The Pitch: May 2019

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Tattoo

CONTENTS

20

Convention 6 GET OUT

All Inclusive The first-annual Transfiguration aims to be a Pride fest for a queerer generation.

BY EMILY COX

10 NEWS

Cheat to Win How low will Republicans go to undo Clean Missouri?

BY EMILY PARK

12 Pet Issue

With the sudden departure of Great Plains SPCA, what will happen to the second-largest animal shelter in the metro?

BY ROXIE HAMMILL

14 FEATURE

Witchy Women Unpacking the surprising resurgence of KC’s metaphysical community.

BY LIZ COOK

20 Pinhead

Meet Keri Wing, the top-ranked female pinball player in Kansas.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

22

KELCIE MCKENNEY

CAFE

What’s in a Name In an increasingly crowded fine-dining scene, can Farina live up to chef Michael Smith’s reputation?

BY LIZ COOK

26 EAT

Eat This Now Mango sticky rice at Baramee Thai Bistro.

BY APRIL FLEMING

26 DRINK

Drink This Now The Agroni at Mean Mule Distilling Company.

BY APRIL FLEMING

28 ARTS

Power Moves The vital KC organist Jan Kraybill is revved up.

BY LIBBY HANSSEN

May 10th - 12th 2019 Sheraton at Crown Center 23 45 McGee St Kansas City, MO 6 4108

COME GET TATTOOED

KCMOTattoo.com thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

3

CONTENTS

THE PITCH

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

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JUNE 22, 2019 7-11 p.m.

At the beautiful Overland Park

Arboretum & Botanical Gardens

Visit stemssoiree.org or call 913.322.6467 for all ticket and event information.

MUSIC

People Get Ready Make some room for The Freedom Affair, KC’s nine-piece soul powerhouse.

BY RILEY COWING

32 Stuck in the Middle

There’s very little Midwest Nice in Salty’s charming, KC-centric basement rock.

BY AARON RHODES

34 FILM

Fin Saying goodbye to the Tivoli, an irreplaceable anchor of Kansas City cinema.

BY DAN LYBARGER

36 SAVAGE LOVE

Outed on Instagram “My friend’s married father has been liking and following accounts of very young boy models.

Underage boys.”

BY DAN SAVAGE

38 EVENTS

May Calendar A packed schedule lies ahead.

COPYRIGHT

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2019 by Carey Media. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher.

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WITCHY WOMEN

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19

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itness six of KC’s most talented chefs as they battle for the Gold Fork along with sampling from 20+ restaurants.

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GET OUT

WELCOME

TO THE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH OF THE RESURRECTION

OUTWARD-FOCUSED • THOUGHT-PROVOKING BRIDGE-BUILDING • HOPE-RADIATING

Leawood

13720 Roe Ave. Leawood, KS 66224 Sat. & Sun. Evenings 5 pm Sunday Mornings 7:30, 9:15, 11 am

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Downtown

Blue Springs

1601 Grand Blvd.

Kansas City, MO 64108

601 NE Jefferson St. Blue Springs, MO 64014

Sat. & Sun. Evenings 5:10 pm Sunday Mornings 9 & 10:45 am, 5 pm

Sundays 9:30 & 11 am A crowd gathers on the dance floor for Intelligent Sound and UN/TUCK’s floral-inspired Spring (In)Formal, in April 2018.

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ALL INCLUSIVE

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THE FIRST-ANNUAL TRANSFIGURATION AIMS TO BE A PRIDE FEST FOR A QUEERER GENERATION. BY EMILY COX

2/20/19 4:21 PM

Mazzy Mann and Zoey Shopmaker are direct about their intentions for Transfiguration, the new queer-and-trans-centric music and arts festival they’ve organized. It’s being held May 31 and June 1 — the same weekend as KC Pride Fest.

“We want to present it as an alternative to KC Pride Fest, which is notoriously not very inclusive to anyone beyond cis white gay men,” Shopmaker says. “We want to move away from a singular idea of what it means to be queer or gay or trans in the Midwest.”

Complaints about KC Pride Fest becoming less gay and more corporate are, at this point, almost as much of a tradition as the festival itself. “It’s gone from being a political event to being an entertainment event,” Camp magazine publisher John Long told The Pitch back in 2014.

The perception is not without merit.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the famous 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, a major turning point for LGBTQ rights in America. Pride fests in many other cities will commemorate this historic insurrection this year. But KC Pride Fest’s website doesn’t even mention Stonewall.

It appears that 2019 will be another year of EDM stage shows at a park filled with vendors who’ve slapped rainbows on their products for the occasion.

By contrast, Mann name-drops Stonewall icons Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera as ancestors worthy of celebration, and emphasizes that Samantha Ruggels, the executive director of both the Kansas City

GET OUT

Transfiguration is Friday, May 31 (doors at 8 p.m.) and Saturday, June 1 (doors at 6 p.m.). Tickets are $20 for two days, or $15 for single day.

A low-income option will be available. As of this writing, the location is not yet set. Check UN/TUCK’s Facebook page for the address and full schedule of the festival.

Center for Inclusion and the KC Transfinity Chorus, will be a keynote speaker at Transfiguration. “[Transfiguration] is a call to the cause as much as it’s an entertainment event,” Mann says. “It’s something Kansas City has never seen before.”

Lofty goals for an event that, at press time, wasn’t ready to announce its location. But Mann and Shopmaker, both trans women, have built up a sturdy reputation over the past few years as the founders of

GET OUT

$2.00 TUESDAY All games and shoes $2.00 each (all day)

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• SIZZLING SUNDAY $8 a person 7:30 pm to 10 pm unlimited bowling and shoes

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JEFF, NORM DAVE & JIMMY 7PM

THUR 5/2

CHRIS HUDSON & FRIENDS

FRI 5/3

OLD SOUND

SAT 5/4

REX PRYOR SONG CIRCLE 2PM

LIVE MUSIC

WED 5/1

WED 5/8 THUR 5/9 FRI 5/10 SAT 5/11 WED 5/15 THUR 5/16 FRI 5/17 SAT 5/18 WED 5/22 THUR5/23 FRI 5/24 SAT 5/25 WED 5/29 THUR 5/30 FRI 5/31 SAT 6/1

FRICKUS & THE HOOLIGANS 8PM JND&J 7PM BARCLAY BROTHERS BETTER OFF DEAD ROCK PAPER SCISSORS 5PM PROMISE MAKERS 9PM JND&J 7PM REPEAT OFFENDERS BOB & UNA WALKENHORST 7PM FRED WICKHAM & THE HADOCOL CARAVAN 7PM JND&J 7PM FLAT PENNY REVIEW + GAS FOOD & LODGING 7PM THE OUTTAKES HEAVY GRAMS W/BROKEN ARROWS & HEAVY FIGS JND&J 7PM NACE BROTHERS ACOUSTIC TRIO 7PM TRACER HEIGHTS JEFF PORTER 6PM COUNTER CULTURE 9PM

1515 WESTPORT RD. 816-931-9417 8

THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

UN/TUCK, an electronic music label and collective. Along with Lorelei Kretsinger, they started UN/TUCK, in 2017, in response to their observation that queer and trans artists weren’t being regularly booked in the city. They hooked up with Intelligent Sound, an electronic and hip-hop collective, and started doing shows at Niche, the upstairs space at the now-closed Uptown Arts Bar. The lineup at Transfiguration will draw heavily on the community of artists that frequented those Niche shows. Local electronic music will be represented by Whorxata, Close Qrtrs, Xanna, Elijah, and Sister Zo (Shopmaker). Two headlining DJs are coming from out of town: LA-based Bored Lord (industrial beats with nostalgic, ravey vibes) and Adab of Cleveland’s queer electronic collective In Training.

It’s not all dance-oriented, though.

Also slated to perform: Evil Pillows (alltrans punk band), Lava Dreams (a dream pop solo act), Lovergurl (a synth-pop trio that invites you to “come dance to dismantle the patriarchy”), The Black Creatures (sci-fi soul pop), and Calvin Arsenia (awe-inspiring indie-jazz-electronic melange). Specialty cocktails concocted by Helen Proctor will be available, but so will offerings from a nonalcoholic bar spearheaded by herbalist Julissa VanGillig. The event strives to be welcoming to all — including those who choose to party sober.

Transfiguration will kick off with a drag show, “Drag Through the Decades,” hosted by House of Alter, that will showcase looks from different cultural moments in queer history. “[The show] offers a chance to playfully reflect on a rich history,” says Alter’s Bo Hubbard. “We will be featuring early-1900s cabaret all the way to the present push of genderfuck drag. We might even get wild and pull out some 18th century decadence.”

(The show will be emceed by Hubbard and Boi Boy, founders of House of Alter and throwers of wild, late-night dance parties across the city since 2017.)

Shopmaker draws a connection between the exhausting daily oppression of being a trans woman — who face a higher risk of violence than those of any other gender identity — and the need for a space to be together with others.

“It gets so tiring that it’s easier to just stay home,” she says. “There’s so many people who feel that way. For everyone who experiences that marginalization and that fear — having to make yourself small to avoid violence or discrimination or harassment — [events like Transfiguration and UN/TUCK shows] gives them power.”

After all, as Mann adds: “If you aren’t giving back to the community, what are you doing? That’s the heart of all communal art.”

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9

NEWS

CHEAT TO WIN

Clean Missouri advocates gathered in Jefferson City in August 2018.

HOW LOW WILL REPUBLICANS GO TO UNDO CLEAN MISSOURI? BY EMILY PARK

In November 2018, a resounding 62 percent of Missouri voters approved Constitutional Amendment One, better known as Clean Missouri.

The amendment restored a modicum of sanity and fairness to a legislature with a reputation for the kind of corruption that tends to grow out of a lack of transparency.

Clean Missouri replaced the state’s bipartisan system for drawing legislative districts with a nonpartisan system. It required legislative records to be open to the public. It mandated that politicians wait two years before becoming lobbyists. It placed a cap on lobbyist gifts at five dollars. And it constrained campaign contribution limits. Every single bit of Clean Missouri was nonpartisan and common sense.

Which is to say: anathema to a certain kind of Missouri Republican.

“The polls had not even been closed yet, and there was already chatter about how they [lawmakers] were going to have to work to undo it,” says Sean Soendker Nicholson, the director of the Clean Missouri campaign. “Some folks in Jefferson City

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

have grown accustomed to the old way of doing things. They enjoy operating in secret, they enjoy that lobbyist-gift gravy train, and they enjoy running in districts where the outcome was decided long before election day.”

No surprise then, that the 2019 legislative session, which is scheduled to end May 17, has seen multiple members of the Missouri House and Senate introduce resolutions that would undo parts of Clean Missouri or repeal it entirely. And because Republicans enjoy supermajorities in both chambers, these bills stand a pretty good shot at passing.

