By: Kelsey Lawrence

Two weeks ago, in a garage in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I picked up a book about a woman who has a romantic relationship with a dolphin. Written in 1981 by Ted Mooney (known also for being the longtime senior editor of Art in America), this book “Easy Travels to Other Planets” takes place in an eighties near-future. Personal computers don’t seem to exist in this world, yet its citizens are still feeling the effects of overstimulation via radio, television, and phones. I learned Mooney was born in Dallas, the son of Booth Mooney, a close friend and biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson. This was the first of a few times Dallas popped up in the assorted popcorn things I’ve recently filled my time and brain with — podcasts, books, random pieces of cultural ephemera.

A few days after picking up Mooney’s book of dolphin romance, I thought randomly of Jane Aldridge, now Jane Dashley, who was well-known in the late 2000s and 2010s for her fashion blog Sea of Shoes. She was regularly featured in Teen Vogue and Vogue, The Cut, Glamour, and all the other fashion mags during a time when personal style bloggers were really popping off. During the height of her popularity, she debuted at Paris’ Crillon Ball, received attention from Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour, exchanged photos with Kanye West, and worked with Coach. But, at least according to interviews, she was never interested in leaving Dallas.

When French designer Philippe Starck’s Ghost Chair was mentioned in a 2012 Texas Monthly profile on Jane, I was reminded of the Starck Club, a haute-couture nightspot in ‘80s Dallas that was designed by an up-and-coming Starck and tucked under a freeway. Then, a few days after going down that rabbit hole, I was listening to writer Sarah Hepola’s podcast when she talked briefly about her trip to Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company in an anonymous location somewhere in Dallas that is working to “solve the colossal problem of extinction.”

The city hasn’t been the main character of the subjects that have come across my radar, rather it’s been the anonymous backdrop to other worlds. Ted Mooney’s dolphin book; Jane Aldridge’s fashion escapism in a quiet, tony Dallas neighborhood; an avant-garde club where George Bush and Grace Jones partied; a biotech company working to bring back the woolly mammoth — the speculative future comes out of Dallas, Texas.

“Easy Travel to Other Planets”

This book opens with a scene of lovemaking between Melissa, a marine biologist, and Peter, a dolphin. She’s studying him on the island of St. Thomas, living in an experimental structure that’s been intentionally flooded to facilitate a shared lifestyle between woman and dolphin. At night she lays in a bed suspended from the ceiling and thinks, “I am going to die from the strangeness of this.” But when Melissa is back in New York, the book shapeshifts into interweaving narratives of drifty youngish adults thrill-seeking, living in cramped apartments, and trying to figure out if they want kids—figuring out how to make their lives happen.

“Easy Travel” drifts between scenes abruptly, before you know it’s happening, yet somehow the transition between lanes is so smooth you don’t wake up from your highway nap. My favorite aspect of this book is that it is only a little futuristic. Written by Mooney in 1981, it appears to be set in a time not so far after that year. It is “a world like our own, but not quite,” to quote a 2010 blog post discussing the book. Glimpses into the “not quite” include a scene where Melissa uses her forefinger to turn the environment around her blue. In this world, people can suffer from a condition called “information sickness,” where those affected, overwhelmed by the stimuli around them, become nauseated as blood pours out of their noses and ears. “Rooms—as in our rooms—have television sets going, radios murmuring, phones ringing,” wrote Carolyn See for the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Symptoms in the book include “deliriously disconnected speech,” an inability to distinguish “where one thing left off and the next began,” and the “desire to touch everything.” (Dear 1981: Just y’all wait.)

In this world, a global struggle is unfolding over control of natural resources in Antarctica, including the “last set of relatively quiet airwaves on earth.” Mooney’s books talked presciently about political and social conditions. His second novel, “Traffic and Laughter,” (1990) exists in the ambiance of nuclear age paranoia. Another, “Singing into the Piano,” (1998) delves into the consequences of globalization by way of a soccer star running for president in Mexico. Mooney, with his dad working behind the political curtain with LBJ in Dallas, might have had some sort of psychic insight passed to him. Maybe he, in turn, imparted it to us in his cosmic swimming pool way.

Taking a World That Doesn’t Exist and Making It Real

In 2012, former Texas Monthly writer Jason Sheeler wrote a profile of Jane Aldridge (now a painter of lush, folkloric scenes) that alluded to a sort of secluded fantasy life that Jane and her mom Judy, an interior designer, created in their home in Dallas’ upscale Turtle Creek neighborhood. Theirs was a world where closets are stuffed with vintage fur coats, stacks of nineties fashion magazines and Japanese kids’ books abound, shelves hold “88 pairs of kooky convex wedges,” and four small dogs “lose their collective mind.”

Judy told the journalist that she had given their home a makeover to reflect their “online lives.” This prompted the reporter to quote science fiction author William Gibson, who once described speculative fiction writing as presenting a world that doesn’t exist and making it real. Jane’s mom smiled and responded: “You know, it’s true. Our life out here is fantastical. My ex-husband says we live in our own world.”

Sheeler’s feature ended up causing mild controversy on the 2010s fashion internet. A then twenty-year-old Jane came off as a little bratty, snapping at the journalist within the first few sentences to put her Miu Miu boots down. Though she later disputed the quote, Jane says in the piece, “Why should I go to college? I’m already doing what I want.” (Today, I suspect this quote would read less as bratty and more as realistic.)

When the idea of an isolated fantasy life and a girl and her mom come together, a Grey Gardens reference is inevitable. In response to the stir-up, Sheeler wrote a follow-up piece titled “I Really Do Like Jane Aldridge” where he referred to the style blogger and her mom as, indeed, a bit like Little Edie and Big Edie, albeit “significantly more lucid and with fewer in-house raccoons.” He expressed hope that online commenters quick to snipe at Jane and her mom would see the more nuanced scene he had wanted to show. “The story is about a whimsical world that a then-teenage blogging sensation and her mother created five years ago, out of little more than suburban boredom and back issues of Vogue,” Sheeler wrote.

Reading the profile years later, I was struck by how this imaginative existence in suburbia appeared to be a key instrument of Jane’s life at that time in Dallas. “For someone with such national reach, Jane is, in fact, stubbornly, almost mystifyingly committed to this circumscribed world,” Sheeler wrote in the original profile, listing her “main haunts” as Central Market, Sephora, and Barnes and Noble. This is not so mystifying to me. I think that, often, those who are given to calling the woods behind their house “the enchanted forest” seek the boundaries of familiar comforts to ground their magical realism.

“She doesn’t follow trends—part of that comes from being in Texas and being isolated,” a Teen Vogue fashion news editor said at the time.

A Temple of Future People

Philippe Starck’s Ghost chair, a polycarbonate palimpsest of Louis XVI’s baroque chair, celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2012, the year Jane’s Texas Monthly profile came out. Sheeler noted that the iconic chairs were present in the Aldridge home, in black. The chair was remarkable when it was invented for being formed in a single injection mold, a familiar shape in an unfamiliar material, as one article described.

“I’m going against the majority and [preparing] myself for the downvotes: I love the original design by Philippe Starck,” someone on Reddit wrote last year. “It’s humorous, ironic and actually is comfortable. I HATE all these ripoffs that scream tacky beauty salon where you get too much Botox injected.”

Starck, just starting out in his career, landed in ‘80s Dallas because he was “fearful of a Russian invasion during the Cold War,” according to a 2016 Red Bull Music Academy feature. Local businessman Blake Woodall, looking for something more exciting than inheriting his family’s Vent-A-Hood kitchen appliance business, sought out Starck for the endeavor of creating an avant-garde new world in Dallas. The designer flew from Paris to meet Woodall at tiki restaurant Trader Vic’s in the early ‘80s to discuss their visions for what would become the Starck Club.

The resulting venue, open between 1984 and 1989, was, for a time, “America’s most hedonistic and forward-thinking club,” where George Bush partied, Stevie Nicks invested, and Grace Jones rode in on an elephant during the 1984 Republican Presidential Convention. Ahead of its time, it pioneered a new dance floor culture as disco was fading. When Woodall took a trip to Ibiza, he was inspired to ensure the Starck Club wasn’t stuck in a Top 40 time loop. “We were listening to music from Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles,” he told Red Bull of his time on the Spanish island. “It was a remarkable music scene and I made the decision at that point that would be the music aspect of our project.”

Rick Squillante, one of the Starck Club’s resident DJs, went on to head Virgin Records’ New York Dance division in the ‘90s, overseeing Janet Jackson’s superstar launch. “He was playing music you couldn’t hear at any other local club… that you couldn’t hear at any other club in America – until he made it relevant,” Don Nedler, who briefly reopened the club in 1996, told the Dallas Observer.

For a minute there, Dallas was the future and the future looked clean — no disco balls or strobe lights. “It was all granite, steel, chrome – high-tech looking but playful,” former Starck Club employee Mark Ridlen told Red Bull. Though accounts say that Starck and Woodall ultimately clashed on the final design—Starck wanted to spend beyond what was comfortable for Woodall—they both had a goal of creating something ahead of its time.

“I think this club can be a temple of future people in 3,000 years,” Starck said in the 2013 documentary The Starck Club.

The De-Extinction Company in Dallas

A few days after reading about The Starck Club, and the many articles with juicy details about it, I heard Dallas Morning News reporter Sarah Hepola talk briefly on her podcast with Nancy Rommelmann about visiting Colossal Biosciences, the startup that brought back the extinct dire wolf last year and plans to do the same to the woolly mammoth, dodo, Tasmanian tiger, and bluebuck. Hepola described visiting the company’s facilities in an undisclosed Dallas location as “one of the most profound trips in my life” and like “walking into the future we were promised.”

I had not heard of Colossal Bioscience before, but I was curious about this sci-fi-seeming experiment. In 2025, three genetically engineered dire wolf cubs were born using ancient DNA and gene-editing technology. Scientists at the company are reconstructing the DNA of the extinct species and introducing their traits to current relatives. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you’ll recognize dire wolves from the show — and, of course, one of the cubs is named Khaleesi.

Critics argue that what the company is doing is essentially a publicity stunt — that dire wolves are ultimately just gray wolves genetically modified, just as woolly mammoths would be Asian elephants with shaggy coats. Ecologist Joey Hinton spoke with the MIT Technology Review about Colossal’s avoidance of the traditional peer review process, which has led several scientists to doubt whether they’re “doing good science.” Much of the biotech company’s work is behind closed doors, leading some to speculate about what the end goal of this technology is. Let’s just say the controversial phrase “artificial womb” is being kicked around! But the runoff technologies that might result from the splashier excitement of bringing back a Game of Thrones creature could include advancements in disease modeling and gene therapy development.

At Colossal, timelines are colliding in an unprecedented way, creating something both new and old, real and fictional.

–

Dallas is, for better or worse, the cloudy clairvoyant eye of big ideas. To borrow that Gibson quote — something about the city has made it an ideal backdrop for taking a world that doesn’t exist and making it real. Real or something like it.

An Americanism first documented in the 1820s, a so-called “norther” is a wind that blows in from the north, sometimes called a blue, or Texas, norther if particularly severe. In a 1990 column for the Victoria Advocate, writer Henry Wolff Jr. tried, and ultimately failed, to describe the weather phenomenon, saying instead, “every Texan knows about them.” Looking in library books, Wolff couldn’t find the weather phenomenon described and assumed that “northern writers don’t mention northers at all, as such, and I think the southern writers just take it for granted that we already know what [it] is.” The idea is that northers are so commonly Texan that they don’t warrant mention; you don’t describe water to a fish.

In 1928’s The Wind, a norther is so ubiquitous as to become the titular antagonist of the film, the driving force behind an 18-year-old woman’s descent into madness. Based on a 1925 book by Baylor University professor Dorothy Scarborough, the movie was of MGM’s final silent films and, released the same year as the first “talkie,” one of the last great works of a dying medium. Though it was originally panned by critics, it has since become well-respected; last month, Texas Monthly included the film in its updated list of the state’s greatest movies. When I learned that the film was set in Sweetwater—a small town with a “pleasant-sounding name” in which Kelsey and I also went slightly insane, and whose windy dustiness went remarked upon—I knew I had to see it.

The story begins with a stranger on a train—a plot device that would be used two decades later by one-time Texan Patricia Highsmith in fellow book-cum-film Strangers on a Train. In The Wind, the stranger is Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), a slimy cattle buyer who we later learn is married. Like Leslie Lynnton of 1952’s Giant, our young protagonist, Letty Mason (Lillian Gish), is en route to Sweetwater from Virginia, to stay at her cousin’s ranch when Roddy approaches her on the train.

