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REW Feature: Local Theater

Perhaps your taste in live theater runs to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged for an evening’s worth of laughs). Or maybe you’d prefer a musical trip to 1960’s Las Vegas with tributes to Frank, Dean, Sammy and their crooner friends. How about the Brothers Grimm fairytales woven together in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, or the musical adventures of the Charles M. Schultz’s comic strip Peanuts gang? Shakespeare, Sinatra, Sondheim and Snoopy—they’ll all be on local stages in the coming year, to the delight but not surprise of Central Virginia theater lovers, who are accustomed to such rich and varied fare.

Theatrical organizations here range from non-professional community groups that put on plays purely for love of it to an internationally known Shakespearean troupe performing in a re-creation of the Bard’s own theatre. “The theatre scene here is huge, especially for a community of this size,” says Alex Citron, one of ten local theatre enthusiasts who founded the Play On! theatre in 2005. “The area has four year-round community theatres: Play On!, Live Arts, Four County Players and The Hamner Theater. The area boasts no fewer than ten theatre companies—most without permanent homes—which produce from one to four shows per year.” Let’s see a little of what’s playing in the next few months.

Play On!
The all-volunteer Play On! company begins its seventh season in Charlottesville’s IX building with a popular parody, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Not your grand Shakespearean production, it’s a fast-paced evening of laughs—Hamlet whizzes by in 43 seconds—in which three actors portray dozens of characters, often breaching theater’s so-called fourth wall by directly addressing the audience and making it part of the show. The fun happens September 7-23. 
 
In October, Play On! takes audiences back to Victorian London for the Central Virginia debut of Jekyll & Hyde, a Broadway musical based on the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson’s celebrated tale of horror, split personality, and double-sided human nature concerns one Dr. Henry Jekyll, a scientist whose unsuccessful attempts at suppressing the evil within him give vent to the murderous Mr. Hyde. The show runs October 6-November 11.
 
Nice and Easy from November 3- December 2 will spotlight the talents of Dick Orange, star and producer of two musical revues at Fluvanna County’s Carysbrook Performing Arts Center. A singer in the style of Frank Sinatra, Orange will perform songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Julie Stein and other Great American Songbook composers. He will be accompanied by a jazz quartet led by pianist, Bob Benetta, another longtime area favorite, with special guests the Belle Tones, a trio in the style of the Andrew Sisters. All shows take place in the Play On! space in Charlottesville’s IX building.
 
Four County
Founded in 1973, Barboursville’s Four County Players can boast of being Central Virginia’s longest continuously-operating community theater and “the cultural hub of the community.”
 
“We’ve done big and small productions,” says Four County’s Laura Mawyer. “The way we look at it, every time we do a new production we’re just adding to the family.” Four County opens its 40-year anniversary season with Snoopy: The Musical, a lighthearted family show featuring a team of teen actors playing Charlie Brown, his dog, and his friends. “The voices that these kids have . . .” Mawyer marvels. “They stand up and sing and open their hearts.” Snoopy continues through July 8.
 
In 2009 Four County opened The Cellar, a 50-seat basement theater and bistro intended for more experimental theatrical fare than what it serves upstairs. The first musical to play The Cellar is I Love You, a humorous, gender reversed updating of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set in modern day New York City. I Love You runs September 7-23. 
 
With grant money tough to come by in the current economy, Four County “is actually surviving on ticket sales,” Mawyer says, “which nobody can really believe including us.” On October 12-14 they’ll give themselves a little help with 40 & Fabulous, a one-weekend only fundraising revue featuring company veterans reprising big Broadway numbers from previous company shows. 
 
The theater has a few spots left in its July 9-13 summer camp for rising first to rising ninth-graders. Whether “you have a drama queen at home or if your kid just wants to develop some more confidence, it’s a great place for kids to build their own skill set,” Mawyer says. 
 
Live Arts
With its architecturally distinctive, concrete and titanium alloy building on Water Street just off Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, Live Arts is situated right in the geographic heart of the local arts scene. And it acts the part, offering classic and cutting edge plays plus stand-up comedy and educational classes and workshops for children, teens, and adults.
 
From July 13-August 4, Live Arts presents a large cast of kids and adults in Hairspray,  a Broadway musical based on the John Waters film, a cult favorite. “Hairspray is about inequality in the 50s in the setting of the American Bandstand generation, and beehives and Ultra-Clutch hairspray,” says the theatre’s executive director Matt Joslyn. “It’s nothing but pure fun.”
 
On August 16-19 comes the third annual edition of Playwright’s Lab Summer Shorts. This year’s show consists of nine brand new plays running from five to fifteen minutes apiece, all by area playwrights, many featuring first-time directors. A total of eighteen actors will take part. 
 
New artistic director Julie Hamburg opens her first season and Live Arts’ 22nd with Clybourne Park. An “incredibly brilliant” work inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the 2010 drama set in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood “won the theater world’s Triple crown,” Joslyn says, picking up the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2011, and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2012. Clybourne Park is a meditation on race and heritage and culture, but it’s also “an uproarious comedy. We’re thrilled to be the first theater in Virginia to do it.”
 
American Shakespeare Center
Stiff and stuffy Shakespeare productions can ne’er be seen in downtown Staunton, but vividly imagined stagings in Elizabethan-era style take the boards year ‘round, thanks to the American Shakespeare Center. Performed in the 300-seat Blackfriar’s Playhouse, a handsome recreation of the Bard’s own indoor theater, ASC productions observe period conventions: house lights remain up, pacing is brisk, sets are minimal, and costumes indicate class and character. Actors play multiple parts, as many as seven in one show, and while women act as well as men, the occasional gender-bending casting is a nod to the all-male casting of Shakespeare’s day. Productions are given musical, often contemporary, soundtracks. ASC Shakespeare is direct, down-to-earth and exciting.
 
Although respectful but not reverent Shakespeare and other classic 17th century plays are its mainstay, ASC sometimes presents more recent work. David Sedaris’ The Santaland Diaries is a December favorite for adult audiences; a rollicking version of Charles Dickens’ beloved A Christmas Carol brings out the families. 
 
ASC will alternate three shows this summer: Shakespeare’s drama The Merchant of Venice, his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona and—in a Blackfriar’s Playhouse premiere—the modern theatrical masterpiece, The Lion in Winter. James Goldman’s 1966 drama, set during Christmastime in 1183, depicts struggles for power between England’s King Henry II, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, their three sons, and their guests. 
 
ASC’s Staged Reading Series brings in actors from outside the company to perform little known Renaissance works, scripts in hand. Edmund Ironside by Anonymous (some think he’s Shakespeare) will be read October 28. George Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth will be read November 4. 
 
Bent Theatre
With a motto of “You Say It, We Play It,” Bent Theatre Improv’s intention is “to keep Central Virginia laughing.” The troupe that first popped up in restaurants and bars in 2004 now regularly appears in the Play On! and Four County Players spaces, parodying pop culture and creating comedy on the spot from live audience suggestions. They’ll be at the Play On theatre for an Improv All-Stars Show on July 6 and August 10, and at The Bridge on 209 Monticello Rd on July 20. The Bridge show is R rated. The folks at Bent also offer workshops in improvisation comedy. The next series of classes will begin in the fall. 
 
Earl Hamner Theatre
Over in Nellysford, the Hamner Theater is named for Nelson County’s own Earl Hamner, Jr., creator of the 1970’s hit television series, The Waltons. Soon to begin its eighth season, the Hamner produces up to five plays a year.
 
Where Chaos Sleeps, a new work about the troubled life of Renaissance madrigal composer Carlo Gesualdo, will run July 31-August 4. Agate Hill to Appomattox, a compilation of three Civil War narratives, will follow August 10-11.
 
The Hamner’s ongoing Virginia Playwrights and Screenwriters Initiative gives writers the opportunity to work with directors, dramaturges and actors to shape and perfect new material for stage and screen. The work in progress is then presented free to the public in staged readings, followed by open discussions that provide the writers with invaluable feedback. The theatre also holds Monday evening improv sessions that are free and open to experienced actors and first-timers alike. 
 
Ash Lawn Opera
Ash Lawn Opera, now at Charlottesville’s beautiful (and air-conditioned) Paramount Theater, puts on one musical and one opera each summer. Meredith Willson’s heartwarming 1957 Broadway hit The Music Man runs July 13-20. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1791 amusing but profound The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) runs July 29-August 7.
 
Arts and Dollars
Theater in Central Virginia is just one aspect of the rich artistic scene here, a scene that enriches our quality of life economically as well as culturally. “We know already that Charlottesville is a great place for the arts, and now we have proof that the arts are great for Charlottesville,” says Victoria Long of Piedmont Council for the Arts, which recently studied the economic impact of the arts in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. 
 
The study found that “the arts and culture industry generates $114.4 million in annual economic activity in the Charlottesville area, supporting 1,921 full-time equivalent jobs and generating $9.2 million in local and state government revenues. Arts and culture organizations spent $49.5 million during fiscal year 2010. Those dollars, in turn, generated $31.2 million in household income for local residents. In addition to spending by organizations, the local arts and culture industry leverages $64.9 million in event-related spending” (restaurant meals, parking and shopping, etc.) “by its audiences.”
 
“Theater in Central Virginia is a great way for people to be involved in their community,” says Laura Mawyer, noting that Four County Players, like other area arts organizations, relies on a pool of talented, enthusiastic volunteers. “You don’t have to be onstage. It’s OK if you have shy bones in your body. You can still find a place in the theater.” 

 

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Oceans on the Mall

Andrew Owen, the co-founder and director of the festival that has made Charlottesville an important stop for serious photographers and photo lovers each June, has fond memories of the slide show parties wildlife photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols used to hold in his Albemarle County backyard. A 25-year tradition, these annual one night affairs, last held in 2005, drew as many as 500 people from as far away as Washington D.C. and New York City.

