Author: Julia Stumbaugh

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Living

Season’s greetings: Highlights from last year and a look ahead in the world of UVA sports

Will UVA produce another sports standout this year, like current NBA Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon? Photo by Will UVA produce another sports standout this year, like current NBA Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon? Photo by Matt Riley.

UVA sports saw some big successes last year: The men’s tennis team claimed the NCAA trophy, alongside Thai-Son Kwiatkowski’s singles championship. And Malcolm Brogdon, men’s basketball alum, was named the NBA Rookie of the Year. Drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round of the 2016 draft, Brogdon defied the odds and became the first second-round pick to earn the award. But UVA teams had some disappointments too, with Bronco Mendenhall’s less-than-stellar first football season, and the men’s basketball team’s second-round departure from the NCAA tournament. The good news? UVA has added some promising players-to-watch, including a quarterback heir apparent and an undefeated high school tennis player.

Football

Bronco Mendenhall probably envisioned his first season at UVA ending a little differently, while, across the field, Virginia Tech players celebrated. Their quarterback got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend.

She said yes, of course. Why wouldn’t she? He’d just rushed for 105 yards, making it twice into the end zone against Tech’s favorite rival to beat.

The scoreboard read 52-10, a demoralizing defeat that marked Virginia’s seventh straight loss in a 2-10 season, the team’s worst record since 2013, and Mendenhall’s lowest since he began coaching at Brigham Young in 2005.

“I have a base philosophy, and that is a team plays the way they are prepared,” said Mendenhall in a post-game interview. “I’m responsible for how they prepared, and I’m responsible for how they execute. And clearly what the outcome today showed is that I didn’t prepare them well enough.”

Mendenhall brought six assistant coaches with him from BYU, introducing new blood to everything from the offensive coordinator to quarterback coach. But the staff overhaul wasn’t enough to give UVA the winning season it’s been looking for since 2011. And with many starters graduating, especially on the offense, 2017 looks like it might be yet another year to rebuild and regroup.

UVA’s first three games this year are home games, which is good news for the beleaguered program. The season home opener is against William & Mary, which puts some pressure on the team—a home game against the Tribe is very nearly a must-win—but if the Hoos can put together three wins to start off the season against manageable opponents (William & Mary, Indiana and Connecticut) then they will improve their 2016 win total.

Season highlight: Tailback Taquan Mizzell made ACC history in his final year with the Hoos, becoming the first player to record 1,500 yards rushing and receiving in his career. He rushed for 940 yards in 2016 alone. Although these accolades weren’t enough to get him drafted, making 2017 the first year in three decades that UVA didn’t send a football player to the NFL draft, the Baltimore Ravens signed him as a free agent this summer.

Players to watch:

Lindell Stone

6’2″, 205 pounds

Position: Backup QB (to starter Kurt Benkert, fifth-year senior, making Stone UVA’s potential heir apparent)

Status: True freshman (from Virginia’s Woodberry Forest School)

Matt Gahm, Charles Snowden and Zane Zandier

Gahm: 6’3″, 225 pounds, 6.9 tackles per game in 2016; Snowden: 6’7″, 200 pounds, 28.3 receiving yards/game; Zandier: 6’4″, 215 pounds, 34.4 receiving yards/game

Position: Linebackers; because of UVA’s depleted depth, it’s likely some of them will see playing time

Status: True freshmen

Men’s basketball

In the 60-plus years since the Atlantic Coast Conference’s creation, no team has managed to hold its opponents to under 40 points for three games in a row—that is, until the 2017 Virginia men’s basketball team. They did it with three straight wins against St. Francis, Yale and Grambling State. It was a testament to the nationally ranked defense that helped them go 23-11 (and 11-7 in the ACC) on the season.

Unfortunately, what goes around comes around, and Virginia itself was held to under 40 points in the game that eliminated the Hoos in the second round of the NCAA tournament. For a team that only two years ago was back-to-back ACC regular season champs, it was a disappointing end to a successful year, especially for star senior London Perrantes. The Cavs also lost three key players—Marial Shayok, Jarred Reuter and Darius Thompson—who all decided to transfer to other colleges following the 2016-17 season.

