Fort Worth Weekly // January 24-30, 2024

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Broken Dreams A lack of mental health care often leads to preventable inmate deaths — like the newborn in Tarrant County Jail.

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EATS & DRINKS Hudson House is good, but some similar ma-and-pa spots are better.

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STUFF Like Sisyphus, the Cowboys and their fans will roll that rock up the hill again next year.

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STAGE Stage West’s Marjorie Prime brilliantly interrogates memory and the stories we tell ourselves.

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MUSIC Gritty krautrock from Mark Ryan hits all the right notes.

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Experience the light and color of France Closing January 28

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Promotional support provided by Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country (detail), 1913, oil on canvas. Lent by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Volum e 1 9

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J an uar y 24 -30, 2024

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No Chance

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She was born in jail and died — and the county still won’t admit wrongdoing.

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Nothing will change for the Cowboys, but we will still tune in next season.

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Broken Dreams

A lack of mental health care often leads to preventable inmate deaths — like the newborn in Tarrant County Jail.

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enorah was barely one week old when doctors took her off life support. She exhaled her last breath in the arms of her grandmother.

“I held her until she was, you know,” Kimberly Hammond said. “I held her until she went on and her body was cold. It was like somebody ripped out my soul.”

Zenorah’s official cause of death was asphyxiation — her umbilical cord was tightly wrapped around her neck, suffocating her.

The unofficial cause of death, as her family argues, is a deplorable Tarrant County Jail. Zenorah was born there on May 5, 2020.

Mother Chasity Congious was left to bleed out and suffer in a cell for hours before she was given medical attention, says Jerrett Adams, a national attorney representing Congious and her mother in an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit against Tarrant County. By the time Zenorah reached John Peter Smith Hospital in mid-May of that year, she was brain dead due to a lack of oxygen.

As Hammond talked, Congious sat beside her at their Northside apartment holding a baby doll.

Do you often think of Zenorah, I said.

Congious’ eyes widened.

“She is so cute,” she replied ecstatically.

“She is the cutest. I love what God gave me.”

Adams told me before the meeting that Congious often talks about her deceased baby in the present tense. Hammond said her cognitively impaired daughter has only recently found the right blend of mood-stabilizing medications. Due to the amount of work it takes to monitor her, Hammond is able to work only part-time, meaning her family relies on state-funded nonprofits like MHMR (My Health, My Resources) and JPS for checkups and prescriptions. During visits with either group, Congious rarely sees a physician, Adams said, and if he wins his lawsuit or settles with the county, Congious may finally receive the medical attention she needs and deserves, her mother said.

Before Zenorah’s death, Hammond said she viewed cops as the “good guys.” She lost faith in our local justice system after Fort Worth police arrested Congious in 2020 after she had experienced a mental health flare-up during her second trimester and needed to be taken to JPS — not jail. Her three months in confinement were equally disillusioning to her mother.

“The hospital called to tell me my daughter gave birth but not the jail,” Hammond said. “The sheriffs never called.

Speaking about her baby doll, Chasity Congious said she wanted a “little girl to dress up.”

During that whole ordeal and after Chasity returned back to the jail [after Zenorah died], they wouldn’t let me check on her.

We owe everything to our children. I haven’t grieved because [the county has] not been held accountable. They are still trying to cover it up.”

The Tarrant County Sheriff ’s Department, which oversees the county jail, continues to ignore our requests for comment.

Based on open records requests, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which compiles in-custody jail death data, says Tarrant County Jail logged 17 custodial deaths in 2020 and 13, 11, and nine deaths the years following. For unexplained reasons, Zenorah was not included in the 2020 records.

Adams is seeking monetary damages.

The suit filed in January 2022 is now in mediation, and Adams said county leaders recently made a settlement offer that may help cover treatment and housing costs for Congious. A quality facility in North Texas, he said, would cost $5,000 to $7,500 per month.

Congious’ case underlines a disturbing trend. The Texas Tribune says the federal government has designated 98% of the state’s 254 counties as “mental health professional shortage areas.” The Tribune estimates that more than 2,000 members of Texas’ jail and

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Shown while on life support at John Peter Smith Hospital, newborn Zenorah was kept alive for only a few days before doctors, with the grandmother’s permission, removed the neonate from life support.

prison population are waiting for a bed in the state hospital system. Nationally, 44% of state-run jail detainees have at least one diagnosed mental health disorder.

Texas has a “chronic problem” of allowing men and women with intellectual disabilities and mental health diseases to become stuck in the criminal justice system, said Texas Jail Project executive director Krish Gundu.

The systemic problems that lead to cases like Congious’ are complex, Gundu said, and our state’s underfunded mental health system — ranked last in a recent study by Forbes — is a major factor but only one of many. Gundu’s nonprofit works to improve the conditions within our state jails while advocating against mass incarceration policies, but too often, she said, hospitals and public health groups like MHMR dodge criticism.

“Many of these people go to hospitals only to be arrested,” she said. “It is shocking how many people are criminalized in the very places they go to for help.”

When Adams heard about Zenorah’s death, he said he couldn’t sleep. He soon contacted Hammond, Congious’ legal guardian, and offered to represent them. Suing the government for monetary damages can be a long and complicated process, he told us that month (“Justice for Chasity,” Jan. 2022). He initially filed a lawsuit against Fort Worth police, the City of Fort Worth, and Tarrant County for Zenorah’s death, but District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the officer who wrongfully arrested Congious, David Nguyen, was protected by the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which often shields peace officers from liability for misconduct in all but the most egregious circumstances.

The district court did find grounds for suing the county based on the disproportionate number of deaths at Tarrant County Jail.

Judge O’Connor wrote, “The overall statistics that Tarrant County Jail has failed three inspections in the past seven years, has

the highest inmate mortality rate in North Texas, and has a mortality rate 3.5 times higher than Dallas County Jail should put a reasonable policymaker on notice about potential condition of confinement issues at the jail. Based on the court’s own analysis and bolstered by the findings of the other courts in this district, the court finds that the plaintiff has successfully articulated” that the jail’s unsafe conditions can be the subject of a lawsuit against the county that manages the jail, Tarrant County.

Few publications outside the Weekly showed interest in covering the story, Adams said, adding that race likely plays a role in the lack of mainstream media coverage. In November, he updated us on the lawsuit, expressing his frustration with the county’s less-than-earnest attempts to comply with court-ordered releases of evidence which would allow him to prepare his case should it go to jury trial.

“We had court today,” he told us, referring to the ongoing mediation and discovery process. “They gave us 60,000-plus documents.

We are making our way through them.”

Most of the documents, he said, are completely irrelevant to the lawsuit, something he said may be purposeful to drain his law firm’s time and resources.

“Litigation is not just costly,” he said.

