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BRINGING RIO DE JANEIRO TO LAKEWOOD
How a 1993 UFC fight gave Lakewood a new jiu-jitsu gym
Story by AYSIA LANE
Photography by AMANI SODIQ
On November 12 in 1993, the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight took place in Denver, Colorado. 5,875 miles away in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a young and inspired Rafael Lang watched, plotting the next 30 years of his life.
When Lang was a child, he attended a private school that offered several sports options for students. Every day after school he would partake in a new sport.
Soccer? Judo? Track? Swim? Lang says, yes.
The spirit of competition is what drew Lang into the world of sports.
Lang understood the value of playing with a team. He felt the camaraderie and connection in those sports was important, but something about a solo journey was intriguing.
“I think jiu-jitsu is unique because it’s the only sport that you go to the arena by yourself,” Lang says. “But you cannot improve by yourself.”
It seemed like the best of both worlds.
“You need a whole team behind you. You need to train partners. You need a good coach, but I like the idea that inside the arena if I win or lose, that’s on me. That’s no excuse,” Lang says.
This conclusion and the UFC fight pushed him to fully enter the world of jiu-jitsu and martial arts.
“So at 15,16 years old I decided to be a world champion,” Lang says.
It doesn’t seem like there was another option. Lang had made up his mind and his coaches pushed him forward.
So at 17, he became the World Champion in the Middle Weight and Absolute Division.
He continued, gathering and collecting titles until he was 26. It was at that time, the prime of his career, that he got into a motercycle crash.
He was left with a plate in his back, four hooks in his shoulder and a plethora of other injuries to nurse.
But returning to the mat was never a question for Lang, despite doctors proclaiming he should never fight again.
He recalls one of the first lessons taught in jiu-jitsu: the tap. Tapping out is how a person can submit or surrender during a match.
“Tap and try again, right? So let’s say I tapped on the motorcycle, but I was ready to try again right after,” Lang says. “That’s what the sport taught me most. Like when you get a takedown, after the takedown, you get up and you try again.”
After he recovered, Lang traveled the world.
Rafael Lang has been a black belt since 2006 and will be earning his fifth degree in 2025.
He began teaching airline companies how to manage unruly passengers, the Australian Army how to navigate combat situations and police in Brazil ways to safely practice self-defense against suspects. Eventually, he made his way to the U.S.
Today, Lang is a Lakewood resident, sitting on several titles and medals including the 2022 No-Gi Pans Jiu-Jitsu Gold Medal and the 2021 IBJJF Master Worlds Gold Medal. He is also the owner of Rio Jiu-Jitsu Lifestyle, located in Hillside Village Shopping Center.
On the weekends, you can find Lang sitting on the mat with a group of 14 children during their 9 a.m. class, lined up wearing white gis — the traditional uniform for brazilian jiu-jitsu — with white and green belts tied and knotted in the front. None of them are older than 12. They sit in front of him, some more still than others, watching intensely as he models moves with a fellow instructor. He meets their gaze the same way he would any of the five instructors that line the wall behind him, who encourage the children to engage as the class continues.
In the middle of demonstrating a move they would soon replicate, he asks them a question — probing them to see who can tell him what his next step should be.
“Can someone help me here?” he asks the children.
It’s not rhetorical.
The children stretch their arms and hands, offering answers to the hypothetical problem. Every child is known by name. One of the children is Lang’s son.
At the end of class, each student shakes hands with the instructors and as they transition into the adult class, the instructors become the students.
There are 32 group classes every week and private lessons shared amongst the 13 instructors at Rio Jiu-Jitsu. Every instructor has previously been Lang’s student.
“They’ve been with me for years, so I trust them. I know their wives and know their kids. So that’s people that I know,” Lang says. “Capable in terms of ‘do the job’, but also good people.”
Lang’s done it. He’s competed —and won, a lot — he’s taught and he’s opened up his own gym. Now, his goal is to pass on the lessons he’s learned from the sport to the next generation.
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WHAT’S GOING ON?
Meet the team behind the one and only East Dallas centric podcast
Story by AYSIA LANE | Photography by VICTORIA GOMEZ
RICHARD HARMER, CAMILLE LIEBBE
AND D. HAYES SMITH . The three make up the What in East Dallas is Going On?! podcast. Three peas in an East Dallas pod-cast.
The podcast has racked in somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 downloads per episode across its 111 episodes — covering the nooks and crannies of arts, culture and business in our neighborhood.
It was at The Avett Brothers’ concert that Harmer, Liebbe and their spouses were tossing around the idea of starting a podcast.
Harmer and Liebbe felt they had a natural chemistry, sharing a sibling-like
dynamic that would translate well behind the mic. The two also shared a background in media, with Harmer coming from his own podcast show and Liebbe coming from the magazine space.