Alum spotlight: In his five years at UVA, Malcolm Brogdon earned a master’s in public policy from the Batten School and the ACC Player of the Year award. Now, with his No. 15 jersey retired and hanging from the rafters at JPJ, Brogdon has collected perhaps the highest honor of his career: NBA Rookie of the Year. He’s the lowest-ranked draft pick to win the award since 1958. Brogdon was selected after a spectacular first season with the Milwaukee Bucks, where he started in 28 games with an average of 10.2 points per game.

Players to watch:

Jay Huff

6’6″, 16.3 points/game

Position: Guard

Status: Starting sophomore after a redshirt freshman year

Marco Anthony

6’6″, 11.7 points/game in 2016

Position: Combo guard

Status: True freshman (from Holmes High School, Texas)

Women’s basketball

The last game of the Virginia women’s basketball team’s season was a nail-biter. In a back-and-forth match that had everything you could ask for in a game—a dozen ricocheting lead changes, tie score after tie score—the Notre Dame Fighting Irish finally pulled ahead in the third quarter, eventually eliminating Virginia from the ACC tournament and ending a 20-13 season (7-9 in the ACC).

Alum spotlight: “Success will not come easy, but it will come,” Dawn Staley promised UVA graduates in her 2009 valedictory address. And for Staley, come it did. Before she graduated from UVA in 1992, she was the ACC Rookie of the Year and a key component in her team’s three Final Four appearances, although she never actually won an NCAA championship. Two and a half decades later, she finally hoisted the trophy as coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks, the 2017 NCAA champions.

Player to watch:

Amandine Toi

5’11”, 9.54 points/game in 2016-17

Position: Shooting guard

Status: Freshman (from the French National Team)

Women’s soccer

The Virginia women’s soccer team didn’t just begin 2016 with seven straight wins; it began it with seven straight shutouts.

In fact, the team held its opponents to nil in its first 10 wins (the Hoos went 15-5-2 on the season). The women outshot the other teams by huge margins, averaging 2.36 goals per game, while their opponents hovered at 0.82. Virginia’s shot accuracy was actually lower on average than its opponents, but the sheer bombardment of scoring attempts (395 total for Virginia, 125 for the other teams) led the Cavs to a winning season. They finished the regular season with a record of 15-5-2, and 6-2-2 within their conference.

Hana Kerner is a midfielder and striker on the UVA women’s soccer team, which started last season with seven straight shutouts. Photo by Matt Riley.

Player to watch:

Laurel Ivory

5’9″, starting keeper of U20 Women’s National Team and U17 World Cup team, member of West Florida Flames of ECNL

Position: Goalkeeper

Status: Freshman (graduating early from Miami Country Day School in Florida)

Men’s lacrosse

Lars Tiffany’s first season as UVA’s lacrosse coach probably wasn’t all he hoped for (Hall of Famer Dom Starsia’s contract was not renewed last year after 24 seasons at the university). In 2016, Tiffany guided his team at Brown to a 16-3 season. In 2017, Virginia only managed 8-7, dropping his win percentage from 0.842 to a less inspiring 0.533; the Cavs lost all four conference games. UVA hasn’t won a conference game since 2013-14, when it went 1-3 in the ACC. In the final loss of the 2017 season, an ACC showcase game, the Cavaliers ran into a problem that had plagued them throughout the season: They were outshooting, but not outscoring, their opponent.

Player to watch:

Matt Moore

6’2”, 156 goals and 173 assists in career

Position: Attacker

Status: Freshman (from Garnet Valley High School in Pennsylvania, where he holds records for playoff points, goals, assists and goals in a single game)

Men’s tennis

The Virginia Men’s Tennis team lost a match to Wake Forest on March 31. The team waited around for a two-and-a-half hour rain delay, only to lose 5-2. Why is that mid-season match important? Because it was Virginia’s only loss of the entire season.

The team went 34-1 in 2017, dominating their way through the postseason just as they did the regular to claim its third consecutive NCAA championship. It marked the fourth trophy in five years and was the final jewel in the crown of Coach Brian Boland’s 16-year tenure at UVA. The dust from engraving Virginia’s name into its third straight championship trophy had barely settled before UVA named Andres Pedroso, former associate coach, as the new head coach.

