‘Mesmerizing’: This singing bartender helps Kansas City venue rise from fire’s ashes
This corner lounge on Main Street is hardly the place her parents — fundamentalist Christians, certain of alcohol’s evils — ever hoped their home-schooled daughter would end up.
But 33-year-old Vonne Whitman, black hair with a black sleeveless top, tattooed with a musical treble clef on her right shoulder, a Taylor Swift lyric on her left arm, calls the place “my comfort zone.”
More than that, the area behind the bar at the Uptown Lounge, 3400 Main St., has become her stage.
It’s the domain where, since the piano bar opened one year ago in June, Whitman (her Uptown stage name) has created a new life and mini-celebrity for herself as the venue’s singing bartender. It’s where her backbar talent — belting out Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Broadway show tunes and more — has become key to creating a new life for a venue that in 2022 rose from the literal ashes of the legendary Davey’s Uptown Rambler’s Club.
An institution for local rock bands for 70 years, Davey’s closed for good after it was gutted by fire March 14, 2020, three days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. Among the new owners’ hopes is that when Kansas City’s streetcar line opens along Main Street in 2025, it will carry a stream of customers keen on music in a sophisticated setting.
“Vonne?” pianist and prime owner Alan Stribling, 56, said on stage at the lounge’s baby grand piano. “Maybe you’d like to sing something?”
At the opposite end of the club, Whitman smiled from behind the bar. Soft chords rose from the piano. Whitman’s voice rang out clean and clear like a Disney princess or, more precisely, like a little mermaid.
I wanna be where the people are/ I wanna see, wanna see ‘em dancin’ …
Weekends are the busiest. When Whitman tends bar on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, the tiny club that holds 60 at round cafe tables and its white quartz bar is often packed. While she sings, she moves nonstop, mixing custom cocktails from clear and amber bottles of rye, gin, bitters, sweet vermouth, absinthe. A French 75 to this customer, a La Louisiane to the next. She serves tables, tabulates bills, fills glasses.
Tell me somethin’, girl/Are you happy in this modern world?
First-time customers, unsure where the voice is coming from, spot her singing through her headset. Some, awestruck, record her on their phones.
Or do you need more?/Is there something else you’re searchin’ for?
“She’s amazing. Magical. I mean she’s got a phenomenal voice,” Brooklyn Van Becelaere, 35, of Liberty, said while listening to the bartender live for the first time. A friend had sent her a video of her singing.
“Mesmerizing,” Van Becelaere said.
Jennifer and Mark Nightengale of Tulsa, both 61 and first-timers to the lounge over Fourth of July weekend, sat at a cafe table. They’d come to Kansas City to meet their son, Tobe, and daughter-in-law, Mani, both 25 and musicians, currently living in Boston, but thinking of relocating to Kansas City.
“We were just talking about her,” Mani said of Whitman.
“We were, like, just so impressed that she was doing what she was doing,” Jennifer said. “She was making drinks, she was ringing people up. She was singing so well. That’s multitasking at its very best right there.”
“We were wondering how it all came about,” Mani said. “Was she singing, usually, and they just noticed that and decided to put a mic on her?”
A musical childhood
That answer is no.
Stribling planned from the start to have a singing bartender. But for Whitman — the second of four kids, home-schooled by what she called “deeply religious parents” outside Milwaukee — it was serendipity.
“They believe a lot of stuff,” including about alcohol and homosexuality, Whitman said of her parents, “that I absolutely do not align myself with anymore. … My mom still thinks I’m going to hell because I drink.
“At this point in my life I would consider it a cult.”
Music, however, was deeply valued in her home, she said. Her dad, who worked overnight shifts as a respiratory therapist, played and owned at least four tubas, euphoniums, trombones and other brass instruments. Her parents gave her piano lessons, voice lessons, including opera, shuttling her to singing competitions and supporting her desire to appear in local musicals.
But their strict faith, she said, also came with strict beliefs, including labeling songs good or bad, appropriate, or not.
Rodgers & Hammerstein: good. The musical “Chicago,” about sex and murder: no way. “The Sound of Music”: Yes. “Rent” or “Avenue Q”: Forget it.
