Summer staple: a filled-to-the-brim (and beyond!) cone from Kirt's. Photo: Rammelkamp Foto
What’s a dessert lover gotta do to get some straight up, full-fat ice cream* when fro-yo is as ubiquitous as Starbucks? Head to one of these local spots for homemade creamy goodness, that’s what.
Chap’s
223 E. Main St., Downtown Mall, 977-4139
Take your pick from more than 20 flavors (recommended: classic butter pecan), then grab a seat at one of the diner’s turquoise booths. Put a quarter in the jukebox if you’re feeling nostalgic.
Kirt’s Homemade Ice Cream
Albemarle Square, 202-0306
The ice cream’s made in-house and is customizable with a variety of topping combinations, but we’re nuts about the Frodo: an ice cream sammy made from a halved Carpe donut.
Ben & Jerry’s
Barracks Road Shopping Center, 244-7438
All your favorite pints (including hard-to-find Milk & Cookies) right before your eyes. Stop in on April 14 for Free Cone Day to celebrate the company’s opening in 1978.
Chandler’s
921 River Rd., 923-8349
An old-school treat in an unlikely spot by the Tractor Supply store, Chandler’s soft-serve is a Charlottesville staple. You can’t go wrong with timeless chocolate. Bring cash!
It’s backyard barbecue season. But before you fire up the grill, it’s important to be prepared. Sam Rochester, executive chef at Downtown Grille, offers this advice for grilling restaurant-worthy food at home.
First, know your grill. “Propane is fast and easy, and gives food a more crisp finish,” he says. However, charcoal grills give food a deeper, grilled flavor. And there’s the telltale aroma, of course. “You turn on your charcoal grill and the whole neighborhood knows you’re grilling.”
Next, Rochester advises having three items on hand: a small, flat pan, a meat thermometer (“You don’t want to get anyone sick.”) and a good pair of tongs.
“Your tongs should be like another set of fingers—they should be that comfortable,” he says. “You should be able to pick up food with them effortlessly.”
While some home cooks are taught that food should marinate for hours before grilling, Rochester says not to marinate an item for more than 25 minutes. Marinades are high in acid, which can cook the food and change the flavor.
When you’re ready to begin, Rochester says to have your ingredients grillside. “If you forget something and have to leave, all of a sudden you’re going to have flames rising out of the grill,” he warns.
Next, start the grill hot and adjust the temperature as desired. Using the meat thermometer to check for doneness, cook meat, poultry and fish according to these guidelines: “Rare is 110 to 115 degrees or below, medium rare is 120 to 130, medium is 135 to 145, medium well is 150 to 155, and well done is 165 and above,” he says. Pay special attention to temperature when grilling delicate items, such as fish, he advises. “It gets more delicate as it cooks,” he says.
With any item you’re concerned about overcooking, “It’s important to have an exit strategy,” Rochester says. This is where the small pan comes in.
While a lot of people grill until the food is done, often it’s better to cook food on the grill until three-quarters done and place it on a pan to finish it. “A small pan gives you the flexibility to move items off the direct heat while still keeping them warm,” says Rochester. You can also use the grill rack, a feature of many grills, to let the food rest until you’re ready to serve it.
And don’t be afraid to grill something besides meat. “I love grilling pineapple for margaritas. Or you can grill tomatoes, celery and onions, pop them in a blender and you’ve got a great bloody mary.”
Above all, successful grilling begins with quality ingredients. Says Rochester, “You can’t grill bad food and hope it comes out good.”—Jennifer Senator
Photo: Andrea Hubbell
Fill your grill
Bone-in pork chops at JM Stock Provisions
Skip the marinade and season with salt 45 minutes to an hour before searing these thicker-than-usual chops (cut 1.25-1.5 inches) over direct heat for two to three minutes per side, says owner James Lum. He also suggests trimming some of the fat before cooking to avoid flare-ups on the grill.
“These trimmings are great to use in the pan for sautéed veggies, or the classic cookout side, baked beans,” he says. To get a delicate crust on the fat, Lum says to use tongs to continually move the chops around the grill until both sides have a nice sear. Next, move them to indirect heat and apply a glaze of lemon zest, lemon juice, black pepper, crushed red chili and olive oil to both sides while they finish cooking. Remove once the center has reached 130 degrees, and let rest for 15 minutes before serving.
