St. Louis News Blog

All told, about 3,000 people showed up Thursday night at the City Museum for the Riverfront Times' annual Best of St. Louis party. There was a variety of attractions: free drink tickets, fire-breathers, burlesque dancing, stilt-walkers and the Dirt Cheap chicken among them. Nightlife photographer Egan O'Keefe was there and brought back these photos.

Photo: Egan O'Keefe

Burlesque performer Lola Van Ella. See more photos from last night's RFT Best Of St. Louis party.

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Photo: Egan O'Keefe

See more photos from last night's RFT Best Of St. Louis party.

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You could go out this weekend and spend a wad of cash drinking like a sailor. Or, you might find yourself online or at the mall, and end up charging a ridiculous-looking thermal coat to your Visa.

But why put yourself in the poorhouse (or the poky) when all the following events are just $10 or less?

P.S. We've got plenty of music choices this weekend, too.

Image Via

See Bob Run premieres Friday.

​See Bob Run at the ArtSpace at Crestwood Court (Opens Friday)
See Bob Run, a one-woman show by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, is a darkly weird combination of unreliable narrator and undeniable horror. Soundstage Productions presents this psychological drama at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday (November 6 through 8) at the Marble Stage Theater in the ArtSpace at Crestwood Court (Watson and Sappington roads, Crestwood.) Tickets are $10. Paul Friswold has more details about See Bob Run here.

Via Jezebel.

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Today's Post-Dispatch lays out in detail what apparently has been kicked around now for the past few months.

The failed downtown shopping mall, St. Louis Centre, is going to be converted into a parking garage. Well, mostly anyway.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7119320@N05/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

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flickr.com/photos/mychatham

​With Thanksgiving rapidly bearing down on us, surer than death and taxes, it came as alarming news yesterday when the Missouri Department of Conservation announced that this year's fall turkey-hunting season was the second-worst on record.

Hunters only managed to bag 8,300 birds last month. That may seem like a lot to a city-slicker who thinks turkeys come from the supermarket, wrapped in plastic, but in 1987, more than 28,000 turkeys met their maker.

What has gone wrong? Could the recession be affecting the wild turkey population in the same mysterious, all-encompassing way it has been affecting everything else? Is it any coincidence that last year was the worst turkey hunting year of all time?

Fortunately, no. The Department of Conservation is blaming poor nesting weather. Turkeys, like humans, thrive in warm, dry spring weather, particularly since they nest on the ground, not in trees.

The good news is, no hunters were shot this year. This, apparently, is a not-uncommon phenomenon when hunters neglect to mark their turkeys as already dead and other hunters have poor aim.

Further good news (except for those who despise turkey): the supermarket turkey population appears to be unaffected.

We here at Daily RFT count ourselves as fans of the St. Louis-based American Mustache Institute.

After all, what's not to like about a faux advocacy group fighting for the civil rights of mustached Americans? AMI's entire premise is so ridiculous, it's funny. Besides, the guy's at AMI throw killer parties and have the support of mega celebrities like John Oates.

But today we found one man who has no appreciation for AMI.

We'll let him explain his case in the video below. Dude really takes it on the chin, so to speak.

​Gay Wilkinson has been a busy man since he and his anvil shooting hobby were the subject of a feature story in a recent Riverfront Times. Not only has the RFT-produced anvil shooting video in which he starred received more than a million views on YouTube, on Monday Wilkinson was profiled on CBS Evening News' "Assignment America" feature.

The segment, titled "Anvil's Away," was filmed last week in Wilkinson's hometown of Farmington, Missouri. Other than misspelling Wilkinson's name in the text-version of the story, at least one obviously staged moment, and the requisite kitschy jokes, correspondent Steve Hartman and his crew did a solid job of encapsulating all the quirks that make Gay one of the most colorful (and hilarious) interviews any reporter will ever encounter.

Watch the video (embedded after the jump) and be sure to stick around until the end when they toss it back to the studio; the look on Katie Couric's face when Hartman tells her she ought to see an anvil shoot is absolutely priceless.

Interstate 64, a.k.a. Highway 40, will open December 7 -- a month before the deadline to complete the massive rebuilding of the roadway

At a press conference this morning near the intersection of Hanley Road and the highway, Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT) director Pete Rahn said the project would also come in at $11 million under budget.

A stretch of Highway 40 in Richmond Heights as viewed in August.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/journeyguy/ / CC BY 2.0

​If we told you that Missouri deer hunters were engaged in liberal do-gooder activities to help the have-nots....would your mind implode? Watch the eff out.

Show-Me State outdoorsmen donated about 270,000 pounds of venison to charitable organizations that feed the hungry last year. Such is the stat that Dan Zarlenga of the Missouri Department of Conservation gave the Daily RFT today. These hunters even had to pay some of the cost of processing the animal. 

But this year, he says, hunters can drop off a deer for charity without having to pay. (Click here for more on this state-run program.)

Sure, you say, but how many heartless Bambi-killers are gonna care whether a homeless shelter in St. Louis has deer meat for supper? Well, says Zarlenga, in 2007 over 5,500 hunters across the state bucked up -- if you will -- and donated venison.

Wikimedia Commons

Time for confession?

​A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted the Rev. James Grady for sex trafficking, enticement of children and possession of child pornography. 

Grady was arrested this past summer during an FBI and Maryland Heights Police Department sting. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Grady showed up at a house expecting to pay for a half-hour's worth of sex acts with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Grady allegedly arranged the meeting through an ad on Craigslist. 

Grady was the pastor at St. Raphael the Archangel in south city. St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson suspended Grady after his arrest this summer.