The Pitch: June 2021

June 2021 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM

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CONTENTS

THE PITCH

Publisher Stephanie Carey Editor-in-Chief Brock Wilbur Strategy Director Kelcie McKenney Associate Digital Editor Savannah Hawley Music Editor Nick Spacek Film Editor Abby Olcese Contributing Writers Emily Cox, Liz Cook, Rachel Potucek, Anne Kniggendorf, Barbara Shelly, April Fleming, Deborah Hirsch, Brooke Tippin, Beth Lipoff, Riley Cowing, Dan Lybarger, Vivian Kane, Orrin Grey, Adrian Torres, Reb Valentine, Aaron Rhodes, J. M. Banks, Gail Folsom Little Village Creative Services Jordan Sellergren Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Joe Carey, Chase Castor, Caleb Condit, Travis Young, Jim Nimmo Contributing Designers and Illustrators Katelyn Betz, Austin Crockett, Jake Edmisten, Lacey Hawkins, Angèle Lafond, Alex Peak, Frank Myles, Jon Tinoco Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Account Manager John Phelps Director of Operations Andrew Miller Editorial Interns Bek Shackelford, Lucie Krisman, Sophia Misle Multimedia Intern Nicole Mitchell Design Intern Laurel Crouse Marketing Intern Khaqan Khan

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Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey

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COURTESY OF STRAWBERRY SWING

4 LETTER

23 DINING

36 KC CARES

6 NEWS

24 How Kansas City Learned to Stop

38 SAVAGE LOVE

Letter from the Editor A toast untoasted, a couple unroasted

BY BROCK WILBUR

Pavement-Slanted and Enchanted The people move to reclaim power over our streets

BY BARB SHELLY

8 S.T.E.M. Cells

Invention convention brings young investors attention

BY BETH LIPOFF

10 SPORTS

Kick Out The Jams FCKC’S disappearing act in 2017 is set right in 2021 by a married couple and KC’s queen

BY JOSEPH HERNANDEZ

14 SUMMER GUIDE

2021 Summer Guide Our Summer Guide is your key to an unforgettable season

BY SOPHIA MISLE, BEK SHACKELFORD, LUCIE KRISMAN, NICOLE MITCHELL, SAVANNAH HAWLEY, KELCIE MCKENNEY, AND BROCK WILBUR

Eat This/Drink This Now Betty Rae’s Ice Cream and The Daiquiri at Tiki Huna

BY APRIL FLEMING

Worrying and Love Da’Bomb Spicin Foods deliberately punishing hot sauce sells one millionth bottle

BY LIZ COOK

26 Magic (Of) Mushrooms

BoysGrow BoysGrow prides itself on being a family by working and growing together

BY BROOKE TIPPIN

Savage Love The Blowjob “Button” and CrossDressing

BY DAN SAVAGE

Living a Morel Life

BY ANNIE KNIGGENDORF

29 CULTURE

I Want a New Plug One that won’t go away

BY EMILY COX

32 ARTS

Music by Timber Land A renovated lumber yard brings live performances to Baldwin City

BY NICK SPACEK

34 FILM

On Location at True/False 2021 Highs and lows of Missouri’s famous documentary film festival amid pandemic-transition

BY ABBY OLCESE

“The Moment John’s Soul Left His Body” by Zach Bauman thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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LETTER

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR A TOAST UNTOASTED, A COUPLE UNROASTED

BY BROCK WILBUR

Derek and I met Day One at college. We didn’t live in the same dorm. We weren’t in any sort of “Meet & Greet,” and we had no shared interests. Determining how and why we met or even spoke is nearly impossible.

As is the case for him across his lifetime, I assume he tagged into a preternatural instinct that just pointed him in a direct and said, “Hello, yes. That person. That person belongs with me now.”

Derek and I swore we weren’t the kind of guys to join a frat. Then we joined a frat.

Because that frat only wanted both of us or neither of us and we were like “Sure, let’s try this weird experiment.” My little sister Brooke (who you might know from being our KC Cares writer every month) loved to come visit me in college. She stayed in our frat house—a place where no woman should have ever set foot, nor any human being truly. On so many trips, Derek was a better big brother to her than I was. The kind of guy who would kick the shit out of someone for being weird to her. A true protector.

In 2017, Derek was the best man at my wedding. While the event itself was a small personal affair in Salina, Kansas, Derek oversaw the group as we did a three-hour limo ride to Kansas City. (Yes, drinking champagne for three hours in a limo resulted in… a number of restroom stops between Lawrence and KC.) Because Derek is a huge big-shot fancy business-boy these days, we checked in that night to Crown Center, and he was automatically upgraded to the Honeymoon Suite. Instead of—I repeat—the

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people on honeymoon. I do not think my wife begrudges him for this, nearly as much as she begrudges me for being baked outta my gourd in a hotel room with a grand piano (!) and trying to bash out Ben Folds Five songs at 3 a.m. instead of being, y’know, a husband.

Last week, I flew to LA to be a part of Derek’s wedding. My sister was my date for the wedding, because her connection to Derek for always being the “other older brother” has never gone away—a true testament to his character. We had an exceptional weekend out on the coast, at venues overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and staying in a resort hotel more expensive than, I assume, the cost of saving the rainforests or sending a manned mission to Mars.

When Derek announced the wedding, it was set for Italy in mid-2020. I remember texting him in February to say, “Hey, I don’t think your wedding is happening.” This was as I was watching the news say that travel between us and Italy was getting shut down.

He called back to say “Why do you think this won’t happen? I’m in Italy and checking out venues right now!” To which I said…

“Uh, how fast can you possibly run to the airport. I fucking mean it. Go go go go go.”

The wedding finally happened. Our gift bags and other merch all had letters that said things like “Welcome to Italy” with the “Italy” part crossed out and “California” written in with a magic marker. They leaned into the whole “whoops” element, and it was very funny.

My job at Derek’s wedding was to be the M.C. for the evening. To set the stage and to introduce all the people and songs, and generally just celebrate/roast the beautiful couple to be. Minutes before the post-wedding party began, the wedding planners hid the microphone from me. They thought I might be a loose cannon and didn’t want to deal with it. To be fair: I have loose cannon eyes. And I’m absolutely a chaos demon who lives for violence. But still. I’d been asked to run this almost two year ago. And now we were hiding the microphone from me, in a grade-school level Derek and Alaina ERICA STREELMAN PHOTOGRAPHY passive aggressive solution.

And I did not take it well.

The big centerpiece was that they’d you’ve overcome. asked me to come speak to them and enterBy way of coda: Derek came back to the tain the entire party; mostly in my capacity hotel from the wedding so drunk that two as a stand-up comedian. Instead, the person men had to carry his corpse between them, who showed up was the investigative jour- like Weekend at Bernie’s but for the most nalist. The night before, at the post-rehearsal important night of his life. He slurred at me dinner when everyone got way too drunk at in an elevator: “I’m never drinking again.” the hotel for hours on end, I did a Brock. I Which marks the 13th year in a row Derek sat around different groups and—while it has said that to me in total earnestness. But looked like I was just dicking around on my as we waited on security to come help break cell phone—I actually took down notes. I him into his own room (because he lost his took notes on everything that I overheard. keycard), his brother laid him on the ground From so many different friends and family and my sister held his hand and patted his groups. hair. “Brooke, I’m so sorry and you’re so Had I been allowed to speak at the wed- wonderful,” he said repeatedly. There was ding event (I was flown out to lead), I had no better end to this wedding than my sisprepared 37 different anonymous quotes ter, who considered him the better protecfrom their extended circle extrapolating tor, kneeling in a hotel hallway a decade later embarrassing stories from their past, tales and returning the favor. of horror from previous relationships, and To Derek and Alaina: Mazel tov. Also, painfully honest evaluations of what chance you’ve got a helluva journalist dunk headthis new marriage had. ing your way in nine and a half years. Hope My wedding present to this couple, as you think it’s funny then. Congrats, dumbthe Woodward and Bernstein of petty bitchy dumbs. Love you both, unending. bullshit, is that I’m never sharing this document. Not until your tenth wedding anni- Pitch in, and we’ll make it through, versary—a point at which this will only be funnier than before, and will only solidify how truly in love you are, and what hurdles

Howdy, Kansas City Howdy,Kansas City

thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

5

NEWS

PAVEMENT— SLANTED AND ENCHANTED THE PEOPLE MOVE TO RECLAIM POWER OVER OUR STREETS BY BARB SHELLY

O

n e way t o look at a street is as a slab of asphalt. Maybe with a painted line in the middle. It’s simple and—mostly—functional.

But right now, in the public conversation, streets are so much more. For too long in Kansas City and some of its surrounding communities, streets have been the domain of cars, cops, crime, and decay. A movement to reclaim them for walkers, kids, dogs, and bikes could change the city.

“Transportation has always been a social justice issue, but people are recognizing that more so than in the past,” says Eric Rogers.

He is executive director of BikeWalkKC, an increasingly vocal nonprofit that promotes a simple idea: Streets are for people. If people of all races, ages, and identities can safely walk, bike, roll, scoot, or otherwise move around their community, we’ll have better air, better health, and a better economy.

It was BikeWalkKC that recently alerted the City Council to the racist aspects of the city’s jaywalking ordinance.

It turns out that Kansas City is the birthplace of jaywalking—both the funny name and the crime. In a sop to the auto industry (perhaps the first of many), the city in the early 1900’s made it a municipal offense for people to walk across the street.

Ticketing pedestrians doesn’t make the streets safer. “I can’t think of a single example in my career when a pedestrian was issued a ticket to protect an individual or the public around them,” says Rick Johnson, a criminal defense lawyer.

Johnson began his law career as a public defender. One of his first clients, he says, was a guy who was ticketed for taking one

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step over the line of a crosswalk.

Jaywalking is what lawyers call a “pretextual offense”—a reason to stop people and look for something more serious. More often than not, the people who get stopped are Black, brown, and/or poor.

“You’re not going to be living in Mission Hills and get ticketed for jaywalking,” Johnson says.

For the people who are stopped, one errant step into the street can lead to a spiral of jail stays, fines, lost income, and outstanding warrants.

“For some people, jaywalking is the first step to a life of being punished for things that are out of their control,” says Michael Kelley, director of policy for BikeWalkKC and a nationally recognized expert on equitable street use.

In early May, the Kansas City Council wiped its jaywalking ordinance off the books. It also—after a rather long conversation—got rid of an ordinance that made it illegal to bike or roll around the city with dirty tires. Another ordinance that allowed police to stop cyclists and look for defective features on their bicycles also got tossed.

The council’s actions are surely progress. But the bigger street-related crimes in Kansas City are institutional—perpetrated not by citizens but against them.

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Imani Morris, 10, has a sweet pink-and-white bicycle but no safe place to ride it. Her street, near 81st Terrace and Euclid Avenue in Kansas City’s Marlborough neighborhood, is narrow and bumpy. It has no sidewalks.

Imani’s mom, Sharonn Morris, sometimes lets her daughter ride up and down the block, but only if she is watching, looking left and right, and yelling “car!” if a vehicle comes flying down the street. Which they do, all the time.

If her mother shouts out a warning, Amani is expected to bolt for the side of the road. While some neighbors on the block wish for sidewalks and rain gutters, Sharonn wants speed bumps. No one has much hope that anything will happen soon.

“When you look at the sidewalks or the way streets are designed, the built environment can be a big barrier to people’s mobility, and especially for kids,” says Andrea Clark, policy and planning manager for KC Healthy Kids, a nonprofit that, among other things, works to create safer spaces for children to play outside.

“We approach our advocacy around safe and accessible streets, but we also look at it as an issue of equity,” Clark says.

Look at Census tracts in and around Kansas City, and you’ll see an inescapable

correlation among race, income, and streets and sidewalks.

The poorest neighborhoods have the highest numbers of what the Census calls “zero-vehicle” households, meaning no one owns a car. There are more than 49,000 of those in the Kansas City region, according to data compiled by BikeWalkKC. Those neighborhoods are the most likely to record pedestrian injuries and fatalities. And their streets and sidewalks (if they exist) are in the worst condition.

Kansas City’s street and sidewalk challenges are epic.

In 2019, a city report classified almost half of the city’s roads as poor or failed. The City Council recently more than doubled the street resurfacing budget to $39 million, which everyone agrees is just a pittance of what is needed.

A study in 2008 estimated the cost of fixing or providing sidewalks for every street in the city to be at least $1 billion. To say the city is taking baby steps is an understatement; it is budgeting $7.5 million a year for replacement and repair. More than a quarter of households in Kansas City lack sidewalks altogether.

“When we fail to invest in the transportation systems, the infrastructure, the

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Imani Morris loves her bike, but her street is dangerous.

programs, and the other things that can support those neighborhoods, that is a choice to invest in inequity in our community,” Kelley says.

In 2008, the League of American Bicyclists ranked Kansas City dead last on its list of bike-friendly cities. It was embarrassing, but accurate. Kansas City had few designated bike lanes, its streets were—and still are—in terrible shape, and pedestrians and cyclists risked their lives trying to cross the Missouri River, hugging the shoulders of bridges while the cars and trucks roared by.

