Cheers to the fabulous eateries of the Triad!
Top off that taste of summer with Katie’s favorite Whiskey Sour
3/4 cup your Bourbon of choice
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (3 lemons)
1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (4 limes)
2/3 cup sugar syrup* Maraschino cherries
Combine the Bourbon, lemon juice, lime juice, and syrup. Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with ice and fill two-thirds full with the cocktail mixture. Shake for 30 seconds and pour into glasses. Add a maraschino cherry and serve ice cold.
*To make sugar syrup, put 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Chill thoroughly before using.
Katie
Keeps Selling
WATER RESOURCES
A summer of new memories, new friendships
Summer is the perfect time to discover the benefits of joining the waiting list for making Friends Homes your future home.
Sign up for one of our upcoming tours, delightful lunches or other special events. You’ll get to experience the engaging activities, upgraded amenities, welcoming residents and thriving campus that make summer a breeze at Friends Homes.
And by joining our waiting list now, you’ll get priority access to available apartments, townhomes and cottages. So when you’re ready to start enjoying new friends, new memories and new experiences, your Friends Homes residence will be ready, too!
Scan the code, call or visit us online today to learn more.
August 2024
Summer Vibes:
Cugino Forno Wood Fired Pizza
Black Magnolia Patisserie
Peace of Her by Lou Cafe
Kau Restaurant, Butcher & Bar
Grapes & Grains Speakeasy Tavern
Redefining Community and Active Living
Introducing Penick Village’s Newest Expansion, redefining retirement living and elevating it to new heights.
Crafted Residences: Experience the perfect blend of luxury and comfort in our 44 Independent Living residences, thoughtfully designed to provide a stylish space where you can truly feel at home.
Embrace an Active Lifestyle: Indulge in activities at our state-of-the-art Wellness Pavilion, from Pickleball to personal training and more. Each designed to keep you healthy and engaged in the community.
Exceptional Healthcare: The Terrace, our health services building, will be enhanced and renovated, ensuring personalized care, whether short-term therapy or long-term care.
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Learn more about our community , where you have the freedom to focus on your wellness and relationships while living life to its fullest . Contact us today. Call (910) 692-0300 , email info@penickvillage1964.org , or scan the QR code to learn more.
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This stunning, turnkey penthouse condo is completely remodeled, offering modern elegance and breathtaking panoramic views. The main level with two-story windows is an entertainer’s paradise, featuring a spacious living area and state-of-theart kitchen. The upper level offers an additional versatile living space for relaxation or socializing. The bedrooms provide unparalleled comfort and ensuite bathrooms. Fully furnished with opulent home furnishings, and designer lighting, no expense has been spared in ensuring the utmost comfort and style. Don’t miss your chance to elevate your lifestyle.
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The Artof Living
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Working as a 4th generation landscape designer, Steven Dunn was always inspired by nature—which in turn inspires his art. “I paint to record the beauty of the natural world as I experience it,” he says. “Whenever I take a walk, I’m seeing trees and light as a composition.” Today, as part of the Arbor Acres community, Steven teaches painting to other residents in a fully equipped art studio. “I help them express their uniqueness. We’re all one spirit with something personal to say.” For Steven and all of our residents, here is a place that celebrates the joy and mysteries of art—as a vocation, passion, or simply a fuller way of seeing the world.
MAGAZINE
Volume 14, No. 8
“I have a fancy that every city has a voice.” www.ohenrymag.com
PUBLISHER
David Woronoff david@thepilot.com
Andie Rose, Creative Director andiesouthernpines@gmail.com
Cassie Bustamante, Editor cassie@ohenrymag.com
Jim Dodson, Editor at Large jwdauthor@gmail.com
Miranda Glyder, Graphic Designer
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Cynthia Adams, David Claude Bailey, Maria Johnson
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Lynn Donovan, Amy Freeman, John Gessner, Steve Raeford, Bert VanderVeen, Mark Wagoner
CONTRIBUTORS
Harry Blair, Anne Blythe, Susan Campbell, Jasmine Comer, Ross Howell Jr., Billy Ingram, Gerry O’Neill, Liza Roberts, Stephen E. Smith, Zora Stellanova, Ashley Walshe, Amberly Glitz Weber
ADVERTISING SALES
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336.210.6921 • lisa@ohenrymag.com
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336.456.0827 • amy@ohenrymag.com
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Jennifer Bunting, Advertising Coordinator ohenrymag@ohenrymag.com
Henry Hogan, Finance Director
910.693.2497
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OWNERS
Jack Andrews, Frank Daniels III, David Woronoff
In memoriam Frank Daniels Jr.
© Copyright 2024. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC
DO SUMMER YOUR WAY
Curious on what you may find in our downtowns? Or perhaps you’re looking for something unique? Alamance County is the perfect place to explore and experience our small-town charm. Discover local shops, quaint bookstores, clothing boutiques and galleries featuring artisan crafts. Linger over coffee and signature local treats in one of our coffee shops, bakeries or restaurants. Get off the beaten path and stay a while.
You’ll find small surprises lead to big memories in Alamance County.
Candor Market
When I Get to Where I’m Going
. . . there had better be lotsa books!
By Cassie Bustama Nte
WhenI imagine heaven — or whatever awaits me on the other side — I envision a cozy room with a roaring fire, a lush, rose-colored velvet chair to sink into, next to which sits a side table holding a steaming cuppa. And surrounding me? Warm-toned wooden walls lined with shelves upon shelves of all the books I didn’t have time to read in my time on Earth. Currently, my TBR — “to be read” — list most definitely exceeds the amount of minutes I have left in this lifetime, and quite possibly the next, too.
And that pile of books grows larger by the minute. Every week brings exciting releases, offering new opportunities to escape into fictional worlds, delve into the minds of intriguing people or learn about places and times past. How on earth am I supposed to keep up with that while also working, running a household and keeping my kids alive at the same time? Therein lies the dilemma.
When overwhelm strikes, I have to step not back, but closer. Don’t look at the big picture, because it’s scary as hell. Instead, focus on one small part. After all, how do you eat an elephant? Well, frankly, I am a pescatarian, so I wouldn’t know. But I’ve heard it’s one bite at a time.
To celebrate our reading issue, here are a few of the nibbles I’ve taken over the last year that have stood out.
A few years back, I read Daisy Jones & the Six and loved it so much that I was ready to consume everything by Taylor Jenkins Reid. And yet, I didn’t. But if you want to know the trick to starting a book faster, it’s borrowing — versus buying — because you’re obligated to return it. Thankfully, a friend loaned me her copy of Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. When I finished it, I didn’t want to return it. While the title may leave you doubtful, it’s a beautiful love story with so many facets of human emotion. Did I cry?
Yes. But do I weep at the end of most books that enrapture me? Also yes. After every great book comes a period of mourning. Colleen Hoover is some sort of magical unicorn who writes more books in a year than I get haircuts! Granted, I only go to the salon two to three times annually. Just like my stylist — hi, Caitlin! — she hasn’t yet let me down. (Even when I got bangs.) With so much hype around Verity, I had to read it and, boy, was it a gripping page-turner! While many of Hoover’s books are considered romantic, this thrilling tale was dark and unputdownable. By the last page, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. For fans of Verity, or books that, if made into movies, would be in the film noir genre, also check out Push by Ashley Audrain. When it comes to nonfiction, especially memoirs, I prefer the audio versions. Why? Nothing beats hearing the tone and emotion delivered directly by the author. Plus, I can multitask, strolling my neighborhood with my dogs at the same time. (Note: If you see a woman power-walking through Starmount, earbuds in, laughing hysterically or with tears streaming down her face, stop and introduce yourself to me!)
Two memoirs that had me walking more miles than I needed are Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told and Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died. Key’s book shares a comedic and intimate look at his wife’s infidelity and the marital journey that followed. I found myself in hysterics and relaying quotes to my husband, Chris, who looked at me quizzically. A story of cheating that’s hilarious? But yes.
By opening a window into her vulnerability and letting out the innermost secrets of her heart, McCurdy shares the darkest corners of her life, the areas most prefer to keep locked behind a closed door. And I will always appreciate a memoir that’s written with honesty, no matter how hard or heartbreaking.
What’s next on my TBR? I’m not totally sure. But I think I’ll snag a novel from my living room bookshelves, sink into our worn brown leather sofa and read by the soft glow of a sconce, my dogs comfortably nestled by my feet. Maybe, just maybe, heaven is a place on Earth after all. OH
Cassie Bustamante is editor of O.Henry magazine.
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The Quiet of Nature
In an increasingly loud world, maybe we should be still and listen to nature
It’s two hours
before sunrise and, per my daily morning ritual, I’m sitting with my old cat, Boo Radley, in a wooden chair beneath the stars and a shining quarter-moon.
Today’s forecast calls for another summer scorcher.
For the moment, however, the world around me is cool and amazingly quiet.
It’s the perfect moment to think, pray or simply listen to nature waking up.
In an hour or so, the world will begin to stir as folks rise and go about their daily lives. Nature will be drowned out by the white noise of commuter traffic, tooting horns and sirens.
But, for now, all I hear is the peaceful hoot of an owl somewhere off in the neighborhood trees, the fading chirr of crickets and the lonely bark of a dog a mile or two away. Amazing how sound carries in such a peaceful, quiet world.
Ah, there it is, right on cue! The first birdsong of the new day. I recognize the tune from a certain gray catbird that seems to enjoy starting the morning chorus. Soon, the trees around us will be alive with the morning melodies of Carolina warblers, eastern bluebirds and the northern cardinals. What a perfect way to lift a summer night’s curtain and herald the dawn!
Unfortunately, it’s a sound that Earth scientists fear may be vanishing before our very ears.
On a planet where many are concerned about the impacts of global warming, declining natural resources and vanishing species, it seems to me that noise pollution and the disappearing sounds of the natural world might be among the most worrying impacts of all.
A recent article in The Guardian alarmingly warns of a “deathly silence” they claim results from the accelerating loss of natural habitats around the globe.
The authors note that sound has become an important measurement in understanding the health and biodiversity of our planet’s ecosystems. “Our forests, soils and oceans all produce
their own acoustic signatures,” they write, noting that the quiet falling across thousands of habitats can be measured using ecoacoustics. They cite “extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.”
A veteran soundscape recordist named Bernie Krause, who has devoted more than 5,000 hours to recording nature from seven continents over the past 55 years, estimates that “70 percent of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.”
As quiet natural places are drowned out by the sounds of freeways, cellphones and the daily grind of modern life, fortunately, a nonprofit group called Quiet Parks International is working to identify and preserve sacred quiet places in cities, wilderness areas and national parks, where all one hears — for the moment at least — is the beat of nature, the pulse of life in the wild.
“Quiet, I think, holds space for things we can’t verbalize as humans,” the group’s executive director, Matthew Mikkelsen, recently told CBS News. “We use silence as a way to honor things.” Quiet, he notes, is becoming harder and harder to find these days, even in the most remote wilderness or within the depths of the national parks. “Every year we see more and more data to reaffirm what we’ve known for a long time — that quiet is becoming extinct.”
Perhaps because I grew up in a series of sleepy small towns across the lower South, places where I spent most of my days wandering at will in nature, I’ve been groomed to be a seeker of natural silence and quiet places in my life.
The first decade of my journalism career was spent in major cities, embedded in the cacophony of busy streets, which explains why I bolted for the forests and rivers of northern New England the moment I had the chance to escape honking horns, blasting radios, screaming sirens and even background music in restaurants, a personal annoyance I’ve never quite fathomed.
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by traveling in France and Italy and other ancient places. There, cafes and bistros are generally meant to foster a relaxed, slower pace of life through the auspices of
good food, lingering conversations and woolgathering as one watches the harried world pass by.
It is no accident that I built my first house on a hilltop near the coast of Maine, surrounded by 200 pristine wooded acres of beech and hemlock trees. On summer evenings, my young children and I could hear the forest coming alive with sounds and often saw and heard wildlife — whitetail deer, pheasants and hawks, a large lady porcupine and even (once) a young male moose — gathering at the edges of our vast lawn where I created feeding areas of edible native plants for our wild neighbors. On frigid winter nights, I put on my Elmer Fudd jacket and toted 50-pound bags of sorghum out to that feeding spot by the edge of the woods, where deer and other critters could be seen dining in a moonlit night. The eerie late-night sound of coyotes calling deep in the forest reminded us that we were the newcomers to their quiet keep.
