KC Confidential

These kinds of stories are never easy to tell…

However as working members of the local media there’s little doubt that people such as Kansas City Star television and radio critic Aaron Barnhart live in glass houses. Remember KSHB weather wonk Gary Lezak‘s bout with the Big C several years back?

So it is that Barnhart’s unexplained absence since late last year has been the cause of much wonder and speculation by both readers and co-workers.

With the speculation centering unfortunately on Barnhart’s past history with cancer.

"It’s unfortunate, but apparently it’s his wish that nobody knows about it," says one Star staffer. "So unfortunately, maybe we’ll remain in the dark until we read his obituary or something, but I was told those were his wishes to HR."

Attempts to contact Barnhart via messages to his mostly dormant Facebook page went unanswered.

"I feel sorry for Aaron," says another former colleague. "I mean, if you’re not working, that’s not a good sign. I hope he’s okay."

For now the newspaper is still listing Barnhart as its telelvision writer on its website. However copy editor Sara Smith appears to be the one filling in for Barnhart on locally-written television stories with the heavier lifting falling to syndicated writers outside the newspaper.

That said, the Star‘s "Television" page still features extensive information about Barnhart, inviting readers to "get updates from Aaron" and claiming that "more than 7,000 readers are following Aaron right now."

However Barnhart’s Facebook and Twitter pages have been silent since January, and outside of a Don Harman suicide story December 1st, a minor news item the next day and a television year in review Christmas Day story Barnhart has been MIA at 18th and Grand.

It gets murkier.

"Why did tvbarn.com go away? no weekly newsletter either," reads one unanswered Facebook query to Barnhart in late June.

"Just a note from an old friend wishing you good health and my warmest regards, and hoping you’ll be up and about and writing soon," reads another posted in April.

Barnhart’s wife did post a pic of the couple recently with no explanation, including when it may have been taken.

"Nice to see you back," one commenter wrote. "Great picture," added another.

Seven months absence is a long time though and the Star is not known for dishing out paychecks for prolonged periods of ill health.

So people are wondering what’s going on and hoping for good news but, "Probably he’s pretty sick," adds another staffer.

You don’t have to be a die hard sports junkie to have insights or opinions on sports…

A handful of comments section naysayers ripped me last week for suggesting that some locals – notably the sports media – were over-hyping this week’s All Star baseball game in Kansas City.

"Your opinion on baseball is as relevant as mine is on quantum physics," snarled Merle Tagladucci before hammering me for supposedly not knowing that the team that won got home field advantage in the World Series.

Sorry Merle, I do know that. But that’s supposed to matter to everyday Kansas Citians again why?

Look, there’s nothing wrong with hardcore sports buffs like Merle obsessing over baseball minutia. No more than there is people who obcess over stamp or comic book collecting. It’s the human condition.

We all have our dalliences.

However people here have a habit of getting snookered into falling for broad assertions about the amazing things that will come to pass and propel the local economy if we just do this. Or get that.

The Sprint Center was a sure bet to land KC a pro basketball or hockey team if only we’d build it. The Power & Light District would pay for itself. The Legends would be an economic bonanza for KCK.

With rare exception those assertions by politicians and the benefiting business interests went unchallenged.

And while – just like the All Star game there’s no doubt Kansas City has reaped some rewards from all three – there are no pro sports teams even talking about coming to Sprint, the P&L is a red ink machine that taxpayers must now subsidize and the developer of the Legends is heading towards foreclosure.

The point being, mindless cheerleading is not what Kansas City needs. Not entirely anyway.

And as for the laughable hyperbole of comparing the need for a degree in quantum physics to having an opinion about sports, please.

Check the headline atop Sam Mellinger‘s column on the All Star game in the Star‘s advertising special section:

"Game Isn’t What It Once Was," it reads. "We may never recapture passion of Midsummer Classic despite flawed World Series tie-in."

Now I could be wrong, but I don’t think Sam has a degree in quantum physics or baseball either…

Now go enjoy the game!

In what feels like just a few short years (but is actually closer to a lifetime) Major League Baseball‘s gone from No. 1 on my list to not even on my list….

What’s more I suspect I’m not alone.

