January 2021 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM
How The Westside Was Won
The Wooton Crown Affair
Same Old Song And Trans
Love Crafting Country
BY LIZ COOK
BY ANNE KNIGGENDORF
BY ALLISON HARRIS
BY BETH LIPOFF
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CONTENTS
THE PITCH
Publisher Stephanie Carey Editor-in-Chief Brock Wilbur Strategy Director Kelcie McKenney Music Editor Nick Spacek Film Editor Abby Olcese Contributing Writers Emily Cox, Liz Cook, Rachel Potucek, Anne Kniggendorf, Barbara Shelly, April Fleming, Deborah Hirsch, Brooke Tippin, Beth Lipoff, Riley Cowing, Dan Lybarger, Vivian Kane, Orrin Grey, Adrian Torres, Reb Valentine, Aaron Rhodes Little Village Creative Services Jordan Sellergren Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Joe Carey, Chase Castor, Caleb Condit, Travis Young, Jim Nimmo Contributing Designers and Illustrators Katelyn Betz, Austin Crockett, Jake Edmisten, Lacey Hawkins, Angèle Lafond, Alex Peak, Frank Myles, Jon Tinoco Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Account Manager John Phelps Director of Operations Andrew Miller Editorial Interns Allison Harris, Joseph Hernandez, Lucia Verzola Multimedia Intern Andrew Dodderidge Design Intern Erin Hoyt, Connor O’Neill Marketing Intern Tyler Infinger
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Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey
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COPYRIGHT
The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2020 by Carey Media. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. The Pitch 3543 Broadway Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111 For information or to share a story tip, email tips@ thepitchkc.com For advertising: stephanie@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6702
12 Agustin Juarez, owner of Los Alamos
4 LETTER
17 DRINK
26 FILM
6 NEWS
18 FEATURE
28 KC CARES
Letter from the Editor Should old acquaintance be forgot? Duh. Obviously. BY BROCK WILBUR
Hope in Weighty Matters Ehren Schwarz on becoming a beacon for others BY BARBARA SHELLY
8 Creative Arts Get Creative
Pandemic pivots flaunt thinking outside the black box BY LUCIA VERZOLA
12 FOOD
Westside Story Community support keeps one neighborhood thriving through our full collapse BY LIZ COOK
16 EAT
Eat This Now The Double Smashburger at Cosmo Burger BY APRIL FLEMING
Drink This Now Sour Lemon Beverage Company’s Cider Vinegars BY APRIL FLEMING
Annika Wooton Wears the Crown The speed painting beauty queen who rules her world BY ANNE KNIGGENDORF
20 CULTURE
ZACH BAUMAN
The Best Films of 2020 Even as the year failed, movies continued to deliver BY ABBY OLCESE
Kansas City Artists Coalition BY BROOKE TIPPIN
30 SAVAGE LOVE
Gay dream believer BY DAN SAVAGE
Love Crafting Country Scraps KC finds treasure in the trash BY BETH LIPOFF
22 MUSIC
Black Creatures’ Latest Outing is a Must Own Jade and Xavier’s masterpiece lives to spite you BY NICK SPACEK
24 Trans Dance Revolution
Trans women aren’t just music’s future, they’re its past and present BY ALLISON HARRIS
“All Hands In For The Great Reset” By Jordan Kroeger
thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
3
LETTER
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT? DUH. OBVIOUSLY. BY BROCK WILBUR
“Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?” That’s the familiar refrain of tech support professionals and millennials with less-thantech-savy parents across the globe. When the problem seems unsolvable by any other means, perhaps the simplest way through is just to pull the plug for a bit and try starting over. The troubleshooting solution seems an appropriate parallel to our current America. “Fuck 2020” is a chant you’ve probably heard echoing from all corners of your social circle. Not just in December, but for most of this hell-year. And it isn’t a new chorus: it seems like the last four or five years have ended with comparable affirmations. After all, certainly the coming year will bring salvation, whereas the year that has just wrapped-up is assuredly the low point from whence nothing could possibly get worse. I tend to not participate in this question of “How could this possibly get worse?” because it feels like a line delivered by a character in a horror movie, just before everything gets unimaginably worse. Moreso, the concept that, by some time or narrative magic, everything changes over on January 1st at 12:01 a.m. and we live in a better universe has never once come true. I didn’t believe that we could do worse than 2019, then on the third day of 2020 the United States performed a coordinated airstrike in Baghdad to assassinate an Iranian leader, which seems to be trying to instigate a war. That was day three. And even then I was naive enough to ask, “How could this possibly get worse?” Then Kobe Bryant died. And then I went to the hospital. And then I was trapped in my house for 11 months while 300,000 Americans died. See? Asking the question is like poking for a war with Iran, if Iran in this analogy was fate itself.
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[Also of note, the Black Lives Matter protests were in full-swing this year. A terrible thing that we have to take to the streets for so many lives senselessly lost. A wonderful thing that so many good people stood united as one to demand America do better.] We are now, in this moment, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Not a magical switch flipping in 2021, but a true sense of hope for a different future, thanks to an incredible triumph of science. The last vaccine that medicine churned out on a worldwide scale was for mumps. It took four years. Miraculously, we cracked (multiple) vaccines for coronavirus in 11 months. And the FDA was prepared to approve anything that had a 50 percent or higher success rate. We’re getting something with a 95 percent success rate. Not only that, it serves as the foundation by which we might be able to vaccinate up to 50 of the other most frightening diseases in the world. If you step back to take a look at it, this is truly a godsend. We lucked out so hard it is difficult to accept. I’m writing this on the day that vaccines first arrived in Kansas City and our frontline hospital workers began to get the protection they require. The cure is here. There is a future that is no longer an endless series of pushing back our plans while hoping for a better tomorrow. That doesn’t mean that we’re safe. There are still months and months to come before everyone can get access to the drugs, and in that time our spiking numbers will continue to claim lives. This sucks. This is terrible. We cannot let our guard down. And yet. There is a tomorrow that you can see, and almost touch, where some kind of normalcy returns. I bought tickets to a concert in Chicago in September. I haven’t seen live music
in nearly a year and I’m going to go hard in the paint. That’s my best guess for when we’re okay again. And if we aren’t, sure, push it back a bit. Whatever keeps us alive. This is mostly to share that your local black-pilled statistics cynic, the last person that you would expect to hear it from, is fully on-board with believing that the end is in sight. We’re gonna be okay-ish. And that is sort of the theme of this issue. As you can tell from the cover, I believe that we’re coming together to hit the gigantic “RESET” button. We’re about to turn it off and turn it back on again. We’re going to reclaim that year that we lost. And as such, this issue is mostly about hope, forward progress, what comes next, yada yada. It also reflects a celebration of some folks who did exceptional work during the shutdowns; in the hopes that this is some of the final COVID-19 specific coverage we have to write. [God, I cannot wait to stop typing that goddamned name. I will never drink a Corona ever again.] But part of this reset includes the idea that we’re not even truly gonna be doing a “new” year. We’re going to be redoing a lot of the last one. For example, the Japan 2020 Olympics are happening in 2021. They’ll still be called the Japan 2020 Olympics. That’s just how this is going to go. We’re going to be doing all of 2020… on top of 2021. We’re going
New Years celebrations, but also to funerals, birthdays, weddings, and so on. As any Irish-based song must include, by law, there is indeed the “take a cup of kindness” line, that suggests perhaps we drink our troubles away. Sure. Find your own variation on drinking troubles away. There has been so much shit this year, that I have long been concerned that we will never recover. Not from the disease itself, but from the chips on our shoulders from what we’ve encountered. From what we’ve seen around us. From the politicalization of every choice made, down to the memory of seeing your neighbor who didn’t want to care about anyone else, and hoarded all of the toilet paper in the story back in March. The idea that we’d come out of this with so much anger directed at our friends and neighbors that a new kind of disease would linger for decades, in the form of resentment. I carried this disease too, for so long. But your neighbors and friends did not let you down. Our government should have, and could have, done so much better for us all. The rest of the world has shown how easily this could have been handled. We should have never had to face a choice between keeping businesses open versus dying to provide for our families. Even those whose behavior I do not understand, I have come to agree that
THERE IS A FUTURE THAT IS NO LONGER AN ENDLESS SERIES OF PUSHING BACK OUR PLANS WHILE HOPING FOR A BETTER TOMORROW. to be doing two years at the same time. It feels fair after being cooped up for all of 2020. But I’m not sure we’re prepared for how exhausting it is going to be to burst outta the gate and tackle double the amount of stuff. It’ll be a densely packed time. Reboot me, fatalism daddy. As New Year’s Eve approaches, I’m stuck on a yearly wormhole question: What is Auld Lang Syne about? What does any of that even mean? Well, I’m not alone in that, because historians have often been equally stumped by it. The song’s earliest traceable version extends to 1711 in Scotland, but even that seems apocrypha. And tracing it from there has been equally a fool’s errand. “Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind” seems to suggest that we forget our friends? But if you look up the word “acquaintance,” you will see two standard meanings: 1. “A person you know but isn’t a close friend,” 2. “A person’s knowledge or experience of something.” So perhaps it’s a refrain asking for us to put the past behind us on every level. Grudges, fears, anger; burn all of your troubles in this airing of grievances. Perhaps this is why the song has not traditionally just belonged to
we were all failed by the same people, and in that way I struggle to blame them. For this, and so many other reasons, I’m ready to put the entirety of 2020 into a little emotional box in my heart, let it shake like the puzzlebox from Hellraiser, and burn it in a fire at the end of our tunnel. We are being offered a mulligan for a year that was stripped from our fingers and our souls. To return after the reset into a world where we carry these weights with us is to deprive even ourselves of a chance at a better future. The “Old Acquaintance” that need be forgot is the memory of the anger you carried. Of the wrongs you perceived. And eventually, yes, of our constant acquaintance—an invisible assassin that haunted our every moment. Let’s hit the reset. Let’s turn it off and turn it back on again. Let’s walk into that sunshine when we can and double down on the most incredible year imaginable. And, despite what I said before, Fuck 2020. Pitch in and we’ll make it through,
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5
NEWS
Ehren Schwarz at his gym Genesis Health Club in Lawrence, KS. Scharz says his time in the gym is his escape.