Season highlight: Less than a week after his team hoisted the NCAA championship trophy, Thai-Son Kwiatkowski beat out North Carolina freshman prodigy William Blumberg to claim the title of NCAA Men’s Singles champion. For Kwiatkowski, the championship is a cap on his senior year after he went 33-7 in singles matches.

Player to watch:

Matthew Lord

Went three years in high school without losing a match

Status: Freshman (from Connecticut’s Kingswood-Oxford School); verbally committed to UVA

Swimming

In early August, a new head coach was named to oversee men’s and women’s swimming and diving at UVA. Todd DeSorbo’s stacked résumé includes six seasons as associate head coach of the wildly successful program at North Carolina State.

Season highlight: If Leah Smith’s name sounds familiar, it’s because you heard it alongside Katie Ledecky’s in the 2016 Olympics, where Smith claimed two Olympic medals. Although 2017 marked her final year at UVA, she is still putting Virginia up on podiums. She won three medals at the 2017 FINA World Championships—gold on the 4x200m freestyle team relay and the 400m freestyle—and she had a bronze-winning 800m freestyle that broke her previous personal best by a whopping three seconds.

Categories
Magazines Village

Back in the swing of things: A guide to city and county school happenings

Summer may be over, but the fun doesn’t have to stop there. After the beach trips and visits to train museums, the start of the school year brings its own kind of magic, between new supplies and unfamiliar faces and environments. In this issue, we’re checking in with public schools—what changed over the summer and what to expect this year.

 

What I did this summer

Just before school starts (bummer, dude), we asked you to tell us how your kids spent their vacations. Here’s what your neighbors were up to over break.

“My son Ashton is 16 and for the last five years he has done a coat drive for his birthday. In those years he has gathered almost 7,000 coats, with the help of everyone who donated. Every summer he spends hours helping me plan the details and enjoys meeting with those who make this event possible. Already this summer, he has set the date for this fall’s Ashton’s Birthday Wish coat drive and spoke to many who will be involved.”—Kim Ryan

 

 

 

 

“We are a family of five from North Garden. Our kids are ages 7, 3 and 8 months. We are spending our summer traveling in an Airstream travel trailer and are on our way to Montana (hopefully!). We will be checking out the national parks, including Glacier, Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore. My oldest will be doing the junior ranger program and has already received one badge from New River Gorge. We’ve already made plenty of stops, including the Indianapolis Children’s Museum and lots of small parks so the kids can play and run.”—Lani Pokrana

 

 

“We went camping for the first time as a family of four at Small Country in Louisa. My oldest son, Levi, practically lived on this sand mountain the entire trip!”—Crystal Jones

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I am the new volunteer program manager intern for the summer at Open for Service. Throughout the summer I will be running the volunteer program by helping to encourage new volunteers and promote the organization through social media. Through the years, in our small but diverse town, I have made friends who were not always the same as me. …Some who even felt uncomfortable in their own bodies or were not always accepted by other people. My parents really opened my mind by opening our home to everyone. My mother has been helping a refugee family over the past year. Having parents who view everyone as equals taught me to accept people regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or anything else that sets them apart.”—Asha Gupta, 14

 

“We’ve done a few things this summer. Perhaps the most exciting so far has been the tank museum in Danville. Highly recommend for young boys. So. Many. Tanks.”—Sam Preston with son David, age 8

 

 

New and improved

Here’s what the city and county have been working on over the summer.

Help is on the way

Got a bad cough or a scraped knee? If you’re a middle or high school student in Albemarle County, you could have found a nurse right away, but in an elementary school, you might have found yourself out of luck. Prior to the 2015-2016 school year, nurses in county elementary schools were only staffed for six hours per day. That’s less than a full day of school for a student, and it doesn’t cover accident-prone bus loading and unloading times. To solve this problem, Albemarle County Public Schools has been slowly growing its contingent of full-time elementary school nurses; in 2016-17, 11 out of the 16 elementary schools were staffed with all-day nurses. For the 2017-18 session, all 16 schools will have full-time nurses.

Staying focused

ACPS student enrollment has increased by about 8 percent over the past decade. In those same 10 years, the county’s percentage of economically disadvantaged students (those on free or reduced lunch) has increased by 67.4 percent. To address the growing population, the county has created a Social Emotional Academic Development (SEAD) program for the 2017-2018 school year.

