Playwright and LGBTQ rights activist Larry Kramer appeared at the Virginia Film Festival in 2015 to discuss his life’s work. Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Film Festival
Reposted from 2015. Larry Kramer died from pneumonia on May 27, 2020.
Larry Kramer has had his finger on the pulse of what it is to be a gay man for the past 50 years. His 1978 novel, Faggots, and its depiction of the partying, promiscuous ’70s made him a pariah on Fire Island. His play, The Normal Heart, captured the fear, anger and heartbreak as a mysterious fatal disease decimated the gay community in the 1980s.
However, it’s his work as a gay rights activist that may be the first thing that pops into people’s mind. Kramer is the founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He also founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—ACT UP—a group that used civil disobedience to protest the lack of funding, research and treatment for people with AIDS in the ’80s. Its first demonstration blocked rush hour traffic in New York in front of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency Kramer believed was dragging its feet in coming up with treatment for the HIV positive.
“I have no idea how many times I’ve been in jail,” Kramer told C-VILLE via e-mail because of difficulties hearing on the phone. “Less time than I’ve been in hospitals, I’m afraid.”
In 1988, Kramer discovered that he had hepatitis B, was HIV positive and in dire need of a new liver. Mount Sinai Hospital refused to put him on its organ transplant list because people who were HIV positive were considered poor candidates for transplants due to their projected short life spans. Kramer became the poster boy for AIDS/homosexual discrimination, and after news reports that he was dying, he received a new liver in 2001.
It’s “still in good shape, I’m told,” he says.
He says his writing and his activism feed each other. “AIDS gave me my subject matter that set my creativity on fire,” says Kramer.
Growing up Jewish in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer has been an atheist since he was a teen. “But being Jewish has made me fascinated in how we have been eliminated during so much of history, just as gays have,” he says. “I write about this to a huge degree in my new book.”
That book, The American People: Volume I, isn’t the first time he’s observed parallels between Jews and gays. During the AIDS epidemic, he wrote 1989’s Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist.
It’s been more than 30 years since acquired immune deficiency syndrome was first observed, and a diagnosis of human immunodeficiency virus infection is no longer a death knell—Kramer has been HIV positive for 27 years. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states cannot discriminate against gays who want to marry, but assessing the changes he’s seen in his lifetime is not a question Kramer likes to answer.
“We still are not a unified united population, so I don’t think that enough has changed to congratulate ourselves,” he writes. “There is still much work to do. That AIDS is still a plague after 35 years proves how powerless we are.”
The 80-year-old makes his first trip to Charlottesville for the Virginia Film Festival screening of the documentary, Larry Kramer in Love and Anger, and for An Evening with Larry Kramer, both November 8.
Kramer says his husband, David Webster, was “heartbroken” he was turned down to study at the University of Virginia, and went to Columbia instead. Webster, an architect, has been here often and is very knowledgeable about the area’s history, says Kramer. “He knows all about Charlottesville and Jefferson, etc.,” he says.
During the inevitable Q&As with Kramer, here’s a tip about a question he hates: How would you like to be remembered? (C-VILLE asked anyway so you won’t have to.)
“I would like my writing to be recognized for its excellence, rather than its controversy,” he says. “I am usually reviewed as a loud-mouthed activist, not as a good writer.”
Fans of his 1969 Oscar-nominated screenplay for D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love would disagree.
As the pandemic took hold in mid-March, Charlottesville and Albemarle’s criminal justice decision-makers started letting people out of jail. Two months in, it looks like the emergency measures have paid off: The Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail has not reported a single coronavirus case among inmates, and those transferred to house arrest have not posed any notable threat to public safety.
When the pandemic began, jails and prisons were quickly identified as potential coronavirus hotbeds, given the crowded living conditions and low quality of medical care. The area’s commonwealth’s attorneys, judges, and jail administration responded accordingly: They ended pretrial detentions, meaning people awaiting trial no longer had to sit in jail simply because they could not afford bail. And they transferred non-violent prisoners with short remaining sentences to home electronic incarceration (house arrest). That’s resulted in the lowest number of inmates inside the ACRJ in decades.
Local advocates have long hoped to see these decarceration policies put into practice. The pandemic offered a chance to speed that process along. Speaking to C-VILLE in March, Albemarle County’s reform-minded Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley framed the pandemic as a sort of experiment: “We are going to be accumulating information about the effects of liberalized policies with respect to sentences and bail decisions,” Hingeley said. “We’re going to see how instituting these different practices works out…My hope is that it’s going to work out well.”
Two months later, early returns show that the liberalized sentencing policies have had just the effect that Hingeley and other advocates envisioned.
