Explore end-of-life care for the LGBTQ+ community with author Kimberly Acquaviva, who will discuss The Handbook of LGBTQIA-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday, January 20. Supplied photo.
Kimberly Acquaviva has strong advice for health care professionals caring for patients in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly those who need end-of-life care: “No patient should ever have a sense that they are being judged.”
Acquaviva, UVA nursing school’s Betty Norman Norris endowed professor, lectures nationally to try to change care approaches and minds. She recently put her expertise into writing with The Handbook of LGBTQIA-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care. What sets the handbook apart from other books for health care providers is that it uses everyday language, not an academic voice, to reach the largest audience. A broad reach, and an open mind, is essential to moving the conversation forward. Acquaviva points to a lecture she gave to homecare nurses in Washington, DC. “At the end of my presentation, a woman came up to me and said, ‘I’m going to change my practice based on what you said,’” recalls Acquaviva. “‘I still think you’re going to hell, but I’m going to stop telling my patients that they are.’”
Acquaviva often confronts the obstacles of opinion in her talks, offering: “It’s okay for people to have strong religious beliefs about homosexuality, and I respect their beliefs. No one needs to change their beliefs to provide exceptional care. What needs to happen is for those beliefs not to be apparent to patients.”
When her wife, hospice expert Kathy Brandt, was diagnosed with a swift, incurable form of ovarian cancer about five years ago, Acquaviva’s scholarly interests became deeply personal. Just after the diagnosis, the couple moved to Charlottesville in 2019 for Acquaviva’s job at UVA, and learned that Charlottesville didn’t have a hospice/palliative care center with an inclusive nondiscrimination statement that covered sexual orientation and gender identity. Some hospice leaders reached out to assure them that care would be excellent.
“We let them know we could not accept care until the businesses were inclusive for everyone,” says Acquaviva. In less than two weeks, all of the local hospices had expanded their nondiscrimination statements. Brandt died about a week and a half after that.
The new nondiscrimination statements were good progress, but not enough. In-depth training and actively seeking ways to become more inclusive are also important, and changes have happened. Acquaviva says she would now feel comfortable receiving care at any of the hospices here.
Statistics show that many places need improvement. A 2023 survey of 865 end-of-life health care workers found that more than 15 percent of them witnessed disrespectful or inadequate care. Forty-three percent reported discriminatory care of their spouses or partners. Examples include care that was denied, delayed, incomplete, or rushed; insensitive and judgmental attitudes and behaviors; and gossip and ridicule toward patients.
Acquaviva provides many scenarios showing why LGBTQ+ community members in particular may have special needs at the end of life. They might feel more vulnerable in their homes, especially if living alone. Some feel they have to take steps to hide photographs of their family life. They can’t predict whether caregivers will react or be judgmental, Acquaviva says. “We have an obligation not to cause suffering.”
There is still a lot of educating to do in terms of equality in quality care, she says.
Noe Garcia Corona will pour wine from Grace Estate Winery at the Two Up Wine Down Festival on Sunday at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Photo by Derrick Waller.
The Two Up Wine Down Festival will showcase Virginia wines of all kinds, but it will also shine a spotlight on broader talent from our winemaking region when 11 curators pour 15 wines at the Jefferson School on October 29 from 3 to 6pm.
Tracey Love, one of the event’s organizers and the marketing and sales head at Blenheim Vineyards, calls the afternoon “an opportunity to highlight the work of underrepresented communities of all sorts.”
Grace Estate Winery’s Assistant Winegrower Noe Garcia Corona says, “it has been hard to find people who want to bring the entire wine community together. In the past, sometimes vineyards have been stuck in a bubble.”
When asked what it means to be part of a more inclusive community, Garcia Corona says it makes him “feel comfortable, it’s an opportunity to meet passionate people who are contributing to the wider community of wines in Virginia, and it makes us better able to advise each other.” Today’s wider professional wine community better serves all types of people who are interested in wine, he says. “That is how you get more sales.”
Garcia Corona adds that the event is not only a chance to highlight Grace Estate’s wines, but also to impart his vineyard’s formal wine philosophy: “Everything we need to make great wine is already in the soil and the fruit itself, and so we strive to produce a product free of outside inputs.”
Garcia Corona and winegrowing partner Robbie Corpora use minimal, mostly organic insecticides, employ a chemical-free period before harvest, and depend on indigenous yeasts and bacteria on the grape skins for the final taste. They use no refrigeration and minimal sulfites. The result is popular—about 80 percent of the grapes grown at Grace Estate are purchased by other winemakers.
Love and Reggie Leonard, winemaker and co-creator of the fest, tout the many Charlottesville- and Shenandoah Valley-area wineries that women and BIPOC producers have founded or work for. Some are even a one-person show, like Seidah Armstrong, who owns Sweet Vines Farm Winery, and makes and sells her wines. “She does it all,” Love says. (And if you’re looking for some out-of-town star power, NBA Hall of Famer Dwayne Wade, a co-partner of Wade Cellars, is also on the program.)
The Wine Down is an offshoot of local efforts that continue year-round, Love says. “The name is an homage to our incredible Commonwealth, Virginia (Two Up, Two Down). The V is two fingers up (like a peace sign) and the A is two fingers down for VA and we riffed on that idea for the festival name and TUWD design by Tim Skirven.”
The Oenoverse, a wine club based at Blenheim Vineyards that includes people from historically underrepresented and excluded communities, and a related nonprofit group called the Veraison Project (volunteer wine industry professionals committed to making the industry more diverse and equitable) chose the curators for Two Up Wine Down.
Artificial intelligence was once the stuff of sci-fi dreams, and though it has been available in some form for many years, 2023 has marked a sea change for AI. New chat bots seem to launch by the day, and backlash has already begun to foment. The “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, left Google, warning of the dangers of the invention, and Writer’s Guild strikers have named AI as a threat to their livelihoods.
Advancements in the ease-of-use and sophistication of AI have prompted companies around the world to integrate the most powerful technology of the moment—and maybe for years to come—into their businesses. Now, Charlottesville’s techies are harnessing AI to achieve all sorts of research and marketing goals, but each application comes with its own risks and rewards.
The origins of AI
Before AI, machine learning developed. “The goal of ML is to extract patterns from data,” says Yangfeng Ji, the William Wulf Career Enhancement Professor in the University of Virginia’s computer science department. For example, looking at restaurant reviews, a machine trained on data sets can examine the data and figure out which words are related to positive reviews and which words are related to negative reviews. The machine extracts patterns and then predicts something from them, such as whether to add a restaurant to suggested recommendations for a user. “Machine learning is a way to achieve artificial intelligence,” Ji says.
Ji says AI began when people started trying to build and train computers to mimic human-level intelligence and perform tasks in the way a human would, in several aspects. For each aspect, “we try to create a research subject to study it,” Ji says. “To name two examples, we have natural language processing, where the goal is to understand human communication in the natural language. Computer vision teaches the computer to recognize and identify a human face or a different object in an image.”
