GOING OUT

HOT TICKET



Everyone loves a parade, but our favorite has to be The Adol-phus-Children’s Christmas Parade. For the second year in a row it will wind its way through downtown Dallas with marching bands, prancing horses, fabulous floats, and some pretty awesome 45-foot helium bal-loons. Bundle up the kids and grab a curbside seat as Santa and cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Fred Flintstone, and George Jetson go wafting by. Dec. 2,10 a.m. 634-3912.

IN STEP WITH THE SUGARPLUM FAIRY

BALLET To ballerina Maria Terezia Balogh, The Nutcracker is a special ballet with a special set of hazards. Like halos that fall off seven-year-old angels, creating booby traps center stage. Or skittish little angels that balk, afraid of getting in the Sugarplum Fairy’s way. Balogh, who is dancing Sugarplum in the Fort Worth Ballet’s holiday production, doesn’t mind a bit. She first danced in The Nutcracker when she was nine and remembers how she was in awe of the Sugarplum Fairy. It’s a role that is “very regal and very delicate at the same time. All the children look up to you, thinking you’re the queen. It’s a nice feeling.”

-Margaret Putnam

An Ancestral Adventure



ART The vivid retentions from Africa past-the mythology, sense of ceremonv. devotion to ritual, and the powerful influences of music and dance-are embodied in a new exhibit organized by the Dallas Museum of Art titled “Black Art-Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art.”

Supervised by the DMA’s adjunct curator of African-American art, Alvia Wardlaw, it will run from Dec. 3 to Feb. 25.

The exhibit promises to be an adventurous synthesis of African consciousness and African-American life, as the 49 artists represented depict the culture of their ancestors. Many of the 150 works recall traditional Africanisms, while others simply draw on Africa for inspiration. Dallas’s own Jean Lacy juxtaposes urban America and ancient Egypt in her work, while Los Angeles artist Ed Love pays homage to such black musicians as Bob Marley in his series of huge, polychromed steel figures.

The most exciting aspect of this exhibition is the discovery of new artists like Renée Stout, whose life-size, body-cast sculpture projects a primal intensity as it hearkens back to the belief of fertility and strength in African women.

“Black Art-Ancestral Legacy” is provocative to the eye and dramatic in content and thematic loyalty. More important, it celebrates survival as it bridges the chasm between African magic, myth, and mores, and the realities of black life in 20th-century’ America.

-Rosalyn Story



Leave the Driving to Us



OFF THE BEATEN PATH Just when we decided that shopping was torture, a weird pastime inflicted on us by a cruel and commercial society, we met a couple of women who have changed our minds. Luann Sewell and Joyce Belofsky are specialists in the fine art of bargain shopping and have developed a foolproof system for making shopping excursions fun and pain-free.

Two days a week, the partners load up a van full of shoppers in search of great deals on jewelry, clothing, handbags, lingerie, and gifts (like 25 to 50 percent off retail). The best thing about these trips (besides the fact that they do the driving, the parking, and the planning) is that Sewell and Belofsky are picky about where they shop: the day before each trip they go to each outlet to make sure the merch measures up to their standards and that there’s plenty of it to go around.

With more than a hundred bargain resources in the area, their jaunts are always changing. They’ve even begun to “theme” some of them. Take, for example their men’s Christmas shopping spree- imagine the boys getting together to toss back a few beers while being chauffered around town and you get the picture.

The five-hour shopping tour costs $40 (catered box meal included). To sign up, write Shoppe Finders, 14310 Edgecrest, Dallas, 75240.

CZECH EXCHANGE

The SMU Conservatory Chamber Orchestra will spend 10 days in Czechoslovakia this month as part of an ongoing cultural exchange program. We love musical diplomacy. It’s so Nineties.

Catch the Wonderland Express



AROUND TOWN Ban Bywaters is passionate about trains, a passion he shares with the rest of the world come Christmastime. For more than 10 years, he has been assembling his enormous model train collection, the Wonderland Express, for holiday viewing about town.

From beginning to end, Bywaters and his group of volunteers spend about 1,600 man-hours constructing the display, which measures 75 feet long by 20 feet wide and includes 2,400 feet of track and about 250 cars and 60 locomotives. (Bywaters can blame his train mania on his dad, who started collecting them the Christmas after World War II. Now he’s charged with carrying on the family tradition. His total collection includes some 300 cars and about 65 locomotives.)

Bywaters acknowledges the special fascination that children have for his trains, but says that adults are usually equally as awed by the attention to detail and the miniature realness of the display.

His trains travel through a scaled-down Dallas, complete with people, buildings, billboards, and airplanes. They continue on through snow-covered mountains with ski lifts and elk, past a running waterfall and an imaginary candy castle.

A few moments spent with the Wonderland Express is a brief venture into fantasy, a step back in time to a kinder and gentler era, an era when trains were a way of life.

