Month: March 2014

Categories
Arts

Live Arts production of Grey Gardens is a beautiful musing on interiority

Kate Monaghan as Big Edie and Perry Payne Millner as Little Edie in the second act of Live Arts’ production of Grey Gardens. Image: Martyn Kyle

The façade of a large house spans the stage, partly obscured by white drop cloths on which the shadows of trees create a ghostly overlay. The year is 1973, and an elderly woman in a yellow one-piece bathing suit, quilted housecoat, and striped sunhat wobbles out onto the gray clapboard porch.

Radio static cuts through the air as a warbling announcer describes the health department raid uncovering the unfathomable squalor of Grey Gardens, the 28-room Hamptons party house where Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her grown daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”), live alongside cats, raccoons, fleas, and hundreds of pounds of garbage and debris. The Beales are the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and as a result, the discovery of their strange misfortune makes a media splash.

“How could members of American royalty,” the radio announcer asks, “fall so far so fast?”

Grey Gardens—a musical with book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel, and lyrics by Michael Korie, based on the 1975 documentary film by David and Albert Maysles—presents two sides of the same curious coin. On one is the picture of Grey Gardens’ heyday, when the house was glamorous, its women beautiful, and Little Edie was bound for liberation and a marriage to Joe Kennedy. On the other is the home’s startling shift into dereliction and decay, the structure overrun by cats and creeper vines, its inhabitants trapped in codependence and squalor.

Live Arts’ production is funny and touching. Honestly, I cried a little. Hats off to director Bree Luck for creating a poignant show that allows the triumphs of joy and inner strength to overcome pain and sorrow. The show’s few imperfections (a long pause, an off beat) are lovely reminders that authenticity isn’t, and shouldn’t be, flawless.

Kristin Baltes and Heather Powell nurture strong song and dance numbers from this all-volunteer cast, and the large crew also deserves praise for building costumes and a set that look remarkably true to real life photographs.

The first act pokes fun at old money mores, its humor propelled by the arched-eyebrow snark of Chris Patrick’s Gould and the situational irony of the script. Imagine young Jackie Bouvier and sister Lee bouncing in time to their auntie’s appallingly racist show tunes. Determined to distance herself from Grey Gardens, Sarah Edwards’ young Little Edie reveals both independence and love for her mother beneath dueling roles as performer, lover, and dutiful child. She also nails the real character’s broad New York accent and bent-wrist-on-hip physical mannerisms.

Perry Payne Millner, who plays spotlight-seeking Big Edie, establishes a firm counterpoint, offering layers of neediness, brayed off-key arias for impromptu audiences, and a tragic, passive melancholy when faced with real-world problems. Her palpable desire for positive feedback secures her future stranglehold on Little Edie.

In the grimier, darker second act of the play, Millner soars, this time as adult Little Edie. She sings and moves exactly like a grown-up version of Edwards’ character, and although she bemoans her return to Grey Gardens and the obligation she feels to care for her mother, she looks at the world with eyes full of stardust and radiates tremulous joie de vivre. You might not expect wreck and ruin to result in fierce self-love, but even though Little Edie is lost in her mind, she never wavers from her own beliefs.

Big Edie (Kate Monaghan) has mellowed, in a manner of speaking. She’s more prone to holler for her girl’s help, but Monaghan imbues her with contentment, as she trills songs about a life well-lived and deflects responsibility for Little Edie’s unhappiness. The rest of the cast populates the shambles, relieving tension with fun musical numbers (there are singing cats and a church choir!) and inspiring songs like “Jerry Likes My Corn,” which is hilarious, sad, and borderline crazy.

The cats and the filth provide non-subtle hints that these ladies have some problems, but is it a case of a high society refusal to empty the litter box or a physical manifestation of the punishment for women who disengage from social norms?

Is Big Edie a narcissist who unwittingly primed her daughter for a loveless life? Should absent fathers and brothers share the burden? Is Little Edie a desperate victim of circumstance or the (un)happy product of her own “staunchness”?

Like the estate named for its cement walls and foggy seashore, this show is a study of nebulous grays. Little Edie struggles to delineate love from duty and artistry from mental illness, and we’re left to grapple with our voyeuristic tendencies, our hunger for tabloid rumor and fallen celebrity. We’re quick to judge, to vote “normal” or “not,” but why? Caught between freedom and family love, where would you draw the line?

Categories
News

Win-win: Tax incentives lure a major employer to former MJH site

Guy Williams, CFA Institute’s head of finance and risk management, oversaw the approximately $37 million renovation of the former Martha Jefferson Hospital site that features a soaring glass atrium and the restoration of various historic elements in the old Patterson building facing Locust Avenue. Photo: Elli Williams

From the outside, the changes to the old Martha Jefferson Hospital aren’t visually jarring. In fact, other than a new sign on High Street, a seven-story glass atrium soaring above the former emergency room entrance, and continuing construction around back, someone driving past the site might not realize that a building where thousands of babies were born is now a bustling hive of investment professionals.

In late December, after an approximately $37 million renovation to the historic property, the 400-plus employees of CFA Institute relocated to the company’s new north Downtown headquarters from three previous locations —two in Albemarle County and one in the city—thanks to various local, state, and federal tax incentives that helped Charlottesville beat out Albemarle County as the new home for the global association that awards professional credentials and champions ethical behavior in investment markets.

The location wasn’t an immediate choice, said Guy Williams, CFA’s head of finance and risk management, who oversaw the two-year renovation of the building and worked closely with the CFA board to select the right spot. The company considered both existing buildings in the area and “greenfield” sites, where CFA would have been able to build to suit.

“There were some extremely attractive options in Crozet,” he said, describing both the county and the city as eager suitors. “Everyone was extremely positive about welcoming us to the area, which made it difficult to choose.”

For city officials, wooing CFA with incentives was a no-brainer since the alternative was a massive, vacant structure and a loss of tax revenue that could have stretched on for years.

