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POSTCARDS FROM JOHN & JODY

Austin TX
| JODY JAFFE & JOHN MUNCIE | Postcards from

This is a series of “postcards” sent to WDT
Magazine publisher, Ron James, from veteran
journalists and friends Jody Jaffe and John
Muncie as they travel the globe.

Dear Ron,

You can’t go to Texas without buying cowboy
boots. Well at least one of us can’t. We’d just
scored the perfect pair — cherry red boots
with broncos bucking down the shins — when
we heard a twangy version of Dylan’s “Tangled
Up In Blue” coming from South Congress Av-
enue.

It was James Anthony Johnson, whose cow-
boy hat and guitar picking matched his twang.
He’s been singing the blues on South Congress
for 15 years and he’s watched the neighbor-
hood change. “Used to be, it was full of trans-
vestites, prostitutes, and transsexuals ...and
politicians cruising to find them,” he said.

Nowadays it’s full of retro shops where you
can buy the ugly clothes we wore in the ‘60s;
folk-art stores with the obligatory Day of the
Dead skeletons and turquoise squash blos-
soms; shoe shops where the half the proceeds
go to Haitian children; and high-end booteries
where you can easily drop $2,000. And that’s City marketeers have been trying to re-brand this seven-block
just on one block. area, “SoCo,” a nod to New York’s SoHo, that locals find amus-
ing at best. “No one but tourists and PR people call it that,” we
South Congress is the trendy section of Austin’s main drag, 10 were told repeatedly. The trendiness has spilled one block west to
blocks from the state capitol and just across the famed “Bat the edgier First Street, with funkier stores like the vegan grocery
Bridge” over the Colorado River. From March through October, called “Rabbit Food.”
1.5 million bats — the largest bat colony in North America —
roost in the crevices underneath the bridge. And every evening We wandered both streets for a couple of days, shopping, eating
crowds gather to watch the clouds of bats fly off for dinner. While and just getting a taste of urban Texas hip. Just like you can’t go
we missed the bats, who were keeping warm in Mexico, there was to Texas without buying cowboy boots, you can’t go to South Con-
still plenty of entertainment on the south side of the river: Pin- gress without eating a Hopdoddy burger and their killer truffle
striped suits in the rear-view mirror, blue jeans, ironic beards and fries. Here’s where it pays to be old. Eating dinner at 5:30 is now
tattoos dead ahead. normal, which is good at Hopdoddy because when the hipsters
eat, the line stretches out the door and into the parking lot.

56 Wine Dine & Travel 2016