October 1997

Features
What happens when the modern world gets its hands on the lowly burrito? A food fad is born.
Up on federal drug charges for the second time in fifteen years, the impresario of Antone’s nightclub in Austin may finally have to face the music.
Has the best-known Latina writer of our day painted herself into a corner?
High peaks, scant rain, and hardpan soil—but also high art, hip hotels, and a new telescope that’s a star in its own right: Snapshots from a remote region of our state unlike anyplace else on earth.

Columns
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.
Conflicting accounts of the killing of German immigrants in the Hill Country during the Civil War are creating a certain amount of dis-Comfort.
Thanks to his penchant for classic literature, Wishbone is the new top dog in kids’ entertainment.
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.
What is ex–football star Bill Glass’s plan for reforming hardened prison inmates? God is in the details.
Reporter
Hot CDs Few voices evoke the pathos of country and western tragedy as genuinely as the rich, honeyed timbre of George Jones. By 1962, the year Jones signed with the United Artists label, the East Texan had been divorced, jailed, and was already as legendary for his hard drinking as…
George W. Bush faces a dilemma. What’s a poor front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination supposed to do when all anyone in the media wants to talk about is when he’s going to announce his intentions? Why don’t interviewers ask him about shoes or ships or sealing wax—anything but that?…
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…
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…
Miscellany
Senior editor Joe Nick Patoski provides readers with what you used to get at your local gas station: full service. Writing so-called service pieces—mini-guidebooks that offer readers do-it-yourself instructions and suggestions for trips and other leisure activities—has taken the 46-year-old resident of Wimberley all over Texas. Says Patoski: “I’ve climbed…
Web
Tomato Pesto Pesto 1 cup chopped pecans 4 medium garlic cloves 3/4 cup olive oil 25 large fresh basil leaves 10 sprigs Italian parsley, leaves only 10 leaves fresh mint salt and pepper to taste 1/2 to 1 tablespoon red-pepper flakes 1…