Category: Tales of passion

We all know that fan—the one who can rattle off concerts dates and set lists, detailing the lineup, the between-song banter, and even the attire of her favorite band or musician. Jess Martin is of that tribe.

The 30-year-old Charlottesville resident has more concerts under her belt than some aging rock stars, and she’s just getting started. First bitten by the live music bug when she saw Juliana Hatfield at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro in 1995, Martin estimates that she’s attended 800 shows since. Ani DiFranco is the artist she has seen perform most often, and locally, the (now-defunct) band Moneypenny tops her list. Other locals she can’t get enough of include Corsair, Sharkopath, No BS! Brass Band, Michael Coleman, and the new stuff from Blake Hunter.

The thrills come in various ways for Martin. It can be a point and wave from Dave Grohl at a Foos arena gig, or the privilege of being in a venue during the sound check—like the time she heard Brandi Carlile warming up the piano with a rendition of “Mad World” played to an audience of four people. “I really think the sound checks have been the most memorable,” said Martin, “especially considering I couldn’t even form a sentence after the Brandi Carlile one.”

Despite an avid attendance pace, Martin still regrets the ones that got away. “Shows in the past I wish I could have seen are Sting’s Bring on the Night tour featuring Branford Marsalis, and locally, Snoop at the Jefferson,” she said.

A chef by trade, Martin carves out as much time as possible for her hobby, but her dream job would land her somewhere in the realm of concert hospitality, and ultimately running her own venue some day.

She’s logged almost 30 shows so far in 2013 with Superchunk, Pearl Jam, Meat Puppets, El Ten Eleven all on the horizon, and many more to come.

Although she sometimes travels as far as New York, D.C., and even Florida for concerts, Martin feels her love for live gigs is well-served in Charlottesville. “I am always hoping to get off work in time to walk down to the Mall and see music.”

You can usually find Ryan DeRose, founder of the digital creative agency Vibethink, standing in front of one of the giant white boards in the company’s Downtown Mall office space, mapping ideas with a dry erase marker. The 27-year-old Western Albemarle High School graduate normally works 80-plus hours a week, all seven days. To say his work is his passion is getting it backwards. His passion is his work and his goals are so big they sound naive.

“What I’m passionate about is creating impactful ideas that move us as a human race forward, from an evolutionary perspective and also just from the innovation standpoint of making life better,” DeRose said. “Whether that’s helping other people realize their dreams or giving people a work environment that doesn’t kill their passion but gives them the stability that most people need to thrive.”

Less than a year ago, he started his company without a space, a single paid employee, or a major client. Today, he has eight employees and he’s built websites for two weekly newspapers (including ours), the International Bluegrass Music Association, and high-profile local businesses like Mudhouse.

How does a self-taught programmer with a background in outdoor education build a company in a year? That’s complicated. Rather, complex, a word DeRose prefers to describe the particularly ecological space his firm occupies in the business world. His answer is basically that he has spent his life to this point formulating and solving problems in a range of environments and then one day he realized he had a grasp on the complexity of the new nexus between web design, marketing, and social media.

DeRose grew in Free Union on 25-acres on the side of Fox Mountain in Peavine Hollow. “As a kid, you weren’t going to get out of those woods. You could walk all day,” he said. His grandmother, mother, and sister are all UVA engineers. His grandfather was an art director at a Madison Avenue ad agency, his father a master stonemason, and his brother a ceramics artist. The principles of ecology, design, and engineering are in his DNA.

But DeRose traces the beginning of his entrepreneurial success story to his decision to transfer to the University of Hawaii at Hilo during his sophomore year in college. He studied marine science and biology, worked at the W.M. Keck Observatory at the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano, surfed every morning, rode his skateboard around town, and generally learned how not to be a haole.

After a stint gathering teaching credentials and running an experimental outdoor education program for the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California near Lake Tahoe, DeRose came home to start a similar program for the Triple C camp. He’d already begun tinkering with business ideas and web design. He formed a baby food company called Keiki Food, which was a marketing and technology innovation to flash pasteurize and vacuum seal whole fruits and vegetables so parents could make their own in bulk without the risk of salmonella and e. coli. It never went anywhere, but it was a sign of things to come.

He also created his first website, teaching himself enough flash to promote the educational idea of spontaneous evolution at Spontevo.com.

“The website was the way I could add credibility to a company as a sales tool on a low budget. I didn’t have money but I was young and I had time to build these things,” he said.

DeRose began tinkering with WordPress platforms in 2008, and, along the way, people started asking him to build websites. Lawyers, real estate agents, bands, friends. You know how it goes.

“People were just finding me through the grapevine and I was building my chops,” DeRose said. “But the whole time, the way I was able to do it was to talk to them about what was going to drive their business forward in the design process. And then I’d go home and try to figure out how to do it.”

Bluegrassnation.com and c-ville.com were his first big projects, but more have followed and now he has a whole team of marketers, designers, and developers who participate in his design-based processes. Which brings us back to the whiteboard, his palette. For DeRose, web design and digital marketing aren’t that different from his grandfather’s job on Madison Avenue, just more complex.

