Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > April
April 2010
Art of Business at Laguna Gloria
Business and art have always learned from each other. Creativity is creativity after all. And both human activities require it.
Sara Patuel and Victoria Osborne
The Art of Business yokes the two by displaying and auctioning works of art by executives from Austin companies, profit and nonprofit. Proceeds go to the Austin Museum of Art and the HBMG Foundation, which, not coincidentally, promotes creativity.
Zach Shoher and Renée Leaman
The late afternoon light softened and refracted around the ancient villa at Laguna Gloria on Thursday. While MoPac and the Blue Suburbans played outside, easels on the ground floor held paintings, photographs and other works of art by the likes of Sloan Foster (HBMG, Inc.), Victoria Osborne (Tapestry) and Zvi Yaniv (Applied Nanotech).
Melissa Rabeaux and Sloan Foster
I didn’t stay late, but I shared some choice conversations with folks, such as playwright Kirk Lynn, just returned from triumph with “Method Gun” at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., and other kind souls.
Dale and Natalie Glover
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Conspirare Hidden Music V at Texas Alumni Center
As with all things Conspirare, this was perfection. The setting for the small Hidden Works gala: The light-bathed rooms of the UT Alumni Center, designed by Charles Moore. The crowd: A stimulating mix of old and new, arts and otherwise.
Jervin Justin and Katie Apple
My table was populated with a comparatively young contingent, led by Sheila and Ryan Youngblood. So the tabletop conversation swooped from topic to topic, including style, art, in-house concerts, old connections, recent discoveries. All delightful.
Toni Burns and Margene Beckham
The live auction featured a novel duo act: Sherri and Mike Hanley. Yet all awaited the arrival of Craig Hella Johnson. Conspirare’s artistic director wastes not a second of his life, much less his time in front of others. He played a grand piano and sang themed songs taken from musicals and the Great American Songbook. He squeezed the most meaning from each lyric and note.
Sherri and Ryan Youngblood
Then he welcomed to the stage a set of male singers who delved into the German intricacies taken from the Comedian Harmonists, little known in this part of the country. After that, the grand surprise: The full symphonic version of the Austin choral group chanting “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Chilling. More music. More fun. More spiritual leadership from the Rev. Johnson (I don’t believe he’s consecrated as such, but he might as well be).
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UT student John Meyer wins top Mitchell Award
University of Texas English and government major John Meyer won the $20,000 Mitchell Award grand prize at the Four Seasons on Wednesday. The Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran was honored for “American Volunteers: A Play in Four Acts,” which depicts soldiers on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and was presented earlier this years at FronteraFest. He was nominated by James Loehlin, head of UT’s Shakespeare at Winedale program.
The awards, named after longtime University Co-Op President and CEO George H. Mitchell, recognize outstanding work from UT undergraduates. Scores are nominated; nine are selected as finalists. At the ceremony, past grand prize winners spoke humorously and eloquently about their graduate studies, research projects and career plans.
Other 2010 finalists were recognized with cash awards for research that sounded like preparations for Nobel Prizes — enhancing the kinetics and stability for chemicals associated with cancer, looking at post-racial attitudes in medieval Europe, searching for binary active galactic nuclei, etc.
Those undergrads included Lynne Chantranupong (Cell and Molecular Biology); Grace Eckhoff (Biology/Plan II); James Hammond (English/Psychology); Om J. Neeley (Business Honors & Corporate Finance/Plan II); Kathleen Skinner (English/History); Krista Smith (Astronomy); Keeley Steenson (Radio-Television-Film/Plan II); and Anthony Wright (Anthropology).
Please, please, nobody look up my doctoral dissertation. I’m so shamed by these astronomically accomplished undergads!
Photo: Director Allison Hammond and playwright John Meyer.
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Your A List: Best TV Weathercaster
Winner of the A List readers poll for Best Weathercaster, Jim Spencer, has prognosticated for KXAN for decades. He triumphed with 37 percent of the vote.
KVUE’s Mark Murray (36 percent) and KEYE’s Troy Kimmel (12 percent) have also predicted Central Texas sun, wind and rain for years upon years.
TV’s relative newcomers include News 8 Austin’s Burton Fizsimmons (7 percent), KTBC’s Scott Fisher (6 percent) and KAKW’s Blanca Gaytan (3 percent).
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Your A List: Best Place to Write
Clearly Austinites are inspired by the out of doors. Why else would three of the Best Places to Write in the A List readers poll require arranging words au naturale. (By that I don’t mean writing in the nude. Just in nature.)
Zilker Park is a muse to the most voting writers, taking a 36 percent share. Barton Springs (9 percent) and Mount Bonnell (8 percent) also pleased the nature-loving authors.
All the other scribbling spots are coffee shops, although most of these also offer an outdoor alternative: Mozart’s (19 percent), Spider House (12 percent), Flipnotics (6 percent), Ruta Maya (3 percent), Epoch (3 percent), Dominican Joe (2 percent) and Genuine Joe’s (2 percent).
I’m intrigued. I don’t think I’ve ever written at length in a park, a pool or atop a mountain.
[Note: Photo is not from Zilker. It’s from Flickr.]
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Your A List: Best Wings
Austin360.com readers have chosen the Best Wings around.
No, not the hairstyle worn by the original Charlie’s Angels. Nor any particular episode of the comedy set in a small New England airport.
The best in the area? A slight plurality of A List readers say Wing Stop, the nationwide chain with four Austin locations. It flew away with 37 percent of the vote.
Flapping just behind was favorite son Pluckers, scratching out 36 percent of the tally. It operates five areas locations.
All other wing outlets barely got off the ground. Third Base, Hoover’s, Wings ‘N More, Uncle Billy’s, Buffalo Wings & Rings, the Tavern, Casino El Camino and Alamo Drafthouse sauced no more than 5 percent each.
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Your A List: Best Hotel Bar
Since the 19th Century, the Driskill Hotel has served as a watering hole for the powerful and anonymous alike. Located outside the hotel’s famous grill, the Western Baroque bar is quiet, yet lively, posh, but approachable. It won 41 percent of the vote in the A List readers poll for Best Hotel Bar.
The Four Seasons, a den of understated luxury, is also a celebrity magnet. It took 21 percent of the tally.
The Omni, located in a vast atrium, came in third with 17 percent. The Stephen F. Austin, with its romantic terrace and old urban feel, was not far behind at 14 percent.
Hotel San Jose on South Congress — which opens onto a gorgeous garden — attracted 5 percent. The rest — Lakeway Inn, Barton Creek, Radisson Downtown, Hyatt Regency and Hilton Austin — managed less than 1 percent each.
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Covering the Sandra Bullock divorce case
If you have not read the account of Sandra Bullock’s petition against Jesse James elsewhere — and fresh details are scarce on the ground — link to our Movies blog for my report.
Keep an eye out for tips. Somebody out there will stumble on something contributing to the international media whirlwind.
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Threads of Hope at the Phoenix
Threads of Hope last week. High Voltage on Thursday. Fashion for Compassion on Friday. I honestly don’t think Austin knows how many runway shows it produces a year. Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?
Brooke Ulrich and Shannon Shibin
Threads of Hope raises money to help the poor and fight sex trafficking in The Philippines. The benefit swimwear show at the Phoenix on Saturday was put together by Austin designer Stacy Kenyon. This was definitely rock ‘n’ roll swimwear for women — tight, slinky, inventive, even a little edgy.
Travis James, Melissa Gold and Camille Fajardo
I fit the show into my evening rounds because anything event planner Jen Shoemaker oversees turns out festive. And, sure enough, I ran into all sorts of folks worthy of crunchy conversations that would have been easier if the music wasn’t so loud. (The din also scrambled orders at the bar, but that’s another story.)
Sandy Richards and Devin
The long line of swimwear received a fervent response. Or was that for the models? I’m actually sure it was for both. And yet another runway show strides into the sunset.
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On Your Feet at the Monarch Center
Thank you Carla Jackson. The former New Yorker, Yale University graduate in theater management and associate director of the Austin Community College Center for Public Policy is a bottle rocket. She can get me excited about anything.
Vanda Vancromvoit and Ahmed Mohiuddin
Through Facebook, she prodded me to attend On Your Feet, a charity event for Casa Marianella and Posada Esperanza at Marchesa Hall and Theatre (formerly the Monarch Event Center). It would be an extravaganza of international dance.
Ramiro Paz, Sara Paz and Dario McCrary
And it was. Masses migrated from hall to hall in the former multiplex to shake it up to Latin, Asian and all sorts of genres of movement. I assume the whole thing ended with a jamboree of social dancing, but I was off to just one more event.
Jacqueline Gilles and Aaron Caspar
I hope, hope, hope that next year it’s not scheduled up against a trillion other events so I can join the final dance.
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Loop 360 Party at Linda and Michael McCaul home
From a distance, the home of U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul and his wife, Linda, looks like so many mountainside villas that dot the southern tier of Europe. One reaches it from a very steep driveway through the Summit neighborhood high above Lake Austin. Across the lake, one spies Laguna Gloria, along with a vast swath of West Austin.
Rep. Michael McCaul and Rita Willoughby
Saturday, the manor’s doors opened onto a playland of Rococo design, decor, furniture and art. Yet the crowd at this particular Dell Children’s fundraiser we drawn immediately to the terrace with the spectacular view. Here, a sizable pool and pleasantly arranged social areas allowed for mingling to the capable sounds of Loose Wheels, composed of junior-high and high-school students. (McCaul picked up a guitar to join them later.)
Lynn Nolan, Alex Bargioni and Rosalind George
The Loop 360 Circle of Friends organized the affair for the Texas Child Study Center at Dell Children’s Medical. I met a neurologist and a psychologist associated with the program, which partners with the University of Texas. It’s the first of its particular kind in Central Texas, providing emotional and cognitive treatment for the youth and their families.
Teresa Foster and Joann Bentley
The McCauls’ home is ideal for such events. I look forward to future donor parties at their rococo manse.
Kevin and Carol Crocker
[Note: I am way behind on the party reports. Please forgive.]
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Joe Dunn’s disorder mirrored Luci Baines Johnson’s
It began with the big toe of his left foot.
“I couldn’t feel or move it,” Joe Dunn says. “I thought: ‘Maybe it’s just asleep.’ ”
The next morning, his whole left foot was flopping around, out of control. “I looked like Frankenstein when I walked,” the Austinite says.
In July, Dunn, then a plebe at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Great Neck, N.Y., was rushed to a Long Island emergency room. The medical staff drew a spinal tap. They tested his protein levels. A neurologist confirmed the diagnosis: Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Yes, the same rare and serious disorder that Luci Baines Johnson now has. On April 16, the daughter of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson was evacuated from Seton Medical Center of Austin to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where she has improved significantly, says a family spokesman.
Dunn, now back in Austin and fully recuperated, realizes he shares with Johnson a battle against long-term paralysis. He wants to relay a message of hope.
“It’s not every day you have a connection to such a distinguished family,” says Dunn, 19. “To help her in any way would be an honor.”
His long days in intensive care and long months of rehabilitation are behind him. On a recent warm, rainy afternoon, Dunn sipped an iced drink in South Austin, his posture erect, his navy blazer crisply pressed.
Why the blazer? “You want to make a good first impression,” he says, voicing a politeness echoed by his unforced responses of “yes, sir,” and “no, sir.”
Nothing in Dunn’s background foretold a potentially debilitating condition like the nerve-ravaging syndrome commonly known as GBS.
Son of an Ohio physicist, Patrick Michael Dunn, and a registered nurse, Michele Dunn, he grew up acutely aware of his blessings. Through school in Florida and Dallas and, later, the Lost Creek neighborhood of West Austin, he ground through textbooks to achieve almost perfect A’s. He played left tackle for the Westlake High School football team and, at 6-feet, 4-inches tall, he was welcomed onto the basketball team as well.
Although he missed playing in a state championship game — his younger brother, Tim Dunn, earned that honor last year — he was recruited to play tight end for the Academy (there is one more Dunn brother — the youngest, Ed).
And no wonder they came calling. With his scrubbed looks, carefully considered diction and seemingly dauntless work ethic, Dunn is the type of leadership material that would have made an old-fashioned Irish ward healer crack: “Let’s run this kid for Congress as soon as he makes the age cut.”
