TCB June 15, 2016

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point triad-city-beat.com June 15 – 21, 2016

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READING GUIDE Starring Whitney Way Thore

PAGE 16

Gay in America PAGE 3, 14

Guinevere goes gaming PAGE 26

Brock Turner, rapist PAGE 15

June 15 — 21, 2016

Write for Triad City Beat Now accepting intern applications for July – December 2016 Send a resume and cover letter to eric@triad-city-beat.com by June 10.

College grads, women, trans folks and people of color strongly encouraged to apply.

315 South Elm Street Greensboro, NC 27401

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EVENTS

Playing June 17 – 23

Thursday, June 16 @ 8 pm

Open Mic Night

The Room Un-Cut LIVE!

Friday, June 17 @ 8 pm

Featuring Greg Sestero, Star of “The Room” and writer of “The Disaster Artist” ONE NIGHT ONLY!!! 9 p.m. Friday, June 17. $13 tickets!

2nd Today with Taylor & Micah Saturday, June 18 @ 8 pm

Jake Decker

Monday, June 20 @ 7 pm

Mystery Movie Monday --OTHER EVENTS & SCREENINGS-NEG & Geeksboro Present

MADD CITY GREENSBORO NC’s BIGGEST Super Smash Bros Melee Tournament of the Summer 11 a.m. Saturday, June 18. CASH PRIZES!

TV Club Presents “Preacher” Based on the hit comic book series! 10 p.m. Sunday, June 19. Free Admission With Drink Purchase!

Star Trek Countdown Featuring the TOP 50 EPISODES of Star Trek 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 22. FREE ADMISSION

FRIDAY JUNE 24 MATT MARSHAK | OPENING PERFORMER - TITUS GANT

602 S Elam Ave • Greensboro

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8:30 p.m. Thursday, June 23 $3 Buy In! Up to Six Player Teams! Winners get CASH PRIZE!

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No safe spaces

UP FRONT 3 Editor’s Notebook 4 City Life 6 Commentariat 6 The List 7 Barometer 7 Unsolicited Endorsement

by Brian Clarey

NEWS 8 Affordable housing for W-S 10 Fresh food access in GSO 12 HPJ: Treatment as a solution to heroin scourge

OPINION 14 Editorial: Playing with guns 14 Citizen Green: Get it together 15 It Just Might Work: Integration 15 Fresh Eyes: Rape culture

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COVER 16 Our big fat fabulous reading guide

CULTURE

FUN & GAMES

SHOT IN THE TRIAD

22 Food: Blue Apron baby 23 Barstool: Strange brew 24 Music: When the sound cuts off

26 Redemption for Guinevere

28 West Smith St, Greensboro

GAMES

ALL SHE WROTE

27 Jonesin’ Crossword

30 Guns N’ Roses

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

I’m pretty far left. I think Bernie Sanders has good ideas.

I’m a member of the ACLU. But I’m also a prosecutor. I have come to believe that all drug offenses are violent. It breeds violence, and it breeds all kinds of other disasters in your community.

— Guilford County Assistant District Attorney Jordan Green, in High Point Journal, page 12

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Box 24, Greensboro, NC 27406 • Office: 336-256-9320 BUSINESS PUBLISHER Allen Broach

SALES DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Dick Gray

EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Brian Clarey

SALES EXECUTIVE Lamar Gibson

allen@triad-city-beat.com

brian@triad-city-beat.com

SENIOR EDITOR Jordan Green jordan@triad-city-beat.com

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Eric Ginsburg eric@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL INTERNS Joanna Rutter

dick@triad-city-beat.com

lamar@triad-city-beat.com

SALES EXECUTIVE Cheryl Green cheryl@triad-city-beat.com

CONTRIBUTORS Carolyn de Berry Nicole Crews Anthony Harrison Matt Jones Amanda Salter Caleb Smallwood

Cover photography of Whitney Way Thore by Alex Klein

NEST Advertise in NEST, our monthly real estate insert, the final week of every month! nest@triad-city-beat.com

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TCB IN A FLASH DAILY @ triad-city-beat.com First copy is free, all additional copies are $1.00. ©2015 Beat Media Inc.

I was trying to get my head around the thing: what drives a man to shoot up a place full of people he’s never met, what happens in a crowded nightclub before dawn when the bullets start flying, what it might feel like to be part of a persecuted class of Americans.

“Gay bars are supposed to be safe, right?” I asked Dick Gray, our director of advertising.

“Gay bars are not exactly safe,” he said.

“Right,” I said, remembering some of the rooms on the lower end of the French Quarter, tough as any biker bar in town, and with some of the same clientele. “But it’s a safe place to be gay.”

He looked at me then the way everyone looks at me when I say something stupid.

“It’s never safe to be gay in America,” he said.

Lots of places have been shot up in the last 12 months in the United States: A black church. A Planned Parenthood clinic. A military recruiting center. A community college. A state-run clinic.

It’s worth pointing out that all of these shootings were perpetrated by American citizens with legal weaponry. But the problem here transcends gun control and fear of the other — though those are major tributaries to this river of violence flowing through our country.

The problem here and now is that my friend Dick — and all my other friends in the LGBT+ community — don’t feel safe being themselves in their own country, where they live and work and pay taxes, and where freedom is supposedly our most cherished value.

Before Omar Mateen killed dozens of people in the Pulse nightclub, its patrons had been persecuted by their own state legislature: In 1977, Florida overturned a gay-rights law based on an effort by Save Our Children, an anti-gay group ‘It’s never safe to be that successfully conflated homosexuality with pedogay in America,’ he philia. The state senator said. who sponsored the bill said it was designed to say, “We are tired of you and wish you would go back in the closet.”

Twenty years later, the state passed a Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples basic American rights, and in 2008 passed a constitutional amendment affirming the position. Two years ago, the state approved criminal penalties for clerks who perform same-sex marriages.

Gay, queer and trans people have been under attack in Florida — and the rest of the country — for more than 40 years.

LGBT+ have never been safe. Only now are we starting to count the bodies.

triad-city-beat.com

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

CONTENTS

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June 15 — 21, 2016

CITY LIFE June 15 – 21

by Joanna Rutter

ALL WEEKEND Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore @ UNCG Auditorium (GSO) Otherwise known as The Witch’s Curse, this silly, old-timey supernatural romp comes to you from the same dudes behind Pirates of Penzance. (Think you haven’t heard of it? Go look up “Modern Major General.”) For the uninitiated, the low cost of entry and the removal of a language barrier may make this light English opera even...approachable. It runs Thursday through Saturday with evening performances and a Sunday matinee. Tickets and times via performingarts.uncg.edu.

THURSDAY Cajun Country Shrimp Boil @ the Edible Schoolyard (GSO), 6:30 p.m.

Jay Pierce, executive chef of the Marshall Free House, teaches this adult class, where you’ll cook shrimp, sausage, corn on the cob, garlic and potatoes in a big pot and eat it with your hands, as is tradition. (Germophobes need not apply?) Jay promises to whip up some snacks and lemon chess pie with a saltine cracker crust.

Go hold him to it. Find the event on Facebook for more info.

SATURDAY Firearms Safe Surrender @ Waughtown Baptist Church (W-S), 9 a.m.

Especially in the light of recent tragedy, Saturday could be a good day to safely pass off your unloaded firearms to the Winston-Salem Police Department if you’ve been thinking it’s time for them to go. They’ll take handguns, long guns, BB guns and airsoft guns, along with ammunition. All weapons being turned in should be secured in trunks or backs of pickup trucks, from which the officers will come to collect them. Contact Lt. Paterson at 336.773.7949 with questions.

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12th annual Triad Juneteenth Festival @ Bailey Park and BioTech Place (W-S), 11 a.m.

Set symbolically in what used to be an African-American business community, celebration of this historic black holiday in Winston will be wild with MC Busta Brown and Kia Hood, and a schedule including a black family forum, an Andrae Crouch and Daryl Coley tribute, and performers such as Cinnamon Reggae and the Renaissance Choir. You’ll get a “freedom train ticket” to be punched in each festival area. Try not to get obsessive about it.

For more information, visit triadculture.org.

FRIDAY

Birth of the Cool Juneteenth Celebration @ New Winston Museum (W-S), 6 p.m.

Diana Tuffin’s smooth stylings in various tongues and tones provide a multilingual backdrop for this monthlong photography exhibit showing how local artist Owen Daniels captured Miles Davis and other jazz musicians on film. Visit newwinston.org for more info about the event and exhibition.

triad-city-beat.com

Friendge with Andrea Vail @ Shelf Life Art + Supply Co. (GSO), noon This Charlotte-based artist pays a visit to Greensboro to collect participant-made tassels for her ongoing project, Friendge, consisting of tassels pieced into fringe created by different communities she’s visited or collected from, to build an ornamental border that “symbolizes inclusiveness rather than exclusivity.” Participants will learn to make tassels and get to hang with Andrea. Shelf Life’s Cassandra hinted at her coolness. Drop-ins are welcome; RSVP recommended at tinyurl.com/friendge.

Juneteenth Luncheon @ Old Salem Visitor Center (W-S), noon Old Salem Museums & Gardens in partnership with Winston-Salem State University hosts an observance honoring the abolition of slavery and the 250th anniversary of Salem’s founding. Jon Sensbach, an African Moravian scholar focused on 18th and 19th century Forsyth County history, will be the featured speaker, clearly. Guests can also tour the St. Philips African Moravian Church, where the ending of slavery was announced on May 21, 1865. Make reservations by calling 800.441.5305.

Backwards Broadway: A 40th Anniversary Gala @ High Point Community Theatre, 7 p.m.

The Triad’s standby musical performers will sing songs that they were never quite intended to sing, and you’ll want to be there. Numbers will be pulled from everything from The Music Man to more recent hits like Next to Normal. And gee whillikers, this theater’s held up for 40 years? Cause enough to go out and unconsciously tap along. Find tickets by visiting online.etix.com and searching for HP Community Theatre.

SUNDAY Tea time @ High Point Museum, 1 p.m.

Sip on the kinds of colonial-era teas that were so hot they got dumped in harbors. Learn about imports and tea grown in colonial gardens and learn about its power and the history behind its American Revolution boycott. All ages welcome; it’s drop-in. Visit highpointmuseum.org for info.

Juneteenth Jamboree @ 1006 West Florida St. (GSO), 2 p.m.

Queer People of Color Collective’s lead organizer April Parker is throwing a Juneteenth bash on a friend’s property, and she’s pulled out all the stops: Food truck, vendors and a graduation celebration for the class of 2016. As she says on the event page, “black joy is an act of resistance.” Powerful sentiment; a very likely good time. Find the event on Facebook.

MONDAY

Greensboro Community Makerspace grand opening @ Nussbaum Center (GSO), 10 a.m.

There’s a new co-working space in town, though the kind of work you’ll get done there will be in the miniscule and plastic variety. That’s right: This makerspace is expressly for the purpose of Lego creations, and they have the 70,000 pieces to prove it. Sounds like a recipe for inner-7-year-old heaven. They’re in Suite 1107. Come say hi to the staff at Triad City Beat on the second floor when you stop by. See their Facebook page for more info.

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Two views on revealing sensitive personal details

I knew Ellin Schott and her son Hunter very well [“Death of a panhandler”; by Jordan Green and Eric Ginsburg; June 8, 2016]. I was expecting to find an article about how a person incarcerated in the Guilford County Jail would suddenly die while in their custody. I was expecting perhaps some sort of debate on the idea of jailing people for panhandling.

This “story” is nothing more than dredged-up personal family business made public for no discernible reason. I’m guessing it’s because she had a drug problem or became homeless that you feel you have some sort of license to take their private affairs, publish them and pass it off as journalism.

Shame on you.

Randall Howell, via triad-city-beat. com If her family was against this article and its honesty, it wouldn’t have been written. The Jennifer McCormack mentioned in this article was a close friend of mine. Jordan has written very critical, in-depth, and well-researched articles about what happened to her under the same company’s care. Jordan Green is a good man who really cares about what happens to people in his community. He and Eric report on the lives people lead to prove that anyone can become addicted and end up in desperate situations.

They are pointing out that another person tragically lost their life due to indifference and greed in a broken system. Removing the stigma that is attached to addiction will only help those afflicted to seek help. Calling it “personal family business” sounds as if there should be shame around what happened, and there shouldn’t be.

