Tuesday, December 14
Bank move adjacent to Meadow Creek approved
Charlottesville Planning Commissioners tonight approved a site plan submitted by Union Bank and Trust to relocate its Barracks Road-area branch to a site near Meadow Creek. According to a report by John Yellig in The Daily Progress, the bank, which earlier this year acquired Guaranty Bank, plans to close Guaranty’s Arlington Boulevard branch and reopen a new office at the northwest corner of Cedars Court and Barracks Road. The bank will not be subject to the City’s water protection ordinance, which bars construction near the creek, because it submitted its site plan to the City before the ordinance became law.
Wednesday, December 15
Happy Birthday, Bill of Rights
Those short on Christmas cash were pleased to learn today, on the 213th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, that the Rutherford Institute would give away free copies of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. As a collection of freedom’s greatest hits, the Bill of Rights is the perfect stocking stuffer, a great way to remind certain Republicans that separation of church and state isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law! Also today, the Jefferson Area Libertarians gathered outside the Albemarle County Office Building, encouraging people to fight the Bush Administration’s attempt to restrict the Bill of Rights during the war on terror. “I’m sure they mean well, but the legislation takes on a life of its own,” said James Lark, secretary of the local Libertarians and a member of the party’s national committee. “Now is the time when you have to protect your rights.”
Thursday, December 16
Bomb threat diffused at CHO
US Air flight 2425 made an emergency landing at the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport around 3pm today due to a bomb scare. An unidentified would-be passenger, who probably grew to regret that bathroom break, missed the Knoxville-bound flight as it left Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport. Frustrated, he told airport staff that his bag—already on board—had a bomb in it. At CHO, experts and bomb-sniffing dogs found nothing; however, the fiasco shut down the airport for two hours and delayed dozens of flights. Terrie Dean, public relations coordinator for the airport, said it was the first plane to be grounded for terror concerns in Charlottesville. “Whenever a situation like this is announced it triggers a reaction from everyone to consider it a serious issue—you go into the situation thinking that you are going to handle it like an emergency,” she says. The faux bomber was taken into questioning by federal authorities.
Friday, December 17
Cupp bows out
Longtime WVIR news director and sometime actor Dave Cupp bid Charlottesville farewell at the end of tonight’s 6pm newscast. Following a retrospective of Cupp’s 26-year career on Channel 29, including highlights of his work on a “menengitis” [sic] outbreak and a tour of his many facial hair stylings (just say “No!” to a goatee), Cupp announced his plan to teach at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communications starting in fall 2005. Neither his on-air nor his newsroom replacements were named.Farewell to the chief Charlottesville Fire Chief Julian Taliaferro, a 42-year veteran of the department, announced his retirement today. When Taliaferro took the post in 1971, at age 30, he was one of the youngest chiefs in the country, City Manager Gary O’Connell said in a press conference this morning. O’Connell credited Taliaferro with reorganizing Charlottesville’s fire department, modernizing equipment and guiding the department to accreditation by the Commission on Fire Accreditation International in 2001.
Saturday, December 18
Con artist makes change
A woman using dime rolls filled with pennies duped at least three local retailers today, according to a report in The Daily Progress, prompting city police to urge cashiers to check the middle section of any coin rolls they receive during transactions. Reportedly, the woman put dimes on the ends of the rolls to fool cashiers.
Sunday, December 19
Naked ambition
Though slated to open for Mary Prankster tonight at Gravity Lounge, the Naked Puritans, the local punk funsters, were absent. According to guitarist and singer Lance Brenner, who was a guest last night on WNRN’s “Local Motion” show, the trio was invited to New York by Spin Magazine publisher Jacob Hill to play at the music rag’s Christmas party. And in another sign of the Puritans’ rising stock, Brenner said, Punk Planet magazine gave the thumbs up to the band’s new three-song CD “single,” Don’t Burn Your House Down. If the three songs were sandwiches, Brenner quoted the pub’s reviewer, “I’d eat ’em.”
Monday, December 20
Housing advocates to meet
The Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority convenes tonight to take public comment on the Annual Plan drafted by the Piedmont Housing Alliance, city proponents of affordable housing. Central to the PHA’s 2005 Plan is the Housing Choice Voucher Homeownership Program, which aims to increase affordable housing options for disabled people.
Written by Cathy Harding from news sources and staff reports.
