The Pitch: August 2019 by The Pitch KC

AUGUST 2019 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM

WORLDS of

FOOD

The finest Korean joints in Johnson County

A Nigerian gem in Independence

Christopher Elbow dips into Fairway

Szechuan bud cocktails in Waldo

“Lobster buns” at the Home Depot in Midtown

TED NUGENT AUGUST 2 | 8:30PM

THE FOUR TOPS AUGUST 3 | 8:30PM

THE LALAS BURLESQUE AUGUST 16 | 8:30PM

JOE NICHOLS AUGUST 23 | 8:30PM

THE ROBERT CRAY BAND AUGUST 30 | 8:30PM

BOB SAGET SEPTEMBER 13 | 8:30PM

.. QUEENSRYCHE SEPTEMBER 20 | 8:30PM

AIR SUPPLY SEPTEMBER 28 | 8:30PM

GLADYS KNIGHT OCTOBER 11 | 8:30PM

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2019 | THE PITCH

CONTENTS

THE PITCH

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

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Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey

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DISTRIBUTION

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

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2019 by Carey Media. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. The Pitch 1627 Main St., #600, Kansas City, MO 64108 For information or to share a story tip, email tips@thepitchkc.com For advertising: stephanie@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6702 For classifieds: steven@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6732

6 STREETSIDE

What’s coming and what’s going in KC retail, food, drink, and real estate. BY DAVID HUDNALL

8 NEWS

Creative Math

Last year’s Open Spaces arts festival still owes nearly half a million bucks to its vendors. BY EMILY PARK

12 Settled

In a “unicorn” of an immigration case, a Honduran family is granted asylum in Kansas City. BY TRACI ANGEL

14 CAFE

It Takes a Village

In Independence, the year-old Nigerian restaurant My Village Grill is a welcome home away from home. BY LIZ COOK

18 FOOD

Bibimbap and Beyond

The Korean food scene in KC is getting spicy — if you know where to look. BY APRIL FLEMING

20 Consider the Lobster Bun

They serve food at the Midtown Home Depot now. You’ll want to read the menu carefully. BY LIZ COOK

22 EAT

Eat This Now

Dipped Cones at Fairway Creamery. BY APRIL FLEMING

DRINK

Round Here

Drink This Now

The Flower Bomb at Brick & Mortar. BY APRIL FLEMING

The Old Country

COMEDY

Funny Business

The Comedy Club of Kansas City aims to be far less generic than its name. BY GINA PEPITONE

36 Deep Cucks

ARTS

Breaking the Routine

The monthly showcase Paradox hopes to unite a fragmented local dance community. BY RILEY COWING

“We really have no clear idea why people have any of the unique sexual fantasies they do.” BY DAN SAVAGE

38 EVENTS

August Calendar

Boon Companions

A musical friendship forged at a midMissouri arts festival blooms this month at the 1900 Building. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

30 MUSIC

Good Times

Rapper Amira Wang is a walking, talking, one-woman party. BY AARON RHODES

COVER

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Chuck Mead left Lawrence for Nashville in the Nineties, but his songs still live in Kansas. BY NICK SPACEK

SAVAGE LOVE

“Wingin’ It,” Zach Bauman

Catching up with the Urge, torchbearers of a bygone regional rock scene. BY NICK SPACEK

Where to go and what to do during the dog days.

Race. History. Identity. Beauty. Contemporary art by 30 of the most important African American artists of the past four decades.

Only through August 25

Under 12 FREE; adult, group, senior & student pricing available.

45th & Oak | #30AmericansKC | Organized by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bird On Money, 1981. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 66 x 90 inches. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Art ÂŠ The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

STREETSIDE

DAVID HUDNALL

WHAT’S COMING AND WHAT’S GOING IN KC RETAIL, FOOD, DRINK, AND REAL ESTATE. BY DAVID HUDNALL

Charlotte Street Foundation will formally move to a new headquarters at 3333 Wyoming. The arts organization will break ground on the new space this month, with plans for an opening of the new HQ in the spring. “The Urban Culture Project, which provided studio space and venues for Charlotte Street for over a decade, was very dependent on heavily subsidized rent from generous partners in the downtown core,” says CSF executive director Amy Klingman, explaining the move. “Times have changed, and those kinds of opportunities are less readily available.”

The Frank Lloyd Wright house at 3600 Belleview in Roanoke Park is headed for auction on August 12, if you have a couple million dollars burning a hole in your trousers. The Sondern-Adler House, as it’s known, was built in 1939.

WeWork will open a second coworking location in Kansas City, in the City Center Building downtown at 1100 Main. Kansas Citians now have four Plexpods, three iWerx, two WeWorks, and an Industrious to choose from for their coworking needs.

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

The long-running midtown gay bar Buddies has closed following the death of its owner in an April home explosion. “Buddies essentially died with Lee when the bomb went off,” Eileen Norris, who has leased to Buddies since she took ownership of the property in 2001, says. The space — 3715 Main, next door to Sidekicks Saloon — is currently up for lease.

Thou Mayest, another coffee-and-booze concept in the Crossroads, closed last year. But it recently reopened at 519 E. 18th Street — just a block away from its old digs — as Thee Outpost. No alcohol at the new spot, though.

The Italian restaurant Milano is out at Crown Center after 30 years, to be replaced by two operations: Burnt End BBQ and a Starbucks. The remodels are expected to be completed in time for a December opening for the new tenants.

Mike’s Wine and Spirits in Westport is expanding. The liquor store will move into a new, $3.5 million building that spans three lots adjacent to its current location at 1106 Westport Road. The new Mike’s will be 7,500 square feet in all and serve as a hub for Mike’s booze delivery business, which has taken off since the Kansas City Council legalized the practice last year.

Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. is now open at 2129 Washington, just down the street from Rhythm and Booze on the western edge of the Crossroads. As the name implies, it’s a coffee shop in the morning and a taproom in the afternoons and evenings.

Cuento Coffee has opened inside Raytown’s Crane Brewing Co. The coffee shop — Andy Gallant is the owner and head roaster — will operate in the early morning and during the award-winning brewery’s afternoon hours. Crane is also the current home, on Saturdays, of the muchraved-about Harp BBQ.

P R E S E N T S

FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2019 6-9 PM

L A S T

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ZACH BAUMAN

NEWS

CREATIVE MATH LAST YEAR’S OPEN SPACES ARTS FESTIVAL STILL OWES NEARLY HALF A MILLION BUCKS TO ITS VENDORS. BY EMILY PARK

Nine months after the closing of Open Spaces last October, KC Creates — the non-profit that produced the two-monthlong citywide arts festival — is still on the hook for approximately $480,000 owed to various vendors that participated in the event. The city of KCMO has contributed nearly $1 million to the festival; earlier this year, it injected $375,000 to help make up for the losses from the event. And so, in mid July, KC Creates executive director, Cheryl Kimmi, and the city’s director of creative services, Megan Crigger, were called before the city’s Finance and Governance Committee . “Bottom line is, revenue projections did not hit their mark and expenditures were higher than projected,” Kimmi told the committee. “So we have a shortfall that we’ve been working on.” Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner questioned how the festival became so costly in the first place, noting that it was originally intended to be a three-day festival and grew to two months of arts and culture exhibits and events stretched across the entire city. “What strikes me is that no one said, ‘You know, maybe we can’t quite do that this time around,’” Wagner said. “I’m trying to understand where everything kind of grew, because I guess from my own observation, everything sounded great: ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it, hope it all works out.’ And then [the city] gets a budget memo for $375,000.” Kimmi told Wagner that a lot of last-minute bills came in that she was unaware of, and pointed toward the expenses of “The Weekend” at Starlight Theatre, which featured major artists such as Janelle Monáe and The Roots. The Weekend was expected to make up the largest portion of revenue for Open Spaces. But only 4,000 tickets were collected for the event, which was not a large enough turnout to cover the cost of the event, let alone turn a profit. Kimmi said The Weekend was the largest financial challenge resulting from Open Spaces. To come up with the money still owed to vendors, Kimmi said that KC Creates is selling assets (like projectors and other equipment) and art from the event to make up the difference — a process that has gone slower than she hoped it would. She noted that if all

