In the run-up to my first trip to New Orleans with my wife, Angela, I watched the series Treme as research. At one point, a brass band was playing rap music, and I was like, oh, come on.

I understood that the show’s writers wanted New Orleans to seem like a magical place where centuries of musical tradition might collide on any given street corner, but this was laying it on a little thick. A tuba and trombone playing rap? That was not cultural authenticity. That was television hyperbole written by people who needed New Orleans to be even more “New Orleans” than it already was.

Then, a few weeks later, we found ourselves upstairs at the Blue Nile on Frenchmen Street, waiting for Kermit Ruffins’s standing Friday-night show, watching a group of sweating musicians with a tuba, drums, trombone, trumpet, and maybe a bass guitar—but no lead guitar—play rap music. Not something vaguely rap-influenced. Genuine rap music, played by a brass band, exactly like the supposedly unbelievable thing I had seen on television.

Treme had not been ridiculous. I was ridiculous. I simply did not know enough about New Orleans—or the history that produced it—to recognize reality when somebody put it on the screen.

The same thing happened again with the movie Sinners. I am not one of those people who believes every movie can be improved by adding vampires, but oddly enough, the vampires were not what tested my suspension of disbelief. It was the juke joint: twin brothers buy an empty sawmill one morning, then haul in some bootleg liquor and musicians to create a packed, all-night dance hall before sundown. Surely that was dramatic license—a conveniently instant setting in which everyone could sing, dance, and (mostly) be devoured.

Then I came across the story of Waco’s Mercy Dee Walton.

He was born in 1915 to parents who farmed in the Brazos River bottomlands. By age 13, he was following local blues pianists from party to party, especially Delois Maxey, whose piano playing and singing became the foundation of Walton’s own style. Most of those musicians never entered a recording studio, but years later, Walton remembered the world where he learned his craft.

“They had houses then that a group would go out to pick cotton, well, they had these houses for them to live in, see and it would just be a big, vacant house and they’d rent a piano and put it in,” Walton said in an interview with Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz. “Then they’d put a table across the door and have a tub of soda pop, fish, and this and that and they’d give a ball, see. Boy you’d be surprised, people’d come from miles around. Just like you have big dances now at the auditorium.”

Strip away the vampires, and Walton’s rented-piano house party is basically the juke joint in Sinners.

This time, however, the history ran straight through Waco.

Walton eventually moved beyond Waco’s house parties into the Fort Worth nightclub circuit, cutting his teeth in the same scene where a not-yet-famous T-Bone Walker was playing. In the late 1930s, he followed the agricultural migration west to California, working in the Central Valley’s fields while playing bars and weekend dances for the same Black farmworkers beside whom he labored during the week.

Walton sang about the rural hardship he and his listeners returned to when the weekend ended. His first release, “Lonesome Cabin Blues,” reached No. 7 on the R&B chart in 1949. Four years later, “One Room Country Shack” reached No. 8 and became his signature song and a blues standard.

But two Top-10 records still did not get Walton out of the fields.

The record business of his era was the Wild West, and Walton bounced through a series of independent labels, short-lived deals, and recording sessions that never added up to a sustainable career. Add segregation, payola, and accounting practices best described as imaginative, and he was left with little more than his name on records in jukeboxes across the country.

That could’ve been the end of his story. But in 1961, Strachwitz found Walton in the Stockton, California, area and brought him back into the studio. The resulting sessions produced the albums Mercy Dee and Pity and a Shame. Still in his mid-40s, Walton suddenly appeared positioned for the kind of discovery that had eluded him the first time around.

The timing invites one of history’s crueler what-ifs. British and European enthusiasm for American blues was gathering momentum, and within a few years musicians such as Son House would be pulled from obscurity and introduced to young audiences overseas. There is no guarantee Walton would have enjoyed the same revival, but he never had the opportunity to find out: He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died on December 2, 1962, at 47.

But Walton had already explained why he kept playing:

“The blues to me was a way of getting rid of your trouble through your music. During those times when I started playing, things kinda rugged, you know what I mean. A dollar or two was a great thing back then. I just started playing the blues. You get words, you play the blues. Play it all. Take it out on the music. Because that’s the reason why I love the blues. I play a variety of music, but I love the blues best because a guy really tells how he feels. Your soul singing the blues.”

As for me, I had made the same mistake twice: confusing the unfamiliar with the unbelievable, one of ignorance’s more reliable magic tricks.

History looks fake when you don’t know the history. And what looked ridiculous to me would have looked like just another Saturday night to Mercy Dee Walton.

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A Pity and a Shame

Walton’s 1961 album Pity and a Shame is a small-combo record in the most literal sense. He supplied the piano and vocals, Sidney Maiden played harmonica, and Otis Cherry played drums—and that was the entire credited band.

With no guitarist or bassist competing for space, Walton’s piano carries both the rhythm and the harmony while Maiden answers him from the edges. Meanwhile, Arhoolie label founder Chris Strachwitz served as co-producer and wrote the liner notes.

Then there is the Rudy Van Gelder connection. Strachwitz recorded the sessions in Berkeley, but the tapes were shipped across the country to Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the legendary engineer mastered them for release. It is an improbable production trail: a Waco-born blues pianist, recorded in California by the founder of Arhoolie, and finished in New Jersey by the man whose work helped define the sound of modern jazz with his recordings of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Donald Byrd.

Nobody Comes from Nowhere

People like to imagine that great musicians spring fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, but that is almost never how music works. I remember first hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s 1983 debut, Texas Flood, and wondering: What the heck is this, and where has this guy been my whole life?

But however new Vaughan was to me, he was the product of a Texas blues-guitar scene that included his older brother Jimmie as well as Rocky Hill, an early SRV mentor who still has a reputation as an absolute wild man on the guitar. Hill was criminally under-recorded during his lifetime, but the archival Houston Blues Throwdown—recorded in 1977 and finally released in 2021—is a good place to hear what all the fuss was about.

The same was true of Mercy Dee Walton. By the time his smiling face appeared on the cover of the 1961 album Pity and a Shame, he looked every inch the world-weary blues pianist. But in an Arhoolie interview from the same period, Walton went out of his way to credit other Waco-area musicians besides Delois Maxey who shaped him: Son Brewster, a remarkable Waco singer; Bob Jackson, a Marlin pianist; and Roosevelt T. “Grey Ghost” Williams.

Williams was an itinerant barrelhouse pianist who spent part of the 1920s in Waco. He earned his nickname by appearing almost from nowhere to play a show and then disappearing again. He eventually emerged from obscurity and released his first commercial album in his 80s—the kind of rediscovery Walton did not live to see.

One Room, Three Shacks

I have never been a big fan of tribute bands. I know plenty of people enjoy them, and I’m glad that working musicians can make a living playing in them, but classic songs do not become standards because everyone agreed to preserve one definitive performance under glass.

The original recording is a starting point—an invitation for other musicians to pull the song apart, find something new inside it, and remake it. A song is a living thing, not a museum piece requiring a meticulous historical reenactment to be appreciated.

Walton’s “One Room Country Shack” has been covered dozens of times by people ranging from John Lee Hooker to Shuggie Otis. Some of the more notable ones include Mose Allison’s 1957 rendition in his limpid piano-and-vocal style, cool and spare without draining the loneliness from it. Blood, Sweat & Tears—normally capable of blowing down the walls with brass—unexpectedly rebuilds the song around an acoustic guitar. Buddy Guy makes it his own, too, but not quite as expected: his guitar eventually gets its solo, yet the arrangement remains driven by the piano figure rather than Guy’s customary in-your-face guitar attack. Each version leaves Walton’s shack standing while rearranging everything inside it.

“Howdy Stranger!”

On the afternoon I arrived in Colombia this summer, Juan Diego, who owns the coffee farm where I was staying, met me with a mango in his hand. In a South America meets Barry White voice, he said, “Mark, today I was walking nearby and plucked this ripe mango from a tree. It is my gift to you. Life is abundant here.”

But now? It’s September. And I’ve been gone long enough for Waco to become an abstraction: a place where my wife had to return well before me and two animals—one indifferent and one openly resentful—continue living without me.

Getting home is easy. Actually arriving takes longer.

🎧 Listen to this episode of Your Waco Weekend to hear the rest of the homecoming—and find out whether our dog Harley intends to renew my household residency permit.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—nine minutes, one story.

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On the afternoon I arrived in Colombia this summer, Juan Diego, who owns the coffee farm where I was staying, met me with a mango in his hand. In a South America meets Barry White voice, he said, “Mark, today I was walking nearby and plucked this ripe mango from a tree. It is my gift to you. Life is abundant here.”

But now? It’s September. The school year has begun, Halloween decorations are already appearing in stores back in Texas, and Waco recently ended a nearly month-long streak of 100-plus-degree days. It must be time to go home. And while four and a half months is not an eternity, it’s long enough to acquire new routines, get used to rehearsing every grocery store interaction in Spanish, and regard any temperature above eighty degrees as a personal affront.

But I have been gone long enough for Waco to become an abstraction: a place where my wife had to return well before me and two animals—one indifferent and one openly resentful—continue living without me.

Getting home is easy. Actually arriving takes longer.

🎧 Listen to this nine-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend to hear the rest of the homecoming—and find out whether our dog Harley intends to renew my household residency permit.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

I remember being read to before I could do it on my own. My dad had a stack of old brown-backed Hardy Boys books, and at night he read them aloud to me, one by one. The fact that an entire world—one completely different from the small Texas town where I lived—could be created out of words alone was mesmerizing.

I also remember the frustration of looking at a book and knowing it contained something I wanted but could not yet reach. Learning to read meant I no longer had to wait for an adult to open that world for me.

For years, I assumed everybody felt some version of that hunger which ran through my family. Then I became a college English teacher.

I saw plenty of students who could read when required. But as time went by, I saw fewer who reached for a book for pleasure. And now, when every idle moment can be filled by a glowing screen and an infinite scroll, I sometimes wonder whether reading still occupies the place in our lives that it once did—or that I imagined it did.

So when Dolly Parton died this week at 80, amid all the deserved attention to her songs, movies, and singular public persona, I kept thinking about books.

Dolly Parton gives me hope.

Not simply because her Imagination Library encourages children to read. Schools, teachers, and (hopefully) parents do that work every day. Her program does something more elemental: It places a book in a child’s hands and invites that child to love it.

Parton launched the Imagination Library in 1995 for preschool children in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up. Inspired by her father, who never learned to read or write, she began mailing children one free, age-appropriate book every month from birth until their fifth birthday.

What started in one Appalachian county eventually spread across multiple countries, delivering hundreds of millions of books. By 2024, one in seven children under five in the United States received an Imagination Library book each month.

