Are you holding yourself back? This week Ginny talks with stARTist and published author, Becky Blades. The two discuss the mental barriers preventing people from being creative, incredible motherly advice, and just doing that thing you want instead of talking about it.
In this episode of KC Leaders, we are overjoyed to be sitting down with Becky Blades. Becky’s career has spanned journalism, public relations, and the arts, and she has played a significant role in shaping the entrepreneurial and artistic landscape of Kansas City. Some of the key takeaways from this moving conversation between Virginia and Becky are:
If you’d like to stay up to date with Becky and her projects, you can find her on her: Website
Interested in grabbing a copy of one of her best selling books? Click this link: StARTistry
The vote is in- Becky’s favorite place to grab BBQ is: Jack Stack
Want to stay involved in the KC community? Here are some mentions from Becky and Virginia’s conversation:
Mayor Q // Comedy Club of KC // Heartland Tree Alliance
All episodes of KC Leaders brought to you by Catapult Creative Media.
Welcome back to another episode of the KC Leaders Podcast. I’m one of your hosts, Virginia, and I have the the delightful opportunity to sit here and talk to Becky Blades today. Becky is a multifaceted individual in the Kansas City area. She is an author, an artist, an entrepreneur, a mentor. She’s served on several boards in the past, and she has a lot of stuff that we’re going to be talking about today. So, Becky, thank you for being on the show. Welcome.
Thanks. I’m so glad to be here.
Awesome. I am glad to have you. Let’s just jump right in. Tell us about a bit of your background here in the Kansas City area.
Okay, I’ll start at the beginning. Three years old, my mom moved us here to take a job at the Kansas City Star as a typesetter. So it’s fun to have that history. She set type for 20 years, and then I grew up in the Midtown area and went to journalism school, having visited her at the Kansas City Star and being around journalists, that’s what I wanted to do. I went to journalism school. I got out and was a journalist for about a minute and a half because I realized that I like taking sides on things. I got a little bit into politics, a little bit into entertainment. My first job was an internship at Starlight Theater that turned into a full-time job. So that was my entrée into theater and the arts. And then I started working at ad agencies and doing communications, mostly public relations. And at age 30 in 1990, I… Oh, people can do the math on that. Shouldn’t have done that one. No, I started Blades and Associates, the public relations firm, and spent the next chunk of my career in that business. Then when it was time, when I wanted to do the writing and the art that I get to do now, I merged my business and ultimately sold it to TriZolo Communications, which is a wonderful name and family in marketing communications here in Kansas City.
So I’ve been very lucky and had a had a great ride. And along the way, I wanted to be a good corporate citizen. So really enjoyed getting to know what makes Kansas City tick. I served on the Chamber Board, was one of the founding leaders of the entrepreneurship group within the Chamber. I’ve been involved in the Hillsburg Mentoring Program since its early days and chaired Arts KC, really fell in love with the arts in Kansas City. And I’ve spent really the last 20 years with this almost a journalistic study of what makes Kansas City so great and what makes entrepreneurship and art and those ‘st-ART-istic’ fields really the lifeblood of a community and a life.
So there’s two things here I want to jump on. One, thank you. Thank you for all that you’ve done for this. Because as we’re sitting here today and us here at the podcast are getting to discover what it’s like living in Kansas City and all these amazing things. You had a direct part to play in that with your roles throughout the council.
Oh, thanks for saying that. No, that’s really cool. That’s so many people do.
That’s really awesome. And secondarily, tell me about ‘stARTistry’.
StARTistry is a word that… Actually, it became the name of my third company because I started a publishing company to publish my first book. It is exactly what it sounds like, Ginny. It is the art of starting, the art of acting on our ideas, the art of beginning and then following the creative process. We don’t know in family folklore exactly where the word came from, but it went something like this. After I sold the business, I was doing a lot of things around home. My girls were, I’m going to say, middle school and high school. And rather than coming home and hardly ever seeing me there because I was running a business, they would come home and I’d be either in the studio or dashing out to a board meeting or sitting in the kitchen on my computer. And one day my youngest daughter came in and said, Mom, what are you? Are you an artist? Are you a business person? Are you a… I can’t remember what else. And first I started with the labels talk. Honey, why does it matter? Why do you need to label me? Well, it really was that she wanted to tell her friends at school what her mom did.
