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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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Voters weigh an unusual tax pitch
SMALL-TOWN
STRONG
Against the odds, our towns endure
Turnout will be key for issue on Nov. 5 ballot that would pay for medical research. By MIKE HENDRICKS The Kansas City Star
Never have Jackson County voters considered anything like this. If approved, the half-cent sales tax proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot would raise $800 million over 20 years not for parks, public safety INSIDE or other pro- Opposing jects normally views on funded with the sales sales taxes. tax for Instead, the medical tax would un- research. derwrite med- | A29 ical research at two private hospitals and the health professional schools at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, all collaborating under a new umbrella organization: the Jackson County Institute for Translational Medicine. The last time county residents were asked to approve a tax approaching this amount was in 2006. That SEE TAX | A22
Island life shaped Chiefs lineman
Spectators lined the main drag to enjoy a parade that is held each summer at the conclusion of the Overbrook Osage County Fair in Overbrook, Kan. The town has survived despite its small size.
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e’ve been hearing about the slow death of small towns all our lives. And it’s true, if you weigh the percentages: 36 percent of Americans lived outside of urban areas back in 1950; fewer than 19 percent do today. Experts had been forecasting a slight resurgence of retiring baby boomers migrating from cities and suburbs to quieter, calmer places — after all, small towns remain deeply ingrained in our DNA. But then the economic crash kept everyone frozen in place. And small towns suffered even further. Main Street businesses struggled against big-box stores. Schools closed. Yet, somehow, small-town America keeps hanging on. Just look at a place called Overbrook, Kan., population 1,000. They keep throwing parades. They go to the grocery store for hunting licenses and leave trucks parked with keys in the ignition. And they’re willing to raise an insane amount of money to build a better library. In a three-part series beginning today, The Star looks at how life in one small town is threatened, how it’s changing and why it still matters.
Story by RICK MONTGOMERY Photos by RICH SUGG The Kansas City Star
VAHE GREGORIAN
The story of Overbrook, Kan., a four-page special report
COMMENTARY
HOG HAMMOCK, Ga. | With an escort of dolphins on this crisp, bright morning, the ferry ride from the mainland to Sapelo Island lasts perhaps 20 minutes, a span that might as well have been spent in a time machine. This simple, peaceful and lush but complicated island was once a slave colony. Now it has a dwindling and aging permanent population of fewer than 50 “Saltwater Geechee” descendants in Hog Hammock, the one remaining community on the 10-mile by 2-mile barrier island — a community that improbably nurtured
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Topeka
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Lawrence 335
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Overbrook THE KANSAS CITY STAR
@Go to projects.KansasCity.com/overbrook for more photos and videos from Overbrook.
SEE ISLAND | A20
A+E D1
CAREER BUILDER F1
CLASSIFIED F2
DEATHS A23-26
H+H C1 LOCAL A4
LOTTERIES A5
MOVIES D7
OPINION A27-29
SPORTS DAILY B1
SUNDAY HOMES E1
134TH YEAR | NO. 40 | 9 SECTIONS
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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Early start on Halloween Dressed as a minion from the movie “Despicable Me,” 2-year-old Kensley Pingel of Shawnee waited in line for a lollipop ghost Saturday during the Trick or Treat Off the Street event at the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm in Olathe. SUSAN PFANNMULLER | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Local KANSAS CITY | Mayor’s
project gathers momentum
RUNNING SCARED
IDEAS INSPIRE CIVIC VISION First event of its kind from Sly James generates exchange of plans and thoughts. By MARÁ ROSE WILLIAMS The Kansas City Star
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PHOTOS BY BRIAN DAVIDSON | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Ring lost for years finds its way home Shawnee Mission West student lost it while stationed at Camp Lejuene in ’80s. By JOHNNY WHITFIELD The Garner-Cleveland Record
Marvin Kirby finds all kinds of stuff when he pulls out his metal detector and trains it on different spots around Lake Benson Park. But one recent find sent him off on a search for the owner of a missing high school class ring from Overland Park. The owner, it turns out, wasn’t too far away. Mark Phillips has lived in Alexandria, Va., since 2003. He lost the 1980 class ring from Shawnee Mission West High School in the mid-’80s, while he was a Marine stationed at North Carolina’s Camp Lejuene. “I wore it all the time,” GARNER, N.C. |
Phillips said, “and one day I realized it was gone. I looked everywhere for it, but I never found it.” How the ring ended up in Garner remains a mystery — Phillips said he’s never been to Garner before in his life — but when he visited the Wake County town last weekend, he was genuinely glad to see the ring again. Kirby found the ring Oct. 8 on a metal-detecting expedition at the park. The ring was buried under about four inches of dirt near a playground. “You find a lot of pull-top can lids out here,” Kirby said, “so it was nice to find something like this.” Kirby showed the ring to a friend, Todd Ehling, who suggested Kirby look for the rightful owner. That set in a motion an ef-
On Saturday, zombies and sport combined in the Running Dead 5K run at the Renaissance Festival grounds in Bonner Springs. At top, David Feldner (center) of Lansing was pelted by a bag filled with flour thrown by the undead Jessica Drake. Molly Feldner was nearby. Immediately above, Bridget Koan of Kansas City had her face painted by BJ Bigham-Trupp before the run.
.B. Wiltz had what he thought was a brilliant idea, so he got together with the Louisiana Swamp Man to cook it
up. Wiltz, whose career roots are in construction, decided he would teach young urban men how to build hotdog carts, and friend Jeff Guillory Jr., more commonly known in cooking circles as Swamp Man, would teach the guys how to make Louisiana sausage. They call their project Brother from Another, and they debuted it Saturday morning at Kansas City Mayor Sly James’ first Ideas Fair at the Central Public Library downtown. Wiltz and Guillory joined about 40 other residents who brought their visions to the four-hour fair, presented in conjunction with the Mayor’s Challenge Cabinet and the city’s chief innovation officer. The ideas tackled public health, sustainability, new uses of media and technology, neighborhood organizing, community art projects and crime prevention. James later talked with some who produced new ideas and commended them for their innovation, saying that the imporSEE IDEAS | A6
@
Visit KansasCity.com for a photo gallery from the Running Dead 5K.
FAMILY WANTED Mark, 11, is a friendly boy who’s good at helping around the house and picking up his toys. He likes watching TV and playing video games, but he enjoys playing outside, too. Recess is his favorite time at school because he’s able to run around. Mark hopes for a home that has pets. He’ll also need a family that is very patient and supportive. To learn more about adoption, visit www.adoptkskids.org or call 877-4575430. Mark’s case number is CH-5398. | The Star
SEE RING | A6
IN CASE OF HORNET ATTACK, GRAB A RACKET
I
n nearly half a newspaper life spent traveling the world and writing about other places, other cultures, it never once occurred to me to visit China. That’s not to suggest I bear any antipathy for the Chinese people. But I had no desire to be led around by the ear to see only what some government escort allowed me to see, which was often said to be the fate of a Western journalist in the Maoist years. What’s more, as the father of two wonderful daughters, I found nothing to admire about a country whose population policies encouraged female infanticide. Those footloose years are large-
C.W. GUSEWELLE
COMMENTARY
ly behind me now, but even if they were not I recently came across a new and even more persuasive reason to avoid traveling there. It goes by the name of Vespa mandarinia, more commonly called the Asian giant hornet. And the adjective “giant” describes it accurately. Its body, gold and brown striped, is 5 centimeters (rough-
ly 2 inches) long, and its wingspan is 7.6 centimeters (3 inches). In other words, it is almost the size of a hummingbird, and has a quarter-inch-long stinger, through which it can inject a poison able to cause anaphylactic shock and kidney damage in an adult human. They nest and travel in swarms, and according to a brief New York Times report out of Shanghai, recent hornet attacks in that province have killed 43 people and injured more than 1,600, including children. Fleeing on foot doesn’t help, and in fact it’s said to provoke pursuit by the swarm, which can travel at 25 mph. So that’s the bad news. The worse news is that Vespa mandarinia’s range
is not limited to the Orient. One Sunday in July of last year, an Asian giant hornet was said to have been seen in a park in Arlington Heights, Ill. Other alleged sightings have been reported from Nebraska, Detroit, Virginia Beach, North Carolina and several Florida locations. I’ve never encountered one of these nasty creatures, though I’ve been stung by lesser insects. Once, during a military training exercise in Georgia, a fellow infantryman and I dug a foxhole and hunkered down in it while machine gun fire raked by overhead. Too late, we discovered we’d dug into a nest of bumblebees. Getting up would have been fatal, so we just stuck it out
with dime-size bees clinging to our fatigues and stinging us through the cloth. And in a storage shed outside my Ozark cabin, red wasps nest during the winter. Having been stung more than once when opening that shed door in spring, I now go armed with an aerosol can of wasp and hornet spray. But if the Asian giants happen to find their way to my country neighborhood, I’ll need some better defense than a spray. Because the giants are immune to it. If they come after you, the literature says, your best hope is a tennis or badminton racket. For more of C.W. Gusewelle, go to gusewelle.kansascity.com.
FOR PHOTO ALBUMS OF EVENTS ACROSS KANSAS CITY, SEE COMMUNITY FACES AT WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
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LOCAL | THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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IDEAS: Officials hope connections will continue ‘beyond this room’ FROM A4
tance of an event like the fair is highlighting what citizens are doing to make Kansas City its best. “Some of the ideas have been launched with zero funds and have zero budget, and others have been able to secure some funding,” said Ashley Hand, a spokeswoman from the mayor’s office. “We have brought together some amazing projects and hope to inspire other residents to turn their own ideas into projects that would benefit the city,” Hand said. “What we hope is that this fair is building great awareness about some of what is
happening in the city. We hope it will help to build relationships that will grow beyond this room.” Zay Thompson’s booth was next to Nick WardBopp’s booth. The two men started talking and found they both hope to promote the arts and craftsmanship in the urban core. Ward-Bopp wants to open a place at 31st and Cherry streets where he would have wood and metal workshops. Residents would bring their materials, and Ward-Bopp’s Makers Village would provide the expensive tools and equipment and guidance needed for residents to build
their designs. First he has to renovate the building. He expects to open in late 2014. Thompson and fiancee Stacy Lindgren are leasing a historic building at the southwest corner of Armour Boulevard and Troost Avenue. With financial support from the owner, they intend to rehab it and turn it into housing, commercial and art space. Plans for the KC Arts Ecovillage project call for the second floor to have about seven apartments; the first floor would have space for small businesses and nonprofits, maybe a cafe and a gallery. On the back lawn,
Thompson would like to see a community garden growing around sculptures to “create something that is not only going to be food for the people living in the building but also for the folks living in the neighborhood,” he said. “We know there is a lot of artistic and sustainability energy being focused on Troost Avenue and we want to collaborate with that,” Thompson said. Lindgren said she and Thompson were really excited about the opportunity the fair presented to meet other groups and to collaborate. “We want to be part of the movement in Kansas City
where new ideas are celebrated,” she said. “I think Kansas City is ripe for new artistic, creative, innovative and entrepreneurial-type ideas.” That’s the spirit Wiltz and Guillory are counting on to make Brother from Another take off. For now Wiltz is working with five young men building carts in his south Kansas City garage. At the fair he connected with people interested in joining him to teach the young men some business operation skills. If the young men stick with it, bring their friends
and so on, they could learn a self-sustaining business, he said. “If we link some of the things we are doing here together, there is no reason why we can’t solve some of the problems we have in this city,” Wiltz said. “I want to plant the seed for some young people (to know) that you can do it for yourself and help your community. You know it is not what we build that’s most important, it’s who we build.” To reach Mará Rose Williams, call 816-234-4419 or send email to mdwilliams @kcstar.com.
RING: Librarian helped search FROM A4
fort that started with Shawnee Mission West librarian Rhonda Mundy. “I got hold of this superhelpful librarian. She went above and beyond in helping me find a name,” Kirby said. Kirby told Mundy he had found the ring that included the graduation year, the first name Mark and the initials MEP on the inside. Mundy searched through yearbooks and determined that Mark Phillips was the man Kirby was looking for. She even sent him a copy of Phillips’ senior picture from the yearbook.
Mundy says she gets unusual requests for help regularly, from adoptees looking for birth parents to alumni looking for old classmates, but this was the first time she helped reunite a class ring with its owner. Once Kirby had a name, he still had to find the person. He convinced television stations in Raleigh and Kansas to do reports about the missing ring. One of Phillips’ classmates, Steve Parker, saw the news report and recognized that it belonged to his childhood friend Phillips. Parker had lost track of
Phillips, but remembered seeing an obituary for Phillips’ father. He found that and contacted Phillips’ brother, who lives in California. Mark Phillips said he got an unusual voice mail from his brother a few days later, telling him that Parker was looking for him to tell him about the new-found ring. Parker told him to visit Kirby’s website. “I looked at it and said, ‘That’s my ring,’ ” Phillips said. Phillips tried the ring on last weekend. It didn’t fit. “I’ll have it resized and wear it again,” Phillips said.
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The Star earns 2 commentary awards The Kansas City Star won two media awards from the Kansas City Association of Black Journalists, the group announced Saturday. Jeneé Osterheldt won the features commentary award for “Not Going to Spend My Life Being a Color.” Mary Sanchez won the metro commentary award
for “Seeking Fairness for KC Charter.” The organization also awarded scholarships to students who participated in the KCABJ Urban Student Journalism Academy this past summer. Tonyae Thomas, a junior at the Plaza Academy, received the KCABJ-Lucile H. Bluford Scholarship. Briana Simmons, a junior
at Missouri State University, received the KCABJ-Roy Wilkins Scholarship. Molly Dillinger, a senior at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, received the KCABJ-Laura R. Hockaday Scholarship. Zach Kilgas, a junior at Liberty High School, received the KCABJ-Nancy Diuguid Scholarship. | The Star
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
SMALL-TOWN
STRONG
DAY ONE OF A THREE-DAY SERIES
A way of life in Overbrook, Kan.
O
VERBROOK, Kan. | Kids are passing around a baby Story By RICK MONTGOMERY Photos by RICH SUGG
raccoon at the wedding reception. The groom’s mother, Cathy Sowers, rolls her
The Kansas City Star
eyes. “That’s Rascal,” she explains. “I came home
one day to see a Styrofoam box in the kitchen. Opened it up and
there he was. I was, like, ‘What the…?’ ” Her husband, David, who had found the orphaned raccoon, really was not intending to bring Rascal to the wedding party until he learned The Star was showing up to look at life in a small town. “There you have it,” his wife says. “Small town.” Then she asks me: Why pick us? They’ve been asking that a lot. “Not much goes on here,” they point out. No breaking stories, I agree. There’s life, death, but few headlines. The Star wondered, though, how a small town endures in 2013. So the newspaper suggested I find one sleepy speck on the map and spend plenty of time there this year. Pundits have been writing America’s small-town obituaries for decades, and the recent recession delivered more trouble. Yet towns hang on for reasons that seem hazy from a distance. Many of us have connections to small towns and want them to last if they can, even though more than 80 percent of Americans today dwell in the cities and suburbs. SEE SMALL | A14
At top, nearly a fifth of the local population attended the June wedding reception of Madison Swisher and Derrick Sowers at the Overbrook Fairgrounds. Above, flower girl Trysten Sowers, 4, kept a rescued raccoon named Rascal company at the event.
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
SMALL: Residents won’t let go of town FROM A13
Still, the Sowers family and others want to know, why pick Overbrook? For starters, the town’s century-old motto — emblazoned on two water towers — darned near demands it: “Don’t Overlook Overbrook.” The town is neither idyllic nor backward. It isn’t booming. It’s not busting, either, and its heartbeat is strong. Roughly 1,000 people choose this place 30 miles southwest of Lawrence, and some families have stayed through parts of three centuries. And in almost every way, it’s a small town that feels like one, offering scenes that hardly ever play out in the city. Laundry tumbles unattended in the dryers at W & W Laundromat. Often a customer will forget and return the next day to find the clean load on a shelf, folded. As dawn broke before the Sowers wedding, dozens flocked into town for a “poultry swap,” which is exactly what it sounds like. And the nuptials of Derrick Sowers and Madison Swisher reflected even more about the rhythms of small-town life (beyond Rascal being on the guest list). The bride didn’t wait to finish college to get married. The groomsmen had been tight since early grade school — so tight they called the groom’s father Dad, even if he wasn’t theirs. The newlyweds climbed into Derrick’s all-terrain Razr to drive from the church to the reception at the fairgrounds, which would’ve gotten them pulled over in the burbs. Also, where else can couples claim their wedding was attended by nearly a fifth of the local population? The dancing goes on as darkness consumes the water tower at the party’s edge. The motto fades to black for another evening. “Don’t Overlook Overbrook.” Next morning, many residents will rise before the sun. They know what I’ve learned: In times that seem to be against them, small towns stay alive only because people want them to.
Well, it’s home So there’s Pat Martin, 78, climbing aboard her John Deere mower to ride to the four-block stretch that passes for downtown Overbrook. The mower pulls a 55-gallon barrel in a homemade cart. Martin fills the barrel with water from the volunteer fire station spigot and motors to each flower pot on the main drag to soak the petunias. Cliff O’Bryhim, around sun-up, starts butchering meat at Overbrook’s only grocery. The town needs him to show. Residents talk of how O’Bryhim’s Thriftway, a third-generation fixture, almost single-handedly keeps the business district afloat. What a shame that Cliff’s sons don’t want to take it over. Rotary meetings start at 7 a.m. every Tuesday. For retired banker Max Friesen — longtime town treasurer, fire chief, Scoutmaster, church choir director and unofficial patriarch — one more notable achievement was to be notched this summer: Sixty years of perfect Rotary attendance. Another group, Overbrook Pride, meets at 7 a.m. monthly, on third Saturdays. Eight or nine stalwarts show, including Martin. At the May gathering, she reported on her neighbors’ tasks in planning the Santa Fe Trail Festival in September: “Carol Baughman is showing off quilts. Bill Shipp is doing bingo. The Girl Scouts are doing funnel cakes. Ed Harmison will talk about the Santa Fe Trail.” The mayor will serve biscuits and gravy. These, of course, aren’t professional event planners. No paid staff handles the details of procuring 12 gallons of gravy to go with the mayor’s biscuits. It takes work to keep a little town ticking in 2013. Businesses here struggle. Schools consolidate and disappear, off to other communities. Fuel costs for driving to a job 30 miles away keep climbing. The locals have long prayed for a physician to settle in and replace Doc Ruble, who retired in 1993. Fundraising is a constant: The 4-H, the Scouts, Overbrook Pride, high school band, Christmas displays — to be an Overbrookian means getting hit up. And don’t think it goes unknown if you say no. Still, one sunrise after another, they put in the work and choose to stay. For many, it’s because the parents live just down the road, or a sibling lives next door. For second-grade teacher Angie Portlock, working in the same school that she attended — and where her mother also taught, and a son is now enrolled — has real meaning. Or consider Allene Hesseltine, known as “Pug” throughout her 91
years. Her great-grandfather co-founded Overbrook in the 1880s. Her 93-year-old sister — Doris Marshall, or “Tommie” — resides at the Brookside Retirement Community, the largest employer in town. The distant relatives of Pug and Tommy, by bloodline or marriage, might be any longtime resident of Osage County. Pug has lived nowhere else but for a few years in Kansas City, where she worked for a wholesaler during World War II. When I ask what has kept her here, she flashes a quizzical look I found common when asking that question. “Well, it’s home,” Pug says. “It’s family.” Besides, “People from all over remember that slogan, ‘Don’t Overlook Overbrook,’ ” she says. They do? “They sure do. You mention where you’re from to people in the cities ... and that’s the first thing they’ll say: ‘Don’t Overlook Overbrook.’ ” Certainly, the townsfolk have done yeoman’s work trying to pitch it. The message is on a mural splashed across a machine shed that commuters to Topeka pass every day on U.S. 56, an undulating, two-lane blacktop. When Wade Sisson launched a “Don’t Overlook Overbrook” Facebook page in 2009, it drew more than 300 friends in 10 days. Unfortunately, scores of them were expatriots who had moved on, and today the motto serves as much as a plea to Overbrook’s own: Don’t take your hometown for granted, or it’s apt to shrivel over time. The older residents say they won’t allow it. Many of them worry, though, that future generations might. “Younger people aren’t into joining clubs and attending meetings,” says Gerry Coffman, one of Overbrook’s most active volunteers. Small-town life is not for everybody. Growing up in Overbrook, Kelly Lehman’s family was as close as any. Close enough to include “double relatives.” Her mother’s brother had married her father’s sister. “Double aunt, double uncle,” she said. “Their offspring are my double cousins.” It was hard to leave them all, including her sisters, who stayed to pass their upbringing on to their children. But as Lehman, 35, explained to me in an email from Denver, she wanted to live around big-city amenities, “different foods, ethnicities, religions, people of a different mindset ... “Diversity was just not something found in Overbrook.” Although that’s changed a bit since she left.
Pat Martin, 78, regularly rises with the sun to ride her mower along Overbrook’s main drag, watering all the flower pots.
Lois Harris, 93, is known around Overbrook as the pie lady. She spends many a Saturday morning making pies from scratch then placing them on racks to cool. Her delicacies are sold at the livestock sale barn, where a popular community lunch is held Mondays.
Tradition in flux A lot has changed about small towns since perhaps you left your own. The main streets don’t look very main anymore. The retail action for many small communities is out at the interstate exits. Which Overbrook doesn’t have. And yet, about 13,300 out-of-the-way towns nationwide survive with populations of fewer than 5,000. In Kansas, 80 percent of the incorporated cities have just 2,000 people or fewer. The tiniest has a population of five. Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow suggests small-town people share a simple reason not to be where the economic and cultural clamor is. “They hate sitting in traffic,” said Wuthnow, a Lyons, Kan., native and author of “Small-Town America,” a new examination of the lifestyle they favor. Many prefer tradition over change — not that the latest technology has overlooked Overbrook. In some cases, the digital age helps them live there. From his office computer, Kevin Stone, pastor of Overbrook Bible Church, can answer for online readers from around the globe questions about faith via his side job with GotQuestions .org International. At the BP, where the ol’ boys gather for coffee with their biscuits and gravy, retiree Larry Woodson thumbs his smartphone to prove his talking points. Joggers here wear earbuds, like anywhere. Students at Santa Fe Trail High School, 6 miles west of town, sit on the hallway floors during breaks with their heads down, tweeting. Not that everything’s gone digital. Landline numbers are easy to jot down, because almost all begin with the same four numerals: 665-7.... That means you only need to memorize the last three digits to phone your neighbors. Conrad’s Bar and Grill has a jukebox that can take requests from cellphones. But the restaurant still won’t take credit cards. Nor will the barber, who rings up $11 haircuts on a hand-cranked register that goes ka-ching and displays the price on tiles.
Ben Winans got a haircut by town barber Paul Mohler, while Dustin Brownlee and his two sons, Dorian Schallock, 13, and Dalan Brownlee, 4, wait their turns.
@Go to projects.Kansas City.com/overbrook for more photos and videos from Overbrook.
COMING THIS WEEK Monday: An auto mechanic gambles on moving to town and making a living on main street.
People from throughout the area come to Overbrook to take part in the poultry swap, which is held two Saturdays a month, from May through October. Most early mornings, the ol’ boys of Overbrook gather at the BP to drink cups of coffee and chat about current events and goings on about town.
Tuesday: Residents rally to build a gathering place after receiving a $1 million surprise.