Things were so bad that the BBC actually sent a crew to Kansas City to film a documentary about us. That at least got the attention of City Hall. Mark Funkhouser, (mayor at the time) declared a crusade to make Kansas City bike-friendly. The BBC film was also the incentive for the creation of BikeWalkKC. “Bicycling was not the only poor ranking for KC,” Rogers wrote recently in a blog post. “We had terrible stats for healthy living indicators like sedentary lifestyles, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and child health. In a city that proudly touted having more freeway miles per capita than any American city, we were dealing with the effects of a community designed for cars and not for people.”

He added, correctly, that the worst indicators are seen in low-income neighborhoods with high percentages of people of color. “The negative impacts on health, wellness, financial stability, and physical mobility are still felt today.”

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There was a time, says Clark, at KC Healthy Kids, when public life took place in the streets. Kids played ball, vendors sold food, people gossiped.

That changed with the automobile, with laws that penalized pedestrians, and with highways that separated neighborhoods from one another and from essential commerce. Streets are now places where parents tell their children not to go.

“It wasn’t always that way and it doesn’t have to be that way going forward,” Clark says. “There are things we can do to make streets safer for all users.”

BARB SHELLY

The good news is that people are starting to take back their streets.

In northeast Kansas City, Kansas, one of the region’s poorest neighborhoods, residents are conducting “walking audits.” They document the conditions of streets and sidewalks, threats from traffic, accessibility to parks and playgrounds, and other quality of life issues. College students tally up the data and neighborhood groups use it to set their priorities.

“Northeast Kansas City, Kansas, is an area that was redlined,” says Rachel Jefferson, executive director of Groundworks Northeast Revitalization Group, a coalition of neighborhoods. “Because of structural racism, it’s an area where people were set up to fail.”

By demanding safer streets and better environments, people are controlling their own destinies, she says. “It’s really about local decision-making being put in the hands of people.”

The staff at BikeWalkKC also sees progress, starting with bus service. Although still clunky and inadequate, it has ditched fares on some routes and has plans to go to completely “zero fare” at some point.

Other good news: Kansas City finally has a designated transportation division.

Walkers and bikers can now cross the Missouri River on bridge walkways separated from traffic. Bike education programs are thriving in the city. Its bikeshare program is going strong and more neighborhoods are asking for funds for bike lanes.

“It’s not just the crazy bike advocates anymore,” Rogers says.

The crusade to decriminalize jaywalking in Kansas City mobilized a powerful coalition of neighborhood and advocate groups, including the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, KC Tenants, the Midwest Innocence Project, and KC Healthy Kids.

A group like this—organized around the goal of making the streets work for people— could change Kansas City and the region.

“Being able to walk and bike in your neighborhood should be something that’s fun and brings you joy,” says Rogers. “I think everybody should be able to participate in society and the economy, whether they want to walk or bike or use transit.”

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7

NEWS

S.T.E.M. CELLS INVENTION CONVENTION BRINGS YOUNG INVESTORS ATTENTION BY BETH LIPOFF

Move over, Thomas Edison. A whole crop of young Kansas City inventors is gathering steam (or is that STEM?) with the Invention Convention competition held by the Linda Hall Library. This is the first year this national program has made it to the metro area.

“The library was interested in becoming involved in the STEM ecosystem in Kansas City,” says Eric Ward, vice president of public programs for the library. “There are a lot of STEM organizations doing great work in the city, and we didn’t want to duplicate anything that other organizations are doing.”

Invention Convention is a program of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. The Linda Hall Library became an affiliate of theirs to participate, which is already a Patent and Trademark Resource Center and helps people doing intellectual property research.

For Invention Convention, that’s a key step. To qualify, projects must not be something that is already patented or available on the market, but they should solve a problem or issue.

“It’s for any student. It doesn’t have to be for students who are planning to be engineers or planning to be scientists,” Ward says. “It can be a musician who has an idea of a better music stand or an athlete who has an idea for a better football cleat or soccer cleat.”

Students keep track of all their efforts— what worked and what didn’t—and present their idea with all the research to back it up.

Although they have to have an original idea, their prototype doesn’t have to work in order to win. It’s more about the innovation process.

Local STEM professionals made themselves available, both as mentors and judges, for the contest.

The contest didn’t inspire Anthony Arquieta to create his invention—he’d already been working on it as a student at Blue Valley’s Center For Advanced Professional Studies—but it did give him an outlet to show off his creation. It paid off, and he took home the best of show title with a $2,500 scholarship and an $800 cash prize for his invention, the Pelokit.

His Pelokit takes the energy generated

Declan Adair, 11, and Madhava Bhadriraju, 12, worked together at Lakewood Middle School to create their Low-Cost Portable Water Filtration System. The invention earned them first place in the 6th-8th grade category.

BETH LIPOFF

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

Anthony Arquieta, a recent graduate of Blue Valley High School, won the best in show award for his invention, the Pelokit. It charges the battery on an ebike while you’re riding it.

BETH LIPOFF

by a bike cruising fast down a hill and cycles it back into the ebike battery using a hub generator attached to the front wheel and connected to the ebike machinery.

“When you’re mountain biking, there’s a lot of going up the mountain and then riding really fast down the mountain. With these ebikes that are coming out for mountain biking, it makes it easy to cruise up the mountain so you’re not out of breath, but after a few runs the battery will start wearing out,” Arquieta says.

Creating new equipment and modifying his own kit was an interesting experience.

“I’ve never torn into my own bikes. I had to learn how to lace things into spokes and do all these different things I had never done, including taking off my crankshaft petals. I spent a lot of time in the lab just trying to configure things,” he says.

Arquieta ordered better parts to enhance his inventions and boost the amount of energy it’s able to cycle back into the battery before the national competition. He’s hoping to eventually get enough to make the

battery last 25% longer.

Like Arquieta, 17-year-old Kelly Ann Greene had already started working on her invention, the Baby Saver, as a freshman.

Long before she heard about the contest.

Her inspiration came from a news story about a child left in a hot car.

“I really like just being able to potentially help someone,” says Greene, who just graduated from St. Teresa’s Academy. “Just having that idea and that motivation makes it really rewarding (to know) that possibly one day this invention could save a baby’s life.”

The Baby Saver can detect if a child is in his or her car seat and monitors temperature, pulse, and other vital signs. If it senses these spiking into dangerous levels, its connected app sends an alert with a GPS signal to both the parents and emergency services.

Greene has already obtained a provisional patent, though she’s still refining her design.

“It’s pretty clunky right now. It’s about the size of maybe a big mug,” Greene says.

“It’s pretty large right now just because the

NEWS

parts I used for it are the basic building parts from Amazon, such as a Raspberry Pi unit with extensions.”

When Lakewood Middle School students Madhava Bhadriraju and Declan Adair learned how difficult it can be to get clean water in the developing countries they were studying at school, they wanted to do something about it.

They were especially concerned about the high cost of water filters and decided to make something easy to carry that filtered

ing—but that’s how it goes with innovation.

“We started out with powdered charcoal, and that would make the water black.

We went to the carbon. We tried many different things until we found which one worked,” Adair says.

The Pelokit, the Baby Saver, and the water filtration system are all going to the national competition. Also heading to the national competition are a lawnmower trimmer from Saint Thomas Aquinas High School students James Rogge, Aar-

Kelly Ann Greene, who just graduated from St. Teresa’s Academy, took second place with her Baby Saver invention, which monitors vital signs of children in car seats and sends alerts to make sure on one is left unattended in a hot car.

BETH LIPOFF

“[INVENTION CONVENTION] IS FOR ANY STUDENT. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOR STUDENTS WHO ARE PLANNING TO BE ENGINEERS OR PLANNING TO BE SCIENTISTS,” WARD SAYS. “IT CAN BE A MUSICIAN WHO HAS AN IDEA OF A BETTER MUSIC STAND OR AN ATHLETE WHO HAS AN IDEA FOR A BETTER FOOTBALL CLEAT OR SOCCER CLEAT.” —ERIC WARD bacteria and viruses from water, but wasn’t out of range monetarily.

“Water filters on the market, they don’t filter waterborne viruses. Our filter, it does, because it uses activated carbon which filters waterborne viruses at 0.5 microns,” Bhadriraju says. “Most small handheld filters have a plastic membrane with microscopic holes, and that can filter bacteria but not viruses.”

Bhadriraju figures their creation costs about $1 per unit as opposed to the $20 other filters cost.

Developing it wasn’t all smooth sail-

on Scaletty, and Dillon Scharpenburg, and hand-sanitizing slime from Summit Trail Middle School students Sophie Thibeault, Madilyn Grady, and Sophia Plotnikov.

With the contest open to the entire metro area—covering 17 counties from Douglas to Bates—23 students from six schools entered 12 projects in the competition. These numbers are on par with what Ward expected for Kansas City’s first year in the program. Results from the national competition, which is virtual this year, will be released June 24. thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

9

SPORTS

KICK OUT THE JAMS FCKC’S DISAPPEARING ACT IN 2017 IS SET RIGHT IN 2021, BY A MARRIED COUPLE AND KC’S QUEEN.

BY JOSEPH HERNANDEZ

On April 26, the city’s sports culture changed. Playing at Children’s Mercy Park on short notice, the night marked Kansas City NWSL’s first home game. It was a soldout crowd, even with COVID-19 protocols in place. The Blue Hell is a sea of teal. The Blue Crew, the city’s women’s soccer superfans, get the crowd going through the good and the bad. It’s the start of a new generation in Kansas City.

We know what happened to its predecessor, FC Kansas City. It won championships in back-to-back seasons, hosted superstar talent, and looked to build itself among the ranks of the Chiefs, the Royals,

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

and Sporting KC in Kansas City sports lore.

Players such as Nicole Barnhart, Amy Rodriguez, and Lauren Holiday were becoming local legends. Holiday even had her number retired by the franchise.

It came tumbling down in 2017. Elam Bear, the CEO of North Central Equity, LLC in Minneapolis, was named the new owner.

“This is a good day for Kansas City, one of the greatest sports towns in the United States,” FCKC founder Brad Likens said at the time. “With Elam and his partners committed to the club and our region, I know our organization will be stronger than ever and that this move is not only good for the

team, and our fans, but the league as a whole.

While there are no certainties in sports, I know FC Kansas City will take the field on opening day poised to compete for another NWSL championship.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

After mismanagement by the new ownership, the NWSL announced after the 2017 season that FCKC would cease operations and move out west to Utah. Dell Loy Hansen, who owned the MLS’s Real Salt Lake, would take control. The team disappeared in a heartbeat and nothing would be able to stop it. When asked if Kansas City could still be a viable market for professional women’s

soccer, then NWSL Managing Director said “given a different set of circumstances, yes.”

Chris and Angie Long of Kansas Citybased Palmer Square Capital Management were given a different set of circumstances.

NEW OWNERSHIP, NEW DIRECTION Hansen announced Aug. 30 that he would sell his teams as Major League Soccer investigated allegations of racism against him.

According to The Athletic, former employ-

SPORTS Houston Dash forward Nichelle Price and KC NWSL defender Sydney Miramontez.

CHRIS ORITZ

their significance and impact. I believe that communities are strengthened by diversity. I am truly sorry for offending and being insensitive to the plight of others. I seek to do better and commit to supporting and improving diversity and inclusion in my own community going forward.”

No amount of texts from his wife, Julie, to a news station in Utah would make up for the damage he’d done to the players in the organization. Apologies through press releases weren’t going to stop the bleeding. He could give out The New Jim Crow to all the MLS teams and it wouldn’t stop him from doing what needs to be done. Hansen lost the trust of the teams and the league. It was time to move on and sell the teams.

The relocation announcement came Dec. 7. The Long family, joined by former professional soccer player Brittany Matthews, would take control of Utah Royals FC. Women’s professional soccer made its way back to the Soccer Capital of the United States.

“It’s incredible. It’s amazing. The support from the community is so tremendous and the gratitude from the community has been so much,” Angie Long says. “It feels like [it’s] really an honor and exciting to be a part of it.”

The journey for the Longs officially started during the 2019 Women’s World Cup. The Longs have always been huge supporters of women’s athletics. After attending the tournament and seeing their daughter play in local tournaments in France, the Palmer Square power couple were convinced that soccer’s greatest community needed a team back. It only makes sense that season ticket holders of FCKC with a lot of money are responsible for the return.

Almost immediately after they returned to the U.S., the Longs reached out to the NWSL to start discussions on an expansion team. Staying in contact with NWSL commissioner Lisa Baird and other team owners in the league, they planned for the new team to join in either 2022 or 2023. Instead, Christmas came early not only for them but for soccer fans in the area. ees and players accused Hansen of using slurs and calling Black people thugs. Hansen’s comments on a Salt Lake City radio show about his team joining eight other MLS teams in postponing games over the summer didn’t do him any favors, as teams across all sports in the U.S. were protesting over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI. “I recognize that at times I have spoken too quickly, without pausing to consider the feelings or good intentions of others,” Hansen says in a statement. “This is not acceptable, and I assume full responsibility for allowing my words to travel unfiltered as to

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME Getting the team back was the easy part.

