Vox Magazine April 2019

BINDING BOOKS TO DIVERSITY PAGE 16

PAQUIN TOWER: IMPERFECT, HOME

LOOKING AT LIFE WITH BIPOLAR

PAGE 20

PAGE 26

SPICE UP YOUR WING GAME PAGE 44

THE VOICE OF COLUMBIA ï‚&#x; APRIL 2019

Run the world F I V E L E A D E R S MAKE THEIr MARK ON COLUMBIA College President

Chief Financial Officer

Reverend

High School Principal Partner at a Law Firm

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Missouri Contemporary Ballet & Columbia Chorale: Carmina Burana Friday/Saturday April 5 & 6 | 7pm Missouri Theatre

Glenn Miller Orchestra Saturday, April 13 | 7pm Missouri Theatre

BOX OFFICE 203 S 9th Street | Columbia 573-882-3781

www.concertseries.org

MU Choral Union: Mozart’s Requiem Thursday, April 25 | 7pm Missouri Theatre

Ozark Mountain Daredevils Friday, May 3 | 7pm Missouri Theatre

FROM THE EDITOR E DI T OR -I N -CHI E F KEEGAN POPE

REDEFINING ROLES

DE PUT Y E DI T OR STEN SPINELLA M AN AGI N G E DI T O R ELIZABETH ELKIN DI GI TAL M AN AGI N G E D IT O R MCKENNA BLAIR

F

ive months ago, I started brainstorming ideas for a package on Columbia’s hidden movers and shakers. I even penned a working title for it: “Hidden Power Brokers.” I searched far and wide for people outside the public eye who held influence and importance in our city. Much of my research led me to real estate developers, business executives and medical practitioners — most of whom were white men.

After weeks of work, I had somehow ended up with a group composed of people who weren’t hidden at all. Back to the drawing board. This time, I focused specifically on finding women, the 49 percent of our society that for generations has been held back from achieving the kind of influence and privilege white men yield.

As young men we’re bombarded with refrains like, “it’s a man world.” Or “man up.”

Whether overtly or subconsciously, we’re instructed from our earliest moments that aggression, power and dominance are inherently male values, and we’re often told to be wary of women who seek the same things. Our forceful and violent behaviors are excused as “boys being boys” or lessons that will “toughen us up.” A girl who displays the same behavior is chastised for not being “ladylike” or defer-

“Even in instances when we don’t intend it, our society tells women they shouldn’t — or can’t ­— be equal to their male peers.” ential. Women who challenge the status quo or dare aspire to the kind of power men have exerted for eons are labeled as bitchy or rude.

Even in instances when we don’t intend it, our society tells women they shouldn’t — or can’t — be equal to their male peers. And to be completely frank, that’s bullshit. I’ve worked alongside dozens of women. I was raised by an incredible one and was lucky enough to have two sisters who have helped guide my personal growth more than anyone I know.

Each of them do things on a daily basis that break the stereotypes of what we’ve clumsily come to expect of them.

On Page 32, you’ll find a quintet of women who have stomped on the barriers society has put in front of them. The five we featured are by no means a complete representation of the women changing our city — more so a microcosm of them. But whether it be in the boardroom, the home room or the courtroom, these women show us exactly what they — and our world — can accomplish when women are empowered to take the opportunities and equality they rightfully deserve.

HOPE JOHNSON PHOT O E DI T OR JESSI DODGE M ULT I M E DI A E DI TO R SAM MOSHER

AS S I S TAN T E D IT O RS

BROOKE JOHNSON, CONNOR LAGORE, LUCY SHANKER E AT + DR I N K KAELYN ADIX, MCKENNA BLAIR, JESSICA DUFFIELD, ABBEY PERANO CI T Y L I F E JENNA GRUNDTNER, TEDDY HANS, NAT KAEMMERER, MADISON SKAHILL CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JENNA ALLEN CON T R I B UT I N G W RIT E RS ANTHONY ASHLEY, ISAAC CARMICHAEL, ALLISON CHO, SHANNON HENDERSON, ASHLEY JONES, DANIELLE PYCIOR, MORGAN SPEARS, JOE SIESS, ETHAN STEIN, SAVANNAH WALSH, TAYA WHITE DI GI TAL E DI T OR S DRU BERRY, MARGARET DONOHUE, ASHLI ELLERMAN, BROOKE KNAPPENBERGER, EMILY HURLEY, NICOLE JIE YI FONG, CARY LITTLEJOHN, HANNAH MCFADDEN, LIBBY MOELLER, BIANCA RODRIGUEZ, RUNJIE WANG M ULT I M E DI A E DI T OR S MAKENZIE BAGLEY, INLANA HENDERSON, RAN HUAN, TREVOR ROWLAND DE S I GN E R S CLAIRE HARMAN, HAYLEY ODOM, ALYSSA WEISBERG

E DI T OR I AL DI R E CT O R HEATHER LAMB DI GI TAL DI R E CT OR SARA SHIPLEY HILES E XE CUT I V E E DI T OR JENNIFER ROWE OF F I CE M AN AGE R KIM TOWNLAIN

Vox Magazine

@VoxMag

@VoxMagazine

VoxMag

ADVERTISING 882- 5714 CIRCULATION 882- 5700 EDITORIAL 884-6432 v o x @m i s s o u ri . e d u

OPENING THE DOORS TO PAQUIN Before she started this story, writer Elena K. Cruz knew Paquin Tower existed but didn’t know what it was. After meeting with Columbia Housing Authority employees and building residents, Elena knew she had to share what she’d learned. The story’s title, “Paquin Provides,” is purposefully ambiguous. The first draft painted the building as a beautiful oasis, but that’s not exactly what it is. Paquin Tower provides a necessary shelter for many, but the low-income housing system of which it is part is messy, and people aren’t always able to leave Paquin when they’d like. It is, in short, complicated.

CORRECTIONS: The March story “Earth, wind and solar” should have listed the price of a solar kiloWatt hour from Boone Electric’s solar program as 15.95 cents and stated that its wind blocks provide 100 kWh of electricity. In “What’s in a poem?” Laura Fisher’s name was misspelled.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

ART DI R E CT OR S SHAOYANG CHEN,

CULT UR E CAMERON R. FLATT, KATHERINE HERRICK,

KEEGAN POPE Editor-in-Chief

4

ON L I N E E DI T OR LAUREN PUCKETT CR E AT I V E DI R E CT O R KELLYN NETTLES

CALENDAR send to vox@mi s s o u ri . e d u o r subm i t vi a onl i ne form a t v o x m a g a zi n e . c o m TO RECEIVE VOX IN YOUR INBOX sign up for email newsletter at voxmagazine.com A PRI L 2 0 1 9 V OL UM E 21 , IS S U E 4 PUB L I S H E D BY COL UM B I A M IS S O U RIA N 320 L E E HIL L S H A L L COL UM B I A, M O 6 5 2 1 1

MAGAZINE

Cover photography by Jacob Moscovitch and design by Claire Harman

FEATURES

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32

Bipolar disorder has derailed Sam Pfeiffer’s idea of what his life was supposed to be. Through his personal journal, he explores the ups and downs of his illness.

Five influential women are crushing the proverbial glass ceiling and reshaping Columbia from the clergy to the courtroom.

Sam.

BY MADDIE DAVIS

Empowered and In Power

BY VOX STAFF

ONLINE

Finding Home series

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Paquin Provides Although it’s not always a perfect home, Paquin Tower’s community acts as a family and a refuge for its residents. It’s a place of support for those who need it.

BY ELENA K. CRUZ

Whether you’ve been in Columbia for three years or 30, our city has places where you can pause and breathe when life feels suffocating. Welcome to four of these respites. The door is open at The Grind Coffee House, KCOU FM, Eastside Tavern and Cooper’s Landing. Visit voxmagazine.com to explore and celebrate these Columbia havens. BY VOX STAFF Photography by Lauren Richey

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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SECTIONS

13

EAT + DRINK

CITY LIFE

43

47

Kaitlyn Clark makes cookies at night. Don’t worry; she isn’t decorating in the dark.

The latest health craze is to freeze your body with liquid nitrogen. Cool.

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49

How to stuff more calories, and chicken, into your diet.

Peek in the window of Columbia’s housing market.

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50

Listen to the hive mind: the experts’ take on why local honey beats national brands.

Putt yourself to the test; learn to improve your golf game.

Baking After Bedtime

Wing It

What’s the Buzz on Bees and Honey?

Comedian Johnny Lane performs his stand-up set.

It’s Cold Inside

House Numbers

How to Get Your Game Up to Par

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43 IN THE LOOP

CULTURE

7

13

Adventures of Huckleberry Gin Enjoy some of Missouri’s favorite contributions to history: Samuel Clemens and local booze.

8

Finding Home Despite its name, The Grind Coffee House isn’t solely a place for work.

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Vox Picks We’ve got your list of places to go, people to see and things to do this month.

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VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

A Laughing Matter Your chance to revel in others’ self-deprecation. Have fun.

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Street (Sm)arts Our city is covered in art. Do you know where it all came from?

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Unbound 2019 The festival welcomes local authors and also makes revisions after #UnboundSoWhite.

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Sounds of Spring Our guide to April music acts.

MU football player Tyler Badie preps for his turn in the cryotherapy machine.

Photography by N. Andrew Dent III, Madison Parry, Antranik Tavitian and Ethan Weston

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME P. 8

MONTHLY PICKS YOU CAN’T MISS P. 11

Adventures of Huckleberry gin Because of the taproom’s success, it plans to expand its offerings this summer.

BY CATHERINE WENDLANDT

Ten rotating taps and Missouri-made spirits are the focus at Twain: Missouri Taproom.

Photography by Liz Goodwin and courtesy of Pixabay

Tucked inside the Tiger Hotel, Columbia’s newest taproom officially opened Jan. 18. The leather sofas and copper-plated bar hearken back to the 1800s.

The laid-back vibe will make you feel as at home as a draft from the 10 rotating taps of Missouri-made beer.

Bartender Alina Robinson says the taproom isn’t a college bar but a nook to enjoy a good drink. “It’s someplace where you can come in and speak easy,” she says.

The public reaction has been downright joyous at times, says Benjamin Hedrick, the Tiger Hotel’s marketing and media manager. Hedrick says people love the taproom because of its local products.

The menu is intimate and small, Robinson says, but the flavors are diverse. Like the beer, the spirits are Missouri-made; there’s vodka from Pinckney Bend Distillery in New Haven and 1220 Origin gin from 4 Hands Brewery in St. Louis.

Kentucky-made David Nicholson 1843 bourbon whiskey is the only spirit offered at the Twain: Missouri Taproom that doesn’t come from the state, and that’s only because Mark Twain drank it himself.

There are five signature cocktails, with plans to add more this summer.

Robinson suggests the Midwestern. It’s your classic old fashioned poured over smoked ice, and sipping on it might make you feel like you’re sharing a drink with Samuel Clemens himself.

23 S. Eighth St.; Mon.–Thurs. 3–11 p.m.; Fri. 3 p.m. to midnight; Sat. noon to midnight, Sun. noon to 10 p.m.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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IN TH E LOOP ESSAY

Finding home How a coffee shop and the people inside it became a beloved sanctuary.

BY CARY LITTLEJOHN

“Tonight’s gonna be long,” Josh Gunter said to his girlfriend of the past two years.

“I need some coffee.” It was May 19, 2018.

The solution was unspoken: They’d stop at The Grind Coffee House.

Emily Brehe did not object, though she was still mildly annoyed. Here they were, on their way to MU professor David Crespy’s house for a faculty party, and she knew they were going to be overdressed.

But Josh, in his dark suit and skinny black tie, wouldn’t hear it. He’d insisted it was going to be fancy. He’d even gotten her the gown she was wearing — a long black dress with sequins at the top, she remembers — specifically for the night.

As Emily stood at the counter surveying the menu, Josh backed out of the way, letting her order. Emily didn’t notice; this was a normal occurrence. Only this time it wasn’t.

Josh got down on one knee.

“I was sitting there for what felt like

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VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

an eternity while she was looking over the menu,” Josh says. “I made eye contact with the barista, and she was like, ‘She’ll turn around eventually.’ It was a silent exchange.”

Finally, Emily did. And there, he had a proper answer for the countless times she’d mused, “You know what would be awesome? If you proposed to me at The Grind.”

Now living in Frisco, Texas, Emily and Josh still speak fondly of The Grind, which served as poetic bookends to their time together in Columbia. I sought them out because I knew of the proposal. I knew it had been at The Grind because they’d had their first date there, and I wanted help sorting through my feelings toward the tiny coffee shop. Because for me, The Grind feels like home.

Where the heart is Home is not a physical structure; it’s an aura, a wavelength, a feeling. When you

FIND THE GRIND 4603 John Garry Drive, Suite 1 The coffee shop’s flagship location opened in 2016.

