The Pitch: April 2019 by The Pitch KC

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CONTENTS

6 5 IN MEMORIAM

End of watch Remembering Jen Chen, onetime Pitch Night Ranger and alltime KC friend. BY SCOTT WILSON

6 NEWS

Relief Pitch After the destruction of black landmarks on KC’s East Side, what’s the path forward? BY TRACI ANGEL

12 FEATURE

Green New Deal Rural Kansas may not be ready for the CBD craze, but it clearly needs hemp. BY DAVID HUDNALL

16 CAFE

Exile in Guyville Guy Fieri, the Power & Light District, a fake dive bar: You gotta love America, baby. BY LIZ COOK

18 FOOD

Down with O.P. Is the downtown Overland park food scene low-key kind of wonderful? Yes. Yes, it is. BY APRIL FLEMING

20 EAT

Eat This Now Cacio E Pepe at Farina BY APRIL FLEMING

21 DRINK

Drink This Now Momentum at Lawrence Beer Company BY APRIL FLEMING

22 ARTS

Border States Bricolaje at La Esquina examines the personal and the political in the Mexican-American experience. BY EMILY COX

26 Cannabis Culture

A sponsored guide to CBD, hemp, and more in the KC area.

28 Conversant in Chutzpah

Multihyphenate musician Coleen Dieker navigates a code-switching career. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

34 PAGES

Always Sunny Happiness guru — and KC native — Gretchen Rubin’s latest is a Marie Kondo-style guide about the joys of declutterization. BY DAVID HUDNALL

JUNE

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CONTENTS

THE PITCH

Publisher Stephanie Carey Editor in Chief David Hudnall Digital Editor Kelcie McKenney Staff Writer Emily Park Contributing Writers Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Riley Cowing, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Roxie Hammill, Libby Hanssen, Deborah Hirsch, Dan Lybarger, Eric Melin, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek Little Village Creative Services Jordan Sellergren Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Joe Carey Graphic Designers Austin Crockett, Jennifer Larson, Katie McNeil, Danielle Moore, Gianfranco Ocampo, Kirsten Overby, Alex Peak, Vu Radley, Zachary Trover Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Senior Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialist Becky Losey Director of Operations Andrew Miller Multimedia Intern Rebekah Lodos Design Intern Jake Edmisten

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Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey

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DISTRIBUTION

The Pitch distributes 35,000 copies a month and is available free throughout Greater Kansas City, limited to one copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $5 each, payable at The Pitch’s office in advance. The Pitch may be distributed only by The Pitch’s authorized independent contractors or authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of The Pitch, take more than one copy of each week’s issue. Mail subscriptions: $22.50 for six months or $45 per year, payable in advance. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Kansas City, MO 64108.

36 MUSIC

Starting a Fire With a label deal and a new album, Hembree finds its wild self at last. BY NICK SPACEK

40 Out of Eclipse

With a lush new LYON disc, Andrew Morgan enters a new phase. BY NICK SPACEK

42 FILM

Camp Counsel How Queer Eye brought my friend Joey Greene out of the wilderness. BY ERIC MELIN

44 SAVAGE LOVE

Hot for Asians “I met this really handsome Chinese American guy, and I’ve been exclusively attracted to Asian guys since. Is this normal? BY DAN SAVAGE

46 EVENTS

April Calendar What to do and where to be this month.

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2019 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 1627 Main St., #600, Kansas City, MO 64108 For information or to share a story tip, email tips@thepitchkc.com For advertising: stephanie@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6702 For classifieds: steven@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6732

COVER

“Prairie Hemp,” by Emma Olson

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IN MEMORIAM

END OF WATCH REMEMBERING JEN CHEN, ONETIME PITCH NIGHT RANGER AND ALL-TIME KC FRIEND. BY SCOTT WILSON

The Night Ranger left at dawn. That cruel fact — fabled Pitch nightlife columnist Jen Chen dying at 6:37 a.m. March 6 as her husband described the sunrise to her — is the only aspect of her departure that’s even remotely appropriate. The rest is wrong. The cancer discovered less than a year ago. The infection that hastened her decline. The death of her own mother last fall. Jen being just 46 and leaving behind a family, a 6-year-old daughter. Absolutely wrong. The sheer, galling stupidity makes you cry. So does losing Jen, whose gift to Kansas City was to see more of it than most, understand it better than all but a few, and judge it almost never. It’s not a coincidence that the friends who said goodbye to her a week later said essentially the same thing about our relationships with her. She was a singular listener. She got us, effortlessly. To talk with her was to be bathed in a gentle glow. She could laugh with us at our mistakes in a way that encouraged us to keep telling on ourselves but allowed us to forgive ourselves faster. Under her byline, both as Night Ranger and, later, as a Pitch staff writer, Jen was KC’s friend, its vodka cranberry–sipping wingman, recording local experience by the happy, sad, or absurd jiggerful. And as she conveyed the grinning one-liners and shitfaced non sequiturs of third-shift drinkers and foamy-lipped regulars and glossy cougars and wide-eyed recent college grads, she captured a community. It was a different place then. Our city’s downtown was on the weird cusp of gentrification, and the country was at war. The comedy of George W. Bush’s presidency had given way to brutalist folly. There was no Facebook yet, so friendships still required effort and yielded in-person awkwardness. Life was already internet-saturated enough that it was getting easier to dislike most people and things, and the new century seemed to suck out more energy than it generated. In the face of this entropy, though, Jen motored from bar to bar, notebook in hand, “Research Assistants” in tow, and chose to filter what she saw through the rosy lens of a 1980s-FM-loving suburban overachiever who has sneaked out the night before senior skip day. She was still doing her homework, but her paper would be about something not discussed in school: how actual people cope with being actual people. She was there to transcribe our collective pre-hangovers, but her writing reminded us that we’d stepped out in order to feel off the clock, slightly freer.

Along the way, she discovered that proximity to liquor was rarely an end in itself. Some of Jen’s most piquant work involved nights away from Plaza glamazons and the reduced-calorie seductions of the metro’s various anybars. I’m remembering her chronicle of a fetish troupe’s get-together at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club (“Whip Cream,” November 2005), which veers from coy to blunt without a hint of leering. She wraps up her dispatch this way: Pounding techno music started, and a shirtless guy got onstage. As he bent over a table, another guy tied him up and started whipping him. In the meantime, a woman in a quasi-French-maid outfit and knee-high black fishnets climbed onstage, sat on a chair, and spread her legs. Another woman who was similarly dressed stood behind her and unbuttoned the first woman’s top a bit to reveal a leopard-print bra. After the second woman teasingly caressed French Maid’s exposed skin, she pulled out a razor blade and made two thin cuts on French Maid’s shoulders, then bent down and started licking the blood. They were soon joined by a lithe guy wearing a sleeveless, diaphanous dress with a silver, sequined spider-web pattern radiating from his crotch. (He wore black briefs underneath.) Mr. Spider Web (aka Asmo, the bassist for Vibralux) got on the other shoulder and started lapping up the blood, too. We weren’t too shocked or grossed out; the whole thing seemed surreal. Afterward, a DJ put on some music, and everyone danced. That’s Jen: part Jane Austen (the aboveness whose superiority is ironic), part Joan Didion (the participatory matter-of-factness, the blood), zero Bukowski (to conjure beautiful losers, someone would have to lose; that’s not how Jen processed us). And her writing was no less involving or humane when she moved beyond the column to cover the city at large — or later, when she rejoined local journalism as a producer at KCUR. When I started writing this, I got in touch with Catherine Frazier, who worked on The Pitch’s retail side just before Jen started writing Night Ranger and became — as “Cat” — one of the column’s most frequent Research Assistants. “When I went out with her for the column, she never made it feel like we were at whatever random bar for her work,” Frazier

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told me recently. “We were both in our early 30s, and she was kind of over the party scene, so she was able to be observant, introspective, and empathetic when writing about people on the hunt for a hookup or on an all-night binge. We’re both pretty quiet and introverted before drinks, but we both loved to people-watch and make up stories about strangers. Observe and snark. Who doesn’t love to do that? It was like being a part of the filming of Drunk History or Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But Night Ranger was also full of compassion: “Even though she may have made fun of a group of people or a bar,” Frazier added, “she was your older sibling who’s like, Girl, I know how it is. I’ve puked there. I’ve kissed that rando myself.” In the office, Jen was quiet except for a robust, post-Beavis and Butthead giggle that could also compound into a brassy HA! Her workspace was on the dark side of the moon compared with the staff writers’ cubes and the editors’ offices. Her view was of the elevator landing, where no natural light fell on the secure vestibule or the two generic armchairs where visitors, mostly uninvited complainants and tipsters, waited to be seen by an editor or a writer. If a staffer brought beer to share, though, this was where it was drunk. And at the high counter that separated Jen from the foyer, everyone stopped and tried to get her to laugh. We started our day there and ended it there, too. She saw and heard everything but said nothing. She kept even the secrets she overheard. On the right side of her aural field, out of her line of sight, was a cove of disappointing vending machines. One for beverages, dully reliable but peddling Cokes to

a beer-thirsty staff; one hand-cranked candy dispenser, giving out palmfuls of stale, defeated red hots by the quarter; and one gallery of single-serving salt and sugar programmed by grifters. This last could, and often was, tilted back and forth on the uneven old plank flooring by those whom it had cheated, a rebuttal that was never conducted without loud profanities. Over her left shoulder were the most acoustically unforgiving bathrooms in the history of local architecture, used by people who consumed only cola, beer, dusty Hot Tamales, and Doritos. She never even wore earbuds. She closed her tab at the paper just ahead of this town’s cocktail renaissance and microbrew overflow. This was probably a relief to the person whose Night Ranger summary of Mission’s departed Clarette Club — ”a sleazy good time” — was added to the servers’ shirts as a slogan and was an easy epitaph for the column itself. The last few times I met up with Jen, we drank coffee. She helped me pick out pants at a Plaza store once, suggesting, in her deadpan voice, that the ones I liked were not “assy” enough. Then and other times, we talked about our old days and her new ones, as a mother. Our relationships were without drama, so we indulged some unmalicious gossip about other people. The time always passed easily, and we knew, when we said we needed to do it again soon, that we meant it. On these occasions, the sun was always up. I got over missing the Night Ranger. But the daylight Jen Chen, the calm and wise and gracious friend, is an impossible loss. Scott Wilson joined The Pitch in 2001 and was its editor from 2011 through 2017. thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

NEWS

Fugly MAKEOVER Indoor, outdoor, enter one, enter ‘em all.

AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK LANDMARKS ON KC’S EAST SIDE, WHAT’S THE PATH FORWARD? BY TRACI ANGEL

Bob Kendrick was sitting at Niecie’s on Troost, working his way through the “Daily” — scrambled eggs, grits, white toast — on a Saturday morning last June when he got the call. Kendrick is president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and on the line was his colleague, Dr. Raymond Doswell, the museum’s curator and VP. “You’ve got to come down here,” Doswell said. Kendrick rushed to the Buck O’Neill Research and Education Center, an extension of the NLBM at 18th Street and Paseo. In 1920, eight black baseball team owners met in the building — it was formerly the Paseo YMCA, one of the oldest black YMCAs in the country, opened in 1914 — and gave birth to the Negro Leagues. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. An effort to renovate the building into a museum and event space had been underway and ongoing since O’Neill, the legendary Kansas City Monarchs player and manager, died in 2006. When Kendrick arrived, fire department officials were spread out across the building, trying to push water out of the building and mitigate damage from a water pipe that had been sliced open inside. The water had been running for at least 14 hours before the leak was discovered. The new parquet floor in the gymnasium-turned-event space was ruined. It appeared to be an inside job. “I am certain it was [an inside job],” Kendrick says, sitting in a conference room at the NLBM. “And by that I mean it was a contractor or subcontractor with institutional knowledge of the building, as opposed to a random act of vandalism. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill copper thief. This was someone who meticulously went in and executed a plan. They knew where the pipe was up on that second floor. They knew where the water supply was.” But why? “I honestly doubt if we will ever find out why,” Kendrick says. Another sad mystery lies a few miles southeast, near 28th and Prospect, in the

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former home of Satchel Paige. One of the greatest baseball pitchers in the history of the world, Paige lived in Kansas City for the last 30 years of his life. But neither the city nor the NLBM nor any other group had made an effort to preserve his home, and one day last May, Kendrick got a string of calls from reporters asking about the house at 2626 E. 28th Street. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s Satchel’s house,’” Kendrick says. “My heart sank.” A fire had swept through the house overnight, charring the top floor to a crisp. Authorities suspect this, too, was an intentional act. The questions of who would want to destroy Negro Leagues landmarks, and why they would want to do that, are tough, and probably best left to authorities. A different question is why we as a city have allowed these things to happen. After all, it wasn’t until 2006 — more than thirty years after the Paseo Y had last been occupied — that anybody even began discussing preserving the beautiful building where the Negro Leagues were born. Paige’s house was on Historic Kansas City’s “watch list” as recently as 2014, but obviously not a priority for the city, which likely could have purchased the house for a modest sum. As for the NLBM, Kendrick says purchasing the Paige house was “on the back burner” for the organization, but it lacked the funding to acquire and preserve it. And, of course, no benefactors emerged to purchase the home and donate it back to the NLBM. Also located in the 18th and Vine District is the Black Archives, an organization founded in 1974 by Horace Peterson. There, you can find accumulated sports memorabilia, Alvin Ailey’s papers, documents about slavery, and other records and works by African Americans of local and national importance. Under Peterson’s leadership, the Black Archives became an epicenter of black history for the community and the larger region. But the organization began to sputter upon Peterson’s death in 1992. First, offi-