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

ZACH BAUMAN

the art sells, it could return up to $260,000 of lost revenue. But Kimmi projected the actual amount will be closer to $150,000 to $175,000. The council members on the committee seemed to doubt that KC Creates will be able to make up for the lost revenue and questioned if the city will have to pour in further funding. Kimmi ensured the committee that KC Creates will pay down the entire deficit and that the city will not be asked for any more funds. But Councilman Lee Barnes, Jr. (5th District At-Large) voiced his uncertainty about Kimmi’s claim. “It is my suspicion that it is not on the city now,” Barnes said, “but that at some point, we may be asked.” Wagner (1st District At-Large) voiced his concern about the volume of phone calls he has received from those still owed payment for their contributions to Open Spaces. “I can’t speak for the others here, but we have certainly received phone calls from those who have not been paid,” Wagner said. “I guess my concern in all of this is the individuals, performers, or artists who may not have the ability to float those things.” Kimmi explained that as revenue comes in, KC Creates is strategically paying off small entities and individuals that don’t have the capacity to carry long-term debt first. It was also noted that all of the commissioned artists who participated in Open Spaces have been

paid, but that KC Creates is still on the hook for payments owed to suppliers and fabricators. “We’re talking to vendors daily, keeping them apprised of what the situation is because this is not a situation that any of us desire or foresaw,” Kimmi said. Despite the money loss, Kimmi and Crigger voiced that they felt like Open Spaces was a success. Crigger showed video testimony of various Open Spaces participants praising the event and highlighted the top exhibits that resulted from the festival. “Open Spaces was ambitious — it was unprecedented,” said Crigger. “It was the first of its kind in many ways, and it was uniquely Kansas City … The exhibition provided support for artists to take risks, expand their practice, and pursue their work in the context of the city as the canvas.” Kimmi shared feedback from Pete Brown — the president of Kissick Construction Company, which is owed the largest debt from Open Spaces — who said he understands the financial setback and would be all-in for the next generation of the festival. Kimmi noted that KC Creates has to close out the expenditures from last fall’s Open Spaces before it can move forward with another cycle of the festival. “I hope you do see a next generation,” Kimmi said. “And I would love to be a part of that, I think, taking the lessons learned and scaling down a bit so it’s more manageable.” thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2019 | THE PITCH

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

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NEWS

SETTLED IN A “UNICORN” OF AN IMMIGRATION CASE, A HONDURAN FAMILY IS GRANTED ASYLUM IN KANSAS CITY. BY TRACI ANGEL

Just after 8 a.m. on a Friday morning in mid-July, Mercedes Yolanda Zelaya Mendoza and her four children file into immigration court in downtown Kansas City. It’s been a stressful three years since this family fled its home country of Honduras, where Zelaya Mendoza’s husband was killed in a politically targeted assassination that occurred in their front yard. For weeks, they hid from his political enemies, who were tracking them. They made their way across the Rio Grande and requested asylum at the U.S. border. They had no family in this country. But Zelaya Mendoza did have one friend in the Independence area. So they set out for Missouri. They’ve since settled in Kansas City, Kansas, where the children are enrolled in school and quickly picking up English. Now, their fate lies in the hands of an immigration attorney, Angie Williams, who has spent the last two years preparing their legal case seeking permanent residency in this country. “Are you ready for this?” Williams asks before the proceeding starts. Zelaya Mendoza breaks out into a smile. Hearings like these often last up to five hours. But this one shouldn’t take long. Government officials are expected to grant the family asylum. Such an outcome would be an anomaly, to put it mildly, given the political landscape and the policies of the Trump Administration, which has overseen a humanitarian crisis at the border where children are caged in holding pens inside detention centers. Zelaya Mendoza’s hearing comes at the end of the same week that the Trump Administration defied a Supreme Court ruling and declared an executive order (which it later walked back) to include a citizenship question on the U.S. Census. It also comes just two working days prior to a change in U.S. policy requiring immigrants seeking asylum from Central America to apply for refugee status first in the first country that they enter, rather than at the U.S. border, as Zelaya Mendoza did. The Zelaya Mendoza case is “a unicorn,” as one local immigration attorney described it. “Asylum grants in general are getting rarer and rarer,” Williams says. The numbers back that up. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an independent database that gathers statistics on issues of justice and law enforcement, asylum cases were denied about 65 percent of the time in fiscal year 2018. And the rate for denials has been

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Zelaya Mendoza (fourth from left) surrounded by family and supporters.

steadily increasing; six years ago, the denial rate was 42 percent. Zelaya Mendoza has a strong case, though. In Honduras, the family was targeted and persecuted because it supported a land rights group called COPINH. In the eyes of the American government, that’s a more compelling argument for asylum than the more common (and nebulous) requests based on being a particular social group (“PSG”), such as the kind a Mexican journalist or Somali woman might make. “The amount of international attention and the political motivations — and the continued abuse of land activists in Honduras — has a lot to do with the [American government’s] willingness to stipulate [to asylum],” Williams says. Still, Williams says Zelaya Mendoza’s case required a tremendous amount of legal work. “We put together close to 500 pages of evidence about Honduras, the murders, land rights defenders, the Honduran protected witness program, general impunity for criminals in Honduras, and the corruption of the government,” she says. “Additionally, all of the family went through extensive counseling, wrote numerous drafts of their declarations. We translated about 80 pages of the Honduran case file, collected witness statements from people still in Honduras.” Karen Spring, the Honduras base coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, even made the journey to Kansas City in case the judge asked for additional evidence in the hearing. As the proceeding approaches, friends,

activists, and other supporters enter the courtroom and take a seat. Legs bob nervously up and down. “I think you have a reason to be happy today,” says Judge Justin Howard, whose asylum denial rate, according to TRAC, is more than 75 percent. It doesn’t take long. “Congratulations,” Howard says after a few minutes of questions and paperwork. “I am going to grant your asylum today. I wish you the best of luck. If ever there was a case [for asylum], this was it.” (Asked for clarification from Howard about his ruling, Gail Montenegro, regional public information officer for the U.S. Department of Justice said, “The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) does not comment on immigration judge decisions as the decision speaks for itself. Immigration judges also do not provide interviews.” She continued: “Please note that each case in immigration court is unique, with its own set of facts, evidentiary factors, and circumstances. Asylum cases typically include complex legal and factual issues and immigration judges review all cases on a case-by-case basis, taking into consideration every factor allowable by law.”) After the decision, Zelaya Mendoza walks over to hug Judy Ancel, with whom the family lived when they arrived in Kansas City and who has helped the family settle. “Felicidades,” she says. Ancel is the former director of the labor-studies program at UMKC and a labor activist who has served as president of the Cross Border Network board. “I am really

TRACI ANGEL

proud of her,” Ancel says. “She has defended her family and figured out how to live in the U.S.” Since learning that asylum might be granted, Zelaya Mendoza says she has been sleeping more peacefully; her headaches have lessened. Through a translator, she tells The Pitch that Williams “worked so hard to give me a new life,” and that Ancel has “become family.” This morning’s result “got rid of a rock that was placed right here,” Williams translates, pointing to the back of Zelaya Mendoza’s neck. It’s important to emphasize, Ancel says, that Zelaya Mendoza is lucky. Other Hondurans might not be able to gather the evidence and proof for a successful asylum. The political turmoil there is not an accident, but an extremely cruel series of policies that targets the country’s poor. Political unrest and protests have escalated in recent months due to accusations of corruption and rigging the 2017 election. There’s plenty more work to do in the days ahead. Zelaya Mendoza will seek employment and dreams of owning a home for the family, who can now move on with their lives without the uncertainty of asylum hanging over them. Williams has clients to visit in jail. Later that evening, they’ll join others at the “Lights for Liberty” demonstration in Washington Square Park, to stand with immigrant communities and protest detention camps. Today, though, it’s a celebration. How does Zelaya Mendoza feel? “Better than ever,” comes the translated reply.

2019 LEGISLATIVE END OF SESSION REPORT Rep. Ashley Bland Manlove

Rep. Ashley Bland Manlove Missouri State Representative

• District 26

Missouri State Capitol • 201 West Capitol Ave, Ofﬁce 101-I • Jefferson City, MO 65101 Phone: 573-751-2124 • Email: Ashley.blandmanlove@house.mo.gov thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2019 | THE PITCH

CAFE

ZACH BAUMAN

Chef-owner Victor Ejelonu often pulls double-duty, greeting guests and dashing back to the kitchen to prepare their meals.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

IN INDEPENDENCE, THE YEAR-OLD NIGERIAN RESTAURANT MY VILLAGE GRILL IS A WELCOME HOME AWAY FROM HOME. BY LIZ COOK

Here’s the thing: I’m not an expert on Nigerian food. This confession shouldn’t come as a surprise. I grew up in rural Iowa and have the skin tone of someone who spent the last 30 years locked in a windowless basement. But restaurant criticism seems to demand that one adopt an authoritative tone — that one make flat pronouncements about “insipid” soups and bluster about perceived gaffs in technique. What’s an ignorant critic to do? I read, of course — as much as I can get

