Month: August 2024

Raise your hand if your toxic trait is buying new bras when you have perfectly good ones in your drawer. If your hand is up, Derriere de Soie suggests turning in the old to make room for the new, with its twice-annual bra drive. The West Main Street store chooses a nonprofit benefactor (this past spring, it was The Haven) and offers a 20 percent same-day discount in exchange for your gently used donations.

The joy of hunting for the perfect tomato or apple at a farmers’ market is seriously dampened when you’re getting soaked by a downpour. Which is why a spankin’ new red building now stands where there once was only a white tent at 2775 Barracks Rd. After months of construction, the Barracks Road Farm Market reopened this spring with the same impressive array of fruits and vegetables, plants and flowers, eggs, meat, and fish, and baked goods, maple syrup, honey, and pickles—but now shoppers are protected from the elements while they peruse the spot’s offerings. By moving inside, “we hope to better accommodate our customers, offer a better shopping experience, and be able to have a better display,” says Maynard Swarey, the market’s co-owner. If the substantial crowd and flatbeds overflowing with goodies on a recent Friday afternoon is any indication, Swarey has more than achieved his goal.

St. Anne’s-Belfield School made a splashy hire for its football program this spring, tapping one-time UVA and Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Heath Miller to replace former head coach Joe Sandoe.

Miller, whose career as a Cavalier earned him a first-round pick by Pittsburgh in 2005, was named to the NFL team’s Hall of Honor in 2022. His 11 years with the Steelers included two Pro Bowl selections, two Super Bowl championships, the most regular season games played by a tight end in team history (168), 592 receptions, 6,569 receiving yards, and 45 touchdowns.

“Heath comes from a tremendous football background, and when Joe decided to leave us, we knew we were not going to do a national search for a coach,” STAB Athletic Director Seth Kushkin says. “We wanted to hire someone that has been a part of our community.” 

Miller has four children enrolled at STAB, including a rising high-school freshman who intends to play football in the fall. Miller’s coaching experience is limited to working with his oldest son at various levels as he’s grown, so when Kushkin and his team reached out to the former UVA star, the initial conversation was far-reaching. How could Miller best support the Saints football team? 

Eventually, all parties settled on a head coaching role—with considerable support from a staff of experienced high-school-level coaches. Topping the list is Associate Head Coach Patrick Blake, son of the Saints’ head football coach immediately prior to Sandoe. John Blake coached the team for a quarter decade, going 175-75 from 1997 to 2022, winning six state titles, and sending three players to the NFL. Also on staff are Joe Hall, a former All-ACC defensive lineman for UVA, Kevin Badke, Joe Reed, Chris Peace, and Jared Passmore.

“Heath has built a tremendous staff around him, and that is really what we are excited about,” Kushkin says, adding via email that Miller “does not want the story to be about him.”

Will Miller’s success as a player translate to success as a head coach? Kushkin says the first step is to define success. Sure, it would be nice for the Saints to reascend to the highest level of Division 2 Virginia football and win more state titles. At the end of Blake’s tenure, the team suffered through some lean years. COVID essentially canceled the team’s 2020-2021 season, and Blake’s final season saw the team at 2-7. In Sandoe’s first year, the Saints won only one game, but a resurgent 6-3 record followed before Sandoe was attracted back to his home in Atlanta for another coaching job.

The other way to define success, according to Kushkin, is by the experiences of STAB’s student-athletes.

“Heath wants to provide the opportunity for young men who play football to learn all of the pieces: the hard work, the leadership, the growth opportunities that come from competing in this game,” Kushkin says. “He loves being a dad and being a part of this community, and he wants to impact and help young men through football in the same way that he was.”

Laura Frantz wants to write you a poem. Luckily, the Charlottesville Poem Store owner is never too far away, parking her tent (and her vintage typewriter) at the Farmers Market at Ix, The Doyle Hotel (total Algonquin Round Table vibes), and special events like the Crozet Arts & Crafts Festival and Common House’s Writers’ Happy Hour. Plus, she’s for hire. Have her stop by your event and craft an on-the-spot poem for each of your guests based on a set of agreed-upon prompts. Now that’s poetry in motion.

Those of us following the “Small Town, Big Crime” podcast—a locally produced show from journalists Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan that investigates the 1985 Bedford County double murder of Derek and Nancy Haysom—got a bit of a surprise while browsing Netflix at the end of 2023. The co-hosts had been tapped for commentary in the streaming service’s documentary, “Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom.” “The two of them were a horrible puzzle that fit together just right,” says Stuart of Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, the couple at the center of the case, in the series’ lead-in. Consider us hooked.

Ty Cooper defies categorization. As a marketing professional, he’s worked with all manner of companies and in myriad media. As a visual artist, he’s made his mark as an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and designer. 

Perhaps that’s why Cooper is drawn to short films.