TRAVIS YOUNG
HOPE IN WEIGHTY MATTERS EHREN SCHWARZ ON BECOMING A BEACON FOR OTHERS BY BARBARA SHELLY
In those first pandemic months of 2020, when just about everyone was wandering around in a state of discombobulation, Ehren Schwarz was hitting his stride. “I was averaging 70 some hours a week at work and taking 12 credit hours at school along with five or six days a week at the gym,” Schwarz says. “And I was able to come out with a 4.0 GPA, and l lost 40 pounds the healthy way.” Later in the year, he rented his first apartment and celebrated his 26th birthday. “Oh, and I just upgraded vehicles recently,” he says, “and I got a truck I’ve been wanting since I was like freaking five years old.” All this would add up to a good year for just about anybody. But two years ago, Schwarz was the one adrift. A former high school football and wrestling star in Nebraska, he’d blown his shot at scholarships and college sports and was living on the streets of Kansas City. He slept on park benches, looked for free food, and ingested every bit
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
of alcohol and substances he could get his hands on. “I was watching my life like a car accident,” Schwarz says. “It wasn’t anything I had ownership with. It was something that I was watching happen from the outside.” Schwarz was in and out of treatment programs and hospitals a lot those days, as substances wreaked havoc with his body and mind. He was being discharged from the behavioral access center at St. Luke’s North Hospital in Smithville one day in 2018 when a staffer told him he should wait around and chat with a man named Kar Woo. Schwarz had heard of Woo, a guy who helps people with mental illnesses and substance abuse issues. “He’s kind of like the unicorn of the mental health field,” Schwarz says. “You hear about him a lot, but you never see him. And one of the people up in Smithville told me he was coming up and I really should meet with him.” Schwarz shrugged. Why not? He had
no plans or place to go. After a while a slender, long-haired Asian man sat down with him and asked, conversationally, “So what do you want to do with your life?” Schwarz was floored. “That was the biggest shell shock for me,” he says. “Because I firmly believed that I had burned every bridge and every opportunity to have a choice in what I was wanting to do with my life. And here this energetic man comes in and asks me what I want to do. Like I have every opportunity in the world.” Schwarz mumbled something about maybe getting a job. Woo shook his head. “What do you really want?” he asked. Schwarz wanted to wind the clock back, to the day in 2010 when his mother—the person he loved and looked up to most in the world—was killed in a car wreck. He was 15 years old with the body of a heavyweight athlete and the heart of a wounded child. Now, almost 10 years later, he wanted to grasp hold of the values she’d instilled in
him and fulfill the hopes she’d had for him. “I want to go back to school,” he told Woo. “I want to take back the opportunity I walked away from.” “OK,” Woo said. And that was the beginning. Woo’s own story is legendary among the people in Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, who work with people in crisis due to mental illness and addiction. An immigrant from Hong Kong, he was operating an art gallery near the Country Club Plaza when he began to connect with many of the homeless people in that area. Woo had studied counseling and psychology in college, and had a way of understanding these folks. Eventually leaders at St. Luke’s Health System asked Woo if he would put his gallery business on hold and work on finding better options for people with mental illness and addictions than the hospital emergency room.
NEWS
Above: Ehren Schwarz at the Artist Helping Homeless Kairos House in Lawrence, KS. The House offers respite housing and care to men suffering from addiction and mental illness. Below: Schwarz and other staff members of the AHH Kairos House. TRAVIS YOUNG
That was the beginning of Woo’s non-profit, Artists Helping the Homeless. One of its core functions is the operation of recovery houses in Kansas City and Lawrence. By the end of the day on which he met Woo, Schwarz was settled into Bodhi House in midtown Kansas City. Schwarz had been through a number of treatment programs in the three years he spent on the streets. Most of what he learned he cast aside as soon as he was discharged. Woo’s program, he says, was different. Woo instructed Schwarz to come up with a plan. Turns out, Schwarz loves plans and action steps. He badgered the Bodhi House managers with details of how he planned to spend the next day, the next
week, the rest of his life. Within three weeks he was enrolled at Penn Valley Community College and had a part-time job in the campus weight room. Schwarz thrived in the structure and camaraderie of Bodhi House. But after a couple of months, when Woo proposed that he move to a supervised apartment building operated by Artists Helping the Homeless, he panicked. “This is too much,” he recalls telling Woo. “I can’t handle school and moving. I’m an addict, you know, and this and that.” “OK,” Woo said, serenely. “I’ll just keep believing in you until you believe in yourself.” So Schwarz moved to the apartments.
After a bit, the weekend overnight supervisor’s job opened up. Schwarz asked Woo if he could try it out on a volunteer basis. He quickly earned a spot on the payroll. One thing led to another and Woo asked Schwarz to help him open up a new recovery house in Lawrence. They found and purchased a duplex and began admitting clients. Schwarz enrolled at the University of Kansas to study business management and leadership. “His story is very wonderful because he really is trying to do everything right,” says Woo. “He’s taking little steps at a time.” But Woo and Schwarz both know, better than most, that success among addicts is measured minute by minute. Woo has seen
many clients thrive and then fall. “I had one kid, he was doing really well for two years,” he said. “He moved in with his girlfriend and within a month he relapsed.” When that happens, most clients are welcomed back into Woo’s program. He never gives up on anybody. Schwarz has now been clean and sober for two years and four months. “If I’m being transparent,” he says, “I haven’t made it. There’s no point of victory. I continually do the same things I did in the first 30 days of recovery. I still go to meetings. I still make my bed. I still do the dishes. I’m doing a lot better, but it’s because I’m doing the same things that got me here.” Fitness has always been important to Schwarz, and his Facebook page shows him pulling off feats like bench pressing 315 pounds. Schwarz says his time in the gym is his escape. “That’s where I can go and just be in my own little world,” he says. “I don’t have to think about bills. I don’t have to think about work. I don’t have to think about school. There’s just a bunch of weight on top of me and I have to lift it, and the calm in the storm is a beautiful thing to me.” His recent trappings of success, like that four-wheel drive truck he bought without taking out any loans, might be a sign to others of how far he’s come since the days he stumbled around Kansas City with nothing but a change of clothes and a backpack. But Schwarz knows not to let them define him. “Stuff is just stuff,” he says. “These are the easy things for people to see the growth, but what they can’t see is the growth inside me. Like, I do not recognize myself today.” More rewarding than his job, his grades and any possessions he’s acquired is his reconciliation with his father and two brothers. “They always loved me, but they had to love me from a distance,” he says, remembering the alienation he felt when he was homeless. “But now it’s to the point where I actually get phone calls from my brothers asking for advice.” Schwarz has even embraced a sister he never knew existed before she got in touch recently after tracing her family online. In a season in which despondency looms for many, Schwarz thinks often about how his story can help create hope. “To me hope is the precursor to faith,” he says. “And in order to have faith in myself, I must first have hope that I can do something.” Schwarz loves inspirational books, videos, and slogans, so he pulls one out now. “I always use the quote, ‘Be the light you wish to see in the world,’ It’s like trying to find your way out of a dark room, you’ve got to have some sort of light, some sort of belief. I’ve been where there is no light in the room. And today I do my best to be that light in the room for the next individual.” thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
7
NEWS
CREATIVE ARTS GET CREATIVE PANDEMIC PIVOTS FLAUNT THINKING OUTSIDE THE BLACK BOX BY LUCIA VERZOLA
Relying heavily on live performance and interactive experiences, our local arts community was unsure how they would stay afloat when the city went on lockdown in March. However, the pandemic has demonstrated the resilience and creativity of the arts in Kansas City. These organizations have not only adapted but are thriving with COVID safety precautions in place. They have supported the community and each other while reminding people of the importance of the arts during this chapter our city is living.
COURTESY OF RIGHTFULLY SEWN
Rightfully Sewn 1800 Wyandotte St #204, Kansas City, MO 64108 | rightfullysewn.org Jennifer Lapka, the founder and president of Rightfully Sewn, read about the international shortage of PPE in January. As an organization dedicated to training seamstresses and bringing life back to the Kansas City garment industry, Lapka knew Rightfully Sewn had the resources and the skill to do something. After the team began working remotely on March 13, all other operations were put on hold, and full effort went toward sewing masks. Rightfully Sewn raised $20,000 through donations from foundations and individuals through social media. It was important to Lapka that her employees continued to receive income through the pandemic, and this money allowed them to continue paying employees and double their staff from six to thirteen seamstresses, hiring those who had
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
lost their jobs from other manufacturers. The team cut and sewed 40,000 masks that they donated to hospitals, social protest groups, and nonprofits throughout the city, donating masks to over 30 entities. The pandemic has shown the importance of domestic manufacturing and valuing seamstresses. “How can we help the consumer understand the value of the price of an American-made good?” asks Lapka. “Because it directly affects our community. These seamstresses are based here in Kansas City, they’re paid here, their children go to school here, they reinvest that in the community.” KC Young Audiences 3732 Main St, Kansas City, MO 64111 | kcya.org The importance of investing in the community has been demonstrated by arts organizations across the metro area. Kansas City Young Audiences (KCYA) was founded in
COURTESY OF KC YOUNG AUDIENCES
1961 to provide arts education in schools across the city. When schools shut down in March, the first thing KCYA wanted to do was find a way to support teaching artists booked for the spring who were no longer getting to earn their anticipated income, with many being independent contractors who are full-time artists and rely on interactive performance. The organization hosted Band Together, a virtual telethon featuring teaching artists who performed and raised over $30,000 that was then distributed to its teaching artists. They also shifted their focus on how to best move to a virtual platform, using donations to send proper technological equipment to instructors and convert spaces in their Main St. brick and mortar to allow instructors to record workshops in the space and teach some classes socially distanced. Martin English, KCYA executive director, has seen the resilience of the organization through the pandemic. “I think the creativity and the innovation that we’re seeing from our teaching artists from our staff, that’s been really inspiring for me, and we’re small enough that we’re nimble. We can change and I think we’re gonna come out the other end of this for sure.”
Jones spoke on how the pandemic has been secondary to vital issues such as suicide and depression, both of which existed long before the pandemic and will continue to exist long after. “We will continue doing exactly what we do. Finding every platform, every space that’s safe, whether it’s online, whether it’s six feet apart at a staging studio… we’re going to keep planting in the lives of young people, resilience, character, accepting one another. Because resilience and character count in the long run. We’re planting in them something that will take them through [this], and everything else in their lives.” KC Latin Jazz Orchestra Grandview Park Presbyterian Church/ La Paz House | kansascitylatinjazzorchestra.com With the arts community connected across the world, KC Latin Jazz Orchestra anticipated the arrival of the pandemic. The band was touring South America in February prior to the city being shut down. “We immediately knew that we were going to have to come up with a new strategy. Not just to get ready for when the pandemic was over,
Kansas Academy of Theatrical Arts 3144 Woodview Ridge Dr, Kansas City, KS 66103 | katayoutharts.org Another organization dedicated to providing arts for students in the KCK metro area, the Kansas Academy of Theatrical Arts was founded by Mama Judi Jones just over 30 years ago. Over the summer, Jones used grants to pay a staff of six students, ages 14-19, who worked virtually to create collaborative projects. Their efforts produced a coloring book and a journal, both of which were published in physical form. They also filmed a socially distanced performance of “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying,a” a poem by Charles Finn, in face masks covering their mouths and their eyes.