One reason I love the game of golf is because golf is a two- or three-hour adventure in nature where the simple elements of wind, rain, sand and water provide an existential challenge to mind and body. As a kid, I learned to play golf alone, walking my father’s golf course in the late afternoon, when most of the older golfers had gone home. I came to love “solo golf” at a time of day when the shadows lengthened and the sounds of nature began to reawaken creatures great and small.
Golf courses, like libraries, are meant to be quiet places — which makes the recent trend of golf carts equipped with digital music systems particularly bothersome to a lover of nature’s quiet sounds.
Pause for a moment and just think what one can do in the quiet:
Read a good book.
Admire a sunset.
Rest and recover.
Take an afternoon nap.
Watch birds feed.
Write a letter.
Talk to the universe.
Say a prayer.
Grieve — or feel gratitude.
Think through a problem.
“In quietness,” says the book A Course in Miracles, “are all things answered.”
My heart aches when I hear that the world’s natural places may be going silent.
A world without nature’s quiet sounds would be a very lonely place.
Hopefully, we’ll learn to listen before it’s too late. OH
Jim Dodson is the founding editor of O.Henry.
September 19 • 6:30 pm • Piedmont Hall
Get ready to groove and give back at Blueprints and Bubbly, Habitat Greensboro’s House Party! We will gather at Piedmont Hall on Thursday, September 19, 2024, from 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm for an evening packed with good vibes and great people. We look forward to seeing you soon!
Celebrating our 2024 Habitat Heroesthe Tesh Family
SAZERAC
"A spirited forum of Gate City food, drink, history, art, events, rumors and eccentrics worthy of our famous namesake"
Sage Gardener
After reading The Orchid Thief (which I unreservedly recommend), I’ve started calling Anne, my wife, the Seed Thief. Her cache of stolen — and also saved-fromthe-garden — seeds is vast. One day, she said, “Why don’t you write about saving seeds, O Sage Gardener.”
So . . . here’s why I’m NOT writing a column about saving seeds.
Let’s start with this response from an online permaculture forum: “Why do something poorly, when I could instead support someone who does an amazing job at seed saving/plant breeding?” The permaculture curmudgeon adds, “In my region, there is no shortage of amazing small farmers selling open-pollinated, regionally-adapted, unique varieties.”
Guilford County’s annual Passalong Plant Sale comes to mind. And there’s also the annual Sown and Grown Seed Swap Weekend at Old Salem, which has featured heirloom dinners in the past.
But let’s get down to the nitty-gritty topic of plant sex. Whether plants have sex with themselves or with insects is a topic that’s way above my pay grade. However, the N.C. State Extension Service has an army of plant experts who understand the mysteries of the birds-and-bees that produce the next generation of plants. “When saving seeds, make sure you are collecting from open-pollinated varieties,”
advises Emilee Morrison from Onslow County. (More about open-pollinators in a minute.) “Because of their diverse parentage, hybrid plants will not produce consistent, reliable offspring when you save their seeds.”
Dusty Hancock, a Master Gardener volunteer from Chatham County, has even more discouraging words about plants with diverse parentage: “Seeds from hybrid plants may be sterile, but, if not, it is difficult to predict the characters of the resulting offspring.” He goes on to say that plants from hybrid seeds will be a new combination of the best and worst traits of the original parents. In other words, the seeds you save from that extraordinary okra plant with boocoodles of perfect pods might have the characteristics of a parent that, though drought resistant, produced itty-bitty pods.
So . . . if you really want to play it safe, you need to make sure that the seeds you’re saving come from heirloom plants, all of which are so-called open pollinators, meaning they are pollinated naturally by birds, insects, wind or human hands.
So far, so good — but there’s a catch, says Emilee: “If you grow more than one variety of a crop, you will need to take some precautions to prevent cross-pollination between varieties. Cross-pollination will result in unexpected characteristics in your
plants in subsequent generations.” I’m not about to venture into the area of scraping the seeds out, drying them on a screen or in a hydrator, storing them so bugs and humidity don’t ruin them . . . because I’m not going to write about saving seeds. And, from the permaculture curmudgeon, here’s a compelling reason: “I just really, really love buying seeds. Maybe it’s materialistic of me, but pouring through catalogues is what gets me through the winter!”
— David Claude Bailey
Just One Thing
Go ahead. Try not to be drawn into this photograph, taken in 1913 to herald the screening of a silent movie starring Smilin’ Cowboy Louis Bennison as Randy Burke — smiling even when held at gunpoint by Virginia Lee, as seen in the poster. Is that her or a local look-alike posing none too enthusiastically for a promotion in Newport, Rhode Island? Who are those children on the right, one impudently staring at the photographer, Marshall Hall, an AP correspondent? When artfully reprinting the photo in 1970, Brian Pelletier obviously was unwilling to crop out the bystander heedlessly walking right into the photo just as the shutter closed. Featured in Weatherspoon's exhibit that goes up on Aug. 13, “Interpreting America: Photographs from the Collection,” the images on display “illustrate what artists have had to say about American culture from the late-19th to the early-21st centuries.” Americans have always loved sappy Westerns, like this one in which our brave hero saves an orphan after her father is killed in a saloon, is mistaken for a desperado, wins enough money in a poker game to pay off the Widow Mackey’s mortgage, and falls head over heels for a rancher’s daughter, who “takes his revolvers and orders him to put his hands up — and then around her.”
Window to the Past
"Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables as we did in Kansas." — Langston Hughes, The Big Sea PHOTOGRAPH
The Write Stuff
When Andrew Levitt set out to brighten children’s spirits in their hospital rooms, he wasn’t just clowning around. In our December 2022 issue’s “The Fezziwigs Among Us,” founding editor Jim Dodson introduced us to Levitt, whose “charming medical clowning lasted almost a decade, touching the lives and cheering up thousands of kids, young people, parents and staff.” Levitt, who had a lifetime of performance under his belt — everything from miming to acting and clowning — officially became Dr. Merryandrew on April Fools’ Day years ago. The date? A funny coincidence. And, yes, Levitt does, indeed, hold a bona fide University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. — in folklore, fittingly. In his new memoir, With Tales and Folly Instead of Pills, Levitt takes us behind the doors of Moses Cone Hospital, sharing stories he regaled patients with to bring, well, levity to hardship. After all, he writes, “Maybe if more people hear the old stories, there will be more people around who know that life is full of magic and miracle.”
With Tales and Folly Instead of Pills by Andrew Levitt is available at bookstores and online.
Calling All O.Henry Essayists
This year, we’re moving our annual O.Henry Essay Contest to earlier in the year so that you have all summer to meditate on it while you mow your lawn, swim your strokes or swat away the skeeters. The theme this time? “Furry, Feathered and Ferocious.” That’s right, we’re all ears for your animal tails — oops, tales — and we’ll be accepting entries through Sept. 30, 2024. Got a wild hare? Submit a story about it! From beloved pets to snake encounters, we want to get our paws on your story.
Of course, there are some rules:
• Submit no more than 1,000 words in a digital format — Word or Pages document, a PDF, pasted into an email, or tattooed on your body and sent via photographs. Essays over 1,000 will not be considered. After all, as Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Why were your plays so long, Willy???)
• Only one entry per writer.
• Email entries to cassie@ohenrymag.com.
• Deadline to enter is September 30, 2024.
• Winners will be contacted via email and will be printed in a 2025 issue.
We can’t wait to hear the clickety-clack of keyboards across the Triad as you type your stories — stories that are sure to make us laugh, cry or rush to the animal shelters to bring home even more rescues. What’s one more at this point?
—
Cassie Bustamante, editor
Unsolicited Advice
Soon enough, we’ll see the flashing lights and hear the squeaking brakes of big, yellow buses as they roll through our neighborhoods. Kids will be going fullSTEAM ahead — as in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math — as they head back to school. But, now that we are grown adults, according to our driver’s licenses, we have some ideas about necessary school subjects.
Phone Basics: More Than a Texting Device. We know, we know. Your smartphone features a handy-dandy voice mailbox that allows you to avoid calls, and, instead, listen to messages and respond via text, safely steering clear from any potentially empathetic human contact whatsoever. But — this may come
as a shock — you can actually answer your phone. Repeat after us: “Hello?”
Taxes and You: Sam Is Not the Fun Uncle. Pythagoras’ theorem about right triangles is really a-cute, but Uncle Ben Franklin once observed that nothing is certain other than death and taxes. So why not study deductions and learn how to properly fill out W9s? Had we done that, we would’t be left feeling so, well, obtuse.
Handwriting: The Wet Signature & the Curse of the Cursive. In our modern, digital world, penmanship doesn’t seem so important. And frankly, we’re coming up dry on a good reason why you might need it. But hey, we’re an arts publication and we don’t want to see any form of art lost. Don’t agree? Please mail a handwritten letter to the editor.
1725 NC 66 South
Kernersville, NC 27284
336-564-1010 / www.bmhs.us
The Center of It All
Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School develops students in their pursuit of excellence. In partnership with committed families, our dedicated faculty form the faith, character, and intellect of young men and women within an engaged, diverse community grounded in the Catholic tradition.
Bishop McGuinness is fully accredited, and a college preparatory high school that is widely recognized for high academic standards, extensive extra curricular activities and championship athletic teams.
Students are guided by an exceptional faculty and college counseling team, not only as they work towards college goals, but in all aspects of their experience at Bishop.
We offer a full AP program, aviation STEM courses, a thriving arts program with over 40 courses, Learning Support program and on-site tutoring services. We are located in the center of the Triad and have transportation available. We offer tuition assistance as part of our commitment to making a Catholic education affordable for families.
Visit our website at www.bmhs.us to schedule a private tour or to register for a Villain Walk, and immerse yourself in the Bishop experience. All faiths welcome.
For additional information contact the Admissions Office at 336-564-1011or send an email to psmendoza@bmhs.us.
Leo
(July 23 – August 22)
Impossible as it seems, someone dear forgets your birthday this month. Do you: a) attack them; b) discard them; or c) both? The new moon in Leo on August 4 spells reinvention and radical honesty. If there’s something — or someone — you’ve outgrown, there’s no need to make a production of it. That said, when Mercury enters your sign mid-month, your life becomes a bit of a Broadway musical. Take the stage and own it.
Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:
Virgo (August 23 – September 22)
Try a fresh coat of paint.
Libra (September 23 – October 22)
Trust your bones.
Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)
Dot your i’s and cross your fingers.
Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)
The world will keep spinning.
Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)
Dream a little bigger.
Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)
Don’t skip the cooldown.
Pisces (February 19 – March 20)
Check the tread.
Aries (March 21 – April 19)
Pack your toothbrush.
Taurus (April 20 – May 20)
It’s time to go off-script.
Gemini (May 21 – June 20)
Breathe between reps.
Cancer (June 21 – July 22)
Leave some space for the miracle. OH
Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.
TOUR of Remodeled Homes
August 17 & 18
Utilize the TOUR of Remodeled Homes to explore ways to transform your home to meet your needs today!
Open Houses will be held Saturday & Sunday, August 17 & 18 from 12 noon – 5 pm…admission is free. Find a listing of open houses in the TOUR magazine and on the website.
Virtual Tours are available for all TOUR renovations. From the comfort of your home…virtually tour complete home renovations, kitchens, baths, entertainment areas, outdoor living and more.
Shhhh!
Learning
to read (in) a room full of people
By m aria JohNsoN
Afew years ago, an editor pitched me a column idea.
“You know what would be fun?” he said.
“What would be fun?” I asked, taking the bait.
“For you to go someplace where you couldn’t talk and write about it later,” he teased.
“Fun for you,” I shot back.
But I remembered that challenge when I saw a local calendar listing called “Greensboro Silent Book Club.” Here was my chance to be still and know . . . something.