Waco was one of the communities that took Dolly up on this idea. Local founders Noelle and Kevin Baker brought the program here in 2020, creating an independent nonprofit responsible for enrolling children and raising the money needed to mail their books. Within five years, Imagination Library of Waco was sending books to more than 2,000 children every month.

But success can be complicated. The program became so popular that in April 2025 its volunteer board temporarily stopped accepting new enrollments while it considered how to keep growing. Enrollment resumed that September, but the pause exposed a basic tension: A small independent nonprofit had proved that Waco families wanted the program. Could it build enough infrastructure to meet that demand?

In January 2026, a solution was announced. Imagination Library of Waco would become a program of United Way of Waco–McLennan County. The books, the Dolly affiliation, and the experience for families would remain the same; United Way would assume the administrative and fundraising work needed to sustain and expand it. The organization also announced plans to extend eligibility to families in Bellmead, Lacy Lakeview, Gholson, and Elm Mott.

That transfer might sound like the least interesting part of the story—one nonprofit becoming part of another—but it reveals something essential about what Dolly built. The Imagination Library was designed not as a personal charity but as a structure local communities could adopt, fund, and enlarge. In Waco, a volunteer board carried the idea for five years before placing it inside an institution capable of carrying it further.

Fame, by itself, is mostly an ability to attract attention. The more interesting question is where a famous person directs it. Dolly funded scholarships and hospitals, helped families displaced by wildfires in her native East Tennessee, and donated $1 million toward COVID-19 research at Vanderbilt University.

The Imagination Library was not her only act of generosity, but it may have been her most far-reaching. She lent it more than her face or her name; she gave it the gravitational pull required to bring publishers, donors, and thousands of local organizations into the same orbit. Celebrity made people look. What Dolly did with their attention made the looking matter.

In mailboxes across McLennan County each month, books arrive bearing children’s names. In one of those homes, perhaps an adult will open it and begin reading aloud. Perhaps a child will ask to hear it again and again, until the words become familiar enough to recite before the page turns.

That child may never carry novels everywhere or become an English teacher. There are no guarantees. The book will have plenty of competition.

But first, the book has to be there.

See whether your child is eligible for free monthly books—or help put books in more McLennan County mailboxes—through Imagination Library of Waco.

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Hello, Dolly—Again

“Never meet your heroes” has always struck me as sound advice. But meeting one twice—first through the unquestioning eyes of a child and later with an adult’s powers of observation? Yikes! Especially as that second encounter gives reality an opportunity to tamper with what could be a perfectly good memory.

Still, Cecily Knobler got the happier result. She was six when Dolly Parton, in Waco to open for Willie Nelson, stopped by country station KKIK (“K-Kick”), where her father was general manager. Dolly hugged her and called her the cutest baby.

When Knobler met Dolly again 42 years later and told her the story, Dolly smiled, patted her arm, and replied, “Well I do remember! And you’re still the cutest baby!” Some people remain capable of making us feel six years old—in the best possible way.

Country Outlaws & Rhinestones

Success is inconveniently shaped like a mountain range. Reach one summit and the only route to something higher may require climbing back down—often while everyone watches and wonders whether you’ve lost your way.

Dolly Parton had already become a country star alongside Porter Wagoner when she left to build a solo career, assemble a new band, and reach beyond traditional country audiences. Touring with Willie Nelson probably looked sensible on paper. In practice, Willie’s outlaw crowd and Dolly’s rhinestone constituency barely seemed to belong to the same species.

The first night of their 1977 tour was at the Waco Convention Center, where Dolly opened as much of the audience talked through her songs and shouted Willie’s name—and then the sound system failed. Her guitarist later summarized the tour with admirable economy: “We took our money and ran.”

Willie and Dolly remained lifelong friends; the pairing was the problem, not the people. Six years later, Dolly found a more natural crossover partner in Kenny Rogers, and “Islands in the Stream” reached No. 1. Sometimes reinvention requires surviving the wrong room before finding the right one.

Dolly Parton’s America

I work remotely with people scattered around the world, and before a meeting this morning, I asked a woman in southern Mexico if Dolly Parton had been popular there at all. She said no, not really, but that she’d become a fan nonetheless because Dolly and Miley Cyrus had been so close. Not the entry point I would have guessed—or even remotely close to my own—but it goes to show Dolly could reach almost anyone just about anywhere.

Dolly Parton’s America, a nine-part podcast, is less a celebrity biography than a cultural excavation. Host Jad Abumrad uses Dolly’s songs and story to investigate gender, faith, class, regional identity, politics, and the strange alchemy by which a carefully constructed public persona can still feel completely authentic. Along the way, he examines how so many different versions of America could look at the same woman and recognize something of themselves in her.

“Thank You. Thank You a Lot.”

Fathers and sons have a remarkable talent for turning love into a decades-long guessing game conducted under rules neither side will acknowledge. Admiration becomes expectation while humor doubles as target practice. And silence? It’s supposed to communicate everything nobody is willing to say aloud.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with Thank You a Lot, a 2014 indie film starring Waco-area country singer James Hand. In it, a fictional son receives the kind of explanation real fathers seldom deliver on schedule, assuming they ever deliver it at all.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—eight minutes, one story.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

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Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

Fathers and sons have a remarkable talent for turning love into a decades-long guessing game conducted under rules neither side will acknowledge. Admiration becomes expectation while humor doubles as target practice. And silence? It’s supposed to communicate everything nobody is willing to say aloud. By adulthood, a son may still be trying to determine whether he has lived up to his father or merely acquired enough of the man’s habits to alarm everyone around him.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with Thank You a Lot, a 2014 indie film starring Waco-area country singer James Hand, where a fictional son receives the kind of explanation real fathers seldom deliver on schedule, assuming they deliver it at all. What remains is the less cinematic business of deciding what can be understood from the things they actually said—and the looks on their faces when they said them.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

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The first time I drove into the maw of “The Circle” in south Waco, I wasn’t scared. I knew how to handle the beast.

I grew up in a small town west of Fort Worth, and a couple of times a year my family would load up in the car to head into the city for a big shopping trip. The most nail-biting part of the ride was when we’d come up on the Benbrook Traffic Circle, a relic of mid-twentieth-century highway design, as we entered Fort Worth. There were two approaches people took: either floor it and enter the circular lanes at rocket speed or sit at the entrance yield sign forever, waiting for a lull in the traffic that was never going to come.

My dad? He was an Option 1 kind of guy, a true believer in the “long pedal goes down” philosophy of driving. We’d roar into the traffic, I’d be slung against a passenger door by the g-forces and catch a quick glimpse of the big Kinney Shoes store as we flew past.

When I entered Waco’s traffic circle for the first time—the day after I’d interviewed for a teaching job at Texas State Technical College (TSTC)—I didn’t wait for an opening. I punched the accelerator—I think I heard the back of my then-girlfriend’s head smack the back glass of my truck’s cab—and carved my own path driving counterclockwise from the Valley Mills entrance toward Trujillo’s on the far side. When we got close, I slammed on the brakes and skidded across some loose gravel in the parking lot before coming to a halt. I think by this time she was using both hands to hold onto the dashboard.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

It had been a long time since I’d been on a traffic circle, and one of the many things that came to surprise me about Waco was that it still had one. By then, big traffic circles were already relics of an earlier highway age—oversized monuments to the optimistic belief that American drivers could merge without becoming emotional.

When The Circle was completed in 1933, it sat beyond the developed city, part of a larger plan to divert highway traffic around downtown, where automobiles, streetcars, delivery trucks, and pedestrians were already competing to see who could make Austin Avenue least passable. At first, some of the roads intended to feed the thing had not even been completed. Wacoans reportedly drove out on 18th Street, made a quick loop around it, and returned home, briefly making The Circle less a solution to traffic than somewhere to go on a slow afternoon.

That changed as the major highway connections began to reach it. The Circle became a gateway for travelers moving through Central Texas before interstates and elevated interchanges gave engineers more expensive ways to alarm us. In an old aerial postcard, roads radiate from The Circle toward Fort Worth, Dallas, Meridian, Temple, Austin, Cameron, and Waco, with a giant Texas star in the center.

This was civic optimism expressed through concrete, landscaping, and a touching faith in people’s ability to merge into traffic.

The Circle did more than steer travelers around downtown. It gathered them in one place. Businesses recognized a captive audience when they saw one. Restaurants, filling stations, tourist courts, garages, and other roadside stops collected around the junction, turning a traffic-control device into a commercial district of its own.

The Circle had been designed for 3,000 cars a day, but traffic exploded during the postwar automobile boom. The increasingly absurd traffic load gave Wacoans something communities cherish almost as much as a winning football team: a shared grievance.

Naturally, someone put the experience on a T-shirt. Health Camp sold brightly colored “I Survived the Circle” shirts, allowing Wacoans to commemorate the successful completion of an ordinary drive as if they had crossed Death Valley with one canteen. Driving The Circle had become a local rite, and the shirt converted private irritation into public membership.

But if someone proposed dramatically revamping The Circle? The joke stopped being a joke. The Elite Cafe advertised its survival shirts in Texas Monthly in the late 1980s beneath the headline, “You Survived, but will the Circle?” and promised to donate a dollar from each sale to Save Our Circle. The people who had spent years complaining were now paying to preserve it.

Today, places like Magnolia Table, Trujillo’s, and Health Camp line The Circle, giving visitors and Wacoans alike reasons to keep returning, long after I-35 diverted much of the traffic it had been built to serve. It has survived because Waco didn’t seal it beneath glass: New signs, lane stripes and traffic rules changed how drivers navigated it; and another reconstruction realigned entrances, added turn lanes, and rebuilt the central star.

What Waco protected was not every sacred inch of 1933 pavement or the historic right to terrify passengers. It saved The Circle’s recognizable shape, star, and name.

In old postcards, roads radiate from the Texas star toward points major and minor in Texas. But the last ninety-three years have revealed the more interesting story: everything that accumulated around it. Maybe that’s how something everybody claims to hate lasts almost a century. Eventually, surviving it becomes one of the ways you know the place belongs to you—and that you belong there.

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Trujillo’s

Its official name is Trujillo’s Comedor y Cantina, but everyone—and that includes the sign outside on The Circle—just calls it Trujillo’s. After my first fateful trip there, I wound up living just south of it for five years right off Highway 77. At least once a week, I’d head north and pull into the parking lot after a cursory right turn onto the traffic circle. While getting into the parking lot was easy, I was always more than happy to have a Big O (or two) with my fajitas or chicken enchiladas to brace myself for looping the rest of the way around The Circle to head back south.