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NEWS

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NEWS

Left: Kendrick inside the water-damaged Paseo YMCA. Below: Satchel Paige’s former home, months after the fire. Previous page: The Paseo YMCA where the Negro Leagues were founded. CHASE CASTOR

cials discovered it wasn’t paying county real estate taxes. Then an annual subsidy from the city was pulled. The Missouri Secretary of State eventually revoked its nonprofit status. In recent years, a new board has been established, and some grant money has trickled in. Dr. Carmaletta Williams, a former Johnson County Community College professor, has taken over as director. She has a progressive vision for the organization, one that in theory could include drawing attention to these historic sites in the 18th and Vine District with this attention bringing with it the preservation effort needed. Thabit Murarah, who served as the executive director of the Black Archives in the late 1990s, likes Peterson’s vision and also thinks East Side preservation projects fit into the Black Archives’ mission. “The bottom line is that this [the Paseo Y] is a historical building funded by the African American community,” Murarah says. “It is an ideal place for that history [to be honored], and it [preservation] is certainly something that needs to be done.” Since the fire, the city has put a fence around the Paige house to keep trespassers away. John Baccala with Kansas City Neighborhoods and Housing Services says

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

officials are trying to work with the property’s current owner to acquire it through the Kansas City Homesteading Authority. “Once that’s done, the KCHA will clean it, mothball the structure, stabilize the support structure, and add a new roof,” Baccala says. “And while that is in process, the KCHA can issue an RFP [request for proposals] for its development.” Baccala continues: “The city would be excited to partner with any entity interested in preserving and honoring Mr. Paige’s accomplishments on and off the diamond. He is an important and vital figure not only in baseball history, but Kansas City’s history, and we are working hard to make sure his home and his legacy are properly recognized.” *

In February, Kendrick and I visited the Buck O’Neill Research and Education Center/old Paseo YMCA. The ceiling was peeling, drywall was destroyed, the floor was warped. “We’ve licked our wounds,” Kendrick said, acknowledging the devastating setback surrounding us. “I have to remind myself that if you think about the story of the Negro Leagues, and if you think you are

going to be a steward of this story, you can’t wallow in self pity. They [the founders of the league] didn’t. They went out and did something about it.” Plans at the building for expanded classroom space, a research library, and new offices are on hold while the building is cleaned and remediated. On the brighter side, private contributions totaling $350,000 — including the proceeds of a

Kickstarter campaign selling bobbleheads of Negro Leagues players — have come in, most of which are earmarked for the cleanup. Kendrick says the museum has put together a game plan for the restoration of the building. The timeline is 2020: the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues. “How special would it be to have the building open then?” Kendrick said.

E AST ER

WORSHIP AT C HURCH OF THE RESURRECTION

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COR.ORG/EASTER

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EMMA OLSON

GREEN NEW DEAL RURAL KANSAS MAY NOT BE READY FOR THE CBD CRAZE, BUT IT CLEARLY NEEDS HEMP. BY DAVID HUDNALL

Sean Lefler twists the top off a glass jar filled with hemp flower, lifts it to his nose, and inhales deeply, as though starved for oxygen. This one’s called Sweet Cake, he says. Other strains — Dough Boy, Space Candy, Secret Kush — inhabit other jars on a shelf behind the counter here at Free State Collective CBD, a colorful storefront on the edge of an otherwise decaying Lawrence strip mall. “The first day we were open,” Lefler says, beaming with pride, “we had a guy come in, and he looked at all this flower and he looked out the window, then he looked back at us, and he goes: ‘Am I still in fuckin’ Kansas?’” That’s the reaction Lefler was going for when he and his fiancée, Anne Martin, opened this shop last summer. He was fresh off a few years in Oregon, where he’d moved after 24 years working as an insurance broker in the Kansas City area. He knew a hemp guru out there — a guy named Vic who was willing to show him the ropes.

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“He was one of the first licensed guys in Oregon doing medical cannabis,” Lefler says of Vic. “We’re talking 20 years ago. Then he got into growing hemp. He is a master hemp grower. So I went out there, and he taught me everything about growing, about the business, about it all. I dropped a quarter of a million dollars on it. I consider it my Ph.D. in hemp.” A terminal degree is not required for this article, but perhaps this is the spot to slip in a bit of Hemp 101: • Hemp and marijuana both derive from the same plant — cannabis sativa — but they are not the same thing. • The psychoactive chemical in marijuana that gets you high is called THC. • Marijuana typically contains levels of THC somewhere between 5 percent and 35 percent. • Hemp, on the other hand, has negligible levels of THC — less than 1 percent.

• Thus, hemp will not get you high, no matter how many blunts of it you smoke. • Instead, hemp contains a high amount of a chemical called CBD, which is believed — and in some cases proven — to have a variety of health benefits, including treating pain relief, anxiety, arthritis, and epilepsy. • In addition to its CBD-related medicinal utility, hemp can be used in thousands of products, including rope, textiles, body products, health foods, clothing, kitty litter, insulation, and biofuel. For incredibly dumb reasons — Reefer Madness panic and, if you believe many hemp advocates, the corrupting influence of a powerful paper industry threatened by a cheaper substitute — the U.S. government in 1937 criminalized the cultivation of hemp on American soil. Over the last half-decade, though, hemp has been making a comeback. The 2014 Farm Bill paved the way for individual states to create pilot

programs to research the production of industrial hemp, and the most recent Farm Bill, signed by President Trump in December, legalized hemp federally (with a multitude of complex restrictions that become harder to parse at the state level). Hemp grows wild across Kansas, and it grows tall: 12 feet high, you’ll hear from farmers, 15 feet sometimes. But Kansas has lagged way behind on legalizing the cultivation of industrial hemp. Only last year did the Legislature vote in favor of a pilot program to allow Sunflower State farmers to start growing hemp. On the retail side, shops such as Lefler’s are allowed to sell CBD products as long as they are derived from hemp that contains less than 0.3 percent THC. Anything over that amount of THC is still considered a controlled substance. Free State Collective CBD is unusual in a couple of ways. One is how much hemp flower it sells. Yes, there’s the usual all-purpose array of CBD products: CBD hand creams, CBD lotions, CBD bath bombs, CBD gummies, CBD tinctures, CBD vaping cartridges, CBD animal treats, CBD hot sauce. But he says more than 70 percent of his sales comes from those big jars of Sweet Cake and Pine Berry. Lefler calls his shop a “West Coast–style dispensary,” which basically means that it looks and feels like a marijuana dispensary, except that all the wares are CBD. The other distinctive thing about Free State Collective CBD is that, unlike most CBD shops in Kansas, which buy their products from wholesalers, Lefler owns and runs a processing kitchen in a suite adjacent to the shop. Many of the CBD products he sells are made here. This is legal; he has a license to do this, and he believes it’s the only such license yet issued in the state. Lefler sources his raw CBD from farms in Oregon and California (which also are required to produce CBD with below-0.3 percent THC), connections from his Oregon days. In addition to providing inventory for his own store, Lefler is in talks with a few wellknown American chains to distribute his products, he tells me. “We got a lot going on,” Lefler says, grinning. “Kansas is the spot, man. This is gonna be a big deal here. It’s just beginning.” That was December. Two months later, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation will raid Lefler’s shop and confiscate $70,000 worth of CBD product and equipment. *

Beneath a faded ball cap pulled low and tight, Bobby Gabriel has the reddish face of a lifelong farmer — weathered by the scorching Kansas sun and the winter’s whipping prairie winds. Gabriel, his brother, and his father farm on land near the Kansas towns

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of De Soto and Eudora. Corn, soybeans, some cattle. His family has husbanded here for six generations, since 1859. It’s never been easy, but lately it’s become damn near impossible. “There’s just not much profit left in it,” Gabriel says. “My grandpa raised five kids on 300 acres. The way crop prices are today, I couldn’t raise two kids on our 6,000 acres.” Grain — the lifeblood of Kansas farmers — is way down. Since 2012, soybean prices have declined 26 percent; wheat, 48 percent; corn, 50 percent. Meanwhile, fertilizer, gas, and equipment costs continue to rise, sometimes dramatically. And that’s before you factor in President Trump’s trade wars, which last year resulted in China halting its purchase of American soybeans, a move that pushed crop prices into free fall. China recently pledged to begin buying soybeans again, but even if the country makes good on that promise, its new orders will account for only two-thirds of what it bought in 2017, according to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. “It is beginning to become a serious situation nationwide, at least in the grain crops,” Allen Featherstone, head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, told the AP in late February. Or, as Gabriel puts it: “Another year like last year, and I might have to hang it up.” Plenty of farmers already have, one way or another. Suicide rates for farmers — already the highest of any profession in America — are on the rise. The suicide rate in Kansas has increased 45 percent over the past 17 years, outpacing the national average. And in the least populated Kansas counties, the suicide rate is much higher than in urban areas, according to High Plains Mental Health Center, in Hays, which now distributes brochures on mental illness and suicide to farmers across the state. Farm bankruptcies are also increasing. Bankruptcies in the Midwest were double in 2018 what they were in 2008. In Kansas, 35 farms filed for Chapter 12 in 2018, the second-highest increase in the country. It’s due to these grim circumstances that Gabriel enrolled earlier this year at America’s Hemp Academy, a new educational venture in a De Soto office park, just off Kansas Highway 10. He’d been hearing promising things about hemp. The upfront costs are high — corn costs about $300 an acre to plant, whereas hemp is $7,000 — but the potential profits are huge, Gabriel says. “You can make $15,000 on that acre if you do it right,” he tells me. “I was on Amazon last night, and they’re selling a 7-ounce thing of hemp flour for $18. So, yeah, that sounds pretty good.” America’s Hemp Company officially began accepting applicants earlier this year, following a December 2018 ribbon-cutting

attended by then-Gov. Jeff Colyer. Gabriel is one of about 15 members of the first official class. It’s a weeklong program, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it costs $2,000. Students receive a mix of hands-on training and lectures from experts: the history of hemp, greenhouse best practices, business advice. It all has the distinctly for-profit feel of a technical college — of instruction tied to a boom to be squeezed. As Gabriel and I stand talking in a shabby “hemp laboratory” filled with demonstrations for making hempcrete blocks and kitty litter, we’re surrounded by a stew of nervous farmers, supposed experts, earnest back-to-the-landers, white-collar professionals hoping to map their skills onto a burgeoning industry, and, of course, scheming hustlers — what I now recognize, months of reporting later, as a deeply representative cross-section of the emerging hemp industry in Kansas. Among them is Shawn Thornton, an agronomist from Meade, in southwest Kansas. For the last 30 years, Thornton has been advising clients on how to grow the usual Kansas crops. But lately more have been coming to him asking about hemp. He’s here to educate himself. “There’s a real question about where to sell it,” Thornton says. “With soybeans, you just take it to the elevator. But with hemp it’s less clear. I’m trying to figure out where the markets are while I’m here, too.” Then there’s Ben Ross, a rep from Monosem, a European company whose U.S. headquarters is in Edwardsville. It makes precision planters for vegetables that lately have been optimized for hemp production, and it’s trying to increase hemp-related sales in the Midwest. “Personally, I’m taking three calls a day from hemp customers across the U.S.,” Ross says. “And I’m just one of 11 reps.” America’s Hemp Academy is the brainchild of Joe Bisogno, the founder and CEO of the sandwich chain Goodcents Subs and Pastas (née Mr. Goodcents). I meet Bisogno a week later, in a conference room in a different De Soto office adjacent to the academy. This winding stretch of real estate along Commercial Drive is a sort of business campus for Bisogno and his various endeavors. Many are related to Goodcents: a point-ofsale technology company, a custom foods operation. Now, he has KMC, which stands for Kansas Miracle Crop. The miracle crop, of course, is hemp. For a big-shot CEO, Bisogno is surprisingly unkempt — shaggy plaid shirt, sleepy eyes — but he has a Trumplike salesmanship about him. “Industrial hemp is not pot, but it is a pot of gold for Kansas farmers,” he told the crowd at the December launch of America’s Hemp Academy. Four years ago, Bisogno decided he wanted to sell hemp cookies at Goodcents. So he went to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt — who told him not to do it, be-

cause hemp was illegal in Kansas. So Bisogno traveled to Scotland, Germany, Ireland, and Brazil, to learn more about how those countries approached the crop. He also went to progressive hemp states such as Oregon, Colorado, and Kentucky. He’s since been pushing Kansas lawmakers to legalize hemp. Now that CBD is legal in Kansas, Goodcents is selling hemp cookies and hemp pizza crusts, with plans to incorporate it into more food products. “I tried for two years at Goodcents to make a pizza you can grill,” Bisogno says. “It’s very difficult to grill a pizza. With most flours, the pizza burns too quick. With hemp flour, though, we now have a pizza crust you can grill — or bake — and in 10 minutes you have a piping-hot, high-nutrition pizza.” He says the long-term goal of his academy is to “keep Kansas kids home” — by which he means build an economy in which the children of rural farmers don’t have to leave Kansas to make a living. “There’s no opportunity in so many of these places,” Bisogno says. “They can’t stay in a small community because there aren’t any jobs. Hemp allows you to start a hempcrete company, or a milling company to make flour. We use 100,000 pounds of flour a week. There’s demand for hemp flour if somebody started making it. There is a major growth spurt in demand for hemp coming right around the corner.” Two young men in crisp suits carrying leather binders have arrived in the lobby, just outside our conference room. They’re from Florida, he tells me. He checks his watch and begins to wind down our meeting. “Hemp will create more commerce, jobs, and opportunity than anything we’ve seen in this state in a long time — it’s going to be huge for Kansas,” Bisogno says, sounding a bit like you-know-who. “Huge.” *

Bisogno is right about Kansas’ small towns. Rural communities built around the old American way of life have declined dramatically since the 1990s. NAFTA, passed in 1993, hollowed out the manufacturing industry in small Kansas towns and cities, and hordes of family farms have given up or sold out in the face of rising global agribusiness corporations. The slide in Kansas accelerated over the past decade, owing to former Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts — a historic policy disaster that transferred the state’s money away from government services (schools, infrastructure, pensions, Medicaid) and into the bank accounts of wealthy business owners. Today, half of all Kansas counties contain fewer than 10 people per square mile. “I’m watching with serious dismay the industrialization of the agriculture sector and the depopulation of rural Kansas,”

