I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
Thanks to its low taxes and central location, many companies are headquartered in Dallas. Which means lots of meetings and conferences take place there, and thus business hotels have the shit beat of them. Case in point, the Hyatt Place in which I stayed needed a makeover, badly, starting with the missing H out front. My friend Ariel kept asking me how the “Yatt” Hotel was. My response was a tribute to Defending Your Life, in which Albert Brooks, staying in a modest place in Judgement City, is jealous of Meryl Streep’s five-star hotel. When she asks where he’s staying, he replies, “I’m at the Continental. Come over one day; we’ll paint it.”
Grapevine, TX, just north of Dallas, was a real wild-west town back in the day (Bonnie and Clyde killed a cop there), so the city commissioned its first town jail be built in 1910. They called it “The Calaboose,” and many bad, drunken dudes spent frigid evenings in it all the way into the 1950s. These days, it’s on display on Main Street. The same-sized space would fetch 5k a month in Manhattan.
AT&T Stadium, where the Cowboys play, felt like the biggest building I’ve ever been in. The stands are steep and massive. To class up the joint, the wife of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones commissioned 25 artists to create pieces displayed inside and out. Most are not football-themed, but this one, from a 60s hippie artist’s series of “Thesaurus Paintings,” is. You know those medieval paintings in which the artists had never seen an elephant, but they’d read a description of one and were certain they got the gist of it? Anyway…