I rang up the group’s founder, 32-year-old Maria Perdomo, who explained that she started the local SBC chapter in the fall of 2019 after hearing an NPR story about the first club in San Francisco.
Members brought their own books and read quietly in a shared space for an hour. Conversation before and after was optional. The practice spread and gelled into a national organization.
The concept made sense to Perdomo, who grew up in Colombia, in a culture that exalted storytelling. Her father, a writer, and her brother devoured books. By comparison, Perdomo was a literary slow-poke.
“It kinda kept me from wanting to engage with books in my own way,” she says.
Eventually, she found her way back to words. She started blogging while she was an international studies student at UNCG, and she yearned for a community of like-minded readers.
Cue the NPR story. Perdomo checked the SBC website — “Welcome to introvert happy hour,” it trumpets quietly — and saw a chapter in the Triangle, but nothing in the Triad. So she and a friend started a monthly meet-up in Greensboro’s independent book store, Scuppernong.
The group met a handful of times before COVID and resumed their regular hushed assemblies in 2023.
Every second Sunday of the month, they draw a core of 10 to 20 people, just enough to fill every seat in the comfortable space at the back of the store.
“My goal is to make it a space that’s not stressful,” says Perdomo, who now writes a Substack newsletter. “We hear all the time, ‘I’m a slow reader,’ but here no one is going to look down on you because you haven’t finished that massive book you started.”
I’m intrigued. I’m not an introvert, but I am a rather slow reader.
Also, my husband has just given me The Backyard Bird Chronicles, a nonfiction handbook by celebrated novelist Amy Tan. I tote the book to the next SBC meeting and take a shortterm vow of silence.
Beforehand, Rachel Wasden, who leads the gathering in Perdomo’s absence, explains that people will show up with stories in a variety of platforms — traditional books, tablets, e-readers and audiobooks.
Once, a guy worked on writing his own book.
The point is, everyone will do their own thing, quietly, together.
“Every time I tell someone about it, they say, ‘That’s so weird. Why wouldn’t you read at home, in silence?’” Wasden says.
Her answer: It’s about choice. And energy, a precious commodity for introverts.
“You get to participate, or not participate, as much as you want,” she says.
The funny thing is, by the time I make it to the back of the store, these introverts — average age mid-30s — are chatting up a storm. Rachel asks folks to introduce themselves with names, pronouns and a short description of what they’re reading.
Jeff is working his way though The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the true account of a Vietnam vet who returns to the war as a sort of civilian beer fairy to U.S. troops.
Priya is reading Fairy Tales of Ireland.
Enid has brought the same book she brought last time, Notes on an Execution, the story of a serial killer’s life as seen through the eyes of women in his life. But she might crochet instead.
Kelli, a first-timer, is well into The Yellow Wallpaper. Heaven, another first-timer, is nibbling away at Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
The reading list goes on. Rachel, who is plowing through She Who Became the Sun, a re-telling of the Chinese myth of Mulan, calls the meeting to order.
It’s 12:25 p.m., not that anyone is counting the minutes she’ll
All Aboard
have to remain quiet.
Ready. Set. Silence.
Whoa. They weren’t kidding. Everyone is reading.
My attention snags on the store’s creaking wooden floorboards.
On the violin music that wafts through speakers at the front of the shop.
On the crispy whiff of pages turning. I look up and scan the group. Does anyone want to . . . ?
Nope. All heads are down.
Surrounded by stories that I’m forbidden to tap via conversation, I wade into the book in my lap. It’s good stuff.
Tan, who, as a child, liked to draw and play in creeks, outgrew those joys as an adult. Only at age 64 did she sign up for a birding group that sketched their subjects in the field.
It makes me wonder: What could a “new thing” be for me? How long would it take to learn? And . . . what time is it now?
I check my phone. 12:49. Hmm.
Quite the variety of footwear we have in this circle. I need a pedicure. And who is that crooning on the speakers now?
Andrea Bocelli?
I rub my eyebrows to reset. It occurs to me how much reading is like meditating, bringing focus to the moment, noticing how the mind wanders and reeling it in again. It also dawns on me why I’m a relatively slow reader.
Finally, Rachel speaks: “If you want to finish the page you’re on, we’ll come together in another minute or so.”
It’s 1:24 p.m.
I pretend to read for the last minute. Rachel welcomes us back into communion with a prompt for discussion.
“Where does your mind go when you read?” she asks.
I can’t help but laugh. Silently, of course. OH
Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com. Find an SBC chapter near you at silentbook.club. Maria Perdomo’s newsletter, “here I am,” can be found at mariamillefois.substack.com.
More Than a Mystery Murder haunts a college town
By A nne Blythe
The makings for
an ordinary crime thriller are present in Joanna Pearson’s first novel, but Bright and Tender Dark is anything but ordinary.
In the first few pages, Karlie, an alluring and enigmatic college student, is found dead in an off-campus apartment, brutally murdered, with no clear trail to the suspect. A former busboy with an eighth-grade education is in prison, conveniently convicted of her murder and serving time for a crime that shattered the tranquility of a college town.
The whodunnit aspect is there.
Joy, Karlie’s freshman year roommate and Pearson’s complicated protagonist, thinks the justice system got the wrong man.
It is through Joy’s hunt for the real killer that we quickly realize Pearson’s book is a bit different from the traditional murder mystery. Layered on top is a retrospective investigation into the psychological ripple effects that Karlie’s dark death has had on the whole community, connecting seemingly unconnected people even two decades after it happened.
Pearson, a psychiatrist who lives in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area, is also a poet and short story writer who now can add literary crime fiction to her compilation of writing genres. Just as her short story collections show that her poetic style spans literary genres, Bright and Tender Dark shows that her storytelling skills extend beyond short stories to novels. Many of the chapters could stand alone as stories within the larger story.
Pearson is masterful at character building. We meet Joy in the throes of middle age. She’s a mother of two finding a new footing
after a painful divorce, assessing and reassessing her life. That evaluation creates the springboard for bouncing between two critical times in her life: the present, in which her ex is about to become a father again with his new wife; and the past, for which she has a new obsession, a decades-old murder.
Part of her compulsion comes from an unopened letter that Joy’s teenage son, Sean, finds in a book of John Donne poetry he has borrowed for English class.
It’s from Karlie.
“The letter has made a long and improbable voyage through time after being tucked away and forgotten, never even opened,” Pearson writes. “A miracle. An artifact of an old-fashioned epistolary era. Sean hands the letter to Joy with the solemnity of someone who has grown up on Snapchat. Joy’s hands tremble at the sight of the familiar handwriting. She dare not open it.”
Joy had been taking long walks alone at night, unable to sleep. Words and phrases reverberated through her mind as it raced. “Constitutionally unhappy.” That’s how her husband had described her as their marriage was blowing up. It had been “oppressive” for him, he said.
“He made the unhappiness sound like the core feature of her personality,” Pearson writes. “A suffocating force. The way that Joy looked at the world, pinched and vigilant, bracing for fire ants, falling branches, and tax deadlines, rather than celebrations. But her unhappiness allowed her to get things done!”
Joy eventually musters the courage to open that letter from Karlie. It was written in December 1999, shortly before her
death, and is filled with exclamation points and underlined words — Karlie’s “characteristic arbitrary overuse of emphasis” on full display. But the letter holds a clue, one that Joy has not seen in any of the coverage of Karlie’s death, a mention of a BMW that had been pulling up outside her apartment. In the letter Karlie wonders whether it was Joy, but Joy didn’t have a BMW, nor had she been following Karlie to her apartment. Now, nearly two decades later, Joy is determined to find out who it was.
The search takes her back to old haunts in Chapel Hill, where Joy and Karlie went to college and where Joy still lives. She spirals into the depths of internet conspiracy theorists and true-crime Reddit platforms.
Pearson introduces an intriguing cast of characters: the predatory professor who woos his female students; the mother of the man doing time for the crime; the transgender night manager of the apartment building where Karlie was killed; the teenage son of a police chief on the high school soccer team with Joy’s son; people in cult-like religious groups; and more.
She takes her readers on a journey of discovery, giving them a glimpse of each character’s flaws and leaving open the possibility that they might be the killer, while also revealing clues that raise doubts about their potential guilt.
For anyone aware of high profile murders in Chapel Hill over
the past couple of decades, there might seem to be some similarities with the 2012 killing of UNC sophomore Faith Hedgepeth and the 2008 death of UNC student body president Eve Carson. But at readings and in published interviews, Pearson has said the book is not based on a true crime. It’s fiction, although as a writer and engaged resident in the area, Pearson acknowledges that she cannot escape true events that continue to haunt the community. Writers write what they know.
Readers will appreciate Pearson’s adroit descriptions of Chapel Hill, places both real and imagined. She takes you onto campus, inside its buildings, and across its many grassy quads and wooded edges. Spots on Franklin Street and in downtown Carrboro are recognizable, as are near-campus neighborhoods.
As Pearson explores the mystery of an inexplicable crime in her novel, she also delves into the many mysteries of the mind. Her novel is a dark, yet tender and bright study of the void a death creates in a community, and the way people use that memory to make sense of themselves. OH
Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.
september 11, 2024
PEYTON MANNING
The NFL’s only five-time MVP, Hall of Fame QB and two-time Super Bowl Champion, he supports various organizations including the PeyBack Foundation and the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital. In 2020, he founded the Emmy Award-winning company, Omaha Productions.
LJVM Coliseum
november 21, 2024
ANDERSON COOPER
A CNN anchor and correspondent for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” he has received 20 Emmy Awards and authored four books—all of which topped the New York Times Bestseller List. Wait Chapel
december 5, 2024
JESMYN WARD
An American novelist, she is one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. Presented in partnership with the Program for Leadership and Character.
Wait Chapel
february 27, 2025
DAVID BROOKS
A bestselling author, op-ed columnist at the New York Times, and commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” he is a keen observer of politics and people with a gift of humor and quiet passion.
Wait Chapel april 8, 2025
JOHN LEGEND
A critically acclaimed, multiplatinum singersongwriter and the first African American man to earn an EGOT, he leverages his influential position in the entertainment industry to advocate for ending mass incarceration and advancing community equity.
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Dichotomies & Gaps
Frank Campion’s examinations in paint
By liz A RoBeRts
Clemmons-based
artist Frank Cam-
pion brings a cerebral tenacity to his explorations of color and geometry. A series of paintings examining vertical slices of abstracted landscape evolves into another, which juxtaposes rational and random compositional styles, which then gives way to pieces addressing the spaces between those dichotomies. Gap, a recent painting, explores all of that, with the added dimension of a snippet of a view, a depiction of the ways our eyes take in the world before us.
Lately, it’s been hard work. “Sometimes artists have this conceit that everything they touch is going to turn to gold,” he says. “The truth is that it rarely does. So you have to make a lot of messes.” Gap, for instance, is “coming out of the midst of exploring where things might go.”
Campion says 2024 has been a year of just that, of “mucking about, cutting stuff up and putting it back together again. It’s a fun way to work because you can move stuff around without com-
mitting to it. It ends up looking like it’s fall in the studio: There’s leaves everywhere, and I’m just sort of blowing them around.”
He made his Dichotomies series by taping off one side of the canvas and painting the other “until it looked interesting.” Then he’d cover that painted side with newspaper and go to work on the blank one. When it was complete, he’d unveil the full canvas to himself. “There are moments when it’s really kind of interesting,” he says. “I have a vague memory of what the other side was like when I peel the tape and the newspaper off, and sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not.”
Gap represents his current interest in “playing around with the idea of gaps and alleys and fissures, looking for a looser way of working. Instead of having two fields to work with, I’m seeing what happens in between them.”
To watch Campion paint is to witness intuitive creativity at work. Once, on a studio visit, he pulled a canvas to the floor and stared at it for a moment before tipping a bucket of paint onto its blank expanse. The paint was gray and viscous. It splashed indiscriminately, like muddy water. He studied it for a moment, then tipped the bucket again and again and again, finally picking up a broom-scaled squeegee to push and pull it back and forth. As starry splotches became ghostly shapes beneath a paler scrim, this respected painter looked for all the world like a pensive janitor, mopping the floor.
