It's been well over a week since Jimmy Buffett and his "Welcome to Fin Land" tour stopped in Kansas City at the Sprint Center, and we hope you've enjoyed our recap of the extravaganza. If you missed it, read about the pre-pre-party, the pre-party at Power and Light and our bar-dancing escapade at Pizza Bar.
Now, for the main event.
Jimmy Buffett in the Sprint Center was interesting and different. Lots of us had seen a Buffett show before, but for many of us, our previous concert experiences were outdoors in an amphitheater after a day of tailgating in the parking lot.
Dave commented that the stage setup didn't seem all that fancy. In fact, his actual words were something like "Our St. Patrick's Day parade floats are fancier than that." Sure, it was just a couple beach umbrellas and a fence, with a backdrop that changed scenery for almost every song.
I'm not going to rehash the entire set list here, mostly because I enjoyed the show instead of taking notes. If you want to read a good review of the show, check out this one. It even includes a set list.
A couple of random observations:
Sprint Center could sell a LOT more beer if they would open up more stations. Dave and Pat were annoyed by the amount of time they waited in line for a beer. Surely there are people willing to man the stations, and the income they generated would surely outweigh the payroll cost.
The hats were funny. The guy in front of Dave was wearing a contraption that included a plastic cup. Dave kept trying to drink out of it, and I thought it was empty. Until the guy sat down in his seat so hard the cup fell out, and the beer in it went straight into Dave's shoe. Karma?
Our party bus crew was very good at following directions. Everyone was back at the bus right after the concert, we didn't have to look for anyone and we didn't leave anyone behind.
We headed back to Lawrence, unloaded the buses and partied on at the Sandbar. It was a great night for the patio!
Last Saturday, downtown Lawrence was inadvertently the host of yet another crazy event: the Running of the Bullsh*tters.
This themed pub crawl required costumes (of course!) and was the brainchild of former Sandbar staffer Erick. He traveled to Spain last year and saw the famous Running of the Bulls, and decided that if we can't have exactly that in Lawrence, this was the next best thing.
Participants were asked to wear white pants, white shirts and red sashes. A lucky few were selected to be the bulls.
The pub crawl started off at the Sandbar and then the bulls herded everyone south to the Granada:
A cardboard cut-out of Michael Jordan that was inexplicably in the Sandbar's upstairs office made the trek, too. Someone apparently found humor in having a member of the Chicago Bulls along for the ride and his likeness was taped to a wooden oar.
Stops included the newly-reopened Jefferson's, the downtown Lawrence sign at the corner of 6th and Massachusetts and then a trip across the river to Johnny's.
Erick did a great job organizing this fun adventure. The weather was great and everyone enjoyed running (or walking) along Massachusetts, enjoying food and drink at some of our favorite places.
Last Saturday was ridiculously busy; in fact, it was one of our best sales days in a long time. Along with the Jimmy Buffett pre-party crowd and passengers on our party buses, a charity pub crawl was happening in downtown Lawrence. Even though we don't participate in the pub crawl, many of the teams stop by the Sandbar in between their official stops.
One of the teams, Team Brewhawks according to the message they so politely left ON OUR BUILDING, apparently had a little more time to play than the others.
When we got back from Jimmy Buffett later that night, we found this graffiti scrawled outside in between our windows.
So, Team Brewhawks, thanks very much. It's one thing to write on a bathroom wall (which we still don't love), but it's another to write on the outside of our building. Please, people, don't do this. Dave's already painted over it, but believe me he had plenty of other things to do without spending time on this.
Our final stop at Power & Light during our Jimmy Buffett pre-party extravaganza was Pizza Bar. We were hungry and pizza sounded good.
We walked in, took one look at the line and thought "we'll never get any food." But fate intervened- we spotted former bartender Erick, his sister Shelly and their parents across the bar, and as we headed their direction, we saw another familiar face. Remember the downtown Lawrence restaurant JoShmo's? The proprietor, Josh, is now working at Pizza Bar.
After a round of enthusiastic greetings, Josh quickly hooked us up with a pizza. And then he also introduced Dave, Peach and the world-famous Sandbar, Home of the Indoor Hurricane to the entire crowd at Pizza Bar. The man with the microphone has all the power.
We ate, we drank, we chatted. More people we knew showed up. And then Josh was back on the mike, announcing that Dave was going to do the Car Wash. On the "bar" in the middle of the restaurant. (It's really just a strange stone-like divider that's about bar height.)
There's no getting Dave off of bars. He, and several more fearless followers, stayed up there for one more song and danced to "YMCA." There's video of that too:
And then, after all our fun at Pizza Bar, it was time to go see the man, the legend, Jimmy Buffett.
Please excuse the brief interruption of the Jimmy Buffett Extravaganza while we tell you about the second charity event we participated in over the weekend. (It was a busy weekend, if you couldn't tell already!)
Our staff and friends have participated in Bowl for Kids Sake, a fundraiser for Douglas County Big Brothers Big Sisters, for a number of years now. This year, a new event was added: a special bowling day for the hospitality industry, with teams from bars, restaurants and liquor stores.
The Sandbar put together a team full of not-very-good bowlers and one ace bowler. We had a great time bowling, even though most of us were tired from the Buffett concert the night before. Bartender Heather and her husband Ken celebrated their one year wedding anniversary, and the lucky couple both won gift certificates at the event! They prompty exchanged "gifts," as Becki pointed out that the first year's gift is, in fact, supposed to be paper.
We were amused that the team next to us was "Team Super Dave." It was not a rogue team captained by our own Super Dave, who served as a cheerleader instead, along with Jana and Bettina.
It was a great event, and the Bowl For Kids Sake committee deserves a round of applause for their dedication!
The buses were loaded and we were off to Power & Light!
After what seemed like an extremely short trip- most of which was spent, at least on bus #2, trying to get the sound system working so we could listen to Sandbar music, and also dodging the slow-to-move Ktag gates at the tollbooth on I70- we arrived at the Kansas City Power & Light District.
As soon as everyone could hop off the buses, our Sandbar crew disappeared into the throngs of parrotheads. Grand Boulevard was closed for a block or two, and there were some random booths set up in the street, but the real party was in the KC Live area. A tropical band was playing and there were parrotheads everywhere.
We realized quickly while walking through the crowds that a lot of people had heard of the Sandbar. Many people in our group had on our commemorative concert T-shirts, and everywhere we went we heard "Hey, Sandbar!" or "It's Dave from Sandbar!"
Surprisingly, it didn't take long to find people we knew in the huge crowds. Brit and Megan, a pair of former bartenders who met at the Sandbar while working together on Saturday nights and are now married, met up with us at Johnny's Tavern:
We traveled from bar to bar, which is easy to do in the P&L with its open arrangement and lax Missouri liquor laws. We started at Johnny's Tavern, where we also found our man on the street Pat, and wandered back to the tropical-themed Shark Bar, which Dave has never visited. At Shark Bar, we ran into a couple who love the Sandbar so much that when they got married last year, they stopped at the bar with their wedding party before going to their reception:
And finally, after realizing Shark Bar can never be as cool as our own tropical bar, we moved downstairs to Pizza Bar, where we ran into some more familiar faces. Stay tuned for stories about our fun at Pizza Bar, because they're good ones.
