Pulse

It’s in a strip mall off Greenville Avenue and Forest Lane, in a storefront with no windows and less charm. But Don Nelson is a regular. In fact, in explaining on the Ticket 1310 AM how he got such great seats at the Oscars, Nelson declared the King’s X his favorite bar. So he started bringing along his friend Owen Wilson. The two wager at the shuffleboard table, Nelson with a beer in hand, Wilson often only with a water—the better to take Nelson’s money. “Nellie likes it here because people leave him alone,” says bartender Daryl Larose. Partly out of ignorance, the regulars have left Wilson alone, too. A couple of days after the duo’s first visit to the bar, Larose was flipping through channels and came across a Jackie Chan movie. “And, I’m like, that’s the same guy that was here!” he says.

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VERY PICKY: The band keeps it clean, but Barry Pullman (left) is rumored to be a rib man.

More Banjo
Forget the cowbell. Eating barbecue on a Saturday morning calls for stringed accompaniment.

Witness the Dallas Banjo Band. Forty members strong, they’ve played a free show at Back Country Bar-B-Q on the first Saturday morning of every month for the last five years. Don’t misunderstand. Back Country serves great ’cue. But the banjos are the real reason to go. Well, the banjos and the one tuba, played by Ernie Repass.

Most of the players are 65 or older. They’ve toured together for 16 years. Even played Wyoming. That they’ve stuck together, though, is an honor to Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery, the group’s former leader and a member of the Depression-era Light Crust Doughboys. On his deathbed in 2001, with the band’s future in doubt, Smokey had one request for his bandmate and friend Harold Poole: “Keep the band going.”

The set on a recent morning included “All That Jazz” and a cleaner version of the Ray Wylie Hubbard classic “Redneck Mother.” Because that’s the way Smokey would have wanted it. 6940 Greenville Ave. 214-696-6940. —MICHAEL DARLING

Photos by Elizabeth Lavin

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Snap Judgments

THUMBS UP: According to a recent report in the magazine Trader Monthly, T. Boone Pickens last year took home about $1.5 billion—perhaps the highest one-year income ever. Through his fund company BP Capital, Pickens bet that oil prices would rise. And they did. Returns on his main commodities pool were estimated to be above 700 percent in 2005. Pickens, 77, wouldn’t comment on Trader Monthly’s $1.5 billion number, but he told Reuters: “It was a very good year.”

THUMBS DOWN: The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is ruining the state’s image abroad as it uses gestapo tactics to arrest harmless drinkers. The agency has started sending undercover agents into bars to arrest people suspected of public intoxication. The idea is to curtail drunken driving. We thought that’s what designated drivers and cabs were for. But fine. We can almost tolerate that. What we can’t abide is the TABC arresting people in hotel bars—people who are registered guests of the hotel. In one well-publicized case, an Arkansas man in town on business was arrested in his Irving hotel and wound up losing his job because of it. That’s going too far. And because we’d rather call a person to the carpet rather than a faceless commission, we give this thumbs down to Gail Madden. The SMU grad and onetime chair of the Crystal Charity Ball lives in Dallas. And she’s one of the TABC’s three board members.

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From kissing mouths to heads of deceased pets, Wood has made a career of creating an exact copy of her subjects.

Don’t Move
If it’ll stay put, Cindy Wood will sculpt it.

“My house is full of body parts,” Cindy Wood says. She’s no ax murderer. She’s a sculptor. “I’ll cast anything that’ll stay still long enough.” From kissing mouths to heads of deceased pets, Wood has made a career of creating an exact copy of her subjects, frozen in a moment in time. She once cast the hands of 96 Brentfield Elementary students, and she has an ongoing contract to cast the hands of retiring Southwest Airlines pilots. She mounts them atop the Boeing 737’s thrust levers. She has even made a death mask.

“I networked with several funeral homes years ago to determine if there would be an interest in such a ‘commemoration’ of a deceased loved one. There was,” Wood says. “I just don’t advertise and promote that particular piece these days. I really prefer the living.”

