Every $1 provides 7 meals. Give today at safoodbank.org/donate
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2025 | 6 PM
ELEPHANT CELLAR AT HOTEL EMMA
Join the San Antonio Food Bank for a wild game dining experience like no other. Featuring chef-curated action stations led by Chef Geronimo Lopez, Executive Chef at Hotel Emma, the evening will highlight thoughtfully sourced cuts of venison, duck, and other exotic game—alongside classic offerings. Enjoy live music, craft cocktails from indoor and patio bars, and a live grilling exhibition beneath the Texas sky.
This meaningful event supports the Food Bank’s Hunters for the Hungry program—bridging conservation and compassion to provide essential nutrition through donated wild game.
Publisher Michael Wagner
Editor in Chief Sanford Nowlin
General Manager Chelsea Bourque
Editorial
Digital Content Editor Stephanie Koithan
Contributing Arts Editor Bryan Rindfuss
Staff Writer Michael Karlis
Contributors Abe Asher, Bill Baird, Ron Bechtol, Danny Cervantes, Amber Esparza, Brianna Espinoza, Anjali Gupta, Colin Houston, Kiko Martinez, Mike McMahan, Kevin Sanchez, M. Solis, Dean Zach
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in this issue
35 Pogo Across Texas
Photographer Pat Blashill coming to San Antonio to promote new book about Lone Star State punk
07 News
The Opener News in Brief
Exceeding Limits
Feds demand Ken Paxton's Senate campaign explain more than 100 potentially illegal contributions
Dismal Data
New numbers show Trump's tariffs, mass deportations taking a toll on the Texas economy
Bad Takes
Conspiracy theories and ignorance threaten our ability to respond to a COVID surge
14 Calendar
Our picks of things to do
Sweet Homecoming
Catching up with New Braunfels’ Austin Meade ahead of his two-night stand at Whitewater Amphitheater
Critics’ Picks
Auditor’s Certification:
The Wizard of Oz in a Graveyard
San Antonio illustrator John Picacio, bestseller Leigh Bardugo release
kids’ book exploring grief, Día de los Muertos tradition
23 Screns
Thank You, Horror Weapons succeeds as both a thrill ride and something deeper
25 Food
10-Year Reserve
Whiskey Business celebrates milestone birthday with spirited bash at the Witte Museum
It’s Showtime!
Nicosi Dessert Bar serves up a highend culinary showcase worthy of its ticket price
Cooking Up
Conversation
Celebrating with Ohio Crawford of Backyard on Broadway and Dibs Mixers
41 Music
On the Cover: Photographer Pat Blashill documented Texas’ early ‘80s punk scene, which included SA band Marching Plague, pictured here. Photo: Pat Blashill. Design: Ana Paula Gutierrez.
Pat Blashill
Fearless Together
– Save the date –Thursday, October 9th | 6-9pm 2800 Broadway, SATX 78209
Special Performances • Mobile Testing OnsiteArt Photobooth • and More!
Enjoy food, drinks, vendors, DJ, & a panel discussion between youth with informative narratives such as living positive, dating, and stopping the stigma.
#FearlessTogether
#OperationBrave
#DayToBeBrave
#IAmBrave
RSVP FOR YOUR FREE TICKETS TODAY! *While Supplies Last For more info call (210) 644-1555
That Rocks/That Sucks
R epublican Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows is requiring Democrats who returned to the House floor Monday after breaking quorum to sign “permission slips” and seek a personal Department of Public Safety escort just to leave the chambers. As of press time Tuesday, State Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, was defying the order and has refused to leave the chamber.
The San Antonio Spurs will open the 2025-26 season in Dallas against the Mavericks in a matchup that will pit No. 2 overall draft pick Dylan Harper, who plays for the Silver and Black, against No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg. It will be only the second time since 1966 that the two top picks in the same draft will face each other in their first respective regular season games. The Spurs are also set to face Oklahoma City on Christmas Day
The Trump administration has scrapped plans to expand Texas’ oldest wildlife refuge. The Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, which was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and covers grasslands across West Texas and the Panhandle, was set to expand from 6,440 acres to as many as 700,000 under a plan advanced by the Biden White House. The ecosystem is particularly vital for migratory birds such as the sandhill crane.
Someone has returned the San Antonio Public Library’s copy of Your Child, His Family, and Friends by Frances Bruce Strain — 82 years after it was last checked out. Earlier this summer, an Oregon resident returned the book after finding in the belongings of their late father and discovered that their grandmother had checked the book out in the midst of World War II and failed to return it. — Abe Asher
Throwing tantrums in Jesus’ name with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick
Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
Yes, we’re fully aware Danny Goeb — oops, we mean Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — was the subject of the Assclown Alert column a mere two issues ago.
Forgive us for bringing Dandy Dan back so quickly, but it appears the motherfucker just can’t stop saying stupid shit.
Last week, during a session of the Texas Senate, Patrick fired off a blatantly unconstitutional threat to hurl anyone out of the chamber who doesn’t stand during official prayers.
Patrick issued his threat after state Sen. Angela Paxton, a fellow Republican, delivered a invocation “in the name of Jesus, who has saved us, who keeps us safe and who is coming again,” according to the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).
Afterward, Patrick lambasted those who remained seated during the invocation, claiming their actions showed disrespect to the Texas Senate.
“If you don’t stand for the invocation, I’ll have you removed,” he added, according to the FFRF. “We have asked you to stand. I’ve never seen a gallery ever have any members in my 17 years of people who refused to stand for the invocation. It will not be tolerated.”
As could be expected, the FFRF fired off a letter explaining the clear cut language in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits government officials from compelling symbolic acts of faith. The group also called out Patrick — who purports to be a champion of religious liberty
for walking out during the Texas Senate’s first Muslim invocation in 2007, telling the media that staying put would have made it appear he gave an “endorsement” of the prayer.
The FFRF should be applauded for calling out Patrick for being the assclown he is, but there’s every reason to suspect their complaint will go ignored.
Patrick’s repeatedly demonstrated that he couldn’t be bothered to understand what’s in the Constitution, much less show it a modicum of respect. Not when there’s grandstanding to do in the name of appeasing the Lone Star State’s most backward and bigoted voters. —
Sanford Nowlin
YOU SAID IT!
“The end of this outbreak does not mean the threat of measles is over.”
TexasDepartmentofStateHealthServicesinan announcement that the state’s worst measles outbreak in more than three decades has officiallyrunitscourse.
San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has, at least for the moment, dropped her proposal to change how City Council members bring up policy proposals for votes. Jones’ plan faced fierce blowback from members of the deliberative body, several of whom filed a memo with the city clerk’s office demanding a meeting about the proposed change. Jones wrote to colleagues last Thursday that the council will instead stick with a process established under former Mayor Ron Nirenberg .
San Antonio police last week arrested Marcos Olvera, 24, for allegedly threatening the life of Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones over her request to pause negotiations for a new Spurs arena.
SAPD officials said officers arrested Olvera after he allegedly tweeted “we need to kill the mayor” during a discussion on social media platform X. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
There may be good news for embattled Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife Imelda in their federal bribery case. Following a memo from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi narrowing the enforcement of laws regarding foreign lobbying, a federal judge appeared poised to dismiss two of the charges the Cuellars face for allegedly accepting $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank. The couple currently face 14 federal charges in total. — Abe Asher
WIkimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
Exceeding Limits
Feds demand Ken Paxton's Senate campaign explain more than 100 potentially illegal contributions
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
Federal regulators are asking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate Campaign to explain or return roughly $658,000 in political contributions that appear to violate federal law.
The Aug. 17 letter from the Federal Election Commission gives the Ken Paxton for Senate campaign a little more than a month to justify five pages worth of second-quarter contributions that — as recorded in its paperwork — exceed federal limits on how much individuals donors can contribute.
Under federal law, individuals are barred from making contributions to a candidate that exceed $3,500 per election. Yet the FEC letter identifies more than 100 contributions to the Republican’s Senate campaign that exceed the limit — many by thousands of dollars. Among the contributions called into question is one from former state lawmaker, Texas Tech chancellor and AT&T executive John Montford, who donated $7,000 to Paxton’s Senate campaign during the quarter.
The FEC letter also asks the Paxton campaign and its treasurer, John Plishka, to offer more details about contributions from five businesses listed in its second-quarter filings as limited liability companies, or LLCs. Under federal law, LLCs may only donate to campaigns if the IRS considers them to be organized as partnerships rather than corporations.
The Current reached out to the Paxton campaign for comment early Monday afternoon but received no response by press time.
The FEC letter gives Plishka until Sept. 22 to either explain the contributions, return them or refile the campaign’s paperwork so they’re correctly accounted for.
“Failure to adequately respond by the response date noted above could result in an audit or enforcement action,” the letter states.
“Although the Commission may take further legal action concerning the acceptance of prohibited contributions, your prompt action to refund the prohibited amount will be taken into consideration,” the FEC also warns.
FEC letters asking campaigns to explain their filings aren’t uncommon, but this one includes an unusually long list of questionable contributions, campaign finance experts note. What’s more, it comes as questions about corruption and Paxton’s political and business ethics swirl around the campaign.
During his tenure as Attorney General, Paxton was impeached by the Texas House over allegations of bribery and abuse of office, although he was later acquitted by the state Senate. Further, Paxton agreed in March to settle a yearslong securities-fraud case, and in April,
a Travis County district judge awarded $6.6 million to four of the AG’s former aides, who said he improperly fired them after they reported his conduct to the FBI.
Paxton’s Republican primary rival, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, has so far shown a willingness to bring up corruption concerns. While the FEC letter may not prove as powerful a weapon as an impeachment or court judgment, political experts said it could figure into a larger campaign.