COURTESY OF KANSAS ACADEMY OF THEATRICAL ARTS
NEWS
that this was work created during some of the darkest times in our lived experience. I think we’re gonna see this whole experience reflected in both the visual and performing arts in a way that will be life-altering. [It’s] shaped everyone’s life, whether you’re an artist or consumer. This is our time to talk about the process and how this pandemic has affected us. And I think artists do that most effectively.” KC Clay Guild 200 W 74th St, Kansas City, MO 64114 | kcclayguild.org
COURTESY OF KC LATIN JAZZ ORCHESTRA
but for the permanent changes that this pandemic was going to create in society, especially in the music scene,” says Pablo Sanhueza, the artistic director and bandleader. Sanhueza knew that the band, an international quality orchestra with musicians from the area, would do what it always had: focus on community. No longer performing at clubs and venues into the early morning hours, the band would play at Grandview Park Presbyterian Church at 10 a.m. (with COVID safety precautions in place) on Saturday mornings to raise money for a local food basket. They also formed La Paz Youth Orchestra, a project created to provide a means for youth musicians to continue training
despite traditional academic settings being eliminated with the virus. Sanhueza sees the possibility of racial and wealth gaps widening due to the pandemic, with the arts only being for the privileged few. He is hopeful this time will help to unite the city to build a stronger local community.
space closed with the shutdown of the city in March, they remained committed to the same programming they had planned before the pandemic but adapted it to a virtual
The KC Clay Guild is a nonprofit ceramic arts center, with a small staff and many instructors being independent contractors or volunteers who worked at the space as a secondary hobby. Because of this, Louis Reilly, the studio coordinator, was confident they would make it through their temporary closure. Prior to the pandemic, most of their volunteers were elder populations, more at risk of contracting the virus. Though they initially struggled to find new volunteers upon reopening, the pandemic has brought younger people into the organization. Even with the nonprofit limiting the number of people allowed in the building, the
KC Arts Coalition 3200 Gillham Rd, Kansas City, MO 64109 | kansascityartistscoalition.org Founded in 1976, KC Arts Coalition has held on to its founding foundation of being “an artist-centered, artist-run alternative space.” Though the non-profit’s physical
COURTESY OF KC CLAY GUILD
platform. Marissa Starke, executive director of the Coalition, spoke on how COVID has forced them to embrace the virtual world. Though the gallery has reopened with safety restrictions, Starke feels virtual programming is here to stay, as it opens doors in who sees the art and how far of an audience it can reach. This has resulted in an uptick in interest from wider circles of museums and collectors. She is also excited to see the artwork that will be created because of the pandemic. “I think what comes out of this will be what we look back on in history,
guild has seen full classes and has hit a cap on the programming they can offer. They have made up on lost income from when they were closed at the beginning of the pandemic. Reilly knows COVID restrictions will be in place for the foreseeable future, but he is hopeful of what the space will continue to offer. “Especially using the potter’s wheel, there’s a certain degree of concentration that’s required in that,” says Reilly. “When you’re focusing so hard on something, it has a meditative effect. It’s a place where you can kind of come and push away some of that other noise.”
COURTESY OF KC ARTS COALITION
thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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NEWS
COURTESY OF KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY
Kansas City Symphony 1703 Wyandotte St Ste 200, Kansas City, MO 64108 | kcsymphony.org With large gatherings no longer being an option, organizations that perform live in front of thousands at the Kauffman Center had to adapt. When the Kansas City Symphony’s 2019-2020 season was cut short in March, they had to come to terms with how long it would be until they could return to live performances. “As we got to the end of the summertime, we started making plans for a different sort of season,” says KC Symphony executive director, Danny Beckley. Between September and December, the symphony has been performing on a mobile stage, something that has broadened symphony attendees. As of Nov. 30, the mobile music box has allowed the symphony 132 performances, reaching approximately 14,000 people. The Symphony has also adapted to streaming performances online, embracing the opportunity to bring in new subscribers being offered through the convenience of a screen. Beckley has been impressed by the organization’s adaptability through the last year. “We had a very finely tuned organization that was successfully following the same playbook, year after year after year,” says Beckley. “But necessity is the mother of invention, and the creativity that’s come from our musicians, and both in terms of learning new skills, but also in terms of the way that they perform music together, and the way that they program music so that it’s more representative of the community that we serve.” They are exploring the option of
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offering concerts to limited live audiences in the new year. Kansas City Lyric Opera 1725 Holmes St, Kansas City, MO 64108 | kcopera.org Deborah Sandler, executive director of the Kansas City Lyric Opera, told patrons to
COURTESY OF KANSAS CITY LYRIC ORCHESTRA
wash their hands and stay well at the curtain speech before the opening night performance of Lucia di Lammermoor last March. By the following week, the city had been shut down, and the remainder of the Lyric’s 2020 season was canceled. Sandler knew that the organization was going to have to engage with audiences in a new way with live performances no longer possible. They created
a series focused on local partnerships called New Visions. It includes an eight-part digital history of opera, presented by musicologists from UMKC and KU and featuring art from the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Though there were plans to perform Amahl and the Night Visitors as a live puppet show in front of a small audience, new information on the virus has made it clear it wouldn’t be safe. The opera made its debut in Kansas City in 1951 at the Hallmark Hall of Fame. It’s reimagined format will feature newly-designed puppets from KC’s own Paul Mesner. The performance will premiere digitally on Dec. 15, available to be purchased for viewing. Sandler understands that it will be a long time until audiences feel comfortable returning to sitting in a live theater. However, she hopes people will “turn to the arts for the solace and the comfort that we can provide and that maybe we will gain new people who can see the benefit of the arts. I mean, there have been studies that have said that watching an arts program, such as they are currently delivered, is one of the few things that make people feel better. So I hope that will continue to bring people back to us.” Kansas City Ballet 500 W Pershing Rd, Kansas City, MO 64108 | kcballet.org The Kansas City Ballet (KCB) also faces stress regarding returning to the stage for live performances. “Nobody believes that a ballet company can exist without doing the
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COURTESY OF KANSAS CITY BALLET
Nutcracker,” says Jeff Bentley, executive director of KCB. However, KCB is doing just that. Through applying for the PPP early on, the company was able to continue paying their dancers through the remaining seven weeks left in their contract at the time the city shut down. After months of taking ballet class from their homes on Zoom, the company has seen progress with dancers returning to the Todd Bolender Center. Each dancer is grouped in one of three separate specific pods to limit those they share the space with. These pods of 10 make contact tracing easier if one dancer were to get infected. The company has further explored the importance of filming in the studio or on stage—offering the option of streaming performances for audiences. Bentley believes that the company will return to where it once was, though probably with “some additional resources and information, and creative ideas at our disposal that were forced upon us by this pandemic that made us think differently in and in more expansive ways than before.” Ultimately, he believes that Kansas City Ballet will be a better company, better artists, a better organization, and better management because of the pandemic.
this arts community.” KC Crew recently contacted the non-profit to offer their support and provide artists with the opportunity to perform virtually and reach new audiences. Haralson feels that when it comes down to it, organizations staying afloat will depend on a business’s available funds. He hopes to also provide knowledge and resources for arts organizations to utilize. “Once we turn to 2021, I think there will be this real desire to get life back to normal. We’ve all heard so much about how 2020 has been the really problematic year, but the truth is that for at least the first quarter or two of the next year, we will look very similar to where we are now. So we encourage people to accept that and to continue using the resources that we have offered so that you can keep the art and keep art in your life.” The new year offers a fresh start and the chance to build new habits. Want to keep art in your life? Consider donating to any of the arts organizations in this article.
ArtsKC 106 Southwest Blvd, Kansas City, MO 64108 | artskc.org A backbone for arts organizations across the city, ArtsKC is a non-profit with a mission “to unleash the power of the arts.” When the pandemic hit in March, ArtsKC immediately began asking potential donors from across the board for help in providing funds for the most vulnerable in the arts community. “It’s amazing when a community is threatened in this kind of a way, we all come together, to lift each other up to try to get the word out about opportunities,” says Branden Haralson, communications, engagement, and public policy manager at ArtsKC. “It goes back to that old adage of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ and that’s certainly the case in
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FOOD
WESTSIDE STORY COMMUNITY SUPPORT KEEPS ONE NEIGHBORHOOD THRIVING THROUGH OUR FULL COLLAPSE BY LIZ COOK
On a sleepy Wednesday in December, I went for a walk on the Westside. It was sunny but cold, and I didn’t expect to encounter many people as I stalked past the neighborhood’s curious mix of concrete-and-glass modern homes and whitewashed brick duplexes as old as the city’s railroads. Instead, I felt like I’d stumbled onto a small parade. Accordion music streamed out of an open door at Los Alamos Market y Cocina; inside, cartoonish piñatas swung from the ceiling like punching bags. Across the street, the door to Blue Bird Bistro chimed open with the Hallmark tinkle of a bell. Every table on the sidewalk in front of Chez Elle, the brick-faced crêperie and coffee house, was full of diners in sunglasses and sweatshirts. If it wasn’t for the masks dangling from customers’ ears—and the omnipresent dread draped over my soul like a weighted blanket—I could have forgotten Kansas City was in the middle of the worst phase of the COVID-19 pandemic yet. Businesses across the city have taken a pounding from the pandemic and associated shutdowns, and any attempt to sketch an economic silver lining is bound to ring false. But in tentative, relative terms, the Westside seems like
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
it might be doing…kind of…OK? “Oh, we’re doing more than OK,” Los Alamos owner Agustin Juarez says. “We’re doing great. For me, because we’re so blessed—to me, it seems like there’s nothing happening out there. Because there’s no day that we’re not busy.”
behind the restaurant’s glass case, giving customers good-natured ribbings while he fills tray after Styrofoam tray with dripping meats in jewel-toned sauces. Customers have been pouring in lately, worried Los Alamos might close. They tip well, fret often, overpay for their tacos on
“ON TOP OF THE HILL AT 17TH AND SUMMIT, EVERYONE’S DIFFERENT. I THINK THAT’S WHAT MAKES IT UNIQUE.” —AGUSTIN JUAREZ, LOS ALAMOS Juarez has been operating at the corner of 17th and Summit for almost 20 years— long enough to build relationships with the community, long enough that he knows just about everyone in the neighborhood’s name. The pandemic hasn’t changed him much. He wears a mask, now, but he still holds court
purpose. “I had a priest who came in and gave me an envelope,” Juarez says. “I thought it was a card, but I opened it up and there was $1,000 in cash. From a priest! He made me cry; he made me cry.” The success of Los Alamos has a lot to do with Juarez’s singular personality and
Agustin Juarez, owner of Los Alamos ZACH BAUMAN
hustle; you get the sense he could make the business work just about anywhere in town. But he knows there’s something special about the Westside, too. There’s an unusual amount of foot traffic, to start—those piñatas dangling from Los Alamos’s ceiling are meant to be colorful lures for pedestrians. According to Juarez, they work. The business mix helps, too. Juarez points out the variety of restaurants he can see from his front door—Chez Elle (French), Clay & Fire (Mediterranean), Blue Bird (crunchy American). “We’re not right on the Boulevard, if you get the picture, where all the restaurants are Mexican, Mexican, Mexican,” he says. “On top of the hill at 17th and Summit, everyone’s different. I think that’s what makes it unique.” That variety has a cost, of course. Latino immigrants largely built up the Westside, and as the neighborhood has grown and attracted more development, some of its original residents have been priced out. For years, Juarez and his family owned a home near their business. Not anymore. “These gringos came and bought me
thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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FOOD
most of their square footage. The refrigerated case inside Yoli’s small-but-airy space is almost always brimming with a new salsa or bottled drink; a freezer just inside the door is stacked with tamales. Gencarelli tries to keep the events fresh, too, hosting kaleidoscopic pop-up feasts at the store in partnership with local chefs. The tight-knit business community has been a big help with those. At a recent pop-up event, Gencarelli ran out of cabbage. She ran next door to Los Alamos, and Juarez offered her one of his own. She notes that community-minded attitude isn’t specific to the Westside—when you’re a small business owner, you help your neighbors. You take care of each other. The broad mix of nearby businesses here just makes it easy. Gencarelli says she’s never felt like she’s in competition with any of her neighbors. Jenny Vergara, a longtime Westside resident and contributing editor for Feast Magazine, points to businesses like those owned by Juarez and Gencarelli as examples of the Westside’s more thoughtful approach to development. “You know, it’s independent,” Vergara says. “There’s not a single chain over here, and that’s by design and by desire, just
because the landlords are kind of watching out for who they let in. The landlords that own the restaurant and retail spaces in the Westside live in the Westside, and they all traverse and go to these places too.” Perhaps no one fits that description better than Adam Jones, a real estate developer who’s lived on the Westside since graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1982. Jones renovated the iconic two-story house at 815 W 17th St, a spot that’s housed restaurants such as Novel and Fox & Pearl. For all its quirks, it’s beloved by customers, and Jones could have rented the house to just about anyone to keep his cash flow up during the pandemic. But he had promised the space to his friend Orcan Yigit, a restaurateur based in Ankara, Turkey. When the pandemic hit, travel shut down, and visa challenges have kept Yigit stranded in Turkey since. Instead of abandoning his plans, Jones brought in chef Brent Gunnels—a fellow Westsider—to help open the Middle Eastern restaurant on schedule. Jones and Gunnels have been on the phone with Yigit and his chef in Turkey constantly to share ideas and refine the menu. The collaborative result, Clay & Fire, opened in September.
