Author: Tami Keaveny

Arts Editor Tami Keaveny has navigated the world of arts and entertainment through a variety of marketing and public relations jobs. She has worked at WBCN, BAM Music magazine, Bonnie Simmons Management, Bill Graham Presents, Tickets.com, ClearChannel Entertainment, WordHampton Public Relations, Starr Hill Presents, and SMG before taking the desk as Arts Editor at C-VILLE Weekly. She calls San Francisco State University her alma mater and Charlottesville, Virginia her home. Hobbies include: amateur food photography, junk food culture (Food Seen), orchid killing, offensive cross-stitch, vintage glassware collecting, and wine with everything.

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Arts

The 2019 VAFF offers a diverse lineup with over 150 films

The Centerpiece Film of the 2019 Virginia Film Festival is Harriet, starring Zackary Momoh as John and Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features

Oscar buzz abounds among the spotlight films screening at the 32nd Annual Virginia Film Festival, from the opening night feature, Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan, to writer-director Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta. VAFF Director and UVA Vice Provost for the Arts Jody Kielbasa also announced appearances from guest programmers: artist Federico Cuatlacuatl, filmmaker Michelle Jackson, filmmaker and programmer Joe Fab, film scholar Samhita Sunya, artist and scholar Mona Kasra, and Washington Jewish Film Festival director Ilya Tovbis.

Music fans will get an exclusive look at the Bruce Springsteen concert film Western Stars, and actor, writer, and director Ethan Hawke is coming to town to reflect on his career and screen the 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, in which he stars alongside the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Ann Dowd known for her role as Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” will participate in a discussion following Dismantling Democracy, a political documentary she narrates.

Senior guest programmer Ilana Dontcheva says a synergy emerged among the submitted films, resulting in a new sidebar featuring women writers and directors, and director Wanuri Kahiu will be at the screening of her film, Rafiki (a love story between two women that was banned in 2018 in Kenya), for a conversation about her career and the creation of the Afrobubblegum Movement.

The Virginia Film Festival takes place October 23-27; tickets will go on sale to the public at noon on Monday, September 30. More information can be found at virginiafilmfestival.org.

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Pat Alger

Songwriter Pat Alger has written eight No. 1 songs and many hits for Americana and country artists. He's playing them at C'ville Coffee on Saturday. Publicity image.

Behind the hits: Chart-topping songwriter Pat Alger says, “It never grows old hearing a great singer perform one of my songs.” Alger brought his skills to Nashville in the ‘80s, and made a name penning hits for others including Nanci Griffith and Garth Brooks. His songs have been performed by Peter, Paul and Mary, Dolly Parton, Lyle Lovett, Brenda Lee, and Crystal Gayle, and in 2010, Alger was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His live show includes many of his recognizable hits, plus some tunes he’s kept for himself.

Saturday 9/21. $2-23, 7pm. C’ville Coffee, 1301 Harris St. 817-2633.

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Arts

Grace by design: Walé Oyéjidé uses fashion to tell stories

“My work is not about the clothes we design, but more about the impact that can be made when people who wear them feel the freedom to express themselves authentically in society,” says Walé Oyéjidé, who gives a talk at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center Saturday, September 14. Publicity photo by Mark Thiessen of National Geographic

“The way that a story is told is just as important as the story itself,” designer Walé Oyéjidé told a National Geographic Storytellers Summit audience in January. Oyéjidé, who’s also a director, writer, filmmaker, musician, and lawyer, tells stories by using fashion design to dispel stereotypes and biases. In his ongoing photography project “After Migration,” featuring models who are themselves migrants, he asks us to “really look” at the strength and triumph in people’s unique identities, and to celebrate the resilience, beauty, and life experience of those who’ve suffered. “There is grace to be found. You just have to look long enough,” says Oyéjidé.

C-VILLE: How did you decide to use fashion design as a way to communicate about social issues?

Walé Oyéjidé: It’s incumbent on all of us to make an effort to improve our surroundings, in whatever ways that we can. I happen to be an artist and designer, so these are the tools at my disposal. Among others, the issue of migration is one that I’m particularly sensitive toward. Much of my work focuses on celebrating the lives of migrants; a group of people whom our society commonly disregards.

