TCB July 13, 2016 — HB2 and the war on NC cities

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point triad-city-beat.com July 13 – 19, 2016

FREE

PAGE 16

Mi Mi’s presidential bid PAGE 12

Dutch baby brunch PAGE 20

Enter Joymongers PAGE 21

July 13 — 19, 2016

EXPERIENCE … EMF

Tickets are available through Saturday, July 30.

PERFORMANCES TO INCLUDE: Viva Vivaldi

Wednesday, July 6 / 8PM First Presbyterian Church, Greensboro The best of Italian Baroque in one of Greensboro most EVOCATIVE settings.

EMF Open House

FREE Sunday, July 24 / 1-8:30PM Guilford College Campus Recitals SHOWCASE EMF percussion, guitar and piano students. Conducting Fellows lead Eastern Festival Orchestra in concert.

EMF Guitar Summit

Faculty Chamber Series

Wednesday, July 27 / 8PM Temple Emanuel, Greensboro EMF’S SUPERLATIVE guitar faculty and young artists perform works spanning four centuries.

Eastern Music Faculty

Young Artists Concerto Competition Winners Thursday, July 28 / 8PM Friday, July 28 / 8PM Dana Auditorium DISCOVER EMF’s most talented young artists.

Faculty Artists provide INTIMATE concerts twice weekly during the festival.

Chamber Music at UNCG School of Music, Theatre and Dance Mondays through July 25/8PM Chamber Music at Guilford College Tuesdays through July 26/8PM Dana Auditorium, Guilford College

Music For A Sunday Evening in the Park Tuba Skinny with special guests The Swamp Nots caps the day with a concert on Dana Lawn.

JULY 16 WESTEND MAMBO (LATIN DANCE) JULY 22 URBAN JAZZ COALITION & WILL DONOTO | OPENING PERFORMER - WILL DONATO

Ticket information & Sales 336-272-0160

EASTERNMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG All programs, dates, artists, venues, and prices are subject to change.

2

315 South Elm Street Greensboro, NC 27401

Three friends passionate about exceptional food and entertainment.

336-273-0970

Mary Lacklen • Allen Broach • Bob Weston

orders@cheesecakesbyalex.com

(336)210–5094

abroach@earthlink.net

Life by the drop

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

by Brian Clarey

NEWS 8 Race, policing and residents 10 A new start in Winston-Salem after fleeing war-torn Iraq 12 Mi Mi for president

OPINION 14 Editorial: Calling all heroes 14 Citizen Green: The case for boycott 15 It Just Might Work: Ramen in the Triad 15 Fresh Eyes: Thank you, police

COVER 16 The 30 years that brought us HB 2

CULTURE 20 Food: The functionality of eating in Austin 21 Barstool: Joymongers opens 22 Music: Effortless mastery and cosmic Americana 24 Art: A slam poet interprets a master’s work

20

FUN & GAMES

ALL SHE WROTE

26 Hot streak, summer in the city

30 North Carolina — The Musical

GAMES 27 Jonesin’ Crossword

SHOT IN THE TRIAD 28 W. Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

This is my best chance to rule the world, in all honesty.

— Melisa “Mi Mi” Boyett, on her bid for US president, page 12

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Box 24, Greensboro, NC 27406 • Office: 336-256-9320 BUSINESS PUBLISHER/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Brian Clarey brian@triad-city-beat.com

PUBLISHER EMERITUS Allen Broach allen@triad-city-beat.com

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

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

EDITORIAL INTERNS Naari Honor

Jesse Morales intern@triad-city-beat.com

ART ART DIRECTOR Jorge Maturino jorge@triad-city-beat.com

SALES DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Dick Gray dick@triad-city-beat.com

SALES EXECUTIVE Lamar Gibson lamar@triad-city-beat.com

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

Cover photography by Caption

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

SALES EXECUTIVE Korinna Sergent korinna@triad-city-beat.com

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

We head west on Fifth Street from our hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, then turn south until we hit the Colorado River, where pedestrian crossings hang on either side of the First Street Bridge. At Butler Park, precisely where my phone said it would be, we find the stoic bronze statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

He stands with one hip cocked in a billowing poncho, trousers tucked into his cowboy boots and his flat-brimmed, gambler-style cowboy hat casting a shadow over his face, just as it did in life. A friend from the Austin Chronicle told me that the river can rise high enough to spill over the seawall and submerge Stevie up to his neck before it subsides.

After more than two years at the helm of Triad City Beat, I think I know what that feels like.

We gather in Austin with a couple hundred or so of our fellow alt-weekly troopers to share business and editorial strategies, prognosticate on the coming trends and have moments of fellowship that remind us all why we do this thing in the first place.

It’s not for money, though the largest papers in the Association of Alternative Newsmedia take in more than $10 million a year. And it’s not for fame, but there are people of renown in our little universe — daring publishers who have forged new streams of revenue in trying times, editors who transcend their roles, two-fisted journalists who create the kind of content that has the capacity to change the world.

This year, as it turns out, one of them is from the Triad.

Just hours after we paid our respects to Stevie Ray, we learned that TCB Senior Editor Jordan Green took Second Place honors in the Best Political Columns category A friend told me the for papers that river can rise over the print 45,000 copies and under. For seawall and submerge our small paper, Stevie up to his neck. in its first year of eligibility, this is a moment for the ages.

Besides the accolade, we have numerous takeaways from the annual gathering of the alts, many of which you’ll see reflected in the pages of the newspaper over the months to come: some digital wizardry, a few brilliant story ideas we’ve pinched from our colleagues and some strategic collaboration, like this week’s cover story, “The 30 years that brought us HB 2,” beginning on page 16, that we’re running in conjunction with our friends at Indy Week over in the Triangle.

No waste of time we’re allowed today, as my old friend Stevie Ray Vaughan says. That’s how it happens living life by the drop.

triad-city-beat.com

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

CONTENTS

3

July 13 — 19, 2016

CITY LIFE July 13 – 19 ALL WEEKEND ConGregate 2016 @ the Radisson Hotel (HP) High Point’s third annual sci-fi/fantasy con, created and staffed solely by volunteers, features a costume contest, charity auction and special guests including musical duo Valentine Wolfe. The event website declares that “we pride ourselves in trying to provide an inclusive environment” — and at a local venue, too. Take a cue from the Silver Surfer and tell your squad that ConGregate also strives to meet Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines. Gotta love a con for everyone. Hit up con-gregate. com for more.

by Jesse Morales

WEDNESDAY

Pride adult game night @ Fan Zone (W-S), 7 p.m.

Still buzzing from your summer Pride festival romps? Keep the energy flowing with this wild game night for grownups. Pride Winston-Salem hosts the festivities, and they’ll host a volunteer sign-up as well. Best perk? The event’s Facebook page talks up its “life size Jenga” swag (whoa), so go there for more deetz.

THURSDAY

Public vinyl demo @ Ember Audio+Video (W-S), 5 p.m.

Ember AV brings out the big machinery with vinyl tunes cranked out on their KEF Reference 5 speakers. Johan Coorg, who describes himself as “dynamic and music-crazed” plays host along with the Ember folks. Plus, the organizers at Ember AV humblebrag about the “hot coffee and mood-lighting” aura of their vinyl demo. Wonder if vinyl-gazing qualifies as a relaxation technique? Visit emberav.com for more.

FRIDAY 15 Ladies’ night aerial yoga @ Yoga Mindset (HP), 6:30 p.m.

The folks at Yoga Mindset invite you to “come fly with us” IRL, as long as you ID as a lady (interpret that how you want). Along with aerial silks and intense stretches, you’ll find wine and eats at this full-body-experience event. Yogis of all levels are welcome, as are funky yoga pants. Search Yoga Mindset High Point on Facebook to register.

4

triad-city-beat.com

SATURDAY Greensboro World Refugee Day @ Oka T. Hester Park (GSO), noon Celebrate the Triad’s diverse refugee population at this outdoor festival by showing up for international food, a football (...soccer) tournament and fine arts performances. Be sure to bring your own delish eats to sizzle alongside dishes from all pockets of Mother Earth. To register for the tourney, and get the full story, email greensborowrd@gmail.com.

By Any Means Necessary @ Dillard Auditorium, WSSU (W-S), 7 p.m.

Local Winston-Salem playwright and director Omeka Lucas’s work makes its stage debut with this play about “a single mother who hits a rough spot in her life.” Lucas’ LinkedIn Page says that she’s a “marketing and branding specialist who also works in finance. Talk about doing it all. Look up the event page on Facebook for a short synopsis and more.

SUNDAY

Dog Essential Oils Class @ All Pets Considered (GSO), 1:30 p.m.

If you understand people food and dog food as a strict dichotomy (no chocolate for pups), you may snicker at the idea that dogs require their own relaxing scents. However, if your doggie parent love knows no boundaries, this class is for you. At the post-class workshop, you can create a mix of aromas fit for puppy paradise — including blends labeled “muscles” and “bugs.” Check out the event’s Facebook page for details and tickets.

MONDAY

Act!vating High Point @ High Point Public Library, 11 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Have kids on summertime overdrive (or underdrive)? The Act!vated Story Theatre’s Facebook page says its mission is to provide “live multicultural folktale theater to children all across America.” A rendition of The Tortoise and the Hare is in the works (run, Tortoise, run!), along with audience participation. If your family’s interested, search for “Act!vating High Point” using Facebook’s events tool.

TUESDAY

Book Signing: The Sitcom Reader @ Scuppernong Books (GSO), 7 p.m.

Consider leveling up your love of comedy by meeting media and communications professors Mary Dalton and Laura Linder, who edited The Sitcom Reader. If you’re a Golden Girls fan, cheesecakes aren’t included (but you can find some across the street). Dalton and Lindner’s book engages in critical analysis of sitcoms and humor from I Love Lucy to Amazon’s Transparent. Stop by scuppernongbooks.com for the full DL.

5

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture

by Jesse Morales 1. Americanah (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) swept into my mind as I browsed the Design Archives vendor booths on South Elm Street in Greensboro. The book recounts the sojourn of a Nigerian woman in the United States, who, having fled her country due to violence, discovers — and writes about — the many shades of American racial discord. It occurred to me while looking at non sequitur Americana, such as a painting of Jimi Hendrix hung adjacent to a set of cast-iron Amish figurines, that all Americana, like America itself, stands as a marker to our own turbulent history of trying to live together. In a deep way, Americana is actually Americanah.

2. War and Peace (by Leo Tolstoy) came up for me in Greensboro, where the material remnants of conflict and the struggle for peace emerged on the shelves. Resting below a rack of colorful, flower-print maxi dresses from the Vietnam era, a pair of used combat boots stood out as a stark survival of wartime. As War and Peace the novel illustrates, global-level hostilities reach us all — even down to our clothes and shoes, some of the most personal, yet public-facing, objects we own.

studio) loomed above me as an ironic meme of theatrical Americanism. Die Hard 6, anyone? Yeesh.

4. On Beauty (by Zadie Smith) considers intertwining themes of gender, religion, love and cultural conflict, on which I reflected while pondering another item in the Greensboro store. It’s called the “Lady Schick Haircurler with Beautifying Mist.” I’ll allow that title to speak for itself.

5. Pride and Prejudice (by Jane Austen) — the title at least — resonates with one of the more curious (and tattered) books I discovered in a dark nook at the Greensboro store. The title? Finger Lickin’ Good: The Story of Colonel Sanders, by L. Henry Dowell. From what I gather on the internet, the work is a kind of hagiography in praise of Sanders. Mic.com offers strong pushback on that narrative, reporting that “Colonel Sanders tried to

elect America’s most infamous segregationist — George Wallace — to the presidency.” For me, this book served as another reminder that we Americans still have a long road to walk towards racial justice and reconciliation.

6. Orientalism (by Edward Said) isn’t a strictly literary work, but its argument filled my mind as I flipped through the stacks of Kennedy-era Life magazines at the Winston-Salem location. Said’s work asserts that Western culture erroneously casts non-Western cultures as “Oriental,” that is, mysterious, exotic and even illogical. Personally, I can’t think of a more irrational (and orientalist) cultural representation than the Life cover from 1961 that shows Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. Yet, as weird as American material culture seems, it’s this very patchwork of memorabilia that survives us all.

3. The Icarus Girl (by Helen Oyeyemi), like Americanah, centers on Nigerian cultural experience and mythology. I felt like extrapolating those notions to American cultural mythology when I encountered a massive centurion statue guarding the Winston-Salem Design Archives door. Complete with red-brush helmet and mock sword, the figurine (which apparently originated in a Wilmington movie

All She Wrote

Shot in the Triad

Games

Fun & Games

6 of Design Archives’ most weirdly literary objects

6

First Amendment, you say I read the editorial “Jackboots at the Golden Corral” [July 6, 2016]. I agree with the sentiment.

However, it is unclear what is meant by the reference to the First Amendment, or how it is relevant in this case.

David Rigby, Winston-Salem The editors respond: The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press — a principle that, at least in spirit if not actual practice, should allow the press to report freely and independently without prior constraint or vetting to ensure that the coverage is favorable.

