The Perfect Night: Saturday, December 30

by Teresa Gubbins

DALLAS — The perfect night for the night-before New Year’s Eve should come so jam-packed with amusement that, by the time the real New Year’s Eve rolls around, you’ll be content to stay in and leave Amateur Night to the amateurs. Sons of Hermann Hall is here to enable you by booking two separate shows in a single night. That’s no typo, read it again: two separate shows, back-to-back.

Start the night early with a quick stop at Road Agent, the new-ish gallery on Canton, where a show called Various Small Fires focuses on everyday images that have been given a surreal twist. The show’s goal is to fill you with a renewed appreciation for ordinary life – whatever the heck that is. Appropriately wondrous, you can walk the few blocks to Daddy Jack’s Wood Grill, where there’s nothing ordinary about the pecan-crusted rainbow trout prepared by chef-owner Salvatore Gisellu.

And then it’s off to Sons of Hermann Hall, starting at 8 p.m., with some nutty (but gentle) acoustic jam band action starring Faint Image, Ephesians Five, and Emily Elbert, the 17-year-old whiz-kid singer-songwriter who seems to think that being a serious musician is more important than, like, getting famous on American Idol. If that’s not enough to win you over, she has long blond hair, too. I’m so there!

If you stick around ‘til 9:30, you’ll catch James McMurtry and Jon Dee Graham, up from Austin with their rough-hewn country-ish tunes. If Sons of Hermann Hall has the stamina to present two shows, back-to-back, on the same night, it’s your civic duty and nothing less, to hang on with them, all night long.