•

•

•

Clean Missouri really does represent a substantial departure from the way redistricting previously worked in the state.

It created a new state position: a nonpartisan demographer responsible for drawing the legislative district maps for the House and Senate. The amendment also listed and ranked six priorities — among them, racial equity, partisan fairness (which is cal-

culated using a specific formula), geographical contiguity, and compactness — for the demographer to consider when drawing those maps.

Once the maps are drawn, the demographer makes public the redistricting plan and the data used to conceive it. This information is then reviewed by bipartisan commissions in the House and Senate. Those two commissions can then make changes to the plan, but only with 70 percent support of their members.

That’s a major improvement over the way things used to work. Before Clean Missouri passed, there was no state demographer and only three requirements were considered: equal population, contiguity, and compactness. A recipe, in other words, for rampant gerrymandering.

One of the reasons Evelyn Maddox campaigned for Clean Missouri was because she didn’t think the former redistricting plan did enough to curb gerrymandering.

Maddox is the co-president of the Kansas City chapter of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to mobilizing voters via information about

candidates and issues.

“If you would find the map on the internet of the district boundaries, you would see that some of them have very odd shapes, which implies constructing the district to favor somebody or something,” Maddox says.

She also points out that unopposed election races indicate an unfair system. In the 2018 general election for the Missouri House of Representatives, nearly 25 percent of district races were unopposed.

Bob Johnson, a city council member in Lee’s Summit who spent a combined 23 years in the Missouri Legislature as a Republican, says another indicator of gerrymandering is the division of cities with populations under the amount needed for one legislative district. For example, parts of Lee’s Summit are divided into five state Senate districts — despite the fact the city doesn’t have a population large enough to fill one.

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The bill Rep. Dean Plocher (R-St. Louis) introduced in February of this year, HJR

NEWS

48, seemed straightforward: a ban on all lobbyist gifts, rather than the five-dollar cap approved by Clean Missouri. But Nicholson was skeptical of the legislation. A longtime observer of Missouri politics, Nicholson feared provisions might be added to the proposal later on that would alter Clean Missouri’s redistricting process.

He was right. A House Committee Substitute combined HJR 48 with Rep. Phil Christofanelli’s (R-St. Peters) HJR 46 and Rep. Curtis Trent’s (R-Springfield) HJR 47.

The end result is a proposal to alter several aspects of Clean Missouri’s plan for drawing legislative districts.

Under this plan, the role of the nonpartisan demographer would be replaced with “Independent Bipartisan Citizens Commissions” for the House and Senate. Critically, these commissions would not be required to make the demographic and partisan data used to draft the maps open to the public.

And the commission members would be appointed by the governor from nominees provided by Republicans and Democrats.

Nicholson says the citizens commissions are essentially the same thing as the prior bipartisan commissions, just under different names. He says the nonpartisan demographer is necessary because it gives

everyone a “fair shake.”

“The reason it’s important to add independence to the process is that those commissions have traditionally been made up of political consultants and lobbyists, and political appointees who are more interested in communicating their own parochial or partisan future,” Nicholson says.

The joint proposals would also prioritize contiguity and compactness considerations over partisan fairness and competitiveness. In recent weeks, we’ve also seen state Republicans arguing that Clean Missouri’s redistricting rules will cost African American lawmakers seats in the legislature.

But that’s plainly not true: Clean Missouri’s provisions outline that districts must be drawn in a way that achieves racial equity.

In fact, Yurij Rudensky says Clean Missouri is one of the fairest plans for drawing legislative districts in the country because it protects communities of color. Rudensky studies best practices for avoiding gerrymandering in the state legislative redistricting process at the New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. He says it’s important to keep racial equity and partisan fairness at a higher priority than compactness and contiguity.

“There are at least seven different ways

compactness can be measured,” says Rudensky. “So it’s something that can be used as a veil to hide behind when really there is something untoward, when there are partisan or racial manipulations going on behind the scenes.”

A number of other proposals also threaten Clean Missouri. HJR 57, sponsored

by Rep. Jeff Pogue (R-Salem), calls for a full repeal of the amendment, though that bill has not progressed past its committee hearing.

On the Senate side, two proposals sponsored by Sen. Dave Schatz (R-Sullivan) and Sen. Bill Eigel (R-Weldon Springs), would also change redistricting provisions, but neither have been debated in committee. SJR 13, however, has made it past committee and into the perfection stage.

Sponsored by Sen. Jason Holsman (D-Kansas City), it would exclude certain records under Clean Missouri’s open records provisions. Sen. Bob Onder (R-St. Charles) offered an amendment to SJR 13 that would alter the redistricting process, but it has not been added to the legislation. Holsman did not return The Pitch’s request for a comment about his proposal.

Rep. Shamed Dogan (R-Ballwin) put forth HB 445, and Sen. Ed Emery (R-La-

mar) filed SB 132 — both would reduce legislative records made public under the Sunshine Law. Dogan’s bill has been passed over to the Senate, and Emery’s bill is in perfection stages.

The fate of these proposals will be determined in May, as the legislative season comes to a close. It is worth noting that all of these proposals — excluding HB 445 and SB 132 — require constitutional amendments, and, if passed by the legislature, would have to go before Missouri voters in November 2020.

Nicholson, Maddox, and Johnson say if any of these proposals make it onto the ballot in 2020, they’ll just have to get back out there to educate the public about the importance of an independent redistricting process. But Johnson says that 2020 is probably the only window lawmakers have to try to make any changes to Clean Missouri’s redistricting provisions.

“If this stays in effect in 2020, that means the reapportionment requirements will be completed by 2022,” Johnson says. “If you wait for another election cycle, you’re going to say to people, ‘I know we’ve just redrawn all the boundaries, but let’s do it over again.’ So I think it becomes even more difficult after that.”

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

(816) 471-0400 / kcsymphony.org

INSPIRING PERFORMANCES Michael Stern

Classical Concert

STERN CONDUCTS MAHLER’S THIRD Friday & Saturday, May 17-18 at 8 p.m.

Sunday, May 19 at 2 p.m.

Michael Stern, conductor Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano Women of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus Charles Bruffy, chorus director

Allegro Choirs of Kansas City

Stefan Jackiw

Classical Concert

MOZART’S FIFTH VIOLIN CONCERTO with BRAHMS

Friday & Saturday, May 31-June 1 at 8 p.m.

Sunday, June 2 at 2 p.m.

Michael Stern, conductor Stefan Jackiw, violin

MAHLER Symphony No. 3

ANNA CLYNE Within Her Arms W.A. MOZART Violin Concerto No. 5, “Turkish” BRAHMS/SCHOENBERG Piano Quartet No. 1

As one of the most exalted works of the symphonic repertoire, Mahler’s Third is a not-to-be-missed concert event.

Tickets from $25.

Relish the sweet poetry of Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto, followed by the gypsy energy of Brahms’ First Piano Quartet.

Tickets from $25.

Christy Elsner, founder and artistic director

BANK OF AMERICA CELEBRATION AT THE STATION - Sunday, May 26 at 8 p.m. (rain or shine) Free patriotic concert with fireworks at Union Station Kansas City. Visit kcsymphony.org/celebration for event details.

Jason Seber

Featuring Elgar’s Enigma Variations

CLASSICS UNCORKED: SECRETS REVEALED Thursday, June 13 at 7 p.m.

Jason Seber, David T. Beals III Associate Conductor When the backstory is as intriguing as the music, we have to pull back the curtain! Elgar’s Enigma Variations captures the essence of his friends and even himself in 14 variations on an enigmatic theme. Masquerade by Anna Clyne conjures up a mid-18th century London promenade concert with street entertainers. Most tickets $25.

Sponsored by

Sponsored by

thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

11

NEWS

PET ISSUE WITH THE SUDDEN DEPARTURE OF GREAT PLAINS SPCA, WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE SECOND-LARGEST ANIMAL SHELTER IN THE METRO? BY ROXIE HAMMILL

Hopes were high when the new animal shelter opened at the rural edge of Independence in 2013.

The shelter, built through an agreement between Jackson County and the City of Independence, seemed to be the answer to the area’s stray animal problem. It would be “no-kill,” with a focus on foster homes for animals, spaying and neutering, and educational programs aimed at helping lower income people keep their pets.

And it was beautiful: a rustic design with three times the space of the decrepit Independence animal control space.

Six years later, that promise has dimmed. A series of funding emergencies led to the shelter operator, Great Plains SPCA, shedding board members and making major cutbacks. Then, in January, Great Plains stunned government and animal wel-

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

fare officials by announcing it would no longer run the facility past July — despite the fact that it had just successfully bid to run the Independence shelter through the end of 2022, with a guarantee of about $550,000 from the city and $130,000 for utilities from the county.

Some assumed Great Plains’ announcement in January was a bargaining ploy. But as time ticked on with no further comments from Great Plains, it became apparent that it was not.

Now, with the nonprofit’s last day as operator fast approaching, it’s still not clear who will run the second-largest animal shelter in the metro. No one directly involved is commenting. There have been no public requests for bids. When asked, city and county spokespeople, and even Independence Mayor Eileen Weir, deliver bland, robotic responses about “continuing to work together to ensure a smooth transition of the shelter for our residents” and “determining the appropriate manner for moving forward.”

Good luck getting much beyond that.

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In a way, the way things look today — a city-county partnership falling apart at the seams — isn’t so different from the state of things in 2012.

“It is no longer fiscally prudent for us to continue to run the shelter,” board chair Chuck Laue announced in January.

ZACH BAUMAN

Back then, the locals were wondering why a fully built animal shelter, nice enough to be mistaken by satellite for a Bass Pro Shops, was sitting empty past its expected opening date.

The shelter was a $5.3 million, county-owned building sitting on six acres of land belonging to Independence. The original plan was for Independence’s animal services to run it, with the county paying utilities. The idea was that the city, which didn’t want to have to pay to build something to replace its three-decades-old, 7,100-squarefoot shelter, would get a new building paid for by the county. The county, which didn’t want to pay to run an animal shelter for its unincorporated areas, would have the city to run it.

As it turned out, that optimistic picture of governmental harmony was the first thing to falter. The county balked on the deal at the very last minute, right before the shelter was supposed to open. Jackson County Legislator Dennis Waits, a big backer of animal welfare causes and the shared shelter idea, wanted Great Plains to run it instead of Independence. The city, he said, had not budgeted enough money for it to be run as a

true no-kill shelter.

