. When it is sentimental, it shows up the hokiness of Rocky. And as a display of
virtuosity, Woody Allen turns out to be the triple-talent Barbra Streisand tried and failed to be in A Star Is
Born.
But enough enthusiasm. If I go on any longer, I’ll start giving away my favorite moments. So to paraphrase one of
Woody’s best lines in the film: See it with someone you love.
– Charles Matthews
Coming Attractions
Edison Theatre, 2420 N. Fitzhugh. MGM Festival, including Pat & Mike/Adam’s Rib, Grand Hotel/ Dinner at Eight,
Thin Man/North by Northwest, Philadelphia Story/Woman of the Year, Ben-Hur, Go West/ The Big Store, The Wizard of
Oz/Meet Me in St. Louis, Gaslight/Mutiny on the Bounty, Gigi/Band Wagon. All Features for two-night screenings.
Call tor dates and times 823-9610.
University of Texas/Dallas. 7 30 and 9:30 p.m. in Founders North Auditorium. Floyd & Lookout. Richardson. $1. Call
690-2945 for dates. June films are: // Grido, Little Women, Ministry of Fear, All Quiet on the Western Front,
Scarlet Pimpernel. The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Shoot the Piano Player. Sitting Pretty, Competition. I Am
Curious (Yellow). I Am Curious (Blue), Black Peter. and La Chienne.
Art
Openings
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The Face of Egypt: Permanence and Change in Egyptian Art, June 14-Aug 15.
with tours, lectures, and slide shows. Tue-Sat 10-5. Sun 1-5. Fair Park/421-4187
Kimbell Art Museum. June 1 -July 15. Dutch Drawings from American Collections, including Rembrandt. Van
Goyen, and Ruisdael. Tue-Sat 10-5. Sun 1-5 1101 Will Rogers Rd/(817)332-8451
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. May 27-June 26. Riverboats on the Mississippi, a photographic
essay. Tue-Sat 10-5, Sun 1-5:30. 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd. Fort Worth/(817)738-1933
Fort Worth Art Museum. Morris Louis: The Veil Cycle opens June 19. showing through July 31. Tue-Sat
10-5, Sun 1-5 1309 Montgomery/(817)738-9215.
GALLERIES
Adelle M. June 11-30, exhibition of ten Dallas artists. 9-5 weekdays. 10-4 Sat. 3317 McKinney/ 526-0800
Afterimage. Contemporary works by Robert May Mon-Sat 10-5 30. Quadrangle. 2800 Routh/ 748-2521.
Allen Street Gallery. Photo Extensions, June 5-18 Photo silk screens and photo extensions workshop
June 4. 9-2:30 Tue-Fri, 2-6 Sat. 2817 Allen St/ 742-5207
Arthello’s Gallery. Pencil drawings by Nathan Wright Jr. 1-6 Sat & Sun. 1922 S Beckley/941-2276.
Chisholm Trail Gallery. Works by the Taos Founder group. Mon-Sat 10-5. 7068 Camp Bowie Blvd. Fort
Worth/(817)731-2781.
Clifford Gallery. Etchings and lithographs by Diane Marks. Michael Sumner, Martha Matthews, and others.
Mon-Sat 10-5:30. 6610 Snider Plaza/ 363-8223.
Contemporary Gallery. Acrylic on canvas by Jeanne Koch through June 24 The summer-long master graphics show
opens June 25, with Miro. Calder. Picasso, and others. Mon-Sat 10 30-5 and by appointment 2425 Cedar
Springs/747-0141.
Cushing Galleries. May 16-June 10, oils and bronzes by Bernique Longley June 11-July 15. works by Danny
Pierce. 10:30-4:30 Mon-Sat. 2723 Fair-mount/747-0497.
Delahunty Gallery. Paintings by Roger Winter and drawings and collages by Toni LaSelle, opening June 3.
Tue-Sat 10-6 and by appointment. 2611 Cedar Springs/744-1346
D.W. Co-op. May 28-June 23, clay works by Norma McManaway; paintings and drawings by Jeannie Hamel. Tue-Sat
11-6. 3305 McKinney/526-3240.
Fairmount Gallery. May 20-June 16, sculptures by Annie Crawford. June 10 through mid-July, paintings by John
Cates. 10-5 Mon-Sat. 6040 Sherry Lane/369-5636
Stewart Gallery. Watercolors by Dick Phillips. May 22-June 24. Tue-Sat 10-7 and by appointment. 12610
Coit/661-0213.
Etc.
Enlightenment
First Unitarian Church. Lucy Caswell leads a workshop. Handling Jealousy and Anger in Constructive Ways,
June 25. 9-5 $12 Register at 528-3990.
YWCA. Employment programs dealing with problems faced by women who work. Call 827-5600 for specifics and
schedules.
Cushing Gallery and Mountain View College. Classand demonstration in woodcutting by Ann Cushing Gantz. 7-10
p.m. June 21. $7.50. 2723 Fair-mount/747-0497.
Kidstuff
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. June 7-17. Tue-Fn. 10-12 a.m. Art in Pre-Columbian America. Ages 9-15. $25
per person June 21 -July I. Ancient Art of the Western World Ages 8-12. $25 per person. 421-4187
YWCA Summer Fun Day Camp. At all branches June 6-Aug 19. Wide range of activities, from cooking and nutrition
to camping and nature study Open to boys and girls aged 5-12 Fees vary; scholarships available Call your local
branch or 827-5600 for more information.
Junior Players Guild. The Magic Is Me. a production/performing workshop. June 6-24, Mon. Wed & Fri,
9:30-I2:30. Tuition $65. For information, call 351-4962 or 363-4278.
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Music-ln offers instruction for young people on the instrument of their choice
June 6-July 28, Mon-Thu. 9-12 Tuition is $10 per week, with some scholarships available 4401 Trail Lake Drive. Fort
Worth/(817) 921-2676
Dallas Health & Science Museum. SummerSearch.a series of courses in astronomy, anatomy, geology, and
more for children 3-13. using tours, puppets, and other entertaining media June-July Tuition varies with course
428-8351
