Bringing out the big guns: Dave Matthews, Jaime Harrison, and Stacey Abrams joined Terry McAuliffe for a Charlottesville campaign stop. Photo: Eze Amos
By Kristin O’Donoghue
Virginia’s November 2 gubernatorial election is rapidly approaching, and the two campaigns are ramping up their efforts to energize voters. Last Sunday, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe hosted a star-studded get-out-the-vote rally at the Ting Pavilion. Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams spoke alongside McAuliffe and DNC chair Jaime Harrison, while Dave Matthews played an acoustic set for the hundreds who had gathered.
Glenn Youngkin will wrap up a 10-day “Win for Glenn” bus tour on October 28. Youngkin has held a number of meet and greets at inns, restaurants, and convention centers, especially in rural areas. The bus tour did not include a stop in Charlottesville, a Democratic stronghold.
McAuliffe also held an event with former president Barack Obama in Richmond on Saturday. “You can’t run, telling me you’re a regular old hoops-playing, dish-washing, fleece-wearing guy, but quietly cultivate support from those who seek to tear down our democracy,” Obama said of Youngkin.
In Charlottesville on Sunday, Harrison told the crowd that “Virginia is a blueprint for so many other states. That only happened because of the leadership in the governor’s mansion and at the state house.”
The DNC committed $5 million to Virginia, a testament to just how significant the upcoming race is.
Introduced by Harrison as the “Energizer Bunny of American politics,” McAuliffe hopped on stage to talk about his “proven leadership.”
He highlighted a few achievements from his time in office, including the restoration of voting rights to those who had committed a felony, and his efforts to protect women’s reproductive freedom.
In reference to abortion rights, McAuliffe said, “This is no longer a talking point. This is real.”
Photo: RealClearPolitics
Abrams—the first Black woman in American history to be nominated by a major party to run for governor—underscored the important role that young people and people of color play in Democratic politics, though the gathered crowd was predominantly middle-aged and white.
“The commonwealth has the power to set the course of this nation for the next decade,” Abrams said.
When asked what might motivate young people to vote for someone they might perceive as yet another establishment candidate, Harrison talked about the ways in which McAuliffe represents progress for young people and for the nation.“What young people want is the freedom to be able to live their American dream…We don’t need neanderthals like Glenn Youngkin to drag us back into some bygone time.”
All the speakers warned against the “radical Republicans” who, if elected, would roll back all the progress the state has made in recent decades.
“There is such a profound threat to our democracy, and we’ve got to show up for Terry to change the future for the better,” Matthews said before ginning up the crowd with a performance that included his hits “Mercy” and “Bartender.”
“The Avengers are not coming in November,” said Harrison. “It’s up to all of you.”
Addressing the young people in the crowd, Abrams pleaded: “Don’t let us screw this up.”
Since the 1980s, the Pink Warehouse on South Street has been home to local artists of many kinds.
Staff photo
Sandwiched between South Street and some train tracks, the Pink Warehouse has stored various things throughout its 105 years: wholesale food for the Albemarle Grocery Co.; tools for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; imagination.
In 1983, Roulhac and Ben Toledano—an author of architectural history books and a Southern literature-loving lawyer—bought the abandoned building. They renovated it, raised four children in it, and eventually, accidentally, transformed it into a storied creative mecca.
Today, the building holds a few different apartments and offices, and Roulhac says that while she has no rule about renting to artists, “they just come.” And if they’re not creative when they move in, they are before they leave.
The building is perhaps most famous as the site where, in 1991, the newly-formed Dave Matthews Band played its first official gig on the warehouse roof to a couple dozen people.
Matthews’ manager, Ross Hoffman, rented the bedroom next to Roulhac’s, and Matthews used to sit on the floor with his guitar and play his songs. Roulhac heard him through the wall.
Artist John Owen lived there, too, and, reportedly threw memorable parties after Live Arts productions.
C-VILLE Weekly rented space in the Pink Warehouse in the 1990s. Roulhac has written a number of books there, and she’s exhibited Edward Thomas’ paintings in her living room. In the late 2000s, John Noble and Dee Dee Bellson opened BON Café, a music venue/art gallery/coffee shop in the building. Bellson is the daughter of actress and singer Pearl Bailey and Louie Bellson (Duke Ellington’s drummer), and a well-known jazz singer in her own right. The Tom Tom Founders Festival offices are in there now, and a few apartments remain upstairs.
Until recently, Lauren and Daniel Goans of folk duo Lowland Hum lived in a studio that was once Roulhac’s library, and still contains floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with hundreds of books on every topic imaginable. Lauren says that living among these books fueled creativity, including the writing and recording of a new record, Glyphonic. “It was one of our favorite creative seasons to date,” she says. Due to the nearby parking lot and morning commute traffic, “we had to wake up at 4am to get in enough quiet hours for recording each day. I will never forget Daniel playing guitar in the pitch dark before anyone around us was up.”
“People thought we were crazy to buy the warehouse,” says Roulhac. But perhaps, in a stroke of inspiration that’s come to define the place since, the Toledanos saw something that others did not.
Former DMB violinist Boyd Tinsley denied allegations of sexual harassment.
Jason Moore / Zumapress.com
In a move that has Charlottesville and the music world reeling, the Dave Matthews Band parted ways with longtime violinist Boyd Tinsley, 54, late May 17 following an explosive story that detailed a lawsuit against Tinsley for alleged sexual assault, harassment and long-term grooming.
