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The Tutu Live Krewe Brings the Good Vibes (and Sequins) to Galveston’s Mardi GrasPastels and pettiness are forbidden by the Tutu Live Krewe. To become part of this Galveston-based dance troupe comprising 96 mature women, you’ll need knee-high black boots, a corset and tutu in their signature black, purple, and turquoise color scheme, and a desire to have fun, learn the choreography, and entertain the crowds at holiday parades. “It’s like a grown-up drill team,” says the krewe’s founder, Donna Joy Swartz. When not in tutu mode, she’s a program director and assistant professor of medical administration at Galveston College. Swartz started the group because she loved the camaraderie that performing in parades with other women her age brought to her life. “I would also look really silly dancing out there all by myself,” she says.Back in 2012, Swartz…

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A Los Weyes de la Asada steak night platter.Diego Zamora was 12 years old when he opened his first business, a torta stand next to the entrance of the Coca-Cola plant in Celaya, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Soon, Zamora moved on to selling sushi to-go, explaining, “When you’re young, sometimes you get bored and try more businesses.” At 21, Zamora opened a full-service Spanish eatery, followed by some rotisserie chicken and carnitas spots. He was insatiable, and his family supported his endeavors. “My father always tried to instill a belief in vision and confidence in [the] entrepreneurial spirit,” Zamora says. “He always told us, ‘You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.’ ”A friend convinced Zamora, who was born in Orange County, California, to operate his import-export…

The post You Shouldn’t Miss Steak Night at This San Antonio Taco Trailer appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Rashee Rice #4 of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates scoring a touchdown during the first quarter against the Miami Dolphins in the AFC Wild Card Playoffs at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium on January 13, 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri.Patrick Mahomes threw his first pass to Rashee Rice almost a year ago during an informal workout at TCU. Until that day, the two had never met, and it’s funny now how insignificant that throw probably seemed back then. Had either of them known then that they’d be playing together in Super Bowl LVIII, they might have marked the occasion with toasts and takeout from Joe T’s.Every championship team generates bits and pieces of folklore that live on long after the parades and confetti. If Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers to win their third Super Bowl in five seasons on Sunday in Las Vegas, that meeting in Fort Worth will be part of theirs.Rice, a standout receiver at Southern…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Paxton Watch: Ken argues his right to a speedy trial was violatedIs Ken Paxton in trouble? It’s a question that anyone aware of the Texas attorney general has been asking for a full decade now. Thus far, the answer has always been, “Not yet; we’ll have to see what happens with the various crimes he’s been accused of.” For a long while, resolution has seemed far away—particularly on the matter of the first crime Paxton stood formally charged with. A refresher: In 2014, the Texas State Securities Board disciplined Paxton, then an elected member of the state Senate, for violating the Texas Securities Act by soliciting clients for investment advisers without registering as a representative of those advisers. Then, in 2015, federal charges followed, and he was arrested and indicted with two counts of securities fraud. (He…

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Warthog AttackBy the age of thirty, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring high-risk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-twenties, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God. So as he…

The post His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Amanda Edwards vs. Sheila Jackson Lee for U.S. HouseAmanda Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for Texas’s deep-blue Eighteenth Congressional District, rarely mentions incumbent Sheila Jackson Lee on the campaign trail. On a recent evening spent criss-crossing the sprawling district that encircles Houston like a lumpy donut, Edwards, a 42-year-old municipal-finance lawyer, delivered her stump speech at three neighborhood meetings. At the first two, held in majority-Black neighborhoods, she made no reference to her opponent beyond calling for “new leadership.” At the third, before a mostly white audience in Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, she was a bit more direct.“This race is not about me or Congresswoman Jackson Lee,” Edwards told the several dozen Houstonians who had gathered at Messiah Lutheran Church. “It’s about you getting the results that you deserve.” She predicted…

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Tamir Kalifa wins the American Mosaic Journalism PrizeWHO: Tamir Kalifa, a 34-year-old visual journalist based in Austin.WHAT: Kalifa is one of two winners of the 2024 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, recognizing excellence in longform, narrative, or deep reporting about underrepresented or misrepresented groups in the United States, complete with a $100,000 cash grant.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Most Texans will remember where they were as news of the shooting at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, began to break on May 24, 2022. Photojournalist Tamir Kalifa was working in a coffee shop in Austin, thinking, as many Texans were, Not again. “I didn’t want to go,” he tells me via phone. “I thought I could never cover a mass shooting again.”Kalifa had spent three months in El Paso in 2019 documenting the healing journey…

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Queen Citriana and King Citrus atop their float in Mission, TX during the annual Texas Citrus Fiesta parade on January 27, 2024.About fifty folding chairs are lined up in front of the Border Theater in downtown Mission, a town of 86,000 just west of McAllen. The row of onlookers is composed mostly of multigenerational families, from toddlers to grandparents. They all gaze north toward the parade coming down North Conway Avenue, and many hold up their hands to block the sun that pierces through this breezy January morning. R. J. Gonzalez and his wife, Eva, are waiting for the float carrying their sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Natalia Flores. Today she’s the Princess of Emerald Dove, a dignitary of the White Wing Royal Court, representing the neighboring city of Peñitas. Over the din of police sirens and tejano music pumping from speakers on the parade floats, Flores shows me a…

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The Houston Artist Helping Locals Send NudesNurse practitioner and author Emily Medley entered a concrete-floored studio on a cold February day and took her clothes off. She centered herself upon a platform heaped with soft blankets and pillows, ready to be drawn nude. As ambient tunes played during the next two hours, a spotlight illuminated her nearly fifty-year-old body while studio artist Nyssa Juneau transferred her figure onto a piece of green pastel paper, a shade that just happened to be Medley’s signature color. As Medley recounts it, the surreal, cerebral, and private experience resulted in her feeling like an artist, too. Designed to be a birthday gift for both herself and her husband, who had it framed in “the most expensive frame possible,” the portrait was also a way of memorializing…

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Damla Karsan, a Houston-based OB-GYN (C) speaks during a press conference outside the Travis County Courthouse on July 19, 2023 in Austin, Texas.Dr. Damla Karsan was filled with a mixture of anger, fear, and anxiety. It was a Thursday in early December, and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, in an unprecedented move, had threatened the OB-GYN—and the hospitals where she worked—with prosecution if they helped Kate Cox, a 31-year-old woman with a nonviable and life-threatening pregnancy, obtain emergency abortion care. Karsan’s thoughts immediately shifted to her women’s health practice in downtown Houston: How would she pay the rent? Or pay her staff? And most importantly, what would happen to her patients?“I was really nervous. I did not want to be forced to give up my practice and caring for my patients,” Karsan, who has been an abortion care provider in Texas for more than two decades, told…

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