At the time, Great Plains — formed in 2011 from the merger of two other animal welfare groups — was a new organization on an upward trajectory. Its CEO, Courtney Thomas, was well-regarded in the animal adoption world. She came from Wayside Waifs, where, as chief operating officer, she reduced the euthanasia rate from 72 percent to 6 percent, and grew Wayside Waifs from a $1.2 million to a $4.3 million agency, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Great Plains also had considerable backing from Charles Laue, a Leawood investment firm founder who is now chair of the national Humane Society Legislative Fund board. Two of Laue’s foundations, Ringo’s Fund and the Quinn Foundation, have been major contributors to Great Plains.

Waits was convinced Great Plains and Thomas could do a better job. Independence officials objected, saying they could do as well for less than Great Plains. But they were overruled, and ended up footing the bill for Great Plains to run the shelter.

From that point on, the bickering almost never stopped. Waits now puts most of the blame at Independence’s feet.

“Great Plains is a wonderful organization that is very fortunate to have some people there helping to underwrite [expenses],” he says. But the city underfunded the nonprofit every year by hundreds of thousands, Waits argues.

What it boils down to is that Independence underestimated by about half the number of animals its animal control officers would bring to the shelter, Waits says.

Since the city’s contract was based on that number, Great Plains regularly had a shortfall that the county legislature, at Waits’ urging, at least partially filled.

The first crisis occurred less than a year after the shelter opened. An unexpected surge of cats caused operators to scramble to close a potential $735,000 gap in its budget.

In 2014, the city had to temporarily open an old fire station to take in cats because state inspectors said the shelter couldn’t have 400 cats in a space meant for 175. Then, in 2015, Independence’s health advisory board recommended that the city sue Jackson County because the shelter was refusing to take all the cats. (The suit never happened.)

Laue did not respond to The Pitch’s interview requests through LinkedIn and the Humane Society. Thomas, the former CEO who now heads the local business women’s group Central Exchange, said she’d prefer not to be mentioned in the story but referred The Pitch to other employees.

One of those former employees, Beth Pauley, was adoption supervisor at the Independence shelter and later an executive assistant working with Thomas. She agrees with Waits’ take. One problem, Pauley says, was the city’s now-defunct ordinance re-

NEWS

quiring that cats be leashed while outdoors.

“The ordinance disempowered people in the community to care for feral cat colonies,” she says. “Under that ordinance, animal control would bring in any stray cat they saw.”

Pauley also thinks the ordinance was too aggressively enforced.

“I don’t think it would have been [enforced so strictly] if the city was managing the shelter,” she says.

The shelter, overwhelmed with cats, had to put a temporary stop on accepting them.

“It was a very desperate time,” Pauley recalls. “Our space had the highest amount of animals it had in its entire history. I think we felt like we were at a place where we definitely could not manage this any longer.”

These issues began to take a toll. Great Plains was also running a shelter in Merriam, and by some accounts had become the largest animal welfare group in the area. But tax returns show that its financial picture had started to waver.

The organization, as a non-profit, never had an especially comfortable cushion. But by 2015, total revenues outstripped expenses by less than $100,000. The next year’s returns were even worse, with about $724,000 more in expenses than the organization took in. In 2017, the last returns available, Great Plains saw a rebound, owing to it closing the deteriorating Animal Haven building in Merriam the previous year. But that decision cut the amount of space Great Plains had for new animals. It eventually had to tell some cities with which it contracted that it was limiting cat intakes to the sick or injured, and would no longer provide a 10-day observation for rabies for dogs that had bitten.

At the same time, Great Plains was paying its executives a whole lot more.

In its early years, the organization never topped $175,000 in executive pay, with only a chief executive officer and chief financial officer. By 2015, though, that figure rose to $269,330, with the addition of a CEO/VP position. A year later, Great Plains added even more high-level spots to the roster, including a chief operations officer for the Independence shelter that made $66,459, and a chief development officer earning $81,591.

That brought the grand total for executive-level positions to $457,237. By comparison, the total salary laid out for 212 employees was about $3.4 million.

The next two years saw a mass exodus of those officers. Thomas left at the end of 2016, followed by most of the top staff. Pauley, who was not in the top tier of officers, also chose that year to leave.

Thomas was being worn down by the strains of the job: constant fundraising and always being on call saving animals, Pauley says. As for the others who left, “I can’t speak for the rest of the staff who left, but for me it was because of uncertainty around who the

next CEO was going to be,” Pauley says.

Then Waits stepped down from his spot on the county legislature. Waits had always been a staunch champion who would fight for more county funds for the shelter. He, too, acknowledges his departure was a factor in the shelter’s decision.

“Finally Great Plains just got to the point that they were no longer willing to underwrite the shortfall,” he says.

So, who’s going to step in? Most animal welfare organizations already have contracts with cities to provide services. KC Pet Project, which handles KCMO, says it hasn’t entered into any negotiations, though it would take a look at a request for proposals, if one ever is issued. Spay & Neuter Kansas City sent an informal message to Independence asking to be included in the conversation, but has not heard back, CEO Michelle Rivera tells The Pitch.

So far, no public bidding process has been initiated, though county spokeswoman Marshanna Hester didn’t rule one out. But the perception is that Independence wants to run the shelter itself.

The question, Waits says, is whether the city is willing to run it as a true no-kill shelter.

No-kill doesn’t mean literally no animals are ever euthanized. Some very sick or dangerous animals end up being mercy killed, even in no-kill shelters, Pauley says.

But everyone agrees that running a shelter as no-kill is a very expensive proposition.

With the euthanasia rate limited to less than 10 percent, the shelters fill up quickly.

Non-lethal alternatives, like foster homes, must be found. Solving the overflow problem can even involve sending excess cats to new homes in places as far away as Oregon, as Great Plains has done to avoid the higher cost of keeping them in the shelter.

Shelter operators that don’t want to do that can cheat a little by getting creative with how they categorize animals, Waits says. For example, a dog freaking out about being abandoned could be labeled “dangerous” — when really it just needed time to get used to the shelter, he says.

Waits, never a fan of the Independence operation, questions the city’s commitment to no-kill, based on its track record.

“I’d be very doubtful Independence could do it themselves,” he says. “They did a terrible job for years. It got to be so horrible people that would go in and adopt [the same day] because if you didn’t adopt that day, [the animal] would be euthanized the next day.”

Other private agencies might not have the capacity to take on an operation the size of Independence, either, Waits says. That would leave Independence with a choice of going back to the table and working with Great Plains to get the costs down, or increasing its budget.

Not everyone hopes for Great Plains to continue, though. Tanner Lightfoot, outreach manager of the urban core animal advocacy group Chain of Hope, soured on Great Plains because they were turning so many animals away. “I don’t think it could get worse than it was under Great Plains,” he says.

Other animal advocates say the city and county should be more transparent about the changeover.

“I think they should put out an RFP and let agencies respond,” Pauley says. “I know the community will want it to be a no-kill shelter, so the question the community has is: What is the City of Independence going to do to make sure pets are not being unnecessarily euthanized? If the city can respond to that and come up with the same solutions we’ve seen other agencies [such as Kansas City Pet Project and Great Plains] do, they would be a great fit for it.”

Waits says his “hope would be that it would continue to run as a no-kill shelter in the days ahead and Independence would find a way to fund it or find a private entity.”

But money will always be an issue, he says: “There’s never enough money.”

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13

FEATURE

WITCHY WOMEN UNPACKING THE SURPRISING RESURGENCE OF KC’S METAPHYSICAL COMMUNITY.

BY LIZ COOK

Sometime in the last year or so, my friends all started turning into moon witches.

These were women in their late twenties and early thirties. Women with graduate degrees who vaccinated their children, who read more than just the headline, who could spell “teleological” and use it in a sentence. Most of them weren’t religious.

And yet they’d share zodiac memes on Instagram — #justscorpiothings — and tweet photos of their tarot card “pull of the day.” They Snapped me videos of giant blunts of sage burning in their homes.

I squinted at them with what I thought was curiosity but what was mostly “Me, An Intellectual” snobbishness. How, I asked myself, had so many smart women been hoodwinked by what was clearly, to quote the late, not-so-great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, “pure applesauce”?

The answer was more complicated than I’d expected. It turns out, I had some applesauce ideas about women in the metaphysical community. Maybe you do, too.

Walk with me.

•

•

•

The first stop on my quest for answers was the KC Metaphysical Fair, held in March —a bazaar for all things spiritual or countercultural or New Age. I dragged my friend Taylor with me for support. We were both skeptics, there on a lark.

There was plenty to lark about. A vendor selling a wide variety of wolf shirts. A healer promoting a technique called “quantum touch.” At a booth near the entrance, an attractive young woman was clutching a crystal skull in each hand, her eyes closed as if in a trance. I snuck a look at the program. The booth description said that a woman named Cindy could guide me to just the right skull for me. I made a mental note to watch the worst Indiana Jones movie again.

In the afternoon, we followed a clump of women into a workshop on “Starseed Angelic Soul Lineage.” It was led by an eloquent, sweet-voiced white woman in a Professor Quirrell turban. She mentioned the “dolphin people on Sirius B” with the casual air with which one might observe a

14

THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

beetle on a lampshade.

Taylor and I shared a long, silent, expressionless look. We were in over our heads.

When I talked to the fair’s organizers, Sylvia Martin and Gigi Woodman, they assured me we weren’t alone or unwelcome.

They’re used to seeing skeptics — the fairs offer a way for newcomers to try out new ways of thinking without committing to an expensive reading or an intimidating private consultation.

They’ve also seen exponential growth in attendance since they started the fair in 2010. They now organize three fairs a year (the next one’s in July) and have nearly outgrown their expo space at the Abdallah Shrine Temple in Overland Park. Martin actually expressed some reservations about talking to me for this story, worried the publicity would attract more fairgoers than they could accommodate.

Woodman suspects the fair’s growth is due to both an influx of newcomers and the growing social acceptability of pursuits such as tarot and astrology. “There’s always been a fair amount of people who practice different spiritualities like this,” she notes.

“But I think it’s more mainstream now. If

you think about the past history of this stuff, persecution was kind of a big deal.

You don’t call yourself a witch if you don’t want to die on a stake.”

Still, Woodman says, the fair has undeniably grown faster in the last year and a half. And Martin adds that the workshops in particular are suddenly drawing big crowds: “People are really wanting to learn more, not just buy stuff or get a reading.”

At the fair, I paid $50 for an astrological chart reading. The astrologer didn’t look like a moon witch; she looked like one of my mom’s friends. The process felt objective, clinical, like going to the doctor. She asked me my birthdate and time — I had to guess on the latter — and she plugged them into her laptop. Seconds later, I had a printout of my birth chart in hand. There were a lot of symbols I didn’t recognize. One I thought might have been carved into the forehead of a character on Stargate.