“The tech is just the tool. It’s the paintbrush and there are lots of canvases we can go paint. But when it gets right down to it, it’s two main things,” he said. “It’s the ability to solve complex problems through design-based thinking, and the ability to empathize, to understand what makes people do the things they do. From there everything else is just technical skill bases you’re using to affect change.”

Lucky for us, DeRose is also passionate about the place he chose to build his dream and about the type of people he wants on his team.

“Why not go to Silicon Valley? Or Seattle or Austin or New York?” he mused. “Charlottesville’s still under the radar. It’s still way cheaper to live here. I’m confident that if I needed to get a meeting with the mayor I could get it. That investor that’s untouchable in Silicon Valley because hundreds of people are trying to get to them is a phone call away. For whatever it doesn’t offer, it has all the opportunities you need.”

Tango is the dance of passion: a gendered, structured improvisation of impossible closeness with fluid patternings that prioritize expression and intimacy, and the result of the collision of European and American cultures at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. Maybe it’s no surprise then, that Gloria Rockhold, co-founder of the Charlottesville Tango Society, is also the product of cultural plate tectonics. Having split time growing up in Asuncion, Paraguay and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she is, in her own words, “perfectly bicultural.”

Rockhold came to Charlottesville in 2000, first landing in the countryside before gravitating to town to take a job with Albemarle County Schools as a community engagement coordinator. Her arrival coincided with the growth of the area’s Latino community, and since then she’s been that community’s voice in the public school systems.

“I have startup energy. I can start any program. Give me all the problems and I’ll put them in a format that will work. You have to be both creative and organized,” she said.

Whether she’s in Southwood Trailer Park or Townwood Trailer Park near Hydraulic Road, Rockhold’s energy is out on the streets, so much so that her boss jokingly threatened to get her a T-shirt that just said “No” on it.

“I think my passion comes from bringing a child into an environment that he or she has never seen and getting this huge smile. That motivates me,” Rockhold said.

Rockhold’s latest plan is to start a two-week bridge camp at Agnor Hurt Elementary School for rising fifth graders. Bridge for fifth graders? That’s how her mind works. It’s like the scene in Ghostbusters where they cross the streams of their ray guns and it magically works out.

“I find something old’s that’s dying and I find these kids that it might inspire and we put them together to learn socialization, negotiation, numbers,” Rockhold said. “I think in many ways I mix my personal desires with the job. In a way I merge my passions.”

The most passionate thing about Gloria Rockhold is the way her life overflows from its vessel, bursts at the seams. She serves on the boards of the Charlottesville Free Clinic and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, as a committee member for the Charlottesville Democratic Party, as the chair of Creciendo Juntos, and she’s on the citizens action committee for the Office of the Public Defender. That’s in addition to her tango dancing and working and social butterflying.

And she does all of it with the style of the “precisely creative” dance she loves.

“I just want to mix people up,” she said. “That’s fun to me.”

When Kai Rady came to Charlottesville in 1974 with her growing family, her first real challenge wasn’t finding the right schools or dealing with a picky eater—it was a lack of toy stores.

Rady said her first child was a very active and curious infant. “I was always looking for new things to stimulate him,” she said. She vividly recalled an article from Ms. Magazine (“a terrific list of at least 100 items, 90 percent of which were not in the area—including LEGO!”), and realized all the other young parents she met in town were having the same trouble entertaining and educating their kids. In no time at all, she opened a toy shop in her home on Ivy Road and Shenanigans was born.

Over the years, Rady’s priorities in toy-seeking have remained the same. “I’m looking always for play value,” Rady said. “A toy can be very educational…but if they’re not going to play with it, it’s not [useful]. It has to appeal to a child’s sensibilities.”

Rady lets the five senses drive many of her toy selections. “Children appreciate beautiful things, just like adults,” Rady said. She seeks out toys that look or feel good—even toys that simply sound fun, like the noise of suction cups. She also feels that things like playhouses and tents, which allow children to mimic adults and foster independence, are important additions to any playroom.

Rady fondly remembers her own toy-filled childhood. “We had a very toy-rich environment at home,” said Rady, who grew up in New England with two very playful parents. Some of her favorite memories include beloved babydolls and riding her horse, an independence that seems lightyears away in the modern world. “That’s why so many new toys have been invented,” Rady said, “because kids don’t have the freedom they did.”

At first, Rady believed running the store would be a holdover job until she eventually entered graduate school for English, or possibly law. Prior to moving to Charlottesville, she had worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency, an experience she likened to the popular television show “Mad Men.” Far as Shenanigans may have been from her roots, the shop grew quickly and she soon found herself leasing space in the Barracks Road Shopping Center.

After several years there, Shenanigans outgrew its walls once more and moved into a new location on West Main Street. So far, the move has proved a successful one. Always thinking like a parent, Rady was able to widen aisles for stroller access, lower shelves so parents can keep an eye on tots throughout the store, and increase seating for weary caretakers. Improvements at every turn simply make it easier for her to share her knowledge and love of the business. “Play is children’s work,” Rady said. “If they had no toys, they would still play, but we can expand their opportunities for play.”