Now they have to build a staff that’ll fit with their vision and meshes well with the incoming roster. They knew they wanted Huw Williams as the head coach as he has ties to the city. The Welsh native was a founder, assistant coach, and general manager of FCKC. He coached Avila University’s men’s soccer team from 1989-1992 and is also a former director of coaching for Kansas Youth Soccer. thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

11

SPORTS

After Williams, it became a puzzle that the Longs loved putting together. Chris says that one of the beauties of starting a team in Kansas City is the abundance of talent in the area. Staff from other organizations that were jobless due to the pandemic, leaders in their respective fields, and out-of-town recruitments make up the coaching, equipment, and medical staff. They tapped marketing and creative executive Jen Gulvik to be the team president. Amber Cox, formerly the Vice President of Sports for the Mohegan Sun, joined as the team’s Chief Operating Officer.

They then turned their attention to the players and getting their housing, cars, and access to facilities up to par. The Longs did everything they needed to do to make their team comfortable living here. It sounds simple on the surface, but it gets hectic.

Not all of the players reside in Utah, so shipping all of their possessions from one place to another in a relatively quick fashion during a pandemic isn’t ideal. Having players from Argentina, Australia, and Scotland adds another wrinkle to the plan, as pandemic restrictions make traveling overseas tougher.

Next came marketing, which is where Brittany Matthews shines. She was immediately interested in the team when the Longs

12

THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

reached out to her. Matthews led a brand advisory group that’s behind a lot of the promotion strategies fans see today, including asking the community what the team’s name should be. Her name draws attention alone—most people know her as the partner to Kansas City’s crown jewel, Patrick Mahomes. “(Matthews) is a great person,” Angie says. “She’s so fun to work with. She’s young.

She really connects well with our players and she’s such a great leader and business person herself. She’s just a joy to work with.”

“We are so lucky to have them in the community for so many reasons,” Chris Long says. “They’re so authentic. They’re both leaders, true leaders and they are so caring about everything Kansas City. From a community-specific standpoint, a sports perspective, and a business perspective they’re now really involved, so we’re really lucky to have them here.”

Matthews’ partnership is just one of many in which high-profile names are joining in on owning a franchise in a women’s professional league. In July, a group including Natalie Portman, Serena Williams, Eva Longoria, and members of the 1999 Women’s World Cup team announced they were starting Angel City F.C., an expansion team out of Los Angeles. Naomi Osaka now has a

stake in the North Carolina Courage, while Jenna Bush Hager and Chelsea Clinton are a part of an ownership group for the Washington Spirit.

They haven’t released season ticket holder numbers, but Chris says it’s far surpassed the number they expected. The team sold out its first two games—a trend that’ll most likely continue as the season progresses and capacity limits increase. Matthews and her crew know what they’re doing in a market that ranked third in viewership during the 2019 World Cup and finished in the Top 10 for 2020’s Challenge Cup. While their first game was at Children’s Mercy Park, Legends Field will be their home venue for the 2021 season. It’s a temporary spot and one that’ll operate at maximum capacity for the team’s 12 home games.

The Longs are looking to build a stadium for the team very soon, and while they have a preferred location, they wouldn’t reveal its whereabouts.

“It was a lot of work for sure,” Angie says. “We’re lucky that the league is expanding and there was an opportunity with the Utah team dissolving for another team to come in. We’ve been in close contact with the league. They knew our interest and the seriousness of our interest and our commitment, so we had a chance to bring them

here. Part of it is Kansas City. They know what a great soccer market this is.”

PLAY FOR KANSAS CITY The Longs want this team to be a cornerstone of the city for centuries to come. As Chris put it, “momentum begets momentum” and it was felt during both games. Despite losing 3-1 to Houston Apr. 26 and 2-1 to the OL Reign May 3, the crowd knew they were watching something special. Filled with young girls who were attending their first live soccer game or surrounded by their youth soccer teammates, the impact this team will have can’t be measured.

They are seeing women’s soccer played at its highest level. They are feasting their eyes on players they can look up to. Sometime down the road, some of the kids in the audience will be playing on a professional soccer field, whether at KC NWSL’s future stadium or overseas. They might even end up on the United States’ Women’s National Team, where they’ll trace their inspiration back to the nights KC NWSL forwards Michele Vasconcelos and Mallory Weber scored.

“I was in their shoes at one point,” Barnhart says. “I know exactly what it’s like to be

SPORTS

Houston Dash midfielder Kristie Mewie, KC NWSL defender Katie Bowen, and KC NWSL midfielder Addie McCain.

CHRIS ORITZ

IV Hydration therapy for:

out there and have role models that you look up to, admire, and want to be like one day. I had the opportunity to play alongside some

of my role models, so every time I step out on the field and anytime I’m doing anything off the field, I know there are eyes on me and

I always want to represent myself, represent this club in the best way that I can.”

“I just love being able to go around and

connect with those girls because like Barnie [Barnhart’s nickname] said, that was us and I think that makes a huge difference,” Vasconcelos adds. “We have to take care of business on the field obviously, but I think that one of our biggest things to being in this community is getting to know the fans and getting that relationship with them, especially those young girls [and boys] that look up to us.”

It’s not often markets get a second chance at hosting sports franchises. Chris and Angie Long, Brittany Matthews, Jen Gulvik, Amber Cox, and the rest of the front office don’t want this to fail. The players, headlined by Barnhart and Rodriguez, who have been a part of the Kansas City/ Utah franchises since the beginning of the NWSL, don’t want it to fail. It might be too early to tell, but it seems like the fans don’t want it to fail.

Whether it’s a women’s revolution or a women’s evolution in sports, they all want to change the world. The change starts in their communities and for Kansas City, that change starts now.

wellness

•

vitamin booster

• • hangovers • migraines • jet lag • fatigue • athletic the flu

performance

thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

13

SUMMER GUIDE

2021 SUMMER GUIDE

EVENTS

COURTESY OF STRAWBERRY SWING

Saturdays June-October Strawberry Swing Festivals and Pop-ups, Waldo and Brookside, Overland

Park, thestrawberryswing.com

June 3, 5, 19 Hamburger Mary’s Charity Bingo,

Hamburger Mary’s

On Saturdays in June-October, you’ll find goods from local makers, music, food trucks, and flowers all in one place. The Strawberry Swing festivals will happen on Saturdays in Waldo and Brookside, and Overland Park. Keep an eye out for other pop-ups throughout the city.

June 4 Camp Entourage Presents: “An Evening with the ‘Rents’”, Lemonade Park

Mondays at 6 p.m.

Needle in a Gay Stack: Needlework Club, Kansas City Center for Inclusion

September 4 Derby Party and Kansas City Museum Reopening, Kansas City Museum

Every third Tuesday EQUAL Trans Support Group, Kansas City

September 12 Chiefs Opening Day, vs Cleveland Browns, Arrowhead Stadium

Center for Inclusion

June 6 National Cancer Survivors Day DriveThru Event, Gilda’s Club

Summer is here, and many of our favorite events are coming back from the summer we collectively took off. Whether you’re into festivals, concerts, food trucks, art exhibits, movies, or wellness inspiration, we’ve got you covered. Our Summer Guide is your key to an

JUNETEENTH

unforgettable season. We all deserve a break, and with The Pitch’s guide, you can find exactly what you want to do during that break.

JIM NIMMO

June 4, July 2, August 6 Juneteenth KC First Friday Celebration, 18th & Vine

June 4-5 Vine Street Hoops, Gregg Klice Community Center Basketball Courts

BY SOPHIA MISLE, BEK SHACKELFORD, LUCIE KRISMAN, NICOLE MITCHELL, SAVANNAH HAWLEY, KELCIE MCKENNEY, BROCK WILBUR 14

THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

June 12 Juneteenth KC Cultural Parade, Begins at Benton and 18th St

June 18 Juneteenth Kick-off “All Black Everything Party,” Union Station

June 19 Juneteenth KC Heritage Festival 18th & Vine, juneteenth-kc.com/festival

The Juneteenth KC Heritage Festival has been gathering the community and celebrating African American arts and culture for 10 years now. From 12-9 p.m. in the 18th & Vine district, celebrate Juneteenth with food, music, and plenty of other activities at the free festival. Keep an eye out for more information on their website.

Kansas City Juneteenth Celebration, Blue Mills Park

The Last Dance Steppers Challenge, The KC Juke House

E V E RY F R I DAY FROM JULY 9 - 30 Crown Center Square

FREE ADMISSION! For scheduled movies, bands and food trucks visit CrownCenter.com/WeekEnder

SUMMER GUIDE

SUMMER GUIDE

FESTIVALS

4TH OF JULY

COURTESY OF THE 24TH AND FREE STATE FESTIVAL

June 10 Proclaiming Pride,

Community Christian Church

July 24-28 Grand Carnivale, Worlds of Fun

June 12-13 Virtual Future Stages Festival,

August 2-7 Queer Narratives Festival, Black Box

kauffmancenter.org

Theatre

June 17-19 Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival,

August 20-22 Parkville Days, Downtown Parkville

June 21 Worldwide Make Music Day,

Kansas City PRIDE Community Alliance, kcpridealliance.org

Overland Park Convention Center

Participating Venues

June 21-27 Free State Festival Participating

Venues, freestatefestival.org

Free State Festival is a weeklong celebration of film, music, and art in Lawrence. The festival is held in two acts starting with a week of outdoor movies screened across the city. Act One will feature several movies focused on social justice, such as The 24th, produced

by Oscar winner and University of Kansas film professor, Kevin Willmott. Act Two will feature indoor cinema screenings with headliners Boots Riley, John Waters and Cameron Esposito. Tickets for Act One go on sale May 24. Tickets and dates for Act Two are yet to be determined.

June 25, 26 Bluegrass in the Bottoms, Grinders KC

July 9-11 KCMPT New Playwright Festival, Just Off Broadway Theatre July 10 Water Lantern Festival, Frank A. Theis Park

July 16-18 Crypticon KC, KCI Expo Center

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

August 21-22 Kansas City Pride

KC Pride is almost here, and this time it’s going to be hosted by the Kansas City PRIDE Community Alliance. PRIDE is an acronym for “Programming Rooted in Inclusion and Diversity through Education.” The organization was created to fill the gap left as the result of the Kansas City Diversity Coalition deciding to no longer coordinate the annual pride events. Location and sponsors for the event are in the works. Follow KCPCA on Facebook to stay updated.

COURTESY OF KC AIR SHOW

June 25 PARKED! Festival,

Stump Park, Shawnee, KS

July 3 Freedom Run, Lenexa, KS July 3-4 KC Air Show feat. US Navy Blue Angels New Century Air Center, kcairshow.org Celebrate the 4th of July this year with a spectacular view at this year’s KC Air Show, headlined by the United States Navy Blue Angels Flight Demonstration Squadron.

General admission tickets are $35 for adults in advance and $45 at the gate. At an additional cost, tickets from the event’s

premium packages can gain access to perks like boxed seats, food and beverages, and shuttle and golf cart access. Got tickets to the 2020 show? You’re in luck, those tickets will be honored at the 2021 show.

KC Monarchs vs. Lincoln Saltdogs, Legends Field

KC Royals vs. Minnesota Twins,

Kauffman Stadium

July 4 Basehor Independence Day Celebration, Basehor Linwood High School VillageFest To Go, Prairie Village Shops

STAGES

August 21-23 Virtual Ethnic Enrichment Festival, eeckc.org

September 3-5 Kansas City Irish Festival, Crown Center

September 3-6 SantaCaliGon Festival, Independence September 24-25 Camp Leavenworth

Leavenworth, campleavenworth.com

How do live music, s’mores, a chalk art contest, silent disco, and fireworks sound? The second annual Camp Leavenworth is back this summer and features all that and more. Some featured bands include Unfit Waves, The MGDs, Quite Frankly, and Oscar-winning singer/songwriter Melissa Etheridge.

Camp Leavenworth is free and open to the public, but tickets will be available for those who want the VIP experience.

COURTESY OF THE KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY

June 4-6, 17-20 Kansas City Symphony,

Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, tickets.kcsymphony.org/events

The Kansas City Symphony is returning to in-person performances, with two different series performed at Helzberg Hall in the Kauffman Center. The symphony will play selections from Mozart, Dukas, Debussy, Barber, Haydn, and more throughout the concert season. Tickets are only open to Classical Series subscribers. To be added to the waitlist to become a subscriber and secure a ticket, contact the box office at 816-471-0400.

June 22-27 Godspell, Starlight Theater June 30 - August 8 Dragons Love Tacos, Coterie Theatre September 7-12 On your feet!, Starlight Theater September TBD The Lifespan of a Fact, Unicorn Theatre

The most comprehensive exhibition on Auschwitz featuring more than 700 original objects.