“So we already made the decision, everything that we do, we want local, everything, literally everything, and that included a producer,” Harmer says.
The co-hosts’ search for a producer began in the birthplace of many modern neighborhood collaborations: Facebook.
It was through a friend that saw their Facebook post that Hayes caught wind of the opportunity. He worked in post-pro -
duction for 15 years prior and had just been laid off.
“Immediately that timing was ... it couldn’t have been better,” Smith says.
The group recorded their first episode at the opening day of the State Fair of Texas back in 2022. Two years later, curiosity and community submissions lead the way for the trio as they embark on a new narrative journey every time they record.
The podcast features several nonprofits, councilmembers and “pseudo celebrities” who have ties and live in our neighborhood. The Dirt Doctor Howard Garrett, Old 97’s guitarist Ken Bathea and former
Olympian Vince Poscente are just a few of the names that begin to circulate as the trio reminisce about past guests.
“We don’t give them any questions beforehand. We like it very conversational. We don’t like it to come across as staged or anything,” Liebbe says, as Harmer shares that their goal is to approach the show as “organically” as possible.
The team moves like a well-oiled machine, with Liebbe and Harmer lining up guests and prepping the shows, and Smith sound mixing, editing and handling post-production.
Now that they have hit their stride, mastering their banter and how best to showcase their personalities via audio, the team is opening the door for new podcasting opportunities.
“I want to start doing more live shows,” Harmer says, adding that video may be a future endeavor for the group.
No end in sight
La Casita owner Maricsa Trejo recently opened yet another location in Half Price Books
Story by AUSTIN WOOD | Photography by HALEY HILL
LA CASITA OWNER
Maricsa Trejo knows what it means to be pushed.
Her career began in El Centro College’s class kitchens. The path has taken her to fine dining kitchens in New York and bakeries in Oregon. She’s gotten there and back by being pushed by her family, colleagues, mentors, fiery chefs and, of course, herself.
Trejo is a highly-skilled pastry chef, business owner and James Beard award finalist. La Casita’s name frequently pops up in local publications’ “Best Of” lists. She recently opened a second La Casita Coffee location in the Lake Highlands area, and plans to debut a third later this month in Uptown. After months of wrangling with code compliance, vendors and contractors, it would be understandable for her to take a break and catch her breath.
But oddly enough, she’s still talking about expansion.
She’s still pushing.
PANCAKES
Trejo was born in Mesquite as the daughter of immigrants from Mexico. Her mother arrived in her early 20s, and hadn’t received much formal education. Even though she had trouble reading herself, she still would take Trejo and her siblings to the library on Saturdays.
Her father, Alfredo, worked six days a week.
“I’d miss him,” Trejo says. “So sometimes I’d go with him on Saturdays, when he worked, I’d do my homework. He’s a plumber, so he does all the houses that aren’t built yet, he does all the plumbing for those, so he would be out in the heat. And I was like, if my dad can do it, I can go out there and do my homework.”
She says she tends to keep those long days in the Texas heat in the back
of her mind when she’s pushing herself to finish laminating in the back of her air-conditioned bakery.
Alfredo may have worked constantly, but the seventh day was a special occasion. On Sunday mornings, he got the time off from work some would use to rest on a reclining chair and watch TV. Instead, he saw it as an opportunity to share a meal with his family.
“They [Trejo’s parents] didn’t grow up eating pancakes as kids, my dad learned how to make pancakes on his own,” Trejo says. “He would make pancakes and fried eggs and bacon and all these things for us on Sundays because he wanted to be part of us.”
She knows the sacrifices her parents made in coming to the U.S. paved the way for her career, and says she respects their resilience “so much” in a “country that has very little love for people coming over here.”
“I’m doing it for myself and my husband, because we started this business together, but I’m also doing it for them. Because [when] I just became a cook, I’m like, ‘I promise I’m gonna do something big with it.’”
THE PASTRY HATER
Food has been a fascination from an early age, although her first interests were in art and music. She grew up surrounded by Mexican cuisine, but her “super authentic” experiences at her Argentine godmother’s house helped her realize she was interested in cooking, not flute playing.
“My mom would get jealous, because I’d be like ‘(She) is so good at cooking, and she does this and that.’” she says. “But my interest became, basically going from art and music, to, for some reason, cooking.”
She went on to enroll at El Centro College. Trejo didn’t want to commit to full-time culinary school before testing the waters, so she took basic cooking classes alongside the core curriculum.
Her least favorite class may come as a surprise.
“I hated pastry really,” she says. “I went to school and, my first pastry class, I don’t know if it was my teacher.
