Author: c-ville-weekly-writers

Labor Day is a bittersweet holiday, a day off for many but also the occasion to bid summer goodbye. Out with the cool of ice cubes on the tongue, in with the earthiness of pumpkin in the belly. So long, head-in-the-clouds; hello, nose-to-the-grindstone. But before we all break out our flannels, remember that summer’s end is a gradual process, not an overnight change. Between now and when autumn really sets in is special period that’s one of the best times of year for traveling. With the high tourist season over, crowds thin considerably and cooler weather makes outside activities more comfortable. Travel at this time of year is relaxed and contemplative, even in the same spots that would have felt cluttered and stressful in July. Virginia obliges the early-fall traveler with a wide array of destinations. Three day trips follow. They include two presidential homes, those of George Washington and Woodrow Wilson – one is a major tourist mecca while the other is a little-known but delightful stopover. Also on the menu are the antebellum mountain resort at The Homestead, thriving historic districts in Alexandria and Staunton, mineral baths, European farmsteads and chamber music. Enjoy – and this time, don’t worry about bringing sunscreen.

Minerals and melodies
Relaxation abounds in two Appalachian outposts

The perfect day trip should feel like a brief departure, as though you just accidentally drove your car through a curtain into another world. You can’t force that to happen. But you can stack the odds in your favor by heading to a pair of towns – Warm Springs and Hot Springs – that have drawn travelers to their high perch in the Allegheny Mountains for centuries.

I left I-81 in Lexington and headed west on Route 39, which is also called the "Avenue of Trees." The name calls to mind giant redwoods in California, but here the trees are not so much the main attraction as part of an appealing mix: horse farms, trailheads and swimming holes on the Calfpasture River, and little villages that seem sweetly well-cared for. This is the western flank of Virginia, its most mountainous part, and 39 climbs through several passes, opening onto enormous views, before descending to an intersection with US 220, which connects Warm Springs and Hot Springs.

As their names imply, these towns are historic destinations because natural mineral springs bubble up from their hillsides. In Hot Springs, the waters have been the raison d’etre for local tourism since the 1750s, when small cabins were built to accommodate visitors. The property has evolved considerably since then: It’s now The Homestead, a sprawling resort that nearly matches the scale of the mountains that cradle it.

I strolled onto the property past the spa and gardens and got a table at an outdoor café facing the hotel. It’s a huge brick battleship of a building, with multi-storey wings radiating from a central spire that dates from the turn of the last century. I snuggled into my wicker chair, sipped lemonade and looked out through white columns at brick walkways carving through a sloped lawn.

Golf is a big deal here. Of the constant parade of well-heeled visitors passing my porch, several were observed practicing their swings. In fact, the whole resort is quite pricey. Aside from lunching, strolling and people-watching, there’s not much here for the budget traveler. Still, the hotel’s maze of carpeted corridors is worth a look, leading past shops, a theater and fine restaurants. And if you do have hundreds of dollars a night to spend on a room, activities from falconry to caving will be at your disposal. The Homestead dwarfs its hometown, but Hot Springs does have a block or two of shops and restaurants.

Five miles north, Warm Springs is a bit more down to earth, and has a more direct connection to the tourism of yore. The Jefferson Pools (named for – you guessed it! – our very own Thomas, an enthusiastic soaker at the spot in the year 1818) are enclosed by gentlemen’s and ladies’ pool houses dating from 1761 and 1836, respectively. Technically part of The Homestead, they have an entirely different feel. Simple wooden structures right on the roadside, their peeling white paint and crumbling foundations make them endearingly ramshackle. They also make the $15 fee for an hour’s soak a bit steep.

Still, if you’ve driven all the way into the mountains, you may as well splurge. The pools are a wonderful experience. I was issued a fluffy towel and a styrofoam "noodle" for floating before stepping into the eleven-sided ladies’ pool house. Nearly five feet of 98-degree water were circled by a narrow wooden catwalk, onto which opened curtained dressing rooms. The bottom of the pool was made of irregular stones, like a riverbed, and in the center of the high ceiling was a large skylight, allowing natural light to sparkle on the clear-green water. It was a delicious combination of natural elements and minimal human enhancement, and it took about three seconds to relax once I descended the staircase into the water, which is said to have restorative powers. Floating on my back and watching clouds drift over the skylight, I felt like I’d fallen completely under the spell of this quiet, pristine corner of the world.

On a side note, more natural wonders can be found in Douthat State Park. About 20 minutes from Warm Springs, the park is another highlight of the region. Its Depression-era cabins are a thoroughly charming and less expensive alternative to the inns and hotels of Hot Springs and Warm Springs. Hiking its trails or boating on Douthat Lake gives a closer look at the natural setting that, in the towns, serves more as background.

But back to Warm Springs. The day wasn’t over yet. I still had one more stop: the Garth Newel Music Center, a converted farm at the top of a precipitous driveway off US 220. Once the country home of a wealthy couple, the center now boasts a 30-year history of chamber music performances in its complex of white wooden buildings on a steep mountainside. In the summer concerts take place on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in a barnlike building called Herter Hall, and various musical programs are scheduled most weekends throughout the fall into October. With exposed beams, wooden floor and large windows, it’s a much more casual setting for classical music than the usual velvet concert hall.

When I realized I could get a glass of wine and sip it during the concert, I decided I’d landed in the most civilized spot on earth.

True to the relaxed setting, the musicians were conversational and helpfully explained some history behind the pieces they played. Their performances sparkled, especially that of a guest clarinetist, Richard Faria. While the day’s program featured lesser-known composers (Rebecca Clarke, Darius Milhaud and Ernest Chausson), most pieces are by classical music’s big names, from a variety of eras. Saturday concerts are followed by gourmet set-menu dinners, and post-summer there are occasional weekends of music throughout the year. You can even spend the night on the grounds.

On my way out of town, a gas station attendant addressed me as "Milady," the area’s last extravagant gesture of hospitality before I left. I took a different way home: Route 42, a laid-back valley road that led north into a dramatic summer storm and on to Staunton.

View from the Valley
Staunton is an appealing flipside of the coin

It’s easy to overlook a place like Staunton. It looks so unassuming from the interstate that it doesn’t exactly scream "day trip." But Staunton is, in many ways, Charlottesville’s fraternal twin: We’re so closely related that our differences become all the more intriguing. And, with the cost of living rising steadily on this side of the mountain, Charlottesville and Staunton may soon become even more intimately linked, as artists and others flee Valley-ward. Now’s the chance to get some impressions of Staunton before its hipification gets underway.

Decidedly pre-hip is the city’s main claim to fame, the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace. Yes, I know: You don’t care about Woodrow Wilson. But stay with me. The museum is worth a visit even if the Fourteen Points are the last topic you care to explore.

The president who would lead the country through World War I was born here in 1856, and spent only his first two years in this Greek Revival-style Presbyterian manse before his minister father was called to another church. The museum freezes this upper middle-class household in that antebellum moment. Because it’s neglected by the madding crowds, the excellent guided tour through its dozen rooms is an unhurried look at the Victorian age – when, for example, sewing machines were so newfangled and expensive that if you had one, as the Wilsons did, you put it in your front window so passersby could admire it.

This was a period – like our own – of rapid technological change, when plumbing and paved roads were changing society. Staunton, as a railroad town, had access to all the newest inventions. Our guide painted a vivid portrait of the Wilson’s brand-new range woodstove (so called because it actually offered a range of temperatures for cooking – imagine!) being unloaded at the station, then hauled up Gospel Hill to the manse.

After we’d been through most of the house’s dozen spacious rooms, we gathered on a second-floor balcony and looked across the street to Mary Baldwin College, named for a crafty Civil War-era headmistress who hid supplies under her hoop skirts during Union raids. Today, the school is a women’s college. Looking down, we could see the formal gardens where, in the Wilsons’ day, chickens would have roamed through vegetable patches – even wealthy city homes were mini-farms at the time. And even the well-to-do bathed only once a week, using the same tub of water for the whole family.