I send my thoughts and love to her friends and family, and thank them for not letting her death be swept under the rug by this horrible “healthcare”

provider. It takes great strength to be so open. Correct Care Solutions and their employees need to be held accountable.

Sarah Sellers, Greensboro

HB 2, the Pulse massacre and the NC GOP

Gov. McCrory, do you really think lowering the flags to half-staff in North Carolina shows us your compassion for the Orlando LGBTQ community lost and injured? We know your heart and mind from your previous actions with your quick support for HB2 and “Amendment One.” With your Republican legislature that applies their Christian faith and interpretations similar to Sharia law, are you better than the shooter himself?

Your efforts to now appease those you so evidently hate and legislate against will come back to haunt you in November.

This is a call for every LGBTQ North Carolinian and for our friends to vote in November and turn out the zealots who want to make North Carolina a Christian, conservative state.

Now is the time to stand up against those who will demonize each of us and call us criminals and evildoers and sinners and say we’re despised

by God. Now is the time to stand up against true evil in our state and make our presence known.

I know I will. I am Richard Gray of Greensboro, and I know that I will vote in November, and I will not vote for you, Mr. McCrory, or any of your Republican cohorts, whether for local, state or national office. I am a proud, gay man born and raised in North Carolina, and I know evil when I see and hear it.

I am a North Carolinian, and an American. I am Pulse.

Dick Gray, Greensboro Editor’s note: Dick Gray is the director of advertising for Triad City Beat.

8 facts about NC reproductive rights

by Joanna Rutter 1. Above-average sex ed mandates North Carolina mandates sex and HIV education (one of only 21 states that do so, and only one of 13 that require the curriculum to be medically accurate), with a stress on abstinence. This mandate follows the Healthy Youth Act that passed in North Carolina in 2009, which requires all sex and HIV education curriculum to be objective and scientifically peer-reviewed. NARAL Pro-Choice of North Carolina says on its website that it replaced an abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum that had been in place for 15 years.

2. Condoms available throughout the Triad According to the Guttmacher Institute, almost all (95 percent) of unintended pregnancies are attributable to the third of people who do not use contraceptives or use them inconsistently. Planned Parenthood in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, health centers at almost all Triad colleges, county health departments and Alcohol & Drug Services locations offer free condoms via the Triad Health Project, says their website.

3. Higher-than-average unintended (and expensive) pregnancies In 2010, 54 percent of all pregnancies in North Carolina were unintended, more than the national average of 45 percent. In their most recent report in 2010, the Guttmacher Institute said that federal and state governments spent $858.3 million on public insurance programs like Medicaid for unintended pregnancies in NC that year.

4. Maternity/paternity leave not guaranteed Some states have laws that require private employers to give employees time off for the birth or adoption of a child, or to care for a family member with a serious illness. North Carolina does not have such a law, but the Family and Medical Leave Act usually covers employees of companies with 50 or more employees; small business employers with fewer than 50 employees are not required to provide leave.

5. NC abortion rates high, but steadily decreasing The Center for Disease Control reports

that 24,439 abortions took place in North Carolina in 2014 — the lowest number since 2003 — and that of those abortions, 2,521 were performed in Guilford and Forsyth counties (around 10 percent). The state also has the 11th highest abortion rate in the country.

6. Strictest abortion time cutoffs A pregnancy is usually considered viable at 24-26 weeks, but North Carolina is one of three states that bans abortions more than 20 weeks after fertilization, the other two being Mississippi and South Carolina. This state law, which requires abortion providers to submit their patient’s ultrasounds (usually considered private documents) when an abortion is performed after 16 weeks, was signed by Gov. Pat McCrory in June 2015, though of abortions performed in North Carolina in 2014, the state health department reports 99.9 percent were done at 20 weeks or less after fertilization.

7. Triad abortion providers ghost in HP There are plenty of places to get an abortion in Greensboro and in Winston-Salem, but a representative of the the only abortion provider in High Point — Carolina Woman Care at 712 N. Elm St. — said in a recent phone call that it’s planning to end abortion services soon, in preparation for its doctor’s eventual retirement. There are religiously affiliated pregnancy care centers in all three cities.

8. Triad counties provide abortion services unavailable elsewhere As of a 2013 NARAL press release, 86 percent of North Carolina counties did not have an abortion provider, making it difficult for people living in rural areas to obtain abortion care (that’s keeping in mind that citizens out-of-county may also have to zig-zag due to the 72-hour consideration period). Guilford and Forsyth counties are among the few that do. Numbers from the NC State Center for Health Statistics capture how the geographic scarcity of providers can affect people seeking to end pregnancies; in 2014, 1,087 people had abortions in Forsyth County, 785 of whom were county residents — perhaps drawing some of the 157 from Davidson County or 28 in Stokes who couldn’t obtain care there.

have the best winning record in NBA history. Maybe that’s why 88 percent of our readers who voted chose GSW, while just 12 percent picked LeBron, Kyrie & company.

New question: Where would you like to go on vacation? Vote online at triad-city-beat.com!

90

60

50

10

GSW

12%

LeBron, Kyrie & Company

All She Wrote

88%

Shot in the Triad

20

Games

30

Fun & Games

40

Culture

Readers: It may help that by the time most readers started voting in

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Cover Story

Eric Ginsburg: You guys are kind of embarrassing — let me handle this one. The Cleveland Cavaliers are a great team. They leveled Golden State in Game 3, winning by 30 points, and LeBron James & Kyrie Irving both dropped 41 points in the Cavs’ Game 5 win over the Warriors (admittedly with GSW Draymond Green out for a game). But they aren’t nearly as skilled as the Warriors, or even the Thunder who the Splash Brothers and the rest of the golden boys fended off in the semi-finals. I expect — and hope — to see Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and the other California titans finish this one off during Game 6 on Thursday night.

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by Eric Ginsburg Your dog is cute, I guess. But it’s not a corgi.

There are many adorable small animals in the world. Mini-lop bunnies, for instance, with their droopy ears and wiggling little noses. But nothing beats a li’l corgi pup.

The big ears, the short legs, the little rump, and best of all, that gigantic smile — I just can’t handle it. It’s their cuteness more than the practicality that attracts me to them, but corgis are superior for more than just their looks. Corgis are the perfect size to avoid the annoying yappy dog category, the kind that look more like oversized rodents than dogs, and small enough that they can’t jump up on the counter and eat your food.

But back to the looks — search Instagram for corgis and you’ll see what I mean. You could start with some of my favorites, including Winston-Salem’s own Charlie the Corgi.

And there’s Nugget, Noodle and Huey. Just the other day I started following @taleoftwocorgis, which features two little goobers — siblings, actually — one with brown markings and the other black.

There’s a rule in our household: no tagging me in corgi videos. I can handle the photos, kind of, but when it comes to adorable videos of these pups trying to climb stairs, or smiling uncontrollably or a litter of corgi pups tumbling over each other, I just can’t even.

I desperately want a corgi, or really two.

And all my friends know it well. I’m resting my head on a large, plush stuffed animal corgi as I write this, and I have a daily corgi calendar.

But I’m too damn practical to break down and adopt one, recognizing that I need to wait until a more stable station in life when I can commit to taking care of one.

I’ve never had a dog — my mom rightly insisted she’d end up being the one to care for it — and I didn’t even do very well taking care of our family’s pet bunny as a kid. I lost it when a good friend added an adorable corgi pup named Piper to her life, but when she told me that she needed to go home daily during lunch and talked about the complications with traveling or nights out in a different Triad city, I knew my dream would need to wait.

Until then, there’s Instagram and playdates with my friend’s dog. But in my heart, I know corgis are worth the wait.

Opinion

Jordan Green: Golden State Warriors? I hesitate to even wade in because I’m not following the tournament. I’m reduced to evaluating the teams based on their hometowns’ respective histories. On the one hand, Cleveland is a great rock and roll city, giving us Alan Freed, Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. On the other hand, I love the fact that the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, and that the gritty, working class city in the East Bay is kind of an antidote to neighboring San Francisco’s airy bohemianism, so I’ll go with Golden State.

Corgis

News

Brian Clarey: Seriously? I don’t have time for this crap. But I will say that I like the Warriors in seven. I see them losing the next contest in Cleveland — it’s a game those fans have been waiting on for a decade — and then wrapping it up at home. And I should add that I haven’t watched a single NBA game all season long.

this week’s Barometer poll, the Golden State Warriors led the Cleveland Cavaliers three games to one. No team has ever come back from that much of a deficit in the NBA Finals, the commentators repeatedly remind us, though the Warriors did just that in the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder. And they

Up Front

By the time you read this, it may all be over. And despite an extreme lack of relevant sports knowledge on behalf of most — but not all — of our editors, they all ended up agreeing with our readers on this matter.

triad-city-beat.com

Who will win the NBA Finals?

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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NEWS

For Cleveland Homes residents, transformation comes with a move

by Jordan Green

The Housing Authority of Winston-Salem has asked the city to invest $4.5 million to support a $30 million federal grant to transform the Cleveland Avenue Homes community, but council members want more details about case management services to support the relocation of residents.

Some members of Winston-Salem City Council want more clarity about plans to relocate residents before committing city funds to support a $30 million federal grant from the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem to revitalize the area.

During its meeting on Monday, the finance committee of city council considered a request by the housing authority to commit $4.5 million over a six-year period to pay for improvements in the Cleveland Avenue Homes public housing community, like neighborhood business façade improvements, revolving loan funds for business attraction and retention, streetscaping and so-called “place-making projects.” The housing authority is also requesting that the city serve as the “neighborhood lead” agency for promoting public and private reinvestment in the targeted area, which is wedged between Cleveland Avenue and Liberty Street to the north of 14th Street and south of 21st Street.

The city’s investment would support the housing authority’s transformation plan through a Choice Neighborhoods implementation grant from the federal government.

Councilman Derwin Montgomery expressed concern that the city needs to have a binding agreement from the housing authority for adequate case management to assist residents with relocation before they are asked to move out of Cleveland Avenue Homes.

“In other conversations with the [US Department of Housing & Urban Development] and the housing authority, there are things that we’ve talked about that didn’t actually happen,” Montgomery said. “There are some cities in which we’ve seen across the country [where] communities are revitalized and there’s displacement that takes place

Residents of the Cleveland Avenue Homes public housing community will have to relocate before grant money can be used for improvements.

when there’s a lack of full-service case management.

“What you do in effect when people are displaced — communities are broken,” Montgomery continued. “Communities lend themselves to resolve issues. When you dismantle those neighborhoods and displace people, you have removed some of the opportunities in neighborhoods that suppress issues before we have to call the police and have something that’s really problematic.”

Councilwoman Denise D. Adams and Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Burke expressed enthusiasm for the project, while joining Montgomery in calling for more specifics.

Mayor Allen Joines, who convened a “thought force” to address poverty earlier this year, likened the initiative to past efforts to transform the Kimberly Park and Happy Hill Gardens public housing communities into townhomes through Hope VI federal funds in the 1990s.

“I think it has the potential to be tremendously impactful in our efforts to address poverty and housing conditions, and really creating a stronger core area

in which to grow,” Joines said. “I’ll be very supportive of this.”

Housing Authority of Winston-Salem CEO Larry Woods was not present at the meeting due to a family medical emergency but in a letter addressing relocation of displaced residents, he wrote, “I want to take this opportunity to reiterate my agency’s commitment to providing relocation services to any resident who is displaced as a result of our redevelopment efforts. With respect to any redevelopment projects undertaken as a part of the Choice Neighborhood grant, we will be legally required to provide case management services to displaced residents. United Way is the lead agency in this respect; and United Way will be coordinating with other providers to ensure sufficient case management services are delivered.”

Ritchie Brooks, the city’s community and business development director, said the housing authority needs to submit the grant request this month to meet its deadline. That means the latest city council can sign off on the proposed partnership would be June 20. The

JORDAN GREEN

finance committee agreed on Monday to forward the request to the full council without a recommendation.

Council members also learned during the Monday finance committee meeting that staff will be bringing a request from the housing authority in August for $1.7 million in financial assistance to acquire the New Hope Manor Apartments, demolish some units and rehab the complex. The apartments are at the northern end of the Choice Neighborhoods grant area and across the street from Fairview Park.

Accessible only through a lane off Cleveland Avenue that runs past the blighted New Hope Manor Apartments, Fairview Park has a barren feel exacerbated by the heavy truck traffic on nearby Highway 52. A driveway along the eastern edge of the park is strewn with broken glass and used condoms.

