On her first day as a telemarketer in Overland Park, Cindy Rella (not her real name) experienced a rather routine workplace predicament: She couldn’t find the restroom. No big deal, she thought, just ask a supervisor. She expected some variation on the usual instruction: “Third door on your left.” Instead, she heard, “Go to Snow White, and the Seven Dwarfs…
At this moment, the dance floor is looking thin. It’s a desert, a no-fly zone. Every so often an awkward lambada-ish romp appears, but usually the two-headed dance demon evaporates after a couple of songs. Slowly the night begins to change. The sights, the sounds, the scene mutates as Olathe’s schizophrenic dance club, Orlando’s, goes from early-evening two-step to late-night…
I’m always intrigued by restaurants that have colors in the title, like Lawrence’s new BleuJacket. I still regret never making a pilgrimage to the legendary — and now vanished — Gold Buffet in its glory years. Friends tell me the place had mind-boggling variations on foods — and onstage performances by celebrities everyone thought had died years earlier. I’m sure…
When I asked one friendly young waitress why the sophisticated French-American restaurant in Lawrence was called BleuJacket, she launched into a monologue involving pioneers, the Santa Fe Trail, wagon trains and a man in a blue jacket. “But,” she said as she put a silvery metal basket with tiny slices of warm bread in front of us, “I’m not…
22 Thursday High school drama teacher Shelly Blay wanted to make sure her students got more than just adoration from their classmates when starring in school plays, so she created Oak Park High School’s Theatre for a Cause, which donates proceeds of its productions to worthy causes in the area. This year’s beneficiary is Heart of America Stand Down…
Dave Eggers is taking his appendix on tour. It’s 15,000 words, and it’s tacked onto the new paperback edition of Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in which Eggers managed to relate the sadness of the years following his parents’ deaths — which occurred within five weeks of each other when he was 22 — with an often…
The relationship between sultry women and comic books has always been tight. Explanations for this phenomenon vary, but the results are tangible: Attending this weekend’s Planet Comicon comic book convention are both Julie Newmar, the original Catwoman from the classic 1960s Batman show, and local pinup painter Jennifer Junesko. Three decades have passed since Newmar played Catwoman. She has…
A shrine holding lighted candles and framed photographs much too small to identify hangs at the back of the set of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding at Missouri Repertory Theatre. No one refers to it, but it very well could memorialize any of the premature deaths in and around the play: The father and son who are gone before…
Red Meat (not to be confused with the harder-rockin’ Chicago outfit Red Red Meat) is a traditional country outfit whose members have apartments in San Francisco and hearts and homes in various parts of the Midwest. As singer Smelley (David) Kelley sings in the anti-California lament “Midwest Blues,” Iowa’s callin’ me ’cause I got nothin’ out here to lose. Kelley…
The hype surrounding Amen’s We Have Come for Your Parents raises some questions. Here is a band that proclaims itself to be some breed of dangerous punks, poised to kill the dinosaur of nü metal. Instead, Amen blurs the lines, or perhaps just establishes new connections, between such ’80s hardcore bands as Black Flag and current metal standard-bearers, such as…
The dour black-and-white photo of the Dave Matthews Band on the cover of its new Everyday is more compelling than anything on the disc. It looks as though it were snapped before Matthews scotched an album’s worth of material he deemed too downbeat for his audience, too morbid, dark, depressed — too much what he felt when writing the new…
Jam bands, with their fifteen-minute songs and four-hour concerts, tempt fans with the promise of endless music, an eternity spent twirling to cosmic jazz and out-there guitar noodling. So when such a group goes on hiatus, the silence is all the more deafening. Phish, every hippie’s favorite nonfrozen Vermont export, swam away from the mainstream a few months ago, declaring…
The cold reality of trying to have a music career in the Midwest occasionally causes beloved mainstays of the area’s music community to leave and set up shop in a thriving coastal metropolis. Artist Travis Millard, known for his contributions to the back page of Spin and his cover illustration for The Get Up Kids’ breakthrough disc, Something to Write…
Every tour has one — a little thing that goes wrong, making the band face the conundrum of whether it’s time to pack the bags and head home. More often than not the problem has to do with the band’s method of transport, and the Creature Comforts aren’t about to be exceptions to the rule. “We had a complete nightmarish…
The Donnas (three of them so far this year, anyway) have turned 21, but they’ve yet to abandon their teen spirit. Their new disc, The Donnas Turn 21, is the quartet’s most aggressive yet, stacked high with come-ons and put-downs perfectly suited to their aesthetic. And even though they’re barely old enough to drink, the Donnas have been partying like…
Unlike many members of coast-based multiplatinum acts, who might see a string of Midwest gigs as one indistinguishable blur, Destiny’s Child’s Tenetria Michelle Williams (she goes by Michelle) perks up when she notices that the group has upcoming tour dates in Manhattan and Columbia. Just as KC-area fans will make the trip to one of those destinations, Williams hopes to…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel, is the most enthralling of these new adaptations. Where John Madden’s Ethan…
Unless noted, all showings take place at the Rio Theater, 7204 W. 80th Street in Overland Park. Tickets are available at the Jewish Community Center, 5801 W. 115th Street, up to 24 hours before show time, or at the Rio the day of the showing. For more information, call the center at 913-327-8000. Cours Toujours (Dad on the Run) Saturday,…
You’re our last boy, and most of us were exterminated,” a prominent Jewish banker tells his gay nephew. “Don’t let our name die.” Accompanied by an incentive of 10 million francs, this lament becomes an offer too tempting and too laden with shame to ignore in Jean-Jacques Zilberman’s 1998 film L’Homme Est une Femme Comme les Autres, translated on these…
“I think he’s going to go all the way to Minneapolis with us if we keep on winning.” — Nick Collison, on “Stank’em,” the Jayhawks’ new monkey mascot, KCTV Channel 5 GH: Coach Roy needs to send Wanda shopping again to get a gorilla for Terry Allen and his Kansas football team. “I guarantee you Bill Self does not want…
Less than a week ago, Oklahoma bounced the Kansas Jayhawks from the Big 12 Tournament. The team had bottomed out. KU players were bickering — on the court. At the press tables, reporters heard Drew Gooden yell at Eric Chenowith as the time clock ticked away inside Kemper Arena. Chenowith yelled back. Afterward, Roy Williams declared that no Kansas team…
Sisters of No Mercy Girls don’t cry: Regarding Deb Hipp’s “Tough Love” (March 15): This was one of the most terrible stories I have ever read. If this was an attack carried out by males on this female, all of the girls mentioned in the story would have called for the males to be sent to prison. I don’t know…
But what about those carnies? Cancel the chartered motor coaches, city folks. It turns out 4-H kids won’t be handing out bucketfuls of methamphetamine at this summer’s Missouri State Fair after all. In fact, since announcing the theme of this year’s festivities, fair director Gary D. Slater has been scrambling to combat a nasty case of foot-in-mouth disease — the…
Every morning, drivers flood this town with 280,000 copies of The Kansas City Star. They dump bundles into blue street boxes and throw rolls wrapped in orange plastic onto front porches. People pay 50 cents for a copy on the sidewalk, a few dollars less for a yearlong subscription. Then they grumble. They gripe about all the bad news, or…
