Fort Worth Weekly // January 31 - February 6, 2024

January 31-February 6, 2024 FREE fwweekly.com

FEATURE She’s on a quarter now, but Jovita Idar was giving no quarter to racist forces a century ago.

BY E.R. BILLS

Peace, Love & Gritz Beloved Chef Keith Hicks needs help, so Fort Worth is doing what it always does: putting on a benefit show.

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SCREEN Comedy doesn’t come any cringier than The Curse.

BY KRISTIAN LIN

NIGHT & DAY Brace yourselves. Valentine’s Mardi Gras Super Bowl Time is coming.

BY JENNIFER BOVEE

HEARSAY With the Post’s closure, its booking agent looks ahead.

BY STEVE STEWARD

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J an uar y 31 - Febr uar y 6, 2024

INSIDE

STAFF Anthony Mariani, Editor Lee Newquist, Publisher Bob Niehoff, General Manager Ryan Burger, Art Director Jim Erickson, Circulation Director Emmy Smith, Proofreader Michael Newquist, Regional Sales Director Jennifer Bovee, Marketing Director

Curse, You

Stacey Hammons, Senior Account Executive

Emma Stone leads a crack cast through this bizarrely ending house-flipping comedy.

By Kristian Lin

Julie Strehl, Account Executive Tony Diaz, Account Executive

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Wyatt Newquist, Digital Coordinator Clintastic, Brand Ambassador

Chef Keith Hicks is battling end-stage COPD and needs your support.

By Elaine Wilder

Anne-Marie Sokol

Helping a Helper

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Christina Berger, Edward Brown, E.R. Bills, Jason Brimmer, Buck D. Elliott, Juan R. Govea, Patrick Higgins, Laurie James, Kristian Lin, Cody

Milk of the Gods

Neathery, Wyatt Newquist, Steve Steward, Teri

Stoner-rock doesn’t come any sweeter than One-Eyed Monsters’ Ambrosia.

Closing Time

The Post’s booking agent detects changes underfoot.

By Steve Steward

CONTRIBUTORS

By Steve Steward

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Webster, Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue, Elaine Wilder, Cole Williams

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EDITORIAL

BOARD

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Feature Screen Night & Day ATE DAY8 a Week Eats & Drinks

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Coining a Texas Heroine

the Times’ “Overlooked” story describes it, “Laws of the Jim Crow era enforcing racial segregation also limited the rights of Mexican Americans in South Texas (they are often referred to by scholars today as ‘Juan Crow’ laws). Signs saying ‘No Negroes, Mexicans or dogs allowed’ were common in restaurants and stores. Law enforcement officers frequently intimidated or abused Mexican-American residents, and the schools they were sent to were underfunded and often inadequate. Speaking Spanish in public was discouraged.”

Jovita Idar was doing DEI long before it was welcome — and before conservatives turned it into a cultural boogeyman.

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The New York Times’ 2020 series of feature obituaries, “Overlooked,” was primarily devoted to women and “people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported” in the publication. It was an ambitious project and one that Texas itself, as a state and a society, would arguably do well to replicate.

Especially since a Texas woman named Jovita Idar was one of the series’ most compelling figures, and, on August 15, 2023, she became the second Latina and first Tejana to be featured on United States currency.

Jovita Idar’s face now graces the unfrumpy side of American quarters, and her presence is wildly original and artistic. On the flipside, George Washington appears more and more irritated by the usual oxymoron that undermines so much of our legal tinder: “LIBERTY” in large all caps up top and an arguably contradictory, monotheistic “IN GOD WE TRUST” smaller and left adjacent. Idar’s reverse appearance incorporates her chief cause, “MEXICAN AMERICAN RIGHTS”; her primary callings, “JOURNALISTA” and “TEACHER”; and the names of the publications where she championed Washington’s liberty in the face of Anglocentric injustice.

The “Overlooked” story on Idar in the New York Times was particularly intriguing to me because I had stumbled onto reports mentioning her family years before and, at first, didn’t make the connection. When I started researching her for another story, I recalled the original link. I discovered that something was missed or “overlooked” in all the new reporting and most of the scholarship.

Idar was born in Laredo on September 7, 1885. Her father, Nicasio Idar, was born in Port Isabel. Nicasio’s father was a Portuguese sailor who was rarely around and, according to Idar’s youngest brother, Aquilino (in a 1984 interview), Nicasio’s mother “sold” him to some cowboys for a year of work in Oklahoma when he was a teenager. He then got a job in the Nuevo Laredo railyards and worked as a yardmaster for 20 years. Nicasio met Idar’s mother, Jovita Vivero, of San Luis Potosi, in Rio Grande City, and they married. They had 13 children. Three died at birth, and one didn’t

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Activist/journalist Jovita Idar became the second Latina and first Tejana to be featured on United States currency.

survive childhood. Jovita Idar was the second eldest. Nicasio had done fairly well and settled in Laredo, where in the mid-1890s he founded El Partido Independiente de Laredo to help Mexican and Mexican Americans there organize politically. By 1896, he was elected a Justice of the Peace. Nicasio and his wife’s children were raised with the relative privilege of la gente decente citizenry, and he placed a special emphasis on education and public service. Aquilino has said his father often discussed these matters with them.

Out in the yard, my father used to sit right there, and all of us — seven brothers and two sisters — used to form a circle around him. And he would talk to us about Mexicans, about Mexican Americans; how to fight for the Mexican people; what to do for the Mexican people. How to think. Don’t let anybody tell you how to think, because you are a freethinker. You are standing on the face of the earth on your own two feet. So use your own brain to work your way up in any situation. He said, “You don’t depend on anybody to tell you that you’re going to heaven, to paradise, or this and that. You’re gonna stay here until you die.”

Idar was able to attend the Laredo Seminary (later known as the Holding Institute), founded just three years earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church.