An 8-foot-tall plastic centurion — and retired prop from a Wilmington film set — welcomes customers into Design Archives’ Winston-Salem store.

JESSE MORALES

Eric Ginsburg: Yes, but I’m inclined to line up with the thinking laid out by Anthony Harrison (below) in saying that if at all possible, it might make sense for that decision to come after November. I’ll cede the rest of my space to him.

30 20

70% Yes

20% No

10%

Unsure/maybe

All She Wrote

10

Shot in the Triad

40

Games

50

Fun & Games

60

Culture

70

Cover Story

New question: Are you playing Pokemon Go? Weigh in at triad-city-beat.com!

Opinion

Jordan Green: Yes. Those in the know in Raleigh seem to think that the NBA All-Star Game is the economic prize that GOP lawmakers covet the most. As I argue in Citizen Green this week [see story on page 14], boycotts work and the tactic is needed to overturn HB2. As much as it hurts for the people of North Carolina to share the sacrifice when business is withheld from our state, it’s nothing compared to the indignity and danger that transgender people face with HB2 on the books.

The all-star game is the most powerful lever we have in this fight.

News

Readers: We, or rather Ginsburg, screwed the pooch a little on this one, forgetting to upload the poll until Tuesday afternoon because, well, he was in Austin with the rest of us for the AAN Convention. But of those who did see the poll before we went to press a couple hours later, 70 percent said yes while 20 percent voted no. The remaining 10 percent opted for unsure/maybe. Our sports columnist Anthony Harrison explained his vote: “I did vote yes, but I’m also of the mind that believes ordinary citizens shouldn’t be further punished due to the actions of malevolent bastards in Raleigh,” he wrote. “A boycott like this, while effective, can divert attention away from the problem’s source.

What I support more than a boycott by the NBA is voting out the General Assembly members who supported HB 2 in the first place. So yes, I feel that the NBA should stand against HB 2 and its ilk as a national institution, but I also believe the NBA should operate with the understanding that HB 2 will be thrown out by the time of the All-Star Game and hold off on a concrete cancellation until the 11th hour.”

Brian Clarey: First I should say that the NBA AllStar Game is the best all-star game in professional sports, with the possible exception of hockey.

Baseball’s is terrible, with fresh arms coming in every inning. Football’s Pro Bowl is a joke, basically an excuse for everyone to go to Hawaii as soon as the off-season hits. But the NBA game usually has some real razzle-dazzle. That being said, depriving our state of the game — or, more accurately, the revenue generated by it — would make a strong statement on our current leadership and, hopefully, would force some accountability at the polls

by Naari Honor One of the most memorable bars I ever encountered was in Orlando, Fla., buried deep in the backwoods across a set of abandoned railroad tracks, with no name and a rickety floor. The bartender handed me a roll of toilet paper before pointing me in the direction of the bathroom.

Despite the conditions, I find myself missing that place on occasion.

What can I say, Danny-boy made a perfectly blended rum and coke, and the jukebox had me with “Work Me, Lord” by Janis Joplin.

I’ve lived in Greensboro for more than five years now, and while I’ve enjoyed my share of bars here, I hadn’t quite found that place that gave me that same juke-joint vibe I felt nearly a decade ago in that little shack of a place until my friend and I wandered into Bender’s Tavern.

While you don’t have to drive “over the river and through the wood” to get to Bender’s, the bar rests in the sweet spot of the forgotten stretch of West Market Street. During the day you may notice storage facilities, independent restaurants and a mom-and-pop store or two.

But at night it’s a ghost town and if you drive too fast you could miss the burgundy-colored, ’70s-inspired sign that’s taller than the building itself.

My time indulging in hole-in-the-wall dives has taught me one very important lesson; It’s not what a bar has that makes it the go-to spot, but rather the people who frequent the place that make it worth revisiting.

In this particular case Mike, the bartender, made Bender’s my new juke house.

Yes, Bender’s has a plethora of televisions that would make any sports bar jealous; I counted at least 13 flat screens. There’s cornhole in the parking lot, arcade games, a ginormous Jenga set, and a few touchscreen bar games we have all wasted our quarters on at some point.

Bender’s Tavern has 18 beers on tap, a generous wine selection, and a large back bar that any liquor owner would fawn over. And even though the mozzarella sticks and fried pickles were amazeballs and the jukebox had the whole bar singing in unison at random moments throughout the night, it is Mike the bartender who made my visit the first of many more to come.

How did he do that, you ask? Very simple.

He asked my companion Rhonda how much ice she wanted in her double Knob Creek on the rocks.

I Know, I know. He didn’t solve world hunger. However, he made me smile by caring enough to not ruin a good bourbon. That, along with asking which type of Knob Creek she wanted, since Bender’s carried four different types, instead of assuming. It made all the difference in the world.

If Mike took time to ask how much ice Rhonda wanted as to not ruin her drink, then he is going to take his time to ensure that my time at his establishment is a pleasant one. And that is exactly what Mike did.

There’s no need to dress to the nines when visiting Bender’s. Just as there is no need to wonder if you will be accepted within its walls. We fit in perfectly well with the merry band of patrons that had gathered before us.

I can almost guarantee that you won’t leave the bar without making at least one friend. We acquired enough to start our own team for the infamous trivia night held every Tuesday at 10 p.m.

I hope to see you there. I’ll be the overly inked loc-haired girl drinking a Maker’s and coke with light ice.

Up Front

There are calls for the NBA to boycott North Carolina for its planned 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte over the discriminatory HB2 law. Do you support the boycott? We asked our readers and editors what they think of the tactic (an approach you can read more about in Citizen Green on page 14).

Bender’s Tavern

triad-city-beat.com

Should the NBA All-Star Game skip NC over HB2?

7

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

8

NEWS

Residents struggle to address race, policing at community forum

by Eric Ginsburg

A week after the officer-involved deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the mass killing of Dallas police, Greensboro residents came together to mourn, vent, listen and try to organize at Bethel AME Church on Monday.

Despite the best efforts of the evening’s conveners, no particular unified message emerged from an emergency community meeting on race and policing held at a church near downtown Greensboro on Monday night.

The capacity crowd at Bethel AME Church responded most enthusiastically to an audience member’s passionate metaphor comparing the need for “black lives matter” versus disingenuous responses that “all lives matter” to a house on a street burning down. She borrowed from a cartoon circulating on social media with the same imagery, arguing that there’s a pressing need to focus on the lives under assault — or the house on fire — rather than the fire department spraying water on all houses in the neighborhood.

But many of the people who approached microphones placed throughout the room wore down the patience of the audience, running long despite repeated moderator requests to remain brief, a pattern that suggested that more than a dozen people had something to get off their chest in light of recent tragic national events. Attempts by two of the hosts, Joyce Johnson and the Rev. Nelson Johnson of the Beloved Community Center, along with retired civil-rights attorney Lewis Pitts, to galvanize attendees to pressure Greensboro City Council over access to police body-camera footage received a tepid response.

After more than a year of pressuring the city to take a more open stance towards releasing the body-cam footage to the public, advocates including Pitts who want it to be considered a public record have been unsatisfied with the council’s response, decrying council’s stance as undemocratic and lacking the transparency originally lauded as the reason to purchase the cameras.

The lukewarm response from meeting attendees might be due to a lack of awareness of the matter, but it is also likely connected to the fact that Gov. Pat McCrory recently signed HB972 into law, severely restricting public access to such footage and tying the hands of local governments such as the Greensboro City Council.

Pitts and the Rev. Johnson called for the council to pass a resolution opposing the new state law and approve an ordinance they’ve been pushing in defiance of the state General Assembly and governor.

Joyce Johnson, one of ERIC GINSBURG the evening’s moderators, Attendees waited in line to address the crowd at Bethel AME Church in Greensboro on Monday evening, including one man who strummed occasional chords. repeatedly reminded the crowd that they wanted A few audience members made a sentiment shared by several others people to turn out in support of the similar remarks, but most shared who spoke, saying, “As a 28-year-old proposal at the July 19 city council perspectives that ran counter to the black man, I’m scared every day of my meeting, and while about two dozen narrative and focused on institutional life,” adding that he feels threatened people raised their hands to indicate racism. When it came to calling for by police as well as street violence but they could attend, the public comments specific changes, the most common concluding that if people stick together, and applause indicated minimal interest refrains appealed for police departments they can make the world safer. in the action request. to stop protecting “bad apples” and for One black woman, who identified The speakers from the floor — as is increased police training. herself as a 26-year-old educator, chaloften the case — were disjointed but Alfonza Everett, the pastor of New lenged the idea presented earlier in the touched on a few themes: personal Goshen United Methodist Church and evening about disrespectful black youth, stories of alleged police misconduct or a retired state law enforcement officer, saying as a teacher, she’s seen just as interpersonal racism, fear from — or may have been the evening’s second many rude white kids. After relaying a for — young black men about police most popular speaker from the floor, story of alleged police harassment while violence, calls for unity and arguopening by saying he feared doing a driving and saying, “I could’ve been ments from black men in particular funeral for young people in his church.

Sandra Bland,” she asked what else that blamed disrespectful black youth, Everett said young black people in parshe could do after complying with the neighborhood gun violence or divides ticular often don’t know why police are officer’s orders to exit the car. within black communities in part for the stopping them, saying that while he has “Pray,” several people in the church current crisis. plenty of friends who are police officers, pews murmured.

Byron Gladden, a black Democrat a few “bad apples” can spoil the whole There were several Christian prayers running for Guilford County School bag if they aren’t removed. as part of the official program at the Board’s District 7, talked about divides Everett added that he took a psybeginning of the evening, as well as a within black communities during a chological exam when he became a song. The meeting came one day after long speech that ranged from sexism in pastor to determine if he was fit for the a prayer vigil held by the Greensboro churches to racism in policing. role, and that similar added tests were Pulpit Forum and two days after a “Before we tell the white man downnecessary before sending officers out on Black Lives Matter rally in downtown town that Black Lives Matter, black lives patrol.

Greensboro. When one commenter have to matter to black people,” he said.

A speaker following Everett expressed — addressing other Christians present

connect with Black Lives Matter Gate City, undergoing an anti-racism training and joining the League of Women Voters’ social justice roundtable. Tawana Sampson, who is appealing her lawsuit against the sheriff’s office for what she says was a “brutal” jail beating, even called for Sheriff BJ Barnes’ resignation.

Not too long after, the Rev. Johnson

took center stage to say that he knows some of the comments so far that night may have made some people uncomfortable.

“Get used to it,” he said, adding that while people didn’t gather to denounce a specific person but instead to uproot a culture, that being uncomfortable would allow people “to walk towards

each other.” That’s how, he said, the city can address a crisis in policing and race relations that dates back long before the recent tragedies to the beginnings of slavery.

“We have a capacity to make a new Greensboro,” Johnson said, but only by sticking together.

triad-city-beat.com

and criticizing the hypocrisy of racist so-called Christians — said, “We’re all Christians,” someone in the audience quickly and loudly responded, “No we’re not.”

A few actionable next steps were put forward beyond police reform, prayer and the call for body-camera footage transparency, including invitations to

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

9

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

10

Starting a new life in Winston-Salem after fleeing war-torn Iraq

by Jordan Green

A refugee who fled with her family from her village in Iraq in 2009 has recently become a US citizen and found her calling at Salem College as an educator.

Dania Yadago, a 23-year-old education student at Salem College, recently celebrated her first Fourth of July as a US citizen.

Yadago’s naturalization comes amid a politically tumultuous time in US politics, against a backdrop of governors and federal lawmakers calling for a suspension of refugee resettlement last fall and continuing jeremiads by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, raising fears about Muslims entering the country to commit acts of terrorism.

Yadago, a Christian who fled with her family from their village outside the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2009, said she sympathizes with the Syrian refugees trying to find safe haven from the violence in their native country.

“What if you’ve been living in a safe place and all of a sudden people come and tell you to leave your home or you will be killed?” she asked. “Nobody asks to be a refugee…. Wouldn’t you want countries to have mercy on you and relieve you? Even though you might cause some danger, you go through so much interviewing, background checks, medical checks. It’s very secure. They will watch your every move and ask you: ‘Why did you leave?’ They have everything about you in a file. If they suspect a small thing they would put you on hold. It would be very rare for a refugee family to be a terrorist.”

Yadago was 7 when the US military deposed Saddam Hussein, a dictator who kept a tight lid on the sectarian tensions in the country. Although Yadago acknowledges that Hussein’s rule was objectionable in many ways, at least Christians felt safe in the country, based on what her grandparents told her. She recalled traveling with her family to the capital city of Baghdad to worship in a church.

“It was okay; I wasn’t worried,” she said. “People didn’t think, ‘Hey, I’m a Christian. I need to leave.’ People lived with Muslims; nobody questioned it.”

Dania Yadago took the oath of citizenship in Charlotte in April.

After decades of living under a dictatorship, Yadago said she believes the people of Iraq were unprepared to suddenly take on the responsibilities of democracy in a pluralistic society.

