Category: Tales of passion

“You can open most any book and read a history of Charlottesville and not get a sense of the African-American presence. Then you hear the oral histories about the thriving communities that existed, like Little Egypt over in the Proffit Road area and many areas here in town where there were five or six streets that really understood community, educated together, churched together, took care of each other.”

Those are the words of Caruso Brown, by day the financial administrator for the Region Ten Community Services Board, and any other time of day a playwright, minister, genealogist, and, in the words of a friend, “a positive workaholic.

Brown grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, but attended Virginia State University, in part because his family’s roots in Buckingham County can be traced back to the 1790s. “When I think of Virginia as being my home, I think beyond just my present life to my existence in terms of us as a people,” Brown said.

Brown arrived in Charlottesville as a newlywed in 1979. With his friend Julian Burke, he started the African American Genealogy Group in 1990. Since then, tracing the histories of the area’s black families and communities has been an absorbing passion for Brown. He speaks with a quiet voice and thinks hard before he answers a question. Genealogy for him is not just a pastime, it’s an act of reclamation.

“When you read the history of Charlottesville with Thomas Jefferson and the whole bit, it’s rich as can be. I mean what is there that a community wouldn’t be proud of?” he said. “Unless you don’t have a presence in that history. And what I’ve found out about Charlottesville is how rich the African-American history is.”

Perhaps Brown’s most consuming passion is the community at Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church, established originally at the intersection of Main and Ridge streets in 1867. He is an associate minister at Mt. Zion and has served as drama ministry leader at the church since the late ‘80s, staging over 60 productions by his estimation, often dealing with themes of black history and faith.

“I’ve got lots of passions and they all burn hot,” Brown said. “If I’m not here at Region Ten, I’m writing plays or directing plays or working on the genealogy. And if it’s not that, I’m at the church or I’m working with the kids in some capacity. All of those things are things that I cannot put on the shelf, the files stay open all the time.”

Brown has spent 28 years at Region Ten, working for the people in the community who need the most help to live fulfilling lives. It’s the type of job that screams burnout. But his work is only one facet in a fuller life with a unified mission.

“I find that anytime that I have a minute, that someone else might see as a time to relax, I’m working,” he said. “The reason it doesn’t feel like being a workaholic is that it’s positive work and it’s what brings me joy.” Amen.

For the past 14 years, Kerry Moran has volunteered her time to help create high-quality local theater. She designed and produced A Winter’s Tale at PVCC Theatre, performed as an actor in A Christmas Carol for The Virginia Playwright and in the Screenwriters Initiative at the Hamner. She produced and designed Arcadia for Play On! Theatre, went on to collaborate with the director, John Holdren, on The Importance of Being Ernest at Four County Players, and recently designed the costumes for Legally Blonde: The Musical at Live Arts.

“Some volunteers work at one place only, but I don’t have loyalty to any one theater,” Moran said. “I try to work at my highest level wherever I am. Ultimately, it is about the play and how we bring it to life, whether acting, producing, or designing.”

Moran was involved in theater in high school, but didn’t return to it until her daughter was cast in a show at Black Box Players that also needed adults. She landed a role on stage, and began helping out behind the scenes, eventually becoming a set and costume designer for Black Box and then volunteering at other theaters.

“As a practicing architect, I look at everything as a design project,” Moran said. “With theater, you’re out of the gate really fast and it’s temporal so you have to be there. It’s something you have to experience. It’s different every time. It’s all heart for me, and I like the challenge of it.”

Her volunteer work is not only about her love of theater and design, it’s also a quest for comradery. “It’s exciting to find people you work with well and with whom you share your passion.” Plus, the time-sensitive nature of theater production creates a sense of urgency, which in turn creates a satisfying bond between the team. “It’s fun to spend four hours doing something with someone—something out of the norm, like making a marble floor out of paint.”—Raennah Mitchell

“Chicho wears many hats here,” says BON’s proprietor John Noble, and there are certainly many hats to wear and jobs to do at the recently opened café, art gallery, and event venue in the Pink Warehouse. “Chicho does it all, from developing the space, coordinating featured artists, booking events, pursuing vendors…”

What is most remarkable about Javier “Chicho” Lorenzo, in addition to the many roles he performs as art director at BON, his prolific art career, and the active role he plays in the Charlottesville arts community, is the pure joy and enthusiasm he brings to everything he does and his interactions with everyone he meets. When offered a handshake he gives a warm embrace, and when told a poor joke, he is generous with a hearty laugh.