Silverio and Delia Trujillo opened the family-run restaurant on The Circle in 1981, and it still serves scratch-made Tex-Mex. Tuesday-through-Saturday specials include a full entrée with rice and beans for $7.99 to $9.99 and selected 18-ounce drafts run as little as $2.50. For anyone who finds ordinary margaritas insufficient, the Big Red Rita arrives frozen with an upside-down bottle of Big Red plunged into it, because subtlety was never going to survive The Circle. But if you get one of the specialty margaritas, let discretion be the better part of valor and have someone else drive home.

Health Camp

I’ve only eaten once at the ironically named Health Camp, pairing a gloriously greasy hamburger with the biggest vanilla malt they had. After that, I had a heart attack. Not right away—it was a few years later—so I’m not proposing any kind of cause and effect. That said, there’s no reason to push an actual connection to its unhappy conclusion. Still, whenever I’m whirring around The Circle, I give Health Camp a wistful glance and think about the Double Meat Double Cheese Super Burger I could’ve had for lunch.

Jack Schaevitz started Health Camp in 1948 as a mobile canteen selling burgers and ice cream to personnel at Connally Air Force Base (now TSTC’s campus), then opened the permanent Circle location a year later. The name wasn’t an attempt at nutritional disinformation; Schaevitz reportedly borrowed it from words stamped on eggs sold by his father’s Ohio dairy. Fast forward to 2026, and the walk-up windows and stainless-steel counters remain, along with burgers, homemade onion rings, and frozen custard—best consumed along with an aggressive exercise regimen.

The Elite Cafe

I ate at the old Elite Cafe several times before it closed in 2016, but it was already deep into its final decline. Don’t get me wrong: The food was always good and the service was fine, but it felt like some permanent malaise had settled into the place. Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia empire has generated mixed reactions in Waco—will people ever quit blaming them every time property taxes go up?—but it’s pretty clear that the Elite had run out of future before they turned it into Magnolia Table in 2018.

That said, I’ve never eaten at Magnolia Table itself. But when I used to work the Bare Arms Brewing taproom across the street on Saturdays, one of its cooks would sometimes bring over a box of food from the kitchen that otherwise would’ve been thrown away at the end of the day. Yes, the tater tots were just as good as people raved about. And, oh my God, so was the bacon. My wife, Angela, swears by it and takes her out-of-town friends there whenever they visit.

“The Honky Tonk Happy-Hour Wedding”

Marriage is a serious commitment, but weddings have acquired the dignified restraint of an arms race. Couples are encouraged to purchase a temporary fantasy and control every variable while behaving as though ordinary life has agreed to wait outside until the photographer is finished. But what if a ceremony gains something by entering a place already in progress instead of taking it over?

🎧 This nine-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend follows host Mark Long and his then-fiancée Angela as they test that proposition last October at Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon, where the bar’s Saturday afternoon regulars and approaching karaoke hour remained part of the bargain. What emerged was neither a compromise nor a parody, but a wedding that could not have belonged to anyone—or anywhere—else.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—nine minutes, one story.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Support Waco Insider

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Who gets married in a honky tonk?

Marriage is a serious commitment, but weddings have acquired the dignified restraint of an arms race. Couples are encouraged to purchase a temporary fantasy and control every variable while behaving as though ordinary life has agreed to wait outside until the photographer is finished. But what if a ceremony gains something by entering a place already in progress instead of taking it over?

🎧 This ten-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend follows host Mark Long and his then-fiancée Angela as they test that proposition last October at Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon, where the bar’s Saturday afternoon regulars and approaching karaoke hour remained part of the bargain. What emerged was neither a compromise nor a parody, but a wedding that could not have belonged to anyone—or anywhere—else.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Welcome to the first installment of Waco by the Numbers, an ongoing series in which different people answer the same set of questions about the places, routes, and relationships that define the city they live in.

First up is Sam Shaw, who moved here in 2025 and is a reporter for The Waco Bridge. The photograph above was provided by him in response to the interview’s final question.

Is Waco a place you came to, a place you returned to, or a place you never left?

Waco is a place I came to sight unseen. Before I was living in Waco, I was working as a local reporter in Longview, which is in deep East Texas. I only had a visual image of Waco from helicopter shots of the Branch Davidian complex, which now I think is in Axtell.

But I drove in during late June, and it was a very green summer. The rivers were so much more pronounced than I realized. I didn’t understand that it was a river city and that there was significantly more topography than in East Texas.

Tell me about the first place you lived in Waco.

I live in Dean Highland, and I think I really made a good choice. It’s a fascinating place to me because I come back to this art history concept of the palimpsest—a surface that’s inscribed and then erased, but you can kind of see the old inscriptions or illustrations behind the new ones. And that’s kind of what Dean Highland is. There’s maybe the only last remaining fragment of the electric streetcar network, running right down my street and the old electric trolley stop.

There is a mixture of old townhomes and bungalows and colonial-style homes and a real mix of incomes and demographics. Unlike the suburb I grew up in in Colorado, it feels like it’s gone through multiple eras that are visible within the fabric of the neighborhood.

Where was the first place you ate after moving to Waco?

The first place I ate was Slim Chickens. I actually went through my bank statements to figure this out. I’ve never been back since, but I got some slim chicken and sat on the one chair I had set up in the living room and ate.

The next day, I apparently went to Tortilleria Santana, which I’m happy to announce because that is one of my go-to spots in Waco, a place I always bring visitors.

Who was the first neighbor you met?

Oscar across the street. One time he saw me when I had these rusted old hedge clippers—it was like 100 degrees—and I was doing the edge of my front lawn with them. He literally said, “Oh, hell no. I’m not letting you do that.” And then gave me his weed whacker to trim the sides. I’m always in his debt for that.

Where was the first place in Waco you hung out when you weren’t at home or work?

The first place I started to hang out was the Dichotomy bar, rest in peace. I tend to gravitate to places where there aren’t a lot of TVs and there appears to be an atmosphere where you sit down and a stranger will talk to a regular or regulars will welcome in a stranger into the conversation.

There was a bartender named Kayla, who ended up moving to Dallas. And she was one of these gifted connector people who go, “Meet this guy,” or “Hey, it’s this person’s birthday.”

I met a bunch of people and didn’t feel so lonely for an evening. I was welcomed as a stranger, and people were telling me about their life or their jobs, working as a music teacher at Waco ISD or this or that.

Who was the first friend you made after moving to Waco?

There was this young guy with a Stetson hat, the spitting image of a rodeo guy, and his name is Landon. He was going into some technical training at TSTC, but he was really into hydrology and water use and conservation and organic gardening. Just a really fascinating guy.

We hung out quite a bit until he moved away. Through him, I met a girl named Kenna, who is a chemist. They both took me to my first dance hall, Melody Ranch, and one of Kenna’s friends showed me how to two-step. I was like, “Oh man, this is pretty fun.” I’ve only been a handful of times, but that felt as much like an introduction to local culture as anything else I’ve experienced.

That was my first group of friends. One thing that whole Dichotomy crew taught me was that a lot of young people leave. I realized I needed to be a little more conscious of who was really sticking around, because it’s tough to have to reset the clock every six months to a year when everybody moves away.

Who’s a person you run into on a regular basis in Waco?

I run into Jess and Floyd Colley a lot. Jess is the owner-operator of Sloane’s, the bar on 25th, and she’s a magician with cocktails. During the summer, Sloane’s has Wiener Wednesdays. I’m a miserly journalist, so I can get a hot dog for, I think, $1.50 or they have the special hot dog for $3.50.

Her husband, Floyd, owns Brazos Bike Lounge and repairs my mountain bike. His shop looks like the old-school bike shops I grew up with, where you go and hang out and talk about bikes while they’re being repaired. We talked about where to cycle and the local scene. I didn’t realize Jess and Floyd were a couple until a couple of months later.

What is one drive/route in Waco you know by heart?

All the different ways into Cameron Park. The two I use a lot—on a bike or in a car, if I’m going to run—are taking Herring past 18th, then turning left right before the bridge and diving down into the park; or turning left from Herring onto 18th, then right onto College Drive toward the MCC boat ramp and entering Cameron Park from the opposite direction or onto the Highlander Trail.

Those are drives or rides that I look forward to, and I feel a little bit like a dog when they know they’re about to go in the car for a walk. I get kind of excited.

If you were out of town for more than a few days, what would be the first place you’d want to go when you returned to Waco?

It would be Tortilleria Santana. Those norteño-style burritos are difficult to find, and I think Santana is the best exponent of that style in Waco. I yearn for the Santana burrito.

Can you show me the last picture on your phone you took in Waco, and tell me what was happening in it?

It’s Bertha’s Bakery, a little panadería on 25th. It’s one of those places in my neighborhood I’ve been meaning to visit for a long time. I finally went to check it out, but it’s cash only and I didn’t bring cash. I’ll come back with cash and try it.

I’m sort of a completionist with my neighborhood. I want to have a sense of the full tapestry, at least in my area. I think we’re all better served being curious about each other—the lives and merchants and institutions and restaurants that comprise the multiple stories of Waco.

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Dean Highland Neighborhood

When I first moved to Waco and was looking for a place to rent, it took me longer than anywhere else I’d lived. That was because you could seemingly never predict what a street, block, or individual house was going to look like based on the address alone. I’d be driving to check a place out and, as I got closer, would think, “Okay, this is pretty nice.” Then I’d pass one more intersection, the houses would take a turn, and all I could say was, “Oh my gosh.”

Stretching roughly from Bosque Boulevard north to McFerrin Avenue, and from MacArthur Drive to North 25th and 26th streets, Dean Highland has what Shaw calls a “mosaic quality”—a block-by-block mixture of incomes and demographics. Unlike neighborhoods where wealth allows residents to remain socially insulated, he said, “everybody is kind of meeting each other at church or on the street or at the corner shop.” Although he encountered warnings on Reddit about living there, Shaw said people sometimes mistake visible signs of poverty for a lack of security. “I’ve never really felt unsafe,” he said. “That just hasn’t been my experience.”

Melody Ranch

If you drive south of the La Salle traffic circle on Highway 77, you’ll find Melody Ranch, which boasts the largest dance floor in Central Texas. I’ll admit: I’ve passed it a kajillion times without ever having been in it. That said, thanks to Action U.S.A., filmed in Waco in the late 1980s, I still feel like I’ve been there because of a pivotal bar fight scene shot inside with local favorites Cherokee Rose playing in the background.

When my wife Angela and I watched the movie for the first time, she laughed because almost nothing about Melody Ranch seems to have changed since she went there in the years after she attended Baylor. In fact, she’s seen Cherokee Rose play there multiple times. That continuity is part of what makes a Texas dance hall: the decades turn over, but country bands and two-stepping dancers keep entering the same room to perform the same rituals.