She was a good teacher. You could just tell she just did not want to be there.”
The art of pastry was lost on her. Trejo liked cooking. She relished the flash of the pan, and the ability to improvise on the fly to rectify mistakes. With pastry, instead of seeing beautiful manifestations of hours of labor, she saw tediously time-consuming fragile eggshells that presented 100 opportunities for miscalculation and ruin.
But as she progressed through her training, pastry started to make more and more sense.
“When I got into pastry, I realized I had all these weird ideas for pastries,” she says. “And like cooking, I guess you could say I never had an original idea. And I was like, ‘What am I?’”
The pastry hater slowly turned into a pastry chef.
Trejo left El Centro in favor of the college of hard knocks. She found a job at the Omni Hotel, and progressed from the banquet kitchen to the Texas Spice garde manger. Wanting to learn “as much as possible,” she volunteered to help prep for pastry in her spare time.
“I met one of my best friends there,” she says. “Her name is Lucia. She has a pastry place. She has a patisserie in Puerto Rico — I actually visited her two weeks ago — She was like ‘If you want to do this, dude, if you’re getting pressure to do this, don’t do it.’ But I was like, ‘No, I actually really like this.’ So I fell in love with pastry.”
“NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO HIRE YOU”
After leaving the Omni, she took a job in Oak Lawn working for an unnamed chef. The environment was not what she’d hoped.
“There’s no reason to treat anybody in any industry anywhere without respect, whether you’re male or female,” Trejo says. “And I was like, this is just not where I want to be anymore.”
She quit mid-shift after a particularly nasty interaction with the chef. On her way out, with announced plans to go to the Big Apple, the chef told her that “no one is ever going to hire you in New York.”
She got hired — in New York — to work at restaurant legend Tom Colicchio’s Collichio and Sons.
“He actually went there one of the nights and hung out and cooked with us,” she says. “And I was like ‘oh my god, I can’t believe I’m in the presence of Tom Collichio.’ It was so cool.”
After New York, she took a job in Oregon working as an overnight bread baker for Grand Central Bakery. She says she traveled there, alongside her now-husband, Alex, to become more well-rounded as a baker, which she figured would benefit her when she opened her own shop one day.
The chain operates similar to La Casita, with an array of locations selling housemade pastries and baked goods.
“I learned how to work with those big machines and I learned what it takes to have a big company like that … they’re huge in Oregon. They provide a ton of places with bread, and we do that now too.”
After a year in Oregon, Trejo and Alex returned home. She missed her family. She’d traveled across the country for two
years, first in New York, then in Oregon, gaining valuable experience along the way.
Sitting on a stool in her Richardson bakeshop, Trejo remembers the Oak Lawn chef’s words a little more gently than she probably did at the time.
“He made me realize that, funny enough, I’ve always felt what he said to me about myself,” she says. “And then I went to New York, and I proved him and myself wrong.”
BURGER BUNS
Alex is an accomplished chef in his own right, so he and Trejo consulted for Small Brew Pub in Oak Cliff upon their return. The pair helped craft a new, elevated menu, which Trejo says was soon supplanted by burgers and fries.
The urge to create her own business started to take hold. She hounded Alex with thoughts about a potential bakeshop until he’d had enough.
“He was like ‘I love you, Maricsa, but you either have to stop talking about this dream or do it. You can’t do both,’” she says. “I can’t spend the rest of my life just hearing my wife be like, ‘I should have
been. I should have done it,’ he said, ‘Just do it. Just try it.’ And he pushed me. And I have never been pushed that hard before. And I was like, ‘How rude. He’s so rude. How dare he say this shit?’ And I was like, ‘You know what? He’s right though.’”
While she left Small Brew Pub’s employ, she didn’t leave its kitchen. She registered La Casita Bakeshop — named in honor of her Hispanic heritage — as a DBA and began selling her pastries to a few coffee shops around town. Small Brewpub’s kitchen was rented as a baking venue in exchange for burger buns.
But, working mostly by herself, the hours were long, and she needed help.
Luckily, Alex was getting tired of bar food. So, he left the pub and joined Trejo in the endeavor. La Casita was officially launched soon after in 2017. The pair opened the doors of the first Richardson Bakeshop in 2020.
HALF PRICE BOOKS
Four years later, the La Casita brand employs close to 100 people across five locations. La Casita Bakeshop, the brand’s
flagship store in Richardson, serves artisanal cruffins alongside a full brunch menu. Trejo’s event venue, La Casita Garden, is open for rentals with a lengthy catering menu available.
There are two coffee shops, one in Rowlett and another on Northwest Highway, where she recently opened up a second La Casita Coffee location in Half Price Books. A self-described “book nerd,” she says the location is perfect.
