May 2018 I FREE I PITCH.COM
The Last Forest
IF 800 ACRES OF WOODS FALL IN NORTH KANSAS CITY, WILL ANYONE MAKE A SOUND?
PLUS POWELL GARDENS VS. A FACTORY FARM
THE FIRST ANNUAL WORKERS REVIVAL FEST
ASSESSING THE BIRDS AT BROOKSIDE POULTRY COMPANY
CAMPANAS DE AMERICA
LITTLE RIVER BAND
CHICKS WITH HITS
MAY 5
MAY 4
STRYPER MAY 25
DARREN KNIGHT
AKA SOUTHERN MOMMA
MAY 11
HERMAN’S HERMITS STARRING PETER NOONE
JUNE 2
MAY 19
AIR SUPPLY JUNE 23
Join us in the Star Pavilion for our thrilling upcoming shows. Get your tickets at ticketmaster.com or visit the Ameristar gift shop to receive $5 off the standard ticket price with your mychoice ® card.
Free Live Entertainment 8:30p –12:30a SAUCY JACK • May 4 FLASHBACK • May 5 STATE LINE DRIVE • May 11 PHIL VANDEL • May 12
SELLE BROTHERS BAND • May 18 HUDSON DRIVE • May 19 MADD HOSS JACKSON • May 25 JJ & THE ALLSTARS • May 26
Must be 21 or older to gamble. Must be a mychoice member to receive mychoice discount. Must be at least 18 or accompanied by an adult to enter Star Pavilion. Must be at least 21 to enter Depot #9. Tickets available online at ticketmaster.com (service charges and handling fees added by ticketmaster.com), or at the Gift Shop. No refunds/exchanges unless canceled or postponed. Offer not valid for persons on a Disassociated Patrons, Voluntary Exclusion or Self Exclusion List in jurisdictions which Pinnacle Entertainment operates or who have been otherwise excluded from Ameristar Kansas City, MO. Gambling problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. ©2018 Pinnacle Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
A photography exhibition spanning the entire history of the medium. Open late Thursday & Friday nights Admission is FREE
Kansas City, Mo | 3 blocks from the Plaza
This exhibition is supported by the Hall Family Foundation in honor of Keith F. Davis. Additional support provided by the Campbell-Calvin Fund. Camille Dolard, French (1810–1884). Self-portrait as a hookah smoker, 1845. Daguerreotype, 8 1/2 × 6 1/2 inches. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2017.44.5.
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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Led by rock violinist and arranger Nina DiGegorio, Femmes of Rock features the music of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, The Beatles, Metallica and more! This will be an electrifying evening you won’t want to miss!
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8 QUESTIONNAIRE
Jesica and Clayton DeLong The jazzy pair behind A La Mode swing in for a chat ahead of their upcoming Celebration at the Station gig. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY
10 PULSE
Rev-olution International Female Ride Day picks up speed in KC. BY DAVID HUDNALL Radical Cheek Madi Apparel threads the needle between its luxury underwear customers and women in need. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY Labor Party The first annual Workers Revival Fest promises some work, plenty of play. BY AARON RHODES DREAM On ICE detainees face grave uncertainties every day. Enter the Deportation Defense Legal Network. BY TRACI ANGEL
COPYRIGHT
3200 N AMERISTAR DRIVE KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI 816.414.7000 AMERISTAR.COM Must be 21 or older to gamble. Must be a mychoice member to receive mychoice discount. Must be at least 18 or accompanied by an adult to enter Star Pavilion. Must be at least 21 to enter Depot #9. Tickets available online at ticketmaster.com (service charges and handling fees added by ticketmaster.com), or at the Gift Shop. No refunds/exchanges unless canceled or postponed. Offer not valid for persons on a Disassociated Patrons, Voluntary Exclusion or Self Exclusion List in jurisdictions which Pinnacle Entertainment operates or who have been otherwise excluded from Ameristar Kansas City, MO. Gambling problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. ©2018 Pinnacle Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. ®
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
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COVER
Julie Stutterheim in the Northland woods. Photo by Zach Bauman.
Lakeside Live Live MUSic at tHe winery and brewery
- Local Wines -
20 14 NEWS
The Last Forest If 800 acres of woods fall in North Kansas City, will anyone make a sound? BY ROXIE HAMMILL Track in a Field Joe Effertz’s quest to build an exotic-car paradise near Stillwell. BY ROXIE HAMMILL A Load of Bull Is the state of Missouri really going to let a factory farm move in next to Powell Gardens? We’re about to find out. BY KAREN DILLON
28 CAFÉ
Winner Winner Brookside Poultry Company’s savory, no-fuss birds squawk for themselves. BY LIZ COOK
32 DRINKS
Bar Rescue Tonganoxie’s revamped Myers Hotel is a townie bar worth the drive. BY APRIL FLEMING
- Craft Beers -
36 ARTS
Hole New World With its new North Kansas City headquarters, the Rabbit Hole is aiming for the children’s-literature stars. BY ANGELA LUTZ Goin’ Out West Dana Mengel channels Independence’s frontier history in “The Oregon Trail Suites.” BY LIBBY HANSSEN
42 MUSIC
The Voice There ain’t any lip-syncing on Miss Daisy Buckët’s debut. BY NICK SPACEK
44 SAVAGE LOVE
Spring Flings Reentering the world of one-night stands; the repercussions of snooping; a porn festival. BY DAN SAVAGE
46 CALENDAR
May Events What to do and where to be this month.
Letter from the Publisher I am a city girl. Specifically, I’m a Midtown girl who offices in the Crossroads and loves every aspect of city life. But there are so many nooks and crannies of Kansas City that I have yet to visit. And after reading about Julie Stutterheim in this month’s feature, “The Last Forest,” I was inspired to get out and explore a little. Which is exactly what Adam and I did a few weeks ago when we paid a visit to Lawrence (more to come on that soon!). It was refreshing to spend the day in such a vibrant college town and meet local business owners who also love The Pitch. So where should I go next? Do you have a favorite park you frequent? Or a not-sosecret spot you’ve come to love? I want to hear from you about your favorite Kansas City metro area gems. Here at The Pitch, our goal is to be everyone’s independent news magazine — this is #OurPitch. But it’s also lovely to kick up our heels at our events and meet (in person!) so many people from across the area. Speaking of which: thanks to everyone who came out to Bacon & Bourbon at the Guild in April. We’re now gearing up for our next event, Taste of Kansas City, on May 24. We’re a tasty town, and this party will feature some of the best food and drink KC has to offer. I hope to see you there! Cheers, Stephanie @QueenofQuirky #OurPitch
- Tasting Room - Lakeside Views - Event Venue - Lakeside Overnight Suite - Full Menu - RV Hookups Book your parties today! 19203 Old US 40 Higginsville, MO 64037 660·584·6661 arcadianmoon.com Just 45 minutes from Kansas City! Worth the drive! pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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Concerts are held in Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
C I S U M T A E R G & S E FUN TIM ONE NIGHT ONLY!
AUDRA McDONALD with the KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY Saturday, May 5 at 8 p.m.
Andy Einhorn, music director for Audra McDonald Audra McDonald is among today’s most highly-regarded performers. Blessed with a luminous soprano voice and an incomparable gift for dramatic truth telling, she is equally at home on Broadway, opera stages and in concert halls as she is in roles on film and television. Share in this special performance with the Kansas City Symphony as Audra visits the American Songbook as only she can. Tickets from $49.
SPECIAL PERFORMANCE SYMPHONY CHORUS presents DURUFLÉ’S REQUIEM Sunday, May 20 at 3 p.m.
Kansas City Symphony Chorus, Charles Bruffy, chorus director
Join us for this special afternoon performance of Duruflé’s Requiem, a soaring Gregorian chantthemed masterpiece. You’ll also enjoy a piece by Kansas City composer Mark Hayes and witness an exciting 20th anniversary performance of Morten Lauridsen’s radiant Lux Aeterna. Tickets from $20. The Kansas City Symphony does not perform during this presentation.
CLASSICAL CONCERT BEETHOVEN’S “EMPEROR” and WAGNER’S RING
Friday and Saturday, June 1-2 at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 3 at 2 p.m. Johannes Debus, guest conductor ^ Martin Helmchen, piano WAGNER Selections from The Ring BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor”
Experience Beethoven’s grand masterpiece, his Piano Concerto Number 5, “Emperor,” along with selections from Wagner’s thrilling “Ring” cycle. Big, bold and exciting music for everyone! Tickets from $25.
CLASSICAL CONCERT MENDELSSOHN’S “ITALIAN” and HAYDN
Friday and Saturday, June 15-16 at 8 p.m. Sunday, June 17 at 2 p.m. ^ Michael Stern, conductor Augustin Hadelich, violin
RAUTAVAARA Cantus arcticus F. J. HAYDN Violin Concerto No. 1 in C Major THOMAS ADÈS Violin Concerto “Concentric Paths” MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 4, “Italian”
Enjoy a concert filled with the sights and sounds of spring — from Mendelssohn’s tour of Italy to the beauty of Haydn’s First Violin Concerto. Tickets from $25.
ORDER NOW (816) 471-0400 / kcsymphony.org 6
THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
Yo u a r e I n v i t e d! The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection
Grand Opening downtown Ju n e 2 & 3
1 6 0 1 G r a n d B lv d | K a n sas C i t y, M O
RESURRECTION DOWNTOWN
WORSHIP #withKC
Saturday 5:10 pm; Sunday at 9, 10:45 am & 5 pm (Currently worshipping at 1522 McGee)
RESURRECTION LEAWOOD 13720 Roe Avenue | Leawood, KS 66224 Saturday at 5 pm Sunday at 7:30, 9:15, & 11 am and 5 pm
RESURRECTION WEST
24000 W. Valley Pkwy | Olathe, KS 66061 Sunday at 8, 9:30 & 11 am and 5 pm
RESURRECTION BLUE SPRINGS
601 NE Jefferson Street | Blue Springs, MO 64014 Sunday 9 & 10:45 am
COR.ORG
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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QUESTIONNAIRE
Jesica and Clayton DeLong THE JAZZY PAIR BEHIND A LA MODE SWING IN FOR A CHAT AHEAD OF THEIR UPCOMING CELEBRATION AT THE STATION GIG. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY
In A La Mode, husband and wife duo Clayton and Jesica “Baby J” DeLong deftly tap into Kansas City’s nostalgia for the wild Prohibition days of yesteryear. Their hot-jazz swing sound is accentuated by Jesica’s sultry vocals (and her way with a kazoo), Clayton’s jazzy guitar tones, and, often, a collection of other musicians and dancers that join them onstage. A La Mode performs regularly all over town — at the Phoenix, the P.S. Speakeasy (inside Hotel Phillips), Chaz on the Plaza. But we’re especially eager to see their act at this year’s Celebration at the Station, on May 27 at Union Station. Below, Jesica and Clayton answer The Pitch Questionnaire.
Finding morel mushrooms. Don’t ask me where I find them, it’s a secret. Jesica: I have a natural talent with children of all ages. They love me. What is your guilty pleasure? Massages, we get one or two each month. Best advice you ever got: Don’t make excuses, just try harder. What’s your greatest struggle right now? Getting Jesica to wake up before noon. What is your soapbox? Traditional jazz is making a comeback. The last album you listened to: Clayton: Wes Montgomery Trio. Jesica: Blossom Dearie, They Say It’s Spring How did you two meet? We met at a jazz club called Jardines that used to be on the Plaza. We started working together to create our band and swore we’d never “mix business and pleasure,” but that didn’t last long. After dating for eight years, we finally got married last October. It was meant to be.
CAPTION
How does Kansas City’s jazz history impact your music? The history of prohibition in Kansas City during the 1920’s is our main inspiration. KC was like the Las Vegas of the 20’s, people came from all over the country to freely drink, dance, and listen to swing music. We try to take our audiences back in time with our musical style and song choices, as well as costumes, props, dancers, and the venues themselves.
“WE STARTED WORKING TOGETHER AND SWORE WE’D NEVER MIX BUSINESS AND PLEASURE. BUT THAT DIDN’T LAST LONG.”
Twitter: @alamodejazz
especially toward 18th and Vine.
Hometown: We are both from KC. Jes is from Raytown. Clayton is from Parkville.
What is the last thing you laughed at? Trailer Park Boys, season 12. We’re mega fans.
Current neighborhood: Volker.
Where’s dinner? Go Chicken Go after every gig at Chaz on the Plaza. It’s a ritual.
What do you do when you’re not playing music? Booking music with our entertainment company, Awestruck Entertainment or planning prohibition-themed events with our event company, Prohibition Parties. We love to take our weenie dogs Petunia and Maggie to the park and we love going out to watch and support our fellow KC musicians.
What does KC need more of? Jazz and cocktails. And streetcar extensions,
What are you currently binge watching? Peaky Blinders, Trailer Park Boys, and
Your drink: We both love classic cocktails. Jes’s signature cocktail is the French 75. Clay’s cocktail is a Tito’s press. We both love Jameson.