“It is emotionally damaging for the victims.”

Adams has tried and won many high-profile civil rights and wrongful death lawsuits. He said this one is by far the most appalling. For one, he said, Zenorah wasn’t a member of the jail population. Court documents indicate that Hammond warned the jail’s medical staff that Congious had cognitive impairments and would not be able to fully comprehend her surroundings or know where she was. Hammond also confirmed that she had alerted jail staff to the complexities of her daughter’s pregnancy.

Adams also believes Tarrant County jailers failed to complete checkups every 20 to 30 minutes as mandated by both the state and county. Indeed, the Weekly was the first to publish previously unreleased audio from mid-2020 tied to the death of Javonte Myers at the jail (“Checking Out,” Nov. 2023). In the audio, Texas Ranger Trace McDonald questions jailer Erik Gay about the day Gay was tasked with checking up on Myers, who died from a seizure disorder and was only found hours after his death.

Gay confessed that he did not check up on Myers and other detainees while on duty and that he falsified government reports to say that he did. He went on to allege that supervisors not only condoned but encouraged jailers to falsify reports. Upon hearing the confession, Ranger McDonald stopped, saying that it could open a “Pandora’s box.”

In the recording, McDonald told Gay, “I get how hard it would be to do all of your duties and keep up with this thing accurately as well. I’m not mad at you at all. It’s a technical thing that unfortunately happened around the death of a guy that may cause some stink. Hopefully, we’ll get through it.

For me, even if you walked down the hall at all, I tended to give you credit for it, even though you didn’t look into the individual cells. I was primarily focused on the dead guy’s cell.” continued on page 5

continued from page 4

Gay and colleague Darien Kirk are currently indicted on felony charges for tampering with a government document.

In 2022, McDonald left the Rangers and joined the Tarrant County Sheriff ’s Department’s narcotics team.

Texas Jail Project directors are calling on state leaders to audit and analyze Texas’ forensic waiting list, which determines how long jailed individuals must wait for mental health treatment at one of 15 statewide facilities offering around 2,400 beds. Gundu said her nonprofit is seeking data on how many inmates on that list have an intellectual or developmental disability like Congious. The state is failing families from the moment they interact with the health-care system, she said.

“From our work, we have seen a pattern,” she said. “When people call a public crisis line, they are asked if [their relatives] are actively hurting themselves. If not, [public crisis workers] say they can’t help. If they are, then it is too violent [and requires law enforcement intervention]. Either they aren’t nonviolent enough or so bad that you are at risk of incarceration. There doesn’t seem to be a point where [public crisis teams] engage.”

Gundu said another barrier to proper care that can lead individuals with

intellectual disabilities to lose state-funded treatment is if the patients lack resources and support to meet appointments.

“Once you miss an appointment or two, you are considered noncompliant,” Gundu added. “If they drop you from service, you can end up in jail.”

The nonprofit leader pointed to the early-2023 death of Nathan Lee Johns, who committed suicide in Smith County Jail at the age of 28. His death is an example of how law enforcement can send patients in crisis to a detention center even when they are initially taken to a health-care facility, she said. Tyler-based KLTV said Johns used a phone cord inside his cell to hang himself.

Before his detainment, he sought medical help at a local hospital.

“His family called the crisis line because he was suicidal,” Gundu said. “At the hospital, he tried to kill himself. The hospital staff collaborated with the sheriff office and sent him to jail without him being stabilized. At the jail, he gets put in solitary for a week. By the seventh day, he kills himself with a phone cord. What was the need for this man to be taken from the hospital when he is in acute crisis?”

The new Texas law SB 840 intended to protect nurses and doctors makes physical assaults of health-care workers a felony, which further criminalizes acts by patients who may not be lashing out with criminal intent to harm, Gundu added.

“People with an intellectual or developmental disability often can’t express themselves,” Gundu said. “They use their body to communicate. It’s like a kid having a tantrum.”

Jason Brimmer

Feature

Kimberly Hammond (right) said home life can be stressful due to the constant care and attention that her daughter requires.

Gundu said she recently spoke with the family of a young Black woman with an intellectual disability who was arrested shortly after her dismissal from a hospital.

Her charges were later dropped, but the detainment traumatized her, Gundu said.

Federal law under the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act mandates that hospitals ensure public access to emergency services regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. Gundu, based on her work with hundreds of cases across the state, sees

a pattern of health-care providers violating that law by allowing or even facilitating the transfer of patients with an intellectual disability or an ongoing mental health crisis to county jails.

“We are actively pushing people with [intellectual disabilities] into our criminal punishment system because we haven’t invested in robust mental health care,” Gundu said. “We have become comfortable pushing them into the system and saying there is nowhere else to go. Why is there nowhere else to go? People are sitting in jail waiting for help. Somehow, we are OK with that.”

Another law, SB 26, which was passed earlier this year, requires the state to audit mental health authorities once every 10 years and publish findings on the reasons for backlogged wait times for state hospital beds. The current waitlist is around 2,500, based on state data. Gundu believes most of the men and women on the list may have intellectual disabilities and are waiting for so-called competency restoration — which Texas Health and Human Services says consists of services “designed for people with a mental health disorder or co-occurring psychiatric and substance use disorders who are found incompetent to stand trial and are court-ordered to participate in competency restoration treatment.”

Texas Jail Project routinely documents cases in which individuals with an intellectual disability are arrested for nonviolent offenses like trespassing, Gundu said.

“That approach is such a bad idea,” she continued. Treating those individuals inside continued on page 6

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jails “takes away resources from preventive solutions. That’s the frustrating part. We are taking bad, short-term approaches to a problem that has been in the making for a long time.”

While Gundu founded her nonprofit to address inhumane conditions within Texas’ jails, her advocacy has grown to criticize the state for not providing adequate resources for impoverished individuals struggling with mental health disorders, hospitals for colluding with sheriff departments to jail patients seeking mental health treatments, and state agencies like MHMR for not providing adequate treatment options for the communities they serve. Leading to Congious’ 2020 arrest, she received uneven mental health-care services from MHMR and JPS, Hammond alleges.

“All we see are nurse practitioners,” she said. “They are in control of medication management. My daughter needs talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. She needs to be in a position to be treated on a day-to-day basis and with a support group that is consistent. She doesn’t see the same doctors. We have to repeat her background over and over again. We aren’t getting anywhere.”

Gundu believes the current under-funded system is allowed to persist because jails are rarely successfully sued for causing onsite deaths and because state leaders benefit by avoiding the financial cost of adequately funding state health-care resources and institutions.

The system that is driven by a punitive culture, Gundu said, works to expand Texas’ multi-billion-dollar carceral system.

