INDY Week 3.25.20

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Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill March 25, 2020

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CONTENTS FEATURES 8

Raleigh’s bars and restaurants wonder how long they’ll be closed, and whether they’ll reopen. BY JAMES MICHAEL NICHOLS

10 Without breweries and events, food trucks are suffering, too.

BY SARAH EDWARDS

11

Now More Th a n Ever

Triangle universities responded quickly to the pandemic. Their contracted employees didn’t always know what was going on. BY SARA PEQUEÑO AND COLE VILLENA

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On Ninth Street, there’s a makeshift bulletin board full of flyers for events that never took place. BY CARMELA GUAGLIANONE

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We’ll never know how many people couldn’t get tested for COVID-19, but a Durham man is giving them space to share their stories.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

15 While hospitals are asking the community for help securing protective gear, one local company allegedly saw an opportunity. BY LEIGH TAUSS 16 Jails are petri dishes for infectious diseases. What are state and local officials doing to protect inmates from COVID-19? BY THOMASI MCDONALD 17

A.yoni Jeffries and the art of optimism.

18

The silver lining of COVID-19: the golden age of streaming.

BY BRIAN HOWE

20 Coronavirus reveals the need to rethink arts-funding.

BY BYRON WOODS

BY TOMMY NOONAN

DEPARTMENTS

irst and foremost, I hope you’re well and doing everything you can to slow the spread of this awful virus.

COVID-19 radically changed life here in a matter of days. The INDY’s journalists are working around the clock (literally, in some cases) to cover the effects of the coronavirus—the government’s response, the impact on our local business community, the challenges to our cultural institutions—and help you understand what’s really happening and make informed decisions for yourself, your family, and your friends.

After all, you are the reason the INDY exists.

On that note: If you don’t already, I urge you to subscribe to our morning newsletter, PRIMER (indyprimer.com), where our editor offers daily insights into the most important stories from the Triangle and around the country. In addition, our website is updated all the time, and we’re still distributing print editions of the INDY every Wednesday.

But in difficult times like these, we can only do our jobs with your help.

As a small, independent news organization, we’re facing an unprecedented challenge.

Simply put, producing quality local journalism requires resources, and we’ve always relied on advertising revenue from events, nightclubs, and bars and restaurants to keep the lights on. Right now, however, there are no events, and all of the bars, nightclubs, and most of restaurants are closed; thus, there are few resources to be had. That dynamic led several papers like ours to abruptly close in the last week—and about 20 percent of alt-weeklies to cease print publication.

There are a lot of people who need and deserve your support right now. But we believe the community we love and serve also needs and deserves fearless, high-quality local journalism, especially in times of crisis.

So we’re asking you to join the INDY Press Club today. By visiting KeepItINDY.com and contributing any amount—a dollar or $1,000, once or monthly—you’ll be helping to not only ensure that we survive, but that we have the resources we need to help our readers get through it, too. Your support has meant the world to us: Last week alone, 314 contributors donated $11,800; 123 people became recurring donors.

Our goal with the Press Club has always been to foster better journalism for a better community. To do that, we need your help now more than ever. If you’re able, please visit KeepItINDY.com today and become a member of our team.

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For now, I hope you and your family stay safe. We’ll continue providing the best local reporting and enterprise coverage we can. And we look forward to the time when we all come out of this together.

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March 25, 2020

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BACK TA L K

Last Thursday, we had some fun with One America News Network “journalist” Chanel Rion, who first Chinese researchers in a secret lab at

Profit from the Plague

UNC-Chapel Hill had manufactured

Grab your pitchforks and point them at Richard Burr

spent time “investigating” whether

the coronavirus and released it in Wuhan.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

It had been a long week, and we figured you could use a laugh.

As it turns out, Rion has some MAGA fanboys who are very mad that we are not taking her journalism seriously. Here is CHARLES ST. JAMES: “Rather than simply writing that there are different opinions and that a number of these opinions have been engendered over the years precisely because people do not trust, justifiably, governments and the elites often given to lying to people and engaging in blatant forms of psychological propaganda, the writer chooses to use ad hominem attacks and references.

“In my view, journalism should mean, or perhaps, used to mean being willing to investigate and explore various theories and ideas as well as different explanations. Or does the writer believe that the government and those in power never have lied to people and, at times, do not seek even more power, wealth, and privileges and that there are times when no strategy or set of tactics is beneath them?”

Because we enjoy being right, let’s venture back to Sunday, March 15, when Sarah Edwards wrote a piece discouraging people from going to still-open bars and spreading COVID-19.

“Unless the author of this article is going to pay the rents for the businesses and all of the business’s employees, it’s irresponsible for her to tell businesses that they should shut down,” JOHN SMITH replied on March 16. “Everybody is going to be exposed to this virus. There’s no reason to make countless people homeless and wreck lives with this sort of insanity. I was just at my local bar tonight, and I’ll go back again tomorrow, and every day until all of this has passed.”

“Not going to get my medical advice from the INDY,” added HONK HONKLER on March 17. “If that is needed, the folks in charge of the pandemic response will say so.”

That day, Governor Cooper closed dine-in restaurants and bars across the state.

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indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @IndependentWeekly @indyweek 4

SOA P BOXE R

March 25, 2020

INDYweek.com

o write about politics is to become jaded. Time and time again, you watch people you admire disappoint you, cynicism win the day, and idealism get seduced by power, ego, and money.

This was always true. But it’s especially true in the Trump era, when the president has turned bad faith into standard operating procedure. So it takes an exceptional kind of venality to pierce the armor of numbness and provoke seething, go-grab-the-pitchforks rage.

In other words, Senator Richard Burr.

On February 3, Burr and Senator Lamar Alexander wrote an op-ed for Fox News, saying that while Americans are “rightly concerned” about the coronavirus, “Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.”

The last two months have shown that the administration was anything but prepared. The U.S. is still playing catch-up on tests, states are begging for ventilators, and hospitals are pleading for protective equipment.

Most important, the country didn’t implement social-distancing early enough to contain the virus’s spread when it could have.

No president could have stopped the coronavirus from reaching American soil. But you can lay the blame for our current mad scramble to avoid calamity directly at Trump’s feet. Throughout January and February, the president downplayed the threat, insisting that everything was under control even as top-secret intelligence briefings showed that disaster loomed. That Trump now wants

to retcon history doesn’t change the reality that his failure to take COVID19 seriously will likely cost thousands of lives.

As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Health Committee, Burr was privy to classified and private briefings on how bad things were about to get.

While Trump was gaslighting to prop up the stock market, Burr could have warned Americans about the incoming pandemic and forced the administration to confront it.

Instead, 10 days after co-authoring that rosy op-ed, he sold off most of his stock portfolio in 33 transactions totaling between $628,000 and $1.7 million, ProPublica reported last Thursday. A week later, the stock market began what’s turned into an ongoing collapse.

A week after that, on February 27, Burr told a group of well-heeled business elites that shit was about to hit the fan—travel bans, school shutdowns, military hospitals, etc. “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: [The coronavirus] is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” Burr said in a private meeting. (NPR obtained a recording and published it last Thursday.)

At a press conference that same day, Trump promised it would soon be over: “When you have 15 [cases] and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Burr, who knew better, didn’t say a word.

By Sunday evening, the U.S. had nearly 33,000 documented COVID19 cases and more than 400 deaths. It’s estimated that more than 3 million people filed for unemployment last week—including more

than 80,000 from North Carolina—and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis told Bloomberg News this weekend that unemployment could reach 30 percent by June. That’s Great Depression territory.

(Adding insult to injury, Burr and his Republican colleagues tried to ram through a $1.8 trillion stimulus package that allocates $50 billion, few strings attached, to bail out the airline industry and creates a $425 billion slush fund for the Treasury Department to give to whomever it wants—quite possibly, Trump’s friends and family. Republicans then got the vapors when Democrats objected.)

In a better world, Burr would have not only been forced to resign by now, but he’d be staring down an ignominious frogmarch in a shiny set of silver bracelets, too. As it is, neither of those things is likely. On Friday, Burr asked the do-nothing Senate Ethics Committee to review his actions, buying time for the storm to pass.

He’s not the only lawmaker who appears to have acted on inside information. Newly appointed Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler and her husband, who runs the New York Stock Exchange, dumped millions in stocks after a private January 24 Health Committee briefing on the coronavirus. She also purchased shares in Citrix, which offers telework software.

