TCB April 5, 2017 —Electro's swan song

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point April 4 – 11, 2017 triad-city-beat.com

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Electro’s

swan song The last free man on Tate Street PAGE 12

Stadium startup PAGE 6 Flemons fans PAGE 18 Track town PAGE 20

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April 5 – 11, 2017

The last kid in the bushes I interrupted a game of hideand-seek when I went to pick up my daughter last week. Upon my arrival, her scrum of friends raced

by Brian Clarey into the house to gather her things while I stood in the driveway waiting.

Then I heard a rustling from a large shrub, and a thin voice came from within.

“Hey guys?” it said, uncertainly. “We still playing hide-and-seek?”

I had cramped up laughing by the time the poor kid rustled his way out of the bush, the last boy in the yard, and this 12-year-old kid looked at me like I was some kind of jerkwad. Which, of course, I was.

I thought about it for days afterwards.

Why was that so funny? I settled on the notion that we’ve all been in that position, literally or figuratively — the last kids in the bush, the ones the game left behind.

As I’m writing this column on Monday night, I’m starting to feel a lot like my daughter’s friend, the one who thinks I’m a jerk.

The final numbers from the layoffs at the News & Record and the Journal have

come in: 36 staffers gone in Greensboro, 14 in Winston-Salem. Fifty good people who were reminded today that a daily newspaper can’t love you back.

I suspected as much back in 2013, before we started Triad City Beat, when a job at a more staid publication was something I was considering.

I decided I’d rather gamble on myself and my team than take my chances at another corporate paper, the purpose of which is still to grind as much copy out of its reporters it can get for the least amount of money.

And while we’re not naïve enough to believe that what we’ve created is capable of loving us back, it sure feels like it sometimes.

Meanwhile BH Media has had two rounds of layoffs since TCB began in 2014. Right now, at the time we need them most, there are fewer real reporters covering the Triad than at any time this century.

It’s times like these that my colleagues and I — who still have the privilege and honor of working in this profession — start to feel like the kid in the bushes, wondering where the hell everyone has gone.

Hey guys? That whole Fourth Estate thing? Truth to power? Feet to the fire?

We’re still doing that, right?

triad-city-beat.com

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

QUOTE OF THE WEEK She’s probably best known for dying alone at age 38 and for possibly being eaten by her own dog.

— Jelisa Castrodale in Triaditude Adjustment, page 23

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Box 24, Greensboro, NC 27406 Office: 336-256-9320 BUSINESS PUBLISHER/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Brian Clarey

ART ART DIRECTOR Jorge Maturino

PUBLISHER EMERITUS Allen Broach

SALES DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Dick Gray

brian@triad-city-beat.com allen@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL MANAGING EDITOR Eric Ginsburg

jorge@triad-city-beat.com

dick@triad-city-beat.com

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

eric@triad-city-beat.com

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

EDITORIAL INTERN Joel Sronce

CONTRIBUTORS Carolyn de Berry Kat Bodrie Spencer KM Brown

Jelisa Castrodale Stallone Frazier Matt Jones

Cover photography by Steve Turner Electro, aka Harry Wilton Jr., is a legendary slide player, raconteur and street person.

intern@triad-city-beat.com

TCB IN A FLASH DAILY @ triad-city-beat.com First copy is free, all additional copies are $1.00. ©2017 Beat Media Inc.

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April 5 – 11, 2017

EVENTS Thursday, April 6 @ 8pm

Justin Cody Fox, Joel Henry Band, & David McLaughlin Saturday, April 8 @ 8pm

Bryan Toney

Monday, April 10 @ 7pm

Mystery Movie Monday

CITY LIFE Apr. 5 – 11

by Joel Sronce

FRIDAY Mend-It Night @ Forge Greensboro, 6 p.m.

Whether you’re looking to mend or alter a favorite shirt, jacket or pair of pants, Forge Greensboro can show you the steps. The Forge provides inexpensive access to a workshop area and a collaborative space, including access to equipment not commonly available. While most of the mending can be done by hand, Forge Greensboro has sewing machines for the heavier jobs. More info and registration at forgegreensboro.org.

Huff family pop-up art gallery @ Winston-Salem Urban League, 6:30 p.m.

For First Friday Gallery Night, Jasmine Huff hosts a pop-up gallery to display and honor her parents’ art careers. Since 1972, James and Earnestine Huff created art in Winston-Salem that depicted the African-American figure, African-American life and African-American history. Some pieces have been exhibited in museums across the world. Admission is free but registration is preferred. More info at wsurban.org.

602 S Elam Ave • Greensboro

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Crystal Bright & the Silver Hands @ the Blind Tiger (GSO), 8 p.m.

Local musicians come together to raise money for Matty Sheets, a Greensboro artist whose MS fundraiser benefits from the show’s proceeds. Other acts include Jonny Alright, Nathan Weeks, Sanders Davis, Santos and Georgie Harris. More info at theblindtiger.com.

SATURDAY SPREADING JOY ONE PINT AT A TIME

Monday Geeks Who Drink Pub Quiz 7:30 Tuesday Live music with Piedmont Old Time Society Old Time music and Bluegrass 7:30 Wednesday Live music with J Timber and Joel Henry with special guests 7:30

Thursday The Radials 8:30 Friday, Saturday, Sunday BEER

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joymongers.com | 336-763-5255 576 N. Eugene St. | Greensboro

Open house @ Forsyth Tech (W-S), 9 a.m.

The open house at the Oak Grove Center on Forsyth Tech’s main campus offers the opportunity to learn about the career and college transfer programs available at FTCC. In addition to workshops on financial aid, campus life and career options, representatives from local companies speak with prospective students about potential careers after graduation from Forsyth Tech. The event is free and open to the public. For more information and to complete the required pre-registration, visit forsythtech.edu/ openhouse.

Spring fling and egg hunt @ Glenwood Recreation Center (GSO), 10 a.m.

Celebrate early spring as the Greensboro Parks & Recreation Department hosts a free, Candyland-themed event. The fling includes a bounce house, an obstacle course, a DJ, prizes, games and — barring scheduling conflicts — the Easter Bunny. Children can participate in contests for best and silliest dressed. More info on the Facebook event page.

Blacksmith demonstration @ the High Point Museum, 10 a.m.

As part of the North Carolina Science Festival, the High Point Museum presents “Fire and Iron: The Art & Science of the Blacksmith’s Forge.” Members of the North Carolina Artist-Blacksmith’s Association craft various iron pieces throughout the day, and discuss the science involved in turning raw materials into everyday objects. All ages are welcome at the free event. More info at highpointnc.gov.

the eastern horizon / …When the sun goes down.”

His writing often evokes images of suffering, pain and death, such as in “Portrait in Georgia,” a short poem which reads in its entirety: “Hair — braided chestnut, / coiled like a lyncher’s rope, / Eyes — fagots [sic], / Lips — old scars, or the first red blisters, / Breath — the last sweet scent of cane, / And her slim body, white as the ash / of black flesh after flame.”

As it approaches its centennial, Cane continues to reverberate in its readers. Pick up a copy and find just how the reapers, the boll-weevils, the sawmill’s whistle, the cane-lipped scented mouths and the sacred whisper of the pines choose to haunt you.

News

leges but never completing a degree, Toomer worked and wrote in DC and New York City before accepting a position as a teacher in rural Georgia, where he became immersed in the black folk-culture. The first and most powerful third of Cane takes place in this rural Southern setting.

Throughout this section are stories, poems and what seem to be fragments of songs. Often women’s names — Karintha, Becky, Carma, Fern and Esther — are the titles of longer prose sketches of their lives, tragic and even ethereal. Here the lyrical additions enter, rhymed lines separating sections of prose.

In “Karintha,” Toomer repeats in varying forms, “Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, / O can’t you see it, O can’t you see it, / Her skin is like dusk on

Up Front

by Joel Sronce Almost 100 years have gone by since Jean Toomer published Cane in 1923. With the passage of time it has remained elusive in genre — including passages of dialogue, and as much poetry as prose, often stitched together in the same vignettes — and similarly undefinable in its effect.

Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple and several other novels, once said that Cane reverberated in her to an astonishing degree. Toomer’s work is haunting and sublime, yet filled with challenges both in form and in the clarity of its characters and settings.

Toomer, an African-American author who became an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, grew up in Washington, DC. After attending several col-

triad-city-beat.com

Cane

Opinion

3. Joel Berry Joel Berry — the game’s leading scorer — grabbed the loose ball. He took two quick dribbles and threw a difficult pass to Justin Jackson, who ran ahead of everyone toward the basket.

5. Theo Pinson Out of timeouts, Gonzaga rushed the ball up the court.

But Kennedy Meeks made another outstanding defensive play, stealing a long pass and getting the ball to Berry.

Gonzaga fouled, and Berry made one of two free throws to give the Heels a six-point lead. The Bulldogs missed a final, desperation three-point shot with two seconds left.

Pinson grabbed the rebound — his ninth of the game — and threw the ball toward the stadium rafters. As the ball ascended, the Tar Heel team rushed the court, ready to celebrate their redemption.

Crossword

The Tar Heels had possession and a one-point lead as the clock ticked down. But without a score, the threat of a second consecutive championship loss would become reality if Gonzaga held the ball for a last chance. With 25

2. Kennedy Meeks Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss spun into the lane and hoisted up a shot that would get the Bulldogs back within one. Kennedy Meeks followed the drive at every step, stretched his arm toward the shot and blocked it. It will likely be the most memorable moment of the game.

Already, a photograph of the moment has become the cover for the next Sports Illustrated.

4. Justin Jackson Jackson dunked it. The crowd, the Tar Heel bench and fans in living rooms across North Carolina went crazy.

The basket gave UNC a five-point lead with 11 seconds remaining.

Sportsball

1. Isaiah Hicks

seconds left, Hicks hit the biggest bucket of the night.

He drove the lane and banked in a challenging, contested shot that gave the Heels a more commanding three-point advantage.

Culture

by Joel Sronce On Monday, the University of North Carolina battled for the men’s college basketball national championship with a guiding purpose: Redemption. One season after last year’s sudden and heartbreaking last-second defeat in the same title game, the 2017 team walked off the court as champions. Barely.