“The idea was that anybody who showed up could show work,” Owen says. “So you might have a National Geographic photographer showing his newest project and that would be followed up by the neighbor who just got back from a family vacation. It was that campfire spirit that got us started.”
 
Now in its sixth year, LOOK3 has grown out of beloved informal get-togethers to a month-long community happening highlighted by “three days of peace love and photography” on and around Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. David Doubilet’s stunning underwater images of the world’s oceans grace the Mall. Exhibitions by nine other artists are on display all June. Open air slide shows plus artist interviews, book signings and master classes all designed to showcase a vibrant, evolving art form take place June 7-9.
 
“I call it an immersive public arts experience,” Owen says. “Photographs are hanging in the trees; they’re on the sides of buildings; they’re in the galleries. We have shows in the Paramount and the Pavilion, and they’re in all the coffee shops. Any business with wall space that puts up art is showing photography in June.”
 
Since it was first held in 2007, LOOK3 has drawn photo fans from 46 U.S. states and 26 other countries. Eighty-five percent of attendees who buy three-day festival passes come from out of town. Besides pumping tourist dollars into the area economy, the festival organization itself spends liberally in the local business community as it produces exhibits and events that are free and open to all.
 
Each year the festival celebrates “three legends of photography who have made an indelible mark on the medium.” This year’s three Insight Artists—Stanley Greene, Donna Ferrato, and Alex Webb—who largely work as photojournalists, will be interviewed at the Paramount Theater in separate evenings devoted to their work.
 
Stanley Greene’s work is showing in a specially constructed gallery at 306 Main Street adjacent to Bank of America. Although Greene has produced iconic images in such news hot spots as Croatia, Rwanda, the Berlin Wall and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, he rejects both the photojournalist and the artist labels, claiming the former has been “bastardized” and preferring the idea of being “a photographer, just being photographer.” A photographer “is someone who looks at the world and tries to make some sense of it for themselves, and for everyone else,” Greene says. “And that’s what I want to do.”
 
A man who believes in believes working deep and thorough, Greene spent more than a decade in Chechnya as Chechnyans fought Russia for independence. “He stands his ground,” says fellow photographer David Griffin, curator of Greene’s exhibition. “He’s very impassioned and refuses to compromise his values.”
 
Owen is “particularly excited about Stanley because he’s so analog. He’s a strong critic of what digital has done to photography, and for a lot of the young photographers in the audience it will be a perspective they don’t know anything about.” Greene will be interviewed by photojournalist Jean-François Leroy at the Paramount on June 7 at 7:00 p.m.
 
Donna Ferrato’s unflinching documentary work is on display in the McGuffey Art Center’s Main Gallery. Ferrato determined to shine a light on the lot of battered women early in her career, after seeing a man hit his wife. Her exposés of domestic violence add up to “powerful and important work,” Owen says. “Nobody has made a contribution to this field quite the way she has.”
 
Ferrato’s 1991 collection, Living with the Enemy, the first book-length photographic exploration of domestic abuse, has been reprinted four times and sold 40,000 copies worldwide. Since 9/11 she has focused on her Lower Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca, a now trendy area with elegant landmark buildings and a gritty commercial and industrial history. Ferrato will be interviewed at the Paramount on June 8 at 4 p.m. by Alex Chadwick, journalist and co-creator of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.
 
A retrospective of the work of Alex Webb is on display at 2nd Street Gallery. “Alex is the photographer’s photographer,” Owen says. “He has been copied and emulated for 30 years. His use of color is singular.” Webb was first inspired to use color in the 1970s when forays to Haiti, the Caribbean and the U.S.-Mexico border, so different from the New York and New England environments he’d been documenting, led him to switch from black-and-white to capture the South’s particular heat and light.
 
Webb “is one of the most patient photographers still working today,” Owen says. “He will go and find a beautiful wall or a particular street intersection and just wait; he’ll go back to it every night when he thinks the light’s right and just wait for something to happen.” Webb will be interviewed by essayist and novelist Geoff Dyer at the Paramount on June 9 at 4:00 p.m.
 
LOOK 3’s most popular show each year is the one hanging in the trees—the trees along the Downtown Mall. Intended to promote environmental awareness and conservation, the exhibit features images from nature. This year’s photos from the 40-year career of National Geographic underwater photographer David Doubilet, including coral reefs, blue-ringed octopuses, leafy sea dragons, schools of giant bumphead parrotfish, and tiger sharks, make the Mall the setting for “a self-guided tour of the world’s most fascinating ocean environments.” Under Exposed, Doubilet’s interview with Alex Chadwick, takes place at the Paramount on June 6 at 7:30 pm.
 
Friday and Saturday evenings at 9:00, the festival will take over the nTelos Wireless Pavilion for Shots and Works, two hours a night of what Owen describes as “visual essays by photographers from all over the world,” culled by “advisory boards from New York who look at hundreds of potential projects.” These onscreen projections will feature new and innovative work from both professionals and emerging talents in photojournalism, fine art, and everything in between.
 
Rather than presenting a smorgasbord of individual photos, the 40 artists will show entire projects constructed free from commercial restraint, sometimes with musical accompaniment. Shots on Friday will be a sort of Fridays After Five continued in the dark, and still free. Tickets for Works on Saturday are $10. Each evening will follow the same format, but with different participants. 
 
Renowned photography teacher Ernesto Bazan, a native of Sicily, first saw Cuba in 1992. He went back for 14 years. “For many years I had strongly desired Cuba, as if longing for a woman that you meet only once and can’t get out of your mind,” Bazan says. “I’m almost certain I lived there in another life.” Bazan will show his work and present a Masters Talk at the Paramount June 8 at 11:00 a.m.
 
Five other artists will receive exhibitions this year. Lynsey Addario has documented wars and humanitarian crises from Darfur, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya for The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek, and Time. In 2009, she was on a team that received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Addario’s exhibit Veiled Rebellion is on display at McGuffey.
 
Bruce Gilden’s criterion for a good street photograph is that it makes you smell the street. “He’s proven that the street is an exotic destination,” says guest curator Vince Musi. “I’ve been known for taking pictures very close,” Gilden says, “and the older I get, the closer I get.” Gilden’s exhibition Street Smart, including images from Coney Island, Tokyo, and Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, are on display on the wall outside the Regal Cinema.
 
Hank Willis Thomas is a rising art world star whose central subject is the black male figure as portrayed in the media. “Thomas appropriates images from popular culture—advertisements, magazines—and strips them of their branding,” Owen says, showing the image by itself “as a way to poke fun but also create a dialogue about race and identity and popular culture.”
 
Thomas’ Myth(ology) has been printed on vinyl banners and is displayed on the Freedom of Speech Wall on the Mall. “There has been a lot of talk about race relations in Charlottesville,” Owen says, referring to the City’s ongoing Dialogue on Race initiative, “and I think that this is going to be an important contribution to that conversation because it is about how black males are perceived in popular culture.”
 
When Camille Seaman was growing up as part of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, a self-governing tribe in a small village outside Long Island, New York, she was taught that the human race and the natural world are intimately connected. “This false idea that we as humans are separate from nature is what I seek to challenge with my images,” she says today. Seaman’s conviction is reflected in a body of work that guest curator David Griffin describes as dramatic and sometimes ominous. Seaman herself compares her photos of polar ice in the Arctic and Antarctica to portraits of ancestors, each revealing a unique personality. Her exhibit The Last Iceberg is at Chroma Arts Project.
 
Robin Schwartz has been taking pictures of her daughter Amelia with animals since Amelia was three. Gibbon apes, dogs, kangaroos, llamas, and a hairless cat have all appeared with 13-year old Amelia, who now collaborates with her mother, helping choose poses and clothes. “My daughter and I share an affinity with the animal kingdom and we play out our fantasies and explore our eccentricities by creating a cultural space where animals not only co-exist with humans, but also interact as full partners,” Robin says. Schwartz’s interspecies fantasia Amelia’s World is on display at Warm Springs Gallery. The photographer will be at the gallery on June 9 at 11:00 a.m. Pets are welcome.
 
LOOK3’s feast of images and stimulating discussion is bound to put some festivalgoers in a, shall we say, interactive mood. Let them head to the Truth Booth on the front lawn of the McGuffey Arts Center June 7-9. Truth Booth is a touring inflatable installation shaped like a cartoon speech bubble. Inside, the booth functions like an old-fashioned photo booth that takes multiple, rapid portrait shots, except that it takes two-minute videos instead. As the videos are taken, subjects are invited to complete sentence, “The truth is…” First installed at Ireland’s Galway Arts Festival in 2011, Truth Booth is traveling to festivals, fairs, and the like, compiling footage that will be edited into a single work of art.
 
“The stories behind the photographs, I think that’s where we’ve distinguished ourselves,” Owens says modestly, acknowledging only when asked that LOOK3 is the preeminent photo festival in the U.S. “When we bring people to the stage, it’s not a canned presentation. We sit them down with a professional interviewer and ask them questions that are sometimes tough to answer.” Look and listen—Central Virginia has the privilege every June. 
 
For tickets and information about classes and other events, go to www.look3.org. 
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Virginia Festival of the Book

Every few years, it seems, someone comes out with a study finding that Americans are reading less. But not in Charlottesville. In Charlottesville the driver looking down in the next lane over may be texting, or he may be rereading War and Peace. We love our books in Central Virginia, and we love our book festival, the five-day literary blowout the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities throws every March with hundreds of authors in bookstores, libraries, schools, and other C-ville venues where reading is safe and legal. Twenty-thousand bibliophiles attended last year’s festival, many of them from outside the region; 96 percent of them rated it “great” or “excellent.”
 
The 18th annual festival, five days of mostly free talks and panels designed “to bring together writers and readers and to promote and celebrate books, reading, literacy, and literary culture,” takes place Wednesday, March 21 through Sunday, March 25. Two hundred and twenty-two events are scheduled, fifty-two of them geared towards children. Three hundred and ninety-eight authors, illustrators and publishers will take part.
 
