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GOING OUT

By D Magazine |

HOT TICK

The 32nd Annual U.S. Space-modeling Championships take off in Dallas Aug. 6-10 at Sam-uell East Park, featuring some pretty serious flight competition between amateurs who build and fly model rockets. The national competition will be preceded by a weekend (Aug. 4-6) of model rocket building and flying, which the public is Invited to participate in. For more information, call 644-2067.

KING OF HEARTS

profile W.T. Greer knows his way around a song. And he wants you to follow him. Every night but Sunday, Greer sits down at the ebony grand nestled in the corner of The Library at the Melrose Hotel and starts his vocal wooing. A few Nat King Coles, a Gershwin, and a Cole Porter later, and he’s got the crowd right where he wants them-mesmerized by the thought of romance, in tears or on the verge, remembering when to anyone who will listen. “I want to move people, make them ’fall in love,’” Greer says. “I guess you might say I’m going through my romantic phase.” Yeah, you could say that. You could also say this ex-actor, ex-model, ex-microbiology major is one of the best song stylists to blowtorch his way into our hearts in a long time.

-Anne Warren

An Oak Cliff Oasis

discoveries One of the most enduring things about Oak Cliff is its hidden abundance of cultural eclectica. The Book Gallery, a unique little shop on South Edgefield Avenue, has managed to capture some of the town’s artistic diversity within its four square walls.

This former drugstore now houses secondhand books, antiques, paintings, photography, and sculpture by local artists such as Clint Imboden, Tony Holman, Scott Berry, and Joan Siebens. The Book Gallery even hosts “creative evenings” on the first Sunday of each month, when patrons are invited to bring samples of their work to share with other aspiring writers.

Owners Brian Falk and Tom Greer proudly claim the shop to be “one of a kind in Dallas,” and hope to make a success of what is now a part-time venture. The Book Gallery, 2101 S. EdgefieldAve., 943-9409.

-Cathlynn Richard

The Eighties Revisited

Theater Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, opening August 8 at Theatre 3 in the Quadrangle, deals with homelessness, AIDS, our economic system, and corporate chaos. So it’s a comedy, right? Actually, it is, although it’s a comedy with a social conscience. Greenberg sets out to describe what living in New York City was like in the Eighties, and it is naturally hard to describe the Big Apple without making it sound like the core of the fruit that Adam and Eve discarded after they had finished munching.

The first act, set in a tony Upper East Side bistro, shifts its attention among three tables. At one sits a young architect and his gay school chum. At another sits a beautiful stockbroker (the unwitting object of the architect’s obsession ) and her brother (who has caught the school chum’s fancy). At the third table sits a bag lady, schizophrenic perhaps, but essentially content with her life. As these folks begin to interact among themselves and with their waitress (an aspiring actress, of course-what Manhattan serving person isn’t?), chaos results.

The second act, in which all the characters converge upon the architect’s Long Island home, gives everyone the opportunity to voice their dreams and aspirations. Amid the witty epigrams and repartee, there is an underlying soberness. Life may be grim, the message goes, but the characters will take whatever accidental happiness presents itself.

Greenberg’s play, which started out atThe Manhattan Theatre Club beforemoving to Broadway, got great reviews inboth New York and Boston. Do we thinkits very East Coast sensibility will play inDallas? Probably-we’re not exactlyPeoria, after all. -B.J. Jungman

MUSCLE BEACH PARTYA bevy of large muscles will descend on Galveston on the 18th of this month for Lee Labrada’s Muscle Beach Extravaganza at the Moody Civic Center. Pro bodybuilder Labrada appears as guest-flexer. For info, call (713) 996-9206.

Anson Funderburgh: Keeper of the Flame



Music Forget Robert Cray, Tinsley Ellis, Kenny Neal, and other alleged guitar hotshots. If it’s uncompromised blues you want, take a listen to Anson Funderburgh.

Anson’s fans know they were lucky to have beard him at Poor David’s Pub on a majority of the last decade’s Monday nights. Anson also brought luck to 53-year-old Sam Myers, the band’s talented harp blower and singer who was off somewhere in Mississippi, career going nowhere, until he joined Anson in 1984. Myers has since realized his full . musical potential, and the result is the most successful black-white blending in blues history.

In 1988, Anson and Co. broke the stranglehold blues-rich Chicago has long held on the prized W.C. Handy awards, given yearly in Memphis. Anson and Sam carted off four of the awards, including Best Blues Band of the Year.