Kansas Farmers Union vice president Donn Teske recently told the Guardian. “There is no work for our rural folks,” Rep. Don Hineman, majority leader of the Kansas House of Representatives (and a farmer in western Kansas), told The New Food Economy last year. Bisogno had told me he owns a large property in southeast Kansas called Timber Hills Lake Ranch, where folks pay to hunt and fish on his land. Bisogno said his son, who lives in the area, was in the process of building a laboratory for hemp product testing there, and that local leaders had expressed interest in that project and other hemp-related businesses. Now, in February, I find myself trekking 90 miles south through freezing, horizontal rain to the Bourbon County Courthouse, in Fort Scott, Kansas. Like a lot of small Kansas towns and cities, Fort Scott has nice bones, with a well-preserved (if sparsely occupied) downtown. About 7,700 people live here, a number still in decline. Not very long ago, however, this small city had a perfectly healthy economy, as did dozens of other places like it in Kansas. “Historically, we were trains and insurance,” says Justin Meeks, legal counsel for Bourbon County. “The train companies were here until maybe the ’30s. Then we had Western Insurance, which was a Fortune 500 company in its day. They and a few other insurance companies left in the ’80s.” Meeks is 40ish, tall, bearded, friendly. His family’s been around Fort Scott since before the Civil War; much of its property has been converted back to natural prairie. He grew up here, moved to the KC area, and came back. Like many a native son, he’d like to see his hometown thrive again — or, at least, not wither and die during his lifetime. At the moment, the outlook remains bleak. Bourbon County has little in the way of industry. Besides some jobs at a small window manufacturer and a denim-overalls company, it’s mostly a farming and ranching community, with the third-worst per-capita valuation in the state of Kansas. After years of million-dollar losses due to declining patient numbers and diminished reimbursements from insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid, Mercy Hospital, the only hospital in Fort Scott, closed at the end of 2018. Now, if you break your leg or have a heart attack in Fort Scott, you’re in for a 30-minute ambulance ride across the state line to a hospital in Nevada, Missouri, or a 45 minute drive to the hospital in Pittsburg. “We’re a pretty large community not to have an emergency room — I would imagine maybe one of the larger communities in the country without one,” Bourbon County Commissioner Lynne O’Harah tells me. “And with the hospital closing, our firstthepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

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Left: Free State Collective CBD’s offerings. Right: Bisogno’s De Soto academy.

blush look at things is that we could lose about 10 percent of our population in the next two years. And that’s on top of the 16 percent of the population we are projected to lose over the next 25 years.” Bourbon County’s leaders are trying to make the most of what remains. Fort Scott is located at the intersection of two fairly well-traveled highways, U.S. 69 and U.S. 54. There’s plenty of water down here, unlike in western Kansas, and there’s also pretty good internet access, which is hardly a given elsewhere in the state. Completed a year ago, the county’s high-speed fiber highway is a pitch for new businesses and members of the work-from-home economy who’d like a cheaper place to live. And a recently announced partnership among Allen, Bourbon, and Crawford Counties proposes what would be a substantial recreational investment: the ABC Trails Plan, a biking and hiking rail-trail system (think Missouri’s Katy Trail) that would connect a good chunk of southeast Kansas. “I truly believe we’re in the epicenter of a lot of things, and that’s there’s still a lot of potential here,” Meeks says. “It’s just a matter of pulling all these things together.” “We want to be a model of what a rural community looks like,” O’Harah says. O’Harah and others are beginning to believe that hemp might be one way to get there. They, too, see CBD hurtling toward the mainstream — CVS announced in March that it would begin selling CBD products in its stores — and they are aware that speculative money for hemp operations is beginning to pour into the state. Though hemp farming is better suited to drier climates than Bourbon County’s wet, Ozarks-adjacent valley, it’ll grow here; before the Civil War, a lot of rope made from hemp came from the area. A new tax program aimed at redevelopment in the area would also allow Bourbon County residents to erect commercial facilities on their property and receive five- or 10-year rebates on their taxes.

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But the county is more interested in attracting hemp-related businesses: CBD-oil-extracting companies, distributors— the types of enterprises that employ several dozen people. A partnership with Fort Scott Community College to provide training for hemp jobs is under discussion. But a lot of this talk is, for now, just that. For instance, the potential Bisogno-related project. “Joe hasn’t given us authority to talk about potential production facilities, but we believe there is out-of-state interest — and possibly in-state interest — in building a facility somewhere in Bourbon County,” Meeks says. *

A slightly more advanced study in hemp’s potential to reinvigorate rural Kansas economies lies in the central Kansas city of Russell, population 4,500. Some famous, successful names hail from Russell — former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, billionaire Philip Anschutz — but, as Grace Blehm tells me, the community has been struggling for a while. “For farmers here — this is primarily an ag-and-oil community — it’s really tough. Really tough,” Blehm says. “I grew up in this area, and I can’t name you one farm family where at least one of them, if not both, work off the farm somewhere. And they do it for two reasons. One, for insurance. And two, to have a steady income so they can actually pay their bills.” Blehm, as one of Russell’s few business owners — hers is a liquor store called Bottlenecks — is motivated enough to sit on the economic development advisory board for Russell County. (The city of Russell is the county seat.) As part of that board, she’s also a member of a hemp subcommittee. Russell County got curious about hemp four years ago and has been highly engaged with legislative efforts at the state level ever since. It’s beginning to pay off. The county

was selected to participate in a hemp pilot project last year, and in March it announced two hemp-related businesses that would be opening soon in Russell County. KB Extractions will focus on industrial hemp growth for oil; Mechanized Concepts, an outfit based in Utah, has received a half-million-dollar grant from the county to open an industrial hemp equipment manufacturing facility in Russell. Janae Talbot, the economic development director for Russell County, says Mechanized Concepts could bring to town about 50 new jobs over the next few years, with possibly as many as 200 jobs by 2023, depending on the market. “We decided to target fiber, not oil,” Blehm says. “I don’t know how sustainable the CBD-oil thing will be over the long term. I tend to wonder whether Big Pharma is going to take over that industry. They’re already heavily involved in it and have all the influential lobbyists in D.C. working on it. Fiber [industrial hemp] is more sustainable, and I think it’s a better fit for our farmers in this area.” John Henning, a 37-year-old, third-generation farmer born in the south-central town of Kingman, agrees. As a kid, he saw hemp plants growing wild in the fields, often three times higher than his head, and wondered why his family’s farm couldn’t get their other crops — alfalfa, wheat, beans — to grow like that. Henning left the farm for college at the University of Mississippi; he had a scholarship to work at the Blues Archive there. He went on to work in the music business, booking regional tours in the South, until his father died of cancer in 2015, at which point he says he started to get interested in hemp, especially its medical uses. “I’ve spent the last four years moving around the country learning everything I can about the business,” Henning says. “Colorado, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania — I’ve been spending 200 days of the year on the road, meeting people in this [hemp]

industry.” His business, Henning Trading Company, is now based in Pennsylvania, centered on a 330-acre family farm and handling what Henning calls “headache problems” for farmers looking to get into hemp. “We work with farmers and put them in direct contact with labs and processing centers, insurance companies, logistics,” he says. “Some people just need our help to get certified seed. Some want more help than that. Basically, the things a co-op would do, we do that for hemp.” Last year it expanded to Kansas, where Henning’s family still owns about 2,000 acres, and 28 farmers have signed up: five in Kingman, nine in Larned, 14 in Russell. (“Russell’s kind of a progressive honey hole,” he says. “They’re becoming a real beacon for hemp in Kansas.”) Henning says about half of those 28 farmers are below the age of 40 — an encouraging sign for those concerned about the aging populations in these rural areas. All 28 farms Henning is working with are growing industrial hemp — fiber, not CBD. “I was the biggest proponent of CBD in 2015,” he says. “Then I spent three harvests in Oregon, Kentucky, and Colorado, watching how hard it is to stay on task with even just an acre a day doing CBD. Nobody ever reports how hard and labor-intensive it is. I’ve seen 20 or 30 employees on 40 acres trying to do CBD, and they still struggle. It’s not hard to get it in the ground and grow it, but it’s very hard to get it off the field without compromising the CBD content.” And whereas CBD requires a whole new way of farming, most farmers already have a lot of the equipment they need — swathers, balers, combines — to make the conversion to industrial hemp, he says. That means less upfront investment on what’s already a chancey proposition. “A lot of people are chasing the money — it’s a get-rich-quick thing,” Henning says.

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Learn Basic Massage Techniques in a One-Day Workshop “But my experience is that it doesn’t happen like that. About 70 percent of all hemp businesses fail in the first two years.” *

In the 1990s, ostrich meat was the thing that was going to save struggling Midwestern farms. The pitch was obvious: Big birds, lots of meat to sell, surprisingly nutritious. The number of farmers commercially raising ostriches spiked for several years — and then dropped when it turned out Americans couldn’t be convinced to eat ostriches the way they devoured chickens and cows. Later, canola oil was anointed the savior of rural America. Then it was horizontal oil drilling. Next, wind turbines. Cotton, more recently. History suggests, then, that caution is in order when it comes to hemp. “Obviously, right now there is a huge boom in CBD — that is what is drawing the money in,” says Kelly Rippel, the co-founder and vice president of Kansans for Hemp. “But we’re going to see a plateau in that, and in some ways we’re already kind of reaching it.” Rippel is also the president of Planted Association of Kansas, a nonprofit trade organization advocating for the reintroduction of hemp. He’s skeptical of big-business guys like Bisogno, and he clearly loathes the idea that a would-be mogul in De Soto wants $2,000 a pop from hard-done farmers for information his group is disseminating for free. Instead, Rippel has been involved in drafting several hemp bills in Kansas and is on the board selecting which farmers will receive licenses this year to grow hemp in the state. “I personally think Kansas has so much to gain from the thousands of products made from industrial uses of hemp,” he tells me. “The market is already there. We’re just importing these hemp products from other countries — mostly Canada. Also, there is limestone all across Kansas, and you need lime to make hempcrete.” He goes on: “We’re going to see an influx of resources in smaller communities due to the reintroduction of hemp. We’ll see plants cropping up in rural and frontier Kansas, and we’ll see ancillary businesses built around that. There are so many technical jobs and careers that are emerging in the field of testing, analytics, horticulture.” Henning agrees. He believes, based on his experiences in other states, that Kansas could handle four or five industrial hemp processing centers statewide, each one employing 40 to 60 workers. Still, Rippel emphasizes that much remains unknown in Kansas: legislation, licensing, markets. The pilot program will continue in Kansas until at least 2021, but there’s no predicting when or whether the

state will pass a full hemp bill, let alone when the USDA might issue rules and regulations (which would mandate that states send their plans back to the feds for approval). Speaking of which: the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s ski-masked tactical raid on Sean Lefler and Free State Collective CBD, in Lawrence. When the six bureau agents swooped in, just after 5 p.m. on a Friday, Anne Martin, Lefler’s fiancée, thought it was a joke. Then she was handed the search warrant and told that an undercover officer had done a controlled buy at the store the day before, and that a test of the hemp flower showed it contained .15 percent THC. “Which is legal in Kansas!” Lefler tells me in late March. “Their search warrant was for marijuana, not hemp. We don’t sell marijuana here. My assumption is, they did a field test for marijuana, and the test they use only checks to see if there is any THC at all. And of course there’s some THC — we tell you how much there is right on the label. But it’s legal under the law. But none of these guys even knew what we do here, what we sell, nothing.” (At press time, the KBI had not responded to a request for comment.) The agents seized 11 strains of flower, the point-of-sale system, cash, a laptop, an iPad, checkbooks, glass pipes, and bongs. They hauled away items from the kitchen, too, though Lefler says the warrant was only for the retail business address. Still, the raid didn’t shut down the business. Free State Collective CBD is open, selling the same products, complying with the law as it and like businesses have interpreted it. Lefler has hired a lawyer to fight KBI on the raid. Rippel, who is in regular contact with law enforcement representatives as he and his group try to push through legislation that would align Kansas’ laws with federal hemp statute, says that some in the KBI and other law enforcement agencies in the state are strongly resistant to change when it comes to CBD and hemp. Regarding the legality of the raid on Lefler, Rippel notes that, although hemp with THC levels below 0.3 is federally legal, legal questions and gray areas in Kansas will persist until the USDA signs off on the state’s permanent hemp cultivation plans. “Anybody operating in the hemp space in Kansas is operating with inherent risk,” he says. “We have seen that it can be hard, especially with law enforcement, to get people out of this prohibition mentality when it comes to hemp, because that’s all they’ve known for decades. “Ultimately, they’ll see that what we’re doing offers a better economy and a new way to rebuild communities,” Rippel concludes. Out there on the forgotten, withering prairie, it sure is pretty to think so.