The ACRJ has transferred around 15 percent of its pre-COVID population to house arrest, and the jail has recorded zero cases of COVID among inmates. By contrast, the state prison system has transferred just 217 of its 30,000 prisoners (less than 1 percent) out of the prisons, and the system has seen more than 1,100 cases of the virus in facilities around the state.
Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, allowing ACRJ prisoners to serve their time on house arrest has not endangered the public. In the last 70 or so days, more than 90 people have been released on house arrest, and “no new criminal offenses were committed,” says jail superintendent Martin Kumer. Eight people, out of 90, have been transferred back into the jail, all for technical violations such as drug use or unauthorized travel.
Last week, the Tom Tom Foundation convened a panel of local criminal justice leaders to discuss reforming the justice system during and after the pandemic. For some, the conclusions from the past two months support arguments they’ve been making for years.
“The data has already been there,” pointed out panelist Cherry Henley, who runs Lending Hands, an ex-offender aid service. “Most people like myself already recognize that if you can release people into the community, they are not that high risk. At the jail, at the work release department, most of these people go out anyway, every day.”
Even so, the pandemic has given these reformers new momentum, and keeping that going is important to them. “People forget stuff really quick,” said Harold Folley, a community organizer at the Legal Aid Justice Center. Folley thinks that moving forward, advocates for decarceration must “constantly remind [people] that releasing folks is safe. Those folks that were released didn’t go and do something criminal here in Charlottesville.”
It’s also important to remember that the house arrest system is far from perfect. “We’ve been dealing with a lot of inmates being released, and they’re on HEI, and they don’t have identification,” says Whitmore Merrick, who works for the city’s Home to Hope offender aid program. “So they’re not able to be employed. They’re stuck in the house with nothing to do. That’s been a major struggle.”
Martize Tolbert, an ex-offender who now works for the Fountain Fund, a re-entry support program, said that this moment feels like an opportunity to make change. “Let’s talk about things that we can radically do now,” Tolbert said. “Programs over prisons. Now is the time to [be] thought-provoking, to try to figure out institutions that we can use here in Charlottesville.”
Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania, who supports these alternatives to incarceration, outlined the challenges ahead. Not everyone in the system is on board. “You have victims, you might have detectives or police officers that have worked on the investigation, you have judges that are going to have to buy in…maybe probation officers that are involved in a violation hearing,” Platania said. “They feel a responsibility that might be at odds with some of what Jim [Hingeley] and I are trying to do. There’s a lot of different interests that you have to factor in as a prosecutor.”
“It’s a shame that it took this crisis to motivate the community to get behind decarceration,” Hingeley said, “but it’s happened now, and when the crisis has passed, we’re going to work to continue doing this.”
Stay tuned for the next edition of the Tom Tom Foundation’s Com Com Live! series, which will feature some of the leaders mentioned in the article and will be free and open to the public. Date to be announced.
Batesville Market’s Kristen Rabourdin immediately jumped in to help other businesses in her first days as the market’s new owner.
The tradition of neighbors helping neighbors has taken on new meaning during the time of coronavirus, pushing many of us to become creative in figuring out ways to help each other. There’s no better example of this than in the Charlottesville-area food community, where business as usual came to a screeching halt two months ago. To combat that, many food professionals turned to collaborations to help get their products to customers in a safe and efficient manner.
Responding early was the Local Food Hub, a nonprofit that partners with Virginia farmers to increase community access to local food by providing support services, infrastructure, and market opportunities. With farmers’ markets unable to open, LFH scrambled to launch two alternative low-contact markets.
“We developed the drive-through markets when we saw the traditional sales outlets our farmers rely on drying up,” says Portia Boggs, the Hub’s director of advancement and communications. “The old infrastructure that connected the two was just no longer functioning. Our markets are great for people who have the capacity [income, car, and time].”
For people who don’t? “Our Fresh Farmacy program is catered to those who don’t have those resources—for example, the homebound, elderly, unemployed, and low-food-access,” says Boggs. “This program provides 400-plus weekly shares of locally sourced products, either via home delivery or a centralized, accessible drop point.”
Wilfred Henry of Mount Alto Sungrown in Esmont recognized that his neighbors needed to get their products out, and organized a contact-free delivery of goods to Charlottesville and Albemarle and Nelson counties, including farmers’ market favorites such as cheeses from Caromont Farm, pork and lamb from Double H Farm to soaps and lotions from Grubby Girl, and Henry’s own full-spectrum hemp and CBD products.
“The idea evolved naturally out of my friendship with each of these people,” he says. “We’re neighbors. This is our community. Working together and helping hold each other up is what we do.”
Kristen Rabourdin hadn’t even signed the paperwork to purchase the Batesville Market when everything shut down. A volunteer with the Community Investment Collaborative, she’d planned to showcase local products. “We had anticipated the market being a local music venue [on weekends], and didn’t anticipate having to shift so quickly, but this pushed us…to be this great little country store for people to get their basics without having to go to a large grocery store,” Rabourdin says.
