When Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Administrator Alan Steen told the Dallas Voice that “If our guys would have followed the damn policy, we wouldn’t have even been at [the Rainbow Lounge],” Static was a little confused. According to records obtained by Fort Worth Weekly, the TABC doesn’t have much policy and seems to inspect just about everyone.
In May and June of this year, the TABC did 314 inspections at bars and restaurants in Fort Worth. The infamous Rainbow Lounge raid was listed as an “open compliance check” (OCC), whatever that means. Other places receiving OCCs during those two months were as varied as Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar, Café Aspen, the Spiral Diner and Bakery, and Sardine’s Ristorante Italiano.
TABC agents conducted an “external surveillance” at Rainbow Lounge just two days before the raid. But they also camped outside and did external surveillance at many other joints, including Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse downtown, Billy Bob’s Texas in the Stockyards, and the Yucatan Taco Stand on the South Side.
So according to the TABC, agents conducted the same type of inspections at Café Aspen and Del Frisco’s as they did at the Rainbow Lounge. Static doesn’t buy that, and also figures this state agency has way too much time on its hands. Or hires too many agents who figure they need to look busy.
Honk If We’re Dreamin’
In the old days in Fort Worth, Static knew of only one street intersection so bad that locals would perform intricate detours to avoid it, that being the spider web where University Drive, Camp Bowie Boulevard, West 7th Street, Bailey Avenue, and probably the River Styx cross. That’s what side streets are for – until you figure out that the traffic is even worse on your re-routed route because everyone else is doing the same thing.
Now, unfortunately, the web of woe-inducing thoroughfares is spreading. Who among us has not searched (usually in vain) for an alternative to I-35 that wouldn’t add gray hairs and subtract years from one’s life? Who has not pounded the steering wheel in inchoate frustration, upon remembering, as the last available exit appeared in the rearview mirror, that a golf tournament/college football game/rodeo/spring break zoo mania was going to block one’s progress at University and I-30 for the next interminable 45 minutes? Is there anyone in Cowtown with soul so dead who never to his passenger has said, “Just shoot me if I ever suggest going anywhere on Bryant Irvin Road on Saturday again”?
Well, that’s what public transportation will be for, someday. Maybe not for us, but for our grandkids. In the meantime, Static has a suggestion, one that won’t help drivers one whit, but might lower the collective Cowtown blood pressure. It’s one that’s been used in some other cities with great results: Just give up, officially, on certain of our prettier streets on, say, Sunday afternoons. Close ’em down to any kind of motorized traffic. Turn them into rollerblading, biking, jogging, pedestrian avenues for a few hours each week. Let people actually enjoy the oaks and gardens along University. Turn Oakhurst Scenic Drive, on the East Side, back into a lazy scenic meander, rather than the latest shortcut for I-35-dodgers.
And while we’re pipe dreaming, how about cotton candy clouds and peppermint stick light poles? Static appears, once again, to have ingested too much carbon monoxide while idling in traffic.