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CAFE

EXILE IN GUYVILLE GUY FIERI’S FAKE DIVE BAR IN THE POWER & LIGHT DISTRICT IS ALMOST TOO BORING TO RIDICULE. WE SAID ALMOST. BY LIZ COOK

When is a man more than a man? When he’s a Guy — Fieri, to be precise, the Food Network star and latest celebrity to slap his name on a restaurant in the Power & Light District. It’s impossible to visit Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint without grappling with Fieri’s polarizing, maximalist mythos. To some, Fieri is endemic of everything wrong with the American way of eating — with Americans in general, maybe. Everything about him is extra, from his frosted tips and wraparound sunglasses to his candy-red Camaro convertible to his Chad-Kroeger-meets-Lucifer goatee to his Dad-lite pronunciations of Worcestershire (“wa-shashashashasha!”) To others, Fieri is the last rock-n’-roll Unicorn in a world of fussy show ponies. Just his name is enough to serve as a balm, as a promise: this is a place for you. This is a place where guys can be Guys. Where they can scarf burgers and giggle and belch free from the food snobs and the clean-eaters and the pleasure-policers. A place where satisfaction isn’t just an address but a zipcode: Flavortown. Imagine my disappointment when Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint turned out to be not a haven for excess and food-world id but just another hastily assembled corporate restaurant churning out tepid food in a concept too thin to fill out Fieri’s bowling shirts. Guy’s Dive opened in February in the cavernous Grand St. anchor space recent-

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ly vacated by Cleaver & Cork. The vibe is “heartland truck stop meets strip club adjacent to heartland truck stop.” One wall is painted with an enormous American flag; the other glows with brand-new neon signs blaring slogans like “Namasté Bitches” (acute accent not mine) or “Don’t Do Coke in the Bathroom.” Everything else is bathed in a hellish orange light that makes you feel as though you’re living inside a heatlamp. I would have preferred a literal heatlamp. Much of the food I sampled arrived at an uneasy room temperature. The cubes of underseasoned chicken on my “Achiote Chicken Tacos” were actually cold. The “Diablo Shrimp Tacos” had an appealing chipotle-lime aioli, but the shrimps had a crumbly, canned texture and the flabby-flimsy appearance of a depressurized Sea Monkey carcass. They, too, were lukewarm. The “Cheeseburger Tacos” seemed safe: standard hardshells lined with ground beef, queso, and a few cold shreds of lettuce and cheddar cheese. They were. I have little to say about them except that you could create a more flavorful version at home with a $3 Old El Paso kit. (To be fair, the menu promised both pickles and “Donkey Sauce” — both of which might have made a difference, but neither of which made an appearance on the tacos I was actually served). I tried dressing up those tacos with the three house salsas, available at the bar in large plastic squeeze bottles that did not

squeeze. The avocado-tomatillo version was smooth with a decent acidic bite. The nozzle of the molcajete salsa bottle was completely clogged (this was true on two other visits). “Just unscrew the cap and pour it,” said a bartender who saw me struggling. “That’s what I always do.” “Why is there a cap?” I asked, but she didn’t seem to hear me. The condiment setup does not inspire confidence. Next to the salsas sits a communal plague jar of vegetable escabeche with a heavy glass lid that has nowhere to go but face down on the salsa-slopped bar mat while you tong out chubby carrots (and it’s mostly carrots) into too-small plastic cups. Unless you have the steady hands of a surgeon-monk, I don’t see a way to serve yourself without sloshing vinegar and vegetable matter into the bar mat’s nubby crevices. But Flavortown means never having to do the dishes. Everything here is served in paper, even the chicken tortilla soup. The famous “Trash Can Nachos” arrived not in a trash can but in an upside-down paper cup nestled in a recycled cardboard boat. On my first visit, the food runner removed the cup with a flourish to reveal a tower of chips sogged with gluey gas station queso and crema. Even “bad” nachos are usually palatable, but these had an overwhelming sweetness from the “bourbon brown sugar BBQ sauce” slathered onto the borracho beans like an aunt’s sloppy kiss. The “Taquito Piquito Burrito” wasn’t supposed to have that barbecue sauce — just the beans. But it, too, was oddly sweet and unpleasantly mushy. To eat at Guy’s is to ride a carousel of vaguely unsettling textures. The pickled onions were spongy and dry (but how?), the “Al Pastor Tacos” were filled

Vroom, vroom, head on down to P&L for some depressing-ass tacos. ZACH BAUMAN

Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint 1333 Grand Blvd 816-255-2110

Hours: Sunday–Thursday 11 AM–12 AM Friday–Saturday 11 AM–2 AM

Prices: Appetizers: $5.95–$10 Entrees: $8–$10 Cocktails: $9–$14

Best bet: Order the Carne Asada Fries and a house margarita at happy hour.

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Voted Best Lunch in KC

$ with soft, weepy pork, and the guacamole was stippled with chalky, foot-y cheese. The guacamole itself was cold and creamy, but I couldn’t taste the avocado for the lime juice (a symptom, perhaps, of needing to prevent large make-ahead portions from browning). Diners are showing up anyway. Guy Fieri has a broad Everyman appeal that defies categorization, which may have something to do with a clientele that feels unusually diverse for Power & Light. On most of my visits, I observed a surprising mix of old and young, black and white, women and boys dressed like Bobby Hill. But who is this restaurant for? It’s surely not for the customers. I cannot think of a “joint” less geared toward the comfort of its patrons. There’s no table service here, but there are also no hostesses to tell you that. Your only clues on how (or where) to order are inkjet printer paper signs taped to the bar. If you get lost, just look for the densest clump of crabby-looking customers. Everything — ordering food, picking it up, doling condiments into plastic cups from communal squeeze bottles — happens at the same narrow end of the restaurant’s central, rectangular bar. The food line coils all the way around that bar, squeezing seated patrons like a lethargic boa constrictor. When it’s busy, it’s a catastrophic clusterfuck. The employees look frustrated. The customers look confused. I kept waiting for a man in a labcoat to emerge to tell me I was part of an environmental psych practicum, that the whole experience had been constructed. Of course it has been constructed. Every offhand touch here is deliberate, every kitschy gesture a careful, corporate calculation. Trying to reverse-engineer a “dive” necessarily means posturing a kind of grit that would feel phony on any property with Cordish ties. Nowhere is this more evident than in the miscellaneous stickers wallpapered

above the bar, many of which feature advertisements for other corporations. A quick scan above my seat returned logos for Pizza Hut and Facebook as well as a jaundice-yellow Minion — the one from the memes. If you don’t look too closely, it all seems fine. The problem with Guy’s Dive is that no one was meant to look closely. If you look closely, the vision collapses like a pile of trash can nachos whose cup was removed too soon. Part of the problem may be that the guy — the Guy — seems to have forgotten his latest “joint” exists. A full month after the opening, Fieri’s official website still had no reference to the Kansas City property. Nor had Fieri mentioned it on his promo-heavy Twitter page, not even on the day the restaurant opened (he did, however, find time to tweet a photo of someone’s bare feet with “F L A V O R T O W N” tattooed on the toe knucks). I began to wonder: was I being duped? Now that I was thinking about it, did the signs say “Guy Fieri” or “Goy Fiero?” But no. When the restaurant’s flatscreens aren’t tuned to sports, they’re playing Guy TV: a bizarre mashup of late2000s YouTube clips, soundless Brett Michaels music videos, and instructions for drinking games like Dizzy Bat. At one point, I looked up from my taco and saw a clip of a race car crashing and catching fire. “Should I put that in the review?” I asked my friend. “It feels a little on-thenose.” At times, there are glimmers — mirages — of what the restaurant could be. The beer list is solid for P&L, and the margaritas are serviceable. Ignore the $12 specialty margs, which taste like colors and run the gamut from sweet to sweet. Order the house margarita ($5 at happy hour) instead, which is pleasantly tart. The Carne Asada fries were everything I wanted the nachos to be: crisp, gooey, and evenly smothered in cheese, guacamole,

chewy steak, and thin-sliced jalapenos. The empanadas, too, gestured toward a Fieri sensibility: the pastry was fried to the color of a spray tan and well-stuffed with molten cheese and soft bites of poblano pepper. My favorite entrée on the menu was the “Nacho-Crusted Chicken Torta Sliders.” For the price and the size, I wanted three, not two. But the nacho-chip crust was sharp and crunchy, the chicken was competently fried, and the twin acid-spice punch of the salsa molcajete and “Donkey sauce” was the closest I came on any of my visits to an address in Flavortown. Management has made a few positive changes recently. After complaints from diners, the tacos per order were upped from three to four (though you still can’t mix and match). On my last visit, the bartender who took my order even pointed out where I could find napkins. Of course, the fundamental flaws and the layout haven’t changed. Guy’s desperately needs a designated pick-up window and a condiment station located anywhere but the bar. The most frustrating aspect of Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint is that most of its major problems could be fixed with $1,000 and an afternoon. The question isn’t whether the City Council of Flavortown can fix it. The question is whether they have the wit or the will. In the entryway to Guy’s Dive hangs an enormous pockmarked STOP sign, into which some presumably hip décor firm has key-etched “NO MAS.” I should have listened. I kept going back, desperate to find a trace of its namesake. I visited the restaurant five times, waiting for something to move me, not caring much whether it excited or repelled. Exhaustion would be something. Disgust would be something. Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint wore me down not with a gorged, glorious burst of fuck-you energy but a feeble cry of attrition. Stop. No más.

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FOOD

DOWN WITH O.P. WE TOAST THE LOW-KEY WONDERFULNESS OF THE DOWNTOWN OVERLAND PARK FOOD SCENE. BY APRIL FLEMING

Though our reflex is to bristle at its sleepy, deep-Metcalf suburbanism, we find ourselves wondering more and more lately whether it’s possible that, actually, downtown Overland Park might, quietly, perhaps ... be kind of great? Allow us to plead our case: 1.) The Rio, one of the finest independent, locally owned movie theatres in the city, screens art flicks every day in a lovingly restored art deco movie theater that looks straight out of 1950s Miami Beach. 2.) There’s a booming farmer’s market that boasts many of best vendors of any market in town. Among them: Yoli Tortilleria, Tea-Biotics Kombucha, Weiner Wagon, Ibis Bakery, Ash & Bleu Cheese Company, plus many more local farmers and ranchers. Also in downtown OP: Penzey’s Spices and businesses like the Culinary Center of Kansas City, which offers cooking classes every day.

APRIL FLEMING

Torreador

7926 Floyd Street

Torreador is less of a restaurant than it is a cozy dive bar that serves inexpensive, gringo-friendly enchiladas, hard-shell tacos, and burritos. Sometimes all you really want is to down yard beers and eat some ground beef tacos like your mom used to make, and this is an excellent place to do just that.

3.) But mostly we love the surprising density of well-worn neighborhood restaurants that resist the pull of cool — Shared plates! Edison bulbs! Reclaimed wood! — and fit us like our favorite old pair of jeans.

Dragon Inn

Here, in no particular order, are a few of those restaurants that are always worthy of a visit.

7500 West 80th Street

Elsa’s

8016 Santa Fe Drive

This Overland Park diner is one of the city’s best options for Ethiopian cuisine, from its buttery, garlicky key wat (beef stew) to doro tibs (chicken in a sauce of green chili, seasoned butter, and herbs). You’ve got dietary restrictions? Try the vegan samosas, potatoes in Berbere sauce, and spicy lentils, or the gluten-free injera (the spongy bread used to scoop up and eat Ethiopian food). The restaurant’s extraordinarily friendly owners, Elsa and Hailie Michaels, are happy to offer suggestions and advice, including what foods they think you’ll like — and the best way to eat it.

Mi Ranchito

7148 West 80th Street

There’s a queso-bowl-shaped place in our hearts reserved for downtown O.P.’s Mi Ranchito, which serves up consistently tasty,

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Midwest-friendly Mexican food. More than once, we’ve walked in on an off night and been astonished to see how big of a crowd this place draws — but then, hey: every day’s a good day to sprawl out on a sunny patio, cram your nose into a giant margarita, and order some cream cheese enchiladas and a stuffed-and-fried avocado.

The Peanut

7936 Santa Fe Drive

The O.P. Peanut has a different owner than the O.G. Peanuts south of the Plaza and in downtown KC. But the laid-back sports-bar vibe is roughly the same, and, most importantly, so is the wing recipe. These full, bonein wings are deep-fried until the skin is crispy, slathered in a spicy, pepper-specked

Buffalo sauce, and served piping hot. They are as much of a joy in the suburbs as they are in the city.

The Snack Shack on Santa Fe 8039 Santa Fe Drive

We order “The Bobby” — a generous double cheeseburger piled high with grilled jalapenos and onions — at the Snack Shack, but you can’t really go wrong at this lovely little diner. The burgers are made with fresh, never-frozen beef, and everything down to the sides (hand-cut fries, house-made onion rings, sweet corn nuggets) are made to order. You can also pick up a root beer float, hand-dipped malt, or even an off-menu whip: your choice of soda blended with ice cream.

When Kansas Citians think “retro Chinese restaurant,” they tend to go for Princess Garden, in Waldo. But Dragon Inn has a lot of those same vibes: gaudy gold dragons, thick red carpet, murals spanning entire walls. But the food speaks for itself. Try the shrimp toast, Szechuan-style spicy lamb, or the crispy duck, which is marinated and steamed before being flash-fried to crisp the skin. The Dragon has been a downtown O.P. anchor for decades, and here’s hoping it remains one for many, many more.

Clock Tower Bakery and Cafe 7911 Santa Fe Drive

Clock Tower Bakery and Cafe doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to be: under one roof you can get chewy, hand-tossed pizza; cottage pie; French macarons; quiche; Greek salad wraps; and an almond tart. But everything is really damn good, so it’s easy to forgive the vaguely schizophrenic menu. Plus, it turns out that a goat cheese macaron dessert pairs quite nicely with a slice of pepperoni pizza.

FOOD

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HAPPY HOUR The Upper Crust

7943 Santa Fe Drive

Cupcakes, cinnamon rolls, ice cream — give it to us, we want it, we love it. But for our money, nothing beats a pie, and the adorably petite Upper Crust specializes in all the good stuff, from fruit pies (gooseberry, rhubarb, peach, Dutch apple) to custard and creams (chocolate chess, key

lime, sour cream, coconut custard) and nut pies (cranberry pecan, oatmeal, pecan oatmeal). The shop’s crumbly, buttery crusts demonstrate a patience for the craft, and the fillings are all made from scratch each morning. And there’s nothing stopping you from picking up a few oversized soft cookies while you’re there. Trust us: Cookies? They go great with pie.

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EAT

70+ RESTAURANTS. 10 BARS. 5 STAGES.

