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Music|
March 1, 1998

The Entertainer

How has Jacksonville native Neal McCoy, a self-described “easy-listenin’ kinda guy,” managed to sell five million country CDs and cassettes? It has little to do with his singing.

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Music|
March 1, 1998

Toad Warriors

Is there a black cloud hanging over Fort Worth’s Toadies? You might think so based on the alt-rock band’s recent history. Their major-label debut for Interscope, 1994’s Rubberneck—a painfully angst-ridden record—went platinum after two years of incessant touring, but some strange stuff happened during all that time on the road:

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Art|
March 1, 1998

The Return of the Native

With a major retrospective of his work at three Houston museums, Robert Rauschenberg is once again the talk of Texas. What’s he been up to? A portrait of the artist as an old man.

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Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Jensen Ackles

As a kid, Jensen Ackles used to poke fun at the “mushy” daytime dramas his mother regularly watched, but not anymore. Since last June, the Richardson native has starred on the hit NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives as Eric Brady, a mature-for-his-age teen who keeps his emotions bottled

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Film & TV|
March 1, 1998

Robert Benton

We moved to Waxahachie in the early forties, when I was about ten years old. I was a seriously dyslexic child, and no one quite knew what dyslexia was in those days. People just thought I wasn’t too swift. And my way out of it was drawing. It was something

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Sports|
January 1, 1998

Life of Wiley

At his pool hall near White Rock Lake, on bar tables across the country, and at professional tournaments around the world, Carson “CJ” Wiley earns his keep by ramming balls into pockets. It’s that simple.

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Film & TV|
January 1, 1998

Pulpit Fiction

HE MAY LOVE the smell of napalm in the morning, but Robert Duvall also has a certain affection for Texas. Over the years, some of his best-known films have been made here, including Tender Mercies (1983) and Lonesome Dove (1989). Now the 67-year-old has returned to the state again for

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Sports|
January 1, 1998

Guy Mezger

HE’S BEEN A WORLD-CLASS practitioner of the martial arts and a champion of the famously brutal “ultimate fighting,” but these days Dallasite Guy Mezger gets his kicks from a sport that is somewhere in between the two. In pancration fighting, combatants can draw on any martial arts technique, and only

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Sports|
January 1, 1998

Mean Joe Greene

I played linebacker at Dunbar High School in Temple. It was an all-black school, but that only bothered me in the sense that we didn’t have a chance to play against the white schools. After my senior year, I was interested in a couple of colleges: A&I, Prairie View, Houston.

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Art|
January 1, 1998

Joan of Art

Less than a decade ago, she was a homemaker and an arts volunteer, but today the Arlington Museum of Art’s Joan Davidow is the most imaginative and adventurous museum director working in Texas.

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Film & TV|
December 1, 1997

Austin, Storied

Just as Austin is the Dallas of the nineties—a booming cultural icon bordering on cliché—Austin Stories may be the Dallas of the nineties. The MTV sitcom, which debuted this fall, is weekly television’s first credible portrayal of Texas and Texans since J.R. got shot. (Walker, Texas Ranger? Kung fu in

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Business|
December 1, 1997

Weekly, Strongly

Why are small-town Texas newspapers thriving? Because unlike big-city dailies, they know their readers, and they give them what they want.

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Film & TV|
December 1, 1997

Ara Celi

“When I was little,” Ara Celi says, “I used to watch TV and ask, ‘How do you get on there?’” At 19 the El Paso native set out for Hollywood to answer that question; once there, she quickly learned the three most important words in show business: audition, audition, audition.

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Arts & Entertainment|
December 1, 1997

Tommy Tune

I started dancing when I was five, after [Houston dance teacher] Emmamae Horn visited my school and asked my parents if I could enroll in her dance class. It must have run in the family, though, because my parents were great dancers too. When I was about nine, I remember

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Music|
November 1, 1997

Horn Free

After years in New York’s jazz trenches, trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe has come home to Smithville in search of the simple life.

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Art|
November 1, 1997

The Lens Justifies the Means

If you measure a photographer by the stature of his subjects, then Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is very big indeed. After all, he’s shot such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel, Hillary Clinton, and for this month’s issue of Texas Monthly, George and Barbara Bush (see “The Revision Thing”). And if

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Books|
November 1, 1997

Mary, Queen of Plots

For fans of Mary Willis Walker, May will be the merriest of months, for that’s when the Austinite’s fourth novel will hit stores. In All the Dead Lie Down (Doubleday, $22.95), her plucky protagonist, Lone Star Monthly reporter Molly Cates, springs into action to find her father’s killer and foil

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Art|
November 1, 1997

El Circo

As in Hanoi and Moscow, the circus in Mexico is no three-ring extravaganza. It’s one of the grittiest shows on earth.

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Sports|
November 1, 1997

Brandon DeLuca

Calling Brandon DeLuca the Karate Kid would be inaccurate. Although he has won the North Texas Karate Association’s Grand Championship the past two years, and although he attended this summer’s Junior Olympic Games in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he earned medals in each of the twelve events he entered—including six

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Film & TV|
November 1, 1997

Patricia Richardson

I thought that moving to Texas would be the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it saved my life. It happened during my junior year in high school, which was really traumatic. All my life I had never been at the same school for more than two years,

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Music|
September 30, 1997

Rare Byrd

Beaumont’s Tracy Byrd may be a hunky, hitmaking hat act, but if it’s all the same, he’d rather be singing an old Bob Wills tune.

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Film & TV|
September 30, 1997

Reneé O’Connor

Their mission is to save the world, not conquer it, but the stars of Xena: Warrior Princess are winning television-ratings battles from San Angelo to Slovakia. The two-year-old syndicated show airs in more than eighty countries, making Lucy Lawless, who plays Xena, the first leather-clad TV lead since the Fonz—and

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Books|
September 30, 1997

Dan Rather

MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Grandma Page, was up at three-thirty or four o’clock in the morning to bake and churn and get ready for the cotton fields on our family farm in Bloomington. At night, after all the cooking and sewing, there was energy left for her reading. “Come, Danny, I’ll

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Books|
September 30, 1997

Writes of Passage

Getting published was supposed to be a cure-all, but for Austinite Louise Redd, it was just another chapter in the life of a struggling novelist.

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Music|
August 31, 1997

Yule Love It

The holiday season comes early for Asleep at the Wheel, who’ve just wrapped Merry Texas Christmas, Y’all (High Street/Windham Hill Records) at Austin’s Bismeaux studios. Highlights include Tish Hinojosa singing “Feliz Navidad” and Willie Nelson and Don Walser on “Silent Night.” Too homey for you? Wheel front man Ray Benson’s

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Art|
August 31, 1997

What a Drag

Celebrity portraiture often requires that the subject be ready for anything. An imaginative photographer like Houston’s Pam Francis will conjure up unusual settings and costumes to best evoke her subject’s true nature, as when she lured oil tycoon Oscar Wyatt and his German shepherd to the roof of a building

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