“Having the building empty was a considerable concern,” said Chris Engel, Charlottesville’s director of economic development. In other cities where hospitals have vacated buildings, Engel said, it has taken five to 10 years for a new tenant to move in. The time between Martha Jefferson’s move to its new digs on Pantops in 2011 and CFA’s occupancy of the old hospital site was just 27 months.

“We’re very fortunate to have had such a quick and smooth transition,” said Engel.

Among the tools at the city’s disposal for attracting CFA and other large corporations to locate within city limits is something known as Tax Increment Financing (TIF), which provides a property tax break to a corporation in exchange for meeting certain requirements. CFA agreed to hire 40 new employees and in exchange will receive a 50 percent break on the local property taxes assessed on improvements to the building for 10 years. At the building’s current assessment of just over $21 million, that would mean a total tax savings of close to $1 million over 10 years, but both Williams and Engel concede it’s likely to be much more than that since the assessment doesn’t yet reflect the full value of the renovation, which could be nearly double the current assessed value.

Correction: CFA Institute awards professional credentials and champions ethical behavior in investment markets. 

WhatIsTIF_news_0314

 

“It’s an interesting incentive in that it happens after the fact,” said Engel of the TIF, which was also used to lure educational travel company WorldStrides to relocate from the county to the new Waterhouse building on Water Street. “They make the investment, bring the employees, and then we share a portion of the increment they’ve created.” The developer of the Martha Jefferson Hospital site, Octagon Partners, is still completing work on the former Rucker and Cardwell buildings, which will house several other businesses including biotech company Hemoshear. Octagon representatives did not return C-VILLE’s calls.

Williams said that while CFA appreciated the TIF incentive, it was not the organization’s primary reason for selecting the old hospital site. Instead, he said, it was the board’s belief that renovating an already existing building was the better choice from a sustainability perspective.

“It felt like the right thing to do,” said Williams, adding that the historic tax credits at the state and federal level were another powerful draw and could save the organization a total of $11 million.

Of course, receiving historic tax credits means heavy oversight on the renovation, and Williams proudly led a reporter on a tour of the new 144,000 square-foot headquarters, including the Patterson building built in 1929 that fronts Locust Avenue. In a historic renovation, walls and windows can’t be moved, and Williams pointed out the building’s preserved archways and the original Terrazzo floor as among the elements restored in order to receive the tax credits.

In addition to preserving the building’s history, Williams said the renovation focused on sustainable design and includes a “gray water” reuse system that will reduce CFA’s use of public water by 70 percent as well as various high efficiency systems that will allow the property to operate using 22 percent less energy than other similar sized offices.

The city has been delighted by the arrival of CFA, said Engel, who called it a “splendid corporate citizen.” And those who live nearby are pleased as well after initially expressing concerns about traffic and the possibility that CFA hadn’t planned for adequate parking. That’s not been the case, said Bruce Odell, president of the Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association.

“It seems they have adequate parking on site, and anecdotally, we haven’t seen much difference in traffic impact from them,” said Odell, who expects other developments Downtown, including City Walk between Water Street and Meade Avenue, to have a greater impact.

“They’ve done a good job,” Odell said of CFA, expressing gratitude that the building was preserved and remembering the sounds of ambulances and the increases in traffic along High Street and Locust Avenue that occurred when shifts changed at the hospital.

“In many respects,” he said, “the neighborhood feels fortunate.”

 

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Editor’s Note: Work and the ‘ville

Photo: Jack Looney.

This job brought me to town. I remember the process of circulating my resume three years ago, starting in early spring, a good time for changes, and winding up in an hour-long phone conversation with Frank Dubec, C-VILLE’s publisher at the time. It’s a six-hour drive from North Carolina’s Tuckasegee River valley to Charlottesville and worlds away. The high mountains were just greening up in early April, but the Shenandoah Valley was already dotted white with newborn lambs.

I forgot my bag on the way out the door, so I had to stop at a J.C. Penney in Roanoke to buy an interview outfit, which must have looked pretty funny on me as I came in the office on the Downtown Mall. A skinny, tired fellow in department store clothes, still sporting the crushable felt fedora and long ponytail that signified years of living in the individualistic, quixotic, and hardly workable rural landscapes of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Northwoods, I was looking for a break.

Some people come to Charlottesville because they hear about the lifestyle from friends, or even catch a rumor on the wind that it’s a good place to retire, start over, or settle down. Others come because they’ve known it as students, or think they’ve known it, and figure they can run a seamless transition between a happy college experience and a satisfying professional life with a family down the line.

Some people are born here, and after they go away to experience the big, wide world, it dawns on them that they miss their little town tucked in the green hills of Ole Virginny, with its irresistibly mellow spring and fall and better than average brains. A few never leave, but even they run up against the same essential dynamic: It’s hard to find well paid jobs in nice places.

This week’s feature illustrates how businesses in different sectors are innovating to build a new kind of city. Traditionally, university towns have been one-and-a-half job markets that bank on professional couples from cities willing to make career sacrifices in exchange for lifestyle improvements. The limitation is starting to feel self-imposed.

Categories
Arts

Interview: Classic rocker Eddie Money is still makin’ it rain

Eddie Money gets his kicks playin’ to the crowd. “I put ‘Endless Nights’ back in the set because all of my ladies from the ’80s, they love that song,” he said.

Eddie Money whose songs “Baby Hold On,” “Two Tickets to Paradise,” “Shakin’” and “Take Me Home Tonight”  dominated the airwaves throughout the ’80s, died Friday, September 13 at age 70. A statement provided by his family reads: “The Money Family regrets to announce that Eddie passed away peacefully early this morning. It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to our loving husband and father. We cannot imagine our world without him. We are grateful that he will live on forever through his music.” C-VILLE spoke with him in 2014.  The interview is reposted below.