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At the livestock sale barn, ladies take Turns out that safety, according to cash only to serve a popular communi- polls by the University of Minnesota’s ty lunch on Mondays. Extension Center for Community VitalThat’s where I first heard about the ity, is among the big reasons families patriarch. still choose small towns. “You ought to talk to Max,” said Rita, “The No. 1 reason is slower pace of the cashier. “Max Friesen.” life,” said Ben Winchester, a research She pointed him out when Friesen fellow there. walked in — a man in a purple K-State “No. 2, safety and security. No. 3, lowsweatshirt, stooped at 85, with short er cost of housing.” white hair and rosy cheeks. Religion is a mighty draw, too. He ordered a slice of made-fromOn Sundays, about 600 people from scratch pie baked two days earlier in several counties flock to Overbrook for the kitchen of Lois Harris, 93, known a contemporary service at Grace Comaround here as the pie lady. munity Church. Friesen could’ve boasted of his own They include a large contingent of achievements. motorcyclists, the “Prairie Fire Riders” Running the Kansas State Bank for 30 of the Osage County Christian Motoryears. Co-founding the retirement cen- cyclists Association, many of whom ter. So devoted to perfect attendance serve as ushers in their riding vests. with Rotary International, on vacation When worship is underway, more he’d pull into meetings in Europe and people fill the Grace sanctuary and not understand a word. Overbrook’s two other churches than He didn’t mention that at the lunch. occupy the rest of the town. Instead, Friesen, the consummate booster, spoke of how wonderful Over- Class dismissed brook is to commuters who covet a Census numbers from 2010 tell a stoquiet, country life on the greener edges ry, but not the whole one. of the Flint Hills. Ninety-seven percent of the residents And he introduced me to others. are white — typical for little Kansas “Butch Foster, come on over and talk towns. About a quarter are age 65 or olto The Kansas City Star,” Friesen said to der. a man in coveralls at the counter. Median home value was $115,000, and “Butch’s family goes back to the Civil 10 percent of residents received food War.” stamps, both slightly lower than the Foster, 63, maintains roads for the statewide average. county. As he stepped from the counter, The black population, well, tripled he said: between 2000 and 2010 — from one “Max, you’ve been calling me Butch person to three, because of white famsince I was 10. My real name is Jim. Or ilies adopting youngsters of color. James.” Eleven people in 2010 reported being Friesen slapped a hand on the table- of mixed race. top: “I didn’t know your name was Jim!” Now there are at least 12. Ashley Nor did some others in Overbrook. Fischer, who is white and grew up in Jim Foster later would attribute the Overbrook, in 2011 delivered a daughter staying power of his childhood nick- named Taegyn, whose father is black name to the nature of small towns: and lives elsewhere. Traditions die hard. “Honestly, (Taegyn’s acceptance) “That nickname,” he said, “wouldn’t hasn’t been an issue, since I’m from go away if I held a funeral for it.” here and everyone knows my family,” said Fischer, a teacher engaged to marAround town ry a local man. Head west into town on U.S. 56. Also, she believes, small-town mores Hang a left at a sign that reads “Jack’s have evolved with the larger culture, inCafe: Food & Fuel,” serving breakfast tertwined as we are by mass entertainbut not run by a Jack in a quarter-centu- ment and satellite news. ry. No fuel pumps anymore, either. “I don’t think the kids really notice Slow to 20 mph. that she’s darker,” she said. You’re on Maple Street, though the When I sought to pick the brains of locals don’t usually call it that. young people, the Santa Fe Trail School To most it’s “main street,” or the main District could not have been more weldrag. It is a wide, sun-soaked avenue coming of my request to visit some boasting two of Overbrook’s most sa- classes. cred possessions — the municipal It was the opinion of Kristy Dekat’s swimming pool and a library under ex- journalism students that social standpansion. ing is not much of an issue in small Another huge point of pride: Only towns. It’s in the larger cities that the three banks in all of Osage County rich and poor live separately. weathered the Great Depression (14 “Small towns,” one student said, failed), and two of them still do busi- “really don’t appreciate snobs.” ness on main in Overbrook. A longtime teacher said the wealthMain also features an ancient City iest person in Overbrook “might be the Hall, post office, Conrad’s, farmer’s co- guy in the dirtiest coveralls sitting in op, O’Bryhim’s Thriftway and the Quilt the barber chair.” Connection, which attracts out-ofI brought this up with the barber, and towners on Saturdays. he suspected that could be true. But it Nothing stays open 24/7. Not even was hard to know, he said, because few fast-food chains have found Overbrook. are fool enough to crow about their Casey’s General Store is the only joint riches in a town of 1,000. serving pizza. While working on a customer, MohThe business district is pretty much ler said people are wise to be humble dead all afternoon, save for the grocery and get along with their fellow Overstore, because most residents of work- brookians because they can’t avoid living age commute to city jobs. ing with them: “It’s not like people are walking up “Let’s say Bob has a flat tire. So you and down buying ice cream sodas, I tell stop and help. Well, I might be telling you,” says the town barber, Paul Moh- myself, ‘I thought I didn’t like Bob.’ And, ler. really, I don’t.” Just one barber chair. In a back room, But still Mohler helps, knowing he’ll he keeps a couple dozen wheelchairs be seeing Bob at the grocery store. and walkers for customers to take home Even disagreements about politics if they ever need them. are treated with humor by the ol’ boys One commemorative signpost dubs at the BP. Maple, or main, “Pat Martin Blvd.,” a “Jon here just went to his proctolonod to the woman who drives the flow- gist, and they found his head,” said Reer-watering cart. publican Woodson about the guy Street names are seldom spoken, across the table, Jon Wilhite, a former though, in places this size. Democratic state legislator. “I know where everybody lives,” says Elk Township, where Overbrook is Mary Rappard Anderson. “I’ll just tell located, votes about 65 percent with the you to go three blocks that way, turn left GOP. and Wade’s house is the second one But among the eight ol’ boys drinking down. coffee, there is common ground in dis“Why do I need to know the street liking their own parties’ leadership: names?” The Dems don’t care for President Ba(Incidentally, it was outside the home rack Obama, and the Republicans gripe of Wade Sisson — author of a book on about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. the Titanic — where residents last winter awed over a giant snow sculpture of Know thy neighbor the doomed luxury liner. It sunk as it You hear it a lot in small towns — melted.) “Everyone knows each other’s busiOn many front yards, households dis- ness,” people say. play family names carved into stone But it’s not all true. markers. The first names of all six The ol’ boys at the BP, for example, members of the Fleming family are reached for their smartphones after I burned onto wood shingles dangling mentioned that a state website lists at out front. least six housing units in town occuUnthinkable in the city, for fear of pied by ex-convicts registered as sex offlim-flammers and abductors. fenders. Also unthinkable: Doors on some On main, florist Linda Kennison rehouses haven’t been locked in decades, called the goof she made when assumthe homeowners swear. ing to know somebody, a local, who At least one Elm Street home built in stepped into Overbrook Floral shortly the 1920s, lovingly cared for and loaded after Kennison and mother Ilo Downs with valuables, has two ground-floor launched the shop in 1986. windows that open and shut but can’t The Overbrook man bought flowers lock. for Valentine’s Day. A few weeks later, No latches — maybe none in 90 when his wife walked in, Kennison years, far as the owner knows. asked: “Did you like the flowers your He shrugged at the thought of an in- husband got?” truder slipping in: “The neighbors will Well, the wife hadn’t received flowlook out for us” when the family is away ers. And their marriage didn’t last. on vacations. “I learned then and there — never, On weekday mornings at the Casey’s, never again,” said Kennison. commuters grab energy drinks while Others were curious to learn that, actheir cars idle outside, unlocked. cording to a 2010 study, small-town resLock a car in town and the locals know you are from a city. SEE TOWN | A16
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
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TOWN: Filling the shoes of a community leader FROM A14
idents fall into three broad categories, each with distinct perspectives and backgrounds. In her Ph.D. dissertation, “Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America,” sociologist Lyn C. Macgregor zeroed in on the community of Viroqua, Wis., population 4,000, about 90 miles outside Madison. There, she identified the Regulars, the Alternatives and the Main Streeters. They dwell in Overbrook, too. The Regulars include the Goodyear twins, Todd and Tadd, lifelong residents who help when something needs excavating. Police Chief Ed Harmison — “Hard-ass Harmison” to some, “Harmless Harmie” to others — qualifies as a Regular because he knows local history and which residents are plain trouble. He’ll bolt from a nice dinner with his wife when duty calls. A fellow Regular said of Harmison: “In small towns, you get only two choices in law enforcement — Andy or Barney. Those are the only two. We’re lucky to have Andy.” The Regulars are blue collar, mostly. And, as a rule, they aren’t wild about change. “Butch” Foster (or Jim) sees the push for growth as threatening something special. “Small-town people typically treat land as an acquisition, not an investment. That’s a whole different philosophy from the city, where everything is seen as an investment.” So what if Overbrook’s population stays around 1,000, Foster asks. Is that a problem? It’s already beginning to feel to him, and to many other Regulars, not as tight-knit as the place they knew 40 years ago. “When I graduated from Overbrook High in 1968, I knew at least two-thirds of the people who lived around here,” he told Friesen at the sale barn lunch. “Now I might know … 25 percent?” The people Foster is least likely to know are the Alternatives. Cheryl Miller is one. She moved to town last year. Having grown up in Michigan cities, Miller came to Kansas to work a state job. Budget cuts presented an early-retirement option, and Miller left Lawrence to follow “my quiet voice,” to downsize and escape the traffic. “I never lived in a small town in my life,” she says. But with the Internet and the phone headset she wears, she can teach “teleclasses” in marketing and social media. She bought a house built in 1875, planted 13 fruit trees, started canning tomatoes and growing beans. She has a dream of turning the threecar garage into a community theater, showing documentaries. Miller didn’t plan on this, but it feels right — sustainability, back to nature: “I’m hoping there’s going to be a resurgence of those simpler values, and we’ll see people move back to places like Overbrook.” Hoping for the same are the Main Streeters — the third small-town group identified by sociologist Macgregor.
Newlyweds Madison Swisher and Derrick Sowers drove to their wedding reception in Sowers’ all-terrain Razr — a ride that surely would have gotten them pulled over in the burbs.
Growth is good, the Main Streeters believe, but it requires a lot of teamwork. Many of the Main Streeters, including Friesen, weren’t born here. So some have to overcome the “newbie” tag. “Oh, yes, I’m still a newbie,” says Marilyn Anderson, active in Friends of the Library. “And I’ve lived here since 1976.” Main Streeters put in the long hours of planning that a community needs to keep things from sliding. Those who sit on the town council, which meets monthly, know that sessions can drag for upward of five hours. Five hours, unpaid, to almost midnight — talk given to tedious things like alley drainage, sewer-line issues and backflow regulations. Or to critical things such as the swimming pool. Who’s going to teach the kids to stay safe at the pool? That would be the Rotary Club, a weekly assemblage of Overbrook’s Main Streeters. Mayor Don Schultz — an ex-Marine, smart, drawling, dry-as-dust funny — took time along with six other Rotarians to visit Overbrook’s K-2 school and get the pool safety message across. “Do you all know what’s down there on the corner, that hole in the ground?” Schultz asks a group of 20 kindergartners. “The swimming pool!” they reply. “And, hey,” Schultz says. “Have any of you been out to City Lake Park to fish?” A boy’s hand shoots up. “My family went fishing there. We caught a dolphin,” the boy says. “You did? You know, I wondered where that dolphin went.” But on to pool safety. Ol’ boy Wilhite is Josh the Baby Otter. In a locker room, he sweats in a woolly costume with enormous feet and an otter head the size of a beanbag chair. Wilhite is 78. Josh the Baby Otter will serve as a lesson to stay with adults in water, to learn to float with your mama and papa otters. But while kindergartners love being high-fived by a huge dancing otter, Wilhite doesn’t quite know why he volunteered for this gig.
After the first of his four performances of the day, he unzipped the costume and stripped off his Rotary Tshirt. “Man, that’s hot out there,” a dripping Wilhite told his spotter, Vic Robbins, a fellow Rotarian who took time off his engineering job to help with the suit. Still, the kids learn something that might spare them from a tragedy. That’s why the Main Streeters are here.
Once booming One other time a newsman picked Overbrook and gave it a fleeting 90 minutes of national fame. October 1957. That’s when NBC’s Dave Garroway, host of TV’s “Wide Wide World,” arrived to report on efforts to modernize medical care in small towns. The star of the show was Overbrook’s new young doctor, James Ruble. The main drag boasted Doc Ruble’s new clinic, car dealerships, a newspaper, clothier, hardware store and one of the oldest family-run pharmacies in Kansas. Overbrook had only 500 folks then, and it boomed for a while. Farm couples came dressed up on Saturday nights to dine and dance. On weeknights, they rooted for the basketball team. They were Gophers. The high school bonded everybody, and it set intense rivalries with the Colts of nearby Scranton and the Vikings of Carbondale. But state budget pressures and tiny class sizes could not be overlooked. The three districts reluctantly consolidated in 1969 and a new high school, home of the Chargers, arose from a cornfield west of Overbrook. “Yes. There are still some hard feelings about that,” says Wilhite, who served on the school board at the time. The population began to idle at about 1,000 in 1980. Then longtime shops, including the pharmacy, started to fold. The closings coincided with the rise of bigbox stores in Topeka, Lawrence and Ottawa, each just a 30-minute drive. Four years ago, consolidation advanced further. Overbrook lost its middle school, and the Gophers vanished
altogether. “Basically, we were going broke,” says Santa Fe Trail district Superintendent Steve Pegram. The children now start schooling at Overbrook’s K-2, then hop buses to attend third and fourth grades in Scranton, fifth through eighth in Carbondale and finish up in the high school that sits all alone in between. Now, from kindergarten through graduation, they’re the Chargers. “The kids are fine with it,” Pegram says. “A number of the parents, not so.” Some moved. Some switched to home-schooling. Other things have changed, too. Former resident John Shepard of rural Osage County, back in town one Saturday for a community-wide garage sale: “When I grew up here, this was the most wonderful place in the world.” On a bench at the fairgrounds, longtime resident Kathy Coffman listened as Shepard continued. “Then you had these people from Topeka and Lawrence moving in, these commuters,” he said. “For them, it probably seemed like they were out on the farm! “But those people brought their city rules with them. They come here and say, ‘We’re going to zone you.’ You need to fix up your property. Well, I live where I want. I’ll zone you.” Coffman let him vent. “Things change,” she said. “You either adjust to change or, I guess, you get out.” Shepard threw up his arms. “Hello? That’s me. Got out.” Things do change. In recent years, town leaders even tweaked the motto: “Don’t Overlook Overbrook — A Town with a Great Future Built on a Trail of Past Success.” True, there’s been success. The consolidated school district every year meets federal Adequate Yearly Progress requirements. And the Brookside Retirement Community recently won its third-straight nursing home award, given annually by the state of Kansas to just a few facilities. And that’s about as big as the news gets here. (Strike that. Just this month, a false story on a sa-
tirical website placed an annual Gourmet Dog Meat Festival in “the modest hamlet of Overbrook, KS.” The bogus post went viral, prompting calls from around the nation.) One day in 1991, some real news hit. “You ought to read Max Friesen’s autobiography,” a local librarian suggested. “He writes about that day.” Sure enough, Friesen invited me to his split-level home to lend me his last copy of “To the Max,” the 85-page story of his life. It is a three-ring binder of memories, describing his warm friendship with Doc Ruble’s family, the hunting trips and profitable investments they made together. Chapter 17 is titled “Attempted Bank Robbery.” It tells of how two men wearing ski masks slipped into the Friesen home — it was unlocked — and tied up Max and wife Dee. They demanded a code for entering the vault at the local bank where Friesen was president. Friesen told them the vault was programmed not to open at certain hours. Frustrated, the home invaders rooted around the house and didn’t find much of value. They took the couple’s car. Turns out that one of the culprits was an acquaintance of the Friesen family who had figured that a businessman of Max’s caliber must be oozing in valuables. In small towns, that is a miscalculation. All he had was junk, one man told the court that sent him to prison. Friesen wrote: “I always thought that (the robber he knew) would look me up after he got out, to apologize in person, but he never did … “This ends the robbery story, but I want to repeat again and again how much admiration I have for our law enforcement people who were able to crack this case!” The consummate booster.
Dying famous “Everybody dies famous in a small town,” sings country artist Miranda Lambert. It’s true. Outside O’Bryhim’s grocery, a marble bench memorializes LeOra Woodruff, who worked there well into her 80s, in addition to cleaning the post office and First Security Bank, just to stay active. This summer, town Councilman Jon Brady and his son donated time at City Lake Park to install a bench in memory of Blair Flynn, who fed the geese each morning. A plaque at the swimming pool honors Nina L. Schlink: “Life-long resident, rural school teacher, farmer and lover of children.” In 1957, she willed $50,000 to get the pool started. Each loss leaves a hole. Some leave a crater. In July — just before he was to be honored for 60 years of perfect Rotary attendance — Max Friesen fell on a farm field he owned. Medical technicians from the volunteer Fire Depart-
ABOUT THE STAFF Rick Montgomery joined The Star in 1986 and has spent most of his career covering national issues. In 2007 he co-authored “Fatal Failures,” an investigative project that revealed hundreds of cases of front air bags not inflating in fatal, front-end crashes. That work netted several awards. Montgomery also helped write “Kansas City: An American Story,’’ an awardwinning book on local history. Montgomery is a native of Des Moines, Iowa, and graduate of Iowa State University. Photojournalist Rich Sugg started his career with The Star in 1985. He is the Star’s principal photographer for the coverage of NCAA basketball. His work on and off the basketball court has garnered many awards. Sugg recently documented the construction of a major art project in the form of a Pakistani-style truck built in Kansas City. The photos were published in Star Magazine, and photos and video appeared on kansascity.com He is a native of Hutchinson, Kan., and a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism.
ment came to his aid. At the hospital, Friesen seemed to be on the mend with a new pacemaker in his chest. But he took a turn. He died a few days after calling a fellow Rotarian from the hospital to say he wouldn’t make the Tuesday meeting. “The closeness we have in a small community, it hurts when you lose someone,” said Mayor Schultz. “It really hurts.” Hundreds attended Friesen’s funeral at the United Methodist Church, built in 1983 on land he donated. Two fire pumpers waited outside to lead the procession to the Overbrook cemetery, where Friesen had served a half-century as treasurer. Pickups wedged in the parking lot or on the grass belonged to laborers taking time off their landscaping and construction jobs. Not many mourners showed up wearing neckties. A grave was dug next to Friesen’s wife of 60 years, and just a few gravesites north of his good friend, Doc Ruble. Speaking at the funeral, his son Stan broached the subject on everyone’s mind. Who will be the go-to people to tackle the things that give a community purpose? “We can all help to fill those shoes,” he said. And the crowd stood to applaud. To reach Rick Montgomery, call 816-234-4410 or send email to rmontgomery@kcstar.com.
COURTESY OF STAN FRIESEN |
Max Friesen in his 1928 Chevrolet truck.
Hundreds attended the funeral of Max Friesen, a retired banker and Overbrook’s unofficial patriarch. He was heavily invested in the community, serving as the longtime town treasurer, fire chief, Scoutmaster and choir director. He was buried next to his wife of 60 years.
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FROM THE COVER | THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
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ISLAND: Player’s hometown striving to preserve its traditions FROM A1
and produced a Kansas City Chief: defensive lineman Allen Bailey. It’s a people groping with how to preserve and honor their West African ancestry and customs while contending with modern times and circumstances. “It’s almost like you can see the handwriting on the wall, but you don’t want to see it,” said Cornelia Bailey, the island “griot,” an African term for tribal historian. “So we hope and pray.” No doctors live on this land draped in Spanish moss, an island that lies about an hour south of Savannah that you can only visit as a guest of one who lives there or as part of an organized tour. On this day, one such tour ends with a woman who brought her three children for a look lamenting having visited this “land of sorrow.” And while there are two paved roads, an aptly named bar called “The Trough” and a fire truck that was donated last year, there have been no schools here since 1978 and there are no cellphone services, no supermarket to speak of and no police. Not all of that is problematic, of course. “We don’t have crime, so you don’t need police,” said Cornelia Bailey, who is Allen Bailey’s great aunt. “You might need a doctor, but there are first-responders and emergency numbers to call. And we can call in a helicopter. “You live on an island, so you don’t panic. … You don’t have to go to school or have a medical degree to figure out some things.” If it sounds like a certain mysticism prevails here, well, it does. “We live by signs. Signs carry you through,” she said. “Signs of death. Signs of joy. Signs of madness. Signs of luck. Signs to plant by. Signs to fish by. Signs to give birth
DAVID GOLDMAN | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Cornelia Bailey, great aunt of Chiefs lineman Allen Bailey, enjoys life on Sapelo Island, just off the Georgia coast and hometown of the Chiefs player. “We don’t have crime, so you don’t need police,” she said.
JOHN SLEEZER | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Allen Bailey’s journey to the Chiefs was a new one for the community of Hog Hammock. He began playing organized football in seventh grade on the mainland.
by.” ❚ ❚ ❚ Live by signs as they might, there could have been no harbinger for the island cultivating a Chief, as much a fairy tale as a ferry
tale. “We have ventured out,” Cornelia Bailey said. “But Allen is our biggest adventure, that’s for sure.” Bailey is in his third year with the Chiefs. He is a re-
serve but plays frequently in opponent passing situations and is an emerging presence on a defense allowing an NFL-low 11.6 points a game entering today’s game against Cleveland at Arrowhead Stadium. “He’s a very, very athletic big man,” defensive coordinator Bob Sutton said. “I mean, he can run, change directions, has great energy. I think he is really coming on right now, honestly. And I think he can be a real factor as we move forward here. His arrow’s definitely pointing up.” Just how that arrow was put on a trajectory from Hog Hammock to Kansas City is an improbable tale. “Sometimes, people don’t believe it,” Bailey said, smiling. But it’s less so for him because he had no points of comparison in how he grew
up. And what would be the point of making comparisons, anyway? That wasn’t the island way, after all. Don’t wish for what you don’t have. Enjoy what you do have. And so Bailey did, limited as that existence might seem from the outside looking in. The sixth of seven children always had chores to do or church to attend and someone to play touch football or basketball or hideand-seek with. Never mind that you had to be wary of the wild bulls and alligators and foxes and rattlesnakes. “We couldn’t go too far because you could get lost,” he said, smiling. “That’s all we did, really: walk around. “It was adventurous. You didn’t have the dangers of a city life, cars. You could play in the streets all day.” That wasn’t the only thing
different from city life. Bailey grew up on a diet that among other exotic entrees featured armadillo, possum and raccoon, at times prepared by himself or one of his siblings since their parents often were working. “I can’t really describe the taste of raccoon because it’s so different; you have to eat it yourself,” he said, laughing. “People say it tastes like chicken. It really doesn’t. It tastes wild but not, like, gamey wild. You might have to try it.” It’s unclear what impact the diet had on Bailey, whose mother, Mary, was and is a cook at the Reynolds Mansion, a retreat on the island. But he grew to be unusually large. So much so that his great aunt is struck by his resemblance to her father, Hicks, who was better known as “Big One” and lived to be 100. Despite his size, or perhaps because of it, the understated Bailey was so shy, recalled Nancy Banks, an island guide, that she literally had to shove him out on a stage to play his role in an island Christmas show. So it was determined that he’d be better-suited to behind-the-scenes work with the lights. But Bailey was less tentative when it came to sports. He began playing organized football in seventh grade on the mainland, where, like his three sisters and three brothers, he took the ferry for school every day. This could be family time not just with brothers and sisters but his father, Alfred, who was a first mate on the boat and a good mate to all. So it was especially jarring when, at just age 53, Alfred died of complications after an apparent heart attack this past Labor Day. “Everybody knew my dadSEE CHIEFS | A21
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
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CHIEFS: Bailey attracted flood of coaches FROM A20
dy, loved my daddy,” Bailey said. “He was like me, basically, a quiet dude helping everybody.” As football became a more serious matter in high school, Bailey frequently stayed on the mainland with friends during the week because practice wouldn’t end until well after the last ferry back at 5:30 p.m., a time he rattles off to this day. The ferry would become a popular ride for college football coaches as Bailey came to excel for McIntosh County Academy and became conspicuous at camps, including those run by Nike and on campuses at the universities of Georgia and Florida. Because Bailey had a voracious work ethic to match his natural attributes, said Robby Robinson, his high school coach, “Once he was seen, it just caught like wildfire. … Literally, everybody in the country offered him” a scholarship. No one, evidently, spent more time trying to lure him than Georgia coach Mark Richt. “Oh, Coach Richt was courting him, courting him heavily,” Cornelia Bailey said. “Every time I looked up, he was courting him.” As attached as Bailey might have been to family and home, where he reckons 95 percent of the population is related to him, he also had a yearning to get away. So Richt “hounding me,” as he put it, didn’t help. And since he didn’t know what to make of Alabama’s new football coach, Nick Saban, he chose Miami … where he became a two-time All-ACC player. And no, he says, he had no dealings with rogue booster Nevin Shapiro, a statement Robinson believes he can back up when he says Bailey seldom ever left the campus and “wasn’t into all that stuff.” When a high school recreation director went to visit Bailey in Miami one spring and offered to take him to dinner wherever he wanted to go, Bailey said, “Let’s go to Denny’s,” since it had good cheeseburgers. Just weeks after being drafted in the third round of the 2011 NFL draft by the Chiefs, Bailey thrilled his family by becoming its first college graduate. ❚ ❚ ❚ Bailey remains enamored of home and goes back as often as possible, unspoiled by moving away. He is as sincere and amiable a guy as he appears to be, everyone says. “Like Flip Wilson said, ‘What you see is what you get,’ ” said Cornelia Bailey, who says that means he doesn’t drink or carouse “whatsoever” and is a magnetic role model for the few children left on the island. “He’s like a giant, with all these kids walking behind him.” But what will there be for those children to follow going forward, to learn about the basket-weaving and making their own fish nets and living self-sufficiently off the land and the sea? Who will be the guardians
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR
VAHE GREGORIAN | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Hog Hammock is the only remaining community on Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast.
of the history and folklore, there to tell of the 400-plus slaves who once plucked cotton and cultivated rice and worked the sugar mill? Who will help decipher the meaning of ominoussounding places like “Behavior Cemetery” — was it thus named because unruly slaves were sent there, or was it because if they behaved it was a place to be left alone? And what of the area called “Hanging Bull”? Was it really where slaves were hanged? Who will tell about the crops and ways of life mirroring what’s to be found in Sierra Leone, where the endlessly inquisitive Cornelia Bailey traveled to learn about the ancestry that brought her family here under slavery in 1802? What she saw there were familiar things: familiar fish and familiar birds and famil-
iar bush animals and familiar foliage. If she had the resources of Bill Gates, she would want every African-American to visit such places and see what he or she comes from. “It’s like a missing link, a missing place, because to me once you get over there and set your foot on the soil of the mother country, something happens to you,” she said. “You’re not going to be the same.” But Hog Hammock soon won’t be the same, either. The average age of the island’s residents is now over 60. Even with no improvements in service, oppressive taxes are being assessed in the wake of attempts at development elsewhere on the island, which is also inhabited by a few researchers at the University of Georgia Marine Institute. Work opportunities are increasingly scarce even as the
Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society has launched the Sapelo Island Geechee Red Pea Project. Cornelia Bailey doesn’t want to see the island become a resort, like Hilton Head — doesn’t want that kind of exposure or a bridge built here. “We are the permanent natives of Sapelo; everybody else came and went,” she said. “But we’ve been here 200 years. So we figure we’re the permanent people, and we should be granted some special status for that fact.” Allen Bailey reckons it’s only a matter of time before it’s all going to change. And to what, he’s not sure. “There’s no way to know,” he said. “You can only wait.” But as long he’s “blessed to be financially stable,” he said, “I’m going to make sure we never lose our parts” of the island — which always will be part of him.