From here in examinations of Idar’s life, most narratives — including the Times’ “Overlooked” account — jump to her father’s activism and his work as the editor and publisher of La Crónica, a local Spanish newspaper, but there was more to Nicasio’s progressive work. It included membership in Mexican-Tejano social and fraternal orders in the Rio Grande Valley, including the Masonic-structured Gran Concilo de la Orden Caballeros de Honor, of which Nicasio was the

Laredo lodge secretary. And Crónica articles reporting on the lodge parroted Nicasio’s views. One from December 17, 1910, titled “Excitativa Del Gran Concilio de La Orden Caballeros de Honor a La Raza Mexicana,” is almost striking for its candor.

It is not possible … to attain respectability, trust, and protection within the American nation, if we ourselves do not have this with our co-nationals; if we believe that the Mexicans are unworthy of our association with them, of us joining their associations, we should not expect that the Americans would gladly receive us in theirs. If we do not have trust in the men of our own race, how can we expect other races to have trust in us?

As Gabriela González puts it in Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), the article “critiqued the divisions among MéxicanoTejanos, particularly the selfish shortsightedness of the comfortable class for their lack of loyalty to the group and their lack of respect for Mexicans of modest means.”

After Idar’s graduation and attainment of a teaching certificate, she worked as a teacher in Los Ojuelos, a small community between Laredo and Hebbronville, but she was discouraged by the conditions and school facilities in the community and reportedly resigned, opting to work with her father and two of her brothers, Clemente and Eduardo, at La Crónica. In Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (2011), Zaragosa Vargas notes the ways “the Idar family sounded off against separatist and inferior housing and schools, the abysmal conditions faced by Tejano workers that took on the visage of peonage, and the gross violations of Tejano civil rights” in the pages of La Crónica. And this, at a time when, as

Idar, herself, was particularly compelling.

Often composing diatribes under pen names like “Ave Negra” (Spanish for “Blackbird”) or “Astraea” (the Greek goddess of justice), she tirelessly advocated for Mexican Americans and, particularly, women, asserting that they should educate themselves and not acquiesce to lives of subservience to men or, for that matter, the patriarchal Catholic Church. For La Crónica, it verged on a crusade. The publication’s writers openly blamed religious fanaticism for Mexico’s staggering illiteracy rate, noting that “83% [of the Mexican Republic] are illiterates who vegetate like pariahs, unconscious of their existence, and ignorant of their rights and duties as of a republic that proclaims to figure in the vanguard of the most cultured and powerful nations on earth.”

A controversial, anonymous article in the February 2, 1910 edition of La Crónica warned of the patriarchal monopoly of the Catholic confessional.

The confessional scares me, and I advise mothers to teach their daughters to confess their guilts and faults not to God, or to confess them before the lattice of the confessional, to the ear of a man who has no right to listen to the conscience of youth, and who is susceptible to feel all of the human passions precisely because he is human and celibate. The mother loves her daughters with heartfelt, immense, pure, and incomparable love, and she is the legitimate confessor of the family and the legitimate counselor of the home.

Then, a week later, a Crónica piece titled “Vulgariza La Revista Catolica” clarified the publication’s position: “We do not want the woman to stop believing in whatever God strikes her fancy. … We only want to destroy the idols of the woman’s heart and have her turn her face once again to her God, so that she can adore him with more intelligence, freely.”

By the time “Debejamos Trabajar” appeared in the December 7, 1911 La Crónica, Idar had secularized the sentiment, so that it appeared more palatable (if not more digestibly feminist): “Working women know their rights and proudly rise to face the struggle.

The hour of their degradation has passed. … They are no longer men’s servants but their equals, their partners.” And she was known to take it even a step further, flatly proclaiming, “Educate a woman, and you educate a family.”

In a 2017 interview with the San Antonio continued on page 5

Progreso published an editorial by a Mexican revolutionary named Manuel Garcia Vigil that was critical of the United States’ occupation of Veracruz later that year, members of a local company of the Texas Rangers appeared outside the door of El Progreso with the intent to shut it down, but they hadn’t planned on encountering Jovita Idar. She defiantly berated them, reportedly issuing a succinct lecture on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. The Rangers retreated. They returned the following morning — when Idar wasn’t around — to destroy El Progreso’s offices and printing equipment and arrest the other employees.

Idar’s stand against the Rangers was incredibly brave considering their reputation for violence and bloodshed during encounters with Mexican and Tejano populations along the border at the time, and the history of her fearlessness and resolve is thankfully becoming more widely known. But a largely forgotten incident early in her life had a

more profound effect on her and her family’s social and political outlook (and perhaps the city of Laredo itself) because this incident shaped the family’s views moving forward.

A brief account of the Laredo Smallpox Riot is available online via the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas.

LAREDO SMALLPOX RIOT. A smallpox epidemic at Laredo that began in early October 1898 led to events that eventually climaxed in March 1899, when a violent showdown between Mexican Americans and Texas Rangers resulted in the immediate death of one man, the wounding of thirteen, and the arrest of twenty-one participants.

On October 4, 1898, Laredo physicians began noticing a disease resembling chicken pox among the city’s children.

The first death directly attributed to smallpox, that of a Mexican child on October 29, prompted Mayor Louis J. Christen and local officials to start a committee to investigate reports of the illness. By the end of January 1899,

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Express-News, González, an associate professor in history at the University of Texas-San Antonio, said Idar “worked toward the creation of a better world where women and men of all backgrounds would be able to thrive and contribute to their communities.

She labored for social justice, for an end to racism and segregation, for women’s rights, and for the rights of children to have an education and therefore greater opportunities.”

Idar and her family utilized La Crónica to support the creation of El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (the First Mexican Congress) to advocate for justice and equality for Hispanic people in Texas. The Congreso met for 11 days in September 1911. They recognized Mexican-American achievements, celebrated their Mexican heritage, sponsored empowering speeches, and staged festive community performances. Idar and other women were prominent participants in the event and subsequently formed the Liga Femenil Mexicanista (the League of Mexican Women, of which Idar was the first president).