Both Burr and Loeffler deny they engaged in insider trading or violated the STOCK Act, the 2012 law barring members of Congress from using nonpublic information to trade shares. (Burr, notably, was one of only three senators to vote against it.) Burr says he based his financial decisions on publicly available information. (Relatedly, I have some Florida swampland to sell you.) Loeffler said she doesn’t manage her family’s portfolio and didn’t know about the sale until weeks later. (Also for sale: the Brooklyn Bridge.)

Even giving Burr the benefit of the doubt, here’s the bottom line: He knew enough to look out for his interests, which means he knew enough to look out for yours. He simply chose not to. W

QUICKBAIT

The Joys of Capitalism in a Time of Crisis

Total Complaints Cleaning Products

(136)

21

Fuel

11 67

Groceries

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9

Health Products

hen Governor Cooper declared a state of emergency on March 10, North Carolina’s price-gouging law went into effect, empowering Attorney General Josh Stein to seek refunds for consumers forced to pay too much during a crisis. (Courts can also impose fines of up to $5,000 per violation on the unscrupulous bastards who take advantage of a bad situation to line their pockets.) By March 18, the AG’s Office had received 136 price-gouging complaints, according to records obtained by the INDY. Of those, 22 were based in Wake, Durham, and Orange Counties. Below are 10 allegations of price-gouging that we found to be of particular interest.

10

Sanitizer Travel "Not Gouging" Other

4 1 4

Complaints by County of Alleged Gouger 9

Durham Wake Orange

12 1 10

Mecklenburg 6

Forsyth Guilford

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Complaint 1

Complaint 4

Complaint 7

Complaint 10

Date: March 17

Date: March 16

Date: March 10

Date: February 15

Where: Purchased via computer after Wake County complainant responded to printed advertisement

Where: Via internet (complainant lives in Ohio)

Where: Craiglist (complainant lives in Fayetteville)

Where: Amazon (complainant from Raleigh)

Product: Toilet paper, Seventh Generation 2-ply, 4 rolls

Product: Hand sanitizer

Product: Hand sanitizer, 12 8 oz. bottles

Price Before Disaster: $3.10

Price Before Disaster: $40

From: Factory Hardware Store, Wilmington

Price After Disaster: $50

Price After Disaster: $145

Product: Toilet paper (unspecified amount) From: Darryl Honeycutt (no contact information provided) Amount in Dispute: $5,000 (cash)

Complaint 2 Date: March 17 Where: eBay (complainant lives in California)

Price: $89 Explanation: “Claims it is [sic] was for a 12 pack on the review I wrote but it was not. They have since removed the 4 pack for $89 from their website.”

Complaint 5

Product: Alcohol (rubbing, presumably), Equate, 32 oz.

Date: March 16

From: josgr-567, Fayetteville

Product: Lysol wipes, 3-pack

Price Before Disaster: “$1.48 per bottle at Walmart”

Price Before Disaster: $10

Price After Disaster: $200

Complaint 3

How Do You Know the Pre-Disaster Price? “I’ve bought them before.”

Price After Disaster: $25

Complaint 6

Where: Via internet (complainant lives in Charlotte)

Date: March 11

Product: Mega toilet paper, Charmin, 1 roll

Product: Toilet tissue, Walmart brand, 24 rolls

From: Factory Hardware Store, Wilmington

Price After Disaster: $20.97

Price After Disaster: $83.13

Date: March 13 Where: Costco, Mooresville Product: Kirkland water bottles, 16.9 oz., 40-500-ml Price Before Disaster: $2.99 Price After Disaster: $7

Where: Staples, Durham

Date: March 14 and March 16

Price Before Disaster: “Unsure what they charged before, but no way a single roll of toilet paper costs near the current amount”

Complaint 8

Where: Walmart, Brunswick County

Complaint 9 Date: March 17 Where: Citywide Janitorial, Charlotte Product: Hand sanitizer, 1,000 ml Price Before Disaster: $5.99 Price After Disaster: $94

Explanation: “I ordered 12 8oz bottles, got email from seller stating they used wrong barcode & would refund me 25% of the order & send me 12 2oz bottles.

I contacted Amazon, they credited me back $30 and said to reorder. I challenged the Amazon Rep to find it for me. They looked and he was shocked. I asked what the seller has it listed for now & he said $145.00. They credited me back enough money to re-purchase, but I was continually saying, just to send me the hand sanitizer for the order I placed, order was accepted, etc. It was stressful as my order was for my daughters teacher in middle school! Amazon Rep stated issue is with seller & myself... I corrected & said my account is with Amazon & that amazon makes more money the higher the sales, so Amazon is allowing this price gouging!! I said someone from Amazon needs to contact me, but I have heard from nobody!!”

Price Before Disaster: $12.97 Explanation: “Last night, I purchase toilet tissue WalMart brand of 24 rolls when I went to the register it was almost double the price of $20.97. Previously purchased the same at $12.97 Even my daughter in law was shocked. She looked up on line while we were waiting for the store to ‘price check’ the item. On line it was in stock and priced at $12.97. When we got home, we were going to send it to my email and then I was going to print it out. This morning is now ‘out of stock’ and no price given. Considering the ‘run’ on certain items due to the ‘Pandemic’ this is an emergency and WalMart should not be gouging its customers” [everything sic].

KeepItINDY.com

March 25, 2020

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A WE E K IN THE L IFE

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

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3/17

After Governor Cooper issued an executive order closing dine-in restaurants and bars to promote social distancing and protect against the coronavirus, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR DAN FOREST—Cooper’s opponent in November—challenged its legality, arguing that Cooper did not have authorization from the Council of State.

The UNC SYSTEM ordered students off its campuses and reduced their housing and dining options.

A Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 42 PERCENT OF NORTH CAROLINA ADULTS were at risk of severe illness if infected by the coronavirus.

The Raleigh Police Department’s five-day report on the police-involved shooting of JAVIER TORRES said Torres pointed his gun at the officer who shot him.

3/18

Within 19 hours of Cooper’s order, nearly 5,000 PEOPLE filed claims for unemployment in North Carolina, twice as many as typically file claims in a week. By week’s end, more than 100,000 would file for unemployment.

DUKE UNIVERSITY announced that it would make sure full-time contracted food-service workers got paid through May 30. It also canceled spring commencement.

3/19

NPR obtained an audio recording of a February 27 meeting SENATOR RICHARD BURR had with business elites, in which he warned them about how bad the coronavirus pandemic was about to become. That same day, President Trump assured Americans that the number of cases in the U.S. would soon fall to zero.

A few hours later, ProPublica reported that on February 13—a week after Burr co-authored an op-ed praising U.S. preparedness for the coronavirus—the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee DUMPED UP TO $1.7 MILLION in stocks. A week after that, the market tanked on coronavirus fears.

North Carolina’s first case of COMMUNITY SPREAD—meaning the first case in which the person diagnosed with COVID-19 hadn’t traveled to an infected area or come into contact with a known infected person—was discovered in Wilson.

The federal government approved a request by Governor Cooper to give DISASTER AID to the state’s small businesses.

MAYOR STEVE SCHEWEL issued an order closing gyms, fitness centers, health clubs, and theaters throughout Durham.

3/20

DURHAM COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SATANA DEBERRY announced that she was taking steps to decrease the population of the county jail in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fending off calls for his resignation, Burr asked the SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE to investigate him.

One America News Network personality CHANEL RION—fresh off accusing a lab at UNCChapel Hill of manufacturing the coronavirus—asked President Trump at a press conference if he thought the term “Chinese food” was racist, then accused other media outlets of being in league with the Chinese Communist Party.

3/22

The number of confirmed CORONAVIRUS CASES in North Carolina exceeded 300.

Wake County declared a HEIGHTENED STATE OF EMERGENCY, limiting crowd sizes to 50 people and barring people from public playgrounds.

3/23

(Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

Governor Cooper declared that schools will remain closed until AT LEAST MAY 15 and ordered the closure of gyms and hair and nail salons.

March 25, 2020

INDYweek.com

d goo

The Folks Making Sure Kids Get Fed When They Don’t Have School Amid all the bad—and there is so much bad—Wake and Durham County schools are working hard to make sure that children are getting fed. The need is acute. Sixty percent of North Carolina public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs. In fact, this was among school officials’ biggest reservations in deciding to close the schools—there are a lot of kids that depend on them to eat. In Wake County, volunteers have begun distributing hot lunches and cold breakfasts at 16 curbside pickup locations. In Durham County, DPS is providing meals at 67 community locations, including grab-and-go spots. They’ve also repurposed the dormant yellow school buses into delivery vehicles.

