Month: February 2019

Categories
Arts

The world of the play: Boomie Pedersen gets inside the story with Chekhov Unbound

Chekhov Unbound travels to several Charlottesville-area venues through March 17. Visit hamnertheater.com for a full list of performance dates and locations.Publicity image.

When playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov arrived on the Russian literary scene in the late 1800s, he changed the course of modern drama. According to Boomie Pedersen, artistic director of the Hamner Theater in Nelson County, Chekhov’s work meant that “theater went from being larger-than-life declamatory screaming to the back rows, to much more realistic and relationship-driven.”

Now Pederson is translating Chekhov’s realness for local audiences. Maybe even taking it up a notch. As the director of a Hamner Theater project called Chekhov Unbound, she’s expanded and experimented with the rehearsal process while developing a traveling adaptation of Chekhov’s play, Three Sisters.

“In this town,” Pedersen says, theater is “all about the performance.” But what gets lost in the shuffle of three rehearsals a week as you’re gunning toward production is “the creation of the community of the world of the play” and “what can we discover working together all the time.”

So instead of following the typical product-driven model for Three Sisters, Pedersen invited her actors to consciously take time for the show. “Not just get together, read the play, memorize your lines, and do it in six weeks, but spend time with it and see what happens.”

All told, cast members rehearsed for seven months prior to their first performance. Along the way, Pedersen also hosted open rehearsals, where anyone could come and watch, at private homes around town. “The environment affects not just the audience but the actors as well,” Pedersen says. “You’re doing your scene, and there’s an audience member sitting right on the sofa where you sit down. What does that do to you as an actor, and what does it do to the audience?”

These experiments in time and place will continue once performances begin.

“We’re doing [the show] in many different venues,” Pedersen says, including Unity of Charlottesville, private houses in Palmyra and Rappahannock, and the Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, among others. “As an actor, when you experience different audiences in different spaces, you get out of your comfort zone. You have to be present, and you have to be telling the truth.”

Telling the truth is at the heart of Three Sisters, which follows a brother and three sisters as they wrestle with love and longing.

The play has no hero, Pedersen says. “You see bits and pieces of relationships, and it all adds up to these lives. It’s very much an ensemble piece. It was actually the first play that Chekhov wrote for the Moscow Art Theatre specifically.”

Pedersen says she’s wanted to direct Three Sisters for a long time. “My mother, Carol Pedersen, studied acting in New York with a woman named Tamara Daykarhanova, who actually was in the Moscow Art Theatre, and who had been in the movie version of Three Sisters, directed by Laurence Olivier many years ago,” she says. “Chekhov is someone that my mother uses in her teaching all the time, because he is so good for actors. My mom is getting older, and she also has early-stage Alzheimer’s. I really wanted to do something that she could be connected to.”

To create Chekhov Unbound, Pedersen worked with Doug Grissom, a playwright and teacher at UVA, to adapt the show for local audiences. She also cast older actors in traditionally youthful roles to shine a metatheatrical light on ageism. Though none of Chekhov’s sisters are above the age of 30, Pedersen says “the things they experience in terms of yearning, like ‘Nothing’s ever turning out right. I want to find love.’ do not change as you get older. They get more and more acute.”

Although the show was written over a hundred years ago, Pedersen believes many themes are relevant to contemporary audiences. “So much of what the play is about is the notion of, ‘Who am I in this world right now?’ With the political situation the way it is, and global warming, everything is dire. We’re asking those same questions. We all have the need to figure out why we do what we do and what the value is of what we’re doing.”

Much of Three Sisters centers on the idea of ‘becoming’—people evolving into who they will be. Through Pedersen’s experimental process, the show’s performers are doing the same.

“They’ve discovered where their lives differ and where they are in parallel with their characters,” she says. “The other day, one of my actresses said, ‘Oh, I just discovered that my character doesn’t think very highly of her husband. She pays no attention to him.’ This came up because the actress hadn’t heard a line that her character’s husband had been saying. She discovered that she wasn’t listening.”

Pedersen believes that taking time and space to discover who we are becoming has tremendous value. “If we don’t slow down and pay attention to what we have now, we may never know. We won’t know what we’ve lost.”

Categories
News

In brief: Adjournment day, Short stay, Fashion Square buzz and more

Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax presides over the state's senate in Richmond, Virginia, U.S., February 11, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake (Newscom TagID: rtrlten858176.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

Scandal marred

It was the most eventful—and scandal-plagued— session of the General Assembly in recent memory. Over in the executive branch, Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring’s past blackface antics were revealed and drew calls for Northam to resign. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax faced accusations of sexual assault, which he denied and called a “political lynching.” Both the Northam and Fairfax scandals were initially publicized by a right-wing website owned by Reilly O’Neal, a North Carolina political operative whose clients have included Roy Moore and Corey Stewart.

Local Delegate Rob Bell plans to hold a hearing on the Fairfax allegations in the Courts of Justice Committee, which he chairs, although it’s unclear if Vivian Tyson, who says Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex in 2004, will attend, amid her concerns of being “embroiled in a highly charged political environment,” according to her lawyers.