When the tour was done I checked out the nearby museum relating Wilson’s biography through photos, keepsakes and his 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine. He was an interesting man – probably dyslexic, but one of the most educated presidents, serving as president of Princeton University and writing numerous books. His White House tenure from 1912-1921 saw major changes in this country: World War I made the U.S. an international power, women got the vote and the eight-hour workday became standard.

The birthplace is right in the heart of Staunton’s downtown, so it’s natural to take off on a stroll after getting your history lesson. I walked past the appealing Mary Baldwin campus, with its cluster of cream-colored buildings, then headed for Beverly Street, the main drag through Staunton’s historic downtown.

Here is where comparisons with Charlottesville become tempting. Both cities are rightly proud of their thriving, well-preserved downtowns, and both feature brick Victorian facades graced by tidy details. But whereas Charlottesville resurrected its Main Street by banning cars and cultivating the arts, Staunton’s downtown feels more down-home. Perhaps it’s the agricultural bent of its Shenandoah Valley setting, which tends more toward corn and poultry than showhorses. Gift shops along Beverly Street – of which there are many – offer antiques and dried flowers rather than the Vietnamese pottery or artisan jewelry you’d find in Charlottesville.

That’s not to say that Staunton is inhospitable toward the arts. It’s the home of the Blackfriars Playhouse, for example, and Beverly Street houses several galleries. Architecture fans will find lots to look at, from an imposing neoclassical bank to an English half-timber structure to a theater with Art Deco tile mosaics. Lots of buildings had signs of their original uses – "YMCA" or "Elks Club" – still bricked into their facades.

I poked around in funky Zelma’s, a secondhand store, then had lunch at the Pampered Palate, one of many cafés in the area. It boasts a huge menu of quiches, sandwiches and salads and a potpourri-and-antique-dolls sort of atmosphere. Again, a different brand of charm than Charlottesville offers, but no less inviting.

Down the hill in the Wharf District, another cluster of shops and restaurants lines up along the railroad tracks. The tone of this development seems just right – good smells and appealing storefronts co-exist with, rather than overpower, the romantic melancholy of the railroad station. Staunton is doing a great job of re-inventing itself without sacrificing a palpable sense of its history.

The town’s other major attraction, which I’d visited on a previous trip, is the Frontier Culture Museum, just off I-81. The idea here is to illustrate how three major immigrant cultures – German, Scotch-Irish and English – blended in the Shenandoah Valley during the 1700s (when the area was considered a frontier) to create a new American rural society. The lesson is elaborately presented: Four separate farms have been moved here from their original European and Virginian locations and reassembled along a half-mile path, which you stroll at your own pace.

From the wattle-and-daub German farmhouse to the whitewashed Irish cottage, costumed interpreters are ready to explain what they’re doing. And since these are working farms complete with livestock, there’s lots to be done: making cheese, shearing sheep, threshing grain. I appreciated that the interepreters, though very knowledgeable and friendly, spoke of their characters in the third person; I always find it awkward when interepreters say "I have to go out and saddle up the horse" as though they didn’t drive to work like everybody else.

Like other authentic historical sites, the museum can be appreciated in an academic sort of way, or as a purely sensorial experience (read: kids will like it). If history’s your thing, though, you can’t beat a visit with the granddaddy of American history, George Washington himself.

Return to fatherland
At home with the original George W.

Living in Charlottesville, you might start to believe that Thomas Jefferson founded not only UVA, but the whole darn country. And that Monticello, somehow, is the very birthplace of democracy. Well – ahem – one million annual Mount Vernon visitors beg to differ. George Washington’s home near our nation’s capital (what was it called, again?) is a major American destination.

When I visited Mount Vernon, I took my favorite route toward D.C. (20N to Route 3 east to I-95) and exited into suburbia south of the city. Sanitized housing developments march right up to George’s door, but once you arrive at Mount Vernon you know you’re in tourist-land: The license plates in the parking lot are from all over our great nation, and everybody’s sneakers are brand new.

As I waited in line to buy a ticket, a soccer mom-ish woman stopped her SUV at the curb and pulled from the backseat a curving, four-foot-long bugle. She stood by her car, played a rousing little tune to no one in particular, replaced the instrument, and drove off. As it turned out, such weirdly anachronistic scenes are the norm at Mount Vernon. Mostly because there are so many 21st-century visitors around, the 18th-century elements have to compete for the attention they deserve.

I walked uphill a short distance and came upon one end of the mansion’s wide lawn, or bowling green, which was mowed with scythes in Washington’s day. At the other end was the familiar, almost barnlike house: red roof, black shutters and white wooden siding, topped by a cupola. I joined a long line stretching backwards from the door.

Up close, it became obvious just how wealthy the Washingtons were (the money, by the way, came from Martha’s family, not George’s). Their imposing home, built gradually over the second half of the 18th century, presides over an entire little city of outbuildings, slaves’ quarters, and riverfront along the Potomac – 200 acres now, 8,000 in George’s day. There’s even a special building just to house the servants of the Washingtons’ many houseguests.

Unfortunately, during my visit the inside of the mansion was so packed with visitors that it was next to impossible to really see it. The situation wasn’t helped by Mount Vernon’s assembly-line guide system: Instead of leading a defined group through the house, guides stay put and spout a continually repeating stream of information at whoever happens to be shuffling past. Like any normal human being would, they start to sound like robots, and visitors must patch together a narrative from disconnected fragments. If this is the postmodern approach to historical interpretation, I’ll take mine the old-fashioned way.

Still, I did catch interesting glimpses: George’s deathbed, his presidential chair, the key to the Bastille (a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette). In the kitchen (a separate building, minimizing the risk of fire) wild turkeys and ducks hung from the ceiling, and beautiful stoneware jars lined up along brick shelves. Everything is restored to its 1799 appearance, the year Washington died, and is as luxurious as you’d expect.

Back outside, I joined the ranks of amateur photographers lining up to frame the most familiar view of Mount Vernon: its wide porch overlooking the Potomac. Frustrating as the house tour had been, there was still lots to see around the estate. I peeked into the smokehouse, stables, and dung repository (how often do you get to see one of those?), visited Washington’s grand tomb, and wandered the kitchen garden. Looking with interest at the pre-industrial gardening techniques used there, I reflected that Mount Vernon could accommodate deeper inquiry into lots of different topics: architecture, agriculture, slave history. Visitors who want to go beyond the surface should plan on a whole day and take advantage of the estate’s specialized walking tours, and now, in the off-season is the perfect time to do so.

The one quick way I found to gain insight into Washington the person was in the small George Washington Museum, which showed that Washington, like Jefferson, was a man of many talents. Even before the American Revolution, he was an accomplished surveyor and held several public offices. Also, unlike other founding fathers, he freed his 316 slaves upon his death. I couldn’t help but long for the days when presidents were competent outdoorsmen, social progressives and avid, self-taught scholars.

What better remedy for historical nostalgia than a little shopping? I headed north 15 minutes to Old Town Alexandria, a delightful port city that proudly preserves its colonial architecture while layering it with modern consumerism. If you have money to blow, you can do it on the King Street corridor, via Thai food, shoes, or furniture. If you don’t, you can still wander brick walks for hours admiring details of the old buildings. The city seems perfectly symbolized by one very old brick and stone structure, now jarringly occupied by a national coffee chain which shall remain nameless. The bastards.