History was his favorite subject in high school. His top leaders: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln.
“They compromised, but they never gave up their beliefs,” he says. “Especially Lincoln. He dealt with so many tough things, including the death of more than one child. Yet he held himself with distinction.”
Dunn needed role models sorely when, last July, he suddenly, if temporarily, lost the dream of traveling the world he had only glimpsed in National Geographic magazine and on the History Channel.
“My parents started freaking out,” he says about his first call from the hospital. “I had no idea what GBS was. But right away I thought, ‘Whatever it is, I’m going to beat this.’ ”
He learned that, after fighting a viral infection, the immune system can attack the body’s nervous system. His initial treatment: intense infusions of immunoglobulins and round-the-clock vital-sign checks. Then months of tender rehabilitation — helped by his mom and dad, who took him walking every day at 6 a.m. through the Lost Creek neighborhood — as the nerve casings grew back. “They grow back a millimeter at a time,” he says. “I had to learn how move my foot all over again. Once I could feel it, it was really tough just to move my foot up and down.”
By November, Dunn had regained his reflexes and he was ready to take up his dreams again. He would have to wait for another midshipman class. Meanwhile, he had dropped from his linesman weight of 240 pounds to 195. (He’s gained back 15.)
Dunn had read that Johnson, too, was in excellent health before her first GBS episode, and that the disorder was diagnosed early on, both good signs.
He hadn’t seen, however, the photograph of Johnson taken by Helene Gordon on April 13, the day before GBS hit, published here for the first time.
Johnson, 62, reclines in a field of bluebonnets. For a woman with four grown children and 12 grandchildren, there’s a fresh, schoolgirlish quality about her relaxed smile and tossed hair. Still, you recognize the accomplished businesswoman and philanthropist in the smart phone at her side and the stylish blouse.
How could this striking woman fall so far, so fast from vigor? And how long could it take to regain well being?
“I had a lot of community support,” Dunn says. “I know Johnson has that. But it would be neat to become pen pals so I could let her know: She’s going to get better.”
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Body of Art Gala at Mayfield Park Home
Rarely has a personal collection received such a rapturous response. Deborah Green and Clayton Aynesworth opened their new Mayfield Park home to hundreds of gawkers on Friday. They came for the art. They came for the architecture. They came for the party.
Deborah Green and Clayton Aynesworth
Gatsbyesque. That’s the first adjective that comes to mind. And who knows how deep into the night this Women & Their Work gala progressed?
They were here …
Denise Prince’s performers — dressed head-to-toe in a Spandex-like material — set the tone. They posed on ledges. They splashed in the entry pool. They frolicked in a bed and lounged in a tub. Since the W&TW series is called “Body of Art,” the omnipresence of these serpentine dancers could not have been more appropriate.
They were there …
Then there’s the house. It’s large. On several levels. Modernist. Severe is sections, playful in others. And since it is perched above the Laguna Gloria slough, it feels wrapped in peacefulness.
They were everywhere … even flirting with dance legend Deborah Hay
It was anything but peaceful Friday. Hundreds of guests mingled among the collections of contemporary art, antique objects and stuffed animals. (My favorite room is dominated by two exquisite peacocks. Not living.)
Mark and Meredith Word with Elizabeth Tigar
Clearly the house was designed for the collection, because it is displayed to its best from ceiling to floor. The objects are so various, there’s no way to evaluate them individually or in small groups. As a whole, the effect is overpowering.
Andrew and Christine Stewart
Since it was also a Fusebox Festival night, I wondered which Austin tribes would show up. Many — law, sports, arts, charity, style, nightlife, interactive — were represented. My guest for the evening, Jeff Kirk, and I could have chattered all night. (Separately. Like a good walker, Jeff can handle himself in a crowd while I work a room.)
Christine Mennes and Anthony Garza
At one point, I said: “Let’s start heading for the door. It will take us a while.” It did. We were both sidetracked so many times, it looked like we’d be kidnapped by the romping Spandexites.
Oh. And a fire dancer down by the water. Does anyone remember a more incendiary W&TW party?
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Opening of the Stark Center for Physical Culture & Sports
The “wow factor” at the opening of the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports was the blockbuster exhibit “Our Body: The Universe Within.” This extremely popular — and controversial — show consists of actual human bodies. When it opened in major cities, the curious traveled hundreds of miles to see the preserved muscles, arteries, organs and such, arguing about their physical origins (China?) and the neonatal room (oh dear).
Rachel Scheer and Ana Lila Betancourt
“Our Body” is dramatically displayed inside the Weider Museum at the new Stark Center, chiseled into the north end of UT’s Royal Memorial Stadium. The Center is certainly one of a kind, archiving 35,000 books and hundreds of thousands of magazines on physical culture and sports. The center’s entry halls feel a bit unsettling in themselves, decorated with selections from the Blanton Museum’s Battle Casts and huge photos of muscle men like Steve Reeves and more aerobically designed bodies like that of Dr. Kenneth Cooper.
Kate Wright and Rick Barnes
And there he was! At age 79, still preaching the gospel of aerobics, a word Cooper invented. Other big names on tap for the grand opening included University of Texas basketball coach Rick Barnes, plus four powerhouse Austin philanthropists: Susan and Michael Dell and Joe and Teresa Long. Also spotted Austin’s own running guru, Paul Carrozza. Representatives from the Stark and Weider families also attended.
Jill and Hiro Tanaka
A note on accessibility: Deep inside the UT campus, the Stark Center is not exactly located near free public parking (no problem for a pedestrian, but for others …). It’s also poorly marked on the exterior of the stadium’s Gate 16. One takes a left, then journeys up to the fifth floor through an area that’s restricted at times when most of the public might encounter it. It reminds me a lot of the old version of the Ransom Center, which hid its reading room on the seventh floor, completely invisible to students, much less the public.
“Our Body” is very much worth the visit. A few improvements could make it more accessible to Jill Q. Public. And a valued tourist attraction.
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Umlauf Garden Party 2010
It is the more delicate and decorous cousin to Austin Museum of Art’s La Dolce Vita. Set in a wooded glade bisected by a convincing, yet nevertheless artificial stream, the Umlauf Garden Party trades in the same wares: Chefs sampling, winemakers tasting, lights twinkling, music swaying and mesmerized guests floating from one attraction to another.
Melvis Lara and Ana Gallo
The setting is crucial. The winding lanes among the fluid sculptures of Charles Umlauf (and others) encourage behavior reminiscent of a 19th-century promenade. (By its very nature, La Dolce Vita is a bit more animated.) And some people dress for the occasion in cool whites and caressing fabrics. Others come ready to romance to the big band standards.
Negeen Mosely and Heidi Kasnoff
For the past three years, I’d arrived at the Garden Party early. The better to savor the dusk before heading out to other social obligations. (It is the spring. There will always be other obligations in Austin.) This time, I arrived late — probably last. And that allowed me to linger even longer. (Still, I was forced to cut two events to make it at all.)
Adam Harrison and Sarah Glenn
I talked to many blissed-out guests, as well as a few food and wine representatives who had the time on their hands. At the very end of the evening, Stuart Moulton snuck me the names of artists booked in the next Austin Cabaret Theatre season. No, I can’t tell. That’s what’s called “speaking on background.” Still, it made my cabaret-lovin’ heart beat a little faster.
Jonathon Todd and Dale Huggins
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Breakthrough Champions Event at West Austin home
We gathered at the base of the hill. In the distance, we could see the modernist home resting like a ship on a knob. Three trolleys — former Dillos — ferried guests up the steep, winding incline to the party at the home of Neil Webber.
Now, imagine variations on this view 360 degrees around Neil Webber’s hilltop house. Note downtown skyline in the distance.
Webber, you may recall, was one of the founders of Vignette, a giant of Austin’s dotcom boom. He cashed out at the right time. And he built this astounding house off the Southwest Parkway with a true 360-degree view of the Barton Creek Wilderness Park, several tree-blanketed subdivisions and, in the distance, the skyline, like another ship in the fog.
José and Maria Vara, whose children José and Jasmin are enrolled in the Breakthrough program
While it’s tempting to go on and on about the house, designed by David Heymann, and its rooftop lookout and splendid pool deck, or the food from Fino/Asti, or the top connectors assembled for the fundraiser, the event centered squarely on the Breakthrough program.
Jinous Rouhani and Sara Fox
Staff, interns and volunteers with this noble project mentors low-income middle school and high school students from families with no college in their backgrounds. The numbers speak for themselves: 90 percent of Breakthrough seniors have graduated from high school in four years; more than 75 percent enrolled in college, nearly two times the rate (39 percent) for low-income students in Central Texas. The class of 2009 earned admission to 55 different colleges and universities across Texas and the United States.
Guyanne and Nick Nichols
Some major Austin connectors serve on the Breakthrough board. Webber and the Topfer Foundation pledged to match almost any donations made last night. I don’t know which I admire more, the house or the cause. Doesn’t matter. Both are hard to forget.
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Fusebox Festival Opening Night at 3 Locations
Three tribes converged on the opening night of the Fusebox Festival on Wednesday.
Savannah McAnally, James Fain and Kate Motzenbacker
The first event — a demonstration of Texas social dancing at the Capitol — attracted a heterogeneous lot. Yet the population was dominated by what I would call social populists. Hipsters and worshipers at the altar of high art infiltrated among the true two-steppers in unaffected Western garb.
Lisa Schiff and Darrell Allred
The weather was divine for the dance, orchestrated by inventive choreographer Allison Orr and composer/instrumentalist Graham Reynolds. One of the last recorded songs, as the tribes dispersed, was Lyle Lovett’s “That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas).” What struck me in this setting was the sweet completion of the refrain: “But Texas wants you anyway.”
Allison Orr and Graham Reynolds
Now that’s a winking welcome to the international artists gathered for the 10 or so days of top-shelf contemporary art, organized by Ron Berry. From the Capitol, I toddled down Congress Avenue, running into a crowd outside the empty retail slot at Congress and East Eighth Street, once slated for condos. A pop-up art installation inside — better seen later when the sun had set — assembled a vision of abandoned urban space.
Molly Alexander and Dana Friis-Hansen
At the Paramount Theatre for the second official Fusebox event, the high-art tribe was already assembling. Hardly a personality from Austin’s contemporary visual or performance art community, from Deborah Hay down, was absent. Which was cool, because that meant 1,000 spectators or more for the American debut of “The Velvet Suite” by Japanese dancer Kaiji Moriyama.
Julie Thornton and Jennifer Wijangco
Imported for an unnamed price by testperformanctest’s Julie Thornton, it was, by any definition, intense. I’ll leave the formal review to the able critics at our newspaper’s Austin Arts blog.
Marcy Hoen and Bijoy Goswami
Here are striking things I noticed during the extended performance: Moriyama’s back. His fingers. His hair. His animal-inspired poses and motions. The enormous globe of suspended flowers that looked, in some lighting, like a burning heart. His eventual frenzy, which explained how the whole thing fit into the announced theme of “Eros.”
Eugene Sepulveda and Kirk Rudy
Later analysis of the performance split the high-art tribe, who were joined by yet a third group, Austin’s progressive social leaders at a United States Art Authority after-party. You know who they are. This set appears in Out & About every week. Because they are everywhere. And, in the process, they form widely-adopted opinions on everything from politics and finance to charity and art.
Heather Barfield and Shuana Danos
They mingled easily with the other tribes. They dressed in finer threads, but one thing they are not: Stuffy. These top connectors know how to have a good time. And the funky Authority was the right place to have it. Frito pie (required) was paired with fine sparkling wine and a pair of ironic DJs. So, so, so Austin.
Annelize Machado and Nicole Viado
And so much fun. Much more Fusebox to come, although I’ll miss most of it, given the crashing close to the traditional social season. (For instance, six major events for May 6, another six for May 8. When will the madness end?)
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How Lady Bird’s Legacy won me over
Inheriting the Lady Bird’s Legacy wildflower project was like receiving an unexpected bequest.
Two angels, Janet Wilson and Retta Kelley — now known as Retta Van Auken — launched the American-Statesman campaign. It has raised more than $100,000 to spread wildflower seeds around Central Texas.
Beginning in 2008, the veteran reporter and the community developer marshalled explanatory articles, printed appeals, donor events and large-scale pledges.
