Rising real estate prices are diluting our neighborhood’s personality. In the early ’90s, the building across the street from me was selling apartments for $25,000. I didn’t buy one. Today, those apartments sell for five or six times that amount. This demonstrates two things. First, I know nothing about real estate. Second, I’m not sure anyone else does, either. The one indisputable fact about home prices in Lakewood and East Dallas over the past decade is that they have soared, skyrocketed and gone through the roof. What’s much less clear is why, and, in the long term, what it means to the neighborhood. Coldwell Banker’s Ron Burch, who humors me by showing me houses he knows I’m almost certainly not going to buy, gave up trying to explain what was going on five or six years ago, when prices on Lower Greenville went to $100 a square foot. Today, 1950s old-lady ranch houses go for $150 a square foot, homes in the M Streets go for $400,000, and if there is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house with closets below Northwest Highway that isn’t falling down for less than $200,000, I’ve yet to find it. It’s not popular to say anything untoward about this sort of price appreciation. The county and city like it, since they can increase property tax revenues without increasing property taxes. (And as hellish as the school finance problem is, how much worse would it be if home values hadn’t doubled in the past decade?) Homeowners like it, since they enjoy the increase in equity without doing anything other than being in the right place at the right time. And what’s wrong with being rich? Which is, of course, not the question to ask. Rather, we need to ask what the consequences of all this high-rent real estate might be. Certainly, there are concerns about a real estate bubble, and those of us who were here 20 years ago and saw houses lose value — in many of the same neighborhoods that are so hot today — are well aware of the possibility. But the experts say there’s a difference between what’s going on now and what happened then, and since I don’t know anything about real estate, I have to believe them. The consequence, instead, is on display on the other side of Central Expressway, where a starter home can cost $650,000, and the only people who can afford to move in there these days are those F. Scott Fitzgerald called the very rich — whom, he pointed out, are quite different from the rest of us. A 20 percent down payment on a home that pricey is $130,000, which is double the median family income in the United States. Or, in more practical terms, eat dinner at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in the Lakewood Shopping Center, and then go eat at the Mi Cocina in Highland Park Village. You don’t have to be a sociologist to notice the difference. Lakewood and East Dallas are vigorous and healthy neighborhoods, and the reason is not real estate prices. Rather, it’s about young and old, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers, people who are odd and people who aren’t quite so odd. It’s about people like me living more or less next door to people who are not like me in any way, shape or form, and both of us respecting the other. That makes us a genuine community, not a bunch of rich people who are buying schools. But what happens if home prices keep rising the way they have? I was in the grocery store recently and overheard a younger fellow with long hair complaining that he had to move, since he couldn’t afford to live over here anymore. Twenty years ago — even 10 years ago — that never would have happened, and we’ll be worse off if it keeps happening. There are already plenty of neighborhoods and subdivisions in the Dallas area where everyone is middle-aged, owns two SUVs, and plans their life around their 3,000-square-foot house. The day that happens to us, we won’t be us anymore.

Living faithfully begins by hearing God’s word A Native American tourist walks along a New York City street and suddenly stops. He awkwardly bumps into people as he bends low and searches close to the sidewalk. People think he has lost something. A crowd gathers to see what is going on. Just then he plucks a cricket out of a small unkempt flowerbed. He had heard the creature’s distinctive leg chirping and felt like it was a familiar call from home in a strange place. Most of us would not have heard the sound of a cricket on a crowded city street because our ears are not tuned to such a noise. Which means our hearts are not turned toward such creatures. Which means our attention is not given to their presence around us. Which means our efforts are not directed to their welfare. One reason we go to a church or synagogue or mosque is to practice listening to the things we believe God cares about. We tune our ears to hear the call of those whose voices are too easily drowned out by the noise of advertisers and entertainers. We listen to be better informed, so that our sympathies will be aroused, so that our lives will be altered accordingly. We do not go to houses of worship to reinforce our comfortable lives. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might (Deut. 6:4-5). Jesus joins this central creed of Israel to another: You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18), making it the single greatest commandment in two parts. You cannot love God with your whole being if you do not at the same time love your neighbor as yourself. What does God care about? In his recent address to the National Prayer Breakfast, activist rock star Bono reminded us that more than 2,100 verses in the Bible speak to God’s care for the poor: “God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.” Are we? Faith — faith that acts faithfully — begins by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.

