The Dallas Cowboys had an eventful NFL combine. Jerry Jones and Stephen Jones were working the media circuit, fans got to learn more about Christian Parker through a few interviews, and there was drama surrounding the reports of Brandon Aubrey’s contract negotiations.
Dallas, TX
These are the 14 best things to do in Dallas this weekend
Although March had a few festivals, the month of April is when festival season kicks into high gear. This weekend will feature three of them in and around Dallas, along with two local theater productions, a symphony concert, three comedians, two dance productions, a quartet of art openings, and a concert from a Dallas favorite.
Below are the best ways to spend your free time this weekend. Want more options? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city’s best events.
Thursday, April 3
The Firehouse Theatre presents Godspell
Godspell was the first major musical theatre offering from Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin, Children of Eden), and it took the world by storm. Led by the international hit, “Day by Day,” Godspell features a parade of songs, including “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord,” “Learn Your Lessons Well,” “All for the Best,” “All Good Gifts,” “Turn Back, O Man,” and “By My Side.” The production runs through April 19 at The Firehouse Theatre in Farmers Branch.
Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents “Sibelius’ Symphony No. 3”
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Harp Emily Levin will be front and center for Henriette Renié’s Concerto for Harp and Orchestra. Widely recognized for his dual career, John Storgårds both plays and conducts Beethoven’s Romance and Keith Jarrett’s Elegy. The concert is headlined by Sibelius’ Third Symphony. The concert will have three performances through Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center.
Improv Addison presents Frank Caliendo
From his many appearances on late night shows to his weekly picks segment on the FOX NFL pregame show, comedian/actor/impressionist Frank Caliendo has been seen all over television. He’s known for his impressions of John Madden, Jon Gruden, Al Pacino, and many others. He’ll perform for one night only at Improv Addison.
Friday, April 4
Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair
The third annual Deep Ellum Community Arts Fair transforms Deep Ellum’s streets into a three-day celebration of art, music, community, and culture. Festival goers can discover booths from more than 120 fine and decorative artists, while enjoying sounds from more than 80 bands and performing artists spread across four stages. A wide variety of food and drink specials will be available throughout the weekend from the neighborhood’s restaurants and bars. The fair takes place through Sunday.
The State Ballet Theatre of Ukraine presents Swan Lake
The State Ballet Theatre of Ukraine will present Swan Lake, the most famous love story of all time. With completely new choreography and stage production by Andrei Litvinov, the classical score by Tchaikovsky comes to life. The performance, taking place at the Music Hall at Fair Park, features a ballet troupe of 50 dancers, and more than 200 new costumes created specifically for this production.
Lewisville Playhouse presents Uncle Vanya
Sonia and her uncle Vanya have devoted their lives to managing the family farm in isolation, but when her celebrated, ailing father and his charismatic wife move in, their lives are upended. In the heat of the summer, all the wrong people fall in love, desires and resentments erupt, and the family is forced to reckon with the ghosts of their unlived lives. Lewisville Playhouse will present an intimate, immersive new adaptation of Chekhov’s classic Uncle Vanya from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. The production runs through April 20.
Saturday, April 5
Crow Museum of Asian Art exhibition openings
The Crow Museum of Asian Art will open three new exhibitions on Saturday. In the solo exhibition “Let One Bird Sing,” Anila Agha addresses the violence and destruction of natural environments such as plants, trees, and entire ecosystems. “The Shogun’s World: Japanese Maps from The Maclean Collection” features ceramic plates that the Japanese used to give a worm’s-eye view of the world. And Cecilia Chiang: “Don’t Tell Me What To Do” features work from the self-taught artist who operates beyond the confines of the traditional artistic canon, expressing her spontaneity and creativity across a broad spectrum of media.
Breakaway Music Festival
The Breakaway Music Festival is an electronic music event that will be headlined by Slander, Zedd, Afrojack, GRYFFIN, and Louis The Child. They will be joined by 16 national touring acts and four local DJs across two nights. The experience will also include a silent disco featuring local artists and brand activations. Originally scheduled to take place on Friday and Saturday at Fair Park, it will shift to Saturday and Sunday due to expected inclement weather on Friday.
Dallas Country, Blues & Red Dirt Festival
The Dallas Country, Blues & Red Dirt Festival will feature five different performers, including Jarrod Sterrett & The Hired Guns, Brennen Leigh, Jeremiah Johnson, Sundance Head, and headliner Wesley Pruitt. There will also be an arts & crafts marketplace and a gourmet food garden with craft beverages. It takes place at Flower Mound Riverwalk.
