Misconceptions about flamenco dancing abound, Melinda Hedgecorth can attest. Most people these days seem to know it has nothing to do with gangly pink birds, but plenty still think it’s a simpler form of tango or salsa dancing — an assumption that Hedgecorth is eager to clear up. “It’s nothing like those things,” said Hedgecorth, a Kansas City native who has been studying and performing flamenco for ...
Kathi Fair never thought of herself as artistic, partly because she was never encouraged as a young person to do so. But now she knows better. “You can escape what people tell you,” she said of her artistic “awakening” in her mid-50s. That’s when, after working as an auctioneer and raising six kids with her husband, Bill Fair, she walked into a friend’s ceramic studio with the hankering to try ...
Jordin Silver doesn’t want any kids to grow up the way she did: confused, alone, knowing she’d be more loved if she were more “normal.” “I’m 37, and gay was AIDS, gay was bad,” she said of her childhood in Old Orchard Beach, a small tourist town on the coast of Maine. “Life could have been so much different,” if she could have spoken about her sexuality to a sympathetic adult, if someone could ...
The appearance of multiple low-flying military jets over Lawrence Friday morning rattled many residents. One caller — of many — to the Journal-World said the planes were so low that he could see details of the cockpit’s underside. He said he saw four jets make two very loud passes over Lawrence before flying off. Later Friday, Dan Beckler, a spokesman for Kansas Athletics, told the Journal-World that the ...
The administration badly mismanaged a lockdown Tuesday at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School, causing needless panic and trauma among the young students there, according to some parents familiar with the situation. “For more than 15 — possibly 20 — minutes” hundreds of children “contemplated their own demise,” said Andrea Albright, the mother of a seventh grader, in a letter she sent to ...
Story updated at 5:52 p.m. Tuesday A parent worried about his daughter’s safety broke a window late Tuesday morning at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School and helped pull several students out after he heard a report that someone with a gun was in the school. The report turned out to be a “miscommunication,” said Patrick Compton, a spokesman for the Lawrence Police Department. There was no threat, and ...