Dallas Bound

D Magazine touts the finest chicken fried in the city (Dallas of course) as the CFS (waitress code) served at Ozona Cafe. Well, I happen to know where Ozona Cafe is, and it's in my neighborhood pretty much.* But I'm also torn: for the first official Texas feed, I really do think catfish should be on the menu. I had a lovely grilled catfish at Good Eats, pretty much just down the street from Ozona. These fine establishments are both on Greenville Avenue.

Now, if I can just withstand the broad expanse of west Texas once more, where the food delights that await come in the form of Grandma's cookies with a "best by" date in the last quarter, McDonald's fries fresh out of the (really, no REALLY it's trans-fat) and maybe a Kashi granola bar that I snagged at the last minute at Target in El Paso.

And as much as I'd like to be fair, and give Abilene a try once again, after 30 years, I just hope sincerely, and will plan assiduously to drive right on through the City Set On The Hill. Why? Because there's always Stephenville. (That's a regional joke. Readers from the area are spewing coffee on their monitors right this minute.) (I think they have teh INtarwebs in Abilene yet? S'ville and S'water, fer shur.)

Ok, so Abilene has Taco Bueno. So does Fort Worth and probably Dallas. But the original TB of my hidden college days is in Abilene, and if forced to stop for gas, we may partake, though I will couch the event heavily in the folklore and mystery that I simply refer to as "The Dark Time." (No, that is NOT when Jimmie Johnson was Dallas Cowboys' coach... he was the Anti-Christ, though). The Dark Time refers to that hole on my resume where the three and a half semesters (yes, a half, people... more like two weeks) that I matriculated .... ahhhhh, no, I just can't admit it.

Back to Dallas. Yes, back to Dallas I go. The highways are pretty much the same, but all the faces, places and colors are different, so I'm going there for the first time, again.

I'll be sure to ritually eat a chicken fried (or catfish) on Friday, and will snap a photo of the very first big-haired gal I find.

* NB: Texasisms will begin to creep into my writing and speaking voice almost any minute now, with alarming frequency. After talking on the phone to my insurance agent, I swear I was back in Texas already. She has that soft indescribable twang that makes you cock your head just a little, and think back to Ann Richards' silver foot comment, Molly Ivin's excoriation of all the boneheads in Texas, and even Mrs. Six Million Dollar Man, Farrah Fawcett (before she was ruint by Hollywood). And my mother.... who developed quite a pretty good Texas twang after 30 years of living there.