The Pitch: November 12, 2015

1 NOVEMBER 12–18, 2015 | FREE | VOL. 35 NO. 20 | PITCH.COM

After four years with a friendly City Council, Mayor Sly James is learning to play well with others.

by stev e vockrodt

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November 12-18, 2015 | vol. 35 No. 20 E d i t o r i a l

Editor Scott Wilson Managing Editor Justin Kendall Music Editor Natalie Gallagher Staff Writers Charles Ferruzza, David Hudnall, Steve Vockrodt Editorial Operations Manager Deborah Hirsch Events Editor Berry Anderson Proofreader Brent Shepherd Contributing Writers Tracy Abeln, Jen Chen, Liz Cook, April Fleming, Larry Kopitnik, Angela Lutz, Dan Lybarger, Dan Savage, Nick Spacek

frosty After four years with a friendly City Council, Mayor Sly James is learning to play well with others.

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Art and Production Director Allyson Peck Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Angela C. Bond, Barrett Emke, Chris Mullins, Sabrina Staires, Brooke Vandever

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Advertising Director Mick Moore Senior Classified Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialists Savannah Cox, Becky Losey, Ruby Wetzel Production and Digital Coordinator Ashley Reed

m a r k E t i n g

Director of Marketing and Operations Jason Dockery

the good burN Three years and one fire into Michael Forbes’ Brookside residency, the place has truly arrived.

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Publisher Amy Mularski Office Administrator Jessica Kittams

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Jazz bassist — and composer — Gerald Spaits tries out some new strings. b y n ata l i e g a l l ag h e r

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Questionnaire news Feature agenda shop girl stage Film caFé Fat city bartender’s notebook on tap this week music d a i ly l i s t i n g s savage love

m eaN w h i le at p i tc h . c o m MuMFORD & SONS appears at the Sprint Center in April.

UMKC moves closer to its fundraising goal for a DOWNTOWN ARTS CAMPuS.

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Hometown: Kansas City

What’s your hidden talent? Art collecting

Current neighborhood: Mission Hills

What’s your guiltiest pleasure? Peanut butter

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my wife after being told to go out with her a year earlier.

“I always laugh at ...” The Marx Brothers.

My brush with fame: Being a best-seller recently on Amazon Germany. My book reached No. 5 on the best-seller list! It will also be translated into German and Japanese!

“I’ve been known to binge-watch ...” Pawn

My soapbox: I do not like waste.

“I can’t stop listening to ...” “Beast of Burden”

What was the last thing you had to apologize for? Jumping to conclusions.

“In five years, I’ll be ...” Hopefully in Europe.

Stars.

by the Rolling Stones.

“My dream concert lineup is ...” The Beatles,

Led Zeppelin and U2.

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(JAN. 15-24)

Being hard on myself.

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“Kansas City screwed up when ...” The sports

Who’s sorry now? Still me.

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The best advice I ever got: Time flies. In Latin,

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NEWS

FIRE SALE

The demise of a barbecue joint in the Legends somehow yields few lessons for the Unified Government.

BY

S T E V E V OCK ROD T

ow did the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, know it had paid reasonable prices when it made $3 million available to a restaurateur to festoon a barbecue outlet at the Legends at Village West with high-priced accoutrements such as custom motorcycles?

And how did the UG know whether it was reselling those items for reasonable prices when it auctioned them off this past summer, two years after that venture — Backfire BBQ — went belly up?

No one seems to know, and it doesn’t appear as though it was anyone’s job to find out.

Those questions went unanswered two weeks ago during a UG Board of Commissioners special meeting to address public concerns about how it handled the liquidation of all that pricey memorabilia — tax-funded acquisitions — inside Backfire BBQ. The restaurant’s developers used $3 million worth of proceeds from STAR Bonds to furnish the place, lavishing much of that cash on vintage and contemporary motorcycles to suggest an Orange County Choppers theme.

STAR Bonds are sold by governments in Kansas and bought by investors, who are repaid over time through local and state sales taxes generated by a development project. They’re a powerful inducement, and they’ve been used to develop not only the Legends at Village West but the neighboring Kansas Speedway and Sporting Park.

Backfire lasted little more than three years.

The development already had two barbecue restaurants in business when Backfire opened.

When it went out of business, in 2013, UG officials rounded up all of the items purchased with STAR Bonds. It had a chance to recover some of what was lost with an auction this past June in the basement of Memorial Hall, in downtown KCK. But of the $3 million, the UG recovered only $174,000 from the auction. And that total even includes $80,000 that the UG spent on items for itself, mostly kitchen equipment that doesn’t sell well secondhand.

Back when the UG let Backfire’s developers — Schussler Creative and RED Development — make use of $3 million in STAR Bond proceeds, it hired a real estate consultant named Kirk Sherman to oversee the purchase of the business’s decorative memorabilia.

Sherman showed up at the October 29 UG Commission special meeting to explain how things had gone down. He verified that invoices for expenses, such as motorcycles, matched receipts.

“Was it part of your responsibility, or do you know if it was part of anyone’s responsibility, to verify the legitimacy of those values?” asked 7th District UG Commissioner Jim Walters.

KELSEY WROTEN

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“It was not our scope of work,” Sherman replied.

It might have helped to have someone evaluate those prices, a reality that occurred to some UG commissioners.

“I was told those [motorcycles] were worth a lot more than what they went for,” said 5th District Commissioner Mike Kane. “And there are people from Wyandotte County, believe it or not, that have money.”

You wouldn’t guess that by looking over the winning bids for some of that memorabilia.

One of the vehicles that the UG bought in 2009 was an Orange County Choppers–style motorcycle, for $285,000. It’s a custom motorcycle, so it’s difficult to know what was done to it to merit a six-figure purchase price.

But whatever dazzlements were included in the price didn’t impress its latest buyer. The motorcycle sold for $6,000.

Another Orange County–themed motorcycle that sold at the June 19 auction was a 2009 model, which fetched the opening-bid price of $5,300. Was that a good return? According to the database assembled by the National Automobile Dealers Association: yup. It lists a new 2009 Orange Choppers motorcycle for the base price of $38,900. (And that doesn’t take into account that the motorcycles at Backfi re hung from a ceiling — hardly the same depreciation one might expect from riding it around town.)

Ann Murguia, a 3rd District UG commis-

sioner, expressed a healthy dose of skepticism about how the auction was handled.

“Let’s say we paid $500,000 for an antique car. And if we were willing to pay that amount of money to put it in a store, then why isn’t there anybody else out there that’s willing to pay $500,000?” Murguia said. “And if there isn’t, then I’m concerned about what we’re willing to pay.”

Other commissioners expressed concern about how well the auction was publicized.

“A lot of people I encountered afterwards said, ‘Man, I wish I had known about that auction. I would have loved to have been there,’” Walters said.

Marty Higgenbotham, the auctioneer hired by the UG to sell Backfire’s booty, said he contacted motorcycle dealers.

Advertising invoices obtained by The Pitch show that Higgenbotham spent $11,462 of a $15,000 budget on advertising, including three ads in The Kansas City Star, another three in Thrifty Nickel and a variety of spots on Fox News and Cumulus Radio stations.

Auction records show that 164 bidders showed up for the auction, both in-person and online.

“I think the sale was a huge success,” Higgenbotham told commissioners. “As far as what it brought, it brought every nickel that it was worth.”

Higgenbotham has a weird sense of what constitutes “a huge success.” The auction’s

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$174,000 net constituted half the value that Higgenbotham had established ahead of time.

UG County Administrator Doug Bach downplayed the auction’s “success.” “Do I wish we could have gotten more out the auction process?” Bach said. “Yes, I do.”

But Bach added that the $3 million in STAR Bonds spent on Backfire is less than 1 percent of the outlay in Village West.

UG Mayor Mark Holland appeared similarly sanguine about the Backfire affair. He said at the meeting that the success of T-Rex Café, a dinosaur-themed restaurant (which cooks, Holland added, the best hamburger he has ever tasted), more than makes up for Backfire’s loss. (T-Rex is a concept created by the same people who came up with Backfire.)

“They didn’t bring us a line-item budget to us and say, ‘We’re going to buy a motorcycle for this much,’ because if you look at these custom motorcycles, I would have said this is ridiculous for a motorcycle,” Holland said.

“We bought into a concept to draw people to the Legends, and the concept didn’t work, and we lost money.”

More than one commissioner during the meeting expressed a desire to learn a lesson from Backfire. Here’s one for the public: Pay closer attention when you see a Thrifty Nickel ad for a UG liquidation auction.

E-mail steve.vockrodt@pitch.com NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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S A B R I N A S TA I R E S

After four years with a friendly City Council, Mayor Sly James is learning to play well with others.

by st e v e vock rodt

T

he mayor approaches with a firm handshake and a smile.

“I’d like to apologize for being defensive the other day,” Sly James tells a reporter on the 10th floor of City Hall.

He’s talking about an interview with this newspaper that took place in his office October 23. I had come to ask James about the fi rst few months of his second term. He cruised to re-election, but now he was surrounded by a new Kansas City, Missouri, City Council — a quizzical group that is, by all accounts, a freethinking bunch. At times during our 45-minute interview, the mayor took exception to my questions.

The Pitch: One of the biggest issues facing the council is this convention hotel. When the old council voted on the convention hotel’s public financing during its last session, was that timing to keep the new council from taking on that issue?

James: I love the way you phrase a question that already sounds like a setup for a negative answer. The answer is no — it was done because the old City Council had worked their butts off for three or four years on it and they wanted a chance to finish the job. It had nothing to do with the new City Council.

But some members of the current City Council say they feel double-crossed about the last-minute, lame-duck-session passage of the $311 million convention-hotel project, half of which will be financed through pub-

lic sources, just prior to the new council’s swearing-in.

Kansas Citians often see an amiable, charismatic James — an ebullient and quickwitted booster who exudes his fondness for the city and never misses a chance to extol its virtues at public events or through social media. (James’ Twitter musings are often hashtagged with the word frosty, an expression of enthusiasm indicating that the thing or person at hand is cool.) James was often credited in his first term as mayor with towing Kansas City out of four years of economic and political doldrums, giving rise to a new wave of economic development and municipal projects as well as leading a charge against this city’s innate inferiority complex. He has sought instead to instill a sense of confidence and braggadocio.

Less seen publicly is the bombastic, sometimes argumentative mayor, a James whose cajoling can curdle into an impulse to control critics or opponents, both real and perceived.

“Compared to past mayors, in my experience — and this goes all the way back to Charlie Wheeler — he is not as comfortable with dealing with criticism as other mayors have been,” Dan Cofran says of James. Cofran is a former councilman who briefly considered running against James last year. “When Sly runs into criticism, he’s more likely to be confrontational than cooperative in finding a way to get from point A to point B. That’s just a different leadership style.”

Even less seen is a mayor who says he’s sorry for raising bruises.

But already in the new term, he has had to extend apologies to a few new council members and others who have opposed his hardcharging style.

“I think that we are not treated in every instance, or many instances, as if we are intelligent adults who were elected to the council just like everyone else, and I think particularly the mayor … you do get a great deal of paternalistic, condescending attitude,” says Katheryn Shields, a 4th District at-large councilwoman who earlier this year upended Jim Glover. That longtime councilman was a reliable vote for James.

The Pitch has heard from people working in and around City Hall that James’ office at times fails to communicate well with new council members and shows resistance to answering questions — or submitting substantive information on pressing municipal issues to the council. The mayor’s critics also say his committee structure keeps council members so busy that they struggle to tend to their regular tasks.

James’ first-term agenda was largely, if not entirely, unimpeded by the previous City Council. But it’s clear that his second term faces headwinds from a group that has shown itself more freethinking — and more willing to act on its own volition.

“One of the reasons for things being relatively smooth in Sly James’ first term was

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reaction and relief from the extreme tension between the council and Mark Funkhouser,” says Cofran, who last year was also the chairman of the Citizens Association. “Everyone was ready for a kumbaya time. Speaking for myself and a number of people, we wanted to see more independent thinkers on the City Council this time around. That’s why a lot of people pushed for Katheryn Shields and Teresa Loar.”

“I do kind of sense that the council seems to work or think independently of the mayor,” adds 2nd District Councilman Dan Fowler.

“That doesn’t mean we’re against the mayor.

We’re just thinking independently.”

W

hen James first campaigned for mayor — the first time he had sought political office — he cast himself as a mediator. The practicing lawyer was a man who would bring different experts, interested parties and divergent viewpoints into a room to forge a healthy consensus.

In practice, James has left little to chance.

In a city that’s often described as having a weak-mayor form of government, James has made his office as strong as it can be. His office’s budget in the current fiscal year has grown to just more than $2 million, which supports 18 full-time staffers. That’s twice the budget of his predecessor.