And Delegate David Toscano, 68, who served as House minority leader for seven years, announced on the last day of the session he will not seek reelection to an eighth term representing the 57th District.

Amid the scandals, legislators, all of whose seats are up for grabs in November, also passed some new laws.

Laying down the laws

  • Gerrymandering: Long an issue for legislators like state Senator Creigh Deeds, a redistricting bill finally got the nod from both houses. The constitutional amendment, which would establish an independent commission to draw state and congressional lines, still has to pass the General Assembly next year and then go to voters before it’s official.
  • Felony DUI: Drunk driving that results in serious injury, as was the case with an 8-year-old Palmyra girl who was almost killed in a 2017 crash, will now be a felony with passage of a Rob Bell bill.
  • Jamycheal Mitchell’s law: Another Bell bill requires the Board of Corrections to establish standards for mental health care after Mitchell, 24, stole $5 worth of snacks and languished in a Hampton Roads jail for months before dying of heart failure and severe weight loss.
  • Tommie’s law: Penalty for animal torture is upped from misdemeanor to a Class 6 felony. The bill passed both houses unanimously after Tommie, the Richmond dog tied to a pole, doused with accelerant and set on fire, died.
  • No-excuses voting: Citizens can cast absentee ballots in person one week before an election, starting in 2020.
  • Wage discrimination: A Jim Crow-era law that allowed employers to pay less for jobs once frequently held by African Americans—such as newsboys, shoe-shine boys, and doormen—passed both houses, with Delegate Matt Fariss one of the 14 “no” votes.
  • Keep talking: The General Assembly was poised to ban driving while using a hand-held cellphone, but at the last minute voted to allow talking, but no texting or web surfing.
  • No spoofing: Displaying Virginia area codes if not in the commonwealth is prohibited, but whether the toothless Class 3 misdemeanor will deter robo-callers remains to be seen.
  • Public notice: Before state universities hike tuition, they must hold public hearings—if Northam signs the bill into law.

Quote of the week

“This was their chance to actually take a vote on ratifying the ERA, and they blew it.”—Delegate David Toscano on House Republican leadership redirecting a vote on the Equal Rights Amendment back to committee

In brief

More to C

A revised tourism campaign, which features a “more to C” theme, wins points with the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau after an earlier campaign touting “C’villeization” bombed.

Rumor mill

Several people have contacted us to ask if Fashion Square Mall is for sale—and one said UVA had purchased it. Not true, says UVA spokesman Anthony de Bruyn, who adds the university has no interest in doing so. And Washington Prime Group, the parent company of Fashion Square, “has no plans to close or sell the mall at this time,” says spokeswoman Kimberly Green.

Can’t get a date

Charlottesville for Reasonable Health Insurance, which called out Sentara-owned Optima’s 2018 tripling of health insurance premiums here, says it wasn’t invited to Congressman Denver Riggleman’s February 19 meeting with Sentara Martha Jefferson to find ways to make health care affordable, nor, says the group, can it get on Riggleman’s calendar.

Back where he came from

Former Trump staffer Marc Short, who drew controversy—and two resignations—when he joined UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs as a senior fellow in August, is stepping down and headed back to the White House, where he’ll serve as chief of staff to Mike Pence. Tweeted UVA professor of religious studies Jalane Schmidt, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”

wikimedia

Bare-breasted Virtus

ERA activist Michelle Renay Sutherland was arrested February 18 for enacting the Virginia state seal, which features Virtus with an exposed left breast. A judge initially ordered her held without bond for the misdemeanor charge, but she was finally released three days later.

Categories
Arts

Focused fortitude: Jodi Cobb looks at life behind the lens

Partygoers at Carnival in Venice, 2008. Jodi Cobb

Photojournalist Jodi Cobb is one of those rare people who walks toward danger. And when she meets it, she usually introduces herself.

“I’ve never disguised myself or misrepresented what I was doing,” says Cobb. “I even introduced myself as a National Geographic photographer to the most notorious human trafficker in Bosnia.”

Cobb has spent the better part of four decades as the only female staff field photographer at National Geographic-—the only one in its 130-year history, actually. But she says gender was never top of mind for her. “I was always really surprised when the first thing out of people’s mouths was the woman angle. It’s like asking people what it’s like to breathe.” Still, she admits, “You feel like you need to hold up all of womankind, and it’s an extra thing that men don’t have to think about all that much.”

Cobb grew up in Iran, where her father worked for Texaco, and she had been to 15 countries by the time she entered high school in the U.S. The global exposure gave her a head start in finding her passion. “I spent my life explaining the world to people, then I realized that was what journalism was,” says Cobb.

On Thursday, she hosts a live retrospective about her life behind the camera, including her wide-ranging exposé on human trafficking, her book on geisha culture from the inside, and a look at Venice celebrating Carnival against a backdrop of looming environmental peril.

Geisha  Kyoto, Japan

“I did a book on the geisha of Japan and spent six months over a three-year period just immersed in their world, going to the geisha districts every day.

“You don’t realize how hard that [image] was to get. It was a moment in the geisha house that shows how inside I was at that moment. No one had ever photographed behind the scenes in the geisha world, with candid photographs, so that was a real accomplishment.

