Best U.S. Made-Over Towns Worth a Visit

Who made Yahoo Travel's list of best made-over towns worth a visit? Oklahoma City did!

Set where the state’s eastern green Ozark leftovers open into the wide-open plains of the west, Oklahoma City is justifying the claim that it’s "oh so pretty" from the Bobby Troup song "Route 66." Long the dusty cow town at the point where old Route 66 crisscrosses with I-40, I-44 and I-35, the city has passed a one-penny sales tax to pretty itself up. The change so far has been stunning. Its long-domeless capitol finally got its top, its central river finally has water (and sculler rallies in stylish new boathouses), and its downtown has transformed from a mass exodus scene at 5 p.m. to an after-hours destination. Here you’ll find the NBA’s Thunder playing at the new Ford Center, rooftop cocktails and independent films at the relocated Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and Bricktown’s San Antonio-styled canal passing a minor league ballpark, barbecue restaurants and Flaming Lips Alley, named for the local rock heroes. Those needing something beyond the usual meat-and-potato go for authentic Vietnamese pho (beef noodle soup) or banh mi (sandwiches, filled with tofu or pork) in the in-progress renovation of "Asian District" – centered on old Route 66 at NW 23rd St and Classen Ave.

MAPS3 is already paying off.

(Hey, I've blogged about the independent films at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Hipster!)

Good for us. Next time you're out this way, stop by. You won't be disappointed.

iPhone Pictures

Looks like it's time to empty my iPhone of its pictures. I'm still not as excited as I'd like to be with the iPhone's camera; I'm not quite capturing what I'm seeing, a complaint I really didn't have with my Blackberry. Maybe it's me but things just seem flat and washed out.

Rather than make a post for each, let's just make it a grab bag of sorts, okay? Here we go:

I was downtown about 10 days ago on IRS business and had some time to kill before meeting Clara for lunch. I killed it by elbowing aside the homeless exercising their inalienable right to access porn on the Internet and taking this from the lounge on the West side. That's the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and Patience Latting Circle:

It was a crystalline Fall evening. The moon was on its way to setting over Miss Betty's roof line:

(If my iPhone's camera can capture this, what's my complaint?)

I was sweeping the leaves off the patio on the sunny Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving and I saw this guy. Someone forgot to tell him summer was over. He looks a little sun-faded and weak-kneed so maybe he knows his time's about up:

Here, I got an angle on him and the shadow he throws makes him a little easier to spot:

I call him a "him." Since he still has his head, he might be a she. Or a male praying mantis who has yet to learn the carnal touch of a female praying mantis. And the subsequent head-munching by the female that occurs in the afterglow of the act. Either way, it was surprise.

Finally, one morning last week we had a good deal of fog. Here's the view outside my office window. Not quite Victorian England but close:

Movies at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art

I wanted to do a separate post about our visit to catch a movie at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art because I didn't want to distract from the brilliance of my brief review of the movie. But I managed to take a few pictures with my iPhone of the auditorium and I wanted to post them and say a few words about being here.

The OCMA is housed in the old Centre Theatre :

On Christmas Day 1947, Oklahoma City saw an impressive new movie palace open downtown. The Centre Theater, the last of the downtown movie palaces to open in Oklahoma City, was considered to be one of the most modern cinemas between Chicago and the West Coast. Built within the municipal center of Oklahoma City, the theater’s design matched those of its neighbors: City Hall, the County Courthouse, and the Civic Center Music Hall.

Now sixty years later, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art occupies the entire block at 415 Couch Drive on the site of what was formerly the Centre Theater. In 2002, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art opened its new location while preserving many of the unique architectural elements that were original to the building, such as the box office, poster display cases, and the Plexiglas staircase railings.

I'm not quite clear if the auditorium we were in was the original one; we had to go up a flight of stairs to get in and that doesn't quite make sense to our modern theatre-going sensibilities. And by today's standards, it's tiny, no bigger than the small venues you'll sit in at the local google-plex. Oh, but it's been beautifully restored and you can imagine the ghosts of the past that are sitting right beside you as you watch the movie. (Drat. No popcorn though. But they did have previews. Yes!)

A brief glimpse of what the OCMA will be showing next. I was wanting to get a shot of the stage and its hardwood floors but the low light and limitations of Blogger only get me the screen. Well, maybe you get an idea of it:

Here's something you don't see anymore in movie theatres: the projection booth. An actual person is in there jockeying around the reels of celluloid. Cool:

In this part of the museum, you'll find another Dale Chihuly. And, again, thanks to he limited iPhone photo capability and Blogger, you get only a tiny sense of the beauty of this piece. (Funny how I manage to shift the blame of my lousy photos, isn't it?):

After the show, you can go back out the doors into the night of downtown OKC. No, you're not in Manhattan - it's foolish to think you'd have that kind of experience, but maybe it'll do for now. It's enough to think you might have just passed through the same doors, stepped on the same sidewalk, as Susan Hayward and Robert Preston and thousands of Oklahomans before you who were doing the same thing you just finished doing: looking for a few hours of entertainment in the city.