Tortilleria Santana

Shaw found Tortilleria Santana on 18th Street via Google Maps while looking for Mexican food that leaned away from Tex-Mex. (You can also find it by looking for the luchadores painted on its garage doors.) What distinguishes its norteño-style burritos, he said, is their simplicity and the buttery tortillas made on site: “Just anything you combine with that tortilla is good.”

But the tortilleria is only one pin on a much larger personal map. Shaw calls himself “an inveterate Google Maps user,” saving places he reads about or hears someone recommend so he can visit them later. He admits his map now looks like “you hit a piñata and it exploded,” crowded with flags, stars, and markers. “That’s kind of how I spend my weekends,” he explained, “picking a place that I haven’t scoped out yet and going to see it.”

“You Know, We’re Lucky to Be Alive”

Shared lives do not require shared interpretations. Two people can travel side by side for years while assigning completely different motives to the strangers around them—and perhaps remaining themselves is part of what keeps the journey interesting.

🎧 This ten-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend follows host Mark Long and his wife Angela along Austin Avenue through Waco’s Uptown. At two mini-roundabouts, her instinct for courtesy meets his conviction that survival belongs to the driver who refuses to ever lose a game of chicken.

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Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—ten minutes, one story.

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Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

Shared lives do not require shared interpretations. Two people can travel side by side for years while assigning completely different motives to the strangers around them—and perhaps remaining themselves is part of what keeps the journey interesting.

🎧 This ten-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend follows host Mark Long and his wife Angela along Austin Avenue through Waco’s Uptown. At two mini-roundabouts, her instinct for courtesy meets his conviction that survival belongs to the driver who refuses to ever lose a game of chicken.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

One evening last March, my wife Angela and I joined about 25–30 people eating fajitas around tables at the South Waco Community Center for a Waco Bridge event called Waco Voices Live! Editor-in-chief JB Smith opened by noting that Waco’s longstanding Hispanic community has remained largely underrepresented in city government, civic conversations, and the stories Waco tells about itself. That night offered community members a chance to describe their own experiences in the city.

At our table, Jeremiah Olvera traced his family’s Waco history back several generations. His great-grandfather had ministered at an Assembly of God church in Sandtown, a Hispanic neighborhood along the Brazos River erased by urban renewal during the 1960s, forcing the people there to move to other parts of the city.

Olvera grew up among Hispanic families in the Beverly Hills neighborhood, where children moved freely between one another’s houses and all the parents knew each other. If your mother wasn’t around, some other adult was watching—and could call her if you acted up.

The Waco that Olvera, his wife, and other people at our table described was totally different from the one I carried around in my head. Some of its geography, like Sandtown, had physically disappeared before I arrived in 2000. But other parts had been right in front of me.

When I first moved to Waco, I lived on Ferndale Avenue in Beverly Hills in the house where my landlady had raised her children. She’d moved farther south to Robinson during the 1970s when, as she put it, “They started expecting my kids to go to school with all those little Black and brown kids.”

The unfamiliar reference points kept accumulating that night: Waco Missions as a center for dances and quinceañeras; University High and Waco High as enduring South–North Waco identities; and Tiempo, a local Spanish-language newspaper that had published family birthdays and school accomplishments. They were part of the basic machinery of growing up in Waco—and Angela and I had no idea they existed.

Then again, no one experiences a city whole. We build our understanding from our own lives and other information we encounter. Some of this comes from people we know; much of the rest arrives already organized for us through local media, marketing, and search engine results.

For example, ask Google “What are things to do in Waco?” and the usual places immediately pop up:

• Magnolia Market at the Silos

• Cameron Park Zoo

• Waco Mammoth National Monument

• Dr Pepper Museum

• The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum

Don’t get me wrong: all these places are significant parts of Waco. That said, the list becomes less useful if it stops answering a particular question—What is there to do here?—and becomes a “mono-story” about Waco: a single collection of places, experiences, and ideas that seemingly represents the entire city.

One way to understand this is via the Matthew Effect: those who have more receive more; those who have less lose even what they have.

Search for a Waco weekend, a Waco bucket list, or the best coffee/queso/cocktails in Waco, and the usual suspects return again and again, each appearance making them more visible and therefore more likely to appear the next time. The problem isn’t that the story is untrue. It’s that every repetition makes other, equally true Wacos less likely to reach us.

I see a similar process at my day job at a software company. AI produces text by predicting, one word at a time, the statistically most probable next word in each sentence. The result is writing that’s readable and generally accurate, but probability is not insight. That comes from the specifics of human experience, not from averaging those experiences together.

So, what’s my point? Just to be a guy shaking his fist at clouds?

One response to this dilemma—the Waco mono-story—has been the weekly podcast series Your Waco Weekend, an examination of smaller stories and places: a roadside honkytonk, a vanished barbecue restaurant, a restored neighborhood mural, and a guy preserving a collection of concert posters nobody asked him to save. None of these episodes represents Waco by itself, but by the end, each local story builds toward a larger argument about life here.

Still, every Your Waco Weekend episode by default ultimately represents the Waco I inhabit—the city shaped by where I go, whom I meet, and what catches my attention. To encounter the Wacos other people have constructed from their experiences requires less explaining and more listening.

That’s the idea behind a new Waco Insider interview series called Waco by the Numbers rolling out over the next few weeks. Rather than asking people to explain Waco—or answer loaded questions like “How great is it to live here?”—the interviews will ask them to show the particular Waco they inhabit. No single interview can represent the city, but together they’re meant to reveal some of the many Wacos that are hidden if you average them together.

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“The Danger of a Single Story”

Around 2015, during a stint teaching at Baylor, I rode the city bus downtown each day and walked the remaining half-dozen blocks to campus. Along the way, I passed two old white silos that I’d heard someone local was restoring. I didn’t have cable, so I wasn’t familiar with Fixer Upper, the television show that launched the Chip and Joanna Gaines empire. At the time, I thought maybe the silos would become something. Or maybe not. What the heck did I know?

Today, of course, Magnolia Market at the Silos—and its related businesses—has an ever-increasing footprint downtown and beyond. More than that, Magnolia has become an origin story about Waco: the city as a fixer-upper, a place whose value was always there but required people with vision to reveal it.

In her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how repeated stories about a person or place can become mistaken for the whole. The danger isn’t necessarily that the story is false; it’s that one version acquires enough power to become definitive, reducing people and places to whatever that story allows us to see. And if a renovation plot becomes our default interpretation of progress in Waco, we risk mistaking the moment new investment recognizes a neighborhood’s value for the moment that value was created.

The Matthew Effect

Back when Waco Insider was primarily an events calendar and weekly event listings newsletter, I routinely scanned nearly a thousand websites each week looking for information about what was happening in Waco. And yes, this is known as working hard, not smart.

One side effect was seeing an enormous share of what people posted about the city. What struck me was how often “best of Waco” posts returned to the same topics and short lists of places to go: best margaritas, best karaoke, best ribs. The recommendations weren’t necessarily wrong, but I kept wondering: aren’t there more than five places to get good nachos, coffee, or migas? And every time the same five appeared, they became easier for the next person making a list to find and include.

There’s a name for that kind of self-reinforcing visibility: the Matthew Effect. Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term to describe how prominent scientists receive disproportionate credit compared to lesser-known researchers for comparable work. Recognition begets recognition—the same feedback cycle that keeps familiar Waco places returning to the top of searches, best-of lists, and #hiddengem recommendations.

All Night Menu

I don’t remember exactly when I first came across Sam Sweet and his All Night Menu website, but his project—documenting “old” Los Angeles one address at a time—immediately struck a chord. After the Waco Bridge’s Waco Voices Live! event last March, I realized the connection ran deeper than I’d initially thought. Sweet uses essays, interviews, and photographs to capture an LA that has vanished or is perilously close to disappearing.

His work helped clarify what I want to do with the Waco by the Numbers interview series: not so much to recover Wacos that used to exist but document the ones people inhabit right now. Interviewing someone who moved here last year can therefore be as revealing as someone born here 75 years ago. And it’s from Sweet I’ve gotten my guiding principle: “There is no definitive history, only specific history.”

“What You Calling a Renaissance?”

Every redevelopment pitch arrives dressed for its own victory party. Architectural renderings glow with promise while the future drinks craft beer under string lights. Somewhere between the press release and the ribbon-cutting, a real-estate deal becomes a public moral achievement. Maybe the place will be terrific. Money can repair busted buildings; it just doesn’t get to claim authorship of the lives around them.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with a 2020 Instagram post that treated a few new Elm Avenue businesses as proof that East Waco had been “reborn.” That ultimately leads to the Brookview Hills Shopping Center, where a $4.5 million renovation project is being presented as a renewed community gathering place—while leaving open the question of whom the finished center will ultimately serve.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—eight minutes, one story.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

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Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

Every redevelopment pitch arrives dressed for its own victory party. Architectural renderings glow with promise while the future drinks craft beer under string lights. Somewhere between the press release and the ribbon-cutting, a real-estate deal becomes a public moral achievement. Maybe the place will be terrific. Money can repair busted buildings; it just doesn’t get to claim authorship of the lives around them.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with a 2020 Instagram post that treated a few newer Elm Avenue businesses as proof that East Waco had finally been “reborn.” That ultimately leads to the Brookview Hills Shopping Center, where a $4.5 million renovation project is being sold as a community gathering place.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

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Three seconds.

That’s all the time a sign has to get its message across.

As local sign painter Mike MacDonald explained to me recently: “The ultimate goal of your sign is: Who are you? What do you do? And can people read that in about three seconds as they drive by? If you don’t achieve that, you’ve really kind of failed the basics.”

I first came across MacDonald via a video on social media called “Nobody Asked Me to Do This.” It featured a barbershop sign on Waco Drive that he passes almost every day. It could be charitably described as a little… busy. There are seven pictures of different haircuts. The lettering is a dark blue on a black background. There are two large barber shop pole icons flanked by multiple scissors. I must have driven past this sign a million times. I don’t remember ever noticing it.

So MacDonald created an unsolicited redesign—not a replacement for the actual sign but a visual exercise—and posted the mockup online.

He replaced the cluttered collage with a white background dominated by “BARBER” in enormous red block letters. A pale diamond behind the name and a turquoise border supply structure and personality without competing with the message. From the road, the purpose of the business is unmistakable.

“You have a few seconds,” he said, “so make it count.”

MacDonald developed his eye for design early. Growing up in Montana, he was fascinated by the old neon motel signs he passed from the back seat of his parents’ car. Years later, he began photographing them, drawn to something he could appreciate before he could fully explain it.

“Old neon signs have an interesting shape to them,” he said. “Typically, they have cool color combinations, and then the lettering style attracts me because I love letters. It’s just the overall design. It’s not something you typically find today.”

MacDonald began planning stops—and occasionally entire trips—around photographing surviving signs.