Some Highlights
The celebration begins at 7:30 Wednesday morning at the Omni Hotel with a Leadership Breakfast featuring basketball legend Jerry West, former star of the L.A. Lakers. West will speak about overcoming obstacles, being a team player, and achieving success, and will sign copies of his autobiography West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life. Individual tickets are $40 and may be purchased on the festival’s website.
 
Politics and history buffs of all stripes will invade City Hall at 10:00 a.m. for Reinventing the Constitution with Christopher Phillips, author of Constitution Cafe: Jefferson’s Brew for a True Revolution. Phillips will speak about his efforts to engender interest in a new Constitutional Convention.
 
The festival officially kicks off at noon at the JMRL Central Library in a ceremony with Poet Laureate of Virginia Kelly Cherr, author of 20 books of poetry, including Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. The ceremony will feature readings from the winners of the state of Virginia’s Letters About Literature contest, in which kids grades 4 through 12 tell their favorite authors what they’ve learned from their books. 
 
Also at noon, at the UVA bookstore, China scholar and Charlottesville resident Wright Doyle, co-author of China: Ancient Culture, Modern Society, discusses the history, culture and politics of that rising nation.
 
At 6:00 p.m. at The Happy Cook, Sandra Gutierrez will demonstrate recipes from her book The New Southern-Latino Table: Recipes that Bring Together the Bold and Beloved Flavors of Latin America and the American South. 
 
At 7:00 p.m. at the Haven, Music From the True Vine: A Tribute to Mike Seeger will celebrate the late Lexington, VA resident, a multi-instrumentalist whose life was dedicated to the celebration and preservation of old-time American folk music. Seeger biographer Bill C. Malone will speak and musicians Alexia Smith, James Leva, Danny Knicely, Aimee Curl, and Elizabeth LaPrelle will pick and sing in an “old-time” jam hosted by the Charlottesville Friends of Old Time Music.
 
Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. at the UVA Bookstore, Andrew Laties and Tanya Denckla Cobb will discuss Food and Books: The Power of Local. Laties is author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want to Fight For—from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities. Cobb teaches food system planning at UVA and has written Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing the Way We Eat.
 
Thursday at 11:45 a.m. the Festival Luncheon at the Omni features Dr. Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and one of the “History Guys” on the public radio show BackStory. Ayers is on the advisory committee of the Encyclopedia Virginia and is editor of America on the Eve of the Civil War and America’s War: Talking About the Civil War and Emancipation on Their 150th Anniversaries. Tickets are $60. 
 
Thursday noon at the Central Library, the Memoirs: Women on the Edge program will feature Judith Dickerman-Nelson and B. Morrison. Dickerson-Nelson, a poet and educator from Townshend, Vermont, is the author of Believe in Me: A Teen Mom’s Story, about her experience as a cheerleader and honor student at a Catholic girl school in Massachusetts. Morrison’s Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother, tells the story of a woman who was raised to look down on the poor, but joins their ranks in the wake of divorce. 
 
At 1:00 p.m. at the UVA Rotunda, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann will read from Soliton: Poems, The Same and Not the Same. Hoffmann is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University, and the author of numerous books on science, poetry, and philosophy.
 
At 8:00 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, Susan Haltom and Jane Brown will discuss the connections between writing and gardening in a program entitled Growing Thoughts: Of Gardens and Writers. Haltom and Brown are co-authors of One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place. Moderator Sallie Brown, a former garden guide at Monticello and Montpelier, is a lecturer in American Garden and Landscape History. 
 
Friday will feature Real Estate Weekly’s very own editorial coordinator, Joanne DiMaggio, author of Soul Writing: Conversing with your Higher Self. She and Frank DeMarco, author of The Cosmic Internet, will be at CitySpace at 10:00 a.m. 
 
“Frank and I both have written books that focus on how to access guidance from a higher source,” said DiMaggio. “It’s the same process of tapping into the well of inspiration that writers, composers, and artists have used for centuries. Frank and I have had different experiences using this process, so we’ll be giving the audience a different slant on the same subject based on how we’ve applied the process to our lives and our work.”
 
Danielle Valore Evans’ debut collection of short stories about young African-American women, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, was the co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for first-time authors.  Evans will read from her work for the African-American Authors Book Club program at noon at the Central Library. 
 
Charlottesville poet and motivational speaker Rose Williams has written a memoir called Tiny Steps about her struggles and accomplishments as a student with cerebral palsy at Clark Elementary School. Williams will discuss her experience at 1:00 p.m.at the Herman Key Recreation Center.
 
Kathleen Curtis Wilson is author of Irish People, Irish Linen and founder of Old Abingdon Weavers. She will examine Irish linen through the prisms of art, architecture, technology, economic and social history, and cultural traditions at 2:00 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, The Literary Icons program at 4:00 p.m. at the UVA Bookstore will focus on the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Leo Tolstoy, and E.B. White. Panelists will include Charles Shields, author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy, and Michael Sims, author of The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic.
 
The People’s Pharmacy Comes to Charlottesville in City Hall Chambers at 4:00 p.m. as National Public Radio’s cheeriest voices, Joe and Terry Graedon of the popular NPR program, host a live show, taking audience questions about health issues and discussing the latest research and remedies. 
 
Everyone loves a whodunit, and year after year the mystery and crime programs are some of the festival’s most popular offerings. Two bestselling writers, Steve Berry (The Jefferson Key) and Lisa Gardner (Catch Me) will speak about their craft In Crime Wave: The Art of the Thrill at the Albemarle County Office Building at 8:00 p.m.
 
Poetry lovers can hear three contemporary African-American poets at UVA’s Small Special Collections Library at 8:00 p.m. in An Evening with Nikki Giovanni, Nikky Finney, and Kwame Alexander. Giovanni has written numerous volumes of poetry and received many more awards for it. She teaches at Virginia Tech. Finney won the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry for her fourth collection, Head Off & Split. Alexander has written 14 books of poetry and fiction including the children’s picture book Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band, featuring “Mules Davis” and “Ella Finchgerald.”
 
Story Fest
Story Fest on Saturday is a full day of activities on and around the Downtown Mall. WVPT will lead a parade at 9:30 a.m. from the Omni Hotel to the Paramount Theater for a screening of a Curious George movie. 
 
Several kids programs will run concurrently Saturday at 10:00 a.m. In Making a Picture Book with Anna Alter at CitySpace, the Charlottesville-born author will display art from her picture books, read from her latest, What Can You Do with an Old Red Shoe?, and lead young future authors in an art project. Valerie Tripp and Fred Bowen will talk shop at the Omni for Writing for Girls. Writing for Boys. What’s the Difference? Tripp has authored many books in the popular American Girl series, and Bowen is a Washington Post/KidsPost sports columnist and author of many sports fiction books for boys. 
 
The winners of the 2012 Book Festival Poster Contest will be announced at the JMRL Central Library at noon, where posters will be on display all week. Oakley’s Gently Used Books will hold a Book Swap exclusively for kids at from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
 
Fifty-five events for kids take place at schools throughout the city and county. “We love engaging young readers,” says the festival’s Susan Coleman, Director of Center for the Book at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. “The kids are wiggly and giggly and excited. We trick them into thinking this is all fun, and it is all fun, but we’re also supplementing the standards of learning with literacy skills reading writing and listening.”  
 
Publishing Day
Publishing Day is an annual cluster of events at the Omni for aspiring authors and illustrators. 
 
Robert Goolrick’s debut novel, A Reliable Wife, has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. In Making the Breakout Book at 10:00 a.m., Goolrick, agent Lyn Nesbit, editor Chuck Adams, and publicist Kelly Bowen talk about their mutual success and plans to capitalize on it for Goolrick’s next book. At 4:00 p.m., literary agents Erin Cox, Deborah Grosvenor, and Byrd Leavell will talk about what agents do and how to find a good one. Vendors will fill the atrium at the Omni for the Annual Book Fair on Saturday beginning at 9:00 a.m.
 
Romance
Are romance novels a source of understanding or just a guilty pleasure?  Authors Cathy Maxwell (The Seduction of Scandal), Katharine Ashe (When a Scot Loves A Lady), Kerrelyn Sparks (Sexiest Vampire Alive), and Pamela Palmer (Ecstasy Untamed) will discuss the value of romance novels at Barnes and Noble at 2:00 p.m. in Fiction: Everything I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Romance Novels.
 
Southern Refrains: An Evening with Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Marshall Chapman, and Matraca Berg brings together two award-winning authors with two Nashville veterans to celebrate the South a benefit for the festival. Winner of the Southern Book Critics Award in Fiction, Smith’s most recent novel is Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Jill McCorkle is the author of five novels and has had two stories selected for publication in The Best American Short Stories. Singer-songwriter and author Marshall Chapman has had songs covered by songs Emmylou Harris, Joe Cocker, Irma Thomas and Jimmy Buffett. Matraca Berg’s new record, The Dreaming Fields, has garnered raves from the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NPR. They’ll sing and reminisce at 8:00 p.m. at the Paramount Theater. Tickets are $48 and $32. 
 
The Virginia Book Festival is a highlight of the year for literature lovers—and for hotels, restaurants and bookstores throughout Charlottesville as well. Local bookstores provide books for sale at every event. In the first ten years of its existence alone, the festival pumped $2 million dollars into the local economy. The festival is a community effort, presented by the VFH with the help of area foundations, corporations, schools, libraries, businesses, civic organizations, and numerous enthusiastic individuals. It says a lot about Central Virginia.
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The Paramount Theater

It’s the grandest room in town; a neo-classical beauty with brass chandeliers, plaster molding, and lush silk tapestries. It was the Saturday night dress-up destination for decades of Charlottesville families eager to catch the latest Technicolor Hollywood hit. First opened on East Main Street in Charlottesville in 1931, long before the street was turned into an outdoor mall, the Paramount Theater went dark in 1974, a victim of hard times in the movie industry and the advent of indoor shopping malls, which drew consumers away from traditional downtowns. Plans for the empty structure came and went for years until a group of community leaders set their minds to restoring the historic building to its former glory and pride of place in Albemarle County cultural life. 