I meekly volunteered to represent the newsroom in the ongoing Legacy effort, scheduled to continue through December 2012. After all, I like nature and the out of doors. I’m fond of Texas and road trips. I am drawn to people and their stories. I admire and respect the Johnson family.
Quickly, I became acquainted with astute professionals at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center and the Texas Department of Transportation. Even more satisfying were conversations with families who had donated significant sums to honor loved ones.
One afternoon, I learned that the Bohls brood traced their time in Central Texas to the early 19th Century. Through e-mail exchanges, I discovered the Kuhl family’s matriarch closely resembled Lady Bird Johnson, and was often mistaken for her. Over coffee, I discovered that the entrepreneurial Boone family was eager to offer their Hangtown Grill or Mr. Gatti’s restaurants for campaign events.
The donation forms offered more social clues. Cheryl B. Schneider gave $25 so seeds would go to fourth-grade teacher Johnna Dennis at Jacob Well Elementary School in Wimberley. Mary and Ted Eubanks made a $100 donation in honor of two of our children and their spouses, with whom: “We have many shared memories of Texas wildflowers in full bloom and want future generations to know the same joy.”
And then there was Tracy Minchich, who spoke the following words during the “celebration of life” service for her father Jim Marshall on Dec. 12.
“A few years ago, Dad and I spent a special day together on a drive in the Hill Country,” she said.”During this drive we discussed the beautiful wildflowers and how peaceful and serene the Hill Country can be. As Dad’s days drew to a close, we discussed the Lady Bird’s Legacy wildflower fund, and as I explained contributions to this fund would enable us to name a one-mile stretch of highway in his memory, he got a big smile on his face. So in the spring and fall when the wildflowers bloom their fairest, we can all smile as we pass by knowing how much Dad enjoyed the beautiful Texas Hill Country.”
The family passed out packets of wildflower seeds and donation information for Lady Bird’s Legacy campaign. To date, more than $1,000 has been donated in Marshall’s name.
In closing, Minchich said, at the ceremony: “If Dad were here today, he’d advise you to ‘live simply, be happy — and most importantly, take time to enjoy the wildflowers.’”
For more information on the project and to view a complete list of donors — or to donate online — visit statesman.com/wildflowers.
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Your A List: Best Quick-Service Restaurant
This is an amusing A List category: Best Quick-Service Restaurant.
Winner of the A List readers poll in this category: Thundercloud. The ancient sub chain served up 17 percent of the tally.
Torchy’s, a newer competitor with its latter-day tacos, nearly caught Thundercloud with 16 percent.
Freebirds — based in College Station but very Austin — rose to 13 percent.
Taco Deli — with its fervent fan base — drummed up 12 percent, while P. Terry’s, the innovative burger joint, hit 11 percent.
Schlotzsky’s, once the pride of Austin, managed just 9 percent. Chilito, younger brother to El Chile, perked dup 8 percent.
Zen: 6 percent. Dan’s: 5 percent. Hog Island: 3 percent.
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Your A List: Best Rock Singer or Group
While Austinites revere their musical gods — Willie Nelson as a benevolent Zeus? — they open up creative spaces for relative newcomers.
More established Ghostland Observatory trailed with 17 percent of the tally.
Musical chameleon Bob Schneider placed a respectable third with 10 percent.
Consider the names and reputations of the artists who managed 6 percent or less: Alejandro Escovedo, Okkervil River, Vallejo, White Denim, What Made Milwaukee Famous, Broken Teeth and Black Angels.
Image courtesy of We All Want Someone to Shout For.
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Your A List: Best Addition to the Austin’s Retail Scene
Even during a recession, Austin has attracted new retail. You may have to look for them, but the retailers are out there.
Bargain bonanza Nordstrom Rack came in second with 19 percent of the tally.
Smaller Sprouts nurtured 14 percent, while male-oriented Stag fought for 9 percent.
All the rest — East End Wines, Sneak Attack, Gallery D, Zara, Mana Culture and Gaga — took home 5 percent or less.
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Your A List: Best Place to Feel Like a Kid
The two winners of the A List readers poll for Best Place to Feel Like a Kid are within easy biking or skateboarding distance from each other: Barton Springs and Peter Pan Putt Putt, both on Barton Springs Boulevard.
They tied at just over 18 percent of the vote.
Dave and Buster’s busted out 17 percent of the tally, while Toy Joy enjoyed 16 percent.
Main Event managed 10 percent. Austin Park and Pizza and Lake Travis very nearly tied at 6 percent.
Blazer Tag zipped 4 percent. Terra Toys tamped down 3 percent. Skateland waltzed off with 2 percent.
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Roadside biodiversity, then and now
In his 1947 classic, “Adventures with a Texas Naturalist,” Roy Bedichek described a roadside experiment.
On a May afternoon, he walked a mile along a Texas highway, recording the species of flowers along the right-of-way. He listed 68.
It gets worse. On the following days, he duplicated his experiment along goat and sheep enclosures. Highway right-of-way: 46. Goat pasture: Eight. Highway: 54. Sheep pasture: A solitary rain lily.
“This flower pops up and out as if it was set on a spring explosive,” Bedichek wrote. “It is one of the few species agile enough to elude the goat or even the sheep and get in its blooming while they are not looking.”
From 1917 to 1948, while Bedichek was criss-crossing Texas as director of the University Interscholastic League, he witnessed the state’s most visible ecological disaster: Overgrazing. The practice of fencing in too much livestock stripped the topsoil from Texas ranchlands, leaving it vulnerable to undesirable, thirsty species like salt cedar and mesquite.
In contrast, the rights-of-way along the state’s new highways appeared to be paragons of biodiversity. In “Adventures,” Bedichek praised the landscape experts of the Texas Department of Transportation who, beginning in 1932, promoted indigenous plants under the criteria: “Safety, Beauty, Utility, Economy.”
Experts still commend TxDot for its propagation of native species. That effort now includes the American-Statesman’s ongoing Lady Bird’s Legacy wildflower campaign.
Last year, 80 percent of the Legacy donations went to purchasing seeds distributed throughout Central Texas by TxDot. Eight percent of the $100,000 raised paid for seed packets for schoolchildren; 12 percent for plantings in parks and other community locations.
“Much of the credit for the spectacular displays of wildflowers along Texas’ roadways can be directly attributed to TxDOT’s distribution and protection of native wildflowers across the state,” confirmed Damon Waitt, senior biologist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Some metaphorical weeds grow in this roadside garden, however. Waitt and other experts are concerned with inadvertent introduction of invasive species and the department’s selective use of non-native Bermuda grass seeds.
“The same features that make (Bermuda grass) ideal for roadside revegetation — quick establishment and rapid colonization — also make it a threat to parks, natural areas and wildlands,” Waitt said.
“I’ve never seen Bermuda grass take over native species,” responded Dennis Markwardt, TxDot director of vegetation management, explaining that the department uses this familiar, adaptive species in areas that require low vegetation, and in combination with natives.
Travis Gallo, coordinator of the Invaders of Texas program at the Wildflower Center, focuses his ire and energy on species such as the bastard cabbage, tall yellow flowers that are threatening to crowd out roadside natives, like the ones planted through the Legacy campaign.
“It is spread through contaminated grass seeds when people re-seed an area,” Gallo says. “It is in the mustard family and we all know how small mustard seeds are (biblically small, so to speak). So, the bastard cabbage seeds do not get caught in the screening process as the grass seeds are screened. The actual introduction is unknown, but it is likely that it was introduced in the same fashion, contaminated grass seeds.”
Which means TxDot and other entities maintaining rights-of-way might have unknowingly contributed to the bastard cabbage invasion.
What is to be done? Wildflower Center restoration ecologist Mark Simmons tested a way to artificially increase the density of native wildflowers and therefore reduce the bastard cabbage population.
“This would be a great method for large scale roadsides,” Gallo says. “You could also develop a strategic mowing/weed-eating regimen and reduce the population. It is an annual, so if you knocked back the plant before it goes to seed you would reduce the seed bank. It would take several years of mowing/weed-eating to see results.”
At TxDot, Markwardt’s vegetation department is as dedicated to promoting natives as it was back in 1932, when Bedichek first described the beneficial effects of highway right-of-way management. The economic scale, however, of managing vegetation along thousands of Texas highway miles means runs smack into commercial roadblocks.
“The seed market drives us. And that is driven by cattle producers,” Markwardt says. “But we are working with Texas A&M-Kingsville on commercial seeds from grasses that thrive in South Texas. So far, however, they don’t produce enough to meet our needs.”
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Stories flow from journalist and teacher
Raising a penciled eyebrow, Anita Brewer Howard pointed to the yellowed newspaper clipping on her dining room table.
Headline: “Dying newspapers don’t go out alone.”
She wrote that commentary about the daily Houston Press’s closing March 20, 1966.
“The death of a newspaper to newspaper people is like a death in the family,” she had written. “Maybe it was a distant cousin who died, a newspaper we didn’t know very well, but yet we feel a sense of loss.”
Under the name Anita Brewer, she served as staff features and education reporter for the Austin American-Statesman from 1954 to 1966. Her first break came during World War II. A student at the University of Texas, she was hired to type the society column for Molly Connor Cook, whose handwritten copy the “back shop” refused to typeset.
On a recent rainy Austin afternoon, Howard was wearing a goldenrod jacket of geometric patterns, accented by coral earrings and necklace. Papers, magazines and books rose in neat stacks throughout her corner house in Wilshire Woods, a mid-century neighborhood just east of Interstate 35.
At the end of the spring semester, Howard will retire from her teaching job at Austin Community College. She joined the college staff in 1973 as public affairs officer and became a full-time journalism teacher in 1984. She partially retired in 1993. Retirement will mean more time for regular poker games with friends, including Emma Long, who became Austin’s first female city council member in 1948. Also for family.
The daughter of rural Lampasas, she bore six children; four of whom survived. She buried three husbands.
She volunteers memories of childhood in the Great Depression. As a school principal, her grandfather was comparatively well-off, so she always carried an apple or orange in her lunch bucket. Other children would beg for the apple core or orange peel.
“People have no idea how bad it was,” she says. “We had the lowest birth rate in the country. I interviewed 1,200 women — a lot of them Catholics — about how and why they didn’t have children. They just didn’t have sex. They were afraid they couldn’t feed their babies!”
Along with raising children in the postwar period, she found time to serve as legislative aide to Rep. Bill Patman (his widow Carrin is still her best friend). She’s always kept busy.
“I never intended to get old,” she says. “That bugs me a lot.”
But this afternoon was for newspaper memories.
“A man came in with a walking dog,” she says. “The reporters in the main section sent him back to us, in the women’s section. The dog actually walked on its hind legs. When he left, one of us said: ‘Why do all the crazies in the world come to the newspaper?’ Another answered: ‘Water seeks its own level.’”
She started on the night shift, writing headlines and filing police reports. “$18 a week,” she remembers. “Six days a week. 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. Those were long days.”
Journalists today imagine postwar newspapers as peopled with hard-drinking, hard-talking men — almost always men — cut from “The Front Page” pattern. Yet Howard says everyone treated her well.
“I felt like everybody’s little sister,” she said. Not that she abstained from fun. Once, as she drank, she told all the men at a party she loved them. A friend offered her a cup of hot coffee. “I don’t want that now,” she said. “Maybe later.” She poured the coffee into her purse. Along with the play came serious reporting. Although she also wrote Sunday features and columns, education was her primary beat. She covered the slow, painful integration of Austin schools.
“Austin was fairly liberal even then,” she says. “The major players, newspapers and TV stations agreed to keep the controversy out of integration reporting.”
She interviewed literary giants Katherine Anne Porter and T.S. Eliot. She couldn’t hide her enthusiasm for poet Eliot, so an editor teased: “I’m a poet, too. T.S./B.S.”
Her biggest scoop was an exclusive interview of Judge Sarah Hughes who administered the oath of office to Lyndon Baines Johnson after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The assignment made her nervous. “How was I supposed to find her?” she says. “I just looked her up in the phone book. She said: ‘Come on over.’ I was the only one there!”
She won numerous prizes, including two for a deadline report on the suicide of her uncle and role model, Stanley Walker, former city editor of the New York Herald Tribune.