And she was proud, had been proud of the fact that I owned a business. So she wanted to tell somebody what I was. Well, from the other room, her big sister said, “She’s a stARTist!” Because I think I had said, I’m starting this and I’m starting that because I did start a few other little companies. I think that just sat with me for a while. And then we just started using it around home, which is just… It says something, don’t you think? Absolutely. You know what it is. You’re a stARTist.
I’ve got lots of opinions on it. I just want to hear it from you first.
But early on, it wasn’t a compliment to some people because it implies, depending on where you’re coming from, and if you’re not embracing the creative process, it seems like, oh, maybe you start a lot and you don’t finish at all. Or maybe you start more than you can finish. Or maybe you have too many starts, too many plates in the air. And indeed, that would describe me. And really, that was the hypothesis I wanted to test out and probably spent 10 years consciously and subconsciously researching it. And Kansas City is the best place to do it because our entrepreneurship economy, community is so rich, our artistic community is so rich. Another genre of stARTist is engineers and inventors. Oh, my gosh. Do not get me started. Writers. Everyone is a stARTist, but those fields are rich with ideas of people who do know what I mean when I say stARTist. They embrace it, they get it. And so I went on a big interview spree, meeting people and hearing what made them tick. I realized that what made me tick, after I sold my business, was finding the people that I wanted to grow not old with, if you know what I mean.
I had finished my first act and thinking like, Who do I want to be around? What do I want to be doing? And it was people that act on their ideas, people who make things happen, leaders, creators of all kinds, and there were some commonalities. But there are also many differences in how those disciplines, shall we say, approach beginning and approach iteration and approach the cross-pollination of those skills and processes. So it was really fun to study it all, and I came out with some really very clear findings, and I think that’s why it was so easy to write a book.
A little bit of background. How did you tackle that? Because I personally think that a lot of people are… You dream about things, and then we put that label of, Oh, just dream about it. But then you wake up and you got to go do your reality work. But the starting things gets in people’s way. And like you were saying, thing, not only the blank slate gets in people’s way, but the, Well, I’ve already started one or two things, I haven’t finished them yet. How did you make that connection for people? Where did that go for you?
Good question. I think I had some ‘Ah-Ha’s’ in talking to groups. For example, I was teaching a class at the Kansas City Art Institute of senior illustrators. These were artists who had already been through most of their education. They were seniors, and they were clearly creative. And I wondered everybody I ever talked to had something they wanted to start that they hadn’t. And I thought, well, maybe artists, maybe they’re going to be the exception. So I asked every class, I taught, I think, three classes and asked them all the same question, Is there something you want to start that you haven’t started? They all said yes. Then I started asking, Why haven’t you? And after I stood back and extrapolated all the answers, the answers were all the same. They had all not started the things they wanted to start because they didn’t have enough. Enough of fill in the blank. We know them all. Time, resources, confidence, support, energy, passion, permission. Knowledge. So it’s always going to be enough to… And so then they don’t have enough, but they aren’t even starting. How do they know? Because we know that the creative process and only the creative process shows us what we actually need.
How did they know they didn’t have enough? A-ha, they don’t have enough to finish. When I asked them if they have enough to start, say they want to paint a mural on a bridge. How do you start a mural? It starts with a drawing. If your drawing is cool enough, somebody might find you a bridge, somebody might find you the money. But it started me then down a road of researching what hold the finishes, the finish has on our idea. And it just all fell out, of course. All the fear about starting, all the fear about creative initiative comes from fear of the finish. Finishing like we think we need to, finishing like we planned, finishing big enough, finishing specific enough, finishing soon enough. So, if we loosen our demands on the finish, we can get started. And then when we get started, then there’s another whole body of research about what the start has in store. And I like to say this, the start, the beginning, the first step has a swag bag. It gives us information. It gives us momentum. It gives us confidence. And it gives us something that psychologists know about, and it’s called the Zeigarnik Effect.
And the Zeigarnik Effect is that phenomenon that we, our brain remembers and calls back things that are not finished more than it calls back things that we’ve done and completed. So once we start something, a trigger goes off. We create this homing device in our head for all the ideas, all the information, all of who knows what that we need, that’s how we get the answers in the shower. That’s how we get the ideas when we’re driving. Because somewhere along the line, we’ve assigned our brain to solve a problem or finish something we’ve started. And then after we’ve finished something, after we’ve taken the test, after we’ve walked out of the test room, then it’s gone. Our brain knows, Okay, we can’t hold… We don’t need to hold on to that anymore.
