Appetite for Destruction

The gathering was in a three-bedroom apartment just east of 51st Street and Troost, a beautiful space decorated with orb-shaped rice-paper lanterns, red-shag area rugs and a sexy leopard-print couch. The host, Angie Rosete, was attending the University of Missouri-Kansas City and needed a way to earn some extra cash. This party was one of the requirements she had to fulfill to become a Tupperware saleswoman.

Rosete welcomed into her home that evening's official Tupperware rep — a shy, puffy-cheeked woman with dark, curly hair and glasses. Everybody gathered around the coffee table, and the rep explained how the evening would work. She would display and describe the available food-storage items one at a time. The guests could interrupt with questions; each person who included the word Tupperware in a question about Tupperware would take home a free small piece of Tupperware, courtesy of Tupperware.

When it came time for her to describe the Rock 'N Serve, the rep perked up. One of Tupperware's newer lines, the Rock 'N Serve set was clearly among her favorites. It was easy to see why. Each Rock 'N Serve item had a lid with a burper-type piece inserted into it. It opened to reveal a spout that could be used to pour the contents — perhaps soup? — into a serving dish. Conveniently, it also could be opened to release steam when its contents were being microwaved.

You can put it in the freezer, she explained. It's microwavable, it's bulletproof, you can drop it, it's —

"Excuse me," the Pitch reporter interrupted. "Did you say this Tupperware is bulletproof?"

The rep offered the reporter a prize for using the word Tupperware, then answered the question.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?" someone else asked, flabbergasted.

The rep offered only a bewildered stare. An awkward silence followed before the party finally resumed, and the bulletproof question went unanswered.

It lingered, though.

Would leftovers in a Rock 'N Serve container really be fully protected from an armed assault? And who worries about an intruder threatening yesterday's lunch at gunpoint?

Later, after Rosete had completed her own Tupperware sales training, we asked whether she had been told that Rock 'N Serve was bulletproof.

"They didn't tell us to say it was bulletproof," she said. "But they did tell us it was the same material used in airplane windshields and bulletproof glass."

The Pitch put in a call to Tupperware and spoke with the company's head of engineering and design, David Kosuma. He confirmed that polycarbonate, used in the Rock 'N Serve line, is also used in the windshields of fighter jets as well as in the windows of presidential cars. "But of course, at a much greater thickness [in the vehicles]," he said.

When we asked, point-blank, if the Rock 'N Serve line was bulletproof, Kosuma answered, "If you're asking if I would hide behind one of these if someone was shooting at me, I wouldn't."

Kosuma detailed stories of dropping full Tupperware from great heights, freezing it, subjecting it to intense heat.

"We do a lot of product testing," he said. "But we have never shot it."

Well, guess what. We have.

With a little help from some very unexpected friends.

Sculptor Mac Maclanahan isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. With a day job at Wenzel Steel and an art studio filled with demolition-derby cars, he makes fine art with a wrench and a blowtorch.

Maclanahan recently moved into a new "studio" space: a 7-acre plot of land near Quindaro in Kansas City, Kansas. The neighborhood used to house the city's salt trucks and other utility vehicles, but with storage now moved to a new location, the area is deserted. Maclanahan shares the space with an industrial liquidator. His artistic medium is cars, so what most artists would call a huge studio would be insufficient for him. "I have 15 cars," he explains. "I have a lot of shit. I need to spread out."

When he first started going to the studio, he thought he might need to bring along his shotgun for protection. Now that he has grown accustomed to his surroundings, he no longer feels that way. In fact, he hopes eventually to invite other artists working on heavy-duty, industrial-sized sculptures to share space there with him, turning the site into an outdoor work-and-display space similar to a mechanic's garage.

"I'm tired of coffee-table art," he says, explaining the criteria he'll use to select his studiomates. "If it can't crush a coffee table, it doesn't belong there."

Maclanahan is nothing if not a contradiction. He's 100 percent manly man, 100 percent sensitive artist, 100 percent fearless city guy and 100 percent farmboy from Missourah. De Soto, to be specific.

His parents moved to De Soto, a few miles south of St. Louis, when he was 7 years old. They were afraid that their son, a dyslexic boy who had already smashed in a brand-new Corvette's window, would become a juvenile delinquent in the city. So the family went back to his dad's farm, the one his mom had hated because there wasn't any running water.