Marissa Gencarelli, owner of Yoli Tortilleria, which opened in the Westside in July. ZACH BAUMAN
out.” He says this without a trace of malice— those gringos have also helped keep him in business. What was that 2020 cliché? It is what it is. Still, the neighborhood’s working-class history—and its more measured approach to development—have slowed the pace of gentrification relative to some other areas of Kansas City. Since 1973, the Westside Housing Organization has been working to expand affordable housing options in the neighborhood and save existing homes from being torn down for highway construction. The Guadalupe Center, another nonprofit, has provided social services to Westside residents and the broader Latino community since 1919. Recent multifamily housing developments have brought a mix of young professionals and lower-income families to the neighborhood, apartment complexes scattered among stately historic homes. For now, at least, the Westside doesn’t feel economically or culturally homogenous. And as the economic crisis deepens, new residents have been a lifeline for area businesses. The diversity of the Westside—its people, its businesses, its architecture—is what
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
drew Sonora, Mexico native Marissa Gencarelli and her husband, Mark, to open a small retail outpost of Yoli Tortilleria there. “I like mixed-income communities,” Gencarelli says. “You have small homes right next to these other gigantic homes. I don’t want to get too political here, but the fact that someone is running a bank or whatever and walks by another house that may not be in their financial situation—you create that awareness of overall societies and communities and what they need.” Gencarelli says she’d tried to move Yoli into the neighborhood twice before she succeeded this July. Opening a new storefront during the pandemic would seem like a risky prospect for any entrepreneur, and Gencarelli’s still cautious—she’s thinking week to week, not year to year. But so far, she says, business has been surprisingly good. “We feel pretty optimistic,” she says. “Opening through COVID would be suicidal for most people, but for us, it was the best thing we could have done. Because we have a small footprint, we can put [new products] forward and see customer’s reactions without having to hustle through a distributor.” The Gencarellis have been making the
Jenny Vergara, a longtime Westside resident and contributing editor for Feast Magazine. ZACH BAUMAN
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g ro w n b y h a n d
made by hand
Adam Jones inside his restaurnt Clay & Fire, which also opened in the middle of the pandemic.
ZACH BAUMAN
8 1 6 .2 2 1 .7 5 5 9 | bl u e bi rdbi stro .co m 1 7 0 0 S u mmi t S tre e t
Jones says he’s felt the neighborhood support throughout his career, but the new development has made a noticeable difference. “I’ve been here a long time, and there never used to be this traffic. There’s just new people all the time—and they’re moving here, living here because of the community that we’ve built over the past 30 years. They’re trying to support local biz, and they’re totally in exploration mode.”
better than quite a few local restaurants. But Jones is still worried. He’s says he’ll need to do brisk carryout business to weather the winter. “I’m just praying—we’re just about to have our liquor license I think, it’s been a little arduous—and if we can just get to a break-even point where we can just hold on until things change, I’ll be in heaven. I think we’re close.” “Close” is still a precarious place to be.
“IF WE CAN JUST GET TO A BREAKEVEN POINT WHERE WE CAN JUST HOLD ON UNTIL THINGS CHANGE, I’LL BE IN HEAVEN. I THINK WE’RE CLOSE.” —ADAM JONES Like Juarez and Gencarelli, Jones says the variety of neighborhood businesses has been a strength during the pandemic—visitors can grab a latte at Goat Hill Coffee & Soda, shop for lingerie at MADI Apparel, have lunch at Chez Elle, and pick up a loaf of bread at Fervere for dinner. The Westside is a destination instead of just a pit stop. Jones counts himself lucky to have the support of those neighbors as well as his friends in the restaurant industry. He thanks his customers profusely; he calls Gunnels “a warrior.” Even though Clay & Fire opened in the middle of the pandemic, it’s been doing
The Westside’s walkability, diversity, and mixed-use, mixed-income development have been a boon during the pandemic. But it ain’t magic. The virus lives here, too. Business owners—restaurant owners in particular—have been forced into an impossible bind as they weigh the guidance of public health experts against mounting bills and vague municipal ordinances. And in the face of those challenges, one of the neighborhood’s beloved marquee restaurants, The Westside Local, closed in December. The cruel irony is that the restaurant’s community mindset partly contributed to
its closure. Although Kansas City has allowed some form of in-room dining since May, owner Brandon Strick decided to stick to carry-out and occasional patio dining to try to keep his staff and customers safe. “My partners and myself and my staff all agreed that safety was the more important thing,” Strick says. But safety couldn’t keep the lights on. Strick hopes he can reopen The Westside Local in 2021—Congress pending. He says without an additional federal relief package, there’s just no way for him to keep going. But he’s grateful for the support he’s received, and he can’t imagine going anywhere else. “The neighborhood has kept us going this long, and I cannot say enough about that. It has truly been our regulars—the people that we saw all the time before, and as soon as we reopened, we saw them continually. The love and the support has been so strong.” I ask Strick what drew him to the Westside in the first place, and he reacts as though I’ve asked him to explain why sex is good or French fries are delicious—like, have you been here? Are you kidding me? He went to school for architecture, he says—he fell in love with the neighborhood and the building circa 2009. “Los Alamos next door, they’ve been the best neighbors we could ever have. But we’re not short on the best neighbors. Blue Bird Bistro, Chez Elle, the whole community. It didn’t take but one visit here to go: absolutely.” On twitter @lizcookkc
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EAT
Eat This Now The Double Smashburger at Cosmo Burger WORDS AND PHOTOS BY APRIL FLEMING
With the signature beef blend from Fairway Meat Market (formerly McGonigle’s), buns from Roma Bakery, and house-made sauce and pickles, the burger from Cosmo Burger is a quality Kansas City affair, in and out. And while there is no shortage of great burgers in town, Cosmo’s manages to stand out by keeping its focus on this one pretty perfect offering. Jacob Kruger, who owns and operates Cosmo Burger out of Dodson’s Bar and Commons in Waldo, tested out just about every burger he could find in KC before launching Cosmo Burger, though he always knew though that he wanted to offer a smashburger. “It’s not something like a restaurant style burger where you’re at a sit-down place and it’s made to order with a mountain of toppings on it,” he says. “I’m not knocking that—can get down with that too. But with a Smashburger, it’s going to be something old school, simple, and easy.” It’s also goddamned delicious. Meaty, juicy, and cheesy, with a little tang from Kruger’s sauce and the house-made pickles, the burgers here pretty simply just hit the spot. Kruger has kept the menu at Cosmo tight—you can order a single cheeseburger, a double cheeseburger, or a Beyond Meat (vegan) option. You can add a side of tots… and that’s it. Thankfully, you won’t need anything else. For now, Cosmo Burger is only available for pickup Wednesday through Saturday from 5 to 11 p.m. It’s an easy process: Visit cosmoburgerkc.com, place your order for an ASAP pickup or a future time, and pull up to Dodson’s Bar & Commons (7438 Wornall Road) at the time you chose. You’ll get a text when your order is ready, and it will be waiting for you at a table by the front door. From there your only responsibility is to stuff your face. cosmoburgerkc.com
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
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DRINK
Drink This Now Sour Lemon Beverage Company’s Cider Vinegars WORDS AND PHOTOS BY APRIL FLEMING
January represents new beginnings, and oh yes, do we ever deserve a new start after the last year, the year of endless WTF. While we can’t change some of the big things, we can do at least one decent thing for our bodies as thanks for getting us out of 2020. A suitable beverage companion for the necessary renewal in and out at the start of the year is a cider vinegar from Overland Park’s Sour Lemon Beverage Company. Sour Lemon Owner Callen Johnson began experimenting on her own with apple cider vinegar in an effort to improve her family’s health, hoping to soothe sour stomachs and frequent strep infections. Drinking straight cider vinegar wasn’t working—it burned her throat when she tried vinegar shots, and her kids wouldn’t touch it. So over the course of many months, Johnson worked to produce an apple cider vinegar blend that both delivered digestive benefits but that tasted good enough that it wouldn’t send kids away screaming. With her husband’s help, Callen found sources for a high-quality vinegar that she loved, as well as many local ingredients that she could use for flavor. What we like about Sour Lemon’s line of vinegars is not only that they totally do taste good—tart and tangy, but not abrasively sour. Some, like the pink lemonade, cater to those who like a sweeter drink, while limeades and spiced ciders have completely different profiles. It’s also easy to make: all that is required is to mix the concentrate with water (we recommend carbonated). And it’s no small thing that it’s economical and friendlier to the environment, with each bottle of concentrate delivering up to 16 servings—welcome affordability in a world of $8 single serving bottles of kombucha and $10 cold-pressed juices. It also works for a dry January—but we won’t judge if it turns into a mixer, either. sourlemonbeverage.com
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thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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FEATURE
ANNIKA WOOTON WEARS THE CROWN THE SPEED PAINTING BEAUTY QUEEN WHO RULES HER WORLD BY ANNE KNIGGENDORF
Beauty queen Annika Wooton says, “RBG is sitting in my living room.” It’s mid-November 2020, two months after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Miss Kansas’s voice comes over the phone from her home in Wichita. It seems that she hasn’t veered into the occult, she’s simply spent a lot of time painting one particular portrait of the justice over and over. In fact, she performed speed painting RBG as her talent in the Miss America competition in 2019—note: the organization no longer uses the word “pageant.” “For the Miss America competition,” Wooton says, “I had three canvases that I, for practice runs, would paint over and over. So, there’s probably 20 versions of RBG beneath RBG. I would paint three in a practice session, I would wait for them to dry, then I would paint it black and I’d do it again.” And now, what became the final version is sitting in Wooton’s home, where she moved from Lawrence after being crowned Miss Kansas a year and a half ago. Wichita is the unofficial HQ of the Miss Kansas competition and works well as a central location for all the travel required of the winner. Before the pandemic, Wooton had been on track to make 400 appearances in the full time position that is Miss Kansas. Now, she mostly executes speaking engagements through Zoom. But what’s just as wild as having RBG in her living room is a pandemic bonus that absolutely no one else in Kansas received: an extra year to wear a crown. The 26-year-old Overland Park native expected to hand over the silver tiara to another young woman in the spring, but the Miss America Organization extended her reign after cancelling the 2020 competition. She competed for that crown for six years before she won on her seventh try— the year the organization raised the age limit from 24 to 25. “My last year was also my bonus year, and then I got another bonus year thanks to the pandemic,” Wooton says. Pageants famously include segments like the interview, the now-defunct “swim-
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
suit competition,” and the talent show. Wooton says that choosing and executing the talent portion is the only part that’s completely in the control of the contestant. For four years, Wooton competed as a singer. In fact, the year she took the state crown, she sang a mashup of “Let Me Be Your Star” and “Don’t Forget Me” from the NBC show Smash. The other three years she speed-painted. Each woman who holds the state title competes in the Miss America competition as well, so Wooton had the opportunity to change up her talent. After no deliberation at all, she decided to make a return to speed painting when she had the national platform. “You get one shot. You have 90 seconds on stage. You can’t control your interview questions, you can’t control your onstage questions, but your talent… you can plan and prepare for that 90 seconds all you want,” Wooton explains. Speed painting is still an unusual talent in the world of beauty pageants, but a fouryear-old New York Magazine article Wooton appeared in suggests it’s gaining in popularity. The most well-worn talents are singing, dancing, and playing an instrument, often a piano. In 2019, when Wooton competed on the Miss America stage, she wasn’t alone in performing speed painting as her talent. Joanna Wicks, Miss Delaware, also tried her hand at it. However, Wooton says, “I believe I am the first speed painter to place in the Top 15 and to also win a talent award.” The activity is unlike regular painting in several ways other than taking place in a short amount of time. Wooton paints at different speeds depending on the event. Ninety seconds is the quickest, but then there’s medium speed, which is around seven minutes for a demo, and then a longer performance of up to 60 minutes for a pre-COVID cocktail hour. Wooton, who’s a leftie, paints double-handed, especially during those speed rounds. She laughs and says, “I’ve got two hands and 90 seconds, we’re going to use ev-
Speed painting in the 2019 Miss America competition.