Her lead: “Stanley Walker, who loved life on his own terms, ended his life Sunday at his ranch home near Lampasas, just over the hill and across the creek from the place where he was born 64 years ago.”
“When I saw her bylines, I immediately read her stories, trying to pick up pointers,” says Forrest Preece, a retired adman who continues to write articles. “I often wondered what it would be like to observe life, write about what you saw, and get paid for it.”
Another reporter who grew up reading Howard’s stories said she had “wicked wit.”
“No,” Howard demures. “I’m a smart ass, if that’s what they mean.”
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Rare and Fine Wine Auction at the Four Seasons
A study in contrasts: Saturday afternoon, we marketed for Sunday’s Wren Cottage Feast for my nieces and nephews. While Kip was picking out a Zinfandel for the cheese course, I ran my fingertips over the California Cabernets. I was struck by how many wineries I recognized, partly because of yearly exposure at the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival
Susan Lilly and Renu Swartz
That night at the Four Seasons Hotel, I perused the lots for the Rare and Fine Wine Auction, which benefits the Wine & Food Foundation of Texas. I hardly recognized a single label. Way out of my league. Yet fascinating — and another kind of education — just to come in contact with them.
Cyndi and Phillip Golden
Last year at the auction, three bottles of Screaming Eagle, a Napa Valley superstar, went for $18,000. Just three bottles. Intrigued, I Googled the winery. Oh. Wine supreme judge Robert Parker rated it a 99 out of 100. That kind of grade is a blank check.
Rebecca Robinson and Donaji Lira
This year’s most charismatic-looking package consisted of five Bond Estates wines, estimated value: $3,500. But that lot didn’t take the top cash. That was dinner in the cellar of auction founder Larry Peel and prepared by the Four Seasons’ Elmar Pramb, which went for $4,500. So Peel offered a duplicate set and it went for the same price.
Total take: $213,630, primarily for culinary scholarships.
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Stars Across Texas at the Long Center
I read in the newspaper today that the Sunday fair for the Texas Hill Country Food and Wine Festival was muddy and shorter than expected. I didn’t go this year, instead attending the festival’s dry and plenty long Stars Across Texas event Friday at the Long Center. It was a blast.
Gaby Ceniceros and Aaron Manshaem
First the spatial arrangements: A T-shaped tent protected the food, wine, water and spirits booths in the center’s plaza. Others were set up in the narrow first-floor lobby. The VIP area was moved this year to the western deck and an attached lounge. It worked! Few lines. A minimum of bumpage. Access to all the edibles and potables.
Halley Tuck and Chris Hammon
This kept most of the crowd curious, relaxed and happy. I learned a lot. Which I might have forgotten if I hadn’t used my trusty camera to take snaps of labels, menus and signs. I highly recommend this method.
Chris Apollo Lynn and Rachel Naugle
This was the second year running of rain during Stars. It didn’t matter. The open circulation meant that the mood stayed light, breezy. I caught up with foodie regulars.
Liz Burkhart and Jeff Washler
By the end of the evening, I had recalled why this, to me, is the high point of the festival, despite the higher end lunches, dinners and demonstrations during the week.
Myndi Garrett and Jennifer Kim
The festival has changed a lot over the past 25 years. I hope this night never changes.
Erika White and mother Hildy
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Livestrong Celebration with Charlie Mars
So it wasn’t just me. Every time I’ve come into contact with Livestrong and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, I’ve felt their anti-cancer efforts were on par with the Austin athlete’s efforts atop his bike. Winning is the only option.
Charlie Mars and Lance Armstrong
Friday, the foundation celebrated two more victories: Recognition as one of the best places to work by both Outside Magazine and The NonProfit Times. These kinds of awards are derived from unsigned surveys about everything from governance to benefits. Also, work atmosphere, aided at Livestrong on East Sixth Street by its light-kissed renovated warehouse by Lake Flato Architects and the Bommarito Group. (So much dusk light that it fooled my camera into thinking I didn’t need a flash. Forgive the images that look like I took them with my iPhone instead of my Canon.)
Stephen Sweeney and Messa Adjavon
To toast its success, Livestrong threw a Friday happy hour with barbecue and a band. Not just any band. But Charlie Mars (yes, the one linked to “Weeds” actress Mary Louise Parker). See his interview with music writer Brian T. Atkinson.
Sean Patton and Randyl Mauldin
I stayed long enough to hear a few bands, meet Mars and say hello to Armstrong himself. In case you are wondering, I know the seven-time Tour de France winner only insomuch as I talked to him on the phone. Once. And we’ve shared maybe 10 sentences in person. But why pass up a chance to welcome him back to his chosen hometown?
Israel Soto and Denise Burley
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Luci Baines Johnson hospitalized with nervous system disorder
SUNDAY UPDATE: According her longtime physician, Dr. Dudley Youman, Luci Baines Johnson has made significant improvement in the past 24 hours. Her physicians are encouraged that her case of Guillain-Barré syndrome may be less severe than usual. She will remain in intensive care a while longer for close observation.
Luci Baines Johnson was admitted into the intensive care unit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. on Friday with a working diagnosis of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare and serious autoimmune disorder affecting the nervous system.
The daughter of President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson first entered Seton Medical Center Austin on Wednesday after experiencing extreme muscular weakness. After extensive tests, she was transferred to St. Mary’s Hospital, part of the famous clinic complex in Rochester, where she is receiving intensive immunoglobulin treatment, said her Austin internist, Dr. Dudley Youman, who accompanied her.
Johnson’s husband, Ian Turpin, her sister, Lynda Johnson Robb, and her children and grandchildren have joined her in Rochester, said family spokesman Tom Johnson (who is not related), former chairman of CNN and the Los Angeles Times. She is under constant observation in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Guillain-Barré syndrome “is a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system. The first symptoms of this disorder include varying degrees of weakness or tingling sensations in the legs. In many instances, the weakness and abnormal sensations spread to the arms and upper body. These symptoms can increase in intensity until the muscles cannot be used at all and the patient is almost totally paralyzed.”
Guillain-Barré Syndrome is treatable if caught early. The NINDS said most patients recover “from even the most severe cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, although some continue to have some degree of weakness.”
“You can get over it,” Dr. Youman said. “But it’s not quick. We’re only three days into it. We are still in the early stages of this.”
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Culinary Masters Dinner at the Four Seasons
Although 200 or so guests gathered in a banquet room, they did not eat banquet food. Oh no. The Culinary Masters Dinner for the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival served only the best of the best. All to go with a series of Louis M. Martini wines introduced by Napa Valley’s funny, no-nonsense Mike Martini (the most satisfying: A luscious Lot 1 Cabernet 2005).
Ed Auler and Chad Auler
Trying to make the earlier Texas 25 celebration at Whole Foods, which was rained out, I was late for the Culinary Masters at the Four Seasons, which moved indoors from the hotel’s lawn. So I missed Todd Duplechan’s appetizers. Seated next to festival founder Susan Auler, however, I was primed for small servings from six top Texas chefs.
Frank Lin and Elaine Lin
Elmar Pramb’s beef carpaccio supported a large farm egg and manchego, plus some truffled arugula. It was lovely, but almost forgotten after Kent Rathbun’s perfectly seared diver scallops resting in a pool of roasted cauliflower/spring leek risotto. (I consider myself a risotto master myself, but Rathbun’s was out of this world.) Next came a chip of crisp black bass set up by a goat milk ricotta from David Bull (citrus surprise: a tuft of soaked celery heart).
Sherrie Parker and Adrian Martinez
How could these be topped? With Brian Caswell’s lean braised short ribs with baby beets (I barely noticed the fava bean and spring onion compote, given the meat and beety sauce). Rebecca Rather left the guests with a climactic flourless chocolate cake topped by pistachio gelato. Oh. My. Goodness.
As amazing as the food and wine were — and they were — I most prized the distilled experiences of Auler and her family, who told so many stories, I’ll have to devote a whole post to them — someday, when I have recovered.
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Will Ferrell to headine May events in Central Texas
“We’ve done this for 17 years in Southern California,” says charity spokesman Greg Flores. “This will be our first outside of that state.”
For tickets to the tournament or dinner, go to www.shop.cancerforcollege.org.
The previous day, Ferrell will appear at Dell Diamond for a Round Rock Express game. “For people of this generation, Will Ferrell is synonymous with comedy,” said Express owner Reid Ryan. “It’s an honor to have him join us.” What’s Ferrell’s Central Texas connection? Chad Meley, senior manager at Dell Inc.
“I met Will shortly before he made it big, and kept in touch with him and his family,” Meley said. “Several years ago, my wife and I traveled to their farm in Sweden (Will’s wife Vivica is of Swedish descent), and while at the airport, there’s Will on the cover of Golf Magazine.
“The article was centered around Will’s involvement in a small charity called Cancer for College. … At that time, I had just passed a major milestone in my own battle with cancer (stage 3 melanoma). When I got to my destination, Will elaborated more on the charity and his good friend Craig Pollard who founded the charity after his inspiring experiences in battling cancer.
“What caught me the most was how Will admired and articulated the pure and grass roots nature of this charity (coming from someone who has been exposed to numerous charitable activities. I knew then that this was the right cancer charity for me to volunteer my time.
“After getting to know Craig, we both decided that given that Cancer for College was now getting applications from all 50 states, it was time to start doing events beyond the West Coast. Since I live in Austin … why not right here!?! I’ve been able to pull together a great network of volunteer committee members, we have a fantastic host site in Cimarron Hills, and the Austin college town vibe makes it a perfect fit,” Meley said.”
Long before that, Connie Britton from “Friday Night Lights” will serve as the celebrity starter for the Hope, Steps & A Cure Charity Awareness Walk on Sunday. The walk, which starts at RunTex on Riverside Drive, benefits the Aplastic Anemia & MDS International Foundation. For more information, go to www.aamds.org/aplastic.
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The Mill Party at Star Bar
More than 10 years ago, Richard Florida identified the creative class. In his demographic theory, it consists of a super-creative core (researchers, artists) and creative professionals (knowledge-based workers). He predicted that post-industrial cities — like Austin — that nurture openness and creativity would prosper through this class. He has been proven right, for the most part.
Melissa Glynn and Tyler Schmitt
The Mill Party at Star Bar on Thursday convened a tiny fraction of Austin’s creative class. The ostensible reason: To celebrate the union of photographers Tyler Schmitt and Melissa Glynn under the rubric of The Mill Photography Studio. (Mergers make powerful sense in this economy.)
Christen Ales and Kristin Tan
Naturally, writers, event planners, makeup artists, interior designers, lighting experts and allied creatives gathered in the sleek bar, redefined as the anchor for the West Sixth Street district. Lots of talk about architectural photography, business networking and parties — past, present and future. Which reminded me, I was committed to two events at the Texas Hill Country Food and Wine Festival that evening, so …
Jeni Hoover and Martin Pederson
All the best to Tyler, Melissa and crew. Stay creative.
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Slowing down socially by speeding up
My plan was to slow down. Savor the socializing. Polish the prose.
Amy and Tim Riley
And it was going quite well for a few months. Even attending more than 40 SXSW parties didn’t crush my spirit. Pacing was the key.
Yesterday I pushed a bit. Yet every event rewarded in its way.
I started with lunch at Snack Bar with Tribeza publisher George Elliman. Crab salad for me, chicken salad for him. Our conversation steered away from the recent unpleasantness at the lifestyle magazine. We just learned more about each other and our publications.
Emily Brown and Suzanne King
Then I strolled down to the newsroom to polish another Lady Bird’s Legacy story. The rate of donations so far has been very slow compared to last year, when American-Statesman megastars Janet Wilson and Retta Kelley ran the show. After years of steering Season for Caring, they were well-seasoned for this kind of hybrid campaign, in which 100 percent of $100,000 has gone to wildflower seeds in honor of the late Lady Bird Johnson.
One article draft accomplished, I sprinted over to Malverde to pick up media materials for the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival. Event goddess Elaine Garza updated me on this long weekend party — and on some not-to-be-disclosed SXSW dirt. I dallied with other media types, sure that I would see them at later events this week. I also learned from board members that ticket sales are up, even if the number participating wineries is precipitously down.
