The Pitch: August 2018

AUGUST 2018 I FREE I THEPITCHKC.COM

Who Doesn’t Lo

ve

? s y o B y Sh Kansas City’s k pop angels loo ins. beyond the pla

BY DAVID HUD

NALL

TOWER OF POWER 50TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR 2018

CHIPPENDALES

THE TEMPTATIONS

SHAMROCK FC MMA

AUGUST 3 & 4

AUGUST 11

AUGUST 18

AUGUST 25

CARLOS MENCIA

BRET MICHAELS

THE CLAIRVOYANTS

THE OAK RIDGE BOYS

SEPTEMBER 7

SEPTEMBER 15

SEPTEMBER 22

SEPTEMBER 29

PRESLEY, PERKINS, LEWIS & CASH

ANDY GRAMMER

RICK SPRINGFIELD

SCOTTY MCCREERY

OCTOBER 5

OCTOBER 6

OCTOBER 27

NOVEMBER 9

& AVERAGE WHITE BAND

Join us in the Star Pavilion for our thrilling upcoming shows. Get your tickets at Ticketmaster.com or visit the Ameristar gift shop to receive $5 off the standard ticket price with your mychoice® card.

Must be 21 or older to gamble. Must be a mychoice® member to receive mychoice discount. Must be at least 18 or accompanied by an adult to enter Star Pavilion. Tickets available online at Ticketmaster.com or at the Gift Shop (service charges and handling fees may apply). No refunds/exchanges unless canceled or postponed. Offer not valid for persons on a Disassociated Patrons, Voluntary Exclusion or Self Exclusion List in jurisdictions which Pinnacle Entertainment operates or who have been otherwise excluded from Ameristar Kansas City, MO. Gambling problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. ©2018 Pinnacle Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

CONTENTS

THE PITCH

18 FEATURE

Publisher Stephanie Carey Editor David Hudnall Digital Editor Kelcie McKenney Contributing Writers Tracy Abeln, Traci Angel, Liz Cook, Karen Dillon, April Fleming, Natalie Gallagher, Roxie Hammill, Libby Hanssen, Deborah Hirsch, Larry Kopitnik, Angela Lutz, Dan Lybarger, David Martin, Eric Melin, Annie Raab, Aaron Rhodes, Barbara Shelly, Nick Spacek, Lucas Wetzel Little Village Creative Services Jordan Sellergren Contributing Photographers Zach Bauman, Chase Castor, Jennifer Wetzel Graphic Designers Jennifer Larson, Kelcie McKenney, Katie McNeil, Gianfranco Ocampo, Kirsten Overby, Alex Peak, Vu Radley Director of Marketing & Promotions Jason Dockery Senior Multimedia Specialist Steven Suarez Multimedia Specialists Becky Losey Director of Operations Andrew Miller Multimedia Intern Kate Scofield Design Intern Danielle Moore

Rare Type Kansas City’s last remaining typewriter repairmen are still hanging on. For now.

BY APRIL FLEMING

22 CAFE

Full Success Neither old-world stuffy nor showy avant garde, the food at The Restaurant at 1900 hits all the right notes.

BY LIZ COOK

26 FOOD

Whole Foods At Paradise Locker and Bichelmeyer Meats, you can literally buy half of a cow — and it’s more humane and cheaper than how you’re used to purchasing meat.

BY APRIL FLEMING

CAREY MEDIA

Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Carey Chief Operating Officer Adam Carey

30 Drink This Now

VOICE MEDIA GROUP

National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

DISTRIBUTION

The Pitch distributes 35,000 copies a month and is available free throughout Greater Kansas City, limited to one copy per reader.

Additional copies may be purchased for $5 each, payable at The Pitch’s office in advance.

The Pitch may be distributed only by The Pitch’s authorized independent contractors or authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of The Pitch, take more than one copy of each week’s issue. Mail subscriptions: $22.50 for six months or $45 per year, payable in advance.

Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Kansas City, MO 64108.

COPYRIGHT

The contents of The Pitch are Copyright 2018

by Carey Media. No portion may be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without the express written permission of the publisher.

The Pitch 1627 Main St., #600, Kansas City, MO 64108 For information or to share a story tip, email tips@thepitchkc.com For advertising: stephanie@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6702 For classifieds: steven@thepitchkc.com or 816-218-6732

18 6 GET OUT

10 NEWS

Your August Agenda What to do and where to be this month.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

House of Cards Can a rental inspection program help solve the city’s eviction epidemic?

BY BARBARA SHELLY

9 QUESTIONNAIRE

12 Borderline Disorder

Amber Botros Instagram celebrity, curvy model, and the doctor behind Plaza Medical Spa.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

In Kansas City, ICE has deported a woman after a traffic stop, detained a man with no criminal history, and physically assaulted an immigration attorney. And that’s just one case.

BY TRACI ANGEL

The Biere de Ferme at BKS Artisan Ales

BY APRIL FLEMING

31 Eat This Now

The seaweed donuts and trout roe with cream at Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room

BY DAVID HUDNALL

32 ARTS

La Dolce VITAs A Kansas City chamber ensemble clears a path for the voices of new composers.

BY LIBBY HANSSEN

16 Machine Politics

Is the Johnson County Election Office ready for the midterms?

BY ROXIE HAMMILL

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

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CONTENTS

Job #

Client

Entertainment Half Page Vertical

106090

AKC

August

Title

Version

PNK Creative Studio

34 MUSIC

Media Type

Pitch

Print Ad

CMYK

40 FILM

Pub / Vendor

Qty

Color

One More Time The beautiful second coming of Shy Boys.

BY DAVID HUDNALL

Trim / Flat width x height

N/A

4.9717” x 11.5”

Finish / Fold

4.9717” x 11.5”

Live Area width x height

width x height x depth

Bleed Overall

BlacKkKansasman KU professor (and Spike Lee collaborator) Kevin Willmott has written one of the most important and surreal films of the summer.

BY ERIC MELIN

44 SAVAGE LOVE

46 EVENTS AE

Artist

SD

Round

August Calendar Round out your summer with SIGN-OFF these events.

CD

SEPTEMBER 22

Built at 100% Print at 100%

THE CLAIRVOYANTS

Special Tech.

Print Instructions

Quickies Skype sexing, ball busting, and good old pegging.

BY DAN SAVAGE

3

PM

Chosen as the “World Champions of Mentalism” and America’s Got Talent 2016 Finalists, this exhilarating magic show will leave you speechless.

8:30p Tickets available at Ticketmaster.com.

Must be 21 or older to gamble. Must be a mychoice® member to receive mychoice discount. Must be at least 18 or accompanied by an adult to enter Star Pavilion. Tickets available online at Ticketmaster.com or at the Gift Shop (service charges and handling fees may apply). No refunds/exchanges unless canceled or postponed.

Offer not valid for persons on a Disassociated Patrons, Voluntary Exclusion or Self Exclusion List in jurisdictions which Pinnacle Entertainment operates or who have been otherwise excluded from Ameristar Kansas City, MO. Gambling problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. ©2018 Pinnacle Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.

4

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

Letter from the Publisher It’s been a busy month. We officially moved to our new home, now at thepitchkc.com. It was about time we had you in our domain, Kansas City.

We are also busy tallying your (nearly 36,000!) nominations for this year’s Best of Kansas City issue. If you haven’t voted yet, fret not: the voting round begins August 13.

Meanwhile, I’m distracting myself by looking at your cute pets in our Pitch Pets contest (online at thepitchkc.com/cutestpets18).

And if that’s not enough, we are excited to bring you Margarita Wars (August 24) and a brand new shopping event, Fashion for a Fraction (August 9), this month. During this year’s Kansas City Fashion Week, I was inspired by the beautiful model (and my new friend) Dr. Amber Botros, who you can read about on page 9 of this issue. Her beauty and positive messages about all bodies really spoke to me. As someone who has struggled with her own weight fluctuation, and who loves fashion, I wanted our fashion event to be more than just a fun shopping night. I wanted it to make a lasting impression on people that beauty is in all of us and fashion has no limits.

That’s why I’m thrilled to share that we will be featuring a panel of amazing women talking about body positivity during Fashion for a Fraction. Keep your eyes on our social media for more details, but this is an inspirational addition to an already amazing fashion event from The Pitch.

August is going to be another busy month, but I’m excited. I hope to see you out and about.

Cheers, Stephanie @queenofquirky #OurPitch

COVER

Shy Boys, Barrett Emke

Generosity, community & new ways to experience art.

Free.

Open until 9 p.m. Thursdays & Fridays.

Sean Scully, American (born Ireland, 1945). Landline Tappan, 2015. Oil on aluminum, 118.1 x 74.8 inches. Purchase: acquired through the generosity of Sean Scully, Dr. Luther Brady in honor of Lee Lyon and the William T. Kemper Foundation—Commerce Bank, Trustee, 2017.46.

nelson-atkins.org

WELCOME HOME

TO THE CHURCH OF THE RESURRECTION Discover a church that speaks to your life, challenges your mind and inspires you to make a difference in the world.

One church with four locations.

Join us for worship this weekend. cor.org

Leawood

West

Downtown

Blue Springs

13720 Roe Ave. Leawood, KS 66224

24000 W. Valley Parkway Olathe, KS 66061

1601 Grand Blvd.

Kansas City, MO 64108

601 NE Jefferson St. Blue Springs, MO 64014

Saturday & Sunday Evenings 5 pm

Sundays 8, 9:30 & 11 am, 5pm

Saturdays 5:10 pm; Sundays at 9 & 10:45 am, 5 pm

Sundays 9 & 10:45 am

Sunday Mornings 7:30, 9:15, 11 am

COR.ORG

GET OUT

August

FIERCELY LOYAL. ALWAYS THERE WHEN YOU NEED. REPRESENTING YOU SO WELL, THEY’LL THINK WE’RE YOU.

GOT YOUR BACK BY STANDING AT YOUR SIDE.

LAST: NEGOTIATOR

MAKING SURE YOU NEVER HAVE TO GO IT ALONE Have you ever been around someone who truly loves what they do?

Their passion is infectious. You can practically feel their integrity. You want those people around you, especially when you enter into the world that they live and breathe. Now imagine that world is buying or selling a home. That person is a REALTOR®, they’re the ones who will not only have your back but the backs of all home and private property owners.

Why? Because they love it. And because it’s right.

Deafheaven

Saturday, August 4 The Granada thegranada.com

Often regarded (or dismissed, depending on who you’re talking to) as a metal band for non-metal fans, Deafheaven has, since 2013’s critically acclaimed Sunbather, adorned its black metal with genres — post-rock, shoegaze — friendlier to the Pitchfork readers in your life. The same goes for its latest, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, the title of which is pulled from Graham Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair.

hair, Pusha T raps on “Hard Piano,” from this summer’s DAYTONA. It’s a swipe at artists like Lil Uzi Vert — rappers half Pusha’s age who made their name on Soundcloud and are as likely to be inspired by ‘90s emo as they are Hell Hath No Fury. The rap world is changing rapidly, and this bill — which also features up-and-comers G Eazy and Ty Dolla $ign — offers a sampling of what lies ahead.

{

NEXT: MATCHMAKER

LOYAL DEDICATED COMMUNICATIVE TRUSTWORTHY PROACTIVE CREATIVE AVAILABLE EDUCATED PROTECTIVE EMPATHETIC

R E A LTO R S ® TA K E O N M A N Y R O L E S .

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Jason Kander

Thursday, August 9 Unity Temple on the Plaza

rainydaybooks.com

Lil Uzi Vert

Tuesday, August 7 Providence Medical Center Amphitheater

providenceamp.com

I’m too rare amongst all of this pink

Before he decided to run for mayor of Kansas City, Jason Kander was, most smart people seem to agree, planning on running for President of the United States. One of the things you do before you run for president is write a book about yourself, which Kander did sometime over the last few years. It’s called Outside the Wire — a reference to his service as an Army captain — and Kander will read from the book, discuss his plans for the city, and answer questions from the crowd at this event. A purchase of Outside the Wire from Rainy Day Books gets you in the door. thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

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GET OUT

Smashing Pumpkins Thursday, August 16 Sprint Center

sprintcenter.com

Charlie Puth

Thursday, August 9 Starlight Theater

kcstarlight.com

His star was born on YouTube, and it rose considerably via the insufferable and omnipresent 2015 Wiz Khalifa collab “See You Again,” but judging by recent developments, Charlie Puth appears to be maturing into a non-embarrassing pop star. The 26-year-old’s new album, Voicenotes, is … kind of good? Puth has perfect pitch, a talent he deploys on Voicenotes in service of pulsing R&B and yacht-rock-anchored jams: Michael Jackson, yes, but Michael McDonald, too. Blast that bass on “Attention.” Let the Puth set you free.

A reunion tour of sorts, this is the first Smashing Pumpkins outing in nearly 20 years to feature founding members Billy Corgan, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin. (Original bassist D’Arcy Wretzky remains persona non grata; she has reportedly even been removed from the nostalgic montages projected on the big screens during the show.)

Early returns suggest attendees can expect a career-spanning set list emphasizing the classic albums (Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), a smattering of covers (Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie), and several Corgan costume changes. Metric opens.

Daddy Long Legs

Spinning Tree Theatre August 17–September 2

spinningtreetheatre.com

Spinning Tree Theatre opens its 201819 season with Daddy Long Legs, a 2015 Off-Broadway hit musical. Based on the 1912 novella by Jean Webster, it’s a “heartwarming Cinderella story about a witty and winsome young woman and her mysterious benefactor,” according to the Spinning Tree folks. Samantha McHenry and John Cleary star, and Sarah Crawford directs.

Mary Gauthier

David Cross

Thursday, August 23 Knuckleheads Saloon

Saturday, August 25 Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

On her latest, Rifles and Rosary Beads, Nashville singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier has collaborated with American veterans and their families to produce ethereal folk songs that explore life during war and its aftermath.

Who’s gonna care for the ones who care for the ones who went to war? Gauthier asks on one track. Landmines in the living room / eggshells on the floor.

