Dunce capped: I am writing in behalf of all African-American children in the Kansas City, Missouri, School District who saw themselves depicted as a “dunce” on the cover of the March 3 issue of the Pitch. Shame on the Pitch! The teacher in the cartoon looks like the slave master overlooking the slaves working in the fields. The child has…
Jimmy the Fetus Hey, kids, Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, helping everybody see that what we learned in Sunday school really matters. Dear Jimmy: I always dug searching for eggs on Easter Sunday, although now my friends and I just skip the plastic eggs and stash kind bud around the house. We didn’t…
When Harrisonville fire investigator Wayne Schraml and officers from the Missouri State Fire Marshal’s Office failed to notice a bead of copper on a wire at the Cass County Medical Center after a fire in the respiratory therapy office in 2001, it cost then-20-year-old Jennifer Hall a year of her life in prison. The fire, which caused an estimated $23,000…
Longtime readers of the Strip know that this pontificating porterhouse enjoys nothing better than pointing out the foibles of our local television newshounds and, in particular, the pervert-obsessed ways of KCTV Channel 5, the station that turned lurid investigations into ratings gold and trounced longtime laid-back 10 p.m. leader KMBC Channel 9. So you might think that the meat patty…
Raytown South High School basketball coach Bud Lathrop faces his team. His game plan covers the dry-erase board behind him, a series of now-useless scribbles. It’s a couple of hours before midnight on Friday, February 25. As they slump across rows of orange chairs, Lathrop’s players can hear muffled cheers from the adjacent locker room. Sophomore George Goode fidgets with…
Sarah Lee Guthrie
Of all the places to meet potential dates in Kansas City (blood banks, Cool Crest and beneath the bridges of Southwest Boulevard), the Kansas City Convention Center ranks up there with the best of ’em. We’re referring to the February 26 “Singles in the City” extravaganza, which sounded somewhat intriguing. Sponsored by a bunch of radio stations and dating facilitators…
A reader e-mailed me last week to say that she had fallen in amour with “a French bistro located on the corner of Troost and Gregory.” I knew exactly the location she was talking about — it had been home, over the years, to places such as A Taste of Italy, Marc’s Chicken & Waffles and Vera’s Soul Food —…
I’ve already broken all of the resolutions I made on New Year’s Day, and I wasn’t all that observant of Chinese New Year the following month (even though I was born in the Year of the Cock, which reportedly makes this rooster year a lucky one). But I have a third chance at getting my act together next month, during…
SAT 3/19 Barbershop-quartet singing, along with meticulous mustache care, is a lost manly art. But the Heart of America Barbershop Chorus still knows how to resolve a diminished seventh. See the group at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Music Hall (301 West 13th Street). Call 816-478-4165. — Jason Harper Light Up UMKC chooses its battles. 3/18-4/10 Turning current…
FRI 3/18 When someone asks us to describe what Mark Sheinkman’s paintings look like, our feeble answer — “a bunch of squiggly lines?” — makes us sound like we’re responding to Bill Murray’s character in the opening scene of Ghostbusters. But unlike Murray’s ditz-seduction props, Sheinkman’s abstract paintings are spellbinding. The layers of chalky white loops on a background of…
ONGOING Tired of handling your club solo? Looking for a threesome of like-minded swingers? The American Singles Golf Association meets and mixes at 6 p.m. the third Thursday of every month at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Bar and Grill in Overland Park, 10975 Metcalf. Call 816-228-1059. — Jason Harper Hugger Ruggers The Blues take to the pitch with high hopes….
3/18-3/19 Going to Cy Rudnick’s fabric store in Crown Center is an adventure in time travel. Even when they’re just dropping by to dig through the jar of buttons in hopes of replacing one that popped off a cute blouse (many are the curses of the busty lady), efficient shoppers find themselves incapable of departing less than an hour later….
Fall 2004 was an exciting time for left-leaning demonstrators, who flocked to the J.C. Nichols Fountain with slogan-smothered signs. Media outlets gave them prime-time coverage, and conservatives cared enough to confront their opponents, if only by raising a one-finger salute as they motored through Plaza intersections. Reasonable discourse was difficult in such a climate, but the pro-peace pack hoped that…
Thursday, March 17 When a friend told us that the Crossroads Infoshop, as part of its weekly series, hosted a recent lecture titled “Creating Radical Change: How to Build a Movement,” she remarked that she’d happened to watch The Weather Underground the night before and joked that the FBI probably showed up downtown to see if “movement” was actually a…
Documentary filmmakers walk a tightrope, balancing the truth of their subjects against their own perceptions, then factoring in the demands of satisfying storytelling. But we wonder how close to the facts a documentary can get before it becomes journalism — or how much of the director’s vision it can contain without straying into fiction. So we asked Margarita De la…
Afternoon Delight Graffiti-inspired artist Jason Brunson presents colorful canvases that look more like creations born in alleyways than like typical gallery fare. But because he doesn’t have to be sneaky during the process, Brunson clearly puts in a lot of time and attention refining his images — which should offer fans of the graffiti aesthetic a breath of fresh air….
At the last good dinner party I attended, the guests alternately took whacks at the bumbling Democratic Party and Hilary Swank. It was lively, yet tasteful — a far cry from a dinner party a couple of years ago where I was getting a lap dance by the umpteenth bottle of wine. A dinner party can be a great…
Jessalyn Kincaid is a white girl. A white girl with a round face, ruddy cheeks, shiny eyes and big ol’ knockers. A year ago, she was wearing a fat bunny suit with long ears and drawn-on whiskers to play the sweet, innocent Velveteen Rabbit in the Theatre for Young America’s play of the same name. Now she humps the stage…
With skateboarding the unofficial fifth element of hip-hop, it’s fitting that DJ Ataxic and Reach’s Tuesday-night set is presented by downtown skateboard shop entrepreneur DJ Zach Lovely. DJ Ataxic, one-third of the Soul Providers DJ crew with DJ Kiz-one and DJ Mix-o-Flix — the team responsible for handing out those monthly Agenda mix tapes at clubs — strives to keep…
With its so-you’re-a-philosopher stage name and its album-opening sequence (in which someone intones, “It’s an aboriginal art process” over a didgeridoo solo), Deep Thinkers might terrify the pretentious-phobic. That fear would fade fast, however, because this duo is actually much more down-to-earth than most of its underground hip-hop peers. Like the post-wackiness Pharcyde, DT’s Brother of Moses balances quick-witted wordplay…
As part of some unspoken exchange program, many Dublin-based bands emulate brassy American R&B ensembles, whereas plenty of U.S. groups fetishize shamrocks and shenanigans. Grain Valley’s Tullamore is to Scottish and Irish traditional songs what the Commitments were to soul covers. Its festive harmonies, fiddle-fueled jiggery and lilting accents make this the Missouri band around which to build St. Patrick’s…
The Architects’ Keys to the Building shifts jarringly from gospel to gritty rock like a Sunday service spent remembering Saturday night at the saloon. On the bar-band numbers, the riffs recall John Mellencamp and the drumbeats deliver more solid thumps than a workbench-intensive carpenters convention. Unconcerned with subtlety, the secular songs repeat phrases until singing along becomes almost involuntary, then…
Get Up Kids keyboardist James DeWees’ kooky pop project Reggie and the Full Effect has flirted with metal before, turning in a giddy cover of Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and introducing characters such as the Finnish mosh warlords Common Denominator and Hungary Bear. But he’s never concocted late-era Metallica riffs like the one that fuels “The Fuck Stops Here” — it’s…