 

Eddie Money was supposed to be a policeman. His father, grandfather, and brother walked a beat in New York City and a young Eddie Mahoney was expected to follow the same path. He did a short stint with the NYPD, which became more of a stunt after an incident involving the misuse of official stationery, and then in 1968 he followed his love of music to San Francisco, where he was discovered and groomed (starting with a name change) by rock impresario Bill Graham.

The outgoing prankster with a thick Brooklyn accent was a perfect frontman for the burgeoning ’70s blue collar rock. His hook-heavy lyrics and scratchy soul earned him several Top 40 hits and platinum records, and made him an early MTV idol.

Money still enjoys the spotlight and takes pride in his role in pop music history. “I was thrilled that Lady Gaga gave me a nice shout-out in Rolling Stone,” he said. “A lot of people—like these young kids in Third Eye Blind—are big Eddie Money fans. It’s a real thrill.”

The Money man took time to speak with C-VILLE Weekly by phone before his upcoming gig at the Jefferson on March 13.

C-VILLE Weekly: Talk about the early days in San Francisco. You were discovered in a local talent contest at Winterland?

Eddie Money: I loved Bill Graham, he was like a dad to me. I was actually one of the first rock artists to get a deal over videocassette tape. Can you believe that?

You’ve stayed true to your own brand of rock ‘n’ roll over the years.

It’s really crazy. I mean I ran into this guy Dave Grohl [of] the Foo Fighters and he says he’s the biggest Eddie Money fan in the world. I got a lotta great fans out there and it really hasn’t changed me much.

I always had my own style, which is great. When you listen to my voice, whether you think it’s good or bad, it’s very identifiable because I’ve got that crazy Brooklyn accent.

Your early vocal coach worked with Sinatra and Streisand. Do you admire that style?

Oh yeah. I grew up singing a lot of R&B actually. Four Tops and James Brown, a lot of Otis Redding. When I started doing my own material I used a lot of R&B. “Baby Hold On” has a lot of R&B, where “Two Tickets to Paradise” is more rock ‘n’ roll.

You seem to have a sense of humor about your career. The Geico commercial for instance.

I never really took myself too seriously. But now that they’ve got Internet—I’m up four years in a spiritual program—I was teasing my audience and went out there and said ‘I’m sorry I drank that quart of vodka, I’ll try to give you a good show,’ and I was straight as an arrow and next thing I know it was all over the Internet.

Every night that you perform you’re going to be on YouTube now, so you gotta give ’em the best show ya got.

You’ve been open about your personal struggles. What’s your perspective like these days?

Actually, one night when I was drinking a lot of vodka, I took this thing Phenitol and it knocked out the sciatic nerve in my left leg and blew out my kidneys and I couldn’t even walk for nine months.

I do appreciate that these days I’ve got my life together. It was a tough road for me, but then again after the overdose I wrote my best record which was No Control.

At what point in your career did you think you’d made it big?

I always wanted to play Madison Square Garden, which was in my song “Wanna Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and then I got the chance to play there with Santana and again with Cyndi Lauper. I went to Japan and played Budokan. I played the Silverdome with The Who, I was on the road with The Rolling Stones.

At the US Festival with The Police, it was about 95 degrees out and Bill Graham and I decided to spray the crowd down with “Gimme Some Water.” So while this mist was hitting the crowd, 650,000 people, we were doing “Gimme Some Water.” I’d have to say that was probably the highlight of my career.

So, you toured with The Rolling Stones?

I did four shows with The Rolling Stones and I was supposed to do eight. I ran into Keith Richards and he said, ‘You got a big record out now Eddie, and we’re gonna have somebody else do the other four shows.’ I says ‘Why?’ and he says, ‘Well to tell you the truth, Mick likes you, but you’re gettin’ like three encores a night.’”

So I didn’t do the last four shows because I was getting too many encores, and I guess Mick was a little tired.

Do you have any acting gigs on the horizon?

I have a Broadway show that I put out about three years ago called The Eddie Money Story. It’s a musical. I’m tryin’ to get some investors to put the play back on Broadway because it’s a lot like Jersey Boys and it’s really got some great songs in it.

I’ve also got a song called “One More Soldier Coming Home.” The money is going to the Wounded Warriors. I’m very happy about helping the veterans out.

I see from past interviews that you’re a big baseball fan.

When I was a kid my father was an usher at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The first time I went onto the field with my dad I looked at the players and it was peculiar to me, I saw a black man in a blue and white Dodger uniform, and who was it but the great Jackie Robinson.

What do you think of making baseball’s opening day a national holiday?

I think it’s a great idea because baseball is America’s pastime. I’m ready for some baseball. How ’bout you?

Would you like to add anything else?

Eddie Money’s got two tickets, but he’s taking everybody. Come down and do some shakin’ with the Money man.

Categories
News

He’s back! Oliver Kuttner returns to local development with a new project and big ideas

After a nearly 10-year hiatus from local development, Oliver Kuttner is doing an addition at the Glass Building and has a vision for affordable housing Downtown. Photo: Elli Williams

In 2005, fed up with the tangle of bureaucratic red tape he said was stifling creativity in Downtown development, Oliver Kuttner vowed he was done with building in Charlottesville. The man who has a historic connection to nearly every large Downtown Mall-area project from The Terraces to City Walk to the Landmark Hotel packed up his money and headed south to Lynchburg, where he set to work buying and renovating empty warehouses while simultaneously founding Edison2, a company that developed a 100 mpg vehicle and won $5 million in 2010 in the Progressive Automotive X Prize competition.

Time has a way of soothing old frustrations, apparently, and earlier this year, 52-year-old Kuttner did what he swore he’d never do again: He started a new project in Charlottesville, this time at a property he already owns, the Glass Building on the corner of Second and Garrett streets. The three-story addition on the building’s southwest corner isn’t huge—just 10,000 square feet that will eventually house retail and commercial space on the first two floors and three small apartments on the top—but as anyone who knows Kuttner might expect, he has a bigger vision for the rest of the site that he believes will help with Charlottesville’s lack of affordable housing, and his attitude about development hasn’t changed.

