Author: cathy-harding

Forget the $6 million man. Try the $6 million “cottage.” Vintner-socialite Patricia Kluge completed one such 6,000-square-foot structure on her Blenheim Road property last month and the luxury subdivision it heralds, Vineyard Estates, promises bionic proportions of its own.

Start with the marketing (which, right now, is the bulk of what’s under consideration, given that 23 of the other “estates” Kluge intends to add to her 2,000-acre parcel aren’t there yet). In two months, Kluge’s project has been in the Robb Report, that Bible of luxury living, The Washington Post and The New York Times, where Kluge revealed, in one of VE’s few unscripted moments, a decidedly plebeian side of the development (“we’re not doing this for poetry,” she reportedly said, on the subject of lowering her real estate taxes). Which is to say nothing of VE’s marketing, which includes ads in Wine Enthusiast and a two-page spread in The New Yorker’s recent Food Issue. Kluge spokeswoman Kristin Moses Murray anticipates ads in Departures and Centurion, too, where they’ll reach “those who travel and seek the finer things,” Murray says by e-mail. Add a 14-minute online video that invites you to “awaken to America’s Eden,” meaning Carter Mountain, and you have the full-court press of luxury promotion.

The marketing for Vineyard Estates “is designed to sell a lifestyle, rather than a home,” in the words of Patricia Kluge’s publicist.

The concept: two dozen giant “turnkey” homes, priced between $6 million and $23 million, situated on 511 acres around Albemarle House, what vineyardestatesonline.com calls Kluge’s “family seat.” (This project is being built by-right, following county planners’ rejection of a 2003 proposal that would have configured the houses somewhat differently.) Included among the amenities are a round-the-clock concierge service and the option of cultivating “private label” wine with assistance from Kluge Winery personnel. All this and more, the British-born Kluge promises in her regal accent, will support a lifestyle of “emotional comfort.”

And as if the link among prospective deep-pocketed wine enthusiasts and the grand lady herself were not enticement enough, the great man is trotted out to cinch the deal, America’s first wine snob and Albemarle’s most famous neighbor, Mr. Jefferson. The online brochure even depicts a view from Monticello, promising that a view from VE will be identical.

In the 20 years since she moved out of her ex-husband’s adjoining mansion and into her own, Kluge has rarely detoured from her ambition to build a brand (the recent shuttering of Fuel, her bistro-gas station concept that failed to sweep the nation, let alone the corner of Market and Ninth streets, doesn’t seem to have thrown her). Indeed, she declares she will build her winery to one of the largest on the East Coast and her wines, like VE, were covered by national media when they were young. Plus, with wine consumption spiking nationally and the sliver of ultrarich Americans getting richer, Vineyard Estates may well be communicating the right message at the right time. As spokeswoman Murray puts it, the “marketing is designed to sell a lifestyle, rather than a home.”

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The blonde from New York may not have understood her own true whereabouts on Sunday afternoon, standing in front of Sal’s on the Mall, but nevermind—she was assured in her opinion. “She really won the thing,” the visitor said of Hillary Clinton’s 75-minute fundraiser at the Paramount. And why had this investment banker traveled the 350 miles to see her Senator in a mildly scripted conversation with famous Democrat John Grisham, especially when Hillary had been on all five political talk shows that very same morning? “I wanted to see how she did in a red state.” Cue the map showing a blue oasis within the Republican Commonwealth, please.

Indefatigable, and with a pretty sweater, to boot: Hillary Clinton hit five Sunday morning political talk shows before making her way to the Paramount for a fundraiser with John Grisham, who asked her, among other things, if it was “kind of fun to be the only girl in the race."

Indeed, it came as no surprise that Charlottesville would yield a warm crowd for Hillary. People don’t pay up to $2,300 per ticket so they can heckle, particularly when the candidate leads the Democrats and the buzz is heavy on how Virginia is “winnable” in a general election given Kaine and Webb and now Warner’s chance to take the whole senatorial shooting match. When Hillary settled in next to Grisham, framed on stage by 52 big donors and student volunteers, she allowed as to how she won’t cede any part of these fine United States and before things got rolling the campaign’s senior spokesman said that Hillary “doesn’t want to wait” because “Virginia is a changing state.”

Yes, she’s not the official candidate yet, but that seemed like a technicality as she rolled through a greatest hits package of domestic and international talking points (ably aided in this by Grisham, who promised he would not, like Chris Matthews, “rudely interrupt” her, nor would he, like Larry King “fall asleep,” and neither would he, like Tim Russert, “remind her of things she said to the contrary 25 years ago”). Her topics? Among other things, education (“we have a teacher shortage because we have a respect shortage”); America’s global profile (“After I’m elected…I will send a very simple message: The era of cowboy diplomacy is over”); global warming; and, of course, health care. Hillary’s marathon session supporting her new health care plan earlier that day was already a centerpiece of online news analysis by afternoon (except apparently in The Washington Times, whose national political correspondent seated next to me downloaded and edited transcripts for the duration of the Paramount event), and she devoted the greatest chunk of time to her claim that “Americans want government to regulate the quality and cost of health care.”