As sectarian tensions worsened in her village, Yadago’s family faced danger on two fronts.

Militant groups targeted the entire village with car bombs, including one that exploded outside a school. Anyone might be randomly killed in the violence, regardless of their religious background. Many of the houses in the village were old and constructed from stone, making them all the more susceptible to damage.

The Yadagos’ position was even more precarious as an evangelical Christian family — a tiny minority even within the larger Christian community of Iraq — who preached a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and held religious meetings in their home. Yadago said her father received anonymous notes warning, “Stop talking to people about Jesus, or you’ll be dead,” and “If you don’t

COURTESY PHOTO

Yadago will graduate with a degree in teacher education from Salem College next year.

stop, we’ll tell the jihadists about you.”

By fleeing their village in 2009, the Yadago family likely avoided a much greater danger. ISIS bombed the village and took over, issuing an ultimatum to the residents: Convert to Islam and pay taxes, or be killed. Yadago’s uncle and grandparents fled to northern Iraq.

Kurdish fighters recaptured the village, but Yadago said two months ago ISIS bombed again. Yadago said that from her understanding the village is basically a ghost town now. Her family doesn’t know whether their house has been destroyed or not. In any case, they’ve given up any claim on it.

While many families like the Yadagos are threatened by ISIS in the Middle East, in the United States xenophobic sentiments have been whipped up by politicians raising fears that ISIS fighters might pose as refugees to gain entry into the United States in order to carry out violent attacks.

The Yadagos arrived in Lebanon as refugees. Their housing was a step up from the tents that provide shelter

JORDAN GREEN

to many of their cohorts. Yadago, her parents and three siblings shared a one-bedroom basement apartment that was unsanitary and equipped with only a tiny small kitchen. Yadago was 16 at the time, and she was forced to suspend her education, working in a cafeteria at an English-language school to support her family. Even if she could have afforded to study in Lebanon, it wouldn’t have been practical, considering that she was a temporary resident with no way to know whether her certification would be recognized wherever she might find herself in the future.

The process of applying for asylum is rigorous, Yadago said, adding that families don’t get to choose the country where they will make new lives; they go to whichever country, if any, that accepts them. Applicants for asylum go through multiple videotaped interviews, where officials look for discrepancies, Yadago said. Mothers and fathers are interviewed in separate rooms to see if their accounts align. Then officials conduct a background check to see if their

triad-city-beat.com Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

stories check out. Even a small misstep like misstating that you left your country in September when you had earlier stated that you left in August could cause suspicion, and derail or significantly delay the application process.

The Yadago family was fortunate: They only had to wait about a year before gaining approval for resettlement in the United States in October 2010.

“I know a lot of families who stay five years or longer,” Yadago said. “Emotionally, it’s very hard. You’re just waiting for a phone call to tell you you’re moving to the next step.”

While the fear that extremist fighters might pose as refugees to infiltrate the United States is understandable, Yadago said she believes it’s largely misplaced.

“These refugees who will come here go through so many interviews and background checks,” Yadago said.

“Pretending to be a refugee would cause the process to be even longer than it would ordinarily be. Does that mean there won’t be one family that will cause terrorist stuff? There might be. Is it worth making 100,000 others suffer?”

She added that anyone, regardless of whether they’re a refugee, might choose to commit a mass shooting.

Celebrating her first Fourth of July in the United States, Yadago can look forward to graduating from Salem College next spring with a bachelor’s degree in teaching.

It hasn’t been easy. Learning a new language is only one challenge. Refugees like Yadago’s father, who was a teacher in Iraq, must settle for low-paid work outside of their fields. State Department benefits end after three months, and refugees often find themselves unable to afford medical care.

But Yadago is also grateful for the opportunities she has received in the United States. During her time in Lebanon she had given up on the idea of furthering her education, but when she arrived in Winston-Salem at the age of 17 she was surprised to discover that she could still attend high school, even though she would be set back two years.

When she enrolled at Salem College, Yadago found her professors in the education department to be supportive and helpful. Her studies education coincide with her volunteer work with World Relief to help orient newer arrivals.

“I took one class in education and loved it,” Yadago recounted. “I love working with kids. I love public speaking, and what gives you more opportunity for public speaking than standing in front of a class every day? I just want people to know about education. I’m also passionate about these refugees who come here and say, ‘It’s too late for me.’ I want to tell them they can still get their education.”

She cried when she took the oath of citizenship in Charlotte in April.

“I came a long, long way,” Yadago said. “My struggles are getting smaller and smaller.”

find it here

11 Garage Branding Down Town Winston Salem Mechanical 06.09.16

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

12

Not Trump or Clinton: This local woman wants to be president

by Jordan Green

A Guilford County woman who was arrested for attempting to lower the Confederate flag last year at the state capitol in South Carolina has decided that she should be president.

Melisa “Mi Mi” Boyett’s quest for the presidency of the United States began with a vision a year ago that God was telling her to go to the South Carolina state capitol, lower the Confederate flag to half-mast and heal herself of breast cancer.

Just before midnight on July 3, 2015, Boyett was arrested by state law enforcement officers after jumping the fence at the Confederate monument, according to a report in the State newspaper. As she recounted over coffee during an interview at the Iron Hen in Greensboro on Tuesday morning, Boyett danced around the flagpole at the South Carolina capitol to make her point. She spent several days in a local detention center serving Richland County, which surrounds the state capitol — an experience that sensitized her to racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and led to an encounter, she said, with a woman named “Preacher” who healed her breast cancer.

“I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that mass incarceration is real,” she said. “I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that mass desperation is real.”

As a mark of her moderate politics, Boyett merely wanted to lower the Confederate flag to half-mast as a show of respect for the nine people massacred

by Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, although she admires Bree Newsome — who had scaled the flagpole and removed the flag altogether a week earlier — calling her “my hero.”

The Whitsett resident, who has a background in sales and interior design, initially set her sights on a goal of being appointed secretary of state by the next president. She said the idea to run for president as a write-in candidate came about while she was registering people to vote. People would tell her, “Oh no, I don’t want to be part of that circus,” but she said when she mentioned she was running for president, they changed

their tune and told her she could count on their vote.

“Recently, God told me to feed His people,” Boyett recounted.

“That’s when I decided to run for president.”

She made her official announcement in a press release on July 9, in the aftermath of the Dallas sniper shooting and police-involved deaths of black men in Baton Rouge, La. and Minnesota.

“Motivated and devastated by the recent tragic events all over the country, Mi Mi has decided to match her executive-level management skills and and experience as Richland SC Prisoner Inmate #629509 with that of JORDAN GREEN Melisa “Mi Mi” Boyett demonstrated some of the gumption that got her arrested in South Carolina by sliding behind a fence for a photo shoot. the millionaire and billionaire candidates,” primary, and she registered online to “For some reason, I don’t believe Trump the release reads. host a phone-bank party for the Sanders wants to be president. If he’ll hear the During the interview Tuesday, Boyett campaign.

She voted the nonpartisan trumpet sound and do the right thing, I confided with a hearty laugh: “This is ballot in the second primary on June 7. believe he’ll step back and say, ‘She’s the my best chance to rule the world, in all She views herself as having a kind one. I’m voting for her.’” honesty.” of divine ordination to trump Donald Boyett doesn’t have much bad to say Her political pitch brims with Trump, in a manner of speaking.

While about Hillary Clinton, the presumptive high-profile political names, includthe presumptive Republican nominee Democratic nominee, calling her a ing both adversaries and potential famously stumbled when citing a Bible “powerful woman who’s giving women allies. She compared her management verse by calling it “Two Corinthians” a choice” and taking the position that experience to that of Carly Fiorina, instead of “Second Corinthians,” Boyett she’s not a crook. the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and chose her web domain name, beincorWhen pressed to make the case for unsuccessful Republican candidate for ruptible.com, based on the verse from 1 why voters leaning towards Clinton president. She pledged to implement Corinthians 15. should switch their vote, Boyett said, something called “God’s Economic “The Scripture tells us: ‘For the trum“What makes me mad about Hillary Plan,” acknowledging another Republipet will sound, the dead will be raised Clinton is that Bernie Sanders went can presidential candidate, Ben Carson, incorruptible, and we will be changed,’” from 3 to 43 percent in the polls, and gave her the idea, while insisting with she said.

“Don’t you see?

I’m the blast she wouldn’t make him vice president.” a sly twinkle of the eye that God is the trumpet.

It’s time for all of us to wake She quickly added, “The polling is ultimate author. She said she’ll invite up.” completely suspect.”

And then, tangenBernie Sanders to serve as vice presiShe realizes this all sounds a little cratially: “9/11 is completely suspect.” dent, noting his experience and suggestzy, remarking with a note of self-awareAs a candidate, Boyett displays more ing his progressive politics will counterness: “I’m completely delusional, right?” enthusiasm then strategy.

Asked how she balance her own capitalist orientation.

She suggests her candidacy with its plans to get her message out to voters, And she would like Carson to serve as platform of unity and bipartisan syntheshe responded with a statement ambiguher secretary of state. sis could somehow miraculously induce ous in detail and heavy in faith. “TechRegistered unaffiliated, Boyett voted Trump to step aside. nology is key,” she said. “Social media is the Democratic ballot in the March 15 “I believe I’m his girl,” Boyett said. key. If God’s behind me, I’ll succeed.”

triad-city-beat.com Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

She’s been campaigning basically anywhere she can find people.

“I go to car shows,” she said. “I meet people at malls.

Yesterday, it was so cool. I went to a daycare. They were about to start having the staff meeting. I said, ‘Hey, can I talk to you for a couple minutes?’ And the woman who was leading it said, “Yeah, yeah, come on in.’”

Discussing her presidential aspirations, Boyett will occasionally veer into state politics, particularly when it comes to water quality. She faults Duke Energy for degrading well water through its coal-ash dams, and considers Gov. Pat McCrory — a former Duke executive and beneficiary of lavish campaign spending — to be a crony.

“I was down at Mirage” — an adult entertainment establishment — “looking for strong, powerful women to help with this campaign,” she said, joking in reference to her adventure at the South Carolina state capitol that she wanted to enlist “pole dancers like myself.”

The linchpin of Boyett’s economic policy is appealing, but somewhat fanciful.

“It’s the Year of the Jubilee,” she said, as an explanation for how God’s Economic Plan would work. “We can free the slaves. You’re a slave. We’re slaves to debt.

Don’t you deserve to be free? We have to hit reset.”

Asked how she would persuade lenders to forgive debt, she suggested that upsetting a handful of bank CEOs would be nothing compared to pleasing millions of US citizens. The economic plan, described in some detail on the candidate’s website, explains that the website would function as a platform for an online listing similar to the phone book for every American, with display advertising sold around it.

The banks should be the most enthusiastic participants in the plan, Boyett suggested during her interview.

“Really, we want to sell a boatload of advertising and give it back to the people, as part of the jubilee,” she said. “In the next round we need to get money out of politics. We need to fire all the lobbyists.”

The candidate’s preoccupation with sales and display advertising surfaced as she and this reporter negotiated a backdrop for a photograph to illustrate this story. She took note of the Dunkin Donuts sign on Wendover Avenue, around the corner from Iron Hen. She asked to be photographed from the chest up with the signs in the background, with mixed results considering that most of the signage was several feet above her head. The photo shoot attracted the attention of the proprietor of an adjacent Kangaroo Express, and Boyett tried to allay his concerns by explaining that she was a politician getting her picture taken. Suddenly Boyett had the idea to slip behind a low fence to pose behind a row of tobacco and lottery advertising placards.

“There’s bees back there,” the gas-station proprietor warned, but Boyett was undeterred.

And taking a stance beside a green Kool cigarette placard, she declared, “Smoke this!”

13

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

14

OPINION EDITORIAL

Calling all heroes What do you think would have happened had footage of Alton Sterling’s death at the hands of Baton Rouge police not been captured by a bystander on a cellphone?

And what would we have been told of the murder of Philando Castile during a traffic stop outside Minneapolis if his girlfriend had not live-streamed the immediate aftermath to her Facebook page?

This footage, on both instances, refuted the initial narratives posited by police, suggesting that perhaps, in shootings like these, police tend to protect their own.

This is not to disparage the city police departments — and, more directly, the men and women who serve them. By design, law enforcement agencies have constructed mores and processes that relieve officers from the type of accountability regular citizens face when they kill people. Any cop, at any time, can be called upon to draw his weapon and shoot someone with it. Some degree of protection is necessary.

Also necessary is public access to the police body-camera footage of these incidents, because in light of past performance, the public has lost trust in law enforcement’s version of events.

One would imagine, although it’s impossible to know for sure, that body-camera footage exonerates police officers at least as often as it disparages them, and that most police act entirely within the ethical and legal guidelines of their profession.

Unfortunately it only takes a few rogue officers to besmirch the whole bunch, especially when the department does nothing to expel them.

In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory this week signed legislation taking police body camera footage off the public record, suggesting that he is perhaps not as confident in the actions of law enforcement as we are — why else would he want to hide their activities?

