Mayor Maddie Parker Mistakes Michelle Obama for Kamala Harris
During the celebration of the 100th birthday of Fort Worth legend Dr. Opal Lee, a.k.a. the Grandmother of Juneteenth, effortlessly elegant former First Lady Michelle Obama spoke — after she was mistaken for former Vice President Kamala Harris by Fort Worth Mayor Maddie Parker.
“This evening, Dr. Lee, you’ll be greeted by your First Lady, Kamala Harris, to celebrate this moment in the history of our city,” Parker told the hundreds gathered at the Fort Worth Convention Center to fete Lee and raise funds for the forthcoming National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth.
After a little ado from the crowd, Parker added, “That is the worst flub of all time.”
We don’t know if the mayor writes her own speeches, but if she doesn’t, we’ll never know. She did not blame anyone for the mulligan — no “lousy” speechwriters like some thin-skinned, testerical orange monster did at a gross press “roast” not too long ago. Parker acknowledged the mistake, then moved on the way real, thick-skinned, non-shrill leaders do at the podium and got the right name for the right person.
We get it. Mistakes happen. What’s a shame is that in this current U.S. historical context, too many of us may have thought, “Was Maddie’s speechwriter being sneakily racist? Was Maddie?!”
Yet this is us now.
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Sweet Baby James Ahead of Crooked Ken in Most Polls
The U.S. Senate race between Democratic State Rep. James Talarico and Republican State Attorney General Ken Paxton is super-close but with Talarico ahead.
Of the 11 polls recently compiled by The Texas Tribune, two have the race even and only one — Republican-sponsored — has Paxton in the lead. The rest are all James Talarico, whom the Trib says is also “dominating” Paxton in fundraising. Additionally, Beto O’Rourke did not lead nearly as much when battling U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 as Talarico does now against Paxton. The margins are tight but close enough to push the dial blue, ~48% on average for Talarico to ~45% for Paxton.
Rocking the vote is all that remains. Early voting is Mon, Oct 19, thru Fri, Oct 30.
Hien An Ngo
Goldee’s Bar-B-Q Wins Fort Worth’s First Michelin Star
After winning two awards from the Michelin Guide in 2024 and 2025 for exceptional, affordable grub, Goldee’s Bar-B-Q (4645 Dick Price Rd, Fort Worth) has just earned Fort Worth’s first Michelin star in 2026’s Texas Michelin Guide.
Congrats to them.
Texas paid the Michelin Guide $2.7 million in public money for the prestigious list to dig into the Lone Star State. It’s unclear whether the guide will return next year.
Guess we gotta pay the vig first.
For the third year in a row, the Michelin Guide “recommends” Birrieria y Taqueria Cortez and Panther City BBQ on the South Side and Smoke’N Ash in Arlington.
Goldee’s is open 11am-3pm Thu-Sun.
Frats Control Campus Nightlife — at a Cost
This former-student rape lawsuit against the Cornell University fraternity Chi Phi may change campus nightlife for good.
And that’s a good thing.
Since boozing became synonymous with college life eons ago, frats have held enormous power over students looking to imbibe but not old enough to yet legally. In a recent Star-Telegram column reprinted from USA Today, a sociology prof argues that breaking the frats’ stranglehold on campus nightlife is essential to everyone’s safety. The author is a Cornell alumna.
“Women who interacted with fraternity men quickly learned our core function in their eyes: sex objects. In sororities, this dynamic was explicitly structured into our social calendar. We were invited to fraternity mixers with themes like ‘CEOs and Secretary Hoes’ or ‘Golf Bros and Tennis Hoes.’ … Women were not only objectified in the abstract. We were used as sexual currency for men to build status with one another. At one fraternity, a brother there told me, members recounted their sexual exploits at their weekly fraternity meeting, awarding a trophy jersey to the member with the most lauded encounter. The ritual explicitly incentivized the sexual conquest of women.”
One answer to diminishing the frats’ power — because, as history has taught us, young party boys cannot be trusted to keep women safe — is lowering the drinking age to 18, like it is in some parts of mild-mannered Canada and in Europe. That way, frats face competition from local bars for young revelers.
Another possible solution, the author posits, is campuses offering well-supervised under-21 spaces for drinking and gathering.
As a former frat bro whose only frat bro-ish move was holding a 190-pound brother by his ankles out a third-story window for him to playfully knock on his girlfriend’s kitchen window below (yes, we were drinking), I fully support anything that reduces the all-encompassing power of fraternities — and sororities — on college campuses. Your late-teens and early-20s present all sorts of hormone-imbalanced challenges. Adding copious amounts of booze and social pressure to already lawless zones can’t be good for anyone, especially young women. It needs to stop.
“As long as young women have to enter male-controlled spaces to fully participate in campus life,” USA Today says, “fraternities will have a form of power that no student organization should have.”
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly.