In selecting people to serve on important continued on page 8 NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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continued from page 7 boards and commissions, he has required appointees to sign undated resignation letters.

James has portrayed the practice as a means to keep members from going rogue, but others have seen it as a way to exert control.

Beyond appointments and dollars and cents, James has enjoyed surprising success, for a political newbie, in ushering in his agenda. His first four years in office, he was in the majority of every ordinance passed except for two. His was the lone vote against a 2013 resolution to support the Kansas City Health Commission’s recommendations for reducing gun violence. His only other loss came in 2014, when a majority of the council voted against earmarking bond proceeds for streetcar-expansion studies right after voters had rejected a measure to lengthen the downtown streetcar to the Plaza and the East Side.

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led to a bigger payout when a majority of the council finally decided to can him.

Scott Wagner, whom James appointed mayor pro tem two months ago, served his first term after those fractious Funkhouser years. He discounts the notion that the previous City Council was mindlessly obedient to James; he says most of the returning council members who served under Funkhouser were simply ready to get things done after four years of stagnation.

“In the last term, we were coming off of four years of Mayor Funkhouser,” Wagner says. “It was safe to say there was a pretty unworkable relationship in those four years.

Half the council of the last term had just come off that experience. You have that compared to what this council has: nine new people who did not have that experience previously.”

Unlike Funkhouser, James has seen very little opposition against his big initiatives.

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

By then, though, James had already scored arguably his biggest victory: establishing a downtown streetcar line — one funded by a transportation-development district, which involved an election within a narrowly proscribed district that was selected to ensure passage of the $150 million project.

Funkhouser used to brag that the City Council voted with him 80 percent of the time.

But that’s not much for a mayor to hang his hat on, given that the vast preponderance of council votes involve routine matters: dull stuff such as plats, easements and small contracts.

When it came to the big stuff, Funkhouser’s City Council often sought to outflank the unpopular mayor. That compulsion led to a few bad decisions, such as a contract extension for former City Manager Wayne Cauthen when Funkhouser sought to fire him, and which

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James (upper right) presides over a City Council legislative session.

Occasional dissent popped up among the last council, most often from political veterans Ed Ford and John Sharp, and sometimes from Scott Taylor and Scott Wagner.

“I have been, in my opinion, a pretty independent voice on the council,” Taylor tells The Pitch.

Still, the council by and large was predominantly in lockstep with James.

Some of those initiatives didn’t get wrapped up during James’ first term — notably, a future plan for Kansas City International Airport and an expansion of the streetcar system. The new council will take on these matters. And it may yet raise questions about the convention-hotel project.

ccording to various sources, some members of the new City Council contemplated an attempt to reverse the previous council’s approval of public financing for the convention hotel, a move that authorized City Manager Troy Schulte to work out a contract with the hotel-development team. This would have required action immediately upon the council’s swearing-in, and the idea never gained enough traction, but after the project first officially came up for the new council, during an October 1 business session, there were signs of a political hangover.

Following a long presentation that day from the Port Authority of Kansas City, the council went into a closed meeting. In such sessions, council members are allowed to discuss certain matters out of public view. This one had been called to get advice from City Attorney Bill Geary about the council’s legal options for dealing with a petition initiative against the convention hotel.

September 22, a watchdog committee called Citizens for Responsible Government had submitted 2,007 signatures on a petition calling for voters to decide whether to use public resources to finance the convention-hotel project. (Owing to low voter turnout in the most recent election, just 1,708 signatures are required for such a ballot-seeking initiative.)

Prior to the petition’s arrival that day at City Hall, city officials had signed the contracts with the hotel-development team. The

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fact that they were signed before the petition’s delivery is a chief argument for why city leaders now say CFRG’s petition is invalid. Geary has said petition initiatives cannot force a city to break a valid contract.

Council members tell The Pitch that they received an e-mail from Schulte the morning of September 22 with the hotel contracts attached, indicating that they would be signed later that day.

James says those contracts weren’t signed to throw off the petition process.

“The petition could have been filed at any time,” James says. “This was not a secret.

There were eight hearings on this before. If they didn’t like it, they could have filed it anytime. Have you asked them whether or not they filed their petition initiative to wreak as much havoc, for example, on the earnings-tax election, so they could get this on the April 6 vote?”

Kansas City residents will head to the polls April 6 to determine whether to renew the 1 percent tax on earnings of residents and those who work in Kansas City, as well as on the profits of businesses, for another five years. City leaders are concerned about the vote because the earnings tax represents more than $200 million in annual revenue. Without it, they say, the city’s budget would descend into chaos.

And a springtime ballot complicated by other issues could imperil the renewal of the earnings tax.

Dan Coffey, the south Plaza resident who is the public face of CFRG, says the group’s hotel petition has nothing to do with the earnings tax.

“I think they’re the ones concerned about

that,” Coffey tells The Pitch. “We’re not the least bit concerned with that.”

Teresa Loar, a Northland councilwoman who served on the City Council in the late 1990s and early 2000s, raised concerns in the closed session about whether the city should take the petitioners more seriously.

“Two thousand signatures, no matter where they got them, that’s a lot of people out there,” Loar tells The Pitch. “There’s some concern about this.”

During the closed session, Loar and James raised their voices at each other. James declined to discuss what he or others said during the closed meeting, but according to people who were present, James said the City Council sometimes has to clean up messes from previous councils. To illustrate his point, he mentioned the millions of dollars that taxpayers spend each year to satisfy bondholders on the underperforming Power & Light District.

Then he offered another example: a disastrous development plan that was approved during Loar’s last term on the council. That deal, Renaissance North (sometimes called Prospect North), was an ill-fated tax-increment financing, passed in 1999, that was supposed to lead to mixed-use development and new housing subdivisions in Clay County. The original developer on the project died, and nothing was built in the years that followed.

A later developer eventually sued the city over the matter and settled for $6 million.

“It was a cheap shot,” Shields recalls. Loar, Shields says, “got upset and left.” (James says he recalls the incident differently, but he declined to elaborate.)

From left: Shields, Reed, Lucas, Fowler and Loar, from the KCMO City Council This was one of the first visible signs that James’ free ride with the City Council may be coming to an end.

Loar and James met the following week in his City Hall office. “There’s a bottle of scotch over there she brought me,” the mayor says.

“We sat here and talked. We had a good time.

Teresa and I get along fine.”

“Every mayor has their own quirks,” Loar says. She has served with three Kansas City mayors. “I was pretty spoiled working under [Emanuel] Cleaver, who was and is a mentor for me. He was always inclusive, shared credit with everybody. If you wanted information, he shared it with everybody. Kay [Barnes] was very different but, again, a mentor of mine.

Kay and I got into it a few times because we are both hardheaded, but we worked it out.”

Loar adds, “I was hoping it would be the same with this mayor, but I think he was given a lot of negative information about me.”

J

olie Justus is serving her first term as a Kansas City councilwoman, after eight years as a Missouri senator. A Democrat, Justus received credit for working well with Missouri Republicans in a Legislature that, like Congress, can be an inflexible bunch.

In Jefferson City, legislation moves slowly.

Justus says bills that weren’t even partisan or particularly controversial could take three years to ultimately reach passage. And for bills that needed to move quickly, by Jefferson City

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standards, she says, there was an unwritten rule in the Missouri Senate that lawmakers couldn’t vote on a measure during the same week it was first heard on the floor.

“That way, you could have a week to do the due diligence you need,” Justus says. “As crazy as people think Jefferson City is, we were deliberative.”

City Hall moves at a quicker pace, and Justus isn’t the only one getting used to the speed.

During the first full City Council meeting of the new term, the council took up a renewal plan for the East Crossroads that would establish a framework for developing the area between the West Crossroads and U.S. Highway 71. The plan encourages mixed-use development through a patchwork of incentives. The vote narrowly passed 7-6.

Among the no votes was Quinton Lucas, a first-term 3rd District at-large councilman.

Lucas is one of eight lawyers on this City Council, and he draws on the profession’s calculated and Socratic thinking to analyze his legislative decisions. He says he was against the plan because it didn’t go far enough into the East Side. He adds that he didn’t receive enough information ahead of the vote.

“It would be nice to know sooner information that’s going to find its way into a fact sheet or ordinance,” Lucas says. “My hunch or belief is that others, including city staff, knew more than I did.”

Justus also voted no, and she tells me that the council didn’t receive training on the rules of City Hall’s legislative process until the week after that vote. She adds that prior to being sworn in, council members had been through hours of orientation by city staff on more mundane topics, such as social media.

“A no vote is always the safer vote when you don’t understand the issue,” Justus says.

She goes on: “I think there’s this narrative that we’re fractured,” Justus says. “I’d like to start the narrative that because we ask questions and not everything passes 13-0, we’re not fractured.”

T

he work of elected officials in Kansas City is broken up into committees. The mayor appoints council members to various committees, where ordinances and resolutions are first heard. The power of appointment is one of the few advantages that the city charter gives the mayor.

During the Cleaver years, there were only three committees: Finance; Planning and Zoning; and Audit and Operations. During James’ first term, there were five committees.

Now there are 10. He says he created a separate committee for housing, which used to be part of a larger committee for Neighborhoods and Public Safety, because the Housing Authority of Greater Kansas City emerged from federal receivership in 2013. And the Airport Committee was created in anticipation of major discussions about KCI’s future. continued on page 10

NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

the pitch

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10

SERIOUS SUSHI. SERIOUSLY DELICIOUS.

a l ly l s o n p e c k

Bob Wasabi Kitchen

f rost y

MEET BOB WASABI

continued from page 9 Of the now 10 committees, three receive the bulk of legislative activity: Planning, Zoning & Economic Development; Finance and Governance; and Transportation and Infrastructure. Eight of the committees are supposed to meet regularly.

“There is frustration because we’re just overwhelmed trying to get to committees,” Loar says.

“We’re constantly going to something,” Shields says.

But Shields, who served on the City Council in the 1980s and ’90s, followed by 12 years as Jackson County executive, initially sat on none of the busiest committees. In fact, there’s no one from the 4th District — which covers portions of Brookside and midtown along with most of downtown and Briarcliff — on the Planning, Zoning & Economic Development Committee. That committee handles ordinances related to real estate development, and the 4th District is historically the most active district for such projects.

Shields is retired professionally, so she started attending other committee meetings in her spare time, a move that eventually got her placed on Planning, Zoning & Economic Development. James says he let her on simply because she asked.

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

pitch.com

ames was the lead speaker at a September 25 announcement at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

The mayor and others were unveiling plans for the Urban Youth Academy at Parade Park, which borders the 18th & Vine District. The $14 million project was hailed at the announcement as a development boost for the long-struggling historic area and entertainment district. Partnering with Major League Baseball and the Kansas City Royals, city leaders expect that the Urban Youth Academy will provide inner-city children with an opportunity to discover baseball firsthand.

From left: Barnes, Justus and Shields Secondarily, it might help the public rediscover the financially troubled 18th & Vine District.

Many City Council members see the development as a good thing. They just wish they had known more about it ahead of time; they had received notice of the September 25 press conference, but several were not briefed ahead of time about the details of what was being announced.

“Some were. Some weren’t,” James told me later. He declined to elaborate further.

First-term Councilwoman Alissia Canady apparently was one who didn’t.

“That’s a great project, but I didn’t know about it until the day before,” Canady says. “I get calls from people, and their perception is the white people are taking over Parade Park and putting them out of their homes.”

Canady’s observation is in keeping with a frequent complaint among members of the new City Council: Key information isn’t always readily available. In this case, they can credibly argue that they deserved to know because local public funds make up part of the project’s financing.

“I represent the 5th District,” Canady says.

“I enjoy working with the mayor and want to work with him, but he’s got to give me enough information. If he can’t provide it, he can’t count on my vote.”

For his part, James acknowledges that he’s honing his leadership style to better work with the new council.

“I think I need to try and figure out the individual issues with each councilperson, which I started when I met with each councilperson before they took office. And I asked them, ‘What do you want to do? What’s important to you?’” James says. “And then I try to match them up with the things they wanted.

With one exception, and I won’t tell you who, everybody said, ‘I like this. This is what I want to do. Thank you very much.’”

E-mail steve.vockrodt@pitch.com

11 WEEK OF NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

Is it cheap of us to pander to your Star Wars mania by suggesting that Crown Center’s Legoland is where it’s at this week? Maybe, but if it’s wrong to feel joy at the sight of Lego-Motocross-jumping Imperial stormtroopers, then we don’t want to be right. The latest “no kids allowed” night at Legoland’s Discovery Center is, you guessed it, Star Wars– themed — pandering, quite fairly, to all of us swept up in pre-Force Awakens hype.