Alreen Sanchez and Chris Day
That gave me just enough time to swing by the Hill Country Conservancy meet and greet at Stubb’s. Everyone there was gearing up with their Lone Star tall boys to watch the Old 97s, who headlined the benefit, aided by Ben Kweller. I should have planned more carefully to stay at this event, but at least I learned that there’s such a thing as bicycle valet service in Austin! (Pictured team from Bicycle Sport Shop.)
I raced back to Congress Avenue to pick up a cab for my next show, “City of Angels” at St. Edward’s University. None available in sight! Caught one just in time at East Cesar Chavez Street, making it time for the overture.
Daniel Curtin, Andrea Rado and Chris Carter
I love this period detective musical; it’s smart, witty and fun. I hadn’t realized how difficult, however, it was to sing Cy Coleman’s seriously jazzy score. Still, Michael McKelvey’s mix of pros and students held it together.
My walk home — almost completely downhill at this point — in the cool of the evening confirmed that, even on a crazy busy afternoon and evening, the entirity could be appreciated as part of the essential Austin experience.
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Your A List: Best Place to Buy Beauty Products
Anyone who has met me knows I’m mad for beauty products! Actually, not. Probably should be, but just another expertise I never really mastered. Although I appreciate the effort made by others.
Second with 28 percent was Sephora, followed by Ulta with 13 percent. Love both names. Don’t they sound like places where beauty is appreciated?
All the rest attracted 5 percent or less of the vote: Nordstrom, Lux Apothetique, Sabia, Bath and Body Words, Body Shop and Myka.
Makes me feel plain. Just remember the old saying: “God must love plain people. He made so many of them.”
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Your A List: Best Recording Studio
Improvements in home recording technology have not ruled out the need for professional studios with the latest equipment. Austin has many.
Pedernales, Willie Nelson’s nationally respected creative hive, came in second with 20 percent.
Congress House did nicely with 9 percent, followed by Bubbl with 8 percent and Sweat Box with 7 percent.
Ohm and Addison tied at 6 percent. Bismeaux, Finishing Studio and Wire sufficed with 3 percent or less.
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Your A List: Best Tattoo Parlor
My skin bears exactly one tattoo.
For various reasons, we acquired these permanent markings in San Francisco, not Austin. Yet Our Town is blessed with numerous respected ink shops.
The winner of the A List readers poll for Best Tattoo Parlor was — in a landslide — Platinum Ink. Working out of two locations, one north and one south, it whipped up a full 45 percent of the vote.
Three parlors ranked pretty far behind — Atomic, Southside and True Blue — with between 10 and 12 percent of the tally.
Diablo Rojo — great name! — won 8 percent. Taking 5 percent or less were Gully Cat, Perfection, River City, Rock of Ages and Steadfast.
[The photo is not from Platinum Ink and does not represent their work. You can go to their site, linked above, for copy-protected images.]
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Your A List: Best Place to Impress a Date
The best place to impress a date is where ever you are at the time. That said, it sometimes helps to add a romantic atmosphere, exquisite food and classy entertainment.
Driskill Grill barely beat out Hudson’s on the Bend and Hotel San Jose, all taking approximately 14 percent of the tally.
Truluck’s, Vespaio and Jeffrey’s were stationed at the next rung down, with between 6 and 8 percent.
Rounding out the romantic list were Cru, Long Center and B Scene at the Blanton.
Sounds like a full week of impressive dates.
[Photo: Courtesy of Uchi.]
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Where are those Legacy wildflowers?
Laura Bohls expressed mild concern about a stretch of Mopac near West Fifth Street, where wildflowers were seeded during the fall to commemorate longtime Austin businessman and outdoor enthusiast Everett Bohls.
Bohls had hoped for an April family photo on the roadside near Tarrytown. She was not alone.
Restaurateur Ann Boone of Hangtown Grill and her family had thrown a fundraiser for Lady Bird’s Legacy, but saw virtually no blooms further up Mopac between 35th and 45th streets.
Michael McGown worried about a mile of wildflowers on William Cannon Drive donated by Dorothy Longacre for her son’s birthday.
“I also made a substantial donation to the Lady Bird’s Legacy fund, and I have yet to see a single wildflower in the area I had seeded,” McGown said.
Texas Department of Transportation officials confirm that these areas were indeed sown with a special blend of native species during prime planting season this past fall. Experts give varying reasons why some wildflowers bloomed brilliantly this spring, while others failed to show their petals.
“With near perfect fall and winter rainfall, some folks are asking why the wildflower season is a bit delayed this spring,” said Damon Waitt, senior botanist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. “The most likely explanation is the third piece of the wildflower puzzle, warm sunny days and cool nights. With a cooler than average February and a spell of cold fronts moving through the area in March it is not surprising that we are just now seeing a peak of early spring bloomers like Indian paintbrush, pink evening primrose and the Texas bluebonnet.”
Department of Transportation officials confirmed that some wildflowers take two to three years to bloom. Also, the newer plants must also fight off established species stoked by the rainy winter.
Buddy Hudson, vegetation management specialist, said that appears to be the case on upper Mopac.
“This area is overrun with rye grass from the wet winter and spring and that’s what for the most part choked out the wildflowers this spring,” Hudson said. “This area was seeded in the later part of October last year with the seed that was marked for the site. Hopefully next year this area and others will be looking better.”
(See photo.)
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The Rolodex Syndrome
Retiring any address book is a somber affair.
Especially if it contains decades worth of personal contact information, triggering a flood of memories.
I’m slowly vaporizing my data into Apple’s MobileMe cloud. That means relinquishing hundreds, if not thousands of yellowing Rolodex cards collected from my various reporting and editing assignments at the American-Statesman since 1989.
Some belonged to Austin arts groups that didn’t survive the subsequent booms and busts, or transmogrified into something else, or just dropped off my personal radar: Austin Musical Theatre, Frontera @ Hyde Park, New Texas Music Works, AuxTix, Public Domain, Artists Gallery and Studio on Sixth, Johnson/Long Dance Company, Norwood Gallery, Artists Legal and Accounting Assistance, F8 Fine Art Gallery, Admur Gallery, Flamenco Austin, Downstage Players, Austin Arts Consortium, Latino Arts Consortium and Austin Dance Ensemble.
Others were decorated with fanciful, inextinguishable names: Children of Light Players, Dancing with the Sun Gallery, Colonial Shakespeare Company, Play Ground Zero, Pro-Jex Gallery, Subterranean Theatre Company, Moving Stories, Violet Crown Players, Hand to Mouth Puppet Theatre, Lupe Arte, Lyons-Matrix Gallery, Critical Mass Productions, Paradox Players, Galeria Sin Fronteras and a Leap of Art.
Remember this? — Greater Austin Performing Arts Center, or “GAPAC.” Sounds like someone gasping for air. It became the Long Center. Few recall that what is now Texas Performing Arts was known as “COFAPAC,” for College of Fine Arts Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas. That abbreviation suggests instead a corporate-generated breakfast cereal.
Some cards recall writers or editors with whom I once exchanged messages on a daily basis, and now hear from almost never: “A Girl Walks into a Bar” columnist Moira Muldoon, all-star editor Yvette Walker, classical writers Jerry Young, Michael Huebner and Karl Miller, stylish editor Leslie Yazel, classical editor Ann Pyle, dance critic Beth Kerr, prolific arts reporter Rebecca Cohen, artist Christopher Schade, dance writer Marene Gustin, promising editor Alex Hannaford, comedian Laura House.
Others contacts left town, but remain connected through Facebook, etc.: Rae and Sean O’Malley (Hawaii); Bud Coleman (Boulder, Co.); Nancy Schaffer (New York); Richard Runkel (Milwaukee); Dan Fallon (Pittsburgh); Jeff McCrary (Los Angeles); Tommy O’Malley (Boston); Sean Massey (Binghamton, N.Y.); Larry Faulkner (Houston); Brian Lieske (San Francisco); John Walch (New York); Harley Erdman (Northhampton, Mass.), Adrienne Martini (Oneonta, N.Y.) Kate Breakey (Tucson, Ariz.); Michael Guarino (San Antonio); Joe McClain (San Miguel de Allende).
A few cards traced the outlines of major stories I covered.
For a 1990s series on the future of the arts in Austin, I kept track of leaders in Seattle, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham N.C., Portland, Ore., Minneapolis, Minn., Charleston, S.C., Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and elsewhere.
For a gigantic package on the Ransom Center, notations remain for New York, London, Washington D.C. experts.
For articles on the creative class and local gay culture in the 2000s, contacts fan out from Pittsburgh and San Francisco to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere.
The saddest pile of all records the names, addresses, phone numbers, personal Web sites, e-mail addresses and — talk about ancient tools! — fax numbers for the permanently departed.
Just typing the list brings pause: Entertainer and hostess Karen Kuykendall, playwright Horton Foote, Gov. Ann Richards, businessman and power broker Lowell Lebermann, jazz leader Tina Marsh, theater founder Ed Mangum, journalist Molly Ivins, philanthropist Angela Topfer, arts leader Boyd Vance, director Bil Pfuderer, actor Joe York, critic John Bustin, playwright David Mark Cohen, opera singer Gina Ducloux, theater backer W.H. “Deacon” Crain, author Edwin “Bud” Shrake, writer and activist Liz Carpenter.
I puzzled over one such card. How long had it been since I’d talked to dancer, dreamer and cultural enthusiast Gina Lalli? .
The very next morning I spotted her scuttling along the sidewalk outside the Blanton Museum of Art.
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Nobelity Dinner prized by social set
Social superstar Carla McDonald deemed it: “Party of the year!”
Architect Dick Clark went even further, praising the Nobelity Dinner on Sunday: “Best Austin charity event ever!”
They have a point.
Bill Paxton and John Paul DeJoria
Christy and Turk Pipkin’s Nobelity Project fundraiser, primarily aimed at building Mahiga Hope High School in Kenya, brought out the best in Austinites and their culture of creativity, generosity and openness.
Without frills, the Four Seasons Hotel provided the classy backdrop.
Linda Ball and Sarah Bird
Almost all the promised celebrities — parking at least one at each table was the plan — showed up, including actors Peter Fonda, Joe Sears and Bill Paxton, philanthropists Eloise and John Paul DeJoria, “Desperate Housewives” hottie Ricardo Chavira (mobbed by the ladies), and the “Friday Night Lights” team: Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Brad Leland and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson.
Literary lights Sarah Bird, Stephen Harrigan and Bill Wittliff joined the fray. Former Longhorn Derrick Johnson and runner Gilbert Tuhabonye led the pack for sports figures, while Nobel Prize physicist Steven Weinberg represented science. And, of course, an exultation of Texas musicians gathered, there to lionize Willie Nelson, the Nobelity Project’s first big backer and winner of the Feed the Peace Award that night.
Kinky Friedman and Gina Pizzini
Funnyman Pipkin kept 500 or so guests tittering while his wife made sure the trains ran on time. At points, she joined her husband onstage for short, affecting speeches.
One of the special things about the Nobelity organization: It shines light on allied efforts from Austinites around the world, for instance: Caroline Boudreaux’s Miracle Foundation (orphanages in India) and Philip and Donna Berber’s A Glimmer of Hope Foundation (basic needs in Ethiopia).
Bruce Robison and Becky Beaver
Besides their films, “Nobelity” and “One Peace at a Time,” the Pipkins’ Kenyan project has enlisted the skills of many Austinites, like designers Dick Clark and Matt Garcia, who created a special “Rainwater Court,” which doubles as a multi-use gym and a water collection system that will supply schoolkids who otherwise must march a mile and a half to the nearest stream.
Even Austin kids got involved: Elise, Sophie and Nathan Kunik presented the Pipkins with a mock-up check for $10,000, which they raised in tandem with their shared b’nei mitzvah.
Ray Benson and Joe Ely
The Pipkins staged perhaps the cleverest and most effective live auction I’ve ever witnessed at a charity gala. To pay for a science lab at the high school, they offered a singular guitar — to be signed by Nelson — for $10,000. It went right away. So they revealed a second guitar. Then two mandolins. Then two ukuleles. In a matter of moments, they raised well over $30,000 and a lot of indulgent laughter
They saved the best for last. Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, Robert Earl Keen and Ray Benson lined up with guitars to sing Willie Nelson-penned songs. Nelson joined them for “On the Road Again,” after an amusing rendition of “We’re Dying as Fast as We Can.”
