Category: 2024 Best of C-VILLE Staff Picks

As your official source of all things good, better, and best in Charlottesville, it’s always a pleasure when we can introduce you to someone making a splash in the local arts scene. Enter Harold Bailey, the virtuoso pianist and composer who’s making classical cool. 

Hailing from Richmond, Bailey began his career as a self-taught musician at age 16, and went on to earn his bachelor’s and master’s in piano performance. Throughout his career he’s played at Carnegie Hall, improvised with the late Chick Corea, had his compositions choreo­graphed by Charlottesville Ballet, and now teaches piano at The Front Porch and leads workshops throughout the commonwealth.

With a focus on the classical genre, Bailey showcases the versatility and individuality of the piano, and draws on his own life experiences for original compositions. His live performances are a celebration of musical connection, and often involve collaborations from other pianists and vocalists. Find more information on Bailey’s upcoming live shows at @thebaileybard.

You’ve heard of yoga, maybe you’ve heard of children’s yoga … but have you heard of kids aerial yoga? Local youngsters can try this gravity-defying practice at FlyDog yoga, which offers classes and summer camps for little kids (ages 4-8) and big kids (ages 8-12). In the aerial studio, 10 silk hammocks securely attached to the ceiling allow children to move, jump, play, and do things in the air that they wouldn’t otherwise get to do, says FlyDog owner Eliza Whiteman. “Kids are sort of missing that aspect of play in their lives now, with their schedules and activities being so structured. Aerial is an opportunity to play!”

During an aerial class, a trained instructor leads everyone through safe entry and exit from the hammock, demonstrating yoga postures on and off the ground. “There are safe boundaries,” Whiteman says. “The instructor demos how to do things, and then lets the kids play some.”

Some benefits to this high-flying playtime? “The kids learn about their bodies: proprioception, body awareness, and strength-building,” she says. “We mix in some more grounding yoga postures, too, so kids start to understand being in their body, getting out of their thinking brain.”

Laura Frantz wants to write you a poem. Luckily, the Charlottesville Poem Store owner is never too far away, parking her tent (and her vintage typewriter) at the Farmers Market at Ix, The Doyle Hotel (total Algonquin Round Table vibes), and special events like the Crozet Arts & Crafts Festival and Common House’s Writers’ Happy Hour. Plus, she’s for hire. Have her stop by your event and craft an on-the-spot poem for each of your guests based on a set of agreed-upon prompts. Now that’s poetry in motion.

Every August, the grounds of James Monroe’s Highland come alive with young farmers leading their cows, pigs, goats, and chickens around a ring, in hopes of wowing a panel of judges. But the popular livestock demonstrations aren’t the only place to shine at the Albemarle County Fair. New this year: a giant sunflower competition and a country-themed pageant, where girls from newborns to age 12, clad in either their Sunday best or something they’d wear around the farm, earn sashes for their efforts. And as always, the fair includes a variety of fiercely fought agriculture competitions, everything from pumpkins, figs, and okra to honey, hay, and Mr. and Mrs. Potato and Veggie Heads, as well as awards for best pies, cakes, jams, pickles, jerky, and dozens of others. Visitors will also find plenty of food trucks, live music, historical demonstrations, art and craft exhibits, and more. Bonus: Admission is still only $5, and children under 6 get in for free.

Those of us following the “Small Town, Big Crime” podcast—a locally produced show from journalists Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan that investigates the 1985 Bedford County double murder of Derek and Nancy Haysom—got a bit of a surprise while browsing Netflix at the end of 2023. The co-hosts had been tapped for commentary in the streaming service’s documentary, “Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom.” “The two of them were a horrible puzzle that fit together just right,” says Stuart of Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, the couple at the center of the case, in the series’ lead-in. Consider us hooked.

After more than a decade of helping high schoolers learn the ins and outs of planting and plowing, Charlottesville High School Urban Farming has gone commercial.

The successful program, launched in 2013, isn’t changing its focus on the intersection of agriculture and entrepreneurship. But it is upping the ante by selling its wares. While the program has served hundreds of students over the years by letting them dig their hands in the soil and raise animals, the produce and flowers grown along the way were always donated or used at the school. This past April, for the first time ever, CHS Urban Farming hosted a plant sale.

“We came from very humble beginnings,” says Peter Davis, who’s directed the program for the last seven years. “We were just an after-school club. We fixed up a small garden behind the school that had been neglected for a couple years.”

