The Beginning of a Tradition

This Thanksgiving it was fantastic to have my whole family home. Each one of my children are either working toward or already in a career that someday will most likely take them far away from home. It was a delight to have them all crowded around the dining table on Thanksgiving Day. As my late father-in-law would have said, “This is glorious!”

Almost every family has it’s holiday traditions. My wife’s family would have everyone hold hands around the table as her father said a blessing; which most often was more of a short speech on how happy he was to have everyone “home” and a short newsletter on what was happening in the family. Being my shy, introverted self this was an awkward feeling moment for me the first few years, however I got used to it and eventually learned to look forward to what he would have to say at any particular dinner. Today his family still carries on the tradition each holiday although no one can quite put the panche’ into it that Jack did.

My family didn’t have any special tradition. I tried to emulate the hand-holding speech making but it just wasn’t me. And I could tell it made the new members of the family uncomfortable, just as it had made me so many years ago. This year at Thanksgiving, thanks to a  family member that works in a vineyard and winery we had some great wines. So I made a toast before the dinner. I started by thanking everyone for being there and how delighted I was that they all could make it. Not too long after the dinner was underway my daughter made a toast to the cook and later near the end she made a toast to all the members of the family that are working so hard to follow their dreams. I think we may have stumbled on to what I hope will be Our Tradition.

I am going to call it an Open Toast tradition. At any time during the dinner, anyone, if the mood strikes them can make a toast. I think it will be fun. Of course we will need to keep the wine glasses full.

Blogging and the KCRep

As usual I didn’t follow through on my beginning of the year promise to blog more often. Maybe I’m just not born to blog. I hope I have some interesting things to say. But by the time I get to posting it is old news.

Did anyone see the KCRep production of Borderland? What did you think?
I have enjoyed all the productions this year. I was getting a bit tired of the “same old same old” as my father says. But this year Eric Rosen has brought us something new. Thank you.

However, I was disappointed in Borderland. I thought the acting was weak. The first act was boring until right before the intermission; just enough suspense to get me back for the second act. And then it all fell apart.

Alfred Hitchcock once said in an interview about his movies that you must first get people to buy into the McGuffin. Once there you can go anywhere and the audience will follow. And that was the problem with Borderland.

BTW. Did you know La Bodega has a happy hour of half-priced sangria and tapas from 2-6 pm during the week? Perfect timing when the KCRep is at the Copaken.

A Great Double Header

When I selected the dates for the plays at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre I just picked every third or fourth Saturday night because weekends at the first of the month always seem so busy. First Friday. Second Saturday. Everyone wants to be early.

So, I was disappointed when I realized our tickets to “The Drawer Boy” were over the Memorial Holiday Weekend. That weekend usually involves a weekend trip back home to the Ozarks. However, since we had the tickets we decided to stay in town until Sunday.

Last weekend I saw a mention in The Pitch about the restaurant La Bodega, and the wine and tapas. I have always enjoyed a good glass (or bottle) of wine and I have been curious about tapas since my daughter came back from a summer visit to Spain and was all infatuated with their culture.

We decided to double up on Saturday night for tapas at La Bodega and a play at the KCRep. Both were a resounding success.

At La Bodega we did the potato pancakes to clams and mussels. All washed down with cold sangria. As the early evening sun shown on the colorful tiles of the restaurant we might have been in Barcelona.

We ended the evening with a standing ovation for the actors of “The Drawer Boy”. I have seen a few plays in Kansas City, Chicago, Toronto and New York. This was one of the best.

Part Two: Back in Town

The summer weeks are passing fast. Last weekend Dulcinea and I did Zona Rosa on Thursday night. We went for Mexican food at Abuelo’s Mexican Food Embassy. There isn’t a lot that can be done with Tex-Mex unless you hit the mom and pop places. It is essentially the battle of the chains. Abuelo’s is good Mexican chain food.

Late Friday night I was craving Kansas City bar-b-que, some good blues and cold beer. So we headed out to one of the best roadhouses in Kansas City, BB’s Lawnside BBQ. Yes, there is better bar-b-que, bb’s always seems a little overcooked and the sauce could be improved. But you can’t find a better place that blends the essence of Kansas City. Try the Abita Amber, a New Orleans beer that lets you feel the soul of the south. Gary “Alaska” Sloan (from Arkansas) did a great job of bringing down the house with his harmonica, singing and theatrical joy.