In any case, police accountability must come from within — from the silent majority of sworn officers and brass who thus far have not spoken out when one of their own takes human life unnecessarily and without legal justification, for fear of violating the sanctity of the blue line.

Because it’s becoming obvious that a solution will not be forthcoming from our elected officials.

So we’re calling on the police to police themselves: to ostracize racist cops, monitor illegal activity and pursue accountability when the actions of a few endanger the reputation of all the rest.

Most people become cops because they consider themselves to be the good guys. And until we’re proven wrong, we prefer to believe that most of them are.

But we won’t know for sure until they step up.

CITIZEN GREEN

The case for boycotting North Carolina

by Jordan Green

House Bill 2 was the final blow to North Carolina’s reputation as an oasis of progressive, forward-looking government in the Solid South, following three years of successive assaults by our dangerously unhinged

state legislature.

More importantly, for transgender people, along with their friends and family, the law is a frontal assault on the safety of an already marginalized and vulnerable population — enacted for no other reason than to gin up votes from misplaced fear and resentment.

Those of us who make North Carolina our home and earn our livelihoods here are not leaving. We’re obviously going to stand and fight. #ThisIsNotUs, as the hashtag declares, and we owe it to each other to struggle for a more just and inclusive North Carolina.

So how do we make sense of being the target of a boycott by entertainers like Bruce Springsteen and major corporations like PayPal? As my friend Chris Kromm pointed out in a recent piece for Facing South, boycotts by their very nature “raise the economic and political costs of business as usual, to the point that decision-makers — whether lawmakers or corporate CEOs — are forced to change course.”

The cost is most certainly shared by those of us who oppose HB 2 and the bigotry it represents. Every canceled concert represents a negative multiplier — think of the marketing budgets that provide revenue to publishers or restaurant meals that put money in the pockets of servers and line cooks.

Yet boycotts have always required a sacrifice from those who are struggling under the yoke of oppression. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott economically starved the city’s transit system; the black citizens organizing against discrimination had to walk or carpool to get to work. The striking farmworkers led by Cesar Chavez in the mid-1960s called for a consumer boycott of the grapes that provided their very livelihood.

Perhaps the most relevant historical precedent to North Carolina’s situation is the boycott against apartheid South Africa, dramatized by Artists United Against Apartheid’s 1985 recording “Sun City.” Led

by Springsteen sideman Steven Van Zandt, the allstar ensemble whose members included everyone from Run-DMC to Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Joey Ramone, declared they would not per-

form at the South African resort and entertainment complex known as Sun City. Far from being a paternalistic gesture by a group of privileged entertainers, the boycott had been initiated a quarter century earlier by the black freedom fighters in South Africa.

It may be easier to accept the economic sacrifice of taking a stand against the degradation of our trans friends than the social cost of isolation. There’s a strong argument to be made for the role of culture in tipping society towards justice. What could be a more powerful statement of resistance, after all, than Laura Jane Grace, the trans lead singer of Against Me!, setting fire to her birth certificate during the band’s performance in Durham?

By the same token, it’s impossible to overstate the impact for those of who were demoralized in the wake of HB 2’s passage — the thrill of having someone powerful and influential on our side — when Springsteen canceled his concert in Greensboro. The Boss explicitly framed his decision as an act of “solidarity” with “freedom fighters,” meaning the groups, businesses and individuals in North Carolina who are fighting to overturn HB 2.

“Some things are more important than a rock show, and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them,” Springsteen said. “It is the strongest means I have of raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.”

The politics of promoting a boycott from the home-front can feel messy. Imagine how Johnny Clegg, a white performer who was arrested repeatedly for speaking out against apartheid, felt about being unable to perform as a South African artist because of the boycott.

Despite the personal cost to himself, Clegg told Green Global Travel in 2014: “All of the boycotts, both outside and the consumer boycotts inside South Africa, were a part of a multilayered strategy to isolate the apartheid government and bring them to their knees.”

The boycott is working in North Carolina, too.

Thanks, in large part to the backlash against HB 2, North Carolina’s gubernatorial contest is expected to be one of the most closely contested in the country.

And polling as recent as late June finds that HB 2 remains unpopular with North Carolina voters.

It’s not that the majority of North Carolinians are necessarily pro-LGBTQ. As a release from Public Policy Polling put it in late May: “The reasons for voters wanting HB 2 repealed are pretty straightforward — they think it’s hurting the state both economically and in terms of its national reputation.”

A ramen joint in the Triad

by Jordan Green

Cover Story Culture Fun & Games

Cynthia Davis is an at-large member of High Point City Council.

Opinion

their oath and training techniques in order to protect themselves and the citizens they serve. No officer I know wants to take a life or to see loss of life.

A special note to the men and women in blue: Keep up the good work and know that if there is anything I can do, anything at all, please do not hesitate to call. My thoughts and prayers are with you, as you continue to serve with integrity, courage and with a deep love for your fellow man.

A special note to High Pointers: As a community of such great diversity, we must not use a broad brush on all law enforcement officers or citizens. We must recognize that High Point is continually striving to build relationships and these relationships make us a stronger community.

You are changing lives as you continue to give of yourself in some small way every day. Thank you.

A special note to our media outlets: It is paramount that you be accurate in your reporting of the news, as lives are on the line. The lives of our officers and the lives of our citizens are at the mercy of your very fingertips. Thank you for keeping us all informed.

Let us continue to build relationships one person at a time, because I like many of you believe that all lives matter.

News Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

1st Street bridge are two examples. Yet I feel confident those kinds of innovations are going to happen in Winston-Salem and Greensboro as a natural consequence of demand from high-earning, tech-savvy millennials, supportive city planners and rising fuel prices.

I’m thinking about something subtler: a ramen joint [see also “TKfoodstory on page TK]. The Triad City Beat crew’s last-night outing to Ramen Tatsu-Ya seeded the idea. We don’t have ramen restaurants in the Triad yet, although the basic idea of an Asian noodle dish with a savory broth and lots of add-ons should be familiar considering how much we love pho around here.

Although the concept is similar, the result is completely different, with ramen using a miso base and wheat noodles.

But I don’t want to get to hung up on the food.

The production model of this kind of food service is based on speed and customer volume with pre-made broth and noodles, enhanced by spicy “bombs” of chilis, garlic and the like, augmented by extra toppings like braised pork belly and pickled ginger. Really, to be honest, this model probably works with any kind of noodle restaurant.

What I loved about the experience is that within minutes of taking our place in the long line stretching along the side of the restaurant, a convivial host came out and took drink orders, so that soon we were sipping sake cocktails as we waited to get in the door. It didn’t hurt that there was a long awning to provide relief from the brutal central Texas heat and a watercooler bungee-corded to a support post — with free refreshment, of course.

That’s really the essence of Austin — a hip, urbane experience in a laidback setting. And I think it’s transferrable to the Triad. The location on South Lamar Boulevard was nothing special — a stretch of busy highway — and I can totally imagine a place like this on Peters Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem or Gate City Boulevard in Greensboro.

Now the line around the side of the building — that might be a tall order.

I cannot even begin to imagine the depths of what it takes to put on the color blue in times of violence and as

by Cynthia Davis cries for justice are raised across our country, but I am very proud to know courageous men and women that do. I have known many of our officers for 20 years or more. I am blessed by their professionalism and their love for their fellow man. It takes a special kind of courage to serve and protect the lives and rights of others. I see it in the committed lives and longevity of service by so many. I just wanted to say: Thank you.

I believe that the relationships our officers have built will be manifested in the community looking to their continued leadership. I know they will not be disappointed. How do I know this? Well, our officers are fighting the good fight against drugs, domestic violence, violent crime and the like, all in the shadows of violence and cries of justice that have occurred in other cities and states. All of which could have led to extended protests and violence here, but I believe the reason they have not occurred here is because of the diligence, commitment and the strong relationships that our police department and our citizens continue to build together.

I believe that most officers try to deal with each encounter or incident as carefully, cautiously and in as informed a manner as they possibly can. Our officers have been well trained and are reminded every time a shift-change occurs to remember

Up Front

Spending four days with a couple hundred of the smartest, weirdest and most public-spirited people in North America, as the Triad City Beat staff did on July 7-10 for the 2016 Association of Alternative Newsmedia convention, would be awesome no matter where it was held.

But the fact that the setting was Austin, Texas — a phenomenal city where I spent four formative months as a newly minted 21-year-old in 1996 — was doubly amazing.

I can’t do justice in this space to the strange and varied set of experiences that made me fall for this city in the first place, but returning gave me both a sense of nostalgia and wonder at how far it’s progressed in the meantime.

I tried to tease out a couple facets of Austin’s magic that might be transferrable to Winston-Salem or Greensboro, and quickly realized that the essence of Austin can’t be extracted. It developed the way it did because of specific circumstances. A liberal oasis in a deeply conservative state, it’s lovable weirdness likely comes from being a university town isolated from other population centers by vast geographic space. Exposure to Eastern religion and mysticism from the university no doubt allowed the psychedelic rock scene to flourish in the mid-1960s. The musical admixture of the blues, Western swing and Latin, and culinary traditions of Tex-Mex and soul food could only coexist at the crossroads of the Deep South and Southwest.

There’s a reason why Austin produced the outlaw country movement in the 1970s and a sensational guitar slinger like Stevie Ray Vaughan in the 1980s. A city knit together by a laid-back culture and an ethos of creativity over materialism, ironically, was perfectly positioned to attract the creative-class talent that drove the tech boom from the 1990s onward.

So what would be an example of a tiny slice of Austin that we could transplant to the Triad? I’m tempted to mention the cycling infrastructure: Protected cycle track with physical separation from both car traffic and pedestrians along Guadalupe, the main drag along campus, and bike turn-lane queue boxes on the South

Thank you, police

triad-city-beat.com

FRESH EYES

IT JUST MIGHT WORK

15

July 13 — 19, 2016

The 30 years that brought us HB 2

BATHROOM PANIC WAS THE SPARK, BUT THE LAW THAT SHOT NORTH CAROLINA TO THE FRONT OF THE CULTURE WARS HAS A MUCH DEEPER HISTORY

by Barry Yeoman

I. Hell Breaks Loose

Cover Story

L

ast year, when the Reverend Mykal Slack was preparing to move south to Durham, nearer to his and his wife’s families, some of his closest friends questioned his judgment. Slack had left rural Georgia twenty years earlier, and it was up north that he had built a career and an identity. He earned a law degree, clerked for a judge, and spent his early thirties attending New York’s Union Theological Seminary.

“I was getting clear about my faith,” he says. “Part of that clarity was understanding that, for me anyway, I must honor God by honoring the truth of myself.”

Slack had long understood that he was male, even though his birth certificate said otherwise. “But I knew enough about the way the world works that I couldn’t share the truth with anybody,” he says. Within the welcoming confines of the seminary, he found the path to authenticity, and in 2006 he came out as a man.

“That’s when a lot of my life began,” he says.

Slack, now forty-two, worked for several Northern congregations. He got together with his wife, psychologist LeLaina Romero, while he was living in Pennsylvania and she in Massachusetts.

In August 2015, the couple moved to North Carolina in the hope that living closer to relatives would also carry them into territory where their work could make a big impact. Durham, with no majority race, seemed simpatico for an African-American transgender man and a Puerto Rican-French Canadian-Jewish woman. Still, not everyone was convinced of the wisdom of moving south.

“I’m so scared for you,” friends told him.

“I appreciate that,” he’d respond, before noting that he’d seen plenty of bigotry above the Mason-Dixon line.

In his new hometown, he’d say, “I’m going to be surrounded by queer and trans people of color. This is going to be

like heaven.”

The Triangle lived up to its billing. The people Slack and Romero met were “resilient, joy-filled, willing and ready to support one another,” he says. He found work as director of congregational life for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh. She became pregnant.

They prepared for parenthood while also taking care of Romero’s ailing father.

“Little did we know,” he says, “that once we moved to North Carolina, all hell would break loose.”

The hell, of course, was House Bill 2, the hastily passed legislation that flung North Carolina into the center of the nation’s culture wars — triggering lawsuits, demonstrations, copycat bills, boycotts, federal directives, corporate pullouts, and an interminable stream of rhetoric. The law’s most debated section assigns bathroom access in public buildings according to the “biological sex” listed on the user’s birth certificate. Other provisions strip city and county officials of the right to protect their LGBTQ constituents and others, and prevent local governments from imposing wage and other employment rules on their contractors. (Another section, prohibiting job-discrimination victims from suing in state courts, was repealed two weeks ago, but the time limit for filing a discrimination lawsuit was shortened by two-thirds.)

HB 2 became law March 23, the same day it landed on legislators’ desks — just in time to overturn a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance scheduled to take effect the following week. That morning, Slack attended a House committee hearing where supporters claimed that both safety and religious freedom were in peril unless the state

‘Telling a lie over and over and over again does not make it true. I am a transgender male, and I am not a threat to you.’

16

dictated his bathroom access. He had not planned to speak, but the absence of testimony from trans people of color moved him to address a Senate committee that afternoon. At the microphone he was a commanding figure, his clerical collar resting on broad shoulders, his chin sprouting a soul patch.