“Tucumcari is a small town in New Mexico that has the Blue Swallow Motel sign and a bunch of other cool ones,” he explained. “If you saw it, you’d probably be like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before.’”

Eventually MacDonald moved to Austin, where he studied graphic design at Texas State University in San Marcos. As he learned more about the signs he had been photographing, he discovered that nearly all commercial lettering had once been painted by hand—and that some people were still making a living doing it.

Studying graphic design and sign painting taught him to understand how those old signs worked: the shapes, proportions, color combinations, and lettering that gave each one its character. That said, even calling the lettering a “font” misses something important.

“Letter styles aren’t really fonts,” he explained, “because back then everything was essentially hand-drawn.”

He frequently drove past Roadhouse Relics, Todd Sanders’ Austin studio specializing in vintage-style neon. A college project brought him into Sanders’ orbit, followed by an internship, and then a job that lasted a couple of years. There he learned the practical foundations of the trade: brushes, equipment, transferring designs, and turning drawings into signs.

What began as an instinctive attraction became a learned vocabulary—proof that paying attention is itself a skill. That vocabulary also separates the maker from much of his audience. I suggested that most people passing a storefront probably couldn’t distinguish painted lettering from vinyl, and MacDonald didn’t disagree.

“There are people who are going to notice immediately, and there are people who aren’t,” he said. “But those are probably also people who aren’t going to notice a sign in general unless they’re looking for it.”

Some people have even told him that his painted work looks like a sticker—a comment he accepts as a compliment to its precision. A sign does not need to explain how it was made to shape the way someone experiences it.

MacDonald also recognizes when a designer understands traditional lettering and when someone has merely selected a font that looks vaguely retro. He is not entirely dismissive of the latter.

“Sometimes it’s pretty good design,” he acknowledged.

In his mind, there’s no purity test. It’s a matter of fluency—whether the work understands the visual language it is speaking or merely wears the style as a costume. Multiply those choices across a city, and they become part of the accumulated visual language through which a place learns to look like itself.

MacDonald brought that visual vocabulary to Waco in 2021, when he and his wife moved here in search of a smaller, more affordable place to live. His sign-painting and design business, The Old 93, is not an exercise in historical reenactment. MacDonald uses contemporary tools such as vector graphics to develop designs that he then transfers by hand to windows, walls, and signboards.

His local work includes hand-painted windows for Sendero Provisions Co. and Be Kind Coffee, bold exterior lettering at the new Swim Waco building, and signage for The Apple Gal. He has also painted murals, vehicles, and storefronts beyond Waco across Texas. His online store operates on a smaller scale, ranging from vintage motel signs to pop-culture artifacts such as a Camp Crystal Lake sign, a nod to the Friday the 13th movies.

A visual language survives only if someone teaches the next person how to speak it. This summer, MacDonald stepped outside his usually solo practice to help mentor 20 high school students through Creative Waco’s ArtPrenticeship program. Their project was restoring the Brookview Hills shopping center mural. He initially found the prospect of being around a lot of high school students intimidating, but he settled into his role answering questions and demonstrating techniques rather than doing the work for them.

“It is kind of exciting to pass on knowledge that you’ve acquired,” he said—knowledge that he and other artisans gained by doing things incorrectly and ultimately finding a better way.

Teaching people how to carry a visual language forward is one form of preservation. Allowing its surviving traces to remain is another.

“I don’t necessarily think restoration is always the best thing,” MacDonald said, “but I definitely believe in preservation.” That can mean allowing faded paint, obsolete advertisements, and old lettering to remain as evidence that other people occupied these buildings and moved through these streets before us.

A sign may only have three seconds to make itself understood by someone driving past. But seen for three seconds at a time, year after year, a sign becomes part of a city’s memory. Eventually, it tells you where you are.

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Brookview Hills Shopping Center

My wife and I live in Brookview Hills, a perfectly pleasant neighborhood that nobody today would mistake for “Waco’s finest subdivision” as advertised in the 1940s. Its shopping center at 34th and Bosque has since settled into less exalted circumstances: a dollar store, a couple of smoke shops, and a long row of empty storefronts. Now a $4.5 million redevelopment project is scheduled to begin this fall, prompting talk of a “miracle on 34th Street.” We have our fingers crossed.

Artist Mick Burson painted the figures marching across one end of the center—shoppers, perhaps, though I have always guessed foxes or maybe penguins as I’ve driven by—without a commission or payment. He used materials he had on hand, including interior paint, accelerating the mural’s apparent age.

During this summer’s restoration project, Mike MacDonald recalled, “A lot of people from the neighborhood were like, ‘Yeah, I’ve lived here 30 years. That’s been here as long as I can remember.’ But he only did it in 2013.”

The Brasserie

Hotel 1928 is not kidding about the 1928 part. The Moorish Revival building opened that year as the Grand Karem Shrine Temple, a downtown gathering place with a ballroom, meeting rooms, and ground-floor shops. After serving as county offices and then sitting empty, it was restored by Chip and Joanna Gaines as a 33-room hotel with two restaurants and a café.

MacDonald didn’t design The Brasserie’s logo, but he translated it onto the first-floor window, adding the outline and drop shadow that keep it legible against downtown’s shifting reflections. He did design the “GENTS” and “LADIES” lettering on the third-floor textured-glass restroom windows. The results help create an old-world atmosphere that feels native to the building rather than layered on after-the-fact design cosplay.

Bull Durham Ghost Sign

A ghost sign is an advertisement that survives after the business, product, or world that produced it has begun to disappear. This Bull Durham tobacco sign once covered the wall of an East Waco building at the corner of Elm Avenue and Myrtle. In 2017, the location was used for a scene in Robert Redford’s The Old Man & the Gun, set around 1980.

MacDonald called it “probably my favorite” of Waco’s ghost signs, but by the time we spoke, the building had been demolished.

“That’s kind of what I’m talking about,” he said, “the preservation. ‘Oh, let’s build something new,’ and then you just tear down history right there, which is a big bummer.”

Old School Texas Barbecue: The Same Kind Jesus Ate

Guess Family Barbecue grew from a weekend food trailer parked outside a Waco brewery into a brick-and-mortar restaurant, earning statewide recognition before quietly shuttering its doors last year. But its story suggests that longevity is not the only measure of whether a business succeeded—or whether it became part of a city’s life.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with a little red trailer promising “Old School Texas Barbecue—the same kind Jesus ate” and follows it through television exposure, Texas Monthly acclaim, and menu items like its jalapeño-cheese sausage. Along the way, one closed restaurant becomes a reflection on what Waco remembers—and the comforting fiction that a city’s trajectory moves in only one direction.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Support Waco Insider

Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

Cities measure progress through arrivals: another restaurant, another ribbon cutting, another sign that growth is proceeding according to plan. Places that close are harder to incorporate into that story, especially when they followed an enviable path toward success.

Guess Family Barbecue grew from a weekend food trailer parked outside a Waco brewery into a brick-and-mortar restaurant and earned statewide recognition before quietly disappearing. Its history suggests that permanence is not the only measure of whether a business succeeded—or whether it became part of a city’s life.

🎧 This eight-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend begins with a little red trailer promising “Old School Texas Barbecue—the same kind Jesus ate” and follows it through television exposure, Texas Monthly acclaim, and menu items like its jalapeño-cheese sausage and Farmer’s Breakfast. Along the way, the story of one closed restaurant becomes a reflection on what Waco remembers—and the comforting fiction that a city’s trajectory moves in only one direction.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

I used to think making a movie began with a director saying, “Action.”

But after talking with local filmmaker Chris Hansen, I realized I was wrong.

It begins with asking permission.

Want to shoot a scene in a dumpy laundromat on Valley Mills Drive that has cool old tile on the floor? Or maybe you’ve found a boutique café in a historic home with a backyard that’s perfect for a wedding scene. Or maybe you head up to Bellmead to film in a funeral home.

It all starts with finding the right place—and getting permission to shoot there.

For Hansen, who chairs the film and digital media department at Baylor University, that’s one of the things he likes about making films in Waco: the generosity of the people.

“If you did this in LA, it’s like, ‘Well, pay me’ or ‘No, I don’t want the hassle’ because they’ve seen it a thousand times, and it’s not interesting anymore,” he said. “And people here are curious. They’re very willing to open up their homes or their businesses and want to observe the process.”

Those individual acts are only part of the story. Baylor’s film program supplies students eager for production experience. Creative Waco and the Waco Independent Film Festival create opportunities to connect with other filmmakers. Together, they’ve made it easier for independent films to be imagined—and completed—here.

“It was kind of a massive coming together of all these efforts,” Hansen said, “that I think over the past two decades has really culminated in a new kind of creative ecosystem that wasn’t here before.”

He also believes the city itself is unusually versatile for independent filmmakers.

“Everything is 15 minutes away in Waco,” Hansen said. “When we need to be out in the woods, we don’t have to go very far. Then there are more city looks. Waco’s got a lot of different looks that you can use in a film to feel like it’s taking place in a number of locations.”

Those production advantages offered him another benefit.

“I thought about going to LA,” Hansen said. “But I would not have thrived in a big, bustling city—not to mention the industry in LA, in terms of networking and competition, always feeling like you’re missing something. That’s not the way I wanted to live my life. This is the right speed for me.”

Waco’s also a place to learn how to make movies. Unlike many other universities with film programs, Baylor students don’t spend years with introductory coursework before making it onto a set.

“You get your hands on a camera in the first class,” Hansen said. “You have to make stuff from the very beginning of our program.”

And after graduation? In the past, that likely meant leaving Waco to find professional production jobs. But that’s changing too.

“A lot of them stay in the area,” Hansen said, “because it’s not as hard for people to imagine shooting a film here now.”

Still, the evolution of Waco’s filmmaking scene is a process, not a product. Looking back, Hansen describes those cumulative efforts not as a master plan but as dozens of people simply doing their part.

“We did what we wanted to do,” Hansen said. “That’s the kind of thing that’s going to keep it building and keep it going.”

Waco has often been defined by stories that left the city as national headlines—cults, scandals, shootouts. A creative ecosystem tells different stories—but not overnight. A homeowner invites a film crew into a backyard. Baylor students carry equipment onto a movie set. The Waco Independent Film Festival helps finance a local production. None of those actions transforms a city by themselves. But taken together over years, they begin to change what people imagine is possible here.

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Where We Started

A few years ago at a storytelling open mic in Waco, a guy got up to talk about how, during a family medical crisis, a stranger at the hospital offered him more comfort than any of his friends. His takeaway was that his friends had failed him because a stranger had done what they couldn’t. I’ve wondered about that story ever since because I’m not sure I agree. Maybe strangers simply have less at stake. They can say things without years of history hanging on every word.