Exhibition Opens June 14 Tickets at UnionStation.org An Exhibition By

Presented By

A woman’s dress shoe belonging to an unknown deportee to Auschwitz (1940s) Courtesy of ©Musealia

Plus, we are pleased to announce a Speakers Series associated with the exhibition. These online and live events are free and open to the public but require pre-registration. Schedule, additional information and registration are available at UnionStation.org.

Now Fully Reopened For The Whole Family!

Voted “Favorite FamilyFriendly Attraction” -VisitKC

TRAVEL RAVEL THE HE UNIVERSE NIVERSE (AND BE HOME IN TIME FOR DINNER)

Magic Treehouse • Sky Station Live! • Dinosaurs at Dusk • And Your Favorite Music Artists Perform To Electrifying Laser Shows

Union Station Members visit FREE Plan Your Visit Today ScienceCity.com

ARVIN

Proud to be a

Smithsonian Affiliate

GOTTLIEB

P L A N E TA R I U M thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

17

SUMMER GUIDE

MUSIC

June 3 Band of Heathens, Knuckleheads

June 18 The Samples & Counter Culture,

PHOTO BY ZACH BAUMAN July 1 Fitz and the Tantrums,

Making Movies, Lemonade Park

Center Cut Records presents a Summer Soulstice Celebration Concert,

Lemonade Park

Ok, you caught us. We love Fitz and the Tantrums. The upbeat indie pop ban returns to provide what is sure to be an energetic show at Grinders KC. GA tickets are $35 a piece, but a $59 VIP ticket will get you access to an air conditioned lounge, private restrooms and cash bar, and preferred viewing at the main stage. Doors open at 6 p.m. Livingston, a young performer whose newest album An Unlikely Origin Story is gaining quick success, will open.

June 21 Make Music Kansas City,

July 3 Lindsey Stirling, Starlight Theatre

Matchbox 20, Starlight Theatre

July 9 Idaho / The String and Return / Slights,

Saloon

The Mastersons, Knuckleheads Saloon

June 19 Nolatet in the Alley Featuring Mike Dillon ~ Brian Haas ~ James Singleton,

June 5 Hot Vaxx Summer Dance Party with Electrosexual Collective,

Sky Smeed / Fred Wickham Caravan,

The Pitch and District present Dreamgirl / The Moose / We The People

Dunbar Park and Lemonade Park

Lemonade Park, lemonadeparkkc.com

Kick back and take in the summer, baby: Performances by Dreamgirl, The Moose, and We The People are gracing Lemonade Park this June. Doors open at 7 p.m., with We the People kicking off the show at 8 p.m., The Moose following at 9 p.m., and ending with Dreamgirl at 10 p.m. Tickets are $15 if you bring your own chair, and for $25, you can reserve a table on the lawn.

June 11 The Grisly Hand / DJ Literate Corvette, Lemonade Park June 12 The Wires/Adee Rocket Dancy, Lemonade Park

Giants Chair / Worlds of Fun / Red Kate, Lemonade Park June 17 Andy Frasco, The Truman THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

Lemonade Park

June 4 Tennessee Jet in the Gospel Lounge, Sara Morgan, Jason Boland & The Stragglers, Knuckleheads Saloon

Mockingbird Lounge

18

The Truman

The Ship

June 22 They Might Be Giants, The Truman June 25 Styx with Collective Soul, Azura Ampitheater

The Fey / Lesser Pleasures / The Royal Chief, Lemonade Park June 26 Jazz on the Lawn,

National WWI Museum and Memorial

Katy Guillen & The Drive / Kat King, Lemonade Park

June 28 Sheryl Crow, Grinders KC June 29 Barenaked Ladies, Starlight Theatre

Grinders KC, grinderspizza.com/kansascity/ concerts

Lemonade Park

July 10 Calvin Arsenia, Lemonade Park July 16 Kadesh Flow / NuBlvckCity / Mensa Deathsquad /DJ Skeme, Lemonade Park July 17 for KING & COUNTRY, Azura Ampitheater MGDs / Maria the Mexican, Lemonade Park

July 19 Motley Crue and Def Leppard with Poison, Kauffman Stadium August 3 Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit with Lucinda Williams, Azura Ampitheater

SUMMER GUIDE

MOVIES COURTESY OF BLACK CREATURES

August 7 The Black Creatures

Lemonade Park, lemonadeparkkc.com

It’s no secret we love the genre-fluid duo the The Black Creatures, composed of Jade Green and Xavier. They return to Lemonade Park to provide guests with an eccentric in-person experience this August, and you shouldn’t miss it—their album Wild Echoes was our favorite of 2020, hands down. The show starts at 7 p.m. and tickets are not yet available. Be sure to check the Lemonade Park website for more information and tickets as they become available.

August 11 Shakey Graves, The Truman, August 12 Wilco and Sleater-Kenny, Arvest Bank Theatre

August 21 Deicide, Katakylsm, Riot Room August 25 Alicia Keys, Starlight Theatre

COURTESY OF IN THE HEIGHTS

June 2 Wretch, Lemonade Park

June 30 The Blues Brothers,

July 30 The Green Knight, Theatrical

June 5 The Goonies, Screenland Armour

Zola, Theatrical

July 6 The Suicide Squad, Theatrical

July 4 La La Land,

August 27 Reminiscence, Theatrical/HBO Max

Theatre

June 6 Queer As Film feat. The Half of It, Kansas City Center for Inclusion June 9

A Mighty Wind, Lemonade Park

June 11 Rocketman, Screenland Armour Theatre

June 12 E.T The Extra Terrestrial,

Screenland Armour Theatre

Luca, Disney+

Uptown Theater, uptowntheater.com

Singer-songwriter José González is going on tour this summer in support of his new record Local Valley, which will be released September 17. You can currently check out the music video for the second song on the album titled “Visions.”

Rufus Wainwright is joining right along and will be performing music from his newest album, Unfollow the Rules.

July 23 Old, Theatrical

Candyman, Theatrical September 16-26 Kansas City Underground Film Festival, Charlotte Street Foundation

Enter the public and private worlds of Billie Holiday, through the poignant, beautiful photographs of Jerry Dantzic.

Lemonade Park

August 28 Beartooth, The Truman

September 20 Rufus Wainwright & Jose Gonzalez

July 16 The Night House, Theatrical

June 16 Shut Up And Play The Hits, June 18 Clue, Screenland Armour Theatre

September 8 Chris Renzema, The Truman

Screenland Armour Theatre

In the Heights, Theatrical/HBO Max

August 27 Moon taxi, The Truman

September 2 Morgan Wallen, Azura Amphitheater

Lemonade Park

June 19 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze, Screenland Armour Theatre

June 23 Total Recall, Lemonade Park June 25 The Sandlot,

Screenland Armour Theatre

Fast & Furious 9, Theatrical June 26 10 Things I Hate About You, Screenland Armour Theatre

May 08, 2021 – August 01, 2021 American Jazz Museum 1616 E 18 St, Kansas City, MO 64108 816.474.8463 | americanjazzmuseum.org BILLIE HOLIDAY AT SUGAR HILL: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JERRY DANTZIC is an exhibition organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Jerry Dantzic Archives.

All photographs © 2018 Jerry Dantzic / Jerry Dantzic Archives, All rights reserved.

thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

19

SUMMER GUIDE

ARTS & EXHIBITS COURTESY OF THE KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

April 2-June 24 Art for the Animals, Buttonwood Art Space

May 27-September 6 War Remains: Immersive VR Experience WWI Museum, theworldwar.org

Hotel Kansas City

July 4-25 KCAC June Exhibitions: Margo Kren,

June 2-September 11 The Regional,

July 20 Pre-War European Jewry,

Jim Needham, and Brian Spies, Kansas City Arts Coalition

July 10-March 6 Castles, Cottages, and Crime, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

July 12-15 MCHE Summer Institute: The Path to Genocide, Union Station

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

MCHE via Zoom

June 5-March 27 Testimony: African American Artists Collective,

August 2 The Roma Experience of the Holocaust, MCHE via Zoom

June 10-October 24 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, kemperart.org/exhibitions

A new immersive exhibit debuting this June at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is powered by viewers’ heartbeats.

Pulse Topology, a project by MexicanCanadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, demonstrates the heartbeats of visitors through thousands of suspended light bulbs with the help of touchless remote photoplethysmography (PPG) technology.

It will be on display for roughly four months. Don’t miss it THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

June 18-19 “Art Remains” by Wylliams Henry Contemporary Dance Company,

Experience the history of World War I in a new up close and personal way at the new immersive virtual reality exhibit “War Remains.” The experience, narrated by podcaster Dan Carlin, opened officially on May 27 and will be at the National World War I Museum & Memorial through Sept.

6. Viewers can walk their way through the perspectives of soldiers at the 1917 WWI battle, The Battle of Passchendaele. Tickets are $18 for museum members and $24 for non-members.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

20

June 14-July 1 Auschwitz, Union Station

August 13-15 KCMO Carnival of Ink, KCI Expo Center August 24 Terezin and Deportations from the West, MCHE via Zoom August 28 Kansas City Dance Day, Kansas City Ballet

September 1 Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death,” Union Station

SUMMER GUIDE

WELLNESS

COURTESY OF HOSPITAL RUN

Every Tuesday at 5 p.m.

HIV Testing,

Kansas City Center for Inclusion

June 19 Will You Walk With Me for Suicide Prevention 5K, Liberty Memorial

June 5 Hospital Hill Run, Hospital Hill

Skyline Yoga Series with Daisy Chavez, The Westin at Crown Center

June 12 The Color Run

Arrowhead Stadium, thecolorrun.com

The Color Run returns in, well, full color!

Runners will be doused with color at various zones throughout the course. For the maximum experience, wear white (or register for a package with the white Color Run shirts) to proudly display all of the color powder you’ll be wearing at the end of the race. Tickets begin at $19.99 and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Children’s Organ Transplant Association.

Rooftop

July 18 Kansas City Nutrition and Wellness Festival, Somerset Ridge Vineyard & Winery

July 19 Pop-up Yoga, Kansas City Museum July 30 Sunset Goat Yoga,

The Barn on Hickory, Stewartsville, MO

▶ Beautiful pavilion with park and trail access ▶ Free and convenient parking

SATURDAYS

MAY – SEPTEMBER

ON SALE NOW!

.

MAHAFESTIVAL COM

7 a.m.

TO 1 p.m.

MERRIAM MARKETPLACE 5740 Merriam Drive, Merriam, KS

thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

21

SUMMER GUIDE

FOOD & DRINK

July 8 Grinch-mas in July,

KC Wine Co. Vineyard & Winery

August 8-9 Kansas City Taco Festival

Kansas City Live! Block, tacofests.com

The highly anticipated Taco Fest is coming back to KC this year, along with its margaritas, games, live music, and, of course, tacos. Over 20 of Kansas City’s own eateries are bringing their best tacos—with over 75 options!— to the event and for only $3 each. Tickets start at $9.95 each and kids under 10 are free with a paying adult.

August 20-21 BBQ & Fly-in on the River Turkey Smoke Contest, Excelsior Springs, MO

June 5 Strang Hall Beer Fest, Strang Hall

June 12 KC Brew Fest

Hamburger Mary’s Beer Bust,

Head to the GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium to party on the playing field for a Saturday night full of food trucks and unlimited access to beers from over 60 breweries at this summer’s KC Summer

Hamburger Mary’s

Free Music Bingo-1 Hit Wonders, KC Wine Co. Vineyard & Winery

Arrowhead Stadium, kcsummerbeerfest.com

1708 CAMPBELL ST.

22

THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

August 28 I Love The 90’s Bar Crawl, Beer Fest. General admission tickets include all of the above starting at 8 p.m. for $50, and the $65 early admission tickets will get you an hour’s head start.

June 18 Food Truck Friday, Union Cemetery

Kansas City Live! Block

September 17-18 American World Series of Barbecue Turkey Smoke contest, Kansas City, KS July 9, 13, August 13,14 Murder Mystery Dinner, Belvoir Winery

DINING

EAT THIS NOW WORDS AND PHOTOS BY APRIL FLEMING

A Cone from Betty Rae’s Ice Cream 7140 Wornall Rd 412 Delaware St bettyraes.com

Buried in the tidal wave of 2020’s terrible news was the fact that Kansas City had lost Betty Rae’s Ice Cream. Conflict between the store’s ownership and its staff had made the beloved shop’s future impossible. The whole story was a giant, disappointing turd in an ocean of giant turds. (This tale of woe is too complex to dive into here, but check out our coverage at ThePitchKC.com) Unlike almost anyone else in 2020, this story had a legitimately happy ending. In the case of Betty Rae’s, a group of former staff organized to buy the business, rescuing it for anyone who likes a scoop. Or an ice cream sandwich. Or a boozy shake. In the past handful of weeks, Betty Rae’s has reopened both of its locations (one in City Market and the original location on Wornall), with a recognizable menu, many of its former employees, and a clean slate.

