The Golden Ox was already five years old and one of the busiest restaurants in Kansas City when a newlywed from northeast Kansas City, Jasper Mirabile Sr., bought a saloon on 75th Street in Waldo and turned it into a family-style restaurant called Jasper’s. It was 1954 and the scrappy young Mirabile, who had started cooking in his mother’s kitchen…
Remember the ad campaign that asked “What becomes a legend most?” In the 1970s and ’80s, Blackglama Furs ran a series of photographs featuring aging Hollywood icons — such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck — swathed in dark fur and looking a little weathered but still feisty and appealing. Whatever those babes had in their prime,…
26 Thursday With a name like SuperNationals II, how can this weekend’s chess championship at Bartle Hall not be, as promised, a four-day “bonanza”? Also known as the Second National Scholastic Chess Championship, the event will mark the largest scholastic chess tournament in the world, attracting 6,000 school-age participants and 4,000 spectators. Who knows, maybe among the participants lurks…
Jenny Mendez of the Mattie Rhodes Art Center and painter Maria Boyd have big plans for a group show, called Sopa de Arte: A Tasty Mixture of Latino Artists. When they speak with the Pitch, however, they don’t know exactly who will contribute to that tasty blend. Mendez and Boyd talk about a “wait and see” strategy and what…
It seems as if Gorilla Theatre has performed anywhere there are a stage and a few chairs. From deserted bathhouses to coffeehouse basements, the company has made a name for itself with such bold moves as staging Greek classics on the south steps of the Nelson-Atkins Museum and presenting Major Barbara in the same season as Missouri Repertory Theatre’s handsome…
A fuddy-duddy teacher tells the title character of the Coterie Theatre’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day that his art assignment shows “much too much imagination”; a similar charge could be applied to the imaginative crew behind the show — except that, in this case, the imagination is not too much but exceedingly right. It…
The face of poverty typically portrayed by mainstream photojournalists is one of despair, sadness, anger, tragedy. A face without joy or self-respect. Look closely and you’ll find these photographs often are staged, with props rearranged to magnify the story’s bathos. Facial expressions and poses seem rehearsed too, as if the photographer were coaching: “Now give me a look of…
Welcome to the thawing-out of caveman rock stars, suspended in time since their primordial heyday when Neanderthal guitarists and woolly mammoth vocalists ruled the terrain. Surveying their unfamiliar surroundings after releasing their first album in six years, the Toadies discover that the grunge hunter-gatherers who once traveled in packs called Lollapaloozas are long gone, having taken prizes of gold and…
If there’s one thing you can reliably judge by its cover, it’s porn. Until now. From the goat-adorned cover illustration (a campy, polite version of Big Black’s classic Songs About Fucking sleeve) to the suddenly urban-sounding Neko Case cameo, Vancouver’s The New Pornographers hamstring expectation. The band’s name is borrowed from Jimmy Swaggart’s heartwarming children’s book, Music is the New…
It’s a clue that a band kicks ass when explosions are involved, but it’s an absolute certainty when said explosions are unplanned. In a freak accident well documented on the lunch-break staple Real TV, one of The Kiss Offs’ amps burst into flames because of the band’s intense riffage during a hometown concert in Austin, Texas. A few kind souls…
In 1939, five students from the Talledega Institute for the Blind, led by the indomitable Clarence Fountain, began sneaking off to sing at a local military base as the Happyland Singers. By the ’50s, Fountain and his partners, by then known as the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, ranked among the most celebrated groups on the famed gospel highway,…
“All praise to God,” Prince said to a round of polite applause. “Some people say there are multiple gods and various ways to serve them, but that’s not true. There’s only one God.” Less clapping this time, and the pattern of diminishing returns continued as the newly devout superstar’s impromptu sermon briefly turned a frenzied funkfest into a Sunday service….
The title of Albino Fly’s demo, Easy as One, Two, Three, capsulizes the group’s musical strategy, which includes generous samples of each facet of heavy music’s current reigning trinity: sludgy postgrunge, low-end-scraping Korn metal and a vocal attack that incorporates rapping and tuneful singing into the string of shouts. It also summarizes the telling trio of covers the group tends…
The Ramones, one of the most influential rock groups in history, never scored a gold album and never landed a song in the Top 40, despite the lasting omnipresence of tunes such as “Blitzkrieg Bop.” (Its Hey-ho-let’s go! chorus has become a sports-stadium favorite.) This wasn’t because of the band’s staunch devotion to underground ethics — The Ramones made videos,…
I love you/You love me/We’re a happy family/With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you/won’t you say you love me too? — “I Love You,” Barney We’re a happy family/We’re a happy family/We’re a happy family/Me, mommy, daddy/We ain’t got no friends/Our troubles never end/No Christmas cards to send/ Daddy likes men. — “We’re a Happy…
Danny James Phillips (code name: DJ P) doesn’t fit the typical profile of a turntablist. For example, turntablists aren’t known for wearing Kiss T-shirts and Wrangler jeans. But that’s what DJ P sported at the 2000 DMC regional championships at The Granada theater in Lawrence. As the 27-year-old Springfield, Missouri, native approached the deck, members of the crowd hissed, heckled…
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so, naturally, he begins unzipping his trousers en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning over her motley scrapbook of home furnishings and decor,…
Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep — barring the odd sound effect — but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck — and it happens to be hallowed ground for its role in conveying…
Justice may be blind, but vengeance, it turns out, has a very short memory. So it goes in Memento, the much anticipated “puzzle” movie from Christopher Nolan (Following), which — as is already fairly well known — plays out its plot more or less in reverse. Pitting the protagonist (and us) against short-term amnesia and temporal disorientation, the project…
Breast in Show Skin to win: This is in regards to the letter by Jason Neland of Overland Park about a naked woman on the cover of the Pitch (April 12). Damn! Must have missed that one — and there were naked men inside? Double damn! Well, what do you want? It’s an alternative paper! Stick to your church newsletter…
Missing link: After the Kansas City school board tried to fire him and then hopelessly mired his job in lawsuits, even man-of-steel Benjamin Demps Jr. broke down and wept while resigning. His critics suggested that Demps wanted to avoid questions about how he had run the district. But with all of Kansas City focused on a desperate attempt to raise…
There is no good place to begin with Harry Shearer, because he doesn’t sit still long enough to allow one the chance to focus. He is a blur, forever in motion—on his way to the radio station, on his way from the movie studio, on his way to the publisher’s office, on his way from the concert stage. One…
Gay and lesbian employees of Hallmark are beginning to wonder whether the company’s commitment to employee diversity is anything more than a sappy sentiment. Hallmark Employees Reaching Equality, a gay and lesbian employee resource group, asked management last year to consider adding domestic-partner benefits to the employee package. In March, they got their long-awaited answer: No way. The group had…
As their debts rose five years ago, Jeff and Maaike Coldwell unhappily agreed to join more than one million Americans annually who reach the do-or-die point in the Monopoly game of personal finance. The Coldwells filed bankruptcy. “It was anticlimactic,” Maaike Coldwell says, “but it makes you sick to your stomach. You don’t want to do it because it puts…