The name is a nod to the popular coffeehouse It’s A Grind, which closed in 2012. Owner Aucky El-Tayash prides himself on his curated playlists that change throughout the day to fit the crowd.

cry out that you want to go home at the end of a trying day, it’s not because of anything inherently special in those four walls. It’s for the comfort it brings you.

It’s for the sense of peace. It’s for the fulfillment of a basic need. The output may differ, but the starting equation is always the same: home is a place, and people make that place whole. The beauty of home is that it can take different forms.

Some find home in the masses — the ability to connect with kindred spirits, to revel in the company of strangers and friends alike. They find home in those places that make the heart pump a beat or two faster, that fire the synapses and tingle the senses, that sweep you up in the energy of the room.

I am not those people. I am the opposite of those people. But my math is no different: Home is a place, and a place is people. The Grind, my place. Allison, my people.

Photography by Sarai Vega

I N T HE LO O P ESSAY

Fresh beginnings I’d moved to Columbia for a new start — a change in careers that would begin by going back to school. I met Allison three days after I arrived. It was Jan. 6, 2018. I wish I could say that I met her at The Grind, but I didn’t. Our first meeting was dinner at ABC Chinese Cuisine, just off of I-70 Drive Southeast. After exchanging some emails at the suggestion of a mutual friend, it culminated in an invitation to dinner.

I arrived earlier than I should have, and embarrassed by that fact, I sat in my car for about 15 minutes, waiting for the appointed hour. When I walked in to find her sitting in a booth, I approached nervously, wondering all the while what I’d say, what I’d do with my hands. Do I shake her hand? Or does that feel too much like a job interview?

Do I hug her? Or is that creepy? Once she became aware of me, to my great relief, she stood up and gave me a hug.

I told her I’d wanted to do that, being from the South and all, but that I wasn’t sure how it would go over up here. She made a crack about Missouri being in the South. I scoffed, she laughed, and dinner had officially begun.

We learned basic background facts Photography courtesy of Love Tree Studios

about each other — where the other was from and what events led us to Columbia. But we also learned small things that revealed a lot. She loves New Year’s Eve and hates unread emails piling up on her phone. She laughed at the literal hundreds of unread emails in my inbox, and she listened as I rambled on about loving resolutions for a new year, even though I’m terrible at keeping them. She was a bottomless pool of understanding as I choked up about the goodbyes I’d recently said, especially with my younger brother who was just finishing Navy boot camp and about to pursue his dream of becoming a Navy SEAL. Before I knew it, we’d been in that booth for three hours, and the restaurant staff was ushering us out the door.

I was sad to see the night end because I wanted to know more. I got my chance the next day; she invited me to The Grind. It was among the first places I went in Columbia with any intentionality. It did not last three hours, and it did not require the same ice-breaking as the night before. There, I started to meet her friends. There, I became a tiny part of her life.

Connection point She’s a medical student, and I’m a graduate student studying journalism. Her days are filled with words and concepts with too many syllables for my brain to comprehend. Her days are filled with patients and clinics. Mostly, her days

ONLINE ESSAY SERIES Finding a place to call home is a universal, human need.

Those places might be the oddly adorned dank corners of Eastside Tavern, the riverside getaway of Cooper’s Landing, or the eclectic lounge at KCOU. In Vox’s essay series, four writers explore the local sanctuaries they’ve found to provide refuge and respite.

Read the series at voxmagazine.com

Josh Gunter surprised his girlfriend of two years, Emily Brehe, last May when he proposed to her at their favorite coffee shop, The Grind Coffee House.

are simply filled. My schedule allows for little free time and is always subject to unexpected obligations, and the uncertainty makes it difficult to find time for each other. This is where The Grind comes in. It’s not simply the place where we meet up to study or steal a few moments in close proximity — though it is, and we do. More times than not, though, The Grind is a crowded place I go to be alone when I can’t see her but still want to feel close to her.

A part of Allison resides there, in the air or absorbed into the varnish on the chairs. For me, she’s its friendly ghost.

As for the place itself, there’s no real reason it should feel like home. It endeavors to be cozy only in the slightest ways — a couch here, a cushioned chair there. Otherwise, it’s a space defined by function rather than form. The colors fade into the background; blindfold me and ask me the color of the wall, and I’d fail that test. It’s not particularly quiet — an eclectic Spotify playlist runs nonstop, and the sounds of espresso machines whoosh alongside conversations of long lost friends, study groups, first dates.

A cozy escape But in those countless cups of vanilla-nut coffee, I am transported back to Allison’s old apartment at the Boulder Springs complex, on the ground floor where she lived when we first met — the apartment that grew to feel more and more like our apartment. The apartment where we’d spend Saturday mornings after sleeping in later than we should and start our day with a fresh pot of coffee.

We’d grind the beans and sit back as we waited for the pot to fill, looking out the windows at a hillside spilling down from the woods. She’d placed bird feeders near the hill, and we adopted a family of cardinals and a herd of deer that both made regular use of them. We sat cuddled on the couch, watching nature treat us to a sight most on campus wouldn’t even know was possible, all while the scent of coffee grew stronger.

The labored gasps of the coffee maker finally grew quieter, then fewer, then stopped altogether. With our mugs in hand, our world felt tiny and complete.

She doesn’t live there anymore. She VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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IN TH E LOOP ESSAY

has a new house and new roommates.

That feeling of being the only two people in the world doesn’t happen as much as it once did. In a lot of ways, that’s the feeling I’m chasing at The Grind, and that’s why I go after work at 10 p.m. or on a Saturday morning as she prepares for exams. She won’t be there. I know that. But it’ll feel damn close.

A haven for many For different reasons, Emily and Josh thought of The Grind as home. For them, it was a sense of family cultivated by the owner, Aucky El-Tayash. “Aucky has it all figured out,� Emily says. “He’s a really good business owner. I don’t think I’ve ever been to another coffee shop where the owner is welcoming you through the door and always has a smile on his face.� The couple watched The Grind grow with their relationship; when they went for their first date in August 2016, the shop was barely two months old. Because they lived close by, The Grind was a regular part of their

lives. “We went there way too often,�

Josh says. “I think we were going every day in the early months of us dating.�

They became close friends with Aucky, and five months before Josh proposed, he told Aucky of his plan to do it at The Grind. Aucky didn’t just wish Josh luck with the plan; he got involved. “He talked to a photography agency that he knew, and he had them come in,� Josh says. “I was really thankful for that.�

When I asked Josh whether he thought Aucky would do that for any of his customers, he said that he thought he would. But he couldn’t help but feel like it was personal. “He was there from the start, he saw exactly what happened between Emily and I, and each time we’d go in, he’d see how much further our relationship was progressing, how much we loved each other,� Josh says. It’s unspoken, but he feels that Aucky did this specifically for them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. once summed up the concept of home: “For there we loved, and where we love is home, Home that our feet may leave,

Cary Littlejohn is a Tennessee native and MU graduate journalism student.

A licensed attorney, he relocated to Columbia to pursue a career change.

but not our hearts.� He understood that home is not merely a place but the sum of the people and events that inhabit it. He understood how a couple could move over nine hours and 500-plus miles away to Texas but find themselves homesick for a tiny Columbia coffee shop. He understood that home is a wavelength. He understood how I could find sanctuary in The Grind, the hilltop of coffee shops, where the signal is clearest and my girlfriend’s frequency finds me no matter our distance. He understood simple math: home is a place, and that place is people.

Rose Music Hall

FIRE STATION

WABASH STATION

Coming Home The Beach Salon

Talking Horse Productions Dogmaster Distillery Yoga Sol North Village Recording Studio

E. Ash St.

Orr St. Farmers & Artisans Market

Fretboard Coffee

Missouri Contemporary Ballet

EVERY SUNDAY

Range Free

PARKING

Orr Street Studios

Good Food Co.

Shannon Webster Studio Resident Arts Shear Soul Hair Studio

COURTYARD

N. 10th St.

9th St. Public House

Orr St.

N. 10th St.

CafĂŠ Berlin

E. ASH ST.

Ophelia’s Flowers Dancearts

AMEREN LOT

Park Avenue

WildysWorld!

Artlandish Gallery

Sager Braudis Gallery PARKING

Hubble Dr.

DrinKraft Le Bao

St. James St.

The North Village Arts District is an art, music, food, drinks and fun lovers paradise packed into beautifully renovated warehouses, shops and historical buildings in downtown Columbia, Missouri.

E. Walnut St. SHORT ST. GARAGE PARKING

WHAT YOU UNEXPECT

Carla Ciolli Hair Studio ALLEYWAY

PACE YOUTH THEATRE

Broadway 10

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

Dogwood Artist Workspace

PARKING ENFORCEMENT HOURS Parking Garages 8a-6p M-F Parking Lots 8a-6p M-S Street Meters 9a-7p M-S

www.northvillageartsdistrict.org Photography courtesy of Cary Littlejohn

I N T HE LO O P VOX PICKS

Vox’s picks for

APRIL

Each month, Vox curates a list of our favorite shops, eats, reads and experiences in and around Columbia. We highlight the new, trending or criminally underrated — so you’re always informed of the best our city has to offer.

BY CAMERON R. FLATT

Play…

At the third annual Midwest Campus Clash and Gaming Expo hosted by Columbia College. This celebration of all things gaming will include a public Fortnite tournament, a two-story Arcade Zone and the Gargantuan Galaga. The main event is a collegiate eSports League of Legends tournament with a $2,500 prize for third place, $5,000 for the runner-up and $15,000 for first place. Anyone can attend to cheer the teams on.

Southwell Arena, 700 Rangeline St., April 6, free, 875-7419

Experience…

Mid-Missouri’s own Unbound Book Festival.

The event returns for a fourth year to Stephens College with George Saunders as the keynote speaker. This year’s guests also include Rebecca Makkai, Shane Bauer and Jacqueline Woodson.

Stephens College, April 19-20, free, 442-2211

Watch…

Talking Horse Productions’ latest musical, Daddy Long Legs, based on the classic novel and Fred Astaire film. This play carries on the spirit of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Downton Abbey, according to the theater’s website. It tells the story of a mysterious benefactor who supports a girl with her schooling in exchange for monthly letters. And this leads to a love that transcends social class.

The play highlights the music and lyrics from Tony Award-nominated composer and lyricist Paul Gordon.

Talking Horse Productions, 210 St. James St., April 12-14, 18-21 and 25-28, Thurs.Sat. 7:30 p.m. and Sundays 2 p.m., $15; $13 for seniors, 607-1740

Laugh…

With a stand-up comedian at The Blue Note on back-to-back nights.

Drew Lynch and Preacher Lawson were both finalists on America’s Got Talent. Lynch came in second in the 2015 season. Lawson, who is known for winning the title of “Funniest Comedian in Florida” in 2015, made it to the final 10 of America’s Got Talent two years later.

The Blue Note, 17 N. Ninth St., Drew Lynch: April 10, 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. $20; Preacher Lawson, April 11, 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m., $22, 874-1944

Photography by Antranik Tavitian

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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SURE, AT FIRST I WAS A LITTLE TAKEN ABACK

BY THE WHOLE PEEING STANDING UP THING. BUT I TAUGHT HIM TO THROW A STICK AND NOW HANGING OUT WITH HIM IS THE BEST PART OF MY DAY. — EINSTEIN adopted 12-09-10

ART ON THE STREET, UNDER YOUR FEET P.15

BOOKS: NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE P.16

A laughing matter From raunchy to reflective, Columbia’s comedy scene brings an array of styles to the stage.

BY NICOLE SCHROEDER When performing stand-up, Kovoski George paces as he speaks. He says his brand of stand-up helps comprise the “trail mix” of comedy styles that exist in Columbia. “The way I see it, we’re all taking notes from each other,” he says.

Photography by Madison Parry

Local comic Kovoski George rolls through his stand-up set during the Sideline Jokes show at Sideline Sports Bar.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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CULTURE COMEDY

George, 27, exudes the same energy that he has onstage when he talks about his place within Columbia’s kaleidoscope of comics, a collective he has been a part of for about a year. The group of jokesters has grown in recent years.

They vary in comedic styles, but all of them have their own place in the scene, and they all share the goal of making the audience laugh.

George admits his style of comedy is fairly raunchy, mixing self-deprecating jokes and humorous public service announcements with the skills and mannerisms he has developed from watching other comedians. A lot of his act relies on stories he pulls from his daily life or poking fun at audience members he thinks he could joke with. Rob Harris shares the slightly explicit tone of George’s stand-up. “I’m not G-rated,” says Harris, 40. “I curse, and I say dumb stuff, but I’m tamer. I want to do more stuff my daughter (13) can see.”

Doing family-friendly material is important for Harris, who has been a comedian for seven years and currently runs the monthly Pints and Punchlines comedy show at Rose Music Hall. Fatherhood has shaped much of his comedic style over the years, but other family members have been inspirations as well.