Since 2004 evenings at the red brick building with the Greek Revival-like facade have been special occasions again, opportunities to catch a wide variety of nationally and internationally known acts and even a few films from yesteryear in a grand old movie palace that’s a source of visual delight and civic pride. Visitors to Charlottesville marvel at the “European atmosphere” of the bricked-over Downtown Mall with its charming specialty shops, restaurants and cafés. The revived and rejuvenated Paramount sits smack dab in the middle of all that charm and creativity, drawing people there to discover it.
 
Situated on East Main Street on land originally owned by Martin Hardware Company, the Paramount was designed by Rapp and Rapp, a Chicago architectural firm with over 400 film theaters to its credit throughout the United States. In a nod to the area’s favorite son and unofficial first decorator, Thomas Jefferson, the Rapp brothers eschewed the then popular Art Deco style and built an octagonal auditorium with damask walls framing colonial scenes. Twelve hundred and sixty-one seats faced a stage 50 feet wide by 26 deep and proscenium 50 feet high.
 
The state of the art, air-conditioned theater opened on Thanksgiving eve, November 25, 1931, with a showing of the gridiron drama “Touchdown,” starring athletic legend Jim Thorpe alongside Richard Arlen, Peggy Shannon and Jack Oakie. “A line, with people three and four abreast, was extended down the block to Second Street East, and around the square to the post office” (today’s Jefferson-Madison Regional Library building), the Daily Progress reported. Some people had to be turned away. “The popular impression of the playhouse was that it is a place of charming design, harmonious varicolored lights and luxurious seats.”
 
Stars including Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford sent congratulatory cables and flower baskets that night, and the inaugural screening was followed by fireworks—eight “aerial bombs”—shot from the rooftop.
 
Although it opened early in the Great Depression and was situated just down the street from another ornate movie house, the Jefferson Theater (in operation since 1912), the new theater thrived, operating as part of the nationwide Paramount Pictures theater chain and presenting cartoons, fashion shows, and live musical entertainment along with first run films. Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller and other top stars took the stage in the Swing era. Sock hops, limbo parties and rock ‘n rollers including Roy Orbison came later.
 
Nights at the Paramount were elegant and theatrical, with valets stationed at the front doors and a red velvet rope splitting the grand lobby down the center for entering on the right side and exiting on the left. Ushers helped patrons find seats and attendants dispensed toiletries in the ladies rooms. Inside the auditorium, a Wurlitzer organ would rise dramatically from the orchestra pit before film showings, glowing in colored lights and manned by a vivacious gentleman known as “Brownie” who would lead the audience in “Good Times are Here Again” and other popular songs. Admission was 25 cents for adults, 10 for children.
 
But the fancy treatment was undercut for a large part of the audience by Southern segregation. African-American patrons suffered the indignities of a separate entrance on Third Street, separate concessions and restrooms, and balcony seats. Not for three decades did the theater integrate, finally closing the balcony and the side entrances in 1963, the same year Sidney Poiter made history as the first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in Lilies of the Field.
 
Decline and Decor
Back in 1959, the Paramount’s owners had given it a dubious remake. Paramount Executive Assistant Sandy DeKay grew up in Charlottesville, a daughter of two avid movies buffs, and spent Friday nights at the theater with her parents and sister. “I remember the big old candy counter,” DeKay remembers, “and having popcorn and Baby Ruth candy bars and coming up the grand lobby.” But the place was “suffering from its 1959 redecoration,” Dekay says, a “huge alteration in color scheme from the original muted earth tone beige and calm green to burgundy and black.” 
 
And there were mirrors, oodles of mirrors. “Each mirror was a square foot and they just attached them to the wall in the lobby.” The mirrors may have seemed hip in their day, but “they pretty much obliterated the 1931 atmosphere.” The decorators gave the auditorium a facelift as well but, perhaps due to prohibitive expense, spared the lovely murals.
 
Whatever the merits of the makeover, by the early 70s the theater was showing its age. “It became very bedraggled,” DeKay says. “It needed some TLC.” The crowds that might begin shopping on Main Street and then take in a show at the Paramount had fallen off, hurt by the 1959 opening of Barracks Road Shopping Center, which billed itself as a “progressive shopping center typical of Charlottesville’s modern expansion program, offering its residents the latest in every form of shopping conveniences.”
 
One Friday night in 1974, a malfunctioning popcorn machine started a fire. The audience members were evacuated safely–all twelve of them. This was the year the Paramount’s operators took note of the times, declined to renew their lease, and decamped to Greenbrier Drive where they built a new double-screened theater.
 
Save the Paramount
In the years that the building stood empty and unused, proposals were made to raze it for a mini-mall, an office high-rise, and a national jazz hall of fame. But some people still cherished the old theater. As part of the festivities when the Tour de Trump bicycle road race came through town in 1990, 3,000 people toured the place and many signed a pledge to clean or paint or do whatever to restore it. Around this time, Save the Paramount shirts went on sale downtown.
 
In 1992, with grants from the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, the non-profit Paramount Theater, Inc. bought the building, restored the marquee, and lit it up on New Year’s Eve, a neon promise that the Paramount would live again. BAMA Works Fund, the charitable arm of the Dave Matthews Band, contributed $500,000. Over the next 14 years, hundreds of individuals, businesses and foundations made contributions ranging from $5 to more than $1 million.
 
The Washington architectural firm Martinez & Johnson Architecture was brought in to partner with Charlottesville’s Bushman Dreyfus Architects. A $16.2 million renovation plan was drawn up with the goal of restoring the theater to its original elegance and preparing it for a “new role as a regional performing arts center.”
 
Work began in March 2002. Seats were widened to 20 inches, and the space between each row was lengthened to 36. For better accommodation of live performers, the stage was deepened from 14 to 24 feet, and a retractable orchestra pit was added, reducing the number of seats from 1261 to 1040. The fly loft was modernized, and a three-story annex was built to house a box office, a ballroom and meeting spaces, and a community rehearsal room.
 
To undo the 1959 changes, researchers analyzed original carpet squares from theater storage room and paint samples from the walls to determine their original colors. “If you look up in the main lobby you’ll see a series of three barrel vaults,” DeKay says, “and they have a gold hatch marked stencil on them which we didn’t even know was there because they had painted them burgundy. Now they’ve been restored and it makes the whole structure much lighter. It was sort of like walking in a cave before, comparatively speaking.”
 
A Community Theater
The long awaited grand reopening finally took place in December 2004 with a fundraising concert by crooner Tony Bennett and an official opening show by opera star Denyce Graves. “I can vividly remember Mr. Bennett asking the staff to turn off all the microphones and the sound system in the theater,” says recently appointed Paramount Executive Director Chris Eure. “He then stepped to the front of the stage and sang without any technical enhancement. After he finished singing he stood there shaking his head with deep nostalgia in his eyes and said ‘they don’t make them like this anymore!’”
 
In the past seven years the Paramount has reached out to the whole community, presenting everything from country to classical, ballet to the blues, old time Hollywood to high-definition live broadcast. Bill Cosby, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis and Joan Baez have all appeared. So have Ralph Stanley, B.B. King, Randy Newman and Jeff Tweedy. Moscow City Ballet makes regular appearances and the theater’s elegance provides the perfect setting for high def (HD) broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera and London’s National Theatre. The Virginia Film Festival reserves the theater for its top-billed films each November.
 
This year’s free Martin Luther King Community Celebration featured civil rights heroes Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond, and celebrity chefs like Peter Chang and Tom Colicchio have brought out the foodies. The theater serves local school kids as well. As part of Theater Education, programs intended to foster understanding and love of the performing arts, 70,000 Central Virginia students and have come for theater, poetry, dance, music, and science.
 
The Paramount was brought back to life with community support, and that support is what keeps it going. The 155 names on the donor wall in the lobby honor people who gave $5,000 or more to the theater’s restoration. Hundreds more made smaller gifts. Nowadays ticket sales cover roughly 47 percent of the Paramount’s operating expenses, but doubling prices isn’t an option, Eure says: “If we did, then we would only be serving part of our community.” Contributions to the annual fund, corporate and individual sponsorships of performances, fundraisers, foundation support, and gifts to the historic preservation fund make up the gap instead. Along with the theater’s 1000 annual financial supporters, several hundred volunteers serve as ticket takers and ushers, help with administrative work, and paper the town with flyers advertising upcoming performances.
 
Thanks to their work and support, Central Virginia has a jewel of a theater that’s both an arts and entertainment venue and an economic anchor to a revitalized downtown. More than 75,000 people came to The Paramount just last year. That translates into more than $1.7 million in incremental sales receipts for neighboring restaurants and businesses. Research indicates that each ticket the Paramount sells generates an additional $27 income for other downtown merchants.
 
The Paramount’s mission is to operate “for the artistic, educational, and charitable benefit of its community,” Eure says. “I want to ensure that it is around for generations to come to inspire more and more moments of magic. We are here for the community, and the community in return has responded with great generosity and support.” 
 
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Snow Homes

So the car’s all loaded with that new winter sports equipment Santa brought us, and now we just have to wait for a good snowfall. Or do we? Not with the Massanutten and Wintergreen resorts so close at hand just off the Blue Ridge Parkway we don’t. Massanutten boasts that its 5,200 acres include “1,110 feet of vertical – the most in Virginia, Maryland, or Pennsylvania.” Wintergreen has twice been named “Best Ski Resort” by the readers of Washington Post online. Skiing and skating, even snow tubing and snowboarding–these resorts provide both snow and ice all season ‘round for day-tripping sports enthusiasts and prime real estate for sport and nature lovers looking for a second home.

