Mary Novaria

Doing Our Best to Keep Austin Weird—Part 2 “When in Rome… er, Austin” My Beloved used to say I was “bohemian.” I think it was because I wore clogs and was somewhat of a free spirit. Austin is definitely a throw back to my quasi hippie chick days. Who’d have thought that in the middle of Bush country, in the state that gave us Big Oil, Big Hair and J.R. Ewing, there would be such an enclave of funky weirdness? Seeing the Longhorn cheerleaders (think Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, only younger) at UT sporting events, you’d never guess they share a campus with today’s version of the Beat Generation. Darling Daughter and I met Samantha as we strolled down The Drag (Guadalupe Street) on Friday morning. Samantha seemed to have all of her stuff with her, including her black lab, Cracker, who was snoozing in the sun on the steps of a church. Samantha rose as we passed and asked if she could read us a poem she’d written. It was really a song, she explained, but she was too shy to actually sing it ...

Doing Our Best to Keep Austin Weird —Part 1 Four Nights, Nine Bands Fun destinations have slogans: The City That Never Sleeps. Virginia is for Lovers. (At least it used to be.) What Happens in Vegas… …Keep Austin Weird . For a few days over Spring Break we did our best to do just that. Darling Daughter loves all things weird. My Beloved has been itching to get to the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, which is a little weird for the progeny of Goldwater Republicans. We all needed a change of scenery. It’s not that we’ve been buried under four feet of snow in sub-zero temperatures, but winter here is just so erratic—weeks of bleak, cold days, a teasingly warm day or two, an ice storm, a flood warning, bitter, biting wind. Overcast. Brown. Gray. We’d just seen (for the second time) the film Glory Road , where a coach tempts basketball recruits with the promise of more than 300 days a year of Texas sunshine. As a self-diagnosed victim of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), that was go...