Orange, Chatham, and Johnson County schools, meanwhile, have organized volunteer and system-led meal distribution efforts. In difficult times, there are some things that make us prouder than ever to be part of this community. This is one of them.

bad

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Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest If you’ve got a pedantic legal argument to make against the person you’re challenging for office, perhaps the best time to make it isn’t in the middle of a crisis, let alone a worldwide pandemic that might soon overwhelm your hospitals and kill hundreds or thousands of your residents. But Dan Forest nonetheless felt the need to act like he mattered last Tuesday, challenging Cooper’s decision to shut down dine-in restaurants and bars because, in Forest’s view, Cooper did not have the consent of the Council of State.

Cooper’s executive order asserted that the (universally acknowledged) public health emergency gave him the right to do what he did anyway. But even if Forest is correct on the merits, it’s not entirely clear what he stood to gain. Would a few political points be worth being held responsible for whatever COVID-19 cluster emerged out of some country kitchen three weeks from now?

Senator Richard Burr Bad: Writing an op-ed telling the American people that their government has never been more prepared to deal with an epidemic while you’re getting classified briefings telling you how bad the pandemic is going to be. Worse: Telling a group of well-heeled suits that the shit is about to hit the fan the same day the president— and the leader of your party—assures America that this coronavirus thing will be over soon. Why haven’t you resigned yet? Dumping most or all of your stock portfolio a week before the market crashes, then having the gall to tell us that the classified info you received as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had nothing to do with your decision.

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eek two in the shadow of a pandemic, which, we can safely report, still sucks. There are now more than 300 confirmed cases of coronavirus in North Carolina. Schools are shut down until at least May 15. Gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited. Gyms and hair and nail salons have been ordered to close. Restaurants and bars are closed, and most of the ones doing takeout and delivery are barely getting by. The state is edging closer to what seems like an inevitable shelter-in-place order.

The stock market is collapsing, local newspapers are folding, unemployment is shooting through the roof, hospitals don’t have the supplies they need, and the president is a clueless buffoon who will probably get us all killed because his daddy never loved him.

THE

HANG

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And if all that weren’t bad enough, we’re also GOOD AND GODDAMN READY to leave our houses again, which we apparently won’t be allowed to do until, like, what, AUGUST?!

Which is to say, our collective ennui took us to some pretty dark places in the Slack channel this week.

Deep breath in. Hang in there. Deep breath out. We’ll get through it together.

For the second iteration of our infinity-part Social Distancing series, we’re telling what we call Shutdown Stories—short features portraying this bizarre moment through human eyes: people struggling, people adapting, people left behind, even people (allegedly) trying to scam their way through it.

Hang in there, everyone. The light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train, or it might be actual light. Let’s hope for the latter. It’s all we can do. W

KeepItINDY.com

March 25, 2020

7

SHUTDOWN STORIES

DEAD ZONE Last week, Raleigh’s hospitality industry screeched to a halt.

Its leaders are trying to figure out how to survive.

BY JAMES MICHAEL NICHOLS backtalk@indyweek.com

F

or nearly 70 years, the Players Retreat has been a Raleigh institution, attracting a diverse clientele of college kids, politicians, service industry staples, and downtowners, many of whom frequented the bar and restaurant several nights a week.

Then, on March 17, the PR—along with every other bar and dine-in restaurant in North Carolina—was ordered to close indefinitely.

“I had to lay off 50-something people the other day,” owner Gus Gusler told the INDY last week. “It was a very, very difficult day. Hopefully, when we open back up, every one of those people will come back to work. But we’ll have to see.”

Last Tuesday, in an effort to slow the spread of COVID19, Governor Cooper signed Executive Order 118, mandating that bars and restaurants cease sit-down operations and pivot exclusively to delivery and curbside to-go orders. While the order also removed barriers to accessing unemployment benefits, it means that tens of thousands of service industry workers across the state are suddenly without jobs.

Indeed, more than 83,000 people filed unemployment claims between last Monday and Saturday afternoon, compared to the usual 3,500.

Many local industry leaders, including Gusler, have expressed support for Cooper’s measure, though if the crisis continues beyond a few weeks, their ability to reopen remains in question.

“We are functioning on a week-to-week if not a day-today type of basis,” says Vansana Nolintha, co-owner of Bida Manda and Brewery Bhavana. “This current baseline is not about thriving. It’s not even about surviving. This is about immediately sustaining so that if there’s any 8

March 25, 2020

INDYweek.com

Brewery Bhavana

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

loan or grant coming, that within this immediate seven to 14 days, restaurants won’t go under prior to structural support coming out.”

Brewery Bhavana introduced curbside pickup and delivery options on Friday but paused all restaurant operations after just one night. On Instagram, Nolintha wrote that, despite a successful first night, after a conversation with his staff, they decided that “the rapid progression of these last few days has made it increasingly evident that our natural yearning to care for you all—through food, drinks, community, and connection—is antithetical to public health and safety.”

Nolintha says he’s deeply concerned about the well-being of his staff during this industry-wide shutdown. Currently, the restaurant group is providing the staff with meals and is attempting to work with local governments to explore long-term, interest-free loans for staff members to help them make it through the crunch.

Several community-based groups have responded to the industry-wide need, as well, including a Triangle Restaurant Workers relief fund coordinated by the Frankie Lemmon Foundation.

Angela Salamanca, owner of Raleigh’s Centro and Gallo Pelón Mezcaleria, told the INDY last week that efforts to support staff are multifaceted. She says that, despite the

uncertainty, she wants to empower her staff of roughly 40 to develop their skills surrounding financial literacy in order to weather the storm.

“From what I see, not a lot of people know their expenses,” Salamanca says. “So I encouraged them to really look at their expenses and see where they could cut one or two or three or any excess spending that they had that would be unnecessary. And then to get back to me after two weeks of pay and cutting some expenses. If things are really rough because they don’t have the support of family or a partner, I do want to take care of them because I really do love them.”

The people-centric nature of service environments creates employee bonds unique to the industry. These relationships have also established a tight-knit cohort of local restaurant owners, many of whom are banding together to create solutions for service workers. For now, though, the prevailing sentiment is that, whether through curbside to-go orders or direct donations, restaurants and bars need public support in a dire and desperate way.

And for places that can’t make their goods to-go, the reality of this moment appears even bleaker.

Vita Vite, an art gallery and wine bar with locations in downtown Raleigh and North Hills, has shuttered its doors indefinitely.

“It’s not feasible for us to function as a takeout place,” says owner Lindsay Rice.

“We tried the first day, and, unfortunately, it just really isn’t feasible.”

Rice says one of the most concerning things to her is the public’s lack of understanding about the way the service industry works.

“I think the thing that people outside of this industry don’t realize is how much you rely on tips for your income,” she says. “It’s just basic facts about this industry that if you’re not open, then you’re not serving people, and your pay is going to be either nonexistent or, you know, very minimized.”

Tim Lemuel, the owner of Ruby Deluxe, The Night Rider, and the Wicked Witch, three Raleigh bars that have become havens for LGBTQ folks and allies, shares that sentiment.

In the days leading up to Cooper’s order, Lemuel tried to work many of the shifts at his establishments by himself in order to convert any revenue into wages for staff. But he reached a point at which he couldn’t physically do it.

“I didn’t know how to tell these kids that they don’t have any grocery money or rent money coming up,” Lemuel says.

The community surrounding the three bars raised a substantial amount of money through an online donation platform, but those funds will only sustain the venues’ rent for the coming month at the most.

Lemuel says that LGBTQ-community-supported bars like his aren’t massively profitable to begin with. His focus right now is ensuring that he’s able to reopen when the pandemic ends and make sure that the staff has money for rent and bills.

“The weight of this is that we didn’t have any dedicated queer spaces [in Raleigh] before,” Lemuel says. “And if we go out of business, then there’s this huge weight that we won’t have one again for a long time.”

While facing disparate challenges, the owners have a unified message: The restaurants, bars, and venues you’ve relied on now need your support.

“We live in a culture where going out and eating out is part of living,” Salamanca says. “I would imagine that everyone has at least one favorite place where they like to dine or do takeout. If they have that connection to a place, then they can relate to the hardship that someone is going through at this moment. If you could donate the money that you spend on an average, weekly basis while dining out, that would make a difference.” W

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To make a tax-deductible donation to support employment for people with disabilities, please send a check to: The Partnership for a Sustainable Community, attn: Special Treats Inc., 104 S. Estes Dr., Chapel Hill, NC 27514.

