INDY Week April 12, 2023

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

VOL. 40 NO. 15

CONTENTS

6 Durham's planning commission passed on a proposed redevelopment of Southpoint Mall due to a lack of affordable housing. What will the council do?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

8 The Town of Cary hopes to be the next beneficiary of Wake County's program created to boost affordable housing. BY

NATE HOPKINS

ARTS & CULTURE

10 An evening of all-star musical performances draws inspiration—and courage—from a 1977 songbook about the women's liberation movement.

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH

11 The Story of Us draws on the oral histories of LGBTQ+ alumni of UNCChapel Hill, and brings their stories to stage. BY

BYRON WOODS

12 Carol Sloane, who passed away at 85 in January, spent years singing jazz in the Triangle. A new documentary shines light on her complicated life.

BY FRED WASSER

14 A conversation with Angela Thorpe, new executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. BY

KYESHA JENNINGS

W E M A D E T H I S

PUBLISHER

John Hurld

EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief

Jane Porter

Managing Editor

Geoff West

Arts & Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Jasmine Gallup

Lena Geller

Thomasi McDonald

Copy Editor

Iza Wojciechowska

Interns

THE REGULARS

3 Backtalk | 15 Minutes

4 Quickbait

5 Op-ed 16 Culture calendar

Sarah Innes, Nathan Hopkins

Contributors

Spencer Griffith, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Byron Woods

CREATIVE

Creative Director

Nicole Pajor Moore

Graphic Designer

Izzel Flores

Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

ADVERTISING

Publisher

John Hurld

Sales Digital Director & Classifieds

Mathias Marchington

CIRCULATION

Berry Media Group

MEMBERSHIP/ SUBSCRIPTIONS

John Hurld

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Monsoon performs at The Pinhook on Saturday, April 15. (See calendar, page 16.)

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PINHOOK

COVER PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Last week, we published a cover story in partnership with The 9th Street Journal about students learning English in Durham Public Schools. Upon publication, some factual errors were brought to our attention and to the attention of our partners at 9th Street with whom we have a content sharing agreement. 9th Street is investigating what happened and their statement is forthcoming.

15 MINUTES

Mayanthi Jayawardena

Mayanthi Jayawardena is a Durham-based Sri Lankan artist. Her new mural, “Lotus Rising—An Ode to Women,” is painted on the side of Chapel Hill restaurant Lantern and celebrates women and marginalized voices.

BY SARAH INNES backtalk@indyweek.com

Can you tell me a bit about your background?

I grew up in the Midwest in Iowa and Minnesota. I moved to North Carolina as I started my public health journey—I got my master’s in public health and did sexual violence prevention work for about nine years. I did that at the community level and then ended in higher education. After doing that for so long it eventually began to take an emotional toll on me and I realized that I needed to find other ways to navigate the intense work. I started turning to art to heal and process—and from there, people started resonating with the work that I was creating, and all of the sudden I started seeing my life pivot in that direction. I started talking about my experiences as a woman—and my experiences being a Sri Lankan woman and a second-generation immigrant. It kept flowing through me through artwork in various forms. What got you interested in murals as a medium and what was your first mural?

I’ve always loved painting, and when the pandemic hit it was actually my boyfriend who asked if I’d ever consider painting on a larger scale, like on large walls. When he first asked, I immediately said no. But as I started thinking about it more, he really planted the seed and I eventually started reaching out to people. One of the first people I reached out to was Element Gastropub in Raleigh. They had just opened and were looking for a mural. I ended up painting on three of their walls—and I got

the bug! It was an amazing experience to paint on such a large canvas, and it’s something that I crave now. I want to paint on every single wall that I can.

How did the “Lotus Rising” piece come to be?

I had the idea of doing something for Women’s History Month last year. I found the Orange County Arts Commission grant. I felt like this was the perfect home for this kind of project, and I was so grateful when I received the grant. I wanted to do something that celebrated women in the community and women in general. It’s been a tough few years for women, and I didn’t want to focus on the negative things that have been in the media but instead focus on the beauty of what being a woman means to me and how it’s impacted my life. I’ve been blessed with absolutely incredible women who have been pillars of strength, even just within my family. I was like, “Let’s create more spaces where that positive message exists.” I want everyone who walks by to be able to pull something positive from the mural in whatever way they want.

What’s the significance of the lotus flower in the mural?

Lotus flowers grow in swamps and muddy areas but become some of the most beautiful flowers in the world. I feel like women experience that as well. We are so resilient and strong. And for me, as a Sri Lankan, lotus flowers are our national flower—so there’s a bit of me painted in there as well. W

U I C K B A I T

A New Era of Book Censorship

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

CQrusading parents and protesters made a record number of attempts to ban, censor, or restrict access to books in 2022, according to the American Library Association (ALA). The number of book challenges has skyrocketed since the new decade began, going from 156 in 2020 to 1,269 in 2022, a more than 700 percent increase. "Overwhelmingly, we’re seeing these challenges come from organized censorship groups that target local library board meetings to demand removal of a long list of books they share on social media,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a news release. “Their aim is to suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nation’s conversations, such as people in the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color.”

Censored or Restricted Access to Books

Number of challenges to books

Number of books challenged

2021 and before 2022

The number of challenges to books nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022

8x 1

151x

The most frequently challenged book was challenged an average of 8 times

86%

The most frequently challenged book was challenged 151 times

of all challenges were to children's or young adult books

32% 58%

The vast majority of challenges sought to remove/restrict access to only a single book

of all challenges included multiple books

of all challenges targeted books in school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula

Source: American Library Association

A Shifting Scene

A Durham musician reflects on 40 years.

BY ALEX WEISS backtalk@indyweek.com

Imoved to Durham in 1984 along with my first wife and two young daughters. The previous decade, I had been plugging along, living and playing music in Flagstaff, Arizona, restaurants and bars, backing up other musicians playing blues, folk, country, and pop music.

In Durham, I became a fish in a slightly bigger pond, and other possibilities opened up. I had gained some experience in Flagstaff with Artists in the Schools and was able to continue that through the CAPS program of the Durham Arts Council.

I met master drummer Khalid Saleem, who was the music director for Chuck Davis and The African American Dance Ensemble. Being new to the area I had no idea who he was. We were at a jazz jam held by the late Usuf Salim when he casually invited me down to dance classes to check out what they were doing. And so began a decade of immersing myself in African and Latin rhythms. What the late Chuck Davis and The African American Dance Ensemble did for the Durham community and beyond

cannot be fully described here. I will always hear his resounding voice saying, “Peace, love, and respect for EVERYBODY!”

The 1990s were prosperous times for festivals in Durham, the Triangle, and North Carolina. So much music and culture flourished in these festivals. Unfortunately, funds for festivals started drying up. By the year 2000 and during the next decade, festivals ceased or were greatly diminished. Offering programs for Durham’s libraries, senior centers, and Duke Regional Hospital took up the slack for me—until COVID struck. Now, as the pandemic recedes, festivals and events are making a comeback. Certainly Durham Central Park has been a continuous gathering point for great music and community. It’s an incongruous existence of old Durhamites gathering amidst all these new condo high-rises around the park.