The tractor beam hauls you in from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, November 12. Details and tickets at legolanddiscoverycenter.com/ kansascity.

The Empire Strikes Bike DAILY LISTINGS ON PAGE

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I M A G E B Y Y O H A N E S S A N J AYA

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12

shop girl

Pouring it All out

At Luna, coffee time gives way to restorative creativity.

By

A ngel A l u t z

Each week, Pitch Street Team cruises around to the hottest clubs, bars and concerts. You name it, we will be there.

While we are out, we hand out tons of cool stuff. So look for the Street Team...

Crafts & Drafts s pe @ Uptown Shop

Zach Bauman

We will be looking for you!

E Cra @ Upt fts & Drafts own S hoppe s

Drafts Crafts & Shoppes n @ Uptow

Crafts & Drafts @ Uptown Shoppe

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

rin Rosales wants you to stop saying that your paintings suck. The owner of Luna Coffeehouse and co-owner of Dare to Dabble in North Kansas City is something of an expert, after all. She has for several years taught art classes to adults — you know, the kind where you drink wine and clumsily try to re-create a painting by an actual artist.

Rosales and her business partner, Sheryl Godsy, were two of the first people in Kansas City to hand wannabe artists booze and a paintbrush, renting spaces in various buildings before moving earlier this year into their permanent location on Swift Avenue. Now, painting parties have sprung up around town, in a fashion akin to “the cupcake explosion,” Rosales jokes. (Her own paintings are a bit more complex than most, incorporating arthistory influences and techniques such as shading, the better to show students.)

During each of her classes, Rosales hears a familiar refrain. Her students don’t think their paintings are good enough. They’re worried about messing up — a fear that trumps the creative impulse.

“You’ve almost got to hold hands and talk people over the edge,” Rosales told me when I met her at Luna one afternoon. She had given birth to her first child, Iris, in early October and, on this day, was moving a bit slowly but was obviously eager to be back at work. As we chatted, she organized and rearranged the studio, returning various art supplies to their respective places. “The point is not to mimic the pros,” she said, “but to have fun and be creative.”

Rosales and Godsy’s business depends on imagination and inspiration. There’s a lot going

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on in the warehouse-size space, which used to house an embroidery manufacturing company and which Rosales calls “perfect for artists.”

In many ways, Luna is like any other coffeehouse. The espresso bar serves Roasterie beans and pumpkin-spice lattes, and locally made pastries fill the bakery case. The space has plenty of tables for spreading out for a while to read or write. A number of locally made goods are for sale, including Dick Daniels’ bold and amusing illustrations, beeswax lip balm from Messner Family Farm, and Rosales’ own otherworldly paintings.

But the similarities to a typical coffee shop and artsy marketplace stop there. The rest of the large room is lined with enough craft supplies to entertain nearly any creative whim.

The mosaic station, for instance, glimmers with shiny bits of glass and tile, the paper station features countless colors and patterns, and the fiber station has hundreds of spools of yarn stacked high. The space functions as an open studio — anyone can come in, choose a project and get busy during the shop’s hours.

“It’s kind of a new concept for Kansas City,” Rosales, who is a KC native, told me. “You don’t have to invest a lot of money to be a maker. You can use what you need for your project, and we clean up the mess.”

In the center of the room, a large wooden table and elegant blue chairs provide an inviting space for a variety of art classes, from metal stamping with Gigi Moon Gems’ Garnet Booth to Halloween silkscreening for kids. On the day I visited, a number of colorful mosaics from a class earlier that week sat on the table, shining under the light.

Customers travel from as far away as Olathe

Godsy (left) and Rosales, with daughter Iris or Lee’s Summit to attend classes at Luna, but in terms of miles, they can’t beat the Tibetan monks who created a sand mandala in the space last April. Rosales offered them the location on a whim, relishing their wonder as they explored her studio. Many of the monks returned to Luna to paint when they were in town in September, bringing gifts for Rosales’ daughter.

Rosales hopes that people from across the metro area will make the drive to her North Kansas City neighborhood, which she says could summon the artistic vibe of the CrossLuna Coffeehouse and Dare to Dabble 1329 Swift Avenue, North Kansas City, 816-533-4718, daretodabble.net

roads. She eagerly mentions several spots planned for the area that she’s excited about: two breweries, Chicken n Pickle (an entertainment complex and chicken restaurant) and Restless Spirits Distilling. “And it’s just a 10-minute drive over the river,” she said.

By the time I left Luna that afternoon, I was convinced. I even vowed to sign up for an art class, though I live near Swope Park. But for a moment, my old anxieties took over, and I worried that whatever I turned out wouldn’t look like real art. Then I remembered: Even for bona fide artists, that’s never the point.

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S ta g e

serves Urinetown well.

By

l i z c ook

Tim ScoTT

wastE not, want not

MTH’s low-f low approach

M

usical Theater Heritage tackles an unlikely marriage of self-conscious parody and Malthusian catastrophe in Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Urinetown: The Musical.

The meta-theatrical digs start early, as narrators Officer Lockstock and Little Sally (a Dickensian guttersnipe) unite to rattle off a list of musical death warrants: too much exposition, bad subject matter, aimless focus.

“A bad title, even,” Sally pipes up. “That could kill a show pretty good.”

Not so, Little Sally. Urinetown’s title did not, in fact, prevent the show — a pastiche of winking Broadway tropes and familiar song structures, lined with vaudevillian dad jokes (Ms. Cladwell! What an unexpected surprise!/Is there any other kind?) — from earning a threeyear stint on Broadway, a national tour and three Tony Awards.

Urinetown ushers us into a dystopian future in which a 20-year drought has made private toilets a relic of the past. Much of the first act plays outside Public Amenity No. 9, a pay-topee privy run by the street-toughened Pennywise. Poor residents have a strong incentive to cross their legs and hunt for coins — freeloaders and shrub-waterers earn a one-way ticket to “Urinetown,” a punishment as mysterious as it is permanent. Enter a class war between the full-bladdered poor and the upper-crust managers of Urine Good Company, led by magnate Caldwell B. Cladwell, who control the means of micturition.

Revolution begins in earnest when Mr. Cladwell’s daughter, Hope, returns from college and falls in love with Bobby Strong, a fire pot whose father was shipped to Urinetown after an unsanctioned pee. As Hope tries to navigate shifting allegiances, Strong leads a rebellion against UGC and the sneering Officer Lockstock (Don Richard).

Richard was onboard for the original Broadway production, and he hasn’t lost any steam over the years. His Lockstock is the comedic engine, equal parts dimwitted and cocksure. Jeff Berger is believable as his affectionate lackey, and Julie Shaw lends a husky noir purr to gatekeeper Pennywise.

As Cladwell, Kip Niven is Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags come to life. Niven plays the tycoon as more cynical than conniving, sounding almost grandfatherly as he berates Hope for neglecting her studies on mass manipulation. The hammy “Mr. Cladwell” is a lower-energy tune here than in some productions, but Niven preens like a parade marshal nonetheless.

Janet Wiggins has some nice moments as Hope — the intro bars of “I See a River” showcase her expressive singing — but her performance feels a bit thin, even for a naïve archetype. Tyler Fromson is more successful as the principled Bobby, knowing when to draw from the well of brassy show tunes and (crucially) when to pump the brakes.

The ensemble is no less dependable, with

especially crisp work from Shelby Floyd (who seems, at times, to be channeling Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove). And two supporting characters make some of the strongest contributions. Natalee Merola is brilliant as Little Sally, one foot firmly in parody and the other in the world of the play. Her childish drawl feels more earnest than affected, and her scenes with Richard are some of the funniest in the show. Ryan Hruza earns similar style points for his Jacob Marley–inspired portrayal of the defiant Old Man Strong. Hruza and director Sarah Crawford join forces for one of the play’s most clever sequences, a “haunting” a la sickly spotlight and canned fog.

Crawford knows how to shape a line and score a laugh. The show is peppered with impeccably timed gags, from the not-so-haunting to something as simple as a shared sigh. She’s a key part of Musical Theater Heritage’s magic.

Her blocking is so creative and her casts so expressive that you hardly notice the mics and the music stands.

But there are mics and music stands, and a few choices flout that constraint to the show’s detriment. Actors frequently move between mics or turn their heads away midphrase, causing the volume to waver like a poorly tuned radio. (John Hileman’s sound design is top-notch, but he’s not a magician.)

As you might expect from the premise, Urinetown’s antics can occasionally ring hollow. Literal potty humor and musical lam-

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Officer Lockstock (Richard, center) and the cast welcome you to Urinetown. poons, while great fun, make a better sketch than they do a whole show. Kotis and Hollmann try to temper this a bit in the second act, turning the satire sour.

Sure, crony capitalism takes heat, but the would-be revolutionaries get as much of a dressing-down as their corporate counterUrinetown: the Musical Through November 22 at Musical Theater Heritage, Crown Center, 2450 Grand, 816-221-6987, mthkc.com

parts. Idealism falls apart in the face of deprivation. Scarcity proves to be a greater enemy than any corporation. Cladwell may have been corrupt, the playwrights suggest, but, hey, at least he staved off the drought.

If that sounds like a cynical note to land on, it is. But it’s the right cap to a show that turns out to be more about the lemon than about the lemonade. The show’s unsustainable land of plenty — a mirror of our own — makes a throwaway gag loom large: “Gosh, Daddy, I never realized large, monopolizing corporations could be such a force for good in the world!”

E-mail feedback@pitch.com NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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film

ThE Way WE LivE NoW

Room wants to be a safe place for the unspeakable to become uplifting.

By

S c o t t W il S on

B

oy, everybody sure did love Room when it first arrived. Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel was a made-for-book-clubs hit, greeted by generous sales, critical acclaim and a place on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. Driving the consensus was an impressive narrative achievement: telling a deeply disturbing story through the voice of a 5-year-old.

A beguilingly smart 5-year-old. A heartbreaking 5-year-old. A naggingly precious, supremely chatty, utterly exhausting 5-year-old.

Boy, I did not love Room when it first arrived.

I do not love it now that it’s a softened-up movie — one with a beguilingly smart performance by the child actor Jacob Tremblay, and a heartbreaking performance by Brie Larson.

Not that Donoghue’s book and the screenplay she has fashioned from it seem meant to be loved, conveying as they do a violent horror and its permanent effects.Yet Room posits maternal love as the reason to scrutinize this horror — one rooted, for an unfortunate few, in real life — as well as the profound avenue by which to transcend it. That’s a lot of mother’s milk to swallow.

Jack (Tremblay), that smart kid, is celebrating his 5th birthday when we meet him, helping the young woman he calls Ma prepare a makeshift cake in the little dwelling they share. They have wakened in the same bed, and Ma has led Jack through a fitness-andeducation regimen in their cramped quarters.

(In the book, she has also tried and failed, not for the first time, to stop breastfeeding him.)

By the end of this hallmark occasion, though, the absence of birthday candles will send Jack into a screaming paroxysm. His day is ruined.

But he doesn’t know what ruin really is.

Ma does. Jack has been born to her in captivity, fathered by the man — she and Jack call him Old Nick (Sean Bridgers, looking for a split second like a padded Ryan Reynolds; what a creepy surprise that might have been) — who abducted her seven years before and jailed her in a 100-square-foot garden shed.

It’s soundproof and locked electronically from the outside, with only a skylight to let in just enough sun to be cruel. She knows that their space — Room, they call it, a kind of personalization also applied to objects such as Plant — is a cell. Her son’s Sesame Street is her Oldboy — a discretely askew, vacuum-sealed universe. It’s the only world Jack has known, and may ever know, because his mother has shielded him from all that might pain him as she herself has been pained.

This kind of thing, we know, has happened.

Abductions, imprisonment and (sometimes incestuous) rape. We know because some of the victims have escaped or been freed. The excruciatingly tense sequence in which Ma attempts to liberate Jack — knowing that she

may not get out — is director Lenny Abrahamson’s surest work here. (He last directed Frank, the 2014 movie in which Michael Fassbender played a different kind of prisoner, a papiermâché-masked avant-punk provocateur.) He lets Tremblay so perfectly capture Jack’s frozen incomprehension at the real world, and his ignorance of the potentially lethal moments ticking by, that the child is, for a few moments, equally piteous and loathsome.