But this was more than a fundraiser (estimated take: $200,000). It was an icebreaker, insofar as the former First Lady still has an image problem in some quarters. To wit, she seems chilly. Former Charlottesville mayor John Conover, for one, was satisfied: “I’d describe her as relaxed. People were wondering, does she have two feet and an ass?” Sherry Kraft, co-chair of the city’s Democratic Party, lauded the format for giving a glimpse of what Hillary is like “when she loosens up.”

For sure, Hillary ladled more than a few folkisms into her repurposed stump speech. Diplomacy, she said, sometimes seemed “slow as molasses moving uphill in the wintertime.” She told pitiful family stories about being a Chicago Cubs fan. And there was this one too: A yarn about how Arkansas-born Grisham was “like, 17th cousin twice removed” from her husband Bill, a discovery that was made shortly after that Clinton was elected to the White House. To which Grisham noted wryly—and with passing reference to his checkbook—that once you hit a certain level of success, “you have kin folk picking up everywhere."

For more information: The Charlottesville Podcasting Network has audio of Ms. Clinton’s interview at the Paramount.

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stage

The collegiate cast of Hair—and most of the audience on opening night last week—could be forgiven for thinking the recurring song “Manchester” was an homage to the birthplace of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. For though the musical is 40 years old, under Thadd McQuade’s direction it seems to be located nowhere specific, neither in terms of time nor space, and insofar as there are no visual cues to suggest that the score and plot relate to East Village hippies who resist the Vietnam War—well, who’s to say the catchy number isn’t being sung by a guy wanting to pass himself off as part of the Madchester scene of the 1990s?

Locks of love: Thadd McQuade directs a relatively tamed Hair. Well, we’ll always have the original cast recordings.

And therein lies the challenge with staging today a musical that shocked and thrilled audiences two generations ago. The Broadway-era Hair inspired courtroom discussion about whether government could close down a show before it opened (town fathers in Tennessee apparently found lyrics about cunnilingus and sodomy along with the mass nudity that ended the first act to be just too much to anticipate). But these days, post-American Pie, with every middle schooler in America well versed in the art of going down, what can possibly be done with Hair to retain the vibrancy of its counter-cultural themes while acknowledging that times, as measured by the shock-o-meter, have changed?

McQuade, always an interesting director and much appreciated since his days with Foolery, has avoided going the nostalgia route. Nary a thread of tie-dye is in sight, and, even more significantly, the coiffures are pretty darn tame. He’s not presenting a ’60s homage act. Fine.
But what is he presenting? If it’s a commentary on how the current unpopular war and society’s response to it parallels Lyndon Johnson’s mess, well that doesn’t exactly work. All those songs about burning draft cards bear marginal relevance now (though one character’s line about how the draft is “white people sending black people to kill yellow people to defend the land they stole from red people” needs only a teeny bit of tweaking to sound current). If it’s a distillation of Hair’s themes, well, O.K., the completely stripped, vaguely industrial set helps toward that goal, though it mostly got me thinking about art from the Gulag or other such drab Eastern European themes. If it’s a collection of well-executed songs about youthful disgruntlement and the complications of freedom, now you’re getting close.

For if there’s one thing that can still be said about Hair, however the cast is costumed and wherever the scene is located, it’s this: Great score. “Aquarius,” “Easy To Be Hard,” “Colored Spade,” the list of hits goes on and on. Even if I couldn’t be sure why these kids were up there and what it was that motivated them, I was reassured by their musical performances. Let the sun shine in, indeed.

The kids had plans with friends at Chris Greene Lake, so last August 19 their parents, Colin and Virginia Glasgow, packed them into the family’s blue Toyota van and headed out from their home in Crozet. The plan: drop the kids (a son and daughter) and Virginia at the lake while Colin, unemployed, would continue his job search. Sadly, what should have started out as an unremarkable Saturday ended up in trauma.

Colin Glasgow, 44, who will serve 12 years for taking his family on a terror-filled ride, keeping them in the car for hours, then crashing the vehicle into a tree. Reportedly, his wife wanted a divorce.

Colin Glasgow kept his family hostage in the vehicle while he took them on a wild and dangerous driving spree, eventually wrapping the van around a large tree in an Earlysville yard in what law enforcement authorities categorized as an attempted murder-suicide. With his family inside and injured, Glasgow ran away from the scene.

On Tuesday, April 17, after being held without bond in the regional jail, he was sentenced to serve 12 years for abduction, child endangerment and domestic assault. In January, he entered an Alford plea on these and other charges, meaning he acknowledged that there was enough evidence to convict him. When Glasgow, 44, gets out of jail, he will have three years of supervised probation. If he puts together 40 years of good behavior, including getting and keeping a full-time job, then he will be allowed to see Virginia and his children again.

Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jon Zug, who tried the case in Albemarle Circuit Court, says that Virginia Glasgow believes her declared intention to divorce Colin prompted his reckless behavior. As for whether 40 years without contact between him and his family is an exceptionally harsh restriction, Zug is emphatic: “He tried to kill them, so no.”

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dance He burst onto the scene as a tap prodigy 21 years ago, a snap-crackle-pop, step-ball-change 12-year-old star. Eventually he earned a Tony, got dubbed, somewhat homophonically, “the savior of tap” (he had by then surpassed classical steps, bringing tap to a new edge), and exemplified the complexity of physics as his fleet-footed moves eluded cinematic capture. Tuesday, February 6, Savion Glover brought all his selves to the party he threw onstage at the Paramount—gleeful prodigy, jazz musician, gentle superhero—but more than anything else he worked the scene as a Griot. He was Grand Master Tap accompanied by the Furious Nine, telling the people’s story with his long, lean body and those glorious feet. Dancing to the live sounds of classical music by everyone from Vivaldi to Bartok and Bach and Mendelssohn (he calls the show “Classical Savion”), Glover was a marching, Latin-tinged, tick-tock, astrophysical, cow-poking, sea-faring, whirlygig counterpoint to the stringed compositions played so lovingly by the musicians who joined him on stage. We’ve all heard about mathematics being the subtext in J.S. Bach’s compositions, but what about heavy metal or blues rock? Glover tore through the third Brandenburg concerto like John Bonham on Aderol. Disonant? No way! Rhythm is just a measure of time, after all, and by creating an aural and physical bridge, Glover put us right there in both Madison Square Garden circa 1973 and in the manor of Bach’s Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen circa 1720.

Dance dance revolution: Savion Glover delivered more than 300 years of music, history and culture in less than two hours at the Paramount.

If that was a more intellectual exercise, other moments in the intermission-free 100-minute show were acutely visceral, starting at the beginning. While the strings played three of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, evoking the fuzzy bumblebee blur of summer and the silver dusk of winter, Glover was moving across a Western plain, his feet (and knees and legs and luxuriously long arms, when called upon) telegraphing the wide open vista, the mountains in the distance, the smoldering campfire, the notion of possibility that lines the American myth of boundlessness and noble lawmen. Two stories, one poem of music and hundreds of rapt souls taking to the edge of their seats in the Paramount.

And before we get to the indescribably ecstatic conclusion to Glover’s show, the mash-up that brought three more musicians to the stage and combined, as another critic noted, John Coltrane with John Philip Sousa, let us here give a shout out to our host, the Paramount itself. Simply put, the fusty new/old theater has become—whodathunkit?— the place to see top-tier dance performances in this town. Three years and running, and not one bad choice yet. No dance equivalent of the sad, “as seen on Broadway” revival starring C-list celebrities from TV shows no one watched anyway. But as thrilling and astute as the dance programming has been, they might want to stop now. Ain’t nothing gonna top Savion Glover.

Getting back to it: He called the ending number “stars and stripes forever 4 NOW.” A sample of what Glover describes as “improvography,” the piece found him trading riffs with each of the musicians, who now included a quicksilver drummer (what are these people eating?), a pianist and a saxophone/flutist. He introduced each player to the audience and then, Robert Plant-like, traded his metatarsalian version of “ooh-aah-ooyeeah”s with each of them. Mind you, one of the riffs was a Shaker folk tune, another “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” It might have seemed like the point was to remind us of Glover’s unmatched virtuosity (and his joy, which, with that smile plastered across his face and those happy dreadlocks snaking out from a bunch at the back of his head, was never in doubt). In fact, it was probably just a warm-up for everyone.

These are my contemporaneous notes from the jam that ensued as every instrumentalist poured his and her gonads into the music and Glover met all of them with a body that seemed to multiply before one’s very eyes:

“Cacophony. Fourth of July in a bending bonfire haze. Atmosphere rising. Bows on fire. Sharp one-toed crane. Italics. Jazz. Gunfire. Rockets. Subway and crowds. Ellis Island. What? San Francisco in the 1950s. Hippies. Summer of love. Everything that is the messy shrapnel of democracy. Impossibly percussive right foot. Like a whirlygig in riverboots. The United States of Tapography. We’re all in the dance. Every step you take, every up ride you push, any contact, surface to surface, surface to air, mouth to lung. Get on the bus! We’re riding this thing off the cliff! Ferris wheel off its axis. Free at last, thank God almighty, I’m a tap dancer at last. The eagle has landed. Fly me to the moon, buddy. Tight! Zizzle fplishfvifevexxxxdingsingbingalong. Rise this tide. Get off get on get going. Thank you ladies and Gs, Good Night!”