In 1913, Idar crossed into Mexico and worked with La Cruza Blanca (a medical aid organization like the Red Cross) during the Battle of Nuevo Laredo in the Mexican Revolution.

La Crónica closed its doors after Nicasio’s death in 1914, and Idar became a staffer for another Spanish-language newspaper in Laredo, El Progreso. When El

“You don’t depend on anybody to tell you that you’re going to heaven, to paradise, or this and that. You’re gonna stay here until you die.”

more than 100 cases of smallpox had been reported in Laredo. Dr. Walter Fraser Blunt, State of Texas health officer warned that more systematic and thorough measures would have to be taken to control the epidemic. Dr. Blunt’s instructions included houseto-house vaccination and fumigation, the burning of all questionable clothing and personal effects that could not be fumigated, and the establishment of a field hospital to disinfect patients.

This field hospital was in effect a quarantined area, referred to as the “pesthouse.” Most of the vaccination and fumigation efforts were directed at the poorer barrios of the city along Zacate Creek on the east side of town.

Conditions worsened to such an extent that on March 16, 1899, Blunt arrived from Austin to take charge of efforts to control the epidemic. A serious problem arose when a number of Laredo residents began to resist the vaccinations and fumigations. Blunt responded by requesting the services of the Texas Rangers to help medical teams carry out house-to-house vaccinations and fumigations. On Sunday, March 19, 1899, a small detachment of Rangers arrived from Austin and joined in the efforts to get all residents immunized.

The arrival of the Rangers heightened the apprehension of some people being forced to submit to the radical health measures. Friction between Mexican Americans and Texas Rangers was

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long-standing in South Texas. Where the Rangers met resistance, they broke down doors, removed occupants by force, and took all who were suspected of having smallpox to the pesthouse.

A throng of angry protesters gathered and showered the Rangers and health officials with both words and rocks. In the ensuing melee, Assistant Marshal Idar was hit on the side of the head by a stone, and one of the protesters, Pablo Aguilar, received a shotgun wound in the leg.

“Assistant Marshal Idar” was Jovita’s father, Nicasio.

As educated members of la gente decente, Jovita Idar and her family were caught between historically abusive and overbearing American law enforcement and medical officials and, on the other side, the uneducated, “pariah”-like members of their fellow Tejano

and co-national community.

The next day, the Laredo Times reported that Deutz Brothers, a local hardware store, had “received a telephone order for 2,000 rounds of buckshot to be delivered to a certain house in the southeastern portion of the city, but instead of filling the order, the authorities were notified and given the location where the delivery was to be made.” Sheriff L.R. Ortiz quickly obtained a search warrant and took with him Capt. J.H. Rogers and his detachment of Texas Rangers. The elite squad had been reinforced that morning with the arrival of more Rangers on the train from Austin.

Together they began a house-to-house search in the immediate area where the ammunition was supposed to have been delivered. At the home of Agapito Herrera, trouble began for Sheriff Ortiz and the Rangers. Herrera, a one-time Laredo policeman, met the lawmen outside his home and took Ortiz aside to talk privately. As the discussion continued on page 9

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As educated members of la gente decente, Jovita Idar and her family were caught between historically abusive law enforcement and, on the other side, the uneducated, “pariah”-like members of their fellow Tejano and co-national community.

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of March 21, the Tenth United States Cavalry [composed of AfricanAmericans], under the command of Capt. Charles G. Ayers, moved into the affected neighborhood to maintain the peace and assure that the work of controlling the smallpox epidemic continued unhampered.

Rangers also patrolled the area, searching for and arresting anyone they thought involved in the riot. Liberal journalist Justo Cárdenas and twenty others were arrested. Few disturbances were noted in the days that followed. The army seemed to have taken control of the situation, and Mayor Christen pleaded with other areas of the state to send food and clothing to the victims of the epidemic. Throughout March, many children continued to die of smallpox, but in April, the number of deaths decreased dramatically. The situation had

improved so much that by May 1, 1899, Blunt ordered the quarantine lifted.

Today, one in five Texans is still not vaccinated for COVID, and certainly during the pandemic’s heights and leveling off, our uneducated, ill-informed or ignorant, “pariah”-like neighbors (of all ethnicities) reacted in much the same way their counterparts did in Laredo in 1899. The difference is that the undereducated and underprivileged members of the Tejano and Mexican community in Laredo at the turn of the 19th century had a legitimate excuse. They faced Juan Crow discrimination and underfunded education systems.

The Texans who verged on rioting and violence regarding the COVID vaccinations at the dawn of 2020 had complete access to informational opportunities and educational programs, and their obliviousness to public health considerations and borderline

Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the author of Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations into Infamous History and The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas.

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heated up, a youngster standing in the doorway shouted “ya!” and darted inside. Almost simultaneously, while the nervous Rangers drew their guns, Herrera disappeared into the house and ran out the back door accompanied by several armed men. In the ensuing gunbattle, Capt. Rogers was wounded in the shoulder by a bullet fired from Herrera’s pistol. Herrera himself was shot in the chest by Ranger gunfire.

Ranger A.Y. Old ran up to the wounded Herrera and pumped two fatal shots point blank into his head. The dead man’s sister, Refugia, was shot in the arm, and a friend, Santiago Grimaldo, was shot in the stomach.

After evacuating Rogers, Rangers returned to find an angry crowd of about 100, some of whom were armed, gathered around Herrera’s lifeless body. After the hurling of more taunts, someone in the crowd fired a shot. The Rangers promptly opened fire into the crowd, wounding eight, including one man mortally. As evening approached, the Rangers retreated to Market Square.

All through the night, sporadic gunfire could be heard in the same troubled neighborhood. Realizing that the situation could easily worsen, the Rangers called on the cavalry unit stationed at Fort McIntosh for additional support in restoring order. On the morning

“Working women know their rights and proudly rise to face the struggle. The hour of their degradation has passed. … They are no longer men’s servants but their equals, their partners.”

spiteful intransigence are still inexplicable and stupefying.