The city has budgeted $200,000 from a 2014 bond to pay for improvements to the park, including fencing enhancements, a new pedestrian area and a new parking area.

1706 Walker Avenue 4 Bedrooms/2.5 Baths $229,900

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Say their names

Up Front News Opinion

Presented by

Frank Slate Brooks Nego Crosson and Alyzza May embrace after a performance by Cakalak Thunder during a vigil on Sunday in Greensboro to honor the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre.

JORDAN GREEN

336.708.0479 frankslate.brooks@trm.info

Cover Story

Broker/RealtorÂŽ

Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Greensboro moves forward on food access, insecurity

by Eric Ginsburg

Greensboro City Council has decided to try and move more quickly on the Fresh Food Access Plan it adopted last summer rather than attaching funding to a bond referendum vote, instructing staff to come up with specific ways the city can fund initiatives to address food insecurity and hunger.

Food deserts are not a new problem in Greensboro — they’ve been around at least as long as Sue Schwartz, the planning director with more than 25 years under her belt at the city. But that doesn’t mean anyone knew what to do about the problem, or even how to define it.

“Since I’ve worked here, this has always been a serious issue, but it didn’t have a name,” she said.

Now that the term “food desert” — used to describe a low-income area without readily available access to fresh food — is more widely in use, Schwartz said it’s easier to wrap your hands or your head around the problem. Looking at a map of the city’s food deserts, Schwartz noted that the areas are spread out geographically, though there is a higher concentration in the south and northeast. Mapping ERIC GINSBURG Urban gardens such as this one on North Greene Street near downtown Greensboro are just one of the ways the issue makes it easier to understand residents are already taking action to improve food access, as outlined in the city’s Fresh Food Access Plan. both how the problem arose as well as what a solution will require, she said.

First Place in April 2015 — injected a commitment of funds at an exact dollar bureaucracy circles, Schwartz said.

“This is a pile of spaghetti in terms of sense of urgency. The following month, amount yet.

Especially considering the progress of the road networks,” Schwartz said, gesturing city staff pulled together a Community The Fresh Food Access Plan, which Community Food Task Force. to parts of east Greensboro that were anFood Task Force at District 2 Councilman rings in at about 50 pages, outlines the The somewhat informal group meets nexed long after the city’s Jamal Fox’s behest, and in city’s “food system” as a whole, identifying monthly and is convened by Phil Fleisfounding and don’t follow August of the same year specific barriers to food access including chmann, community recreation services a similar grid pattern of Wanna make a the city council adopted a lack of retail, existing organizations such division manager in the city’s parks & recroads as the city’s core. a new Fresh Food Access as the Renaissance Community Co-op reation department. It functions differentdifference?

You Only after recognizing Plan as policy. and the Guilford Food Council, public ly than the city’s boards and commissions can stop by the the overlapping factors of Greensboro City engagement and recommendations in that participants aren’t appointed by transportation, accessibilinext meeting of Council recently conrelated to production, distribution, retail council and there’s no explicit memberty, income and availability sidered tacking funding and waste. ship, per se, Fleischmann said. the Community of quality food — among for a portion of the plan But despite the plan’s detail, it does not “It is a more free-flowing, grassroots others — can a solution be Food Task Force on to a forthcoming bond spell out exactly what a given proposal sort of a group,” he said, adding that it’s an devised, she said. would cost or go into specifics about effective forum that enables people who June 21 at Hemphill referendum that will go City staff, leaders and before voters, but decided how to execute ideas such as “build and want to help to plug in more quickly.

Library, located at community organizations earlier this month that it sustain relationships between producers, The group isn’t without structure — have worked to address 2301 W. Vandalia wanted to fund actionable distributors and intuitional customers” or Fleischmann compiles an agenda with food insecurity and items faster than a typical “establish community commercial kitchen input from participants who are on an Rd. (GSO), at 2 p.m. hunger in Greensboro for bond timeline would facilities in food deserts.” The plan is genemail listserv, and he prepares minutes for years, but the Food Reallow, Schwartz said. A $1 eral, Schwartz said, and the idea now is to each meeting. search & Action Center’s million figure was bandied about, but as drill down to specifics and a price tag.

The task force has already taken on recent ranking of the Greensboro/High staff begins distilling specific ways the city The fall will be a full year after the city several projects, including one to provide Point metro area as the second-worst could combat food hardship and access, council adopted the Fresh Food Access weekend meals in the summer to comin the nation — elevated to a shameful Schwartz said there is not a specific Plan, but that’s not long in government/ plement school-year backpack programs,

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

even five clear-cut things to do to solve food hardship, access and insecurity.

Russ Clegg — a long-range planner with the city of Greensboro and a former culinary school-trained chef — agreed.

“Food is very personal,” he said, adding that seemingly easy solutions run into problems when people don’t consider the full scope including what people know how to cook, like to eat or can afford.

“There are different layers of need and types of need out there.”

Council and staff have learned that the hard way over the years, maybe most keenly with the repeated failed efforts to attract a grocery store to a vacant shopping center in a food desert in northeast Greensboro. Identifying the problem — even with a clear name and scope — isn’t necessarily enough, they learned. But they’re hopeful, not just for that neighborhood — where the grassroots-driven and city-backed Renaissance Community Co-op grocery store is slated to open — but for the progress now underway more broadly.

triad-city-beat.com

working with the Guilford Food Council to conduct “asset-mapping” around food such as which convenience stores already accept SNAP and EBT as well as helping to create the Fresh Food Access Plan itself last year, he said.

The group’s overarching goal is to address hunger and food insecurity by filling in gaps and connecting people and resources so that efforts aren’t redundant and organizations aren’t competing, Fleischmann said. Within the next year, the task force plans to undertake a strategic-planning effort to “lay a roadmap” for its future work.

Schwartz hopes that the food access plan can act as a map for residents and organizations as well, and not just the city.

It’s written in a way that the average lay person could understand, designed to help people outside of city government comprehend the breadth of the problem and imagine some solutions. (Googling the plan quickly brings up an online version for those interested in reading it in full.)

When Schwartz read the finished plan, the thing that hit her is the complexity of the problem. There’s no silver bullet, or

Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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HIGH POINT JOURNAL

Prosecutor pushes treatment as a solution to heroin scourge

by Jordan Green

A police officer and a prosecutor concur that law enforcement and the courts are limited in what they can do to address High Point’s heroin problem.

Jim Bronnert, a retired custom-car painter and former city council candidate, is part of a cadre of people in High Point grappling with the city’s scourge of heroin.

As president of the Oakview Citizens Council, he organized a presentation by a prevention consultant with Alcohol & Drug Services and a local police officer to educate residents about the facts of heroin addiction in early May. Continuing on the theme, he brought in Assistant District Attorney Jordan Green (not the same person as this reporter) to talk about how the criminal justice system is dealing with the drug on Monday. Bronnert was disappointed in turnout for the event; not counting the presenter, only seven people showed up, but they included High Point City Councilwoman Cynthia Davis and Guilford County School Board member Ed Price.

Both Green and police Officer Robert Burchette acknowledged that the criminal justice system and law enforcement are ill-equipped to deal with the root causes of addiction.

“We’re not really designed to fix an addiction or a mental disease,” Green said. “We’re designed to punish. The only system we have for a medical problem is punishment.”

Burchette agreed.

“How do you punish more than death?” he asked. “We see it time after time: We find them clinically dead, and bring them back with paddles and Narcan. And then they cuss us because we ruined their high.”

Since a tidal wave of heroin overdoses hit High Point in May 2014, the crisis has shown little indication of abating: Burchette informed the group that there have been 21 overdoses in the city since their last meeting. Two, one each in May and June, have been fatal. With 61 overdoses to date this year, the number of overdoses is likely to soon overtake the total for the entire year of 2015 (77)

and is on track to surpass the year-end total for 2014 (116).

While the number of overdoses remains high, efforts to save addicts’ lives through a drug called Naloxone — also known by its brand name Narcan — that reverses overdoses seems to be making a difference. The two deaths to date this year compare to a total of six last year and 14 in 2014.

“It’s probably because we’re getting more educated,” Burchette said. “We’re getting Narcan, or Naloxone. The addicts have it. The police are getting it this year. EMS has had it.”

The stats maintained by the High Point Police Department indicate that the largest share of overdoses take place in residences, but police also respond to calls for service in parking lots and convenience stores. A sizable share, roughly 12 percent, occur in roadways and streets — a result, Burchette said, of addicts finding themselves unable to wait to get home and shooting up in transit.

A map shows that overdoses occur in every part of High Point, but with a particularly high concentration on South Main Street between Business 85 and Fairfield Road. The addicts who are overdosing are overwhelmingly white — the police have recorded only one by a black male and none by black females this year — and tend to be between the ages of 21 and 40. More than half of the overdose victims encountered by police are people who live outside of High Point, although Burchette cautioned against the assumption that they’re coming to the city to obtain the drug, reasoning that they might hold down jobs there.

“It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question,” Green said. “Two counties over, there’s no heroin, but they have a big meth problem, or crack cocaine. High Point is heroin. It’s bizarre. Do we have a lot of heroin users because we have a big supply of heroin? Or do we have a big supply of heroin because we have a lot of heroin users?”

Green said prosecutors find themselves using the only tool at their dis-

Guilford County Assistant District Attorney Jordan Green (right) chats with Jim Bronnert.

posal to push offenders into treatment, where resources are limited.

“Our only good response from a criminal-justice standpoint is boxing them into treatment,” he said. “‘We’ll give you probation if you accept treatment. If you stop going to treatment, we’re going to put you in jail.’”

The Guilford County court system has a couple programs designed to divert people into treatment: The drug treatment court run by Judge Susan Burch serves long-term addicts while the 90-96 program — named after the statute that enables it — is designed for first-time offenders. In both cases, offenders plead guilty in exchange for agreeing to undergo treatment, and if they successfully complete the program, their charge is wiped clean. Green said the long-term program provides treatments specific to the offender’s particular addiction, while the treatment provided under the 90-96 program is more or less one size fits all.

“We might have 10 or 20 people in High Point in drug treatment court when we have hundreds and hundreds of people who are using drugs,” Green said. “So it’s kind of like putting out a forest fire with a cup of water.

“I feel pretty confident saying that

JORDAN GREEN

arresting our way out of a drug problem is not going to do it,” Green added.

“We knew that back in the ’80s. We need a better system. Maybe that is to legalize or non-criminalize certain types of drugs. That would put drug dealers out of business, and we could tax the revenues from sales. That’s been likened to giving out condoms in a high school.

Is that gonna encourage teenagers to go out and have sex? Or are they going to have sex anyway and so we might as well make sure they’re protected?”

While suggesting that the merits of decriminalization are open to debate, Green insisted that prosecutors still have an important role to play.

“I’m pretty far left,” he said. “I think Bernie Sanders has good ideas. I’m a member of the ACLU. But I’m also a prosecutor. I have come to believe that all drug offenses are violent. It breeds violence, and it breeds all kinds of other disasters in your community.”

Drug dealing often comes with other criminal activity, including theft and assault, Green added.

“If there’s a drug house nearby, that’s too close,” he said. “The police love to get tips. You can even report anonymously. If you call CrimeStoppers that information goes directly to the police.”

triad-city-beat.com Up Front

News Opinion

Cover Story Culture

Fun & Games

Games

Shot in the Triad

be bold

All She Wrote

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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OPINION EDITORIAL

Playing with guns It was not, as some social media threads suggested, filed the day after a crazed gunman murdered 50 people with a legally obtained AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle. HB1148 was actually filed days earlier, but that makes it no less ridiculous and no less dangerous.

North Carolina’s HB 1148 proposes to amend the state constitution — the principal set of rules upon which all others in the state are based — to do away completely with any regulation of concealed-carry permits in the state of North Carolina.

To wit: “Any person who is a citizen of the United States and is at least 21 years old may carry a concealed weapon in this State unless provided otherwise by law.”

More interesting is the sentence that will be removed from Sec. 30 of our constitution: “Nothing herein shall justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons, or prevent the General Assembly from enacting penal statutes against that practice.”

It’s a complete 180.

If passed, the item will go on the November ballot in a statewide referendum. And if it passes, we will be one of seven states — along with Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming — to allow such a thing.

It’s an obscenely cynical move — not unlike HB 2, which purports to help children in public restrooms while actually endangering the most vulnerable among us — because a lot of North Carolinians probably believe a law-abiding gun owner with a .357 Magnum in her fanny pack could have ended the Pulse nightclub massacre before it began.