Spring Gate Farm goat kabobs, available at Foods of All Nations and Croftburn Market in Culpeper(above)
To grill the leanest of all red meats (a six-ounce serving has just 5.2 grams of fat), Jane McKinney, owner of Spring Gate Farm in Barboursville, suggests first rolling the meat in a mixture of olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, pepper and chopped chives, cilantro and parsley. “Add a dash of paprika and cardamom and refrigerate themeat for several hours,” she says, “then place the meat onto metal skewers and place on the grill. Grill at a high temperature for seven minutes, turning the skewers until the meat is browned.”
Polyface Farms’ chicken thighs at Rebecca’s Natural Foods
“Keep the skin on, brine for a few hours and add a basic dry rub, like Paleo Powder seasoning, an hour or so before grilling,” says Bill Calvani, store co-manager and grocery buyer at Rebecca’s Natural Foods. Once the thighs hit the grill, “turn them as little as possible” and apply barbecue sauce with a brush every 15-20 minutes. Calvani recommends Wahoo Q’s Sweet n’ Spicy sauce, which is locally made and organic. All productsare available at Rebecca’s.
Alaskan salmon at Seafood @ West Main
“The simplest preparation is best,” says owner Chris Arseneault. “Rub it with olive oil, maybe some sea salt and pepper and don’t overcook it. Turn it just once; when it easily flakes with a fork, it’s done. Add rosemary or thyme from the garden after it’s finished.”
Shiitake mushrooms from North Cove Mushrooms, at Charlottesville City Market
“Brush them with Soy Vay Teriyaki sauce, or barbecue sauce, or soak them in a balsamic vinaigrette before grilling two to five minutes per side,” says Robin Serne, owner of North Cove Mushrooms. Rebrush with marinade when you turn them, she says, and grill until mushrooms are “a nice dark golden brown color, not quite burned.” She suggests slicing the mushrooms for roasted veggie sandwiches, or serving on focaccia with tomatoes.
Lamb chops from Cestari Sheep & Wool Company at Foods of All Nations
“We’re Italian, so we like to rub them with garlic and basil, with a little balsamic vinegar before we grill them,” says Francis Chester, owner of this Churchville sheep farm. He advises grilling the chops 10 minutes on each side, until medium. “Rare to medium is best for lamb chops—you don’t want to overcook them,” he says.—J.S.
Photo: Andrea Hubbell
Garnish respect
Sam Rochester’s grilled pineapple margarita
3 limes, halved crosswise
3 lemons, halved crosswise
Kosher salt
Ice
12 oz. silver tequila
4 1/2 oz. simple syrup*
6 pineapple slices
Grill the halved limes, lemons and pineapple over high heat, cut side down, until lightly charred and juicy (about five minutes). Transfer to a plate to cool. Juice the limes and lemons into a cup. You should have about four ounces of each juice.
Using a lime wedge, moisten half of the outer rim of six rocks or margarita glasses and coat lightly with salt, then fill each glass with ice. Fill a pitcher with ice and add the tequila, simple syrup and the lime and lemon juices. Stir well and strain into the prepared glasses.
*To make simple syrup, combine equal parts sugar and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil; simmer until the sugar is dissolved, and the syrup starts to thicken. Remove from the heat and let cool completely. To add extra flavor, color and zest to your drinks, put some diced pineapple or grilled jalapeños in the syrup as it cooks. The syrup can be refrigerated in a glass jar for up to one month.
“What happened to Alexis is so tragic, and there are still other families going through that,” said Trina Murphy, above, embracing Gil Harrington in Lynchburg in December 2013. “I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.” Staff photo
The death of any loved one can be staggering, but when someone simply vanishes, it can be even more difficult, said Trina Murphy, the great aunt of Nelson County teenager Alexis Murphy who disappeared in 2013 and who is presumed dead, although her body has never been found. After spending the past 18 months seeking answers about what happened to Alexis and acting as the family spokesperson, Murphy wants to share what her grief has taught her. She’s now pursuing a career as a motivational speaker, giving presentations in this area and beyond.