Jovita Idar’s family bore Nicasio’s attackers no ill will, and the patriarch, two of his sons, and his daughter set out to help them by educating them and providing them an alternative, cogent voice in the Mexican-American population’s ongoing struggles for equality and justice in their community. And not for monetary reward, fame or political gain — but for the future of La Raza.

Idar married Bartolo Juarez in 1917 and moved to San Antonio. Though childless, she helped raise the children of her sister Elvira, who passed away during childbirth.

Idar established the Democratic Club in San Antonio and became a precinct judge for the party. She also created a free kindergarten and served as an interpreter for Spanishspeaking patients at a local hospital. Idar struggled with tuberculosis for many years and succumbed to a pulmonary hemorrhage at the age of 60 on June 15, 1946.

Jovita Idar championed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) a century before it was a thing, well before it was cool, and way before Anglo conservatives made a political football out of it. And they were no match for her almost unparallelled Third Estate bum rush. She was more Texan and American than the entire lot then — and now. And her quarter grants no quarter. l

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K R I S T I A N

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How does a TV show end? We’ve seen the “main character dies” ending, we’ve seen the “all the characters die” ending, we’ve seen the ending where everyone finds new beginnings, and we’ve seen the ending where life just goes on.

Then there’s The Curse, which Christopher Nolan has said is unlike anything he’d ever seen. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, too. After spending nine and a half of its 10 episodes behaving like a show whose reality is somewhat like ours, it wakes up one morning and turns that upside-down. It is officially the craziest ending to a TV show I’ve ever seen.

The couple at the heart of the show is Asher and Whitney Siegel (Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone), a recently married couple who have chosen the run-down, suggestively named town of Española, New Mexico, for their experiment in “passive housing,” building the first of what they hope will be a community of carbon-neutral sustainable homes that will be affordable to everyone.

The third wheel in their marriage is Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie), Asher’s longtime friend and a New York filmmaker who follows them around the desert with a film crew hoping to make a reality TV series about them. The show is named Flipanthropy, which is terrible and perfect.

Internet users accuse Emma Stone of stealing the design of Doug Aitken’s mirrored houses in The Curse.

The first episode centers on a scene that’s truly worthy of the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music, as Dougie tells Asher to film a bit for the show with him giving money to an African girl (Hikmah Warsame) who’s selling soda in the Family Dollar parking lot. With a $100 bill as the only cash in his wallet, Asher gives the money to the girl and then takes it back once he thinks Dougie’s cameras have stopped rolling. Ignoring Asher’s explanation that he’s going to find a smaller bill to give her, the unamused girl places a curse on him and leaves.

This seems unnecessary, because the Siegels have no trouble making their own bad luck. Their houses come with no heating or air conditioning, instead using a self-regulating climate control mechanism that takes at least five hours to work every time someone opens a door or a window, something Asher explains to a prospective buyer who’s sweating through his shirt.

Whitney, in her determination to be different from her slumlord parents (Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman), spends so much money that the company is leveraged to the eyes and can’t survive unless Flipanthropy is a hit. Her desire to present a perfect façade to the cameras runs up against Dougie’s desire for the dramatic conflict that

makes entertaining television, so he plays the husband and wife against each other and exposes the cracks in their marriage.

This is a potent mix of personalities.

Fielder is a master of cringe comedy as the star and creator of The Rehearsal, and his brand of humor pairs well with Safdie (his co-creator here) and his ability to portray lives an inch away from spiraling out of control. They’re both good at playing two different kinds of guys who think they’re so smooth. Dougie is a real bastard who bullies Asher and edits his TV show to make his childhood friend look like a buffoon, and when Asher finally claps back and points out that Dougie killed his wife in a drunk-driving accident, Dougie lays his own curse on Asher. (That could explain what happens later.)

He’s not even the worst character here, because self-absorbed, hypocritical, virtue-signaling Whitney takes that title.

Sometimes when big-time Hollywood movie stars play in TV shows like this, you can feel them keeping one eye on their smartphones for their agents offering them the next blockbuster movie role. However, anything less than full commitment isn’t Stone’s style, and she hurls herself into the role of a woman whose colorful blouses

The Curse Starring Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, and Benny Safdie. Created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. Rated TV-MA.

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The housing comedy TV show The Curse achieves escape velocity with its bonkers ending.

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and flirty manners disguise deep reserves of anger. The show does not miss the way the Siegels appropriate Latin and Native American culture for their purposes, and it is painful to see Whitney at an art opening rattling on about Native American art to a tribal governor (Gary Farmer).

More than painful is the scene that seems to be the series’ climax, when Whitney forces Dougie to show Asher the footage of her interviews where she says she doesn’t like her husband very much and he’s holding her back. Asher is predictably furious, but what he does with his anger is much less predictable, and both we and Whitney are horrified to learn that he is more devoted to her than ever. It takes a phenomenal performance to upstage Stone, and Fielder makes Asher’s self-abasement into something awe-inspiring.

I have a question, though: How does Whitney become pregnant? Twice, at that.

Based on our one glimpse of her and Asher having sex, there’s just no way. (By the way, her first pregnancy is an ectopic one that she needs to terminate, and under our current laws, she is very lucky to live in New Mexico rather than Texas.) Like many other shows, The Curse ends with the woman giving birth, but the circumstances around her labor and Stone’s enactment of Whitney’s birthing agonies make it uniquely harrowing.

What about that ending? I’ve read at least a dozen theories put forth by fans and TV critics about what it means, and none of them have convinced me entirely. Part of me feels unsatisfied with how things end up, but Fielder and Safdie’s gambit is an inspired stroke that literalizes the idea of the Siegels’ marriage holding them back in the most insane way. Even if it doesn’t entirely work, it finds some dark truths in the New Mexico sunshine, lingering at the heart of smiley-faced home improvement TV shows.

The way it comes to those is nothing less than genius. l

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Cour tesy Imagine Exhibitions Cour tesy Hao Dao Linon Dance Association

Dinosaurs Around the World await at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden thru Sun, Mar 17.