Says David Cross of his upcoming tour: “I am beyond aroused to get back out on the road and bring my very special, artisanal, small-batch, handcrafted, 100 percent organic jokes and jibberings to a venue near you.” Note to fans who only know Cross from Mr. Show (the legendary absurdist comedy sketch show he co-created) and Arrested Development (on which he played Tobias Fünke): his stand-up is caustic and political and, depending on what kind of person you are, maybe even shocking. It’s also pretty dependably hilarious.

knuckleheadskc.com

arvestbanktheatre.com

Blackalicious

Crossroads KC at Grinders Friday, August 24

crossroadskc.com

Los Lobos

Friday, August 10 Knuckleheads Saloon

knuckleheadskc.com

Lobos gotta lobo: no new album to speak of, but the East L.A. Chicano lifers continue to grind it out on the road, still refining their trademark melange of blues, rock, and brown-eyed soul 40 dang years into their career. Colorado roots-poppers Big Head Todd & the Monsters, who’ve been doing it for nearly as long, open this show.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

Father John Misty

Friday, August 17 The Uptown

uptowntheater.com The indie-rock internet’s number-one content provider has returned — oh, but he never really left — with God’s Favorite Customer, a new collection of Elton-John-on-Adderall pop takes.

David Beeman opens.

Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel, the brainy duo behind soul-drenched hip-hop act Blackalicious, are second fiddle on this bill, supporting Wyclef Jean. We probably won’t stick around for Jean, who has been accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Haitian charity — funds that were meant for victims of that country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Blackalicious is cool, though.

Melissa Etheridge

Wednesday, August 29 Crossroads KC at Grinders

crossroadskc.com

It’s been 25 years since Melissa Etheridge released her landmark coming-out album Yes, I Am. (You’re old.)

The gay icon’s current tour celebrates that moment as well as other cuts from Etheridge’s heartland rock catalog.

QUESTIONNAIRE

day for a chat.

Hometown: Topeka Current neighborhood: Midtown Who did you want to be when you grew up? I’ve never really been focused on becoming someone else. When I was in high school, I was interested in going to medical school and pursing primary care. I was never interested in modeling.

Your drink: Malibu and diet When did you start modeling? I started modeling approximately three years ago when my dear friend and business neighbor Nataliya Meyer, of Lucia’s Sarto [clothing store], asked me to model for her. I modeled for a few seasons of KC Fashion Week, although I was still more focused on my career as a physician and Medical Spa owner.

A year ago I modeled in a rooftop lookbook for Honey’s Child Boutique in St. Louis. One of the photos went “viral,” which piqued my interest in the industry, turning this current hobby of modeling into something so much more.

You are a med spa doctor, which often includes procedures that can change appearance, but you also promote loving the skin you’re in. How do those two ideas work together? Our goal should be aging gracefully and feeling the most comfortable and confident in our skin that we can. Small procedures that do not change our appearance, but make us the most relaxed, beautiful, timeless version of ourselves is a great goal.

KELCIE MCKENNEY

Amber Botros INSTAGRAM CELEBRITY, CURVY MODEL, AND THE DOCTOR BEHIND PLAZA MEDICAL SPA.

BY KELCIE MCKENNEY

When Dr. Amber Botros walks the runway, it’s mesmerizing. She’s six feet tall and curvy, with a piercing gaze. You might have seen her at the West 18th Street Fashion Show, on the past few Kansas City Fashion Week runways, or on Instagram as @ambercurvemodel, where she expresses to her more than 100,000 followers that sexy doesn’t have a size limit. Botros also owns and operates Plaza Medical Spa, where she’s the lead physician.

In addition to a handful of upcoming events — Miami and Philadelphia Curve Week, NYC Curvy Con — Dr. Botros will be a panelist on body positivity at The Pitch’s Fashion for a Fraction on August 9. We stopped by Botros’s office the other

“THE AVERAGE WOMAN IS A SIZE 16 AND WANTS TO SEE HERSELF REPRESENTED IN FASHION.”

What’s your biggest struggle right now? Deciding how best to merge my business as a beauty doctor and my social media as a model/influencer. I wholeheartedly believe that I can make the greatest impact by merging the two, but I want to do so as seamlessly as possible. My thought is to start with skincare and beauty tutorials that I can post on social media sites as well my professional website. I’m working on becoming #DrAmberCurveModel.

What’s your guilty pleasure? Dark chocolate What is the last thing you laughed at?

Myself eternally laughing at myself.

When did you become interested in body positivity as a message? It was at my first modeling experience at KC Fashion Week. I realized there was a lack of size inclusivity in our metro area. I immediately received positive feedback from so many models and designers that were happy to

see a plus-size model — and even more so as a professional and businesswomen in the plus-size industry.

Any pets? Harlow. She’s a 10-month-old French Bulldog (@inlovewithharlow on Instagram, naturally). And Frank, my 16-yearold flame tip Himalayan cat (@frankielechat).

What gets you on your soapbox? When people I love are treated poorly. I have such a difficult time understanding why people are so cruel, especially on social media. I have no problem taking negativity myself, but those who are near and dear to me — I just can’t stand it. All the negative comments that I receive I like to address and turn into a learning experience. My favorite comment was on a runway photo of mine: “Did they need to reinforce the stage?” I worry about young, impressionable women seeing these negative comments and it scaring their confidence. I will often add screenshots of the negative comments to my story and try to appropriately address them, turning a negative into a positive. Also, to show young women that they don’t need to be silent. We are conditioned as plus-size women to stay silent, and that is not OK. What makes Kansas City special? It’s the biggest small town. No six degrees of separation here — essentially everyone is connected by one degree. I’m so blessed to have had such strong support from my community where I was able to build a small business so quickly.

Why is it important for there to be better representation of plus-size models in the KC modeling community? The average woman is a size 16 and wants to see herself represented in fashion. Women want to see how they are going to look in clothing, and it’s difficult to purchase clothing from a designer when they only use size 0 models.

The best advice you ever got: Never give up. With hard work and determination, everything in life is possible.

How do you use social media to promote body positivity? Growing up, I never had positive plus-size role models. I was always told that my legs were too thick to wear short skirts, it was unsightly to wear shorts, my body was too sexy for short dresses. Women who looked like me were not in magazines; we had supermodels like Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford who were considered beautiful per societal standards. I want young women who are not naturally thin to see my photos and know that they are also beautiful, relevant in society, and can pursue all that they want in life, whether that means becoming a doctor or a model or both. thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

9

NEWS

House of Cards CAN A RENTAL INSPECTION PROGRAM HELP SOLVE THE CITY’S EVICTION EPIDEMIC?

BY BARBARA SHELLY

Advocates for low-income Kansas Citians were seething as they walked out of City Hall one hot afternoon last August.

The City Council’s Housing Committee had stomped on a measure they thought would bring some relief to tenants living in dangerous and unhealthy places: a rental inspection program.

Over two afternoons of hearings, the response to the program — proposed by Councilman Scott Wagner — had been remarkably dismissive. Committee members nicked it to death with a thousand doubts and questions. While landlords in the audience nodded approvingly, elected officials visualized a dumpster load of unintended consequences. A guest who traveled from Baltimore to talk about that city’s model inspection program was accorded a hearing so cursory it bordered on rudeness.

“There was not one single comment made by anyone on the committee acknowledging that Kansas City has a problem,” Colleen Hernandez, a consultant for affordable housing programs, said a few weeks later. “It was stunning to me. I was really disgusted.”

One need only take a drive through neighborhoods to understand that Kansas City does indeed have a housing problem.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

Four in 10 of its residents live in rental housing. Beyond the boom of pricey new apartments in downtown and midtown, conditions range from adequate to awful. About a hundred tenants in Jackson County are formally evicted in an average week, leaving families desperate to rent anything.

Wagner’s proposal would have asked voters to approve the creation of a complaint-based inspection program, paid for by fees collected from landlords. With the money raised, the Health Department would hire inspectors to check out tenant concerns. The Housing Committee’s decision to place the measure on hold last August meant it would not appear on an upcoming ballot, as Wagner and housing advocates had hoped.

Landlord groups celebrated the burial, but the idea was far from dead. Supporters — among them, representatives from social justice groups, neighborhood associations, and Legal Aid of Western Missouri — resurrected it within a month. If the City Council wouldn’t put the idea before voters, they’d do it themselves.

Currently, Kansas City’s initiative petition process is so loose that citizens could easily order Mayor Sly James to quit wearing bow ties if they had a mind to do so. Advo-

About 40 percent of Kansas City residents live in rental units, like this one in midtown.

cates had no trouble rounding up the 1,708 signatures needed to get their question on the upcoming Aug. 7 ballot.

And the new measure is actually tougher than the one Wagner had proposed in collaboration with the city’s Health Department.

The original plan called for an annual $25 fee per building. The new proposal seeks $20 a year, but for each apartment unit. And while the first proposal called for inspections only when prompted by a tenant complaint, the new measure allows for health officials to also conduct random inspections of properties they think might have violations.

The push for rental inspections is part of a broader discussion about Kansas City’s shortage of affordable housing and its startlingly high number of evictions.

For months, people in City Hall and elsewhere have been talking about research led by housing advocate Tara Raghuveer that shows landlords in Jackson County file for an average of 42 formal evictions per business day. Judges grant an average of 25 of those 42 requests. The number of people who get kicked out of their homes without the formal eviction process is thought to be even higher.

Every Thursday, landlords, lawyers, and tenants pile into courtrooms on the 7th floor of the downtown Jackson County Court-

NEWS

ON house for the landlord-tenant relations docket, more commonly known as “eviction court.” Amid the myriad of sad stories there, it doesn’t take long to find a tenant who stopped paying rent because a furnace wasn’t working, a basement flooded, or a ceiling collapsed. Instead of remedies, they find eviction notices on their doors. And, very often, judges grant those evictions, leaving a family casting about for a new home, while someone even more desperate moves into the appalling place they’ve been thrown out of.

“It’s really common,” Gina Chiala says of that scenario. Chiala, a lawyer and director of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, monitors eviction court weekly.

She estimates that at least a quarter of the tenants she speaks to face eviction because they withheld rent as a form of protest.

“The tenant is struggling anyway and they think, ‘Why should I pay full rent and not pay for food and other necessities when the landlord is not fulfilling his or her end of the bargain?’” Chiala says.

Under the envisioned rental inspection program, tenants could call the city Health Department and request an inspection. Officials could order landlords to fix the problem, with the threat of ultimately losing their rental permits if they don’t comply. The proposed ordinance prohibits landlords from retaliating against tenants who complain, and it requires hefty reinspection fees from property owners if violations are found.

Opponents say a rental inspection system will cause more problems than it will solve. Landlords will pass fees along to tenants in the form of rent increases, they predict. Some will leave the business or sell to owners who will charge higher rates, making affordable housing even harder to find.

Alissia Canady, the councilwoman who represents the 5th District, was the most strident opponent of Wagner’s rental inspection proposal. In her words, she “rebuked” staffers from the Health Department when they showed photos of rotting, rodent-infested rental housing in Kansas City.

“People are in that property because no one else will rent to them,” Canady said.

“Nothing about this ordinance supports truly low-income people. Either their rent is going to go up or their housing options are going to be fewer. How does that help?”

Bob Wise, a lawyer who represents landlords, framed the people-have-to-livesomewhere argument more colorfully.

“I can get a suit at Brooks Brothers, or I can go to Walmart,” he said. “But they’re not the same thing. You can’t live on Ward Parkway on east-of-Troost prices.”

The problem is, east of Troost prices are pretty damned high. It’s hard to find a rental anywhere in Kansas City for less than $700 a month. Like their tenants, many landlords operate on paper-thin margins, with little

money to invest in upgrades. Hundreds of rental properties are owned by out-of-town investors, making it hard to keep them accountable.

The Neighborhoods and Housing Services Department, along with a group of citizens, is studying Kansas City’s housing situation and is scheduled to make a presentation to the City Council sometime in August. Canady said she wants to look at measures such as a receivership plan for properties owned by “the bad actors,” and a low-interest loan fund to help owners fix up properties. The rental inspection plan, she says, gets in the way of substantive solutions: “I feel like the tail is wagging the dog.”

Even supporters aren’t claiming rental inspections are the full answer to Kansas City’s housing woes. Quinton Lucas, the councilman who chairs the Housing Committee, says he plans to vote for the ballot question, even though he voted to hold the measure last year.

“I know there are issues with it, but these are issues that can be worked out,” he says.

At the top of that list: What happens to tenants if inspectors shut down their units, or landlords walk away in frustration?

“It’s extremely important that the city makes sure tenants aren’t doubly victimized,” Chiala says. She wants some of the money raised from landlord fees set aside to help displaced tenants find and move to a new place and pay the deposit and first month’s rent.

One point of agreement is that the rental inspection program won’t work unless the city gets good information to both tenants and landlords. Most low-income tenants are currently at a loss about how to handle a dispute with a landlord or an eviction notice.

Volunteers with Chiala’s group hand out information at eviction court, but by then it’s usually too late. Tenants need a well-publicized clearinghouse where they can learn their rights and obtain legal advice. The Heartland Center is raising funds to hire a lawyer to work full-time on eviction prevention.

Landlords say they are also in the dark about how the inspection program would work. A fact sheet compiled by Landlords Inc. answers “we don’t know” to many of the questions it poses. About the only thing the group is sure of is it doesn’t want the ballot question to pass. “We need landlords to organize to vote against the ordinance and to communicate to their tenants that it is in their interest to vote against this ordinance,” Landlords Inc. says on its website.

It’s always risky to predict how a ballot question will turn out. But barring a vigorous last-minute campaign by opponents, most people expect the inspection program to pass. If it does, it will be up to the city to make it work.

PROP A = RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS Proposition A is wrong for Missouri. It is an unnecessary, unfair government overreach into the workplace that distracts from the real issues like creating jobs and improving schools.

Proposition A is being promoted by a wellcoordinated network of out-of-state billionaires, super PACs, and corporate special interest groups that are down-sizing, shipping jobs overseas, and hiding profits offshore to avoid paying the same taxes families and small businesses must pay.

Proposition A would lead to lower wages, median household income in Right-to-Work states is on average $8740 less.

Proposition A would give even more power to big corporations at a time when CEO pay has grown 364 times higher than what the average worker makes.

VOTE NO ON

PROPOSITION A TO REPEAL RIGHT TO WORK AND PUT WORKING PEOPLE BEFORE GREEDY CEOs

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT:

VoteNoONA.org

PAID FOR BY KANSAS CITY BUILDING TRADES COUNCIL, ALISE MARTINY, TREASURER

NEWS

Luis and Noah, in late June. Luis is currently being detained, despite having no criminal history.

