Pulse

Ice Queen

Hilary Kennedy has great teeth. They’re cute, white, and
clean—just like the rest of her. That’s why she doesn’t wear skates as
the entertainment hostess for the Dallas Stars, who better be in the
playoffs when this issue hits newsstands or else a certain local
magazine writer is going to be disappointed. “I’m horrible,” she says.
“My mom’s a dentist, and she wouldn’t be happy with me if I chipped a
tooth falling on the ice.” Even without skates, there’s a looming
danger of a crowd-pleasing spill. “Some season-ticket holders have told
me they’ve placed wagers on when I’ll wipe out,” she says. Kennedy, 24,
grew up in Coppell and graduated from TCU. In addition to her gig as
the between-period emcee, she has appeared in a couple of commercials
and has some independent films lined up. Until then, you can continue
to see her orchestrating the Bud Bottle Races, human curling, musical
chairs, and the like. But not one idea she pitched to her bosses: “You
can take frozen turkeys and a giant slingshot and try to score a goal,”
she says. The Stars organization went with frozen wieners instead. —Adam McGill

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A Few Questions from Tracy Rowlett

After he was fired last August, former Dallas Police
Chief Terrell Bolton told the City Council he just wanted his good name
back. But now he wants money. His Dallas lawyer, Bob Hinton, says the city violated its charter and ruined Bolton’s good name. He is suing for $5 million, for “mental anguish.”

ROWLETT: You’re asking for $5 million. Why that figure?
HINTON:
I have no idea what the experts, the economists, the actuaries are
going to say the damage is. But I thought $5 million would relate to
the $5.6 million that the city threw away on those seven properly
demoted command staff officers.

ROWLETT: The families of the 9/11 victims have
received, on average, $1.8 million. Is Bolton’s pain and suffering
greater than theirs?
HINTON: No. It’s not greater. It can’t be
any greater. I mean nothing could be worse than that, of course. We’re
not talking about just his suffering. We’re talking about his lack of
marketability. He’s 44 years old and hasn’t got a job and can’t get one
because of the way he was treated by the city.

ROWLETT: How much of that $5 million would you get?
HINTON: We have a contingent fee agreement with Bolton that, I think, would be a 33-and-a-third contingent agreement.

ROWLETT: We’re hearing charges of racism and things
we haven’t heard in 25 or 30 years around here. Do you feel any sense
of responsibility for this clash?
HINTON: A lot of people
view this as having been motivated by race. I don’t think it’s a racial
problem, unless, of course, Laura Miller has a problem with
non-Caucasians.

ROWLETT: You’re not accusing her of being a racist, are you?
HINTON: I’m not accusing her of being a racist. She just doesn’t like Terrell, and she doesn’t like Ted [Benavides].

ROWLETT: Bolton is unavailable. Is that your doing?
HINTON:
He is entrenched in his religion, in his church. And the people in his
church are really well-meaning people. Maybe not knowingly, but they
are certainly putting a lot of pressure on him to make this look like
something that it’s not. It’s that world against Laura Miller. This is
not about Laura Miller. But the African-American community wants it to
be about Laura Miller, and that’s been putting a lot of pressure on
Terrell.

ROWLETT: So, if you could, you’d say to the African-American leadership, “Please back off?”
HINTON: Well, don’t back off, but don’t make us your utility tool to accomplish that, because that’s not what it is.

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{ BEVERAGE }
What’s the Dill?
How the FDA robbed America of its salty treat.
by Tim Rogers

The Goldin Pickle Company in Garland has been producing
and packing pickles since 1923 and has enjoyed the kind of prosperity
that any regional pickle concern would envy. Four million pounds of
pickles per year is pretty impressive.

Then, in 2001, Brandon Brooks had a radical idea: why not bottle and sell not just pickles but pickle juice?
Or, even better, a pickle juice-like concoction with a secret recipe
that included filtered water, salt, white distilled vinegar, and high
fructose corn syrup? Thus was born Original Goldin Pickle Juice.
Slogan: “Quench the Craving!” That year, Brooks and his partner,
Stephen Collette, sold about 48,000 16-ounce bottles of the stuff.

There
was just one problem. Pickles, as everyone knows, are salty. And so is
pickle juice, even if the drink is not really the juice left over from
pickling pickles but is, rather, just a pickle juice-like concoction. A
16-ounce bottle of Original Goldin Pickle Juice had 3,280 milligrams of
sodium, about 128 percent of the recommended daily allowance.

But
that wasn’t the problem with Pickle Juice. The problem was the label on
the 16-ounce bottle indicated that one serving was 4 ounces (820
milligrams of sodium). And about five months ago, the Food and Drug
Administration sent Collette a letter. The FDA had determined that
quenching a craving for pickle juice would require more than 4 ounces.
A single serving, they said, should be 8 ounces. The label had to be
changed.

Despite the piping times at Goldin Pickle Company,
printing new pickle juice labels proved cost-prohibitive. Plus there
was a possible public-relations problem that could pop up from saying
that one serving would contain 1,640 milligrams of sodium. Production
was stopped.