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
What makes the Prohibition era so captivating? Art Deco fashion and architecture, the rebellious nature of drinking in speakeasies, flappers and the early days of women’s lib, and of course, the birth of hot jazz and swing! Game of Thrones (waiting for the last season patiently). Jesica’s favorite show is RuPaul’s Drag Race. What makes Kansas City special? Superior jazz, cocktails, and BBQ, but mostly the artist community here in KC. All types: visual, musical, and performance artists, all come together to create an atmosphere in our city that is truly unique. We are so proud to be a part of it all. The last book you read: Jesica: Stephen King, IT. I’m a horror freak. Clayton: Victor Wooten, The Music Lesson What’s your hidden talent? Clayton:
Which Kansas City musicians inspire you? Rod Fleeman, Dave Stephens, Lonnie McFadden, and the legendary Marilyn Maye, just to name a few. What is the best part about performing with your spouse? Stealing kisses in between songs. What is the worst part? Clayton: Waiting on J to get ready for the gig! How does one become a kazoo master? Jesica: I played the kazoo along to recordings of Louis Armstrong from the 20’s and 30’s. I try to mimic his style and make the kazoo sound like a raunchy, muted trumpet at a burlesque show. It seems to work.
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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PULSE
JONNY HACKETT
Rev-olution INTERNATIONAL FEMALE RIDE DAY PICKS UP SPEED IN KC. BY DAVID HUDNALL
The future is female? For the motorcycle industry, it would certainly appear that way. Twenty years ago, women accounted for 8 percent of bike sales. Today, that number is up around 14 percent — and growing. Last year, about 60 local lady riders met up at Blip Roasters in the West Bottoms for Kansas City’s first official citywide International Female Ride Day. Three weeks before this year’s event, 160 women had already regis-
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tered to ride. Among those who will cruise the twolane back roads on Saturday, May 5, is Pam Smith, who took up the hobby two years ago and is now one of the Litas of Kansas City, a female motorcycle group with nearly 400 members. “I took a basic [motorcycle] riding course in 2016, and I got bit hard,” Smith, an organizer of this year’s IFRD, says. “I’m
ORGANIZERS EXPECT NEARLY TRIPLE THE NUMBER OF RIDERS FROM LAST YEAR.
on my third bike now. It’s 2018 Harley Road Glide Special. But for the ride, it’ll be all kinds of bikes. Trikes, sports bikes, Can-Am Spyders. It’s for everybody.” Everybody’s who’s a woman, that is. The 100-mile ride starts at Freedom Cycle in Grandview, wends west into Kansas through Hillsdale State Park, then loops back to Gail’s Harley Davidson in Grandview for an afterparty. (Men are welcome to attend the festivities at Gail’s.) “I think one of the main goals this year is just to keep making it more and more inclusive,” Smith says. “It’s women from 18 all the way up to 70. Some are empty nesters and it’s finally ‘me time’ for them. Others have been riding most of their lives. Some live in the city, some live in rural areas. We want ‘em all.”
PULSE
Caption
Hayley Besheer Santell and Daniel Santell
KELCIE MCKENNEY
Radical Cheek MADI APPAREL THREADS THE NEEDLE BETWEEN ITS LUXURY UNDERWEAR CUSTOMERS AND WOMEN IN NEED. BY KELCIE MCKENNEY
For pretty understandable reasons, most shelters won’t accept used underwear as a donated item. You can buy new underwear and donate it, but not a lot of people do that. As a result, women’s underwear is one of the under-donated items of clothing there is. In 2013, Hayley Besheer Santell founded MADI Apparel, a line of eco-friendly underwear, sleepwear, robes, and bralettes with a buy one, donate one model. With each purchase of any garment from MADI, a pair of MADI underwear is donated to women in need at domestic violence shelters, homeless shelters, rape crisis centers, and disaster relief efforts. MADI has partnered with 14 local organizations — including MOCSA, Hope House, and Journey to New Life (helping women who recently left
prison) — and 30 global organizations. So far, over 4,600 pairs of underwear have been donated. In an effort to reach more women — both customers as well as those who benefit from donations — Besheer Santell and her husband recently modified a camper to take MADI on the road. “Any time we travel in person for a drop off, we set up a table and make it like a real boutique,” Besheer Santell says. “That way they can pick out a pair and choose their own color and we can talk to them about the fabrics and how to wear them. It really creates a dignity factor.” Currently, all MADI products are made locally by women-owned sew teams. But as MADI’s business has grown, the need
for more seamstresses has, too. So MADI recently teamed up with Hope Faith Ministries, a homelessness outreach facility. Together they’ve launched a new program called MADI Makes that trains previously homeless women to sew MADI underwear at Hope Faith’s onsite sewing center. Miranda Treas, an independent manufacturer who has been sewing for MADI the past four years, will begin training MADI’s first new seamstress, Andreshia, at the end of this month. “With my business, it’s crazy, I have to turn away so many people,” Treas says. “There’s just so much sewing need in Kansas City, and there really aren’t places available that can make goods for even the small guys.” After her training, Andreshia will be working part-time for MADI out of Hope Faith Ministries. The goal is to eventually train and employ three seamstresses. “We didn’t think we’d so quickly be able to train at-risk women,” Besheer Santell says. “So now it’s like a full circle: we’re training women to sew the pairs of underwear to donate back to women [whose situation] they were once in.”
MADI APPAREL 1659 SUMMIT THE MADI CAMPER WILL BE POPPED UP AT 20TH AND BALTIMORE DURING MAY’S FIRST FRIDAYS.
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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PULSE
Downtown Boys
FARRAH SKEIKY
Labor Party THE FIRST ANNUAL WORKERS REVIVAL FEST PROMISES SOME WORK, PLENTY OF PLAY. BY AARON RHODES
Though the objective of this month’s first annual Workers Revival Fest is to improve labor conditions here in the Kansas City area, the inspiration behind it was 5,000 miles away, in Uruguay. Last year, Missouri Jobs with Justice organizer Natalie PatrickKnox attended a labor conference in the country and was taken aback by its vibrant atmosphere. The venue wasn’t a dull auditorium or convention center. It was held mostly outside. There was live music, food, and drinks. It was fun. “We started talking about why there’s no equivalent to that here,” says PatrickKnox’s husband, Ron Knox. “[An event that] speaks to a different kind of person than somebody who’s already familiar with the labor movement and its issues and is happy just sitting in some conference room and participating in a panel.” The timing for such an event also seemed particularly ripe. Corporate monopolies, decades of stagnant wages, and Republican-led efforts to weaken unions, slash state budgets, and redirect taxes to
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
WORKERS REVIVAL FEST MAY 11-12 AT RECORDBAR AND COLLECTION. SET TIMES AND TICKET INFO AT WORKERSREVIVAL.COM
the already-rich have been disastrous for the average American worker. This is, of course, old news for activists and labor organizations. But lately it seems as if we might finally be reaching a tipping point. Workers are fed up. You can glimpse it in the fast-food employees’ fight for a $15 minimum wage and the teacher’s walkouts in West Virginia and Oklahoma. These movements are heavy lifts, though. The challenge lies in routing general concern about workers’ issues into the local organizations that lay the groundwork to make change. That’s where the Workers Revival Fest hopes it can add some value. Through two days of live music, workshops, and speakers, it aims to energize the uninitiated and introduce participants to the tools of labor organizing. Few bands on earth mirror the ethos of something like the Workers Revival Fest as closely as the Rhode Island punk act Downtown Boys. So it’s especially impressive that the organizers — Patrick-Knox, Knox (an occasional contributor to The Pitch), and Missouri Jobs with Justice organizing director Justin Stein — were able to secure a performance from the band for this first-time fest. “Downtown Boys literally started because they were trying to organize the hotel they were all working at in Providence,” Knox says. “That’s, like, their origin story. It couldn’t be a better fit.”
Downtown Boys’ vocalist, Victoria Ruiz, is even leading one of the many workshops scheduled over the course of the fest’s two days. Others will touch on topics such as neighborhood organizing and the connections between visual art and the labor movement. Former Chiefs player and current construction union advocate and Missouri Senate candidate Martin Rucker will give a talk, as will Noisey metal editor Kim Kelly, who — when she’s not breaking down the history of capitalism in Teen Vogue or writing about anti-fascist fantasy metal bands — is active in the Vice Union. (The full lineup of events can be found at workersrevival.com.) One of the five local music acts rounding out the Workers Revival is the long-active punk band Red Kate, whose bassist-vocalist, L. Ron Drunkard, is an activist in his own right. He sees the fest as an opportunity to build back some of the IRL community that’s been lost in the age of social media. Also: a chance for the city’s hard-working activists to take a load off and celebrate their accomplishments. “We don’t often, as organizers, stop and take a breath and say ‘Hey, we did a good job,’” he says. “You can burn out really easily if you don’t, every now and then, stop and get some appreciation from people, show appreciation to others, and just have a good time.”
PULSE
FINAL DAYS CLOSES MAY 28
JIMÉNEZJOSEPH’S STORY, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, ILLUSTRATES THE MORTAL DANGER THAT ACCOMPANIES BEING HELD IN ICE CUSTODY.
Presented By
Jean Jimenez-Joseph died in a Georgia jail last year after being held in solitary confinement by ICE.
DREAM On ICE DETAINEES FACE GRAVE UNCERTAINTIES EVERY DAY. ENTER THE DEPORTATION DEFENSE LEGAL NETWORK BY TRACI ANGEL
We hear a lot about DACA these days. Jean Jiménez-Joseph was part of the program (short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which shields from deportation those brought to the United States as children. Jiménez-Joseph arrived in the United States from Panama at the age of 10. He graduated from Junction City High School, in Kansas, and attended Johnson County Community College. He played drums and once dreamed of becoming an architect. In January of last year, Jiménez-Joseph was convicted of stealing a car in North Carolina and subsequently taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He was transferred to Stewart Detention Center, an immigration jail in ru-
ral Georgia, and held there for two months while deportation proceedings against him began. Despite a documented history of mental illness, Jiménez-Joseph was placed in solitary confinement for 19 days. In midMay, he was found unresponsive in his cell, a sheet tied around his neck. He was 27 years old. Jiménez-Joseph’s story, like so many others, illustrates the mortal danger that accompanies being held in ICE custody. On May 15 — the one-year anniversary of Jiménez-Joseph’s death — at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, local activists are set to launch the Deportation Defense Legal Network, which will assist immigrants who, like Jiménez-Joseph, find themselves suddenly
and unexpectedly detained by ICE. “We want to get people out of detention as quickly as possible,” says Bob Grove, the organization’s director. Grove says the group grew out of an effort to work with Kansas City officials on mitigating the threats to immigration rights being carried out by the Trump administration. But officials declined. So Grove and others set about creating a network of attorneys and community activists that can communicate and strategize before and after ICE raids. The goal is to provide pro-bono representation for immigration bond hearings and fund basic necessities, like phone calls from jail. Have a law degree but no expertise in the area of immigration? Not a problem. “We would like to train as many non-immigration attorneys as possible,” Grove says. Scheduled to speak on the 15th: local attorneys, immigration activists, and the family of Jiménez-Joseph. “[It’s about] honoring what Jean went through while taking action to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Grove says.
Tickets as low as $10* • UnionStation.org Union Station Member Price. Excludes taxes & fees.
*
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
13
NEWS
The Last Forest
IF 800 ACRES OF WOODS FALL IN NORTH KANSAS CITY, WILL ANYONE MAKE A SOUND? BY ROXIE HAMMILL
Julie Stutterheim is trying to preserve the land ZACH BAUMAN surrounding the Line Creek Trail.