But we know what happens next in such stories, and it’s from this point on that Room slips into drab, predictable territory. Donoghue and Abrahamson have nothing special to say about victimology, about our staring disbelief, our collective inability to imagine, and our culture’s insistence — via TV interviews, via TV re-enactments — on imagining anyway. As Ma recovers her identity as Joy, as someone else’s child, and Jack learns that they are merely two people among countless others, Room devolves into a Spielbergian Law & Order: SVU. (That’s glib, of course, and unfair to Steven Spielberg, probably the greatest director of children in movie history, and to Ice-T, probably the greatest reason to watch post-2001 Dick Wolf in TV history.)

The special thing that Donoghue wants to

say, though, is still loud and clear (very loud, when Stephen Rennicks’ naifish, distracting score swells). Remember, we’re talking about motherhood. Room-womb, get it? As Joy at last weans Jack (only figuratively onscreen), she also must reattach to her own mother (Joan Allen, a glowing patience) and set aside the Old Testament coldness of a father (William H. Macy, abused) who sees Jack as a rapist’s bastard, not a grandson. In fact, the special thing that Donoghue all but shouts is a bumper sticker: Jack is a child, not a choice.

In a story that’s already 75 percent metaphor, obviousness like that rings upsettingly hollow. But Room isn’t without power. Its early scenes deftly balance Jack’s wonder at being the world’s only child against the viewer’s mounting claustrophobia. And that same terror of confinement haunts Larson’s face even after Joy is free. That we recognize it later as a fear of knowing only one role — sainted motherhood — in what should be a full and complex life is a credit to the actor more than to the material.

In the novel, Joy is 19 when Old Nick takes her. Here, that age has quietly been reduced to 17, which gives the crime a nastier, more predatory edge while further simplifying the

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Larson and Tremblay learning to heal. world from which the girl has been spirited.

The Joy pictured in school yearbooks that she eventually shares with Jack is an athlete and a popular girl. She’s also, to a not much lesser extent than Jack, a child. She has never voted.

She hasn’t gone to college. She hasn’t chosen much, if anything, for herself. She has never spoken up. And when she at last raises her voice, it is to yell at her mother as a teenager might, though what she says is key to Room and its failure. She wonders if she would have been abducted had she not been a nice, helpful person — nice and helpful to the wrong person at the wrong time. Well, fair question, but not very motherly, and so Room moves on, pushing toward sanctimony, toward trite epiphany.

When last we see Jack and Joy, they visit Room one final time, well-guarded and safe but not yet truly free. The mother must let the child choose for himself to leave the womb, rather than, when he asks if they can see Room again, saying no and sitting down with him to binge-watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt until they cry.

E-mail feedback@pitch.com NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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CAfé Three years and one fire into Michael Forbes’ Brookside residency, the place has truly arrived.

By

Ch a r l e s F er ru z z a

Michael Forbes Bar & Grille • 128 West 63rd Street, 816-333-4355 • Hours: 11 a�m�-10 p�m� Monday-Thursday, 11 a�m�-11 p�m� Friday, 9 a�m�-11 p�m� Saturday, 9 a�m�-9 p�m� Sunday • Price: $$-$$$

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aving dined at Michael Forbes Bar & Grille five times since its recent reopening, I feel confident saying that, three years into its run, the place is at last living up to its potential.

It took only a nearly ruinous electrical fire to get there.

After that April mishap caused owner Forbes Cross to shut down his venue for repairs, a funny thing happened: This address — where the popular Sharp’s slid into an increasingly shabby decline before a merciful close — finally got the makeover it had needed all along. A room that had benefited from a topcoat of attention when Cross took it over now shows the felicitous results of significant labor: long-covered ceilings restored to their proper height, original terrazzo floors emerging from long eclipse, bathrooms eradicated of grimness. Its feel alone makes Cross’ 63rd Street Forbes 2.0 his most surefooted restaurant since he opened Parkway 600 in the 1990s.

It’s also his best since those days.

Mind you, the menu hasn’t changed a great deal. Cross and his son, Matt — the restaurant’s chef — have simply streamlined a grillcentered menu that still recalls the original Michael Forbes Grill of three decades ago. That Waldo mainstay was never a fancy restaurant — or even a particularly imaginative one. But Cross père, then in his 30s, was already showing what he had learned in his years with the Kansas City-based Gilbert/Robinson chain: Give diners what they want, and do it right every time.

I haven’t liked some of the post–Michael Forbes restaurants that Cross has launched.

In fact, I hated the ersatz, wildly inconsistent Michael Forbes restaurant that landed in Overland Park in 2003 — and went away the same year.

“It was the wrong location,” Cross tells me with a sigh. “That wasn’t our clientele.”

To find his clientele again, in 2012 he snapped up the former Sharp’s, in the heart of Brookside, where he could count on a chance to draw not just regulars but die-hards. “It’s a real neighborhood that wanted the kind of food and atmosphere we could offer,” he says.

The food, sure: The fried catfish (still 1 pound, still e Mor deboned tableside), the sour-cream apple pie, the Greek salad, the moderat ine ately priced steaks that Onl .com pitch made a name for Forbes Cross back in 1985 — they all were, and are, big sellers here.

They’re damned tasty, too. But the atmosphere is only now, post-renovation, truly inviting.

And one should feel invited when one de-

Café

cides to eat a whole fried chicken. You want the room on your side.

“Our customers like big portions,” Forbes Cross says. “They like taking leftovers home.”

But when it comes to that fried-chicken dinner — the bird perfectly crisp, the deal perfectly affordable — friends at the table have a way of robbing you of future cold-bird snacking.

What also vanished, after a friend and I set out merely to sample: a newer poultry offering, this one consisting of a plump, moist breast glazed in a discreetly boozy Marsala wine sauce and sided with toasted lemonspinach orzo. Ditto an aggressively rich but full-flavored dish that tossed rigatoni with sizzling strips of sautéed steak, mushrooms, red onion and garlic cream, the surface then scattered with crumbles of punchy gorgonzola.

Cross had told me how tired he was of hearing his patrons (and curmudgeons like me) complain about the dearth of really good Reuben sandwiches around here, so Matt Cross now brines and slow-braises his own corned beef for the Forbes Reuben. He piles the meat onto a slightly sour rye — which tastes the way rye is supposed to — with Swiss cheese, sweet sauerkraut and his own Thousand Island dressing. It’s not cheap, but it’s excellent.

The new carnitas tacos are closer to Wall Street in sensibility (and price) than they are to Southwest Boulevard, but the pork is sumptuously tender, tarted up here with just the right notes of hot, salty, sour and creamy (pickled onion, jalapeño, queso fresco and cilantro).

Order two or three and you have a suitably light meal — light, that is, for diners like me, who habitually overindulge here on such oldschool starters as chicken wings. Forbes and Matt Cross know that this is what their patrons want: food that is not too swell and not too plebeian but is — like this Brookside location — right square in the middle. If the fried artichoke hearts I (still) like to order, splashed in astringently tart lemon-garlic butter, are a vulgarian’s approach to appreciating the glories of the Cynara cardunculus, then color me unmannerly — but save me a seat at Michael Forbes Bar & Grille.

The chicken Marsala (above) and the Reuben grill are delicious Forbes additions�

Michael Forbes Bar & Grille Reuben grill��������������������������������������������������$12�99 Chicken Marsala �����������������������������������������$13�99 Carnitas tacos (2) ��������������������������������������� $9�99 Steak gorgonzola rigatoni�������������������������$15�99 Fried-chicken dinner����������������������������������$12�99

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Waiting for takeoff

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hef Tom Harley has bounced around a bit in recent times, and now he’s peddling crack in the Northland. Crack sauce, that is — a dressing that he says is helping make diners at the six-month-old Beaches Cantina into regulars.

“It’s our smoky chipotle aioli that we serve with our fish tacos and fries,” Harley tells me, after explaining that the menu doesn’t actually contain the word crack. “Our staff and customers call it crack sauce because it’s so addictive.”

The last time The Pitch checked in with Harley, it was 2014 when he was working with chef Michael Smith during that chef’s shortlived consulting stint at CocoBolos, in the Prairiefire complex at 135th Street and Nall.

Harley, former executive chef at MelBee’s and the Kansas City Café, left CocoBolos before Smith said adios to the suburban cantina earlier this year.

Montica Alexander sold the Kansas City Café to restaurateur Celina Tio two years ago.

Tio later turned the venue into a restaurant called Collection, which today is a specialevents space.

When Alexander and business partner Staci Santoro took over the former Luna Azteca Mexican Grill, at 10004 Northwest Ambassador Drive, to create a casual-dining restaurant called Beaches, they hired Harley to oversee the menu and the kitchen. (Before that, Harley was kitchen manager for Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar on the Plaza.)

“I liked the idea of creating a menu for a laid-back restaurant that could be as tropi-

Near KCI, Beaches Cantina imports chef Tom Harley.

cal or as resort-inspired as we want it to be,” Harley says. “The hardest thing for us has been getting the word out that we’re not a Mexican restaurant anymore, even though we do sell tacos. But customers won’t find traditional Mexican food here at all.”

No, Beaches doesn’t do Tex-Mex. But the tacos are a thing. Harley offers a dozen of them, including one centered on barbecue pulled pork, one with braised pork belly and an Asian plum glaze, and a rum-and-Coke steak taco. I’ve tried that last one — in which the rum is used to caramelize carrots and the Coke is integral to braising chuck steak — and it’s a perfectly sassy variation on a basic beef taco.

The best-selling folded-tortilla creation here, though, is a taco with tilapia that has been seared on the grill, then garnished with pico de gallo and that narcotic chipotle aioli.

The dressing helps push the fish’s smoky char to the fore.

For the less Mexican-minded, there are reasonably priced soups, salads, burgers and sandwiches here, including a BLT with housecured bacon.

There’s also a classic Maine lobster roll.

“I use a warm, buttery roll filled with fresh lobster salad with my own house-made mayonnaise,” Harley says. “Almost everything in our kitchen is made from scratch.”

Harley is also doing his own spin on the popular Vietnamese starter, banh tom: shrimp and sweet-potato fritters. “Mine

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Harley (right) has created tasty tacos for Beaches, including the fish tacos (left). aren’t breaded,” he says, “but I wrap a sheath of sweet potato around the shrimp before I fry them, then serve them with a Boulevard Wheat–and-honey glaze.

Harley’s three dessert choices include a banana burrito — grilled, not fried — with a fresh banana tucked into a flour tortilla with chocolate and peanut butter. His take on crème brûlée is a hot one. The custard is made with Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. And in place of a burnt-sugar crust, Harley caramelizes crushed red-hot candies. A chipotle chocolate tart is drizzled with house-made caramel and sea salt.

“This isn’t really a destination restaurant yet,” Harley says, noting that many of the restaurant’s customers either work in the offices around KCI or are guests staying at nearby hotels. Beaches may be serving resort-style food, but the kitchen hours are strictly Midwestern: 11 a.m.–8 p.m. Monday–Thursday and 11 a.m.–9 p.m. Friday. Saturday hours are 4–9 p.m., and the place is closed Sunday.

“Our business has been good, but we’re waiting for the hipster crowd to find us,” the chef adds. “We have a menu with a lot of interesting and creative choices. Who else in town has chorizo cheese fries?”

He’s right. I can think of no other such place.

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Bartender’s noteBook

AmAro, AmAri, Amore

Il Lazzarone’s Laura Wagner and Andrew Iwersen are in love — with amari.

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aura Wagner and Andrew Iwersen, Il Lazzarone’s recently appointed bar manager and beer director, respectively, are dwarfed by the City Market restaurant’s mammoth bar. They stand behind its vast marble slab, in front of shelves of liquor that reach toward the restaurant’s high ceiling. The décor here — bright-red barstools, artfully distressed wood — feels modern, but the space’s simple structural beauty also hints at old-school Italy.

“When Laura and I talk about this bar, we talk about what it means to give people an original but still authentic Italian experience,” Iwersen tells me. “We already represent authentic Neapolitan pizza, which has its own set of regulations. There’s no rule book for what our bar needs to be authentic, but we know that Italian culture really appreciates aperitifs and digestifs.”

Iwersen gestures to an entire shelf dedicated to amari (the plural for amaro, the Italian word for bitter).

“Amari are quintessential to that,” Iwersen says. “They’re spirits that are infused with different botanicals and herbs to aid the digestion and prepare you for the next meal. So, while we celebrate Italian culture in our kitchen, it only fits that we should celebrate it here at the bar.”

I consider my amaro options. There are more than 30 bottles here, from the fluorescent orange of Aperol to the inky black of assorted

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fernets. Together, Iwersen and Wagner select three. We start with the Nonino, a daintylooking amber liquid. Iwersen pours an ounce into a cordial glass.

