St. Remedius and Dealey Plaza: Together At Last!
(Remember how, in the days of standard episodic television before streaming and binging, many dramas and some comedies would give a thumbnail update starting with “Previously on…”, flashing scenes so fast that people starting midway through a season or story were more confused than before? Well, that’s what this newsletter is like. Look at these as regular updates of how the sausage is made, with what, and whether or not the staff washed their hands after they used the toilet. Or, worse, if they only washed their hands before using the toilet.)
BEGIN SIGNAL
Here in North Texas, we’re in the final stretch of autumn. Halloween is done. Generally, all of the typical Dallas autumn events are winding down (for instance, this coming weekend is about the last chance to host a garage sale before the weather risks getting nasty), and we’re all gearing up for the five-week slog that is the Dallas holiday season. We’re broke, we’re anxious, we’re pissed off, and we’re looking for something to do, preferably free or as close to it as can be managed. Whether we’re locals, transplants, or visitors, what do you do in that weekend before everything turns into traffic jam hell and practiced nastiness in the name of “Peace on Earth”?
How about a trip to downtown Dallas’s Dealey Plaza? As a St. Remedius gathering?
Now, put down the net. And the taser. There’s a madness to my method. Ow. OW. Let me explain. OW.
Okay, for the last 61 years, Dallas wasn’t famed for its architecture, or its cuisine, or relevant history, save for one event. November 22, 1963, Dallas turned probably its worst moment into a tourist attraction. Oh, city leaders will cluck their tongues about the “horrible tragedy,” but have no problems with sleaze like Oliver Stone using the city as his personal testicle mop if there’s a buck to be made. It’s time to take this in a different direction, and all of you and your friends can help.
Back in 2013, in a drastically different venue, I wrote a modest proposal on how to celebrate this “holiday”:
For the last fifty years, anything involving John Kennedy in Dallas has been a circus. There’s the actual assassination, of course, as well as the tourist industry that built up around it. Then there’s the backstory, which entities such as the Dallas Morning News want to bury and pretend didn’t happen. Then there’s the current effort for a massive panegyric the weekend before American Thanksgiving, simply entitled “The 50th”, which intends to “celebrate the life of Kennedy” without, you know, actually saying what happened to end it. Complete with efforts to make sure that nobody “extreme” gets anywhere near it. If there’s one thing any good circus needs, because it already has plenty of clowns, it’s costumes.
So here’s the idea. It’s a dangerous vision, but one that should be the maraschino cherry atop this gigantic, indigestion-inducing banana split of an event. It’s open to everybody who wants to participate, and it won’t cost a thing.
The idea: on November 22 of this year, Dallas gets a flood of time travelers. Famed travelers from fiction alongside ones brand new to the continuum, with outfits to match. Before you know it, the streets of Dallas are full of temporal explorers, cartographers, and marauders of all sorts, all asking the same question: “Which way to Dealey Plaza?”
At this point, half of the fun will be the responses. After all, if time travel is possible, then (barring the Morphail Effect, of course) an event as big as the Kennedy assassination should be so flooded with time travelers that they should outnumber the temporally static by a thousand to one. There’s no reason to believe that you wouldn’t have visitors planning to change the time line, keep it static, or take out anybody trying to do either. That’s why, when asked by reporters or passersby as to what’s happening, just hinting “I’m here to see history” is a good start.
The punchline comes around 12:20 Central Time, as the streets continue to flood with the Displaced. By this point, there should be more Daleks on the streets of Dallas than on those of London in 2100, and I won’t even start with the Yithians. At that point, everyone looks down the road where Kennedy’s motorcade drove a half-century ago, pulls out watches, clocks, sundials, chronometers, and hourglasses, and all exclaim at once “Right time, but WRONG YEAR!” before evacuating downtown.
That was then. Now, the 62nd falls on a Saturday, a perfect time to visit downtown Dallas. The weather should be great, traffic relatively light, and parking and DART trains with plenty of room. For those keeping up with the St. Remedius annals, you know exactly why no real time travelers will be there, so we have to fill the gap. So here’s the plan:
For those who can get to Dallas: starting around noon on November 22, 2025, get to Dealey Plaza on the west side of downtown in your time traveler best. Waistcoats, Lycra, Dalek battle armor: just please, PLEASE limit any gore to a dull roar and leave weapons at home, and if you’re coming in pink suits and pillbox hats, tell everyone you’re Dr. Girlfriend. If all else fails, look for Kylo Boomhauer handing out St. Remedius flyers and other ephemera.
For those who can’t get to Dallas: Among other places, go visit the Dealey Plaza Live Cam from the Sixth Floor Museum. Let friends and cohorts know about the event, and tell them to hit the Live Cam and any other feeds coming from the Plaza.