She’s already sourcing locally produced naan and samosas to sell in her market, and she enlisted area baker Maria Niechwiadowicz—herself about to open a bricks-and-mortar location for Bowerbird Bakeshop when everything shut down—to provide macarons.
When she heard that a nearby cannery had closed, Rabourdin applied to get her commercial kitchen approved for use by area purveyors such as Yvonne Cunningham, of Nona’s Italian Cucina tomato sauce, who hopes to shift her sauce production to the Batesville kitchen.
Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Kitchen answered the call to provide food for those in need by offering free meals daily for anyone who wants them, and in another response to food insecurity, Pearl Island Café went from providing snacks at the Boys & Girls Club, to getting 400 meals (such as BBQ chicken, rice and beans, fruits and vegetables) per week into the hands of club and community members, an effort privately funded by Diane and Howie Long.
Whitney Matthews, proprietor of Spice Sea Gourmet food truck, was surprised when a friend from culinary school donated money to help her prepare meals for frontline workers. After contacting more alums, she’s been able to prepare 160 meals to date.
“I’ve [also] been reaching out to other female-owned businesses to help with things like desserts,” she says, such as Cocoa & Spice’s Jennifer Mowad, who’s prepared brownies. Maliha Creations’ Anita Gupta, who crafts boutique wedding cakes, donated other desserts; Kathryn Matthews of Iron Paffles & Coffee donated softshell crabs; and Cunningham contributed her sauce and time, preparing food and delivering it. In addition, Matthews has been collecting donations of food and supplies for immigrant families in need.
Jessica Hogan and her husband Gabino Lino of Farmacy Food Truck joined the list of locals who are working with chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen to feed frontline workers, preparing 300 meals a week for area police departments. Fellini’s Chris Humphrey, who is also contributing to WCK, has been providing two meals a week to his restaurant’s furloughed staff, and is selling frozen meat from local farmers through Foods for Thought.
Junction Executive Chef Melissa Close-Hart says her place and The Local have contributed over 500 meals to various community members, including frontline workers, while also providing one meal a day to the restaurants’ staff.
While the virus’ grip on the ability to operate as usual remains tight, local restaurants and food workers—including too many others to list here—have looked within their community to help where it is most needed, and to maintain each other’s businesses. Henry says the key to carrying on is staying loyal to the food and product sources that are closest to home. “We’re all committed to the sustainability of the local economy, and together we’re working to not only keep each other afloat but also expand access to and knowledge about all the great products we have on offer right here,” he says.
Richard Shackelford—known as “Shack” to his friends—was a driving force behind the redevelopment of Crescent Halls. PC: Eze Amos
Beloved public housing advocate Richard Shackelford passed away in his Crescent Halls apartment on the morning of May 21, after a heart attack. He was 66 years old.
Shackelford—known as “Shack” to his friends—grew up in Charlottesville, on the corner of Fifth and Harris streets. For many years, he worked as a gym instructor for Charlottesville City Schools, and was heavily involved in his church, Mount Zion First African Baptist Church.
In 2014, he moved to Crescent Halls, a public housing complex for the eldery and disabled, with his wife, Sandy, after they lost their house.
For years, Crescent Halls residents protested against the 105-unit building’s poor maintenance, including broken air conditioners, sweltering heat, sewage flooding, broken-down elevators, and cockroaches. Plans to renovate the complex, as well as other public housing facilities, were made as early as 2010, but action had been notoriously slow.
Wanting to join the fight for change, Shackelford enrolled in the Public Housing Association of Residents’ six-month internship program, which trained him to be an advocate. After completing the internship in 2016, he went on to serve as vice president and president of the Crescent Halls Tenant Association, as well as vice chair of PHAR’s board of directors and a member of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority redevelopment committee.
While Shackelford advocated for public housing residents across the city, he was an especially strong champion for the redevelopment of Crescent Halls, says CRHA redevelopment coordinator (and former mayor) Dave Norris. Last January, CRHA finally approved a partnership with Riverbend Development and PHAR, along with two other developers, to completely renovate the more than 40-year-old building. Construction is set to begin this fall.
“He thought it was very unfair that people who had spent…and worked their whole lives in Charlottesville, in many cases, were having to live in such unfortunate conditions,” says Norris. “His advocacy for his neighbors was largely responsible for the fact that the city…and others have ultimately agreed to put about $19 million into renovating that building from top to bottom.”
Shackelford made sure his voice was not the only one heard, Norris points out. He helped to include more Crescent Halls residents in conversations about the building’s renovations, as well as other public housing issues.