The course next transitioned into an elective for students with special needs before becoming what it is today: a full-credit class offered as part of CHS’s career technical education track. Offered in two parts, students can go through the program over consecutive years and earn two credits.

Currently, CHS Urban Farming has six sections and 72 enrolled students. According to Davis, there’s a waiting list to get in just about every year.

Davis says the course focuses primarily on marketing, as most students who go through it don’t end up as farmers. “Farming is a business,” he says. “That entrepreneur mindset is important, and a lot of people go that route.” Along the way, students also learn to grow crops and do some carpentry.

CHS Urban Farming has had a livestock component for most of its history, with students currently tending to 11 chickens. The cluckers “are pretty spoiled,” according to Davis. Students take turns bringing eggs home, and the chickens are part of the farm’s ecosystem, with waste crops and weeds going into their feed.

With seasonal produce growing all year round, Davis and students typically plant their summer crops before school lets out. The next semester, newly enrolled student farmers return to school to peppers and tomatoes, and later greens and carrots, ready for harvest. Flowers and herbs are a consistent part of the cycle, as well. 

Seedlings are available for purchase on the CHS Urban Farming website to supplement the program’s burgeoning commercial component. “The bread and butter as far as the marketing and business side is the plant sale,” Davis says. “Our first public sale was a smashing success.”

After years of marketing the sale only as an exercise, CHS students made $3,500 in their first go at actually selling plants. “I think that was definitely a proof of concept for us,” Davis says. “It made the case for a bigger and better sale next year.”

On the heels of the success, Davis believes the CHS Urban Farming program has a chance to be self-sustaining in the years to come. He thinks he and his student teams can earn at least $10,000 with a bigger marketing push.

Money, though, has never been what teaching kids to farm is all about, according to Davis.

“The thing I love the most is getting notes from parents or former students,” he says. “One parent emailed me pictures of a garden their kids had installed on their own. I think kids walk away with a great understanding of a lot of things, be it business or agriculture or construction.”

Ty Cooper defies categorization. As a marketing professional, he’s worked with all manner of companies and in myriad media. As a visual artist, he’s made his mark as an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and designer. 

Perhaps that’s why Cooper is drawn to short films.

“If a person is interested in being a filmmaker, shorts are an easier entry,” Cooper says. “They’re less expensive, and you can be super creative and do things you can’t get away with in a feature film. You can have fun and learn to love filmmaking. It gives [filmmakers] an opportunity to experiment and get better and be as quirky as possible.”

Cooper held his inaugural Indie Short Film Festival, a three-day rumpus of screenings, table reads, and parties in March. He showed nearly 75 shorts, held panel discussions, hosted a screenplay competition, and helped select best-of-show winners—all in four locations centrally located around the Downtown Mall.

The festival was an expansion of Cooper’s long-running short film series—a way to “massage the market,” he says, and get a sense for whether he should keep the festival going annually. After the success of the first event, during which three of the 12 screening blocks were sold out and several others were at greater than 80 percent of capacity, Cooper says he’s planning a second festival for 2025.

“I quantify success not only by looking at the numbers of people coming in—the sold-out screenings—but by going to the panel discussions and seeing the Common House with only a couple seats open and seeing people engaged with the filmmakers,” Cooper says.

To select films, Cooper started his search at Sundance, which he attends every year to see movies and meet filmmakers. Nearly 25 percent of the eventual Indie Short Film Festival playlist came from the renowned Salt Lake City independent film festival. Another 25 percent of the flicks came straight from Virginia, and the rest were selected from other submissions, festival screenings, and foreign films, with at least 11 countries eventually represented. 

Cooper has eschewed a themed festival to maximize voices, but he organizes the films for screening blocks. The 2024 festival featured animated blocks, documentaries, Virginia-focused segments, and miscellaneous narrative blocks. It included films by people of color, women, and wide-ranging ethnic representatives. The panel discussions took on topics like women in film and the Black experience in American cinema. 

“Part of my goal is to put all these voices on the screen,” Cooper says. “It was a melting pot.”

Cooper, whose marketing and branding firm Lifeview Marketing and Visuals counts the Virginia Film Festival among its clients, says his 2025 event will be bigger and better than his first foray. After polling attendees about their experiences, he says he’ll implement changes large and small. “I talk to every single person I see with their lanyard swinging,” Cooper says. 

The 2025 Indie Short Film Festival will be held March 21–23 at various theaters and restaurants around the Downtown Mall.