Rady’s passion for toys is ultimately a passion for children—one she’s held onto nearly 40 years after her first steps into the industry. Shenanigans may be an Irish term for mischief, but in Rady’s world, it’s about fostering young minds. She said with conviction, “We’re raising people, not just raising children.”—Danielle Bricker

“I was working as a substitute teacher in an eighth grade science class while I was also taking my medical school prerequisites at UVA. There was no lesson plan for class one day, so I looked out the window to see if I could find a science project for us to do. And I said ‘O.K., right there. Why are the flowers under that drain spout bigger than the other flowers?’ When I saw the kids picking things up and sniffing things, I thought, this could be my job. I could teach.”

That’s local educator Carlos Pezua on his first “Eureka!” moment. His life, at least in retrospect, has always been that way—a series of “Eureka!” moments leading him to one outcome: teaching.

His first one came at age 13 when, as a forward-looking junior high school student, Pezua toured the Bay Area with his parents. “We went to the [University of California] Berkeley campus, and the vibe of the place was so great I told my folks that that’s where I wanted to go to college,” he said.

The son of a physician in the U.S. Army, Pezua grew up on military installations around the world, from Germany to Panama to Korea and finally Northern Virginia for high school, before earning a scholarship to attend UC-Berkeley.

Once at Berkeley, however, the call of San Francisco’s smorgasbord of social and cultural indulgences, more often than not, was too much for Pezua to resist. He lasted only a semester at Berkeley, and spent the next semester in the city, hip-deep in the music and party scene and loving every minute of it.

When he returned east, he eventually got on a clear path to commencement and earned a degree in politics from UVA. He went to work in Washington, D.C., as staff assistant for Senator Chuck Robb. It was during this episode when he met with another “Eureka!” moment: “It was the autopen,” said Pezua.

One of Pezua’s duties as a senate staffer was to write responses to Senator Robb’s mail and then set an autopen, a device that mechanically replicated the senator’s signature, to sign the letter. He’d then mail it off as though the senator himself had taken the time to address his constituent’s concerns.

“I was standing on my rooftop with my friend one night looking out over the city and I said, ‘There’s got to be more than this. This isn’t enough.’”

So Pezua set off with a friend for Arizona, where he worked as a backcountry ranger for the Park Service at Coconino National Forest. He cruised the Arizona wilderness for a little less than a year then he was back at UVA, where he realized that teaching had been his calling all along.

Pezua was fluent in Spanish, so it was only natural that he would teach the language, which he did for Albemarle County schools for nine years, earning him the Golden Apple Award for best teacher at Murray High School in 2008.

Pezua is no longer in the public school system, but teaches privately, both one-on-one and group sessions. This summer he offered a class upstairs from Mudhouse on the Downtown Mall.

“I’m not so much teaching as learning. I am like a prism,” said Pezua. “I’m breaking down Spanish knowledge and the students are the ones who see the colors. I’m channelling more than anything. When I am teaching someone the Spanish verbs and they finally get it and have that break through and they feel it and I feel it, it’s invigorating. When they get it, it’s an epistemological unlocking. I’m moved by—I’m compelled by the experience.”

The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” is to blame for Stephen Pollock’s love of music.

“I was nearly 14 and had no idea what I wanted to do with myself until February 9, 1964,” Pollock said. “That was the evening of the first Beatles “Ed Sullivan” appearance. I, like a million other boys and girls, was struck by a sort of lightning that evening, transfixed by the sight of The Beatles rocking out.” He bought a guitar and an amp from Sears with his paper route money and taught himself to play like George Harrison.

In 1986, he joined up with Bebe Buell (lead singer of the Gargoyles, Playboy centerfold in November 1974, and mother of Liv Tyler), and he played alongside music legends like Blue Oyster Cult, Debbie Harry, and Motorhead. He even signed the wall at CBGB after an opening gig for the Ramones.

These days, Pollock is content to play alongside his son, Nick, a singer/songwriter, and in two bands —a rock outfit called PTF (so named for the first initial of each band member’s last name) and a more mellow band called Collector’s Item. He’s also busy adding to his guitar and amp collection, which he began building in the late ’80s.

It tops out at more than 35 guitars and 15 amps, each chosen for Beatles-era accuracy.

“When I was just starting out, I could never afford gear like The Beatles used, but later in life I was able to and I started to collect,” he said. “For most of my career, I rarely had more than three guitars at once.”

Pollock finds most of his instruments on eBay, Craigslist, and Guitar Center, but said his favorites are ones he didn’t even pay for—a 1972 Rickenbacker bass his brother left him when he passed away, and a 1976 Gibson Firebird, which Buell gave him when he joined her band.

“Tremendous fun,” he said. “I had never been happier and that’s where I developed the passion for music, bands, and gear that I feel to this day.”