“The first show that I ever realized that I loved theater was ‘Les Miz,’” Whitman said. “When I was 7 years old, I used to get cassette tapes out of the library. I memorized it all in about a week and a half. The sound of the music was fine, because we weren’t allowed to listen to anything with like a heavy beat.
“Then I started singing the words to one of the songs in front of my dad.”
It was “Master of the House,” about a thieving innkeeper.
“He was like, ‘Uhm, we’re going to have to listen to that,’” Whitman recalled.
The song “Lovely Ladies” — I smell women/Smell ‘em in the air/Think I’ll drop my anchor/In that harbor over there — was an utter no-go.
“I was still allowed to listen to it (‘Les Miz’), but I had to skip certain songs,” Whitman recalled. Her first tattoo at 18 was the treble clef encircled by the “Les Miz” lyric: “Do you hear the people sing?”
‘I’ve got me’
Even as a teen, while Whitman dreamed of singing, she never pictured herself like Adele standing in a spotlight with a microphone. At 16, she’d harmonize in her car to Taylor Swift, one of her favorite artists, thinking that if wishes came true, she might one day go on the road as a backup singer. Through a lifetime of changes, it’s singing she loved, not the attention.
“I don’t necessarily like being the focus even now,” Whitman said. “I’m a super-private person. If I could sing like the Sia method, where she (the pop singer) covers her entire face, I would do that.”
She felt awkward even in high school competitions, singing at center stage, all eyes on her.
“I would have to just stand there,” Whitman said, “I was constantly told, like, ‘Stand still. Don’t make your hands look weird. Like, stand with your arms at your sides.’ You never know what to do with your hands for some reason. It’s like, ‘Where do I put them?’ Suddenly I’m very aware of my hands.”
In musicals, characters move and act as they sing. She liked that. The same at the bar.
“I’ve been bartending for three, four years now,” she said. “That’s very comfortable. A lot of things I do back there are so muscle memory, that if I forget the words, it will help me remember.”
Say you love me/Every waking moment/Turn my head with talk of summertime
“That was, like, a memory trick we learned in theater. If you’re forgetting your words, you’re probably in the wrong space on stage.”
Post high school, she began studying music at Florida’s Pensacola Christian College, but changed to religious studies to settle nagging questions. Chief among them was how, given the number of different religions, any single religion could think it was correct.
“It just gave me more confusion,” she said. “I think I’m now at the place in my life where I think nobody is right, and also everybody is right. I think that everyone has a little bit of truth and there’s no way that everybody can have all the truth.”
At 21 — feeling pressured by parents and her religion — Whitman married a classmate from Kansas City. They moved. They divorced as friends seven years later. No kids. Kansas City, by then, had become her adopted home.
“I like Kansas City,” she said. “Even when I was leaving my ex-husband, I felt he was the reason I came here, but Kansas City was the reason I stayed.”
Wherever she has worked, as a cashier at a liquor store, serving beers at a brewery, making lattes at a coffee shop, she’s sung aloud to whatever music is playing. No matter how much her life has changed, Whitman said, “I’ve always sung at work. That’s just part of who I am.”
A line inspired by Taylor Swift’s 2020 song “It’s Time to Go” is inked on Whitman’s left arm: “They’ve got my past frozen behind glass, but I’ve got me.”
“Who doesn’t sing to the radio?” Whitman said. “I worked at Black Dog Coffeehouse as a barista for a little bit. Any time I worked in the kitchen, I would be singing at the top of my lungs. People out in the lobby would be like, ‘Who’s in the kitchen?!’”
The offer to be a singing bartender still came as a surprise.
Pitch perfect match
While Whitman was on her journey, Stribling, who has played piano since age 5, was on a path of his own.
Married with two children (both at The Barstow School) Stribling is a graduate of Raytown South High School (class of ‘85) and later attended both the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas with no overarching plan other than to study business.
“I was just going to see where the world took me,” Stribling said.
Entrepreneurial, he started his own computer software consulting company in college to pay his way. That business connected him to a client, a mortgage broker, who in 1989 hired Stribling to work in Newport Beach, California, at least up until the time the savings and loan crisis quickly turned lenders sour.