Borderline Disorder IN KANSAS CITY, ICE OFFICERS HAVE DEPORTED A WOMAN AFTER A TRAFFIC STOP, DETAINED A MAN WITH NO CRIMINAL HISTORY, AND PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED AN IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY. AND THAT’S JUST ONE CASE. BY TRACI ANGEL

Kenia Bautista-Mayorga’s immigration story began just two years ago, as she carried her baby, Noah, across the U.S. border at Eagle Pass, Texas, ending an arduous trek from Honduras.

Bautista-Mayorga was escaping the abuse of a husband who was a police officer in the village where she lived. He had tried to take Noah from her as the two were separating. She felt she had no other choice but to run in fear for her and Noah’s safety.

At the border, she asked for asylum, a human right the United Nations spells out for those fleeing from persecution.

She agreed to attend immigration court in Dallas to argue her case about why she had moved and the danger she faced if she returned to her home country.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

As Kenia began piecing together a new life in Texas, she connected with Luis Alfredo Diaz Inestroza. They fell in love. They decided to start a family and have a baby. That baby is due in a few months.

In May, the family was driving back from Iowa. Luis, at the wheel, turned his head to say something toward the backseat. As he did, their white Nissan Altima swerved a bit. They were then pulled over along Interstate 35, northeast of Kansas City.

The police ran a check on Kenia. It revealed that she had missed her asylum hearing. Kenia claims her attorney did not show up for it, and she did not want to attend it alone. Regardless, the missed hearing meant that she now had an order of removal — deportation — on her record. She was taken to

the Platte County Jail. They let Luis go.

Last year, or even five years ago, Kenia likely would not have been detained. But that was before this administration escalated its aggressive “zero tolerance” tactics. Earlier this year, the Justice Department and Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE, changed its policy so that pregnant women may be detained. Another change is a policy that domestic abuse, like what Kenia faced, is not an argument for asylum.

Thus, Kenia and her growing belly remained in a jail for the next five weeks.

Inside the small cell, Kenia’s head spun.

Dizzy bouts came and went. She vomited often. Her blood pressure climbed along with her stress levels. Luis had returned to Texas with Noah so he could keep his construction job. Kenia would use Skype to talk with Luis and Noah, trying to reassure the little boy that “Mama” was not gone forever.

A few days into her jail time, attorneys Andrea Martinez and Megan Galicia received an email on a listserve requesting pro bono work for a pregnant immigrant.

“We don’t do a ton of pro bono cases, so this is an anomaly,” Martinez tells The Pitch.

But this seemed like an important one.

They wanted to get Kenia out of detention as quickly as possible.

Some headway was made. Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, learned about Kenia and visited her while in Kansas City. He and Sen. Claire McCaskill, along with the ACLU, pushed for getting her released while Martinez and Galicia appealed her deportation status. They were able to make sure a gynecologist checked Kenia’s health and growing baby. But she remained in jail.

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The Platte County Jail is one of more than 600 facilities nationwide that house ICE detainees. Under its contract with ICE, it is paid per bed — meaning the more ICE detainees who stay there, the more money it makes. Many immigrants stay for just a day or two before they are transferred. (The jail was the location of another high-profile immigration case earlier this year, when Syed Ahmed Jamal, a Kansas scientist whose visa had expired, was held there.)

ICE was founded in the heightened time following 9/11, as part of 2002’s Homeland Security Act. It was designated as one of the agencies that became part of the Department of Homeland Security. It serves as the federal law enforcement agency that carries out federal immigration policies.

Private prisons and detention centers that hold immigrants boomed during the Bush and Obama administrations, but late in Obama’s administration the Justice Depart-

ment scaled back this trend and pushed for reform.

Last year, though, the Trump administration began rolling back those efforts and widened its nets of picking up undocumented immigrants, including non-criminals.

This evolved into the anti-human-rights practices of separating families and calling for eliminating due process in immigration and asylum cases.

As ICE started Kenia’s deportation process, Martinez and Galicia attempted to ask for time and another chance.

“We tried to reopen her removal with Dallas Immigration Court, and we tried to appeal the Dallas judge’s opinion,” Martinez says.

They were told they would be unable to win that appeal.

“We got the decision from the board of immigration on Monday” — June 25 — “at 4 p.m,” she says.

Kenia was set to leave the country in less than 12 hours. Luis was driving up from Odessa, Texas, to bring Noah to join his mother. Noah would be leaving the country along with his mother. Along with them was a documentary film crew from Netflix that was highlighting his experience as part of an upcoming show about deportation.

It was nearly 10 p.m. when Luis and Noah arrived at Martinez’s house. Her family had helped prepare food. Everyone feasted on hamburger, cheese, eggs, rice, and beans.

Noah fell asleep in Martinez’s son’s bed.

“He was so excited to play with my son again and so excited to see his mom,” Martinez says.

In the dark morning hours, around 2 a.m., they woke Noah up and took him to see his mother at the ICE parking lot near the Kansas City International Airport. A photo shows Luis holding a black umbrella with one arm and Noah with his other arm.

You can see the child clutching the blue, toy dinosaur Luis gave him.

ICE officials that morning were not expecting a large audience. Social media and message boards had spread news of the deportation, and nearly 40 people arrived with signs to stage a peaceful protest. A widely circulated video captures a group standing and singing.

“We were always going to meet in the parking lot,” Martinez says. “We were going to hand off Noah in the parking lot — have Noah get in the van with Kenia to have the least traumatic experience as possible and make sure that he gets to his mom. And Luis wanted to give Kenia a hug. She is pregnant with his child, and he hasn’t seen her in a month. He wanted to say goodbye.”

Martinez then received a phone call from ICE asking that Luis come inside the facility because it was raining.

“It’s not what we agreed upon,” Martinez says. “This is not what we want to do,

NEWS

Hey KC,

WE MOVED! A pregnant Kenia with her son Noah. Kenia has since been deported.

THE ICE AGENT FORCIBLY PUSHED MARTINEZ TO THE GROUND TO BAR HER FROM ENTRY. HAVING COLLECTED ALL THREE MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY, ANOTHER OFFICER THEN LOCKED THE DOOR.

and they were insisting that we go in the lobby. So we told them we would go back and ask Luis what he wanted to do so he could make a decision.”

For about 15 minutes, Martinez and Galicia talked to Luis and then walked over the speak with the ICE agents at the door.

They weren’t comfortable with Luis going inside.

ICE officer Everett Chase then followed them to the parking lot and grabbed Luis, who was holding Noah in his arms. Chase pulled him along as they walked toward the door.

The video circulating captures the following actions.

“As we walked, I was saying, ‘Take your hands off him, he’s not the client,’” Martinez recalls. “I kept asking Officer Chase to let him go and said we could walk in [Noah], but Luis didn’t have any choice in the matter. The officer forced him as he was holding Noah.”

Chase pushed Luis and Noah in the door first and then entered as another officer held the door. Martinez and Galicia were trying to follow Noah — their client — in the door. They still had not seen Kenia and wanted to make sure the boy would be with his mother.

At that point, the ICE agent forcibly pushed Martinez to the ground to bar her from entry. Having collected all three members of the family, an ICE officer then locked the door of the building.

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M O C .

C K H C T I P E TH

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That didn’t last long.

“They realized they needed an attorney with the child,” Martinez says. “There was an issue with lack of access to counsel. There thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

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NEWS

Ten days after Kenia and Noah were sent back to Honduras, about 50 protestors gathered outside the ICE office calling for Luis to be freed and the officers to be fired.

was a 3-year-old boy in there without an attorney.”

ICE only allowed Martinez inside.

“I go in,” she says, “and when I walk in there was a room where Kenia, Luis, and Noah are all hugging and crying. Noah was crying because he didn’t want to leave [Luis].”

The family had a minute to embrace before Chase told the other ICE agent to take Kenia and Noah to the airport.

Luis begged for a few more minutes. He bent down and kissed Kenia’s belly.

Noah screamed, realizing the person who had cared for him while his mom was detained would not be going with him.

“I want to stay” with Luis, the child sobbed.

Chase remained in the room with Luis and Martinez.

Luis, still crying, pointed out the wounds on Martinez’s leg and foot. She was bleeding.

“I didn’t even notice it at first,” Martinez says. “My blood was pumping so much.

While [the family was] hugging, I asked Officer Chase, ‘Why did you push me?’ I was in shock. He said, ‘You were trying to forcibly enter a federal facility without permission.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? You just told us we had to come in, and we didn’t even want to come in, we wanted to meet in the parking lot.’ It was like a switch flipped in

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his brain. His story didn’t make any sense.”

Chase looked at her and, she says, told her the injury wasn’t severe. Her foot was swelling now, and she suspected it might be broken. She asked for ice. Chase wouldn’t bring her any. Then she heard him call Federal Protective Service and say, “Bring backup, bring handcuffs, Andrea Martinez was trying to forcibly enter our facility.”

After a while, EMS showed up. Galicia had called them following the altercation at the door. They carried Martinez out of the building on a stretcher. She went to the ER. •

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As for Luis, he was trying to figure out where Kenia’s plane would land in Honduras, so he could alert her family there. He was eventually taken to the Morgan County Jail.

“They promised us they were going to let him go,” Martinez says. “It was super vindictive, because they told us they would not [detain him].”

Luis has no criminal history.

On Monday, July 9, Luis was being transported from Morgan County to the ICE office in Kansas City. His feet and hands were shackled, but he was not wearing a seat belt. When a Morgan County officer, who was driving the vehicle, slammed on the brakes, Luis fell on the floor and hit his

head on a metal divider, according to Galicia, who’s serving as his attorney. Luis was injured but did not receive medical attention until after Martinez spoke with him the next day and noticed his speech was slurring.

Luis then told her about the injury. He had a bump on his head but seemed to be doing better after receiving some medication later in the week.

Galici says that, while it is no longer rare, in the age of Trump, for someone like Luis to be detained, “what is particularly distressing in Luis’ case is that ICE stated repeatedly that they would not detain him when Noah was being handed over to his mother.”

She adds: “We work with ICE officers on a daily basis, and when we cannot take them at their word, our working relationship with them is undermined, as is our ability to properly advise our clients and advocate on their behalf.”

As of late July, Luis was being detained in the Morgan County Jail and awaiting a bond hearing, where an immigration judge will decide whether to release him, Galicia says.

“It’s very unusual, even now, for ICE to refuse a bond for a person with zero criminal history,” Galicia says. “Luis not getting a bond is clearly tied to ICE’s displeasure at us shining a spotlight on them as they deport a woman and her child in the dark of night.”

Luis’ detainment and the confusion around it is just an example of how non-criminal undocumented immigrants have been caught up in policy changes since the Trump administration began in January 2017. Raids, regardless of cause, and other arrests have become more frequent and the immigration battles in the courts have created inconsistent arrests and deportations, as well as a rise in refusing asylum to those who seek it.

Shawn Neudauer of ICE e-mailed The Pitch when asked for a follow-up comment and explanation regarding the events of June 26.

“As was noted in our previous state-

ment ICE can offer no further comment on the other matter,” the email stated, letting stand the agency’s earlier response that it was taking the allegation seriously and looking into the matter.

Messages sent to, and left with, Timothy (Todd) Nay, ICE assistant field director in Kansas City, requesting additional comment on what happened June 26, were not returned.

On the other side of the state, Meggie Biesenthal, an assistant public defender and former immigration attorney in the St. Louis area, says she has heard from multiple attorneys who say they are having a harder time negotiating meetings with ICE. “Obviously, if those agreements are no longer honored, it will have a chilling effect on cooperation between the immigrant community, immigrant attorneys, and ICE,” Biesenthal says.

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A week after the incident Martinez was working at her office, her broken foot in a boot. She won’t need surgery, but it could take three months to heal. We spoke about the growing campaign to abolish ICE and the public outrage over family separations and the government’s slow and disorganized effort to reunite parents with their children.

“This case of Kenia, Noah, and Luis, and what happened to me, it’s just an example of how ICE — some ICE agents — are not representing our values as Americans and not enforcing the law with dignity,” Martinez said. “They are doing it with excess force and aggression, and I think people are tired of that. We are a nation of immigrants and people don’t want to see the most vulnerable people in society — asylum seekers, immigrants who are detained — mistreated any longer.

“If ICE officers are going to assault two lawyers in front of all these cameras,” she continued, “how do they treat immigrants when there are no cameras, particularly when they are detained?”

NEWS JOCO election commissioner Ronnie Metsker examines one of the county’s new voting machines.

primary.

The stakes are high for 2018, and Metsker knows it.

There are more voters than ever in Johnson County, and more than 70 percent of those registered in the county voted in 2016. A similar turnout is expected in 2018.

This fall, the county sits in a hotly contested Congressional district — a seat occupied by a very vulnerable Kevin Yoder. And those new voting machines? Johnson County is the first county in the nation to use them.

They’re made by Election Systems & Software — the same vendor whose tech support failed the county so miserably in 2016.

“I certainly don’t claim to have the magic wand to tell you what’s going to happen,” Metsker says of the upcoming elections.

“But I do know this: We’d better be ready.”

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Muriel Kauffman Theatre, Kauffman Center (816) 994-7222 or kauffmancenter.org THE WHITE THEATRE AT THE J ListenUp! Acapella Sunday, August 19 at 3 p.m.

5801 W. 115th St., Overland Park, Kan. (913) 327-5054 or TheWhiteTheatre.org

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UMKC CONSERVATORY Tom Stein, tuba Monday, August 20 at 7:30 p.m.

White Recital Hall, UMKC Campus FREE KANSAS CITY BALLET FREE Event: KC Dance Day Saturday, August 25 from 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Register Now at kcballet.org KANSAS CITY SYMPHONY Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban™ in Concert September 5, 6, 7 and 9 Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center (816) 471-0400 or kcsymphony.org QUALITY HILL PLAYHOUSE Broadway and All That Jazz: Songbook of the 20s and 30s Opens September 28 303 W. 10th St., Downtown Kansas City, Mo. (816) 421-1700 or QualityHillPlayhouse.com HARRIMAN-JEWELL SERIES 2018–2019 Stunning Season: The Philadelphia Orchestra, Joyce DiDonato, Swan Lake, Itzhak Perlman, many more! hjseries.org KANSAS CITY REPERTORY THEATRE 2018-2019 Season Tickets Now on Sale!