Describe how an article of clothing can empower.

As a ubiquitous form of expression, clothing is the most common way that we make statements about who we are, or who we aspire to be. My work is not about the clothes we design, but more about the impact that can be made when people who wear them feel the freedom to express themselves authentically in society.

Is there a story about how your design work has affected someone personally?

As a designer, I’ve worked with Sub-Saharan migrants in Europe and Maasai tribesmen in Tanzania. But I’m not comfortable discussing the circumstances of any specific individual in a way that is self-aggrandizing.

What do you do to ensure that your design work is accessible?

We make art that is authentic to our experience. The work is intended to be for anyone with whom it resonates, or for anyone who finds meaning or connection in what we create.

What celebrities wear your work?

Our pieces have appeared in motion pictures, in museums across the globe, and on the stage of the Super Bowl. That said, we are more interested in ordinary individuals who are able to find a transformative experience through our artistic expressions than we are with collecting marquee names.

Walé Oyéjidé will discuss his work with Dr. Kwame Otu, an assistant professor at UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, in the lecture series Seeing Black: Disrupting the Visual Narrative at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Saturday.

publicity photo

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Arts

Learning curves: Bruce Holsinger crafts a timely work of fiction with The Gifted School

Bruce Holsinger’s The Gifted School is a sharp take on the perils of over-parenting that’s hitting bookstore shelves in the midst of a cultural firestorm surrounding equity and admissions in education. Holsinger will read from The Gifted School at New Dominion Bookshop on July 3. Image: Tom Cogill

Charlottesville resident, author, UVA professor, and dad of two boys, Bruce Holsinger may want to add prognosticator to his CV. His new novel, The Gifted School, is about privilege, parenting, inequity, and the corrosive extremes that parents go to in order to ensure their kids’ educational advantage. The novel arrives in the aftermath of a headline-grabbing college admissions scandal and an article by the New York Times and ProPublica that exposed equity crises in Quest, Charlottesville’s public school gifted program. It’s almost like Holsinger saw it coming.

“It is a bit disconcerting to see the novel come out in this climate when everyone is thinking about privilege in relation to school admissions,” Holsinger says. Yet, “people have been thinking about that for a long time.”

In fact, Holsinger first conceived The Gifted School about 15 years ago, while he was living in Boulder, Colorado, after his first child was born. “I wanted to explore these issues around pressure parenting, helicopter parenting, and privilege, and the way those [things] feed into questions about children and the way that we parent,” he says.

The story of The Gifted School emerges from the lives of four women who become close friends after meeting at a baby swim class. Holsinger captures the intimate bonds and competitive nature of their friendship years later when their kids are in middle school. He uses the admissions process for a new school for gifted students to guide the unraveling of his characters, and expose the dark consequences of parental ambition. Relationships turn cutthroat, creating a ripple effect of strife among fifth grade BFFs, a first-generation immigrant artist and his family, a teenage vlogger and her audience, and a midlife-crisis dad and his soccer star sons. Characters are tested and contrasted through assessments, parental interventions, and dire consequences.

While comparisons to Charlottesville can’t be avoided when talking about a book by a local writer that’s set in a community with extreme parenting (the fictional city of Crystal) and equity issues, Holsinger says his inspiration for the novel is solidly founded in the Rocky Mountain state. “This book is very much a Colorado book,” he says. “I lived there for nine years and the place really imprinted on me—the things I loved about it and things that made me uncomfortable about it—and this is a novel of that place.” But, he admits, the “experience as a father of soccer players is from here.”

He also confesses to his own participation in angling to define his child as exceptional, once even lying about his son’s age, subtracting it a bit, in order to make him seem more advanced than other kids on the playground. “When my kids were younger, I was never above massaging the facts a bit,” Holsinger says.