“As a preacher, it’s my job to speak as plainly as I can, in all the places I’m called to, with as much love in my heart as I can muster,” he said. “So let me be plain and clear today. Telling a lie over and over and over again does not make it true. I am a transgender male, and I am not a threat to you. … I get up in the morning. I go to work every day. I go to church every Sunday. I kiss my wife’s belly every night before we go to sleep.”

By forcing him into women’s restrooms, lawmakers were putting his safety at risk — perhaps, Slack generously suggested, because their knowledge of the subject was lacking. “The issue here is to have deeper conversations,” he said. “You should not vote on legislation or amendments that you do not fully understand.”

Slack left the legislature still wearing a black suit and clerical collar. Usually fearless, he looked over his shoulder repeatedly as he walked away. Only after he’d reached his car and locked the doors did he allow himself a relieved sigh.

“Thank God,” he thought, “nothing happened to me.”

House Bill 2 seemed like a bolt from nowhere. One day transgender North Carolinians were living low-profile lives; the next day their most private moments were being bandied about without a modicum of understanding.

But the new law was not a bolt from nowhere. It can be understood by examining the decades preceding its passage. If history is a river, then at least three distinct tributaries converged in Raleigh on March 23.

The first is the growing practice by state lawmakers — one that took root during the Reagan era — of slapping

II: Pre-emption

T

o understand the roots of HB 2, let’s take a thirty-year step back.

When I started covering the North Carolina legislature in the mid-eighties, business interests were already pushing to strip cities and counties of their powers. In 1987, Representative George Miller, a Durham Democrat, introduced a measure making it harder to remove nuisance billboards, as Raleigh’s city council was trying to do. He also sponsored a bill, favored by the N.C. Board of Realtors, prohibiting local officials from “down-zoning” properties to lower-intensity use — an important conservation tool — without compensating owners.

Neither bill passed. But a strategy was taking shape: as cities took more initiative to improve their quality of life, aggrieved businesses could plead their cases to the friendlier state legislature. This tactic of defanging local governments is called “pre-emption.” It’s hardly restricted to North Carolina. And its use has burgeoned over the years leading up to HB 2.

The tobacco industry, fighting indoor-smoking regulations, helped pioneer pre-emption in the 1980s. A former lobbyist named Victor Crawford revealed the strategy publicly after his own diagnosis with a smoking-related cancer.

“We could never win at the local level,” he told The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995.

“All the health advocates, the ones that unfortunately I used to call ‘health Nazis,’ they’re all local activists who run the little political organizations. They may live next door to the mayor, or the city councilman may be his or her brother-in-law. … When they’ve got their friends and neighbors out there in the audience who want this bill, we get killed. So the Tobacco Institute and tobacco companies’ first priority has always been to pre-empt the field. …

The health advocates can’t compete with me on a state level. They never could.”

Big Tobacco made big strides initially, then lost ground as public support grew for smoking restrictions. The more enduring push came from the gun lobby, which blanketed the country with bills to stop places like Durham and Chapel Hill from regulating firearms. Lars Dalseide, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, calls pre-emption key to eliminating “patchwork” regulation. “While you’re a law-abiding citizen in your hometown,” he says, “you cross a county line and all of a sudden you become a criminal.”

Around the country, NRA lobbyists courted legislators — treating North Carolina’s, for example, to seafood

parties and Christmas gifts starting in 1994 — and racked up victories. Most states, including North Carolina, now tie the hands of cities that want to address gun violence.

“The game is over, and the NRA won it,” says Mark Pertschuk, director of Grassroots Change, a California-based nonprofit that runs a project called Pre-emption Watch. Since then, pre-emption efforts have flourished.

“Every industry, every interest group, said, ‘We might not get what we want, but we can stop anything,’” explains Pertschuk.

Those industries are often assisted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market advocacy group that brings together business leaders with state legislators at luxury hotels. ALEC also publishes model laws curtailing local authority, with wording that lawmakers can copy and paste.

It’s no shock, then, that in recent years states have barred municipalities from regulating fracking, banning or taxing plastic bags, and creating sanctuaries for immigrants. This spring, Wisconsin outlawed county development moratoriums. Mississippi upended local regulations on companies like Uber. Arizona took away local leverage over drones and puppy mills. And Kansas passed a law pre-empting — in a single swoop — local policies governing rent control, housing inspections, and nutritional labeling.

As HB 2 makes clear, one focus of this push has been labor: both ALEC and the dining and tourism industries have tried to prevent local governments from regulating wages or other working conditions.

“Over ninety percent of restaurants are small businesses running on extremely thin margins,” says National Restaurant Association spokeswoman Christin Fernandez. “The last thing they need is a patchwork of policy initiatives.”

This means not just handcuffing elected officials, but also overturning direct democracy. Two years ago, voters in Orange County, Florida, approved an ordinance mandating up to seven days of annual paid sick leave for workers at all but the smallest companies. Opposing the measure were Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Red Lobster) and Disney. Before the vote could take place, however, the Florida legislature outlawed local employment standards. That invalidated the ballot measure as soon as it passed.

“It was a huge blow,” says Stephanie Porta, director of the Orlando-based Organize Now, which championed the measure. “People had worked very hard to do this for the first time ever. It was historic. It should have been celebrated. Instead it was squashed.”

North Carolina has long used pre-emption, though not in an exceptional way. That changed with an off-year election that immoderately altered the political mood in Raleigh.

III: The Great Dismantling

D

uring the lead-up to Election Day 2010, a national caucus called the Republican State Leadership Committee recognized that whichever party controlled statehouses after November would also redraw the post-census congressional district lines. Seizing on President Obama’s falling popularity, it launched the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP, which poured $30 million into state legislative contests around the country.

REDMAP says it invested $1.2 million in North Carolina, where Democrats at the time ran both the House and the Senate. The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity also targeted North Carolina legislative seats. So did in-state conservative groups linked to Raleigh businessman Art Pope.

As Jane Mayer later chronicled in The New Yorker, the money funded a barrage of attack ads of dubious veracity.

Not only did the ads blindside Democratic incumbents; they also succeeded in installing GOP majorities in both state chambers. When Pat McCrory was elected governor two years later, Republicans celebrated their first lock on North Carolina’s government since 1870.

This was more than a partisan shift. The 2010 election triggered a breakdown of North Carolina’s moderate consensus, which Democrats like former governor Jim Hunt and Republicans like former governor Jim Martin had shared for fifty years. That consensus favored roads, schools, and racial civility, all of which undergirded a healthy business climate.

The new legislative majority set out to dismantle that consensus: curtailing voting access, cutting education spending, and rejecting a federally funded Medicaid expansion. It slashed unemployment benefits and imposed new barriers to abortion. It repealed the Racial Justice Act, which guarded against bias in the sentencing of death-row inmates. It set into motion Amendment 1, which wrote one-man/one-woman marriage into the state constitution until the federal courts invalidated it. It redrew its own district lines to explicitly give Republicans a greater electoral advantage.

And it picked up the mantle of pre-emption with exceptional vigor. Never before had there been such a disconnect between the state’s government and its urban areas, nor such a strong impulse to rein in liberal and even centrist cities.

This time, pre-emption went beyond big-picture issues like gun control. Lawmakers got personal with individual cities and counties. They wrested from Asheville control of its own water system and, from Charlotte, control of its airport. (The Asheville case is currently in legal limbo.)

They redrew electoral lines for the Wake County commissioners and school board (struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals this month) and Greensboro City Council (still in court). They forced Durham to extend utility services

triad-city-beat.com

back local governments that get too proactive. The second is the successful national Republican effort to seize control of North Carolina’s government. And the third is the recent visibility of transgender Americans, their push for legal equality, and the utterly predictable backlash.

It’s hardly a stretch to say that those three currents made House Bill 2 not just possible, but virtually preordained.

‘Every industry, every interest group, said, ‘We might not get what we want, but we can stop anything.’’

17

July 13 — 19, 2016

to the 751 South development near Jordan Lake, despite concerns about water quality and traffic.

“This is new,” Frayda Bluestein, a professor of public law and government at the UNC School of Government, says of the targeted pre-emption bills. “Those kinds of things were not common until this recent change in the legislative makeup.”

Top Republican officials would not comment for this story. Governor McCrory, Senate leader Phil Berger, and retiring House Speaker Pro Tempore Paul Stam all declined or ignored interview requests. Andy Munn, deputy chief of staff for House Speaker Tim Moore, asked for a written list of questions, to which he and his boss never responded.

Notably, until HB 2, lawmakers did not pre-empt local antidiscrimination efforts, as Tennessee did in 2011 and Arkansas did in 2015. And with same-sex marriage a settled issue — in the courts and increasingly in the mainstream heart — lesbians and gays are no longer widely perceived as a threat. If North Carolina’s culture warriors were going to use pre-emption as a weapon, they would need to find a different way in.

Cover Story

IV: Bathroom Politics

18

“

We all expected there would be an enthusiastic backlash against marriage equality,” says Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. After Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage ruling, overt homophobia was no longer “polling well.” But the emergence of a visible transgender-rights movement opened new lines of attack. “This is a more vulnerable community, and there wasn’t as much sympathy for the discrimination that trans people experience,” Franke says. “It’s still a new idea to so many people, and one that sounds at best exotic and at worst unnatural.”

Trans people have long been treated as junior partners in the LGBTQ pantheon: they are fewer in number, more recently considered “disordered,” and historically a lower priority for movement leaders. Yet trans folks have been in North Carolina all along, living quiet and productive lives without much protection, finding support in their communities and resilience in themselves.

Christy Summersett moved to North Carolina ten years ago as part of a work relocation, but she was terminated after beginning her gender transition. “Of course, it wasn’t because I came out,” the fifty-nine-year-old says sardonically. “It was for ten thousand other reasons.” The firing spurred her to find a job where she’s respected, as the maintenance manager for a Rocky Mount windshield company. Overall, she says, life on the coastal plain has been good.

“John Doe on the street, that you meet at the grocery, doesn’t care,” she says. “You’re a living, breathing individual. If you’re contributing to society and the economy, fine.”

Because she still has a deep voice, contractors sometimes call Summersett “sir” on the phone. “But when I meet them face-to-face,” she says, “they can’t eat their words

fast enough.”

Not everyone fares so well. A 2011 survey of 6,450 transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans found that 41 percent had attempted suicide. (Studies have placed the general-population suicide-attempt rate between 1.9 percent and 4.6 percent.)

“The shame, the constant hiding, the fear of discovery just wore me down — to the point where I didn’t want to live anymore,” says Sharon Westfall, a fifty-five-year-old programmer in Chapel Hill who recently transitioned.

Living as a woman was essential to her well-being, she says, but the metamorphosis has been hard. “It took what was a very successful life — married for thirty-one years, twenty-something years in software development — and threw a grenade in it.”

The 2011 survey, published by the National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, showed that poverty and job discrimination were rampant among trans people.

Almost one-fifth of respondents had experienced homelessness.

As schoolchildren, 35 percent had been physically assaulted and almost one in eight suffered sexual violence.

When it comes to safety, restrooms and changing rooms are particularly fraught. One trans woman in Durham told me about growing up in a small New England town in the 1970s where other kids perceived her as a gay male and bullied her. She defended herself in fights, but that didn’t stop the harassment. “By the time I was high school, it had escalated between me and the boys,” she recalls. “They decided one afternoon they were going to teach me a lesson in the locker room, and they beat me and raped me.”

The threat doesn’t run the other way — that is, there’s no independent research showing any harm when trans people use restrooms that match their gender identities.

“We haven’t found any instances of criminals convicted of using transgender protections as cover in the United States,” the nonpartisan fact-checking website PolitiFact declared in April.

Still, conservatives have managed to flip the narrative about who’s at risk. “It’s not about transgender people,” says state Senator Andrew Brock, a Mocksville Republican. “It’s about people who prey upon women and children. They would use the transgender people as scapegoats to condone their bad behavior.”

If Charlotte’s nondiscrimination measure were allowed to stand, he says, “someone could use that ordinance as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.” (Brock, a former congressional candidate who touts his “Christian values,” used more combative words at an April rally outside the legislature, saying the $42,000 cost of the special session to enact HB 2 “will not cover the medical expenses to the man who walks into the bathroom when my little girl is in there.”)

Franke, the law professor, says it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the latest battle has moved into the toilet.

“Bathrooms are a way we fight out civil rights norms,” she says.

During the 1960s, segregationists claimed that African-American women would spread syphilis to white women via toilet seats. Ten years later, critics of the Equal Rights Amendment raised the specter of unisex restrooms. During the 1978 fight over California’s Briggs Initiative, which would have purged public schools of their gay faculty, state Senator John Briggs speculated that “most” homosexual teachers in San Francisco were “seducing young boys in toilets.”

The fear of something untoward occurring in a bathroom — the semipublic space where we are most exposed — has had remarkable staying power. “Women’s restrooms are the one place where men feel like they can’t be in there to protect women or children,” says Andy Garcia, program manager for Equality Federation, a nonprofit that works with state organizations on LGBTQ issues.

