Your Waco Weekend

An organic lemon can cost $1.30 without proving Waco has become a luxury market, and a Waffle House can inspire civic delirium without saying much about affluence at all. The arrival of The Scout Guide business directory is making a different wager: that there are currently enough places selling expensive things to benefit from reaching an overlapping clientele. At Hotel 1928, a gathering for the...

Developers and advocates for the homeless can look at the same low-budget motel and make two very different assessments. One sees redevelopment leading to affluent buyers, short-term rentals, and upscale retailers to transform the property; the other warns that removing cheap lodging will push precariously housed people into even worse conditions. Dottie Oaks advertised $695,000 townhomes that cou...

The first version of a dish you eat can become your standard for it. Years later, someone might tell you the recipe was all wrong. And maybe it was. But what does that verdict change about the meals you remember loving? At Lupita’s on 19th Street , host Mark Long unexpectedly orders what may be his first bowl of menudo, pig’s foot and all. He likes it but then Googles what makes a good menudo to s...

Bad publicity is supposed to be bad. So why do people keep engineering spectacles that invite it? This episode looks at how a staged catastrophe draws a crowd and why the reaction can carry the story further than anyone imagined. In 1896, the Katy railroad sold excursion tickets to watch two trains smash into each other near Waco. At least two people died, and the railroad fired the man behind the...

A price tag used to tell you how much something cost. Now? It doubles as a personality test. Pay for food without complaining and you appreciate quality, respect craft, and support local business. If you have a problem with a price, the problem is apparently you—and your cheap tastebuds. Host Mark Long visits Waco’s much-celebrated new Sprouts and encounters a $1.30 organic lemon and ten-dollar-a-...

Traveling through Colombia offers abundance: mountain views, unfamiliar birds, cheap beer, and ripe mangos plucked from roadside trees. Waco has something less spectacular but more useful—driving your own car instead of relying on Uber, buying groceries without first rehearsing the transaction in Spanish, and knowing whether a place is really open without consulting three different social media ac...

Fathers and sons can spend years trying to understand each other, usually with all the grace and precision of two drunks assembling patio furniture without instructions. Sons want to live up to their fathers while being terrified they’ll turn into them. Meanwhile, fathers pass down wisdom, damage, bad jokes, and assorted emotional contraband without bothering to label the boxes. In this episode, a...

The wedding industry operates on the sound financial principle that anything involving love should cost roughly three times what it did before somebody said “matrimony.” This episode considers what actually turns a room into a wedding venue—and whether authenticity, personality, and cold beer might matter more than endless meetings with an event planner named Madison. Last October, host Mark Long...

The people closest to us can look at the same situations and see entirely different worlds. A lasting relationship does not necessarily resolve those differences; sometimes it just puts two people together and asks them to keep moving. In this episode, host Mark Long and his wife Angela take a drive along Austin Avenue through Waco’s Uptown, where two mini-roundabouts reveal their opposing assumpt...

Nothing gets local lifestyle influencers humming like glossy renderings of a tired shopping center being refurbished with somebody else’s money. But before everyone starts ordering fancy coffee drinks on a patio that doesn’t exist yet, it’s worth asking who’s already there—and who the shiny new version is meant to attract. In this episode, host Mark Long revisits a well-meaning Waco Insider social...

Restaurant openings are often treated as evidence that a city is becoming the place its boosters always promised it would be. Closures receive less attention, quietly disappearing from the civic narrative even if a restaurant earned acclaim and became part of people’s routines. But permanence isn’t the only measure of whether a place succeeded—or whether it mattered. Guess Family Barbecue began in...

Craft breweries didn't invent chalkboards with beers listed on them, but over time what began as a practical way to keep up with constantly changing beer selections became shorthand for something else entirely: local ownership, independence, personality, and the sense that someone was making decisions one pint at a time. But what happens when those visual symbols are separated from the culture...

Movies too often tell us up front who to trust, who to fear, and what everything means before the characters—or the audience—have a chance to discover those things for themselves. But what happens when a story refuses to rush those judgments? Patience, rather than kneejerk certainty, can produce more honest storytelling and a deeper understanding of the way people reveal themselves over time. Blur...

