As I stood in the middle of the empty street, the sky became increasingly grey and the wind had much more of a chill than expected. It had been about twenty years since I was last at Carey Place—or as we called it back then, Scarey Place—but the eerily quiet neighborhood was still a somber place out of time in Oklahoma City.
Back in the late 90s, I got my first reporting gig writing for Christopher Sharpe’s Okay Magazine. With the motto of “The Oklahoma Cultural Survival Guide,” it was a well-meaning cross between a free alt-weekly and a well-to-do ‘zine; it seemingly lasted about as long too. But, within those scant couple of issues, we covered so much of Oklahoma City’s outré culture that it gave us a loyal fanbase that followed many of us and our works for years on end.