Equality Federation has examined how Americans respond to different messages about transgender rights. “The support for nondiscrimination protections was very broad, but not very deep,” says Garcia. “We lost huge chunks of the conflicted audiences — they just went away — as soon as the opposition started saying, ‘Hey look, this allows a man, any man at any time, to say that he’s a woman and go into the woman’s restroom.’ We lost people with that, and we still can’t figure out how to get them back.”

So when Charlotte passed an antidiscrimination ordinance in February covering gender identity and sexual orientation — as Greensboro had done a year earlier, without incident — opponents had a surefire countermove at the ready. They would introduce a bill pre-empting the entire ordinance. But they’d keep their rhetorical focus on the toilets.

‘I quit going places that had large groups of people. I wasn’t afraid of the law so much as the vigilantism that the law perpetuated.’

V: The Black Box

H

ow HB 2 came together — the mash-up of pre-emptions involving restrooms, discrimination bans, and contractor employment rules, plus the now-repealed restriction on lawsuits in state courts — remains a mystery. “A black box,” says state Senator Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte Democrat who opposes the law.

State Senator Shirley Randleman, a Wilkesboro Republican who chaired a Senate working group responding to Charlotte’s ordinance, told her local newspaper that the legislation took shape over weeks of conference calls. But that’s all she revealed, and neither she nor Representative Dan Bishop, the Charlotte Republican who was the bill’s principal sponsor, responded to messages seeking interviews.

Two LGBTQ rights groups, Equality NC and the Human Rights Campaign, filed public records requests for

VI: A Target on Our Back

U

ntil Governor McCrory signed HB 2, no other state had such a measure.

“Even in the states where there are extremist legislatures, in every case but North Carolina, after they really thought about it, somebody decided to be an adult,” says Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

But North Carolina is no longer alone, especially now that the Obama administration has advised states that federal sex-discrimination law covers gender identity. In June, Kansas senators passed a resolution urging public schools and universities to ignore Obama’s guidance. A new Mississippi law, signed by the governor in April (but blocked by a judge this month), protects businesses that restrict transgender restroom access. Michigan is considering legislation curtailing bathroom access for transgender public-school students. And in May, eleven states filed a lawsuit accusing the federal government of illegally turning “workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment.”

Last week, another ten states filed a similar lawsuit.

“This is an issue that’s sweeping the country,” says Richard Mast, a Virginia-based attorney with Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based litigation group and self-described Christian ministry that supports HB 2. North Carolina declined Liberty Counsel’s offer of legal representation, but Mast claims at least twenty states have requested its assistance.

What’s coming next in North Carolina? We really don’t know, and that’s the point: “black box” legislation like HB 2 has become commonplace.

“You’re sitting next to a budget that landed on my desk this morning that we’re going to vote on tomorrow,” Jeff Jackson, the Democratic senator, told me in June. “No one’s seen any of this. There was no public input. It’s twenty-two billion dollars. This has become the norm.

“That’s what I like about HB 2: it’s gotten people’s attention,” Jackson added. “What they need to understand is HB 2s happen all the time. We pass budgets without reading them. The public gets no say. We neglect major investments on a routine basis. We’re gerrymandered from head to toe. I’m glad we finally have people’s attention.”

‘Bathrooms are a way we fight out civil-rights norms.’

For a while after the passage of House Bill 2, Rocky Mount’s Christy Summersett avoided public places where she could expect to encounter large groups of people. “I wasn’t afraid of the law so much as the vigilantism that the law perpetuated,” she says. Having been fired before, she had an honest talk with the plant manager at the windshield company where she works. “He assured me, with no ifs, ands, or buts, that I will be safe where I’m at,” she says.

“There will be no repercussions.”

For others, the impact has been more pronounced.

Joaquín Carcaño, a twenty-eight-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer who coordinates an HIV program at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, has been told by his therapist that using a women’s restroom would compromise his mental health.

(Besides, he presents as male, with chin stubble and tattooed, muscled arms.) But UNC is a public institution, and the administration has sent mixed signals about how it will interpret the law. UNC president Margaret Spellings has said the system does not plan to enforce the bathroom provision, which has no enforcement mechanism.

But she also wrote a memo April 5 stressing the campuses’ obligation to segregate restrooms by “biological sex.”

For now, Carcaño walks to another campus building, ten to fifteen minutes away, to use a single-occupancy bathroom. He recently learned of a lockable unisex restroom in his own building, but he rarely uses it because it requires the very public act of taking a housekeeping service elevator.

“It’s a mentally exhausting process,” says Carcaño, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit, filed by the ACLU of North Carolina and others, challenging the new law. When he travels for work, he tries to make himself invisible and watches for hostile reactions at gas-station restrooms. “It’s very clear that there’s a target on our back,” he says. “It’s tough to feel you have to be prepared for a potential attack.”

Sharon Westfall, the Chapel Hill programmer, told me about visiting the North Carolina Zoo with friends after HB 2 passed. Her driver’s license says she’s a woman, but her Michigan birth certificate lists her as male. Her face is feminine, thanks to surgery, but she is six feet tall and built (in her words) like a linebacker. When it came time to use a restroom, “I sat out there for about a half hour mulling it over: Which one is less likely to get my ass kicked? I decided to use the ladies’ room, and I was sweating bullets the whole time I was in there. When I finished, I didn’t even stop to wash my hands.”

Most of the trans North Carolinians I interviewed expressed heightened fear since HB 2 became law. Mykal Slack, the minister, also has a driver’s license and birth certificate that don’t match. He tries to avoid government buildings. But that’s not always possible — and, to him, either restroom door poses danger.

“If I have an incident [and] police were to get called,” he says, “I’m keenly aware of how I may experience that moment as a black man. All I can do, really, is to keep my head down, do what I need to do and leave, and hope that nothing sketchy happens. But it’s only a hope. There’s only so much control I have.”

triad-city-beat.com

correspondence between McCrory, Moore, and Berger and pro-HB 2 activists; all three Republicans rebuffed them. As of press time, McCrory has also failed to respond to similar requests, made on March 28 and April 25, from the INDY. When I contacted Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian legal organization fighting transgender restroom access in North Carolina and elsewhere, it promised to respond to a list of written questions. But it never did.

Records obtained by the INDY from Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest do not reference the contractor and state-court sections of HB 2. They do, however, contain a March 10 letter from Edwin L. Barnes Jr., vice president of development at Charlotte’s Reformed Theological Seminary, urging GOP officials to invalidate all of Charlotte’s LGBTQ protections in a special session.

“For those of you who are Christ-followers, fear God, not man,” Barnes wrote.

Forest and Bishop responded in agreement. “Courage is exactly what is needed,” wrote Forest.

What’s evident from the bill is that it was crafted with the intention of bringing together business and religious conservatives, both inside and outside the legislature. The contactor section, for example, overlaps a model bill by ALEC, the free-market organization, outlawing local living-wage mandates for contractors and other employers. It also resembles a last-minute measure that North Carolina lawmakers rejected in 2015, which would have banned local wage and employment standards for all private companies.

HB 2 opponents say the business-friendly provisions were no random add-ons. “The bill is sweeping in order to try to engage as many stakeholders as possible within a conservative majority,” says state Representative Chris Sgro, a Greensboro Democrat who also heads Equality NC. To some degree, it worked: the thirty-five-thousand-member North Carolina Chamber of Commerce stayed silent about HB 2 for almost two months after its passage, then released three suggested changes that didn’t touch the bathroom section. (Chamber officials insist they had no input before the bill was introduced.)

Into that silence stepped scores of large corporations — GE, Xerox, Kellogg, Northrop Grumman, Coca-Cola, American Airlines, Levi Strauss — whose leaders forcefully condemned the bill. PayPal and Deutsche Bank canceled North Carolina expansion plans. Both WRAL and Charlotte city lobbyist Dana Fenton reported threats and fears of GOP revenge against outspoken companies. By June, Charlotte developers were worrying aloud about not filling office space because of the backlash.

“They didn’t anticipate this level of blowback,” says Jackson, the Charlotte senator. “They really believed this was a lay-up — a quick way to score some points.

As it turns out, the world has changed faster than they thought.”

19

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

20

CULTURE The functionality of eating in Austin, Texas

by Eric Ginsburg

T

he best thing about traveling is food, and that’s because it functions in so many different ways.

Eating is a way to feel welcomed. When my girlfriend Kacie tagged along to the the annual Association of Alternative Newsmedia convention in Austin, Texas last week, we immediately dropped our bags at the hotel and started walking through the heavy heat to Iron Works BBQ. There, sweating profusely in the barn-like setting that Kacie compared to a camp mess hall, we dined on memorable brisket and the best green beans I’ve ever eaten alongside construction workers and two men in business suits. This is Texas, we thought to ourselves, distilled into one TV-ready barbecue dive. It felt as if we’d come home and taken our shoes off before putting our feet up.

Eating is a way to explore. The hunt for dinner one night took us to Casino el Casino, a dive bar on rowdy Sixth Street where traffic is diverted on weekend nights. There, as Kacie ordered hot wings at a back counter, my friend and co-worker Lamar and I took in the truly bizarre mix between the street-punk door guy, porkpie-wearing female bartender, a biker patron and the Abba and Beatles coming from the jukebox.

Just a few blocks from our downtown hotel, we wondered where the hell we’d ended up. I guess they were just doing their part to keep Austin weird.

Eating is a way to connect. Over incredible biscuits and delicious sausage at Stubb’s, a live music venue and restaurant, I talked to other alternative newsies from Reno, Nev.; Chico, Calif.; and Canada. Food gave us — former strangers — something to talk about. The next night at a place called Hopdoddy Burger Bar, food played the opposite role, giving five of us a reason to converge around a table though we didn’t discuss our meal at all. Despite the line snaking through the long restaurant, out the door and around the side of the building, the burgers didn’t come close to the similarly named Hops Burger Bar in Greensboro, but at the time I was more focused on reconnecting with my old friend Claudia who lives in Austin.

Eating is a way to learn. During a late brunch at a spot east of downtown called the Austin, I tried something called a Dutch baby pancake for the first time.

It tasted like a cross between French toast and fried dough but resembled a bread bowl. I loved it, and I’m glad my friend Mike let me try his, though I favored Kacie’s porkbelly sandwich and even more so my carnitas with grits, salsa verde and an egg. At an upstairs spot called Swift’s Attic, I learned that I love goat shoulder, especially when it comes with ricotta gnocchi and smoked fig. I savored the devils on horseback appetizer, but wish I’d tasted the squid fries.

Eating is a way to understand a place. From the hipness and mildly pretentious vibe of Swift’s to the lowkey cool of Fresa’s — a drive-thru or walk-up Tex-Mex joint where Kacie and I nabbed breakfast tacos before heading to the airport — our meals and the restaurants

The Dutch baby pancake isn’t small and it isn’t really a pancake — it looks much more like a cross between fried dough and French toast. Regardless, it tasted fantastic.

that served them provided insight into the place we were visiting. Reading the dining guide put together by the Austin Chronicle for the conference, gathering friends’ suggestions, chatting up the bartender at Easy Tiger and walking by food trucks helped us comprehend what food distinguishes the city and who values what aspects of the myriad options across town.

Eating is a way to express emotion. I identified this most clearly on our final evening, as the whole Triad City Beat team in for the convention gathered for dinner at Ramen Tatsu-Ya where we ate an unbelievably satisfying meal. Our leader Brian Clarey had called us together to express his gratitude towards us, picking up the tab on what may’ve been the best meal of the entire trip. And it turned into an opportunity for all of us to express our jubilance that our own Jordan Green took home Second Place for political columns — no small feat for the association’s youngest and near-smallest publication — raising our glasses, laughing, hugging and maybe crying over his win.

Later that night as most of us sat at the hotel bar, Brian returned with a dozen ridiculous treats from

ERIC GINSBURG

Voodoo Doughnuts — I tried one with Tang, and another came with bubblegum — and I took his gesture to be a sign of his affection for us.

It’s true of course that you could do any of these things while traveling without food. But why the hell would you want to?

Pick of the Week Twist on taste Zoodle with Chimichurri Tasting @ Greensboro Farmers Curb Market (GSO), Wednesday, 9 a.m.

The name of this event may sound like Klingon, but this culinary zinger is definitely homegrown.

Translation: zucchini noodles meet a minty Argentinian-style verde sauce. Partners 4 Community Care, a local health access collaborative, features its own resident cuisiniers Sherri Vettel and Caitlin Romm as the day’s zoodle wizards. Plus, the weekday market will be in full swing. As a reminder, the curb market does accept SNAP and EBT. To find out more, visit the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market Facebook page.

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

Greensboro’s newest brewery feels more like Jake’s Billiards than Preyer Brewing, the nearby brewpub within crawling distance

by Eric Ginsburg of Joymongers.