Is a West Village in our neighborhood’s future? No one knows for sure, and the reasons why are frustrating. Put a few neigthborhood residents together, and they’ll come up with 300 or so questions about retail development in the neighborhood. What’s going to happen to Lakewood Shopping Center and Casa Linda? How come we don’t have something like West Village here? Why would we want something like West Village here? Why isn’t there more neighborhood retail? Fair questions all, for retail development — like crime and real estate prices — is one of those things that makes our neighborhood what it is. So we put together a panel of nationally known developers and experts, all of whom have Dallas ties, to answer just those questions (each was interviewed separately by contributing editor Jeff Siegel). These are not bureaucrats or politicians; rather, these are the guys who pay the bills to throw the dirt: [PRODUCTION — BREAK THIS OUT INTO IT’S OWN LITTLE GRAPHIC WITH MUGSHOTS] • Ken Hughes , whose projects have included Highland Park Village and the Old Town shopping center at Greenville and Lovers Lane. Hughes is best known for Mockingbird Station, one of the first so-called urban lifestyle centers in the United States. • Robert Bagwell , whose Urban Partners developed West Village, another nationally known retail project that has been copied throughout the country. • Brian Stebbins , who turned a cotton field near Highway 114 in Tarrant County into Southlake Town Square, perhaps the first of the new generation of lifestyle centers. • Mickey Ashmore of United Commercial Realty, whose company provides leasing and other real estate services to some of the aforementioned developments, as well as others throughout the Dallas area. Q: Urban lifestyle centers such as Mockingbird Station and West Village are the sorts of projects everyone wants to build now. When you’re looking to put something like this in a neighborhood, what do you look for? What does the neighborhood need to have? Stebbins: You have to start with reality. You can only do what the market allows you to do. It’s not one of those things that if you build it, they will come. It has to be market based. Ashmore: I get calls all of the time from municipalities that want something like that. But they are also within the trade area of a mall that has 70 percent of the tenants that would be in a town center. That’s not going to work. They just don’t understand the dynamics of the market. Q: You mentioned trade area. Traditionally, that was defined by drawing circles on a map — one mile for a smaller center, three miles for a bigger one, and five miles for an even bigger one. Does that still apply? Or is there another way to measure trade area? Hughes: Radials really don’t mean much anymore. It used to be how grocery stores spaced themselves, three miles apart. Now what you’re looking at is density, how many housetops are in the area. Bagwell: You have to ask yourself, “Who is our customer?” and then you have to build something for those customers. Look at who lives around the area. At West Village, the customer is young, urban, high income, disposable income, well traveled, sophisticated, stylish. So you can’t build West Village somewhere that you don’t have that. Stebbins: What’s the area’s age? We have 26 percent 40-59 and 24 percent 25-40, because they are peak spending years. Do they have children? How many are women, because purchasing decisions are made by women. Q: So you’re talking about demographics. But are there other things that matter as well? Ashmore: It also means driving patterns, driving time, natural barriers like White Rock Lake. What’s the proximity for the shopper? They don’t want to drive great distances. What’s the road infrastructure like? Is there easy access, like at NorthPark or Mockingbird Station, right on Central Expressway? Stebbins: We defined specific things that we wanted. Our drive time, for instance, is 15 minutes. There were no malls within nine or 10 miles. Q: That doesn’t sound too complicated. So why don’t we see more of these things, especially in East Dallas and Lakewood? Hughes: Developers who do retail, in general, don’t do a good job of finding out what the neighborhood needs. They have to worry about the investor yield requirement, so they don’t build what the neighborhood needs. You really need to interview the neighborhood about what they need. Bagwell: You have to find a developer who is willing to do it correctly. Most developers, they’re just happy doing a one-off. Some of them just don’t give a damn about a lot of these things. You just can’t plop something down, transplant it from somewhere else. If you did that, why would anyone go? What’s new about that, what’s different about that? Q: Isn’t that a little esoteric for a shopping center? Hughes: There’s a philosophy. You have to create a sense of place. People yearn for places to go shopping that have a neighborhood feel, that are more intimate, on a smaller scale. They want the neighborhood hardware store, the neighborhood toy store, and I think they’re even willing to pay for it with higher prices. I don’t even think they want all these big grocery stores, because for some reason we’ve gotten away from the smaller ones. Instead, you get big-box stores. But that’s not an adventure. That’s not a sense of place. Stebbins: You have to give them reasons to go there besides shopping, reasons to go there every day. You don’t want just another strip center. That’s why we have the city hall [at Southlake]. They can get their driver’s license renewed. We have a post office. We’re going to add a movie theater and a restaurant row and a hotel. It really is about planning a community. Q: You talk about local retail and how important that is. But how difficult is that to do? Ashmore: Everyone says they want local retail. But they also want to shop at the Gap. And if you don’t get the national retailers, you can’t do the project. Stebbins: We were very conscious of getting local retail, because that helps add to the sense of ownership in the community. We’re about 70 percent national and about 30 percent local, and that’s a really high local number. But having said that, those 30 percent of the tenants take up 70 percent of our time. You have to consciously want local tenants, and that’s why many developers don’t get them. Bagwell: You have to have local retailers buy into your philosophy. Once they saw what we were doing, that we were a reflection of the neighborhood, then we got the neighborhood flower shop. Q: One of the things that irritates people here is that we believe in all this, but we don’t have enough quality local retail. We have the demographics, we have the density, and we still have dollar stores. Why is that? Ashmore: It comes down to NorthPark. It’s easy to get to NorthPark, it’s close to NorthPark, and that means it’s very, very difficult to get the usual suspects of tenants that you need. The closest we came was when I leased Casa Linda in the 1980s, and we had the Gap and some mall tenants. But they just didn’t do the business. Bagwell: It isn’t easy to do financially. If you want to redevelop an area, like the strip centers at Mockingbird and Abrams, you’re going to have to pay not just for the land, but for the cash flow [since the purchase price will include the value of the rent the tenants pay]. Then, after you scrape the land, you’re not going to have the cash flow coming in that you paid for. Who is going to want finance that? Who is going to be able to afford to finance that? Hughes: That part of town is so profitable for the companies that own the centers that they have no incentive to sell. You run into that a lot. Q: Yet aren’t there areas here that could be redeveloped? Ashmore: The Lakewood Shopping Center, all of Gaston and Abrams. There’s a pedestrian feel to it. The physical presence, the style of the buildings. Plus, some of the landlords, I think you could work with. I also think you could do something at Mockingbird and Abrams, especially if the Albertson’s goes out in the center on the southeast corner. You’ve got density, you’ve got access, and since so much of it would be empty, you could afford to scrape it. I think you’d be able to get some sexy development there, bring in some new tenants. Hughes: You might be able to redo part of Mockingbird and Abrams. Some of it hasn’t done well, just a bunch of typical L-shaped shopping centers. There’s no place there, so you’d have a chance to do something. Q: So it’s about being patient, then, for people in the neighborhood? Hughes: This is a problem we’re going to have for the next generation. There are a lot of buildings, not just out there now, but that are being built, that are going to be functionally obsolete. And then what’s going to happen to them? Are big boxes still going to be the way people shop?