The signs began popping recently up on trees at the edge of the big woods near the Line Creek trailhead at Northwest Platte Brooke Drive. Little red and white signs, all along the edge of the clearing where the forest begins. “No hunting, weapons, trespassing,” they say. But to Julie Stutterheim and others in the Northland, the signs mean something else: the beginning of the end. On a chilly, brown-gray March afternoon, Stutterheim walks north from her home on the Line Creek Trail. She moved here about eight months ago because she liked the school district for her children. “I honestly am a city person,” Stutterheim says. “If I had my druthers, I’d rather be within walking distance of a Starbucks and I’d be a very happy person.” But she quickly saw the impact the woods were having on her two daughters: how they were playing more outside, searching for stick swords and little fish in
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
the creek with other families creek-walking along the trail. Stutterheim, too, became enchanted with the stream and the woods. “It only gets more beautiful as you go on,” she says, as the trail twists upward through limestone hills overlooking the creek. “There’s this amazing point where the trail curves around and you look down on this valley of trees. We don’t have a lot of places like this.” For decades, nature lovers have passed afternoons wandering in the deep woods off the trail. It’s enveloped in forested land in all directions — 800 acres of hills and trees — offering a peace not often found in the suburbs. At a quiet midpoint, it’s almost impossible to imagine that, just a couple miles to the west, airport traffic roars by on Interstate 29. “It’s just something about being able to walk on any trail and not see signs of humans,” Stutterheim says. “It allows you — at least for a brief while — to kind of discon-
“IF WE DON’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT, THERE’S NO GETTING IT BACK. THERE’S NO GETTING ANOTHER ONE.”
nect and decompress and find a little solitude and not be imposed upon by something man-made.” Stutterheim’s fear — and that of 7,500 others who have signed a petition to save these woods — is that the worst lies ahead for these beautiful woods. Those signs? They were put up by the Park Hill School District, which plans to build a new elementary school here — and, later, perhaps a new high school. When Stutterheim first learned about the school district’s plans for the woods, she did what comes naturally to someone who’d recently quit a job in marketing for a nonprofit. She named the 800 acres The Last Forest and set up a website and Change.org petition to save it. Once the schools are there, Stutterheim and others wonder, can development on private property to the north be far behind? There’s already a road right-of-way, planned years ago, that cuts straight through
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the middle. If that four-lane parkway is built, the uninterrupted forest would be history, survived only by the strip of protected woods along the trail and stream. “If we don’t do anything about it, there’s no getting it back,” Stutterheim says. “There’s no getting another one.” •
•
•
The Last Forest is unique in part because of its size. It’s unusual to have 800 acres of forest that is not already a park of some kind, says Wendy Sangster, community forester for the Missouri Department of Conservation. The 800 acres is in an area between Northwest Barry Road and Northwest 68th Street on the north and south, North Coventry Avenue to the east and Northwest Waukomis Drive/Green Hills Road to the south. Sangster took a look at the area in December at Stutterheim and Nichol’s request. “I had never walked that forest before, and I was surprised at the quality of it,” Sangster says. “Its value is that it is a highquality forest. That’s hard to come by in the Kansas City region.” It’s not an “old growth” forest – one where timber has never been cut. That’s almost impossible to find in the metro area, Sangster says. But it does have a good mix of old and new trees, uplands and lowlands and stream bottom lands. There are large trees at least 50 years old and some big oaks that are easily 100, she says. Also unusual is the fact that invasive plants have not moved in. Nichols quotes from her report: “Because of its relatively healthy condition and its location, the area is an important piece of property for conservation.” It doesn’t have any rare species, though — at least not that anyone knows of. As far as historical value, there’s the Interurban Railway route, plus a rumor no one has been able to run down that the area was a hunting grounds for former president Harry Truman — small beer in the eyes of the officials who
ZACH BAUMAN
make such decisions. The northern portion of the forest is private property. The southern portion was, too, until the school district bought it. That means the best the petitioners can hope for is a land donation from one of those owners or a conservation easement that would keep the land undisturbed. Neither of those outcomes appear likely, at least in the short term. Funds for park upkeep are tight in Platte County because of low reserves from the half-cent sales tax for
c e l e brat i ng
3 2
parks and stormwater, says Commissioner Dagmar Wood. As a result, acquiring new land is not on the county’s radar. Kansas City also has no budget for a big land buy, says Councilman Dan Fowler. The northern property owners haven’t been approached yet. And the school district isn’t budging. •
•
•
Platte County is one of the fastest growing areas in the metro, as northland school par-
ents can attest. Park Hill School District has grown every single one of the last 34 years, says Paul Kelly, assistant superintendent. Six of the thirteen grade levels are at their highest enrollment ever. In 2011, voters approved a bond issue that allows the district to go on a building expansion program. After that, the district immediately went to work identifying and rating land parcels where it could build. The district and its consultants looked at 30 to 35 properties and rated them on
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19 criteria, including access, site preparation expense and appropriateness of location, Kelly says. Despite its rugged terrain, the 272-acre forested piece scored relatively high. The building project will save money in other ways to mitigate the cost of site work, he says. “The thought that there’s all this land out there to develop on is just a myth,” Kelly says. For the district, the forest’s appeal is that it was a larger parcel that could be used
for future expansion. Today, the general building plan for the area is as follows: the district breaks ground on the new Hopewell Elementary School in April, with the school opening next August. After that, it has plans to build a LEAD Innovation Studio – a type of high school learning center for 600 students that would open in 2020. A ways further down the road, if enrollment continues to increase, the school may dip farther south in the forest to build a full-sized high school on land that is not immediately in use. In any case, donating or a conservation easement is not being considered, Kelly says. Petitioners target that extra land, he says, “because nobody can believe right now you’ll ever need it. Our staff isn’t ready to tell our board of education that in 10 years there’ll be no purpose for that land and that we bought 100 acres we are going to just give away.” Besides, the district will build the schools to eco-friendly LEED standards, which require low environmental impact and minimal change to the personality and feel of the land, he argues. The district is already taking care to keep its environmental impact as low as possible. Stutterheim actually supports the Park Hill elementary school. She’s got kids; she knows the district is growing quickly and needs to expand. It’s regarding the high school that she and others hope to convince Park Hill to pump the brakes. Stutterheim has urged district administrators to conserve that extra 100 acres instead, and to move the elementary and LEAD building closer together to minimize the footprint. That would help save the southern part of the forest, she says. Eventually the conservationists would like to convince property owners to the north not to overdevelop as well. (So far, no development appears imminent on the north part of the forest.) And, of course, they don’t ever want to see a parkway cut through the middle of the forest. On that front, at least, they’re starting
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to see some positive action. The Line Creek Parkway has been a part of the city’s master plan for decades, Fowler says. It was drawn in by planners to preserve right-of-way for a north-south stretch of road that would eventually connect NW Barry and NW Waukomis. Fowler says he’s sympathetic with the conservation proponents and had planned to file a resolution asking that the road be removed from the master plan. Removing the right-of-way seemed like an easy fix, Fowler says, because owners would then have to reacquire the land, raising their cost of development. But he changed his mind after being advised that such a move would return ownership of the land to adjacent landowners, who would then be free to build to their hearts’ content. Keeping the right-of-way could prevent development, he says. Fowler hopes other council members and planners can be convinced that it would be smarter and cheaper to just make improvements on the existing nearby streets than start from scratch in the forest. •
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Though the school district remains unmoved, Stutterheim is holding out hope that the number of petitions signed and the comments that accompany them will eventually register. She’s hardly the only one with personal attachment to these woods. Bill Nichols, a long-time paralegal, shares that he used to spend his spare time tromping around in the forest, exploring the dry lake bed and old Interurban Railway cuts there. He dreamed of putting in campsites and rehabilitating the dam that breached in 1977 and letting it fill back up to restore
the 12-acre Drennon Lake that was once a for-fee local fishing spot. When a friend forwarded him Stutterheim’s petition, he quickly offered to help Stutterheim with her efforts. “You can’t get back this last remaining tract of KC forest once you destroy it,” wrote Lisa Owens, who lives near Stutterheim. “There are so many birds, deer, beaver, fox, coyote, mink and other animals that call this creek home. Not to mention the wildflowers and butterflies. Build this stuff somewhere else.” But it’s impossible to tell from the petition how many signatures come from those who live within the Park Hill School District, Kelly says. And he and other school staffers haven’t noticed a big outcry about the forest from the residents who’ve turned up at presentations on the new schools. “It doesn’t seem to be resonating with the communities that we’re going to,” Kelly says. Given the journey so far, Stutterheim is not sure how optimistic to be. But she plans to keep trying. “If we started on this petition and got two signatures and nobody cared, I’d be like, ‘Well, OK,’” she says. “But it’s not just me and it’s not just Bill and it’s not just the other people who have joined our team. This is a lot of people saying this isn’t right.” An unusual bird calls from somewhere off the side of the trail. What kind of bird? “I don’t know. I wish I knew,” says Stutterheim. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. All I know is that the more I learn about how old this forest is and how much people care about it, the more I think that, if a non-nature-lover like me can fall in love with it, can we just take a beat and think a moment before we destroy it entirely?”
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ZACH BAUMAN
Track in a Field JOE EFFERTZ’S QUEST TO BUILD AN EXOTIC-CAR PARADISE NEAR STILLWELL. BY ROXIE HAMMILL
It’s the day before Easter, and the crowd at StoneGate Motorplaza near Stilwell is in a celebratory mood. Hundreds have parked along 207th Street and in a nearby field to gawk at all the eye candy: a Shelby Cobra, a gull-winged McLaren, a British Noble. Inside the gate, people cluster around for a peek under the hoods of these and other exotic cars. Gun it! they shout to an exiting driver. A man in a ’61 Chevy Impala obliges. Outside, more gather to cheer on the drivers willing to step on the gas and burn some rubber for a few feet as they leave the event. On the side of the road, a child, perhaps 12, lets loose with a derisive guffaw at a car that seems to be stuck in an adjacent field: “Oh god, it’s a Fiesta!” Joe Effertz, owner of StoneGate, says this record turnout for his Cars and Coffee event may just be the result of an eagerness to enjoy a spring weekend. Then again,
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
some of them may also be stoked about a project he has going just to the east of his car condo complex. In a field there, on what was once cropland in the Effertz family farm, a pattern has been traced on the ground. In a few months, when the blacktop is laid atop it, it’ll host something new to the metro: an automobile performance test track. Or, in other words: a place where people in the area who own some of the most expensive cars on earth can finally learn how to drive them. • • • Kansas Citians do own performance cars. A lot of them, in fact. Black Horse Motorwerks, just around the corner from the Effertz farm, specializes in exotic cars and they see a lot of them, says mechanic Chazz Hobson. Hobson estimates there are over 400 Ferraris alone in the city. Jay Dee Krull, a performance car owner
from Overland Park, agrees. “The numbers would surprise you,” he says. “There’s more Lamborghinis than you can shake a stick at. There’s several McLarens.” Many of them are collector cars that never leave their garages. But sometimes those Ferraris and other exotics do venture out onto Kansas City streets, their whereabouts captured on a Facebook Car Spotters page like the sightings of rare birds: a Lamborghini Diablo list-priced at over $270,000, an Audi R8 for $165,000 and a Rolls Royce Wraith weighing in at a suggested $320,000. More spotted every day as the weather turns nice. The local market for high-end cars has been on the upswing, partly because of the wealth in the area and partly because there is now more of a service economy to support them, Hobson says. A few years ago, owners had to have them hauled to someplace like Chicago for mechanical work. Once the winter road salt is gone, it’s only natural to want to take them out and show them off. But that’s where the proud owners can get into trouble, Effertz says. International soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, famously crashed his Ferrari his first time behind its wheel. You-
Tube is full of compilations of other inexperienced drivers who crash their supercars out on the highway. “Some guys are wrecking them pulling out of the parking lot — they’re that fast,” Effertz says. “You step on the gas and they do a 360 and you’re wrapped around a telephone pole.” So Effertz sees his track as a public service, in a way. Sports car owners can indulge their need for speed without endangering anyone else on the public roadways. Local car enthusiasts seem to agree. “There’s a huge need — and also the need to convince people that they need it,” says Nathan Powers of Blue Springs, who is on the board of the Kansas City Exotic and Supercar Club and the owner of 10 cars. For a city of its size, Kansas City is a “car-cultureheavy city,” Powers says, but, “there are some people who don’t know how to drive their cars.” High-performance cars are built differently than cars most of us are used to driving, says Scott Quick, the aptly named director of track operations for StoneGate. “It’s the suspension, the horsepower, the drivability, the handling, all the engineering work that’s gone into making these performance cars,” he says.
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REAM
KC's Friendly Neighborhood smoke shop Thake, a British track designer well known in the racing industry. Effertz is also bringing in a race simulator so drivers can check out the course before risking their wheels. Even that won’t be enough, though. Quick says a certified instructor will have to sign off on drivers before they can race the clock unsupervised. “One thing you just don’t do is just turn people loose on a racetrack or a road course,” he says. Track membership is required to drive on the StoneGate track or use the simulator. There will be a range of membership prices. But Effertz says the cheapest way to be a member is to own one of his car condos. He began building the condos about five years ago for people who want a place to kick back and admire the expensive cars they are storing. The condos, which can be outfitted with
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“On the street you can’t begin to explore the abilities of your car,” says Powers. “The only thing you can do without being a complete fool is find a track.” And a performance track has been lacking in the Kansas City area. There’s the Kansas Speedway, of course, but even if it was available for that kind of thing, its oval shape is not the best for probing the limits of performance street cars. Quick, former manager of the Brainerd International Raceway in Minnesota, explains: “With NASCAR you’re always turning left. On dragways it’s always straight. This type of racing is very technical, very competitive. That’s why you design the track with all these turns and twists.” The StoneGate track layout looks like a fancy paperclip or maybe a bent coat hanger. It will have twelve different racing configurations. The idea is to have a course route that can be changeable to keep things interesting. StoneGate’s was designed by Martyn
all manner of creature comforts, have been successful enough that Effertz plans to build more of them. Condo owners get lifetime track memberships as part of their deal. The condos list on his website starting at around $100,000. (Without a condo, the minimum for track membership is $15,000 for five years, put in escrow until the track is built.) “This really is like a private golf course in the sense that it is exclusive and [has] a somewhat limited membership,” says Effertz. “But the big difference is that there isn’t another one of these five miles away.” Many of Kansas City’s performance car owners have driven considerably farther than five miles to find a track to put a car through its paces, usually with groups that rent racing facilities for a day. The closest place to do that would be Heartland Park in Topeka. Heartland was closed in 2015 due to financial problems, only reopening to a full schedule last year. There are tracks in Pacific Junction,
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Iowa, Hastings, Nebraska, and St. Louis, too. But KC-area owners must haul the cars all the way there, sometimes only to find out on track day that there were mechanical problems. “The worst case is you load up your car, drive to a facility far, far away, and find
out something wasn’t right,” says Krull, who is enthusiastic enough about the StoneGate track to have sunk a six-figure investment into it. With the local track, “I’ll be able to head to an event with high confidence everything is ready to go.”
