On November 29, 2000, Officer Alexander Petigna of the Kansas Highway Patrol knocked on the weather-beaten door of a house just off Leavenworth Road in Kansas City, Kansas. Beside him stood a shivering 77-year-old man. A 911 caller had reported that the man was wandering beside I-635. Petigna was trying to help James Washington (not his real name) find his…
Late last year, when restaurateurs Charles Hargadine and Steve and Susie Wilson opened PrairieFire (see review) on Lawrence’s vibrant Massachusetts Street, they announced they would start serving lunch in January and they would create a four-seat table for customers that was actually inside the restaurant’s kitchen. But lunch service won’t start until February. And what about that table right in…
If there’s a sensational meal at the end of a car trip, I don’t care how far I have to travel to sit down and start eating. But I got more than I bargained for when I invited my friend Carol on an outing to check out PrairieFire, Lawrence’s newest upscale eatery. I had made the reservation for 6:30…
25 Thursday The Couples Massage Clinic tonight from 7 to 9 at the Lenexa Community Center, 93rd and Pflumm, is neither as weird nor as kinky as it might sound. Participants learn techniques for stress reduction and relaxation. Attire should be loose-fitting and comfortable. The only part of the regimen that sounds even remotely suspect is the self-massage segment,…
When psychics Saphira dil Rain, David Schneider and Patricia Moore get together to prepare for Thursday’s All-Star Panel of Kansas City’s Best-Known and Best-Loved Psychics’ New Year’s Predictions, they mostly tell jokes about how hard it is for psychics to be in relationships, how tiresome the requests to search for dead bodies (à la Stand By Me) can become…
The last time KT Sullivan was in Kansas City, she was taking elocution lessons and playing gin rummy eight times a week as Billie Dawn in Missouri Repertory Theatre’s 1990 production of Born Yesterday. “It was a dream come true,” she says. “I had always wanted to play that part and probably never will again.” She didn’t mind giving…
The first clue that Maybe Baby, It’s You at American Heartland Theatre is more like an athletic event than a traditional show is in the two-person cast’s credits. Karen Hinton, who plays all the female roles, is an alumna of ComedySportz in Philadelphia, and Brian Patrick Miller, who plays all the male roles, has performed in Forbidden Broadway in…
As one listens to Samiam’s new album, two thoughts spring to mind: 1. My, that’s a bouncy little opener. 2. How long before this poppy song reveals itself to be, in fact, a three-chord rocker-stomper? The answer, apparently, is 33 seconds, give or take a few. The band rarely strays from this quiet-to-noisy evolution, and the similarities to Diary-era Sunny…
Memorial albums are basically critic-proof. Who is heartless enough to mock an album that features normally nihilistic rock stars expressing love for a friend who died young? Lynn Strait, the frontman for the California-based hardcore outfit Snot, died two years ago in a car crash, leaving behind plenty of grieving peers in the heavy-music scene. The remaining members of his…
I’ve never been a believer that good bands should go unheard. There’s something undeniably cool about discovering a group before it gets huge, but wouldn’t true fans want everyone to enjoy the music that means so much to them? And even if the mainstream co-ops a band, isn’t it an accomplishment that its ideas get recognition? For example, while many…
His dad said it best: “Everybody must get stoned.” Now it’s Jakob Dylan’s turn to weather a pummeling. First, the indignity of low sales and indifferent critical response to Breach, The Wallflowers’ follow-up to the massive 1997 hit Bringing Down the Horse. Then, only a couple of months after it became clear that Breach isn’t even a hot Napster score,…
Instead of weathering embarrassing experimental phases like U2, briefly and successfully reinventing itself in the early ’90s like Duran Duran or reuniting to hit the festival/casino circuit like Loverboy and countless other me-decade hangers-on, the members of The Police disbanded in their prime in 1984, just one year after releasing Synchronicity, their finest album. As a result of the band’s…
After a decade of guitar-heavy No Depression alt-country and shoegazer indie music, homespun rarely means using electronics anymore. So the modest crowded-room recording ethic of local keyboard-based newcomers namelessnumberheadman sounds pretty fresh. The group’s down-to-earth attitude extends to having its headquarters address — a band member’s home — printed on the disc packaging twice, and it’s typically modest of headman…
What do you get when you throw some academically inclined kids in a room full of alcohol, low-grade drugs and instruments and tell them to go at it? No, not Trout Mask Replica, but close — Lawrence’s Teriyakis. Actually, I’m not certain about the alcohol and low-grade drugs, but the presence of such substances would go a long way…
Mark Crumbaker pulls his truck to a stop on a dirt road near his home and counts the deer crossing before him. “Thirteen!” he exclaims, unable to conceal his pleasure. “See, that’s what kind of a place this is!” It’s a common sight for his daily commute, which takes him along 95th Street on the southern edge of DeSoto. With…
For a few warm days back in October, Missouri felt like a place of honor. After Governor Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash, politicians laid their bad blood to rest — in public at least. Beneath the silence of John Ashcroft’s suspended campaign and Jean Carnahan’s two-week retreat into mourning, the hostilities continued. But when voters rejected the senator…
Freedom, oh freedom: The Star’s Mike Hendricks can’t seem to let up on Johnson County for dissing Martin Luther King. On January 15, Hendricks scolded commissioners for not closing county offices and instead treating the day “as if … this was one of those second-string holidays that doesn’t matter all that much. This seems like questionable public relations for a…
Cracks and Spend Downtown where? I usually manage to shrug off C.J. Janovy’s articles as the usual “Pitch goofiness,” but “Chamber Maids” (January 18) can’t be let go that easily. No, C.J., we do not need a new stadium downtown. In fact, we need to close the two we have and let the clumps of “past-its” and “never-gonna-bes” that hang…
“Dick Vermeil’s press conference was an hour and seven minutes by my count. There were so many people in the media who said, ‘I’m going to get this guy. I’m going to barbecue this guy. I’m going to take him to task.’ owned the room. He had the media eating out of his hand. It’s a different time for the…
The doomed are often a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered. This is because the imbalance represents so much to so many. From the horrifying lore of the…
The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a 7-year-old girl performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies, a fitting opening since the movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you were (or are) a child very much like this little girl, you’re…
Yes, Kittie is an all-woman group. Yes, the average age of Kittie’s band members is 17. Yes, Kittie is from Canada. Now that the painfully obvious parts of the Kittie profile have been dispensed with, it’s time to focus on something far more important. Dude, Kittie rocks. In the twelve months since releasing its now-gold debut, Spit, the group has…
Our Kansas City Chiefs haven’t qualified for a Super Bowl since Neil Armstrong kicked up moon dust on behalf of mankind in 1969. The three-decade drought ought to have self-respecting Chiefs fans in mourning — or rioting — but all indications are that they’ll just keep partying. “It is an extremely good day for us,” says Chris Perrin, the general…
The night of January 8, country siren Faith Hill, overcome by peroxide and shallow adulation, accepted one of her handful of American Music Awards and thanked her songwriters by asking where “we” would be without them. Her fellow performers greeted the remark with a silence born of “What do you mean ‘we’?” hauteur, which is funny considering that those fellow…