C.C. Young residents to display works of art In the seventh annual art exhibition “Art is Ageless,” sponsored by C.C. Young’s Learning and Cultural Arts Center, adults 65 and older will present their works and prove that creativity can thrive at any age. Dee Wadsworth, director of the arts center at the senior residential community, says the exhibit highlights the creativity in the human spirit and places a special value on older generations. “We focus on older people and their creative endeavor. We believe creativity is ageless, and that’s our focus,” Wadsworth says. With a growing participation of Dallas’ senior residents, the exhibit’s applicants this year share a particular enthusiasm for art. Sue Turner, a resident in the community, smiles when she shows a visitor the first painting she will submit to the exhibit. This is her first attempt with art — she moved to C.C. Young in December and completed the painting in two days. “She told me what needed to be done. She wouldn’t ask me what to do. She has a good eye,” says Georgia Kifer, a volunteer who teaches art to residents in the Alzheimer’s unit. Turner’s painting, titled “Dreams of the Past,” is a colorful image of a boat in an open field with a sunset facing the landscape. She says she wanted to paint something that would evoke nostalgia. “I can imagine somebody really wanted that boat at one time,” she says. “At one moment, that boat served its purpose. I can remember things that we got that we were so proud of, and it all went into the past.” Painting is just one of the exhibit’s categories. Others include photography, poetry, hard crafts, soft crafts and visual arts. Wadsworth noticed a variety in seniors’ work. “Sometimes it’s a portrait, sometimes it’s abstract. [It] reflects the diversity of older people’s experiences. They’re so individualistic. They don’t try to mimic each other,” she says. Dale Parvin, a resident of the community, is submitting his first work to the exhibit. “Bandit, The Gazebo Squirrel” is a photograph Parvin took on C.C. Young’s campus. The photo captures the motion of a squirrel jumping into a bird feeder to catch food. “The squirrel was out and waiting, anticipating — ‘Where’s the food?’ I took the little Kodak throwaway camera. I was ready for Bandit,” Parvin says. Submitted work will be reviewed by a panel of three judges. The event, says C.C. Young president Kenneth Durand, promotes a meaningful message to our community. “Believing is seeing. If we believe that older people can still give, can still be creative, are still valuable, then they are more apt to be. If this vision is fulfilled, our culture will be richer.” 2006 ART IS AGELESS EXHIBIT What: All artists 65 and older can participate in the event. Categories include paintings, visual arts, soft crafts, hard crafts, photography, short prose writing and poetry. Submission deadline is March 15. Where: Dallas Children’s Theater at the Rosewood Center for Family Arts, 5938 Skillman at Northwest Highway. Open to the public. When: Saturday, April 8, 2 p.m. For information: 214-841-2834 or ccyoung.org

