Isle of Capri
Singles Event – Disco Night
Archives: November 2004
Grand Emporium
Ski Club Membership Drive
Lucky Brewgrille
DJ Kirby
Swing Set
In a recent vacation to Chicago, the Night Ranger learned a valuable lesson. It’s easier to pick up there. Perhaps this can be attributed to Vacation Mode, which — as everyone knows — makes you do things you normally wouldn’t do. Like go to two bars whose names should ordinarily repel you (i.e., Finn McCool’s and Funk). And let someone…
A Fetching Place
I don’t have a dog, although I’m seriously thinking of adopting one now that I’ve eaten at the three-week-old Lillies On 17th (815 West 17th Street), the “Spanish Bistro and Bar” in a 100-year-old home just around the corner from the Blue Bird Bistro. The restaurant may be the first in the city to encourage dog owners to bring all…
Disco Cantina
I find something supernatural about coincidences. When they happen, I experience a shiver through my body. I can’t remember who said it, but I’ve always believed the adage that “a coincidence is God’s way of performing a miracle anonymously.” But I’m not sure that what I experienced on a recent Friday night at the three-month-old Kokopelli Mexican Cantina was…
Fish Story
FRI 11/12 Side by side on a concert stage, Ezra Idlet and Keith Grimwood look like a skyscraper next to a convenience store. Idlet is 6 feet 9 inches tall, and Grimwood 5 feet 5-1/2 inches — yet they’re compatible in the musical duo Trout Fishing in America and have found a comfortable niche in the music industry. Idlet’s and…
Poetry in Motion
THU 11/11 When Rita Dove told her father that she wanted to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, he said, “Well, I’ve never understood poetry, so don’t be upset if I don’t read it.” But Dove, who felt a passion for writing despite her family’s penchant for science (her father was an engineer; all three of her siblings are…
Hot Rolls
SAT 11/13 Women in kneepads, helmets and tight T-shirts cruising around a skating rink at top speed? That’s hot. And the new Kansas City Roller Warriors know it. They wear their sex on their skates. Think Heather Graham in Boogie Nights, without the porn-world tragedy. The Roller Warriors, an all-female roller-derby league, are strong of heart and hamstring, and they…
Gilmore Girl
TUE 11/16 Dana Gilmore flips the script on every expectation about poetry performance. She’s raw but never crass, romantic yet far from sappy. She’s tough enough to inspire admiration but vulnerable enough to attract empathy. Her sharp wordplay and internal rhyme schemes make her work come alive on the page. The Kansas City native earned national respect with her smoldering…
Yemen of Peace
In the late 1940s, as a token to celebrate newly forged diplomatic relations, President Harry Truman gave the small Arabian country of Yemen its first radio station. It wasn’t exactly CBS — two hours a day, the few Yemenis who owned radios could tune in to readings from the Quran and poetic ballads sung to the king. Ahmed al-Kibsi, 52,…
Night & Day Events
Thursday, November 11 Nigella Lawson can certainly cook as well as her American counterpart, Martha Stewart, but one difference is obvious to her legions of followers: She’s hot. Yeah, we know Martha used to be a model, but by now everybody has seen the swimsuit pictures of her in Us Weekly, so that’s not a valid argument anymore. In contrast…
Video Star
A woman, visible only from the calves down, skips through a field, pausing occasionally to kick the heads off dandelions. The seeds flutter and fall. A large tree sways almost imperceptibly. In a bathroom, a body moves in and out of the frame of a small mirror; eventually, a man’s face appears. Slightly withered tulips bounce to a soundtrack of…
Stage Capsule Reviews
Amelia Bedelia Over the course of thirty Amelia Bedelia books, author Peggy Parish put her titular housekeeper in the employ of various dotty families. The domestic’s most notable trait is her literal, concrete take on the world; she’s the kind of person who, when told to strike a match, hits one with a hammer. For Theatre for Young America’s production,…
Art Capsule Reviews
Charlotte Street Foundation Awards 2004 Three words: sweaters on lights. The concept is ingenious. Not only does a curving tube of light wearing a fashionably striped sweater look cozy and adorable, but the porous knit cover diffuses the light in a way that’s easy on the eyes. So if all you can muster is a drive-by viewing, you are in…
Holy Christmas, Batman!
There’s nothing blatantly off-putting about the 27 songs that season Sanders Family Christmas. After all, it’s that time of year, and the onslaught is upon us. It may be the perfect show for locals who ensured that Kansas and Missouri would remain red states. Democrats still licking their wounds, though, may feel a little like a Christmas goose being force-fed…
Hey, Good Lookin’
Just because I’m messy doesn’t mean I don’t see your filing systems and your neatly labeled desk drawers, your sock dividers and your shoe racks, your magazines displayed lovingly on your coffee table. Mine are piled too high on a magazine rack; the resulting glossy avalanche is my own natural disaster. It’s a sight I don’t enjoy coming home…
Tortured Soul
The phrase dance band brings to mind an amalgam of celebratory funkateers and drill-team-choreography fodder that could be dubbed KC & C and the Sunshine Factory. Tortured Soul pairs the sweat-soaked soul of the former with the precise pounding pulse of the latter, but unlike electronic acts that use live instrumentation (such as Ming and FS), this trio works without…
Prince’s Sign O’ The Times
Each volume in the “33 1/3″ series focuses fanatical intensity on a single renowned album by giving writers free reign to analyze, contextualize and rhapsodize about their favorite albums. Michaelangelo Matos — like Prince, a Minneapolis native — was only 12 when Sign ‘O’ The Times came out in 1987, and the dense, double-disc opus initially baffled the youngster who’d…
Love & Death
The general premise of this book is that Courtney Love is a ruthless, conniving bitch. Tell us something we don’t know. Courtney Love is a ruthless, conniving bitch who abused, manipulated and helped stage the murder of her husband, Kurt Cobain, so that his death appeared to be the tragic inevitability of a tortured musical genius instead of a cold-blooded…
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide
Twelve years after a third edition written by just four critics, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide returns to the formula of the 1979 and 1983 versions, employing a few dozen writers with mainstream pedigrees and dividing (with considerable bias in favor of the most recognizable names) all of music — “every record that matters,” according to the book’s absurd…
Ian McLagan and the Bump Band
It’s been a good year for Faces fans. The group that wrung out the last bit of mod from the Small Faces and bottled the bluesy grappa as the best-ever Rolling Stones aperitif got the four-disc Rhino treatment over the summer with the essential Five Guys Walk Into a Bar. And founding keyboardist Ian McLagan issued the tough, infectious Rise…
Cradle of Filth
Unless you are a huge fan of the genre of black metal, there’s a good chance that T-shirts for your favorite band don’t feature photos of nuns being crucified and that said band doesn’t work under the self-imposed banner of “Supreme Vampyric Evil.” Thankfully, we have Cradle of Filth hoisting its freak flag high. The English sextet has been cranking…
Find The Pitch