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

my hands on. I try as many dishes as possible. But when it comes to the food at My Village Grill, the year-old Nigerian restaurant in Independence, I know I’m missing some culinary touchstones. I’ve never inhaled the raw scent of a stick of oburunbebe before it’s simmered to make banga, or tasted a bush mango seed before it’s ground into a coarse powder for ogbono soup. Chef-owner Victor Ejelonu didn’t waste any time puncturing my self-consciousness. “You are going to have an experience,” he told me after taking my order (efo riro

with pounded yam). He sounded almost giddy, as if a voice could skip. “You’re going to be Anthony Bourdain.” I looked around the restaurant, spotless and empty. I didn’t feel like Bourdain. I felt like a guest at a wedding in an Elk’s Lodge circa 2000. Black tablecloths were topped with glittery gold charger plates; colorful helium balloons were tacked to drop-ceiling tiles; strings of color-changing LEDs pulsed around the bar. Laugh, commanded a sign on the wall in curly silver script. On the eastern wall, a portable stage squatted beneath an electronic disco ball, both waiting to come to life. I felt like turning on that disco ball when the efo riro arrived. The stew was smoky, spicy, and richly flavored. Although efo riro is often made with aramanth, My Village Grill uses spinach leaves cooked down until they’ve practically absorbed into the savory broth. The greens add a bittersweet pulse to the fermented funk of stockfish and the bracing red heat of the soup’s pepper base. If you’ve never tried Nigerian soups before, this is a great introduction. Ejelonu has assembled a menu that represents a broad cross-section of Nigerian cuisine. Some of the dishes on offer are popular in the Niger Delta, others in western Nigeria. A few soups, such as efo riro, originated with the Yoruba people, others with the Igbo or Efik. Part of the “experience” Ejelonu alluded to lies in the act of eating them. The soups are part of a menu of “swallow meals” — a reference to starchy accompaniments like fufu meant to be “swallowed” with your soup. My Village Grill offers several swallows, from pounded yam fufu (wispy and soft, with a texture like stiff mashed potatoes) to eba fufu (a toothier, grainier dough made from grated cassava). Forget your fork and use the fufu as your cutlery. Pinch off a little ball with your first three fingers, then shape it into a starch-spoon for scooping up soup. Peppers are a key player in Nigerian cuisine; recipe writer Yewande Komolafe turned me onto a Yoruba saying, translated as “the soul that does not eat pepper is a dead soul.” But some dishes on the menu are naturally mild. The egusi soup relies on ground melon seeds to provide a nutty taste and crumbly texture while thickening the tangy, greens-laden soup into a hearty stew. The okra and spinach soup is another benign option, though it’s not likely to convert okra skeptics. The soup showcases okra in all its mucilaginous glory, yielding gooey spoonfuls that trail away from the bowl like chewing gum. The tripe in my bowl was too tough to power through — I’d order it with the goat next time, which is mild and sweet and fall-off-the-bone tender — but the broth’s subtle flavors let the flavor of the okra shine.

On the other end of the spectrum: the whole grilled tilapia, which is one of the better-prepared whole fishes I’ve been served (and a great deal at $12). For years, I’ve resigned myself to ordering restaurant dishes with a “spice cushion” — which is to say, one step hotter than I actually want. (I don’t begrudge restaurants for grading on a curve; the spice distribution has been inexorably skewed by diners who find black pepper taxing). But when I ordered the grilled fish “hot,” it came out exactly that, with a rich, round pepper burn from a fragrant, nutty spice paste dry-brushed liberally onto the flesh. I attacked the fish between lusty gulps of ice water: each morsel flaked easily off the bone but retained a plump juiciness. As corny as it sounds, I consider that spiced-to-order fish an act of trust. Eating at My Village Grill feels like dining in a new friend’s home. The chef and servers are eager to share their food and invite you in; friends of the restaurant cheer on your entrée choices or lean over from the pool table to advise on fufu technique. On one visit, a friendly waitress brought my table a little dish of chin chin, crunchy wheat crackers with a subtle sweetness, because she thought we might like to try them. On another, Ejelonu insisted we try the palm wine: a milky, naturally fermented drink made from the sap of a palm tree. The bottled drink was a little yeasty and a lot sweet — an ideal complement for earthy, spicy meals. The neighborly hospitality extends to

CAFE 3010 M-291, Independence 913-999-2072 myvillage-grill.com

Hours: Monday–Thursday 12–9 PM Friday–Saturday 12–10 PM Sunday 4–9 PM

Prices: Appetizers: $5–10 Entrees: $9–20

Best bet: Sip some palm wine and sample some samoosas while you wait for your soup and swallow — efo riro with pounded yam.

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CAFE

ZACH BAUMAN

Above: The ground beef samoosas demand to be doused in a smoky dipping sauce. Below, from left: Subtly sweet fried plantains are the ideal accompaniment to spice-stippled jollof rice; thin-sliced beef suya, one of My Village’s signature dishes; Efo riro balances bittersweet spinach with a lively heat.

the décor, which evokes a pan-African vibe. The Nigerian flag shares wall space with the flags of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Tanzania, among others. (Before Dale with the bald eagle profile pic writes in — yes, there’s an American flag, too). Newcomers to the cuisine have plenty of easy entry points. Take the samoosas — samosas, but twice as fun to say. The pas-

NEWCOMERS HAVE PLENTY OF EASY ENTRY POINTS, LIKE THE SAMOOSAS — SAMOSAS, BUT TWICE AS FUN TO SAY.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

tries come five to an order, each fried to a crisp sable brown and filled to the corners with mildly seasoned ground beef. They’re the perfect neutral vehicle for the smoky, velvety tomato sauce served alongside. Ejelonu called it his “secret sauce” and declined to elaborate on the ingredients. “If I told you…” he began, then trailed off meaningfully. Another crowdpleaser: the jollof rice

(a generous portion runs $5). Each grain of rice is perfectly chubby and chewy, tomato-rouged and spice-mottled. For a couple extra bucks, you can add stapler-sized slices of fried plantains, crisped and caramelized on the edges but tender within, sprinkled with just enough salt to make the natural sweetness crackle on the tongue. One of the restaurant’s most popular dishes is the beef suya: skewers of thinsliced beef dredged in a peanut-forward spice blend and kissed on a grill. There’s a chicken version, too — and as with most dishes, the restaurant will customize to your spice tolerance. Still, I’d nudge first-timers toward the soup menu. You can order jollof or skewered meats at a few different restaurants in the metro; isi-ewu (spiced goat head) is harder to come by. Sometimes I hear from diners who are wary of trying unfamiliar cuisines. “I don’t want an adventure,” someone told me when soliciting a recommendation. “I just want dinner.” Everyone has the right to order what they like, but I find this sentiment puzzling. It doesn’t take courage to sit at a table and eat what someone else has prepared. It does take some curiosity. Enjelou had the measure of it when he called eating “an experience.” Adventures are ephemeral. You can have an experience, but you can also develop it. Here are a couple sentences that are only marginally about food: You don’t have to be an expert at everything. You just have to be willing to learn — and to look a little foolish in the process. I’m an expert at the latter. I’m sure I handled my fufu with the grace and poise of a famished warthog. But that didn’t seem to matter to the waitress, who dropped by the table to deliver a message with a shy grin: “I’m so happy you’re eating with your hands.” I’m going to need to eat a lot more fufu before I master my starch-spoon technique. My Village Grill makes that practice an attractive proposition.

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FOOD

BIBIMBAP AND BEYOND THE KOREAN FOOD SCENE IN KC IS GETTING SPICY — IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK. BY APRIL FLEMING

The Kansas City area, it must be acknowledged, is not a destination for Korean food. We know this. But things change. And lately the local options for sampling one of the world’s great cuisines have improved a bit — maybe even a lot. Slowly but steadily, there are more Korean restaurants in the metro, and the quality of the food at those places is trending up (and beyond bibimbap and kimchi). We spent the last month wandering around looking for the finest Korean barbecue, crispy pancakes, and tteok in the city, from Overland Park to the Crossroads. Here are our picks.

Chosun Korean BBQ 12611 Metcalf Ave, Overland Park; chosunkoreanbbqkc.com Meat’s the star of the show at Chosun Korean BBQ, whether it’s tangy marinated bulgogi beef, the rich-and-thinly-sliced pork belly, or the

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KoKoDak 14856 Metcalf Avenue, Overland Park; kokodakchicken.com KoKoDak is the only restaurant in the metro that specializes in Korean fried chicken, and the fare at this fast-casual OP joint is crunchy, juicy, piping-hot, and delicious.

Sura Eats 1707 Locust Street, KCMO; suraeats.com What began as an occasional Korean pop-up is now one of Parlor food hall’s most popular tenants. Keeyoung Kim and David Son’s Sura Eats offers a small but refined menu of Korean snacks, which includes crispy fried pork dumplings (mandu) and kimchi pancakes. But Sura’s main draw is the bowls — traditional flavors served in a modern setting. There’s bibimbap, but also a japchae bowl (sweet potato noodles and vegetables) and rice bowls topped with generous servings of sweet and savory bulgogi beef, spicytangy pork, and soy-marinated fried tofu.