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CALL: 888.366.4222 CLICK: AAA.com/travelsale VISIT: Your Local AAA Travel Branch Offers may be withdrawn at any time without notice. AAA members must make advance reservations through AAA Travel to obtain Member Benefits and savings. Member Benefits may vary based on departure date. Travel Sale will take place October 19-November 2, 2013 during normal business hours. Your local AAA club acts as an agent for the various travel providers featured during the Travel Sale and is a motor club with a principal place of business at 3333 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa, CA 92626. CTR #1016202-80. †Savings valid for AAA members only. Save up to $1,260 per couple on new General Tours Small Group, Privately Guided or Small Ship journey when paid in full at time of booking by November 2, 2013. For travel January 1, 2014-December 31, 2014. Not valid on Hosted and Free Style journeys. Other restrictions apply. *Shipboard credit of $650 is per stateroom, valid on select Azamara Club Cruises and is based on $500 per stateroom for bookings made during the AAA Travel Sale (by November 2, 2013) combined with a $150 per stateroom standard AAA member benefit. Shipboard credit applies to oceanview staterooms and above and is valid on select departures only. Shipboard credit is in U.S. dollars, has no cash value, is not redeemable for cash, not transferable and will expire if not used by 10:00pm on the last evening of the cruise. Copyright © 2013 AAA Club Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
To reach Vahe Gregorian, call 816-234-4868 or send email to vgregorian@kcstar.com.
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*Minimum balance to open the account and obtain the Annual Percentage Yield (APY) is $1,000. The Flexible Savings account is for new money only. We have the discretion to determine what constitutes new money — if you or a member of your household have closed or made a significant withdrawal from another account with us in the past 30 days, your deposit may not be considered new money. The total balance in your Flexible Savings account(s) cannot exceed $1,000,000. A 12-month rate lock is required. Fees may reduce earnings. The rate on the Flexible Savings account may be lowered to the then-applicable “Base” rate when the rate lock period expires. Rate lock periods can be extended for an additional 12-month period at the then applicable 12-month lock rate. $125 penalty will be imposed for early closure within any rate lock period. APY is accurate as of 10/10/2013. See rate sheet for details. Other fees may apply. For consumer accounts only. See a Personal Banker for complete details.
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
THE OUTDOORS MISSOURI OPENER
Placing a call to the ducks Hunter knows how to carry on a conversation with waterfowl near Squaw Creek refuge. By BRENT FRAZEE The Kansas City Star
MOUND CITY, Mo. | As the sun peeked over the horizon, Dusty Banner placed a long-distance call. Moments after spotting a small flock of pintails speeding across a marsh near the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, he blew into the duck call he designed and pleaded with the birds to fly closer. When the squadron turned and headed toward Banner’s decoys, he got ready, and his black Labrador retriever, Teal, began to whimper with excitement. The pintails dipped down, and Banner raised up, fired two shots and hit one of his targets. And for both man and dog, another Missouri duck season was off to a successful start. “I love it when the ducks react to a call like that,” said Banner, 27, of Blue Springs. “They definitely wanted in.” For Banner, duck hunting is definitely a calling. Since he learned to carry on a conversation with waterfowl when he was in his early teens, he has been obsessed with imitating the sounds ducks make. Not only does he make duck calls through his Pin Oak Call Co., he has advanced to the World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest eight times. He finished third in the 2011 competition and is looking forward to competing in this year’s contest in November. In the meantime, though, he is content to compete for the attention of creatures far less tough to please than the human judges that assign scores. “A hen mallard would never win a calling contest,” he said as he sat in a blind on the marsh he leases. “Ducks make terrible noises out here. “Their voices will crack. Their feed calls will sound gravelly. They shriek. … They aren’t perfect. “In a calling contest, you can’t make a mistake — not at Worlds anyway. Everything has to be very smooth.” On Saturday, opening day of the duck season in the Missouri North Zone, Banner was trying to appeal to the feathered judges. With his buddy Teal at his side, he watched as the ducks put on a show just moments before shooting hours started at 7:14 a.m. Flock after flock of ducks swept down on the decoys and some even landed, almost as if to taunt the hunters. Once shooting time finally arrived, Banner took a second to admire the sunrise and said, “Opening day 2013. It’s great to be back.” Then he watched as the inevitable happened. All of those ducks that had swarmed the sky only minutes before seemingly disappeared. “That’s the way it always happens,” he said with a smile. But the ducks did show up again, although not in the same numbers
BRENT FRAZEE | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Dusty Banner called a distant flock of ducks as his retriever, Teal, kept watch during the Missouri hunting opener Saturday.
BRENT FRAZEE | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Teal, a black Lab ownd by Dusty Banner, paused after retrieving a duck Saturday during a hunt in northwest Missouri.
as they had in the predawn moments. Banner pulled the trigger, Teal bounded out to make retrieves and all was well. In a matter of minutes, Banner added two bluewinged teal to his total and lamented the shots he missed. “I could have a limit (six ducks daily) if I had been shooting well,” Banner said. “Still, it’s just fun being out here on opening day. “This is when it all starts.” Banner, a waterfowl-hunting fa-
natic, figures he is out on the marsh 60 to 65 days a year, between his time in Missouri, Canada and Arkansas. He spent the past week in Canada, hunting a variety of ducks. But that didn’t diminish his enthusiasm over taking part in Missouri’s opener. He has been a part of that opening day since he was 4 years old and he would tag along with his dad to the blind. He still remembers the excitement of watching the adult hunters use their calls to bring the ducks in. “I still remember how my parents got me my first duck call for my 13th birthday,” he said. “They bought a call from Mike Keller (the late World Champion caller from North Kansas City). “Mike would have calling lessons every Wednesday night, and I would go. We got to be friends, and he taught me everything.” Now Banner has become an expert in his own right. He practices year-round, seldom missing a day. And he dreams of cold days when flights of mallards flock to the Squaw Creek area and react to hunters’ calls. “Those days when you get 100, 150 mallards to commit, those are the ones I look forward to,” he said. To reach outdoors editor Brent Frazee, call 816-234-4319 or send email to bfrazee@kcstar.com.
CALLING ALL DUCKS Dusty Banner of Blue Springs knows a thing or two about carrying on a conversation with ducks. He has qualified for eight World Championship Duck Calling Contests and spends as many as 40 days in his blind during the Missouri hunting season.
BRENT FRAZEE | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Pelicans paddled through a pool at Squaw Creek on Friday.
SQUAW CREEK: A MISSOURI TREASURE ❚ WHAT/WHERE: Squaw Creek is a national wildlife refuge about 100 miles northwest of Kansas City. ❚ AGE: Squaw Creek was established as a national refuge in 1935 as a refuge primarily for migrating waterfowl, but for other wildlife as well. ❚ SIZE: Squaw Creek covers 7,350 acres. It centers on wetlands, but also includes wooded areas and grasslands. ❚ WILDLIFE: Squaw Creek is one of the most significant migratory rest stops on the Mississippi Flyway. It can attract as many as 100,000 ducks in the fall and up to 1 million snow geese during the spring migration. ❚ HUNTING: No waterfowl hunting is allowed on the refuge, but many private duck clubs are located along Squaw Creek’s borders. Hunters also flock to private crop fields in late winter for the Conservation Order snow-goose season. ❚ BIRDING: It is a popular birding spot, with as many as 300 species known to either inhabit or visit the refuge. Rare species such as trumpeter swans stop at the refuge and attract plenty of attention. Bald eagles also gather in large numbers in winter, and Eagle Days presentations draw large numbers of participants. ❚ OTHER WILDLIFE: Many visitors visit the refuge to see white-tailed deer. Turkeys, pheasants, coyotes, foxes, minks, raccoons, beavers, bobcats and other species also inhabit the refuge.
Shoot and learn with us.
Here are a few of his tips for calling in the ducks.
Shooting RangeS &
❚ “Ninety percent of the battle is reading the ducks, finding out what they’re reacting to,” Banner said. “You can’t just go out and blow your call the same way every day and expect them to come in. You have to speak their language.” ❚ And just what is that language? Listen. Sometimes, Banner said, the ducks will be calling to each other aggressively. “Those are the days you have to talk right back to them in an aggressive tone,” Banner said. But Banner turns down the volume when the ducks seem to be less talkative. ❚ When the ducks are far out, Banner will use a midrange hail call. “I’m trying to reach out and touch some ears,” he said. “It’s like a greeting call.” When the ducks turn, he will continue to talk to them, but not as loudly. As they get closer, he will go to softer calls “like you’d hear when they’re on the water,” he said.
outdoor education Centers
BRENT FRAZEE | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Dusty Banner knows that reading the ducks is the key to successful calling.
❚ If there is more than one caller in the blind, Banner likes to mix it up. One hunter may imitate feeding chuckles, another will do some louder calls and another will do a series of intermittent quacks. “When you have a lot of decoys out, you want to make some noise,” Banner said. “You want it to sound natural.” ❚ Practice makes perfect. Banner blows his duck call almost every day. ❚ But perfection isn’t required to call in a duck, Banner said. “If you listen to them, they’ll make a lot of mistakes,” he said. “If you make a call that cracks or shrieks, it doesn’t mean you’ll scare them off.” | Brent Frazee, bfrazee@kcstar.com
MDC Shooting Ranges and outdoor education Centers are designed to help you become a sharper, safer hunter or outdoors person. Come to shoot targets or attend one of our many outdoor skills programs.
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Lake City
Regular Shooting Hours 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday through Tuesday Deer Season Sight-in Hours 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Oct. 25 to Nov. 26
Regular Shooting Hours 12 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday Deer Season Sight-in Hours 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Oct. 16 to Nov. 15
15900 NW River Road, Parkville, MO 64152 816-891-9941 mdc.mo.gov/node/283
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M I S S O U R I D E PA R T M E N T O F CO N S E R VAT I O N
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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Spectral Style Designers dabble in creating ghostly tables and chairs. | C3
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house and home
EXPERT ADVICE | NEW PRODUCTS | SECRET SOURCES | EVERY WEEK
A FALL TREND SET IN STONE The real thing rocks the season. Minerals are used to highlight furnishings. By KIM COOK The Associated Press
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ilary Thomas responds to the divergent qualities of primitiveness and sophistication in rocks and minerals. “I find that using pieces like petrified wood and malachite helps a space look more collected and layered,” says the Los Angeles interior and product designer. And the range of colors — the bright agates, the neutrals — is fun to play with. “You can be color-shy and still tie a room together or make a big statement with a finial,” she says. Rock and mineral-themed decor is part of a fall trend toward nature and natural elements. In many cases,
The elegant, glowing base of this Sydney lamp, by Arteriors, is made of a snowy marble.
real rocks and minerals are integrated into the decorative items. Thomas creates lamp finials out of slivers of malachite, howlite and agate, as well as unusual specimens like inky iridescent labradorite, creamy blue-tinged chrysophase and petrified wood. The colors range from intense purple, turquoise and cranberry to light sunny yellow, snowy white and a range of striated hues. Besides aesthetics, some stones have been endowed by various cultures with special properties. The Chinese view jade as a protective stone, and it features prominently in feng shui, the SEE DECOR | C4
MUGGPHOTO.COM
Anna Rabinowicz, a designer for RabLabs, dipped amethyst and citrine crystals in gold and silver to create paperweights. HORCHOW
FRANKENSPACES AND OTHER SCARY STORIES AROUND THE HOUSE hen my wife moved in with me, our bed faced a large framed Polish movie poster for a film with a title that roughly translates to “A Short Film About Killing.” I bought it in my pre-wife life when I had enough free time to see obscure Polish films. The poster depicted a bunch of scrawled Polish words and a single startling image of a ghostly face, outlined by
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trails of blood. I had owned the poster so long that I had basically quit seeing it — but my wife still saw it, in all its blood-curdling glory. After a year, she banished it from our bedroom, and it was only in its absence that I realized how creepy it was. If she hadn’t acted, I imagine it would still be there, looking at us from across the room with its bloody forehead and
beady little eyes. Mwahahaha. You may wonder why I thought such a poster was appropriate for our bedroom. The answer, or at least the seed of the answer, lies in another movie, which premiered nearly four decades ago: a made-for-TV job called “Bad Ronald.” Its plot was ingeniously simple: a vaguely-HarryPotterish-and-not-in-a-
DAN MAGINN
COMMENTARY
good way teenager named Ronald accidentally kills a girl who had rejected him. To hide her “misunderstood” son from the au-
thorities, Ronald’s delusional mother boards him up in a bathroom and wallpapers over it so that all traces of the room are gone. Then she promptly dies (of course she dies) and another family moves in, not suspecting that a wacked-out, cricket-eating teen is contained within the walls. Abandoned and alone, Ronald proceeds to scurry around his personal Frankenspace, peeping through holes into the various rooms of the house. Eventually he is discovered, but only after doing many bad things — things
THE HOME OFFICE: 1729 GRAND BLVD | HOME@KCSTAR.COM
I watched with my wideopen 7-year-old eyes late one night in 1974. By the time the movie ended, I was a quivering, whimpering, pajama-clad wreck. It was at this point that my older sister, who had watched the movie with me in our darkened family room, slowly turned my way and said: “You know, we have a guy living in our walls, too. But his name is Donald.” And then she calmly got up, and left the room, leaving me (and Donald) behind to sort it all out. SEE HAUNT | C4
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
local color CUSTOM BATH GIVEAWAY CONTEST FOR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD Schloegel Design Remodel and The Love Fund for Children are accepting nominations for the Big Splash Custom Bath Giveaway through Nov. 8. Nominees must be 17 or younger and have special needs; be nominated by either a child services professional or list a child services professional as a refer-
ence on the application; and reside in Jackson, Cass, Clay, Platte, Wyandotte or Johnson counties. For more rules and regulations and to nominate a child, go to remodelagain.com or call 816-361-9669. The winner, who will receive a $25,000 bathroom makeover, will be announced the week of Dec. 2.
CATALOG SCOUT
q+a | Jeanne Bieger, early American enthusiast and collector By ALICE THORSON The Kansas City Star
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tep inside the Overland Park house where Jeanne and Don Bieger have lived for 47 years, and you’ll think you’ve entered an early American museum. The interior of the one-and-a-half story colonial, designed by Jeanne with a gambrel roof, is a showcase for the couple’s taste and talent for early American furniture and decor. The furnishings are not rare museum pieces, Jeanne Bieger points out, but were gathered on trips and excursions to antique shows in an extended “labor of love.” The scheme, which includes multiple pieces of furniture and sculpture made by Don and curtains and cross-stitch samplers sewn by Jeanne, speaks volumes about the Biegers’ creativity. In July 2001 the couple’s home was featured in a six-page spread in Country Sampler magazine.
Venetian Antiqued Ornament, $10 and up
Restoration Hardware inspires holiday chic Restoration Hardware’s Holiday 2013 catalog is out, and I’m going to buy several strands of the Starry String lights, which look like tiny jewels on copper wire, and wrap myself in them from now until New Year’s Day. They are that pretty. Plus, they’re battery operated, so I won’t need to sit next to an electrical outlet.
Your living room really gives the feeling of stepping back in time. It’s all things I picked up at mall shows and antique shows. Don built the bookcase and put the beams in the ceiling. That’s a Chippendale-style sofa that I had upholstered in a gingham patchwork print. I chose brickred checks and solid dark blue fabrics for the pair of wing chairs. I found the rag rugs in Shakertown, Kentucky, and that’s an old musket over the fireplace. That’s a dough box at the end of the couch. The dough would be stored inside, and the top could be turned over to work it. I found it in a shop at 45th and State Line. The lamp is an old jug. I took some blue paint and added the bird motif to replicate salt glaze. And I love models of houses. The group on the shelf includes a model of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the George Wythe House in Williamsburg. Many of these pieces were created by you and your husband. Don makes barn sculptures out of scrap lumber, including one he modeled after the old barn where Hawthorne Plaza is now. I did all the cross-stitch reproduction samplers and that small Amish quilt above the bucket bench in the hall. That grouping includes Amish dolls, an Amish bonnet and a Shaker straw bonnet. I also painted the reproduction of “The Man With the Golden Helmet” (once attributed to Rembrandt, now thought to be the work of one of his students), that hangs in the living room. I saw it in St. Louis, where I grew up, as part of an exhibition of paintings hidden from the Nazis during World War II. I took a little painting instruction, and sitting at my mother’s dining room table, I copied the painting from a postcard. What inspired all this? Looking at magazines and trips to the Northeast and Williamsburg, Virginia. All of the colors blend from one room to the next. All the walls are off-white, based on the original simple houses with plaster walls. The woodwork was always painted. I’ve used a colonial red, a Williamsburg blue and also a gray. How did you furnish the dining room? The bird-cage-back Windsor chairs were kits from Cohasset, Mass., that I put together. I found the table at an antique show in a mall. Those are my grandmother’s chocolate cups in the hutch. My aunt, who was a china painter, decorated them. We received the Melon silver-
Then again, I could string them across my mantel or put them inside one of RH’s 1920s French glass cloches ($69 and up). Decisions decisions. Yes, it’s way too early to have Yuletide merchandise thrust upon us, but at least RH’s stuff is subtle and elegant. There are lots of other festive and nifty things to be had from the pages of this particular catalog. Its Starlit Tree ($49 to $359), which comes in two finishes (snow and bark) and six sizes (2 feet high to 11 feet high), looks like a leafless tree and would make an elegant ornament-free alternative to the traditional evergreen.
PHOTOS BY JIM BARCUS | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Jeanne Bieger found the table that sits in her Overland Park dining room at an antiques show in a mall. She put together the Windsor chairs using kits from Cohasset, Mass.
Don makes barn sculptures out of scrap lumber, including one he modeled after the old barn where Hawthorne Plaza is now.
Or you could decorate it with their Venetian Antiqued Ornaments ($10 and up), which are styled as chandelier crystals and mirrored frames. Like everything RH sells, they’re finished to look aged. There are also plush faux-fur blankets ($79), pillows ($24), bean-bag chairs ($199), and a Russian Ushanka ($39). I think I’ll wear that hat with the Starry String lights. | Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian
JEANNE BIEGER
Starry String lights, $12 to $89; and 1920s French glass cloches, $69 and up
Bieger handmade a small Amish quilt and Amish dolls that sit on a bucket bench in the home’s entryway.
plate tea and coffee service as a wedding present, and I put it on a wood chest I found in Spring Hill, Missouri. The breakfast nook is charming. We designed it to have lots of windows onto the open expanse out back. None of the neighbors
Bieger also did the cross-stitch reproduction samplers. Her decor is inspired by trips to the Northeast and Williamsburg, Va.
put up fences. I made the blue and white checked curtains. They’re tab curtains, easy to make and easy to hang. My sister found the pie cabinet in St. Louis, and I painted it. Three years ago we had new flooring put in. I chose a laminate that looks like rough-sawn planks. You’ve continued the illusion in
the upstairs bedrooms. The second bedroom, which used to be my daughter’s room, is the doll room. The old doll bed was mine when I was a little girl. The same aunt who did the china painting made that quilt with the morning glories. I saw the bobble-edged curtains in a country curtains magazine, so I copied them.
Starlit Trees, $49 to $359
Faux fur bean-bag chair, $199.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
C3
Ghost chairs — and tables — are multiplying CYNTHIA BILLHARTZ GREGORIAN
CG R E G O R I A N @ KC STA R .CO M
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f you pay attention to interior design at all, you’re probably aware of the Louis Ghost chair by Philippe Starck, the worldrenowned architect and interior and product designer. Debuting in 2002, it has become one of the most famous chairs of the last decade or so. Starck created the iconic piece by taking a classic — the Louis XV armchair — and reinventing it using translucent injection-mold-
py as its name ed polycarbomight imply. nate. The Other deresult is a signers, howrather subever, have stantial chair taken the that appears concept of to be there, ghost furniand yet not. ture and put Interior their own spin designers love on it by shapit for its clasing transparsic lines and ent and ghostultramodern, ly white matetranslucent rials into some materials that Louis Ghost chair eerie-looking allow it to pieces. blend in perIn 2009, Valentina Gonfectly with a wide array of zalez Wohlers, a Mexicaninterior design styles. The born designer based in same goes for its armless London, created “The Ghost cousin, the Victoria Ghost of a Chair” by draping chair. sheets of 4-millimeter transThe Louis Ghost chair, parent acrylic over Louis which has been copied by a XV chairs. The resulting lot of other manufacturers, piece, she explains in her is more whimsical and product description, seems clever than weird and cree-
to wear an “invisibility cloak and will play tricks with your mind, especially when lighting is involved.” They can be commissioned through her website at valentinagw.com. In 2010, Graft Lab, an architecture and design firm in Berlin, created a limitededition Phantom dining table. It looks like a thick glossy cloth draped over a levitating table and is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of scenes from the 1982 film “Poltergeist.” But the Graft Lab designers were inspired by the film “The Seven Year Itch,” in which Marilyn Monroe’s white dress blows up as she stands over a subway grate, according to the company’s website. The table was created using fiberglass and carbon fiber shaped to look
like a tablecloth that is swaying, gathering momentum by the energy of the those seated around it and is about to take off when it reveals that there is no table underneath. “As if it never existed. A phantom.” Actor Brad Pitt reportedly purchased one of the nine that were made. That same year, Snarkitecture, a design firm in Brooklyn that creates a lot of products that are not what they appear to be (a slab of concrete that looks like a fluffy pillow for an iPhone, for instance), built a prototype of a ghost chair out of reinforced fiberglass. It looks like a chair moving into a strong headwind that’s blowing its ghostly white slipcover. Two years ago, Studio Drift, a product design firm
in Amsterdan, Netherlands, introduced a collection of plastic glass chairs that have ghost-like forms encased inside them, the result of light reflecting off tiny air bubbles and a 3D technique that forms subsurface drawings. The chairs are sold through Patrick Brillet Fine Art of London. In his product description for the Grand Illusion table, designer John Brauer explains how he was inspired by round cafe tables with square tablecloths while walking in Copenhagen, Denmark. He stopped to take photos then set about finding a plastic workshop that could create a version that looks like a tablecloth floating on air. Brauer’s original and copycats can be found at several online retailers.
Ghost of a Chair by Valentina Gonzalez Wohlers is also based on the Louis XV chair.
Actor Brad Pitt reportedly owns one of nine Phantom dining tables made by Graft Lab. Several manufacturers have copied the Grand Illusion table by John Brauer.
A chair from The Ghost Collection by Studio Drift looks like it has the X-ray of a skeleton embedded in it.
Save 30%-70% on select items. Final week to save on lighting, décor and more! OVERLAND PARK 10530 Marty 913-642-1500 Mon–Thurs 9 to 8 • Fri 9 to 6 • Sat 10 to 5
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‘Going faux’ transforms a home’s style on the cheap RESOURCES
Prefabricated architectural details and custom paint jobs elevate plain rooms.