“I used to go to the library with my mom,” Trejo says. “And even in Rowlett, we’re near a library, and now we’re inside Half Price Books, and I’m like, what other library places can I go into?”
The Half Price Books location, which opened in August, sells pastries baked at the flagship bakeshop and coffee from a program developed by La Casita’s third partner, Brianna Short. Sandwiches such as the Tikka Marsala, a fried chicken breast covered in house-made Tikka Masala sauce and served with a cucumber raita, pickled red onion and fresh cilantro, all come served on La Casita’s house-baked bread. A full brunch menu is on its way, and
Trejo says she plans to eventually transform the space into a tiki bar with dinner service at night. An old colleague from Small Brewpub has been brought on to develop a cocktail list, and an eclectic dinner menu has been planned.
“It’s gonna be like a mix of Pacific Island food,” Trejo says. “Asian food, Vietnamese, Korean and Mexican food.”
COMMUNITY
One of Trejo’s points of emphasis is taking care of her employees, she says. She uses the word community to describe the culture she’s tried to create.
“It’s so cool to have a community … we’re here at work all the time, so for me and my husband and our employees, it’s important to care about each other,” Trejo says. “They don’t have to love each other. But just caring about when someone leaves here, where are they going home to, or who are they going home to? That matters a lot to us.”
La Casita offers health insurance to fulltime employees, although that may have to do less with community and more about keeping her workforce healthy, she admits.
Trejo says that her “community” is one of the biggest contributors to La Casita’s recent success, and that she’s created a collaborative atmosphere where employees are welcome to have thoughts on the menu.
“Weirdly enough, my employees push me,” Trejo says. “I can see in their eyes. They’re like, ‘I want to do these new things.’”
PUSHING FORWARD
La Casita Coffee is expected to open another location in Uptown this month, bringing the total of La Casita locations to six across Dallas, Richardson, Rowlett and Frisco. She says that she will continue to look for “smart” expansion opportunities, and that she does not want growth to compromise quality.
It doesn’t seem like she plans on stopping anytime soon.
“My dream for us as a bakery is to be everybody’s neighborhood bakery. And it’s hard to do that when you’re just in one neighborhood.”
La Casita Coffee , 5801 E NW Highway, 469.899.0969
SCOUTS FOR SERVICE
How one Lakewood teen combined her passion for horses with her aim for Eagle
Story by ALYSSA HIGH | Photography by YUVIE STYLES
To East Dallas neighbor senior Madalena Ritz-Meuret, riding horses is more than just a hobby. It’s a way to connect with a creature that is more like us than we may think.
“It is just so amazing to be able to connect with a creature so big and to be able to practice a skill that not many people do,” Ritz-Meuret says. “Throughout the years, I have discovered how special it is to have a bond with them.”
As she prepared to enter her senior year of high school, Ritz-Meuret also got closer to another deadline: becoming an Eagle Scout.
Since the Boy Scouts of America organization began letting girls join area troops that agree to it in 2019, coed and girl’s scout troops have popped up all over the country. There are hundreds of troops in DFW, tied to neighborhood churches, schools and other local groups.
One of these is Troop 890, sponsored by Lake Highlands United Methodist Church. The troop has over 30 girls, and nearly a dozen have gone on to become Eagle Scouts. One of these is Madalena Ritz-Meuret, a rising senior at The Hockaday School.
Becoming an Eagle Scout is no small feat. It has been estimated that only 4-7% of Boy Scouts earn the Eagle Scout rank. Scouts have to be active as a Life Scout (the second highest level for scouts) for at least six months, earn a minimum of 21 merit badges, hold positions of leadership within their troop and complete a significant community service project – all before turning 18.
Ritz-Meuret recently completed her service project, which BSA describes as one of the most “distinctive and challenging aspects of becoming an Eagle Scout.” The scout has to plan, develop, lead and execute a service project that benefits their community or a nonprofit.
For Ritz-Meuret’s project, she facilitated designing and building several benches for the Heart of Texas Therapeutic Riding Center in West, Texas.
The center focuses on equine therapy, which is used to treat behavioral and relationship issues, grief, anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction and eating disorders as well as assisting
with occupational therapy and veteran reintegration.
“I wanted to pick out a center that was not publicly known to raise awareness of it and encourage clients or people interested in therapeutic riding to go there and support them,” Ritz-Meuret says.
Similar to the concept of therapy dogs, domesticated horses are thought to be attuned to human’s emotions and nonverbal cues, mirroring their rider’s emotions and allowing for the rider to engage with and identify what they were feeling. Others use horse riding to foster empathy, build trust and learn to interact with the animal calmly and safely.
