MO Day 2 - Baseball, Blues, and Botanicals
My second day in Kansas City started with a trip to the excellent local coffee shop Oddly Correct Coffee Roasters. I really loved everything about this place, from their name to the art on the walls (see this image I took from their facebook page below) to their creative and, more importantly delicious, coffee. I got something I hadn’t seen before, an Orange Blossom Cold Brew, which had just just a hint of citrus and botancial flavors to cut through the bitterness of the coffee. It was fantastic, and a great way to start out my day.
After fueling up with some great coffee, I made my way to the first stop of my day: the museums at 18th and Vine. Kansas City’s 18th and Vine District has historically been a hub for the city’s prominent African-American owned businesses. In particular, the area is considered the birthplace of Kansas City Jazz, launching the careers of legends like Charlie Parker. Commemorating this rich history is not one but two fantastic museums that are conveniently located in the same building: the Negro League Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum.
The lobby between the two museums served as a great introduction, featuring lots of really beautiful Afrocentric art and memorabilia from the region’s heyday. It was a nice way of acknowledging other important businesses and community areas not represented in either of the two main museums, including the pioneering Black-owned and operated newspaper, The Call.
I started with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which really blew me away. I’m not much of a sports guy, so I might have totally missed out on it if it wasn’t connected to the American Jazz Museum and I would have really missed out. While the museum is certainly pretty heavily concerned with baseball, the game also serves as a fascinating entry point to discuss all kinds of issues around race, economics, and American identity while also highlighting the sometimes pretty remarkable true stories of the athletes themselves. Besides Jackie Robinson breaking down the color barrier in the MLB, I can’t say I ever really learned much about the Negro Leagues themselves in history, and I loved how the story of the league really intersected with so many more familiar stories in American history of the late 19th and early 20th century and added in some pretty eye-opening details that tend to get glossed over.
The museum opens with a pretty big wow right off the bat (the pun had to be done), in the form of a really stunning display called the Field of Legends which features bronze statues of various great ball players in pretty strikingly lifelike poses washed in dreamy lighting that makes you really feel like you just stumbled across a nighttime game. When you walk in, you can only see the field through a chicken-wire fence but the museum galleries sort of circle the game until you end up on the diamond as you’re leaving.
After the Field of Legends, the first few displays served as a helpful overview of things to come throughout the museum. First up was a map of all the cities that were home to Negro League Teams from 1920-1955. Independent Black Baseball Leagues also operated alongside the Negro League, but the text beside the graphic helps make the distinction that League was essentially the Black equivalent to the MLB with only the strongest athletes getting added to these teams while other leagues served as a sort of minors. The map also serves as a pretty staunch reminder of how segregated the country was (and to some extent still can be) with teams largely popping up in larger cities in the South, Midwest, and Northeast. The gap of teams between D.C. and Atlanta though is pretty striking, as is the lack of any representation in New England lest we fall into the trap that a lot of us Northerners do in not acknowledging that there is, unfortunately, still a whole lotta racism in the North as well.
One of my favorites of these early scene-setting displays featured photos of young people dressed to the nines to attend Negro League Baseball games, which many considered to be the hottest social event of the week. In contrast, nowadays baseball game attendees look like they’re going to “rake leaves”, according to a charmingly impassioned quote on the wall from someone who remembered the old games and how dolled up everyone used to get.
Next up we had various pieces of great baseball-inspired art. Highlights for me included: a bench made out of baseballs, bases, and bats emblazoned with the names of great Negro League players; a dynamic abstract painting of a baseball with dramatic bursts of color; and a stunningly expressive painting of a Kansas City Monarch sliding home.
