Since mid-March, Dallas’ cultural venues have been eerily quiet. Thousands of seats in cavernous concert halls remain empty. The stages are dark, the general admission floors are empty. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t just changed business for many in the live event industry. There is no business. While Congress considers a bipartisan bill that would cover nearly half of a venue’s operating costs, the outlook is grim. 

Deep Ellum was hit particularly hard. There are about 25 live performance venues in the neighborhood. So when efforts to curb the coronavirus restricted large gatherings, the neighborhood’s lights dimmed. 

“We’ll go around at night and it’s dead still–feels like we’re in small-town America or something,” says Clint Barlow, owner of the Bomb Factory, Canton Hall, and Trees. All three venues have been shuttered for nearly five months. Barlow says he is paying his employees out of his own pocket. 

Lily Cabutu Weiss, executive director of the Dallas Arts District, says the district’s venues have lost $23 million through May 31. Citywide, a survey of 57 arts organizations found total losses at $34 million through the end of May; most of the losses are concentrated in the Arts District. At the nonprofit AT&T Performing Arts Center, about 60 percent of the staff has been furloughed. 

Survival is an active process for the AT&T Performing Arts Center, which is starved for ticket revenue and ancillary income from concessions and parking. It’s bringing in almost nothing. The center created a “Raise the Curtain Campaign” to encourage donations and still retains contributed income from sponsors. That source of revenue has suffered, too, as a recession impacts every business’ financial standing.

“We thought it would be short term and the dynamics of this thing were that almost every day, but certainly every week, the new facts were surfacing that the case rate was going up … so every week, the news really got more dire,” said Debbie Storey, president and CEO of the AT&T Performing Arts Center. “We spent week after week after week just saying, ‘What if we can’t open till April? What if we can’t open until July? What if we can’t open until September?’’

She said, “I guess you can only eat the salad here?”

I said, “Pretty much.”

She said, “Is that what it’s like being a vegetarian in Dallas?”

I said, “Nah, it’s all right, there’s some nice spots around town”

What she didn’t know was the underworld, the door to door, the non-state-inspected kitchens, the aunties, The Brown Market.

You see, life finds a way. Even in a city like Dallas where BBQ and big hair reign supreme—aunties, Sri Lankan aunties, find a way to make and sell Sri Lankan delicacies on a mass scale. It’s word-of-mouth marketing: you call a land line, you get a disgruntled teen who hands a phone to an auntie, she takes an order, and, in a day or two, the disgruntled teen delivers a tray of food to your house.

Your Daily Coronavirus Update. Yesterday, Dallas County added another 537 cases and six deaths, continuing a downward trend. This was a much better day than Wednesday, when the county added 704 cases and a record 36 deaths. We know deaths often lag new cases, so the jump isn’t totally unexpected. But it’s terrific news that we didn’t set another record. Hospitalizations jumped to 658 and about a quarter of all ER visits are related to COVID-19. Statewide cases dipped below 10,000 to 8,800. County Judge Clay Jenkins is urging residents to purchase takeout and stay out of restaurants. This feels like a holding pattern; let’s hope the dips continue.

Texas Superintendents Are None Too Happy With Ken Paxton. The attorney general’s new guidance “muddied the waters” after Gov. Greg Abbott gave local health authorities permission to push back the beginning of school at least until September 8. Paxton sent a letter contradicting that, saying public health officials could not keep campuses closed indefinitely to slow the spread of coronavirus. As such, if schools don’t open, they risked losing state funding. Here’s the quote from the Texas Association of School Administrators: “We believe schools should have the authority to work with local health officials to determine when it is safe for schools to be open for in-person instruction without the threat of funding cuts by the state.”

Dwaine Caraway Is Staying In Jail. A federal judge denied the disgraced councilman’s request to spend the remainder of his sentence at home due to his health problems and the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus. The judge found that Caraway’s argument was not enough, that it did not present any “extraordinary and compelling” evidence that he should be granted home confinement. Caraway’s co-conspirator, Robert Leonard, also was denied his request to be sent home. They’ll both probably petition the Bureau of Prisons for the same thing.

We Got Ourselves a Cold Front. Even if that only means that our high is just 92, it’s a nice deal. Less humidity is in the forecast, too. As I type this, it’s 75. It’ll be 84 by noon. Maybe take a morning walk.

Mariana Griggs thinks I have said things about her in the past that were not true. I don’t think I ever said what she says I said. I might have implied it. Maybe. I never said it. But, OK, let’s just clear the decks anyway.

