Month: March 2012

 Here’s an interesting fact from last week’s Republican primary in Michigan: Although Rick Santorum recently led Mitt Romney by as much as 15 points in the polls, he ended up losing by a three-point margin. And a huge part of that 18-point swing came courtesy of women voters. In fact, if only men had voted in the primary, Santorum would have come within one percentage point of besting Romney. But alas, due to that pesky 19th Amendment to the Constitution, women also showed up at the polls, and they favored Romney by six points.
So what does any of this have to do with the Old Dominion, you ask? Well, perhaps nothing. But consider this: In the week leading up to the GOP’s Michigan showdown, Virginia’s retrograde Republicans made quite a splash on the national scene, and not in a good way.

Hundreds of people marched on the State Capitol in Richmond, Saturday, March 3, to protest a series of controversial measures dealing with women’s reproductive rights being considered in the General Assembly this session. The protesters were met by Virginia State Police dressed in riot gear, and by the end of the day, 31 people had been arrested for demonstrating against the legislation, which includes a bill that would force any woman seeking an abortion to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before receiving the procedure. (Photo by Scott Elmquist)

If you remember, the last time we visited our friends in Richmond they were hard at work debating a number of controversial measures, including a bill that would endow a fertilized egg with all the rights of a “person” under the law, and a bill that would force any woman seeking an abortion to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before receiving the procedure.
It was this last measure, with its grotesque use of an invasive medical procedure as punishment for seeking a perfectly legal operation, that really caught the media’s attention. And the elephants in the Assembly certainly didn’t help themselves by treating the entire issue as an opportunity for sophomoric jokes.

The main offender in this regard was Delegate Dave Albo, who is without a doubt one of the dimmest bulbs in an already low-wattage chamber. For reasons known only to himself (and perhaps his therapist), Albo thought that it would be a brilliant idea to take to the floor of the House and explain, in detail, how television coverage of the ultrasound bill had caused his wife to refuse to have sex with him. Seriously.

To help make his point, Albo even had one of his fellow legislators play a bass-heavy porno soundtrack while he rambled on about the size of his flat-screen TV, his “patented” sex-making moves, and the indignity of having his name linked to “‘trans-v’ this and ‘trans-v’ that.”

Needless to say, this cringe-inducing monologue was soon all over the Internet and late-night comedy shows, and surely contributed to the quick removal of the “trans-v” requirement from the ultrasound bill in the Senate.

But the damage had already been done. Just as Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration laws have turned Latinos against the GOP nationally, so has Virginia now become a symbol of the callous, mocking attitude Republicans seem to have toward the health, dignity, and self-determination of American women.

Did Virginia cost Santorum a Michigan victory? Of course not. But his long history of anti-abortion rhetoric and ominous warnings about “the dangers of contraception” have historically turned off many women voters, and we would argue that the Virginia ultrasound debate only served to heighten their concerns.

And remember, this is just the GOP primary. In the general election, the Republican candidate is going to need a sizable chunk of both Latino and women voters to win—and the crazier that state legislatures in places like Virginia and Arizona act, the harder that becomes.

On the plus side, however, if Barack Obama wins a second term, maybe Dave Albo’s wife will finally sleep with him again.

Jinx Kern (Photo by Cramer Photo)

“There have been few culinary experiences in my life that have quieted, humbled, and thrilled me with [their] utter perfection, but Jinx’s pork did all of those things,” wrote New York food blogger, Chichi Wang, somewhat hyperbolically, after a trip to Jinx’s Pit’s-Top Barbecue in 2010. “Like true love, the experience of the sandwich left me quite certain that it would be a long time before I could feel anything tantamount to the pleasure I experienced on that summer afternoon.”

What kind of pork inspires a love letter? Or should Ms. Wang’s note have been addressed to Jinx himself, the Quixotic figure behind the high counter, 60 years old with a ’50s side part and a wolfish grin?

I set out to answer that question by trying to understand why Jinx has gotten so much attention since he opened his little barbecue shack on Market Street a decade ago. Southern Living, USA Today, Maxim, and The Wall Street Journal have all touted his business, comparing it to national barbecue institutions like Dreamland and Rendezvous. Locally Edible Blue Ridge, The Hook, and a whole passel of food bloggers have sung his praise. All this attention for a business that’s open for lunch only, has one employee, and serves 20 people on an good day.