The Plan: Generally, come out to the Plaza, with clocks, sundials, watches, hourglasses, chronometers, and whatever timekeeping apparatus around noon on Saturday. Feel free to wander around and greet cohorts, and explore the Grassy Knoll. The area has regular vendors and tour guides happy to show the particulars of the Plaza: be nice, buy postcards and guides, and tip well. By about 12:20, though, get over on the sidewalk on Main Street, looking to the east (east is toward downtown: west is toward the tunnel) and checking your timepieces. Stay out of the street, but feel free to look in anticipation to the east.
At 12:30, look at your timepieces one last time, yell “WRONG YEAR!”, and scatter. Hang out in the Plaza or visit the Sixth Floor Museum, or hit any number of restaurants in the vicinity. Any way you go, go in peace, and take lots of pictures of your fellow chrononauts. If it works out well, we’ll do this again next year.
After the Event: You have plenty of options that weekend, both in and out of costume. Among other things, the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, a vital part of history that day, is hosting its JFK Week series, running the films War Is Hell and Cry of Battle at the same time and price as when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas in 1963. If that doesn’t work, there’s a lot to do in the vicinity.
And after this? I have plenty of ideas for more St. Remedius events, but first, let’s hit the ones already on the schedule.
END SIGNAL
St. Remedius News
If you haven’t been to the main site in a while, there’s a lot of new stuff: the current plan is to have 200 installments of St. Remedius lore, including Mandatory Parker stories and a few more Personal Interludes, up and readable by New Year’s Eve, so the last few weeks have been packed with new anecdotes and forbidden lore. As of this installment, we’re at 175, and the plan is to hit 300 by the end of 2026. After that, let’s see.
Cooking References
Over two years ago, I nearly moved to New Jersey for work, and one of the draws to the relocation was to live close enough that I could drive to Princeton with a 20-foot truck, visit the Princeton University Press store, and tell them “Just fill ‘er up.” The Press’s natural history and art history selections are already dangerous, and the recent book Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human by Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez. Purchase mass quantities for your science-loving friends, and even more for your culinary friends: I just started, and it’s a trip.
Other Reading
More newsletters you should be reading:
Heat Death: Asher Elbein is one of the best living Texas nonfiction writers out there, and he’s definitely in the top five living English-language science writers anywhere. (As both a former science writer and an incessant popular science article reader, I can say that with a bit more authority than usual.) Heat Death is a project by Asher and his brother Saul on a wide range of subjects, but Asher tends to concentrate on Texas paleontology as part of an upcoming project, with hilarious results.
Jack Boulware: Early 1990s gonzo magazine addicts remember The Nose, the West Coast counterpart to New York’s Spy, and Jack Boulware was the editorial voice responsible for its high weird content. Lately, Jack started a newsletter sharing both some of his biggest stories from the 1990s, with annotated updates on everything that changed since the original publication, and lots of new material to go with them. Al Jourgensen of the band Ministry famously said that anybody who remembers the 1990s wasn’t actually there: for those of us who avoided the drug and alcohol saturation of alternative culture (and who can explain why alternative and “alternative” were completely different things back then), Jack’s columns are a great way to touch up your memories. For the rest of you, it’s a great reminder that for a brief sparking moment in the early 1990s, things almost changed with more finality and force than at any other time in recent history, and there was just so much going on that won’t make MTV documentaries.
Simon Owens: When I first started compiling what became the Annals of St. Remedius in 2022, the original plan was to develop the pieces into a possible Netflix miniseries, with plenty of room for additional installments. The reason why I didn’t was thanks to Simon Owens’s media newsletter, which rapidly disabused me of anything new getting done in the middle of media consolidations, studio layoffs, and a general malaise in entertainment right now. Any up-and-coming screenwriters, directors, and development crews wanting to get a lead on projects when the malaise ends should subscribe right now: as it is, I make sure to go through his whole newsletter every week, and I catch the segments on LinkedIn as well.
Mark Finn: I’ve known Mark Finn since the days of the long-defunct Dallas Fantasy Fairs, and his North Texas Apocalypse Bunker newsletter just reminds me every Friday why he’s still a friend. Do you have that friend who’s crotchety as hell but with good reason, and who keeps up the crotchet to keep your morale up? If you don’t, go subscribe, and you will.
Events
The Campus and Off-Campus Activities section was just updated with a slew of new opportunities, including the recent schedule for the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo (with four Texas shows in 2026, Dallas’s is running at the end of September at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center), but if finances allow, the St. Remedius tour moves outside of Dallas next year. In particular, StokerCon, the big Horror Writers’ Association convention, runs in Pittsburgh in June, and the fervent hope is to have to finances to go out to say hello to several of the guests of honor. In particular, it’s very much thanks to the one and only Billy Martin that I have that original St. Remedius icon on my bookshelf, and I promised him dinner a long time ago as thanks.
Final Words
The big event day for St. Remedius is his feast day on February 3, not to be confused with my birthday on February 30. The plan is for things to get really weird then, possibly with a recreation of the St. Remedius Time Traveler Balls. Stay tuned.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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