His interest in comedy began as a kid, and he attributes his ability to make jokes to his grandmother’s sense of humor. The rest of his comedic repertoire comes from his own life, such as when he was a teacher at his daughter’s elementary school. “I just tell stories about the stuff that happens to me,” Harris says.

“And I mean, I embellish or whatever.

I’m extra by nature, so it’s pretty easy for me. But most of them are just stories.”

Other comedians combine current events with the happenings of everyday life and their own personal stories to come up with material for their acts.

One such comic is Kaitlin Rounds, 25, who finds ideas for her stand-up in a number of places including her own experiences. “I would say about 60 percent are me, and then about 40 percent are just things I’ve ingested from the media that I have a point of view on,” she says.

Rounds lives in Kansas City, but she performs throughout Missouri. When she’s

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LATE-NIGHT LAUGHS Jonesing for some gut-busting comedy? Check out these mid-MO stand-up shows to satisfy that need.

Rob Harris (top) routinely brings his parenting-inspired comedy to the monthly Pints & Punchlines show, while Kansas City-based Kaitlin Rounds (lower left) performs at shows all around Missouri.

talking about her own life, her jokes fluctuate between self-deprecating — such as the jokes she makes about her bad driving — and self-aggrandizing — like an exaggerated story about how she once managed to get revenge on a roommate.

She enjoys having her routine play off those extremes.

After two and a half years in the stand-up scene, Rounds has met plenty of comics with other methods, such as one comedian whose act heavily features one-liners. For her, the styles of jokes people make aren’t as important as the idea of comedy itself. “It feels really, really good to make people laugh, and people need to laugh,” she says. “It’s one of the most important things, and it helps people come together.”

The As Yet Unnamed Comedy Show This “entirely renegade” show makes for wild comedy every week at the Eastside Tavern.

1016 E. Broadway; 10 p.m.

Tuesdays; free Pints and Punchlines Rose Music Hall’s monthly lineup of comedians features CoMo comics with a wide range of experience.

1013 Park Ave.; 9 p.m. April 24; $2 Sideline Jokes Dubbed “the wildest comedy show in Columbia,” Sideline Jokes opens its doors the second Thursday of the month. Sideline Sports Bar, 701 Big Bear Blvd.; 8 p.m. April 18; $5 The Laughayette Showcase Need to expand your horizons?

Head south to the capital to see some of the state’s funniest folks.

619 E. Capitol Ave., Jefferson City; 8 p.m. May 4; $5

Photography by Madison Parry and courtesy of Rob Harris and Kaitlin Rounds

C U LT U RE ART

Street (sm)arts Art looks best in the sunshine. We’ve got your guide to some of Columbia’s public artwork.

BY MATT NOWORUL

B

rightly colored murals, a giant keyhole and statues of animals playing musical instruments: there’s an abundance of public art around Columbia. The majority of these pieces were funded by the city’s Percent for Art program. Like similar funds in other cities, the program encourages large construction or renovation projects (those with budgets of $1 million or more) to include public art by covering 1 percent of their costs.

“I feel that living in a community that has a percent for the arts program is a wonderful thing,” local artist James Calvin says. He adds that Columbia values not only “the quantity of life but the quality of life.”

Keys to the City Daniel Boone City Building One of Columbia’s most recognizable pieces of public art is the large keyhole sculpture in front of the Daniel Boone City Building. The sculpture, officially titled Keys to the City, was created in 2010 by New Mexico artist Howard Meehan, who says his idea was to make “a true montage of the city’s characters and leaders.” When Meehan was first commissioned to do the project, he began brainstorming the design by exploring the city via bicycle and asking residents what they wanted from the sculpture. Meehan says he wanted to find what the city represented and demonstrate that through the piece.

Top: Keys to the City is a “true montage of the city’s characters and leaders,” artist Howard Meehan says.

Left: Jamboree, depicting a four-animal band, was completed just days before its public reveal in 1996.

Jamboree Boone County Courthouse Square This bronze sculpture, created as part of a collaboration between artists James Calvin and Andy Davis to celebrate community, depicts a band of various animals playing musical instruments.

“We wanted to show diversity,” Calvin says, “and the notion of Columbia as a diverse community.” The duo worked a combined 80 hours a week for about a year to meet its deadline, ultimately finishing the project only two days before the unveiling ceremony in 1996. Despite the stress of completing the installment on time, Calvin says it was a positive experience all around.

Middle: Madeleine LeMieux laughs while giving a speech when displaying her and her team’s Art for Science mural in 2018.

Right: Starting in 2007, the painting of downtown’s traffic signal boxes reduced graffiti and helped beautify the public space.

MKT Trail murals Four murals along the trail In addition to natural wonders seen on the MKT Trail, joggers, bikers and hikers can also find beautiful murals painted on the underpasses above the trail, such as at Elm Street or Stewart Road. Local artist Madeleine LeMieux has painted four murals along the trail since 2016. LeMieux says her Arts for Science mural, completed last October, has been her favorite so far. “I think it just ended up being a really beautiful project,” LeMieux says. In addition to her work in Columbia, LeMieux has also created murals in Chicago, New Mexico and New York City. Now she’s planning on painting another four murals in Columbia before the end of 2019.

For a look at four more pieces of public art, visit voxmagazine.com

Archive photography by Wonsuk Choi, Jeremy Jardine, M. Colleen McDevitt and Di Pan

Traffic boxes 13 in the downtown area Since 2007, the Office of Public Affairs has selected local artists to paint downtown traffic signal boxes, which house the computing systems that control traffic lights, as a way to reduce graffiti and create works of art. “You could pass by those traffic boxes 100 times before you realize there’s art on them,” says local author and artist Amanda Harms.

She is the artist behind the traffic box painting at the intersection of Seventh and Cherry streets, which depicts a train on the MKT line.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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CULTURE

2019 Unbound Bo

BOOKS

Is Unbound still #SoWhite?

The book festival’s lack of diversity became an issue last year.

Organizers say they’ve listened.

BY JASMINE-KAY JOHNSON

I

n April 2018, Columbia’s Unbound Book Festival garnered attention — and not solely due to the excitement surrounding the event.

One social media hashtag in particular circulated as authors and attendees took to Facebook and Twitter to express discontent with the festival and its lack of diverse voices: #UnboundSoWhite.

Change doesn’t happen overnight, but festival executive director, Alex George, and his team have worked to make progress.

The controversy first came to light when Palestinian-American author Ibtisam Barakat announced that she didn’t want to participate in the The Power of Protest panel because she would have been the only person of color on it. Poet Heather Derr-Smith joined in Barakat’s decision after realizing the lack of representation. Later, Barakat’s frustrations were exacerbated when George tried to steer her away from mentioning Palestine during another discussion, leading to a larger conversation about the festival’s white-washed nature.

“A non-diverse society and community is humanly emaciated,” Barakat writes in an email to Vox for this story. “Columbia can benefit on all levels from starting a conver-

sation about what keeps the community segregated with invisible walls.”

Turning the page George says he wasn’t upset about being called out. It led to a focus on finding solutions to the representation issues haunting the festival, he says.

Critics last year also said a crucial change needed to be made in regard to the festival’s board. The festival team started by increasing transparency. The Unbound website now displays the names, pictures and bios of board members. The board followed up by expanding representation on the programming committee, the group responsible for choosing panel topics and inviting authors. Half of this year’s group, increased

Ibtisam Barakat’s works, which exist in numerous translations, focus on healing social injustices and often center on the lives of young people.

Zadie Smith, whose award-winning novels detail life in multicultural London, spoke to poet and essayist Camille Dungy during the 2018 Unbound Book Festival. Smith was the keynote speaker that year.

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from three people to six, now comprises people of color.

George believes diversity shouldn’t only be examined in terms of which authors get invited but also in terms of who attends the festival. The Unbound team has contacted organizations such as Race Matters, Friends and Worley Street Roundtable to understand how to improve audience diversity. This part isn’t fleshed out yet, but George says he hopes it will start important conversations. The festival also created a student advisory committee following suggestions from Stephens College students.

Parts to a whole The problems Unbound faces are symbolic of issues within the literary community. Walidah Imarisha, an author featured at this year’s festival, wasn’t aware of the Unbound backlash but has witnessed it in a broader sense. She says institutions that shape the literary world will have to change at the core in order for true advancement. “I don’t like the term ‘diversity’ because most often when it gets used, the idea is keeping a white center, a white norm, and then adding in — often tokenizing — folks of color,” Imarisha says.

George knows the festival still has a long way to go. “It’s just an improvement,” he says.

Archive photography by Liv Paggiarino and Kelsey Walling

C U LT U RE

nd Book Festival

BOOKS

Abundant authors Three Columbia writers are among those bringing expertise and enthusiasm to the fest.

BY KATE ROBBINS The Unbound Book Festival draws an influx of literature enthusiasts and 20-plus authors from around the world to Columbia. Local authors are equally excited about the upcoming festival April 19–20. We spoke to a few of them about what inspires their work, how they came to Columbia and what authors they’re excited to see at Unbound.

Jay Sexton

Phong Nguyen

Jocelyn Cullity

A Nation Forged By Crisis: A New American History

Memory Sickness

Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons

With black-rimmed glasses, disheveled hair and an infectious enthusiasm for history, Jay Sexton embodies the stereotype of a college professor. After teaching at Oxford University in England for nearly 20 years, Sexton left in 2016 to be a history professor at MU. He considers himself a historian first and a writer second, but Sexton has single-authored three books during his career. He describes writing as a “compulsion to answer a question.”

And that compulsion makes for speedy writing; his latest book took only nine months to finish.

Phong Nguyen was inspired to write almost by accident. When he was in college, Nguyen stumbled across a copy of Marcel Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past while exploring a used book store. “[Proust] did impossible things with language, and it inspired me to want to do impossible things with language too,” Nguyen says. This moment became a catalyst for his flourishing literary career, which includes one novel, two short story collections, short story publications in over 50 literary anthologies and an English professorship at MU.

His must-see author at Unbound is Kristin Hoganson. She has written several books including Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, a deep dive into the lives of women during the Gilded Age, which Sexton says is much better than the book he would have written on the subject.

His must-see author at Unbound is Rebecca Makkai. In her 2018 novel, The Great Believers, Makkai writes a painful depiction of Chicago during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s in what Nguyen calls one of the best books he’s read this year.

“Her ability to capture that communal sense of loss is unique,” he says.

The seed of Jocelyn Cullity’s first novel was in an English relative’s diary, written in 1857, that describes a huge Indian rebellion against English rule. In her research, Cullity discovered the key resistance was organized by a group of women, a fact rarely noted in history books. Motivated by this absence of female perspective on a historical moment, she wrote Amah and the Silk-Winged Pigeons, an account of the resistance from the point of view of the women who tried to stop the English.

Although her fiction often uses international settings, she has made a home in Columbia and plans for her next book to be set in the Midwest.

Photography courtesy of Jay Sexton, Phong Nguyen, Jocelyn Cullity and Amazon

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE...

unboundbook festival.com The full schedule is coming soon.

Her must see author at Unbound is Bobbie Ann Mason; author of Shilo and Other Stories. Mason details rural life in her native Kentucky and its changes. “Generations of fiction writers have learned from [Mason],” Cullity says.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

17

CULTURE MUSIC

Sounds of spring Don’t let your month fall flat. Check out these three shows to stay in tune with Columbia’s music scene.

BY ETHAN STEIN

A A

sharp lineup of musicians is coming to Rose Music Hall and The Blue Note this April. With dozens of acts hitting local stages, from folk music to indie rock to country, there’s something for everybody to enjoy.

Narrow down the options with the help of Vox’s music roundup. For more, see the To-Do List on page 52.

William Clark Green We challenge you to find music that sounds more Texan than the songs on William Clark Green’s LPs. Ringling Road climbed to No. 18 on Billboard 200’s Top Country Albums in 2015, and each song will remind you of long car rides under a summer sunset. April 4, 7:30 p.m. doors; 8:30 p.m. show, Rose Music Hall, $10 in advance, $12 day of, 875-0588

Hippo Campus Hippo Campus has played at large festivals like SXSW, Lollapalooza, Leeds and Hangout, and they’ve even performed on network television. Yet, the indie-rock group brings their chill vibe to smaller cities, such as Syracuse, Burlington, Columbia and more. April 19, 8 p.m. doors; 9 p.m. show, The Blue Note, $25, 874-1944

Register at www.como.gov or by contacting the City of Columbia’s Volunteer Programs at 573-874-7499

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Valerie June By the time you’ve decided what genre Valerie June fits, she switches into a bluesy guitar riff you never saw coming. Her blend of folk, soul and blues with an Appalachian flair keeps you on your toes. You might recognize her from the MTV web series $5 Cover, which followed Memphis musicians through the challenges of being in the music industry, or previous Roots N Blues appearances. April 26, 7:30 p.m. doors; 8:30 p.m. show, The Blue Note, $20, 874-1944

The voice of Memphis native Valerie June has been described as a throwback.