“One of our goals is to really be part of the greater arts community,” said Lorenzo. This theme of connectivity and outreach is central to not only his work for BON, and his personality, but also to his artwork.

Lorenzo was born in a small town outside of Madrid, and claims the vibrance, passion, and color of the Spanish culture as a great influence on his paintings. As a self-taught artist, Lorenzo studied ancient Egyptian, Greek, Persian, and Aztec culture, early religious iconography, as well as more modern masters including “the shapes of Picasso, the patterns of Klimt, the expression of feelings from Frida Kahlo, Dali’s fantasy, a sense of balance from Calder” for inspiration. He also cites his father as his “best teacher” and the source of his passion for art—a passion he will most likely pass on to his own children, Lucas and Yemaya.

After establishing himself in the art scene in Madrid and then Brooklyn, Lorenzo settled in Charlottesville, where he was quick to work covering the walls of the Walker School, Crozet Elementary, the Venable School, and the Southern Café and Music Hall with bold, bright painted murals that seem to move and dance more than lay flat in decoration. Lorenzo’s portraiture and figurative paintings are also notable, occasionally abstract, and always playful.

When he isn’t painting, or booking a concert at BON, or spending time with his family, Lorenzo performs with a local flamenco music and dance group, Toma que Toma.

Wherever you run into him around town, you can be sure he’ll be smiling.

It’s 3pm on a Thursday, and Kate Zirkle holds the door open for a dozen 10-year-olds, each clutching a juice box and string cheese. The kids all smile and say “thank you” as they pass through the doorway and rush up the steps into the Boys & Girls Club of Central Virginia for snack and journal time.

Zirkle, a longtime volunteer, board member, and former board president who eats, sleeps, and breathes the Boys & Girls Club, shakes her head and grins at the well-behaved group.

“That right there? That just makes me want to do a happy dance,” she says.

Zirkle has been consumed by the Boys & Girls Club, which covers Charlottesville, Albemarle, Orange, and Madison, for about seven years. She moved here from Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband and their five children about 11 years ago, and was recruited by a friend a few years later. Naturally comfortable organizing groups and leading projects, Zirkle dove in head-first and immediately began working with both the kids and the board of directors. She knew, after sending her daughters to magnet schools in an urban area of Raleigh what the Boys & Girls Club could do for at-risk children and youth both academically and personally, so she said she was eager to get involved.

“When they asked me to chair the [annual fundraiser], I just needed to get to know what this was about, so it wasn’t just a fundraiser,” she said. “It’s something that I can speak to and believe in, and I could represent the club and recruit people to join in the project from a position of authenticity.”

She said she doesn’t spend nearly as much time with the kids as she’d like because most of her energy is expended on fundraising and collaborating with community partners. But when she does get to hang out in the club for an afternoon, she finds herself newly energized and it reminds her that everything she’s doing has a purpose.

“There’s no better feeling than to see a kid gain confidence and strength, and feel so secure here,” she said.

When asked what’s the most challenging aspect of serving on a board that manages a regional nonprofit with a multi-million-dollar budget, Zirkle immediately said “fundraising.”

The board of directors is in perpetual fundraising mode, but the biggest and most voluminous source of the club’s budget is the Big Gig, an annual black-tie gala held in Charlottesville.

“Black tie, dinner, auction, dancing—it’s a pretty standard affair,” Zirkle said modestly.

Sure, if “standard affair” means “event that national celebrities show up for.” Former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw has been known to fly in to be the guest auctioneer, football hall of famer Howie Long and his wife, Diane, have made an appearance in the past. The event brings in a hefty chunk of change—roughly $200,000 of the board’s annual $1 million operating budget—but Zirkle said it’s about more than that.

“People who are in the room at the Big Gig understand the cause,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about the Club much that night because everyone knows. Everyone gets it.”

For starters, Song Song’s Zhou and Bing’s pork and leek bing—a pancake, ever-so-delicately crisped and stuffed with an exquisitely-seasoned pork patty—is heavenly and, quite possibly, the best cheap lunch in Charlottesville. But that’s not really the point here. The point is that a woman with a business degree started a restaurant because she wants people to be healthy.

“When I first started,” said Song, “I just wanted the customers to have healthy, nutritional food, especially for people who could not afford expensive food, that they could come here and have low-cost healthy food.”

When she talks about how much effort, thought, and experimentation she has put into the select few items that are on the menu at her Downtown Mall restaurant, and how all of them are there to contribute to the long-term well-being of her customers (or at least not make things any more difficult for their bodies), you get the sense that she processes it all at very personal level. But her earnest zeal for keeping people alive, healthy, and happy, while not taking too big a toll on their wallets, may also be her weak point.