“If you keep making it more and more complicated to develop, you will lose the creative part,” said Kuttner, recalling his first local project, the old Skatetown building at 1117 E. Market St., which he purchased in 1984 when he was 23 for $240,000 after the building’s former owner agreed to finance the sale to the budding entrepreneur.

Renovating a building back then was a simple process, Kuttner said, and involved filling out minimal paperwork with the city and then doing the work to convert what had been a large open space that housed a roller skating rink into several separate commercial units. He estimates the pre-construction costs, including his time, to have been around $500.

“Today, to do the same thing could cost $70,000 to $80,000,” he said, citing zoning issues, obtaining building permits, the stringent standards of the Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review, and the carrying costs associated with owning an empty property while waiting for final construction approval.

He recalls the frustration of working on The Terraces between 1999 and 2002 when stop work orders piled high, and at the Downtown Tire Center building, current site of the new Waterhouse, where he notably overcame a BAR requirement that he preserve the old garage doors by constructing walls around them.

Financial burdens created by the lengthy bureaucratic process, he said, are closing the doors to entrepreneurs and creating an environment in which only large corporations and the very rich can enter the development game. That dynamic can lead to cookie cutter designs, he warned. But in a seeming contradiction, he said Charlottesville has been fortunate to avoid much of that type of unimaginative construction thanks to the very organization that’s given him headaches.

“The BAR is my nemesis, but I like them,” said Kuttner, explaining that he doesn’t object to restrictions on construction in any form, but only the multiple layers of bureaucracy that slow projects down and make developing too expensive.

“I give them 100 percent credit that we don’t have a Mall full of McDonald’s,” he said of the board.

Fortunately for Kuttner, he has one less hoop to jump through for his current construction at the Glass Building. It doesn’t fall under BAR control, since the property is outside the historic district, south of the railroad tracks, tucked between the Water Street Parking Garage and Garrett Square. Kuttner and a partner, Lisa Murphy, bought and renovated the project 15 years ago even as some questioned the investment because of its proximity to public housing.

“The Glass Building started everything on the other side of the tracks,” said Kuttner, citing the subsequent development of the nearby Gleason’s Building and ACAC health club’s decision to build it’s Downtown location across the street from the western side of Friendship Court, the low-income housing development previously known as Garrett Square.

“We dispelled the myth that if you’re next to Garrett Square, you have problems,” he said. “You don’t.”

That’s why Kuttner’s confident that after completing the current addition to the Glass Building, his next vision for Downtown Charlottesville will have broad appeal even if, in typical Kuttner fashion, it already features outside-the-box ideas: 80 affordable apartments and 20 affordable condos, all under 600 square feet, on the parking lot next to the Glass Building.

The idea of $1,000-a-month apartments and condos priced at $200,000 raises questions for one real estate expert and business owner who acknowledges high demand for Downtown housing but questions the reality of constructing affordable housing one block from the Mall—and somehow keeping the value from rising.

“I’m not sure why the premier location Downtown should be affordable,” said Roger Voisinet, a real estate agent and co-owner of the Main Street Arena. ”That’s contrary to all the indices of real estate. It’s more of a wish.”

Kuttner, however, believes increasing the housing supply just off the Mall would lower Downtown housing costs across the board, and while that might not sound like good news to other developers—or to Downtown property owners hoping to maximize money made on their own investments, Kuttner’s concerned less with profit margins than with quality of life in the community and his own legacy, which rests on having big ideas and then making them happen.

“I can do very little and sit on the money I have, or I’m going to change the world,” he said. “I think it’s going to be the latter.”

He’s back, all right.

 

The Oliver touch

Oliver Kuttner’s played a role in numerous developments around Downtown Charlottesville, including some you might not know about…

The Landmark Hotel (1), 201 E. Water St. Kuttner bought the property from developer Lee Danielson in 2006 and announced plans to construct a nine-story building that would be either a hotel or affordable housing. A year later, frustrated by city bureaucracy and the high carrying costs associated with owning the vacant structure, Kuttner sold it back to Danielson, whose ill-fated partnership with CNet founder Halsey Minor fell apart amid Minor’s numerous financial woes. It was sold at bankruptcy auction in June, 2012 to Atlanta businessman John Dewberry and remains unfinished.

The Glass Building, 313 Second St. SE. Kuttner partnered with Lisa Murphy in the early 2000s to develop the Glass Building, home to The Bluegrass Grill, the now defunct Glass Haus Kitchen, and a variety of small businesses. Kuttner is currently adding a three-story addition to the building’s southwest corner and envisions residential units on an adjacent parking lot.

Waterhouse, 216-218 Water St. Kuttner purchased the former Downtown Tire Center property in 1994, renovated the building and bolstered the foundation to prepare for construction of a large structure. He sold to architect Bill Atwood, who was able to woo WorldStrides educational travel company to relocate its headquarters from the county to the city. The upper levels are high-end condos that are still mostly unoccupied.

The Terraces (2), 100-106 Main St. Kuttner designed and built this massive Downtown building, owned partially by his family. It houses a variety of upscale retail stores on the ground level and offices and apartments on upper floors.

Old Skatetown building (3), 1117 E. Market St. Kuttner still owns the first building he ever developed, a former roller skating rink that houses a variety of light industries.

Old National Linen building (4), 1304 E. Market St. Kuttner purchased the large warehouse building that formerly housed the National Linen Company in 1996. He still owns the property, now home to the Woolly Mammoth restaurant and a variety of light industrial businesses.

Ix (5): Kuttner was one of several developers including the late Gabe Silverman who worked on the Ix project, the sprawling property between Monticello and Elliott avenues. Kuttner’s father, Ludwig, and brother Fabian, are now developing the site.

The Coal Tower (6): The old Coal Tower along the CSX railroad tracks is now part of the City Walk development and a row of townhomes along an extension of Water Street. Kuttner owned the property for five years between 1998 and 2003 and sold it to Coran Capshaw.