❚ FauxSteamboat.com ❚ Fypon.com ❚ BomarDesigns.com
By DIANA MARSZALEK The Associated Press
Phoebe Taylor’s 20-year-old suburban Atlanta ranch house began plain and “builder grade.” A professional decorator, she transformed it with faux wood beams, decorative molding and a gold-spun “soft marble” paint job. Her vision: “what our dream house would have been if we had gone out and bought it.” It’s called “going faux:” turning homes into something they basically are not through prefab architectural embellishments and eyetricking wall finishes. Enthusiasts say there’s no reason for even the most budgetconscious among us to live a cookie-cutter existence. “My house was not an expensive house. But even the million-dollar houses don’t have this kind of detail,” Taylor says. She recently sold the house in one day. Other “faux” features include ceiling decals that look like parts of elaborate chandeliers, cabinetry embellishments and painted wainscoting. “I’ve seen trailer homes have more personality to them thanks to paint, sweat equity, lumber, and their owners using their creativity,” says Lee Gamble, a designer and painter in Steamboat Springs, Colo., who specializes in faux finishes. Gamble says a homeowner can change anything with desire and patience, even make the interior of a standard subdivision home look like a cozy Tudor, classic Colonial or something out of the rustic West. Next is paint, which Gamble calls “the cheapest way
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Phoebe Taylor added architectural details, including faux wood and molding, to a shower in her plain, builder-grade home in Atlanta.
to improve your house.” It can be used to create illusions of architectural elements. For example, you can use blocks of color on walls to create the look of molding, or three variations of one color for a three-dimensional look — an old technique called trompe l’oeil that can make your home look just a little more like the Palace of Versailles. Paint can make high ceilings look lower — extend the ceiling’s color to a lower point on the wall — or give them more height by going dark. Using different colors on the top and bottom halves of a wall can create the look of wainscoting, Gamble says. Ornamental appliques that adhere to anything from cabinetry, walls, mantels and molding to furniture and picture frames add readymade detail without breaking the bank. They can be painted, stained or glazed and are particularly helpful in transforming the look of kitchen
cabinets. The products that make such projects possible are becoming easier to use. The manufacturer Fypon, for example, makes synthetic ceiling beams, medallions and decorative millwork that are lighter and more manageable than real wood, Gamble says. Decorative millwork like a sunburst pediment over a door is an easy improvement to a room, says Kathleen Ziprik, a Fypon spokeswoman. In redoing her master bath, Taylor began with “ a straight shot bathroom.” She added molding and wood panels to the walls, and framed the bathtub, using material with decorative embellishments. Buying a new home with those real architectural features would not have been affordable, she says. “It looked very dramatic; it really looked real.”
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Show-stopping globes of color Alliums contribute height and whimsy to gardens that need a dose of drama. By SARAH WOLFE The Associated Press
Alliums are a graceful way to add color and architectural dimension to your garden. With large globes of tiny white, purple, yellow or blue flowers that rise from bulbs on green stems as high as 4 feet tall, they look like giant, fluffy lollipops — something Willy Wonka would have planted in the Chocolate Factory garden. Most bloom in late spring or early summer, so they fill the gap between spring bulbs and summer perennials. “For people who are considering planting them, my advice is, don’t think twice. Do it,” says Michaela Lica Butler, a 38-year-old mother and gardener in Schweich, Germany, who has planted the giant, purple Globemaster allium for years.
Varieties There are dozens of varieties of ornamental alliums. Try the shimmering white flowers of the Mount Everest allium, or the fuchsia with metallic undertones in the Stars of Persia variety, says Kim Fusaro, head gardener at the Mohonk Mountain House resort in New Paltz, N.Y. If you need something a bit shorter, Fusaro suggests the yellow shades of the moly Jeannine or the flavum alliums. Looking to plant allium in a shady spot? Try the triquetrum — or threecornered leeks — which bear delicate white flowers with shades of blue and a triangular stem. Want something unusual? The drumstick allium produces egg-size (and egg-shaped) heads in a rich burgundy color, while the bulgaricum blooms are creamy and bell-
shaped with tinges of green and pink that hang from baseball-size flowerheads.
Uses Alliums are typically displayed best among perennials as a border plant, says Amy Dube, a bulb expert with Dig.Drop.Done, an educational campaign promoting flowering bulbs. They hide their leaves, which whither quickly, and don’t take up much space, giving room to quickly emerging perennials. Hans Langeveld, co-owner of Longfield Gardens in Lakewood, N.J., recommends using shorter, smaller varieties in rock gardens, where they can thrive in welldrained pockets between rocks. Some alliums do well in containers, while larger varieties are perfect for cutting gardens. “They are gorgeous by themselves, paired with a large monstera or philodendron leaf or two in a simple glass,” says floral designer Rachel Cho of New York. “They have really long stems that are very sturdy, so I like to keep them really tall.” Butler likes to dry allium heads for centerpieces and holiday decorations, spraying them white and adding sparkles to make delicate winter snowballs.
Planting Alliums grow best in full sun, though some do well in part-sun or shade; they prefer well-drained soil. Plant them in the fall as you would other spring-blooming bulbs. “The general rule of thumb is to plant bulbs three times the depth of the bulb itself, and make sure the root is facing down toward the soil,” Dube says. Deer, squirrels and other garden pests don’t like the oniony taste of allium bulbs and will generally leave them alone.
DIG.DROP.DONE | AP
The Globemaster Allium is a hybrid that’s bred for superior strength. It grows up to 4 feet tall.
HAUNT: Scary is hereditary FROM C1 morbid detail that I reverse-creeped myself out. The first thing I did was to turn all the You also can’t go wrong with the unlights on in the house. likely intersection of singing European Her masterstroke was brilliantly children and plumbing fixtures. The played; I fell for it completely. For years whispered singsong voices of sad Gerafter she uttered those words, every man children, coming from the toilet, for creak and groan of our old house coninstance. I tried this on a girlfriend many firmed that things weren’t as they years ago. We didn’t last long. seemed, that Donald was real, lurking in In mischievous present-day moments, I our walls, eating our crickets and plotting even find myself haunting my beloved bad things against us. The fact that we wife. One storyline has turned into a lived next to an old graveyard and had yearly tradition. As the calendar aptwo black cats didn’t help matters. Donald’s existence seemed completely proaches Halloween, I will turn to her in our darkened upstairs bedroom as we plausible to me. At that time, I lived in a prepare to drift off and, in a hushed voice, world filled with supernatural certainask her about our non-existent third ties: Santa Claus tumbling down the floor: chimney once a year Me: “Say, how come with a bag of toys, the we never go up to the Easter Bunny leaving third floor”? tiny piles of candy in the She (sighing, realizyard, the Tooth Fairy jabbing her hand under ing what’s happening): my pillow and stealing We don’t have a third my teeth. Why not a guy floor, Dan.” named Donald, living in Me: “Ohhhh, I think our walls? we do. There is a stairThe logical thing to do case that goes up there, would have been to get but we never go up. out the tape measure to Why? What’s up there? confirm that there She: “No third floor. wasn’t any secret hiding No third floor.” space within our walls, Me: “Of course but that would have there’s a third floor. clued Donald into the What happened up RICH SUGG | THE STAR fact that I knew he was there? Something must This Polish horror movie there, wouldn’t it? That I have … happened … up poster was in Maginn’s was on to him! And he there.” bedroom for many years. wouldn’t have liked that She: “No third floor. — nooooo, he wouldn’t No third floor … stop have liked that at all. it.” Half-devoured crickets would tumble Me: “Mwahahaha…” down his scruffy, foot-long beard as he And on comes the light. would whisper through some unseen Of course this juvenile compulsion to peephole: “You, sir … are next.” temporarily guide the fearful minds of Yikes. my friends and loved ones toward mildly Perhaps because my sister’s decree was sinister conclusions is not my fault. I so effective, I have found myself, in the blame it all on my sister, and the 16 words ensuing years, sowing sinister seeds of she spoke four decades ago. And it turns doubt into the fertile minds of those out, we are not the only paranormal around me. Having seen firsthand how instigators in the family: One night, as he little it takes for the human mind to bedrifted off, my 3-year-old son whispered lieve that one’s living space could be to me: “I have a little brother in the basenefariously occupied, I’ve experimented ment.” My arms and legs broke out in with a wide range of tactics. goosebumps. One especially effective tactic is to “Now, now,” I nervously chuckled. reference the Civil War. While attending “You don’t have a little brother, silly boy.” college in New Orleans, I convinced my In his darkened bedroom, I could see roommate one night that the house we the whites of his eyes as he opened them shared served as a makeshift hospital to gaze up at me. “Yes I do,” he whisduring the Civil War, and that his bedpered, dead serious. “You know I do. room was where all the gruesome surger- How come you and Mommy pretend he’s ies had taken place. Perhaps he had heard not there?” the muffled screams on nights when the And on comes the light. air was still, coming from the crawlspace? Reach architect Dan Maginn, principal at El My tale was so convincing and full of Dorado Inc. in Kansas City, at Eldo.us.
DECOR: Range of natural colors is a hit FROM C1
Hillary Thomas Designs created lamp finials using Norwegian Wood (left) and a sliver of vibrant green and black malachite (right).
Amethyst is thought to be calming and energizing. Here, it is used as the base for RabLabs’ Cielo lamp.
The Herst lamp from Arteriors has a carved marble base set into a geometric frame to give it a contemporary vibe.
RabLabs encased its Cele alarm clocks in brightly colored pieces of agate.
ancient art of harmonizing individuals with their environment. The Vikings carried calcite, believing it aided in navigation. Native Americans considered chalcedony — the family of minerals that includes jasper, onyx and agate — capable of imparting strength and courage. “I have a client who keeps a pyramid of lapis lazuli under her bed to ward off bad vibrations,” says David McDonald, a mineral and bead dealer in Toronto. Table lamps are an easy way to add a touch of stone. Arteriors’ Sydney and Herst marble lamps, both at RESOURCES Horchow.com, have honed and ❚ hillarythomas.com softly buffed mar- ❚ horchow.com ble bases that de- ❚ westelm.com velop a dreamy ❚ target.com translucence ❚ cb2.com when lit. From the John ❚ rablabs.com Richard collection, there’s a stacked, square-cut alabaster lamp with a geometric vibe. And the retailer’s River Rock nightlight lamp’s base is a rectangular slab of acrylic embedded with small white rocks; a small bulb fixture is encased in it as well, so you can use both the main lamp and nightlight, or just the latter. Eduardo Garza’s agate-inlaid jewelry boxes are part of West Elm’s fall collection. Swirls of natural graphic design make a group of agate ornaments intriguing for the holiday tree, or just to hang on cupboards or window latches. Target’s fall collection includes the Threshold agate bookend, sleekly honed on one end to show the swirling layers, and left in its natural state on the other. A trimmed mirror adds marble to the wall. And an agate-patterned, glass-topped accent table and turquoise or plum rugs in a marble motif suggest those materials in faux finishes. The convergence of modern manufacturing techniques and the intricate, timeless forms of nature is what intrigues New York-based product designer Anna Rabinowicz. She gives a collection of amethyst and citrine table objects a mantle of liquid gold or silver. Her Cielo amethyst lamp combines sleek chrome with the crystal forms. And she embeds little chunks of colorful agate — considered long ago to bring owners a peaceful slumber — with small clock faces, ready for the bedside.
ae
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM
Light show J
ames Turrell is having a banner year in American art museums, and he is currently making a blue splash in Lawrence. | D4
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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STAR FILE PHOTO
The musical version of “A Christmas Story” had its world premiere at the Rep and eventually made it to Broadway, where it garnered three Tony nominations.
THEATER | In pursuit of a national name
BUILDING A REP IS PRICEY KC Repertory Theatre dips into its endowment to meet expenses.
ROBERT TRUSSELL
RTRUSSELL@KCSTAR.COM
Y
ou want to make a name for yourself? Be prepared to spend. When the artistic director of Kansas City Repertory Theatre began his tenure at the city’s leading nonprofit theater company in the summer of 2008, he inherited an organization where the previous artistic director, Peter Altman, had already elevated the company’s national
reputation with a series of coproductions with important regional theaters and by commissioning new plays. But the Rep’s board of trustees, some of whom entertained dreams of a regional Tony Award, wanted more. The search committee chose Rosen over other candidates because he was young (37 at the time), ambitious and bold. He seemed the right candidate to push the Rep and carve out a place alongside other major regional theaters with histories of developing new plays and musicals and getting them to New York. In his first interview with The Kansas City Star in 2007, the year the board and the University of Missouri-Kansas City tagged him to become the fourth artistic director in the Rep’s history, Rosen ticked off a roster of goals: Taking the Rep
in a new direction, expanding the audience to include more young people, raising the company’s national profile, inviting nationally known artists to the Rep, developing and producing plays and musicals and staging productions in collaboration with regional theaters as well as local companies. To accomplish his goals, Rosen needed more money than his predecessors had. Before Rosen’s inaugural season in fall 2008, the Rep board bumped the budget to $7.5 million, an increase of $1 million. And Rosen has continued spending. According to the tax forms the Rep is required to file annually with the Internal SEE REP | D2
Eric Rosen
FILE PHOTOS
Recently at the KC Rep: “Venice” (top), which went on to the Public Theater in New York, and Matt Sax (center) in his one-man hip-hop musical, “Clay.” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (above) and “Clay” also got the Rep’s name in front of New York audiences.
KC SYMPHONY
Park student is no ordinary pianist After appearances around the world, Behzod Abduraimov, 23, will perform a playful French concerto with Michael Stern.
I
n the past three weeks, Behzod Abduraimov has given piano recitals in Austria, Milan, Amsterdam and Paris. This would be a challenging schedule for any seasoned touring concert pianist, but Abduraimov is a senior in college. Obviously, this is no ordinary college senior. The 23-year-old, who is
PATRICK NEAS
THE CLASSICAL BEAT
wrapping up his bachelor’s degree in piano perfor-
mance at Park University, already has won the London International Piano Competition and has released his first CD on the Decca label. He’s a bona fide musical superstar, and next weekend he’ll perform Camille SaintSaens’ Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Kansas City Symphony. It has been seven years since Abduraimov came to the Park University International Center for Music to study with Van Cliburn gold medalist Stanislav Ioude-
nitch, whom Abduraimov credits with much of his success. “We are really close,” Abduraimov said recently. “Stanislav is extremely dedicated and an enthusiastic musician and pedagogue. Every lesson with him is a discovery. He helps me a lot. “We even travel together sometimes. In fact, he was present at the recording sessions for my CD. He’s the only person whose opinion I SEE NEAS | D3
ALLISON LONG | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Pianist Behzod Abduraimov (foreground) practices with Stanislav Ioudenitch at Park University in Parkville.
Calendars, D5 | Tonight’s TV, D5 | Amy Tan’s new novel sprawls, Books, D6
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
WWW.KANSASCITY.COM Martin Buchanan (left) stars in the title role of the KC Rep’s latest production, “The Foreigner,” which runs through Nov. 3.
REP: Board knew of Rosen’s spending plans viting environment to develop new work, according to Kaufman, who was in Kansas City recently to direct the world premiere of “The Tallest Tree in the Forest.” In an email, Rosen said his major goals were not only to spread the fame of the Rep but also to draw attention to what he described as an extraordinary community of artists in Kansas City. Partnerships with other nonprofit theater companies and commercial producers and the emphasis on developing new work were part of a strategy “to achieve top-ofmind status among our peer theaters, and therefore to make Kansas City an even more desirable place in which to live, work, and create,” Rosen said. “Some of these efforts require little or no resources, and some are expensive,”
“There’s no question that at the time Eric came on board, the decision was made that we would invest in the art. We have the good fortune of having a very strong endowment to allow us to do that.” SCOTT BOSWELL, KANSAS CITY REP BOARD CHAIRMAN
Rosen said. “Some bring tremendous income from outside the area that flows into the local economy, and some strengthen the financial lives of nearly 200 artists and artisans a year who live and work in Kansas City.” Boswell said the gap in expenses compared to revenues was offset to some extent by an increase in contract revenue, which includes such things as investment money contributed by commercial producers in the world premiere of “A Christmas Story.” But shortfalls were largely covered by withdrawals from the Rep’s endowment, which now totals about $8.7 million. The endowment’s all-time high was just over $9.1 million in June of 2007. The annual budget, he said, has been balanced “but the endowment and support from the endowment is certainly a component of the budget.” Boswell said earned in-
DON IPOCK
come — season tickets and single tickets combined — has “contracted over time.” Ticket sales have fluctuated, according to the IRS filings, but the Rep has avoided a precipitous decline in ticket revenue. From 2008 through 2011 the figure hovered on either side of $2.5 million before dropping to $2.3 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2012, the most recent period for which numbers are available. “I will tell you that we are actually ahead of the industry trend,” Boswell said. “Theater tickets across the country have been in decline.” Longevity and admiration do not necessarily guarantee permanence in the performing arts world. Shakespeare Santa Cruz, a highly regarded company that was affiliated with the University of California, Santa Cruz, will end its 32-year run after its holiday production because it couldn’t staunch the red ink. New York City Opera, which was founded in 1943 and enjoyed an international reputation, has announced it will file for bankruptcy. Boswell, however, said the Rep is in good financial shape. The current budget, he said, will include another “prudent and appropriate” draw from the endowment. A fundraising gala in May will essentially kick off the Rep’s 50th anniversary season, Boswell said. And although it was too early to discuss details, he said the Rep would be making major announcements in the coming year regarding the company’s continued longevity. “We always want more,” he said. “We want more subscribers. But at the end of the day we want to inspire and educate and entertain more people, and money and talent are the things that let that happen. … I think we
are good stewards of the resources we have.” Asked if he thought the big spending was worth it, Boswell answered this way: “I would say yes. … I think
we produced great art for Kansas City, and we’ve educated a lot of people along the way.” Rosen struck a note of humility and gratitude in con-
To reach Robert Trussell, theater critic, call 816-234-4765 or send email to rtrussell@kcstar.com.
DECEMBER 7-24, 2013
DELIGHT IN THE WONDER OF IT ALL Dancer: Rachel Coats. Photography: Kenny Johnson.
FROM D1
Revenue Service, from 2008 through 2011, expenses dwarfed revenues, amounting to red ink that has ranged from almost $669,000 to more than $1.1 million. The spending was done with the oversight of the board, according to Scott Boswell, the current chairman. Boswell was not on the board when Rosen was hired, but he said the numbers reflected a decision the board made at the beginning of Rosen’s tenure. “There’s no question that at the time Eric came on board, the decision was made that we would invest in the art,” he said. “We have the good fortune of having a very strong endowment to allow us to do that.” Some of the shows staged at the Rep were less successful than others, but Rosen has done everything he said he would: ❚ He has brought in toprank directors (David Cromer, Moises Kaufman, Mary Zimmerman) and designers with Broadway experience. ❚ He was the original director of “A Christmas Story: The Musical,” which had its world premiere at the Rep and eventually made it to Broadway, where it garnered three Tony nominations. ❚ He co-wrote and directed “Venice,” a hip-hop musical that premiered in Kansas City and went on to be performed in Los Angeles and at the Public Theater in New York. Two other shows, “Clay” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (the latter a co-production), also got the Rep’s name in front of New York audiences. ❚ “The Great Immensity,” which the Rep produced in partnership with the Civilians, a New York company, received its world premiere at the Rep and will be staged next year at the Public Theater. ❚ Productions in Kansas City, including “The Glass Menagerie” and “Venice,” received glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Time. ❚ The Rep partnered with the Living Room, one of the city’s boldest young theater companies, to present a reprise of the Living Room’s unconventional production of “Carousel” directed by Kyle Hatley, the Rep’s associate artistic director. ❚ And the Rep is now perceived in New York as an in-
cluding his statement: “It has been a tremendous honor to lead the company in a period of tremendous artistic growth, standing on the shoulders of my extraordinary predecessors who built what we have activated. “As our 50th anniversary approaches, it is our task to make these gains permanent, and transform the Rep into not just one of the great theaters in the United States, but the economic engine that secures the future of our thriving theater town.”
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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MUSIC
BALKAN TUNES GET A SAVALL TOUCH Friends of Chamber Music brings ‘Blood and Honey’ to the Folly Theater.
‘Phantom’ plus organ In an age when slasher movies and zombie TV shows are commonplace, the silent film version of “Phantom of the Opera” still packs a punch — especially when seen on the big screen with live musical accompaniment. The Kansas City Symphony’s Screenland at the Symphony Series will present “Phantom of the Opera” on the big screen in Helzberg Hall on Halloween night. This scary Hollywood classic starring Lon Chaney will be accompanied by Aaron David Miller playing the
By PATRICK NEAS Special to The Star
A
ny time Jordi Savall comes to Kansas City, it’s an event. The combination of period instruments, fascinating programming and Savall’s charisma casts a spell that audiences don’t soon forget. The Friends of Chamber Music will present Savall and his ensemble, Hesperion XXI, in a program called “Blood and Honey: The Cycles of Life in the Mosaic of the Balkan Peoples” on Thursday at the Folly Theater. Savall, probably the world’s greatest proponent of medieval and Renaissance music from Spain, has in recent years been venturing beyond the Iberian peninsula to discover the roots of European music. His musical travels have taken him to the Middle East, Turkey and even Japan. For “Blood and Honey,” Hesperion XXI will be joined by musicians playing the oud, duduk and kaval as they explore the incredible mix of ethnicities and religions that make up the Balkan states. To deepen your appreciation of the program, you are encouraged to attend “Convergences of Music, Art and Belief in the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire” at 7 p.m. WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday WHERE: Folly Theater, 300 W. 12th St. COST: $30 to $40
FILE PHOTO
Jordi Savall examines music from the Middle East, Turkey and Japan to put his own charismatic spin on European music.
INFO: 816-561-9999 chambermusic.org
or
Village choir The Village Chamber Choir and Orchestra conducted by Mark Ball will present a sacred concert tonight titled “Transformations.” The program includes three works, two of which are by Gerald Finzi: “Dies Natalis,” featuring soprano Jessica Salley, and “Farewell to Arms” for tenor sung by Bryan Pinkall. There will al-
so be the world premiere of the Requiem by local composer Dale Ramsey. Ball is a huge advocate for Finzi’s music, which does not show up all that often on concert programs in Kansas City. “People are always talking about how Benjamin Britten was the great composer for setting English texts, but I think Finzi is every bit as good,” Ball said. “He knows how to set poems so musically and expressively that you just do what’s on the
page and the poems come alive.” For “Dies Natalis,” Finzi set the words of Thomas Traherne, a 17th century Anglican clergyman. “It’s the experiences and observations of a little soul coming into the world,” Ball said. “It’s innocent without being saccharine or sappy. Just beautiful, beautiful poetry. The music is pure delight. It’s Finzi at his most melodic, wonderful, expressive best.”
Ramsey was for many years the principal organist at Country Club Christian Church, but according to Ball, he has also been quietly composing music his entire life. Ramsey proposed that the Village Chamber Choir perform his Requiem, and, after looking at the score, Ball jumped at the opportunity. “It’s a really amazing, delightful work,” he said, “and the choir is loving it. “It’s a little bit like (Francis) Poulenc harmonically, and it’s a real challenge to sing and the orchestra parts are going to be pretty tough, too, but I have rarely seen a choir get so excited about a brand new work.” Ball says that unlike Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s and Giuseppe Verdi’s requiems, Ramsey’s is not full of blood
Julia Irene Kauffman Casavant Organ. WHEN: 7 p.m. Thursday WHERE: Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts COST: $25 to $45 INFO: 816-471-0400 or kcsymphony.org
and thunder. “It has tremendous vigor and excitement but ends with a sense of peace and consolation and confidence that human life matters and that we matter to each other,” he said. By the way, I will be giving a talk at 4 p.m. The concert is free, but donations will be accepted to benefit the Wyandot Center’s Frank Williams Outreach Center, which provides basic services for the homeless. WHEN: 5 p.m. today WHERE: Village Presbyterian Church, 6641 Mission Road, Prairie Village COST: Free INFO: villagepres.org Patrick Neas is program director for RadioBach.com. You can reach him at pneas@jccc.edu.