The Heart of Texas Therapeutic Riding Center offers therapeutic riding with social, educational and sport opportunities, aquatic therapy, massage therapy and “elite therapy,” which includes speech, physical and occupational therapy.
After discussing the needs of the riding center with its employees, Ritz-Meuret decided to build the benches for the facility so that riders can observe their peers and have a place to sit while not riding.
Together with a leader from the troop, Ritz-Meuret planned out the materials and funding requirements of the project. She set up a GoFundMe that collected $680 and gathered volunteers to help out. Ritz-Meuret was responsible for leading the project, even after the rain foiled the volunteers’ original plan of building the benches outside of Lake Highlands UMC.
Though adults did the sawing, RitzMeuret notes, she and her peers built the benches entirely by hand, adjusting along the way when things did not go to plan.
“We had to think creatively on how to work around challenges,” she says. “We made errors on measurements so we had some benches that varied in size, but it taught me to embrace the diversity of problem solving and making sure that everybody’s opinions are taken into consideration.”
She later transported the benches to the center, a little over an hour away, sanded them and applied a translucent paint to seal them once at the location.
“It’s really special to discover the different personalities that the horses have,” Ritz-Meuret says. “They have this very therapeutic power that, if you are calm around them and you’re patient with them, they will be able to reciprocate that.”
THE DOORMAN THAT SINGS
C.T. Davis always had soul, even when he was too young to know what soul was
Story by AYSIA LANE
Photography by VICTORIA GOMEZ
At the top of the The Balcony Club lounge steps, just before entering, maybe three times a week, you’ll find a certain doorman. He’s over 6 feet tall and is usually sporting his long dark brown hair in a low ponytail. His name is C.T. Davis. Before you ask, yes, the C.T. stands for something. But you’ll probably never find out what for. He’s chosen to keep that to himself, for a little mystery.
Davis has met former Dallas Cowboys players and other “cool people’’ as he’s manned the door. But for him, that isn’t the fun part. There’s a certain hour in the night when the barbacks take over his doorman duties and Davis makes his way to the stage. If you’re a regular, you’ve seen it before — the fun part.
Davis has always been at home on a stage. Since the age of 3, Davis has been singing.
“Yeah, I came out of the womb, you know, singing and screaming,” he says.
He was an only child, born in a Pentecostal household deep in East Brewton, Alabama. His town had a population of less than 4,000 people. His father was a preacher and his mother was the church pianist.
The joyful noise he was making at such a young age painted a stark contrast to the life he lived behind closed doors. His father was abusive. He had been tossed around, locked in closets and run over with a car — all before the age of 15.
“I was making good grades in school. I did my chores. I made my bed,” he reflects. “I didn’t understand why my father didn’t love me.”
clear that Davis was going to end up exactly where he started: on a stage.
“I can express myself (on stage) and try to convey a message to the audience,” Davis says. “I like people to feel what I feel.”
He moved to Texas and began working to establish a name for himself in the DFW area.
Davis rattles off a long resume of places he’s performed. One of them was Nate’s Seafood & Steakhouse with Jakie Don Loe.
He became friends with Loe, who affectionately calls Davis his “little brother.” After meeting him about nine years ago, Loe has been able to watch his friend grow as a performer.
“Some singers know how to sing but they don’t know how to entertain and some entertainers know how to entertain but can’t sing,” Loe says. “What C.T. has learned to do is put both of those things together.”
“YEAH, I CAME OUT OF THE WOMB, YOU KNOW, SINGING & SCREAMING,”
At a young age, he became aware that he was a sort of puppet for his family. They used his gift as if it were their own.
“I sang in front of general conferences, maybe two, three, four or 5,000 people strong,” Davis says.
Eventually, things became even more violent at home and at the age of 15, Davis had to flee from his family after being stabbed by his father. He left and went to stay with his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama.
Two years later, his father passed away. Everyone was grieving, but he couldn’t help but feel “thankful” he wouldn’t get hurt anymore.
Shortly after, his mother passed away from kidney failure and then, the grandmother that took him in passed on too.
When he reflects on the dynamic he had with his parents, his tone is calm. He chooses to move on with grace.
“I was trying to keep my head above water,” he says.
Davis threw himself into his education. He studied at the University of Alabama and Holland Rim Christian Academy in Tennessee.
Although he had several interests, it was always crystal
Davis had always found a home in music but now, he was using his gift and building a new kind of family.
“I wanted to earn my way in and because I’ve earned my way in, I’m one of the most talked about guys in Dallas,” Davis says.
If you know about live blues and jazz in DFW, then you know Davis’ name is quick to pop up in the conversation. Today, he has his own residency, recently celebrating two years at The Forum Pub in Richardson and has shared the stage with internationally known artists with Grammys under their belt, including Bubba Hernandez, James Hinkle and Tommy Katona.