“There are a lot of things I do here I know are not the way to make money,” said Song, who holds an MBA and was once an assistant CEO. “But I want to do things this way.”

She serves three basic things, all of it made by her, from scratch: a very healthy porridge called zhou (pronounced “Joe”), bings, and salads. A native of northeast China, Song serves real-deal food like they eat in her home country. “Everything here takes at least half a day to prepare,” she said. “So I cook a big batch, like at home, and share it with the customers.”

How healthy is Song’s food? “Sometimes I have the hospital calling me for patients who want the zhou,” said Song. “Zhou is very good recovery food. …In China, it is called the man’s fuel station and the woman’s beauty salon.”

Song had a couple other lives before getting into the food business. She was a cancer researcher and graduate student in microbiology at Case Western Reserve University. But it was while working as an executive that she developed a debilitating case of carpal tunnel syndrome that sidelined her for two years. Once she got healthy, she wanted a new line of work that would inspire her to the same degree her previous careers had, and she went at the food business with the same motivating factor that pushed her toward cancer research: people.

“In research, it takes years to get anywhere,” she said. “When I first started I didn’t really think about longevity, I just wanted to make healthy food. Years from now, if some people have the memory of zhou and bing, that is enough for me to make it worth it. That makes me feel good. I wish for all my customers to live a long time.”

Jim Rounsevell is after architecture deeply rooted in place, built “for our time with what we have, with care, and with discipline.” His commitment to aesthetics, design, and a progressive future for our city can often lead him to be, admittedly, “that crazy, passionate person in any given city planning meeting.”

Rounsevell graduated  with a degree in anthropology from Grinnell College and has been designing in Charlottesville for the past decade, and for his own firm since 1998. Though he started out as an anthropology major who liked taking pictures, ultimately, while in a masters program at the Pratt Institute of Interior Design, “two wonderful teachers told me to get out of there and get into an architecture program,” he said. The teachers were architects themselves and recognized a latent talent in the young student.

Today, Rounsevell’s modern, resource-conscious designs have garnered prestigious awards, including a Residential Design Award from Washington, D.C.’s AIA and Washingtonian Magazine and from the Virginia AIA for his Poplar Terraces. Rounsevell was also chosen as the lead consultant for the City of Charlottesville’s ongoing Belmont Bridge design project.

Rounsevell rankles a bit at the mention of the term “sustainable architecture.” He disagrees with the notion that eco-building should be a separate movement. “Sustainable building practices should simply be ingrained in what we all do as architects,” he said. “While recycled glass countertops are cool and reclaimed wood from the bottom of Lake Michigan is beautiful—it’s all just ‘eco bling.’” What’s most important, according to Rounsevell, are design principles that reduce energy usage. “Limited-income families could save $400 a month on heating and put that money towards groceries or new job skills. Building homes where this is possible should be our focus,” he said.

Rounsevell also has a few things to say about the legacy of Mr. Jefferson as it looms large over our city’s architectural landscape. “If Jefferson were alive today, he’d be a modern architect; he wouldn’t be building in brick with white trim,” Rounsevell said. “What Jefferson was doing in his lifetime was very progressive—he was very aware of his materials, how many bricks he was using, and he was synthesizing French styles with British Palladian architecture. It was very of the moment.”

And Rounsevell is all for progress. In fact, he insists on it. In partnership with Pete O’Shea and Sara Wilson of Siteworks, Rounsevell has developed an ambitious vision for the Belmont Bridge reconstruction project. “Building another highway overpass would be going backward,” Rounsevell said. Instead, the team is building off of the winning design of the 2010 community-driven bridge redesign project, and is proposing a vehicular underpass and a pedestrian- and bike-friendly cable-stayed bridge. The underpass would not only revert the east end of the Downtown Mall to its 20th century condition, but act as an impetus for the “rebirth of a vital commercial district” in Belmont.

“This is not about my ego. I want to do the right thing, the best thing for the City of Charlottesville. It’s a complex project, and it’s not going to be cheap to build,” admitted Rounsevell. “But we as a city need to build up the collective will that we need to get this done. It could just be fabulous.”

“Nothing has ever been planned in my life,” said Kenny Ball.

When Ball arrived in Charlottesville in the 1980s for a job working with and showing horses, he never dreamed that 30 years later he’d own a successful antiques shop and be training with the area’s top marathon runners. He’s passionate about everything he does, he said, so it’s not terribly surprising that he qualified for the Boston Marathon after running his first-ever long race.

