The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 57

CALENDAR Saturday October 19 1991 The Kansas City Star E-7 A guide to selected erents in the area 11901 Wornall Road (942-8400 Ext 289) WEDNESDAY TODAY FRIDAY 7:30 pm Martin City Melodrama Vaudeville Co 13440 Holmes Road (942-7576) A Woman Called Truth: 8 the Coterie Crown Center (474-6552) Shear Madness: 8 pm Stage Two Westin Crown Center hotel lobby (842-9999) Murder on the Nile: The Wyandotte Players 8 pm Performing Arts Center Kansas City Kansas Community College 7250 State Ave (596-9690) Purlie Victorious: 6 pm Tiffany's Attic 5028 Main St (561-7529) The Pecos Bill Show: Theatre for Young America 1 1 am and 2 pm Overland Theatre 7204 80th St Overland Park (648-4600) The Mousetrap: Lee Summit Community Theatre 7:30 pm Lee's Summit Christian Church 800 NE Tudor Road (525-5777) Music Kansas City Chamber Soloists: 7:30 pm Unity on the Plaza 707 47th St (235-2700) Sports Kansas City Blades vs Salt Lake City Golden Eagles: 7:35 pm Kemper Arena (931-3330) Theater Other Money: Theater League 8 pm Quality Hill Playhouse 303 10th St (421-7500) Lend Me a Tenor: 1 and 8 pm American Heartland Theatre Crown Center (842-9999) Purlie Victorious: 6 pm Tiffany's Attic 5028 Main St (561-7529) A Woman Called Truth: 10 a the Coterie Crown Center (474-6552) Hansel and Gretel: Ibsen Theatrical Company 10 a and 1 pm 7221 North Oak Trafficway Gladstone (436-0299) Shear Madness: 8 pm Stage Two Westin Crown Center hotel lobby (842-9999) SUNDAY Nat (David Howard left) and Midge (William Jay Marshall) argue over rights to a park bench in Missouri Repertory Theatre production of Not Music Paillard Chamber Orchestra with Michel Debost flute and Gerard Jarry violin: Friends of Chamber Music 8 pm Folly Theater 300 12th St (561-9999) Michel Debost flute master class (includes performance): 4 pm Grant Recital Hall UMKC 50th and Cherry streets (235-2700) UMKC Conservatory Choreofest: 7:30 pm White Recital Hall UMKC 50th and Cherry streets (235-2700) Sports Kansas City Blades vs Sait Lake City Golden Eaglet: 7:35 pm Kemper Arena (931 -3330) Theater A Woman Celled Truth: 10 a the Coterie Crown Center (474-6552) Winnie the Pooh: City Theatre 2 and 7 pm Roger Sermon Community Center Truman and Noland roads Independence (836-7195) Other People'e Money: Theater League 8 pm Quality Hill Playhouse 303 10th St (421-7500) Ten Little Indians: Northgate Community Theatre 8 pm Northgate Community Education Center 2117 NE 48th St (454-7225) Lend Me a Tenor: 8 pm American Heartland Theatre Crown Center (842-9999) Purlie Victorious: 6 pm Tiffany's Attic 5028 Main St (561-7529) Compiled by Devin Snell The Mousetrap: Lee's Summit Community Theatre 3 pm Lee Summit Christian Church 800 NE Tudor Road (525-5777) Shear Madness: 2 pm Stage Two Westin Crown Center hotel lobby (842-9999) Music Kansas City Symphony with Alicia da Larrocha piano: 8 pm Lyric Theatre 1 1th and Central streets (471-0400) Overland Stag Chorus: barbershop quartet 2 and 8 pm Cultural Education Center Johnson County Community College 12345 College Blvd (469-3846) Kansas City Civic Orchestra: 8 pm Rockhurst High School 9301 State Line Road (836-8742) Joseph Hagedom guitar: Kansas City Guitar Society 7:30 pm St Peters United Church of Christ 1 10th Street and Holmes Road (235-2700) Double Reed Ensemble: 1:30 pm Grant Recital Hall UMKC 52nd and Holmes streets (235-2949) Sports Kansas City Blades vs Phoenix Roadrunners: 7:35 pm Kemper Arena (931-3330) Theater I'm Not Rappaport: Missouri Repertory Theatre 4 and 8 pm Helen Spencer Theatre 50th and Cherry streets (235-2700) Torch Song Trilogy: MCC Theatre Company 8 pm Metropolitan Community Church of Kansas City 3801 Wyandotte St (931-0750) Other People'a Money: Theater League 2 and 8 pm Quality Hill Playhouse 303 1 0th St (421 -7500) Lend Me a Tenor: 8 pm American Heartland Theatre Crown Center (842-9999) Japango: Missouri Repertory Theatre Second Stage Reading 7:30 pm Unicorn Theatre 3820 Main St (235-2700) Hansel and Qretel: Ibsen Theatrical Company 2 pm 7221 North Oak Tratficway Gladstone (436-0299) Coup Clucks: Froghead Theatre Productions 8 pm 233 GEB Johnson County Community College 12345 College Blvd Overland Park (469-3846) A My Name la Alice: 8 pm David Theatre 4200 NW Riverside St Riverside (381-9017) Frankenstein and Reading Ritlng ft THURSDAY MONDAY Music Thilde Beuing German lieder: master class (includes performance) 7:30 pm Grant Recital Hall UMKC 52nd and Holmes streets (235-2949) Danish Boys Choir: 7:30 pm Christ Lutheran Church 6700 NW 72nd St Platte Woods (Call (816) 238-1703 Avila College music department: 8 pm Goppert Theatre Avila College Theater The Scarecrow: Out-m-the-Cold Players 8 pm 8th Street Cafe Theatre 323 Eighth St (931 -0035) Music Luther Vandross with Slnbad and Sounds of Blackness: 7 pm Kemper Arena (931-3330) Hillside Christian Church Choir and Raytown Christian Handbells: 7:30 pm Raytown Christian Church 6108 Blue Ridge Blvd (358-0292) Jacomo Chorale: 3 pm John Knox Village Pavilion 520 NW Murray Road