Archives: April 2017

Roasted and toasted: The Pitch‘s Bacon & Bourbon returns this week

The Pitch’s Bacon & Bourbon Festival is just what it sounds like: hog heaven. Graphic tees, bumper stickers and Arby’s commercials agree: Everyone likes bacon. Sure, there are a few exceptions — vegetarians, people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons, most pigs). And the savory American favorite finds its perfect complement in a certain brown liquor. In fact, bacon…

Manifesto’s birthday party, a Thai New Year’s celebration at Aep, and more: this week’s restaurant events, April 10-16

Monday, April 10Manifesto (1924 Main) turns eight years old today and is marking the occasion by bringing in guest bartender Ryan Rama, from Altamar Brands distributors. The bar is running $8 cocktail specials, with a margarita time-out shooter available from 5 to 8 p.m.Wednesday, April 12Venture up to Cinder Block Brewery (110 East 18th Avenue, North Kansas City) this evening…

Red Kate issues a new EP on Black Site, its fledgling new label

It was St. Patrick’s Day, and Kansas City punk quartet Red Kate was dressed to celebrate: black shirts, black jeans, black boots.To be fair: A green T-shirt did peek from beneath the black button-up worn by L. Ron Drunkard, the band’s singer and owner of maybe the most preposterous stage name in the city. But that hint of green was…

Missouri AG Josh Hawley hires Shook, Hardy & Bacon to defend DOC discrimination lawsuit that was supposed to have settled last week

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley has hired two partners and an associate lawyer from a high-profile law firm to fight a $900,000 settlement agreement that his agency had agreed to last week but backed away from a day later.The Kansas City-based Shook, Hardy & Bacon, one of the country’s largest law firms — it has represented Big Tobacco, top pharmaceutical companies…

Trace Beaulieu talks Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ahead of tonight and Saturday’s Mads shows at the Alamo

Since the late 1980s, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff have been best known for torturing two reluctant astronauts and a pair of acerbic bots with bad movies. On Mystery Science Theater 3000, they played the mad scientists (or Mads) Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV’s Frank, who subjected series creator Joel Hodgson and, later, Michael J. Nelson to such turkeys as Manos:…

Major Baisden sold his tech company for $134 million and started a pro wrestling league — and he means business

It’s Saturday night, an hour ahead of showtime for the National Wrasslin’ League, and inside the Kansas City Scottish Rite Temple’s courtly green room — modestly perched podium on one end, a massive etching of a Masonic double-headed eagle on the other, blood-red carpet and white walls in the hundred or so feet between — the vibe is cheerful but…

Missouri car insurance industry is super racist, report finds

Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer dismissed ProPublica as a “left-wing blog.” ProPublica is not a left-wing blog. It is an independent, nonprofit news organization responsible for some of the finest investigative reporting in America. Sean Spicer is a sad, doomed clown, and he got owned for trying to imply that ProPublica is down in the hyper-partisan…

The KC Rep’s A Raisin in the Sun finds new relevance in a classic

What happens to a dream deferred? At the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, it metastasizes into an evening of compulsory theater.It helps when the script in question is A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 magnum opus about the aspirations of a black family from Chicago’s South Side. The play opens in a tidy but threadbare apartment in the Woodlawn neighborhood,…

Topeka-based Payless Shoesource has filed for bankruptcy

Grim days for retail brick-and-mortar chains. Many of the old giants — Sears, Macy’s, KMart, Kohl’s — are closing stores across the country. Gordmans filed for bankruptcy in March. Today, Payless Shoesource, the budget footwear chain founded in Topeka and headquartered there since 1956, made its debut in bankruptcy court.According to the bankruptcy filing, Payless has somewhere between $1 billion…

Ike and McCarthy author David A. Nichols on the art of lying, and the truth about Eisenhower

Kansas City-raised journalist Walter Cronkite said in 2004 that his long-held view of Dwight D. Eisenhower — whom history has sometimes painted as a do-nothing preisdent — had changed over time. “I came to realize how wrong I’d been about him and his presidency.” Because Eisenhower often worked behind the scenes and was careful about his public remarks, the true impact…

Discrimination lawsuit against Missouri Department of Corrections takes unusual turn

The disability discrimination lawsuit of Lori Lynn Walker, a former state prison guard who worked in Kansas City, has taken an unexpected turn.Walker’s lawsuit against Missouri Department of Corrections officials, who face dozens of discrimination lawsuits and are being investigated by a legislative subcommittee, was set for trial Monday. It would have been the first trial since The Pitch published a…

Here are the Kansas Republicans who just voted to oppose expanding Medicaid to 150,000 people

Last week, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed a bill, passed by the Kansas Senate and House of Representatives, that would have expanded Medicaid in the state, effectively providing medical care to roughly 150,000 low-income Kansans. Though Democrats and many Republicans voted for Medicaid expansion, Brownback and other fringe conservatives believe denying health coverage to poor people is a bad idea…

Cocktail dinners, a new Crane Brewing release and growing a herb garden: your week in food and drink events, April 3-9

Mondays, we round up the week’s most interesting food and drink events in the Kansas City area. Besides the meals and classes below, remember that this weekend marks April’s First Friday, so a host of food trucks will be scattered throughout the Crossroads on Friday evening.Monday, April 3To commemorate the Royals’ season opener, Barley’s Kitchen & Tap (11924 West 119th…

Saturday’s Olathe town hall shows eagerness to override Brownback’s Medicaid veto — just not among Olathe lawmakers

Depending on one’s perspective, the timing of the annual town hall meeting of the Kansas Legislature’s Olathe delegation Saturday couldn’t have been better.Or worse.Legislators around the state are being bombarded with calls to override Gov. Sam Brownback’s despicable veto of the Legislature’s bill expanding Medicaid eligibility to an estimated 150,000 Kansans. For the bill to become law, two senators and…