That they would be wrong does not matter to the prevailing voices in our legislature. In fact, they seem to be counting on it.

Make no mistake: This law was not designed to make us safer; it was designed to make us afraid — that, and pull some campaign donations from the NRA. It was also designed to bring bedrock Republican voters out in November, which should tell us something about who is actually scared here.

There’s a lot at stake for the NC GOP in November: pressure to deliver the state for Trump and to keep McCrory in power, along with new congressional districts the gerrymandering of which has yet to be tested by an actual election. Even the state reps, mostly in safely drawn districts, would benefit from the bump of a clearly cut, values-driven wedge issue.

It is a similar ploy to the marriage amendment, which was passed during a primary before it was declared illegal. And just as in that instance, it doesn’t seem to matter to our General Assembly who gets hurt.

CITIZEN GREEN

We got to get ourselves together Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan embraced the Rev. Nelson Johnson before giving her concluding remarks at a town hall meeting on policing and race before an audience of about 200 on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in the Howard

by Jordan Green Chubbs Enrichment Center at Providence Baptist Church.

She marveled at the fact that the two have been meeting, along with a cohort of handpicked community members selected by each, since March 28, 2015.

“We could have had a baby and then some,” the mayor said, prompting a titter of prurient laughter.

Vaughan recognized her gaffe, and recovered — partially. “We birthed this baby,” she added. “I don’t know where your minds were. Mine is somewhere else.”

She could be forgiven for having a lot on her mind. In a couple hours, the mayor, who also serves as the executive director of the pro-LGBTQ Guilford Green Foundation, would be emceeing a candlelight vigil at Governmental Plaza for the victims of the Orlando Pulse massacre.

Vaughan was eager to promote a view that months of dialogue have been productive, ticking off accomplishments. She said the Greensboro police have already increased their training for interacting with citizens with mental health challenges.

Encounters between police officers and people with behavioral or mental health challenges all too often end in tragedy — a point underscored by the release of video of the fatal shooting by Officer Tim Bloch of Chieu-di Thi Vo. Many in the audience who viewed the video of Vo carrying a knife as she moved aimlessly down a sidewalk said they concluded that her death was unnecessary.

Jack Register, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Health-North Carolina, said this state lacks an infrastructure for addressing mental health. For the benefit of comparison, he said a person could find themselves injured in a car accident and count on getting their arm set within in the span of a couple hours.

“If you have a psychiatric breakdown on the way home today — please don’t let it happen — you may end up in jail, you may end up in the emergency room for days, you may end up dead before you get the services you need,” Register said. “It’s unacceptable.”

Continuing her upbeat assessment of progress in community-police relations, Vaughan said, “When the police go out, they don’t seek a lethal interaction. They want to police compassionately. Maybe we need to give them better tools to do that. The chief made a pretty bold move last November about not stopping cars for minor infractions. He caught a lot of flak for that.”

She added that the police department is seeking legislation to make resisting arrest a separate charge from obstructing and delaying arrest. In Vaughan’s view, that could help filter out frivolous charges for resisting arrest — which disproportionately fall on black people — when there is no underlying charge.

One issue that might be harder to resolve is what’s known as contact policing, or the broken-windows approach. Pioneered by New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton in the early 1990s, the approach focuses on aggressively policing quality of life crimes such as disorderly conduct, drugs, prostitution and vandalism with the goal of preventing more serious crime.

“We are spending too much time and too much resources on harassing poor people and people of color, and this has got to stop,” said Claude Barnes of the Beloved Community Center.

An analysis of traffic stop and search data released in March by the Greensboro Police Department with assistance from academics at NC A&T University and UNCG in some ways supports the notion that contact policing is driving racial disparities.

The study was billed as an independent review, following a critical study by UNC-Chapel Hill professor Frank Baumgartner and a string of media stories, but it was actually produced by the police department with the assistance of academics from local universities.

The study found that traffic stops are “most highly correlated” with Part 2 crimes such as drug and weapons offenses, simple assault, domestic disputes and vandalism, and quality-of-life crimes. Traffic stops of blacks are highly correlated to geographic areas with high numbers of quality-of-life crimes, but the same isn’t true for whites.

Despite the headline-grabbing finding in the report that there is “no evidence supporting the claim that disparities observed in the city of Greensboro are the result of racism,” the report contained another somewhat contradictory conclusion buried deep in the pages.

“The search disparity is partially explained by the level of crime in the area,” the report states. “But we cannot identify every reason for all the disparity at this time and with this data. The possibility of police bias accounting for a portion of the observed disparity may exist.”

Correction

The editorial, “Trudy Wade draws a blank,” in the June 8 issue of Triad City Beat contained some factual errors. State Sen. Trudy Wade never served on the Guilford County Comission as a Democrat. She was elected in 2000 as a Republican. The bill that proposed to alter Greensboro government was SB36, not SB2. And she sponsored SB151 last year, in the first part of the session, not last week.

School integration

by Jordan Green

Emily Doe and ending rape culture

Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

Korinna Sergeant studied psychology and art at East Tennessee University. She works in the community as a professional artist and lives in Greensboro with her long-term boyfriend and their cat.

Opinion

to one month in jail. This is the same sentence that can be handed to someone over expired parking tickets. I was in my fourth month of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, EMDR, while learning how to cope with my new diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. Yet, all I could hear were echoes from that town of how I had ruined a charming young man’s football career.

Kyle’s general likability and defensive football stats would be used as rhetoric. The sheer fact that I was unconscious was their best defense because, “How would you know?” These were my first realizations that at different parts of your female life, you will mean less than the male sitting across from you.

I became a shell of who I used to be. My self worth was gone. I too was once a “happy-go-lucky athlete.” Yet my volleyball or softball statistics were not a part of the conversation. I quit sports. My artwork became very dark. My night terrors and screams would shake me awake; so, I slept with a night-light. Social situations with males became paralyzing and binge drinking helped me forget why that was. I barely showed up to my sophomore year of high school. I finally decided to take control over what had ruined me. I began disassociating and being promiscuous. This proved to be a dangerous and empowering game that I played with myself for years to follow after the attack. It wasn’t until I had met CM that I even realized what intimacy was supposed to feel like, emotionally.

One day, during my freshman year of college, my sister called me to say that Kyle had died. At the age of 22, he had crashed a single-engine plane into a cornfield, somewhere over Georgia. It wasn’t until then that I had realized why my mother, many years before, had urged me to find in my heart enough peace within myself to verbally forgive him.

Through releasing my anger towards him, I have found my soul gentle again. It would take years to feel whole. But, it was a start.

After reading Emily Doe’s testimony of what she has endured over the past year, I was glad to see her forgive Brock, too. The one in three females who are raped in their lifetime, including me and Doe, our stories are not identical to one another. Yet we are bound by our stories given a voice. I can only hope that Doe’s story, in particular, Brock’s lackluster punishment and the people who have formally defended his actions, have finally angered enough people to make a change; to finally serve as a guiding light to end rape culture.

News

I came to consciousness in the backseat of his truck. I had not placed myself there, I was just there and the sun was rising. I heard Jessie say, “You know she was a virgin, right?” Kyle

by Korinna Sergent responded, “Oh, s***.

Seriously? If she doesn’t remember anything, just don’t tell her”. As I lay there, motionless and awake, I had never felt emptier in my entire life. I crawled out of the backseat and felt a bulge in the front pocket of my favorite Abercrombie & Fitch jean skirt. Once inside, I reached into my front pocket and found my cotton underwear, big butterfly patch, adoring the back. At the age of 15, my entire life stood still as I held that butterfly in my hand. The tears shook my entire core and in that moment I knew my innocence had been stolen. A piece of me was gone and I wasn’t getting it back.

The letter from the unidentified victim, “Emily Doe” to the Stanford all-star athlete/rapist Brock Turner rang eerily through my spine. My past experience shot back into full scope and it was going viral.

My attacker got one month in county jail. Brock was getting six months, maybe four with good behavior.

Every single sentence, this woman so bravely read in front of her perpetrator, was similarly not only my story, it was others too. I immediately sent a text to one of my closest girlfriends, in that exact moment, she herself was also looking through her high school papers, to find her own written testimony. There was something about Brock’s “normal, happy-golucky face” that set me off. It was the “happy guy rapist” that I just couldn’t deal with again. Yet, out of nowhere, all of my emotions came flooding back.

My rape story is one of the unconscious victim.

The story that lies outside of the “rape box” that society loves to hate. I don’t remember what happened to me. I remember sneaking out of Jessie’s house together. I remember talking about my new life in Tennessee with old friends and drinking vodka at a fire pit. I remember kissing Kyle on a trail. I remember falling unconscious out of my chair and nearly into the fire. I remember Zach asking what they should do with me. I remember Kyle carrying my limp body into the nearby work trailer. After all, Kyle was sober. I remember coming into conscious moments and trying to say, “No.” The words were barely there. My body wouldn’t move, I was in a complete paralysis state, unable to stay awake. Later, much like Doe, I would hear that I liked it.

When the case closed, a year later, Kyle was charged with criminal sexual conduct in the 4th degree (force or coercion), and he was sentenced

Up Front

I’ve been a big fan of investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones ever since I heard her riveting, two-part series on school segregation on WBEZ Chicago’s “This American Life,” last July.

The story, “The Problem We All Live With,” intuitively leaps into the fray over unequal educational opportunities with Hannah-Jones’ observation that the mother of Michael Brown, the Ferguson, Mo. teenager killed by a white police officer in 2014, fixated her grief and outrage on her efforts to make sure her son had graduated from high school.

As Hannah-Jones recounts, the Normandy School District — an academically struggling district with 97 percent black enrollment, where Brown was educated — lost its accreditation. De-accreditation triggered a Missouri law allowing students from the unaccredited district to switch to a nearby one for free. Although many school officials believed students would find it inconvenient to leave the district, Hannah-Jones reported that 1,000 students — nearly a quarter of those enrolled — joined an exodus to Francis Howell School District, a predominantly white district.

“And that is how Missouri accidentally launched a school integration plan in what was an unfashionably late year for such a thing: 2013,” Hannah-Jones says with no small amount of irony. Integration as an educational policy — synonymous with the racially charged term “forced busing” — has largely fallen out of favor across the country as school districts began to re-segregate in the 1990s.

The uproar from white parents in Francis Howell School District and blatant use of racial stereotypes reacting to the new arrivals strongly suggests that educational desegregation in the 21st Century wouldn’t go much differently than it did in Little Rock, Ark. in 1957.

Follow any debate about school assignment zones in North Carolina, Missouri or virtually any other part of the country, and the theme of white parents shopping for real estate to try to ensure their children get into good schools and are insulated from exposure to those kids is virtually ubiquitous. Meanwhile, every school district in the country struggles to address the widening achievement gap, often by putting additional resources in challenged schools, with little or nothing to show for it.

Hannah-Jones tells her own family’s story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, noting that Americans in their early forties entered middle school at the historic moment when integration was most fully realized.

“By 1988, a year after [my husband] Faraji and I entered middle school, school integration in the United States had reached its peak and the achievement gap between black and white students was at its lowest point since the government began collecting data,” she writes. “The difference in black and white reading scores fell to half of what it was in 1971, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. (As schools have re-segregated, the testscore gap has only grown.) The improvements for black children did not come at the cost of white children. As black test scores rose, so did white ones.”

Strangely, integration is the only policy option that’s not up for discussion, from the local to the federal level. Why won’t we try it?

FRESH EYES

triad-city-beat.com

IT JUST MIGHT WORK

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June 15 — 21, 2016

READING GUIDE

Cover Story

Starring Whitney Way Thore

16

You may recognize Greensboro native Whitney Way Thore from her hit TV show “My Big Fat Fabulous Life” on TLC, or from running into her around town. Thore’s first book, I Do It with th

which books are worth your fleeting free moments.

We chose books with local ties — either the writer, publisher or subject — many of them from our own backyard.

That’s just the sort of paper we are.

Whether you’re looking for a hilarious romp alongside a fictional female DJ, a guide to creating social change, a primer on voting rights or an insightful and true wilderness trek tale, there’s something here for you. The authors range from a Greensboro native with a fashion career to the president of High Point University to the winner of a Winston-Salem publisher’s fiction award.