In the last 25 seconds, each of the five Tar Heel starters contributed to turning one of the ugliest games in recent memory into a victory. The sequence defines the synchronicity that the starters — all upperclassmen — created throughout the year.

Cover Story

5 Tar Heel players who sealed the championship for UNC

Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

COURTESY IMAGES

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April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

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NEWS

High Point council approves $15 million for multi-purpose stadium

by Jordan Green

High Point City Council votes to spend $15 million to acquire property and pay for site design for a multi-purpose stadium conceived as a “catalytic project.”

High Point, the last stubborn holdout in the Triad’s urbanization movement, is ready to play ball.

City council voted 8-1 on Monday to spend $15 million in city funds to buy land and design a site for a multi-purpose stadium in a four-block area near the intersection of English Road and North Elm Street.

The president of the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, a minor league that is in the process of expanding from eight to 12 teams, has signed a letter of intent expressing a desire to bring a team to High Point, said Sims Hines, vice-chair of Forward High Point. Hines added that Forward High Point has “secured a local ownership entity that is well along in their discussions with the Atlantic League and is anxious to get into discussions with the city of High Point about a long-term operating lease as well.”

The multi-purpose stadium, which is estimated to cost $30 million to $35 million, will be designed to host baseball, football, lacrosse, soccer, concerts, religious gatherings, movie screenings and other community events.

“The nation’s largest promoter of Christian music concerts, Premier Productions, is headquartered right here in High Point,” Hines said. “They produce over 450 Christian concert events a year all around the United States. They’ve never promoted a single show in High Point because there’s never been a venue to host one in. And they’re very anxious to start producing a Christian music series in your new stadium.”

Hines said the stadium will draw from a market of 230,000 in a territory that runs from the northern rim of High Point to Lexington and Thomasville in the south.

“We’re looking at a modest-sized stadium a little smaller than Greensboro, a little smaller than Winston-Salem, but nicer than both of ’em,” Hines said.

Hines said Forward High Point

A rendering shows what a future multi-purpose stadium in High Point could look like.

officials have spoken with several local developers, who expressed interest in making investments surrounding the stadium, which will be located one block from High Point Regional Hospital.

Hines said most of the developers said they would build a minimum of 80 to 100 apartments.

“That would give us a vibrancy to downtown High Point that we haven’t seen in a long time,” he said. “Once you get the people living downtown, then you get the breweries, you get the restaurants, you get some of the stores to follow, hotel, office buildings, and all of a sudden we have a great downtown development.”

The project was spearheaded about two years ago by the High Point Convention & Visitors Bureau. The city of High Point and local business leaders set up Forward High Point, a non-profit downtown development agency, last year to lead the effort. Ray Gibbs, the agency’s executive director, has been widely credited with setting the stage for neighboring Greensboro’s downtown renaissance as executive director of Downtown Greensboro Inc. from 1999 to 2007. When he took the helm of Forward High Point seven months ago, Gibbs’ primary task was to bring the city a so-called catalytic project that

will generate ancillary development and create jobs.

Baseball stadiums are a tried-and-true tool of downtown redevelopment. As Hines noted, Fayetteville, Kannapolis and Gastonia — with populations ranging from 40,000 to 200,000 — are all slightly ahead of High Point (Pop. 104,371) in redeveloping their downtowns around multi-purpose stadiums.

Greensboro and Winston-Salem, both with populations upwards of 200,000, built ballparks in 2005 and 2009, respectively. High-end apartments followed the Greensboro ballpark in 2013 and 2014, and developer Roy Carroll’s multi-used Bellemeade Village is currently under construction just to the east. In Winston-Salem, Link Apartments Brookstown was built overlooking the ballpark in 2015, and the same year an Atlanta-based developer announced plans to build a $96 million residential and retail complex around the ballpark.

Gibbs said private development lagged behind ballpark construction in Greensboro partly because the project only included the stadium site and didn’t bank surrounding properties for private development. And in both cities the 2009 recession delayed investment.

“With this project, we’re going to try to control the land around it, and we

COURTESY FORWARD HIGH POINT

started working with developers before so we can bring them in at the same time,” Gibbs said.

City staff and Forward High Point presented the stadium secondary to the objective of creating a “downtown catalyst project.” Project leaders contend the stadium and spinoff development will meet the goal set by city council last year to produce 500 private-sector jobs, 15-20 new restaurants and shops, 250 residential housing units and a central gathering space.

“We feel like this project will accomplish that goal,” Assistant City Manager Randy Hemann said. “The most exciting thing is it will do it without a tax increase.”

Staff estimates that the project will increase the tax base of the downtown area from $805 million to $904 million, creating $99 million in new valuation.

The city’s plan for financing the project over 20 years includes new tax revenue, annual leasing, facility fees, parking fees and naming rights.

Gibbs said he is already two major mixed-use projects to complement the stadium and establish a nexus of pedestrian activity. He said he’s “finalizing a deal” with International Market Centers to repurpose the unused Showplace West as a boutique hotel and retail

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“Neither,” Hemann responded. “He was already purchasing that property for development. It was neither. He purchased that directly from the Enterprise. He purchased that for development. We’re re-purchasing from him.”

Hemann added that the $1.2 million the city intends to pay for the property is significantly less than its $2.7 million tax value. He said that the new owner signed up for the city’s brownfields program to remediate the property “months and months, long before we even looked at it,” and that DJ Worldwide LLC had the property under contract before city officials started looking at it.

“I will tell you that did cause heartburn for us,” Hemann said. “But when we looked at all the other sites and when we looked at the site that was south of this we would have ended up paying much, much more for property.”

City council ultimately approved the $15 million allocation on an 8-1 vote, with only Councilwoman Cynthia Davis, an at-large representative, voting in opposition. Davis said she supports the project, but believes it should not be financed with public funds.

Gibbs said Forward High Point will likely issue a request for proposals for a master developer in the summer. The goal is to have stadium open by April 2019.

triad-city-beat.com

center, and he’s talking to developers about a proposed mixed-use development on North Main Street mixing retail, restaurant, office and residential with an estimated value of $16.5 million to $22 million.

“I needed to show city council that when we talk about private development, it isn’t just fairy tales,” he said. “We’re actually in negotiation with folks.”

The city council vote to appropriate city funds to pay for property acquisition and site design did not take place without controversy.

Under questioning by Councilman Jim Davis, Hemann acknowledged that a private investor recently purchased seven parcels within the area designated for the stadium from the High Point Enterprise for $400,000, and that the city plans to pay about $1.2 million to repurchase the properties. A deed executed on Jan. 5 shows that the Enterprise sold the properties to DJ Worldwide LLC. The LLC’s annual report, on file with the NC Secretary of State, indicates that the company is owned by David Payne of High Point and Jerry Lee Hill of Thomasville.

“On the surface, this looks like insider information,” Davis said.

“The heartburn I’m having is — I want to support this — but how do I answer to the citizens of this city when you have an LLC corporation that has automatically bought up property, and they got extremely lucky or they had some kind of insider information that this is going to happen?” Davis continued.

204 S. Westgate Dr., Greensboro

Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

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April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

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Participatory budgeting volunteers get word out amid skepticism

by Jordan Green

Student volunteers from UNCG are canvassing neighborhoods in Greensboro’s five city council districts to encourage residents to attend idea collection sessions for the city’s participatory budgeting project. Organizers are trying to increase participation in the midst of criticism from Councilman Tony Wilkins.

Tony Wilkins, a Republican who represents suburban District 5 on Greensboro City Council, is one of the most vocal opponents of participatory budgeting, a process that carves out $500,000 from the city’s multi-milliondollar annual budget and allows residents 14 years and older to vote directly on how the money is spent.

As the city kicked off its second year of participatory budgeting, student volunteers from Spoma Jovanovic’s communications and communities class at UNCG combed through Wilkins’ district and encouraged residents to bring proposals for improving their neighborhoods to a series of idea collection sessions. A group of budget delegates will vet the ideas over the summer, and in November residents will have the opportunity to vote on which projects they want to fund.

Wilkins was on the losing side of a closely divided 5-4 vote to implement participatory budgeting in 2014, and he said the first year of the program gave “him plenty of ammunition to support why I oppose it.” Particularly, he objected to the choice made by residents of District 5 to allocate $20,000 for two game tables to be installed at Griffin Recreation Center and Hester Park this spring.

“We live in the highest taxed city in ratio to the size of our city in the second hungriest [metropolitan statistical area] in the country,” Wilkins said in a recent interview, “and to spend $20,000 on game tables was ludicrous in my opinion.”

Wilkins said city staff was able to procure the gaming tables at a lower cost and complete the project for only $10,000. Last month, he persuaded his fellow council members to vote unanimously to reallocate the remaining $10,000 to Out of the Garden Project, which provides food each weekend to the families of K-12 students and op-

UNCG student Megan Montgomery, accompanied by Joy Braswell and JORDAN GREEN Arissa Drayton (right) speaks to a resident of Farmington Forest.

erates mobile markets in under-served people. Participation in the most recent areas across Greensboro. city council elections in 2015 exceeded Wilkins said he hoped the volunteers’ voting in participatory budgeting by a efforts to increase the number of resfactor of about 10, ranging from a low idents who weigh in would be successful. of 2,144 in District 5 where Wilkins ran “If we have more than what we had unopposed to a high of 5,493 in District last year — 71 out of 50,000 partici3, which featured a competitive election pating, that would between Justin certainly be a Outling and Kurt The city of Greensboro plus,” he said.

Collins.

The actual Valerie Warren, hosts an idea collection number of District a consultant who session for its participatory is working under 5 residents who budgeting process at Caldvoted on projects contract as a comlast year is 139, ac- cleugh Multicultural Center, munity engagecording to figures ment coordinator, provided by Karen located at 1700 Orchard said she doesn’t Kixmiller, the think the compariStreet, on Thursday from lead staffer in the son is fair.

6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Residents city’s budget office “There’s no from all five city council dis- Democratic Party on participatory budgeting. That tricts are welcome to attend or Republican compares to 323 Party machine and propose projects. people in District that’s supporting 4, 303 people in the effort,” she District 2 and 229 said. “We don’t people in District have the funds 1. District 3 had the lowest participaof a C(4) [organization] to pour into a tion, with 128 people voting. campaign.”