Julia Thompson, president of the Aquarian Organization of Astrologers in Kansas City, cites those quick computerized calculations as one reason for the new wave of interest in astrology — and she adds that the profession has seen a surge of interest among millennials in particular.

“The availability of astrology — the democratization of it, so to speak — makes it more accessible,” Thompson says. “When I first started studying in the ‘70s, one of the barriers to access was the math. In the days of yore, astrologers would spend hours calculating the astronomy before they could ever really take a serious look at the chart.”

Now, computers can do those calculations almost instantly.

That explanation made some kind of sense, but it didn’t seem applicable to tarot or other popular metaphysical pursuits. So I did what I always do when I’m stumped: I called a librarian.

Kaite Stover is the Director of Readers’ Services at the Kansas City Public Library and looks the part. She’s short but has a commanding presence, with soft red-gray hair, dark-framed glasses, and the wise, resonant voice of an NPR correspondent.

She’s also a dedicated tarot reader and deck collector who has been studying the cards for about 30 years. For the past 10 of those, Stover has worked with other practitioners reading tarot at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. Tarot, she notes, has some universal appeal.

“I think when a lot of folks sit down

FEATURE

June 8TH

Stover has been studying tarot for 30 years.

“We have all noticed a big uptick in people coming for readings since the current political administration,” she says.

ZACH BAUMAN

and ask for a tarot reading, it’s the doorway they want to walk through for conversation with a stranger about the things that are troubling them most,” Stover says.

But Stover has seen an increasing number of young clients — she calls them “seekers” — at RenFest. The 2017 festival was the turning point.

“We have all noticed a big uptick in people coming for readings since the current political administration,” she says. “We have seen it. People are freaked out. It feels as though we’re living in a time when the world is extremely chaotic. I don’t know that the tarot can offer order, but the tarot can offer comfort and understanding and a new way of looking at the chaos and working through the chaos.”

The new stream of seekers has something else in common: they’re mostly young women. Stover isn’t a millennial herself; she lived through the crest of second-wave feminism in the ‘70s and sees some parallels with the newer, fourth wave. At a time when traditional (predominantly patriarchal) religious institutions are losing followers, alternative forms of spirituality and meaning-making are gaining ground.

That’s not a coincidence.

“Some young women are looking for religions that empower women, that are female-centric,” she says. “Paganism is one of them. Tarot, mysticism, witchcraft — those are all female-centered spiritual pursuits.”

One of the many decks in Stover’s collection is the “Daughters of the Moon Tarot” — a round, oversized deck of cards with all-female illustrations. Some tarot decks have dark or disturbing imagery. But these cards are colorful, celebratory depictions of goddesses from different cultures.

This vibe seems to be resonating with millennial women. Elaina Smith, a 30-yearold romance writer, was raised in a fairly devout Protestant-Christian home. She no longer attends church. But over the past couple of years, she’s started reading oracle cards (a system similar to tarot, but more beginner-friendly) and attending workshops led by spiritual guides. There’s a direct line, she suspects, between her religious upbringing and her new interests.

“I see this as a version of spirituality that isn’t so much what I’m not allowed to do, but what I’m capable of,” Smith says.

“Every time I’ve gone to church, I felt like I should be meeker, less ambitious, less of me as a woman who didn’t want to just get married, have babies, and never venture beyond my picket fence in some suburb of a Midwestern metro.”

Fewer rules, more options. Less order, more chaos — or, at least, more tools for navigating it. Different religions and mythologies from around the world have historically coded chaos as feminine (Jordan Peterson, hardly an icon of the feminist movement, has written about this, too).

Maybe it’s only natural that young women have rejected rigid belief structures. Stover sums it up more succinctly: “There’s a reason it’s called ‘organized religion’. No one’s ever accused paganism of being organized.”

Broad statistics support Stover’s and Smith’s observations. The Pew Research Center notes that nearly 1 in 5 adults under age 30 have left the religion they were raised in. And millennials who are religious are less attached to their religion, attending services and praying less often than any other age group.

That doesn’t mean they’ve found the meaning of life. According to Pew, younger and older millennials are also at the bottom of the generational barrel when it comes to “feel[ing] a sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing.” That might explain why so many of them are looking for meaning in the stars or a deck of cards.

•

•

•

Before I started researching this story, I had a vague idea of tarot as some kind of divination device — like a more complicated Magic Eight Ball. Will he ask me out? Should

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15

FEATURE

Left: Pensar of Moth & Candle, a tarot shop and studio in Midtown. Right: JDale of The Healing Culture Company in the Crossroads.

I get bangs? That’s a reductive interpretation, but there’s a grain of truth to it. Tarot isn’t especially well-suited to superficial yes-or-no questions, but people do use cards to make predictions large and small.

Laura Pensar, a professional tarot reader and deck designer, says she’s lately observed a different mindset in tarot newcomers.

“I think the most exciting part of the recent resurgence is that people are starting to understand it as a contemplative tool and not fortune-telling so much,” Pensar says.

Pensar operates Moth & Candle, a tarot shop and studio in Midtown. It’s a comfortable, approachable space, carpeted and accented in cool creams and whites. Pensar matches the room. When we meet, she’s wearing a cozy, oatmeal-colored sweater.

She speaks in a calm voice, gentle but deliberate.

“For the most part, to me, fortune-telling in and of itself isn’t useful,” she says.

As she sifts through a deck with graceful hands, I see a flash of a wrist tattoo: TRUE. KIND. NECESSARY. “’Will I find love, yes or no’…ehh. But: ‘How can I find love?

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

How can I bring love into my life? What’s standing in my way, what are the obstacles?’

Those kinds of things are useful. Most situations are workable in some way or another, and the fortune-teller approach, the predictive and diagnostic, tends to shut that down for people.”

Think of the cards as less magic than mirror. Pensar works with clients to help them get perspective on a particular question or challenge. She isn’t there to tell clients What the Cards Mean. She’s there to help them parse what the cards could mean, to make stronger, more useful connections to their lives.

If that sounds a little like therapy to you, you’re not alone. Pensar never uses the word “therapy” in our interview, but nearly everyone else I spoke to talked about cards in similar terms: “it’s mini-therapy,” “it’s cheap therapy,” “it’s not therapy, but it’s like therapy.”

But the same aspects of alt-spirituality that make it appealing to those too broke for therapy and too woke for organized religion can also be vulnerabilities. While fortune-telling might not be the main draw

ZACH BAUMAN

as much these days, it is nevertheless intrinsically rooted in many metaphysical pursuits. And just as a bad weather forecast can leave us caught in the rain, a bad card or astrological “forecast” might spur us to make poor choices.

Thompson of the AOA recalls a young woman who was afraid to get married because an inept astrologer had told her that her first husband would die. Thompson was incensed. “Who would say that? Who would tell anyone that?“ The surge of newcomers comes with other dangers. Spotlight a countercultural movement for long enough, and someone will find a way to commodify it. Just as yoga has been co-opted by some into a spandex-and-smoothies lifestyle, magic and metaphysics have started to veer into aspirational Instagram territory.

Some of this was inevitable. Tarot cards are beautiful. Star charts are hypnotizing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

A surface attraction can often turn into something more substantial. But there’s a line practitioners have to navigate between making the practice appealing to newcom-

ers and turning it into just another form of white wellne$$.

“The spiritual community here, from what I’ve seen, is segregated,” says JDale, a black spiritual guide.

JDale doesn’t need tools like tarot cards or herbs or birth charts to read for her clients. She says she was born with the ability to see and receive messages from spirits — “anointed with the gifts to see into the spiritual realm,” as she puts it. But she worries about the superficial appeal of some of these tools and the potential for amateurs to turn them into props instead of pathways to healing. She laments the “commercialized, whitewashed, glossy finish” she increasingly sees seeping into her profession.

JDale is tall and slender and beautiful; when we meet, she’s wearing an elegant black head wrap with gold trim and a coordinating black outfit. I can’t help but think, somewhat cynically, that she could make a killing if she were to position herself as a lifestyle guru in the inauspicious vein of Goop.

But that’s the exact opposite of what she’s advocating for. JDale’s worked with

thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

17

FEATURE

vulnerable populations in the past. Before she devoted herself to her spiritual vocation full-time — this April, she launched The Healing Culture Company, at 2018 Main — she supervised two properties for a homeless program in San Diego. And she has serious concerns about spirituality becoming inaccessible to the people who need it most.

“Everyone doesn’t have Lululemon money,” JDale says. “Everyone doesn’t have the $500 or the $1,200 for a membership package or a yoga retreat. Healing is not a luxury. Healing should not be some kind of luxury. It’s a necessity. Everyone should have access to it.”

•

•

•

Tarot reader Jessica Dore isn’t local.

She’s based in Philadelphia. But I wanted to talk to her because so many of my friends have retweeted her tarot interpretations onto my timeline over the past year. Dore is one of the more visible practitioners of the new wave: she has more than 51,000 Twitter followers and has built a successful business doing tarot readings and teaching workshops in tarot skills and fundamentals.

When we speak, she’s frank about the limitations of her field.

“Tarot is an unregulated thing,” she says. “I think people who are drawn to tarot are people who tend to be interested in human psychology and behavior and interested in hearing people’s stories and doing deep emotional work. And that can be sort of an inclination to dig around in people’s personal lives, more than one might be qualified to do or prepared to do.”

But Dore, a graduate student in social work, also seems cognizant of the way new spiritualities have filled a hole left by a fractured health care system.

“There are so many people who don’t have access to the care that they need,” she says. “A tarot deck is 20 bucks, and I can connect with myself and do self-care and develop my intuition and learn about my mind, and maybe that’s the best I can do — maybe I can’t afford therapy, maybe I don’t have health insurance.”

There’s an aspect of all this that makes me uneasy. I’m a big proponent of therapy — the “sit on the couch and talk to someone with a license who’ll take your insurance” kind. And I recognize that’s a sort of luxury. Insurance is expensive. Therapy is expensive. But when readers of any kind substitute for licensed, trained medical professionals, they have the potential to do real

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

damage. To hurt hurt people. Doubly so if they just picked up a deck last week.

Most of the practitioners I spoke to are already thinking about this. Pensar calls it “the danger of the overenthusiastic amateur.”

“When a person sits in front of you, even if they’re a total skeptic, they’re asking you to say what you see about them,” she says. “And that’s a vulnerable thing.”

But others are still catching up to a wave of new clients with a broad spectrum of experience levels and backgrounds. At the metaphysical fair, my friend Taylor sat down for a “stone reading” from a psychic medium who looked like Mary-Louise Parker. The woman began by calling Taylor “a breath of fresh air” after a morning spent reading for a lot of “people with trauma.”

It had weighed her down, the psychic said, dealing with all that negative energy.

A brief note: less than a year ago, my friend Taylor was brutally beaten and raped by a stranger in a public bathroom.