FRIDAY, JUNE 7TH | 7:30 PM – MIDNIGHT

APRIL FLEMING

Eat ThisNow CACIO E PEPE AT FARINA

The James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Smith offers 10 varieties of fresh pasta on the menu every day at Farina, his recently opened Crossroads restaurant. Most pastas change with the season, but four staples — what Smith refers to as his “Kings of Rome” — always stay in the rotation: bucatini carbonara, tagliatelle Bolognese, rigatoni all’ Amatriciana, and spaghetti cacio e pepe. They are all ridiculously good, but the simplest, cacio e pepe (which literally translates as “cheese and pepper”), might well be our favorite. Freshly made spaghetti cooked al dente is topped with a blend of pecorino and grana padano, plus a little freshly ground pepper. That is it. In the wrong hands, this dish could easily go astray — too gooey, too bland — but with Smith, the pasta is bouncy, the cheese sharp and just a little tangy, and the pepper humbly ties it all together. You won’t want for more. --April Fleming

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

DRINK

APRIL FLEMING

Drink ThisNow MOMENTUM AT LAWRENCE BEER COMPANY

We can’t say enough nice things about Lawrence Beer Company. The space is super comfortable (and will only get more welcoming as the weather warms). Chef Ken Baker’s food continues to surprise us with its flavors and consistency. But it’s Sam McLain’s beers that keep us coming back. McLain (formerly of Boulevard as well as Half Acre in Chicago) changes the taps frequently, but right now there’s a well-rounded selection of IPAs, pale ales, a tart saison, and a couple of barrel-aged stouts on the menu. We’re partial to Momentum, an IPA brewed with lactose that comes in at the nice mid-range ABV of 7 percent. It’s brewed with five (!) types of hops — Citra, Mosaic, Lemondrop, Simcoe, and CTZ — and the lactose gives the beer a smooth finish. It’s tangy, hoppy, and smooth, and we have literally driven to Lawrence just for this beer, so Sam, please keep brewing it. (Bonus: You can also order crowlers, canned on demand, via the Lawrence Beer Company website.) --April Fleming thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

ARTS

EMILY COX

BORDER STATES BRICOLAJE AT LA ESQUINA EXAMINES THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL IN THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. BY EMILY COX

In the news, a border wall is discussed as an economic concern, immigration reduced to statistics and talking points. Bricolaje, a new exhibition at Charlotte Street Foundation’s gallery La Esquina (1000 W 25th St), offers the personal and the specific in contrast to these political generalizations. It manages to be timely without being reactionary. For the Mexican and Mexican-American artists on display at La Esquina, issues of immigration, identity, and belonging are essential to their lived experiences. Immigration enforcement practices separated them from their parents. Gentrification displaced their families from their neighborhoods. These political realities show up in the artists’ lives and, naturally, in their art: barriers, fences, borders. Lizbeth Contreras’ “Behind the Border” is woven with hand-dyed yarn, presenting a barricade that resembles one of the designs for the proposed wall on the Mexican border. Mary Kuvet’s indigo-dyed cotton triptych “Estamos Sin Fronteras” (which translates to “we are without borders”) depicts a wall through rolling hills. But behind the wall, there is a silver banner flying, suggesting joy and celebration. There

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

are plowed fields, a lush scene that looks like a land of plenty. Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s three largescale works show hand-drawn maps for border crossings, scaled up and cut out of acrylic. These maps have labels such as “camino de diablo,” “beacon,” and “fence boundary.” Much is illegible, just as it would be for those on the journey. The background of these maps are cut out in the silhouette of a chain link fence. The fence shape is ominous, a reminder of the many obstacles faced by those following these maps. Themes of home and belonging also reverberate throughout Bricolaje. A diptych of self-portraits by Patricia Bordallo Dibildox shows her body on two continents, turned away from the camera, leaning into foliage. These photographs are hung in frames decorated by her mother with an aluminium embossing technique called repujado. Her work is literally framed by family. Representations of her self are held and illuminated by the work of her mother. Tributes to family, ancestry, and culture, are abundant in Joselyn Garcia’s stunning altar installation, composed of ceramic pots and figures, flowers, bells, candles, and

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Bricolaje. Through April 20. Also featuring works by Diana Lerma, Narciso Argüelles (the exhibit’s co-curator), Thomas Luna, Rodolfo Marron III, and Rebeka Pech Moguel

more. The altar is overseen by figures that represent saints. Ceramic pots depict the Mexican border crossing: scenes with drug lords and children used as drug mules, saints and flowers, and more. Front and center is a ceramic coyote head, referring to the “coyotes” who guide immigrants across the border. Both of Garcia’s parents were deported at different times when she was a child, and her altar pieces are part memoir: they seek to recover the loss of identity that comes with separation from parents. The work is intimate and sacred, a reminder that our personal lives cannot be divorced from the culture that shapes us. Kiki Serna has two collages of domestic spaces: “Granjas, Mexico, 1998” depicts the front of a house, with plants and a trike, while “Meadow Ridge, MO, 1999” is the scene of a birthday party, a banner with the word “FIESTA” trailing off the frame. Across the two paintings, the color palette and visual language remain the same, suggesting a continuity across geography. This visual language expands into the 3D realm with Serna’s “Remnants/Fragments,” in which the quotidian realm of the 2D works is expanded. Papier-mâche representations of flowers in vases, a bag of Takis, mangos, and more unite these works across space and time. Throughout the exhibit, artists use traditional cultural craft methods — yarn dyeing and weaving, ceramics, repujado — to speak to their own experiences and this cultural moment.

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MANY MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED!

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ARTS

MULTIPLICITY

ZACH DALIN

EVER-PRESENT MUSICIAN COLEEN DIEKER NAVIGATES A CODE-SWITCHING CAREER. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

Coleen Dieker has us hooked. You want Irish fiddling? Call Dieker. Flamenco flourishes? Coleen is your gal. Jazz? Bluegrass? Weird arty stuff? Classical? Maybe a contemporary Jewish song leader? Coleen Dieker, on all counts. Though Dieker set on the musical path at a young age — she and her siblings all started piano by five, sang, and learned string instruments, too — her own winding road followed no clear markers. Two years at Boston’s Berklee School of Music opened her eyes to a wealth of other music and styles, so she…quit, moved back home to KC, and enrolled in nursing school. But that wasn’t the right fit, either. “I was gigging to put myself through nursing school, so I thought, This is stupid, I’m just gonna gig and see where it goes,” Dieker says. “It was liberating, but it was scary. I was 20 years old. I was busking at the River Market for hours for tips, taking every gig I could, getting paid insulting amounts of money. I made a lot of interesting life choices, because I think I suddenly was like, ‘I’m not going to try to play the game.’” She ended up succeeding anyway. These days, Dieker is associated with some of KC’s finest up-and-comers and tried-and-trues.

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

She’s a full-fledged member of the fiery Celtic rock act Flannigan’s Right Hook; she performs with bassist Gerald Spaits’ Sax & Violins, drummer Ryan Lee’s Mezzo Strings, singer-songwriters Jessica Paige and Julia Othmer, and singer/harpist Calvin Arsenia; and is part of a new group, Siento y Vivo Flamenco, with dancer Melinda Hedgecorth and Ensemble Iberica’s Beau Bledsoe. “Early on, I would get asked to perform for a certain scene, or for a certain group of people, and I would be like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to go ahead and say yes.’ Fake it till I make it,” Dieker says. “It always worked.” Dieker was also, for a time, music director at The Temple-Congregation B’nai Jehuda, even though she was raised Catholic. A few years ago, she converted to Judaism, traveled to Israel, and recently toured with the Jewish guitarist and singer Josh Warshawsky for his album Chaverai Nevarech. Last November, Dieker recorded a sound kit of Eastern-inspired samples. She called it Gypsy Psalms. Within a day of the release, her producer texted her: people were upset about the album title. Unbeknownst to Dieker at the time, the word “gypsy” carries, to some, a negative connotation — though to many it’s also

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Coleen Dieker in performance: April 2: Sax & Violins, Westport Coffee House, KCMO, 7:30 p.m. || April 5: Flannigan’s Right Hook, Llywelyn’s Pub, Overland Park, KS 8:30 p.m. || April 6: Siento y Vivo Flamenco, Elizabeth Sherbon Theatre, Lawrence, KS, 7 p.m. || April 19 and 20: Flannigan’s Right Hook, O’Malley’s Pub, Weston, MO, 8 p.m. || Eastern Psalms is available at sounds.com.

a romanticized word for a traveler, evoking a free-spirited aesthetic. Dieker apologized on Facebook, and the album was renamed Eastern Psalms. The whole hubbub got a mixed response online — some people supported the switch, others defended the original term. Dieker was already pretty well-attuned to racial tensions — she’s half Korean — but she says the experience made her more sensitive to the way she approaches the many musical traditions she’s absorbed over the years. But it also convinced her to take a break from the internet for a while (the 250 comments she received on a post in which she shared the cover of Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility didn’t help matters, either). For the time being, at least, she’s sticking with ski trip photos and performance updates. As for her offline life, it’s more gigs, more learning, more exploring her new faith. “[Living Jewishly] means you question everything,” Dieker says. “You question yourself. I had to fight to do [this career] — I had to fight myself because I was scared of doing my own thing. But now that I’ve done it for ten years, I’m less scared, and I’m a lot more comfortable. It’s all about the struggle.”

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PAGES

ALWAYS SUNNY

space in your house to see it from another perspective, which might help you figure out how to improve that space. Why do you suppose that’s helpful? That’s something they do with hoarders sometimes. It’s a way to pull things out of context. I think it’s also helpful to take ourselves out of context — to detach your identity a bit. You can pretend to be a real estate broker trying to stage a certain part of the house, or a party organizer, or whatever. Anything that forces you to look at a space with a different set of eyes will get you the distance you need to help you see the ways in which you’ve become inured to disorder.

HAPPINESS GURU — AND KC NATIVE — GRETCHEN RUBIN’S LATEST IS A MARIE KONDO-STYLE GUIDE TO THE JOYS OF DECLUTTERIZATION. BY DAVID HUDNALL

Gretchen Rubin’s extremely fantastic-seeming life began in Kansas City. She grew up on Stratford Road, which runs just west of Ward Parkway parallel to 59th Street, and graduated from Sunset Hill (now Pembroke Hill) in the early 1980s. Rubin went on to become the editor of the Yale Law Journal and clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — until one day she decided she wanted to become a writer and said goodbye to all that. Rubin broke through to the mainstream with the publication, in 2009, of The Happiness Project, in which she chronicles a year spent probing classical philosophy, modern ideas, and scientific research for ideas about what makes us happy. She’s gone on to host a very popular podcast (Happier with Gretchen Rubin) and write several more books, including Outer Order, Inner Calm, which was released in March and contains several helpful organizational nuggets, including “Everything looks better arranged on a tray” and “Put up hooks for clothes in-between clothes that you’re worn but aren’t ready to go in the laundry.” Rubin will be the keynote speaker at “Books and Boutiques,” a benefit for St. Luke’s South, on Friday, April 12. (The event is at the Overland Park Convention Center; see rainydaybooks.com for more info.) We spoke in mid-March. The Pitch: How often do you make it back to KC? Rubin: I come back two to four times a year, I’d say. My parents are still there. They live just off the Plaza. I gotta come back and get my Winstead’s. I’m curious about how you describe yourself, particularly now that you have this popular podcast. You write books, you have a podcast, you do talks. Are you a self-improvement guru, a public personality, an author? What are you? I usually just say “writer and podcaster.” I think what links everything together is my interest in human nature. Even the book I wrote about Churchill [Forty Ways to Look at Churchill, 2004] is about human nature. The fact that he’s such giant character makes him an interesting study in human na-

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

I’m trying to get out of this interview without mentioning Marie Kondo— Oh, no, I love Marie Kondo. Well, I think some people associate her and her success with a growing interest in minimalism. And I was wondering if you see your new book as having minimalist type of ideas, or adjacent to minimalism, or what? I don’t, actually. I think minimalism works for some people and not others. Some people want collection and choice. Not everybody wants total simplicity. But the definition of minimalism is different to different people, so it can sometime be hard to really talk about. MICHAEL WESCHLER

ture — everything about him is so huge that it’s easier to see. How big has the podcast been to your career? It has dramatically increased my audience. Some people don’t read very much, or maybe they do read, but it’s just easier to reach them while they’re walking their dog or exercising. So it’s very exciting to find new people that way. Now, at many of my book events, people seem to know me through the podcast, which is definitely not how it used to be. And it’s weird, because they see me as a podcaster, whereas I feel like I am a writer — that’s the core thing I do. But clearly these days, many people I come across found me through the podcast and then the books, instead of vice versa.

Do you think your quest to become happier has actually made you happier? Oh, absolutely. Just thinking through the implications of your decisions can make you so much happier. For example, I’ll think: Should I come back to Kansas City for this high school reunion? And the answer is “Yes, I should,” because I’ve done the research and I know that relationships are a huge key to happiness, and to reconnect with people from my past will likely make me happier. Whereas I think at an earlier point in my life, I would have thought it was too inconvenient, or that I shouldn’t bother. One of your suggestions for decluttering in Outer Order, Inner Calm that I thought was interesting was taking a picture of a

You’ve spent more than a decade now research happiness. What’s the secret? Tell us. Or, at least, tell us the stock answer you give people at parties when they ask you this. There are, I guess, two ways to answer that. One is: relationships. That’s the core of it. Ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that enduring bonds, and having somebody with whom you can confide important secrets, and having people to give support to, and receive support from — in other words, enduring relationships — is a major key to happiness. The other way is self-knowledge. We can build happiness through knowing our own nature, our own temperament. That sounds easy, but it’s actually the great task of our lives to understand ourselves. And again, this isn’t new. “Know thyself ” is written on the temple at Delphi.

Concerts are held in Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

(816) 471-0400 / kcsymphony.org

CELEBRATE SPRING! FRESH + FUN! Kansas City Symphony Chorus

Jean-Guihen Queyras

POPS Concert

Featuring Lalo’s Cello Concerto

Classical Concert

Friday and Saturday, April 5-6 at 8 p.m. Sunday, April 7 at 2 p.m.

Friday and Saturday, April 12-13 at 8 p.m. Sunday, April 14 at 2 p.m.

Friday and Saturday, May 17-18 at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 19 at 2 p.m.