erything we’ve got.” Her right hand does the crude work of paint application, sometimes in big globs just to get it on the canvas, then her left hand forms the lines and curves of the painting’s subject. The two-handed approach wows like a magic trick. Wooton uses a special spinning easel. Once she’s completed the painting, she rotates what appears to be an abstract jumble of shapes to reveal a scene like The Wizard of Oz’s emerald castle surrounded by its field of red poppies. Other times, that flip reveals a face, as it did when she painted Ginsburg. Wooton chose to paint Ginsburg because it’s her view that the woman embodied the Miss America Organization’s mission statement: To prepare great women for the world, and to prepare the world for great women.
COURTESY OF ANNIKA WOOTON
“I get goosebumps every time I say it,” Wooton says. Miss Kansas cites Ginsburg’s work for LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and human rights as inspiration for her decision to make her the subject of a painting. “We’re also showing that we’re so much more than what we look like, and we’re more than our gender, and she did the same thing, opened doors for people as well,” Wooton says. And she didn’t just appropriate Ginsburg’s image; that would not have been genteel. She asked and received permission from the woman herself. Wooton drew a sort of mini comic book of her game plan and mailed it to the Supreme Court. Within days, Wooton received an email from a Supreme Court address telling her the justice had approved. A beauty queen isn’t about to perform
FEATURE
Wooton speaks to a group about the Miss America talent selection and process on Zoom from her home. COURTESY OF ANNIKA WOOTON
in dead silence, so each painting has an accompanying soundtrack. With a small team, Wooton created a special one for Ginsburg she hoped would reflect the values of the Miss America Organization and RBG as well. She teamed up with a teacher from the high school she attended in Virginia—Miss Kansas was born in Overland Park and earned a degree from KU, but most of her schooling took place in the southeast—and Kansas City writer Emily Wilkinson to write a spoken word poem largely comprised of Ginsburg quotations. A composer in the Netherlands wrote the music, and 17 women Wooton knew in Virginia recited the poem. Wooton did not win that competition, but something happened that she says was just as good or better: Ginsburg’s trainer saw a photo of the preliminary competition and messaged Wooton to ask for a video.
She sets the scene: “It was the night before the final competition. My roommate was Miss Oklahoma, and she was on the phone with her parents, and I was sitting there browsing social media.” That’s when Wooton received a message from RBG’s trainer. He said he’d shown justice the video. Like most audience members, Ginsburg couldn’t understand what Wooton was painting at first. “He said, ‘just wait,’ and then when I flipped it at the end she said, ‘Oh my gosh, how did she do that?’ I immediately started crying.” In September, Wooton travelled to Washington, D.C. and stood at the bottom of the Supreme Court’s steps to pay tribute to Ginsburg, which she counts as among the most memorable moments of her life. For the most part, she donates or auctions her paintings, but she thinks she’ll hang onto the one sitting in her living room. thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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CULTURE
Above: Scraps KC is Kansas City’s frist creative reuse center. Scraps KC is located at 3269 Roanoke Rd, Kansas City, MO. Below: The Maker’s Studio is equipped with sewing machines, overhead projectors, jewelry making tools, light table, book binding machine, Circut Cutter, and other small machines. The space is available for 60 minute slots during store hours. TRAVIS YOUNG
LOVE CRAFTING COUNTRY SCRAPS KC FINDS TREASURE IN THE TRASH BY BETH LIPOFF, PHOTOS BY TRAVIS YOUNG
If you’re artistic but don’t fancy dumpster-diving to find inspiring materials, there’s a much cleaner way to find objects to recycle into creative endeavors. Scraps KC has been repackaging and repurposing artsy materials for years. In the last four years, they’ve steered approximately 170 tons of supplies away from landfills, estimates Brenda Mott, Scraps KC’s executive director. “We educate people on the environment. We try to focus on reduce, reuse, and refuse, rather than recycle, because recycling uses a lot of our precious resources,” Mott says. Scraps KC partners with schools and educators in a few ways. A few schools collect end of year school supplies that kids would throw out and give them to Scraps KC, and Scraps KC provides many educators with classroom supplies when they need them. And there’s a bonus—the profits go toward helping homeless folks in Kansas City as well as education programs. “Our main goal is to transform things
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
that are unwanted into things that have value, whether it’s a half-used tube of paint, and it creates a beautiful picture, or whether it’s somebody who sleeps on the street, and we can provide some friendship, some food, hopefully move them off the street and walk with them as they move into a new environment,” Mott says. “Those are the transformations that we love to see.” It’s not just the money that helps, either. Mott encourages anyone to volunteer, homeless or housing secure, and everyone works together to clean and restore materials. She estimates between one and five homeless volunteers turn up each day, with many returning weekly or monthly. “It breaks down barriers of our community members with the homeless as they work side-by-side with them,” Mott says. Although they do provide some supplies to homeless people, it’s truly a team effort. Those who receive supplies volunteer inside the store. “We also think it also builds them up and helps them feel differently about themselves gives them hope for moving forward.
GET OUT Scraps KC continues to hold workshops on Zoom and at its 3269 Roanoke Road location, with social distancing and masks. For more information on their programs, visit scrapskc.org/events Not everyone wants to get off the street, but we want to be here to support them. Even those people who want to stay on the street forever, they may come to us for real information,” Mott says. Many homeless folks came to them for pandemic information in the face of numerous rumors they’d heard. This whole operation didn’t all come
together immediately. When Mott started, she thought she’d recycle milk jugs and fruit clamshells—but there was a problem. “It turned out nobody wanted those,” Mott says. “Then all of the sudden, the creative community had heard of us, and they started bringing us paints and specialty papers and textiles and that’s really where we transformed what we reused and what we
CULTURE
Above: Rachel Morningstar sifting through wooden blocks at Scraps KC. Below: Kaitlin West makes Christmas crafts with her 9-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter in the Make and Take section of the store. TRAVIS YOUNG
sold for reuse.” In addition to paints and papers, Scraps KC has a large stock of fabric, notions—and pretty much anything else you might need to express yourself creatively. All of it is based on donations. “We’ve never done any advertising or marketing. Everything is word of mouth or social media. People come for specific reasons [like] art supplies they don’t want to give to another resale store. They know somebody who really wants them is going to find them here,” Mott says. Folks helping their parents downsize might bring in the entire contents of a sewing room. “We sometimes get very neatly organized donations, like a nice baggie full of pom-poms. Sometimes, we get a drawer dumped into a box. Sometimes, we get one pom-pom,” Mott says. That’s where the volunteers shine. They measure, sort, and repackage things so they’re more useful to those who come to shop at Scraps KC. Gladstone resident Blaine Shepherd, a graduate student studying costuming, missed working in his school’s costume shop as he took his classes online. He found
Scraps KC when he went hunting for fabric. “I really like doing the mundane tasks of rolling the fabric and organizing it and making it look good. Now they utilize my skills in fabric identification and what I know through costuming. I give advice on what I would want to buy or what’s the worst
of something,” he says. Although he volunteers in the store once a week, he also brings home projects to work on in between his shifts. “It’s really nice to be appreciated for those skills when you don’t have a costume shop where you can channel those skills,”
Shepherd says. For Nora Utech, a physical therapist from Lenexa, volunteering was a way to get out of the house. “It’s nice for me to have a task where I can use my hands and unplug from technology for a bit. There’s always something to do, always something different,” Utech says. The welcoming atmosphere has also made Utech’s experience a good one. “Everybody there has been really friendly. They treat you with a lot of respect. [They’re] welcoming to all walks of life,” she says. Both Shepherd and Utech began volunteering during the pandemic. True to its varied stock, Scraps KC does a little bit of everything, from working with a community garden to advising Girl Scouts on STEM to teaching individuals how they can best help people who are homeless. “It all blends together so beautifully. We’re able to take seeds and replant them from vegetables we may have had. Then we teach kids about the garden and use that food to feed the homeless,” Mott says. “It’s just this whole cycle of how things intertwine so easily.” thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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MUSIC
BLACK CREATURES’ LATEST OUTING IS A MUST OWN JADE AND XAVIER’S MASTERPIECE LIVES TO SPITE YOU BY NICK SPACEK
The sheer variety and number of releases offered around the region this year made putting together a list of the best albums of 2020 a real nail-biter of a task, but when it came to putting a recording in the number one slot, there was no question as to what it was going to be. When the Black Creatures released their debut full-length Wild Echoes via Kansas City’s Center Cut Records this summer, it instantly grabbed my ears with the way the duo of Jade Green and Xavier mixed genre stylings, mood, and tone to craft an album which spoke to both personal and global issues. It became my obsession to the point that I spent the better part of two and a half months going back and forth with Jade and Xavier, asking questions about the album, going track-by-track to parse out the thoughts and processes behind Wild Echoes. The sheer amount of time I’ve spent listening to and thinking about the Black Creatures’ Wild Echoes shot it to the top of my 2020 list, and once I realized just how much time this music has been in my head the last six months, and how strongly it’s affected my perspective on every other album put out in and around the area this year, it had to be my top local release of the past year. Dig deep with me in this track-by-back breakdown of Wild Echoes with Jade Green and Xavier.
“Wild”
The song seems like it’s an elegy for a relationship which is already over for one partner, but the other doesn’t know yet. What was the inspiration for the song, and why did you go with this as the first track on Wild Echoes? Xavier: Honestly, it’s difficult to know exactly what inspired this song, but it’s definitely
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
more literal than people have interpreted. The only thing that could make this opening story more traumatic is if it was about a lover, so thank god it’s not. Musically and from a story-telling perspective we felt that this track perfectly established the album’s tone and setting.
“Fear & Chaos”
This borders on being full-on horrorcore, especially with that opening message and the repeated movie references. Is the power of the track meant to contrast the opener?
Black Creatures on the come-up.
BETH TAYE
LISTEN UP
“Catharsis”
These lyrics sound intensely personal, but also seem like they can be relatable to so many other people. How’d it come to be?