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Several dozen people recently packed the Tarrant County Sub-Courthouse in Arlington for a panel discussion focused on the high number of deaths at the county jail.

Commissioner Alisa Simmons organized the event that featured Rev. Katherine Godby, County Criminal Court Judge Deborah Nekhom, Tarrant County Magistrate Judge Tamla Ray, County Administrator Greg Shugart, Sheriff Bill Waybourn, and Pamela Young from the grassroots group United Fort Worth, along with Gundu, who spoke first.

“The pretrial population [in Texas jails] is over 76% percent,” she said, citing state data. “Ninety-one jails are housing population members outside [their respective] counties. County jails have become de facto mental health-care warehouses. I do not call them mental health-care providers. When your largest population in your jail is the most vulnerable, people with mental illness and disabilities,” that isn’t a justice system.

Speaking on behalf of United Fort Worth, Young said her group’s focus has been to see that people who did not need to be in jail were released. The main barrier keeping nonviolent, legally innocent defendants from being released, she said, is Texas’ cash bond system. “Our county officials continue to invest an exorbitantly high amount of resources and our taxpayer dollars into law

Edward Brown

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MHMR’s Mark Tittle: “Our programs are driven by what the patient wants.”

enforcement instead of more cost-effective, people-centered solutions that get to the root causes of harm in our community.”

Waybourn began by describing the scope of the work his employees perform at the jail.

“Tarrant County Jail is the 14th-largest jail in America,” he said. “It’s a big operation. Our jail has been described as a large mental health facility. It is. Let me describe who I see in jail. Eighty percent of that population has three things in common. They are going to be fatherless, not have a high school education, and motivated by some type of narcotic. As the Texas [Commission on] Jail Standards have told us, we’re the largest, cleanest, and safest jail in Texas. We have noble people doing noble things. We have had 59 deaths. We dole out around 2 million pills a year, as far as medicine. We have a group that takes people to JPS every day. We have started doing mental health restoration. We restored 430 people who could go to trial and take care of business [because of the mental health restoration program]. As you look at the causes of death, they are having heart attacks. Because they used drugs, they are addicted to opioids.

Those things happen all the time in our jail.

Let’s not call them ‘nonviolent,’ because almost every crime that we have, there is going to be a drug close by. You can almost bet on it.”

The majority of audience questions and comments took aim at Waybourn, both for the high number of deaths at his jail and for the sheriff ’s involvement in creating the county’s Voter Integrity Unit even as voter fraud remains infinitesimally low in this country (“The Fraud Squad,” Mar. 2023).

In January 2022, the county opened the Tarrant County Mental Health Jail Diversion Center to provide alternatives for low-level offenders with substance abuse issues or mental illness to access treatment in lieu of being jailed. Located at a former assisted-living facility in the Fairmount neighborhood on the Near Southside, the two-floor center funded by the county and continued on page 7

the funeral [because she was in jail]. She couldn’t say goodbye. Because of that, she has a lot of triggers.”

Hammond said her daughter’s baby doll helps calm her.

“Her name is Layla,” Congious said. “I wanted a little girl to dress up. It’d just be me and her.”

Hammond said she knows little about Zenorah’s biological father, whom she said

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When asked about her deceased daughter, Chasity Congious often refers to Zenorah in the present tense.

has not been present in her daughter’s life, either during or after the pregnancy.

Hammond said monitoring Congious’ medications takes constant oversight. One medication helps calm her, but any mistiming of administering the prescription drugs could leave her unable to sleep at night.

Adams is protective about who meets Congious, but he wanted me to see the cognitive impairments that leave the early twentysomething conversing at the level of an adolescent.

“I’m Chasity,” she said abruptly. “Who can I trust?”

Adams turned toward me.

“This ain’t no game,” he said. “This is their life. At the point that she told [the jailers] that her stomach hurts, that should trigger anyone with common sense to know she might be having contractions.”

With compensation from the county, which Adams is confident will come whether through mediation or a jury trial, Hammond said her daughter can settle into a living facility that can monitor her medications and provide daily activities and a high quality of life. Hammond said she is a person of faith and knows her granddaughter is waiting for them in heaven.

The night after Zenorah was taken off life support at JPS, Hammond said the baby girl’s spirit visited her.

“I felt her,” Hammond said. “She came into my room. She told me that she was at peace, that she was no longer hurting. I felt that she was telling me that everything was going to be OK.” l

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managed by MHMR offers bedrooms, TVs, a kitchen, and a library.

MHMR Director Mark Tittle said the jail diversion center’s goals are to create a warm and welcoming space where the voluntary program can lead to better health outcomes. Speaking at the 42-bed facility, Tittle described the intake process. The jail diversion team never knows who will be arriving until a police officer calls to notify MHMR staff that a criminal suspect is en route to the building.

“We say, ‘Thank you for considering us,’ and we get ready for them to arrive,” he said.

The first person to contact the detainee is one of MHMR’s peer specialists, who are specially trained to interact with individuals who may be experiencing a mental health crisis. The peer specialist tells them they are safe, Tittle said.

“We perform a nursing assessment to make sure they are viable for the building,” he continued. “If they are not, we will get them to the emergency room or wherever they need to be. We want them to be comfortable. They are used to being told they are not wanted. We want them to feel accepted.

We offer them food and their own bed. You aren’t going to get that at the jail.”

The typical stay at the diversion center is 48 hours, Tittle said, adding that the vast majority of alleged offenses are for criminal trespassing. Many of the building’s clients are homeless.

“We give them 24 hours to rest,” he said. “During that time, we have a nurse practitioner who will assess them for any mental health or medical needs they need.

During the first 24 hours, we connect our guests with housing coordinators, therapists, chemical dependency counselors, and case managers with the aim of figuring out what wellness looks like to them. It’s driven by what the patient wants. When it is time for discharge, we take them where they need to go, and we follow them for up to a year while providing case management services.”

Since opening two years ago, the jail diversion center has received 1,021 referrals.

Tittle said he would like to see more peace officers use the program.

Last year, Tarrant County’s five commissioners unanimously voted to expand the list of crimes eligible for the diversion center to include defendants facing charges for five misdemeanor offenses: theft, possession of marijuana, disorderly conduct, false report, and terroristic threat. Any person accepted at the diversion center will not have to face criminal charges, and they are free to leave at any time.

Seated next to Congious at their Northside apartment, Hammond described the challenges of taking care of her daughter.

“It is hard to put in words,” she said.

“I have to focus on monitoring her triggers due to the trauma [of her jailing]. That is something medicine alone cannot address.

That’s one thing. A lot of her cousins have babies. Seeing them really does affect her.

She wasn’t able to hold Zenorah. She didn’t grieve properly and wasn’t allowed to attend

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Jason Brimmer

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STAGE Algorithm of Loss

Stage West’s Marjorie Prime is a progressive, moving tale of love through memory.

