Tag Archives: Dallas

Turkey Trot

Posted on by Bill Chance

Everyone has their Thanksgiving traditions, most of them involve massive amounts of food and televised football. Ours involves eight miles of running. Lee was running the Turkey Trot in Downtown Dallas this year.

I would love to do the run, even the short 5K jog – but my job is to get everybody to City Hall on time and to carry all the extra crap.

A six AM alarm on a holiday is an early alarm. I was more than a little stressed about driving down there (we’ve taken the DART train before and that doesn’t work too well – the trains are all packed full) and finding a place to park. It didn’t help when I walked out to start the car and realized the entire city was socked in tight with a pea-soup thick fog.

Not to worry, after thirty-odd years I’ve learned my way around downtown (the key is to use Good-Latimer Expressway and sneak in from the east) and found a ten dollar parking spot on Wood street across from the Presbyterian Church. We had to step over the sleeping homeless folks in the fog, but the walk wasn’t too far.

As we walked past the closer-in lots I noticed a lot of people putting on turkey costumes. I had not read the notice – the race organizers had a representative from the Guinness Book of Records for the most people dressed as turkeys in one place. They did set the record – 616. There sure seemed to be a lot more turkeys than that wandering around.

Everybody said it seemed a little less crowded this year. I think the thick fog had something to do with that. They announced thirty eight thousand runners (including 616 dressed as turkeys) with another 15 thousand spectators (the folks that had to drive and carry all the crap).

City Hall Plaza is packed with runners until the race starts. Then, suddenly, it is almost empty – a very strange conversion. That doesn’t last long – there is an eight mile race (which Lee runs) and a 5K run/walk. The first 5K runners show up in less than twenty minutes, and it takes longer than that to get everybody going at the start. In other words, the fastest runners are finishing before the slower ones start.

Lee has not had enough time to train properly, but he finished about five minutes before he had estimated – a pretty good time if you ask me. He said the whole course was foggy and there is one leg that goes across the Trinity River on a causeway. He said that the ends of the bridge were lost in the fog but he was crossing as the fastest runners were coming back. All there was were runners going in both directions coming in from and disappearing into the dense fog.

We walked back to the car and slipped out, missing the bad traffic.

What about all the food? We stopped at the Boston Market on Forest Lane on the way home where Candy had pre-ordered everything. A ten minute wait in line and we had Turkey and all the fixins. Ready for all the football games.

The fog was thick at the start of the race on Dallas City Hall Plaza

To set the world record, all the turkeys had to be "cooped up" for ten minutes.

There was live music at the start.

A turkey dancing to the band

A Henry Moore sculpture and an Inflatable Turkey.

Lee dancing before the run

The runners lined up at the start. This picture was taken about a half mile from the actual start.

The starting line. Thirty eight thousand is a lot of runners.

And the turkeys are off. I don't know how anyone could run in those costumes.

Near the end of the eight mile race, there is a steep hill to torture the runners. I always wait there to see my kids run by. Here is Lee a hundred yards from the finish.

Oak Cliff Bicycles

Posted on by Bill Chance

I found a nice little cafe in the Bishop Arts District. It’s a latin inspired coffeehouse called Espumoso Caffe. Inside, it’s a dark, relaxed place with an inviting couch and window seating – I’ll have to try that place as a writing location sometime. Today, though, I bought my coffee and settled in to a little table on the sidewalk to sip and do some people watching. They were playing some awesome latin jazz on a speaker over the door.

I sat there looking at the posters on the clothing store next door. Let’s see, what do we have going on in the big evil city… Salsa Lessons, Music at the Granada, Blood and Black Lace at the Texas Theater, and Roller Derby…. I’d like to see me some Roller Derby.

A couple doors down is the Oak Cliff Bicycle Company. It’s a little bike shop with an attitude. How can you not love a place that wins the Best Vigilante Justice award from the Dallas Observer.

Out in front was the usual display of bikes for sale. One, in particular, really caught my eye. Not an ultralight racing machine, this was an urban bomber sort of bike – a beautifully utilitarian ride. It had chrome mudguards, nice canister shaped pack containers in back, a useful double kickstand, and best of all, a luscious, gorgeous, classic Brooks leather saddle. There is nothing better than a Brooks saddle.

As I watched a couple guys came out of the shop, pumped up the tires, and went off for a ride. I tipped my coffee cup a little bit – some folks get it exactly right.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!
For your holiday enjoyment – The Best Television Thanksgiving Episode Ever

If you want to see the whole episode – It’s online at Hulu.