It’s also affordable and highly modifiable. You can get a whole or half chicken, boneless nuggets, wings, drums, or a number of configurations thereof. You can eat it unadorned, or you can choose a sauce. For the latter, try the traditional Korean; it’s made with lightly spicy and sweet gochujang chili paste, garlic, and apple cider vinegar. KoKoDak also offers a variety of other Korean favorites, including kimari (deep fried seaweed rolls), cheese buldak (spicy chicken coated in cheese), and kimchi fried rice. Pro tip: It takes about 20 minutes to fry up your chicken, so be ready to wait a bit, or call ahead.

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

spicy chili pork shoulder. Much of it you’ll grill yourself at your own table, which makes the trip to Chosun a particularly rewarding experience if you’re dining with a large group. (Service staff will help with the process if you desire). Also on the menu: enormous seafood hotpots, delicate dumplings, fried fish, and cold noodles. Sobahn 7800 Shawnee Mission Parkway, Mission; sobahnkc.com Come and stay a while at Sobahn, a family-style restaurant in a Mission strip mall where the dishes are Seoul-influenced and made to order. Here, you’ll find several rich stews (yes, made to order), including a very

good beef stew with dumplings and chewy rice cakes (tteok mandu guk). Koreans love their proteins, and standouts at Sobahn include the spicy pork (jaeyuk bokkeum) and hand-sliced short ribs (tang golbi). But Sobahn is also pretty vegetarian friendly, offering crispy kimchi pancakes (kimchi jun), a chilled version of bibimbap with loads of vegetables (bibim guksoo), and deep-fried tofu in a sweet chili glaze (yangyum tegim dubu). Gangnam 10326 Metcalf Avenue, Overland Park; ordergangnamop.com Visit Gangnam for its cozy dining room, homestyle cooking and authentic touch-

es, including stainless steel water cups and soju selection. Be sure to try the luscious beef stews and the crispy seafood pancakes (haemool pajun), which come loaded with shrimp and squid. Kobi-Q 1531 Grand Boulevard, KCMO; kobi-q.com Perhaps not surprisingly, given its downtown address, Kobi-Q has the sleekest dining space of any of the metro’s Korean establishments. The bar is elegant and wooden, and natural light pours in through the skylights. And the food largely lives up to the ambiance. Kobi-Q’s menu features about as

APRIL FLEMING

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many Japanese specialties (sushi, tonkatsu, tempura) as it does Korean, but the Korean comfort food dishes are especially excellent. A favorite is the spicy grilled pork with chili paste, chewy rice cakes, and vegetables. The Korean-fried chicken wings are just as good, though. One more: the traditional Korean barbecue beef, which comes with the choice of either ribeye bulgogi or soy- and pear-marinated short ribs. Choga Korean Restaurant 6920 W. 105th Street, Overland Park; choga-korean-restaurant-overland-park.sites.tablehero.com As far as we know, Choga has the distinc-

tion of being the only Korean restaurant in the KC area that offers an all-you-can-eat barbecue option. Tell ‘em you’re there for it, and the hosts will seat you at a special table equipped with a recessed grill at its center. Every half hour for two hours, your table can request two different proteins. Go for the pork belly, marinated short ribs, spicy pork, and shrimp (there are more options), and cook as much as you like. (Banchan, the traditional assortment of pickled accompaniments, comes included). For a quicker — and cheaper — experience, opt for madeto order options off the menu, including the spicy stir-fried octopus or the excellent sweet short ribs (LA galbi).

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FOOD

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER BUN

THEY SERVE FOOD AT THE MIDTOWN HOME DEPOT NOW. YOU’LL WANT TO READ THE MENU CAREFULLY. BY LIZ COOK

Everything is a restaurant now and none of us are safe. I felt fine when it was just Ikea — the Swedish meatballs and toddler-sized cups of vanilla ice cream felt like a prize for reaching the end of the particle-board maze. Then gas stations started adding full kitchens and filling growlers with 600 IBU IPAs. Then the grocery stores — Whole Foods with

its craft beers and $1 oyster feasts, Hy-Vee with its contagion of Market Grilles. Now, even Barnes & Noble has gotten in on the fun, opening five “upscale casual American restaurants” as Barnes & Noble Kitchens. Restaurants are growing at twice the rate of the overall population, and they won’t stop until they’ve wormed into every inch of commercial real estate. I come home from

solvents and spare jigsaw blades — has a restaurant now, too. I scoped out the website, which has a short blurb about the store’s new Pro Café. It promised to “satisfy [my] taste buds” with “freshly baked New England lobster rolls.” I searched my heart. Did I really want to eat a lobster roll in the parking lot of a national home improvement chain? (Yes.) Was this what journalism had become? (Yes.) What would Woodward and Bernstein do? (They’d deep throat the goddamned lobster roll.) I struck out for the Home Depot with singular focus. I was on fire, like an unattended soldering iron. A sandwich board outside the store beckoned me in. FREE COFFEE, it read. Only when I was about six inches away did I see the fine print — dark gray letters LIZ COOK on a black background — alerting me that work every day fearful that a restaurant has the free coffee was only for “PRO XTRA” opened in my cramped Midtown kitch- members. The Pro Café is a gleaming black trailen. I have nightmares about it sometimes. It serves nothing but Hamm’s and jalape- er parked in the easternmost entryway, the no-stuffed olives and is called “Sad Martini.” portal to what I will hereafter refer to as the East Wing. The East Wing is where you The waitress is a real bitch. So I was unsurprised to discover that go for the Hard Shit: lumber, power tools, the Home Depot on Linwood — the place backhoes. Of course I go Margarita for tile grout and industrial-strength Pitch wars.qxp_Layout 1 7/19/19 9:39 AM Page 1 this is where the Pros hang out, I

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thought to myself, as far as they can get from the casuals buying light bulbs and mailboxes. Mailboxes! True to form, the guy in front of me in line was wearing possum-stompin’ boots and a Day-Glo t-shirt. I gave him a somber nod so he’d know I was a Pro. Xtra. The trailer was custom-detailed with stylized silhouettes of Swiss cheese and inspirational quotes like “GOOD FOOD” and “GRUB TO GO.” An inset flat screen displayed photos of the menu items along with their prices. I scanned it frantically for the lobster roll. It wasn’t there. Where had I gone wrong? Then I read the description for the café’s hot dog and Italian sausage. Both purported to be served on “lobster buns.” Read: ordinary split-top buns. The buns that are sometimes used for lobster rolls. I write about food semi-professionally and have never, ever heard of someone calling a lone bun a “New England lobster roll,” as though the bread were the essential component. It’d be like calling Michael Jordan a golfer, or a single carrot a beef bourguignon. I was feeling pretty victimized by synecdoche at this point, but it was too late to turn back. So I did what anyone in 2019 does when they’re embarrassed: double down and pretend they were in on it all along. I recalibrated my profile of a Pro — my

Pro-file. Pros have an entirely different understanding of lobster rolls, I decided. Pros understand that the most important part of the lobster roll is the bun, just like the most important part of the house is the asbestos. I approached the cashier and eyed the menu again. It was compact and built around the Five Bs: brats, burritos, breakfast sammies, hot dogs, and Italian sausages. I know what you’re thinking: two of those aren’t Bs. But you’re forgetting the loBster roll. All of the items were $1.95, so I ordered an Italian sausage and a breakfast burrito. The menu had really sold me on the burrito. The photo was of an enormous grilled wrap, cleaved into two and bronzed like a bodybuilder. “Anything to drink?” asked the cashier. The TV next to his head advertised “20 oz. coffee” for 95 cents. “I’d like the 20 ounce coffee,” I said. He handed it to me in a 12 ounce cup. I nodded knowingly. Of course. At the Pro Café, 20 ounce coffee is served in a 12 ounce cup. How do they do it? It is not for amateurs to know. The Italian sausage had grill marks like tire treads and a few spindly strips of green

pepper and onion. It was sweet and plump, if not especially flavorful. The best part was the frantic drizzle of mustard, which suggested a line cook familiar with the works of Jackson Pollock. It was kind of jazzy, that mustard, the sort of design you might see splashed over a 1980s windbreaker. I turned to the breakfast burrito. It was smaller and paler and less attractive than its photo. I related to it instantly. The burrito was honestly pretty good. The eggs were fluffy, the tortilla was well-stuffed, the “sweet crumbled sausage” was sweet and crumbled. It just needed a little more time on that grill. I color-matched my burrito at the Behr paint display. It was somewhere between “Translucent Silk” (MQ3-36) and “Creamy Mushroom” (PPU5-13). The coffee…was fine. It wasn’t burnt, which is all I ask of a 95-cent beverage purchased in the atrium of a hardware store. I sipped it slowly while I wandered the East Wing, looking for someone who could cut my lumber. I needed to build some shelves, and I don’t own a table saw. I grew more ashamed as I watched associate after associate shrink away from my eager face. The message was clear. A real Pro — Xtra — would own a table saw. A spokesperson for Home Depot tells

me the Kansas City Pro Café was the first to launch, and that the corporation plans to bring the café to “a handful of additional markets to improve the concept.” It might do better at a Home Depot without a Costco next door. The Pro Café is cheap, but you can cross the parking lot and get a quarter-pound dawg with a 20 ounce soda (served in a 20 ounce cup!) for $1.50. Admittedly, it doesn’t come on a lobster roll — and they make you do your own mustard. But I’m unlikely to return to the Pro Café now that I’ve been exposed for a fraud. Journalism means facing up to hard truths: I’m not a pro, but I am [e]xtra.