The numbers across the five districts Both Warren and Wayne Abraham, a are miniscule when considering that the member of the Participatory Budgeting population of each of the five districts Steering Committee, pointed to findings is about 54,000 in a city of 269,666 in a report by Spoma Jovanovic and

Vincent Russell at UNCG indicating the 164 people who participated in the participatory budgeting neighborhood assemblies in 2015 compared favorably to turnout for public input meetings for the city’s annual budget in prior years, which dropped from 114 in 2012 to 69 in 2015.

Abraham also noted that one of the goals of the steering committee is to empower people who don’t typically participate, and 80 percent of the people who showed up to contribute ideas, vet projects and vote on the final ballot said they had never engaged in the city budgeting process before. In that sense, he said, the process was successful.

Abraham said it’s difficult to compare participation in Greensboro with other cities that have undertaken participatory budgeting. The only other city in the United States with a citywide program is Vallejo, Calif., which instituted participatory budgeting through a special tax after the city emerged from bankruptcy — a seismic event that generated significant publicity.

“We’re unique in that we’re doing it in the South, we’re doing it citywide and we’re carving it out of the budget,” Abraham said. “Getting people’s attention isn’t easy.”

On a recent Saturday, six student volunteers from UNCG canvassed neighborhoods to talk to residents about participatory budgeting. They started in the morning near Morehead Elementary in District 4, and reconvened in the parking lot of the State Employees’ Credit Union on Holden Road to begin canvassing in District 5.

Before they had knocked on the first door, the volunteers had to run across four lanes of traffic on Holden Road to get to the Farmington Forest neighborhood near Smith High School.

“We don’t have a crosswalk,” Arissa Drayton groused.

“It’s a project for participatory budgeting,” enthused Megan Montgomery.

After the students broke into two groups, Drayton, Montgomery and their classmate Joy Braswell knocked on their first door. The resident who came to the door gave them a friendly reception, but appeared to not understand English and told them no when Drayton

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TRUTH IS POWER

asked if the neighborhood needed sidewalks, crosswalks or street lights.

“People with small children, they’re more enthusiastic,” Braswell reflected as they walked down Goodall Drive.

“Then the older folks. It’s the people who are 28 to 45 who are like, ‘Hmmm.’”

“I feel like the older people’s society was a lot nicer, so they’re trying to restore it,” Montgomery said.

Drayton added, “The older folks who are African American, they’re used to having decisions made for them. Now they have a voice and they want to use it.”

Near the end of Goodall Drive, the students found David Allison, a welder, sitting on his front steps. Allison, who doesn’t have children of his own, said his primary concern is Smith High School, where his voting precinct is located. He said he favor demolishing the school, segregating out the troublemakers and then floating a bond to pay for new facilities.

The UNCG students were well aware that the city of Greensboro is not responsible for public schools, but they exercised their discretion to not mention that to Allison so as not to puncture his enthusiasm.

“The thing is everyone wants to tackle the little stuff,” Allison said. “Sidewalks — we could do that ourselves.”

“That’s why we need to hear your voice,” Montgomery said.

“For something like that we need the Gates Foundation,” Allison rejoined.

Montgomery urged Allison to organize his neighbors to come to one of the public input meetings to build a consensus behind his idea.

Drayton visibly winced when Allison referred to Smith High School and Dudley High School as “pre-prison schools,” but she congratulated him: “You’re the first person to give us feedback.”

The students had more luck finding residents with practical ideas in the Lamrocton neighborhood.

At least two residents said they wanted an additional streetlight on Lamroc Road.

Lamont Manning listened quietly to the volunteers’ presentation. Then, without missing a beat, he said, “I need a light right here. It’s really dark.”

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April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

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OPINION

EDITORIAL

The cowardice of the false majority Rep. John Faircloth and Sen Trudy Wade were the only Guilford County representatives who voted for it. Greensboro City Councilman Tony Wilkins invoked the name of “Big Daddy,” who he said held all the cards in Raleigh. A Greensboro coalition that included Earl Jones, Skip Alston and Jim Kee also supported it. Former Greensboro Mayor Robbie Perkins gave it a cryptic endorsement.

But in the end, the bill we came to call SB 36 died a trifling, pitiful death as befitting such a petty piece of legislation.

Without input from any elected officials or citizens save an anonymous group of “business leaders” she invoked, state Sen. Trudy Wade submitted a bill that drastically changed the way the city of Greensboro would elect its council, turning five districts into eight, eliminating at-large reps and limiting the mayor’s ability to vote.

Not all of it was bad. The bit about four-year terms has since been adopted by the city. But everyone knew the rest of it was pure crap — even the people trying to sell it.

“This is not a case where it is difficult to discern legislative motivation,” Judge Catherine Eagles said in her ruling, which was handed down on Monday. “All of the credible evidence points in one direction: a ‘skewed, unequal redistricting’ intentionally designed to create a partisan advantage by increasing the weight of votes of Republican-leaning voters and decreasing the weight of votes of Democratic-leaning voters. This evidence is unchallenged and uncontroverted.”

The law was literally indefensible — the Guilford County Board of Elections did not engage County Attorney Mark Paine to defend the law, because the BOE by charter does not care how the districts are drawn.

Sen. Wade invoked legislative privilege and refused to testify.

As the heroes recede — both the citizen plaintiffs and the city, which steadfastly defended itself against this legislative overreach and can now get on with its upcoming council election — the perpetrators remain in the light.

Faircloth’s in place until 2018. Same goes for Wade.

We’d be shocked if Alston hasn’t entertained the idea of angling for the Guilford County Commission seat recently vacated by Ray Trapp — Trapp was Alston’s hand-picked successor to the seat.

Wilkins has already announced his intention to run again for council, though he has coyly avoided naming which race he’ll enter when filing opens in June.

All that’s left for the rest of us to do is vote.

CITIZEN GREEN

Chip Marble, Mississippi Episcopalian, rest in peace

Alfred “Chip” Marble, who and righteous so that [Marble’s] movement into Missisdied in Greensboro at the age of sippi was a movement into a place that had already sort 80 on March 29, was a Southern of demonstrated that it was willing to go against the flow white clergyman from Mississipof traditional Southern racism. I think he picked up that pi who committed his pastoral ball and he really was brave there.” work to social justice and racial As an example of the Alabama church’s intransigence, reconciliation.

Taylor Branch reports in his magisterial volume At

by Jordan Green Living in accord with the dicCanaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, that tates of conscience as a person in 1965 Bishop CCJ Carpenter denounced a “ministers’ with white privilege in a society that brutally enforces a march” in Selma as “a foolish business and a sad waste code of racial hierarchy requires a certain kind of courof time.” Nonetheless, the presiding bishop decreed that age, although — let’s be clear — there’s no comparison participation in the march had already been approved with living under the heel of oppression as a person of through church resolutions on voting rights, overriding color.

Carpenter’s objections.

As an assisting bishop, Marble confirmed me as an Chip Marble graduated from University of Mississippi Episcopalian in 2006 at St. Francis Episcopal Church in in 1958, served in the Navy during the Cuban missile Greensboro. I regret now that I didn’t take advantage of crisis and then attended seminary before receiving the opportunity to ask him what it was like to be a white ordination to the priesthood in 1968 and pastoring conperson deciding when, if and how to take a stand when gregations across Mississippi, as he recounted in a 2010 black people were subjected to an official reign of terror sermon at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cary. Whether while trying to register to vote and obtain other basic because of modesty or because there wasn’t much to tell, human rights. At the time of my confirhe said little about his personal involvemation, I’d assumed that Bishop Marble ment in the civil rights upheavals chronihad been on the right side of the struggle, ‘You don’t grow up cled by Branch. but of course it’s never quite that simple.

I know more about his work in Greenswhite in a culture The truth is that human beings usually boro, where was an assisting bishop after like I did without take calibrated risks based on many serving as bishop of Mississippi from 1993 racism being a factors, including a person’s sensitivity to 2003. Marble enthusiastically promotto the suffering of fellow human beings, part of your bones.’ ed the Greensboro Truth and Reconcilthe egregiousness of abuses and the iation Commission, which produced a – Bishop Chip Marble relative constraints of the institutions like report on the 1979 Klan-Nazi shootings. employers, universities, the military and, He hoped to replicate the commission in yes, the church. his native Mississippi.

My clearest sense of how Bishop Marble grappled with Bishop Marble spoke out against mistreatment of black racism in segregated Mississippi comes from a remark and Latino officers in the Greensboro Police Departhe made to the summer interns at the Greensboro Truth ment. He reinvigorated the Racial Justice and Reconciliaand Reconciliation Commission in 2005, as recorded by tion Committee in the diocese, and he was recognized by the commission’s Executive Director Jill Williams. the church for his work on behalf of immigrants and the “Growing up, I had to work on my own personal jourLGBTQ community. And Bishop Marble was a founding ney,” Marble told the interns. “You don’t grow up white co-chair of the Greensboro Faith Leaders Council, an in a culture like I did without racism being a part of your interracial and interfaith body that brings together Chrisbones.” tian, Jewish and Muslim clergy.

I asked Charlie Hawes, my priest at St. Mary’s House At the end of that 2010 sermon in Cary, Bishop Marble until he retired in the late 2000s, what the Episcopal signed off with some pretty sound advice.

Church was like in the Deep South in the 1960s so I could “Get involved,” he said. “Make a difference. A church understand the ecclesiastic culture that Marble would on mission is really carrying forth God’s kingdom and have found when he entered the priesthood in 1968. giving witness to it, or it’s a club. I don’t want to be a “Our church in Alabama was terrible during the Civil member of a club, and I hope you don’t either. Give Rights Movement, whereas [the church in] Mississippi thanks for so many people down through the years who was heroic during the Civil Rights Movement,” Hawes have worked for justice and equality, for God’s kingdom. told me. “They were even deeper South. The church And let’s do it, too.” knew what the church was supposed to be about. I know the bishop of Mississippi… at the height of the demonstrations and marches was really courageous and brave

(336) 723-7239

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Opinion Cover Story

Whitewashing Black Lives Matter This event was initiated by Black Lives Matter Gate City and was hosted by the anti-racist white committees serving BLM leadership [Citizen Green: Lesson of ’79: How to keep going after the worst”; by Jordan Green; March 15, 2017]. It is crucial to include this in the article so the work of BLM does not get erased. Please edit, thank you!