That year, in San Diego, he would also walk into his first piano bar.
Michael Rorah from Boonville, Missouri, sat singing at the keyboard. Age 70 now, Rorah not only would become Stribling’s friend, he now performs late weekend nights at Uptown and is a 10% partner.
“He was playing at the piano bar,” Stribling said. “I was infatuated. I said, ‘This is something I might like to do.’”
For 30 years he has done exactly that. For four years, Stribling sang and played on Carnival Cruises to the Mexican Riviera, through the Panama Canal, to Caribbean islands and, in 1997, on a cruise to Alaska. There he met a passenger, Jean. They married several years later. She handles Uptown’s social media.
Settling back in Kansas City, Stribling played for a decade, to 2007, at The Raphael Hotel in the evenings while, by day, he was an entrepreneur. He restarted a computer business. He flipped and rented houses. With business partner Perry Kessler, he got into commercial real estate. He began franchises, including Yogurtini south of the Country Club Plaza, which he later sold.
Through everything, his love of music remained. On weekends, he played nights at the Piano Room in Waldo, a piano bar at 8410 Wornall Road with roots dating to 1978. For years he and Rorah had toyed with an idea.
“We talked about it back in the ‘90s,” Stribling said. “’Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a kind of space?’”
Cue “Newsies,” the musical: Open the gates and seize the day / Don’t be afraid and don’t delay.
When COVID struck, Rorah returned to Kansas City to be close to his mother. Davey’s Uptown had burned. Kansas Citians by then knew that an extended streetcar line, carrying thousands of passengers and potential customers each day, would begin construction along Main Street.
“I could honestly say that I would not have chosen this location were it not for the trolley,” Stribling said. “The streetcar was a critical component.”
In 2021, Stribling and Rorah acted. The building’s owner cleaned the fire damage, re-plumbed, rewired, restored and renovated the building. Davey’s liquor license was transferred. Rorah designed the interior in what Stribling called “a loungey, New York-type feel”: clean brick walls, soft lights, round tables, teardrop lights over the bar.
He signed a 20-year lease.
Crowds on Tuesday nights have become steady, even building over the night, for jazz jams featuring artists such as Joe Cartwright, Stan Kessler and David Basse. Vocalists and musicians Amanda Lee, Kristin Korb, Lucy Wijnands and Jan Harrington have performed there.
On weekends, the surprise is still Whitman.
Getting paid to sing
Stribling gives the Piano Room in Waldo full credit for the singing bartender idea.
For 14 years, singer Heather Price had performed there — slinging beers, pouring shots, making cocktails from behind the bar while she sang in a rich, blues-tinged voice, somewhere between pop star Stevie Nicks and Broadway star Keala Settle. Price had sung at the Bar Natasha cabaret before it closed in 2008.
Price understood the theatrical appeal.
“It’s a performance. You’re multitasking while you’re singing,” Price said. “What’s really special is having someone up on stage. Everybody is watching that. Then, all of sudden, you hear a voice. But no one is up there singing. Then, you hear the whispers. You see their eyes looking around. … You can always tell who has never seen it before, because, ‘Check it out. It’s the girl behind the bar!’”
Stribling offered Price the job. She turned it down. Instead, she is now a featured stage performer at the Uptown, 7 to 10 p.m. on Fridays. No more pouring drinks. Stage only.
But she did know someone great, Price told Stribling. She was a young woman who had been coming to the Piano Room for Tuesday night karaoke. She had experience as a bartender. And , oh, how she could sing.
“I just thought she’d be a perfect fit,” Price said of Whitman. “I was like, ‘If you need a singing bartender, you need this girl, because she can floor you with her voice.’ Oh, she belts. She sings. She’s amazing.”
For Whitman, it’s what she always wanted.
“Ever since I saw Heather, I saw her doing that and I was just like, ‘Oh my God. That is the coolest thing. I need a job like that,’” Whitman said. “Something I’ve always said is if I can get paid to sing, that’s what I want to do. And I’m doing it.”
Behind the bar, she served up some vodka, a bit of lemon, Aperol, sparkling wine and a request, “La Vie En Rose,” a rosy view of life.