Saturday I had to work on finishing an article. But I took off early for dinner at Milano in Crown Center. It had changed since my last visit, with a much smaller menu which seems for the best. I recommend Ravioli Alla Creama Di Trartufo. I’m not one for white sauces, but this sweet, salty dish with a touch of truffles was excellent. The wine list is also limited but if you like reds I recommend the Banfi Col Di Sasso Sangiovese, Toscana. It is a great taste for a small price. Sangiovese is the same grape that is used in Chianti but it doesn’t have that alum taste.

We finished off the night at The American Heartland Theater with Bunk-Bed Brothers. It was closing night.

Sunday was sleep in time.

34th Annual Hospital Hill Run

As usual I’m a week late in taking this blog to press.

Last Saturday morning, June 2nd, I ran…err...okay…mostly walked in my first ever Hospital Run. I did the 5k. I had first thought about doing it when I received an email at school asking if I wanted to get on their training schedule. I said yes and then talked Dapple and a friend from Columbia into competing with me.

Of course I never got around to training, I just read the emails. So my goal was to finish within the time that you had to do to get a participation medal. Yes, I wanted that medal.

The week before the race Dapple pulled up lame while training on a six mile run. So she decided just to do the walk/run with me. I am happy to report that her training mate finished in the top twenty and Dapple and I both finished in time to get those medals. In fact, I had so much reserve that once I topped the last uphill stretch and it was all downhill I could have went faster. But we were enjoying the event so much that we had already decided to make it an annual thing. Our goal would be to beat our previous year’s time. So I decided to keep on pace as to not to get next years goal to high. How is that for a slackers reasoning.

If you have never ran the Hospital Run I highly recommend it. It was a very festive atmosphere. They even fed us pancakes after the race. As with most endeavors it has its own atmosphere, its own type of crowd, which was great fun to watch. It was definitely a healthier crowd than with I normally hang-out. More energy bars and bottled water and less bar-b-que sandwiches and bottles of beer

The highlight of the morning was seeing an Iraqi vet, Sergeant Bruce Dunlap, finish the race. He had ran the race five previous times, and was wounded this winter in Iraq. After being released from Walter Reed on Friday he came to Kansas City to compete in a wheelchair on Saturday. His courage and bravery was overwhelming and had nothing to do with politics other than to magnify the false bravado of our President’s ridiculous decision to invade Iraq.

An Odd Way to Make a Charitable Contribution

As previously posted, last Saturday Dulcinea and I thought we would take in a film at the Tivoli Theater in Westport. We had a late lunch/early supper at La Fonda El Taquito on Southwest Blvd. One of my favorite Westside eateries. You can’t fail with the fresh tamale or the chorizo and potato enchilada.

When we arrived at Westport in the early evening, we spotted groups of people in various colored t-shirts. Every person in the group had the same color and each group had a different color. We couldn’t read what the shirts said from our car because the script used was very flowery (they should have used Helvetica).

The street in front of the Tivoli was closed off so we had to park a few blocks away. As we walked through the crowd we discovered the t-shirts said “Crawl for Cancer”. 20 Pitchers, 10 People, 5 Bars, 1 Perfect Day. It seems we were in the middle of a charitable event.

Most of the donors looked very young and many were very drunk. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the humor of drunks when you yourself are not inebriated. Such as the two women behind us who were pissed-off and yelling about the shabby treatment they received on the plaza when they were not allowed to come in off the street to use the restaurant restroom. Actually, pissing in the street seemed to be a popular past time. Some couples seemed about to fornicate, while others were very angry and bitching at each other. There were several crying drunks, and a few humorous characters. Emotions were running high.

All in all, getting drunk out of your mind seems to be a strange way to make a charitable contribution to curing cancer. However, Fidel’s, the cigar store in Westport seemed to take it all in stride. This is the sign they had out in front of their store.

Rendezvous at the Kona Grill

Dulcinea went down to the crossroads to have her hair cut my Jimi at Imij (yes Hemingway that is a palindrome) yesterday afternoon. She called just as my day at school was ending asking me to come have a happy hour drink at the Kona Grill. She had commandeered a table in one of the large open windows of the bar that looks out onto the Plaza. She said she was in desperate need of help in fending off all the valiant knights that were intent on coming to her aid.