“This is for someone who’s never tried an amaro before and might be a little shy,” Iwersen says. “This is a little lighter on the tongue than most. There are some floral characters to it and some spice.” I detect a few other notes: honey, lemon, tea, bark. When Iwersen tells me that the Nonino is grappabased, aged in oak barrels for five years, I’m not surprised. But there’s no harshness in the flavor, and the overall profile sways more sweet than bitter.

The next amaro will prove more traditional.

Up All Nitro Espresso Porter release, at 75th Street Brewery (520 W. 75th St.).

Thursday, November 12

Boulevard Bourbon Barrel Quad, barbecue and tailgating, at the Boulevard Brewery

THUR NOV 12

TH

tasting room (2501 Southwest Blvd.), 4 p.m.

PATRICK WOOLAM SUN NOV 15TH

COWARDLY LIONS

Bur Oak tasting , at Gomer’s (1606 W.

75th St.)

Schlafly Eleventh Labor tapping, at Flying Saucer (101 E. 13th St.), 7 p.m.

EVERY TUESDAY

KARAOKE WITH TONY T

Free State tasting, at Smooth Liquor (18114 W. 119th St., Olathe), 4–6 p.m.

THUR NOV 19

TH

ZACK MUFASA

Free State pint night, at Rock & Brews (5701 W. 135th St., Overland Park), 6 p.m.

friday, November 13

Tappings of Winter Warmer and Fruit Beers, at Amerisports (3200 N. Ameristar Dr.), 11 a.m.

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

pitch.com

Urban Chestnut “Brews and Cheese” pairings,

at Plaza Liquor (4500 Belleview), 4–7 p.m.

saTurday, November 14

Midwest Medal Fest, honoring the KC region’s Great American Beer Festival medal winners, with McCoy’s Ursa Minor, Free

State Garden Party, KC Bier Co. Weizenbock, Logboat Mamoot and Bear Hair, Nebraska Brewing Melange a Trois, and Perennial Savant Blanc, at the Foundry (424 Westport Rd.), noon–5 p.m.

Socks and Hops: A Benefit for Swope Health Services, with Crane Brewing, at City Market (20 W. Fifth St.), 7–10 p.m.

Free State East Side Brewery Tour (1923

Moodie, Lawrence), 2 p.m.

suNday, November 15

Homebrewing for Beginners class, at Grain to Glass (1611 Swift, NKC), $50, 3–6 p.m.

Wagner and Iwersen say benvenuto to Italian customs.

“The Zucca is rhubarb-based,” Wagner tells me. She takes a whiff. “It’s got this really musty, earthy smell that I love.”

By “musty, earthy,” she probably doesn’t mean “smells like mothballs and moldy underwear,” but that’s what I get from my own sniff. I tell Wagner, and she laughs, confident that the taste will trump any olfactory turnoff. She’s right. It has a lighter body than the smudgy brown color suggests, and a pleasant, slightly syrupy sweetness. Wagner and Iwersen take turns bouncing off flavor notes — lemon zest, dried citrus peel — before we move on.

moNday, November 16

Kansas City Metro Bicycle Club teams up with KC Bier Co., at Bier Station (120 E.

Gregory Blvd.), for a fundraiser, 6–9 p.m.

All proceeds from KC Bier Co. Dunkel sales go to the cycle club’s public advocacy for cycling safety.

Tuesday, November 17

Perennial Abraxas rollout, with 2015 Abraxas, 2014 Abraxas, Coffee Abraxas and Vanilla Abraxas and bottle sales, at Bier Station (120 E. Gregory Blvd.).

WedNesday, November 18

Free State beer dinner, at Pig & Finch (11570 Ash, Leawood).

Martin City Brewing Co. beer dinner, at Columbus Park Ramen Shop (549 Gillis).

Schlafly the Eleventh Labor tapping, at the Foundry (424 Westport Rd.), 4 p.m.

Glass night, at Flying Saucer (101 E. 13th

St.), 7 p.m.

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“There’s a distributor in California who is almost the direct cause of popularizing FernetBranca, and this is the next thing in her portfolio that she’s begun to push,” Wagner tells me as she pours the Santa Maria al Monte. “It has really limited distribution in Kansas City right now because not a lot of it is being made.”

The Santa Maria al Monte is by far the most biting amaro we’ve tried so far — not quite as astringent as my beloved Fernet-Branca, but close. There’s a great punch of ginger on the nose as well as on the tongue; after a few sips, I feel my lips tingle.

“This is super-bold,” Iwersen agrees. “If you’re building a cocktail with these, you might have to use a little more of the Amaro Nonino and the Zucca to really let them shine.

You only need a little bit of the Maria al Monte, and it’s going to stand out.”

A cocktail, you say?

I ask Wagner and Iwersen to each select a favorite of the three we’ve tasted and work it into a new recipe. Wagner takes the Zucca, Iwersen the Santa Maria al Monte.

Iwersen, a self-proclaimed history nerd, goes first, with a riff on the fernet-driven Hanky Panky. “This recipe dates back to the 1920s, and it’s really popular in Italy right now,” he tells me. “We’re going to sub out the fernet for the Santa Maria al Monte, and instead of sweet vermouth I’m using Cocchi Americano Rosa, which is another style of fortified wine.”

In a mixer, Iwersen combines those ingredients, plus J. Rieger & Co.’s Midwestern Dry Gin and a dash of orange bitters. He stirs, then strains the result into a coupe glass. He calls it the Danza di Giacamo, and he’s as curious about it as I am. “I haven’t tried this yet,” he warns me.

The liquid’s bewitching, ruby-red glint makes it look both intimidating and glamorous, like a handsome stranger at a bar. Iwersen has managed a sophisticated balance, even as the zest and ginger of the Santa Maria al Monte coyly play through the flavors.

Wagner’s drink has twice as many ingredients and steps as Iwersen’s. She’s going for a variation of a flip — a frothy style of drink that involves an egg white — using mezcal and the Zucca. She combines these ingredients, plus lemon juice, orange juice, her own chiliinfused honey, a pinch of black sea salt and

Whet the appetite. a few drops of olive oil. (She got used to using kitchen ingredients in cocktails, she says, working under bartender Erik Mariscal at the now-closed Local Pig in Westport.)

A few shakes later, and Wagner sets up a drink that appears in two layers, the bottom a rich caramel color, and the top a creamy quarter-inch of foam. A smear of black sea salt decorates the rim of the glass. The mezcal, which tends to lead the charge in a cocktail, is strangely muted, especially given the drink’s name: Smoke of the Earth. It’s actually airy and delicate.

“Italians will drink for hours on end, before and during and after the meal, which is why you have a lot of lower-proof amari,” Wagner says. “That goes along with Italian culture. Here, we like to overindulge, but Italians don’t drink to overdrink — they drink to enjoy it.”

I glance at the remainder of my cocktail, turning my head toward the sounds and scents of the kitchen. I certainly am enjoying this.

Danza Di Giacamo (Giacamo’s Dance)

1 ounce J. Rieger & Co. Midwestern Dry Gin 1/2 ounce Santa Maria al Monte 1-1/2 ounces Cocchi Americano Rosa 1 dash orange bitters

Iwersen: Combine ingredients over ice, stir, strain into chilled coupe glass. Garnish with orange peel.

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1-1/2 ounces Del Maguey Vida Mezcal 3/4 ounce Rabarbaro Zucca Amaro 1/2 ounce lemon juice 1/2 ounce chili-infused honey 1/2 ounce orange juice small pinch black lava sea salt 4 drops extra virgin olive oil 1 egg white

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MUSIC

Playing Himself

Jazz bassist — and composer — Gerald Spaits tries out some new strings.

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it was my first time hearing the arrangements.

I was struck with the instrumentation — it’s so unique. I had never been a part of a sound like that.”

In addition to Spaits and Steever, the jazz quartet features Perkins on alto sax and bass clarinet, and Rich Wheeler on soprano sax and tenor sax. The rich billing for Sax and Violins aside, Steever is plain curious, he says, to know where Spaits will guide the group.

“He has tendencies toward the avant-garde that don’t necessarily get to shine when he’s in other groups,” he says. “But when he’s the leader, it’s always very interesting because there’s a certain freedom about it. There’s an openness. He allows whatever is going to happen to happen.”

If all goes well Wednesday, Spaits plans to remount Sax and Violins and perhaps make it a recurring event. He’s humble, quietly hopeful, as he tells me this. When I ask him if he ever doubts himself, he replies, “Yes, but only every 20 minutes or so.”

He goes on: “I think, like any artist that plays music, I question what I do a lot. Something like this is really putting a lot on the line because it’s all my compositions or arrangements — that’s all me, really. I just hope that people show up.” He pauses, then gives a modest smile. “And like it.”

E-mail natalie.gallagher@pitch.com

zach bauman

ou expect Gerald Spaits to hear things the rest of us do not. He has been a jazz musician for more than 30 years and has spent 15 years teaching at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, under Bobby Watson. But sometimes those carefully calibrated ears do him no favors. The music playing overhead at the Sprint store, where he went before we met, is “just awful,” he says.

“But people hear the same thing every day and they blank it out,” Spaits says as he adjusts the volume on his new phone. “I listen to that more than the average person would.

It’s a curse.”

So are the baseball games, he says with a laugh. We’re speaking a few hours before the third game of the World Series, the only time the Royals would lose to the Mets. Spaits, playing later at Louie’s Wine Dive, knows he’ll lose to both teams, yielding what would typically be a bigger audience for the Gerald Spaits Trio’s monthly gig in the basement lounge there. His trio, he fears, will become little more than background music against the sports chatter.

When I arrive at Louie’s later that night — 15 minutes after the first pitch, at the onset of Spaits’ four-hour set — only two tables are seated in the spacious room. The occupants of both are facing the glowing screen, their backs to the band. But Spaits plays as though he has a rapt audience, anchoring his body against his upright bass, moving his shoulders to the rhythm of the songs. Saxophonist Charles Perkins and keyboardist Roger Wilder share his smile.

These are just standards, Spaits tells me during the break. “You call tunes as you go for a gig like this, whatever you feel like. These are the basics.”

“I live for standards,” Perkins says. “Those are pure sounds.”

But standards are off the table for Spaits’ next outing: a new show, called Sax and Violins, Wednesday, November 18, at the Westport Coffee House Theater.

For years, Spaits has written original music and rearranged the music of others — including that of legends Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington — centering his compositions on eight voices: jazz quartet plus string quartet. Some of his pieces are more than a decade old — he did a Monk show about 12 years ago — but Wednesday’s music, for the most part, will be fresh. (And it will include at least one Beatles tune: “I Am the Walrus.”)

“This mash-up or whatever you want to call it — two styles, two genres — that’s always appealed to me,” Spaits says, “to try and do different disciplines, with classical and jazz or whatever it might be. I’ve written a lot for

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a string quartet and a couple different combinations — sometimes with strings and bass and drums, some with just bass — and we’ll be doing that when we play.”

A jazz quartet and a classical string quartet generally have no reason to overlap, violinist Adam Galblum says.

“Those are two different worlds,” he tells me over the phone. I hear him playing scales on his violin. “These eight people are playing combined quartet music, and it takes somebody who has the vision to compose and arrange the strings part for these tunes, as well as for the jazz quartet, which is really complicated. Not everyone can compose like that. It takes a lot of effort to write that kind of music. You have to sit down and make all these parts happen, and not everyone has that kind of initiative. Gerald is that person.”

Spaits approached Galblum in the summer for help assembling the string quartet to carry out his vision. Galblum, a Kansas City native who recently returned home after a decade spent in the Denver bluegrass-music scene, said yes right away. On Wednesday, he’ll sit alongside violinist Matthew Bennett, cellist

J a z z B e at Spaits wants to bring two worlds together.

Justin Coward and Kansas City Symphony principal violist Christine Grossman.

“I get to play with classical string players, which I don’t get to do all that often,” Galblum Sax and Violins Wednesday, November 18, at Westport Coffee House Theater

says. “And on the other side of it, there are these seasoned jazz musicians. For me, this hits a lot of sweet spots.”

Drummer Brian Steever is one of those seasoned jazz musicians — and Spaits’ former student. He plays nearly every night of the week in one group or another, including Hermon Mehari’s Tuesday residency at the Majestic. But this project, he says, is special.

“When Gerald asked me to do this gig, there was no question in my mind about it,” Steever tells me. “He called me to do a rehearsal at his house a couple months ago, and

pitch.com

KEvin Mahogany, with 12th Street Jump, at grEEn Lady LoungE

The public-radio show 12th Street Jump, a mix of outstanding jazz with comedy, moves its live recording this week from the defunct Broadway Jazz Club to the downstairs Orion Room at Green Lady Lounge.