September 7, 2018 – May 19, 2019 Spencer Theatre and Copaken Stage (816) 235-2700 LYRIC OPERA OF KANSAS CITY West Side Story | September 22-30, 2018 Madama Butterfly | November 3-11, 2018 Così fan tutte | March 16-24, 2019 The Pearl Fishers | April 27 – May 5, 2019 (816) 471-7344 or kcopera.org Follow KCLiveArts on Facebook and sign up for E-News Alerts at KCLiveArts.org

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Machine Politics IS THE JOHNSON COUNTY ELECTION OFFICE READY FOR THE MIDTERMS?

BY ROXIE HAMMILL

How bad was November 8, 2016, at the Johnson County Election Office? Very bad.

Flop sweat, reporters-pounding-on-thedoor-to-get-answers bad. Ronnie Metsker remembers it well. It was his first big election, less than a year after he became commissioner of the office. The choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had sparked a high number of absentee votes in Johnson County, the most populous county in the state. College students sent in ballots from across the country, excited to be a part of what they thought would be a historic day: the election of the first female president.

But the JOCO voting machines, made by a company called Election Systems &

Software, were having a hard time keeping up with the influx of absentee ballots. They seemed to be on the precipice of a shutdown.

When Metsker’s team began to upload the votes, they discovered they were missing about 2,100 ballots. For a sickening three hours, Metsker tried to make sense of it all, communicating with a baffled tech specialist at ES&S. The county didn’t get its final vote reported until 1:30 p.m. the following day. A debacle.

In mid-June, I drove out to the Johnson County Board of Elections to visit with Metsker at his office. In the back of the building, employees were testing 1,100 new voting machines the county has ordered, making sure they’re ready for the August 7

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Voting machines in the United States are generally easy to hack. Hardware and software vulnerabilities are abundant, as is the existence of foreign-made parts. The Internet is rife with scary stories of security failure: old voting machines from Tennessee sold on eBay with voter information still inside, phishing scams, malware and scanning attempts against systems in Illinois and Arizona. Even the Election Assistance Commission — the body responsible for certifying voting equipment — was itself the subject of a hack. (One more to keep you up at night: it took less than two hours for computer hackers to break into U.S. voting machines at the 2017 DefCon computer security conference.)

What went wrong in Johnson County in 2016, according to Metsker, was hardly the stuff of spy novels. He believes the issues stemmed from, essentially, a failure to update software. Eight months after the election, while the election office was being remodeled, Metsker says an employee discovered an old ES&S memo from 2008. It stated that Windows was reducing storage space for its voter systems from four gigabytes to two, and that users of the systems should back up more often. The memo had apparently been misplaced, forgotten, or ignored.

Two gigabytes would have been plenty for most ordinary elections, Metsker says. But not for one with the kind of turnout seen in 2016.

Johnson County election commissioners had actually been pushing for new voting machines since even before Metsker resigned his spot as chairman of the Johnson County GOP and took on the elections commission job in February 2016. His predecessor, Brian Newby, asked the county commission for new machines because the old system was nearing the end of its elec-

NEWS

tronic life. (Newby went on to become director of the federal Election Assistance Commission.) There had also been public demands in the county for a paper trail — a way for voters to confirm that the machines they used accurately reported their vote.

In 2016, having allocated $13 million to replace the old inventory, Johnson County decided to join the three other most populated Kansas counties — Sedgwick, Wyandotte, and Shawnee — and shop for replacement voting machines together. Those three counties bought ES&S machinees — the kind that allow for the paper trail — and have used them for elections in 2016 and 2o17.

But Johnson County waited.

Metsker says he wasn’t crazy about the version the other counties purchased. The paper ballots had to be put through a separate scanner to be tabulated, and those machines were bulky and heavy and would take up too much of the election office’s limited storage space. They reminded him of Deffenbaugh dumpsters, he says. Election officials in other counties jokingly called them shredders.

“We didn’t have any space out here to have 200 Deffenbaugh containers,” Metsker told me. Eventually, ES&S offered Johnson County machines with a built-in tabulator, and Johnson County at last made the purchase.

Election commissioners in the other three counties say they’ve been happy with their version of the machinery so far, especially the paper trail. Even Beth Clarkson, the statistician who unsuccessfully sued Sedgwick County for an audit after she saw suspicious patterns in the 2014 vote totals, says the paper trail is an improvement (though she adds that the electronic poll pads that hold voter registrations need a closer look).

Wyandotte County used the new machines for its municipal elections last year.

“They worked great for us,” says Bruce Newby (no relation to Brian), the election

commissioner there. “They were very voter-friendly. I don’t know how on earth anyone would ever hack it.”

Metsker is confident the system they’ll have in place in Johnson County come August will be secure. The machines have no port to be connected to the Internet, he says, and even ES&S doesn’t have remote access for tech support. Moreover, the vote totals will come back to the election office on encrypted proprietary USBs. (As for the old machines, they’ll be bought back by ES&S, which will disassemble them, he says.)

He also notes that skeptical voters can ask to have their ballot read on a different machine to see if it matches. “You can ask machine number two, ‘Read my ballot and tell me what you see when you read these barcodes,’” Metsker says.

Also: the state is requiring an audit of a section of the vote. Though that statute is new and in need of clarification, it should reassure voters, Metsker says.

“A person can find stories out there about this, or this, or this, or this,” Metsker says. “But for us, we dealt with these kinds of problems a long time ago. So that kind of story does not happen in Johnson County.”

The county is nevertheless racing against the clock. It must train poll workers on a voting system that’s considerably different than the one used for the past 15 years.

And having ordered the new machines in May, it only received them in mid-June. The aforementioned 1,100 ExpressVote Tabulators are half of the order — enough for the primary election, Metsker says — with the other half due in early September. A lot of variables in the air. A lot to do in a short amount of time.

Inside the election office, in Olathe, the new machines are lined up in the warehouse, ready to be tested. They look sleek in their black encasements. Steps away, the old machines lie under dust covers, on hand to be put into emergency service should the unthinkable happen — or, rather, should the unthinkable happen again.

FREE FAMILY FUN

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

17

FEATURE

ZACH BAUMAN

Rare Type KANSAS CITY’S LAST REMAINING TYPEWRITER REPAIRMEN ARE STILL HANGING ON. FOR NOW.

BY APRIL FLEMING

Steve Kavanaugh examines the antique Oliver typewriter I’ve brought to him for repair, gliding its carriage back and forth, checking for problems I may have missed in my own mechanical diagnosis. He leans the bulky machine back, quickly scans it from below. From this angle, you can glimpse its wondrous guts: the hundreds of curved, metal pieces connected to one another by tiny bolts, screws, and springs.

I love typewriters — an enthusiasm that dates back to my first encounter with an old Underwood owned by my grandfather.

I take my machines to Kavanaugh because there’s almost nothing about these machines he hasn’t been able to fix for me. He has been repairing typewriters in Kansas City for the past 43 years. And he is likely to be one of

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the last to ever do so professionally here.

A soft-spoken man, Kavanaugh began working as a typewriter repairman for Kansas City’s Office Machine Mart in 1975. He notes that he’s always been mechanically inclined and jokes that he stumbled into the job because his best friend was dating the boss’s daughter.

“When I first came here, there was an IBM C-model, just like this one here,” he says, pointing at a bulky plastic machine on a shelf crammed with colorful vintage IBM typewriters. “It was torn apart. My first job was to put it back together. From that point, I worked on everything.”

Though he has bounced around to a few different companies over the course of his career, he has been back at Office Ma-

THE CITY WAS ONCE HOME TO SEVERAL DEDICATED TYPEWRITER SHOPS. OF THESE, ONLY OFFICE MACHINE MART REMAINS.

chine Mart for the past 25 years. The bench where he works is surrounded with shelves full of parts, mostly for IBM selectrics and Wheelwriters — inventions that, in their time, were the futuristic supermachines of typewriting.

Kavanaugh belonged to what once was a massive industry. A whole sector of American manufacturing was dedicated to the production of typewriters, and dozens of repair schools were scattered across the country. Different schools were dedicated to unique brands and models. Typing schools were ubiquitous.

So was retail. In the 1960s and 70s, Kansas City was home to several dedicated typewriter shops, including Brookside Typewriter, Johnson County Typewriter, and Suburban Machine Mart. Of these, only Office Machine Mart remains, though it’s moved from its prominent original location at 1534 Grand to its current midcentury building on 31st Street in Midtown.

Kavanaugh is one of just two repairmen still working professionally in Kan-

FEATURE

Steve Kavanaugh is one of just two working typewriter repairmen left in Kansas City.

sas City. The other is Daryl Martin, at EBS Scantracker in Merriam. He declined to be interviewed for this story. Like many of the older men — it’s always men — I meet at estate auctions and repair shops that service older equipment, Martin is wary of too many questions. He likely doesn’t recall that he was the first person to whom I took my grandfather’s Underwood for repair. It took six months. But that Underwood will likely go another 60 years as a result.

Though it was perhaps inevitable, given the advent of the computer age, the decline of the typewriter wasn’t as precipitous as you might imagine. Some businesses, Kavanaugh explains, still use them, including car dealerships, insurance companies, and banks — though he notes that many of these business, too, are transitioning away. Who’s left? Hobbyists like myself and a rapidly dying generation of typewriter users.

“We’ve had people bring in typewriters and pass away,” Kavanaugh says with a

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

shrug, starting to laugh. “That’s just the way it is.”

In fact, Office Machine Mart doesn’t make ends meet by repairing typewriters, though Kavanaugh explains that a few machines do come in each week. Kavanaugh actually spends most of his time repairing and servicing Xerox machines. Other scanning and photo companies sublet some of Office Machine Mart’s space, which covers much of the business’s overhead. As to why they repair typewriters at all anymore, owner Mark Lee explains that it’s just part of Office Machine Mart’s 74-year history.

“We’ve always done it, we have what we need to do it, Steve knows how to do it,” Lee says. “It’s a heritage thing.”

Kavanaugh is in his sixties, as is Daryl Martin. There are no plans to bring on new repairmen once Kavanaugh retires. Until then, though, Office Machine Mart’s doors are open every day. Just walk in and ring the bell for service.

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Relive the magic of your favorite wizard in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban™ in Concert. Based on the third installment of J.K. Rowling’s classic saga, fans of all ages will experience the thrilling tale accompanied by the Kansas City Symphony as Harry soars across the big screen. From the moment Harry first uses the Marauder’s Map to when the Patronus Charm bursts from his wand, you’ll be transported back into the world you love. Tickets start at $40 for adults and $32 for children.

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CAFE

Full Success NEITHER OLD-WORLD STUFFY NOR SHOWY AVANT GARDE, THE FOOD AT THE RESTAURANT AT 1900 HITS ALL THE RIGHT NOTES. BY LIZ COOK

The dish was unassertive enough: a brownskinned cube of veal breast, a shimmer of mahogany demi-glace, three lightpoles of white asparagus slashed with grill marks.

A culinary version of “duck, duck, goose” played in my head: brown, brown, ghost. I pulled a morsel of veal away from the plate.

The veal pulled me away with it.

A great meal — and The Restaurant at 1900 has a few of them — can wreak havoc with the senses and turn cynics into synesthetes. Chef Linda Duerr’s veal was velvet: supple as a pork belly, rich as duck confit.

Her asparagus was ethereal, so tender I could scarcely map its edges; I forgot why anyone had ever called the vegetable “fibrous.” An errant wedge of rhubarb ignited in my mouth like a flashbulb. Then, a stray snippet of conversation dragged my stomach back to earth: “Would you prefer Majorca or Ibiza?”

I blinked, wondering if I was being of-

fered a strange aperitif — no. It was a couple at the table next to me, debating their next weekend getaway. They had the bleached teeth and careless pattern-mixing of the urban elite. A silver-haired man bent over a two-top nearby, ribbing pompously about coworkers who eschewed jackets at the office.

I chanced a look at my tablemate. He was wearing cargo shorts and the expression of a French peasant in the summer of 1381. It was clear he’d been eavesdropping for some time.

“It’s OK,” I muttered. I skimmed a slice of asparagus through the demi-glace like a jet-ski and offered him my fork. “This isn’t for them.”

Of course, it is for them, in the most literal sense. The Restaurant at 1900 was designed in part to cater to wealthy patrons of the 1900 Building’s performing-arts spaces.

The recently restored building in Mission

Woods is an architectural platypus of tulip columns pasted onto limpid plate-glass windows. It’s going to draw some suits.

But Duerr’s approach to fine dining is neither old-world stuffy nor showy avant garde. The food here is elegant enough to appeal to the special-occasion crowd but playful enough to lure repeat visitors. A few dishes have the waggish air of culinary pranks. For example: the “lobster pop tart,” a contradiction of flaky crimped pastry crammed with rouge-tipped lobster meat and plated alongside a cherry-tomato salad and “whipped VSOP cream.” If there was cognac in the cream, it was undetectable. The unassuming tomatoes were the firecrackers.

Another wink: the Narragansett Bay lobster salad roll, a $30 sandwich with a side of chips. The presentation is almost obstinately humble; I can imagine ordering a near-identical sandwich from a dockside food cart. But the toasted brioche bun arrived piled high with knuckle-sized hunks of lobster, and a chubby slice of yellow heirloom tomato added interest to the plate. The chips needed seasoning, and I would have preferred a dash more lemon in the aioli to brighten things up (maybe even — gasp — an herb). But then, I’m neither a New Englander nor a purist. If you prefer your lob-

From full service to express drop-off and everything in between, you can rest assured that you will get the menu and service you need to make your celebration a success!

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

ster plump and relatively unadorned, this is the roll for you.

Of all the upscale restaurants that have opened in the past couple of years, The Restaurant at 1900 seems closest to marrying

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CAFE

ZACH BAUMAN

genuine hospitality with a sense of humor.

There’s no dress code, no white table cloths, no back waiters anxiously skating crumbers across your table. Instead, service is suffuse with small, graceful touches. A wooden tray

of savory shortbreads (courtesy of pastry chef Elizabeth Paradise) soars out of the kitchen before each meal, complementing Duerr’s cooking like the previews for a film.

Those shortbreads are a feat of engineering

as much as flavor. Both the Kalamata olive and the rosemary-thyme were delicate and spindly, feathering on my tongue like cotton candy.

The ambience, too, is elegant but unpretentious. Sure, there’s white marble tables and Lester Goldman paintings, but also lots of natural light, dusk-blue leather, and a glass-cased collection of novelty saltand-pepper shakers. The vibe feels right for an address that once belonged to homey fried-chicken outpost The Green Parrot Inn. Beverage director Doug Frost has nodded to that history with the “Green Parrot,” a moss-colored cocktail blending rum, Aperol, blue curaçao and passion fruit. The drink I tried was round and complex with a tiki-style smoothness. It was also garnished with half of a community garden — a bouquet of flower blossoms, a shrubbery of mint — adding a heady fragrance to each sip.