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Peering across the black box theater, you might be forgiven for assuming Marjorie Prime is a sentimental examination of family. After all, based on its sparse, four-person cast and its minimally decorated and rotating stage in the center of the Evelyn Wheeler Swenson Theater, it seems, well, small.

But like memory, time and space are merely constructs expertly manipulated by Allen Dean’s excellent set in this well-executed production directed by Sasha Maya Ada at Stage West through February 11.

“How much does she have to forget before she is not your mom anymore?”

Early in Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer-finalist play, Marjorie’s son-in-law posits this question to his wife regarding her mother’s condition. A great one to pose when a family member is steadily slipping toward the thief of time and memory, Alzheimer’s. Though the play does examine familial and generational trauma, don’t be fooled. This progressive work owes as much of its DNA to a Black Mirror episode or Spike Jonze’s Her as it does to Arthur Miller.

First performed in Los Angeles in 2014, Marjorie Prime presciently explores the world of artificial intelligence and the

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Cindee Mayfield tries to hang on against Alzheimer’s in Marjorie Prime at Stage West.

importance of the stories we tell ourselves.

Joseph Campbell, meet Chat GPT 4. The title character (Cindee Mayfield), an octogenarian dealing with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, is under the care of daughter Tess (Shannon J. McGrann) and her husband Jon (Jakie Cabe) at the younger couple’s home. The only catch is that they have help via an AI program appearing as a hologram. The purpose of Walter (Parker Gray) is to keep Marjorie from slipping any further into mental deterioration by reinforcing her past through forgotten memories and stories, but the crux of this entire endeavor

hinges on this very idea: Whose stories are these? Experience, perspective, motive, and time all begin to weave complicated webs.

This, though, is only the initial conceit. The story continues to evolve in interesting and unexpected ways, which I won’t spoil here.

Because so much of Marjorie Prime depends on the changes of characters over time, the small cast has a heavy burden to carry in this tightly focused space. Mayfield’s expertly nuanced performance as Marjorie drives much of the narrative and provides a perfect backdrop for the other characters to react. The mother/daughter

dynamic between her and Tess is central to the play’s success, and as the daughter, McGrann portrays the duality of both mourning and anger with precision. Son-in-law Jon is afforded the leeway to act as both a mediator and a detached caregiver, which gives Cabe the space to leverage much of the needed comedic respite, and in this, he shines.

The tricky part of delivering a high-concept idea is translating the technological aspects of the production for the stage. How do you insert an artificial intelligence onto an already crowded space when the AI appears and disappears based on different characters’ perspectives? If even that sounds confusing, it doesn’t play that way thanks to both Gray’s measured performance as Walter in its early learning stages and to Ada’s deft staging. Walter, when not directly working with Marjorie or Jon, is just on the outskirts of the stage in power-down mode with what appears to be some sort of lapel light.

Not always quite “there” but not completely gone, he exists as the algorithms that run our lives. Always in the peripheral. Walking the line of both being and not being a person requires a restrained performance, and Gray does an excellent job exploring the multifaceted personality of Walter in all of his stages.

The set is both a gift and an obstacle. The ever-changing perspectives of the characters is matched by the slow rotation of the stage, which is an interesting and effective mirroring of the changing character perspectives through time, but it limits the space the actors must work in, putting them in closer proximity to the AI, who is not always visible to all the characters. Perhaps a touch more physical connection among the main characters would make a starker contrast between the humans and the AI more noticeable. Not that these characters necessarily lack this, but in close quarters, the stage becomes a tad overcrowded but never seriously problematic. And it all pays off in Part 3, when we reach the Bradbury-esque coda that enables the staging to pay off in a satisfying way. l

Marjorie Prime Thru Sun, Feb 11, at Stage West Theatre, 821 W Vickery Blvd, FW. $45.50-49.50.

817-784-9378.

P A T R I C K

H I G G I N S

I admit it. They got me. Over the years, I’ve fairly successfully conditioned myself into never having expectations. If there are three things that literally everybody knows it’s that falling toast always lands butter-side down, the melting point of the post-transition metal Flerovium in a vacuum expressed in Kelvin, and the fact that the Dallas Cowboys have not flirted with an NFC championship game, much less a Super Bowl, in nearly three decades.

Accepting this last fact, why would anyone be dumb enough to expect any given year to be any different than the preceding 27? Yet they got me just the same.

Despite the conditioning I’ve endured like that creepy, masochistic, melanin-deficient priest in The Da Vinci Code, lashed mercilessly with year after year of heartbreaking failure and mediocrity, I allowed my (in hindsight) selective recollection of a fool’s gold 17-game regular season convince me that this year just might be different.

High-scoring, home-dominant, defensively flashy, with several players performing at All-Pro clips, and the least daunting path to success ahead in several years — it was all laid out. What a fool to believe. I can hear the dulcet blue-eyed soul of Michael McDonald mocking me now, “Only to realize it never really was.”

It’s been more than a week since I watched my favorite sports team, one I’d been suckered into believing had so much promise, fall butter-side down in front of the whole damn football world. The veil was removed, Capone’s vault was empty, and the emperor had no clothes. And all at the hands of a seemingly innocuous 7-seed Green Bay team.

To all who watched, the 48-32 final score is anything but indicative of the game. The tilt was over at the two-minute warning in the first half when a regular season MVP-candidate Dak Prescott removed his mask to reveal the panicky playoff Dak underneath and threw an unforgivable pick-six to put the Packers up 27-0 and ultimately ice the Cowboys’ 2023 season.

I will contend that, among an ever-mounting list of candidates, this is the most embarrassing loss the Cowboys have suffered in my history as a fan. Every aspect

of the franchise shares responsibility. From the head-in-the-sand roster-building approach in the offseason when the front office tried to simply paint over glaring vulnerabilities highlighted by last year’s playoff ass-whooping, to Head Coach Mike McCarthy’s and Defensive Coordinator Dan Quinn’s bewildering respective game plans heading into the contest and their stubborn lack of in-game adjustments when it was obvious the plans weren’t working, to the performance of every single player in all three phases of the team on the field — everyone collectively crumbled at once.

The epic collapse elicited a level of shock that would make John Waters gnash his pencil-mustachioed, oversized teeth with envy. Regardless of the passage of nine days, it’s still sitting with me. Like a previous night’s Never-Ending Pasta Bowl® at a rural roadside Olive Garden, it’s an immovable rock in my gut.

Naturally, immediately after the game, the bloodlust was up among fans. Someone, hell everyone, had to pay! The head coach, the DC, the quarterback, the equipment manager, and that livestock vet-cosplaying sideline doctor in the 10-gallon hat!