Strategic Communications Officer Phil Giaramita says that the program will be focused on helping students who need extra attention “in such areas as bilingual support, home and school counseling and assistance with technology learning resources.”

The SEAD program will be piloted at the four schools with the highest proportion of economically disadvantaged students (Agnor-Hurt, Cale, Greer and Woodbrook) and will involve incentives for teachers to gain better credentials, creating a more inclusive school environment and monitoring the academic development of at-risk students.

Equal opportunity

The 2017-2018 school year will be a big year for the city schools: It marks the first year of their new, five-year strategic plan. Described as “transformational,” the plan will shape the goals and growth of Charlottesville City Schools over the next half decade. The plan focuses on creating equity in school programs, improving both student access (by increasing the percentage of underrepresented students in advanced programs) and student achievement (by increasing the percentage of underrepresented students with high AP scores). These changes are part of the city’s goal to keep up with “Profile of a Virginia Graduate,” which is a set of state requirements ensuring that a diploma means students are ready for life after high school.

What’s next

It’s a time of growth for the Charlottesville City Schools. The city is wrapping up a facilities capacity study, which is indicating that the city school system—in which a new school has not been built since Charlottesville High School in 1974—is over-enrolled and over capacity. The next move once the capacity study wraps up, says city schools spokeswoman Beth Cheuk, is “fostering community conversations about the next steps we want to take to make sure that our facilities are equipped to match the anticipated growth in our enrollment.”

Room to grow

Woodbrook Elementary School is getting a makeover this year. When students step into the school in August 2018, they might not recognize it: The renovations involve the sprucing up of seven old classrooms as well as the addition of 16 brand new ones. And the makeover is more than surface-level. The changes involve the introduction of multi-age classrooms, where kids from different grades will learn together. The school expansion, which will increase Woodbrook’s capacity to 600 and includes everything from a maker space to a new gym, will be ready for the 2018-2019 school year.

Safe space

Breathe easy, parents: Baker-Butler Elementary is about to get even safer. As part of a county-wide security initiative, Baker-Butler is opening for the 2017-2018 school year with a newly secured entrance. The new entryway will funnel all visitors through a central point, requiring them to walk through the main office before entering the building while school is in session. Small renovations are underway to shape the school for the new security measures, which county officials intend to use to control access to the school and ensure that there will be no unregistered visitors.

On the right track

Planned renovations for the Charlottesville High School track hit a slight road bump this summer when no contractors immediately jumped at the opportunity to take the job. But never fear, runners: The city is re-opening contractor bidding this fall, in hope that the renovations—like a new eight-lane track and rehabbed bleachers—could be completed within the 2018-2019 school year. City schools spokeswoman Beth Cheuk said that with the new bidding session fast approaching, “Now is time to identify and begin planning so that the first of these improvements will be on the to-do list for next summer.”

Around we go

In the dense city landscape, Venable Elementary School feels like a breath of fresh air; a splash of green among urban gray. Despite its downtown location, the school manages to fit in outdoor elements from a playground to a multi-use trail to soccer fields. This coming school year, Venable will add another outdoor feature with a newly installed track for kids. For students who aren’t fans of the dreaded indoor Pacer running test, a few laps on the track might seem like a welcome proposition.

 

Meet your teach

Students aren’t the only fresh faces on the scene at the start of a school year. This year, both the city and county are getting new teachers, so we asked them a few questions by way of introduction. Welcome!

Jess Dollar

New third or fourth grade teacher at Brownsville Elementary School

Are you new to Charlottesville? My husband and I have been living in Charlottesville for a year now. I love being so close to the mountains and being able to go hiking at places like Humpback and Spy Rock. I’m excited to work at Albemarle County Public Schools so I can truly engage with the community here in Charlottesville.

Favorite part of your job: What I love about teaching is that I get to see a group of young learners change from the beginning of the year to the end. It’s amazing to watch them blossom and grow and to help them develop the potential they have.

When you were in school, what was your favorite grade/class? I’ve always loved writing—from a second grade “writing workshop” to fourth grade writing prompts, and on to more complex assignments in middle and high school. I remember my 10th grade English teacher asking us to look at classic artwork and write stories or poems based on the images, and one of my college professors, who incorporated personal journal writing into our coursework. Writing is an important part of my life, and I’m excited to inspire kids to write, too.

