Sarah Hepola
Articles tagged ‘Texas women’

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 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