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Cold, crunchy, melty, chocolatey — few cold treats evoke childhood the way a softserve dipped cone does. Eating them as an adult, the nostalgia persists, but it’s often diminished by inconvenient facts, like how the chocolate shell of most dipped cones leaves a waxy film in your mouth, or that soft-serve ice cream really doesn’t have all that much flavor. Enter Kansas City’s master chocolatier Christopher Elbow. For months prior to opening his new ice cream, coffee, and donut shop Fairway Creamery (5938 Mission, in the former Pizza 51 Fairway building), Elbow and his team worked tirelessly to engineer a premium dipped cone. It was, says Tony Glamcevski, the Creamery’s director of customer experience, a surprising challenge; turns out, getting a chocolate dip (a delicious one, at least) to stick to ice cream is pretty tough. But their efforts have paid off. Walk into Fairway Creamery, and you can order chocolate or vanilla soft-serve cones hand-dipped in your choice of chocolate, butterscotch, or cherry — with plans for more rotating flavors in the future. We mean it when we say it is almost certainly the best dipped cone you’ll ever have. And for all the struggle it took to perfect the dipped cone, the treat has lost none of its fun. --April Fleming

Szechuan buttons, also known as buzz buttons or buzz blossoms, have been popping up in cocktail publications and trendy coastal bars over the past couple of years, though they’ve remained scarce around Kansas City. When you chew on these little yellow buds (the edible flower of a plant called acmella oleracea), your tongue tingles and a rush of coolness fills your mouth. Why put them in a cocktail? Well, for one, it’s a weird and fun sensation. But we’re also told it stimulates salivary glands and changes the flavor profile of the drink. At Brick & Mortar (7425 Broadway; the old Tanner’s), the Flower Bomb features Patron Blanco, ginger syrup, yuzu and lemon juice. The citrusy, bright cocktail starts off as a gingery margarita. But as you chew that Szechuan button, the drink gets tarter, colder, spicier. The Flower Bomb would be a nice drink on its own, but with the bud and the extra sensory experience, it adds up to a good reason to visit Waldo’s newest food-and-drinks spot. --April Fleming

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

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“The clubs that try to prove themselves as funny, instead of trying to get rich out of the gate, are the ones that are still successful,” Kaufman says.

FUNNY BUSINESS THE COMEDY CLUB OF KANSAS CITY AIMS TO BE FAR LESS GENERIC THAN ITS NAME. BY GINA PEPITONE

Upon hearing the name, you might assume it was chosen out of laziness, or perhaps Google searchability. But Dustin Kaufman says The Comedy Club of Kansas City,

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

which he opened in May in the Watts Mill Shopping Center area, is a nod to the city’s history. When Kaufman was thinking about

opening a comedy club in KC, he says he searched the Missouri Secretary of State’s website to make sure he wouldn’t copy any existing names. It turned out that something called The Comedy Club of Kansas City was incorporated all the way back in 1915. It wasn’t a comedy club as we think of them today, though. It didn’t have a stationary venue hosting performers every week. Instead, it put on shows at some of the best theaters in town. The original Comedy Club of Kansas City had a good run, finally dissolving in 1965 after 50 years. Now, after another 50 years have passed, Kaufman is reclaiming the name. (The SEO doesn’t hurt, either.)

ZACH BAUMAN

Kaufman, who has a contagious smile and deep laugh lines hidden beneath an unruly beard, is a comedy junkie; he’s spent the better part of the last 20 years orbiting the industry. Originally from Kansas City, Kaufman moved to Los Angeles in 2010, where he worked at Flappers Comedy Club. Over about four years at Flappers, he learned the biz: marketing, sound, tickets, kitchen work. When he moved back home, Kaufman took a job in sales but continued doing comedy, producing a mock late-night talk show called “Kauf Drops,” which ran weekly from 2014-2015 at the recently closed Uptown Arts Bar.

COMEDY

Eventually, though, Kaufman determined he needed to decide what he was going to do with his life. His goal in moving back to KC was to pay off debts, raise his credit, and eventually open his own business. He was working in the flooring industry and considered opening a specialty carpet store. “But when it really came to the moment of, What am I going to do?, it just made sense for me to be in the [comedy] industry,” Kaufman says. “That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years.” He decided to open a comedy club. The goal was to get it off the ground in 5 years. It only took 3. It didn’t hurt that Stanford and Sons, the long-running KC comedy club, closed down last year, following the deaths of Jeff and Craig Glazer, who ran Stanford’s for decades. But Kaufman says he’s not trying to replicate what Stanford’s did; he’s trying to do something fresher. “This venture started while they were still in business,” he says. “We want to rebrand comedy in Kansas City — to be the new face of comedy in Kansas City.” He deliberately chose a sizable room — the space seats 250 — over a smaller, indie room because, Kaufman says, “Kansas City can be a hard critic. They want to support something that’s worth supporting.” Hence, the bigger names he’s aiming to bring in. So far, the list of performers includes Andy Dick, Andrew Dice Clay, Emo Philips, and Emma Willmann. Matt Braunger will

perform at the club in August. But Kaufman recognizes that names alone aren’t enough. “If you rely on name value — and only name value — to sell your tickets, you end up having to give away tickets the rest of the weeks,” he says. In preparing to open the club, Kaufman regularly asked club owners and working comics what they thought makes a club successful. The simple answer: Funny people. “The clubs that would try to prove themselves as funny, instead of trying to get rich out of the gate, are the ones that are still successful,” Kaufman says. “And that was easy for me, you know, to book funny. I can book funny all day. And we are. We have regulars, people who are already here every week.” Right now, the schedule calls for open mics on Monday, local showcases on Wednesday, and headlining acts Thursday through Saturday. They serve food and alcohol, and there’s no two-drink minimum. And Kaufman says he’d like to incorporate a sketch-comedy element into the weekend shows — perhaps some old-school, Second City-influenced sketches sprinkled in between the stand-up performances. For now, though, it’s about building up the audience. “Our back row on Saturday nights are further back every week” Kaufman says, beaming. “You’re coming to see quality stand-up comedy. You’re coming to the comedy club — The Comedy Club.”

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ARTS

BREAKING THE ROUTINE THE MONTHLY SHOWCASE PARADOX AIMS TO UNITE A FRAGMENTED LOCAL DANCE COMMUNITY. BY RILEY COWING

After moving from St. Louis to Kansas City a year and a half ago, dancer Jordan Kaya began to notice a divide in the local dance community. There are those who work in concert styles (formal stage and theater, typically) and commercial styles (music videos, television). That’s where the jobs are. But then there’s the street style types, who tend to perform in less classical setting, like parks, parties, and, yes, streets. The two groups are quick to critique one another, Kaya says. But she feels it’s all rooted in a lack of understanding, and she craved a space where all dance styles were welcomed and respected. So she recently launched Paradox, a monthly event for local and traveling choreographers to present their work. “I just wanted to create a showcase that was based on art and perspective first,” Kaya

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says, “and then dance second. I see companies and choreographers [in Kansas City] never reinventing themselves because they’re being rewarded for doing the same thing over and over. I never want my audience to suspect what they’ll see from Paradox. I just want the unexpected.” ” The first, sold-out showcase took place June 22 at Fishtank Theatre in the West Bottoms. Audience members squeezed in next to one another on folding chairs atop risers, and the garage doors on both sides of the theater stayed open until just moments before the show, in an attempt to fight the humid air. The evening included seven pieces — three soloists and four group pieces — with many dancers participating in multiple numbers. Some choreographers were local, while others were visiting from Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Albuquerque.