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March 25, 2020

9

WHITHER THE FOOD TRUCK?

SHUTDOWN STORIES

The restaurant industry is being bled dry by the coronavirus.

Food trucks aren’t far behind.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

A

food truck can make anything feel like a party.

During warm months, they’re everywhere—at gas stations, breweries, farmers markets. Most food trucks are event-focused. They go where the people are.

Except, amid the coronavirus shutdown, there are no events. No open taprooms. No large groups of people.

Harry Monds has owned and operated Bull City Street Food for five years. He rotates through a diverse streetfood-based menu: everything from Jamaican beef patties and BBQ chicken mac and cheese to spicy fish cakes and chicken pot pie. The business began as a catering experiment, eventually growing into a full-fledged operation that Monds sees as an extension of the Triangle’s high-quality restaurant scene.

On a typical weekday, he’d begin by driving his truck to RTP for the lunch crowd, then hit a bar or a brewery to set up and wait for people to begin after-work socializing.

In early March, he saw festivals and breweries canceling events, weddings being postponed. Then offices began emptying out. The decline in business was particularly rough, given that Monds has spent the past year and a half preparing to open his first brick-and-mortar outpost in the Durham Food Hall.

“We are in a precarious situation because we were going to be opening,” Monds says. “Funds-wise, we have pretty much put everything we’ve had into that over the past year.”

The concept, called Lula and Sadie’s, was supposed to open at the end of March.

On March 16, Mayor Steve Schewel and Durham County Board of Commissioners chairwoman Wendy Jacobs held a conference call with area hospitality professionals to let them know of the incoming mandate from the governor’s office: Across the state, restaurants and bars would go dark, except for takeout and delivery.

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Pork in the Road outside of Ponysaurus on February 23.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHAD CHRISTENSEN

The ban was an extreme measure, but at least it came packaged with tweaks to unemployment regulations that would provide some relief to the thousands of restaurant workers about to be unemployed.

Numerous food-truck owners were also on the call, including Monds. And although food trucks were exempt from the closures, local owners nonetheless hung up the call with a heavy heart. As people disappeared from the streets, the decline in business was about to get worse.

A 2018 study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranked Raleigh 11th in the nation for food-truck friendliness, thanks to cheap permitting and low operating costs.

Today, in fact, Wake County has 183 actively permitted food trucks, though not all of them are operating; Durham County has 143.

Other factors have made the Triangle fertile ground for a mobile-kitchen revolution, too. There’s a vibrant, ever-changing food scene. There are universities, which means packs of students in search of late-night tacos.

There’s RTP as well as thriving downtowns that make it easy to catch customers for lunch. And there are the film festivals and food rodeos, the fairs and arena concerts.

Christian Thompson and Allison Overington of Pork in the Road have been serving pork (as well as vegetarian and kosher options) out of their marigold-colored truck for two and a half years. The business was just beginning to pay off. Overington notes that the virus hits the food-truck industry at a particularly difficult time—the beginning of the event season.

“A lot of food trucks use April and May as a way to reinvigorate their capital so you can run through the rest of the summer and then bankroll all the hard months in winter,” she says.

Thompson and Overington are on a WhatsApp thread with more than 100 other food truck owners in the Trian-

gle and Triad. Normally, it’s a space buzzing with tips. The past couple of weeks, however, it’s been a space to anxiously workshop survival techniques. Ramped-up sanitary measures. Ideas for keeping customers physically spaced out. Different specials and deals.

Most businesses have taken to parking near apartment complexes and waiting. Monds has been parking outside the West End apartments in Durham.

“My payroll is tomorrow,” Monds told the INDY on Wednesday. “I’m pulling everything I can together to meet the payroll. Second to payroll is trying to keep employees employed.”

Not all food trucks rely on events: Julio Velasquez, the owner of Mexican JV American, typically parks near one of the bus stops along Highway 55, occasionally relocating to a construction site.

A few weeks ago, his regular customer base thinned to a trickle. For now, he’s improvising, crafting specials and trying to find apartment complexes where people are still going outside. His priority is his five employees, three of whom are full-time.

“What about my employees?” Velasquez asks. “Everyone has bills to pay, rent to pay.”

The needs of restaurants have been visible. A number of fundraising campaigns have sprung up to support bartenders and wait staff without work.

Higher-end restaurants have publicists. Food trucks— permitted to operate, as of now, but with almost no one to serve—have been left behind. They don’t want to get sick, and they want to help keep the public healthy. They hope they won’t lose their businesses.

“Friday, we were on a shift, and we watched emails come in and shifts just disappear,” Overington says. “It’s really been tough. You’re just watching all this money, future money and potential revenues, disappear.” W

SHUTDOWN STORIES

LEFT BEHIND Triangle universities made coronavirus decisions quickly, but some workers were left in the dark.

BY SARA PEQUEÑO AND COLE VILLENA backtalk@indyweek.com

W

hen the coronavirus was confirmed in North Carolina in early March, the Triangle’s universities were among the first to react. Duke University extended its spring break and announced a move to online classes March 10. The next day, the UNC System Board of Governors made the same call.

The shutdowns were met with questions—not just from students, but from staff as well. Dining-hall workers, sanitation staff, graduate students, and resident advisers weren’t sure when they’d be returning to campus, if they’d be getting paid, and even if they still had jobs.

Contracted workers—those who worked for the university through a third-party vendor that operates on the university—were especially confused. They’d been considered essential to the universities in hurricanes and snow, but the pandemic was new territory.

The INDY spoke with workers at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State, and N.C. Central to see how they’re treating workers as students and faculty desert campus.

DUKE On March 10, Duke students and faculty received a notice that the university would close its doors. Students were told their spring break would be extended until March 22, and classes would continue online.

The university’s contracted workers were not told anything.

Davon Ferguson, a 22-year-old contracted worker in the Brodhead Center and a member of grassroots group Duke Contract Workers United, says he never heard from the university that students would not be returning or anything about what would happen to food vendors while campus is closed.

Most communication from the university to contracted employees comes from managers. But Ferguson heard about the decisions from students. “[My friend] had said they were closing school down for the rest of the year, essentially,” Ferguson says. “I was like, that’s got to be taken out of context.”

Twitter told him it wasn’t. He texted his manager for confirmation. The workers didn’t receive any information from their employer until later that day.

Another contracted worker, who asked to remain anonymous, says that while she is still employed, her schedule says zero hours. “Some of us are in really dire situations,” she says. “We’re making a hundred dollars stretch right now.”

Under pressure from contracted staff, who banded together as Duke Contract Workers United, Duke vice president Tallman Trask III released a statement on March 18 promising that all food service workers “currently assigned to work full-time in Duke University facilities as well as employees of the Washington Duke Inn and J.B. Duke Hotel will maintain their current pay through May 31, 2020, to the extent that their employers are unable to do so, and they are not covered by pending state and federal government programs.”

Members of DCWU worried that the “full-time” wording might prevent some contract workers from being paid; many workers in the Brodhead Center’s dining stations are kept under the full-time limit so that contractors don’t have to pay them $15 an hour or offer benefits.

But on Sunday, The Duke Chronicle reported that the administration said it considered anyone who worked 30 hours or more to be full-time, even if hours were split between companies under one contractor.

However, DCWU still says most contract workers won’t meet the requirement. Another contracted employee told the INDY she works only 29 hours a week. She and others in DCWU say this is the case for many contracted workers.

UNC-CHAPEL HILL, N.C. STATE At public universities, communication between faculty and staff has been more transparent. The UNC System said supervisors must determine which employees are mandatory and not mandatory—meaning who continues to work on campus and who stays home.

Faydene Alston, a housekeeper at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Davis Library, says she was told by her supervisor that she’d receive paid administrative leave until she could return to work. This was confirmed by a March 17 statement from the university saying that any non-mandatory employee who could not do their job at home would still be paid.

On N.C. State’s campus, the conversation hasn’t been as clear. Grace Ullman, a teaching assistant, graduate student, and president of the university’s UE150 NC Public Service Workers Union chapter, says she’s received more information as a student than as an employee.

The university confirmed that all employees would be informed by supervisors what constituted a Some of us are mandatory or non-mandatory worker, but UE150 wants a standardized in really dire definition. Other university efforts, situations. We’re such as sick leave that won’t draw from the employees’ allotted sick making a hundred days, only hold up until March 31. dollars stretch “This is not going to be over in less than two weeks,” Ullman says. right now.

“If anything, there’s going to be more sick people around.”