So go to Betty Rae’s and get your favorite scoop. Maybe you like the novelty stuff: Joe’s Burnt Ends in ice cream form, Cereal and Milk, or some Hatch Green Chile Chocolate.

We go for the old-fashioned Brown Butter Pecan. Betty Rae’s has perfected the texture and flavor here: it’s dense, creamy, smooth, sweet, crunchy, caramel-y. It’s a perfect scoop of ice cream, and we’re grateful that it’s back.

DRINK THIS NOW In the wrong hands, a tiki cocktail is a sickly sweet, instant headache in a glass. But in skilled ones, a tiki cocktail is basically as great as a cocktail can get. Fresh-squeezed juice, good rum, and spices in the right proportions can pack in the flavor. A good garnish (or, if you’re in a tiki bar, an over-the-top environment) is a total mood booster.

Tiki Huna’s Brian Kesterson has the skilled hands for this job. At his bar in the Iron District in North Kansas City, he offers his own inventive recipes as well as a handful of rotating classics. One of those classics, the Daiquiri, is a perfect introduction to the good side of tiki drinks.

The Daiquiri at Tiki Huna 1599 Iron St facebook.com/ TikiHuna

A fruity daiquiri may sound the opposite of tempting—that is, until you sip and realize “Oh. This is how they are supposed to taste.” At Tiki Huna, Kesterson delivers that experience by paying tribute to a near-perfect recipe developed

by Constante Ribalaigua (a famous Cuban bartender) beloved by Ernest Hemingway. White rum, maraschino liqueur, and simple syrup are shaken with fresh grapefruit and lime juices, then poured over chipped ice. It’s a bright, porch-pounding refreshment, and is guaranteed to only taste better the hotter it gets outside. thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

23

HOW KANSAS CITY LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE DA’BOMB SPICIN FOODS’ DELIBERATELY PUNISHING HOT SAUCE SELLS ONE MILLIONTH BOTTLE

BY LIZ COOK

24

THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

The staff of The Pitch thoroughly enjoying a tasting of small dabs of Da Bomb on a single chicken wing. Just really loving the whole experience.

ZACH BAUMAN

DINING

I

f you’ve never seen Hot Ones—the hit YouTube series from First We Feast in which celebrities are interviewed eating hot wings—allow me to suggest an entry point: Paul Rudd.

In the viral 2019 episode, Kansas City’s prodigal son suffers through a series of increasingly hot sauces with Midwest stoicism. The producers have placed a pint of milk at his side; he doesn’t touch it. He jokes with the host and plays around with his phone camera, never losing his Golden Retriever grin.

Until that is, he gets to Da’Bomb Beyond Insanity—an intentionally punishing hot sauce manufactured in Kansas City, KS. Rudd and host Sean Evans each pop a sauce-coated cauliflower “wing” into their mouth. They stop smiling. They start choking.

“Shout out Kansas City,” says Evans.

“We also have Patrick Mahomes,” Rudd whispers through a mask of pain. “Don’t judge us on just that.”

Welcome to KC: your one-stop destination for smoked meats, star quarterbacks, and pointless suffering.

Da’Bomb is the deviant brainchild of Spicin Foods, née Original Juan Specialty Foods, a small-batch condiment manufacturer that’s operated out of a 60,000 squarefoot warehouse off Southwest Boulevard for almost 20 years.

In 2018, the company was sold to Florida entrepreneur Scott Morse; an ongoing legal dispute with the former owners suggests the building needed some work. Spicin kept going. They bottled sauces for well-known local and national businesses, from Joe’s Kansas City to Jones Bar-B-Q to Williams Sonoma. But they also poured more resources into growing their own brands—Pain Is Good, American Stockyard, and Da’Bomb.

This May, Spicin filled their millionth bottle of Da’Bomb, thanks in large part to the Hot Ones bump. Da’Bomb has been a part of the show’s line-up for 13 seasons, the only sauce with that distinction.

For Chris Schonberger, creator of Hot Ones and general manager of First We Feast, that inclusion was a no-brainer. He says the show’s primary focus is the interviews, a goal that transcends the gimmick. “But there’s still a certain bloodlust among the fans—they want to see a real reaction, and Da’Bomb almost always delivers.”

There’s a reason it gets that reaction.

The sauce clocks in at 135,600 Scoville Heat Units (for reference: a jalapeño ranges between 2,500 and 8,000). Da’Bomb is a sauce that earns its roguish, mocking apostrophe.

It smells like a habanero massacre and tastes like a goblin’s ashtray. I sampled it on my way to Spicin Foods for a tour: a drop the size of a pencil eraser was enough to inflame every mucous membrane in my body. After three drops, my skin bristled like an angry hedgehog. The experience was anatomically fascinating; I hope to never repeat it.

Spicin’s chief operating officer, Jeff Hinds, is a businessman, so I expect him to lie to me—to tell me Da’Bomb gets a bad rap, that it’s a versatile sauce with redeemable qualities. Instead, he gives me a medical history.

“It’s just an overbearing heat,” he says.

“Bloodshot eyes are normal. Watering eyes are normal. Ringing ears are normal. Your neck and chest and head start turning red.

Sweating. Hiccups. And then pray you don’t burp, because it comes back up for a second shot.”

Schonberger describes the sauce in similar terms. He tastes Da’Bomb before every season of Hot Ones but hasn’t unlocked any new tasting notes. “Da’Bomb isn’t about nuance, and that’s kind of why it works. It’s just a stick-your-tongue-in-an-electrical-socket type of experience. In the novelty hot sauce category, it is king.”

Where Hinds and Sconberger disagree is the sauce’s culinary utility.

Hinds: “The whole intent of that was to heat up, like, a pot of chili or something. It never was designed or intended to go on a wing.”

Schonberger: “Cooking with Da’Bomb isn’t something I’d necessarily recommend, unless you are serving a revenge dish to someone who has wronged you.”

How do you make a sauce this flatly painful? Da’Bomb has a habanero and chipotle pepper base, but the heat gets a boost from hot pepper extract—pure, uncut capsaicin without any pesky flavors to get in the way.

That’s partly why Da’Bomb tastes much “hotter” than other sauces with a similar rank on the Scoville scale: the oily extract coats your tongue and sticks around. With Da’ Bomb, it’s not the initial blast that kills you—it’s the aftershock.

Hot sauce fanatics tend to look down on extract sauces—the conventional view is that they’re prank sauces, taking shortcuts that shortchange flavor. But that doesn’t seem to have put a dent in Da’Bomb’s sales.

“It’s our number one seller,” says Mark Romero, business development executive for

Spicin Foods. “Hands down. Depending on who’s on Hot Ones week after week, that’ll drive how many sales we have.”

If Da’Bomb is a prank sauce, that prank helped get a business through the pandemic.

Like most manufacturers, Spicin Foods faced supply chain disruptions in 2020. Plastic resin costs increased, glass bottle costs increased, aluminum costs increased. Demand for some of their products tanked at the same time.

Hinds and Romero estimate that before the pandemic, about half of their business was in gallon jug sales to restaurants. When restaurants shut down, that business evaporated. The company refocused on online and retail sales and looked for other ways to collaborate with restaurants. When Gojo’s Japanese Steakhouse closed, Spicin worked to bottle and sell the restaurant’s beloved “yellow sauce” directly to consumers.

Hot Ones has been a lifeline—Romero says they owe the show a “debt of gratitude” for all the free publicity they’ve received over the years (Spicin Foods has never paid to be featured on the show). And things are a little more stable, now. The day I visited the factory, three restaurateurs from out of state were in Spicin’s test kitchen, tasting commercially scaled versions of their restaurant sauces and giving the chefs notes.

The chefs on Spicin’s R&D team—AJ Smith, Tommy Carter, and Edwin Fluevog— churn out hundreds of test batches a year in the quest for the next big sauce. Hinds calls them “the three-headed dragon.” If you’ve ever wandered the Spicin Foods gift shop and picked up a $0.99 test kitchen sauce—these are the guys who make it.

When I ask to see the ingredients they have to work with, Smith immediately sets about opening cabinets and pulling out drawers. The team has just about any spice or acid or powder they might need, and a few they probably won’t. In one drawer, there’s a small cylindrical tin that looks like it should contain breath mints but that actually contains dead scorpions.

If “hot sauce inventor” sounds like a dream job, consider that these guys also have

to taste test each batch of hot sauce against an archived sample for quality control—including Da’Bomb. The three rotate the duty, but Smith estimates they all have to taste Da’Bomb at least once a month. When I ask him what flavors he’s tasting for, he seems surprised by the question.

“Pain? Whatever pain tastes like?”

The resistance never really builds up.

Smith says his palate is always wrecked for at least 15 minutes after a taste. “When people eat really hot stuff, they’ll usually have one thing that goes—for me, I start to sweat under my eyes.”

“My back cramps up on both sides of my spine,” Carter chimes in.

This isn’t pain theater. Nearly every Spicin employee I talk to mentions the same thing about Da’Bomb bottling days at the factory—chiefly, that you always know when it’s Da’Bomb day. The habanero mash is ambient. Think mace as a dorm-room incense.

“The whole place smells like fire,” says Carter. “It’s a more cautious day.”

Spicin Foods is a small-batch manufacturer, but the batches are still prepared in enormous industrial kettles. Kettles mean heat. Heat means steam. Steam means aerosolized capsaicin—literally, pepper spray.

The hot sauce business comes with a host of unique occupational hazards. When Spicin Foods bought the plant from Original Juan’s, they had to repair the flooring—the acids from the sauces had eaten through the epoxy. Some ingredients have enough capsaicin to burn skin. Hinds says on Da’Bomb days, workers wear goggles, masks, gloves, and face shields (one plant worker I spoke to confirmed this).

“I tell a lot of people, this is the one place in the world where you want to wash your hands before you go to the bathroom,” Hinds says.

The Hot Ones bump means workers are going to be smelling (tasting, breathing) Da’Bomb for a while. Each episode inspires a new crop of victims eager to be poisoned. But Spicin Foods has other tricks up their sleeve.

This year, they signed a multi-year deal with the Kansas City Chiefs to produce branded barbecue and hot sauces. They continue to co-pack sauces for major retailers and celebrity clients (“we’re working with one guy named Dave,” Hinds says. “He’s pretty Famous.”) They’ve got a destination gift shop where heatheads can buy cheap test kitchen sauces—the treasures of the three-headed dragon.

They do a lot more than just make one of the best worst hot sauces in the country. But Da’Bomb casts a big shadow, and for now, the folks at Spicin are happy to walk in its pungent shade.

You could say the same thing about Hot Ones.

“Sometimes, I feel like the mythology of Da’Bomb is bigger than the show itself,” says Schonberger. “It’s bigger than any of us. Long live Da’Bomb.” thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

For people who think of spring as morel-hunting season, that time of year is filled with excitement, one or two really great meals, muddy shoes, and dashed hopes.

Balancing those components takes practice and a philosophical mindset that can prove as elusive as the fungi themselves.

That jumble of mud, hopelessness, and good cooking deserves some unpacking and thoughtful reflection at its conclusion. And it’s really not so hard to sort out if you’ve been around the block—or forest—several times as Maxine Stone has.

Part of the season’s charm is nature’s limited time offer on the morel. And while it’s true that morel season only lasts about four weeks, Stone, past president of the Missouri Mycological Society and author of Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms, can respect that without quite buying into the allure.

“There are some people in Missouri who think that’s the only mushroom there is. I hunt morels—that’s not my first choice,” Stone says. “Everybody hunts morels, but

there are so many other good edible mushrooms.”

Her top three non-morel picks are the chanterelle (July), chicken of the woods (April to September), and hen of the woods (fall).

But the trouble with those three—at least among the throngs who hit the trails just once a year—is that they’re not as hard to find. They don’t famously glue people to their weather apps, get them up early, or cause endless discussion of methodology.

Those three mushrooms have never been an ice cream flavor at Betty Rae’s.

They’re also not what hooked artist and vegetable fermenter Laurena Roytberg on mushrooms, prompting what can be described as the development of a new spiritual attitude toward nature. “[Mushrooms] are very intelligent beings to me. I don’t know if you knew this, but they breathe oxygen and release carbon dioxide just like us,” Roytberg says. “Their kingdom is closer to ours than a plant king-

dom, and their network is so vast and so connected, and it kind of mimics the connection of humans and the connection of the internet to me.”

The first time she went morel hunting a few years ago, she didn’t find anything for so long that she grew frustrated and gave up—a common experience, she says. But within 10 minutes of quitting, she began to see them all around her.

Ever since, she’s taken a different approach.

“I really try to quiet myself and just listen and really tap into the psychedelic space of the forest itself. And it’s so hard to put words to it, because it’s so intuitional, and it’s all based on feeling, and I just follow those feelings, and almost, like, pray as I’m doing it, and just give respect to the land that I’m on,” Roytberg says.