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Many high-end car owners still grieve the loss of Kansas City International Raceway, which closed in 2011 and was turned
into a city park. It was a local drag-racing strip that Powers remembers fondly. The track was known for providing a drag-racing outlet to teenagers for a small fee back in the day, even offering grudge matches, he says: “A lot of people said the street racing scene increased dramatically after they closed that drag strip.” But KCIR was the source of a lot of noise complaints from neighbors over the years, a fact Powers blames on development near the facility. That could be a cautionary tale for Effertz. Unincorporated Johnson County is developing a reputation for neighborhood objections about everything from wedding event centers to the ting, ting, ting of metal bats hitting balls in proposed batting cages. Neighbors did have questions when Effertz first brought his $5 million track project before county officials more than two years ago. But none were voicing complaints by the time his final approval went through in March. Effertz, a veteran of other business pursuits, including Barley’s Kitchen + Tap, says he has done his utmost to make sure noise is not a problem. Drivers will be
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racing the clock, not each other, so there will be no noisy bunches jockeying for position. One or two drivers will be on the track at a time, and there will be no night racing. Multiple noise studies, including one by an acoustics expert from the University of Kansas hired by the county, showed even with the loudest engines recorded and unfavorable winds, the track sounds dissipate by the time they reach any homes. “There’s more noise from regular cars going up and down Metcalf than a race car being out in the middle of the field,” Effertz says. Special events might bring up the volume a bit, but Effertz has to get permits if he wants to host any of those. He’s also promised to make the track available to law enforcement for training. Effertz hopes adding the track to the condos will bring the synergy to eventually transform his corner of Stilwell into a hub for auto-related business. He suggests the track could be an attractive testing ground for research on autonomous cars. There’s still land available, he says, for “companies that want to cozy up next to the test track for testing whatever types of products. So there’s
a need beyond the car culture.” And that car culture goes much deeper than money, Effertz and Quick note, though it’s true that the test track is aimed primarily at the wealthy. And indeed, the crowd at Cars and Coffee seems to encompass all ages
and income levels. Even car owners without a lot of money show up with their rides polished down to the lug nuts to display alongside the supercars. “It’s car people. Whether you’re interested in cars or not, you can’t help feeling the wow factor when you get in
the midst of all these cars out here,” he said. “They’re just beautiful to look at.” “It’s just passion,” Effertz says. “If you have a passion for something, you’re going to devote your resources to it. Just some guys have more resources to devote to it.”
IN THE HEART OF KCMO.
waldokc.org pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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ZACH BAUMAN
In 1898, the Wilkinson family settled on a farm just east of Lone Jack, Missouri. And there the family has stayed for the last 120 years. On a Tuesday afternoon in April, Jack and Carolyn Wilkinson — married 48 years — and their three children showed me around their original, certified-centennial homestead. Outside, cattle grazed quietly on pasture land. It’s a family-oriented community out here — the type of place where area residents chip in to help resurface the roads and gather every summer for the Hick City Ice Cream Social. Carolyn pointed toward the house to the east and noted that it’s inhabited by Wilkinson relatives, as is the one beyond that. That third house, too. Further in the distance, the metal roofs of silver barns rose above a ridge just south of their farmstead. We drove about 500 yards across the Wilkinsons’ pasture for a closer look at the barns, which sit on property owned by a man named David Ward. There are currently somewhere around 900 cows on Ward’s property awaiting the slaughterhouse (which is also located on his land). They’ll eventually be marketed as “locally grown beef with a one-of-a-kind flavor” and sold by Ward’s business, Valley Oaks Steak Company. Ward has bigger ambitions for his business, though. He intends to convert his property into a factory farm — what’s known as a confined animal feeding operation. CAFOs are unpleasant by nature and often contro-
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
A Load of Bull IS THE STATE OF MISSOURI REALLY GOING TO LET A FACTORY FARM MOVE IN NEXT TO POWELL GARDENS? WE’RE ABOUT TO FIND OUT. BY KAREN DILLON
versial. Scientific studies show that wind can carry the stench from factory farm waste five to six miles. Other studies, one as recent as January, have found that nearby property values can plummet as much as 50 percent. If Ward’s application with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources is approved, the number of cows on his property could rise to 6,999 — and these cows won’t be gently grazing in a field. They’ll instead be mashed together inside six massive, open-air barns, producing 420,000 pounds of poop and urine each day as they are fattened to be killed. Ward’s plans have turned this quiet, just-outside-the-city community upsidedown. Several neighborhoods surround his farm. An estimated 900 homes lie within a three-miles radius of Valley Oaks. Powell Gardens, one of the most beautiful and serene locations in the Kansas City area —it attracts over 100,000 tourists a year — lies about three miles east of Valley Oaks. Lone Jack is three miles west. Lee’s Summit and Lake Lotawana are 10-15 minutes away. The proposed Valley Oaks operation
would be unique in that nowhere else in Missouri is there a factory farm that’s been plunked down in the middle of a fast-growing residential area — much less near an institution as renowned as Powell Gardens. “This is highly unusual to put this right in the middle of a growing area,” says Tabitha Schmidt, president and CEO of Powell Gardens. “You wouldn’t put this next to the Nelson [Atkins Museum of Art].” As adjacent landowners who will be among the most affected by Ward’s CAFO, the Wilkinsons have helped spearhead opposition to it. Planted in the front yards of hundreds of nearby homes are signs that shout NO TO VALLEY OAKS and NO CAFO. “We are pro-farming and pro-business,” Jack Wilkinson says. “But we also believe in good neighbor practices and being responsible landowners.” Chad Wilkinson, Jack’s son, says the predicament the Wilkinsons and other Lone Jack residents face regarding Valley Oaks could just be the beginning if the state allows it to proceed as planned.
“I can tell you right now, they [CAFOs] are coming, they are going to go up like Walmarts, they are going to pop up everywhere,” he says. “Kansas City is going to wonder why, when a few of these factory farms drop into their neighborhoods.” •
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On April 3, the anger and frustration that has been simmering in and around Lone Jack over Valley Oaks came to a boil, when 600 people showed up in Warrensburg for a hearing convened by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Few in attendance were happy about the prospect of welcoming a factory farm as their new neighbor. Many landowners in the area suspect Ward will only be in the business for the short term and plans to eventually sell to foreign investors in China or South America — a sequence of events that happens with increasing regularity in rural America. Among those who spoke in opposition to the CAFO was a surprising figure: Woody Cozad. A Kansas City lawyer and lobbyist, Cozad is the former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party. He’s also a proponent of factory farms, and has represented CAFO companies in other parts of the state. He said he was shocked when he learned a CAFO was planned so close to Powell Gardens. He noted that, several years ago, one of
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from The Pitch for this story, was not present at the hearing. But he did have defenders, the most prominent being members of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association. Several speakers explained that CAFOs are the wave of the future and are necessary to feed the world. Other cattlemen said neighbors’ concerns of health, pollution, and property values were overblown. One farmer explained that manure odors are easy to deal with. “All you have to do is get in the shower and it washes off,” he said. The man’s thinking seemed to mirror that of William Gabel, the presiding commissioner of the Johnson County Commission. When I called Gabel, who was first elected to the office in 2010, he acknowledged that he had received 45 letters in opposition to the CAFO — the most he’s received in eight years as a commissioner. But he also said “there are a lot of people in favor of ” the CAFO. Asked to name a single resident who supported the Valley Oaks expansion in Johnson or Jackson Counties, or more specifically, in Lone Jack or the neighborhoods surrounding the industrial farm, Gabel found himself at a loss. Finally, he said that the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association “strongly supports it.” Gabel, who lives in Warrensburg, then said that several farmers had “indicated that they would love to have the manure from the CAFO and couldn’t wait to [buy] it.” When asked for the names of the farmers, Gabel said: “The farmer didn’t leave a name.” He added: “I’d like to have some [manure] on my lawn.” He then told a story about when he was a boy and his father made him clean a barn with a manure spreader. “I thought my dad was being so mean to me,” Gabel said. “Within an hour I didn’t notice the smell. It wasn’t fun work, but I took pride in it. I got to where I appreciated what [my dad] did.” •
Jack Wilkinson (top) and his family have organized opposition to the Valley Oaks CAFO. “They are going to kill the small farmer,” he says. ZACH BAUMAN
his clients was a very large CAFO in northern Missouri and that you could fly over the area in a helicopter and not see any houses for miles. “If you fly over Valley Oaks, you are going to see literally hundreds of homes…and businesses,” Cozad said. “Believe me, this [the Valley Oaks proposal] is unique. It is freakish that they are trying to put it where
it is.” Cozad said there are plenty of places in Missouri where farming populations have shrunk that would be perfect for such an operation — “and you are not going to destroy people’s homes and a tourist business with hundreds of thousands of visitors each year like Powell Gardens.” Ward, who did not respond to calls
•
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Though the Wilkinsons, Powell Gardens (which recently hired Aimee Davenport, an experienced environmental attorney, as its legal representation), and hundreds of other neighboring landowners are clearly in the majority in asking that the Valley Oaks permit application be denied, the odds are stacked high against them. State laws make it extremely difficult to fight a CAFO. Laws governing CAFOs favor new businesses, and MDNR officials have never turned down a so-called factory farm permit due to complaints of neighbors. “DNR says if [the industrial farm owners] fill out the paperwork, [the company is] good to go,” says Karen Lux, one of the lead organizers of Lone Jack Neighbors for Responsible Farming and a Wilkinson descendent. “Honestly, that is the truth. There
is nothing [MDNR] can do.” Because the Valley Oaks herd will be allowed to have one cow less than 7,000, the CAFO falls into what is called Class 1B, as opposed to Class 1A. That means MDNR can oversee and inspect the facility for violations of the Clean Water Act. But that’s it. Clean air pollution laws that govern particulates, bio-aerosols and dust, and public nuisance regulations regarding odors and insects (such as hordes of flies) won’t apply to Valley Oaks. One cow more and those regulations would apply. “We do recognize that odor and flies are a concern for these facilities, but they fall outside of the clean water laws,” says Jake Faulkner, chief of MDNR’s industrial permits. Because of staffing levels, inspectors will only visit the Valley Oaks facility once every five years. Faulkner notes that his agency will also respond to complaints about possible water pollution. But even if wrongdoing is found, bad actors now face little in the way of repercussions. Several years ago, neighbors of CAFOs, particularly in northern Missouri, were successfully suing owners of big industrial farms for being public nuisances, including one that resulted in an $11 million jury award in 2010. In response to heavy lobbying by such organizations as the Missouri Farm Bureau and the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, the state legislature — made up of a majority of Republicans — passed a law severely curtailing the amount of damages a jury can award in these types of cases. •
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It is possible that, should its permit be awarded, Valley Oaks will prove itself an engaged, responsible neighbor in Lone Jack. Documents obtained by The Pitch, though, show that Ward’s reputation regarding environmental laws and animal treatment is far from sterling. For one, Valley Oaks’ current permit application has received extensions because of a number of deficiencies including failure to submit engineering reports and water monitoring reports. In addition, the company was supposed to notify at least 22 residents about the CAFO last August, but those notices were not mailed until Feb. 1, by which time Valley Oaks was already building its barns. And last year, on Feb. 22, the United States Department of Agriculture suspended the inspection personnel at Valley Oaks for one day because of a violation of the Humane Slaughter Act. The reason? A USDA inspector discovered a Valley Oaks employee shooting a cow with a revolver. pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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NEWS
Hundreds of landowners in and around Lone Jack are asking that Valley Oaks’ permit application be denied. ZACH BAUMAN
For humane reasons, cows during the slaughtering process are supposed to be stunned using a captive bolt gun. Then, once they are unconscious, their necks are slit and bled out. On this February day, a USDA inspector heard two gunshots ring out and subsequently found a wounded steer wandering around still “ambulatory and alert.” An employee had shot the cow with a .22
mag revolver instead of using the captive bolt gun. Autumn Canaday, spokeswoman for USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, says the company was issued a correction action and suspension “due to the mis-stunning of livestock.” Valley Oaks had to provide the government with a corrective plan to inspectors.
