America: Now and Here

Where is America? Kansas City blushes and squirms at all the attention. We hesitate to answer anything, in our modesty, but they have asked: what is America? And the collective answer, woven from artists both local and far-flung, is as varied as America demands. The whole of the Leedy-Volkos gallery, and spaces across the street, […]

Giving and Having

I woke up this morning to death. I didn’t cheer it like those kids in DC. My cat had killed a mouse. I screamed, and then I laid a towel over the corpse. My great-grandfather used to say, “It’s not the dead people you need to worry about– it’s the living.” He was a mortician. […]

Circles

Everyone was as still for Bach as they were bouncy for Al Green. As rabidly as I’d danced to the Jackson 5 Saturday night, I sat still for Bach on Sunday. I closed my eyes, even. Pop music goes forward, neatly, in a way you expect, and it reinforces what you want and where you […]

Wined and Dined

Only once a year were mass quantities of wine served in the basement of the Lutheran church: on Maunday Thursday. Someone had a lamb roasted. The lamb was a source of stress for me and my sisters. We didn’t eat lamb at home (we weren’t that exotic) and visions of wooly Jesus-guided lambettes danced in […]