It’s the active information. Right.
So I think I’m getting in the weeds here, and this stuff is all in the book, ‘Start More Than You Can Finish’. But just makes the point to me that it’s all there. It is starting is very clearly a good thing. Yes. We shame each other for not finishing. We shame each other for starting too much. The shame is really what I wanted to attack in the book. So to get to that, I had to really explore all the baggage we hang on the finish. And entrepreneurs get that. Although entrepreneurs are the first people that set lofty goals without an overplan. So I mean, how much is enough? I was mentoring a kid who did not want to pull the trigger on his business until he had a business plan that would end with a public offering that would make him independently wealthy. Are you kidding me? Yeah. And all that time he spent planning could have been, I don’t know whatever happened to it, but the start would be build the product, meet a customer or vice versa. The first customer would probably tell him something that would totally change his idea. The plan changes the second we start it.
Yeah, I was going to throw that out there. What is it? No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. I mean not that that…
But going into this, and you said something that really made me think of this. How many… Okay, so a lot of pieces of our world operate around what is the point? What is the end that you’re going to achieve? How is it that you’re going to get there? So, I mean, you can see with Hollywood. It’s like they don’t want to put money into movies unless they know it’s going to be a blockbuster and they get X amount return. So we are these wonderful, squishy things of human beings. How many doors do you think don’t open because somebody delays their starting. I mean, just as a reminder for people, we have limited time on this. And if you’re sitting there and you’re waiting and you’re trying to gear it up, Becky seems to have worked through a process that allows you to embrace as much of the life as you can that you want for yourself. Becky, how does that influence your work? Because you’re an artist yourself. So I know you deal with the blank canvas phenomenon somehow.
Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head. What is the loss if we don’t act on our ideas?
And we don’t think about it like that. Because, it’s either in existence or not.
Right. For me, I am more haunted by the things that I don’t start than by any amount of failure of the things that started and went awry. And every stARTist, every serial stARTist that I talk to gets it. You don’t even need to say it. The author, Daniel Pink, who wrote A Whole New Mind, Drive, a lot of books. His most recent book is Regret, The Power of Regret. He did a big worldwide study on regret, and it’s universal. And you’ve heard it before. We’ve heard it in quotes. Well, he proved it. The biggest regret people have is not of failures. It’s not of the things that went wrong. It is the shot untaken. And he categorizes types of regret. And this is called a boldness regret. I do not regret anything I started and didn’t finish or things that didn’t pan out. In fact, the favorite stories I have are a couple of businesses that I pulled the plug on. And the fact that I pulled the plug on them practically giggling, when I realized, Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I got so much information. And yes, I spent money, I spent resources, certainly time.
But when you get that, Hey, I scratched that itch, I answered that question, I don’t have to wonder anymore. And also, I like to say that our starts are our self-portrait. We are not made up just of grand planned finishes. We are not made up simply of the things that went exactly the way we want them. We aren’t made up of our promotions or all of our best things that we’re made of our ideas. The ones we tried, the failures, the goofy, wonky stories that we get to tell, we’re made up of all those layers. And to think that people would die with all these ideas inside them that went unexplored, nothing makes me sadder. And this book is a passion project because I met a lot of those people. I tell a story in the book, people are tired of hearing it. But my first book was an accidental book. It was my healing process when I was becoming an empty nester as my first daughter was a senior in high school and I just started realizing, Oh, my gosh, these little pumpkins are going to be gone soon. And also this child is not ready.
She is not ready for the world. The world is not ready for her, and I need to tell her some stuff. Uh-oh, she’s not listening anymore. So I started journaling. And the journal entries for a whole year wound up in an email that I sent to her the first day of her first year of college. Yeah, first day of her first year of college. And the subject line was, do your laundry or you’ll die alone. And the subject line was chosen because I needed for her to open it because she’s at school with her friends. She may never listen to me again. But she opened it and she called back and she said, Mom, this is funny. My roommates think it’s funny. You need to make it a book and you need to put your art in it, because I was making art at that time, and you need to have it done by the time Tess graduates from high school, which is her little sister. And at that time in life, the only thing you can give to your kids is a good role model. So, of course, I’m going to have to finish that book.