“

N.C. CENTRAL Larry Tucker, a mandatory employee at N.C. Central, has to show up every day. His job performing maintenance on campus residential buildings hasn’t changed much since the reduction in operations, he says.

“It’s pretty much business as usual,” he says.

“We don’t have any more personal protective equipment than we usually have.”

Tucker says he’s been asked multiple times by his supervisor to sign a letter saying that he’d continue to work during the university’s reduced operations.

He responded that he’d continue to come in, but he refused to sign a letter obligating him to do so.

“You don’t have to worry about me coming up with excuses and saying I’m not coming in,” he says. “But I have an uncle that has kidney cancer, and two of my children have asthma, so that’s a compromised immune system.”

Tucker provided the INDY with a copy of the letter, which was circulated by Central’s Office of Administration and Finance. A representative from the office says the letter was intended to clarify the definition and responsibilities of a mandatory employee, not to bind them to show up, and employees weren’t obligated to sign. W KeepItINDY.com

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March 25, 2020

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SHUTDOWN STORIES

FROZEN IN TIME IN A FROZEN ECONOMY A makeshift bulletin board on Ninth Street offers a window into what might have been

BY CARMELA GUAGLIANONE backtalk@indyweek.com

T

he building is empty, and the sun-bleached paint is peeling, but the wall of Ninth Street’s now-defunct clothing store, Native Threads, is still alive with a kaleidoscope of brightly colored flyers.

The makeshift bulletin board, an old-school way to learn about events in the area, stands as a snapshot of what life had in store before the COVID-19 shutdown earlier this month. Since then, concerts, comedy shows, and meditation classes have been canceled as chaos and social distance have overtaken the Triangle.

We tracked down the performers and organizers behind some of the flyers to ask how the state’s cultural shutdown affected their events—and them.

THE BRIGHT SIDE CONFERENCE, GONE VIRTUAL The flyer for The Bright Side Conference is, appropriately enough, quite bubbly. It promotes “a gathering [of] high-fiving women for where they’re at now and helping them get to where they want to go.”

But with high-fiving deemed unsafe, the event wouldn’t be held as planned in Raleigh on March 21 and 22.

Still, The Bright Side Conference “was always about optimism,” says organizer Jess Ekstrom, and she has 12

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INDYweek.com

Flyers on a makeshift Ninth Street bulletin board

PHOTO BY CARMELA GUAGLIANONE

adapted. With unpredictability being just about the only predictable thing in our lives, Ekstrom and her team are still leaning into their hopeful message: “We need [optimism] now more than ever.”

The conference, rescheduled for April 25, will go on, albeit in a different form. The organizers have shifted gears to make the whole thing virtual—which, Ekstrom says, has come with unforeseen benefits. She invokes a phrase a friend has been using: “With new problems come new solutions.”

The conference, originally open only to women, will now be open to anyone. The virtual platform also allows selfpaced access to talks and workshops that never expire on topics such as yoga, meditation, and art. The team has been able to invite more speakers now that travel is not a consideration, and their message is reaching more people and might have “a greater ripple effect.”

Ekstrom says the episode is a reminder to be flexible and learn.

“Sometimes we think because something was our original plan, it was right,” Ekstrom says. In having to reeval-

uate her plans, she found that there are “things in store for us that we don’t even know about.”

That created a shift in the conference’s central theme as well. It will now focus on “the future and how we can remain optimistic.”

Ekstrom graduated from N.C. State with a bachelor’s degree in communication and media studies in 2013.

Since then, she’s started two businesses, made a name for herself as a public speaker, and recently published a book titled, appropriately enough, Chasing the Bright Side. The book emphasizes using optimism as a tool to create the life you want to live. She got her start in college when she founded a company called Headbands of Hope that donated a headband to a child with cancer for every headband sold.

“I had no idea what I was doing but had this belief that I could make the future better,” she says.

She’s taken a similar approach for The Bright Side Conference. Since participants won’t be getting swag bags, the conference is donating them to nurses and hospital staffers.

Yet even Ekstrom sometimes finds it tough to see the bright side.

“One moment I’m like, ‘This is great,’ and then the next moment I get sucked into a dark hole on Twitter,” she admits.

She describes the experience as “an emotional roller coaster” but says she’s maintained a sense of hope. Like so many, Ekstrom is finding solace in the community that will come from this strange and unknown time.

“It’s affecting everyone,” Ekstrom says.

“And that’s the good and the bad part. But there’s so much unity in that.”

THE REBECCA SHOW, POSTPONED The flyer for The Rebecca Show’s What if I’m the Becky? features two women striking thoughtful poses. Rebecca Fox and Rebecca Jackson-Artis are pondering one of life’s most pressing questions, posed by the title of their show, which was postponed at Pure Life Theatre. Their website describes Becky as “a catch-all name for a white woman who doesn’t get it … is that redundant?”

The show—set to run from March 12–22 before being postponed—was going to cover “sexism, racism, violence, the brutality of motherhood, exploitation in sports, regrets in old age, and the dynamics of changing friendships.”

Fox says the two Rebeccas “are proud to have made a decisive, timely choice” in pushing the performance back. The Manbites Dog Theater Fund, which was sponsoring the show, “has given all the recipients an extension,” she adds.

Fox, a bilingual speech-language pathologist, teacher, performer, and mother, says she’s now focused on taking care of her children, who are out of school. She’s not yet sure when performing will be back on her mind.

“I’m anticipating that we will all be inside for a long time,” Fox says. “I’m hopeful that after my family and I have established some semblance of a new routine, I’ll be able to carve out some time and energy for work and a creative life again.”

She adds: “As with so many things, it’s TBD.”

LAMA GESHE DENMA, CANCELED “Tibetan Lama Geshe Denma will introduce practices of Nine Breaths of Purification and Tsa Lung,” promises one flyer, advertising a weekend of Tibetan Yogas of Body and Breath. It describes the Nine Breaths of Purification as “a simple yet powerful practice for clearing our relation-

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ships to attachment, aversion, and ignorance by regulating our breath and bringing awareness to the movement of the winds in the channels.” Tsa Lung, meanwhile, teaches exercises that cleanse the chakras. The flyer notes that these are “movements easily learned and benefits quickly felt.”

Scheduled for March 20–22, the weekend of meditative practice was canceled, leaving the chakras of many Durhamites clogged. Lama Geshe Denma, who was born in Nepal and trained in India, was coming to Durham from a nearby retreat in Virginia. Now that he will no longer be passing through, it would be a challenge to reschedule.

But yogi and event sponsor John Gordon Moore has found peace with the decision.

“Although I was certainly disappointed that the workshop had to be canceled,” he says, “it also provides an opportunity to practice contentment and to gracefully accept whatever life offers.”

Moore, a Durham local since 1999, has been teaching yoga since 1987, and in his many years with the practice, he has come to learn that it is “not only about flexibility of body but also of mind.”

He says this time of reassessment and finding grace in the midst of disorder reminds him of an old Sanskrit word, “Santosa.” The word embodies a profound sense of comfortability or contentment.

Already, the quietness that life has taken on has prompted contemplation in Moore.

“Surprised isn’t the right word,” he muses. “I’m impressed by the ways the community is coming together.” W

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HISTORY TRIVIA: • On March 27, 1911, Pisgah National Forest was created. Land for the forest was bought under the Weeks Act, which allocated federal funds for the purchase of land for conservation in the eastern U.S. • On March 28, 1880, Körner’s Folly, designer and painter Jule Gilmer Körner’ show house, opened to the public in Kernersville, NC. Körner had made his fortune by painting murals of the Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco bull across the east coast.

Courtesy of the Museum of Durham History

This story was produced through a partnership between the INDY and The 9th Street Journal, which is published by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

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March 25, 2020

13

SHUTDOWN STORIES

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW No one’s been tracking how many people tried to get coronavirus tests but couldn’t. Last week, an IT guy in Durham decided to give it a shot.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

O

n March 11, the day after Governor Cooper declared North Carolina a state of emergency, 21-year-old N.C. State student Audrey Roh flew from Raleigh to New York City to visit with friends for spring break.

She returned on March 16, the day before Cooper shut down the state’s bars and restaurants, feeling tired and sick, and soon developed a fever and cough. Thinking she might have been exposed to the coronavirus, she made an appointment at N.C. State’s student health center.

When Roh went in, she says, she tested negative for the flu—a prerequisite for a COVID-19 test.

But after waiting for more than an hour, Roh says, she was told that she didn’t qualify for a COVID-19 test. The reason: She’d taken a fever reducer before going to the health center, and the center required proof that her fever was as severe as she said it was.