However, Cowboys nation will have to continue to release its bottled rage by

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After another embarrassing playoff disaster, fans wanted HC Mike McCarthy’s head, but it will remain on his body on the sidelines while we’re all in for more of the same.

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Running it back is the last thing anybody wants to hear, yet there are no realistic alternatives for the franchise — or for fans.

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Rolling Rock

Photo cour tesy DallasCowboys.com

STUFF

punching drywall and throwing remotes through flatscreen TVs because as of this writing, they’re all coming back (unless, of course, that doctor will be busy tending to blue-ribbon Angus heifers).

Hop aboard the bandwagon. We’re running it back!

While you recite to yourself the “definition of insanity” that is often falsely attributed to a certain wild-haired Germanborn physicist, let me go ahead and explain to you why they’re doing it anyway: They don’t have a choice. That’s right. They’re stuck.

Replace McCarthy with a better coach?

Fat chance. No decent coach in their right mind is ever going to come here to play yes-man to the Trumpian-ego’d Jerry Jones. Find a new quarterback? Nope, not that either. Dak is on the hook for $60M against the cap next year and has a no-trade clause. So not only will he be under center next season, he’ll likely be extended and be throwing interceptions in playoff games for the next four or five years. Well, maybe Dan Quinn will satiate our need for vengeance?

If only because he leaves to be a head coach somewhere else. Hate to break it to you, but that’s probably not going to happen either. His options are thinning, and time is running out. Looks like his inability to handle hard-running offenses and to get stops when the team needs them have dulled his former brilliant shine. Perhaps the Wild Card game has put 28-3 back in the minds of his potential landing spots.

So, sorry. They’re all back. And you know what? You will be, too. Because what are you realistically going to do? Not watch?

Yeah, right. You might keep the moralistic high ground for the next several months by maybe only half paying attention to the draft, or even actively ignoring OTAs, but I’d put up my middle child (obviously not the first-born or the youngest) that come kickoff time Week 1 in September, you’ll be donning your Parsons jersey in your living room with a tall boy in one hand and a blue, star-emblazoned foam finger on the other to watch our local football Sisyphus start to push that rock back up the hill. And I will be there, too. Because I’m an even bigger fool than you. We’ll all be there to stand in place while that rock inevitably rolls right over us on its way back down. l

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6.) Don’t forget to visit any Fish City Grill or Half Shells location by Wed, Jan 31, to try the “chalkboard specials,” including grouper tacos (with charred pico de gallo, fresh spinach, avocado crema, and cilantro bourbon roasted corn for $15.99) and shrimp-and-andouille mac ’n’ cheese (with creamy smoked Gouda and Parmesan plus a breadcrumb topping for $16.99), and more. Other specials are unique to each restaurant and will change twice daily. You can see them via live chalkboard cameras at

5.) Learn to make three different handcrafted alcoholic drinks at Cocktail Class with Master Mixologist Jason Shelly at TX Whiskey (2601 Whiskey Ranch Rd, Fort Worth) 6pm Wed, Jan 31. Your $86.80 admission includes one drink ticket to redeem pre-class, a guided demonstration of three cocktails to make and imbibe during instruction, and 15% off bar and drinkware in the TX Ranch Store. Tickets must be purchased in advance at FRDistilling.com.

Cour tesy La Pulga Spirits

4.) Join the Fort Worth Food + Wine Foundation for a cross-cultural dining experience called Beyond Borders at Whiskey Ranch (4250 Mitchell Blvd, Fort Worth, 817-840-9140) 6:30pm Sat. The multi-course meal will be followed by a panel discussion with the three chefs: Rodrigo Cardenas of Don Artemio Mexican Heritage, Michael Fojtasek of Olamaie, and Tom Perini of Perini Ranch Steakhouse. Tickets are $250 at FWFWF.org/Events/Beyond-Borders.

Cour tesy Facebook

Ridglea Theater will host a benefit for Chef Keith “Buttons” Hicks Wed, Jan 31.

Learn to make pasta at il Modo in February and March.

Sample Toro Toro bites and La Pulga Spirits at Meet the Maker at Worthington Hotel Thursday.

FishCityGrill.com/Locations. Choose your location and click “daily specials” to see what is available now.

7.) Southfork Ranch (3700 Hogge Dr, Gate 1, Parker) will host a murder mystery dinner — All Is Fair in Love and Murder — on Fri, Feb 9. Arrival is requested at 6:30pm, then the dinner and show are 7pm to 10pm. Tickets are $95 per person at SouthforkRanch.com/Murder-MysteryDinner. This Valentine’s Day event is happening a little earlier in February than the other ones I’ve seen. Pick up next week’s paper to check out more such activities and specials closer to the “holiday.” It will be chock-full of love and other icky stuff in this column and Night & Day. 8.) On Thursdays Feb 22, Mar 14, and Mar 28 at 7pm, attend a hands-on pasta class at il Modo inside the Kimpton Harper Hotel (714 Main St, Fort Worth, 817-332-7200).

You will learn about the history and process of making pasta, eat samples, and leave with your freshly made noodles and a takeaway recipe card. Wine and additional beverages will be available for purchase at the event.

Tickets are $70 on Eventbrite.com.

By Jennifer Bovee

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3.) To celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s national poet, Robert “Rabbie” Burns, Acre Distilling (1309 Calhoun St, Fort Worth, 817632-7722) will serve up an incredible array of artisan cheeses paired with an exclusive lineup of limited-edition whiskies and all your other Acre faves on Burns Day at 5:30pm or 7pm Fri. Taste an assortment of five artisan cheeses and seven spirits, plus receive a 15% discount on retail bottles. Tickets are $25 per person at AcreDistilling.com.

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1.) Beloved local Chef Keith “Buttons” Hicks is suffering from end-stage COPD and needs a double-lung transplant and some love and financial support in his journey to a healthier life. At 6pm Wed, Jan 31, Ridglea Theater (6025 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, 817-738-9500) will host the Button’s Family Affair Benefit Concert, and everyone is invited. When Hicks’ Buttons restaurant was open, it played host to many such events, and now it’s time to return the favor. There will be live music, complimentary appetizers, and food for purchase from Chef Billy Kidd, Chef Ty Frazier, The RIM, Fat Face Full, and Ms. Angi’s Louisiana Kitchen. This event will be staffed by a group of Hicks’ former employees and friends. Tickets start at $25 per person on Eventbrite.com.

FO R T WO R T H W E E K LY

2.) At its Meet the Maker tasting event on the last Thursday of every month, Toro Toro inside the Worthington Renaissance Hotel (200 Main St, Ste B, Fort Worth, 817870-1000) invites you to try local bites and spirits 5pm-7pm. This time, the featured spirit is La Pulga by Fort Worth natives Sarah Castillo, Andrew De La Torre, and Stephen Slaughter. This free-to-attend event is open to the public (21+ only) and includes complimentary valet parking.

