June 1996 Issue

On the Cover

The Lawsuit from Hell

How an East Texas attorney spawned the most massive products-liability case ever—one that has cost millions of dollars and involved thousands of plaintiffs and might never end.

Features


The Last Refuge

For years the dusty outpost of Terlingua has been a magnet for renegades and loners looking for a haven from the modern world. No wonder the brother of the suspected Unabomber holed up there.

Junior Achievement

Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker—and now Junior Brown? The former community college teacher is the latest outlaw to hijack Texas country music, and he may be the greatest.

Columns


The Hole Story

Austin’s Butthole Surfers have always been very strange. But these days, the strangest thing about them is their mainstream respectability.

The Rites of Swing

It doesn’t matter that his most famous pupil was shark- bitten at the Masters. Butch Harmon is still Texas’ hottest golf pro since Harvey Penick.

Reporter


CD and Book Reviews

Hot CDsGrammy award aside, Flaco Jiménez’s last solo album was a big disappointment, for it showed how far Texas’ greatest accordionist had strayed. After all those studio sit-ins with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Dwight Yoakam and those trips around the globe as the ambassador of Tex-Mex, his

Marcia Gay Harden

I REMEMBER ONE SUMMER when there were snakes galore on Lake LBJ near Kingsland. We have five kids in our family, and we’d all go swimming in the lake, but when we’d see something in the water—and couldn’t tell if it was a turtle or a water moccasin—we’d jump out.

Cheril Santini

MAKING A SPLASH—so to speak—is what Cheril Santini does best. As a member of Southern Methodist University’s diving team in the early nineties, the Dallas native made All-American ten times, was a finalist for NCAA woman of the year, and was named one of the nation’s top ten college women

He Takes the Cake

Wally Mejía designed his first wedding cake for a friend in 1989. It was a five-tiered butter-pecan-creme-filled extravaganza adorned with intricate scrollwork that imitated the architectural treatments he’d admired in France the year before, when he took a pastrymaking course at the Cordon Bleu. “The guests surrounded it and took

The Art World

LEAVING THE COUNTRY THIS SUMMER? You can still get your fill of Houston artists. Sculptor Joseph Havel will be taking his solo exhibition of shirts and shirt fragments to Kiev’s Soros Center for Contemporary Art, and possibly to the Herzliyya Museum of Art in Israel. This month Havel’s shirt fragments

Web


Roasted Spring Chicken With Garden Vegetables

Recipe from Chef Lance Young, The Roaring Fork, Dallas.Spring Chicken1/2 cup lemon juice 1/8 cup honey 2 tablespoons fresh thyme 2 tablespoons fresh chives 1/4 cup olive oil 1 tablespoon garlic, minced 1 teaspoon salt 11/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 2 whole chickens (21/2 to 3 pounds each) salt

Miscellany


State Fare

Underscoring the “comfort” in comfort food, the Roaring Fork in Dallas (14866 Montfort) has brought classic roasted chicken into the nineties with a dish that’s a breeze to fix and soul-satisfying to eat. Chef Lance Youngs generously bastes the fowl with a lemon-and-honey glaze brightened by thyme and chives. The

Around the State

THE MAIN EVENTShtick Shift These days, stand-up stalwarts like Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres get rich off genial, self-deprecating, politically correct routines, but comedy has not always been so pretty. For half a century or so, in cheesy lounges and joke-filled rooms, Vegas and the Borscht Belt have buckled under

Swartz and All

We didn’t know it at the time, but there was something karmically appropriate about asking senior editor Mimi Swartz to write about riding around the state with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Victor Morales in his dented white pickup truck (see “Truckin’,”). At first, it seemed to make sense

Beef Choice

PITY THE POOR COWMAN. All his life he has been told to raise bigger and better cattle. More meat on the hoof meant more dollars in his pocket—which is why Texas ranchers have turned away from smaller British breeds like Angus and Hereford in favor of heftier continental breeds like

Explore the Archive

See all issues
Magazine Latest