The intricate layers of perspective in The Gifted School allow Holsinger to dig deep into the lives of his middle school characters as well as the adults. “I didn’t want to write this just about parents and just about parenting and friends and frenemies and so on. I wanted it also to be about the pressures that kids face in an environment of intense scrutiny and testing from the point of view of parents and schools.”

Holsinger says he had “the most fun and the most challenge” coming up with the point of view of 11-year-old Emma Z, who he calls more socially gifted than intellectual, and sharp as a tack. Xander is the same age and a chess genius who masterminds a major plot twist. “I wanted to work those two in tandem with each other so that you’d have a clash of sensibilities,” says Holsinger. “So that world of the children could be as rich as possible.”

Holsinger’s characters find emotional closure by the end of the book, but the pervasive anxiety that drives The Gifted School is not entirely resolved, and Holsinger says the complexity of the topics he explores is always evolving, adding that while a novel is not an opinion piece, it’s certainly an important conversation starter.

“Given all the very fraught issues around giftedness in terms of race and economic privilege and differential treatment of children in the public schools…I hope one takeaway from the book is that it might hold up a mirror to people…and ask them to think about them in a more self-critical way…it can be hard to step outside your own point of view. One thing fiction can do is provide a bit of a lesson on how to do that.”

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Twenty One Pilots

Twenty One Pilots returns to Charlottesville on tour for new album, Trench. Publicity photo.

Firmly entrenched: After huge success with 2015’s thematically cryptic Blurryface, Twenty One Pilots entered into a period of “going dark” for a year, which singer Tyler Joseph says was needed to bring authenticity back to the music and battle some unspecified personal demons. When the duo released its follow-up, Trench, in 2018, its fanbase, better known as the Skeleton Clique, went on gleeful searches to decode the record’s hidden meanings. Joseph and drummer Josh Dun offered clues online and in songs that referred to earlier releases, further populating the band’s imagined universe with characters who convey stories about insecurity and the interplay between the darkness and light that fuels the pair’s artistic process.

Sunday 6/9. $39.50-79.50, 7pm. John Paul Jones Arena, 295 Massie Rd. 243-4960.

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Arts

Get lit: Global harmony starts with a fire for Burning Man’s Michael Mikel

A view from the playa at Burning Man in 2016. Ellie Pritts, CC

Eight days in the desert under harsh conditions with no permanent infrastructure, including a stable water source, sounds like a test of the human spirit worthy of a cable channel reality show. At the annual Burning Man, a gathering that began on a San Francisco beach 32 years ago and is now set in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the extreme geography serves as the foundation for an event that’s become a utopian model for social principles and creative placemaking.

“Burning Man is the largest outdoor art museum, and it’s also a city for one week,” says co-founder Michael Mikel, who will speak at the Tom Tom Festival on April 11. “It becomes the third largest metropolitan area in Nevada.”

What began with a group of experimental creatives collecting driftwood to build sculptures and burning them as a way to build community, has exploded into a festival that attracts more than 80,000 people who drive or fly to the remote location where they make art around a theme, build a city, and burn stuff—mostly art.

“Burning Man teaches people about their place on the planet, and the impact that they have there both physically, environmentally, and socially,” Mikel says.

With astonishingly efficient levels of cooperation and interdependence, all of the burners are involved in making the event a success.

Early on, the founders devised a set of 10 guiding principles for Burning Man: radical inclusion, gifting, radical self-reliance, decommodification, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leave no trace, participation, and immediacy. Everyone in attendance brings their own food, shelter, and water, and no money changes hands on the playa, with the exception of a coffee shop and ice supply stations run by the organizers.

“It’s the largest leave-no-trace event in the world,” says Mikel. And if someone is an asshole and leaves a pile of trash behind? “Larger members of our community, if they see it they will call them out on it,” he says. “Someone else will take the initiative to take that trash away. It’s a matter of social pressure.”

Burning Man co-founder Michael Mikel. Courtesy of subject.

A Texas native, Mikel arrived in Northern California in the earliest days of Silicon Valley’s tech boom. With a background in electro-mechanical systems engineering, he says he “got involved in that whole phenomenon which turned out to be quite amazing.” He also mingled with the creative minds of the time and found his way into an underground group that centered around performance art and pranks called the Cacophony Society. The group’s motto defined them as “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society, and you may already be a member.”