Charlottesville is a “hub for AI” work and research, says John Elder, who has owned Elder Research for nearly 30 years. He notes that the university here has researchers and professors who train students in AI and machine learning, and many graduates like living here. Elder, whose company creates business value from client’s data, says, “Alumni of our organization have also started or staffed other analytic firms nearby. Charlottesville is very strong, for its size, in data science, just like it is in good restaurants. We also have an abundance of hedge funds and venture capitalists here, which likely further amplifies local innovation.”
Artificial intelligence used by companies reaches far beyond the free version of ChatGPT (which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”), an assistive, natural-language bot available online through Microsoft’s OpenAI. OpenAI offers more robust products, like the GPT-4 model that is available as an application programming interface, or API, for developers. Other large companies also offer AI, including Alphabet (home of Google), Meta (Facebook), and Baidu in China, so smaller companies can build AI-based applications and services.
Yangfeng Ji, the William Wulf Career Enhancement Professor in UVA’s computer science department, is working on a system where human users will be able to verify whether an AI’s answer is truth or misinformation. Photo courtesy UVA.
AI growth is moving fast
AI usage is growing swiftly in labs and companies globally. Elder says his company brings in “millions” annually for AI-related work.
Market.us estimates that the global artificial intelligence market size was $129.28 billion in 2022, with more than 51 percent of revenues in North America—and growth is estimated to accelerate at a compound annual growth rate of 36.8 percent, to an estimated incremental revenue of more than $2.7 trillion by 2032. While a search for AI revenues in central Virginia or the state didn’t return results, a study by AI-driven website builder YACSS found Virginia to be the 10th most “AI-obsessed” state, based on Google keywords data (Massachusetts was first).
“Analytics, data science, and AI are on a continuum,” Elder says. “They all use experience of known situations and their outcome [data] to better determine actions to be taken for similar new cases. They are ideal for, for instance, finding people who are the lowest risk for repaying loans, or who could be the highest threat to national security. Success marries the speed and accuracy of the computer with the people skills of creativity and understanding of the problem.”
Aiding accurate, swift analysis is UVA’s new School of Data Science. Commerce school alum Jaffray Woodriff, successful in hedge-fund analytics, gave the university $120 million to establish an entire school full of students, from undergraduates to Ph.D.s., looking toward careers in AI and other data analysis fields.
Tobias Dengel, president of WillowTree, a TELUS International company with its headquarters here and more than 1,000 employees worldwide, says, “Over the next 24 months everything we do—from design to development—will be made more efficient using AI tools. Consumers will see this change as every app and website will become a virtual voice-based assistant. To order your favorite coffee or pizza, you’ll just open your Starbucks or Domino’s app and tell it what you want. The entire human/machine interface is about to change.”
Some are wary of that predicted inevitability, however. Artist Rosamond Casey says AI artworks need to stay in the digital world: “Label it as AI art, set up a market for it, but call it what it is,” she says. “Keep it out of the physical world.” With AI making the art, “it appeals to emotion, but large areas of the composition fall apart. Maybe artists being artists will find a way to own AI and make it their tool, and we will all adapt.”
Eric Seaborg, a journalist and author, notes, “The articles I write are based on interviews with experts, and AI doesn’t seem close to being able to do that, so my little part of the world is safe for now.”
But as usage of AI grows, and many leverage its power, some experts’ confidence in its abilities to assume other tasks in society grows with it. Michael Freenor, WillowTree’s principal data scientist says, without hesitation, “I predict every shop will be using AI.”
John Elder, owner of Elder Research for nearly 30 years, believes Charlottesville is a “hub for AI” work and research. He points to university researchers and professors, as well as hedge funds and venture capitalists in town, who are focused on AI. Photo by Eze Amos.
Locals leverage AI
Elder’s group approaches queries to learn, for example, about people with security clearances by looking for anomalous behaviors—their keystrokes, which doors they enter and exit, and so on. “The question is, ‘How do you create good features out of that vast sea of flowing information, so that you can summarize it in a way to make it clear?’” he says. The model shows only that a person has a certain probability of being risky, fraudulent, or not paying off loans. A model provides a probability (a number between 0 and 100, say), and it’s up to the end user to decide whether to act on the prediction.
Other local businesses, like Astrea, also use AI. Its website describes an “artificial intelligence platform to combine cutting-edge technologies and analytics-ready satellite imagery,” dealing in geospatial data and tools to analyze the data at lower costs.
Drug developer Ampel’s site notes that the company “brings their expertise in basic and translational research, clinical trial design, and bioinformatics together in a new way to develop scalable systems using AI and deep machine learning to improve patient outcomes.” Ampel expects its first product, LuGENE (a blood test that assesses disease state and drug options for lupus patients), to be out this year. ZielBio is also using AI to develop drugs, as is HemoShear Therapeutics. All three are based in Charlottesville.
Sheng Li, a professor in the UVA School of Data Science, primarily directs his AI research to improve trustworthiness. In the concept of machine learning, those in the field define trustworthiness from several angles: robustness, fairness, transparency, security, and interpretability. His team would like to investigate all of these topics, but for now it focuses on robustness and fairness.
One robustness project is fish recognition—gathering data for the U.S. Geological Survey. Researchers are recording unique patterns and markings that stay with individual fish over the years. The recognition data has robustness issues, however, because often the fish are not seen in winter, and by spring and summer they gain size. Such changes will make the model work worse if you only examine data from certain seasons. More frequent data will improve the project, which tracks fish to learn how populations are growing. If individual fish can be recognized, then researchers can monitor the health status of the fish, based on unusual skin patterns, Li says.
WillowTree has an active AI project group, including clients in health care, human resources, financial services, and agribusiness.
WillowTree’s Freenor says his most complex project to date involved a client dedicated to enabling data-driven efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion. AI can drastically increase productivity across product development, so one assignment that typically takes six weeks was completed in two days. The final product entailed creating a smart database interface for HR professionals skilled in the DEI space but not necessarily at data analysis or engineering. With GPT, natural-language commands such as “What’s the gender pay gap at my company?” allowed users to search for patterns in the client’s own HR database on which the AI was trained.
“It was the first major project we used GPT on,” says Freenor. “It’s the first time in my career that I got giddy with a piece of technology, honestly. It was very obvious. It was so fast and I had it performing in just a couple of hours, which was wild.”
Freenor cautions that with a large-language model like GPT, the first answer isn’t always the right answer, however.
WillowTree found prompting and then re-prompting technology is a good technique, says Freenor. Adam Nemett, WillowTree’s director of brand and content strategy, explains that this kind of “prompt engineering” is vitally important. “If the technology is operating in a world of assumptions, drawing on the massive amount of public information it’s been trained on, it’s going to reflect whatever bias exists in its training.”