A similar path followed for Durham’s Artists in the Schools program. Funds and time keep diminishing for art education. What once was officially school-coordinated is now done by PTA volunteers. At one time, in-class, hands-on residencies were popular; now it’s more common to pack an auditorium for a school concert. I really appreciate performing school concerts. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share about the music, history, and cultures, but it shouldn’t replace the hands-on experience with an artist in the intimate space of a classroom. And that brings me back to the bars. When I performed in the bars in the 1970s and ’80s, the going wage for artists was about $100 a night per person. I don’t think it’s changed much since then, but the cost of living is much higher. Popular acts with a big following will make more money because they bring in more people to buy drinks. It’s the premise that musicians should bear the responsibility of financing the bars that rubs me the wrong way. What it seems to cultivate is musicians with a mercenary approach to making a living through music. Many move among several bands like hired hands. In the jazz world, it’s like musical

chairs. Gone are the days when musicians “bonded and woodshed together” as The Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, or The Band did at their house, “Big Pink.”

Our current professional music scene puts the emphasis on productivity and does not foster the environment for group creativity. “Bandmates, look up the tunes on Bandcamp or YouTube and we’ll meet on stage,” is a joking refrain. Of course, this is not the only way music is coming together; there will always be musicians working together, forming new creative mixtures, but the music scene has shifted to the commercial. Or maybe it always has been this way, and I’m just seeing it now.

Another observation is how open mic events have been popping up everywhere. I think open mics serve a good purpose for young musicians needing performance experience, musicians new in town, and older musicians trying something new. But it makes me skeptical, because the abundance of open mics might also be a form of cheap or free entertainment for the bars to lure in patrons, provided by professional musicians who can’t find work and just want to play.

I’m sharing these thoughts having played music on every continent but Australia and Antarctica. The language of music has

always been an important connection for me, from the teahouse on the outskirts of Taipei, Taiwan, to the central square in Jacmel, Haiti, where troubadours joined us and people danced, and Santiago, Cuba, an artistically vibrant country. I was fortunate to have hooked up with Cuban group J.J. Son on my first visit. I sat in with them every day of our weeklong stay, and on my last day, José, the leader, said I could join them whenever I returned, which happened two more times in the next six years. In Cuba, the feeling of creative camaraderie is so strong it bridges cultural differences and thrives in spite of material and financial limitations.

And so, here now, in this materially abundant, fast-growing, ever-changing Triangle area, I think it’s important to know where we came from and how we got here. It’s important that funding for the arts and local musicians keep pace with the Triangle’s growth. It’s important to incorporate the things we learn along the way to make it a better world for those coming up.

At this stage in my life, I’m fortunate to be healthy, creative, still making music, and sharing my reflections with the town I call home. W

Alex Weiss is a composer and multi-instrumentalist living in Durham.

Alex Weiss PHOTO BY JEFF WILLIAMS

No Room at the Mall

The proposed redevelopment of Southpoint Mall does not include affordable housing.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

Members of the Durham Planning Commission last month called a plan to redevelop the Streets at Southpoint mall “transformational” and “massive.”

Then they voted overwhelmingly to oppose recommending the project to the city council.

At the heart of the planning commission’s thumbsdown 10-3 vote was the complete absence of affordable housing in the redevelopment that will span more than 1.9 million square feet of land along the 6900 block of Fayetteville Road and 8060 Renaissance Parkway.

Low-income families and workers such as those who staff the mall’s shops and restaurants would, by default, not be welcome to live in the proposed development, which one commissioner likened to a new downtown district for southern Durham County.

Despite the city’s elected leaders’ calls for equity and shared prosperity, the verdict is still out as to whether they will approve the rezoning of Southpoint for the mammoth, mixed-use development.

Council member Leonardo Williams told the INDY this week that while the proposals have not yet come before the council, he and his fellow council members “are paying attention” to ongoing developments with both the Northgate and Southpoint locations.

“Look at what North Hills and Fenton [in Cary] did with, in addition to chain stores, adding boutiques and housing,” Williams said.

“Southpoint has to evolve,” he added. “The challenge is that it’s really expensive. First of all, we have to decide what is affordable housing. What does that mean? Affordable housing for whom? We have to be very clear on what

type of affordable housing we’re talking about.”

City council member Jillian Johnson emphaszied that the council can’t legally deny a rezoning due to a lack of affordable housing.

Johnson added that although the project has not yet come before the council, she “in a general sense supports turning parking lots into housing and retail space.”

Durham attorney Patrick Byker, representing Southpoint on behalf of owner Brookfield Asset Management, said during a March 14 planning commission meeting that the development would take place on seven parcels of land that are now parking lots. The plan calls for 300,000 square feet of office space, a 200-room hotel, and up to 1,382 apartment units.

Planning commissioner Nate Baker summed up the sentiments of the commission’s majority when he noted during the more-than-one-and-a-half-hour hearing that “a lot of people are looking for places where they can live, where they can get to places, and walk to places; and I think that’s really important that we’re creating a higher supply of these kinds of neighborhoods.”

Then Baker cut to the chase and asked Byker what percentage of the planned 1,382 apartment units would be set aside for affordable housing.

“There would be no affordable units on [the development] site,” answered Byker, who added that the developers “would be looking [at] an affordable housing project that’s in a qualified census tract” that would give “much greater bang for the buck in those housing venues.”

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, qualified census tracts are identi-

fied as communities with a large proportion of low-income residents.

“OK, none?” Baker asked. “Absolutely none on the site?”

“That’s correct,” Byker answered.

“So none, not in my backyard,” Baker reiterated. Byker explained that affordable housing on the development site would not be financially feasible because the NC Housing Finance Agency requires 1.75 parking spaces per affordable unit in order to issue a tax credit.

“The financing gap per unit under current conditions with interest and building costs is around $65,000 a unit,” Byker said. “In a qualified census tract it’s $45,000. So when you put all these factors together it’s inefficient to try and build affordable housing that’s not in a qualified census tract.”

Planning commission chair Austin Amandolia asked Byker if the developer had made a proffer related to affordable housing at the redevelopment site.

“We don’t have a partner identified yet,” Byker said. “We’re waiting on the city and county to allocate ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funds. That process is ongoing and should be done in the next several weeks. Once that process plays itself out, we’ll be able to identify where there’s a shovel-ready partner where we can step in and provide financing.”

It’s no secret that Durham has struggled in recent years to address a housing shortage that’s felt most acutely by low-income families. The issue has been exacerbated by apartments that have become increasingly unaffordable and rapidly rising housing costs. This is particularly true in historically affordable neighborhoods near the city center

PHOTO BY BLAKE WHEELER ON UNSPLASH

where gentrification is happening rapidly.

