Last month I was driving home from our monthly Business Connections mixer in Fort Worth. As I tooled down I-30 recalling the people that I had met and the really, really good food a thought popped into my head. Oh my god, I like Fort Worth. No, I love Fort Worth!

There, I’ve admitted it. I’ve come out of the Fort Worth closet. Without sounding like a cliché I have to tell you, it’s liberating.

From the time that I moved to Texas (Dallas) I was convinced that Fort Worth was something less than Dallas, the wrong side of the tracks, ‘those people’. You get the idea. Why anyone would want to live there, especially gay people, was a mystery. For a few years we made an annual pilgrimage to Fort Worth for the Miss Texas Pageant at the Convention Center. [Seriously, one of the best shows ever! We’ll save that for another blog.] We drove in on I-30 exited at the convention center, parked, watched the show, got in our car and high-tailed it home like we were vampires trying to out-run dawn.

Then, several years ago I checked my passport and headed to the Bass Performance Hall to see Pirates of Penzance. An old Albuquerque friend was stage managing and much to my surprise my opera counterpart from ASU, Curt, was singing Frederic. (Curt was the opera tenor and I was the music theater tenor, good times.) After the show we all decided to go to dinner (and bore my husband to tears with college stories). We were stumped;where to go? There were so many choices and all of them right there in downtown Fort Worth! That’s when I first began to realize that maybe, just maybe the world isn’t flat and Fort Worth could be, dare I say it, enjoyable!

Since then I’ve been to the Bass several times. I’ve been to Q Cinema and I’ve visited with Fort Worth’s favorite sons, Joel Burns & Todd Camp on more than a few occasions. I’m fortunate to sit on the Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau’s diversity & multicultural committee and of course, we now have monthly Business Connections mixers thanks in large part to the efforts of Jana White. In the past year I’ve driven to Fort Worth more than I had in the past thirteen years combined.  I gotta tell ya, it aint bad!

We all know that Fort Worth has great museums, an amazing ballet company (that they graciously share with Dallas) and an unbelievable opera company. We all know that, right? BTW – Did you know that the Fort Worth Opera has been in existence since 1946? That’s eleven years before the Dallas Opera (not that it’s a competition).

Fort Worth also has a thriving GLBT business community.  It’s true, we’re everywhere! Each month when we hold our Business Connections mixer I have a chance to meet local GLBT/allied business people and they get to meet each other. We’re providing a safe and welcoming place to be authentic and create new business contacts. We’re spreading the gospel of the ‘Chamber Movement’, recognizing that we can use business to produce social change.

I guess Fort Worth is to Dallas as Canada is to the US. It’s a fun place with great people and it has a lot to offer. We just need to remember that it’s right there just waiting to be enjoyed!

[Be sure to join us in Fort Worth for our Business Connections mixer on November 19. See the Chamber website for more inf0 www.glbtchamber.org.]

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