Austin Does Austin

Nancy Daley
5 min readMar 28, 2023

Or at least it used to.

Ella would have fit right in. (Author’s Photo)

What follows is an essay I wrote over 20 years ago. I’m publishing it because I’ve been grieving it; thought it was lost forever but it was merely in a huge stack of paper with typing all over it.

It features my dear friend Jeff, the most alive and joy-filled person on earth, who died of a flu long before COVID. As I have said, if I went to his funeral 1000 times I would never believe he could be dead. I still refuse.

A recent New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright was a piece about Austin then and now, so you know my fair city isn’t like my essay any more.

Austin Does Austin

Or so said the marquee of a downtown blues club at the time. In this capital city we do Austin all the time in all kinds of places, wearing our town like the Texas-shaped belt buckle you can’t help seeing under the Texas-sized beer bellies of toothpick-chomping good old boys in every ice house from Nacogdoches to El Paso. This is about one night when even I did Austin.

Like many of my city-mates, I started out at happy hour with friends, using up ‘ritas and chips on a shaded patio where there was still enough heat to make one of my tablemates comment, We should have ordered frozen.

We did, another guy told him. Oh.

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Nancy Daley

Artist, food-worshipper, grouch, retired psychologist and uni lecturer (Human Sexuality). Currently running for Queen of the Universe.