Gymnasium updates give Woodrow basketball teams a home to be proud of Michael Langley’s only aim while attending a Woodrow Wilson High School basketball game last fall was to cheer on a player from his church. But when he walked out of the school’s gymnasium that night, he had a new objective — convincing his employer to renovate the court. “It was under-padded, and the equipment was dilapidated and borderline safe,” Langley says of the circa 1929 gym. “I was watching kids bounce off the brick wall.” Langley, who lives in Hollywood Heights, is director of marketing promotions for the John F. Clark Company, which works with architects to design athletic facilities. It had previously renovated two gymnasiums pro bono, so Langley expressed his concerns about Woodrow’s gym to company owner Jennifer Clark-Junker, and asked if it could be next. Both his company and one of its manufacturers, Draper Inc. of Indiana, agreed to pay for the $25,000 project. Once he received a green light from the school, Langley and his crew set to work lining the entire gym with new padding and replacing the frames, backboards and goals. The old scoreboard was broken, so they installed a new digital board with Matt’s Rancho Martinez picking up part of the cost. The boys’ practice gym, built in 1979, also received new frames, backboards and goals. “It’s a brand new gym to me,” grins Pat Washington, the boys’ coach. Girls’ coach Tony Bustos claims the new equipment has “uplifted our basketball program,” and his players say the improvements have motivated them to practice and play harder. “This is our house, so when people came over before, we were embarrassed,” says junior Susan Harris. “Now we’re so proud of it.” Basketball at Woodrow often operates in the shadow of other more popular and seemingly successful sports like football and volleyball, say Langley and the coaches. But both basketball teams made it into the playoffs this year, despite the fact they were a smaller school up against some of the best teams in the region. Langley believes the teams just “needed a boost.” “We’re not a Carter or a Kimball or something like that, but I’m so glad that somebody took an interest in a program that’s trying to get to that elite level in Dallas,” Washington says. “This right here helps us go a long way toward that.” Woodrow wasn’t the only program impacted by the renovations. The White Rock YMCA, Lakewood Elementary and J.L. Long Middle School also use Woodrow’s gym. “It affects this entire community, and it’s something that then became very personal because I live here,” Langley says. “It’s one more thing we can try and keep going.” He’s not finished yet. Langley is hoping to redo the floor and the seating before he closes out the project. “This place has kind of become my heart now, so I’ve got programs set up for summer and fall. I’ve pledged to the kids that I’ll hang onto them,” Langley says. “We’re in it, and we’re going to finish it.”