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A year later, Ward’s Woodbury Homes of Grain Valley, pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of providing a false document to the EPA, according to EPA records and news stories. The document falsely stated that “Woodbury” had applied for a stormwater permit to develop a subdivision. Ward, the principal owner of Woodbury Homes, paid a $15,000 fine. None of this has stood in the way of Ward moving forward on his Valley Oaks plan, of course. County records indicate he has taken out $35 million in loans for the project. And even though the permit hasn’t yet been approved, he’s already building those silver barns.
Canaday says inspectors are continuing to closely monitor “the establishment to ensure that its processes are in compliance with humane handling regulations.” Since 1986, Ward has been buying property to develop subdivisions and selling land to builders. Here, too, he has run afoul of regulators. In 2004, a $13,500 civil judgment in Jackson County Circuit Court was assessed against David L. Ward, Randall W. Salle, and Wallee/Ward Investments Inc. for past violations of the Missouri Clean Water Law and Regulations at a construction site. And in 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency fined Ward’s company, Ward Development and Investment, $95,000 because of “an illegal discharge of pollutants associated with an industrial activity into waters of the United States” at its Woodbury Homes of Grain Valley site. The EPA said the $95,000 civil penalty was for five violations of the Clean Water Act: failure to conduct site inspections, failure to maintain pollution control measures, failure to obtain a permit, failure to implement an adequate stormwater solution prevention plan, and failure to implement appropriate best practices management.
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The members of the Lone Jack community who would rather not suffer the potential odors, pollution, and decreased property values likely to be caused by Valley Oaks may have one last chance to fight the CAFO off. Valley Oaks is believed to be supplying water to its current cows by using a residential water hookup that draws from a nearby
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water tower. In other words, it’s using the same water supply as an ordinary household. In January, Valley Oaks used 188,000 gallons of water. In comparison, an average household uses 8,000 to 10,000 gallons monthly. This arrangement is not feasible if Valley Oaks adds another 6,000 cows. Ron Brockhaus, general manager of Public Water Supply District No. 2., says he told Valley Oaks in March that it couldn’t use more water from the tower. He says several people have complained about possible water pressure problems. “They can’t add more cattle” until they resolve the water issue, Brockhaus says. “They have been told they can’t have more volume off that tower due to the supply and demand [by the other residents].” The company is discussing whether to dam a creek on its property and create a lake, or dig a new waterline from the direction of U.S. Route 50, pulling water from a different water tower, Brockhaus says. It’s unclear how long that might take. It’s also possible that Powell Gardens has enough sway with state officials to slow this thing down. To do so, they’ll have to go through the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association. And they’re not a
friendly bunch. In mid-April, I asked Mike Deering, executive vice president of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, why he felt it appropriate to support a CAFO located in an area next to 900 homes. Deering did not answer the question. In a statement, he said, “It is important that consumers have access to safe, affordable and nutritious food. The ‘experts’ say we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the previous 10,000 years combined.” He said the Ward family is on a quest to meet these growing demands. If this challenge isn’t met, Deering wrote, “I cannot even begin to describe the disaster that will be upon all of us.” In a subsequent phone call, I again asked Deering about the location of the CAFO. Why so close to Powell Gardens and all these homes? Was that necessary? “I’m on vacation, and I’m not going to talk to you now,” Deering said. “I haven’t had a vacation in five years.” Greg Buckman, the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association board president, also didn’t like the question about the placement of the CAFO. Buckman said he had visited the farm.
The Valley Oaks CAFO, as seen from the Wilkinsons’ property.
“I saw no problems with it,” he said. “It’s the most environmentally friendly farm I’ve ever seen.” I pointed out that he had visited the farm while it has only about 600 cows, and the Valley Oaks plan, should it receive its permit, is to house nearly 7,000 cows on the property. “They way they control it, it doesn’t
ZACH BAUMAN
matter if there are 900 cows or 3,900 cows,” Buckman said. He then said it wasn’t up to the association to determine where the CAFO should be located. “We support property rights,” Buckman said, “and if you want to do something legal in the state of Missouri, you should be able to do that.”
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It was 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and Brookside Poultry Company had already run out of chickens. There was plenty of chicken, explained our server, a supremely patient man named Justin. My tablemates and I could order an individual thigh, a craggy-coated breast, a pile of saucy drumettes, a something-salad sandwich. But the whole birds? 86’ed. I craned my neck to peek at the roaster behind the bar, where a lone fowl rotated slowly like a beauty pageant contestant. I suspected Justin was holding out on me. “We do have one duck left,” he said, following my gaze. “A couple other tables seemed interested, but if you’d like, I could put a hold on it for y—” “Put a hold on it!” I cried, slapping the table like a gambler. I hadn’t yet looked at
the menu; I wasn’t even sure I wanted the duck. But I’m a sucker for artificial scarcity — and, as I soon discovered, for Chef Charles d’Ablaing’s duck. Chef d’Ablaing opened Brookside Poultry Co. three months ago, and it should tell you something that the restaurant reliably runs out of its whole ducks and chickens long before the dinner rush (and if you want one, call ahead: while the staff won’t reserve tables, it will reserve birds). Much of that success is due to d’Ablaing’s reverent approach to the classics. All of the poultry is wet-brined for up to 72 hours to maximize juiciness; all of the condiments, from the wing sauce to the blue cheese dressing, are made from scratch in the restaurant’s stamp-sized open kitchen. Previously, d’Ablaing served as execu-
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tive chef for the Hotel Sorella and Webster House. But Brookside Poultry Co. is a lower-priced, lower-fuss outfit, the kind of Southern-inspired neighborhood eatery where Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin blare over the speakers while vellumskinned birds spin like jewels in a glassfront case. There’s wine, but it’s served in a can. There’s art on the walls, but it’s exhaustively, exclusively chicken-themed. You don’t get the sense that anyone involved hired (or knows) an interior decorator. And at these prices, you don’t much care. Exhibit A: the $4 fried chicken thigh, which swims in a sour-cream brine for two days before it’s cooked. You can order a breast for $7, and it’s fine, but there’s no reason to splurge. The thighs at Brookside Poultry Co. are boneless, but the brine keeps the meat tender and flavorful. The breading is crisp and thick without skewing greasy. I’d turn up the batter’s seasoning a bit — a single click of the spice dial — but it’s satisfying as-is. Even better are the fried wings, enormous drumettes tossed lightly in a tangy sauce so the breading stays shatteringly crisp. A disclaimer upfront: these are mild wings, not hot wings. I’d peg the heat level at “Christian Mingle.” But the sauce is irre-
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sistible nonetheless: a blush of heat, a touch of sweet, a vinegar twang that’s assertive but not too astringent. Although the cups of ranch and blue-cheese dressing served alongside were cool and creamy, what I really wanted was another cup of that wing sauce for dunking. If the restaurant offered a hotter but similarly balanced sauce, I’m not sure I’d order wings anywhere else. White-meat lovers can get a similar experience with the chicken tenders, pudgy spears of boneless breast meat tossed in that wing sauce. As much as I love wings, the trade-offs are tempting: the tenders come with saucy sliced jalapenos and tiny leaves of charred cabbage tipped with tongueteasing caramelized sugars. Most of the sides here are a la carte, but you can order any of the fried chicken dishes as an “entrée” for an extra $7. That expense nets you a generous helping of plump, butter-poached green beans and a small hill of gooey-creamy cheddar potatoes. This is rich fare, and the sides come dangerously close to gilding (greasing?) the lily. Just looking at the menu can make your jeans tighten around you in warning. The “Best Chicken Salad Sandwich”
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is the brightest and freshest-tasting option here. I don’t know if this rendition was the best I’d ever had, but it was certainly good. The spit-roasted chicken was moist, the dressing was clean and light, and the toppings were just right: thick slices of avocado, thin wheels of tomato, and a confetti sprinkle of alfalfa sprouts. Stout, soft slices of multigrain bread gave the sandwich structure without overwhelming it. Still, even that sandwich was leadened with a side of (very good) house fries — home fries, really, each chubby wedge handsomely browned and dusted with parmesan and chives. The fries came with a too-large ramekin of a pink-tinged sauce reminiscent of Comeback Sauce, a Southern staple blending mayo, ketchup, paprika, and chili. Brookside Poultry Co.’s version was benign — a little tangy, a little sweet, not much spice. If you want to get away from the deep fryer, stick with the spit-roasted poultry. I was glad I gambled on the duck on my first visit. I was doubly glad I ordered it before glancing at the menu, which described it as a “whole duckling.” The cutesy diminutive was a bit off-putting; I steeled myself for the
arrival of a teacup-sized Easter animal, batting its liquid eyes demurely at me from the plate. But if the bird I tried was a duckling, it had a Midwesterner’s grip on childhood obesity. The duck looked adult-sized, with more than enough meat for two hungry diners. And that meat — moist, dark, rich as Sheldon Adelson. I plucked a supple strand off the bone and my fingers came away dewy (don’t cringe: fat is flavor). And the skin was a dark mahogany-brown, crisp but light. At $32, that duck was the most expensive thing on the menu — though it was a fancypants, pasture-raised duck from the Barham Family Farm in Kearney. For $20, you can order a mutt duck of indeterminate origin. The flavor is similar, but you won’t get the semi-smug satisfaction that comes from eating local. Brookside Poultry Co. sells about half of its whole birds as carry-out orders, a sign that it’s already integrating smoothly into the neighborhood. Given the poultry’s consistency and relative value, it’s not hard to see why. D’Ablaing and his staff don’t waste time on dollhouse garnishes or pompous
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Celebrating 20 years! dish descriptions. They just put out solid food with a strong sense of identity. On each of my three visits, I left feeling refreshed (if a bit too full). The small, done-right menu is a welcome antidote to a restaurant moment dominated by master-of-none menus that can read like confused grab-bags of hipster clichés. Which is not to say that everything on Brookside Poultry Co.’s menu is perfect. The “Izabella” sandwich was promising but miscued the night I tried it — the chicken thigh was juicy, but the sandwich was a messy affair. Between the generous smear of chive aioli, the white wine-butter braise, and the weepy tomato slice, there was too much moisture to keep the delicate rice-flour breading crisp or the brioche bun intact. The cheddar biscuits were savory but doughy on one visit and so soft they fell apart on another. And the black-eyed pea soup was a bit bland, though the broth was silky and the beans tender. It also arrived after my dining companion and I had received — and finished — our entrées. The restaurant only seats 30, but the small kitchen can still seem overwhelmed at peak times. Even if you’re there on a busy night,
the dessert is worth waiting for. Brookside Poultry Co. offers two diner-style pies, both with chewy graham-cracker crusts. The key lime pie was perfectly textured, with a supple, silky-smooth custard. But the lime flavor was a bit too subtle; I wanted something sharper and brighter to round out the meal. I preferred the chocolate pie, which featured a divinely dense and sticky-smooth chocolate filling the texture of hot fudge. I wasn’t hungry when the plate arrived — I’d promised to share the dessert with the table — but I found myself parrying their forks away with the predatory hiss of a sheGollum. Hey, if you’re going to indulge, Brookside Poultry Co. is the place to do it. This is solidly a “buffet pants” kind of joint. After my first visit, I found myself prepping for the excursion the way other people do for hikes. “I’m almost ready,” I told my husband, probing my closet for a roomy cult robe or caftan. “I just need to change out of these skinny jeans.” If I keep eating at Brookside Poultry Co., I may never don them again. But if they keep making those wings, that’s a sacrifice I can live with.