Cacophony took what Mikel calls “zone trips,” journeys to faraway places and tourist destinations where a spontaneous art event would be conducted, usually with costuming involved.

These formative activities came into play as the beach gatherings reached critical mass in 1990. “We showed up on the beach in San Francisco with about 1,000 people and a four-story-tall wooden man,” says Mikel. But the authorities stopped the sculpture from being lit. Shortly after, he and some friends were watching a video of a “surreal” croquet game played with a ball 8 feet in diameter and pickup trucks in the Nevada desert. Always ready for some artistic high jinks, they loaded up the wooden man and headed to Black Rock to make history by holding the first burn at the site.

Mikel says the gathering relies on 10,000 volunteers, and employs a staff of about 100 people year-round, adding another 500 as the start date approaches. The site now has public works, a complete hospital, an FAA-approved airport, and a fire department. He is the founder of a community support and mediation organization, the Black Rock Rangers, that he started as a search and rescue team and which earned him his playa name, Danger Ranger.

“It’s a unique structure and it’s not very hierarchical,” says Mikel. “We give people opportunities and turn ’em loose and that works out very well for us.”

Despite its functionality and minimal conflict­ (in 2018 there were 44 arrests reported, versus 234 at Coachella), the growth of Burning Man and its hip factor is beginning to push the limits of its egalitarian promise—tech leaders, influencers, and celebrities now jet set into the festival and set up luxury camps.

With prankster spirit, the org poked fun at the issue in a recent April Fool’s story declaring Google as a major stakeholder, but Mikel says it’s something that’s being taken seriously. “There’s a lot of discussion…we are looking at that right now with our cultural direction-setting committee. Looking at ways that we can integrate that part of the culture into our community and make them really be a part of who we are, what we do. You’ve always got the old-time burners who are jaded and used to go out there and camp lying in the dust, and ate power bars three times a day, but the city itself has evolved.”

And that evolution began with the simple act of starting a fire. The festival holds two iconic burns each year—on Saturday night the effigy of the event goes up in flames in a raucous celebration, then a solemn closing ceremony honoring lost friends and family is held on the final night when the playa’s temple ignites.

“I really think that fire goes back to our earliest roots as human beings,” says Mikel. “It’s a social place, a place where people tell stories. …I’ve always been interested in people and community. How our community exists and functions out there in the desert is really fascinating, and we have a lot to teach the world about how to get along.”

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Arts

Focused fortitude: Jodi Cobb looks at life behind the lens

Partygoers at Carnival in Venice, 2008. Jodi Cobb

Photojournalist Jodi Cobb is one of those rare people who walks toward danger. And when she meets it, she usually introduces herself.

“I’ve never disguised myself or misrepresented what I was doing,” says Cobb. “I even introduced myself as a National Geographic photographer to the most notorious human trafficker in Bosnia.”

Cobb has spent the better part of four decades as the only female staff field photographer at National Geographic-—the only one in its 130-year history, actually. But she says gender was never top of mind for her. “I was always really surprised when the first thing out of people’s mouths was the woman angle. It’s like asking people what it’s like to breathe.” Still, she admits, “You feel like you need to hold up all of womankind, and it’s an extra thing that men don’t have to think about all that much.”

Cobb grew up in Iran, where her father worked for Texaco, and she had been to 15 countries by the time she entered high school in the U.S. The global exposure gave her a head start in finding her passion. “I spent my life explaining the world to people, then I realized that was what journalism was,” says Cobb.

On Thursday, she hosts a live retrospective about her life behind the camera, including her wide-ranging exposé on human trafficking, her book on geisha culture from the inside, and a look at Venice celebrating Carnival against a backdrop of looming environmental peril.

Geisha  Kyoto, Japan

“I did a book on the geisha of Japan and spent six months over a three-year period just immersed in their world, going to the geisha districts every day.