Gap, 2024 by Frank Campion. 21 x 42 inches, acrylic and rag paper.
The result, weeks later, belied those humble beginnings. Sharp geometry, deep blue, soft orange and acid yellow layered the gray-splashed canvas with subtlety and contrast, dimension and structure. Pieces of gray remained, muddying some of the bright shades, swirling in tendrils on the margins.
“I like color. I like emotion,” Campion says. “I like the collision of chaos and order.” What viewers see in his work includes all of that, but most of all, he says, it’s what they bring to it themselves. “One of the things I like about abstraction is that it’s a kind of mirror. It’s a challenge.”
Campion works in a modernist showpiece of a studio he designed and attached to his house in a residential neighborhood (a contractor likened the space to the spot where Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron’s father parked his ill-fated Ferrari). It’s a space that challenges him, delightedly so. Miles Davis plays on a continuous loop, art books fill side tables, sunlight pours through a ceiling of skylights; there’s room for giant canvases and places to sit and talk. The floor is a mosaic of speckled paint, and so is he. “He” being “Frank 2.0,” a “re-emerging artist,” as he calls himself (in writing, anyway), the present-day iteration of a Harvard-educated man who came to prominence as a young artist in Boston
Zaran, 2023 by Frank Campion. 48 x 96 inches, acrylic.
Zanda, 2023 by Frank Campion. 30 x 60 inches, acrylic.
in the 1980s. Campion had collectors, critically successful solo shows, and was in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts (where one of his paintings is in the permanent collection). Then he became disillusioned with all of it, walked away from art completely, and immersed himself for more than 30 years in a successful advertising career.
That’s what brought him to Winston-Salem, a top job at ad firm Long, Haymes & Carr, where accounts like IBM, Hanes Hosiery and Wachovia Bank and Trust Co. kept things interesting. “It was a great ride,” he says, “very creative.” After that, painting called him back.
From the beginning, color has been a main attraction. So has tension. Campion says he’s constantly intrigued by “the imposition of geometry, with its logical and rational right angles and parallel lines, pitted against a painterly catastrophe.”
His description of such a catastrophe sounds like the musings of a man in love with his work: “It’s random spills and splats, and drippy, sloppy paint. Thick paint, thin paint, rational form against random painterly incident. When I look at all the things I’ve worked on, that’s a consistent theme.” OH
This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.
Zarrab, 2023 by Frank Campion. 42 x 84 inches.
Kebado, 2023 by Frank Campion. 42 x 84 inches.
Meltdown Turned Masterpiece
A brown-butter sugar cookie and raspberry ice cream sammie
My sister’s devotion to ice cream is legendary. Once, years ago at a family gathering when she was 5, she dropped her ice cream cone on the ground and immediately had a, whoops, meltdown. You would’ve thought her cone had been the very last frozen treat in the world. Even today, her passion for ice cream still goes unrivaled in our family. She’s the inspiration behind this recipe.
There’s truly something about homemade ice cream. Unlike store-bought varieties, it is made with love — often with someone special in mind. You get to customize everything from flavors and textures to mix-ins. Watching the churner work its magic, transforming ingredients into a cool, creamy confection is pure summertime satisfaction. And that first bite of ice cream you made with your own hands? Sweetness that goes beyond flavor.
Go ahead and pull out all the stops by sandwiching raspberry ice cream between brown-butter sugar cookies. The crisp, buttery cookies cradle the velvety, tart-and-sweet raspberry ice cream for a symphony of balanced flavors and textures. To achieve a perfectly creamy texture, I use equal parts milk and cream in the ice cream base. The beauty of this recipe lies in its endless possibilities. You can replace the raspberries with any soft seasonal fruit. Just make sure to puree before stirring it into the base. And there’s nothing wrong with vanilla or chocolate ice cream. This recipe might be a labor of love, but it’s totally worth it. I can’t promise you won’t have a meltdown after the last of your ice cream sandwiches are gone, though.
Raspberry Ice Cream
(Recipe adapted from Buttermilk By Sam)
Ingredients
4 large egg yolks
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
Directions
12 ounces fresh raspberries
Pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1. In a pot over medium-low heat, add and mix the egg yolks, sugar, whole milk and heavy cream. Simmer until the mixture thickens and reaches a temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Transfer the mixture to a bowl.
3. Meanwhile, puree the raspberries in a food processor.
4. Stir the raspberries into the cream mixture. Place the mixture in the fridge overnight.
5. Follow the instructions on your ice cream machine. Then transfer to a freezer safe container.
Brown-Butter Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter, cubed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup cane sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cornstarch
Pinch of salt
Directions
6. Place the butter in small pot over medium heat. Stir continuously. The butter will start to crackle and then it will stop. It will then become foamy. Keep stirring until you see brown bits in the bottom of the pot. Pour the butter into a glass bowl to cool.
7. Once the butter is cooled, add it to a large bowl with the sugars. Whisk until combined. Then whisk in the egg and vanilla extract.
8. Fold in the flour, baking soda, baking powder and cornstarch. Divide into eight balls.
9. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, preferably overnight.
10. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and place the chilled dough balls on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
11. Bake for 8–10 minutes or until the edges are golden brown and the tops of the cookies are slightly puffy.
12. Cool on the baking sheet for 5–7 minutes. Then transfer to a rack until completely cooled.
13. Before assembling the ice cream sandwiches, it may be necessary to let the ice cream soften a bit. Let it sit out at room temperature until it is soft enough to scoop. Place a generous scoop of ice cream on one cookie. Then place another cookie on top and smash the ice cream until it spreads to the edges of the cookie sandwich.
14. Enjoy! OH
Jasmine Comer is the creator of Lively Meals, a food blog where she shares delicious, everyday recipes. You can find her on Instagram @livelymeals.
SOUND DECISIONS
Whatever your musical jam, Weymouth Center’s got you covered. Join us for any one concert or subscribe to a full series and save!
Come Sunday Jazz Series:
August 25, 2024:
Mary D. Williams, Gospel vocalist
September 29, 2024:
Rebecca Kleinman, Brazilian Jazz
October 27, 2024:
Onyx Club Boys, Gypsy Jazz Swing
March 23, 2025:
Sarah Hanahan, Alto Saxophonist
April 27, 2025: John Brown, Double Bassist
May 18, 2025: Al Strong, Jazz Trumpet
Individual concerts start at $27.50. Series of 6 starts at $145
Subscribe and save $20. Student tickets available.
Chamber Sessions:
December 15:
Friends of Weymouth Concert
February 2:
Sono Auros, Flute, Cello, Harp
April 13:
Tong/Sheppard Duo, Piano, Violin
May 11:
Astralis, Classical ensemble
Individual concerts start at $30.
Series of 4 starts at $100. Subscribe and save $20. Student tickets available.
Also! Kicking off with One Wonderful Night on October 19th, we will have a moving play, Long Words, that will aim to tell the story of the Boyds and the history of Weymouth!
Scan the QR code for sibscription tickets and additional information!
555 East Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines, NC
Al Strong
Jessica Tong
Keep Your Stinkin’ Vacation . . .
A candy-coated tale of family road trip woes
By CynthiA AdAms
There were warning signs before Dad finished packing Mama’s pea-green-colored Samsonite luggage set into the new-to-us station wagon. In the days before soft-sided luggage, such cases were hardshell, hideous and unyielding. Her clothing and makeup cases alone claimed most of the cargo space.
Our Great Canadian Trek was so auspicious Dad had passed over the usual Yank tanks — huge Caddies and stinkin’ Lincolns — for a second-hand forest-green station wagon with faux-wood accents. My brothers were excited. My sister and I less so.
And then I saw my father surreptitiously stuffing in wholesalesized boxes of Almond Joys, Baby Ruths, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs and Butterfingers. It dawned on me: He planned to fill us up on sweets so he wouldn’t have to spend money eating out on the road.
Arguing commenced about who would sit where. My youngest brother wanted to wedge himself in the rear beside the candy boxes.
Before we’d left the driveway, our wheel man was fuming. “Shut the ‘H’ up!” he commanded, soon adding the puzzling: “Don’t make me stop this car!” He hadn't actually even started it.
My thoughts turned to the Donner party and other god-awful, doomed expeditions. There were 1,500 miles yawning ahead between Hell’s Half Acre and Nova Scotia. Ironically, Dad promised Prince Edward Island, the inspiration for my beloved Anne of Green Gables, would make it all worthwhile.
The AC spluttered then died as we rolled through northern Virginia on new Michelins Dad couldn’t stop bragging about. He was not much on getting repairs even as he mumbled about having the Freon checked. Fanning herself, my mother muttered, “So much for driving in comfort.”
Dad, gray eyes narrowing, accelerated onto the interstate and shouted to the hesitating driver in front of us, “The sign says ‘YIELD,’ for God sakes, not ‘give up’!”
I sulked, too, wondering if my new crush would even remember me weeks later.
Dad barked at me to toss some candy to the youngest ones as soon as they began hinting about hamburgers. They devoured sweets, grew antic, then complained about the heat, which in-
creased as we approached the Chesapeake area.
Mom suddenly shrieked. “The sign says there’s a tunnel ahead!”
She was completely petrified of tunnels and long bridges.
Dad commenced reassuring her that she would be OK. I looked forward to the tunnel, assuming it was cool inside. I hissed, “If we drown, we drown.” Dad looked back and shot me a murderous look. Mom paled.
Things did not improve as we skirted New York. In fact, the northward journey became a blur of heat/exhaustion/sugar comas and quibbling. The days (and chocolate candies) melted as everyone’s tempers shortened.
Memorably, we found cooler temps as we hit New England, stopping off in Lincoln, Maine, to visit Dad’s friends, the Lloyds. We learned they were putting us up, but in separate houses. My younger sister and I stayed with Miss Lillian in a Victorian greatly resembling the Addams Family home.
That night, my sister pressed a button near the antique headboard. The kindly widow knocked gently at the door. “Yes, dears?” she asked.
The button had once been used to summon servants.
“My sweet Herman used that to call me when he was ill,” she explained sweetly. As soon as the door closed, I said Herman likely died in our bed. My youngest sister, age 11, was terrified but tried to hide it. Instead, she refused to share the same bed, taking her pillow and our blanket to lay on the rug, where she remained until morning.
At breakfast, I insisted the pot of full cream on Miss Lillian’s table was “northern milk” and watched as my gullible sister poured a glass and took a huge swig. Meantime, our mother discovered bears feasting on wild blueberries in the Lloyd’s backyard, terrifying her.
By the time we lumbered into Canada, we were thoroughly sick of each other. By the first Canadian sunrise, Dad — ever eager to buy property — met with a Realtor. The innkeeper knocked at my door, saying Dad had arranged for me and my sister to help out with housekeeping in exchange for lower room rates.
We grudgingly complied because, well, we’re Southerners. Dad also rejected driving to the Green Gables heritage site. Instead, we returned via Moncton, experiencing the much-ballyhooed Magnetic
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Hill. As Dad and my brothers exclaimed, I sighed dramatically.
As we continued homeward, nerves shot, Mom overruled Dad and chose a white-tablecloth restaurant, where we (inscrutably) ordered six tomato juice cocktails while he was in the bathroom. Seeing the waiter place juices on a little saucer before all of us, he exploded, “Do you think I’m made of money?” All eyes followed as we noisily scraped our chairs away from the table and departed.
There were more proverbial straws soon to break the camel’s fractured back. Naturally, the car threw a fan belt before we made it to the Mason Dixon Line. The radiator blew, too, prompting me to dub the wagon “Moby Dick.”
We dressed in shorts and T-shirts, seeking relief from the heat, but my sweat-damp thighs stuck to the brown Naugahyde seats. Each shift of my posture produced embarrassing fart-like noises, delighting my siblings. My youngest brother imitated this, producing a gross symphony of sounds to accompany the miles southward — an obscene vacation soundtrack.
Despite Moby Dick’s many ills, and our laments and complaints, Dad finally docked him in our driveway.
I leaped out, pirouetted in the gravel, and raced inside to claim the aqua-colored Princess phone by my parents’ bed.