“The smoking was common and no one wanted to be photographed smoking. It makes her real to me. Instead of this sort of icon that geisha are. It makes her a real person.”

Brick kiln workers  Agra, India

“This is from the story on 21st-century slaves. I photographed in 11 countries over a yearlong period, trying to put together as many kinds of human trafficking [images] as I could find.

“National Geographic was going out on a limb to do that story—it was my idea—and it was so outside of what they usually did. It was before there was so much consciousness in this country about human trafficking. We knew bits of it–child labor existed and about sex trafficking—but no one had put it all together into a look at how pervasive it was.

“The brick kiln workers are often held in debt bondage for generations. The owners get workers by lending them money for an emergency, then charge outrageous interest rates. The debt can never be repaid and gets passed on for generations. That story broke my heart every single day.”

Carnival  Venice, Italy

“I did a story on Venice that was about whether Venice was going to survive floods and the rising sea levels. That was a party during Carnival. People in their incredible costumes come from all over the world. We are used to seeing all of these setup images taken on the piazzas and things. But I was able to get into the private parties…and that’s where I’ve always wanted to be in my career—on the inside and behind the scenes. That sums up my body of work: being inside these hidden worlds and secret places that outsiders wouldn’t see.”

National Geographic Live will be at The Paramount Theater February 28.

Categories
News

Little wonder: Why it’s so hard to find affordable, high-quality child care

The YMCA’s Early Learning Center at the Jefferson School is dedicated to providing high-quality child care to the Charlottesville/Albemarle community. Photo: Eze Amos

Jessica Maslaney remembers trying to navigate the complex maze of child care options before her first child was born. “It’s a confusing process where everything matters, from cost to educational environment to teacher qualifications, and you’re just scrambling to figure it all out.” After toting her baby son to work with her at the Piedmont Family YMCA for his first seven months, Maslaney tried two different in-home care options and a commercial child care center in search of consistent, reliable care.

“The foundational issue is that you feel that nobody can watch your kids as well as you can,” she says, “so you start off kind of resenting the process from the beginning because you want more than anything to be that person. It’s an emotional journey.”

Now CEO of the Piedmont Family Y, Maslaney is part of a team dedicated to providing high-quality child care to the Charlottesville/Albemarle community through facilities like the YMCA’s Early Learning Center at the Jefferson School. While steep demand for affordable care should logically lead to increased supply, the twisted economics of child care can tie providers in knots.

Start with the cost of full-time care. “The average cost of child care for an infant in this area is $13,500 per year, and $11,000 for a toddler or preschooler,” says Barbara Hutchinson, vice president of community impact at the local United Way. At the top end, a handful of smaller centers in town charge upwards of $15,000 per year.

The biggest expense for providers is paying their staff. Because state law requires teacher/student ratios of 1:4 for infants and 1:8 for toddlers, and because child care is largely unfunded by the government, providers can’t afford to pay their staff anywhere close to what public school teachers make. “People who work in child care do not do it for the money,” says Maslaney. “We struggle with teacher retention because our teachers could go to Walmart and make $13 per hour while our pay range is $10 to $12.” That also has an effect on quality—teachers who earn a college degree in early childhood development often choose to teach in public schools, where they can receive higher pay and benefits.

Jennifer Slack, owner of Our Neighborhood Child Development Center, a private daycare near UVA, agrees that finding and retaining good teachers is a serious problem. “Child care is hard work, poorly paid, and poorly supported,” she says. “In a lot of ways, society undervalues it.”

Labor costs also limit providers’ ability to offer partial-day or off-hours care for part-time or shift workers. “Places like UVA Hospital and Sentara operate on 24-hour schedules, and Charlottesville has no child care centers that offer evenings, overnights, or weekends, so there’s nowhere for those parents to go,” says Hutchinson.

Beyond teacher compensation, child care centers have materials, insurance, and regulatory expenses. Facilities must be licensed and inspected to pass standards as specific as the depth of the mulch in the playground, and per-child square footage requirements for both indoor and outdoor space dictate how many children may be enrolled.

Simply finding an appropriate location can be daunting, and Slack calls local building and zoning codes “intense.” “We have been looking for property to expand into for years now but can’t find anything because of the combination of the high cost of commercial property in Charlottesville, the need for outdoor space for children to play, and the near-impossibility of transferring a property from residential to commercial zoning,” she says.

Even upper-income families are affected by the shortage of care. Slack’s center serves 48 children, from newborns to age 3, and charges over $1,600 a month per child (annually, that’s more than a year’s tuition at UVA), yet runs a lengthy waitlist. “There are many families who will never be able to get in, so I’d say it can be hard to find quality care at any cost,” she says.

The severe financial burden of child care expenses on a young family puts an effective lid on how much providers can charge, which makes it difficult for centers to stay afloat. “The crux of the problem is that people can’t work without child care, and child care needs to be high quality, and quality is driven by cost,” says Hutchinson. “It’s a vicious cycle not particular to Charlottesville, but one that exists all across the state and country.”

Addressing this problem is the focus of groups and agencies all across the region, and every step forward is hard-won. The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation advances initiatives such as Virginia Quality and Smart Beginnings to enhance the experience of young children in daycare centers and preschools. “High quality” providers prioritize teacher education, curriculum, and the facility’s environment and level of child interaction.