Chris Hansen’s Where We Started (2013) circles that same uneasy idea. Will and Nora, two married strangers, meet unexpectedly at a roadside motel outside of Waco and spend one night talking their way into places neither of them can reach at home. After a late-night motorcycle ride, Will asks Nora, “So was it everything you were always afraid it would be?” By then the question echoes through everything else the two of them have shared. Whether those conversations become a betrayal, a lifeline, or something harder to name is what Hansen leaves hanging after the credits roll.

The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah

Not everyone is wired to be the center of attention, and sometimes they spend their lives in the gravitational pull of those who are. They’re the siblings who smooth things over after Thanksgiving dinner implodes, the spouses who quietly apologize for someone else’s behavior, the friends who know exactly when it’s time to change the subject before things get worse. They didn’t ask for the job. They just woke up one day to realize they were the ones who had to keep the wheels from coming off.

That’s what stayed with me after watching Hansen’s The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah (2006). The mockumentary follows two brothers consumed by the question of which one of them might be the next (regional) messiah, but it’s their sister Miriam who quietly keeps the whole enterprise afloat, even when she’d rather be somewhere else. At the end, the off-camera interviewer asks her whether she believes she has a special purpose. Before she can answer, her brothers start arguing behind her on the front porch over who gets to wear their one Jesus costume. Miriam silently shakes her head. Then the movie ends before she can finish her thought.

Endings

Every time I go to a funeral, it has a clarifying effect: the sky seems bluer, the world comes into sharper focus, and I feel like I’m living in the moment. Afterward, I’ll walk back to my car and think, “I need to hang onto this, make it my new normal.” But it never lasts, and at some point later—maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months—I’ll look up from wherever I’m at and go, “Wow. What have I been doing since that funeral?”

Hansen’s Endings (2010) imagines that moment of clarity if you didn’t have time for it to fade. Over the course of one day, a drug addict, a little girl with leukemia, and a woman with cancer face the reality that their time is running out. Instead of an extended bout of “Oh woe is me” or “Life is so unfair,” each of them begins to take care of the people around them. The addict tries to keep a friend from relapsing, the woman prepays for her funeral without telling her family, and together they take the little girl to visit the mother she hasn’t seen in years. In the end, this isn’t a movie about dying—it’s about what people do when they know they don’t have forever.

Dollar Dollar Sign, Y’all

We rarely stop to think about why some visual styles feel authentic while others… not so much. Yet many of the symbols that now signal “local,” “craft,” or “independent” began as practical solutions to everyday problems before gradually taking on meanings of their own. Once those meanings become embedded, they can be repurposed and deployed almost anywhere—even by businesses that never shared the circumstances that created them.

🎧 In this seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend, one odd detail on a brewery-style chalkboard leads to an unexpected story about beer lists written in chalk versus stick-on vinyl lettering. Sometimes all it takes is a long look at something you’ve never paid attention to before to realize it’s been telling a different story all along.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—seven minutes, one story.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Support Waco Insider

Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

We rarely stop to think about why some visual styles feel authentic while others feel manufactured. Yet many of the symbols that now signal “local,” “craft,” or “independent” began as practical solutions to everyday problems before gradually taking on meanings of their own. Once those meanings become embedded, they can be repurposed and deployed almost anywhere—even by businesses that never shared the circumstances that created them.

🎧 In this seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend, one odd detail on a brewery-style chalkboard leads to an unexpected story about beer lists written in chalk versus stick-on vinyl lettering. Sometimes all it takes is a long look at something you’ve never paid attention to before to realize it’s been telling a different story all along.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

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Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

One thing that was on my bucket list forever was becoming a book publisher. Not a writer, but the guy who found other people’s work that deserved to be released into the world. That appealed to me as a noble calling.

Then I spent eight years running Texas State Technical College’s publishing program. It didn’t take long to discover the reality had less to do with romantic ideals than logistics. ISBN numbers. Print run estimates. Profit-and-loss statements. Cardboard boxes headed to UPS.

Trust me: nobody dreams about that part.

That’s why I’m fascinated by people like local artist Matt “Doc Hoff” Hoffman, who’s self-published multiple horror and sci-fi comic books over the last couple of years. Print-on-demand services, Amazon, and online marketplaces have made it easier than ever for independent creators to publish their work. But that hasn’t eliminated the publisher. It’s simply turned the creator into one.

Hoffman understands that distinction.

“I still look at myself as someone who is a cartoonist,” he told me, “but publishing is being able to get the word out.”

Hoffman’s journey into publishing didn’t begin with his Edgar Allan Poe adaptions or comic conventions. It began with comics themselves. Growing up with dyslexia, he discovered that speech bubbles and sequential panels made stories accessible in ways traditional books didn’t.

“Comics for me were really a gateway into literacy,” he said.

Years later, after earning a doctorate in theology and spending a career as a healthcare chaplain, Hoffman decided to chase his childhood dream of being a cartoonist. He enrolled in the Sequential Artist Workshop (SAW) and began learning the craft of making comics.

One of Hoffman’s mentors at SAW gave him a piece of advice that permanently changed how he thought about publishing: don’t show up at your first comic convention with just one book. So instead of laboring over a single project, Hoffman spent much of 2025 with the goal of releasing a new comic roughly every 45 days. The purpose wasn’t simply to draw comics but to build a catalog. Readers who liked one story would have something else to discover when they came back to the table.

Creating the comics, however, only solved half the problem. The harder question was finding the people most likely to appreciate them. Hoffman learned that readers rarely appear by accident. Edgar Allan Poe fans gather in online communities. Comic conventions introduce readers looking for something beyond superheroes. Every niche has its own doorway. The goal? To build the audience that every independent creator believes is out there somewhere.

Waco has become one of those doorways. Hoffman’s Poe adaptations now sit on the shelves at Raven’s Nook. Once a month, he joins other local artists at Drink ’n Draw, where sketchbooks, ideas, and encouragement move around the table as freely as the conversation. He even hopes the city’s cartoonists might someday publish an anthology together. Independent publishing may begin alone at a drawing table, but it rarely stays that way.

Still, self-publishing has earned a reputation as the path authors take when traditional publishers don’t see enough potential in a book to invest their own money. And, to be fair, the barriers to entry have never been lower. Anyone can upload a file, order a box of books, and call themselves an author… or a publisher.

But readers are still the final gatekeepers.

“I’ve had people buy one of my Edgar Allan Poe comics at a convention,” Hoffman said, “take it back to their hotel room, read it that night, and come back the next day saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I love this. Let me buy all of them.’”

Ultimately, Hoffman’s story isn’t just about comics or publishing. It’s about how creative work moves through the world. An idea becomes ink on a page. Boxes of books are loaded and unloaded from the trunk of a car. A new fan walks away with a copy tucked under an arm. Comics need readers like songs need listeners and films need audiences. And publishing is the mechanism that brings them together.

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Making Art! with the Martin Museum of Art

Paint, ink, paper, printing blocks. Museums usually ask us not to touch anything. Baylor’s Martin Museum of Art is doing the opposite. Instead of waiting behind gallery walls for visitors to admire finished work, it’s hauling supplies to the Waco-McLennan County Central Library and inviting young hands to make a mess. Every artist starts out on the wrong side of perfection.

Martin Museum educators will lead three art projects from 2 pm to 4 pm on Friday, July 17, at the Central Library on 18th Street, including a printmaking self-portrait, a collage built from found objects, and an abstract piece inspired by music. The come-and-go program is designed for children ages 6 to 13, though the real lesson has less to do with technique than discovering there's a difference between making something and simply looking at what someone else created.

MC Art Supplies

Creative work rarely begins with inspiration. It begins with realizing you’re out of ink. Or that the sketchbook’s full. Or that the brush you’ve been pretending still works really doesn’t. Every artist knows the ritual: one more trip for supplies before the real work can begin.

That’s where MC Art Supplies fits into Waco’s creative ecosystem. Beyond the shelves of watercolor paper and printmaking supplies is a business that spends as much time championing the people who make art as the materials they use to make it. Anybody can sell brushes, but not every store helps build artists.

David & Art

Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Most of us keep them in separate mental filing cabinets, pulling one out depending on whether we’re in the mood for music, art, or literature. Baylor historian David Smith has spent years arguing that those walls are mostly imaginary. Culture isn’t organized by department. It’s one long conversation.

On David and Art, Smith traces those connections in weekly three- to four-minute segments on KWBU, moving from jazz to painting to theater to American identity with the ease of someone following questions instead of categories. Recent episodes revisit Sonny Rollins, artistic freedom around Independence Day, and what makes an American composer sound American. The arts rarely exist in isolation. Neither does their impact.

Blur Circle: No Voiceover Required

Independent films are often judged by what they lack rather than what they accomplish. But sometimes restraint is the point. Instead of reaching for bigger twists or louder emotions, Blur Circle, co-written and directed by Baylor professor Chris Hansen, demonstrates how trusting an audience can become one of the boldest creative decisions a filmmaker makes.

🎧 This seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend argues that local filmmaking doesn’t have to imitate Hollywood to be worthwhile. The greatest strength in this understated yet ambitious film lies not in the mystery it presents but in the people it gradually reveals.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—seven minutes, one story.

Coming Next Week

Every city watches movies. Far fewer make them. Somewhere between the first page of a script and the final edit is a group of people quietly proving that stories don't have to come from Los Angeles or New York to matter. Next week, The Weekly Dispatch explores what it means to build a filmmaking culture close to home.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Support Waco Insider

Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

Independent films are often judged by what they lack rather than what they accomplish. But sometimes restraint is the point. Instead of reaching for bigger twists or louder emotions, Blur Circle, co-written and directed by Baylor professor Chris Hansen, demonstrates how trusting an audience can become one of the boldest creative decisions a filmmaker makes.

🎧 This seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend argues that local filmmaking doesn’t have to imitate Hollywood to be worthwhile. The greatest strength in this quietly ambitious film lies not in the mystery it presents but in the people it gradually reveals.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Driving past 420 Dallas Street in East Waco, there’s no reason to give the two white cinderblock buildings there another look. The warehouse spaces they house face one another across an open parking lot full of potholes, surrounded by chainlink fencing at either end topped with concertina wire. At various points, it’s been home to the Waco Paddle Company, a small auto repair shop, and the roll-off containers and trucks used by Waco Waste Solutions.

Then the weekend arrives. Teenagers and twenty-somethings mill around the open door to one space called Reapers, grabbing a hot dog from barbecue pitmaster Kaleb Blaine or a cone from an ice cream truck before the music starts. Inside, an empty space is transformed into a place you’d never imagine at first glance—a room where punk and hardcore bands with names like Riddance, Kitetsu, and Gasoline Gurgle from Waco and other Texas cities share the floor, part of a music scene that most of the city doesn’t even know exists.