She explains “psychedelic space” as the optical illusions caused by an overwhelming amount of visual input in a forest. She says she’s so focused on the unusual shape

and texture of the morel that she’ll start to see them everywhere, while simultaneously experiencing them as completely camouflaged.

During one of these trips, an older mushroom hunter offered her some advice: scan a small area of slightly elevated ground.

She’s remembered that because she and most other people tend to look down, not up or out.

But there are a lot of ways to go about it.

Kansas mushroom enthusiast Russ Davenport is a member of the Kaw Valley Mycological Society and generally looks down on his forays into the Flint Hill Wildlife Refuge. He uses his backpack, not intuition or higher ground.

“What I do,” he says, “is I’ll go into an area and, when I pick a morel, I’ll drop my bag right there. And what I’ll do is I’ll walk around my backpack 15, 20, maybe 30 feet out and zig and zag a little bit and just cover it slowly.”

Once he’s satisfied, he walks slowly

Mushrooms off a trail at Swope Park.

ANNE KNIGGENDORF

back to his bag and often finds a few more.

What’s great, he says, is that the more people hunt them, the more there are, because many morel-lovers use mesh bags that allow the spores to drop from the mushrooms they’ve already picked.

And that reproductive strategy is really useful to any mushroom, morel or otherwise. Mushroom expert Stone says that the fungus’ real job is decomposition.

“They’re doing their job, which isn’t really to feed us, even though some of them are delicious. Their job is to decompose wood, basically,” she says.

Mushrooms need a massive below-ground network called mycelium to locate everything that needs to be broken down. Stone says, “That’s the real fungi, that’s the real mushroom happening under the ground.” thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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DINING

Above: Laurena harvests some Turkey Tail mushroom. Right: Laurena Roythberg considers it magic when she comes across a mushroom, like a gift from the universe.

ANNE KNIGGENDORF

What people get all excited about, and rightfully so, is more like an apple on a branch. Her tip for finding mushrooms is not about looking down, looking up, intuiting, or backpacks.

“You really look for certain trees, because you know they fruit around certain trees. They’re not going to fruit in the middle of a meadow, and they’re not going to fruit under a maple,” Stone says, “but they like dying elms, and they like ash, and sycamore, and cottonwood, so when you’re looking for something specific like a morel, you look for

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And of course, the most important thing to know is that you’d better be sure what you’ve got before you eat it. Stone says that Missouri only has two deadly varieties: the destroying angel and the deadly galerina. Several others will make you sick.

She advises that photos in a book are inadequate for beginners; joining a group, or finding an expert to learn from is the way to go. As a bonus, that’ll put you in touch with a whole slew of people who’ll be happy to share their insight.

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CULTURE

I WANT A NEW PLUG ONE THAT WON’T GO AWAY BY EMILY COX

In the face of rising rents and gentrification, amplified by disconnection and strained resources during a pandemic, Kansas City lost some vital arts spaces. But one is being reborn.

Plug—formerly known as Plug Projects—has been around since 2011, originally in a space in the West Bottoms. After a complete turnover of their board and ending their lease in the West Bottoms, they are set to open a new gallery space in a newly developed arts building on the east side, called Agnes Arts.

“Artist-run and DIY collectives are rapidly disappearing from the Kansas City region,” reads Plug’s website. “Because of this, opportunities for artists to exhibit their work outside of restrictive commercial gallery venues are becoming increasingly scarce. Plug seeks to contribute to the reinvigoration of the arts ecosystem both locally and regionally.”

Five local artists collaboratively run Plug: Ariana Chaivaranon, CJ Charbonneau, Mary Clara Hutchison, Melanie Johnson, and Marco Rosichelli.

“Spaces where people can show their work outside of a commercial consideration is getting rarer and rarer in this town,” says CJ Charbonneau. “There’s not that many independent spaces that are in existence.”

Plug’s purpose is different from a commercial gallery that represents artists and facilitates sale of their work with art buyers and collectors.

“If you’re going to a commercial gallery,” continues Charbonneau, “their aim is to sell the work. So they’re looking for artists whose work is commercially viable, and is going to appeal to the tastes of the people who regularly come there.”

While commercial galleries have an important role to play in the arts ecosystem, independent spaces like Plug seek to support artists unconditionally.

“We’re looking to expand conversations or have those safe spaces, if you will, where someone can do some really weird shit, and we can talk about it, and they can get feedback,” says Charbonneau.

Places like Plug are essential for artists to be freely creative, to make the work that speaks to them, and be able to share it with others, without market concerns hanging over them.

“Plug is a space that’s not afraid to take

risks,” says Ariana Chaivaranon. “We have a really strong history of showing artists who are experimenting, who are emerging, who are at the forefront of trying things, who are at the cross sections of different media.”

And artists are hungry for it. On the day Plug board put out an open call for artists, they received multiple submissions within the hour. (The open call closed May 31. Their first exhibition will open in June.)

“It’s so clear that there’s a deep need for a space, and for a gallery that is really committed to serving artist visions and is financially beneficial for artists,” says Chaivaranon. “Our last fundraising campaign, the average donation was less than $50. So knowing that folks want this space, that we’re here because the community supports us, and normal people are willing to chip in for the space to exist, is so incredibly exciting and something that sets up a system of accountability to artists, to audiences, in a way that is rare in other spaces in the city.”

Plug’s fundraising campaign—which set them up financially through at least this year—was amazingly successful despite being in the midst of a pandemic, when they did not have a physical space, and when they were an entirely new board. The community still showed up for Plug.

Three out of five of the board members grew up in Kansas City, left and lived elsewhere for several years, and then found their way back here. (The other two are transplants.) Hutchison moved back here “for six months,” she says, laughing, because that was seven years ago. “What made me decide to stay was the arts community,” she says. “‘Man, this is the place to be!’ Totally different than when I grew up here.”

Kansas City’s interconnectedness is one benefit to being an artist in Kansas City.

“The size of the community is really nice, in terms of being an artist and feeling supported. It is a really visible community, and it seems like even if you don’t know someone, you know them,” says Johnson. “Like with our fundraising campaign, we are largely artist-supported. It was the arts community coming in and helping us. So there’s that kind of reciprocity and mutual support that can happen at this scale in Kansas City that maybe can’t happen in larger cities.”

“That might be what it comes down to,” adds Hutchison, “doubling down as a community, linking elbows, and saying, we’re

CHASE CASTOR

still going to do it.”

Chaivaranon, who was raised in Washington DC and Thailand and moved to Kansas City two years ago for a job at the Nelson-Atkins, gives some perspective on the perks of the Midwest.

“The way that folks settle down here or return here allows you to build really long term relationships. Because the population is so much less itinerant than places like DC, places like New York, where folks are moving in and out and coming from all over the world, you can really establish more and deeper connections with people, and grow with them over time to build something that’s truly collaborative.” Our deeper roots give us an advantage.

And while Kansas City is getting more expensive, and waves of gentrification continue to roll in, we still have opportunities that are obsolete in some coastal cities.

“This space it’s not something that is easy to come across in DC,” says Chaivaranon. “Because of the relative affordability of spaces, the willingness of artists to get together and try curatorial initiatives, it just is a possibility that wouldn’t exist in DC, or would be much harder to come across, much more expensive to run.”

Having this space is an asset for artists connecting to the wider arts world. “We have talked about how the space is insistently local and grounded in the community,”

says Chaivaranon, at the same time that it is “a space to actively look to make connections between Kansas City and the broader national conversation in the arts. It’s clear there are these threads of connection in what people are thinking about [across the nation].” Plug intends to provide a platform to contribute to those broader developments in contemporary art.

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When the current board members applied and were accepted to join Plug a year and a half ago, they were surprised to learn that all the board members at the time were leaving en masse, and a whole new board was forming in their place.

“We had our first meeting as a board the week of the shutdown [in March 2020], so that was a really intense transition,” says Mary Clara Hutchison. “There were three other people who were selected to be on the board who immediately were like ‘can’t do it,’ ‘don’t have a job anymore,’ ‘not interested anymore,’ whatever.”

So their first meeting took place around dramatic organizational change, and huge cultural uncertainty. And their lease was up.

The questions facing them, Hutchison said, “‘Oh this is going to look completely different. What do we do, do we still do it? Or do we let Plug die?’ That was a very real converthepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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asking artists what they would like to see in low him to advocate for more permanency. sation that we had.” tryway walls, or the communal space. a new space that a group of investors, led by “I just got tired of being chased out of So why keep Plug alive?

“There’s also the ability for them to “The last couple of years, a lot of places Paul Migliazzo and including Watne, had every studio I’ve ever had in this city,” says branch out of that gallery,” says Agnes Arts’ Watne. “This time I’m going to invest in it. Watne. “We’ve made it known to them that in Kansas City have been shifting and clos- bought on the east side of Kansas City.

“Davin put out a call to see what art- If gentrification comes, if 20 years from now they are completely welcome to have exhibiing,” says Hutchison, “and heading into the whole COVID-19 situation, it was like, this ists needed in the community as they were some big pot company wants to come and tions outside of that space, out in the parkis only going to get worse. To me it’s worth designing this space and we jumped in and gut it and grow purple haze or something, ing lot, in the grounds, on the roof, we’re then yeah, we sell the building for $5 mil- really open to those kinds of things.” fighting through this and solving these said, ‘a gallery!’” says Johnson. problems in order to “We love this dead ensure that at least one end street,” says Rosispace will come out on chelli, “because we can the other side.” then have food trucks “There were moand street venues, and ments,” says Marco we talked about video Rosichelli, where they or time based artworks had to convince one and projecting those another. “‘I think I’m outside, we’ve talked about ready to back about public artworks, out,’” someone would things visible from the say at a meeting. “‘No, freeway.” don’t, this is why this is Ideas for what is going to be great!’ And possible in this new then the next meeting space are freewheeling, was trying to convince and occasionally deone of the other ones to licious. “Several of us stay.” mentioned pie in our Motivation continvisioning exercises, so ued to come through I think we’ve got some for them. “We’ve repie stands in our future. ceived a lot of encourI don’t know why that agement from former was a common thread, board members who but let’s pull on the are still very much inthread, let’s see what vested in the life of happens,” says HutchiPlug, which makes it son. easier for us to say, we Plug could eventucan do this, this is imally expand their gallery portant,” Johnson says. space. “We also have And they got the potential to grow,” some wins, including says Rosichelli. “On the CHASE CASTOR successfully wading other side of this wall is through the paperwork a lot more room.” Only to become an official about one-fifth of the 501(c)3 non-profit. “I building has been de“WE LOVE THIS DEAD END STREET,” SAYS ROSICHELLI, “BECAUSE WE CAN THEN think at every point veloped—behind the HAVE FOOD TRUCKS AND STREET VENUES, AND WE TALKED ABOUT VIDEO OR when we got to that like gallery wall is a cav‘oh this isn’t going to ernous raw warehouse TIME BASED ARTWORKS AND PROJECTING THOSE OUTSIDE, WE’VE TALKED ABOUT work’, something came space (“You could play PUBLIC ARTWORKS, THINGS VISIBLE FROM THE FREEWAY.” —MARCO ROSICHELLI through. ‘Oh maybe baseball in there!” says we actually can have a Watne). space!’” says Johnson.

The Agnes Arts One of the immeowners will see where “We had this space in mind [to use as lion, let’s do it. I don’t see that happening. demand takes them. On the arts side of diate decisions the board had to make last spring was whether to leave their longtime a gallery],” says Watne, “so I was looking at I think it’s gonna stick around a lot longer.” things, the building may eventually include space in the West Bottoms as their lease approaching some small spaces like Plug. rehearsal or recording space for musicians, a • • • ended. With concerns about rent and other I always thought to myself quietly, ‘Somesculpture studio, photography dark room— building issues already, and the pandemic to thing like Plug would be perfect here,’ so it whatever there is a call for, that is, whatever Just inside the Agnes Arts building, a glass there are potential studio tenants/clients for. boot, they decided to let it go. And hoped just really worked out.”

Migliazzo & Co purchased the building door opens to Plug’s new 14’ x 25’ white- Plug is likely to have vibrant neighbors unthey would be able to be in a space again.

“We had to vacate our West Bottoms in late 2019. Just a few months prior, Migli- walled gallery. It’s a downsize from their al- der their shared roof. spot so quickly, and had to make that deci- azzo and his brother had sold a building they ready-small space in the West Bottoms, but Agnes Arts also hopes to bring in some sion in part of the COVID-19 whirlwind,” owned in the Crossroads, Kunstraum, that the building holds a lot of opportunity for local businesses, to have a symbiotic relasays Hutchison. In looking for a new build- had housed artist studios for seven years, as creativity and collaboration. tionship with the artists. “The businesses “We have talked a little bit about part- would subsidize the studios, and the studios ing, she continues, “Part of it was just, where the real estate became more valuable.

Watne wants to prevent that from hap- nering with the artists who are gonna occu- would offer some kind of creative cache can we find affordable space with somebody who knows our needs and can accommo- pening again. After being displaced from his py the studios to maybe curate some shows that would make that space a unique destistudio in the Kunstraum building, he hopes with people who are in the building,” says nation,” says Watne. “I think if we can baldate us?”