 
Massanutten Sports
Massanutten was the first resort in Virginia to offer snowboarding and snow tubing trails, plus lighting on all its ski trails, a quad chairlift, and a loading conveyor belt. Its 70 skiable acres, the most of any Virginia resort, include 14 trails ranging from the 4100 foot ParaDice to the 300 foot Yee Ha. 
 
For skiers and snowboarders for whom merely sliding downhill at high speed without wiping out isn’t challenging enough, Massanutten has two terrain parks, comparable to skateboard parks in the snow, with tabletops, rollers, spines and other hard, unyielding objects that must be negotiated with skill – or else. And Massanutten staff hand-groom the parks daily, so that their contours and layouts constantly offer fresh challenges. 
 
The Easy Street Terrain Park for beginners has relatively small features and is for boarders only. CMB Terrain Park is for upper level snowboarders and twin-tipped skiers, and has its own lift.
 
Peaked Mountain Express Tube Park is a 900-foot long, eight-lane hill that opened in 1998. A conveyor belt takes boarders up the hill, and a staff member ensures that lanes are clear before they start their ride.  
 
“In the old days when you got to the bottom of the hill, you’d pole or shuffle to the load point where the chair would come and pick you up,” says Massanutten Ski Area Manager Steven Showalter. Nowadays, a gate pops open automatically and you slide onto the conveyor and the chair gently picks you up and takes you back up to the top. 
 
Massanutten veterans will be pleased to find that construction has been completed on a new, Doppelmayr Triple Chair, replacing a 1972 era Double Chair, and re-grading to allow easier access to the Lower MakAttack and Pacesetter trails.
 
Massanutten Snow Sport Learning Center assists skiers and boarders at all age levels. The Center’s most popular option, the Pathway Program for beginners, includes equipment rentals and two hours of instruction. “Hopefully in those two hours we can teach you how to turn left, turn right, and stop, and give you experience riding the lift!” Showalter says. The Center also offers lessons on the advanced beginner/intermediate level, and private lessons for experienced skiers. Its Ladies Skiing Clinic serves Intermediate level women, while its Silver Skiing Clinic serves intermediate skiers of both genders who are “over 50 years young.” Slope Sliders Children’s Program teaches skiing for ages 4-12 and snowboarding for ages 4-12. 
 
Physically challenged individuals of all ages can find instruction in each winter sport at the Adaptive Ski School (M.A.S.S.), a partnership with Therapeutic Adventures, Inc., a three decade old organization dedicated to teaching, coaching, guiding and mentoring physically challenged individuals and families. 
 
As a member of the Southern Alpine Race Association (SARA), Massanutten offers team competition in skiing and snowboarding for kids on the intermediate through advanced levels. Meets are held every weekend throughout the season from late December to early March at a different resort throughout the region, and at Massanutten itself, with each resort fielding a team. The Race Competition Squad is for skiers ages 7-19 who are competent on advanced terrain. The Ski Development Squad is for children ages 7-16 who can compete on intermediate through advanced terrain. The Freestyle Squad is for snowboarders ages 7-16 and competes on advanced terrain, and the Snowboard Development Squad is for boarders ages 7-16 and competes on intermediate terrain.
 
Ice skating aficionados can lace up their skates at Massanutten’s newest winter playground, the LeClub Recreation Center. The 4,250 square-foot outdoor skating rink can accommodate up to 132 skaters at a time. Novice skaters, both children and adults, can take lessons either privately or in a group.
 
Massanutten rents skis, snowboards, boots, skates and helmets. It does not rent clothing or accessories. 
 
Massanutten Housing
The Massanutten resort is studded with 1,000 single family homes, and 1,300 time-sharing units and many property owners are eligible for 20 percent discounts on ski and snowboard tickets. With its walking paths and numerous mountain trails, Massanutten is a great place for dog owners to buy a home. 
 
Current single family homes for sale range from 16,000 a square foot, nine bedroom and eleven bath property on ten acres with a $1.675 million asking price to 1,495 a square foot, three bedroom and three bath townhouse.   
 
Massanutten also has time shares for sale to suit many budgets. Its top of the line Summit Hills and Summit Sunrise townhomes on Emily Lane boast excellent mountain views, have four bedrooms and four baths and can sleep twelve. Both can be split into two separately locked units.
 
Equally top quality Woodstone Casa de Campo (Country House) units have two bedrooms and two bathrooms and can sleep eight, while Woodstone Meadows townhouse units have four bedrooms and four bathrooms and can sleep twelve. Both styles can be split into two separately locked units. Each is close to the resort’s Woodstone Meadows Golf Course and Woodstone Recreation Center.
 
All Massanutten owners have access to the Owner’s Corner website with its newsletters, budgets, and privacy policies.
 
Wintergreen Snow Sports
Wintergreen is proud to be the only resort on the East Coast to use an automated snow making system across its entire terrain. The computerized system uses some 40,000 linear feet of pipeline and more than 400 snow guns. The result: snow all of the time, snow everywhere.
 
The 11,000-acre resort on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains has 129 slide-able acres with 26 ski and snowboard slopes and trails, the largest tubing park in Virginia, two terrain parks, and a snow park for young kids. All that plus a Snow Sports School makes Wintergreen an all-ages, all-skill levels place to play. 
 
Twenty-three percent of Wintergreen’s snowy terrain is considered suitable for beginners, while 35 percent is for intermediate and 42 percent for advanced and expert sliders. Among its slopes are Cliffhanger, a double-black-diamond expert hill, and Outer Limits, a new 2,000-foot single-black-diamond. Eagles Swoop and Tyro are intermediate slopes. Upper & Lower Dobie are suitable for beginners. 
 
The tubing park, officially called the Plunge but nicknamed the “scream machine,” is more than three football fields long, and daredevils take it at speeds of nearly 30 miles per hour. The 30-second trip down the 900-foot Zip is even faster, reaching 40 mph. A conveyor lift takes tubes and tubers back both hills. 
 
Ski fans can make runs by day, and Tuesday through Sunday nights. The park’s seven lifts can take as many as 11,200 skiers up the mountain every hour. Of its five chairlifts, two are high-speed with a six-passenger capacity. Two surface conveyor lifts are transports skiers in the beginner areas. 
 
Folks who prefer sliding on a flat surface can head to the Shamokin Ice Skating Rink outside on the Blue Ridge Terrace. The 45 x 90 foot rink can hold up to 60 skaters at a time. A 150-ton “chiller” keeps the ice icy when the weather is not. The park is available for skating parties, birthday parties, broomball events, etc. 
 
Wintergreen’s two terrain parks are for freestyle skiing on snow features, jibs and rails. The parks also host events and competitions with fancy names like Freestyle Rail Jams, the Blue Ridge Doublecross and the Glass & Powder Slopestyle.
 
Wintergreen rents skis, snowboards, boots and poles. Equipment may be rented for individual sessions or a whole season at a time.
 
Snowsports School
Wintergreen offers group and private instruction in skiing and snowboarding for all comers ages 4 and up. The Treehouse serves kids 4-14 while offering childcare for kids 2 ½-12. Its Ridgely’s Rippers program for ages 4-14 teaches skiing and its Mountain Explorers program for ages 7-14 teaches both skiing and snowboarding.
 
The resort offers instruction to adults as well, based on the American Teaching System, guaranteeing beginners the ability to turn (important) and stop (very important!) by the end of the first lesson. 
 
Ridgely’s Fun Park is a safe play place for kids 3 and older to make snowmen and snowballs, and to sled, ride a carousel in a mini-tube, explore tunnels and try out bear paw snowshoes. The park tee-pee sells hot chocolate and s’mores, and the park mascot, Ridgely the Bear, makes regular appearances. 
 
Wintergreen Adaptive Skiing (WAS) is a non-profit organization that teaches kids and adults with physical disabilities to ski and snowboard. Lessons are available all day long. 
 
Wintergreen Housing
With its numerous sporting and other recreational opportunities for the whole family throughout the year, its holiday programming, range of dining options and, of course, those gorgeous views, it’s no wonder Wintergreen is such a sought after spot for a vacation home. 
 
Many people first go to Wintergreen with “a singular focus” says Wintergreen’s Brian Chase. Maybe their kids want to ski or snowboard, but “quite often they get there and find themselves pleased with the other options, such as dining, or that it’s a great place to congregate and bring friends. I have some clients who were really shocked at the amount of time they were spending at Wintergreen in the spring, summer and fall. It’s a four seasons resort.”
 
The resort is home to roughly 1200 condos ranging in price from $80,000 to $500,000, and a variety of townhomes in the $180,000 to $450,000 price range. Detached single family houses are valued from $200,000 to $1.5 million. Right now there are 100 condos and townhomes for sale, along with 85 single family homes. In addition, about 40 percent of homes in the valley below Wintergreen are second homes, according to Chase.
 
Annual expenses condominium owners pay, including taxes, insurance, condo dues, HOA fees, and utilities, run about $10,000 a year. For detached, single-family homes, that figure is only $6,000 per annum.
 
But many homeowners actually reside on the mountain only part-time, renting out their property the rest of the year either privately or through the resort’s rental program. “With all the conferences and other business activity,” Chase says, “there’s a reasonable expectation for rental activity year ‘round. In the resorts rental program, you’re looking at defraying operating costs. You might break even plus or minus a couple of thousand dollars.” 
 
Prospective renters will find some 275 privately owned properties currently available. Renting at Wintergreen is much like staying at a hotel, with 24-hour a day access to the front desk. 
 
