Scopes it out: Regarding Tony Ortega’s “Your Official Program for Scopes II: The Kansas Monkey Trial” (May 5): Nice job on the school-board article. I especially like the inclusion of the quote by Richard Dawkins. My biological anthropology final is Monday, and I wish that everyone could take the class. We didn’t have a single creationist in the class this…
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: Do you think Paula Abdul really was kicking it with that skinny-ass Corey Clark? He is so full of himself, and no joke — he can’t sing. But that…
So I’m at the hair salon, a tiny but lively shop in Waldo, and my stylist has just returned from a vacation in San Francisco. One of the highlights was a tour of Alcatraz, which remains crumbling the way it was when the federal Bureau of Prisons abandoned it in 1963. Paint and plaster still peel off the cold, cold…
The Strip is glad to include among its friends Rick Hellman, editor of this town’s Jewish Chronicle, who gave us a curious heads-up about three weeks ago. The Pitch had just printed its latest issue. On the cover was Tom Deatherage, the horny and hilarious downtown art pimp, but inside, Hellman noted, Pitch restaurant critic Charles Ferruzza had reviewed…
After Uli Stosch arrived in Kansas City this past February, something unusual started happening: More than a hundred 7-foot-tall, yellow metal boxes began showing up in parking lots around town. Stosch had contacted managers at restaurants, gas stations, churches and laundromats, asking permission to set up Planet Aid collection boxes outside their businesses. Stosch, a 37-year-old native of Hamburg, Germany,…
Kelly J. Locke, a Kansas City North realtor who works in Gladstone, has confirmed to the Pitch that he subpoenaed former Kansas City Royals manager Tony Peña to testify in his pending divorce trial because he believes that Peña had an affair with his wife, Monica A. Locke, and that the relationship contributed to the marriage’s breakup. Peña, 47, resigned…
The first psychic approached Brandy Shipp at the candlelight prayer vigil the night after she learned that her mother, Summer Shipp, had disappeared. Brandy can’t recall with certainty what the woman looked like or what she was wearing. She claimed to have lived near Summer in Kansas City’s Valentine neighborhood and said they’d met a couple of times before. “I…
We recently got an offer we couldn’t refuse. Our friend Colin the hipster lawyer e-mailed Night Ranger HQ with an intriguing proposition — a tour of bars on U.S. Highway 40 in Independence with him and his friend James. “James also has a 15-passenger van now to make the trip both comfortable and sufficiently trashy,” he wrote. We thought he…
The other day, I picked up that quintessential example of good journalism the Weekly World News to see this headline: “Five-Star Restaurant Uses Zombies As Waiters.” Like all of this unique tabloid’s stories, this particular article was hilariously over the top. I especially admired how it tried to sympathetically dispel voodoo stereotypes (that zombies are also cannibals) by quoting the…
I made an interesting discovery the other day, one that reflected the basic cultural differences between Johnson County and midtown. I asked a dozen or so midtown residents of varying ages, genders and sexual orientations where I would find the Stonewall Inn. The answer was almost always the same: “It’s the famous bar in New York where the gay-rights movement…
SAT 5/7 Famed Kansas City bluesman Big Joe Turner got his start by belting out lyrics — with no microphone — while he was pouring drinks at swinging downtown nightspots in the late ’20s. Once he was discovered, Turner moved about the country for the next 50 years recording blues, swing, boogie-woogie and jazz platters in every regional style that…
5/6-5/8 Tracy Arts Park is a bit off the usual Crossroads map for First Fridays. But the intersection of 21st Street and Tracy will be abuzz this weekend to celebrate Chameleon Arts and Youth Development’s tenth anniversary. Opening from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday is a group exhibit that includes “older, established artists” such as Jim Leedy and Russell Ferguson…