So I did the book and it turned out to be quite successful. But it’s a very simple book. Anybody can write an advice book. So people would come up to me as that book was going gangbusters, and they would say things like, I have an idea for a book, or, I could write a book like that. I have so much good advice, or, I’ve thought a lot about writing a book. People tell me that I’m a good writer. And at every turn, I would say, Oh, well, you should do that then. And about 5% would say, Really? And they would be hungry for that nudge and that encouragement. But most people said, Oh, pf, pf. I can’t do that. I can’t do that. They had seriously thought about it. I had no doubt that they were not serious. They had ideas they wanted to write about. There was something they thought they could do, but they weren’t even going to start it. It wasn’t even a consideration. I think we all talk to people who say they’re not creative and you see them being creative in one way and they don’t think it’s creativity because it’s making soup and not writing a poem.
But that people wouldn’t act on their ideas no matter what they are, it pains me. I think of all the things that are lost. And in a world in the state that ours is in, people destroy very easily. It’s easy to destroy. So at the very least, I’m going to go out screaming for the creation. Let’s build at least as much as we destroy. Let’s act on our ideas. And this is really the essence of your question. Why start something if you don’t know where it’s going to go? Because this is how we know ourselves. How do I find out who I am unless I start writing? If you write, you know that. We know that journaling, I mean, neuroscience proves how good journaling is. Neuroscience supports all of this. I read three stacks of books as tall as I am. Starting isn’t studied specifically, but the creative process, the Ignition switch, the process of getting ideas and acting on them, it all creates all those feel good chemicals. It suppresses the cortisol and the bad stuff, reduces perfectionism, which is a source of huge anxiety in our society. There is every reason to act on our ideas.
Why don’t we give ourselves permission to do that more?
Permission is a great word. I think we don’t know what permission really is. You’re right. It has to come from us. But until we quit shaming each other with things like, Oh, you have three companies you’re building? Well, why don’t you just focus on one and make it really big? Because to some people, that’s their idea of a good finish is getting bigger, faster. I remember in Kansas City, and I’m glad we’re over this, the big entrepreneurial groups would support really one tech startup: high-fast, high-growth, high-tech. So now we realize, Dubuque needs a dry cleaner. What if we have somebody that wants to open a dry cleaner? We need retailers, we need restaurants, we need not just high tech, high-growth companies. So the shame, by deciding which kinds of starts are okay and worth it, we lose starts. We lose starting power. We make people lose their passion. So our bliss, our thriving comes from what we do with the stuff that is of us. If we come up with an idea, think about it. If you come up with an idea, it’s made up of all the parts of you.
I’m not going to come up with the same idea you do. You’re going to have your past in it. You’re going to have your passions in it. You’re going to have what you ate for lunch yesterday in it. And it’s going to arrive to you at a timing that’s very particular to you. If you don’t act on it, that idea is not going to get born. A lot of people don’t start things because they worry about originality. They’re like, Oh, I have this book idea. I wonder if it’s been done before. I don’t care. It hasn’t been done by you. And it could have the same name. It could have the same general principles. But I guarantee you, once you start writing, it’s going to turn into something else. Because Tuesday is going to happen to you in a way that it doesn’t happen to anybody else.
That’s one of the things that I love that I do like about being up here. I’ve had the chance to go out and explore just a little bit. You know, on a Saturday, drop myself into downtown and wander around and get lost or just see the street art that’s out there and see where you end up. And you’re right. There’s so many unique little businesses that… It’s like, what combination of a human are you that created this out of nothing? And just to talk on the starts and stops and wins and losses, successes and fails like you’re saying, if you don’t even get started, then you don’t even know. So Kansas City in particular, there’s a lot of stuff going on right now. And to me, that’s very exciting. I mean, we’re getting ready for some big, big things coming in 2026. There’s a lot of movement to push Kansas City more on the map. We’ve got a lot of a very favorable article came out for Kansas City in terms of technology momentum. So we’ve got a lot of growth and movement here. From what you’re seeing, what unique opportunities or challenges do you see on the horizon?