“If a baby is in child care 40 hours a week, what happens to that baby during those hours has everything to do with his or her developmental trajectory, so those hours need to be high quality,” says Gail Esterman, director of early learning at ReadyKids, a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting children and families and to working with providers to improve quality.

Maintaining options such as the YMCA’s Early Learning Center, where 92 percent of families receive financial subsidies, depends on tapping steady sources of funding. “Child care in my opinion is not financially sustainable on its own,” says Maslaney, “so you have to have diverse funding streams.” The ELC draws resources from the Virginia Department of Social Services, the United Way, and a host of public and private grants.

Hutchinson points to a generous Charlottesville community, noting that this area of the state is in “better shape than average” in terms of funding. “Both private foundations and wealthy individuals have been phenomenally invested in early childhood care, and we are blessed to be a community that has that level of support,” she says.

Families who don’t qualify for subsidized care but still struggle with high costs often look to family-based care, where kids stay in a private home with an in-home caregiver. “One of the most sustainable models for affordable, high-quality care is home child care, but there are a lot of unlicensed programs because the licensure process is so difficult and expensive,” says Slack. Virginia law requires a license to provide home care for five or more children (not including those of the caregiver); below that limit, licensing is voluntary and there are no required background checks, regulations, or inspections.

In the end, Esterman believes child care is a human rights issue, and solutions will have to be addressed as a society. “As long as people are trying to just handle it individually, as opposed to looking at it as a community, the system will continue to be a jumble,” she says. “All children deserve a high-quality start to life.”

Photo: Eze Amos

When school’s canceled—but it’s still business as usual for parents 

By Susan Sorensen

Who doesn’t love a snow day? Well, for starters, working parents.

“I’ve spent years dreading that 5:30am call/text message from ACPS,” says Elaine Attridge, a mother of three and medical librarian. “My husband’s job isn’t flexible, so it’s up to me to cobble together half-baked plans that are the best of my poor options” when school is unexpectedly canceled.

Like many moms and dads who have to show up for work on days when the flakes are falling and schools are closed, Attridge has been known to load her children up with electronics and bring them to her office. She’s lucky, she says, because “I’ve had some very tolerant bosses, but multiple days of [my kids at work with me] is hard on everyone.” You can ask friends for help, but, as
Attridge points out, “How often can
I do that and keep the friendship?”

She says she’s rescheduled work meetings and taken vacation days to stay home with her children, adding that she’s still reeling from 2013. There were so many snow days that year (some courtesy of a March blizzard that dropped 16.5 inches on the area), Attridge refers to it as the “winter of my discontent.”

Some big local employers, like UVA and S&P Global, have recognized the problem and offer employees access to back-up child care. But if yours doesn’t, here are a few suggestions for when school is shuttered.

Plan ahead! You usually have some warning before a snowstorm (or a teacher work day), which means you can line up child care in advance. If you don’t have a regular sitter (or a relative who’s willing to step in), consider Hoositting (hoositting.com), a network of UVA students who will provide babysitting on short notice. 

ACAC to the rescue. On scheduled school days off, as well as some of the unscheduled ones, ACAC’s Adventure Central (978-7529) offers a summer camp-like experience (arts and crafts, sports, and other structured activities) called Kids Day Off. Cost is $55 per child for members, and $65 for nonmembers, and hours are 8am-5:30pm.

Network with your neighbors. Create a snow-day babysitting co-op where every family takes the others’ children in turn. If you have, say, four families, you’ll only have to cover one in every four days off of school. Bonus: The kids will take some of the burden off you by entertaining each other.   

Categories
Arts

Picture stories: Deborah Willis merges two collections at the Jefferson School

“Deborah Willis: In Pursuit of Beauty,” is on view through April 27 in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Courtesy of the artist.

Deborah Willis has never been far from a camera.

Her father was a photographer, and he documented many things, including frequent visits the family made from their home in Philadelphia to Virginia. Willis’ father grew up in Orange County, and they made trips to Charlottesville, Louisa, Fredericksburg, and Luray Caverns—many of them documented on film, the prints preserved in albums of family memories. Her family told its stories through photography and it wasn’t long before Willis got behind the lens herself.

Since studying at Philadelphia College of Art in the 1970s, Willis has had a distinguished career as a photographer, a writer, and a scholar. She’s exhibited work in the U.S. and abroad, and curated dozens of shows to boot. She’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fletcher Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly known as a “genius grant”), and the 2014 NAACP Image Award for her book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, which she co-authored with Barbara Krauthamer.

Willis returns to Charlottesville on Saturday to give an artist talk for “Deborah Willis: In Pursuit of Beauty,” on view through April 27 in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s contemporary gallery. The exhibition is part of the “Seeing Black: Disrupting the Visual Narrative” series of presentations and community outreach going on at the JSAAHC throughout the year.

“Professor Willis has transformed the entire conversation about beauty and photography, and evolved a methodology that combines visual and cultural studies, high style and vernacular,” writes art historian, curator, and Jefferson School African American Heritage Center Executive Director Andrea Douglas on the exhibition’s introductory panel.