If my mother hadn’t given away my baseball card collection, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here now writing this. I’d be jet skiing with Mitt Romney or wind surfing with John Kerry in Nantucket.

I was that into baseball…despite how bad the team here was. I even liked that silly mascot mule.

Then when the Royals got good – like pretty much everybody else here – I hopped on the bandwagon – but the passion was really never the same. And after the team fell out of bed, I completed the process of moving on in life.

Without baseball.

Look, I had the highest read column in the Star off and on for 16 years and batted to about every field imaginable; entertainment, politics, real estate, society, celebrity, business, the arts, radio, television…and sports.

But for the life of me, I can barely remember writing anything much about the Royals all those years.

They just didn’t matter much to me, nor to anyone else. Which rendered baseball a secondary sport here at best. I’d watch a couple playoff or World Series games. Maybe. And if George Brett or another baseball player who halfway mattered made an ass of themselves on the Plaza I’d write about it. Maybe.

Here’s a story I wanted to write but then sports editor Mike Fannin wouldn’t allow me to.

Several years ago I went to some boring baseball kickoff luncheon. The one that’s kind of a big deal to sports media types and other assorted jock sniffers. But trust me, it was boring.

Afterwords, I hooked up with a huddle of reporters shooting the shit with Royals star Mike Sweeney who was there with his brand new bride.

Newsflash!

Sweeney was off the "available" list and here was his new leading lady. I took a pic of the pair, made some small talk and left with the intention ofgivingreaders the news and a gander at the new Mrs. Sweeney.

No harm, no foul, piece of cake, right?

Wrong, Sweeney and the Royals prevailed on Fannin – who was pretty much always first in line to kiss sports management butt – to kill my tiny tidbit and photo. Sweeney wasn’t ready to show off his prized new possession

It was small, hick town journalism on Fannin’s part. You think any editor in Chicago, New York or LA would kill a story like that? A tidbit about a cleancut baseball star getting married in the off season and here’s what his wife looks like. But that’s the way things can work at the Star.

Sometimes it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know and Sweeney knew Fannin.

Anyway, baseball doesn’t do much for me any more, but if the team takes off, I’m sure I’ll lock arms with the rest of you fair weather fans and pretend I’ve been true blue just like Brandon.

Then I’ll probably care when some of player shoots up Westport like the ’90s Chiefs. I’ll probably care when somebody parties until the break of dawn, then strikes out and costs the team a playoff berth. I’ll care if one of them gets in a May – December affair with Madonna.

But I really won’t give two hoots about the All Star Game.

Not unless they decide to play it in Loose Park or something. It just doesn’t matter. Never did.

And anybody who doesn’t know the All Star game doesn’t matter probably doesn’t know anything about baseball.

That said, I’ve rained on enough parades lately; The Addams Family, Ted, Alamo Drafthouse‘s texting policy. I don’t want you guys to typecast me.

I even went to the last All Star game in KC.

My dad took me. It’s been a while, but I knew it didn’t matter then either. And we had lower level box seats right on third base. That’s back when George Brett was just a few years away from mattering – he wasn’t just some ex jock that had a few to many and mouthed off at a golf tournament.

Anyway, instead of bagging on next week’s All Star game, I’m gonna say, great for Kansas City!

Have at it, everybody. If you get a chance to catch the game live, do soby all means. If there’s nothing else on telelvison (or your DVR), go for it on the small screen. And don’t skip the ads, it’s here in KC, let’s support this baby all the way.

But for heaven’s sake, how much more of this over-the-top, phony cheerleading about what big a deal this game is must we endure?

It’s not like this is a actual reason to clean up Kansas City. We don’t need to pick up after ourselves because a few dozen TV cameras will be roving about and we don’t want to appear untidy.

We don’t need to paint the city streets and write phony headlines like, "Hoping for a Home Run" and "Jazz District Thrilled" to try and breath meaningfullness into a meaningless game that’s gonna be on national TV for a few short hours.

Who are we kidding?

This isn’t the sort of formal affair Kansas City needs to rent a tuxedo for. Nice slacks and a clean shirt will do fine. We don’t need to pretend this is like the 1964 World’s Fair in New York because frankly it’s not the 1964 Worlds Fair. Not even close.