And if there isn’t something in here that grabs your interest, we’re pretty sure you don’t like reading anyway.

triad-city-beat.com

he Lights On, came out earlier this month. ALEX KLEIN

We all love reading. Or at least we hope you do if you’re holding this newspaper in your hands or hanging out on our website. But it can be challenging to slice out space in our overly busy lives to read, especially to sit down with a long read like a book.

We tell ourselves we’ll get around to it on our summer beach vacations, but even then many of us will look back and realize the minutes slipped away as we stared at our phones, yelled after the kids or drifted off to sleep in the midday sun.

But we want to read more. We long for authors to take us to lands we wouldn’t otherwise visit, to worlds we wouldn’t otherwise imagine or to decipher the landscape around us. So with such little time on our hands and such a strong desire to read more good books, it makes sense for someone to compile a list, complete with summaries and analysis, of

A moment with Whitney

by Eric Ginsburg

When Whitney Way Thore was younger, she used to “be a writer,” she says, making air quotes with her fingers as she sits on a couch in her Greensboro living room. She always wanted to be one when she grew up, and even took home a $25 check after winning a writing contest as a 5th grader. But Thore never knew exactly what she would write about, and the craft slipped away from her in college.

Thore took a circuitous route to becoming a published author, never imagining that she’d be the star of her own reality television show — “My Big Fat Fabulous Life,” which returned for a third season on TLC on June 8. But the series led to a book deal that went from a concept to an agreement within weeks. And Thore only had four months to write and edit the book before the early June publish date.

“If I knew I’d be writing a memoir, I would’ve been paying more attention,” Thore jokes.

She describes writing I Do It with the Lights On: And 10 More Discoveries on the Road to a Blissfully Shame-Free Life as a cathartic process, an attempt to answer the loaded question of “How did you get here?” and explain her journey of self discovery as well as her ruminations on feminism, body positivity and health.

Thore can hardly remember writing it.

Between filming 10 to 12 hours a day, with two days off a week, Thore can’t imagine where she found the time to crank out the book, though she said some portions went through heavy revisions.

“Writing really is like a muscle,” she says, explaining that once she started flexing it again, the words flowed more easily.

As vulnerable as Thore may be on her reality TV show, carrying out fights and other difficult or unflattering moments on camera, she says the book is only more so as she revisits her childhood and moments where she didn’t hold her head as high.

Sometimes people assume they know Thore, considering they

have such an expansive view into her life through the television show. That can lead to unwarranted criticism or assumed familiarity — though Thore said people recognize her more often in public outside of her hometown, possibly because locals are trying to respect her privacy. Regardless, her newly released book provides the context to actually understand her, she says.

“My Big Fat Fabulous Life” takes place in Greensboro, where Thore grew up and still lives. After I Do It with the Lights On came out, Thore held a reading at the Barnes & Noble in the Friendly Shopping Center, the same bookstore she grew up going to and not too far from where she now lives. It’s a little surreal she says, adding that even though the TV show airs “on every continent except for Antarctica” and has taken her to places such as Russia and South Africa, seeing her name on the marquee of the Carolina Theatre downtown still delighted her.

As a kid, Thore read RL Stine’s “Fear Street” books, later finding herself drawn to books with strong women including The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. These days, her bookshelves are full of books about feminism, and she’s recently enjoyed Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls by Jes Baker and Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller.

Sometimes people think, “I’m not fat, or I don’t have weight issues, so there’s nothing in this for me” about books like she’s been reading or the one she wrote, Thore says. But she receives hundreds and hundreds of messages a day on her social media accounts from people who find inspiration in her story, regardless of their size or the specifics of their personal struggles.

People identify with her living her life and loving herself in spite of societal ideals that argue she shouldn’t embrace herself. I Do It with the Lights On is for anyone that has a body, she says, because it’s about finding an independent sense of self worth.

And that’s something we could all benefit from.

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Cover Story

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REVIEW

REVIEW

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015

Midnight Bowling by Quinn Dalton, Carolina Wren Press, 2016

It’s tempting to believe that after President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act the racist Southern lawmakers and local officials who had turned firehoses on activists had a change of heart and realized that disenfranchising black voters was wrong.

That frame is captured in the tableau of veteran civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis, Peggy Wallace Kennedy — daughter of former segregationist governor George Wallace — and US Attorney General Eric Holder linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome” during the 44th anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala. in 2009.

US Supreme Court Justice John Roberts seemed to subscribe to such a view — or else he was being deeply cynical — when he wrote in the notorious 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that “history did not end in 1965,” citing dramatic improvements in black representation and voter turnout over the past five decades.

But as Ari Berman, a political correspondent for The Nation, demonstrates in this fascinating and essential volume, the conservative response to the Voting Rights Act was at best a tactical retreat, with opponents like US Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina strategizing to neutralize the law from the outset.

Meanwhile, court battle by court battle, activists have used the law to improve black and Latino political representation and allow blacks to be elected to Congress in many Southern states for the first time since Reconstruction. As an example, the Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in Gingles v. Thornburg struck down North Carolina’s multi-member state legislative districts as an unconstitutional scheme to dilute the black vote.

“As a result of the newly drawn single-member districts,” Berman writes, “the number of blacks in the state legislature increased from four in 1981 to nineteen in 1990.”

And despite efforts to roll back progress during the Reagan administration, Berman shows how voting rights advanced during the administration of George HW Bush through an unlikely coalition of civil rights groups and the Southern GOP, resulting in the creation of majority-black congressional

Against the stark backdrop of ’70s post-industrial suburbia, 16-year-old Tess Wycheski cuts a strange figure at the Galaxy Lanes in Sandusky, Ohio: a glistening prized AMF ball in her hand, pro shoes on the wellworn boards, brown hair pulled back and the obvious air of a young pro.

Then she lets go of the ball, and it practically flies, clattering 10 pins easily to the ground, as if she’d never done anything else. Little could one know how weighty that ball sometimes feels in her hand.

This is the picture Greensboro’s Quinn Dalton paints in her second novel, Midnight Bowling, a love story orbiting two entangled families, their unified obsession of a bygone sport and the loves that destroy and heal them.

Dalton said in an interview she almost “broke up” with the book — twice. It took her more than a decade to write.

“I kept getting stuck at the 200-page mark,” Dalton said. She’d always seen herself as a short-story writer.

“With short stories, you can date around, and if you get stuck, you’ve only invested 10 pages or so, and [you think], This isn’t working out and date another story,” she said.

“A novel is a marriage. You have to show up every day.”

But Durham’s Carolina Wren Press published Midnight Bowling — a multi-generational drama centered on a teenage bowling prodigy —in March. And Dalton’s choice to commit shines from every page.

The novel strikes two distinct tones of melancholy using the voices of dual narrators. Tess provides the emotional kaleidoscope of a teenager falling in love while grappling with a destiny pressed upon her by her ill father who is trying to repair his own failed bowling career through hers. Leo, her coach, harbors a poisonous, Steinbeck-style hatred for his brother that’s been years in the brewing.

Both narrators are haunted — Tess, by an uncertain future; Leo, by his life’s twisted path — but under their unique sadness runs a thread of hope that hints at redemption, which tugs the reader along, and the bittersweet, tender reward at the end will probably leave them aching but content.

Dalton’s gently paced writing sinks the reader into a lulling narrative rhythm. It’s a complex concept and mode of execution, but the intricately woven tale is easily followed, thanks to Dalton’s unassuming prose.

It only draws attention to itself for pearl-like observations such as, “Women pour themselves out for you, but I didn’t know that yet, standing in the kitchen that morning with Louise. What I did know was that I wasn’t sorry my brother was dead, because he’d made his wife do without sugar.”

Phrases like these are quietly planted in a paragraph here and there, and call for multiple meditative rereads before proceeding. The book as a whole produces the same effect.

by Jordan Green

districts in states such as North Carolina — increasing black representation while giving Republicans a better opportunity to compete in adjacent districts with whitened populations.

And he shows how a concerted effort to restrict voting rights gathered force even before the election of the second Bush to the presidency with an aggressive purge that removed thousands of voters who were wrongfully identified as felons, resulting in a finding of “widespread voter disenfranchisement” by the US Civil Rights Commission. While the Justice Department under President George W. Bush shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to detecting mostly phantom voter fraud, Bush would sign the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006. Berman posits that Republican lawmakers supported reauthorization to avoid alienating black voters as they sought reelection after the stain of federal abandonment in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The courageous determination of civil rights workers who faced bloody state suppression in Selma, shocking the nation’s conscience and spurring the passage of the VRA, comes full circle in Berman’s book with the rise of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina in 2013. Chief Justice Roberts’ observation that history did not end in 1965 finds an ironic coda when North Carolina state Sen. Tom Apodaca announced on the day of the Shelby ruling: “Now we can go with the full bill.”

The Republican majority in the state General Assembly would go on to pass what is widely regarded as the most restrictive election law in the nation.

Earlier this month, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay against two of the provisions of North Carolina’s new election law — same-day registration during early voting and out-of-precinct voting — so that they will be in place for the November election. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court — which will undoubtedly make the final call on the law — remains split down the middle with the Republican-controlled Senate’s refusal to confirm President Obama’s appointment to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Give Us the Ballot then serves as an excellent preview for the next significant phase of voting-rights history.

by Joanna Rutter

REVIEW

Revolutionize Now: Creative Leadership & Action for Social Change by Jada Monica Drew, self published, 2016

by Eric Ginsburg

To some people, social-justice circles can feel unwelcoming and cliquish. It can feel, some say, like trying to join a club where you don’t speak the language.

Those are the sorts of barriers that Guilford College grad and former college multicultural educator Jada Monica Drew dismantles while delivering a practical, step-by-step guide for leadership and social action in her first book, Revolutionize Now. The book is designed as a tool for those seeking to build stronger and more inclusive social-justice movements, whether they are new at trying to create change or elders who may now find it easier to name and describe their techniques. Revolutionize Now could be considered a fast read at just 126 pages, many of them with blank space for readers to fill in their own answers to questions such as, “What are three things you can openly share that will help people understand you better?” But for those ready to utilize it as a handbook for conceptualizing a project or effort to actualize change, this means that Drew’s thoughtful frameworks will take much longer

to consider and complete.

There’s nothing boring about Drew’s book — she makes sure of that with inclusions such as “Jada’s Social Justice & Empowerment Playlist” tucked into the end with 35 jams ranging from Pete Seeger to Kendrick Lamar.

Revolutionize Now should be of particular interest to locals; Drew outlines initiatives she’s propelled in Greensboro, makes local references including Dudley High School and ArtsGreensboro and includes personal narratives to illustrate her points. The endorsing quote on the back of the book from former High Point human relations director Al Heggins underscores its Triad relevance. But the book appeals far beyond the three cities, put forward instead as an invitation to anyone to be an effective agent for change.

REVIEW

Trespassing Across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas, Blue Rider Press, 2016

by Anthony Harrison A walk can perform wonders. It’s good to shake off the dust from your limbs and clear your head.

But the desire to go on a real long walk — a transcontinental hike, for example — is a luxury and privilege enjoyed largely by the white middle class, those who have time to worry and wonder about existential dread and possess the money and resources to do something about it. Exhibit A: Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild fame/infamy, the wildly unprepared, wannabe explorer who didn’t even have a topographical map of the Alaskan region where he starved to death in 1992.

Author-environmentalist Ken Ilgunas, who received an MA from Duke University, began his own journey for similar reasons. But Ilgunas thoroughly stocked himself with money, food, a destination and a purpose. That didn’t make his trek any less difficult or enlightening.

In Trespassing Across America, Ilgunas records his travelogue of the seemingly most-boring region of North America — the Great Plains.

“It would be just as well to refer to the area as the ‘Great Boring,’” Ilgunas writes. “Not only are the Plains plain, but they’re enormously plain.”

Finding himself discontent washing dishes in Alaska, Ilgunas planned to trace the path of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Beginning his quest in September 2012, Ilgunas hitchhiked from Denver to the northern

end of east-central Alberta’s Tar Sands, from where oil would be transported southeast to Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border. He’d walk the length of the hypothetical pipeline, traipsing borders and private pastures, as something of a nonviolent protest against both climate change and land-property rights.

The resulting book, which was not part of his plan, contains poignant moments of self-examination and humorous self-deprecation. But Ilgunas soon realizes Big Oil is even more complex than he’d believed.

“Oil was everywhere; it was in everything,” Ilgunas opines. “And going without oil or coal or natural gas was, on this hike and in life in general, pretty much impossible.”