Mariana Griggs, wife of former council member and mayoral candidate Scott Griggs, says she never went out one night 10 years ago and painted DIY bike lanes on Dallas streets with a traffic-lane striping machine. I must take her at her word.

A moment after telling me this, however, she gets a look in her eye. She says, “But I do know who did.” Well, forgive me, but to my nose that carries a whiff of complicity. The thing about those bike lanes: whoever painted them got the city’s attention. Within a few years, “official” bike lanes were sprouting all over Dallas.

But back to Mariana Griggs. We have to look at what I believe the clinical psychologists would call a sustained pattern of behavior. It has been 10 years now since the alleged renegade bike lane painting matter. I sit now with her on the front steps of the stately Griggs home on Montclair Avenue in the Winnetka Heights Historic District of Oak Cliff, gazing out onto a full-blown vegetable garden in the broad strip of land between the sidewalk and the street where there is supposed to be grass. This is also what Mariana Griggs does. She is a founding partner of an urban micro-farm called Granja Urbana, which helps people learn to farm in urban areas. Now she’s found a new patch to work on.

But prominently displayed on bamboo poles at one end of the garden is an orange stop work order from the city. I don’t see any work stopping.

“I did talk to a city code person,” she tells me. “She was very nice. Very professional. She said, ‘I’m putting a stop work order in your garden, because you need to get permission before you continue.’”

The thing being, once you plant a vegetable garden, especially in the summer in Texas, you can’t just stop watering and tending it or you might as well pour gasoline on it and strike a match. So she is still watering and tending. But is that the same thing as continuing?

Griggs has always operated in an area where forgiveness is sought more readily than permission. “If I had asked permission to do this,” she says, “I was never going to get it.” Her garden is at the front of her house rather than in the ample backyard, she says, because the front of the house is where the sunlight falls.

We used to watch Forensic Files until dawn or until fear invaded us. Our one takeaway being that a lot of people were now dead over life insurance money. You made me promise then that we’d never kill each other via minute, imperceptible amounts of arsenic, that we’d never even consider pulling the teeth out of one of our lifeless heads for the sake of getting away with murder. I remember you’d get up and check the locks often—to keep people out, you said, and to keep me in.

At the time you were taking literature courses at the community college across the street and you’d read aloud the texts you were assigned. Because you’d implied at one point that I was shallow or vain—I can’t remember which (probably both)—I would sit through it all and say things after lengthy passages to impress you:

Goneril and Regan are dicks. And later, Poseidon is, too. And so on in that vein.

Dallas County Reports a Record 36 Deaths Due to COVID-19. There were also 704 new cases yesterday.

New Sexual Assault Allegations Against Tony Ronzone Raise Questions for the Mavericks, as Well as Sports Illustrated. An investigation published yesterday by SI claims that that the team failed to fully investigate allegations of sexual assault against Tony Ronzone, the director of player personnel for the Dallas Mavericks, which were raised by a woman in July 2019. The Mavericks issued a swift response, raising some valid questions about why a number of pieces of evidence referred to by SI, including contemporaneous statements the woman made to others at the time of the alleged assault, were never released, even in redacted form, to the team. The Mavericks further state that The Bloom Firm, which represents the woman, refused to release the evidence unless “the Mavs came to the negotiating table to discuss a settlement” and agreed to a number of stipulations. The Mavericks also raised some less valid questions, insinuating that the woman’s failure to file a police report was proof of her lack of credibility. (RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, states that of every 1,000 incidents of sexual assault, 230 are reported to police and only 5 result in a felony conviction.) I’m sure more details will be forthcoming, and I’m interested to see what they are.

City of Dallas Extends Furlough for More Than 400 Employees. Many who have been going unpaid since May, including library and rec center staff, have been notified that they will continue to be off work through at least the end of September.

Joyrides Are a Dumb Idea, and Good Deeds Aren’t Always Returned in Kind. A 15-year-old was taken into custody yesterday after allegedly stealing two vehicles, the second of which was a truck owned by a good Samaritan who stopped to help after the teen crashed the first stolen car into a highway barrier in Grapevine. Police say after an ensuing chase, the teen began driving toward the officer, causing the officer to fire four rounds at the truck, none of which struck the teen. The teen then continued to drive into Southlake, where he crashed the truck into another vehicle and started running. That’s when a police dog finally took him down.