“Cornyn will try to make as much hay as possible with this,” University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor said of the letter.
Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said red flags in Paxton’s second-quarter filing likely stem from the AG being accustomed to Texas campaign finance rules, which include no upper limits on individual contributions. The FEC letter could prove a potential liability if Cornyn or another Paxton rival can figure out how to effectively weaponize it, the professor added.
“In politics, it’s rarely what you did but what your opponent makes of it,” Jillson said.
Even so, both Taylor and Jillson said corruption allegations directed at Paxton are unlikely to hold much weight with GOP primary voters, who seem eager to overlook the MAGA loyalist’s political baggage in favor of his proximity to Trump and his similar brand of bare-knuckle politics.
It’s also open to question what potential penalties Paxton would even face from the FEC, which has been effectively neutered by Trump.
The independent agency no longer has the minimum number of members to carry out enforcement actions and other business key to its mission. Trump made the unprecedented move in February of firing one of the FEC’s Democratic appointees, and a Republican on the commission who resigned hasn’t been replaced.
WIkimedia Commons Gage Skidmore
Dismal Data
New numbers show Trump's tariffs, mass deportations taking a toll
on the Texas economy
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
Agrowing number of signs suggest Trump’s tariff tantrums and mass deportation roundups are delivering a bruising one-two punch to the Texas economy.
Numbers released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas show the Lone Star State faces slipping job growth, declining construction starts and rising inflation. All signs its economic engine is sputtering. And all at least partially tied to the White House’s policies.
The Dallas Fed’s bleak analysis arrives as the national Consumer Price Index jumped 3.1% year-over-year in July, the
steepest rise in five months, and as the Labor Department said Thursday that wholesale inflation rose 0.9% from the prior month, its largest leap in more than three years.
“The bottom line is that there are early warning signs in the data that economic harm in the form of employment losses and higher prices are happening,” University of New Hampshire economic researcher Michael Ettlinger said of the deluge of dismal numbers.
The trends pile up as the Trump administration has slapped massive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and levied penalties on most goods entering the country. The administration also is undertaking the most aggressive immigration crackdown in recent history.
Economists warn the Lone Star State will be among those hardest as Trump’s moves ripple through the economy. Texas is one of the top states for international trade, and it also has one of the largest percentages of undocumented immigrants in its population and workforce.
Texas’ June employment dropped 1.3% from the month before, according to the Dallas Fed’s report, and job growth since the start of the year has slowed to 1.8%. While that’s higher than the national
rate of 0.7%, it’s off considerably from the state’s 2.5% increase in May.
Texas employers surveyed by the Dallas Fed said they’re enduring workforce disruptions from the White House’s immigration policy. Those shakeups come as businesses, worried about uncertain economic conditions, slow hiring and try to hang onto the positions they have, according to economists.
“If deportations continue at current levels or further accelerate, we expect ... the data will increasingly reflect economic injury such as slowdowns in economic growth, higher unemployment rates, declines in business formation, increases in business failures and broadly rising prices,” Ettlinger said. “As has been seen in past mass deportation episodes in American history, these policies damage the wellbeing of all Americans, not just the wellbeing of its noncitizen residents.”
Texas’ construction contract values plummeted 26% from a January peak, and the housing market has dropped 7% since January, according to the Dallas Fed.
The Fed’s report cites an analysis by the Association of General Contractors of America indicating that uncertainty around Trump’s trade policies is leading companies to cancel or delay new projects.
Michelle Schulz, founder and managing partner of Schulz Trade Law PLLC in Dallas, attributes much of that slowdown to the president’s trade polices.
“The feedback we’re getting from international companies in Texas is that we’re making it extremely hard to justify making more investment here,” she said. At the same time, Texas’ consumer price index jumped in May after declining for most of 2024 and the beginning of this year, the Dallas Fed also reports. The core consumer price index — a number that factors out volatile food and energy prices — was up 1.1% for the month.
The report notes that inflation likely hasn’t risen more quickly because businesses have decided to eat some of the cost of tariffs rather than raise consumer prices. That delay is likely coming to an end, researchers noted.
“I do expect things will get worse,” Schulz said. “It’s been a slow trickledown since April, but we’re starting to see more companies pass on price increases as they run out of inventory.”
She added: “I see prices going up and imports going down.”
Shutterstock Brian Jason
HOW TO ENTER AND RULES:
1. Design a flash art tattoo using the voodoo ranger icon
2. Follow @voodooranger and @newbelgium_texas
3. Post your design on your instagram feed and tag #inkmethis
4. Design submissions will end on august 31, 2025 (stories don’t count, only feed posts and reels)
5. Winners will be announced on september 13, 2025, through @newbelgium_texas instagram handle
Conspiracy theories and ignorance threaten our ability to respond to a COVID surge
BY KEVIN SANCHEZ
Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Every day for at least the next month or two, hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents will contract a highly contagious pathogen officially named “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” — or SARS-CoV-2, for short.
Using data from sewage-monitoring sites, infectious disease modeler James Weiland has accurately forecast wave after wave of COVID-19 surges, region by region, for the better part of the novel virus’s existence. But one doesn’t need a PhD in biomedical engineering to notice when the cough medicine shelf at the local pharmacy is suddenly empty.
As of Aug. 11, nearly a third of COVID tests performed at Texas urgent care clinics came back positive. And right as kids are heading back to school.
An awful lot of people are feeling miserable or are about to be. And if you recently emerged from a half-decade-long coma, you might wonder why more of us don’t seem interested in lessening the predictable outcome.
After all, the intervening years have proven that COVID is far from “just a cold.” Of those who catch the virus — that is, damn near everybody — “approximately 13% will develop new persistent symptoms lasting three months or longer,” according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Those afflicted reported “worse rates of returning to full-time work” and “worse overall productivity, general activity impairment, and financial outcomes,” underscoring the “persistent and debilitat-
ing nature” of long COVID, according to an investigation the journal published Aug. 12.
Indeed, a Wall Street Journal feature last year detailed how COVID knocked at least one million Americans out of the labor force. But good luck trying to secure workers’ compensation for brain fog or incessant fatigue.
And when epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina sensibly recommended that we “consider wearing a mask in crowded indoor spaces, especially places like airports,” as she did recently in her newsletter, fewer and fewer of us seem willing to listen. This despite extensive meta-reviews by the journal Clinical Microbiology a summer ago and the British Journal of Medicine earlier this year confirming the superiority of snug-fitting N95s to cloth or surgical masks and definitively supporting their effectiveness at reducing community transmission.
However, some readers — assuming they have slogged this far down, might respond by sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “La La La.”
When a medical news account on social media shares a post announcing that COVID can awaken breast cancer cells in the lungs, for example, the laugh-reactionaries in the comments cry out in virtual unison, “It’s the jab!” Few bother to click on the study, which juxtaposed cancer rates among those who recovered from COVID
in the pandemic’s first year, well before the mass introduction of vaccines, with cancerous samples taken from COVID-infected laboratory mice.
Ten percent of U.S. adults think the Earth is flat, according to a University of New Hampshire survey released this month, while 11% disagree that humans are raising levels of carbon dioxide or that vaccines have been mostly beneficial. If they were safely relegated to the status of prestigious guests on The Joe Rogan Experience, that would be one thing.
Unfortunately, MAGA hats are lined with tinfoil. Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled $500 million in grants for mRNA vaccine development — a decision Dr. Larry Schlesinger, president of the Texas Biomedical Research institute, said “will cost lives.” Jerome Adams, the surgeon general during the first Trump administration, condemned RFK’s move even more candidly.
“People are going to die because we’re cutting short funding for this technology,” Adams told CBS’s Face The Nation
Predictably, Fox News failed to cover Adams’ remarks, despite the Combover-inChief personally nominating and appointing him in 2017.
For what it’s worth, the CDC, even under the directorship of Trump’s non-doctor RFK-approved appointee, still recommends COVID vaccines for adults ages 18 years and
older, especially those who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, senior citizens and those who have yet to receive one.
But at over $200 bucks a pop for uninsured folks, who can afford one?
What ever-so-briefly appeared to be a triumph of science and global solidarity has now become a “story of Covid normalization,” to quote Julia Doubleday, a journalist who’s been homebound since 2023 thanks to long COVID.
“It’s impossible to conduct a public health response of one,” she told podcaster Briahna Joy Gray last September.
Tragically, though, it’s not impossible to conduct a terrorist attack of one.
Two weeks ago, a vaccine skeptic was arrested on charges that he fired 200 rounds at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, shattering 150 windows and slaying a 33-year-old peace officer who’d graduated from the police academy in March.
“To extend empathy and then be met with bullets feels demoralizing, to put it mildly,” epidemiologist Jetelina wrote through tears the following Sunday.
Tens of millions hospitalized due to COVID, millions left disabled and we can add Officer David Rose’s body to the over one million dead — another victim of ignorance and solipsism.