“Obviously if someone’s going through some sort of tragedy, that’s where my niche is,” she said. “Turning tragedy into triumph. For a while, you get really bogged down dealing with the details, how to cope from day to day. You finally get to a point where you’re like, how do I move this forward? I can’t just wallow in this forever.”
It was August 3, 2013 when Alexis, a 17-year-old rising senior at Nelson County High School told her family she was heading to Lynchburg to buy hair extensions. She was captured on surveillance video at the Liberty gas station in Lovingston soon after she left the house, and she was never seen again. Also seen on that video was Randy Allen Taylor, a 48-year-old man who was considered the prime suspect in another missing person case, the September 2010 disappearance of 19-year-old Samantha Clarke in Orange. Investigators found physical evidence including blood, hair and a stud earring in Taylor’s nearby trailer tying him to Murphy, and he was convicted of first degree murder in May 2014. He is currently appealing that conviction.
In the immediate aftermath of Alexis’ disappearance, Murphy said she felt helpless, so when Alexis’ mother Laura Murphy asked for her assistance in helping the family communicate with media and law enforcement, she readily accepted. “When something happens, I can’t just sit around,” she said. “Keeping her story out there, keeping it in the forefront, it was something that I could do.”
With assistance from her cousin Diane Givens, owner of Nelson-based artist management firm 1Krown Management, Murphy, who works full time as a nurse manager, is hoping to spread her message of support and safety further.
“My focus is on the missing, and nobody understands that position unless you’ve been in it,” she said.
Murphy has already participated in panels at area high schools, and she’s also working with Help Save the Next Girl, the nonprofit founded by the parents of Morgan Harrington. Support from Gil Harrington has been part of her inspiration, she said.
“It’s such a pleasure to know her on the level we do,” Murphy said. “I garner a lot of strength and positive energy from her.”
Next stops for Murphy are a panel discussion with various local law enforcement officials on March 30 at Monticello High School, which is free and open to the public, as well as an event at Hollins University through that school’s chapter of Help Save the Next Girl.
Ultimately, she said, helping other families—and helping keep other young women safe—is a way of honoring Alexis.
Awkwardly cast as an action hero, Sean Penn flounders in the lead role of The Gunman despite direction by genre trendsetter Pierre Morel. Photo: Open Road Films
There are bad movies, there are really bad movies, there are atrocities committed against the intelligence of paying crowds that call themselves movies, and then there’s The Gunman. Watching it will make you forget that movies that aren’t this bad exist at all. It’s so godawful that even calling it bad is an insult to otherwise respectable movies whose only sin is not being good, and its waste of normally excellent actors is so upsetting that I’d wager that Sean Penn and Javier Bardem returned home from filming to find their Oscars crying tears of blood.
On its surface, The Gunman is presented as 54-year-old Sean Penn’s foray into the new, sometimes glorious action subgenre of pissed off old guys killing everybody because of one really bad day. It’s a movement that has highs (The Equalizer) and lows (The Expendables 3) but shows no sign of slowing down so long as there are gravelly-voiced Academy Award winners willing to get pulpy. The strength of these movies has always been in the sparks of inspiration that fly when you put A-listers in front of the camera and gifted technicians behind, both of whom throw everything they have at a script that wasn’t necessarily written with that level of pedigree in mind. The space in which the leading man occupies in the audience’s mind is played to maximum effect; Denzel Washington’s roles are generally trustworthy, dignified and crackling with intelligence, while Liam Neeson’s characters are often world-weary and hopelessly behind the times, walking statues dedicated to their own former greatness. Stunt casting, maybe, but it guarantees that our sympathies are in the right place in order for our emotions to be taken on an exciting ride.
But holy hell, does The Gunman ever mess that winning formula up. Directed by the man responsible for this trend, Taken’s Pierre Morel, there is never even a hint of the promise shown in that genre-defining film. The film opens with Penn as Jim Terrier (ugh), a private military contractor responsible for simultaneously safeguarding non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Congo while protecting the interests of international mining companies. Following a high-profile assassination, Jim has to flee the country and the woman he loves with no explanation. Years later, Jim is working for an NGO when he is pursued for reasons related to his former questionable activities, prompting his return to Europe to find his former squadmates and… O.K., that’s enough of that.
