The Weekly Dispatch
The Places You Go & People You See
Not long after my wife and I returned from our first summer trip to Colombia, we ran into one of Waco’s assistant police chiefs and his wife in Target. I knew them from my time a few years earlier working weekend shifts at Bare Arms Brewing’s taproom, where they were regulars.
I walked up quietly behind them in the grocery aisle and said in my best bad cop voice, “Freeze. You’re under arrest.” They spun around and laughed when they saw me. Within a few seconds, they were quizzing us about our trip because they’d been following our Facebook posts.
That kind of encounter happens a lot in Waco once you stay in one place long enough. At Bare Arms, I started noticing how the same people kept resurfacing in different parts of town and in entirely different contexts. A manager from Shorty’s Pizza Shack, who came in after work, became someone I recognized at Cameron Park’s disc golf course. And when a local artist who showed up for Drink ’n Draw nights later cofounded a comic book company, I went to the release party and bought an autographed copy of the first issue.
None of us belonged to the same friend group, profession, or social circle. Our connection was the brewery. Other places become part of people’s lives that way too—not because they are new or especially showy, but because they keep giving them reasons to come back.
Spend enough time scrolling through local social media feeds, however, and Waco starts to look like a city built entirely from things that sprang to life in the last 48 hours, with the inevitable round of “hidden gem” or “run don’t walk” hashtags. A new restaurant appears with a carefully staged overhead photo of tacos under neon lights. Another advertises espresso martinis beside a freshly painted mural designed for Instagram photos.
None of that is fake. Restaurants, bars, and small businesses need attention to survive, and social media has become one of the easiest ways for them to introduce themselves.
The problem comes from mistaking what is most visible online for Waco itself. Novelty moves faster than familiarity because it translates neatly into a square image and a short caption that provokes an immediate reaction.
But the places that matter in our lives earn that through the history we accumulate there rather than novelty alone.
The first time I went to Bare Arms was on a Friday afternoon after I was done teaching at Baylor for the day. They’d just recently opened, and it was only me and one of the co-owners behind the bar. I ordered a beer. He asked if I had any questions. I didn’t. Silence followed until I ordered another beer. The beer was pretty good, and the next Friday I went back. A lot of silence ensued between me periodically ordering a beer.
Over time, more people started showing up to sit at the bar. Conversations became directed toward everyone sitting there as opposed to being private. I got to know a manager of one of the local college bookstores, a technology specialist at Waco ISD, and this one Baylor prof who was a huge Alabama fan and would yell (unprompted), “Roll Tide!” louder and louder as the afternoon passed. I began to recognize faces and remember names.
Eventually, I found myself on the other side of the bar. The crew I worked with would meet up at Old Chicago at the end of the night to have a few more beers and grab a bite to eat. More than one former student was surprised to see me pouring them a beer. Because of Bare Arms, I started to see folks that I knew—well or just in passing—at the grocery store or other breweries or, in one case, midget wrestling.
This is not to say Bare Arms possessed some magical quality. When my wife Angela and I started dating, she finally came in one Saturday while I was working and was underwhelmed.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s a lot of fluorescent lighting you have in here. It’s very… late 20th-century industrial cafeteria.”
I remember looking around and having to agree with her. But that wasn’t important to me.
Once in a while when I’m looking for an old photo on my phone, I come across pictures from Bare Arms during the year and a half I worked there. Almost all of them seem like they’ve caught the middle of some inside joke that wouldn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t been there in that moment.
And now I might be at the Saturday morning farmers market at Bridge Street Plaza or having a pint at a local brewery, and I’ll catch a glance of two people unexpectedly running into each other when it’s obviously a welcome surprise. It’s nothing you can decipher just by watching it or from a photo posted online. Then the moment is over, and everyone moves on.
Brotherwell Brewing
On a handwritten whiteboard near the taps inside East Waco’s Brotherwell Brewing, the events schedule stretches across nearly every night of the week: Brewer’s Choice Monday, yoga in the beer garden on Tuesday, music bingo on Wednesday, Thursday night trivia, and more. Since opening inside a converted industrial warehouse on Bridge Street, Brotherwell has folded pop-up markets, fundraisers, meet-ups, and live music into its routines.
Cofounders David Stoneking and Jacob Martinka have spent years saying yes when people approached them about using the brewery for things beyond craft beer, allowing the space to accumulate multiple uses over time. The result is a brewery where the calendar matters as much as the beer.
Treasure City Flea Market
Each weekend, Treasure City Flea Market spreads across rows of covered stalls and open-air lanes at the old Circle Drive-In on La Salle Avenue, where you can find everything from tools and vinyl records to sneakers, cookware, and used DVDs. Take a slow walk around, and you’ll hear longtime vendors greeting regular customers by name, conversations drifting by in Spanish, and entire stretches of booths that seem to change purpose on a weekly basis.
Treasure City operates less like a curated shopping experience than an ongoing public ecosystem where commerce, routine, and social life overlap. Even as the La Salle Avenue corridor continues changing around it—with Magnolia Table, new apartments, and steady redevelopment pressure creeping east from downtown—it remains stubbornly itself, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, without ever fully smoothing out its edges.
Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon
At Papa Joe’s Texas Saloon south of Waco in Lorena, the weekly rhythm hasn’t changed much in decades. One night it’s karaoke, another it’s a country band setting up near the dance floor while motorcycles gather outside under the lights. Memorial benefits appear on the calendar as naturally as the regular pool tournaments. Inside the low-lit honky-tonk, neon beer signs and decades of barroom history compete for space on the walls.
Papa Joe’s has spent years absorbing different moments in people’s lives without ever fully changing what the place is. That could be an afternoon wedding, a round of chicken shit bingo, or sometimes both at once. While many bars regularly reinvent themselves to chase attention, Papa Joe’s continuity is the attraction.
Sherman Ayres Steps into the Light
Last July, 72-year-old Sherman Ayres stepped onto the Texas Music Cafe stage to record a live album drawn from songs he’d been writing for decades. Before settling in Central Texas and spending more than thirty years working for M&M Mars, he had what he thought was his one shot at a music career in Memphis during the 1980s. Instead, he walked away after record executives tried turning him into someone he wasn’t.
🎧 This episode of Your Waco Weekend is more than an unexpected comeback story. It’s about how Ayres’s songs finally emerged after being hidden in notebooks, cassette tapes, and memory.
Subscribe to Your Waco Weekend wherever you get your podcasts—nine minutes, one story.
Coming Next Week
The Weekly Dispatch examines the mechanics behind Waco’s live music scene, from venues and promotion to audiences and the economics of being a working musician. Along the way are Monday night patio shows at a beloved neighborhood bar, weekly country and western dances at the Waco Lions Den, and an upcoming summer camp helping younger musicians learn to play together in their own bands.