You do not need an online lip reader to understand when he says “Sweetwater?” And guffaws, “HaHAHa.” It is Roddy who explains that this region is the “‘land o’ the winds’” that “makes folks go crazy—especially the women!”

Almost immediately upon arrival in Sweetwater (where wind really is a sinus hazard, and the wind turbine industry boomed in recent years), Mason is accosted by three men, including Roddy, proposing marriage, and is a near-victim of a cyclone. Here we have the stakes: Men and weather pursue the innocent Mason until the movie’s climax when a formidable norther comes from the north, Wordy rapes her, and, in fear, she kills him.

That is only the half of it. The picture is absolutely gorgeous, shot in black and white and composed with care, and the music is by turns eerie and beautiful. Long stretches of silence are broken by creaky hinge mews, howling violins, and occasional dusty coughs. The studio exec who greenlit the film told its lead actress: “Mr. Thalberg said we had a very artistic film, which I knew was a veiled punch,” and though he may have meant it as an insult, he was correct. The wind is clearly a giant metaphor for something.

One 1920s critic wrote of the film’s heavyhandedness: “In the picture, the wind, whether it is a breeze or a cyclone, invariably seems a sham. . . during one of the early episodes she does her bit to accentuate the artificiality of this tale by wearing the worst kind of hat for a wind. [Director] Victor Sjöström hammers home his points until one longs for just a suggestion of subtlety. The villain’s sinister smile appears to last until his dying breath.” But for modern audiences, the black and white of it all, the simplicity, works to convey some sort of parable about the elements and man’s dominion over—or women’s submission to—them. Such a binary is also a motif of Westerns like this one: there are bad guys and good guys, sane and insane women, man versus nature. Also artful, I feel compelled to note, are the overlays of bucking and galloping horses; a Satanic, ghost version of the animal, in the Native American lore of the story, is the cause of norther winds.

Though it takes place on the English moors, rather than a Western setting, the creeping atmosphere and strong winds brought to mind Wuthering Heights, another gothic revenge tragedy that reentered the public consciousness earlier this year. In that film, the wind isn’t a foe, but adds to the plot, the isolation, the insane behavior of its characters. (See also Wizard of Oz, a wind-induced fever dream, and Black Narcissus for themes of wind and sanity loss.) But like in Brontë’s book, a queasy uneasiness portends rampant abuse as the settings’ inhabitants slowly lose their minds. Both works also possess elements of the thriller/horror genre. Just as Cathy’s ghost haunts Heathcliff in the 1847 book, Mason at one point believes Roddy has risen from the dead to avenge himself. In the film’s poster, he hovers over her, watching on through a window.

And like Wuthering Heights, The Wind in novel form is a tragedy: Mason disappears into the desert wind after murdering her abuser. But for the movie, MGM ordered a happy ending, thus Mason falls in love with a man who promised to never rape her and lives happily ever after in the dust storms of Sweetwater, Texas. Somehow, despite this quaint conclusion, Texan audiences still took huge issue with the state’s portrayal in the film, though that reaction only served as “a tribute to its realism,” according to Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.

In every review of the film I could find, contemporaneous and modern, the wind is described as the catalyst of Letty’s mental disintegration. “The wind was the cause of it all,” the novel literally begins, and perhaps in the written work that’s true. But watching the film adaptation in the present day, I can’t see how the wind is at fault for anything other than conveying Mason across a Western landscape of leering men, and for heightening the stakes of her mad dash toward the story’s conclusion. Yes, there’s dust all over her bed, all over her plates, and sand that never stops blowing into the window of her cramped cabin, but what seems to actually be driving her insane is the discomfort of dodging multiple propositions before finally succumbing to her attacker. When she tries to escape Roddy, the wind pushes her back into his arms. After the violation has happened, it conveniently dies down. (Funnily, when men are caught behaving badly in the film, they fake innocence by brushing dirt off the lapels and sleeves of their suits.) In this way, this silent Western thriller, with its female protagonist, feels quite modern, having made use of the female abuse-revenge trope (see The Housemaid, starring Sydney Sweeney’s breasts, and Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell, of Wuthering Heights, the film). Affirming the righteousness of her violence—a very contemporary take— Mason’s love interest in the movie reassures her that the wind covers up a fallen body if “you kill a man in justice.” When she looks outside, Roddy’s body is nowhere to be seen.

And, if there is ever any doubt that the men of the film—and not the wind—were her true pursuers all along, consider one of her final lines of the movie, which comes after her rapist is dead and gone:

“I’m not afraid of the wind—I’m not afraid of anything now!”

By: Kelsey Lawrence

Researching Sandra Ilene West, the socialite who was buried in San Antonio in 1977 wearing a lace nightgown and sitting in her Ferrari, made me feel nuts. Over the course of a week, I had at least 30 tabs open at all times with various news articles from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Each one said something different about Sandra and her husband Ike West, Jr., the South Texas heir to an oil and cattle fortune. The more I read, the murkier the lives of this couple grew. The gumshoe reporter that usually lies dormant within me was determined to get the story straight, but it simply doesn’t seem possible. The exact ages of Sandra and Ike, the reasons they died, where they lived, even Sandra West’s real name — each news story told a slight variation on whatever the truth was.

An article in the San Antonio Express-News reported that the (possibly) 37-year-old socialite, in a 1972 handwritten will, had requested to be buried as follows: in a lace nightgown, in the front seat of her favorite blue 1964 Ferrari “with the seat slanted comfortably,” and next to the grave of her husband.

Besides her burial, the only other details we know to be true about Sandra are the fun ones: she was gorgeous, her party-girl tan emanated scintillating energy even in grainy newspaper archives, and she had a pet parrot named Pancho, procured in a 1968 Vegas craps game. (In a San Antonio gossip column, there’s an anecdote about her bringing Pancho poolside at the Menger Hotel, capturing the attention of everyone there by saying “Make an eagle!” as Pancho “spread its brilliant plumage and begins talking up a storm.”) The facts, however, are less certain.

Most papers reported her age as 37, though some sources said she was 36 or 38. Billy Fichtner, born-and-raised San Antonian, was there to see her burial wishes come true on a Friday morning in 1977, along with 300 other San Antonio residents.

“Well, it was funny, because they had a big crane there, and then the car was enclosed in a plywood box so you couldn’t really see anything,” Billy told me over the phone. “But I looked over and the kid that I went to church with, a friend of my younger brother’s, he was in charge of the operation because he worked for the architectural firm, I believe, that did the arrangements and boxed the car up and everything.”

Though West was an L.A. woman — the daughter of a Beverly Hills shopkeeper, one paper reported — it seems that her wish to be buried next to her husband is what led her to San Antonio’s Alamo Masonic Cemetery, a historic downtown cemetery where other members of Texas royalty such as Clara Driscoll and Erich Menger are buried. The car was lowered by the aforementioned crane into a 19-foot long, 10-foot wide, 9-foot deep hole as members of the press milled around the crowd.

“The press was going around interviewing people,” Billy said. “I remember they asked me if I would consider a burial like that for myself. And I said, I’ve got a pickup truck. It’d be too expensive.”

Billy told me that he looked through several photos taken at the burial, but he never was able to find himself in the crowd. He remembered the cement trucks that were there to fill the grave after the crate was lowered, “so that there would never be a chance of anybody digging the thing up.” The solidness of that cement also gave Billy the chance to joke with his friend, the one who worked for the firm responsible for executing the sui generis burial, that perhaps he had switched out the Ferrari at the last minute.

“I had sold him my Volkswagen convertible, plus a 1933 Plymouth body, and he combined the two and made a car out of it,” Billy explained. “I was just joking with him that he had that Ferrari stashed away somewhere, and he buried her in that Volkswagen Plymouth combination.”

Billy assured me this was just a rumor in good fun. It’s also a rumor West might have enjoyed herself, considering she was known as a “practical joker” by friends. According to a San Antonio Express-News article from 2023, the heiress would move her husband’s car around, leaving him to wonder if he was losing his mind.

More was known about Sandra’s husband Ike, as he was the son of one of the first families of Texas, the Wests. Ike’s grandfather was one of three brothers who drove herds of cattle across the Great Plains during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The family amassed land across South Texas and property in San Antonio. The town of George West is named after Ike’s uncle. A 1983 article from San Antonio’s The News compared the Wests to the Ewings, the fictional family on Dallas that similarly was involved with “drugs, divorces, odd-ball wills and vast wealth wrung from Texas oil and cattle holdings.”

Ike West Jr, “a trust fund baby” as Billy described, had two marriages before Sandra. His first marriage produced two daughters, Mary Louise West and Nellie West. (In some articles, the daughters were incorrectly identified as belonging to Sandra.) His second marriage had been, according to one paper, to his cousin, a woman named Scott Abbey West. After that marriage ended, it was reported in 1965 that West had attempted suicide in a hotel room using sleeping pills. Sometime around then, he married Sandra West, née Sandra Hara. San Antonio gossip king Paul Thompson wrote after West’s overdose: “He can go anywhere in the world…buy whatever they have there. His gorgeous, 25-year-old wife, the former Sandy Hara of Los Angeles, would do justice to a maharajah. But young Ike is restless, unhappy…”

Sifting through articles from that era, each one says something subtly different about the jet-setting, presumably fast-living couple. In one account, a Beverly Hills man named William Alexander Jack says in testimony that he was her “best friend…the only friend she had.” I couldn’t find any other mention of Jack, but plenty of other articles reference her having friends. An “old friend” of Sandra’s, San Antonio attorney Fred Semaan (who, in 1974, claimed to Texas Monthly that he had “tried more death penalty cases than any lawyer in the history of the United States”), told The Los Angeles Times that she had “sought fame when she lived but it eluded her until the announcement of her strange burial.”

The only article I could find that relayed a more personal sentiment about the couple was a wire story published in an Arkansas newspaper headlined: “Small town residents accepting strange ‘burial’”. One anonymous resident of Comfort, Texas, where the couple spent time, said this about Ike and Sandra: “They can be jet-set and they can live the common life. If a party calls for sophistication, they are there. If they come to dinner with us, they are without any airs.”

In that same article, a man named Herman Vinyard, grand master of the Grand Lodge of Masons, expressed a tender note of support. “If that woman wants to be buried in a lace nightgown sitting in a Ferrari I think that’s the finest thing I ever heard of in my life,” Vinyard said. “I understand that woman. If they can dig a grave deep enough, I’m all for it.” Another Comfort resident did, however, rationalize West’s request by simply stating, “She was from California.”

A one-off piece in the San Antonio Light introduced another bizarre element to Sandra’s story. It seems that Sandra briefly dated Ike’s brother Sol prior to marrying Ike. In 1961, she was named in a petty theft complaint filed by Sol in Los Angeles. He filed it against two women described as “beauteous Hollywood models” with the age and description of Sandra matching one of the two women, named Sandra Lane at the time. The Los Angeles Times reported on March 18, 1977, that Sandra had gone by 15 aliases based on the names “Sondra Hara West,” though that same article incorrectly identifies her as the mother of Ike’s two daughters.

The discrepancies in the hundreds of articles published about Sandra and her final wishes were surprising to me — how, for instance, could just one story mention her arrest for “petty theft” by her brother-in-law who she bequeathed most of her fortune to? The matter of her death was also reported with lots of conjecture. It was ruled that she died from an accidental overdose of barbiturates and codeine, with a July 1977 article quoting her physician as saying she was “psychotic with a tendency toward paranoia and hallucination.” Meanwhile, a May 1980 story from the San Antonio Light coarsely depicted her as a “36-year-old high school dropout whose loneliness and insecurity ended with an accidental overdose of drugs.” What these articles don’t mention (and note, once again, the inconsistency in the reporting of her age) is that she likely had residual pain from a car accident. A May 1977 article attributed her death to “injuries suffered in a 1976 traffic accident.” The 2023 story about Sandra’s life reported that she “needed the care of a physician for a year” after the accident.

Her nurse Mildred Richards testified that Sandra’s burial wishes resulted from her being a “student of Egyptology” and that the heiress “often mentioned that Egyptian monarchs were buried with their worldly possessions…”.

One article described her as having a “brief and unsuccessful career as a model and actress.” Interestingly, the year that Ike West, Jr. divorced his second wife, a society report in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News stated that a “huge party” thrown at singer Dean Martin’s restaurant in L.A. had as the guest list “Sandy O’Hara” and “Mr. and Mrs. Ike West Jr.” The Sandy O’Hara mentioned might have been Sandra West, which suggests that Sandra and Ike could have connected during that trip to Los Angeles. But there was also a burlesque performer and actress named Sandy O’Hara who was popular around that time, so the connection is unclear.

