3 FACES OF SPRING

LEESA BLAKE CONORY Style On The Links



Dr. Leesa Blake Condry misses having babies. Delivering them, that is. She’s cut the obstetrics work out of her medical practice for the time being to concentrate on her toddler son Bill, her investment banker husband Jim, and a weekly round of golf. On the subjects of birth and shooting below 100, Condry quips: “It’s a miracle every time.”

As a gynecologist and infertility specialist in Dallas, thirty-lmir-year-old Condry has a patient roster of about 3,000, mostly young professional women. “Dr. Con-dry,” says one patient of five years, “goes the extra mile to make you feel comfortable.” Condry”s extra efforts include a departure from the typical, white-coated doctor’s attire. “It helps make you feel like you’re with a friend and helps erase (hat formality of the doctor’s office,” the patient says.

To keep that informality constant throughout her office, Condry has banished the white look to the closet and prefers that her staff members dress in street clothes, too. Condry is partial to Ralph Lauren tweeds and Calvin Klein basics. Other efforts that give her office a friendly, casual feel include sayings painted onto the ceilings of examination rooms. To wit: “Those who think they know it all are very annoying to those of us who do,” and “Don’t be anybody’s fool; be selective.” And then there are the knitted booties (like golf head covers, Condry says) that cover the usually imposing steel stirrups.

Since the ripe old age of sixteen, Leesa Condry knew that she wanted to be a doctor. “Medicine,” she remembers, “seemed glamorous. I liked the sciences even though I was the only girl in chemistry and physics classes in my Lubbock high school.” Braving that, she moved on to Southwestern Medical School, where she found herself just one of ten women in a class of 160 doctor candidates.

Condry chose the field of gynecology because she didn’t like working with chronically ill patients and felt that “taking care of men was awkward.” She’s found the life of an OB/GYN fast-paced and impromptu. “It’s certainly not as cerebral as neurosurgery,” she says.

Being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field doesn’t mean that a woman has to dress or act like a man. insists Condry, adding that she doesn’t own a single business suit. “I think women should be feminine,” she says. She sticks to a conservative wardrobe, punctuated with splashes of color such as emerald green, or black and red combinations. Her theory’? “As a patient, you don’t want a flamboyant physician. You might think that your doctor’s philosophy of dress translates to his or her philosophy of medicine.” Condry’s closet, however, does yield one strapless red number that she saves for special on-the-town occasions, usually out of town.

Condry shops smaller boutiques, often trying to patronize those owned by patients. Because of her tight schedule, she plans three big shopping trips a year. “I get everything done at once,” she says. “I tend to think of shopping as a reward for a period of a lot of hard work.”

But the real reward for Condry is a relaxing eighteen holes of golf. A devotee of the links for less than a year, Condry already has broken 100 a few times-a respectable beginning. Condry was inspired to pick up the clubs when she saw that her husband Jim was spending a lot of time on the golf course. Deciding to join him rather than fight him, she teed off one day and has been buying golf balls ever since. Her uniform for the golf course, however, is not the usual polyester stretch stuff immortalized by legions of female golfers, but more tailored sportswear from the likes of Ralph Lauren and LizSport.

Condry’s sure of what she likes to wear inthe office and on the links, but she’s somewhat stumped on what the so-called “DallasLook” is all about. All day long she seesfashionable patients in various states ofdress-and undress. “All 1 can say,” she says,”is that everyone seems to have visited a tanning salon. This year, everyone has brownbreasts and bottoms.”

ALYCE CARON The Flip Side



If the Held of forensic pathology didn’t require a degree in chemistry, Alyce Caron just might be a criminologist right now instead of a news anchor on Channel 5.

“I decided that if I had to have a chemistry degree,” Caron says of her college days, “then I might as well be a doctor.” Opting out of medical school, Caron decided to trade in a “Quincy” career for one in mass communications at the end of her sophomore year at Florida State. Her first taste of TV reporting came when a professor suggested an internship at a Jacksonville, Florida, TV station. She called the station and found that in addition to the internship, she could get a full salary, “I could do this,” she told herself and promptly joined the station’s newsroom to learn the ropes of broadcast journalism.

Caron credits her first big professional break to an Air Florida passenger who observed her during a crisis. While she was a senior in college, Caron worked part-time for the airline as a ticket agent. One day the airline had overbooked sev-assengers on a flight. The scene at the ticket desk was crazy. “I tried to keep cool,” she recalls. Then one of the passengers came up to the ticket desk, asked her name, and offered her a reporting job at his TV station in Dothan, Alabama. ’”He liked the way I worked under pressure,” she says.

It was in Dothan, Caron says, that she learned respect for the people behind the cameras. She found herself doing everything in the four-person newsroom from reporting to occasional anchoring. After only eight months, she was hired away by a station in Columbus, Georgia, as a weekend anchor and reporter. After four years in Columbus, Caron moved to Orlando, Florida, where she worked a stint as a weeknight anchor at the local ABC affiliate. Then the management at KXAS-TV in Fort Worth called. That was three years ago.

Today, Caron lives with Xena, a Collie mix she adopted as a puppy, in a Southwest Arlington home overlooking Lake Arlington. She loves the out-of-the-way location and the view she wakes up to each morning. She just turned thirty and celebrated the birthday with her sister and parents in Houston. “We’re a very close family.” she says. “My parents are my best friends.”

The family name isn’t Caron, explains Alyce, it’s Panzarino. Caron is her middle name. The management at Channel 5 thought that Alyce Panzarino would be a mouthful, so they opted to drop the surname, Caron says.

