February 1983
Features
They’re where you went to get your hair cut or to see a picture show or to watch the squirrels on the courthouse lawn.
It’s Houston’s driveway, a twenty-mile kaleidoscope of bankers, punkers, strippers, surgeons, students, grackles and cars.
If you think Texas is pretty much the same as it was ten years go, you’re wrong. Nineteen seventy-three remade the state overnight.
Charlie Brooks was the first man to die by lethal injection, but everyone wondered whether he or his partner was the real murderer. In his last days, Brooks answered that, and other questions.
And I’m telling you, if you can’t batter it, fry it, spike it with chiles, or bathe it in buttermilk, it’s not worth your time.
Can Texans be won over to the antique tradition of tea and little sandwiches in the afternoon? Dallas’ and Houston’s new gilded hotels are counting on it.
Columns
Texas opera lovers would have ended the season happily just having seen a lively Rosenkavalier, a magical Rheingold, and a fiery Wozzeck. But then the Houston Grand Opera’s Pagliacci came along and took their breath away.
Dale Steffes can predict the future of the oil business. So why do the majors turn a deaf ear? Because, says Steffes, the news is all bad.
Texas women write about crop dusters and frozen custard and the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport in the encouraging new anthology Her Work. Life Sentences, though, is a flimsy feminist exercise.
The Fabulous Thunderbirds storm away on a new album that shows why they’re Texas’ hardiest rhythm and blues band. Eight more releases capture everything from mandolin picking to Balinese monkey chants.
Gandhi presents its title character as all but a god and India as all but a paradise. Starstruck is a lark; Sophie’s Choice is a letdown.
Miscellany
Treasure hunters want state booty; Republicans aren’t so hot about Phil Gramm; there’s hope for Texans with money in Mexico; Texas newspapers worry about USA Today.
End of the line for a cop, a coach, quilters, and the Confederate Air Force.
Reporter
The unhealthy politics of emergency medicine; according an accordionist his due; sucking it up for Lite beer; the condo boom that went bust.
