Previous Special Events

Children and parents are invited to be part of monthly interactive story times presented by the Coterie Theatre. Coterie Theatre artists read from favorite children's books while audience members enjoy an opportunity to "jump into the story" and then participate in an improvised story of their own making.

Over nearly two decades Lady Bird Johnson recorded 47 oral history interviews with historian Michael Gillette and his colleagues at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Now Gillette details Johnson’s stories of marriage to a powerful man, of creating a media empire, and of encounters with first ladies like Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bess Truman.

The six-week America’s Music program is a film and discussion series that looks at popular music from blues to bluegrass, Broadway to rock ‘n’ roll. Each event features films followed by a discussion (and frequently performances) led by UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade.

Featured are the documentaries Latin Music USA: Bridges (2009) and From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale (2006), and a discussion/perfromance with KC rapper Denzel "D/Will" Williams.

This postcard tour of a bygone era offers views of Independence Boulevard (Kansas City’s first boulevard) and the rugged beauty of the city’s only urban Scenic Byway, Cliff Drive. Other featured spots include the Concourse, the Kansas City Museum, and breathtaking vistas across the Missouri River Valley.

Local historian and postcard collector Michael Bushnell presents a series of postcard tours of Kansas City neighborhoods. Bushnell is publisher of The Northeast News, a weekly community newspaper that serves the Historic Northeast area of Kansas City. He is also the author of Historic Postcards of Old Kansas City.

Author Mary Collins Barile observes Cinco de Mayo with a look at the colorful history of the Santa Fe Trail and its importance to the Kansas City region. For decades in the early 19th century this economic and cultural conduit linked the frontier settlements of Missouri with the colonies of Mexico, and was the invasion route of U.S. military forces during the Mexican-American War of 1846.

Hollywood has long been known as the Dream Factory. But what happens when the dream dies?

That's the story told by director Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard, which finds a broke screenwriter (William Holden) becoming the kept boy toy of a fading silent movie star (Gloria Swanson) who is so bent on a comeback that she's sliding into madness.

Four award-winning children’s authors, Brian Selznick, Richard Peck, Sarah Weeks, and Avi, are joining forces at the Kansas City Public Library for a program of the Authors Readers Theatre that adapts their popular books for dramatic presentation.

The evening is part of the Library’s Friday Night Family Fun series and this event is for ages 10 and up only.

On May 4, 1886, a peaceful labor rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago erupted in violence. Four anarchists were convicted and hanged for their purported role in a bombing that resulted in the death of seven police officers and at least four civilians.

For much of a century the executions of the anarchists were widely viewed as a miscarraige of justice. But in a discussion of his book The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age, Timothy Messer-Kruse argues that the prosecution was solid. It was the anarchists’ lawyers who chose to ignore a sound defense and instead use the trial for political grandstanding.

The six-week America’s Music program is a film and discussion series that looks at popular music from blues to bluegrass, Broadway to rock ‘n’ roll. Each event features films followed by a discussion (and frequently performances) led by UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade.

The Rock evening features a screening of The History of Rock n Roll: Plugging In (1995) and a live performance by rock legend Bob Walkenhorst, singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Rainmakers.

The Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre continues its seventh season of Script-in-Hand performances with an extension of 2012’s popular female-focused Women of the Years series.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) became the voice of an entire generation of women who came of age in the 1980s. In The Heidi Chronicles she follows her intelligent, well-educated heroine from college through a career as an art historian. But Heidi is less sure of herself when it comes to men.