photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Sunflower State Dance Studio, 2004 E. 23rd Street, is pictured on Oct. 29, 2021.

Some news and notes from around town:

• I’ve had many dancing partners who I am sure would have enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a “virtual dance.” While their feet may love the idea, it is not an ideal arrangement for a dance studio, yet many studios found themselves in such a situation during the height of the pandemic.

“It was very rough,” Rachel Weitekamp, owner and director of Sunflower State Dance, said of the pandemic business environment for her studio. “We did online classes during the quarantine period. We are seeing a slow increase in students coming back.

“I’m hoping that increases as younger students are able to get vaccinated. I think a lot of younger families are ready to get out and find some normalcy again.”

Sunflower State, in fact, is betting on it. The business has recently moved and expanded. The company in recent weeks moved from its longtime home in Eudora to 2004 E. 23rd St. in Lawrence. The space — it occupies a building that for a short time was a funeral home and before that was a spa store — is about 800 square feet bigger than the business’ former location.

The reason for the move also is related to a pandemic lesson learned: “I just kept finding that businesses that own their own space are doing a little bit better,” Weitekamp said. “My goal was really to own my own space.”

Weitekamp did strike a deal to purchase the building, and she plans to use the extra space to accommodate more dance students and to create a new arts program that she hopes to offer to children.

The business focuses on teaching students 2 to 18 years old a variety of dance styles, including ballet, tap, jazz, modern, hip-hop and others. The studio teaches students ranging from those who are just looking for a fun activity to those who want to dance competitively. Plus, the studio hosts an annual performance where every student gets a chance to dance in a presentation of “The Nutcracker.”

With a strong base of clients in Eudora, Weitekamp said she is hoping she can keep those customers and draw from a larger region in Lawrence, which she said will be one of the drawing cards of the studio.

“We want to be kind of a melting pot for the surrounding area,” she said. “We want students to have a chance to meet people outside of their normal niche and make some lifelong friends.”

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Lawrence is basically average, but is right next door to pretty darn good, at least according to a recent report. A new report on the “Best Small Cities In America” was released on Tuesday, and Lawrence ranked in the middle of the pack nationally but was considered one of the best small cities in Kansas — except for all of those communities in neighboring Johnson County.

The report is from the financial website WalletHub, and I’m not sure I would make it my prime determiner in choosing my next place to live. However, it does compile a lot of statistics from the Census and other government databases for about 1,300 U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 people. So, there is some value in keeping an eye on the rankings, although the overall report is still pretty subjective given that the report’s authors have to decide how much to weight each statistic they gather. (How much credit should a community get for coffee shops per capita versus median family income, for example?) So, in some ways, the report may be more useful in seeing how much a community has changed in the rankings over the years.

In that regard, Lawrence has been holding relatively steady for the last few years, but that hasn’t been the case for some communities, like our college town cousin, Manhattan. Lawrence this year ranked in the 53rd percentile, meaning we were better than 53% of the other communities in the rankings. In the 2017 report, we ranked in the 54th percentile, according to an article I wrote back then. In that same report, Manhattan was in the 45th percentile, but now it has fallen to the 37th percentile.

What hasn’t changed is Lawrence in 2017 was the top-ranked Kansas community outside of Johnson County. That remains the case, as three Johnson County communities fared better than Lawrence, with Leawood continuing to be ranked as one of the best small cities in America. Here’s a look at all the Kansas communities that were ranked in the report with their 2021 ranking versus their 2017 ranking.

• Leawood: 99th percentile 2021; 99th percentile 2017

• Lenexa: 89th percentile 2021; 88th percentile 2017

• Shawnee: 88th percentile 2021; 85th percentile 2017

• Lawrence: 53rd percentile 2021; 54th percentile 2017

• Manhattan: 37th percentile 2021; 45th percentile 2017

• Salina: 33rd percentile 2021; 46th percentile 2017

• Hutchinson: 32nd percentile 2021; 29th percentile 2017

• Dodge City: 28th percentile 2021; 52nd percentile 2017

• Leavenworth: 21st percentile 2021; 25th percentile 2017

• Garden City: 19th percentile 2021; 39th percentile 2017

As you can see, the rankings do reinforce a general perception that exists in Kansas: Communities are facing some real struggles basically everywhere west of Lawrence.

The report ranked each community on several broad factors: affordability, economic health, education/physical health, quality of life and safety. Here’s how Lawrence ranked in each category. For context, there are 1,322 communities in the study, so any ranking below 661 means a community is above average, while everything above 661 means the community performed below average.

• Affordability: 666

• Economic health: 973

• Education/health: 453

• Quality of life: 103

• Safety: 403

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Wonder Gallery, 15 W. Ninth Street, is pictured on Oct. 19. 2021.

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A local art gallery is emerging from its pandemic shutdown and will return with more than just gallery art to offer patrons.

The Wonder Gallery, 15 W. Ninth St., is reopening on Oct. 29 as part of the Final Fridays art event in downtown.

If you remember, the gallery is an offshoot of the downtown Lawrence retailer Wonder Fair, which sells a variety of stationery, art supplies and other such goods. When Wonder Gallery reopens, it also will have a new retail component, the business said via a press release.

Plans call for the space to have an “expanded focus on presenting beautiful and useful items for the home, alongside a utopian bookstore.”

The gallery, though, will continue to host exhibitions of featured artists. The first show will feature local printmaker Matthew Willie Garcia. He specializes in what he calls 4-D printmaking, with many of his works featuring undulating ribbons and curves. The fourth dimension part of his works also refers to the dimension of time, which is highlighted in many of his pieces that draw “from ideas of quantum mechanics, cosmology and astrophysics to speculate what it looks like to have a queer fluid existence,” Wonder Gallery said in its release about the show.