He also recognizes the importance of oil to the people he meets and their communities. “[The Heartland] feeds us, irrigates us, powers our cars and planes, and bears some of the best and worst of our history as a people,” Ilgunas concludes.

Adventurers go on hikes to learn more about themselves, but Ilgunas learned more than that — he learned about modern America itself, good and bad.

Naked DJ by Jo Maeder, Vivant Press, 2016

by Joanna Rutter

The effervescence of radio as a medium lends to its magnetism and its mystery. Who are the faces behind the obnoxious morning show’s energetic patter and late-night’s smooth seduction? Who would take such a demanding job in such a transient industry?

And what are they wearing?

Greensboro author Jo Maeder’s latest gift to the world, a novel that’s probably more of a memoir than she’d like to admit, exposes dirty secrets that take place behind studio doors, from skeezy execs and the entangled mafia-like network of the music industry to the old-school sexism that can run rampant in intra-station melodramas.

Naked DJ tracks protagonist Patty “Jazmyn” Brown (though she’s gone by more on-air pseudonyms than she can keep track of) as she moves to New York to take on a rock daytime show with a catty co-host trying to sabotage her every move — all while trying to shake off lingering co-dependencies from a former love affair with a rapper and deciding whether or not posing for Penthouse is over her fluid moral boundary line.

The deliciously scandalous story rips along at speed worthy of an AM shock jock, complete with irreverent, tight turns of phrase and to-the-point descriptive language that hustles the reader’s imagination such as, “The skyline was dotted with new super-tall buildings… It reminded me of a mythological hydra that if you cut off its head, grew back five.”

Told in first person, the tone is equal parts gal-pal, shock-value and barely embarrassed confessional. Maeder certainly earned the right to narrate with that authority, having deejayed for Miami’s Y-100 and becoming one of the country’s first female Top 40 DJs as the “Rock and Roll Madame,” along with swapping chairs on the daily with Howard Stern on K-ROCK. Though besides all of that, just her shock of lavender hair alone could serve as evidence of her well-lived life, mirroring her character’s wild tear through ch-ch-ch-changes in her name, relationship status, job and concept of decency.

Jazmyn forms a much-needed alliance with Ariella, a DJ with whom she shares the passion for on-air highs and the same career pitfalls of betrayal, heartbreak and see-through blouses.

One of Ariella’s sage insights encapsulates one of the main themes of the story and the industry itself.

“The human voice is incredibly powerful,” she says. “It soothes. Destroys. Manipulates. If the eyes are the windows to your soul, the voice is what’s beyond the window, what’s really there.”

In Naked DJ, Jazmyn spends much of the story listening to other voices. By the end, she has begun to listen to her own.

triad-city-beat.com

REVIEW

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Cover Story

REVIEW

REVIEW

F**K IVY **and Everything Else by Mark McNairy, Harper Design, 2016

by Anthony Harrison

A self-described postmodern traditionalist, Greensboro-born fashion designer Mark McNairy breaks the rules of menswear. He flips the bird at the tried-and-true, the boring. And he makes whatever he creates undeniably his own.

That trend now includes books.

F**K IVY **and Everything Else is the portable McNairy stylebook, his designing mind distilled into an infectious little coffee-table read and possibly an essential for any guy into crafting a unique style.

The titular “Ivy” refers to preppy, Ivy-League fashion: polos and chinos, Oxfords and cardigans, blazers and boat shoes. McNairy made his big break with J. Press, one of the preeminent Ivy League clothiers, in 2005.

“I was hired to administer CPR to a dying brand,” he writes in the introduction, “but the powers that be would not let me do what I was hired to do. So I said: F*** this.”

He branched out on his own in 2009, establishing Mark McNairy New Amsterdam in 2009, where he could do whatever he wanted with his designing — match skate wear with brown brogues, print a women’s wool coat in brown duck camo, whatever. Not much of a surprise from someone who worships both Chuck Taylors and worsted-wool charcoal trousers.

Broken down into three informal sections, F**K

IVY represents the culmination of everything McNairy admires in the recent history of menswear, as well as some of the trends he despises.

“The navy blazer: Unless you is in Nickelback, Creed or some other supercool rock ‘n’ roll band, you probably need one of these,” he writes, tongue boring a hole through his cheek. But he also breaks from convention by declaring the old match of khakis “a horrible combination.”

Along with his helpful basics and next-tier tips, McNairy’s writing style is uniquely and naturally his own voice.

“A $1,225 sweater is not an investment,” he states. “So unless you is fo’ real ballin’, you better think twice.”

Caveat: This may not be the book you bring to a long weekend on the Crystal Coast. Not because it lacks in content or quality, but because it’s a blazing-fast read. Its 174 pages are delightfully colorful in both language and layout. You could knock in out in an hour, but remember its lessons forever.

“Use this book as a guide,” he suggests.

“Find your voice. Be discerning.

“Or, put more simply,” he continues, “read (if you know how to), think (if that is possible), look at the pretty pictures, get inspired and then go f*** yourself.”

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Daily Motivation: 365 Messages to Inspire You at Work and in Life, by Nido R. Qubein, Simple Truths, 2016

by Jordan Green

This small but thick tome, designed like a secularized version of those 1970s-vintage, sunshine-themed Bibles, rests on the coffee table in the reception area of the city manager’s suite at City Hall in High Point. One hopes that the example set by the author, who is the president of High Point University, inspires the city staff every day to do something magnificent in emulation of the monument to grandeur at the corner of Lexington and University.

If your interest in this book stems from a curiosity about what makes one of the Triad’s major power brokers tick, you’re likely to come away disappointed: Qubein’s philosophy can best be described as bland, inoffensive inspiration. Not surprisingly, Qubein dishes out generous helpings of self-affirmation. The entry for Sept. 19, headlined, “Face It: You’re Wonderful,” is typical. “You don’t want to become boastful and self-centered,” he writes, “but it never hurts to accept kudos when you deserve them.”

Company with greatness has always been part of Qubein’s agenda — behold the statues of noted historical figures like Marie Curie, Shakespeare and Sacajawea relaxing on benches along the campus’ promenade — and Daily Motivations makes liberal use of inspirational biography. Qubein casts an ecumenical net, and occasionally comes up with some good stuff. An Oct. 31 entry entitled “Find Your Joy” is built around the bio of novelist Stephen King, who says, “Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it…. I have written because it fulfilled me…. I did it for the buzz, I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for you, you can do it forever.”

The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, with Jonathan Wison-Hartgrove, Beacon Press, 2016 Rev. Barber’s Moral Monday crusade began in the summer of 2013 and has been pushing back against every indignity the General Assembly has thrown at the people of North Carolina. This memoir traces Barber’s road and what lies ahead.

The Universal Physics of Escape by Elizabeth Gonzalez, Press 53, 2015 This moving work of fiction by the winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction is among some of the great titles released by the Winston-Salem publishing company in the last year. By the end of the vivid first chapter, readers will be lost enough in this book that they’ll forget how hot the summer sun feels.

Left in the Wind by Ed Gray, Pegasus Books, 2016 Subtitled, “The Roanoke Journal of Emme Merrimoth,” Gray’s fictionalized history of the Lost Colony takes on the legend and speculates on its aftermath.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear by Joseph Mills, Press 53, 2016 The latest from Winston-Salem poet and professor Joseph Mills, Exit, Pursued by a Bear is a collection of work “inspired by Shakespeare’s stage directions.” Not to be missed.

Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan, Workman Publishing, 2016 Another UNCG MFA writer, Morgan won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for his 2015 novel The Road From Gap Creek. This year’s book is about two escaped slaves who make their way north.

Sweet Girl by Travis Mulhauser, Harper Collins, 2016 UNCG professor Travis Mulhauser launched his second novel this year, a tale of miscreants trapped in a blizzard

and the missing girl that binds them.

North Carolina Craft Beer & Breweries, Second Edition by Erik Lars Myers and Sarah H. Ficke, John F. Blair Publishing, 2016 Erik Lars Myers — head of the state’s craft brewers guild and founder of Hillsborough’s Mystery Brewing — and his wife Sara H. Ficke revamped their guide to the state’s beer scene this year. Good thing they did; the industry is growing at a rapid clip, enough so that the original 2012 version just won’t do anymore.

Scuppernong Books Leigh Himes

triad-city-beat.com

Notable books with local connections

reading & signing

Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age by John Railey, Cascade Books, 2015 Railey was on the team at the Winston-Salem Journal that in 2002 investigated the practice of forced sterilization that endured in North Carolina into the 1970s. This work of literary journalism chronicles the fight for reparations that is still being fought.

Dimestore: A Writer’s Life by Lee Smith, Algonquin Books, 2016 Hillsborough author Lee Smith, winner of the North Carolina Award for Literature and the O Henry Award, collects 15 essays in this telling love letter to Appalachia.

You Can Fly by Carole Boston Weatherford, Atheneum Books, 2016 An award-winning author tells the story of the Tuskeegee Airmen in verse. Weatherford got her MFA from UNCG and now teaches at Fayetteville State University.

The Blue Hour by Jennifer Whittaker, University of Wisconsin Press, 2016 Whitaker, both a graduate of and professor for the UNCG creative writing program, releases her first book of poetry this year.

The Tulip Factory by Kacie Davis Idol, Inkshares, 2016 What happens when you put life on hold for love? Idol, of Kernersville, shows us in this NC-based novel.

Friday, June 17, 7pm “An enchanting novel about the choices we make in life and love - by turns hilarious, poignant, and nostalgic.

Himes’s novel will make you revisit all the “what ifs” you’ve ever contemplated, from fleeting encounters to almostweddings . . . a lively debut that will strike a chord in anyone with a romantic past.”- Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook and See Me

336.763.1919 scuppernongbooks.com 304 South Elm St. Greensboro, NC 27401

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE A food writer takes to the kitchen

by Eric Ginsburg

I

’m a terrible cook. Or at least that’s what I told people up until a few weeks ago.

As a kid, my mother tried to make my sister and I learn how to cook a few things by having us help her out in the kitchen, but we didn’t get much further than baking brownies and discovering what would become a family favorite called cookie pizza. In college, I relied heavily on the dining hall, and even years later I never grew far beyond dorm-room cooking. I didn’t eat out all the time — though I spent nearly all my disposable income doing so whenever possible — but what I did at home using a freezer and a microwave never exactly impressed anyone.

Cooking felt like a chore, and beyond a small stable of recipes, I avoided preparing food on my own. I’m the guy who brings beer to the potluck. I’d throw a Fourth of July party and supply the grill but bank on someone else running it. I doubted my abilities, hated doing dishes and never got around to trying any of the dinners outlined in the binder my mom gave me or a recipe book next to it on my kitchen counter.

And neither did my girlfriend. Her skills outranked mine, but in large part due to her work hours, she rarely put them to use. When we moved in together, we both considered it an opportunity to change, to better ourselves, but we knew we’d need a new approach to jumpstart the cooking process.

That’s why we signed up for Blue Apron, one of those shipped-to-your-doorstep programs that portions out the food you’ll need for several meals and includes a basic recipe. With the ingredients sitting in our refrigerator and each other for accountability, we figured we could make progress.

And, unremarkably, we did.

The gigantic cardboard box arrived on my neighbor’s porch — none of the weekly deliveries have made it to our door yet, despite explicit instructions — filled with three meals with two portions each (though there is a family option with more). First up: a crispy catfish with yuzu-kosho udon and snow peas.

When I say that I didn’t really know how to cook, I mean that I’d never prepared fish before at all, and the catfish intimidated me. It didn’t help that I had no idea what “yuzu-kosho” meant, though I figured the udon noodles would be easy enough. But we followed the directions carefully, using the apportioned flour to pat the fish before cooking.

Not only did we avoid burning down the apartment, but the catfish and noodles actually came out fantastically. I didn’t feel ready to open a restaurant or anything, but the experience immediately boosted my self-confidence. The next two dishes didn’t go quite as well — the gnocchi stuck to the pan, where I tried browning it after boiling, and the steam buns fell apart almost immediately. The ‘pesto’ we made for the spinach pesto gnocchi reeked of amateur hour, and the ‘kimchi’ we created for the chicken steam-buns with

The salmon presented some cooking challenges, but it came out wonderfully. We paired it with pinot grigio.

radish and cucumber kimchi would never be found in Korea. But the steam bun entrée still tasted stellar, and things improved a little the following week.