Noise in the ’Hood
Planned Parenthood faces more legal challenges
The legal wrangling over a new Planned Parenthood clinic isn’t over, and it may not stop until it gets to the State Supreme Court. The Herbert C. Jones Reproductive Health and Education Center on Hydraulic Road passed a zoning challenge on November 9, when the Albemarle Board of Zoning Appeals ruled 3-1 that the clinic complied with County zoning laws. Now, that ruling has been appealed to Albemarle Circuit Court.
Culpeper attorney J. Michael Sharman filed the appeal on December 7. Last month he also filed a lawsuit over the new clinic, naming as defendants not only Planned Parenthood but also Albemarle County, the Board of Supervisors and Chairman Lindsay Dorrier.
“This is a land use issue, pure and simple,” says Sharman. The Central Virginia Family Forum, a local Christian political group, is helping fund Sharman’s activity.
Sharman represents six people who live in Garden Court, a development adjacent to the clinic. He argues that the Jones Center is a “hospital,” and therefore prohibited by County zoning laws from existing at its current location, 2964 Hydraulic Rd. The clinic has been there since Planned Parenthood built it in August 2004.
Since then, the clinic has prompted legal attacks. In August, Garden Court resident Renae Townsend challenged the County zoning department’s decision in 2000 to grant the clinic an occupancy permit as a “professional office.” Last month, when the BZA ruled 3-1 in favor of the County, nearly 1,000 people crammed the auditorium at the County Office Building to support Planned Parenthood.
Along with her December 7 appeal of the BZA’s decision, Townsend is also suing the County in Circuit Court. On November 5, Sharman filed a writ of mandamus on behalf of Townsend and five other Garden Court property owners. The suit asks the County to revoke the clinic’s zoning permits.
According to the suit, these property owners need assurance that “the County would fairly and objectively apply the law, rather than strain the language of the County code to permit, without public scrutiny, a political favorite to locate in an area where it would not be permitted to operate without either favoritism or malfeasance by the County.”
County spokeswoman Lee Catlin says zoning staff followed “appropriate and established procedures throughout the process.”
The County and Planned Parenthood both recently filed responses to the suit, saying that Sharman filed his petition improperly. Now a County judge will review the filings and decide whether Sharman must rewrite his petition, or whether the County and Planned Parenthood must answer Sharman’s charges. A hearing date has not been set.
All this sounds very familiar to people at the Falls Church Healthcare Center, a Northern Virginia abortion clinic that opened in 2002. The clinic’s director says Christian groups also tried to close her clinic with zoning challenges. She says it is a common tactic.
“There are several manuals out for people who are trying to take away access to medical services,” says Rose, a clinic employee who asked that her last name not be printed “because of security issues.” She says anti-abortion activists also blocked construction equipment and harassed the contractor in attempts to fight off the Falls Church clinic.
Joe Scheidler, director of the Pro-Life Action League, published a book in 1985 called Closed, 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, which tells activists how to fight clinics with zoning laws. A Chesapeake group called Army of God publishes a more aggressive manual on its website (www.armyofgod.com) advocating arson, bombing and other types of sabotage.
“You just have to know that you’re right and keep going,” says Rose in Falls Church.
It seems like both sides are taking that advice. Catlin says the case could go all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court. “There’s so much emotion on both sides,” Catlin says. “I wouldn’t expect anyone would step back and walk away until they got as far as they could go.”—John Borgmeyer
It’s crowded at the top
“This is your Paramount Theater,” Chad Hershner intoned from the lip of the stage last Wednesday night, in the final moments of build-up to Tony Bennett’s kick-off concert. And, if on that night you were going by the name Mamie Atkinson Jessup or Claude A. Jessup (lobby) or K.K. and Larry Pearson (usher room), or Bank of America (grand staircase) or Elsie Wilson and W. McIlwaine Thompson Jr. (loggia), then indeed, it was your theater, no doubt about it. Or, if yours was among the 80some names scratched into the glass plaque honoring the Founders Circle up on the second floor, then it was clearly your building, too. If you were über-philanthropist Hunter Smith, whom Executive Director Hershner credited with picking out the celadon and gold draperies for the newly restored 73-year-old Downtown showcase, then yes, this was your place.