 

After a nearly 10-year hiatus from local development, Oliver Kuttner is doing an addition at the Glass Building and has a vision for affordable housing Downtown. Photo: Elli Williams

 

“We dispelled the myth that if you’re next to Garrett Square, you have problems,” Kuttner said. “You don’t.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Living

On the half-shell: Public Fish & Oyster makes its debut on West Main

Public Fish & Oyster owner Daniel Kaufman said he’s always dreamed of opening a restaurant, and the new West Main spot fills a hole in the local market for fresh seafood. Photo: Christian Hommel

I’ll just come right out and say it: I’m an oyster snob. Born to parents who lived in Charleston, South Carolina for a decade, I tried my first chewy, salty, slightly slimy mollusc—lightly roasted, served on a Saltine cracker with a dollop of homemade cocktail sauce—around age 10, and I never looked back. So when I caught wind of Daniel Kaufman’s plan to open a seafood restaurant with a raw bar on West Main, I was one of the first in line.

Located at 513 W. Main St., in the same spot as the short-lived One Meatball Place, Public Fish & Oyster opened its doors for business in January. Kaufman, who’s been in the food industry for years and spent nearly 10 years running the high-end dining room at Farmington Country Club, said opening his own restaurant has been a lifelong dream. Despite growing up nowhere near the coast, Kaufman said when he discovered oysters as an adult, he was hooked.

“I saw a hole in the Charlottesville market for good, fresh quality seafood, especially oysters,” he said.

Public Fish & Oyster’s raw bar features a rotating menu of fresh oysters and clams from all over the East Coast. At least two different Virginia oysters will always be available, Kaufman said, but he’s “really been taken aback” by the quality of the bushels they’ve ordered from New England, particularly those from Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

“I love my Virginia oysters,” Kaufman said. “But I want the selection to be constantly rotating, to give people new opportunities to try different things.”

Individual oysters on the half-shell are priced at $2 to $2.50 apiece, and served with sides of rose mignonette and shaved horseradish. Reminding myself to save room for the rest of the meal, I practiced great restraint and ordered three: a Rappahannock from Topping, Virginia; a Rome Point from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island; and a Katama Bay from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Kaufman and I agreed that the Rappahannock—a small, inoffensive specimen with minimal slime-factor and a mild, buttery taste—may be the best option for first-timers. The longer, skinny Narragansett Bay was sweeter than the first, with a definite presence of salt water. My server warned me that the Katama Bay was “not for the faint of heart,” and she wasn’t kidding. Taking up the entirety of a shell roughly the size of my palm, the Massachusetts-grown oyster rested in a giant pool of its own clear, salty liquor, and packed an intense, briny flavor.

“Oysters are very similar to wine in that they taste like where they came from,” Kaufman said. “To get the real flavor of an oyster, you have to have it on the half shell, raw, in its own liquor. You really are drinking the water they came out of.”

As I examined, photographed, and eagerly slurped my three oysters and perused the menu for dinner, I couldn’t help but marvel at the novelty of eating my favorite shellfish indoors, wearing respectable business attire, with a napkin in my lap.

In my mind, oysters don’t mean nice linens, glassware, and candle-lit two-top tables. When I think of those shelled saltwater delicacies, what immediately comes to mind is my family’s annual pre-Thanksgiving oyster roast (or, as my brother and I fondly call it, the Ingles Family Glutton Fest). To me, eating oysters is about a giant fire in the backyard, paper napkins, and simple ketchup-and-horseradish cocktail sauce. It’s about my dad hauling freshly roasted shovelfuls from the fire pit to the carport where a 10′ table is strewn with work gloves and shucking knives and surrounded by oyster connoisseurs chomping at the bit to get their hands on the next batch.

I’ve never associated what I see as an excuse to wear Carhartt overalls, drink too much beer, and build a fire (not necessarily in that order) with upscale dining. Still, culture shock aside, Public Fish & Oyster’s raw bar did not disappoint. For that matter, neither did the rest of the menu.

Kaufman’s favorite is the fennel pollen-crusted Virginia rockfish served over stone-ground grits, “a dish that really screams Virginia.” Also on the menu are starters like the plump, succulent, pepper-seared scallops. While most scallop small plates feature little more than a dainty drizzle of accompanying sauce, these are served over a generous helping of pureed butternut squash and apple sauce. If you want a little bit of everything, the seafood stew delivers with a medley of fish, mussels, clams, shrimp, butternut squash, and chickpeas in a spicy Sicilian-style broth.

But what stole the show (aside from the oysters, of course) were the Bangkok-style moules frites. The menu offers four distinct mussel dishes, each simmered in an international-inspired broth with a side of house-cut, twice cooked Belgian fries and aioli. The Thai-style mussels are served in a coconut milk-based red curry sauce that I shamelessly slurped from a half-shell and sopped up with my remaining bread. Kaufman said he’d be happy to give me a straw next time.

“The mussels have become a surprising staple,” Kaufman said. “I guarantee if you come back 10 years from now, we’ll still have mussels on the menu, served three or four ways.”

Perfect pairings

Wondering what to sip on with your platter of raw oysters on the half-shell? Daniel Kaufman recommends a white wine with a high acidity and neutral flavor, like muscadine. But the most classic pairing is with Champagne, made from grapes that grow in a chalky soil made up of fossilized shell fragments.

“You can almost taste the oyster shell in the wine,” he said.

As for beer, Kaufman said it really depends on the oyster, but generally he suggests something that will “let the oyster speak for itself,” with a relatively low alcohol content and minimal hoppiness, like Guinness or a lager.

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News

Allegations of a botched UVA rape investigation at center of a challenge to the Campus SaVE Act

The University of Virginia. Photo: Dan Addison/UVA Public Affairs

A month ago this week, UVA President Teresa Sullivan sat at a long table in Newcomb Hall, one of six college leaders on a panel addressing sexual assault on college campuses around the country. The discussion was part of a two-day national conference billed as a proactive effort to solve what Sullivan called “one of the most vexing problems I’ve seen since becoming a president.”

