%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM …to Kansas City Police Department officers Melody Spencer and Kevin Schnell. It’s pretty clear that hard-core invalid license plate-flaunting perps on Kansas City’s mean streets won’t be able to hide behind their fetus shields any more. But have you stopped to think that maybe you’ve been paying too much attention to Sofia Salva’s post-arrest miscarriage, and…
By C.J. JANOVY Over at Prime Buzz yesterday and in the Star’s print version today, there’s a little item about Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s suggestion that a Wednesday-night town hall audience consider, just think about, the idea of waiving the requirement that police recruits be felony-free. Felonies and drug convictions for things people did when they were young and stupid, Funkhouser…
By CHRIS PACKHAM FRIDAY Stand-up comic and star of Budweiser commercials DC Benny plays tonight, Saturday and Sunday at Stanford and Sons (1867 Village West Parkway, Kansas City, Kansas, 913-385-3866). People in other countries save their pennies for months, earning extra money by selling the charcoal they make from horse manure, just for the opportunity to go to the art…
This fabulous, trenchant evisceration of the Grammys by blogger Bill Wyman, inspired by a NYT article on how the strike will affect this year’s ceremony, had me standing up and cheering. In this one paragraph Wyman sums up the main reason why the Grammys suck better than I’ve ever heard articulated: “Decades of awards that consistently fall upon on a…
%{}% By CHRIS PACKHAM • The pollen count is expected to be extremely low today. So it’s a great day for allergy sufferers to get out there and attempt to maintain their core temperatures in the icy arctic weather front while contemplating their mortality. • Dude in Independence says he came up with the idea for the WNBA. And he’s…
By JEN CHEN Recently, a couple of sharp-eyed, camera-armed Lawrence residents took this picture of a vandalized sign at the Lawrence Athletic Club. Naturally, the club took the “gay ass” part down. But, according to another witness, the club inadvertently left in the “Mangina.” Which might be preferable to, say, being in a widely circulated picture while posing next to…
It’s possible to construe the recent layoffs at Kansas City anchor tenants Sprint and Cerner as indicators of a local economy in distress. Counterbalancing the pessimism of those corporate employers, the Cordish Company evinces extreme optimism about the impending opening of the downtown Power and Light District, which the company says will bring 1,000 new jobs to the area.When…
Paul Nison found a way to cure a nasty digestive disease and trim his utility bills at the same time: He stopped cooking. At age 20, this fast-talking New Yorker was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an incurable colon ailment that doctors said would plague him the rest of his life. When medications did little to ease his symptoms, Nison discovered…
According to the World Health Organization, 33 million people worldwide live with HIV and AIDS. Closer to home, approximately 4,500 people in the Kansas City area have the disease; more than 700 are between the ages of 12 and 24.Given this sobering news, you might write off your ability to make a difference. But remember what Dr. Seuss said in…
Readers might have noticed a letter in last week’s Pitch attacking Bands Across Kansas City. Joe Jacobson of Richmond, Missouri, griped that the company takes money from bands and promises them the world. Jacobson is the bass player for the butt-rock band Drive 13, which you may have seen on KCTV Channel 5’s Kansas City Chiefs Locker Room Show before…
An Evening of Three One-Act Plays The event: the Kansas City Actors Theatre, our best new theater company, lays claim to the Off-Center Theatre, Kansas City’s brand-new stage space in what used to be the movie house in Crown Center. True to its nature, the KCAT mounts challenging art just up the stairs from the Crayola Café. The program: Julie…
It could almost be a scene from a Paul Thomas Anderson movie — a dropped subplot from Magnolia, perhaps, in which a 37-year-old, press-shy movie director responsible for some of the most excitingly original films of his generation waits in the lobby of that storied Burbank watering hole, the Smoke House, for the critic who has coerced him into giving…
American Soil In the elegant and subtle new Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, architect Kyu Sung Woo has designed a light-filled space whose primary duty is to showcase art, not itself. Inaugurating the first-floor galleries is an exhibition in which diverse images suggest landscape in its broadest possible sense. Los Angeles artist Tomory Dodge creates monumental and unknowable landscapes that…
Dear Mexican: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that Mexican-Americans have the highest proportion of DUIs and alcohol-related traffic fatalities of any ethnic group (60 percent, as opposed to 40 percent for Caucasians. They’re even substantially higher than any other Latino group. I apologize that this question isn’t wisecracky, but that statistic is terrible. What’s the deal with all…
Not to be all doom and gloom, but it was impossible not to feel a chill when this year began, moneywise. The stock market tanked on its first day of the new year. USA Today reported that the Dow Jones industrial average had its “poorest first day since 1983” and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index had its worst beginning…
Gloria Squitiro is one unconventional first lady. She’s from a strange place — Long Island, the inscrutable East. She teaches natural childbirth. And after helping her husband, Mark Funkhouser, become mayor, she went to work with him. She even has a desk at City Hall (though she accepts no salary). But where does originality end and looniness begin? The question…
Kacico Dance offers weekly professional level dance classes for experienced dancers in ballet, modern, improvisation, contact improvisation, and strength training. Call for information. Starts: Feb. 5. Daily, 2007 Tags: 1164, Night & Day
Philadelphia playwright Thomas Gibbons says his new play, A House With No Walls, started with a specific concept rather than a set of characters.”I started with the controversy — how to commemorate the existence of a group of slaves. But it arose from a real-life controversy in Philadelphia,” he says. “When the new pavilion was being built for the Liberty…
Kansas City’s longest-running acoustic jam. Sundays, 8 p.m., 2007 Tags: kansas city, Night & Day
“Mockingbirds … don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Published in 1960, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird became a bestseller, selling over five million copies in thirteen countries and winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1999, it was voted “Best Novel of the Century”…
Giant puppets dance and act in narrated ballets to these two beloved Beatrix Potter stories with music by William Walton. This full-scale theatrical production from New York’s award-winning Hudson Vagabond Puppets uses costumes and larger-than-life-size rod puppets up to 8 feet tall! The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck is about an absent-minded duck, Jemima, who takes flight on a fine spring…
We’re deep in the season of campaign rhetoric, so why not use today’s national holiday to remember the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., whose oratory is so frequently emulated and whose message is so often invoked?First, take the kids for some morning fun at the Rockhurst University Convocation Center (54th Street and Troost). The MLK Jr. Youth Day Celebration…
You have to be willing to sacrifice if you want to be cold as ice. Foreigner knew that, and the same wisdom pertains to ice carvers who master the Zenlike discipline en route to becoming executive chefs. At the highest levels of competition, ice sculptures are tricked out with lasers and sometimes rise as tall as multiple-story buildings. (Yes, Virginia,…
Comedy. Wed., Jan. 16; Thu., Jan. 17; Fri., Jan. 18; Sat., Jan. 19; Sun., Jan. 20, 2008 Tags: Night & Day