And one of KC’s favorite jazz sons, singer Kevin Mahogany, comes back to town to join in. Mahogany, who performs in festivals worldwide and whose talents can be heard on more than a dozen CDs, enthralls with his deep and resonant voice, wrapping standards with an R&B sensibility.

And he can shout the blues Kansas City– style with the best. He’s joined by Jump regulars Joe Cartwright on piano, Tyrone Clark on bass, Michael Warren on drums, and hosts David Basse and Eboni Fondren.

— Larry Kopitnik Kevin Mahogany, with 12th Street Jump, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 18, at Green Lady Lounge (1809 Grand, 816-215-2954), $20 admission.

NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

the pitch

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24

Music

TEEn (GuiTar) Wolf

Never mind his age: Guitar prodigy Julian Davis is an old soul.

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’m always a little nervous when talking to teenagers. It wasn’t that long ago that I was one of them, and it was a rather terrible time. But Julian Davis (who placed second in this year’s Kansas State Fiddling and Picking Championships for flat-pick and finger-style guitar) is far from your typical 16-year-old.

Davis has been playing guitar for a decade.

His dexterity on the instrument is breathtaking — and not just for a kid. Davis commands the guitar with the confidence and heart of an artist. And he can sing. Davis can send his supple tenor soaring over complex chords or grinding against them.

Friday, November 13, he plays a recordrelease show at the Westport Saloon for Who Walks In When I Walk Out (Little Class Records). I called him at his Pittsburg, Kansas, home to chat about his dedication to the guitar.

The Pitch: How did you get your start playing guitar and writing music?

Davis: I’ve been playing guitar since I was about 6 years old. I started at my mom’s photography studio — she had a prop guitar, and I would bang on that. Later that year, I got a real one, and that’s where that started. It’s just progressed over the years. I started writing about two years ago, in 2013. Doing covers was getting boring, so I started writing original material.

I wrote my first song in July 2013. It was called “Special Delivery.” It’s easy to remember because that song was about one of the famous St. Louis musicians Pokey LaFarge — he sent me a vinyl record in the mail of his new album, and it was a special delivery. It came on July 5. The songwriting factor came in then, and it’s continued since.

Are your parents musical?

No one in my family is musical. No one has ever touched an instrument in my family — no one is in a band or choir, nothing like that.

But my mom has always had good taste in music. She would play lots of stuff as I was growing up.

I was definitely influenced by the White Stripes and punk and hardcore, heavier stuff.

I used to play punk stuff religiously, and I just got tired of it. I wore myself out on it. I wanted to move to something a little more challenging and intricate, so I went from punk to country, which is really not that different, technically speaking. Then, in late 2012, I heard Pokey LaFarge for the first time, and that got me inspired to play the music from the ’30s and ’40s, stuff that has balance and heart to it.

I used to mimic Pokey LaFarge completely, trying to make big-band sounds with just my guitar, but you’ve got to make it your own. And mimicking, it got boring.

I heard Tony Rice around that time, around mid- or late 2014. That got me interested in 24

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

bluegrass. I was writing my own songs, and I would put these bluegrass runs and Tony Rice licks into a big-band-sound format. That’s kind of where I am now.

What is it about the instrument that keeps you interested, that makes you want to work at it?

I hear all this music that I enjoy and I know I can do it, and that’s the biggest part that fascinates me. What can I do that will impress myself? Things I think I could never do. I can run all the way from the F-note to the G-string, and it’s perfect, neat, matched. Technically, that’s not very impressive, but the fact that I can make all this music with those notes — I’m able to make so many different styles of music and sounds.

The challenge never stops. it keeps going.

I don’t think I’ll drop the style of music I’m doing for a while because people like it, and there’s a lot of rebirthing going on in the genre — Americana, whatever you want to call it.

There’s a desire for it among a lot of people.

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So I’ll keep doing that but I’ll incorporate new styles.

I’d like to start ’30s and ’40s swing music, with those advanced jazz chords. Right now, my thing has been with working classical music. [Beethoven’s] Sonata No. 1 — I’ll take bits and pieces I’ve learned from that and put it into my own music, on the guitar. That’s really hard. It was all written for a violin and piano, and trying to force it onto the guitar is a major challenge.

Julian Davis Friday, November 13, at Westport Saloon

Does performance come naturally to you?

I started performing back in 2012. I was playing a local open-mic night — where I was doing my punk music — and there was a house drummer, and he learned all these

Davis: beyond his years White Stripes songs. We’d play five or six songs once a week. And then that place got shut down, and I had nowhere to perform for a solid year. I stayed in my room and I learned all this new stuff. Occasionally, here and there, people would offer me a gig to play around town, and it wouldn’t pay, and no one would listen, but I’d do it anyway.

Luckily, now, I’ve been able to find a bass player from St. Jo, Seth Campbell. He’s got the same outlook on performing as I do. I love it.

I’ve never had stage fright. I can’t control my enthusiasm before I go on. I can’t wait to get onstage and give it all of my energy. I see a lot of performers today who have no energy or no smile or pizazz or bounce — they’re just there to play and get their cash and leave — and that’s not me. I get onstage and give it more than 100 percent.

E-mail natalie.gallagher@pitch.com

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Music

Music Forecast

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Big Freedia

Ass, ass everywhere, Big Freedia promises on “Azz Everywhere.” Saturday at the Riot Room, you can bet she’ll deliver. The irrefutable “Queen of Bounce” (as her Fuse TV show calls her) remains a powerful figure in the realm of dance — where she calls for everyone to twerk equally — and the LGBTQ community. Born Frederick Ross, Freedia has become an icon for transgenders nationwide. No matter how you slice it, she’s an inspiration.

Saturday, November 14, the Riot Room (4048 Broadway, 816-442-8179)

Murs

Glen Hansard

Glen Hansard has a doctorate in breaking hearts. How else to explain his Leonard Cohen–worthy ability to make you weep just a few verses into Didn’t He Ramble. On the solo album, the former lead singer for the Frames and the Swell Season proves that, 25 years into his career, he still has plenty to offer. Take his gentle, almost undetectable Irish lilt or the occasional rasp that appears as his lyrics become deeply personal. Hansard remains generous and optimistic in his views, and that alone will give you all the feels. Ugh, pass me the tissues.

Tuesday, November 17, Uptown Theater (3700 Broadway, 816-753-8665)

Young the Giant

It’s a tough world out there for indie rockers.

For starters, no one knows what “indie rock” means anymore, and yet it’s the only label that seems to fit bands like California’s Young the Giant. Last year’s full-length, Mind Over Matter,

Hansard is trying to break your heart. is a competent marriage of Muse-inspired guitar bursts, propulsive drumming and Sameer Gadhia’s pliable tenor. Is it memorable? Eh. Is it likable? Very.

Thursday, November 12, Liberty Hall (644 Massachusetts, Lawrence, 785-749-1972)

Eliza Gilkyson

Eliza Gilkyson has built a formidable catalog in 46 years. The daughter of 1950s singersongwriter Terry Gilkyson is a folk artist in the tradition of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

On last year’s The Nocturne Diaries, Gilkyson addresses social issues and explores her own conflicted views. Friday night, enjoy a splendid storytelling session.

Friday, November 13, Unity Temple on the Plaza (707 W. 47th St., 816-561-4466)

f o r e c a s t

Have a Nice Life, Murs’ second album released under Tech N9ne’s Strange Music label, finds the Los Angeles rapper largely at peace — he’s successful, he has a family — and preaching self-reflection. It’s far from a mellow album — Murs expects his listeners to think about his messages. A particularly telling line in the timely “No More Control” addresses recent police violence: We got to start to take a look in the mirror … if we don’t respect ourselves, then they always gon’ fear us. We have a lot more to learn, Murs seems to tell us.

Monday, November 16, the Granada (1020 Massachusetts, Lawrence, 785-842-1390)

Ben Folds

I stopped caring what you think about me, Ben Folds insists on “Capable of Anything,” the opening track off So There. It’s not clear to whom he’s speaking — an old lover, a former friend, a high school bully? — but let’s assume it’s the collective haters. Folds has always been a charming weirdo, putting out the kind of music that either resonates deeply with its listeners or turns them off totally, but the good news is that, at this point, Folds doesn’t really need to worry about pleasing anyone but himself. And So There, with its resplendent harmonies and orchestral refrains, is about as Ben Folds as it gets.

Wednesday, November 18, Uptown Theater (3700 Broadway, 816-753-8665)

K e Y

Pick of the Week

In the Name of Rock and Roll

Socially Conscious

From Across the Pond

Buzz Band

Queen of Bounce

Sensitive Soul

Folk Yeah

Hippity Hop

Dance Pants

Sing It, Sister

Worth the Weeknight

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PB

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m o n t h x x–x x , 2 0 0 x

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KC

BUY LOCAL

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SCREENLAND AT THE SYMPHONY: STAR TREK 2009

THEATER SHOWS & EVENTS Dates and times vary.

Blueprints to Freedom | Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Copaken Stage, 13th St. and Walnut, kcrep.org A Charlie Brown Christmas | Starting Tues-

day, the Coterie Theatre, Crown Center, 2450 Grand, thecoterie.org

Good People | Olathe Civic Theatre, 500 E. Loula, Olathe, olathetheatre.org

Missing You, Metropolis | Starting Wednes-

day, InPlay Inc., at Just Off Broadway Theatre, 3051 Central

R TU SA

.1 1 1

The Producers | The Barn Players, 6219 Mar-

Urinetown: The Musical | Musical Theater Heritage at Crown Center, 2450 Grand, musicaltheaterheritage.com

Restaurant, 9229 Foster, Overland Park, newtheatre.com

A Centenary of Australian War Art | National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial, 100 W. 26th St., theworldwar.org

Thursday | 11.12 |

T.J. Erhardt | 7 p.m. The Phoenix, 302 W. Eighth St.

NIGHTLIFE

Brookside’s Holiday-Season Opener, with open houses, live outdoor music, pop-up events, giveaways and complimentary treats from Brookside merchants | 5-9 p.m. 63rd St. and Brookside Blvd., brooksidekc.org

Grand Marquis | 7 p.m. Jazz, 1823 W. 39th St.

DJ G Train | 10 p.m. Replay Lounge, 946 Massachu-

1809 Grand

Geeks Who Drink | 8 p.m. Tapcade, 1701 McGee

Shrine Circus | 7:30 p.m. Silverstein Eye Centers Arena, 19100 E. Valley View Pkwy., Independence

John Paul’s Flying Circus with Tom “Trashmouth” Baker | 7:30 p.m. B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ, 1205

Foundry, 424 Westport Rd.

Chris Hazelton Trio | 9 p.m. Green Lady Lounge,

E. 85th St.

L I T E R A R Y/ S P O K E N W O R D

Dumb and Dumber, a free screening sponsored by

Candice Milliard discusses her book Destiny of the Republic | 9:30 a.m. Yardley Hall at JCCC, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park

Breckenridge Brewery and Never Summer Industries | 10 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, 1400 Main

COMEDY

ment of Film and Media Studies | 7 p.m. Tivoli Cinemas, 4050 Pennsylvania, tivolikc.com

The Forbidden Room, presented by the UMKC Depart-

Good Time Season 3: A Comedy Event for the People | 7 p.m. Replay Lounge, 946 Massachusetts,

The Membranes, the Uncouth, the Bad Ideas | 9:30 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

PERFORMING ARTS

Organ Night with Greg Meise Trio | 8 p.m. The

KC Lyric Opera: Rusalka | 7:30 p.m. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway, kcopera.org

Ship, 1217 Union

L I T E R A R Y/ S P O K E N W O R D

Rossonian, the Invisible World, the Pale Blue Dots, Something Sideways | 7 p.m. The Riot Room,

Bar, 7210 N.E. 43rd St.

Arena, 1800 Genessee, americanroyal.com

4048 Broadway

Steven Michael Quezada | 8 p.m. Stanford’s Comedy

Ice skating | 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace,

chusetts, Lawrence

2425 Grand

Brad Williams | 7:30 p.m. Improv Comedy Club and Dinner Theater, 7260 N.W. 87th St.

