Section Memorial Park, by Woodway Drive, to Hogg Bird Sanctuary, Houston
Difficulty Easy
Length and duration 3 miles, 1–3 hours
Resources Tours by Buffalo Bayou Partnership, buffalobayou.org
Reward yourself Order the spinach-artichoke turkey burger at Shandy’s Café, on Memorial Drive, in Houston.
UPDATE: Thanks to the tireless efforts of anti-trafficking expert Dottie Laster and David Walding, an attorney with the Bernardo Kohler Center, the woman called Kiki featured in this story was released, after about a year of incarceration, from the La Salle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, on July 20, and is awaiting receipt of her T-Visa. After a brief stop in Houston for Thai food, she has moved to a safe place with a specially trained staff who assist victims of human trafficking.
Fergus & Geronimo
It seems like every other band playing the annual SXSW Festival in Austin this year can be described as lo-fi or garage, but Fergus and Geronimo take inspiration from the other half of the ‘60s. “Tell It (In My Ear)” and “Powerful Lovin’” sound so much like old Motown singles you half expect them to show up to shows in snappy suits and skinny ties, while “Turning Blue” has a surf-pop vibe that could soundtrack a game of beach blanket bingo.
Of the many memorable moments in Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle, a three-part, nine-hour production being staged through early May at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space, in Manhattan, perhaps none is more quietly arresting than the prologue. A young man rides a train from his home in the fictional Texas town of Harrison to Houston, circa 1910. He strikes up a conversation with an older woman who settles into the seat across from him. The subject soon turns to religion.
Life is too short not to live it in Texas. But recently we asked ourselves an uncomfortable question: If we had only one year left on earth, what would we do in the Lone Star State? A spirited conversation ensued, writers and editors submitted their picks, and more than two hundred ideas poured forth. We overlooked suggestions like seeing the Alamo or going to the Capitol because we assumed that everyone has already done those things (you have done them, right?).
Almost immediately after Annise Parker won the Houston mayor’s race last December, a new phrase started cropping up in the local lexicon of one-upmanship. “Kathy’s done my taxes for years,” I heard a pretty young woman brag in the balcony of the SRO Wortham Center the day of Parker’s inauguration. Later that week I heard the same refrain. “Kathy’s done my taxes for years,” a writer for the Houston Chronicle told me offhandedly.
Susan Wright, the blue-eyed butcher of the Houston suburbs, is still a lovely young woman, still as polite and well-mannered as she was seven years ago, when she grabbed a knife, stabbed her husband at least 193 times, and buried him facedown in their backyard.
For the February issue, the subject of my column was the ongoing discussion between Rice University and Baylor Medical School, concerning a merger of the two institutions. The issue went to press last week, before discussions came to an end today, January 12, with a joint announcement from the two presidents, David Leebron of Rice and William Butler of Baylor. As I wrote in this column, Baylor's ongoing financial problems made the merger a dicey problem for Rice.
On the day my mother died, I found an opened Neiman Marcus box sitting just outside her closet. I peeked in and spied a stunning double-breasted Nanette Lepore jacket in a bright-pink tweed with a high, wide collar, silver zippers, and a price tag that, for a winter coat, almost—but not quite—bordered on reasonable.
Before he made it big as Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze was just a boy from Oak Forest in Houston, a running back for the Waltrip High School Rams in 1971. But considering the fact that his mother was a well-known choreographer and dancer, maybe it wasn’t a big surprise that Swayze would go on to acting and dancing and singing himself.