The majority of the planning commissioners were not impressed with Byker’s explanation that the developers could not fork over an extra $20,000 to perhaps include 75, 50, or even one affordable housing unit in their plan to build more than 1,300 apartments. The commissioners were concerned that city and county employees along with the mall’s workforce would not be able to afford to live at the proposed redevelopment site.

“I’m concerned about projects that come to us where the developer is not going to provide a good-faith effort at an attempt to [include] affordable housing as an intricate component of their project,” commissioner Stephen J. Valentine said. “I’m very concerned about that.”

Another commissioner, Garry Cutright, echoed Valentine’s concern.

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse,” he said, “but have you looked at providing [affordable units] at just 80 percent to 100 percent of the average median income … where we can get firefighters and teachers to be able to utilize all of the amenities on the site?”

Cutright added that he recognized the dollars-and-cents challenges posed by the inflated costs of parking spaces that accompany affordable housing. But he wondered if the developers could navigate through their own financial models that don’t have the same constraint from financing via a qualified census tract.

Byker said the developers did indeed evaluate building affordable units at the 80 percent average median income.

“And it was not financially feasible given the underwriting standards of our financing partner,” he said. “It was not feasible given the parking requirements of the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency. It’s simply not something our financial partner is able to approve.”

Another planning commissioner, Anthony Sease, said that the issue of affordable housing had not been “treated sufficiently by hanging it on the efficiency question or the census tract designation.”

“Because, yes, we may have less efficient yield of the number of units of affordable housing, but the people who work at all the [mall] stores get here by bus today, a lot of them,” he said. “And the ethos you’ll hear expressed over and over again in this community is that people should have equity and more access. And I think that includes equity in access and seeking ways to include some affordable housing.”

Sease also pointed to “very, very small projects” south of the redevelopment

location “that have come before the planning commission that included an offer of affordable housing on-site.”

“Given the scale of this project, I would encourage the applicant to consider ways around these issues,” Sease added.

The mall, unlike a number of indoor malls across the country, remains vibrant.

Southpoint’s 140 retail shops account for a 97 percent occupancy rate, and with 13 million visitors each year, it is Durham County’s largest generator of property and sales taxes.

While noting that the mall is “facing increasing competitive pressure from mixed-use districts in other nearby cities and counties,” Byker cautioned that “the worst thing you can do is rest on your laurels.”

“This is about Southpoint’s future and creating success for another 20 years,” he added.

Meanwhile, Baker pointed to Durham’s four-year comprehensive plan and listed points in the plan that appear to be diametrically opposed to a redevelopment plan at the mall, which opened its doors in 2002 and spurred unprecedented growth and development in southern Durham County.

The plan, Baker said, calls for developers to collaborate with residents in proposed mixed-use communities and “focus on those most in need of affordable housing and transportation.”

Baker also noted that while the plan “encourages the retrofitting of aging and vacant shopping centers for development, it also encourages pedestrian-oriented places that include affordable housing that provides reasonable access to necessary goods and services.”

The goal, Baker said, is to “equitably distribute affordable housing throughout the county.”

“I’m simply not willing to abandon all of the work we’ve done putting together this comprehensive plan,” he added. “The big question here is, is this going to be a giant, exclusionary private development, or will this weave into the fabric of the city?”

Amandolia, the planning commission chair, was even more succinct.

“I’m hearing [about] market-rate housing here and affordable housing there,” he said.

“It sounds a lot like segregation,” Amandolia said and emphasized that people who “do service” at the mall can’t live there.

“It’s wrong.” W

Disclosure: Zuri Williams, a member of the Durham Planning Commission, is is the daughter of writer Thomasi McDonald.

Affordable Incentives

The town of Cary is hoping to be the latest beneficiary of Wake County’s assistance program created to boost affordable housing development in an area starved for it.

BY NATE HOPKINS backtalk@indyweek.com

When Lorena McDowell arrived in Wake County four years ago, the number of naturally occurring affordable housing units had been dwindling, and developers had little incentive to replenish the supply in one of the country’s fastest-growing counties. The lack of affordable housing would soon turn into a crisis.

“And it’s only worsening,” says McDowell, who leads Wake County’s Department of Housing Affordability and Community Revitalization. “We have left things to the open market for far too long, assuming that it would just correct itself—and that’s never happened.”

Finding ways to boost affordable housing production sparked the county to create McDowell’s department, which she joined in 2018 as its first director. Her work as Atlanta’s deputy director under Mayor Kasim Reed helped reduce homelessness in the metropolitan area by half.

“I’m glad that Wake had the foresight to start this work years ago—it’s what brought me here,” she says. “I was excited to hear about a county that was willing to create a whole department to combat this issue—that was rare at the time, and now there are counties from around the nation that call us and ask how we did it.”

Administering $90 million in federal eviction relief during the COVID-19 pandemic and overseeing a Landlord Engagement Unit to help landlords understand the importance of working with the department are among the ways McDowell’s department has tried to combat Wake’s housing insecurity.

The department is also responsible for a program that incentivizes developers to focus more on affordability in their housing projects.

Proposed development at 921 SE Maynard Road in Cary

According to McDowell, this program is key in Wake because North Carolina does not have inclusionary zoning, meaning the department can’t legally require developments to include units of affordable housing. Instead, McDowell’s department allows developers to apply for county funds in exchange for providing affordable options.

“If developers want our support financially, we’re happy to do that,” she says. “But for our dollars, they’re then contractually obligated to hold a certain number of units affordable for a period of time—our goal is 30 years.”

When McDowell’s department was created, the department set a goal to create 2,500 legally binding affordable units through this developer support program within the first five years; that goal was met by year three. All told, it has administered funding in almost 3,000 units.

Those units are in development across Wake County, with Wake-funded affordable- and mixed-housing projects in Raleigh, Apex, Zebulon, Garner, and more. The first wave of these nearly 3,000 projects is about to hit completion as more and more developers apply to work with Wake.

One proposed development that hopes to find funding from Wake’s Department of Affordable Housing and Community Revitalization was approved in the Town of Cary in November of last year.

The proposed development, set to be constructed at 921 SE Maynard Road, will be the first mixed-income housing development on Cary-owned soil. Assistant town manager Danna Widmar says that the project, in partnership with developer Laurel Street, will “introduce a ‘first’ in affordable housing that will serve as an inspiration for future residential projects.” The project hopes to secure $1,690,000 in funding from Wake County.

The Town of Cary had originally planned to use the land for a new water tower, but residents were unwilling to let go of the old tower, which Cary High School’s senior class paints each year.

Instead, the site—along with two additional acres purchased from Wake County Public Schools—was identified as a prime location for affordable housing due to its close proximity to downtown Cary and the workplaces of many employed in the area. The development will also sit alongside a planned 2028 bus route between Cary and Raleigh.

The development will consist of 126 three- and four-story housing units, over half of which will be set aside for affordable housing. Twenty-five of the units will be made available to families earning 80 percent or less of the area median income (AMI) for the Raleigh/Cary area, and 26 will be made available for those earning less than 50 percent of the AMI. Thirteen more units will be set aside for those receiving federal housing subsidies.