ONGOING
SELF-GUIDED BRACKENRIDGE PARK ART TOURS
Walking through what the Brackenridge Park Conservancy calls “the most culturally significant park in the U.S.” can feel like a trip back in time. The greenspace features range from the ruins of an old bathhouse-turned-playscape by the river bend to the Sunken Garden Theater — sites that can feel as mysterious and ancient as those left behind by the Aztecs or Romans. With a free, self-guided walking tour of the park’s notable art installations, the conservancy is bringing this history to life. Using the special map and guide on the organization’s website, participants can run their hands over famed Mexican-born artist Dionicio Rodriguez’s functional Faux Bois sculptures, which remarkably look and feel like natural wood but are actually crafted from concrete. They can also marvel at the 8-foot tall, 14-foot-long Italian marble lion sculpted by Louis Rodriguez at Lions Field. Those wanting to bring Brackenridge’s resilient history to life can contact the conservancy via phone or its website. Free, 5 a.m.-11 p.m., Brackenridge Park, 3700 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 826-1412, brackenridgepark.org. — Dean Zach
SAT | 08.23
FILM
SEX WORK: IT’S JUST A JOB
Sex work, a consensual exchange of sexual services between adults for compensation, has existed across human history. Around the world, advocates are working to reframe it not as a moral debate but an issue involving labor rights, public health and social justice. Yet in reality, sex workers — primarily women, transgender people and people of color — still face discrimination, exploitation, harassment and abuse from law enforcement. The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, ACT 4 SA and The Pride Center SA are joining forces to present a screening of Sex Work: It’s Just a Job, a 56-minute documentary by Hunter College professor, filmmaker and activist Tami Kashia Gold. The film shifts the conversation around the profession to focus on issues of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia that drive law enforcement to target and exploit sex workers. The goal is to explore the decriminalization of sex work, to reframe sex work as a social justice issue and create a safe space for sex workers to organize in San Antonio. A conversation with community leaders, activists and former sex workers will follow. Free, 7 p.m., Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, 922 San Pedro Ave., (210) 228-0201, esperanzacenter.org. — Becky Hardin
THU | 08.21 + TUE | 08.26
SPECIAL EVENT
PATIO & PEARLS AND CLAY & CUISINE
San Antonio restaurant Clementine is closing out the summer with a pair of special events. On Thursday, Aug. 21, Patio & Pearls transforms the restaurant’s outdoor dining area into a laid-back oyster bar, complete with endless pours of wine and the smooth sounds of Chris Guerro. Restaurant staff will shuck fresh oysters to order, making for an elegant midweek wind-down. Meanwhile, Clay & Cuisine the following Tuesday is a feast both for diners’ palates and pantries. Guests will savor a $105 three-course prix fixe dinner from Clementine’s award-winning chefs — think white mushroom salad and squid ink angel hair pasta with Texas crab — then take home a handcrafted ceramic bowl by local artist Jesselyn Gordon. Prices vary, 7-9 p.m. Aug. 21 and 5-9 p.m. Aug. 26, 2195 NW Military Highway, (210) 503-5121, clementine-sa.com. — Kat Stinson
Scott Heins
@Jesselyn GordonClay&Cuisine
Courtesy Photo Brackenridge Park Conservency
FLAME & FORM OPEN HOUSE
As longtime instructors in the metals department at UTSA Southwest, formerly the Southwest School of Art, Laura Quiñones and Alejandra Salinas Pérez have fostered the talents of many aspiring jewelry artists. While both maintain strong ties to the school’s community education program, they have teamed up to bridge a creative gap with Flame & Form — a Pearl-adjacent space that promises to place “jewelry, workshops and good vibes all under one roof.” An exciting development for the local metalsmithing community, the new venture follows an approachable model that complements structured classes with make-and-take events, “date nights” and open lab sessions — a game changer for experienced makers without home studios. In addition to soldering torches, a hydraulic press, jewelry benches and a dedicated enameling room, Flame & Form includes a gallery space and shop that will showcase the work of Quiñones among other local artists. “We’re hoping to have shows at the end of every semester so that people see the work that’s being made by the community — because right now, it’s not really shown,” Pérez told the Current. In keeping with that supportive spirit, Quiñones plans to mentor students on skills that go beyond metalsmithing techniques — including submitting work to exhibitions, staging pop-ups and applying to juried events including Fiesta Arts Fair. “Nobody teaches you the suffering of applications, photographing and displaying your work, or even just approaching a customer,” Quiñones said. “Some of us artists don’t do numbers. We like being in the studio, creating and making. But what do you do with all this stuff that you made?” Echoing the importance of marketing and other practical conundrums, Pérez added, “There hasn’t been a class in a long time that goes over all of those things — even pricing your work. If you’ve never put up a tent or a table or set up for a craft show, you’re thrown in the pool — and there’s a lot that can go wrong.” Before Flame & Form kicks into gear with the inaugural classes Color on Metal, Unlock the Power of the Press, Creative Metalsmithing and Back to the Bench, Quiñones and Pérez will welcome the community for an open house complete with light bites and a vintage Vespa wine bar provided by MotoVino. Free, 3-7 p.m., Flame & Form Metals Studio & Gallery, 774 E. Locust St., flame-formstudio.com. — Bryan Rindfuss
MON | 08.25 SPECIAL
GRAPHIC NOVEL BOOK CLUB
FRI | 08.29
SPECIAL EVENT
GROWN-UP SUMMER CAMP
A “third space” is usually defined as a place set apart from home, school or work where one feels a sense of belonging and interacts in the spirit of rebellion with people otherwise might not have met. The San Antonio Public Library provides an array of these so-called third spaces via its community book clubs, ranging from the paranormal romance-themed Spellbound to the Leadership Evening Book Club, all of which are open to those with an appreciation for the written word. SAPL’s Graphic Novel Book Club, which meets on the final Monday of the month, features ND Stevenson’s Nimona. Adapted into a 2023 Netflix film of the same name, the book follows the shape-shifting title character, who joins forces with a disgraced knight to take down the tyrannical Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics. Dark magic, queerness and rebellion abound — what’s not to love? The Graphic Novel Book Club will feature not just spirited discussion but also activities related to the literary art form. Free, 6 p.m., Central Library, 600 Soledad St., (210) 207-2500, mysapl.org. — DZ
Grown-up gatherings need not be limited to insurance seminars or work happy hours — especially since so many of us have genuinely nostalgic feelings about days spent at summer camp. To that end — and before summer officially winds to a close — San Antonio Parks & Recreation invites adults, including seniors, to Lions Field to relive the carefree joys of childhood day camp, no bug spray required. Expect lighthearted games, creative crafts, refreshments and plenty of laughs with new and familiar faces. This free program is open to members of the Lions Field Adult & Senior Center. Membership is free, by the way. Free, 1-3 p.m.,
Lions Field Adult & Senior Center, 2809 Broadway, (210) 207-5380, sanantonio.gov. — KS
Courtesy Photo Flame & Form
Courtesy Photo San Antonio Parks
Shutterstock / jirawat phueksriphan
FRI | 08.29SUN | 01.04.26 VISUAL ART
LARRY BELL: IMPROVISATIONS
Finish Fetish — a West Coast art movement that originated in the late ’60s in and around Los Angeles — evolved in an era when synthetic materials were manipulated to capture the essence of natural phenomena, such as the glimmer of sunlight on the Pacific Ocean at twilight. Instead of picking up a paint brush, these artists used pearlescent finishes, resin, lacquer, Plexiglas and ultra-thin metallic and plastic film to transform static forms into furtive objects of beauty and desire. Larry Bell, along with fellow art world juggernauts John McCracken and Ed Ruscha, put this movement — and arguably the ’60s-’70s West Coast school — on the post-modern map. Larry Bell: Improvisations, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, includes 50 years of Bell’s oeuvre in a multitude of genres. The exhibition includes something to dazzle esthetes of all ages. $22 general admission and free for children 12 and under, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday and Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, San Antonio Museum of Art, 200 West Jones, (210) 978-8100, samuseum.org. — Anjali Gupta
FRI | 08.29 - FRI | 09.14
THEATER
DON’T TALK TO THE ACTORS
The title of the play Don’t Talk to the Actors by Tom Duzick evokes the adage “don’t feed the animals,” and for good reason. The plot centers around greenhorn playwright Jerry Przpezniak and his fiancée as they try to navigate New York City’s hectic theater scene and its perilous humans. Przpezniak’s latest play is slated to feature on Broadway, but plans go awry when the cast and crew resort to manipulation, diva-like behavior and chaotic abandon to get whatever they want. This backstage comedy incites non-stop laughter as the naïve couple encounter outlandish characters and head-scratching dilemmas all too common in the ego-driven world of professional theater. $24 adults, $22 seniors and $20 military and first responders, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, Boerne Community Theater, 907 E. Blanco Road, Boerne, (830) 249-9166, boernetheater.org. — Rae Drady
SUN | 08.30 - MON | 08.31 THEATRE
BROKEN GLASS
Jahi Osaze’s original play Broken Glass — not to be confused with the 1994 Arthur Miller piece of the same name — is a gripping stage drama that peels back the layers of a woman’s life shattered by childhood trauma. As memories resurface and emotions boil over, the audience is taken on a powerful journey of suffering, resilience and redemption. Raw honesty and unforgettable portrayals encourage the viewer’s own inner confrontations and catharsis. More than just a piece of theater, Broken Glass is an emotional experience that will create discourse long after the curtain falls. $20, 5 p.m., Woodlawn Pointe Center for Community, 702 Donaldson Ave., (726) 500-2448, theliberationcentersa.org. — RD
Larry Bell Studio, Courtesy of the Sarlo Collection
Courtesey Bourne Community Theater
Unsplash / Katelyn G
The Wizard of Oz in a Graveyard
San Antonio illustrator John Picacio, bestseller Leigh Bardugo release kids’ book exploring grief, Día de los Muertos tradition
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
The new children’s book The Invisible Parade brings together two luminaries of science fiction and fantasy: San Antonio-based illustrator John Picacio, who’s won both the World Fantasy and Hugo Awards, and bestselling author Leigh Bardugo, the LA-based author of the Grishaverse novels.
Released by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, The Invisible Parade follows a girl named Cala, who isn’t eager to participate in her family’s Día de los Muertos celebrations because she’s still too pained by the loss of her grandfather. On the way to the cemetery, she encounters the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who guide her on an adventure through which she discovers her own bravery and ability to process grief.