Lee's Summit (524-8400 Ext 2238) John Obetz pipe organ and Randall Wolfgang oboe: Cathedral Artists Series 4:30 pm Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral 13th Street and Broadway (474-8260) Robert Satterlee piano: Music in the Simpson House 3 and 8 pm Simpson House 4509 Walnut St (235-2700) Avila College Symphony Orchestra with Alan Smith cello: 3 pm Goppert Theatre Avila College 11901 Wornall Road (942-8400 Ext 289) Theater Not Rappaport: Missouri Repertory Theatre 2 pm Helen Spencer Theatre 50th and Cherry streets (235-2700) Torch Song Trilogy: MCC Theatre Company 2 pm Metropolitan Community Church of Kansas City 3801 Wyandotte St (931-0750) Japango: Missouri Repertory Theatre Second Stage Reading 7:30 pm Unicorn Theatre 3820 Main St TUESDAY Purlie Victorious: noon and 6 pm Tiffany's Attic 5028 Main St (561-7529) Other Money: Theater League 2 and 7 pm Qual'ty Hill Playhouse 303 10th St (421-7500) A Woman Called Truth: 2 pm the Coterie Crown Center (474-6552) The Scarecrow: Out-in-the-Cold Players 8 pm 8th Street Cafe Theatre 323 Eighth St (931 -0035) Murder on the Nile: The Wyandotte Players 2:30 pm Performing Arts Center Kansas City Kansas Community College 7250 State Ave (596-9690) Hansel and Gretel: Ibsen Theatrical Company 2 pm 7221 North Oak Trafficway Gladstone (436-0299) Coup Clucks: Froghead Theatre Productions 8 pm 233 GEB Johnson County Community College 12345 College Blvd Overland Park (469-3846) Frankenstein and Reading Riting ft Rhythml: 3:30 and 7:30 pm Martin City Melodrama Vaudeville Co 13440 Holmes Road (942-7576) Lend Me a Tenor: 2 pm American Heartland Theatre Crown Center (842-9999) The Pecos Bill Show: Theatre for Young America 2 pm Overland Theatre 7204 80th St Overland Park (648-4600) Theater Other People's Money: Theater League 8 pm Quality Hill Playhouse 303 10th St (421-7500) Murder on the Kaw: dinner theater cruise 6 pm Missouri River Queen 1 River City Drive Kansas City Kan (281-5300) A Woman Called Truth: 10 a the Coterie Crown Center (474-6552) Purlie Victorious: 6 pm Tiffany Attic 5028 Main St (561-7529) Lend Me a Tenor: 8 pm American Heartland Theatre Crown Center (842-9999) Times and dates of events listed may change Suggestions for listings can be accepted until 5 pm the Monday before publication Include a telephone number and mail items to StyleProfile Calendar The Kansas City Star 1729 Grand Ave Kansas City Mo 64108 Publication cannot be guaranteed For additional listings of concerts or nightclub performances see the Preview section of The Star on Friday For additional art gallery and other fine-arts listings see the Arts section in The Star on Sunday journey of discovery led to Cottonwood Falls Kan Continued from E-1 Cottonwood Falls celebrates debut with festivities William Least Heat-Moon Name: William Trogdon Pseudonym: William Least Heat-Moon Age: 52 Family wife Linda Education: Graduated from Southeast High School in Kansas City 1957 Received bachelor of arts degree in English in 1961 degree 1962 doctorate in English literature 1973 and in journalism 1978 all from the University of Missouri-Columbia By The Star Staff tion ceremonies in front of the courthouse 2 to 5 pm: Readers can purchase copies of PrairyErth and have them autographed by the author All the books sold will be stamped with a special Chase County seal 5 pm: buffalo barbecue on the courthouse lawn Cottonwood Falls is about 18 miles west of Emporia Kan or about 120 miles southwest of Kansas City Take Interstate 35 west to Emporia US 50 west to Kansas 177 at Strong City Kansas 177 south about 'h miles to Cottonwood Falls COTTONWOOD FALLS Kan Many events are scheduled here today to observe the publication of PrairyErth the new book by William Least Heat-Moon: 10 am: live music just outside the Chase County Courthouse Pearl and Broadway streets 1 1 am: one-hour ques-tion-and-answer session with the author at the Chase County Historical Society 301 Broadway St one block north of the courthouse 1 pm: formal introduc 5740 TOUCH Call 816889-STAR and enter 5740 to hear William Least Heat-Moon discuss his career Exploring Chase County Eight years later PrairyErth may be perceived as a companion volume Even in interviews Heat-Moon gave in 1 983 he referred to another project describing in eastern In fact the idea for PrairyErth dates back to about the same time Heat-Moon came up with his Blue Highways concept I was looking at the Rand he said thought that maybe like to do something about the Flint Hills I liked the name I liked the idea of a distinctive place like While studying the maps Heat-Moon noticed an area where roads and highways seemed to fall away was a blankness and then a town named Cottonwood he said name I wondered if Cottonwood Falls looked like what I thought it would look like Within a year I was out there to look around and it did I liked the look of the whole county in Beginning in 1983 Heat-Moon began a second quest The property he had chosen Chase County turned out to include within its boundaries declared the what Heat-Moon as