“Barbecue is a timeless thing,” Jinx said. “If it’s been cooked right, you are eating something that’s been a human experience since cooking began. I know enough about the history of art that I can legitimately say that the first barbecue was the food of the gods.”

Jinx is a storyteller, and he was answering a reporter’s question I had posed to him in a roundabout way. What makes the place special? Jinx started the Pit’s-Top because he was at a crossroads in his life. At age 49 he was heartbroken and unemployed, driving home to Virginia from a failed relationship in California. When he got to Arkansas he turned left, to Paducah, Kentucky, and Starnes Barbecue, in search of the food he grew up with and some insight into the process of how it was made. After talking his way into the back, Jinx came away with five pounds of pulled pork infused with hickory smoke and the secret of his success.

“The thing about people who love barbecue is they’ve got an idea. There’s always the hope that when they go to that next place they’re gonna find it again and not have to drive all the goddamn way to Paducah.”

Or to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in my case, just across the railroad tracks from the town where my dad grew up. At Brooks Barbecue a pound of pulled pork comes with a half loaf of cheap white bread, bright yellow mustard-based cole slaw, and an orangey-red vinegar-based hot sauce. The meat is cooked out back and pulled by hand into long strands, crisp at the edges and glistening with fat. It’s heavenly.

But no one writes about Brooks, or Starnes, or any of the cinder block buildings with dirt parking lots and piles of hickory wood on the side that dot the South the way they write about Jinx.

Is it that he’s a double Hoo with a master’s degree in art history? Or that no one ever knows when his business is open? Or that his place seems to defy a half century of development in the health code? Or is it something more mysterious?

“If you verbalize all that, if you articulate it and put it out in the air…” Jinx paused and sighed. “There’s a kind of a magic there that we all conspire to and if we discuss it, suddenly it vanishes, because it becomes self-conscious.”

Back to Ms. Wang, who visited Jinx on a 90-degree summer day after having spent a week in North Carolina in search of the best barbecue she could find. This from a woman who spent a year at a butcher’s shop learning about meat and who is as comfortable in the eateries of Jackson Heights as in the brasseries of Paris.

“Each bite presented a different facet of Kern’s art: the way the meat seemed almost flaky, like confit, or the wetness of the flesh, which was impossibly juicy without being the least bit soggy.”

I declare, I believe I need a handkerchief.

Mr. Kern, I presume

J.W. “Jinx” Kern lives near Stuart’s Draft in a family home, Slatelands, originally constructed in 1789. (Photo by Cramer Photo)

J.W. “Jinx” Kern was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the son of an assistant chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad who hailed from Paducah, Kentucky. Jinx’s grandfather and namesake was the superintendent of the Kentucky division of the Illinois Central, and cast a shadow on following generations.

“He was a big deal. All the rest of us are kind of rag-tag after him,” Jinx said.

The Boss, as Jinx’s grandfather was known, died on December 6, 1941, and the Sunday paper’s front page top headline was “J.W. Kern dies,” with a smaller one below that read “Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”

This is the type of anecdotal history that is familiar to Southern families of a certain class. It speaks to the need to preserve stature in a world controlled by Yankee carpetbaggers and also to a deeply ingrained classical education—the histories of heroes and gods.

But Jinx never was called The Boss. Instead, he took his nickname from his great-grandfather, The Boss’s father, a professor of Greek at Episcopal High School and Washington and Lee University, whose sense of things was so iconoclastic that his wife called him Hijinks, Jinx for short. Jinx says he got his name because we was born on the 13th day of September, but who ever really knows how these things work?

“I didn’t know that until I was about 35, and by then it was too late to do anything about it. And I didn’t want to anyway,” Jinx said.

Jinx’s mother’s family, Jefferson descendants through the Davises, connects him to Charlottesville. His grandparents, Peggy and Bernard Mayo, lived on the Lawn when Bernard taught history at UVA.

“It’s kind of a burden and it’s also a legacy, and my brother and I are the only ones who seem to worry about it,” Jinx said.

Jinx has a box that his uncle took to World War I, where he died. The box is filled with family letters that he plans to digitize, but there is unwritten information in his head that’s just as important, like the fact that his paternal grandmother’s recipe for dinner rolls “almost made it into The Joy of Cooking.”