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Bar Rescue TONGANOXIE’S REVAMPED MYERS HOTEL IS A TOWNIE BAR WORTH THE DRIVE. BY APRIL FLEMING
Six months ago, Kate Frick started the liquidation process on the Myers Hotel Bar, the Tonganoxie smart-cocktails destination she opened in 2015. Frick’s landlord had sold the property, and a new lease wasn’t forthcoming. She sold off the bar’s equipment, furniture, decorations — even the plants. Closing time. Then something unexpected happened. The building’s new owner, Doug Dowell, of Overland Park, met some of Frick’s former clientele. He heard about all the financial and emotional work she’d put into building the Myers. And, one month after the bar closed its doors, Dowell had a change of heart. Not only did he want Frick to reopen her bar — he wanted to sell the entire 139-year-old building to her. “He called and said, ‘I want you to buy the building, and I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse,’” Frick recalls. “[He said] ‘You guys have been the stewards. I don’t want to ruin what has already been
“HE CALLED AND SAID, ‘I WANT YOU TO BUY THE BUILDING, AND I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE.’”
established.’” Frick was stunned. “It was hard to wrap my head around that kind of kindness from a stranger,” she says. They negotiated a personal sale, and today Frick and her partner and girlfriend, Stephanie Marchesi, own the old hotel and the nearly two-acre lot on which it sits. The Myers Hotel has accommodated many enterprises in his long history. The building was once owned by Magdalena Bury, the founder of Tonganoxie. Mollie Myers ran her namesake hotel there from 18941931. Since then, it’s also been a diner, a cafe, a salon, and even, it is widely believed, the inspiration for the 1955 William Inge play Bus Stop (later adapted into a film starring Marilyn Monroe). The original neon sign for the Myers Hotel (weathered and minus the neon tubes) still hangs, almost impossibly, out front. Various architectural additions stacked on top of the original structure speak to
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how many hands have worked here over the years. The edges are rough, but, to use a realestate cliche, the place has excellent bones. That makes it an ideal canvass for somebody like Frick. An architect by training, Frick made a career swerve into mixology and bar management — her credits include opening Lawrence’s John Brown Underground — and is committed to renovating all 3,000odd square feet of the building (as opposed to just the 500 square feet in which the bar has been operating). Frick and Marchesi say they have no intention to ever run an actual hotel, but the building is already much more alive than it was just a few months ago. A coffee bar was built out of a bathroom, and light fare (banana bread made by Deb Crum of Crum’s Heirlooms and chocolate croissants) is available during the coffee shop’s Tuesday-through-Saturday morning hours. Hot breakfast is available on Saturdays. A cabin behind the main building was renovated into an Instagram-worthy Airbnb space, complete with cowhide rugs and a quaint, vintage-themed kitchen. A bar garden has been erected. A large ballroom is now furnished with vintage pieces, a game table, and a large, comfortable wrap-around couch beside an antique fireplace. “It feels almost like a friend’s house,”
she says. “It definitely changed the way people behave.” The cocktail program has been the big draw of the Myers Hotel Bar these past few years, and nothing’s changed on that front. The bar continues to serve drinks on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Frick changes the drinks menu at least 12 times a year, which keeps her motivated. When I visited, on a cold, late spring day, she served me her Picnic cocktail: gin, Barenjager and egg white, along with Herbsaint and fennel, garnished with bee pollen. It smelled like her garden out back: fresh earth and budding plants. (Lest anyone think she takes herself too seriously, the menu also includes drinks like the VFW: “vodka, fresca and whatever.”) While the bar and its $8-$12 cocktails has a more obvious appeal to urbanites — and it’s true, Frick says, that about half of the Myers’ customers come from Lawrence, Kansas City, and other surrounding towns — Frick seems to be gradually earning the business of a substantial number of customers here in Tongie, population 6,000. “I disappoint people on a daily basis that I don’t have Bud Light or Moscato,” Frick says. “There was definitely an element of education. But it is really fun, once you gain that trust — they will come in again and try anything.”
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Hole New World WITH ITS NEW NORTH KANSAS CITY HEADQUARTERS, THE RABBIT HOLE IS AIMING FOR THE CHILDREN’S-LITERATURE STARS. BY ANGELA LUTZ
Pete Cowdin stands in an expansive North Kansas City warehouse filled with bottled beverages stacked on wooden pallets. Everything in this three-story, 165,000-square-foot industrial space is made of raw, exposed concrete, amplifying the abnormally chilly spring day. Workers zip by on forklifts, moving at a speed that seems unsafe, glass clanking as the pallets are loaded onto waiting trucks. Cowdin puts his hands on his hips and takes a deep breath, surveying the room. “Isn’t it great?” he says. Soon, the bottling company that occupies this massive building will move out, and Cowdin and his partner, Deb Pettid, will take over the place. They bought it earlier this year with plans to convert it into the permanent home of the Rabbit Hole, a big-vision concept they’ve taken to calling the world’s first “explorastorium.” A what? “We want to create spaces where you can walk into literature and translate knowledge into an immersive experience,” Cowdin says. Among other things, Cowdin and Pettid hope to fill the warehouse with not only
life-size renderings of classic and contemporary children’s books, but also a bookstore, resource library, theater, and printing press/ bindery, with the whole thing functioning like a living piece of art in the style of St. Louis’ City Museum.
literature has been the central focus of their lives since 1988, when they opened the Brookside bookstore Reading Reptile. They closed the shop in 2016 and began devoting their time to a new, Crossroads-based nonprofit called the Rabbit Hole.
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Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid inside their future Explorasatorium. ZACH BAUMAN
Clousseau, about a painter whose hyper-realistic work comes to life and roams the streets of Paris. More than 3,500 people visited the exhibit, including Agee himself, and nearly every family bought a book. Knowing they wanted to continue down this path, and grow, Cowdin and Pettid began scouring the city for potential new locations. North Kansas City gradually emerged as a frontrunner. “We became fans of the area and the many wonderful things happening here in terms of new and smart development,” Cowdin says. “We spent almost two years searching for a home in downtown Kansas City and the Crossroads, but we found ourselves on the back end of that trend and consistently priced out. We feel like we’re on the front end of the North Kansas City phenomenon, and we can be a part of that.” The Rabbit Hole has taken on new life — and received more financial support — now that the physical location for its manifestation is secure, and they’re eyeing an opening date sometime next year. The estimated price tag to make everything happen, though, is steep: $10 to 12 million. But there are reasons to be optimistic they can pull it off. The couple has
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
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COTERIE THEATRE AT CROWN CENTER Jack and the Bean Mágico! | Now through May 20 2450 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. (816) 474-6552 or thecoterie.org QUALITY HILL PLAYHOUSE Billboard Blockbusters: Top 40 Hits Now through May 20 303 W. 10th St., Downtown Kansas City, Mo. (816) 421-1700 or QualityHillPlayhouse.com KANSAS CITY REPERTORY THEATRE Brother Toad & Welcome to Fear City Now through May 27 Copaken Stage, Downtown Kansas City, Mo. (816) 235-2700 AMERICAN JAZZ MUSEUM Pablo Sanhueza and the KC Latin Jazz All-Stars Saturday, May 5 at 8:30 p.m. Blue Room | AmericanJazzMuseum.org
A model design of the future Rabbit Hole. ZACH BAUMAN
a lot of experience with large-scale exhibitions, and during the Reading Reptile’s 27year run, it earned a national reputation and put Kansas City on many publishers’ radars. Cowdin and Pettid often made sculptures and planned events to coincide with authors’ visits. “We treated their work in a way that was not only respectful but also crazy and weird,” Cowdin explains. Also working to the Rabbit Hole’s advantage are the years Pettid spent working at children’s bookstores in New York and the extensive knowledge (and contacts) she picked up along the way. The nonprofit’s board — stacked with local and national literary stakeholders such as Linda Sue Park, Kate DiCamillo, and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) — reflects that. “You have to read good writers to understand what good writing is,” Pettid says. “Our team needs to be knowledgeable and confident regarding books, publishers, and editors to create context and value.” Cowdin says that, much in the same way that life lessons are cleverly hidden in the best children’s stories, layers of deeper meaning will be tucked into the Rabbit Hole’s eventual exhibits. It’s not just for kids, in other words, or even parents. It’s for everybody. “It will be like a garden, always growing,” he says. “But mostly it will just be a blast.”
FOLLY THEATER 40th Anniversary of Cyprus Avenue - Kelley Hunt Friday, May 11 at 8 p.m. 300 W. 12th St., Downtown Kansas City (816) 474-4444 or FollyTheater.org KANSAS CITY BALLET Peter Pan | May 11 - 20 Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (816) 931-8993 or kcballet.org KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY CHORUS Duruflé’s Requiem | Sunday, May 20 at 3 p.m. Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center (816) 471-0400 or kcsymphony.org STARLIGHT THEATRE On Your Feet! | May 22 – 27 at 8 p.m. 4600 Starlight Road, Kansas City, Mo. (816) 363-7827 or kcstarlight.com KAUFFMAN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS A Conversation with Mark Bittman Wednesday, May 23 at 7:30 p.m. Muriel Kauffman Theatre, Kauffman Center (816) 994-7222 or kauffmancenter.org UMKC CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC & DANCE June Summer Camps | Middle school–college age Conservatory.umkc.edu/festivals LYRIC OPERA OF KANSAS CITY 2018-2019 Season Subscriptions on sale now! West Side Story, Madama Butterfly, Così fan tutte and The Pearl Fishers | kcopera.org HARRIMAN-JEWELL SERIES 2018–2019 Stunning Season: The Philadelphia Orchestra, Joyce DiDonato, Swan Lake, Itzhak Perlman and more! hjseries.org Follow KCLiveArts on Facebook and sign up for E-News Alerts at KCLiveArts.org
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ARTS
Mengel plays a fiddler in a recent docu-drama on George Caleb Bingham. WIDE AWAKE FILMS
Goin’ Out West DANA MENGEL CHANNELS INDEPENDENCE’S FRONTIER SPIRIT IN “THE OREGON TRAIL SUITES.” BY LIBBY HANSSEN
When violinist Dana Mengel and his brothers were teenagers, they would practice music together in Woodlawn Cemetery, off Noland Road, a few blocks from their home in Independence, MO. It was quiet (plus there were no critics), with a beautiful view all the way to Blue Springs, but Mengel always wondered about the stories of the people buried in the ground beneath his feet. He still does, even though he’s now a full-grown adult who has lived his entire life in Independence. Starting sometime around 2014, Mengel’s affinity for the city’s history led him to start writing “The Oregon Trail Suites,” a strings composition that traces the journeys of families setting out across uncharted territories, facing uncertain challenges. “[The Oregon Trail] is special to me because it brought the nation together at a time when it was divided,” Mengel says. “[It’s] an epic story, and I just want to embellish on the greatness of it.” So, Mengel continues, “I laid down in a swale, in the wagon ruts up by the Bingham Mansion, and I just had this overwhelming pathological feeling that I was there and I could hear their [the pioneers’] voices. Not literal — it was more just a feeling. But I
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
hear that stuff in my head when I go play at my keyboard.” Though he spent 20 years making a living writing sacred choral music, Mengel has recently turned his attention back to instrumental compositions. Along with orchestra pieces (he’s currently on his fifth symphony), he’s written about 300 “prairie dances,” as he calls them: works for violin and cello that he plays with his brother Leslie in the Mengel Brothers Duo. (Most Sunday evenings, you can find the Mengel Brothers Duo at Chaz on the Plaza, performing original compositions as well as strings arrangements of pop, rock, and classical songs.) Some of those “prairie dances” are inspired by the work of George Caleb Bingham, the famous Missourian celebrated for his portraiture and genre paintings depicting ordinary lives in the American frontier. The River Market-based film production company Wide Awake Films recently made a docudrama about Bingham, An American Artist: The Life and Times of George Caleb Bingham, which has aired on PBS. Mengel has a cameo in the film (he plays a fiddler) and the duo recorded music for the soundtrack. (They’re in good company: the other music in the film was performed by Yo-Yo Ma.) “Bing-
ham really captures humanity,” Mengel says, “He was just so close to nature.” On the third weekend of May, Independence will host a three-day celebration called “Party Like It’s 1843,” to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Great Migration of 1843, when roughly 1,000 pioneers left Independence for Oregon. Among the festivities: a full-string
emotional journey of the trail, from Wayne City Landing all the way to Oregon City, with the movement of the wagons, the river crossings, the excitement, fear, lonesomeness, joy, and relief. “I’m describing thunder and lightning and crossing the depths of these rivers, so the music is dynamic and in-your-face — it’s scary,” Mengel says. “But then there’s a lot of
SOUNDS FROM THE OREGON TRAIL SUNDAY, MAY 20, AT THE NATIONAL FRONTIER TRAILS MUSEUM, 2 P.M. MORE INFO: PARTYLIKEITS1843.ORG. (MORE ON AN AMERICAN ARTIST: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM AT BINGHAMFILM.COM.)
orchestra, with percussion, performing selections from “The Oregon Trails Suite” for the first time. The musicians will be dressed in period garb, and a multimedia component will add historical images, quotes, and context. Mengel’s suite is tuneful and soulful, but, rather than recreating the folk music of the era, he channels the influences of Antonín Dvořák, Béla Bartók, and Jean Sibelius into the music. It traverses the physical and
music that’s romantic, like Dvořák — lots of rich, soulful, pining music, longing for a better life.” Mengel says he hopes those contrasts will add up to something more nuanced and evocative for listeners — maybe something closer to the voices he heard lying on the ground outside the Bingham Mansion. “It makes you have compassion for these people,” he says, “rather than just the history.”
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MUSIC
The Voice THERE AIN’T ANY LIP-SYNCING ON MISS DAISY BUCKËT’S DEBUT. BY NICK SPACEK
It’s a chilly, late-March afternoon up on the roof of the new Messenger Coffee headquarters in the Crossroads. Spencer Brown is sipping coffee and wearing a hoodie over a denim jacket covered in enamel pins — a far cry from the ornate gowns and fancy cocktails favored by Brown’s alter ego, the drag performer known as Miss Daisy Buckët. The topic today is Pansy, Buckët’s recently released debut album. “I’ve always wanted to do a record,” Brown, 33, says, “but I never knew the right people.” Brown has been knocking around KC’s drag scene for more than a decade, but musicians and drag performers don’t overlap as often as you might think. He recalls that, early in his drag career, after singing at an audition, he was told to come back with a
pre-recorded song to lip-sync to. He recorded his own vocals and lip-synced to that. He did not get the gig. Over the years, Brown developed Daisy’s character in the few local joints — Bar Natasha and Missie B’s, home to Late Night Theater — where drag existed. Miss Buckët made her first appearance on the scene in 2006, and Brown joined the “dragapella” quartet the Kinsey Sicks in 2008 as Trampolina. Since then, it’s been a full-time gig. It was at Late Nite Theatre that Brown met Kimmie Queen, the lead singer for local rock ‘n’ roll act the Philistines. They were in A Scary Carrie Christmas Carol together, then later worked together on The Rose, with Brown starring in the Bette Midler role. During The Rose, Queen’s Philistines bandmate, guitarist Cody Wyoming, helped put Spencer Brown as Daisy Buckët.