Max Berry | 7 p.m. The Blue Room, 1600 E. 18th St. The Bottle Rockets | 8:30 p.m. Knuckleheads Saloon,

Free State Story Slam | 7 p.m. Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire, Lawrence

Aaron Watson | 7 p.m. The Granada, 1020 Massa-

Don Williams | 8 p.m. Star Pavilion at Ameristar

MUSIC

10 p.m. MiniBar, 3810 Broadway

Friday | 11.13 |

946 Massachusetts, Lawrence

American Royal UPHA National Championship Saddlebred Horse Show | 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Kemper

Club, 7328 W. 119th St., Overland Park

Mondo Disco with Ray Velasquez | 10 p.m. The

Mr. & the Mrs., the Hillary Watts Riot, Wiener Records tape-release party | 10 p.m. Replay Lounge,

SPORTS & REC

Lawrence

setts, Lawrence

The Monthly Layover with Brenton & Daniel |

FILM

Open-mic comedy night | 7 p.m. The All-Star Rock

n

Screenland at the Symphony: Star Trek 2009 | 7 p.m. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway, kcsymphony.org; also Thursday

COMMUNITY EVENTS

MUSEUM EXHIBITS & EVENTS

4

de ai m . e ge th ke oya v Ta

tway, Mission

You Can’t Take It With You | New Theatre

Y DA

Casino, 3200 N. Ameristar Dr.

Young the Giant, Wilding | 7 p.m. Liberty Hall, 644

Massachusetts, Lawrence

2715 Rochester

COMEDY

Dirty Birdie Story Hour | 10 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar,

3611 Broadway

Chris Hardwick | 8 p.m. The Midland, 1228 Main Steven Michael Quezada | 7:45 & 9:45 p.m. Stanford’s Comedy Club, 7328 W. 119th St., Overland Park continued on page 28

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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28

Art Exhibits & EvEnts

A ChArlie Brown ChristmAs

Adult Coloring session | 6 p.m. Thursday, Kansas City, Kansas, Main Library, 625 Minnesota Ave., KCK, kckpl.org American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood | Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525

Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains | Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., kemperart.org

The Center Is a Moving Target: If You Lived (T)Here | Fridays and Saturdays, Kemper at the Crossroads, 33 W. 19th St.

Dark Days, Bright Nights: Contemporary Paintings from Finland | Kemper Museum of

Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd.

Freak Power: Hunter S. Thompson | Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire, Lawrence, lawrenceartscenter.org

Gallery Conversations Drop-in tour | 1 p.m.

Saturday, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick

J . R o b e R t S c h R a e d e R a n d c o u R t e S y o f t h e c o t e R i e t h e at R e

Oak, nelson-atkins.org

tue

11.1 ay 7

Go

od

gri

sd

ef

A Charlie Brown Christmas | The Coterie Theatre, Crown Center, 2450 Grand, thecoterie.org; above: Lexi Morris as Lucy and Steven Eubank as Charlie Brown

Philip Haas: The Four Seasons | Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak

Intimate Riot : Peregrine Honig’s viewer-

friendly interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., kclibrary.org

Waterplaces: 100 Works on Paper by Lynn Benson | Kansas City Design Center, 1018 Baltimore

“What is a portrait?” Artist Talk with Mari Rantanen | 6 p.m. Friday, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd.

Robert Zakanitch: Ephemeral Beauty | Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, nermanmuseum.org

Andrzej Zielinski: Open Sourced | Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park continued from page 27 Brad Williams | 7:30 & 9:45 p.m. Improv Comedy Club and Dinner Theater, 7260 N.W. 87th St.

sports & reC

Michael Ian Black, Carson Kressley, Fortune Feimster and Dana Goldberg | 7 p.m., $30-$168, Folly Theater, 300 W. 12th St., follytheater.org Community events

shrine Circus | 7:30 p.m. Silverstein Eye Centers Arena, 19100 E. Valley View Pkwy., Independence 28

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

niGHtLife

Gavin James | 7:30 p.m. The Tank Room, 1813 Grand

America recycles electronics recycling and paper shredding | 9 a.m. Sprint Center, 1407 Grand

Broadway

American royal upHA national Championship saddlebred Horse show | 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Kemper Arena, 1800 Genessee, americanroyal.com

ice skating | 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace,

2425 Grand

King King | 9 p.m. B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ, 1205 E. 85th St. marasmus, torn the fuck Apart, sedlec ossuary | 9:30 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

Kansas vs. northern Colorado men’s basketball | 7 p.m. Allen Fieldhouse, 1651 Naismith Dr., Lawrence

sara morgan | 7 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

musiC

north, A Light Within, soiled Dove | 9 p.m. Mini-

Bar, 3810 Broadway

Deanna Bogart, Albert Castiglia & Kris schnebelen, Kate moss, Crystal shawanda, Amt Blues Band, Lauren Anderson | 6 p.m. Knuckle-

heads Saloon, 2715 Rochester

Capsize | Jackpot Music Hall, 943 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Clear the Day, famous mammoth, violent Bear | 9 p.m. Californos, 4124 Pennsylvania Billy ebeling and the Late for Dinner Band |

Jazz, 1823 W. 39th St.

Community Benefits

Like me Lighthouse Annual fundraiser, featuring

Goodbye Gravity | 7 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611

reckless Kelly, micky & the motorcars | 8:30 p.m.

Knuckleheads Saloon, 2715 Rochester

Dominique sanders, tim Whitmer | 5:30 p.m.

Green Lady Lounge, 1809 Grand

soul rebel and the Beast | 8 p.m. The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire, Lawrence

Cirque du risque, featuring Cora Mia, Augie G., Luna Flare, Zephyre Phoenix and Ülla La | 10 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway DJ e | Quaff Bar & Grill, 1010 Broadway DJ Grand marino | 10 p.m. MiniBar, 3810 Broadway flirt friday | 9 p.m. VooDoo, Harrah’s Casino, 1 Riverboat Dr., North Kansas City Girl 2 Girl social | 6 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway

soul preservers featuring elliott oliver | 9 p.m.

The Ship, 1217 Union

Saturday | 11.14 |

stone Cutters union, Lonnie mcfadden | 4:30 p.m.

performinG Arts

that Dragon’s, Astronaut merit Badge | The

Classic Albums Live: The Dark Side of the Moon | 8 p.m. Yardley Hall at JCCC, 12345 College Blvd.,

The Phoenix, 302 W. Eighth St.

rae fitzgerald | 6 p.m. Replay Lounge, 946 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Brick, 1727 McGee

Overland Park

Gekko | 8 p.m. The Granada, 1020 Massachusetts,

Westport Rd.

twice on sunday | 10 p.m. Kelly’s Westport Inn, 500

Kalichstein-Laredo-robinson trio, presented by

Lawrence

Getter, fox stevenson | 8 p.m. The Riot Room, 4048 Broadway

valentine and the ticklers | 7 p.m. Jazz, 1859 Village West Pkwy., KCK

Charles Williams & Genre, BmW | 5:30 p.m. The Blue Room, 1600 E. 18th St.

pitch.com

the Friends of Chamber Music | 8 p.m. Folly Theater, 300 W. 12th St., follytheater.org

screenland at the symphony: Star Trek 2009 | 7 p.m. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway, kcsymphony.org

29 Comedy

chris hardwick

farmers markets Brookside Farmers market | 9 a.m.-noon

KC Comedians FUNRaiser Show, benefiting mission Project 2 , featuring David Kious and

Saturday, 63rd St. and Wornall

Elliott Threatt | 7:30-9 p.m., $25, the Buffalo Room at the Westport Flea Market, 817 Westport Rd., missionproject2.org

City market | 6 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, 8 a.m.3 p.m. Sunday, 20 E. Fifth St.

Steven michael Quezada | 7:45 & 9:45 p.m. Stanford’s Comedy Club, 7328 W. 119th St., Overland Park

Friday Night market | 4-8 p.m. The BadSeed,

Rod Reyes, Russ emery, Ross Glazner, Jim meyers, Tristan Joseph Newell | 10 p.m. Uptown

lawrence | 8-noonSaturday, 824 New Hamp-

1909 McGee

shire, Lawrence

Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway

lee’s Summit | 7 a.m. Saturday and Wednesday, corner of Second and Douglas, Lee’s Summit

Brad Williams | 7 & 9:45 p.m. Improv Comedy Club

and Dinner Theater, 7260 N.W. 87th St.

CommUNiTy eveNTS

Shrine Circus | 10 a.m., 2:30 & 7:30 p.m. Silverstein Eye Centers Arena, 19100 E. Valley View Pkwy., Independence

fr i d

107th Street | 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Saturday,

ay

3 11.1

Grand Court Retirement Center, 501 W. 107th St.

overland Park | 7 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday,

h wit ead . k kd l c i a T rdw Ha

7:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Wednesday, between 79th and 80th streets, west of Metcalf

Film

Autism in Love , part of the Indie Lens Pop-Up

community-cinema initiative | 11 a.m. Kansas City Plaza Library, 4801 Main, kclibrary.org

Flash Gordon | 1:30 p.m. Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St., kclibrary.org

Socks and Hops, a night of craft beer and bites to benefit Swope Health Services | 7-10 p.m., $45-$75, City Market, 20 E. Fifth St.

Chris Hardwick | 8 p.m. The Midland, 1228 Main

The Godfather double feature | 4 p.m. Alamo

F00d & dRiNK

SPoRTS & ReC

The Grapes of Wrath | 2 p.m. Nelson-Atkins Museum

irish Whiskey tasting | 3 p.m., $20, Celtic Ranch, 404 Main, Weston, celticranch.com

American Royal UPHA National Championship Saddlebred Horse Show | 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Kemper Arena, 1800 Genessee continued on page 30

Drafthouse, 1400 Main

of Art, 4525 Oak, nelson-atkins.org

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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29

30

ghost world

DJ Candlepants | The Eighth Street Taproom, 801 New Hampshire, Lawrence

Monday | 11.16 | COMEDY

DJ E | Quaff Bar & Grill, 1010 Broadway Meta Hi-Fi | 10 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway

Uptown Comedy open mic with Norm Dexter |

9-11:30 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway

Poetry slam: sTL vs. KC | 7 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar,

3611 Broadway

Sunday | 11.15 |

sPORTs & REC

Ice skating | 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace, 2425 Grand

PERFORMING ARTs

su n day

11.15

Ghostin g with Illeana

Pianists Kuok-Wai Lio and Zoltán Fejérvári |

2 p.m. Lied Center of Kansas, 1600 Stewart Dr., Lawrence, lied.ku.edu

KC Lyric Opera: Rusalka | 2 p.m. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway, kcopera.org L I T E R A R Y/ s P O K E N W O R D

Ghost World with Illeana Douglas (above, right) | 7 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, 1400 Main, followed by a Q&A with Douglas, who will also sign copies of her new memoir.

continued from page 29 Buck O’Neil 3k Walk & 5k Run | 9 a.m., $15/$22, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, 1616 E. 18th St.

Guns’N Hoses Charity Boxing, benefiting local first

responders’ families | 7 p.m., $25, Kansas City Convention Center, 301 W. 13th St., kansascitygunsnhoses.com

Ice skating | 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace,

2425 Grand

Arrowhead Stadium, 1 Arrowhead Dr.

Turkey Bowling on Ice | 2-4 p.m. Line Creek Community Center, 5940 N.W. Waukomis Dr., kcparks.org MUsIC

The Acacia strain | 7 p.m. Aftershock, 5240 Merriam

Robert DeLong, RAC, Big Data, Coleman Hell |

6 p.m. The Midland, 1228 Main

Molly Hammer Quartet | 6 p.m. Green Lady Lounge, 1809 Grand

Taproom Poetry series: Gracie Leavitt and David James Miller | The Eighth Street Taproom, 801 New Hampshire, Lawrence

1020 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Eilen Jewell | 9 p.m. Knuckleheads Saloon, 2715

JWB | 8:30 p.m. The Blue Room, 1600 E. 18th St. Movits | 8 p.m. The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire,

19100 E. Valley View Pkwy., Independence

Organ Jazz Trio | 9:30 p.m. Green Lady Lounge,

1809 Grand

Red Velvet Crush | Red Door Grill, 11851 Roe, Leawood shannon & the Rhythm Kings | 9 p.m. B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ, 1205 E. 85th St.

Big Freedia, Boyfriend, sheppa | 7 p.m. The Riot

Room, 4048 Broadway,

steddy P, JL B Hood, Barrel Maker, scotty Wu | 9:30 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

Boogie Wonderland Disco Revue | 8:30 p.m.

Twice on sunday | Local Tap, 7300 W. 119th St.,

Knuckleheads Saloon, 2715 Rochester

Overland Park

Brad Buckner presents the music of Grant Green | The Ship, 1217 Union

2 Proud 2 Beg | 10 p.m. Kelly’s Westport Inn, 500

Dangerous Toys, Looks That Kill, Federation of Horsepower | 8 p.m. VooDoo, Harrah’s Casino, 1

NIGHTLIFE

NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

Ice skating | 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace, 2425 Grand

Devin the Dude & Potluck, Royce smith, Tiny from FsP, stylez & Busty, BluntRap | 7 p.m. The

Riot Room, 4048 Broadway

MG3 | 9 p.m. Green Lady Lounge, 1809 Grand Murs, Red Pill, King Fantastic, seuss | 7 p.m. The Granada, 1020 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Rural Grit Happy Hour | 6-9 p.m. The Brick, 1727

McGee

Westport Rd.