“You don’t realize how hard that [image] was to get. It was a moment in the geisha house that shows how inside I was at that moment. No one had ever photographed behind the scenes in the geisha world, with candid photographs, so that was a real accomplishment.

“The smoking was common and no one wanted to be photographed smoking. It makes her real to me. Instead of this sort of icon that geisha are. It makes her a real person.”

Brick kiln workers  Agra, India

“This is from the story on 21st-century slaves. I photographed in 11 countries over a yearlong period, trying to put together as many kinds of human trafficking [images] as I could find.

“National Geographic was going out on a limb to do that story—it was my idea—and it was so outside of what they usually did. It was before there was so much consciousness in this country about human trafficking. We knew bits of it–child labor existed and about sex trafficking—but no one had put it all together into a look at how pervasive it was.

“The brick kiln workers are often held in debt bondage for generations. The owners get workers by lending them money for an emergency, then charge outrageous interest rates. The debt can never be repaid and gets passed on for generations. That story broke my heart every single day.”

Carnival  Venice, Italy

“I did a story on Venice that was about whether Venice was going to survive floods and the rising sea levels. That was a party during Carnival. People in their incredible costumes come from all over the world. We are used to seeing all of these setup images taken on the piazzas and things. But I was able to get into the private parties…and that’s where I’ve always wanted to be in my career—on the inside and behind the scenes. That sums up my body of work: being inside these hidden worlds and secret places that outsiders wouldn’t see.”

National Geographic Live will be at The Paramount Theater February 28.

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News

On down the road: WNRN’s longtime morning show host Anne Williams departs

Anne Williams signs off from WNRN on February 15. “I just want to say thank you for being such a loving town,” she says. Photo by John Robinson

In the summer of 1999, Anne Williams had just relocated to Virginia from Ohio, and she brought along some on-air experience from Yellow Springs’ WYSO that helped her land an interview with independent radio station WNRN.

Williams says she was driving on Interstate 64, headed to the interview with her radio dial tuned to 91.9, when Icicle Works’ “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” came on, followed by the song “All Star” by a new band named Smash Mouth. The programming impressed her, and she knew she was going to the right place.

“It spoke to the eclectic nature of WNRN, to what it was then, and to a certain degree now,” says Williams. And she thought, “Wow, this would be great to be here. I would love to keep on doing this.”

Almost 20 years later, on Friday, February 15, Williams will pull her final shift as the host of WNRN’s morning show, a role that has made her an unassuming icon in local radio, and a champion of music in central Virginia. She’s moving to Knoxville, Tennessee, for an off-air gig as the operations/development director at WDVX, and “looking forward to being part of one of the only all-Americana stations in the country,” says Williams.

The Americana radio format had just begun to coalesce on a national level when Williams joined WNRN, and she made the genre the focus of her “Acoustic Sunrise” show. On weekdays beginning at 6am, Williams played popular favorites like Alison Krauss, Steve Earle, and Lucinda Williams, and introduced listeners to new acts such as Lake Street Dive and St. Paul & The Broken Bones before they gained traction.

“I remember our meet and greet with station VIP members, and St. Paul & The Broken Bones had about 10 people when they played the Southern Café & Music Hall,” says Williams.

Staying musically curious helped her wake up between 4 and 4:30am each weekday for her show, and Williams says it’s also been a factor in her support of developing acts in central Virginia.

“Some of my favorite times were giving local folks the opportunity to play live on the air,” says Williams. “I have a really vivid memory of doing an interview with Danny Schmidt during my first summer here, and of Devon Sproule when she was 16.” She also found satisfaction in championing the talents of The Steel Wheels and watching the career transformations of Bryan Elijah Smith and Jason Isbell.

Charlottesville singer-songwriter Carl Anderson, who’s now making a name for himself in Nashville, says he grew up listening to Williams’ morning show. “It was her support of local music in particular that encouraged me to wonder if perhaps my own voice might one day come through the speakers,” he says.

Williams plans to continue lending a hand to touring bands. Those who stop by to play WDVX’s “Blue Plate Special,” a live hour of programming six days a week at noon that supports up-and-coming acts, will now be greeted by a friend.