Oddfellows Chicken and Waffles

Posted on by Bill Chance

On the extremely rare occasions that I watch certain films or especially certain television programs featuring fashionably cool people (Sex and The City come to mind immediately) I am always gobsmacked by the amount of time these people spend leisurely sitting around cute round tables at outdoor sidewalk cafes, sipping mimosas and chatting away. It appears these people are able to enjoy several hours every afternoon with their dearest chums completely relaxed and rested, exercising their witty bones: a little tète-à-tète, a little repartee, topped off with a dollop of vicious gossip and a viscous ice cream sundae.

Do real people actually live like that? Of course not. Life is not leisure and conversation. Lunch is a short brutal orgy of quick gobbling, if it exists at all. Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so (Douglas Adams). In Texas at least, the weather is only conducive to al fresco dining a handful of days each year.

Still, you do drive by these places and see people sitting outside… sometimes. There they are, take a quick glimpse before you plow into the car in front of you and are late for whatever unpleasant task awaits at the end of the drive. They seem happy enough. Who are these people?

I’ll never know.

At any rate, the other day while we were visiting that pleasant oasis of interestingness in the desert sea of the big evil city, The Bishop Arts District, we realized that the weather, while a tad coolish in the shade and a bit sweltry in the sun, was bearable and we had an opportunity to dine out in the open. After considering a number of opportunities (most establishments had at least a couple tables out on the sidewalk) we had an appetizer tray in a couple of very well-worn comfortable Adirondack Rocking Chairs in front of Eno’s Pizza and Tavern and, as the sun set, headed on down to a place called Oddfellows for dinner.

Oddfellows seems to be gathering a following and I can see why. It is an open plan, with both sidewalk tables and an innovative and attractive set of open bench spots along the windows. It must be a popular hang out in addition to a place to eat as a number of folks had their laptops out and seemed to be settled in for the duration.

The bar dining spot at Oddfellows - a wooden bench, metal pipe for a backrest, and a log for a footrest. Our waitress has my wheat beer and Candy's wine.

The restaurant was attractive and had a good attention to details. While I was waiting in a corridor for the men’s room, I saw they had their larder on display (This may have been a fake shelf meant to impress… it doesn’t really matter) with such things as a dozen boxes of Cafe du Monde Beignet mix, gallon jugs of Frank’s Red Hot Wing Sauce, and large boxes of Bisquick, all comestible ingredients of necessity and quality. When they serve tumblers of water, they leave behind a glass bottle (like an antique quart milk bottle) of the cool stuff.

Candy ordered the Macaroni and Cheese with Buffalo Chicken. It was very, very good (I ate the leftovers later) – the Mac N Cheese was flavored with Blu Cheese which was great and the chicken was really spicy (Now I know where all that Franks’s Wing Sauce goes).

Looking over the menu, I was quickly drawn to the Chicken and Waffles. Who wants to live forever?

Chicken and waffles, a bottle of water and a wheat beer. This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

The waitress said that was her two favorite things. I’ll bet she always says that.

Now, recently, I have traditional Chicken and Waffles at a soul food drive in, and a modern take at a local food truck. Now was the opportunity to try some at a real restaurant.

The chicken was spicy and crispy, the waffles were nice and fluffy. What more do you want?

They come with butter, syrup and white southern gravy. I ate every scrap. My only complaint was that I was too full and stuffed and sleepy on the way home.

I’ll get over it.

The Soda Gallery

Posted on by Bill Chance

There are some really cool places in the Bishop Arts District. One of them is The Soda Gallery. It’s the place where you can hang out… and it gives the phrase “pop art” a new double meaning.

It’s a little art gallery and it’s a soda shop… it’s both.

So you can go inside and make a selection from their extensive collection of soft drinks – 30 kinds of root beer, Dublin Doctor Pepper, Nesbitt’s, Ramune (the Japanese stuff with the marble), and so on and so forth. They have a nice little table out on the sidewalk and I watched some groups buying sodas and sitting there drinking them. What a nice idea! I am so down on alcohol right now – it’s cool to find another option for social interaction other than booze or coffee.

And inside they do have art displayed on the walls. They had some really good stuff – screenprints of superheroes or comic book panels and other examples of local pop art.

I wish this place was in my neighborhood – but I’ll go visit when I can.

On the Soda Gallery’s website they have some examples of interesting soft drink ads… here’s some for your enjoyment.

Nesbitt’s Orange, from the 70’s. There is a lot of Robert Crumb psychedelic stuff going on here.

Japanese Fanta Commercial

It’ll Tickle Yer Innards!

The Raven

Posted on by Bill Chance

Ravens Pharmacy

500 West Jefferson Boulevard, Oak Cliff, Dallas, TX

Ravens Pharmacy, Oak Cliff

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted – nevermore!