Blessthefall, stick to Your Guns, Emarosa, Oceans Ate Alaska, Cane Hill | 6 p.m. The Granada,

1020 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Andrea Gibson, shira | The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire, Lawrence

Intronaut | Jackpot Music Hall, 943 Massachusetts,

Lawrence

Daturday Night Live starring Approach | 10 p.m.

Karaoke sammitch | 10 p.m. Replay Lounge, 946 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Lawrence

sonic spectrum Music Trivia | 7 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

Tuesday | 11.17 | L I T E R A R Y/ s P O K E N W O R D

Writers Place Poetry series | 7 p.m. Johnson County Central Resource Library, 9875 W. 87th St., Overland Park

Peacers, Elisa Ambrogio, Expo 70, Nitemirror | 8 p.m. The Riot Room, 4048 Broadway

COMEDY

627 Big Band | 8:30-11:30 p.m. Green Lady Lounge,

Make Me Laugh | 8-10 p.m. The All-Star Rock Bar,

NIGHTLIFE

Open-mic comedy with Rashaad Wright | 8 p.m.

1809 Grand

Communion Club Night | 8 p.m. The Tank Room,

1813 Grand

Replay Lounge, 946 Massachusetts, Lawrence

pitch.com

Geeks Who Drink Pub Quiz | 8 p.m. Green Room

Burgers & Beer, 4010 Pennsylvania

Open Mic | 8 p.m. The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire, MUsIC

Approach & the Boogaloo Odyssey, Def Harmonics | 10 p.m. Replay Lounge, 946 Massachusetts,

Riverboat Dr., North Kansas City

Kyle Ayers | 9:30 p.m. RecordBar, 1020 Westport Rd.

NIGHTLIFE

shrine Circus | 1 & 3 p.m. Silverstein Eye Centers Arena,

Lawrence

Pkwy., KCK

Bad Math | 8 p.m. The Tank Room, 1813 Grand

America’s Got Talent Live: The All-stars Tour | 7:30 p.m. The Midland, 1228 Main

sPORTs & REC

Lonnie Ray Blues Band | Jazz, 1859 Village West

Lawrence

A La Mode | 8 p.m. The Tank Room, 1813 Grand

COMMUNITY EVENTs

Mason Jennings, s. Carey | 7 p.m. The Granada,

Dr., Merriam

the pitch

about her new memoir, My Life on the Road | Sold out, 2 p.m. Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th St., rainydaybooks.com

Rochester

Missouri Tigers vs. BYU Cougars football |

30

Gloria steinem, in conversation with Vivien Jennings

MUsIC

7210 N.E. 43rd St.

The Tank Room, 1813 Grand

Open-mic night | 8 p.m. Stanford’s Comedy Club, 7328 W. 119th St., Overland Park

31 Film

Old School quote-along | 8 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse,

1400 Main

lyric lab: music open mic | 9-11:30 p.m. Uptown

Arts Bar, 3611 Broadway

patchy Sanders, Betse & clarke | 9:45 p.m. Record-

Bar, 1020 Westport Rd. SportS & rec

NiGHtliFe

ice skating | 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace,

2425 Grand

cinema cabaliste | 7 p.m. Uptown Arts Bar, 3611

Patient, a Surgeon’s Journey | 7 p.m. Tivoli Cin-

emas, 4050 Pennsylvania, tivolikc.com

The Shining , a free screening presented by Brecken-

ridge Brewery and Never Summer Industries | 10:30 p.m.

Alamo Drafthouse, 1400 Main

Broadway

missouri mavericks vs. Allen Americans |

Brian ruskin Band | 7 p.m. The Phoenix, 302 W.

Film

Eighth St.

Jimmy Smith of the Gourds | 8 p.m. Knuckleheads Saloon, 2715 Rochester

Venom, inc., Necrophagia, inner Altar | 7 p.m. The

Granada, 1020 Massachusetts, Lawrence

SportS & rec

NiGHtliFe

elegant Knock with DJ Approach | 10 p.m. Replay

7:05 p.m. Silverstein Eye Centers Arena, 19100 E. Valley View Pkwy., Independence

Geeks Who Drink pub Quiz | 8 p.m. The Cashew,

Ice skating | 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Crown Center Ice Terrace, 2425 Grand

muSic

Geeks Who Drink pub Quiz | 8 p.m. Hi Dive Lounge,

muSic

Jazz poetry Jam | 7 p.m. The Blue Room, 1600 E.

Big Something | 8 p.m. The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire, Lawrence

the roast of Dutch Newman | 9:45 p.m. RecordBar,

mike Scott, Bill pile | MO Brew, 1403 W. 39th St.

the Bright light Social Hour, Swimm, rachel mallin & the Wild type | 7 p.m. The Riot Room,

Sensei party with Dom chronicles & Scotty Wu | 10 p.m. MiniBar, 3810 Broadway

rick Bacus trio | Jazz, 1823 W. 39th St. Brothertiger, Body-san, Blk mario | 7 p.m. The

Riot Room, 4048 Broadway

the Bunny the Bear | 6 p.m. Aftershock, 5240 Mer-

riam Dr., Merriam

2000 Grand

1411 W. 39th St.

18th St.

Wednesday | 11.18 |

Grease House Boogie Band | 7 p.m. B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ, 1205 E. 85th St.

Glen Hansard, Aoife o’Donovan | 7:30 p.m. Uptown Theater, 3700 Broadway

John Kizilarmut trio | 9 p.m. Green Lady Lounge,

1809 Grand

Lounge, 946 Massachusetts, Lawrence

Nerd Nite | 7 p.m. MiniBar, 3810 Broadway

4048 Broadway

Ben Folds | 8 p.m. Uptown Theater, 3700 Broadway

1020 Westport Rd.

Spinstyles | 8 p.m. The Tank Room, 1813 Grand

comeDy

red Front Funnies open-mic contest | 8 p.m. Red Front Bar and Grill, 310 Admiral Blvd.

trutV Impractical Jokers “Where’s larry?” tour, starring the tenderloins | 7 p.m. The Mid-

land, 1228 Main

Follow us

@TheFastPitch Your Filter for Kansas City News

Hip-Hop essence | The Brick, 1727 McGee Brendan macNaughton | Jazz, 1859 Village West

Pkwy., KCK

organ Jazz trio | 9 p.m. Green Lady Lounge, 1809

Grand

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2800 East 12th St. • Kansas City, MO 64127 816.231.9696 • KcShadyLady.com pitch.com

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32

S ava g e L o v e

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN

By

D a n S ava ge

CHATLINE TM

816.533.0048

Try for FREE

Ahora en Español

For More Local Numbers: 1.800.926.6000 www.livelinks.com Teligence/18+

Dear Dan: I’m a hetero guy in need of advice.

Back in college, I met this girl. Suffice it to say she was into me, but I had some shit to work through. So we ended up being a missed connection, romantically. Despite that, we still became fast friends. I’m less awkward now, in large part because our friendship changed my life.

We each married other people, and everything worked out great. Except I still love her. I think about her often, want to share things about my life with her, find myself wanting to rely on her when things are tough. I don’t know what to do with it. On the one hand, she means an awful lot to me — she is the kind of friend who comes along once in a lifetime — and I know that I mean a lot to her. So this is a relationship worth protecting, even as asymmetrical as it is. On the other hand, these feelings are starting to seem kind of pathetic. We’re barely part of each other’s lives anymore. Do I even have a right to feel the way I do? I see three options, each of which is shit. (1) Keep my feelings to myself and endure/enjoy a painful but deeply meaningful friendship. (2) Disappear, either abruptly or gradually, with no explanation. Or (3) damn the torpedoes and bare my soul, which might painfully explode the relationship. After years of option 1, I’m strongly leaning toward option 3 — just blowing shit wide open and dealing with whatever happens.

No Good at Acronyms Dear NGAA: You’re going to need a gay dude to

act on the advice I’m about to give you — and not just any gay dude but the kind of gay dude who obsesses about Broadway musicals. And not just any gay dude who obsesses about Broadway musicals but the kind of Broadwaymusical-obsessed gay dude who has good taste. (Look through his record collection: If Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is in there and Mame isn’t, he does not have good taste.)

OK, here’s my advice: Listen to the original Broadway cast recordings of Company, Follies and A Little Night Music — music and lyrics, in all three cases, by Stephen Sondheim, peace be upon him (PBUH). Yes, you can get all three recordings on iTunes, but you need to listen to them on vinyl, and you need to discuss these shows, and three songs in particular, with someone who already knows them by heart.

Hence the need for a gay dude with good taste in Broadway musicals and an extensive collection of original Broadway cast recordings — on vinyl. As any Broadway-musical-obsessed gay man will tell you: Epiphanies, insights and breakthroughs come most reliably in moments of silence, i.e., when you have to flip the record over.

Here are the songs you need to pay close attention to: “Sorry-Grateful” from Company, 32

the pitch

NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

him to show me how, what he likes, and he said just do the same as I’ve always done. The sliding, gliding, twisting motions that I usually use, all with a reasonable amount of squeezing, just do not work without lube. My hand stuck to the dampish skin and would not slide. He says I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but I’m upset.

One of the best tools in my sexual toolbox has just been rendered unusable.

Sincerely Laments Obstructed Wanking Dear SLOW: You need to listen to the origi-

“The Road You Didn’t Take” from Follies and “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. (You might be a little too fragile for “Too Many Mornings” and “Losing My Mind,” both from Follies.) Listen over and over again, until you know the lyrics of all three songs by heart. Discuss what these songs mean with your new gay friend. Then you’ll know what to do.

Dear Dan: A friend of mine talks about his sex

life almost constantly. Not quite like bragging, more matter-of-fact. For instance, out of the blue he will come out with this: “I was sitting in a bar, and this broad looks at me and asks if I want to fuck. She had the tightest pussy I’ve ever had.” It just seems like conversation for him.

I’m baffled by this. What’s going on with him?

Not So Talky Dear NST: I want to say something like this:

“The amount of pussy and/or cock a man is actually getting exists in inverse proportion to the amount of pussy and/or cock a man brags about getting.” But it ain’t necessarily so (“It Ain’t Necessarily So,” Porgy and Bess, music by George Gershwin [PBUH], lyrics by Ira Gershwin [PBUH]). I’ve known plenty of guys who bragged constantly about getting tons of ass, and they weren’t all liars. Almost every one of them, however, was deeply insecure.

They bragged about the ass they were getting because they feared that people saw them as guys who couldn’t get ass in a donkey storm.

Dear Dan: I was stroking my partner and went

for the lube, when he informed me that he prefers to have his handjobs sans lube. He says lube is messy. For the past three years, he has raved about my handjobs and said my skills are professional level, and never once did he complain about the lube. I attempted to follow through, but all my old techniques didn’t work. I asked

nal Broadway cast recording of Wicked, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (PBUH). When Idina Menzel sings “Defying Gravity,” pretend that she’s singing “defying aridity.” Apparently, that’s your boyfriend’s superpower, or his cock’s superpower: Aridity — “being without moisture, extremely dry, parched” — is no impediment to pleasure. And it’s not an uncommon superpower. Lots of guys prefer lubeless handjobs. So have your boyfriend jack himself off while you listen to Wicked, see what works for him, and then try not to make a big deal — try not to make any sort of deal — out of his handjob preferences going forward.

Dear Dan: I usually like your advice, but I was

dismayed when both you and Peter Staley got it wrong in your response to STATUS, the woman who was preparing to divorce her HIV-positive husband after the revelation of another affair.

You both seemed to think she was trying to get her husband sent to prison. I think she was trying to avoid that outcome! She wants her husband to tell the truth in therapy, but she’s concerned that doing so will land him in prison.

Here’s something else you both missed: When someone tells a therapist what they have already done, the reporting requirements are far less stringent than when a patient tells what they plan on doing. If a therapist believes a patient is likely to harm themselves or others in the future, the therapist may have to act.

Patient confidentiality carries a lot of weight when it comes to past actions.

Really Regular Reader Dear RRR: You weren’t the only reader who came to STATUS’ defense. It’s possible that Peter and I got it wrong — our familiarity with cases in which vengeful exes abused reporting laws to go after HIV-positive people may have colored our response. On the off chance I got it wrong, I’m going to need to be punished. It should be something that really hurts. Oh, I know: I’ll listen to the original Broadway cast recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Twice.

Have a question for Dan Savage?

E-mail him at mail@savagelove.net

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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NOVEMBER 12-18, 2015

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