Aside from horseback riding, Ball said he was never athletic growing up.

“I was the one picked last for the team in school,” he said. “I couldn’t run a lap around the track—at least, I didn’t think I could because I wasn’t encouraged to do it.”

Running 26 miles for fun was never something that crossed his mind, until a couple years ago when he watched his daughter run a 5K. Inspired by the race day energy, Ball laced up a pair of running shoes himself, entered a short race with his daughter, and was hooked.

“I found it to be quite rewarding and easy, for never having done it or trained,” he said.

In tandem with his newfound appreciation for running was the realization that he was approaching the same age his father had been when he began suffering heart problems.

“When you’re approaching 50, you start to think about the rest of your life,” Ball said. “I decided right then and there that if I was going to live, I was going to do it in a healthy way.”

Ball laughed when he recalled how much fun he had during the first half of his life, and vowed to live out the next 50 years without some of his prior indulgences. He hasn’t touched alcohol since his running career began, he’s wearing the same size clothes he wore in high school, and he said old temptations like junk food no longer faze him.

“I’m so much more in tune with what’s going on in my body,” he said. “When you realize how hard you have to work to burn off a doughnut, you tend to not have them.”

Ball noted that because of the extreme calorie burning, runners do have the option of eating more freely. It’s “not a license to eat a box of doughnuts,” he said, but he gets a kick out of watching his running comrades reward themselves with frozen coffees and giant pastries at Greenberry’s, the unofficial Charlottesville runners’ hangout spot.

Much of the passion Ball has for running is fueled by a sense of community around the sport. At least once a week he trains alone, to prepare for the oddly isolated nature of long races, but Ball said he couldn’t imagine putting in the hours and miles without his fellow athletes by his side.

“It’s not just about the running,” he said. “When you run with a group, you form lifelong bonds with those people.”

It’s been a couple years since Ball’s life as a runner began, and he doesn’t intend to slow down anytime soon.

“I have never once regretted putting on my running shoes and getting out the door,” he said.

He’s traveled everywhere from Chicago and New York to Berlin and London for races, and has a new marathon in Tokyo on his radar. When asked about ultra-marathons—any race longer than a standard marathon, up to 100 miles—he said he didn’t have much interest.

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe I’ll do a 50-miler. But that’s probably how all that gets started, huh?”

In the 13 years since she’s been an animal behavior specialist, Erika Proctor has fostered 387 animals—and she’s only kept three for herself. The founder of nonprofit organization Green Dogs Unleashed, Proctor realized how little is known about therapy dogs, so in 2007 she began establishing the Troy-based business to rescue special needs animals, rehabilitate them, and professionally train them to become therapy dogs for special needs humans. In 2013, it was official.

The mission, Proctor said, is to “improve the quality of life for individuals with special needs and veterans with PTSD, by conducting volunteer pet-facilitated therapy.”

The animals that aren’t suitable for the program, she adopts out or transfers elsewhere. All told, around 900 rescue dogs have passed through her doors since November of 2011—100 of those since January alone.

Most of those are success stories, but there are a few in particular that are close to her heart.

“Six years ago, I watched as a truck drove up and tossed a brick-sized white ball out the window and sped off,” she said. Proctor ran out to see what it was and found a Great Dane puppy lying in the driveway. Unresponsive to sound and squinty-eyed, the dog was the product of a “double merle” breed, which leads to both deafness and blindness.

“We were advised these dogs do not live full lives and can become vicious, and the most humane thing we could do was euthanize her,” Proctor said. “It was not going to happen.” Serendipity, as Proctor named her, is 6 years old now.

“Her world is dark and quiet, but filled with perfect love and acceptance. Something we, as human beings, could learn from.”

Carlos Ayers isn’t sure exactly why it dawned on him when it did, but he knew at age 15 that he was going to be a doctor.

“I was just waltzing along, and all of a sudden it came over me that this is what I wanted to do,” he said. That was 1947, when he was still living on a small West Virginia farm. He finished high school a year later, and 10 years after that, he graduated from the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia.

Fifty-five years later, he’s technically retired after a long and distinguished career as a cardiologist that included 46 years as a faculty member at his med school alma mater. But Ayers isn’t ready to stop being a doctor. At 81, he still spends two evenings a week giving preventive cardiac health consults at Charlottesville’s Free Clinic.

