By Don Bradley
Here she came, the server named Brenda.
She was carrying a tray filled with cocktails and beers and began belting out Billie Holiday’s “All of Me.” Didn’t miss a beat, fully devoted to both tray and song.
The crowd parted almost dancelike.
Was it choreography? No, just another late night at the Piano Room where servers do that all night long.
Headsets. It’s called Singin’ n Slingin.”
The Piano Room is also the place where anybody can get up and sing a song. Step on stage, take the mic, watch for the piano player to give that nod, and the room is yours.
Later the night, braver the crowd.
During the place’s recent year and a half shutdown, its loyal following wandered the desert because there was nothing else like it in town.
Now it’s back. The Piano Room recently reopened at 332 W. 75th St. in the heart of Waldo.
Grand opening events are set for Aug. 1st, 2nd and 4th.
It’s open now.
On a recent night, Laura Lynch, a jazz musician, stepped on stage and sang “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” Back at her table, she said she loves looking out from stage at a Piano Room crowd.
“Young people, older people, that’s the fantastic thing about this place,” Lynch said.
Fridays and Saturdays are when anybody can get up and sing. And they do.
Gershwin to Gaga, Broadway to hip hop, Sinatra to Johnny Cash.
Piano player Ken Page, a longtime veteran of the bench, can likely play anything you want.
A recent night brought “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “In the Still of the Night.” A woman accompanied herself with a flute on a Hank Williams song, and that server, Brenda Smith, did Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” again with her hands full.
The Piano Room closed at its old site near 84th and Wornall in January 2024 due to business circumstances. Longtime-owner Ginny Klos said some regulars were so anxious for the new place they kept up with construction progress on the city’s planning and zoning website.
She has her own story. During the shutdown, she paid employees part salary and on a trip to a bar to give cash to one she found herself sitting next to a guy who proceeded to tell her about all his surgeries in graphic detail.
“I had to get this place open,” she said last week.
Now, the mystic. According to Ginny, she and a friend were having lunch and Ginny was bemoaning the frustration of dealing with city bureaucracy.
A woman, a total stranger, from a nearby table walked over and handed her a bracelet with the words: “Keep Going.”
Ginny told her she couldn’t take the gift. The woman smiled and walked away.
Ginny never saw her again.
But she’s still wearing the bracelet and believes it was some sort of sign that she had to keep going.
“This is a traditional, historical piano bar and that matters to a lot of people,” Ginny said in her new makeshift office complete with a washer and dryer in a back corner.
She’s proud of the Piano Room’s inclusive legacy, and she credits her new partner, Laird Lindsey, for helping make the rebirth happen.
Mondays at the Piano Room feature the Waldo Jazz Collective and Wednesday is open mic.
Ginny bought the business in 2006 after working there for years as a server. That was back when folks from Starlight and other theaters would show up late on weekend nights and the place would get so crowded “you couldn’t fall over if you tried.”
Kay Bode remembers those nights. She’s been coming to the Piano Room for 40 years, singing songs older than most people in the house.
For her, the shutdown was an empty time. She was one who brought in sheet music on Friday nights for World War II-era songs.
When did she have her last drink after the place closed a year and a half ago?
“About a year and a half ago,” she said.
The change of location doesn’t bother her because on a recent Friday night she was pretty much in the same old seat.
Down front, close to the piano, close to the stage. Just saving steps.
“Kay, come on up here and sing us a song,” piano player Ken Page says into the mic as he tickles the ivory to sweeten the invite.
A half-minute later, Kay’s turning heads with Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies.
Tina, her daughter, watched with a little nervousness as her mom sang about the days hurrying by and when you’re in love my how they fly.
Tina didn’t know how the younger crowd in the new Waldo venue would respond to her mother’s nearly operatic voice singing from the Great American Songbook.
“She missed this place so much,” Tina said.
She needn’t have worried. Because the Piano Room is where the crowd knows and loves when a singer gives a song their all.
And it’s where every song is in the moment.
A moment lost but now is back.
And hopefully for the regulars, it’s nothing but blue skies from now on.
For more information, go to pianoroomonline.com.
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