The quarterback takes the snap and veers right. Reading the linebacker, he pitches to the back just before getting gang-tackled. The back snares the throw and speeds down the sideline. Touchdown, Avila! Avila? You heard right. Little Avila College, quietly nestled in the suburban hills of South Kansas City, is starting a football program completely from scratch. The team…
Every now and again a play will come around that truly captures the essence of the power of theater in our modern world, a play that brings to life the toils of society in its quest for uniformity, a play that presents its case in a stimulating and educational format. The Missouri Repertory Theatre’s production of Moises Kaufman’s Gross…
Luckily for the new Kansas City restaurant that adopted J. Pierpont Morgan’s name, the image associated with the powerful banker is one of good fortune and a comfortable lifestyle rather than that of the actual millionaire, who was a bulbous-nose, overweight, womanizing financial genius. Pierpont had a hearty appetite, though. And though his actual connection to Kansas City is…
NO-WORK GARY, Liberty Justice, Big Larry, One-Arm Larry, Uncle Joe, Little Joe, Tanker John, John John, Duckman, Screaming Eagle, Diamond Dave, Just Randy, Josey Wales, Whiskey, Beef Jerky, Home Guard, Papa Smurf, Pops, Pappy, Pyro, Chaka, Modoc, Magoo, Butch, Tiny, T.J., V.T., R.D., W.C., The Flying Dutchman, The Mayor, Pretty Girl, Snowman … they’ve all lived in Kansas City or…
Michael G. is going legit — if the Federal Communications Commission will have him. He may have been a “renegade” radio broadcaster before, he says, but if he’d known the FCC was going allow low-power FM radio licenses in the year 2000, he would have waited. The former Leavenworth disc jockey, who is also known as Michael Gonzalo Calderon, broadcast…
The humanity behind the sequins In your cover story, “Men With Fashion Sense to Spare” (Jan. 20-26), Jeffrey Ramsey stated that “female impersonators, transsexuals, and other gender-benders have been on the front lines” of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement for decades. In all these decades, the same people have also been used as fuel to fire the Religious…
NO HIP REPLACEMENT NEEDED… In a recent column, The Kansas City Star’s Hearne Christopher Jr. speculated that the New Times’ purchase of PitchWeekly has affected the paper’s “hipness” quotient, noting rumors of a new dress code for certain departments. An anonymous Pitch employee responded by saying that these charges are not nearly as damaging as Christopher’s allegation in a previous…
Republicans are anti-environment and Democrats are pro-environment. That is the rhetoric heard in political campaigns everywhere. And with the publication of the League of Conservation Voters environmental scorecard, released last week by the Sierra Club, those lines have become even clearer. The scorecard assigns a percentage to each member of Congress based on his or her votes on environmental…
It appeared to be an innocuous item in the minutes of a recent Kansas City Tax Increment Financing Commission meeting. The chair, Peter Yelorba, “questioned the Plaza Library’s policy regarding pornography on the Internet.” Yelorba, according to the minutes of the meeting, felt “the Internet should mirror what is on the shelves of the Library.” The library’s policy regarding patrons’…
The offices of HNTB, an architectural design firm, are spread out over the seventh floor of 1201 Walnut with a grand view of downtown and the Missouri River. Amid scale models of HNTB projects — Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums, several buildings including 1201 Walnut and what looks to be a train station platform — Kevin Klinkenberg sits looking though the…
It used to be widely believed that if you threw a black person into the water, he would automatically sink to the bottom. That’s just one of the many stereotypes associated with African-Americans and swimming. In the world of sports and athletics, racist attitudes and stereotypes have played a major role in shaping perceptions about which sporting events are more…
“Mixed media,” “local talent,” “sculpture,” and “thought-provoking” all read like a description of an exhibit at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. In a sense, this is true. However, the masterpieces being discussed, and more important, devoured, have been on display six days and one night a week since the spring of 1995 inside the museum’s eatery, Café Sebastienne…
Where do you start when: ð The Dallas Mavericks hire one out-of-work NBA player by the name of Dennis Rodman. The Mavs are getting used to having an owner more interested in winning a few games than in arranging new arenas and real estate deals. This attitude earns new owner Mark Cuban the humanitarian of the year award. Because…
Occasionally a great author manages to slip through fame’s cracks. Gene Wolfe is just such an author; relegated to the literary ghetto of genre fiction, his work has never attained the universal praise it so clearly merits. Wolfe is consistently lauded by science fiction critics as one of the best in the field, but his writing has been of such…
In allowing its students the opportunity to direct their own plays, Longview Community College offers audiences a chance to see raw talent flourish, as in the Longview Actors Guild’s take on the Woody Allen comedy Play It Again, Sam. Allan Felix’s wife has just left him in search of a life that is bigger and better than the fairly regular…
Once again the American Heartland Theatre has taken an extremely talented cast, a highly skilled crew, and a strong director, wrapped them up in a pathetic script, and served them up to die before Kansas City audiences. The Complete Millennium Musical (Abridged) by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor is a nauseating journey through the last 1,000 years of human…
Not all visual arts exhibitions are about an artist. The culmination of a show is, in a simpler sense, an art unto itself, and many times a show is pulled together to present not the vision of an artist but rather the thoughts and ideas of a quiet hand behind the scenes: the curator. Competent curatorship and installation can…
This is a column of ambivalence: of expectations soured and surpassed, of pleasant surprise and mild disdain. What else can engender such swings in a critic’s heart but film adaptations of novels? Understand that not all novel-to-films are suspect, but as with good marriages and good sports teams, we want to know why the good ones are good —…
Back in 1964, director Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter) had a unique idea. He interviewed more than a dozen 7-year-old British kids from various ethnic and social backgrounds and then broadcast their thoughts as a BBC special. He invited them to share their dreams, ambitions, and fears and managed to elicit a wide range of observations about life and, most…
Giovanni Ribisi (The Mod Squad) stars as Seth Davis, a young “entrepreneur” who gets involved in illegal day trading, in this debut drama from writer-director Ben Younger. Boiler Room has a bold, in-your-face style that befits the subject matter, and Younger doesn’t pull any punches in his portrayal of all of the characters’ vicious and ultimately self-defeating greed. This…
Leonardo DiCaprio is back in the water. As Richard, a young American traveler lusting for adventure in The Beach, DiCaprio chooses his first starring role since fluttering hearts in Titanic two years ago. Titanic not only demolished the all-time box office gross record but also catapulted DiCaprio to mega-stardom status and gave the teen idol carte blanche in Hollywood…
If rich pro football players who give money to charity and die tragically — and stupidly — because of a car accident can be heroes, a taxi cab driver can be talented, funny, and sometimes a little wise. I have a friend who has been in the people-mover business for close to a decade. He knows it’s dangerous work. Some…
“It’s pretty exciting to see young people who are into Robert Johnson and Robert Plant,” says Ben Harper. His choice of those particular names also offers shrewd insight to the multifaceted musician’s own span of influences. “I think there’s a growing interest in different music among young people today,” Harper says during a call from his Los Angeles basement, where…
From the obscure town of Two Foot Falls, Kan. (“Don’t look for it on a map,” the group writes in its liner notes), comes country juggernaut The Euphoria Stringband. This banjo-and-fiddle-heavy quartet offers its take on such selections as “Gooseberry Pie,” “This Old House,” and “Fall on My Knees,” as well as concocting amusing originals, such as the bluegrass romp…
