Ah, March in Texas. As much as everyone wants to joke about Texas weather in general, the real fun is waiting for the week of St. Patrick’s Day/the vernal equinox, because just about anything can happen. Tornadoes, dust storms, snow…stick around Dallas long enough, and you’ll see almost everything. This year, the tornadoes stayed away for a bit, but we got hail across the northern half of Dallas County, thankfully not large enough to cause sustained damage or injury, but still a bit disconcerting. I suspect that March 2023 is the month for asteroid strikes, but we’re only halfway through March 2022, so it could be setting up for the end of the month. (April 2 marks the fortieth anniversary of the dust storm that gave me a particularly distinctive scar that allows me to tell if my hairline is receding, given to me in a pig pen no less, so I literally have some skin in Texas weather prognostication.)
In various developments, the gallery renovation and reorganization starts this month, with the height of the revival in April in time for the Manchester United Flower Show, tentatively scheduled for April 23. It’s already starting with moving the taller enclosures to the front, but it’s the detail that should get everyone. (The designer keeps joking that it needs to look like a Rainforest Cafe as designed by Peter Jackson, but we also agree that it might benefit from a few pylons. If you can’t have fun with the concept of a carnivorous plant gallery, then why even bother?)
On the event front, the last March open house opens the door at noon on March 19, and this is the last open house for a little while. Part of this is because of the Oddities & Curiosities Expo at Dallas’s Fair Park on March 26, and part is to take a break to finish up the renovation. When it’s ready and open houses and Porch Sales start up again, the skies will light up with the news.
Other than the weather and renovation fun, the rest of the month goes toward further surprises, particularly involving the big Texas Frightmare Weekend show at the end of April. Between new enclosures debuting at the show and new species never before encountered at a Frightmare, anyone wanting to attend should get their weekend passes before the show sells out. Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but Frightmare sold out completely in 2019, and the number of people looking forward to coming back out for the traditional April show after two years of lockdowns suggests that you should get those passes NOW.
And in final news, the Day Job that kept things going at the gallery since the end of 2020 ends as of March 18, and I’m currently cleaning up everything for the final cleanout. If you want to know details, come out to the next open house: with luck, some of my former coworkers will be there, too, so you can ask them directly if my work persona is any different from the gallery persona. And after they stop twitching on the floor because they can’t laugh any harder…