book He encountered little reticence Heat-Moon if intense on paper is approachable in person bearded and bespectacled standing just under 6 feet tall and wearing his graying hair loose over his ears Only one person a Texas woman who owns a good portion of Chase County declined to cooperate with him "People knew who I was" he said somebody sits there and asks 30 questions sooner or later the person answering is going to want to know why I had to tell them what I was doing I worried about was that they might try to feed me stories manipulate me I never suspected that nor saw it A bigger problem was organization After three years Heat-Moon had more material than he had direction He went however back to a favorite inner compass: maps In this case they were not Rand McNally road maps but US Geological Survey maps In an epiphany he describes in PrairyErth Heat-Moon laid the 25 maps that include Chase County on a floor He noticed that while 13 of the maps held only a part of it an inner 12 held most of it The resulting rectangle which Heat-Moon held in his mind gave him an archaeological grid from which he felt confident he could unearth representative samples I saw those 12 central maps on the floor the book began to fall into he said The grid survives as a graphic element of the book it is embossed on the hardcover of PrairyErth just as a Hopi maze of emergence a circular pattern could be found on the Blue Highways hardcover use maps to organize my thinking about land Both of my books have been about land Blue Highways though I know if people saw it that way is very much about land and the things upon it including Much of PrairyErth is written with a distinct sensitivity of what befell the Kansa tribe a nation moved about by government treaty until today it almost has vanished Heat-Moon who declares a portion of Osage ancestry and who makes the fate of those American Indians central to his book has endured curiosity over the years about his pseudonym The name he said was given him by his father lawyer Ralph Trogdon who was active in scouting and called himself Heat Moon His brother David six years older than he received the name Little Heat Moon name Least Heat Moon while it came from my father formally was bestowed by the Tribe of Heat-Moon said referring to the honor camping organization wlgke activities take place at the Roe locations of mounds and cemeteries and just where a particular plane went down in 1931 Eventually PrairyErth an old geologic term for the soils of the central grasslands according to the author reads like a guide to a new world albeit one being discovered by Heat-Moon alone He introduces the book in ceremonies today in Cottonwood Falls Kan (see box with story) going to be peculiar standing there with the book a finished Heat-Moon said been thinking about this book for the last eight years In a way still thinking about The original deadline for PrairyErth was 1985 Heat-Moon turned in the final draft only this past May Today PrairyErth is being positioned to be one of the major titles of the fall publishing season Everything about the book its price ($2495) and its heft (622 pages but even that is not enough as Heat-Moon will explain) hints of the heavyweight Finally his itinerary reads like the back of a rock fall 1 99 1 tour T-shirt: 30 cities in two months Detroit Boston New York and Philadelphia all will be visited just in October Heat-Moon recently seem sure which was more rigorous: writing a book or talking about it could be a two-book author I he said smiling like to be able to complete a trilogy but I may not make Fork in the road If charted the Heat-Moon literary career would have to begin in Columbia at the University of Missouri once said get more degrees than Heat-Moon said All at MU he received a in 1961 a in 1962 and a doctorate in English literature in 1973 Three years later at age 37 he returned to school and earned a bachelor of journalism degree He served in the US Navy in 1963 and 1964 In the 1970s he taught English at Stephens College a private school in Columbia Then came the now-providential fork in the road After losing his teaching job at Stephens through a staff reduction as well as seeing his marriage end Heat-Moon left town on a vague vision quest of his own In his Ford van which he dubbed he brought along notebooks a Nikon a copy of Walt Leaves of Grass and a copy of Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt whose University of Missouri course on Twilight of the Heat-Moon once had audited He drove east The idea went back to a moment in the mid-1970s after Heat-Moon had received his doctorate and was considering submitting a piece to National Geographic was looking at a Rand he said I could get inspired over had to do with travel I wondered if you could go from Washington DC to San Francisco and never get on a federal highway I started tracing with a finger along the map I found you could go a long way on these little roads that used to be blue in the old Rand In 1978 he did Three months and 13000 miles later