NEAS: ‘Brilliantly lit’ Tchaikovsky nowhere near its name, ‘Death’ FROM D1
totally trust. It’s tremendous to have such support at my age.” Ioudenitch specializes in taking extremely gifted musicians to the next, rarefied level, adding an undefinable star quality to technical skill to make a true concert artist, one who can command not only the keyboard but also the audience. Abduraimov is such an artist. He specializes in the kind of virtuosic music that leaves an audience dazzled. Works such as the SaintSaens piano concerto. “It’s an exciting piece,” Abduraimov said. “Brilliant and virtuosic but also really elegant. It’s French, of course.” But of course. Saint-Saens’ music is noted for its distinct Gallic sensibility. What it may lack in Wagnerian profundity, it makes up for in abundant charm. “I wouldn’t say this is the most serious piano concerto, but it’s always a great pleasure and fun to play this concerto,” Abduraimov said. “It starts in G minor, kind of like a Bach fantasia, but as a Polish pianist, whose name I can’t remember, once said, this concerto starts like Bach and finishes like Offenbach. “This lightness, it is always present, even in a very loud place. The second movement is especially French. It’s so elegant, you have to hear it. It’s so light, it reminds you of rosé wine in some little cafe.” Abduraimov, who previously performed Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Variations
on a Theme by Paganini with the Kansas City Symphony, is looking forward to playing with the orchestra again. “It’s very easy to work with Michael Stern,” he said. “He’s very flexible and I like it. I think in music we should be flexible.” Stern is mutually appreciative of the young player. “Behzod has the real spark which makes a performance take off from the stage and connect with the audience,” Stern said, “and that’s what sets him apart. Aside from his obviously phenomenal control of the keyboard, he’s got something more than that. He’s a really smart, thinking, lovely musician. “The performances that he’s able to deliver are powerful and communicative, and they make you want to listen to the music that he’s playing.” Before Abduraimov takes the stage, the concert will begin with the Overture, Scherzo and Finale by Robert Schumann. The second half of the concert will be devoted to two lushly orchestrated tone poems, “Death and Transfiguration” by Richard Strauss and the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. English music critic Ernest Newman once wrote that you would not want to die to “Death and Transfiguration”: “It is too spectacular, too brilliantly lit, too full of pageantry of a crowd; whereas this is a journey one must make very quietly, and
FILE PHOTO BY SHANE KEYSER | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
“It’s very easy to work with Michael Stern,” Behzod Abduraimov said of the Kansas City Symphony’s leader (above). “He’s very flexible and I like it. I think in music we should be flexible.”
alone.” Stern said it’s a profoundly beautiful piece. “And it has a program to it. It’s a man at the end of his life looking over his life-long experiences and looking toward the end. “He has this ability to spin this narrative, which in this case is a very profound one, with an extraordinary connection to a feeling that is in all of us. It deals with acceptance of life and looking forward but understanding where you’re coming from. “Even the opening is kind of reminiscent of a heartbeat; it’s this internalized, almost meditative, private
rumination on your own existence. It’s an exceptional piece to work on and to realize into sound. And it’s great fun.” Stern has demonstrated a real affinity for the music of Strauss. For example, last season I heard him lead a thrilling performance of Strauss’ massive Alpine Symphony, a work that in lesser hands could easily fall apart at the seams. Stern’s personal connection to Strauss’ music was formed during his student years at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “I came to Strauss when I started studying scores,”
Stern said. “Those scores are like textbooks of instrumentation and orchestration. For a conductor learning his craft, there is so much there to deal with in all sorts of ways — technical things, balancing things, pacing, making the music sing. “So I turned myself to the study of Strauss with alacrity. And I also had a teacher, Max Rudolf, who was steeped in that tradition. When he first started conducting in the pit in Darmstadt, he was conducting pieces by Richard Strauss that Strauss himself conducted with that orchestra.” Studying with Rudolf allowed Stern to gain rare insight into Strauss’ music and to discern between valid interpretations of his music and dubious innovations. “It was a connection with a world that he (Rudolf) knew so well,” he said. “You really felt like there was a sense of respect and upholding the tradition without being enslaved to that tradition. Mahler said that tradition is laziness. But there is a line of understanding that is passed down from certain great interpreters. “When you listen to Mahler performances, and you hear sometimes the extraordinary distortion or indulgence which some people take, and then you listen to a recording of Bruno Walter, who learned directly from Mahler himself, you realize how far we have come from the composer’s intention. It just makes you wary of taking tradition at face value be-
cause you want to go back to the source.” The Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is another virtuoso showpiece for orchestra and a work that is very familiar even to casual classical listeners. If you’ve ever seen a commercial that showed two lovers running toward each other from across a field, most likely the music used in the background was the Romeo and Juliet Overture. “Tchaikovsky really knew how to write a tune, and that carries the day,” Stern said. “It’s incredibly lush music. Even though the inspiration is Shakespeare, the tragic irony, the high drama of the moment is absolutely in Tchaikovsky’s voice. Here he’s depicting two aspects of the drama, the love between the two young people, and the tragic ending. “The audience knows that this is going to end badly, and so it does. But there’s also that wonderful love music in the middle. It’s a ubiquitous piece in the repertoire, and deservedly so. It’s beautiful. And we haven’t played it on a subscription concert in a very long time. It’s fun to bring it back.” WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Nov. 3 WHERE: Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts COST: $23 to $74 INFO: 816-471-0400 or kcsymphony.org Patrick Neas is program director for RadioBach.com. You can reach him at pneas@jccc.edu.
MORE THIS WEEK Arts and culture coverage planned this week in FYI, Ink and kansascity.com: Monday in FYI: Reviews of the Kansas City Symphony, Ricky Skaggs-Bruce Hornsby and more.
Tuesday in FYI: Readers share tales of Halloween. Wednesday in Ink: Local bands have released a wide array of music this year. Friday in FYI: “12 years a Slave” and other new movies.
Saturday in FYI: The FYI Book Club discusses Charles Portis’ “True Grit.”
FOR WEEKEND REVIEWS AND MORE ARTS NEWS SEE KANSASCITY.COM/ENTERTAINMENT.
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
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VISUAL ART
TURRELL LIGHTS UP SPENCER MUSEUM The innovative artist’s ‘Gard Blue’ as well as some of his new works are featured at the Lawrence museum.
Turrell’s Spencer exhibition includes recent holograms, including “Untitled (5LOG)” (2007). “They look like aquariums of pickled light,” Turrell says.
By ELISABETH KIRSCH Special to The Star
D
ressed all in black, with a mane of white hair and a glorious bush of a beard, James Turrell looks like a hip Santa Claus. And for the 800 people in the overflow crowd at the Spencer Museum in Lawrence last month, the presence of the 70-year-old artist was indeed a gift. In marked contrast to the bombast that dominates the international art scene, Turrell is a rarity: a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner whose artwork is revolutionary, inimitable and still evolving. He was thoughtful, modest and humorous as he addressed myriad questions from the audience. Besides the free public talk, Turrell was in Lawrence for the re-installation of his classic 1968 artwork “Gard Blue,” lent by University of Kansas alum Mark Booth and his wife, Lauren. Also on exhibit are holograms Turrell recently created, and this is their first public venue. “Gard Blue” is one of the earliest of Turrell’s innovative artworks, created when he began abandoning objects altogether in favor of ambient light projections that define space. In the Spencer’s piece, a field of glowing blue light in a small room emanates from what Turrell calls a “cross corner structure,” immersing the viewer in an arena that is both real and illusionary. “I think this piece is significant,” Spencer Museum director Saralyn Reece Hardy said in a recent interview, “because it’s one of Turrell’s early works, and it has an elegance and simplicity. It represents what’s extraordinary about Turrell’s art, which is that the viewer plays a central role in everything he makes.” If “Gard Blue” transfixes the viewer, the holograms affixed to the walls surrounding the central installation visually insist that one move over, around and under them in a never-ending dance as they change shapes. “I think they look like aquariums of pickled light,” the artist says. Turrell has been in the public eye since the 1960s, when the Los Angeles-based artist controversially began fashioning his installations of light. In his talk, Turrell recalled how at first his work was excoriated by New York critics such as Clement Greenberg, who accused him of being merely “theatrical.” “I saw nothing wrong with being theatrical,” Turrell be-
GENEVIEVE HANSON PACE GALLERY © JAMES TURRELL
FLORIAN HOLZHERR | COLLECTION OF MARK AND LAUREN BOOTH
“Gard Blue” is one of the earliest of James Turrell’s innovative artworks.
BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL “James Turrell: Gard Blue” continues at the Spencer Museum of Art, 1301 Mississippi St., Lawrence, through May 18. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; noon-4 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday. For more information, 785-864-4710 or spencerart.ku.edu.
FLORIAN HOLZHERR | JAMES TURRELL
Turrell has been working on the skyscape at Roden Crater since the late 1970s.
musedly recalled. “After all, I’m from Los Angeles, and L.A. is what New York wants to be on its day off. Europeans immediately grasped that the art being made in L.A. then, with artists using commercial materials, was the first real American art, while the work coming from the East Coast was still of European origin.” Turrell writes in his newly
released retrospective cata- have this kind of light that log: “I am involved in the ar- reminds us of this other chitecture of space. I use place we know.” Turrell now lives in the form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas. I am interested in the form of the space and the form of territory, of how we consciously inhabit space. “I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream,” he adds, “I like to
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Arizona desert and travels around the world fabricating “skyspace” commissions, architectural works of all sizes, materials and shapes that allow light to penetrate their interiors. He has completed 82 skyspaces in 26 countries and is working on more. For the last few decades his work has been on and off the radar of the mainstream art world. He had not exhibited in New York since 1980, nor had his work been visible in many public spaces. But there’s little question he is the artist of the moment now. This year he simultaneously orchestrated three major one-person exhibitions — at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York — where people waited in line for hours to see both old and new light installations. The timing of Turrell’s show at the Spencer was a happy coincidence, according to director Hardy. In 2014 and 2015, Turrell’s retrospective that originated at the Los Angeles museum will travel to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Turrell is most famously known for a monumental, multifaceted skyspace that few have seen: Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Arizona Desert that Turrell bought in the 1970s and has been transforming into a naked-eye observatory ever since. An avid pilot, Turrell spent seven months in 1974 flying above the Western states looking for the ultimate environment for the ultimate skyspace. When he decided upon the Roden Crater, he had to buy the land surrounding it along with the volcano. Suffice to say, it was seen by many as the ultimate boondoggle as
well. “It cost me two marriages and at least one relationship,” he noted ruefully in a 2001 PBS interview on art and spirituality. Recent photographs of the interior spaces that Turrell has created at Roden Crater are spectacular, however, and even in its semi-finished state it is astonishing, much like a contemporary variant of such ancient and mysterious sites as Mesa Grande, Stonehenge, and Machu Picchu. And like visitors back then, ultimately viewers will be able to travel to the crater and witness celestial events. Because there is no contrast with the depth of sky in Turrell’s works, there is no feeling of separation from the incoming light. “You end up feeling one with the universe,” the artist notes. Turrell grew up a Quaker, and he talks about going to the local Quaker meeting house as a child with his grandmother. She encouraged him “to go inside to greet the light,” one of the meditative practices of Quakers. Turrell has actually built a Quaker meeting house with a skyspace opening. “I have always been very interested in religious traditions,” Turrell said in an interview after his talk. “I’ve built a Catholic chapel and Tibetan Buddhist temples with skyspaces.” When he was young he studied the works of the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce. As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he flew nuns and lamas from Tibet during the diaspora and studied their centuries-old manuscripts. “There is a paucity of spiritual richness in our culture, and we need to raise the bar on that,” Turrell insists. “Art and light can be used for healing. Reality is just a consensus, and we can change reality.”
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
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CROSSROADS ARTS DISTRICT: First Fridays in the Crossroads. 7-9 p.m. Nov. 1. 18th and Baltimore. kccrossroads.org EPPERSON AUDITORIUM, KCAI: “Current Perspectives.” Lecture series will feature presentation by contemporary visual artist Randy Regier of Wichita. 7 p.m. Oct. 31. 45th and Warwick. kcai.edu, 816-802-3426 NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART: “Explore Traditional Islamic Arts.” 1 p.m. Oct. 27. Curator of Chinese art Colin Mackenzie, who wrote introduction of “The Chinese Art Book,” will sign copies after presentation titled “What Is Chinese Art?” 2 p.m. Nov. 2. 4525 Oak. nelson-atkins.org, 816-2356222
GALLERIES/MUSEUMS BELGER ARTS CENTER: “Contemporary Talavera Uriarte” and “The French Connection.” 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday. Through Jan. 4. 2100 Walnut. belgerartscenter .org, 816-474-3250 BLUE DJINN GALLERY: “Bad Medicine Wheel” by Doc Snyder. Opening reception, 6-9 p.m. Nov. 1. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. 1400 Union. bluedjinn gallery.com, 816-518-4649 HILLIARD GALLERY: “Vintage Mix” by Dana Swedo Bernal. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday. Through Oct. 27. 1820 McGee. hilliardgallery.com, 816-561-2956 H&R BLOCK ARTSPACE: “New Four: KCAI Faculty Biennial.” Noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Through Dec. 12. Kansas City Art Institute, 16 E. 43rd. kcai.edu/artspace, 816-561-5563 IMAGES ART GALLERY: Sandy Cahill and Marla Craven. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Through Nov. 9. 7320 W. 80th, Overland Park. imagesartgallery.org, 913-232-7113 KANSAS CITY ARTISTS COALITION: Maria Velasco, Clyde Heppner and James Beasley and Shannon Ross. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Through
Nov. 15. 201 Wyandotte. kansas cityartistscoalition.org, 816-4215222 KANSAS CITY PUBLIC LIBRARYCENTRAL LIBRARY: “What True Grit (Might Have) Looked Like: The Photographs of F.M. Steele” (through Nov. 28), “Guerrillas in Our Midst” (through Dec. 29). 14 W. 10th. kclibrary.org, 816-7013400 KEMPER EAST: “Nomads: Traversing Adolescence.” 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. Through Nov. 15. 200 E. 44th. kemperart.org, 816-753-5784 KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART: “Poem Spill: Art & the Written Word” (through Nov. 3), “Dressed Up” by Hope Gangloff, Marcia Kure and Neeta Madahar (through April 13). 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. 4420 Warwick. kemper art.org, 816-753-5784 MAIN STREET GALLERY: Paintings by Amy Green (opening reception, 6-9 p.m. Nov. 1; runs through Nov. 23), special art auction featuring work by Andrew McCoy and Tommy De Yampert and benefiting Honduran Equality Delegation (6-9 p.m. Nov. 1). 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Sunday. Upper level of Anton’s Tap Room, 1610 Main. 816-716-5940 or 816210-6534. MISSOURI BANK CROSSROADS: “Artboards.” Billboard-scale images by Kansas City artists Judith G. Levy and Robert Howsare. Through November. 125 Southwest Blvd. artarch.org or charlottestreet.com, 816-994-7731 NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART: “Early American Silver From the Cahn Collection” (through Nov. 3), “Impressions of the Southwest and Mexico” (through Nov. 17), “Rodin: Sculptures From the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation” (through Dec. 8), “Mythological Subjects” (through Dec. 15), “Secret Messages: Symbolic Meaning in Chinese Art” (through Jan 12), “About Face: Contemporary Portraiture” (through Jan. 19), “Impressionist France: Visions of Nation From Le Gray to Monet” (through Feb. 9), “The Naked and the Nude: Representations of the Body”
(through Feb. 16), “Echoes: Islamic Art and Contemporary Artists” (through March 30). 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. 4525 Oak. nelsonatkins.org, 816-751-1278 NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART: “Plunder Me, Baby” by Kukuli Velarde (through Dec. 22), “Roots & Journeys” (through May). 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Through May. JCCC, 12345 College, Overland Park. nermanmuseum.org, 913-4693000 RED STAR STUDIOS: “Confluence” by Paul Donnelly and Rain Harris. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Through Jan. 3. 2100 Walnut. redstarstudios.org, 816-474-7316 RED STAR STUDIOS AT BELGER CRANE YARD STUDIOS: “Ceramics Top 40” and “Affably Amusing.” Runs Nov. 1-Jan. 25. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. First Fridays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. 2011 Tracy. redstarstudios.org, 816-474-7316 SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART: “Solo” by Jun Kaneko. Opening reception, 7-9 p.m. Nov. 1; runs through Dec. 21. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. 2004 Baltimore. sherryleedy.com, 816-221-2626 SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART: “1 Kansas Farmer” and “Conversation XV: Dust” (through Dec. 15), “Drawings for Sculpture You Can Walk Through” by Rockne Krebs (through Jan. 5), “Diego Teo: International Artist-in-Residence” (through Jan. 5), “Gard Blue” by James Turrell (through May 18). 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday and Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, noon-4 p.m. Sunday. University of Kansas, 1301 Mississippi, Lawrence. spencerart.ku.edu, 785-864-4710 TODD WEINER GALLERY: “Board Game Taboo” by Ian Young. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. WednesdayFriday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday. Through Oct. 29. 115 W. 18th. toddweinergallery.com, 816-9848538
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OFF CENTER THEATRE: “Carrie: The Musical.” Egads Theatre Co. 8 p.m. Oct. 27-28 and Oct. 31-Nov. 2; closes Nov. 2. $20-$25. 2450 Grand. egadstheatre.com, 816-842-9999 OLATHE COMMUNITY THEATRE ASSOCIATION: “Piece of My Heart.” 2 p.m. Oct. 27, 8 p.m. Nov. 1-2, 2 p.m. Nov. 3; closes Nov. 3. $12-$17. 500 E. Loula, Olathe. olathetheatre.org, 913-782-2990 ROGER T. SERMON CENTER: “The Mousetrap.” City Theatre of Independence. 8 p.m. Oct. 31-Nov. 2; closes Nov. 10. $11-$12. 201 N. Dodgion, Independence. citytheatreofindependence.org, 816-325-7367 SPENCER THEATRE: “The Foreigner.” Kansas City Repertory Theatre. 2 p.m. Oct. 27, 7 p.m. Oct. 30-31, 8 p.m. Nov. 1, 3 and 8 p.m. Nov. 2, 2 p.m. Nov. 3; closes Nov. 3. $20-$60. James C. Olson Performing Arts Center, 4949 Cherry. kcrep.org, 816-235-2700 UNICORN THEATRE: “Seminar.” 3 p.m. Oct. 27, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 29-31, 8 p.m. Nov. 1-2; closes Nov. 10. $22.50-$32.50. 3828 Main. unicorntheatre.org, 816-531-7529
to, Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” 8 p.m. Nov. 1-2, 2 p.m. Nov. 3; $23-$74. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway. kcsymphony.org, 816-471-0400 LEGENDS 14 THEATRES: “La Boheme.” Gran Teatre del Liceu opera. 7 p.m. Oct. 29. $12-$15. 1841 Village West Parkway, Kansas City, Kan. phoenixtheatres.com, 913-428-2978 LIED CENTER: Naoko Takada, marimba. 2 p.m. Oct. 27. $11-$22. 1600 Stewart, Lawrence. lied .ku.edu, 785-864-2787 “THE MAGIC FLUTE” AT EASE WITH OPERA PRESENTATIONS: 7 p.m. Oct. 28, Kauffman Foundation, 4801 Rockhill; 5:30 p.m. Nov. 1, Beth Ingram Administration Building, 1725 Holmes. Free. kcopera.org NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART: Jun Kaneko will talk about his
production of “The Magic Flute” for Kansas City Lyric Opera. 6 p.m. Oct. 31. Free. Atkins Auditorium, 4525 Oak. nelsonatkins.org, 816-751-1278 SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: Xin Jing, flute. UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance. 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27. Free. 318 E. 55th. conservatory.umkc.edu, 816-2352900 VAN HORN HIGH SCHOOL: Spirit of Independence Band Concert. 3 p.m. Oct. 27. Free. 1109 Arlington, Independence. WHITE RECITAL HALL: Fall Dance Concert with the Conservatory Wind Symphony, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 31-Nov. 2; $6-$8. Fall Dance Concert, 2:30 p.m. Nov. 2; free. UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance. James C. Olson Performing Arts Center, 4949 Cherry. conservatory.umkc.edu, 816-235-2900
MUSIC + DANCE CARLSEN CENTER RECITAL HALL: Stephanie Zelnick, clarinet, and Ellen Bottorff, piano. Noon Oct. 28. Free. JCCC, 12345 College, Overland Park. jccc.edu/music/ ruel-joyce-jazz.html, 913-4698500, ext. 3689 COLONIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: Kansas City Flute Choir. “East Meets West.” 3:30 p.m. Oct. 27. Free. 9500 Wornall. kcflutechoir.org FOLLY THEATER: Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI. 8 p.m. Oct. 31. $30-$40. 300 W. 12th. chamber music.org, 816-561-9999 HELZBERG HALL: Kansas City Symphony, “Symphonic Poetry: Tchaikovsky and Liszt,” 2 p.m. Oct. 27; $21-$72. Screenland at the Symphony: “The Phantom of the Opera,” screening of 1925 movie accompanied by organist Aaron David Miller, 7 p.m. Oct. 31; $25-$45. Second Piano Concer-
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ASPEN ROOM: “Love Letters.” Dinner theater by Summit Theatre Group. 3:30 p.m. Oct. 27; closes Oct. 27. $30-$32. Stanley Historic Events Space, 308 S.E. Douglas, Lee’s Summit. summit theatregroup.com, 816-463-2654 BLUE SPRINGS AUDITORIUM: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Blue Springs City Theatre. 2 p.m. Oct. 27. $8-$10. 2000 N.W. Ashton, Blue Springs. bluespringscitytheatre .com, 816-228-0137 CHESTNUT FINE ARTS CENTER: “Forever Plaid.” 8 p.m. Oct. 31-Nov. 2; closes Dec. 15. $22-$25. 234 N. Chestnut, Olathe. chestnutfinearts.com, 913-764-2121 COPAKEN STAGE: “Big Love.” 2 p.m. Oct. 27; closes Oct. 27. $6-$15. 13th and Walnut. umkc theatre.org, 816-235-6222 COTERIE THEATRE: “Dracula: The Journal of Jonathan Harker.” 2 p.m. Oct. 27; closes Oct. 27. $10-$15. 2450 Grand. thecoterie .org, 816-474-6552 GLENWOOD ARTS THEATRE: “Rumplestiltskin.” Paul Mesner Puppets. 10 a.m. Oct. 29-Nov. 2; closes Nov. 2. 9575 Metcalf, Overland Park. $6-$11. paulmes-
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OPENING LINES | “The Death of Santini” by Pat Conroy (Doubleday) On June 4, 1963, I walked off the graduation stage of Beaufort High School without a single clue about where I was attending college next year or if I’d be attending one at all. My parents had driven me mad over this subject and neither
Reassessing the killing of Matthew Shepard BRIAN BURNES
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would discuss it with me further. I had planned to get a job at the tomato-packing shed on St. Helena Island to earn some money if my parents somehow managed to enroll me in a college. But my father received orders to Offutt Air Force
Base in Omaha, Nebraska, for the following year. I didn’t want to leave Beaufort, and I sure as hell didn’t want to move to Nebraska, a place where I didn’t know another human being. I wanted to go to college.
REVIEW | ‘The Valley of Amazement’
CHINESE COURTESAN CULTURE Amy Tan’s heroine endures many disappointments navigating this early 20th century world. By JEFFREY ANN GOUDIE Special to The Star
READORAMA
Matthew Shepard died 15 years ago this month. However shocking the gruesome details of the gay student’s beating death in October 1998 — authorities found him tied to a log fence near Laramie, Wyo.; he died five days later — there was more to the story, friends quickly suggested. Their statements that Shepard likely had been targeted because he was gay rendered his death as possibly the country’s most horrific anti-gay hate crime. Their remarks received immediate play in the media; activists organized protests and demonstrations. Journalist Stephen Jimenez, however, believes that Shepard’s Jimenez killing was not triggered by what one of his assailants earlier had described as a “gay panic” after Shepard allegedly had approached him in a bar. As he writes in “The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard,” Jimenez believes that Aaron McKinney, with accomplice Russell Henderson, assaulted Shepard for drugs and money. After 13 years of investigation, Jimenez believes McKinney, who initially said he hadn’t known Shepard, in fact had known him for close to a year. Both he and Shepard, Jimenez writes, were dealing and using methamphetamine in Laramie. Jimenez’s book, at minimum, greatly complicates the accepted narrative of Shepard’s death, which inspired a play and television movie and contributed momentum to a federal hate crime law. Some critics have wondered about the integrity of Jimenez’s sources. An online petition also surfaced, urging booksellers not to host events featuring Jimenez. “What the book is saying is, let’s face the complexities: This was much more complicated than a pure anti-gay hate crime,” Jimenez said before speaking at Unity Temple on the Plaza in an appearance scheduled by Rainy Day Books. “What I’ve noticed is that there was a lot of commentary before the book came out. There seemed to be many people responding to the idea of the book rather than what was actually in it. “What I’m saying is that if we are serious about dealing with hatred and violence in its many manifestations, then let’s look at the complex circumstances that, in this case, brought about such a grotesque and violent crime.” Jimenez’s book was published by Steerforth Press of New Hampshire, whose president is Chip Fleischer, a Kansas City native. For more information, go to steerforth.com. To reach Brian Burnes, call 816-234-4120 or send email to bburnes@kcstar.com.