What didn’t make it into the news stories on the dialogue was that UVA was about to take a more central and less welcome role in the debate over how to stop college sexual assault.

Last week, a Jane Doe who claims UVA botched the investigation of her own reported 2011 rape at the University filed a lawsuit to force a resolution in a long-running investigation into the University’s sexual misconduct policy.

Filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on March 6, the suit is intended as a landmark civil rights action that could derail the controversial Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act, according to Doe’s attorney James Marsh. Touted as a major reform turning point by supporters, SaVE pushes more responsibility for preventing sexual assault onto colleges. The new federal law gets some things right, Marsh said—particularly education initiatives aimed at students—but it seriously undermines recent federal efforts to force schools to take a harder line on sexual assault cases.

And without the stick of tough federal laws behind them, colleges and universities won’t crack down on sexual violence, said Marsh. There’s just not enough incentive. “The victims’ lobby pales in comparison to the university presidents’ lobby,” he said. “This is our legal recourse.”

The details of the suit lay bare the accusations at the heart of Doe’s case. Her 30-page complaint against UVA, attached as background to the civil suit, was initially filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in June of 2012, then folded into a broader DOE compliance review of the University’s sexual misconduct policy. It not only details her alleged drugging and violent rape at the hands of a fellow student, but also accuses UVA health professionals, administrators, and the University’s Sexual Misconduct Board of essentially burying her case.

According to Doe’s complaint, a fellow student slipped into the seat next to her at a debate club meeting at Jefferson Hall on December 1, 2011, touched her thigh and her breast against her will, and handed her a beer.

She drank it and became “substantially incapacitated,” the complaint says, and remembers only parts of what happened next: He took her to his apartment, “raped her, pulled her hair in an effort to penetrate her mouth, and ejaculated on her chest and hair,” it reads, claiming she awoke later naked and in pain, with her bra hanging off her body.

She sought treatment and went to police within a week, but according to the complaint, key information gathered by UVA forensic nurse Kathryn Laughon was never presented to the University’s Sexual Misconduct Board when Doe’s case went before them months later. Missing were descriptions of symptoms of drugging and photos of the interior of her vagina described in one of Laughon’s earlier reports, the complaint says. Marsh said it was his understanding that the ultimate lack of forensic evidence also scuttled any hopes of prosecution in the case.

The complaint goes on to say the male student confirmed much of what Doe remembered to the board, including digitally penetrating her, despite acknowledging her having said no to any sexual contact.

There are more allegations in the complaint: That the accused got to review and control which parts of his taped police testimony were shown to the Sexual Misconduct Board while Doe didn’t; that he was allowed to question her “directly and aggressively,” in violation of UVA policy; that his differing statements indicated he lied about giving her beer and taking off her clothes.

He was eventually cleared of all but one count, it says—touching her at the debate club meeting. That was despite the board finding in its final decision that the accuser was “very compelling and believable” and the accused “disrespectful” and “offensive,” according to the complaint.

And there, according to Marsh, was the sticking point, and the proof that UVA wasn’t following its own rules.

In April 2011, the Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to administrators across the country, detailing a policy update that made failure to adequately combat sexual assault a violation of Title IX, the 1972 gender inequality law. A key component of the change was the requirement that college discipline boards adopt a more relaxed burden of proof when weighing internal sexual assault complaints. Like many other elite institutions, UVA had adhered to a “clear and convincing” standard; the memo demanded a switch to a preponderance standard, meaning that to find in favor of an alleged victim, it must simply be more likely than not that an assault took place.

The University updated its sexual misconduct policy in the summer of 2011 to bring it into line with the new guidelines. But Doe’s complaint calls into question whether UVA followed those guidelines when it came to her case. How could it call her credible, the complaint asks, but find in favor of her alleged rapist?

Last month, a year and a half after she filed the complaint, the federal government still hadn’t answered her. The implementation of the Campus SaVE Act loomed, said Marsh, a piece of legislation he said looks like reform, but actually masks big backwards steps in combating college sexual assault—most notably, by eliminating the preponderance standard set forth three years ago by the DOE. It also removes the time limit for colleges to resolve sexual assault cases.

So his client is petitioning a judge to force a resolution in the long-stalled federal investigation of UVA’s policy, demanding, in essence, that both the government and the courts square the contradictory regulations now on the books.

“We’re trying to make these issues public, get them discussed, to have the Department of Education indicate how they’re going to be proceeding in these cases,” Marsh said. “This is really a test case.”

UVA spokesman McGregor McCance said the University is committed to confidentiality when it comes to issues of sexual misconduct, so “we must decline to make any remarks relative to the former student’s case that was adjudicated last spring or to the federal suit regarding the Campus SaVE Act.”

Of the specific allegations in Jane Doe’s complaint, he said only that the University “has investigated those claims.”

But UVA takes sexual misconduct seriously, said McCance. “We are committed to enhancing understanding and raising awareness of this important matter, including contributing to the national discussion about strengthening how universities are addressing this issue,” he said.

Marsh said his client’s case—and her long wait for an answer from the government—is evidence that it’s going to take more than that to stop sexual violence on college campuses. The suit is leverage, he said in a fight to push UVA and schools like it to protect women.

Without clear rules for handling rape cases, “what can happen is you have a long, slow, wide, and disparate watering down of women’s rights,” said Marsh.

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Sell me on it: What the pitch competition philosophy can do for Charlottesville’s startup scene

A pitch competition during the 2013 Tom Tom Founder's Festival. Photo: Darkfire Designs

A Belmont mini-market transformed into a catering hub. A company that opens up the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to vacationers through a network of homestay houses. An eyewear line featuring glasses with removable lenses and exchangeable frames.

These are some of the business ideas born in Charlottesville that debuted as part of a pitch competition, where a crowd of locals—students, average citizens, business experts—voted to steer a pot of funds to one of multiple possible projects.