And, if you were wearing beads, baubles, mink or an Italian-cut tuxedo, even if you hadn’t paid full freight ($1,000 a head) for the “grand reopening fundraising gala,” nor contributed to the cause in the past five years, once you had the first glass of Merlot in your grip, sweetheart, it was your Paramount Theater, too. For not only had you joined everyone else in town to complain about the perennial construction site smack dab in the middle of the Mall, you’d joined the chorus of skeptics casting doubt on the renovation’s finish date. (And not without reason: As one of the architects on the project conceded, balancing a wine glass and relief, the chandeliers had been hung only three hours before the doors opened.)
And yet somehow here you were at 6:30 on the evening of Wednesday, December 15, checking your fur in the capacious tent-cum-coatroom that had been raised outside the theater’s front door and processing past the fake “paparazzi” along the reddish carpet and through The Paramount’s long-shuttered front doors into a den of your—meaning Charlottesville’s—celebrities.
There was developer Colin Rolph in a kilt; folksinger Mary Chapin Carpenter in pinstripe trousers and a morning coat; and rock ’n’ roll manager/real estate developer Coran Capshaw in a tux and brown cowboy boots. Diminutive Oscar-winner Sissy Spacek was spotted leaving the settee-furnished ladies lounge on the lower level. Howie Long, all six acres of him and his shoulders, was on hand in form-fitting black, head to toe.
And the demi-celebrities were filling up the lobbies of both floors, too. Margareta Douglas, looking every inch the grand dowager in her two-piece, floor-length coral dress and robust pearls, yet nonetheless describing herself as a “farmer” and rooting her declared love of the new theater in her lifelong romance with music. Joyce Robbins asking no one in particular, “Don’t we dress up well?” Homebuilder and soon-to-be bank director Michael Gaffney commending a “wonderful group of great people” for “just the fact that we’re restoring history.” Even Rosa, the 19-year-old waiter trucked in from Design Cuisine in Arlington, seemed to have an extra swagger in her bowtie as she navigated the crowd with carrot fritters and mango sauce. Beads glistened, feathers lilted, décolletages sparkled—and those were just the men!
But there was no more time to admire the region’s best haberdashery. It was hurry-up-and-wait time as Tony Bennett, the man with the golden pipes, he who has sold 50 million records, the guy who left his heart in you-know-where would have to take a turn behind Tracy Grooms-Key who would unleash the first notes into the impeccably restored, acoustically superior auditorium with her rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Following that, a trio of “blondes,” clearly adrift since the networks stopped broadcasting Bob Hope Christmas specials, sang and danced a few ditties about The Paramount’s upcoming season. Then a few comments from Hershner, a little ribbon-cutting, some applause, some more applause, a well-rehearsed, spontaneous utterance of appreciative comments from Spacek, Long, Carpenter, John Grisham and Hugh Wilson, and then yes, finally, here he comes, ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome Tony Bennett!
There are movie stars and then there are movie stars and then there’s Tony Bennett. Shiny suit, swinging band, big smile, warm affect and a vocal range that a man half his age (78) could admire, Bennett was the picture of cool, professionalism, class—you name it. The band, folks, let’s have a hand for the band—especially unsurpassable drummer Clayton Cameron. They took Tony and the 1,100 assembled sophisticates through a jazzy, confident tour of the great American songbook.
More than 100 minutes later, Bennett finished his second encore and while some remained behind for another reception, those in steerage, so to speak, made their way out. Ushers thrust gifts, like paperweight magnifying glasses, into the hands of the happy departing crowd. Outside a lone vendor, with freshly framed photos of The Paramount on display at a long table, stood in the bitter cold. Sales had been slow, he said. “I don’t know how much the black-tie crowd goes in for these kind of souvenirs,” he said.—Cathy Harding
Christ all mighty
Bright lights, big manger scene at Greene County house
If you coo with Christmas spirit over the inflatable Santa Homer Simpson in your neighbor’s lawn, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Holiday light aficionados should drive up 29N, just over the Greene County line. Take a right at the Sheetz gas station. Bear left on to Matthew Mill Drive. And then…well, then you can’t miss it. Trust us. These people don’t need no stinkin’ inflatable Homer Simpsons. It’s the jolliest freaking house in Central Virginia.