“If a person is interested in being a filmmaker, shorts are an easier entry,” Cooper says. “They’re less expensive, and you can be super creative and do things you can’t get away with in a feature film. You can have fun and learn to love filmmaking. It gives [filmmakers] an opportunity to experiment and get better and be as quirky as possible.”

Cooper held his inaugural Indie Short Film Festival, a three-day rumpus of screenings, table reads, and parties in March. He showed nearly 75 shorts, held panel discussions, hosted a screenplay competition, and helped select best-of-show winners—all in four locations centrally located around the Downtown Mall.

The festival was an expansion of Cooper’s long-running short film series—a way to “massage the market,” he says, and get a sense for whether he should keep the festival going annually. After the success of the first event, during which three of the 12 screening blocks were sold out and several others were at greater than 80 percent of capacity, Cooper says he’s planning a second festival for 2025.

“I quantify success not only by looking at the numbers of people coming in—the sold-out screenings—but by going to the panel discussions and seeing the Common House with only a couple seats open and seeing people engaged with the filmmakers,” Cooper says.

To select films, Cooper started his search at Sundance, which he attends every year to see movies and meet filmmakers. Nearly 25 percent of the eventual Indie Short Film Festival playlist came from the renowned Salt Lake City independent film festival. Another 25 percent of the flicks came straight from Virginia, and the rest were selected from other submissions, festival screenings, and foreign films, with at least 11 countries eventually represented. 

Cooper has eschewed a themed festival to maximize voices, but he organizes the films for screening blocks. The 2024 festival featured animated blocks, documentaries, Virginia-focused segments, and miscellaneous narrative blocks. It included films by people of color, women, and wide-ranging ethnic representatives. The panel discussions took on topics like women in film and the Black experience in American cinema. 

“Part of my goal is to put all these voices on the screen,” Cooper says. “It was a melting pot.”

Cooper, whose marketing and branding firm Lifeview Marketing and Visuals counts the Virginia Film Festival among its clients, says his 2025 event will be bigger and better than his first foray. After polling attendees about their experiences, he says he’ll implement changes large and small. “I talk to every single person I see with their lanyard swinging,” Cooper says. 

The 2025 Indie Short Film Festival will be held March 21–23 at various theaters and restaurants around the Downtown Mall.

I scream, you scream … okay, you know where this is going. Lucky for us, we don’t have to scream very loud (or at all!) to find a frozen treat in this town. Here are 11 of our favorite hot cold spots.—SS

Ben & Jerry’s

Barracks Road Shopping Center

They had us at Cherry Garcia. 

Chaps Ice Cream

Downtown Mall and UVA Corner

A trip to the Downtown Mall isn’t complete without a scoop of coffee raspberry in a waffle cone from Brenda “Granny” Hawkins. (A second Chaps recently opened on the UVA Corner.)  

Cold Stone Creamery

1709 Emmet St. N & 5th Street Station

Just-made ice cream is thwapped on a frozen granite stone (hence, the shop’s name), where a variety of mix-ins (fruit, nuts, candy) can be added. Sounds Berry, Berry Good to us.

Dairy Queen

1777 Fortune Park Rd.

Five words: Chocolate chip cookie dough Blizzard. 

Kilwins

Downtown Mall

It’s tough to resist a cup of Blue Moon ice cream with a side of just-made sea-salt caramel fudge. 

Kohr Brothers Frozen Custard

1881 Seminole Trail

Less fat and sugar than ice cream, a light, silky texture, several twist flavors (vanilla and orange sherbert, please), and a merry-go-round.

La Flor Michoacana

601A Cherry Ave.

We once likened leaning over the shop’s store-length cooler filled with an array of brightly colored popsicles to gazing at the treasures in a jewelry store’s glass counter—but Rum and Raisins on a stick is much tastier than a diamond ring.  

Moo Thru

Dairy Market

Schlepping an hour north to the red barn on James Madison Highway became history in 2021, when more than a dozen flavors that change with the seasons (come to mama, Blackberry Merlot!) arrived on Grady Avenue. 

Splendora’s Gelato

The Shops at Stonefield

Trays of ever-changing, custom-crafted gelato flavors (check out the store’s Instagram and Facebook pages for the week’s offerings) and vegan chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. We’ll take some (okay, a lot) of each.

SugarBear Gourmet Ice Cream

1522 High St.

Emily Harpster’s made-from-scratch, locally sourced flavors (Wild Woman Whiskey, Vanilla Plum Blackberry, Mayan Hot Chocolate), once available only at specialty stores and bakeries, got a brick-and-mortar location this year. 

Timberlake’s

Downtown Mall

Step back in time at this back-of-the-drugstore soda fountain, where the dessert menu includes ice cream floats and sodas; shakes, malts, and sundaes (how’s about a Hannah Banana Split?); or a double dip in a cup or cone.