Later, my father and brothers remembered the trip positively. They would extol New England’s abundant beauty, plus lack of litter, billboards and heat, seemingly forgetting all else. Dad would tell all listeners about the mystery of Magnetic Hill.
But my mother’s brow would raise, her eyes round before exploding. “Tunnels and bridges! Bears in Maine! Overtaxed hairspray costs in Canada! Miles of nothing! That hideous, hot station wagon! Never. Again.”
“Say what you want,” Dad would muse affably, a changed man once home in his easy chair. “That’s some bee-yootee-ful country up there. Can’t wait to get back.” OH
Cynthia Adam is a contributing editor to O.Henry magazine.
Incredible Investment Opportunity in Bustling Greensboro
Maud Gatewood, Untitled (Molly Skating), c. 1982, acrylic on canvas. Collection of Lee Fazzi & Christine Burns-Fazzi
The Stately Little Blue
A summer visitor dressed in white
By susA n CA mPBell
Late summer can be an especially exciting time for birders. We need not travel far to find unexpected visitors. Weather events may cause individuals to be blown off track and show up in the neighborhood. These lost birds may stick around for mere hours. However, in other instances, it may be a more deliberate response to environmental conditions that brings them our way.
One bird that frequently appears in wet areas later in the summer is the little blue heron. And it may not be just one, but several of them, that show up. Furthermore, they are not usually blue. This is because young of the year (which these inland wanderers almost always are) are actually white. Except for the very tips of the wing feathers — usually a challenge to make out — these birds are covered with white feathers. Unlike the great or snowy egret, which also may turn up in the Piedmont or Sandhills at this time of year, the bill of these small herons is pinkish gray, and the legs are greenish.
All of these white waders may be spotted in shallow wet habitats — streams, small ponds, water hazards, retention areas, etc. Little blue herons may be by themselves, mixed with other white, long-legged waders, or even with the much larger great blue heron. Little blues can be identified by their more upright foraging posture, their slow, deliberate movements and a downward angled bill as they stalk prey. Unlike other smaller waders, they will hunt in deeper water, often all the way up to their bellies.
Little blues watch for not only small fish but frogs and crayfish, as well as large aquatic insects. It is thought that their coloration allows them to blend in inconspicuously with similar white species. The association then provides protection from predators. Also, it has been found that little blues are significantly more
successful predators when foraging alongside great egrets. These larger birds are likely to stir up the water as they move after underwater prey, which can then flush a meal in the direction of nearby little blues.
It takes these herons at least a year to develop adult plumage, not unlike white ibis — who sport dark plumage their first summer and fall — which also breed along our coast. They may have a pied appearance for a time in late winter or early spring. By April they will be a slatey blue-gray all over with a handsome bluish bill. Unlike our other wading birds, they lack showy head or neck plumes. They are also unique in having projections on their middle toes that form a comb, which is used as an aid when grooming.
Unfortunately this species has experienced an alarming drop in population numbers across North America over the past halfcentury. Loss of coastal wetland habitat, continued declines in water quality and elimination as a nuisance in fish hatcheries all are thought to be contributing to the decline. So be sure to stop and appreciate these stately birds should you come across one — regardless of when or where you happen to be. OH
Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com, or by calling (910) 585-0574.
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Down to a Fine Art
For 125 years, The Art Shop has decorated Gate City walls — and beyond
By Billy i ngRA m
“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”
— Edward Hopper
Residents in “The City of Flowers” (as Greensboro was known at the time) must have thought the big city had come to town when, in 1899, Andy Andrews opened Andrews Art Store on the 100 block of West Market, an emporium stocked with custom-made framing materials to accommodate the aesthetic needs of our more refined citizens.
Just up the block was the borough’s newly implemented, earliest attempt at a public transit system, consisting of a horse-drawn streetcar traveling north up Elm Street all the way to Judge Dick’s Dunleath house. With its limited horsepower, an old mule, passengers were required to disembark and push from behind at any incline that was encountered.
Rechristened The Art Shop, ready-made frames, prints and etchings were added to the store’s inventory before famed local commercial photographer Charles Farrell purchased the whole kitand-caboodle in 1923. Farrell expanded the business to include the latest Kodak folding cameras and a state-of-the-art developing plant for photo finishing and enlarging. As this area’s first photographic center, the shop began hosting a camera club in 1933, attracting enthusiastic practitioners all across North Carolina.
“With increased interest in architecture, interior decoration, and amateur photography, The Art Shop has shared widely in those cultural developments in Greensboro and the state,” wrote Ethel Stephens Arnett in her exhaustive historical tome, Greensboro, North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 1955).
Farrell focused his lens on this corner of the world for The Greensboro Daily News, snapping pics depicting everything from the mundane to the extraordinary, like his exclusive aerial image of the crime scene on the day R. J. Reynolds’ scion was murdered.
Farrell, as a young man in 1913, assisted his father in creating one of the most iconic images in modern commerce, the original image of a circus camel named “Old Joe” that became the
trademarked mascot seen on every pack of Camel cigarettes. In 1939, Farrell staged photographs illustrating everyday Black life in the South for Tobe, the very first children’s book produced for an African American audience.
At that time, The Art Shop’s familiar green canopied entrance was on West Market, right where the front steps to Lincoln Financial Group are today. In 1964, after Farrell fell ill, the family sold The Art Shop to Stanley Dolin, who, a decade later moved the shop to a nondescript, stand-alone storefront at 3912 West Market — where I purchased art supplies as a teenager in the 1970s.
Art supplies had long ago been swept aside when current co-owner Andy McAfee began collaborating with proprietor Stanley Dolin in 1997. “My degree was in art marketing and I had worked for five years with Bill Mangum,” McAfee recalls. “Stanley was more into framing so he brought me on to get more involved in the fine art market.” Launching a website soon after, The Art Shop began selling paintings and sculptures internationally. “That really opened a lot of doors. My first big sale was three Oleg [Zhivetin] originals to [a buyer in] Japan.” Dolin constructed a sprawling, cathedral-like gallery on the site in 2000. Then, in 2015, Andy and April McAfee bought the business.
“My number one selling artist is Nano Lopez,” says Andy McAfee says, standing next to one of the sculptor’s larger works, a 400-pound, distinctly abstract bronze interpretation of a goat. “Lopez is from Columbia, South America. He currently resides in Walla Walla, Washington. That’s like a $68,000 goat.” Known for his almost mythological approach to his subjects and a singularly vibrant color palette, Lopez created a smaller but equally kaleidoscopic bronze of a parrot, being crated and shipped out as we spoke. “[Nano Lopez] was one of the first artists I picked up. He’s just turned 70.”
The showroom is brimming with original oils and sketches by Rod Chase, Pino, Hessam and Roberto Salas, mixed media originals by Bisaillon Brothers, as well as limited edition giclée and serigraph reproductions on canvas from Iranian artist Sabzi and artist Thomas Arvid, known for his portrayals of wine. McAfee also offers a collection of fanciful drawings from the fertile mind of Dr. Seuss.
“I’ve been here long enough that now I work with mostly the
family of the artists,” McAfee says. “Like with Hessam, I work with his son. Pino, who made Fabio famous, passed away about 14 years ago, but his artwork still sells well.” McAfee notes that the shop has an email list of 5,000 who are interested in Pino alone.
Dealing in original art is not without its pitfalls. “I’ve had to learn the hard way,” McAfee says. “An artist can be famous for figurative, but his landscapes could be worthless.” Oftentimes it comes down to subject matter: “Like with Pino, everybody wants the female or the mother-daughter. If I had a mother-and-daughter Pino original, it would sell pretty quickly.”
Each year Leland Little, the illustrious auction company in Hillsborough, ends up with a significant number of acquired pieces. “They sold a couple of original Peanuts comic strips by Charles Schultz for me,” McAfee says. It so happens that Charles Schultz sketches in particular are some of the most common forgeries out there. “Schultz mailed all of his strips in, so there should be folds in [an original], which it had,” McAfee says of the research involved in authentication. “I found the year and the date of the actual strip and it was identical.” The strip with Snoopy in it went for around $14,000, and the one without Snoopy sold for a little more than half that. “So there’s a huge difference.”
Shortly after purchasing The Art Shop, the McAfees opened a North Carolina Gallery inside the store dedicated to artists from around the state, such as painter Phillip Philbeck from Casar, a small town near Hickory. “He came down and did
some original paintings of Greensboro for me, which I love.” Stunning is the only way to describe his meticulous, photorealistic depictions of our downtown skyline and shops along Elm Street.
McAfee is happy to do walk-in appraisals for those curious about a cherished treasure. “I just enjoy doing them, really. If you brought something in and wanted me to look at it, there wouldn’t be any charge for that.” If travel is required in order to assess a collection spread out across an entire house, there’s an hourly rate. “A lot of art is inherited,” he says, adding that some people have no idea the item that’s been hanging on their wall for 50 years is something special. But it’s also not uncommon to come across artwork an owner believes is worth tens of thousands of dollars when, in fact, it’s a print ordered from a catalog. “And people are like, ‘No, it has to be an original — my grandmother said it was.’ There are a lot more reproductions out there than originals.”
For 125 years, award-winning custom framing has remained at the core of The Art Shop’s mission. “We do a lot of corporate work. We’re getting ready to do the Truist Leadership Institute campus out by the airport,” McAfee says of what the organization dubs “the perfect getaway for self discovery and personal growth.” He continues, “We hang a lot of hospitals; we did High Point University; and recently hung art throughout an entire home on Figure Eight Island.”
As Greensboro’s second-oldest locally owned business (Binswanger Glass beat it by a quarter-century), The Art Shop has developed and changed its focus over time, selling it’s last photographic accessories, paint and brushes many decades ago. Still, it’s name may suggest something else to some people. McAfee, chuckling, says, “For the 27 years I’ve been here, people are still calling asking for art supplies.” OH
Billy Ingram is the author of EYE on GSO, a compendium of stories (mostly) about the Gate City’s rich history. For instance: How Greensboro, Charlton Heston with a cast of thousands, and a camp filled with Nazis won World War II. Oh yeah!
Where Your Smile Finds Its Roots
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Our Writers and Illustrators
RANDALL KENAN (1963-2020) was a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship a Whiting Award and the John Dos Passos Prize.
KATHERINE MIN (1959-2019) received an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, two New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowships and a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship.
SHELIA MOSES was raised in Rich Square, N.C., the ninth of 10 children. She is a writer, director, producer, poet and playwright. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and named a Coretta Scott King Honoree.
DAVID ROWELL was born and raised in Fayetteville, N.C., and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the deputy editor at the Washington Post Magazine for nearly 25 years.
MAX STEELE (1922–2005) directed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Creative Writing Program for 20 years before he retired in 1988. He was an editor at Paris Review and Story Magazine and the recipient of two O. Henry Awards.
RAMAN BHARDWAJ is an international muralist, illustrator, fine artist and graphic designer. Born in Chandigarh, India, he has had solo exhibitions in India, Norway and the U.S., has painted more than 50 murals in North Carolina and illustrated 16 books.
KEITH BORSHAK has worked in advertising and design as a graphic designer, art director and creative director, receiving dozens of Addy Awards over his 30year career. His illustration and design work has been recognized by Communication Arts Advertising Annual, The One Show, and the Graphis Design Annual.
GARY PALMER graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design. His work has been published in Wildlife in North Carolina, Ducks Unlimited, Shooting Sportsman, Better Homes & Gardens and Texas Monthly in addition to commissions for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service.
MARIANO SANTILLAN is a contractor for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, where he works as a web developer and illustrator. His “other” clients include Ohio State University, Fayetteville State University, The Washington Post, Cricket Magazine, and The Atlanta Journal- Constitution.
JESSE WHITE is an illustrator, author and muralist. She graduated with a BFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her master’s in art education from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Summer Shorts
August is more than sweet tea, watermelon and air conditioning.
At O.Henry, it’s our Summer Reading Issue. This year’s selections are drawn from the collection of stories entitled Long Story Short published in 2009 by the University of North Carolina Press. The volume showcases the writing of 65 well-known North Carolina authors working in the genre called “flash fiction.” In Japan these short-shorts are called “palm-of-the-hand” stories.