Davis has “a great friendship” with the owner of The Balcony Club, David Luckey, who will occasionally play the drums with Davis’ band whenever they perform there.
“He and I both grew up in church,” Davis says. “He and I were in the same circles at the same time and never met each other.”
When Davis was looking for supplemental income, Luckey hired him to work the door for the lounge. They felt he was trustworthy and personable enough for the role. That was just over three years ago.
After all the cash is counted, all the credit cards are accounted for and his job is done, they ask “C.T. You want to come and sit in and sing a couple of songs with us?”
The answer is always yes.
Davis often addresses the crowd before singing by saying to “put your religion and your politics deep in your back pocket” and “let all of that go.”
“Music is a great unification process,” he says. “I don’t care where you come from, what age you are, how much money you have. What’s important to me is that you enjoy the product of the music I’m providing.”
a much needed makeover
INSIDE THE DALLA S MAVERICKS
GRANT APPLICATION THAT GAVE THE
EAST DALLAS BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB A BRAND NEW LOOK
Story by AYSIA LANE
Photography by LAUREN ALLEN
the East Dallas Boys and Girls Club has been around for quite some time. The building itself was previously home to a grocery store and rumored to have been a movie theater and, at some point, a warehouse.
With all of that, you could say it had developed some character. Floors were uneven, ceiling tiles were coming down and the building was showing its age.
Over the years, the Club received some smaller renovations here and there — leading to portions of the facility and rooms being upgraded. But the team knew it was time to start figuring out how they would transform the space on a larger scale. As they searched for funding opportunities, they kept an eye on the Dallas Mavericks, waiting for their grant cycle to open up.
The original ask within their grant application was for funding for the Club’s computer lab, the Club’s Vice President of Advancement Anthony Valente says.
“Then, as they came in for their tour, they noticed that that Club was in massive need of repairs,” he says.
The gym floor wasn’t in the best condition. The walls were separating and needed a paint job. And some of the rooms needed foundational repairs.
“They said ‘you guys would be a great candidate for an entire club remodel,’ essentially,” Valente says.
The Mavericks advanced through their season, and as they continued winning, they were able to expand their renovation plans for the Club through their NBA Cares partnership — the National Basketball Association’s global social responsibility program, geared towards addressing social issues.
“Apparently, once teams make it into the finals, this is a project that the local team does with the NBA, where they team up and they deliver a massive project to a local nonprofit and we were lucky they chose us, so that as they advanced, the project got bigger and bigger.”
Their computer lab wasn’t the only thing that was going to be upgraded. The Club’s Vice President of Education and Well-Being Juany Valdespino-Gaytan, and CEO Karen Tan said that everything happened quickly, without much time to wrap their heads around the progression of their ‘one-step-at-a-time’ plan that turned into what felt like an overnight development.
The staff kept as much of the renovations a secret as possible from the children, but the cat was out of the bag when a bunch of Bentleys and Mazzeratis surrounded the building — that, and the clusters of men over 6 foot.
“Then they had a big event at our club, which is pretty much invite-only with the NBA Commissioner and the CEO from the Mavs, and some of the players came and played with our kids,” Tan says. “(Dereck) Lively was putting Legos together with our kids.”
The Club celebrated its re-grand opening in early September. The renovations included a play zone, a new basketball court, new basketballs, a new scoreboard and a new STEM lab with computers.
Tan says that the renovations open up the door for new programs, with hopes of expanding their services to include mental health support and access to mental health resources so that the Club can become a “true wraparound center.”
About 50 to 60 children use the East Dallas Club facillities daily, though the number of children increases in the summers and during spring breaks.
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SHOPPING
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3RD - LOWER GREENVILLE JEWELRY
BEST MEN’S CLOTHING STORE
WINNER - STAG PROVISIONS FOR MEN
2ND - BONOBOS- KNOX HENDERSON
2ND - KNOT STANDARD DALLAS
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WINNER - REDENTA’S GARDEN SHOP
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BEST THRIFT /CONSIGNMENT
WINNER - DOLLY PYTHON
2ND - VINTAGE MARTINI
3RD - UPTOWN CHEAPSKATE
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WINNER - FAVOR THE KIND
2ND - CANAL CLOTHING
3RD - ESTHER PENN
To nominate your favorites of any category for next year’s Best Of competition, email aquintero@advocatemag.com
Crossing over a new bridge
Looking into the University Crossing Improvement District’s Homeless Outreach Program
Story by AYSIA LANE
AT 6:30 A.M., somewhere within the University Crossing Public Improvement District (UCPID), you can find Michelle Sanders and Lionel Weber making their rounds. Today, it’s an early morning trip, but later in the week, the evenings may be a more prime time.
