Your guide to what's what in the cowboy culture on this side of the calamity.

By John Forsyth

Life goes on. In the immediate aftermath of tragedy, the human reaction is to wonder how normal life can possibly continue, and then it does. It's changed incrementally or substantially, and "normal" takes on a new definition. That is the case here and now.

In the wake of last week's terrorist attacks on the capitals of our nation's commerce and government, life in the United States, whether one resides in Manhattan or Benbrook, made that shift. Americans recoiled in terror, lost sleep to the CNN images, and pulled family close. Anything that would resemble a celebration of life, like dining out with friends or hoisting a few cold ones, seemed discomfitingly out of place.

It won't be long, however, before Fort Worthers' interest in living life to its fullest will crop back up, not unlike sprigs of grass peeking through the ash beneath an erupted volcano. That's where Fort Worth Weekly's Best of the West-o-Plex comes in.

Why on earth, readers may ask, would the Weekly publish this light-hearted look at the most fun, best-tasting elements of life in Fort Worth and Tarrant County at this time, as we're all struggling to recover from one of our nation's darkest days? It was on the schedule; it's as simple as that. We would have postponed it for a month or two if we could have, but it just wasn't feasible. Advertisers' contracts specify the September 20 issue and six months' editorial planning was aimed at this week, to name but a couple of concerns.

You should hold onto a copy, though. You'll need it in the coming weeks and months as a smile creeps irresistibly back onto Fort Worth's collective face, assuming no local targets have been struck by a second wave of violence. That smile will happen, you know, and when it does, the editorial staff of the Weekly hopes you will consult this guide when shopping, dining out, watching tv news, or going out to hear some live music. We've put a lot of work into it, and we're proud of it.

Our sixth-annual "Best Of" issue came about like this: We ran ballots in four issues, and you filled them out and mailed them in, or you voted on-line. We compiled those votes (the younger the staffer the more ballots they had to record -- good eyesight is such a wonderful thing), and those results are listed below under "Readers' choice."

The editorial staff then contributed its own opinions in most of the categories. Whether a business advertises in these pages -- despite the fact that we very much appreciate it -- had no bearing on the process whatsoever. We let no staffers nominate winners with which they were involved personally, such as the nonprofit organization to which they give time for Best Volunteer Organization, or the club at which they play guitar on the weekends for Best Tejano Venue.

Every year, someone accuses us of arrogance because we write descriptions of our choices but not of the readers' choices. This criticism is off base. We write about the staff choices because we have a lot of space to fill and the winners' names by themselves don't constitute enough copy. And we don't write about the readers' choices because the very nature of popular voting means that their winners will be mainstream, and what on earth is there to be said about breakfast at IHOP?

As usual, we had ballot stuffing, but what wasn't usual was the seriousness with which two Fort Worth businesses, a West Side hair salon and a downtown nightclub, approached this deal. (It seems like a hair salon does this every year --what is it with those people?) It says in the rules, folks, that "Any ballots considered fraudulent by Fort Worth Weekly staff will be eliminated." Fraudulent, in this case, covers business operators who abrogate the spirit of the contest, which is intended to find out who or what the public thinks is the best in Tarrant County, not who the staff and clients of one certain business think is the best. Those ballots with fake addresses, of course, were easily identified and eliminated. The readers' choices you see on the following pages, to the best of our knowledge, reflect that standard.

Please use this in the spirit in which it was published. We'll get back to smiling here soon.