Xavier: Yes. It propels the album due north and changes the perspective of the audience, as well.
“Lazarus”
With the repeated hammer cock that could be interpreted as either dangerous to someone or one’s self—and worrisome, either way—“Lazarus” is confrontational and introspective in a way which is really unique to my ears. “I live to spite you” seems to be the key lyric, but am I wrong? Xavier: A lot of these songs focus on two different sources of conflict, so it’s good you were able to pick up on that as a listener. In a way, what you’ve said is true. The idea of living to spite either an internal or external conflict is a big element of this track. That said, our favorite line is “I’ve been through myself and I climbed out the dirt into lazarus.”
“The Fall & Winter”
That opening piano line almost reminds me of My Chemical Romance’s “The Black
one to an untimely death? “The Fall & Winter” is about many of the concepts.
Black Creatures Wild Echos (Center Cut Records) Parade,” which is from an album that’s all about missing someone who’s gone. Are you singing to someone specific, or is this meant to be straight to the listener? Xavier: “The Fall & Winter” is definitely about vast degrees of separation. Have you ever been in a room full of people and felt utterly alone? Have you ever realized how much you value a friend only after they stop being your friend? Have you ever lost some-
Xavier: There’s a fine line—like a balancing act to be done—between writing something completely alienating and writing something specific to your experience. You can go either way, or your third option is to create something completely bland. In writing “Catharsis,” I did write about some obviously personal experiences, and the unfortunate fact is this particular experience is extremely relatable to a lot of people. Many of us are the children of absent parents, or even completely unreliable ones. Sometimes life be like that, to where you wake up in the middle of the afternoon and decide, “Welp, I’ve gotta write a song about my fuckin’ dad.” But it wasn’t necessarily on purpose to write something that hits so close to home. Jade Green: It’s always really rewarding to see how people connect with our music, and I like how tracks like “Catharsis” hit folks differently.
“Wretched (It Goes)”
This was the first single off Wild Echoes.
MUSIC RUNNERS-UP FOR BEST ALBUM (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)
What made you choose to lead off with it: was it the fact that it kicks off with that great riding beat, or was that it fit right in with the current focus on repairing and/or tearing down broken systems? Jade Green: So, trivia time! We wrote “Wretched” years ago, and the title is based off of Frantz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth. It makes some very obvious references to prison abolition–like how the police state thrives off of “unhappy” homes, about how the system itself is a greater issue, King’s speech about integrating us into a burning house, and so on–but Black liberation is a pretty integral piece to our wellbeing so, honestly, if you look close enough at any of our lyrics, we have and will continue to write critically about global and ongoing settler-colonialism. When the uprising started, news outlets were shining a light on the idea of abolishing the police, which solidified our decision to start with “Wretched.”
Approach Merely, Minutes In A Day {Section 2: Antique Mall} (Datura Records)
Dom Chronicles Let’s Go Outside (Self-released)
Ebony Tusks Heal_Thyself (High Dive Records)
The Freedom Affair Freedom Is Love (Sunflower Soul)
The Harrisonics Love Songs for All Occasions (Fabcom Records)
Kevin Morby Sundowner (Dead Oceans)
Shiner Schadenfreude (Two Black Eyes)
Shy Boys Talk Loud (Polyvinyl)
They Watch Us from the Moon Moon Doom (self-released)
Xavier: It definitely feels like an excellent introduction into our catalogue or the “experience that is us,” so to speak. While being a kind of rally cry or political anthem facing listeners with a laundry list of systemic issues within our social lives and government, it also outlines a few solutions and promises of change at the hands of all of us.
“D’ummm”
Listening to this cut, it seems like it’s a conscious choice for a laid-back summertime jam in line with the artists you namechecked in the song. Were you hoping to take the energy down and chill everyone out for a few? Xavier: That’s a big part of the song. Jade Green: If there’s time for hard work then there has to be time for unabashed joy. Finding the balance is real tricky, though. Let me know if you know how to do it, because I’m still stumped.
“U N I Verse”
Of a pair with “D’ummm,” here you go even more hopeful and positive, and get really contemplative. Why go so cosmic? Jade Green: Special people come into our lives and make meaning where maybe there was none before, and we all have a place here in this ridiculously confusing ride through the cosmos. That’s part of the point with making this song sound so optimistic. This song was a complete example of riding the wave. Xavier: We love a good metaphor; especially
having been intensely inspired by sci-fi and fantasy media that’s more often than not allegorical to all kinds of human experiences. How could we not?
“Elements”
Who is this song about? It’s a powerful song, lyrically, discussing as it does this person who keeps you together and whole, and the uplifting music has it feeling like it’s a celebration of life for a certain individual. Xavier: Admittedly, we have to talk more about what this song is about. “Elements” is a veneration of sorts; an acknowledgment of a relationship, an anthem for those of us who are to those who helped us be.
“Beacon”
It’s so sparse, this one. What were you all listening to that inspired the production on “Beacon”? I hear a lot of The XX. Xavier: Honestly, it’s difficult to remember. So many songs have come out since then! But, having to guess, probably The Weeknd and Macintosh Plus.
“The Grey Rain Bird”
As a penultimate cut, this seems perfect, as it seems to encapsulate the way you’re striving throughout Wild Echoes to embrace positive energy, while still acknowledging the constant struggles thrown at you by the world. Where did this song come in the process of putting the album together?
Xavier: Quite literally last. We had the instrumental way before summer, we definitely threw around a bunch of ideas, but we didn’t put any lyrics down until a few weeks when we had to.
“Echoes – Outro”
Is ending the album with an instrumental meant to allow the listener a chance to meditate on what preceded? Xavier: It’s reflective of the first track of the album; intended to be a sort of meditative, lucid, echoing experience. For somebody working out it’s like a cool-down song. Wild Echoes is out now from Center Cut Records, and is available via most major streaming services. thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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MUSIC
DANCE
Trans women aren’t just music’s future, they’re its past and present Too often, the groundbreaking and earth-shattering music made by transgender women artists is dubbed “the future of music” or “a vision of what’s to come.” While this is a nice sentiment—it certainly is poetic to dream of a future utopia where the music of trans artists reigns supreme—music created by trans women has already been woven in and out of music’s canon, communities, and its very history. The narrative of the music made by trans women being strictly futuristic begs the question: are they only the future because they’ve been pushed out of the present? Some trans art is beginning to be recognized globally for their contributions, like the shuddering and clanging vision of pop music created by Scotland’s SOPHIE or the harrowing, haunting production by Venezuelan artist Arca. But more often than not, less famous trans women musicians face extreme discrimination in their own communities by a money-hungry and vicious music industry rampant with racism and transphobia. Through solidarity that bridges the gaps of class and genre, trans women are building a more equitable industry for themselves. Kansas City’s UN/TUCK collective, a queer and trans-focused record label, are at the forefront of this ethos locally. As an entity, UN/TUCK promotes the work of the individual members, while also using a collaborative effort to put on intricate live shows and orchestrate music connections both locally and nationwide. Founded in 2017 by Zoey Shopmaker, Mazzy Mann, and Lorelei Kretsinger, UN/TUCK was crafted out of a need for music venues where queer and trans people could feel safe and showcase their art. “I strongly believed that if I could elevate the voices of those in my community, I could elevate my own,” cofounder Mazzy Mann says, of this need for change. “Therefore, I was creating a stage for myself, because I wasn’t being given opportunities. Even up until right before COVID-19, it was like fighting tooth and nail to book a show with venues.” While queer artists are beginning to gain traction in the mainstream, they are disproportionately white or cisgender compared to the vast diversity of queer art at large. While it is truly
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
historic to see SOPHIE, Arca, or Kim Petras recognized for their contributions to music as transgender women, Quay Dash still does not own the rights to her music and faces harassment in her own neighborhood. Mykki Blanco was originally not paid for their contributions to a Teyana Taylor song. Big Freedia’s vocals were featured in two top ten songs on the Billboard charts in the last five years, Drake’s “Nice For What” and Beyoncé’s “Formation,” yet was not credited as a feature on either track’s title. In general, trans people are in the minority, especially Black trans people, says Zoey Shopmaker. “To break through these certain barriers, like representation, is honestly still a problem. Cis white people get booked way more than Black trans people. The music industry likes to tokenize trans people, but it doesn’t necessarily like to create level platforms for trans people. When I think of successful trans artists, it’s a handful.” “Everywhere you go, your identity is just put into question in some way, shape, or form,” local punk artist Clelia Walking of Bath Consolidated says. “That doesn’t stop when you get in the music industry.” In Kansas City, transgender performers are placed at a distinctive disadvantage to their cisgender peers. Even when club promoters are interested in booking trans artists, often exorbitant fees stand in the way. “It’s hard, because in the Kansas City area, it’s just hard to get paid [at many venues]. You kind of have to put money down, and there’s not really a guaranteed audience.” says Lina Dannov, a member of UN/TUCK. “UN/TUCK is cool because it’s creating its own spaces. The three shows we did last year,
WORDS BY: ALLISON HARRIS, PHOTOS BY: MASON KILPATRICK, TRAE MAYBERRY, SPENCER CHANEY, SHEPPA
they were all in DIY spaces. Transportal was in Washington Square Park, so that was interesting. We get to come into a space and take it over, rather than have to be coming into someone’s [venue].” Moving forward, these women say venues and shows have to change in order to give everyone a fair shot. Through UN/TUCK, Mann says that they are able to create brand new “pop-up” style events and performances, which are more equitable all the way around. By centering their own talents as well, the crowds they draw are queerer, and therefore safer for everyone involved. “It was so much better for me, for us, to do the ideology of the ‘pop-up space,’” says Mann. “We did a three-part series, last year, called the Portal series, that was: Transfiguration, Transportal, and Transhuman, and these were three giant, DIY pop-up events. No venues, we just got the grant funding for it, and we just did it.” “We’ve always been struggling to have space and find space,” Mann continues. “So, the ideal musical landscape is that we would have our own spaces that would not be infringed upon by the venue. As soon as we start talking about profiting, having to save the space as a business, it’s no longer about the community, and what the community needs in order to provide safer and more accommodating spaces. It’s no longer about the people, it’s about the institution.” COVID-19 has upended all aspects of the live music industry, but because of a reliance on the need to reinvent, UN/TUCK is at a distinct advantage compared to straight and cisgender music alliances. While the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on our world, it offers the opportunity to intent something new and to change the things weren’t fair or weren’t working. Throughout the pandemic, virtual and livestream concerts have thrived, often harnessing
MUSIC