On Alexandria’s very pleasant waterfront, the Torpedo Factory Art Center is the big draw. It’s a flashier, bigger version of Charlottesville’s McGuffey Art Center; it actually was a torpedo factory from 1918 through World War II, and now houses the studios of 160 artists who are billed as eager to chat with visitors. I felt a flush of hometown pride when I realized that McGuffey houses, on average, much better art than the more urban "Torp." Much of what I saw there was fairly commercial, and artists were actually using most of their studio space as mini-galleries.

Though I preferred McGuffey’s edgier aesthetic and paint-splattered authenticism, I still found some gems throughout the Torp’s three floors. Robert Roselle’s ceramic sculptures, for example, were highly original and magically evocative. Another plus here is that much of the art is quite affordable.

If you want to continue following Washington’s trail, you can do it in Alexandria by visiting Market Square, where City Hall is flanked by several historical attractions. Washington actually shopped at the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary, and Gadsby’s Tavern Museum dates from his era too. Both offer tours.

Any of the above three trips make for a great one-day getaway, and plenty of other fantastic sights and scenes can be found across Central Virginia. Now’s the time to grab a map, get in the car, and get away.

Since its birth on September 5, 1882, Labor Day has provided every workingman and woman at least three crucial with things: an excuse for a picnic; a chance to sit in shore-related traffic; and an occasion to complain about work. For the al frescolunching and OBX traveling this Labor Day, you’re on your own. But when it comes to capturing just how miserable work can be, C-VILLE can get you started. From roller-skated table-waiting and street corner traffic-counting to cigar-making, box-packing and propaganda-spreading, 15 Charlottesvillians here unleash their horror stories from the job market. If nothing else, on this workforce holiday, you might find yourself grateful that you don’t have to pick coffee beans all day.

James Watts

Manager and cook

Garden of Sheba

In 1998, I was in need of some quick cash, so I took a job picking coffee beans for a day while visiting Guatemala. Not only was the job located high in the mountains but the weather was too cool in the morning, and far too hot in the middle of the day.

At the time, I thought it might be an adventure—until I realized how many actual beans you had to pick to make one U.S. dollar.

If I had owned the field, as if it was my coffee, maybe I would have seen it differently. But at that rate, picking one bean at a time, I knew it would take me years to get one day’s wage. I only lasted half of the day.

 

Susan Payne

President

Payne, Ross and Associates

In the early 1970s my mother made me take a job at the Vermont State Fair, so I worked at the "pig in a blanket" bar, a fancy name for selling corndogs out of a sweaty trailer. I was about 18. Eventually I made friends with everyone in the traveling circus.

I hung out with all of them from the bearded lady to the sword-swallower every night at the beer tent and little did I know I was making friends with them for life.

More than five years later while attending the Virginia State Fair with my new husband, [L.F. Payne, former U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Fifth District], lo and behold, who should run up to me but all of the same people from the traveling circus.

They all recognized me, ran up and started saying, "Hello Susan," and my husband must have really been wondering about the person he had just married.

 

Devon Sproule

Singer-songwriter

I waitressed at a restaurant in Woodstock, New York, called Heaven. I partly waitressed and partly answered the phone to take take-out orders. So it started with me answering the phone, "Hello, Heaven. This is Devon."

The worst day I had there I came in 15 minutes late and it turned out the boss had fired all the cooks. He was the only cook that day and I was the only waitress. In addition to yelling at me for being late, he was the most demanding and perfectionistic gay restaurant owner I had ever met. Every time there was a mistake in the order he would blame it on me. As a waitress you want to offer people breaks on things, and he would remind me to charge an extra 90 cents if someone ordered the black currant sauce instead of whatever else. At the end of the day I was literally in tears, and he said, "Guess it’s time to take off the roller skates, huh?" It was the only nice thing he said to me all day.

 

Saul Barodofsky

Owner

Sun Bow Trading Company

The year was 1966 and the President was Lyndon B. Johnson. I became a research investigator for the Office of Economic Opportunity under the President’s Commission for Manpower in Los Angeles, California. I supported the President’s Commission and actually took the job thinking I could make a difference. Instead my experience was utterly hellacious.

On my first day, I wore a suit and I was immediately told I was overdressed. When I asked them what was wrong they said it looked too expensive, and that I was making everyone else look bad. I told them I only owned one suit, and they said, "Well then, wear a sport coat."

For 20 hours per week, another part-timer and I collected data on the program, which was set up to retrain potential workers at different companies. That data then made work for 23 separate people in the LA office. For three months, I carried around this personal letter from President Johnson stating that he would personally appreciate it if the person I was talking to would give their full cooperation.

For one national moving company, for example, I learned that the "retraining" of potential workers amounted to 1,200 hours worth of lessons on sweeping and 3,000 hours on properly moving boxes.

And these companies actually got tax write-offs for this, while we taxpayers paid for this supposed training in which no one, in reality, was given any work experience. I would continue to ask these employers I was talking to, "What percentage of these trainees actually go to work for you?" They’d consistently respond, "Uh, we’d have to get back to you." I’d say, "Can you just guess a number, be it even a very vague number?" And they’d say, "We’d have to get back to you."

The best part is that they told me if I stayed the course, I could go to exotic and exciting places to have conferences, which is what most of these people spent their time doing. I couldn’t do it. I decided I would never work for another employer again. And I never did.

 

Cindy Stratton

Vice-chair

Albemarle-Charlottesville Branch

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

I worked as a carhop at Shoney’s on Barracks Road in the 1960s. People pulled their cars up to the monitor and placed their order, and I had to bring it out on my roller skates. I could barely even roller skate. But the worst part was my too-short black poodle skirt and dirty white blouse, full of not only food stains, but dirt from repeated falls on my skates.

Generally I tried to wait until I rolled inside to drop a tray of food, which didn’t always work. Luckily for me, shortly after I started, they decided to do away with the carhops on roller skates theme. I only lasted about three months.

When I look back on that I know I’d rather clean people’s houses than ever do that again.

 

Andrew Holden

Living Wage Activist 

The worst job I ever had was three jobs, a few years ago. I’d wake up at 4am, be on the road by 5 and arrive at my first job, working the line at the Plow & Hearth factory, by 6 in the morning. That job lasted until around 3 in the afternoon, though in December, 16-hour days weren’t uncommon.

I was employed seasonally, which meant I would get an extra 50 cents an hour—bringing my pay up to a whopping $6.50—if I lasted until after Christmas. A lot of people quit early, since the job meant working in a rush all day in silence, packing boxes and breathing in dusty, dry air from the mass quantities of cardboard in the warehouse.

After that I’d head home and rest for a few hours while waiting for my next job, at 6pm, washing dishes at the Tokyo Rose. Atsushi Miura’s a great boss, and he pays well. No complaints.

I’d head home around midnight and be up at 4am to do the whole thing over again. On Sundays I did janitorial/gopher work for Blue Ridge Mountain Sports.

Aside from just being exhausted and smelling like dead fish, the worst part was thinking it would never end. My insurance carrier had dropped me and I was paying most of my earnings directly into the 12 pills I have to take every day (for a genetic disease). There were a few times when I fell asleep at the wheel and almost drifted off the road on Route 29, which I’m not proud of, but it happened. I sold off most of my stuff to make ends meet, got a couple Madison County speeding tickets, and missed my family and friends terribly.

Eventually I just gave up on surviving with a job, and found life was a lot better without one. Some of my new streetpunk friends taught me about dumpster diving for food, and I eventually fell into a small anarchist commune house on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I’m still working hard of course, but now it’s to produce a better society, not more wealth for the already rich.

 

Jill Hartz

Director

UVA Art Museum

I think my worst job was during a college summer, when, because I was a fast typist, I took office jobs. I worked for an insurance company where I had to transcribe all day long interviews with people who had accidents, including car accidents where people had died. As a young person it was traumatic and frustrating to be inside every day during the summer. But it was a difficult job.