April Kimble and Lyle Lovett
Then, an amazement: For a culminating “Amazing Grace,” these musical stars welcomed to the stage peers such as Hannibal Lokumbe, Butch Hancock, Jimmy Lafave, Eliza Gilkyson, Jeff Lofton, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Shawn Colvin, Bruce Robison, Sara Hickman, Charlie Sexton, Ruby Jane and Kat Edmonson, The last two young talents offered earlier tributes as well.
So Austin. So Nobelity.
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Learning about Lady Bird at Pioneer Farms
They already know a lot. And they are eager to learn more.
On Friday, in the color-spackled meadows around the Pioneer Farms historical settlement in northeast Austin, the students pored over 19th-century farming techniques, old-fashioned tools — axes left a particular impression — as well as the surrounding indigenous plants.
They also expanded their knowledge of Lady Bird Johnson, the late first lady whose name rang faint bells for the 8- and 9-year-olds, if her ecological work was still news.
“I know I’ve read about her in many places,” said Jason Moreno, who also recognized a reference to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. “Her name makes me think of nature.”
“There’s a bird in her name,” said Sierra Scott, bravely recovering from multiple fire-ant bites. “She sounds like she was nice.”
(It was perhaps too early to bring up the $100,000 already raised by the newspaper’s campaign, or that 100 percent of the donations went to purchase seeds, or that the newspaper plans to continue the campaign through 2012. Leave the heavy fundraising to the adults.)
“There are so many different kinds of flowers here,” said Zoe Briceno, brushing against the yellow, lavender and white blossoms. “We don’t have them in our lawn.”
“And there’s tall grass here,” Jason Moreno said. “That’s rare in our neighborhood.”
Camille Gerlach was proud that her Austin grandfather’s front yard was completely saturated with wildflowers.
Reesa Moreno was most impressed by the Pioneer Farm animals, but said she enjoyed the flower-open spaces as well.
“I’d like to see more when we are driving,” A.J. Prince said.
“I’d like to see them right in our neighborhood,” said Aidan Martinez, who also found memorable the Pioneer Farms’ “Swedish Silo,” “one of only two in the world!” he said.
Evan Holland, who first spotted the blanket of bluebonnets near the edge of the interpretive hamlet, said his family owns 10 rural acres fairly permeated with wildflowers.
“There must be a mill- …” he said, correcting himself quickly. “Well, not a million, but a lot. Everywhere you look.”
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Petite Ecole Party near Stratford
The Petite Ecole Party lived up to it’s name: Small and educational.
Warinda Harris and Stephanie Land
First, the mini-fundraiser showed us the Stratford-area home of Kristi and Scott Eckert. Designed by Paul Lamb Architects, it feels like a light-porous bastion on a precipice overlooking the green of the Brackenridge Tract, as well as Lady Bird Lake and a unusual view of downtown.
Elizabeth Baird and Jamie Chioco
Also, the party introduced me to all sorts of Austinites, some directly connected to the bilingual school, others simply friends or friends of friends. They circulated easily, tasting from a buffet supported by Texas French Bread, Olivia, Fête Accompli and Austin Wine Merchants, among others. All the goodies fit the francophone theme.
Paloma Efron and Stephen Land
More to the point, I learned about the tiny school, Petite Ecole Internationale on North Loop near Burnet Road: 18 students, 1 teacher, 2 assistants. Now that’s a niche market. It might not be the smallest organization to throw a lovely party in a swank Austin home this season, but it surely comes close. Sincèrement, bonne chance!
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Centre Pompidou Party in Old Enfield
It began at a toga party. Suzanne Deal Booth bid on an auction item at Arthouse’s Roman-themed gala last year. The item promised a small dinner party at the home of Julie Thornton.
Suzanne Booth and Paul Rodgers
The party grew. Booth, who once worked at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and whose mentor was that social and artistic beacon equally at home in Houston, Paris and New York, Dominique de Menil, now sits on the board of the French contemporary art museum’s American-based foundation.
Ryann Hennessee, Margit Raczkowski and Dave Bryant
Fostering connoisseurship, the foundation makes annual pilgrimages to art-collecting centers, this year to Central Texas. And what a time the group had! Dana Friis-Hansen showed them the Art of Hatch Show Print exhibition at Austin Museum of Art; Annette Carlozzi the thought-provoking Desire exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art.
Don Mullins and Cameron Larson
The art tourists visited the home of top Austin collectors Jeanne and Mickey Klein, then took a boat across Lake Austin to peek at Suzanne and David Booth’s steep, wooded land where construction begins this fall on a site-sensitive home. The troupe even shopped South Congress Avenue and stuck their heads into Okay Mountain, and later will attend the ArtPace gala in San Antonio. They’ll also visit the Charles Moore Foundation and Ransom Center here in Austin.
Lisa Dennison and Scott Stover
That just about hits all the high points. Add to that the exquisite Booth-Thornton party, which included some local dignitaries as well. The Thornton PoMo Palace, now on the marketplace, will seem odd and empty without Thornton’s frisky collection. I hate to see it broken up, but what is one to do?
I spoke with thoughtful folks from Tucson, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston and, of course, Austin, while grazing from a tempting Fête Accompli buffet. I almost could have spent the whole weekend with this crew.
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Tribeza at By George
When I say it was a good party, you can bet it was a good party.
Todd O’Neill and Malavika Vinta
Tribeza pioneered the media happy hour. These parties launch each of the lifestyle magazine’s issues. They also publicize their advertisers.
Rusty Irons and Lorley Musiol
To traditional journalists, that seemed, early on, a bit like kissing your sister. Now, everybody does it. Only not always as well as Tribeza did at By George on Thursday.
Joe Ross and Kristin Armstrong
Start with the setting: The North Lamar edition of By George is set up for a cocktail party. Islands of clothing and accessories provide traffic medians for mingling guests. And the fashion on the racks amplified the fashion on the revelers.
Camille Styles and Kimberly Chassay
Then there’s Tribeza’s core following: The stylish sets from arts, letters, style, design and nightlife. They were there in force. Some of the top connectors there to toast Carla McDonald’s new arts column. Even former mayor Will Wynn was there, and he’s been out of the limelight for a while now. (Good to have him back!)
Lauren Petrowski and Justin Poses
Once there, however, the guests were enlivened by fare from La Condesa, the still-smoking restaurant in the Second Street District, and offerings from Grey Goose Vodka and King Liquors. (Some may have indulged in a bit too much of the Goose.)
Abraham Padilla and Kim Ngo
But give credit where credit is due: Everybody loves Tribeza editor Lauren Smith Ford. (A subset of us line up to converse with hubbie Bennett Ford.) On first glance, this issue seems a bit thin in terms of substantive articles, but hey, we’re all doing what we can in this uncertain publishing environment.
Jake Holt, Tolly Moseley and Cory Ryan
Meanwhile, Tribeza gave the best happy hour of its life.
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At last … Justine’s
First it was the Reading Week. Then SXSW. Then Lady Bird’s Legacy and the spring gala season.
First, we found out through Facebook and Twitter that, to avoid long waits for a table, we should arrive before 6 p.m. or after 9 p.m. Easy enough on such a lovely day to head over just before six, zipping past Springdale Road on East Fifth Street.
Justine’s sits in a strictly industrial area. Owners Pierre Pelegrin and Justine Gilcrease chose an isolated bungalow, charmingly fronted by mature sycamores that whisk one’s imagination directly back to France.
When we arrived, the patio seating looked more popular than the indoor tables. Designers Gail Chovan and Evan Voyles greeted us almost immediately — we had seen each other moments earlier as I walked home through our shared Bouldin hood.
We took a corner table inside, instead, a little crowded and cramped for two big guys, but with pleasant views and a nice social echo. The service among that dark-wood decor was superb, perfectly timed for each contact and course. This was a good sign. We ordered and ate slowly, in the European manner, though not as slowly as one often experiences in the Mediterranean zone.
The menu is very simple, all familiar fare from previous brasserie or bistro adventures here and abroad. We started with a glass of innocent Trocadero champagne to toast our 19th anniversary, then ordered cheese and charcuterie plates. These arrayed three main appetizers each, with selections sampled in increasing complexity.
Kip’s Belgian endive salad — matched with haricots verts, blue cheese, pears and walnuts — was well balanced; my salad Niçoise separated out its yummy parts, but the tuna blocks were way too stiff. In the other hand, we had nothing but praise for Kip’s steak frites with sauce au poivre; and my gorgeous, thick fish, swimming in a sauce that made the ideally prepared haricots verts beneath it my favorite part of the meal.
Our Louis Latour pinot noir lacked depth but not character, and, after all, brasserie wine is meant for lighter, less expensive tastes. We almost skipped dessert until the waitress explained that the pear tart came with a layer of dark chocolate (an unusual combination!). Kip’s creme brulee achieved the right creamy and brittle textures.
The crowd proved 100 percent hipster. Lots of stray whiskers. Artistic apparel and eyewear. I’m pleased that this addition to Austin’s scene — already well established — seems capable of sustaining its gustatory and social buzz.
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Your A List: Best Club DJ
DJ Mike Swing, who spreads hip hop to spots like the Hudson, the Madison, Six Lounge, Union Park and Red Fez, handily won the A List readers poll for Best Club DJ. With 59 percent of the vote.
DJ Chicken George bravely followed with 11 percent and socially connected DJ Kurupt responded honorably with 8 percent.
Spinning 5 percent or less were DJ Manny, Toddy B, DJ Mel, Seth Cooper, Rapid Ric, DJ Dallas and Soul Happening DJs.
We revere them all.
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Your A List: Best Restaurant That Delivers
Austinites like food with a story. And David Ansel’s Soup Peddler comes with a biography as compelling as its liquid nourishment.
Pluckers, more than just a wings joint, doled out a substantial 22 percent. Hip East Side Pies did nicely at 10 percent.
Texican Cafe and Southside Flying Pies tied exactly at almost 7 percent, closely followed by Hao-Hao and Rounders.
Winning 4 percent or less were Hil-Bert’s, Hog Island Deli and Craig O’s.
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Your A List: Best Place to Hike
Now, I know rocks can’t vote. Not even for online readers polls like Your A List.
More convenient Barton Creek Greenbelt came in second with 16 percent of the tally. Lady Bird Lake Trails followed with 12 percent.
Pedernales Falls State Park trailed not far behind that with 11 percent. Hamilton Pool — more about swimming than hiking — refreshed at 6 percent.
Rounding out the pack with 5 percent or less were Bastrop State Park, McKinney Fallls State Park, McKinney Roughs Nature Area, Brushy Creek Lake Park and Inks Lake State Park.
Makes me glad I purchased my yearly state park pass. (A bargain if you go outdoors at all!)
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Your A List: Best Chefs
Gosh. Somebody really likes the Driskill Grill. A lot of somebodies.
Uchi, Tyson Cole’s creative sandbox on South Lamar Boulevard, landed a distant second with 17 percent of the tally.
Despite their individual distinctions, everyone else trailed far behind, with 5 percent or less. In descending order, those were Bess, Roaring Fork, Hudson’s on the Bend, Fonda San Miguel, Wink, Vespaio, Aquarelle and Imperia.
I’m hungry.
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Ballet Austin Guild’s Luncheon at Renaissance Austin
Yet another annual event that I had never before attended: Ballet Austin Guild’s “Women on Their Toes” luncheon. The name never appealed to me. But I also completely miscalculated that the event, held this year at Renaissance Austin Hotel, simply honored volunteers who had helped out the ballet in the previous year.
Leslie Cox and Sonia Wilson
A nice gesture, but rationale for a large luncheon? Well, I was wrong, as usual: The event honors volunteers across the board, from nonprofit organizations of every stripe and size. Wow. Great idea. Sort of like the Philanthropy Day luncheon, but for the blue-collar workers, as it were, of the nonprofit sector. Bonus: It binds folks with no obvious ties to the arts to the ballet.
Sondra Lomax and Cynthia Gregory
Honorees included Bill Bastas, founder and president of the Smile Never Fades, raising money and awareness for breast cancer and its cure; B.J. Gerstner, a Hospice Austin volunteer; Martha Hoflich, primarily a “behind-the-scenes” volunteer at Austin’s Capital Area Food Bank of Texas; and Patty Huffines, who has proven to be one of the Long Center’s most valued and celebrated volunteers (see previous stories on the center’s anniversary party).