Walking into the Pit’s-Top is like traveling back to the early ’50s—posters of pinup girls and aluminum cola advertisements layered on the clapboard walls while This is the Army flickers on an old television. Jinx banging around in the back, greeting people with and offhand charm that belies how closely he pays attention.

“Jinx’s basically looks like a small, not particularly well kept home. Inside was littered with old memorabilia, like the old school pepsi logo and VHS tapes(?). It was pretty messy. I’d guess its been weeks since the floor has seen a mop. I was greeted by Jinx, who was hustling back and forth grabbing firewood and a piece of newspaper set on fire. I knew that this was going to be in for an experience,” wrote one of the many food bloggers who’ve been drawn to the place like moths to a lamp.

Not everyone sees the charm, which may be why one of his close friends, Booton Lee “Boo” Barnett, calls it a “barbecue Brigadoon.”

“After hearing about this ‘hole in the wall,’ my family and I were ready for some great BBQ, but were thoroughly disappointed in both the food and the experience. Not only was there nowhere to sit, Jinx pushed aside some old VHS tapes and other assorted personal letters and clothing items that cluttered the countertop, but the place was altogether filthy,” wrote one commenter on TripAdvisor.com.

So how did Jinx get from the Lawn to the shack? It’s a long story. The short version is he finished a master’s in art history at UVA in the mid-’70s, got engaged, and was all set up to live the kind of life people expected him to live. He spent two years as a paid intern at the UVA Art Museum, moonlighting in food service and preparation at the Boar’s Head, Farmington, and The Gaslight, which is where he got his first real experience in the kitchen.

“You get it in your blood and it’s hard to get rid of,” Jinx said.

And then the train went off the tracks. It was 1975 and he’d gone with a friend to visit his future mother-in-law. It was March 13 (beware the Ides of March), Jinx’s half-birthday, and his fiancée was still in London finishing her degree. Jinx and his friend took the car and said they were going to see The Sound of Music. Instead, they headed in the opposite direction in search of an ‘X’-rated movie. As they sped alongside a railroad track in the southern edge of Cook County, Illinois, near Chicago but out in the country, their car was struck without warning by another car, a black Pontiac Trans Am, that had hit the railroad grade and launched into the air, landing on the roof just behind Jinx’s left ear.

His friend suffered a fractured skull and lost six months of memory. They found Jinx walking in circles in a field in shock. He woke up in the hospital, with his father holding his hand, thinking that he had cancer. His life had changed.

“A nanosecond earlier or later and I’m dead. I got back to the University and finished the year all right. I don’t know,” Jinx said, searching for the best way to explain what happened. “My own theory is that I have a scar on my frontal cortex which froze my emotional capacities at the age of 23, which is a fine place to be. But after that I decided if it’s not fun, I’m not going to do it.”

Master of the house

The Retired Old Men Eating Out (ROMEO) lunch group meets every Friday at noon at Jinx’s Pit’s-Top Barbecue near the corner of Market Street and Meade Avenue in Charlottesville. On Thursdays, a young men’s lunch group fills the place. (Photo by Nick Strocchia)

“‘It was an odyssey and a saga,’ says Jinx with a sly smile that signals he’s about as comfortable discussing his personal journey as he is spilling his barbecue secrets. On this chilly morning, though, he does both,” wrote Steve Russell in an Edible Blue Ridge profile of Jinx.

But I’m not certain that Jinx hasn’t just learned the value of hiding out in the open. Every Thursday, a group of young men gathers at Jinx’s for a long barbecue lunch that was instigated by Chip Ransler and a group of friends. Ransler is from Paducah, understands the magic of Starnes, and recognized the authenticity of Jinx’s work, not just in the pork but also in an old sign for the Kingsway Skateway that hangs just inside the door at the Pit’s-Top. The young men are musicians, writers, academics, and entrepreneurs in their 30s, clean-cut and mostly clean living. Jinx sets out a steaming platter of barbecue chicken thighs, marinated in yogurt and ranch dressing because buttermilk wasn’t available.

“Where did that come from?” one says.

“From the egg of course,” quips Jinx, with a balletic whirl that ends in the satisfying sizzle of sweet potato fries dropped into hot grease.

“We’re all seekers here,” Ransler says.

“What is Jinx the answer to?” I ask.

“He is the riddle,” says Ian Ayers.