The Crane Shandy was simpler but no less thoughtful. Cappelletti highlighted the bitter notes in Crane’s Tea Weiss, while a dollop of raspberry-rosé sorbet softened the beer’s sharp edges. (I was less excited by the Spring in E Major, an aquavit and pisco-based drink that tasted stiff and out-of-season.)

Another graceful touch: teetotalers get to feel special here, too. Besides bottles

of Mexican Coke and Sprite, the restaurant serves seasonal agua frescas (watermelon and pink peppercorn on a recent visit), a fresh ginger soda, and a housemade passion fruit fizz. Both the agua fresca and fizz were served with all the artistic flourishes of a high-margin cocktail.

Even the wine list is thoughtfully arranged. Reds and whites aren’t separated by grape but are instead ordered from “softest & lightest to full-bodied.” Frost offers small and large sizes of each wine-by-the-glass, which are called “tastes” and “pours,” respectively. The “taste” is much more than that, and the perfect size for lunch if you’ve got shit to do later.

And lunch is a lower-cost path to the 1900 experience. It’s also the only way to sample the lamb and chanterelle mushroom burger, which is one of Duerr’s standout dishes. A snowmelt of goat cheese and a tangle of tart beet relish were the only condiments needed; the lamb was tender and flavorful with a salty-sweet crust. This may be the first time I’ve ordered a $16 burger without griping about the price tag.

The “Lunch Special at 1900” is similarly worth the modest expense. For $14, you get a cup of soup, a small side salad, and the half-sandwich of the day. On a recent visit,

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I sampled a crisp piece of fried halibut on a white hoagie, tramped up with a curry remoulade and a tomato slice the size of the bun and the shade of a mortified fire engine.

But at any price point, you’d be hardpressed to find a dud on Duerr’s menu. My objections on any given night were almost comically minute. A dish of fire-roasted tomato orzotto with steamed littleneck clams and crispy pork belly needed more parsley — parsley! — to add tension to the rich flavors. I had a similarly superficial gripe about a clever starter of cotechino sausage and heart of palm in a smoked tomato vinaigrette. The gigante beans were crumblier than they were creamy, but the flavors were bright and bold, each element balanced like an equation.

The only disappointment was the wild king salmon and panzanella salad, which was uncharacteristically dull. Duerr’s panzanella swaps the usual tomatoes for beets, and the marigold vinaigrette was too subtle to account for the absent acid. Still, the salmon — an ivory king on the day I ordered it — was oily and succulent.

Portions at 1900 are Goldilocks-right, leaving welcome room for Paradise’s desserts. The Cookie Plate at 1900 contained four dubloon-sized cookies warm from the oven (on a recent visit: chocolate tahini, coconut, sugar, and peanut butter). The peanut butter cookie was the obvious front-runner.

It was chewy but crisp-edged, with a sindark peanut aroma so lush and fragrant that I expected to see a cartoon scent trail from the kitchen. The coconut macaroon was livened by a dusting of lime zest, and the chocolate tahini was satisfyingly rich and nutty.

Only the sugar was a miscue — well-structured but bland.

If you like lemon, the lemon chiffon layer cake is compulsory. I met Paradise once, at a crowded Pitch event, and I can never meet her again. I fear she already knows too much. She knows that I don’t want a mere flirtation with lemon. She knows that I want to be drenched to my elbows in sun-gorged citrus, brightness forking across my tongue like lightning.

This is not to say that the cake is indelicate. The chiffon is suitably moist and airy, and the layers are as slender as tea sandwiches. In fact, the whole presentation is so chaste, it feels tongue-in-cheek: a couple of whole blackberries and a thin wisp of candied grapefruit peel are the only adornments.

I came up from the cake for a gulp of air and heard the nasal voice of the man at the table next to me fade in like a poorly tuned radio. “When we went to Puerto Vallarta…”

I tuned him out. There was a bite of chiffon cake yet to conquer. It was definitely not for him.

ZACH BAUMAN

The Restaurant at 1900 1900 Shawnee Mission Parkway, 913-730-1900 therestaurantat1900.com

Hours: Monday 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

Tuesday–Thursday 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

Friday 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

Saturday 12 p.m.–11 p.m.

Prices: Cocktails $10–14 Appetizers $6–14 Entrees $16–36

Best bet: Sip on a Green Parrot while you wait for the slow-cooked veal breast. Save room for the lemon chiffon layer cake.

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FOOD

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AT PARADISE LOCKER AND BICHELMEYER MEATS, YOU CAN LITERALLY BUY HALF OF A COW — AND IT’S MORE HUMANE AND CHEAPER THAN HOW YOU’RE USED TO PURCHASING MEAT.

BY APRIL FLEMING

Self-aware meat-eaters have little choice but to navigate an uncomfortable reality when we travel to the grocery store.

The experience is an ethical minefield — and particularly so when it comes to beef.

An insatiable appetite for inexpensive beef, both here in the U.S. and across the globe, has given rise to factory farming of cattle.

It is no secret that this is an unpleasant enterprise. Factory farming has long been associated with wretched living (and dying) conditions for the animals, as well as highly dangerous conditions for the slaughterhouse workers, many of them immigrants.

Then there are the environmental impacts, which range from the local (see: the recent CAFO that threatens to harm Powell Gardens) to the global (methane from cow farts is a major contributor to the rise in global temperatures, a fact that would be hilarious were it not destroying our planet).

We know, we know. Just stop eating beef (or pork, for that matter). But a simple truth remains: steak is just so damn good.

So are burgers.

And slow-cooked brisket.

And pot roast.

And so on. Think about what your

ZACH BAUMAN

mouth does when you so much as drive by Arthur Bryant’s. Our natural appetite for beef is primal.

If you’re not going to give up meat altogether, there is one other way to buy beef that minimizes environmental impacts, ensures the more humane treatment and slaughter of animals, and promotes safer, clean workplaces for industry workers. You also end up with some of the highest-quality product available, custom-cut to your desires. And it’s cheaper.

How? You literally walk into a store and order a half a cow.

Colloquially, it’s known as buying a “half beef.” Some people also call it “a side.”

You can do this at a couple places in the Kansas City area, including Paradise Locker, in Trimble (just north of Smithville), and Bichelmeyer Meats, in KCK. “We’ll take them [customers] in the

cooler and we’ll pick out [a cow] which we think is best suited to their needs,” says Matt Bichelmeyer. “Then we bring it out on the table and cut it to their specifications.”

Questions they’ll ask you: What kinds of cuts do you want? Do you want your meat to be bone-in or boneless? Do you want more roasts, or more steak?

Paradise Locker supplies meats not just to KC restaurants (Corvino, Black Dirt, and the Rieger among them) but to some of the best-known restaurants in the country, including David Chang’s Momofuku spots and Lidia Bastianich’s Del Posto in New York. But regular-old You can also buy cows from Paradise, though owner Nick Fantasma recommends first picking up the phone.

“A customer can just give us a call and let us know that they are interested in purchasing a side, quarter, or whole beef,” Fantasma explains. “Our farmers” — which are all located within one hours’ drive of Paradise’s Trimble facility — “typically have beef available throughout the year, but you might have a little bit of a wait time, depending on when the order is placed.” All beef raised by Paradise’s farmers is naturally raised, without the use of any added growth hormones or antibiotics. Grass fed and finished beef is also available.

Bichelmeyer sources the majority of its beef from its own ranch, located in Williamsburg, Kansas, between Ottawa and Emporia. It typically keeps 600-800 head of Angus at the ranch at any given time.

This cattle is grass-fed and corn-finished before slaughter at Bichelmeyer’s facility in KCK. As at Paradise Locker, butchers at Bichelmeyer then hang the carcasses to age for over two weeks, letting natural enzymes begin to break down muscle tissue, making the meat more tender and flavorful.

At Paradise Locker, once the customer has selected the meat he or she wants, the animal will be cut down to the customer’s specifications. This can add up to anywhere from 100 to 400 pounds of beef after all the cuts are packed. Then everything is frozen to ensure freshness.

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Customers at Bichelmeyer can also have their meat frozen, or they can leave the facility with it as-is and freeze themselves.

Matt Bichelmeyer notes that the meat is good for up to two years, though for best flavor he recommends consuming the beef within around one year, which is about, he explains, as long as it takes a family of four to consume a half beef.

So yes, this is undoubtedly a lot of meat — more than you’ve likely ever imagined having at your house at one time. A half beef at Bichelmeyer’s will likely include the following: 14 ribeyes, 8 sirloins, 16 porterhouse/t-bone steaks, 10 round steaks, one

flank steak, eight arm/chuck roasts, eight boneless roasts, and 60-80 pounds of ground beef. A quarter beef is essentially getting half of this, though customers can also opt for different cuts from specific quarters (roasts from the front quarter, and steaks from the hind quarter, for example).

Does this all sound expensive? It is — but only up front. The average half beef, whether from Paradise, Bichelmeyer, or another provider, will likely cost somewhere between $1,000-$1,500, depending on the type and weight of the cow you choose. A quarter beef will run about half of that cost.

This breaks down to anywhere from $10-$30

Striving for the highest quality meals available anywhere, at any price!

Taste our “Farm-Inspired” menu!

A “HALF BEEF” AT BICHELMEYER’S WILL LIKELY INCLUDE 14 RIBEYES, 8 SIRLOINS, 16 PORTERHOUSES OR T-BONES, 10 ROUND STEAKS, A FLANK STEAK, 8 ARM/ CHUCK ROASTS, 8 BONELESS ROASTS, AND 6080 POUNDS OF GROUND BEEF.

per week. That’s a lot to spend on beef in one fell swoop. But you’re buying at a flat price per pound. That’s where the savings come in.

“You’re talking about $3.50 a pound,” explains Bichelmeyer, “versus buying an individual steak at up to $15-$16 per pound, or more.” (At Kansas City Price Chopper stores, for example, ground beef runs about $3.99 a pound, and grass-fed beef is $6 a pound. Ribeyes go for $14-$18 per pound.)

The advantages, however, go beyond price.

“A big advantage [over grocery store products] is that you know exactly where your beef is coming from,” says Fantasma.

“We have all info as far as what farm the animal came from, how it was raised, what it was fed, and, of course, where it was processed. There’s full traceability all the way through that animal’s life when you’re dealing with a small custom processor.”

And, says Fantasma: “Not only are you supporting a local, family-owned business with the meat processor, you’re supporting a small family farm.”

Also: this is an unconventional shopping experience. A final word of advice: bring a hairnet.

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BKS Artisan Ales keeps narrow hours at its taproom: noon to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. But demand is high for its tasty offerings, and beer enthusiasts and Brookside locals alike pack the place on weekends. It is not for the claustrophobic.

But it’s worth it for the Biere de Ferme.

A golden, sour, farmhouse-style ale, the Biere de Ferme is brewed in a giant wooden cask known as a foeder, which can contain between 6,000 and 10,000 liters. All that volume means the beer benefits from more contact with the wood, which enhances the flavor. And what flavor: the Biere de Ferme is made with malt, German noble hops, BKS’s house saison yeast, and an ever-changing mix of wild yeast and lactobacillus. The result is malty, but super citrusy and crisp — a heavenly way to beat the heat.

––April Fleming

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

EAT

Eat This Now SEAWEED DONUTS AND TROUT ROE WITH CREAM, AT CORVINO SUPPER CLUB & TASTING ROOM

Donuts and fish — such an appealing, intuitive combo! How has nobody thought of it before?

We joke, we joke. But only because of how much we love this Corvino dish, which doesn’t remind us much of donuts or fish.

These donuts ain’t Krispy Kremes, for starters. They’re savory, and a little puffy, and — as the name implies — they’ve got seaweed inside them. Try ‘em blind, though, and there’s a good chance you’d never guess about the seaweed. It snakes subtly through the dough, dispersing flavor, and the bites

APRIL FLEMING

are rare when you can even register this raw marine plant on your tongue.

As to the fish: it’s trout roe — little pink fish eggs — floating in a gooey lake of heavenly cream. Hold the donut in your left hand. Grab the oar-like utensil they’ve provided you. Smear the creamy roe on the hot donut. Toss that baby into your mouth. Revel in the almost criminal saltiness that washes over your taste buds.

Repeat until the main course arrives. Do not try at home.

––David Hudnall

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

31

ARTS

La Dolce VITAs A KANSAS CITY CHAMBER ENSEMBLE CLEARS A PATH FOR THE VOICES OF NEW COMPOSERS.

BY LIBBY HANSSEN

To the uninitiated, the Kansas City Vibrating Internal Thyroarytenoids sounds like an organization advocating an alternative health practice, perhaps, or a tinfoil-hat conspiracy group.

And, in fact, there is something a bit unconventional about the KC VITAs (thyroarytenoids is a bit of a mouthful). This chamber choir is infiltrating Kansas City’s choral scene with a subversive idea: to perform and record new work — exclusively new work — from a wide array of composers. That mission has set the group apart in KC’s robust and well-established chamber-music scene in the three years since Jackson Thomas founded the VITAs as a graduate student at the University of Kansas.

“We started this because of the niche that was not there for new composers,” says Jackson Thomas, the VITAs’ founder and artistic director.

When 400 people showed up to the first VITAs concert, they knew they were onto something. Each subsequent summer-series concert has drawn similarly large crowds.

Critics have commended the ensemble for blend, balance, and attention to detail. An-

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

thony Rodgers, writing for KC Metropolis, lauded the VITAs’ “invigorating richness” and “high level of musicianship.” One concert has grown to three a year (winter, spring, and summer performances), all showcasing contemporary classical vocal music.

“We have from the very beginning [been] playing catch-up with how fast it has grown,” Thomas says.

For this year’s call for scores, VITAs received over 200 submissions from composers in 26 countries. (Work is chosen on a blind basis, just a score with no identifying information on it.) The selection committee whittled down the submissions to 11 works, resulting in a concert with five world premieres, five regional premieres, and one U.S. premiere, performed August 3 and 5. (With the permission of the composers, the group recently created a library for the works it has received, hoping to find performance opportunities for quality works that don’t make the initial concert cycles.)

“We’ve got composers who are young — like sophomores in undergrad — through being an established composer,” Thomas says. With each cycle, those chosen perform

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and record the works, since quality recordings are difficult for young composers to come by and essential to promoting one’s work.