Willis’ exhibition at the JSAAHC includes pieces from two recent bodies of work, “Representing Joan Baez’s Civil War,” and “In Pursuit of Beauty: Imaging Closets in Newark and Beyond,” but Willis says they are not so separate.

They are joined, she says, by the concept of the closet and the concept of memory. And in fact, viewing works from each in tandem can help lead to a deeper understanding…a new story, if you will.

For the “In Pursuit of Beauty” series, Willis photographed the contents of people’s closets. There’s the black and gold dinner jacket of Wayne Winborne, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University; artist Kevin Darmanie’s hat; dancer-turned-Harlem style icon Lana Turner’s gold and black opera coat.

A vibrant red silk dress entitled “Hortense’s Red Dress” is one of the first pieces Willis photographed for the series. Hortense was born in the 19th century, lived in the 20th century, owned a 15th-century castle, and spent a lot of time alone—and a lot of time shopping. “She found joy in wearing certain types of clothes that made her feel very special,” says Willis, and when Hortense died, her family preserved certain items known to be her favorite.

Two pairs of high-heeled shoes, one gold, one black, stand tall atop a shoebox in “Santeka’s High Heels.” Santeka Grigley wears these shoes only when she goes out in New York City, and in doing so, Willis says Grigley is “making a statement about how she feels about performing her own beauty in a different city.”

Though they are often concealed in a closet, clothing and accessories are outward expressions of an inner self—they can say a lot about a person. In seeing these items without bodies to literally flesh them out, viewers have the chance to understand an aspect of the wearer’s identity differently.

Willis wants viewers to imagine themselves in the clothes, too, and follow that thread of the closet and clothing through to “Representing Joan Baez’s Civil War.”

For 2018’s Whistle Down the Wind, which Baez has declared her last record, the singer-songwriter wanted to put together a visual album to accompany the music. One of her producers sent Willis the 10 tracks and asked her to choose one to illustrate visually. Willis chose “Civil War,” a song penned by Joe Henry and sung by Baez.

The song isn’t expressly about the war between the North and the South, but it is about a complicated situation rife with tension. Willis, who is currently writing a book about black Civil War soldiers, saw it as an opportunity to visually discuss the pride they took in wearing their uniforms: Uniforms that were preserved not just in closets but in photographs.

In “Representing Joan Baez’s Civil War,” dancers Djassi Johnson and Kevin Boseman perform a choreographed dance before a carousel of photographs of uniformed black soldiers. The dancers’ moving bodies tell a story as they cast and create shadows; at times they seem to be part of the projected photographs. The past and the present mingle physically, conceptually, and emotionally.

When we open up a closet, a concealed space holding something we can touch or see, “we find a sense of memory that we want to tell a story about,” says Willis. Perhaps there’s “the sense of feeling good about wearing a certain dress, or a certain pair of shoes, remembering the experiences of joy, or even sadness,” she says. Perhaps there’s the sense of imagining what it would have been like for a black soldier to don a uniform to fight in the Civil War. “The fact is, it creates a narrative about an experience that wants to be preserved,” says Willis.

Categories
Arts

Conscious comic: Hari Kondabolu brings hilarity to an age of anxiety

Underlying almost every joke is the near-constant theme of race—or, as Kondabolu likes to call it, “made-up bullshit.” Publicity image.

Fourteen years ago, Hari Kondabolu thought a career in stand-up comedy was impossible. “In 2004, 2005… South Asian stand-up didn’t seem realistic,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine anyone wanted me to do that.” Though Aziz Ansari  and Mindy Kaling were rising stars, there were few popular South Asian comics in America at the time.

Jump forward a decade and a half, and Kondabolu is a leading voice in the industry he thought he would never break into. With a rise to fame that includes four recorded comedy specials, one of them released through Netflix, and the truTV documentary “The Problem with Apu”—not to mention two shows this week at the Southern Café & Music Hall—Kondabolu has garnered considerable awe during his ascent, surprising himself as much as his contemporaries.

“It’s still kind of shocking to me that the window was open,” he says. The “window” he refers to is HBO’s Comedy Festival, a now-defunct extravaganza that launched Kondabolu from Seattle, where he was working as an immigrant rights organizer by day and performing at night. He was introduced to a wider audience, and suddenly “had a career from that point on.”

It’s a career that has always incorporated his commitment to social justice. Even after the festival, Kondabolu made a point of getting his master’s in human rights before pursuing comedy full-time.

At first, he worried his interest in politics and activism would be a stumbling block to a successful career. “I said things that could bother people,” he explains.

Early on, he felt pressure to adopt a more palatable style of humor. “I think if I had, my career would’ve been a little faster,” he admits, but adds that such a sacrifice would have radically affected his comedic identity. “I didn’t want to change my tone or how I did things.”

W. Kamau Bell, a comedian whose work incorporates similar themes of activism, helped to convince Kondabolu that he should preserve his own values. “When I saw [Bell]…I was like, ‘This guy’s like me!’ We want to make this comedy that’s thoughtful and doesn’t throw marginalized people under the bus, that is intersectional.” He describes Bell as someone who “busted their ass to get themselves in a position to speak their truth to a national audience. …He’s doing this, so I’m going to stick to my guns and keep going too.”