“He really believed passionately that even if you were extremely low-income, you still deserved a voice and…a seat at the table,”says Norris.
Both inside and outside of meetings, Shackelford was friendly and encouraging, but “when he had something to say, he would be very firm about it,” says PHAR Lead Organizer Brandon Collins. “He’d been in Charlottesville his whole life and had a real perspective on things. He called [the city] out for not doing enough for poor folks, not giving people enough of a chance, [and] not using resources the right way to help people with homeownership…He was just really dumbfounded by the lack of help that poor people get.”
“He brought his personal experiences and family knowledge to the table with policy makers,” adds Legal Aid Justice Center Outreach Director Emily Dreyfus, who serves on PHAR’s advisory council. “He made a real difference in helping people understand some of the intentional wrongs that were inflicted on black people in Charlottesville over the decades.”
When not advocating for housing rights at meetings and community events, Shackelford could be seen helping his neighbors. He would often carry groceries for people and give out extra canned goods, says resident Alice Washington, who is now president of the tenant association.
“Not only did he love to cook—he could cook! He was always sharing food with people,” she says.
Shackelford ultimately touched many lives, and left a lasting legacy on our town. “He was a committed guy. He put in the work,” says Collins.
“All in all he was just a good person,”adds Washington. “We are going to miss him a lot.”
At 25, Blue O’Connell discovered she had partial hearing loss, but remained committed to a life as a musician. She’s just released Seven Songs of Solace, a multimedia songbook filled with both traditional and original music intended to bolster resilience. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
When Blue O’Connell sings an old song, she feels a strong connection to the past, to the person who wrote that song and all the people who’ve sung it before her.
“I often tell people…if you read a history book about [a] time, it was probably written by someone who didn’t live through that time,” says O’Connell. But in singing a song written during a certain period, there’s a sort of alchemy of time, space, and empathy that allows the singer to connect not just with a narrative, but with human experience and to lives and voices not always included in history books.
As we make our way through this latest historic moment, O’Connell’s looking to music as a means of comfort and hope, and she knows she’s not alone in that. She recently released Seven Songs of Solace, a songbook complete with sheet music, guitar tablature, and recordings of some of her own songs plus arrangements of traditional and popular tunes from different eras and places—seven songs that have resonated with O’Connell as she’s experienced longing, loss, grief, pain, peace, and resilience throughout her own life.
When O’Connell was a 25-year-old musician living and working in Chicago, afriend invited her over to hear his latest piano composition. She sat in the room with him for a while, waiting for the piece to begin. “When are you going to play it?” she asked.
Her friend paused. “I did.”
O’Connell hadn’t heard a single note. She’d lost the ability to hear certain frequencies, particularly higher ones, but she didn’t let that stop her from making music and writing songs. She moved to Charlottesville in 1989, and throughout the 1990s performed at Live Arts, The Prism Coffeehouse, First Night Virginia, and elsewhere, and was a folk music DJ at WTJU 91.1FM.
After September 11, 2001, O’Connell read a newspaper article about how people were coping with the tragedy. Some talked about “a song that gave voice to feelings they didn’t have, or validated their experience. Some said they went to a concert,” remembers O’Connell. Up until that moment, she’d understood the significance of music—she was a musician playing regular gigs after all—but those stories made her understand just how important, how personal, it is to so many people.
Soon after, an ad in a music magazine for a certified music practitioner program caught her eye. The training happened to be at Martha Jefferson Hospital, and O’Connell signed up right away. In 2003, she completed an internship at UVA hospital and was hired there as a musician-in-residence, playing for ICU patients as well as local nursing home residents.
In 2009, at age 50, O’Connell received a cochlear implant and started undergoing various therapies of her own to learn how to hear again. Hearing some of those frequencies, those notes, for the first time in many years was difficult, says O’Connell. But she persisted.
Playing therapeutic music, “in a lot of ways, is the opposite of what a [music] performer does,” says O’Connell. Performers aspire to entertain an audience, keep them engaged, excited, awake; therapeutic musicians aim to calm a listener to the point of relaxation, even slumber.
In the ICU, she plays unrecognizable music to avoid causing uncomfortable or painful memories that a person might associate with a particular song. Nursing home sets can be a bit more upbeat, and she fields requests to conjure happy memories and movement.
O’Connell imbues sensitivity and reassurance into Seven Songs of Solace, on the traditional songs she’s chosen—like “Shenandoah,” with its melody relating a “sense of longing and love,” and “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven wrote after he went deaf—and in her originals.
She composed “Acceptance (for Mom)” after her mother died. O’Connell folded the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) into the music, which transforms as the song progresses. When she considered what “denial” might sound like, she thought of an Irish jig. “I know when I’m in denial, I dance around,” she says with a laugh.