Sanders and Webers are members of the Street Outreach Team for the UCPID Homeless Outreach Program.
“Sometimes we go on foot. Sometimes we take our vehicles and ride and then stop at some of our hotspot locations,” Michelle says. “Once we locate someone that’s in need of services, then we will approach them, we introduce ourselves, let them know who we are.”
The program was created in 2020, after UCPID’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to allocate funds and resources to establish a formal effort to facilitate homeless outreach.
“Post-COVID, rents were starting to go up,” UCPID Communications Director Ginger Greenberg says. “Everybody sees the writing on the wall. ‘What are we going to do?’ As kind of a perfect storm of people experiencing homelessness explodes here in our area.”
The conversation continued, with Greenberg and Executive Director Patrick Sanders quickly realizing they needed an expert to move forward with next steps.
In came Michelle, who also works at The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center. Her previous experience led her to look into alternative forms of security when doing sweeps throughout the encampments and other prominent hotspots in the area — citing the trauma an individual experiencing homelessness may have may have when dealing with law enforcement.
“Police officers are trained to address crime,” Patrick says. “I will say that some officers will go out of their way to help and assist when they can, but they are not trained to assist in getting people care and into homeless shelters.”
Weber had already been working in the PID for over 10 years, so when Patrick gave him a call and outlined what they were looking for, he was all in. Currently working as a security manager and being a veteran who served as a military police officer for the U.S Navy didn’t hurt either.
“We try to approach — ‘Hey, can I have permission to talk to you? Is it okay if I do this’ and giving them control of the conversation,” Michelle says. “We ask permission, because we realize that when you encounter someone, especially if there’s a tent, that’s their home, right?”
The two have established a rapport with the individuals who frequent the PID, and for Michelle, this is the most important part of the job.
“When dealing with persons experiencing homelessness, it’s not a one-day-fix,” Michelle says. “It’s building a relationship, that’s meaning consistency — being out in the PID on a regular basis. Sometimes we can’t even get to that housing conversation for a few months, until we’ve built that trust that comes in the meanwhile, while we’re out there, building those relationships.”
When first meeting a person who may be in need of their services, Michelle does what she calls a triage assessment. What are their medical needs? What are their immediate needs? What are their mental health needs?
She shares that while their mission has remained the same, the growth in her work has come from striving to be even more educated about different resources so that she can then share them with those experiencing homelessness.
“It can be the difference between whether a person gets permanent supportive housing, if they have a disability and they’ve been chronically homeless, or if it’s a rapid solution, where they maybe don’t need a lot of help. They just need help getting an ID and getting into an apartment so that they can save,” Michelle says. “It’s kind of a different experience with each individual that we encounter.”
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
By PAT IN THE HAT
I Spy, Lakewood
I am not a spy, but the daughter of a spy
Iam not a spy, but the daughter of a spy. I am the daughter of U.S. Air Force military intelligence security service Lt. Col. Robert E. Powell. I take after my father with his green eyes and Roman nose. He chose the name Patrick because he wanted his firstborn to be a son. But I am Patricia, a patrician, indeed. Not a plebian.
I am a self-made woman who financed her way through work study and scholarships to graduate from the University of Texas in Austin with honors. No one attended my graduation.
One of my brothers coached George Strait’s son in basketball at TMI Episcopal in San Antonio, my place of birth. My other brother looks like George Clooney. My grandmother’s birthday is on Halloween, 1899. I often feel that I was born in the wrong century and am attracted to old buildings and old books.
I am fond of fonts. Sans-serif, please. I drink martinis, margaritas, and Maker’s Mark. Why do I always wear a Stetson?
Because you only have one chance to make a first impression. If not a hat, then a headpiece or scarf, earrings, and perfume.
I moved from Houston to East Dallas, Lakewood 10 years ago.
I am a trailblazer. With no highschool in Karamursel, Turkey (where my father was stationed), I lived in a dorm in Ankara. With my camera and journal, I went by foot and took public transit all over Ankara and Istanbul (old Constantinople). I read French, Russian and Italian novels.
I invite you to join me on a magical journey through East Dallas/ Lakewood — land of hidden treasures, passionate and creative people: musicians, entrepreneurs, artists. You will learn the history behind the names Gaston, Cole, Abrams, DeGoyler, Scalini’s, and Jimmy’s, as I spy Lakewood.
PATRICIA S. GERECCI is a guest writer who has lived in East Dallas for 10 years. She has worked over 50 years as an educator and writer across Texas, Germany and Turkey.