Picacio, who’s Mexican American, pitched the idea for the book to Bardugo nearly a decade ago by describing it as The Wizard of Oz set in a graveyard. Picacio’s vibrant artwork and Bardugo’s riveting prose make the book not just an exploration of Latinx culture and personal growth but a journey full of imagination and wonder.
The pair’s promotional tour for The Invisible Parade will come to San Antonio on Saturday, Aug. 30. The event, sponsored by Nowhere Bookstore, will take place at Texas Public Radio’s downtown headquarters. Picacio and Bardugo will discuss The Invisible Parade and sign copies. The admission price includes a copy of the book. The following interview with the pair was edited for length and clarity.
The book’s Día de los Muertos theme will be familiar to San Antonio readers, but as you tour the book, are you finding that those in other places are also familiar, or at least intrigued and want to know more?
John Picacio: I think the movie Coco probably had a lot to do with making Día de Muertos mainstream. I mean, that might be a really gross overgeneralization—
Leigh Bardugo: I don’t think so. I mean, that’s what Disney does.
JP: Yeah, there you go. Book of Life was another film that came out — it was by a guy named Jorge Gutiérrez — and I think that had some effect as well. But I want to say this: those are almost a decade old at this point. So, I definitely felt, for myself — I think Leigh felt this way, too — that we weren’t interested in being Coco Jr. We weren’t interested in being Book of Life Part II or doing anything that was inspired by those things. But I think those did help to make the holiday more mainstream. So, the book’s not out yet, but when I’m out there starting to do this early publicity, I’m seeing people receptive to the imagery. But what I’m very, very pleased to see is that we’re blowing people’s minds a bit, because they’re not used to seeing the Día de Muertos imagery the way Leigh and I have presented it in this story.
And that’s very encouraging to me, because I am very familiar with this holiday, and I think San Antonio will be very familiar with it. And there are icons that we are definitely paying tribute to within our story. But let’s face it, I think Mexican American culture is infinite. I am Mexican American, and I love where I come from, but I want to see where we’re going, and I want to help to present paths for where we’re going in terms of how we visualize ourselves, how we imagine ourselves. And Leigh was my accom-
plice in this mission, and I think we’re doing something different and engaging. But we won’t know until the people take it into their hands and their hearts — and that’s still coming.
LB: I think the iconography is quite familiar to a lot of people at this point, but I think that the meaning of the holiday and the way it might relate to the way they’re experiencing life, or loss, or grief is something I hope we can open more of a door to.
And I think, too, there are multiple points of entry for people who come to this story. They might be looking for an adventure. They might be looking for a way to talk about loss with somebody who experienced it, or they might be experiencing loss themselves. They might be trying to find a way to talk about grief with a child, or they might have a friend who’s their own age in their own peer group who they want to discuss it with. And my hope is that the book will have a lot of different doorways that people can walk through to access that story.
I know the picture-book concept for this work has been part of the plan all along, but I have seen adult picture books, and some could argue graphic novels are picture books of a sort. At what point did you settle on the idea this should be aimed at young readers? Why
arts
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Courtesy Image John Picacio
Courtesy Image John Picacio
arts
was that important?
JP: It was decided the moment it came into my head, and that’s the honest answer. I have stories in my head, and I think they come in different shapes. And I knew that I had the beats for this thing and that it should be a picture book because it was a simple story, and I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone, all the way down to the youngest reader. So, it was going to be a picture book.
Now, to psychoanalyze that, I haven’t gotten there yet as far as wondering why. I think maybe part of it is my kid. At that point, I was dad to a 6-year-old daughter. I think that’s about the closest I’ve come to saying, “Why would I have done a picture book at this time in my life?”
But I would say something else that I knew pretty early on. I wanted Leigh to do it with me because I am a fan of her work. I buy her books on the first day of release, every single one of them. I love the way she writes. I love the way she thinks. I laugh when I’m around her, and I just thought, “She’s going to have a sensibility that will bring something to this.” I liked also that she wasn’t Mexican American, and I thought that that would, in some ways, break some new ground that some people might not be comfortable with. So, those were some early decisions I made, and we’ll see how many of them turn out right, but that one I know I got right.
LB: Thank you, John. For me, I had been toying with the idea of a picture book about grief, because I wanted to find a way to help parents, or friends, or families talk about something that we don’t talk about often. My experience in grieving the loss of my father was that things were very noisy for a while, and then they got very quiet. And it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because they don’t know the right thing to say. Frequently, when we don’t know the right thing to say, we end up saying nothing and leaving people isolated at a time when they need community the most. So, I had been toying with this, but I could not find the right way into the story. And then John came to me with this, and I was like, “Oh, of course, it’s an adventure.” It’s structured as a fairy tale of a girl who’s going on this journey and has this lesson to learn before she can reconnect with the living and reconnect with our experience of appetite, joy, happiness. And that, for me, resonated
very powerfully.
It seems like there’s a lot of universality in the theme. Do you hope that will help readers understand that even though we, as humans, have different traditions, different iconography, different ways of looking at the world, we are united in dealing with death and loss?
JP: Absolutely. And I think part of what I saw with some of these larger mainstream presentations of Día de Muertos, such as Coco and Book of Life, is they were successful on a lot of levels, but there was still a sense of, I don’t know, maybe class worship that I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. I wanted something that was a little more about all of us, and I wanted something that would hopefully make people who aren’t Mexican or Mexican American realize that we’re not so much the other as they might think, that we’re more like them than they might imagine.
And I think the way Mexican culture embraces death in order to celebrate life very vigorously, and on a daily basis, that’s the way we process grief — and it’s not something that all cultures handle the same way. So, if we were to present a story that could help people who weren’t Mexican or Mexican American process grief, maybe that would be something that could help bridge some gaps.
LB: I think the point I would want to make is this: how does the culture welcome people into it? We didn’t set out to make people eat their vegetables, right? This is not about like, “Oh, take your medicine. Learn about this.” We wanted to take people on a real adventure and invite them in.
We work in different fields in the art, but we’re both keenly aware of the way art has been flattening because of social media, because of AI, and we wanted to push against that. This book is weird. We’re weird. And the book is, itself, strange, and it doesn’t necessarily slot into an easy category, but I think it has a lot of heart in it, and it’s different from anything else out there. So, no matter how people choose to embrace it or reject it, we made the thing we wanted to make.
And that, for me, is a powerful thing at a time when I’m not sure how much room there is for artists making what they want to make.
Speaking of things being flattened, it does feel sometimes that when art invokes the iconography of Día de los Muertos, it’s the most familiar tropes. It’s the sugar skulls and the calavera makeup and that sort of thing. The art in this book is distinct from that. How delicately did both of you tread as you tried to make sure you honored traditions but put your own stamp on the presentation and ideas?
JB: I didn’t feel like I had to handle it delicately, at all. Really, Leigh and I got to play in the sandbox together, and she had some ideas about how she wanted to present certain icons. And those conversations did influence the way I wanted to process the look of some of these characters and tell about our history and our social values — and also the aesthetic of some of these characters. For instance, there’s a reference in one of the major illustrations to the San Antonio Chili Queens. There are some deep holes when it comes to Mexican American history, and our social values, and where we came from. I don’t expect everybody to fully understand these things, but I hope what we’re doing hits people emotionally as opposed to just intellectually.
And if we hit them in the heart, may-
LEIGH BARDUGO AND JOHN PICACIO PRESENT THE INVISIBLE PARADE
be, at some point, maybe want to take it a little deeper to understand, “Well, why did you do this?” And maybe they start to make some connections to things that maybe they wouldn’t have seen before. I’m talking about people both within the culture and outside of it. There are a lot of references that are baked into these characters, but I wasn’t really looking for an Easter egg hunt. I was looking more to try to hit people in the heart, and I think that’s what Leigh and I both do. … We’re looking for how we can make people feel like this is a story they can connect with.
LB: I think we both feel that tradition is really important. It can be very grounding, and it’s why those traditions are built into Cala’s experience with her family, but we also wanted to find ways for Cala’s story to be hers, to belong to her. So when people read this, they felt like they are participating in it with her, and it isn’t just a walk through a museum display. This is about her journey when she leaves our ordinary world and she enters that cemetery.
For John, this was The Wizard of Oz moment. This is when Cala starts to come back into the illustrations, but it’s when Cala begins to reconnect with the living by entering the world of the dead. We wanted our story to belong to us and to belong to her. And I think for readers to be able to connect with it, it needed to have a little bit of audacity.
$29.49, 2-4:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 30, Texas Public Radio, 321 W. Commerce St., (210) 640-7260 nowherebookshop.com/event/leigh-bardugo-and-john-picacio-present-invisible-parade
Courtesy Image John Picacio
Thank You, Horror Weapons succeeds as both a
thrill ride and something deeper
BY JARED RASIC
My whole life, people have made fun of me for my deep and abiding love of horror movies.
When I was a kid, running around excited, trying to explain the plot of Evil Dead II to my family, they would not only question what kind of people come up with such disturbing ideas, but what kind of kid was so enraptured by them?
I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain that it wasn’t the gore and disturbing ideas that I was so in love with, it was that being genuinely scared out of my wits made me feel breathtakingly, wholly alive.
As a middle schooler, my oldest brother — a bigger fan of horror than I will ever be — ordered a rare and expensive Michael Myers mask out of a catalog. Once it arrived, he also bought coveralls to complete the costume.
So, for a dark summer or two of my childhood, when most kids were going swimming with friends or riding their bikes across the rural countryside, I was stalked around my yard by the Shape, complete with deafening silence and a real butcher knife. Is this why I’m so weird as an adult? Most likely.