I am not looking at the macro much anymore, so I’m not really educated on any trends. I do- You need to take a picture of that. Yeah. The history of Kansas City is all coming together to give us the greatness that we deserve. I mean, if you think about it, there are a lot of artists in Kansas City, historically, we think, because Hallmark was here. I mean, if you think about the people that came here to work at Hallmark in the early years, they grew up here. Some of them are gone, but they bring trailing spouses or partners who are probably also creative. So if you think of the ripple effect of that and then now the new generation, because of that base… Because people ask, Here we are in the prairie. There’s no reason to understand how Kansas City got as funky as it did in the past few years. So I credit Hallmark. Disney was here. Hemingway worked at the start. There are some little dots of creative greatness that meandered through. But I think it’s all coalescing now with the sports energy, with putting our money where our mouth is, with the streetcar and the airport and just our infrastructure, that the timing is great.
The tech, it still has been a challenge to compete with Silicon Valley from Kansas City.
But we’re not as far away as you might think. And that’s the cool part. So, that momentum is definitely there.
There’s support. I mean, the Kaufman Foundation is the biggest supporter, financial support for entrepreneurship, in the country, maybe the world, so it’s here. But that stuff will all play out. Where my head is right now is on the individual mindset. Yes, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs every day, every week, but they inspire me more than I inspire them. They’re the fuel to reinforce what I’m still studying about starting muscles. We can start taking creative initiative, and that’s what I’ve come to call starting power. I like that. It’s creativity, but it’s initiative because we all know people that are creative that talk about their ideas all the time, but they never pull the trigger. And we all know people who take initiative, I mean, those are the people who are going to be your CEOs. They’re going to do it by the book and they’re going to do it within the box. They’ll do it first, they’ll do it on time. So it’s about pulling those strengths together. And one thing I think the evidence shows is that that is a skill that can be learned, that can be practiced, and that can be supported by a community.
So it’s an ecosystem fiber of strength that we can build by supporting each other and not shaming each other and looking for the cross-pollination. How can we cross-train the creative messaging and arts with the engineering savvy and the training, strength of the athletic community. I don’t know. There’s lots of cross-pollination, and I talk about it in my book with certain examples, because you always meet somebody who is creative in a way that you didn’t know. I tell a story in the book of a boxer named Cam Awesome. Cam F. Awesome. He changed his name to that. I’m wondering. You can decide what you think the F stands for. Cam is a Kansas Cityan. He’s really an old friend of ours. He’s the winningest amateur boxer in national history. He never went pro. But now he is a speaker. He just put out his first book. And he always intended for his boxing to be his platform for his creative pursuits. And there’s a chapter in the book about how he cross-trained those skills, how he used what he learned in boxing to build a speaking business. Okay. And he’s doing great. I thought, okay, the one discipline I’m not going to be able to make creative is athletics.
Nope, I was wrong.
Well, it’s there. And people have said that creativity is problem-solving, and there’s a lot of different ways to look at it. It’s something you said earlier about people not labeling themselves as creative because it doesn’t look a certain way. So that can significantly shape a person’s life and what route they choose to go. Do you have a personal experience or lesson that has shaped your perspective, maybe?
Mine is the opposite. I think what makes me able to write this book is that I am truly the worst person at finishing things. So you don’t… It’s one of those, if I can do it, anybody can do it. It’s also that I have a lot of examples of starting and not finishing or starting and failing. But I didn’t have anyone telling me, It’s not what you start, it’s what you finish. My mom was essentially a single mom. She worked nights. She did not tell us not to make a mess, not to start more than we could finish. And then I had a teacher in third grade who let me be in charge of the bulletin board because, of course, I have ADD, if you haven’t figured that out yet. And I would finish my work early so that I wouldn’t be a troublemaker, she let me be in charge of the bulletin board. And that was a life-changing experience about having a place for all my ideas to go.
Yeah, you just needed an outlet.
Huh? Yeah. You needed an outlet. I have a hearing loss, so I don’t hear out my right ear. I think we think it was now mumps when I was three or four. So I was sent out of my neighborhood to a school for lip reading and had to find my place. I didn’t have any friends, so I found the art class. I don’t know that I was particularly talented in an art, but together with the bulletin board and then that and then journalism, I just arrived at a place not afraid of starting new things. I think I mentioned this when we were talking earlier that then having kids showed me true, true initiative. I tell the story about my firstborn daughter who wanted to be a performer. So back in the day, it was Annie was the frozen of the time. Oh, yes. Frozen of the time. Frozen is that song that everybody… Oh, yeah. All the kids sing and it drives you crazy. The sun will come out tomorrow. The sun will come out tomorrow. So Taylor K. Phillips, my little girl, came to us when she was five and said, You guys, I know Annie.