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Mariyah Hawkins, a 16-year-old dancer living in Albuquerque, made her choreography debut that night. Hawkins met Kaya through their involvement with Tiger Style! Crew, a professional performance company based in Kansas City with mentors in other cities, like Albuquerque and St. Louis. She choreographed a first draft of her piece in Albuquerque and then rehearsed with dancers in Kansas City in the week leading up to the show. “I was more scared to present my work during rehearsal week [than] show day,” Hawkins recalls. “I knew the environment would be somewhat intimate and very safe, but my expectations were largely exceeded.” Kaya says her experience organizing Paradox, as well as her involvement in Tiger Style! Crew and teaching open classes at Empire Dance Academy, has reinforced for her the importance of collaboration to creativity. “It’s so satisfying to be in a group with people that are like-minded and pushing just whatever they want. I think without that and without all of them, I would’ve never been like, ‘OK, yeah, let’s do a whole fucking showcase,’” she says, with a laugh. Paradox also invites a fair amount of audience participation. As the June showcase got underway, host and poet Rye Lanae Boothe asked the crowd to respond to each

number by clapping, stomping their feet, or cheering when they felt moved. The crowd didn’t shy away from the request — nor did the dancers waiting in the wings. “[I]t’s always nerve-wracking telling an audience to respond to your dancers,” Kaya says. “Because either you’re going to get people that heckle, which happens sometimes, or you get people that are scared to make noise. But it was perfect … It wasn’t an audience that was just, ‘Oh my daughter is dancing,’ recital sort of vibe. It felt like people were honestly sharing. It was very much — it felt like an event.”

GET OUT

Paradox Volume II Saturday, Aug. 3 Fishtank Theatre (1060 Union) Two shows, 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

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BOON COMPANIONS A MUSICAL FRIENDSHIP FORGED AT A MID-MISSOURI ARTS FESTIVAL BLOOMS THIS MONTH AT THE 1900 BUILDING. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

It sounds like the slogan for a friendly dive bar, the type of joint where an enthusiastic, just-for-fun garage band might play its first gig: “Good Friends, Great Music.” In this case, it’s the theme of an upcoming show at the 1900 Building, an elegant arts venue where you’re unlikely to be served a yard beer or hear Nuggets-era covers. The enthusiastic, just-for-fun part, though? That you can find at “Good Friends, Great Music.” It is indeed friendship that stimulated this upcoming piano quartet concert, which features violist (and former principal with the Kansas City Symphony) Christine Grossman and cellist (assistant principal with the KCS) Susie Yang joined by violinist Helen Kim and pianist Tanya Gabrelian. The roots of the concert started last summer, after an impromptu sight reading session at the Missouri River Festival of the Arts, a three-day festival in Boonville, Missouri. Yang and Grossman have played in the festival for about 6 or 7 years, and it tends to bring in players from the Kansas City and St. Louis areas. Kim is currently associate principal second violin with the San Francisco Symphony, but she was with the St. Louis Symphony prior to that, and attended the Boonville festival for many years. At last year’s fest, the three performers met and gelled with Gabrelian, who teaches at Boston University. “It was instantly fun,” Grossman says. “We just read piano quartets and it was simpatico. We realized that the combination of us four was a really good one.” Grossman and Yang have been friends and colleagues for nearly 20 years. They met in 2001 at a summer festival in Germany, then both attended the Juilliard School in New York, and later found themselves together at the New World Symphony, then San Diego, and now back here in the orchestra. At this point, they’ve played together for hundreds of performances there in the front row of the ensemble in Helzberg Hall. “As we moved through life, we sort of had parallel steps,” Grossman says. Despite living in different parts of the country, the Boonville foursome has been eager to get together again. Finding compatible chamber music partners can be as challenging as dating, and they don’t want to waste a good match. “Good Friends, Great Music” will be a shorter concert — about an hour — but they’re not stinting on quality; it’ll feature Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozar’s Piano Quartet No.1. The Mozart piece — a favorite of many

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GET OUT

“Good Friends, Great Music: A Piano Quartet Concert” August 27, 7 p.m. The 1900 Building 1900bldg.com

chamber fans — is the one that started their friendship. “That was the piece we read last summer,” Grossman says. “It just came together so well and highlighted our synergy.” But Grossman says she’s most excited for the Schumann. “It’s truly one of my desert island pieces,” she says. “I have a visceral reaction. [The third movement] has one of those melodies that’s so simple and beautiful and so heartfelt, it feels like it’s always been — that Schumann just kind of pulled it out of the ether. It goes seamlessly into the finale movement, which is also a very cool movement. The last movement has a fugue in it. I’m a sucker for fugues, so selfishly I’m really looking forward to the Schumann.” The plan is to perform the Schumann and another piece in Boonville, then travel back to Kansas City for a weekend of rehearsal and relaxing social time — something the pace of the festival can’t really accommodate. They’ve also booked a house concert with Charlotte House Series, an intimate new-ish venue in Brookside that will offer another excuse to share their enthusiasm with the Kansas City crowd. Here especially, they’re not overthinking it: “It’s fun to just make music with your friends,” Grossman says.

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GOOD TIMES RAPPER AMIRA WANG IS A WALKING, TALKING ONE-WOMAN PARTY. BY AARON RHODES

Amira Wang has always had a talent for starting parties. “In high school, I swear to God, I would just walk around and yell, ‘Big booty hoes!’ in the hallways,” Wang says, laughing and recalling her days at Raytown South (where, yes, she was once voted class clown). She caught some odd looks in the process, but inevitably her female classmates started dancing, and then the boys, and a little party would break out in the hallway. “I enjoy my own company — I’m funny as fuck to me,” Wang says. “I just fuck with myself heavy and I think that’s what really shows on stage. I have a good time. I be tellin’ myself jokes, I be talkin’ shit to myself. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll look in the mirror and be like, ‘Boy, you fried as fuck today,’ and I’ll roast myself. And then sometimes I’ll look in the mirror like, ‘Damn, bitch, you glowin’, ain’t you?’”

Room showcase before she even had time to say yes. Wang’s debut EP, Rap Game Ragu, was released in October, and nearly a year later, it’s still finding the ears of new listeners. The project sees Wang trying out a handful of different styles but consistently accomplishing the goal of creating an ass-shaking good time. “Cake Day” is post-Cardi B club bop; “Use Ya Back” features authentic New Orleans bounce; and the video for “Let The Beat Go” references Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” (And I’m fairly certain Missy would approve of the whole package.) Live, her shows buzz with chaotic but benevolent energy. At a recent show at the Buffalo Room, half a dozen young women hopped on and off the stage, twerking as Wang confidently spit her raps. (Let this be a warning, though, to dumb men who wish to discuss Amira’s music with her: Despite her liberal use of sexual imagery

WANG’S LIVE SHOWS BUZZ WITH A CHAOTIC BUT BENEVOLENT ENERGY.

AARON RHODES

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

Lately, more and more Kansas Citians are finding Wang to be glowin’, too. She conjured up her first raps several years ago, driving around and hanging out with her friends. At first inspired by the aggressive bars of artists like Chief Keef and Fat Trel, Wang eventually began to hone her skills and find her own voice. In 2017, after hearing Wang rap a portion of what would eventually become her first single, “Let the Beat Go,” a friend became genuinely upset with her for not having any recorded material. “Make a SoundCloud. You keep wasting your talent, your youth is leaving. You’re just gonna waste your shit and miss your shine,” he implored her. The local veteran emcee The Epitome, who Wang now calls a mentor, was also pushing her to do more. Last May, he placed her on the flyer for a Riot

in her music, there’s far more to Wang’s art than sex. In my first interview with Wang, and in a different interview that I listened to, remarks were made about the “nasty” elements of her raps. Rightly, Wang pointed out the double standard in place: male artists with lewd lyrics — including rappers she grew up admiring, like Ludacris and the Ying Yang Twins — are rarely subjected to such questions. So, why should she be?) Wang hoped to release a new project this summer, but decided that the material she’d been producing lately is too lyrically dense and wouldn’t land right with a summer crowd jonesing for melodic party tracks. So, we’ll have to wait a bit longer. Silver lining: Wang says the new stuff is more fulfilling. “I think now I’m just making the music for me,” she declares.

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MUSIC

ROUND HERE CATCHING UP WITH THE URGE, TORCHBEARERS OF A BYGONE REGIONAL ROCK SCENE. BY NICK SPACEK

Not long after St. Louis funk-punk hard rockers the Urge formed more than 30 years ago — 1988! — the band started regularly making a trek west down Interstate 70. “As soon as we got cars, we were coming through Columbia, Kansas City, Lawrence. We’d throw in Omaha once in a while,” frontman Steve Ewing says by phone, following a busy lunch rush at his St. Louis restaurant Steve’s Hot Dogs & Burgers. By the mid-Nineties, when the Urge released its breakthrough album, Receiving the Gift of Flavor, the band was frequently performing at the Bottleneck and receiving major airplay on Lawrence’s alternative radio station, 105.9 the Lazer. The band was such a fixture in the Lawrence scene that its song, “Take Away,” kicked off the Lazer’s local music compilation, Big Sandwich, when it was released in 1995.