Nasher Sculpture Center presents “Otobong Nkanga” opening day
The Nasher Sculpture Center will present a new and re-envisioned work from the 2025 Nasher Prize laureate, Otobong Nkanga. The work of Nkanga reconsiders people’s relationship with the land and the materials extracted from it. For this exhibition, Nkanga will engage with Texan history, material culture, ecology, and community through a process of deep research and an exchange of knowledge. The exhibition will remain on display through August 17.
Michael Blaustein: The Taste of Me Tour
Comedian Michael Blaustein has had appearances on the Comedy Central Campus Tour, The College Humor Tour, and the Oddball Comedy Fest. Along with his college campus experience, Blaustein performed at prestigious festivals such as Just For Laughs 42 and The New York Comedy Festival. He currently co-hosts the podcast Stiff Socks with Trevor Wallace. He’ll perform at Majestic Theatre.
Ballet Ensemble of Texas presents Gaîté Parisienne and Other Works
Ballet Ensemble of Texas’ annual Celebration of Dance will feature a revival of Gaîté Parisienne, along with other works. The troupe is the official performing company of the Ballet Academy of Texas and trains dancers who are recognized by prestigious pre-professional training programs across the country. The production takes place at Irving Arts Center on Saturday and Sunday.
Sunday, April 6
Josh Johnson: The Flowers Tour
Josh Johnson is an Emmy-nominated writer, stand-up, actor, and NAACP award-winner from Louisiana by way of Chicago. He is currently a writer/correspondent on The Daily Show, and is a former writer and performer on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he made his late-night debut in 2017. Johnson’s most recent stand-up special, Josh Johnson: Up Here Killing Myself, premiered on Peacock. He’ll perform twice on Sunday at Majestic Theatre.
St. Vincent in concert
Dallas can claim musician and songwriter Annie Clark – aka St. Vincent – as its own, as she spent her formative years here and was once a member of The Polyphonic Spree. One of the most distinctive artistic voices and original guitarists of her generation, she’s collaborated with such big names as David Byrne, Taylor Swift, and The Chicks. She’ll play at The Bomb Factory in support of her 2024 album, All Born Screaming.
A tribute to a family dog is now helping other animals. Daisy’s Memorial Dog Stick Library encourages dogs to take and leave sticks on their walks near White Rock Lake. Kimberly Haley-Coleman stopped by The Post to talk about the tribute.
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Wilonsky: A mom deported, 4 kids left behind and an 80-year-old Dallas Girl Scout troop leader’s good deeds
Early the morning of Feb. 9, Ana, a 45-year-old mother of four, woke up in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center outside Abilene. Bluebonnet, it’s called, so named for the toxic state flower. She was hustled from bunk to bus for a ride to Del Rio. By noon, she was standing in the middle of the International Bridge that connects Del Rio with Ciudad Acuña across the Mexican border.
Ana was told only: You’re free to go – back to Monterrey, which she left in 2006 and where her parents still lived. She did not know how she was going to get there. Or when she would see her girls again.
Only five weeks earlier, Ana had a job at an ice cream shop at Lombardy Lane and Brockbank Drive in northwest Dallas, where she’d worked for six years. A single mother, she alone cared for her daughters, two of whom are in elementary school – fifth and sixth grades – and struggle with dyslexia. Her 12-year-old, diagnosed with severe depression, had twice tried to harm herself just last year. Her eldest, a 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, is set to begin college in the fall.
Ana crossed the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft near Laredo 20 years ago for a life she couldn’t find in Mexico. She met a man in Lewisville with whom she had four children. He abused her, she said, so she left again, to start over in northwest Dallas.
Immigration officials gave her a preliminary court hearing: Aug. 24, 2027. Ana, who has no criminal record, went to the ICE offices on Stemmons Freeway around New Year’s Eve for her annual check-in.
A plethora of messages were created on handmade signs for attendees to hold during an ICE vigil held outside the Dallas ICE field office, located at 8101 N. Stemmons Freeway in Dallas, on July 27, 2025.
Steve Hamm / Special Contributor
And every time she returned home to her girls. Until Dec. 30, 2025, when she was detained by officers, then shuffled around the state – Dallas to Alvarado to Abilene – before being sent back to Mexico, leaving behind daughters, all born in Dallas, to whom she did not get to say goodbye.
“I was so scared,” said Ana, who, with her eldest, agreed to talk to me if I did not use her full name or her children’s names.
“And I was in shock,” she said. “The whole morning I was just praying thinking about what to do next. I thought I would see my lawyer or talk to someone about what was going on, but the way they took us, no one explained anything to us. I know I did something wrong when I came over without my paperwork, as I should have. But I wasn’t stealing or hurting someone; I was working for my family, providing.”
Ana spoke by phone from Monterrey, where, last week, she buried her father, whose heart failed him days after she was left on that bridge. She began to cry.