For more information on winter sports and home ownership at Central Virginia’s two exciting resorts, visit www.wintergreenresort.com and www.massanutten.com.
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First Night Virginia

They call it First Night in a spirit of optimism, not irony. It’s the last night of the old calendar year, but the night when new hopes lead to new opportunities. It’s a night when kids can stay up late and parents can choose from a couple of dozen entertainment options on the cheap, like this year’s big screen broadcast of the University of Virginia Cavaliers football team in the Chick-fil-A Bowl. It’s a 30-year Central Virginia tradition, a family-friendly, alcohol-free New Year’s Eve celebration on and around the heart of Charlottesville, the red-bricked Downtown Mall. And it’s a whole lotta fun.

 
This year’s bash will feature over 50 performances, events and activity opportunities in 11 hours, beginning at 1:00 p.m., two hours earlier than previous revels, and ending with a laser show at midnight. Think of it as the kickoff party for Celebrate 250, Charlottesville’s year-long 250th anniversary celebration.
The fun starts with the first annual First Night 5k run, a five-kilometer race beginning and ending at the Charlottesville Pavilion on the east end of the mall. Runners and walkers are both welcome, with or without dogs and strollers, and all participants will receive a “First Night Virginia 5K” shirt. Awards will be given to top finishing men, women and children. Registration is open until 10:00 a.m. on the day of the race at $25 for individuals, $30 on race day. Families get a discount rate of $20 a person, $25 on race day. 
 
The Virginia Discovery Museum will offer free admission with a First Night wristband from 1:00 to 8:00 p.m. The Discovery Museum will also have maps and clues available for a treasure hunt sponsored by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. Main Street Arena will offer half-priced admission for skating fans with First Night wristbands from 5:15 p.m .to 1:00 a.m. Eight local art galleries will also be open. 
 
Hungry First Nighters will have their choice of vendors including Carpe Donuts, The Lunchbox, Last Call Dogs, Dan’s Food and the Whole Foods vending truck. 
 
Kid Fest
Kid Fest in the Omni Hotel ballroom from 1:00 to 5:45 p.m. will feature face painting, juggling, magic, balloons and a Bounce and Play inflatable. Creation Station will offer crafts, and Triple C Camp’s Green Adventure Project will have a campsite display and a touch tank where kids can pick up a snake skin and feel a turtle shell. At 5:45 p.m. performers and staff will join kids for the annual Kids Processional, a march down the mall to the Pavilion replete with noisemakers and party hats, and a stop along the way for best video op of evening, the Bubble Wrap Stomp.  
 
Charlottesville Ballet’s Nutcracker Suite is a 45-minute interactive performance specially designed to introduce young audiences to the beloved Tchaikovsky classic. The dancing will take place at the Herman Key Rec Center at 1:00 p.m. 
 
Barefoot Puppet Theatre tells world folk tales, classic tales with a twist, and their own original stories to young audiences in theaters, schools, libraries and children’s museums up and down the East Coast. They’ll put on a show with hand-crafted puppets, sets and scenery at CitySpace at 3:30, 4:45 and 6:45 p.m.
 
Buffalo Bill will bring his one-man Wild West Extravaganza and Revue, and his “world famous persona” to Grace Covenant Church 4:45, 6:45 and 8 p.m.
 
Teen Extreme
Big kids – 10 and older – will have a chance to ditch parents and younger siblings and cut loose at Teen Extreme in the Herman Key, Jr. Rec Center, with its Ultimate Adrenaline Rush obstacle course, 22-foot Roaring River Slide, and mechanical bull. They can even beat on each other with oversize boxing gloves in the Big Glove Boxing Ring. Teen Extreme will be open from 3:30 p.m. till midnight.
 
Magic and Comedy
Monkeys in the House is a family show by John Hadfield with original music, comedy, magic and juggling tricks. The monkey business will be happening at Grace Covenant Church 1:00 and 2:15 p.m.
 
Captain Shiny Pants juggles, performs magic tricks, and sings funny songs along with first mate robot bird Nelson Beakley and Soupy Seal. They’ll be silly at Grace Covenant Church at 3:30 p.m.
 
Master juggler and comedian Mark Nizer will be playing First Night for the fourth time since moving to town in 2000. Nizer says his audiences should expect the impossible. The Los Angeles Times says he’s “one of the best practitioners of the art.” He’ll show his stuff at the Paramount Theater at 4:45, 6:45 and 9:15 p.m.
 
“Digital dexterity,” “cunning sleight of hand” and “a charming personality” – that’s what to expect from magician Eric Jones. He’ll bring it all to the Omni Hotel at 4:45, 6:45 and 8 :00 p.m.
 
Bone Hampton has starred in a film with Sandra Bullock and appeared on ABC’s popular morning show, “The View.” He’ll do stand-up comedy at the Paramount Theater at 8:00 and 10:30 p.m.
 
Bent Theatre has been making Charlottesville laugh since 2004 with its Second City-style improvisational skits that riff on pop culture and audience suggestions. We’ll Say It, They’ll Play It at CitySpace at 8:00, 9:15 and 10:30 p.m. 
 
Music
Musical choices this year run the gamut from classical string quartet to classic rock, barbershop choral to bluegrass gospel. 
 
In Vivo String Quartet—two violins, a viola and a cello—are members of the award-winning Charlottesville High School String Ensemble. They’ll play chamber music at CitySpace at 1:00 p.m.
 
Singer/songwriter Billy Caldwell came to Charlottesville from the Green Mountains of Vermont. He’ll play his “Roots & Roll” blend of Americana, classic rock and R&B at the Haven at 1:00 and 2:00 p.m.
 
Albemarle Pipes and Drums was formed in 2006 to play and pass on the tradition of the music and culture of Scotland and the British Isles. They will perform at First United Methodist Church Main Sanctuary at 2:15 and 3:30 p.m.
 
The Deanes are a bluegrass gospel band from Standardsville. They’ll pick and sing at the Haven at 3:30 and 4:45 p.m.
 
The Jeffersonland Chorus, directed by David Rogers, are a 19-man, nattily dressed acapella ensemble specializing in barbershop music and horseplay. They’ll harmonize at First United Methodist Church at 3:30 and 4:45 p.m.
 
The five guys in the Downbeat Project sing soulful melodies over a unique instrumental blend of mandocello, upright bass, slide guitar, and drums. The young Charlottesville group will play their groove-filled tunes at the Haven at 6:45 and 8:00 p.m.
 
Janet Muse of Charlottesville and Mike Dunn of Crozet play dance tunes—English, Scottish and contra dance tunes, that is. They’ll play traditional and original compositions at First United Methodist Church at 6:45 and 8:00 p.m.
 
The Buzzard Hollow Boys got together here 20-odd years ago, but locate their old-timey music “somewhere between the Dust Bowl and the Mississippi Delta,” in the virtual place where “Johnny Cash shook hands with Lightning Hopkins, on the road with Bob Wills.” They’ll play it old school on acoustic and electric instruments at First United Methodist Church at 6:45 and 8:00 p.m.
 
Dr. Levine and the Dreaded BluesLady are singer Lorrie Strother and guitarist and University of Virginia blues historian Stephen Levine. They specialize in blues from the 1920s and ‘30s, the Mississippi Delta slide guitar style, and the Piedmont fingerpicking style characteristic of the Southeast. They’ll play the Omni Hotel at 8:00 and 9:15 p.m.
 
Carleigh Nesbitt is a young up-and-coming singer/songwriter from Ivy with a Southern drawl and a love of country and Americana folk music. Nesbitt and friends will play First United Methodist Church Main Sanctuary at 9:15 and 10:30 p.m.
 
The Groove Train takes audiences back to the 70’s with disco beats, wild costumes and big hair. They’ll party in their platform shoes at the Omni at 9:15 and 10:30 p.m.
 
Soul Transit Authority is an eight-man soul and jazz band that loves Motown and cocktail party tunes. They’ll sock it to dance fans at the Haven at 9:15 and 10:30 p.m.
 
The Gladstones are C-Ville rock royalty, veterans of popular bands including The Casuals,  Skip Castro Band and Baaba Seth. They’ll let us hear that old time rock and roll at the Omni at 6:45 and 8:00 p.m. and at the Pavilion after the ball game until midnight. A ball drop and laser light show will follow!
 
Films
Light House Studio, Charlottesville’s independent media center for kids who want to express themselves and tell local stories on film, will hold a Short Film Showcase at 6:45 and 8:00 p.m. The program will include documentary, animation, and short fiction works from the past year, including the winner of the Virginia Film Festival’s Adrenaline Film Project, “The Iranian Job” by Jake Sarrell, Sam Gorman, and Will Jones. 
 
History
The first First Night was held in Boston in 1976. Charlottesville and Worchester, Massachusetts followed suit in 1982, and soon these community-wide, no-alcohol celebrations were being held all over the country and overseas. 
 
A Charlottesville resident named Nancy Rudolph attended Boston’s inaugural First Night, envisioned a similar event on the mall, and brought the idea to the Piedmont Council for the Arts. Partnering with Downtown Charlottesville, Inc., Darden Towe of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Colin Ross of WINA, Kate Punch, marketing director for Ash-Lawn, and Rudolph herself, they booked Lou DeWitt of the Statler Brothers as the featured performer, and sold admission buttons for a mere $3.
 
“We had 3000 buttons,” council member Sandra Levine remembers, “and we said if we can sell 1500 we’ll feel pretty good about it.” They sold them all. 
 
“It was a very balmy evening, fortunately, because we had things going on outside in Jackson Park and Lee Park,” Levine says. “There were no special events for children so everything was available to families. And they came. They came in droves! It was really exciting to be outside, and then at midnight the fireworks went off and people just sort of gathered. It was an amazingly communal experience.” 
 
The whole event was relatively inexpensive according to former executive director Chris Eure. “You had artists performing for peanuts, basically because most of them couldn’t get a gig on New Year’s Eve or it was a smoky drunken gig and they didn’t want it. First Night offered them the opportunity to entertain in a family setting.” 
 