The expansive indoor seating, packed front patio full of beer lovers at picnic tables and fast movement behind the bar recalls the popular Spring Garden Street spot despite the lack of pool tables or food and a décor that is decidedly more denim than sportsy. And the clientele leans preppier than the diverse and slightly younger crowd often found at Jake’s, not far from UNCG’s campus.

But other than the fact that beer is brewed on the other side of the wall, it feels like night and day between Joymongers and Preyer. Or better put, winter and summer.

That’s how someone — my apologies, but I forget who — put it to me when comparing the two LoFi neighborhood breweries on the north side of downtown Greensboro, and it’s stuck with me. Preyer’s aesthetic feels more like a winter hunting lodge or a cozy yet upscale living room. The plentiful floor-to-ceiling windows at Joymongers — some of them garage doors like the one at Preyer — and patios flanking two sides make it a great open-air location, ideal for long ERIC GINSBURG Joymongers is particularly attractive at night, with a view of the downtown skyline, and will be more so when a summer afternoons and evenings. small park along the Downtown Greenway will be completed in front of it.

I wonder if it’s more outward-facing orientation — as opposed to Preyer’s which no-frills, satisfying creations that hold true to what Far more visually appealing is the painted sign with turns more inwards towards the bar and through intereach specific style should taste like. the company logo along the brewpub’s southern wall, nal windows into Crafted — will make Joymongers view These are not the sort of beers that Budweiser takes a grinning and almost devilish face that recalls the No a little bleak come wintertime. aim at in its commercials mocking craft beer. Instead, Fear logo popular in the ’90s. Several other decoraBut in some ways, Joymongers is more prepared for Rollinson is — at least for now — putting out more tions inside are also ready-made for Instagram photo bad weather than any other brewery in the city, and everyman, accessible brews that, besides the Hefetrit shoots, too. almost the Triad, thanks to considerable on-site and hefeweizen, are merely named for their style such as Joymongers doesn’t currently offer flights, but padedicated parking that will allow you to skip a trudge American IPA or kolsch rather trons can try samples or order through snow or rain. That level of parking is likely the than something like Mr. Mizhalf pints to get a better sense envy of any downtown business owner, especially in zle’s Magical Elixir (no offense, of what the area’s newest Visit Joymongers Brewing at the increasingly packed slice where the brewery exists.

Small Batch, but you get my brewery has to offer. I’ve tried 508 Battleground Avenue More importantly, Joymongers — the fifth brewery point). five so far over the course of to open in the Gate City — is already making fantastic The strangest thing about (GSO) or at joymongers.com. three separate visits, twice beer.

Joymongers is its sign — stanretreating to the side patio for This comes as no surprise, considering that Mike Roldard blue-lit lettering by the some quietude with a friend linson, who previously ran Natty Greene’s downtown front corner along Smith Street reads “brewery” while and bringing the light and enjoyable hefeweizen with brewing operations, helms Joymongers’ production, more stylized metal letters say “Joymongers” a good me. churning out high-quality beers that are true to form. distance to the left. The different font and size is one I haven’t been disappointed by a beer here yet, Rollinson plans to add considerable heft to the brewthing, the gap between the words another and the especially appreciating the Belgian strong ale my last ery’s arsenal, which currently includes about a dozen arguably less important illuminated word and less time in, and given the caliber of Rollinson’s brewing brews, but for now Joymongers’ beers are straight-up, visible name just bizarre. prowess, I expect that isn’t going to change.

triad-city-beat.com

Joymongers brewery opens

21

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

22

CULTURE Effortless mastery and the healing power of cosmic Americana

by Jordan Green

Y

ou might have noticed Sanders Davis, his long, brown hair tied back in a ponytail and hornrimmed glasses manifesting a friendly, thoughtful presence while stocking the beer cooler or working behind the counter late at night at University General Store in Greensboro.

That was a couple years ago, and the now 27-yearold former UNCG student currently makes his living as a naturopathic healer and working musician, although he still occasionally busks in front of the store ­— a campus landmark across from College Hill Sundries and in the heart of student housing on Mendenhall Street — to keep himself grounded.

He’s played with a dizzying number of outfits — a ska group called the BFGs in Winston-Salem, Emily Stewart & the Baby Teeth, Vaughn Aed and Grand Ole Uproar, Taylor Bay & the Laser Rays and the Family, among them. As Davis noted during a recent interview at Gray’s Tavern, “I was the guy to call for bass.”

Last year, he played about 150 nights on the road, and he said it’s been gratifying to pare down his portfolio to steady gigging as the bass player with Crystal Bright & the Silver Hands. And while developing his chops and learning to adapt as an accompanist remains a crucial part of his musical development, he also continues to write songs and hone his own vision.

Best described as cosmic Americana, Davis’ original music distinctly projects hopeful themes of interconnection and self-realization. A four-song EP released in early 2015 with Davis’ reedy voice floating over a resonant musical patchwork of acoustic guitar, violin, cello, trombone and drums provides a good representation of his value proposition.

“My music is kind of like a ministry,” Davis said.

“Things are connected subtly and electro-magnetically.

It’s a whole thing about how people affect each other.”

The theme of interconnection is readily apparent in “Everything,” in which Davis sings, “Everything seems to you all around as you’re passing through/ Where are you going? Haven’t you heard the news?/ Time was never there, do as you will do.”

Davis practices healing touch therapy and holds a certification from the California-based HeartMath Institute. As an indication that naturopathic healing is at least equally if not more important to Davis as music, he mentioned his gratitude at having mentors twice his age and invited this reporter to an individual energy healing session, mentioning that he works on a donation basis instead of for a flat fee.

Davis’ music comes from the same spirit of centeredness and detachment as his healing work.

“It’s about expression and being true and direct,” he said. “People resonate with that. They want that authenticity. There’s so many things in the world that get in the way. I relate it to the eight-fold path Buddha was talking about. Even though difficulties are inherent in our lives, it’s about finding a way to be at peace with

Sanders Davis’ music has settled into a genre he calls cosmic Americana.

that. It’s about effortless mastery.”

As Davis continued, he shifted seamlessly from music to healing.

“When you’re at ease, you’re in the zone,” he said.

“We teach people how to do that intentionally. It’s something that everybody experiences as fleeting. It doesn’t have to be fleeting. That’s where meditation comes in. It’s beyond language. It’s the big, expansive mind that you can feel and touch.”

It wasn’t always this way.

He got burned out studying jazz at UNCG, and even came to the point of deciding he was done with music.

It took learning about healing touch practice to reconnect to himself.

“Being a perfectionist and being so concerned with perfection, I didn’t understand that perfection is in the imperfection. It’s more of an experiential moment,” he said. “I got burned out on trying to be perfect, with that rat race — striving for something that isn’t actually there.”

In 2008 he taught himself how to play guitar to accompany his vocals as he developed his songwriting craft.

“It’s something where you can play a song yourself,

JORDAN GREEN

not to where the technicality takes precedent,” Davis said. “It’s the musicality; it’s the song.

“I just kind of figured it out,” he continued. “I spent time with it. It was a meditation. It gave me something to focus on.”

Davis’ friend, Josh Watson — the primary creative force behind Grand Ole Uproar — introduced him to the music of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead a

Pick of the Week Hustle and flow Perceiver of Sound League @ Glenwood Community Bookshop (GSO), Saturday, 4 p.m.

Winston-Salem sound artist Michael Thomas Jackson headlines this evening of improv musical revelry at GCB’s location on Grove Street (the bookshop swapped its old Glenwood Avenue spot with a furniture store). Stay for “a trio performing roots improvisations” on a glorious orgy of instruments.

The event page touts mandocello, guitarron, and juice harp — in the lamellophone family, if that helps — as part of the trio’s lineup. Planning to go? Search for Glenwood Community Bookshop on Facebook.

triad-city-beat.com

couple years ago. Garcia and the Dead, along with Neil Young, Gram Parsons and Hank Williams, have provided ballasts for Davis’ interest in synthesizing storytelling, improvisation and mind expansion. The late Garcia as a trailblazer of psychedelic rock who immersed himself in American roots music throughout his life provides a particularly compelling model. But contrary to Garcia’s example, Davis doesn’t promote substance use.

“There’s ways of accessing that consciousness without chemicals,” he said.

“I think it’s people’s right to have access to that and to know how to access those tools that help your well-being rather than relying on pharmaceuticals.”

The Dead’s music, jazz and old-time music are all fertile areas for improvisation, Davis said, comparing the process to “quantum computing.”

“It’s free, but not floating off into space,” he said. “It’s a balancing of opposites. It relates to everything. It’s about breath. It’s a wide path. The road I’m heading down is sharing peace and wholeness.”

Selling Lindley Park

Frank Slate Brooks Broker/Realtor®

Up Front

336.708.0479 cell 336.274.1717 office FrankSlate.Brooks@trmhomes.com 1401 Sunset Dr., Suite 100 Greensboro, NC 27408 trm.info

News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games

Large 1-topping pizza

11

$

99 Good through 7/19/16

Monday – Thursday

Order online at pizzerialitaliano.net

219 S Elm Street, Greensboro • 336

WE !

DELIVER

All She Wrote

L’ITALIANO

Shot in the Triad

PIZZERIA

274 4810

23

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

24

CULTURE A slam poet interprets a master’s work

by Naari Honor

“

One of the things that makes poetry different,” Ismael Khatibu said, “is that poetry is very much in the moment.”

At that moment a mix of young teens and adults gathered at the Coffee Park Downtown in the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts in Winston-Salem to listen to him recite excerpts from Jaqueline Woodson’s novel, Brown Girl Dreaming, on July 7.

Even though the words spoken by Khatibu were not crafted from his own pen, his dynamic voice breathed life into them as if he were a kindred spirit with their creator. He began the reading with “Home,” a poem selected by his 11-year-old son.

Khatibu’s voice seemed to entrance the audience while he read from the Newbery Honor-winning work of literature.

Some children looked at their parents as if searching for the right way to respond as he recited, while others closed their eyes in an attempt to recreate the scene he depicted within their own minds.

Khatibu explained how the body’s senses can be used when writing poetry to create a verbal NAARI HONOR Onlookers at Ismael Khatibu’s reading of Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming sit in fascination at the MIlton representation of vivid imagery. Rhodes Center for the Arts.

After finishing “Home”, another of Woodson’s poems, been in conjunction with Bookmarks. Rachel Kuhn grabbed his father’s bicep and buried his face in the Khatibu began to recite a piece that instantly caught Stinehelfer, who runs the Authors & Schools program nook of his arm. Was he shy or was this his way of enthe attention of those in the audience. “Greenville for Bookmarks, was responsible for organizing the couraging his dad to speak in front of the audience?

1963” shares the author’s observations of her mother book discussion event and inviting Khatibu to come being made to carry herself a certain way due to racial and speak.

Pick of the Week tensions that were occurring at the time.

“We chose Brown Girl Dreaming since the author will At the end of his reading, the silence was broken and be at our book festival in September and also because Fantastic ekphrastic the patrons started to offer feedback in an intimate it is just a great book,” Stinehelfer said. “I had worked Letters to the New Year: Artists’ Collaboration Workdiscussion about the author’s work that captured her with Ismael Khatibu on a couple of other poetry visits shop @ New Winston Museum (W-S), 5 p.m. experience as an African-American child growing up in with school kids and thought it would be a great fit for Letters to the New Year, a collaborative exhibit the South in the 1960s and ’70s. him to have a discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming.” between four Winston-Salem artists focusing on the While Khatibu describes himself as “a thinker who The Bookmarks festival has attracted award-winning interplay between diverse artists and media, hosts can articulate what is on his mind” rather than a writers such as Geoff Rodkey, author of Daddy Day this workshop as an extension of the show. The artpoet, he is known to many around the Triad as an Care. Similar to many literary greats who work with ists, Bullock, Durando, Nolan and Paul, aim to guide award-winning slam poet who organized the Piedmont the nonprofit, Rodkey also spends time working with you through an “artistic translation experience.”

Spoken & Literary Arts Movement, or SLAM, in an the additional programs Bookmarks offers through Rad. This workshop, geared towards artmakers of effort to build community around the literary arts.

Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. any level, takes a co-working approach to digesting These days Khatibu spends less time on the slam Khatibu ended the discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming works of art. If you go, you’ll explore ekphrasis, or the poetry circuit and uses his talent and experience to with an invitation for fellow poets in the audience to process of interpreting one artwork by creating your help educate young people. Several of his efforts have read their personally poetry out loud. A young child own. Go to newwinston.org for the complete scoop.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’LL FIND...

Eclectic

by Nature

ary’s Gourmet Diner

(336) 723-7239

Up Front

pay accolades in a poetry setting by finger-snapping, hands went up in the air.

The night wound down and the audience went from a small crowd to just Khatibu and the barista.

“How do you think the night went?”

I asked.

“Pretty good,” Khatibu said.

He turned to gather his things with a smile on his face, no doubt proud of the moment he had just been a part of.

triad-city-beat.com

Although bits of incoherent chatter and adolescent giggles came from their direction, poetic verse does not, and so Khatibu shared words of his own.