Several days later, one of her friends in NYC tested positive for COVID-19. Roh says the health center told her she could come back, but she’s already started feeling better; her fever has broken.

She’ll probably never get tested. She’ll never know whether she had the coronavirus.

These stories aren’t uncommon. By now, the Trump administration’s failure to make tests widely available, even as President Trump falsely assured Americans that anyone who wanted a test could get one, has been well-documented. What’s less documented is how many people tried to get tested but were turned away. As The Washington Post reported on March 12, “The number of medical professionals and patients who are denied access to tests is not tracked nationally.”

That sentence jumped out at Charles Mangin, who works for Oracle in downtown Durham.

“Nobody is tracking people who present with symptoms and don’t get a test,” he says. “The numbers you see on the news, they’re only based on people who have had access to a test.”

Last Tuesday, he took about a half-hour and set up covidtest.me. The website is simple—it’s just a Google doc. It’s less quantitative than qualitative; it doesn’t track people who couldn’t get tests so much as allow them to self-report their stories. Mangin stores the data privately, telling those who submit that he’ll only provide it to journalists and medical researchers.

As of Friday, 125 people had reported their symptoms. (Mangin also posted the link to his site in a Reddit thread, which garnered hundreds of comments sharing similar stories.)

One of them, a 31-year-old in Illinois, wrote: “Called my state’s COVID-19 hotline. They told me my symptoms and spouse’s recent association with people who have traveled warranted me getting a test, and I should go to the ER. Called ER ahead of time, and they told me they could not test me because they do not have any tests.”

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Another, from Ohio: “Go to the doctor after booking an appointment for mild coughing/ fever/aching, etc. There’s a sign on the door that says, ‘If you’re coughing OR have a fever OR shortness of breath, don’t come in EVEN if you have an appointment.’ So I call them and she’s like, ‘You cannot come in here with your symptoms. You have to go to the ER for a COVID-19 test.’ So I call the ER and THEY tell me that I have to pay full ER prices if I don’t have a PRESCRIPTION for a test. Which my doctor won’t give me because she won’t see me. And now we’re in a situation where Ohioans have to pay full ER prices for a coronavirus test.”

Later, the submitter provided an update: “I called my doctor to ask if they could just send over a script. They’re not sure what to Nobody is tracking do. Said they would call me back, people who present which was now over an hour ago.”

And then another: “Doctor called. with symptoms and Said, ‘There’s no script for the test, so just stay home.’ Which means don’t get a test. The the ER is asking for scripts that don’t exist.” numbers you see on “I haven’t read through them all,” Mangin says. “I thumbed through. the news, they’re It really is people who can legitimately fit into the category of, only based on people ‘I was in contact with someone who was really sick now. I was on who have had access a plane in Italy. I was on a cruise to a test. ship. Either I was in contact with somebody, or I’m sick and in contact with somebody, and I don’t want to get sick.”

On March 13, President Trump belatedly declared a national state of emergency and announced a series of steps to boost the availability of public testing in the U.S. As of Monday, while the U.S. has begun producing more tests, testing is not nearly as available as public experts believe is necessary—there are still not enough testing kits, protective gear for medical personnel, swabs for sampling, reagents to extract genetic material, or even humans to do the work. Per capita, the U.S. has tested 30 times fewer people than has South Korea.

And because the U.S. is so far behind in testing, it’s likely we’ll never know how many people actually had COVID-19—or how many people died from it. As of Monday, the U.S. had at least 41,000 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus.

The real number, Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch wrote in The Washington Post on Monday, is likely 10 times higher. W

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SHUTDOWN STORIES

MASK COMES OFF While local hospitals scramble to gather enough medical supplies to combat coronavirus, one company allegedly tried to cash in on the crisis.

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

A

s patients testing positive for coronavirus begin to pour into area hospitals, health care workers’ front line of defense is less than a millimeter of protective fabric—face masks and gloves that keep doctors and nurses from becoming infected with the virus themselves, and keep them from infecting other patients.

But there isn’t enough of this vital gear to go around, and area hospitals—Duke Health, UNC Health, and WakeMed—are asking the community to chip in.

One local company allegedly saw an opportunity in the crisis, according to a price-gouging complaint made to the state Attorney General’s Office, one of 225 such complaints the office has received since Governor Cooper declared a state of emergency on March 10. Most focus on stores jacking up the price of hand sanitizer or toilet paper. This one, however, alleges that a Morrisville-based business tried to charge Duke Health more than four times the normal cost of face masks.

On March 11, Mike Kivel, the director of Duke Hospital’s supply chain, received an email from Oliver Block, a sales representative for Stephen Gould, whose website describes it as “the largest independent custom product and packaging solutions provider” in the country.

Normally, Duke pays $35 for a pack of 17 N95 face masks, about $2 a mask, according to the price-gouging complaint. For a bulk order of 7 million masks, Stephen Gould wanted to charge $8.45 per mask, according to emails included in the complaint.

“Due to the extremely high demand, and sold-out U.S. supply, we’re currently importing products from Mexico and South America but it is all volume-based business and time-restricted,” Stephen Gould employee Sam Sweet wrote to Duke in a March 12 email.

In the complaint, a Duke Health procurement employee called the pricing “usurious,” noting the manufacturer hasn’t changed its pricing.

Representatives from Stephen Gould did not return the INDY’s request for comment. Duke Health spokeswoman Sarah Avery declined to comment on this alleged incident.

Duke, WakeMed, and UNC are asking the public to donate the supplies they need to fight the virus.

“This situation is unprecedented, and we are asking for extra help,” says UNC Health CEO Wesley Burkes.

The most urgent need is for N95 face masks, surgical masks, and nasal swabs. Hospitals are also asking for disinfectant, safety goggles, gloves, hand sanitizer, soap, and shoe covers.

Hospitals can only accept new, unopened supplies.

Monetary donations are also welcome. W

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SHUTDOWN STORIES

COVID, INCARCERATED Jails are a petri dish for infections. What are local officials doing to protect detainees from the coronavirus?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

J

ails and prisons, like nursing homes, face a significant threat from the coronavirus, which thrives in confined, close-quartered populations and preys on the medically vulnerable.

While no one in the state’s prisons or local jails has tested positive for COVID-19, officials in Durham and Wake Counties aren’t taking any chances. Last week, they released detainees who are older, have underlying health issues, and are charged with nonviolent offenses from county lockups. Court officials also say they’re reviewing custody rolls to locate people they can release.

John Bull, a spokesman with the state Department of Public Safety, says the state isn’t yet considering early release for offenders housed in corrections facilities across the state.

That hasn’t stopped some inmates from seeking release. Last week, attorneys at the Duke University School of Law representing Ronnie Long—who’s served 44 years in state prison for a rape he says he didn’t commit—asked Governor Cooper to commute Long’s sentence. On March 16, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Long’s motion to rehear his claim that evidence prosecutors withheld at trial might have affected the jury’s verdict; because of the pandemic, however, the court postponed his hearing indefinitely.

“The COVID-19 virus will make its way into North Carolina’s prisons,” the attorneys wrote in a letter to Cooper, “and Mr. Long is at high risk for severe illness from the virus, as he is above 60 years old and has a chronic underlying condition.”

DPS officials say they’ve ramped up their sanitation and prisoner-hygiene efforts by distributing hundreds of gallons of liquid soap and disinfectant to prevent COVID-19 from breaking out in state prisons.

Bull says that Correction Enterprises, an in-house production company for DPS staffed by inmates, created a non-alcohol-based hand lotion and disinfectant in “large quantities.” (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that individuals use soap and water or hand sanitizer with an alcohol content of at least 60 percent to minimize the risk of contracting the coronavirus.)

Bull declined to comment on DPS’s contingency plans in the event of an outbreak. The prison system houses about 34,300 people across the state.

“No one has tested positive for COVID-19 at this point,” Bull says. “The great hope is that it does not make its way in.”

Each prison has a medical section or hospital—with the largest at Raleigh’s Central Prison—equipped with health providers experienced at handling infectious disease cases, Bull says.

The Durham County Sheriff’s Office was not available for comment on Friday about its plans if a detainee tests positive for COVID-19. Last week, the DCSO suspended all in-person and video visitation at the jail, opting instead for remote visitation, and began screening and temporarily quarantining new detainees.

The Durham County Detention Facility has beds for 736 inmates. On Friday, there were just 326 people in custody.

