129When the Water Towers Attacked
War of the Worlds, Waco edition, painted by Dan Holzschoh with Isaac Brown, 2015 · at Twisted Root Burger Co., the old Texas Playhouse, 801 S 2nd StMURAL
Waco's water towers pull their legs out of the ground and march on the city. Elvis is there. Of course Elvis is there.
Every side of this building — the old Texas Playhouse — is one continuous B-movie: Waco's own checker-domed water towers reimagined as tripod invaders, striding across a boiling orange sky toward everything the city holds dear. McLane Stadium cowers on one wall. The Dr Pepper bottling plant braces on another. A red-headed woman screams in flawless 1950s-poster form, a black cat bolts across a bridge, and Elvis — mid-flee, collar up — thinks urgently of hamburgers.
About those hamburgers. When muralist Dan Holzschoh pitched this in 2015, his spaceships were going to be flying burgers. The city didn't approve the design. So the ships became water towers, the mural became a landmark — and the burgers snuck back in anyway, floating in thought bubbles above every panicked head, technically legal at last. The painted ROOTVILLE HOTEL facade on the corner completes the set: fake stone, fake topiary, and an upstairs window where somebody's silhouette is forever home, watching the invasion with a drink in hand.
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