Cour tesy il Modo

The best food and drink events and activities are coming soon to North Texas.

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EATS & drinks Crowded House

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Hudson House opened a few weeks ago, and, apparently, nobody can get a reservation.

At least that’s the story from the annoying reservation system –– while perusing it recently, I found it easier to reserve a table for a party of four than a party of two (three

days’ wait versus five). Instead of dinner for two, my quartet ventured out for Saturday brunch. When we arrived, the place was busy but not overcrowded –– the large back room was less than half full –– which made me question the reservation system. Maybe management is being deliberately protective of their new employees. Maybe the decision to use mostly horseshoe-shaped booths, best for parties of four or six, is responsible for the weird reservation math.

However, once the Bleu and Gold martini showed up, I had no reservations about anything. Are these the coldest martinis in

the world? Perhaps. Did I love the acerbic combo of frosty vodka, a splash of olive brine, the glorious dusting of blue cheese salt, and house-made blue cheese-stuffed olives? Absolutely. The salted rim was a revelation — deeply pungent kosher salt infused with blue cheese provided a surprisingly nutty, slightly briny pleasure.

Although there’s no dedicated brunch yet, the regular menu offers a boggling selection of sushi options (eight), four entrée salads, burgers and fish, and, oddly, “avocado dip.” So, “guacamole” is too … ethnic?

Side note to the chain with four locations in

Texas and one in California: All my Long Island relatives and everyone in your service areas know what guacamole is.

An appetizer of deviled eggs came out with the yellow centers piped to perfection –– the yolks rose majestically and slightly gravity-defying-ly above the whites. If you like celery in your deviled eggs, this is the treat for you. The strong flavor and crunch of celery has a place in many dishes but not here.

The Lupton roll, our second shared app, was detailed on the menu as a riceless roll with crab, tempura flake, avocado, Hamacontinued on page 15

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S T O R Y A N D P H O T O S L A U R I E J A M E S

The Hudson salad has all the goodness of a club sandwich on top of a bowl of mixed greens.

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The Lupton roll turned out to be more like a crab cake than actual sushi.

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A new Texi-Cali chain with Long Island aspirations tries to woo the locals.

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Eats & Drinks continued from page 13

Deviled eggs — the higher the yolks, the closer to heaven.

tle au jus or béarnaise — or horseradish cream sauce if you’re fancy — and throw down a healthy handful of fries. The fist-sized piece of meat looked like a hockey puck, well done instead of medium, with a slim portion of the skinny fries and, inexplicably, a mixed green salad that dwarfed the actual star. Wherever Anthony Bourdain might be, I picture him having a fit of apoplexy seeing this.

Hudson House claims that its cuisine has roots in “the rich culinary history of the Hudson Valley.” To that end, the oyster selection is firmly East Coast — on the day we visited,

Hudson House Steak frites ................................................. $49 Pan-seared redfish ..................................... $31 Lupton roll .................................................. $21 The Hudson salad ....................................... $17 Skinny fries ................................................. $7 Deviled eggs ............................................... $9 Bleu and Gold martini ................................ $14

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If it’s not the coldest in town, the Bleu and Gold martini may be the only one with actual blue cheese-infused salt.

the bivalve specials included two varieties from Prince Edward Island on Canada’s east coast and one from Connecticut. I thought I felt a little déjà vu going on, and I was right.

The corporation behind Hudson House also owned the defunct East Hampton Sandwich Company, which at one point maybe a decade ago was a prime spot for a lobstah roll.

The restaurant may be the new place for the Athleta-clad set to see and be seen, but bless their hearts, there are other places in town that do what Hudson House does better. Lobster roll and icy martini? Hit up Lucille’s, just up the street. Hankering for fresh oysters? Jon Bonnell’s Waters has you covered. Hudson House’s opening coincided with the very public closure of several locally owned restaurants, including La Onda just

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Anthony Bourdain would have been mad at the presentation of the steak frites. We sure were.

this week, and what we recently said about rock clubs after the recent closure of 16-yearold Lola’s is true for our food scene as well: “Municipalities are not liable for the survival of rock ’n’ roll clubs. The people who live in a city are.” Hudson House looks beautiful –– the corporation that owns it spent a fortune making it so — but other than the martini, fries, and salad (one of the world’s best lunches, a scandalous $48 here), there is very little to recommend the place, save for the facts that it’s new and we in the Fort will run to the next new restaurant — at least once. l

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chi, salmon, and truffle. What came out tasted remarkably like the center of a crab cake, right down to the slightly crunchy tempura mimicking a crust. It was off-putting if you were expecting a beautifully composed roll with individual elements that harmonize beautifully, rather than what amounted to fancy crab dip in a roll.

Highlights of the rest of lunch included the Hudson salad, packing the punch of a club sandwich with bacon, tomato, avocado, and popcorn chicken on mixed greens along with cheese and a heavenly, savory Green Goddess dressing. The salad was a beautifully layered feast for the palate as well, with each bite delivering a nice amount of protein or creamy avocado. Skinny fries (perfectly crispy matchstick potatoes, lightly salted with truffle and Parmesan) were lovingly seasoned and presented with ketchup and house-made ranch dressing.

The palm-sized serving of pan-seared and allegedly flown-in-daily redfish, which is generally mild, tasted overly fishy. Blackened seasoning didn’t perk up the filet much, and the beurre blanc sauce was scant and thin. As the side, whole broccoli crowns (not cut into manageable bites) arrived al dente with goodsized chunks of parmesan cheese.

Steak frites may be the ultimate bistro staple, with French or Belgian origins depending on which story you read. The dish is ridiculously simple: Season the meat, cook to desired doneness, slap it on a plate with a lit-

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MUSIC

In Marked Men and Mind Spiders, Ryan said, he feels he may have “tried to be too serious. For O-D-Ex, I don’t take it seriously at all. I get to write lyrics with my wife, and they’re just silly — inside jokes and things that make us laugh, like wearing shorts in the winter.”

The lyrics might be silly, but the context in which they are delivered comes across as anything but. The driving pulse of synth lines and heavily distorted guitars ride the rapid punch and snap of digital drums while Ryan delivers his subliminally comic lines through a haunting robotic vocal effect. The result leaves the listener with the feeling of a blitzkrieg sonic wall bearing down, a schizophrenic aural assault that contrastingly retains an infectious slam-danceability and boasts the same subversive hookiness that has been the hallmark of all of Ryan’s material.

The songwriter has been pleased with the effort so far and the seeming simplicity of working in a more electronic medium.