The first problem is that Sean Penn is not a good action star. Despite bulging with muscle in places that maybe aren’t even supposed to bulge, Penn’s intensity works in the opposite direction of his character; Penn plays Jim as determined where he needs to be desperate. The actor’s own brand of intensity does not translate into thrilling chases or combat, and more than a few supposedly brutal takedowns end up making no sense due to the shaky camera and awkward angles, possibly employed to mask poor fight choreography. Bardem sinks his teeth into the role, and would be a pleasure to watch if his character were anything other than binary. The love interest played by Jasmine Trinca is an utter waste of the award-winning Italian actress, and you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the normally memorable Idris Elba is in this movie at all.
(And while we’re at it, directors: “fuck” does not always have to be every other word out of Ray Winstone’s mouth, especially when the other ones are nearly incomprehensible.)
Capping things off is a “moral” delivered by a TV news anchor about the troubling lack of scruples in multinational corporations. It comes from out of nowhere, though Penn’s surprising co-writing credit is a likely suspect. (To borrow from Penn’s Oscar speech: “Who gave that son of a bitch script approval?”)
If you like movies and want to continue to do so, you should not, under any circumstances, see this unexciting, confusing, ugly movie that somehow features the worst possible performances by some of our generation’s greatest actors.
Laurie Berkner’s kid rock combo of quirky lyrics and folk pop melodies prompted Time magazine to deem her “a kind of sippy-cup Sheryl Crow.” Photo: Jayme Thornton
If you are a parent of a millennial there’s a good chance you can sing along to the tunes of “kindie rock” songstress Laurie Berkner. Her hits “We Are The Dinosaurs,” “Bumblebee (Buzz Buzz)” and “Victor Vito” (made popular on Nick Jr. TV channel) offered a welcome alternative to the catchy banality of Barney and The Wiggles when she emerged in the late ’90s, and inspired carpool peace of mind across generations.
Sunday 3/29. $19.50-50, 3pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.
Trading is a hobby for Jay Campbell, chief buyer at Beer Run. Photo: Rammelkamp Foto
Ever ask yourself, “Is there any way to make beer uncool?” If so, rest assured the answer is yes. Beer traders have made it so.
Not content to leave behind one of the great hallmarks of childhood dorkdom—swapping stuff with friends—beer traders communicate across the country and occasionally across the pond to locate brews they can’t otherwise get, determine what might be of fair barter value and set up in-person trades or ship each other boxes of sweet, sweet suds.
No, beer trading isn’t a new hobby, but it’s growing faster than ever before. And Charlottesville certainly has its share of these geeks.
“I know a lot of people that trade,” said Brian Martin, an active homebrewer who’s planning to open Charlottesville’s next nano-brewery, St Fuad, sometime this year. “How else would they have beer X, Y or Z? It is common.”
Just how commonly locals trade beer is tough to determine. Though there’s nothing unlawful about trading beer person-to-person, the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibits the practice of shipping alcoholic beverages by anyone who isn’t licensed to do so. Likewise, the U.S. Postal Service and the major private shippers like Fedex and UPS have policies against booze mail. So it’s not something people are necessarily eager to talk about—and when they are they’re more comfortable referring to in-person swaps.
There’s no doubt, though, the practice is more common around the country now than it was 15 years ago. BeerAdvocate started its online trading forum in the late ’90s with only a few members and currently hosts hundreds of daily trades by thousands of members around the world. Other forums have popped up as well, including one on RateBeer and dozens on Facebook like Beer Trading 101, BeerTrader ISO:FT and Casual Beer Traders. In February last year, a new social network devoted entirely to swapping suds, BottleTrade, launched.
“I’ve been trading on a regular basis since early 2010,” Martin said. “I probably do 15-20 trades a year, say one every two to three weeks.”
Martin said one of the things about trading he enjoys is sharing his homebrew, and Beer Run owner Josh Hunt reckons homebrewers indeed launched trading while looking for some homespun distribution back in the day. That quickly turned into people from different areas of the country looking for things they couldn’t find on their local retail shelves.