The converted garage of her North Dallas home serves as her studio. There she employs a technique that she created to make her sculptures look as if they were bronzes. The material she uses to make the mold is an alginate, or “moulage,” made of centuries-old seaweed. Modern dentistry refined and incorporated it into its precision-casting techniques. She casts her sculptures with a mixture of architectural stone and resin. After it cures, she coats them with metallic pigment, then applies acids and a finish. “I just sort of played around with the coatings and acids for three years until I hit on the exact finish I was looking for,” she says. Wood might replicate moments in time, but she says she’s never seen anyone replicate her technique. —JENNY BLOCK

Photo by Elizabeth Lavin

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Open Letter to John McCaa

It might seem an insignificant detail, but we’re compelled to bring it up. See here, John. Your tie knot is consistently way too small.

We know you came to Dallas from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1984, because you’re still tying your tie like it’s 1984 and still living in Omaha, Nebraska. What is that? A four-in-hand? Seriously, tie knots that tiny went out of style a long time ago. Are you still wearing OP corduroy shorts?

Listen, we’re not advising you to go double Windsor like Baron James over at Fox Channel 4. But step it up to a half Windsor, give that silk some umpf, a little poof. Work it, anchorman!

But whatever you do, keep the mustache.

Photos: McCaa: Courtesy of WFAA; Model: Courtesy of Ralph Lauren

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Random Quote

“Few, if any, law enforcement officers are perfect, and just about all of them have a bad day occasionally.”
—Attorney Richard Carter, explaining his client’s behavior to the Star-Telegram. Fort Worth police officer Trini Feggett was fired after yelling racial slurs and sexually explicit comments at citizens, challenging another officer to a 102-mph race, and failing to help a stranded female motorist—all in the same day.

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Dallas Celebrities: Rated!
A new, super-sophisticated way to measure fame.

Why didn’t someone think of this sooner? That’s all Jeff Chown has heard recently. He’s the president of Davie-Brown Talent in Dallas and the creator of the Davie-Brown Index, the new metric that gauges a celebrity’s ability to influence consumers. But the DBI isn’t for the consumers’ use. It’s for the companies that hire the celebrities who shill to the consumers. It tells the companies, using eight attributes, which celebrities the public likes, trusts, wants to be, relates to—it tells them, in short, everything. Chown says the DBI is far superior to the Q Score, the 41-year-old industry standard that indicates only how many people have heard of Mr. Big Celebrity and how many name him (or her)as their favorite. Given the money companies now spend on celebrity endorsements, “an agency can’t afford not to have this,” Chown says. Advertisers pay $20,000 to gain access to the DBI database, which rates more than 1,500 celebrities based on 1.5 million consumer surveys. Below, a look at how our locals fared. —PAUL KIX

*Celeb’s ranking among all 1,500 in the DBI database; the lower the number, the more valuable the celebrity. Oprah is No. 1.
+Don’t just add up the columns. The DBI is calculated as the sum of .6 times Awareness score and .4 times Attributes average score out of 100 percent.

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Our Current Obsession

Woot is a web site run out of Carrollton. You can buy stuff on Woot.com, but only in a most unusual way: Woot offers exactly one (well-priced) item for sale each day. When they run out of the item, that’s it. And you can’t go back and buy yesterday’s item. Genius. But we love the site for its snappy writing. We drop in daily just to read the descriptions of what’s for sale. A recent example:

“New Clear Watch: Tremble before the great and terrible power of the atom. Locked within its molecular bonds is a force more violent than a volcanic eruption and more destructive than Terrell Owens. But when properly tamed, it can light our homes, sterilize our agricultural pests, and give us powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men.

“Such as the ability to tell time with perfect accuracy. The Casio Atomic Waveceptor Tough Solar Watch receives an invisible, odorless time calibration signal from the atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado, the most accurate clock on earth. Imagine the fun you’ll have constantly reminding your friends, co-workers, and cellmates that their clocks and watches are inaccurate. At last, all the fools will admit that you’re right! What are they going to do—argue with the mighty atom?”