Thirty years later, it’s still a family affair, and still an all-volunteer, non-profit production, funded this time by 31 Presenting Sponsors, 26 Community Patrons and a joint city-county grant. Five thousand people bought admission wristbands last year, and an estimated 7000 people thronged the mall. 2011 sales look even better. “I think we’re ahead of schedule,” says Cindy Adams of Carpet Plus, First Night’s chief sponsor this year and last.
 
Admission
Wristbands for admission to First Night may be purchased online at http://www.firstnightva.org/index.php/howto at $15 for adults and $5 for children ages 6 -15. Family Packs for two adults and two kids are $35. Prices rise slightly on December 31, when they will be available at the Omni. 
 
All events are general admission only with no reserved seating, except for the Mark Nizer and Bone Hampton shows at the Paramount, for which tickets must be purchased at the Paramount box office or online at http://tickets.theparamount.net/eventperformances.asp?evt=118. 
 
To register for the 5k run visit http://www.firstnightva.org/index.php. 
 
First Night Virginia is a community effort. To volunteer go to http://www.firstnightva.org/index.php/volunteer or call 434-975-8269.
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More Than Our Share – The 24th Annual Virginia Film Festival

 “I want it all quickly ‘cause I don’t want God to stop and think and wonder if I’m getting more than my share,” says Elizabeth Taylor’s character, Velvet Brown, in the 1944 movie classic, National Velvet. After 23 years of the Virginia Film Festival, it’s clear that somebody up there loves Charlottesville, because where else in a town this size can you find such a riot of cinematic riches year after year? We’ve been getting more than our share all along. 

 
Come November and the stars come to town. But not just the stars —the producers and directors too. They bring out the academics, and after the screenings come the panel discussions and the question and answer sessions. We also get a day for kids, a 72-hour Adrenaline Film Project competition for amateurs, and a chance to mingle with the pros at opening and closing night parties. 
 
Whether we deserve it or not, the bounty is ours for the taking again this November 3-6, with National Velvet and over 100 films at the Paramount, Regal and Vinegar Hill theaters downtown, and the Culbreth Theatre and Nau Auditorium on the grounds of the University of Virginia. In this third year under Director Jody Kielbasa, the emphasis is on new films, and the accompanying classics have a theme and a focus. 
 
“I think what’s unique about this festival is that we’re able to get to the ideas behind the films,” Kielbasa says. “A lot of festivals you go to, they’ll have discussions about what camera did you use, what was the budget, what about this artist. We do that as well, but I really think it’s when we bring people in and say ‘why did you make this film, what was your reason for making this film, what was your passion in making this film, who are you trying to reach?,’ then we really get down to the substance of what I feel the Virginia Film Festival is really about, and what makes me most proud.”
 
Kielbasa works hard to bring the festival to the audience and the audience to the festival, not just tailoring post-film discussions to the interests of a brainy university town, but cultivating partnerships with social service and cultural organizations. “Community outreach and community building are an important part of my artistic vision and programming,” he says, “screening films from Virginia filmmakers and bringing in experts and activists from the community, along with the academics that make up the creative and intellectual firepower in the University of Virginia.”
 
Opening Night
Last year’s festival got off to a stimulating start with Black Swan, the most controversial film of the festival, and indeed the most talked about, love-it-or-hate-it release of the year. “I think we do no less this year by opening with The Descendants, a film that has received tremendous Oscar buzz,” Kilebasa says. Directed by Alexander Payne, The Descendants stars George Clooney as a Hawaiian landowner trying to hold his family together after his wife suffers a boating accident. The Thursday, November 3 showing at the Culbreth will be followed by the Opening Night Gala in the Jefferson Ballroom at UVA’s Alumni Hall.
 
Tragedy in Dallas
Friday afternoon at 3, the Culbreth hosts a 20th anniversary screening of Oliver Stone’s JFK, a controversial, frankly fictionalized exploration of the November 22, 1963 assassination and the characters purportedly behind it, starring Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, and Albemarle County’s own Sissy Spacek. In the sort of casting, so to speak, that makes the Virginia Film Festival so engaging, Stone will discuss the film with UVA Center for Politics director and nationally known talking head Larry Sabato, who is completing a book on Kennedy. 
 
Is Pornography Free Speech?
That evening at 8:15 at the Culbreth Theatre there will be a 15th anniversary screening of Miloš Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson in the title role, along with Courtney Love and Edward Norton. The porn publisher will be on hand to discuss First Amendment issues with Josh Wheeler of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and scholars from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Florida.
 
Courage and Civil Rights
Every year the festival has a special screening for middle and high school students —last year 700 kids watched Stanley Nelson’s documentary Freedom Riders. Friday morning, even more will see another powerful civil rights chronicle, Nancy Buirski,’s The Loving Story, about Richard and Mildred Loving, a young couple in the Richmond area who were forced to leave Virginia after defying the state’s ban on interracial marriage. Sneaking back at night to visit family and friends, the couple sought the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, who went to the Supreme Court and won a landmark,  1967 ruling striking down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and setting a precedent under which all such state laws were voided. Legal experts will be on hand to discuss the film when it’s shown to the general public at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the Nau Auditorium.
 
Courage and Gender
The festival’s Centerpiece film, Albert Nobbs, will be shown Saturday at 8:30 at the Paramount. Directed by Rodrigo García and starring Glenn Close, who won an Obie in the title role in an off-Broadway production in 1982, it also features the young star Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids are Alright), and veteran stage and screen actress Janet McTeer. Based on a 19th century short story by the Irish modernist author George Moore, Albert Nobbs tells the story of an independently minded woman posing as a butler at a posh Dublin hotel who falls in love with a painter and decides to give up her job and her false identity. Longtime friend of the festival Julie Lynn is one of the film’s producers, and will interview Garcia and Wasikowska. 
 
Families Rule
Saturday is also Family Day, when the festival throws a party on the Downtown Mall for young film fans, future film stars, and those who love them. The day’s highlight will be the 10:30 a.m. Paramount showing of the 1944 classic National Velvet, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Angela Lansbury. Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a young English girl who wins a horse in a town lottery and decides to train it for the Grand National Steeplechase. A father of two young daughters, Kielbasa calls Taylor’s character “a wonderful role model for young women,” and the film one of his favorites as a child.
 
The Library of Congress Chooses
What’s better than relaxing on the couch with an old favorite on Turner Classic Movies? Watching that same film in one of the old movie palaces it was made to be seen in. We’ll get five chances to see classic flicks in a classic room in the inaugural year of what Kielbasa calls “a one of a kind program in the United States,” Turner Classic Movies and the Library of Congress Celebrate the National Film Registry. The series will choose films added to the national registry for their cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance. 
 
In addition to National Velvet, this year’s selection includes Terrence Malick’s Badlands, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The General, the famed 1926 silent film starring and co-directed by Buster Keaton, with live musical accompaniment by Matt Marshal and the Reel Music Ensemble. Each will be seen at the Paramount in newly restored, 35-millimeter prints shown through old-fashioned, refurbished projectors. TCM host and film historian Ben Mankiewicz will provide introductions, and Sissy Spacek and husband Jack Fisk, who met filming Badlands, will join him onstage afterwards.
 
A new documentary, These Amazing Shadows, will serve to introduce the new classics series, highlighting the preservation work of the Library of Congress and the founding of the National Film Registry. “If you want to know why I love film, why I think it’s transformative, why I think it’s an important art form in the 20th century, go see this film,” Kielbasa says. These Amazing Shadows will be shown at 7:45 p.m. Thursday at the Regal 3 Theater on the Mall.
 
Documentaries 
with a Conscience
For 45 years Kartemquin Films, best known for their critically acclaimed 1994 work Hoop Dreams, has been documenting social issues and social phenomena. Hoop Dreams director Steve James and Kartemquin co-founder Gordon Quinn will be at the festival as it presents no less than nine Kartemquin releases, including their latest, A Good Man!/A Good Man? about dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones and his creation of a dance about Abraham Lincoln. Audiences at that showing will also see a 15-minute long work, 100 Migrations, filmed when Jones was in residence at UVA two years ago. Jones will discuss the film after its 4 p.m. showing Sunday at the Culbreth. His company will perform at the Paramount on November 11.
 
Focus on Food
When Joel Salatin speaks, foodies listen. Saturday at 3 at the Culbreth, Salatin will be the special guest for Farmageddon, an exposé of governmental agricultural policies that favor big factory farms and harass small, environmentally responsible family operations.
 
Sometimes it takes a child to make adults face the obvious, like say, if you want kids to eat, you’d better serve them appetizing food. Cafeteria Man features New Orleans-born celebrity chef Tony Geraci, who was hired by Baltimore City Schools after students dropped a lunch tray on the superindent’s desk and told him, “You eat it.” The mortified super bought a farm, hired Geraci, and gave his 83,000 charges something to savor instead of throw. Geraci will join director Richard Chisolm and other area foodies including Kate Collier of Local Food Hub to discuss what may be the Slow Food movement’s most remarkable achievement, the greening of public school cafeterias.
 
Virginia Saturday
Vinegar Hill will showcase the home state film industry Saturday, with four made-in-Virginia films. Trolley to Bank Street at 10:45 a.m. is a portrait of Charlottesville Area Transit and the many economically disadvantaged people who use it. Growing Up Cason at 1 p.m. celebrates the Depression-era family that founded Charlottesville farmer’s market, and shows a way of life little known or remembered today. Alchemy of an American Artist at 4 p.m. is a “Dante-esque” journey into the turbulent mind of Charlottesville artist and musician Christopher Breeden, fittingly shot with a hand held, lo-fi camera. Rothstein’s First Assignment at 6:30 p.m. is an exposé of the eugenics scandal filmmaker Richard Knox Robinson discovered on an assignment to commemorate the 75th anniversary celebration of the Shenandoah National Park. 
 
A sampling of great new foreign films, a six-film focus on Israel, and a behind-the-scenes look at the newsroom of the New York Times . . . the list of festival subjects goes on and on as always, and attendance figures show that Kielbasa knows his audience. Attendance jumped from 11,000 in 2008, the year before he arrived, to 23,750 last year, the first he had a completely free hand. And folks aren’t coming for the popcorn.
 
“They’re some of the most polite audiences I’ve ever been in the theater with, even compared to audiences at other independent film venues,” says recent C-ville immigrant John Armstrong, who estimates he’s seen 175 movies in the past year, and is one of the festival’s many small financial contributors. “They’re so much quieter, and interested in watching it for the craft of the film.“ Our Virginia Film Festival, in other words, has the audience it deserves.
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Art for Our Place

It’s almost caused three accidents on 29 North, but it’s a reason one Monticello director took her job. It’s been the most loved and the most hated item on the Charlottesville city budget. It’s large; it changes annually; it’s a have-you-seen-that-? topic of conversation around the water cooler; and it doesn’t cost current taxpayers a dime. It’s Art in Place, the homegrown program that puts up monumental sculptures in well-traveled parts of town to surprise and delight (but not distract) Charlottesville drivers. 

 
That harried guy with the briefcase in the median strip on the Route 250 bypass, and the sunbathing lady at the intersection of Market and High that some prankster kept adorning with tennis balls (now that’s community involvement in the arts)? They’re Art in Place work. The biker on the grass strip where Nelson Avenue feeds into McIntire Road? That’s an old Art in Place work the city now owns. In fact by November 5 there will be nine new Art in Place sculptures up around town, replacing last year’s show, and there are eight different Art in Place sculptures on permanent display because they’ve been purchased by or donated to the city. 
 
The soapstone sculpture “Family” on Court Square in downtown C-ville is not an Art in Place piece; it’s by the late David Breeden of Biscuit Run Studios just south of town. His wife Elizabeth helped him display and sell his work, and it was Elizabeth, along with a couple of friends, Blake and Charlie Hurt, who dreamed up Art in Place in 2001 as an instrument with which to “make art accessible to the general public” and provide it “with a wide range of artistic styles, themes and media which enhance our concepts of space and place and enliven our sense that art has the power to move us.”
 
“We all shook hands that we were not into raising money, that we wanted this to go as inexpensively as possible,” Breeden remembers. “Satyendra Huja was also a part of our original board; he was development director and how to go through the city processes would have been a lot more work. He would say here’s the city process, here’s what you have to do, and he was a big fan of having art on the streets of Charlottesville.” 
Breeden and company drew on funds from the city’s no longer operational Percent for Art program. As Huja explains, it was money “from the city’s capital budget . . . publically funded by the city of Charlottesville. One percent of certain projects was set aside for public art.” With that money they put up six sculptures, including two now permanent works, Rod Marshall-Roth’s Metallice Glosserous at Harris and Preston, and Richard Whitehall’s The Biker.
 
“We were hated the first four years,” Breeden says with a twinkle. “People thought we were the dinkiest, dumbest idea they’d ever seen, to put up art that wasn’t necessarily nationally acknowledged as good. But then they got it—you didn’t have to live with it, it went away again. You didn’t need to take it seriously, or you could take it seriously, but it was your option. We had emails about children’s car seats moved from one side of the car to another for the ride in and out because they would miss their favorite piece if they were on the wrong side. That got us through city council for our second funding appeal.
“I’ve talked to a new executive at Monticello, who drove into town and looked at this work and said ‘I want to live in a town that likes public art.’ I’ve had people choosing to retire here look at this and say, ‘a town brave enough to put up sculpture and take it down.’”
 
102 Pieces And Growing
Drawing on the still extant Percent for Art fund, Breeden’s once controversial, non-profit Art in Place has put on display 102 sometimes perplexing, sometimes bemusing, quite often enchanting works of art. Each piece goes up in an area of high vehicular traffic and stays there for 11 months.
 
The process of choosing new sculptures starts with an annual call for submissions in Sculpture magazine and a couple of online discussion groups for artists, and nets an average of 40 applications from all over the country. Each submission is examined by a nine-member jury including an artist, a gallery owner, and a professor. Once a work is accepted, artists arrange and pay for delivery, and Breeden and her crew supervise its installation. New Art in Place pieces have begun popping up around town, and by November 5 all eight will be on view. 
 
Jim Paulsen’s welded steel and painted wood “Sentinel Magic” will stand guard at Emmett Street at Barracks Road, across from the city’s first shopping center. (The Route 29 location where gawking drivers nearly caused accidents is no longer in use). “The Sentinel is a metaphor for a protective icon, a guardian or perhaps a shaman,” Paulsen says. “It is a very primal figure with strongly contrasting colors and angular geometric elements. It is meant to exude a sense of power and intensity, as well as ritual and mystery.”
 
Carl Billingsley’s elegant “Convergence,” constructed of oiled steel, will stand outside of the old Monticello Dairy building on Preston Avenue opposite the SPCA. It’s just east of Whirled Peace, a city-owned Art in Place work, near the entrance to Grady Avenue with its early 20th century single family homes in Georgia Revival and Colonial Revival style. 
 
Jim Respess’s fanciful “Shugoweh 1,” constructed of cloth, Styrofoam, metal, acrylic, concrete, will grace Preston Avenue at Rose Hill Drive. The Rose Hill Drive neighborhood to the north, one of the oldest in the city, is full of small to medium single-family homes. A phonetic rendering of “shoo, go away,” this piece takes its name from a game Respess plays with his young grandkids, “the lights of my life right now.” A Charlottesville native, Respess keeps a studio at McGuffey and teaches at Mary Baldwin College and Averett University. 
 
Mary Ruden’s stainless steel, steel and aluminum “Metamorphosis,” created in collaboration with welder and metallurgist Robert Benfield, will stand just further west on Preston in Washington Park. Ruden’s piece “is all about the shadows of the butterfly,” Breeden says. Ruden chose the name because “it represents a life cycle, change, and new life. This is a common theme in my artwork. It is slightly kinetic, as it moves gently in the wind.”
 
Charlie Brouwer’s wooden “He Always Carried It With Him,” will stand at Eliot and Burnet, just west of Oakwood Cemetery, and not far from Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church to the south and Play On! Theater to the north. Brouwer says the idea for the piece came from “our connection with nature—and how our existence is dependent upon it. This guy,” who is carrying a giant leaf, “realizes that whatever he does, wherever he goes, he is supported by the natural world, and he has an impact on it.”
 
Andy Denton’s “Love Arch” is made of stainless steel and painted cast aluminum. It will stand at the foot of the hill that is the intersection of Market and High streets, where Market runs by the Central Library, skirting the Downtown Mall, and High goes past one of the city’s most lovely and luxurious residential areas. “These two people are, in a sense, standing upon each other,” Denton says. “They are each other’s supports in the topsy-turvy world. The swirling waves that move over their skin represent their energy and it is their connection to the natural world. The arch is made up of their mutual affection and reliance for each other.”
 
Hannah Jubran’s stainless steel and bronze “Cloud” will be on display in Schenk’s Branch Greenway alongside McIntire Road. A world-renowned sculptor, Jubran is Israeli, Breeden notes, “so he talks a lot about walls and boundaries and what walls do. There is a lot of imagery you don’t get till you’re up close to it.”
 
Antoinette Prien Schultze’s granite and glass “Cultured Stone” will stand along the Fifth Street-Ridge Avenue corridor connecting downtown Charlottesville with developments south of town. A historically African-American community, Ridge Street’s stately Victorian houses date to the late 19th century. 
 
“The source of my art is the human being in concept or/and in form,” writes Schultze, a well-known New England sculptor. “I marry materials, color, and light to create a place and space for light to effect a spiritual washing and insight into the sensual nature of existence. I strive to create sculptures that are beautiful and meaningful.”
 
Adam Walls’s painted steel “The Ball and the Red Staircase” will be visible from afar off in both directions on the Route 250 bypass that cuts through town on a curving northwest/southeast axis. “I wanted the viewer to share my feelings about goals and achievements that I want for myself and how impossible it seems to attain certain goals,” Walls writes. “Atop this impossible staircase is a stainless steel sphere that reflects the viewer. It is my hope that the viewer can look into this sphere and see themselves at the top of that unreachable goal.”
 
Art From A Car
After ten years of annual outdoor sculpture shows, spotting new Art in Place work is an autumn routine: if the leaves are changing colors, the sculptures must be too. But those first few seasons, the skeptics were everywhere—even on the jury. 
 
“Bill Bennett, the UVA art professor was on our jury one year,” Breeden remembers, “and he did the whole jury process, and then he got up as he was ready to leave and turned around and said, ‘You know, I’ve gotta say this. I looked at your program when it first came, and I thought, art from a car, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard; you know it’s just not honorable. But now that I’ve lived with it for four years, I realize that it’s so American, it’s so cool. Of course art from a car. We’re too busy to go to a museum but if it’s art from a car, we’ll do it.’” 
 
Connoisseurs that we are around here, some of us will even get out of the car, like the joker with the tennis balls, and the lady at a newcomer’s luncheon who told Breeden she was dressing the polar bear on Schenk’s Branch Greenway, “Looking for Ice.” “I think people are enjoying it,” Breeden says philosophically. “I can be in a bunch of artists talking about people messing with art and more than half of them get mad and the others think it’s love. It’s engagement.”
 
It’s unlikely the mayor is the mysterious messer—but he is a fan. “The City spends a tiny amount of money each year on Art in Place, but the program makes a big impact,” Mayor Dave Norris says. “I firmly believe that public art enriches and enlivens a community. And I have to say, I’m glad that elected officials like me play no role in choosing which pieces get picked. I love the fact that I don’t know what’s going up until everyone else in Charlottesville knows. Every year there are pieces that I love and pieces that I could do without. That’s the beauty of the program. It evokes a diverse range of impressions from a diverse range of viewers. That’s the beauty of art.”