Tal Thompson

New fifth grade teacher at Stone Robinson Elementary

Are you new to Charlottesville? My brother, his wife and brand new baby live in Charlottesville. My family is excited to live close to them and begin starting new traditions as well as begin playing in the mountains.

Favorite part of your job: Igniting the love of learning in children, inspiring the belief in higher potential with my students and collaborating with my peers to develop amazing experiences for children.

Proudest moment on the job: In 2015, I was a runner-up for America’s Top Teacher on ABC’s “Live! with Kelly and Michael.” Being recognized by my community was a fulfilling and proud moment for sure.

When you were in school, what was your favorite grade/class? Any class that used music and movement was my favorite.

Mousumi Franks

New Spanish teacher at Walker Upper Elementary

Are you new to Charlottesville? I’m not totally new in that I went to college and grad school here, but I haven’t lived here in a very long time. I’m looking forward to four seasons and living in a smaller town.

Favorite part of your job: The kids! Getting to laugh with them is the best.

Proudest moment on the job: The proudest moment at my job is any time a child tells me that I’ve helped them make learning easier or made them want to do more with what I teach them. The feedback from the kids is what makes me proud to be a teacher.

When you were in school, what was your favorite grade/class? In college I learned what I love to do. I can’t say there was just one, because the whole thing a process. I’ve just always liked school.

Jamir Kai

New Spanish teacher at Monticello High School

Are you new to Charlottesville? I’ve been here for five years with my husband and we’ve fallen in love with all the adventures to be had: on mountains, kayaks or even the Downtown Mall. It’s also lovely being in such a diverse community.

Favorite part of your job: Using music, movies and language to connect students to new cultures.

Proudest moment on the job: I’m going into my first year. But, so far, my proudest moment was getting my two degrees. Many awesome moments on the way.

When you were in school, what was your favorite grade/class? Spanish is the best! But in college I took a course called “Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe,” which just rocked my world.

 

Categories
Arts

Adar stands in solidarity while gaining traction

Since releasing The Rapids EP in March, Adar frontwoman Adar Seligman-McComas has been on a trajectory that includes a headline gig at the Southern on Saturday. Publicity photo

There was an apple going bad on Adar Seligman-McComas’ desk. But it had been a week of writer’s block and listlessness, and she wasn’t hungry right then. She’d eat it later, she told herself. Over the course of the month, she watched that unwanted apple slowly rot. Then one morning, Seligman-McComas woke up gripped with a thought: “I don’t want that to be me. I don’t want to be the apple.” And so the song “The Other Fruit” was born.

The frontwoman of the band Adar, Seligman-McComas finds inspiration in even the most mundane of muses. Her songs draw on everything from feeling okay with being alone to the anguish of a breakup to, well, fruit.

“Music has made me feel like the things I’m experiencing are things I’m not experiencing alone,” says Seligman-McComas, remembering a time, around age 17, when she listened to Radiohead’s In Rainbows on repeat. Her own music imparts this catharsis in a sweet indie-girl voice reminiscent of Regina Spektor, backed by soulful music that has made grown men in the crowd at Miller’s cry.

Seligman-McComas takes advantage of the emotional connection between performer and audience, using it as a platform. “I’ve had a lot of opportunities,” she says. “I feel it’s the responsibility of the bands in this town to make people feel safe and welcome no matter what ethnic or religious background.” She and her band put together a free unity concert at Rapture in July as an escape from the increasingly sour debate surrounding the Robert E. Lee statue downtown. “This town feels very liberal to me, but it’s a blue dot in a mass of red,” says Seligman-McComas. “I feel like it’s our responsibility to stand in solidarity.”

Adar is coming up on its one-year anniversary as a band. In that year, the group has released an EP (The Rapids) and played locally, everywhere from museums to music festivals to a long list of bars. For Seligman-McComas, who likes singing even more than she likes eating chocolate (“And I really love chocolate,” she laughs), the journey has been a fun one. She’s hoping to get Adar onto the festival circuit for 2018, eyeing a new website, a wider touring range and maybe new music.