The Raven (last stanza) – Edgar Allen Poe

3 Men and a Taco!

Posted on by Bill Chance

Again, today, I consulted my twitter feed to see where the various gourmet food trucks were distributed around the city. A truck I had never tried before, 3 Men and a Taco, was set up on Davis Street in Oak Cliff. I have wanted to visit the Bishop Arts District, only a few blocks down from there, so I decided to make the drive clear across town.

Cutting across north of downtown I drove through the tunnel that the Woodall Rodgers Freeway has become. They have decked over the road for the new five acre park that is going in overhead. I was working downtown when the freeway was dug – it seemed like an enormous undertaking at the time – I can’t believe that they are now building a wooded park over the top of it. It will be very cool when it is finished – a nice addition of some nature to the edge of the Arts District.

I cut across to Oak Cliff and drove down to Davis Street. This brought back a lot of memories for me. When I first moved to Dallas in 1981 I lived with some friends that were remodeling a house in Kessler Park for a while. I remember riding the bus on those streets to my new job in the skyscrapers of downtown. For a kid that had been in Kansas for years this was really exciting and every day I would look out of my bus windows with excitement, wonder, and anticipation at the amazing future that was sure to come to pass. Well, I was young and didn’t know any better.

The street the house was on, Edgefield, is as beautiful as ever. It looks unchanged in thirty years, except the trees have grown almost together overhead and they were orange with fall colors – georgeous. The house itself was a bit of a shock. It still looked the same in the front, the classic Kessler Park Tudor Revival brick – but the entire back yard was filled with a massive two story addition – making the humble cottage into a gigantic mansion.

The truck was set up at Davis and Edgefield, in front of Urban Acres. I was a little late, so many of the choices were crossed off their menu board, but I chose a Coconut Mango Chicken (with Thai Pepper Slaw) and Sweet Potato Portobella (roasted and topped with an orange balsamic reduction). They don’t call these food trucks “gourmet” for nuthin’ – these were not your mama’s tacos.

As usual… it was very good.

3 Mean and a Taco - Gourmet Food Truck

The board with today's selections, next to the "Tip Monster"

The key to a Food Truck's success is to communicate with their customers. The Twitter feed and Facebook Pages have to be kept up, minute to minute.

Coconut Mango Chicken

Sweet Potato Portobella (this was really, really good)

Bánh mì at Walgreens

Posted on by Bill Chance

Nammi Food Truck at Walgreens

I had a day off of work and was being lazy when I began to feel a mite peckish. I checked my twitter feed and discovered that the Nammi Food Truck was setting up in a Walgreens parking lot on Beltline in Addison – not too far from my humble home. Some Bánh mì would hit the spot, so off I went.

One of the tough nuts to crack as gourmet food trucks become more and more common is where do they find a place to park. Restaurant owners tend to be powerful political players and always work to restrict their competition – especially mobile cavalry type competition that can swoop in on a moment’s notice and gobble up valuable customers.

Now I realize how difficult it can be to run a restaurant and sympathize with their plight. But I also don’t think that competition is always a bad thing. The more options people have the more they will eat out and the more business will be driven to restaurants in general. I’m in the minority on this, of course.

So the food trucks have to fight restrictive ordinances to find a place to set up. It is rare to find them out in the suburbs, so I was glad to find one at a Walgreens.

Addison is lousy with restaurants and all the parking lots were full with folks out for lunch from work. There were only a couple spaces left in the Walgreens lot. A steady flow of customers, about two or three deep were ordering at the little window at the bright blue truck. Everyone would order, then stand around typing on their smart phones while their sandwiches were put together. I waited my turn, ordered a grilled pork Bánh mì and pulled a cold Diet Dr. Pepper from a mound of ice in the front of the truck.

“Hey, I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to sell you a Dr. Pepper here,” the guy in the truck said. “It’s a deal we have with the location.”

“Oh,” I said, “I guess they want me to come inside the drug store and buy my drink there.”

The guy nodded. I guess that’s fair. They give up a bit of their parking lot in exchange for customers that come inside for drinks and maybe some ibuprofen while they are at it. I almost went inside, but didn’t want the hassle.

I had writing to do, my first strong idea for a story that I had had in weeks, so I carted my sandwich off to the library, and filled my water bottle from the drinking fountain.

It was very good, by the way.

 

Order Here

Posted on by Bill Chance

The order window at the SSahmBBQ food truck. Get you some Kimchee Fries!

Carrie, thanks for the TED talk suggestion.

Getting ready for NanoWriMo

Posted on by Bill Chance
Underwood Typewriter

Underwood Typewriter

November is approaching rapidly and I have the usual annual decision to make. Do I do NanoWriMo?

One thing is nice this year. Usually November is a nasty busy month for me at work, which makes getting the time… and especially the energy, up for the fifty thousand words extremely difficult. This year, October is the tough month and November will be easier – except for the first week. The first week is brutal – so I’ll have a slow start but should be able to catch up. I have to take some vacation time, so maybe I can even go on a bit of a writing trip.