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OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
By PATTI VINSON
Saving Skillman
Southwestern
Neighbors rally to “Save Our Library”
It’s an old expression: “You can’t fight City Hall.” Bureaucracy rules. But what happens when ordinary citizens stubbornly forge ahead anyway, odds be damned? A beloved branch library is granted a reprieve, that’s what. Power to the people.
Back in August, East Dallas neighbor Maggie Watson first heard the news about the possible closure of Skillman Southwestern Branch Library as part of the proposed City of Dallas budget and, like many, was dismayed. “Honestly, I cried on the bus on the way home from the library after finding out. As a resident who relies on transit, having an accessible library is incredibly important to me.”
Living in Dallas, she points out, can be expensive. “City services like the library and the community that they build are what keep me here. Those services offset in quality-of-life what savings I might make in moving to an outlying community. When I imagine losing that anchor to my community, the kind of place that brings together people from all walks of life, our city seems less vibrant.”
Watson reads over a hundred books each year, favoring literary fiction like Colson Whitehead and nonfiction about political history. She also borrows DVDs, audiobooks, uses computers, and participates in book clubs. Losing the branch would be devastating to her.
Unwilling to merely wring her hands, Watson decided within a couple of hours of hearing the news that she was getting involved. “I knew I had to try to do something or I’d always wonder ‘what if.’ “ She got busy creating a “Save Our Library” petition. It was new territory for her. “I’ve never been involved in civic activity of this kind—I vote and engage with the news but I’d never taken something into my own hands.”
After collecting signatures from friends and neighbors, Watson shared the petition on social media. She printed flyers with a link to the petition and canvassed her neighborhood. She passed out flyers on the bus, and she asked neighborhood businesses to post them.
All told, the petition would ultimately collect 3,349 signatures.
Watson accumulated a small army of supporters and stood outside the branch several times with “Save Our Library” signs, providing information to those interested. She attended budget town hall meetings hosted by council members and encouraged others to do so. Several inspired citizens became involved and spoke at council meetings. “So many people took to promoting the petition and campaigning for the library. It really took off,” marvels Watson.
Two people, in particular, says Watson, worked especially hard: Ashley Grossman and Caitlin Dolt. Frequent flyers of the library, they reacted immediately when they heard the news: they were in the middle of a salon appointment and left abruptly to start planning. Dolt says, “When I found out they were coming for my library, it wasn’t hot rage that hit me—it was a quiet, simmering anger. The type of anger that motivates you to do something, rather than the fiery and mean kind.”
She adds, “Libraries are a vital resource for education, community gathering, and empowerment, and I will not stand by when those things are threatened. The library represents values I hold dear—equal access to knowledge, support for underserved populations, and the fostering of connections in a city that raised me.”
Grossman agrees. “When we heard the news, we could not stop ourselves from doing everything we could to understand why the decision had been made and advocate for a different path forward.”
While Dolt started gathering emails for their representatives, Grossman got to work on a flyer with information about the situation. “We printed the flyers and started passing them around that night. Later that week, we started going to budget town halls and we signed up to speak at the City Council Meeting.”
All the hard work paid off. City Hall listened to the voices of the people. Council member Paula Blackmon, who represents parts of East Dallas, proposed using COVIDera funds to keep the library afloat. The budget passed, and Skillman Southwestern Branch Library lives for another year.
Sue Ramirez, president of Skillman Southwestern Library Friends, reminds us that the best way to keep the library open is to use it.
“Visit often, attend programs; stay awhile - read a book, newspapers or magazines; check out and return books; use the computers,” she advises. “Let’s show how important SSL is to the community. Also, keep reminding our Mayor and City Council members that we love and want to keep our library. Attend City Council meetings, even if the Council isn’t discussing libraries that day. Make sure they know we’re still here and plan to stay! Join Skillman Southwestern Library Friends and help us raise funds so the Skillman library staff can provide even more outreach, programs and services.”
Remember, if the usage numbers go up, threats of closures go down. “We absolutely should not have to go through this trauma each year,” Ramirez says.
And let this serve as a reminder of your power as a citizen. You have a voice. Use it. “I truly thought only a handful of people would respond to my petition,” Watson admits. “I believed it was futile but I did it anyway. I couldn’t quietly accept the loss of something so special to me. Every step of the way, I doubted the efficacy of what I was doing. I didn’t listen to that doubt, however. I just kept showing up. If something is meaningful to you, it’s worth working for.”
Watson is quick to praise the efforts of others. “Collaboration from the community is how we got here—not my online petition. Showing up is what counts. So many residents just showed up, just made one phone call, sent one email. It has made all the difference.”
PATTI VINSON is a guest writer who has lived in East Dallas for more than 20 years. She’s written for the Advocate and Real Simple magazine.
