How would you feel if a longtime friend invited you to her birthday brunch at a fun restaurant, and you put on your favorite sundress and even curled your lashes, and then, after everyone was seated, your friend stood up and talked about herself for 30 minutes?

"I've been putting chia seeds on everything, y'all. Seriously. They make me feel full without even eating as much. I've lost 5 pounds! Remember that time in college when I totally hooked up with that cute Fiji?" Like that. And the waiter got irritated that the table wouldn't order already, so he stopped refilling the chips and salsa.

That's the sort of self-indulgence we wanted to avoid in our official 50th anniversary issue, which we put online today. Editorial meetings to plan this issue began last year. More than once, I heard someone say, "That feels like too much navel-gazing. It should be less about us, more about the city."

But what if your birthday friend were Tony Award-winner Kristin Chenoweth, and she delivered a stem-winder about growing up as an adopted kid in Oklahoma and learning later that her biological father was briefly a bassist for ZZ Top? And what if instead of salsa, you had bottomless queso? That's the brunch we wanted to invite you to.

So, yes, you'll see that we do talk about ourselves -- the magazine and its former staffers -- in the issue. But you'll also find a lot of talk about people outside our office. Because, despite our plans, when things magically fall into place, when a substitute subject shows up with only an hour's notice for a huge photoshoot, when John Grisham out of the blue offers to write a story about an innocent man on death row, when the simple task of tracking down a puzzlemaker of yore reveals a surprising tale about a woman and her enchanted house -- each of these events transpired for this issue -- then we bundle it all up and send it out as a love letter to the city. Even when we're critical and take institutions and their leaders to task, we do it from the heart. Because we care about this place and the people who live here.

For 50 years, we've been doing this, talking about ourselves, talking about all of us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. With your support and with our good luck, we'll keep telling these stories for another 50 years. Each issue addressed: To Dallas, With Love.