In 2012, when Eboni Bugg began working at the Women’s Initiative—a nonprofit offering mental health services to women—she was its first Black therapist on staff. “I was one of only a handful of clinicians of color operating in Charlottesville at that time,” Bugg says. “It was rewarding, but it was lonely.” 

After five years and the addition of just one more clinician of color, Bugg was inspired to start a wider network of support and resources. Her brainchild, the Central Virginia Clinicians of Color Network, began in June 2017. Two months later, the white supremacist rally of August 12 happened. Then, she says, “people were coming in demanding therapists who understood their racialized experience and the cultural context that is at the intersection of their mental health and well being.” 

The CVCCN meets that need. It provides funded trainings, supervision, and other practical tools therapists need to grow, secure, or maintain licensure, as well as regular meetings that offer emotional and social support. “We can also subsidize care for CVCCN members and their patients,” says Dr. Kim Sanders, a member of CVCCN’s steering committee. “This allows for the clinician to remain whole and still service the community that’s looking for us and needs us.”

Sanders points out an example of the nonprofit’s work: During COVID, CVCCN offered 20 clinicians a free training in EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), an evidence-based modality used to treat trauma-based mental health issues, with a track towards certification. This training normally costs thousands of dollars. 

“We also offer scholarships for our clinicians, which expands their knowledge and skillset,” Sanders says. She says CVCCN has an “inward focus first. By supporting each other, we’re better able to pour back out into this community.”

CVCCN is always looking to add new members and create new community partnerships. Clinicians of color can connect online at cvccn.org.

I scream, you scream … okay, you know where this is going. Lucky for us, we don’t have to scream very loud (or at all!) to find a frozen treat in this town. Here are 11 of our favorite hot cold spots.—SS

Ben & Jerry’s

Barracks Road Shopping Center

They had us at Cherry Garcia. 

Chaps Ice Cream

Downtown Mall and UVA Corner

A trip to the Downtown Mall isn’t complete without a scoop of coffee raspberry in a waffle cone from Brenda “Granny” Hawkins. (A second Chaps recently opened on the UVA Corner.)  

Cold Stone Creamery

1709 Emmet St. N & 5th Street Station

Just-made ice cream is thwapped on a frozen granite stone (hence, the shop’s name), where a variety of mix-ins (fruit, nuts, candy) can be added. Sounds Berry, Berry Good to us.

Dairy Queen

1777 Fortune Park Rd.

Five words: Chocolate chip cookie dough Blizzard. 

Kilwins

Downtown Mall

It’s tough to resist a cup of Blue Moon ice cream with a side of just-made sea-salt caramel fudge. 

Kohr Brothers Frozen Custard

1881 Seminole Trail

Less fat and sugar than ice cream, a light, silky texture, several twist flavors (vanilla and orange sherbert, please), and a merry-go-round.

La Flor Michoacana

601A Cherry Ave.

We once likened leaning over the shop’s store-length cooler filled with an array of brightly colored popsicles to gazing at the treasures in a jewelry store’s glass counter—but Rum and Raisins on a stick is much tastier than a diamond ring.  

Moo Thru

Dairy Market

Schlepping an hour north to the red barn on James Madison Highway became history in 2021, when more than a dozen flavors that change with the seasons (come to mama, Blackberry Merlot!) arrived on Grady Avenue. 

Splendora’s Gelato

The Shops at Stonefield

Trays of ever-changing, custom-crafted gelato flavors (check out the store’s Instagram and Facebook pages for the week’s offerings) and vegan chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. We’ll take some (okay, a lot) of each.

SugarBear Gourmet Ice Cream

1522 High St.

Emily Harpster’s made-from-scratch, locally sourced flavors (Wild Woman Whiskey, Vanilla Plum Blackberry, Mayan Hot Chocolate), once available only at specialty stores and bakeries, got a brick-and-mortar location this year. 

Timberlake’s

Downtown Mall

Step back in time at this back-of-the-drugstore soda fountain, where the dessert menu includes ice cream floats and sodas; shakes, malts, and sundaes (how’s about a Hannah Banana Split?); or a double dip in a cup or cone.

It takes a certain amount of vision to decide to stake your future on a herd of goats. But in 2008, that’s exactly what former homebuilder Jace Gooding did. With the economy barreling toward a recession, he found a business partner and started Goat Busters, setting his herd of Kiko goats to work clearing vineyards, backyards, and golf courses. You may have even seen them as you drove by Washington Park—last summer the city hired Goat Busters to remove invasive species.