Collette says he still gets calls and e-mails every
week from people all over the country who miss their Pickle Juice. Some
say it helps with pulmonary hypertension.

“It was an adjunct to the pickle business, and it was fun,” he says. “But we’re sticking to pickles.”

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HOMECOMING: Designer John Bobbitt says his neighbors are eccentric.

{ REAL ESTATE }
The Rebirth of Cool
Maple Terrace—the hippest apartment building in Dallas—makes a comeback.
by Mary Brown Malouf

Since its construction in the 1920s, Maple Terrace, at
the corner of Wolf and Maple streets, has been home to many of Dallas’
best-known artists, designers, and interesting people. Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke,
art dealer Laura Carpenter, fashion designer Todd Oldham—they all lived
there. The Alahambresque apartment building has also been the source of
more than one urban myth. They say there used to be a tunnel between
the Terrace and the Stoneleigh Hotel across the street. They say Sir
Alfred Bossom, an eccentric Englishman who built the place, had Tex-Mex
flown to London for his lunch.

But four years ago, the building
changed hands, and the grande dame of Dallas apartment houses fell
victim to the chimera of luxury real estate. News that the bohemian
heart of town was about to go upscale, like the Uptown that had
recently grown up around it, sent longtime residents fleeing. The new
owners were talking five-star restaurants, five-star hotel. Occupancy
dropped to about 50 percent, and everyone who stayed had to go
month-to-month.

But Maple Terrace is back. Shortly after 9/11,
the hotel plans were scrapped. It was too expensive to renovate the old
building, especially given that other hotels were hurting for guests.
Now the place is about 95 percent leased, and Maple Terrace is
returning to its place as the center of eclectic Dallas. Or, rather,
eclectic Dallas is returning to Maple Terrace.

Maple Terrace
doesn’t have the amenities of new luxury apartments. No 24-hour
concierge, no fountains in the pool, no electric gates, no business
center. But it does have history. And if you know the folks at the
Stoneleigh and they’re not busy, you can still get room service.

“Everyone
is coming back,” says Tressia Young, who became the property manager a
little more than two years ago. “Lots of people who lived here before
have moved back into the building.”

Hairdresser Gary Hottinger
is there. So are concert promoter Angus Wynne,  event planner
Quentin Pell, and Zero 3’s Jan Martin. Designer John Bobbitt has
returned to his old haunt. He lived at Maple Terrace from 1983 to 2001,
was part of the exodus, then returned in November.

“There’s a
‘for lease’ sign out front,” Bobbitt says. “That’s one thing that’s
changed. The old manager, Dorothy, who passed away, is probably turning
over in her grave. She had a list. If she didn’t like you, you didn’t
get in. Now, if we don’t like someone, we just frown at them until they
leave.”

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THE BEVNAP FILES

With all the crime recently on Lower Greenville, it
seems the bandits and highwaymen outnumber the good citizens who are
just out to have dinner and a drink. One entrepreneur is poised to take
advantage of the trend—apparently by catering to the criminals. We had
cocktails with him the other night. When he excused himself to visit
the john, we stole his plans.

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Piraro for the People
Comic artists puts his pen down and hits the road.

When New York-based cartoonist Dan Piraro
returns to town this month, it won’t be to wax sentimental about the 20
years he lived here. Rather, it will be to drive a fiery (albeit funny)
torch into the eye of the conservative Republican beast.

“We’ll make no bones about what kind of message you’re getting,” Piraro says of his new traveling comedy show, Bizarro’s PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go,
something he put together out of his frustration with the current
political environment and Bush administration. “We’re taking it right
to Bush country,” he says. “If we could set up a stage at the Crawford
Ranch, we would.”

Piraro, the creator of the award-winning syndicated newspaper comic Bizarro, as well as a former cartoonist for D Magazine,
chose Dallas as the first stop on the show’s tour for a few reasons.
“There are liberals in Texas whose votes basically don’t even count,”
he says. “This show is for them.” And he hopes the show can “pull
people out of the closet who don’t even bother to vote, especially
young voters. We want to get them interested in the upcoming election.”

The
show features Piraro as emcee and three other barb-tongued comics:
Michael Capozzola and Brian Malow from San Francisco, and Jeff Kreisler
from New York. At the end of each performance, Piraro might read from
his new mock children’s book, The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House.
“It’s about Dickie, Rummy, and Dubya,” he says. “They take a nation of
bricks and turn it to straw while they search for the Big Bad Wolf.”

After its Dallas debut, Bizarro’s PolitiComedy
will head south to Austin and Houston, before moving to more
liberal-friendly territory on both coasts and Canada. But Piraro, who
loves his newly adopted Big Apple (where, he says, “you can say
anything you want to about Bush”) has some lingering affection for Big
D. “I know all 200 Democrats who live there. And they’re my friends.” —Christina Rees

Bizarro’s PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go comes to the Addison Improv April 11 and 12.

Photos: Ice Queen: Sean McCormick; Maple Terrace: Doug Davis