umsl | I don’t know about you, but I was over holiday music before Thanksgiving this year. Of course, songs about the holiday season’s first holiday would take up the bottom half of a dog-eared, faded sheet of paper with Great-Aunt Gertie’s sweet potato pie casserole (featuring mini-marshmallows!) typed on the top half, single-spaced, with a 1928 Underwood. Well, the tiresome lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Wood, to Grandmother’s House We Go!” used to be down there until some ornery kid spent hours rubbing them out with a big pink eraser. The great existential question, of course, is who hid all the great Thanksgiving songs? They couldn’t all have been performed by Wayne Newton. Well, here comes a different spin on holiday tunes that probably doesn’t include that unfortunate modern classic about Grandma getting run over by a reindeer. Think very classy … and quite brassy. Plus, there’s no charge! The United States Air Force Band of Mid-America will perform its “Spirit of the Season’’ concert Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. at UMSL’s Touhill Performing Arts Center in the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall. Although admission to this family-friendly, all-ages event is free and open to the public, tickets are required. This year, Santa himself will give a special guest reading of “Hababy’s Christmas Eve.” After the performance, Santa and Mrs. Claus will be available to meet with young guests. For tickets, visit usafboma.eventbrite.com.
the metro
Any of you who’ve read this column for awhile may recall some of the antics of the dumb criminals we cover from time to time. We tend to avoid the police blotter these days, but a few perps and perpetrations I’ll not soon forget. Like the bank robber whose haul the teller dispensed in small bills, which fell out of his pockets like leaves, making a trail for police to follow through U. City and Clayton all the way to the Metrolink station. Some of my favorite knuckleheads to strut their stuff lately have been billionaires. By the time Elon Musk is done with Twitter—in, oh, a few more weeks—he’ll probably be begging Trump for a special deal on Truth Social. Not to buy the former president’s social network, mind you. Just to join. I wonder whether Trump will charge him $8 for an extra-special check mark. I’m pretty sure Musk would’ve charged Trump—would the world’s richest man leave money on the table? Well, other than that $44 billion for a bunch of circuits, a whole lot of hot air and some measly intellectual capital. Meanwhile, I bet Mark Zuckerberg is wishing he hadn’t screwed over all of his Harvard classmates. I hear the first billion dollars is the hardest, and then the automatic raises start to kick in. Finally, what’s to be said about whatshisname, the Amazon CEO, whose generous ex-wife MacKenzie Scott is angling for sainthood with her divorce settlement, a hundred million bucks at a time. Jeff Bezos—that’s the name of the knucklehead whose biggest concern is whether his superyacht can sail under a bridge in Holland.
hazelwood
At the POWERplex in Hazelwood, for our blurb this issue we could go with one of two ledes, based on recent developments. Let’s start with the one about best-laid plans, mixed with the cinematic aphorism, “If you build it, they will come.” Or, based on the apparently long-held municipal wishes for an area that hasn’t managed to find its footing since the early 2000s, when the original St. Louis Mills mall was built: “You can’t fight city hall.” You see, we’d heard rumblings before our Nov. 16 issue that the hoped-to-be future home of one of the country’s largest youth sports resorts might actually be replaced by an industrial park. The place has been there a long time, and ‘they’ still ain’t comin’—if not for the area’s only Cabela’s outdoors emporium and the Ice Zone skating complex, the acreage is well on its way to resembling an industrial park, anyhow. Anyone who could have found a way to monetize thistles and other noxious weeds, meanwhile restoring deteriorated and crumbling concrete, would’ve been off to making their first zillion dollars by now. OK, then: It never came together as a shopping mall, so now what? Well, in one version of a perfect world, Dan Buck et al. may have had first dibs. Their wildly innovative concept didn’t float any boats five years ago in Chesterfield, the first projected location for Buck’s Big Sports group’s enterprise (and others, including Mike Matheny of the Redbirds). For a while afterward, it could have been St. Peters. But that’s all conjecture, and in the past anyhow. A Cleveland-based developer has scooped up the defunct mall for an undisclosed price, and if everybody can play well together, a scaled-down version of the POWERplex is in the offing. For one thing, the developer has retrofitted once-abandoned malls for similar purposes. For another, the concerns would be at opposite sides of the property and operate at different times of day. So, let’s play ball, and let’s all play fair. We’re already into extra innings.
notable neighbors
wildwood
Maybe the aroma of coffee brewing intoxicates you, or perhaps you’re one for whom just a whiff of beans grinding will send you to the moon. The elixir of life was the main topic of conversation while sitting across a coffee shop table from Deborah Reinhardt, author of St. Louis Coffee: A Stimulating History. While perusing the menu at Blueprint Coffee on The Loop (name-checked near the end of her book), my eyes snap to Italian Espressoda, and my mouth starts to water. Meanwhile, to the untrained eye, not to mention palate, Reinhardt orders something right out of chemistry class: It comes in an Erlenmeyer flask and indeed has several active ingredients, two of which are not sugar or cream. (It was a filtered pour of two coffee varieties halfway around the world from each other, Reinhardt confirms. It’s a seasonal blend called Tekton. Some beans come from Chiapas, Mexico; the others, from Riripa, Ethiopia. They’re roasted in-house at Blueprint.) “I’ve been drinking coffee from the get-go,” Reinhardt says, as we sit down between a young man and woman both focused on their laptops. Reinhardt takes her coffee black because it brings out the unique character and flavor of the particular roast. Cream and sugar may have been introduced to mask the heinous taste of cheap, mass-produced brands like Maxwell House and Folger’s, which were as common as old Kleenex by the end of World War II, and now, they’re among heaven knows how many other mediocre blends crowding supermarket shelves. But something great has been percolating here and has been since the 1800s. The Gateway City was a key stop for miners, trappers and settlers heading west, so offices and wholesaler warehouses lined the riverfront. Railroads and steamboats brought an abundance of goods, including green coffee. By the early 20th century, St. Louis—with more than 70 roasting companies—was the coffee capital of our still-expanding nation. Some businesses—including Blanke, Forbes and Evans—folded. Ronnoco (backwards, it’s O’Connor; see?) is still chugging, alongside newer generation roasters such as Kaldi’s and dozens more. Could you identify a regional coffee magnate? This book will help. “A lot of people can name the beer barons,” notes Reinhardt, with a grin, “but few know who the coffee barons were.” Today’s creative roasters, blenders and baristas continue to influence our culinary culture. The StL is remarkable for shoes and brews, but we’re unlike somewhere such as Kansas City, the self-proclaimed world capital of barbecue. Reinhardt has been making headway in that regard. The native St. Louisan and award-winning travel and food writer co-wrote A Culinary History of Missouri: Foodways & Iconic Dishes of the Show-Me State with Suzanne Corbett. As author of Delectable Destinations: A Chocolate Lover’s Guide to Missouri, Reinhardt posits that quality chocolate and a good cup of coffee are two of life’s greatest pleasures. “Having written about chocolate before this, I see the similarities,” she says. In 2020, Reinhardt launched her food blog, Three Women in the Kitchen, with a focus on comfort food and wisdom from her mother, grandmother and other home cooks. Visit threewomeninthekitchen.com and you’ll probably see why it’s already received state and national awards.
