And then there were three ...

book/daddy has five Katie Awards, the prizes presented by the Dallas Press Club for the best journalism in the Southwest. (For the record, book/daddy's have been in arts criticism, specialty column, arts criticism, feature Q&A and arts criticism -- notice a trend?). In case you haven't been paying attention, the chair of the Katies turns out to have been a fraud who never had the entries judged last year. When book/daddy saw Elizabeth Albanese at that ceremony (the only one he's ever bothered to attend), he was struck by how she was queening it up too much. But book/daddy just shrugged it off as the slightly ridiculous performance of another would-be grande dame at a Dallas charity ball.

Now it seems her dereliction of duty (and even common sense) extends further into the Press Club's past, involving wholesale misuse of the Club's credit cards, fabrications of her own journalism and college credentials and, apparently, even physically absconding with the finished entries before they were mailed to judges.

All of this may sound provincial and inside-the-industry, but the Dallas Observer story by Matt Pulle and Jesse Hyde looks at who brought her down and how a particular con works: Ms. Albanese deluded herself with belle-of-the-ball fantasies so thoroughly, she was able to delude others.

It's actually a fascinating tale -- if you can ignore the Observer's typical moralizing. For a supposedly liberal alternative weekly, it sure climbs on its winded high horse a lot.