Sofia Tull, via triad-city-beat.com

Culture Sportsball

Great article! Thank you so much for reporting on this. Did you know that the anti-racist white folks are actually a contingency of [Black Lives Matter], serving black leadership? It seems important to mention since Black Lives Matter Gate City is the main reason this event took place. Thanks!

Sarah Elizabeth, via triad-city-beat. com

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News

A civil rights revolutonary Thank you for your review of my documentary film, Chairman Jones in the March 29 issue of Triad City Beat.

The film had a very good run at the

Up Front

God’s unwitting servant I love your column on Sam Frazier in this week’s TCB! [“Editor’s Notebook: Sam Frazier, on the road”; by Brian Clarey; March 29, 2017] It doesn’t surprise me that Sam would be a volunteer for Meals on Wheels. He has such a kind soul. What I do find ironic is that one of the reasons I attend the rejoice Service at First Presbyterian Church is because Sam plays in the band along with the amazing James Keith. Even if Sam is an atheist his musical gifts bring people like me to church on Sunday mornings. God works in mysterious ways!

Carole Perkins, Greensboro

Recycle this paper.

triad-city-beat.com

The GOP’s diabolical healthcare plan This bill is not much about healthcare really! [“Editorial: Playing a dangerous game with healthcare”; March 29, 2017] Just a Trojan horse to transfer wealth to the top five percent and slash Medicaid as an entitlement. Healthcare is just a means to a diabolical end for the gang who won’t shoot straight.

William C. Crawford, Winston-Salem

RiverRun Festival. Some people drove over from Greensboro on Saturday evening, because they had seen your review.

I can see how the film could feel a bit like hagiography, but I think that my father was simply a different kind of revolutionary and those who witnessed his leadership were honest brokers who were telling the truth as they saw it with no intention of trying to saint him.

In any case, I appreciate that your overall review projected a good image of the film and highlighted the importance of this little known North Carolina leader. Thank you!

Anna Jones, Durham

274 4810

11

April 5 – 11, 2017 Cover Story

Electro’s swan s The last free man on Tate S by

12

Harry Wilton Perkins Jr. — better known as Electro — enjoys a cigarette behind his Roxboro trailer on a recent Saturday morning.

song Street Jordan Green

JORDAN GREEN

Word of his return coursed through the coffeehouses and bars like an exhilarating current in early September 2016.

Electro, the legendary street player, raconteur and bluesman, was coming back to play the Tate Street Festival. He’d been living in a small trailer outside of Roxboro in rural Person County, where he’d taken care of his mother before she passed away, and now at the age of 69 and in declining health himself, his visits to Greensboro had become more and more infrequent.

Pam Cooper, the manager at the once divey but now vaguely upscale College Hill Sundries, recalled seeing him the day of the festival at the house she shares with her boyfriend, the bass player Mike Duehring.

“He came to the house and sat down,” she said. “You could tell he didn’t have the energy. Some friends of ours took him back. He really wanted to play some music at the Tate Street Festival. That was his plan.”

The two-block commercial strip known as Tate Street hugging the eastern flank of UNCG has churned with creativity and social upheaval for at least half a century. Its legacy as musical epicenter begins with future country superstar Emmylou Harris’ first foray into live performance, and the various clubs on the street nurtured local luminaries like Scott Manring and Bobby Kelly of the revered Sentinel Boys, folksinger Bruce Piephoff, guitarist Sam Frazier, Muddy Waters sideman Bob Margolin, avant-weirdo banjoist Eugene Chadbourne and the punk band the Othermothers, while catching touring acts like REM and Black Flag at the peak of their powers.

The counterculture crystalized around Tate Street in the late ’60s with the growing protests against the Vietnam war, and when the drug culture took hold it became a haven for all sorts of dropouts, a place known for a relaxed and free atmosphere despite frequent pushback from local merchants and occasional interventions by the police.

For at least 30 years, Electro was perhaps Tate Street’s most ubiquitous presence. If his history, even during his mainstay years from 1969 to 1995, seems murky, it’s probably because by his and others’ accounts, he was always coming and going, hopping trains in and out of Greensboro, camping by the tracks or crashing on friends’ couches. Electro’s tenure is so long that it’s difficult to fix him in a particular period, and his many acquaintances retain different pieces of his story.

“Electro could walk into certain bars and the place would light up,” said Duehring, who was 14 or so when he started hanging out with Electro on Tate Street in the early ’90s. “It was like Michael Jackson — he was a superstar.”

As the 2016 Tate Street Festival approached, the old-timers had two reasons for excitement. The first was that Amelia Leung, who once operated the fabled Hong Kong House restaurant, would be tabling with her new, aptly named cookbook Hong Kong House Cook Book.

Hong Kong House was perhaps Tate Street’s most important institution, because as Piephoff noted: “All the musicians hung out there. Amelia took care of everybody and fed everybody.” Leung’s role is notable for another important reason: She leased the basement of Hong Kong House to an employee, Aliza Gottlieb, who opened the Nightshade Café, a focal point of the music scene.

The other reason for excitement was the rumor that Electro would be in town.

“Electro bills himself as ‘Tate Street’s last hippie,’” said Jim Clark, an old friend who directs the UNCG MFA writing program. “When he

comes back, something comes back alive that so many of us miss so much.”

“I love that man,” Pam Cooper said on a recent Saturday morning as she prepared to visit Electro. “I made him some lasagna last night.”

“She doesn’t even make me lasagna,” Mike Duehring, her boyfriend, chortled. Then, alluding to Electro’s cancer diagnosis, he added on a more serious note: “He needs to eat because the chemo makes you not want to eat.”

She met Electro at College Hill when she started bartending in the early 2000s, Cooper recalled, as she aimed her Honda Pilot east on Wendover Avenue, heading for Electro’s digs near Roxboro.

“We connected,” she said. “We’ve been pen pals for several years.”

More than an hour later when they pulled into his driveway, Electro was sitting in front of his trailer. He took a drag off a cigarette and gazed ahead with a look that flickered between wariness and amusement as his visitors piled out of the car. It was a warm day, and birdsong lilted in the air. Pines towered around the small home site and beyond the tree line a newly plowed field unfurled along a gentle ridgeline. Dressed in a flannel shirt, ripped jeans, thermals and black New Balance sneakers with red-and-yellow trim, Electro appraised Cooper as she approached.

“I brought you some lasagna,” she said.

He nodded. “You can put it in there in the refrigerator.”

Electro’s arrival in Greensboro almost 50 years ago was largely accidental, and his dry recounting that day in front of his trailer accorded it little apparent significance.

“I was on my way to Los Angeles,” he said. “I had a friend of mine who knew some people in Greensboro. I’d never been to Greensboro before.

We stopped there, and we just started partying.”

By the time Electro — born Harry Wilton Perkins Jr. — happened on the scene on Tate Street, he had finished a stint in the Air Force as a radar technician stationed in Iceland. He’d acquired the name Electro thanks to his propensity for playing loud electric music in a band he had in the service called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Electro’s assignment in Iceland gave him the opportunity to travel to London, where he got to see Pink Floyd and the Zombies.

“One place had flowers that would spray out this perfume,” he recalled of his visits to London. “They had all kinds of nifty s***.”

David Little, a former student organizer in the anti-war movement whose father owned Little Bi-Rite grocery on Tate Street, remembers that Electro “was a really good guitar player even back then.” In the late ’60s, Little recalled, there were two distinct camps, with the student activists in one and the hippie musicians in the other. Electro was decidedly in the latter camp. Little lived with his best friend, Curtis Fields, in a house on Aycock Street on the other side of UNCG’s campus. A native of Thomasville, Fields earned an MFA in the UNCG creative writing program, but his primary focus was playing the saxophone. Electro was enamored of Fields’ playing and became a frequent visitor at the house on Aycock Street. Fields eventually moved to New York.

Years later, Electro recalled that “Curtis was a great sax player” and that the two would play gigs together in New York under the moniker the Tall Toads.

He and Electro were more acquaintances than friends at first, Little recalled, “but then in the ’70s there was this period in which Electro and I, for some reason we would meet and sit on a curb and drink Red

triad-city-beat.com

Sittin’ on the wall in front of Hong Kong House Listenin’ to Electro playin’ Son House — “Tate Street Blues” by Bruce Piephoff

13

April 5 – 11, 2017 Cover Story

14

Rooster wine. I would sit and listen to Electro’s stories about his crazy goings-on. I would tell him my paltry stories about my more timid goings-on.”

Little had lived in Texas at one point, and he had a disassembled motorcycle there that he wanted to retrieve.

“I decided to drive an old panel truck to Texas to get the motorcycle,” Little recalled. “Just on the spur of the moment Electro said, ‘I’m going with you.’ We laid in a supply of Red Rooster. I did 90 percent of the driving because Electro was drinking most of the time. We stayed in Tyler, Texas for a while, but we got run out of town. I think Electro grabbed a bottle of wine he didn’t pay for.

The manager of the store didn’t see the humor in it.”

The upheaval on Tate Street attracted Jim Clark, a Duke University divinity student who showed up around 1970. Clark’s initial visit to Tate Street took place at the behest of parishioners at a church on West Market Street who asked him to track down some runaways.

“When I first started going to Tate Street I figured I’m going to find people sticking needles in their arms, like this really dark scene,” Clark recalled. “I would go down there, and I thought this was one of the most creative, beautiful places in the world in terms of art and music and ideas, the kind of thinking people were doing. I think a lot of the kids in this town discovered Tate Street, and realized there’s something special down there. Of course, there was drugs, too….”

Eventually, a consortium of church leaders came together with doctors, lawyers and restaurateurs to give Clark financial backing to launch a social outreach and political organizing project.

Electro was Clark’s primary liaison with the street community.

“I went around talking to people, and asking who’s who around here,” Clark recalled. “More fingers were pointing to Electro than anyone else. He really became my guide to life on the street. I explained to him what I wanted to do in terms of organizing people around justice and fairness. I was down there for 10 years. He became my mentor. Hardly a week went by when I didn’t talk to Electro.”