Help Cleanup Columbia on Saturday, April 13. Volunteers will be assigned all over town in the morning to pick up litter and make our city look great.

Cleanup Columbia is a perfect volunteer event for individuals and groups of all sizes and people of all ages and abilities.

The City of Columbia will provide you with a cleanup location, bags, and gloves and will pick up the filled trash bags.

Volunteers are invited to lunch at noon at Twin Lakes Recreation Area.

Lunch and supplies will be provided.

Filled bags will be picked up by the city.

A special thank you to our sponsors as well as Solid Waste Utilities and Columbia Parks and Recreation.

M

MISSOURIAN

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Photography courtesy of Clark Green, The Blue Note and Clement Caron

Don’t mis s Taco Tues day and Soul Food Everyday !

Located in Vandiver Plaza | 1301 Vandiver Dr, Suite E - Columbia OPEN TUESDAY TO SUNDAY | 10:30 am - 6:00 pm Dine In • Carry Out 573-424-3718 Menu Changes Daily • 10 Minutes From Downtown

Mrs G’s A Touch Of Soul

2019 Summer Art Camps are now Enrolling!

Camps for ages 5-16!

Go Online to Register Today!

C R E AT E , A P P R E C I AT E , L E A R N 207 S 9th St • 573-443-8838 Tues - Fri - 11:30am -6:00pm Sat - 11:00am - 5:00pm ColumbiaArtLeague.org

Providing the community with a stimulating environment for experiencing the visual arts through exhibitions, education, appreciation, promotion, and creation of art.

P A Q U I N P R O V I D E S

After 46 years, Paquin Tower remains a fixture of the Columbia skyline.

Much has changed, but the building is still a home for those who need it.

BY ELENA K. CRUZ • PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAUREN RICHEY

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Photography by Photographer Name

Mike Bishop, a current resident of Paquin Tower, has lived in the building for 29 years, longer than any other resident.

Photography by Photographer Name

VOX

21

MIKE BISHOP HOLDS A CIGARETTE, FINGERS RESTING CASUALLY ATOP THE RUBBER HANDLES OF HIS ELECTRIC MOBILITY SCOOTER. HE’S SITTING AT THE BASE OF PAQUIN TOWER, AND HE LOOKS TOWARD THE BUILDING AS HE BEGINS TO SPEAK.

“The longer you stay here, you’ve seen a lot of things happening,” he says. “You’ve seen people that shoot themselves, bring guns in here just shooting themselves in the head... you’ve seen it all, so it’s like nothing makes any difference to you anymore.”

Bishop has a long Southern drawl and even longer wrinkles stretching from the rims of his eyes to the middle of his cheeks. His crow’s-feet deepen as he laughs, which happens when he explains that he’s lived in Paquin Tower for 29 years. Bishop, 53, has lived there for more than half his life, longer than any other resident. He’s seen hardships, but he says Paquin Tower provided a home when he needed one most.

“The people here are like family,” Bishop says. That’s why he stays. Well, that and because the rent is affordable, and the location is close enough to the Walmart on Conley Avenue — about two and a half miles — that he can drive his scooter there.

Fewer than 800 yards from Rise on 9th apartments, the construction of a new multimillion-dollar MU School of Music and Beta Sigma Psi’s College Avenue fraternity mansion, Paquin Tower houses nearly 200 low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities. College students, who pay thousands of dollars for their education, walk past the 15-story apartment complex on their way to classes. Downtown businesses open their glass doors Mondays through Fridays a few blocks away.

The brick structure sandwiched between Hitt Street and College Avenue doesn’t fit Columbia’s changing image of downtown, but for the past 46 years, Paquin Tower’s rooms have been home to Columbia residents who don’t have other local housing options.

The building towered over Columbia when it was opened in 1973, but more expensive high-rises have crowded the skyline since. However, the need for affordable housing has remained.

Paquin Tower is maintained by the Columbia Housing Authority, and it

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provides low-income housing assistance and fully accessible single apartments.

Unlike the $700-or-more-a-month student apartments that have multiplied in recent years, residents at Paquin Tower dedicate 30 percent of their adjusted incomes, no matter how much that is, to pay for their rooms. Housing and Urban Development covers the rest of that cost, according to Affordable Housing Manager Beth Cockrum.

Paquin has offered an affordable sanctuary and access to the otherwise unreachable shopping for its residents, who often consider Columbia their permanent home. Many in the building don’t have family members to help them shop, and Paquin Tower supplies the infrastructure residents need to simply sleep and eat independently.

It was originally built as an installment under the Columbia Housing Authority, says CHA Chief Executive Officer Phil Steinhaus. “My understanding is that there were many in our community, including those in the medical field, who realized they had persons with disabilities who lacked any kind of accessible housing in our community,” he says.

Paquin Tower is the only building for seniors that has full Americans with Disabilities Act-accessible accommodations.

A COMPLICATED COMMUNITY

As an unusually warm October day turns to dusk, people circulate the patio around Bishop. Two women sit at a metal picnic table and laugh with him. A man and a woman begin arguing about some building drama. Greg Fugate, a new resident, strikes up a conversation with Bishop, cigarette also in hand. It’s a community centered on the need for fresh air and the smell of tobacco.

Independent Living Coordinator Samantha Christian says the staff has created a safe environment for residents, who often are extremely vulnerable and need the infrastructure and assistance the staff provides.

Christian is one of the six full-time employees working in the building. Alongside her is Cockrum, who has been an employee at CHA for 13 years, with nearly 12 of those years spent at Paquin Tower.

“For most of the people that live here, they don’t have family,” Cockrum says. “We are their family. We’re their brothers, sisters, mothers, caseworkers; we’re everything. So if they need something, then we’re here for them.”

When Bishop learns that Christian recommended him as an interviewee for this story, he scrunches his face in confusion. He doesn’t get along perfectly with the staff, he says, and he believes they often go floor to floor purposefully trying to catch residents smoking.

What he doesn’t mention, though, is that Paquin has a strict ban on smoking indoors. Residents also might be kicked out if they’re arrested or caught doing drugs, depending on the basis of each case. Cockrum says these policies have helped clean up the tower over the past decade by keeping the residents safer and the apartment complex cleaner.

Bishop’s one close friend was evicted for smoking a cigar in his room. Since then, Bishop says he still considers the resiWdents to be family, but he doesn’t refer to anyone in the building specifically as a friend. Resident Michelle Adams, 30, distances herself from her neighbors in a similar way.

“I use the term friendship loosely,” she says, looking out from under expertly placed black eyeshadow. “I’m not a very trusting person.”

There are peoPaquin Tower has a garden ple Adams talks to (top photo) in the back often, whether in where residents have the the lobby or halloption to grow their own food. The staff also offers ways. Still, this art classes and bingo. emotional separation is necessary as Ellen Stockton (lower left), a regular participant in the a self-preservation weekly Wii Sports game strategy. Bishop in the lobby, colors a city uses a similar tactic. black-and-white skyline while waiting for her turn.

“It seems like everybody that Bishop decorates his room got close to me (lower right) with his own artwork and mementos. always died, and Angel was Bishop’s beloved that’s why I never dog, and he likes to keep tell anybody that the flyer in rememberance.

23

they’re my friend,” Bishop says.

Adams lives on the same floor as Bishop in an identically shaped one-bedroom apartment. Her room wasn’t furnished when she first moved in, but she has made it her own in the seven years she’s lived there. She also has made her room as accessible as possible due to her disabilities, including having a ruler that helps her open the oven.

She has a tattoo on her arm listing her health-related issues. “Conditions: Spina Bifida, hydrocephalus. Medical device: VP Shunt. Allergies: Latex, Amoxicillin, Betadine, Suprax.” They’re all written above her elbow.

Multicolored clothes fill up two cluttered closets and two other sets of racks, and makeup brushes are strewn across Adams’ 5-foot-long dresser. “Want to know what happens whenever you toast bread?” she says with a laugh. “My fire alarm goes off.” Then she gestures to the toaster sitting on the bathroom counter a safe distance from the fire alarm and, consequently, the kitchen.

THROUGH THE SLIDING DOORS

Adams moved into Paquin just six months after she graduated from MU with a degree in art in 2011. She has felt less restricted since moving in. She says she has gained independence because she doesn’t need a personal care attendant anymore.

She splits her time between her room, hanging out at Lucky’s Market and shopping downtown. Paquin’s location makes it easy for her to access the businesses with her electric wheelchair.

When she’s in the building, she’ll often chat with residents in the lobby, where there is almost always a group of people sitting around.

Paquin resident Michelle Adams likes to travel around downtown Columbia to her favorite haunts, including Lucky’s Market and Walgreens. Her favorite hangout in Paquin is the art room, where she says she prefers to talk to friends rather than make anything herself.

The lobby is often where many residents congregate, and everyone who enters the building passes by the hub.

Eight wooden tables rest on the lobby’s cream-colored floor, and a 60-inch flatscreen TV can be heard over the hum of the vending machine. The two elevators ding repetitively, automatic doors slide open with a rush, dog leashes jingle, and snippets of people’s conversations halt as they acknowledge the passing residents.

Even at 5 a.m. when Cockrum arrives to work, the lobby is busy. “We have coffee out there every morning for them,” Christian says.

Paquin Tower also offers group activities, such as Wii bowling tournaments, pottery classes and bingo nights throughout the week. There are options

W E A R E T H E I R F A M I LY. W E ’ R E T H E I R B R O T H E R S , SISTERS, MOTHERS, CASEWORKERS; WE’RE EVERYTHING. S O I F T H E Y N E E D S O M E T H I N G , THEN WE’RE HERE FOR THEM.” —Beth Cockrum Affordable housing manager

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for occupational therapy and Columbia Parks and Recreation-led forums, which bring the residents out of their rooms to be together on the first floor.

The building underwent a $12 million renovation project that was completed in 2018. The project was paid for using low-income housing tax credits, and they were able to install new elevators, appliances, LED lighting, flooring and more. There are still parts of the building that need repair, though, and its residents keep the six employees at Paquin busy.

According to Cockrum, residents make three to 15 calls to 911 each week. They cover a range of alerts from breathing difficulties to behavioral discrepancies that are reported to the Columbia Police Department, depending on the emergency. Cockrum and Christian sometimes have people on hospice in their care and people who need a lot of medical attention. In addition, the employees have constant work in looking after the few hundred residents.

Work for Cockrum often includes dealing with emergency situations. “The part of my job that I dislike the most is when somebody passes away,” she says.

“Whether I find them or hospice comes in, it’s horrible. I do not like that part of my job at all. But, that being said, you know, they don’t have family, and if we

can be there...” She trails off, pulling her green hoodie over her lip. Her blue eyes turn red and damp.

Cockrum steps back to look out the window, and Christian takes over to explain how much they’re asked to do. “You get this black-and-white job description,” she says. “But the job is way more than that because you do step in and fill those gaps.”

FOR THOSE WHO NEED IT

Bishop was 16 when he was involved in a massive car crash that caused a traumatic brain injury. Soon after, when Bishop was 18, his father died in a house fire. He then moved between Missouri and Arkansas, first attending Wonderland Camp in Lake of the Ozarks, which is a camp for people with disabilities. Then he went to the physical therapy clinic NeuroRestorative Timber Ridge in Benton, Arkansas, and then a rehabilitation center in Mount Vernon, Missouri, before landing in Paquin at age 24.

Oftentimes people judge him by the effects of his brain injury, such as his slow speech and inability to walk, and ignore his humanity. “I can’t be out in that out-

side world where everybody stays because it’s like being in an institution,” Bishop says. “Going out in life, it’s like nobody treats you the same... So people here is like family.”

After nearly three decades at the tower, Bishop would like to move into Boone Point Central near Columbia College, a new 13-unit housing complex for citizens with disabilities. But he has done what outsiders often cannot: He has cut through Paquin’s tough exterior.

“Look over there, behind the concrete,” Bishop says while he sits outside, cigarette still in hand. “In the concrete, right over there. See that split over there?

Go over there and look.”

He wheels his electric scooter a couple feet to the base of the metal picnic table. Engraved in the concrete is a message: “Mike 96.”

“They almost took it off, but I got it in there when they wasn’t looking,” he says, laughing mischievously. Bishop has been here long enough. He’d leave if he had his way, but he has earned the right to mark the space as his own.

As apartment complexes geared to-

ward students continue to pop up, the tower provides a shelter for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Without it, some 200 residents would be without an affordable home — or even a home at all.

Bishop and Paquin Tower serve as reminders that nestled between Columbia’s business district and college-town mindset are hundreds of people who can’t afford such luxuries, and they, too, need spaces to call home. It ultimately must provide shelter, but it also must be a place residents can interact without judgment or belittlement. Some residents live out the rest of their days in the tower, and some move on.

For those who live there, no matter how long, Paquin Tower — faults and all — is a place to call home.