Ike West, Jr. died at 33 (or 32 or 34, depending on the story you read) in Las Vegas in 1968 in the Flamingo Capri Hotel. He had been released days prior from a “Los Angeles hospital, where he had undergone a crash program of weight reduction.” Some reports state that he passed from a drug overdose. I suspect whoever knew Sandra and Ike around that time has either passed from similarly ambiguous causes related to fast living — or grown older and moved on, thinking sometimes of an eccentric couple they used to know.

In a 2015 article on Porter Loring Mortuary, the San Antonio funeral home that made West’s burial arrangements, the son of Porter Loring II (who handled the burial) declined to speak on the matter. “There are still family members alive,” he said. And speaking of family, it appears that no family members on either Sandra’s or Ike’s side attended her funeral. “If members of the wealthy socialite’s family did venture out to see the gigantic gray box slowly lowered by crane into the grave, they didn’t want to be recognized by the mass of news media present…” San Antonio Express-News reporter Vickie Davidson wrote on May 20, 1977.

The couple’s lives together and apart feel ephemeral; it’s unclear where they lived, for instance, seeming to bounce around Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Antonio, and some of the family’s properties in South Texas. While it’s likely both died of accidental overdoses, details are murky. Witnesses said that the heiress had been “almost obsessed with her burial plans” following the death of Ike.

The story of West’s unusual, extravagant burial wishes and the ensuing court battle led to a flurry of news coverage around the country. West had stated in a 1972 holographic will, which is a will written and signed by the testator but not witnessed, that she would leave $2.85 million to her brother-in-law Sol in exchange for him carrying out her last wishes. In other words, Sol had to make sure she was in that car.

Her Ferrari burial was opposed in court by her mother, Susan Hara, her stepsiblings, and her stepdaughters Mary Louise and Nellie. The elder Hara testified that her daughter had told her that she wanted “to be buried in a normal fashion in a coffin next to her husband.” But her testimony was rebutted by others who said that West spoke often of her desire to be buried in her Ferrari. The Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner at the time declared that “the average person has a right to dispose of his or her remains as he or she sees fit if it does not violate the law” — and that the burial instructions were “unusual but not illegal.”

Who was Sandra West? I wish she had been accounted for in the way Cecil Beaton’s diaries kept alive the names and gossip and nuances of glamorous society women who might have otherwise been lost to a time and a place. Only one story, an April 1977 piece in the San Antonio Express-News, talks about her life prior to her last wishes. After Ike passed, she apparently dated “several show business celebrities, including Engelbert Humperdinck” and “had a strange habit of calling people at odd hours of the night to chat.”

A more recent anecdote from the same San Antonio paper, to me, speaks the most to Sandra’s cosmic energy. “Even now, almost five decades later, people come looking for West’s gravesite,” reporter Timothy Fanning wrote. “A palm-sized stone, painted neon-green, says ‘Girls trip 2022.’ It was placed on her weathered marker.”

By Taylor Prewitt

Football was king in my hometown, but dressing for game day was its own kind of sport. One did not simply wear the prescribed team tee. Instead, every fall, when a new shirt design was released, local women and girls spent the pre-season decorating their gear. E-6000 epoxy, I learned, was the preferred glue for the hundreds of plastic gems that would be affixed to every white surface of jerseys and bows. On top of the sparkly shirts, it was the early-aughts fashion to layer a handful of chunky jewelry in the team’s colors: blue, black, and white. Cubic zirconium pendants of crowns and footballs and faux turquoise would dangle from the tangle of gems around fans’ necks and countless bangles would clink from their wrists. Gearing up for the season in such a way was my earliest lesson in the irresistible southern urge to bedazzle.

Consider, again, the homecoming mum, of which bedazzlement is the animating principle. Adornment is the same impulse that compelled certain women to cover Stanley cups—already available in a range of colors—in glitter and monograms and bows a few years ago. And I recognized the same compulsion in the current mahjong revival, in which entrepreneurial Dallas women essentially bejeweled the traditional game’s tiles. Southern women, it seems, simply cannot allow a surface to go unadorned.

In many ways, this type of over-the-top display is embraced by rural culture everywhere, but I believe its roots to be Texan. In 2021, I traced the origins of “Texas boho” maximalism to the fields of Round Top where, once upon a time (beginning in 1968), rich women from Houston wore their cowboy boots and denim with diamonds and fur, buying both European antiques and flea market junk. The style progenated by Junk Gypsy founders, and sisters, Amie and Jolie Sikes, epitomized the bedazzlement urge: clashing prints, animal and otherwise, loud colors, literally loud, clanking jewelry, scarves, hats, and turquoise.

But that urge feels more fundamentally Texan than just a passion for flash. Here we say, “Everything is bigger in Texas,” and we mean it as a good thing. And if bigger is better, then more is obviously just more. More necklaces, more fringe, more jewels. It’s also an outward expression of the independent Texas prerogative to do whatever we want to do: “Texas girls are like, ‘We’re Western, we’re from Texas, and we’re wearing whatever we want to wear,’ ” one Texas boho influencer told me in 2021. Coco Chanel may have advised women to take off one accessory before leaving the house, but in Texas, you put three more bracelets, and a big ol’ pair of diamond hoops, on.

And just as Chanel, and her advice, indicated a kind of upper class consciousness—we use the word “classy” to describe the elevated accessorizing she describes—the dripping of fake jewels and glitter says something about the class of its wearers too. The message isn’t quite about tax brackets—the chunky necklaces and the spectacular mums ain’t cheap—it’s about taste and the way that conveys status.

Nothing feels more indicative of this distinction in taste than the trend I’ve witnessed in country corners in recent years: the “befringing” of authentic Louis Vuitton bags. Kelsey and I saw the phenomenon at Round Top, in a shop called Custom Louis Vuittons, but I’ve also seen it at the Houston Rodeo and on the Instagram pages of Texas boutiques. Obviously the base layer LV product is expensive on its own, but taking a legitimate French designer handbag and outfitting it with Western embellishments is, essentially, another form of bedazzlement. It’s also kind of tacky but in a ballsy, irreverent way (that I love). In a perfect kind of reversal, Louis Vuitton, the 172-year-old Parisian design house, in recent years took inspiration from country western gear, designing a line of cowboy boots, belts, and tooled leather bags in 2024.

It’s likely that Chanel, had she been alive to see it, would find all this maximalist Texas style “tacky.” But back in Navasota, we would have found her Friday night football fit lame, snobbish, or—worst of all—boring.

In the meantime, here are some things piquing our interest this week.

1. When Grapefruit Packing Resembled The Jetsons in Olmito, Texas

For a while there, in the forties, fifties, and sixties, the Rio Grande Valley was a somewhat unlikely hotbed of mid-century architecture. In fact, with the palm trees and sun and coastal breeze, it really was downright Californian at times. Alan Y. Taniguchi, a U.C. Berkeley-trained architect, ended up in Harlingen with his family after World War II. His father had been imprisoned in an internment camp in nearby Crystal City, and after the war, when returning to the family farm in California proved untenable, the Taniguchis ended up back in South Texas.

“Everything was so much more expensive, so that’s when they decided they were going to go to Texas because that was kind of a land of opportunity because things were really starting in the Rio Grande Valley at that time,” Evan Taniguchi, son of Alan, said in an interview.

Together with another mid-century architect, John G. York, they started a firm and designed buildings that “responded lyrically to the climatic conditions of the Rio Grande Valley.” One such forward-thinking, lyrical construction was a citrus packing plant, The House of Mo-Rose, a gift fruit packaging plant near San Benito, Texas. News articles from the time say it was shaped like no other packing plant in the world, but I’d wager it was shaped like not many buildings in the world in general. The structure was made of inverted hyperbolic paraboloids — upside down columns with wavy funnel-shaped tops that supported the building. “Color harmony is important because everything is exposed,” said firm architect Charles Croft in a 1962 San Benito News article. “Even the machinery will be painted.”

The building is still there today, luckily, albeit in less-than-stellar condition.

— Kelsey

2. Bob Dylan <3s Texas Girls

Via @bobdylanpics

Everyone loves Texas girls it seems and Pulitzer Prize-winning American songwriter Bob Dylan is no different, it seems. Here he’s pictured with junior Miss Texas Rodeo pageant winners Stephanie Scogin and Lisa Goe at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2002. It’s alright, indeed.

— Taylor

3. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are on tour!

Maybe I will see them during their Austin stop next Monday…they are going to perform “Thunderstruck,” of course, and do “live auditions to decide who advances to the final round” after all. And Kelli and Judy are going to be there!

— Kelsey

4. We, Too, Are Minor Regional Novelists…

Larry McMurtry may have worn a sweatshirt labeling him a “minor regional novelist,” but he had an eye towards not pigeonholing himself or other writers as good ol’ boys who could only write about Texas from a singular romantic cowboy perspective. He wrote about this in a 1981 essay for The Texas Observer.

“Meanwhile, as the cities boom and the state changes, a great period is being wasted,” he wrote at the time. “Fiction in particular thrives on transitions, on the destruction of one lifestyle by another. Houston and Dallas have sucked in thousands of Rubempres, but where are the books about them? These cities are dripping [with] experience, but instead of sopping up the drippings and converting them into literature our writers mainly seem to be devoting themselves to an ever more self-conscious countrification.”

Nature of Things, a gallery in Dallas, is now running a show named after that sweatshirt — Minor Regional Novelist — with artists’ work on “what it means to make work about a place, from a place […]”. See the exhibition at 3002A Commerce Street in Dallas now ‘til May 23.

— Kelsey

5. Consider: The Mutton Bustin’ Weight Limit

I hadn’t thought much about mutton bustin’—much less, the competition’s weight limit—when my friend and colleague Lauren Castro pitched an essay to Texas Monthly on the ways in which the rodeo sport ruined her childhood.

Riding the fluff of an unlucky sheep is a rite of passage for many rural Texas kids, but Lauren was excluded from the activity—and denied her “shot at glory”—due to her size. Earlier this year, she interviewed an adorable three-year-old and a brave eight-year-old to get a sense of what she missed out on.

Below, one of my favorite grafs from the story:

“On the big day, I’d sit in the stands with my family, funnel cake in hand, and watch Peyton from the grade above me win a belt buckle. How proud her parents must have been. How I wanted to wear my thrifted baby-pink boots in front of the crowd and catch a glimpse of myself on the JumboTron as I held on far longer than anyone else.”

— Taylor

By: Taylor Prewitt & Kelsey Lawrence

Days after Kelsey and I spent a long Wednesday at Round Top, the biannual eleven-mile-long antiques show, my social media feed began serving up “hauls” from other women who had made the trek to the small town (population: 90) from Austin, Houston, Dallas, and beyond.

Removed from the artfully styled environments of high-priced antique booths and richer-than-thou shoppers, the items in these social media hauls are hilariously mundane. I’ve seen women unveil: a wooden spoon, a rusting icebox, a shaky bench, a brass knickknack, a bowl or pot of some sort.

But I get how they ended up with expensive, random junk. As you’ll see from our own hauls and wish lists below, Round Top can induce a temporary psychosis in which a $45 wooden spoon seems not only reasonable, but aspirational or even necessary. Presented with so much choice, at so many price points, any weak-willed woman might grab the nearest, cheapest thing she finds remotely pleasant if only to participate in Texas’s marquee shopping event—if only to come home with a haul of her own.

Below, see what we resisted bringing home — and what ended up in our shopping bags.

Our Wishlist

Kelsey

Circa 1910-1915 ice box converted into refrigerator, $14,700

If there is one core thing I learned about Round Top, it is that this sprawling fair is for balling out only. There is little point to shopping small at Round Top; you will feel depressed and you will stare at your pink tea towels for $20 and think, “I just didn’t fucking need these.” The only way that I could ball out was by ordering a pickle Bloody Mary and then a giant cup of frozen sangria topped with a Prosecco floater (to “cut” it, the gentleman sunglassed bartender said). But if you’re going to really relish the point of shopping at Round Top, you maybe should bring about $15,000, which is the price of this refrigerator that began its life when $15,000 could buy you at least three homes.

This piece was jaw-droppingly cool. To have this pristine jewelry box holding my dumb groceries would feel like an embarrassment of riches. If I were a rich girl (and one in possession of my stellar taste!) and I had this fridge, I would have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling too hard when a visitor walked into my kitchen for the first time. The compartments are lit up in icy nightclub blue like you’re stepping into a subzero vodka room or that hotel made of ice in Sweden.