“You know what they call me, Trauma-Free Taylor,” she joked on our way back to the car. She sounded pretty cheerful for a woman who had just paid $50 to be implicitly told her trauma was a burden to others.

“At least I got some rocks.”

Stover tells me a story that makes me feel a little better. In March, she attended South by Southwest and a stranger asked her for a reading in a bar. People are always asking her to read in bars. It seemed like a typical reading — until the stranger stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking, pushed his lighter and a nearly full pack across the table, and announced, “I quit.”

For her part, Stover’s skeptical. Is a tarot reading really enough to break a smoking habit? She’ll never know if the man quit for good, if his revelation held.

But I’m inclined to say it doesn’t matter. In a noisy, chaotic world full of brokenness and salves kept behind the glass, maybe a single moment of clarity is enough.

That’s more than some of us ever get.

I think I’m done looking down at the moon witches — done parceling out selective scorn for female-centric modes of meaning-making while letting more traditional (and equally speculative) institutions slide without a second glance. I’d like to live in a world where everyone was as interested in seeing things from new perspectives as the women I talked to for this story.

“We all like to think this is how we help,” Stover says. “This is how I help.”

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FEATURE

PINHEAD MEET KERI WING, THE TOP-RANKED FEMALE PINBALL PLAYER IN KANSAS.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

Almost every Wednesday night, you can find Keri Wing at Strawberry Hill’s 403 Club, where the flashing lights of nearly a dozen pinball machines light up the dimly lit interior and a neon sign that shouts “Play Pinball” shines on the wall above Deadpool and Metallica machines. Wednesday is tournament night at 403, and a couple dozen local pinball enthusiasts typically turn up for it. But tonight’s extra special — it’s the first league night since Wing won the Women’s World Pinball Championship on March 28. Wing stands back and watches her fellow pinballers and sips at a $3 draft beer.

Wing is poised and calm when she stands in front of a pinball machine. Between the dings, taps, and bright lights of the games around her, the only thing that moves are her eyes and her hands, which tap rhythmically at the flippers on each game. A saxophone player and teacher from Olathe, Wing came of age during the 1990s — a period considered by many to be a golden age of pinball. She credits her father, Kevin Wing, for instilling in her a passion for pinball machines. He taught her how to play and repair electromechanical games — machines made before the 70s. Together, they have nearly 30

20

THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

pinball machines in their basement, and it was Wing’s dad who brought her to her first tournament.

“I got second place — almost got first,” Wing recalls. “And I was kind of, like, Oh, I want to come back and try to win.”

Wing is currently the top-ranked female pinball player in Kansas, and seventh in the world out of over 2,000 registered female players. When you broaden the rankings to include the 37,000 registered male and female players, Wing is ranked second in Kansas, 170th in the country, and 330th in the world.

Gender dynamics have become a spicy topic in the pinball world in recent years. A stunning 92 percent of pinball players are male, and though Wing says she always feels welcome at Kansas City tournaments, there’s been multiple reports of hostility toward female players across the nation. (There’s also the fact that, historically, pinball artwork is often, well, sexist.) To combat some of these perceptions, the IFPA — the International Flipper Pinball Association, pinball’s “governing body” — helped create a number of women’s leagues, such as Belles and Chimes, founded in 2013 in Oakland by Echa Schneider. In two short years, the percentage of female pinball players in California nearly doubled, to 24 percent.

“People ask, ‘What’s the point of having a women’s tournament? Women and men can both play pinball,’” Wing says. “Which is true. But I think it’s more of a matter of getting more women interested in pinball.”

The 403 Club’s tournaments — open to all and only $5 to participate — are inclusive by design; owner Artie Scholes opened the bar in 2011 because he felt there wasn’t really a dedicated pinball destination in Kansas City at the time. Early on, only five or six dedicated players came in regularly. Today, about 25 come in every Wednesday for the tournaments.

“I first met Keri at a pinball tournament in Shawnee in 2013,” Scholes says. “We were all very impressed by her skills. Little did we know at the time that she was raised in a home full of pinball machines in the basement. Of course, now she beats most of us on a regular basis.”

Pinball’s a niche sport that often requires specialized knowledge, but the players at 403 are largely welcoming — happy to share tips and guide newcomers through the rules of the league. Everyone has their own unique combinationation of skills: Steve Hill has a encyclopedia-like handle on rules and strategies; David Ziegler is a patient player adept at catching the ball before it “drains,” or leaves the playing field; and Jason Schefflemaer — currently the top-ranked Kansas pinball player, and 134th in the U.S. — has refined flipper skills that give him precise control over every shot.

What sets Wing apart is not only her zen-like stance, but also her deep knowledge of a variety of games.

“She has the ability to play games from all eras,” Ziegler says. “In her basement, there are games from the 60s, but also new

Wing at KCK’s 403 Club, a home base for local pinball enthusiasts.

KELCIE MCKENNEY

games. You have to attack them differently.

And she can attack them all in a very efficient manner.”

Prior to her championship win, Wing spent hours watching videos, reading instruction cards, and taking notes on the pinball machines she would be playing. Every pinball machine has an entirely different set of rules, she explains. If you’re new to pinball, her best advice: “Shoot whatever is flashing.”

Last December, Wing helped run the first pinball tournament at KC Game Con, a local gaming convention. Collectors brought in machines, and 48 players signed up to compete. After the convention, the 403 Club started seeing new faces at Wednesday night league. Wing will be working on the same event at this year’s KC Game Con, set for November, which she hopes will help continue to grow the pinball community.

During the Women’s World Championships, Scholes and several other 403 regulars stayed up late to watch a live stream of Wing competing. In the morning, Wing woke up to messages of encouragement and celebration. Tonight, back at the 403 Club, Wing is met with the same enthusiasm: congrats, cheers, people excited to play next to the winner of 2019’s Women’s World Pinball Champion.

“When you play with these people every week,” Wing says, “they kind of become your best friends.”

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21

CAFE

ZACH BAUMAN

WHAT’S IN A NAME IN AN INCREASINGLY CROWDED FINE-DINING SCENE, CAN FARINA LIVE UP TO CHEF MICHAEL SMITH’S REPUTATION? BY LIZ COOK

If Michael Smith builds it, Kansas Citians will come. Case in point: Farina, the chef ’s new upmarket Italian restaurant, which has been crowded with eager diners since it opened in February.

Smith’s star-power pull makes sense; he’s been a fixture in the local dining scene for decades. During his tenure at The American in 1999, Smith and co-executive chef Debbie Gold earned the James Beard Award for Best Chef Midwest (no small feat, and a centerpiece of Farina’s marketing).

But these days, most Kansas Citians know the chef and his wife and business partner, Nancy Smith, from their two Crossroads ventures — the now-closed Michael Smith Restaurant and the still-swinging Extra Virgin.

The Smiths planted their latest, Farina, in a nearby Baltimore Avenue building that previously housed the Kemper at the Cross-

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

roads gallery. The restaurant’s menu, which is billed as “modern Italian,” leans heavily on fresh pasta, veal, and crudo.

But “modern” seems an ill-fitting descriptor for many of Farina’s dishes, which skew toward familiar classics and simple, unchallenging flavors.

This isn’t a criticism per se. A selection of classic pastas — labeled here the “Four Kings of Rome” — are worthy menu mainstays. The tagliatelle Bolognese I sampled was rich and comforting, with thick, chewy ribbons of pasta and a blizzard of Grana Padano.

The bucatini carbonara checked off the usual boxes. The pancetta-spiked pasta was savory enough for a Clydesdale’s salt lick, silky enough to line a Farina diner’s designer handbag. The crowning touch: a whole egg yolk cooked to a gooey, pudding-y texture.

But the bucatini was slightly overcooked

and oversoft, making the already unctuous dish salesman-slick.

Texture was an issue with a couple of pastas I tried on the “pasta atipica” menu, which rotates seasonally and features somewhat bolder flavors. The whole wheat campanelle was a hair too soft, muting an otherwise exceptional dish (the pheasant sugo was generously seasoned, with a salty-earthy punch from aged goat cheese).

Perhaps by virtue of its thicker, wrapped-Werther’s-Original shape, the caramelle was among the chewiest and most satisfying of the pastas I tried. Each noodle held a purse of gooey crescenza cheese, mild enough to counterbalance the salty mushroom marsala. The potato gnocchi was another textural success — each little dumpling was as plush and supple as a feather pillow. The rabbit, leek, and mushroom-flecked sauce was too salty for me, but my tablemate

scraped the plate clean.

That’s easy to do at Farina. The pastas ($14–16) are small, appetizer-sized portions, in keeping with the Italian tradition of primi and secondi piatti — literally, first and second plates. A standard meal begins with a few bites of pasta and progresses to a larger entrée showcasing a single protein.

But if you’re craving a more Italian-American-sized bowl of carbs and cheese, you can order an entrée plate of pasta for twice the listed price (ask your server; on my first visit, they didn’t offer this option).

The entrées listed as “secondi” are priced for fine dining, with most options in the $30–$40 range. They’re also a little more conservative: an aged ribeye with mashed potatoes, a Campo Lindo chicken cacciatore. On my visits, three of the nine offerings were veal-based. The wood-fire-grilled veal chop pizzaiola ($42) was a primal show-

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23

CAFE

piece, but the bone-in chop was cooked beyond the medium-rare I ordered and difficult to saw. The veal scallopini ($32), was a better value, with tender cutlets and a bright caper-lemon-herb sauce. The best of the veal triad were the braised veal cheeks ($30), which were so luscious and tender I felt indecorous eating them.

That might have something to do with the open dining room, which offers prime people-watching. Farina is a different animal than Michael Smith, with its more intimate ambience and date-night lighting. The vibe here is lighter and brighter and a little more youthful, with textured gray couches and camel-colored leather banquettes. The Kemper gallery’s enormous west-facing windows have stayed to maximize natural light (and maximize squinting as the sun sets through gaps in the shades). It’s a pleasant, unfussy space that could moonlight as a Crate & Barrel showroom.

The best seat in the house is at the raw bar, where you can order oysters, octopus, and caviar while peering out north-facing windows to the street. For an economical option, try the clam dip, served cold and creamy with a fresh pop of salmon roe. You could spend a fine happy hour here nibbling the jagged continents of crackers and

sipping a draft from the well-curated (and surprisingly inexpensive) beer list. For wine drinkers, there’s a veritable card catalog of bottles selected by Nancy Smith and priced for nearly every budget, from “is there a split plate charge?” to “my compliments to the sturgeon who birthed my meal.”

Cocktail drinkers are in good hands with beverage director Alberto Santoro, whose attention to the ice alone augurs a careful program. The perfectly clear, jewel-cut cube in my negroni made it look like a $14 drink — which is good, because it was.