There was some sense behind his choice of medical specialty. His paternal grandfather died of a diabetes-related infection, and both his grandmothers and his father died of heart disease—his father at the age of 54 —“so there was plenty of stimulus for me to be concerned about cardiovascular disease,” he said.

Ayers has been witness to and taken part in a great deal of medical advancement in the decades he’s worked as a doctor. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, had essentially no effective treatment when he started his residency at UVA. “We did a lot of research in hypertension in the ’60s and ’70s, and we learned more about it,” he said. “Clinical trials came out in abundance. By the late ’70s, we really had a handle on it. That was very exciting, and rewarding, and something I participated in heavily.”

Later in his career, his focus shifted to preventive health. He was awarded a five-year grant in 1980 to pilot a preventive cardiology clinic that aimed to reduce patients’ risk factors for developing heart disease through various lifestyle and drug treatments—at the time, still a novel idea.

“More and more work had come out on atherosclerosis and its causes—the role of lipids and a lot of other factors. I saw that as a potential area. And that’s what I did the rest of my career.”

And it was successful beyond anyone’s imaginings at the start. In a recent pool of more than 2,000 patients, the incoming expected rate of cardiovascular health-related events was about 60 per year, he said. The clinic ended up seeing only three to five events per year—a risk factor drop of 90 percent.

That’s part of why he didn’t want to quit.

“I was still interested in what I was doing,” he said, so he moved his preventive work to the free clinic, helping low-income people avoid the diseases that killed so many members of his own family.

He’s happy to have more time with his wife, Mary Joe. He walks the dog, plays tennis, works in the garden. And he thinks matter-of-factly about the eventual end of his career.

“It’s fulfilling, and I think it serves a useful personal purpose,” he said—it keeps him sharp. “But when I feel like my mental situation is such that I’m no longer doing a good job, I’ll stop.”

Hopefully not too soon, though. “When you learn to do something really well, it stays with you,” he said.

Wendy Fisher fell in love with Montessori through the experience of her children.

Fisher, now head of school at Mountaintop Montessori on Pantops, spent so much time in the classroom of the school in Washington, D.C. that the oldest of her five kids attended that the head of school suggested Fisher explore getting certified to teach. After that, Fisher said, “I never looked back.”

The philosophy of a Montessori education, which emphasizes kids’ individual development in mixed-age classrooms and gives them lots of freedom to direct their own learning process, spoke to Fisher, who had studied journalism and worked in PR before her children were born. In addition to leading Mountaintop, she now works as a Montessori consultant, serves on the Board of the Virginia Association of Independent Schools, and is pursuing her doctorate at UVA’s Curry School of Education.

But for the last 10 years, life has revolved around the school—a community that’s more like a family unit than anything else. Her role is not unlike that of a mom: “You have to be a jack-of-all-trades, and turn on a dime,” and it’s best to forget your ego. “People love you and hate you, and the same people love you and hate you in the same day,” she laughed.

For all her study in the field of education, the job often has little to do with applying pedagogy. “All this stuff that I have empirical knowledge about—most of that is irrelevant,” she said. “All those things really are like the palette on which everything else I do rests. Sometimes I get to the end of my day and I’ll say, ‘I accomplished nothing. All I did is walk around and sit around and talk to people.’”

Sometimes that’s just the life of an administrator. Fisher remembered a speech given by a retiring president of the Fork Union Military Academy—a school on the opposite end of the instructional spectrum from hers, if ever there was one—at a VAIS meeting once. “He said, ‘Most of my job is drinking coffee and looking concerned,’” she said. “You get to this point in your career where people want somebody to listen, and care, and maybe throw a tidbit of wisdom.”

But that belies the great devotion of time and energy Fisher’s job does require. Not that she’d have it any other way. The thing about Mountaintop, she said, is that it attracts the very people she would want to spend all her days with anyway.

“There’s a lot of diversity, but there are some common threads that run through,” she said: an emphasis on intentional choices, being in nature, appreciating local food, getting connected to your own creativity, staying active. The school community eats together, works together, runs together. “There is no work-life balance,” she said, matter-of-factly. “My friends are there. We care about each other.”

And they care about their mission, and the bigger picture of helping kids—and each other—find their places in the wider world.

“Our system of education honors that people find meaning through purposeful work, and by grounding themselves in the larger purpose of being a human being,” she said. Finding that path becomes the greater goal of school—and life outside school. When you’re working for what you love, no matter your age, “it makes the work and the learning and the striving for excellence second nature,” she said. “It’s not a decontextualized task or a broken-apart checking of boxes. It’s all whole and part of being who you are.”