From there, I made my way into the main galleries of the museum which were organized loosely along a chronological timeline tracing simultaneously baseball history, African-American history, broader American history, and the intercepts among the three. The timeline begins in the mid-1860s around the ending of the Civil War and the early days of Emancipation. Prior to the War between the states, there was no organized national baseball league nor a codified set of playing rules as various different regional variants of the game had sprung up throughout the country. During the war, the New York-style, or Knickerbocker Rules, of playing started to gain prominence as Union Troops would play this version of baseball together in their downtime. This coincided with the founding of the National Association of Base Ball Players (baseball used to be written as two words, which was interesting), which was the first codified professional baseball league. Sadly, but not surprisingly, it didn’t take very long for racism (America’s other national pastime) to interfere with the rise of the game, when the NABBP refused to admit the popular all-Black team The Philadelphia Pythians. Naturally, this segregation was framed as a way of “protecting” Black players from violent backlash by white crowds instead of the simple racism it was. If there was any doubt as to the hatefulness motivating the exclusion of Black players, one need only look at the wildly offensive newspaper caricatures of Black baseball (bottom right). Despite the cartoons belittling Black athletes, it’s also entirely possible White teams favored segregation because they didn’t want to suffer the embarrassment of consistently losing to Black teams which did consistently happen whenever they played exhibition games. Before the NABBP normalized segregating teams, there had been integrated club teams and there was a lot of depressing quotes from white players in the 19th century stating pretty simply how segregation kept out some of the best athletes they ever played with.
Beyond baseball getting more organized, the world was changing considerably around the end of the 19th century. The promise of a more egalitarian nation post-emancipation was too soon extinguished as Reconstruction was sadly bungled and the Jim Crow-era (or slavery by any other name) was ushered in. There is a tendency sometimes in American history to downplay just how oppressive things were between Emancipation and Civil Rights (and also at almost all other times as well) because in theory African-Americans were “free”, but I think photos like the one the museum had of a “separate but equal” classroom (left) really say a devastating thousand words about the gap between our promises and our actions to Black America. Fortunately, while there was a lot of distressing, but all too real, history to confront, the museum also made sure to highlight moments of Black excellence to add rays of light in even the darkest moments of the timeline. For example, I didn’t know the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby was a Black man, and I thought that was a really cool bit of trivia (though I should probably say it’s possible that’s a more commonly known fact than I realized because I simply don’t know much about any sports and especially not ones that don’t have a Boston team I could have learned facts about from osmosis).
Entering the 19th century, the next section of the museum was dedicated to some of the first Black baseball players to become stars in their own right. Such stars included Pop Lloyd, who some people (including Babe Ruth) believe to be one of if not the greatest shortstops and batters of all time. For some fun added context, Pop got to play against a white Major League team in an exhibition match in Cuba in 1911 and he had a batting average of .500, while Ty Cobb only batted .370. Other stars included Rube Foster who was a pitching ace as well as a brilliant manager off the field who also helped found the Negro National League, the first professional baseball circuit for Black teams. Interestingly, one of the most famous and successful teams in the days before the Negro Leagues were organized was a Harlem Globetrotters-esque comedy baseball team called the Page Fence Giants. Sadly, a lot of their comedy was rooted in stereotypes originating from Minstrel shows, but the trade-off for playing into white audience’s prejudices was that players were able to earn a living, travel the country, and play the sport they loved at a time when continued opportunities for Black athletes was by no means guaranteed. It’s a sad but common story among early Black entertainers of all kinds, and on the bright side, the sacrifices and humiliations faced by these men and women helped keep doors open for greater successes to come in future generations, it just would have been nice if such choices never had to get made.
With the advent of the Negro Leagues, Black baseball reached new heights, but success did not come without hardship. The draft devastated the ranks of the league during World War I and a number of young ballplayers fought in France and Germany, and some are even buried in Arlington National Cemetary for their service. In and out of wartime, Black baseball players faced constant discrimination on the road being barred from hotels, restaurants, and gas stations even after playing at sold-out stadiums. One story goes that during a barnstorming match (where Black teams would play local White teams in exhibition games) in Montana, the White team’s owner had big posters advertising the game in his restaurant but refused to serve the same team he was advertising. The manager of the Black team said that in that case the restaurant owner could refund everyone for the tickets that had already been sold, because they weren’t playing and lo and behold the team was allowed in to eat and the restaurant owner ended up gaining a big crowd of fans coming in to get autographs. One player was quoted as saying "If you touch the pocketbook of the person oppressing you, anything is possible". Hard times also bred innovations and during the Depression, the manager of the Kansas City Monarchs had the brilliant idea that more people might be able to come to baseball games if they weren’t during working hours so he mortgaged his property and built the first lighting system necessary to play baseball at night. Night games proved to be a spectacular success and they helped keep the Negro League teams afloat during hard times before simply becoming a common staple for baseball teams of all races. Having lights to play at night seems like such an obvious thing but like so much of what I learned in this museum even things we take for granted in modern baseball are often indebted in some ways to the ingenuity of the Negro League Teams and managers who were often forced to think more outside the box then their white counterparts.