It’s far from the only way to finance a startup, but it’s an increasingly popular one. Next month’s third annual Tom Tom Founder’s Festival, a citywide smorgasbord of ideas, art, and innovation running from April 9 through 13, will kick off with a big community pitch night, and already dozens of hungry entrepreneurs have applied to be a part of it.

“For a lot of startup businesses that are kind of scrappy and trying to build momentum behind their idea, the first step is having the community behind them,” said Tom Tom founder Paul Beyer. “It’s a way to get the message out and get people invested in your idea early on, get them believing in you. It’s a trend we’re seeing nationwide.”

And it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of a business venture born from a well-polished speech and a group vote as a fad. But the underlying philosophy—equal parts kumbaya spirit and cutthroat competition—is echoed in other corners of Charlottesville’s startup scene, and those who spend a lot of time thinking about how to move the needle on innovation in the city say that’s a good thing.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way people approach new business ideas, said Carolyn Zelikow, who is in charge of marketing for Tom Tom.

“It used to be if you wanted money, you went to the bank, or you went to your state government, or the rich guy with the house on the hill,” she said. “But now, you can go to your friends, and the people who care about the same things you do, and you can make things happen.”

But there’s a tendency to get stuck on one end or the other of the startup spectrum, said Beyer: Are you going the Kickstarter route, or are you lounging in cigar bars with venture capitalists?

Beyer said the answer should be both. Pitch competitions, like the rest of Tom Tom’s developing schedule of talks with startup founders and investors, highlight the fact that entrepreneurial success is far from one-dimensional—and that Charlottesville is becoming an increasingly good place to prime the pump.

“There has to be money coursing through an economy, and people willing to take chances and invest in businesses,” he said. “But there’s also a lean startup movement, and this idea that people can tap their friends, tap their family, scrape together a business regardless of your background and your race, and make something. And Charlottesville is a hospitable place for that.”

Mark Crowell, head of UVA Innovation, the nonprofit foundation responsible for the University’s licensing and ventures, said the University has made a conscious effort in the last decade to transform itself to reflect that philosophy.

“If you look today, much of what we’re doing is creating venues and opportunities in all kinds of settings where these ideas surface and get evaluated and pounded,” Crowell said, whether it’s in undergraduate classrooms, entrepreneurship competitions, or Darden’s iLab, a startup incubator that accepts applications from UVA students and the wider community. “Suggestions are made, concepts further developed, and if we’re lucky, some funding arises so we can advance that early-stage idea.”

The city owes a lot of its image as an idea town to UVA. But storied research institutions like it have not always been the engines of innovation you might expect them to be, said Crowell. For a long time, the process for turning a researcher’s good idea into a marketable, usable product or company was linear and reactive, he said: wait for a scientist to speak up, file a patent, and hope somebody comes along to invest.

But in the last decade, UVA, like other schools, has tried to change the culture around the development of ideas in a fundamental way, infusing the academic experience with a mix of support and rigorous examination of potential.

Getting there has meant expanding the definition of success, particularly for faculty, he said. In the past, to survive in academia, you had to do two things: publish and bring in grants. If you cling to that idea, you might see efforts to get faculty to patent findings and pursue investment for startups as a distraction.

“We’re trying to say, ‘It’s all good,’” said Crowell. But it’s working. “When you look at the number of inventions per $10 million of research funds, UVA has one of the highest [invention] disclosure rates for our research volume. The level of activity is almost hyper.”

Can the city as a whole become a productive primordial soup where big ideas can evolve? Beyer said time will tell. “But there’s a building momentum,” he said. “People are taking it as something that’s essential to the Charlottesville narrative.”

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A new way to operate: A surgery practice bets on a price transparency model

Dr. William Grant is a Charlottesville orthopedic surgeon and chair of the Monticello Community Surgery Center’s board. He and nearly two dozen other physicians are opening a new independent outpatient surgery center on Route 29 that’s built around a radically different procedure pricing philosophy. Photo: Elli Williams

Ever had a hip replaced? Tonsils removed? Broken bone set?

How much did it cost? And not your out-of-pocket costs—what was the total pricetag for the procedure? If you managed to find out, the number could vary wildly.

“Chargemaster” prices—essentially, a hospital’s sticker price for a given procedure—are often hard for patients to unearth, and there are often massive disparities within a single market, as the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found in a 2013 study. In New York City, for instance, a joint replacement ran anywhere from $15,000 to $155,000.

Hospital industry groups have pointed out that those list prices are essentially meaningless, and usually don’t reflect the actual cost of procedures; they’re often calculated to include hospital overhead costs and make up for the sometimes sizeable gap between patient costs and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. Besides, their argument goes, most patients never pay “retail” price. Their insurers, who usually negotiate a lower price, pick up most of the tab.

But as the ramp-up to Obamacare has thrust the health care and insurance industries—and their inefficiencies and shortcomings—under the microscope, the issue of price transparency in medicine has come front and center, and an outpatient surgery center set to open this week in Charlottesville is making a radical move to change things locally.

The Monticello Community Surgery Center (MCSC), an independent outpatient center owned by 22 shareholding physicians, is embarking on a new model centered around price transparency. Need a rotator cuff repair? Check online for the cost. That’s what you’ll be billed.

“What the American public is looking for is an opportunity to know what they’re getting and at what cost,” said MCSC board president Dr. William Grant, an orthopedic surgeon with his own Charlottesville practice. “We’ve gotten into a terrible upward spiral of double-digit inflation of insurance prices. People are wondering what is it we’re getting for those increasing premiums today that we weren’t getting last year and the year before?”

“There’s no question that these guys are in the vanguard of where medicine has to go,” said Tom Massaro, UVA’s Harrison Foundation Professor of Medicine and Law. A pediatrician, Massaro now lectures on health policy at the University’s law school and the Darden School of Business.