Here are five easy pieces to enjoy on a hot day under a beach umbrella.
The Playhouse
Fiction by Max Steele
Illustration by Mariano Santillan
The professor was standing now before the doors of the American Embassy. He was early for an appointment with an old frat brother, a legal attaché who would help him procure a fast Mexican divorce. There was no urgency really in getting a divorce. It was simply that he could not concentrate on a permanent separation. When he tried he would end up in a hot soapy shower thinking about putting on freshly starched cotton clothes. Someone should have warned him in Raleigh not to drink on the plane. Here he was in Mexico City, a mile high, still a bit dazed.
Three blond children, not more than five or six years old, obviously embassy kids, a little girl and two little boys, were playing house in and around a sort of blueprint design of squares and rectangles drawn with green chalk on the sidewalk. A solid block of taxicabs, more than the professor had ever seen, was passing on the Paseo de la Reforma.
Something about the broad boulevards and the taxi horns reminded him strongly of Paris, where twenty years ago he had spent his one sabbatical. The next year he had met his wife, who often reminded him that he had never taken her to Paris as he had promised. Or done any fun things. There was never enough money on his salary, she accused him, to do any fun things. In the late autumn air the feeling of déjà vu was so strong that he felt it was a dream, or a forgotten passage from a novel he was living through.
The two boys were now standing near him whispering, and the little girl was in the chalk-line house, busily sweeping, putting things on shelves, getting pots out of a stove only she could see, and washing dishes in the silent sink.
At a signal he did not notice, the small boys, giggling and full of themselves, marched slowly to the front of the house and knocked on the door. “Knock. Knock.”
The little girl seemed genuinely surprised. She came through the house, untying her apron and opened the door, drying her hands on the apron.
“Oh, there you are!” She was quite annoyed. “Late again, as usual. And furthermore you have brought a perfect stranger home to dinner.” Oh, she was vexed. “Without even asking. Without even calling!”
“Yes, my dear,” the little husband said proudly, full of his secret. “I would like for you to meet the man who owns the merry-go-round.”
As the boys entered the house, the professor glanced at his watch. He was still five minutes early. Enough time to walk to the far corner.
As he strolled up the dark gusty boulevard, he could still hear the high laughter of the children, and at the sound of their thin, excited voices his heart almost broke. After all, how were they to know (for they were still children), how could he have known she would run off with the man who owned the merry-go-round? OH
Where She Sits
Fiction by Randall Kenan
Illustration by Gary Palmer
They were in the little dining room off the kitchen when he finally told her. He paced about, motioning with his hands.
She just sat there, staring down. Feeling nothing. Maybe. Or just plain tired.
“I can’t do it anymore, Sandra,” he said.
Sandra said nothing. Slowly, she moved her hand over the oilcloth, steadying herself.
“I don’t care what your family says about me,” he said. “I don’t care. I can’t . . . I’m not . . . I’ve got to . . .”
She might have asked Dean about the children. But the idea that he would come up with some sleazy nonsense only made her feel a wave of nausea. Sandra put her head down.
Dean stopped behind her. She could feel the tension in the air; without seeing him, she knew he was clenching and unclenching and clenching his fists. He did that when he was angry. “Did you hear me? I’m leaving.”
Sandra raised her head. “Then go.”
He stood there for the amount of time it takes a frying egg to turn white and walked from the room.
Sandra reached out and caressed the table, and remembered. Not so much remembered as allowed a flood of images, past scents, past sights, to overtake her, fill the void she was now harboring. Each image evoked something like a feeling. So much took place in this room, upon this very surface. Not merely the food served, or the homework fretted over, or the cards played, or the beer spilled, or the puzzles arranged. Moments occurred right here. And now, in this instance of illusions shattered, of dreams wrecked and a heart frozen, these moments seemed to simmer before her, behind her eyes, and she could only hold on to them, to find some strength.
She had inherited this very table from her great-grandmother. Made of pine, by whom she did not know, it had been oiled, dented, dusted, polished, chipped, varnished, battered, peed upon, burned, broken, mended, hammered, nailed, or some such for decades. If it could feel, she knew she’d feel the way it
felt now . . .
“Sandra? Damn it! . . . Where is my . . .”
The first true memory of her grandmother had been watching her across this expanse, on the other end, smiling and slicing with pride a piping hot blueberry pie. No, child, wait for it to cool. And so many mornings, days, nights, her mother at that same end: What you doing out so late? Sandra! An A in math! Now that’s good. Girl, don’t you ever raise your voice at me. I’ll knock the taste out your mouth! You heard about Uncle William, didn’t you? . . .
“Sandra, can’t find my . . .”
As if he actually expected her to come in there and help him to pack, to leave; as if any of this fault rested on her shoulders; as if she was expected to go along to get along; as if she would be unreasonable to go into the kitchen, get a butcher’s knife, and chop him into seventeen billion little pieces.
She ran her hand out against it again, against its smooth flatness, as if to absorb some of its stolid solidity.
Here, she served him his first taste of her cooking: catfish, greens, mashed potatoes, corn bread; here, she told her mother she was to wed the man who made her legs feel like overcooked spaghetti and her heart feel like butter. Here, where she tended him, listened to his tales of boring sales meetings and petty office feuds, and where he entertained his buddies (when not in front of the TV); here, where she fed and consoled and interrogated first one, then two daughters; here, where she slowly watched the shoals of her marriage erode, grain by grain.
Oh, if it could talk . . .
“Sandra.” He stood in the door. She didn’t want to look up at him. She had nothing to say.
“Good-bye.”
She did not look up, as he turned, wordless, and walked down the hall. As the door clicked behind him, she held fast. He may go, but some things would remain. A part, a piece, a fixture, a witness. Even now. OH
The Music Lover
Fiction by Katherine Min
Illustration by Jesse White
Gordon Spires lived across the courtyard from Leonard Hillman, concert master of the M Symphony, and his lover, Kyoung Wha Jun, the second violinist. Leonard and Kyoung Wha often practiced together outside in the courtyard, under the brim of a large oak tree. The neighbors would hear them playing Debussy or Brahms and sometimes something contemporary that they wouldn’t recognize.
Gordon liked to listen to them. He was in love with Kyoung Wha, who was slender and lovely, and he believed that she secretly returned his affection but could only reveal it through her music. So when she played Mozart, it was because he was Gordon’s favorite, and when she played Bach, it meant that she was biding her time, and when she played Tchaikovsky, it was surely a sign that she was ready to run off. For it was well known that Leonard beat Kyoung Wha when he was drunk, that he cheated on her with the first violist, and that he had not quit smoking like he told Kyoung Wha he would, but snuck cigarettes after matinee performances. At least these things were well known to Gordon, who was sickly and often home during the day.
One Sunday afternoon in late autumn, Kyoung Wha and Leonard played Beethoven. From his bedroom window, Gordon could see them, Kyoung Wha in a pleated blue skirt with prim white blouse, her long bangs swinging in her face as she swept her bow across the strings of her violin; Leonard, his narrow face impassive, eyes closed, chin tilted up at an unpleasant angle. Gordon could distinguish the rich, vibrant tones of Kyoung Wha’s playing from the darker, ruminative vibrations of Leonard’s, and he attributed the mistakes — rushed tempo, inconsistent meter, mawkish drawing out of notes — to Leonard, who was, in Gordon’s opinion, the inferior of the two musicians.
Taking careful aim, Gordon threw a Monopoly piece — a silver top hat — at the rounded, balding place at the back of Leonard’s head. Leonard did not stop. Gordon threw the wheelbarrow, the thimble, and the Scottish terrier. He used more force.
“What the — ?”
Beethoven came to a halt. Gordon peeked to see Leonard rubbing his bald patch, looking up at the oak tree, then down to the ground. Leonard shrugged at Kyoung Wha, who shrugged back. They resumed playing.
The next day, Gordon lobbed a satsuma, just grazing Leonard’s
left temple. Leonard leapt from his chair. Kyoung Wha seemed to look straight at Gordon then, smiling sadly. Even crouched below his bedroom window, he could feel her smile penetrate his heart like the most tender of arrows.
A few days passed before they played outside again, Leonard setting up in what had formerly been Kyoung Wha’s spot, farthest from Gordon’s window, Kyoung Wha moving farther from Leonard, into a sunny patch that did not get much shade. Her face in sunlight looked faded to Gordon, wan, and when she played — Mendelssohn this time — he heard the silent suffering as separate notes from the ones that overlapped with Leonard’s, inhabiting the spaces between. She was even more beautiful in her despair, black hair against pale complexion, in an autumnal ensemble of mauves and rusts.
Gordon heaved a bottle of multivitamins, but it overshot its mark, landing, with a muffled plop, in a giant hosta.
It rained for several days after that, the afternoons overhung with mist. Gordon saw Kyoung Wha come into the courtyard in a yellow rain slicker. He thought her green rain boots splendid, as were the orange bill and bubble eyes on her hood, which were meant to make her look like a duck.
On the first clear day, Leonard appeared without Kyoung Wha. He began to play Mahler, his feet planted like andirons before a hearth. Gordon disliked the implication that music could simply go on without her. He wondered where she was, what Leonard had done to her. The lights were off in their apartment. He could see the white fringe of an afghan against the window, resting on the back of a blood red sofa.
Gordon palmed a large rock shaped like a dinosaur egg, with a rough, pock-marked surface. He raised the window and hurled it. The rock rainbowed up and out, hitting Leonard squarely on top of the head and bouncing off. The strings of the violin made a distressed, bleating sound as Leonard slumped sideways out of his chair, then fell face first against the brick walkway.
Time passed. The lights went on. Gordon saw Kyoung Wha come out, heard her call Leonard’s name. Approaching his body, she kneeled, bent to retrieve his violin by its broken neck, got up, and stumbled back inside. The lights went out.
Gordon listened, but all he heard was the sound of distant traffic.
Softly, he closed the window. OH
An Afternoon, No Wind
Fiction by David Rowell • Illustration by Keith Borshak
Astriking, big-boned woman runs back and forth trying to fly a kite. She is surprisingly eager, considering there is no wind today. There is not enough of a breeze to sail the gum wrapper off the bench I’m sitting on. She darts tirelessly across the park as the kite drags behind her like a little dog. Every so often the kite lifts off the ground, though no higher than her head, and that’s only because she is a fast runner. This goes on for an hour.
I’m supposed to be helping my ex-girlfriend move her tanning bed into the spare room. But when the woman with the kite throws her arms up in an almost vaudevillian show of disgust, I get up, stiff from the wooden slats, and walk over to her. She isn’t aware of me until I am close enough to touch her.
“Tough day for kites,” I say.
We look at each other, and for a few seconds neither of us seems sure what to do. I back up a step or two. I am suddenly confused and can’t remember if I have spoken yet or just thought about what I might say. Tough day for kites?
“Je ne comprends absolument pas ce que vous dites.” I know it’s French, but I don’t speak a word of it. Watching her earlier, it didn’t occur to me that she wasn’t American, but up close I can see the faint olive glow of her skin, the slightly pouty curl of her lips. I consider turning around, leaving her alone, but there is something
helpless about her and her shiny but now damaged triangular kite. I point to the kite, then to the sky. I blow a deep breath and shake my head no.
“No wind,” I say slowly, so slowly that I am keenly aware of how my lips feel when they move. “There is no wind.”
We stand another moment in silence, as the strangled cry of taxi horns and someone’s high-pitched laughter and the rusty churn of a nearby bicycle chain play off each other like jazz musicians. Behind the woman a mass of clouds forms a penguin, then a penguin on skates. She says something — something abrupt, like an order — and points to the kite. She points at me, then to the kite again. I reach down to pick it up.
“Oui,” she says.
I raise the kite slowly over my head, arching my brow to say, Is this OK? Is this what you want? She doesn’t indicate one way or another. Out of the corner of my eye I notice that two older women who are dressed for the tundra have stopped to watch.
She backs up and lets some string out, all the while staring into my eyes so intensely that I am afraid to look away. She nods her head once, the way mob bosses in movies indicate their willingness to listen first, before killing. Then she turns and starts sprinting, divots of grass spraying from her heels. The kite jerks out of my hand and immediately sinks, not quite hitting the ground because,
as I say, she’s fast. Her ponytail thrashes behind her like a fish pulled into a boat.