The Hoa Dao Lion Dancers will perform at the Galleria Sat, Feb 10.

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That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s Groundhog Day! Those Friday looking to enjoy “the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather” should head to Grandscape (5752 Grandscape Blvd, The Colony, 972668-2222) for its annual Groundhog Day

Get in the car and head to The Colony for the Groundhog Day Celebration Friday.

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There is a lot — and I mean a lot — of stuff going on in early February. We go Tuesday to press on Tuesday, which is a big enough task in and of itself, but today’s deadline is the last chance to tell people about ideas for Valentine’s Day, Fat Tuesday, and where to watch the big game that Taylor’s boyfriend is playing in on Sun, Feb 11. There’s also National Margarita Day coming up. Geez! Business owners, we need your ideas pronto, and don’t think we won’t let you buy an ad (#keepingthelightson). Please email Marketing@FWWeekly. com ASAP.

By Jennifer Bovee

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If you missed out on skating at the Stockyards Rodeo Rink over the holidays, take Sunday a Sunday drive to Dallas.

Now thru Tue, Feb 20, Galleria Dallas (13350 Dallas Pkwy, Dallas, 972-702-7100) has its ice rink decked out for the Lunar New Year. An art installation of 250 lanterns hangs over the Galleria rink in celebration of 2024, the Year of the Dragon. If you can make it there at 2pm Sat, Feb 10, you will also be treated to a dragon dance and drum performance on Level 1 (near Sephora) by the Hoa Dao Lion Dance Association, a Fort Worth-based Buddhist youth arts organization.

5 Monday

Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! Just kidding. I rather enjoy writing this little ol’ column. Those

What’s happening at your place in February?

Email your event links to Marketing@ FWWeekly.com.

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I’m not sure what rocky cove I’ve been hiding in, but for the last 10 years, there’s Saturday been an annual pirate festival in North Texas. At 6pm, the newly remodeled Uptown Theater (120 E Main St, Grand Prairie, 972-237-8786) hosts Pirates on the Prairie XI featuring The Bilge Pumps, who do comedy and sing Celtic music, nautical songs, and sea shanties. This kid-friendly event promises “swashbuckling fun for the whole family” with caricature artists and face painters in the lobby before the show and during intermissions. While there’s no mention of costumes, let’s assume they’re encouraged along with talking like a pirate. Tickets are $20 for adults and $20 for children (ages 5-12) at PiratesonthePrairie.

TheBilgePumps.com. #ahoymatey

Cour tesy iMdb.com

Thursday

Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (15931652) was one of the first female artists to stand up for

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women’s rights and pave the way for future feminists like playwright Laura Gunderson.

Running every Thu-Sat thru Sat, Feb 24, at Circle Theatre (230 W 4th St, Fort Worth, 817-877-3040), Gunderson’s Artemisia tells the tale of this 17th-century pioneer and is a “work of humor and warmth which celebrates the courage, artistry, and humanity of a woman who attacked the glass ceiling with every brushstroke.” For times and tickets starting at $37, visit CircleTheatre.com.

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Created in collaboration with Dr. Gregory Erickson Wednesday — one of only 150 fulltime professional dinosaur paleontologists in the world — Dinosaurs Around the World features animatronic dinosaurs representing every continent.

This outdoor exhibit will be on the grounds of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden (1700 University Dr, 817-332-4441) 8am-4pm daily thru Thu, May 30. This narrated experience is free with general admission (12 for adults, $10 for seniors 65+, $6 for children ages 6-15) and free for younger kids (ages 5 and under) at FWBG/org/events/dinosaurs/.

Cour tesy Canva

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are just the lyrics to a number from My Fair Lady (1964), and in honor of its 60th anniversary, Audrey Hepburn’s willful, self-aware, and ultimately self-reliant Eliza Doolittle along with Rex Harrison’s phonetics teacher, Professor Henry Higgins, are headed back to the big screen for a limited run Sun-Mon. For locations, times, and tickets in our area, visit FathomEvents.com.

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NIGHT&DAY

Celebration. From 6pm to 9pm, enjoy a “dirt pie” craft project, see Punxsutawney Phil — or Gary the Groundhog, in this case — and watch the 1993 movie of the same name. You can also stream Groundhog Day on AMC Plus, Apple TV, or the Roku Premium Channel.

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Cour tesy Blue Mesa

2.) This year, the Cajun Market at Bourbon Street Bar & Grill (1833 Airport Fwy, Bedford, 817-527-5640) is putting a bit of lagniappe (a little something extra) in its Valentine’s Day Celebration 11am-10pm Wed, Feb 14. For $79.99 per couple, choose

3.) Delta Charlie’s, a restaurant, bar, and grill at the Grand Prairie Municipal Airport (3116 S Great Southwest Pkwy, Grand Prairie, 972-655-6665), invites you to “take your love sky high” this Valentine’s Day. From Fri, Feb 9, thru Sun, Feb 18, there are dinner-and-a-flight packages for two starting at $300. The meal begins with a Caesar salad followed by your choice of entrees, including artichoke pasta with chicken, tilapia with wild rice and mixed vegetables, New York strip steak with garlic mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables, or vegetarian pasta with mushrooms, zucchini, and yellow squash in a marinara sauce. For dessert, it’s New York-style cheesecake.

Wine and specialty cocktails are available for additional purchase. After dinner, your private flight across North Texas takes off.

For reservations, visit DeltaCharlies.com.

8.) Toro Toro at the Worthington Renaissance Hotel (200 Main St, Ste B, Fort Worth, 817-870-1000) is presenting a limited-time, three-course, prix fixe Valentine’s Day Dinner 5pm-10pm Wed, Feb 14, and Fri-Sat, Feb 15-17. Start with your choice of oysters or tuna bonito. Choose between the filet/lobster duo or roasted chicken for the main course. Dessert offerings are an amaretto-strawberry brioche or a chocolate fondant.