“This development aims to connect all Cary residents and reduce the barriers for families to live in the neighborhoods they know and love,” said Morgan Mansa, Cary’s intergovernmental affairs liaison.

According to Mansa, the varied range of income levels that this development will cater to provides Cary with a range of unique opportunities that a strictly affordable development would not.

“We wanted to create a product that was mixed, where people from all different backgrounds and income levels can live together,” she says. “That’s what Cary looks like.”

While some worry that fully affordable developments have the potential to concentrate poverty, making it difficult for the area and its residents to grow economically

PHOTO COURTESY OF LAUREL STREET

and hindering the development of social safety nets, mixed-income projects are seen as ways to encourage both economic growth and community bonds by uniting differing income levels.

The uniqueness of the project, however, doesn’t just lie in its affordability. Cary is committed to making sure that the development also emphasizes sustainability.

The site will feature a wet stormwater retention pond along with other green stormwater and drainage solutions. Community common spaces, such as hallways and parking lots, will be completely powered by solar panels, and residents will have access to electric vehicle charging stations capable of charging up to 14 vehicles.

Forty-two percent of the total site also will be reserved for natural spaces, and a greenway connection will be constructed through the development. Construction of the development is slated for completion in 2024. W

Lorena McDowell

PHOTO COURTESY OF WAKE COUNTY

“We have left things to the open market for too long, assuming it would just correct itself, and that’s never happened.”

DAWN LANDES AND FRIENDS REIMAGINE THE LIBERATED WOMEN’S SONGBOOK

Friday, Apr. 14, 7 p.m. | A.J. Fletcher Theater, Raleigh | $18+

Singing Out

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH music@indyweek.com

F or most of her adult life, Dawn Landes has been moving her copy of The Liberated Woman’s Songbook from one coffee table to the next through a series of relocations, sitting down and thumbing through the photos and lyrics from time to time.

After stumbling upon the book in a used bookstore over 15 years ago, Landes mostly viewed the 1971 collection of 77 folk songs—inspired by the women’s liberation movement and assembled into the anthology by Jerry Silverman—as a curiosity from decades past.

The aftermath of the 2016 election, though, led Landes to a concerted effort of digging deeper into the songs.

“I’ve always been an advocate for women’s rights and reproductive rights,” Landes says. “I knew they would be on the Supreme Court docket, so when Roe fell, I knew it was coming, but part of me was just trying to resist in song somehow by looking to the past for answers. Women have been oppressed for hundreds of years, so I wanted to learn what kind of music they were making then because I wanted something to identify with.”

With reproductive rights increasingly under attack in North Carolina and across the United States, Landes will present 18 selections from the Songbook at Raleigh’s Fletcher Opera Theater this Friday as part of PineCone’s Down Home Concert series, joined by a star-studded cast of mostly Triangle-based musicians that includes guest singers Charly Lowry, Rissi Palmer, Kamara Thomas, Watchhouse’s Emily Frantz, and Violet Bell’s Lizzy Ross. The trailblazing Alice Gerrard also joins—a handful of her own

songs are included in the program—while the group will be backed by Seth Barden, Isa Burke, Tatiana Hargreaves, Austin McCall, and musical director Creighton Irons.

Landes moved to the outskirts of Chapel Hill in February 2020, just prior to the pandemic. Despite the timing of the move, though, Landes—who was raised in Kentucky and Missouri but has also made homes in Nashville and New York—has been able to connect with a community of like-minded local singers through mutual friends. But it wasn’t until last fall, when Tift Merritt invited her to perform at Sing Out NC, a Cat’s Cradle benefit concert for reproductive justice, that Landes finally met many of her collaborators face-toface. The event reaffirmed their shared spirit in fighting for women’s rights.

“It’s kind of like we’re suddenly back in 1971 all over again,” Landes says, pointing out that the introduction to the Songbook mentions “the grotesquerie of men passing anti-abortion laws” that echoes today. Through Broadway connections, Landes reached out to Silverman’s son—Antoine Silverman, an accomplished violinist—and was granted permission by the family to present the Songbook project.

Landes’s next step was discovering more about the songwriters and the backstories of each song.

“Learning from community can really help a problem, along with learning about these specific individuals who have done so much, especially labor organizers and suffragists, to fight for something and sing about it,” she says.

Landes credits a pair of Triangle insti-

tutions—Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture and UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection—for assisting in her research for the event. Among the stories she plans to highlight are those of Ella May Wiggins, a union organizer murdered in Gastonia during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike, and Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, who both wrote songs about the Harlan County War of the 1930s.

Friday’s performance will help tell the stories behind the songs through introductions, videos, and snippets of audio interviews.

“It’s more than just songs, which is what the book is, because it gives you context, which I really am attracted to,” Landes muses. “I spent eight years of my life working on the Row musical and it changed my thinking about performance. I found it really interesting to make a narrative in a performance, so this show is scripted.”

Landes also plans to release a studio album of the songs next year and is reuniting with Josh Kaufman, of Bonny Light Horseman fame, to reinterpret part of the Songbook. Though the two projects share musical overlap, she considers them separate in that the live performance has a more communal approach, whereas primarily she will be doing the vocals on the album.

Together, Landes and Kaufman made some musical adjustments by changing around chords and adding reharmonization

to the simple structures of the Songbook selections. Some of the dated language also required an update.

“It felt like a translation,” Landes says. “I’ve translated a couple of French songs into English, and it’s the same thing. You’re just trying to keep the essence of it with the rhyme scheme.”

While Landes hopes to take The Liberated Woman’s Songbook show on the road to other markets, this debut performance will have some decidedly local touches beyond Landes’s cast of collaborators, who will be dressed in costumes by New York–based designer Andrea Lauer with funding from a Come Hear North Carolina grant. First Lady Kristin Cooper will introduce the performance, and the NC History Museum is helping provide some visuals, along with a display of ERA buttons from the 1970s in conjunction with its current Sign of the Times exhibit on the history of protest in the state. Though the entire production has been in the works for months, it feels particularly timely and relevant given North Carolina’s political climate as of late.

“The recent news has been tough for me and lots of women friends,” Landes says in regard to the state’s recent shift to a GOP supermajority. “I know we’re in for a long fight and it helps to find solidarity where you can, so I’m glad to offer a space and some songs for that.” W

To better understand the struggles of the present, Dawn Landes consulted a 1977 songbook inspired by the women’s liberation movement.

Dawn Landes PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

THE STORY OF US: ORAL HISTORIES OF LGBTQIA+ ALUMNI

The Process Series | Carolina Pride Alum Network | Global FedEx Center, UNC-Chapel Hill | Friday, Apr. 15–Saturday, Apr. 16 | Processseries.org

A Tar Heel History

A new production draws on the oral histories of LGBTQ+ alumni of UNC-Chapel Hill and brings their stories powerfully to the stage.

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

LGBTQ+ people have traditionally been left out of primary public historical sources like newspapers and governmental documents.