Wedgwood tea cup and saucer, $12

Coming on the heels of being in the spend-y section at Blue Hills where an antique match striker was $700, I somehow didn’t trust that these teacups were actually $12. I regret not getting this pretty blue teacup, but I had the irrational fear that I would get to the register and the period in “$12.00” was supposed to have been a comma after the 1. I’d then be embarrassed which would cause the teacup to fall from my hands, and I’d have to pay $1,200.

18th century gilt fragment, $795

There is an unlikely psychic connection between the gleaming Chevy Tahoes and F-150 King Ranch editions sailing like super-speed land yachts down 290 driven by blonde, bronzed, be-hatted Texas women (or their husbands!) and a gently crumbling 18th century French chateau. During these two weekends a year when the main road that runs through Round Top, Texas, is lined with 11 miles of stuff, women and some men sort through bits and pieces of Western Europe’s architectural history that would positively wilt if they lived outside for a single Texas summer.

That all goes to say, this $800 piece of gilded molding is available at the same festival where you can also buy a trucker hat emblazoned with AMEN. Which one will stand the test of time, I’ll have to check back 200 years from now after I finish my pickle Bloody Mary at Round Top Spring 2226.

Mid-century ice bucket, $165

As much as I liked the look of this ice bucket, I knew it was the sort of thing I would see on my counter after the fact and say “huh!” Due to its cost, I’d have to insist on bringing it out anytime I had friends over — hell, anytime I poured myself a glass of water before bed — until everyone stopped noticing I had brought out my mid-century ice bucket.

Mid-century set of 12 pink elephant invites, $30

Printed invitations simply to invite some friends over for a drink — chic!

All of these Murano light fixtures

This isn’t a great photo. I was a little too jittery to properly photograph this museum of Murano fixtures sold by Janet Wiebe, one of the first places we walked into at Blue Hills. Each light was in pristine, gleaming condition and so beautiful. Everything on this shelf looked like it should be in the home of a very wealthy, glamorous woman in Palm Beach with coiffed white hair and a spread in a 1980s Architectural Digest issue.

Taylor

Y2K light teal leather zip vest with bubble studs, $210

The Pamela Anderson top of my mid-aughts dreams! Kind of sad I didn’t just splurge for this one.

French language six-foot movie poster for L’Adventure du Texas, $2,000

The vendor at this booth told us that Drake, who owns a ranch in nearby Brenham, stopped in once and bought five different movie posters including one for 1958’s La blonde et le shérif (in English, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw), starring Jayne Mansfield. The vendor also had French and Italian language posts for Blazing Saddles, Giant, and The Cowboys.

The “Instagator,” a real, formerly live, seven-ish foot, stuffed alligator wearing a saddle, price unknown.

This showpiece typifies Round Top inventory for me: large, expensive, and zany, it’s unlikely to sell any time soon. And yet, it’s large, expensive, and zany! Who doesn’t aspire to be cool enough—and wealthy enough—to take something like this home and plop it on your hearth.

Tiny Murano glass slippers, price unknown

I actually could have used a lamp from this booth, but, as we were in the moneyed section of Round Top’s eleven-mile stretch of shops, I didn’t even check prices. This area—the Blue Hills barns—really made me feel my tax bracket.

Two two-toned wooden UV tables with slots for both manis and pedis, $250 each

One for my house, one for Kelsey’s. “It works!” the vendor shouted at us as he noticed us eyeballing the units.

Funky, eclectic boleros made of denim, cheetah print, and fringe, $118

These were maybe not objectively cute, but once you’ve been in Round Top for about an hour, your personal fashion sense begins to warp toward the bohemian and the eccentric, while also feeling formulaic. There is a standard outfit that many shoppers adhere to at the antiques show, but I would be curious to know how many of those women dress like Magnolia Pearl models in their day to day lives.

A 1970s blue, green, and orange Bermuda bag with wooden handles and an adorable cloth turtle on the front, $185

I just know that I will see this at an antique mall for $20 soon.

A colorful, beaded turquoise necklace, price unknown

I observed two sisters decide which necklace to buy as a gift for their mother. “I don’t know if she’ll like that,” one said. It was the closest I’d get to an acknowledgement that some of the featured wares were wacky. “Well, we’ll get it when she dies,” the other said. Both cackled with glee.

A pink-and-white-striped Stanley cup with the words “Meet me in Round Top Texas” written across the front, price unknown

This truly appealed to me for a few seconds, clear evidence of the Stockholm syndrome one catches after a day spent in the Round Top fields.

Our Haul

Kelsey

1800’s beaded black bolero, $100

I’m going to be real, I regret this purchase. The beads are falling off because it is over 150 years old and the dye — which is surely made of some toxic chemical that ceased being used decades ago — rubs off on my hands. I don’t know what came over me other than it was late afternoon and I had finished my tall cup of frozen Prosecco sangria. I was also charmed by the exuberant saleswoman who said that Round Top was a lot like Burning Man. At one point, she grabbed another very fragile-looking, decrepit late-1800s coat off the rack and randomly modeled it for us, which had the subtly disarming effect of making me feel like we could be at Burning Man together braiding each other’s hair, if only I had this bolero.

Pink linen napkins, $20

These are pretty!

Chandelier baubles, $10

Will I decide to actually use my hands and make a craft off of Pinterest with these? Stay tuned!

Sheet music from Noel Coward’s 1934 play “Conversation Piece”, $5

I feel good about this purchase! In the 1934 New York Times review for this play, it is described as a “fluffy omelet”.

Taylor

A costume “diamond” necklace, $5

To go with my stuffed alligator.

Two dead stock slip skirts, $30 each.

One for me and one for Kelsey. Both feature flowers. One is butter yellow, one is white with little pink flowers. Both came from Opa’s Vintage, a booth made up entirely of dead stock vintage from the owner’s late grandfather’s collection.

Notepad featuring poodles playing mahjong, $9

I bought this under the influence after my phone died and I wanted to keep taking notes (like “Prissy Pants - children’s boutique”), and tracking my wish list and expenditures. Did I need it? No. And yet here we are.

By: Kelsey Lawrence

I forgot that the wind in Texas in March blows like the Santa Anas, and like Eve Babitz wrote of those crazy high-desert winds that blow down into LA: “Just think, if we didn’t have the Santa Anas, how straight we would all be.” This might apply to Texas in this season of bluebonnets and celebrities stopping by and all of us trying to grab the comfortable hours outside while we can. This all goes to say, it might have been the winds, in part, that blew myself, Taylor, and my fiancé Steve into an old sausage factory on Austin’s east side last Friday night where a rave that had been advertised to us on Instagram was in its nascent hours.

Here’s what else brought us to this rave. Back in January, I declared “movement” to be my word of 2026 and I shared this boldly with those I encountered next to me on sofas. There’s something about dance that is really grabbing everyone right now, and lately I have been appreciating that I have a body I can move around and control. I love to dance! And I’ve never, at least that I know of, been to a rave. I’ve been to things that came close probably, and I’ve been to shows in many juxtaposed places — a near-naked rapper dangling a mouse in the basement of a Mexican restaurant, seeing Madonna’s daughter in the early morning hours of a Chinese-restaurant-turned-club — but never a proper rave. While I can still look natural enough in a mesh crop top, I wanted to see what it was like.

Now if you are reading this and you are a raver, I must first establish with you how little I know of this scene. When someone asked what kind of music was playing, I answered uncertainly “trap?” Techno, house, dubstep, trance, drum and bass, I couldn’t really tell you. But again, I like to dance! I have now been to two raves since this craving struck, with the first being in another warehouse in Southeast Austin. That had more people wearing big pants and cat ears and stuff. And I realized, at least so far, that I don’t know if raves are for me. The repetition just feels like something you have to be on ecstasy to enjoy and even then I’m searching for a pop star feeling. I would imagine that the repetition is likely part of a spiritual ascendence akin to hearing the Benedictine Monks or a Hare Krishna chant — there is a soul to raves that I probably haven’t yet accessed — but here we are.

So that brings us to this weekend’s rave — my second attempt in Austin — where upon walking up I heard Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” being spliced into a beat. Here was my pop star feeling! I downloaded an app I’ll surely never use again to buy a $10 ticket and showed it at the door, and we walked into a small maze of rooms with graffitied walls. The dance floor wasn’t huge, but it fit everyone perfectly, and two sets of industrial swinging traffic doors brought to mind the frozen sausage that used to be in this place somewhere. Within a few minutes “Toxic” was also being chopped and screwed and sped up, and I thought maybe I can be a rave girl after all. Except that I am a woman, a fact I was reminded of truly, madly, deeply within two minutes of walking in. This rave was for the kids. It was so for the kids, in fact, that it nearly felt wrong to be there. A memory came to me of being at a Brooklyn house party years ago with a similarly young crowd and a friend seeing a former MTV VJ, in his fifties now, slinking against the wall of a staircase. I wondered how he was doing.

To be in your mid-thirties is confusing and disorienting for a lot of reasons, one of which being that you can look either older or younger depending on the day, lighting, humidity level, outfit, etc. Even with that potential to seem young enough, I was old there. Unless you’ve been around 18- to 23-year-olds a lot lately, you forget how their features haven’t quite settled in a certain way yet. “I was searching the crowd for people our age and only saw one millennial face with an apologetic smile and graying temples,” Steve told me later as we rehashed the night. We agreed one other couple wearing harem pants and prayer beads seemed around our age too.

Staring into the swirling vortex of time as “Once in a Lifetime” played on a loop in my mind and my mesh crop top stuck to my back was, I hardly need to tell you this, bare and humbling. Even more so was realizing, as Steve, Taylor, and I stood outside cooling down, that my license had fallen out of my pocket. The flashlights of iPhones were turned on, door guards were asked, and eventually, Steve talked to one of the event organizers who interrupted the current DJ’s set to ask the crowd if anyone had seen a lost license. He wrapped up his announcement with a “Let’s give it up for Kelsey!” as the crowd cheered, which was incredibly heartwarming and made me feel like I was the new kid at a youth group retreat being gently encouraged to come out of my shell. I also felt like they were cheering on their high school English teacher who at this point is probably named Kelsey.

The license was found in the grass outside, along with my debit card, and please know I was mostly sober. The tension that resulted from this led Steve and I to get in a tiff, while Taylor took my side, and we were really all on the verge of being 19 again. Back inside we went, where the headliner of the night (at least that I could tell) was on deck. This guy had superstar energy, for real. Big smile, one tooth missing, dressed like your high school boyfriend (if you are, in fact, millennial-aged and remember those button-up Abercrombie shirts and baggy jeans and flip-flops and basketball team hair cuts), he knew exactly how to be best friends with the crowd. None of us ever truly grow out of the “Who’s looking at me?” feeling associated with being around a lot of people your age, but of course that sensation was so electrically palpable as girls wearing carefully curated emo MySpace looks and Miss Me jeans walked past me that it almost hurt. But this kid — Instagram tells me his name is Gavin Munroe — was having fun, and you wanted to have fun with him, which united the room in the way that superstar energy does.

Now listen, I know remember-when can only go so far, but stay with me here. In 1995, so many iconic albums were released that it makes a person seethingly jealous, just for a moment, of anyone young during that time. Two of those albums, with two of their hit songs, were played during Munroe’s set Friday night. Within minutes of each other, I was hearing “My eyes feel like they’re gonna bleed” and “Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you”. It reminded me of the pure, familiar joy I experienced in college when Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” came out and I was hearing the canon of American music presented to me, in bite-sized pieces, on an overflowing silver platter. In this sausage factory on a Friday night, I’m not sure what hearing these songs meant to the people in the room at least 15 years my junior, but I was curious.

Rave classic “Born Slippy” was also released in 1995, and I thought of having to call a phone number to find out where the party was that night. Of course social media changes the nature of things, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals — young people, sausage factory, etc. In the Instagram promo for last weekend’s rave, the song that soundtracked the video brought to mind the British-guy-talking-over-a-driving-beat ambiance of “Born Slippy”. I assumed it was a song from the nineties that I hadn’t heard before, but then I looked it up and it was someone new.

P.S. Four years ago, rave reporter and guru Michelle Lhooq wrote about the Texas rave scene popping off particularly in Austin, Dallas, and McAllen. One DJ interviewed, Ultrathem, had this to say at the time: “Come to Austin,” they said, after swooping into the Texas capital during South By Southwest. “This city by far has one of the most authentic rave scenes—it’s an organic, MSG-free homegrown thing,” they continued. “I’ve gone to a rave in a baseball field, in a Long John Silver’s, on a fucking bridge… The way they operate over there is TRUE AMERICAN RAVING. It’s gorgeous!”