So I remember being surprised to discover, around that time, that the members weren’t local to Lawrence. Instead, they were part of a regional rock scene that no longer exists, a network of Nineties bands with overlapping audiences, if differing sounds. “We were playing the same venues,” Ewing says of his contemporaries in other small Midwestern cities and college towns. “There were parties and festivals, so you’d see each other a lot. You end up on a lot of the same shows. [Longtime Lawrence and KC music promoter] Jeff Fortier did a lot of the shows where we’d all be on the same bill. It just ended up being a lot of bands that you’d see all the time.” Lawrence became the Urge’s home away from home due to one simple reason, Ewing explains. “We’d go to Kansas City, but there was

mostly 21-and-up bars, so you couldn’t do punk shows or all-ages shows,” he says. “Fortier was booking shows [in Lawrence], doing punk at the Outhouse and the Bottleneck and a few other places that he would find here and

there. So it was a place where bands that were not cover bands or bar bands could play at.” Over the years, the Urge has released quite a bit of music, but the three albums the band released between 1995 and 2000 are the

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MUSIC

“We played a lot, so it wasn’t just that you heard the record — you saw us a lot,” Ewing says of the band’s Nineties heyday. COURTESY OF THE URGE

ones that seem to resonate most. (Receiving the Gift of Flavor turns 25 next year.) During this heyday, the Urge’s shows were Fishbone-level exercises of onstage insanity; you worried that Ewing was one misguided jump

away from breaking his neck. “It was just a different time,” Ewing says with a laugh. “It was wild. Everybody was trying to outdo each other, stage-wise.” One of the bands the Urge was com-

peting with in those days was a rising, reggae-tinged alternative act from Omaha called 311. Eventually, 311’s popularity would eclipse just about every Nineties band in the Midwest. But the band’s relationship with the Urge persevered through its meteoric ascent. The Urge played 311’s Caribbean Cruise back in March, for instance. Ewing thinks the bands’ connection persists partially due to all the fond memories of their performances together 25 years ago. “People remember those shows,” he says. “People continually ask us to play together, and we jump on it and we take it. It’s a party, and we love it.” He goes on: “We played a lot, so it wasn’t just that you heard the record — you saw us a lot. It became something endearing, like, ‘I see these guys live, and sometimes I hang out with them.’ And that’s a big thing, you know?” These days, Urge members have settled into their largely post-band lives; Ewing’s restaurant, which he opened as a food truck in 2008 and a brick-and-mortar establishment a few years later, now has two locations. But they’re still releasing new music, albeit at a leisurely pace. The Urge’s last album, Galvanized, came out in 2013. But last year they recorded a goal song for the St. Louis Blues hockey team, and they’re still chipping away

at new material. “We just release things when we finish them, you know?” Ewing says of the Urge’s future plans. “It might be a single here, or a few songs there, and then maybe radio stations take a stab at them and see how they go. We’re not pushing sales, so it’s a different vibe altogether. We’re not worried about charts or checking sales figures at the end of the week. We’re not on a major label anymore, and we’re not pushing music for retail. So it’s about playing the show and doing the best that we can, performance-wise.”

GET OUT The Urge with Six Percent and One Flew West Lawrence Beer Co.’s Second Anniversary Party Friday, August 21

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THE OLD COUNTRY CHUCK MEAD LEFT LAWRENCE FOR NASHVILLE IN THE NINETIES, BUT HIS SONGS STILL LIVE IN KANSAS. BY NICK SPACEK

After four solo LPs, a string of records with Nashville western outfit BR5-49, and a trio of records with Lawrence’s the Homestead Greys, it can safely be stated that Chuck Mead knows country music. It’s damn near in his blood, after all. “I grew up playing in my folks’ country band,” Mead says by phone from Switzerland, where he’s preparing to play Hangar Rockin’, a rockabilly and kustom car festival three hours north of Zurich. Mead’s maternal side was musical; the family had a radio show in Nevada, Missouri, in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s; they played old hillbilly, gospel, and western songs. “Then they kind of fell out of it, but in the early Seventies, they decided they’d put the band back together and go out and play dances,” Mead says. “Of course, they made me the drummer.” He received a drum kit for Christmas when he was 12 years old. From then on, up until his early twenties (by which time he’d started playing guitar), Mead spent his Friday and Saturday nights in and around Lawrence playing drums in the family band. They’d play a lot of the same songs Mead’s later band BR5-49 would play on Lower Broadway in Nashville: country covers by Ray Price, Carl Perkins, Don Williams, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings. “I was one of those guys in high school who didn’t like Foreigner and Styx and Journey and all that shit,” he says. “I was still into Chuck Berry and Elvis and all that.” Mead recalls sitting in art class one day — 1978, maybe — drawing and listening to KY102, the old Kansas City rock and roll station. “All of a sudden, I heard these guys saying, My gal is red hot / Your gal ain’t doodily squat. And it blew my fucking mind!” Mead says. “It was Robert Gordon, doing the old rockabilly classic, ‘Red Hot.’ That kind of stuff really turned me on.” Mead started to notice that a lot of the music that was starting to get popular — the Ramones, the Clash, the Jam, Nick Lowe — was hearkening back to the rock and roll he really liked. “It was something new, and it was something exciting, and I wanted to play it,” Mead says. But he still had those deep country feelings. “I lived at this house for a span of two years where there was a party at my house,” he says. “I don’t mean that there was a twoyear span of parties. I mean there was a two-

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2019 | thepitchkc.com

year party at my house. It was a band house, you know? We were all into punk rock and it was a lot of rock and roll going on, but at two in the morning, when I’d put on Bob Wills or Hank Williams, I found out who my real friends were.” Still, the two genres didn’t jibe in Mead’s head until Jason & the Nashville Scorchers came to town; he calls the show a “watershed moment.” It was ultimately the impetus for the formation of the Homestead Greys, a Lawrence roots act that morphed into more of a rock-soul kind of experiment toward the end. Mead left Lawrence in the early ‘90s to seek his fortunes in Nashville, but somehow, some way, the town always seems to finds its way back into Mead’s repertoire. “I would say Nashville has kind of become my home, musically, but Lawrence is always my home,” Mead says. “You can’t take the Larryville out of the boy. It’s weird, because of the pull of what a good friend of mine there calls the ‘velvet gulag’ of Lawrence: You can get stuck there, but if you get stuck there, who cares, because it’s a great place. But I wanted to go down and really learn how to play country music, and the only way you can do that is to go down to Nashville, really. You go where the teachers are, and that’s where they all are.” In Nashville, Mead formed BR5-49, a honky-tonk western act that cut its teeth performing nightly at Robert’s Western World for nothing more than tips — sort of a Beatles in Hamburg situation. BR549’s first release, the Live from Robert’s EP, featured a Homestead Greys song, “Me ‘N’ Opie (Down By The Duck Pond).” “Alan Murphy” — the frontman of legendary Lawrence band Ricky Dean Sinatra — “and I and Mark Roseberry, from Ricky Dean, wrote that song,” Mead recalls. “We came up with it one dark night in Lawrence over at Mark Roseberry’s house. I was playing it for maybe six months or so before I moved down to Nashville, and then I played it down on Lower Broadway, and I immediately got requests for it. People asked for it every time I stepped onstage. And that carried over to BR5-49.” The Homestead Greys’ songs “Chains of This Town” and “Lifetime to Prove” were also included on the self-titled BR5-49 record. “I wrote those in the Eighties, and they were good songs, and I felt like we could pull that sort of a thing off in BR5-49,” Mead says. “We also ended up doing a couple of others: ‘Change the Way I Look’ and ‘Too

Mead speaks of the “velvet gulag” of Lawrence. “You can get stuck there,” he says, “but if you get stuck there, who cares, because it’s a great place.” JOSHUA MOON WILKINS

Lazy to Work, Too Nervous to Steal.’ Those are Homestead Greys songs, too, but I wrote ‘em, so I didn’t feel like I was betraying anybody.” In 2014, Mead released Free State Serenade, a noirish country tribute to his native state. And Mead’s latest album, Close to Home, sneaks in a reference to the old hometown. The first line of the track “Daddy Worked the Pole” goes: Mama danced down at the Bird six nights a week, a reference to the Flamingo Club, the longtime exotic dancing establishment that sits just outside the city limits in North Lawrence. The song — co-written with his friend and fellow songwriter Otis Gigg — is a grinding bit of hoochie-cooch, but Mead says it isn’t filthy at all, despite the chorus, which goes, Daddy worked the pole so mama didn’t have to. “It’s the story about true love,” he insists. “It’s not a story about any sort of exploitation or naughtiness. It’s the story of two people who do what they have to do because of love.” The man in “Daddy Worked the Pole” wants to be a rock ‘n’ roll drummer, Mead

GET OUT Chuck Mead & His Grassy Knoll Boys The Bottleneck Saturday, August 24 explains, but he falls in love with a woman who’s a stripper. They end up getting married and having a baby, so he goes out and gets a job working for the telephone company. He works the pole, you see, so she doesn’t have to. “Then, she figures out later in life that maybe she can make a little more money doing that than he did and — well, you know the end,” Mead says. “It switches around. She works the pole, so he doesn’t have to. People do what they have to do to get along in life and please the people they love.”