“Most papers in NC weren’t going to publish information about Gay Pride marches, or the organizational efforts of gays and lesbians at UNC in the 1970s,” says Hooper Schultz, a PhD candidate in the university’s department of history and a Carolina Pride Alumni Network Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill. “They saw it as unseemly, illegal, or obscene.” Despite some strides in equality over recent decades, the everyday lives of queer citizens have still largely been left out of the historical record altogether.

Until, that is, someone realizes they’re missing and does something about it.

This weekend in Chapel Hill, audiences at the university’s Global FedEx Center will see the culmination of three years’ work: the first phase in collecting, documenting, and studying the oral histories of more than 50 LGBTQ+ people who attended UNC from the 1950s through the 2010s.

Over two performances, 19 all-stars from stage, screen, and television, most of them UNC alumni themselves, return to Chapel Hill from New York, Los Angeles, and other cities to weave the lives of 27 former students into an evening-length work. Over the course of two hours, it tries to answer, at least in part, one main question: What has life been like for queer students at UNC over the last 50 years?

The project’s name: The Story of Us.

Shawne Grabs, a senior regional offi-

cer in the university’s development office, knew something was missing when she went looking for pictures of past LGBTQ+ student groups for the Carolina Pride Alum Network (CPAN), an organization of some 1,500 queer UNC graduates. “We couldn’t find anything,” she says, “and I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we need to document our legacy.’”

After Grabs viewed Black Pioneers, an earlier Process Series production of oral histories from the first generation of Black students admitted to UNC, between 1952 and 1972, the network raised $113,000 to fund a similar effort on queer history at the university.

“If you don’t know your history, then you can’t compare to see if you’re evolving as a university, as a community,” Grabs says. The present day, she says, “is so much different from the sixties—I don’t know if there’s any understanding of what that [time] was like.”

“Without a public history, people really have no knowledge of themselves as an identity group,” Schultz says. “It’s hard to have [an] identity, and a cohesive community, without a history.”

The money from fundraising efforts went toward a collaboration between CPAN, the university’s archives and the Southern Oral History Program (both located at Wilson Library), and the departments of history and communication.

After two years of work gathering oral histories for a specific permanent collection at the library, Schultz and UNC alum Cassie Tanks created Queerolina, an online exhibit

QUEEROLINA: EXPERIENCES OF PLACE AND SPACE THROUGH ORAL HISTORIES exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/queerolina

on queer history at UNC. Then, Elisabeth Lewis Corley, the playwright and editor who worked on Black Pioneers, started distilling well over 1,000 pages of transcripts into a workable evening-length script to depict common experiences across a broad spectrum of lives. It wasn’t easy.

“All this time, I’m just falling in love with all of these voices, and thinking, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’” Corley says.

A linear, chronological approach, fast-forwarding over a half century, was out of the question. “None of the voices would permit that,” Corley says. “These people are just too complicated, too human.”

Instead, Corley let the characters “tell whatever story was urgent to them, and then saw how placing and shifting them together increases our collective understanding of them. Eventually, themes emerged and I could hear some voices in conversation with each other.”

Voices famous and familiar to local followers of politics will be heard.

The stories of former Chapel Hill mayor Mark Kleinschmidt and town councilman Joe Herzenberg, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the South, will be performed by a cast of alumni including Max von Essen, who helped found Company Carolina before his Tony and Grammy nominations for the Broadway production of An American in Paris, and director Eric Rosen, who founded Chicago’s About Face,

one of the country’s leading LGBTQ+ theater companies.

According to David Terry, one of the actor’s in the show, one of the strengths of Corley’s script is an emphasis on LGBTQ+ people’s quest just to have ordinary lives.

“We tend to say that queer lives only matter when they’re exceptional. That brings a lot of pressure, which many of the folks interviewed talk about, to be ‘bigger than life’ all the time,” Terry says. “She’s edited the piece toward this sense of ordinary, of the every day.”

Queer culture is not monolithic; a broad range of experiences and battles for acceptance over the decades can divide as easily as unite the people embraced across the lengthy acronym.

“In this story of us, the challenge of creating any ‘us’ involves figuring out what we have in common,” Terry says. Noting the generational tensions between queer activists who came of age during the ACT UP era of the 1970s and ’80s, and those who followed after, Terry says, “That sense of who is ‘us’ is complicated. But the complexity is where a lot of the joy lives.”

At its best moments, Terry says The Story of Us feels like a conversation or a dance between people. “It’s a dance where they’re wanting to create space for one another to coexist, without giving up their sense of ‘This is the me that I fought really hard to find and to be.’” W

Group photo from the Southeastern Gay Conference, held at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1976 PHOTO COURTESY UNC UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Sloane: A Jazz Singer

Select virtual and local screenings | goingbarefoot.com/sloane.php

All That Jazz

The career of acclaimed singer Carol Sloane, who died this year at 85, was full of upheaval. A new documentary shines light on her years in North Carolina.

BY FRED WASSER music@indyweek.com

Stephen Barefoot had a listening post that many music lovers might envy. It was the mid-1970s and Barefoot, then in his late 20s, was tending bar at Raleigh nightclub the Frog and Nightgown.

Carol Sloane was onstage singing timeless jazz standards. Barefoot was entranced.

“It was the first time I’d ever really seen so up-close that relationship between the artist and the audience,” Barefoot tells INDY Week from his home in Durham. “People sitting at their tables were so intensely listening to her.”

Barefoot became a friend of Sloane’s and a steady fan. The decades passed.

Sloane: A Jazz Singer—a new documentary directed by Winston-Salem’s Michael Lippert, with Barefoot as an executive producer—follows Sloane as she prepares for her 2019 performance at legendary jazz venue Birdland in Manhattan. By this point, Sloane was in her early 80s.

In a 1998 cabaret review, music critic Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that Sloane “may in fact be [Ella] Fitzgerald’s truest heir in the seamlessness of her style, which is at once swinging and insistently melodic. She never loses sight of a song’s overall musical shape. Modest almost to a fault, Ms. Sloane also never shows off.”

“What I sing is old-fashioned,” Sloane says in the film. “I really just have always wanted to be considered one of the best. I gained a reputation that I cherish. And I want to make sure that people understand I’m still viable. I’m not too old. And it’s not too late.”

Sloane: A Jazz Singer premiered on February 23 at the Santa Fe Film Festival, one month to the day after the singer’s death at a nursing home in Stoneham, Massa-

chusetts, from complications of a stroke. She was 85.

There was a time when Sloane’s life as a singer was ascending toward the stratosphere.

She was born Carol Morvan in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1937 and began singing professionally when she was just 14 years old. When she was 18, she married Boston radio personality Charlie Jefferds, though the marriage didn’t last long. By the late 1950s, billed as Carol Vann, she was a vocalist with the Les and Larry Elgart Orchestra.

In 1961, she sang at the Newport Jazz Festival. Within a few weeks, she was offered a contract with Columbia Records. She opened in nightclubs for comedians Lenny Bruce and Phyllis Diller. Richard Pryor opened for her.