Under the auspices of Clark’s Ministry for Social Change, the Tate Street community launched a free clinic, free kitchen, drug counseling unit, draft resistance center and newspaper, most of which took place in a small accessory dwelling resembling a treehouse across from St. Mary’s House church on Walker Avenue. Clark would often run his ideas past Electro to see if they were viable, and then enlist Electro’s help to get buy-in from the street community.

“At that time it was outright war between the Tate Street street people and the police,” Clark recalled. “There were a lot of big marijuana arrests. We were for decriminalization.”

A riot just north of campus in Lake Daniels Park in 1971 touched off when police said they found marijuana in a biker’s saddlebag; it resulted almost 60 injuries, according to an account in the Greensboro Sun newspaper that Clark and his friends published. The Ministry for Social Change collected photographs and presented them to the Greensboro Police Department as evidence of excessive

force, and unsuccessfully pushed the city to set up a poElectro at the Nightshade Café or whatever party was lice review board. Despite the animosity, Clark also looked going on that offered a place for musicians and artists to for opportunities to broker peace between the police and congregate. the street people, and he found a willing partner in John “I kind of can’t remember a time when he wasn’t Patterson, an African-American officer who headed the around,” Roscoe said. “When I would come down to get department’s community-relations division. lunch at Hong Kong House I would see him likely as not “He said, ‘Can we make some overtures to bring the strumming a guitar and trying to talk to a college girl. police and the community together?’” Clark recalled. “I Why not? Fun guy.” talked to Electro about it. This was not a popular idea.

Around 1977 Sam Frazier started taking guitar lessons The idea of war with the police was popular. Electro from Roscoe. He entered UNCG and fell in quickly with helped get that going to where we were able to get some the music and social scene. Eventually, Frazier rented an relations going with the police.” apartment on Tate Street above what is now East Coast Along similar lines, Clark organized a street cleanup to Wings, and Electro was his neighbor down the hall. ease relations with local merchants.

“I didn’t know him all that well,” Frazier said. “I’d drop in “I said, ‘We’ll spiff the place up and show the merto say hello to a friend of mine that lived where I used to. chants that we’re not a lot of dirty, lazy, dope-smoking He was just a character that played slide guitar. Or I’d hear hippies,’” Clark recalled. “They said, ‘Well, we are dirty, him from down the hall.” lazy hippies.’ It was a kind of thing like, ‘What’s in it for For Frazier, the Sentinel Boys — the band that included us?’ I said, ‘There’s a lot of tension. Let’s show that it’s our Scott Manring and Bobby Kelly — set the standard. street as much as theirs.’ That didn’t go over well. I went “They were the guru,” he said. The Tate Street music to Electro, and he listened. He must have talked to some scene in the late ’70s was “pretty fecund,” Frazier recalls, people because on Saturday morning, I saw some people but for him Electro “was more of a peripheral guy.” dragging in with brooms and bags. We had a pretty good When others from the ’70s cohort were professionalizlittle group.” ing the music, starting families or taking day jobs, Electro The treehouse-like accessory dwelling on Walker Avecontinued the tradition of picking the guitar at late-night nue, known as MSC House, became a sanctuary. parties. By sheer ubiquity and perseverance his music and “People who were on the run, as long as they got personality became the lantern for a new generation of in there, the police, sheriffs and FBI rebel-seekers that started appearing on wouldn’t bother them,” Clark said. “It Tate Street in the early ’90s.

“I met him down on was modeled on the idea of sanctuaries “I met him down on Tate Street Tate Street sharing 40 sharing 40 ounces and stories,” recalled in the Middle Ages. If you got in there, nobody would come after you. None of Josh Johnson, aka Pinche Gringo, a ounces and stories.” the law enforcement would come upgarage-punk musician who plays in Paint — Josh Johnson, aka stairs. They would come to me and say, Fumes and Wahyas. “We would drink Pinche Gringo ‘We understand that so-and-so is posin public down there when you could sibly upstairs at your place. Is it possible do that without getting in trouble. Two we could talk to them?’ Once they got into that space cops was about it. One was an older guy, and he wouldn’t they would not be seized by law enforcement until we do much as long as we weren’t endangering ourselves or had negotiated things like lawyers and bond. It was draft acting a fool.” resisters, people who were AWOL from the military, some Electro turned Johnson on to early blues and ’60s rock. people on the run for drug charges, some for supposedly “He kind of took us under his wing, making sure we political crimes like making pipe bombs.” were staying out of trouble, but staying in trouble — the As often as not, the person taking refuge at MSC good kind of trouble,” Johnson said. “He was keeping us House wasn’t a draft resister or revolutionary, but Electro. out of sight of doing things that would harm us later in “I’d go up there and down on the floor under the table life — hard drugs. We were pretty young. He would talk where we put the newspaper together he’d be sleeping,” to us about stuff like that, that our parents couldn’t tell us Clark recalled. “He’d be surrounded by books. Electro about.” loved books. I would come in there in the morning, and it Electro once rescued Johnson and another kid named was obvious that he had stayed up late reading books.”

Jimmy from a storm sewer.

During the same period, Electro was a fixture in the “Electro was sitting and playing on the street one night, local music scene. and he heard this, ‘Heeeelp,’” said Cooper, who has heard “Back in the early ’70s, during that time, he was playing the story before. “And Electro pulled up a sewer grate on in a lot of the same joints I was playing in,” Greensboro Tate Street so they could get out.” musician Bruce Piephoff recalled. “He was really into the “That sewer grate was heavy as hell,” Electro said, takblues, country blues, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins kind ing up the tale. “That’s how me and Jimmy met. [I] jerked of stuff. He was around during the period [the late] Billy him out of the sewer, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Ransom Hobbs was around. I knew both of them and Like Johnson, Mike Duehring started playing in punk played music with both of them.” bands. It wasn’t until about five years into his friendship Keith Roscoe, who opened a guitar repair shop upstairs with Electro, when Duehring got interested in country, from the Hong Kong House in 1972, would run into blues and rock and roll, that the two started playing music

together.

One time Electro was visiting Duehring at an apartment on Spring Garden Street, and Electro picked up an old, beat-up guitar that Duehring considered worthless.

“Electro picked up that guitar and made it sing,” Duehring recalled. “I said, ‘Electro, how did you do that?’ He just said….” And demonstrating, Duehring vocalized an uproarious laughing-braying-purging sound.

“He taught me how to bend notes,” Duehring said. “‘If it don’t sound right, you have to make it sound right,’ he would say.”

Electro drafted Duehring and Johnson into a group that they billed as Electro & the Circuit Breakers.

“We kind of hung out on a daily basis,” Johnson said.

“He slept on a rooftop or in a field where he would camp out. Sometimes too he would stay at my house on Dillard Street.”

As with housing, Electro maintained a reputation for itinerant travel. During his friends’ visit at the trailer outside of Roxboro, Cooper prodded him to tell a story familiar to the regulars at College Hill. Electro and some friends hopped a train in Greensboro with the intention of going to Chicago.

“We had a bunch of homebrew,” Electro recalled. “We passed out and thought we were rolling down the [track].”

The journey only lasted three blocks, and when they woke up the next morning they found themselves next Beef Burger, the stalwart restaurant on what is now Gate City Boulevard.

“Damn, I didn’t know there was a Beef Burger in Chicago,” Electro quipped.

The contrast between low and high living with Electro was exhilarating for Duehring.

“We would be sitting on Tate Street at 2 o’clock in the afternoon drinking Wild Irish Rose,” Duehring recalled of a period in the early 2000s. “And then that evening we would be playing for college students at the Exchange and drinking top-shelf scotch. It was like one moment we

“I realize I’m not the life of the party, but I’m working on it,” Electro says, as one of his cats, Punky, pokes his head from around the corner of the trailer (his other cat is called Brewster). His prescribed morphine is taking a while to kick in.

Cooper has been preparing to celebrate a grand opening of her new retail store in Greensboro with live music and food trucks in the coming months. Duehring tells Electro they would be happy to come pick him up and bring him back if he wanted to be there.

“Be something to think about,” Electro ventures.

Cooper and Duehring discuss the many changes on Tate Street in an attempt to get Electro to talk about what it was like back in its heyday.

“The thrill’s about gone,” Electro says.

“There’s four different pizza places,” Duehring says with an air of incredulousness.

“Damn,” Electro says.

He tells Duehring and Cooper that he quit drinking two weeks earlier. A friend in the neighborhood regularly took him to the grocery. His chemo treatments had been discontinued, and he had a scheduled visit to the VA hospital coming up.

“I quit smoking for a while, but I started back,” Electro tells Duehring.

“Did you find yourself needing something to do with your hands?” Duehring asks.

Electro nodded.

“Who’s your friend — your boon companion?” he says, answering with a question.

They make small talk, Duehring discussing a recent solo trip to Asheville to play a gig when his bandmates couldn’t make it.

“Musicians, they piss me off,” Electro says. “I had a show booked at the Cave one time when the band backed out.

But I had to rise to the occasion. I did the whole f***ing show by myself. The show must go on.”

As the hour drifts by, the conversation between Electro and his friends becomes more relaxed and affectionate.

“I think my pain medication is starting to kick in,” he says. “Feeling better.”

Then he asks, “You got a place I can crash?”

“Yeah,” Duehring responds. “You just got to make sure to bring enough oxygen. I don’t know if I can score that for you on Tate Street if you run out.”

Electro picks up a cordless phone and punches in some numbers.

“Hey Josh,” he says when Johnson’s answering machine picks up. “We all down here in ever-fabulous Roxboro. You want to pick up?”

If anyone has figured out an explanation for the enduring myth and legend of Electro, it’s probably David Little.

“He was a dose of wildness, and everywhere he went he was a reminder that we can be wild, unapologetically wild,” Little said. “That seems to be his role.

“Electro never bought into anything,” he added. “All he cared about was being wild and free. He was willing to pay whatever price had had to do that.”

Electro admitted to Duehring that he hadn’t felt like playing his guitar much in recent weeks.

“I’ve got to get back in the spirit of things,” he said. “It’s hard to do. If you’re not in the spirit, you can’t do nothing.”

Duehring and Cooper could tell that Electro was getting tired, and they each gave him a hug.

