Halloween

I made Gwendolen this really cute cheetah costume. Doesn't she look adorable?

$19 Ticket to Texas Ballet Theater

Unable to convince Lloyd or Gwendolen to accompany me and not wanting to miss Texas Ballet Theater's production of Mozart's Requiem, a contemporary piece choreographed by TBT's own artistic director, Ben Stevenson, I went by myself to the Sunday matinee and bought a cheap ticket. What a show! The first piece, danced by seven ballerina's to a medley of songs by Judy Garland, was spare and beautiful. The second, danced by nine male dancers to Mozart's beautiful Requiem, was sublime. I couldn't help thinking how Victoria Morgan, AD of Cincinnati Ballet, would have stripped these hotties down to frilly diapers and sent them leaping across the stage. And while Stevenson could have punched up the color to match the lush choral tones of the Requiem, his fluid yet precise choreography perfectly complemented the structure and emotion of Mozart's music. I loved it!

Bass Performance Hall is one of the prettiest theater's I've ever seen, it's creamy white lobby a vision of Heaven. And at only about 2,000 seats, my $19 ticket, 25 rows from the stage, was an fantastic value. I'll be back.

Sleeping Beauty at Casa Manana

I happily bought a subscription to the Children's Playhouse, thinking Gwenny and wouldn't want to miss a single production. I needn't have been so excited though: Sleeping Beauty was disappointing, set in the late 20th Century and losing its fairy tale magic in the process. I'm sick to death of Disney's prissy princesses, but a good fairy tale deserves better than this. And there is a lot in the original tale that the show's target audience could relate to that this production completely missed. Gwendolen, however, had no complaints.

Moslah Shrine Circus

The Circus was just like any other circus I have ever been to. Did you know that the Shrine Circus has been traveling the country raising money for Shriners Hospitals for Children since 1925? I didn't until today

Pumpkin Patch

Gwendolen has two days vacation from school for Yom Kippur, so we headed off to a pumpkin patch in a place with the queer name of "Flower Mound." Just like you can in Cincinnati, you can be in the country in about a half hour's drive from Fort Worth. Pretty landscape actually, with little hills--mounds?--and lots of horses. It's 85 degrees in October, hotter in the sun, so it would be a blazing inferno in August.

Texas State Fair

The Texas State Fair is the
biggest fair in the biggest state so I was thrilled to learn it was less than an hour's drive from here. We had a blast. Dickies is the official outfitter. Check out Tex's outfit.

Blading the Trinity Trail

68 degrees, calm winds...the perfect morning for rollerblading. There are paved bike trails--30 miles of them!--running through Fort Worth, most along the Trinity River. I can catch the trail a mile or so from our apartment and blade all the way to the zoo or the stockyards and beyond. It's not as scenic as my beloved Miami Whitewater trail, which meanders through Ohio farmland, or as gloriously transcendental as blading along the Long Beach shoreline at sunset, it is worth breaking a sweat for. Just past the cow pasture, you can see the downtown Fort Worth skyline.