"Little lower, a little lower ... there's the gear shift."

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Chihuly, Central Market, that crazy bridge -- they're all being billed as the saving grace of Dallas, or rather stuff that makes our already valuable stuff more valuable. Fine, you can have your bridge and your heart-healthy prepared meals and your blown-glass chandeliers, but none of those things will get you laid. You know what will? A drive-in, that's what. That's more valuable than all of Chihuly's woven suns and Central Market's artisan bread loafs, combined.

It was announced yesterday that a nice hunk of parking lot along the Trinity has entered into a 10-year lease in Fort Worth with plans of using the dead space for a drive-in movie theater. Why aren't we doing that? The city wins: They get a company to move into an abandoned lot, clean it up, erect a few screens and hand out some jobs. The discarded asphalt that time forget turns into a gathering place and revenue source. Life happens, those street lamps get fixed and before you know it, maybe a coffee shop pops up nearby,

Locals win: Always a pleasant balance of seedy and thrifty, drive-ins make it easy to spend quality time with friends or pitch a fun and grab-heavy date night. Just having the okay to bring your own food and drinks to a movie makes the experience worth while -- translation, I'm a notorious cheapskate and I die a little inside if I spend $20 on a hot pretzel and another five on nacho cheese. I can bring, and have brought, entire multi-course meals to the drive-in.

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Tennessee Williams had a weird thing about hotels, beaches and death. In his play The Night of the Iguana, currently onstage at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, the rundown Costa Verde beach resort in Mexico acts as the holiday getaway for the Grim Reaper. Every guest who checks in is on the brink of a breakdown. One of them dies.

Director René Moreno, Dallas' best director for pushing actors to their best work, has assembled a strong, sexy ensemble for this production. It's not an easy play to do. The setting on the hotel's wide veranda has to accommodate a lot of comings and goings. There's also a rainstorm, achieved beautifully on CTD's tiny stage. (Set design by Rodney Dobbs does visual magic with see-through walls affording glimpses of three small hotel rooms.)

Handsome actor Ashley Wood plays the lead, defrocked Episcopalian minister T. Lawrence Shannon, who calls himself "a man of God ... on vacation." He's hiding out from his bad habits that include drinking heavily and sleeping with the teenage daughters of the upright Baptist women who hire Shannon as a tour guide. Kicked off his latest tour for deflowering yet another virgin (played with swirling teenage angst by Jessica Renee Russell), Shannon heads for the Costa Verde, owned by his old friend Maxine (Cindee Mayfield). She's newly widowed and nearly broke, but enjoying a midlife sexual awakening, thanks to the handsome young Mexican men who work in her hotel.

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Let's face it, Lula B's is Dallas' mecca for living room necessities. They've got all the basics covered, from a suspended round TV to a '70s disco light that flashes to the beat of the stereo it's connected to. While wandering the aisles of Lula B's West on a lazy Saturday, we discovered some chichi, but totally essential living room decor, and couldn't resist sharing our finds with our radtacular Mixmaster friends.

The first relic we stumbled across was a New Wave clock ashtray. Need to know the time and ash your cigarette all at once? No prob. The piece of '80s pop culture comes with a $15 price tag.

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Beauty in the aftermath: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossoms

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When cartoonist/illustrator/story teller Don Hertzfeldt spoke at Texas Theatre last Friday, he mentioned what he likes to watch at film festivals. Surprisingly, it isn't other animated shorts or even feature buzz-heavy full-lengths; he watches the documentaries. His logic was sound: "You realize that if you watch a feature film and it turns out to be terrible, you've wasted an entire evening. If you watched documentaries, at least you've learned something."

Tonight Texas Theatre is giving you a quick education in this year's Academy nominated documentary shorts, and with each measuring in at roughly 30 minutes you'll learn stuff without falling asleep and spilling your cocktail on yourself. (What? Those chairs are comfy.)

They're showing four of the five that have grabbed noms; let's take a quick peek at each.

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Act of Valor is a fictional film that uses currently serving U.S. military to express the daily struggles endured by our camouflaged men and women through dramatic reenactment. It premieres this evening at Cinemark West Plano and will be presented by Congressman Pete Sessions, Councilmember Sheffie Kadane and U.S. Navy SEALs Clint Bruce and Stephen Holley.

Why are so many folks coming together for a film screening? Well, the theater is really a gathering point for discussion. SEALs Holley and Bruce are using the release to raise awareness for their now-annual event Carry the Load, which had its inaugural launch last Memorial Day. Carry the Load is an effort to steer folks away from barbecues, hangovers on the couch and the other ways that Memorial Day has grown to be experienced and redirect our focus to the day's original intent.

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Wave "hello."

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In his new solo show Beyond Words, Bill Bowers combines mime, music and text to tell stories from his life growing up in Montana. He also shares some stories from other lives, including one about a small-town boy from Sherwood Anderson's short fiction collection Winesburg, Ohio.

Beyond Words is one of the mainstage shows at this year's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival, playing at Addison's WaterTower Theatre March 1-11. (Dallas Observer is a sponsor of the event.)

This will be Bowers' third appearance at Out of the Loop. His 2008 Loop show, It Goes without Saying, won the DFW Critics Forum award as best touring production that year. Beyond Words was a hit with critics and audiences during its run Off Broadway last fall.

