Adopting orphans from foreign countries comes with risk, but Kathie Seidel was willing to roll the dice. She was hurting. She wanted to be a mother again. For more than 20 years she had showered love on her only child, Brian, and his accidental death in 1989 had sent her reeling. “Everything in my life was an adventure with Brian,” she said. “He was such a joy, and I wanted to have that again. Parenting was the best thing I ever did with my life.” Unable to bear more children, she decided to become an adoptive mother. At 40 and single, she wasn’t the preferred candidate for American adoption agencies, so she looked overseas. Her... (more)

“This baby better like track, after all this,” a very pregnant Keisha Davis says as she walks across the grassy infield at Clarke Stadium in south Fort Worth. She pauses a moment, then turns to the exhausted runners who have maybe 30 seconds until their next 200-meter run. “You got a few extra seconds to rest this time — these last two should be good.” It’s after eight on a warm evening in late June, and the 12- to 18-year-old members of Hallmark Track Club are finishing their practice by running a set of three 200-meter sprints with an all-too-brief three minutes of rest in between. After an hour of warm-up, this is the real... (more)

Jorge’s Mexican Restaurant, 1802 Santa Fe Dr, Weatherford. 817-341-3208. Mon-Fri 11am-10pm, Sat-Sun 11am-10pm. Discover, MasterCard, Visa accepted. I’m not a big fan of Tex-Mex the way it’s commonly prepared in the chains or in the more high-traffic ma-and-pa restaurants here. Which doesn’t mean I don’t love the stuff, just that I’d rather cook it myself at home or be invited to someone else’s house for a real meal rather than grab the first quick enchilada that comes along. That said, every now and then I do get a hankering to splurge a little and let someone who makes a living cooking for other people cook for me while I sit... (more)

Movies about very rich, very unhappy families — genre classics such as Ordinary People and Sidney Lumet’s version of Long Day’s Journey into Night — offer us working-class filmgoers a chance to indulge and judge at the same time. We can check out the high-end real estate, the impeccable foreign-language skills, and the unfulfilled epic ambitions at the same time we tsk-tsk over the pathological addictions, the outsized competitiveness, and the general sense that these people, materialistic status-seekers, are spoiled to the core. Big money looks great but feels bad, right? True or not, this is the general premise of Savage Grace,... (more)

Local writer and retired journalist Phil Vinson has published his first work of fiction — and it’s a good one, although I suspect it is not altogether fictional. I doubt that anyone can write as compassionately and insightfully as Vinson does about the private hell of what the psychiatrists now call “major depressive disorder” without having first suffered through it or seen it in someone very close. It Takes a Worried Man was a painful but ultimately satisfying read for this reviewer who, like the protagonist Greg Spencer, spent too many years in that lonely black hole before climbing out into the sun again. The title, of... (more)