This past Friday, we had the chance to escape the sububble (“suburban bubble” sounds more redundant) for our first First Friday in quite some time. How exciting it was to drive down to the Crossroads, spend 20 expletive-laced minutes searching for parking, and see the pedestrian traffic swarming downtown Kansas City like it was a normal Tuesday evening on the Upper West Side. And the crowds were young. It was actually nice to feel a bit old, and the hipster/weirdness quotient—the kind you would expect to find in most any urban core—both delighted and disturbed me a little.
At the corner of 19th Street and Baltimore, we ran into Greg Azorsky, the creator and vendor of, among other things, KC Cool, a new line of (truly) original t-shirts that project a slightly sardonic attitude, meant to be worn and seen by people who take an insider’s pride in Kansas City’s up-and-coming present (and storied past) as a center of arts, culture, and food.
I had the opportunity, not long ago, to help Greg by writing the copy for his web site. So rather than reinvent the wheel here, I’ll let you click over to kc-cool.com, where you can see, you know, the original wheel.
If only to prove that I could never in good conscience work for an organization I did not support, I purchased one of Greg’s fine shirts, similar to the one pictured here (my physique is not currently quite as similar to the one pictured here).
What are those? Shuttlecocks? Hey, if you’re KC Cool, you’ll get it.
I’m sure Greg happily would have paid me in t-shirts in the first place, but this way, he was able to see a direct return on his investment. You, too, should get one or more, at the next First Friday, or now on the web (open every Friday and all the days in between). A great gift for anyone with a torso.