As the Negro Leagues took off, Black baseball stars became celebrities and League games became big events, with everyone dressed fully to the nines. I loved the celebratory photos from the heyday of the league with ballplayers posing with other big-name celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne (throwing out the first pitch in the center photo), and Jesse Owens, or just making some fans really happy. It was a nice infusion of the joy the game could bring even if the practicalities of these athletes getting to play were often surrounded by hardship.
Up next was a facsimile of the sitting room in the historic Street Hotel, a beautiful Black-owned hotel in Kansas City’s 18th and Vine district. Unlike the hotels Black ballplayers were forced to stay at on the road, the Street Hotel was glamorous and catered to many Black celebrities coming to town for business, jazz, baseball, or a little bit of everything. The museum singles out the Hotel not just to shout out another historic Black-owned business in KC, but to also show the ways in which Black baseball was invaluably tied to other economic opportunities for African-Americans.
I the next display case there was a pretty snazzy and well-preserved Kansas City Monarchs uniform:
The Negro League players didn’t just travel all around the US, and the next few displays were focused on international travels. Negro League teams were often the first American ballplayers to visit many countries, and they were often received with open arms. In Spanish-speaking countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, Black baseball players were celebrated, treated to fancy meals, and put up in the nicest hotels when they couldn’t even walk into restaurants in cities they played in back home. Unsurprisingly, a good number of Negro League players ended up signing to teams in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and relocating permanently to places where they could just be treated like good athletes regardless of the color of their skin. One of the most interesting stories I read was of Black baseball teams visiting Japan in the 1920s, nearly 10 years before Babe Ruth is credited with bringing American baseball to the East. Negro league players were the first professional baseball players to visit Japan, and while the country had already begun playing baseball they were delighted to see these pros at work (at least two members of the 1927 team would go on to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame), the teams served as excellent goodwill ambassadors for the sport and the country. It’s entirely possible that if this tour hadn’t been such a smashing success, Japan may not have sent invitations for Babe Ruth to come down in 1934. It’s a fascinating long-overlooked historical anecdote that was really amazing to learn about, and the height differences in the photos were just hilarious.
Next up was a short film about the Negro Leagues and the eventual integration of the MLB. It was a great video, and the mini-theater wallpapered in vintage newsprint was an excellent touch, but good lord the Missouri accents were THICK. It was amazing that they were able to interview people old enough to remember when baseball first became integrated but 70+ year old Kansas City Natives almost sound like they are speaking an entirely different language. The biggest bummer from watching the film though was learning that Boston was very adamantly the last MLB team to integrate and boy did they fight it hard, which is a sad but not too surprising thing to learn about your hometown.
After the film, the last few galleries were dedicated to legends from the Negro Leagues and some of the most incredible stories around them. A few of my favorites in no particular include: the feats Cool Papa Bell possibly one of the fastest men to ever live, who apparently regularly stole two bases at a time which is bananas. Supposedly he was so fast, he was the only person Jesse Owens ever refused to race one on one and Jesse Owens had beaten racehorses in a sprint which is two insane factoids for the price of one. There was the fact that while Ted Williams is correctly celebrated for being one of a very few ballplayers to end a season with a batting average over .400, not one but two Negro League players, Wild Bill Wright and Lester Lockett, also achieved this feat to sadly less fanfare. And my favorite fact was that there was a player on one of the Globetrotter-esque comedy teams, The Clowns, who everyone knew as Pork Chop because that’s all he ate on the road, and spry, silly Pork Chop would grow up to be none other than all time great player Hank Aaron.
