GOING OUT

HOT TICKET

Since Czechoslovakia is a veritable hotbed of antisocial behavior these days, we felt inclined to suggest a global (and very social) approach to New Year’s Eve. One that transcends party hats and champagne-like-geopolitical polka. Don’t scoff. The Czech Club, a Dallas dance hall, will hold its annual dance on Dec. 31 with music by the Czech Harvesters. Call 381-9072 for more Information. It’s the politically correct thing to do.

THAT VISION THING

Tired of repetitious resolutions, I opted for a non-traditional approach to the new year-like having somebody predict my next 12 months for me. My quest led me to Trudy, a woman who knows the palm of your hand like the back of hers, a woman who told me I’d get married this spring to a recently divorced professional man from Houston who wears Hermès ties and Bally shoes and parts his prematurely graying hair on the left side. (Information like this certainly makes life easier, if you ask me. Too bad she couldn’t be more specific.) You too, can make an investment in your future ($60 an hour), by calling Trudy at 690-9408. -Anne Warren

Digging for Urban Treasures

OFF THE BEATEN PATH So, you’re in the market for some anything-but-new object to lend character and conversation to your Nineties living space. A gingerbread-style door frame salvaged from an old farmhouse, a reconditioned brass light fixture gingerly removed from a historic school building, or perhaps a claw-footed tub from a turn-of-the-century hotel. Few local wrecking and demolition companies actually salvage or recycle these relics of the past, but we found three good places to start. You’ll find vintage lumber and molding, ornate doors, beveled and stained-glass windows, porcelain doorknobs, and more. Considering the historical value of such objects, the prices will delight you, and the search is as fun as the find.

You might want to start out in Dallas at Orr-Reed Wrecking Co., 1903 Rock Island St., 428-7429. In the business for 42 years, Jack Orr has four large yard/warehouse areas filled to capacity, including an incredible stock of doors in every size and description.

On to Fort Worth and The Old Home Supply House, 1801 College Ave., (817) 927-8004. Ralph Watterson has built quite a reputation for his collection of reconditioned objects-wood and hardware, pedestal sinks, and fireplace fronts. Housed in a 1927 red brick grocery/drugstore building, all 5,000 square feet of merchandise is not reconditioned, mind you, but the service is available.

Finally, head for Hearne Wrecking & Lumber Co., 2466 S. Riverside Dr., (817) 535-2191, revered locally as the granddaddy of them all for more than 40 years. The Hearne family has worked to preserve pieces of the past pulled from such buildings as the old Worth Hotel, the Lake Worth Casino, the Western Hills Motel, and, most recently, the Tastee Bakery building. Hearne’s has loads of lumber and molding, hundreds of doors and glass knobs, window sashes, beaded ceilings, some beautiful lighting fixtures, tubs, junk, and even antique floor heaters and grates.-Lynn Adler



Madama Butterfly Alights on Fair Park



OPERA As far back as we can remember, you have never been able to go to an opera in Dallas in the month of January. But this year, with the opening of the Meyerson center, the Music Hall at Fair Park is free to house opera almost any time.

So, for our first January opera in memory, Dallas Opera is presenting Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a longstanding favorite. Puccini’s tale of an American naval officer who pretends to marry a young Japanese girl, then abandons her, contains the most sensual love duet in all of opera (the most famous aria ever written-’Un bel di”) and enough heartbreak to ensure that there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Yoko Watanabe and Giorgio Tieppo make their Dallas debuts as Butterfly and U. Pinkerton, and maestro Nicola Rescigno conducts on Jan. 5, 9, and 12 at 8 p.m. and Jan. 7 and 14 at 2 p.m. Tickets $5 to $70. 871-0090. -W. L. Taitte

LONE ADVENTURES

Going Solo, the perfect travel newsletter for those who like going it alone, features the faraway and the familiar. It highlights restaurants offering communal dining as well as hotels where you’ll feet more at home than alone. $36 a year. P.O. Box 1035, Cambridge, MA 02238.



A Cultural Memory

PROFILE “I see my images as being sacred; I’m making icons of my culture,” says the kindly, soft-spoken Dallas artist Jean Lacy. With irony, she reinterprets the urban environment as a United Nations that extends beyond time and cultural boundaries. One of Jean Lacy’s paintings of a glittery, figure-studded tenement graces the current catalogue cover of the Dallas Museum of Art’s national touring exhibition, Black Art-Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. The undiscovered artist’s work was honored by being selected from almost 50 American and Caribbean artists. “I never imagined to he recognized like this in my lifetime,” confldes Lacy. The picture, Little Egypt Condo/Sew York City, twinkles with gold leaf, tempera paint, and magazine cutouts. In the collage-a mosaic of Egyptian, American, and voodoo images-modern black men slap hands in greeting and black women dressed as Egyptians pose in Congo stance. Her small-scale pieces hearken back to 14th-century Byzantine icons, which were used as personal religious shrines. The trained artist’s work refers to art history and also incorporates a folk tradition. Her suburban home/studio is filled with collections of apron-skirted black dolls, ceramic jugs with grotesque faces, and memory pots used as funerary jars. “All this African art inspires me,” she says proudly. “Black mammy dolls are stereotypes, but they have other meanings; I see them as guardians, protectors of the household.” In her artwork, Lacy deals with what she calls “an innate cultural memory” that reaches beyond her African heritage. Other pieces in the show bespeak the layers of meaning in Jean Lao’s precious, story-telling treasures on display at the Dallas Museum of Art through Feb. 25.