“He is an enigma,” Ransler continues. “This is like a testament to an authentic life. This is the most organic thing happening. We don’t eat like this anymore.”

That’s the Thursday crowd. On Fridays the Retired Old Men Eating Out come in and talk about stuff that happens to people a generation older. They love Jinx just as much, more probably.

The two groups came together for the first time earlier this year at Jinx’s family home in Stuart’s Draft for a dinner of cassoulet, which took Jinx a week to make and allowed him the lifelong fulfillment of confit-ing a duck. Slatelands, which was built in 1789 and came into the family in 1840, belonged to a great aunt before Jinx moved in. Her electric lift chair still graces the spiral bannister, but otherwise the house looks like it has changed little through the years, save for the artistic evidence of successive grand tours that litters the walls.
Chip Ransler: “There’s still new information coming out all the time. I didn’t know if his so-called estate was a trailer or an antebellum house.”

The men brought their wives and kids to the dinner. Three generations of Jinxers.

I went out to Stuart’s Draft a few week’s after the dinner, which they are still talking about. Jinx and I sat in the drawing room and I asked him what made him tick. It’s a strange thing to ask someone, but he was patient with me.

We went back through his biography, which for the past two decades has been about working various chef jobs at venues as exalted as the executive dining room at The Field Museum in Chicago and as humble as prep cook at the Doubletree. Jinx is a serial monagamist, forever falling in love with ideas, projects, people. If he could be anyone else right now, it would be Kim Boggs, the found object artist whose work is on display at The Bridge/PAI.

Dates and numbers are important to Jinx. His revelatory visit to Starnes happened the day before Thanksgiving. He was fired for the last time the day after Christmas. Thirteen is his lucky number. Nothing is random.

“It all led back to Charlottesville. To where we’re sitting. All of these little things along the way have led me seemingly inexorably to where I am, which worries me because you wonder what’s next,” Jinx said.

He knocks wood for the fifth or sixth time in the conversation. Jinx is sad that he’ll not marry and have children, but otherwise he sees his life as a kind of paradise.

“It’s a great life. I have to pinch myself. I answer to no one…,” Jinx said. “Except maybe the IRS.” He wakes up in the morning and drives into town and makes barbecue that is better than anyone else’s. He opens the shop and puts on a show and the people mostly love him.
“When you pick something to do and it’s the right thing, the doors begin to open for no reason and suddenly the stars align and one thing leads to another and bang, you’re doing it,” he said.

Boo Barnett is one of Jinx’s Minxes, a loose confederation of women who help him out when he’s oversubscribed a catering gig. A Charlottesville native, Boo describes Jinx as “the love child of Elmer Gantry and Atticus Finch” and encapsulates his charm with an elegant sentence.

“He’s this intellectual who’s out at the rock pile drinking port, singing at the top of his voice while standing on that electric chair going up the stairs, declaiming Cicero. And then he’s this sweaty, essential alchemist who grabs bloody hunks of meat and seduces them with smoke,” she said.

After Jinx closes the shop each day, he goes to visit his mother, Peggy, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. It was her approval that set Jinx free. He spent a year after he opened the Pit’s-Top trying to get his barbecue to taste like Starnes and it always fell short.
“One day I got fouled up and had to leave a situation here and it caused me to add a step to the barbecue and I came back the next day and tasted it and my eyes lit up and I said, ‘She’s got to taste this,’” he said.

Jinx raced over with a plate. His father was still alive then and had a sammich too, but Jinx’s eyes were on Peggy.

“My mother, if she can find a thing wrong —this is her job, this is what mothers do—they find things wrong with you and she said, ‘It’s better than Starnes.’ And I knew that already,” Jinx said. “Angels started singing.”

That was in 2001. Since then he’s run his business on a model that he describes as “by the skin of my teeth.” It involves selling pulled pork sandwiches and ribs and overseeing a modern-day salon that Boo says is “almost like a Lost Boys Club.”

“He kind of cleaves to that Faulknerian view of Virginians that says we’re so interested in ourselves, we don’t really have time to be too interested in you,” Boo said. “If you like us, come on in and partake. If you don’t, we couldn’t care less.”

Born in Jackson but bred in Charlottesville. A Faulknerian Virginian, Jinx doesn’t really want to get into Proust, but he has something important to tell me, and he has to be precise.