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“We want to make sure they are not a danger to themselves or others who are detained, especially in these times,” District Attorney Satana Deberry told the INDY. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman says her office, along with other court officials, is doing much the same thing. There are four courtrooms still operating in the Wake County Justice Center. Court officials are sending defendants charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses home with unsecured bonds.

Freeman’s office is encouraging law enforcement to issue notices to appear in court instead of arresting people and working with the Wake County Sheriff’s Office to identify more people in custody who might be eligible for unsecured release.

In addition, Chief District Court Judge Robert Rader recently signed an order suspending weekend jail sentences for low-level Wake County offenders in an effort to reduce the number of people in jail.

The detention centers in downtown Raleigh and on Hammond Road have a total bed capacity of 1,568.

They currently house almost 2,000 people, including 408 inmates in the jail annex, according to data provided by WCSO spokesman Eric Curry.

According to a March 13 press release, the WCSO updated its screening procedure to include asking new detainees if they’d recently been out of the country or had been in contact with someone who had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

The jail has four negative-pressure rooms in which to house anyone believed to have been exposed to the coronavirus.

Curry says that while no detainees have tested positive for the coronavirus, the jail’s medical staff is currently monitoring five or six inmates out of an abundance of caution.

On Friday, he adds, Sheriff Gerald Baker implemented a policy placing all new detainees in single cells for a 14-day period.

“One or two cases can spread like wildfire,” Curry says. W

“

The COVID-19 virus will make its way into North Carolina prisons.

”

LEADING LIGHT

SHUTDOWN STORIES

How not to shut down during a crisis with inspiring Durham musician A.yoni Jeffries

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

W

e often pay lip service to art’s power to heal, uplift, and inspire, but the coronavirus crisis has forced us to test those clichés and see if they hold true.

For me, the definitive proof came when I put on Durham musician A.yoni Jeffries’s video “Searchin 4” on Friday, while she, along with all other gigging artists, was trying to figure out how to bring people together in a world without gatherings.

“Searchin 4,” a beautiful piano ballad with lyrics open to all kinds of healing interpretation, was set to appear on her first full-length album on May 2. For me, it turned a moment of stressful isolation into one of soothing connection that I hadn’t realized I needed that badly. I don’t mind telling you it made me cry.

Thus soothed and uplifted, I was then inspired by Jeffries’s optimism and can-do spirit in our interview, which was particularly striking coming from someone who’d just lost all her freelance income and postponed her album, Potential Gon Pay, indefinitely.

Instead of caving to the crisis, Jeffries is not only continuing to work on the album with engineer Chaka Harley at Durham’s Playground Studios, but she’s also starting a new web series called A Deeper Look Within. Produced at and sponsored by Living Arts Collective (with subjects contributing remotely), it will give bite-size looks into the lives of North Carolina artists and small-business owners three times per week—Tuesday through Thursday— starting March 24.

The series was conceived as a way to connect people and support artists at a time of crisis, but it’s also just a lemons-to-lemonade good idea.

“Day in, day out, people are doing their gigs, but we don’t know anything about them, and we wait until they get access to bigger platforms to share their story,” Jeffries says. “We want to tap into what it means to be human, have people really talk about their challenging times that may not be the happiest but define who we are as artists.”

You can watch the introductory video to learn more about who Jeffries is, though it’s hard to imagine how it will fit in five minutes.

In addition to a singer, songwriter, and musician, she’s an arts curator, a community organizer, and the project manager at Handèwa Farms, an Afro-Indigenous-led hemp-farming co-op in Rougemont. Handèwa means “generational” in Tutelo, the native tongue of Jeffries’s Occaneechi-Saponi tribe; the pandemic is also disrupting the spring planting season.

Potential Gon Pay features production by Feelo, Dexter “Strizzy” Jeffries, Kevin Patterson, and others; the collaborators come from as far away as Nigeria and Germany and from as nearby as Jeffries’s family (Strizzy is her cousin).

“I’m really excited to have this be a project representative of myself but also have a global feel,” Jeffries says. “I’m Native American and Jamaican, which are very different cultures, but I was blessed to have them both. To highlight them feels very necessary to provide people with the spiritual part of it, but I also pride myself in being very down-to-earth, very urban, and I’m very excited for people to experience a body of work I think is representative of so many Americans today.”

Though the album’s release is indefinitely delayed—at least until Jeffries feels it’s possible to have a live event, a crucial component—a

A D E E P E R LO O K WITHIN WEB SERIES

A .YO N I J E F F R I E S : “RESPECT THE HUSSLE”

Starting Tuesday, Mar. 24 Instagram: @dreamsthatprosper

Tuesday, Mar. 31 Instagram: @ayonijeffries

A.yoni Jeffries

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

new Potential Gon Pay single will join “Searchin 4” and the guitar-flecked R&B of “Our Terms” on March 31. “Respect the Hussle” pays tribute to the contemporary rap legend Nipsey Hussle on the first anniversary of his death, with a video by Christian Wilson expected to follow soon.

“The budget that was going to support the project has been cut in less than half because of the pandemic, and it seems very paradoxical because you look outside and it’s just beautiful, spring is here, things are growing,” Jeffries says. “I can sense a time of rebirth. Music is one of the only things that can really heal without any invasion. You don’t have to ingest it, it doesn’t have to be applied topically, you don’t have to do surgery. People can connect to it and share it with their friends when they can’t be together. A virtual hug, if you will.”

As Jeffries turns her energy toward A Deeper Look Within, which this week will feature Chaka Harley, the musician Darion Alexander, and the photographer Kennedi Carter, she has a realistic yet encouragingly sanguine perspective on an anxious time.

“A freelancing artist is my livelihood,” Jeffries says. “It’s not an easy one, but it’s the one I chose to be able to live out my dreams. So I’m in a bind, but I’m keeping myself encouraged and motivated, and of course, there are so many people in this same boat. Something about that unifying factor makes me feel that it’s not me, it’s outside of my control, and anything that’s outside of my control, I can’t let get to me right now.”

If you’re looking for signs of energy, hope, new music, and raised voices right now, Jeffries’s light is one to follow. Check @ayonijeffries on Instagram for the new music and @dreamsthatprosper on Instagram for the web series. W KeepItINDY.com

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SHUTDOWN STORIES

LIVING THE STREAM For the performing arts, the silver lining of COVID-19 cancellations might be the golden age of livestreaming

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

S

now and ice might cross out the occasional weekend of local theater, dance, and music. A rare natural disaster, such as Hurricane Fran in 1996, could turn out the lights for a little longer. But the region’s performing artists have never seen anything like the coronavirus.

As government measures to contain the threat of COVID-19 escalated during the second week of March—including the unprecedented closure of Broadway on March 12—the Triangle’s largest arts presenters, dance and theater companies, and music venues began postponing or scratching dozens of shows slated over the coming weeks and months. Duke Performances and Carolina Performing Arts canceled the rest of their seasons outright. By the time the governor banned gatherings over 100 people on March 14, only a handful of independent theater and dance productions were still playing to live audiences.

But even in the darkest hour in decades, a group of innovative artists and technicians were busy engineering a means of placing their art in front of paying audiences, even if they could no longer reach them face-to-face, by taking it online, live.

Between March 14 and 16, four independent local groups streamed five live events to hundreds of viewers on the internet. Local artists across genres finally capitalized on a technology that others had found too daunting in the past—and opened the doors for others to follow.

ShaLeigh Dance Works’ The In-Between was scheduled to premiere at The Fruit on the same day that the gathering ban came down. Based on recent years, choreographer ShaLeigh Comerford could have anticipated selling out the alternative performance venue, but in the current climate, she was facing dwindling audiences and major financial losses as her one-weekend run progressed.

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After Comerford decided to livestream the show, webmaster Majid Bastani and technician Joe Bell worked Friday and Saturday to overcome a number of obstacles before switching out computers mere moments before Saturday night’s successful broadcast.

Now Comerford is planning to livestream all future works, but with an online production schedule longer than two days.

“I think I’m going to always do it,” she says. “It helped us reach more people, not only locally but outside our town and state, all over the country.”

Singer, songwriter, and music ethnographer Kamara Thomas recalls the doubts she had about livestreaming the latest in her series of country and Americana showcases, Country Soul Songbook, at NorthStar Church of the Arts on March 15.

“I was thinking, is this going to be fun? There’s going to be nobody here to interact with,” Thomas says.

But by the end of the show, which reached more than 400 viewers—an audience larger than NorthStar could accommodate—those misgivings were erased.