“Choose the Sky” came about as O’Connell drove alone on a highway in Arizona. “I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t even notice I was driving in the most beautiful place you could imagine.” The lyrics came after the music, and for O’Connell, the song is about stability, how the sky is always present and yet always changing.
“For me, that’s a metaphor for what’s going on now, about finding something that will sustain you, and knowing it’s going to be okay.”
When the pandemic broke in March, O’Connell’s full-time hospital and nursing home work was “suspended indefinitely.” She misses it, but she’s still got the music, and in sharing her songbook, she’s finding some solace of her own.
Local resident Cat Thrasher transformed her yard into a large urban garden. Photo: John Robinson
Monday was Memorial Day, the unofficial start to summer, but with local lakes, spray grounds, and pools closed (except to those who can afford membership at private clubs), some took to the Downtown Mall in the hopes of another day not exactly the same as the last.
In spite of the Phase One reopening, closed signs still dominate downtown. “Maybe in June” the signs at 2nd Act Books say hopefully. At Citizen Burger Bar, the sight of several tables full of patrons casually having lunch (none of them wearing masks) felt jarringly out of place. At Chaps, customers waited outside the door, a roughly appropriate number of feet apart. “How areyou?” one parent on line called across to another. Themom, behind her mask, made a face that seemed partsmile, part grimace. “Today’s a good day,” she said. “Wehad a bike ride, and ice cream, so today’s a good day.”
That’s pretty much the best any of us can manage, as our strange spring turns into an uneasy summer. Left to find our own ways to salvage the season, many have turned to gardening, so this week we offer some tips, whether you’re just starting out or ready to explore a deeper relationship with nature.
We’re also launching a new series, Checking In, to catch up with familiar faces around town and hear how they’re getting through this time. “We’re trying to make the best of it,” says Ragged Mountain Running’s Mark Lorenzoni, who’s still coaching runners and even organizing socially distant races. “If you go looking for negatives, it’s not hard to find, it’s in our faces all days long,” he says. “But if you go looking for positives, it’s just as easy to find. It’s just more subtle.”
During the shutdown, Mark Lorenzoni and his family have continued to advise and support runners, including creating a way for customers to test new shoes without having to go inside the shop. Photo: Zack Wajsgras
Mark and Cynthia Lorenzoni opened Ragged Mountain Running Shop on Elliewood Avenue in 1982, and they’ve been pillars of the Charlottesville community ever since. Every year, Mark trains hundreds of athletes, from newbies to elite runners, and directs a dozen local races, all without pay.
Under lockdown, Mark has kept the training going, emailing workouts and even organizing the “Triple Crown,” a series of socially distant races (runners choose one of multiple courses to run any time in a three-day window) to raise money for local charities.
The shop, once described in these pages as “part clubhouse, part support group, part town square,” has also kept going, even though it was one of the first in town to close its doors, on March 13. “We had a big family meeting,” says Lorenzoni, whose two oldest children, Alec and Audrey, become co-owners of the business last fall. “It was like a reality show, it went on for an hour.”
Though Mark initially thought closing was premature, his children convinced him, and now he says Ragged Mountain will likely be one of the last to re-open. “We won’t do that until it’s 100 percent safe.” In the meantime, he’s staying positive. “We’re trying to make the best of it,” he says. “And to be good neighbors.”
How has your business adapted during the shutdown?
We’ve been using this motto that we closed the doors, but we’re still open to serve you like we have in the past. We’re trying to recreate the same service, but in a safe manner.
Our online store, we just went to town with it, getting that as up to date as we’d ever had it before. We started offering a 15 percent discount to everyone. And then we did next-day shipping, free. That’s huge. We tried to get out ahead of it, to say, “okay, you’re willing to support our family during this time, we’re going to give back to you as best we can.”
We’ve done free home delivery for years, but most people weren’t aware of it. Now we do anywhere from 15-25 a day. And we have curbside pickup and try-on. That’s the coolest thing.
People are doing a virtual gait analysis with us [through video] if they’re new. Then what we do is we put about five shoes out on the curb, they come up, we have all these try-on stations that are 10, 12 feet apart, and we go out there and help, with masks on. We’re not touching people, but we’re able to talk to them.
In a weird way, we’ve kind of expanded services beyond what we’d normally do. It’s good for Cynthia and I, it’s exciting to create new things. Here we are in our mid-60s, and it’s like we’re kids again, starting up the business.
What have you struggled with the most during these past few months?
For me there hasn’t been the great sacrifices that so many other families have had to make. We live in a community where we can go outside. Life has been good to us in a lot of ways.
We’ve had two family things: We don’t get to be physically with our grandkids, that’s been a little tough. And my wife’s mother died recently. We had her in a nursing home here in town, and we couldn’t see her for nine weeks. That was really a sacrifice for my wife, and for me too.