The amaro-centered L’Averna & Shirley tasted blunt and boozy, and I was put off by a hulking raft of citrus peel that slapped me on the cheekbones whenever I took a drink.

(One of many low hills I will die on: garnishes should not make a drink less pleasant to, well, drink.) But The Two Yoots, which combined gin and fennel liqueur, was balanced and sunny, with a bright (but not tart) citrus profile and a subtle fragrance from the rosemary.

The cocktails and appetizers come closest to evoking the restaurant’s “modern” ethos. I wanted to love the cacio e pepe fritelle — fried domes of cheesestuffed pastry popularized at Missy Robbins’ beloved restaurant Lilia in New York.

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CAFE

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MODERN AMERICAN FARE WITH A FRESH KC TWIST.

Smith’s versions were fried to an attractive amber brown and had a pleasant crunch, but the filling was blander than its namesake pasta would suggest. I preferred the duck meatballs, which were soft, lush, and swaddled in a tomato-prosciutto gravy.

But my dark-horse favorite was the clam toast, a humble-sounding dish that seems lab-engineered to perfection — tender clams, pungent dried tomato and parmesan, toast thick enough to crunch but thin enough to keep the spotlight on its toppings.

Hospitality has historically been one of the Smiths’ strengths. True to form, I spotted Michael Smith circulating among the tables on all three of my visits, greeting patrons with a winsome smile (he never stopped by my table, but I look like someone with student loans.)

I was surprised to find service at Farina so uneven. On my first visit, I had a bored-looking server who offered little insight into the menu. On my second, the server was so transparent about upselling that she came off as pushy. Crucially, neither she nor the food runner who delivered our dessert, a mixed plate of different Italian cookies, bothered to tell us what cookies were on the plate (the unhelpful notes I took on my

phone: “molasses boi. Alison Roman-esque choc. chunk shortbread. fig horn??”)

On my third visit, I had an easygoing server named Sean who made the experience much more pleasant. Clone Sean, is my advice.

The desserts, courtesy of pastry chef Ali Woody, don’t feel as sure-footed as the rest of Farina’s menu. Those Italian cookies were interesting, but the accompanying dish of chocolate and strawberry soft-serve was unremarkable. I adored a satiny panna cotta with a huckleberry compote, but the dessert had vanished from the menu by my last visit.

In its place was a flatly sweet riff on a strawberry shortcake. I bear some culpability for ordering this dish in early April, but the strawberries were pale and prepubescent.

Farina has some excellent, memorable dishes that attest to the wisdom of its crowds. You’re unlikely to have a bad meal here. But as Kansas City’s restaurant scene balloons, I’m forced to consider a fussier metric: whether I’ll return to a place once the review is filed and I have to pick up my own tab.

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25

EAT

DRINK

APRIL FLEMING

APRIL FLEMING

Eat ThisNow MANGO STICKY RICE AT BARAMEE THAI BISTRO

Drink ThisNow

With the recent arrival of Waldo Thai Place, Sweet Siam, and Baramee Thai Bistro onto Kansas City’s food scene, we locals now enjoy an embarrassment of homestyle Thai riches. Even better: KC diners are trending more adventurous, which is allowing (some) Thai restaurant proprietors to expand their menu options. In other words, it’s not all about pad Thai anymore. And of those not-pad-Thai dishes, the item we’ve particularly come to adore of late is one of the most classic desserts in all of Asia: mango sticky rice.

Baramee — recently opened in the former Pizzabella space in the Crossroads — has the best: glutinous rice, flavored with coconut milk and just enough sugar to hint at sweetness without going over the top. A nice pillow of the stuff is topped with ripe, thinly sliced mango, which is then drizzled with coconut syrup (again, not too sweet — mango remains the star). It’s dusted with some nutty-crunchy sesame seeds and plated with fresh flowers.

Tangy, chewy, sweet, and incredibly addictive — you gotta try it. --April Fleming

Tequila is nowhere in the conversation when we speak of negronis, which are typically made with gin, Vermouth Rosso, and Campari. But Mean Mule Distilling Company, a new, spirits-forward bar in the East Crossroads, might change your mind about that. Mean Mule has been making its own agave (the preferred name for tequila not made in Mexico) for the past five years and just opened a new tasting room, which features flights of spirits and a handful of craft cocktails. The margarita is well worth trying, but the Agroni is our favorite. The bartenders use a dangerously smooth house agave; white, herby Vermouth Routin for a bit of sweetness; and Luxardo Bitter Bianco to add an aromatic bite. It’s not a 1:1:1 ratio — there’s a little more agave in there than the rest, bar manager Justin Klaas tells me — but it’s nevertheless exceptionally light and drinkable, and a great excuse to venture over toward this new spot. --April Fleming

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

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ARTS

Kraybill playing the Kauffman Center’s epic organ.

ERIC WILLIAMS

POWER MOVES JAN KRAYBILL, A VITAL KC ORGANIST, IS REVVED UP. BY LIBBY HANSSEN

Some of us lack the coordination to drink coffee without splattering drops down the front of our shirt. Jan Kraybill, on the other hand, can regularly be found operating a 40-by-60-foot instrument that requires her to push and pull knobs while manipulating four keyboards and a pedalboard and perform like a virtuoso pianist, all at the same time.

Kraybill serves as organ conservator for the Julia Irene Kauffman Casavant Organ, Opus 3875 — the dazzling, custom-built organ inside the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts’ Helzberg Hall. She’s also organist-in-residence at Community of Christ in Independence. And Kraybill collaborates with some of KC’s finest groups: Kansas City Symphony, Kansas City Chorale, Te Deum, and Bach Aria Soloists. She’s busy, but emits a high-decibel energy, motoring between venues on her Harley-Davidson. And she’s adored: this year, some 700 attendees turned up for her 20th annual Super Bowl Sunday recital.

On Mother’s Day, the Kauffman Center will host a special concert featuring Kraybill on solo organ. It’s a celebration of the 25th

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

anniversary of the Muriel I. Kauffman Heart Center at St. Luke’s Hospital as well as a tribute to Julia Irene Kauffman — the daughter of Muriel, who saw to fruition her mother’s vision of a landmark performing arts center in Kansas City.

The May 12 concert, designed by Kraybill, is all about love.

“Love of family and love of friends, love of mentors and love of country,” Kraybill says. “And love of bigger things, whatever it is that binds us together. Some of us call it God, some of us call it the universe: the love of connection, and the love of peace, as well.”

If you’re just now hearing about this concert, bad news: it sold out within two hours. But not to worry: Kraybill has two more shows in town this month.

The afternoon of May 5 is Bachathon XL, the 40th annual celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the world’s most revered organists. The show, which is at Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral, has a casual vibe and features performers rotating in every half-hour.

“I decided to go further afield and explore some lesser known works by Bach,” Kraybill says.

Bach, a Lutheran, never left Germany, but was inspired by French, Italian, and Catholic traditions. Kraybill’s selections show “Bach’s ability to absorb and then emulate the best music of his time,” she says.

Then she’s back at Helzberg Hall on May 28 for “Organ Extravaganza,” the last installment this season for the Kansas City Symphony’s popular Free Happy Hour Concerts.

“It’s an extravaganza, so we have to celebrate this instrument for all that it can do,” Kraybill says. “By the end of the program, I will have played nearly every pipe in this organ.” (There’s one bird-song sound effect that she just couldn’t fit into the hour-long program. Maybe for the encore?)

With an instrument that boasts 5,548 pipes, that’s a lot of variety. The biggest pipe is 32 feet tall — as tall as a flowering dogwood, the state tree of Missouri — and weighs 960 pounds. The smallest pipe is no bigger than a pencil. Sitting in Helzberg Hall, Kraybill estimates, you can only count about 100 pipes. The rest are hidden behind the vaulting metal screens.

Along with works featuring KCS trumpeter Julian Kaplan and cellist Mark Gibbs, the Helzberg Hall concert includes a transcription of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s “Coronation March,” featured on Kraybill’s latest album, The Orchestral Organ. Released May 7, it’s her sixth album, including the Grammy Award-nominated album of Camille SaintSaens’ Symphony No. 3 “Organ,” with Kraybill as soloist.

Organists often operate in secret, hidden away in organ lofts or obscured by choirs. In the case of Helzberg Hall, Kraybill’s back faces the audience. From across the hall, it’s hard to see what all she’s up to, even as the music envelops your body and rattles your bones. From time to time, though, Kraybill is able to do demonstration concerts, usually at Community of Christ, which has two instruments: the Temple Organ (5,685 pipes) and the Auditorium Organ (6,334 — but who’s counting?). You can catch her there on June 4.

“I love helping people understand the mysteries of this wonderful musical machine,” Kraybill says of her organ adventures across the city. “And I’m buzzed about Kansas City. I’ve been here since ‘86, and I’ve seen the city go through all sorts of ups and downs. This renaissance that we are in the middle of is so glorious.”

GET OUT

Jan Kraybill in concert: May 5: 40th Annual Bachathon, Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral.

2-6 p.m. Donations accepted.

May 12: Mother’s Day Concert, Helzberg Hall. Sold out.

May 28: Kansas City Symphony Free Happy Hour Concert, Helzberg Hall. 6 p.m. Free, but tickets required.

June 4: Pipe organ demonstration, Community of Christ Temple. 2:30 p.m. Free.

More at www.jankraybill.com

SAVE THE DATE! JUNE 10-16 JUNE 10-16

MANY MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED!

EMAIL STEPHANIE@THEPITCHKC.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION

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MUSIC

The Freedom Affair at Knuckleheads in March.

ZACH BAUMAN

PEOPLE GET READY MAKE SOME ROOM FOR THE FREEDOM AFFAIR, KC’S NINE-PIECE SOUL POWERHOUSE. BY RILEY COWING

Six white guys in suit jackets take the stage at Knuckleheads on a Thursday in early March. They start in on an upbeat instrumental number with a deep, funk beat: bass, drums, guitars, then the horns. The bassist, Chris Hazelton, steps up to a microphone and announces that the performance we’re about to see offers “a message of love and togetherness.” Then he introduces what he calls the “stars of the show.”

Misha Roberts, Seyko Groves, and Paula Saunders — three fabulously charismatic black singers — arrive onstage, take their places in front of their respective microphones, and begin to slide together in a choreographed sway. Then, for the next hour or so, they burn up the joint.

This is the Freedom Affair’s first performance at Knuckleheads — a milestone of

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

sorts. Usually, the band performs at the Ship, in the West Bottoms. That’s the site of its first gig, and it usually plays there at least once a month, typically on a Wednesday. The band began as an idea in the summer of 2017.