Tinsley has denied the allegations in an online music news site Consequence of Sound article and in the lawsuit.
He had previously announced he would not be touring with the band February 2, the same day an attorney for James Frost-Winn filed a demand letter to settle his claims of assault and harassment. On Twitter, Tinsley said he needed a break to focus on his family and his health.
A statement from DMB says, “Though Boyd is no longer a member of the band, we are shocked by these disturbing allegations and we were not previously aware of them.”
Some find it hard to believe band members and Red Light Management knew nothing of Frost-Winn’s allegations, and social media lit up following the story.
“Of course they knew. The whole town has been calling it Fiddlegate for years,” says @arkSHOP on Twitter.
“A lot of the town knew,” says musician Jamie Dyer on Twitter. “I drew the line with Boyd in the early ’80s and he never messed with me again.”
Songwriter Lauren Hoffman writes on Facebook that three young men “separately confided their experiences to me” in the late ’90s.
Frost-Winn was 18 and homeless when he first met Tinsley in 2007. The two became friends, and in 2014, Frost-Winn joined Tinsley’s Crystal Garden band.
He filed a $9 million lawsuit May 17 in Washington state alleging Tinsley created a hostile work environment “where compliance with sex-based demands was tied to the band’s success,” Consequence of Sound reports.
Frost-Winn, a trumpeter, says Tinsley often requested his and band members’ dirty socks, and he describes waking to Tinsley masturbating beside him with his hand on Frost-Winn’s butt. Tinsley blamed the incident on a pill mix-up, according to court documents.
The two slowly became friends again with Tinsley bestowing gifts on the young man. But he also began sending more sexually explicit texts. A screenshot of a March 18, 2016, text from Tinsley calls Frost-Winn “boner material” and says he’s masturbating to the thought of photos of Frost-Winn and suggests he shave his pubic hair for an upcoming photo shoot.
“You are the dirty pretty boy of the band,” says the alleged Tinsley text. “I have to sexually exploit you as much as I can without looking like I’m sexually exploiting you. I’m in full jerk right now, catch you later.”
In 2016, Frost-Winn left Crystal Garden.
His is not the first lawsuit filed against Tinsley. Getty Andrew Rothenberg, Tinsley’s former personal assistant, filed a $10 million suit in 2015 that alleged Tinsley’s “cult of personality has a dark side that Tinsley has gone to great lengths to hide,” and claimed Tinsley was a “sexual predator” who used gifts, jobs and access to other celebrities “to gain leverage over the people in his world which he currently calls Narnia.”
Rothenberg described eight unidentified people who had allegedly been victimized by Tinsley. Rothenberg was convicted of embezzling from Tinsley between 2009 and 2012, sentenced to nine months in prison and ordered to pay $1.25 million in restitution. The lawsuit was thrown out.
“Everyone knew,” says a local familiar with the band who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “There’s going to be other people coming out.” The source says rather than getting Tinsley help, those around him “enabled” his behavior.
“This was an open secret within the company,” says a former Red Light employee, who also spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
“The band was not aware of these allegations until they read about them yesterday in the media,” says DMB publicist Allison Elbl in a May 18 email.
In a May 14 interview in Vulture before the Consequence of Sound story came out, Matthews says, “I have a deep love for Boyd, and he has to deal with his stuff. In many ways, I’m sure it would’ve been a lot easier for him to just say, ‘I’m good. Let’s go play.’ But you can’t just throw yourself away, your wellness away, because you play violin in a band. It doesn’t make any sense to do that.”
Matthews adds, “I can’t say, ‘I can’t wait till he comes back,’ because I don’t know what’s going to happen. But right now being away is better for him. Nobody is happy about this situation. Except that we’re happy he can figure some stuff out. I hope he does. But I’m going to miss having that whirling-dervish Adonis-Muppet over there on my right. I know the audience is, too. But we can’t serve that desire.”
For years, Tinsley has hosted the Boyd Tinsley Clay Court Classic, a women’s invitational tennis tournament at the Boar’s Head Sports Club, which was most recently held in April.
“We’re just talking it over right now,” says Boar’s Head marketing and communications manager Joe Hanning about the future of the tournament. He says he’s “shocked like the rest of Charlottesville.”
“I’m truly hurt by the one-sided account that appeared on a blog about me yesterday,” says Tinsley in a statement. “I will defend myself against these false accusations. …These accusations have caused embarrassment for my family, my friends and my fans. I will fight both in and out of court to repair the damage that has been done.”
Frost-Winn’s lawyer, Jason Hatch, responds to Tinsley’s denial in Rolling Stone: “We are disappointed in Mr. Tinsley’s complete lack of personal responsibility for his actions.”
As Lauren Hoffman's music star was rising in the late ’90s, her 17-year-old eating disorder battles was just beginning. Photo by Eze Amos
In 1997, local musician Lauren Hoffman almost had the world in her hands. A three-album deal with Virgin, rave reviews from music magazines, and a growing audience in Europe. Then something went wrong. And when she launched other albums, something went wrong again, despite packed shows on several continents. Now she’s ready to talk about it.
Hoffman’s eating disorder became a constant wrecking ball in her career, yet she still managed to put out a series of critically acclaimed albums and build her body of work. On the 20th anniversary of her first release, with her current band, The Secret Storm, she has launched her fifth studio album and has finally made peace with her body and food.