P A Q U I N ’ S P A S T

1956

The Columbia Housing Authority is established.

A federal urban renewal grant provided money in an attempt to replace Columbia residences deemed dangerous and unsanitary with safe and clean dwellings.

1967

The housing authority began its planning for Paquin Tower in July 1967. The intent at the time was to design housing for disabled younger people who would be able to thrive if given the proper infrastructure.

1973

The tower opened on Paquin Street, named after Dr. Paul Paquin, a professor of veterinary science at MU in the 1880s. It also began housing elderly citizens.

2009

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered incentives for renewable energy.

The tower put in geothermal heating and LED lighting.

The common room is a space where many residents leave their apartments to hang out.

Bishop often plays Wii in the common room, and he also likes go to Paquin’s gym.

2017

A $12 million renovation began, which included the update of two new elevators, appliances, flooring and more.

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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Sam. PHOTO ESSAY BY MADDIE DAVIS

Sam Pfeiffer lives with bipolar I disorder. After experiencing a manic episode last spring, during which he lost his job and apartment, crashed his car and strained important relationships, the 33-yearold trained chef has spent time trying to rebuild his life. Since he started noticing his mental illness as in his early 20s, he has recorded and collected his thoughts and feelings into writing.

“Every time I come back from a manic episode, it’s like I have to relearn and relive a lot of things and regain confidence,” Sam writes in his notebook. “It’s so weird because when you’re going manic, you have all of that. I have that confidence, I have that assurance, I feel so alive and part of the world and connected.”

Photographer Maddie Davis worked with Sam while he was living in his hometown of Lupus, Missouri, to examine themes and details in his writing that emphasize how he feels during episodes of mania, depression and everything in between. Those moments can be so disorienting and hallucinogenic that he says “you have to write them down because they seem so unreal.”

His words are illuminating, and they guided her through the reporting process.

Pressured into surviving.

This portrait was taken on what Sam called a tough day. “You build it up, it falls down,” he says. “You build it up again, it falls down again. At this point in my life, I’m supposed to be a guy who has a job and a car, and I’ve had all those things at one point, but lost them again and again and again.”

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The blue empty.

In order to cope with his mental illness, Sam has used different kinds of drugs and alcohol to self-medicate. He says he has also been on various prescribed psychiatric medications. He dislikes the side effects that often come with these medications, which makes him not want to take them.

Change my childhood.

The house where Sam was born is visible from his mother’s current house across the street. After experiencing manic episodes, he often returns to his hometown to stay with his mother. Sam says he uses this time at home to ground himself and make money doing odd jobs for friends and neighbors.

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Coming to accept the burning flames inside my mind.

Sam started experiencing the symptoms of bipolar disorder as a teenager. Although his illness makes life more difficult for him, Sam tries to keep a positive outlook.

“I’m trying not to let the little things get to me,” he says. “It’s human nature to do that, though. But life is good. I try to think of bipolar as a good thing. There are a lot of things I can learn from it.”

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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Straight into Wonderland.

This image shows Peace Park, where Sam first experienced mania. “There’s a survival instinct that takes over when you’re manic,” he says. “It’s like you’re out in the woods and you panic for a bit, but then your body adjusts and everything is fine.

The hardest part to go through is the guilt you experience after mania when you look at everything you’ve done.”

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LEARN MORE Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood and activity. Also known as manicdepressive illness, there are four basic types. Sam has bipolar I disorder, which is characterized by prolonged manic and depressive episodes. The manic episodes can consist of things like high energy, increased irritability and recklessness, and depressive episodes can include feelings of emptiness and hopelessness or being slowed down.

For more information about bipolar disorder, consult the National Institute of Mental Health’s website. If you or a loved one is in crisis, call the toll-free National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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Five women. Five stories.

These difference makers are here to run the world, starting with Columbia.

EMPOWE 32 32

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VOX MAGAZINE • MARCH 2019

Photography by Photographer Name

IN POWER

AND

ERED PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACOB MOSCOVITCH

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Charity Goodwin gives her spirit to The City

BY MICHAEL CONNOLLY

F

our months ago, the Rev. Charity Goodwin stood before her 136-person congregation at the Missouri United Methodist Church and delivered a sermon about “worshiping fully” during the holidays, a time when many put consumerism before faith. Dressed in a black shirt, a thin, draping coat and bright blue pants, the church’s pastor of discipleship paced back and forth, gesticulating passionately and engaging with the crowd. She stands just over 5 feet tall, but she is dynamic and captivating.

This sermon, at the inaugural gathering of church’s new contemporary service, The City, is unlike any she’s given before.

It challenges the traditional ideas of what a service should be, and that’s exactly what she wants.

Blazing a new path Goodwin’s goal with The City, which she began developing last April, is to change the way people worship. She and the Rev. Fred Leist, MUMC’s lead pastor, were considering potential changes to the church’s Sunday services. They wanted to add a fourth service to the existing three but were unsure about the logistics.

Goodwin felt constrained by the rigid structure of traditional Methodist services and had no interest in leading

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them time after time. “Maybe I would consider preaching every week if it didn’t have to look that way,” she remembers saying. That night, she woke up at 3 a.m. and made a list of ways she could “turn church on its head.” She brought the list to Leist, who approved the idea, and after about eight months of planning, The City made its debut.

The casual and engaging service occurs in the church’s upstairs gym on S. Ninth Street every Sunday at 10:45 a.m. and features a live band with guitars, drums and a keyboard. Beyond eschewing the setting, music, rhythm

THAT NIGHT, GOODWIN WOKE UP AT 3 A.M. AND MADE A LIST OF WAYS SHE COULD “TURN CHURCH ON ITS HEAD.”

and structure of a traditional Methodist service, The City is different from most services in Columbia because it is led by a 42-year-old black woman.

In a religion that is 94 percent white, Goodwin is working to open the church to new members by fostering diversity and talking about pertinent social justice issues in her sermons.

Following her passions Goodwin was born in Centreville, Illinois, a small town near East St. Louis, where her paternal grandfather was a Baptist minister at New Macedonia Church. Growing up, Goodwin frequently helped her grandfather write his sermons. This early exposure to faith was important in her path to ministry.

When she was about 5, Goodwin and her family moved to northern St. Louis but still made the drive to Centreville for church on Sundays. At 18, She came to MU’s journalism school, whose founder, Walter Williams, also attended MUMC. She graduated in 2000 and worked as a journalist around the Midwest while volunteering at local Baptist churches in her free time. After covering a murder-suicide for the Des Moines Register, she realized she needed a change. “I remember thinking I couldn’t keep waking up and doing this,” she says.

In 2003, she walked away from journalism and enrolled at Saint Paul

COMING BACK FULL CIRCLE TO THE PLACE WHERE I ACCEPTED MY CALL TO MINISTRY ...

WAS VERY HUMBLING AND EXCITING. –Charity Goodwin

Creating heaven on earth

MISSOURI UNITED METHODIST PASTOR OF DISCIPLESHIP Goodwin began developing The City last April with three goals in mind: form community, uncover purpose and create heaven on earth.

School of Theology in Overland Park, Kansas, to become a minister. “It was a very scary step,” Goodwin says. “I was walking away from what I have only known was my life’s call.” While studying at Saint Paul, her views on her Christian faith evolved. Eventually, she was drawn from the Baptist denomination she grew up with to Methodism because of its emphasis on putting faith into practice.

She graduated from Saint Paul in 2005, worked at three churches near Kansas City and gave birth to two sons — Gabriel, 7, and Levi, 5 — before coming to MUMC in Columbia in 2015 to serve under Leist and focus on youth and family ministry.

“Coming back full circle to the place where I accepted my call to ministry, across the street from the school where I got my degree, was very humbling and exciting,” Goodwin says.

With The City, she hopes to form a community within the church. She wants to create an inclusive and diverse space where people can worship freely.

In addition to developing bonds inside the church walls, The City reaches into Columbia’s community with their City Diner events, which are a way to gather with neighbors to share a meal, their stories and prayer. The goal is to encourage those in the congregation to pay more attention to the people around them, a sentiment echoed by Goodwin, and for everyone to find a place to belong.

“She’s reminded all of us in The City to have conversations with our neighbors,” Hayden says.

In addition to fostering community, another The City hopes to “uncover purpose” by helping people discover their natural gifts. She applied this with the members of the congregation who composed The City’s launch team. At one of the planning meetings in November Goodwin began by having the group read 1 Corinthians 12, a passage focusing on “spiritual gifts,” and then had them discuss their personal gifts and talents in smaller groups. “The way you get to creating heaven on earth is [having] people know what they’re good at and get to do it and love it,” she says. Each Sunday, Goodwin puts her faith into practice by doing what she’s good at and bringing a little bit of heaven into that church gym.

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Dianne Lynch writes her own story

BY CONNOR LAGORE

D

ianne Lynch has an autobiography that hasn’t been published. “It was fascinating and gripping,” she says.

It was also only 12 pages long. “On my seventh birthday, I cried because I hadn’t been published yet. I was a storyteller from the time I could talk.”

Lynch, no longer the journalist she started as but now the president of Stephens College, jokes that she first decided to study journalism by reviewing a list of majors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that didn’t require math.

But she knew she was always going to be a writer, even before her early memoir.

Although she has been in education for years now, she considers herself a journalist first. Her long list of jobs backs that up, too: columnist at USA Today and ABC News, founding director of the Online News Association and even her first teaching job — an editing class at UW. “I don’t think I ever introduce myself to anybody with any more than 30 seconds of conversation without somehow finding a way to tell them I used to be a journalist,” she says. “Journalism is in my soul.” Lynch says she’s insatiably curious. She wants to look at other people’s travel photos to learn about where they’ve been. And her open-door policy makes it easy for Stephens College students and faculty to bring her their vacation pictures.

She’d surely love to hear about her students’ trips to Hawaii or Europe, but her openness is mostly utilized to better the college. Lynch, who has been the school’s president for a decade, is all about making sure Stephens is doing the best by its students. She holds open forums, attends every campus event she can and knows the names of every undergraduate student by the time they graduate.

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“She really listens, and she really likes to be a part of the problem-solving,” says Leslie Willey, Stephens College’s vice president for academic affairs.

Lynch is student-oriented and wants to help them break down barriers, a goal she started pursuing early on in her Stephens tenure. In her second year as president, she started Stephens’ Magic Moments, a program that funds learning experiences that happen outside of the classroom. Often, it allows students to take opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. One student, who Lynch says had never been out of Missouri, was presented an opportunity in New York City and was able to pursue it because of the program. That student has since moved to the Big Apple.

Lynch’s curiosity is what brought her back to Columbia, despite the fact that she visited once in 1993 and declared it a town too humid for people to actually live in. While serving as dean of Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications, a position she held from 2004 to 2009, she saw a job opening at a small women’s college in Columbia, Missouri — Stephens College.

The further she looked into it, the more interested she was. She brought the idea to her friend, Ithaca’s business school dean, Susan Engelkemeyer.

Dumbfounded, she asked Lynch what interested her about it because she had actually graduated from Stephens.

Lynch knew then it was the place for her. Her friend and colleague is a brilliant woman, she thought, and if she was an alumna, the job was at least worth checking out.

She visited Columbia for the second time in her life to interview for the position in 2009 and has since made it her home. It has become everything to her.

“This is a life’s work,” she says. “This is a place where you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself.”

STEPHENS COLLEGE PRESIDENT Lynch attends all the Stephens College events she can fit into her schedule but still wishes she could go to even more, she says.

That idea is something Lynch has imbued into the culture of the college during her tenure. “Whenever we’re interviewing someone, it’s like, ‘This isn’t a job, this is a life’s work,’” Willey says.

The school still fascinates her to this day. “This institution has done things differently for 100 years and entirely based in the premise that women can do anything, which is, hello, true,” she says, before adding that not many institutions are grounded in that idea.

Stephens is and will continue to be Lynch’s life work. Every day is packed with meetings and events that make the school a better place, and she has the examples to show for it. Just go ask her; she loves to talk. Maybe someday, she’ll put some more of those examples in her autobiography.

Speaking of which, it probably needs some updating.

BY KEEGAN POPE

T

wo steps inside the door of Rhonda Gibler’s third-floor Jesse Hall office hangs a 4-by-4 foot state map of Missouri. No particular spot is marked, but her eyes focus on one naturally: the meeting point of the Randolph and Macon County lines just east of Highway 63, where her late father’s farm sits. It’s home, she says, a place where she has trekked — with her three kids and husband — for the last 20-plus years to eat dinner with her six siblings and parents almost every Sunday night.

She talks about her upbringing there with fondness, her Midwestern inflection turning “Missouri” into “Missour-uh” every so often. She’s neighborly in the small-town sense and at the same time cerebral and precise, rarely misspeaking or backtracking.

She grew up a farmer’s daughter in the early 1980s; her family moved 2 1/2 hours northwest from Florissant to Jacksonville so her father could continue to farm during one of the worst agricultural recessions since the Dust Bowl.