But it remains to be seen, he said, whether such a radical move away from traditional funding structures will stick in a city like this one, where people have a lot of provider options and tend to be well-insured. “Historically, not many practice innovations have come from small markets like Charlottesville.”

 

COST CONUNDRUM: What does a biopsy cost in Virginia? Depends on where you go. The cost of outpatient medical procedures can vary wildly, thanks to the different charge methods used by hospitals. The above data, from 2011, is from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, which collected the "sticker price" for various categories of procedures at hospitals across the U.S. The dollar amounts are the average cost of all procedures billed as "biopsies or excisions" for that year.
COST CONUNDRUM: What does a biopsy cost in Virginia? Depends on where you go. The cost of outpatient medical procedures can vary wildly, thanks to the different charge methods used by hospitals. The above data, from 2011, is from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, which collected the “sticker price” for various categories of procedures at hospitals across the U.S. The dollar amounts are the average cost of all procedures billed as “biopsies or excisions” for that year.

 

The MCSC isn’t exactly a newcomer. It launched in August 2003 as the Martha Jefferson Outpatient Surgery Center, owned equally by Martha Jefferson and a group of shareholding surgeons with their own practices in Charlottesville and Albemarle. It was the doctors who managed the day-to-day business of the center.

That autonomy has been a big part of what has made the center successful over the last decade, said Dianne Simmons, the group’s chief administrator. The layers of committees and rigid hierarchies of a big hospital aren’t there, and the result has been a tight-knit workforce where everybody’s responsible for everybody else, said Simmons.

That’s made for a cohesive, democratic, and highly efficient outfit. “We can turn on a dime if we have to,” she said. The staff sees the center’s physician board members every day. “If you’ve got a problem, you talk to them.”

But when the corporate nonprofit hospital system Sentara took over Martha Jefferson in 2011, it became clear that there wasn’t a place in the new structure for their independently run operation, said Grant. After an unsuccessful year of negotiations, the physician shareholders bought out the hospital’s stake, and the cord was cut.

On March 15, the center will see its first patients at a new location on Route 29 south of Polo Grounds Road. On a recent weekday afternoon, staff and doctors in hard hats gathered in what will be the 18,000 square-foot facility’s lobby as dozens of constructions workers made a last minute push to paint walls and lay flooring. As they explained it, their surgery center isn’t just getting a new name and a new home. It’s getting a philosophical makeover as well.

Like a growing number of health care experts, the center’s surgeons believe that a big part of their industry’s problem is that standard economic rules of competition have been warped and skewed by a payment system that isolates patients from the costs of care.

“You could arguably say the health care market is really different than any other market in this country,” said Dr. Dave Nielsen, another Charlottesville orthopedic surgeon who sits on the MCSC board. Payer insurance companies “really aren’t bound by the normal rules of economics.”

And that’s a problem, said Grant. When the list price for medical care is arbitrary and obscured, nobody can make an informed decision, and cost and quality become uncoupled.

“What’s wrong with our current system is that nobody understands what the cost of services are that they’re able to obtain through insurance, unfortunately in part by design,” he said.

As government agencies, nonprofit groups, and companies looking for the best deal for their employee plans dug into the data, “they started finding that it’s not always the highest cost providers that provide the best care,” said Grant. “A lot of the time, it’s actually an inverse relationship.”

Grant, Nielsen, and their colleagues maintain there’s a very simple fix: advertise prices. MCSC plans to post the cost for its core procedures on its website. Barring major complications—which are rare for outpatient surgical procedures like the ones they offer, Grant pointed out—what you see there is what you’ll pay.

It’s a big shift. Doctors aren’t used to talking frankly in dollars and cents. But Grant said the model appeals to an increasingly price-sensitive population—and it complements a trend toward higher-deductible insurance plans and health savings accounts, which give patients more responsibility for their up-front costs. Those “value shoppers” are going up in number, he said, and they look at care in a whole new way.

Somebody with great insurance might demand an MRI for a bum knee even if he’s told by his doctor a few weeks of rest and observation would be a better and cheaper course of action, simply because he knows his insurance will cover it, said Grant. Somebody shouldering more of the cost or spending an allotted amount on procedures will consider options more carefully.

“In a way they’re becoming their own insurance entity, and they have to use responsible planning as to how they want to spend those dollars,” he said.

Can a big shift in a small market make a difference on a broad scale?

“Today, in the big medicine world, the innovation has come from the San Franciscos, the New Yorks, the Seattles,” said Massaro, and a price transparency model would likely do better in a place where there are more people with fewer resources seeking care, he said.

But Massaro said small disruptions in the status quo can and ultimately will have an impact. “It’s going to take little pilot programs or seed elements like these guys to break established norms,” he said.

The MCSC docs are confident they can win people over to their model of care. Nielsen said their hope is that it will appeal to the self-insured in Charlottesville or far beyond. It will help that their prices will be highly competitive. Grant said they expect to offer procedures for as low as a third of what other local care providers ultimately charge.

“It is a cultural shift in how we approach medicine,” he said. “But it’s one I think we have to have.”

 

Dr. William Grant is a Charlottesville orthopedic surgeon and chair of the Monticello Community Surgery Center’s board. He and nearly two dozen other physicians are opening a new independent outpatient surgery center on Route 29 that’s built around a radically different procedure pricing philosophy.

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Harlem Globetrotters

The whistled notes of “Sweet Georgia Brown” signal the Harlem Globetrotter’s return to town.

Hot hand jersey, make or miss, and trick shot challenge are three new rules fans can vote for to be used in upcoming games by the infamous Harlem Globetrotters. The full court wizards in red, white, and blue have been wowing audiences with superhuman basketball skills for an incredible 88 years, and have played over 20,000 games in 120 countries. The Globetrotters’ focus on theatrics and comedy is matched by unparalleled athleticism, paving the way for fans to share in the love of basketball.

Thursday 3/13. $25-97, 7pm. John Paul Jones Arena, 295 Massie Rd. 575-8497.