PINK MARTINI with the KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY

LA VALSE with COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING

Jason Seber, David T. Beals III Associate Conductor Pink Martini joins your Kansas City Symphony for an evening of glitz and glamour, led by pianist Thomas Lauderdale and featuring vocalist China Forbes. Experience an alluring mix of Brazilian samba, ’30s Cuban dance and Parisian café music as “one of the world’s most elegant live bands” (The Times UK) mingles with your Symphony for an unforgettable party. Tickets from $40.

Michael Stern, conductor Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello MILHAUD Le boeuf sur le toit LALO Cello Concerto COPLAND Appalachian Spring RAVEL La valse, poème chorégraphique Enjoy a concert filled with the sights and sounds of spring. Tickets from $25.

STERN CONDUCTS MAHLER’S THIRD

Michael Stern, conductor Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano Women of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus Charles Bruffy, chorus director Allegro Choirs of Kansas City Christy Elsner, founder and artistic director MAHLER Symphony No. 3 A gigantic and exciting musical poem. Tickets from $25.

Free Symphony Happy Hour Concert with KC Ballet II - I COULD'VE DANCED ALL NIGHT on Tuesday, April 30 at 6 p.m.

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thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

MUSIC

JEFF NORM & DAVE

THURS 4/4

TBA

FRI 4/5

THE BILLY BATS

SAT 4/6

BROTHER & THE HAYES W/ KIAN BYRNE & TERI QUINN

WED 4/10

JEFF NORM & DAVE

THURS 4/11

BROTHERS BARCLAY

FRI 4/12

BOB WALKENHORST 7PM BETTER OFF DEAD 10PM

SAT 4/13

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WED 4/17

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It’s National Margarita Day, and Hembree guitarist Alex Ward has purchased a round of drinks for everyone at Harbour Lights. We’re clustered around a couple of tables at the back of the Lawrence bar, discussing the band’s upcoming album, House On Fire, due April 26 on the Nashville label Thirty Tigers. Bassist Garrett Childers is absent — “He just had a baby, so he went home,” Flynn says, laughing — but the rest of the band is here: Ward, singer and guitarist Isaac Flynn, drummer Austin Ward, keyboardist Eric Davis. It’s relatively rare that all the members of Hembree find themselves in the same place. They’re a Lawrence band whose members largely live elsewhere: Flynn in Los Angeles, Childers in Kansas City, the Ward brothers — decade-serving veterans in another Lawrence-formed band, the Noise FM — in Chicago. But they’ve been cooped up together these past three days, rehearsing House On Fire songs in preparation for a tour. Flynn’s been the band’s primary song-

writer since he started Hembree in 2014 as a bedroom project in the wake of his and Childers’ previous band, the Americana group Quiet Corral. The band’s first EP, New Oasis, retained elements of that genre, and Flynn had originally figured Hembree might stay in that realm. But he realized there were new strengths to be capitalized upon. “We all came from the type of genre that Hembree is — this alternative, indie-rock thing,” Flynn explains. “It took this group of people coming together and playing live to land where we are. That first EP didn’t quite sit. Then we made [2015 single] ‘Can’t Run Forever’ and we realized that’s what this band is.” Another place you can hear what Hembree has become: “Holy Water,” a single that took off in 2018, reaching a million plays on Spotify and soundtracking an Apple HomePod commercial during the 2018 Grammy telecast. After a quiet, measured introduction, a synth pulse kicks in, starting loud-quiet-loud waves that build to a huge ending. It’s the sound of Arcade

GET OUT

Release party for Hembree’s House On Fire with Cowboy Indian Bear Saturday, April 27, at the Bottleneck Fire’s “Wake Up” or Mumford & Sons’ “Little Lion Man,” geared to move the listener’s body as much as her emotions. Guitarist Ward heard those bedroom tracks when Flynn sent the brothers a Facebook message shortly after they’d moved to Chicago. “He [Isaac] said, ‘Here’s a new song that Hembree has,’ and I was like, ‘All right, they’re on to something now,’” the guitarist recalls. “’They’re grooving now, baby! I

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

MUSIC

want to be in this band!’” The previous record, Had It All, was loaded with hooks and danceability, but the new LP kicks off with a two-song salvo — “I Don’t Know Why” and lead single “Culture” — that’s more challenging, with off-kilter drumming and angular chords. This is Hembree trusting your ability to understand what the band’s going for. Or, as Flynn says with a grin and raised eyebrows: “It’s wild.” “They’re a little more aggressive and a little weird,” Austin Ward says of the songs. “But all of us connect to that, because that’s the type of music that we love.” Overall, though, the album remains in line with the band’s catchy alt-pop, with rewards such as “Heart,” which features a soaring chorus, chiming guitars, and a breakdown that’s tailor-made for audience participation. Those catchy elements, along with a chance encounter at South by Southwest in 2018, landed the band on Thirty Tigers. Following a Live From Jeriney’s Room set for the 96.5 the Buzz DJ, Hembree was due at the Continental Club. Jeriney’s friend Roze Braunstein, who was director of alternative music at Thirty Tigers, wanted to see the artist Parker Millsap — who just hap-

“WE TRULY HAD THE EXPERIENCE THAT I THOUGHT WAS NONEXISTENT AT SXSW. I WAS LIKE, ‘WHAT?’”

pened to be playing the same venue after the Lawrence act. “Jeriney and Roze walk in, and Jeriney’s like, ‘These are my friends!’ And Roze is like, ‘I need to sign these guys!’” Flynn says, still conveying amazement at the text he got from Jeriney asking if the band had a label, because Braunstein was interested. “We truly had the experience that I thought was nonexistent at SXSW. I was like, ‘What?” “Tenth year’s the charm,” jokes guitarist Ward. “It only takes 10 times of going down, and you’ll get that deal.” The album was recorded over three weeks in September and October 2018 by Eric Hillman, at Flynn’s parents’ house in Lawrence. The frontman convinced his folks to convert their entire house into a studio, he explains, and because they’re both musicians themselves, they were more than happy to host. Flynn’s mother slapped a piece of wood up and wrote on it with a Sharpie, “ROUNDABOUT STUDIOS: FUN TIMES AND MEMORIES.” “She wrote all of our names on it,” Davis adds. “It was, like, the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. We could charge people a lot of money for that experience.” It wasn’t just Flynn’s family who lent a

hand. Joel Martin of Y god Y did a lot of drum engineering, Cowboy Indian Bear’s Beau Bruns lent some equipment, and Jim Barnes from the Lawrence Public Library’s Sound+Vision Studio pitched in. Bucking a trend, the band opted to not include any of its previous singles on House On Fire. For Austin Ward, the lack of “Holy Water” isn’t a risk but rather a testament to the power of the new material. “Even though those previous songs did pretty well, we feel that this batch, quality-wise, is kind of better,” he explains. There is a callback, though: The main riff of “Culture” comes from a keyboard solo Davis had written for an older song. When he played that demo for the band, the reaction was instantaneous. “It was the only part of the song anyone cared about,” Flynn says. “It took me about three years to realize that they only wanted to hear that riff.” “There wasn’t any idea that was too crazy or laughable on the record,” agrees guitarist Ward. “Any wild idea ended up on the record. I don’t think we ever said, OK, you’ve gone too far.’” Concludes his brother: “It’s usually, ‘How can we go farther?’ or ‘How can we keep it weirder?’”

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OUT OF ECLIPSE WITH A LUSH NEW LYON DISC, ANDREW MORGAN ENTERS A NEW PHASE. BY NICK SPACEK

Andrew Morgan issued Wave Pool, the tranquil new instrumental album made in his Lyon guise, to coincide with January’s total lunar eclipse. It’s appropriately ethereal in places, then. But it’s the quiet, Antônio Carlos Jobim–influenced elements that put it on a different orbital plane from mere ambient background music. Morgan explained in an email that Wave Pool (released on New York’s Cosmic Trigger Records) was influenced by “unexpected LPs encountered on weekly visits to Love Garden Sounds.” He went into further detail when we sat down at my kitchen table to discuss the lush project. “I love Jobim,” he told me over coffee one afternoon in early March. “There’s the obvious one, Wave, but there’s The Eloquence of Antônio Carlos Jobim, which is this weird kind of corporate thing, where he’s kind of, like, sponsoring it, and everyone’s doing songs in his styles, but it’s actually different composers from Brazil.” Morgan said Wave Pool reflects his big-picture enjoyment of music. Its scope also owes something to his extra-musical experiences over the decade since his Andrew Morgan record. He taught English in Korea for a year. He went to law school at the University of Kansas (studying two semesters in London), graduated, moved to California to look for a job, got his law license, then moved back to Kansas. And he met his wife and decided to stay here while she worked on her Ph.D. in English (concentrating on poetry). “Because I’d been moving around so much, until 2014, I didn’t even have a turntable,” Morgan recalled of the early part of that era, when he lived with a couple of backpacks and a guitar. Once he got his hands on a record player, he started hit-

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

ting up Lawrence record store Love Garden Sounds to stockpile old favorites on vinyl. Wednesdays, the shop refreshes its Used New Arrivals section. He built his own schedule around that. “I started looking forward to this break in my week, where I’d pick through those four columns of records,” he said. “I’d just take it [a record] back to the listening station and check it out, or just be, ‘Oh, I love the cover,’ and take it straight home for three bucks or whatever.” Wave Pool synthesizes Morgan’s eager curiosity and renewed sense of discovery. It’s by turns jazzy, cinematic, lounge-y: the result of musicmaking without barriers or preconceived ideas. “When I switched to focusing on instrumental music, in 2010, it freed up a lot of things, because you’re not having to sing over everything,” Morgan said. The switch encouraged him to be more adventurous with where chords went, or with song structures, setting aside master plans. “Not trying to fit any format was a part of it,” he added, “but some of it was just, like, really from a high school–like kind of place: I like music. Let’s try some out and see what happens.” The music Morgan makes as Lyon is recorded either at home or at KU’s Murphy Hall, home to the university’s music and theater programs. He bought his own recording equipment in 2010, then paid an engineer to teach him the basics, recording with an Mbox, a Macbook, and an Audio Technica microphone — “just a backpack rig,” he said. “I’d have classical and jazz players over to our apartment, just meet them at their place, or meet at Murphy Hall,” Morgan said of the Lyon process. Working with KU students meant that he was able to occasionally gain access to some of the building’s

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

high-ceilinged rooms. The space let him and his musical cohorts — including rhythm section Alex Doolittle and Murphy Smith — pay sonic homage to the classic jazz recordings of Rudy Van Gelder, whose custom-built studio owed some of its distinct

results to cathedral ceilings. “I wasn’t really playing any concerts or releasing new music until 2017,” Morgan said of the past decade. “I’ve just been here, kind of quietly making music and just living.”

MUSIC

LISTEN

Love Garden’s “Used New Arrivals” rack has long nourished Morgan. Among his favorite discoveries there:

Ben Webster With Strings — Music With Feeling (1954) Webster writes in the liner notes: “Strings create a special atmosphere and this atmosphere makes me feel better and it makes me play my horn better, too ... When I was a kid growing up around Kansas City I studied the violin. But I finally had to put it down ’cause I could never get the right sounds that I was always after. So I turned to the saxophone for what I had to say musically.” Morgan: “Strings make me feel better, too. I love Ben Webster’s beautiful jazz music, and I love that he grew up around Kansas City.”

The Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group: The Music of Erik Satie: The Velvet Gentlemen (1970) Morgan: “This record is so weird. It reminds me of listening to Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein on a plastic turntable over and over again when I was a kid.”

Duke Ellington: Ellington Indigos (1958) Morgan: I adore the version of “Autumn Leaves,” with Ozzie Bailey singing and Ray Nance on violin.

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Love, Strings and Jobim: The Eloquence of Antônio Carlos Jobim (1966) Morgan: “Gorgeous album of music by Jobim, Marcos Valle, Durval Ferreira, Eumir Deodato, Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal, Luis Eça, and Oscar Neves, with a gorgeous cover of Jobim’s silhouette, guitar in hand, standing on a Rio beach at sunset.”

Stuyvesant String Quartet: Ravel String Quartet in F Major / Debussy String Quartet in G Major Op. 10 (1964) Sleeve: “In the course of a tribute to the music of Ravel, Virgil Thomson has spoken of ‘the classic ideal that is every Frenchman’s dream of every foreigner’s dream of France. It is the dream of an equilibrium in which sentiment, sensuality, and the intelligence are united at their highest intensity’ through a steady loyalty to craftsmanship.” Morgan: “Lyon dreams to be the dream within a dream described by Thomson. Ravel’s quartet in F Major is just one of all-time favorite pieces of music. And the cover — an illustration of Ravel and Debussy happy together in a hot air balloon — couldn’t be more delightful.”

Tony Bennett and Count Basie: In Person! (1959) Morgan: “Few things have brought me greater happiness than listening to this record, which I obtained for less than $5 from Love Garden Sounds in my first few weeks of owning a turntable in March 2015. I think that says a lot about music, record stores, and the vinyl format.”