Heat-Moon got off the highways returned to Columbia and got going One excerpt of his working manuscript appeared in the Columbia Daily Tribune as early as 1979 Heat-Moon would do a lot more work for the Tribune but not in its newsroom For three years he labored on the loading dock working 9 pm to 6 am Fridays and Saturdays The schedule left him free to write on weekdays The experience was about as enriching as his $2000 annual salary $2000 a year you even maintain Heat-Moon said many of my friends live in Columbia and if you afford to make phone calls or go see them friendship begins to fade Letters do it did that for three grim years I had a PhD and was out on a loading dock doing manual labor There was nothing wrong with that In fact it was salubrious for me being a writer and having to sit so much it was not salubrious for my self-esteem was tough All my friends and family even mention the book They were afraid of embarrassing me I think they thought off on this lark writing this book never going to be published not bring it And when you know people are thinking that way tough on me and on them Heat-Moon wrote several versions of what eventually emerged as Blue Highways Atlantic Little-Brown accepted it in 1982 That September the Atlantic Monthly excerpted it Later Time magazine and The New York Times Book Review declared Blue Highways to be among the better booksiif 1983 style and content as Heat-Moon details Chase better and lesser moments Lesser moments include the mob scavenging that followed the Rockne air crash in 1931 or more than 50 years later the intolerant mutterings he once heard in a county eatery as some began to feel their beer But in all instances following procedure he established on Blue Highways Heat-Moon submitted his material back to individual subjects out of courtesy and a quest for accuracy The response: ambivalence While no one objected to what he wrote Heat-Moon said nobody jumped up and down either I show people what written about them a little bit like showing somebody a photograph taken of them they seem disappointed the first time you heard your voice on a tape recorder? a shock probably even a disappointment think hearing their lives come back at them from somebody else they know how much has been left out a disappointment to them that the writer could do only that But even after so much time and care Heat-Moon still thinks PrairyErth is incomplete I turned in the manuscript in May I wished that I had 10 or 12 more months to work on it wanted to put a few more things in which sounds absurd given such a big book now But there are a few more details that I just have time to plug in got a list of them upstairs and been thinking about one day maybe doing a slightly revised version and putting these last facts in there just barely scratched the top of what exists there Bartle Scout Reservation near Osceola Mo Years ago while Heat-Moon was sitting in his New York office one confused reader happened to call with a question about Loose Hot Meat" At one point he added a hyphen between the Heat and Moon to avoid being called Mr Moon never claimed to be an Indian Having an Indian ancestor is quite a bit different from being an Indian I claim to speak for Native Americans in any way never have I do think the deepest roots of my writing come out of a Native American sensibility said from time to time that William Trogdon the En-glish-Irish American is the carpenter of my work and William Least Heat-Moon is the Full of details Heat-Moon claims two principal inspirations for PrairyErth One is The Pine Barrens a 1 968 book about a wilderness region in southern New Jersey by John McPhee But the intense sometimes dreamlike way in which Heat-Moon describes Chase County in PrairyErth can be attributed to a second book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men the Depression-era sharecroppers saga by James Agee and photographer Walker Evans Heat-Moon who earned his most recent degree in photojournalism had been struck by how Agee in his thick undiluted prose had tried to match the lens for detail wanted to put into words what a photograph dot That was part of my wish alsoJpS The finished booTintense in square section of tallgrass prairie left in the United It once included the hunting grounds of the Kansa (or Kaw) Indians It was where Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne died in March 1931 after his plane which had taken off from Kansas City crashed Heat-Moon today married to his second wife Linda commuted from Columbia to Chase County There he walked the tallgrass He went to Oklahoma to find a remaining half-dozen full-blooded members of the Kansa nation He researched the grisly details of death Although he wrote for four years the real writing start until after about three years of driving and walking the county He hard to pick out Heat-Moon said as walking through distant fields or along remote roads was judged sufficient evidence of eccentricity It long before he was known among Chase 3000 residents Heat-Moon said.