“The fact that they just took apart my family, it’s breaking my heart,” Ana said, trying to catch her breath. “There are a lot of people who are doing bad things. We’re just trying to provide for our kids. Why us?”
But she knows why. Everyone does. Because there have been so many stories like this in recent months it’s impossible to keep track.
Ana was transferred to and deported from the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson on Feb. 9. 2026.
Eli Hartman / AP
Just last week, María de Jesus Estrada Juarez of California, who came to the U.S. when she was 15 and was a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, was arrested during her regular check-in and sent back to Mexico. In Alaska, a mother and her three children were sent to Tijuana within 36 hours of being detained by ICE. NBC News also recounted the story of an 11-year-old girl, a U.S. citizen, whose brain-tumor treatment was interrupted when her parents were deported to Mexico.
The Texas Civil Rights Project has been trying to reunite the parents with their 11-year-old girl so she can get the care she needs. I asked the Austin-based organization if they kept track of the number of parents without criminal records deported to Mexico while their children are left behind. A spokesperson said they do not maintain a database tracking such cases, but that “it happens very often under this administration.”
Which is more or less what other immigration advocacy and legal nonprofits told me: We don’t track that data. But it’s, you know, a lot. ICE didn’t respond to emails asking for that information, either.
But just because we’re inundated with these stories doesn’t mean we should turn a deaf ear to them, especially when they involve our neighbors. This feels especially personal, as Ana’s eldest will graduate from my alma mater – if she can survive the next few months of waking her sisters each morning, getting them to school, working late hours at her fast-food job, dealing with grown-up responsibilities suddenly thrust upon her and trying, somehow, to fit in homework.
“It wasn’t really a choice for me,” the 17-year-old told me. “If I don’t do it, who will? The hardest part is getting up every morning, because there’s no break for the rest of the day – it’s the same thing every day, the same loop. And if there is, I have to do laundry or get these girls to their Girl Scouts things.”
Lynn Wilbur has been a Girl Scouts troop leader since 1983. For the last decade, she’s been part of an outreach group within the Scouts that helps girls who otherwise couldn’t afford to be part of the organization.
Courtesy Lynn Wilbur
I never would have known of Ana’s story, and that of the children left behind, had I not been forwarded a newsletter from Now>Forward, the nonprofit once known as North Dallas Shared Ministries. In the newsletter was a brief telling of the tale, along with a plea for assistance, as the girls need food, rent, uniforms.
I was told to call Lynn Wilbur, a Girl Scout troop leader since 1983, when her own daughter turned 5, and, for the last decade, leader of an outreach program that provides financial assistance for girls who want to be Girl Scouts but can’t afford dues, uniforms, supplies, field trips. “Anything that has to be paid for,” Wilbur said.
There are some 60 girls in the program, most spread across Dallas ISD elementary schools, including Ana’s three youngest daughters. Where once the program was funded by a foundation, though, the troop is having to depend on private donations – begging and scrounging, Wilbur said.
“Now, we’re just trying to help the girls pick up the pieces, along with their lives,” the 80-year-old said. When I called, she was with Ana’s daughters.
Most of the girls in Wilbur’s troop are from Spanish-speaking homes. This is the first time one of their parents has been deported. But, she fears, it will not be the last. One mother recently asked Wilbur if she would take her daughter if she, too, is deported.
“The amount of fear is unbelievable,” Wilbur said. “My house is one place they let them come because they know they’d have to kill me before I let them in the door. This has got to stop. Unless good people step up and let their voices be heard nothing is going to change. That’s why I am talking to you. We can’t let this keep happening, especially to children.”
Wilbur taught Ana’s eldest how to pay bills, how to buy a car when her mother’s recently broke down, how to deal with insurance, how to be a grown-up at 17. The TJ student was never a Girl Scout. But Wilbur, the living embodiment of a slogan that demands a Girl Scout do a good deed daily, has surely taught her how to be prepared.
“Miss Lynn has always made us feel like we’re important, that we’re loved,” Ana said. Another small sob. “That we’re human.”
A lot of knowledge is shared throughout the week, both on camera and behind closed doors, as the NFL landscape is set to shift as free agency approaches in just a few weeks. Jeremy Fowler and Dan Graziano, NFL Insiders for ESPN, emptied their notebooks on what they learned throughout the week.
Here are a few nuggets and takeaways that matter for the Cowboys.
1. How Dallas attacks the start of free agency
Jerry Jones held court on his bus during combine week and talked to media members about how the team will be active in free agency. The majority of their moves could come on the defensive side of the ball as Dallas gets their new defensive coordinator the pieces he needs to run his defense.
Clarence Hill Jr. of DLLS Cowboys was the first to report the Cowboys’ potential interest in Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Nakobe Dean. Fowler doubles down on that idea.