Michelle Thompson and Lance Johnson
Add to the list: Dina Mavridis, who joined Impact Austin in 2004 as a 20-something-year-old and was called “a dynamite volunteer”; Nancy Mueller who has signed up for more than 10,600 hours of her time Seton Medical Center; Sandy Perkins for her work with New Milestones Foundation; Chas Studor, a full-time volunteer in 2008 and 2009 on behalf of the Austin Children’s Shelter; Sonia Wilson who has been instrumental in helping to raise more than $10 million for the Austin Symphony Orchestra.
Tammy Goral and Bill Bastas
Last but certainly not least: Rufus Woody has been a volunteer with Meals on Wheels and More for over 25 years. He has consistently logged the most hours annually and was selected to deliver the Millionth Meal in 2009, the first time this mark had been reached in a single year’s time.
Super bonus: Getting to meet ballerina legend Cynthia Gregory.
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Orange Wine Dinner at Vino Vino
Mostly, I kept quiet.
During the Orange Wine Dinner at Vino Vino, I was surrounded by experts. Start with restaurant owners Jeff Courington and Houston-based Kelly Bell Jr., who hosted the meal and wine tasting, dipping into their deep cellar. Continue with John Paine of New York-based Rosenthal Wine Merchant, restaurant consultant Mike Dyer and Julio C. Hernandez, president of D’Amore Wine Selections. Add Lewis Dickson, owner of La Cruz de Comal winery near Canyon Lake, and GSD&M marketplace planner John D’Aciernano and his wife Jill Skinner, whom I’d previously met at a One World Theatre event.
John D’Aciernano and Jill Skinner
Leading the expedition into the evening like a star professor on the verge of tenure was Jeremy Parzen, who writes the nimble Do Bianchi blog and whose presentation of the orange wines was a poetic concoction of history, science, art and biography. A musician and linguist, he had spent years in Italy and Slovenia, which gave him first-hand knowledge of the natural wine movement he described last night.
His wife, Tracie, sales rep for Glazers Wholesale Distributors, assisted (her superior photography can be found at Do Bianchi). Adding more than a little to the meal — although behind the scenes — was chef Esteban Escobar. He had not tasted the wines in advance, but worked from descriptions to incite his own creativity.
Jeremy Parzen, Tracie Parzen and Jeff Courington
It’s hard to believe this was perhaps only the third such public tasting of orange wines in this country; the first two occurred in New York and San Francisco. In case you were wondering, no, it’s not wine derived from citrus, but rather what would normally become white wine, receiving instead days of contact with the grape skins in the vats, rather than just hours.
Thus, the pale orange or yellow hues. And the extraordinary tastes, amplified by all sorts of eccentric winemaking techniques — aging in clay amphoras; or in casks shaped like grapes (“because the grape is the original winemaker”); or using natural, ambient yeast rather than the added type; or trellising vines into tree branches rather than in clipped rows, in the Etruscan manner; or skipping a disgorging, which leaves glorious sediment in the wine.
John Paine and Kelly Bell Jr.
We started with a Movia 2000 Puro from the Brda region of southern Slovenia, not really “orange,” by Parzen’s definition, but strikingly composed and disgorged by our guide in a bowl of cold water. (Served with flaky salmon tatare, grapefruit, lemon oil, chervil and chives.) Then came a spicy Monastero Suore Cistercensi 2008 from Lazio in central Italy, contrasted with a Paolo Bea 2008 Santa Chiara from Umbria, also in central Italy, which supported Parzen’s argument against California winemaking. (Went with calamari, chorizo and tomato coulis; I kept my lip shut about my adored California.)
Our next selection was Edoardo Valentini 1999 Trebbiano D’Abruzzo from the Adriatic coast of Italy, with its intoxicating aroma of coffee. (Paired with a stunning, salty lobster bisque with bits of porcini mushrooms and a dash of crème fraîche.) Then back to Movia for its 2007 Lunar, which gave Parzan the chance to talk about winemaking on the lunar calendar. (It went with a sliver of flounder atop pureed English peas, carrots and ginger.)
Mike Dyer, Julio Hernandez and Lewis Dickson
By this time, we were spellbound. (“These are wines that provoke a discussion about how to make wines,” Paine said.) We sampled the noble and rare Vodopivec 2005 Vitovska Amphora from Italian Friuli. (And my favorite dish: Strands of tagliolini cooked in the sediment from the earlier Puro, entwined with mussels, clams, zucchini, basil and extra-virgin olive oil.) The meal was rounded off with a light Gravner 2003 Ribolla Anfora, also from Friuli. (Served with assorted cheeses, almond brittle and honey.)
The conversation proved as rich as the servings. I learned the backgrounds of many guests and heard their reasons for kneeling before the oenophile altar. It was an extraordinary evening, with story piled upon story. Luckily, the food and wine came in small portions!
It also says something about Austin that it was the third city to embrace this rarity. How does one get started in this field? Paine: “You just start drinking good wine.”
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Saluting one lady … and another with Lady Bird’s Legacy
Since the American-Statesman initiated the Lady Bird’s Legacy project Aug. 27, 2008 (the centennial of President Johnson’s birth), readers have donated or pledged almost $100,000. Among those givers were dozens of families who have commemorated loved ones with donations for targeted wildflower seedings. That way, when parents and children pass a particular stretch of road or highway, they can point to the winecups, paintbrushes, coneflowers and verbenas, saying: “Those celebrate the memory of your grandma.”
“I remember being with my mom as a young child and she had just got her hair done,” daughter Corien Kuhl says. “And at least two women came up to her and asked if she was Lady Bird, or commented on her uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Johnson. Even at my young age, I realized she looked like a beautiful famous person.”
In 1923, Ruth Kuhl’s life started in the snowy Upstate New York town of Batavia. It ended Nov. 4 inside her cozy Wimberley home.
Despite her Depression-era upbringing, Ruth Kuhl played cello, sang opera and graduated with a business degree from William Smith College. After graduation, she married another Batavian, Ivan Kuhl, who had enlisted in the Army and was in medical school at the University of Buffalo.
Ivan Kuhl’s military and medical career took the first waves of their four daughters and five sons to Staten Island, N.Y., San Antonio, Santa Barbara, Calif., and El Paso, among other stops. They settled their growing tribe in McAllen where Ivan was one of two dermatologists south of Corpus Christi.
Ruth Kuhl also dove into the Valley’s social scene.
“Ruth had a rich network of friends and activities,” says Ivan Kuhl. “But her life centered on her family and church.” Like Lady Bird Johnson, Ruth Kuhl often entwined arts, beauty and nature in her life, displaying simple, traditional elegance.
“Mother did not discuss beauty, she displayed it,” says daughter Martha Kuhl. “Our dinner table always had a centerpiece, often created by her with cuttings from our yard and candles lit. Yes, nine kids and candles lit each night.”
“Ruth and I visited Austin for medical meetings,” Ivan Kuhl remembers. “When we were about town in Austin in the ’60s and ’70s, we noticed our service at restaurants, hotels, etc. was outstanding, and small groups of waiters and kitchen staff would appear every so often and speak in hushed tones while gesturing and staring in our direction. On the street we would feel prying eyes and a distance was kept while they figured out I was too small for the Secret Service and definitely not LBJ. Ruth kept to her room while I was at meetings to avoid confusion and catch up on her knitting and reading.”
The look-alike adventures continued into later years.
Son Dr. Peter Kuhl: “(My wife) Janice and I lived in Lubbock when our third child was born. Four days later, I went to Amarillo for a three-month stint as part of my OB/GYN residency. Mom was coming up to help Janice with our three kids. Some friends were to meet her at the airport. They did not know how to recognize her. Janice told them to look for Lady Bird. They had no problem finding her.”
Daughter Anita Kuhl Zinnecker: “In the early 1990s, my husband, Scott Zinnecker, and I took Mom for her first Amy’s Ice Creams treat in the Arboretum. While my husband was explaining how to select the ice cream and crushings, the staff started calling out to them, “Hey Bill Clinton, how about letting us snap a picture of you with Lady Bird!” They took the picture and it hung in that shop for at least a year … labeled as Bill and Lady Bird. As you may have guessed, Scott bears some resemblance to Clinton, too.”
Among her mother’s pre-death preparations, Martha Kuhl discovered this selection from Pericles’ funeral oration to the citizens of Athens: “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
“I don’t know how Pericles fared,” Martha Kuhl says. “But my mom’s unwavering love and devotion is woven into our lives and will continue to shape the lives of generations to come.”
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River Tracing: Sabine 1
Time got away from us. Road trip buddy Joe Starr and I planned to trace the entire Sabine River — 550+ miles of it — Easter weekend. We managed half of it. Friday was spent driving to Houston to pick up Joe, then up U.S. highways 59 and 69 to reach Greenville in Hunt County, where three branches meet to form the Sabine.
Greenville, a former cotton center on blackland prairie 45 miles east of Dallas, is experiencing something of a rebirth. That may be so. Still, if I follow the dictum that, if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it, then my posting on our time in Greenville proper ends here.
The next morning we rose to seek the source of the Sabine, just north of Celeste, home of World War II hero Audie Murphy (we passed the bunting-draped memorial). A helpful state historical marker points to the Sabine’s headwaters — a gentle hill amid pastures topped by a water tower. Interestingly, rainfall on this hill drains into three separate watersheds, the Sabine’s being one. (Sort of like Glacier National Park, on a much less dramatic scale.)
At the appropriate location, we found ruts with standing water, choked with cane. Above, a female dicksissel clung to a wire. This is a bird common to the prairie, but the first one identified by Joe and I. We headed south. Before reaching Greenville, the Cowleech Branch of the Sabine (named after an Indian chief) is already a significant stream. Below Greenville, it’s a river.
Here, underneath the oaks and other hardwoods, circled by barn and bank swallows, we encountered the first of many holiday fishers. Next we dropped by Wind Point Park on Lake Tawakoni, a private recreational area offering an array of family activities. Then we contacted my sister, Valerie Koehler, who was spending the Easter weekend with in-laws on Club Lake, a small, exquisite body of water surrounded by a gated community. (Sorry Luke Wilson, AT&T’s spotty coverage made the detour problematic.) Our visit there was far too short.
Following this respite, we crisscrossed the Sabine near towns with names like Grand Saline (Morton’s still mines there), Mineola, Fruitvale and New Sandy, some these once-thriving commercial centers. Here, the river, already at spring flood stage, engulfed small trees and it was easy to imagine the Sabine disgorging the highest volume of water to the Gulf of Mexico of any Texas river.
Longview, with 200,000 people spread out over its metropolitan area, is the largest city on the Sabine. Just south — not far from Kilgore, where I was born — the river is broad and the current swift. The river is marred by industrial sprawl, but doesn’t seem to suffer directly from it. From there, we angled toward the Louisiana border, as hardwoods gave way to pine forests. Redbuds, dogwoods and, especially, wisteria splashed the countryside with welcome color.
This is true backwoods Texas. For miles, we encountered trashed-out encampments, interrupted by breathtakingly beautiful valleys carved into green pasturelands, or employed for large-scale plant nurseries. Pilgrim’s Pride factories hid behind tree screens. Communities shrank in size and austere churches dominated the roadsides (frequently seen sign: “Prayer: America’s only hope.”).
We followed the Sabine only as far as Logansport, La., just above Toledo Bend Reservoir. Here, steamboats chugged up the Sabine in the 19th century. Now, boaters returned from a full day of sporting. Our Saturday was coming to an end. And, given Easter family commitments in Houston, we ran out of time for the nearby national forest or the Big Thicket swamplands below that, much less Orange, Port Arthur and the Battle of Sabine Pass monument at the mouth of Sabine Lake. (We’d come that way when we traced the Neches, which enters Sabine Lake from the west.)
So we left the lower Sabine for a later tracing, perhaps in conjunction with the Angelina and the Atoyak, or the Cypress and the Sulpher. We do know the last stretch of this historically crucial border river will take at least a full day.