“For most use cases a company will want to license and train the AI independently, to make sure the application is analyzing a concrete set of data rather than billions of data points from all of human history. Then you can essentially engineer the prompt to refine itself,” Nemett says. “Just because this technology is powerful doesn’t mean it’s always correct the first time. You still need human experts building and training these models to ensure the privacy of the data and integrity of the system’s responses.” Nemett says WillowTree is well positioned to work on complex, thorny issues because of the breadth of its expertise, from the data scientists effectively wielding LLMs to the engineers and designers building voice-powered AI solutions to the social scientists in their research division staying abreast of the technology’s impact.
UVA’s Ji is working on a system that would make the human user responsible for concluding the correct answer. He wants a system to include three different characteristics for the user’s peace of mind: an answer, an explanation for the answer, and then the percentage prediction that an answer is information used to come to an answer.
Given all of the information, the human user needs to make an educated decision about whether the answer is truthful or whether it is misinformation. “The difficulty is that we have to construct a collaboration, working together with people who may have different views and backgrounds,” Ji says.
Tobias Dengel, president of WillowTree, believes that within two years everything his company does will be made more efficient with AI. Customers will interact with virtual voice-
based assistants in the apps we use to order coffee or pizza. “The entire human/machine interface is about to change,” he says. Photo by Eze Amos.
Risks of AI technology
Kay Neeley, associate professor in the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science, teaches a course called The Engineer, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility. Every student in the school must take one ethics course.
“One of the biggest problems is that AI is a very broad category of technical capability that can be used for lots of different things,” Neeley says. “We need to start by saying that generalizing about AI doesn’t make sense.” She calls for people to look at specific AI applications in the context of their use.
“Scrupulous” is a word several interviewees used when talking about businesses that use AI. Businesses must be scrupulous or the information delivered will be unsatisfactory, false, or worse. There can be risk to the brand if the LLM doesn’t provide thorough information or provides incorrect information, or if someone can trick it to obtain information or intellectual property that should not be released. “There is risk to the brand and to those who receive its information, and any of those outcomes is bad from an organization’s perspective,” Freenor says.
Often, those who get the information hesitate to use it. Gartner, a technological consulting firm, predicted that “80 percent of analytics insights will not deliver business outcomes through 2022.” Elder says he is pleased that 90 percent of his clients do use the insights his team provides. “People naturally fear making decisions in a new way. They may not understand the model well enough, or just figure that no one gets fired for doing things the old way.”
ChatGPT, open and available to the public, is astonishing people with how quickly it can produce seemingly-sensible commentary on any subject. That it is public and free may be a real problem, in Elder’s view. “It lies brazenly. I wouldn’t make a business decision based on it,” he says. “It never says, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s often right, always wrong about something, and completely confident on everything.”
Elder challenges: “Ask it something you know a lot about. Like, ask what you have invented and how does it work? It’ll get some things right but then run on about your genius with say, a super-shredder or galvanizing rubber. It badly needs a validation mechanism.” He says he knows a local firm using the public version even now to craft marketing pitches to different types of customers.
Neeley agrees that ChatGPT needs to be used carefully. “There are some limited, humane purposes to which something like ChatGPT can be put,” she says. She gives the “very constructive” example of lower-skilled workers who performed at a higher level in the context of interacting with customers if they were assisted by a capability like ChatGPT.
“In an academic context, however, we don’t have students write essays because someone is going to buy the products,” Neeley says. “We have them write so they develop the capability. The point is the people who are developing or making money off of ChatGPT are not bearing the costs of reconfiguring the system of education, so that it still works reasonably well with this capability out there.”
Students could cheat. Neeley bemoans the lack of accountability on the part of the AI developers, while back at UVA, “we are spending a lot of time figuring out how we are going to deal with this capability. Those are costs that we are bearing.”
One of the biggest risks Neeley sees, however, is that people treat the continued development and use of this capability as inevitable, as if this is something that is going to happen, in which case the question is how we adapt to it.
“The discourse of inevitability is inimical to ethical sensitivity and awareness,” Neeley says. “Ethics is not about what we can do, it is about what we should do.”
She subs in “morphine” for AI. “None of us wants to live in a world without morphine. We don’t give morphine to students and say, ‘This can be used for good and bad things, and we hope you make good decisions.’”
With morphine, we control the outcomes. With AI, “we know we cannot control the outcome, but we know the stakes are high enough that we are going to try to control it, and the role that choice plays,” asserts Neeley. “If we believe we have choice, then we do.”
A late-February 82-degree day followed by a stretch of mornings in the frosty 30s? Yep, we’re talking about winter 2023 in central Virginia. After a mild several months (except for that low of 6 degrees in December), it seems like any weather event or temperature is possible. Does this mean we’ll have a scorching summer? Sadly, there is no good way to predict that, says Robert Davis of UVA’s Department of Environmental Sciences. The only sure thing is weather variations, twice a year.
Weather variations
Both spring and fall transition times are when you would expect big changes, Davis says.
The Northern Hemisphere is warming up in spring, but arctic air blasts from the north hit our area and often late winter and early spring nights are very cold. “So we are getting into the season where you can have cold front passages that are strong. There will be several cold days before it warms up again.” Morning frosts can be continual.
Davis says it’s difficult to comment on whether we are seeing greater variability than in the past. “You can’t look at any particular event and say, ‘That is unusual,’” he explains.
Michael McConkey, owner of Edible Landscaping in Afton, agrees that central Virginia weather is up and down, but is sanguine about the struggle involved. “Peach and plum trees here have always been subject to late frost and changes in the weather, mostly because they evolved as arid Persian plants,” he says. Some trees from Japan and China, however, do well here because of climate similarities. Examples are persimmons and jujube, which is a popular fruit in China, brown on the outside and white on the inside, with a sweet apple taste.
“Everyone growing fruits is aware of weather patterns, and they have changed dramatically” for fruit growers, says McConkey.
Ken Bezilla of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange agrees, and says the variations are hardest on fruit growers. Plum trees, often first to flower among trees here, can amount to “the annual sacrifice to the frost gods,” he says.
In general, as the entire planet warms, we would expect less variability overall, Davis says. That may seem counterintuitive. In many parts of the U.S., as the country warms up, the transitional temperature swings are not as great.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps monthly records of high and low temperature for counties in each state. Notably, Albemarle County was at its warmest ever for the period January to February 2023. According to NOAA, our two-month average was 45.0 degrees Fahrenheit—our warmest-to-date record for those months together, and 9.8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the 1901 to 2000 mean of 35.2 degrees Fahrenheit for those months together.
Pam Dawling, a farmer at Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, has been tracking several first appearances of the spring season over a 20-year period. Her data on phenology, the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, is interesting. Many plants over the past 15 years have made a first appearance in three different months, often March, April, and May. Late frost for the year ranges from April 8 to as late as May 11, with an average date of April 29, Dawling’s records show.
Climatologist and biometeorologist Davis reminds, “I would be very reticent to make anything out of the variations other than this has been a strange winter, and these are the kinds of changes we would often see in the spring.”
Michael McConkey, owner of Edible Landscaping, thinks growers are well-equipped to handle sudden shifts in weather. Photo by Eze Amos.
Climate change in the region
NASA defines weather as the conditions of the atmosphere over a short period of time, while climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.
How has our climate changed over time? There are explanations thanks to scientists, farmers, and others who keep track.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency says overall that our state has warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century (from a 2017 report). Carbon dioxide levels and other gases that keep heat close to the ground account for higher temperatures, the EPA notes. “Evaporation increases and the atmosphere warms, which increases humidity, average rainfall, and the frequency of heavy rainstorms in many places—but contributes to drought in others.”
The EPA reports that our state can expect more energy usage, because electricity consumption is on track to increase over time because of additional air conditioning. “Seventy years from now, temperatures are likely to rise above 95 degrees Fahrenheit approximately 20 to 40 days per year in the southeastern half of Virginia, compared with about 10 days per year today,” the EPA says.
Another indicator of climate change in our region is that our region’s U.S. Department of Agriculture hardening zone officially changed. SESE’s Bezilla says we have moved from winters of zone 6b (-5 to 0 degrees Fahrenheit/-20.6 to -17.8 degrees Celsius) to zone 7a (0 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit/-17.8 to -15 degrees Celsius) as temperatures rose over time.
Lettuce is now a year-round crop in this area. “Recently I revised our lettuce schedules, partly to take account of hotter weather arriving earlier in the year, and also to even out the harvest,” writes blogger Dawling, author of Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres.
In another blog post, the Twin Oaks community farmer recorded observations for the future: “I live and farm in the southeast,” Dawling wrote. “Sea level rises and heavy downpours in our region are already obvious. Dangerously high temperatures, higher humidity, new pests and diseases are moving in. … The growing season is ten days longer than it was in the 1960s.”
For the 48-month period from September 2018 to August 2022, Albemarle County was at its warmest, with a value of 47.0 degrees Fahrenheit compared with a value for the mean of 43.5 degrees Fahrenheit for the same 1901 to 2000 period, per the NOAA charts. (This tied for warmest with the same period ending in 2020.)
Trees in Charlottesville bloomed early during winter’s patches of warm weather. Photo by Stephen Barling.
Effects on agriculture and animals
Local growers work hard to protect their fragile plants. For example, Crown Orchard has installed wind turbines at its farms, and Barboursville Vineyard has put in wind machinery to keep cooler air from settling onto its future produce.
Sometimes the fight can seem futile, however.
Susan Smith Ordel, a longtime local gardener, says, “I have noticed just being outside all of the time, the nights in August would cool off. You felt watering was doing some good. Now the plants don’t get a break” from evaporation.
Adaptation is a solution. Crown Orchards is taking advantage of more sun with solar panel arrays near Carter Mountain Orchard, on the rooftop of Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet, and at the production facility in Covesville, the company’s website notes.
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange creates huge trial tracts each year to see what grows best, and which plants and seeds do best in particular in Virginia and surrounding states. SESE’s trial fields, based in Mineral, are the launching pad for the 28 new varieties the exchange added to its 2023 listings. Among the new winners are Okinawa Pink okra (from Japan), Greek pepperoncini peppers, Gulag Stars kale (from Russia), and Florida conch southern pea. (The SESE website has a category that central Virginia gardeners might do well to peruse: “Especially well-suited to the Southeast.”)
Spinach is a crop that has become too tender for our hot summers. Bezilla says some spinach varieties make for good planting over the winter.
McConkey says native trees like mulberries and pawpaws do well. Still, many shoppers love their peach, pear, and plum trees, which can be marginal here.
Ordel planted five camellias in her yard that she wouldn’t have touched 10 or 15 years ago, she says. “Usually you think of camellias as being in the deep South, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, but now we’re starting to be able to see them bloom and thrive here.”
She does mourn a favorite plant that just can’t hack our climate. “Now it is clear we can’t plant hydrangea macrophylla any more” (also called French hydrangea). “The hydrangeas have to have cool nights, and I still have clients asking me for the beautiful blue blooms. We’ve had later frosts, and if the buds don’t get nipped in the spring, the early hot weather either deforms the blooms or keeps them from being realized.”
Winemaker, vineyard, and tasting room owner Michael Shaps can speak to the vagaries of wine production, both with his grapes here at Michael Shaps Wineworks and in Meursault, France, in the Burgundy region. Fortunately, Virginia’s changes are not as dramatic as those he has witnessed in France.
“What I have really noticed in Virginia is the intensity of storms we have seen over the past few years,” Shaps says. The amount of rain and the intensity of storms has been much more severe than in the past 30 years in general, he says. A big fear is hail damage, which has happened at times, but he says is “not significant” for his Virginia vines. The pattern of weather lately has been Gulf of Mexico moisture from the south, rather than storms flowing across the country from the west, he says.
Deforestation, which removes trees that modulate how fast storms move over an area, can also increase storm intensity, Bezilla explains.
On top of that, farmers and growers need to worry about earlier appearances of pests. For example, Dawling’s phenology chart tracks when the harlequin bugs first come out to sip the sap from kale, cabbage, and collards, which has been as early as March 13 for the years 2006 to 2020.
Any year that is warmer earlier may result in extra generations of insects, Bezilla says. This can be detrimental when pests multiply, but also helpful if there are additional pollinating bees.
Ken Bezilla of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange says that spinach can’t take the heat, and some varieties actually plant well in winter. Photo by Irena Hollowell / Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Human hardship
There is proof that weather changes also affect human health. Davis and Kyle Enfield, M.D., who works in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at the UVA School of Medicine, examined 19 years of daily admissions at UVA’s hospital for respiratory reasons. For the first time ever, a measurement called the Acclimatization Thermal Strain Index was applied to human disease. ATSI measures strain on the lung system.
Davis and Enfield learned that there is a definite relationship between seasonal strain stemming from warm, humid air changing to cold, dry air and hospital admissions, on a seasonal scale and on a weekly time scale. Their work, published in 2017 in the International Journal of Biometeorology, showed the adjustment from cold air to warm air didn’t affect health as clearly as during the fall season.
The EPA 2017 report notes that warmer temperatures can also increase the formation of ground-level ozone, a major component of smog. Because ozone can aggravate lung diseases such as asthma, and increases the risk of premature death from heart or lung disease, the EPA and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality have been working to reduce ozone concentrations, which will become more difficult with warming trends.
In 2022, Ordel had her first bout of heat exhaustion because she cannot stay hydrated no matter how much water she drinks. “Even starting early, now I have found that past 2pm it’s just too brutally hot.”
Respiratory difficulties and heat emergencies aside, living with weather changes can cause higher expenses, as air conditioning in longer summers and heating in longer springs extends energy needs.
Ordel’s family depends on a wood stove in their Keswick home. “It was like clockwork for decades that we would start all-day wood in mid-October and go until tax day,” she says. “Now we start full-time fires in the full month of November and go until mid-May, and that’s consistently true now for about five years. It is clear to me there is climate change.”
The camellia flower has migrated up from the Deep South, says gardener Susan Smith Ordel. File photo.
Joyce Chopra will be interviewed by Paul Wagner following a screening of Smooth Talk at the Virginia Film Festival on November 4 at Violet Crown Cinema. The filmmaker and author will read from Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond at New Dominion Bookshop on November 11. Image courtesy of the Virginia Film Festival.
Joyce Chopra, known for her documentary, television, and filmmaking career, recounts her experiences in a new no-holds-barred memoir,Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond. But it wasn’t until she read her book’s promo blurbs that Chopra says she understood she had completed “a history of how hard it was for women to ever get a chance to make fiction films.”
Lady Director makes it clear that Chopra, a Charlottesville resident, always had the people skills and the business sense needed for a successful artistic life. As a bored 21-year-old graduate of Brandeis University, she opened Club 47 in Boston for jazz aficionados, but soon an unknown Bob Dylan was playing there, and Joan Baez was singing on Wednesdays for $10 a ticket.
In her book, Chopra talks about casting her 1985 feature debut, Smooth Talk, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She cast Treat Williams as the malicious hunk Arnold Friend, but struggled to find someone to play the young female lead. A friend suggested a neighbor’s daughter, the gifted teen actor Laura Dern, resulting in a performance that propelled Dern’s career.
Chopra and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Tom Cole, asked a different neighbor, James Taylor, if he’d give them the rights to his song “Handyman” for two scenes in which Dern and screen mom Mary Kay Place dance. Taylor asked if he could write music for the film.
Joyce Chopra. Supplied photo.
Other vivid anecdotes in Lady Director include being bullied in an editing room (but not assaulted) by lecherous producer Harvey Weinstein, as well as details of other toxic Hollywood behemoths’ behavior, including Oscar winners. When producers in Paris grabbed her up and down, “It was considered annoying but normal,” she says.
Hollywood’s aggressors do destroy people, such as Marilyn Monroe in Chopra’s TV miniseries “Blonde” (not the Blonde currently on Netflix), but the director was more interested in portraying the lives of typical young women, like in her short, bittersweet documentary Girls at 12.
Chopra’s own path was easier with Cole, who assisted greatly once their daughter was born. When it was suggested that Chopra make a documentary about her pregnancy and childbirth, her reaction was that it was “the most narcissistic thing imaginable.” But she did, and the film, Joyce at 34, captures tough decisions, exhaustion, and the beauty and bedevilment of another lifeform altering a body.
Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, when that adult daughter, a UVA dean, made a new creative suggestion: Write a book about your life. (Her daughter is the reason Chopra moved to Charlottesville, a few years after Cole died in 2009.) The director pulled out a familiar argument when she said, “Writing a memoir is narcissistic!” But restless without film work, she wrote one sentence, and finally some more. Memoirist Honor Moore showed the work to an agent who contacted San Francisco’s City Lights Books, a well-known publisher of the Beat writers.
Now that Chopra’s book is out, the accomplished yet modest director asks how she might get followers on Instagram. Make a note to follow her when her Insta and other feeds go live.
After two-and-a-half years of living with COVID-19, many of us carry a sense of dread when the temperatures drop. Will winter coronavirus, colds, flus, and other infections rise as we gather in smaller spaces for longer periods of time? In a word: Yes.
But fear not. Vaccinations work to keep infection rates lower for many pathogens, and they may also help make diseases less severe and death rates lower. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it bluntly: “The CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccines for everyone ages 6 months and older, and boosters for everyone 5 years and older, if eligible.”
To determine whether you are medically eligible for a COVID shot or any other vaccine, please consult a health-care provider. (Most people can get vaccines without any problems.)
As of October 7, 76.3 percent of the Charlottesville population has had at least one dose. Albemarle County has surpassed that level at an 87.9 percent rate. Ryan McKay, director of policy, planning, and COVID-19 operations for the Blue Ridge Health District, says the district has one of the highest vaccination rates in the state.
The BRHD underestimated how bad last winter’s COVID transmission rate would be—the omicron variant emerged and the vaccine didn’t fight it. This fall, the new bivalent vaccines protect against both the original strain of COVID and the two current omicron variants.
McKay encourages everyone to get the initial two COVID shots or their boosters when they are due, plus the seasonal flu shot—at the same time, if desired. They are given as two shots, not a combined shot.
Patrick Jackson, M.D., an assistant professor in the UVA Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health, says October is a good month to get these two vaccines, so you can “build antibodies before flu starts circulating” and “combination is perfectly fine.”
The strict COVID recommendations of 2020 have softened nationwide and locally. “COVID vaccination is less of a front burner issue now, because of the reduction in the number of transmissions, and the moderated-disease transmission,” says Phil Giaramita, Albemarle County Public Schools strategic communications officer. “We are not in a position to require or collect vaccination data on our employees or among students—student data is blended into the state COVID information registry.” Nonetheless, employees of ACPS have a vaccination rate of more than 90 percent, teachers most of all.
UVA’s COVID health and safety policy, updated for the fall 2022 semester, says, “All students, full-time and part-time UVA faculty and staff, including those working remotely, are strongly encouraged to receive their primary series of COVID-19 vaccine and booster doses when eligible per CDC guidance.”
Despite vaccination progress, the September 30 UVA COVID-19 Modeling Weekly Update predicts another possible surge this December. “It is critical that Virginians get boosted this fall. Models suggest that a bivalent booster campaign could prevent 150,000 cases by March.”
Jackson recommends reviewing your vaccine history with your health-care provider: “Vaccine reviews should be part of your regular health evaluation,” he says.
Besides the COVID vaccine, there is a new vaccine for monkeypox, which can cause a painful though usually not fatal infection. Monkeypox and many vaccines are given throughout the year, as needed, as are booster shots for certain vaccines.
A healthy dose
Before you panic about another possible winter COVID surge, take a look at our guide to vaccines to consider this fall and beyond. Please consult a medical expert with any questions before you get vaccinated.
Monkeypox.Tetanus.
COVID-19 vaccines and boosters
Who should get these? Everyone 6 months and older who is eligible—ask your health-care provider or health department.
How often? The VDH says, “The first two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech or Novavax vaccine should be given at least three weeks (21 days) apart and the first two doses of Moderna vaccine at least four weeks (28 days) apart.” Do not get the second dose earlier than recommended. The Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a single first dose only authorized for use now in certain situations.
An extended interval option may work for individuals 6 months of age and older based on an individual’s risks and benefits. A longer (up to eight-week) interval may be optimal for some people, especially for males ages 12 to 39 years. Talk to your health-care or vaccine provider about the timing of the second shot.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, those 18 years and older can have a single booster of the Moderna bivalent if it has been at least two months since their primary vaccination or if they have received the most recent booster dose with any approved monovalent COVID-19 vaccine (the first booster shot that was available).
For the Pfizer bivalent, those 12 years and older are eligible for a single bivalent booster dose under the same two-month circumstances.
Who should get this? The CDC says everyone over the age of 6 months, to protect as many as possible. Those 65 and older likely will receive the high-dose seasonal flu shot that the CDC recommends.
When? Once a year, about this time of year (October). Flu activity peaks from December to February.
According to the CDC, this annual vaccine is made to protect against the most common strains, year to year. This vaccine can be given along with the updated COVID bivalent vaccine.
Monkeypox vaccine
Who should get this? People who have sex with multiple or anonymous partners are currently at the highest risk for monkeypox. The VDH says that avoiding these activities greatly reduces your chance of catching or spreading monkeypox.
When? Now, if you are at risk or know you have been exposed to someone with the disease.
Anyone can get and spread monkeypox, which is transmitted by close contact with an infected person. Close contact includes sex or intimate contact, hugging, kissing, cuddling, massage, touching skin lesions, bodily fluids, or clothing, towels, and linens that have been in contact with an infected person. Spread can also occur during prolonged face-to-face contact.
Tetanus/DTaP vaccine
Who should get this? Jackson says this is an overlooked vaccine. It is recommended for all ages, and, according to Jackson, pregnant women should also get the shot to help confer immunity in a fetus to fight whooping cough (pertussis). The Mayo Clinic recommends the shot between 27 and 36 weeks of pregnancy.
When? During childhood, and every 10 years thereafter.
The DTaP vaccine works against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough infections. Diphtheria is caused by a poison produced by a bacterium, and it can be deadly. Tetanus is caused by a bacterium usually when a wound is infected by contaminated soil, dust, rust, or animal or human feces. Diphtheria and tetanus are rare in the U.S. because of vaccination. Whooping cough is more common.
Other vaccines
Newer formulations include the Shingrix vaccine for shingles (two doses two to six months apart for those aged 50 and up) and two new pneumonia vaccines: PCV15 (Vaxneuvance) and PCV20 (Prevnar 20) for those older than 65 and younger people at high risk because of a weak immune system or a chronic medical condition.
Keeping abreast
A quick word about women who still need to get an annual mammogram: Don’t let having a recent COVID or seasonal flu vaccine stop you from getting your annual mammogram. In early COVID vaccine days, the guidance was for women to wait about six weeks after a COVID or flu shot because vaccine material was attacked by enlarged lymph nodes. Enlarged lymph nodes, however, are also a possible sign of cancer.
File photo.
“Many women came in shortly after their first vaccinations, and we were seeing higher rates of enlarged lymph nodes,” so the six-week wait time began, said Lisa Vick, team coordinator for mammography at Martha Jefferson Hospital. “We no longer want patients to delay their care.” Vaccination questions are asked and recorded, but vaccines should not postpone mammograms, she says.
A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks plays at Culbreth Theater. Photo: VAFF
Since the 1940s, documentary photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks has remained relevant as both a visual chronicler of injustice and an example to aspiring artists everywhere. “He could turn an ordinary life into something extraordinary,” says John Maggio, the director of A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, which takes its name from Parks’ memoir.
Among Parks’ famous works is his 1967-68 Life magazine photo documentation of the Fontenelle family’s struggles in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. “Not to diminish the importance of covering the Fontenelle family in a run-down tenement, but he also got the beauty of the composition,” Maggio says.
“Parks is the perfect amalgam of both artist and journalist,” says Maggio, showing a photograph of a woman sitting with some of her children, pleading silently with a poverty bureau worker. “That makes him great. Look at the mother’s eyes—so grave.”
Born into poverty himself, Parks saw power in photography and taught himself how to operate a camera. He worked his way onto the masthead of Life magazine, and was the first African American to shoot for Vogue, as well as the first Black director of a major Hollywood studio movie, Shaft. He also was a noted writer and composed music for films.
In addition to discussing Parks, Maggio’s documentary showcases the trajectories of three newer artists who wield cameras to tell stories. “I didn’t want to keep Gordon encased in amber. I wanted to see his legacy in play today,” says Maggio.
He calls Baltimore’s Devon Allen the nearest extension of Parks. Finding a camera pulled Allen away from a perilous place to the cover of Time magazine. Other artists influenced by Parks and featured in the film are LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jamel Shabazz, who create affirmation in their work, Maggio says.
As a young man hanging around his painter-sculptor father’s studio, Maggio “absconded with a Time-Life photo compendium” that captivated him as he studied Parks and the photos that elicited strong emotions. Today, he says he admires Parks’ bright and colorful series shot in the South. Full of life and joy, the photos defy the harsher stereotypes of the region.
Maggio, who was once a journalist, won an Emmy for “The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis.” He says now is a golden age for documentaries because of the resources that streaming platforms provide for stories that tell us about our society and world.
Maggio cites the Unite the Right rally as an inspiration for his work on A Choice of Weapons. “There was an eerie intimacy to the tiki-torch march, and it felt like something out of a Nazi propaganda film. It was chilling,” he says, before expressing gratitude for the filmmakers and journalists on the scene at the time. The two days of violence in Charlottesville were part of a pattern that includes the deaths of Sandra Blanton, George Floyd, and others. “The sad part of this is that it’s a conversation we continue to have,” he says, adding that there is still a need for potent imagery, as young artists evolve. “It is their story to tell, the important narrative work that can effect change.”
“It’s a dirty place,” says Earl Swift. He’s talking about the moon.
The moon is covered in fine dust, an endless desert of gray particles that smear when disturbed in the breezeless atmosphere. When the Apollo 15 mission landed there in 1971, the astronauts found that the dust meant danger for them and the brand-new rover they’d brought. The moon dirt worked its way into the seals of the astronauts’ helmets and gloves, making them difficult to remove. Dirt coated the instrument panels of the rovers, making them nearly impossible to read. Fine dirt lined the angled walls of the moon’s craters—if the rover slid into a crater, there’s no guarantee that it would ever make it out. On Earth, the astronauts had been swaggering cowboys, but on the moon, they moved slowly, crossing the barren expanse one dust particle at a time.
Swift’s eye for fine, granular detail is a hallmark of his writing. In his latest work, the esteemed Nelson County journalist and author turns that passion for detail to space. Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings tells the story of Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, which took place in 1971 and 1972 and saw three moon rovers wheel across the lunar surface.
Even chatting in a cozy coffeehouse in Crozet, Swift can conjure the vastness and loneliness of space travel. “Forget about interplanetary colonization,” he says, “lunar colonization might not be practical.” The Apollo 17 mission took the rover as far as any human has ever gone, he says. As he writes it: “Here they’d leave humankind’s outermost footprints.”
Swift’s earlier books and magazine articles describe more terrestrial, but perhaps equally dramatic, environments—the sinking Tangier Island (Chesapeake Requiem, A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, on many Best Book of 2018 lists); points where native Americans and then colonists aimed to prosper along the James River (Journey on the James); and the beauty and the beastliness of America’s interstate highway system (The Big Roads). There’s also a book about a risky sojourn to locate, identify, and honor the remains of a crew of a U.S. helicopter downed in Laos (Where They Lay) and the tale of one ’57 Chevy told through the many stories of its owners (Auto Biography).
Swift, 62, keeps his feet on the ground nowadays. He starts almost every day with a five-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, which is near his house. Sometimes he strolls out to a protected ledge on the trail and scribbles away before returning home to write through the evening. Don’t be fooled by the steady routine: He hasn’t been to the moon, but he’s been just about everywhere else.
Writer Earl Swift says the final three Apollo moon landings were distinguished by the astronauts’ use of
the brand-new rovers they brought along. Photo: John Robinson.
As a kid, his father’s job with Firestone tires took the family all around the country. Swift inherited a “geeky appreciation for cars,” he says, learning to tell the difference between a Chevy and a Pontiac based on design elements from year to year, and taking joy in the numbering scheme of the North American highway system. His father was also a huge aviation fan, and by the time Swift was 11 he could identify nearly every commercial airliner.
The fascination with cars remains: Swift has owned “six or seven” convertibles, he says, and he whizzes around town in a Miata MX-5. “A two-seater forces you to make decisions about what’s important to you—and who’s important to you,” he says. “You have to be careful about how much you pack, and you can only bring one other person with you.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Swift doesn’t shy away from technical details in describing the moon missions. When he talks about the moon rover’s drive train, his voice speeds up with excitement. Each wheel was powered by a device that produced just 1/4 horsepower per wheel, or one horsepower for the whole lunar rover. (A Prius has 121 horsepower.)
“The transmission for each wheel was made of just three parts and only two of those moved,” Swift says. “It violates all of your suppositions about a transmission.”
The rover weighed 460 pounds on Earth, but much less on the moon. When a Velcro clasp in a cord would not open up easily, one astronaut nearly picked up the entire rover by accident.
Up there, instant invention was a constant necessity. When a fender broke off the rover, the Apollo 17 team used U.S. Geological Survey maps bound with duct tape to shape a makeshift fender that lasted long enough to let the scheduled work continue.
In his younger days, before settling in Nelson to hike, write, and tinker with his automobiles, Swift traveled widely. Everywhere he’s been triggers vivid and fond memories. When he moved to Alaska in 1984 for a job at the Anchorage Times, the Last Frontier State was just right for him.
“There was a boomtown feel about the whole state. Money was everywhere and cocaine was a terrible problem in Anchorage. Organized crime was a terrible problem, too,” Swift recalls. It was “one of the most dangerous places to live in the United States, per capita, but boy, what a great place to be a reporter.”
He adjusted to wild Alaskan life. “If you’re not at the top of the food chain, you have to have a gun,” but he quickly adds, “It’s the kind of place, if you see a motorist broken down by the side of the road, you have to stop.”
After Alaska, Swift worked for the Virginian-Pilot from 1987 to 2008. Recalling his days at Norfolk’s daily newspaper, he kvells. “One of the best newspapers in the country, story for story. Best job in the world,” he says. The Batten family, who owned the paper at the time, “had installed really smart, hard-thinking management who had hired exceptionally well from top to bottom. It was a writer’s newspaper.”
The paper liked him, too, and granted leaves of absence to write books, some developed from his newspaper work.
In 1998, Swift took a 22-day sojourn on the James in a canoe, and returned with 22 dispatches from the wilderness. From his campsites, he wrote on a Tandy 1000 computer that “gave you one line of text as you typed, so you had to remember what you had typed.” The project was a big hit, and UVA approached him about becoming a Virginia Humanities fellow, a position he still holds.
His Virginian-Pilot work also took him to Tangier Island, the isolated crabbing village in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. He wrote a few stories about the island’s local life before convincing his editors that the real story was about the water creeping over the island’s shores and not receding. When Swift returned to the island in 2016 to work on his book, he says he was “completely floored” to see how much more of the Tangier land mass had gone under water. “Tangier is a test case that announces we have got a problem,” he says. “Respond as you will, but how you respond will say much about how we are going to get through this problem—or not.”
After his years in Norfolk, where he enjoyed the beach and bay life immensely, he now enjoys the trees along the mountains in Nelson County. He’s proud to have raised his daughter from age 11, with the support of “the proverbial village of friends and relatives,” he says. “Looking back, I think there were far fewer challenges along the way than there were rewards. She reordered my whole existence. She introduced me to true joy, pride, worry, and more joy.”
Swift takes about two years to write a book, and says his next project is already underway. He assures that his next book will be as different from Across the Airless Wilds as that book is from Chesapeake Requiem. Swift has to sell his next project, one he’s been working on for a decade. Much of the research is done, but he will not divulge the subject. “I won’t jinx it,” he declares.
Like in his previous work, he’ll try to become“the expert” on his new subject.
Actual experts don’t talk to each other, he explains, and are full of slights, competition, and secrets. “But they will all talk to the reporter,” he says. “You are the sum of their collective wisdom.”
“Expertise may reach its sell-by date, and it may be outdated by the time a book is published,” the author continues. “But you have exercised the ability to dive deep”—or even go to space.
In the plays collected in his new book, Peter Coy includes a range of extreme human behavior, from fears most dreaded to murders most foul, from rank dishonor to impish perversity. He also infuses characters with love, hope, forbearance, and sometimes forgiveness. A House in the Country and Other Plays gives its audience a shot of redemption in the five works, and also gives theater-goers and readers an opportunity to thoughtfully contemplate pressing issues.
Meeting Coy, a genteel, seemingly easygoing man, it’s difficult to square his soft-spoken words with the imagined scenes he asks an audience to take on, the visceral images that materialize from dialogue, from characters’ memories and admissions.
Coy has lived in Nelson County for 30 years, but says he can’t claim it, “because your grandparents have to be born there.” An all-American lacrosse player at UVA, he also trained as a director in the drama department before departing for a life of camaraderie in the theaters of New York and Washington, D.C. He’s a founding member of several theater troupes; the Earl Hamner Theater in Afton is his most recent company. He’s also won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play.
Nelson County playwright Peter Coy published A House In The Country and Other Plays through Hamner Press in April. Photo: Courtesy of the playwright
“From the adaptation of a classic story, to the highly imaginative use of an oversized doll, to the use of music, and inventive uses of time, Coy explores the possibilities inherent and unique to the stage,” says the Charter Theatre’s Richard Washer of Coy’s five plays, which seem to spring from a quest to understand what makes a typical person despair enough to pursue the terrible.
A House in the Country is based on a slightly toned-down version of a gruesome crime in Pennsylvania. It was inspired by a brief item in a newspaper, and it explores how Coy answered his own questions about such a traumatic event.
The believability in his plays comes from deep study, particularly around brain trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. He researches areas of psychology and neuropsychology to learn about what might trigger certain types of behavior.
“Making characters means creating behavior that is transparent to an inner psychology,” he says. “As a director, you try to find activities that keep things interesting on stage, and can morph, change, or reveal something about the character.” Imagination allows you to see things that are not present or obvious, Coy says. He was delighted, for instance, when he handed an actor a beer bottle, and in no time, the actor began peeling the label off.
As tragic as his plays may seem, Coy carefully deploys comedy to keep things balanced.
“Physical comedy is the most difficult acting of all,” he says. “In drama, actors can change timing in their scenes and still have the same impact. In physical comedy, scenes are much tighter.” If a character falls while managing to throw a hat onto a hook, it has to happen the same way each time.
In some of his plays, he introduces the buffoon, who instead of playing the fool, ends up mocking the audience. The playwright is also versed in commedia dell’arte, an Italian form of comedy with character types that have lasted for centuries.
In the 50 plays that Coy has written, there is complicated, lyrical, and antiquated language. Sometimes he makes it even more challenging. In Poe & All That Jazz, his Edgar Allan Poe—part clown, part doomsayer—speaks aloud the rhythmic, escalating verses of “The Raven.” At the same time, the actress who portrays his mother (and also embodies all of his ill-fated loved ones) cuts in by singing Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” as she taps like the wretched raven at his door. Music is an important component in many of Coy’s plays, including one about Mozart (not in the book), and he clearly enjoys playing with lyrics, love letters, poetry, invented words, and uneasy stutterings.
In two of the plays, Shadow of Honor and Will’s Bach, male protagonists suffer and speak as they do because of post-traumatic stress and to seemingly taunt a spouse, although the latter lines are eventually shown to burst from a dark source.
Suspense is served liberally. In a re-imagined The Gift of the Magi, based on the O. Henry story, the writer casts the characters into a gritty 1907 New York. The audience is treated to two new sets of decisions that are as heart-wrenching as they are dangerous. Both the early 20th-century community tragedy and contemporary anguish in A Shadow of Honor yield cliff hangers, as do the shame and secrets of A House in the Country.
When not writing or directing, Coy helps shape plays with Nelson County High School students, assisting them in conquering Shakespeare, Molière, and others. During his 13 years at NCHS, his students have won five first places and four second places in the Virginia High School League’s annual One-Act Play Festival.
For more information about A House in the Country and Other Plays, as well as the upcoming audiobook, go to petercoyplay wright.com.
Both the city and county budgets include cuts for the Charlottesville-Albemarle
Convention & Visitors Bureau, potentially slowing marketing for touristy spots like Monticello. File photo.
The Charlottesville area’s tourism-dependent economy has felt the effects of the pandemic. “From Q4 2019 and Q4 2020, Albemarle County lost 44% employment in the Accommodations and Food Services Sectors,” wrote Eric Terry, president of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association, in a recent letter to Roger Johnson, the chair of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau. Calling the financial and workforce damage “unprecedented,” Terry also noted that hotel occupancies are down 50 percent.
Tourism sector advocates are now upset that both the city and county budgets for the next fiscal year include cuts for the CACVB, a government-funded board tasked with attracting tourists to town.
The proposed CACVB budget from the city for the 2022 fiscal year is $946,848, down $265,843 from this year, and the county budget is $606,281, down $151,135, for a total reduction of $417,000 for FY 2022. The CACVB did receive $120,0000 from the federal CARES pandemic relief act, which went to transition offices from two brick-and-mortar buildings to two mobile visitor centers, one each for county and city.
The CACVB and its supporters say the county stiffed the board by not giving enough lodging tax revenue back to the tourism industry.
The VRLTA points to a state statute that requires any lodging tax in excess of 2 percent be spent solely on tourism. The county charges a 5 percent lodging tax, but has proposed that next year the 3 percent excess be sent to the general fund, to cover the reduced CACVB budget as well as money for cultural community agencies and maintenance costs for the Parks & Recreation Department.
Ann Mallek, a member of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors who represents the county on the CACVB, says the state allows tourism dollars to go to parks “for something that benefits the tourists who come here for recreational purposes.”
“We are in disagreement with the county about whether that is a way to support tourism,” counters Roy Van Doorn, the president of the Charlottesville VRLTA and a partner at City Select, which produces marketing brochures for the city and for UVA.
Not surprisingly, Van Doorn believes the time is now for a marketing blitz. “At this point, all hotels in Virginia Beach are booked to capacity for the summer,” he says. “Those are people who won’t be spending their time and money here.”
Some have suggested that the city and county use federal and local emergency funds to make up for the CACVB’s shortfall.
“I am hopeful the budget for both fiscal years will be made whole through the localities’ receipt of funds from the American Rescue Plan,” says Courtney Cacatian, the chair of the CACVB, referring to the $1.9 trillion federal relief package.
Charlottesville and Albemarle are set to receive over $30 million in total from the plan. Both the city and the county are currently in the process of determining how those funds will be distributed. The county has a public hearing scheduled for April 28.
Mallek says the board’s request for county and city relief has been received and “we are talking about it.”
As the board fights for funding, some have expressed concerns about its effectiveness as a vehicle for helping the tourism industry.
In the letter to CACVB, Terry and Van Doorn faulted the CACVB’s composition as being out of touch with the industry itself. The board’s 15 members include just one representative from the hospitality industry, the Omni’s marketing director. The CEO of Veritas is the only board member who works in the food and drink industry. The board has several elected politicians, as well as various county and city officials. Terry says it is one of very few convention and visitors bureaus in the state with politicians on the board.
The CACVB styles itself as a resource for local businesses. It produces a visitor’s guide and helps wedding and reunion parties find venues for their events.
City Councilor Heather Hill, one of the city government’s representatives on the board, says that even before VRLTA raised concerns, CACVB was working on board development and focused on industry representation and experience, as well as equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Several business owners contacted by C-VILLE didn’t know much about the CACVB or its marketing. River Hawkins, a co-owner at The Bebedero, was not very familiar with the CACVB except for its Visitors Guide, but says “anything that brings people into my restaurant is great.”
Walter Burton, general manager at The Draftsman hotel, says that CACVB has been helpful in keeping communication lines open during the pandemic and has sent out business surveys to find out how people are doing. “They have done a great job keeping people involved,” Burton says.
Van Doorn, a partner in a local marketing firm, insists the answer is more marketing. He thinks there’s a perception that Charlottesville can coast on its reputation as a beautiful, historic, and relaxing location, but that keeping visitors coming will take proactive effort. “McDonald’s is number one, and it’s because they never stop marketing,” he explains. “We can’t just say we’re good and open the doors. It’s going to take perpetual marketing.”