their viewership to collect funds for mutual aid, the transition funds of Black trans people, and a multitude of other organizations. FAIRYWORLD, a wide-ranging group of DJ’s from across the globe, hosted Zoom parties featuring a heavily queer lineup consistently since the spring. Open Pit Presents broke ground in Minecraft to create in-game server parties with a multitude of transgender performers, and they raised more than $20,000 for the Okra Project, which provides meals and money for groceries to Black trans people. TransgenderAvenue used their Twitch music streams to donate directly to trans peoples’ aid funds. Moving music experiences onto the internet may also solve a problem of accessibility for people with disabilities, who are often not made to feel safe in a traditional live setting. However, if online live music wants to be a sustainable model for performers, it’ll have to adapt into a model that rivals the profits of live shows with liquor sales and cover charges, In an Instagram Story post on December 6, Mann called out the hypocrisy of KC venues asking for monetary support to remain afloat during the pandemic after being denied access to perform at these same venues during the span of her career. “I have been making music, playing shows, and providing platforms for a good eight years now in Kansas City, and the amount of blacklisting from radio and venues I’ve received is innumerable,” she writes. “So, no, I don’t want to #savethestage. I want to work harder when this is all said and done to continue to build spaces that are more inclusive and more accessible to a large number of people who are not represented in the Kansas City venue.” Zoey Shopmaker echoes for this need for major change, saying that to her, a more ideal music landscape looks like “more money in the pockets of Black, queer artists. To me, that’s really what it comes down to. The music industry is going to be broken so long as the systemic racism in the industry is not addressed.” UN/TUCK’s members and changes to the Kansas City music scene have already inspired other creators. Local musician Sloane Wednesday speaks of the way it has affected her own career as a musician. “My friend Mazzy, and Zoey Shopmaker have this collective that puts on a bunch of shows and raves, and that’s where I was exposed to their music, and inspired by them doing it, that made me think ‘Oh, I wanna do that too,’” Wednesday says. In conversations with these prolific local musicians, it is clear the effect of seeing other trans artists perform on their own musical journeys cannot be downplayed. Representation matters to queer people. Shopmaker, found representation in Octo Octa’s performance at UN/TUCK’s first ever show, a tribute to pioneering force Wendy Carlos. “She played this live set for us.. She is this six foot three, gorgeous trans woman, super smart,
extremely talented,” Shopmaker says, eyes aglow. “It was kind of a revelation, having her out and seeing her play. That night that she played, I think, was just a really transformative night for me. It was a packed dance floor the whole night, everyone played amazing sets. She just killed it and introduced me to house and techno music in a way I had never experienced it before.” Transgender women artists help shape music in huge ways, but too frequently either go largely unrecognized or are pushed out of their careers before they can gain notoriety. The aforementioned Wendy Carlos—a legendary artist who composed the scores to movies like The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and Tron—goes all too often uncredited for her huge influence in movie scoring and synth music. Y2K revival pioneer Ayesha Erotica and electronica noise pop duo Black Dresses both can be credited with the development of niche internet genres (that go on to influence larger genres, in a trickle-up sort of way), but both artists
In general, trans people are in the minority, especially Black trans people. —Zoey Shopmaker had to give up online personas and the release of music due to transphobic harassment. The aforementioned battle between Mykki Blanco and Teyana Taylor’s management is a hopeful one that some trans people are able to fight for their right to be credited in their contributions to the music of cis artists. Blanco’s eventual crediting on the track was a win against the tokenization without accreditation of trans artists, Mann says. “I think that, when you start thinking and talking about representational queer politics, it comes down to, it’s easier to commodify, tokenize, put it out there, as if these people are cool, awesome props for your video, but not paying them. There’s this divide, even with the narrative that’s placed on, say, a SOPHIE, or an Arca, that they’re really edgy, they’re really cool, and we don’t really talk about the lived experiences of queer and trans people, which is that they have less access to opportunity,” Mann says. Shopmaker agrees that although we are beginning to see more trans women actually being credited for their work, it is usually much more nuanced than it seems. Even the more famous trans artists still face harassment and discrimination, while the tokenization of those artists sometimes swings in their favor. “In this world that I’m a part of, being a trans woman is actually kind of a leg up.” Shopmaker says. “I’ve [only] been in it for two years, and I was working as a DJ full time before the pandemic. I was booked out from March till the
end of June. In the underground dance music scene, people want to put you on. Because that’s what underground dance music was built on, it was built on Black queer people. So that ethos of wanting to represent marginalized artists more definitely gives me a leg up in my industry.” “It’s really weird,” she continues. “And that, on some level, feels kind of token-y. But I’m not gonna complain about it, because I appreciate people wanting to put me on, as an artist.” No matter what the future holds with COVID-19’s disruption of live music and in-person musical collaborations, the work of collectives like UN/TUCK and solidarity being built at the ground level by trans artists across the country are going to have major effects in the next few years. When asked what an ideal music future looks like to them, trans women artists are not looking for their art to be more important than all others—they simply want to exist and be treated fairly in music. Local artist Diyana Shipp is optimistic about things changing for the better. “I’ve seen so many scenes, I’ve been touring since I was 17, and I’m 28 now, so that’s 11 years of going around the fucking country, and seeing how other people operate,” Shipp says. “I have been incredibly grateful, in the sense that I have seen other trans people flourish in a capacity I never even understood. We’re so fucking capable of making music that is incredibly beautiful and profound, in whatever capacity. That’s the beauty of music, just the expression of it, and its aspects.” “I wanna see grandmas front hardcore bands,” Shipp says, laughing. “I wanna see trans-ass fucking grandmas front some fucking hardcore bands, going crazy, losing their goddamn minds, because they never got to before!” “We’re gonna be those grandmas,” Walking says. “And we’re gonna be helping the other grandmas. That’s the future.” UN/TUCK, online venues, and informal collectives of creatives lifting each other up are all building new spaces and opportunities that help create a better world. “We should have our own spaces that are centered around queer voices,” Mann says. “And Black voices. And femme voices. And trans voices. And underrepresented art and music stylings. All those things that are not represented in the mainstream.” While under the surface of the mainstream, those spaces are out there, and they are waiting for us to show up. Music created by trans artists has shaped Kansas City’s underground music scene considerably, and they deserve credit for it. So don’t wait until the mystical trans future arrives; the future is already here. We just have to find it.
thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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FILM
Sound of Metal
AMAZON STUDIOS
THE BEST FILMS OF 2020 EVEN AS THE YEAR FAILED, MOVIES CONTINUED TO DELIVER BY ABBY OLCESE
One of the questions posed to me most frequently in 2020 (other than “How are you surviving quarantine alone with your cats?” and “You’re not sick, are you?”) was “So, do you have anything to watch right now?” Like every other business in this hellscape of a year, 2020 did a number on the film industry. That doesn’t mean, however, that just because everything was shut down or limited that there wasn’t anything new to get excited about. In fact, 2020 was a strong year for new films, and particularly movies from breakout talents and first-time directors. Theater closings, limited capacities, and all-online festivals may have made it harder than usual to get hold of new movies, but we still had plenty of noteworthy art that reflected diverse perspectives and creative ingenuity— themes that would come to define how we survived in difficult, divided times. Some of last year’s outstanding movies came via streaming services. Others had theatrical releases, and some you can rent online to support local theaters like Screenland Armour and Glenwood Arts if you’re not ok with going back into an auditorium yet. Discover 2020’s best cinematic offerings, and check out what you may have missed last year.
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
STUFF THAT SCARED US:
2020 was a big year for horror filmmaking (make of that what you will). The Mortuary Collection was a visually stunning throwback to anthology horror, conjuring up memories of the Crypt Keeper, Creepshow and EC comics, and featuring a pitch-perfect lead performance from genre favorite Clancy Brown. Writer-director Ryan Spindell came crashing out of the gate with one of the most impressive debut films in recent memory. Nearly every horror film that made my year-end favorites list came from a filmmaker making their feature debut. Andrew Patterson’s slow-burn Sci-Fi thriller The Vast of Night was, like The Mortuary Collection, a striking movie that pulled off magical filmmaking with almost zero resources. Josh Ruben’s twisty storytelling horror-comedy Scare Me got great mileage out of comic performances and its tight cabin-in-the-woods setting. Other strong genre entries did what horror does best, calling attention to diverse subjects and perspectives through
Possessor
NEON
artistic metaphor. In Relic, Natalie Erika James explored the terror of aging, inherited illness, and watching a loved one die. Her film followed three generations of women, two of whom try to care for their grandmother at the end of her life, in a house that bears the scars of intergenerational mental illness. Remi Weekes applied horror to the refugee experience with His House, a story of an African couple who try to start over in a new country,
but can’t shake the ghosts of their past. Then, of course, there was Brandon Cronenberg’s wild, icky Possessor, which stood apart from just about everything else on this list. The younger Cronenberg’s futuristic horror movie about a body-swapping assassin didn’t do much to distinguish him creatively from his iconic father David, director of Videodrome and The Fly. However, it did assure viewers that Brandon Cronenberg is every bit as
FILM
talented as his dad, with chilly performances (including a stunner of a turn from star Andrea Riseborough) and some incredible images that stuck with me for a long time afterward.
STUFF THAT MADE US LAUGH:
Continuing the train of auspicious debuts, a number of comedies also came from first-time feature directors expressing personal and artistic points of view that resulted in experiences ranging from astoundingly weird to deeply relatable. Matthew Rankin’s highly fictionalized trip through Canadian history The Twentieth Century lived joyfully on the weird end of the spectrum, weaving together pieces of Guy Maddin, Monty Python, and Paul Schrader to create a delightfully bizarre piece of cult art. The time-loop romantic comedy Palm Springs covered slightly more familiar ground in a fresh way, with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as wedding guests whose repeating day becomes a metaphor for maturity and relational commitment. On the other end of things, female filmmakers tapped into themes of repression, injustice, and aging to astounding results. Karen Maine’s semi-autobiographical Yes, God, Yes, about a Catholic teenager torn between her growing sexual urges and fear of going to hell because of them, rang hilari-
Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado
STUFF THAT MADE US THINK:
The best dramas of the last year were, as with most of 2020’s movies, widely disparate and often experimental. Sean Durkin’s The Nest created a tense domestic drama by using visual hallmarks of the horror genre to ratchet up viewers’ sense of unease. Nothing supernatural or violent happens to Carrie Coon, Jude Law, or their characters’ two kids, but Durkin gives us a strong sense, through mood and economical storytelling, that this family is a horror story unto themselves. I’m Thinking of Ending Things took experimentation to a wholly different level, with an eerie tale of relationship, identity, and loneliness that felt uniquely attuned
NETFLIX
oration with Lawrence-based filmmaker and writer Kevin Willmott, did play with influences and flashbacks in its depiction of the emotional state of a group of Black Vietnam vets. Lee’s film features an excellent performance from the late Chadwick Boseman, as well as a career-best turn from Delroy Lindo, whose paranoid, traumatized Paul takes increasing direction from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s Fred C. Dobbs. The Sound of Metal, from first-time director Darius Marder, combined realism and intense performances with incredible sound design and editing to communicate the experience of a drummer with progressive hearing loss. By focusing on repeated actions and small moments, and fluctuating their levels in the mix, the film helps us understand what Riz Ahmed’s Ruben has lost, as well as how this massive life experience fundamentally changes who he is. Ahmed goes from tightly coiled frustration to a gradually more relaxed understanding of who he’s becoming. Just as impressive is actor and American Sign Language advocate Paul Raci, exuding gentle humanity and wisdom as the director of a deaf addiction recovery community.