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
MUSIC
together the band that backed Brown every night. “We put a real rock band together for it, and really hammered out a rock show in a play format every night,” Wyoming says. “When it was over, I told Spencer, ‘If you ever need a rock band for something else, call me.’” It took a few years, but eventually Brown booked some studio time at North Kansas City’s Sound81 to record the majority of Pansy’s tracks with Justin Wilson. Brown contacted Queen and Wyoming, and they, along with the rest of the Philistines — Steve Gardels (drums), Rod Peal (guitar), Josh Mobley (keys), and Barry Kidd (bass) — helped bang out almost the entire record out in a couple of days. They weren’t the only local band Brown pulled into the studio, either. For the Daisy version of Li’l Johnson’s bawdy blues number “Hot Nuts,” he brought in the folk duo Victor & Penny. The record is predominantly covers, but they’re diverse in genre: Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know,” Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” and Paris Hilton’s
“MY STRONG SUIT IS INTERPRETING OTHER SONGS, OR BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO OLD SONGS. BUT I KNEW IF I WAS GOING TO HAVE THIS OUT THERE, I WANTED TO HAVE A COUPLE OF MY OWN PERSONAL TOUCHES ON IT.”
“Stars Are Blind” — which was the first song Daisy ever performed solo. “Some of these songs I’ve had in my pocket a long time, and some of them I’ve just kind of found accidentally,” Brown says. “That [“Stars Are Blind”] was the only blast from the past in Daisy’s background that happened.” Everybody expects pop songs from a drag queen, of course, but the two original tracks — written and recorded by Brown — on Pansy both subvert the “bold and brassy” drag cliche. But Brown’s not so sure. “Oooof — [those are] not my favorite,” Brown says. “My strong suit is interpreting other songs, or breathing new life into old songs. But I knew if I was going to have this out there, I wanted to have a couple of my own personal touches on it. It’s up to the world to determine whether they like it or they hate it. “It’s a very gay record,” Brown concludes, as we collect our coffee cups and head back inside, “and at this time and in this political climate, having something like this is important.”
SAVAGE LOVE
Spring Flings REENTERING THE WORLD OF ONE-NIGHT STANDS; THE REPERCUSSIONS OF SNOOPING; A PORN FESTIVAL BY DAN SAVAGE
Dear Dan: I’m a 36-year-old straight woman. I was sexually and physically abused as a kid, and raped in my early 20s. I have been seeing a great therapist for the last five years, and I am processing things and feeling better than I ever have. I was in a long-term relationship that ended about two years ago. I started dating this past year, but I’m not really clicking with anyone. I’ve had a lot of first dates, but nothing beyond that. My problem is that I’d really love to get laid. The idea of casual sex and one-night stands sounds great — but in reality, moving that quickly with someone I don’t know or trust freaks me out, causes me to shut down, and prevents me from enjoying anything. Even thinking about going home with someone causes me to panic. When I was in a relationship, the sex was great. But now that I’m single, it seems like this big, scary thing. Is it possible to get laid without feeling freaked out? Sexual Comfort And Reassurance Eludes Dame Dear SCARED: It is possible for you to get laid without feeling freaked out. The answer — how you go home with someone without panicking — is so obvious, SCARED, that I’m guessing your therapist has already suggested it: Have sex with someone you know and trust. You didn’t have any issues having sex with your ex because you knew and trusted him. For your own emotional safety, and to avoid recovery setbacks, you’re going to have to find someone willing to get to know you — someone willing to make an emotional investment in you — before you can have sex again. You’ve probably thought to yourself, “But everyone else is just jumping into bed with strangers and having amazing sexual experiences!” And while it is true that many people are capable of doing just that, at least as many or more are incapable of having impulsive one-night stands because they, too, have a history of trauma, or because they have other psychological, physical, or logistical issues that make one-night stands impossible. (Some folks, of course, have no interest in one-night stands.) Your trauma left you with this added burden, SCARED, and I don’t want to minimize your legitimate frustration or your anger. It sucks, and I fucking hate the people who victimized you. But it may help you feel a little better about having to make an investment in someone before becoming intimate — which really isn’t the worst thing in the world — if you can remind yourself that you aren’t alone. Demisexuals, other victims of trauma, people with bodyimage issues, people whose sexual interests are so stigmatized they don’t feel comfortable
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THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
disclosing them to people they’ve just met — lots of people face the same challenge you do. Something else to bear in mind: It’s not unheard of for someone reentering the dating scene to have some difficulty making new connections at first. The trick is to keep going on dates until you finally click with someone. In other words, SCARED, give yourself a break and take your time. Also, don’t hesitate to tell the men you date that you need to get to know a person before jumping into bed with him. That will scare some guys off, but only those guys who weren’t willing to get to know you — and those aren’t guys you would have felt safe fucking anyway, right? So be open and honest, keep going on those first dates, and eventually you’ll find yourself on a fifth date with a guy you can think about taking home without feeling panicked. Good luck. Dear Dan: This is about a girl, of course. Pros: She cannot hide her true feelings. Cons: Criminal, irascible, grandiose sense of self, racist, abstemious, self-centered, anxious, moralist, monogamous, biased, denial as a defense mechanism, manipulative, liar, envious, and ungrateful. She is also anthropologically and historically allocated in another temporal space continuum. And last but not least: She runs less quickly than me despite eight years age difference and her having the lungs of a 26-year-old nonsmoker. Thoughts? Desperate Erotic Situation Dear DES: If someone is criminal, racist, and dishonest — to say nothing of being allocated in another temporal space continuum (whatever the fuck that means) — I don’t see how “cannot hide her true feelings” lands on the “pro” side of the pro/con ledger. You shouldn’t want to be with a dishonest, moralizing bigot, DES, so the fact that this particular dishonest, moralizing bigot is incapable of hiding her truly repulsive feelings isn’t a reason to consider seeing her. Not being able to mask hateful feelings isn’t a redeeming quality — it’s the opposite. Dear Dan: My boyfriend and I love each other deeply, and the thought of breaking up devastates me. We also live together. I deeply regret it and am full of shame, but I impulsively went through his texts for the first time. I found out that for the past few months he has been sexting and almost definitely hooking up with someone who I said I was not comfortable with. After our initial conversation about her (during which I expressed my discomfort), he never brought her up again. Had I known that he needed her in his life this badly, I would have taken some time to sit with my feelings and
figure out where my discomfort with her was coming from and tried to move through it. We are in an open relationship, but his relationship with her crosses what we determined as our “cheating” boundary: hiding a relationship. How do I confess to what I did and confront him about what I found without it blowing up into a major mess? Upset Girl Hopes Relationship Survives Dear UGHRS: Snooping is always wrong, of course, except when the snooper discovers something they had a right to know. While there are definitely less-ambiguous examples (cases where the snoopee was engaged in activities that put the snooper at risk), your boyfriend violating the boundaries of your open relationship rises to the level of “right to know.” This is a major mess, UGHRS, and there’s no way to confront your boyfriend without risking a blowup. So tell him what you know and how you found out. You’ll be in a better position to assess whether you want this relationship to survive after you confess and confront. CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! Amateur filmmakers, porn-star wannabes, kinksters, regular folks, and other creative types are hereby invited to make and submit short porn films—five minutes max — to the 14th Annual HUMP! Film Festival. The 13th Annual HUMP! Film Festival is currently touring the country — go to humpfilmfest. com to find out when HUMP! is coming to your town — and the next HUMP! kicks off in November. HUMP! films can be hardcore, softcore, live action, animated, kinky, vanilla, straight, gay, lez, bi, trans, genderqueer — anything goes at HUMP! (Well, almost anything: No poop, no animals, no minors.) HUMP! is screened only in theaters, nothing is released online, and the filmmakers retain all rights. At HUMP! you can be a porn star for a weekend in a theater without having to be a porn star for eternity on the internet! There’s no charge to enter HUMP!, there’s $20,000 in cash prizes awarded to the filmmakers by audience ballot (including the $10,000 Best in Show Award!), and each filmmaker gets a percentage of every ticket sold on the HUMP! tour. For more information about making and submitting a film to the best porn festival in the country, go to humpfilmfest.com/submit. Require more Savage Love? savagelovecast.com @fakedansavage on Twitter
pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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EVENTS • Voted KC’s Best Gentleman’s Club • Oldest Adult Club in Missouri • 70 Girls • VIP Lounge • Great Place to Watch Sporting Events • Full Service Kitchen • Cover Friday & Saturday ONLY! • Premium Bottle Service
30 seconds East of the Power & Light District 2800 East 12th St., Kansas City, MO 64127 816.231.9696 • KcShadyLady.com
MAY 1-6
MAY 4-5
Down in Mississippi, The Living Room
Guadalupe Centers Cinco de Mayo Fiesta, Guadalupe Center
Truls Mørk & Behzod Abduraimov,The 1900 Building
MAY 2 & 6
VIP Dance Competition, Kansas City Convention Center
MAY 2
MAY 5
Jazz 101: Open Jam with Jacob Be., Jazzhaus
Kansas City Ballet Dance-AStory, Wonderscope Children’s Museum
MAY 3
Kansas City Jazz Academy Showcase, American Jazz Museum
K.Flay, The Truman
Kevin Morby, RecordBar
¡Three Amigos! Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse
NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, Bier Station
TJ Hooker-Taylor, American Jazz Museum
Plaza PopCon, Plaza Library
MAY 4 From Galway, Ireland: Baile An Salsa in Concert, Drexel Hall Jazz Storytelling, American Jazz Museum Martin Lawrence, Sprint Center “May the 4th Be With You” Night for Grown-ups, National Museum of Toys and Miniatures Playmates and soul mates...
MAY 4-6
Dog Days in the Heartland, B&B Shawnee 18 & Overland Park 16
Patty Griffin, Liberty Hall
Girls!Girls!Girls!
The 8th Annual Kansas City Burlesque Festival, Opera House Coffee & Food Emporium
The Derby Party, Kansas City Museum
MAY 6 Airplane! Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse Prohibition in Kansas City, Central Library
MAY 9-27 Disney’s The Lion King, Kansas City Convention Center
MisterWives, The Truman
MAY 8, 15, 22, & 29
Wild & Scenic Film Festival, Liberty Hall
Abel Ramirez Big Band Dance, Camelot Ballroom
MAY 10
30 minute Free trial 18+ 816-841-1577 // 913-279-9202 46
THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
HAIM, with Lizzo, Uptown Theater Kansas City:
816-841-1521
Jason Aldean, Sprint Center 18+ MegaMates.com
80s Prom, Delta Athenaeum
Jimmy Eat World, The Truman
An Evening with Tracy K. Smith, Central Library
Laurel Gagnon, The 1900 Building
Modest Mouse, Starlight Theatre
MAY 16
The Breeders, The Truman
Brian Jonestown Massacre, RecordBar
MAY 11-12 Workers Revival Fest, RecordBar
MAY 12 The Color Run 5K, Arrowhead Stadium Tiffany Haddish, Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland
Southern Culture on the Skids, Knuckleheads
MAY 18
Joey Bada$$, The Truman Third Friday, Downtown Overland Park Yard Games Happy Hour, Kansas City Community Gardens
MAY 18-19 Bluegrass in the Bottoms, Knuckleheads School of Dance End-of-Year Showcases, Lawrence Arts Center
MAY 18-20 Tasty Expo, Overland Park Convention Center Trevor Noah, Starlight Theatre
MAY 19
MAY 13
5th Annual Spring Fling, American Jazz Museum
Alan Cumming, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
KC Invitational Doubles Pro Tennis Tournament & White Party, Carriage Club
Mrs. Doubtfire Mother’s Day Brunch, Alamo Drafthouse
2018
Godspeed! You Black Emperor, RecordBar
Yefim Bronfman, Folly Theater
Helmet, The Truman
OD & WIN FO E
Yo Gotti, Uptown Theater
NG NI
SAVOR AN
MAY 15 MUSIC RT, FA O
MAY 11
EV E
EVENTS
Spring Whiskey Tasting Festival, Hush Speakeasy Strawberry Swing, Alexander Majors Barn
rée i o s en d r a ag BE OUR GUEST AT THE EVENT OF THE SUMMER! Come join The Arts & Recreation Foundationof Overland Park for an evening of fun at theOP Arboretum & Botanical Gardens. Enjoy the new “Whirlwind: Art in Motion” exhibition displayed throughout delightful landscapesas you’re treated to fine wine, delicious food, and a variety of entertainment options – including a dazzling fireworks display. It’s the premier networking event of the season!