“Yeah,” DIY concert promoter Sheridan Vasquez admits. “It kind of looks a little sketchy from the outside.”

Still, it’s easy—too easy—to misjudge Reapers as nothing more than a warehouse full of screaming guitars, a mosh pit, and teenagers throwing elbows. Vasquez understands the perception.

“I think the scene is really just misunderstood,” she told me recently. “I’m not gonna lie, it can get a little crazy, it can get a little destructive, but I promise everybody’s hitting each other and kicking each other in the face with love.”

“With love?” I asked.

“If someone’s moshing and they fall down,” Vasquez explained, “everybody picks that person up because you know they could get seriously hurt if they just lay there and get trampled.”

Most of us experience Waco through its most visible layer: feature spreads in lifestyle magazines, popular social media feeds, or “Best Things to Do in The 254” lists. But like every city, Waco has another layer that’s built less around attractions than communities—hip-hop, independent film, experimental theater—that are less visible, not because anyone is trying to keep them secret but because they’re less concerned about the wider public in the first place.

That’s how Vasquez describes Waco’s hardcore music scene: “If you know, you know.”

Vasquez discovered Waco’s underground scene while working at Rogue Media. Before long, watching other people’s shows wasn’t enough. She organized her first hardcore bill in the fall of 2024, before opening Reapers to have a venue of her own.

“When I first started, it was a very stressful process because I didn’t know how to do anything,” she said. Before meeting her boyfriend, who now runs sound at Reapers, she had to scramble to find someone willing to work each show while also booking bands, making flyers, and figuring everything else out.

The hardest part? Promotion. Vasquez didn’t leave that to social media alone. She walked Baylor’s campus handing out flyers and talking to students.

“I’ve made a lot of friends who go to Baylor,” she said, “and they’ve talked about the scene to their friends and now all their friends show up.” Originally, she’d see the same 30 to 40 people at her shows. But now? “I’ve noticed a lot more new faces—there’s just so many new people that I’ve never seen before.”

And while the scene may always look chaotic to outsiders, it continues to be built on the unwritten expectation that everyone watches out for everyone else. Vasquez keeps cover charges low to make shows accessible and invites community groups that offer overdose-response information and other resources. And the recent Narcan Fest ’26 at Reapers raised over $1,500.

So, the phrase “If you know, you know” begins to sound less like an exclusive club than an invitation to experience a seldom-seen side of Waco.

Again, like every city, Waco takes big swings to attract people’s attention. But it’s also shaped by people who decide to build the smaller places they wish already existed. Many of those places will never appear in a tourism brochure or on a “Top 10 Things to Do in Waco” list. Stack enough of them together, and eventually you have something larger than any slogan could manufacture: a place with a life of its own.

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Sherman Ayres

For decades, Sherman Ayres carried his songs around in notebooks and on cassette tapes but mostly in his own head. Last summer, at 72 years old, those songs finally found their way onto the Texas Music Cafe stage, where they became a live album instead of a collection of “what ifs.” Some careers move in straight lines. Others spend half a century looking for the right room.

Ayres returns to Texas Music Cafe on Saturday, July 25, to play what he calls “musical gumbo,” backed by Cedric Ballou, Pat Kelly, Rick Terry, and keyboardist Myron Crowell. Country, gospel, blues, R&B, and ballads will figure into his set—a combination that sold out his first appearance there a year ago.

YouCan’tLiveInPittsburghAndThink

Listen to “Cottonelle” and “(I’m) Allergic to Penguins” and your first realization is that Waco’s YouCan’tLiveInPittsburghAndThink is not the next generation of Texas country music. Instead, the band pulls from screamo, post-hardcore, and Midwest emo. Twenty years ago, a band like this would’ve felt like an oddity in Waco. Today, they’re on bills with groups from across Texas.

Catch YouCan’tLiveInPittsburghAndThink on Friday, July 17, at Reapers, the all-ages venue on Dallas Street in East Waco. In addition to Austin’s Grey Feather and San Antonio’s Burnout, the lineup includes Waco’s Riddance—a reminder that local music scenes are built as much by shared stages as the hometown bands.

Blood, Sweat & Beats: The Waco Hip Hop Story

In the spring of 2019, local television newscaster Lindsay Liepman thought Waco rapper Pirscription would make a good story. He had other ideas. “This really isn’t just about me,” he told her before gathering about a dozen rappers and hip-hop artists for a day of filming. By the end of that day, Liepman realized she wasn’t making a television segment anymore. She was making a documentary.

Released in February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic shut down live music, Blood, Sweat & Beats: The Waco Hip Hop Story has become an unexpected time capsule. From Parkside Village block parties in the late ‘70s to Grammy-winning producer Symbolyc One, the documentary preserves a musical history that was already here long before anyone outside the local hip-hop scene thought to point a camera at it.

Zombie #37 & The Art of Making Art Happen

When a new mural or public art installation appears in Waco, most of us barely give a second thought to how it got there. We admire the colors and maybe snap a selfie to post on Instagram before moving on with our lives. Hidden just outside the frame are a million tedious little problems that, if nobody solved them, would leave nothing on a wall except bare concrete.

🎧 This seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend starts with something unusual about Conversations with Creative Waco, hosted by Fiona Bond on KWBU. While most artists are asked to explain what their work means, Bond keeps asking a different question: How did this happen? It’s a less common approach to arts coverage, and once you notice it, you can’t stop hearing what everyone else leaves out.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—seven minutes, one story.

Coming Next Week

Every artist has an origin story. Maybe it begins with an unexpected opportunity to make something for the first time. Or maybe it grows from years spent learning how to see the world differently. Next Thursday, The Weekly Dispatch explores how creative lives are built—and why creativity isn’t a lightning strike so much as a practice.

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

Support Waco Insider

Waco Insider is on Facebook and Instagram.

When a new mural or public art installation appears in Waco, most of us barely give a second thought to how it got there. We admire the colors and maybe snap a selfie to post on Instagram before moving on with our lives. Hidden just outside the frame are grant applications, planning meetings, apprenticeship programs, volunteer paint days, and a million tedious little problems that, if nobody solved them, would leave nothing on a wall except bare concrete.

🎧 This seven-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend began after noticing something unusual about Conversations with Creative Waco, hosted by Fiona Bond on KWBU. While most artists are asked to explain what their work means, Bond keeps asking a different question: How did this happen? It’s a less common approach to arts coverage, and once you notice it, you can’t stop hearing what everyone else leaves out.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Share

For more stories about people and places in Central Texas, subscribe to Waco Insider’s Weekly Dispatch newsletter.

Subscribe now

Everything Waco Insider publishes is free. If you like the work and want to help support it, become a paid subscriber.

When I started grad school, I almost dropped out the first semester because of a British novels class. Giles Mitchell, the professor teaching the course, told us to turn in a three-page paper every week about anything specific we found interesting in each novel. Other than that, there were no guidelines.

We started with Moll Flanders, moved on to the likes of Wuthering Heights, and concluded with London Fields. The reading—and there was a lot of it with ten novels total—wasn’t the problem. It was the writing.

I was stumped.

During my entire undergraduate education, I couldn’t remember a single professor asking me to write about something I found interesting.

Instead, I was used to teachers passing out lists, some longer, some shorter, of writing prompts for each assignment. All these prompts inevitably had both a thesis and expected conclusion built into them:

“In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen initially withholds Mr. Darcy’s true intentions and character from both Elizabeth Bennet and the reader, forcing us to share Elizabeth’s naivete. Discuss how Austen’s use of dramatic and structural irony shapes the reader’s perception of class and character throughout the novel.”

My introductory paragraph practically wrote itself:

“In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen initially withholds Mr. Darcy’s true intentions and character from both Elizabeth Bennet and the reader. This paper will discuss how Austen’s use of dramatic and structural irony shapes the reader’s perception of class and character throughout the novel.”

By the time I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I thought I knew how to write.

But in that novels class, our weekly writing assignment came with no prompts to follow—just the expectation to find something “interesting.”

The Trap

Not only had I come to expect every writing assignment to come with a built-in answer, once I learned a professor’s particular likes and dislikes, I could usually guess the “right” answer before I wrote the first sentence. After all, when you’re asked to discuss “structural irony” in Pride and Prejudice, the right answer is never going to be “there is no structural irony in this novel.”

In an earlier British novels class I took when I was an undergraduate, on the first day after we began reading Jane Austen’s Emma, the professor asked, “How much did all of you love this novel?”

There was a lot of virtue extolling as she called on my classmates around the room.

“Well,” I said when it was finally my turn to talk, “it’s like the diary of a prom queen. Who cares?”

That earned me a quick trip to the hallway outside the classroom for a chat. I learned if that was my opinion, I was welcome to keep it to myself.

Still, by the time I got to graduate school—and in class after class I was expected to think for myself—I figured much of my undergraduate education had been an unhappy fluke in learning to play “guess what the professor is thinking.”

Years later, I realized it was no fluke. I started seeing the same pattern everywhere—from corporate blogs to political commentary to social media influencer posts. The conclusions had been determined before a single word was written.

And like most horrifying things, once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

How Much Do We Love It Here?

Living in Waco, Texas, I frequently ask myself what kind of place Waco is. Is it a small city? Or is it a really big small town? Is it more Branch Davidian or Magnolia Market? What are the seen and unseen dividing lines between the haves and have-nots? And perhaps more importantly, I wonder what Waco wants to be.

So I’m always curious to see how local media outlets describe Waco.

Waco more or less explains itself through two lifestyle magazines, one daily newspaper, and an NPR radio station, along with a mishmash of podcasts, newsletters, and social media accounts. And if you consume enough of them, you start noticing patterns.

But the thing that kept nagging at me wasn’t only how Waco was described. It was that the same handful of stories kept doing the describing.

For example, take the lifestyle magazines Modern Texas Living and the Wacoan. After reading enough issues, I noticed that the stories weren’t merely similar—they occupied the same editorial roles. There was always someone interesting to meet. Somewhere new to eat. Somewhere beautiful to live with a sparkling marble kitchen countertop. The names changed every issue. The roles remained the same.

None of that, by itself, surprised me. Every magazine develops recurring departments and features. Reinventing the table of contents every month would be crazy.

But digging a little deeper, my frustration came from the fact that the stories themselves followed the same emotional arc. Someone faced a challenge, found a calling, built something meaningful, and now enriches the community. Restaurants weren’t simply places to eat; they became stories about passion and hospitality. Artists weren’t there to be understood so much as to demonstrate that Waco is creative. Entrepreneurs weren’t interesting because of their businesses; they were evidence that Waco is entrepreneurial.

Of course, every so often one of these magazines publishes a genuinely surprising story. That’s not my point. But I did wonder whether I was simply noticing a Waco pattern.