She goes probably thirty yards before she looks up at the speckled sky, where she expects the kite to be. Her sturdy legs slow to a gallop, which causes the kite to touch down with feathery impact. The sad sight provokes her to grunt from the diaphragm and kick at the ground with such force that she nearly falls over. Her large frame heaves in and out. She yells something at either me or the kite (the literal translation might be, “What a piece of crap are you!”). I point up at the sky again and shake my head.
When she finishes winding up the string, she puts the kite back in my hands. I notice two small but distinct moles above her right eye. She catches me looking and balls up her face like a fist. She gives me an earful about something, to which I shrug and smile, though not with my teeth.
All afternoon we do this. And every time we try, I can tell that she expects it to go differently. Sometimes I shake my head in mock disbelief. Other times I grab a handful of grass and launch it into the air, as if that might tell us something. Once I try to hand the kite back to her and reach for the string, thinking she might appreciate the break. But she shakes her head in a frenzy, the way monkeys do in TV commercials, and holds the string behind her back. She tries running harder and for longer. If I hold the kite up with my arms even slightly bent, she refuses to start running. When yet another attempt fails, she violently reels the kite in. As we get ready again, she sucks some air into her locomotive lungs, then gives me the signal to release.
By now the sun has melted to the bottom of the sky, leaving behind a fiery red glaze. People walk by with their necks turned at awkward angles, their mouths agape with wonder. My French
companion is still for the first time all day. We stand there awhile, just a few feet apart, but it’s hard to believe we’ve spent the entire afternoon together. If I ran over the hill and brought back two sno-cones, I wonder if she would even recognize me.
The man at the pretzel cart is folding down his umbrella. I imagine a big wind suddenly sweeping through the park and lifting the umbrella up over the trees, the man kicking wildly in the air as he tries to hang on. When I look over again at my partner in aeronautics, it takes me a moment to realize that she is tearing up the kite. She grips it in her muscular arms and splits it down the middle. She yanks out the sticks of the frame, fumbling with them until she snaps them over her knee. Then, with lips moving but making no sound, she grabs the tail with both hands and tries to twist it off, but she loses patience with it and is content to leave it a thin, raggedy string. Her hands are a frenzied blur of methodical destruction, though her face has an even, almost serene expression. When she is finally satisfied, she bundles up the remains and hands them to me. Instinctively I reach out to cradle the wreckage.
She lumbers toward the wrought iron entrance of the park, past the statue of George Washington on his horse, past a little boy trying to step on his balloon, which keeps darting out from under his foot. She steps directly in front of a stretch limousine so that it has to slam on brakes; still, the driver senses enough not to honk. She mows through the streets with an elephantine grace and does not fade from view until well after the darkness settles in.
I COULD GO OVER THIS AGAIN, say at what point this, then that, but it would more or less come out the same. And yet there is something that I can’t account for, even now: In my arms the kite felt like a bouquet of flowers. OH
Tumbleweed
Fiction by Shelia Moses • Illustration by Raman Bhardwaj
My man is like a tumbleweed. He just rolls around and catches everything that crosses his path — every woman that is. I am telling you he’s just like a tumbleweed. That is the reason I did not want to come to this one-horse town to live. But Hogwood, North Carolina, is my Tumbleweed’s home, and he wanted to come back to be near his dying daddy. That was four years ago. His daddy, Mr. Pop, is still alive. So why are we still here?
I knew Tumbleweed would start rolling with the gals that used to love him as soon as the train stopped in Weldon to let us off in 1952. We was only here one day before we ran into one of his old gals, Missy, in the grocery store. That was the beginning of Tumbleweed going back to his old ways. First he told me that Missy was his cousin. Then I looked at that boy of hers, Boone, and I knew Tumbleweed was lying. I knew he was the daddy. Look more like Tumbleweed than Tumbleweed look like himself.
“Come on Sweet Ida,” he said to me.
“Come on nothing, Tumbleweed. You lied to me again. You know good and well Missy ain’t your cousin. You know that boy is your boy.”
“Na’ll Ida, Boonie ain’t no boy of mine. I only got six boys and two girls. You know that.” He say that mess like he proud that he left a baby in every town between Wildwood, New Jersey, and Hogwood. He ain’t never had no wife, so what he bragging for?
Missy ain’t saying a word. She just smiling and turning from side to side like she can’t stand still around my Tumbleweed. That boy Boonie ain’t got good sense. He don’t even know what we talking about. Guess we better leave before he eat up all the candy in the grocery store that Missy ain’t even offered to pay for. He definitely Tumbleweed’s boy because he always want something for nothing.
Can’t be too crazy, now can he?
“Oh stop looking for reasons not to love me gal.” Then Tumbleweed pulled me in his arms in the store that was filled with people. The store always filled with people from Rich Square, Jackson, and Hogwood on a Friday evening. It’s payday, even for the field hands. The womenfolks was looking when Tumbleweed pulled me closer. I forgot all about that boy that looked just like my man. I remembered all the reasons I love myself some Tumbleweed.
I love him for the same reason all these North Carolina womenfolks love him.
He a man! A real man! My man!
He ain’t all fine or nothing. He just a man that you gots to have.
Come that Monday morning we was back working in the ’bacco field. I was hanging ’bacco in the hot barn loft while Tumbleweed drove the truck for Mr. Willie who own all this land and ’bacco. Right now he ain’t driving. Tumbleweed just sitting and waiting to take us home. I think Mr. Willie had extra folks in the field that day. Extra women to prime this ’bacco. Extra women to look at my Tumbleweed.
They can’t fool me. That old Bessie was there shaking her big behind all over the place. She the only woman I know that wear tight skirts in the ’bacco barn. I can’t believe I left my job waiting tables at that rich country club in Wildwood to come here to prime ’bacco. Tumbleweed claimed it is a good way to make a living.
Look at him sitting over there looking at me up here in the loft and all the other women that love him out in the field.
“You want some water?” Bessie yelled to my Tumbleweed when it was time for us to knock off for lunch.
He did not answer her.
He better not!
“Anything Tumbleweed want, I can get for him,” I said, climbing down the hot barn loft for lunch.
“Fine,” Bessie said as she laughed like she knew something that I did not know. “I can get Tumbleweed some water later tonight,” she whispered and walked over to the tree to eat her pork and beans and crackers.
“Say it again,” I said as I ran up behind her. Bessie turned around in slow motion. She must have eyes in the back of her head.
I did not get far when them sisters of hers all jumped up from the ground at the same time.
“Where you going city girl?” her oldest sister Pennie Ann asked as she rolled up the sleeves on her shirt while kicking her can of beans out of the way.
I will fight anybody, anywhere for my Tumbleweed, I thought to myself.
I tried to roll up my sleeves too.
That is all I remember. The next thing I know I am lying in the back of Tumbleweed’s truck and he’s looking down at me.
“How many fights you going to have girl?” he said like he was almost sad.
“How many women you gonna love Tumbleweed?” I said as I reached for my head that was really hurting now. The knot on it felt mighty big.
Tumbleweed leaned over me and kissed me real hard with his big black lips.
All the womenfolks looked at us. They wished they was me. OH
The Wyndham Way
After 85 years, Greensboro’s beloved PGA event is still making history
By Jim DoDson
One morning 25 years ago, while working with Arnold Palmer on his memoir, A Golfer’s Life, I asked the King of Golf if there was one tournament in his illustrious career that he regretted never winning.
I was sure he was going to say the PGA Championship, the only missing major.
Arnold was sitting at his workshop desk, putting a new leather grip on his driver. But he paused and gave me what I’d come to think of as “The Look,” a cross between a constipated eagle and a very disapproving school master.
“Really, Shakespeare?” he growled. “You really have to ask? You of all people should know the answer. After all, you grew up there!”
He meant, of course, my hometown Greater Greensboro Open, which I attended almost every year of my life growing up in the Gate City, including the year after I went off to college, when Arnold had his best chance ever to win the tournament. He led the final round until a triple bogey on the par-three 70th hole allowed lanky George Archer to win at the wire.
“I never quite got over that,” he admitted with characteristic candor. “I had so many friends in the gallery from Greensboro and Winston-Salem, plus my connections with Wake Forest [University]. It still chews at me. That tournament was so much fun and meant a great deal to me. I just never got the job done.”
The King may have regretted failing to win the GGO, as it was affectionately called, in front of the homefolk faithful, but the tournament known today as the Wyndham Championship has never forgotten Arnold Palmer.
Yes, that tournament: in its 85th year, set to begin Thursday, Aug. 8, and continuing until Sunday, Aug. 11. All eyes, as usual, will be on the Wyndham because it determines which 70 PGA Tour golfers will advance into the FedExCup Playoffs.
Several years ago, his grandson Sam Saunders watched as Wyndham officials installed a plaque dedicated to Palmer on the Wall of Champions behind the ninth green at Sedgefield Country Club. The plaque reads: “Widely considered the most important figure in golf and one of the most influential players in Wyndham Championship history, Arnold Palmer had five top-five finishes in 13 appearances at Sedgefield.”
From its modest beginning as the seventh oldest golf event on the PGA Tour,
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN GILLOOLY
won by Sam Snead in 1938, the Wyndham’s legacy of winning champions who made their mark on American golf can be matched by few PGA events. The list includes legends such as Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead (who won the GGO a record eight times), Gary Player, Billy Casper, Larry Nelson, Raymond Floyd and a dashing young Spaniard named Seve Ballesteros, who won his first tournament at Greensboro in 1978 en route to superstardom.
The last nine decades have seen at least three different sponsor name changes before Wyndham Hotels & Resorts became the tournament’s stalwart title sponsor in 2007. All that time, the Triad’s beloved golf tournament — North Carolina’s first professional event — retained its unique personality and important place in the world of professional golf.
“It’s essentially unique for a variety of reasons,” says Executive Tournament Director Mark Brazil, who started with the tournament in 2003. “You can begin, of course, with its almost incomparable history, which rivals the majors in terms of legends who won here. But its evolution under Wyndham has made the tournament even more special in several ways.”
One notable way, he points out, is the strong emphasis the Wyndham places on being a premier fan-friendly event, a fivetime winner of the PGA’s top hospitality award for fan accessibility and friendliness.
“Most tournaments actually focus most of their attention on the players, going out of their way to provide luxury accommodations and services, anything they can to make the players feel welcome. We do the same thing, of course, but the key to our hospitality focus has always been the fan experience, the paying customer who might come out for a day or the entire week in the heat of summer to watch the greatest players in golf.”
Brazil points out that at a time when fan bleachers are disappearing from the grounds of some tournament venues, the Wyndham features numerous bleachers, enhanced spectator viewing areas and much-lauded cooling areas all over the Sedgefield property. The Wyndham’s popular Margaritaville tent, Truist fan pavilion, Sunbrella Sun Deck and Wyndham Rewards areas have become hallmarks of the its laid-back, hometown family feel.
That’s just the Wyndham way.
Another facet of the tournament’s appeal is the opportunity to watch younger players on the rise who may someday become the next Seve Ballesteros. The likes of British Open Champ Sandy Lyle, a young Davis Love III and Webb Simpson have won the Wyndham on their way to stardom. In more recent times, even older players such as Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods joined the field, hoping to claim some Wyndham magic and the tournament’s Sam Snead trophy. Garcia made himself relevant on the PGA circuit by winning the tournament in 2013. A recovering Tiger Woods gave fans a thrill and left a good impression on fans by comparing Sedgefield and its history-rich Donald Ross golf course to baseball’s historic Wrigley Field.
At a time when professional golf is in flux, perhaps the Wyndham’s biggest recurring storyline is its coveted position as the last regular season event where players can make a run at finishing in the Tour’s Top 70 rankings, thus qualifying for the
FedExCup Playoffs that begin the following week in Memphis. The tournament also helps determine the top 50 players who qualify for the next season’s “signature events” that sport $20 million purses after reaching the second FedExCup Playoffs event. Sweetening the attraction, there’s also the $40 million Comcast Business Tour Top 10, rewarding the top-10 finishers in the PGA Tour regular season.
