In The Cigar Box

As teenagers, we thought such antics were great fun tinged with the danger of getting caught.  Most years in the lead up to Independence Day, lots of creative energy was given to how to destroy things through the use of fireworks sold from tents scattered along every major thoroughfare.  Money may have been tight but a package of firecrackers and a few M-80s topped the list of spending priorities for mid-teenage boys whose hormones were rising while their judgment was ebbing. I’ve never seen a rural mail box with the concentric circles of a target painted on it, but rural mail boxes, whether located on country roads or suburban streets, have long been targets for boys who’ve been kidnapped by their lower angels.  A band of boys compete to imagine the look of a mail box after an M-80 is tossed inside and the door slammed shut.  Little thought or discussion is given to the length of the fuse, how far to run, or what to hide behind when the explosion occurs. ...

Two sections over sat a couple wearing peasant clothes; their hair was long and nappy and one had a cheap silk daisy over her left ear.  The Kauffman Center is a testament to modernity in 2013 but the production of Hair pulled the 1960’s into the space and a half century evaporated like so much stage fog.  With its world debut in October of 1967, the production that was ten years in the making arrived in New York’s Anspacher Theater – a space dedicated to experimental works.  Last week the reworked, renewed version made a stop in Kansas City. Cradled between the assassinations of John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, the production spoke, sang and reflected the rhythms of the time.  Long, nappy hair and brightly colored, tie dyed t-shirts were the counterculture’s counterpoints to the white shirt, tie and neatly trimmed or buzz cuts worn by the generation who were building suburbia and saw the world through t...

When the thunder sounds like a continuous kettle drum roll accented by cymbals crashing after a canon blast; when water cascades over the windows like a hundred men in a bucket line emptying their pails just over the transom, you are in a Midwestern thunderstorm.  Thunderheads stand thousands of feet tall rising up through the atmosphere where the roiling motion gains power with each cycle until cells break free explosively to dispel their energy on the houses, farms and fields.  In 1951 and again forty two years later, nature visited our area with such storms.  Days melted into weeks as the water ran through the rills and tributaries making the mighty Missouri rise and rise and escape her banks to fill every lower crack and void for a dozen miles or more from her normal channel.  In other years, the storms hit the Tonganoxie split and bypassed our city either north or south.  Then there were the years in the mid-1930’s or like last year when the storms ga...