“It seems like every year the quality continues to increase, which is real exciting,” Thomas adds.

The summer series, which includes choral works, art songs and a chamber piece, is “a potpourri of all the styles we feature,” Thomas says. “We have tried very hard to ensure that there is wide array of styles being shown, because the current state of choral music is all over the map.”

Offerings in this month’s concert cover a wide range of styles. There’s Jaco Wong’s avant-garde piece “Psithaura” (the word for the sound of the wind in the trees), which uses complex harmonies, throat singing techniques, and wordless effects to challenge our relationship with nature. Then there are works that are more tonal and dramatic, like Christina Whitten Thomas’ “The Deceiver” (based on the biblical story of Jacob), or Kevin Wilt’s “Medusa,” for voice and cello, which casts a contemporary view on the ancient myth.

Concerts are free and, though the mostly graduate-level singers perform at a professional level, the 32-piece ensemble, including Thomas, is unpaid.

“Our mission is to make new music accessible to all,” he says. It’s a mission as vital as air to the future of the art form.

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MUSIC

One More Time THE BEAUTIFUL SECOND COMING OF SHY BOYS. BY DAVID HUDNALL

For over four years, the founding members of Shy Boys — brothers Collin and Kyle Rausch and Konnor Ervin — lived together in a dilapidated house on Bell Street, on the far west edge of the West Plaza. They called it Bell House. I spent a fair amount of time at this place. One afternoon in 2015, I stopped by and was shown a marijuana plant growing wild in the side yard.

There was no mistaking what this plant was. It was gigantic, and the leaves looked like cartoon cannabis, and it smelled like a big bag of stinky weed. If you walked up to inspect this plant, and looked up, you saw that it was growing directly beneath a bedroom window. The plant bloomed in this spot because one of the band’s members had, for several years, been emptying marijuana ash out that window. At some point, a discarded seed burrowed into the ground, germinated, and sprouted into a plant. Eventually, the inhabitants of Bell House did some internet research, cut the plant, dried it, hung it up, and smoked it.

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

Shy Boys subsequently wrote a song about this experience. It’s called “Miracle Gro,” and it’s the first track on Bell House, an endearing and imaginative new album of pop songs that in a just world would represent this beloved Kansas City band’s big break — whatever that means anymore.

On the day after the Fourth of July, I visited with the members of Shy Boys — the band is a five-piece now, with the addition of Ross Brown and Kyle Little — at their new base of operations, a house on Holmes near 33rd Street. Brown and Kyle Rausch live here, and the band practices in the basement, which is home to a a fairly sophisticated makeshift studio. The boys had just returned from a two-week West Coast tour, and they were gearing up for another two weeks in the Southeast and East Coast.

(They’ll be at RecordBar for the Bell House release show on August 4.) We sat around the kitchen table waiting for some pizzas to be delivered, and Brown uncorked a bottle of red wine the band had recently been gift-

BARRETT EMKE

ed during a tour stop at the Idaho Botanical Garden, in Boise.

“There was a wine-tasting booth there,” Brown said, as he filled our glasses.

“We played right across from the AARP booth.”

He was alluding to a foundational truth about Shy Boys, which is that they kind of sound like a band that your grandparents might enjoy. Not exactly. But kind of: lots of multi-part harmonies, prominent melodies — a workmanlike approach to songwriting, with equal reverence for the British Invasion and the Beach Boys, for church hymns and psych pop. As a result, Shy Boys are uniquely prepared for oddball shows like that one in Boise. Reading their audience, they dusted off two Gary Lewis and the Playboys covers — ”Count Me In” and “Just My Style” — and watched with satisfaction as the elderly couples rose to their feet and began to dance among the plants.

•

•

•

At the beginning of this year, Shy Boys signed to Polyvinyl Records, an independent record label home to several well-established acts. (Among them: of Montreal,

Alvvays, Deerhoof, the Rentals, American Football.) In recent years, Shy Boys has toured with mid-level indie acts like STRFKR (who is also on the Polyvinyl roster) and Mild High Club. In May, the band opened for Fleet Foxes at an amphitheater in Raleigh, North Carolina. The release of Bell House, on August 3, feels like an inflection point, and they’re treating it as such.

Everybody has more or less quit their day jobs. They’ve got a manager and a booking agent. They’re gonna road-dawg some tours and see how far this band can go.

Then again, though, there’s a sense that they’ve been here before. In 2014, after playing around KC for about a year, Shy Boys released their self-titled debut, on local label High Dive Records. Pitchfork reviewed it favorably. Something like 400 people turned out for the release show at Harlings. (RIP Harlings.) The show was wild, the buzz was palpable. And then...

“I remember, after that Pitchfork review came out, talking to somebody in the industry, and they were like, ‘Prepare yourself, people are gonna be banging down your door, you gotta be ready for this and that,’” Kyle Rausch said. “Then, uh, none of that happened.”

Deep laughs all around the table.

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Kansas City Pitch Weekly 08-02-18 M18ND331 RSD Yellow.indd 1

6/27/2018 1:24:07 PM

Kyle continued: “We did a bunch of short tours — East Coast, West Coast, the Midwest, obviously. We booked all those shows ourselves, or someone from our friend network asked us to hop on their shows, or something like that. And it seemed like that just didn’t really get us anywhere.”

By the time Little came over to jam with the band, sometime in 2016, Shy Boys were in a dark place.

“They were my favorite band in town, so I was super psyched when Collin asked if I was interested in playing with them,” said Little, who’d previously played with local bands Metatone and Palace Neapolitan.

“And I got there, and it was just so depressing.”

Little went on: “I mean, they had these new songs, and they were amazing. I knew right away that the new material was good.

But it was also like, just sitting around getting baked in this big, thick cloud of depression. I was like, ‘It’s great that I get to play with these guys, but it’s too bad they’re about to break up.’”

Collin Rausch: “We were definitely in a big rut.”

“Our mistake,” Kyle Rausch said, “was getting our hopes up about that first album.

“I WAS LIKE, ‘IT’S GREAT THAT I GET TO PLAY WITH THESE GUYS, BUT IT’S TOO BAD THEY’RE ABOUT TO BREAK UP.’”

SECTION

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BARRETT EMKE

MUSIC

We thought maybe our dreams were about to come true — that we were going to be able to play music for a living for a little while. And then nothing happened. And we’re living in this shitty house, and it’s like this ‘no future’ type of thing.”

The conclusion they drew from the experience was that success in the music industry was impossible for a band of nobodies from Kansas City. So they gave up that

dream. There would be no more national tours. There would be no big label interest.

Best to just hang out with your buddies in a basement and have fun making music for each other. Both Ervin (formerly of the ACBs) and Brown (who leads Fullbloods) were still actively writing their own songs, and the band slowly morphed into something like a songwriting collective.

“For a while, our plan was to release a

“IT SEEMED LIKE THE THING TO DO WAS JUST MAKE THE BEST MUSIC WE CAN AND IGNORE EVERYTHING ELSE.”

three-LP package,” Collin said. “A Shy Boys record, a Ross record, and a Koney [Ervin] record.”

“We were going to call it The Suicide Pact,” Brown said.

“It had just been so many years of working hard on music and seeing no real success,” Ervin said. “I think we were all just so tired of trying to make a go of it. I know I was. It seemed like the thing to do was just make the best music we can and ignore everything else.”

Shy Boys continued to play occasional shows, though. And when bands they admired came through the area, Kyle Rausch made an effort to reach out and see about hopping on the bill. Shy Boys opened for Chris Cohen in Omaha, then Mile High Club in Sioux Falls. A year later, Mild High Club — now headlining its own tour — asked Shy Boys to be the opener on a run of dates. Meanwhile, Mike Nolte, a sound engineer who recorded the first Shy Boys record, had moved out to Portland and was now running sound for Polyvinyl acts like STRFKR and of Montreal. When Shy Boys finished Bell House last year, they passed it to Nolte, who passed it to the folks at Polyvinyl.

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They dug it. The Suicide Pact would have to wait.

•

•

•

The original idea for Bell House was to do a Beach Boys’ Party type of record: “Have our friends over, record in the living room, get the sounds of Bell House baked into the recordings,” Collin said.“But it was going to be a logistical nightmare. And we were running out of time, because we were all moving out.”

(Collin was getting married — he now lives in Lee’s Summit — and both Ervin and Kyle Rausch moved in with their girlfriends.) The Party idea was shelved.

Instead, they ended up with an ode to Bell House and the years they spent there.

Some of the tracks, like “Miracle Gro,” are literal, a touch goofy. But several others seem to reckon reluctantly with ideas about moving on, growing up, not being able to hang with your buds as much anymore — and how horrible that all can be. Take the title track: It’s been a long time coming / This house was falling down / It can be the end / We’ll split apart and still be friends / Don’t be sad, don’t be blue / Don’t gotta talk about what we do. Is it nostalgia if, deep down, you know you don’t want

to go back to Bell House? Or is that precisely what nostalgia is?

“I don’t want to sound like a sad sack, but I was certainly very depressed the entire time I lived at Bell House,” Kyle Rausch said. “But I also look back on it as one of the most beautiful times of my life.”

On “Basement,” Collin ponders what’s next: I’m hanging with my brother for an evening in / If you wanna know the truth of it, it’s looking grim / Got a wife and a dog and I’m living in my mom’s basement.

“I had just gotten married, and we’d had to move in with my mom because we didn’t have any money,” Collin said. “It was tough. You’re out there, living in the house you grew up in, you’re in your thirties and married. And nothing there you reminds you that you’re an adult man. Everything there is telling you you’re a fucking child.

And here I have a wife, a dog, I’m trying to grow up. And literally where we slept, above us on the wall, there was a painting of me as a baby.”

Then there’s “No Fun,” the entirety of the lyrics are which: Can’t keep up anymore / Having fun was so easy / Don’t care what level that you’re on / Think I’m better on my own.

Is this starting to sound like a depressing record? It kind of is, if you choose to dwell on the words. Musically, though, it’s joyous. The songs are taut, short, chiseled down to their core ideas, which more often than not are sturdy, melodic hooks surrounded by jangles and angelic, hard-won harmonies. It is all cattle, no hat.

But there’s something else embedded in the mix — a beauty that is less definable, more abstract. Having listened to Bell House dozens of times, and having watched this band practice and perform and mature over the last several years, I’ve come to believe this sacred quality is fellowship — a friendship rooted in the pursuit of pure songcraft.

The pizzas arrive, and Collin takes a stab at it: “It’s like, why write songs? Why bother? And for me, it’s mostly just to keep up with these guys.” He gestures around the table. “I’ve listened to Konnor’s music for years now. Ross is making amazing music.

They’re the biggest influence on Shy Boys.

That’s what Shy Boys sounds like to me. It’s these guys.”

Shy Boys’ Bell House release show is Saturday, August 4, at RecordBar.

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FILM

BlacKkKansasman KU PROFESSOR (AND SPIKE LEE COLLABORATOR) KEVIN WILLMOTT HAS WRITTEN ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND SURREAL FILMS OF THE SUMMER. BY ERIC MELIN

Less than hour after walking out of BlacKkKlansman, I spoke by phone with Kevin Willmott. Along with the film’s director, Spike Lee, Willmott co-wrote the film, which arrives in theaters August 10. Willmott also happens to live around here: he’s a professor of film and media studies at the University of Kansas. I told him I was still reeling from the experience of watching BlacKkKlansman. I said my immediate reaction was that the film — which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, in May — was an absurd mix of comedy, ten-

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THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

sion, catharsis, and terror.

“That sounds like America today, right?” Willmott said, without missing a beat.

Boy, he isn’t lying.

Before we get to the film, though, a few words about Willmott. He’s been involved in filmmaking for a while now. In 2004, he made the wayyyyy-ahead-of-its-time C.S.A: Confederate States of America, a low-budget satire that imagined a world in which the South won the Civil War. (The New Yorker recently called it “ferociously imagined and

deftly realized.”) Lee saw the film at Sundance, liked it, and eventually signed on as executive producer to lend it a higher profile. Years later, looking to resurrect a script he was calling Gotta Give it Up! (based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata), Lee called on Willmott for help. The pair re-wrote it, set it in Chicago, and re-titled it Chi-raq. It was Lee’s most compelling — and successful — movie in years. So when Jordan Peele — fresh off the success of Get Out — came to Lee with an early draft of a screenplay based on Ron Stallworth’s book The Black Klans-

FOCUS FEATURES

LEE’S LATEST IS AN ABSURD MIX OF COMEDY, TENSION, CATHARSIS AND TERROR.

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ON man, Lee knew exactly who to turn to.

Based on the true story of Stallworth (John David Washington), a black rookie cop in Colorado Springs who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan over the phone in 1979 and had a white Jewish cop (played by Adam Driver) play him in face-to-face meetings with the Klan, the film burns with urgency, rage, and passion. Lee and Willmott (the first pass of the script was by Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz) establish two separate points of view. One is the journey of Stallworth, a fairly conservative guy who always wanted to be a cop and eventually grows to better understand the black power movement after witnessing the racial hatred of the Klan up close.

The second POV is self-reflexive and riskier, opening the movie up more easily to criticisms of being too overt. Opening with the Confederate flag flying high atop the famous Battle of Atlanta tracking shot from Gone With the Wind, and fading into a cringeworthy recreation of an overtly racist “educational” film, BlacKkKlansman examines the way media has portrayed blackness for a hundred years — and how racism has seeped into the fabric of society.

Or, at least, that’s how this white guy from Kansas interpreted it. Which is to say: the second POV in the film is, essentially, that of the black experience in America. Lee and Willmott have every right to be overt about it — the black experience in America is itself filled with overt racism.

Once Stallworth’s bizarre story shifts into high gear, so do the supremely uncomfortable situations and natural parallels to today’s culture. BlacKkKlansman is by turns hilarious and terrifying, with wild tonal swings. The screenplay takes time for diversions from the main narrative of sad, bumbling racists and two men coming to terms with their heritage to tell stories from minimalized black voices. Corey Hawkins plays black power leader Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) gives a rousing speech at a student rally, and no less an authority than Harry Belafonte sets the stage, telling in detail the tragic story of a lynching and the horrific real-time actions of the community involved.