“What I try to do is keep something alive that I have way from the beginning of my time. It’s now 60 years almost. It’s a flavor that’s in my DNA, so it reminds me of the past,” he said. “When the wind is right in this establishment, and the cooker is going, and it’s got a hickory fire in it and the humidity outside is just right, I can close my eyes and get a whiff of that, and bang it’s Paducah 1960 and it’s a rush. All those things come back. Bad and good, but mostly good.”

 A collaboration between The Cardboard Company and New York artist Tom Burckhardt, “The Brooks Natural History Museum C. 1900: A Creative Interpretation,” opened at Ruffin Gallery on February 24. The installation is a whimsical re-imagination of UVA’s defunct natural history museum, which occupied Brooks Hall from 1877 through the 1940s, constructed of brown cardboard (60 percent recycled), black paint, and the creativity of the collaborators. Burckhardt, the 2011-12 visiting artist chosen by the student-run UVA Arts Board, made the show’s centerpiece, a very sympathetic mammoth being led by Henry Ward, the natural history entrepreneur whose company made the original plaster and fur version for the Brooks Natural History Museum.

New York artist Tom Burckhardt’s collaboration with The Cardboard Company, “The Brooks Natural History Museum C.1900: A Creative Interpretation,” at Ruffin Hall. (Photo by Cara Gilroy)

The show is right up my alley. Bursting with energy, it’s imaginative, original, and just plain fun. I loved the handmade quality, which is fresh and authentic. Upon entering Ruffin Hall, you are greeted by The Cardboard Company’s version of Brooks Hall’s façade spilling out of the gallery space that’s marvelously re-created in extreme perspective.

You feel like you’re in a natural history museum, with a touch of funhouse thrown in. There are maps and dioramas, display tables with the intricate wrought iron legs faithfully re-created. The mammoth centerpiece communicates the humor inherent in the show. On one of Ward’s shoulders sits Darwin and on the other, P.T. Barnum, a reference to the particular brand of science that was mixed with a heavy dose of showmanship to create Brooks Hall. The fuzzy science of the original museum underscored the spirit of the project. The purpose was never to reproduce a historically accurate recreation. Rather it was to discover and create new and unexpected narratives.

In this “natural history” museum, a zebra Pegasus is perfectly acceptable. There’s a magnificent ostrich, fabulous birds, a chimp, a wonderful ocean scene, a terrific goat, and an animated grizzly bear, caught in mid-roar. I was captivated by the individual components, yet the power of the entire piece is much more than the sum of its parts. Mostly, it looks like it was a gas to make, a suspicion that was confirmed by a student who said: “It was a blast.”
Megan Marlatt, this year’s Arts Board faculty advisor, first suggested using Brooks Hall as a canvas: “At once specific to the local University community and universally understood, the Brooks Natural History Museum was a perfect vehicle to construct a communal art project with the students. Both academic and artistic, it provides a rich and endless supply of visual information and inspiration to create from.”

Burckhardt liked the idea of using an authoritative model that tried to explain the whole world by cropping it and framing it to fit within the confines of its walls. The approach is reminiscent of the work of conceptual artist, Fred Wilson, whose work draws attention to the biases of museums and how they shape the interpretation of historical truth and artistic value.

Burckhardt, who had done a similar project at Williams College in 2010 on a smaller scale, made several visits to UVA to guide the members of The Cardboard Company —studio art students Bridget Bailey, Hannah Barefoot, Marie Bergeron, Susannah Cadwalader, David Cook, Carmen Diaz, Shiry Guirguis, Margaret King, Brendan Morgan, Agnes Pyrchia, Cherith Vaughan, an additional 30 UVA sculpture students and community volunteers—through the project. The week leading up to the show was intense. Burckhardt was in residence, and, as the opening loomed, students worked feverishly to make enough stuff to fill up the space. One participant likened the project to a “kind of black hole sucking everyone who encountered it, in.”

Known primarily as a painter, Burckhardt grew up smack dab in the middle of the New York art scene, the son of photographer and filmmaker, Rudy Burckhardt and painter, Yvonne Jacquette. Renowned for his photographs of legendary 20th century American artists taken for Art News’ “Paints a Picture” series, Burckhardt’s father counted a number of famous artists as close friends, including de Kooning and Red Grooms, with whom he collaborated on various projects. The Burckhardts imparted a strong artistic work ethic in their son, and beginning in high school, Burckhardt began working as Grooms’ studio assistant, mostly fabricating sculptural items. He continued to work for him for 22 years, and Grooms was a powerful influence on Burckhardt, in attitude more than style, inspiring him, in particular, with his enormous creative energy.

