Sarah Hepola
Articles tagged ‘Dallas’

November 28, 2021

Why I’m Doing a Podcast on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders

For most of my life, they were just images to worship or disdain or ignore -- but they're one of the great and complicated stories to come out of my city

I grew up watching women’s bodies. I think it started on movie screens, but it moved to television and locker rooms and swimming pools. I watched their suntanned shoulders in halter tops, I studied the parting waves of their tumbling hair, and I wondered if my body would ever have that kind of magic. There . . . Read More

May 4, 2020

All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers

I visited NorthPark Mall the weekend Texas started opening up. It was weird.

On Saturday I went to the most popular mall in Dallas, and I wrote this piece. I hadn’t planned to report on my state’s controversial re-opening, but I was overwhelmed by the oddness of the spectacle and the unprecedented nature of the moment. When I posted the story to Facebook, my college best friend commented, . . . Read More

January 17, 2020

A personal history of Taco Cabana

When a little piece of your landscape disappears

The lights inside Taco Cabana had gone dark. It wasn’t even 7pm, and the neon of Lower Greenville was in high throb, Christmas lights still wrapped around trees in early January, so the darkness of that restaurant was conspicuous, like the street was missing a tooth. I slowed down just enough to make out the . . . Read More

January 3, 2020

The warp of beauty

On Texas women, the shifting sands of plastic surgery, and a complicated relationship to our own bodies

A young woman named Vickie Lynn Hogan went to high school about seventy miles away from me in a small town called Mexia, Texas. She was seven years older, though I like to imagine I passed her at the mall one day,  or that we stood side by side at the makeup counter of Dillard’s, . . . Read More

September 16, 2018

The gala, alone

A moment in time, snapped back to reality

I was trying to get a picture of the red neon pegasus outside the Omni Hotel. I was standing on the sidewalk, in my high heels and the dress I’d worn to the gala, angling my phone to capture the Reunion Tower in the background, whose lights were flickering in such a way that if . . . Read More

September 4, 2007

Carter.

A eulogy for a friend

Food critics talk about how hard it is to come up with different ways to say “tastes good.” For Dallas music writers, it was coming up with different ways to describe Carter Albrecht. There were only so many times you could say “mega-talented” without sounding like the hack you very well might have been. And . . . Read More