Drummer Dave Brick had just returned home to Kansas City after about 15 years in Oakland, where he played in a funk act called the Grease Traps. An old bandmate referred Brick to Hazelton, a stalwart of the KC jazz scene. Hazelton knew the Grease Traps, and the two started jamming together. That November, Hazelton (who also runs Sunflower Soul Records) invited a couple of guitarists — Cole Bales and Branden Moser — from Instant Karma!, a band he produced on his label, to join.

Then, one night at a Third Thursday gig at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in January 2018, Hazelton heard Roberts and Saunders singing together with a different act, Diles Mavis. He gauged their interest in singing with this band he was starting up.

“They were like, ‘Yeah we’re on board,’” Hazelton recalls. “Misha was like, ‘Hey, what do you think about inviting my friend Seyko? She’s really great, and she writes really good tunes.’ I was like, ‘OK cool, yeah.’ It just, piece by piece, kind of came together.”

Coming in as an out-of-towner, Brick was surprised by how quickly the band formed.

“I remember expressing the idea of, ‘Hey, it would be great to get three singers for various reasons — creatively, and also

logistically,’” he says, laughing at how uncomplicated it was to turn that ambition into a reality. (Trumpeter Pete Carroll and saxophonist Brett Jackson later rounded out the group.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the identity dynamics in the group — four white dudes, three black women — the songs that the Freedom Affair ended up creating are inherently political, though not in the polarizing way of today’s dominant media outlets.

Instead, like the soul music on which they are built, Freedom Affair’s songs often speak to personal empowerment. There’s “You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down,” which is about exactly what it sounds like. Or “Rise Up,” which will be released as a single in June on Loveland, Ohio’s Colemine Records’ Soul Slabs Vol. 2, and which calls for hope: Let’s move toward a brighter day, together we can find a better way. Rise up!

“We all write about what we feel,” Hazelton says. “Things that’s on everybody’s mind, like, Man, how’re we going to make it through some of this crap that’s going on?

And, you know, we all have to exist on this rock together, so we may as well make some things better.”

The harmony extends to the musical dynamics in the band. There’s no lead singer, and there’s no backup singers. All three women are lead singers, and they alternate from song to song.

“It happens organically,” Saunders says.

“We were looking at a song recently and as

GET OUT

The Freedom Affair.

Saturday, May 4, at RecordBar.

we were talking through, Seyko was like, ‘I hear you on this,’ and I [said], ‘I definitely hear Misha.’ We work together like that. We think about each other when we think about how the song should sound.”

Although each member still continues to perform in different, local bands — Boogaloo 7, Project H, and Funk Syndicate, to name a few — the goal is to eventually take the Freedom Affair on tour. Meanwhile, the shows at the Ship keep drawing bigger crowds.

“People are coming [to the Ship] intentionally to hear us,” Brick says. “It’s not too big a room, so it can feel crowded quickly, which I think is good for us while we’re a young group. But it’s having that intentionality about people coming specifically for this show — rather than hoping for street traffic or something like that — is a good thing for us, because we’re getting an engaged audience. We’re getting people who are stoked about it.”

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SHERBERT

TERMINATOR

thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

31

MUSIC

Let’s rage: Salty at P&L. AARON RHODES

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

THERE’S VERY LITTLE MIDWEST NICE IN SALTY’S CHARMING, KC-CENTRIC BASEMENT ROCK. BY AARON RHODES

Salty is the best band in Kansas City, according to Jonathan Brokaw, the guitarist and singer of the garage-punk-with-synth (don’t call them synth punk!) band Salty.

Brokaw is also the de facto head of the group’s tongue-in-cheek propaganda wing.

Follow along on his Facebook timeline, and between Royals rants and kitchen-work kvetching, you can frequently find Brokaw singing the praises of his own group.

These commendations range from basic (“Salty is a good band,” he posited on an event page in September 2017) to bombastic (a July 2018 tour announcement touted Salty as “America’s most important and influential band, and the likely forebearers of

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

a future global utopia”). Whether you agree with these sentiments or not, Brokaw’s persistent Facebook presence is more entertaining than a majority of the web content generated by the city’s punk and DIY musicians.

Once he’s done urging his friends to catch the band live or listen to its new album, Brokaw is apt to crack his knuckles and punch out a thoughtful status reflecting on the struggles of being in an independent band, his vision for the city and its music scene, and, on darker days, the absolute futility of those endeavors.

On a cool, overcast evening in early April, the members of Salty — Brokaw, Zach Turner (synths), Jesslay Laycock (bass), Ethan Eckert (drums) — and I piled into a compact SUV with an iffy set of brakes and hurtled toward the heart of the beast: Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint in the Power & Light District. Salty is a band that embraces absurdist culinary humor whenever possible, so Guy’s seemed like the ideal venue to learn more about what makes one of KC’s most enigmatic bands tick. Inside the restaurant, a white man with dreadlocks performed Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” as we placed our orders and lounged under a bizarre cluster of birdhouses that hung from the ceiling. We even-

tually took our food and drinks to the P&L’s central courtyard area, where Dave Matthews and Foo Fighters songs blasted over the loudspeakers.

Salty started out under a different name: Lil Toughies. Brokaw and Turner had played together in a band called All Blood and wanted to regroup for a new project.

Eventually, programming the drum machine became too taxing — “It was like playing Battletoads every night,” Turner says — so they recruited Eckert to play drums. His snare, hi-hat, and toms move from show to show; he says it’s the only way to keep things fresh. “I was hired to be a machine,” Eckert says. “I figured I would need a little more symmetry to replicate the rigid aspect of the machine, so I started moving things.”

By early 2017, the band had added Laycock on bass and changed its name to Salty.

Preservation Blues, the group’s first album, was released that year. Despite having an almost-bottomless well of wonky, Midwestern basement rock charm, Preservation Blues flew under the radar of almost everyone besides the city’s miniscule population of DIY music obsessives and dive-bar regulars.

The group’s sophomore effort, Dry Rub, is likely too weird to be rocketing to the top of the Billboard Independent Albums

LISTEN

chart anytime soon, but the attention it has received since its late March release has already eclipsed that of the previous record.

Funds were pooled, and Salty traded in its ultra-lo-fi, mics-hanging-from-the-ceiling production arrangement for some time at Weights and Measures Soundlab with Duane Trower.

“I’ve been doing lo-fi stuff for fuckin’ ever,” Brokaw says, “And I just wanted to finally have something that was studio-re-

MUSIC

corded if for no other reason than if I died tomorrow, at least I did something in the studio before I died.”

DIY rock snobs often snub their noses at formal studio recordings, but the band agrees that the recording of Dry Rub felt more organic than another basement job likely would have. They credit that to the fact that the studio had enough microphones for the band to simply plug in and play most of the tracks live on the recordings. Many of the textures and grooves on Dry Rub are indebted to the garage rock, punk, and new wave of the Seventies, but their frantic and

City and deciding now that it’s hip enough for them to fuckin’ make it their own playground,” Brokaw says. Eckert interjects, clarifying that it’s more about the city now feeling “safe enough” in the eyes of suburbanites.

The rest of the album finds Salty chiming in on today’s intergenerational conflicts, taking jabs at the “moral McCarthyism” and social climbing that PC culture often spawns. There’s even a cover of Guided by Voices’ “Motor Away” — appropriate, given that Robert Pollard was also a frustrated Midwesterner writing about escaping the

70+ RESTAURANTS. 10 BARS. 5 STAGES.

“THAT WHOLE SONG IS STRAIGHT UP ABOUT JOHNSON COUNTY-ITES COMING INTO KANSAS CITY AND DECIDING NOW THAT IT’S HIP ENOUGH FOR THEM TO FUCKIN’ MAKE IT THEIR OWN PLAYGROUND.” JONATHAN BROKAW

delightfully off-kilter execution is a mutation that feels distinctive to Salty, and that execution has never sounded cleaner.

Brokaw’s lyrics have long come with a paranoid, fatalistic slant, and there have always been clever references just for the Kansas Citians listening. “High Tension,” which appeared on Preservation Blues and the sole Lil Toughies EP, nods to one of the downtown skyline’s most popular signs as a bit of tension envelopes Brokaw’s outlook. The allusions to local landmarks and culture are slightly less subtle on Dry Rub, but no less enjoyable.

William Willmott’s album artwork turns the Kauffman Center’s concrete ridges into an enormous bone-in ham; the Bartle Hall pylons become a rack of ribs; and a fry cook grills a human skull on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s lawn. The record’s title track is a mid-pace march that nods to the annual, collective hiss that midtown service industry workers let out as the Kansas City Marathon slows their commute. The song sends barbs flying at the marathon organizers, bandwagon Royals fans, and luxury condo owners crowding the city. But it also raises the question of who the condo pushers are pushing out.

“That whole song is straight-up about Johnson County-ites coming into Kansas

alienation and isolation he felt at home.

Indeed, a healthy portion of my conversation with Salty’s members was spent teasing out the pathologies of Midwestern attitudes in regard to civics and the arts. There’s the protestant stoicism, the fair-weather fandom, the deeply ingrained drinking culture. What mix of these elements, and others, makes Kansas City an often-frustrating place to live? What is keeping more people from caring about Salty, the self-proclaimed best band in Kansas City? We couldn’t figure it out. Let us know if you can.

Dry Rub closes dramatically with “Prairie Empire,” a song whose anguished refrain — “ready mix concrete” — is a reference to the construction company owned by Tom Pendergast, the old Kansas City political boss from the 1930s. Pendergast’s powerful and corrupt machine earned his company contracts building inner-city high schools, Municipal Auditorium, and the Power & Light Building, which loomed above us in the night sky as we sat eating our corporate tacos. The album concludes with Brokaw’s panicked cries: “Crumble alone!” he bellows — a reminder to the rest of us that Pendergast’s concrete won’t last forever.

Entertainment provided by DJ JOE BROOKS DJ JOE STRAWS DJ KIRBY DOLEWITE

OUTLAW JIM & THE WHISKEY BENDERS SUPERSTAR MAFIA WONDERFUZZ

MUNDO NOUVO

Dry Rub is available now on Bandcamp and on CD via What’s For Breakfast? Records. thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

33

FILM

FIN SAYING GOODBYE TO THE TIVOLI, AN IRREPLACEABLE ANCHOR OF KANSAS CITY CINEMA. BY DAN LYBARGER

On April 12, Tivoli Cinemas, a Westport staple for 36 years, screened its last art-house flick. Owner Jerry Harrington announced the theater would close earlier that week, and just like that, one of Kansas City’s most beloved cultural destinations was gone.