“I come from a long line of people with eating disorders,” Hoffman says. “…It wasn’t a really great example for me in my home. My grandfather, when we would go visit him, had a lot to say about what people looked like, what their weight was. He had a pillow on his couch that said ‘You can never be too rich or too thin.’ …I was kind of in a wounded, scared place trying to be defiant. The wounded, scared place was probably a little bigger than the feminist, I’m-not-going-to-fall-for-that-bullshit side of me.”
Hoffman’s father, Ross, saw promise in her as a songwriter from a very early age and worked to develop her talent. Ross Hoffman spent more than a decade in Los Angeles as a professional songwriter. After moving to Charlottesville he was among the first people to recognize Dave Matthews’ talent and became his first manager before Coran Capshaw replaced him.
“When she was 3…with no help from me, she wrote a lovely little baroque four bars,” says Ross Hoffman. “And then…she and I were driving into town with a radio on and there was a song she was familiar with and I was pointing out structure. Verse, chorus and bridge. She was 5. And she was so cognizant of the structure. Me indicating and then her expounding. So clearly a prodigy.”
Hoffman’s dad, Ross, noticed her musical aptitude when she was around age 3, when Hoffman wrote a baroque four bars. “She wrote something that was better than average when she was 3. And at 12 she was writing full songs that she was paying attention to. She got dealt a lot of talent.”
In eighth grade, Hoffman was asked by jazz musician John D’earth, who was teaching music at Tandem Friends School (he is now director of jazz performance at the University of Virginia), to learn to play the electric bass.
“They had a middle school rock band,” Hoffman says. “I wanted to play guitar but there were already a bunch of boys playing guitar and he said, ‘How about you play bass? The first four strings are the same as the guitar and we need it in the band.’ …There’s a version of kind of jazz-guy-music-theory that he taught us that is pretty different from classical music reading and that was what clicked with me and started making sense, and that’s when I started writing songs.”
In high school, Hoffman had a stint as the bass player with Shannon Worrell’s band, Monsoon, where she learned the ins and outs of playing real gigs. Her father’s background as the original manager for the Dave Matthews Band also gave her some exposure to the music business. At the time she was listening to musicians like PJ Harvey, The Cure, Nine Inch Nails and Billie Holiday.
At the age of 17, Hoffman had amicably parted ways with Monsoon, picked up the guitar and decided to record some demos of her own with the help of John Morand, owner of Sound of Music, a recording studio in Richmond.
“John was working with David Lowery from Camper Van [Beethoven] and Cracker. …Then John talked to David about it and they said, ‘We want to develop your thing. We think you’ve got great songs, we want to produce them with you for free and then take them to labels and see if we can get it paid for by a label and put it out.’”
After playing bass in Shannon Worrell’s band, Monsoon, Lauren Hoffman picked up the guitar at age 17 and decided to record some demos of her own with the help of John Morand, owner of Sound of Music, a recording studio in Richmond.
Cracker was a big deal in the late ’90s. David Lowery had a string of hit singles such as “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)” and “Eurotrash Girl.” Suddenly, Hoffman had some powerful allies working to make her The Next Big Thing.
Hoffman moved to New York City in 1995, started playing gigs there and spent more than a year weighing offers from different record labels before settling on Virgin Records. She bounced between NYC, Richmond and Los Angeles to complete work on her debut. Tensions grew between Virgin and Lowery over the way that those early demos were turned into an official release.
“This one song, ‘Lolita,’ we completely re-recorded,” Hoffman says. “David Lowery was a bit pissed and he had a conversation with my manager that was like, ‘I’ve got all of your tapes in the back of my truck and I’ve got a shotgun, yeehaw!’ But things worked out…”
As work wrapped up on the album, promo photo shoots were scheduled. And the subtle suggestions that Hoffman go from a healthy-weight woman to a stick figure began.
“My manager was the first person to say something about this,” Hoffman says. “When I was still in New York and I looked [like I do now], he said, ‘So if you want to sell records you should go to the gym and lose weight.’
This is the only picture Lauren Hoffman has of herself at her lowest weight—103 pounds—while on tour in France and Belgium in 1997.
“It was supposed to be the year of the woman but Fiona Apple was clearly anorexic and Alanis Morissette was constantly talking about it,” Hoffman says. “And you would read these articles about them and unlike an article about a man, they would describe this person…physically. ‘Pleasantly curvy, wearing this or wearing that, looking at me in a seductive way as she talks.’
“New Year’s Eve in the studio, I remember this skinny woman being there and me feeling so shitty about myself,” Hoffman says. “And being in LA, in this place where this is who gets invited to parties and this is who you have to explain your worth to and why the hell are you here. That’s how it felt to me. I was like, I’m gonna lose my chance if I’m not thinner. I’m gonna miss this opportunity.”
She made a goal to lose five pounds.
“That was it,” Hoffman says. “That first diet. Instead of losing five pounds, I lost 40.”
Hoffman came home from touring in France in the winter of 1997.
“I was horrible skinny,” she says. “One hundred and three pounds and my grandfather, with the pillow, asked if I was sick. And I thought if Mr. You-Can-Never-Be-Too-Thin Guy thinks I’m dying of cancer or something, this is bad.”
It was during this time that Hoffman came to grips with the death of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley. He was the son of the legendary Tim Buckley,who also died young at 28.
They first met when Hoffman was 16.