If it sounds a little messy it is, but BlacKkKlansman is truly alive like few other movies I’ve seen. Even as he is careening from one extreme to the next, Lee is able to ratchet up the tension and release it in hilariously satisfying ways, never quite letting anyone off the hook. Nobody in the film achieves anything that looks like a real victory. When the film closes with the shameful events of our country’s recent history in Charlottesville, those documentary clips are seen in a whole new perspective — as a piece of the whole, not an isolated incident.

With that powerful last segment, Wilmott and Spike Lee don’t just touch a nerve. They

peel the skin back. Below, more of my conversation with Willmott.

The Pitch: What did Jordan Peele say when you were brought in to rewrite the script?

Willmott: The only thing Jordan Peele said was, “Make it funny.” And he didn’t mean comedy, he meant humor, you know? You can call it a satire, but it’s not really. To me, it’s about finding the truth of all of it, and that’s what Spike and I did. We went back and really tried to research, like with Stokely Charmichael, going back and finding his speeches, and fully embracing the reality of what this story was. And then because of that, embracing the cold, harsh, ugly reality of all of this, that’s where you find the humor. The other thing that Spike said was he didn’t want it to be a period piece. He wanted it to really speak to today. So I was always looking for things that connected to today — and, unfortunately, that wasn’t very hard.

You created a movie set in the 1970s that isn’t really about the 1970s at all.

Willmott: No, it’s not. In that sense, it’s Brechtian. The playwright Bertold Brecht is considered one of the first guys — if not the first — to take history and connect it to today. For instance, he does a play about Galileo, but he’s actually talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy and the conflict between science and government.

And with Galileo, in his time, it’s science and the church. It’s that whole thing of taking something and putting it in the past to reveal what’s happening today.

But there are still love letters to black culture all over the place. The dance scene in particular is just such a nice break where you’re sitting with these people and this great music and watching them have a great time, despite all the crap that’s going on. It was startling that you made time for that.

Willmott: Yeah, I thought that was a really great choice of Spike’s. The best thing about the 70s is that it was so hip and it was so fun — and it looked so cool! I mean, I’m a guy of the 70s and even then we kind of knew, “This is really cool.” [laughs] The blaxploitation films, and the ‘fros, and the dancing, and Soul Train, and there was still consciousness, too.

That recalls the scene in BlacKkKlansman when you show the movie posters of the films they’re talking about, and the beginning of the film when you show that bizarre racist “educational” film with Alec Baldwin. It was obvious from the beginning that this film would

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not be afraid to talk directly to its audience.

Willmott: In the ‘50s, ‘60s, and into the ‘70s, they made these propaganda movies about how socialism was going to destroy the world and so forth, or these anti-communist short movies. The John Birch Society and various organizations would make these movies. So that was supposed to be one of those movies that the Klan would have made. But it could have been the John Birch Society, it could have been some neo-Nazi group — all those guys were all mixed together, you know? And you can find all those movies online now. Spike had fun with it, but it’s based in those real “educational” films. And I used a lot of those in C.S.A: Confederate States of America. Spike and I both grew up seeing those things, and certainly that’s been an earmark of documentaries now; they go back and find those old movies. So what we did was just make our own.

Starting the film with it sets a tone that lets you know how easy it is to laugh at these openly racist dumbasses, but at the same time there’s something hideous and sinister about the fact that they were so open. By the end of the

movie, it’s harder to laugh because you realize they’re back. Many people who have a hard time understanding what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about didn’t grow up black, so they don’t understand that these kinds of attitudes have prevailed throughout their entire lives.

Did you work with Ron Stallworth closely on the screenplay?

like and what they went through. When I got to meet Ron, I found out he’s a beautiful guy, just the kind of guy we thought he was.

So we took the reality of his story, which is so crazy, but we had to connect it up so you could get the whole concept of it in an easy package. And what that concept is, is that there’s two Ron Stallworths — a white Ron Stallworth and a black Ron Stallworth. One’s working on the phone, and one’s infiltrating the Klan. But in a sense, it’s all coming from one Ron Stallworth, the real Ron Stallworth.

Adam Driver’s character gets to have that arc of coming into his own Jewish self.

That’s something that black people and people from various backgrounds — that whole problem of “passing” is one that people still have today in various ways. That seemed like something to bring in. It wasn’t really in the book, but it was mentioned in earlier drafts of the screenplay that he was Jewish and we expanded upon it, dealing more with him not being connected to his Jewish self. When you have to deal with the Klan, it makes you have to come to terms with who you really are.

Willmott: We really just went back to the book. Spike, Ron, and I — being guys from the 70s, we knew what guys like that were

On the outside, people may look at this and say “It’s a black film.” But it’s not.

BlackKklansman is about America.

Willmott: We never thought about it as re-education, because that’s all in the story.

That’s where the entertainment comes in.

No matter how harsh we were going to be, or what kind of language we were going to use, how mean we were going to get, or too disgusting — I mean it’s the Klan, you know?

Nothing is too disgusting. So with that, you just have to make it entertaining. You don’t want people to shut down. You just have to balance the entertainment level. We never talked about whether it was too much, because we always talked about making it real, letting the audience take ownership of it.

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Willmott: One thing I remembered when we were writing it was this: In college as an undergrad, I was president of the student body at Marymount College in Salina, and David Duke sent me a letter. It was a form letter that he must have sent to every college in the country. At that time, he was president of the NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People), and he wanted to come speak on our campus. I

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never responded to him, but I always kept the letter. What he was trying to do was become mainstream. He was trying to make that transition that you see in the film: of taking of the hood and the sheet and putting on a business suit and running for office. At that time, he was running for Congress in Louisiana. And he won. So that’s part of what we deal with in the film, showing that transition of how the Klan was this outside hate group, and how they had become far more mainstream in American society. Now they talk now about immigration, and they talk about affirmative action, police misconduct, all these things that are really political talking points — but those things were introduced in a lot of ways by the Klan.

It’s uncomfortable to watch, because even when you think the white people in the movie are going to fully embrace the cause, they are still held back by societal norms. You walk the line so skillfully between giving the audience that catharsis but not going too far.

Willmott: It really just worked out that way.

That thing about the cops wanting Ron to withhold the evidence of the case, that’s true. That’s the frustration he had to endure

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with all of this. And that’s pretty typical of America. The institutions as a whole just don’t like to deal with the ugly realities of American life. And that’s one of the things that really holds us all back. I would say that you need a steady dose of this so that you cannot become numb to it, so you understand this is something we’re just always going to have to deal with. That ying-yang that we do in the film, that’s how it is in real life.

That’s certainly how it was with Ron’s investigation. But there’s a bigger lesson in terms of what Americans are going to have to deal with. I don’t think there’s ever going to be an overcoming of these issues, but things can certainly improve. It’s a constant battle, going back and forth — that’s what it really means.

The slogan “America First” is in the film, and you’re dropping a lot of references that aren’t subtle. So when something relevant comes up, it really touches a nerve. The last five minutes of the movie were brutal, because in the context of the film, Trump’s rhetoric and the Charlottesville riots are more than just scary, they are devastating.

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Willmott: That was a late addition to the film. The joke Spike and I had at Cannes was that Trump and David Duke wrote themselves into the movie. That wasn’t really us, it was them. And that’s the reality of it, and it’s part of the real tragedy of what’s happening right now — they’re there, and they’re standing right in front of us. This is who we are right now, and we’ve got to deal with it.

What was it like to get such a rapturous reception at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year?

Willmott: Cannes was just a mind-blowing experience. I had never been there before, and to go there and to be a part of the film that won the Grand Prix and — more importantly — at the screening, they were laughing out loud, clapping in the middle of the film, and then they gave it a ten-minute standing ovation. You could tell: The world is waiting to see what America is going to do. They are waiting to see if we’re going to deal with this or not. And the question’s still there: Are we going to deal with it or not? The world was screaming to us at that screening: We love this and we’re ready. The question is: Is America ready?

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I saw this at a critic’s screening, and the first thing I thought when it was over was, “I have got to see this with a full house. This is what the theaters are made for.”

Willmott: Yeah, and the Cannes screening was like a flashback to when I got to see blaxploitation films when I was a kid. Because we were all so desperate to see these images and these stories that we had never seen before, or hear people say things in a movie that we wanted so desperately for someone to say or do. That’s really what it was like.

Last one: There are so many connections to C.S.A. in this film. Any re-issue news on the horizon?

Willmott: IFC still owns the movie, but I haven’t heard anything yet. It’s kind of become — if I do say so myself — a cult classic, so I’m hoping it gets something. It was on hulu for a while. Unfortunately, that’s one of those movies that keeps being re-issued [in real life] every year whether it’s actually being re-issued or not. It just never fails to be relevant, you know?

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Quickies SKYPE SEXING, BALL BUSTING, AND GOOD OLD PEGGING. BY DAN SAVAGE

Dear Dan: I’ve been faithfully reading your column in the Chicago Reader for years, and now I’m reaching out to you about my own problem. I’ve been dating this guy for almost a year. Everything is great, except one thing: He wants me to kick him in the nuts. It really bothers me, and I’m not sure what to do. He’s very serious about it, and he brings it up every single day. It makes me really uncomfortable that this is some sort of fetish of his and I need help taking steps forward.

––To Kick Or Not To Kick P.S. I play soccer and I kick hard.

Dear TKONTK: It’s a kink called “ball busting,” and as long as you don’t kick him full force — or even half force — you’re unlikely to do permanent damage. That said, childless guys who are into ball busting are often advised to freeze their sperm just in case. And while it’s not a hugely popular kink, it’s common enough that ball busting porn exists, and ball busting Tumblrs, ball busting blogs, etc. Take it slow at first, particularly if your guy has only fantasized about this and not experienced it.

Dear Dan: I am getting in touch because I thought you might be interested in the following article: “Getting to the Bottom of Pegging.” For open-minded people who are open to butt play, pegging is a great way to spice things up in the bedroom. But what exactly is pegging and why is it a thing now?

Sex and relationships expert, Tami Rose, knows how important it is to try new things in the bedroom. She would be able to provide an article explaining what pegging is and tips for your more adventurous readers who want to give it a go. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

–– ––[Redacted] PR Agency Dear Redacted PR Agency: Pegging?

Never heard of it. Wait — what’s that, Wikipedia? “Pegging is a sexual practice in which a woman performs anal sex on a man by penetrating the man’s anus with a strap-on dildo… The neologism “pegging” was popularized when it became the winning entry in a contest in Dan Savage’s Savage Love sex advice column [in 2001].”

Dear Dan: My husband and I were married in Toronto, Canada, in 2005, before marriage equality came to the United States. Does the US government recognize our Canadian marriage or do we need to remarry in the US? Can you find out from one of your legal friends?

Dear Dan: I’m in a six-year relationship with a guy you will probably deem DTMFA-worthy but I deem round-up-able to The One. My kids already regarded him as their stepdad before we moved in together about eight months ago. That’s when I learned he’s an addict: He drinks, smokes weed, and jerks off to porn for about two hours every day. He has been this way for more than 20 years, and I have zero delusions he will change for me. Recently he told me he has very little sexual desire for me, that he knows my pussy in and out and it’s boring, but he loves my companionship. How do I deal with this so we can move forward together as an incompatible couple?

––Does Our Marriage Apply?

––Sex Addict Partner

Dear DOMA: “The US government does recognize your marriage,” said Robbie Kaplan, one of my legal friends — and the attorney who represented Edith Windsor before the US Supreme Court and won.

In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government was required to recognize legal same-sex marriages, thereby gutting the Defense of Marriage Act. “We did the same thing,” Kaplan added. “We were married in Toronto in 2006, and the US recognizes our marriage. No need to get married again here.”

Dear SAP: A romantic partner who says something as cruel and negating as what this man has said to you, SAP, either wants out of the relationship or is grooming their partner for much worse treatment to come.

If he wants out of the relationship, the verbal and emotional abuse will escalate until you finally leave him. If he doesn’t want out, the verbal and emotional abuse will escalate a bit more slowly, so that, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, you don’t realize exactly how bad it’s getting and how much damage it’s doing to you — and your kids. I

P.S. A guy who brings up his kink every single day deserves to be kicked in the nuts—unless he’s into ball busting, in which case he doesn’t deserve to be kicked in the nuts.

know it’s not what you wanted to hear, SAP, but I’m going to say it anyway: DTMFA. Dear Dan: I’m a competent in-person lover, but I’m the worst at Skype/FaceTime/ WhatsApp sex. I can’t get the angle right, I don’t know what to wear, I feel shy, I don’t know what to say, I can’t get off, I giggle like a 15-year-old girl getting her first French kiss under the bleachers. I’m going to be away from my guy for most of the summer, and I need to figure this out. Any advice or tips?

––Struggle Keeping Yonder Penis Entertained Dear SKYPE: A 15-year-old girl may giggle the first time she gets French-kissed under the bleachers — or she may not — but a girl who giggles the first time probably isn’t going to be giggling the fiftieth. So just keep at it, try to relax and enjoy yourself, and ask your partner to take the lead, i.e., if you don’t know what to do, ask him to tell you what he’d like you to do, SKYPE — but only follow the orders you’re comfortable following.

Dean Dan: What’s the fairest way to determine who should get tied up?

––Bondage Bottom Boyfriends Dear BBB: Whoever was tied up last time does the tying up this time and vice versa.

Dear Dan: Do you ever wear panties? Would you post a picture of yourself in panties online? I think you would look good in panties.

––Panties Are Nice To You Dear PANTY: While I have no particular aversion to wearing panties, PANTY, and while I will not deny the allure of the models at xdress.com, I’ve never worn panties and have no plans to start. As a consequence, I won’t be able to post a picture of myself in panties online to delight you and horrify everyone else.

Dear Dan: How much sex is too much sex?

––Numb Over Numbers Dear NON: “Enough is as good as a feast.”

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

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

45

EVENTS • Voted KC’s Best Gentleman’s Club • Oldest Adult Club in Missouri • 70 Girls • VIP Lounge • Great Place to Watch Sporting Events • Full Service Kitchen • Cover Friday & Saturday ONLY! • Premium Bottle Service

August Events

For more events, visit local.thepitchkc.com

30 seconds East of the Power & Light District 2800 East 12th St., Kansas City, MO 64127 816.231.9696 • KcShadyLady.com

AUG. 1

AUG. 4 All Time Low and Dashboard Confessional, Uptown Theater

Armani’s Play House Known For Our Entertainment, Got a Event Give Us A Shout.