Despite its prominence as an international boundary, going back to French and Spanish rivalries, the Sabine was — and, in some ways, is — more mysterious than most Texas rivers to us. It rises among Midwestern scenery, low, rolling prairie hedged with hardwoods. It dips into deep forests and passes, but does not dissect fair-sized cities (Longview and Orange, with Tyler not far off).
The presence of Toledo Bend is a mystery in itself. Was it really necessary to flood all that land? Did the Sabine threaten Orange? Who is using all that water? Meanwhile, Dallas is damming the upper Neches to slake its limitless thirst, wiping out more hardwood bottomlands. More research is necessary. And the casual destruction of the Big Thicket, condemned by no less a figure than J. Frank Dobie, the most popular Texas author of his day, is another scar on the land.
Like MacArthur, we will return.
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Lady Bird’s grandchildren uphold the Legacy
Despite having advanced macular degeneration in later life, Lady Bird Johnson could still spot a wildflower at 300 yards.
According to granddaughter Jennifer Robb, the late first lady — who, in her 90s, could no longer speak coherently because of multiple strokes — often pointed into the distance while touring the LBJ Ranch. “You mean those bluebonnets, Nini?” Robb would ask, using the Johnson grandchildren’s shared term of affection for her.
Mrs. Johnson’s affection for and knowledge of nature — and, in particular, wildflowers — never faded. That devotion was passed on, in various degrees of intensity, to daughters Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and then to seven Johnson grandchildren, as well as to 13 great-grandchildren, now spread across the country.
That’s one reason Jennifer Robb and cousin Nicole Nugent Covert were eager to discuss the pioneering work of their grandmother, who died in 2007, in conjunction with the American-Statesman’s Lady Bird’s Legacy donor program, set up to pay for wildflower seedings. Initiated on Aug. 27, 2008 — the centennial of President Lyndon Johnson’s birth — and planned for completion on Dec. 22, 2012 — which would have been Mrs. Johnson’s 100th birthday — the campaign has already raised almost $100,000 for highway, school and community plantings. Many readers have made donations for specific locations in memory of loved ones.
The Legacy campaign returns this month as wildflowers dot some parts of Central Texas and blanket others, depending, experts say, on the localized extent of winter freezes.
Robb and Covert exchanged memories recently while sitting among the bursting spiderworts at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Southwest Austin. “There wasn’t a set schedule at the ranch,” Robb said of visits from her lifelong home in Virginia to the family’s Texas base near Johnson City. “We’d be on the runway for hours at a time, or just stick near the house, exploring. My grandmother would go out to look at the animals, or walk up to the cemetery, or walk down to the runway. She’d always point things out. None of us learned as much as she would have liked.”
The cousins also spent chunks of each summer at Camp Mystic, near Hunt, deeper in the Hill Country. Their mothers had attended the private Christian camp, and all the daughters returned to the pristine spot.
“You get a feeling when you drive up to the Hill Country and you’d see the Mystic sign, and you’d feel the weight of the world had been lifted off you,” Covert said. “There were no worries. I still feel that way. When I drop my daughter off, I’m jealous.”
Both cousins think urban life, which requires strict timetables and parental oversight, complicates childhood.
Helping the wildflower center is one way they pay tribute to that dreamy outdoor youth. Robb volunteers there, working with native and sustainable plants whenever she’s in town; she’s a high school precalculus teacher in Arlington, Va. Covert raises money for the center in tandem with cousin Catherine Robb, often through the annual Wildflower Gala, slated this season for April 30.
“We’ve had all the perks of living within this family,” Covert said. “But also a lot of responsibility.”
Wildflower center work is only a portion of the Johnson grandchildren’s independent-minded philanthropic efforts, an instinct nurtured in their close family circle.
“Our grandmother and both of our mothers let us do whatever made our hearts sing,” Covert said. “It wasn’t like we were instructed to do wildflowers, or do the (LBJ Library and Museum). My grandmother said: ‘Find your passion and stick with it. And if you are going to give of your time, give 100 percent.’ ”
When in town, Robb also has volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, the Next-to-New consignment shop and Reading is Fundamental, among other causes; Covert sits on the boards of the Children’s Medical Center Foundation of Central Texas and Trinity Episcopal School and contributes time to other groups.
Although their vocabulary demonstrates a familiarity with Mrs. Johnson’s ecological inclinations, neither claims specialized knowledge of the field. “I know absolutely nothing about gardening,” Robb said. “And I know virtually nothing about wildflowers. There’s only about four I can identify. My grandmother would refer to them by their scientific names and really know detailed things about them.”
Robb credits the volunteers and docents at the wildflower center for guiding her initial volunteer work there during a sabbatical from teaching while her grandmother was alive. She was given simple tasks, such as ripping ragweed out of wildflower beds. “I can sit there for hours and take out things they want me to take out,” she said cheerfully. “And it gave me the opportunity to bring home stories to my grandmother. I’d tell her, ‘I tried not to kill everything out there.’ ”
Other Johnson descendants have stayed close to the land. One spends all his time near the ranch. Another helps lead a gardening club in San Antonio. The great-grandchildren are picking up the family trait.
“At school, my daughter made what they called a ‘little museum,’ ” Covert said. “She painted a picture of a ladybug on a leaf. She called it ‘Looking outside nature’s window.’ It caught me off guard.” The cousins have also tried to emulate their grandmother’s graciousness. “She loved watching to see how many were on the tour buses at the ranch,” Covert said.
“Because it was a gift they gave back to country. She’d stop and talk to the visitors. She’d do that even when she could not speak anymore. She’d just wave. There was never a more gracious woman. In her later years, even more so. She found a way to do it. Her eyes would light up whenever people were around.”
Robb and Covert bask in the reflected glory of their grandmother’s achievements and try to stay modest and thankful about it. “I cannot tell you how many calls I’ve gotten, and people say, ‘We were just driving through, and I thought of your grandmother,’ ” Covert said of clean highways and bounties of flowers.
“Every spring we are flooded with that. It just reminds me how grateful I am that she was way ahead of her time in terms of the environment. And not so much that it had to be the prettiest, but just take care of it. Enjoy it and take care of it. And leave it better than you found it.”
For more information on wildflowers and the project, to view a complete list of donors or to donate online, visit statesman.com/wildflowers. Mail donations to Lady Bird’s Legacy Wildflower Fund, P.O. Box 50066, Austin, TX 78763-0066 or use the coupon printed in Sunday’s paper . You also can call 445-1732 or e-mail wildflowers@statesman.com for information.
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OutYouth 20/20 Vision at Zach Theatre
There’s more than one way to regenerate a donor program through social means, and OutYouth has discovered a potent variation. First, they attempt to retire the kind of emergency donations required during the first 20 years of providing services to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.
Heath Riddles and Aubrey Wilkerson
Then they establish a sustainable micro-giving program of $20 a month for professionals to back the nonprofit’s $400,000 annual budget. Furthermore, they empower team leaders to enlist sustaining backers, increasing the social connection to the charity.
Johnny Radelat and Mary Harsh
Plan leaders Heath Riddles, Lynn Yeldell and John Livingston topped off the process with an exemplary social event at Zach Theatre. Everything was just right: Time for mingling over light fare, then a short set by supple-voiced singer Lisa Marshall. After that, the shortest testimonial speeches I’ve ever heard from staff, graduates, backers and the theater’s guest/hosts Dave Steakley and Jaston Williams (taking a break from “Our Town” rehearsals next door.)
Aliza Orent and Kelly Vicknair
Like the ProArts Collective event earlier in the evening supporting the Boyd Vance Scholarships at Austin Community College, this party was designed to produce modest, but tenable results. Yet the long-term consequences for both groups could be momentous.
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Philanthro-Party 101
Business manager Shawne Groves is accustomed to organizing things. Communications. Programs. Offices. Events.
Yet the inveterate multitasker at Protect America, the Round Rock interactive wireless security company, last week had barely reached Square 1 on a proposed charity event with a musical act. And she wanted advice.
“The world has changed so much with the economy and all,” said Groves, who switched careers and moved to Austin, in part because of the recession. “All you need is to change is yourself.”
A good start on the road to philanthropy. My first impulse was to send the Oregon native to the city’s youthful tribes of social fundraisers, such as the CharityBash or Austin Involved, or to one of the charity umbrella groups, like I Live Here, I Give Here or Greenlights for Nonprofits. Admirable groups all.
But instead, why not brainstorm over coffee? Maybe I could save Groves some time and, a little selfishly, track her progress for this social column. Our lively conversation on a blissfully sunny day settled on clusters of questions.
That’s an appropriately scaled group, too. Giants like the Livestrong Foundation and Dell Children’s Medical Foundation could use any financial help and social investment you offer, but, for a first venture, something less ambitious is in order.
Besides money, you dearly want wider exposure for your chosen charity. And, if you represent a business like Protect America, some recognition for your own group wouldn’t hurt.
So don’t get too distressed if donations are relatively modest on your first try. You are building social connections for later harvests.
What’s your bait? Even if your potential guests adore pets, too, they could just write a check and skip the event. Some nonprofit managers actually advocate this kind of giving, since it’s undeniably efficient and cost-effective. Sending in a signed piece of paper or checking an online box, however, does not bond the donor socially to the cause. Thus charity events, even beginner ones.
How can you lure potential guests off the couch? The venue is crucial. It must be a place that’s convenient, attractive and correctly scaled. The more unusual, the more likely you’ll attract the curious. If you can add decorative twist you’ll improve the mood and deepen the memories of the event.
Not everybody has the skill or resources that Bobbi Topfer, Patty Huffines and Creative Consultants had for the recent Long Center Anniversary Party — a glorious madhouse of purple! — but a creative eye can turn an adequate venue into a party palace. Just remember, everything counts: E-mail invitations, social media notices, traffic, parking, greetings, lighting, lines, too much or too little space. So much to consider!
What about “swag”? Don’t bother, I say. People like free things, but it’s hard to please them with a uniform gift. And it gets expensive. Unless you come up with something reasonable and completely novel, like the mood-ring putty Groves was carrying around already.
What about entertainment? Everybody in Austin thinks music. A band. A buzzy singer. No-brainer, right?
Wrong. If you book an Austin act with sympathy for your cause, you can obtain their services for minimal costs. But almost every Austin musician also plays regular local gigs. The market is saturated. Even a Patty Griffin or an Okkervil River can’t guarantee a big crowd for every event.
One way of dealing with this challenge was pioneered locally by American YouthWorks. Its annual gala at the Austin Music Hall is divided into three distinct sections, with different audiences for each: Early for mingling; later for dinner and formalities; even later for the musical act, booked to attract a third set of ticket-buyers. The Paramount Theatre gala switches this order, putting music first, which works for them.
When should all this happen? We covered the problem of overbooked social dates in a recent column. But what about times? If you don’t mind a dry event, a luncheon is an effective alternative. Many planners go for early in the evening, hoping that people will arrive almost directly after work, skipping the trip home, where they could fall into the nesting trap. Others allow time for a change of attire and perhaps a nap. Unless it’s an athletic or religious event, mornings are right out.
All that said, the most important advice is to do what you’d do at home: Be a good host. Stay sensitive to your guests’ needs and moods. Don’t force things. And everyone will walk away with positive feelings for you, your charity, your business and your backers.
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Boyd Vance Scholarship Event for ProArts Collective
Were he alive, Boyd Vance would cackle, coo and howl with pleasure. A scholarship named for the outrageously funny and outspoken leader of Austin’s black arts community? Sure thing: Goes with the absolutely appropriate Boyd Vance Theatre at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center.
Lisa Byrd and Percival Everett
A campaign party for the Austin Community College arts scholarship filled the former home of Ms. B’s on East 11th Street on Wednesday. ProArts Collective sponsored the event, which included eats from G&G New Orleans Cuisine and Soul Food. The guest list mixed ACC dignitaries with reps from the University of Texas, Austin Revitalization Authority, Big Austin and other key groups.
Toni Tipton-Martin, Freddie Dixon Sr. and Claudia Conner
I left before the main speaker, novelist Percival Everett, gave an address, along with a dramatic reading of his “The Fix” by members of Altered Stages. But I was able to spend time with social and cultural connector Lisa Byrd and others whom I sorely miss from the arts beat.
Rochelle Smith, Rachael Mardegian and Livia Perry
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