“I look forward to seeing Charlottesville bands come through Knoxville, and I’ll be right there clapping,” says Williams.

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Arts

Just you wait: Hamilton star Leslie Odom, Jr. on not throwing away his shot at success

Leslie Odom, Jr. speaks at John Paul Jones Arena on January 19 as part of UVA's President's Speaker for the Arts series. Odom, who almost gave up before making it big, advises young people to “walk toward the thing that you love.” Publicity photo

In 2016, Leslie Odom, Jr. found himself at the center of a cultural moment as Aaron Burr in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-meets-history musical had broken box office records, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and saw Odom, Jr. beat out Miranda for best actor in a musical at the Tony Awards that year. It was a dramatic turn for an actor who had just about given up. Odom, Jr. writes about his career and self-realization in his book, Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never Stop Learning. He returns to Charlottesville (he was here in 2017 to celebrate UVA’s Bicentennial), to check in on community healing and discuss his approach to success as the 2019 UVA President’s Speaker for the Arts on Saturday.

C-VILLE: What brings you back to Charlottesville?

Leslie Odom, Jr.: I am super interested in how this community continues to heal and define itself. I’m interested in the check-in, to be honest. I know I’m coming for a talk-back, speaker series but I’m way more interested in listening than I am in talking.

Like the rest of the country I watched how racism and hate descended on [Charlottesville] as it was broadcast around the world. Then I watched the city really stand up and say, “You don’t get to define us. That’s not who we are and we beat that back. We beat that hatred back.” I was really so impressed at the bicentennial. I jumped at the chance to come back and see how this community is healing and how it continues to define itself.

Was that your first time in Charlottesville?

It really was. My association with [Hamilton] makes the university of interest because of the Jefferson connection. I had said yes almost a year prior…I was booked long before A12.

How do you feel about Hamilton’s historical figures now?

I was asked a really interesting question by this kid who was writing a paper. And she said that she and her friends have surmised that Hamilton the show is not revolutionary in any way. It’s actually a bunch of people of color not telling their own stories. They are actually playing white people and cleaning up the images of these guys, awful men, and there’s nothing revolutionary about it. And what did I think about that.

I said, well, it’s a fair assessment. There would be people who would disagree with you, probably millions of people. The show is very popular, very successful.

But, you know…that point is…what are you gonna write? I’m certain there is some kid in this generation right now…who is going to make Hamilton look antiquated. There’s gonna be some kid that has an answer to what Lin made, what we all tried to make.

What we all tried to do, for better or worse, is an exercise in empathy. It was a chance for us to bring some men and women close to us. Closer than they’ve ever been before. That’s an exercise that’s always helpful, and always brings about healing. I hope one day the exercise goes the other way.

Going into the role did you have any reservations about being involved in the project?

No. God, no. I had heard the music. And it’s very, very rare that you get the opportunity to be a part of a masterpiece at its inception. I had no questions about how I felt about it.

Was there a feeling that Hamilton was going to be a masterpiece?

All you have is a gut feeling about it. None of us could know that people would receive it in the way that they have. But I knew how I felt about it, if that makes sense. I knew I was looking at a piece of work that comes along maybe once in a lifetime. I hoped that people would like it as much as I did, but couldn’t be sure if they would.

Besides professional success, how did Hamilton change you?

It made me a better friend, a better husband, a better man. I wish it for everyone. We stood inside a moment and were as good as we’ve ever been and maybe as great as we’ll ever be. When you experience that, it changes you in untold ways.

Your book is called Failing Up. How have you failed?

What I really talk about in the book and hope people take away is the willingness to fail. Whenever I’ve been willing to fail—a handful of times, not a bunch—but whenever I’ve been willing to fail and fall on my face spectacularly, it actually never did lead to failure. That’s what the fear was. It was, I’m gonna look like a fool, I’m gonna fail and everyone is gonna see it and laugh at me.

That was Hamilton! That show—a hip-hop musical about the founding fathers—there’s a lot of ways that show could have failed, and didn’t. It’s really about that. I’m trying to encourage people to be bold, be risky, and take chances.