Yes, I botched the lemon-butter salmon a bit, which tasted excellent despite burning a little on the pan.

And the spiced lamb and beef tagine with couscous could’ve used some more kick. But we were cooking, and not just safe pasta dishes but meals with barley, a Middle Eastern sort of cream cheese called “labneh” that perfectly complemented the tagine and a healthy portion of vegetables.

The best yet: chicken piccata with long fusili noodles and garlic chives and parsley.

Today the next round arrived. You can pick the delivery day, choose between a couple options, and there’s some leeway in terms of which meals you receive.

This week we opted for the seared pork chops with fig compote and sautéed kale with farro salad, spicy miso-glazed chicken wings with purple rice and zucchini salad and steakhouse salmon with thyme-sautéed potatoes, green beans and mushrooms.

We’re skipping next week and the following, as well as another in July, due to travel. It’s really easy and there’s no charge to pass, making it all the more appealing, but I kind of hate that we’re going to miss the next delivery, which includes beef arepas, Peruvian roast chicken with a creamy jalapeño sauce and Maryland-style cod-cake sandwiches.

ERIC GINSBURG

Blue Apron, and likely other services like it, is ideal, at least for right now. But that’s because I’m clueless and timid in the kitchen, living with a partner and hate grocery shopping.

There are downsides, of course. It’s expensive — $10 each per meal, which is almost as much as eating out around here. And there’s some waste, even though most everything Blue Apron sends can be recycled; does anyone want a bunch of oversized ice packs?

We figure we’ll cancel the service after a while, once we improve our chops and are firmly in the practice of cooking dinner at least three times a week. But until then, I love that it forces us to eat in and try things we wouldn’t otherwise.

Pick of the Week Oh, the horror. Burger sampling. It’s hell. Hell, we tell you!

1st Annual Best Burger Tournament @ Farmers Curb Market (GSO), Saturday, 9 a.m.

Okay, are the vegetarians gone? Listen up, beefcakes. Emma Key’s, Libby Hill, Melt and Burger Warfare cook off to win your vote for Best Burger.

(Sad that the actual Best Burger didn’t make the list.) Certifiable burger nerds will be present: Randy Barnes of the Hamburger Square blog emcees, while Greensboro Hamburger² author Billy Ingram will tell stories. Check gsofarmersmarket.org for details.

News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

“This right here is nothing but a French press upside down,” Brown said as we stood in front of the small-batch rig that morning, discussing how we’d run water over the mash. I knew some of the terminology like “lauter” and “sparge” from previous brewery visits, not that I could accurately describe what each meant and what function it served.

I asked Brown what must’ve been an unceasing line of questions, but the answers aren’t what I remember. What sticks out in my mind instead is when the mash got stuck even though he’d added ERIC GINSBURG William Brown, assistant brewer at Gibb’s Hundred, adds sugar to the rice hulls “to prevent saison that we brewed together last week. It’s currently fermenting. it from turning into cement” and Brown said I’d want to drink. I had no idea if the recipe calling for we might need to “burp” it to knock the mixture loose 60 percent pilsner malt, 35 percent dark wheat malt (though ultimately we didn’t need to), or the immense and 5 percent torrified wheat —with French saison heat emanating from the boil kettle on the floor, or yeast added later in the process — would be any good.

Brown talking about how the changing temperature And I still don’t; Gibb’s will be releasing this batch in of city water complicated the process and gave him a August. But I did know that the person who posted it deeper respect for brewers in hotter climes. said this beer is also good with mint and cucumber, I remember measuring out the Amarillo and Cascade and that’s all I needed to hear. hops and dumping the two kinds in at intervals. I It isn’t easy to predict how much cucumber such a remember waiting, and Brown’s patience with me, beer should take, Brown pointed out, and the beers I’ve and drinking a tart Berliner Weisse. I remember him tried with fruits and veggies often fail to hit the right saying it would take at least two weeks to ferment and quotient. We decided to forgo it but retain the simpler another to carbonate. mint addition, though I plan to stick a cucumber round But more than those recollections, I’m left with on the rim of my beer when this thing finally comes a deeper respect for the process, for the amount of out. manual labor that goes into making even a relatively So, a saison with mint — and possibly garnished with small amount of beer, for the unpredictability of what cuke — in need of a name. Riffing off the US Mint, I exactly might happen even for someone such as Brown came up with Summer Currency, and Freshly Minted who has a strong handle on what they’re doing. It’s a Season saison since it’s fermenting as summer offidirty job, filled with all too much science and janitorial cially begins. I also thought of Summer’s Spear mint work to prevent me from pursuing it, but I’m so very saison (get it?). But in the end I realized I’m still just as glad other people like Brown find it rewarding. clueless when it comes to naming beers as I am with I’m also left with a question, and a pretty important regards to brewing them. one; what the hell should I call “my” beer?

I had found the recipe online, picking through a Stay tuned for more details about when you can try forum on beeradvocate.com until I found a straightforthe Ginsbrew mint saison at Gibb’s Hundred Brewing ward saison. It’s summer, I figured, and something dry (GSO) in August, and please offer up better names for and refreshing like a light saison would be exactly what the beer.

Up Front

Spending a morning in a brewery does not a brewer make. But it may be the best way to understand the process.

You could spend days in a brewhouse watching a master at work and still come

by Eric Ginsburg away with only the vaguest understanding of how to make a beer. I know because I’ve done it, hanging out on brew days at Liberty Brewery & Grill in High Point and Preyer Brewing in Greensboro, touring Red Oak and others nearby, interviewing every Triad brewery’s head brewer and kicking it with a local homebrew club during a demo. I’m convinced that unless you enroll in a brewing program, home-brew for a couple years or work in a brewery, you still won’t truly know how to brew a good beer.

That’s part of why, when Gibb’s Hundred Brewing in Greensboro invited me to come in and brew my “own” beer, I said yes, seeing it as a chance to better understand the intricacies and science of producing high-quality beers. But really, I agreed because it sounded badass.

Triad City Beat briefly had a beer named after it — Hoots’ Wheelbite Wheat originally debuted for an evening as the Triad City Wheat at our Winston-Salem Kickstarter party. I once helped a friend brew in college (“Back before it was cool,” he added, in that way pretentious hipsters do) and we got hammered when the alcohol content reached a much higher percentage than we’d intended. But all my real beer cred derives from my experience as a writer — and maybe to an extent from my experiences as a consumer — rather than any qualifications on the manufacturing side.

When I showed up at 9 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, William Brown had already started working.

Just over a year ago, Brown quit his well-paying-but-ultimately-unrewarding logistics gig to brew beer. After years of doing it on his own at home and with the companionship of the Greensboro homebrew club called the Battleground Brewers Guild, Brown joined up at Gibb’s. There, under the guidance of head brewer John Priest — formerly of Michigan-based craft giant Bell’s Brewery — Brown helps produce the brewery’s cool commodity on a 13-barrel system.

But that morning, he’d be working on a much smaller rig, stacked on a rolling cart hooked up to a power source and city water, a 10-gallon set-up made in part from some of his own homebrew gear. The process is comparable, and the timing pretty identical, to brewing in the big time, he said, except the cleanup is easier.

Having watched brewers rake spent grain out of tanks and hearing Brown talk about wearing pants to avoid burns despite the high temperatures in a brewery, easier and smaller sounded ideal to me anyway.

triad-city-beat.com

The author brews a beer (sort of)

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE Lost Bayou Rambler propel Cajun music into the future

by Jordan Green

T

he sound started cutting out during the first song.

By the second number, which wedded Lost Bayou Ramblers’ staple sound — traditional Cajun music hammered out with primitive punk urgency — to a heavy blues rhythm and psychedelic siren effect, fiddler and bandleader Louis Michot’s vocal mic was in and out. Jonny Campos’ guitar was all but missing in action, and he phantom-strummed the instrument to dramatize its muteness.

A worn-out breaker box was the culprit of the sound problems during Lost Bayou Ramblers’ headline set at Twin City RibFest, which took place in a parking lot across the street from the MC Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem on June 11. At the end of the song the sound tech asked Michot for two minutes to swap the box out.

“We got a surprise for you,” Michot told the audience.

And with that, the band members hopped off the stage, Louis Michot heading the procession singing and playing the fiddle, followed by his brother Andre on accordion. The rest of the band fell in behind them: drummer Kirkland Middleton playing the triangle, bassist Bryan Webre tapping two drumsticks together, and Campos beating out a scratch rhythm on his unplugged electric guitar.

The audience had been hanging back, seated in folding chairs and watching the band from a distance, leaving a gulf of asphalt between themselves and the band. But as soon as the procession reached the retiring crowd, they joyously fell in. Louis Michot led them up a short flight of step into the VIP section, whose light aluminum floor provided an ideal platform for him to stomp the rhythm while Webre put metal railings and barricades to good percussive use.

By the time they made it back to the stage the sound was fixed. The band continued the song, not missing a beat as Middleton settled back in behind his kit, and Webre and Campos plugged in.

Strangely, the audience had fallen back into position near the back of the parking lot as the band returned to the stage, although they showed their appreciation with boisterous cheering at the end of each song.

Campos manifested an eerie wind-tunnel effect on his guitar and Middleton kicked in a tribal rhythm that evolved into a fusillade tempo. The Michot brothers coaxed a fulsome sound out of their instruments, creating a kind of harmonic counterpoint to Campos’ droning, Velvets-style rock and roll.

The typical punk MO is a group of friends making music despite not knowing how to play their instruments very well, compensating for lack of talent with a message and sheer energy. The energy and intensity of Lost Bayou Ramblers come at the punk ethos from exactly the opposite end of the spectrum: The Michot brothers, as founding members of the band,

Lost Bayou Ramblers took their show into the parking lot across from the MC Benton Convention Center on June 11 when the sound onstage started shorting out.

are steeped in the roots of Cajun roots music and accomplished musicians, having played in Les Freres Michot, the family band their father and uncles started in the 1980s. With Louis’ yelping shout-singing as a focal point of the band, Lost Bayou Ramblers’ music pares down to a primal emotional connection while at the same time adding layers of sonic armor — a heavy drumbeat and throbbing bassline, even occasional feedback from an electric guitar.

As a Cajun band refusing to be a creaky museum piece and embracing the direct gut punch of punkrock, Lost Bayou Ramblers are embarked on a path similar to the Pogues, a band that fused traditional Irish music, left-wing political content and punk attitude in London in the 1980s.

The members of Lost Bayou Ramblers occasionally back Spider Stacy, a founding member of the Pogues, and in early June they performed the songs of the Pogues as Spider & the Cajuns during Louis’ residency at avant-garde musician John Zorn’s venue the Stone in New York City. The six-week run showcased dozens of Louisiana musicians, including members of Lost Bayou Ramblers and Les Freres Michot, performing various strands of the Cajun tradition in different iterations.

After a decade and a half together, Lost Bayou Ramblers cemented its reputation with a Grammy nomination for Best Americana album for its 2012 release Live at La Blue Moon. It was followed by 2014’s Mammoth Waltz, which featured guest turns by Dr. John, Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes and Scarlett Johannson, and was named one of the 21 best albums of the 21st Century by the Times-Picayune. Their contribution to the Beasts of the Southern Wild soundtrack and an

JORDAN GREEN

opening slot for Arcade Fire have also helped Lost Bayou Ramblers build their audience.

The band members seemed not at all put out by the Winston-Salem audience’s lack of commitment, with Webre and Middleton getting loose on a “O Bye” with, respectively, zoom bass and click drumming. Having switched from accordion to lap steel, Andre Michot explored a sound akin to Hank Williams’ Cajun-inspired material on “A Dollar Here and Dollar There.” By the end of the song, the musicians were goofing on James Brown-style dramatic stops.

During the band’s final song, the sound was on the fritz again. Louis and his comrades responded by unplugging and attacking their material with even more vehemence. Proving that amplification can be more a barrier than a bridge, the audience — at least a dozen of them — surged to the front to reciprocate.

Pick of the Week I get knocked down, but I tune up again Chamber Crawl @ downtown (GSO), Saturday, 1 p.m.

Eastern Music Festival Fringe and Classical Revolution Greensboro team up to present four chamber ensembles at nine downtown Greensboro venues (phew) including Collapss at the Green Bean and Scuppernong Books. So, if you see someone madly dashing across Elm Street with a cello in tow that night, that’s why. Encore performances will start at 5 p.m. at Gibb’s Hundred Brewing. Find the event on Facebook for a full schedule.