At least that’s what my therapist tells me. Running around a dozen acres, hiding from my brother the serial killer was terrifying, but also life-affirming in a way that’s hard to quantify. When I see a horror movie that fills me with dread or bombards me with imagery that chills me to my bones, I don’t just get an endorphin rush of fear but also the sweet kiss of nostalgia that reminds me that being scared has been a way of life for me as long as I can remember.
Regardless of how connected I am on an almost cellular level to horror movies, that’s not the only reason why, as a genre, I find them so remarkable. Horror has an elasticity to it that other genres don’t come close to achieving.
Some of the best new horror releases of the century have already come out in 2025, and to describe them is to examine how dissimilar and expansive they are as pieces of writing and visual art.
Sinners is a bloody and unapologetically horny vampire movie that sheds light on the Jim Crow South and brings the real American monsters kicking and screaming
into the light. Together is a gooey, hilarious and disturbing metaphor for codependent and toxic relationships that manages to be frightening and gut-bustingly funny, sometimes in the same scene. Bring Her Back unpacks trauma and grief as a malevolent force of unpredictable nature, featuring an Oscar-worthy performance by Sally Hawkins and a heart-rending ending I haven’t stopped thinking about for months. Or there’s the allegory for aging in The Rule of Jenny Pen, the generational trauma of Final Destination: Bloodline or the comparison of the nature of evil versus the violence of a hungry predator in Dangerous Animals
Not one of these movies plays like the other.
At the top of this pyramid of new horror stands Weapons, the new film from Zach Cregger, the director of 2022’s Barbarian as well as co-creator of the sketch comedy series The Whitest Kids U’ Know.
Cregger exhibits immense growth as a filmmaker with Weapons, a horror comedy so assured that it feels like the work of a major talent, not someone just releasing his sophomore effort. Go into the film as blind as possible, because watching the unpredictable story unfold is one of the most sublime experiences I have encountered with a movie all year.
All I will say is this: at 2:17 a.m., 17 children from the same third-grade class in a small Pennsylvania town all run out their front doors and disappear. A month later, the town is still grieving and at a loss where the children have gone.
Julia Garner stars as Justine Gandy, the children’s teacher, and Josh Brolin is Archer Graff, the father of one of the missing kids. The two team up like Nancy Drew
and a Hardy Boy to find the kids and solve the mystery.
More than its spookiness or moments of pure terror, Weapons is also drunk on the possibility of cinema and manages to pack every scene with innovative camera movements, compelling characters you want to get to know and a mystery that’s consistently fun and original.
I already want to go back and see it again, spend more time in this world and pay further attention to how Cregger and his team have crafted such a darkly twisted bedtime story that feels like something the Brothers Grimm would find a little too fucked up.
And, sure, you can watch Weapons as a fun and spooky roller coaster ride and nothing more, but Cregger also knows how to — pardon — weaponize the bottomless potential of the horror genre to tell a deeply personal story about loss and grief.
On August 7, 2021, at around 2:30 a.m., Trevor Moore, Cregger’s best friend and co-creator of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, fell from a balcony and died. Sometimes, horror isn’t just how we get scared but how we secretly grieve.
Even if you’re not a diehard horror fanatic, Weapons is an elevated affair without the pretentiousness. It walks a razor-tipped tightrope between exciting entertainment and thought-provoking seriousness — at times both breathtaking and awe-inspiring.
I found myself staring at some of the genuinely insane imagery and was reminded of those months, years ago, running through the fields of my childhood and being stalked by an unknowable, masked serial killer. And, weirdly, I found that comforting.
Thank you, horror movies. You saved me. I owe you one.
screens
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10-Year Reserve
Whiskey Business celebrates milestone birthday with spirited bash at the Witte Museum
BY KAT STINSON
Things are about to get neat, San Antonio.
The 10th Annual Whiskey Business will take place Friday, Aug. 22, at the Witte Museum, raising a glass to a decade of serving up bold bourbons, big flavors and boozy good times.
Presented by the San Antonio Current, the 21-and-up event is celebrating its milestone birthday in style. Expect more than 50 premium whiskeys and other spirits to sample along with a stacked lineup of local restaurants serving signature bites.
Beyond the food and drink, Whiskey Business will offer immersive experiences, photo opportunities, DJs spinning tunes and a headlining set from hometown honky-tonk heroes The Texases, who will bring country hits to life under the stars.
Whether you’re a neat-pour traditionalist, a cocktail connoisseur or just in it for the food and vibes, Whiskey Business offers a chance to sip, savor and celebrate San Antonio’s growing love affair with craft spirits.
Even better? It’s all for a great cause. The event raises money to support the Witte’s mission of showcasing science, nature and culture in South Texas.
What’s pouring this year
Whiskey Business’ featured distillers range from local legends to national standouts. Attendees will be able to taste offerings from Rebecca Creek & TX Ranger, Ranger Creek Whiskey and Beer, Bardstown Bourbon Company, Four Roses, High West Whiskey Double Rye, Ballotin Chocolate Whiskey, Starlight Distillery, Ole Smoky Distillery, Maverick Whiskey, Tequila Corrido, Chapline Distillery, Andalusia Whiskey Co., Johnny Pickles Distillery, Broken Halo Spirits, Mi Campo Reposado, Bending Branch Winery & Distillery, Hotaling & Co. and more. And, yes, there will be plenty of experts on hand. Distillers, brand ambassadors and mixologists will be ready to school imbibers on the finer points of cask strength, rye blends and what makes a bourbon worth sipping slow. The event aims to make new whiskey fans while further enlightening those already well-versed in the spirit’s complexities.
Bites that hit just right
San Antonio’s food scene always shows out for Whiskey Business, and the 2025 edition is no different. Participating restaurants this year will include Whiskey Cake Kitchen & Bar, Los Azulejos, Anacacho Coffee & Cantina, Tu Asador Mexican Steakhouse, Stella Public House, The Meadows Frozen Custard and more mouthwatering names expected to drop soon.
From smoky grilled meats to decadent desserts, every dish is crafted to pair with a pour. The event offers a prime opportunity to get a teaser from some of San Antonio’s best restaurants — all in one venue.
Classic country, cool vibes
For the first time ever, The Texases will headline the event, bringing a high-energy arsenal of country classics straight to the Witte’s lawn. The San Antonio-based act bills itself as “the world’s greatest country band, playing your favorite hits from the ’90s on back.”
Those who remember the summer heat all too well from past Whiskey Business installments take note: this year’s gathering features more indoor space than ever. Think cool air conditioning, comfortable seating and shady spots to enjoy your tipples without melting into the sidewalk.
Multiple ticket options
A limited number of tickets remain at
sawhiskeybusiness.com.
Prices range from $75 to $200 depending on the ticket tier. VIP ticket holders enjoy additional perks including early entry, VIP lounge access, a commemorative Whiskey Business gift, complimentary valet parking, access to a Sipping Sessions seminar and more.
Premium VIP tickets, capped at 50 total, include access to a separate, exclusive dinner experience. All ticket tiers offer unlimited food and drink samplings and access to select Witte Museum exhibits.
$75-$200, 7 p.m. VIP entry and 8 p.m. general admission, Witte Museum, 3801 Broadway, (210) 357-1900, sawhiskeybusiness.com.
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Jaime Monzon
Limited Tickets Remain!
Friday, Aug. 22 | 8 - 11 PM (VIP 7 PM)
BITES
ANACACHO COFFEE & CANTINA, CAKES BY FELCIA, COSMIC CAKERY, FOGO DE CHÃO*, LOS AZULEJOS RESTAURANT, SARI-SARI*, STELLA PUBLIC HOUSE, SUGAR CLOUD COTTON CANDY, THE JERK SHACK, THE MEADOWS ORIGINAL FROZEN CUSTARD FOR HELOTES, TU ASADOR MEXICAN STEAKHOUSE, WHISKEY CAKE KITCHEN & BAR *VIP ONLY.
SIPS
1693 DISTILLERY WHISKEY, AMERICAN HARVEST, ANDALUSIA WHISKEY CO., BALLOTIN CHOCOLATE WHISKEY, BARDSTOWN, BEACH WHISKEY, BROKEN HALO, CHAPLINE DISTILLERY, DON RAMÓN, ELEVACION TEQUILA, ENCHANTED ROCK, FOUR ROSES, HIGH WEST WHISKEY, HOTALING CO., IRON WOLF RANCH, JOHNNY PICKLES DISTILLERY, MAVERICK WHISKEY, MI CAMPO, MILAM & GREENE WHISKEY, NOBLEMEN WINES, OLE SMOKY, RANGER CREEK BREWING & DISTILLING, REBECCA CREEK, STARLIGHT, TANTEO TEQUILA, TEQUILA CORRIDO, TEXAS RANGER, WILLIAM GRANT: BALVENIE + GLENFIDDICH & LUXCO: EZRA BROOKS, REBEL, YELLOWSTONE + PENELOPE, AND MORE!
SIPPING SESSIONS
OAKFIRE RIDGE
LOCATED AT THE AMPITHEATRE STAGE: 7PM-8:15PM THE TEXASES
JOHNNY PICKLES DISTILLERY (SEGUIN, TX) 9:30PM-11PM THE TEXASES
food
It’s Showtime!
Nicosi Dessert Bar serves up a high-end culinary showcase worthy of its ticket price
BY RON BECHTOL
Ihave long envied the license of critics in other fields — literature or cinema, for example — to engage in hyperbolic language.
“A towering work of genius that’s destined to become a classic for the ages,” doesn’t seem to apply to most restaurant experiences, no matter how silky the sauce or sublime the sauté.