The key to Anson’s success is rhythm. Any guitarist who is as rhythmically compelling as Anson should be a star. Trouble is, that’s precisely what eludes a majority of young-blood bluesmen. They want to emote. They dazzle. But Funderburgh plays music that drives, that pushes on so gratifyingly the listener feels involved. This, without an iota of show biz, or even a theatrical gnashing of teeth. For blues of exceptional merit, Alison is the man to see. Which you can do this month at Fatso’s Burgers & Blues in Arlington on the 10th, and at Poor David’s in Dallas on the 11th.

-Tim Schuller

Banff Springs: 7O Degrees in the Shade Getaways Look out the window at the waves of heat rising from the concrete, and then imagine a baronial, Scottish, castle-like hotel, tucked into a verdant valley in the snowcapped Canadian Rockies, where the temperature can plummet below freezing in the dead of a summer night and seldom pushes past 70 degrees on an August afternoon.

The jewel of the Canadian province of Alberta, the Banff Springs Hotel has 829 rooms, 14 restaurants, and 33 shops. From the front, where kilt-clad doormen stand ready, the breathtaking view encompasses the cobalt-blue Bow River snaking through dense forests and, beyond, the Fairholme mountain range pushing its peaks into the clouds.

The touristy town of Banff Springs offers overpriced shopping and ho-hum restaurants, so you need not be enticed to stray far from the hotel, with two pools, ten whirlpools, saunas, an exercise room, tennis courts, a 27-hole golf course, and some delicious bits of history. Built in 1888 as a railroad hotel, a refuge of luxury in the wilderness, the hotel burned to the ground in 1926, but reopened in its present form two years later.

Two sights worth seeing: the flower-filled Cascade Gardens in town and the Sulphur Mountain Gondola ride near the hotel. For other attractions, including Lake Louise, information is available by calling 1-800-661-8888. For hotel reservations, call Canadian Pacific Hotels at 1-800-828-7447.

To get there: take Delta to Calgary witha change of planes in Salt Lake City.Then switch to a bus (Pacific Western orBrewster, both at the airport) or rentalcar for the two-hour trip to BanffSprings. -Derro Evans

A Transcultural World View

The City World-class buildings and airline schedules are mere window dressing on a truly international city. Only international people, woven into the local community at every economic, cultural, and intellectual level, can give that glossy facade a global heart, according to Dr. Kwasi Ohene-Bekoe of The International Center.

Headquartered in a modest wood-frame structure behind First United Lutheran Church on Mockingbird Lane, The International Center supplies practical traveler’s advice (whether you’re coming or going), translation services, and human services for new residents from afar. Founded by Ohene-Bekoe in 1987, the center offers Dallasites a panoramic window into the transcultural world, and international residents a welcome mat at the threshold of the city.

A monthly lecture series is just one example of opportunities The International Center provides for Dallasites to become internationally well rounded. The lecture series, which is supported by the Texas Committee for the Humanities (a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities), explores topics normally confined to university campuses, but a unique breadth of discussion arises from the diverse audience.

Banquets of international cuisine (for which there is a $15 charge) precede each lecture, breaking the ice by breaking bread. The second course at upcoming lectures includes SMU history professor John Mears on developments in Eastern Europe and UT Asian studies professor, Gordon Bennett, on changes in China. The lectures and discussion following the banquets are free and open to the public. For more information call 821-7775.

-John Trimble and Phyllis Williams

The Black-eyed Pea King of Texas Real people Just about any farmer around Canton will tell you that if Winford Sides ever decides to close down his operation, the price of peas in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma would double-if you could get them at all. Sides, 62, has been the main supplier of peas in these areas since 1948, earning him the title of “Black-eyed Pea King of Texas.”

Sides, his wife, two daughters, son-in-law, and nephew work year-round to keep his customers’ freezers stocked. Those who know him say he works from sunrise to sunset overseeing his pea kingdom.

“Other farmers raise peas,” he says, “but the trick is in the marketing.1’ Sides’s no-frills operation is about as efficient and pocketbook-friendly as any business could be. Mostly handpicked, the peas go from the vines to the trucks, down the conveyer, through a husker, and then onto another belt that drops them into sacks and boxes for shipping.

To visit the Black-eyed Pea King of Texas, go south from Canton one mile on FM 19, then left on 2909 for two miles till you come to Sides’ Fresh Pea Farm. A bushel will cost $15-$20. You can also get the same peas at Farmer’s Market, stalls 331, 333, and 335, any day of the week.

Sides’s green peas, freshly shelled, will cook in less than an hour in a saucepan; no need for soaking or a pressure cooker. If you don’t wash them, they will stay nice in the freezer for up to a year.

-Tom Dodge

A BUTTER WAY

It has come to our attention that The Inwood and The Lake wood theaters are the only remaining moviehouses in town that continue to anoint their popcorn with butter. No scary liquid 1poly-products for them-they know movie popcorn deserves to begreased down with the real thing.

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