With The Artist vying for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards, we wanted to know what Bowers, a student of the great Marcel Marceau and one of a handful of professional mimes still performing solo stage shows, thought of the new semi-silent film. One thing about mimes: Out of the white makeup, they're keen to converse.

Did you like The Artist? And are you surprised that a silent movie is such a hit?
Bill Bowers: I did enjoy it very much. I had hesitation because I'm such a fan of silent film. Charlie Chaplin is my idol. But it really won me over. They do a lovely job in the film communicating a story without words. That actor [Jean Dujardin] is so charismatic, he transcends language. As a mime, it encourages me to know that it's possible to carry a two-hour film without any words.

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This Friday you'll crave one. That's just what happens when America's favorite gas-fueled hot dog comes rolling into town. (If the sight of it doesn't make you salivate, the theme music will.) Between 3 and 8 p.m. on Friday, February 24, you can visit a modern Wienermobile at the Irving Arts Center. Taking a peek at its iconic design is completely free, but a hot dog lunch will run you $5. What we often do not consider is how much the Wienermobile has changed over the last 76 years, so let's take a look at how it's evolved through the decades.

1936, A Wienermobile is born. (Shown above)
It was Oscar's nephew, Karl G. Mayer, who concocted the game-changing plan to sit inside a giant hotdog and drive it around. Five thousand dollars later, it happened. This original 13-foot model lurched onto the nation's streets and into its hearts while spreading the word about "German Wieners." Gotta love those '30s advertising fonts.

​1950's Wienermobile
Your daddy's Wienermobile didn't have a hi-fi sound system like this 1950's model. Here's a pic of one of the only remaining hot dog vehicles from the five that were created that year, each built into either a Dodge or Willys Jeep chassis. This vestige of a bygone condiment era sits at The Henry Ford automotive museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

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Tomorrow's Ash Wednesday, let's get trashed!

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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez! It's the last day before repentance, how are you going to spend it? If you feel like getting sauced and earning those eight cent strings of plastic beads, you're in good company. A whole gaggle of nightclubs are featuring DJs, shirt lifting and drink specials, so check out the links at Boiler Room, Plush, Glass, and Wish Ultra Lounge to see which booty-shake bash is the baby Jesus to your King Cake.

It's family friendly, so bring the pooch.

​If you're in a more wholesome Fat Tuesday mood, roll the party over to the Lake Dallas Mardi Gras Festival. Kick back and watch the Carnivale parade at 5:45 p.m. and drip crawfishy goodness on your best green and purple shirt. There will also be a children's mask competition, so you can say things like "Billy's getting so big; he's really grown into that frightening skeleton headgear. Soon, he'll be driving." New Orleans has even given us rental of its own brass band for the evening: the Gumbo Kings, and they promise to transport you to The Big Easy and still get you back in bed at a reasonable hour (Lake Dallas Mardi Gras ends at 9 p.m.).

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​Reigning MVP, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Hart Trophy Winner, and J-Lo's current boy toy: These are a few of the more coveted titles in the world of pop-culture today. None of them, regardless of the spoils that come with such a victory, sound anywhere near as cool as Adventurer of the Year, though.

The U.K.'s Roz Savage held that very title, given to her by the folks at National Geographic, in 2010 after a two-year journey where she became the first woman to row the Pacific Ocean. Just so we're clear, though: she's also the first woman to row the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well (take that, Charles Lindbergh!). Savage isn't only a woman of the high seas. She's also an author, motivational speaker, marathon runner, lecturer and most importantly to her, an environmental advocate.

Savage is swinging through town to speak at the Winspear Opera House for a NatGeo Live! engagement tonight. Given the occasion, we grabbed a few minutes over the phone with the charming ocean rower to discuss pirates, epiphanies and the future of mankind.

Mixmaster: In 2010, you were named Adventurer of The Year. That might be the grandest title I've ever heard of.

Savage: Yes, it's nice to get the accolade, of course, that's not why I do what I do. But it does help with the environmental component of the things I do.

You left a corporate job to become the adventurer/activist that you are now. That must've been quite the logistical task to pull-off in terms of the sheer everyday logistics of life.

It was a gradual process. I knew that I was quietly dying on the inside, working a corporate job that didn't mean anything to me. The money was good, but it wasn't enough to make me feel like it was the way I wanted to spend my life. It took me a long time to admit that to myself. It took four or five years to extricate myself from that corporate life in order to decide what to do next. It was a process of elimination to sever all of my ties with my old life and see what fit for my new life. When I had my environmental epiphany, I found something that I wanted to spend a lot of my time and energy on.

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Dallas Zoological Society/Cathy Burkey

"I'm just big-shelled"

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The Children's Aquarium at Fair Park has a new resident, a big fat alligator snapping turtle that remained nameless until this morning. Thanks to the Carey family from Lewisville, the ancient reptile now goes by Spike and because of some very cautious handling at the Children's Aquarium we now know that he weighs in at 190 pounds.

Alligator snapping turtles are the largest variety of freshwater turtles in the world and the last of their genus Macrochelys -- the rest of his relatives have gone the way of the dinosaur. Let's look at pictures of this giant turtle.

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