Compiled by Taylor Prewitt, with additional notes, comments, thoughts, opinions, and feelings from Kelsey Lawrence

At 8 a.m. on a Saturday smack dab in the middle of SXSW, Kelsey and I loaded into my car and headed for Sweetwater, Texas, home of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup—allegedly the world’s largest—since 1958. That year, local ranchers culled the prolific population of snakes and attempted to burn them in a giant pit to prevent the threat to oft-bitten cattle and pets. In his 1976 article about the roundup, Stephen Harrigan attributed the continued popularity of the yearly hunt to a collective genetic memory of the hardships of life out west. “Tornadoes, pestilence, sandstorms, drought—the early citizens of Sweetwater could do little about such elemental catastrophes, but a rattlesnake was a finite thing,” Harrigan wrote. Since the 1950s, the Sweetwater Jaycees, a group of charitable rattlesnake wranglers, have hosted the roundup each spring to keep the local rattlesnake population in check, educate and entertain the masses about the venomous snakes, and raise money for their community.

Naturally, the intrepid reporters at Texas Star had to investigate. As we set out, Kelsey and I were in a bad way. I had a queasiness in my stomach and Kelsey was dealing with digestion issues, which she kept saying “came from somewhere down below…like from hell”. [Kelsey’s Note: Sorry!]

Maybe the sensations were a premonition. Snakes—or vipers, asps, and serpents—have frequently been used to symbolize evil or the devil, most commonly in the Bible. Recently, in celebration of the Year of the Horse, we’ve covered horses as portals to both fanatical girlhood and the end of the world. But last year, snakes were the thing. Just as the horse is meant to represent a way forward, the Year of the Snake is said to symbolize a shedding of old habits, patterns, and the kinds of new-age limiting beliefs that would hold a fast-moving creature, like a stallion or a beat-up Volkswagen carrying two city girls, back from its true potential.

As we drove through countless small towns—some quaint, some desolate—we discussed our expectations of the roundup.

Kelsey: “I’ve been reading up on this and. . . it’s not great for the snakes.”

Taylor: “I’m worried it’s going to make me sad. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn camo.”

Kelsey: “One article I read said that when they rattle their tails, it’s really out of fear. So when you’re hearing them rattle, it’s actually them screaming in terror.”

Five hours into the journey, we entered the town of Sweetwater (population ~10,600), which felt emptier and dustier than we’d assumed of a world-renowned snake-related tourist destination. Kelsey had read that the roundup annually attracted 40,000 people [Kelsey’s note: This number seems to fluctuate between 25,000 and 40,000 depending on the year and the source.] and the receptionist at our motel told us guests traveled from as far as India to experience the event.

Kelsey: “I feel like—are we going the wrong way?”

It seemed like it, until we turned a random corner and encountered hundreds of cars, including a standstill line waiting to park at least 200 yards out from the Nolan County Coliseum where the roundup is held. The whole crowded tableau— orange traffic cones, wandering families, banners advertising corn dogs—rose like a bronze serpent from the desert.

Upon entering the coliseum, we were immediately overwhelmed by the spread of snake-related activities, but, pressed by a crowd, we had to keep moving. We stopped first at a demonstration pit where a Jaycee—the Jaycees, by the way, are a local branch of a national civic organization—in a cowboy hat introduced the various species of rattlesnake (there are ten in Texas, with the most common being the Western Diamondback) and regaled us with tales of leg amputations and the toxic effects of snake venom.

Next, we visited the Milking Pit where folks like us were allowed—encouraged even—to pet and pose for photos with these allegedly dangerous, leg-altering creatures. The milkers expressed venom from the fangs of the snakes into what looked like a chemistry class set-up to make the animals more meet and greet-friendly for up to a few hours.

Taylor: “Kelsey, this whole time I thought they were milking actual milk. Like to drink.”

Kelsey: “Somehow interacting with the snakes feels very safe. There really isn’t a threatening vibe. Do you think that’s a PR move?”

Taylor: “I feel the same way. I wonder if that’s because we’re city folk. I sent a photo to my mom and she told me to never again let a random man hold a rattlesnake up to my chest. Which is good life advice in general.”

We make our way to the Skinning Pit/Skin Sales area of the arena. Here, visitors could pay $60 dollars to skin their own snake or $30 to skin a miscellaneous snake for photo opportunities. A white wooden backdrop bordering the skinning area was dotted with the bloody handprints of the men, women, and children who had spent hundreds of dollars before us. On a nearby ledge were the lively, disinterred hearts of several snakes.

I asked a man standing next to us who was holding a snake heart in his hand why the heart was still beating.

The man in wrap-around sunglasses answered: Because that’s what the heart does. (<3)

He explained that he worked in heart transplants for several years and saw many a diseased heart beat post-mortem, al fresco. The rattlesnake roundup seemed to be full of experts. A nice young lady invited us to touch the inside of a fresh snakeskin. It was slimy and felt cool. I was still feeling a little nauseated, and my hands shook.

Kelsey: “Taylor, how are you feeling so far?”

Taylor: “Feeling a little weird. Sad for the snakes. I petted one earlier, and I thought it was sad to see it get milked. And then I just saw, like, half of a dead snake corpse wriggle a little bit on the ground at the skinning pit. But I will say, on the other hand, it is cool seeing some cute ladies skinning a snake. So, mixed feelings.”

One of the cute ladies skinning snakes was Miss Snake Charmer herself, or Kaylee, as we came to call her throughout the weekend. As she skinned, she wore a crown, a black trash bag over her pink shirt, and a look of palpable disgust at the disemboweling she was required to do as part of her royal duties. And we loved her for that! We would later learn, from the local paper, that Kaylee, a Christian and expert cheerleader, will use the scholarship she won as queen to attend Texas Tech University and become a pediatric nurse.

Taylor: “Kaylee really seems like a benevolent queen. Our eyes met as she passed the snake around the milking pit for pets, and I could just feel that she has a kind heart.”

Kelsey: “We also saw Miss Texas and a lady wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Pearls are always appropriate. — Jackie O’. Royalty abounds here at the Rattlesnake Roundup.

After the skinning pit—and an abbreviated glance at the “snake pit”, where dozens upon dozens of snakes writhe atop one another before being weighed, counted, and processed—Kelsey and I both needed a seat. We were worn out from our stomach issues, our long drive, and our prolonged exposure to snake blood. Our retreat throughout the day would be the cool concrete bleachers overlooking the entire arena, an apt perch for observing a wide range of tattoos and West Texas style, and for taking in the sights—and smells.

Kelsey: “Doing a quick check-in as we sit here. I feel spiritually and physically more relaxed at this festival right now. Is it because we’ve been sitting removed from the crowd for a while?”

Taylor: “I also feel very zen right now. We’re still people watching. There’s still a ton of people. There’s the man whose really soothing voice is, like, droning on, educating us about snakes.”

Kelsey: “And I’ll tell you this—maybe this is how quick a human can kind of go dark—but all of a sudden, the rattles are not sounding like screams to me. They’re sounding like soothing whispers.”

Taylor: “I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet, Kelsey, the smell. Should we try to describe the smell?”

Kelsey: “Yes, okay, the smell reminds me a little bit of being in a bait shop.”

Taylor: “It’s bait-y. I’d say, like, musty dusty.”

Kelsey: “At times the smell goes from sort of neutrally strange to abruptly quite foul.”

Taylor: “I keep using the word dust, because it feels like it’s in the air, tangibly. I feel like I’m breathing dust that smells like rattlesnake.” [Editor’s note: This was actually the beginning of my slight sinus infection.]

Kelsey: “Yeah. It’s a dusty place. It’s like the Texas Roadhouse, right? But real.” [Kelsey’s note: I don’t really know what I meant by that — I was thinking of Texas Roadhouse back when they had peanut shells on the floor — my brain was pleasantly fried at that moment by heat and wind and dust.]

After an hour or so of sitting and watching, inhaling the musty dust, we felt primed for a sweet treat and exited the coliseum to patronize a Dippin’ Dots food truck. It was around five o’clock and many of the families we’d seen inside were heading back to wherever they came from, maybe the relatively nearby cities and towns of Roscoe, Abilene, San Angelo, and Lubbock. The dots of banana sundae-flavored ice cream were heavenly on our parched throats, as was the mild March air.

Kelsey: “I feel blissful. It feels like the end of a day at the beach where you’re tired, but at peace.”

We could not wait to curl up in the clean(ish) white sheets of our Studio 6 Motel beds for a nap, then spend the night twirling to country singer Cory Morrow at the annual Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup dance.

The next morning, the day of the Lord, we sacrificed a Starbucks run to make it to our bus tour right as it was taking off. It was this excursion that gave us the greatest understanding of the critters at the heart of this cultural event.

They’re beautiful to me, said our Sweetwater Jaycee tour guide Jason Rose, as we stood on rocks and red dirt on the outskirts of town, the snakes’ natural habitat. Curiously, the snake vs. horse dichotomy in the Chinese zodiac had precedence in medicine. Rose explained the relationship during his demonstration.

Rose: “They used to make antivenom by injecting venom into a horse. The horse has a protein antibody in his blood system that would let the venom start working, and then [they would] draw the blood out from the horse and separate that antibody and make antivenom.”

“Well, they thought that was inhumane,” he said in a way you could tell he thought that was kind of bullshit. “So now all the antivenom that is made is all chemically based.”

The question of humaneness was frequently on our minds. The Rattlesnake Roundup has been criticized as outdated, no longer needed, or even cruel for its use of gas to ferret out snakes during hunts.

Rose told us that, even with culling some 5,000 snakes every year (and wildly, 25,000 last year), the remaining rattlesnakes of Sweetwater are doing alright.

Rose: “We’re not even touching the population. They give, like I said, five to twenty-five babies every year, and we only pick up the adults. They’re producing faster than we can even try to collect.”

[Kelsey’s note: Reader, after the fact, I feel more complicated about the driving force behind this event. These sorts of long-running traditions, on one hand, add regional color to an area and keep a shared history going in real time. And of course the event is a huge economic bolster to the town. We met many friendly people who were quick to chat with us and help us, whether that was wordlessly handing us napkins while we had fried rattlesnake bits on our hands or ushering us closer to see the snakes and making sure we got photos with them. And yet…experts say, no surprise here, that gassing rattlesnakes from their holes damages the surrounding ecology. Ecologists have seemingly debunked any benefits the Jaycees have historically claimed result from the roundup. Herpetologists say that rattlesnakes self-regulate their population production, and the venom collected during the event is apparently not produced in sanitary-enough conditions to use in a research capacity. And bites? Well… “Most bites occur when people intentionally mess with rattlesnakes or refuse to move away from them,” wrote Ted Williams for Yale Environment 360. “Western diamondbacks kill about one Texan a year. The single death in 2022 was a handler at the Freer, Texas, roundup.”

But I can respect as an outsider to this tradition that I don’t know the ins-and-outs of life in this part of West Texas. I remember my dad telling me about times out on oil rigs where a roughneck would see a rattlesnake and kill it with a shovel. I’d be scared out there, too, of enduring a bite that might end my life many miles from a hospital. It’s hard to sum up that kind of passed-down, daily fear that articles and scientists can’t quite express. Plus, of course, there’s a romantic-and-fearsome cowboy ethos to an event like this that’s hard to part ways with.

In a 2023 article in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, a professor advocated for a switch to a no-kill event. “We recognize that this is the major economic event for Sweetwater — and it should continue to be so,” Cal. Poly. Professor Taylor said. “But there’s no reason why we can’t transition into celebrating wildlife instead of butchering them.”]

Hopping off the bus after Rose’s presentation, it was finally time to do the dang thing. We approached the concession stand, and Kelsey laid ten dollars down for a basket of fries and fried rattlesnake. We’d been told by various people that it tasted like catfish, alligator, chicken, and/or frog legs. Now was our turn to try it.

Taylor: “We have a fried snake here and it looks very snake-like, in an unappetizing way for me. What about you?”

Kelsey: “The shape is, for me, honestly, a little indiscernible.”

Taylor: “I see like a center vein, a rib. Okay, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna try it. Okay.”

[Chewing and eating sounds]

Taylor: “That one’s like, mostly cornmeal. I can’t even bite it. Oh, god, Oh, hot.”

Kelsey: “There, I got a small chunk. . . Honestly, I see the chicken thing. It’s very hot. I taste chicken.”

Taylor: “Doesn’t that feel like bone, though? And gristle?”