Even as it looks to grow, the band maintains its roots in the Charlottesville music scene, which Seligman-McComas describes as impressively supportive of local bands. In her journey from being a 12-year-old recording songs on an MP3 recorder to fronting a Rockn’ to Lockn’ semifinalist band, Seligman-McComas has worked with other familiar local names, including Gina Sobel, Koda Kerl (of Chamomile and Whiskey) and Erin Lunsford. In fact, Lunsford will open Adar’s upcoming show at the Southern on August 19 with an acoustic set.

In the headlining slot, Seligman-McComas is excited to perform for an attentive audience at the Southern, where the mood will likely be introspective. “It will be less upbeat, and a little more quiet,” she says. “But it’s not gonna be seated, because we always get funky.”

Categories
Magazines Weddings

Make it official: Two top choices for your marriage maestro

Photo: Meredith Sledge

An officiant could be considered the conductor of your wedding ceremony. And whether you want one that’s classical or something a bit jazzier, our area offers many options. We asked Dave Norris and Claire Frances to tell us more about how they set the tempo.

Dave Norris (above)

How long have you been officiating? My first wedding was in April of 2009. I was mayor at that time and had a weekly radio show about current events. One morning the show’s host, Tad Abbey, asked me on-air if I would officiate his upcoming wedding to his lovely bride, Grier. Without hesitation I said yes, then immediately went home and Googled “how to officiate a wedding.” I’ve performed hundreds of weddings since then.

What’s your specialty? My weddings tend to be simple and sweet and personalized to each couple. Many people choose a minister or a priest or a rabbi to officiate their wedding, so what they get is a worship service that doubles as a wedding ceremony, which is great for them. I, on the other hand, am a civil marriage officiant, so with me, you just get a wedding ceremony—one that feels true to the couple because we have worked together to design it. I think of weddings as a celebration of love and happiness and they still make me teary-eyed on the regular.

What’s a stand-out moment in your career as an officiant? I was especially moved by the ceremonies I was asked to perform in the days and weeks after marriage equality finally became the law of the land. A powerful combination of love and justice and freedom and triumph pervaded those weddings. One couple even included the beautiful concluding paragraph of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s prevailing opinion in Obergfell v. Hodges as a reading in their ceremony: Love won.

Any disaster stories or strange details that come to mind from a local wedding? Not a disaster story per se, but a couple once asked me to start their ceremony with that famous wedding quote from The Princess Bride (“Mawwiage. Mawwiage is wot bwings us togetha tooday. Mawwiage, that bwessed awangement, that dweam wifin a dweam…”). Half their guests got the reference right away and broke out in laughter. The other half thought I had a serious speech impediment and surely wondered how I ever got hired as a wedding officiant.

Photo: Aaron Watson

Claire Frances, Sacred Ground Ceremonies

How long have you been officiating? I’ve been officiating since the summer of 2004, when I graduated from seminary and was ordained. I already knew I was going to love doing wedding ceremonies so luckily was able to actually have one or two booked before my graduation. At this point I’ve done around 950 ceremonies.

What types of ceremonies do you provide? I am not from a Christian denomination, I am an interfaith minister. So, I guess you could say my specialty is bringing people together who come from very different backgrounds as opposed to both from the same. For instance, I’ve done a lot of Christian/Jewish ceremonies as well as Hindu/Christian; Buddhist/Jewish; atheist/Christian; Christian/pagan and just about any other combination you can imagine. But more than any other single type of ceremony I do a lot of “spiritual but not religious” ceremonies. I love the experience these kinds of ceremonies provide for the guests…often it is something completely unique for them and gives them an opportunity to experience a religion or culture that they’ve never been exposed to and so it, hopefully, opens hearts and minds to another equally beautiful tradition.

Any favorite moments or clever ideas you’ve seen executed at local weddings? Many years ago I had a bride who loved the Indiana Jones movies, so she chose the theme song to Indiana Jones as her processional music. With a string quartet playing it it took some time to recognize the melody, but when they did, the guests couldn’t stop laughing. Once I had another couple who wanted to get married on a really high peak out in the Shenandoah National Park, so we had quite a hike (a couple of hours) to do their ceremony high up with a 360-degree view. That was a fun experience.

Butterflies fly away

Big nerves on your big day? Here’s what these officiants say to couples to ease the jitters.