JUNE 23 7-11 p.m. At the beautiful Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens
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pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
47
EVENTS
Thank you To our 2018 parTners! kiDS’ Run
PRESEntinG
aftER-baSh
PREmiER
majOR
MAY 20
MAY 25
Tour De Bier, Knuckleheads
James Comey, Uptown Theater
MAY 21 Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, Central Library
ZAK NEUMANN/LITTLE VILLAGE
Wolf Parade, The Truman
Platinum Anderson Erickson Dairy BKD Bryan Cave Demdaco Discover Vision Centers Edelman & Thompson Empower Retirement Garry Gribbles Running Sports by JackRabbit Kansas City Life Kansas City Mavericks Lathrop & Gage, LLP Mobank New Balance OHF (Offering Hope Foundation) Parker Polsinelli Ward Parkway GOlD Alphapointe AT&T Belfonte Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City Crestwood Helix Architecture + Design Hunt Family Foundation / Kansas City Chiefs Kansas City Eye Clinic Kurt Kavanaugh Orthodontics Janise & Marc Naugton Angie & Chris Nease Olathe Medical Center Prairie Capital State Street SilVER Action Mailing Ash Grove Cement Atlantic Aviation
Bank of America Lisa & Curt Chase Children’s Mercy Hospital Pediatric Ophthalmology Commerce Bank Cook Paper Recycling Corp. Cosentino’s Price Chopper Country Club Bank Shirley Doering Duffens Optical Durrie Vision Dysart Taylor Cotter McMonigle & Montemore Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Eye Associates Fike First Federal Bank of Kansas City Hallmark Cards HOK Hufft Husch Blackwell LLP JE Dunn Construction Kansas City Southern Charitable Fund Kiewit Theresa & Matt Linski Mariner Foundation Shelly & Kevin Marsh McFamily Foundation MMC Corp NASB NIC O’Toole Trolley Run Team Pilates 1901 Populous Retina Associates RSM Caryll & John Schultz SPS Companies Sutherlin Optical
TheraSport - Knit Rite Tortoise Capital Tradewind Energy Turner Construction Vine Oh! VML Foundation Williams Foods Inc./C.H. Guenther & Son, Inc. bROnZE ARIXX/J. Colin Leach Bliss Associates BlueScope Steel C3 Centric Children’s Mercy Hospital Sally & Charley Cobb Mary Lynne Dolembo Douglas R. Peete & Associates Mark Eagleton Ernst & Young Eye Care for Animals Fairway Animal Hospital F.I.T. Muscle & Joint Clinic Barb & Jon Haden HALDEX Helzberg Diamonds IQVIA Dr. Nathan Klein, DDS KPMG Krigel & Krigel PC Labconco Lee Jeans Littlefield Eye Associates Meara Welch Brown PC Midwest Builders Casualty Pareto Marketing Payne & Jones Pediatric Associates Peterson Manufacturing Plaza Animal Clinic Sandy Rose
Superior Bowen The Whole Person Carmen & Denny Thum Unified Life Kim & Phil Witt Woodmaster Tools Ben Tarbe Used Bricks Sun lifE aftER-baSh Argosy Casino Anderson Erickson Dairy AT&T Betty Rae’s Ice Cream Bledsoe’s Rental, Inc. Crows Coffee Eat Fit Go (Prairie Village) Farm to Market Bread Co. FIT Muscle and Joint Hostess Louisburg Cider Mill McDonalds Moosejaw Nothing Bundt Cake Papa Murphy’s Pickleman’s Raising Cane’s Snacks on Racks Southwest Airlines Team Fidelis Trader Joe’s US Foods Velvet Creme Popcorn in-kinD DSS First Watch Restaurants Gill Studios Hammer Brothers Hampton Inn Yelp Partners as of 4/15/18. We regret errors or ommisions.
For raCe InForMaTIon:
TroLLeyrun.orG Learn about us: ccvi.org 48
THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
ZAK NEUMANN/LITTLE VILLAGE
mEDia
Wye Oak, RecordBar
MAY 22-27 On Your Feet! The Musical, Starlight Theatre
MAY 23 An Evening Celebrating the Music, Art & Culture of Lithuania, The 1900 Building The Decemberists, with Eleanor Friedberger, Uptown Theater
MAY 24 Fashion Honors Autism, Black Tie Charity Fashion Show, River Market Event Place
Melvins, with All Souls, RecordBar Poison, Sprint Center
MAY 26 Found a Job (Talking Heads tribute), Knuckleheads Nanobrew Festival, Berkley Riverfront Park
MAY 27 A La Mode Celebration at The Station, Union Station
MAY 29 Kimbra, The Madrid The Head & The Heart, Starlight Theatre
MAY 31 #IMomSoHard, Starlight Theatre
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BACCALA’ STRIP CLUB NOW HIRING DANCERS
816-753-5576
Colliers International. EHO
Contact Frank 7pm-3am Mon-Sat
CALL TODAY! KS-KCKS | $515-$615 913-299-9748 HEAT & WATER PAID... NO GAS BILL! KCK 25 acre setting. 63rd & Ann 5 minutes west of I-635 & I-70. One bedroom $505. Two bedroom $620. No Pets Please. You CAN NOT BEAT this value! Don’t miss out on this limited time offer!
NEWto see& what RESALE ALL AREAS | ALL PRICES Want your Short Sales-Foreclosures-Condos
CALL NOW
4000
home is worth?
Sharon Sigman, rE/maX STaTELinE 913-488-8300 or 913-338-8444 www.FormLS.com
BUY, SELL, TRADE
Hydroponic, Aquaponic, & Aeroponic Systems
WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interest. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, CO 80201
Something for everyone!
Call NOW! MUCH NICER THAN THE PRICE!
Classifieds
steven.suarez@pitch.com 816-218-6732
Mon-Sat 10aM-6pM Year-roundgarden.com
117 S Mur-Len oLathe, KS 66062 913-397-0594
816-741-5040 | 2109broadwaylofts.com
THERAPUETIC MASSAGE
$
Lic.# 001567
Saundra 816.896.9344
Secluded Cabin
5 miles from Montauk State Park and Current River.
Spacious one-bedroom cabin, sleeps four. $ /night
85
25 one-time cleaning fee
$
50
901-233-4496
THE PITCH | May 2018 | pitch.com
Small Pets Welcome!
In-Suite Washer and Dryer
Emergency Call Systems
Central Air Conditioning
Beauty Salon & Large Community Room
Patios/Balconies
Close to Shopping, Restaurants, and Places of Interest
Smoke-Free Living
Fitness Center
Elevator/Secure Entry
19301 East Eastland Center Court | Independence, MO 64055 eastlandcourt@clovergroupinc.com
AUCTION DATE: 6/6/18 WEATHER PERMITTING
YR MAKE/MODEL
available Jan. 5th 2 bed. 2 bath | 1477 SQ. FT. $1515
By appointment only.
Free Heat, Electric, Cable, Water & Garbage
The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, June 6th, 2018 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full. For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.
1/2 month off special 1 bed. | 1314 SQ. FT. $1375
45/hour
BRAND NEW, 1&2 BEDROOM APARTMENTS FOR THE ACTIVE ADULT (55+)
N OW L E A S IN G!
Townhomes-Single Family Homes.
816-231-3150
816-363-9684
Hemp Oil Tincture, Topical, Edibles, Lotion, Lip Balm and E-Juice
Please email your resume to sarah@lomavistawest.org or brenda@lomavistawest.org
$400-$850 Rent 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments & 3 Bedroom HOMES.
WHER E NEIGHB O RS A R E BES T FR IENDS
HAVE YOU LIKED US ON FACEBOOK YET?
The Pitch Kansas City
2003 Honda Civic 2005 Buick Century 2013 Chevrolet Malibu 1999 Subaru Legacy 2005 Chevrolet Impala 2002 Mazda 626 1997 Isuzu Rodeo 1999 Saturn SL1 1999 Honda CR-V 2000 Oldsmobile Alero 2001 Buick Lesabre 2000 Buick Lesabre 1996 Chrysler LHS 2001 Chevrolet Malibu 2012 Ford F350 2000 Dodge Dakota 2000 Honda Accord 2004 Gulf Stream Innsbruck Trailer 2005 Chopper Custom ASV 2005 Ford F250 1996 Saturn SL2 1999 Infiniti I30 2015 Ford Fusion 2014 Nissan Edge 2009 Pontiac G3 2009 Ford Focus 1999 Dodge Avenger 2001 Oldsmobile Silhouette 1997 Chrysler Sebring 2000 Ford Escort
VIN# 1HGES16593L026075 2G4WS52J351117862 1G11D5RR1DF117900 4S3BD6850X7243258 2G1WF52EX59171889 1YVGF22C725299258 4S2CM58V4V4323003 1G8ZH5282XZ211622 JHLRD1868XC008675 1G3NF52E5YC329409 1G4HP54K21U265015 1G4HP54K2YU139456 2C3HC56F6TH219553 1G1ND52J716133939 1FDUF5HT7CEC53525 1B7GL22X2YS525783 1HGCG2255YA008079 1NL1NTM2241055904 SW102500R1HTUC184 1FTSX21535EB79722 1G8ZK527XTZ162334 JNKCA21A8XT777949 3FA6P0G72FR293407 5N1AT2ML1EC798280 KL2TD66E99B665491 1FAHP33N29W265543 4B3AU52N8XE157173 1GHDX03EX1D218696 4C3AU42N7VE176405 3FAKP1138YR221723
YR MAKE/MODEL 2006 Kia Rio 2005 Jeep Liberty 1989 Buick Reatta 1997 Dodge Ram Van 2001 Dodge Stratus 2001 Volkswagen Passat 1996 Chrysler Cirrus 1999 Chrysler Concorde 1975 Ford Van 2003 Jeep Liberty 2008 Toyota Prius 2004 Lincoln KS 2003 Chevrolet Impala 2007 Chrysler 300C 2017 Toyota Yaris IA 2002 Ford Taurus 2015 Hyundai Sonata 2011 Nissan Maxima 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee 2000 Honda Odyssey 1991 Jeep Wrangler 2009 Mercury Grand Marquis 2010 Toyota Prius 2015 Ford Mustang 2012 Nissan Versa 2012 Nissan Maxima 2008 GMC Acadia 1999 Pontiac Bonneville 2013 Volkswagen GT1 2003 Dodge Ram 1500
VIN# KNADE123066108492 1J4GL38K65W659213 1G4EC11C5KB900357 2B6HB21X7VK603817 1B3EJ46X61N676473 WVWTH63B01P289413 1C3EJ56H3TN127415 2C3HD46J6XH642599 E26AHV64416 1J4GK48K13W565892 JTDKB20U483455736 1LNHM87A34Y636564 2G1WF52E339429618 2C3KA63H87H684672 3MYDLBYVXHY155906 1FAHP56S92G110694 5NPE34AF4FH084133 1N4AA5AP4BC833821 1J4GR48K25C651163 2HKRL186XYH593474 2J4FY19P7MJ110704 2MEHM75V79X636397 JTDKN3DU6A1145340 1FA6P8CF5F5362816 3N1BC1CP6CK222010 1N4AA5AP9CC836375 1GKER23798J279488 1G2HX52K4XH219151 WVWHV7AJ1DW138377 1D7HU16DX3J600908
Many of these vehicles run and drive. If you are looking for cheap transportation, don’t miss this auction/sale. We welcome all buyers. Terms of auction: All sales are “as is” “where is”. No guarantees or warranties. Paper work to obtain new title will be $75.00 Per vehicle. No guarantee that paperwork will produce title. Bidding will be number only. Terms are cash or certified check. Vehicles must be paid for in full at end of auction. No exceptions. All sales are final. No returns.
INSURANCE AUTO AUCTION 2663 SOUTH 88TH ST. KCKS, 66111 913-422-9303
C
S D E I F I S S LA
To place a classified advertisement call Steven Suarez 816.218.6732 steven.suarez@pitch.com
NOW HIRING
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9627 W. 87TH STREET 7932 W. 151ST STREET OVERLAND PARK, KS OVERLAND PARK, KS 913-730-8520 913-257-5717 www.phoenixnaturalwellness.com
Greg Bangs
for a FREE consultation
Scared? Anxious? Confused? HELP IS HERE! DWI, Solicitation, Traffic, Internet Crimes, Hit & Run, Power & Light Violations, Domestic Assault Criminal Defense Attorney
David M. Lurie
816-221-5900 www.The-Law.com
Now hiriNg part-time eveNt Staff COnCerts, COnventiOns, and sPOrting events
Apply in person 4050 Pennsylvania ave ste 111 KCMO 64111
or online www.CrOwdsysteMs.COM pitch.com | May 2018 | THE PITCH
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