 

Horace Gerald Danner

Co-owner

Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie

My worst job was one in which I had to wear a three-piece suit. I learned very early on that I never wanted to do anything that required me to wear a suit and tie. Even now, if I have to go to an event, or a funeral, I’ll wear one of those straight collar shirts that don’t even allow you to wear a tie.

In 1985, I took a job as a glass salesman in the D.C. metro area. One other co-worker and I were considered "Beltway Bandits"—visiting large companies who bought glass in the greater D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia area.

I basically spent all day driving around and telling jokes and being jovial to these big-wig guys who were buying glass for one building project or another. It was horrible.

Along with my three-piece suit, I had this slicked-back hair and I weighed about 200 pounds.

Sadly enough, that was the most money I’ve ever made in my life. But it definitely wasn’t worth being rich, fat and about to have a heart attack.

 

Susanna Nicholson

Director

Union Yoga Loft

The best part of this particular job is I was fired on my birthday, which in some ways was a present. I went to work for a small, essentially vanity publisher in Northern Virginia and I did it because Eugene McCarthy had a manuscript there. I was told that he was too perfect to edit. They asked me instead to market these huge boxes of a book called Feeding Fido: A Gourmet Guide to Feeding Your Dog. It was a cookbook with incredibly time-consuming recipes dog owners could make for their dogs. I had to call around, go to cable station after cable station trying to push this.

The funny thing is, I’ve done window washing, but usually you find nice people in the grungy jobs. I remember once I did dishwashing but the guy next to me was a retired member of the Australian Navy who would recite Shakespeare. The worst part is these so-called glamour jobs—I worked for Us Magazine and I was forced to write a positive review of a Bruce Willis film, one of his bombs, and I had to write three positive lines for Us to be able to interview him. The next day my review was reprinted in an ad in The New York Times in big bold letters. You get a feeling in your gut, that stomach-churning feeling, when you realize you have your "dream job" and it turns into ashes.

 

Fran Smith

Graphic Artist

I worked for Blackstone Cigar Company. I sewed tobacco leaves together so that the little climbers from Puerto Rico could climb up to the rafters to hang them. We took the green leaves and sewed them on machines, 32 leaves per lath. Then Puerto Rican guys would come and climb to the top of the barn and hang the leaves to dry. It was in Simsbury, Connecticut. It was cigar tobacco, not cigarette tobacco.

I got this job because I wanted to go to college and I wanted to earn money. I could get hired there at 13. Because I was so big I got hired to be a supervisor, so I was a supervisor to kids my own age. After a few months they upped my salary to $2.25 an hour and that’s where my trouble started.

If you couldn’t get 32 leaves together sewing you could turn the machine down so you could do it slower. I told this one girl that if she couldn’t do it fast, she would have to have another job. So she went to Betty Jean, the power girl from North Philly, and told her that I said I was going to kick Betty Jean’s ass. Well, Betty Jean rode the bus with me back to Bristol. She sat behind me and it was an unusual day because the black kids and white kids were sitting together on the bus. I had no idea what was coming. Betty Jean said, "I heard today that you were looking to kick my ass." And then she hurt me pretty bad. Put a nail file on the inside of my mouth. I still have a scar over my eye from where she hit me. I got one good punch in and then she pulverized me. I walked home and my father said, "What happened to you?" I said, "I just walked into a wall." He said, "Whatever wall you walked into you better face it tomorrow. " And I did.

The next day I waited for her. I knew she smoked pot at 10 o’clock. I waited for her to come out from her potty break. I was much taller than her. I grabbed her hands and twirled her around until she was dizzy. I got her on the ground and punched her lights out. That girl’s face was a mess. It was to a point that if I was going to keep this job and get respect, I had to do this. It was not about being vicious. After that we became friends. She said, "Hey you’re tough." Then nobody could play us off each other. Betty Jean and I went to this girl who set us up and we just looked at her. She left.

 

Alex Gulotta

Executive Director

Legal Aid Society

Sometime between college and law school I worked at the Gunite Steel foundry in Rockford, Illinois. They had a steel foundry and an iron foundry, making wheels and brake drums for semi trailers. It was the best job and the worst job. The best because it was cash, baby. I was working my way through college, and it was good money. If you didn’t care about the conditions you worked under, it was the best summer job you could come by.

Working conditions…how should I put it? You couldn’t find OSHA in your alphabet soup. Dante’s Inferno is a fair comparison.

Most of the college students are on the night shift, so lunch is about 1am. The foundry is well over 100 degrees at that time, and you’re wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, a mask, earplugs, a long-sleeved shirt with leather arm covers, long pants and steel-toed work boots. You’re in this little cocoon.

There’s a job students would do called "skull pulling." Essentially, they’d melt metal in a huge oven that would tip and pour molten steel into big cauldrons, maybe 8′ tall and 6′ around. When you pour steel into a mold, some of it bubbles over. While it’s still red hot you have to break off the extra steel or it screws up the mold. You get a hook about 12" long and this little shovel, and for hours you "pull the skulls," these pieces of red-hot steel and dump it in a bucket. That’s your job. In the daytime, it would get to 130 degrees, and the guys who would do that job would pass out, so they’d round up college students to keep the line going. What got me through it was the fact that you worked on various aspects of the job. The concept of doing one thing all summer was death.

The crowning blows were "shutdowns," where everyone had a week off and the maintenance people would come in and work. We spent an entire week crawling down into these sub-basements that flooded regularly and get filled with this black, gritty, muddy sand. Our job was to spend all day shoveling this smelly muck into buckets someone would haul up and dump.

The dirt, the loud noise…it was almost awe-inspiring. The force and power of the machines were incredible. You cannot help but respect people who work in a place like that for a living, because it’s such hard work and the conditions are so disgusting––at least that’s how it was in the late ’70s.

I think that job influences me every day. I’ve worked a lot of labor jobs to work my way through school––working at grocery stores, blacktopping roads, painting houses. I respect the jobs people have to do because I know some of what’s involved, and I have to say it motivated me to stay in college.

I hope my kids have a period where they do different jobs. I can’t think of a better way to teach them about how the world really works.

 

Paul Curreri

Singer-songwriter

It’s really difficult to narrow it down. I was just making a list of all my bad jobs. The first on the list was telemarketing tickets for the Broadway musical Rent. The boss insisted for our morale on having the music from the show piped in all day, every day. We had to keep track of exactly when we made our calls. We have to make three a minute. So you’re writing down 3:31, 3:31, 3:31, 3:32 and in the meantime this music, "I will liiiiight a candle…" is playing in the background.

For two years I had a job called traffic engineer. But it was in reality traffic counting. From 7am to 7pm four days a week you sit on a corner at an intersection and push a button on a thing that looked like a GameBoy with a drawing of an intersection on it and a button above each lane. On the fifth day you entered your "data" in an office. It was used for timing traffic lights and it was cheaper to have two college kids do it than to pay for those strips that do it automatically. I figured out how to beat the system. For 54 minutes I would just sit there reading or sleeping or whatever and for the last 6 minutes I would record the traffic and push each button 10 times. The worst thing was that while I was doing that job I was taking medication for acne, so I couldn’t sit in the sun. So I literally had to sit there with a pillowcase over my head with a floppy hat on top of that. No kidding. I have a picture of it from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. People thought I was a burn victim or the Elephant Man or a member of the KKK or something.

There’s the mailroom in New York City where I would have to leave, because I was breaking down crying all the time. I realized I was just moving and lifting heavy stuff all day. My boss didn’t like me all that much and one day I knocked on her door. "Why don’t you just have a monkey do my job?" I asked her. Then I said, "I realized the monkey couldn’t read to see where the mail would go. That’s why you hired me."

I’m a vegetarian and the job I had for only one hour was in a steak house in Knoxville, Tennessee. I carried these enormous slabs of meat draped over my arm into the room where they would be cut into steaks. I didn’t last too long there.