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DEEP CUCKS “WE REALLY HAVE NO CLEAR IDEA WHY PEOPLE HAVE ANY OF THE UNIQUE SEXUAL FANTASIES THEY DO.” BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: I am a bi, white, married man — 35 years old and living in a big Midwestern city. I’d like to know what’s going on in my psyche — from a sex-research perspective. I’ve been hung up on cuckold fantasies with my female partner for years now. I’m a creative person and I’m especially fond of creative fantasizing in bed, and my partner enjoys this as well. But 9 times out of 10, I’m spinning a yarn about her fucking other men, whether it’s a threesome, cuckolding with me watching, or her going out on dates and coming home a delicious mess. These fantasies took an unexpected turn when I asked her to share stories about people she fucked in the past. She obliged — and holy shit, was I turned on. The only unfortunate thing is that she did not have many great sexual experiences in the past, so she feels like there is not a lot to share. Anyway, we have an amazing sex life, obviously, and I feel no shame whatsoever about these fantasies or how turned on her memories make us. I’m just curious as to why it turns me on so much. I know others have similar kinks, but it seems so antithetical to the heteronormative expectations of what I should be turned on by. Any ideas? ––Fantasies Reliably Enhance Every Dalliance Dear FREED: “‘Why am I like this?’ questions are always rabbit holes,” said Dr. David Ley, a clinical psychologist, author, and sex researcher. “We create rich, satisfying stories that are really just a form of mental masturbation — no bust on masturbation — when the truth is, at least at this point, we really have no clear idea why people have any of the unique sexual fantasies they do.” (Dr. Ley literally wrote the book on cuckolding: Insatiable Wives: Women Who Stray and the Men Who Love Them. Follow him on Twitter @DrDavidLey.) One popular explanation for why being cuckolded might turn a man on — why knowing his wife or girlfriend had fucked someone else (or was fucking someone else in front of him) might turn a guy on — was the “sperm competition” theory. To quickly summarize: A man who suspects his female partner recently had sex with another male — and whose reptile brain believes the other man’s semen might be “present” inside her — will have a more powerful and voluminous orgasm when he next mates with his female partner in an effort to “flood out” his competitor’s semen. For a time, many sex researchers theorized that male swingers and cuckolds were subconsciously inducing “sperm competition” reactions — i.e., they were in it for the more powerful orgasms. “Unfortunately, much of the research into sperm competition is now suspect, due to a failure to replicate many of these findings,” said Dr. Ley. “So to a degree, we’re now saying, ‘You know, it’s complicated, everyone is different,

and there are no simple answers.’” And now that we’ve said that, FREED, Dr. Ley, who has worked with many cuckold couples, has noticed patterns and he’s willing to put out some alternative theories of his own. “Many cuckolds have a desire to engage bisexually with other men, using their wife’s body as a sort of proxy,” said Dr. Ley. “Given that FREED is a bi male in a heterosexual relationship, these cuckold fantasies might be a way for him to express his bisexuality while including his wife. Additionally, vicarious erotic fulfillment is often a central component in many cuckold fantasies. This goes beyond simple voyeurism — and FREED’s comment about his wife’s regret at not having enough sexual experiences to share offers us a clue in this direction. Many cuckolds celebrate their partners being sexually unrestrained. FREED might just be turned on by the idea of his wife cutting loose and sharing that supercharged erotic energy with other partners — past, present, and future.” Finally, FREED, I wanted to add a “ding, ding, ding” to something you mentioned at the end of your letter. The erotic power of doing something that seems antithetical to the heteronormative and/or vanilla-normative expectations heaped on us by culture, religion, family, etc. should never be underestimated. While not everyone is turned on by the thought of transgressing against sexual or social norms, a significant percentage is. So long as our normative-busting transgressive turn-ons can be realized with other consenting adults, we should worry less about the “why” and more about the “when,” “where,” and “how.” (Now, in private, and safely!) Dear Dan: I’m a 35-year-old married man with two beautiful small children. I knew I was a cuckold before I met my wife. As soon as things got somewhat serious, I made this very clear, as I had learned repeatedly that my desire for a cuckold relationship almost certainly spelled doom. While we were dating, she cuckolded me multiple times and seemed very accepting of the idea. I was in heaven, as I finally felt accepted for me. I remember very clearly on the day of our elopement discussing that this was more than a kink for me — it was central to my sexuality and I needed her buy-in before committing for life. We played a time or two after we got married, but my wife’s interest in the lifestyle greatly decreased. After we had children (first child four years ago), her interest in cuckolding evaporated. It’s entirely gone. I accepted this for some time due to having young children. When I broached the subject recently, she expressed legitimate concerns around STIs, pregnancy, and being “found out” by friends/family. But this is something I need, as I made clear before we married. It’s not

just a “kink” for me. I love my wife and I don’t want to pressure her into having sex with others, but I’m hurt and frustrated. I can’t help but feel like I had a bait and switch pulled on me. What do I do? Be thankful for the things I do have? Ask to go to a sex-positive therapist? Ask for a divorce? I’m lost, hurt, confused, and angry. ––Cuckold Has Understandable Regrets Now Dear CHURN: Cuckolding may be something you need, CHURN, but it’s something you’re asking the wife to do. And the doing presents more risks for her — the risks of STIs and pregnancy fall entirely on her, as she pointed out. And if people were to find out (or suspect) she was sleeping around, the “shame” and potential social ostracism would fall entirely on her, too. Even if you were to tell anyone who found out that it was consensual and/or that you were a cuckold, it’s not like she wouldn’t still be shamed or ostracized. Judgmental family and friends would just heap equal portions of shame on you, too. To your credit, CHURN, you acknowledged the legitimacy of your wife’s concerns. And I’m going to acknowledge the legitimacy of your frustrations: You told her before you eloped that you needed this to be happy, and she didn’t just agree to it, she was (or seemed) enthused about it. I might be inclined to see this as a bait and switch myself if you didn’t have children. Even the most adventurous people — sexual or otherwise — tend to become risk-averse when their children are young, and I imagine your wife is currently some combo of highly riskaverse and completely overwhelmed. (Hey, are you doing your fair share of the housework and childcare?) Instead of threatening to divorce her (which would amount to pressuring her), I would encourage you to find a sex-positive counselor who can help you two talk about what your sex life can look like once your children are a little older. If she can express it without being expected to act on it tomorrow, my hunch is your wife can see cuckolding you again once your kids are older. Since finding women who are into this isn’t easy, as you already know, it would be in your own self-interest to take the long view and be patient. In the meantime, CHURN, content yourself with hot memories of all the times the wife cuckolded you in the past and hot dirty talk about all the times she’s going cuckold you in the future. Question for Dan? E-mail him at mail@savagelove.net. On Twitter at @fakedansavage.

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A Doll’s House, Kansas City Actors Theatre

Golf Fore Babies, Prairie Highlands Golf Course

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AUGUST 13 Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers, Lied Center of Kansas The Faint, RecordBar Gary Clark Jr., Crossroads KC

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Late Night at TikiCat, with Ron MeGee and Chadwick Brooks TikiCat

The Business of Micro-Distilling, iWERX

AUGUST 14 Pinback, RecordBar

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AUGUST 15-17

Kirk Franklin, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

Slash and Bash Film Festival, Doubletree by Hilton Lawrence

Raleigh Keegan Concert in the Caves, S. D. Strong Distilling

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Vince Gill, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

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Every Brilliant Thing, Just Off Broadway Theatre

AUGUST 18-20

Galantis, KC Live! Block at the Power & Light District

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Hembree, Light Up The Lawn, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

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John Hiatt (solo acoustic) with Logan Ledder, Knuckleheads

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Kansas City Latin Jazz Orchestra, Prospero’s Books

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AUGUST 16-18 Ethnic Enrichment Festival 2019, Swope Park

AUGUST 17 Scott Mulvahill, RecordBar Slipknot’s Knotfest Roadshow, Providence Medical Center Amphitheater Mike Krol, The Riot Room

AUGUST 18 $uicideBoy$, with Denzel Curry and Trash Talk, Providence Medical Center Amphitheater Burlesque Downtown Underground presents Heroes and Villains III, Opera House Coffee & Food Emporium

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AUGUST 23 Banda MS, Sprint Center Iyanla Vanzant, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts Kidz Bop, Starlight Theatre

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KC Irish Fest, Crown Center Square

AUGUST 30 Bob and Una Walkenhorst, Light Up The Lawn, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Weston Moonshiners Car Club, Downtown Weston

Humanities in the Wild: The Language of Landscapes, Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop

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Katya: Help Me I’m Dying, Folly Theater

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