From Claire Frances…

  • Take a deep breath. Breathing deeply can really help.
  • Keep your focus on each other and on me; don’t worry about your guests right now, you will have the entire evening to spend with them.
  • Remember, this is your wedding ceremony; it’s not a performance, so you can’t mess up or do it wrong. However it goes will be just perfect and at the end of the day, you will be married to your best friend.

From Bhavani Metro, an associate at Sacred Ground Ceremonies…

  • Breathe and know at the end of this day, you will be married.
  • Relax and know that whatever happens today, it is all for good.
  • Your day will hold its own special memories and some of the funny things that may happen are part of that memory.
  • I have you covered. If you cry, I’ll have a tissue. If you forget something, I’ll guide you through it.
  • I always recommend that the couple take time alone immediately following the recessional without photographers, family or friends. It’s their private moment to celebrate with each other. It is important to take that sweet moment, full of the love and energy of the ceremony and share with each other before their attention turns outward to greet their family and guests.

And for words of wisdom
that last a bit longer, from Dave Norris…

  • Be generous with your love and compassion for each other.
  • Remember that you were friends first. Always treat your partner with the same respect and kindness that you would a friend.
  • You can be happy, or you can be right. Choose one.
Categories
Arts

Disco Risqué can’t fake the funk or the punk

“You know your show’s good when people are out there moving,” says Disco Risqué lead singer and trumpet player Ryan Calonder. “They don’t need to be looking at the stage.” The band promises a high-energy show on Saturday at the Southern. Photo by Amy Jackson

Charlie Murchie wrote his first punk song when he was 12 years old. It went something like this: “Satan in my lunchbox drinkin’ all my juice / It’s no coincidence that my mom packed my 666 sandwiches.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because “Satan in My Lunchbox” is now a crowd favorite in the repertoire of Murchie’s current band, local heavy-funk outfit Disco Risqué, which features Murchie on guitar, Robert Prescott on drums, John Bruner on bass and Ryan Calonder on trumpet and vocals.

The band’s 2015 eponymous debut represented a jumbled journey to a cohesive genre, but now, after years of touring, the group has settled into its identity as a kind of chameleon band—a unit that can switch from head-banging heavy metal to high-energy dance music to complement other bands on the bill.

“When we go for the dance, or we go to the heavy, or we go to the funk—we commit to it,” says Prescott. “We don’t fake the funk.”

In a crowded Charlottesville music scene, Disco Risqué doesn’t have to fight to be unique. The band has a track written entirely by using the titles of Journey songs (“Stone Cold Steve Perry”). Live performances have featured Björk covers, and it sometimes blares the voice of Ron Burgundy from Anchorman in the middle of songs. But the guys stick to the heart-pounding heavy dance music at their core, even while indulging in infectious fun at shows.

Disco Risqué began as the brainchild of longtime friends Prescott and Murchie, the last in a long series of pickup band ventures with constantly evolving names (Cardboard Birdcage, Tripods and Short Straws, to name a few). Why did they finally settle on Disco Risqué? “Because it rolls off the tongue,” says Prescott.

The two got together to work on an album that Murchie, sick of playing covers in party bands, had been brainstorming. On their way to recording, they added Bruner and Calonder.

Calonder wasn’t trained in heavy rock when he was recruited; prior to Disco Risqué, most of his musical experience had come from five years in the University of Virginia’s orchestra. “We were all tentative,” he says, “because I’d never played horn like this before.” Now, Calonder’s brass can be heard on a good 50 percent of the band’s live music. These varied backgrounds—Calonder’s orchestral experience, Murchie’s love for punk and Prescott’s firm belief in the power of dance music—gave rise to their first album, an exploration of funk, heavy metal and everything in between.

Two years later, the foursome is almost ready to start recording a second album.

“The first record is 20 songs, and it really shows the diversity of the band and what it had to offer,” says Murchie. “We want the [new] album to have direction. We don’t want to put out another record that just goes, ‘Hey, here we are, check out all our crazy shit.’”

Calonder describes the next phase as “Disco Risqué plus,” but what direction will it take? Only an album release will tell. Until then, you can experience some of the new material when the band hits the stage at the Southern on July 8. Hardcore outfit Deaf Scene is opening, meaning that Disco Risqué will lean toward the heavier side of its repertoire. You’ll probably hear “Satan in My Lunchbox,” along with some new tunes as well. Or maybe you’ll be too busy dancing to even pay attention.