 

Jen Sorensen

Cartoonist

I think probably the most colorful job I ever had was when I was a waitress in a Pennsylvania Dutch family restaurant. I had this big, teal green oversized jumper that was very matronly with white socks and white sneakers and a ponytail. But that wasn’t the worst part of the job. I had to serve this dish called hog maw. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy that consists of pigs’ stomachs that are stuffed with sausage and boiled potatoes. People were very enthusiastic about hog maw and very excited when it was on the menu. I would actually see trays of pig stomachs loaded into the oven—I actually worked that into a comic strip once. It’s not that it was bad, it was just kind of bizarre. The worst part was having to serve more tables than I was capable of serving.

The actual worst job I ever had was working in Hoboken in a coffee shop that seemed to be run by Mafioso-type guys. I can’t be sure that they were mobsters, but they were very intimidating and tough. One guy, when he was trying to make a point, was yelling at me once and threw a big pointed knife on the floor at my feet. There was definitely something shady going on there.

 

Browning Porter

Graphic artist, musician

When I finished my undergraduate degree at UVA in 1989, my plan was to take a job in my dad’s sign shop in Manassas, make signs by day and write poems, novels, screenplays, etc., by night. The first job given to me was strange, hopeless and horrible.

The shop had a client who was one of those builders responsible for throwing up McMansions all over the NoVa sprawl. Still giddy from the over-the-top opulence of the Reagan era, they had a notion to adorn each of their signs with a brass medallion about the size of an extra-large pizza, tricked out with their corporate logo in bas relief. When they learned how ridiculously expensive this would be, they still insisted that the shop imitate the effect by whatever means necessary.

My dad had no idea really how to do this, and so someone referred him to an expert sculptor who needed the work. The guy had been working for the Smithsonian, building giant fake rocks for one of their dinosaur exhibits. Apparently he knew how to do anything. His name was Viktor, and he was an unreformed Romanian Communist—somewhat of an insider in the Ceausescu regime—who had fallen out of favor and fled to America. Apparently before he had immigrated to this country, he had specialized in creating monolithic statues of party leaders, the kind that got hauled down and danced on by the oppressed masses only a few years later. Somehow this character landed in Manassas where he fashioned a method of casting giant fake brass medallions out of plastic for my father.

But Viktor didn’t quite fit in with the sign shop. He worked at his own pace—that of a party apparatchik, I suppose—and drank vodka all day long. When he spoke at all to co-workers, it was usually to disparage American capitalism or to hit them up for money. No sooner had he cooked up the first batch or so of medallions, than he quit. By the time I came home to work, he was long gone, and I had never met him. No one else knew how to do what he’d been doing, so it fell to me, the returning prodigal college boy, supposedly smart, to figure it out.

I was given Viktor’s big rubbery handmade molds, several dozen gallons of raw plastic goop to pour into them, a tiny vial of chemical catalyst, an old mechanical postal scale with which to measure out the catalyst, and a sort of dusty, wheezy Darth Vader-ish gas-mask to wear so that I didn’t asphyxiate. This stuff had fumes so deadly that I was also given an empty industrial warehouse all to myself in which to mix my vile concoctions. My dad had been able to rent very cheaply when the upholstery business it had housed went belly up, and so it was a very creepy, lonely place, filled with the hopeless skeletons of furniture and spiders.

One of my co-workers, an affable West Virginia country boy named Kenny, had found Viktor fascinating, and liked to visit me on his smoke breaks to tell me stories about him. "Viktor," he told me, "always used to wear them Walkmans on his head. I asked him once, ‘Viktor, what on earth are you listening to on them Walkmans all the time?’ And you know what he told me? ‘Classical music and static.’"

Casting the disks was a tricky business. The goop sort of looked like corn syrup and smelled like nail polish remover. One whiff of it without the Vader mask was enough to make you fall over dead of cancer. Too little catalyst in the plastic goop and the disks would turn out soft and sticky and gum up the mold. Too much catalyst and the chemical reaction would overheat and bake the disk right into the rubber. It didn’t help that the amount of catalyst called for in one casting was far less than the margin of error of my decrepit postal scale. I began with five molds, and after my third week I had ruined all but two of them. I was nervous, isolated and hypochondriacal.

Everyone in the shop listened to the same classic rock station, but I’d grown sick of their single 24-hour playlist scrambled fresh every day. (You knew you’d hear Strawberry Alarm Clock’s "Incense of Peppermints." You just didn’t know when.) I bought myself a Walkman, and I became addicted to NPR’s news in the afternoon, and soon I didn’t bother to change the station in the morning when they played Bach and the Mozart. The reception was lousy though, back in my ghostly upholstery shop, and so the station went in and out as I stalked around the premises, muttering chemical miscalculations to myself. One day I realized with a sudden horror that I was listening to nothing but classical music and static.

When I ruined the next-to-last mold, I got permission to purchase an expensive digital scale, and my father coaxed Viktor back for one day to show me what I was doing wrong. Viktor was very thin, white and humorless. He wore jeans and a blue denim vest without a shirt, so that his pale, round little vodka belly protruded over his belt. Sure enough, he never removed his headphones, and their wire seemed inextricably tangled in his long, greasy black hair. He talked like a sullen, mumbling Dracula.

He and Kenny and I went back to my empty warehouse to watch him work his magic. He refused to wear the Vader mask, and, in fact, kept a lit Marlboro in his mouth the whole time he stirred and poured the toxic goop, while Kenny and I stood well away and waited for him to burst into flames. He didn’t bother with the scale either, but somehow eye-balled the correct amount of catalyst, tapping it out of its vial as if it were pepper in a pot of borscht. He seldom spoke or met our gaze, and when he’d finished casting the medallion, we all stepped outside to smoke.

"Viktor, I understand that you know all about statues," said Kenny. "I was wondering what you thought of the Statue of Liberty." Viktor sneered, mumbled something about the doomed Romanticism of the bourgeoisie. And Kenny said, "Well, I think it’s a pretty good statue. There’s just one problem with it. It ought to have a No Vacancy sign on it." Viktor spit and flicked his cigarette into the weeds.

Viktor’s casting worked just fine, and he collected his pay and left. I learned nothing from his demonstration except that I had no aptitude for working with toxic and persnickety chemicals, and soon I’d ruined the last of Viktor’s molds. One of my co-workers stole my digital scale, and it no doubt was put to good use weighing out perfect quarter-ounces. My Dad convinced the client that they couldn’t afford even fake brass medallions for all their signs. I gave up on Manassas, and moved back to Charlottesville to join a band and get an MFA in poetry. I still make my living in graphic arts.

 

Meredith Richards

Vice-Mayor

City of Charlottesville

When I was in college, I would spend my summers as a temp working for ManPower. Most of the jobs lasted a week or two and they were replacements for people on vacation. The worst one I can remember was bad not because of the people but because of the task. It was in a construction trailer in the middle of nowhere. Nothing for miles around, but me and a bunch of men. They were doing legal construction contracts and I had to day in and day out sit in this sweltering trailer typing letter-perfect contracts on legal paper on an IBM Selectric, and every time I made a mistake I had to rip out the paper and type again. It was terrible.

I remember a lot of stressful and tough jobs during that period as a temp. Sometimes people would call a temp because they had so much work they were overwhelmed. You’d arrive Monday morning and never lift your head from your work until Friday evening. Other jobs were bad because they were boring and you had nothing to do but answer the phone. I don’t envy people who work in temp agencies and I did that for four summers.