Even so, pursuit of just such hyperbole seems to be a driving factor in tasting menus composed of 20 of more courses and that cost more than $500. Such extravagances have become a star-chasing staple around the world — for better or worse.
But rarely is a kitchen with high aspirations so open, the creative process witnessed so directly as at the Pullman Market’s Nicosi Dessert Bar — a location also notable for its focus on desserts.
At the high-end culinary showcase, a 20-seat audience is surrounded by dark curtains and arranged in a U shape around the stage — almost a chapel — that serves as a kitchen-laboratory. The primary presenter becomes a priest-raconteur choreographing and explaining the evening’s progress — a liturgy for the unabashed hedonist.
The menu at Nicosi consists of eight dessert courses, four “bites” and four “mains,” though the difference between them is minimal. The dining spot makes an effort to cover the sensory bases: acid, umami, bitter and sweet — all filtered through a nostalgic lens that for this season summons up summers of sun and memory.
It may seem a broad framework, but it works.
In a dramatic start, our recent experience at Nicosi began with a glassy amber box diners are obliged to shatter with a spoon to get to a nest of spherical “dipping dots” underneath. Don’t let a single shard escape you; the dominant
Price: Pre-paid total per person, including tax and tip: $153.90
What you get: A set menu of eight dessert courses with drink pairings
The lowdown: A part of the Austin-based Emmer & Rye group that’s taken over much of the Pearl, Nicosi is the latest restaurant to open in the Pullman Market food hall. Containing just 20 seats arranged around a fully open cooking stage, the dining spot is unique in its focus on a tasting menu of eight courses consisting solely of desserts. Loosely defined. The inventiveness is dazzling, the drink pairings, both alcoholic and non-, are thoughtful and sometimes inspiring, making the total experience well worth the $150-plus tab. Photos aren’t permitted, so ditch the phone and relax into the evening.
flavor is guava, and it persists throughout. The companion drink, served in a small vessel nestled on ice in a miniature bathtub, is a layered affair: watermelon, guava liqueur, cucumber, clear milk punch. Don’t examine it too hard, just sip and savor.
But do save some for the next course, arriving in a container that evokes split bamboo artfully reinterpreted. The jumble of wave-tossed ingredients includes a beachy foam suggesting piña colada,
ful dried strawflowers standing in, I assume, for glowing coals. There’s a cotton candy-like foam, and it all comes together with unexpected finesse in a few exquisite bites. The paired drink goes further down the Texas backyard rabbit hole with a riff on the Spanish kalimotxo — red wine mixed with cola — built on Big Red and a Texas cabernet blend from William Chris Vineyards. It’s at once barrio tough and speakeasy sophisticated.
One’s ability to willingly suspend disbelief will be truly tested in course four. Is that a side of tuna quivering beneath the chef’s knife? A slab of especially rosy beef? No, it’s actually a slice of watermelon that has undergone several freeze-thaw cycles to densify it by forcing out the moisture. The resulting texture is amazingly meaty. The watermelon’s presentation in an aguachile-like dressing with ponzu, soy, mirin and an enigmatic rhododendron distillate is beautiful, and its pairing with a shatteringly dry fino sherry works perfectly.
More acts and liquid entr’actes followed. Highlights included a strawberry wine-infused Nesquick knockoff fortified with rum and mated with a s’mores-inspired box of crunchy Colombian chocolate encasing a tawny filling conjuring a campfire-toasted marshmallow.
A summer hike proved the metaphor for an imagined PB&J-adjacent reward for getting to the top of the mountain — except there were hints of Spanish peanuts, a chocolate syrup-soaked sponge cake and pearls of blackberry infused with saffron.
Beyond that, an inspiringly paired Sauternes bolstered a dish suggesting a summer’s escape into a refrigerated movie theater: popcorn-infused isle flottante in corn-scented crème anglaise.
gelled cucumber, some macadamia nut flotsam, sponge cake of indeterminate origin, coconut sorbet, pineapple and perhaps other ingredients totally forgotten.
The scene next moves from beach to backyard, and the focus from acid to umami.
Nicosi also stretches the notion of dessert in the form of a large cube of Japanese-inspired Wagyu brisket, marinated and smoked for 12 hours. The shimmering skewer is offered atop a miniature hibachi with color-
And then, each of us bearing a small, black box carrying a deeply bronzed riff on a fortune cookie, we were thrust back out into an all-too-real world, not even 90 minutes after we’d entered. Far from being tedious, the experience seemed short.
Alas, though the cookie was actually worth eating, the hand-written fortune inside was a small step above the ordinary — except this one contained a kernel of truth: “You can and you will.”
Perhaps Nicosi isn’t a towering work of astonishing genius for the ages, but I can call it an exceptional evening for the here and now. So I will.
Robert J. Lerma
NICOSI DESSERT BAR
Cooking Up Conversation
Celebrating with Ohio Crawford of Backyard on Broadway and Dibs Mixers
BY KAT STINSON
Name: Ohio Crawford
Job: Backyard on Broadway co-owner, Dibs Mixers founder
Big Impact: Air Force veteran Ohio
Crawford has quietly put his stamp 0n San Antonio, sprucing up Backyard on Broadway into the family-friendly space it is today and hawking Dibs Mixers, his own brand of cocktail syrups now used by multiple area bars.
Money Quote: “Find your niche. For my syrups, I make flavors that no one else makes — filling a gap in the market. Always identify the need, and make sure the market isn’t oversaturated. As the saying goes, necessity is the father of invention.”
How did you first get into the food industry?
About 10 years ago at the Olive Garden. When I moved to San Antonio in 2017, I worked for Jason Dady. That’s where I got to see the private side of restaurant operations. Almost immediately after Range opened, I moved into the catering and sales department. That shift from employee to leader helped me understand so many different aspects of food and beverage.
You also served in the military. How has that influenced your work?
I spent three years in the Air Force as an EOD tech. It was very technical and operational, which taught me to manage both people and high-pressure
situations. In restaurants, if there are 2,000 people out, you have to manage staff and guests at the same time. That skill came directly from the military.
How did you get involved with Backyard on Broadway?
In 2020, I was consulting — taking my corporate restaurant background to help local businesses become more efficient. That’s how I met my current business partner, who needed help making Backyard on Broadway profitable. He gave me free rein to make changes.
What were your first changes?
The first thing was the staff and culture — putting rules in place and building accountability. Then I worked on drink consistency and upgrading the food from frozen to in-house. Pretty soon, we saw the rowdy crowd fade and more families come in. By 2023, we had a playground, picnic tables, outdoor lighting — more of a friendly environment. And we commissioned a mural by Chris Ramos, which ties in what millen-
nials grew up watching and what kids watch today.
Let’s talk about Dibs. How did that come about?
Dibs officially started Halloween 2023, but it was about a year in the making. I began making syrups in 2021 for restaurants and bars across San Antonio because I was noticing inconsistency in mixers from larger brands. I thought I could help my friends at other restaurants with the syrups I was making, and the side project evolved into a fullfledged brand.
Favorite place to grab a bite in SA?
Mon Thai Bistro. They’ve been around for a long time, they’re consistent and they have amazing sushi.
If you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would it be?
Honestly, I’m happy with where I’m at. The only thing I wish I’d done more of was read frequently!
Courtesy Photo JoMando Cruz
Pogo Across Texas
Photographer Pat Blashill
coming to San Antonio to promote new book about Lone Star State punk
BY STEPHANIE KOITHAN
Photographer Pat Blashill’s work has been published in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Spin and the Village Voice. It’s even been featured on album covers for Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Scratch Acid, Nick Cave and more.
But when Blashill was just starting to explore photography, he was living in Austin, where he stumbled into its first punk club, Raul’s. He likens his early days as a punk photographer to the subculture’s musicians, whose enthusiasm sometimes outpaced their aptitude. That fearless approach made Blashill an
important chronicler of a scene alive with raw energy and defiance, which flourished in response to an environment that was especially conservative — Reagan-era Texas.
Texas’ pressurized environment produced rough diamonds such as Dallas’ Stick Men With Ray Guns, Austin’s Big Boys, Houston’s Mydolls and Killeen’s The Offenders along with San Antonio-born groups such as Hickoids, Butthole Surfers and Heather Leather.
Blashill’s new book Someday All The Adults Will Die! The Birth of Texas Punk, published by UT Press, explores that explosive musical uprising.
Though he now lives in Vienna, Austria, Blashill will be at Southtown art bookstore Embarrassing Shoes to celebrate the book and host a punk storytelling hour at 3 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 24.
Blashill expects special guests at the storytelling event, including The Next’s Ty Gavin, Marching Plague’s Brad Perkins and Scott Stevens, who was the first bass player for the Butthole Surfers.
Tell me about the book.
I did a photo book a few years ago, and in the process of putting that one together, I had made some contacts at UT Press who said they were interested in something more text-
Mbased. I always thought this scene that I was a part of in Austin was really full of life and it was a wild, cool thing to experience, but it took 30 to 45 years to get it down on paper.
And what about the scene was so wild and wonderful to you?
I actually hadn’t really been to very much live music at all when I started going to the first punk club in Austin. I had seen concerts and arena shows, but this was totally different. Like a typical sort of ’70s thing, I went to the auditorium in Austin and saw Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Doobie Brothers and that was great, but you were pretty separate from the band and they were rock stars. I went to Raul’s and started going to punk clubs in Austin and elsewhere, and you’re right there on top of the band. They get offstage and you can go over and talk to them, and that made a big difference. It was more real. And on top of that, people in the bands were doing crazy stuff like dressing in drag, wearing makeup, using props and crazy stuff and singing really terrible, funny things — you know
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The Butthole Surfers clown around in San Antonio.