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n “In the Company of the Courtesan,” novelist Sarah Dunant created an enterprising Italian courtesan and her business partner in 16th century Venice. Amy Tan sets her hefty novel of an elaborate courtesan culture, “The Valley of Amazement,” in early 20th century China. In these fictional worlds, economic security is precarious, and women adopt and manipulate subservient roles to gain power. Tan’s first novel in eight years opens in Shanghai in 1905. Violet, the first-person narrator, pronounces: “When I was seven, I knew exactly who I was: a thoroughly American girl in race, manners, and speech, whose mother, Lulu Minturn, was the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai.” Violet knows only half the story. In truth, her father is a Chinese artist who paints imitations of originals. Lulu was Lucia when she met Lu Shing, then an apprentice of American landscape painters. Her backstory is shoehorned into the last 156 pages of this novel. Lucia’s parents are San Francisco freethinkers: her father an art history scholar with a collection of fetishistic objects, her mother the daughter of a botanical artist who is herself an entomologist. They host salons and barely notice the daughter they named after Lucretia Mott and call Lucia for short. Lucia and Lu Shing begin a relationship in the turret room of Lucia’s family home. When Lucia becomes pregnant, Lu Shing confesses he is betrothed to a woman in China. Convinced she can overcome Chinese custom with American pluck, Lucia boards a ship for Shanghai. Once there, Lu Shing caves to family pressure and boards the pregnant Lucia with an American friend, Philo Danner, an art dealer
The Valley of Amazement, by Amy Tan (608 pages; HarperCollins; $29.99)
RICK SMOLAN | AGAINST ALL ODDS PRODUCTIONS
“The Valley of Amazement” is Amy Tan’s first novel in eight years.
with a house in the city’s International Settlement. She gives birth to Violet, who captures her heart but does not win her entry into Lu Shing’s family. Soon they have a boy she names Teddy, in honor of Danner’s dead partner. Lu Shing takes the baby boy to his parents, hoping to win their approval, convincing Lucia this is her
best chance to insinuate herself into the family as Second Wife. But the grandparents keep the boy, and Teddy becomes Lu Shen, heir to the family fortune, lost to Lucia. When Danner unexpectedly dies, he leaves Lucia the house. He also leaves Golden Dove, a former courtesan and current boarder, the bank account containing her ac-
cumulated rent. Lucia and Golden Dove become a dynamic business duo, turning Danner’s house into a pub. They start a string of businesses and shortly open a firstclass courtesan house called the House of Lulu Mimi in Chinese. Violet, the pampered daughter, garners an unsentimental education into the commerce of sex while eavesdropping on her savvy mother’s business dealings. Lulu does not entertain customers or lovers, except for the charming American Fairweather. On Violet’s 14th birthday the Ching dynasty falls, and the Republic of China is born. Lu Shing arrives at the house to say his father has died, informing Lulu their son is in San Francisco. Lulu packs for California. Fairweather takes Violet and the luggage, promising to rendezvous with Lulu on the ship. Instead, he kidnaps Violet, just as Lu Shing’s parents kidnapped Teddy. Violet has been sold as a 14-year-old virgin courtesan to the Hall of Tranquility, where things are anything but tranquil. Just as Golden Dove has been indispensable to the success and survival of Lulu, courtesan Magic SEE VALLEY | D7
Women of the Nazi death machine History professor’s research details some of the ways in which women contributed to genocide. By ELAINA SMITH The Kansas City Star
The atrocities of Nazi Germany have been primarily the purview of German men. German women claimed ignorance and innocence regarding their male counterparts’ brutality, portraying themselves as hard-suffering wives and daughters who cleaned up the rubble of the war after Germany’s defeat in 1945. Wendy Lower’s chilling new work, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” works against this misconception, showing how German women were not just insignificant cogs in a larger machine but instead crucial members of the Third Reich’s genocidal empire. Lower, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and consultant for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, draws on government documents, letters, memoirs and trial testimonies to depict the lives of various Nazi German women who came of age during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. These women experienced the upheaval of government and the economy after Germany’s defeat in World War I in 1918. The Third Reich groomed them to see warmongering and genocide as normal, where they “learned how to navigate a system that had clear
limits but also granted them new benefits, opportunities and a raised status.” Racial-utopian goals and extreme nationalism sparked these women’s ambitions, not only as potential mothers of the “pure” German race but as useful mechanisms within the government. Lower cites examples of specific women who left their homes to travel to the eastern front, including the countries of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. Thousands worked as secretaries, teachers and nurses, all important roles in the running of the regime. Johanna Altvater and Sabine Herbst Dick worked as secretaries for powerful Nazi officials. Intertwined with everyday activities, the women compiled lists of Jews to be spared or killed. “It was up to the receptionists to decide about who would be shot,” Lower reveals. “Sometimes one of the women would ask her colleague: ‘How about this one? Yes or no?’ ” Nurses such as Erika Ohr pursued the opportunity for gainful employment within the Third Reich. Ohr, the daughter of a sheepherder, traveled to Ukraine to work as a nurse during the war. She, like other nurses, not only tended German soldiers, they also sterilized and euthanized “undesirables,” which included those who were mentally ill, disabled or simply deemed unfit to live or propagate. The government also stationed teachers in various towns in the
REVIEW “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, by Wendy Lower (288 pages; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $26)
east. Teachers such as Ingelene Ivens indoctrinated ethnic Germans in Poland in Nazi ideology, with the hope of assimilating them into German society. “Schools were central institutions for converting ethnic Germans to the Nazi cause,” Lower explains, “and for creating a racial hierarchy that pushed non-German children out of the school.” Lower makes clear that most women did not commit actual violence but merely benefited from the violence going on around them, not only with employment but with looting and stealing from Jews who had been forced into ghettos and camps. Many were bystanders, like Ilse Struwe, who watched Jews outside her dormitory window being led to a theater to be killed. Some women committed actual violence, however, and most of them were the wives and lovers of men stationed on the eastern front. These were the women who tended to their children, gave parties
and entertained. They comforted and praised their husbands after they returned home from slaughtering Jews in the killing fields. Among the latter was Erna Petri, who encountered six hungry Jewish children outside her home. After feeding them, she led them outside and shot each one point-blank in the head. Liesel Willhaus stood on her balcony and shot into a crowd of Jewish laborers for sport, her own child at her side. Few of these women stood trial; even fewer were convicted of their crimes. Most re-entered society and led normal lives. Lower estimates at least half a million women contributed to the Nazi regime, which “mobilized a generation of young female revolutionaries who were conditioned to accept violence, to incite it, and to commit it, in defense of or as an assertion of Germany’s superiority.” It was this acceptance of violence that allowed the killing of millions of Jews and other “undesirables.” “Hitler’s Furies” horrifies and angers, depicting how these women contributed to genocide. Lower’s exploration of Nazi women’s involvement not only sheds light on a gruesome history but “helps us see what human beings — not only men, but women as well — are capable of believing and doing.” Elaina Smith is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and an intern this semester at The Star. To reach her, send email to esmith@kcstar.com.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR.
VALLEY: Children are commodities FROM D6
Gourd, the former Magic Cloud from her mother’s house, becomes Violet’s teacher and protector. Violet’s “defloration” occurs on her 15th birthday, on the year anniversary of the abdication of the emperor. Her first patron, Loyalty Fang, purchases her services for one year, which is cut short by mutual squabbling. Violet wants love; Loyalty wants freedom. She transforms from dewy-eyed innocent to dryeyed veteran, following the intricate rules and rituals of the courtesan house. She is unexpectedly befriended by an American, Edward Ivory, in Shanghai to learn his family’s business. They have a baby, Flora. When Edward dies from the Spanish flu, Violet is left with her baby and her protector, Magic Gourd. Violet takes on the mantle of Mrs. Ivory. When the real Mrs. Ivory shows up, Flora is plucked away, just as Violet had earlier been taken from Lulu. Children in this novel are commodities, appropriated for adult purposes. Now a childless common-law widow, Violet returns to the House of Tranquility, renamed the House of Vermillion. But the vagaries of fate are not fin-
ished with her. She and Magic Gourd travel 300 miles to rural Moon Pond Village, where she is to become First Wife to a scholar named Perpetual, a perpetual liar. She is relegated to Third Wife of the remote north wing. Violet’s life goes from bad to worse before it becomes better: Ultimately, this half-Chinese, halfAmerican girl, this former courtesan, this mother, finally learns who she is. “The Valley of Amazement” succeeds in its parts better than in its whole. Tan is a bit too fond of her own research into courtesan culture. Some parts sag, particularly the lengthy section where Magic Gourd advises Violet on strategies for becoming a successful courtesan. A bit of editorial excision would have yielded a shapelier novel. But given the complexities of courtesan culture, and the cultural changes in China from 1905-1939, Tan has many strands to weave. An interesting mix of the formal and the graphic, “The Valley of Amazement” is thickly plotted and as detailed as the protocol of courtesan culture. Jeffrey Ann Goudie is a freelance writer living in Topeka.
TED OWENS: Former KU men’s MARK ZWONITZER: PBS writer/ basketball coach will appear director/producer will speak for “At the Hang-Up: Seeking about Richard Ben Cramer, Your Purpose, Running the author of “What It Takes.” Dole Race, Finishing Strong.” Institute Journalism & Politics 3 p.m. Oct. 27. KU Bookstore, Lecture. 7:30 p.m. Oct. 30. Dole KU Edwards Campus, Institute of Politics, 12600 Quivira, Overland 1502 Iowa, Lawrence. Park. edwardscampus doleinstitute.org, .ku.edu, 913-897-8580 785-864-4900 WRITERS PLACE EVENTS: MIDWEST POETS National Novel Writing SERIES: Adam ZagajewMonth Kickoff info ski will appear. 7 p.m. meeting, 6 p.m. Oct. 27. Oct. 31. $3. Mabee Writers Place Salon, 7 Theater, Rockhurst p.m. Oct. 28. Day of the University, 54th and Massie Dead Celebration, 7 Troost. rockhurst.edu/ p.m. Nov. 1. Writers artsandletters, 816Place, 3607 Pennsylva501-4607 nia. writersplace.org, JOSHUA SLOCUM: 816-753-1090 Author will appear for MARGIE KAY: Author, “Final Rights: Reradio host and magaclaiming the Amerzine publisher will ican Way of Death.” 2 speak. 6 p.m. Oct. 28. p.m. Nov. 1. Kansas Kansas City Public City Public LibraryLibrary-Trails West Plaza Branch, 4801 Barks Branch, 11401 E. 23rd, Main. kclibrary.org, Independence. unx 816-701-3400 news.com or kclibrary DIA DE LOS MUERTOS/ .org, 816-701-3483 DAY OF THE DEADROBERT K. MASSIE: THEMED READING: Author of “Catherine Hosted by graduate the Great: Portrait of a student-run journal Woman,” “Nicholas and Beecher’s. 7 p.m. Nov. Alexandra” and “Peter 1. Raven Book Store, 6 the Great” will speak on E. Seventh, Lawrence. “Russia, the Romanovs ravenbookstore.com, Mackenzie and the Coming of the 785-749-3300 Great War.” 7 p.m. Oct. COLIN MACKENZIE: 28. Pierson Auditorium, 5000 Curator of Chinese art, who Holmes. 816-235-1611 wrote introduction of “The MICHAEL DIRDA: Washington Chinese Art Book,” will sign Post book critic and columnist copies after presentation titled gives the Richard W. Gunn “What Is Chinese Art?” 2 p.m. Memorial Lecture, “A Literary Nov. 2. Nelson-Atkins Museum Life: Twenty-Five Years at the of Art, 4525 Oak. nelsonWashington Post Book World.” atkins.org, 816-235-622 5 p.m. Oct. 29, Big 12 Room, JON NICCUM: Author will appear Kansas Union, Lawrence. for “The Worst Gig: From COLEMAN BARKS: Author and Psycho Fans to Stage Riots, performer will present “This Famous Musicians Tell All.” 5 Day I Cannot Say ... An Evep.m. Nov. 2. Barnes & Noble ning of Rumi’s Poetry” accomCountry Club Plaza, 420 W. panied by cellist David Darling. 47th. bn.com, 816-753-1313 7 p.m. Oct. 30. $15-$20. Unity | Dan Kelly, The Star Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th. festivaloffaithskc.org Send notice of book and author events to literary cal@kcstar .com.
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1. Killing Jesus, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (Holt) 2. My Story, by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart (St. Martin’s) 3. David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown) 4. I Am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb (Little, Brown) 5. The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida (Random House)
1. Storm Front, by John Sandford (Putnam) 2. Doing Hard Time, by Stuart Woods (Putnam) 3. Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King (Scribner) 4. The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty (Amy Einhorn/Putnam) 5. The Longest Ride, by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central)
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY | Oct. 27, 2013
THE STARS SHOW THE KIND OF DAY YOU’LL HAVE:
This year you seem far more upbeat than you have been in a while. You’ll still have periods when you might be withdrawn, which is normal for you. Your public image blossoms, especially after July 2014. Know what you want, and go for it. If you are single, you could meet someone who is very deep before summer. After July, you could meet someone quite joyful. If you are attached, the two of you will decide to schedule a special trip this year. This adventure could affect your bond. Traveling would be best before summer. LEO knows how to make you smile. ARIES (March 21-April 19) ★★★★★ A partner might be depressed or overserious. Understand that you can do only so much. Tonight: Your sensitivity means a lot to someone else. TAURUS (April 20-May 20) ★★★ You might want to have a long-overdue talk, but you could be intimidated by a facet of the discussion. Tonight: Communication could be subject to a
★★★★★ Dynamic
★★★ Average
★★★★ Positive
★ Difficult
★★ So-so
misunderstanding. GEMINI (May 21-June 20) ★★★ You might want to try a new approach with someone who has not been as responsive as you would like. Tonight: Hang out with pals. CANCER (June 21-July 22) ★★★★ What someone thinks about a personal situation could give you some helpful insight. Tonight: Make it your treat. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) ★★★★ You could be taken aback by a family member who has a very strong point of view and who is a bit of a downer. Tonight: As you like it. VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) ★★ Someone does not see a personal matter in the same light that you do. Detach and be gracious, no matter what happens. Tonight: Get some extra rest. LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
★★★★★ Emphasize what is positive in your life, and you will feel as if nothing can stop you. Tonight: Be where the action is. SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) ★★★ Your attitude might be particularly intense, especially to an older friend or loved one. Tonight: A force to be dealt with. SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) ★★★★★ Hop in the car and go for a ride as far away as possible and/or reasonable. Tonight: Be with a favorite person. CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) ★★★★★ You could be taken aback by a situation that seems unresolvable. Don’t worry, the person in question will come around. Tonight: Keep it light. AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) ★★★★ You can’t stop a friend or loved one from dominating. It is a part of this person’s personality. Tonight: Go along with someone’s wishes. PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) ★★★★ Give more of yourself to a situation or a cause that means a lot to you. Tonight: Get a head start on tomorrow. | Jacqueline Bigar © 2013 King Features
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GRACE UNPLUGGED (PG) F 11:10, 5:05, 10:25 DON JON (R) F 11:05 AM, 10:20 PM RUSH (R) F 7:40, 10:40 ENOUGH SAID (PG13) F 11:25, 2:00, 7:50
GRAVITY: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE (PG13) 11:30, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30
DIGITAL 3D GRAVITY 3D (PG13) F 12:30, 5:30, 10:45
DIGITAL PRESENTATION
Reserved Seating, In-Theatre Dining & Beverages
THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 11:45, 1:30, 4:30, 6:00, 7:30, 9:00, 10:45 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) 3 10:30 PM JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) F 3 11:15, 12:30, 1:45, 3:15, 4:45, 6:00, 7:30, 8:30, 10:00 CARRIE (R) F 3 6:45, 9:30 ESCAPE PLAN (R) F 3 11:25, 2:15, 5:05, 7:55, 10:45 THE FIFTH ESTATE (R) F 3 1:25, 4:20, 7:20 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) F 11:15, 12:00, 2:45, 3:15, 6:30, 7:25, 9:45 MACHETE KILLS (R) F 4:50, 10:10 GRAVITY (PG13) F 11:00, 3:00, 8:00 RUNNER RUNNER (R) F 11:20, 1:45, 4:10, 6:35, 9:00 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) F 11:00, 12:00, 1:45, 2:30, 4:15, 5:00 PRISONERS (R) F 4:25, 10:15 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (PG13) F 2:00, 7:35 WE’RE THE MILLERS (R) F 11:40, 2:20, 5:10, 7:55, 10:40
GRAVITY 3D (PG13) F 11:15, 1:00, 3:45, 4:45, 7:30, 10:15 THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 12:30, 3:45, 7:00, 10:15 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) F 3 11:45, 2:30, 5:15, 6:30, 8:00, 10:45 CARRIE (R) F 3 11:00, 2:00, 5:00, 7:45, 10:45 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) F 1:30, 5:00, 8:30 GRAVITY (PG13) F 9:15 PM CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) F 12:30, 2:00, 3:15, 6:00, 8:45 PRISONERS (R) F 12:15, 6:45 ENOUGH SAID (PG13) F 4:00, 10:30
Plush Recliners, Reserved Seating, In-Theatre Dining & Beverages
AMC independent CZ12 (PG13) 3 2:25, 7:45 I’M IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH GIRL (PG) 3 11:10, 4:40 BOSS (NR–NOT RATED) 3 1:40
GRAVITY 3D (PG13) F 12:00, 2:45 THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 11:00, 2:00, 5:00, 8:15 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) F 3 1:00, 3:45, 9:15 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) F 5:30, 9:00 GRAVITY (PG13) F 6:15
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I-29 & Barry Rd.
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GRAVITY: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE (PG13) 11:45, 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, 9:45
DIGITAL 3D GRAVITY 3D (PG13) 10:45, 11:15, 12:15, 1:15, 1:45, 3:45, 4:15, 5:15, 6:15, 6:45, 8:30, 9:15, 10:15 GRAVITY 3D (PG13) J 2:45, 7:45 THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 7:20, 10:20 THE COUNSELOR (R) J 3 10:35, 12:20, 1:20, 3:20, 4:20, 6:20, 9:20 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) 3 11:00, 12:30, 1:30, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:30, 7:30, 9:00, 10:00 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) J 3 12:00, 2:30, 5:30, 8:00, 10:30 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) F 3 10:30, 11:30, 1:00, 2:00, 3:30, 4:30, 6:00, 7:00, 8:30, 9:30 CARRIE (R) 3 11:25, 1:55, 4:25, 7:05, 9:35 CARRIE (R) J F 3 12:25, 2:55, 5:25, 8:05, 10:35 ESCAPE PLAN (R) J 3 1:10, 4:05, 7:10, 10:05 THE FIFTH ESTATE (R) J 3 10:40, 4:50, 7:40, 10:30 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) 3 10:40, 1:40, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) J 3 12:40, 3:40, 6:40, 9:40 MACHETE KILLS (R) J F 3 4:35, 7:25, 10:10 RUNNER RUNNER (R) 3 11:50, 2:25 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) 12:35, 3:05, 5:25, 7:55, 10:25 PRISONERS (R) J 12:45, 4:10, 7:35 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (PG13) 5:20, 7:50, 10:25 WE’RE THE MILLERS (R) 11:20, 2:10, 4:50, 7:35, 10:15 THE SHINING (R) 2:00
AMC independent I’M IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH GIRL (PG) 3 11:40, 2:20 RUSH (R) J 5:05, 8:10
WARD PARKWAY 14
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At Independence Commons M-291 Hwy @ 39th St
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GRAVITY: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE (PG13) 10:20, 12:50, 3:20, 5:50, 8:10, 10:30
DIGITAL 3D GRAVITY 3D (PG13) 12:00, 2:30, 4:55, 7:30, 9:55 GRAVITY 3D (PG13) J F 1:30, 4:05, 9:05 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 IN 3D (PG) 10:45, 3:25
DIGITAL PRESENTATION THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 10:15, 11:20, 1:10, 2:15, 4:10, 5:05, 7:05, 8:00, 9:10, 10:00 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) 3 10:00, 10:45, 11:30, 12:30, 1:15, 2:00, 2:45, 3:45, 4:30, 5:15, 6:15, 7:00, 7:45, 8:15, 9:00, 9:30, 10:15 CARRIE (R) 3 10:00, 11:10, 12:25, 1:40, 2:50, 4:15, 5:20, 6:45, 7:55, 9:20, 10:25 ESCAPE PLAN (R) 3 10:35, 1:35, 4:25, 7:20, 10:10 THE FIFTH ESTATE (R) 3 1:50, 7:25 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) 10:30, 12:05, 12:45, 1:45, 3:10, 4:00, 5:00, 6:20, 7:15, 8:10, 9:40, 10:15 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) J F 5:40, 9:00 MACHETE KILLS (R) 11:05, 4:40, 10:25 GRAVITY (PG13) J F 11:00, 6:35 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) 10:05, 1:05, 5:45 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) J F 11:30, 2:05, 4:35, 7:10, 9:40 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (PG13) 4:00, 6:40 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 (PG13) F 10:25 AM WE’RE THE MILLERS (R) 11:15, 1:55, 4:50, 7:40, 10:20
AMC independent I’M IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH GIRL (PG) 3 10:10, 1:00 DON JON (R) F 12:55, 3:15
TOWN CENTER 20 n
At Town Center Plaza 119th & Nall
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GRAVITY: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE (PG13) 11:00, 1:20, 3:40, 6:00, 8:20, 10:40
DIGITAL 3D GRAVITY 3D (PG13) 11:40, 12:30, 2:50, 4:20, 5:10, 7:30, 9:00, 9:50
DIGITAL PRESENTATION
THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 11:00, 12:25, 1:45, 3:15, 4:45, 6:05, 7:45, 8:50, 10:45 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) 3 11:00, 1:20, 3:40, 6:00, 8:30, 10:45 DIGITAL 3D JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) F 3 12:20, 2:40, 5:00, 7:20, 9:40 GRAVITY 3D (PG13) 11:00, 12:00, 1:20, 2:20, 4:40, 6:15, CARRIE (R) 3 11:30, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30 7:15, 9:45 CARRIE (R) J 3 12:45, 3:15, 5:45, 8:15, 10:45 ESCAPE PLAN (R) J 3 11:10, 2:00, 4:45, 7:30, 10:15 THE FIFTH ESTATE (R) J 3 11:20, 4:55, 10:30 DIGITAL PRESENTATION SECOND SCREEN LIVE: THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (PG) 3 3:10, 5:10, 7:10 THE COUNSELOR (R) 3 10:45, 1:40, 4:30, 7:25, 10:15 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) 11:15, 12:00, 1:00, 2:15, 4:00, JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA (R) 3 10:30, 5:30, 7:00, 8:30, 9:10, 10:00 MACHETE KILLS (R) 10:15 PM 11:20, 1:00, 1:50, 3:30, 4:20, 6:00, 6:50, 7:30, 8:30, 9:20, 10:00 GRAVITY (PG13) J 2:00, 6:40 CARRIE (R) 3 11:40, 2:10, 4:00, 5:00, 6:35, 7:45, 9:10, 10:20 RUNNER RUNNER (R) 11:40, 4:45, 7:10, 9:30 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) ESCAPE PLAN (R) 3 11:10, 2:00, 4:45, 7:40, 10:25 11:00, 1:20, 3:45, 6:05, 8:20, 10:45 THE FIFTH ESTATE (R) 3 12:20, 3:25, 6:25 THE SHINING (R) 2:00 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (PG13) 10:20, 11:30, 12:40, 1:35, 2:30, 3:50, 4:50, 5:50, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:10 AMC independent MACHETE KILLS (R) 9:35 PM CZ12 (PG13) 3 2:15, 7:50 GRAVITY (PG13) 3:45, 8:40 I’M IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH GIRL (PG) 3 11:00, RUNNER RUNNER (R) 2:40, 5:10 1:45, 4:35, 7:25 BAGGAGE CLAIM (PG13) 10:00 AM, 12:30 PM THE SUMMIT (R) 3 11:35, 2:05, 4:35, 7:05, 9:35 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 (PG) DON JON (R) 11:00, 1:15, 3:35, 5:50, 8:10, 10:30 10:40, 11:50, 1:15, 3:10, 5:40, 8:05, 10:30 RUSH (R) 11:05, 2:05, 5:00, 7:50, 10:40 n
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The Counselor (R) 12:15 3:00 4:00 8:10 10:15 Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (R) 11:10 12:10 1:30 2:30 4:50 5:40 7:15 8:00 9:25 10:10 Carrie (R) 11:25 1:50 4:20 5:05 6:50 9:10 9:50 Escape Plan (R) 11:05 1:45 4:25 7:05 9:40 The Fifth Estate (R) 1:40 4:40 7:30 10:15 I’m in Love with a Church Girl (PG) 2:10 4:50 7:35 10:05 Captain Phillips (PG13) 12:45 4:10 7:20 10:10 Gravity 3D (PG13) 11:10 1:25 2:25 3:50 5:00 6:05 7:20 8:05 9:35 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (PG) 12:00 2:30 5:00 7:20 9:30 Prisoners (R) 12:30 3:45 7:00 10:00 Insidious: Chapter 2 (PG13) 11:50 2:10 4:35 7:05 9:25 Gravity (PG13) 12:05 pm only We’re the Millers (R) 12:10 2:35 7:25
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Now Hiring For Staff Positions GRAVITY - REALD 3D [PG-13] 12:00 2:40 5:40 8:20 10:50 JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA [R] 10:25 11:20 12:10 1:10 2:05 3:00 3:55 4:50 5:45 6:40 7:30 8:25 9:25 10:15 10:50 THE COUNSELOR [R] 10:05 1:20 4:35 7:50 10:45 GRAVITY - REALD 3D [PG-13] 10:40 4:10 6:55 GRAVITY [PG-13] 1:25 9:45 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS [PG-13] 11:50 3:20 6:50 10:20 CARRIE [R] 10:00 11:30 12:50 2:20 3:50 5:10 6:45 8:10 9:40 10:45 THE SHINING (1980) [R] 2:00PM ESCAPE PLAN [R] 12:40 4:05 7:10 10:25 THE FIFTH ESTATE [R] 3:10 9:00 I’M IN LOVE WITH A CHURCH GIRL [PG] 12:20 3:45 7:00 10:10 MACHETE KILLS [R] 10:50 8:00 10:40 PULLING STRINGS [NR] 10:15 1:15 4:20 7:40 10:35 RUNNER RUNNER [R] 10:10 12:45 3:30 6:10 8:50 BAGGAGE CLAIM [PG-13] 10:30 1:30 4:30 7:15 9:50 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 - REALD 3D [PG] 11:00 10:00 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 [PG] 1:50 4:40 7:20 DON JON [R] 12:30 6:25 PRISONERS [R] 11:10 2:50 6:30 10:05 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 [PG-13] 10:20 1:00 3:40 6:20 9:10 INSTRUCTIONS NOT INCLUDED [PG-13] 12:55 4:00 7:05 10:30
CARRIE [R] 2:15PM CAPTAIN PHILLIPS [PG-13] 4:30PM THE COUNSELOR [R] 7:30PM JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA [R] 10:00PM
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D7
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2013
Times for Sunday, October 27, 2013
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JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA [R] 12:35 1:50 3:05 4:20 5:35 6:50 8:05 9:20 10:35 THE COUNSELOR [R] 1:40 4:30 7:20 10:15 GRAVITY - REALD 3D [PG-13] 12:30 2:50 4:00 5:10 6:20 7:30 8:40 GRAVITY [PG-13] 1:40 9:55 CAPTAIN PHILLIPS [PG-13] 12:40 3:50 7:00 10:10 CARRIE [R] 12:25 2:55 5:25 7:55 10:30 THE SHINING (1980) [R] 2:00PM ESCAPE PLAN [R] 1:35 4:25 7:10 10:00 THE FIFTH ESTATE [R] 1:05 4:05 7:05 10:05 BAGGAGE CLAIM [PG-13] 12:25 5:05 7:35 CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 REALD 3D [PG] 12:35PM CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 [PG] 3:00 5:25 7:50 10:20 DON JON [R] 12:25 2:45 8:10 10:25 PRISONERS [R] 1:25 4:50 8:15 INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2 [PG-13] 5:05 7:45 10:05 WE’RE THE MILLERS [R] 3:00 5:35 10:35
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE OCTOBER 27, 2013
MAG INTERVIEW: THE GUY ★ October 27, THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE 2013
WITH 300 SUITS | 16
ADVERTISING SECTION: DIABETES | 21
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first of all... index
BY CINDY HOEDEL
CRITTERCAM IS AT HOME ON THE RANGE ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Drew Rudebusch throws a brisket on the smoker.