Fall. The leaves change colors. The sleeves get longer. And enduring sad girls with guitars replaces tubing on the James as the recreational activity of choice. The new cultural season is almost here, and C-VILLE has selected the best bets in music, art, stage, film and more to keep you busy from now until December. Some names to remember: Zephyrus, Kiwirrkura Village, How to Marry a Millionaire, Roxana Robinson, Loudon Wainwright III and Bernarda Alba. All these and more will carry you from perfecting your summer tan to more intellectual, but no less excellent, adventures in the coming months. And check in every week to C-VILLE’s GetOutNow section to find out who else should be on your need-to-know list in our City’s culture club.

MUSIC

Some may harrumph and grouse about the supposed poverty of exciting bands slated to play the City this fall. Pop fans squealed in anticipation when a certain Ivy-based music website recently floated the rumor that Jewel had booked Starr Hill. It proved false (shocking!), and if your idea of excitement is a folk star turned dance diva, the coming months will indeed find you sorely out of luck. However, if you crave alt-country heroes, wild fiddlers, the return of ’80s pop stars, ’90s grunge rock beauties and, more importantly, the return of a beloved local musician, then start saving your pennies.

The Gravity Lounge, the Internet café/art gallery/performance venue recently opened in The Terraces, closes out this month with the return of Lauren Hoffman on August 30, hosted by well-known local performers Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri. Not long after the release of 1999’s From the Blue House, Hoffman—a former Virgin Records artist and one of the City’s cherished virtuosos—abruptly ended her “Shut Up and Listen!” concert series, quit the music scene and vanished. Even if briefly, she’s come home for an anticipated and, no doubt, well-attended performance. Hoffman plays again on September 18, joined by Jan Smith, who fills the venue’s Thursday night slots this fall. The next night Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens, the classic ’80s “new wave” band found on the Desperately Seeking Susan soundtrack, joins Lance Brenner, the lead singer of local group The Naked Puritans. Halloween may find you back at the Lounge to soak up the fiddling prowess of Laura Light, a nationally respected locally-based singer and composer.

DiNizio isn’t the only ’80s rock demi-god in town on September 19. Even Fridays After 5, the consistently rained-out series brought to us by the Charlottesville Downtown Foundation, has something to offer. Foreigner’s lead singer Lou Gramm, this year’s postponed superstar, finally graces the Downtown Amphitheater on his solo tour, and we pray he retains the good sense to sing “Double Vision” or “Waiting for a Girl Like You” through that frizzled mop of hair.

All the mindless ’80s music may send you screaming and full of thanks to The Prism, the bastion of Rugby Road and favored stop of solid, earnest, acoustic acts. September 25 brings together Darrell Scott, a Nashville singer/songwriter now known for penning Dixie Chicks hits recently crushed by pro-war bulldozers, and Beppe Gambetta, a lush Italian guitarist. The Athens, Georgia, group Dromedary visits on September 27 to play their eclectic and acclaimed music (Bolivia meets Spains meets Turkey meets Appalachia), before they hit the big time, at least as The Prism sees it, and country bluesmen Cephas & Wiggins settle down with harmonica and guitar on October 24.

Such respectable and shadowy tunes may not satisfy your urge to rock out or your deep-seated need for star identification. No Robert Plants have been confirmed, but Starr Hill Music Hall can offer you Loudon Wainwright III, one of America’s great, insolent singer/songwriters, and father of Rufus (a rising star in his own right), on September 13. For more insolence, The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash play the next week, on September 21, and no, they’re not illegitimate offspring, and no, they don’t sound like Johnny Cash, but they play newfangled country so well that the Man in Black would be proud. Recipients of critical accolades, Robert Walter’s 20th Congress unleash their top-notch brand of jazz and funk on September 23 to support the release of the new album Giving up the Ghost. The bagpipes and electric guitars of the Celtic modern rock outfit Seven Nations on October 1 precede the appearance of indie-punk superheroes Built to Spill on October 5. Flocked by leagues of loyal fans, Built to Spill love their Stratocasters and riff with electric distortion in maddeningly intricate ways. Then, of course, there’s Evan Dando. The little-grunge-heartthrob-who-tried and former Lemonheads lead drops by on October 12, in perhaps the season’s highest star wattage performance, to show off his solo album Baby I’m Bored. We hear Juliana Hatfield plays drums for Dando, too, and he’s sharing the stage with Georgia’s Vic Chestnutt, a legend in alt-country circles. Hot off a tour with Beck, The Black Keys spin hot, electronic sounds from their new record Thickfreakness on October 15, and then bluegrass superstar Sam Bush and his mandolin fulfill the City’s obsession with Americana roots music on November 1. On the local front, funk soul brothers Man Mountain Jr. hold a CD release party September 5 with hip-hopsters The Beetnix, while C-VILLE faves Vevlo Eel play September 19.

Thankfully, many of the aforementioned acts take Charlottesville audiences far afield of the loud, artless frat rock and dirty—pardon me, earthy—musicians with guitars and banjos that pervade the local scene. Wild card venues like Tokyo Rose and the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, whose schedules are more spontaneous, will undoubtedly showcase the exciting fringes of both local and national music. The Rose features Scene Creamers, a dark and funky neo-soul outfit, on October 14, and Palomar’s catchy bubble-gum pop on November 6. Indie rockers and electronic maestros and even a few worthwhile singing guitarists will fly low, under the radar, and wow you when you’re least expecting it. Stay tuned. —Aaron Carico

 

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Charlottesville continues to be the hub of classical music in Central Virginia this fall with a full concert season of series and single events.

The first major event is the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival at the Jefferson Theater in September and October. Excellent young musicians will perform a series of concerts of music from the 18th to the 20th centuries, including violinist/viola player Timothy Summers, cellist Raphael Bell, and pianists Judith Gordon and Lidija Bizjak, with renowned locals Pete Spaar and John D’earth contributing to the October 2 concert. The program goes as follows: September 18, music by Clara Schumann, Brahms and Dvorák; September 21, works by Beethoven, Dohnanyi and Golijov; September 25, music by Ravel, Kernis and Beethoven; September 28, works by Bach, Britten and Beethoven; and October 2, contemporary works by Kancheli, D’earth, Reich and Adams. The contemporary works, including the Kernis and Golijov, look to be of particular interest. The festival wraps up October 5 at the Woodberry Forest School with pieces by Schumann, Britten and Beethoven.

The Tuesday Evening Concert Series at Old Cabell Hall, always a sell-out, opens September 30 with a recital by the gifted young violinist Gil Shaham, accompanied by pianist Akira Eguchi, playing works by Copland, Bach and Fauré. On October 21 Colin Carr (cellist) with Lee Luvisi (pianist) performs works by Brahms and Schumann, and on November 18 the Talich String Quartet will play music by Schubert, Bartók and Dvorák.

On October 4 and 5 the Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of director Carl Roskott, inaugurates its season by performing a work by UVA professor Judith Shatin, Singing the Blue Ridge, as well as Mozart’s Oboe Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2. The soloist in the Mozart concerto will be Scott Perry, principal oboist of the Orchestra. The Orchestra performs next on November 15 and 16, with a program devoted to 20th century music, including Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by C.M. von Weber. Also to be heard are Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and selections from Copland’s Old American Songs with the University Singers conducted by Michael Sion.

Additional concerts include the UVA Chamber Music Series sponsored by the University’s music department, directed by Amy Leung and Ibby Roberts, and featuring classical and modern works, played on Sundays at 3:30pm in Old Cabell Hall by the Albemarle Ensemble and Rivanna String Quartet. Fall dates include September 21, performing Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 54, Barber’s Summer Music, Britten’s Sinfonietta, Op. 1, and Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp. On November 9 the series feature a cello recital by Amy Leung.

The Oratorio Society, under direction of Lance Vining, will perform Orff’s Carmina Burana at PVCC’s V. Earl Dickinson Hall on October 19, and will give its traditional Candlelight Holiday Concert in Old Cabell Hall on December 14. Zephyrus, Charlottesville’s own vocal-instrumental ensemble specializing in music before 1700 under the direction of Dr. Paul Walker, can be expected to offer a program at a local church, and organ recitals are often featured at some churches in town also.