“Dave [Matthews] was playing a solo show at The Birchmere,” Hoffman says. “I caught a ride up with somebody from [my dad’s] office and when I went in Jeff was opening up for Dave—it was his tour for his EP, this was before his album came out. I went backstage and I was looking for people that I knew but he was the only person there, so I said to him, ‘Are you always that depressing?’
“He seemed offended and then we went back into his dressing room and smoked pot and talked about music and then we stayed in touch and I would visit him in New York and he would invite me to his shows when he came south.
“We would talk on the phone,” Hoffman says. “He was sleeping with a lot of people at the time, so that was confusing because he would say that he loved me and things like that. That was very confusing. I did love him and I loved having him in my life. He died a little while before my album Megiddo came out.
“I remember just before my eating disorder took hold he took my phone call at 2 in the morning. I was drunk, I was freaking out. I was like, ‘If I don’t look right in these pictures nobody’s going to listen to my record.’ He was trying to talk me down off of that ledge and talk me out of believing that was true and telling me that I just had to be myself and that I was beautiful and just go do that photo shoot and be yourself and let who you are shine through.”
Buckley drowned accidentally on May 29, 1997, while swimming in the Mississippi River in the wake of a passing tugboat. He was 30 years old.
“When he died I felt like between my record coming and my obsession kicking in about food I couldn’t process it until that winter [when] I came back to Virginia and [was] trying to get back to eating normally again. I remember finally really crying about it.”
“…Being in LA, in this place where this is who gets invited to parties and this is who you have to explain your worth to and why the hell are you here. That’s how it felt to me. I was like, I’m gonna lose my chance if I’m not thinner. I’m gonna miss this opportunity.”
As Megiddo launched, a change in management at Virgin Records took place. Hoffman says that the projects of the old guard were cast aside as new executives came in with their own favorites.
“She had an AR [artist and repertory] guy and executives at Virgin that were behind her and then as the album was released, that changed,” says Ross Hoffman. “She needed to get out of there. I knew a lawyer who had represented me…the result of that was phenomenal because he took advantage of the disorganization at Virgin. She walked [away with] her masters and owing them no money. It’s a very rare situation.”
This headshot taken for Hoffman’s first album, Megiddo, was the instigator of her eating disorder, she says. “I innocently started my first ‘diet’ to lose a few pounds for this shoot, not knowing it would set off 17 years of hell.”
Virgin failed to follow through with promotion of the album, despite positive reviews from publications such as Spin magazine. Hoffman was written up as a singer-songwriter, though she remains uncomfortable with that label.
“I think that if my first record came out under a band name I wouldn’t have been called a singer-songwriter,” she says. “…People think of me as a singer-songwriter because I have a Jewish girl name.”
Hoffman went home and attempted to recover from her self-starvation.
“So I go home with my mom and my sister and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore, I’m going to eat.’ But I didn’t know how to eat normally. My mom would be like, ‘Oh you’re driving to Richmond, I’m going to make you some cookies.’ I would eat all the cookies. Then I would hate myself and the only way to deal with having eaten all the cookies was to not eat anything or only eat 1,000 calories for a few days.”
The cycle had begun. Over a period of 17 years, Hoffman would put together music, play shows around the world, release albums and then retreat from the spotlight as her diet turned into her job.
“One of my tricks was to be vegan,” Hoffman says. “Being vegan in France is ridiculous. Most of the time I was in France I didn’t really get to enjoy it. Certainly in this period after my album came out, at this point in my eating disorder I was at my worst. At my most, only-eating-salad-with-no-dressing when I was in France.”
The test shots on the left for a French publication were taken in 1997, around Hoffman’s lowest weight. The photo on the right was taken at a photo shoot for Spin magazine during Hoffman’s first anorexic phase, before “it got out of control,” she says.
According to an eight-year study of 496 adolescent American girls, published by The Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 2010, 12 percent developed some type of eating disorder. Peak onset tended to be between the ages of 17 and 20. A large majority of girls monitored in the study recovered within a year, but relapses haunted some of them. Different studies show varying rates of long-term recovery, but most agree that many women can recover from their disorders to live healthy lives.
Like many women with eating disorders, Hoffman says she suffered from a combination of problems at different times: anorexia, binge eating and orthorexia, which the National Eating Disorders Association defines as “an obsession with proper or ‘healthful’ eating.”
Her father noticed the problem but didn’t understand it at first.
“Well, we’re talking about a guy who was born in 1947,” Ross says of himself. “I don’t think I heard the word or the phrase ‘eating disorder’ until after Lauren was born. Some time in the ’80s I heard about it. I was utterly clueless on a personal, experiential level. …My introduction to the concept was a sort of groping in the dark as it engulfed my daughter.”
Opportunities passed her by because of the eating disorder. Adam Schlesinger, of the band Fountains of Wayne, was starting a new indie-pop label and wanted her to come on board after she left Virgin.
“We went into a diner by the studio and what was more important to me was figuring out what vegan low-calorie soup I could order to eat,” Hoffman says. “I was starving. My brain was full of food porn…and exercising and weighing myself and reading about diet and exercise. My brain was so full of all that stuff that there wasn’t room to take up an opportunity like that.”
Dieting—or starving—typically meant locking down her life and withdrawing from other people to avoid difficult questions or social situations where food might be offered. During 2001 and 2002, she found a compromise by pausing her music career to study dance at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The part I’ve never told anybody is that I was thinking [dancing] was a way also to feed the beast of the eating disorder because I would by nature be exercising all day long and engaged with people doing stuff that wasn’t about food,” Hoffman says. “It was kind of appealing because my not-eating times would be very isolating. But also on an artistic level I wanted it to inform my music. Music was so tied up with these expectations. …The talk [in the music business] was so much about the business side of stuff. I wanted to be inspired. I wanted to be around people who didn’t expect fame and fortune because dancers don’t.”
