Nana’s birthday!

Finally, the day we’ve been ready to celebrate, Nana’s birthday! 

We started off the day with a look around the Power and Light district in Kansas City. The area is being fixed up quite a bit as you can tell from the addition of a pub called The Dubliner!
 
We walked over to the new Kaufmann Center for Performing Arts, a fabulous new performance theater that looks a lot like the Sydney Opera House. Nana had been on a tour of the Kaufmann Center and said that the architect was influenced by the opera house, so it wasn’t just our imagination. Like the opera house, this building makes you want to take a lot of photos of it.

John took a photo of us and really threw himself into the job.

Here’s Bartel Hall, a concert venue known as the place when I first saw a concert. Great show, Duran Duran! Here’s the official video for those readers who were not glued to MTV in 1982. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3W6yf6c-FA

Across the street, we stopped to get a closer look at some Jun Kaneko sculptures. Readers may remember his show a couple of years ago in Chicago’s Millennium Park: https://cndkmen.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/dangos-by-jun-kaneko/ and https://cndkmen.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/tanuki-in-millenium-park/

This is sounding like a very busy day but really it wasn’t too crazy paced feeling… we then went to the Liberty Memorial to have a look at the World War I museum inside there. One of the docents asked us what we were doing there and we said we were celebrating Nana’s birthday, and he didn’t miss a beat in asking why she chose to spend her birthday at the WWI museum, and just said very warmly “We’re glad you chose to spend your birthday with us!” It was a really great museum, we’re looking forward to going back to see some of the parts we went through pretty quickly.

Then we went to the Kemper Museum of Modern Art to have lunch in their cafe.
  

I liked this sculpture called Soap Stones and Steel. Best reuse idea for sardine cans EVER.
 

I’ll post some more photos after a bit but for now, hope you had a great birthday, Nana! It was great to see you both and we had a really fun time in KC!