Her mother, who years earlier turned down opportunities to study computer science in favor of raising a family, always instilled the importance of education in her daughter.

But her map and appreciation of MU’s impact on her home state come from Jim Ollar, her former boss at MU Extension, who hung it in his own office and reminded her of one thing often.

“Rhonda, our campus isn’t just Columbia,” he’d tell her. “It’s the 64,000 square miles of the state of Missouri.”

She estimates she hasn’t seen all of those miles, but she has come close. Before becoming MU’s chief financial officer six years ago, she worked in the Extension office. There, she traversed the state, serving as part of the school’s outreach and education team, meeting with community members, alumni and donors from Kansas City to Cairo, Missouri.

In January 2013, she replaced Tim Rooney as the university’s budget director following one of the largest higher education budget cuts in the state’s history.

Almost immediately, she was expected to advise university leaders on how to proceed amid impending budget cuts and faculty layoffs. A year and a half later, the school was thrown into turmoil again when the Concerned Student 1950 protests forced the resignation of System President Tim Wolfe and quickened the exit of Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin. The ensuing backlash put the school into one of its biggest enrollment declines ever.

The protests, and the spotlight on campus racial tensions cut Gibler deeply.

“What this university is here to do is to challenge people to think about different ideas than what (they) got here with,” she says before briefly pausing, “and to see what other people face in the world.”

The next two-plus years saw a pair of interim chancellors, more faculty layoffs and a number of unflattering headlines in The New York Times, CNN and other

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER When Alexander Cartwright came on as the sixth chancellor since 2013, Gibler told him to “make it stick.” “I’m a little weary of having to bring the next guy up to speed,” she said.

major national news outlets. The freshman enrollment drop of approximately 2,000 students between 2015 and 2017 put the school’s budget on the chopping block. Gibler was charged with dissecting the revenue shortfall and recommending cuts. By mid-summer 2017, she and new University of Missouri System President Mun Choi, less than eight months into his tenure, announced the Columbia campus would need to eliminate more than 300 fulltime positions due to the budget shortfall.

Uproar echoed across campus as departments tried to make the case for keeping their jobs. Gibler was then, and still is, implored by outsiders to run the university more like a business by cutting less-profitable sectors and focusing on the school’s biggest revenue generators.

But in reality, Gibler says most people don’t want the university run like a business. “Businesses are much more cutthroat than anyone would allow the university to be. And more so than we would want to be.” She adds that people only look at the aspects of the budget they want to see without considering it as part of a whole system. “You’re doing your damnedest, and they just pick it apart.”

She points to the university’s medical school, which she says is less profitable than it could be because the school covers a large portion of the attendance costs to make it more inclusive and affordable for students. If MU were in the business of turning a profit, Gibler’s staff would recommend tuition hikes and layoffs, but that’s never been the goal: education and maintaining the school’s reputation are.

Even when other people don’t want to, she has to balance both sides of the equation.

She’s become a fixture, Rhonda Gibler.

She’s had offers to leave and admits that for a short time she though about it. But that white paper map is home. “When Dr. Cartwright starts talking about the ‘University for Missouri,’ that’s right in my lane,” she says, referencing the Chancellor’s pseudonym for the school. “That’s where my heart has always been.”

RHONDA GIBLER MADE IN MISSOURI

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Eryca Neville

BY MEGAN SCHALTEGGER “I call them my children,” Eryca Neville says with pride as she mentions her students. “I take this (idea) very personally.

They’re my extended family.”

For the past eight years, Neville has been like a mother for the students passing through the halls of Frederick Douglass High School, an alternative school located in the neighborhood of North Central Columbia. She wears her official title of principal like a badge of honor, but it hardly encompasses what she means to the school community or to her “children.”

After graduating from MU with bachelor’s degrees in economics and marketing, Neville worked as a special education classroom aide at Rock Bridge High School before pursuing her master’s and doctoral degrees. Education was what she loved all along and what she originally planned to major in, but her father, who was in banking, pushed her toward business so she could follow in his footsteps, she says.

Coincidentally, it was one of her classes in economic development that ultimately brought her back to her first love. In the course, she realized something: Education is the driving force in breaking the cycle of economic inequality. It was after a stint at Fairview Elementary and five years of teaching education at MU that she saw the position for principal at Douglass High School was open. She went for it, and there, she’s found her stride as an educator.

Neville leads Columbia’s only alternative school, which aims to be a smaller, more focused version of a traditional school. It has become a home for the nearly 200 at-risk students who walk its halls. However, there are inherent roadblocks on the path to success. According to a study by Raj Chetty and

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Nathaniel Hendren, North Central has one of the lowest median incomes in the city and overall, Boone County is only better than 17.2 percent of U.S. counties in lifting poor children up the income ladder. The same study found that by the age of 26, Boone County children from low-income households will likely make 6 percent less than their peers in higher-income families.

WOMEN HAVE BEEN ENCOURAGED TO THINK LIKE MEN IN THEIR POSITION. NO, YOU NEED TO THINK LIKE YOU. — Eryca Neville The most rewarding part of Neville’s job is getting to help those children and invest in their lives, she says. “Everybody’s got a choice,” Neville adds, enunciating each word. “We work with some of the most struggling kids in Columbia, and it is very challenging and very rewarding at the same time.”

She knows fantastic stories come out of struggle, but there are some who just can’t escape from under the challenges.

The education and income gaps might be holding them back, but Neville strives to set her students up for success. “They are smart, smart children,” she says. “It’s heartbreaking because 99 times out of 100, intellect is not (their) issue.”

Kerry Hesse, Neville’s assistant principal and “work husband,” is quick to insist that Neville practices what she

preaches about helping her students succeed. “We have developed a family atmosphere, and she is the matriarch of our family,” he says. “A lot of our students don’t have wonderful home situations, so she has stepped in and given guidance to the students that they’re not getting outside of the school.”

Each day is about working with the students and trying to find resources to support them both inside and outside the classroom. Neville is doing what she can to reinvent the education system, fill the inherent gaps in opportunities and support her students’ experience.

Being a black female principal comes with its own set of challenges.

“I have a Caucasian male who is my assistant principal,” she says. “We work really well together; however, it’s interesting how people from outside come in assuming that he’s the principal and I’m his assistant.” She admits that sometimes it does more than just rub her the wrong way. “It catches me, and I kind of look at them cross-eyed,” she says with a laugh.

But these biased expectations of leadership have only driven Neville to use her position as a black female leader to push back harder. “It’s timeout for following stereotypical paradigms of leadership,” she says, her voice rising with spirit. “Women have been encouraged to think like men in their position.

No, you need to think like you. Bring your best self, and don’t be afraid to not only find your voice but use it.”

Neville’s unafraid to assert herself, a lesson she hopes to instill in her students. She knows they deserve the same opportunities and privileges given to other children, but that their access to those is often compromised by being “other” — in gender, race, class or ability. “My deal is to be at the table,” Neville adds, “and to open as many doors on behalf of these wonderful children that I get to work with.”

e

educates for a better future

FREDERICK DOUGLASS HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL Neville says she believes education is the driving force in breaking the cycle of economic inequality.

VOX MAGAZINE •APRIL 2019

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The rapid rise of

Jill Harper 40

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

BY WILL JARVIS

O

ne afternoon in October, partway through telling the tale of the winding murder case that changed her life, Jill Harper stated, in near disbelief, “My story’s just so crazy.”

The case that jump-started her career involved a murder in Lake of the Ozarks, where a woman was accused of killing her father, who later died in the hospital, and his girlfriend. Stories of

HARPER, EVANS, WADE & NETEMEYER PARTNER Harper’s practice focuses mainly on personal injury, wrongful death, medical malpractice and worker’s compensation cases.

the murders circulated the state and were even featured in People magazine.

Harper’s story, however, was just beginning. It was 2012, and she was a second-year law student and a clerk at the Columbia law firm Harper, Evans, Wade & Netemeyer. Her clients, a man and woman accused of forging a power-of-attorney health care document, were allegedly responsible for the father’s death in the hospital.

When Harper found a crucial document in the victim’s medical records that exonerated them, she earned the respect and admiration of the firm’s founder, Milt Harper, a longtime Columbia lawyer and former associate circuit judge.

Long story short, she got on Milt’s good side; she got a job with the firm; she married Milt’s son, Joe; she made partner by 29 years old; and she helped earn a $45 million verdict for a client, one of the largest awarded in Missouri in 2017. She pointed out that both serendipity and ambition led her to this downtown Columbia law office.

In a sense, maybe she was lucky that her high school boyfriend got into trouble, hired Milt Harper for representation, called him “the best attorney that ever lived” and made her believe it, too. And that time in college she broke her elbow as a waitress — OK, that was unlucky — that spawned a fascination of workers’ compensation law, which she now practices.

Then there was her work trip to Las Vegas with Milt and his wife, Deanna, when she was a law student. The wine was flowing at dinner, and Harper mentioned to Deanna that her 6-foot-7-inch son seemed like a suitable boyfriend for her. Milt was away from the table, and when Deanna mentioned it to him later that night in their Bellagio hotel room, he responded, “I think that’s a great idea.” Within two years, Harper shared the family name.

Harper did always have that “bulldog” attitude, she says — ­ unabashed, bold and passionate. At 4 years old, she went door-to-door in her hometown of Centralia, trying to sell family recipes.

And that workers’ compensation for her broken elbow? She got the insurance company to raise its offer by five times the original amount.

“She’s no-nonsense,” Deanna says.

Harper goes a step further: “I am one of the most aggressive females I know and probably more than a lot of males, too. I probably overshare. I am straight to the point.”

It’s a natural disposition, but the “good ol’ boy system” of attorneys, Harper notes, certainly emboldens her.

She was “thrown into the fire” early on, her legal partner, Ron Netemeyer, says. He compared her to a young NFL quarterback, forced to start her rookie year at the firm with big cases and big sums. “Jill was in it right away,” he says.

Netemeyer passed down advice when he could, but Harper has always possessed the traits of a thorough lawyer — deep research skills, compassion, the ability to frame a case. Storytelling, after all, is central to practicing law. A good lawyer, Netemeyer says, “knows how to go in and tell the story of their client and capture the jury’s attention and hopefully their compassion.” He adds, “I think Jill has that.”

It’s the stories of Harper’s own life, and her elaborate telling of them, that illustrate her talent and power. “You wanted to know what kind of lawyer I am?” she asks. “Here’s a good example.” It was a few years ago. She was 12 weeks pregnant with her first child.

She was wearing, for the first time, maternity clothing in depositions. Harper was the only woman in a room full of 15 lawyers yelling questions over one another, debating whether a witness could testify. Ten minutes passed.

Harper then took control. “I figure out the judge’s phone number, call him, put it on speaker,” she says. “‘Judge, Jill Harper here. Hello. I’ve got 15 people in this room. Here’s what’s going on. We need you to make a ruling.’” The judge immediately ruled in Harper’s favor.

In her fourth-floor office, she arrives at the moral of her career: “Ron is not a pushover. He expects me not to be a pushover. So I haven’t been.”

She leans back and reminds herself of the coincidences that led her to where she sits. “I’m such a firm believer in everything happens for a reason,” she says. “I really got a lot of opportunities to make a name for myself here. And I ran with it.”

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

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COMO’S BEST WINGS P. 44

BEE IN THE KNOW P. 45

Baking after bedtime How one stay-at-home mom became a cookie maven.

BY MARGARET DONOHUE

At her kitchen table and surrounded by owl-shaped cookies, Kaitlyn Clark wears a shirt with the words, “The ABCs of Motherhood: Always Be Caffeinated.” The mother of two children, 9 months old and 3 years, discovered an opportunity last August after her friends gushed over her second-ever decorated batch of cookies. She thought baking could be profitable and help combat the isolation of being a stay-athome mom, so she started selling custom creations out of her home.

Clark makes everything from scratch, decorates her cookies with free-handed icing designs and promotes them on Instagram — all at night. She bakes after her children go to bed, hence her brand: Bedtime Bakery.“I’ll just keep doing this and selling them from home as long as people like them,” she says. “And if they don’t, I’ll just eat them on my own.”

ON THE ‘GRAM @bedtimebakery Cookie decorating came naturally to Clark. “I just really like being creative,” she says. “I’ve always liked to draw, or craft, or paint.”

Photography by Ethan Weston

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

43

E AT + DRINK RESTAURANTS

Wing it It just became easier to find your perfect sauce or dry rub.

BY TYLER KRAFT

W

ings come in so many different styles, flavors and heat levels that trying to find the right one for you can be a daunting task, but don’t fret. Over the course of two weeks, Vox tossed cholesterol levels and calorie counts to the wind and sampled different styles, so your next foray into wings can come without any unwanted surprises.

CJ’s Burn Your Face Off Wings The hotness level shouldn’t make a wing inedible, and that is why no one should miss out on these.