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

FILM

Left: Greene at the Wildwood ropes course. Below: His camper, now donated to KCUR 89.3’s vehicle-donation program. KELCIE MCKENNEY

CAMP COUNSEL

a change more important than personal style: that his modest way of living wasn’t necessarily right for his 13-year-old son, Isaac. The kid was coming to visit for the summer — the

bag in the bunk bed.” Joey has never needed much to get by, and he believes in living on-site at Wildwood, which is about 40 miles south of Olathe on U.S. Highway 69, near La Cygnes Lake. The motto there is “Kids grow better outside,” and Joey believes wholeheartedly in that mission, in summers of learning and outdoor adventure for kids, especially low-income Kansas City youth. Sensing that Joey was perhaps due a learning adventure of his own, Wildwood executive director Robyn Ratcliff was the one who nominated him to be on Queer Eye. “I wanted Joey to be a Queer Eye hero because he’s so open and interested in learning new things, and I felt like he had an opportunity to increase his success as a camp professional and a staff supervisor by gaining confidence and believing in himself,” Ratcliff says. The producers were interested and contacted Joey’s girlfriend, Kelly Larson, who

most time he’d spent with his dad since Joey and Isaac’s mom divorced. Joey first lived at Wildwood as a camp staffer, in the late ’90s. His once and future apartment, on the back side of the Adventure Challenge Course, had flooded in the time since he’d last worked there and been all but abandoned. So he pulled the RV he’d been living in for the past four years next to it. “All the plumbing needs to be replaced, so there’s PVC on the floor,” Joey says, recounting his first impressions last spring. “There’s boards with exposed nails laying on the living room carpet, water stains on the carpet. I was basically sleeping on a sleeping

lives in the KC Northland, asking her to provide photos of Joey and his environment. “I sent pictures of Joey in all of his various stages of hair or no hair,” she says. “Winter and summer coats. Pictures of him and Isaac that I had taken wherever we were — Lake Michigan, Chicago. They also had me take a video of the camper, inside and out.” During the monthslong audition and interview process, the producers asked Joey what he wanted from a “makeover” show like Queer Eye. “I said, ‘I do similar work. I push people’s comfort zones all the time.’ I’m constantly telling the kids to be present and

HOW QUEER EYE BROUGHT MY FRIEND JOEY GREENE OUT OF THE WILDERNESS. BY ERIC MELIN

When I was in high school, in the late 1980s, Joey Greene turned me on to punk rock. He played me Minor Threat for the first time, and we used to drive from Olathe to Lawrence to see bands at the Outhouse. He and I also did improv comedy together at ComedySportz — we were among the first Kansas City high schoolers to enroll there where our comedy heroes had performed. We both went to K-State and moved in as roommates in Manhattan, eventually playing together for a while in a local band there. Sometime during college, our paths diverged, but we never really lost touch. Still, I didn’t expect to run into Joey 35,000 feet in the air over Canada. This was last August, a chance meeting on the same overnight flight to Iceland. I thought he was acting a little strange but assumed this was due to the unlikely coincidence. It turned out he was under a nondisclosure agreement. Joey had just finished shooting an episode of Netflix’s Queer Eye. He was in fact the subject of a Season 3 episode. He clearly wanted to tell me all about it but was bound to stay vague. He limited himself to admitting he’d been working on a project with “members of the KC film community.” Now I understand that he was referring to the local hires on the crew for the show, which taped the whole season in and around KC. I interrupted him a few times to see if I could guess: Was it a music video for his new band? Was he filming a workshop at

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

an improv conference? A commercial for Wildwood Outdoor Education Center and summer camp, where he was now a program manager? Did the NDA mean he’d won a game show? I was starting to make him nervous. Was it, I asked, a reality show? His eyes got big, and he changed the subject. “Anyway, I really have to go to the bathroom,” he said. Despite knowing that Joey would be a perfect candidate for it, I wouldn’t have asked him about Queer Eye because I hadn’t watched the show since its mid-2000s Bravo heyday, as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I knew it had been rebooted on Netflix with five new “make-better experts,” but I had no idea that the new show was as much a selfhelp product for the soul as it was a remedy for the fashion-challenged. Seven months later, though, the Joey Greene sitting in front of me in a Lawrence coffee shop is a changed man. For one thing, Queer Eye bought him a new wardrobe, including (as he puts it) “enough shoes for the rest of my life.” The show also remodeled and furnished his modest on-site apartment at Wildwood into an outdoorsy but still modern living space “They do one story at a time, so they don’t have to split — so they can focus on you,” he tells me. “It’s really genuine. I’m not a huge reality-TV follower. In fact, I don’t even own a TV.” He pauses to laugh. “Well, I didn’t own a TV.” The addition of a television hints at something the show helped Joey figure out,

FILM

think about what you’re doing and how it’s going to help you grow, you know, and trying to convince them to jump off a 40-foot platform,” he tells me. “And nobody does that for me.” Joey, veteran improv performer and musician, is one of those introverts whose occasional outrageousness masks a deep-seated shyness. As is pointed out in his Queer Eye episode, he keeps his gaze pointed at the ground and his posture humbly slouched. On the show, he’s frank about being a recovering alcoholic: “There was a time in my life where I felt like I just had to accept that it wasn’t going to ever get any better.” Months past his episode, though, he’s sharp, attentive, and upbeat when we talk. “They removed a lot of things that kept me in darkness,” Joey tells me. But he’s still as self-effacing as the kid I used to know. He adds, “It was the hygiene and fashion guys that terrified me the most.” This is a fair worry for a man historically most comfortable in cargo shorts, ratty T-shirts, and bandannas, whose face is usually obscured by a scraggly beard. Grooming

At the Queer Eye watch party, hosted by The Living Room.

expert Jonathan Van Ness called him a “baby Jerry,” which I can only assume is a Grateful Dead reference (amusingly at odds with Joey’s old-school punk-skater mentality). Queer Eye took Joey for an eye exam and fitted him with new glasses that look purposeful, replacing the thin-frame glass-

KELCIE MCKENNEY

es he used to wear because he thought they were invisible. They trimmed his beard and cut his hair. They gave him clothes that can still be worn at camp but that actually fit him and suggest grown-up authority. And over a mere five days, the Fab Five gave him confidence.

Just in time, because his Queer Eye secret is out, and the new season is finally on Netflix. Last night, he picked up Isaac from the airport. Over lunch today, he was live on KCUR 89.3’s Up to Date, where he gave his RV to the station’s vehicle-donation program. Earlier this afternoon, he attended a watch party at the Wildwood offices with its staff and his family, and the nonprofit began a fundraising raffle for a camp paddle signed by the Queer Eye cast. And the long day of intense attention will end at a friends-and-family late-night watch party at the Living Room Theater, where Joey — still all smiles — was recently part of the support crew for “An Evening With the Rents,” a standup show for and about families living with autism. This morning, he had still not seen Episode 302, “Lost Boy.” By the time the party ends, he and Isaac will have watched it twice. They’ll have seen Isaac paint the message “Today not someday” on a camp paddle for design expert Bobby Berk to mount on the wall in Joey’s apartment. Joey seems to have taken the words to heart.

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

SAVAGE LOVE

HOT FOR ASIANS “I MET THIS REALLY HANDSOME CHINESE AMERICAN GUY, AND I FEEL LIKE HE REWIRED ME. I’VE BEEN EXCLUSIVELY ATTRACTED TO ASIAN GUYS SINCE. IS THIS NORMAL?” BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: I’m a straight white woman in my early 30s. In theory, I’ve always been into men of all races — but in practice, most of my exes are Latino and white. In September, I met this really handsome Chinese American guy, and I feel like he rewired me. I’ve been exclusively attracted to Asian guys since. I’m not writing to ask if this is racist, because I’m not asking these guys to, like, speak Korean to me in bed or do any role-playing stuff. We just date and have sex, same as my past relationships. But if any of these dudes saw my Tinder matches, they’d be like, “This woman has a thing for Asian guys.” Which I do, but it’s pretty new. Is this normal? Do people just change preferences like that? Also, can you do a PSA about Asian dicks? In my recent but considerable experience, they run the gamut from average to gigantic. If small Asian dicks were a thing, I would have encountered at least one by now. That shit is a myth. Asian Male/White Female Dear AMWF: Here’s my general take on race-specific sexual preferences: So long as you can see and treat your sex partners as individuals and not just as objects — we are all also objects — and so long as you can express your preferences without coming across and/ or being a racist shitbag, and so long as you’ve interrogated your preferences to make sure they’re actually yours and not a mindless desire for what you’ve been told you’re supposed to want (i.e., the currently prevailing beauty standard or its equally mindless rejection, the “transgressive” fetishization of the “other”), then it’s okay to seek out sex and/or romantic partners of a particular race. I ran my general take on race-specific sexual preferences past Joel Kim Booster — a writer and comedian whose work often touches on race and desire — and he approved. (Whew.) I also shared your letter with him, AMWF, and Booster had some thoughts for you. “It doesn’t sound like her newfound preference for Asian men has anything to do with the uncomfortable fetishization of culture,” said Booster. “It’s good that she’s not asking them to speak Korean or do any sort of Asian role-playing — something that’s been asked of me before (and it’s a bummer, trust). Her interest in Asian men seems to be mostly an aesthetic thing, which you certainly can’t fault her for: There are a lot of hot Asian dudes out there.” Booster also had some questions for you. “It’s not uncommon for people later in life to discover that they’re attracted to something they’d never considered sexy before — full-grown adults are out here discovering they’re bi every damn day,” said

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Booster. “But she went 30 years before she saw one Asian man she was attracted to? And now this guy has ‘rewired’ her to be attracted only to Asian men?” He said that he would like to see a picture of this magical guy, AMWF, and I would, too. “If she was chill about it and just started adding Asian men into the mix, this wouldn’t seem like an issue,” added Booster. “But from what I can gather, she has shifted to exclusively fucking Asian guys and feels the need to write a letter about it. That feels like a red flag, and yet I can’t pinpoint why.” Maybe you’re just making up for lost time — maybe you’re getting with all the Asian dick you can now to make up for all the Asian dick you missed out on before you ran into that one impossibly hot Asian guy — and your desires/preferences/Tinder profile will achieve a racially harmonious equilibrium at a certain point. But whether you remain exclusively attracted to Asian guys for the rest of your life or not, AMWF, make sure you don’t treat Asian guys like you’re doing them a favor by sitting on their gamut-running dicks. “I’m weary of people with a specific racial preference for Asian men. And it’s less out of a fear of being fetishized — though that’s certainly part of it — and more because of the implicit power imbalance that exists in those relationships,” said Booster. “It’s all artificially constructed by The Culture, of course, but I’m acutely aware that society views Asian men as less masculine and therefore less desirable. And I’ve learned that guys who have a preference for Asian men sometimes bring a certain kind of ‘entitlement’ to our interactions, i.e., ‘You should feel lucky I’m paying you this kind of attention.’ And that’s gross! It doesn’t sound like she’s doing that, but something about this letter makes me feel like she wants to be congratulated for being woke enough to consider Asian guys. She’d do well to keep this stuff behind the curtain — no one wants to feel like someone was into them only because of some witch’s curse a hot Chinese American guy put on them at a bar.” (Follow Joel on Twitter @ihatejoelkim, and visit his website ihatejoelkim.com.) Dear Dan: I’m a guy. I’ve been with my wife since 2006. She’s my sexy Asian babe. (Yeah, I’m that white guy who married an Asian woman — I’m a stereotype, but she isn’t.) In the bedroom, it’s great. I’m still madly in love with her two kids later, and she’s as sexy as ever. But she doesn’t like to give blowjobs — always been this way. When we were dating, she’d say I could go get blowjobs from someone else, but I always

took it as a joke. At 35, I’m hornier than I was at 25. And my sexual tastes have changed over the years — or they’ve expanded, maybe, since I now want to see what it’s like to get head from a guy. How do I convince my wife to agree to this? She’s afraid I might like it; I obviously hope I do. There’s nothing I want more than to get head on the way home and then be able to tell her about it and fuck her later that night. How can I convince her to let me do this while also being able to tell her about it and be truthful? Horny Married Man Dear HMM: I’m not lumping your question together with AMWF’s in order to create some sort of hot-for-Asians-themed column. No, I’m including your letter — which arrived the same day — because it illustrates a point Booster made in his response to AMWF: “Full-grown adults are out here discovering they’re bi every damn day,” as he said, and you’re apparently one of them. I can only assume that by “she’s afraid I might like it,” you mean you’ve already asked the wife and she said no. You can ask again — maybe she’ll change her mind — but if the answer is still no, HMM, then the answer is still no. Maybe if this were a sexual adventure you could go on together, it might be more appealing to the wife. And it is, because just as there are dudes out there who love blowing straight married men, there are dudes who are up for blowing straight married men in front of their wives. So if you haven’t already proposed doing this in the context of a hot sexual encounter with a bi guy who’d also be into your wife, maybe you should. As for your label, there are straight guys out there who can close their eyes and think about women while dudes blow them, i.e., straight guys capable of making the mouthis-a-mouth leap. But you’re turned on not just by the idea of getting an enthusiastic blowjob, you’re specifically into the idea of getting one from a dude. That does make you bi, HMM, but for marketing purposes? Yeah, you’re going to want to go with straight. Question for Dan? E-mail him at mail@savagelove.net. On Twitter at @fakedansavage.

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Forks & Corks, Arrowhead Stadium

Pride & Prejudice, KCRep, Spencer Theatre

Kero Kero Bonito, The Granada

APR. 5

APR. 2-7

Nataanii Means, Lied Center

The Play That Goes Wrong, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Story Slam: Endings, Lawrence Arts Center

APR. 3

Vincent, The Riot Room

Playmates and soul mates...

APR. 6 We Came As Romans, The Granada Devil’s Den/Bummer/Brain Worms, The Replay Lounge Mitski, Knuckleheads

APR. 7 816-841-1521

T E G S ’ T LE

h C

y k e e

30 MINUTE FREE TRIAL 18+

816-841-1577 // 913-279-9202

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

The Coathangers, RecordBar

18+ MegaMates.com

Broods, The Truman KELCIE MCKENNEY

Kansas City:

Eat & Drink with Open Belly and New American Economy, Parlor

FAVX, The Replay Lounge Killer Queen ft. Patrick Myers, VooDoo Lounge Jo Koy, Uptown Theater Tesla, Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland Start: An Anti Racism Intensive Workshop, Monarch Coffee

EVENTS

APR. 10

APR. 16

Film Club: We Are Columbine, Alamo Drafthouse

Haley Reinhart, The Granada

Game of Thrones Trivia Night, Restless Spirits Distilling Company

APR. 10-14

TICKETS

In the Valley Below Presents: The Pink Chateau, Alamo Drafthouse

APR. 18

Go to thepitchkc.com/tickets to find the hottest events in KC.