The tone of his voice has changed from a place of a maternal soothing to a roar of a father who has seen his share of life’s struggles and wants nothing more than to be a better father as he read his piece tentatively titled, “Father to Son.” The crowd started to clap at the end of his piece and then, remembering that Khatibu had taught them how to

breakfastofcourse.com

INCENSE • CANDLES • JEWELRY & MORE 336-373-0733 • 414 STATE ST. • GREENSBORO News

Join us for our annual

back to school

Opinion

BACK PACK GIVEAWAY! Saturday, August 13th from 12 pm – 2 pm

Cover Story

We will have supplies for 100 students as well as games, bouncy house, facepainting and more to celebrate the start of a new school year!

Available first come first served.

Culture Fun & Games

gatecityvineyard.com

336.323.1288 Games

204 S. Westgate Dr., Greensboro

03 Lexus ES 300

Auto, Leather, FWD

$9,995 SEL, Auto, FWD

07 Toyota

$12,995 Highlander, V6, Auto, FWD

09 Honda CR-V

$12,995 Auto, Leather, FWD

07 BMW X5

$18,575 4.8i, Auto, Leather, AWD

06 Infiniti QX56

$19,995 Auto, Leather, 4WD

All She Wrote

$8,995

10 Ford Fusion

Shot in the Triad

336-375-1880 • Taylor’s Auto Sales • taylorsautosales.com

25

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

26

FUN & GAMES

G

reensboro Grasshoppers third baseman Aaron Blanton represents an anomaly in the stat-driven world of baseball.

When he stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning in the Hoppers’

by Anthony Harrison afternoon matchup against the West Virginia Power on July 6, he held a mediocre .190 batting average on the season. Even if it’s steadily on the mend from earlier in the year, that metric alone doesn’t do him many favors in his hopes for climbing the minor-league ladder.

But hitting isn’t just about that aggregate. He’d slammed five homers and batted in 25 runs. While batting has sometimes symbolized baseball’s utmost selfishness, Blanton hits for his team.

With a runner on first and two outs, the Hoppers needed him to pad their 1-0 lead: They were trying to extend a solid winning streak.

The Hoppers are doing their best since 2012. When Blanton stepped up, they led the second-half North Division standings with a 10-3 record. They’d swept the Lakewood BlueClaws in a four-game away stretch and beaten the Power twice in a row at home.

Even this early in the second half of the season, a sixgame streak promised a bright future for Greensboro.

Of many different records and statistics in all of sports, streaks rank among some of the most impressive. Many casual baseball fans can recall Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak of 56 games in 1941, one record most believe will never be broken. None thought Lou Gehrig’s games-played record would be broken, yet Cal Ripken Jr. went ahead and started in 2,632 straight games, surpassing the Iron Horse by 502 appearances.

But there are others not so well known.

The 26-game unbeaten streak posted by John McGraw’s 1926 Giants stands as MLB’s unofficial record; somehow, they didn’t even make the pennant race, finishing 74-77. A single tie keeps those Giants from holding the longest true winning streak. That honor goes to the 1935 Chicago Cubs — yes, of all possible teams, the Cubs — who won 21 games in a row and won the National League pennant; they’d lose the World Series to Hank Greenberg and the Detroit Tigers.

But even these MLB teams don’t hold pro baseball’s all-time consecutive win streak.

The 1987 Salt Lake City Trappers of the Pioneer League went on a 29-win tear through the minors.

Sports Illustrated covered their extraordinary run and, funnily enough, they were partly owned by beloved, eccentric actor-comedian Bill Murray. The team no longer exists; their franchise lives on as the Ogden Raptors. But their legacy endures: Memorabilia from the Trappers’ historic season hangs in Cooperstown at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

So many elements go into a winning streak, especially in multifaceted games like baseball. The bullpen

Hot streak, summer in the city

The hot streak is one of the most exciting phenomena in sports. The Hoppers had ridden one for nine games until the West Virginia Power shut it down.

plays a pivotal role; pitchers, as leaders of the defense, must shut down batters game after game. No-hitters and perfect games come only once in a blue moon, though, so the rest of the team must remain on point with their fielding to keep those on base from scoring.

And, naturally, a streaking team must score efficiently.

You must get hits.

So, we return to third baseman Blanton in the batter’s box, underneath the hot July sun.

The first three innings had seen three up, three down for West Virginia. Power centerfielder CJ Hughston finally singled in the top of the fourth and stole second, but Blanton tagged him out at third to end that half. Similarly, Greensboro struggled to reach scoring position; double plays stifled the Hoppers’ efforts in the first and second innings.

But the home team took the offensive in the fourth.

Centerfielder John Silviano drilled deep toward the left-field fence, and the outfielder bobbled the catch, putting Silviano at second. He got to third on a wild pitch with catcher Roy Morales at the plate. After Morales and rightfielder Isael Soto grounded out, second baseman Justin Twine batted in Silviano with a hissing grounder between short and third base, leading to Blanton’s turn at bat.

Power pitcher Gage Hinsz first threw a ball. Then, he caught Blanton swinging twice. But you could tell Blanton was aiming for the fences given his enormous effort on each. Blanton found himself doing risky business. A 1-2 count grants the pitcher plenty of leeway.

Hinsz went for the kill, and Blanton took the gamble.

And his hit soared high and deep, over the left centerfield fence, a two-run homer.

Greensboro didn’t see any other screamer hits, but

ANTHONY HARRISON

the Hoppers’ hurlers shut out the Power with support from infield talent like rocket-armed shortstop Anfernee Seymour. Greensboro’s streak had grown to seven games.

When the Kannapolis Intimidators came to town for a four-game stretch the following day, the home team won the next game. Storms suspended the completion of the July 8 follow-up, but the Hoppers cleaned up when play resumed the next afternoon. Nine wins in a row, knocking on double digits.

But all streaks come to an end: Kannapolis shut out Greensboro and scored a single run in the July 9 evening game. Then, the Intimidators made good on their name and squashed the Hoppers 10-4 on Sunday.

But I wouldn’t cut Greensboro out of the running for the second-half title. The Hoppers are running hot.

Pick of the Week Arm wrasslin’ GRAWL Brawl II: Aunt Flo’s Summer Slamboree @ Geeksboro Coffeehouse Cinema (GSO), Saturday, 8 p.m.

Eight ladies, 16 arms, one good cause. Greensboro Ladies’ Arm Wrestling League returns to Geeksboro for another elbow-to-elbow slam fest. DJ84 will supply the tunes, and judges include G-list celebrities like TCB’s own Brian Clarey. Proceeds benefit the Women’s Resource Center of Greensboro, and donated feminine hygiene products swapped for GRAWL Bux go to Triad women in need.

‘Brexit’ but we were just getting started...

by Matt Jones Across

another?

60 Movie buff 61 Drive forward 63 Door openers 64 Dissenting votes 65 Rhode Island-based insurance company 66 “Isn’t that cute?” sounds 67 Understood 68 Potato soup ingredients

Fridays 7pm — 2am

Opinion

2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro geeksboro.com •

336-355-7180

Culture

EVENTS

Thursday, July 14 @ 8pm

Cover Story

1 Spanish-born NBA star ___ Gasol 2 “Cosmo” competitor 3 “Saw” actress Meyer 4 Lose one’s poker face 5 Symbol that looks like January 2nd?

6 Soft ball maker 7 Horses’ paces 8 Chant in the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” 9 Xavier Cugat’s ex-wife Lane 10 With everything on the line 11 Voice actress Kath of “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “Rugrats,” and “Animaniacs” 14 Silky wool source 15 Teary-eyed 18 “The Tortoise and the Hare” author 20 Sandwich after a sandwich?

24 “That hits the spot” 25 Poli ___ (college major) 26 Right this second 28 Small combo

Night

News

Down

30 “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” band 32 Lava, for one 33 Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s former org.

34 Austrian physicist Ernst 38 Ludd from whom Luddites got their name 39 African antelope 41 Causes of some infections 42 Move emotionally 43 Pueblo Revolt tribe 44 Monogram character 45 Sidewalk issue 46 Pacific Ocean phenomenon of lower water temperatures 51 “That’s the cost of ___ business” 52 Water-based abode 54 “I want!”

56 Some “Gods and Generals” extras 57 Home that gets lined 58 TV kid who said, “Pa, just what can you do with a grown woman?”

59 Scarf target 62 Word with Palmas or Vegas

Up Front

1 Napoleon Dynamite’s pal 6 “___ Degree” (Morningwood song) 9 ___ in “apple” 12 Crop circle creator, supposedly 13 Browning’s “before” 14 Deliver ___ to (send reeling) 16 Armbones 17 Darkish apparel option 19 “I want every non-war symbol you got” request?

21 Hot roofing material 22 “Slammin’ Sammy” of baseball 23 Pointer 24 Fireplace residue 27 Authorize 29 “The Plough and the Stars” playwright Sean 31 Method of accentuating poker hands?

35 Baymax’s friend, in a Disney movie 36 “___ little rusty ...”

37 Cotton-pickin’ 40 All-poultry production of a Steinbeck novel?

45 Rhythmically keep time with, maybe 47 “Schnookie-wookums” 48 .org relative 49 Dashed off 50 Fashion designer Gernreich 53 Pot-bellied pet 55 Ability to tell one conjunction from

Board Game

triad-city-beat.com

GAMES

Open Mic Night Renee Paige

Sunday, July 16 from 3–6pm Answers from previous publication.

The Spencers

Fun & Games

Friday, July 15 @ 8pm

Monday, July 17 @7pm

Games

Mystery Movie Monday

Shot in the Triad

©2016 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com)

(336) 698-3888

All She Wrote

602 S Elam Ave • Greensboro

27

West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro

July 13 — 19, 2016 All She Wrote

Shot in the Triad

Games

Fun & Games

Culture

Cover Story

Opinion

News

Up Front

SHOT IN THE TRIAD

28

Built in 1952, this Greensboro landmark will soon disappear.

PHOTO BY CAROLYN DE BERRY

3 Bedroom, 2 Bath $299,900

triad-city-beat.com

309 Aberdeen Terrace in Westerwood

Up Front News Opinion

Presented by

Frank Slate Brooks Broker/Realtor®

Cover Story

336.708.0479 FrankSlate.Brooks@trmhomes.com

Culture Games Shot in the Triad

www.congregationalucc.com

400 W.Radiance Drive • Greensboro, NC 27403

Fun & Games

WE BELIEVE IN THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND HATE

All She Wrote

29

July 13 — 19, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

30

ALL SHE WROTE

North Carolina — The Musical

I

n the wake of the Pulitzer Prizeand Tony Award-winning Broadway musical

by Nicole Crews Hamilton — a hip-hop rock opera about the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton — a series of lesser known political dramas has been unearthed. Some are closer to the Triad political scene — others farther from home in Raleigh and Washington, DC. Either way, they’re getting national attention despite their humble roots. Here’s a look at the short list of musicals about North Carolina politics and politicians that never made it to Broadway.

Hair — You know it as the American tribal love-rock hippie fest from the 1960s. Reimagined, it’s the life story of “Breck Girl” former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards — a country boy turned ambulance chaser turned politician who married a saint and sinned like a sinner. Edwards, whose $400 haircuts are as notorious as his blatant affair and love child with one of his employees, belts his follicles into a frenzy with the signature song, “I’m gonna wash this campaign right out of my hair.”

Wicked — Currently on Broadway as the untold story of the Witches of Oz, “Wicked” has been rewritten to represent North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, the least likely “friend of Dorothy” ever.

More warlock than witchy, the story revolves around the governor’s four years of tyranny and his flying monkey cronies in Raleigh. McCrory’s signature song “The Wizard and I” is a love song to Art Pope.

Les Miserable — Known to the world as French writer Victor Hugo’s tour de force about poverty and political resistance, Les Mis has been reinterpreted as Les Mis and Mister and circulates around the controversial HB2 and civil rights in general in North Carolina at the moment. Set in a field of bedraggled porta-potties, this show is not recommended for children or those with weak

stomachs.

Waitress — This Broadway baby might be better known to you as the quirky film of the same name starring Keri Russell. It’s about a hash-slinger in a small Southern town who is faced with tough and touching life choices. The remix of this is also a show about North Carolina’s HB2 bill and involves the difficult choices a waitress must make in enforcing the bill in the restaurant where she works. The show-stopping number is a game of musical chairs where chairs are replaced with bathroom stalls and the gender-bending dancers are bedazzled with urinal cakes.

Cats — Based on a book by TS Eliot and composed by Andrew Lloyd Weber, this 1981 musical was originally about a tribe of felines and transcendency to the other side. Reengineered as Hats, this extravaganza is about cool cat Alma Adams who represents North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives, and all of the hats this powerhouse wears.

Stomp — On Broadway this percussion group uses ordinary objects to make noise and employ a grassroots level of physical theater. In its North Carolina incarnation, it stars Raleigh lawmakers who use citizens and their rights as their pummeling ground. Actual citizens are used as drums. Parental guidance suggested.

We support equality!

TWINCITYHIVE.COM

triad-city-beat.com

31

Illustration by Jorge Maturino