Pop Culture
Cotton Candy, the movie featured Howard’s
American Graffiti co-star Charles Martin Smith.
62. Erica Abi Wright is better known to music fans as Erykah Badu. Her original stage name was Apples, one half of the hip-hop duo the Def Ones, while attending Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.
63. The Old 97’s make an appearance (and serve as a fairly major plot point, in the 2006 film
The Break-Up. Producer and star Vince Vaughn is a noted longtime fan of the 97’s. Their “Timebomb” was used in his 1998 movie
Clay Pigeons.
64. KNON was the first radio station to play hip-hop in Dallas.
The many curtain calls of Dallas’ Magnolia Lounge
From talking motion pictures to live theater, this versatile performance space from the ’30s in Fair Park has seen it all.
Margo Jones (right) of Theater 54 points out the play scheduled at the theater for March 23, 1954, to Mrs. Al Silver (left) and Mr. and Mrs. Arch B. Swank Jr. (Patsy Swank). Photograph published in The Dallas Morning News on Jan. 17, 1954.(DMN File Photo)
The Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park has lived several lives.
During the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, it served as a rest stop for fairgoers, and shortly after, it was reconfigured into a performance space for traveling vaudeville performers. Ten years after the lounge’s opening, theater powerhouse Margo Jones fashioned it into one of America’s first professional theater-in-the-round stages: a layout where audience members surrounded the stage.