This was why her third album, which came out in 2006, was titled Choreography.
On the other side of the pendulum, Hoffman at her highest weight while playing a show in Paris in 2004.
Hoffman’s best friend, Gwenn Barringer, met her well after the big launch with Virgin. In fact, it took a while before Barringer even realized Hoffman was a musician. A parade of fad diets were Barringer’s clue that something was wrong.
“That was definitely the tip-off,” Barringer says. “She was also…honest about having struggled with an eating disorder in the past. But I think what was the most difficult part for me was when she was going through these things like, ‘Oh I’m vegan. I’m paleo. I’m this or I’m that.’ She wasn’t identifying [that] at the time as being a part of the eating disorder, but I could so clearly see that it was. It was just an eating disorder couched as a health thing.”
“I had some health problems that I would use as excuses to become interested in diets,” Hoffman says. “I’m not doing paleo because I want to lose weight, I’m doing it because I want boundless energy like they promised me in the paleo book or because of sleeping disorders. …I kept looking to diets to solve all of those problems. Control, out of control. Shit.”
Becoming pregnant in 2008 helped begin a process of seeing her body differently in a way that may have led to Hoffman finally kicking her eating disorder.
“Being pregnant was amazing!” Hoffman, now 39, says. “Because I didn’t expect the same things from my body. It was a completely different perspective. I saw my body as the home for, the food for, a baby. I was a pregnant woman. I wasn’t trying to compete with skinny women on TV. And I was able to connect way more of that feeling, what are you hungry for? What makes you feel good and what makes you feel bad?”
Lauren Hoffman, with her daughter taken in 2009. Photo by Jen Fariello
About a year after giving birth to her daughter, Hoffman started to slip back into her old habits.
“I talked to her dad about it a fairly decent amount,” Barringer says. “Ross and I had conversations about it. We had several late-night conversations about like what do you do? Especially when it wasn’t this super restrictive calorie thing…like being vegan when you know that the heart about it isn’t about that.
“I didn’t know how to eat normally,” Hoffman says. “I didn’t know how to stop obsessing about these things in my mind. Eventually I would give in and find some new fast or diet online. I’ve done the Master Cleanse when you just drink lemon juice and cayenne pepper and maple syrup drinks for like 10 days and at the same time take laxatives. It’s totally horrible. I have done every single diet there is to do.”
In the end, the cure wasn’t the result of an intervention or a program or another fad diet. Hoffman just had enough.
She had recently put together her current band, The Secret Storm, with an all-star cast of Charlottesville musicians, including Ethan Lipscomb on keyboard (also the frontman of Just Sex), guitarist Tony Lechmanski of gothic rock band Bella Morte and Catherine Monnes on cello and violin. Oddly enough, Jeff Diehm, best known as the lead singer of The Last Dance, agreed to exchange a microphone for an electric bass. As they prepared for their second show at the Jefferson Theater in August 2014, she started on her old familiar path of food restriction.
Hoffman says the last day of her eating disorder was August 16, 2014, when her band opened for Bella Morte at the Jefferson Theater. Hoffman had restricted her eating to look thin for the concert, and once it was over she decided she wasn’t going to do that anymore. Photo by Rich Tarbell
NEXT SHOW
Lauren Hoffman & The Secret Storm with Harli Saxon & Juniper
7pm March 18
The Ante Room
“I tried some stupid starvation fasting diet because I was nervous about the show and I wanted to look skinny at the show,” Hoffman says. “So I did that. And right after that show I was like, I am fucking done. Just done. I am done with any of that shit. I’m not doing any of these things to myself anymore. None of this is sustainable. None of these are answers. If I gain weight then I do but I’m gonna dress myself nicely, I’m gonna treat myself well. I’m gonna have the lifestyle that I want to have and whatever my body is as a result of that is what it will be. …Sort of a European style and epicurean but it’s not the focus of your life. When you eat, you eat well. But when you don’t, you don’t think about it.”
It has been three years since Hoffman decided she was done. Today, she has settled on a happy, healthy moderation for her body and her music career (see sidebar on Hoffman’s eight rules for staying healthy). She and her band have just launched their new album, The Family Ghost. And they have also found that a relentless touring schedule and courting from industry players isn’t necessarily what it takes to find an audience.
Hoffman’s rules: Eat to live
1. I stopped weighing myself. I haven’t weighed myself in three years. I don’t even let the doctor weigh me.
2. I stopped reading any diet-related books, cookbooks, blogs or articles.
3. I got rid of my “aspirational” clothes, anything that only fit me after a good long starve.
4. I decided I would accept whatever my body looked like once I was living and eating the way I wanted, and I focused on that; on living and eating in a way that felt right and sustainable for me.
5. I started going to my doctor to address my energy and health problems, instead of believing diets that claimed to give me boundless energy and fix my IBS and sleep problems. I got better skin products instead of believing that a diet would cure my acne.
6. I didn’t try to change the voice in my head from “I’m so fat” and “I hate my body” to things like “My body is beautiful,” because that’s still a judgment. Instead I told myself simply “This is my body.” I stopped judging my body from the outside and started feeling it from the inside.