Pat Blashill
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really sometimes shocking, usually hilarious. And in the case of somebody like the Butthole Surfers really introducing this kind of absurdist, strange theater element to a performance. Some rock stars were doing stuff like that — I suppose David Bowie did — but with the punk bands, you never knew what was going to happen. You go see the Big Boys, and you just never knew what the singer Biscuit or anybody else in the group was going to do, and that was pretty exciting.
I know that the Butthole Surfers had people fucking on stage. What are some of the most extreme examples of this?
Well, that actually I think may have happened only once with the Buttholes, but there was plenty of stuff
besides actual sex going on that was crazy with them. The Buttholes were very theatrical and sort of surreal, and they used really great low-tech tricks like setting a cymbal on fire or fighting with a mannequin that was stuffed with newspaper — you know, a homemade mannequin. Gibby, the singer, would throw out hundreds of these small Xerox copies of roaches. He found a picture of a roach and then made a hundred very small copies of it, or more, and just threw them out into the audience. A San Antonio band that came to Austin a lot was Marching Plague, and the singer would put on a mask and he’d say that he was Reagan Man, and then they’d do a Led Zeppelin song and say they’d written it. Of course, there was the dancing, and the audience was wild and you always
had to be careful. I was knocked over while I was trying to take a picture and there was at least one time where I lost half of my flash to a stage diver. He just jumped off stage and took the bottom half of my flash with him.
So, when were you active in the scene photographing it?
I started [...] going to Raul’s in ’79. That very first night I photographed, but I wasn’t a very good photographer until about ’83 or so.
Did you look easily identifiable as a punk at that time, and did you get messed with?
I did get messed with, but really it was because I wore bright colors or stripes. I’m not sure what it’s like in San Antonio, but in Austin, at UT, the fraternities
MAdriane “Ash” Shown, who tended bar at San Antonio punk club Raw Power, poses for a 1984 photo.
and the sororities are just awful, and the fraternity brothers would pretty much hunt punk rockers for sport. So, I got stuff thrown at me from moving cars and people you know bumping into me and pushing me.
What can you tell me about the San Antonio bands specifically?
The cities are so close that there were several groups that sort of started in San Antonio and then moved over to Austin. Ty Gavin was not originally from San Antonio, but he formed The Next in San Antonio and then moved
Pat Blashill
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to Austin, and The Next were super important. They put out a single that’s a good document of how powerful they could be, but then they didn’t really record too much more than that. They may have been one of the bands that played on the very first night that I went to Raul’s, so in a way it was a San Antonio band that was one of the first punk bands I saw in Texas.
A friend from San Antonio told me the San Antonio bands were especially funny, and I think that kind of fits, because Marching Plague just had a great sense of humor. One of their EPs, the cover is a hand drawing of a giant bat swooping down and biting off Ozzy Osbourne’s head. While I was doing the book I talked to Brad Perkins the drummer and I asked, “Was that because Marching Plague was mad that Ozzy peed on the Alamo?” and he said, “No we thought that was funny, but we also thought you know a bat biting him back would be funny as well.”
The Hickoids were pretty important in Austin and started in San Antonio. They also really fit that idea of San Antonio bands as being the punk jokers in the pack, because Hickoids were hilarious too. And Jeff [Smith, the frontman] has just got one of the best slow, clever smiles. You have to kind of wait a beat and let him get to the punchline out but when he does, it’s going to kill you. And he was typical of a lot of my friends in that scene. We would play with the idea of us as hillbillies, you know inbred-looking, country boys, but it was all smart, creative people, and we were just playing with that shtick.
What do you think makes Texas punk unique from other hotbeds of the movement?
Well, I’ve always thought that a lot of elements came together in Texas to make it happen. You had a lot of smart people, you had cheap rent in some of the cities and you had connections to culture and music that was coming from Los Angeles or New York and other parts of the world [like] England. But I think, really, in Texas the thing that helps to make the music wild is just — it’s so conservative. The state was so conservative then at the dawn of the Reagan era, and there’s so much pressure to conform [...] and to be blonde and Christian and heterosexual. I think in punk rock, people were just reacting against all these very conservative
Mforces with the craziest stuff they could come up with, the most sort of extreme performative art response that they could imagine.
A lot of people tell me the Butthole Surfers’ hit with “Pepper” was a surprise. When you first saw them, did you think, “These guys are gonna be big?”
No, absolutely not. I was as surprised as everybody when they had a hit. I left Austin in 1987 to move to New York. I’d
major label, let alone have a hit. And, incidentally, I mean I hope I don’t hurt anybody’s feelings with this, but I think “Pepper” is just their worst song. I don’t think it’s very interesting at all. I think it sounds like Beck.
Did you spend time with them outside of the clubs?
been seeing punk bands in Austin for about seven or eight years, and when I left, I was pretty sure the Butthole Surfers were the best band on the planet. Their musicianship, their melodies, their craziness. A lot of people saw them as a joke and I didn’t. I thought that their songs were catchy, you could hum them [...] and there was also just so much weirdness and Salvador Dalí and also a lot of Texas in what they were doing. But I never would have thought that they’d get signed to a
Yeah, and actually, that’s from one sort of extended period of time that I was in San Antonio, because that one summer — I think it was in 1984 — I kind of invited myself into their lives because they were in San Antonio at this place called Boss Studios recording their second full-length album, Rembrandt Pussyhorse. And I don’t know if they actually invited me, but they wanted to get Rey Washam from the Big Boys to come in and record with them, and I said I’d give him a ride — and then I just wouldn’t leave. I showed up at the studio and just, like, hung out with them for a couple of days and photographed them, and we went to eat at Taco Cabana, and we slept I think on Paul’s family home’s floor — me and Teresa and King. We all slept for a couple of nights there. So, I was really close to them, and that was pretty interesting, because then you could really see the serious side of them and just how attentive they were to the recording process and very hard workers.
Pat Blashill
Pat Blashill
Left: Hickoids have a hootenanny. Right: San Antonio’s Marching Plague gets the crowd moving.
music
Sweet Homecoming
Catching up with New Braunfels’ Austin Meade ahead of his two-night stand at Whitewater Amphitheater
BY SANFORD NOWLIN
One constant in New Braunfelsbased singer-songwriter Austin Meade’s music is evolution. The son of a Baptist preacher, Meade started playing guitar in church and eventually released the 2014 album Chief of the Sinners, which showcased an Americana-based sound. Over subsequent releases, he’s added crunchy classic hard rock to the mix (2021’s Black Sheep) and simultaneously dabbled in pop and more edgy flavors (2022’s Abstract Art of an Unstable Mind).
Tours opening for big-drawing rock acts including ZZ Top and Godsmack followed, as did an audience that includes fans of both red dirt country and heavy guitar riffs.
Meade’s latest album Almost Famous is due out this fall, and the lead single — also the title track — shows him with one foot in rootsy twang and the other in blue-collar rock. In the song’s self-deprecating lyrics, he calls himself out as a “white-trash dive-bar local favorite” and “front porch rockstar” before deciding he’s “alright with being almost famous.”
Meade and his band will open for Treaty Oak Revival, another band straddling Texas country and harder sounds, at New Braunfels’ Whitewater Amphitheater on Thursday, Aug. 21, and Friday, Aug. 22. The two-night run suggests his days of being almost famous may be on the wane.
We caught up with Meade via phone to talk about his New Braunfels homecoming and the art of creating songs that play well with both rockers and fans of real-deal Texas country.
How does it feel to be playing two nights at Whitewater?
I’m glad to be home. We’ve been touring
the country pretty relentlessly for a couple of years, so it’s nice to have a couple of days where we’re five minutes from my house.
Your music has evolved over the years, running the gamut from Texas country to more of a hard rock sound. How did that transformation come about?
Whenever I was growing up — I went to high school in Brenham, Texas, over there where they make Blue Bell ice cream — we did a lot of going out to buddies’ pastures and house parties and things like that, and everybody was either listening to rap or pop-punk or red dirt country. And a lot of red dirt artists would come play in the small towns where we were at. … So, when I first started, I was just really into the songwriting from the red dirt sound, but I also hadn’t had a lot of experience with guitars, so I didn’t know how to make them sound as big as we’ve figured out how to do lately. And I had a different group of musicians around me that had a different thumbprint on the sound.
But I guess to start it off, I was just really into the songwriting, but I always felt like I was more Tom Petty than Pat Green. … I would also say right around the Black Sheep record … one of my best friends,
who’s been in the band for a while now, came from LA to Austin with a metal band to try to make it. That didn’t work out for them, but it ended up being, honestly, a huge blessing for me. We started diving more and more into a rock sound when we were writing that Black Sheep record. So, the sound started to change. I guess, I started to have more fun with pushing the limits of what I could do.
There’s no shortage of bands playing heavy music, but they’re not always the best at having hooks and melody. It seems like there’s a real attention in your music not just to having riffs but crafting a song.
Right. Pretty much every song that we’ve put out, especially from the Black Sheep record forward, almost all of that starts with either a line I’ve gotten written down on my phone that I felt like was just stuck in my head for days on end. It could just be words that I paired together that I thought were interesting that I’d never heard together, or a play on words, or sometimes it’s simply like a vocal melody that I just can’t stop thinking about in my head. After multiple days of traveling and sound checks and hearing our own other songs at all these shows that we’re
playing, you have so much information in your head, and a lot of times the ones that stick throughout all that, I’m guessing, are going to do the same with other people’s brains too.
What’s more important to you at this point, being able to make a living with music or putting out art that’s a truthful expression?