Practice raising your pinky for this neighborhood church’s formal English tea Tea with Queen Victoria Sunday, March 26, 3-5 p.m. Episcopal Cathedral of St. Matthew’s, 5100 Ross $25 Reserve seats by Monday, March 20: 214-841-0663 or englishtea@episcopalcathedral.org At the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Matthew’s, a church steeped in Anglican heritage, parishioners don’t just admit their anglophile tendencies — they embrace them. Perhaps this is never more evident than during the cathedral’s annual tea, a formal English affair. The tea is so authentic that the late Queen Victoria herself makes an appearance — or at least you’ll see a St. Matthew’s parishioner who looks like Queen Victoria. “She’s as cute as the dickens,” says organizer Sally Sundermann. “We dress her up, and for months afterward, she’s hard to live with.” Two ladies-in-waiting follow the queen around, and both they and the other subjects who dine at the queen’s table dress in Victorian attire. Everyone else dresses up in modern-day attire, and “you’ll see a lot of hats,” Sundermann says. The four-course tea consists of fruit, followed by watercress and cucumber finger sandwiches, then scones with clotted cream or marmalade, and it’s finished off with sweets. Nothing is store-bought — every bite comes courtesy of the St. Matthew’s women. The tea may be formal, but don’t let the watercress fool you — this is no stodgy event. The entertainment is a skit titled “To tea, or not to tea.” It bears no resemblance to the play Hamlet from which its title derives, but instead is a comical take-off of another Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and features a guest appearance by the Beatles. “We’ve got the queen and the bard and the Beatles all in one place,” Sundermann laughs. Guests who arrive early are invited to view the six paintings hanging in the cathedral, copies of masters that were brought over from Europe, including one salvaged from a shipwreck. They can also glance around the tables to view the churchwomen’s finest china and read the story accompanying each set. “You do not want to arrive at 3 o’clock because you want time to walk through the place — you’ve got 40 tables and each one has somebody’s china on it,” Sundermann says. She also suggests sticking around afterward to stroll through the herb garden or take a tour of the stain-glass windows featuring women of the Bible. They were designed for the cathedral’s former incarnation, St. Mary’s School boarding school for girls. Though she hopes people take time to appreciate the cathedral’s more than 150-year history, Sundermann has practical reasons for hoping they arrive early and stay late — “You cannot put 320 people in cars in valet parking at one time.”

After a recent daytime burglary on Wabash, a crime watch e-mail circulated advising residents to take extra precautions when road construction is happening on or around their streets. Later it appeared that the construction crew and the crime were unconnected, but the e-mail’s warning reflected a lingering concern about crews working in the area. With dozens of new builds, remodels and street maintenance projects taking place on any given day, living near a work site is not something that can be avoided in our neighborhood. Is it true that the potential for crime is higher when construction crews are working on or around our streets? You do have more people in your neighborhood, so there’s a higher volume of traffic, and obviously there’s an increased chance for that type of thing to happen. But our city crews are often a wealth of information for us. They call in on things they see, and that’s a good thing. So you’ve got both sides of it out there. Do police have a perception that burglaries increase with construction crews around? We do notice them more at construction sites. New homes under construction are often prime targets for burglars because they have materials lying around, like stacks of wood, new appliances and windows stacked up, and they’re not always properly secured so they’re more likely to get toted away. We do get complaints on that, especially when you’ve got a whole neighborhood going up at once. If these crews begin working early in the morning, then stick around until 5 p.m. or so, they can easily watch to see who is home and who isn’t. How can we feel better about leaving our houses unoccupied? Set times where lights come on and music comes on in your house — that applies in general anyway. It also helps if people can go home during the day or have a neighbor check on your house. Say you’re getting your house painted. You may want to let your neighbors know so when they see the paint crews come up and work on the house, they know they’re supposed to be there. They should have a way to get a hold of you at work and say, ‘Hey, a paint crew or construction crew is at your house — are they’re supposed to be there?’ If not, call us and we’ll come and check it out. Working with your neighbors is important. We all have nosy neighbors, and sometimes we complain about them, but sometimes they can be really helpful. Especially in some of these neighborhoods in Lakewood that are really developing right now, and there’s construction on all sides of them. If they’re concerned, they can certainly request extra patrol in their neighborhood by calling the station — that’s always an option.