For more information and reservations, go to ToroToroFortWorth.com/Valentines-Day. fwweekly.com

1.) Blue Mesa (612 Carroll St, Fort Worth, 817-332-6372) will offer a special Valentine’s Day Dinner 5pm-9pm Wed, Feb 14. The meal for two includes mini crab and shrimp cakes with ancho crema; combo fajitas (fresh local chicken breast and USDA Choice skirt steak) with smoky black beans, coconut lime rice, guacamole, pico, and jalapeno relish; Mexican chopped salad; a dessert of warm churros with chocolate, cajeta, and sangria dipping sauces; and a bottle of bubbly.

Dinner for two is $75. Call for reservations.

6.) Feb 13 is Galentine’s Day, an unofficial holiday made famous by Parks and Recreation. It is a day for “ladies celebrating ladies,” and the Taste Project invites you to spend it with them during breakfast or lunch at Taste Community Restaurant (1200 S Main St, Fort Worth, 817-759-9045).

Everyone is welcome regardless of means.

You either A.) pay what you can afford, B.) pay what you would typically pay, or C.) pay what you would typically, plus a little extra. Time slots are available 9am-1:30pm at TasteProject.org.

7.) Sobremesa is a Spanish tradition that involves time spent in conversation, enjoying friends and family at the table during and after a meal. Executive Chef Christian Lehrmann invites you to do just that at Sobremesa: Valentine’s Dinner Gathering at Tinies Mexican Cuisine (113 S Main St, Fort Worth, 682-255-5425) at 7:30pm Wed, Feb 14. Enjoy a five-course meal while seated communally with fellow foodies. Tickets are $120 per person on Eventbrite.com.

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Besides restaurants and bars, you can also take your valentines — or galentines — to an airport or a haunted house for a special dinner in the coming weeks. After you digest these eight fabulous ideas below, come back for more in next week’s Night & Day column.

appetizers of either jalapeno shrimp and grits or Cajun chicken bruschetta, followed by gumbo, then a main course of stuffed pork loin or lemon-dill redfish. For dessert, enjoy a praline ice cream sandwich with a caramel rum sauce. Guests will receive a free tableside photo, and if you make your reservation in advance, you’ll get a complimentary glass of Champagne. Call the restaurant to reserve your table.

If your honey likes horror, hit Hangman’s annual Valentine’s event.

Fajitas are great to share, especially at Blue Mesa Fort Worth.

Jello-O shots never looked as fancy as these at the new Rayleigh.

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Where to Wine and Dine Your Valentine This Year

5.) Las Colinas has a new Vegas-style venue you can check out with your special someone on the big day. The Rayleigh Underground (316 Las Colinas Blvd West, Irving, 469-9606878) invites you to enjoy its signature Jell-O shots served on a gold platter, a Champagne toast, and a multi-course dinner featuring your choice of airline chicken, bang-bang shrimp, scallop risotto, or smoked chile salmon. Being Las Vegas-themed and all, the music is straight from the Rat Pack days, with Justin & His 6-Piece Swing Band performing classics from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Bobby Darin. Tickets are $150 per couple at RayleighUnderground.com/ Valentines-Day.

Cour tesy Hangman’s House of Horror

Canva.com

4.) Is Halloween more your speed than Valentine’s Day? If horror is your thing, but you’re still up for celebrating love, then Hangman’s House of Horrors (4400 Blue Mound Rd, Fort Worth, @ HangmansHouseofHorrors) may be for you.

Its annual 50 Shades of Fear event will take place over the next two weekends. On FriSat, Feb 9-17, choose from just the haunted house for $39 per person, the #LoveIsBlind (blindfolded) fast pass experience for $49 per person, or the Haunted Dinner Date with all of the above plus a catered Italian dinner for $199 per couple at Hangmans.com.

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E L A I N E

W I L D E R

Beloved local Chef Keith “Buttons” Hicks is suffering from end-stage Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and needs help. He is in palliative care and requires a double-lung transplant — plus a lot of support from the community he loves so much.

Transplant patients need money — lots of it. The original owners and management

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continued on page 19

When Hicks’ Buttons restaurant was open, it hosted many fundraisers, and now it’s time to return the favor.

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Beloved Chef Keith Hicks needs help, so Fort Worth is doing what it always does: putting on a benefit show.

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Peace, Love & Gritz

Cour tesy Elevated Content Co.

EATS & drinks

team of his namesake Buttons Restaurant, with locations in Fort Worth, Addison, and DeSoto, along with co-workers from all the restaurants he’s made a mark on throughout his career, have united to help.

At 6pm Wed, Jan 31, Ridglea Theater (6025 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, 817738-9500) will host the Button’s Family Affair Benefit Concert, and everyone is invited. This event will be staffed by Hicks’ friends and former Buttons owners, managers, chefs, bartenders, servers, and hosts.

“I know personally what it takes to prepare for an organ transplant because of my Pops,” said Carolyn Hughes, Hicks’ sister who is spearheading the event.

When Buttons was open, it hosted many fundraisers, she said, and now it’s time to return the favor.

“Every single one was done out of pure love and compassion toward our community family,” Hughes said. “Right now, I’m coming to you and asking you to please help me raise a whole lot of money to help support Keith. This is a journey that he should not have to bear alone. It’s also a journey that he should be able to afford, and with your support, he will.”

If you’ve eaten out in the area over the years, you’ve undoubtedly sampled Hicks’ upscale Southern cuisine — he was doing chicken and waffles before anyone else — and you’ve probably seen him around: big Black guy with the white beard, big smile, and joyful spirit. And if you’ve run into him, you’ve probably heard his catchphrase: “peace, love, and gritz, katz!”