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COVER STORY ....................................... Rockin’ the Royal: For this team at the American Royal Barbecue, the smokin’ and the partyin’ rarely stop. BY STEVE PAUL
THE MAG INTERVIEW ..................... 16 The always dapper Eric L. Wesson of The Kansas City Call newspaper: “When you wear nice clothes, people will react to you more positively. Sometimes we have dress-down Sundays at church, but I’ll still put on a suit and tie.” BY CINDY HOEDEL
3 MONEY MANNERS ...............................4 TRAVEL .................................................... 18 KC PEOPLE .......................................... 29 PUZZLES, COMICS ............................. 31 LOVE STORY ............................................
Answers on Page 20
HOW TO REACH US Staff writer Cindy Hoedel, 816-234-4304 choedel@kcstar.com Facebook, Twitter: @cindyhoedel Art director, designer Barbara Hill-Meyer, 816-234-4286 bhillmeyer@kcstar.com Ad manager, sales Ted Massing, 816-234-4193 tmassing@kcstar.com The Kansas City Star Magazine is the Sunday magazine of The Kansas City Star and is copyrighted by the Kansas City Star Co., 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64108.
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ver wonder what buffalo do in the downtime after roaming? National Geographic did, so they came to Missouri this month to put Crittercams on two wild bison at Dunn Ranch Prairie, a 4,000-acre preserve owned by the Nature Conservancy. The preserve, in Eagleville, Mo., 100 miles north of Kansas City, has a herd of 56 genetically pure bison (the proper name for the wooly headed creatures that once numbered in the tens of millions on our continent). The bison were introduced two years ago as part of efforts to re-create a tallgrass prairie ecosystem around what is believed to be the last stand of unplowed sod in the state. Last year, at the first-ever roundup of bison, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis put VHFequipped collars on several of the animals to track their movements. “That told us where they were spending time but not what they were doing in the various locations,” said Greg Marshall of National Geographic. Now scientists hope to be able to identify the areas of the hilly, wildflower-covered pastures that the bison favor as bedrooms, play rooms, bathrooms and lovers’ lanes, if you will. A little luck is needed, Marshall said, because the cameras are small and fragile, while the bison are large and powerful. Bison have a natural tendency to butt their heads against things, so it is easy to imagine the cameras ending up smashed against a fence post or another animal’s horn. For as long as they remain operable, the cameras will record images for eight minutes every two hours between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. for 10 to 12 days. Then, if the cameras survive and produce usable images, Marshall will return to Dunn Ranch to pick them up
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MELISSA WALTHART | THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
Bison at the Dunn Ranch Prairie wear video cameras to track their habits.
and take them to his imaging lab in Washington, D.C. Even if the devices survive, the pictures they generate may not be YouTube hits. “Because of the placement on a collar — we can’t put the cameras on the bison’s foreheads — it could quite literally be hours of watching grass grow,” Marshall said. But he isn’t in the game for entertainment; it’s for science. Marshall invented the Crittercam 25 years ago when he was diving and saw a remora (suckerfish) attached to a shark. “I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to be that remora and ride around and see what that shark does all day,” he said. “I realized that technology didn’t exist but it could be invented.” After Marshall designed the Crittercam, he tried it out on an animal infinitely easier to mount things on than a shark: a loggerhead turtle in Belize.
The first system had an automatic fall-off designed into it. A hook in the harness system had a galvanic link that corrodes in salt water. Once the camera broke loose, it floated to the surface of the water, and a VHF radio beacon signaled its location. The Crittercams on the bison have a more sophisticated drop-off device: An electronic squib mechanism turns a bar that releases the camera from the collar. If you saw “March of the Penguins,” you’ve seen footage from Marshall’s Crittercam. The underwater scenes with the emperor penguins were his work. One of the most interesting animals Marshall has worked with is the least exotic. “We put Crittercams on house cats to evaluate their impact on backyard environments when we let them go outside.” The graphic footage of the so-called Kitty Cam Project showed the domesticated hunters acquiring presents that they would bring back to the porch for their owners. “We learned a lot with that footage. It shows that it is incumbent upon us to keep our cats inside,” he said. Marshall says only 10 percent to 20 percent of the footage he has generated from using Crittercams on more than 50 species of animals makes for interesting videos for lay people. You can watch some that made the cut, including “Sharks in Love,” “Brown Bears Socializing” and “Sea Lion Attacks Octopus” at National Geographic’s website: animals.nationalgeographic.com /animals/crittercam. Reach Cindy Hoedel at choedel@kcstar.com. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook and the Star’s ChowTown blog.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
★
October 27, 2013
love story BY DEBORAH SHOUSE
CLIMBING TOGETHER TO FALL IN LOVE ur lighting designer has a similar last name,” one of Molly Alspaugh’s new colleagues told her. In October 2001, 29-year old Molly was starting her job as a graphic designer at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Later that day she ran into Clint Paugh, 31. He impressed Molly. “I thought he was a great-looking guy with a gentle presence,” she says. “I felt an instant spark.” The unfolding: Though the office was small, Clint and Molly didn’t really work together. Initially, Clint had no idea Molly was interested in him. Both became involved with Young Friends of Art and got to know each other at those gatherings. One evening, in late 2001, Molly, Clint and a couple of mutual friends planned to meet for a movie. The friends didn’t show up. That evening, Molly and Clint spent hours talking
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Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.
and realized they had a lot in common. They started hanging out. When they realized they were in love: In 2003 they were hiking down the Grand Canyon. But they weren’t carrying enough water, and the trip back up was extremely difficult. During their struggle to climb up the trail, Clint realized he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Molly. Coming through that adversity, Molly also realized the depth of their love. The proposal and wedding: One snowy evening in December 2005, Clint drove Molly to Lawrence for an evening out. After dinner, Clint drove by the river and suggested they stop for a closer look. Molly thought he was crazy, but she struggled up the icy incline after him. At the top, Clint got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. Molly was delightfully surprised and said yes. They were wed in Grand Teton National Park in June 2007.
David Burkart Craig Lundgren Ed MacInerney Gerald Mancuso
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
★
Favorite activities: They share many interests, including playing indoor soccer, visiting art museums and traveling. Careers and family: Clint is the manager of lighting and fabrication at the Nelson and a principal at Helios Lighting Design. Molly is a development director for the School of Engineering at the KU Endowment Association. They live in Kansas City with their two young children. The qualities they most appreciate in each other: Molly: “Clint’s really a creative person, and he’s open to new experiences. I so appreciate his supportive nature and his calm presence.” Clint: “Molly challenges herself and me to be better people. She’s willing to dive into adventure with me, and we’re on the same wavelength.” Deborah Shouse is a freelance writer. Suggest a Love Story couple by writing to lovestory@kcstar.com.
SUSAN PFANNMULLER | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Molly and Clint Paugh of Kansas City met on the job at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Dr. Thad Stephens Dr. Robert T. Tung Shelley Fair, ARNP Janelle McClymont, ANP
October 27, 2013
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CONTEST
Enjoy the
CAN YOU BUILD A LOGO IN A DAY? f you’re thinking you have a future as an amateur logo designer, we have a message for you: Time is running out. The deadline is Monday to improve on Kansas City’s new marketing “brand.” As you’ve probably heard, the city unveiled a new logo recently. Some people love it. Plenty don’t, saying it seems to borrow liberally from KC sports team logos of yesteryear. Think you could do better? City Hall probably won’t care for this, but just for fun we figured it couldn’t hurt to see what other ideas are out there. Thus: The Star’s Build a Better KC Logo contest. Details and rules: ❚ Design a logo that represents the city of Kansas City, Mo. Remember, your design should be simple. It could include the letters “KC,” but it certainly doesn’t have to. (The previous version was a stylized fountain.) ❚ Tell us your name, city and phone number. Also, explain in a sentence or two how your logo symbolizes the city. ❚ Ad agencies, design firms and related businesses are welcome to enter, too. Please indicate your business affiliation with your entry. ❚ Two ways to enter: Email your entry to star fyi@gmail.com. Put “KC Logo” in the subject line, and attach a clear, readable scan or photo of your logo. Or mail your entry to FYI KC Logo Contest, The Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64108. ❚ Deadline for entries is 11:59 p.m. Oct. 28 (that’s Monday) for email entries. Mail entries must be postmarked by Oct. 28. We’ll pick the best of the bunch and publish them in The Star’s FYI section and on KansasCity.com in early November. Go KC!
Sounds of the Season
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The new Kansas City logo (above) looks a lot like the logos of baseball teams from bygone days: KC Monarchs (below, from top), Athletics and Blues.
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hearingyourbest.com THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
★
October 27, 2013
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ROCKIN’ THE ROYAL For one newly ambitious team of barbecue competitors, the party and smokers rarely stop. BY STEVE PAUL, THE KANSAS CITY STAR PHOTOS BY STEVE PAUL AND ROY INMAN, SPECIAL TO THE STAR
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ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Barbecue smokers come in all sizes and styles, and they were primed for action throughout the American Royal’s recent World Series of Barbecue.
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ord help me. It’s 11 p.m. on Friday, a downpour is underway, and someone offers me a pint bottle of a bluish-looking liquid. “Absinthe?” he says. I extend the empty plastic cup in my hand, the one that had until then held a slug of Templeton rye whiskey over ice, and say, “Sure, why not?” I’m sitting on a high bar stool by an open window inside a stripped-down, 31-foot, vintage Airstream trailer. As the rain comes down, dance music is pulsing from P.A. speakers, one of which is less than 6 feet away, and it’s not quite sardineville, though upward of 15 youngish people are gyrating within inches of my perch. Outside, even more dancers keep going during the storm, first a little sprinkle, then a short but soaking rain, then a drizzle. If it hasn’t been clear before now, the point is beginning to jell in my brain: The American Royal Barbecue, the city’s annual fall festival of smoke and animal protein, is a nonstop weekend party, enlivening and traffic-jamming a patch of the West Bottoms that essentially sleeps the rest of the year. I haven’t seen much of the barbecue weekend over the last 34 years as the cooking competition evolved into a global attraction and civic-identity smokeout. And now I am deep in the heart of it, on the second of three party nights, camped in with a team of funloving Kansas Citians who have deployed, along with the trailer, a half-dozen woodfired smokers in the hopes of upping their barbecue game. THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
★
October 27, 2013
cover story
Drew Rudebusch (from left), Bobby Asher and Ted Kaldis taste chunks of brisket just off the smoker.
Their team moniker, the Bottom Feeders, reflects their lack of competition success in six events over the last 10 years. And the group’s illustrated logo of a passed-out-drunk catfish reflects the members’ party ethos, which, truth be told, seems to fit right in with the party spirit all over the tented, kegged acreage of the American Royal Barbecue. Yet I know I am in a very good place, as the trailer floor bounces with dancing feet, when passers-by in the rain reach through the propped-open trailer window to shake my hand with a kind of how-cool-is-that affirmation. Twice that night, a team of greenshirted “Party of the Year” scouts stops by. Being named Party of the Year would be a significant high point for the Bottom THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
★
Feeders, especially sweet given the time eight years ago when some of the team’s leading revelers got arrested and spent a night in jail for giving lip to police when they had every American Royal right to keep their music going for a few more hours. (As the story goes, some neighboring professional competitors had complained about the noise and called in the cops, by which time American Royal officials were helpless to stop them.) But Bobby Asher and a dozen more members of the Bottom Feeders are on a higher mission this year. After ranking typically deep in the 400s (492 out of 525 teams in the 2012 open competition), Asher and his friends vowed last spring to get serious. This year, they decided, their goal was to hit the top 100 in at least
October 27, 2013
one meat competition. The Bottom Feeders would enter all nine categories — pork, brisket, ribs, chicken, sausage, plus three side dishes and a dessert — of the American Royal’s World Series of Barbecue Open. They’d compete against 534 other teams in the overall rankings and smaller numbers of teams in nonmeat categories. To prepare, Asher and the others smoked meat all summer. They worked on technique, on dry rubs and injections, on meat trimming and temperature control. They practiced trash talk. They imagined presenting the perfect money muscle of pork — the money muscle being a prized, tender cylinder of meat at one end of the Boston cut. And now, as this early October Royal weekend gets
ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
underway, and their collective investment of upward of $3,500 fully engaged, they are confident about kicking some serious smoked butt. I have no role in the Bottom Feeders’ effort. I’m the proverbial fly on the chicken skin, spending the better part of 72 hours in the sun, rain, darkness and smoke to get a close-up view of the Royal experience. And I swear this little taste of absinthe, that legendary spirit known for an older formulations made Bohemian artists crazy, does nothing to skew my vision.
Thursday, Oct. 3: The setup 2:09 p.m. Bobby Asher is fretting. His buddy Ryan Gale was supposed to deliver the Airstream awhile ago. It’s mid-after-
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noon, and he has a party on the docket that night, cooking to get underway, beer kegs to ice down and tap and an elaborately crafted portal to install. A refrigerator stands fully stocked under the kitchen area tent — “I can’t believe it only took us six years to think of bringing our own refrigerator,” Asher says — plastic drawers are filled with cooking tools, Weber smokers are queued like an impenetrable offensive line, and Asher begins to rock them into place, plumbing them with a carpenter’s level so the water pans inside won’t spill. “I don’t want the fact that the smokers aren’t level to be the excuse that we didn’t win,” he says. The Bottom Feeders’ space, No. 510, is near the southern tip of the Royal layout, a five-minute walk from Hale Arena, where the competition judging will take place. A chain-link fence borders the west side of the team’s double-sized asphalt patch along an industrial stretch of State Line Road. The afternoon ebbs and flows. Mary Smith, an erstwhile team member now just helping Asher set up: “The thing about this barbecue is there’s a whole lot of waiting around for nothing.” 3:14 p.m. A train whistle pierces the afternoon quiet. Brian Danker arrives with a box of cooking tools, a super-sized box of Goldfish crackers and a meat slicer. “That’s clean,” Asher says. “It’s got a few spider webs on it,” Danker eplies. Danker works for a defense contractor. His job on this team is to take the lead cooking ribs. Last year they made baby backs; this year it’s St. Louis style ribs. “It’s a meatier cut,” he says. 3:36 p.m. Asher is surveying the space, still awaiting the trailer, strategizing over the placement of a big tub that will hold beer kegs. “Everything is a Cartesian grid here,” says Asher, reflecting his background in architecture, a field he gave up for music and bartending. “It’s hard to work in a triangular space.” 4:11 p.m. Ryan Gale pulls his pickup truck toward the site, and in three or four tries backs the Airstream into place. The trailer forms a wall along the adjacent Royal artery. Asher and the team will soon erect a portal, a metal armature faced with two large wooden rings, painted in red and white stripes like a boat’s life preserver. (A sail will follow.) On the public side of the entry, the ring is emblazoned with Latin: “SS Semper Voluptarum”; on the inside is the translation:
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“Always for Pleasure.” Asher says the portal will help keep down uninvited crowds. Although two of the Royal days offer events and food vendors to the general public — competing teams are prohibited from selling or handing out samples of the food to the public — much of the weekend revolves around team cooking and private or invitation-only parties. “If you don’t have friends down here,” Asher says, “there’s nothing for you.” So tightening the perimeter is in order. Last year, with uncontrolled access to the space, they ran out of beer by Friday night. Now it seems their space is more like the Fortress of the Bottom Feeders, an insular place enveloped by music from beginning to end. More than once over the weekend, I hear someone suggest that the American Royal Barbecue is something akin to Burning Man, that annual gathering of enlightenment seekers in the Nevada
The music was loud and the dancing was frequent, three nights in a row at the Bottom Feeders’ space.
PHOTOS BY STEVE PAUL | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Lauren Krum and Pete Leibert assemble a batch of bacon-wrapped jalapeno peppers stuffed with an onion dip.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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October 27, 2013
cover story desert. Well, yes, it is a pop-up community of thousands of people, but it’s built on asphalt, not sand, and instead of halfnaked mystical creatives, the American Royal appears more like Burning Man for suburbanite beer drinkers, with far fewer mind-expanding substances and much more meat. The Bottom Feeders bring a scruffy, urban edge to the proceedings, but that’s the beauty of the Royal’s bigtent community-building opportunity. “It’s almost like a whole other city,” says team member Shelley Paul (no relation). “This is the best weekend of the year.” With friends Fiona Danker, Brian’s wife, and Julie Wintering, Paul formed the Women’s Sausage League of Greater Kansas City, a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the Bottom Feeders, and they’re preparing to enter the Royal competition with a smoked blueberry and maple sausage, formed into balls and stuffed with smoked cream cheese.
5:19 p.m. Brian Danker dips his finger in a dry rub and tastes. “It’s not too sweet,” he says, though soon he explains that for the Royal’s open competition, cooks want to skew their meats to the sweet side. “You’re making it for Joe Public,” he says, by which he means the volunteer judges of the open competition are not as fully trained as the judges for the Royal’s higher-level invitational competition, and their palates tend to be, well, middle of the road. Smoke begins rising from one of the Webers. New Orleans music is blaring from the speakers (“Tipitina,” “Come on Baby Let the Good Times Roll”), and team member Ted Kaldis peels the fat layer from two slabs of ribs, stripes them with Plochman’s mustard, brushes the yellow stuff all over, then dusts the meat with a dry rub, which, along with the typical red seasonings, includes some brown sugar and a little wasabi. 5:41 p.m. Kaldis, an artist and part-time
production worker at Boulevard Brewing Co., adjusts the smoker vents to lower the temperature. The remote gauge reads 282 degrees, and he’s aiming for 250. 6:19 p.m. A few spaces away from the Bottom Feeders, Charles D’Ablaing, chef of the swank Chaz at the Raphael Hotel, is slicing a smoked Angus strip steak and piling pieces onto a small brioche bun. He hasn’t eaten all day, he says, while running around town and back and forth to his restaurant. “I’m going to keep eating until I can’t eat any more,” he says as he bites into a slider-sized sandwich. Welcome to the American Royal. D’Ablaing and a few fellow chefs — among them Renee Kelly (of Renee Kelly’s Harvest), Jason Wiggin (of the InterContinental hotel), Michael Foust (the Farmhouse), Carter Holton (pastry chef at the River Club) — will be cooking for the Pork and Boots benefit dinner the next night and filling a huge smoker with briskets, ribs and pork butts to make
STEVE PAUL | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
With morning smoke drifting off the nearby cookers and sun coming out, team member Fiona Danker greets the day.
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their second annual run at the open competition. Like the Bottom Feeders, who have absolutely no professional cooking credentials, D’Ablaing’s group of topnotch chefs is hoping to improve on a humbling finish in 2012. One improvement already, D’Ablaing says: During the competition last year the temperature plunged to 21 degrees, a brutally cold day. 6:36 p.m. Scattered puffy clouds are soft and catching some pink sunset light. After stringing overhead lights from the Airstream to the fence, Asher takes a break: “My stress level is now down to about an 8.” 8:30 p.m. It feels like a party is about to happen as friends start arriving. Music — Afro-pop, R&B, hip-hop — continues to fill the space, colored lights rotate and flash in the entryway, smoke is streaming from the smokers and someone puts a few dozen bacon-wrapped, French-onion-dip-stuffed jalapeno peppers — dubbed “atomic buffalo turds” — on the top rack of a Weber. Asher stokes the fire pit. A jar of apple-pie moonshine starts making the rounds. There’s something tribal about sitting outside in the semi-dark and smelling charred meat. In the chatter, someone who has just moved back here from the West Coast mentions First Friday — there’s nothing like that in San Francisco, she says. In addition to the American Royal, this particular weekend in Kansas City would hold a convergence of crowd attractions — the monthly art-gallery walk in the Crossroads, NASCAR races out west and a Sunday afternoon Chiefs away game that would be required viewing in watering holes all over, including this one. 10:06 p.m. The first taste of smoked meat comes off the grill. Kaldis slices into a slab of ribs. The rub has turned into a spicy crust over the tender meat, the ribs disappear quickly, and a huzzah of high fives erupts around the serving table. The sound of a band wafts through the air from another nearby party. Kaldis hands me a stuffed-and-wrapped jalapeno; I’m in the process of polishing off a bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon — I seem to be the only wine drinker in the vicinity — and I’m about to light a cigar. Somewhere around midnight, Asher crashes on a chaise longue inside the trailer. I head to my car to retrieve a sleeping bag, hoping to hit the sack soon. Music is still playing loudly in the space, and a dozen people are still standing around, talking about music, food and
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The Pork and Boots team of chefs served up a series of handsome small plates, incuding a lamb chop, smoked short rib slider and a black bean chili, at a benefit party one night for the beHeadStrong Foundation. Parties and benefit events happen throughout the Royal Barbecue weekend, especially on Friday night.
who knows what. On the way back from my car I hear a band playing Pink Floyd: “Wish You Were Here.” A stillness has settled in around much of this section of the Royal grounds, but pockets of partying continue well into the night. 1:52 a.m. Friday. The music blares. A train whistle blows. I’m still awake. I start reading stuff on my phone. I think my eyes close not long after 3.
Friday: Bring out the butts 6:15 a.m. The trains roll hard and frequently as dawn arrives, and the whistles and horns seem nonstop, like a rooster greeting the day. My eyes pop open. I check my email. About 7, I climb off the cot where I’d landed a few hours ago; I walk around and take some sunrise photos. There’s a cool morning breeze. Back in space No. 510, I toss out some empty beer cups and other pieces of last night’s litter. Asher seems to have disappeared, and it occurs to me, knowing that I have to move my car, that I could sneak home, take a shower and change my smokefilled clothes. 9 a.m. By the time I return, Drew Rudebusch has unpacked a couple of big briskets, and Brian Danker has begun to trim the first one. There’s a little tutorial underway. “You want to get that silver skin off of it, and all the hard fat,” Rudebusch says. Some big chunks of oak are already
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PHOTOS BY STEVE PAUL | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Chef Charles D’Ablaing of Chaz at the Raphael inspect a smoker filled with brisket, ribs and other cuts of meat. He and a team of professional chefs cooked for a benefit party and entered the Royal open competition for the second straight year.
smoking in one of the Webers. Again, they’re just cooking for that night’s party. “We’re smoking a bunch of meat to feed people,” says Rudebusch. His wife would’ve joined him this weekend, but she’s pregnant and due any day now. 9:45 a.m. The music is back on the P.A., Danker dry-rubs the two briskets and puts them into the smoker. 9:50 a.m. Around the Royal complex, latecomers are setting up their tents and cookers. I spot license plates from Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, even Ontario, Canada, home of the Diva Q team, which is among 100 or so high-level barbecuers competing in the invitational. Most of the professional teams, with their corporate trucks, trailer-size smokers and other custom-made cookers, are clustered around the north end of the grounds in full view of Kemper Arena and Robert Morris’ “Bull Wall” steel sculpture. 11 a.m. Rudebusch takes the lid off a smoker and spritzes the slow-cooking briskets with apple juice. Ted Kaldis unpacks another one from the refrigerator and starts giving it the mustard-andrub treatment. 11:40 a.m. Asher returns from a morning break at home and fires up another smoker. He talks to Rudebusch about how to cut a brisket so the slices fit the presentation box just right. (Asher once
served as a judge in the competition, hoping to learn tricks of the trade and wondering if the system could be gamed; no way, he concluded.) There’s a running patter over cooking times and temperatures — two hours per pound for smoking, the rule of thumb goes. On the sound system, the Who: “Who Are You?” Soon Asher is taking poblano peppers off the smoker and putting a pan with four bricks of cream cheese on the top rack. The poblanos and cream cheese will go into a creamy corn he’ll make for tonight’s party and as a competition side dish. 12:31 p.m. Asher and Ryan Gale plan to make a beer run, and the other team members take to the shade where they can find it. “It’s hot, dude,” someone says. 1:13 p.m. Gale bastes two big Boston butts with a cider-vinegar concoction. “It’s more of a Carolina thing,” he says. Danker pulls his briskets off the grill — about four hours of smoking is quite enough; beyond that, the meat can turn bitter, he says. He wraps them in foil to repel the smoke, maintain the cooking and keep the meat moist. 2:53 p.m. Shelley Paul relates a piece of grocery-store barbecue karma. When she asked for ground pork and the butcher realized she’d be cooking at the Royal, he told her she had to have the best. Sausage competitors have been known to enter off-the-shelf Jimmy Dean, but Paul THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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cover story and her cohorts are going all out. The butcher told her she needed Boston butt and proceeded to grind it up; he might’ve even slipped her more than she’d asked for at no extra charge. Soon Paul and Julie Wintering are tearing sage and thyme to season the pork, and Fiona Danker is slicing jalapenos to add to her two pans of canned beans, brown sugar and other ingredients — she’ll prepare the beans today, smoke them Saturday and enter the dish Saturday afternoon in the sides competition. On the classic rock soundtrack, Lou Reed sings “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” 5:30 p.m.: The VIP benefit party at Pork and Boots is underway. The menu is ambitious, and the presentation is elegant: small servings of a pulled pork with jam, a lollipop lamb chop, a smoked short rib sandwich, all served in little wooden boats. Charles D’Ablaing says he has been here off and on since 6:30 a.m. 8:30 p.m. The Bottom Feeders space is probably the only one in the American Royal complex where Snoop Dogg is blasting over the sound system. The Friday night party has begun, and though it seems far more restrained than the legendary throwdowns of past years I’d heard about, the space is beginning to throb with people. 8:55 p.m. The wind picks up and diffused lightning flashes in the far western sky. Someone says we’re in for a storm. Asher stashes bags of charcoal in the trailer, and a few team members batten down the kitchen hatches. 12:02 a.m. The weather has receded, but not the plasma-surge of party in the Airstream.