Kelsey: “It does. I don’t think this is the most rewarding thing to eat.”

Taylor: “I’m not finding it edible at all. With so much respect.”

Kelsey: “There’s not much meat.”

Taylor: “That makes sense why that guy [Editor’s note: An elderly gentleman with a walker and a companion with ample face tattoos in front of us in line] ordered ten plates. [Editor’s note: A different man, nondescript, in line after us ordered raw snake from the vendor.]

So what if we didn’t like the rattlesnake as food (or the French fries either, to be truthful). We had learned to respect the rattlesnake as a cultural talisman for this region — and a tourist draw. Jaycee tour guide Jason told us that the venom his group collects each year is sent off to be used as anti-venom and even in cancer research. Using her snake scholarship, Miss Snake Charmer Kaylee will become a nurse and no doubt do wonderful things. In the Bible, snakes represent evil, deception and temptation, yes. But, in at least one story, they are also a sign of healing.

We’d arrived in Sweetwater weary and unwell. As we headed back home, the ailments that had plagued us on our way into town were with us no longer — and yet the dust was still in our noses.

By: Kelsey Lawrence

I don’t really know why I went to a Wikipedia editing workshop on a Monday afternoon. I don’t have a day job, for one. It’s March, the barometric pressure is fluctuating, and it’s South by Southwest, which felt like something Texas Star should look into. A free event at a public library seemed like a strange, local, and honest entry point into the swirl of koozies and free probiotic sodas and QR codes and plastic badges.

But it turns out I was wrong about when SXSW started, which is actually today and running through March 18th. When I went to Austin’s downtown library to attend this workshop, expecting to hop around and see the sights after, brands were still setting up their “immersive experiences”. The Wikipedia event was part of the education portion of the festival, which happens earlier than SXSW proper. I did not know this going in — poor journalism on my part — so I was too early to catch the Rivians parked atop giant mounds of dirt, the Netflix pop-up bar for Peaky Blinders, something called a “wellness social”, or a panel called “Charmageddon” where tech attendees can learn how to “help robots go from impressive machines to trusted companions”.

There are many people who can speak to the halcyon days of SXSW, but no one is quite sure what role the festival occupies in this era of fragmented culture.

“The people running SXSW may know better than anyone that assembling the smartest people from across the cultural spectrum can’t necessarily tell you what’s going to happen next,” Texas Monthly’s Dan Solomon wrote. “When it comes to their festival’s fate, they’ll have to wait for the future to come one day at a time, like the rest of us.”

SXSW, which has been around for 40 years, has so many Stefon-from-SNL “This club has everything” moments—secret shows in drainage tunnels, Lady Gaga’s Doritos concert, branded events with names like “The Tide Laundry Experience”—that I didn’t know where to begin to add to this narrative.

I wanted to speak somehow to the liminality, the randomness of SXSW—that feeling of reaching for a free tote bag on a Tuesday at 2 p.m.—and thought a miscellaneous Wikipedia panel in a nondescript public setting was as good a place as any to start. And it kind of was. There were free burritos and coffee, a varied assortment of people excited to be learning about Wikipedia, a man of dapper dress who talked about typewriters for a while. But there were no laundry detergents or SUVs or Netflix shows being hawked, just the simple fact that if we want to know the context for how we got here, that information is there, for free and for all of us.

Similar to how we go to Reddit for crowdsourced opinions on health concerns or relationship issues or skincare products, Wikipedia is where we go to get answers, even as grade school teachers refused to let us cite it. The only printed general reference encyclopedia still published today is The World Book Encyclopedia. This year’s edition is $1,349.

While you can of course use online encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica, you’re not going to find niche histories, the details of a D-list celebrity’s life, or learn about arcane concepts like “wet bias”. Wikipedia is our history — and our present — in realtime. The event, sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, invited people of all Wikipedia experience levels to “make a positive impact on the world of online knowledge sharing”. A representative from the new Austin History Center encouraged attendees to use the center’s archives for research and handed out maps that showed downtown Austin in 1873 back when I-35 was just a tree-lined road called East Avenue. (Take us back, etc.) If I were to hazard a guess — admittedly a hopeful one — it’s that this panel does say something about the future, not just of SXSW but of cultural consumption more broadly.

I went to the workshop with my friend Annie and her dad Billy. At the end of the presentations, attendees were encouraged to work collaboratively on editing and writing Wikipedia entries about regional topics of interest. Truthfully, the three of us did not do this — instead, we talked. Billy told us a little of his own Texas history. He talked about having a beer with Tommy Lee Jones while the actor was in San Antonio filming 1977’s Rolling Thunder and about an oil heiress he knew of who was buried in a lace nightgown in her Ferrari. Because the panel was full when we got there (I had incorrectly assumed low attendance), we sat in armchairs slightly removed from the tables of participants with their laptops out. This provided a vantage point from which to observe the group, which spanned demographics of age, race, and gender. Archival materials, oral histories, and the internet — I think we will only see more of this layering of tactile materials and experiences to create a shared, more tangible understanding of whatever our reality is now. I think we will want to help each other do this, and the perk of free burritos certainly won’t hurt.

During the Q&A, one audience member, a youngish guy, inquired about the sorts of trees that were shown dotting the 1873 map of Austin. The history center rep wasn’t sure, but another audience member, an older gentleman, chimed in that they were probably definitely live oaks.

I’m not sure about the future of a film, music, and technology festival during a time when culture is pretty decentralized, but I do think brand activations might be out and questions about trees might be in.

Down the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole by Taylor Prewitt

Since knowledge sharing is trending, below are some bizarre or forgotten pieces of Texana history and/or legend. Share your own with the Texas Star editors in the comments or email us at texasstareditors@gmail.com.

Teen Mania Ministries (noun): a now-shuttered evangelical youth group based out of Garden Valley, Texas, from 1996 to 2015. At one time “one of the largest Christian youth organizations in the U.S.” Teen Mania was known for its rock concert-like worship and recruitment events and also its well-documented teen spiritual abuse. (Weirdly, Garden Valley was also home to several other Christian ministries.)

Bessie Love (person): Born Juanita Horton in Midland, Texas, in 1898, Love was an early silent film actress who survived the jump to “talkies” and received an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1929. Fun fact: Love was 80 years old when she first appeared in Playboy in 1978 (as her younger self, in an illustration by famous pin-up painter Alberto Vargas).

Natural Museum of Funeral History (place): “The country’s largest collection of funeral service artifacts and features renowned exhibits on one of man’s oldest cultural customs,” according to its website (and Wikipedia), the 35,000-square-foot museum in Houston features Abraham Lincoln’s death mask, hearses, unusual coffins, and a funeral bill amounting to $99.25 for George Washington’s final burial.

Texas 42 (noun): The official State Domino Game of Texas, Texas 42 was invented in Garner, Texas, in 1887 and is now played at the state championship level each year in Hallettsville. The game proliferated in the 19th century because dominos didn’t conjure the same negative connotations as playing cards.

The pin-pen merger (noun?): A tendency for Southern folk to say “pin” like “pen” or “kin” like “ken.” The “conditional merger” is thought to have spread through the American South via migrants from Oklahoma and Texas during the Dust Bowl. However, linguists now debate whether Austin should be excluded from the larger pin/pen diaspora.

By: Kelsey Lawrence

I was born in 1990, the Year of the Horse. Thirty-six years later, conveniently for me, another equine year is upon us. I am drawing parallels between myself and horses that might be a stretch. “Some years ask questions, others answer,” a podcast host bubbled into my earbuds. Thank god, I thought, finally a year that answers something for once. Horses have galloped onto my phone screen to save me, to save us. I hope they’re ready for this psychic load.

The end of social media came for me in the form of a horse. Sometime this past year, I opened Instagram on my phone and saw the equivalent of an unclean gas station bathroom. The algorithm had spazzed, and I was seeing stuff far from the usual posts suggested to me of old homes for sale in the middle of the country or angular dermatologists talking about peptides.

Instead, this was on my “for you” page: a male torso with severely enlarged areolas, a woman inexplicably with her pants down in a hospital hallway, a photo of a mother and daughter with text overlay reading: “When my 14-year-old daughter started cooking with me, it was a sign of something sinister.” The townspeople would have burned my phone at the stake.

The only sign of mental peace in this melange of grotesque intrigue was a video of a horse providing palliative care in a hospital room. Over the last two years, horses began appearing on my phone like shimmering mirages. If the internet’s dead (this incarnation of it anyway) horses are carrying it to its grave — and inviting us to ride into oblivion. I saw videos of them galloping down Moroccan beaches and nuzzling women lying supine on a table in search of healing.

If you, like me, participate in the Girl Blog Internet, you’ll know horses appear there too. As Taylor wrote about last week, they summon instant girlhood romance. The Instagram account Bathmat3000 shared a roundup of horse-related images, starting with a still of the music video for “Some Velvet Morning” where Nancy Sinatra’s blonde head melts into an image of Lee Hazlewood atop his horse.

Around that time I saw an image of a teenaged girl embraced in a hug with her horse. “I too remember kindness,” someone commented. Another curator of mood-based ambiance, Slaty, shared grainy photos from a 2018 news story of a young woman wearing a hot outfit riding her horse at night through the streets of Shanghai.

When they’re not depicting romance and wildness, horses on our phones are often used to express surreal internet humor. “Have you seen this horse?” reads text on a flyer with tear-offs reading “I have now”. They might be shown somewhere horses wouldn’t normally be, such as standing in a church or lying in bed with a man wearing a ball cap. The latter example comes from a bizarre AI account that generates disconcerting fake images of an imagined alternate reality in North Carolina’s Outer Banks of all places. The wild horses that live on the region’s barrier islands figure prominently as characters.

There’s a video of a horse missing part of a leg, a wooden board wrapped haphazardly to the remaining stub. Another video shows horses with suitcases on their backs boarding an airplane with the caption: “Due to the approaching winter storm and dangerous cold conditions, local crews are temporarily evacuating the wild horses to safer areas.” Most people seem to know the posts are AI, though there are a few comments that suggest otherwise. “That’s awesome!!! 👏” one person wrote. “The creativity and engine used for this make the perfect balance of off putting but believable for old people lolz” someone else posted.

The Four Horsemen are often evoked when discussing the advent of something seemingly anti-human like AI. Two years ago I encountered a vision of the fourth horseman in Tennessee. On a circular road trip around the country, my fiancé Steve and I stopped in the very small town of Greenback, outside of Knoxville, to see a DIY castle called the Fortress of Faith. It was built by one man, Floyd “Junior” Banks, out of bricks and cinder blocks and concrete and assorted ephemera. He believes that the castle contains messages from God, which he emphasizes with black paint.

Here’s what the castle looked like:

Steve and I wandered around alone for probably about 15 to 20 minutes before meeting its creator. I’ve never liked ascribing horror to children’s toys or things that seem handmade in an unusual way — it seems too easy — but it was hard to ignore the obvious. In modern times, with modern cultural knowledge, there is one thing that comes to mind when you see someone’s thoughts painted on walls in black ink, broken children’s toys strewn in dirt when no children are present, mannequin heads peering through prison-style bars: the end might be near. After meeting the castle’s builder, he confirms that the end is, indeed, pretty close, but this news couldn’t be delivered by a kinder, gentler person. Junior, who is about 80 with white, straight hair and an early American face, started building the castle in 1993 and adds to it all the time.

He saw a vision on the wall of the fourth horseman, the pale horse of death. “The Pale Horse-Man is in side on wall in little room” one of his signs reads. “Do all you can noting [sic] in the world is going to matter, but what is in this place.” Banks hopes that people will come visit the castle before the end of the world arrives. “Tilly Norwood might just be the fourth horseman of the apocalypse,” reads an October subhed from Jezebel about an AI-generated actress. I don’t know how I ended up on Jezebel, a vestige of late 2010s internet blogging culture. When I went to the homepage, instead of new articles featuring prominently, an archival section titled “Resurrected from the Jezebel Catacombs” got top billing.

The idea of an avatar actress feels so corny, I assumed there would be no further news. But then I searched “Tilly Norwood” and saw that Tilly’s creator has just announced that she will be building a studio where other AI characters “live, collaborate and build careers”. I read this alongside a sidebar with another article discussing the “clone conspiracy theory” of Jim Carrey showing up looking pretty darn weird to a French awards show. Then, I think of a man I once interviewed for a story who has been slowly unveiling his AI wife on his Facebook profile over the last few weeks. We’ve got to get to Junior’s castle, quick. He did, after all, warn us: “The Pale Horseman is now on earth”.