I think the worst part for me has been knowing that there are so many people in this country and around the world who are suffering.
What’s bringing you joy?
One thing that’s come out of this that’s been a joy has been to see us appreciating the everyday people. You know a lot of times we don’t appreciate people who work in the grocery store, doctors and nurses. And so I think it’s been a good time for that.
And I think we’re really lucky that this hit our area in the spring, when we can get outside. Cynthia and I garden a lot. We get up in the morning, we go for a walk. We’ve walked every morning together since we closed the business.
We feel the spirit of this community even more than we ever have before, in the outpouring of support we’ve had. Our business is down, but we’re keeping going, people are keeping us going.
This has been one of the most thrilling times in that people are wanting to help their neighbors. So many local businesses are shopping with us, and we’re trying to give back to them too.
What’s something you’re reading, watching, or listening to that you’re enjoying right now?
I listen to the news every day, but I try to find a movie at night. I just watched Something’s Gotta Give. I love that movie. I completely disappeared into Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton for two hours. I think we have to be responsible, we have to readthe news but we also have to find a balance.
I do a Zoom meeting, social meetings, at least four or five times a week. Like tonight, it’s my floor: I was an RA in 1977 to 1978, two years, I had freshmen and sophomores, I called them my boys. And we’ve kept in touch, there’s 30 of us, and tonight we’re having a happy hour, on Zoom. I’m doing this with my athletes once a week. Those have been fun things.
We’re so busy, we’re so stressed, and now, I think it’s this incredible pause. And I do think it’s a silver lining to the death and the sadness of it.
In this new series, we’ll be catching up with familiar faces around town, to talk about how they’re weathering this crisis. Is there someone you’d like to hear from? Email us at editor@cville.com.
Bowerbird Bakeshop’s Earl Vallery and Maria Niechwiadowicz feel fortunate that they’ve been able to move out of a rented kitchen and into their new space at the Tenth Street Warehouses. Photo by John Robinson
Bowerbird Bakeshop debuted at Charlottesville City Market’s annual holiday market in late 2017, at a shared table on a side row that got little foot traffic.
Pastry chef Earl Vallery had just moved to town after helping launch Whisk bakery in Richmond, and before that, teaching at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas. He had about $300 and the desire to have a bakery of his very own.
That cold Saturday morning, Vallery put up a homemade cardboard sign and covered his half of the booth with signature treats: matcha mint cookies, chocolate vortex cookies, and imaginatively flavored French macarons. He hoped that, eventually, Bowerbird might have enough of a following to warrant a bricks-and-mortar shop, complete with a kitchen, small eat-in area, and pastry cases packed with all sorts of delights.
It didn’t take long. After finding investors and raising money via a GoFundMe earlier this year, Bowerbird—now a team of three—is moving from its rented kitchen at Trinity Episcopal Church’s Bread & Roses space to the Tenth Street Warehouses.
It’s an odd time to open a bakery, acknowledges Vallery as he sits in the nearly finished space, light bouncing off of the metal appliances and the pristine glass pastry case. But the ball was already rolling when the pandemic hit: the lease was signed, the equipment ordered, and Vallery, who also received a small Paycheck Protection Program loan, couldn’t back out.
Instead, he adjusted. Bowerbird currently participates in the contactless Saturday market and delivers online orders direct to customers’ doors on Saturday mornings. With sales down and the bakery not opening to eat-in customers right away, Vallery couldn’t hire the staff he’d planned for, so he and his business partner and pastry assistant Maria Niechwiadowicz are tackling all the bakes and sales…in addition to finishing the bakery build-out.
“It’s tiring, figuring out all these ways to reinvent yourself,” says Vallery, who knows other small business owners share that fatigue. But he hesitates to complain, expressing his gratitude for his customers (and his understanding landlord). “I’m grateful we have something.”
Niechwiadowicz shares those feelings. But “sometimes it feels a little unfair that restaurants and long-standing businesses in Charlottesville are closing [and] we are opening,” she says. She is optimistic, though, about what Bowerbird can offer by maintaining ties with the Bread & Roses food ministry (Niechwiadowicz served as the program’s kitchen manager until recently), donating to other nonprofits like City of Promise, and partnering with local farms and food makers.
Even when the shop opens, Bowerbird will continue to participate in the City Market. “That’s our bread and butter,” says Vallery.
In addition to the macarons, cookies, galettes, and savory nest egg muffins that marketgoers have come to love, there will be cakes, custards, Danishes, and more. Vallery also promises breakfast items like smoked salmon on an everything croissant.