“For a minute there, she was on The Tonight Show [with Johnny Carson] all the time,” filmmaker Lippert says. “She was doing gigs with Oscar Peterson, who was the top of the top as far as jazz pianists.”

But the musical and cultural landscape was shifting dramatically. For Sloane and many others in the jazz world, times were tough. Her career took a nose dive.

“She was born maybe 10 years too late,” Lippert says. “I think she came to prominence at a time in the early ’60s when rock ’n’ roll was really on the rise. And jazz was sort of fading from the mainstream. Carol could tell. She stopped getting calls.”

“Suddenly,” Sloane wistfully tells the camera in Sloane: A Jazz Singer, “it went away.”

In 1969, a talent agent that Sloane knew told her about the Frog and Nightgown, a nightclub founded by drummer Peter Ingram that was located, along with other

music venues, at the Village Subway, an underground complex beneath the Cameron Village shopping center. (Cameron Village was renamed the Village District in 2021.)

“Raleigh, North Carolina,” Sloane recalls telling the agent. “They don’t have jazz down there, do they?”

She decided to give North Carolina a try.

“I didn’t want to go down there,” Sloane told the journalist Marc Myers in 2009. “I was certain I was going to have an awful time. But I needed the work. So I went down there anyway and wound up having a ball.”

Sloane performed regularly at the Frog and Nightgown for six years. For a time, it was the place to be. Ingram brought in big-name acts—including Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, and Charlie Byrd. “It was a golden time for Raleigh,” Sloane says in the documentary.

To pay the bills, she also worked as a fulltime legal secretary in the office of former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.

In 1975, the Frog and Nightgown closed. Sloane returned to New York, where she met jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles and entered into a difficult, alcohol-infused relationship with him that led to a suicide attempt before she left him.

But then, in 1981, Barefoot—who had opened his own club, Stephen’s, After All— coaxed Sloane back to North Carolina. In a sense, he threw her a lifeline. This new

club, which he describes as “quite akin to the Frog,” was in Chapel Hill near where Whole Foods is located now. Sloane performed regularly at Stephen’s, accompanied by Paul Montgomery, who was the host for two decades of a children’s program called Time for Uncle Paul on WRAL-TV as well as an accomplished jazz piano player.

Sloane was the club’s public face and its talent booker. She had pull, and booked greats like George Shearing, Shirley Horn, and Betty Carter. They all came to North Carolina and performed at Stephen’s.

“She would call Carmen McCrae and say, ‘You’ve got to come down here,’” says Barefoot. And McCrae would.

Sloane, who lived in an apartment near Durham School of the Arts, also hosted a radio show on WUNC called Sophisticated Lady. She played recordings of the music she loved and occasionally did interviews.

But then, in another one of life’s unfortunate turns, Stephen’s, After All closed after only two years of operation. Jazz was still on the decline, and there just wasn’t enough steady business. The club was, Barefoot says, “heaven while it lasted.”

It was yet another moment of uncertainty in a life of such moments. Sloane’s life in jazz ebbed and flowed alongside the waning popularity of jazz as the decades advanced. It was a wild roller coaster of a life—perhaps one too dependent on a fickle entertainment business.

A still from Sloane: A Jazz Singer PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAEL LIPPERT

In Durham, Sloane lost her apartment and car. She couldn’t pay her utility bills. During her last several months in North Carolina, Sloane took refuge at Barefoot’s home.

“She was very lonely and very depressed,” Barefoot says. “There was nothing ahead for her. It got to the point where she would be up before I got up. I would walk in here and she would be standing in the kitchen with a little glass of scotch in her hand at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning.”

Sloane left North Carolina again, this time for the Boston area, and in 1986 married entertainment manager Buck Spurr.

“He was a sensitive, sweet, loving, caring man,” Sloane says of Spurr. Toward the end of his life, Spurr had a series of health problems, including dementia. Sloane left music to care for him. When he died in 2014, Sloane resumed singing.

In Sloane: A Jazz Singer, after being told that the documentary crew will follow her around for two weeks—in rehearsals, at home, at the grocery store—Sloane questions why anyone would be interested in her life. “Who the hell cares?” she asks the camera.

But she did care, of course.

“All the time she would complain about lights being everywhere,” says Lippert. “And, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe anybody would care about this for more than three minutes.’ And then you see her take a mug out of her dishwasher that says ‘DIVA’ on it. And she kind of winks at the camera. You know that she was very aware of that dichotomy where she didn’t want all the attention in the world, but she kind of did.”

John Brown, vice provost for the arts at Duke University, was impressed by Sloane’s recordings when he first heard them.

“I first heard of her from Stephen Barefoot. Stephen and I have been friends for

a long time,” says Brown. “The perpetual student I am, I had not heard of her name in all the research I’ve claimed to do.”

Brown, who is also a bass player, composer, and educator, says Sloane put a personal stamp on the songs she sang.

“In the case of Carol, when you hear her singing ‘The Nearness of You’—when you hear her sing ‘In the Wee Small Hours’— I’m always hearing her,” Brown says.

“These are the same words that Nancy Wilson sang. Name your singer—Carmen McCrae, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. They all sing the same words. How they do it is where the magic is. She was a singer of the caliber of these people.”

Altogether, during her life, Sloane made about 30 albums. Before she died, she wanted one more. Her final album, Live at the Birdland , was released in 2022.

Lippert showed Sloane several versions of his film as he was working on it. Sloane nitpicked, Lippert says. It was her way. But she was happy with the results overall. Lippert’s film went on to receive the award for Best Documentary Feature at the Santa Fe Film Festival. Locally, two in-person screenings will show at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem on April 15 and 21, with virtual screenings additionally available April 14–22.

“Carol always wanted to be named among the greatest of the greats,” says Lippert. “Not because she had some great ego about it. It was because she really wanted to believe she had earned it. She never felt she was on par with Ella Fitzgerald or Carmen McRae or Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan or any of her heroes. She felt that she was always chasing that perfection but never quite reached it.” W

Carol Sloane at the Newport Folk Fest PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAEL LIPPERT

Home Truths

Angela Thorpe, the new executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, shares her vision for the historic site.

BY KYESHA JENNINGS arts@indyweek.com

Family roots are deeply intertwined with history and culture. This is especially true for those who are descendants of enslaved people.

Angela Thorpe, a cultural heritage leader, public historian, and scholar, has family hailing from Edgecombe County, near Rocky Mount, where her father was born into a family of 14 children. As a military kid, Thorpe often moved around but remained rooted in North Carolina. Like many Black families, her family frequently returned to their hometown for annual reunions.

Growing up around a vibrant, dynamic Black Southern family who shared stories about everyday life on the farm in Edgecombe County inspired Thorpe to learn more about the lives of Southern communities, especially marginalized groups. In college at the University of Florida, she switched from biology to history and, under the guidance of two Black female professors in the African American Studies Department, discovered a passion for public history.