Armed robbery THE VICTIM: Frank Rosales DATE: Friday, Jan. 27 TIME: 6 p.m. PLACE: Corner of Lakewood and Tokalon Every day after work, Frank Rosales returns to his home on Lorna Lane, grabs his iPod and takes his pug on a 30- to 40-minute walk around the neighborhood. This particular Friday was no different, except that Rosales returned home so late that he didn’t take time to change or remove his wallet from his pocket. “I never, ever carry it,” he says. “That was the first time, and it was the last.” He was walking along Lakewood when he noticed a young Hispanic man about 20 yards behind him. “I turned around saw him, and he put his head down like he was embarrassed or something,” Rosales says. Assuming the man was a worker at one of the nearby construction sites, Rosales didn’t think anything of it. He turned back around and moved onto the grass, politely assuming that the man would overtake him. The next time he turned around, the man was right behind him. He had pulled out a gun and stuck it in Rosales’ face, saying, ‘All right man, hurry up and don’t say anything.’” “I said, ‘OK, OK, OK’ and turned around for a minute — I didn’t want to see it there,” Rosales says. The man reached into Rosales’ back pocket, took his wallet out, and ran away. Rosales ran to the end of the block in time to see the man jump into the passenger side of an older model, two-door sports car and the driver speed off. “It happened so fast I was just shocked,” he says. “Then it hit me — oh my god, I got held up by gunpoint. This guy could have killed me.” Rosales ran home and immediately called the police, who arrived within 15 minutes. Then he called his credit card companies to close his accounts, a process that took two hours. By that time, the robbers had already visited Target and NorthPark Center, ringing up hundreds in charges. Rosales forgot about an Exxon Mobil credit card that he hadn’t used in about a year until the company called him eight days later and asked about $800 worth of recent charges. Understandably, Rosales is now paranoid about walking his dog after work. He has shortened the walk to only five or ten minutes and sticks to his own street and the alleyway behind it. And he’s ditched the iPod. The police officers told Rosales that armed robbery hasn’t occurred in Lakewood for five or six years. They assume, Rosales adds, that it was a crime of opportunity — someone who had noticed Rosales listening to his iPod and carrying his wallet. Still, Rosales is concerned for not only himself but also his neighbors. “We see the same people over and over every night walking their dog or walking with their kids in their stroller,” Rosales says. “It was sunny out, too. It wasn’t night or dark yet. Lakewood is so busy, and not one car or anything passed by while it happened.” Rosales plans to take self-defense classes to overcome his paranoia. “I don’t want to be stuck at home and afraid to go out, especially in my neighborhood,” he says. “I’m just glad he didn’t shoot me. They’ve killed people for a lot less.”

Former neighborhood resident Molly Erdman is at the pinnacle of the improv comedy world, performing on the same stage in Chicago once graced by comic heavyweights Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Shelley Long, John Belushi, John Candy and Chris Farley. The former Lakewood resident and Greenhill student is a main stage player at Second City Chicago, but her mug might look familiar to you even if you’ve never taken in a cutting edge comedy show in the Windy City. You may know her as the feisty redhead waiting at the drive-thru window in a series of Sonic commercials that have been running since February. Obviously you don’t live in Lakewood now. When did you live here? I was born in San Francisco but I basically grew up in Dallas — first in Lake Highlands. We lived in Lakewood from 1980 to 1997. My parents divorced but still live in Lakewood. How did you get into improv comedy? I went to Greenhill. Actually, my senior year of high school I started an improv group with two of my friends in theater called “What Happens Next.” Ad-Libs had just opened, and that’s where we got some of the ideas for our improv games. In 1992, I went to college in Boston to study theater. They had an improv group, and I realized I liked improv more than traditional theater. What exactly is Second City? It started in Chicago in 1959. Second City’s claim to fame is as the home of political and social satire. The main part of it is basically comedy theater. It’s sketch comedy born from improv. So the audience sees the show from one part to the other, almost like they’re in on the rehearsal process. A lot of famous Saturday Night Live alums came from Second City. Any aspirations to go “Live from New York?” It’s funny, because when I first thought of Second City, I wanted to do “Saturday Night Live.” Now that I’ve been in Chicago for nine years doing improv, the path you take becomes more important than the end goal. But I will continue to work in comedy as a writer and performer no matter what. Any exciting stories of agents and scouts looking for the next Will Ferrell? Dan Bakkedahl got hired onto “Saturday Night Live” two months ago straight out of Second City (Bakkedahl also works as a correspondent for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”). Steve Carrell and Steven Colbert (former “Daily Show” correspondents; Colbert now has his own Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report”) were at Second City in the early ’90s. I had only been working on the main stage a couple of months, and Lorne Michaels came by with a couple of writers from “SNL.” The writers and producer from “The Daily Show” came the same day. Two of the cast members got flown out to New York. That was the first time it really hit me. This is how it happens.