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Cour tesy Natural Changes Band

Cour tesy Go Fund Me

The artists slated to perform at the benefit regularly played Buttons, including John Adam, Paul Cannon, Bobby Counts, Velvet & Jerry Clark, Kenya Crawford, Lori Dawn, Melanie Dutton, Rob Holbert Band, Ahmad Johnson, Kurt & Ceici Jones, Sam Jones, Killa Bug, Jackie Don Loe, Monty McKlinton, Quinton Moore, Linny Nance, Fredrick Nicholson Band, Natural Change, Taylor Pace, Bergette Rideau, Stephanie Sallie, Honorary Howard Scott, Second Nature, Roxie & Ashleigh Smith, Tone

continued from page 17

Chef Hicks has been a longtime culinary fixture in North Texas, having worked in kitchens at Mercury Chophouse, the Worthington Hotel, and the Italian Villa, in addition to his own place. After Buttons closed, he found a new home at The Rim Restaurant Waterside (5912 Convair Dr, Fort Worth, 817-663-2950).

Sommers, and Lewis Stephens.

There will be complimentary appetizers and food for purchase featuring Hicks’ favorites made by Billy Kidd of Taco Casa and Ty Frazier of Our Doors to Yours, both former Buttons chefs. Selections from Hicks’ current home kitchen at The Rim and from Fat Face Full and Ms. Angi’s Louisiana Kitchen will also be available for sale.

Tickets start at $25 per person on Eventbrite.com. In addition to the GA tickets, you can purchase a table for four for

$400, VIP high-top tables for two for $200, or VIP seats for $65 each. MJ Apparel will sell T-shirts on-site, with proceeds benefiting Hicks.

You can also donate by going to GoFundMe.com/f/keith-button-hicks.

Hicks is a wonderful fella, and even if you don’t know him, just know that he loves this town and this food scene and would welcome any donation of any size you’re able to comfortably afford. We wish him all the best. l

fwweekly.com

Eats & Drinks

Natural Changes Band will join a fabulous lineup of local talent playing the Button’s Family Affair Wed, Jan 31.

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Will chicken and waffles be among the Buttons favorites served at the Ridglea Wed, Jan 31? We hope so!

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

Cour tesy Buttons

For those who cannot attend the event, donations can be made via GoFundMe. com/f/keith-button-hicks.

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MUSIC One-Eyed Monsters lurch through the primordial haze to offer pure Ambrosia.

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S T E V E

S T E W A R D

I don’t want to be like, “You guys! There’s a new stoner rock revival going on in Fort Worth!” because that implies that the one that materialized in the mid-to-late 2000s like a skunky cloud from beneath some high school football bleachers was huge enough to leave a noticeable hole when it receded.

There were indeed a lot of those kinds of bands back then that don’t exist now, but I’m sure that if you ask anyone who goes to shows at Growl Records, there is no shortage of active, heavy bands at the moment, including — especially — One-Eyed Monsters.

The trio just self-released its debut album onto streaming services. While all six songs can stand alone as documents of brain-melting guitar power, when listened in its entirety, the 35-minute-long Ambrosia turns into a spacey journey across the cosmos of your imagination. It’s like activating a time-travel spell carved into a megalith.

Or, if you’re not permastoned, this is a band wielding a lot of interesting melodic ideas in the service of a guitar rock epic.

With Samuel Stevens on guitar, Nathan Walters on guitar and vocals (and drums in the studio), and Tyler Lee Ryan on bass, One-Eyed Monsters came together in this iteration around 2021, after a few years of Stevens and Walters jamming with bassist Mike Lima and drummer Ian Brothers, who still backs the band onstage. Stevens and Walters knew each other in high school — Walters is a few years older and taught Stevens some jazz guitar — and that turned into the two figuring out how to write songs and record them.

At the time, Walters fronted a pop-rock band called Big Red Ants, who made an album at Crystal Clear Sound in Dallas with Kent Stump and Nolan Thies, which inspired Walters to become an audio engineer himself. When the Ants fizzled out, he and Stevens started jamming and tracking their ideas. The two played some shows in 2018 and 2019 and later recorded a couple tracks that would end up on Ambrosia: “Bongilogy” and “Forever Midnight.” After that, OneEyed Monsters was headed into a state of

Anne-Marie Sokol

Bongilogy

(From left to right) Tyler Lee Ryan, Nathan Walters, and Samuel Stevens have come to melt your face.

aimlessness. That changed when Stevens started working on amps for Ryan.

Ryan, who’d gone to Texas A&M to study electrical engineering, had learned the basics of amp repair through building his own as a hobby and working for local electronics wizard Michael Earhart of famed Arlington shop Earhart Electronics.

A colleague of Earhart’s known colloquially as Frank the Tank had an amp repair shop inside EMP Studios, a rehearsal space just north of East Lancaster Avenue.

“We got word that he died,” Ryan said, “so we went to the funeral, and the guy who owns this building was like, ‘I need to get a guitar and amp tech like you to run the shop down here,’ and I thought about it, and I decided I was ready to start my own business, so I bought Michael Earhart’s old inventory — he had it all in storage because he had retired. I had worked with him for a year and a half, so I knew how to run a shop, and I knew how his inventory worked and just hit the ground running. And then seven years later, here we are.”

Ryan’s company, Dragon Amplifiers, is a combo repair service/custom shop.

Because of the ebb and flow/drought and flood intrinsic to that kind of business, he needed to hire a contract worker to help him with his backlog. Enter: Stevens.

“I have a vintage Fender amp that had some problems at the time,” Stevens said, “and [Ryan] was working on it. [Ryan] was really backed up at the time with repair jobs, and when I went to pick up my amp, I showed him some of my music. He was really into it, and then he said, ‘Do you want a job?’ So I said yeah, and he trained me, and now I do contract jobs for him.”

Ryan showed Stevens how to fix guitar amps but was still thinking about One-Eyed Monsters.

“It was about a year after [Stevens] started working for me,” Ryan said, “and I was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the band?’ ” Ryan was really impressed with the riffage Stevens had shown him. “I thought

whatever these guys have going on right now, it’s serious chemistry. It’s Sabbath and Pink Floyd coming together. The jazzy, heavy rock thing … that’s what I’ve always been looking for.”

One-Eyed Monsters, Walters said at Dragon recently with his bandmates, was Stevens’ “brainchild, and then this permutation turned into a different band. It felt like it had a new aim.”

