Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2008 > February > 20
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Your A-List: Best Spa
I know, I know, the experience sounds heavenly: All those massages, mani-pedis, scrubs, packs, healthy eats and drinks. What better way to recuperate for a weekend of Outing and Abouting?
Just because we don’t have firsthand knowledge of these establishments, doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate that the Second Street District 2006 addition Milk + Honey must be treating customers right, having won 30 percent of your A-List vote. Cheers to the relative new kid on the block.
No. 2 Lake Austin Spa — considered one of the best in the world — has had longer to earn its 26 percent. The Crossings took 8 percent, Barton Creek 7 percent, Jackson Ruiz 6 percent, Mecca almost 6 percent, Four Seasons 5 percent, Ann Kelso, Daya Aziz and Joie de Vie right around 3 percent, and Salon 505 2 percent.
Write-ins: Dayhouse, Iris, Kisma, LifeSpa at Lifetime Fitness, Spa Django at Hyatt Lost Pines, Tower Health Club, Vickmay and Woodhouse.
Gotta try that sometime.
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Your A-List: Best Smoothie
With locations on Barton Springs Road and Lake Austin Boulevard, Daily Juice, your winner in the A-List vote with 33 percent, is positioned to service runners, bikers, swimmers and other athletes and recreationalists. DJ also operates a popular mobile unit (see photo).
Here’s what austin360.com blogger Matthew Odam wrote when the Lake Austin location opened: “Daily Juice offers a wide variety of organic vegetable and fruit juices and smoothies. Customers can make their own or order from a broad array of juices and smoothies already devised by the juice masterminds. The store also carries delicious vegetarian and vegan food products, from the Vegan Snicker Doodle to an assortment of treats offered by Baraka Foods Co., a natural food company owned by Daily Juice co-owner Keith Wahrer.”
If not a specialty shop, the next best place to find a smoothie is where they sell the food: Whole Foods came in second with 18 percent, Wheatsville third with 17 percent and Central Market fourth with 8 percent. (Actually, it tied exactly with Jungle Juice.)
Close behind was ice-cream purveyors Amy’s with 7 percent. Taking less than 5 percent: Flipnotics, Maui Wowi, Zoombaz and Camille’s
Image of Daily Juice on Lake Austin Boulevard by Matthew Odam
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Update: Sandra Bullock, Owen Wilson, Dennis Quaid, Taylor Kitsch
Sandra Bullock: She’s slated for another romantic comedy, “The Proposal.” We also hear she’s finally getting local author Amanda Eyre Ward’s “Sleep Toward Heaven” on a faster track (she optioned the novel in 2003).
Owen Wilson: Is he getting his groove back through “Marley & Me” with Jennifer Aniston in Miami?
Taylor Kitsch: Won’t be hanging around Austin for a while, since “Friday Night Lights” is on hiatus, so will join the cast of “Wolverine,” along with Mr. Romantic of the Moment Ryan Reynolds, an infrequent Austin visitor since filming “Fireflies in the Garden” here.
Dennis Quaid: His “Vantage Point” is a critical bust, but he’s all over the news in his new “G.I. Joe” role as General Hawk. Check this image of Quaid in his costume uniform.
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It’s not hard to be Out in Austin
The voice was soft and steady, more Gulf Coast than Central Texas, steeled with an authority acquired, most likely, through motherhood.
“Mr. Barnes, I don’t think the general public is interested in reading about the gay lifestyle … “
The call was inevitable.
Although only a fraction of Out & About chronicles the lives — not the lifestyles — of gay Austinites, the subject still rankles.
I was pleasantly surprised that it took five months of the print version of Out & About before just two readers complained about the gay thing (more on the second response later). In 1994, when the American-Statesman ran a front-page story on how AIDS had devastated the Austin arts community, the attacks were numerous and vicious, including unholy glee over the illness and demise of local artists.
It was also my first experience with death threats. One came scrawled over the image of Nazi SS officer: “We will hunt you down and exterminate you.”
All this despite the fact that the word “gay” never appeared in the article.
By 2001, the civic mood had changed. For a high-profile series of articles, writing partner Sean Massey and your columnist surveyed 1,200 members of the Central Texas gay and lesbian community, finding that they felt safe, comfortable and satisfied with the quality of life here, yet they missed certain aspects of traditional gay culture, such as social spaces, businesses and other resources.
One reader, however, was memorably upset by the image of a man sitting in another’s lap. Only he wasn’t. (See image above.) The reader imagined it. How the mind wanders.
(Catching up: Massey was recently elected to the City Council in Binghamton, N.Y., where he teaches social psychology at the State University of New York. He and partner Loren Couch are opening a bistro in downtown Binghamton, which looks to Austin for clues to attracting the creative class. Their adopted son — my godson — is the most animated 5-year-old one could imagine.)
Out & About, as many readers know, started in 2005 as, primarily, a chronicle of local gay culture on austin360.com. It quickly expanded to include arts and entertainment reporting, as well as vignettes of street life, night life, anywhere life in Austin. It was not until last summer that it assumed the forthright task of recording the social scene, which incorporates every aspect of local culture, including business, politics, education, sports, fashion and entertainment.
A tiny tincture of pink remains in the print column’s subject matter — and title — which led to the other remark, left in the blog edition’s commentary block. One word: “Queer.”
Both responses are exceptions, not rules. Austin can be a gloriously welcoming city for gay newcomers who can adapt to its social eccentricities.
We were prepared for the culture shock of living in close proximity to fraternity houses for the first time, but some of our friends expressed alarm that we might be, somehow, in danger of harassment or worse. After all, this was not long after a gay and lesbian student association float was pummeled with beer bottles during the annual Round Up Parade on Guadalupe Street. Not cool.
They need not have feared. We got along swimmingly with our new Greek friends; they came to our parties; we went to theirs. They tolerated our lame impersonations of blues musicians on our front porch; we cheered their hapless but heartfelt volleyball and basketball games.
One night — and I’ve told this story countless times, so if you’ve heard it, bear with me — during rush week, the fraternity men across the street were throwing a bash, while we were goofing around our front yard after a rehearsal, or work or something. It was very late. Two young men, new to town, spied our improvisational dancing and wandered over to inquire.
“Are y’all on drugs, or something?” one asked.
“No, we’re just in the theater,” one of us replied. “We’re like this every night.”
The duo lingered for a while, using that mocking tone reserved for junior-high bullies, then they returned to the big party.
Moments later, two fraternity officers crossed the street with troubled looks on their faces.
“Did those guys bother you?” they asked, concerned for their neighbors.
“Nah,” we replied. “Their attempts at intimidation just made us giggle.”
“Well, they came back to party and said, ‘We tried to (mess) with them, but they wouldn’t let us.’”
Exactly. That became our house motto. And has been a motto for dealing with the few remaining bullies and bigots in this great city.
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