What advice did you get that gives you confidence to take risks?

Meeting with a mentor when I was wanting to quit and do something else with my life. He looked at me and said, that’s fine…but I’d love to see you try first…And this is after a decade of pretty steady work, you know, I was doing okay.

He said I think you are sitting at home and waiting for the phone to ring. And when the phone rings, you do great. But the phone didn’t ring today, so what did you do in the absence of a ringing phone. Did you call anybody? Did you email anybody? Did you write anything? Did you ready anything? Did you record anything? Did you practice?

That was before Hamilton, before “Smash,” before a lot of the biggest things that I’ve done. So, I almost quit before it got good.

Many young people love the play Hamilton, and are now aspiring to the stage. What advice do you have for them?

I think it’s very simple. I was preparing for my whole life without knowing it…I give them what really worked for me, and it’s really—just love it. Love it with your whole heart. Love as a verb. If there’s something you want to do…if it’s law, if it’s psychology, if it’s medicine, sports…whatever that thing is, you can’t go wrong with reading about it talking about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, planning, studying. You love a thing with your whole heart, and eventually, eventually it will love you back. It has no choice. It’s as simple as that. When you are young, just walk toward the thing that you love.

Leslie Odom, Jr. speaks at John Paul Jones Arena on January 19 as part of UVA’s President’s Speaker for the Arts series.

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Arts

YOU Issue: Jason Elliott offers HIV/AIDS education through celebration

On his journey to becoming an activist, HIV/AIDS educator, model, performer, and online talk show host, Jason Elliott overcame emotional and mental health challenges. On Saturday, December 1, Elliott will host his annual Little White Party, an event that honors World AIDS Day, and pays homage to the circuit parties of the late ’80s and ’90s.  Images courtesy of the subject

Here’s what readers asked for:

“This event has grown from just a little party in my house to a truly amazing event where this community comes together to party for a purpose. I am so proud of this event and cannot wait to see it continue to grow!”—Jason Elliott

As Jason Elliott stood paralyzed by stage fright in front of thousands of people at the opening of a central Virginia Pride festival, he knew he was not the first notable person to forget the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Christina Aguilera, James Taylor, and Cyndi Lauper are just a few celebrities who’ve bumbled their delivery of the national anthem. But Elliott, a seasoned performer, representing Mr. Gay Pride Virginia, was determined to play his flub differently.

After leaving the stage, humiliated, he waited for the end of the opening remarks. “The dignitaries spoke and I said, ‘Give me the microphone,’” he says. Elliott cued up the track, asked the audience to join him, and nailed it.

No stranger to second chances and reinventing himself, Elliott’s journey to becoming an activist, HIV/AIDS educator, model, performer, and online talk show host was filled with emotional obstacles and mental health challenges. But his story also speaks to self-determination and the power of community support.

On Saturday, December 1, Elliott joyfully engages that support at his annual Little White Party, a gathering held to honor World AIDS Day that pays homage to the circuit parties of the late ’80s and ’90s. It’s an event that has grown from a casual BYOB group of friends to a party drawing hundreds of revelers from Virginia and beyond.

In 2015, Thrive, Charlottesville’s AIDS service organization (formerly ASG), was dissolving. Funding had become unsustainable, and the board issued a press release stating that “better treatments mean HIV-positive individuals are living longer,” and there was less of a demand for a some of the services offered. But Elliott, a volunteer at the time, felt strongly about the organization’s disappearance, thinking “Once Thrive is gone, we have nothing in Charlottesville.” And not just the access to treatment and education, he says. The organization had also been a nexus for gay social life, with drag bingos and dinner nights.

For closure, Elliott “threw a little house party, invited ASG/Thrive to provide testing, and [everyone] had a great time.” A year later, people started asking if he would hold the party again, and that’s when he realized, “This needs to stick. This is a thing.” So, with his knack for reinvention, Elliott launched a new tradition around his own experiences.

