With all the bad news today, any chance for a little non-ironic cheer is most welcome. A couple of weeks ago, Austin’s Samaritan Counseling Center launched a new social media site, www.RecognizeGood.com, to offer antidotes-via-anecdotes, encouraging public recognition of good news as a counterbalance to all the crap bogging us down. The site is a public forum where anyone can post thank-you notes to acknowledge and honor good deeds done by others. Not only that, but the organization makes charitable donations in honor of the good deed doers. more ›

A few weeks ago, I was driving my friend, Big Red, home after a show. It had been a cabaret style revue of Broadway tunes and we were inspired to improvise a musical of our own as we drove. I’m a lousy singer. Big Red is much better, but still it’s not like he’s in the running to dethrone Ethel Merman or anything. And so our invented musical sounded more like an off-key cross between old TV theme songs and tunes we’d picked up at guitar mass back in the ‘70’s when we were young and far too impressionable to avoid all that Kumbaya-ing. We had really hit our pace and were belting it out when, on the Northern edge of Hyde Park, I noticed a dude semi-stumbling down the sidewalk, tapping his red-tipped white cane hither and tither. I told Big Red I’d give him five bucks to roll down the window and say, “What are you? Blind?!” more ›

Local writer Spike Gillespie (along with a dozen of her closest friends) has been holding forth on the subject of wookin pa nub in all the wrong places. The Dick Monologues run once a month at Hyde Park Theater. When we walked in, there was a sea of women with tiny plastic cups of red wine. Any trepidation over being surrounded by that many sleeveless tops quickly dissipated as the raucously hilarious women (and... more ›