The Tivoli was one of those places that made filmgoers in other communities — sometimes even in larger communities — envious. Along with a handful of other theaters in town, the Tivoli was a surprisingly welcome environment for movies that might not play well in a Megaplex. I saw Reservoir Dogs at the Tivoli. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Breaking the Waves. Federico Fellini’s La Strada. Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Rashomon. Clerks. A night at the Tivoli was always a wonderful reminder that movies are at their most involving and entertaining when they are shared.

Instead of mourning the loss, perhaps it’s better to celebrate the fact that for three and a half decades — since the early 1980s, when Harrington bought out a repertory theater on Westport Road called The Bijou — these movies found the fans they deserved.

After I heard the news, I found myself thinking about the 1998 film Elizabeth.

At the time, casual filmgoers would have had little reason to head down to a small Westport theater to see a historical drama starring a little-known actress named Cate Blanchett. But Harrington knew how to get butts in seats. His preview screening was loaded with performers from the local Renaissance Festival who showed up in period costumes and later passed word on their friends. Most of these folks were

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

young, but if they hadn’t heard of Elizabeth I or the Australian actress who played her, they were delighted to learn. It was hard to imagine a young theater proprietor going to such lengths today.

“You have to work hard to sell anything anymore,” Harrington tells me, on the road to Omaha, not long after the Tivoli’s last day in business. “For somebody who’s young and wants to do that, it’s great, and it works.

The extra work will pay off. But if you’re not showing a movie exclusively, you’re busting your butt for a movie that’s going to be playing in five other theaters.”

He goes on: “With Elizabeth, it went on to other theaters, but I had it for a few weeks exclusively. More and more, any movie that even seemed like it would have some crossover appeal, it would immediately play in five [local] theaters.”

The audience for independent movies is also evolving — and becoming harder for people in Harrington’s position to read.

“Filmmakers of this generation have different sensibilities than when I was growing up,” Harrington, who is 66, says. “A lot of movies today are pretty depressing in a contemporary way, and they’re hard to sell.

It’s a more niche sensibility. It’s easier for me to know what older people want.”

It’s also tempting to blame the Tivoli’s closing on the rise of streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, but Harrington believes athome viewing had minimal impact on his own bottom line. He adds that the Tivoli might have been better off as a nonprofit, like Los Angeles’ Film Form, but he felt like he couldn’t hit up patrons for more cash after he had already held a successful crowdfunding campaign to obtain digital projectors six years ago. Ultimately, Harrington says it was the need for new carpet, seats, cup holders and other renovations — the kinds of “big experience” perks that places like Ward Parkway and Alamo Drafthouse offer — that forced him to close the theater.

“We didn’t have some of the amenities that people want,” he says. “That’s what I was

Owner Jerry Harrington announced the closing of the three-screen Westport theater in early April.

trying to put in, but it just didn’t make economic sense to do that.”

In my view, the Tivoli had plenty of amenities, albeit on a more modest scale. It stocked vegan cookies and Mexican Cokes, for example. And the concession stand featured a large Barbie doll dressed up in outfits reflecting the films playing any given week:

she held a cross when Shadow of the Vampire was screening, and a dress made of images of Robert Evans when the documentary about Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, played there. Those charms are maybe not as attractive to certain filmgoers as stadium seating, but it made the trip to Westport from Overland Park worth it for me.

FILM

“SOMETIMES, I PLAYED A MOVIE I DIDN’T THINK WOULD MAKE MONEY. I PLAYED IT BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT WAS IMPORTANT, AND I DIDN’T CARE.” JERRY HARRINGTON

Then there was the people: the curious art-school students, the film enthusiasts working part-time to learn the ropes. It was always amusing to see my friend, the filmmaker Glenn Stewart, slide down the railway of the Tivoli’s long staircase. And there isn’t any other theater I know of that with a ticket taker like the late Bob Smith. Bob was once an in-demand male model in Paris and New York, friends with Breathless star Jean Seberg. If the lines weren’t too long, he was always good for a story.

Harrington recalls some cherished memories: screening films by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy); the Library of Congress National Film Registry tour; the filmmaking duo of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory filming Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in town.

“I waded through a lot of movies and picked certain ones that I thought would make money,” Harrington says. “But sometimes, I played a movie I didn’t think would make money. I played it because I thought it was important, and I didn’t care. I always believed everyone in Kansas City was a potential customer. I don’t feel bad [about the closing]. What a great way to make a living: just showing movies and having people come in.”

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35

SAVAGE LOVE

OUTED ON INSTAGRAM “MY FRIEND’S MARRIED FATHER HAS BEEN LIKING AND FOLLOWING ACCOUNTS OF VERY YOUNG BOY MODELS. UNDERAGE BOYS.” BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: My best friend’s father is an avid user of social media. He’s retired and spends most of his day posting memes on Facebook and Instagram. Recently, I realized he might not know how Instagram works. I noticed over the past week or so that he has been following, liking, and commenting on a lot of Instagram pictures of young gay men. I don’t think he realizes that anyone who follows him can see that activity. At first I was worried, not because he might be gay or bisexual, but because he may still be “in the closet.” He’s married, with a son (my friend), and to my knowledge, if he is bisexual or gay, nobody knows. I thought about warning him that his activity is public, but then I saw more. Not only has he been liking pictures of younger looking men, he’s also been liking and following accounts of very young boy models. Underage boys. So now I’ve gone from wanting to warn this guy that he may be accidentally outing himself by not knowing how apps work to feeling morally obligated to tell my friend that his dad is into dudes and might be a pedophile. I can only imagine the ramifications this news would have on him and his family. ––Best Friend’s Dad Dear BFD: “I’m sympathetic to BFD’s concerns,” said Dr. Michael Seto, director of forensic rehabilitation research at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group and an expert on pedophilia and sexual offending.

“I know many people wonder what to do if they suspect someone is sexually attracted to children. And I understand how much of a burden it can feel like to keep a big secret, especially from a best friend.”

But before we discuss your options and responsibilities here, BFD, let’s get our terms straight: If by “young boy models” you mean teenage boys past puberty but under the age

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THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

of consent, then your friend’s father’s behavior is icky and inappropriate — but it is not, by itself, evidence that he’s a pedophile.

“Clinically, pedophilia refers to attraction to prepubescent children,” said Dr. Seto, “though I know it’s still commonly used in public to refer to attraction to anyone underage.”

Actually, the term “pedophile” gets tossed around so indiscriminately these days that some of my own readers have used it to describe (or condemn) people in their 40s or 50s who are attracted to (or fucking) grown men and women in their 20s and 30s. For the record: An attraction to younger/youngish adults does not make someone a pedophile.

If that were the case, almost everyone on earth could be described (and condemned) as a pedophile. Dr. Seto estimates that just 1 percent of men are in fact attracted to prepubescent children.

“Attraction to underage teens — boys or girls — is more common,” said Dr. Seto, “though it’s hard to estimate how common because it’s a taboo subject. We get hints from the popularity of certain porn genres like ‘schoolgirl,’ ‘twink,’ ‘barely legal,’ and so on. We also have a hint from how so many fashion models begin working in their teens.”

But Dr. Seto emphasizes that sexual attraction does not equal sexual behavior.

“The Instagram follows and likes may indeed suggest an attraction to underage boys,” said Dr. Seto. “And it may even be pedophilia if the models are that young. But that doesn’t mean his friend’s father is going to do anything beyond following or liking.”

Understanding what separates pedophiles who’ve offended against children (read: pedophiles who’ve sexually abused children) from pedophiles who’ve never in-

appropriately touched a child is an important focus of Dr. Seto’s research, BFD, and his insights could inform your course of action.

“One thing we know is that people who are low in self-control are more likely to act on sexual as well as nonsexual impulses,” said Dr. Seto. “That low self-control shows up in other ways, including addictions, problems holding down a job, problems in adult relationships, unreliability, and criminal behavior. My hypothesis is that someone who doesn’t show these signs is unlikely to offend against a child. They might look at child pornography, though, which is illegal and problematic, or they might look at legal images of children — like on social media — as a sexual outlet.”

Viewing child pornography is hugely problematic because it creates demand for more child pornography, which leads to more children being abused. But even if no new child porn were ever created, sharing images of the rape of a child is itself a violation of that child. And while it may not be pleasant to contemplate what might be going through a pedophile’s mind when they look at innocent images of children, it’s not against the law for someone with a sexual interest in children to dink around on Instagram.

“Returning to BFD’s question about whether to disclose, I don’t think it’s an easy yes-or-no answer,” said Dr. Seto. “It depends on what else BFD knows about the father. I’m required by law and professional ethics to report [someone] if I believe an identifiable child is at imminent risk. This mandatory reporting requirement is NOT triggered simply by knowing whether someone is sexually attracted to children. Instead, I have to consider information like whether the person has ever expressed fantasies or urges about a specific child, whether they work with children regularly, whether they live with children who are in their attraction category, or whether they have ever engaged in suspicious behavior like direct messaging with a child.”

“In the absence of these kinds of red flags,” Dr. Seto continued, “what we have here is someone who might be sexually attracted

to underage boys but who might not pose a serious risk to children. So while not disclosing might mean some risk of a child being harmed, disclosing could definitely cause harm to the best friend, to the father, and to their relationship.”

You’re in an agonizing position, BFD. You essentially have to weigh the chance — most likely very remote — that your friend’s dad would harm a child against the near certainty that telling your friend about his father’s behavior would do irrevocable harm to their relationship. Your relationship with your friend would also be at risk; this is definitely one of those circumstances where the messenger risks being shot.

Personally, BFD, in your shoes, I would err on the side of protecting even a hypothetical child. I would say something to the dad, perhaps via direct message (you could create a throwaway account and reach out anonymously), and I would also say something to my friend. But I would emphasize what the best available research tells us about pedophilia: It’s not something a person chooses, and most pedophiles never sexually abuse children. (And not everyone who sexually abuses a child is a pedophile.) So even if your best friend’s father is attracted to prepubescent boys — if he’s looking at prepubescent children and not teenagers who happen to be just under the age of consent—that doesn’t mean he’s harmed a child or would ever harm a child. He may need help to avoid offending — if, worst-case scenario, he actually is attracted to children — and being held accountable by loved ones is one way pedophiles avoid offending.

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

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39

TRAVIS YOUNG

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40

THE PITCH | MAY 2019 | thepitchkc.com

MAY 18 Valentine Porchfest KC, Valentine Neighborhood Piff the Magic Dragon, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland 2019 Kansas City Nanobrew Festival, Berkley Riverfront Weston WineFest, Pirtle Winery Kelley Hunt, Folly Theater

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MAY 27 Church of Misery, The Riot Room

MAY 30 Nashville Pussy, with The Turbo AC’s & Guitar Wolf, Knuckleheads Hot Country Nights: Chase Rice, Kansas City Live! Block

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thepitchkc.com | MAY 2019 | THE PITCH

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