He may struggle sometimes to celebrate the occasion because “what we make, it could be considered a luxury,” but when Vallery talks about the feeling he gets from baking, his voice brightens, and he repeats, “I’m just so grateful.”
Cat Thrasher transformed the front yard of her Kellytown home into a large urban garden, where she says she’s been “trying ‘square-foot gardening’ in the form of planting some things very close together.” Photo: John Robinson
Outdoor options may be limited this summer, but gardening is definitely havinga moment. Whether you’re a veteran dirt-lover or a total beginner, there’s never been a better time to dive in and cultivate some earth (or even a window box) near your home. Here are some ideas to spur you along.
Dig in: Tips for veggie-garden novices
Along with bicycling and bread-baking, these homebound pandemic times have seen a rise in another kinder, gentler pastime—gardening. It’s being driven not only by all the extra hours at home, but by a certain amount of uneasiness around food supplies. Lots of us are eyeing those unused corners of our lawns, wondering if they could become more productive.
Starting a garden for the first time is both simple and daunting. Plants have only a few basic needs: good soil, water, and sun. But, for newbies, it can seem like there are a thousand ways to go wrong. If you’re a beginner, here are a few tips to help break it down.
Select your site
The ideal site is well away from trees (which compete for water and nutrients), well-drained, well-lit, and not too compacted—i.e., not a place where cars have been parking or people have beaten a path. But that ideal spot doesn’t always exist. You may have an excess of shade, a problem with swampiness after it rains, or just limited space.
The good news is that a garden doesn’t have to be large to provide food. Think small at first. Can you squeeze in a couple of tomatoes along the front walk? Is there space for a trellis along a south wall for pole beans to climb? If you already plant petunias or other annual flowers, could you intersperse them with lettuce or herbs?
If you really can’t put plants in the ground, think about containers. They can do very well on a deck or even a windowsill, as long as you water faithfully.
Prepare the ground
Raised beds have become so popular that you may think they’re a requirement. But they make it harder to start a brand-new garden—you have to get involved in carpentry before you can plant anything, and then you have to obtain soil. All this can get expensive and time-consuming. At my house, we’ve found it much easier to plant in the ground and focus on improving the soil we have.
When we want to establish a new bed, we first remove the sod with a mattock. This tool makes it easy to just peel away the grass by the roots, but if you don’t have one, you could also use a shovel or spade. Then we loosen the soil with a spade fork—again, a shovel will do in a pinch. Finally, we mix in about three inches of compost. For a small garden, you can buy compost in bags. Horse manure works well too, and stables are usually happy to give it away.
Choose your crops wisely
It feels good to succeed in a garden, so start with things that are relatively foolproof, like green beans, basil, and mint. The next tier of crops would include stuff like salad and cooking greens, tomatoes, peppers, summer and winter squash—these are not difficult to grow, but they do sometimes get hit by pests or disease. The trickiest crops, in my experience, are broccoli, onions, carrots, and cabbage. They’re well worth the space if you have room to spare, but success is far from guaranteed.
Photo: John Robinson
Timing
It’s nearly June, too late to start most veggie crops from seed. (Greens, tomatoes, and peppers get planted indoors in early March.) What you can do now is buy most crops as starts, at a garden center or direct from a farmer. And it’s not too late—in fact, it’s the perfect time—to direct-seed heat-loving crops like beans, squash, corn, and okra.
It’ll feel counterintuitive, but in the height of summer—mid- to late July—you can try planting seeds of cool-weather fall crops: kale, collards, lettuce, spinach, and beets.
Plant carefully
Find the healthiest plant starts you can—vigorous, not too “leggy” (that’s the term for plants with gangly stems)—and put them in the ground when the soil is moist, but not wet and clumpy. Loosen the soil all around where you’re making a hole for your baby plant, and dig deep enough that when you place the plant in the hole, the potting soil will sit slightly below ground level. Water daily for the first few days.
Make provisions for deer
If you’ve ever seen a deer in your yard or neighborhood, then you’ll want to think about protecting your plants. Deer can do more damage in one night than any other pest; they especially like leafy greens, but they’ll hit tomatoes and peppers too. If a tall fence is not in the cards for you, you might consider buying or mixing up some organic repellent spray (there are recipes online).
Keep an eye on water and weeds
Now comes the patience part. The plants won’t need much from you except a regular check-in, preferably once a day. Keep soil moist and pull out the bigger weeds. If you see insect pests like tomato worms or squash beetles, you can pull them off by hand.
Fertilize
That compost you added will feed your plants all season, but you can also boost their growth with organic fertilizers. Garden stores have lots of options, from blood meal (really!) to fish emulsion. And here’s a nice fact: Rainwater contains nitrogen, one of the main nutrients plants crave. So watering from a rain barrel is an extra advantage.