Now, he’s among a wave of comics, like Hannah Gadsby and Hasan Minhaj, who’ve embraced political and social messages in their stand-up.

What aspect of Kondabolu’s humor makes it so edgy? Admittedly, he tackles America’s most taboo topics, whether it’s comparing the three Abrahamic religions to the Back to the Future trilogy or cleverly subverting Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” suggesting that our nation’s poor should harvest the bodies of the rich for food. Underlying almost every joke is the near-constant theme of race—or, as Kondabolu likes to call it, “made-up bullshit.”

Despite the content of his comedy and the passion that obviously imbues it, Kondabolu says his stand-up isn’t meant to be interpreted as a call to action. “I don’t think I’m changing minds,” he said. “I just want to make people laugh.”

It’s safe to say that he succeeds. Kondabolu offers something for everyone, even those who aren’t accustomed to such socially conscious stand-up. There’s a disarming, almost giddy sense of release in hearing him roast “American liberal cowards” for wanting to move to Canada, or compare Trump’s infamous “Grab her by the pussy” line to a Mortal Kombat character’s catchphrase. Kondabolu works a rare kind of magic with loaded issues, helping to defuse the tension around them but never denying their relevance.

While in the early 2000s, Kondabolu didn’t think he had a chance, he concedes that popular culture  has recently shifted in his favor. “I think, in a lot of ways, society changed and I made more sense to people,” he says. “Now you have a lot of people who are talking about some of the things I’ve always talked about.”

Even with the increase in acceptance, he still faces resistance at his shows—often, in very ugly ways. Sometimes, during the middle of his sets, “people just yell Trump’s name as a heckle,” Kondabolu says. “It’s a weapon. It’s something that frightens people, or it shocks people. The word Trump is loaded now.”

On the other end of the spectrum are audience members who are deeply touched by what Kondabolu has to say. These people approach him after a show, Kondabolu says, “because they want to share something personal with me and how my comedy helped them through something.”

Rather than be put off by the polarized responses to his comedy, Kondabolu is reassured by them. “On both ends, there are these extreme reactions, which I think means I’m pretty good,” he says. “If it’s a scale of five, you want ones and fives. Threes heard you. Ones and fives mean you’re doing it right.”

Hari Kondabolu performs at the Southern Wednesday and Thursday nights.

publicity image

Underlying almost every joke is the near-constant theme of race—or, as Kondabolu likes to call it, “made-up bullshit.”

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News

Folklorist, musician, Hysterical Society blogger mourned

With guitar and harmonica in hand, Douglas Day joined the summer of 2017 KKK counterprotest.Steve Trumbull, C’ville Images

Douglas Turner Day IV, former Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society executive director and noted Piedmont blues-style musician, died January 26 from pancreatic cancer. He was 63.

An avid social media-ist, he wrote on Facebook January 22, “Well, it’s official. Hospice later this week. I’ll be posting a fundraiser for my album.”

Day graduated from UVA, and earned a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, in folklore and folklife.

He served as historical society director for five-and-a-half years. In 2007, Day launched the Hysterical Society blog to discuss local history in a “non-academic, non-stuffy venue,” he wrote. The blog lasted 12 days before the historical society’s board made him remove it from the organization’s website, with one board member dubbing it “tasteless,” Day reported. Four months later, Day was out.

His former wife, Sally Day, describes him as “passionate” about music and many other areas, for which he had an “encyclopedic mind.” His interest in folklife started with his interest in the blues, she says, and that expanded to the arts.

Art that came from cultures that didn’t necessarily start here, “that’s what excited him,” she says. “He did his field work working within a tradition and not an institution.”

“One of the times he was happiest was when he got the National Folk Festival to come to Chattanooga,” she says, where he was director of the folklore program at Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga. “He got every community in Chattanooga to come together and everyone got an opportunity to shine.”

Ian Day, his brother and owner of Southern Crescent, recalls them playing guitar and ukulele as kids, and Doug practicing and “getting better and better.” World famous bass player Steve Riggs was their neighbor, says Ian, and he remembers the two playing on the front porch.

He also remembers his brother as a 16-year-old buying a steel guitar. “People said they wish they could play it as well as he did.”

Day spent the past year or so working on a recording project he dubbed The Great Egress. Using a number of different guitars, he recorded more than 30 favorite songs, including “country blues and rags, risqué hollers, and noble praise songs,” according to his obituary.

“That was the final act of his life,” says Sally Day. “It came down to the music.”

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News

‘Reckless, racist ripoff:’ Former vice president opposes pipeline in Union Hill

Former vice president Al Gore said the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a reckless, racist ripoff at a February 19 event in Buckingham County, where Dominion wants to run the pipeline and build one of three compressor stations. Photo by John Robinson

It’s long been clear that the folks of the small, predominately black Union Hill community in bucolic Buckingham County don’t want the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and its compressor station on their soil. And now two well-known voices who condemn environmental racism are joining the fight against it.