-Joan Davidow



Escape to Baja

GETAWAY January brings balmy days and cool nights to Cabo San Lucas, located at the southernmost tip of Baja California in an area the Mexican government has dubbed Los Cabos-The Capes. Between Cabo on the Pacific coast and San José del Cabo on the shores of the Bay of Cortés are some of the most glorious beaches in North America, stretched out in largely uninhabited splendor. Playing Robinson Crusoe for the day is child’s play here along the jade and sapphire waters of the bay.

That sense of peaceful isolation forms the general idea of vacationing in Baja. It’s a long way from the West End, and no matter how hard the developers in Cabo work to turn it into Condo City, it’ll never qualify as a Mexico hot spot.

The best lodging by far: Hotel Palmilla (1-800-854-2608), a meticulously managed, grandly atmospheric smaller hostelry on the beach near San Jose. Or try the nearby Hotel Twin Dolphin (1-800-421-8925), popular with a younger, California crowd, and the Finisterra (1-800-347-BAJA), with a dazzling view from atop the cliffs in Cabo. Mexicana Airlines (1-800-531-7921) can get you there four days a week, with a stopover in Puerto Vallarta. -Derro Evans



a 4-Foot tree Made Out Of Toasters?



Odd, offbeat, nontraditional, experimental, bizarre, absurd, incomprehensible, progressive, regressive, and twisted. You’ll see it all at the First Annual Cowtown Festival of Weird Art. Dec. B-Jan. 31-Out of Bounds Art Space in Fort Worth. (817) 336-8222.

Silver Screen Dreams Can Come True

Movies All my life I’ve wanted to be involved with motion pictures, but one thing or another led me down different roads. It wasn’t until Hollywood found its way to my Oak Cliff neighborhood that I got a chance to have a lifelong dream fulfilled.

I watched as a few blocks of Edgefield Avenue were transformed into the small town of Massapequa, Long Island, for the Filming of Born on the Fourth of July. The decade became the Fifties and later the Sixties, and I relived history and my own past as I was caught up in the action of being a “movie extra.”

The thrill of those days when Tom Cruise played Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic are still with me a year later. Why? Because this movie has a real story to tell; even then, as we stood on the set, we knew we were a part of something important.

So now the moment is upon us. America will grieve for a war we never understood and never had a chance of winning. We will recognize our veterans and maybe begin to understand something of their pain.

For those of us in Oak Cliff, it will be more than just a movie about a town on Long Island, it will always be our back yard, (Born on the Fourth of July opens in early January.) -Cathlynn Richard



A Soulful Commemoration

CONCERTS There may be no better way to characterize the civil rights movement, its pain, trials, and triumphs, than through the music that spiritually sustained those who fought in thetrenches in the Sixties. From the first hushed renderings of “We Shall Overcome” to Mahalia Jackson’s plaintive delivery of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gospel and black folk music underscored the era, giving theme and cadence to the epic struggle for equal rights.

The annual “Black Music and the Civil Rights Movement” concerts (performed in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.) are sponsored by the Junior Black Academy of Arts and Letters and have been a Dallas tradition since 1984. The most memorable one surely was in 1988 when Esther Rolle (of TV’s “Good Times”), clad in African garb and flanked by men in chains and loincloths, emerged from the darkness of the Fair Park Music Hall on a replica of a slave ship, reciting the words of Harlem Renaissance poet Sterling A. Brown. Later, singer Jennifer Holliday (of Dream Girls fame) rocked the rafters with several gospel songs, backed by a 300-voice local choir.

The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center will be the setting for this year’s concert, Jan. 14 at 7 p.m. Melba Moore will headline with the support of a 175-voice choir. The audience is asked to wear white “to symbolize unity of purpose, as well as the purity of struggle,” says JBA founder and president Curtis King. Red armbands will be distributed, King added, “to represent the blood shed by those who fought in the battle against racial injustice and oppression.” For tickets call Metro (817) 640-7400. -Rosalyn Story



Non-standard Fare

After the excesses of the holidays, January finds you frugal-and bored. Our suggested quick fix: spend Sunday evening at The Dream Cafe, where for the price of dinner you’ll be rewarded with the intelligent, lyrical strains of the Gyros String Quartet.