The Cowboys are crafting a detailed free agency plan to bolster their defense. The new scheme under coordinator Christian Parker needs replenishment. Eagles linebacker Nakobe Dean is someone to watch as a green-dot player in the middle of the defense.
Dean has been with the Eagles for four seasons after being drafted in 2022. When healthy, Dean has shown flashes of the player people viewed as the one he could become coming out of Georgia in college. The biggest concern with handing him a big contract is his health.
Out of 68 possible games, Dean was on the field for just 47 of them. He’s battled injuries throughout his young career, so if he’s expected to be the one leading Dallas’ defense, Dean has to be on the field more than he’s shown to this point.
2. The Cowboys will look to add a pass rusher
The Cowboys’ leader in sacks from last year is Jadeveon Clowney, who is set to hit the open market. Two other edge rushers for Dallas are free agents in Sam Williams and Dante Fowler Jr. Both could return to the Cowboys, but the front office might look to not only upgrade the position but also go after one of the top free agents if the price is right.
Fowler: The Cowboys will monitor the top of the pass-rush free agent options, too. They aren’t guaranteed to spend big, but I believe they will get a pass rusher at some point.
Later in the notebook, Fowler says, “Trey Hendrickson (Bengals) and Odafe Oweh (Chargers) will probably not be franchise-tagged.” That means two more premier edge rushers could be on the market. A few beat reporters have mentioned Hendrickson’s name as a possibility this offseason, but will he command too much money that Dallas is unwilling to spend? Probably.
What about Jalen Phillips? Can the Cowboys pull two former Eagles in free agency away from their rivals because of their connection to Parker? The keyword Fowler adds when it comes to Dallas’ interest in the best available pass rushers is “monitor.” If the numbers get outrageous, then they might go in a different direction. A name that could make a lot of sense for the Cowboys is Kwity Paye of the Indianapolis Colts.
He’s totaled 30.5 sacks over his five seasons in the NFL and could play a similar role in Parker’s defense to what Brandon Graham had in Philadelphia with inside-out versatility.
3. Dallas may want to add a few pieces in the secondary
One of Jerry Jones’ biggest regrets in recent history seems to be not re-signing Jourdan Lewis last offseason. Dallas would have been much better off with Lewis, given his skill set, familiarity with the defense, and leadership off the field. His presence was missed in more ways than one. It sounds like Jerry isn’t willing to make the same mistake twice.
Fowler: They [Dallas] will also comb the free agent safety class (Arizona’s Jalen Thompson makes sense), and they need a nickel corner. Dallas has felt the void since Jourdan Lewis left.
Christian Parker talked about how important the nickel position is for his defense at his introductory press conference. There are a few free agent corners out there who should be an upgrade from what Dallas had last year, but the route that makes the most sense is drafting a cornerback in the first round.
Donovan Wilson and Juanyeh Thomas are free agents, leaving Malik Hooker and Markquese Bell as the two players under contract on the team with starting experience at safety. Bell is someone who could play a more significant role in Parker’s defense given his position versatility. Where does that leave Hooker? Dallas could save almost $7 million if they cut him before June 1, but how does Parker feel about him fitting into his scheme?
How Dallas approaches the safety position at the start of free agency will tell us a lot.
4. Brandon Aubrey could have a contract sooner rather than later
You know the negotiations with Aubrey go sideways when he, his wife, and Todd France (Aubrey’s agent) go to Instagram and call the reports around it all “fake.” The Cowboys have remained optimistic in getting a deal done with Aubrey to make him the NFL’s highest-paid kicker. The holdup is just how much Dallas is willing to go and raise that number.
The Cowboys made an offer to Aubrey last year to be the highest paid at his position. The number has never been $7.5 million per year. Aubrey and his camp reportedly asked for $10 million per year, which would blow past the current mark with Harrison Butker ($6.4 million annually), but that has also been a disputed figure.
If it comes down to it, the front office is prepared to apply a second-round tender on their kicker, bringing his salary for 2026 between $5.5-5.8 million. It seemed as though negotiations had stalled after things got out of hand, but a resolution may be coming soon.
Graziano: Sabre rattling aside, I expect the Cowboys to reach a deal with Brandon Aubrey at some point in the first week or two of March that makes him the highest-paid kicker in the league. If they don’t get a deal done by the restricted free agent tender deadline, Dallas plans to put a second-round tender on Aubrey. That means he’d make $5.767 million this season if the two sides don’t reach a deal and the Cowboys would get a second-round pick if another team made Aubrey a contract offer they didn’t want to match.
Getting a deal done within the next 10 days before the second-round tender would be ideal for both parties. The front office would lock up the league’s best kicker long-term, and Aubrey will be making more than the price that comes with the tag.
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