Kevin Costner plays the Blue Note
COLUMBIA — Wait. Kevin Costner has a band?
Yep. That guy from the “if you build it, he will come” movie ("Field of Dreams") had a show at the Blue Note on Monday, and, surprisingly, he still has a couple of fans.
The band, Kevin Costner and Modern West, features the Academy Award winner as the lead singer and acoustic guitarist.
Steffi Simon, 84, who came from St. Charles to see Costner, brought her black and white polka dot purse with two photos of Costner fashionably displayed on the front. Around her neck was another picture, and she had several more in her wallet.
“I have a shirt too, but it’s at home,” Simon said, with a large smile.
She came with a small group, including her daughter and granddaughter. Even though they arrived at the venue more than two hours before the doors opened, they were still behind about 30 people already in line.
Simon, who has been a fan since first seeing “Message in a Bottle” six years ago, had the chance to meet Costner before the show. Her granddaughter, after e-mailing the band for months, was able to get Simon in to the meet-and-greet.
“She’s going to ask him to kiss her,” Julie Heckenkamp, Simon’s daughter, said.
Simon’s house, according to Heckenkamp, is a shrine to the actor. Her Costner-themed collection includes multiple posters, sweatshirts and even light switches displaying the actor’s face. Her favorite movie is “For Love of the Game,” but she buys all of them — even the ones she doesn’t like.
“No one is as obsessed as she is,” Heckenkamp said.
Perhaps not, but Cindy Triplett, a self-proclaimed Costner fanatic, might disagree. Triplett, who had waited for more than three hours with friends, was first in line at the Blue Note. She brought with her a couple of friends and a T-shirt, which featured a doctored photo of her and Costner snuggled close.
The photo is a souvenir taken in a studio atop the World Trade Center in 1993. It superimposes an image of Costner in a tuxedo with an image of Triplett. When she met Costner after the band’s sound check, Triplett made sure he got a glimpse of the shirt.
“I said, ‘Do you remember this night?’ And he said, ‘ I must have been pretty liquored up,’” Triplett said, laughing with her friends.
Also in the group was Lisa Kendall, 43, who said that Costner “smelled good” when she met him and that she was planning to get as close as possible during the show.
“I’ll be trying to get up in the front. I’ll crawl on my hands and knees if I have to,” Kendall said.
The crowd, made up mostly of woman over the age of 40, stayed fairly calm before Costner's band took the stage. Most of the fans had not purchased, or even listened to, the album and were simply there to get a glimpse of the actor they remembered from “Bull Durham” and “Dances with Wolves."
But before there were fans like Simon and Triplett who cared about Costner as a leading man, he played in a band called Roving Boy with John Coinman and Blair Forward. They have both stuck around to play with the actor now that his starring roles, and hairline, have begun to recede.
Coinman and Forward, along with Teddy Morgan, Larry Cobb and Park Chisolm, make up Modern West. The band, along with the actor, is on a tour of small venues in several cities in the Midwest, including Oklahoma City; Omaha, Neb.; and Des Moines, Iowa. Columbia was their only stop in Missouri.
The tour follows the release of the band's debut album “Untold Truths,” which was released Nov. 11, 2008.