Steve Goodman: Facing the Music
by Clay Eals

Read Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE: MAY 21, 1984

'Glad you’re alive — spread it around'

Death will take center stage tonight. The audience knows it. So does the entertainer. Both may hint at it, but no one plans to admit it outright. For despite its eerie unpredictability, this death will rattle with joy, see nearly everything with wit and breathe life into mortality. Or so everyone hopes.

* * *

The sun — the world’s unforgiving timekeeper — is setting on the day’s 82- degree swelter. Dozens of thirty-somethings eat the last bites of their restaurant dinners in the bustling, historic Westport district, climb into their cars and drive 10 blocks west to join scores of others from all over Kansas City for an 8 o’clock show.

Cruising through mostly residential Midtown, along the West 39th thoroughfare, less than a block past the busy, six-lane Southwest Trafficway, they pass the Nichols Lunch truck stop, a corner liquor store, a 24-hour escort service and the Stooges Three bar. They pull into an insurance-company parking lot on the north side of 39th, across the street from a dilapidated, 1930s-era building. Once a movie theater, the edifice sports a second floor that has evolved from a ballroom to a dinner theater and, finally, to a music club named Parody Hall.

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