“What I love about craft beer is it is such a regional phenomenon,” Hunt said. “When I was in my early 20s, I traveled across the country, and I felt like America was just becoming homogenized. Everywhere you went you’d find the same things. What appealed to me about craft beer was that it was different.”
Mike Berman, a financial analyst out of Rockville who’s done some trading, agrees that sharing the local beer love is what beer trading was once all about. But he’s not necessarily been impressed with all the folks who’ve driven the hobby’s growth.
“When I started getting engaged in it, you’d say, ‘I have some great beer coming out of my area, you have some great beers in your area, do you want to swap some beer?’” Berman said. “But it’s become such a big thing that there are a lot of folks out there that are really commoditizing it.”
Indeed, the slippery slope from trading to aftermarket sales would seem to be the main concern for the beer industry.
“The only thing I don’t like is eBay sales,” Champion Brewing Company owner Hunter Smith said. “I get it, but it is bullshit—paying a fair price at the brewery and then reaping money that you had nothing to do with. It’s difficult as a businessperson because you don’t expect to have to account for assholes, but you should. It comes down to: This is why we can’t have nice things.”
Otherwise, Smith supports trading, though he’s careful to advise that no one should be mailing beer. He said he appreciates when locals go out of their way to pick up some of his beer to trade with others out-of-market. It brings exposure and distribution Champion can’t yet get in any other way.
Likewise many beer retailers have enjoyed some benefits from trading. Jay Campbell, Hunt’s chief buyer at Beer Run, sees people come in to buy large amounts of beer for others all the time.
“Obviously it’s great for us,” Campbell said. “We have folks who meet up and have some beer they [brought back] from Colorado, California or even just from North Carolina. It’s always fun for people to share and talk to others about beer.”
That leaves only one more opponent of beer trading, the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. At press time, the department had yet to make a statement on the practice, but in brief discussions with a spokesperson, it was clear one of the chief concerns would be the possibility of trades going to minors.
Let that be a lesson to you, beer nerds: Always determine the age of your trading partner before sealing the deal.
Carolyn Demanelis, Alexandra Deglise-Umble, Maxine Gillespie and Kathleen Welch portray Iraqi and Iraqi-American women who connect through shared experiences in 9 Parts of Desire. Photo: Michael Bailey
Actor, director and UVA Drama professor Kate Burke is on a mission to change American theater.
“I’m very aware of how the American tradition has been influenced by Method acting,” Burke said in a recent interview. “There are some good things about it, but in distorted form it focuses on emotions and neuroses of both the characters in a play and in the actor himself. That’s what Stanislavski called loving yourself in art rather than loving art in yourself. I’m on my own campaign to mitigate that with theater that is larger than any one person’s first world problems. Those can be overwhelming, but most of us live like kings and queens even if we are living paycheck to paycheck.”
Burke, who born in southern Indiana and received her MFA in acting from Ohio University, described working for a small Haitian village without plumbing or running water. “I remember seeing a little girl standing outside a group of children, and she was sucking on a piece of sugarcane,” she said. “It was four in the afternoon, so I asked her, ‘Have you eaten anything yet?’ And she said, ‘No.’ When I came home, I felt sick from the bright lights, the choice, the colors, the overwhelming mechanization of the grocery store.”
Burke said she views theater as a powerful force for good, especially when it focuses on non-traditional subjects (i.e. something other than “white males with beautiful wives or supportive girlfriends”).
“I’m really interested in doing plays that address issues,” she said, in no small part because they “give people an outlet for telling their stories.”
Written and originally performed by award-winning playwright Heather Raffo, the play features monologues by nine Iraqi and Iraqi-American women and spans the time between the first and second Gulf Wars and occupation. Derived from the true stories of women from various walks of life, the characters share unique desires and struggles that seem to address one another.
Raffo, who spent months loving and living, eating and communicating with the Iraqi women on whom her characters are based, wrote on her website that “I had the right mix: I was half Iraqi so they opened up to me immediately, but I was also Western so they felt they could express fears or secrets that might otherwise be judged more harshly by someone from their culture. And most importantly, I had to share as much of myself with them as they were sharing with me.”
9 Parts of Desire dives into cross-cultural themes of longing, womanhood and identity. “I intended to write a piece about the Iraqi psyche, something that would inform and enlighten the images we see on TV,” Raffo wrote. “However, the play is equally about the American psyche. It is a dialogue between east and west.”