Saturday: Prep & first tests 9:45 a.m. Shelley Paul returns from an official cooks meeting in Hale Arena, where she learned it was OK to put a dairy product — the smoked cream cheese — inside her team’s sausage. One more thing: Toothpicks are not allowed in the presentation box. 10:20 a.m. Asher starts up a smoker and prepares another pan of cream cheese. I light a charcoal chimney to jump-start the fire pit. As I sit by the fire, I notice the top of my writing hand has a reddish, low-burn look from Friday’s bright sun. Ted Kaldis emerges from the Airstream like a sedated wild child but turns up the energy to help Shelley Paul make breakfast. Trash trucks rumble along the Royal roadways, and a village of volunteers drives around the complex delivering water, charcoal and ice. A train whistle sounds, and soon Asher turns on THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
A fireworks display on Saturday night entertained all, and illuminated the barbecue grounds.
October 27, 2013
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The family that cooks together: Bobby Asher (center) puts his parents, Bob and Marie Asher, to work trimming chicken thighs.
PHOTOS BY ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Bobby Asher turns over his chicken thighs on the smoker.
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the music. 10:40 a.m. I check in with Charles D’Ablaing at the Pork and Boots tent. He has been at it since 7, he says, and already has some ribs and pork butts in the smoker for eating today. Like everyone else, he and his team will start smoking the competition entries late tonight. He reports that overnight someone tried to steal the team’s generator but didn’t get very far, and police retrieved it. 11:08 a.m. Angie Sestrich, a Royal volunteer, drops by to inspect the Bottom Feeders’ meat. No precooked products allowed, so packages of fresh meat in the fridge are all she needs to see: ribs, check; chicken, check; brisket, check; pork, check. Sausage? Doesn’t matter in this competition. “Sausage is sausage,” she says. “It is what it is.” 11:15 a.m. The music is zydeco. Nick
Davis arrives with a package of fresh tortillas from San Antonio in Kansas City, Kan., and proceeds to make breakfast burritos — scrambled eggs, bacon, cilantro — for the handful of crew members on site. Asher notes how the Royal competition has stretched out in recent years. It used to be the invitational competition took place on Friday, the open on Saturday, and then folks would leave. Now the event has become a long weekend, maybe too long. Some attendees arrive as early as Wednesday, and the upshot is at least three nights of parties before Sunday afternoon, when the open teams turn in their meat entries and then start breaking down their sites. 11:55 a.m. With side dish entries due this afternoon, “I’m really concerned,” Asher says. “Where’s the rest of my
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cover story team?” 12:12 p.m. At Pork and Boots, Renee Kelly is squeezing lemons into a large tub filled with water, where shallots, garlic, orange slices and bags of licorice tea are floating and infusing the liquid. Soon she immerses a large chicken in the brine. It will stay there for most of the next 24 hours. Nearby, fellow team member Jason Wiggin is dry-rubbing a pork butt. Says D’Ablaing: “I think we’re going to do real well this year.” Adds Wiggin: “Next year I’m thinking of raising my own champion pig.” 12:30 p.m. Bobby Asher’s creamed corn is on the smoker, and now he’s reading up on the chicken preparation he’s about to make. He spends nearly a half-hour skinning three dozen thighs and stacking the skins off to the side. His parents, Bob and Marie Asher, show up to pay a visit, and he puts them to work deboning and trimming the chicken thighs, then scraping the fat off the undersides of the skins. “That makes the skin crispier,” Asher says. Later he’ll season and trifold the thighs, then return the skin to each one. Asher’s parents are wearing red Bottom Feeders shirts from 2012. He reiterates he’s hoping to score higher than last year: “This chicken won the American Royal in 2008.” 2:23 p.m. Six small plastic cups sit on a bed of lettuce and parsley in an official white plastic foam serving box, and Asher slowly fills each one with creamed corn. The team scored poorly in presentation a year ago, so it is trying harder, and Aaron Osborne and Fiona Danker have spent the last 30 minutes or so meticulously laying down the greenery. “The box looks pretty,” Asher says. Over the next 20 minutes, he dusts each serving cup with a bit of seasoning and lays on a thin disc of jalapeno. With the clock winding down — there’s a 10-minute entry window, from five minutes before to five after each deadline — Asher soon erupts in a little tantrum when he can’t find a spray bottle to fill with water and give the corn a sexy glisten. Crisis soon averted, he heads toward Hale Arena and turns in the team’s first entry of the weekend at 2:58 p.m. 3:09 p.m. Fiona Danker takes her pan of smoked beans off the grill and starts dishing them into six more plastic cups. Turn-in time is 20 minutes away, and she soon is sent off to a round of hopeful applause with minutes to spare. 6:15 p.m. Rudebusch trims the fat from the second of two briskets. Brian Danker puts out a foil tray of burnt ends, just out THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
Osborne pulls apart one of his smoked pork butts in search of some of the choicest, tenderest pieces with which his team hoped to wow the competition judges. Turned out, the Bottom Feeders exceeded expectations in the pork category.
of the smoker and cut up for tasting. An influx of friends soon turns up, and party No. 3 is underway. 8:17 p.m. Aaron Osborne composes a pile of banh mi sandwiches — his tender pulled pork, pickled carrot and cilantro on a hard, French-style roll. They’re a hit. Asher puts out a test run of his chicken, and soon some sausage balls come out of the smoker for a taste. 10:24 p.m. The drinking games have begun. I am totally out of touch and unfamiliar with the format. I silently applaud my decision to forgo the beer. 10:30 p.m. Totally unannounced, flashes of fireworks paint the sky to the northwest, and the Bottom Feeders have something like a front row seat. As the pyrotechnics soar, Ted Kaldis climbs up the fence with a beer in one hand and a candle in the other and begins shouting a quasi-patriotic slogan: “We got him.” (Think Obama and the killing of Osama bin Laden.) Floral patterns and showers of light explode in the air. Couples cuddle up to watch the display. Cameras click, and the sound system rocks. Asher and others are dancing and fist-pumping the air. Twenty minutes after the fireworks began, Journey is coming out of the speaker — “Don’t Stop Believing” — expressing an anthemic power that feels even better than the close of “The Sopranos.” Huge clouds of smoke punc★
October 27, 2013
PHOTOS BY ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Aaron Osborne (left) and Ted Kaldis inspect the four pork butts they were preparing to smoke for the American Royal’s open competition.
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tuate the end of the show, then spread and dissipate in the air, leaving just the music and the party. 11:30 p.m. Aaron Osborne takes four large pork butts out of the fridge. The clock is ticking down: Meat entries start going to the judges barely 12 hours from now, and it’s time to get serious about the pork, which needs to be on the smoker longer than the other meats. Fellowship. The team’s firewood supply has dwindled, given that the fire pit has been burning for 12 hours. Nick Davis goes on a walkabout and returns with a wagon full of wood he obtained from another group, the Rosehill Nursery folks not far down the way. Soon thereafter, Chris Shores comes to visit and pick up a promised beer. Just back in town from Dallas, Shores is cooking with his twin brother, Allan, for the first time in seven years, and he is happy to be the Bottom Feeders’ firewood benefactor. Shores is stocky, round-faced and bald, and he’s
wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Will Sell Wife for Beer.” You know he knows how to have a good time.
Sunday: Game time 6:23 a.m. I’d rolled my sleeping bag onto the Airstream floor about four hours ago. Ted Kaldis, Brian Danker, Drew Rudebusch and Aaron Osborne stayed up all night, tending to the smokers. Steely Dan is playing softly. A fire still burns in the metal pit, and a cry comes from the meat men in the kitchen: “We got ’em, dude!” Asher joins the group in the kitchen and expresses his concern: “I don’t think the butt’s going to be done.” 8:15 a.m. Asher: “I’m winning the chicken this year.” Danker has turned up the volume at the sound board, and when I notice the rough-around-the-edges R&B that I’ve heard off and on all weekend, he explains that he has a collection of classic Kansas
City soul recordings from the 1960s and ’70s, mostly forgotten players such as Lee Harris and Tony Ashley, who recorded for a label called Forte (a reissue of some of its tracks was recently released). It hasn’t occurred to me until then that the KC soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment to these exercises in barbecue. 8:30 a.m. Danker takes six slabs of ribs off the smoker and, one after the other, prepares them for the finish: He slathers them with squeezable Parkay margarine, honey and a sweet Gates sauce — I’ve never seen such a thing before — then wraps them in plastic and foil to simmer and soften for the last few hours before turn-in time. I ask him whether he’d ever do that while cooking at home. “No way,” he says. 9:40 a.m. Danker: “I just want one top-100 finish. That would do it.” An hour later, he says, “I’m feeling beat up,” then slumps into a patio chair and closes his eyes.
STEVE PAUL | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Sunday morning: Drew Roudebusch and Ted Kaldis have been up all night tending to the team’s smokers. Now they have time for a quick break.
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cover story 10:45 a.m. Asher strategizes with Osborne and Kaldis about the pork butt entry: Take the best of the four money muscles from the butts and add chunks of the richest, close-to-the-bone meat. “That’s how you win,” Asher says. “The money muscle.” Someone turns on the television, which sits on a table outside the trailer. Chiefs pre-game action is underway. Noon: One after another, every 30 minutes, the chicken, the ribs, the pork, the brisket and the sausage get packed up on green beds in the plastic foarm boxes, and team members march them to judging. There’s a frantic quality to the procedure, and at one point, as Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” revs up the pace from the speakers, Osborne says it feels like he’s immersed inside the end of a video game. When the Chiefs score their first touchdown of the day, Asher turns on the Arrowhead fight ditty. 12:19 p.m. Osborne paws through the pork butts, looking for anything that feels like a winner. “That’s the piece right there,” he finally says, placing it on a cutting board where Kaldis is surgically slicing a money muscle, the knife rocking slowly in his hand as he guides it through the meat. Each box leaves the kitchen to applause and a round of high fives. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Asher says, after the brisket heads toward the judging tables, “but this is way better than last year.”
Epilogue: Monday
Julie Wintering (from left) and Shelley Paul brush barbecue sauce on their maple and blueberry sausage balls that are stuffed with smoked cream cheese.
The results are posted. Charles D’Ablaing and Renee Kelly’s Pork & Boots team of professional, restaurant chefs ranks No. 517, spitting distance from the bottom of the list. One bright spot: Its baked beans come in at No. 2 out of 162 entries. Small consolation. The Bottom Feeders do not win Party of the Year, but they do have something to cheer about. Overall, the team climbs about 100 notches to No. 391 in the contest. And although most of their entries are far back in the pack, Bobby Asher’s cream corn hits 47 (out of 137 vegetable entries), Aaron Osborne’s pork reaches No. 54 (out of 531) — a clear victory — and Fiona Danker’s baked beans come in at No. 23. I happen to run into Julie Wintering that day, and she tells me that Drew Rudebusch is at the hospital, where his wife has just given birth to their first child — a child, he’d predicted over the weekend, who would inherit the father’s “barbecue toughness.” Of the rest of the Bottom Feeders, Wintering adds, “We’ve already started talking about next year.” Steve Paul, senior writer and arts editor, 816-234-4762, paul@kcstar.com; on Twitter: @sbpaul.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but this is way better than last year.” BOBBY ASHER
PHOTOS BY ROY INMAN | SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Ready for entry: The Bottom Feeders’ smoked brisket.
October 27, 2013
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ADVOCACY, ACTIVISM AND 300 GOOD SUITS Eric L. Wesson of Independence is a reporter and columnist at The Kansas City Call and kccall.com, a weekly newspaper serving the black community in Jackson County and Kansas City, Kan. Wesson, who has worked at The Call for 10 years, is also the host of two radio programs, “Makes Me Wanna Holla” on Gospel 1590 KPRT and “Eric Wesson Show” on Magic 107.3, and a panelist on KCPT’s “Kansas City Week in Review.” This conversation took place in The Call’s newsroom in the 18th and Vine jazz district. The Call was founded in 1919. What is its mission today? The foundation of the paper was set by (founding publisher) Mr. (C.A.) Franklin, continued by Lucile Bluford until her death in 2003, and now Donna Stewart. The vision is to present a different aspect of the news from the standpoint of the African-American community and to advocate for positive change. The vision is the same. What has changed are the issues. The issues of discrimination in public accommodations and restaurants, we don’t have anymore. Today the issues are economic and educational. We are bringing that fight in this century. What are some specific issues you’re working on now? Blacks in the construction industry not having access to health insurance is a major problem. We are waiting to see if the Affordable Care Act will help that situation. I did a series over the past few weeks on Beacon Hill, where UMKC is building housing units for students. That is supposed to be a Section 3 project, meaning the project is supposed to incorporate training and employment opportunities for people who live in the ZIP code area where the work is being done. So I sat in the parking lot one day
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and asked workers as they were arriving where they were from. Some were from Peculiar and Belton and Lone Jack; not one that I spoke with was from the ZIP code. That is a concern because it is one of the highest unemployment areas in Kansas City. Some workers from inside the ZIP code called to tell me they were able to get hired on after my story ran. Another ongoing problem I have reported on is blacks not being able to access construction jobs through the unions. What is your favorite part of your job? Helping people with problems. For example, if they can’t pay their gas or electric bill, we hook them up with resources that can help. That goes beyond the role of traditional journalism. Yes, it does. When you are an advocacy newspaper, you have to wear a lot of hats. You can’t stay in the area of pure journalism and just gather information and put it out. You have to mentor young people and get out in the community. A few years ago, people were dumping tires on the street, and we took pictures of them and put them across the front page. That got those areas cleaned up. That led to people calling about refrigerators and other things that got dumped. So we would call the
city manager each time, and they would send somebody out to pick it up. I had one lady call because she was getting raw sewage in her basement, coming up through her washer drain. It had created black mold and smelled horrible. We called the city, and they got people in there that cleaned out the basement, gutted the walls and cleaned everything up. When that happened the lady walked over to me and hugged me, didn’t say a word, just hugged me. That was thanks enough. Do you ever think of making the jump from advocacy journalism into politics? No, because I have too many skeletons in my closet and I want to leave them there. You served time for a second-degree assault conviction, and now you run a hotline helping ex-cons integrate themselves back into society. What caused your turnaround? When I was going through my foolishness, I prayed, “God get me through this.” Before, I had always prayed, “God, get me out of this.” If I got out of it, I would just turn around and do it again. So that was a turning point, and God did get me through it. What is the phone number of your hotline, and what help do you offer to ex-cons? The hotline is 855-EX-FELON. I want
to track where these guys are and show them through myself and other guys that it is possible to get out and stay out of trouble. We can help get them connected to resources that can help them find jobs and so on. Do you play sports now? I have a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old. The 5-month-old, Eric Jr., weighs 20 pounds and I have to carry him and his car seat back and forth to the car and upstairs, so that is my main workout. Chasing my 3-year-old, Erica, around is my other workout. Before that, I stayed in shape chasing my older two kids, Amanda and Briana, around. Steve Kraske, political blogger for the Star and your colleague on “Kansas City Week in Review,” says you always dress like you are ready to take the city by storm. Why do you like dressing up? There’s nothing like a good suit. It looks good, it feels good. When you wear nice clothes, people will react to you more positively. Sometimes we have dress-down Sundays at church, but I’ll still put on a suit and tie. And my mother’s a clothes fanatic. I picked it up from her. How many suits do you own? I’ve got about 300 suits and 400 ties. I have a lot of them made. I get to go out of town once a year to the Annual Legislative Convention of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C. There’s a guy from Cleveland who makes suits who is always there. He’s always happy to see me because he knows I’m going to buy five or 10 suits. Tell Kraske the next time I go to D.C., he can come with me and I’ll introduce him to the guy who makes my suits. Reach Cindy Hoedel at choedel@ kcstar.com. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook and the Star’s ChowTown blog.
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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October 27, 2013
the mag interview BY CINDY HOEDEL
JIM BARCUS | THE KANSAS CITY STAR
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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October 27, 2013
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IT’S THE NIGHT OF THE DEAD, TOO Shaman Paul Naveda (in hat at left) calls the spirits with a maraca at the Day of the Dead festival at a cemetery in Lima, Peru.
JODY KURASH THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PARTY PLANNER Nov. 1 HEARAID GALA benefiting St. Luke’s Midwest Ear Institute will be held at the Sheraton Crown Center. $100-$175. 816-932-2252 or saintlukesgiving.org
Nov. 2 GAUDEAMUS (LET US REJOICE) DINNER at the Overland Park Convention Center will raise funds for scholarships for children to attend Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. $150. 913-647-0344 or cefks.org
Nov. 3 TINY TIM HOLIDAY FANTASY, an annual event of the Foundation for Shawnee Mission Medical Center, will have dinner, auctions and more at the Overland Park Convention Center. $125. 913-676-2148 or shawneemission.org/foundation
Nov. 6
In Peru, many families spend a festive night in a cemetery honoring their relatives. By JODY KURASH The Associated Press
L
IMA, Peru | With the magical sound of
wooden flutes, the scent of incense, and the warm Andean sun making shadow patterns across the rolling hills, this event has all the hallmarks of a happy, festive occasion. Families spread out picnics; strolling musicians and vendors sell cotton candy, toys, flowers and food. But this celebration is taking place in a cemetery, el Cemeterio de Nueva Esperanza, one of the largest cemeteries in the world. And the event is the Day of the Dead, celebrated throughout Latin America on Nov. 1, a day after American kids go trick-or-treating for Halloween. It’s a day when families from across Peru congregate in the gigantic graveyard in Lima to connect with their ancestors, and many even spend the night here. While Day of the Dead is most famously observed in Mexico, it’s also an important holiday in Peru and neighboring Bolivia, where traditions honoring the dead predate Catholicism. The Incas honored their ancestors by displaying their mummies in a prominent place and sharing a meal and liquor with them. A shaman would be called upon to communicate with them and bring blessings from the relatives back to the living. The observance at the cemetery includes a procession honoring Santa Muerte, a female folk saint originating in Mexico, the saint of death. A grim reaper-like skeletal figure dressed in a long
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robe, she is associated with healing, protection and the afterlife, and represents the mummies once honored by native people. An altar with a sculpture of the boney lady, flanked by flowers, incense and candles, is carried by four to six men through the cemetery while crowds follow. Colectivo Intinarte, a Lima artist cooperative that was founded in 2008, organizes the fiesta of Santa Muerte. The statue is made primarily of maguey, an Amazonian jungle plant related to agave. Paul Naveda, a shaman, presides over a ritual called a despacho ceremony at the altar, with offerings to spirits and a blessing. He belts out several cries that sound like the call of the condor, to invite spirits to join the celebration with the living. The statue is carried though the graveyard’s snaking dirt paths and up steep terrain, led by the shaman and flanked by musicians. Nearby, puppeteers and jugglers perform. It has the feel of Mardi Gras or a New Orleans jazz funeral. John Alvarado Palomino, one of the event’s organizers, says Lima’s modern Day of the Dead is a mix of traditions. “Mexico marks the holiday as a way of honoring the dead,” he said. “But in Peru, we also call upon the ancient customs from the Andean people and the magic of Amazonians.” At sundown, the altar is disassembled and trucked away. The moon begins to rise. Across the cemetery, a wave of flickering candles and twinkling lights blankets the landscape, illuminating the tombs where families will spend the night communing with their ancestors.
NATIVE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GREATER KANSAS CITY AWARDS DINNER GALA at the Diamond Club in Kauffman Stadium will honor George Brett. $150. 816-926-9397 or nsdkc.org
Nov. 8 SOME ENCHANTED EVENING will feature a fivecourse dinner at the Overland Park Marriott with proceeds benefiting Johnson County Community College Foundation scholarships. $250. 913-469-3835 or jccc.edu/foundation
Nov. 9 LUNCH WITH AN OLD BAG, a Love Fund for Children event at the Overland Park Sheraton, will be highlighted by an auction of handbags.
$40. 913-538-5750 or lovefundforchildren.org RESEARCH ROYAL ROAST at the Armacost Museum will support scholarships for students at the Research College of Nursing-Rockhurst University joint nursing program. 816-276-4218 or theresearchfoundationkc.org
Nov. 13 NIGHT OF COMEDY at the Folly Theater will feature Margaret Cho and will support Likeme Lighthouse. $30-$100. 816-753-7770 or likemelighthouse.org INTERMEZZO, a candlelight holiday home tour at Riss Lake in Parkville, will benefit the Kansas City Symphony and will include music by members of the symphony. $100. 816-741-4014 or kcsymphonyguild.org
Nov. 14 FEEDING THE NEED, A HEART FOR THE HUNGRY raises funds for the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception’s Morning Glory Ministries, with appetizers and drinks at the Catholic Center-Chancery. $50. 816-842-0416, ext. 111, or morningglorycares.com
Nov. 16 HOUSE PARTY IN HOLLYWOOD at the Sheraton Crown Center is the annual Newhouse gala fundraiser. $175. 816-474-6446 or newhouseshelter.org
Nov. 19-20 JOHNSON COUNTY YOUNG MATRONS will have their “Puttin’ on the Glitz” Fashion Show and Dinner ($50) on Nov. 19 at the Ritz Charles, their Home for the Holidays Tour ($20-$25) on Nov. 20 and their JCYM Boutique both days at the Ritz Charles. 913-441-6593 or jcym.net
| Dan Kelly, The Star Send event information to calendar@kcstar.com.
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kc people
PHOTO BY ANTHONY MENDOLIA
2013 BELLES OF THE AMERICAN ROYAL The 64th BOTAR Ball benefiting the American Royal was Oct. 19 in the Imperial Ballroom of the Muehlebach Tower at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown. The formal presentation of the 2013 BOTARs and escorts was followed by dinner and dancing. (Turn the page for photos from the ball.)
THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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October 27, 2013
The 2013 BOTARS are (front, from left) Kristen Peavey, Sarah Luby, Allie Hartman-Frost, Elle Bortnick, Annie Burcham, Grace Haun; (middle row, seated) Jessika Terry, Cari Chestnut, Carrie Barton, Katherine Sweeney, Amanda Haviland, Emily Wellner, Kristen Naughton, Anna Price, Katherine Bruce, Diana Klote, Lee Fryer; (back row) Allison Kipke, Taylor Twibell, Morgan Gonder, Amy Schnoebelen, Caroline Hodge, Anna Leek, Cara Nichole Tamburello, Molly Crawford, Kate Vignatelli, Maggie Kopp, Amy O'Connor, Melissa McKittrick, Kristen Nelson.
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kc people Scott and Alison Ward with their son, Taylor, a BOTAR escort
THE 64TH BOTAR BALL
PHOTOS BY ANTHONY MENDOLIA
Cynthia Pistilli Savage (from left), 2013 chairman of the American Royal; Cathy Frame, BOTAR Ball vice president; Carolyn Sterbenz, co-chairman of ball decorations
Lee Fryer and father Kevin Fryer before the formal presentation
Left: Kim Manka Mann, 2013 BOTAR president, and Scott M. Mann
Joyce Hale (from left), Douglas Nelson, Kristen Nelson, Dana Nelson
Caroline Hodge, with father Charles Hodge, greets her escort, Matt Vance.
BOTAR pages Libby McShane (from left), Courtenay Tetrick and Grace Hessenflow
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THE KANSAS CITY STAR MAGAZINE
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October 27, 2013