The Country Club Plaza was just a short hop south of my Hospital Hill location so I motored on down to join her. The breeze coming in through the open window was delightfully cool and our seating was shaded by a large ornamental pear tree. It was happy hour and several beverages and pupu’s were being offered at a goodly discount so we were determined to order from the happy hour menu as not to dilute our spending power. I love martinis, but not the sweet ones that were featured; I only drink beer when I plan to guzzle it so I settled on the baby Margarita. I think there was some tequila in among the salt and lime somewhere. Dulcinea had iced tea. After several drinks I was beginning to get a bit drowsy, although it may have been the sticky, sweet, hot spicy, fishy, delicious sushi rolls we were also consuming.

People watching being one of my favorite pastimes, I surreptitiously scanned the crowd. Surprisingly it was an interesting mixture of GenY, X and even a few baby-boomers thrown in for garnish. And evenly divided between X and Y chromosomes. The rumor was the big guys in the corner were team members of the KC Chiefs; if so they started in a league over their heads, failed to score and were being let go on waivers.

My Kansas City Walkabout: Day One

In Australia the aborigines have a term "walkabout", often a rite of passage for their young men into adulthood. They wonder about the bush, sometimes with little food or water which can induce a trance-like state that allows them to visit Dreamtime. From visiting Dreamtime they gain insight and wisdom into the creation of their world and culture. A religious experience if you will.

I’m not after a religious experience but after reading the blog New York City Walk I discovered that there is a whole movement of people walking all or parts of many of our urban areas: New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco. They often blog about the experience or document it with photography. So I have decided to mix the idea of a walking the city blog with the walkabout and tour on foot a few of the interesting parts of Kansas City.
Today I started Day One of My Kansas City Walkabout. I decided to start it were it all began in 1826 when Francois Chouteau moved his fur trading post up river to just south of the mouth of the Kaw River.


I parked at 2nd and Main, just above the Missouri River and the railroad that runs along the river. The original buildings of The City of Kansas are long gone. But some of the larger brick buildings built in the late 1870’s as citadels of commerce and industry still stand and have now been converted to lofts and condos.



I walked down Main, cut over at 3rd St. to Delaware, then south to Independence Avenue. On the way I stopped at a small cafe called A Dente', Italian of course, and had a sandwich called "The Rookie". It was eggplant, onion, tomato and other vegetables covered with cheeses and grilled on delicious bread.
There is a wooden and steel footbridge where Main ends at the Missouri River. It has an outlook over the Missouri River and stairs go down to the old levee below. I didn’t go down because the levee area was occupied with a few fellows that were relaxing with a few beers and more. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. In all I thought it was a good start to the first day of My Kansas City Walkabout.

Update: Links to other Kansas City Walkabouts.
Living in the Scoot Utopia

Where am I?

Here are a few clues: I’m looking northwest toward downtown;
Looks like I must be almost as high as Quality Hill.

Hmmm, give up yet? The Spanish writing on the store across the street gives up a lot so you might have figured out I’m up on the hill in the Guadalupe district. But do you know which building? Let me tell you the story.

This picture was taken Easter Sunday. I know that day is time to be with family, to celebrate and worship together. Regretfully, I’m about the last of my line and Dulcinea’s family seems to be spread out all over the world these days; so for the first time in as long as I can remember we were alone for the Easter holiday. The Easter Bunny didn’t come to visit so we slept in late. It was a beautiful spring day. Feeling a bit lonely I remembered that The Blue Bird Bistro (on my all-time favorites list of restaurants) served a Sunday Brunch. A quick call ascertained they were open and serving a 10am – 2pm brunch.

The Blue Bird Bistro is on the southwest corner of 17th St. and Summit Ave. When it was called the Blue Bird Café it was an all vegetarian place that grew its own fresh herbs in a garden across the street. It now has a new owner and chef and it also serves free range poultry and beef and organically grown vegetables. And it is still fabulous!

The Blue Bird is in an old storefront with former living quarters above. Formally only the lower area was open to the public but now the upper story is being used to serve also. The restroom still has a cast iron tub. The walls are decorated with a local artists work. The picture above was taken out the second floor window of the Blue Bird Bistro.