Former vice president Al Gore and Reverend William Barber, known across the country for his ministry and political activism, came to Buckingham February 19 and told a crowd of hundreds of community members and allies they oppose what they believe is a risky, expensive, and unnecessary natural gas pipeline that Dominion has intentionally chosen to run through a poor, black neighborhood.

“This is what change looks like,” Gore said to the folks who had spent the night dancing, singing and chanting, holding hands, and pumping fists in solidarity with Union Hill. He added, “I think Dominion is messing with the wrong part of Virginia.”

The former vice president, who also serves as founder and chairman of Climate Reality Project, said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commision never should have given Dominion permission to start building the ACP in the first place, and that current gas pipelines in the country have almost twice as much capacity as the amount of gas flowing through them. Demand for natural gas has decreased as people switch to renewable energy sources and use newer energy-saving technology such as LED lighting, he added.

“This proposed pipeline is a reckless, racist ripoff,” said Gore loudly and passionately into his microphone, bringing most of the crowd to its feet.

Big utility companies like Dominion don’t really make their money by selling electricity or gas, he said, but by building new capacity and adding the cost into their rate base. “If the pipeline is not needed, they have a powerful economic incentive to build it anyway,” he said, echoing what ACP opponents have contended since it was proposed half a decade ago.

The Union Hill story sparked Gore’s interest when he read about a historically significant, low-income community of color being “insulted and abused” by Dominion, which is trying to wreak havoc on a community it thought couldn’t defend itself, he said.

“We’re here to say to Union Hill, you are not standing alone,” said Gore. “We are standing with you.”

ACP spokesperson Karl Neddenien says Dominion has “profound respect” for the Union Hill community, and it plans to invest $5 million to build a community center and upgrade the county’s rescue squad.

Dominion says it chose Union Hill for one of three of the pipeline’s compressor stations because it intersects with an existing pipeline, and because the for-sale property was large enough to also allow for trees and vegetation on-site, with the nearest home a quarter-mile away. The other two, one at the beginning of the pipeline’s route in Lewis County, West Virginia, and the other near the Virginia-North Carolina State line, have also prompted pushback.

Part of Dominion’s justification was also its calculation of approximately 29.6 people per square mile in the surrounding area. Residents say that number is off by about 500 percent, and during their own door-to-door survey of the Union Hill area, they determined that approximately 85 percent of those people are African American.

A third of the county’s residents are descendants of the freedmen community that was established there by former slaves. Dominion is planning to build the compressor station atop freedmen cemeteries and unmarked slave burials, according to Yogaville resident and cultural anthropologist Lakshmi Fjord, who spoke briefly at the event.

Attendees also heard from Mary Finley-Brook, a University of Richmond professor of geography and the environment who served on Governor Ralph Northam’s Advisory Council on Environmental Justice, which recommended against the pipeline last summer. She said her council exposed disproportionate risks for minority communities if the pipeline is built.

“Historic Union Hill is the wrong place to build a compressor station,” said Finley-Brook, who pointed out that poor internet and phone access in Buckingham could mean residents won’t be properly notified of scheduled blowdowns at the station, when gas and toxic air pollutants are released to relieve pressure in the pipe. She also noted the daily safety risk of fires or explosions due to highly pressurized gas equipment and flammable contents.

Reverend Barber touched on how environmental racism is systemic, and how pipelines like the ACP don’t usually run through affluent areas, though politicians and other people of power will encourage poorer communities to accept them.

“Everybody that tells you to be alright with it coming through your community—ask them why it isn’t coming through theirs,” said Barber.

Dominion’s Neddenien says safety standards at the compressor station, if built, will be the strictest of any compressor station in the country, and emissions will be 50 to 80 percent lower than any other station in Virginia.

Barber counters if Northam truly believes that, “request it to be in your backyard.”

Barber also said the power to protest the pipeline lies in the hands of the community, and clarified that he and Gore came to Buckingham by invitation.

“We didn’t come here to lead the fight, we just came here to say, ‘Y’all fight like you never fought before.’”

Irene Ellis Leach is one of those Union Hill community members. Her family has operated a farm four miles away from the proposed site of the compressor station for 117 years, where original buildings built in 1804 are still standing. She says Dominion insists on crossing through the middle of the cattle fields she uses most.

Now she’s one of many landowners in the incineration zone, or the potential impact radius, of 1,100 feet on either side of the pipeline. If it blows, that’s how far the flames will reach.

“If something goes wrong, the resulting fire can’t be put out. It has to burn out,” she says. “We could lose everything, including our lives.”

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Opinion The Editor's Desk

This Week 2/20

In 1986, a young lawyer and UVA grad named Rick Middleton left his job at a national environmental nonprofit in D.C. and moved to Charlottesville. With two other lawyers, a three-year grant, and a small office on the Downtown Mall, he established the first environmental advocacy organization focused on the South, determined to use the power of federal law to protect the region he loved.

Three decades later, Middleton’s Southern Environmental Law Center is home to 80 attorneys, with offices in six states. Its long list of accomplishments ranges from the protection of favorite local hikes to a landmark Supreme Court victory that prompted the largest power plant cleanup in U.S. history.