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June 15 — 21, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture

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by Anthony Harrison

n a mid-May morning, High Point University communications major Sam Schoenfeld and the rest of his game-design capstone team received the same vague message from their instructor Brian Heagney.

“Dear students: Please read the email below,” signed

Heagney.

The banality of the communiqué obscured its urgency. The game Schoenfeld, Michael Messer, Callum Boothman and Spencer Hitchcock created, “Guinevere and the Fallen King,” had been nominated as a finalist in the College Game Competition at the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 — the gaming industry’s premier convention.

The news struck the quartet like a blow from Excalibur.

“I was flabbergasted,” Schoenfeld recalled. “I’m still waiting for an email saying, ‘This is a mistake,’ but it’s only a couple days away now, so I guess it’s too late for that.”

The team developed “Guinevere and the Fallen King” over the spring semester as a “vertical slice” — basically, a demo — initially for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

“Our summer plan, provisionally, was for me and my programmer [Messer] to keep working and making the game,” Schoenfeld said. “But we got lucky, so now, we’re going to E3.”

The theoretical full game, as the title suggests, follows Lady Guinevere of Arthurian legend in search of her husband following his supernatural passing.

“You play other fantasy games, and there’s orcs and elves and all this other stuff, and there’s really

Redemption for Guinevere no rhyme or reason to it,” Schoenfeld said. “It’s a world-building cliché based on Tolkien.

“Well, no one ever talks about King Arthur,” Schoenfeld continued. “There’s been nothing about King Arthur since that really bad 2004 movie. It’s such a rich world with all the characters in the public domain, so I said, ‘Let’s keep it going, see what happens.’”

Aside from Arthurian legend, “Guinevere and the Fallen King” draws inspiration from classic side-scrolling platformers like Castlevania and Super Mario Bros., the Zelda series, the simple mechanics of GameBoy games and even newer-generation titles like “Super Smash Brothers.”

“We wanted to evoke that old-school feel in gameplay and how it looks, but kind of modernize it — speed it up a little bit, make it look a little fresher,” Schoenfeld said.

Schoenfeld — Guinevere’s lead artist, animator and creative director — conceptualized the game toward the end of his junior year in the HPU game lab. He’d been doodling a female knight who he named Guinevere.

“I was like, ‘Huh, I’ve got this character; what could I do with her?’” Schoenfeld said.

Schoenfeld revisited major works of Arthurian legend, poring over Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s narrative-poem cycle Idylls of the King and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur like a medieval scribe.

“Guinevere’s hypothetically still pretty young by the end of it,” Schoenfeld said. “She’s in her late twenties, and Arthur never comes back after he suffers that grievous injury at the hand of Mordred [his illegitimate son]. So what if he never returned, Morgan le Fay [Arthur’s sorceress half-sister] was siphoning off his kingly power, Camelot was in ruins, all the Knights of the Round Table are dead and there’s civil war? What if she’s the last person to take up the mantle?”

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Schoenfeld conceived this narrative as “a redemption journey” for Guinevere, who infamously shacked up with Arthur’s greatest knight, Sir Lancelot, their tryst partly leading to Camelot’s downfall.

“It’s kind of her fault in the first place,” Schoenfeld said with a rough chuckle.

But he emphasized Guinevere’s role as a strong female lead, a growing trend in games, in order to explore an “underserviced” character.

“We thought, Let’s put the spotlight on her and see things from her perspective, as opposed to the original poems which were male-dominated — men writing for men — just like in games, you have guys making games for other guys,” Schoenfeld said.

An ironic twist to its success: Heagney admitted initial hesitation at the game’s proposed scope.

“I thought that they’d never finish it,” Heagney said.

Despite Guinevere’s nostalgic novelty, the small team faces stiff competition from games submitted by students at the University of Southern California and Savannah College of Art and Design — some with teams of 100 people and multiple semesters-worth of development.

Like stoic, stalwart knights, Schoenfeld and Heagney retain optimism.

“The thing that’s awesome about this is not whether or not they win,” Heagney said. “This is a golden opportunity for them to impress themselves upon people in the industry.”

“I think it’s such a testament to our team and all our hard work that we placed in the top five with so few people and so little time,” Schoenfeld said. “I think it means we’re onto something big or something solid with our game.”

Following E3, the Guinevere team plans to release their demo on the game’s website, currently in development. They may also publish Guinevere on Steam, a digital game-distribution service, and launch a Kickstarter campaign.

Regardless of the competition’s results, Schoenfeld plans to complete Guinevere’s quest, to bring her redemption and deliver a triumph.

“We’ve looked at this project under a microscope for so long, all we see are the flaws, the little issues, the bugs,” Schoenfeld said. “We don’t see it for what players are coming up and experiencing.”

Sam Schoenfeld (right) and Michael Messer discuss their brainchild, “Guinevere and the Fallen King,” in the High Point University game lab.

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Yoga power-up Glow with the Flow @ Gate City Yoga (GSO), Friday, 6 p.m.

Yoga isn’t all just meditation, deep breathing and downward-facing dog. It can also serve as calisthenics for hippies. Gate City Yoga’s throwing a hip-hop themed yoga-flow party. Following the hour-long power-yoga session there’ll be a dance party from 8 to 10 p.m. to keep your groove goin’.

For more info, visit gatecityyogastudio.com.

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GAMES

‘Shell Games’ from an outside perspective.

by Matt Jones Across

Culture

Fill-in at the office Cookie sometimes eaten inside-out iPod Nano precursor Gulf War missiles The Little Rascals, alternately Motherboard component “We’ll tak a ___ kindness yet”: Burns “___ you just the cutest thing ever?”

Formal order Prius, e.g.

Memento ___ Norse counterpart of Ares Ratted

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21 ___-Locka (city near Miami) 22 Track meet component 25 In the ___ of (surrounded by) 26 Add fuel to 27 See-through scenery piece 29 Grant’s landmark 30 Aerodynamic 32 West Coast NFLer as of 2016 33 Bring bliss to 34 Humans ___ York (photo/interview site) 36 Time to drink cheap 38 Old West challenge 40 Astronaut’s pressurized garb 44 Blacktop makeup 45 Rest for a while 49 Head bob 52 Attendant of Bacchus 54 State where “Wayward Pines” is set 55 Cop or call lead-in 56 “If ___ $1000000” (Barenaked Ladies song) 57 Dig 58 “99 Luftballons” singer 59 Actress Conn of “Grease” 60 “Too many more to mention” abbr.

61 Gavel-banging word 62 Meniscus location

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51 Barks like a fox 53 Ornamental carp 55 Schoolroom furniture with a surface shaped like a “7” 63 River into which Ali threw his gold medal 64 Lost spectacularly, in slang 65 “... hit me like ___ of bricks” 66 Recurring “Seinfeld” character from Pakistan 67 Center square occupant Paul 68 Tony of “Veep” 69 Czech Republic river 70 Freight hauler 71 “Ye ___ Curiosity Shoppe”

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1 ___ of Maine (toothpaste brand) 5 Name associated with a philosophical “razor” 10 Some insurance options, for short 14 Stonestreet of “Modern Family” 15 “Star Trek” character that speaks Swahili 16 Little green guy of film 17 Maitre d’ handout 18 Get red, maybe 19 Google cofounder Sergey 20 Alternative rock band formed in 1984 that’s called Honolulu, Austin, and Chicago home 23 Treatment facility 24 “Rikki-Tikki-___” (Kipling short story) 25 Auth. submissions 28 Colonial critters?

31 Punk rocker with the backup band The Pharmacists 35 Scratcher’s target 37 Bovine Old Testament idol 39 Headwear banned by the NFL in 2001 41 “La ___” (Debussy opus) 42 Actor Killam of both “Mad TV” and “SNL” 43 Races, like the heart 46 Hourly wage 47 ___ fugit 48 Olympic skating medalist Michelle

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ALL SHE WROTE

by Nicole Crews

When I was in the 7th grade it was determined that I was to go to private school. It was more me than my mom and dad. They were of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” parenting school and since my grades were excellent and I tested well, it never occurred to them that I wasn’t getting much of an education.

Stating my case, I showed them the contents of my book bag. It consisted of Judy Blume novels, a few bodice rippers and a couple of Tom Wolfe New Journalism epiphanies that I had gotten for Christmas. “It takes 10 minutes to do my homework,” I cried, after witnessing the motherlode of work my friends at Forsyth Country Day, Salem and Westchester Academy were carting around.

Don’t even get me started on the advanced classes my friends at far-flung prep schools were jabbering about during long, languishing summers lakeside. And after what seemed like countless years of attending basketball camp at my father’s alma mater, Davidson

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nderson Cooper: On Sunday, June 11, a gunman opened fire in an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others. The gunman was killed in police crossfire.

Me (commenting): Wow, that’s about the total number of people in my entire high

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Firing an MP5 with Sheriff Gerald Hege in the 1990s.

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Guns N’ Roses

College, it occurred to me that despite being a legacy and my kick-ass jump shot, I might not get in.

In retrospect, I’m sure it had more to do with keeping up with the junior Joneses than education, but it made me push harder for private school than an octomom during vaginal birth. With the help of a few commiserate junior high teachers, my parents were convinced.

The hunt began locally at Westchester and Forsyth Country Day. After a summer session of ghastly commutes, my parents determined that I would have to board somewhere quasi-locally, so I could still spend time at home — at least until I got my driver’s license.

My mother was inconsolable. The arts program at Forsyth was nonpareil in her mind’s eye.

With an eye toward dance, I was keen on the North Carolina School of the Arts. I had visions of bouquets of roses cradled in my arms as I bowed gracefully after standing ovations. Sadly, my bum knee from a basketball injury precluded much of a chance of any real ballet career. Salem Academy proved to be a disappointment when my interviewers seemed more keen on my MRS degree intentions than academics.

So, on a whim and a tip that they were now enrolling girls, we went to Oak Ridge Academy — nee Oak Ridge Military Academy.

I considered the interview an indulgence for my father who had always wanted to attend the school and who was curious about the culture there. I took the tour, met the brass and took a few tests. And then something remarkable happened. Betty Hobbs, head of the English Department, cornered me in the hall and started quizzing me and chatting with me enthusiastically about literature and writers. She handed me a reading list and said, “I will see you in the fall.”

She was right on. I entered Oak Ridge that fall a peon with no knowledge of the military other than what I had seen in movies like Taps and on the 6 o’clock news. All I did know was that I could take Latin from a Yalie, English from a PhD and there were more AP classes than I had time to enroll in. It was a golden era at Oak Ridge, academically — but I learned a lot more than the books had to offer.

Stripped of my Calvin Klein jeans and grosgrain headbands and put into a standard issue gray and black Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps uniform, I learned the meaning of esprit de corps and teamwork.

The ranking system taught me leadership and standard operational procedure taught me discipline. I learned how to rappel down towers, break down an M-1903 bolt-action, magazine-fed, breech-loading shoulder weapon and find my way out of the woods without a compass. I wore a marksman badge on my chest from the school range and was a member of the Dixie Belles — the women’s drill team.

When I turned 16 and it came time for me to pack up my uniform and head to Forsyth, I said no way. I was a lifer (well, at least until graduation.) So I graduated

Oak Ridge a captain and member of the battalion staff with a healthy respect for guns and weaponry of all kinds. Medals on my breast replaced the aforementioned roses as accolades.

In the ensuing years my appreciation of guns continued. I fired AK-47s outside of the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam for a story for Details magazine. I wrote about a local sheriff’s predilection for Heckler & Koch MP5s and went shooting with him. I frequented ranges with friends and even bought myself a tidy little Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum for target shooting.

It was a lot easier, cheaper and faster buying that gun than getting a driver’s license and operating a vehicle. About six months in my tenure as a handgun owner, I realized the same thing about guns that my driver’s ed teacher warned about driving: You can be the best driver in the world, but that doesn’t mean everyone else on the road is. The realization that just having that weapon in my possession — no matter how securely locked up — meant that someone without my training could get their hands on it was enough for me to rid my hands of it. I decided then and there that getting rid of one weapon in the world was the least that I could do.

I chose roses over guns — at last.

Gate City Vineyard is a modern, Christian church that exists to serve the community around us. Our desire is to help people of all ages and backgrounds grow in their understanding of God. At the Vineyard you can come as you are and be yourself.

Whatever your thoughts about church, whatever your beliefs about God … you are welcome here.

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