Author: kyle-daly

The first thing you notice is the noise. A constant stream of stuttering engine rattle, like the choke of a stalling lawnmower: the very sound of internal combustion. And then down on the asphalt, a foot drops and the rumble whips into a roar, the kind that hits your solar plexus first and then shoots upward, an electric jolt to your skull that sets your eardrums jouncing. And the shriek fades back down and the rattle starts again, almost quiet for the comparison, except not, because the next car is seconds away from screaming just like the first, tearing the sky open with its powertrain howl.

And you think: no wonder this isn’t televised. Watching it from your couch, even with a six-pack and an order of wings, you could never feel the force of that gut-shaking, juddering roar. Nor would you get that smell—the second thing you notice as the cars rear up on two wheels and take flight, thick billows of blue-gray smoke pouring out behind them. That acrid smell of gasoline, scorched rubber and something cloying, sickly sweet, almost like sassafras. The smell that sucks the air right from your lungs.

NASCAR works on TV; so does Formula One. They’re all about the skill of the drivers, the sprint for first and, maybe, deep down in that reptilian part of the brain, the hope for the heart-stopping spectacle of a car bursting into flame. It’s nice to make it out to Martinsville or Talladega or Indianapolis for a race, but TV will do.

Not so with drag racing. The shriek, the smell, the proximity to living, breathing speed: all essential to the thing, as necessary as wheels and a motor and a track.

Because that’s what drag racing is. Speed. Speed, Aldous Huxley’s “one genuinely modern pleasure.” Sex, art, friendship, music, a good meal—they’ve been with humanity since we stopped dragging our knuckles (and some before that). But speed? That’s something new. Something primal and yet necessarily modern. And chasing it is what brings dozens of men and women, young and old, to a stretch of track outside Waynesboro week after week after week, year after year after year.

It’s certainly what’s kept UVA history professor John Edwin Mason coming back. Mason’s been a car freak since he was big enough to see over the steering wheel of his dad’s car and mime taking hairpin turns while sitting stationary in the driveway. Now, four decades older and as professorial as they come, Mason is the Eastside Speedway’s unlikeliest fan.

Mason loves anything fast with a big engine. Over the course of our interview, he talked himself into driving down to North Carolina for a race that was happening that night. So when he first read about the Eastside Speedway in the Daily Progress, he had to go. He drove over the mountains in 2002 and found what he was looking for just a few minutes outside of Waynesboro.

“It blew me away,” he says, “to go in with one set of expectations and have it turn out to be completely different.” Mason knew the old stereotype of gearheads in the rural South being “a bunch of dumb rednecks,” but he figured at the very least, he’d see some fast cars and get something of the thrill of speed, however vicariously.

But what he found was enough to inspire a racing photography blog and a fistful of academic articles. “Being a good academic, I went to the library. Nobody had written about this,” he says. These nine years later, he has an entire book of photos and commentary that he’s currently hashing out with publishers.

What was it Mason found? In his words, “easy, unselfconscious racial integration in a working-class setting, where you expect it least.”

Mason estimates that a good 30 percent of the drivers he saw when he first started going to Eastside races were black, and there were a few women too, not to mention the Puerto Rican and Mexican bikers who to this day share a drag strip with the hot rodders. Unlike NASCAR or Formula One, where cars are owned and driven by a moneyed few, the relative affordability (and “relative” is a key word; more on that later) of outfitting a car to drag race found a happy marriage with the iconoclasm that had been inherent in drag racing culture from the very start.

Yet Mason found that Eastside racers and fans did things one better. They weren’t just hitting the track with people of other races out of reluctant necessity. They were forging friendships, relationships with one another that stretch back in some cases 35, 40 years, to when integration in Virginia was still an uneasy truce between resentful whites and terrorized blacks. He calls it “the Democracy of Speed.”

It’s speed as the great leveler. You want to make your car go fast, I want to make my car go fast. And thus comes the building block that a select society is built on. It’s the myth of post-racial America made real, through the startlingly simple alchemy of shared interests.

To get to the Eastside Speedway, to see the Democracy of Speed (which is also the name of Mason’s forthcoming book) at work, you head just past Waynesboro on Route 340 until you hit a nondescript sign pointing you down a country lane toward the Eastside Speedway, the scream of the engines just a muted purr when heard from the highway. But if you turn down that street and drive toward the sound of screaming cars, you’d better be prepared for that noise and that smell.

And you ought to know that Mason isn’t wrong. That over the mountains, far from “enlightened” Charlottesville, with its great bulk of unacknowledged, wished-away racial problems, the great American fantasy of Life After Racism is very real and very alive. And even if it’s a spell that breaks as soon as the drivers and fans leave the track, it’s at least circling something that’s still only a dream even for the People’s Republic of Charlottesville.

Ask Alan Pritchett. Pritchett’s a laconic bus mechanic for the Albemarle County Schools by day, but just about every evening there’s a race on, he hauls his custom ’84 Camaro over to the track. He’s been bringing a car—this is his second, after he got all he could out of a Chevy Vega—to the races for more than 20 years, sharing ownership, maintenance duties and occasionally the driver’s seat of the Camaro with Ivar Dowell, a black Charlottesvillian. When asked about this characteristically diverse, harmonious arrangement, Pritchett just shrugs and says, “Everybody helps one another.”

You start to hear that line time and time again once you talk to even just a few regular Eastsiders. Tim Curry, a tire salesman from Stuarts Draft who races a largely unmodified early ’90s Mustang: “Everybody gets along. Everybody helps each other out.” Tim Southern, track manager: “Drag racing is one big happy family. It makes no difference what your nationality is.” And on and on.

But it’s true. You see it in the stands, where black guys crack open smuggled-in beers with burly bubbas in overalls. You see it on the asphalt ahead of the starting line, where drivers of all ages and most races shoot the shit and crack jokes at each other’s expense while they each wait their turn to stomp on the accelerator. You see it in Devin Dudley, a biracial kid from Charlottesville who just graduated from Monticello High in June but has been coming to the track since he was 2 years old, when he started by helping out his grandpa and great-uncle, who both still race.

“I kind of grew up with it,” says Dudley. “I want to do this for the rest of my life—for as long as I can.” Most likely, he will; it’s in his blood. And all signs point to that being a good plan. Dudley’s only been driving at the track for a year—he’s only had his license for about that long—and already, he’s won four races, with an average purse he estimates at $500. Even the best racers might go an entire season without a single win in an off year.

Even though he’s a good bit younger and maybe a bit more talented than a lot of the other drivers, Dudley’s as good a pick as any to represent the whole crew of drag racers. Point being, you might be a black guy from Friendship Court or a shaggy-haired teenager with a peach-fuzz moustache or a paunchy white dude from deep in the Augusta County sticks or a liver-spotted retiree who started drag racing when the damn thing was invented back in the ’50s. But as soon as you put on that helmet and rev the engine, you’re just another anonymous adrenaline freak chasing the feeling of pure speed.

That’s Mason’s Democracy of Speed. But maybe “democracy” isn’t quite the right word. Because democracy as we know it is a relatively new development. This is something more primal. This is tribalism, a fundamental human bond that says, “This is us. This is ours. This is not yours because you are not us and never will be.” This is worship at the altar of speed.

Maybe it’s exclusionary; maybe it’s just another form of the familiar old “us vs. them” mentality. But then, what human being on the planet doesn’t hold some notion of not-me otherness in his head? Even the most proudly open-minded, “Coexist”-bumper-sticker-bearing Charlottesville liberal seethes at the thought of the great hordes of savage red state dupes. Worshipers of speed vs. the snail-paced masses—there have certainly been more harmful demarcations between people in the history of the world.

Still, there are elements of the speed society that hint at the impossibility of keeping larger racial and socioeconomic forces at bay. Bruce Hensley, a trucker from Orange who drives a dragster—one of those impossibly long, pointed hot rods that look appropriately rocket-like as they tear down the strip—reckons there are about half as many drivers as there were just a few years ago. Allen Hunt, a spectator and Eastside employee (most of the folks in the stands, you’ll find, have some connection to the speedway: a relative who drives, a car in the races) says that while the annual Easter race attracts dozens and dozens of drivers and packs the stands with about 5,000 fans, most nights are like the Friday night I spent at the track, with maybe 60 drivers and just a few more spectators. Track Manager Tim Southern confirms it, though he does say that Eastside is doing fine financially.

Everyone blames the economy for the downturn. Get into the top class of cars—super pro, with its dragsters and NASCAR-quality custom jobs—and you’re looking at $40,000 to $80,000 just to get a car off the lot, never mind the cost of constant upkeep and gas. The bottom two classes, trophy street and footbrake, might see cheaper cars, like the ’88 Dodge Dynasty I spotted limping to the starting line with a 12-year-old kid at the wheel (an adult replaced him in the driver’s seat before the car hit the strip). But there’s no getting around maintenance and fuel. Sure, there are sponsors for some of the top competitors, but at this level of racing, where most of the drivers are mechanics or truckers in their other lives, the extent of a corporate sponsorship might be a thousand bucks or a new set of tires in exchange for a big sticker on the hood.

“It ain’t a cheap hobby,” says Alan Pritchett. There’s prize money to be won, but it doesn’t come close to covering expenses. Even Tim Curry, with his mid-class Mustang, guesses that he’s spent about $7,000 on car repairs just since January, and this isn’t an unusual year.

But longtime fans can’t help but notice, as Professor Mason has, that the recession’s biggest hit has been to the number of black drivers. It’s a trend that speaks to a reality on the ground that the drivers do their best to ignore at the track. According to the most recent Labor Department figures, the unemployment rate for black Americans is above 16 percent, compared to whites’ 8 percent.

The growing expenses and the increasing loss of a vital part of the drag racing community—all those drivers, many of them black—seem to be getting to the Eastsiders. “How long have you been doing this?” was answered with, “Too long,” by half a dozen wives of racers and spectators. “How much do you spend in a year?” Three separate wives: “Too much.” Too much time. Too much money. Just too much. There’s a real sense of fatigue at the track, if not among the drivers and the die-hard fans, then among the family members worried about their jobs, their bank accounts, their livelihoods.

But despite anxiety, fatigue, money problems, the great god of Eastside remains. Even the most enervated wives can’t help but stand up and whoop when a driver like Marty Dabney hits 160 miles per hour in under five seconds. This is Huxley’s modern pleasure, screaming out, declaring its presence to open sky and the silent stands of oak trees that surround this place. The Eastside Speedway. The altar of speed.

Every year, Thomas Jefferson’s birthday marks a tradition that presumably would’ve made the dude proud. On April 13, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression celebrated the 20th annual “Muzzles,” awards given “to those responsible for some of the more egregious or ridiculous affronts to free expression occurring in the previous year.”

Among recipients, the Muzzles tend to generate a mixture of stonewalling, defensive declarations of innocence and, very occasionally, genuine remorse, says Jefferson Center director Bob O’Neil. This year’s crop is a wide-ranging mix of time-honored establishments and scrappy upstarts, all united, in the Center’s estimation, by a singular passion for crushing free speech wherever it rears its head.

The smallest honoree is Hamilton College, a liberal arts school in upstate New York. At the start of the school year, Hamilton required all freshman boys to attend the cheerily titled seminar “She Fears You” as part of orientation. The Jefferson Center commended the seminar for shining a light on pervasive cultural misogyny and condemning rape, but had a problem with the mandatory nature of the thing. The Center also took issue with the program’s treatment of audience members as bigots “in need of thought reform,” in the words of National Association of Scholars spokesperson Ashley Thorne.

The next two award winners both took part in the centuries-old tradition of withholding the written word because, to quote Bobby Seale, “the Man don’t like it.” And the first is local: Albemarle High School was cited for destroying all copies of the student newspaper because gym teachers grumbled about an anti-P.E. editorial. Albemarle High officials declined to comment, but Principal Jay Thomas previously told Lynchburg’s News & Advance that the papers were destroyed because the controversial editorial contained typos.

Meanwhile, Gail Sweet, head of a New Jersey county’s public libraries, was hit with a Muzzle for kowtowing to the demands of a local and vocal Tea Partier who called an anthology of essays by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth “pervasively vulgar, obscene, and inappropriate.” The book, Revolution Voices, is about the struggles of coming out, but Sweet promptly pulled it after classifying it as child pornography.

Next up is Talmadge Littlejohn, the Mississippi judge who held a lawyer in contempt of court and jailed him for five hours because he stood during the Pledge of Allegiance but didn’t recite the words.

Back in the Old Dominion, the Center nails the Virginia Department of Corrections, which blocked a prisoner from obtaining The Jailhouse Lawyer’s Handbook, a guide to the legal process for suing over rights violations in prison. The matter was settled in March before it could make it to court in Charlottesville. Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor tells C-VILLE that the book is now available to all prisoners and that it was blocked out of concern for the “balance between safety and security of our facilities, employees and offenders.”

According to O’Neil, court-ordered solutions to First Amendment problems don’t necessarily prevent a Muzzle. “Classically, if it takes a lawsuit to get the policy changed or the agency really drags its feet and resists, we would not take that as a genuine change of heart,” he says.

Moving into federal territory, the Center cites the Smithsonian Institution for shutting down a National Portrait Gallery video that included the image of ants crawling on a crucifix. Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough ordered the video, a four-minute piece by artist David Wojnarowicz, removed a day after a Catholic group complained. Representatives of the Smithsonian Institution had no official comment, but a spokesperson for the National Portrait Gallery says, “Unofficially? The museum should be recognized for having this exhibit in the first place.”

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) takes the next Muzzle for arresting college student Aaron Tobey, a Charlottesville resident, at Richmond International Airport. Tobey had written part of the text of the Fourth Amendment on his chest—that’s the one about unreasonable search and seizure—and stripped down to his underwear to go through a security screening. Prosecutors dropped “disturbing the peace” charges against Tobey less than two weeks after his arrest. He’s now suing the TSA for $250,000.

And crowning the list: the Obama administration, which shares the honor with BP. BP contractors and federal authorities blocked journalists’ access to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, even as the damaged rig hemorrhaged crude oil into Gulf Coast waters for at least three months after the initial leak. Permits were denied, seaplanes were grounded and arrests were threatened, all in the name of closing off access to the spill.

So, there you have it! Eight—nine if you count BP separately—winners; some surprises (the strenuously liberal Hamilton College, for example), others not (every single presidential administration since the awards began in 1991 has gotten a Muzzle), but egregious free speech violators all. C-VILLE’s bookie will now start taking bets for next year. 

Fifty years ago, John Kennedy’s first 100 days as president were drawing to a close and his approval ratings topped 80 percent. On his 100th day, Kennedy made headlines for throwing the hardest first pitch of the baseball season in presidential history. Two days later, the Russians put a man in space. Less than a week after that, the Bay of Pigs invasion failed spectacularly, and Kennedy would never again enjoy such popularity.

And yet, his assassination guaranteed that he would be remembered as an icon, an avatar of all that is fundamentally American, rather than as a complex human being with his share of detractors. On the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration, both UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and its Center for Politics are trying to unpack the man behind the myth.

To that end, the Miller Center has begun a retrospective it calls “Kennedy Reconsidered.” It includes a new series of phone transcripts and upcoming public forums on Kennedy. Miller Center fellow Barbara Perry is also working on a biography of Rose Kennedy. The Center for Politics, meanwhile, has been running some of its own JFK programming. Center Director Larry Sabato is at work on a book about Kennedy’s 50-year legacy. Sabato also hosted a Center for Politics symposium last week entitled “JFK & Camelot: Political Image-Making.”

That panel of Kennedy experts consisted of two presidential campaign advisors, two Kennedy family biographers (including Perry) and a political journalist. They spoke at length about how the Kennedy mystique was crafted and ultimately overtook the man himself in the public consciousness.

“Kennedy was sold as a movie,” said Kennedy biographer and syndicated columnist Richard Reeves. The beautiful family, the backyard football, the relatability—all bought into by the public despite Kennedy’s philandering, crippled body and privileged background.

It was that image, the panel agreed, that (more than the Peace Corps, the space program or the Cuban Missile Crisis) gave us the Kennedy that consistently hovers near the top of public opinion polls ranking the presidents. The Kennedys “taught us how to be modern Americans,” said Reeves. “We didn’t know how to act as rich people. We were a rural people” when Kennedy took office, he said. Indeed, within weeks of Kennedy’s inauguration, men stopped wearing hats, let their hair grow longer and started wearing European-cut suits, all in imitation of the new president.

Everyone on the panel agreed that such a mythologizing of a president could never happen again. Sure, there’s Bush the cowboy and Obama the neo-JFK, but there are just too many voices in the media to allow one single image to control 100 percent of public perception. Fifty percent is enough of a struggle; we’re a much more divided country than we were in the ’60s. Frank Donatelli, panelist and Republican strategist, mentioned the massive shifts in the electoral maps of mid-century, as compared to the rigid socio-political divisions of today.

Sabato reminded the audience that the term “Camelot” wasn’t used until after Kennedy’s death. Jacqueline Kennedy, his widow, told Life magazine reporter Theodore White that when Jack’s chronic back pain kept him awake, he would put one record on the phonograph: the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Camelot. It ended on a lyric that Jackie couldn’t get out of her head after Jack’s death: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” And so would Kennedy’s place in American history be. “It was brief,” said Perry. “And it was shining.”

It’s Oscar night and things could be going better. Jim Zarling is doing stand-up in front of a crowd of 25 or 30 people at the Southern and, for whatever reason, he’s having trouble connecting. His first few jokes get some modest laughs, and then he flubs—totally flubs—a routine about cult members. He hits the punchline early and wrong and doubles over to laugh at himself for screwing it up.

This could be a Rupert Pupkin moment, a downward spiral of flop sweat, much to the teeth-clenching, stomach-churning secondhand embarrassment of all present. But Jim recovers, starts back at the beginning of his bit, powers through to the punchline and sticks the landing. The audience laughs and applauds his composure. And then a few off-the-cuff comments about how much the audience seems to enjoy watching someone struggle (“You guys must love Ricky Gervais shows”) get one of those big laughs, a cathartic, everything’s-O.K. laugh that rises up from the audience awash with relief and genuine amusement. Jim finishes his set to laughter and applause.

After the show, he says he’s happy with the audience turnout and response, considering the Oscars kept many people at home or decked out in tuxes and evening gowns at the Paramount. The touring comics that Jim and fellow Charlottesvillian Leah Woody were opening for that night had just done a show for an audience of six in North Carolina. By anyone’s standards, for a town Charlottesville’s size and on a Sunday night—which also happened to be the night of one of the biggest TV events of the year —the show at the Southern was successful. And yet that kind of faint praise doesn’t do justice to what Zarling and Woody and a handful of other locals have managed to do over the last few years. They have nurtured a full-on stand-up comedy scene in Charlottesville. And it’s quite good.

Talk about stand-up comedy in Charlottesville, you inevitably start with Gary Greenwood, a teacher from Fluvanna County who calls himself a “good ole country boy” and was doing the redneck comedy thing back when Larry the Cable Guy was still khakis-wearing Dan Whitney of Nebraska. He started around 1982, when, as he tells it, “I saw this awful comic in Richmond and thought, ‘I can be at least as awful as him.’”

Greenwood began with open-mic nights in Richmond and within a year, he was performing regularly at some of the hotels on Routes 29 and 250, which he liked as venues largely because they had ample parking. He even opened for Carrot Top when the prop comic came through town, which was a pretty big deal at the time (remember these were the heady days of the mid-’80s, when Yakov Smirnoff and Gallagher ruled the airwaves and Carrot Top didn’t yet resemble a steroidal “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” reject).

Greenwood had a pretty good thing going, but by 1985, the still nascent Charlottesville stand-up scene dried up as quickly as it had started. Sheraton and Comfort Inn stopped booking shows, and for more than two decades, the only comedy available in Charlottesville was when the Smirnoffs, Gallaghers and Dice Clays of the world blew through on their yearly migrations to Branson, Missouri.

That all changed in November 2008, when Jim Zarling and Bill Metzger performed their first show together at Buddhist Biker Bar on the UVA Corner. Zarling had signed up on a whim to do stand-up for a charity benefit two years prior, and he had a blast, so when the chance came to do stand-up at Vivace a year later, he took it. Finally, he put an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone in Charlottesville wanted to try and make a go of doing stand-up with him. Amazingly, he got a response within days, and it wasn’t even from Nigerian scammers or sado-masochist organ thieves. It was Bill Metzger.

The two had a lot in common from the beginning: surely—surely!—they bonded over the whole “Hey! Your last name has a ‘z’ in it too!” thing, but they also both worked on staff at UVA, Zarling as a manager at the copy shop and Metzger as a supervisor of University bus drivers. More significantly, they shared a hunger to pursue stand-up that has since led both of them to focus on striving to be full-time, professional comedians. And yet it almost never happened at all. “Bill Metzger doesn’t call, maybe I don’t become a comic,” says Jim.

But Bill did call, and they started doing a few shows, and soon enough, Jim got another call, this one from Johnny Mac (real name: John McCullough). A William & Mary graduate originally from the Richmond area, Johnny had gotten his start in stand-up in, of all places, Fairfield, Iowa, population 9,500. He had gone to Fairfield more than 10 years before to study transcendental meditation at the improbably named Maharishi University of Management. A comedian named Gavin Jerome came to Maharishi U. to wow the locals with tales of life in Des Moines and to teach a stand-up seminar. Johnny liked it so much that he spent the next nine years in Chicago and New York, training in improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic in Chicago and trying to make it as an actor and comedian. He made his way back to Virginia in 2008, just in time to get involved with Zarling and Metzger’s fledgling group of comics.

The three of them, Jim, Bill and Johnny, have been the core of Charlottesville’s stand-up scene ever since. Not long after starting up, they were running regular open-mic nights at Buddhist for anyone who wanted to come up with some material. That evolved into a loose collective they call the Charlottesville Comedy Roundtable, which once met weekly so that comics in the area could workshop ideas for stand-up bits before trying them out on an audience. Last year, Johnny eventually branched out into teaching his own private, stand-up seminar, holding two seven-week-long courses on comedy writing and performing. He’s currently registering anyone who wants to take this year’s version of the class. It begins on April 3.

And that brings Charlottesville comedy pretty much up to the present. Things have been shaky at times—most notably, the Roundtable’s patchy history with open-mic night venues, which resembles nothing so much as Frogger leaping from sinking log to sinking log. One by one, Buddhist Biker Bar, Bel Rio and the 12th Street Taphouse all opened their doors to stand-up comics only to close months later. The Southern is hoping for better luck, as it’s just started hosting open-mic nights on select Tuesdays. Still, things are on the upswing for Charlottesville comedians. It used to be that anyone who wanted to tell jokes had to go at least to Richmond to find an audience. Now, comics from Richmond and as far afield as Knoxville and Atlanta are coming here to perform alongside the Roundtable comedians.

All this culminated in that Oscars weekend when Zarling almost lost his audience and then found it again. Emceeing that night was Leah Woody, one of Charlottesville’s rare female comics, who started doing stand-up because, she says, “It was my New Year’s resolution to do more things that scare the shit out of me.” Woody says that she gets a bout of stage fright every time she’s about to perform, and her nerves were maybe just a bit evident when she started that night. But after getting a big laugh for a bit about teetering on the edge of cat-ladydom, Woody loosened up. That, according to Woody, is the secret to her comedy. “In Charlottesville, it’s not like it is at a comedy club,” she says. “People expect to see you bomb and might not be paying attention. You need the first big laugh. You need to get people on your side.”

Bill Metzger had little trouble doing just that the night before at Play On Theatre. He was performing in a show that events promoter Ty Cooper put on as part of his more-or-less monthly “National Stand-up Comedy Series.” Cooper has been bringing national comedy acts to Charlottesville for nearly a year, and Bridget McManus, billed as “America’s funniest lesbian,” was the act for February. Richmond comic Odyssey Michaels was the emcee that night. Metzger opened. He was a mellow counterbalance to the manic energy of Michaels and McManus, and he won over a crowd that wasn’t necessarily there to see him.

At the risk of drowning in stereotypes, the parking lot was not for want of Subarus and there were plenty of cell phones with Indigo Girls ringtones. All I’m saying is that it was a niche audience. And yet, even if most of the crowd came for McManus (who was very funny, to be sure, as was Michaels), Metzger definitely had people on his side by the end of his set. He finished with a joke pertaining to 9/11 that actually didn’t suck the air out of the room—no small feat for any comic, let alone a local working a small theater in Charlottesville.

Of course, that may have something to do with the citywide consensus that Charlottesville isn’t like other towns its size. Remington Donovan, a local stand-up who’s performed a few times in the city since taking Johnny Mac’s class, says the audience here “seems like more of an extended family. Charlottesville is very supportive of people and their artistic endeavors. It’s a great town for that.”

Metzger has a similar take. “Charlottesville audiences are great,” he says. “You have a lot of young people, you have a lot of people who are smart. You have people who won’t get upset if you tell an off-color joke, as long as it’s clever. Charlottesville audiences are able to recognize that and respond to it.”

Indeed, the Charlottesville Comedy Roundtable has found a responsive audience in this town. There was the one fiasco at Fellini’s #9 when Greenwood was so disheartened by the audience’s response—or lack thereof—to his “country boy” material that he dropped the mic and left the stage after five minutes. But otherwise, all the Roundtable comics’ bombing stories are from the road. Greenwood tells of another incident where he, Zarling, and a few of the other guys played to a stone-faced crowd in Covington. They only figured out after the show that Zarling had booked them to follow a Bible study. Metzger’s got a story about a show in Scottsville where the manager of the bar they were performing at heckled them the whole time, screaming, “Go home!” throughout their sets—then he asked after the show if they wanted to come back the next week. Woody remembers being shaken at a show in Richmond when the first comic to go onstage forgot his entire set and just stood there with a white-knuckle grip on the mic, muttering, “I can’t believe this is happening.” And so on the stories go, all cringe-inducing on some level and yet all affirmations that things, for the most part, are going well for comedians in Charlottesville.

Part of that is thanks to Ty Cooper, he of the national stand-up series, who wants Charlottesville on the map for comedians touring nationally and says he’s committed to always giving local comedians a platform on his shows. And he’s stuck to this, giving hosting or opening act duties to Charlottesvillians at every show he’s done so far. Metzger’s rising to the occasion is exactly the sort of thing Cooper is counting on in giving a spotlight to local comics. The comics who have come to town through his series aren’t necessarily names you’d recognize—McManus, Eric Frost, a guy named only Skiba—but they are professional comedians. They don’t have day jobs and they’re doing this on a national level. Getting to open for or introduce them has been a great opportunity for every Roundtabler who’s done it.

Cooper also has some distant plans for one day opening a club in Charlottesville. He’s skeptical of Charlottesville’s ability to support a dedicated club on the scale of Richmond’s Funny Bone, but he has high hopes for the prospects of a nightclub that could host stand-ups a few nights a week.

If it all seems too perfect, it may well be. There’s definitely a minor undercurrent of tension between Cooper and the Roundtable comics, and it stems largely from the premium Cooper puts on diversity. He sees comedy as a chance to promote diversity in a city that remains in many ways starkly divided along racial and socioeconomic lines.

“Downtown is where we really need diversity, and these shows force people together in an intimate space,” Cooper says. “Sometimes you have to give people what they need by giving them what they want. If I can put a Glenmore heart surgeon next to someone who lives in Garrett Square, I’m happy.” But even if he can bring in a diverse crowd to his shows, Cooper says the performers just aren’t diverse enough.

Zarling, for one, respectfully but forcefully disagrees. He says that around half of the Charlottesvillians who have regularly taken the stage at open-mic nights have been from minority groups. In contrast, says Zarling, “Several of us performed at a comedy festival in Richmond last fall, and out of the 60-plus comics that performed, I’d say that less than 10 were from minority groups. Now, does Virginia have a diversity problem? Does Charlottesville? Those might be fairer questions than, ‘Does this show that currently happens once a month have a diversity problem?’’’ Johnny Mac agrees with Zarling and contends that any perceived lack of diversity isn’t anything they could do much about. “Our door remains open,” he says. “Anyone who is willing to do the work required is welcome.

Cooper and the Roundtable in time may just work through this sore spot. But in the meantime, the local comics say they’re happy to just keep honing their acts. Zarling is trying to do a bit more touring so that he can ultimately make a living as a stand-up, and Metzger just moved to comedian-friendly Richmond, though he continues to work his day job and do stand-up in Charlottesville. He’s got an eye on one day moving to Austin, which has a major underground comedy scene but isn’t quite as competitive as New York City—where Metzger has done a few shows in the past.

As for the rest of the crew, they all just want to keep getting better without having to leave Charlottesville to do it. Remington Donovan jokes, “My goal is to supersede Leah. That’s all I want,” but in all sincerity, every last comic has echoed a sentiment that Metzger voiced: “I have a vision in my head of the comedian I want to be, but it’s never going to end. A poem never ends—you just stop writing it. I just want to be really good.”

Johnny Mac compares that kind of devotion and the way it plays out in performance to his experiences with Zen way back in Iowa. “Just like in Zen, if you succeed, you’ve got to move on to the next moment. There’s only one answer for any given moment, and when you hit it, it’s so exhilarating. I don’t know if I’d call it nirvana, but it’s pretty cool.” 

How do you lose a courthouse? It seems a lot more challenging than, say, losing your car keys, and yet Virginia has lost courthouses by the fistful to fire, age and poor record keeping. But in a cow pasture just outside Scottsville, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society is working with a team of archaeologists and volunteers to recover a small part of Albemarle’s dense history—the lost Albemarle County Courthouse.

In 1745, a council of magistrates that included Peter Jefferson (TJ’s dad) chose a field near Snowden, Jefferson’s James River plantation, as the seat of Albemarle County. Samuel Scott, whose family gave Scottsville its name, built a courthouse and prison on the site and then threw in a tavern because, as we all know, few things mix as well as convicts and alcohol. In 1761, the General Assembly shrank Albemarle by a third and moved the county seat to Charlottesville. Samuel Scott’s courthouse, prison and tavern entered a long, slow slide into disrepair and eventual collapse. During the Revolutionary War, the courthouse building was used as an ammunitions storehouse and for target practice. Thomas Jefferson would have ridden past the courthouse on his way to visiting his brother Randolph at Snowden, but that’s about where its brushes with capital-H History end.

Sometime before the 20th Century, the buildings collapsed or were torn down and barns were built on their foundations. By the 1970s, even the barns were demolished. The site is now just an open field, but the ground below is brimming with history.

Steven Meeks, president of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, says that local tradition has long claimed knowledge of the location of the old Albemarle County Courthouse. The Historical Society sought to confirm this and enlisted the help of Steve Thompson and Ben Ford, the co-directors and principal investigators at Rivanna Archaeological Services in Charlottesville. By the fall, Thompson, Ford and their coworker Nick Bon-Harper were volunteering their time and equipment to help the Historical Society excavate the property. Every weekend that the weather has allowed it, they’ve been out with a crew of archaeologists, history buffs and high schoolers, searching for the lost courthouse.

The hard part of any historical search, of course, is finding anything truly definitive. But in December, the crew planted shovels in the ground and hit a brick foundation right around where the tavern is thought to be, based on surveying maps from the 1700s. The apparent dimensions of the foundation, the density of artifacts found nearby, and the fact that it’s made of brick all strongly suggest that the tavern has been found.

Rivanna Archaeology and the Historical Society hope to continue the excavation, but they need more resources, says Ben Ford. He estimates that costs for Phase II of the project, which would be a much larger dig, would probably begin around $20,000. The project relies on grant money and donations to the Historical Society for funding. Everyone involved hopes to have something big to show for their efforts in time for Charlottesville’s 250th anniversary celebration in November 2012. Says Ford, “We don’t want a project of this significance to just die and go away.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan, 44, is a media studies professor at UVA who has appeared on “The Daily Show” and is a frequent contributor to NPR, Salon and The New York Times Magazine, among others. Though a self-admitted avid Google user—when I first tried to reach him, I was redirected to his Google Voice mail—he’s concerned that Google may not be the benevolent and objective wonder-tool we’d all like to think it is. His new book, The Googlization of Everything, is in stores now. He’ll be speaking about it at 4pm on March 18 at the UVA Bookstore as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

What’s wrong with “Googlization”?

My issue is with our dependence on it. I’m not sure Google is making us dumber. I think we’re making Google smarter. We’re constantly feeding Google information that helps it focus ads and results on what we already care about. Google is now able to predict what we’re looking for, almost to the point of reading our minds. That’s really fabulous for shopping, but it’s not so great for learning. Google limits our fields of vision by filtering out things that might surprise or disrupt or disturb us.

Do you think it’s problematic that Google gets its revenue from ads?

Not necessarily. I want Google to make money and do cool things, but we have to understand, we’re not Google’s customers. We are Google’s product. We are what Google sells to advertisers. Google is never working in our interest. Google is always working in its own interest. So we shouldn’t be surprised when those interests diverge. The moment we fall for the sweet talk of corporate social responsibility, that’s when we end up in trouble. In five years, Google could be close to broke and yet still have this powerful position in our information ecosystem—in a position to really abuse its power. That’s lesson number one: be cynical and be wary. Put no religious faith in any company, especially Google.

What’s your take on UVA’s involvement in the Google Books project?

Libraries did not ensure quality standards of the scans or a good search system. I’d like to see us actually pursue what I call a human knowledge project over the next 50 years. But what Google’s doing is nothing close to that. Still, my criticisms are withheld for the public institutions that didn’t defend the public interest.

And that includes the University of Virginia. Libraries were so happy to have a big, rich company take over the digitization process that they jumped at the opportunity. They saw this as a cheap and easy way to have somebody else foot the tab, but ultimately what we’re getting isn’t a bigger, better library. It’s a huge used bookstore. With a lot of tattered pages.

I still think Google holds itself to some pretty high standards. I just don’t think we should trust in that forever. Companies are companies and public institutions are public institutions. We shouldn’t conflate those two, and we should respect both of them. By respect, I mean respect like you respect a wolf.

What do you like about Google?

I think I enjoy using Google more than the average person, because I’ve looked behind the curtain. We should just be in awe of the thing—and I am. We expect every technology to be so cool that within days we sort of fold it into our expectations and our behavior. Google’s only been around for a short period of time. Just yesterday we didn’t have this, and yet we lived well. When you recognize that, maybe you can figure out ways to make it work for you even better.

Ever Google yourself?

I have to! I’m always trying to figure out if people are writing about me. I guess we all do. So far, Google has not downgraded me. I have to give them much respect for being above it all.

Anyone who’s been to UVA in recent months has surely walked away wondering, “What’s up with that black fabric wrapped around the tops of the columns at the Rotunda? Is UVA in mourning or something?” Turns out, it’s part of a much larger effort to completely overhaul the entire building. Stately though it may seem—architectural funeral veils aside—the Rotunda is evidently in pretty sorry condition.

The Rotunda has been renovated several times in its 185-year history, most famously and comprehensively after a devastating 1895 fire that left little intact but the walls and a Jefferson statue. But it’s still at heart a 19th century building, and University officials say that it’s showing its age. Local media has previously reported on the Rotunda’s leaking roof, but UVA Vice President of Management and Budget Colette Sheehy says that outfitting the building with a new, leak-proof copper roof (don’t worry, Jefferson purists; they’ll paint it white) is just the $4.59 million first step in a massive renovation project that’s projected to cost $50.6 million in total.

So where’s the remaining $46 million going? Sheehy explains that it’s not just the roof that’s in trouble. “The entire integrity of the building envelope is compromised,” she says. That means the walls, doors and windows may all be in need of renovations like the one the roof is facing—a lot of masonry, according to Sheehy.

Things don’t look much better inside. All the major systems in the Rotunda, from plumbing to electrical to heating, ventilation and air-conditioning to the elevators, are in varying states of disrepair. They all need to be fixed or at least brought up to 21st century standards.

“We’d also like like to explore whether we could reopen the entrance on the north side,” adds Sheehy. That’ll be the job of the Historic Preservation Colloquium, a conference of architects, historians and preservationists from within the University and from Monticello, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and other historical sites in the area. The colloquium will meet in June to make some final decisions about things like the north entrance and what design will be used for the roof.

Brian Hogg, UVA’s Senior Preservation Planner, tells C-VILLE that nothing they work up is likely to be too radical, appearance-wise. “There might be some changes to the metal cladding for the dome,” says Hogg, “but that would be all.” So while some Philosophy 101 students at the University might be disconcerted about whether the Rotunda will remain fundamentally the same after having most of its parts replaced, at the end of the six-year project, which UVA hopes to start this year, nothing about the Rotunda beyond the metaphysical realm will be noticeably different.

Of course, knowing where the money’s going doesn’t necessarily make that $50.6 million figure any easier to swallow. The University has already asked the General Assembly for $26.8 million, and lawmakers in both the House and Senate have so far been responsive and enthusiastic, but the prospect of that enthusiasm being matched with cash is currently in limbo.

In January, the Senate passed its six-year, $535 million Capital Outlay Plan that allots funding for Commonwealth-owned properties throughout Virginia. It included an unspecified amount to be spent on the Rotunda, but the House of Delegates roundly rejected the Senate’s plan in a unanimous vote. It could be weeks or even months before the House settles on a version of the plan that it likes.

The remaining $24 million will have to be raised privately. Currently, the University has about $3 million in historic preservation funds from its endowment, but as for the rest, it’s going to take a lot of alumni with deep pockets. “We’re talking about the symbol of the University of Virginia, maybe the premier building in Virginia, so hopefully that would have appeal for some donors,” says Sheehy.

Which just leaves the fabric around the tops of the columns.

“Underneath the curtains—that awful, awful looking industrial stuff—are composite capitals made of marble put up in 1897,” says Rotunda Administrator Leslie Comstock. “They’re now deteriorating and need to be replaced.” And yes, 10 Corinthian marble capitals will be expensive. That’s what a chunk of the $50.6 million is for.

During the next four to five years, UVA President Teresa Sullivan hopes to increase the student body by 1,400 undergraduates and 100 graduate students, a move that would confer degrees on more than 1,000 Virginians while enrolling enough out-of-staters to keep tuition in check. It could also rearrange UVA’s academic priorities, make room for dozens of new faculty members, and improve the school’s current student-faculty ratio—so long as sufficient state funding comes through.

Sullivan’s proposal answers pressure from the Governor’s Commission on Higher Education Reform, Innovation, and Investment. That program, founded in June, seeks to put more Virginians through college and bolster many of the left-brain disciplines that Governor McDonnell has said will “equip Virginians to succeed at the highest levels of global economic competition.” Chief among these are STEM programs—a tidy acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

If STEM prioritization has some at the university nervous, then a perceived lack of resources to support growth is even more pressing. Sullivan’s proposal aims to keep tuition steady following an increase earlier this year. In June, the UVA Board of Visitors approved tuition increases of $956 for in-state students and $1,902 for out-of-state students. As long as the Commonwealth follows through on funding, Sullivan contends, UVA should have no trouble expanding.

“What we don’t have are the faculty,” says University Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Leonard Sandridge. “We have a plan to use the tuition and the state money…to accommodate those needs.” This plan would improve student-faculty ratios, currently at 18 to 1, by bringing on more than 90 new faculty members.

University officials were not prepared to get specific about how faculty spots would be divided among departments. However, Meredith Woo, Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says that the programs UVA intends to develop “range from areas of traditional strength such as the humanities to frontier areas in the sciences in which we are poised for distinction, such as global environmental challenges, human life span development, and cosmic origins.”

Those lofty-sounding goals are part of an ongoing commitment to improving research departments. Among these is one that certainly could fill many of the potential new faculty positions: a cross-disciplinary focus on the universe itself. This has already led to the on-grounds establishment of the North American ALMA Science Center—the American headquarters for studying data that the world’s most advanced radio telescope generates in Chile.

The University is also adding its Center for the Chemistry of the Universe, a collaboration between the Chemistry, Astronomy and Physics departments along with the School of Engeering. The Center is scheduled to enter its 10-year, $40 million Phase Two in 2011.

Though the plan is for now merely hypothetical, some worry that the emphasis on STEM programs and generating degrees could result in cuts to arts and sciences and graduate programs. Associate Vice President for Public Affairs Carol Wood insists that these concerns are unfounded. “The goal is to increase quality in the STEM disciplines, [while] at the same time preserving the extraordinary quality that the University has long been known for in the liberal arts,” she says. “There is no intention to sacrifice one for the other.” 

The $30 million renovation of St. Anne’s lower campus, which includes new athletic fields as well as K-8 classroom buildings, is winding down.

According to STAB historian Kay Walker Butterfield, the school’s pedigree dates back to 1856. That’s when the Albemarle Female Institute opened on 10th and E. Jefferson streets. In 1910, one Henry Lee bought the struggling academy and turned it into the St. Anne’s School. 

By 1939, St. Anne’s was doing well enough to relocate to a new campus, paying $40,000 for a property on Ivy Road that had been the home of Elizabeth Wetmore, a journalist noted in her day for taking on fellow reporter Nellie Bly in a race around the world. By 1975, St. Anne’s and the nearby Belfield School had merged, and the school has been spread across the Wetmore property, dubbed Greenway Rise, and Belfield property ever since.

So how does this history lesson tie into the capital campaign? STAB initiated the campaign last year to celebrate 100 years of this path to the present and make enough cash to continue it well into the future. To that end, St. Anne’s raised a staggering—and staggeringly specific—total of $44,000,407.21 (picture a Mr. Burns type scrawling out his check for $7.21). 

Luke Anderson, STAB’s director of communications, says that the campaign had four goals: bulk up the school’s endowment (and this it did, up from $2.7 million last year to $17 million at present); sustain $1 million-plus in its general fundraising coffers; build a new arts and science center on the Greenway Rise campus; and perform a major overhaul of the Belfield campus. 

The former two goals certainly may not do much to dispel, as Anderson puts it, the “rich kids on the hill” image that STAB holds among many in the area, particularly given that most of the money is from parents of current students. However, Anderson says that the push to increase the endowment is largely about stabilizing tuition. “It allows us to keep tuition steady and try to offset the 2 to 4 percent annual increase in tuition that most schools face,” says Anderson.

The endowment is also intended to assist the 41 percent of STAB students who receive financial aid. Anderson contests the notion that this is simply subsidizing the school’s athletic programs and says that financial aid at STAB is purely needs-based. 

The $30 million Belfield renovation project has likewise not been without controversy. C-VILLE previously reported on objections over the former headmaster’s house being demolished to make way for the renovation. But with the demolition well in the past and final construction winding down, STAB expects both campuses to be running at full capacity by next month. The Belfield campus’ new athletic fields and main complex of buildings, housing kindergarten through 8th grade, have been in operation since classes began in September, and the final phase of the project, the preschool building, is scheduled to be completed by the end of this month.