Pull up through the 20′ arch that reads “Happy Holidays” in red and green lights and park—yes, park—in the lot next to the house; if you’re going the weekend before Christmas, expect to find local police directing traffic. Then get out of your car and wander through a lighting display so gloriously gaudy it would make Clark
W. Griswold weep with jealousy and joy.
Countless (literally) lighted figures adorn every corner of the property—enclosed in arches, hanging out around the pool, “skating” on a trampoline, stuck impossibly high in trees. On the wooden playground, homemade light sculptures of Charlie Brown and Snoopy mingle on the swings with Disney characters Mickey, Minnie and Pluto.
And then, there are the Santa lights: Santa cross-country skiing. Santa fishing. Santa flying a helicopter into a tree. Plus, a full 3D, lit Santa, sleigh and eight reindeer flying through the air. Check out the shed converted into a music box room for even more Clauses, like Santa on a Razor scooter. The fat man gets around.
But he always takes time to stop by this house in person. On a recent Saturday night a line 10-people deep rapped with Mr. Claus on the house’s front stoop. Some did the whole Xmas list thing. Some just said, “Boy, this must have taken a lot of work!” Mrs. Claus stood nearby, a vision in her red robes with white-fur trim. She’s actually Tammy Perkins, daughter of James and Jenny Perkins, owners of the holiday-loving house. She explains that they’ve been doing this for eight years, and that it takes her husband (that’d be Santa, Jaime Cancela-Vaz) and her mom three months to check and hang all the lights, which are otherwise stored in the sheds surrounding the property.
Around the corner from Santa’s stoop is perhaps the real piéce de resistance: The Angel Room. A heavenly messenger constructed from lights and garland points the way to a door
to the house’s basement. Inside, more than 200 angels cover the tables, mantle and floor, with more hanging from a pure white, revolving Christmas tree in another part of the room. Some are tiny, some life-sized; some are blonde, some brunette (but mostly blonde); some move (they freak me out), most come with frilly dresses and lights. As one mother put it while looking on in shocked bemusement, “I hope they have sprinklers in here.” But another got the point: “I feel so peaceful here.”
The kind of peace only thousands of twinkle lights, a couple generators and a 10-minute drive into Greene County can buy. Just leave Santa Homer, and your cynicism, at the holly-covered gates.—Eric Rezsnyak
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As Told To
Conversations with Old-School Business Owners
The Jokers Barber Shop has been here—right here in the same spot—since 1936. There’s a sign in the window that says so. It has always been here. Jokers Barber Shop was named after the old Jokers Social Club, and everyone who belonged to it is dead now. I am the last joker—the last joker left standing. I came into a legacy, because I am a legend.
Clarence Massie and James E. Payne were members of the Jokers Club, and they owned this place. Now I own it. I am their legacy, and I am keeping their legacy alive.
This isn’t the only black barbershop in Charlottesville, but it’s the oldest. Here, we do everything. We do white people, Mexican people, Chinese people. We do some women too. We do haircuts for $10 and shaves and shampoos and mustache trimming. We do everything!
I have two employees right now, and am working towards four. Jake here has been with me for eight months. We used to have three chairs, and now we have four.
I want you to know we get everyone in here: people like Maurice Cox and Paul Garrett. Rev. Alvin Edwards just started coming here. We get a lot of well-known people too—people like Willie Mays and Roosevelt Brown, the New York Giants football player. The UVA football and basketball players come in here too. I tell you, we get everyone. All kinds of people come to the Jokers Barber Shop.
I like being a barber because of the conversations I have with the people who come in here. And because I consider this a kind of ministry. I feel that I minister to people. People tell me all kinds of things about themselves, and they know I will keep it to myself. They trust me with what they tell me about their lives, and that’s like being a minister, and having people trust you with their secrets.
I used to be a security officer at the University of Virginia, but then I started having vision problems. I had to stop doing what I had been doing.
One day, my wife bought me a pair of clippers, so I could trim my kids’ hair. And I said: “Hey, I like doing this! I really like doing this.” That was back in 1992, and I have been a barber ever since. I went to barber school to learn how to do it professionally.
I was born in Charlottesville, and have been living here all my life. We have four kids: 4, 5, 15 and 16. I love what I do, and I love this shop. What else can I tell you? We are open every week from Tuesday through Saturday—closed on Mondays.
I love working with the people who come in regularly, and those who come in once in a while. And I tell you, I love working in this shop. We have a good time here. Something else I love. I love music. I guess I’m just a high-spirited man. Listen to that music. Come on, let’s dance! See how people are listening and loving the music? Come on, come on—stand up and let’s dance.