As they started walking back to the car while turning to wave, Electro rose unsteadily. When his body was fully erect, he raised both hands in the air, making twin peace signs with his fingers.

“Peace and love,” he said.

triad-city-beat.com

Electro (left) poses with Mike Duehring and Pam Cooper outside his trailer.

were homeless and then the next moment we were the talent.”

Jim Clark had long since traded in his radical street ministry for a teaching position at UNCG by then. Clark said one of his proudest moments was when Electro showed up in his office and announced that he had enrolled in college.

“He took golf as an elective,” Johnson recalled, “but I don’t know what he majored in. It was kind of bizarre seeing him walking around campus with his golf bag and book bag.”

As more and more of Electro’s time was claimed with taking care of his mother in Roxboro, his visits back to Greensboro became JORDAN GREEN events of music, excitement and drinking.

Mike Duehring, Pam Cooper and Josh Johnson lived together in a house owned by David Little on Tate Street.

“We were always on the porch,” Johnson recalled.

“Electro would come over. He didn’t drink when he took care of his mother. He would come into Greensboro and drink. You would see the best and the worst. You were glad to see him come and glad to see him go.”

Johnson holds a fond memory of Electro visiting him later in Chapel Hill, where he lived at the time. Johnson set up a weeklong residency at the Cave, and Electro came to stay with him. Members of Southern Culture On The Skids, who had been intrigued by Johnson’s stories on tour, came to listen. At the end of the run, Johnson took Electro back to Roxboro so he could celebrate Mother’s Day with his mom.

“I had a tiny garage studio apartment with a kitchenette,” Johnson said. “The bathroom was so tiny if you were taking a s*** your legs would be in the shower. I would come in and find him there, so I’d just go outside for 20 minutes and let him do his morning business. Good times.

I always enjoyed my time with him. Parties. College kids.

People would look at us like, ‘Who are these guys?’ We knew we weren’t wanted there, but they were too scared to kick us out.”

15

April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword

CULTURE Restaurant embodies clean-eating craze

by Eric Ginsburg

A

fter treating my body like a human trash compactor for the better part of the weekend, Monday marked an opportunity to do better. Two friends reached out last week asking for healthy restaurant recommendations, so the franchised chain GrabbaGreen was top of mind.

Not normally one to buy into any sort of health-food craze, diet plan or ecocult, trying to eat healthy at a restaurant for me usually looks like heading to somewhere like Jerusalem Market or Iron Hen. I ordered a damn good salad at Mac’s Speed Shop recently, often hit up the hot bar at Deep Roots and went out of my way to pick up my beloved twisted-chicken salad from Fishbones last week. But after attending a wedding, hosting a brunch and partaking in some Final Four gluttony, I thought I should go a step further.

So I followed a dude in running gear into the Greensboro GrabbaGreen, the health-food chain with four North Carolina locations with “Eat clean” decals on its windows and vibrant green walls.

What’s notable about this restaurant is that it aligns with and represents a national trend that finds firm footing here in the Triad. Its acai cups and fresh-pressed juices are of a piece with relatively new local businesses such as Village Juice and Organix Juice Bar. Yes, decadent desserts including overly loaded milkshakes are popular here and everywhere else right now. But there’s a strong countercurrent represented by GrabbaGreen, a company whose website lists more than a dozen forthcoming locations and that puts franchising materials right by the register.

Shot in the Triad

The Burke Street Food Truck Festival @ Burke St. (W-S), Saturday, 3 p.m.

Triaditude Adjustment

Pick of the Week

The 5th annual festival showcases 65 food trucks from around North Carolina, representing a variety of cuisines and offering vegetarian and gluten-free options. The festival includes art vendors, two music stages, table seating, beverage stations and more. Visit the Facebook event page for more info.

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There’s no feeling guilty when you’re at GrabbaGreen though — it’s all “healthy” food, and I topped my meal off with a so-called Boost drink featuring cucumber, lemon, ginger and mint. The label said it reduces swelling, enhances your mood, fights infection and works as an anti-coagulant. I picked it off the shelf because these are the flavors I’d most like to find in a cocktail.

There’s a low kids’ table with crayons on it, some outdoor seating in front and a tablet hooked up to the back wall near the bathrooms inviting customer feedback.

In some regards, the restaurant’s attitude reminded me of sitting in a pricy-yet-casual vegetarian restaurant I tried several years ago in San Francisco.

GrabbaGreen’s vibe is dangerously close to feeling like some ERIC GINSBURG The So Cal comes with avocado, chicken, cucumber, flax, mint, kind of health club, aided by a red pepper, spinach and feta atop elbow-shaped quinoa noodles. display table just inside the front door, a donation jar for the busiI might’ve been feeling like the pendulum should swing the ness’ foundation and a rewards program. The kind of music other way after my indulgent weekend, but I wasn’t about to you’d hear in an ad for spinning played, and my cashier glowed drink my lunch. When it comes to solid food, the restaurant with the sort of friendliness you might expect from the person offers two main tracks — greens and grains — both served in welcoming you to a yoga retreat.

He actually said goodbye to takeout boxes the size of the small containers at Deep Roots’ a couple customers by name when they left, apparently comsalad bar. It’d be easy to go gluten-free or vegan either way, mitting it to memory after they provided it with their orders. but several of the menu items do offer meat, be it shrimp, When the playlist switched over to Nicki Minaj’s “Truffle chicken or beef.

Butter,” I felt much more at ease.

If run clubs and yoga classes The grain options — featuring brown rice, black beans or can feel at home in breweries, a guy like me who has thus far quinoa noodles — sounded more filling, and I picked the So avoided a gym membership could make GrabbaGreen work, Cal. Besides the name that seemed undeniably appropriate too. for the fare, it comes with avocado, chicken, cucumber, flax, The thing is, the So Cal was pretty good, and I could totally mint, red pepper, spinach and feta atop elbow-shaped quinoa see myself going back. It likely won’t be soon, but that has noodles. more to do with its location in the shopping center at the corThe Southwest with its avocado, black beans, chicken and ner of Pisgah Church and North Elm Street several miles from cheddar jack is apparently the most popular, and almost drew the center city. me in. And I almost opted for the “green” dish called Gulf of If you’re the type who doesn’t just eat healthy when you’re Mexico, with avocado, cayenne, cucumfeeling guilty, you might appreciate one of ber, egg, green onion, parsley, red onion, the collard wraps on the breakfast menu spinach and shrimp. If I had — I learned or the savory quinoa cake with hemp, Visit GrabbaGreen at 431 later while reviewing the menu online — I spinach, tomato, feta, and Mediterranean Pisgah Church Road (GSO) would’ve been consuming 440 or 294 calpomegranate sauce. Or maybe the Red ories respectively. Instead, I’d unwittingly or at grabbagreen.com.

Phoenix smoothie with banana, honey, selected the highest caloric value meal in strawberry and almond milk is more your the green or grain section here, coming in style. at 700.

If green drinks seem normal to you and you’re looking for an The only thing higher is the mango bowl with banana, easy post-workout snack, GrabbaGreen is for you. The “Love” brown rice, chia seeds, coconut, mango, pineapple, quinoa, juice with apple, beet and lemon is a little too much for me, almond milk and granola. but I appreciate the restaurant’s efforts to source organic inWhatever. Counting calories is for suckers, and this surely gredients and list the farms it partners with. If, like me, you’re did me a lot better than the three late-night roast-beef sliders not a health nut but you just want to do better, GrabbaGreen I knocked back to even out the beers I drank on my friends’ is worth a shot. recent wedding night.

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Winston-Salem Wine Market changed my mind about Napa

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

Winston-Salem Wine Market stocks wine from unusual varietals and regions, including Macedonia, Moldova and Lebanon.

A wine dispensing machine allows customers to taste wine in one-, two-, and four-ounce pours.

KAT BODRIE

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75 from the Seventy Five Wine Co. in the dreaded from a nuanced white Burgundy from France to an Napa Valley, Calif. Each month’s haul comes with a easy-drinking, fruity-floral pinot gris from Oregon. I description of the winery and the wine’s tasting notes, haven’t liked the whites as much as the reds, but learnand when you join the wine club, you receive a binder ing what I don’t like is just as informative as discoverto record your own perceptions. There’s even a handy ing what I do. printout of an aroma wheel, which is like a color wheel The best benefit of the wine club is having someone but with smells. else choose what to imbibe.

The Est. 75 smelled like dark berries and tasted like “We find things people wouldn’t normally drink strawberry and raspberry, with hints of smoke or tothemselves,” Kniejski said. bacco. I rated it 4 out of 5 stars.

But you don’t have to be in the March’s red was Nero Misto wine club to discover new wines. (“mixed black”) from Elyse WinGo to one of the free tastings Visit Winston-Salem Wine ery, also from Napa Valley. It had (on Saturdays, they have a beer Market at 1231 Creekshire Way plum aromas, and cherry and station, too) or use the wine-dis(W-S) or wswinemarket.com. dark chocolate flavors. I rated it pensing machine, another way 4 of 5 as well. Three months in, to taste vino in small quantities and the wine club changed my before buying an entire bottle. mind about the notoriously pretentious region.

The late Bruce Heye from Lewisville, a renowned Store owner Bob Kniejski and manager Beth Binder wine drinker and world traveler, eschewed the tradiare responsible for choosing each month’s wine club tional 100-point wine scale in favor of personal taste. offerings.

He once told me: “Everyone should drink whatever “We try to pick the best wines for the best value,” wine they like.” said Binder.

Winston-Salem Wine Market shares the same Together, they sample about 30 new wines or vintagphilosophy, and Kniejski and Binder prove particularly es a week, and only half make it onto store shelves. adept at figuring out what people will like.

So far, they’re on target. The February red — another Kat loves red wine, Milan Kundera, and the Shins. She California blend, this one from Slo Down Winery in wears scarves at katbodrie.com.

San Francisco — was called Sexual Chocolate and was so good, I found myself buying another bottle of it a month later.

The whites in the wine club this year have ranged

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confess: I have been a wine snob. Not in the sense that I have turned up my nose to cheap, inferior wines; on the contrary, I have disdained California vintages and anything over $10.