For Burke, these extended stories invited student performers to develop empathic voices as well as intellects.
“I teach speaking, voice and text work, and most students are trapped in a youth speak. There’s an uptick at the end of a sentence that makes it sound like a question or else the voice falls down and everything loses energy. This is a chance for me to do a lot of intensive voice work with the cast members.”
She said that speech training requires her students to tune into the potential needs of their listeners.
“I spent a sabbatical in Stratford-on-Avon and saw how they prepare actors to speak Shakespeare,” Burke said. “They trained us through speaking out loud and repeating, chanting, call and response.”
Now she uses these same methods to train groups of cast members at UVA and around the country. “Words are such powerful reflections of minds and hearts,” she said. Spoken with commensurate power, those words can bring change to life.
9 Parts of Desire will give local audiences a chance to be part of that change. During the week of performances, Raffo will hold residency and give talkbacks following the show, and on the final Saturday, she will participate in an hour-long panel discussion, “Staging Trauma,” alongside a member of the UVA Middle Eastern Studies faculty, Burke and Hanan Hameed, a young Iraqi woman and UVA student. (Hameed, who lived through the second Iraq War and came to Charlottesville with her family through the IRC, started a successful Change.org petition to protest and demand an apology for Zeta Psi Fraternity’s recent “Bombs Over Baghdad” party.)
On a smaller scale, the show has already opened eyes. “We invited an Iraqi woman from the local community, a refugee through the IRC, to one of our rehearsals and we had a tea party,” Burke said.
Having explained to the cast that they, like Raffo, had to earn the right to hear her story, they went around the circle and each told a deeply personal story. Their guest then told a story about a violent gunning down she witnessed from her apartment.
“The man who was shot looked up and locked eyes with her for what felt like minutes before four bullets ripped into his body,” said Burke. “She said she felt that she was alone with him at the end of his life, and it seemed like a heavy responsibility and so painful. She told it so simply and calmly, with tears running down her cheeks.”
Burke said that afterward, her actresses told her how moving and powerful her story was, how she didn’t need lights or a costume because the words were the most important thing. “This is how a real story from the trenches is told,” she said. “It wasn’t how an actor could tell it. She didn’t want to feel it, she wanted the audience to feel it.”
9 Parts of Desire is at UVA’s Helms Theater through March 29.
A law enforcement officer and his wife said the inclusion of current events in a Black History Month program at Orange County High was inappropriate and that students should stick to celebrating Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
wikipedia/aigrette
Orange is the new Black History Month flashpoint following a March 12 high school program titled “Black Lives Matter.” An anonymous deputy called the event “anti-police” and “political” in a Facebook message that went viral, and by Monday, March 16, parents were keeping their children home because of alleged threats of violence.
Students at Orange County High School designed the program, which featured musical, dramatic and dance performances that highlighted inventors, civil rights leaders—and current events involving the deaths of black men, according to a release from the Orange County School Board.
The issue exploded when someone describing himself as a “deputy in Virginia” sent a message about the event to two pro-police Facebook groups, Stop the Cop Haters and Police Officers, which then stripped the account of identifying information and posted it to the groups’ pages.
The deputy said his wife became concerned when she saw students wearing T-shirts that said “I can’t breathe” and “#blacklivesmatter.” In a portion of the program called “Last Words,” the students started reciting lines evoking black men killed by police, which the deputy transcribed in his message:
“I’m from Ferguson Missouri…I was told to put my hands up. I did, and I was shot seven times. My name is Michael Brown.”
“I was sitting on the couch and the police came in my house and shot me in the head. I was seven years old.”
“I was falsely harassed for selling cigarettes and I was put into a choke hold that eventually lead to my death. I can’t breathe. My name is Eric Garner.”
The deputy wrote that his wife grabbed their 8-year-old daughter after she took part in a Motown Medley and left.
His Facebook message included the names and numbers of Orange County school administrators, and after it was posted publicly, a national audience started chiming in.
Orange County Sheriff Mark Amos said he’s aware of the identity of the deputy, but refused to name the person. Amos said the individual lives in Orange but does not work in law enforcement in that county.
