Is there anything this woman can't do? When she's not producing, directing or designing some wild and woolly experimental thing for Kitchen Dog Theater, her home company down at McKinney Avenue Contemporary, this Texas native and SMU theater grad can take center stage and act up a storm. As "Sister Woman" in WaterTower Theatre's spring production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she waddled around looking 14 months' pregnant (thanks to heavy padding) and drenched her pit-viper dialogue with Southern Comfort, outright heisting the show from Maggie the Cat. In the summer's Henry IV at Shakespeare in the Park, Parker bounded onstage in punk gear as Poins, a role traditionally cast as a man. Parker possesses that elusive element of stardom, the "It Factor." Her eyes sparkle, her smile beckons. Her technique is awesome, too. Great voice, unbridled energy. She may never play the ingenue, but who cares? She's a talent of consequence, best compared to fellow SMU alum Kathy Bates. Parker's also just a real nice down-home gal. Witness her funny preshow speeches to the audiences at Kitchen Dog, where she greets the crowd with a hearty "Howdeeeee!" and then warns theatergoers to switch off their cell phones and pagers...and deactivate any house-arrest prison ankle bracelets.
You might as well give up on radio, because we can assure you, radio has given up on you. At least the people who run it have. It's all about making the numbers instead of making the listeners happy. Not so at The Bone, where they give the people what they want. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much the same thing Q102 and The Zoo gave them 15, 20 years ago. Sure, there are some "new" tunes (Nirvana, Soundgarden, U2, Pearl Jam and such), but those are just side dishes. The meat on The Bone comes courtesy of Jimi and Journey, Led Zep and ZZ Top, Van Halen (both Dave and Sammy incarnations)--just about anything you'd find on a bumper sticker on the back of a sweet-ass Camaro. And the strategy has paid off, both for the station and the long-neglected Dallas rock-radio fan.
She whines. She carps. She's half-wrong. Sometimes she's almost impossible to read. But at least she gives a small hoot about what's going on downtown, and with a little publicity blast this year, she's even being noticed for it. Boyd, whose hit-counter reads more than 52,000 lately, is not the force she aspires to be in Dallas. She's just not electable, and she's too doctrinaire to make enough friends to attain any sort of power, but she is almost a perfect match for the Internet, that great democratizer and spreader of faint voices and long-shot causes.
Every year, we make the three-hour trip to the, ahem, Live Music Capital of the World for SXSW, and what we find is a city that pales in comparison to our own (entertainment-wise, at any rate), a place that's been coasting on its rep since before Willie Nelson got in trouble with the IRS. We know moving the yearly music fest north means someone will lose money for a few years. And you know what? We don't care. It's not our money. We just wanna sleep in our own beds after drinking from noon to 2 a.m. Is that too much to ask?
Whether it's vengeance on his former colleagues at WFAA Channel 8 or just being free of them, Channel 11 News anchor Tracy Rowlett has helped give his fellow teammates an edge the other locals sorely lack. Covering the school district, the cops, the controversy over sexually oriented businesses, the folks at KTVT clearly don't have to worry about all the sacred cows and family-unfriendly troubles that keep News 8 in a constant state of flinch. They've come up with a heads-up, straight-on format that's worth watching.
Without a doubt, the Kimbell Art Museum's show tracking Piet Mondrian's long, slow evolution into a 20th-century icon. A gloriously middlebrow effort, the show--organized by the Musée d'Orsay and on display through December 8--sets out to "analyze...the disparate influences upon [Mondrian]--aesthetic, historical, intellectual and spiritual." In other words, museumgoers are treated to that guiltiest of pleasures, a narrative of historical progression, a tale of artistic development in all its outré, Hegelian glory. By consigning formalist analysis to the trash heap of jargon whence it belongs, the organizers manage to telescope much of the story of modernism into the tale of Mondrian. Best of all, they also produced a readable, 100 percent jargon-free catalog.