We can totally see ourselves waking up next to Megan Henderson, the new co-anchor of KDFW-TV Fox 4’s Good Day morning show. The only problem is, we’d have to wake up pretty early, especially if we crawled out of bed when Henderson does. “I get up at 2:20,” she says and answers the next question before it’s even asked. “It’s all about coffee.” Lucky for the 28-year-old Henderson, whose first day on-air here was August 18, the schedule wasn’t too much of an adjustment. She comes to us after more than three years at Good Day Utah. It didn’t take long for her to get used to her new surroundings in Dallas, either. “Shopping and food could be the death of me,” she says. After spending some time with Henderson, we can report that she’s perky without being obnoxious, so we sure hope she doesn’t die. —Adam McGill

Photo by Stephen Karlisch

{ARTS}
Eviction Notice
South Side’s shooing out the riffraff—and some artists to boot. By Christina Rees

In the middle of the night, Scott Barber heard the swish of an envelope sliding under the front door of his studio loft at South Side on Lamar. It was July, and he was up late working on a series of paintings for his upcoming show at the Barry Whistler Gallery. In the envelope he found a notice and a formal letter signed by Rick Brettell, the possible savior of the Dallas art world. It read: “All of us … are grateful for your help” and for “bringing so much to the [South Side] community.” In effect: thanks, and get out.

“I thought I’d have at least two years here,” Barber says. “I gave up a great space in Oak Cliff to move here.”

Three years into its existence, South Side, the massive residential and commercial project that creeps through the historic Sears complex south of downtown, is a work in progress—one with plenty of growing pains.

Jack Matthews, its deep-pocketed developer, envisioned an urban center with a thriving community of creative thinkers, including subsidized artists living and working in South Side’s “Main Street”—a wide interior corridor faced with windows revealing the artists’ studios. Catherine Steele, South Side’s creative director, set about soliciting and installing artists in the spaces, seemingly with no standards and little direction. To be blunt, much of the art on the corridor was dismal.

Enter Dr. Richard Brettell, the aesthete who could. Brettell, a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and a founder of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, is now a professor in the arts and humanities department at the skyrocketing University of Texas at Dallas. Steele called on Brettell last year to help shape a program that she was too overwhelmed to handle. She hoped Brettell, with his immaculate taste, far-reaching connections, and university support, could transform South Side into Matthew’s original idea of a center for high-caliber artists.

“We’re rolling on this,” Brettell says. “The goal is to have faculty, residents, and students living and working at South Side.” What Brettell wants is a more strategic international artists-in-residence program, like the ones at the renowned Glassell School of Art in Houston and the ArtPace Foundation in San Antonio. Only Brettell says he has in mind something more flexible and “scrappy and urban.”

With the approval and funding of Matthews, individual donors, and UTD, Brettell is staffing the new program’s advisory committee with local art luminaries: Ted Pillsbury, David Quadrini, Nancy Whitenack, Joan Davidow—the list goes on. But before the launch of the program this fall, with its first noted artists coming in from New York, Mexico, London, and Cuba (with residency stints lasting two months to one year), Brettell and company felt they needed to clean house. “I have nothing to do with the past, just the future,” he says. “As the old leases terminate, the spaces will be turned over to the new artists.”

Not a problem when it comes to booting out the riffraff along the corridor, which will be the new program’s hub. But Barber’s ousting was odd for two reasons: his space was in South Side’s basement. He’d chosen it because he’s a private man and wanted to avoid the main corridor’s zoo windows. The other thing that made it odd was that, of the artists in the original program, Barber is inarguably talented. And, like Brettell, Barber teaches students about art—in his case, at the elite St. Mark’s School of Texas.

Barber had heard rumors of a mass eviction and had requested a meeting with Brettell. “He initially agreed to meet with me.” Barber says. “Instead I just received the letter.”

For a doctor of philosophy, Brettell has a pretty rough bedside manner. But he’s the best man for the job. He’s aggressive, exacting, and discriminating. And Barber knows it. He’s articulate about the benefits of Brettell’s leadership of the international artists-in-residence program, outlining how Dallas is the only major city without one and how South Side could boost the city’s profile.

In fact, Barber doesn’t seem to hold a grudge at all—just anxiety about how to proceed with his life and career. He hopes to negotiate a standard lease with South Side, with a rent that could triple. But in the past year, Barber has battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Rick Brettell isn’t nearly so bad.

HOT!
Baking cookies with Lisa Loeb and Dweezil Zappa

The other day, Lisa Loeb was in town to visit her parents and do a little cooking with her mom. The beguiling songstress and Hockaday grad brought along her boyfriend, Dweezil Zappa, who is the son of Frank and brother of Moon Unit. She also brought a camera crew.

In January the Food Network will debut Lisa & Dweezil, a cooking show-slash-
travelogue that follows the couple as they crisscross the country, gigging, eating, and preparing food.

The Dallas episode will feature a segment at the Loeb household, where Lisa and Dweezil were baking cookies with Lisa’s mom, Gail. Three cameras rolled tape while Dweezil struggled with a battery-powered flower sifter and cracked jokes about Gail’s admission that she uses tweezers to place the cherry halves atop Mamaw’s spritzer cookies.

Dweezil wore impressive sideburns. Lisa, with porcelain skin and her trademark feline eyeglasses, wore black slacks, a black V-neck blouse, and pink Pumas.

While the kitchen was busy, Lisa’s father and brother sat in the living room, ignoring it all. Lisa’s father read the New York Times. Her brother did a crossword.

Someone asked Lisa’s father if he found it at all odd that Dweezil Zappa was in his kitchen, with his wife, making Mamaw’s spritzer cookies for a television show.