The aroma of fresh-baked bread wafting from Empire Baking Co. is hard to miss. That smell is European-style bread — no additives, no preservatives and only a smidgen of yeast. “To make bread cheaply, you put a whole bunch of yeast in and make it really fast, but it doesn’t taste like much,” says owner Meaders Ozarow. “We put in a small amount and let it rise at room temperature for 12 hours.” You can buy this bread in loaf or sandwich form at the grab-and-go shop in front of Empire’s bakery. “If you can go to McDonald’s and get cheap-quality high-fat food, why can’t you come and get a good sandwich in the same way?” reasons Ozarow. Sandwiches cost $5.95, and the most popular is either chicken salad or smoked turkey and Granny Smith apples with Muenster cheese. The $2 made-from-scratch muffins also are a good bet. “What we’re trying to do is simple, straightforward, high-quality ingredients,” Ozarow says. “Everything is made the way your mom would make it.” And it’s fresh — whatever’s left at the end of the day is either discarded or given to the homeless. Empire Baking Co. 5614 E. University 214-373-3838 HOURS: Mon-Fri, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. $

As a general rule, chardonnay is aged in wooden barrels whether it’s made in France, California or almost anywhere else. This gives the wine the toasty, oaky aroma and vanilla-like flavor that everyone writes about, the result of the barrel imparting those characters to the finished product. When that kind of aging is done well, there isn’t much to complain about (see almost any high-end white Burgundy). When it isn’t — and a lot of high-priced California wines went through a period in the late ’90s when they didn’t do it well, for a variety of reasons — the wine often tastes more like wood than fruit. Hence un-oaked chardonnay, wine that is aged in steel tanks instead of barrels. There still isn’t a lot of it on the market compared to traditionally made chardonnay, but its availability seems to be growing, and it’s growing in response to chardonnay that has too much oak. Most of it is reasonably priced (some are wonderfully inexpensive), many are very well made, and almost all of them are fresh, fruit-forward wines that pair well with food. Keep these in mind: • Los Vascos Chardonnay 2004 ($8) — This wine is made by the Chilean part of the Rothschild family business, which means you get hundreds of years of French winemaking tradition for less than $10. One caveat: For some reason, this wine sometimes needs to breathe for 15 or 20 minutes before drinking, which is odd for a white wine. • Toad Hollow Chardonnay 2004 ($11) — Toad Hollow impresario Todd Williams says he makes meatloaf wine, which is his way of saying he doesn’t care for wine critics or wine snobs. Drink this appley, crisp California wine on its own, or with any white wine dish. • Argyle Chardonnay 2004 ($12) — One of my favorites (especially because I found it on sale for $10). It’s made in Washington state, and is even cleaner and crisper than the Toad Hollow.

03.2006 Archives - Lakewood/East Dallas

Keep Lakewood Weird

By Jeff Siegel|2011-03-09T15:32:17-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Tuning Our Ears

By George Mason|2011-03-09T15:27:11-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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The Riddle of Retail

By Jeff Siegel|2011-03-09T15:17:57-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Timeless Beauties

By Advocate Staff|2011-03-09T15:15:21-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Cats’ New Lair

By Keri Mitchell|2011-03-09T15:13:03-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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One Lump Or Two?

By Keri Mitchell|2011-03-09T15:10:22-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Ask A Cop

By Advocate Staff|2011-03-09T15:00:06-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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True Crime

By Advocate Staff|2011-03-09T14:57:15-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Molly Erdman Q&A

By Advocate Staff|2011-03-09T14:54:33-06:00March 1st, 2006|News|

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Empire Baking Co.

By Keri Mitchell|2011-01-09T18:12:48-06:00March 1st, 2006|Delicious, Food and Drink, Restaurants|

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Chardonnay

By Jeff Siegel|2011-01-09T18:13:45-06:00March 1st, 2006|Delicious, Wine|

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