Erasure, Uptown Theater

AUG. 2 Between the Buried and Me, Uptown Theater Billy Currington, KC Live! Block Millage Gilbert, American Jazz Museum

Showgirls • Private Parties • Events • Perfection Globalcartel816@gmail.com – Now Hiring

816-301-6075

AUG. 3 Blue Corner Battles, VooDoo Lounge

Girls!Girls!Girls!

Playmates and soul mates...

Galantis, KC Live! Block Playboi Carti, Uptown JC the New King of Funk, American Jazz Museum River Cow Orchestra, Pop Up Art Gallery

30 minute Free trial 18+ 816-841-1577 // 913-279-9202 46

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

Kansas City:

816-841-1521

18+ MegaMates.com

Kansas City Sneaker Summit, Sprint Center Arthur White & Merge, American Jazz Museum Magic 107.3 Groove Party, VooDoo Lounge Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Truman Pusha T, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

EVENTS

AUG. 5

AUG. 11

One of Kansas City's Newest Art Galleries and Studio Spaces

Kansas City Sneaker Summit, Sprint Center Talladega Nights Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse

1701 Oak in the Crossroads 14 Private Studios

Urbana, Power and Light District

Monthly Exhibitions

AUG. 6 Wet Hot American Summer Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse

Lo-Key?, VooDoo Lounge

Alice Cooper, Kauffman Center for the Performing ARts

UNICO Microbrew Fest, Zona Rosa

AUG. 9

AUG. 13

Charlie Puth and Hailee Steinfeld, Starlight Theatre

His Dream of Lions, Uptown Theater

The Pitch’s Fashion for a Fraction, The Guild

AUG. 14

American Idol: Live! 2018, Uptown Theater

Rod Stewart, Sprint Center

Granger Smith, KC Live! Block at Power & Light District

AUG. 10 Doug Talley Quintet, American Jazz Museum David Feherty, Kauffman Center

816.873.5199 www.hangergallery.com

AUG. 14-19 Love Never Dies, Starlight Theatre

AUG. 15 Old Crow Medicine Show, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

AUG. 16 Girls with Guitars, with Ashley McBryde and Jillian Jacqueline, KC Live! Block at Power & Light District The Smashing Pumpkins, Sprint Center Joe Rogan, Starlight Theatre

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

47

EVENTS

AUG. 17

AUG. 20

The Life and Times, with Youth Pool And Knife Crime, RecordBar

Bring it On Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse

Lita Ford, VooDoo Lounge

AUG. 21

Ida McBeth, American Jazz Museum Cash Cab, Mosaic Ultra Lounge Keith Urban with Kelsea Ballerini, Sprint Center Father John Misty, Uptown Theater

AUG. 18

Lil Baby, The Truman Sam Smith, Sprint Center Chris D’Elia, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

AUG. 19 Happy Together Tour, featuring the Turtles, the Association, and more, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

AUG. 22 Niall Horan, Starlight Theatre

AUG. 23 Randy Rogers Band, KC Live!

Block

AUG. 24 Tivon Pennicott, American Jazz Museum Margarita Wars, Waldo Pavilion

48

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

EVENTS

AUG. 25

AUG. 31

David Cross, Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland

Marcus Lewis Quintet, American Jazz Museum

James Ward Band, American Jazz Museum

TIC

K

S T E

Visit thepitchkc.com/tickets to find the hottest events in KC.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Party, Alamo Drafthouse

AUG. 26 Luke Bryan, Sprint Center

AUG. 27

Fashion for a

JAVIER RUIZ

Ziggy Marley, VooDoo Lounge

Thursday, August 9 th 6–9 p.m. • The Guild

Bad Gyal, Uptown Theater Jason Mraz, Starlight Theatre Santa-Cali-Gon Days Festival, Independence Square

Champagne Cinema: Pretty in Pink, Alamo Drafthouse

AUG. 29

August 24th, Waldo Pavilion

Melissa Etheridge, Crossroads KC at Grinders

THE

AUG. 30

Tequila

KC Latin Jazz Orchestra, American Jazz Museum

EXPERIENCE

September 8, Hush

Shakey Graves, The Truman

THE WHISKEYSeptember EXPERIENCE 29, Hush Do you need a ticket platform for an upcoming event?

Email us at stephanie@thepitchkc.com thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

49

AUCTION DATE: 8/29/18

MARKETPLACE LOCAL 1000

1/2 month off special 1 bed. | 1314 SQ. FT. $1375

2000

available Jan. 5th 2 bed. 2 bath | 1477 SQ. FT. $1515

EMPLOYMENT

REAL ESTATE/RENTALS

BACCALA’ STRIP CLUB NOW HIRING DANCERS

VALENTINE NEIGHBORHOOD

816-741-5040 | 2109broadwaylofts.com

Contact Frank 7pm-3am Mon-Sat 816-231-3150

$400-$850 Rent 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments & 3 Bedroom HOMES.

KS/MO Injuries, KS Divorce, All Family, Juvenile & More

816-753-5576

Call

Colliers International. EHO

CALL TODAY!

4000

BUY, SELL, TRADE

KS-KCKS | $515-$615 913-299-9748

Attorney Since 1976

913.345.4100

Greg Bangs

for a FREE consultation

WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interest. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, CO 80201

HEAT & WATER PAID...

NO GAS BILL! KCK 25 acre setting. 63rd & Ann 5 minutes west of I-635 & I-70.

One bedroom $505. Two bedroom $620. No Pets Please. You CAN NOT BEAT this value! Don’t miss out on this limited time offer!

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

YR MAKE/MODEL

VIN#

2013 Volkswagen Passat 2006 Subaru Forester 2006 Suzuki Forenza 2005 Saturn Ion 2004 Mini Cooper 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser 2001 Cadillac Deville 2006 Ford F250 2013 Toyota Corolla 2015 Nissan Versa 2013 Ford Focus 2002 Chrysler 300M 2011 Hyundai Sonata 2007 Chrysler Town&County 2000 Chevrolet Malibu 2010 Ford Fusion 2009 Pontiac G6 2010 Ford Transit Connect 2002 Ford Exporer 2011 Toyota Corolla 2003 Acura MDX 2002 Dodge Dakota 2003 Dodge Durango 2003 Toyota Corolla 2012 Ford Fusion 2005 Ford Expedition 2009 Nissan Murano 2007 Kia Sorento 2010 Chrysler Sebring 2005 Kia Sedona

1VWBH7A33DC005472 JF1SG65646H746472 KL5JD86Z26K330688 1G8AJ52FX5Z176485 WMWRC33464TC51639 3C8FY4BB61T584643 1G6KD54Y01U196254 1FTSW21546EC76447 2T1BU4EEXDC983113 3N1CN7AP1FL852195 1FADP3F20DL138834 2C3HE66G52H266676 5NPEB4AC9BH161551 2A4GP54L57R151485 1G1ND52J6Y6186660 3FAHP0HG0AR177834 1G2ZH17NX94212826 NM0KS9BN1AT015684 1FMZU73W92ZA88271 2T1BU4EE2BC672000 2HNYD18923H533655 1B7HL38N32S724302 1D4HS38N43F617002 2T1BR32E35C439649 3FAHP0JG6CR354187 1FMPU18505LA79308 JN8AZ18W69W134647 KNDJC736675676034 1C3CC5FB9AN168366 KNDUP131156668448

2006 Nissan Atima 2013 Ford Escape 2014 Toyota Camry 2015 Chrysler 200 2008 Chevrolet Silverado 2000 Toyota Camry 2013 Coleman Dutchmen 2015 Toyota Corolla 2011 Nissan Altima 2008 Chevrolet Malibu 1998 Ford Escort 2002 Honda Civic 2007 Kia Sedona 1997 Chevrolet Tahoe 2010 Toyota Corolla 2015 Big Tex Dump Trailer 2009 Honda Civic 2013 Nissan Rogue 2007 Hyundai Elantra 2010 Scion XD 2008 Ford Escape 2012 Hyundai Elanta 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe 2004 Buick Rainier 2003 Chevrolet Tahoe 1998 Chevrolet Blazer 2013 Hyundai Veloster 2006 Toyota Tundra 2014 BMW 328 2008 Chevrolet Silverado 2005 Kia Sedona

1N4AL11D56N339146 1FMCU0HX9DUB57328 4T1BF1FK8EU431199 1C3CCCABXFN634695 2GCEK13C681128772 JT2BG22K2Y0476432 47CTCLS24DK172240 2T1BURHE7FC235088 1N4AL2AP6BN472332 1G1ZH57B884244237 1FAFP13P6WW178771 1HGES26822L017166 KNDMB233476170947 1GNEC13R4VJ368669 1NXBU4EE8AZ180746 16VDX1627F5011637 19XFA16519E049244 JN8AS5MV0DW646048 KMHDU46D87U125527 JTKKU4B41A1001893 1FMCU03188KC06202 5NPDH4AE6CH132022 1GNFK13027R417008 5GADT13S142222456 1GNEK13Z23R293746 1GNDT13W4W2183650 KMHTC6AD1DU127343 5TBDT44106S518322 WBA3B3C57EJ977554 2GCEK13C681128772 KNDUP132656700528

Many of these vehicles run and drive. If you are looking for cheap transportation, don’t miss this auction/sale. We welcome all buyers. Terms of auction: All sales are “as is” “where is”. No guarantees or warranties. Paper work to obtain new title will be $75.00 Per vehicle. No guarantee that paperwork will produce title. Bidding will be number only. Terms are cash or certified check.

Vehicles must be paid for in full at end of auction. No exceptions. All sales are final. No returns.

7000

INSURANCE AUTO AUCTION 2663 SOUTH 88TH ST. KCKS, 66111 913-422-9303

MUSIC/MUSIC ROW

Call NOW! MUCH NICER THAN THE PRICE!

WEATHER PERMITTING

The following vehicles will be sold at public auction on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018 unless claimed by owner and all tow and storage charges are paid in full. For information, please contact Insurance Auto Auction at 913-422-9303.

KC RECORD SHOW Sunday 9/16/2018 9 am – 4 pm Admission – $5 Knuckleheads in the Garage 2715 Rochester K.C. MO

OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT 19’ x 21’ office for rent with private entrance.

Crossroads area.

Call 816-888-8010

Gifts & Decor

NOW HIRING HOUSEKEEPERS | HOUSEPERSONS SERVERS | BUSSERS

Swords & More

Best Kratom Prices in Kc!

c

s D e i F i s s a L

Loyalty program for Kratom cBD products • Smoking accessories • Metaphysical Essential Oils • Swords • Knives, Figurines

mOn-Sat 10am-8pm

913.782.4244

Employment Opportunities Link to

APPLY: www.arborlodging.com/careers FOLLOW US AT LIKE US AT

123 S. mur-Len, OLathe, KS 66062

HOTEL PHILLIPS

Hydroponic, Aquaponic, & Aeroponic Systems

Something for everyone!

Mon-Sat 10aM-6pM Year-roundgarden.com

50

Sun 12pm-6pm

@PHILLIPS_JOBS

117 S Mur-Len oLathe, KS 66062 913-397-0594

THE PITCH | AUGUST 2018 | thepitchkc.com

5 miles from Montauk State Park and Current River.

Spacious one-bedroom cabin, sleeps four. $ /night

85

25 one-time cleaning fee

$

901-233-4496

To place a classified advertisement CONTACT StevenSuarez Suarez call Steven 861-218-6732 816.218.6732 steven@thepitchkc.com

steven.suarez@pitch.com

WH E R E NE I G H BORS A RE B E ST F R I E ND S Eastland Court 816 -363-9684

Senior Apartments Rents Starting at $1,020/mo.

BRAND NEW, 1&2 BEDROOM APARTMENTS FOR THE ACTIVE ADULT (55+)

NOW LEASING!

Free Heat, Electric, Cable, Water & Garbage Small Pets Welcome!

Close to Shopping, Restaurants, and Places of Interest

In-Suite Washer and Dryer

Emergency Call Systems

Central Air Conditioning

Beauty Salon & Large Community Room

Patios/Balconies Smoke-Free Living

Fitness Center

Elevator/Secure Entry

19301 East Eastland Center Court | Independence, MO 64055 eastlandcourt@clovergroupinc.com

tural V ibrations NaHolistic Massage Cozy, relaxed and positive environment.

10am–5pm Call 816-753-5356 ask for Joy

PHOENIX NATURAL WELLNESS, LLC full line of

American Shaman CBD Products NOW OPEN!

Lic.#1324620928

providing relaxation massage to mature clientele in Waldo since 2011

FREE

SAMPLES

Largest seLection of cBD ProDucts in Kansas city!

Hemp Oil Tincture, Topical, Edibles, Lotion, Lip Balm and E-Juice

400 E 18th Street, KCMO, 64108 • 816-474-7400 Thecbdstores.com

Tinctures Water Soluble Pet Health Vape Products Edibles Soaps Topicals

2 LOCATIONS

9627 W. 87TH STREET 7932 W. 151ST STREET OVERLAND PARK, KS OVERLAND PARK, KS 913-730-8520 913-257-5717 www.phoenixnaturalwellness.com

NEWto see& what RESALE ALL AREAS | ALL PRICES Want your Short Sales-Foreclosures-Condos Townhomes-Single Family Homes.

CALL NOW

home is worth?

Sharon Sigman, rE/maX STaTELinE 913-488-8300 or 913-338-8444 www.FormLS.com

Scared? Anxious? Confused?

HELP IS HERE!

THEPITC HKC.COM

DWI, Solicitation, Traffic, Internet Crimes, Hit & Run, Power & Light Violations, Domestic Assault Criminal Defense Attorney

David M. Lurie

816-221-5900 www.The-Law.com

thepitchkc.com | AUGUST 2018 | THE PITCH

51

LO-KEY?

LITA FORD

AUGUST 11

AUGUST 17

REBELLION RISES 2018 TOUR

BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE

SNOW PATROL

MAX

SEPTEMBER 13

WILDNESS TOUR

OCTOBER 12

ZIGGY MARLEY AUGUST 25

HOUSE OF DIVINE WORLD TOUR PART I

OCTOBER 26

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Tickets available at VooDooKC.com or Ticketmaster.com/voodookc or by phone at 1-800-745-3000.

Located minutes from Downtown Kansas City. Unlimited Free Parking.

Know When To Stop Before You Start.® Gambling Problem? Call 1-888-BETSOFF. Subject to change or cancellation. Phone and online orders are subject to service fees. Must be 21 years or older to gamble, obtain a Total Rewards® card or enter VooDoo®. ©2018, Caesars License Company, LLC.