At the same time, Davin Watne was that being a co-investor in this space will al- Hutchison. That could expand into the en- ance that business ecosystem in the right

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

CULTURE

CHASE CASTOR

way—and still maintain affordability—then I think we’ll be doing fine.”

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Agnes Arts (1328 Agnes St.) is on the east side of Kansas City, off of Truman Road, a few blocks east of Prospect. The east side of Kansas City—that is, east of Troost, the racial dividing line designed intentionally by white city leaders in the early 20th century—remains predominantly Black, and predominantly low income. This segregation and poverty have been created historically by white supremacist practices like redlining, but continue into the present day with inequality in city services and funding.

While a dilapidated old building in a neglected corner of the city tucked alongside the freeway makes this an affordable option for artists to work in, there is also the question of how a development like Agnes Arts will impact the neighborhood around it. Will it be the next Crossroads—both for better and for worse?

Considerations about the neighborhood and community that they’ve moved into is at the fore for Plug.

“I have complicated feelings personally about moving into this neighborhood and onto Kansas City’s east side,” says Hutchison. “This is a really great opportunity to come to a neighborhood with eyes open and with intentionality and connect with the neighborhood and the community already in place, and do it a little bit differently, and constructively.”

They intend to reach out to collaborate with neighborhood associations and community leaders, which will hopefully pave the way to shape and be shaped by their surroundings in positive ways.

“We’ve been throwing things around, like community advisory groups, and whether there’s an advisory role on the board, we’re just workshopping ideas right now,” says Chaivaranon. “We want to hear

from folks. If they read this article and want to reach out to us, we would be so excited to hear their ideas.” (Reach them at info@ plug.gallery.)

They are hoping to exhibit artists who engage with these issues directly. “One show that we do hope to have is one that really addresses the site and the community and the history of the building,” says Chaivaranon.

The building itself looms with the history of being a police facility. It was previously the traffic division and backup dispatch for the Kansas City Police Department. The folks at Plug want to acknowledge and reckon with the history of the space, as the police have been demonstrably harmful to the surrounding community.

Making those connections and having those community conversations is integral to what Plug does. Putting art on the walls is important, but their work doesn’t end there.

“The old space had a back room where we would have community events,” says Chaivaranon. “It felt really attractive that this space has artist studios right next door, that there is a public gathering space, because I think we really see a future of continuing Plug’s involvement with programming, community, and multigenerational audiences.”

At exhibitions and programs, “There’s always so many unexpected things that come from those conversations and those ideas and people meeting and sparks flying,” says Charbonneau.

Now that they’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to get into those collaborative and curatorial visions. “We spent the last year problem solving and ensuring plug’s survival on a really basic level,” says Hutchison.

“I’m excited to move beyond that process, and really sink our teeth into becoming what we have envisioned for Plug.”

“Initially we didn’t know if Plug would ever be a brick and mortar thing again,” says Johnson. “This was speculation for a really long time. It’s real now.”

Nominations Open July 6 thepitchkc.com/bestofkc

thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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ARTS

The Lumberyard Arts Center

MUSIC BY TIMBER LAND A RENOVATED LUMBERYARD BRINGS LIVE PERFORMANCES TO BALDWIN CITY BY NICK SPACEK

Baldwin City is not known for live music, which is odd considering that it’s home to Baker University, a college with over 2,500 students. While that’s less than one-tenth the population of the nearby University of Kansas in Lawrence, one would think there’d be an open mic night or something at a local watering hole. Sadly, that’s not the case.

“When I first moved here, my first thing was like, ‘Oh, I got to find somewhere to play in Baldwin,’ and the only place was a worship music circle, which is not my thing,” says singer-songwriter Megan Luttrell, a resident of the city for the last three years.

She says that the only dive bar in town, the Salt Mine, had just closed. The only bars to speak of are The Nook, which is also a bookstore, and The Office, a lounge in the Lodge of Baldwin City, located on the main drag through town.

Luttrell is happily looking to change all that, in conjunction with the Lumberyard Arts Center, located in the renovated Ives-Hartley Lumber Co. building in downtown Baldwin City. As Jeanette Blackmar, the Arts Center’s director, says, this has been in the works for a couple of years. The Lum-

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

beryard Arts Center went through some strategic planning work and thought about how to diversify, increase, and broaden their audience, as well as better serve their mission.

“That began a conversation of looking at our mission and what we do and who we serve,” says Blackmar, who continued to explain that last year the Arts Center noted a real uptick in community interest in more live music.

“The Lumberyard Arts Center never really did any music or touring groups— no focus on that,” says Blackmar. “We use music as a fundraising mechanism, so we would have a bluegrass barbecue when we would raise money for the Arts Center. This program that we developed really wanted to take seriously creating a sustained live music program. That’s kind of how it began and we wanted to do it extremely well.”

Thanks to a planning grant from the Kansas Creative Arts Industry Commission, funded through the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts Center was able to hire someone to lay the foundation and develop the program in its planning period. That

person happens to be Meghan Luttrell—although the musician is quick to admit she was quite surprised to find out what it all meant.

“They were telling me, ‘Oh, we got this grant to start a live music program,’” laughs Luttrell. “I didn’t understand at the time the grant was to pay me to be a consultant. I was like, ‘Oh, so I’m going to volunteer. Cool,’ And they’re like, ‘No, no: we’re going to hire you as a real adult person to help with this.’

We have this planning grant that is funding me to be a program developer to just make my live music dream come true. That’s what they said: ‘Just do what you’ve always wanted to do.’ And now I can.”

The plan is directed by Luttrell’s knowledge of the local music scene—bolstered by several years of hosting open mics and the monthly women’s musical showcase at Lawrence’s Kaw Valley Public House—as well as input from the Baldwin City community.

The Lumberyard Arts Center and Luttrell put together two separate surveys.

One, a general community survey, was to figure out what genres of music people like, what sort of events people would be

JOHN KNEPPER

interested in, any concerns they had, how often they would attend, and why they wouldn’t attend if they decided not to.

“The only concern really that people had was COVID-19, which of course is a huge concern for us, too,” says Luttrell. “But everyone was overwhelmingly excited and positive. Just really excited: ‘I’m so happy this is coming to Baldwin!’”

Luttrell made the second survey specifically for musicians. She wants the Arts Center to be something that helps amateur and professional musicians alike with their development, not just a center for live performances. The questionnaire asked about what kind of music they played, if they would play or lead a workshop for the center, and where they need the most help in terms of development.

“We have Folk Alliance obviously, but not everyone can attend that,” Luttrell explains of the development aspect. “Maybe a workshop on copyrighting your original music, because that’s a complicated thing to navigate, or how to get on a streaming service or a songwriting workshop. We want to do a music career panel—these kinds of things.”

Given that the Lumberyard Arts Center has been in place for over two decades, Luttrell made sure the live music initiative tied into other programs of the center’s programming. “Obviously we don’t want to take away from anything that’s already happening there,” Luttrell says. They plan to pair programming with the Third Friday Art Walk—sometimes providing music for the events as well. That way it will be a mutual event, rather than counter-programming against it.

“We’re just making sure that we’re scheduling around events that are already scheduled, so we’re not competing or taking away attention from that,” Luttrell says.

“We’re considering doing some of our workshops as a class offered by the art center. That’s one thing we’re working on right now—figuring out formatting and ‘Is it going to be an actual class people sign up for, or is it going to be a separate workshop?’”

Luttrell plans to work with others in the community with her live music program.

They want to work with the Baldwin City Academy of Dance and Voice to have live music in a dance class where people can potentially learn salsa while a live salsa band performs.

“We’re working within the community and pairing with people as opposed to having something as a competing force,” Luttrell says. “We don’t want to just come in here and bust things open: ‘Okay! Live music and that’s all there’s going to be!’ It’s an art center and music is just one art.”

ARTS

JOHN KNEPPER

CHECK IT OUT The Lumberyard Arts Center 718 High St. in Baldwin City, lumberyardartscenter.org Saturday, June 26: Jazz Night with Mire Pral

Friday, July 23: Singer-Songwriter Night

Tuesday, July 9: Streetlevel Uprising

Saturday, August 21: Smoke on the Bricks BBQ competition with Megan Luttrell and others

Despite the fact that mask mandates are waning and vaccinated folks are being given the okay to mingle sans-masks, there are some who might feel uncomfortable gathering inside. Thankfully, Baldwin City recently built Sullivan Square, an outdoor space directly adjacent to the Lumberyard Arts Center, with a covered stage and an area for blankets or folding chairs.

Blackmar mentions that the eventual vision for the Lumberyard Arts Center is to make a public-private partnership. She imagines a partnership between Sullivan Square and the Art Center. The partnership would develop it into a creative arts complex. Creating it in a way which ties back to a history that predates the Ives-Hartley Building where the Arts Center is based.

“Sullivan Square is named after Baldwin City’s first female mayor, Lucy Sweet Sullivan,” Blackmar explains. “She was mayor in 1889. There was a house there and it was the convening space of town and gown.

It brought the Baker students into the community, and they had parties and music and events. So here we are in 2021, coming full circle to the realization of getting back to Sullivan Square being the hub of community activities, specifically with live music events. It’s really exciting.”

The plan for the Arts Center’s live music program is to rope in as many genres as possible. Not just the folk-Americana with which she’s identified, but with performers from the community, Baker University, and the surrounding areas.

From Johnny Cash karaoke after a screening of Walk the Line to jazz under the stars, the sky’s the limit in terms of creative concepts. Thanks to a second grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kansas Creative Arts Industry, which the Arts Center and Baldwin City teamed up on to fund performances, Luttrell is looking to book a lot more acts in the coming weeks.

“It’s for the people of Baldwin, but we also want to bring people to Baldwin and stimulate the local economy,” says Luttrell.

“We don’t get a ton of tourism other than the big Maple Leaf Festivals, so we want to have it help us make Baldwin a destination for the arts.”

“What we hope to do is to provide promotion and support and exposure for new artists who are just getting their feet on the ground,” Balckmar says, seconding Luttrell.

“The hope is to showcase local talents, and who knows? Maybe they can say that they were found here and got their beginning at the Lumberyard Arts Center.”

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FILM

ON LOCATION AT TRUE/FALSE 2021 HIGHS AND LOWS OF MISSOURI’S FAMOUS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL AMID PANDEMIC-TRANSITION BY ABBY OLCESE

The True/False film festival has always been “different” than other fests. The quirky DIY aesthetic and “let’s put on a show” mentality, coupled with top-notch curation and an intimate, communal atmosphere is all refreshingly free of slick overproduction and inaccessibility. Typically held the first weekend of March, the Columbia, Missouri documentary festival gives artists and attendees four days of memorable art and jocular downtown bustle.

Given its can-do ethos, it makes sense that in a year when festivals like Sundance and SXSW migrated completely online, True/False decided to try something else.

The planning team moved this year’s event from March to May, with a hybrid model that allowed for safe distancing and in-person involvement for masked and/or vaccinated folks at outdoor screenings in picturesque Stephens Lake Park, or an interactive online experience for those who couldn’t be there, but didn’t want to miss out.

Appropriately for a documentary fest, True/False’s annual themes and film selection often end up reflecting or sometimes presaging the moment we find ourselves living in, either intentionally or unintentionally. This year’s theme was “the nature of uncertainty,” a choice that both reflected the year we just got through and the

SUMMER OF SOUL Q&A AT TRUE/FALSE.

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

weird liminal space we currently occupy.

We’re all starting to shake off the cobwebs of COVID-19 isolation, only to realize that we’re still reckoning with the shock of what’s

been lost, what’s been gained, and what now feels strange to do. For better or worse, this year’s festival carried that sense throughout, both in the featured documentaries and in the experience of being there.

During a typical True/False weekend, the air is thick with possibility. You never know who you’ll meet. One year the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips almost killed my laptop when he spilled his soda at Uprise Bakery (he was very gracious about it).

Another year, I ran into Nathan Fielder at Kaldi’s. As a volunteer in 2011, James Marsh, the Oscar-winning director of Man on Wire, asked me if I’d let him into a screening without his pass (I obliged, of course).

That atmosphere was still present this year, but in limited form. Most events happened at Stephens Lake Park, with concerts throughout the day and screenings at night.

ed exploration of perception, surveillance, and the myth of objectivity. Anthony, a Baltimore resident, couches his meandering philosophical study in the use of body cameras and the rise of surveillance techniques as crime prevention in the wake of the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police.

Anthony’s interest in the act of seeing travels down a series of fascinating rabbit holes, which include attempts by astronomers to capture the transit of Venus in the late nineteenth century, and advancements in photography that helped create both modern profiling and drone surveillance techniques. He also takes us into the headquarters of Axos, the company that created the taser, and which currently produces the majority of body cameras used in police departments.