“There’s a sort of immediacy to creating and recording these songs that’s really fun for me,” he said. “I can kind of bash something out real quick and come up with these ideas — it’s a very dirty and quick method of doing things, and I really like the results.

It’s just really fun to make these sounds and this music.” l

presented by

JAN. 30 MATT HILLYER 1/31 LOCAL YOAKUM

2/1 JOHN BAUMANN 2/2 SONS OF BOCEPHUS

2/3 JONATHAN TERRELL

2 - Feb. 1 . n a

3

Cour tesy Dir tnap Records

The Marked Men have been one of the state’s most beloved punk bands since the early aughts. Even if they never graced Pitchfork, their sentimental lyrics, infectious singalong style, and raw, bratty delivery elevated the four-piece to the same vaunted level as the decade’s most heavyweight indie-rockers like The Strokes, The Hives, and Interpol. At least in the hearts of Texans, anyway.

That esteem has followed the members to the myriad projects that have webbed out from the original Denton collective. Whether you trace the line of singer/guitarist Jeff Burke to Denton’s Radioactivity or his U.S./ Japan collab with Yusuke Okada (Lost Balloons) or follow fellow Marked Men frontman Mark Ryan to the electroclash punk of Mind Spiders — or any of the other branches that lead to High Tension Wires, The Reds, The Chopsakis, or Low Culture — the path taken invariably leads to great music.

Now, there’s a new Marked Men offshoot. Ryan’s new solo project O-D-Ex seamlessly stretches from the subtle synth-coated punk of Mind Spiders to lean hard into the gritty digital sounds of so-called Krautrock and ’80s industrial à la Suicide, Kraftwerk, and Skinny Puppy, albeit with Ryan’s signature up-tempo punk flair. Following re-

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H I G G I N S

“A lot of it was me just getting into old digital synthesizers and digital samplers and drum machines.”

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P A T R I C K

cently released videos for two singles, “Ley Line” and “Back to Form,” the project’s 11song, full-length debut, Breaker, will be out Friday via Milwaukee’s Dirtnap Records.

The origin of O-D-Ex “really came from me complaining that I felt like it takes forever to get stuff done with a band,” Ryan said with a laugh. “The last Mind Spiders album came out in 2018, and I felt like with that band, things had kind of fizzled out. I’d kind of done everything I’d wanted to do with it. I’d been trying to figure out something else to do.”

At the urging of friend and electronic music producer/composer Why — perhaps best known by his equally enigmatic alter-ego “M” from Denton electronic experimentalists Mission Giant — Ryan began messing around with a solo endeavor.

“A lot of it was me just getting into old digital synthesizers and digital samplers and drum machines,” Ryan said. “In Mind Spiders, I was pretty particular about things sounding very clean, and analog, and warm, but I just fell in love with that harsh digital noise and stuff like that, and I started experimenting with sounds and came up with a couple of song ideas I liked, and that sort of sparked things from there. It was an ongoing joke in Mind Spiders that Daniel [Fried], who played bass, would say, ‘You’re going to replace us all with machines someday,’ and that’s kind of what happened,” Ryan added with a laugh.

He shared his initial ideas with Why, who offered feedback and ended up becoming a quasi-collaborator.

“I come from a more electronic background in making music,” Why said. “I’d been kind of fanning [Ryan’s] flames toward that direction anyway. The thing about machines is they just want to work. They want to work when you want to work. For someone who has a bunch of ideas, just going hard, and going at it more or less alone, it actually allows for a faster result. That’s been my role, just sort of flame fanning.”

Ryan gives Why more credit than that.

“He plays it down,” he said of Why’s contributions, “but he definitely works almost like a producer role, telling me when something sucks or to try something else. He’s added a lot of parts to different songs and did the record cover and things like that.”

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Mark Ryan, with a little help from quasi-collaborator Why (right), is “Back to Form” via the new electronic project O-D-Ex.

full lineup JAN. 24 LIKE COMBS JAN. 25 CODY HIBBARD JAN. 26 KAREN WALDRUP JAN. 27 POO LIVE CREW JAN. 29 JAMIE RICHARDS

J

From Marked Men and Mind Spiders, Mark Ryan’s new electronic project O-D-Ex is a pleasure bot for tired ears.

Mark Ryan

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Yes, people are listening to new music, and, yes, they like to be part of the critical conversation about same.

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S T E W A R D

I think the best part of Pitchfork’s demise — parent publisher Condé Nast laid off a ton of the music mag’s employees and announced it would be absorbed by GQ (!) — is that Condé Nast Editorial Director Anna Wintour remained on brand while informing the staff of their fate. According to a tweet, newly laid-off Pitchfork writer Allison Hussey said that Wintour “did not remove her sunglasses while she was telling us we were about to get canned.” I like it because it’s the kind of rockstar detail you’d see in a movie about a music magazine, probably right at the end of the first act, the inciting incident in which the unemployed music journalists have to figure out their next move after the fabulous, elegant, ice-cold media powerbroker destroys their careers. Also, this character is played by either Helen Mirren or Will Ferrell.

Regardless of the cast, the reason people would watch this movie is because its plot exists within the frame of “people really loving music.” And that, I think, is why music journalism matters, and why it will never really go away: Humans are captivated by music. We love to experience it, to think about it, to have it rattling around in our brains, sometimes to the detriment of many other, more important tasks. Making sense of music and its effect on our existence does not have an intrinsic value like harvesting grain and baking bread does.

Instead, its worth lies in what it does to our minds and souls. Talking about it is a way of finding meaning, even when the discussion is something as granular/asinine-Facebook-comment-thread-y as “Strat is better than Tele” or “jazz is punker than punk.” Discussing what a critic has to say about Bad Brains, Bad Bunny, or Bad Company is us using our intellects for something other than the tedious bullshit required to keep ourselves and our kin fed and sheltered. In the way that the bass in a song makes you feel the music in your solar plexus, reading about music further cements it in your core. Finding out how a song or an album or an artist makes someone else think and feel draws you deeper into your own listening experience.

But our collective listening experience has shifted, and the economics of mass-market music journalism have forced it into a state of continual contraction. In a recent edition of his newsletter, venerable jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia attributes this contraction to the state of the music industry itself, pointing out that Pitchfork is but one endangered species in the music

Cour tesy Poshmark

HearSay

“Pack your … frumpy … belongings and vacate the premises immediately.” — Anna Wintour probably

industry ecosystem. Spotify, Universal, YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Tidal have all laid off employees in recent months. Building up to that is a path to oblivion that began with major labels and other investors buying up the catalogs of established legacy artists rather than spending money on new acts, joined by a streaming-service trajectory that encourages passive listening and AI-generated artists. Gioia’s take on all that: “If people don’t listen to new music, they don’t need new music reviews.”