We typically experience public art at the end of the creative process: walking past a completed mural or stepping into an installation without thinking much about the months—or years—of planning, collaboration, and problem-solving that made it possible. But while the backstory shouldn’t dictate how we interpret a work of art, it can change how we appreciate everything that had to happen before it...

Every local music scene has calendars. Far fewer have the stories that turn unfamiliar names into must-see shows by answering one question: Why should anyone care? This episode traces the path from a punk show at Austin’s Liberty Lunch to years spent building one of Waco’s most comprehensive event calendars. The result is a surprising realization about Waco’s music scene—and why even the best cale...

The summer after high school, a Texas drive-in projection booth seemed like the perfect job, and home video was the future. Four decades later, after years of cable television, Netflix DVDs, and streaming services, a COVID-era screening of Godzilla vs. Kong answered an unexpected question about what movie theaters still provide. Inside a nearly empty Waco theater, eight audience members, a baby in...

A Little Free Library on North 43rd Street doesn’t look like that much: a blue wooden box on a post filled with donated books, puzzles, and whatever else happens to land there. But after stumbling across its decade-long trail of guestbook entries, holiday decorations, repairs, a missing weather vane, and an outbreak of alleged book theft, it starts to seem like something more. An examination of on...

A picture on Facebook of a hot dog buried beneath guacamole, carne asada, sour cream, and pico de gallo raises a simple question: Where’s the actual hot dog? What begins as a close look at the “Cali Dog”—available for “only” $11—leads to Waco’s month-long Hot Dog Crawl , complete with a passport app, voting for the best dog, hot dog t-shirts, and even runners covering the 22 miles between particip...

Darrell “D-Rail” Ray has spent more than three decades performing around Central Texas, becoming one of the most familiar names on local music calendars. Catch one of his appearances, and you’ll hear an eclectic setlist that jumps from Johnny Cash to Radiohead to Otis Redding, along with periodic breaks for a swig from a bottle of Tabasco sauce. A recent conversation with D-Rail traces the evoluti...

On May 11, 1953, an F5 tornado destroyed much of downtown Waco, killing 114 people. This episode looks back at the disaster through oral histories in a 1980s documentary recorded by survivors decades later—stories about collapsing buildings, cars buried under rubble—as they still try to make sense of it all. It’s a reminder that good history isn’t just names and dates but ordinary people describin...

Waco artist Ellen Mote has spent years moving between creative disciplines without settling permanently into any one identity. In this episode, she talks about jewelry design, cyanotypes, painting, and basket weaving. Along the way, the conversation turns into something larger about attention and creative reinvention. This episode also explores a side of Waco’s creative culture that rarely fits in...

At 72 years old, Sherman Ayres stepped onto the Texas Music Cafe stage last July to record a live album built from songs he’d been carrying around for decades. From sitting behind a drum kit in Ohio when he was five to recording sessions in Memphis in the ‘80s and a corporate career at M&M Mars, he discovered an unexpected second act in Waco. But this episode isn’t really a late-life comeback...

One version of Waco appears on a smartphone screen while another is seen through time spent there in person, and the gap is wider than it seems. This episode begins with a visit to Mila Café , a recently opened Mexican coffee shop in Waco’s Uptown, and examines how places are introduced versus what stands out once novelty becomes routine. What emerges points beyond any single location to the broad...

This episode heads into Waco’s Cameron Park, where scenic overlooks and weekend disc golfers usually define the place people think they know. But public spaces also collect what others leave behind, and sometimes a routine morning turns into something harder to resolve. A chance encounter with a stray cat on the edge of a creek forces a choice that is less sentimental than practical: keep walking...

Baylor’s homecoming parade knows how to sell the polished history of Waco: plenty of green and gold, marching bands, old stories told like family recipes. But somewhere between the parade route and the parking lot at George’s Restaurant, that cleaner version of the city runs into the one with blood on its shirt. This week’s episode starts with a parade float promoting a local history book called L...