Enjoy the process
That daily check-in is not only for the plants’ sake, it’s a ritual that feeds the gardener’s soul. The growth of plants is a salve in times of stress, and paying attention to your garden’s progress—maybe taking photos or notes—is half the fun. Keeping a garden journal, if you intend to garden again next year, is also a helpful way to track info—things like planting dates, timing of the harvest, and when you fertilize.
Enjoy the bounty
The other half of the fun is eating what you grew. If you’re lucky, you’ll be overwhelmed —drowning in cucumbers, or unloading zucchini on your neighbors’ doorsteps in the dead of night. But there’s a lot of satisfaction in successfully growing even one tomato—one perfect, plump, tangy-sweet, deep-red tomato. Savor it!
Photo: John Robinson
Digging deeper: Local permaculturists design gardens for the longterm
If you’ve gardened in the past and have a handle on the basics, you might be eyeing the next-level approach to growing food. Maybe you suspect that you could get more bounty out of the same square footage, or you might be looking to do things in a more sustainable way. For a lot of folks, that means permaculture—a system for designing gardens (and, more broadly, homesteads and communities) that’s gotten a lot of traction in recent years.
The word is a contraction of “permanent” and “agriculture” (or just “culture”). The name implies long-term resilience. Christine Gyovai, who with her husband Reed Muehlman owns the Charlottesville firm Dialogue + Design Associates, first studied permaculture in California at the turn of the millennium. Since 2007, the couple has lived on a nine-acre homestead in western Albemarle, where they designed and built a straw-bale house. “We knew going into it we wanted to use permaculture principles here,” she says. “It was helpful that we took at least a year to observe the land before we did anything.”
That’s one of permaculture’s first principles: observing natural conditions (like water flow, sun, wind, and wildlife), and designing in a way that protects and mimics those systems. For example, in nature, plants don’t grow in straight, uniform rows, surrounded by bare soil; they form more of a multi-layered mix. Gyovai and Muehlman have a “forest garden” that uses that structure: trees over shrubs over ground-level plants.
Christine Gyovai, who co-owns Dialogue + Design Associates, abided by one of permaculture’s first principles before building a straw- bale house in western Albemarle: observe natural conditions like water flow, sun, wind, and wildlife. Photo: John Robinson
“It has an upper story including apples, pears, and pawpaws,” she explains. “Then there’s a shrub layer with nitrogen fixers”—those are plants that make nitrogen available in the soil for other plants. Among many other plants, “we have New Jersey tea, baptisia, false blue indigo, and comfrey, which is a dynamic accumulator. It draws nutrients up from deep in the soil and makes them available for plants on the surface. Once a year or more, we do chop-and-drop mulching”—cutting down the comfrey and laying the leaves on the ground as a nutrient-rich mulch. Strawberries and other plants form the ground-cover level.
Permaculture suggests dividing a property into “zones” based on how often you’ll frequent each area. Most people usually stick close to their dwellings, so gardens will get more attention if they’re in that zone one or two. Gyovai and Muehlman cultivate a kitchen garden for veggies, intentionally sited very close to their house. “They are largely keyhole-shaped beds designed to maximize growing areas and minimize pathways,” says Gyovai, adding that the compost pile is also in zone one, right next to the kitchen garden. “It’s easy to run outside and pop things in the compost. That fosters energy cycling and recycling.”
Further-flung zones include things that need somewhat less attention—like beehives and larger-scale compost—and wilderness space that only gets visited occasionally.
Connections to the community beyond one’s property are part of the philosophy, too. Danielle Castellano and her family live on a permaculture homestead in Fauquier County, where they attempt to produce quite a bit of food—this spring, for example, they’ve been busy inoculating logs with 2,000 mushroom plugs. Still, she says, it’s important to ask, “How can we be supporting farming friends and neighbors? We’re not trying to produce absolutely everything.” She sources eggs, meat, and raw milk from other farms as a way of strengthening ties within a “larger ecosystem.”
Gyovai has taught permaculture design for years, designs professionally, and helps run the Blue Ridge Permaculture Network. If you’re interested in learning more, check out that group’s Facebook page, or sign up for this fall’s permaculture design course through the Shenandoah Permaculture Institute.
Learn all about kangaroos in an online program via the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Image courtesy of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection
Hop on this: Are you curious about how long baby joeys stay in their mother’s pouches? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about Aboriginal art? In the webinar Roos Galore, Lauren Maupin and Fenella Belle focus on central and northern Australia for a comprehensive look at depictions of the beloved bouncer from down under in Aboriginal art. The online lesson is geared toward families, but all who want to know more about the culture of the kangaroo are welcome.
Thursday, May 28, 7pm; andFriday, May 29, 9am. Zoom registration required. facebook.com/klugeruhe.