Concerts are also regularly given at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and The Prism, usually devoted to jazz and folk music, sometimes presents classical concerts by rising young artists. Keep an eye out. All in all, classical music fans should expect to be kept very busy this fall.—Martin Picker

 

 

ART

The Charlottesville art scene is changing. With the closings of Gallery Neo and Nature, showing grounds for younger—if not better, at least more imaginative—artists have been drying up. At the same time, several events this fall suggest that on some level Charlottesville has reached a new plateau. Shows at Les Yeux du Monde and the UVA Art Museum, and the opening of Second Street Gallery’s new space in the City Center for Contemporary Arts (or C3A) are all important steps.

Of course, there will also be the standard fare of gallery shows. McGuffey Art Center’s fall schedule includes paintings by Gresham Sykes and the Virginia Watercolor Society (September); oil paintings by Caroline Cobb and stained glass designs by Vee Osvalds (October); and collage artist Susan Patrick and Leon Gehorsam’s watercolors (November). Bozart Gallery’s schedule includes member artists Anne Hopper’s oils (September), Amy Mitchell Howard’s work in mixed media (October) and Vidu Parta’s oils and acrylics (November). Both close the year with annual group shows.

The more compelling shows will be at the big venues. The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Center fall exhibitions include “Whichaway? Photographs from Kiwirrkura 1974–1996” and “Sacred Circles: The Tingari Cycle in Western Desert Art” (August 23–November). In the former, Jon Rhodes documents 22 years in the life of the Kiwirrkura village in Western Australia. The latter focuses on the symbolism of the graphic circles that represent the Dreaming, the ancestral journeys of the aborigines. Together they present an interesting balance between an outsider’s interpretation and the portrayal of ancient aboriginal lore.

With its recent exhibition “Modern Masters,” Les Yeux du Monde seemed posed to be a bigger commercial dealer. Is there any other for-profit space in the region offering up such art stars as Basquiat and Andy Warhol? With its fall roster of local artists that include photographs by Barnaby Draper (October), paintings by Lincoln Perry (November) and drawings by Beatrix Ost (December), Les Yeux du Monde will, for the moment, return to more local roots. With September’s “Hindsight/Fore-site Revisited,” works by the artists from the last year’s original “Hindsight/Fore-site” project will be exhibited. Many, like Todd Murphy and Barbara MacCullum, represent the growing number of area artists with reputations farther afield. With this exhibition, Les Yeux du Monde reminds us of the strong arts undercurrent running through the community.

Les Yeux also gets in on the 16th Annual Virginia Film Festival, showing a documentary about three VCU artists (October). This year’s festival theme, “$,” will also be the theme of the City-wide Fringe Festival—an all arts collaboration between the studio arts, art history, drama, dance, music, architecture, and creative writing departments at the University taking place October 17-November 2. The Fringe Festival showcases the work of student artists, as well as some locals. In the past, it has been a big, rambling affair with an art opening one night and a large dance party the weekend of the festival. Although the quality of the work is sure to be as varied as the work itself, it promises to be interesting.

Also in conjunction with the Film Festival, the UVA Art Museum will present “Third Memory,” a video installation by Pierre Huyghe (October 21–November 30). The rest of the museum’s scheduled exhibitions run the gamut from “Roads Taken: 20th Century Prints and Drawings from the Collection” (August 16–October 5), new work by Gay Outlaw—known originally for his sculptures built with pastries (August 30–October 12), O. Winston Link’s photographs of the dying railroad industry (October 11–December 21) and “The Moon has No Home,” Japanese woodblock prints (November 22–March 2004).

This fall also marks the culmination of Tim Rollins’ residency at the University. This past year, Rollins brought the Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) project to Charlottesville. Rollins trained University students in his unique teaching methods and led workshops with the children participating in the University Art Museum’s summer program. The students made works based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. The result, “Purple with Love’s Wound” (September 19–November 9), is the final stage in the project. The exhibition features the large-scale collage made by the students in the workshops.

By far the most anticipated—and long-reaching—event of the fall will be the opening of Second Street Gallery’s new home in the C3A on Water Street. The old space will close with a fitting tribute to the community that supports it. “Artists Among Us: Art by Second Street Gallery Artists Members” (September 5–28) will feature—well, artist members. The new space will open with “30 Years: Three Decades of New Art at Second Street Gallery” (November 7–February 1), an exhibition of new work by 56 past exhibitors. The exhibition features national artists like Shelby Lee Adams, Emmett Gowin and Mel Chin. Regional artists will include Dean Dass, Sally Mann and Anne Slaughter.

It is a significant achievement to pass one’s 30th year as an alternative art space. This exhibition and the catalogue that accompany it should be viewed as an accomplishment for both the arts community and the City at large. It also signals the beginning of a whole new era for area artists.—Emily Smith

 

 

STAGE

What glistening treasures this fall await the theatergoer’s quest for entertainment? What juicy fruits will bloom on the trees of drama’s autumnal orchard? While dates remain hazy and program changes may occur, here are some first glimmers of what you can expect, what’s likely to seem important and be important, and a few predictions on the good, the bad and the ugly.

On September 19, Live Arts opens Coffeehouse 13, its last show in the company’s current home on E. Market Street before moving this fall to the City Center for Contemporary Arts—or C3A—currently being built on Water Street. The new theater isn’t finished, and funding is stretched tighter than Roseanne Barr’s trampoline, so expect the well-oiled Live Arts publicity engine to hype, hype, hype the new space. The hype is entirely justified, but for the general public this final coffeehouse is the more important event.

Coffeehouses were collections of locally written skits presented in a cabaret style. This show’s theme will be “diversity.” You may think Live Arts discussing diversity is like a cigarette company discussing physical fitness. But that’s the point. Coffeehouses past lampooned Charlottesville, the Downtown scene and Live Arts itself. It was a healthy corrective and a rare virtue in the modern world: ironic self-awareness. Some of the skits will fall flat, some of the acting will be bad, but Coffeehouse 13 should be entertaining overall. And for those of us who remember when the Downtown scene really was a scene and Live Arts a self-governing group of artist wannabes, Coffeehouse 13 will mark a bittersweet goodbye.

In early October UVA Drama opens The House of Bernarda Alba by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. It’s about matriarchal domination and sexual repression. You thought Russian literature was depressing? Bring your elephant-strength intravenous Prozac boosters to this one.

Also in early October, Barboursville’s Four County Players will present Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, one of Simon’s sweet, gently comic autobiographical plays. Four County usually does a good job with this sort of material. Watch Bernada Alba and Brighton Beach on consecutive nights to see if the contrast will cause your head to explode.

In late October Offstage Theater opens A Fortune in Antarctica at a yet-to-be-determined location. It’s a story of explorers competing to rescue a fellow adventurer who has been taken captive by penguins. For those offended by C-VILLE’s theater commentary over the last couple years, bring tomatoes to throw. The script is by this paper’s regular theater critic—me. Maybe if you bring a clipping of a nasty comment I’ve written about you, Offstage will discount your ticket.

UVA’s second show of the season will be November’s Way of the World by William Congreve. It’s a Restoration classic, urbane and cynical, about a witty woman and a witty man who want to marry in a world where everyone else is a hypocrite or a fool. The big deal here is the show will be directed by visiting artist Sabin Epstein, former resident director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

Early December brings the opening of Live Arts’ new space on Water Street with Grapes of Wrath. The script by Frank Galati was apparently developed over several years by the famed Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago. Of course, it’s from the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. Okies, forced from their Dust Bowl homes during the Great Depression, arrive in California to find their troubles have barely begun. Although Live Arts’ new theater isn’t yet finished, the proportions of the stage area are beautiful, and director Betsy Tucker’s reputation should ensure a good talent pool. Grapes should be a moving show.