Maybe horses look so uncanny online because in real life they’re the opposite of whatever social media is. Smells like birth, eyes that look deep into you, a warm rhythm that coincides with a human’s body in a way a phone could never. The Year of the Horse really got us excited these past few months. Part of this is probably simply because horses look cool, but I also think the enthusiasm coincides with a wrenching desire to be tactile, to be free. Horses are associated with freedom and escape, even though most of them are domesticated. We’re free but always answering to someone.

Seeing the Year of the Horse shoehorned into the Instagram self improvement vortex made me laugh, and of course I also saved every last post. “The Year of the Horse begins February 17. I’m doing 6 things now to prepare →” reads text over a woman wearing a bikini and smiling into the sun. These six things include words like “decluttering,” “processing,” “getting clear on my vision,” and, say it with me, “letting go of what no longer serves.” Our phones are always encouraging us to do stuff like this.

Actress and writer Annie Hamilton wrote this in an Instagram caption a few days ago:

I’ve never been more online … in my looking, in my stalking and interpreting, in my ‘saving’ but not ‘liking’… and yet— I’ve never been more … offline… in the posting sense. ????? BOY am I 33 years old and still so very ONLINE!!!! And I’m just wondering WHEN does it all end???? And WHEN DO MY MEMORIES BECOME REAL AGAIN???? When do my MEMORIES take place in the non matrix REALM!!!!

And just now, I see another horse on my phone. A meme (though I’m not even sure what constitutes a meme anymore) of two horses facing the direction of an exploding volcano, text reading: “how it feels to still want to pursue a creative career during all of this”. I think we are wondering, as Hamilton wrote, when does it all end? Where is the non matrix realm? We’re banking on the horses to bring us answers or to tell us it’s the end…of something.

Nearly ten years later, I’m still thinking about horses and I’m not alone. There have never been more opportunities for dilettante equestrians to dabble in stalls and saddles. Today, in the Year of the Horse, the “horse girl”—formerly needy, nerdy—has been adopted by the likes of Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner. She is more glamorous than she was, but still retains some of the fervent girlhood sheen of her former era.

Below, my 2018 horse girl essay, unedited from its original presentation. Please forgive any youthful gaffes.

———

“I was after girls who wanted to be cowgirls and I never asked too many questions. Ones I tried to weed out were the ones that were in love with horses. You know, the Freudian thing. Lot of parents, about the time their baby daughters start pushing out their sweaters in front, they buy ‘em a horse to divert their attention from boys. What they really buy ‘em is a thousand-pound organic vibrator. A horse is great for good clean hands-above-sheets masturbation, and some girls never outgrow the thrill of it. Those kind just don’t make real cowgirls.” Bonanza Jellybean, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

I’ve befriended three “horse girls” in my life. You know what I mean by “horse girl” if you’ve met one, and maybe even if you haven’t — that’s the convenience of shorthand. Urban Dictionary defines her as “a very annoying female that loves horses and talks about horses all the fucking time. She draws horses on her binders, dreams about horses, and even has sex with horses.” Male redditors have beat the “horse girls are crazy” horse to a bloody, red pill pulp. Horse girl redditors are left to wonder, what gives, or to continue to post photos of their horses, oblivious to any other way of being.

I have the authority to talk horse girl because I was one, at least in a sense. I took lessons as the illustrious-sounding, middling Foxcroft Farm as a young girl and later owned a pregnant miniature horse (and eventually a baby miniature horse). My first two oil paintings were of a horse and a broken down saddle, and I wrote and illustrated short stories about a horse farm. I had a plastic stable of mounts that I made to gallop as play. I was obviously enraptured, as all horse girls, by definition, are, but I was also noncommittal enough to buoy and turn out as this perfectly well-adjusted human woman. Recently, I remembered my childhood dream of adulthood: one day, I could own my own horse and ride it whenever I wanted to.

As far as I can tell, the first person to use the term “horse girl” as a complete phrase was a phrenologist in 1896 studying a patient who presented as a horse. That is, the female patient acted like a horse, neighing instead of laughing, walking with a horse-y gait, licking people’s hands and “show[ing] a high appreciation of friendship.” Apparently, “horse” as a standin for girlhood “friendship” predates Saddle Club.

Black Beauty, one of the best-selling books of all time, was published almost two decades before, kicking off a subgenre of children’s literature known as the “pony book.” The author, Anna Sewell, wrote the anthropomorphized biography of a black horse while laid up from an injury to which she would succumb five months after publishing. Her intent was to stoke empathy, a feminized skill that’s been cited as the reason more girls fall for horses than young boys, who lack the necessary gentleness. Pony books raged starting in the 1920s, marked by an idealized vision of friendship, fantastical worlds where you can gallop away on fantastical creatures.

For me, horses were a literary preoccupation with such fantasy and not just in the content I consumed. The horse lifestyle was an early foray into world-building, a form of identity tourism. Imagine: life with a built-in best friend, one who doubled as an escape mechanism, a guide to unknown places, a right hand steed. When head cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean, quoted above, talks about cowgirls in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” she’s talking about a way of being, an aspiration for a type of life that one develops in childhood, the way boys dream of being firefighters or superheros. In some ways, horse girls are animated in a suspended amber of childhood, never growing out of the obsession. They are cat ladies who haven’t withered yet. Over 101 books in the Saddle Club saga and the characters don’t age. It’s why we say horse girl and not horse woman.

Catherine Held, author of Horse Girl: An Archetypal Study of Women, Horses, and Trauma Healing, posits that wild horses and women lost their freedom around the same time, thus the innate, subconscious fascination. So perhaps the gallop-y, wind in my hair freedom I’m even now getting swept up in is part of that.

But I think there’s a darker underbelly to the horse girl too. Girls do grow up. In the same way the ponytail, a popular teen hairstyle in the 1950s, named for the horse’s tail, was thought to evoke innocence and eroticism in the wearer, so too does the horse girl straddle the line between little girl fantasy and an obsession that reads as more sinister on a grown woman, at least in this world.

One of the horse girls I knew, a neighbor who would go on to compete on Texas A&M’s horse team, we bonded over exercise, weight loss, and not feeling good enough, working out together and swapping poems, diet tips and heartbreak. What I have in common with the horse girls is that we all come from the social periphery like that; she was lonely because she spent all her time in horse world and I was just lonely. Maybe she and I were both disappointed that the vision the horse gave us, a fantasy life that isn’t real.

The “horse craze” was enough of a thing by the time the pony books began to proliferate for Anna Freud to write in 1926:

“A little girl’s horse craze betrays either her primitive autoerotic desires (if her enjoyment is confined to the rhythmic movement on the horse); or her identification with the caretaking mother (if she enjoys above all looking after the horse, grooming it, etc.); or her penis envy (if she identifies with the big, powerful animal and treats it as an addition to her body); or her phallic sublimations (if it is her ambition to master the horse, to perform on it, etc.).”

As long as girls have been “crazy,” and crazy about horses, the fanaticism has had an erotic sheen. It makes sense; horses are sexy and their members are large and there’s nothing more reviled than a sexually curious young woman. For what it’s worth, the horse girl currently in my life, the one who still displays her dressage trophies in her living room, is a very animated, licensed sex therapist.

For centuries before the invention of the vibrator, the galloping animals were used as a prescription for hysteria, the proto-crazy girl illness of which sexual fantasy was a symptom. Catherine the Great, who was known to take many lovers into her bed, was believed to have been killed while trying to copulate with a stallion before present-day historians recognized the myth as a crock of sexist shit. In addition to well-sexed, she likely straddled horses, giving rise to eyebrows, rather than riding sidesaddle, as was the norm for the women of her time. And then there’s all the euphemisms for riding, mounting, etc., plus the cowgirl sex position to consider.

Obsession also colors the “horse girl,” seasoning her particular varietal of crazy. The second horse girl I know is driven, ambitious, and competitive -- an intense personality that went for Ted Cruz in 2016, but loves Hillary Clinton. Like the first horse girl I knew, she too was preoccupied with her weight. On her wedding day, she was thin as a foal. Before that, when we were still in college, she booked a venue before her boyfriend proposed. They had already decided to get engaged and she knew the venue would be booked if she waited too long, but the move seemed a little much, crazy even.

And because horse obsession is tinted with sex, the “horse girl” as sketched by men on Reddit and Total Frat Move and other online forums, takes on hideous, female monster form. They’re not concerned that her obsession is too infantile or too all-consuming, but rather that it may transfer to other areas of her life, to the men she dates. They swear her off for this reason. She’s crazy: girl to sex fiend to loony in a few gallops.

There is something about horse girls that lends them to generalization. Are we inherently crazy, unable to let go of a lost girlhood dream? Is it that we’re dick-jealous? Or dick-thirsty? Is it actually just that we enjoy taking care of something, those maternal hormones inside us raging at the sight of a mane that needs taming? Or do we love being in control of something, of deriving power from an animal that is literally used to denote power?

In coming out as a horse girl, I miss my simple obsession, my fantasy, my thousand-pound organic vibrator.

For a while, I wanted to get married in Port Aransas. We searched for venues up and down the Texas coast, Gilchrist to South Padre, that matched an image in my head of a run-down mansion with crumbling lion’s heads and cherub fountains and sand-dusted Harlequin tiles. I was on a mildly delusional errand, searching for a crumbling Italian villa along the Texas coast. No matter how many combinations of words I typed in the search bar, I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for. I didn’t want a big, fancy wedding venue, but I did want glamour — maybe an oil baron’s wife’s vacation home, a few decades into disrepair.

Around the time I was looking for this anomaly among native landscaping, Taylor, co-editor of Texas Star, sent me an article from Texas Architect about The Seahorse Inn. The hotel in Port Aransas was built in the fifties as a secret getaway, primarily for gay people, by its proprietor and Port Aransas native Jack Cobb. Perhaps because of its on-the-down-low atmosphere, the inn seemed built for discretion with high walls made from wood slats and midcentury brick.

“From the mid-1950s through the ’90s, the secluded compound offered famous politicians, opera divas, and writers an off-the-beaten-path retreat,” writer Rob Linné shared. “The inn also gave refuge to people skirting the margins of South Texas respectability: gay men and women, academics, and Democrats.”

Reading about the Seahorse Inn gave me the sensation that I had somehow always known a place like this existed. Beach towns, even when they are ornamented with refineries, are portals to somewhere else. The Seahorse, from Linné’s description, was filled with gilded European antiques, Asian ceramics, Venetian chandeliers, nude sketches, New Age crystals, and a colored glass bowl with condoms. Hard to imagine all of this in Port Aransas, but somehow it makes sense. It takes a native son, someone who’s stared at the same landscape around him for so long, to superimpose a means of escape over cellularly familiar terrain. An Italian villa on the Texas coast after all. Here are other moments where I’ve seen hothouse flowers meet hearty native species in Texas’ romantic beach towns.

I. The only mall that ever existed on South Padre Island

The first time a place really talked to me was on a weekend family trip to South Padre Island sometime in the late nineties. I was with my mom and sister in the only mall on the island. (There is no longer a mall there today!) When the concept of a “liminal space” became popular on the internet, the hazy memory of this mall would always enter my mind — soaring atrium windows, tan retail tiles, and a black carpeted hallway leading to a small movie theater. Looking through newspaper archives, it turns out my little kid self did correctly pick up on a sparkling frequency from this place.

When The Mall at Sunchase first opened in 1984, its anchor store was the ritzy Jones & Jones, the Neiman Marcus of South Texas. A 1983 newspaper article about the department store described it as stocking Halston and Oscar de la Renta, antiques from around the world, and a $60,000 Lalique crystal table. To think of these items in a store on South Padre, a beach town primarily featuring stores selling flip flops, sunscreen, and “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” shirts, feels wild.

The mall, it turns out, was built by two wildcatters during boom times. John Connally, former Texas governor and U.S. Treasury Secretary — so high up there that he was in the car with John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated — and Ben Barnes, real estate magnate and politician, collaborated on a few things together. One of them was allegedly helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency and the other was building the first air-conditioned mall on South Padre Island.

They got a prominent New York retail architect named Harvey Weston to design it. There was an optimistic article in the The Baytown Sun with quotes from developers saying they believed the mall would “surely be a sign that South Padre Island has recovered from the loss of Mexican buyers in 1982”. Had the eighties oil bust not ended the party, this stretch of retail and condos might have continued on to be the Rodeo Drive of Texas’ Gulf Coast.