Kansas City FilmFest, Cinemark at the Plaza

APR. 11 The Empire Strips Back, Uptown Theater

APR. 12 Erth’s Prehistoric Aquarium Adventure, Lied Center

APR. 12-13 C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

APR. 13 JOE CAREY

Lawrence Arts Center’s Benefit Art Auction, Lawrence Arts Center TEDxYouth@KC, Plexpod Westport Commons

MONTHLY BEER DINNER AT HOPCAT

Preacher Lawson, The Truman

Featuring Torn Label Brewing Company

Tue, Apr 30 at 6:30pm

Jesse McCartney, The Granada Jessie James Decker, Uptown Theater

APR. 14 Los Tigres del Norte, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts Kevin James, Uptown Theater

APR. 15 Shakespeare in Love, with KC Shakes, Alamo Drafthouse

Bacon & Bourbon No rules. No frills. Just smooth, sweet whiskey all night long. Join us at The Truman for The Pitch’s sixth-annual Bacon & Bourbon Festival, presented by Bulleit Bourbon and featuring the epic Whiskey War, where bartenders create unique cocktails and compete for first place.

DO YOU NEED A TICKET PLATFORM FOR AN UPCOMING EVENT?

Email us at stephanie@thepitchkc.com.

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

EVENTS

LYZA RENEE

31st ANNUAL

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City

APR. 18

APR. 21-23

AIDS Walk Route 2019

Underneath It All: Victorian Undergarments, Alexander Majors Barn & Grounds

Clue Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse

The course for the event begins in Theis Park at 10:00AM on Saturday, April 27th.

Tauk, with Recycled Funk, RecordBar

Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd. will be closed from Rockhill Road to JC Nichols Parkway. In addition, Oak Street will be closed from Volker Boulevard to Cleaver II. From Mill Creek Park, Walkers travel east on 43rd Street to Oak Street, using the south sidewalk. Walkers continue forward on what has become Rockhill Road, which curves to the right and becomes southbound, using the north, and then east, sidewalk, to 45th Street. At 45th, the route moves to the west sidewalk and continues on to Volker Boulevard. Walkers will proceed forward across Volker, veering slightly to the right, on the west sidewalk of what has become Cherry Street and continue south to 52nd Street. At 52nd, the route turns west, utilizing the north sidewalk, to Oak Street. The course turns right on Oak and walkers, on the east sidewalk, will once again cross Volker and enter Theis Park, just north of Brush Creek, where the course ends.

Saturday, April 27th Theis Park KCMO 48

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

APR. 19 Charley Crockett, The Granada Robin Trower, VooDoo Lounge Girls Rock Lawrence Fundraiser! LK Ultra & Ex Brain, The Replay Lounge

The 69 Eyes, The Riot Room

APR. 23 Pop Evil, The Truman

APR. 24

Whitey Morgan, Uptown Theater

APR. 20 Remember When Rock Was Young: The Elton John Tribute, Missouri Theatre

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Walkers head west on Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd., through Main Street, where they will enter Mill Creek Park.

APR. 22

Darlingside with Lula Wiles, RecordBar Ella Vos, The Granada Kemper ART-astic Egg Hunt, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

APR. 21 Finding Neverland, Lied Center

Alice Merton, RecordBar

EVENTS

PRESENTS

601 EAST TRUMAN ROAD KANSAS CITY, MO

WHISKEY WARS DRINKS CREATED BY: Brock Shulte from The Monarch Brent Shirley from MO Brew Charlie Cadle from Tribe

JOE CAREY

Guy Grondman from The Brick House Bartender tba from Trezomare

APR. 24-MAY 19

APR. 28

Bond, Unicorn Theatre

Terror Jr, RecordBar

APR. 25

Michael Schenker Fest, The Truman

Barnaby Bright and Calvin Arsenia, RecordBar

APR. 27 - MAY 5 Lyric Opera of Kansas City Presents The Pearl Fishers, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

APR. 27 Hembree, The Bottleneck Jeremy Enigk, The Riot Room

DMX, The Granada

APRIL 18 VIP ENTRY 6:30PM GA ENTRY 7:00PM a portion of proceeds benefitting

DON’T MISS THE FOURTH WHISKEY WARS AT BACON & BOURBON WHERE SIX OF KC’S BEST BARTENDERS SAMPLE THEIR BEST BOURBON COCKTAILS & ATTENDEES OF BACON & BOURBON GET TO VOTE FOR THEIR FAVORITE CRAFT COCKTAIL.

LAST YEAR SOLD OUT GET YOUR TICKETS TODAY!

$25 GA & $35 VIP

LIMITED NUMBER OF TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THIS PRICE THROUGH APRIL 11! STOP BY ALL PARTICIPATING VENUES TO TRY THEIR BACON & BOURBON SPECIALTY DRINKS ANYTIME IN APRIL

TICKETS AVAILABLE AT thepitchkc.com/tickets

Aziz Ansari, Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland

APR. 30 National Geographic Live - Day To Night, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

APR. 30 - MAY 5 Rent, Kansas City Music Hall

Kegs ’n’ Eggs, Bonner Springs Parkville Microbrew Festival, Parkville GeekCraft Expo KC 2019, Municipal Exhibition Hall The Hangar Party, Airline History Museum Mawwiage: Boobs, Butts, Rings and Tax Deductions, Uptown Arts Bar

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

You Belong At...

MARKETPLACE LOCAL 1000

2000

EMPLOYMENT

REAL ESTATE/RENTALS

VALENTINE NEIGHBORHOOD $400-$850 Rent 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments & 3 Bedroom HOMES.

BACCALA’ STRIP CLUB NOW HIRING DANCERS

816-753-5576

Colliers International. EHO

Contact Frank 7pm-3am Mon-Sat

CALL TODAY!

816-231-3150

3000 KS-KCKS | $545-$650 913-299-9748 HEAT & WATER PAID... NO GAS BILL! KCK 25 acre setting. 63rd & Ann 5 minutes west of I-635 & I-70. One bedroom $545. Two bedroom $650. No Pets Please. You CAN NOT BEAT this value! Don’t miss out on this limited time offer!

4000

BUY, SELL, TRADE

WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interest. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, CO 80201

MUSIC/MUSIC ROW

Piano, Voice, and Guitar lessons

Medical Assisting · Massage Therapy JOB Fitness Training & Nutrition PLACEMENT RATE

86%

FREE

SAMPLES

Scared? Anxious? Confused? HELP IS HERE DWI, Solicitation, Traffic, Internet Crimes, Hit & Run, Power & Light Violations, Domestic Assault Criminal Defense Attorney David M. Lurie 816-221-5900 www.The-Law.com

HOUSEKEEPERS | HOUSEPERSONS SERVERS | BUSSERS

Largest seLection of cBD ProDucts in Kansas city! Hemp Oil Tincture, Topical, Edibles, Lotion, Lip Balm and E-Juice

400 E 18th Street, KCMO, 64108 • 816-474-7400 Thecbdstores.com

Gifts & Decor Swords & More

Best Kratom Prices in Kc! Loyalty program for Kratom cBD products • Smoking accessories • Metaphysical Essential Oils • Swords • Knives, Figurines

mOn-Sat 10am-8pm

Employment Opportunities Link to

APPLY: www.arborlodging.com/careers LIKE US AT

@PHILLIPS_JOBS

913.782.4244 Sun 12pm-6pm

123 S. mur-Len, OLathe, KS 66062

HOTEL PHILLIPS

ESTATE PLANNING

AT AFFORDABLE FLAT FEE RATES! Licensed attorney in both Kansas and Missouri for over 20 years.

Free no obligation consultation. Let me help you protect your assets, loved ones, and your legacy!

Phil Anderson, Esq.

Mid American Legal Services LLC (816) 640-5888 | midamericanlaw.com

NEED A WILL? YOU BETTER CALL PHIL!

Degree & Certificate Start a career in less Programs in: than 18 months. *Average placement rate for all three programs.

NOW HIRING

Start your new career in just 9-19 months

THEPITCHKC.COM

LEGAL

steven@thepitchkc.com 816-218-6732

JOB PLACEMENT RATE*

For more info Please call/text Kathleen 913-206-2151 or Email: klmamuric@yahoo.com

LEGAL

Call NOW! MUCH NICER THAN THE PRICE!

Classifieds

86%

Available from professional musician and instructor. Instructor teaches in a fun and meaningful context from ages 4 to the young at heart. Sessions are 1⁄2 hour and 1 hour. Students who sign up before April 30th will receive $5 off

SERVICES

ATTORNEY SINCE 1976 KS/MO Injuries, KS Divorce, All Family, Juvenile & More. FREE CONSULTATION Greg Bangs 913-345-4100

7000

THE PITCH | APRIL 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Programs in massage KC, Lawrence, & Springfield therapy, medical assisting,

1.866.443.9140

| WellSpring.edu

AUCTION DATE: 5/1/19 WEATHER PERMITTING

The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, May 1st 2019 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full. For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

2006 Hyundai Sonata

5NPEU46FX6H146219

2000 Toyota Sienna

4T3ZF13C7YU220115

2003 Cadillac Deville

1G6KD54Y13U292168

1998 Mercury Villager

4M2ZV1111WDJ21864

2000 Oldsmobile Silhouette

1GHDX03E8YD177933

2003 Toyota Highlander

JTEHF21A130111306

1999 Mitsubishi Galant

4A3AA36G1XE078269

1994 Jayco 300FK Eagle

1UJBJ02M0R1SK0154

2007 Chrysler 300

2C3KA53G97H744976

1995 Prestige Boat Trailer

4JHBS1911SC000845

2003 BMW325 XI

WBAEU33463PM55518

2009 Toyota Corolla

1NXBU40E89Z112935

1972 Triumph TR6

CC78061L

2009 Nissan Murano

JN8AZ18W69W154932

2009 Nissan Murano

JN8AZ18W99W154018

Many of these vehicles run and drive. If you are looking for cheap transportation, don’t miss this auction/sale. We welcome all buyers. Terms of auction: All sales are “as is” “where is”. No guarantees or warranties. Paper work to obtain new title will be $75.00 Per vehicle. No guarantee that paperwork will produce title.Bidding will be number only. Terms are cash or certified check. Vehicles must be paid for in full at end of auction. No exceptions. All sales are final. No returns.

INSURANCE AUTO AUCTION 2663 SOUTH 88TH ST. KCKS, 66111 | 913-422-9303

W H E RE NE I G H BORS A R E B EST F RI E ND S

KC’s Premier

Medical Cannabis Clinic Cannabis Education & Workshops

Eastland Court

Want to be the first to apply for a

816-363-9684

Missouri Medical Cannabis Card?

Senior Apartments Rents Starting at $1,020/mo.

Second Location Now Open

BRAND NEW, 1&2 BEDROOM APARTMENTS FOR THE ACTIVE ADULT (55+)

NOW LEASING!

Free Heat, Electric, Cable, Water & Garbage Small Pets Welcome! Close to Shopping, Restaurants, and Places of Interest

In-Suite Washer and Dryer

Emergency Call Systems

Central Air Conditioning

Beauty Salon & Large Community Room

Patios/Balconies

415 Delaware St Suite 4W KCMO 64105

Schedule Your Appointment Online Now!

816-514-0023

Fitness Center

Smoke-Free Living

TheGreenClinics.com

Elevator/Secure Entry

#FeelBetter

19301 East Eastland Center Court | Independence, MO 64055 eastlandcourt@clovergroupinc.com

Now Hiring

For Numerous Departments

SINCE 1949 MO & KS

· Auto · SR22 · Home · Renters · Commercial · Contractors

● $30 parking per month ● Generous travel discounts ● Vacation & PTO pay ● Holiday pay

● Discounted bus passes ● 1 free meal per shift ● Medical ● Vision ● Dental

@thepitchkc 5 miles from Montauk State Park and Current River.

Call or Text 816-531-1000 · KCinsurance.com

Apply in person at

1130 Westport Road · Kansas City, MO 64111

1329 Baltimore Ave, Kansas City, MO 64105 Questions? Call HR at 816-303-1629

TH E P IT C HKC.C O M

1303 S. 22nd St St Joseph, MO 64507 (Inside 20 After 4 CBD shop)

Scared? Anxious? Confused? HELP IS HERE!

Spacious one-bedroom cabin, sleeps four. $ /night

25 one-time cleaning fee

901-233-4496

DWI, Solicitation, Traffic, Internet Crimes, Hit & Run, Power & Light Violations, Domestic Assault KS/MO Injuries, KS Divorce, All Family, Juvenile & More

Call

Attorney Since 1976

913.345.4100

Greg Bangs

for a FREE consultation

Criminal Defense Attorney

David M. Lurie

816-221-5900 www.The-Law.com

NEWto see& what RESALE ALL AREAS | ALL PRICES Want your Short Sales-Foreclosures-Condos Townhomes-Single Family Homes.

CALL NOW

home is worth?

Sharon Sigman, rE/maX STaTELinE 913-488-8300 or 913-338-8444 www.FormLS.com

thepitchkc.com | APRIL 2019 | THE PITCH

STOKLEY

ROBIN TROWER

SHY BOYS

OF MINT CONDITION

WITH FAST JOHNNY RICKER

APRIL 18

APRIL 19

WITH BERWANGER AND KID COMPUTER

JOHNNY MARR

WALK OFF THE EARTH

APOCALYPTICA

MAY 15

MAY 17

MAY 3 *21+ ONLY

APRIL 20

*21+ ONLY

JIM BREUER LIVE

PLAYS METALLICA BY FOUR CELLOS

THE RECORD COMPANY ALL OF THIS LIFE TOUR

MAY 24

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

JUNE 12

Tickets available at VooDooKC.com or Ticketmaster.com/voodookc or by phone at 1-800-745-3000. Located minutes from Downtown Kansas City. Unlimited Free Parking. All shows are 18 & up unless noted otherwise.

Know When To Stop Before You Start.® Gambling Problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. Subject to change or cancellation. Phone and online orders are subject to service fees. Must be 21 years or older to gamble, obtain a Caesars Rewards card or enter VooDoo®. ©2019, Caesars License Company, LLC.