Also in early December, Four County Players presents an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. This is a family-oriented show, of course, meaning children will be enthralled, adults will be relieved, and teenagers will feign petulant embarrassment.

In middle-to-late December, Offstage will present a satirical Christmas show for the Scrooge in all of us, with any luck in the new space being completed behind Rapture restaurant.

Staunton’s Shenandoah Shakespeare company also has a full slate this fall in the Blackfriars Playhouse, including continuing summer fare like King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing and Knight of the Burning Pestle (September through November), followed by Moliere’s farce Tartuffe, the world premiere of The Holiday Knight (based on Pestle and featuring holiday songs throughout the ages), and the annual A Christmas Carol. In 2004 look forward to Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Importance of Being Earnest and Henry IV, Part One.

Also keep your eyes open for shows from Piedmont’s ever-improving drama department, student projects in UVA’s Helms, offerings from the sporadic ACT I and Scottsville’s Horseshoe Bend Players.

Looking ahead to 2004, look for Live Arts to stage the regional premieres of Pulitzer Prize-winner Topdog/Underdog and David Mamet’s Boston Marriage (January), as well as current Broadway smash Nine (based on Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, March), The Play About the Baby (April) and artistic director John Gibson’s labor of love, Angels in America: Part 1, finally comes to Charlottesville in June.

As for quality, most of the plays above will be too long with too many “deep” melodramatic pauses and way too many slow cue pick-ups. There will be nasty backstage gossip, pretentious stupidity, and zeppelin-sized egos. But there will also be some beautiful scenes, some honest performances, and several shows that hint—and perhaps one which even proves—that theater could theoretically create a form of communication richer, broader and more entertaining than movies or pop songs.—Joel Jones

 

 

BOOKS

While spring’s Festival of the Book draws literati types like bees to honey, the fall offers plenty of book events featuring both nationally touring authors as well as the home-grown variety.

Like John Grisham, whose literary fame mandates number-taking at his New Dominion book signings. Grisham releases his new book Bleachers, an earnest tome about Southern high-school football, on September 9, but the tedium of adoring fans has led him, at least this time, to just hand over signed books to New Dominion—no more face-to-face interaction. September 30 brings Roxana Robinson, a realist author and critic’s favorite, to the bookstore to read and sign Sweetwater, which tells of family conflict in New York City and the Adirondacks. Local hiker George Meek and his book Time for Everything: A Six Year Adventure on the Appalachian Trail arrive on October 4 to reassure the audience that he did not, in fact, get terrifically lost. Don Webster, a National Geographic correspondent, discusses the harrowing defense of China in World War II from his Burma Road on October 15. And An Imperfect God exposes the truth behind George Washington’s relationship with slavery, as local historian Henry Wiencek discusses on October 23.

The corporate giant we all love to hate—or really, just love—Barnes & Noble brings in the authors to please the masses. Preeminent Civil War historian and UVA professor Gary Gallagher discusses The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 on September 18, followed on September 20 by the inspirational churnings of Tommy Reamon, who wrote Rough Diamonds: A Coach’s Journey. The Madam, a novel about a West Virginia whorehouse filled with quirky characters and stilted writing, and its author Julianna Baggott appear on September 29. Barnes & Noble realizes the season would be incomplete without an October 3 reading by David Baldacci of his new book Split Second and a November 4 discussion by Rita Mae Brown of her Full Cry.

If the populist fluff has your elitist heart yearning for depth, fear not. UVA will supply. Historian Andro Linklater reads from his riveting new look at the American dream of property ownership, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy on October 7. Don’t forget your coffee, in case he decides to read the title. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 receives attention in a reading by beloved UVA History Professor Ed Ayers on November 6. The horrible yet titillating issue of killer children is the focus of Joan Brumberg’s Kansas Charley: A Boy Murderer from the American Past, about a homicidal 15-year-old in 1890 and his execution, in her reading on November 19.

By this time, you’ll probably need to escape into poetry and fiction, which is provided with readings by UVA professors Debra Nystrom, from her long-awaited new verse collection Torn Sky, and fiction writer Christopher Tilghman on November 20. And although the dates must still be confirmed, superstar authors Francine Prose and Anne Carson visit for readings this fall, too.—Aaron Carico

 

 

FILM

Just like the next Matrix sequel, fall is coming quickly, and eager cinema buffs will have a full menu of interesting choices to peruse this season, both from the local camera and national lens.

First and foremost, the 16th annual Virginia Film Festival takes over town October 23-26, and the weekend-long event—an increasingly star-studded venture, with Nicholas Cage and the omnipresent Roger Ebert among last year’s attendees—promises to live up to its established standard of topicality.

While last year’s theme was “Wet,” which was on everyone’s mind given the drought that plagued the City, this year’s festival theme, “$,” tackles money in all its forms. With unemployment hovering around 6 percent nationwide—and also on the rise locally—corporate governance scandals on every horizon and deficits ballooning, the organizers have again shown an uncanny knack for getting right to what interests (or ails) us at the moment.

“Since many believe that our last theme helped bring about the end of the region’s drought,” Festival Director Richard Herskowitz modestly observes on the Festival’s website www.vafilm.com, “we’re hoping this year’s ‘$’ theme will turn around the economy.”

Films scheduled for the festival thus far include Greed, The Lavender Hill Mob, Citizen Kane, Wall Street, Take the Money and Run, How to Marry a Millionaire, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Gold Rush. Those who find themselves particularly burdened (or is that bird-end?) with money troubles will even have an opportunity to check out the cartoon legacy of Scrooge McDuck. Additionally, the festival will host presentations on such topics as film financing and the world of public funding for non-commercial media.

Speaking of the film festival, those of you who have been enjoying the retrospective of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s films at Vinegar Hill this summer will be glad to hear that more have been added to the agenda. According to Vinegar Hill management, the series, which showcases Kurosawa’s collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune and is itself a collaboration between the theater and the VFF, will show six more titles than had originally been scheduled. Instead of ending with The Seven Samurai on August 21, Vinegar Hill will show I Live in Fear, Red Beard, Sanjuro, Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths and an encore of The Seven Samurai, with the films being shown every other week on Wednesdays and Thursdays, wrapping up November 19 and 20.

In addition to moving to new digs in the City Center for Contemporary Arts in October, Light House, the local film mentoring program for teenagers, will continue its “youth media tower” at Whole Foods Market through September. The kiosk will show Home Again, a collection of short autobiographical documentaries made by young refugees from Togo, Afghanistan, Bosnia and other countries who resettled in Charlottesville. You might have caught the films when they premiered in June at Vinegar Hill Theatre. In September, Charlottesville Public Access Television picks up Home Again, along with Light House’s Reel Stories, which features teens’ thoughts and views on Charlottesville. Check your local listings for details.

The fall should also bring updates on local director Paul Wagner’s journey to screening his recently completed feature, ANJLZ, to an audience. As reported in this paper, ANJLZ was almost entirely a local production, funded with local dollars and with a cast and crew drawn largely from Charlottesville-based technicians and artists.

“Currently we have a very funny, very crazy rough cut of ANJLZ that runs about 90 minutes,” Wagner tells C-VILLE. “Over the next few weeks we’ll lay in some music and then present the film to a few small audiences to get some critical feedback and also to raise the funds we need to complete the post-production. We’re also starting to show the movie to people in the film biz beyond Charlottesville to set up distribution.

“Sometime this fall we’ll throw a private screening for the cast and crew,” he says. “The rest of Charlottesville will have to wait until we get the distribution in place, probably in early 2004.” Which gives us something to look forward to next year.—Paul Henderson