Acting like this is a far bigger deal than it is makes us look like Podunk and Kansas City is not Podunk.

So go out, have a good time, do whatever it is you plan to do – and if some out of towner starts raving abou how cool it is that Kansas City got the All Star game, calmly look at him and say, "Who’s playing?’

As a little kid I faintly remember my parents having odd-sized 78 RPM vinyl records….

I didn’t understand much about them, other than they played at a rate of 78 revolutions-per-minute on a turntable versus the standard long playing record album of the day that played at 33 RPM. Then my older siblings struck teen, I learned about 45 RPM records. They were tiny by comparison, but packed a powerful punch in that they held only the very best songs. No filler.

At some point later in the 1960s do-it-yourself recorded music hit the mainstream marketplace.

They came before my time, but have you ever seen one of those old reel-to-reel tape recorders with giant spools of audio tape? They were pretty cool looking. Kinda like the old bicycles with those giant front tires on them were cool.

But like the gigundo-tired bikes, reel-to-reel tapes were unwieldy

So somewhere around the mid to late 1960s came a breakthrough and 4 Track tapes hit the scene. They were expensive – really expensive at first – but you could record the exact songs you wanted in the exact order and play them at home or….if you had more big bucks, in your car.

Four track didn’t last long though because before it could take off it was replaced by a lesser technology that was cheaper to make, the 8 Track tape.

However 8 Track tapes were problematic. I can’t tell you how many of them flew out of my car window in disgust while traveling down the highway at high speed. I know, I should have waited and disposed of them properly but it was maddening. And all too frequent.

Around that same time another technology, Audio Cassettes, was incubating in the marketplace.

Trouble was, cassettes musical fidelity was awful because they traveled at a speed of 1 7/8ths inchesper-second over the tape head producing a noisy, low quality sound.

And just like with cars and computers, speed is everything in music reproduction. By traveling so slow cassette tapes produced an inferior sound considered incapable of reproducing listenable music.

Eight track tapes ran at twice that speed at 3 3/4 inches per second. And reel-to-reel tapes could play at 7 1/2 inches per second, so cassettes were considered mere children’s toys until something called Dolby came along, that  eliminated much of  the noise and distortion inherent in cassettes up to that time.

Almost overnight 8 Track tapes were toast.

Cassettes were more reliable, smaller and thus easier to transport and store…and now better sounding.

Then in the mid 1980s the Compact Disc (CD) hit the marketplace and almost overnight vinyl records and audio cassettes began to go away. However until well into the 1990s, even the early 2000s some car manufacturers continued to include cassette players (along with CD players) in their cars.

Finally it got down to CDs only…until now.

The days of CD players in cars are numbered. Last year Ford became the first major car maker to announce it was doing away with them in its cars. With music, navigation and just about everything else migrating to smartphones, auto manufacturers are rapidly moving toward onboard infotainment systems that can be linked to people’s phones.

VHS videotapes and movies long since gave way to DVDs which are now on life support as evidenced by the current state of Blockbuster.

And certainly the death of audio and video software has not been kind to big box stores specializing in electronics like Best Buy and the now defunct Circuit City.

How much longer will we need librairies to store and catalogue physical books when they’re far more accessible sans the needless overhead expenses of staffing, heating and cooling and operating a physical library?

Minus the needless waste of billions of trees.

On the other hand, once just about everything is reduced to digital content how far will we be from where a few well-placed keystrokes could obliterate anything and everything.

My 15 year-old daughters still buy DVDs because for 10 or 15 bucks they can watch a video like a billion times instead of paying Amazon or the cable provider $3.99 or more for a 24 hour watching window. They download most of their music of course, but still buy the odd CD on occasion to sample the full album

And kids still buy, sell and trade physical video games, but for how long?

I remember the controversy when Apple was first to stop including floppy disc drives in its computers.

It was almost unthinkable. Now they’re doing away with DVD drives.

KC Confidential writer Matthew Donnelly suggested earlier today that if people wanted to find tickets for a soon-to-be sold out Sporting Kansas City game they should send out a tweet.

"Of course, if you want to go the old school route there’s always stubhub and the like," Donnelly wrote. "Those are an absolute last resort for me, though."