STUFF THAT WAS TRUE: The Twentieth Century
OSCILLOSCOPE
ously and uncomfortably true. Killing Eve writer and producer Emerald Fennell made her feature writing and directing debut with the razor-sharp feminist revenge fable Promising Young Woman, in which Carey Mulligan exacts gutsy revenge on the men who wronged her best friend. Radha Blank’s The Forty-Year-Old Version was a charming and lived-in character study of a New York playwright who discovers her skill as a rapper as she approaches middle age.
to writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s sensibilities. More than any other film this year, Kaufman’s multi-layered story about a young woman’s trip to meet her boyfriend’s parents felt like spending time in another person’s brain. The result was a dreamlike and strangely empathetic experience, the kind of movie that leaves you more intrigued than satisfied. While not as wildly experimental, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, his latest collab-
In a year where many of us were isolated and separated from loved ones, 2020’s documentaries provided warm reminders of connection and community. There were also, however, insightful and sometimes damning looks at the systems we depend on to keep everything in place. Cameraperson documentarian Kirsten Johnson continued her masterful run with her second film, Dick Johnson is Dead, about her relationship with her father as they both deal with his worsening dementia. Dick, Johnson’s dad, is a sweet and willing subject, and Johnson’s treatment of him—considering his legacy and
creating joyful visions of his death and afterlife—is a moving testament to their bond. It also offers a special kind of comfort to anyone who’s experienced, or has thought much about, the death of a parent or family member. Legacy and recognition were also at the heart of Mucho Mucho Amor, about Spanish-language TV astrologer Walter Mercado. Mercado’s flamboyant life and persona are plenty entertaining on their own, but the film’s celebration of him culminated in a tribute that was both satisfying and heartwarming. Heartwarming, too, was Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent, in which Sergio, an 86-year-old man and possible human incarnation of Paddington, works undercover for a P.I. at a nursing home, only to become actual friends with the residents. Of all the characters cinema gave us last year, Sergio is perhaps the sweetest and kindest. Not every documentary was about warm fuzzies, however. Alexander Nanau’s harrowing Collective felt more like a season of The Wire than a documentary. Nanau follows Romanian journalists uncovering a story behind a tragic nightclub fire which killed dozens and wounded hundreds—many of whom died later of hospital-based infections. He then turns his attention to the newly-minted minister of health, an honorable guy who’s trying to fix the corrupt healthcare system, but faces opposition at every turn. Boys State, about the American Legion event which teaches high school boys about government, provided a microcosm of the present and future of politics that felt equally hopeful and horrifying in an election year. Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss capture a unique set of subjects who you could easily see going on to political careers, during a formative moment in their lives. It feels inevitable we’ll hear more from Steven Garza, Rene Otero, Ben Feinstein, and Robert MacDougall one day. Depending on your perception of them, that could either be a dream or a nightmare. thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
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KC CARES
KC CARES KANSAS CITY ARTISTS COALITION BY BROOKE TIPPIN
Ribbon cutting on September 12, 2019 at the opening of KCAC’s new Midtown location. COURTESY OF THE KANSAS CITY ARTISTS COALITION
Print League KC Demo at KCAC where the art of screenprinting was demonstrated to guests. COURTESY OF THE KANSAS CITY ARTISTS COALITION
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
The Kansas City Artists Coalition (KCAC) was created to change the lives of artists living in Kansas City, Missouri and the region. KCAC is an artist-centered, artist-run alternative space that presents a variety of exhibitions of contemporary artists’ work in its Main Gallery and the Snap Space Gallery. They are constantly working to support artists at every stage of their careers and thus the pandemic, while sudden and in many ways unexpected, has not fundamentally changed how they engage and support their artists. They are opportunity makers that allow artists to dream big and grow their careers without risk. During the pandemic and citywide shut down, KCAC pivoted all their exhibitions and programming to virtual platforms. They worked to gather resources and information specific to each artist to see how they could support them. For their studio tenant artists, they raised enough funds to provide all 10 of their artist tenants free rent for four months to allow them continued safe and stable access to their studio spaces so they could focus on creating artwork and generating needed income from art sales during that time. The gallery reopened to the public in June with mask requirements, contact tracing, and timed tickets. They continue to maintain all of their virtual programming to date. Collectors, patrons, and artists have the opportunity to access art in a way that is most comfortable and appropriate to their needs at this time. Exhibitions are on view in person or in a virtual walking tour each month. This year, KCAC partnered with Imag-
A view of the 150+ original artworks that were donated by local and regional artists to the 2020 KCAC Art Auction. KIRK DECKER
ine That!, an arts organization that provides art studios to creative individuals with developmental disabilities. Imagine That! submitted the work of Parker Levi, one of their participating artists, to the Exhibition Call and Parker was selected by KCAC for a solo exhibition in our Emerging Artists Gallery—the Snap Space for the month of July. From the start, Parker showed such enthusiasm and energy for the opportunity and experience of having his very first solo exhibition at an established art gallery. From the day of his Opening Reception to the last day of his exhibition, Parker was in the galleries with guests touring his show and talking about his works as a whole and individually. With his commitment, diligence, and enthusiasm he made his show a huge success with all but two of his works sold by the last day of the exhibition. Between January 20 and February 24, you can enjoy a preview of over 150 artworks for the 38th Annual Art Auction. Artworks are donated by local and regional artists to ensure the KCAC mission of supporting artists at every level of their career, can stay strong for another year. All proceeds from the Auction goes to help fund operations, exhibitions, and programming for the KCAC. For more information on this year’s Auction visit: kansascityartistscoalition.org/ support/auction/ If you are interested in a general donation at any level, support gives hundreds of artists a year the ability to grow their practice and gives thousands of patrons a safe and welcoming space to learn about art. If you would like to make a donation please visit: kansascityartistscoalition.org/support/donations/
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thepitchkc.com | January 2021 | THE PITCH
29
SAVAGE LOVE
GAY DREAM BELIEVER BY DAN SAVAGE
Dear Dan: Dear Dan: I’m wondering if you can help me with some dream interpretation. If it helps for context, I’m a single 29-year-old gay man. For just about as long as I can remember, I’ve been having mildly unsatisfying sex dreams in that the dreams never seem to lead to sex itself. My dream partners range from people I work with to people from high school to celebrities I’ll never get the chance to meet. I never dream about someone I wouldn’t want to sleep with in the waking world, given the opportunity. The scenarios are generally different as well. Sometimes the sexual tension is palpable but we’re in a crowded room. Sometimes we get close enough to get started but the setting is off. Sometimes we start to get hot and heavy but the dream ends just prior to the sex. In each case I wake up frustrated and masturbate to finish the fantasy. I’ve been pretty sexually starved during the pandemic, Dan, so you can imagine my frustration when I woke up this morning having almost had dream sex with Andrew Rannells. Can you think of why this might be happening? Any advice would be appreciated! Distancing Real Earnestly And Missing Erotic Romps Dear DREAMER: “Well this is certainly VERY interesting,” said actor, singer, and author Andrew Rannells. “I’m honored I made the list of people DREAMER would actually have sex with in real life, if given the chance.” Seeing as this two-time Tony-Award nominee is taken—Rannells fell in love with Tuc Watkins, one of his co-stars in Boys In the Band on Broadway, and the two men now live together in Los Angeles—there’s not much chance of something happening between an anonymous “Savage Love” reader, DREAMER, and Rannells, one of the stars of The Prom on Netflix. But Rannells was more than happy to do a little amateur dream interpretation for a fan. “As for the root of this issue,” said Rannells, “I suppose it could have something to do with not having the confidence of actually following through with the full act? Maybe while awake he could experiment with fantasizing about a more complete experience and see if that changes his dream life?”
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THE PITCH | January 2021 | thepitchkc.com
My two cents: perhaps these dreams are lingering evidence of some shame about your same-sex desires—which is why your dream universes conspire to prevent you from having gay sex—or perhaps the continued existence of bigots who would prevent gay men from having sex preys on your subconscious mind and manifests in the form of these frustrating/frustration dreams. Or maybe there’s no way of knowing what the hell is going on here and trying to attach meaning to something as random as a dream is a waste of time or a scam or both. The real takeaway here, DREAMER, is that you now have Rannells’ permission to masturbate about him whenever you like— or at least that’s how I would interpret his encouragement to fantasize about “more complete” experiences with the men who populate your dreams, Rannells included. You didn’t need his permission to masturbate about him, of course, and as a general rule we shouldn’t need to ask the people we want to jack off about for their okay. But Rannells basically offered, DREAMER, so have at. “Ultimately, we can’t control our dreams,” added Rannells. “For instance I have a recurring stress dream where I am supposed to be driving Jessica Lange somewhere and I can’t get the GPS to work. What does it mean? We’ll never know.” Follow Andrew Rannells on Instagram @AndrewRannells. Dear Dan: After years of receiving oral sex from girlfriends who were careful to never inflict any sort of pain on my testicles, I met a woman who wasn’t so careful. For our fifth date, she came back to my place and we watched a movie. After the movie we began to kiss and soon she was making love to my stiff penis with her mouth while rather roughly massaging my testicles. However this came to be, I was liking it quite a bit. The more pressure she applied to my testicles, the harder my penis became. This has never happened to me in my 33 years of lovemaking! I actually asked her to squeeze my testicles harder and harder and I can honestly say my penis was harder than it has ever been. Against my better judgment, I asked her to squeeze my testicles as hard as she could. After several seconds of the most intense pressure she could provide, I had the most powerful orgasm I have ever had. All of a sudden, I was dizzy and my vision went black. When I finally came back to reality, there was an extraordinary amount of come all over the place. She has made love to my penis dozens of times since in the same manner. My question: Will there be any physical complications to my newly discovered taste for this kind of play? I look forward to your response! This Exquisitely Sensuous Torment Enhances Sex Dear TESTES: Ball busting—the kink you stumbled on—is inherently risky, TESTES, in that you could actually rupture, aka “bust,” one or both of your balls. Hence the name. But
considering how much pleasure you’re deriving from this and considering how short life is and considering how long you’ve been sexually active and considering how little use you’re gonna get out of your balls once you’re dead, TESTES, I don’t see any reason why you should deprive yourself—at this stage—of this newly discovered sexual pleasure. Well, actually… I can see one reason why you might want to knock this off: When it comes to ball busting, TESTES, there’s no way to eliminate the risk of a physical complication that lands your sack in the emergency room and E.R. nurses and doctors have enough on their plates right now. So maybe give your balls a break until after the pandemic is over and then go nuts. Dear Dan: I’m writing in response to WHY, the Italian fellow whose partner has a significantly lower libido than he does. I would like to share my perspective. I have a high libido and my partner of more than twenty years has a low libido. From the perspective of the person with the lower libido, there’s no problem to address. The person with the lower libido gets to have sex whenever they want. When they don’t want sex, it doesn’t happen. If WHY wants to engage his partner in a conversation about this he has to make it clear this is a make-or-break situation. Use very specific language like, “If we can’t talk about this, I’m leaving,” or, “If we don’t go to counseling, I can’t stay in this relationship.” In my case, I did not communicate how important the issue was and my partner did not think we needed to talk about it because it wasn’t a problem for her and she didn’t know—because I didn’t tell her—how much of a problem it was for me. Eventually I acted out and had a random hookup. We wound up in counseling, which got us talking, but nothing changed the fact that we have very different libidos. More than likely I am moving out when our youngest son goes to college. If I had to do it over again I would have let my partner know exactly how important it is to me that we have a healthy, robust sexual relationship. Having a difficult conversation is better than acting out in a way that puts everyone’s health at risk and damages trust. I have no idea if that would have changed things between us, but I would feel a whole lot better about how things went down. One Man’s Opinion Dear OMO: Thank you for sharing, OMO, and here’s hoping you get a chance to “do it over again.” With a new partner, if you wind up leaving your partner, or with the partner you have now, if you stay. There’s nothing you can say to change your partner’s libido, OMO, but if you keep talking you may be able to work out a compromise or an accommodation that takes the pressure off her (to round her libido up) and off you (to round yours down). Good luck. Question for Dan? Email him at mail@ savagelove.net. On Twitter at @fakedansavage.
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ReLeaf Resources
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