The thing is, people do listen to new music, after a fashion anyway, because TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are all still huge platforms. Yet what is the staying power of a song when it has to fight for attention in a channel that is also not specific to enjoying music? In the olden days, the competition among artists for radio airplay was fierce, but they had to contend only with other artists. If you’re a band trying to promote on TikTok, you’re also fighting dozens of other videos in a feed which have nothing to do with paying attention to a guitar solo. Imagine Limp Bizkit trying to break through in a medium that also has pugs being adorable and old people playing Skyrim or whatever. Regarding TikTok and those others, I’d say that music journalism is even more vital, if only that it is a way to cut through all the audio-visual clutter.

I think the newly diminished Pitchfork is symptomatic of how the music industry has changed. Think of the dinosaurs — when those behemoths died out, what do you think happened to the creatures that ate the bugs off their backs? I assume such things existed, and if so, when the dinosaurs died out, the Jurassic versions of a cowbird probably weren’t far behind. But local music journalism outfits — like this one, for example — are not lumbering giants crashing through the forest. We are closer to the ground. The artists we cover are people we see in our neighborhoods as often as we see them onstage, and we cover them because they are part of what it is like living in Fort Worth.

And that goes for every one of us journalists who work on a local level — whether you’re writing about the scenes in San Antonio or Syracuse, you’re likely doing it because you like it. And the same goes for you readers.

Local music writers go to the same shows you do, and they write about your friends’ bands.

In a way, we’re chronicling parts of a lot of people’s experience with music, from both sides of the stage, giving you insight into the musicians schlepping their gear back and forth every night, giving them a chance to explain why they riffed how they did on their record or why they write what they write. As long as there are new local bands, there will be local journalists to write about them, and there’s nothing that Anna Wintour — or Spotify or the decades-long demise of major labels — can do about that. l

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EMPLOYMENT- General

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EMPLOYMENT

American Airlines, Inc. has openings in Ft. Worth, TX for: Sr. Analyst, Business Intelligence (Ref. 1762): Resp for apply’g data visualization, biz intelli, project mgmt, & predictive analytics to create new report’g tools & dashboards to assemble & analyze large amounts of data.

Sr. Developer (Ref. 2289): Resp for design’g, develop’g, & implement’g large-scale, highly available apps. To learn more or to apply send inquiries &/or resume to Gene Womack via email: Gene.Womack@aa.com. Please include Ref # in subject line.

American Airlines, Inc. has openings in Ft. Worth, TX for: Sr. Developer, IT Applications (Ref# 2131): Resp for leverag’g cutting edge tech to solve biz probs at AA. Sr. Analyst, Material Planning (Ref# 1767): Dvlp models & presents using data visual s/w & tools to increase operational performance around aircraft spare parts w/in operat’g budget. Technical Lead, IT Applications (Ref# 1920): Resp for participat’g in req analysis, design, dvlpmnt, implementation, & support. Analyst/ Sr. Analyst, Digital Product Manager (Ref# 1546): Align objectives of Digital Products w/ corp objectives & comm outcomes across all biz stakeholders. Principal Programmer/Technical Lead, IT Applications (Ref# 1225): Resp for implementing policy as code in AA’s choice of cloud to secure & optimize cloud utilization & provide cost transparency. Sr. Engineer, IT Desktop Services (Ref# 2105): Resp for develop’g security systems, analyz’g current systems for vulnerabilities, & handl’g any & all cyber-attacks in an efficient & effective manner. Analyst/Sr. Analyst, Contact Center – Quality Insights (Ref# 2141): Support, research, & co-ord speech analytics requests from all int’l offices related to NEXIDIA. To apply, send resume to Gene Womack at Gene.Womack@aa.com. Put reference number in the subject line.

JA N UA RY 2 4 - 3 0 , 2 0 2 4

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EMPLOYMENT

EMPLOYMENT

FO R T WO R T H W E E K LY

Clinical Revenue Cycle Analyst (Southlake, TX) for clinical lab. specializing in PCR based diagnostics.

Req: Bach. degree in pub. health/healthcare admin/ biology or reltd. natural sc. or med. field + 1yr. exp.

Mail CV: Promus Diagnostics, LLC; 525. S Kimball Ave., Southlake, TX 76092.

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to Plan, dsgn, develop & deploy computer & information networks including LAN, WAN, Intranet, Internet & other data communications systems. Analyze business requirements to develop technical network solutions & prepare functional specifications. Install, upgrade, configure & monitor network devices routers, switches, etc. by managing VLAN, routing, port-securities & troubleshooting LAN issues. Dsgn network & computer security measures using latest technologies.

Sr. Network Administrator

to Plan, dsgn, develop & deploy computer & information networks including LAN, WAN, VPN, Intranet, Internet & other data communications systems. Install, upgrade, configure & monitor network devices routers, switches, etc. by managing VLAN, routing, port-securities & troubleshooting LAN issues. Design network & computer security measures.

Sr. Software Developer

to Plan, dsgn, develop, test, enhance, customize & co-ordinate activities to implement advance software applications & module components in complex computing environments using latest tools & technologies on different O/S.

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Sr. Solutions Architect

to Plan, research, analyze, recommend & implement new technologies, standard processes, tools & techniques to further the solutions offerings in complex computing environment. Provide technical dsgn assistance & architectural leadership etc. Analyze information to determine, recommend, & plan computer specifications, layouts & peripheral equipment modifications.

Sr. Data Analytical Engineer

to Gather, arrange, process & model data. Dsgn, develop, create, test, enhance, customize & implement advance software module components in complex computer environments. Analyze large volume of data etc. Involve in implementation of data foundational procedures, guidelines & standards to improve the efficiency of information processing systems.

Sr. Data Science Manager

to Analyze data using basic statistical methods, interprets results, & provide written & graphical summaries of data analysis. Develop quantitative models, leveraging machine learning & advanced data analysis techniques. Create road maps etc. Coordinate with stakeholders across business functions etc. Involve in the full Data Science life-cycle from conception to prototyping, testing, deploying, & measuring its overall business value. Travel and/or reloc to various unanticipated loc’ns throughout the US may be required.”

Apply w/2 copies of resume to HR, Techno9 Solutions, Inc., 3575 Lone Star Cir, Ste 430, Fort Worth, TX 76177.

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IT JOBS- Computer Professionals for TX Based IT Firm: “Sr. Network Engineer

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Goosehead Insurance Agency, LLC seeks Senior Software Engineer in Westlake, TX (telework 2 days/wk permitted) to analyze, design, develop, implement, maintain and support technology solutions. Salary within the range of $141,156 - $172,227/yr. Send resume to suzaan.nair@ goosehead.com and include reference NMSSE.