“These experiences made me realize that I wanted to document and share the stories of Black people. I wanted to be a part of preserving Black history for future generations,” Thorpe says.

In 2012, she pursued a master’s in history and museum studies at UNC Greensboro.

“I knew that if I wanted to do the work of Black history, I wanted to do it in the place where my family was rooted,” she says.

From writing about the lack of diversity in public history to leading the curation of an award-winning multimedia exhibit that examined the history of Warnersville—the first Black-planned community in Greensboro—and promoting North Carolina Black heritage as the director of the state’s African American Heritage Commission

(AAHC) from 2018 through 2023, Thorpe has made a significant impact during her 10-year journey in public history.

One of her biggest accomplishments as director of the AAHC was developing the nationally recognized North Carolina Green Book Project, a traveling and virtual exhibition produced to highlight the experiences of African American travelers during the Jim Crow era in North Carolina. Her work has involved building community relationships and partnerships, amplifying underrepresented voices, and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In March, Thorpe was named the new executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, making her the organization’s second leader. Located in Durham, the center is a significant historical site anchored by Pauli Murray’s childhood home, which was built by Murray’s maternal grandparents in 1898. In 2011, a coalition of local groups saved the home from demolition. Since then, funding from various sources, including the National Park Service and the Mellon Foundation, has allowed the home to be stabilized and restored.

Thorpe takes on the position from founding executive director Barbara Lau, who has grown the center over the last 15 years.

“It is an honor to nurture and grow the rich work that Barbara led,” Thorpe says. “She spent decades building an incredible foundation for the center, which has positioned me well to see the center through to its next phase.”

Thanks to that vision, the center is now positioned to be a fully operational historic site, with a goal of encouraging visitors to stand up for peace, equity, and justice by connecting history to contemporary human rights issues. The Pauli Murray Center is

expected to reopen to the public in 2024. On the heels of Thorpe’s hire, the INDY spoke with her about the Pauli Murray Center and her vision for it.

INDY WEEK: When were you first introduced to Pauli Murray?

ANGELA THORPE: While working with the Museum of Durham History to develop an exhibit on the history of the baseball card, I was trying to draw inspiration from other creative exhibits. So Katie Spencer, the director of the museum at the time, took me to the Scrap Exchange in Durham to see the Pauli Murray Center’s traveling exhibit. That was when I was first introduced to Pauli Murray. I remember being so moved, inspired, and excited by that exhibit.

I also remember saying out loud, what I hear a lot of people saying to me now, “Why have I never heard about this person?” I would argue that Pauli has had a hold on me ever since. In my work at the [AAHC],

I had the great fortune of being deeply connected with the center in various ways.

What do you love most about Pauli Murrary’s story?

There are a couple of things that inspire and move me about Pauli. One, like how multihyphenate of a person Pauli was. Like, the fact that they spent a lifetime being so many versions of themselves is really inspiring. To be a civil rights activist, to be a writer, to be a lawyer, and later decide “I’m going to be a priest”—Pauli helps me to understand that we can be as much as we want to be. And that we can stand in our identities as fully as we want to, or need to, even when categories may or may not exist for us. That’s another thing that inspires me about Pauli.

As a queer person, and as somebody who today, we might say, is gender nonconforming, they stood in their truth at a time when a box nor the language for

Angela Thorpe in front of artist Brett Cook’s “Roots and Soul” mural on West Chapel Hill Street. PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

that truth did not exist. That, to me, is phenomenal.

Let’s talk about the center’s mission and the work that the team will be doing with your leadership.

Yes. So we lift up the legacy of the great Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray, who, of course, was an activist, a legal scholar, a faith leader, and a thinker. I’m joining the center at a really incredible and exciting time. Barbara Lau has worked for decades to grow the center and amplify Pauli’s story all over the world.

We’re nearing the end of that process and entering a new phase. My big work is taking that house and transitioning it into a museum and historic site that people from all over the world can visit. And that feels so profound to me. I look forward to our center being a place for all people. This is a place where people who love history can come and engage with exhibits. This is a place where perhaps people who love literature or our legal scholars can reserve one of our rooms upstairs so that they can have time to write and study. This will be a space where activists and organizers can gather to strategize, rest, and organize further. This will be a place where families and school children can come to learn about Pauli and hopefully leave being inspired.

Our site is in a historically Black neighborhood on the West End of Durham, a community with rich history, a community anchored by elders. And so part of our responsibility is to make sure that we are holding those folks up by working in solidarity and in community with them as well. I’m really excited to explore what that looks like to connect even more deeply with West End.

How is the center funded?

Over the last 15 years, we have been fortunate to receive support from colleagues and family members, including one of Pauli’s nieces, who sits on our board. The most notable source of the last couple of years has been the Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the recent $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, we have been able to activate the space, complete renovations, and restorations, and conceptualize

and design exhibits for the interior of the space. This funding has also allowed us to bring on an executive director, education coordinator, program and communications coordinator, and assistant to further our preservation efforts.

It takes a lot to run museums. It takes a lot to run a historic site. We have been supported for a long time by the generosity of everyday people. The $5 that somebody is giving every month or the $100 onetime donation is part of what helps us grow, too.

What are you most looking forward to?

A few weeks ago we had a program at the site called “Built by Feel” that was led by the brilliant Aisha Booth and other folks from all over the community. There were kids everywhere playing in the mud, making flower crowns, and eating way too many bags of Cheetos. I’m looking forward to that happening every single day.

I look forward to that space being activated. I look forward to the grounds of the center, the Fitzgerald House, being a place where my fellow community catalyst can find inspiration to create incredible programs for our community. I look forward to our space being a place where kids feel free to just be and where parents feel safe to bring their kids and connect them to the legacy of Pauli Murray. That is what excites me.

If you could say anything to Pauli Murray, what would you say?

I would say that it was worth it. It is so exciting that we are evolving into a space where we are developing language that is inclusive of the identities or the various identities that Pauli Murray once held. You hear people throw around the phrase “I’ve dedicated my life to this work.”

For me, Pauli is someone who truly has dedicated their life to the work and the causes that they believed in. They never stopped writing, advocating, pushing, or pulling. And probably did their work like their life depended on it. They did their work in poverty. They did their work without recognition. Pauli Murray is an example of what it looks like to truly dedicate your life to work, and it was worth it. W

“I look forward to our center being a place for all people.”

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

Energy: The Conjure’s 6th Anniversary $10. Sat, Apr. 15, 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Monsoon $12. Sat, Apr. 15, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. The Raleigh Flute Choir Presents Funk and Variations

Sat, Apr. 15, 7 p.m. Western Boulevard Presbyterian Church, Raleigh.

Relay Relay / Swansgate $10. Sat, Apr. 15, 8 p.m. Bond Brothers Eastside, Cary.

music

Adam Schatz

Rented a Piano and Now Must Pay the Price (An Early Evening of Exciting Music) $15. Wed, Apr. 12, 6 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

The Bobby Lees $15. Wed, Apr. 12, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Duke Symphony Orchestra: Senior Night Wed, Apr. 12, 7:30 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Holst: The Planets

$63+. Thurs, Apr. 13, 7:30 p.m. Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill.