Growing up in Chesapeake, Virginia, Elliott’s love of pageantry and performance was evident at a young age. But as a member of a “very conservative family,” he did not feel supported in pursuing what he describes as his secret bucket list.

“At one point, I really wanted to be a female impersonator,” says Elliott. “Even in my late teens, I thought, ‘I want to try drag.’ I wanted to compete in pageants as a male and as a woman. As a character and as me.”

Elliott came to Charlottesville in 2010 to study psychology at UVA, and shortly before leaving home, he was outed, which started a free fall in his life.

“Some took it well, some did not,” he says. “I myself had a very hard time with the process of coming out. I was very strong in my faith, and I actually planned to be pastor. When I came out, that got flipped upside down and I was told ‘you are not going to be able to do anything of importance, so you should just give up trying now.’”

What followed was a monumental struggle with bad relationships, depression, and an eating disorder. And for a number of months, in order to escape a physically dangerous partner, Elliott became homeless, living in his truck and sleeping at the UVA library, while still attending classes during the day.

When friends in his a cappella group noticed he kept wearing the same outfit and saw some bruises, they confronted him and pushed him to make changes, creating another turning point for Elliott. He credits Counseling and Psychological Services at UVA for his emotional recovery. “They are one of the few aspects that kept me alive,” he says.

That counseling, along with the support of friends, spurred him to another round of coming out. “I wasn’t out as someone who was dealing with depression. I wasn’t out as someone who was homeless, or as someone who was facing these trials,” he says. Elliott also got real about his childhood dream of competing in drag pageants.

He came across an ad for the Mr. Gay Roanoke competition. “I didn’t know where Roanoke was, says Elliot. “But, I thought I could secretly check this off my bucket list.” He drove to the western Virginia city, performed what’s now his signature song, the Michael Bublé version of “Feeling Good,” and won the first of several pageant titles. Shocked by the win, he thought “Now what?”

The path soon became clear. “I had already started to grow my passion for AIDS/HIV and sexual health. I wanted to do two things with this title, promote awareness, and…I also wanted to use it to show all the other guys—you don’t have to have a six-pack, perfect teeth—if you want to be on stage, you just have to have the heart.”

In one of the smoother segues of his life, Elliott began singing, making appearances, and performing in drag shows and as a solo act. And eventually, he joined the staff at the Thomas Jefferson Health District, where he runs a public health program that offers free rapid HIV tests.

It’s with the Little White Party that his flair for performance and health education combine to pull off “the hottest party of the year”—but not without controversy.

Elliott has never been to one of the legendary “white parties” of old, and he says that there’s nothing like it around. But he understands when people do a double take at the name, especially after the events of August 11 and 12, 2017, in Charlottesville.

“Last year I had a person say to me, “I’m sorry, the what party? You can’t do that,” says Elliott. But he says an African American friend turned to her and said, “Girl, you don’t know what you are talking about. White parties are off the chain.”

A major sponsor also told him, “you cannot host a Little White Party in Charlottesville, Virginia. You have to change the name.”

But Elliott decided he simply had to work harder to make people understand what the event is about. He remains firm about keeping the traditional name, which dates back to the ’70s, but was made popular by The Saint, an East Village disco in the 1980s that launched the New York City White Party as an annual February tradition with a requirement that partygoers dress in all white. When the AIDS crisis struck, the club membership was deeply affected, and The Saint was forced to close. Many cities around the country picked up the White Party as a way to fundraise for HIV/AIDS causes.

“I’m trying to pay tribute to the path that was laid out before I even existed,” Elliott says. “I think it still carries that same message [of support]. You look around the room and you cannot tell who has HIV and who doesn’t.” To date, he has 12 sponsors on board for 2018.

When Elliott gets up to the mic on Saturday night to hand out his Red Knight award for extraordinary contributions in the fight against HIV, he will be looking at a representation of activism greater than himself, but one that relies on his passion. Something it’s taken a lot of restarts for him to feel confident about.

And he’s had the right words all along. “We’ve all had to get back onstage and try again,” he says. “Be it in front of thousands of people or just by yourself. It’s okay to walk off and come back and try again.”