I pulled up similar magazines from Savannah, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma City and found the same familiar cast of both aspirational and affirmational stories. Beautiful houses with Gunite pools because fiberglass and vinyl aren’t suitable for a home of your caliber. A community rallying around one of its own after a terrible scooter accident. Restaurants built by women navigating immigration, entrepreneurship, and identity while introducing customers to unfamiliar cuisines.

Different skylines. Different people. Different geography. Yet after a few minutes, they began to blur together. Not because they were copying one another but because they all ended on the same note:

We are so blessed to live here.

And every story and column became another exhibit to make that case.

The Missing Pieces

Today’s lifestyle magazines aren’t just remarkably interchangeable. Each issue is also much the same as one from five, ten, or twenty years ago. The product hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the role it now plays in the local information ecosystem.

Thirty years ago, no one expected a lifestyle magazine to explain a city. That wasn’t its job. Newspapers covered city hall, schools, crime, and elections. Alternative publications covered music, arts, and criticism. Local columnists interpreted civic life. Lifestyle magazines celebrated the people, places, and businesses that made a city feel like home.

Every part of the ecosystem had a different job. Then it collapsed. Not all at once, but to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, first slowly, then quickly.

Waco’s daily paper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, disappeared behind a paywall even as its print editions became smaller and more reliant on wire stories. The staff shrank too, when feature writers, columnists, and critics became luxuries it couldn’t afford. Alternative outlets that periodically popped up like Bohemia and Lost in Waco came and ultimately went. Meanwhile, social media and endlessly repackaged news summaries fragmented what remained, making it increasingly difficult to tell where original reporting ended and recycled information began.

(That doesn’t mean nobody is trying. New efforts like The Waco Bridge have begun filling much of the gap in civic reporting, while long-standing institutions like KWBU continue serving important roles, despite increasingly difficult financial realities. Whether those efforts will prove durable remains an open question.)

Lifestyle magazines didn’t survive because they suddenly became more ambitious. Their business model simply proved more resilient. Each print issue has a long shelf life and is likely seen by multiple people wherever it lands, whether that’s the waiting room at a doctor’s office or the lobby where you’re waiting while your car’s oil is changed. Their upbeat editorial tone also appeals to advertisers selling aspirational products and services to affluent consumers.

They didn’t become more influential because they changed. They became more influential because almost everything around them disappeared.

That was the mismatch on my part. I’d wanted the Wacoan and Modern Texas Living to ask questions they were never meant to answer. What kind of city is Waco becoming—beyond, perhaps, an idealized Chamber of Commerce brochure? Why do some neighborhoods thrive while others struggle? Why do certain events become traditions while others disappear? In the end, I was damning them for something that wasn’t their purpose.

The questions I wanted answered hadn’t disappeared. But many of the institutions that once helped answer them were gone.

Curiosity as Civic Virtue

After graduate school, I spent several years teaching college English, and I borrowed one lesson from Giles Mitchell: I never used writing prompts. Instead, I told my students, “Figure out what you’re interested enough in to write three to five pages about.” I’d remind them that no subject is inherently interesting. What makes a subject interesting is showing readers why it matters to you.

It was not a popular approach.

My teaching evaluations were full of comments like, “Mr. Long expects us to figure things out by ourselves.” My favorite came from a student who wrote, “Mr. Long wants us to be writers. But I just want to know how to write a paper.”

What I really wanted, however, was for my students to be genuinely curious. Not to write a paper as an exercise in guessing what I was thinking but as a way of discovering what they thought. And to begin without knowing where they’d end up.

I think that’s what has disappeared from much of our local media ecosystem too: genuine curiosity. Not the curiosity that chases novelty, but one that begins without a predetermined answer.

Every city needs people willing to ask questions that don’t already contain their own answers. Not “How great is it to live here?” but “Why did that happen?” “What changed after that?” “Who benefited?” “What are we overlooking?”

The answers to those questions are what make a place impossible to mistake for anywhere else.

Mark Roy Long is the publisher of Waco Insider and hosts the podcast Your Waco Weekend.

If you’ve never been to the Waco Independent Film Festival (WIFF), it’s easy to assume it’s just a movie theater with a more complicated schedule. More screenings. Actors and directors hanging out in the lobby. A few awards handed out before everyone goes home.

That’s not it at all.

What the WIFF actually does when it returns on July 16–19 is turn movies into excuses. Excuses to spend a weekend inside the Waco Hippodrome Theatre and unexpected rooms around town. Excuses to argue about narrative arcs over a beer at Brotherwell Brewing. Excuses to discover a filmmaker you’ve never heard of because somebody whose opinion you trust says, “No, seriously. You need to see this one.”

Ten years ago, after traveling the festival circuit with their own short films, Waco filmmakers Louis Hunter and Samuel Thomas decided their hometown deserved that experience too. So they created something harder to describe than just a schedule of screenings: the feeling of stumbling into a temporary community built around movies.

Since then, the venues have multiplied. The audiences have grown. The conversations have spilled out beyond the screenings.

But the mission? It hasn’t changed.

As Hunter recently told me, “We’ve always championed really excellent storytelling. We’ve always championed underserved voices. We’ve always championed the Texas filmmaker… and we’ve always wanted to do all this while having a really good time.”

Independent film festivals are more than just films. They’re about creating the conditions that make independent filmmaking possible in the first place: audiences, connections, witnesses.

That belief has shaped the WIFF from the beginning. Over the past decade, more filmmakers have arrived from around the country—and increasingly, around the world—to share work with growing audiences they may never have met otherwise. Last year, the festival landed on MovieMaker Magazine’s lists for “The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” and “50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.”

But this success hasn’t come from trying to be bigger. It’s come from giving people reasons to come back.

“If you’re a music fan, you go to a music festival,” Thomas explained. “Well, if you’re a film fan, you should go to a film festival.”

Not just because you’ll watch more movies. Because you’ll meet the people who made them. You’ll hear what almost happened, what nearly didn’t work, and what’s coming next. And you can ask the question that nobody else thought to ask.

That’s the part no streaming service can put in its catalog.

Of course, most of these films will find their way to streaming eventually. The WIFF is making many of them available online the week after the festival. But that’s not the point.

Hunter put it this way: “There is a different experience of laughing together… when everyone holds their breath at the same time.”

I learned that lesson myself during the pandemic. The first movie I saw back in a theater wasn’t because I had been waiting months to see Godzilla vs. Kong. It was because I had been waiting months to sit in a dark room full of strangers and experience a story together again.

That feeling doesn’t disappear when the lights go up. It spills into the lobby, onto the sidewalk and, if it’s the WIFF, eventually over to Brotherwell Brewing or the Hotel Cambria or Freight Bar. That’s where filmmakers stop being names in the closing credits and become people willing to answer the question that’s been rattling around in your head for the last two hours.

One thing that caught me off guard was when Thomas told me they’re still surprised by how many people say, “Wait… Waco has a film festival?”

But Hunter has seen something else too. Over the last decade, he says, Waco has grown into a city where people arrive expecting to find things like free concerts, a thriving farmers market—and, yes, an internationally recognized independent film festival.

That’s the real milestone. Ten years ago, the question was whether Waco could support an independent film festival. Today, the WIFF is part of the city’s story.

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Donnie Darko 25th Anniversary Screening

One of the many roads to this year’s Waco Independent Film Festival that didn’t start in Hollywood began inside Baylor’s film and digital media department. There, professors Corey Carbonara and Michael Korpi have spent years developing 6P Color, a display technology designed to reproduce a wider range of colors than today’s standard RGB screens. Along the way, that work brought them into the orbit of cinematographer Steven Poster, now a spokesman for the project. One conversation led to another. Chaos, as usual, did the rest. Suddenly, one of the defining cult films of the early 2000s was headed to the Waco Hippodrome Theatre.

On Friday night, July 17, the festival celebrates the 25th anniversary of Donnie Darko with Poster in attendance for a post-screening discussion. Director Richard Kelly’s time-bending, hallucinatory film has spent a quarter century refusing to behave like a normal movie, evolving from an initial box office disappointment into one of the most obsessively quoted cult films of its generation. Poster, whose cinematography helped define the film’s visual identity, says he already knows exactly how the film should appear on the big screen. Waco audiences will have the chance to find out right alongside him.

Three Documentaries, One Conversation

Independent film festivals aren’t just collections of movies. They’re acts of curation. This year’s Saturday morning documentary block at the Waco Hippodrome Theatre doesn’t simply present three nonfiction films back to back. Festival programmers deliberately grouped them together because they saw a conversation unfolding between them—about history, place, memory and the communities people build.

On July 18, Cycles of Resilience: A Journey Through Austin’s Black History anchors the program with the story of Austin’s annual Juneteenth Ride through neighborhoods shaped by segregation and resilience. It shares the screen with two shorter films: Middle Grounds, a portrait of a Portland coffeehouse built around conversation, and The Last KKKlavern, which explores the preservation of a former Ku Klux Klan hall in Fort Worth. Three films that, on paper, have little to do with one another—until they’re shown in the same room.

Beers, Bulls & Brats

By the time the credits roll on Saturday night, the Waco Independent Film Festival isn’t done yet. It simply moves a few blocks to Brotherwell Brewing, one of Waco’s best third spaces, where conversations continue over craft beer, picnic tables, and the sort of accidental encounters that rarely happen in hotel conference rooms. The festival’s first-ever after-party drew fewer than ten people. Now, these gatherings regularly attract more than 150.

Saturday night’s shindig on July 18 features bratwurst, s’mores, and because this is Texas, a mechanical bull. Festival co-founder Louis Hunter says one goal has always been giving visiting filmmakers a genuine taste of Texas hospitality, especially those making their first trip to the state. That requires barbecue. Local craft beer. And a little friendly encouragement to climb onto that mechanical bull. Name badge not required.

Every Weekend Needs a Biscuit

Nobody wakes up on Friday morning excited to see a band they’ve never heard of. That’s the dirty little secret of every local music scene: calendars tell people where to go, but they rarely give them a reason to leave the house in the first place.

🎧 This six-minute episode of Your Waco Weekend follows the trail from a chance encounter with Big Boys’ lead singer Biscuit to his band’s infamous final show at Austin’s Liberty Lunch, ending with an uncomfortable realization about Waco’s live music scene: good musicians aren’t the scarce resource—curiosity is. And that’s a much harder problem to solve.

Open in Spotify or listen on other podcast platforms.

Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—six minutes, one story.

Coming Next Week

Most people have a picture in their heads of what “live music in Waco” looks like: a country singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar. But one East Waco venue offers something louder, heavier, and built from the ground up. After all, sometimes the fastest way to jumpstart a music scene is a little kick to the face… with love.

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