It’s here, it’s queer: Pride Week arrives in Kansas City this weekend. Below, some options for coming out and participating. Kansas City Pride Fest May 31 – June 2, Berkley Riverfront Park kcpridefest.org The biggest Pride event is at Berkley Riverfront Park this weekend and includes headliners Material Girl (serving “the essence of a Madonna and Lady Gaga concert experience”),…
Farina buzzes on a recent weekend night.Zach Bauman If Michael Smith builds it, Kansas Citians will come. Case in point: Farina, the chef’s new upmarket Italian restaurant, which has been crowded with eager diners since it opened in February. Smith’s star-power pull makes sense; he’s been a fixture in the local dining scene for decades. During his tenure at The…
Joe Carey Millennials are far less economically secure than the generations that preceded them, and as a result are waiting longer to marry. As the U.S. Census Bureau noted last year: “Many young adults entered the job market during the Great Recession (2007-2009). Subsequently, that led to high rates of unemployment and underemployment, lower income, higher rates of poverty, and…
Memories have a way of shortchanging the past. Our rearview reflections tend to compress complex history into “simpler times” and recast previous generations as noble, silent sufferers. Sometimes, it takes a good work of fiction to remind us that our ancestors were every bit as ditzy, dopey, and ill-equipped for life’s challenges as we are. So it is with Kansas…
Mazzy Mann and Zoey Shopmaker are direct about their intentions for Transfiguration, the new queer-and-trans-centric music and arts festival they’ve organized. It’s being held May 31 and June 1 — the same weekend as KC Pride Fest. “We want to present it as an alternative to KC Pride Fest, which is notoriously not very inclusive to anyone beyond cis white gay…
Travis O’Guin, CEO of Strange Music, is a soft-spoken man, but there’s excitement in his voice when I ask him by phone about the label’s first-ever StrangeFest, which he says has been nine years in the making. “Nine years? Why the hell have we been talking about it for nine years and not done it yet?” O’Guin says. “We decided…
April Fleming With the recent arrival of Waldo Thai Place, Sweet Siam, and Baramee Thai Bistro onto Kansas City’s food scene, we locals now enjoy an embarrassment of homestyle Thai riches. Even better: KC diners are trending more adventurous, which is allowing (some) Thai restaurant proprietors to expand their menu options. In other words, it’s not all about pad Thai…
Dear Dan: I keep running into the same issue with my best friend of five years. (She’s also my maid of honor at my upcoming wedding.) We’re both empaths — most of my friends are — and we’re both in therapy working on how to cope with that. I have severe anxiety that impacts my physical health, so one of…
Brunch at Summit Grill, Boru Ramen, or Third Street Social.Courtesy Summit Restaurant Group If you have Monday off, here’s a handful of spots that will cater specifically to your open schedule and empty stomach. Happy summer! Novel (1927 McGee Street) is hosting its annual Memorial Day party, featuring a buffet spread and bottomless wine, beer, and batch cocktails. On the…
Almost every Wednesday night, you can find Keri Wing at Strawberry Hill’s 403 Club, where the flashing lights of nearly a dozen pinball machines light up the dimly lit interior and a neon sign that shouts “Play Pinball” shines on the wall above Deadpool and Metallica machines. Wednesday is tournament night at 403, and a couple dozen local pinball enthusiasts…
Apart from a contentious World Cup match or a weekend in Lindsborg, it’s hard to imagine hundreds of Kansans together in a big room chanting “SWE-DEN! SWE-DEN!” But chant that we did last night at Liberty Hall, where the Hives and Refused brought their “Swedish Scream Team” Tour. It was the first Lawrence show from the Hives in several years…
To read a book by Tony Horwitz is to go on a journey with Tony Horwitz. Beginning with his first book, 1987’s One for the Road: An Outback Adventure, continuing with 1998’s Confederates in the Attic, and on up to his latest, Spying on the South, Horwitz has mastered the art of fusing history tours with personal travelogue. His books are…
Categories: Food & Drink
This weekend, in downtown Lawrence, you might see Martika breathing fire, swallowing a sword, and walking over shards of glass. One block over, witness the Flyin’ Hawaiian — an acrobatic, hula-hooping contortionist cracking jokes to a crowd. One thing you won’t see at this year’s Lawrence Busker Festival, now in its 12th year, though, is male performers. The 2019 festival…
Reading about Phoenix’s Nanami Ozone, you’d think that the band was the second coming of shoegaze, but that’s far too reductive a description. The quartet draws just as much from Teenage Fanclub and Blur as it does Ride and My Bloody Valentine, resulting in a sound that’s as catchily bop-worthy as it is fuzzily introspective. Nanami Ozone’s sophomore LP, and…
Courtesy Rye Leawood Tuesday, May 21 Get out on that patio for the fourth annual Seafood Boil at Rye Leawood (10551 Mission Road). The boil features shrimp, crawfish, and the requisite veggies, plus summer desserts and sides. A cash bar will be available for your drink needs, and live music from the Ernest James Trio will fill the air. The…
Dear Dan: Garbage human here. I’ve had herpes for about 15 years. The first five years, I was in a relationship with a guy who also had it. The last 10 years, I haven’t been in a serious relationship. I’ve been a (rare, drunk) one-night-stand type of gal, and I don’t usually tell the guy because, like, everyone has herpes….
Brian Stauffer While most Missourians were asleep during the early hours of Thursday morning, the Missouri Senate passed a near total abortion ban 24-10. The “Missouri Stands for the Unborn Act” would illegalize the termination of any pregnancy after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or after eight weeks — a ban that includes pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, and…
Welcome to the GalaK.C.! Kansas City is packed full of experiences, people, places, and things, and we need your help celebrating all of them. This year’s Best of Kansas City launches on June 10, when our Nominations round opens. Come back then to write in your favorites — from KC’s best bartender to your favorite shop pet. After all the…
In my 2017 review of John Wick: Chapter Two, I praised the Keanu Reeves action sequel for successfully building out its world — a fantastical hitman society that operates unseen by the rest of the world — while upping the ante on its beautifully staged action sequences. In John Wick: Chapter Three — Parabellum, which arrives this week, returning director…
Salty is the best band in Kansas City, according to Jonathan Brokaw, the guitarist and singer of the garage-punk-with-synth band (don’t call them synth punk!) Salty. Brokaw is also the de facto head of the group’s tongue-in-cheek propaganda wing. Follow along on his Facebook timeline, and between Royals rants and kitchen-work kvetching, you can frequently find Brokaw singing the praises…
The Pitch’s Taste of KC takes place this Thursday at KC Live! in the Power & Light District Thursday, May 16 Six local chefs compete tonight for the Golden Fork at The Pitch’s Taste of KC event at KC Live! (1330 Grand Boulevard), hosted by X105.1 FM’s Afentra and Pitch’n Kitch’n host Brock Wilbur. While the chefs scramble and compete,…
David Dastmalchian has lived in both the Marvel (Ant-Man) and DC universes (The Flash), appeared in The Dark Knight, three Denis Villeneuve films (Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049, and the forthcoming Dune), and Kevin Smith’sJay and Silent Bob Reboot. He was on MacGyver. The man was even in Twin Peaks. But before all that, Dastmalchian — a Pennsylvania native who spent the…
Emma Olson Sometime in the last year or so, my friends all started turning into moon witches. These were women in their late twenties and early thirties. Women with graduate degrees who vaccinated their children, who read more than just the headline, who could spell “teleological” and use it in a sentence. Most of them weren’t religious. And yet they’d…
