THE FORT WORTH BURRITO PROJECT BENEFIT AT FRED’S
www.myspace.com/fortworthburritoproject
By Ken Shimamoto
A number of years ago, when my children were still small, we were walking downtown when we a homeless man approached and asked me for money. I refused him and we walked on. After awhile, my oldest asked, “But Dad, how would you feel if that man died because we didn’t help him?”
A few years after that, when my middle child was in high school, she and one of her ‘zine-scribing friends used to interview homeless people downtown. “We’ll only do it together, in public places where there are lots of other people around,” she promised me. She was very upset when she read in the paper about the homeless dude who got kicked to death outside Ripley Arnold Housing Project.
I hope my children always stay as compassionate as they were at young ages.
Yesterday, I played with Stoogeaphilia at a benefit show for the Fort Worth Burrito Project at Fred’s Texas Café. The Burrito Project is a crew of local folks who meet up at 2pm every Sunday in the Trinity Park shelter house (West 7th and Stayton). From there, they disperse on bikes and in trucks to distribute home-cooked burritos, bottled water, second-hand clothes and (a big favorite) new socks to homeless people around the downtown area. They’ve been doing it since January and while the cat that got the ball rolling has moved to Dallas (where he’s started another burrito project), their mission statement stresses that “there is no burrito project headquarters or leader or the need for one.” They’re not into personal recognition, just doing what they do. It’s DIY-ismo at its best.
It’s also no surprise that fonky Fred’s was hosting one stage of this benefit (the others were at 1919 Hemphill and the Bronx Zoo). After all, the Chandler family has been cooking turkey dinners for the homeless every Christmas for years now, and their annual Fredfest has raised money for the Tarrant Area Food Bank.
We got there in time to catch the tail end of the set by a girl ‘n’ boy duo of Mansfield teens that go by the unwieldy moniker Hands for Bad Habits. Their Myspace thingy says that they “don’t expect to go far, just to have some fun while we’re still kids,” which seems like a fine idea. Wizard o’ sound Andre Edmonson was running the board, which is always a good thing.
Next up were literate whiteboy rappers the Rivercrest Yacht Club, whose remix of Carey Wolff’s “Untold Stories” I’d heard a few months back. The ex-Woodeye frontman stopped by on his way to tend bar at Malone’s, so he happened to be in the house when the RYC boyzzz played his song – a first. The Yacht Club, consisting of DJMCDDS (a guy in a gorilla mask), Generic (aka FW Weekly scribe Eric Griffey), and Heffminster de la Roca, wowed the crowd with Beastie Boys-like antics while dropping rhymes like “I’m feeling amorous / So uncap the cameras.”
The little Stoogeband continued its trail of destruction by blowing a driver on one of Andre’s speaker columns, causing it to smoke and require replacement (sorry, Dre), and played a set that was guaranteed 70% Stooges material (actually more than that, because we had to drop one tune for time’s sake) plus Dead Boys “What Love Is” (which we like real much since breaking it in at the Chat Room 3.9.2008) and Sir Steffin’s guitar tour de force on Television (not Telephone, Linda)’s “Marquee Moon.” For the record, the T-shirts of the day were Dengue Fever, Johnny Thunders, Roxy Music For Your Pleasure, and Clash London Calling.
Watching Fish Fry Bingo’s set of, um, nouveau hillbilly tuneage, I realized I’d seen them before, at the terminal location of the Black Dog Tavern (RIP). A high point of the day was watching a friend’s kids dancing to their jams (at one point, the two-year-old took off in the direction of the stage, with his mom in hot pursuit).
Some folks are ambivalent about street feeding (on the “give a man a fish…” theory), and I’d heard than an earlier attempt to do something along similar lines wound up getting shut down by the FWPD. I asked one of the Burrito Project folks if they were getting hassled by the cops. She said, “No, we never have been. There was a police car there last weekend, but I think he was just looking out for us.” Fort Worth’s a different town than it was in the ‘80s.
Myself, I’m just impressed that someone is actually doing something, on an ongoing basis, to address the needs of the hungry homeless in this town. It’s like a lot of things I’ve been seeing and hearing lately that have been giving me HOPE, and opening my eyes to the idea that “our community” is as big or as small as we want to make it.