But as the SELC has grown, so have the environmental challenges we face. In the late ’80s, the science of climate change was well-established, and the federal government (along with oil companies like Exxon and Shell) was well aware of the potentially catastrophic risks. But the effects were not yet evident, and for most Americans, the “greenhouse effect” was a vague and theoretical concern, less specific than the hole in the ozone layer, less visceral than an oil spill.

Today, when the last four years have been the hottest in recorded history and hardly a month goes by without another extreme weather disaster, the global threat is much closer to home.

But like many other groups and dedicated individuals, the SELC is rising to the challenge. Over the past 12 years, the organization has been working on a strategic plan to lower carbon dioxide emissions in the region, and through a variety of legal and policy actions it’s helped reduce the area’s emissions by almost 30 percent. As we face what beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has called humanity’s greatest threat, these are the fighters we need. —Laura Longhine

Categories
Living

Kids’ stuff: Retail therapy works for the younger set, too

Can kids have a ball at an antique mall? Yes, if they find something cool, like, a tin rocket race car. Photo: Getty Images

My kids get pretty sick of trailing me through the grocery store. Clothes shopping, depending on how it goes, can be a thrill or a deep disappointment. But there are other kinds of stores that are more reliable sources of fun, entertainment, and information—everything, that is, you want from a day trip. What’s more, they don’t require a lot of time.

We’ve made mini-outings to many retail destinations in central Virginia, and one of our very favorites is the Factory Antique Mall in Verona. At 130,000 square feet, the Factory claims to be the country’s largest antique mall. I can’t confirm that, but it’s big enough to advertise on its website that “Buses & RVs are welcome!” Its size means that it has space to house a deep bench of specialized oddities. This is a key fact, because kids—including my girls, ages 5 and 8 —are unlikely to be thrilled by examining armoires and china sets all afternoon.

Inside the warehouse-like building, the wares of more than 200 dealers line a network of indoor “streets,” complete with street signs to help you find your way. We usually nose around first near the front entrance, where there’s a large collection of antique toys: cast-iron tractors, colorful spinning tops, and other stuff my girls’ great-grandparents might have played with. Though I give my kids a small budget to spend in the mall, they like to just look at this section as though it were a museum display—albeit a loosely curated one in which touching the goods is not verboten.

Later in our wanderings, we always take a turn through a different collection of toys, this one focused on my own childhood era of the 1980s. People of the Cabbage Patch/Michael Jackson/Transformers generation, can you imagine the nostalgia of a wall full of metal lunch boxes? I found the exact one I toted to first grade: Strawberry Shortcake, complete with thermos. And my girls were actually interested.

Another booth that always commands our attention sits near the center of the building, featuring rocks and gems. (Are these antiques? In a sense, I guess they are.) This kind dealer had a box of freebies set aside for kids, and talked to the girls for a while about geological curiosities. Nearby, I became sucked into an extensive and well-organized collection of maps, while my kids drifted toward shelves and shelves of Nutcracker dolls.

You get the idea. Everything in the world is here somewhere. Swords, stamps, wooden canoes, birdhouses, quilts, tools, cash registers, rotary phones, silver spoons, beer steins, 8-track tapes, hats, coins. It was, in fact, a silly novelty quarter, four inches across, that each daughter eventually decided on as a Factory souvenir. Heirlooms? No. Hands-on history lesson? Yes.

The Factory Antique Mall is open Monday-Thursday 10am-5pm, Friday-Saturday 10am-6pm, and Sunday 1-6pm. It’s the orange and yellow building off exit 227 from I-81 in Verona. See factoryantique mall.com or call (540) 248-1110.

Other stores to explore

The Green Valley Book Fair is a huge discount bookstore, with a big children’s section, plopped into the rolling farmland near Harrisonburg. Your kids can choose, say, a board book for $2.50 or a chapter book for around $5-6. It opens periodically throughout the year; check gobookfair.com for the schedule.

Tucked away in the Rockfish Valley Community Center, in Afton, the Virginia Rock Shop is a laid-back den chock full of gems, crystals, fossils, and just plain rocks—fun stuff to browse. Budding jewelry makers will be excited to find cabinets full of polished-stone beads and pearls. Call 981-1897.

As beginning knitters, my girls and I love a good yarn store—the colorful skeins are an inspiration in themselves, and beautifully crafted sweaters and scarves make us dream big. Magpie Knits (111 W. Main St., magpieknits.com) and Ewe (617 W. Main St., ewefibers.com) are both worth a stop.

An old-fashioned hardware store should be required
browsing for every youngster. Here they can get a clue about
how the world is put together, and every kid loves those giant spools of metal chain. Martin Hardware, 941 Preston Ave.,
does the trick.

When we’re in town, we sometimes take a turn through
the Habitat Store (1221 Harris St.) to check out all the
curious chandeliers, clocks, and ping-pong tables the world
has to offer. But if we’re in Richmond, Caravati’s (104 E.
Second St.; caravatis.com) has the motherlode of architectural salvage.

Over in Dayton, Valley Water Gardens is a fun place to
explore ponds and other water features, plus fish and plants—
including carnivorous ones like pitcher plants. It’s open
seasonally; check valleywatergardens.com or call (540) 879-2555.