Easily one of the most incredible players to read about was Satchel Paige. Paige’s prowess is probably no surprise to people more familiar with the game (and after Joe Biden’s recent gaffe while he was supposed to be honoring Paige I’m sure even more people are now familiar with him which is one good thing to come from a total embarrassment), but at the time I was unfamiliar and I loved learning about him. Satchel was an all-time great pitcher and a legend in the Negro Leagues for nearly 20 years when, after integration, he became the oldest person to debut in the MLB at 42. While a good decade older than the average player, his pitching helped take the Cleveland Indians to a World Series Win making him not only the first Black pitcher in the American League but the first Black pitcher to win a World Series (the records just keep coming for him). His first season in the majors, besides winning the world series, he also ended the season with a 6-1 record, a 2.48 ERA, 2 shutouts, and 43 strikeouts making hims the oldest person to be considered for Rookie of the Year. He continued to play in the Majors until he was 59 which to this day still makes him the oldest person to play major league baseball. My favorite story I read about Satchel though was that when one of his signature pitches was ruled to be illegal he said of the American League commissioner, “I guess Mr. Harridge did not want me to show up those boys who were young enough to be my sons”.
Of course the museum wouldn’t be complete without a big display about Jackie Robinson, who first broke the color barrier in the MLB which heralded the end of the Negro Leagues (though not right away) and a new chapter of opportunities for athletes of color. The choice of Jackie being the first Negro League athlete to cross over was incredibly strategic because there was so much riding it on it. The person to make the leap had to be an incredible player or racists would jump all over them for causing their team to lose, and they also had to have the bravery and stamina to keep playing even in the face of death threats, jeers, and other disgusting displays from white fans, all while fighting the natural urge to want to fight back because any sign of aggression would also feed into negative stereotypes. It was a tall order, but people felt that more than anyone Jackie had the skill, brains, and temperament to pull off the job of essentially being a baseball player, a politician, and an ambassador all at once. He knocked it out of the park so to speak, ending his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers with 175 hits, 125 runs, 31 doubles, 5 triples, 12 home runs, driving in 48 runs for the year, and the highest number of stolen base in the whole league, not to mention some incredible fielding. More importantly, he made the Dodgers an absolute ton of money by gaining them tons of new Black and White fans alike, as well as making a pretty penny of anyone who wanted to insult Jackie because even racists needed to have a ticket, and sadly money more than anything else has the power to make steps for positive change actually permanent. It was hardly easy for Jackie, and he faced abuse on and off the field, even sustaining a seven-inch gash in his leg from some aggressive fielding by Enos Slaughter (yikes!) so it makes the fact that he was so great even under all that pressure truly astounding. It’s sad that sometimes it takes true excellence (and monetary incentive) to change people’s minds, when really basic humanity should have been enough, but it can’t be overstated how pivotal Jackie Robinson’s success was in moving Civil Rights forward for the whole country not just for the MLB, and he truly was the right person at the right time.
One of the more interesting things to learn was that after breaking the Color Barrier in the MLB, the Negro Leagues also led the way in breaking down gender barriers in the game. Now this decision was partially motivated by needing to replace players snatched up by the Majors and also as a smart way to attract more fans in the face of the dwindling numbers, but none of that takes away from the impressive talents of Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Toni Stone, the first three women to play alongside men in the league. Stone was the first woman to enter the League and she was brought in to replace Hank Aaron as an infielder so she was clearly no slouch, ending her 1953 season with the fourth-highest batting average in the whole league. Mamie Johnson was the next woman to cross over (her nickname, Peanut, coming from the fact that she was just 5’3”!), and she was a mean pitcher with 33-8 record in her three seasons. Lastly, Connie Morgan was brought in to replace Toni Stone after her contract was sold to another team, and she ended up with a batting average of .338 before retiring to pursue a successful career in accounting. They were all so talented it really makes you question if the current gender line in the MLB is really anything more than just “that’s the way it’s always been” because I would be shocked if today there were truly no female ballplayers good enough to compete at that level.
Next up was an interesting collection made up of over 200 autographed baseballs donated to the museum by Geddy Lee, the lead singer and bassist of Canadian prog-rock band Rush. Autographs include Hank Aaron, Cool Papa Bell, and Lionel Hampton. Who knew he was such a big collector, but it’s cool to see him helping out an independent museum.
Up next, was a mock locker-room featuring Jerseys and plaques commemorating greats from the Negro Leagues. It was a touching tribute to some hall of fame players, but I do have to say that at least one player had possibly the worst nickname I’ve every seen.
Last but not least, I made my way out of the museum, exiting through the Field of Legends. The Bronze statues of the great players were the star of the show, but I was also pretty impressed by this incredibly quilt embroidered with Rube Foster and his All-Star Team just sort of quietly tucked into one corner.
After my surprisingly moving visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, I had no break from great museum-ing as I immediately walked over to the American Jazz Museum. Walking into the museum, it’s immediately striking how much attention to detail has been paid to giving the whole space the verve and energy of jazz age paintings. Every display is shaped like abstracted instruments, the colors are warm and moody, and there’s great music on the speakers. It really makes for a heck of a first impression.
The exhibits in the American Jazz Museum alternated between exhibits that focused on broader, more big picture ideas like musical concepts and overarching jazz history, and smaller, more focused displays on key players in jazz history. I always tend to connect to more human element over big ideas (and if this unwieldy blog is any indication, I clearly like a deep dive), so the profiles on individual players were probably my favorite part of the museum. I started out with Kansas City’s own Charlie “Bird” Parker. Charlie Parker, before John Coltrane, was probably the most influential and highly imitated saxophone player in the world, and is largely credited with being the progenitor of the heavy, up-tempo, improvisation heavy style of jazz called Bebop. For anyone to reach his level of skill and influence would be impressive, but the fact that when he died he was only 34 means that everything he achieved happened in such a small window of time that it’s truly astonishing. The gallery on Bird featured a number of personal artifacts including some adorable baby photos of him growing up in Kc, sheet music, awards, vintage albums, and most-excitingly to me the Plastic Alto that he played on Jazz at Massey Hall. The Massey Hall concert is one of my all time favorite albums, and the band consisting of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Bud Powell is probably one of the greatest ever assembled with each player a virtuoso on their instrument. Interestingly, due to contractual issues, Charlie Parker couldn’t be listed by name on the record so in all press materials he’s credited as the fictional detective Charlie Chan, which makes for some charmingly confusing album art.
Of course as interesting as it is to read about Charlie Parker, it’s not half as good as actually listening to the man himself, so here is one of the only surviving live video recordings of him playing on television. As a bonus, he’s playing with Dizzy Gillespie after they were both given Downbeat Jazz Awards. The music starts about 2 minutes in if you want to skip the painfully awkward introduction with possibly the two dorkiest white guys they could possibly find to honor to two jazz legends.
There was great art throughout the museum and interactive elements to keep younger kids engaged which is always fun. That being said, for the piece below I loved the painting around the cut out but I felt like maybe there’d be something slightly disconcerting if I were to put my pasty face through the hole.
The next few galleries were dedicated to the legacy of Kansas City Jazz on the genre. While Jazz didn’t start in Kansas City, KC had a huge impact on the broader jazz sphere in the 20s and 30s. The golden era of Kansas City Jazz is considered to be the years bookended by the rise of Count Basie’s Big Band in the 20s and Charlie Parker heralding in Bebop in the 30s. The scene was characterized by extended jamming at night clubs where dancing and drinking would go on into the wee hours of the night. This allowed space for more extended riffs and soloing which led to friendly competition amongst players to “really say something” with their instruments. This pushed the limits of what was possible in jazz improvisation further than they had ever been pushed before.
The next gallery was dedicated to Duke Ellington, legendary pianist and bandleader. His jazz orchestra helped bridge a gap between classical music and big band jazz that gave the genre the shot of “respectability” necessary to catapult it into the mainstream, making Duke one of the biggest crossover stars for White and Black audiences alike. While he was brilliant pianist, his greatest gift might have been his mind for composition as he was able to seamlessly blend styles from swing, Latin, and classical and come up with arrangements that were complex and beautiful while still clocking in at under 4 minutes so you could sell ‘em as a single. He was prolific and powerful and his career spanned well into the 70s, making him easily one of the 20th century’s most prominent fixtures.
Here’s a clip that really shows off Duke’s skills as a soloist:
Next up was a display dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald, who is easily one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time. In her 60+ years as a performer, Ella collaborated with basically all the greats and became one of the most influential women in jazz at a time when the scene was largely a boy’s club with few other notable exceptions. She was celebrated for her ability to sing with impeccable tone and clarity as well as a gift for improvisation that rivaled the best horn players. The museum had one of her nightclub gowns, glasses, and a sketch of her that had been done by Pablo Picasso himself (which I thought was very cool though I think if I were her I would’ve been a little insulted with what he chose to focus on).
She just lights up the screen, and some of the things she does with her voice truly seem impossible but she makes it look easy:
Next up was a display on Louis Armstrong, who was arguably the most famous trumpet player in the world before Miles Davis came along. He was also probably the biggest crossover success with white audiences of any jazz artist in his lifetime, and he became a celebrated personality as much as a musician appearing in theatre productions, films, and TV shows. He brought the traditional New Orleans brass band style of playing, bright and flashy, to national prominence, and he was celebrated as much for his virtuosity on trumpet as his warm, raspy singing voice. The museum had some fun photos of him, and one of his trumpets complete with the lip salve that he had to use to keep playing with the same ferocity into his older years. You can read about my favorite Louis Armstrong fact, that he made hundreds of collages as a hobby and never showed them to anybody, in one of my posts from New Orleans: https://www.joepalana.com/blog/2018/4/2/nola-day-4-?rq=armstrong
This was the oldest clip I could find of Louis playing live, going back to 1933 so you get to see him sing and play with some youthful energy (he was 32).
As I mentioned earlier the deep dives on individual players were broken up with more general galleries that focused on different aspects of jazz music. These would be great introductions for people with less musical knowledge, but even if you were already familiar with the concepts the artwork and listening stations still made these fun pit stops:
The next gallery was a love letter to jazz album covers which really do have some of the absolute best album artwork. Personal favorites for me are the funky abstraction of Mingus Ah Um and the simple elegance of Sketches of Spain. This was also a nice way for the museum to shout-out different artists that deserve recognition but that they didn’t have full galleries dedicated to.
The next gallery, called the Blue Room, was a real highlight of the museum, because it is in fact a fully operational jazz club that hosts performances several nights a week. It’s really awesome that museum gets to honor Kansas City’s past (the club is named after the club that used to operate in the historic Street Hotel) while giving contemporary artists a space to help build the future of the city’s jazz scene. The fact that the table’s also served as mini galleries with various artifacts from jazz history housed inside them just made the space even cooler.
The walls of the Blue room had fun portraits of different jazz starts adorning them, some which took some delightfully strange artistic licenses like turning Ella Fitzgerald into one of the Muppets.
The showstopper though was massive, multi-media mural by an artist named Michael Massenburg that was almost as larger-than-life as the personalities it depicts:
After the American Jazz Museum, I took a walk around the block to see a memorial to Charlie Parker, entitled Bird Lives by Robert Graham, which really captured how the saxophone legend had a gigantic green head:
Across the street from the Charlie Parker memorial was this strange playful metal sculpture. I didn’t write down the name of it, and I can’t for the life of me find any information about it now, but I did think think it looked pretty striking in the sunlight.
Last but not least before leaving the 18th and Vine District, I stopped to look at the beautiful art deco facade of the historic Gem Theater, which was the African-American movie theater in the city from 1912-1960.
For lunch, I stopped at KC institution called Town-Topic Hamburgers, a no-frills diner that has been slinging patties in Kansas City for over 75 years! The hype was understandable because even if there was nothing particular fancy about it, the cheeseburger was absolutely perfect, and at under $5 who could ask for more out of a lunch.
My last stop in KC before heading across the state to St. Louis was an underground cave, about 150 ft. beneath the city proper. The cave itself had a strange otherworldly quality to it, but it also held a few surprises…
Namely, this cave was also the home to over 10,000 prize winning orchids grown by lifelong plant enthusiast David Bird in his funky little shop, Bird’s Botanicals. Bird moved into the cave after his collection expanded beyond the capacity of his greenhouse. He chose the cave because orchids are notoriously fickle plants and the unique setting allowed him to have a very precise control over the light, temperature, and humidity. It was like a mini tropical oasis in the Kansas City underground, and David Bird leaned into this with shops’s general aesthetic. Sadly, this location has since closed because of a fire in 2019, but David Bird keeps growing and selling his botanicals in local farmer’s markets and I’m glad I got to go while I could because it was a weird and special place.
When I first walked in was greeted with lots of bulbous little succulents for sale. These quirky plants are compact, cute, and most importantly very very easy to care for which has made them popular gifts and houseplants over the years.
Of course the star attraction here was Bird’s orchids and they were really spectacular. They were so colorful they just seemed to pop in the dim cave lighting, and it was pretty neat to see the subtle variations on the classic orchid shape.
The next room had a collection of various carnivorous plants including Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and honey dews. The movie version of Little Shop of Horrors was one of my favorites growing up (I was a weird kid, which should be beyond obvious), so I always had a fascination with actual carnivorous plants and it was pretty cool to see so many all in one place.
The shop also sold various ceramics to spruce up your garden, but naturally one piece stood head, shoulder, and hind quarters above the rest because what garden could possibly be complete without a giant pig’s ass.
After the flowershop, I started on the 3.5-hour drive to St. Louis. Along the way, I made a pitstop for a little pick me up at Picasso’s Coffee in St. Charles., which had good strong coffee and lots of local art on the walls so I was pretty happy.
My first stop in St. Louis once I arrived was the local comedy club, The Funny Bone, for their Tuesday Night Open Mic. They did a lottery, because, since it’s a real comedy club, they usually bring in a crowd even for mics so most of the local comics wanted a shot to go onstage. I was lucky enough to end up on the list, and I really couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the St. Louis comedy scene.
It was really nice hanging out in the green room before the show and getting to be around the other comics. They all seemed to genuinely like one another (which is never a given in local comedy scenes) so it just set a good tone for the rest of the mic, which honestly I needed after sort of falling on my face at the Kansas City mic the night before. I distinctly remember one comic asking me where I was from and replying, “Boston? Huh, you don’t seem racist” and after having just been reading about my city’s reaction to the desegregation of baseball just hours before I gotta admit it actually felt like a nice compliment. Always happy to not live up to the more unfortunate stereotypes of where you’re from. I was like a goodwill ambassador.
My favorite bit of the night was from the host, Janey, who told a very funny story about her young son:“He wanted a Thomas the Tank Engine toy and just started screaming "I want pussy" in the store. What a fun time to learn he couldn't pronounce Percy”
Other highlights:
Andy Hamilton - if you know how to use the self check out you can just ring up everything as bananas
Dot Green - I went to cleft lip Summer camp and boy did we have the biggest smiles you ever did see. I had my first kiss there, our mouths fit together like puzzle pieces
Cathy Dodd-I was promiscuous when I was younger. I'm not proud of that… okay I'm a little proud of that
Greg Warren - I got mixed nuts with pistachios still in the shell in them. I had to separate them out. They were no longer mixed nuts, I had separate nuts! I'm not rich but I'm not poor. Like I can go to red lobster and order anything
Libbie Higgins- I’m gonna give my new cat a week and if she doesn't cuddle me I'm gonna have her euthanized.
As for me, I think I did all the same material as the night before, but this time it all landed. It was a much needed confidence boost, and sometimes comedy can be a real emotional roller coaster like that. It’s easy to feel like you’re as good or as bad as your last performance, which can be really devastating when you bomb, but is also not particularly healthy when you do well either, so it’s good to remember in the back of your head that if you keep your head up there’s always another mic or show around the corner.
Favorite Random Sightings: a restaurant called The Salty Iguana; a billboard with the oddly confrontation slogan “Too chicken to get Lasick?”; The Unicorn Theater; an ad for Custom Butchering (real serial killer vibes); A wig blowing around on the highway (mesmerizing and haunting); a restaurant called Frumpy Joe’s (too close to home)
Random Observations: The thing I was saddest to miss in KC, because I simply did’t have enough time, was the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art which is famous for these giant shuttlecocks out front:
Random Joke of the Day:
A man was telling his neighbor, "I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost me four thousand dollars, but it's state of the art. It's perfect."
"Really," answered the neighbor . "What kind is it?"
"Twelve thirty."
Song of the Day:
Paul Simon wrote a song called Cool Papa Bell which does reference the baseball legend. He also says “motherfucker” a few times and it’s very surreal
what an album opener, from Jazz at Massey Hall