Blondes vs. Brunettes

Blondes vs. Brunettes is an annual powder-puff football fundraiser benefitting the Alzheimer’s Association of Greater Dallas. This year’s game is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 11, at the Cotton Bowl. Tickets cost $25 at bvbdallas.org and include an after-party at the Cotton Bowl with pizza and beer. This year’s fundraising goal is $275,000, and 100 percent of donations and ticket sales go directly to the association. Two neighborhood residents are competing in the game, 29-year-old blonde Jenn Thompson, a real estate agent with game sponsor Ebby Halliday, and brunette Tori See, 25, who is in marketing for Multiview Inc. We asked these tough ladies a few questions about the fundraiser.

How did you get involved with Blondes vs. Brunettes?

See: I found out about it a couple of weeks before the 2010 game. My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I was 12, and my uncle has early-onset, so I signed up for it the next year.

Thompson: Five years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to play on a philanthropic flag football team. I had played powder-puff at TCU in my soror- ity, so I was like, “As long as I can play quarterback.” And that was the first year. I originally played for the sport, and I knew of Alzheimer’s disease, but I didn’t know much about it, or I didn’t think it affected people my age. Once I became involved, I immediately realized that people my age are experiencing Alzheimer’s because they’re caring for their parents who have it. People younger than me, whose parents are younger than mine, are experiencing this. So it blossomed into a greater awareness and passion for the cause.

Who is your favorite brunette/ blonde?

See: Tina Fey.

Thompson: I have to say my golden retriever, Walter.

Who is your favorite football player and why?

See: Troy Polamalu. He uses his fame as a Pittsburgh Steeler to do a lot of good in the Pittsburgh community.

Thompson: Troy Aikman. He is a great leader, a great football player, and he’s a babe. What is your team doing to prepare for the game?

See: Practice every week. Keep an eye on the ball. I don’t want to give away our strategy. But we’re really focused on the game and on fundraising. We won last year, and it really felt great, and we want to do it again.

Thompson: We practice once a week, and we run plays. The coaches are just as involved as the players. They have to raise as much money as the players ($1,000). That’s why it’s a great organization, because we have some playful competition, like, we want to beat the Brun’s, but at the end of the day, we come back to why we’re doing this.

What is the most challenging part of all this?

See: For me personally, it’s playing football. I’m not a major athlete. Luckily, I’m not expected to be great.

Thompson: That I can’t be Brett Favre forever. [laughs] My challenge now is that I’m 29. I’ve had a really good ride as quarterback, and taking myself out of that is hard to think about. I see the younger girls coming in who are like 22, 23, and I remember being there. I just want to squeeze their cheeks. But I’m proud that we’re leaving this legacy. What about redheads?

See: My sister’s a ginger. Anybody who doesn’t fit that dynamic of blonde or brunette gets to kind of pick their team and have fun with it.

Thompson: That’s a very good question because redheads can go either way, but each team definitely has its own personality. So the redhead kind of skews where she fits in the best. It’s not so much about the hair color as it is about personality, for the most part.

—Rachel Stone

Plants on a hard body

Neighborhood resident Donelle Simmons sometimes drives a 1985 Dodge pickup with no air conditioning and a door that occasionally swings open without warning. “It’s a beating,” she says of the truck. But it’s also fun. This Dodge is not just a truck, it’s a farm. Simmons and her mom, Marilyn Simmons, operate DFW Truck Farm, a nonprofit educational service to teach the public, and children especially, about nutrition and growing food. The truck bed contains a miniature garden: a row of chard, spinach, melons, heirloom tomatoes and a little ladybug farm. This past school year, the DFW Truck Farm made 64 trips, visiting schools, fairs and other events in Dallas and all over the surrounding area. The mother-daughter team also runs a for-profit business, Garden Inspirations, teaching private gardening lessons. About a year and a half ago, Donelle was working as an assistant at Sewell Cadillac when she got a call from Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Truck Farm, asking her to create one in Dallas. She decided to quit her job and devote herself fulltime to the family gardening business so that she would have time to operate the truck farm. They started with a grant from Truck Farm to buy their original truck and do some planting. Since then, they’ve moved on to the Dodge, which cost $1,500. They do some fundraising, such as the Truck Farm 5k run this past spring, and they are seeking sponsorships for the farm, but some of the funds to keep it going come out of their own pockets. “To do the farm how we really want to do it would cost about $18,000 a year,” Donelle says. This coming school year, she would like to focus on just one school during the fall term, if she can find a teacher who is interested in gardening, and then move on to a different school in the spring. “I think that will have a bigger impact than visiting a different school every week. If we can get kids to learn about food and where it comes from, then maybe we can overcome some of the food issues we have in our society,” she says. “And it’s fun.”

—Rachel Stone

How it works

Tackling city-related maintenance issues in our neighborhoods goT A quEsTion? Email launch@advocatemag.com.

Installing Stop Signs

With people trying to bypass rush-hour traffic and construction projects, our neighborhood streets can sometimes feel like racetracks. It’s not just an irritant; it’s a safety issue.

q: People are always speeding through our neighborhood. How do we get the city to install stop signs?

A: You can petition for one, but most residential streets don’t qualify.

The chances are slim for getting all-way stop signs installed. The street must not be a thoroughfare (a high-volume street such as Skillman), it cannot be an emergency response route, and it must have at least 300 cars passing through each hour during an eight-hour period, with speeds exceeding 40 miles per hour. That’s why the city has a petitioning process in place. Homeowners and neighborhood associations must obtain signatures from two-thirds of the property owners who are within 900 feet of the proposed location. “It requires a great deal of work,” says Kerry Elder, the city’s transportation planner. “We get calls from all over the city, and most often, it doesn’t warrant a stop sign.” If the request is still denied, neighbors can appeal to the City Plan Commission, which would vote on whether to allow a sign even though it doesn’t meet the criteria. Elder says that road humps are a little easier to obtain than stop signs. To learn more, call 311 or visit dallascityhall.com/services.

—Emily Toman