Hey, the times they are a changing…really fast!

I’m not a theater critic, but I’m playing one today…

So let me say up front, the opening night performance of The Addams Family at Starlight Theatre didn’t knock my socks off. Just as the musical didn’t for critics and audiences on Broadway. But hey, it’s a musical, based on a television show, based on a cartoon strip.

And it’s reportedly grossed more than $60 million on Broadway and that ain’t chump change.

Since then it’s been tweaked by writers and producers for the touring edition, However in the final analysis there still just isn’t enough in the way of catchy songs, plot or script writing to overcome the sweltering outdoor heat, even though Starlight has bent over backwards to provide complimentary water, ice and misting stations.

That said, an opening night audience of around 5,000 people plunked their money down and seemed to enjoy the show and get a few chuckles out of it in between pounding down cold drinks and fanning themselves.

I’s not like the Addams Family doesn’t try.

It’s just that the humor seems forced and bent on cashing in on Baby Boomer audiences via an over abundance of trite, pop culture references, sexual innuendo, political one liners with predictable dialogue.

Take Gomez (Douglas Sills) reference to wife Morticia’s (Sara Gettelfinger) dress being "cut down to Venezuela."

Speaking of which "It makes it look like she’s about to have a wardrobe malfunction," one theatergoer quipped.

Or thaty Gomez and Morticia’s first date was to playwright Arthur Miller‘s "Death of a Salesman?"

"Oh, how we laughed," Morticia cracked.

At one point the cast breaks into a dance routine that included the Bunny Hop, Twist and Frug. Who remembers those steps under the age of maybe 60…or 70? Morticia’s punchline comes when she yells out to "do the Rigamortis."

There’s not a lot to the plot.

Basically it’s the Addams Family hosting a meet and greet for daughter Wednesday‘s (Courtney Wolfson) fiancee (Brian Justin Crum) and his parents (Martin Vidnovic and Gaelen Gilliland).

On it goes with mediocre music and predictable joke line after predictable joke line.

Such as Morticia’s astonishment that her daughter could fall in love. "Little Wednesday Addams who would poison her brother just for a ride in the ambulance." Or when she says, "Something’s wrong with Wednesday. She’s in the kitchen smiling."

There are some touching, father-daughter moments like when Gomez wrestles with his sense of loss and sings, "Wednesday’s growing up, but I’m not ready."

There’s more...

"There are three things I would never do; lie to my wife, lie to my daughter or tell the truth," Gomez says.

And young son, Pugsley (Patrick D. Kennedy) murdering the childhood limerick, "Wednesday and Lucas sitting in a tree. K-i-l-l-i-n-g."

At one point Morticia leans on Gomez to call off the dinner party by explaining, "You’re the father. The father is the canceler."

Not that there aren’t a few gems.

Like when Morticia explains that, "Normal is an illusion. What’s normal for the spider is a calamity for the fly."

But for me it was mostly too far a stretch with schticks like Uncle Fester (Blake Hammond) quipping, "Was rehab right for Charlie Sheen?" Gomez mistaking Morticia for Cher, then going out of his way to tell her she was far more beautiful; the boyfriend’s mom comparing Wednesday and her son’s romance to, "Something everybody loves but nobody has…health care."

Essentially The Addams Family is a slightly darker version of Meet the Parents.

"Allow me to welcome you to our extremely normal home," Gomez tells his guests. "Sorry I’m late," Morticia says. "I was putting the apple pie on the windowsill to cool."

Then there’s a joke by Gomez about Morticia being "acrobatic" in the bedroom, and Pugsley wonders aloud, "What if (Wednesday) never tortures me anymore? What if she never nails my tongue to the bathroom floor?"

At one point Grandma (Pippa Pearthree) ambles on stage to the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It’s Worth" and shouts, "I am Spartacus!" before noting "There’s a couple of hotties out there just waiting to chow down on a grandma sandwich."

"We should have put you down years ago," Morticia cracks.

If all of this sounds good, you love seeing shows in the park at Starlight and don’t mind the heat, by all mean don’t miss The Addams Family now through Sunday at Starlight Theatre.

Me, I’ll be at the Crossroads with Fitz and the Tantrums.

Photographs by Katie Grogan