That’s the main reason I

by Kat Bodrie didn’t visit Winston-Salem Wine Market until last year, opting to buy my bottles at grocery stores and wine warehouses in a form of reverse wine snobbery. But I thank Bacchus for leading me into the tall-ceilinged, well-lit shop off Stratford Road in west Winston-Salem, which celebrated its three-year anniversary a few months ago.

The wall of wine is my favorite to peruse: endless options of European, Australian, South African and South American bottles, some with downplayed, traditional labels and others with swaths of color and quirky names. California wines are in the middle — two freestanding aisles with brands I don’t recognize.

For a couple months, I would skirt the perimeter, avoiding wines from the sunny state. Then, my husband gave me a membership to the Wine Market’s wine club for Christmas. For a little more than $40 per month, we get one bottle of red and one bottle of white a month (you can choose two reds instead), plus perks like 15 percent off additional bottles and a $25 match on a wine card, used for the wine-dispensing machine in the store.

January’s red was a cabernet sauvignon called Est.

KAT BODRIE

17

April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion

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he worn, wooden floors of the music hall vibrated as boots stomped out the beat, the room pulsing with the clap of hands and intermittent brays of whistling and whoops. Adorned in his signature oldtimey clothes — flat brimmed hat, suspenders and plaid shirt — Dom Flemons bellowed out the lyrics, “Going down the road, feeling bad, Lord, feeling bad.”

His long fingers picked and strummed the strings of his guitar, a harmonica hanging around his neck, time suspended as if the crowd had been transported for the moment back to the golden age of folk and blues.

Flemons took the stage with his friend and touring partner Brian Farrow on March 31 at Muddy Creek Music Hall in Bethania on the outskirts of Winston-Salem. Formerly of the Grammy-winning old-time string group Carolina Chocolate Drops — which also featured Greensboro’s Rhiannon Giddens — Flemons has performed across the United States, upholding the old-timey folk and blues tradition in

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CULTURE Grammy-winning folk musician earns local standing ovation

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his performances. His setlist for the evening comprised a number of songs off his latest solo record Prospect Hill, as well as numerous covers by such ragtime and vaudeville musicians as Maggie Jones, Doc Watson and Martha Simpson, giving his own bluesy touch to the melodies.

Muddy Creek Music Hall was forced to open the back hall for seating, having sold out the show before the doors opened for the night. Audience members stood along the edges of the room, all the chairs and tables filled, leaving only a small amount of space for the couples who would periodically stand and begin to dance. And even with almost two-and-a-half hours of music, the crowd never let up their cheering and clapping as Flemons sang.

Farrow, a multi-instrumentalist, has performed alongside such acts as Jonny Grave, Paperhaus, the Hackensaw Boys and Letitia Van SPENCER KM BROWN Brian Farrow (left) and Dom Flemons pick along for a sold-out Sant. Most recently he has been crowd at Muddy Creek Music Hall. performing with Flemons on his As the show ended, the crowd rose to a standing ovation, winter tour, the 31st bein g the closfilling the hall with applause and adulation for the night’s ing night after almost three weeks on the road, before they inspiring performance. And when the cheers failed to cease could both return home for a short break. after a few minutes, Flemons and Farrow came back out under Towards the end of the show, Farrow laid down his bass and the lights for an encore. The crowd roared even louder as they took up the fiddle as Flemons plucked along on his guitar. The saw Flemons clutching the spoons between his fingers. With a pair did a cover of the song “Sitting On Top of the World,” an brief four-count, Farrow pulled his bow across the fiddle and old tune originally written by the Mississippi Sheiks, covered the hollow clack of the spoons echoed in precise rhythm and through the years by several acts including, most famously, skillful speed. The crowd remained standing, clapping along as Howlin’ Wolf, Doc Watson and the Grateful Dead. the duo performed a few original instrumental Appalachian In between songs, as he switched between an array of folk songs, adding a thrilling pulse of energy to end the night. guitars, banjos, harmonicas and spoons, Flemons gave brief After the show, Dom Flemons stood by a table of his rehistory lessons on the music, taking the audience through the cords and CDs, taking the time to meet and pose for pictures past as he explained where various songs originated and how with everyone who had come out, even staying a few hours they evolved into what we hear now. after the show so he could meet his fans.

“It’s the music I love,” Flemons told the crowd as he tuned “It began as a mistake, I guess,” Flemons said, explaining his banjo. “I’ve studied it almost all my life, and I think the how he fell in love with this brand of music. “When I was a kid history of where it all came from is as important as the music I found a few records of the Beatles and other popular bands itself.” and I loved them. But I kept following their songs back to who had inspired them, and back and back until I found the old Pick of the Week blues guys, and that was it.” As some of his own inspirations, Flemons cites such musicians as Phil Ochs, Mississippi John Joe Robinson Quartet @ the Delta Arts Center (W-S), Hurt, Howlin’ Wolf and Carl Perkins.

Saturday, 7 p.m.

“It’s been just amazing,” Flemons continued. “This tour has Celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month as the Delta Arts been wonderful. We’ve gone across the country and are finally Center honors local musician Joe Robinson for his lifelong making our way back home. I’ll be back in Hillsborough by this contribution to jazz. The evening features dinner in the time tomorrow, but just waiting for when we’ll hit the road Simona Atkins Allen Gallery, live music from the Joe Robagain.” inson Quartet and an awards presentation. Food provided He smiled as he adjusted his hat and posed for one last

by Nola Catering. For more information and tickets, visit picture with a group of fans. deltaartscenter.org.

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CULTURE Pedestrians dictate postcards to Donald Trump

A

Up Front News Opinion JOEL SRONCE

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by Joel Sronce ndy Jacobs sat in a red chair, at a desk that held a red typewriter. She faced the enormous window that dominates the facade of Elsewhere, a museum and artist residency in downtown Greensboro. The window was thrown open to the gorgeous spring afternoon on April 1 — a day infamous for its wisecracks and spoofs.

But there was nothing insincere in Jacobs’ odd question to those who sauntered by.

“Wanna write a postcard to the president?” she asked each one.

Jacobs, an intern at Elsewhere, held the reins of Sheryl Oring’s I Wish to Say project, a portable public office — manual typewriter in tow — that invites people to dictate postcards to the POTUS. After speaking their minds, participants were handed their statement, typed and ready to be mailed.

Oring began I Wish to Say in 2004, wanting to see what ordinary people would say to the president if given the opportunity to speak their minds. Since the project’s inception, more than 3,200 postcards have been sent to the White House.

A year ago, almost 60 students from UNCG, where Oring teaches, joined her in New York City’s Bryant Park as typists, photographers and volunteers for the project’s largest public performance.

Despite whatever sentiments Oring and other typists may have toward the president — whether it be Bush, Obama, Trump or other candidates for the 2016 election — they Andy Jacobs finishes typing Brandi Rojas’ message to the president. express no opinion; they’re present only to type exactly what their way home from a prayer walk in downtown Greensboro, others wish to convey. was thrilled and surprised to have the opportunity.

“I felt it was important to offer this opportunity to every“Dear Mr. President,” the short message on her postcard one,” Oring told Triad City Beat. “The role of listening is a read.

“We’re praying for you. Sincerely, Brandi Rojas.” crucial aspect of the work — listening to everyone, even people Oring isn’t aware of any president responding to her project, I disagree with personally.” but in her view the act itself far outweighs reception at the According to Oring, diversity — in more ways than presiWhite House. dential opinion — has been evident in I “For me the most powerful part of the Wish to Say, both in its ambition and the project is the moments I spend listening reception.

Stop by Elsewhere — 606 to each person and typing up their com“The project appeals to a broad specS. Elm Street, Greensboro ments,” she said. “One person who partrum of people from young to old and — every Saturday in April ticipated during a show in Chicago came across racial and gender lines,” she exup afterwards and told me repeatedly from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. for the plained. “People feel empowered by their about how participating in the project participation — active listening is such opportunity to dictate your made him a better citizen. It’s comments a rarity these days that I think people message to the president. like this that keep me going after more respond to this experience.” than 13 years of typing.”

Jacobs, too, recognized this diversity, It’s hard to imagine that the POTUS including one instance that highlighted will read any of the words sent to him, much less allow the the variety of age. opinions to influence his decisions.

“There are kids that come by sometimes,” Jacobs said. “And But despite the hopeless distance between the people in the the kids kind of surprise me by how informed they are. I had United States and the ear of their president, for those passing a 6-year-old boy walk up and all that he really wanted to say by Elsewhere on April 1, at least one typist was listening. was: ‘That wall is a really dumb idea.’”

As Jacobs pitched the postcard to those who lumbered along Elm Street on April 1, the responses differed. Some Pick of the Week shook their heads and moved on silently. Some laughed and tried calling her bluff, while others made their opinions known Spring pottery festival @ Leonard Recreation Center without needing a postcard.

(GSO), Saturday, 10 a.m.

“No,” spat one man without stopping. “I don’t want to talk Potters of the Piedmont holds its annual pottery festival, to that guy.” showcasing more than 50 potters from North Carolina, According to Jacobs, this frustration is common these days; South Carolina and Virginia. Artists sell a selection of more than a few finished postcards have read just: “F*** you.” handmade functional and decorative pottery. The event is But plenty of people did pause to hear Jacobs out before an opportunity to meet some of the most accomplished dictating their own message. regional potters. More info at pottersofthepiedmont.com.

Pastor Brandi Rojas, who stopped with several others on

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April 5 – 11, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

by Joel Sronce

Track meet displays physical and personal achievement

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eams lounged under sun shades just outside the track. On the large field within the loop of eight lanes, pole-vaulters took informal, laid-back runs at the towering bar with few attempts to hoist themselves over it.

Runners stretched and shook their limbs. The green turf

to fall on.

But there was a greater difference than the surface on which the athletes ran.

Like many schools around the country, High Point University didn’t permit a women’s track-and-field team in Vert’s days as a student-athlete. He supports the inclusion avidly.

“What [equality] has done to women’s activities has really been outstanding,” Vert said.

In the decades since Vert’s student-athlete career came to an end, women’s involvement in track and field has inspired extended athletic pursuits. For athletes such as Ty-Liah Muse — a freshman at High Point University who recently graduated from Greensboro’s Dudley High School — participation in track and field opened doors when other athletic options weren’t favorable.