The Wonderland Express will run through Jan. 1 at the Galleria on the third floor, near Marshall Field’s. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for senior citizens and children under 14, with proceeds benefiting The Ronald McDonald House of Dallas. Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. noon-6 p.m. 631-7354.



Modern Dance, Unlimited Appeal



DANCE It’s been 10 years since SMU grads Lori Hughes, Patricia Dickinson, and Jane Evelyn founded the modern dance troupe Dancers Unlimited Repertory Company. The decade has been good to them. Along the way they retired a $30,000 debt, attracted a loyal group of followers, and gained the well-deserved reputation of being a consistently innovative and entertaining performance group. Even better, they’ve earned kudos from People Who Count, tike Tom Adams, producer of the International Theatrical Arts Society (TITAS). “Dancers Unlimited has demonstrated over a period of years that they can produce a good product,” says Adams. We agree. These guys make dance fun and accessible, greeting audiences with open arms-and pelvic lunges, pretzel bends, and other assorted Olympian exertions.

This holiday season, Dancers Unlimited will perform a couple of programs that are not, thank God, holiday themed. (Come on, there are only so many festive activities one can take in a month. Alternative offerings are welcomed.) On the December bill are two programs choreographed by a couple of the troupe’s founders. Dickinson’s dance version of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors and a celebration of the winter solstice set to Old English carols choreographed by recently appointed artistic director Lori Hughes will both be performed at the South Dallas Cultural Center at 10 a.m. on Dec. 6 and at the Trammell Crow Pavilion on Dec. 19. Both performances are free. For more information call 522-8988. -Michael Pellechia

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

For the first time in its 24-year history. The Greenhouse Spa is open during the holidays. Cash in those Christmas calories and sign up for either a three-day or seven-day pass. And as extra incentive, they’re offering special seasonal rates. (817) 640-4000.

SKY LIGHTS Leave traffic tie-ups to the earthlings below, and take your tour of Christmas lights skyward. Worldwide Aviation offers both helicopter and four-seater plane rides. For prices and times, call 985-4330.

Bed & Breakfasting in Fredericksburg



GETAWAY Need a respite from the holiday rush? Head for the Texas Hill Country and make yourself at home- literally. The European bed and breakfast concept of travel lodging has taken hold in contemporary homes and historic houses across the state. One place we’re particularly fond of is 75 miles west of Austin-the German township of Fredericksburg.

Whether you’re looking for a romantic guest house for two or a roomier gingerbread-style setting for the whole family, Fredericksburg is home to nearly 100 bed and breakfast inns and several B & B reservation services that match guests with accommodations.

When planning your excursion, you may want to choose a place to stay convenient to the main street in Fredericksburg. That way you’re within walking distance of a charming string of museums, galleries, clothing and antique stores (even last-minute Christmas shopping is stress-free here), historic homes and churches, and German bakeries and biergartens.

And, if shopping was the last thing you had in mind, you can escape to a remote ranch setting or country cottage to gather your sanity and vegetate for a couple of days before heading back to civilization.

Some places to call: Bed & Breakfast of Fredericksburg, (512) 997-4712; Be My Guest Lodging Service, (512) 997-7227; The Chemists Loft B & B and Reservation Service, (512) 997-8615 or 1-800-284-0526; Gastehaus Schmidt Reservation Service, (512) 997-5612.

For more information contact the Convention and Visitors Bureau at (512) 997-6523. -Lynn Adler

If it’s December it Must be The Fantasticks



THEATER “Try to remember a kind of September…” Barbra Streisand sang that and a song called “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” on her very first album. The show they came from, The Fantasticks, became the longest-running, off-Broadway musical of all because of its large-scale whimsy

and tuneful score. It’s kind of a Romeo and Juliet in reverse, with two comical fathers attempting to marry off their children instead of trying to keep them apart.

This may sound like an unlikely sort of vehicle to try to turn into a local yuletide tradition. Whoever heard of a show with a song that starts out “Rape. Ra-a-a-a-pe. Ra-a-a-pe” (it’s advertising a kidnapping service, not crying for help) as a Christmas specialty? But Theatre Three wants to make The Fantasticks just that, with a special December production outside its subscription season for the second year in a row. Theatre Three has always specialized in tittle musicals of this sort, and executive producer-director Jac Alder is the personification of whimsy. He and Jerry Haynes (television’s Mr. Peppermint) are again playing the roles of the fathers, but they’re switching the parts to keep it fresh. Theatre Three veteran director Cheryl Denson is at the helm again guiding the production.

The vehicle and the theater are a good match, a combo that should ensure yearly success. Besides, it’s definitely time to challenge the normal holiday Scrooge deluge with some alternative fare. Dec. 1-31. 871-2933. -W.L. Taitte