I’m the perfect Annie. You have to take me to audition for Annie. Well, it’s Kansas City. There were no auditions for Annie. So she had to start her own show. She had a karaoke. She had a little sister. What more did she need? That’s all you need. So it’s the equivalent of what you tell an entrepreneur. If you can’t be the CEO of the company you’re working for, you might have to start your own company. Right. And… So that’s what our daughter did. Our other daughter is equally creative. Because my mom never told me, don’t start more than you can finish. I never told my kids they were biting off more than.
They could chew. They had that limitation on you. Yeah. That’s insane. That’s like freedom.
It’s wild. What do we call it? Oh, free-range parenting. Yeah. I really recommend it where creativity is concerned. Now, it gets messy. Your basement might not be the place you want it to be.
Sure. But you’re not walking through life with this little voice over your shoulder going, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t start that. And then something else is running you instead of you.
And what if, as a city, we listen to somebody’s ideas and when somebody started something, instead of saying immediately, Oh, well, why don’t we do it like this instead? That, which is absolutely what we do. Why don’t we support people until they get down the road a little bit to where they figure that out? I mean, if we supported each other instead of competing with each other, be it organizations or just independent development, our social network structure, there are so many ideas. And rather than find fault in them, what if we supported them, knowing that the creative process really does fix things and show the wrinkles? We don’t have to do that for people. I think it would just be really… I think Kansas City is very much like that. Let me just say that. But we can do better.
Definitely. So how do you stay informed about the events and the initiatives going on around? Because there’s lots of ways to find things. There’s lots of ways to find things. So it helps our listeners to… What is it that you do to stay informed? How is it that you stay on top of the things that are going on around our city?
I poke around in the news. I stay involved with involved people. I think our playgrounds and playmates really keep life exciting.
Interesting. Yeah. Are there any local leaders or influencers that inspire you?
I follow the mayor on all the social media. I mean, he does a great job of keeping us informed. My passions right now are… I’m a big old tree hugger. So I love bridging the gap and the tree alliance. If people don’t know it, Kansas City is going to be planting 10,000 trees. We’ve got money to plant trees. If you want a tree on your street, you can get it free. We’re done for the winter. But I just love this initiative. That’s amazing. I volunteer to you can volunteer to plant, you can donate more money. Okay. But building that canopy over Kansas City streets, that’s just something that’s really exciting. I think we should have been doing it for a long time. But our our environmental initiatives are really picking up steam, and I’m real happy about that.
That’s fantastic. Where could somebody get involved? Where do they need to go to get.
Involved with something like that? I would go to the… I’m sorry I interrupted you. I’d go to the bridging the Gap website.
Okay. What do you see as the future of Kansas City? What role do you want to play in that future?
I loved being involved in the business community and civic leadership at one time in my life. This is the time that I’m having fun and working with people individually. A fun thing that I’ve just started is a comedy show.
I’ve read some of that.
Yeah, that really came out of the journey for the book. I was talking to my daughter in New York and she said, Mom, you should come to New York and be in this comedy show with us. We’re asking our moms to be in this Mother’s Day show. And she didn’t know it, but it was my year of saying yes to ideas. So it’s an experiment I put myself on for the book. Very cool. So I had to say yes. So I went to New York. I did this little show with her. I just wrote something funny and read it. And then I put it on Facebook and everybody on Facebook said, Oh, where’s your script? Where’s the video? Oh, you should do a show. And it was my year of saying yes. Actually, I knew this, Kansas City did not have a great comedy community for women. We have-
Not many places do.
Oh, baby. They don’t. I mean, Open Mic Night is a big old 22-year-old dudefest, and it is not the way to learn to enjoy comedy. So what I learned in New York at that show, I was very eager to bring back to Kansas City. I didn’t need anything else on my schedule, but it was actually pretty easy to do. I just scouted clubs, found some comics, female comics, and told them to try to keep it G-rated. And then invited women that I knew to be funny to go on their maiden comedy voyage. So I started a show called The Ladies’ Laugh Lounge. We’ve had three of them. They’ve all been sold out. The next one is going to be two shows because people get mad at me when they sell out, as if I can stop that steamroller. So April 24th and 25th is the next one. Okay.