While things were calm the day after the show, over the weekend, parents started calling the sheriff’s office, concerned about potential violence at the school. Amos said there was talk of protests, riots and weapons, but no direct threats, and the buzz seemed to stem from social media.
“We attempted to determine the origin of these references but our efforts always ended in ‘I heard it or saw it somewhere,’” said Amos in a press release. ”We were never able to determine a specific threat or who it was made by.”
Nonetheless, that didn’t keep parents from keeping students out of school on Monday, March 16. Sheriff Amos said there were 10 or so officers at the high school, extra officers at two elementary schools and others on alert around town.
Orange County resident Kimberley Barley sent two of her children to school wearing blue shirts that said, “police lives matter.” She didn’t attend the black history program, but said, “I wouldn’t have stayed if I had gone.”
Barley, who has worked in law enforcement for 15 years—she wouldn’t say where —is angry that “teachers and administrators allowed a protest at school.” She said she is not a racist, and the program was “flat-out racism,” and that there were so many ways black history could have been positively portrayed. “It’s supposed to be black history, not black current events,” she said.
Ebony Nixon, a 2005 Orange County High grad, didn’t go to the program, either, but she had a different perspective. “I commend those students for speaking out on that topic,” she said. “It’s still part of our history, part of our present history.”
Chrystie Beasley was there to see her niece and nephew perform. “I don’t know how it got turned into a police hate thing,” she said. “That’s not true.”
The deputy said he expected the program would focus on the accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Beasley called that condescending. “There’s more to black history than Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” she said. “History is happening every day. It’s important to educate children about what’s going on in the world today.”
Beasley also wonders why the person who sent the message didn’t go through the school system to express his concerns. “They did the opposite,” she said. “They posted something for the world to see.”
Orange County Schools Superintendent Brenda Tanner, whose contact information was posted online, said she couldn’t guess the number of calls she got about the program. “There were a lot of pink [message] slips,” she said. A notable exception: the still-anonymous deputy.
When asked if she received threats, she took a long pause. “We’ve got a lot of people expressing their opinion—and their support,” she said.
Tanner said three schools—Orange County High, Lightfoot Elementary and Unionville Elementary—had lower than normal attendance March 16, but she cautioned, “We don’t want to infer it was from a particular incident.”
In the flood of messages, the Orange schools administration tried to focus on Orange community members and parents, said Tanner.
“Any time we put on a production, we are responsible for reflection,” she said. “I think we’ll examine the process. There have been questions raised. My job is to listen.”
So was the program anti-cop? “Absolutely not,” said Tanner. And although it was perceived as a political protest by some, she described it as students dealing with controversial current-day events through poetry and song. “It was clear there was no aggression, no defiance, which are some of the things I would associate with a protest,” said Tanner. “This was a performance.”
Barley, the mom who works in law enforcement, wants the school administration to publicly apologize for program. “They need to be held accountable,” she said.
The closest to that might be the release from the Orange County School Board: “We as members of the School Board regret that the nature of the program was offensive to some, but truly believe that there was no intent to offend or disparage anyone.“
The board notes its appreciation of law enforcement, and its support of Tanner. “The School Board takes responsibility for the Black History Program,” said the release.
Dressed in the school’s colors of pink and green, waving signs bearing welcoming messages—“Holla Holla,” and “Vixens forever”— Sweet Briar alumnae from around the country converged on the bucolic women’s college campus on Sunday, March 15 to welcome students back from spring break. Two weeks earlier, on March 3, Sweet Briar interim president James F. Jones had dropped the bombshell that the school would close following spring semester 2015, first to stunned faculty, who say they had no idea the 114-year-old institution’s financial situation was so precarious, and then, just an hour later, to an auditorium of sobbing students, some of whom had already heard the news through social media.
The festive spring break welcome was meant to lift student’s spirits, but it was also a symbol of alumnae’s defiance and part of a growing effort to save the school through any means possible—including legal action. The Saving Sweet Briar nonprofit, founded in the days after the announcement, has raised $3.2 million and has retained a high profile law firm to put up a fight. Their first demand: the resignation of the college’s interim president and board. What’s next for Sweet Briar and its students?