“Even the Burn Your Face Off, it’s very hot, but flavor is more about what (owner Ty Moore) is going for,” says Caitlin Crawford, a manager at CJ’s In Tiger Country. “He wants you to have the heat but still enjoy it.”

Chunks of jalapeños are one of the key ingredients, and they’re mixed in with the sauce, providing warmth that will make your lips tingle. It has a fresh pepper flavor to make the experience an enjoyable one. A popular pairing with this wing is the pepper jack cheese balls. Water isn’t a bad idea either. You can buy 1 pound of wings for $9.99, or if you’re feeding a hungry horde, 5 pounds for $35.99.

704 E. Broadway, Tues.– Fri. 11 a.m to 2 p.m. and 4–9 p.m. Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed on Mondays and Sundays.

Lutz’s Dry Rub Wings When Burl Lutz says “we don’t charge enough” for Lutz’s dry rub wings, he’s right. At only 87 cents per wing, an order almost feels like robbery.

The first bite will blanket your tongue in flavors. A blend of paprika, salt, lemon pepper and garlic that form the base of Lutz’s homemade dry rub is key to these tasty wings. The smoky spices will warm your throat, and it’ll be an experience for your taste buds. Lutz’s homemade ranch is the perfect dipping sauce. You can buy six wings for $6.15 and a dozen for $10.55.

200 E. Nifong Blvd., Mon. – Sat. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed on Sundays.

More than 10 restaurants in Columbia serve multiple types of wings. Here are four favorites.

Como Smoke and Fire’s Buffalo Wings When Como Smoke and Fire’s head chef Patrick Hawkins thinks of his ideal wing, two traits come to mind: meatiness and keeping the bone.

Enter their jumbo-sized buffalo wings, which brings both to the table.

Preparation consists of tossing the wings in the restaurant’s specialty dry rub, smoking them between 225 and 250 degrees for about two hours and frying them to give a crunchy coat lathered in a mild buffalo sauce. The result won’t overheat your mouth and includes a smoky accent packaged in some of the meatiest wings in Columbia. Then choose a local beer offered on tap to top off your experience. You can grab six wings for $7.99 or double your haul for $12.99.

4600 Paris Road, Mon.–Thurs. 11 a.m.­to 9 p.m., Fri. — Sat. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sun. noon to 8 p.m.

Smokin’ Chick’s Wing Ding Wings If you want something with a lot of sweet and a little spice, Smokin’ Chick’s Wing Ding Wings should be on your plate.

They’ll wash over the entirety of your mouth as soon as you bite in with the sweet flavors of the Wing Ding sauce dancing with spices from Smokin’ Chick’s dry rub. Owners Chick Orscheln and Lissa Gaw-Orscheln created the sauce themselves and say the Smokin’ Chicks horseradish slaw is a popular side to eat with these wings. Snag 10 wings for $11.50.

3301 W. Broadway Business Park Court, Sun.­–Thurs. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Fri.– Sat. 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

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Photography by N. Andrew Dent III

E AT + DRI N K FAQ

What’s the buzz on bees and honey?

Here’s the scoop on local honey and that pesky extinction talk.

BY CLARE RALEY

A

pril is here, and it’s time for bees to start doing what they do best: make honey. Fortunately for us, beekeepers in mid-Missouri take great care in harvesting the best sweet syrup in the business.

Bees have made headlines in recent years as misconceptions about endangered species abound. Vox spoke with two local beekeepers to get the need-to-know information on the black-and-yellow insects and the honey they create.

What are beekeepers up to this time of year?

Once April hits, keepers are as busy as the bees themselves. As honey bees bring in nectar and the queen bee lays her eggs, the beekeepers constantly inspect each colony and equalize the hives by combining weak and strong colonies. Equalizing keeps up the honey flow and prevents swarming by the stronger bees.

How does honey actually get made?

Bees collect nectar from flowers and pass it off to worker bees in the hive.

They gradually transform it into honey by evaporating most of the water, retaining sugar and adding enzymes from their mouths. The bees store the processed nectar in honeycombs and cap with beeswax.

Beekeepers then begin the extraction process. After they remove the wax cappings, honey extractors take off the honey by centrifugal force. Once extracted, the honey is run through a separator to remove wax and other particles. Only then can honey be bottled, marketed and sold.

What makes each individual batch of local honey unique? “(Local honey) has a very distinct flaIllustrations by Kellyn Nettles

vor that comes from the floral source, and that’s one of the things that makes honey such a unique natural sweetener,” says local beekeeper Steve Moeller.

Because flowers bloom at various times throughout the season, the taste and hue of each batch aligns with the specific time in which it is produced.

Honey with a yellow tint has a lighter taste, while Honeysuckle Acres beekeeper Nick Kauffman describes darker honey as having a robust, molasses flavor.

What’s the difference between locally harvested honey and national brands?

The bear-shaped containers of honey found in stores are from thousands of colonies. The honey is boiled until the flavors are purified and blended together to create one uniform taste. Not only does this eliminate the distinct contribution of each colony, but it also gets rid of the health advantages.

“Most of the time, the honey that you get from local beekeepers is still considered raw,” Kauffman says. “It hasn’t been pasteurized or anything.

Whenever honey is pasteurized, the health benefits are all gone. All the beneficial enzymes aren’t there anymore, and a lot of times it’ll be cut with corn syrup or rice syrup.”

Are bees actually going extinct?

No. The most common misconception about bees is that they’re all dying, but bees aren’t going anywhere. There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world and 425 in Missouri alone. Only seven bee species have been added to the U.S. endangered species list, and only one of those — the rusty-patched bumble bee — lives outside of Hawaii.

Numbers are down and some Missouri-native species are at risk, but honey

GETTIN’ HONEY

Where to purchase honey products from mid-Missouri beekeepers:

COLUMBIA •Columbia Farmers’ Market •Coming Home •Lucky’s Market •Hy-Vee on Broadway JEFFERSON CITY •Southbank Gift Company •Busch’s Florist •Missouri Valley Mercantile

bees — the species that made headlines — are not in immediate danger of extinction.

“There’s just so much misinformation out there,” Moeller says. “Even in a year where beekeepers are losing 30 to 40 percent of their bees, that doesn’t mean that in three years there won’t be any bees anymore.” And when they do lose a significant percentage of their bees, Moeller says most beekeepers replace the losses, though it can be expensive.

What is causing beehive decreases in mid-Missouri?

Beekeepers commonly attribute recent heavier losses in the winter to a variety of factors, including Varroa mites, diminishing floral sources and increased use of pesticides. The parasitic Varroa mites attach themselves to the bodies of bees to feed on them, which causes malformation and viruses that damage the immune systems of honey bees. Once infestation hits 3 percent, or three mites per 100 bees, beekeepers implement an integrated pest management strategy to avoid losing the entire colony.

Despite the decline, beekeepers like Moeller and Kauffman are working hard to keep the honey bees alive and thriving.

“To me, it’s about the joys of beekeeping,” Moeller says. “I’m probably never more at home than I am with my head stuck in a beehive.”

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JOIN US

for our Area Spring Games April 13 – Rock Bridge H.S. Come out and enjoy our Opening Ceremony at 9 a.m. and then stay to volunteer and cheer on our athletes.

Central Area Spring Games – April 13 (Rock Bridge H.S.) For more information, visit www.SOMO.VolunteerHub.com.

II SHOULD PROBABLY SHOULD PROBABLY GET GET AA RIDE RIDE HOME. HOME. BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING

BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING

PUTT YOUR BEST FOOT FORE-WARD P. 50

COMO’S HOUSING HICCUPS P. 49

It’s cold inside Whole-body cryotherapy puts a modern twist on the traditional ice bath, though its purported benefits remain unproven.

BY NICOLE MONDRAGON

There’s a new health therapy in town, one in which patients willingly submerge their bodies in subzero temperatures. It joins the long list of cold treatment techniques that trace back to ancient Greece.

Today, everything from ice bags and ice cups to ice massages and cold-water immersion are regularly used in the sports world to treat and avoid injuries.

Whole-body cryotherapy is a three-minute, super-cold treatment that came to the U.S. in 2009. The MU athletics department has started incorporating this new therapy into its regimen. And, as of February, it’s available for Columbia consumers, too.

Photography by Antranik Tavitian and courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

MU linebacker Nick Bolton prepares for a cryotherapy treatment supervised by athletic trainer Branden Stephens. The MU Athletics Training Complex now owns two cryo-saunas.

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CITY LIFE WELLNESS

tration doesn’t recognize it as an official medical treatment.

The FDA published a July 2016 notice on its website that cryotherapy’s health claims are unproven, while its risks are apparent. It warns patients about the hazards of asphyxiation that come with exposure to nitrogen vapor, and conditions such as frostbite, burns and eye injury from the extreme temperatures. It recommends consulting a doctor before undergoing the treatment.

Neither of the Taylors have a background in medicine, and they are transparent that cryotherapy is simply a wellness trend.

Cryotherapy, which uses liquid nitrogen to lower the body’s temperature, aims to provide health benefits including recovery from activity and overall wellness, says Matt Taylor, who co-owns Element Cryotherapy with his wife, Claire. Element is Columbia’s first and currently only commercial center to offer cryo treatments.

There are myriad claimed benefits, but the U.S. Food and Drug Adminis-

Andrea Morse, a customer of Element Cryotherapy, undergoes three minutes of the treatment. The center, located at 2901 W. Broadway, has already served more than 100 customers.

The procedure Cryotherapy users must be completely dry before the process begins. Customers remove all clothing and jewelry but wear underwear, gloves and feet covers.

To eliminate the risk of nitrogen inhalation, faces are kept out of the chamber, and supervision is required.

Once the client enters the chamber, known as the cryo-sauna, liquid nitrogen

is emitted to decrease the air’s temperature. MU running back Larry Rountree III has been using this technique for two years. He says it’s much easier and faster than a cold tub, and he hasn’t noticed any negative side effects.

Growing popularity At least 400 cryotherapy centers have opened in the U.S., The Economist reported in 2017. According to Impact Cryotherapy, a group of cryo-sauna manufacturers, there are treatment units operating in 38 states. Columbia recently joined the trend with the opening of Element Cryotherapy, in addition to the two cryo-saunas at the MU Athletics Training Complex.

Rex Sharp, MU associate athletic director for sports medicine, says some athletes, like Rountree, undergo cryotherapy daily for extra recovery. However, the training complex’s cryo-saunas are only available to MU athletes. This created the opening for businesses such as Element Cryotherapy to offer the service to city residents.

Don’t mis s Taco Tues day and Soul Food Everyday !

Located in Vandiver Plaza | 1301 Vandiver Dr, Suite E - Columbia OPEN TUESDAY TO SUNDAY | 10:30 am - 6:00 pm Dine In • Carry Out 573-424-3718 Menu Changes Daily • 10 Minutes From Downtown

Mrs G’s A Touch Of Soul 48

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Photography by Jeffrey Zide

C I T Y LI FE REAL ESTATE

House numbers Columbia isn’t building as many new homes. The reasons and the ripple effect are sweeping.

BY KRISTIN BLAKE With fewer new homeowners and a smaller pool of construction labor, the number of housing permits issued is declining, dropping 23 percent from 2015 to 2017. This breakdown looks at how housing, construction and real estate affect the city.

From 2016 to 2017, the Columbia construction workforce decreased by 7.2 percent, according to the Missouri Chamber of lost workforce Commerce and Industry Staff. This continues the 15 percent drop in Missouri construction laborers from 2006 to 2016. Builders such as Jeff Hemme, founder of Hemme Construction, are feeling this labor shortage firsthand. “It’s taking us a lot longer to build a house, and it costs a whole lot more money to build a house,” he says.

7.2%

$94.8M

Building single-family homes generated $94.8 million of lovalue to economy cal income in 2016, mostly in construction wages, according to the National Association of Home Builders. It also brought $11 million in taxes and other revenue for city governments and maintained 1,655 local jobs. Despite the current labor shortage, the construction industry is one of the top five employers in Boone County, Columbia Home Builders Association President Andrew Kummerfeld writes in an email to Vox.

Since 2010, 4,230 structures, including houses and apartments, have been built in Boone County, according to the American Consumer Survey Profile Report. Compare that to the previous 10 years, when 16,377 structures were built. Two to three years ago, a coveted southwest Columbia lot cost about $50,000 but costs $80,000 today, Kummerfeld says. “I don’t think new construction builders can afford to build for first-time buyers with a profit,” he says. “You wouldn’t even break even.”

21% Twenty-one percent of Columbians say the lack of affordable housing is a moderate or major problem, according to a 2018 survey by the ETC Institute, a market research company. “It’s really straightforward from a builder’s standpoint,” Kummerfeld says. “As a builder, we’re not able to build homes at a profit for the price point where there’s the most demand. As builders, we’re concerned about providing affordable homes.”