As you may have guessed by now, I am going to give it a go. (my Nanowrimo page) I have tried four times and made it once. The other three I wrote myself into a corner and couldn’t get out. They weren’t total losses – I still had a few tens of thousands of words that I might be able to use someday. Probably not. Crash and burned NanoWriMo paragraphs are hoarder houses of writing – piles of useless mouldering crap that seemed useful once, but really needs to be chucked into the dumpster out on the front yard.

I will say the one year I made it was a bigger thrill than I thought it would be. That year I picked a novel idea that I knew had no dead ends. It was an old man, caught in a life-or-death situation, reminiscing about his life during lulls in his struggle. I knew that if I was stuck I could always come up with another memory.

When my word processor said I had hit the fifty thousand words, I uploaded it and discovered that by the official count, I was still about ninety five words short. It was amazingly difficult to write one more little cluster of paragraphs at eleven fifty on the last night. I almost couldn’t squeeze it out.

So this year, my idea to avoid the dreaded dead end plotting is to develop the ideas ahead of time. I want to have about a hundred scenes listed out so all I have to do is write each one, five hundred words or so each, and then I’m done. No possibility of sliding off into the ditch.

The other day I saw The Tempest at the Wyly theater in downtown Dallas. I had seen it before, but I was still impressed. What I think I will do is update the basic plot lines of this last Shakespeare play to modern times. I’m tentatively making Prospero a deposed drug kingpin named John Prosper. Starting from that point, most the other characters start falling in line.

I’m working on Ariel… that is a key character. Setting too…. Maybe an actual island is doable… maybe in a lake. Do I want a supernatural element? Haven’t decided that yet.

Of course, I won’t follow the Shakespeare plot too faithfully. For example, somebody, probably more, will have to die. I do have my writing station set up nice… one less excuse.

So much writing. So little time. Wish me luck.

My secretary setup

One place where the magic happens

Big Mama’s Chicken and Waffles

Posted on by Bill Chance

It wasn’t very long ago that I had some gourmet Chicken and Waffles from the City Street Grille Food Truck. I ate it and it was good.

But it left me with a powerful hankering. I wanted some real chicken and waffles. I wanted some of Big Mama’s Chicken and Waffles.

I had been driving by the spot – a long abandoned drive through burger joint on a shady corner of the diciest intersection in my section of the city – but I had never actually stopped by. Now it was about time.

Big Mama's Chicken and Waffles

Big Mama's Chicken and Waffles. Does anybody know what this building used to be? It was a drive-through burger joint in the ancient past - but I don't know which one. I'd love to know.

I had to drive past the place and do a U-turn at an apartment complex to get into the drive-through. As I went through the intersection, the smell hit me. The wonderful smell of fryers and soul food. It floated through the neighborhood like a greasy cloud of deliciousness. The miasma of saturated fat was enough to give you coronary artery disease before you ever pulled up to the barred ordering window… but who wants to live forever?

I leaned out my window and looked the menu over.  They don’t have an intercom so I drove to the window to speak directly to a live human being and ordered a “three piece regular, with waffle.”

There are several things that separate a place like Big Mama’s from the vast conspiracy of corporate franchise clone grease-heaving locations.

  •  The prices on the board include tax. It said five-fifty, it cost five-fifty.
  • Your order comes in a plain brown paper sack. This adds a subtle flavor, in addition to the visual appeal of grease soaking through brown paper.
  • Heavy black iron bars welded on the drive-through and walk-up windows.
  • A confused history of decorations. The crumbling tower overhead boasted two old clocks, hands long gone missing. A big banner proclaimed, “Under New Management – Same Great Taste.”
  • Cash only.
  • Friendly, human service by people that give a damn.
  • They even serve Kool-Aid.

I paid my cash and collected my brown paper bag. There were two little metal tables on site, perched over a muddy drop down to a stagnant creek hidden back in a thick stand of trees, but I had some errands to run so off I went, eventually gulping my meal down in another parking lot.

Brown paper bag

You know something is good when it is delivered in a plain brown wrapper.

There is something terribly primitive about eating fried chicken in a car.

The food was great. The chicken spicy, but not too much. The waffle was big, soft, and waffle-y. They drop little tubs of Country Crock and Chef’s Quality Breakfast Syrup into the bag. There’s no way to keep from getting a little sweet syrup on the chicken… and that’s a good thing. If you don’t know any better, you might be a bit confused by the combination of Chicken and Waffles. Get over it. Waffles and Fried Chicken go together like grits and greens.

Big Mamas Chicken and Waffles

Big Mamas Chicken and Waffles. Three pieces chicken with waffle.

Everybody knows that.