Because you just had one in October, right?
We did. It was October. So that’s about one-quarter. Yeah, that’s good. Okay. So what do I want to do for Kansas City? Just the little list of things. What’s fun is that each of those women, there have already been two women who clearly have an act for comedy that have come out in these shows, because in each show I have three to four women I call comedy, debutants, give them the stage for one or two or three minutes, and they like it and they’re good at it. And then all their friends come. I mean, you know how girls are. They’re tribal. We like to laugh together, have some wine. It’s the.
Chance for everybody to get out to be yourself a little bit.
Definitely. Yeah. And we laugh. Maybe we laugh at different things than the guys do. April 24th and 25th at the Comedy Club of Kansas City. Right.
So what steps would you suggest to somebody who wants to make their own difference in Kansas City?
Obviously starting. Yes, starting. Talk about ideas. Meet the people and the organizations that are doing things you think should be done and just have the conversation. What are the problems? Who’s solving them? You can google anything. How do we get more trees planted in Kansas City? You will immediately find the tree alliance and bridging the gap and you’ll get names, people to talk to. I think we all have our own little communities. Education is such a needy and important one. Help at a school. You will see immediately how you’re needed and how freely ideas flow. This book, Start More Than You Can Finish, is dedicated to teachers because my kids had great teachers. And it made me realize that teachers start and create every day and they don’t get to see what their work turns out like. The dedication reads, dedicated to teachers who rarely get to see their finished work. And their most creative beings. I mean, you have one kid that’s different from another. You got to get creative. Every lesson plan is a creation. Why we don’t direct monuments to teachers and just throw mediatics at them? I don’t know. But I think engaging with any education, we have some really creative education initiatives going on in the city.
So that’s an easy place to get.
Okay, to get involved with your school and if you don’t have a school that’s in your particular area, go where the schools need some help. It may just be a little bit of a drive, but those resources make such a difference. And saying yes to things and as things get started, you’re going to find, especially in schools, they’re always going to run into, Oh, we’ve got this beautiful list of.
Help us, please. Absolutely.
All right. So this is going to bring us to our last and possibly most important question. Who has your favorite barbecue? Oh, my.
I am a Jackstack girl. All right. But we have this holiday season. We will be at Bryant’s, we will be at Jackstack, and we most definitely be at Joe’s. And probably, what’s the Meet Mitch? The one at the airport? I think it’s Meet Mitch. I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Mitch is in there. Because the people who come home, my new son-in-law is absolutely obsessed with Bryant’s. So I don’t even know if he’ll make it home from the airport, I think. But I’m Jack Stacks all the way.
Okay.
Jack’s Stack.
Well, I’m a firm believer that any barbecue is good barbecue.
Any barbecue is good barbecue. What’s your favorite? My favorite?
I actually get to branch out because all of this is new to me. I had found that hog jawOh, H-A-W-G.
You’re more sophisticated than me.
Oh, no, I don’t know. They just have really good burning. Burnout. And Slaps.
Is really good. Okay, I’ve heard.
See? And there’s like a billion of these places, so we can’t ever try all of them. But we’re going to maybe make a documentary next year.
Oh, good for you.
We’ll see. We’re going to see if we can start something.
Very important question.
All right. Becky, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. And to all of our listeners, pick up her book. She’s got two of them, remember.
Do your laundry or you’ll die alone. Advice your mom would give if she thought you were listening. Brilliant. And start more than you can finish. A creative permission slip to unleash our best ideas. And really, if people want to engage with me, I hope I’m starting a conversation that continues to grow. And I’m starting it on a newsletter, or I call it a no-news letter, a Substack, and it’s called stARTistry. So you can go to beckyblades. Substack or just google stARTistry and you’ll get my newsletter. And conversations are going about things to start and how we can support each other. And I hope people join the conversation. That’s wonderful.
Definitely, we’re going to have all these links put in our show notes for our listeners. There’s a lot of links that are going to be out there for this particular episode. So do make sure to check those and go pick up some books for this season’s reading.
Oh, thank you. All right.
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