Kansas City Blog

A few years ago, I was also a weekly guest on this show when Ellen – an extremely nice lady – was co-hosting with Noel Heckerson. It wasn’t a paid gig, mind you. I’m not sure I even got a “Thank you” for all those morning treks to the station in its former location, when one day I got a phone call from Ellen saying the show was taking a different direction and they no longer required my culinary opinions or my dulcet voice. OK, I thought. No more hopping out of bed at dawn to put together a list of restaurants to talk about. Hallelujah!

But Ellen called again after a year or two and asked me to come back. She was so sweet, I neglected to listen to the little voice in the back of my head saying, “What the hell is in this for you?” I rationalized that it was good publicity for my column in The Pitch and, besides, Ellen and her new co-host E.J. Becker were so damn pleasant that I decided to return to that rushed five-minute slot at one of Kansas City’s most conservative radio stations. My theory was that even Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly listeners need to know where to go out and eat, you know?

But my altruism evaporated yesterday when Ellen called again. Apparently some muckety-muck from Entercom HQ was in our fair city, listened in to “Kansas City Morning News with E.J. and Ellen,” and then wondered, “What’s this soft shit doing on the air?”

I was given the ol’ KMBZ heave-ho for the second time.

But I’m still a panelist on the “Food Critic’s Show” every other Friday on 89.3 KCUR-FM. I also have my own radio show, which only occasionally veers into the culinary realm (I do have other interests!), called Anything Goes every Friday from noon to 1 p.m. on 90.1 KKFI-FM. Not many conservatives tune in to that station, which is probably a good thing. I’d rather be considered a radical thinker than a piece of soft shit.