SAT 5/7 “W.W.J.J.D.?” the T-shirt asks — what would Joan Jett do? What Jack Nicholson is to the Lakers, the rock goddess is to New York’s WNBA franchise, the Liberty. And if Joan Jett likes the WNBA, we like the WNBA. While we ponder names for our imaginary hometown team (the KC Queens? the Plaza Princesses?), the Minnesota Lynx and…
Fri 5/6 The first time Kansas City Art Institute fiber major Summer Farrar felted wool, for a class project, she liked its “stinky and raw” qualities. Farrar takes fleece straight from the farmer, then washes and dries it, combs it out into small squares and stacks them on top of one another. Wool fibers have microscopic “notches,” Farrar explains, and…
When Jim MacDonald took over as managing partner at KCZZ 1480 (Radio Caramba) last September, he revamped the station’s roster and jettisoned its tropical-Caribbean programming. “Mexican music is much more appropriate,” he says. “Ninety percent of the Hispanics here are from northern Mexico, so the station was really missing the mark.” Equally misguided, he decided, were the area’s major Cinco…
Thursday, May 5 How we ought to spend Cinco de Mayo: at the University of Kansas listening to a lecture by Ashanti Alston. The former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army served 12 years in prison for his roles in those organizations before co-founding Estacion Libre, a support group for the Zapatista Rebellion. He’s also…
Paul Dorrell is a man of many hats: artist, gallery owner, arts consultant, promoter — and professional reject. To be fair, Dorrell is only too happy to mention this last one. In fact, he has kept a tally over the years. He has received 177 rejections, and that’s just from book publishers. Now in its second printing, Dorrell’s Living the…
The Boys Next Door It’s quite rare that mentally retarded adults are portrayed onstage, much less with a dignity that doesn’t come off like artificial sweetener. Set in a group home for developmentally disabled men, Tom Griffin’s drama-with-comedy was a hit Off Broadway and turned into a 1996 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie (with Nathan Lane) that never felt cloying….
Blue Gallery Without a theme to hold together the works on display here, the thing that unifies this show is the taste of gallery owners Kelly and David Kuhn. We gravitate toward the work by Joe Ramiro Garcia and Rich Bowman. Ramiro Garcia’s painting “Helpless” might have spoken more loudly to us than usual because of the fast-approaching tax season….
When Sunny Jacobs went to prison in 1976 for a murder she didn’t commit, her son was 9 years old, and her 10-month-old daughter was still nursing. Finally exonerated in 1992, Jacobs reunited with her family in North Carolina. To her granddaughter’s question “Grandma, were you lost?” Jacobs poignantly replied, “Yes, I was.” In the Unicorn Theatre’s exemplary and moving…
An ice queen who doesn’t melt in disco infernos, Miss Kittin delivers deadpan lines (You know Frank Sinatra? He’s dead) in an exotic, yawn-smothered accent. On record, her voice drips with ennui, even as she sets smutty scenes in limousines. It’s the aural equivalent of the inexplicably intriguing bored-model pose. Working with new-wave revivalists Felix Da Housecat and the Hacker,…
“Rock that doesn’t rock” is one way to classify what Olympic Size does. “Rock that lies awake at night and fingers a bottle of pills, watches clouds drift past the moon, listens to the breathing of a lover whom it no longer is sure it loves, then gets up, has a cup of tea and decides it can make it…
How to follow a paradigm shift? Three years ago, the swaggering Kill the Moonlight stripped an already basic sound down to the studs. The immediate result was bracing, a minor masterpiece of ascetic reinvention. The secondary effect was a hum of expectation that has swelled to a ululating cry: What next, Spoon? Gimme Fiction doesn’t really answer the question. It’s…
Unlike Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 unplugged masterpiece, the Boss’ latest is a big-production acoustic venture, larded with atmospheric keyboards, earnest mandolins and all the accouterments money can buy. To his credit, Springsteen has crafted his finest album in years, far better than dronefests such as The Ghost of Tom Joad. “All the Way Home” and “Long Time Comin’” could be…