It’s definitely always the art. Life changes as you get a little older. I’ve got a family now, I’ve got a wife and kids. So I’ve learned to say no to some things that I used to say yes to all the time, as far as leaving the house for six months to do a tour that I’m not going to really come out on top on. Those are things that I’ve had to learn over the last couple of years, but I’ve never once thought about sacrificing any kind of music that I’m going to put out under my name for that. If you start doing that, I just feel like your brand and just your impact on people really becomes cheap, really quick, and folks sniff that out, man.
$65-$128, 8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 21, and Friday, Aug. 22 (sold out), Whitewater Amphitheater, 11860 FM-306, New Braunfels, (830) 964-3800, whitewaterrocks.com.
Courtesy Photo Austin Meade
MAKE A GOOD IMPRESSION
critics’ picks
Wednesday, Aug. 20
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Gillian Welch and her partner-in-harmony David Rawlings have been stunning audiences for more than 20 years now. Despite making Nashville their home base, the pair has eschewed the overproduced glitz of modern country for something far more timeless. Welch has the grace, flow and feel of a dustbowl balladeer. They’re among the best folkies out there, period, making this concert essential for lovers of beautiful and timeless songcraft. $70, 8 p.m., Stable Hall, 307 Pearl Parkway, stablehall.com. — Bill Baird
Thursday, Aug. 21
Modest Mouse, Friko
Emerging from humble origins in Issaquah, Washington, Modest Mouse emerged as one of the foundational indie rock bands of the early 2000s. Best known for the breakout song “Float On” from the 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News, the band did a 20th-anniversary tour for the foundational release last year. Vocalist and rhythm guitarist Isaac Brock remains Modest Mouse’s constant and is known for the leading the group through shows that enchant fans and newcomers alike. $78-$231.30, 8 p.m., Aztec Theatre, 104 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 812-4355, theaztectheatre. com. — Danny Cervantes
Hacienda, The Ripe
Sam Antonio’s Hacienda burst onto the national scene nearly 20 years ago. The group sent its demo to the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who promptly took them under his wing, produced their first album and hired them as his backing band. Comprised of two brothers and a cousin, Hacienda immediately wowed audiences with a garage-rock sound that’s distinctly SA. After many years, the band is still cranking, and it’s still impressive with its throwback sound. The Ripe also mines throwback territory, but theirs has more of a psychedelic edge. San Antonio-raised Jake Garcia — now living in Austin and playing with The Black Angels — started The Ripe with fellow Austin musicians from Amplified Heat and the Nervous Exits. $10, 9 p.m., Lonesome Rose, 2114 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 455-0233, thelonesomerosesa.com. — BB
Saturday, Aug. 23
Tsushimamire, Big Bill
If Tsushimamire aren’t Japanese punk-rock legends, they certainly should be. The all-woman trio has been dishing out slabs of high-energy insanity for more than 25 years with no signs of slowing down. For this special SA gig, Tsushimamire will be joined by Austin favorites Big Bill, who also explore punk but with an emphasis on humor and political confrontation. $10,
8 p.m., Lonesome Rose, 2114 N. St. Mary’s St., (210) 455-0233, thelonesomerosesa.com. — BB
Sunday, Aug. 24
Leaving Time, Keep Jacksonville, Florida’s Leaving Time formed in 2020 while its members were still in other bands. Soon, the group emerged with its own blend of guitars and drums inspired by ’90s-era alt-rock and shoegaze. Last Fall, San Antonio-based Sunday Drive Records released Leaving Time’s latest album, Angel in the Sand The lead single “Burn” gives a great entrée into the sound. Virginia-based openers Keep have a sound inspired by The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins. $21.18, 8 p.m., Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com. — DC
Monday, Aug. 25
210 Jazz Orchestra
There’s nothing quite like watching an actual big band in action, and this 20-piece jazz ensemble puts on a great show, covering modern music and standards alike. Indeed, the young group’s eclecticism helps it stand apart from the crowd of overly reverential jazz historians. These folks bring the fun, and when the show is free — as this one is — who the hell would turn down fun? Free, 8 p.m., Blue Star Brewing Co. , 1414 S Alamo St, #105, bluestarbrewing. com. — BB
Thursday, Aug. 28
Kevin Kaarl
With more than 100 million Spotify streams and millions more likes on YouTube, Kevin Kaarl is a
Fitz & Tantrums
bonafide social media phenomenon. Far from a teen-pop sensation, Kaarl performs an intriguing hybrid of Norteño, indie and folk, which he sings in Spanish. The sky seems to be the limit for Kaarl, who’s recently collaborated with Texas superstar Leon Bridges. $50, 7:30 p.m., Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston St., (210) 2265700, majesticempire.com. — BB
Friday, Aug. 29
Chavela, Favorite Son
Chavela and Favorite Son are two of San Antonio’s best working bands, and for this special show, they’re both releasing singles. Chavela plies its heartfelt brand of folk-soul on “There You Go,” and Favorite Son shows its classic-rock sensibility on “Over The Line.” Also of note for this show is the location — the Ranch Motel, which gives off swanky Marfa vibes right in the heart of Broadway. I guess the days of the Butthole Surfers at Kiddie Park are long gone. But, hey, it’s a good way to support local music, and it’s not every day that you can purchase a pool pass or walk into a “mezcal lounge” at a free show. Free, 7 p.m., Ranch Motel, 3101 Broadway, ranchmotel.com. — BB
Friday, Aug. 29-Monday, Aug. 31
Robert Earl Keen, American Aquarium, Silverada Anyone remember when Robert Earl Keen was going to stop touring and performing publicly? Well, it’s probably a good thing he didn’t take that threat too seriously. REK will play three nights of shows at Floore’s Country Store, a venue so synonymous with Keen it was immortalized in the song “San Antonio Girl” by his college buddy Lyle Lovett. Friday is
billed as the “Homecoming Weekend Show,” Saturday as “A Night of Song and Stories” with friends and Sunday is the fan appreciation day, for which tickets are raffled off. The run comes after a Thursday benefit show at the Whitewater Amphitheater. $40 Friday only, Saturday SOLD OUT, Sunday see website, 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday, John T. Floore’s Country Store, 14492 Old Bandera Road, (210) 695-8827, liveatfloores.com. — DC
Saturday, Aug. 30
Fitz & The Tantrums
Fitz & The Tantrums bring a rare commodity to the stage when they perform live: unabashed joy. The group’s distinctive take on alt-rock has always had a strong undercurrent of soul, no better exemplified than with its first single to go gold, 2010’s “Moneygrabber.” Multiplatinum hits such as “Out of My League” and “Handclap” followed. Sounds like a promising way to get your end-of-the-summer groove on. $42.44-$121.26, 8 p.m., Stable Hall, 307 Pearl Parkway, stablehall.com. — Danny Cervantes
Sunday, Aug. 31
Bomba Estereo, Rawayana Bogotá, Colombia’s Bomba Estereo has been wowing audiences for more than a decade now, including appearances at festivals worldwide at Rosskilde, SXSW, Bonnaroo and more. These days, the group might be best known for their collaboration with Bad Bunny, “Ojitos Lindos,” which has surpassed 1 billion Spotify streams. Yes, billion, with a b. $54.90, 7 p.m., The Espee, 1174 E. Commerce St., (210) 2265700, theespee.com. — BB
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Assistant Project Manager (San Antonio, TX). Oversee multiple projects & manage all aspects of the constructn process. Conduct onsite visits/inspectns & hold meetings with field team, subcontractors & suppliers. Bach in Construction Mgmt, Civil Eng, or rel field. 5 yrs’ exp in constructn project mgmt, incl solid exp in each: commercial concrete constructn; read & interpret constructn drawings & specificatns; prep & manage project budgets, track expenses & ensure cost control; risk mgmt & quality assurance w/in constructn industry; Bluebeam; Textura; Procore; Primavera P6; MS Excel. In depth knowl of: concrete properties, mix designs, curing processes & finish techniques. Excel verbal & written commun skills; strong financ mgmt skills. OSHA 30-hour cert. LEED Green Assoc cert. Must send CV & cvr ltr to Lance Easterby, Greco Structures, LLC, 11000 Equity Dr., Houston, TX 77041 w/in 30 days, ref Job #2024-435.
Licensed Professional Counselor is sought by HIP Healthy Innovative Processes (San Antonio, TX), F/T. Help clients express feelings, explore life issues, & gain self-insight. Guide clients in coping skills & prob-solving. Prfrm crisis interventions to ensure safety. Complete & file paperwork incl. state/fed forms, diagnostics, & prog notes. Create/adapt tx plans. Gather info via interviews. Discuss post-therapy plans. Eval physical/mental health. Wrk w/ MH profs on assessments & tx planning. Lead structured counseling social programs. Refer clients/families to resources or specialists. Provide family counseling for client support. Attend nonprofit mtgs for community outreach. Recruit new LPC assoc’s & help manage HIP’s website. Write grants. Reqs: MA in Counseling, Psych, or related field. Min 1 yr exp in Clinical Counseling or related. Must hold LCSW, LMFT, and/or LPC. Salary: $46,093 yr. Send res: Patricia Elaine Adams, Co-founder/Clinical Dir., 5282 Medical Dr., Ste 605, San Antonio, TX 78229.
EMPLOYMENT NOTICE
Application has been made with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission for a Wine and Malt Beverage Permit by The Brown Bag Sandwich Shop, Inc. dba The Brown Bag Sandwich Shop to be located at 11035 Wetmore Rd, San Antonio, Bexar County Texas, (78216). Officers of corp are: Jaynee Escobedo, owner.
“There’s a Catch”--you may scramble to get there. by Matt Jones