Thomas compares the mix of interviews and electric and acoustic performances, occasionally interrupted by pitches for merch like custom-designed coffee mugs, to “those old days of TV when everyone was off-guard enough to let the intimacy come through.” She found the experience “more off-the-cuff, less precious—a more authentic presentation of what’s going on.”

Given her ultimate goals for Country Soul Songbook as a web-based documentary platform and artist-driven archive, Thomas had a “eureka moment” in the days leading up to the show. Perhaps her most exciting discovery from the streaming showcase is that she can produce them a lot more often than the live concerts she’s been producing.

ShaLeigh Dance Works pulled off a last-minute livestream of The In-Between as the coronavirus came. PHOTO BY SHALEIGH COMERFORD

“This is what the long-term vision of the program was anyway. We were just getting dragged into the future a little early,” she says. “There’s a rainbow of possibilities that’s really flexible, exciting, and calling me toward it now.”

For Curtis Eller, who leads Curtis Eller’s American Circus, a monthlong tour of Australia, Holland, and England he’d been planning for a year vaporized in a moment. Pretour dates closer to home were canceled as well.

“Fortunately, in times of distress, people turn to the banjo,” Eller wryly observes. Joking aside, the band’s March 16 concert on Facebook Live was as much about “figuring out how to be a performer in this world we’re in” as overcoming the financial devastation of a sacrificed tour.

“At the least, I wanted to put a little bit of joy out in an otherwise really bleak time,” Eller says. “We didn’t do much in terms of promoting it; we didn’t have time.”

He made a Facebook page for the band’s “Quarantine Live Stream” the day before the show. Even so, more than 300 viewers caught the live broadcast and generously supported the band via online tip jars and Bandcamp purchases. Still, the seat-of-the-pants approach nearly ran aground when they couldn’t get the band’s studio gear to interface with the livestream before the show.

“We unplugged everything and went totally acoustic into the camera’s microphone,” Eller says. “It worked fine.”

Traditionally, local theater companies have never been able to legally stream productions online; publishing houses controlling the production rights would never license a livestream performance. But in the face of canceled premieres and lost royalties, publishers and playwrights have become increasingly interested in seeing new and developmental works performed online.

That’s how the Women’s Theatre Festival landed a 2019 Pulitzer finalist and an Obie Award-winning playwright for their nascent series of virtual staged readings, which began March 15 on the festival’s Twitch.tv channel. This Thursday, March 26, Lauren Gunderson—currently the most-produced living American playwright—will participate in a talkback after a locally produced staged reading of her 2018 one-woman show, Natural Shocks.

Indeed, throughout the past week, we have seen comedy, concerts, and theatrical readings (at least one drunk—that would be TwiLIT, in which Lauren Knott and other actors drink their way through the purple prose of Twilight on Facebook Live) that could not have otherwise been publicly performed.

Jim Haverkamp at Shadowbox Studios likens the sudden diversity, innovation, and chaos of online offerings to the days of live radio. He and partner Alex Maness are giving Shadowbox a technical upgrade to place the venue at the center of it. Last weekend, the studio hosted live online performances from improvisational theater artists Ian Bowater and Paul Deblinger and a concert by Charles Latham and the Borrowed Band.

“It’s an ongoing experiment, and we all have to jump in and start swimming,” Haverkamp says. He thinks the tech is now at the tipping point; myriad creative programming opportunities can arise when independent artists can afford access to professional online production equipment, and that’s happening in our region.

“Live television used to be what now we’re seeing on Facebook Live,” Haverkamp says. “We’re now heading into our golden age of livestreaming. A variety show, a fireside chat, or a concert: The sky’s now the limit—well, actually, the bandwidth’s the limit.” W

“

The sky’s now the limit—well, actually, the bandwidth’s the limit.

”

WO M E N ’ S T H E AT R E F E S T I VA L V I R T UA L PLAYREADING BOOK CLUB: NATURAL SHOCKS

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SHUTDOWN STORIES

SHOCK RESISTANCE COVID-19 reveals the urgency of rethinking revenue-based arts funding. Culture Mill models a more durable way.

BY TOMMY NOONAN backtalk@indyweek.com

T

he COVID-19 crisis has exposed what many of us in the arts already know: We live in a society with attitudes and public policies that subject artists to the same forces that govern the rest of the goods-and-services economy.

But the arts are not, nor should they be, goods and services. The nature of artistic production demands a different relationship to time and resources, and if we value the arts as a culture, we have to do more than pay lip service to that—we have to act on it.

I’m not going to make an extensive argument for the value of the arts; I’ll just mention that they represent 4.2 percent of American GDP—a greater segment than agriculture or transportation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Still, artists are seen as expendable, and the economic sector offers little protection for independent contractors who draw income from gig to gig and live from month to month.

Many artists have internalized this culture and produce art by depleting ourselves, considering our labor as infinite and, too often, free. Instead of creating sustainable financial support systems, we hope to keep our heads above water by getting enough butts in seats each time the curtain opens. And if it just doesn’t open at all—say, when it becomes unethical to gather in large groups—our income drops to zero.

I am a performing artist, and with Murielle Elizéon, I co-direct Culture Mill, a nonprofit performing-arts lab in Saxapahaw. It goes without saying that Culture Mill is financially impacted by the pandemic. We have so far lost at least $15,000 in revenue, mostly through canceled residencies, events, and commissions. However, we are fortunate, as this loss is not yet an existential threat to our organization or to my ability to pay rent and buy food.

This is because the way we are set up is counter to the prevailing model for performing artists in the U.S., which is to draw a variable income from single-run productions or tours that depend largely on ticket sales or contracts that are subject to market forces and disruptions.

We have a financial model in which earned revenue (like ticket sales) is not the primary or even a major source of income. Our financial stability is based on public and private grant-funding and monthly sustainers who support our facilities. We, in turn, gift our facilities rather than charging rent, and then leverage this community support to gain funders, fostering a model based on generosity rather than scarcity.

We don’t think earned revenue should be the measure of success for an arts organization. This is partly because we believe in making performances as well as space free, or at least affordable, and partly because we believe that more innovative programming results from financial models cushioned from market forces. We pay ourselves a fixed monthly salary as artist-employees, based on long-term projects that involve extensive planning, grant-writing, relationship-building with local and national funders, and constant communication about our vision.

It’s not that our model is not without problems. Major political shifts, as well as long-term economic downturns, can pose an existential threat to Culture Mill in the form of restricted funding options, fewer foundation resources, and a dwindling sustainer base. But we have builtin a safety net that mitigates the absolute shock of the current crisis. You don’t need a nonprofit to do this. I know artists that make themselves employees of their own LLCs and pay themselves a monthly stipend despite fluctuation in gigs.

None of this changes the fact that lost income due to COVID-19 is devastatingly real, not only for artists but for a huge segment of workers in service jobs and the gig economy. Artists man20

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age to keep going in these insane conditions because we are tough, resourceful, and resilient.

The incredible creativity currently on display from artists finding solutions during this crisis is truly inspiring. However, when the show simply cannot go on, then the rickety, unsustainable state of our artistic models, habits, and structures is revealed.

So, what is to be done? To start, we need comprehensive change in public-arts funding, nonprofit and philanthropic practices, and the culture and behavior of artists. Those of us privileged to remain secure in our basic needs (for now) bear a responsibility to create spaces to imagine what systemic change can look like in the broader arts sector.

This should include advocating for better public policies based on existing models in other parts of the world, drawing on ideas from American traditions of alternative economics, engaging in radical imaginative thinking on a societal scale, and building better skill-sets in financial literacy and management.

We need to go further than finding creative solutions for lost income.

This is an opportunity for total systemic change.

As the designers of imaginary worlds, artists have an opportunity to envision a future for sustainability and demonstrate leadership for other economic sectors.

We should first redirect our resources to support struggling artists in the short term, from crowdfunding to online performances to direct giving. Then we should use our theaters and studios to convene thought leaders in economics, sociology, literature, history, ecology, and sustainability to source existing models and build new ones reimagining sustainability in the arts, based on a broader set of ideas than American capitalism has to offer.

Elements of those models might be adopted in governmental, nonprofit, and philanthropic circles. Our habits as producing artists might shift toward designing our projects and income more sustainably. We must find a way to go on, even when the show must be canceled. As my first dance teacher always said, if we cease to think there, we cease to move there. W

“ We don’t

think earned revenue should be the measure of success for an arts

organization.

”

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P U Z Z L ES

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

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

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.

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

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com solution to last week’s puzzle

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3.25.20 INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

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