As All Light, Everywhere digs into the

SUMMER OF SOUL (...OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)

The concerts were impressively varied; you could catch regional acts like Kansas City’s own Shy Boys and St. Louis’ Blvck Spvde alongside indie headliners like Parquet Courts frontman Andrew Savage, who was there in a solo capacity. On Saturday morning, filmmakers and film industry folks engaged in a friendly kickball competition in front of enthusiastic spectators, cheering in spite of the rain. By and large, though, the sense of spontaneity was missing. It turns out that good public health measures, while reasonable and important, require advance planning that decreases the likelihood of exciting chance encounters.

Questions of processing our strange new present in light of the recent past also permeated the film selection. True/False alum Theo Anthony, who showed his Rat Film at the 2017 festival returned this year with All Light, Everywhere, a multi-facet-

overlapping history of science, photography, and criminal profiling, some troubling patterns emerge, best summed up by nineteenth-century French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who Anthony features: “One can only see what one observes, one observes only things which are already in the mind.” Anthony shows the flaws evident in the use of police body cameras, and the ways our individual biases distort what we see in such a way that objective truth becomes impossible to discern. The film occasionally deviates from the main subject in ways that don’t quite connect, but Anthony’s thesis and curiosity are consistently fascinating.

Reacting a rapidly changing world in real-time is the central theme of Peter Nicks’ Homeroom, which follows the Oakland High School graduating class of 2020 starting on the first day of school in 2019 and

FILM

ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE

ending with their graduation in June the following year. Homeroom is the concluding chapter in Nicks’ trilogy of well-regarded documentaries on aspects of civic life and social issues in Oakland, which began with 2012’s hospital documentary Waiting Room and continued with 2017’s The Force, Nicks’ examination of the city’s troubled police department. All three films will be available on Hulu when Homeroom premieres on the platform later this summer.

For Homeroom, Nicks embeds himself with a group of socially engaged students at Oakland High School, which is predominantly attended by students of color. Denilson Garibo, a child of undocumented parents, heads up a diverse student coalition that sits on the district’s board and weighs in on decisions that impact their education. When the film starts, their main interest is reducing police presence at their school. That issue takes on additional urgency the following summer, as Garibo and his classHOMEROOM mates react to the killing of George Floyd.

Homeroom’s other big factor is, of course, the pandemic, which hits at almost exactly the movie’s halfway point. Nicks does an excellent job of establishing the pre-existing stakes for these students ahead of time—elements like SAT scores, college applications, and scholarships—so that

when COVID disrupts their lives, the reality of the challenges they’re facing is clear, and creates significant dramatic tension. Most of these kids come from low-income families.

Several of them don’t have access to working internet at home.

Homeroom presents a microcosm of what teenagers in underserved communities across the country had to deal with in

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which took the themes of the festival in a different direction. There’s been plenty of discussion in recent years about the importance of depicting Black joy, and not just suffering, in film and TV, as well as taking a more expansive look at Black history as a whole. Summer of Soul does both,

the last year. Seeing these kids persevere and continue to actively improve their community in the face of massively dispiriting circumstances is hopeful and inspiring. Much like Boys State’s Steven Garza, I expect we’ll be seeing great things from Garibo in a few years’ time.

My final experience of the festival was

unearthing incredible concert footage of 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series that boasted big names and hundreds of attendees. After the fact, it was all but erased from public consciousness—to the point where some who were there began to question whether it happened at all.

The best concert documentaries give

you a specific look into a time and place, in addition to capturing great performances. A particularly great example of this is the long-lost Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, which showed at True/ False two years ago. In Summer of Soul, the incredibly detailed footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival concerts gives us a tour of late-60s fashion (Jesse Jackson leads a Sunday service wearing an ascot and a fabulous leather vest) as well as a massive crowd of distinct personalities in the audience. Everyone there is interesting to look at, and every face looks like it could produce a novel’s worth of backstory.

Summer of Soul was a fitting closer for the joy and hope it generated; it was also the only movie I saw in an indoor setting, the Ragtag, the festival’s flagship location.

Waiting in line for the film I made friends with a sweet older couple. We talked about music, classic comedy records, and what other movies I’d seen that weekend. It was the first time the festival felt like it does in a normal year—buoyed by a movie that celebrated the same kind of large-scale communal experience, where strangers become friends and art unites us all. We’ve still got a long way to go before we’re “back to normal,” but there are small moments now where it feels, as they say, like nature is healing. This was one of them. thepitchkc.com | June 2021 | THE PITCH

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KC CARES

BOYSGROW

BY BROOKE TIPPIN, PHOTOS BY JEFF EVRARD PHOTOGRAPHY

John Gordon Jr. was working in the Juvenile Court Systems in Northern California when inspiration hit him. He watched as a teenager, who was placed in the foster care system he was managing, began to make positive changes in his life on the farm where his new foster parents lived. He noticed increased confidence and accountability as the teen learned the responsibilities of caring for his own animals and vegetables.

Inspired by the growth this young man showed during some of his most impressionable years, Gordon relocated back to Kansas City in 2010 and founded BoysGrow.

Every summer, 40-60 youth ages 14-16 commit to a two year position working on the BoysGrow farm. While there, the boys learn to work together and develop core vocational skills that are applicable in today’s job market including culinary arts, construction, farming, marketing, and public speaking. Through farming and agriculture, the boys gain pride, identity, discipline, and an understanding of the business world.

BoysGrow prides itself on being a family by working and growing together.

Over the past several years, Gordon has noticed a shift in the influence that social media and the internet have had on younger generations. Many teenagers have entered the program incredibly introverted, to the point that it has negatively impacted their life. Gordon has evolved his programming to give these boys the opportunity to find their voice. During the first day in the program, the boys go around the circle and

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

say a few simple things about themselves, creating an opportunity to speak in front of a few dozen people. One boy, Luis, stood out from the rest. The young man was given many opportunities to speak but was too timid and shy to say anything at all.

During Luis’ two years on the farm, his confidence and ability to communicate with others grew and he approached John about being the keynote speaker at one of their Farm Fest Events. John and his team went over Luis’ talking points which were focused on his personal growth to stand up and deliver a speech.

When Luis took the microphone in front of over 300 people, he paused for a solid 15 seconds of silence as he stared out into the crowd. The BoysGrow staff sat nervously waiting for him to speak those first few words. After composing himself, Luis found his voice and delivered a personal speech on how he landed on that stage. Luis’ parents would reflect on his growth in the program and claim these experiences helped develop him into the man he is becoming today. Luis was able to find a job, ask a girl to prom, and become a confident young man who could communicate with others and better navigate his teenage years.

A donation to BoysGrow goes toward paying the youth for their efforts on the farm. Every youth earns a paycheck with their name on it. The cost to employ a youth for the summer program is $1,500. This includes their wages and processing fees.

BoysGrow also hosts several events

throughout the year, giving individuals and couples the opportunity to experience the farm and enjoy delicious food while supporting the organization. On June 6, BoysGrow will be hosting a Date Night on the Farm featuring Chef Carlos Mortera of Poi-O and Fairway Creamery. Tickets are available on their website at boysgrow. com.

BoysGrow has seen more than 100 young men walk onto a farm and leave two years later with highly marketable skills and a strong work ethic. BoysGrow values the importance of hard work and earning your own money. Most of the boys now dream of becoming local chefs, local farmers, and local business owners. But most importantly, this program has helped them develop the vocational and soft skills they need to achieve these dreams.

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37

SAVAGE LOVE

THE BLOWJOB “BUTTON” AND CROSS-DRESSING

BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: I’m a European heterosexual girl and reading your column from afar has been a good way for me to better know the sex world! I am wondering if you have advice for me about a “faster” way to do blowjobs. Or rather a way to make my boyfriend come faster from them. I like doing them but after some time my mouth begins to hurt and I’d like him to finish. My partner is “slower” to come than other men I’ve been with. During intercourse sex I don’t mind.

I usually come first but it is not a problem to wait for him to finish. But during oral sex, it is harder to wait. Sometimes I say no to giving him a blowjob because I know the effort it will take. I don’t want to talk with him about this because I don’t want to make him self-conscious. I know how good it is to receive oral sex without thinking about having to rush my own orgasm and I don’t want to make him feel rushed. In the years of our relationship I haven’t found a trick that gives me the power to make it faster. I need some button to push. Maybe you have some tips for me?

Sex Tips Inducing Faster Finish Easing Discomfort Dear STIFFED: I have some good news: *there is a button*. It’s doesn’t work on all men, sadly, but for many men a little pressure on this button can speed up an approaching orgasm considerably. While this button isn’t hard to find, STIFFED, you can’t see it with the naked eye… because it’s inside a guy’s ass. The prostate is a walnut-shaped gland that produces seminal fluid; it’s located inside and up a man’s bum. If you’re facing your boyfriend— which you would be while blowing him— his prostate is on the same side of his body that you are. Slip a finger in his ass, make a gentle “come here” motion with your finger, and you’ll be hitting that button.

Keep gently pressing on his prostate as his orgasm approaches and you should feel it harden, swell, and contract.

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com

But you’re gonna need to get your boyfriend’s consent before sticking a finger in his ass, STIFFED, which means you’re gonna have to talk to him about trying this—and I think you should level with him about why you wanna try it. You don’t frame it as a problem (“You take too long!”) because it isn’t a problem. He has amazing stamina, right? And while that stamina is great during PIV (you always come first), it’s a challenge when you blow him. Figuring out what you can do to get him there a little faster without making him feel rushed is something you should be able to talk about. You need to be able to talk honestly with your partner about sex in general, STIFFED, and it’s particularly important that you’re able to freely give him feedback when sex is physically uncomfortable.

While there’s an obvious upside for you to speeding up his orgasms during oral, e.g. less wear and tear on your face, there are two big upsides for him: you’re gonna get him there faster by making

I don’t get the feeling he would hide it if he is struggling with gender issues. I think he just likes to wear a dress around the house sometimes. I’m wondering if we still refer to a guy dressing in women’s clothes as a “cross-dressing” or is it now just “wearing a dress”? Is there a more modern term/name?

Cross-dressing feels derogatory for some reason. We have no intention of trying to change his behavior, but I’d like to use the right words if he wants to talk about it.

Demonstrating Respect Exposes Sincere Support Dear DRESS: No one is more up to date on the right words than the word cops at GLAAD, which used to stand for the “Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation” and now just stands for GLAAD… because coming up with a catchy acronym that incorporated B (bisexual), T (trans), Q (queer), Q again (questioning), A (asexual), A again (ally), I (intersex), 2S (twospirited), P (pan), P again (polyamorous), K (kink), etc., etc., prompted

I’M WONDERING IF WE STILL REFER TO A GUY DRESSING IN WOMEN’S CLOTHES AS A “CROSS-DRESSING” OR IS IT NOW JUST “WEARING A DRESS”? IS THERE A MORE MODERN TERM/ NAME? CROSS-DRESSING FEELS DEROGATORY FOR SOME REASON. WE HAVE NO INTENTION OF TRYING TO CHANGE HIS BEHAVIOR, BUT I’D LIKE TO USE THE RIGHT WORDS IF HE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT. blowjobs more intensely pleasurable for him and he’s gonna get more of those more of those more intensely pleasurable blowjobs once they’re less physically taxing for you. And if a finger in the butt is a nogo for your boyfriend (or you), STIFFED, there are some other tricks you can try.

Some guys get there a little faster during oral if you cup, squeeze, or gently pull on their balls; some guys get there a little faster if you play with their nipples (or they play with their own). And you can always use your hands to speed things along, i.e. pull his dick out of your mouth, give him a few good pumps, get him a closer to the finish line, and then dive back down on his dick.

Dear Dan: My son, a 15-year-old straight guy, occasionally enjoys dressing in girls’ clothing. When he was little it was his sister’s tutus and painting his nails. These days he does it more to be funny. I have noticed, however, that once the joke is over he keeps the makeup and dress on longer and longer. This has never bothered me or his dad. We don’t encourage or discourage it.

We have never gendered things in our very liberal house (no girls/boys toys, etc.). He is a pretty open kid with friends across the spectrum of sexual and gender identities so

several dozen supercomputers to threaten suicide if they weren’t immediately reassigned to bitcoin-farming duties.

Anyway, DRESS, GLAAD says the term “cross-dressing” is *fine*: “While anyone may wear clothes associated with a different sex, the term cross-dresser is typically used to refer to men who occasionally wear clothes, makeup, and accessories culturally associated with women.” GLAAD recommends people use “cross-dressing” instead of “transvestite” and notes that most cross-dressers identify as both male and straight and “have no desire to transition and/or live full-time as women.” But your son is only 15 years old; he may be a straight male cross-dresser, DRESS, or he may be exploring his gender identity under the guise of wearing dresses for laughs. Give him time, give him space.

And just as you’re keeping an open mind about your child’s gender identity, DRESS, I would encourage you to keep an open mind about his sexual orientation. My mom thought I was straight when I was 15 years old and look how that turned out.

Question for Dan? Email him at mail@ savagelove.net. On Twitter at @fakedansavage.

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THE PITCH | June 2021 | thepitchkc.com