Those cinema walls I vaguely remember had been a small theater owned by a cocaine kingpin who had left his home in Tennessee to hide out on Padre Island in the eighties. An anonymous tip turned him into the FBI, and I’m not sure what happened to the theater after that. In the mid-nineties, it was briefly occupied by an impersonator revue, with the last newspaper reference being a show with Blues Brothers impersonators with “CANCELLED” over the ad.

One of the mall’s original stores, Iannelli Diamonds, had just three locations — one at The Mall at Sunchase; one in McAllen, Texas; and the other at 1200 Avenue of the Americas, corner of 47th, Manhattan. Imagine a business nowadays having its three locations exist only in the Rio Grande Valley and on prime Manhattan real estate. When the mall officially closed after Hurricane Dolly, it was converted into a middling hotel. A few reviewers seem to sense something of its past.

“One of the strangest hotels ever!” reads the title of Trip Advisor reviewer Matt C. He first complimented the hotel’s giant shower (“I mean, 6 people could have fit in it.”) then wrote, “It was a strange place as this was a former mall converted to a hotel and there are still businesses on the bottom floor, like a radio station and a newspaper. It was hard to tell it was a hotel and there is a club on the fourth floor that thankfully was not open while we were there.”

II. Riding the ferry after the causeway collapsed and Dido’s “Thank You” was playing

Four days after September 11th, 2001, the bridge that connects Port Isabel to South Padre Island was struck in the center by a tugboat pulling four barges in the middle of the night. With no warning of what had just happened, five cars drove over the edge of the Queen Isabella Causeway and eight people were killed. Because of the national tragedy that preceded it days before, this Texas tragedy received less attention than it would have otherwise.

In the months after, ferries shuttled visitors to the island that had been disconnected from the mainland. My family and I took the ferry one weekend and stayed at the Holiday Inn. I remember warm Saltillo tiles, sunny plates of fruit and eggs, and a quiet, bittersweet kind of Padre experience. On the ferry ride over, Dido’s “Thank You” was playing on the radio as we floated slowly across the Laguna Madre.

III. Learning to surf with a champion body surfer

As part of my perpetual yearning to have grown up in California, I figured I should learn how to surf. My high school boyfriend and I went to a surf shop on Padre Island and asked about lessons. Our instructor met us down by the jetties with two boards. Middle-aged and sun-baked, Dave became part of the lore of our high school relationship. Somehow we learned he was an award-winning bodyboarder. We had only seen people like this on TV. The white people in the Valley were generally rancher types, not surfer types.

I don’t remember much of the surfing itself, but I’m sure it was hard and kind of fun, too, when I stood up for a few moments. The only other thing I remember is leaving in my boyfriend’s old Chevy Silverado truck, the same color as the Gulf of Mexico — it was the truck his older brother used to drive, and I had the biggest crush on his older brother. Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” was playing.

IIII. All of Corpus Christi

Corpus comes to me in snapshots in my mind. Walking into a wood-paneled Ramada lobby, seeing smiling relatives with mixed drinks in hotel glasses. The Holiday Inn on Emerald Beach with one of the few remaining Holidomes, which were the atriums Holiday Inns once had for indoor leisure with a pool, sauna, playground, arcade, and restaurant. Sliding glass doors opened onto the atrium, and as a kid it felt like the best place ever. I probably barely noticed how wet all the surfaces were.

Another Corpus snapshot in my mind is standing in the white “miradores del mar”, the gazebo-like structures that make the bayfront look like the Mediterranean. When Robert Earl Keen says if he could live his life all over it wouldn’t matter anyway, and he’s singing about two brothers on the Corpus Christi Bay, I think of how my dad and my Uncle Cliff were two brothers stationed in Corpus in the Coast Guard in the seventies. Another snapshot around 2018, walking around the fading Sunrise Mall, a nearly perfectly preserved time capsule where a very eighties-looking movie called “The Legend of Billie Jean” was filmed. I think Pretzel World and a military memorabilia store called War & Peace were the only two stores open.

Corpus, to me, kind of feels like an alternate reality, like something else was supposed to be there or was there and we’re seeing the film set decades later.

V. The Story of the Seahorse Inn

Jack Cobb, proprietor of the aforementioned Seahorse Inn in Port Aransas, was a patron of the opera who would follow performances throughout Europe. He decided to build the Seahorse on the tallest sand dune in town, back when it seemed easier to just decide to do something like that.

Cobb’s design for the Seahorse was intriguingly incongruous with the usual hallmarks of beachside living — no Key West colors or faded Maine clapboard. The main beachy tell was a round pool in the center of the compound, one of the area’s first swimming pools. The design of the hotel was sometimes attributed to O’Neil Ford, the architect who invented the Texas Modern style of brick, glass, and wood used to perfect effect among oak trees. But in Ford’s diary, he wrote: “Jack Cobb of Port Aransas came by with a sketch of a plan he has made for a lodge he expects to build on the old Wofford Cain Dune.” The architect noted that the sketch was good for a “rank amateur,” but he wrote it was a “damned shame for that uninspired thing to be built in that beautiful place”.

As much as the Seahorse Inn was a truly special place, I can see what he meant. It’s a lot of wood and brick that juts out from that dune in somewhat abrupt angles. But if Cobb’s intent was a fortress of escape, maybe his design makes sense after all. It is what he dreamed up, no experience in architecture — a master’s in English from Columbia instead. Today, the Seahorse Inn is now Belle’s Sea Inn and it has a different ambiance than its predecessor — more of an anonymous Airbnb situation. I’m glad it’s still standing though. Nothing lasts forever, but brick certainly lasts a long time.

VI. The Grand Galvez at Christmastime

A sunny day on the beach feels like it must look a certain way. But winter on the beach is filled with intrigue, people hiding out over the holidays. Right after Christmas, on this wedding venue search, I found myself in the lobby of the Grand Galvez, Galveston’s Spanish Colonial-style hotel built in 1911 to decorate a seawall built after the historically devastating 1900 hurricane. In the last few years, a Dallas hotelier and his wife brought back the old glamour with harlequin floors and Murano chandeliers and palms and white wicker chairs, and they painted the exterior pink, thank god. Sitting at the bar on a rainy winter’s night three years ago, it was pretty much just us and a young woman bartender who talked about the ghosts she had encountered in Galveston and made us cocktails that smoked.

VII. Two good ol’ boys, one Democratic judge, and a pretty bartender

Another evening on that trip, we visited the hotel bar at Port Aransas’ Tarpon Inn where Hedy Lamar stayed one time. The bar was discreetly tucked away behind the hotel, and it wasn’t evident at first glance that it was open, or even a bar. Walking in, we were met with a bartender who had the looks and smile of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Sitting at the bar, flirting with her beyond mercy, were two middle-aged men. It wasn’t long before the two men were talking to me and my fiancé, as well, and they were funny in the way that two middle-aged best friends really can be if you get a good pair. One was a developer and had a sister who used to live in New York in the ‘80s; the other had an autistic son and found the intersection of geology and oil to be lucrative. They had snuck away from their group but were eventually pulled back to join their wives and a card game.

After they departed, a man who had been sitting by himself, about the same age and vibe of the guys who had just left, scooted over to us. “I’ll bet those men thought I was a Republican like them,” he sniffed, glad to see two people who looked more on the left of things. I don’t recall the men bringing up anything about politics, though they certainly might have, but his relief was felt in being able to unburden assumptions and talk shit about Trump and Texas Republicans. He turned out to be a judge from Austin, and he was right: I would have assumed otherwise.

In the first-ever installment of Texas Star, we are pleased to bring you the story of a short-running 1970s Texas nudie magazine. It feels appropriate, as we launch our own little media venture, to look back at a pioneering, fun-loving publication with a similar affinity for Texas culture, Texas glamour, and the inimitable appeal of Texas women.

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Today, Texas Girl Magazine exists in a handful of postings on resale and memorabilia sites. A seller on eBay who goes by raddoodads will let his 1978 collector’s edition go for $69, while a “DIRTY,” “DOG-EARED,” and “USED” issue featuring Willie Nelson in a Santa hat alongside a petite bare bum is listed for $200.

Further information is scarce; a quick Google search turns up only a couple of issues for sale and the archived interview with Willie. Why do so few issues remain? What happened to a publication with enough cache to feature one of the era’s most popular musicians? And why have you and I never heard of it?

No one, however, would ask why someone would make a nudie magazine full of Texas women. That part just makes sense. Out of the state’s many exports—oil, Friday Night Lights, cowboy culture—there’s something special about its sex appeal. Anna Nicole Smith, Dallas blondes, and breast implants all hail from the Lone Star State.

“Them Texas women is Texas gold,” Willis Alan Ramsey identified in his 1972 song—an element so naturally occurring here that it “grow[s] on trees.” That same decade, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders introduced seduction to the gridiron, while down at “that shack outside La Grange,” the law was disbanding a long-running house of ill repute just as a trio of long-bearded Texans released a hit single alerting the wider country of its existence. On television, Farrah Fawcett’s big hair and megawatt smile charmed the nation. Texas women were hot as ever.

It was in this age that Texas Girl Magazine came to fruition. Bill Freeman was a publisher and the executive editor of the magazine and shared his memories of the publication with me over email. “I remember it all, I lived it all,” he wrote me. Generously, he sent over several issues for me to peruse.

As he recalls, an unnamed someone from Austin approached Freeman, then a partner at a printing company in Houston, in the late 1970s with “lots of quality pictures and an idea”. Together, Freeman and his associates put together that first issue which debuted in the fall of 1978. The pink cover featured a brunette in a high-slit white dress and cowboy hat, plus the promise of “bunches of the best looking girls in the Lone Star State!” It also came with a warning: “Texas Girls are habit-forming! So is this magazine!”

The inside featured spreads of Elaine, an Arabian horse trainer shot both astride and beside a horse, a self-assured “statuesque beauty” that “everyone calls” Definitely Donna, and Nancy, a well-shaped fisherwoman off the south Texas coast. Blessedly, there is bush. There isn’t, however, retouching, which even then was the norm for flesh mags. Just as Playboy positioned itself as the purveyor of the “girl next door” type, Texas Girl sought everyday Texas women to appear in its pages, running contests to solicit aspiring models; one cover model was discovered while working a booth at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. “I’ve been pulling some of these girls in off the streets of Houston,” Freeman told Texas Monthly in a 1979 profile of Texas Girl. In another interview with the now-defunct San Antonio Light newspaper, he acknowledged that the authentic Texas connection was essential to the magazine’s success. “A magazine called ‘Nebraska Girl’ just wouldn’t fly,” he said.

For the well-rounded Texas man, issues also contained articles on subjects like race car driver A.J. Foyt, musician Freddy Fender, women working the oil field, and Willie Nelson’s Lone Star Records. Nelson would remain a supporter of the magazine, appearing on the final distributed cover of the publication in December 1979. Lone Star Beer, appeared as a major advertiser in nearly every issue, solidifying the magazine’s Texas bonafides.

That first issue sold 40,000 copies—four times as many as Freeman and Co. had originally planned. Naturally, everyone wanted a second installment and Freeman delivered, getting together a higher-quality printer, offices, and more funding, advertisers, and contributors. By the end of the decade, Texas Girl was the third most popular men’s magazine in the state, with readers across the nation and even overseas in Germany and France. Toward the end of its run, Texas Girl was commissioning some of the same writers and cartoonists as Playboy, according to Freeman.

The thing about the seventies though, aside from the bush, and the free love, and the outlaw country: the prime interest rate was 21 percent, as Freeman recalls. His magazine had been funded by himself, various partners, and one big-spending trust fund guy. But by the end of 1979, “the Trust Fund said he had enough Fun [sic]” even as the January 1980 issue was set to go to print. That issue, which never saw the light of day, featured the very first “Miss Texas Girl Magazine,” winner of the magazine’s contest for the most beautiful girl in the state. Karla Thompson, the sexiest woman in Texas in January of 1980, was shot in short shorts and a red tank top at the state fair. On the cover, she covers her bare bosom with her arms as streamers rain down in celebration of a brand new decade.

The actual final issue—the December 1979 installment with Santa Willie and the bare bum—sold 60,000 issues. As with all good things, Texas Girl Magazine had come to an end. Freeman and his colleagues attempted to sell the name to larger men’s publications, including to Larry Flynt of Hustler fame. “Flynt’s people had interest,” Freeman says. “But Larry was shot and that was the end.” So it goes.

Today, Texas Girl lives on through Freeman. The magazine publisher still retains the brand, selling its logo on T-shirts and hats in service of the mission to “bring back the Texas mystique in clothing.” There’s something about a Texas girl we just can’t seem to quit.