Colleen Mundstock had worked at U.S. Air for only six years, but new crew members assumed she’d been around forever. At 38, she always seemed to be the oldest stewardess on board. “You the senior flight attendant?” pilots asked as soon as they stepped onto the plane. Mundstock knew that plenty of her fellow flight attendants had been touched up…
Third-baseman George Brett, golfer Tom Watson and quarterback Len Dawson can still draw crowds. With the venerable former Kansas City Monarch Buck O’Neil and the world’s fastest human, Schlagle High grad Maurice Greene, they’re regarded as Kansas City’s greatest sports legends. One man who richly deserves similar fame is former Kansas City Kings guard Nate “Tiny” Archibald. The Hall…
“I love the Kansas City Royals’ colors and uniforms. I’m a styles guy. Style is the key. I signed with Clemson because they wore white shoes.” — Zack Greinke, the Royals’ first-round draft pick, a hard-throwing pitcher from Apopka High School in Orlando, Florida, KMBZ 980 “We’ll see about that.” — Greinke, when told by Kevin Kietzman that it won’t…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th Century Fox whose tone of voice nonetheless suggested bad…
The table of contents for Michael Pollan’s national best-seller The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World reads: Chapter 1, The Apple; Chapter 2, The Tulip; Chapter 3, Marijuana; Chapter 4, The Potato. Most readers go straight to Chapter 3. Pollan is neither surprised nor offended by this. “I think that’s the best chapter in a lot…
The first official day of summer arrives Friday, June 21. With the sunny season barely under way, urbanites are already growing irritable. Car exhaust fills sticky air with suffocating fumes, and the stench of hot asphalt prompts pedestrians to cough pointedly in disgust. But as long as we have to put up with the less-than-pleasant side effects of living in…
I recently attended the estate sale of an anonymous octogenarian who had lived most of her middle-class life in the same Midtown home. It was filled with the oddball relics of a long and well-fed life. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about: candy tins from forgotten confectioneries, ashtrays from restaurants that had vanished like puffs of…
Cynthia Pistilli Savage, general manager of the Raphael Hotel (see review) grew up in the hotel business and has the scar to prove it. She points to a tiny, nearly invisible mark on her upper lip. “This is where I hit the floor after falling off a counter at the old Muehlebach Coffee Shop when I was two,” she says….
If the need ever arises to classify the musical influences and interests of banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in a single word, eclectic will do. Perpetual Motion, his 2001 solo collection of classical inventions and etudes, added another bold Grammy-winning excursion to a career that includes work in contemporary jazz, numerous forays into the funk/jam genre and tremendous contributions to the…
The week before his most recent book, Empire Falls, was issued in paperback, Richard Russo spent a Monday afternoon playing tennis. He lost his match but came home to a Pulitzer Prize. “My wife, Barbara, had been answering the phone nonstop,” Russo says. Late returning from the court, the author had missed the first wave of media calls. “I knew…
If all the teeth-deprived characters from a Flannery O’Connor novel got together and started a band, it might sound something like Ugly Casanova. Part rumor, part myth, part oh-so-strange reality, Ugly C is actually Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock doing a little musical moonlighting. One of rock’s last true eccentrics, Brock follows his muse through a surreal batch of space…
1996’s Primal Fear stars Edward Norton as Aaron Stampler, a seemingly innocent altar boy accused of murder. At the end of the movie, viewers discover Stampler is actually a clever con man — or is he? Similarly, metal fans might listen to Primal Fear’s blend of Dungeons and Dragons lyrics and screaming-for-vengeance riffs and wonder whether this German group really…
The original Flatlanders were more ghosts than legends; it’s not as if fans bump into people at Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore or Butch Hancock shows who say, “Hey, I saw the Flatlanders back in the ’60s.” As important as the group seems now, its first stint — with a grand total of one eight-track-tape release — was a disaster….
The split CD has become a staple of the modern indie band’s diet, as requisite as label-hopping, playing “secret” shows and bitching about bass players. New Jersey’s prolific Electric Frankenstein and Seattle-by-way-of-Tuscon punks the Supersuckers, the groups paired on Splitsville Vol. 1, have much in common: Both were formed in the mid-’90s and have spent the past several years building…
With the offstage murder of an obnoxious comic and a luscious peanut butter cream pie to convert the most determined dieter, Mystery.Comedy’s And Then There Were Two is a guilty pleasure. The Kansas City-based interactive dinner playhouse has branches in Chicago, Nashville, Tennessee, and Raleigh, North Carolina, but its local company is the one with a full season and…
Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal—the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some might say she grabbed it and aimed it directly…
Despite the recent heat on people of Middle Eastern cultures, the veil-wearing Rahman ir Raheem hasn’t had too many “less-than-enlightened” responses to her attire. In fact, she says, “people are going out of their way to be politically — and maybe even spiritually — correct.” She did have one negative experience when someone told her, “By wearing the veil, you’re…
In a more imaginative world, a Japanese restaurant named Kabuki — for the traditional form of Japanese theater — would actually be a dinner theater. Customers could dine on sushi, tempura and shabu-shabu and watch actors in stylized makeup grimace and growl at each other as they performed Kanjincho or the five-act drama Aoto-zoshi Hana No Nishikie. Who knows? After…
If you like sushi, you already know that it’s visually and sensually appealing. But it can also be used to predict fate and fortune! At least that’s the claim made by the Sushi Fortune-Telling Web page (astprince.com/english/sushi/indexe.html). When I double-clicked on a cartoon soy bottle, my individual traits in the categories of Love, Money, Career, Family and Wish popped up…
On June 2, highly influential math-rock pioneers Giant’s Chair performed a startlingly steady set at Spit Fest. Giant’s Chair’s return to the throne was unannounced but hardly a secret — news of the reunion provoked salivating posts on local music Web sites — and enabled fans to see Scott “Rex” Hobart carving jagged rock riffs instead of crooning country tunes….
For a town of 22 people, the crowd seems unimaginable. Nearly a thousand people are crammed along the shoulders of Rural Route J, awaiting the start of the Dalton Day parade. A woman grabs a mic and throws herself into “The Star Spangled Banner,” trilling out the last line for a good ten or twelve seconds. Mayor Donny Hughes waves…
Two months ago Elma Warrick read an investigator’s report on patronage and micromanagement in the Kansas City, Missouri, school district and decided she needed a lawyer. Her colleagues on the school board authorized her to hire one at taxpayers’ expense. When federal Judge Dean Whipple read the same report, he ruled that it contained no clear evidence of wrongdoing by…
It’s Sunday morning at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Claycomo. Two police officers direct a stream of traffic onto the church campus, where crisply dressed families hurry from Sunday school into the sanctuary. Smiling ushers assist worshippers to their places in the 1,800-seat auditorium. On any given weekend, 3,500 people attend Pleasant Valley Baptist Church’s three services. This morning, at…
They’re young, they’re cute and they play potent punkish rock that wears its easy-to-spot influences directly on its prep-school shirtsleeve. The group’s Handsome Boy Modeling School singer croons druggily through low-fi distortion, making teen-age girls and rock critics swoon. Nope, it’s not the Strokes; it’s the Catheters, Seattle’s alt-boy-band du jour. Most of today’s hipster groups tote enough baggage to…