$50+. Apr. 14 and 15, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Coco & Clair Clair SOLD OUT. Thurs, Apr. 13, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Haunted Like Human / Jesse Fox

Thurs, Apr. 13, 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends

Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

The Runaway Grooms Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. Bowstring Pizza and Brewyard, Raleigh.

Some Kind of Nightmare $10. Thurs, Apr. 13, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Tay Tay Party: Taylor Swift Inspired DJ Dance Party $15. Thurs, Apr. 13, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

’70s Dance Party with 8-Track Minds

Fri, Apr. 14, 7:30 p.m. Bralie’s Sports Bar 2, Durham.

Aly & AJ: With Love $40+. Fri, Apr. 14, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Art Lande, Kate McGarry, Keith Ganz, and Alan Hall $30. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Canine Heart Sounds / Hammer No More the Fingers / Bangzz / Nick Sandborn $12.

Fri, Apr. 14, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Crisa Presents Dreaming of You: Celebrating Selena’s Legacy $10. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Dance Party Fundraiser for Black Maternal Health

$50. Fri, Apr. 14, 4 p.m. Museum of Life and Science, Durham.

Dawn Landes & Friends Reimagine The Liberated Women’s Songbook $38+. Fri, Apr. 14, 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Duke Jazz Ensemble with Pianist Cyrus Chestnut $10. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Happy Landing $15. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Mt. Joy $49+. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

Wilder Woods

$31. Fri, Apr. 14, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Built to Spill

$29. Sat, Apr. 15, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Corey Ward $12. Sat, Apr. 15, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Crones of Anarchy

$8. Sat, Apr. 15, 7 p.m. The Eno House, Hillsborough.

Donovan Woods and Henry Jamison $20. Sat, Apr. 15, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Duke Chorale Celebration Concert Sat, Apr. 15, 4 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Drook $10. Sun, Apr. 16, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Duke Chinese Music Ensemble Sun, Apr. 16, 5 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Garcia Peoples / Chris Forsyth $15. Sun, Apr. 16, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Triangle Jewish Chorale: Spring Concert Sun, Apr. 16, 2:30 p.m. Jewish For Good, Durham.

Caitlyn Smith: The Great Pretender Tour Solo $15+. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Ella Mai: Heart on My Sleeve Tour $47+. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tues, Apr. 18, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Ruston Kelly: The Weakness Tour $25. Sat, Apr. 15, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Shallow Cuts: 1900s $5. Sat, Apr. 15, 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Caroline Rose $26. Sun, Apr. 16, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Xiu Xiu $18. Sun, Apr. 16, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

The Lemon Twigs $20. Mon, Apr. 17, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Pageant $8. Mon, Apr. 17, 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Archer Oh $15. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

North Carolina Master Chorale: Verdi Requiem $48+. Tues, Apr. 18, 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Ripe $20. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Samia $22. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

TWRP $25. Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Meagan Church: Last Carolina Girl Wed, Apr. 12, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Marlie Parker Wasserman: Path of Peril Thurs, Apr. 13, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: We Heal Together Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Michelle Zauner: Crying in H Mart SOLD OUT. Mon, Apr. 17, 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Lee Smith: Silver Tues, Apr. 18, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Tom and Rachael Sullivan: Meals She Eats Tues, Apr. 18, 3:30 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Caroline Rose performs at Cat’s Cradle on Sunday, April 16. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

Jersey Boys $32+. Apr. 5-23, various times. Theatre Raleigh, Raleigh.

The Cherry Orchard $30. Apr. 6-23, various times.

Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

Rent $15. Apr. 6-15, 8 p.m. Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham.

Beetlejuice $75+. Apr. 11-16, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Comedy Showcase Wed, Apr. 12, 8 p.m. Compass Rose Brewery, Raleigh.

Mr. Ho’s Orchestrotica $20. Wed, Apr. 12, 7:30 p.m. Magnetic Sound Studios, Durham.

She Kills Monsters $27. Apr. 13-23, various times. Titmus Theatre, Raleigh.

Legends of Drag! $10. Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

North Carolina Opera: Porgy And Bess $24+. Apr. 14-16, various times.

Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

ChoreoLab 2023

$17. Apr. 14 and 15, 7 p.m. Rubenstein Arts Center, Durham.

Evening Performances by the West Virginia Dance Company

$15. Apr. 14 and 15, 8 p.m. Barriskill Dance Theatre School, Durham.

Afrofuturism: Piercing the Veil Sat, Apr. 15, 12 and 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Marvelous Music Family Series: The Little Mermaid $8. Sat, Apr. 15, 11 a.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary.

2023 Bull City Comedy Festival Tues, Apr. 18, 8 p.m.

The Glass Jug Beer Lab, Durham.

Jon Moritsugu Double Feature: My Degeneration and Mod Fuck Explosion Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

The Lost Weekend: A Love Story $11. Thurs, Apr. 13, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Afrofuturism: Piercing the Veil shows at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Saturday, April 15. PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA

su | do | ku

© Puzzles by Pappocom

this week’s puzzle level:

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

U Z Z L E S

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page” at the bottom of our webpage.

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click

“puzzles page”.

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com

C L A S S I F I E D S

EMPLOYMENT

Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to contribute to research & design for software development assignments in various development environments such as Agile & Waterfall for specific software functional areas/product lines. Minimum of Master’s or foreign equiv degree in Computer Science or rltd + 5 yrs exp in job offered or related required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office in Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1100 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job code: 00739.

Sr Tableau Administrator

919-416-0675

Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. seeks a Sr Tableau Administrator (STA-VVL) in Raleigh, NC. Work as Architect to perform End to End implementation/ Administration/Maintenance & dvlpmt of Tableau dashboards. Reqs MS+3 yrs rltd exp or BS flld by 5 yrs prog rltd exp. Salary $122,907.00 - $175,800.00 / year. Email resumes to Hien.Nguyen@intusurg.com. Must reference job title & job code STA-VVL in subject line.

ETL Application Developer

Translate reqs to tech specifications docs & prepare Level of Effort doc to ensure end-to-end activities planned are accomplished as per client needs. Develop, deploy big data code to ingest external data from source systems to Enterprise Data Warehouse. Standardize ingested data into Source Standardizing zone for processing using Big Data techs including Informatica BDM, SparkScala, Pyspark scripts. Maintain, enhance the existing feeds to using techs like BDM, Teradata, ETL/Informatica, Control-M. Diagnose software issues. Conduct code & design review. Debug errors from Job Abends related to Edward data ingestion/analytical processing. Will work in Durham (Research Triangle Park), NC and/or various client sites throughout U.S. Must be willing to travel and/ or relocate. Apply to: Dcube Solutions Inc, Attn: HR, 800 Park Offices Drive, Suite 3602, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 or email to sree.avula@dcubesolutions.net

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LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE