Next Tuesday is Mardi Gras. If you come from New Orleans and suddenly find yourself transported to Kansas, you may experience culture shock on Fat Tuesday. That’s exactly what happened to Mike West and Katie Euliss. The musical duo known as Truckstop Honeymoon moved to Kansas after Hurricane Katrina. For the last several years, they’ve been bringing the Big Easy to their adopted hometown of Lawrence with their Mardi Gras Parade which is now attracting upwards of 400 people. We’re pleased to have Truckstop Honeymoon with us in Studio A performing Mardi Gras in Kansas.
If you are interested in joining the Mardi Gras festivities, the parade (more like a Mardi Gras flash mob) will begin next Tuesday (2.21) at noon at Aimee’s Cafe and Coffeehouse and the procession will continue down Massachusetts St. to Freestate Brewery.
If you weren’t able to make it to the parade this year, here is a look at what you missed:
NOMINATE A LOCAL MAKER: DECEMBER 1 – JANUARY 15
VOTE DECEMBER 1 – JANUARY 15 FOR 3 NOMINEES
WATCH LOCAL MAKERS STORIES ON KCPT IN FEBRUARY
Coinciding with the national airdate of MAKERS in February 2013, KCPT will produce three featurettes of women who have made a difference in the greater metropolitan area of Kansas City. The featurettes will be broadcast as interstitials in conjunction with the national program, will air in a KCPT magazine program, The Local Show, and will be available on the KCPT website, Facebook and Youtube pages.
How do we choose who to feature? You!
You submit your nomination of who should be celebrated as a woman who has made a difference in KC. We will cull the featurette stories from your nominations. You’ll also be able to vote for your favorite stories, helping us determine which of the stories will become a featurette.
Go to makers-kc.org nominate right now! Write up a paragraph and submit a photo. It’s that easy!
Who are the producers of the national project?
The project is founded by filmmaker Dyllan McGee. Executive Producers are Dyllan McGee, Betsy West and Peter Kunhardt, who worked in consultation with a team of advisors to select the groundbreaking MAKERS featured, and Dalton Delan, Executive Producer for WETA. The documentary is produced by Kunhardt McGee Productions, Storyville Films and WETA Washington, D.C., in association with Ark Media. Foundation funding is provided by The Charles H. Revson Foundation, NoVo Foundation, Ford Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Rice Family Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation and others.
For more, visit MAKERS.com/press and follow @MAKERSwomen on Twitter and visit Facebook.com/makerswomen on Facebook.
Join KCPT, The Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and PFLAG-KC on September 13th from 6-8pm for a special sneak peak of the documentary Not In Our Town: Light in the Darkness. The film tells the story of the residents in a Long Island community who take action after a local immigrant is killed in a hate crime attack. Their inspiring story provides a blueprint for people who want to do something before intolerance turns to violence. A discussion of strategies for hate crime prevention and building safer, more inclusive communities will follow the film.
The screening will be held at Screenland Crown Center
2450 Grand Blvd. 3rd FloorKansas City, MO. 64108
The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP required.
Help educate others: Spread the word by talking to the people in your community who have the power to put an end to bullying. Here are a few groups you may want to visit or call:
Your family: If you have kids, teach them that bullying is wrong. Use the government resources provided for bullied kids and bullied teens to help them come up with a plan for what to do if they experience bullying as a victim or an observer.
Your friends and neighbors: Take a few minutes to share this bullying information with people in your neighborhood. Encourage adults and children to speak up and stop bullying wherever they see it.
Your local schools: StopBullying.gov has a wealth of free anti-bullying material aimed at helping teachers, school administrators, and students recognize and prevent school bullying. Print some of the school bullying articles and give them to your local school district or email officials the link. You may also want to suggest that school children take the Anti-bullying Pledge from Bullying.org.
Stop bullying when you see it: By now, you know what to do. The next time you see an innocent child being victimized by a bully, don’t let the abuse continue. Your actions to stop bullying will help victimized children have hope again and will pave the way for others to stop letting senseless bullying harm young lives.
Quidditch? Yes…you read that correctly. The Kansas University Quidditch team is now headed to the World Cup with a top ranking. They were #1 in the rankings in mid-October, but they fell one spot to #2 in the most recent rankings behind the sport’s originators from Middlebury College in Vermont. They will head to the World Cup on Nov. 11 to try to recapture that top spot.
Jonathan Cooper, KU Junior from Lee’s Summit, MO, recently produced a segment about the Quidditch team for his reporting class and The Local Show now presents an excerpt from the piece he produced after the rankings came out in October with KU atop the list.
Here is the accompanying story he wrote:
KU Quidditch Team Seeks World Cup Win
The University of Kansas has a new number one ranked athletic team, and it is not basketball. It’s not football or soccer or volleyball either. In fact, many people probably don’t even consider it a sport.
But for about 30 KU students, the news that their team is the best in the world, is the icing on the cake to a sport they started playing only two years ago. The sport is Quidditch, the Harry Potter inspired game where wizards fly to score goals in multiple rings.
“It’s different from the Harry Potter world in the fact that you can’t fly,” said Doug Whiston, team captain and founder. “We have to make certain concessions to actual physics.”
KU junior Doug Whiston organized the club his freshman year, which officially was recognized by the University in 2010. Whiston noticed the sport gain popularity at other schools around the country and gathered his friends to play in tournaments.
“It started just as casual talk and then Wichita State e-mailed us about a tournament they were hosting,” Whiston said. “We quickly scrambled and got a team together, and then we went down, competed and got third place.”
The team quickly grew and started playing in tournaments against other schools. Just last week the International Quidditch Association ranked KU as the number one team in all of human Quidditch.
“Now that we are ranked one we have a target on our back,” said Hai Nguyen, a player that is one of the founding members. “We have to bring our A-game every time or we could lose a step.”
The team’s success has come fast for Whiston who is unsure if they deserve it.
“A lot of schools on the East Coast say we only play Midwest schools,” Whiston said. “They tell us to face some real competition.”
Whiston and the rest of the team will get their chance starting Nov. 11 at the World Cup in New York.
“The World Cup is a tournament with about 100 teams,” Whiston said. “There will be schools there from around the county and a couple international ones.”
Whiston said the team is excited for the opportunity, but for him, winning is not everything.
“I just want to see us face some tough competition,” Whiston said. “It will be fun to see how good schools on the East Coast are.”
The tournament will run from Nov. 11 to 14, with the winner earning bragging rights as the best team in the world.
If you have content you think might be of interest to The Local Show, please email us at thelocalshow@kcpt.org.
“Best Road Trip Ever” is a GPS-based travel app designed for the iPhone that features over 6,500 offbeat attractions, self-taught artists, sights, and eateries across the country in one comprehensive compendium. Thousands of photos, lots of video and tons of stories from the guys on the KCPT/PBS travel show, “Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations” and Detour Art. Perfect for anyone who loves to get in the car and explore!
He won eight Golden Gloves and played in five All-Star Games. Frank White played 18 seasons in the major leagues and all of them with the Kansas City Royals. Following his playing career he became a coach and a popular Royals broadcaster. That is until recently when his longtime club unceremoniously dismissed him from his contract.
Now, White is no longer spending his days at the K but across town at CommunityAmerica Ballpark, home to the Kansas City T-Bones, the metros’ minor league ballclub, where he recently took on the job of first-base coach.
Their new season gets underway next week. White joined Randy to talk about his life and career in baseball.
The term “life sciences” gets thrown around a lot these days. It is even a big part of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s Big 5. But what does it mean exactly? It is a concept that can be hard to understand, and sometimes quite complicated.
Life science is a multi-billion dollar industry in Kansas City, and it includes over 240 companies involved in the health of humans, animals and plants. One of these local life sciences organizations is the venerable Stowers Institute for Medical Research, which opened in 2000 with much fanfare on the site of the former Menorah Medical Center and was endowed with a jaw-dropping gift of $2 billion from the founder of American Century investments, Jim Stowers and his wife, Virginia.
Over the last decade, the Stowers Institute, located just off the Country Club Plaza, has attracted some of the world’s finest medical researchers to Kansas City to analyze our society’s most debilitating diseases and the keys to their causes. But after 13 years and such a large endowment, what kind of specific research and developments are actually taking place inside the Institute? Producer Pam James visits this center for life science research and discovery to show viewers what the Stowers Institute is all about.
It’s been a year now since the curtain opened on the much anticipated $415 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. The downtown venue designed by Moshie Safdie has quickly garnered both national and international attention.
Many of the center’s shows have earned rave reviews and there have been countless sold out performances. But one year on, is it meeting expectations?
Joining us for a status report is arts leader and philanthropist Julia Irene Kauffman, who chair’s the center’s board, and Symphony Board President Shirley Helzberg.