“It became a heavier band,” Ryan added, “like, more serious and intimidating when I joined.”

Ryan had been in a doom-metal outfit called Southern Waste in the 2010s, for which he wrote a song that found its own evolution in the hands of his new bandmates.

Overall, One-Eyed Monsters said Ambrosia’s songs came together really quickly. Stevens described their sound as “garage-psych … that got heavier, slower” with the addition of Ryan.

Their gear, Ryan said, is a big component of their sonic aesthetic, adding that Stevens “plays through stuff that he’s built. I play through stuff that I’ve built. … We have a specific sound because of those amps.”

Working at Echolab in Denton, Walters tracked, mixed, and mastered the album, and the band transferred the tracks to cassette tapes themselves — “they’re cooler than CDs and cheaper than vinyl,” Walters quipped — using a Tascam Portasound.

Beyond getting their album out, One-Eyed Monsters wants to tour.

“We want to get on the road,” Walters said. “Right now, we’re just trying to find bands to network with to play shows out of town.”

But their shows at home — notably at places like Martin House Brewing Co. in Fort Worth and Growl Records in Arlington — are helping spread the word.

“If you’re a heavy band, you can play at Growl,” Stevens said. “We’ve played some packed shows there. People were really into the music. … If you can get the word out there’s a metal show, a heavy rock show, people will come to it.” l

community, and that happens in generational waves, and a lot of the people I hear that [dying-scene narrative] from are kind of too old to be in a music scene in that way, too. The people telling me [the music scene is dying] are often people who wouldn’t go to these places anyway, who don’t even have bands anymore — old music-scene people that still have ownership in some way but aren’t actively participating in it like they used to.”

Yet Kendall’s shows at the Post (and before that, at the long-gone Live Oak when Afallon owned that business) are kind of for old music-scene people.

“I make my living presenting live music to people in my age group,” he said with a chuckle. “Whatever the next generation is, maybe they are into stuff that isn’t even for me. I know young promoters who are doing stuff for young people, and that’s not a scene I’m part of. Honestly, I’d believe it if someone said [the new band scene] is not as good as it was way back then, and I’d believe it if someone told me the scene was better than ever.”

As an example, he mentioned Daniel Alvarez, a Post employee who books metal, noise, and punk shows under his promotion company NoiseROT. Alvarez, Kendall said, “puts on shows at the Post, Haltom Theater … a lot of these found spaces that some guy will let him rent out and fill with kids. DIY shows, basically. And they do well. From observing what [Alvarez] does, there is definitely a young rock music scene in Fort Worth.”

And also, in my own experience, if you start with a local heavy band search on Instagram — OZONE or Frozen Soul, for example — you’ll likely fall into a scroll-hole full of pictures of crowded shows at local spots you might not even recognize. Most of those bands never played Lola’s or Twilite in the first place, yet here they are, still scorching the ears of tons of young people.

The Post remains open for another month, with a show nearly every night in February. Afallon, for its part, is considering all available options for its venue, and Kendall isn’t really worried that Fort Worth will lose the soundtrack to its cultural identity just because some of its venues are no longer around.

“I don’t really feel the pessimistic outlook I’ve been hearing from a lot of people,” he said. “I think a lot of us old timers need to adjust our attitude and yield to a younger generation. It’s not about teaching them about how we did it 20 years ago. They can figure out their own way of building a music community, just like we [old people] did way back when.” — Steve Steward

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Kendall: “I don’t really feel the pessimistic outlook I’ve been hearing from a lot of people.”

RIDGLE A THE ATER

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In a recent Fort Worth Report story entitled “Live music isn’t dying, music venue owners say,” Texas Music Office director Brendan Anthony said that “three closures announced within one week is likely a coincidence rather than an omen for venues in Fort Worth.”

Fort Worth booking agent Brooks Kendall added, “These are businesses that come and go a lot anyways. It just, I think, came across to people who are invested in the local scene as particularly alarming that three [closed] in one week.”

As head of Afallon Productions, Kendall booked shows mainly at The Post at River East, the venerable Race Street concert hall and restaurant known for presenting a lot of Americana, country, and other singer-songwriter-oriented bills to packed houses of people excited to sit down at a table, eat a really good sandwich, and catch performances by nationally known artists like Rhett Miller, Dale Watson, Jason Boland, and BettySoo, as well as locals like Jacob Furr, Cameron Smith, and Jackie Darlene. To look at the Post’s upcoming calendar, the Report’s headline seemed to poke major holes in the “death of Fort Worth music” narrative.

Five days later, Kendall posted the following on The Post’s social media accounts: “The Post will be closing permanently on February 29. We have reached the end of our lease and have decided not to renew.

We are actively looking for a new location to reopen in. It has been a wonderful five years on Race Street, and we are so happy to have been able to do it. We thank everyone who has been a part of this experience.”

How can a music scene be just fine when yet another venue has shut down? I recently asked Kendall if his opinions in the Report piece had changed. He said that he stands by what he said, pointing out that had the pandemic never happened, “we’d be having different conversations about those venues, because most if not all of them would still be open. …. Each of those places have their own reasons for closing. … I don’t think that it’s fair to say that if someone makes that decision [to close their venue], that it’s specific to Fort Worth or its interest in live music. I don’t know what other owners’ calculus is … but we’ve all faced different challenges coming out of the pandemic. We all had a massive financial hole to climb out. But as for the health of the scene? There’s nothing in my personal experience [of late] to suggest that it’s because people don’t have interest in live music anymore.”

We both agreed that the perception of a dying scene often comes from the perspective of people our age — we’re both in our mid 40s — who were heavily engaged in the local scene nine, 15, maybe even 20 years ago (I in Fort Worth, he in Denton).

“I think that the local music scene is cliquey,” he said, “and a lot of the time, what makes it work is when there is a tightknit

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

Local Scene Dying?

Not so Fast

Cour tesy The Post at River East

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