Illustrations by Claire Harman

$6,660.15

FOR RENT

53.8%

Columbia’s metro area is made up of 53.8 percent renters, according to Census Reporter, a project that makes census data readily available.

Brian Toohey, CEO of Columbia Board of Realtors and city planning and zoning commissioner, sees this as a result of the city’s status as a college town. Hemme says it also could be due to millennials’ draw to renting. Millennials are less likely to own homes due to student debt and marrying later in life than older generations, the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found in 2018.

NEW

new structures built

PERMIT

$235,900 new homes

A permit for a modest 1,500-square-foot home with a 450-square-foot garage now costs $6,660, Toohey writes in an email to Vox. This would cover electrical, mechanical, plumbing and other necessary services for the home. And permit price only goes up from there with the size of the home. Just five years ago, the permit would have cost less than $4,000. Toohey says the costs of approval and development, such as solar-ready requirements and insulating the concrete slab, have increased. He adds that on top of the $6,000-plus for a permit today, the builder can pay an optional e-consultant from an outside firm another $600 per permit to review the plans.

The median price of a new single-family home in Boone County was $235,900 in 2018, according to the Columbia Board of Realtors. Compare that to the median price of an existing home in the same year, which was $188,000. “The gap between used homes for sale and new construction homes is greater than it’s ever been,” Hemme says. “Fewer people are choosing to build or buy new because it’s so much more expensive.”

$188,000 existing homes

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CITY LIFE SPORTS

How to get your game up to par Don’t get stuck in the rough. Whether you’re just starting out or an old pro, Columbia has a golf course for everyone.

BY CARY LITTLEJOHN

A

pril marks the first major tournament of the year in professional golf, The Masters. It’s the clarion call to golfers of all skill levels to find their dusty clubs amid the depths of their garages. But the beginning of each golf season can mean different things for different golfers, especially considering each person’s varying skill level.

FORE!

50

High handicaps Brand new to the game? Welcome to the most infuriating hobby imaginable. Never said a curse word in your life? That’ll change.

You’re about to find out why they call golf “a good walk spoiled.”

The ball just sits there. How hard can it be? Answer: very. Laura Kraft, assistant golf professional at the Country Club of Missouri, says to take it slow at first and try out a par-3 course. She recommends Midway Golf and Games as a place for beginners to play in a no-stress environment and feel out the game.

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Test yourself So you’ve experienced the sweet-yet-addicting torture of golf. Where would you like to consider throwing your clubs in a lake next? “We have such a wide variety of courses, and they’re all unique in their own sense,” PGA teaching professional Shawn Deaver says. However, some courses are harder than others. The USGA has taken the guesswork out of it with a course rating and slope database that ranks each USGA course. For well-known public courses in and around Columbia, the ranking is (from easiest to hardest): A.L. Gustin, L.A. Nickell, Lake of the Woods, Hail Ridge in Boonville, Tanglewood in Fulton and Eagle Knoll in Hartsburg.

Illustrations by Hope Johnson and Kellyn Nettles

C I T Y LI FE SPORTS

Get a grip Yes, even you, the “I can hit a high fade or a low draw off the tee on command” type. We’re all very impressed with your skill, but even superstars need to check in on how they hold the club periodically. Fundamentals are essential, no matter your level of experience. Jake Poe, owner of Poe Golf, says that finding the right grip is the key to developing a good swing. Beginners and pros alike can test out their new grip by swinging at one of Columbia’s many driving ranges, including the brand new range at Lake of the Woods.

Learn your lesson You just chunked a 75-yard chip shot in the water and are contemplating going home when you have 12 holes left to play. All golfers have been there, but thankfully there’s a solution. Just like with courses, Columbia offers plenty of options when it comes to instruction. Deaver gives lessons at A.L. Gustin. Most courses in the area offer lessons as well.

Try something else Are you the type who literally wouldn’t know which end of a golf club to grip? Is it physically impossible for you to care less about swinging a club at a tiny white ball?

That’s OK because Columbia has golf of all kinds. There are three disc golf courses at Strawn, Albert-Oakland and Indian Hills parks. Midway Golf and Games also has both putt-putt and soccer golf. Don’t overthink it; it’s exactly what you’d imagine.

Rhynsburger Theatre 505 Hitt St.

7:30 pm: Apr 18 – 20, 25 – 27 2:00 pm: Apr 28 Tickets: Rhynsburger Theatre box office Mon - Fri, 2p - 5p (573) 882-PLAY (7529) or online at theatre.missouri.edu Scan with smart phone to purchase now.

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CALENDAR

TO-DO LIST

costs of transportation, food and medications. April 20, 3 p.m. doors; 4 p.m. start, CBO Event Center, $10-50, 875-8687

Your curated guide of what to do in Columbia this month.

Yappy Hour With food trucks, live music, vendors, activities, contests, craft beer and room for furry friends to roam, Yappy Hour has it all. Bring your friends and dogs to this park event for an afternoon of fun. April 27,

ARTS Noises Off Be part of a meta experience with a play-within-a-play. Noises Off follows the cast of a flop fictional show called Nothing’s On during its final dress rehearsals with actors comically not knowing their lines, their entrances or what Nothing’s On is even about.

3–6 p.m., Twin Lakes Recreation Area dog park, $5, human only; $10, with dog, 874-7460

April 4–6, April 11–13, April 18–20, 7:30 p.m.; April 7 and 14, 2 p.m., Columbia Entertainment Co., $10 Thursdays; $14; $12, seniors, children, students, 474-3699

What’s Cooking?

FOOD The Columbia Farmers’ Market has recruited Mark Sulltrop, owner of 44 Stone Public House, to give a cooking demo. Visit the market for inspiration for your own kitchen. March 30, 8

Anton in Show Business This dark comedy follows the plight of three actresses as they fall down a rabbit hole and into a sort of wonderland that resembles modern American theater. Follow their journey as they find deeper purpose in their lives. April 4–6, 7:30 p.m.; April 7, 2 p.m., Warehouse Theatre, $8, 442-2211

Carmina Burana Featuring the Missouri Contemporary Ballet and more than 100 singers from the Columbia Chorale, the performance is a combination of music, words and movement.

Singers will be dispersed throughout the theater to create a truly immersive experience. April 5, 7 p.m., Missouri Theatre, $28–48, 882-3781

How I Became a Pirate The TRYPS Children’s Theater will perform an adaptation of Melinda Long’s children’s book of the same name. The show is perfect for younger audiences because of its childoriented story and hour-long runtime.

April 5, 7 p.m.; April 6, 2 p.m., Macklanburg Playhouse, $12; $7, children under 18, 449-4536

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a.m., Columbia Farmers’ Market, free, 823-6889

Glenn Miller Orchestra The ensemble is visiting Columbia just in time for National Jazz Appreciation Month. Since its formation in 1956, the group has toured consistently and is known for its distinct big-band sound. April 13, 7 p.m., Missouri

CoMo will display everything from products and services to resources and involvement opportunities. Learn more ways to promote your business and make connections. April 11, 1–6 p.m., The Crossing church, $10, 817-9119

Theatre, $28-38, 882-3781

A.L.I.C.E. A modern adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A.L.I.C.E. depicts a young girl lost in a world of virtual reality. Instead of meeting fantastical creatures, Alice confronts technology as she grows up and learns to remain true to herself. April 18–20; April 25–27, 7:30 p.m.; April 28, 2 p.m., Rhynsburger Theater, $16, 882-7529

CIVIC Business Showcase CoMo 2019 Prepare to network with community promoters and attendees. Showcase

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

Kick It for Veterans Battle it out with friends and family at an adult kickball tournament while benefiting veterans of midMissouri. Each player will get a T-shirt and have a kicking good time.

Proceeds will be donated to Welcome Home, a nonprofit organization for veterans. April 13, 10 a.m.,

DON’T MISS IT

Young Adult Meet & Greet

Columbia’s annual Earth Day Festival is a fun-filled event you don’t want to miss. Learn about sustainable practices with vendors, food trucks, live music, demonstrations and booths. April 28, noon to 6:30 p.m., Peace Park, free, 875-0539

Mingle with other young professionals in their 20s and 30s over pizza. Be sure to RSVP to get a slice with your favorite toppings.

April 11, 5 p.m., Shakespeare’s Pizza South, free, 449-5424

Primrose Hill BBQ For a Cause

Corner of South Providence and Corporate Lake Drive, $30, 249-0999

Chow down on BBQ pork steak, pulled pork and other homestyle foods while listening to stories from Primrose Hill students. The Primrose Hill Adult and Teen Challenge recovery program strives to help women and children stabilize their lives. The event will also include a live auction.

Aces Up For Better Help Charity Poker Tournament

April 13, 5 p.m., Municipal Auditorium in Moberly, $12, rrowden@primrosehilltc.com

Win all sorts of prizes and raffles at Spectrum Health Care’s fifth annual No Limit Texas Hold ‘em Charity Poker Tournament. SHC provides care for those living with HIV and will use all proceeds for

Meals in a Flash Preparing meals can be timeconsuming and difficult. In our increasingly busy college town, Meals in a Flash teaches people how to not Photography by Phu Nguyen/Archive

CALENDAR

only prepare their own meals but also how to save money and live healthier. Attend to find out how to add some nutrition to your diet. April 17, 5 p.m., MU Student Center, free, 882-1174

MUSIC Big Muddy Folk Festival For the 28th year in a row, Boonville will be home to the Big Muddy Folk Festival, an annual celebration of folk music that hosts different activities, including performances, workshops, exhibits and a barbecue. On Friday, the Bourque Emmissaires and the Alfred Packer Memorial String Band will be featured. On Saturday, performers including STEAM!, Phyllis Dals and the McClain Family will make appearances. April 4 and 5, 7 p.m., Thespian Hall in Boonville, $25, evening pass; $45, weekend pass, 660-882-7977

Darty for Donations Shake off your post-spring break blues with free music from MU performers and food from Rose Music Hall’s Mexican restaurant, Pepe’s.

The best part: It’s all for a good cause. The only thing needed to get in the door is a canned, non-perishable food item to donate to the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri. Stop by to enjoy some good music and help someone in need. April 6, noon, Rose Music Hall, canned donations, 874-1944

Trail to Backwoods: Local Artist Showcase Trail to Backwoods is bringing all your favorite local artists together for one night at The Penguin Piano Bar and Nightclub. At the end of the night, your vote and a panel of underground judges decide which of the bands can perform at the Backwoods Festival in Ozark, Arkansas.

April 4-7 | 11-14 | 18-20 2019 Adults Seniors & Students Thursdays

$14 $12 $10

1800 Nelwood Dr. Columbia MO| 573.474.3699 | www.cectheatre.org

KOPN 89.5fm...Where Else?

It’s not just radio, it’s community radio.

April 17, 9 p.m., The Penguin Piano Bar and Nightclub, $7, general; $15, VIP, noble@connectorpresents.com

Son Volt The alternative country and folk band’s newest album, Union, mixes country and blues with the popular rich lyrics and poetic melodies from Son Volt’s 25-year legacy. Sway along to the songs from their 10th studio album. April 18 and 19, 8

On your radio dial at 89.5 fm or live streaming at kopn.org

p.m., Rose Music Hall, $19 in advance, $22 day of, 874-1944

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CALENDAR

SPORTS

Spring intO the Berg!

10th Annual Head for the Cure 5K Run/Walk Run to support the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center at MU Health Care and the Brain Tumor Trials Collaborative with this annual 5K. Join the community in raising funds and awareness to defeat cancer step by step. April 6, 8 a.m., Stephens Lake Park, $27, team member; $32, individual, 620-203-0191

Kite Flying Day

Enjoy our roof-top patio!

Kitchen Open Late

410 S 9th Street | Columbia 573-449-6927

www.theheidelberg.com

Bust out your kite, and partake in the fun. Prizes will be awarded for the largest, the smallest and the highest-flying kites. For children who don’t have a kite to fly, there will be extras available.

April 13, noon to 1:45 p.m., Douglass Park ballfield, free, 817-5077

Missouri State vs. MU Baseball The Tigers take on the Bears for the second time this season. This time, you don’t have to drive all the way to Springfield to catch the action. April 23, 6 p.m., Taylor Stadium, free for students; ticket prices vary, 882-6501

MID-MISSOURI’S HOME FOR ALL THE HITS!

LISTEN LIVE AT Q1061.COM • DOWNLOAD THE Q 106.1 MOBILE APP /Q1061HITS @Q1061 54

VOX MAGAZINE • APRIL 2019

photo finish

Set your sights PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANTRANIK TAVITIAN Optometrist Dr. Sahba Jalali performs an eye examination on Bethany Nathan at Advanced Vision Columbia. He is using a phoropter, an instantly recognizable hallmark of any eye doctor’s office, to test for conditions such as nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. Using a variety of lenses, the doctor can identify the proper refraction needed to correct vision.

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