7. I stopped having any judgment about foods being good or bad. All food is allowed, nothing is off-limits, not for health reasons or for weight reasons.
8. But I do have some eating habits that work best for me: I eat high-fat, whole food and a good amount of animal protein. I find that I feel best when I eat smaller portions of richer foods, instead of big portions of low-fat, unsatisfying foods. (I have gelato or ice cream instead of fat-free frozen yogurt. I use a ton of butter and olive and coconut oil when I cook. Full-fat dairy, prosciutto, chicken with the skin, eggs, bread, pasta, pizza, sausage and bacon are always in my house.)
Hoffman was “just chilling at home and [hadn’t] done anything to promote my music, when I started getting these fat checks. And I figured out that ‘Broken,’ a song off [my] 2006 record, had been favored by the algorithm of Pandora. So it still gets played all the time on Pandora. A few of my songs do…and that really inspired me in this way. When you do the work and put your heart into it and do everything in your power to put stuff out there, it has a life of its own.”
Lauren Hoffman & The Secret Storm shot the video for their single “Broken” in February. Photo by Aaron Farrington
“Her catalog is deep and rich and varied,” Ross Hoffman says. “I consider her a success in a way that I don’t think that she does. …She was dealt this four-aces-hand of talent. I was there all the way. She wrote something that was better than average when she was 3. And at 12 she was writing full songs that she was paying attention to. She got dealt a lot of talent.”
The Secret Storm plays shows about once a month, usually in front of packed houses. The Pandora checks keep coming, and the band is filming a new music video for the single “Friend for the Apocalypse.” Another album is already planned.
“At some point she slowly moved to the center of her being and said, ‘Fuck this,’” says Ross. “It was very apparent that she abandoned the idea of looking for cures and decided that she was ultimately in charge. That was very nice to see. I’m not speaking of cures, but I know she’s out the other side of it, and that is really good.”
Brian Calhoun created Chickapig after a night spent playing a board game so boring he can’t even remember its name. He refers to Chickapig as “farmer’s chess.” Photo by Eze Amos
One night last February, Charlottesville luthier Brian Calhoun and his good friend, musician Dave Matthews, walked into Kardinal Hall with a massive handmade Chickapig board. Calhoun had measured the back of his car and made the board as big as he could while still fitting it into his trunk.They played a few games over beers, and decided to go back the following week, which started a tradition: Chickapig Tuesdays at Kardinal Hall have been a thing ever since. In the early days, as many as 100 people would show up to play in a night, and Calhoun used the evenings as an opportunity to crowdsource the idea he’d come up with in 2014.
It’s not unusual for our best ideas to occur when we’re running, driving or showering. In fact, it’s a phenomenon so universal that psychologists coined a term to describe it: incubation. Research shows that when you’re performing a mindless task, your brain switches to autopilot mode, freeing up your subconscious to work on something else. This was the case for Calhoun.
Brian Calhoun, owner of Rockbridge Guitar Company, launched Chickapig with a Kickstarter campaign, and has produced 2,500 first edition games. Photo by Eze Amos
After a night spent playing a board game so boring he can’t even remember its name, the owner of Rockbridge Guitar Company decided to try his hand at creating something other than guitars—a board game for him and his friends to enjoy. Enter Chickapig, a strategic game in which four players move their red, yellow, green or blue hybrid animal pieces across the board into their designated goal, bouncing off of hay bales and avoiding obstacles like cow poop. Calhoun came up with the rules and premise of what he has dubbed “farmer’s chess” during states of meditative distraction.
“When I was driving or when I was going to sleep, I’d think about how pieces could work together to do something: to get across a board or escape through a goal,” Calhoun says. “Then one day it just sort of literally popped into my head how the two pieces, which ended up being the chickapigs and the hay bales, could work together.”
After that creative epiphany, he went home and made little cardboard pieces and placed them on a chess board.
“Quickly it was too many pieces, not enough squares. And then I made a cardboard board and it was too many squares, not enough pieces,” he says. “It was a day of that before I narrowed it down to the number of squares and the number of pieces, and then it was about a week of just kind of messing around with those parts before I had what ended up being 90 percent of what Chickapig is today.”
After he figured out the game’s basic premise, he made a handful of wooden boards and chickapig tokens out of a Play-Doh-like mold called Model Magic.
“I gave them to 10 of my friends and I thought that was going to be all that Chickapig ever was,” he says. “And then I would realize that they were playing when I wasn’t there and I was always so surprised. And then I would find out that their kids were playing on their own or with their friends. And my friends were playing with their friends that I didn’t know. And more and more I would have people be like, ‘Hey, I played that game.’”
At that point, Calhoun knew he was onto something. He began studying board game design and started tweaking details.
“There are essentially dials that you can turn to make [the game] tilt more toward a game of luck or a game of skill. Like what the cards say has a big impact on the outcome of the game and what the different rolls of the dice do and that type of thing,” Calhoun says. “What I wanted was a game where you could learn it pretty quickly but you could also get really good at it.”
Rules of the game
Four players select their color of six chickapigs, and sit opposite one another. The aim is to move your entire flock through the goal on the opposite end of the board, but your opponents do their best to stop you by putting their hay bales, chickapigs or the cow in your path. A chickapig moves in a straight line—forward, backward or sideways—
until it encounters a stationary object: another pig, the cow, the perimeter of the board, etc., which counts as one move.