Burckhardt turned to cardboard as he was preparing for a 2005 show. Painting had begun to feel stale and he “had gotten a little peeved at the politeness of painting and fulfilling some expectations I imagined.” He wanted to break out of his funk and get back to the momentum he’d experienced as a young artist and which he’d so admired in Grooms. Having used cardboard to make some giant tools for a benefit party, he had developed an affinity for it. Quick and satisfying, there’s no sense of preciousness to the medium.

“If a piece doesn’t work, you can chuck it and start again,” he said. Burckhardt also likes the idea of using an ordinary material and repurposing it, and cardboard, in particular, has an obstinacy he admires: “It wants to be flat, I like the gentle fight it gives you forming it into something.”

The first fruit of his efforts was “Full-Stop,” an entire artist’s studio made out of cardboard and black paint that is both painting and sculpture. Playful and irreverent, “Full-Stop” traces its lineage back to Grooms’ work, but has a distinct psychological gravity that is all Burckhardt’s. At its center is an easel with blank canvas, representing “the existential moment of the artist alone in the studio about to create.” The title of the piece is brilliant, connoting the positive outcome that stopping and shifting direction can produce. “Full-Stop” is both a tribute to Burckhardt’s father, who had died a few years before, and with its distinctly retro look, to the generation of artists he recorded in his series of photographs.

After his foray into cardboard, Burckhardt did reinvest in painting, albeit with a twist. In his next series, “Slump” he used cardboard to form his “canvases” and included paint cans from the studio. His tussle with painting continues in his most recent work (currently on view at the UVA Art Museum), where he has employed unconventional materials and unusual visual ploys that not only keep the work fresh, but force what he calls a “slow read,” with the goal of deepening engagement with his work.

Burckhardt was an excellent choice to be the UVA Arts Board visiting artist and an inspirational mentor to the studio art students. He’s a serious artist who views play and fun as central to his work. He’s also full of energy, very dedicated, and constantly challenging himself. He’s confident enough to be irreverent, questioning sacred cows like history, museums, and art itself. That attitude is not only healthy, but vital to artistic growth. With “The Brooks Natural History Museum C. 1900: A Creative Interpretation,” Burckhardt shows us (and most important, his students) that there’s more to creativity than just skill; it requires determination, imagination and a certain amount of guts.

 On March 1, members of the Living Wage Campaign—all students at the University of Virginia—announced that they had ended a hunger strike that began nearly two weeks before. UVA president Teresa Sullivan had refused to meet their demands that the university raise its minimum wage for employees to $13 an hour. On February 18, 12 students started a fast —drinking only liquids—and while only two of the original fasters made it to the last of the month, they picked up 14 other participants during the protest, along with the support of social justice luminaries like Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich and national labor unions like the SEIU.

The university ultimately refused to budge on raising the $10.65 an hour rate they currently pay employees and on the wages of workers hired through contractors—some of whom make as little as $7.25 an hour. The issue of bettering employee wages has been a constant battle since the late ’80s. What were the hunger strikers trying to accomplish and what did they learn from their latest effort to bring the University to the negotiating table?

David Flood, a UVA archaeology grad student who fasted 10 days, and was the only striker to participate in two early morning meetings last week with UVA administrators—including President Teresa Sullivan—could only characterize their outcome as “deeply disappointing.”

“It’s frustrating to realize that going through a hunger strike isn’t enough to encourage the administration to make meaningful steps towards the living wage,” said recent UVA graduate Hunter Link, who made it 11 days without food. On day 9, his face was drawn and pale and he was dressed in head to toe winter clothing—despite the warmth of the afternoon sun—to try and ward off the cold flashes his fast induced.

As the strike ended, though, both Link and Flood found silver linings (perhaps it helped that they had both eaten by then). “The number of people that supported us and joined the campaign and the people that got interested and excited is a victory,” Link said. “If nothing else, we’ve absolutely raised the issue of employee treatment at a university that has historically seen incredibly little student activism,” added Flood.