“In middle school I was not much of a runner,” said Muse, who now competes in the shotput and weight throw. “So I was like, I’m gonna try out the field events.

And turns out I was good at them!”

Though some gender separation remains in track and field, Muse believes the division doesn’t dictate the greater camaraderie of athletes at the university.

“We do have a men’s and women’s team,” she explained. “But when it comes down to it, we all come together and we support each other.

“The support of your team does help,” she continued. “When I get in the circle, it’s so nerve-wracking. I get really nervous, but then once I hear my team cheer me on, I feel better, and I can get [the weight] out there.”

Muse isn’t the only High Point University Panther to find confidence and success through women’s track and field. Sophomore Keaton Case won two events at the VertKlasse Meeting, including breaking a 1500-meters record set in 2009.

Pick of the Week Wake Forest spring football game @ BB&T Field (W-S), Saturday, 3 p.m.

Wake Forest football holds its annual spring game, an intrasquad scrimmage between black and gold teams. Admission is free. The Deacons open the 2017 season at home against Presbyterian on August 31. More info at wakeforestsports. com.

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shone silver in the sun.

Spectators snacked, ambling from the seats overlooking the track to the field events by the baseball diamond, then back again. They watched the athletes strive for calm as they awaited their events’ demands for complete precision.

Athletes representing dozens of universities in North Carolina and the surrounding states gathered at High Point University’s ninth annual VertKlasse Meeting on April 1 to compete in a European-style meet that featured a fast-paced sequence of track-and-field events.

Here and there, stretches of the brick-colored track exploded with sudden activity. Group by group, contestants ran their heats as the day warmed toward early afternoon: 100 meters, 400 meters, hurdles.

So much action happened simultaneously — a concentrated array of visual and auditory stimuli.

Track and field offers some of the most stunning sights in human athletics: The shocking physical contortions of the high jump, the unfathomable focus of

hurdle runners, the wild intensity in the brief seconds of a shot-putter’s wind-up, the astounding movement of human muscle.

But at the VertKlasse Meeting, the sounds of the events proved equally alluring. Fans created the chatter and buzz of a baseball game, accompanied by the burst of cheer as the 15 seconds of a 100-meters race roared past. Integral to the events came each startling shot of the starting gun. The death knell of a runner’s heel hitting a hurdle, rattling the obstruction to the track, slowed the runner by precious tenths of a second, or plunged them into the hard ground and absolute defeat. Throughout the stadium, young men and women embodied the sights and sounds of the VertKlasse Meeting.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

When the stadium’s namesake competed in the mile and 2-mile events for High Point University in 1959, there was no women’s team.

Vert Stadium honors Dick and Peg Vert, two of High Point University’s greatest benefactors. (The event’s name, VertKlasse, also nods to these alum, deriving from the Weltklasse Zürich, an annual international meet in Switzerland.)

On April 1, Dick Vert himself strolled around the stadium like the other spectators, enjoying the beautiful weather, site and competition.

But looking back almost 60 years, Vert remembered the differences, beginning with even the track itself.

“It wasn’t what it is here today,” Vert said. “It was considerably older. The old-time cinders were on the track. You didn’t have the synthetic surfaces like you have today.”

Vert confirmed that the cinders hurt like hell

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CROSSWORD ‘“SMarvelous”--’smeaningful to the theme, too...

by Matt Jones

Playing April 6 – 8 Friday Night Standup Presents

Paul Hooper

Thought Provoking. Politically Incorrect 8:30 p.m. Friday, April 7. Tickets $10

OTHER SHOWS Open Mic 8:30 p.m. Thurs., Apr. 6. $5 tickets!

Live Comedy! Featuring Zo Myers and Friends!

10 p.m. Fri., Apr. 7. $8 tickets!

Family Improv 4 p.m. Sat., Apr. 8. $6 Tickets!

Saturday Night Improv 8:30 p.m. & 10 pm. Sat., Apr. 8. $10 tickets!

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NBA great Chris Bartenders’ fruit What a snooze button delays Fashion status in various states?

Stuff in an orange-lidded pot, traditionally Adds some seasoning Frank Zappa’s son Aquatic nymph “Hot Fuzz” star Pegg Clickable communication “Toy Story” kid Stated as fact Get ___ (throw away) Bausch & ___ (lens maker) Rigorous “The Beverly Hillbillies” star Buddy Like some kids’ vitamins Cranky sort Hiker’s path Part of iOS Nocturnal rat catchers ___-cones Kobe’s old team, on scoreboards Word before pick or breaker Chaney of “The Wolf Man” C7H5N3O6, for short

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Down 1 Outdo 2 One of a reporter’s W’s 3 “Shoo” additions?

4 “You busy?”

5 Backtalk 6 Athlete’s camera greeting 7 The Manning with more Super Bowl MVP awards 8 “Electric” creature 9 Putin turndown 10 Sign your dog is healthy, maybe 11 Got up 12 Seth of “Pineapple Express” 13 Some toffee bars 19 “___ bleu!”

21 Liven (up)

23 24 25 27 28 31 33 35 36 37 41 43 44 45 46 49 50 51 53 56 58 60 61 63 64 65

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57 Burgles 59 “If something can go wrong, Gargamel will never get it right”?

62 Pinball foul 66 “Fashion Emergency” model 67 Slow mover 68 On-screen symbol 69 Employer of Serpico or Sipowicz 70 Road trip expenses 71 Penny value

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Across 1 Branch offshoot 5 Charlie of “Winning!” memes 10 All-out battles 14 “How awful!”

15 Dance company founder Alvin 16 Creature created by George Lucas 17 Washington newspaper 18 Take-away signs of happiness?

20 Lhasa ___ (Tibetan breed) 22 Oil transport 23 Casually uninterested 26 Puddle gunk 29 They directed “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

30 1990 Stanley Cup winners 32 Gets warmer 34 Rough purchase at the dairy?

38 One of LBJ’s beagles 39 Anaheim Stadium player, once 40 “___ little teapot ...”

42 1980s actor Corey hawking some tart fruit candies?

47 Passport endorsements 48 Doughnut shape 49 Goaded (on) 52 “Spring forward” letters 54 Teeming with testosterone 55 Grand Canyon pack animals

Free entry with drink purchase! $50 cash prize! 5 p.m. Saturday, April 5.

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Answers from previous publication.

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Totally Rad Trivia 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 11! $2 Buy In! Cash Prize!

Drink N’ Draw 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 12th!

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Swallowing a hoagie sideways the challenges of balancing their careers and their families.

They talked about the double standards that society can place on working mothers and the frustration of having to meet unreasonable, often unfair expectations. I talked about… working, about meeting my own expectations and insisting that I liked having the freedom to sit at my desk until 1 a.m. if I needed to, on the nights when the sentences didn’t fit together the right way. In those moments, there’s nothing missing and, when I said that, I hope I sounded like I meant it.

Back in my kitchen, I finished my pancakes and, as I rinsed my hands under the tap, I thought, “At least I know how to save myself.”

I just don’t need to, not right now. Not yet.

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Jelisa Castrodale is a freelance writer who lives in Winston-Salem. She enjoys pizza, obscure power-pop records and will probably die alone. Follow her on Twitter @gordonshumway.

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save yourself someday,” which is either something new to be depressed about or a valid reason for pursuing a relationship. How are your Heimlich skills, gentlemen?

In the video, a burly firefighter name Jeff kneels on an unattractive rug, calmly teaching lonely people How Not to Die. (He also seems to live in an apartment furnished only with a pair of bongo drums and a set of floor speakers, which makes me think that Jeff learned this skill out of necessity.) Although I usually don’t take life advice from grown men wearing puka-shell necklaces, I watched the whole thing.

“This is a desperate situation,” he said, staring intently into the camera, and I know he was referring to some time in the future when I may or may not swallow a hoagie sideways, but it seemed like he was talking directly to me, about my life right now. As Jeff threw himself violently against his own brown carpet, I realized I was saying, “I’m fine, Jeff, everything is fine,” out loud.

Things are fine. But I also feel like I have to constantly reassure everyone else that I mean that. When I have conversations with my married friends, I find myself filling silences in conversations by justifying it, by wearing my tiny, unattached life like it’s an ill-fitting sweater or an unorthodox food pairing.

“I like this,” I’ll say, squirting chocolate sauce into a pouch of Albacore tuna. “This is what I want.”

I’ve felt extra defensive about it — and extra aware of it — for the past couple of weeks, ever since I spoke on an alumni panel at Wake Forest University. Over the course of an hour, two professionals and me, a woman who somehow bungled her way into a career, answered questions about gender in the workplace. The other two speakers were accomplished and impeccably polished (I made a note to steal some descriptions from their bios — I have no idea what phrases like “synergize and empower your own prospective story” mean, but that’s what I do now) as they talked about

Up Front

’m thinking about Marie Prevost right now, as I stand over my own kitchen sink, eating a stack of microwavable pancakes with my hands. Prevost was a lesser-known silent film… well, calling her a star is probably a stretch, but she apby Jelisa Castrodale peared wide-eyed and gesturing in more than 100 dialogue-free movies. Because flicks like Hell Diver and Seven Sinners were less memorable than their titles, she’s probably best known for dying alone at age 38 and for possibly being eaten by her own dog.

Forty years after her death, English rocker Nick Lowe sang about her: “She was a winner/ Who became a doggie’s dinner,” which has to be the catchiest of depressing epitaphs. (But because Lowe wrote the song in the pre-Google era, he misspelled her name in the title.)

Anyway, I’m thinking about her because I’m inching toward my own 38th birthday and I’m wondering what would happen to me if one of these pancakes wedged itself on top of my trachea. I don’t have a dog (both a pro and a con in this situation) so I’m not sure anyone would notice that I was missing until my neighbors realized they hadn’t heard me through the walls, shouting “Don’t go on that hike, Sheila!” to a doomed character actor in a true-crime drama.

I haven’t always thought about casually dying in my kitchen, but a well-meaning friend recently sent me a YouTube video of an off-duty fireman explaining how a single person could save him-or-herself from choking to death, and now that’s all I can think about.

He probably sent it for the simplest of reasons, because everyone — even casual acquaintances — understand that I eat like an off-duty circus animal. But on a less-superficial level, it says, “I know you might have to

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