Caron, a diminutive size four, is acutely aware that viewers respond to more than just the news she reports. “I get calls and letters from viewers who comment on what I’m wearing and whether they like it or not,” she says. There’s only one fashion no-no on the air, though, and that’s pure white. White tends to make facial contrasts too dark. And too much of a pattern on clothing is also distracting, she says. “I want the viewers to listen to what I’m saying rather than having them watch the dots on my blouse move around.

“I want to present a comfortable image. 1 have a more feminine style, not a lot of suits. That’s too severe for my look. I think sweaters look comfortable.” In shopping, she sticks to smaller boutiques. In her closet, Caron keeps a chart handy that has her wardrobe laid out three weeks in advance. It’s prevention, she says, to keep viewers from reminding her that she has just worn a certain outfit.

The viewing audience is indicative of the high fashion consciousness in Dallas/Fort Worth, Caron says. “The key here is that everyone dresses. Everyone is very fashion conscious. You’ve got to reflect that on TV. You can’t get away with a blouse that’s two years old. You can get away with more of a high fashion look here than you can in other markets.”

After the night’s last newscast. Caron occasionally likes to take in the area’s nightlife and admits that she loves to dance and listen to all sorts of music, from jazz to Motown. Caron likes to have fun with her wardrobe. There’s more than one cut-out jumper hanging in her closet. And for black-tie affairs, Caron picks from an entire closet devoted to the after-five look. “I’m a nut about buying jewelry,” she says, pointing to two boxes full of earrings. “All my life, I’ve loved to dress up. I’m rarely in jeans-except around the house.”

Anchoring two broadcasts a night doesn’t leave much time for hobbies, but when she can squeeze in the time, she models for charity fashion shows, attends aerobics class, swims on a regular basis, and reads “anything I can get my hands on.” Her current favorite is And So It Goes by Linda Ellerbee. But the real love in her life has turned out to be a portable compact disc player. She’s thoroughly converted to the world of CD and is building an impressive disc library.

Veteran weatherman Harold Taft tells us inthe spot TV promotions for Channel 5 thatthe current crew at the station is the best everassembled. It must be. At this writing, it’sthe ratings winner at 6 p.m. Caron is justifiably happy about that and commends herco-workers and fellow anchor Brad Wright.”I love what I’m doing. I certainly wouldconsider doing something else, but it wouldhave to be something pretty fabulous to getme outta here.”

JOHNNY DILLER Baby Routh’s Fashion Plate



Johnny Diller has cause to celebrate. After a long succession of restaurant jobs, he’s found himself the house manager of Baby Routh, the trendy offspring of the Routh Street Cafe and one of the hottest restaurants in town. Diller has hit the dining floor running, logging about 100 hours a week in tandem with executive chef Amy Ferguson and bosses John Dayton and Stephan Pyles. The road to Baby Routh, however, took a few sharp turns.

Diller was, as he puts it, horn on the poor side of the tracks of Highland Park. His family has lived in Highland Park for more than four generations, but, Diller points out, “we were there before the prices were.”

At thirty, Diller is clean-shaven and almost boyish with wavy, dark blond hair. He laughs off suggestions that he is a Dallas blueblood. pointing out that he went to W. T. White High School and hitchhiked around the country to. among other places. Park City, Utah, where he became a ski hum and ran a ski lift. Of course, that’s before Diller joined the Navy in 1975 and found himself in anti-submarine warfare intelligence as a naval assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, And that was long before he found himself running Ralph Lauren’s Polo Shop in London or working in Dallas’s four-star dining rooms.

Johnny Diller remains detachedly modest about his successes. About his promotion to brigade commander of his boot camp troop he says: “I could yell real loud.” Or about his days in the Navy, from which he still retains top secret clearance: “I believe in the country.” But even when he’s told you about his life, he hasn’t told you everything. Like about theology school.

Diller attended the Dallas Bible College working toward a degree in theology. “I needed to answer some questions,” he says. He traded in divinity for religious training of another kind: business school. But before he could finish, he found himself learning the ropes of gastronomy as a waiter at Cal-luauds, the first in a long string of four-star experiences. He’s served time at Jean-Claude, Arthur’s, La Boheme, La Tosca, Routh Street Cafe, and The Mansion. There he was the bar manager (or, as Diller says, “the keeper of the playground”). “The hardest thing at The Mansion Bar,” he remembers, “was to close the bar.” Juggling the high rollers wasn’t an easy task, either. “The best trick was knowing who liked who, and who didn’t like who, and who could share a table until another table became available.”

Another surprise in Diller’s resume is his stint at Ralph Lauren, where he started out in the mail room. Between his restaurant gigs, Diller took a breather from his demanding culinary schedule and went to work for the local Polo store. Before long, he was on the floor. At the time, the Highland Park Village store had the highest grossing income per square foot of the 750 Polo outlets in the world. When Ralph Lauren took Polo on the road to London, Diller went there to organize and manage the store Dallas style, and spent six months in Knightsbridge.

Today, Diller shrugs off his lack of a social life outside of Baby Routh. “We have fun here,” he says. But when the going really gets tough, he goes, what else, Harley riding. Instead of greasy jeans, Diller rides in style in black leather pants, probably Armani. Dressing well has always been an integral part of Diller’s life. At least five of his relatives (including one of his three sisters and his mother) have been models, and Diller himself has occasionally traipsed down the runway. “My mother always said, ’Don’t buy fashion, Buy style, because style remains when fashion’s gone.’ The way to stay in style,” he advises, “is to buy good quality basics. Then bring them up to date with period pieces-shirts, ties, belts.” Citing the Polo motto, Diller says: “Don’t buy year to year; buy decade to decade.” But no matter how hard he tries, Diller just can’t seem to follow his own advice. “I must have 100 great ties,” he admits.

Does Diller think style makes the man inDallas? “It doesn’t hurt.”