When a player rolls a 1 for the first time in the game, he has the option of freeing the cow from its fence in the middle of the board and putting it on any space. When the next player rolls a 1, she can move the cow to another space, but a piece of poop is left behind. When a chickapig slides through a poop square, that player must pick up a poop card (“all of the poop cards are bad because no one wants to step on poop” the Chickapig website states). Alternatively, when a 2 is rolled, that player picks up a daisy card (all are good). The first player with all six pigs through their goal wins.
Chickapig nights at Kardinal Hall have become so popular that they’ve even added a Chickapig sandwich to the menu, and Kardinal Hall staffers still receive Chickapig orders from people living as far away as Seattle (the Preston Avenue restaurant was the main seller of Calhoun’s prototypes).
“It gave me a chance to go talk to people—that’s when I had Chickapig 95 percent figured out—but I talked to people about everything: What do you think of this card? What do you think about the dice? What do you think about this piece?” he says. “I just asked questions to strangers, which was great because your friends are either too nice or too mean, and I just got a tremendous amount of feedback. And also, we were able to see, ‘Oh in this situation, such and such doesn’t work, so I need to change this role.’ After doing that for six months or so, which is a lot of games of Chickapig, it got to the point of confidently saying, ‘There’s no scenario that can happen that I don’t have an answer for, which was a cool place to be.’”
One of the attendees of Chickapig Tuesdays was board game publisher and Charlottesville resident Pete Fenlon. He’s published games for more than 35 years, and his credits include the popular German board game Settlers of Catan. He’s now the CEO of Catan Studios, and he says that he and his chief development partner, Coleman Charlton, were charmed by Chickapig.
“We really liked the game, which is rare, because you know we run into a lot of games and a lot of people who think they have a good game, but in reality have something less than a great experience,” Fenlon says. “And you know, something that might be fun for them but really is not something that is ready for others, much less ready for commercial development.”
Fenlon thought Calhoun was ready, and he and Charlton offered to help him with any development questions he had. Calhoun even incorporated one of their suggestions into his current design, changing one last rule in the final hour before launching.
“A great game often is a game where there isn’t an age limit, it’s just a matter of having rules that are easy to learn and difficult to master,” Fenlon says. “Chickapig has all the elements of a great game. …It’s fun and it’s got great replay value. In other words, it’s something you want to continue to play even after you’ve played it once or a few times. …So we thought it had legs and we still do.”
But launching a game and navigating all the nuances of design, development and marketing isn’t easy—1,000 new games will be released this year.
“Gaming as a whole is no longer considered just a nerdy niche thing. If anything, it’s becoming more and more part of the mainstream storytelling and social entertainment culture,” says Fenlon. “That’s all great and that’s positive and makes it easier to market games. But at the same time, just the sheer volume of the content coming out makes it harder to find your way through the white noise, and this is a big challenge for Brian and Chickapig. And he’s got a good weapon because he’s got good content and I think he’s got the nucleus of a great community. So we’re thinking he’s gonna make it.”
When Brian Calhoun was in the early developmental stages of Chickapig, he and his friend, Dave Matthews, took the prototype to Kardinal Hall to play on a Tuesday night. They brought the game back the following week, and interest quickly spread: Chickapig Night at Kardinal Hall was born. Photo by Tom McGovern
In the wake of feedback he received at Kardinal Hall, Calhoun churned out 1,000 games with the help of jigs he made at his guitar studio. Word spread fairly quickly once he began selling the sets at events like FleaVILLE, and he started researching what it would take to manufacture Chickapig on a larger scale. At that point, Matthews came on board officially, along with friends Fenton Williams and Mark Rebein as business partners to help promote Chickapig. They launched a presale of the game on Kickstarter, which has a large gaming community.
“The games were the exact same prices then as they are now…it was just a ‘buy it ahead of time’ and it was to reach this community of people that we weren’t associated with,” Calhoun says.
Going the Kickstarter route also allowed him to retain financial control of the endeavor.
“Just because my friends might be successful in the other things they do, they wanted me to control this company and to own this. I don’t want a hand out,” he says. “We’re doing this the right way and so that let me keep the equity by raising the money to make the next round, which was, ‘Let’s buy 5,000 of these things.’”
The strategy paid off: Chickapig passed its Kickstarter goal of $30,000 within 12 hours, with a final tally of $86,414.
By the numbers
1,500 Chickapig prototypes
$86,414amount raised by the Kickstarter campaign
55Chickapig Tuesdays at Kardinal Hall to date
2,500 first edition games
4 versions of Chickapig
1 pooping cow per game
There are four different types of Chickapig sets, and local business Cardboard Safari manufactures the standard version. For the version with 3-D tokens, Calhoun’s mom makes the cows and friend Kelly Falk helps make the chickapigs out of Model Magic.
“There’s four different colors and six of each color for each game,” Falk says. “I usually make the chickapigs and then they sit for about 24 hours before I use a fine-point marker to draw on the wings and the legs. And then after that, they go in little baggies with the cows for each game.”
When Calhoun first showed Falk how to make the chicken/pig hybrids, he emphasized that they didn’t have to be perfect.
“He was like, different sizes are fine, you know, the ears, the eyes, the noses, they’re all going to be a little bit different and that’s what makes it really special is that they’re handmade and each game is going to be unique,” Falk recalls. “And I just thought that was really cool and I was excited to be a part of the process.”
Chicka-what?