Six years ago, 17 UVA students also took on the living wage issue by conducting a sit-in in the lobby of Madison Hall—UVA’s administration building—that lasted for four days and three nights. That foray resulted in their arrests for trespassing and little improvement in the pay for the bottom of UVA’s workforce.

Susan Fraiman, a UVA English literature professor, was a vocal supporter of those students, and this time around was part of the negotiating team that met with Sullivan and other top level administrators both mornings. “Even more than the 2006 sit-in, the hunger strike succeeded in bringing national media attention to the plight of low-wage workers at UVA,” she said.

On day 10—after the campaigners’ first meeting with Sullivan—throngs of local media joined a large crowd that cheered on Flood and other striking speakers at a rally in front of the Rotunda, before marching across the street and in through the front door of Madison Hall where they delivered their familiar chant: “What do we want? A living wage! When do we want it? Now!”

Perhaps university administrators were listening. Two days later, UVA Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Strine issued a university wide e-mail wherein he pledged to study the university’s use of outsourced labor, a concession howbeit ever humble.

If UVA turned a largely deaf ear, Charlottesville’s City Council did not. In 2004, they began paying their employees the living wage of $11.44, even those hired through contractors. As a result of the campaign’s latest efforts, Charlottesville Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos confirmed that council plans to consider raising their base pay even higher, perhaps even to the $13 level the Living Wage Campaign demanded from UVA, at its next meeting.

Even so, that does little for those UVA employees on the bottom rung of the pay scale. In hindsight then, was a hunger fast successful or was it the latest in a series of disappointments?

“I think it was an excellent tactic,” said Brad Sayler, UVA faculty and another member of the campaign’s negotiating team. “It was totally non-violent and legal, the University had no way to stop it, and that was the beauty of it.”

At the same time, a hunger strike is typically carried out until the desired results are achieved. “Am I disappointed it didn’t continue? Boy, that’s a tough one,” Sayler said. “Part of me is and part of me isn’t.” Ultimately, he agreed with the students that the fast wasn’t going to accomplish anything more.

“I don’t think there was any one act we could’ve done to get a living wage,” Link explained, “but I know that the hunger strike has set the stage for future actions.”
Along those lines, Flood says the campaign will spend the next couple of weeks trying to capitalize on their momentum. Their prime goal is “to escalate this campaign,” he said. “[UVA] made some promises and we’re absolutely going to hold them to that.”

 When Governor Bob McDonnell released a state budget that changed the retirement plan for public school employees and reallocated a portion of local sales tax dollars, the Charlottesville School Board was left facing a deficit of $4 million for 2012-2013.

After two months of wrestling with the new reality, the school board has found a way to make $1 million in cuts, and the city has agreed to fill the rest of the $3 million gap with one-time funds.

On Thursday, March 1, the school board voted on the official 2012-2013 budget, which increased by about $190,000 from last year’s budget to roughly $70 million.

Changes in this year’s budget include implementing shorter contracts for assistant principals and counselors, eliminating three secretarial positions, and reducing grant funding for teachers. In grades five through eight, class sizes will also increase.

“Our teachers and parents value small class sizes and so do we,” said school board chairman Ned Michie, explaining that he hoped the increases would not become a trend.
Classes, for this year at least, will grow only by one student.

But what about those snazzy new tablet computers that Charlottesville High School and Buford Middle School students received? If the school board was struggling for funding, why did they spend $2.4 million on glorified iPods?

Michie said the tablets aren’t the problem and will ultimately save money for the schools by reducing the district’s demand for costly textbooks that need to be replaced regularly.
“Textbooks are out of date the day they’re printed,” said Michie.

The tablets can serve simply as books, but they will also provide more interactive learning opportunities for hands-on students, he said. Michie estimates that over the course of the next four years, schools will spend an extra $250,000 each year on technology.

The real question posed in this year’s budget conversation is how the district will make up its gap next year, without more one-time funding from the city.

According to City Councilor Dave Norris, tax rates should remain the same, but the city may not be able to fill another gap like the one this year. “There will just have to be some structural changes,” he said.

One such structural change is the postponement of the reconfiguration of the school system. The $1.5 million set aside for that project was redirected toward the deficit, and according to Michie, the reorganization of Buford Middle School and Walker Upper Elementary School will likely not take place for another five years.