Day 26: Kansas City, MO
Nau mai
Yesterday we played a show in Kansas City, Missouri.
Lavonda’s parking spot for our day in Kansas City.
Gabe had invited me to a BBQ breakfast. It was freezing cold in Kansas City when a group of us set out from the bus and there was a steady drizzle that reinforced how ill-prepared we were for any wet weather. For twenty minutes we walked through the rain as our jackets went from warm and cosy to soaking wet. At 10:30am we arrived at Arthur Bryant’s BBQ, Gabe’s favourite Kansas City spot, and found it closed for renovations. This was a huge disappointment to all of us, and we stood there for a few minutes, cold and wet, contemplating our next move.
Another attempt at the candid selfie while waiting outside Arthur Bryant’s closed BBQ restaurant.
We cut our losses. A fallback BBQ restaurant was located and this time we travelled by taxi, making our way to Fiorella’s Jack Stack BBQ just in time for their 11am opening. We dined in comfort in their enclosed, heated patio, and the challenging morning activity turned into a very pleasant outing. I ordered from the BBQ Entrees menu a dish a called the Kansas City Combo – beef burnt ends, smoked sausage, and pork spare ribs, with sides of coleslaw and potato salad.
Our venue was called the Truman, a former auto parts shop located on Truman Street, at the east end of the Crossroads Arts district in central Kansas City. The many lanes of Interstate 670 rolled past the front of the building and the surrounding streets were lined with old brick buildings that sang of a productive history in the area. As you might expect of a venue in an old garage there were no frills to be found; it was a large and simple room with a concrete floor and a stage at one end. You could practically smell the oil and wrenches that haunted this old workshop.
Once the proper rock concert lighting was initiated and the room was full of people everything looked as it should. It seemed that people had come from all points of the compass and that some had driven for a great many hours to make it to Kansas City, this destination which seemed to be roughly in the middle of everything. This was a Friday night show and the crowd were in good form, happy to engage with us on the subject of tornadoes, specifically how much better the tornadoes were in Kansas than in New Zealand. We didn’t let this get us down and our set was full of energy and enjoyable.
Try putting on your favourite Phoebe Rings song while you watch this animated gif.