Chickapig creator Brian Calhoun was destined to be the mastermind behind “farmer’s chess.” Growing up on a farm in Lexington, Virginia, Calhoun loved cows and was always out in the pasture chasing them around. So when it came time to create characters for his game, incorporating cows into the mix was a no-brainer.
As for the chickapig game pieces—a hybrid chicken/pig animal—that’s just where his mind wanders when he starts doodling. “If I get stuck on a long phone call and I have a pencil and a piece of paper in front of me and I’m mindlessly listening to somebody talk, I will often end up with all kinds of animal hybrids,” he says.
Calhoun’s approach to designing and promoting Chickapig stems from the same homegrown entrepreneurial spirit that helped make Rockbridge Guitar Company a success. Calhoun grew up playing guitar and started building instruments in high school, taking after his guitar teacher.
“He was in a neighborhood of white picket fences, and he lived in the house with bamboo and glass orbs hanging and concrete sculptures that he made, and he [would be] in his yard with long hair and blue pants with moons on them,” Calhoun says. “He built all these weird instruments as a hobby and I just thought it was awesome.”
Calhoun built a mandolin to fulfill an independent study requirement in high school, and his interest took off from there.
“I was lucky enough in Rockbridge County, where I grew up, to have an unofficial apprenticeship with a mandolin builder and a violin builder and that’s where I sort of honed woodworking skills and developed an understanding of how wood could be manipulated to make sound,” Calhoun says.
After building a few instruments with fellow luthier Randall Ray, he suggested they form a business together.
“[Randall] always says I was too young and stupid to know that nobody could do that. But I believed we could,” Calhoun says. “I had this great guitar that my parents had given me as a high school graduation present and when Randall and I made a guitar, I was like, ‘I like this more than my other guitar, and I think other people will too.’”
He began taking his guitars to music festivals and steadily building a clientele—he’s doing the same with Chickapig.
“We’re building people that believe in it one person at a time,” Calhoun says. “Sort of the way you grow a band organically.”
Bars, breweries and tailgates were all fair game for marketing, too. Because he was already well-connected in the music industry, the game took off with artists (the table in Matthews’ tour bus is a Chickapig board), and he even threw in a Chickapig freebie with custom guitar orders. But when an unexpectedly large crowd showed up at the Chickapig tent at Nelson County music festival The Festy Experience, Calhoun shifted focus.
“Where I thought people would come in and drink, by the end of the first day, there were like 60 kids in there playing, just packed,” he says. “And then the second and third day the same thing, just filled with kids. …Around that time, I was getting more and more people telling me that they were playing at home with their kids. I was thinking back to the early days when my friends’ kids were playing it and I was like, ‘What are we doing? We should be seeing how this goes with kids.’”
Calhoun turned to Michael Riley, principal of Charlottesville Catholic School and a frequent attendee of Chickapig Tuesdays, and the two brainstormed ways to introduce Chickapig into local schools. Riley invited Calhoun to come to CCS to demo the game for faculty and students. He also coordinated with a committee of Charlottesville independent schools to institute Chickapig clubs.
“Each of the other private schools in town, we’re all creating our own little Chickapig leagues at our schools,” Riley says. He and another teacher sponsor an after-school club that will host small tournaments over the next few weeks. The best players will advance to an intra-school tournament in April.
“Brian wants to create a Chickapig trophy that’ll travel from school to school, whoever wins the tournament,” Riley says. “So I think he’s going to put an actual giant chickapig on top of a trophy. …The idea of tying the schools together in town was something that I talked with Brian about and he’s very passionate about getting this in the hands of kids.”
Another school participating in the league is Mountaintop Montessori. Teacher Judah Brownstein is a close friend of Calhoun’s. A former U.S. Chess champion, Brownstein plays Chickapig regularly and is also helping Calhoun develop a two-player version of the game. He says it’s a great game for children because it teaches chess-like concepts in a fun, interactive way.
“The advantage of Chickapig is that the four-person dynamic adds the social element, which requires people to interact with one another, lobby for placement of certain pieces, try to convince people to do certain things and work together in some sense,” Brownstein says. “It ends up creating this fun game—four people interacting and strategizing but also having to work together through certain issues.”
After noticing that children were especially interested in playing Chickapig, creator Brian Calhoun decided to partner with local private schools to bring boards into classrooms. He recently surprised the Southwood Boys & Girls Club (above) with boards designed with a custom logo. Photo by Eze Amos
Calhoun continues to stay involved in the community, demonstrating Chickapig to students and teachers around town with the hope of increasing child engagement. He recently surprised each independent school with a custom Chickapig board complete with their logos, and he did the same for the Southwood Boys & Girls Club and the Virginia Institute of Autism.
“Brian and Fenton came to our classroom back in December to introduce the game and strategies to our students. After watching an introductory video and no more than 20 minutes of supervised play, the students had started moving cow poop and collecting chickapigs as if they had created the game themselves,” says Jake Frazier of the Virginia Institute of Autism. “The game has become an instant favorite in the classroom; they choose it over our Nintendo Wii U for breaks. When’s the last time you saw preteens choose a board game over electronics?”
Frazier says Chickapig has reinforced a variety of crucial social skills, from teamwork to problem-solving to sportsmanship. The Virginia Institute of Autism even has Calhoun booked to discuss being an inventor for a career-oriented social skills class.
“The fact that this thing that I came up with that was just supposed to be fun for me and my friends might actually be this helpful tool within teaching and with kids. It makes me feel way more proud of it,” Calhoun says.
