White Linen Night

This past Saturday was the 8th annual White Linen Night in the Heights. It's described as a huge neighborhood block party...shops have their doors open late, restaurants close their parking lots and put extra tables outside, there are bands playing on the street corner. It has the potential to be great, but usually it is SO crowded (over 30,000 people!) and so hot that I yearly ask myself, "Why am I here?!?"

Before we even knew White Linen Night was scheduled for that weekend, we had bought tickets to see Ben Kweller at Fitzgeralds (our neighborhood music venue). I actually wasn't planning on attending WLN, but since we were going to one of the main streets anyway, we decided to partake in the festivities.

We were headed to White Oak (6th street) and live on 16th street, so decided to walk there. Coming from London where we walked everywhere, we figured 10 blocks wouldn't be too terrible. About 3 minutes in to the walk, we were complaining that we had barely made a dent in our walk (how can we only be at 14th street?!?! I totally felt like orphans in Annie walking the 45 blocks from the orphanage to Daddy Warbucks). And then Daniel got pooped on by a bird. It was more like a bird explosion. We blame it on him throwing away this maggot-infested baby bird that a street cat left in our flower bed to die, instead of giving the said bird a proper burial. We took that as a sign we were supposed to drive, turned around, changed clothes, and drove the mile like the lazy Houstonians we are.

I say this every year, and I'll say it again. I DON'T GET WHITE LINEN NIGHT! Maybe it's because the Heights is my home, but why go out on this one scalding, packed night when I can go to Onion Creek any other night and actually sit at a table? I do 19th street once a week...I am not going to even think of going into one of those shops when I am pretty sure 300 fire code violations are being broken. I'm going to sound like a Heights snob, but I kinda miss the days when we first moved here and people thought the Heights was a dangerous no man's land. I didn't need a reservation anywhere. Didn't have to wait at the 11th street light for 3 go's before getting to drive through the green. Didn't have young fratty neighbors playing the drums at midnight. With that being said, I am happy that the Heights is the place to be, with so many new shops and restaurants popping up because of the extra attention given to it.

We ended up eating at Taco Nut food truck because every other restaurant was either jam packed or not even serving food. Fitzgerald's was awesome. I hadn't listened to Ben Kweller in about 10 years, but he and Austin's Amy Cook put on a great show.

We ended our night going to 16th's street Alice's Tall Texan. It is a 40 year old hole in the wall, cash only, beer joint where they only serve Shiner or Lone Star in a frozen goblet for $2.50. We could actually sit at a table and I think we were the only English speakers there, let along the only people dressed in white linen. At least Alice's hasn't been touched by the fancy shmamcy (yet).