Finally, players who find themselves potential “captain’s picks” for the President’s Cup and Ryder Cup, have a final opportunity to make a big impression. In 2023, both Ryder Cup captains Zach Johnson and Luke Donald played in the Wyndham Championship for this very reason.
“This explains why we generally leave the players alone,” Brazil notes. “They have important business on their minds when they get here. There is so much riding on their performances. In many cases, the Wyndham becomes the last opportunity of the year to advance their careers. As we like to say,” he adds, “the finale is really the beginning.”
Aside from its strong community outreach programs, including longtime support of the First Tee—Central Carolina, each year seems to bring a nice, new wrinkle in terms of the tournament’s service to the Triad.
Earlier this year, partnering with First Tee, the Wyndham put out a nationwide call for artists to create an outdoor wall mural honoring the civil rights pioneers the “Gillespie Six” at the Gillespie Golf Course, to be commissioned by Wyndham Rewards and overseen by the City of Greensboro.
With Gillespie’s continued revival in mind, a panel of key community figures and organizations selected a trio of finalists from more than 50 artists across the nation to design an outdoor memorial that will honor the Greensboro Six at Gillespie Golf Course. The mural is commissioned by the Wyndham Rewards Program.
In mid-June, Vincent Ballentine was announced as the artist who will paint the Greensboro Six mural on the First Tee— Central Carolina building at Gillespie Golf Course. An artist’s rendering of the mural was unveiled at the time, honoring the course’s history with a depiction of the six pioneers as well as a vibrant nod to the diverse future of golf.
Ballentine hails from Brooklyn, New York, and is a multidisciplined visual artist known for large-scale outdoor murals commissioned by the likes of MTV, the NCAA and BET. At the June announcement, First Tee—Central Carolina CEO Ryan Wilson praised Ballentine’s mural plan, saying it “captures our vision of bringing the community together through the power of golf and will serve as an everyday reminder of our storied past and — because of that — our beautiful future.”
Ballentine also addressed the crowd: “The Gillespie mural honors courageous men who overcame deep-rooted racial challenges to inspire incredible change.” His hope? That his creation will generate thoughtful conversations about the importance of inclusivity while paying homage to the Greensboro Six.
The mural will be publicly unveiled during the Wyndham Championship Jr. Golf Clinic on August 5, 2024, kicking off the Wyndham Championship.
The latest example of the Wyndham Way. OH
Remembering the Greensboro Six
At the height of its popularity in the 1950s, the 18-hole Gillespie course, designed and built by renowned golf course architect Perry Maxwell, was one of the busiest public layouts in the state.
“It was very popular, always busy, a gem of a course that matched up well with our three private country clubs in town,” remembers Greensboro’s legendary former mayor Jim Melvin, who grew up across the street from the course. “There was really only one glaring problem. It was a segregated course for white golfers only.”
On December 7, 1955, the same week the Montgomery bus boycott was launched in the wake of Rosa Park’s defiance of Alabama’s segregation laws, a Greensboro dentist and Civil Rights activist named Dr. George Simkins Jr. decided to try to break down that barrier.
Simkins and five Black friends showed up to play golf at Gillespie, putting down the 75-cents green fee and peacefully demanding their right to play as citizens of Greensboro.
Despite the objections of Gillespie’s manager, who falsely claimed that the public facility was a “private course for members only,” the six teed off and were subsequently arrested and charged with simple trespassing.
The six were found guilty, and appealed their convictions, in two separate state court trials — first being fined $15 each plus court costs, and then in the second trial, being given a maximum 30-day sentence. However, while the trespass cases were still working their way through the state court system, Simkins, head of the local chapter of the NAACP, filed a suit in U.S. District Court against the City of Greensboro for racial discrimination in maintaining a public golf course facility for whites only. Six months later, the courts ruled in favor of Simkins and his fellow defendants, confirming that the City of Greensboro could not escape its legal obligation to provide equal access to all citizens. The court ordered the city to discontinue operating on a segregated basis.
Two weeks before the ruling, however, the historic Gillespie clubhouse — an original structure dating back to Colonial days — mysteriously burned to the ground. Subsequently, the city council voted to go out of the recreation business and closed the golf course, soon selling off nine holes of the facility to an industrial group. Almost a decade later, the course reopened as a nine-hole public facility.
Eventually Simkins’ lawsuit found its way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, where the high court ruled against the plaintiffs, 5-4. A strong dissent by Chief Justice Earl Warren, however, prompted North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges to commute the sentences of the Greensboro Six.
“It was a monumental moment in the history of Greensboro,” says Melvin. “George Simkins is really Greensboro’s Martin Luther King. He and his five friends made history here we can all be proud of.”
Not long afterwards, the Greater Greensboro Open became the first PGA Tour event in the South to welcome an African American player, Charlie Sifford.
Several years ago, the Bryan Foundation and Wyndham Championship teamed up to fund a restoration of Gillespie by local architect Chris Spence, providing a permanent home for the First Tee–Central Carolina’s Learning Center with expanded practice facilities.
And earlier this year, famed international golf architect Rees Jones visited the course and met with city officials to discuss a comprehensive redo of the historic course that the new mural honoring the Greensboro Six will overlook.
hen director, musician and playwright Sherri Raeford was invited to dramatize the struggles “of courageous and resolute women of North Carolina to obtain equal rights” she was struck by the diversity of the those who pioneered the right to vote for women in the state. Many of the stories were Asian, Black, Jewish, Native American, Immigrant Irish and white Americans, she learned.
American Association of University Women North Carolina (AAUW NC) president Cheryl Wheaton envisioned a 2020 performance to be given in Raleigh at the Governor’s Mansion for a special centennial. Raeford, who thrives on group projects, was elated that the diverse group of women she pulled into the project were loving it, too — so much that they agreed to even be cast members. The writers included Jalila A. Bowie, Sheryl Davis, Patsy Hawkins, Ruan Walker, Lennie Singer, Chappell Upper and, of course, Raeford.
“The original idea was to envision women at the Governor’s Mansion on the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage,” she says. Raeford is owner of Shared
Radiance Performing Arts Company, which she founded after years directing the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival.
Underwritten by a grant award from the AAUW and later supplemented by High Point nonprofit Women in Motion, or WIM, the original work, Sisters of Mine; Hear the Voices, will finally come
to the stage at two Triad locations on August 24 and 29 after COVID disrupted that original production.
Raeford has spent years researching and dramatizing events surrounding the passage of the 19th amendment. Ratified on August 26, 1920, the centennial observation — four years after the fact — will
Sarah Wilson, Robin Gentile
serve to mark Women’s Equality Day.
She held developmental meetings in her Pleasant Garden studio.
“A lot of the women who contributed [to suffrage] were women of color, and I didn’t want to write other people’s stories.”
That was then.
“When [the project] began,” she recalls, it was exhilarating. “There was a lot of momentum.” Raeford sighs. “Then COVID hit.”
With the pandemic raging, the group attempted collaborating on Zoom rather than in person. That proved difficult, Raeford admits. The production lost steam as the pandemic ground on. Eventually, the project stalled.
Raeford grieved a bit, then “let it lie for a few years.” She regrouped as best she could during the pandemic, staging
open air company productions in the interim. Best known for bringing classical and original works to students and into the general community, Raeford's company, Shared Radiance, is a member of the North Carolina Theatre Conference and the Shakespeare Theatre Association.
Shared Radiance productions frequently use outdoor locations, including parks and public space, where the audience follows the actors from scene to scene. So, using the outdoors as the stage was nothing new to her.
Open air performance, as it turned out, was a godsend during the pandemic.
Shared Radiance board member Martha Yarborough had learned about the developing production during those
COVID-era Zoom meetings. Almost immediately, she grasped that the theme of women’s equality was a fit with another organization, WIM, a leadership initiative founded in 2015. She felt WIM would instantly see the production was “about finding a voice.”
Yet Sisters of Mine might never have found its voice, Raeford stresses, if not for renewed interest from AAUW NC. “The AAUW Greensboro branch recommissioned the production to highlight today’s equity issues for women,” the organization explained recently in a release.
With AAUW’s renewed interest, Raeford was further buoyed when WIM sought a second performance in High Point for their organization.
O.Henry
Robin Gentile, Sherri Raeford, Sarah Wilson
As a result, Sisters of Mine could stage two Triad performances bookending Women’s Equality Day on August 26.
Linking two of her passions, theater and leadership, Yarborough is delighted that Sisters of Mine reemerged following a dramatic five-year disruption.
“Since 2000,” says Raeford, “Martha has been my muse.” A former educator, Yarborough played a supportive role for a former student, this time by calling Sisters of Mine to the attention of WIM’s director, Pam Baldwin, and fellow board members.
WIM decided to use Sisters of Mine to announce 2024 grant winners in conjunction with the performance and “use it as a special platform for an annual event as well,” says Baldwin. She explains that the organization serves to elevate and support women in achieving professional goals, which seemed a natural fit for the premise of the play.
“The play speaks to the importance of using your voice and being empowered. One way you can exercise your voice is by
voting . . . which these women [suffragettes] fought for.” And there is a dramatic tie-in with WIM.
“Half of our organization’s member dues go into a giving pool,” she says, in discussing WIM’s grant process. Each year the membership votes on allocation of monies raised.
“Obviously, because the women in our organization get to vote on all grants,” the production’s theme of voting rights suited their purpose.
“So, tying all that in and making the celebration of the grant [awards] just elevates it. We’re coming together, talking about our mission, who we are and what we do, and also have a program that they can enjoy as well. It came about organically.”
She adds, “We want them to come, to learn about us, and see where their money would go as a member.” She liked the idea of free admission, following the lead of the AAUW’s premiere in Greensboro.
“Rather than charging as a fundraiser, we want to flip the script a little [by offer-
ing free admission].”
Their hope? That mothers and daughters, women from all walks of life, will attend the play.
Yarborough agrees with Baldwin, envisioning that a performance about the rights of women “will illustrate Women in Motion’s collaboration with other groups.”
Today, Sisters of Mine is not the traditional play it began as. While the original premise of the suffragette-themed work has morphed into a performance piece with original music, it still cleaves closely to the original concept — reflecting “women of diverse histories” seeking equality, according to playwright Raeford.
She is pleased that the handpicked collaborators authentically reflect the varied background of the original suffragettes, calling it a “performance collage.”
Raeford, who is an avid musician and composer, wrote an original song for the play based on the poem “Sisters of Mine” by North Carolina poet Barbara Henderson, who “had written poems about the suffragette movement.” After composing the music, Raeford asked musician Robin Gentile to help arrange the song, and to perform it on flute and guitar. With five years elapsed, the core group changed. Their post-pandemic life circumstances altered. One of the original writers moved away.
Again, Raeford regrouped, assembling a “multi-generational cast,” some in their 20s and others in their 70s. The Sisters of Mine cast includes original writers and cast as well as new cast members Jamila Curry, Robin Gentile, Cynthia Reichelson and Sarah Wilson. Understudies Camille Christina, Candace Hescock, Grace Kanoy and Kelly Kerr will be waiting in the wings. Sarah Wilson is the stage manager.
“The beauty of the generations is also the beauty of women . . . all taking care of each other,” explains Raeford.
“This is what this is all about,” adds Yarborough, connecting the struggle for parity in the workplace and as individuals. “Fighting for our rights. Using your voice.” OH
Seated, left to right: Patsy Hawkins, Cynthia Reichelson
Back row, left to right: Sherri Raeford, Ruan Walker, Jamila Curry, Robin Gentile, Sheryl Davis, Chappell Upper
he original play Sisters of Mine; Hear the Voices provides the backstory of a national and local movement waged — long before the right to vote was finally granted — by women of various ethnicities and backgrounds. Ultimately, the bloodline of the effort was strengthened by the dauntlessness of those varied women who peopled the movement.
Patching together their arduous struggle, Sisters of Mine sweeps from the present time to the late 1800s in upstate New York, training a historic lens upon the Native American Haudenosaunee Confederacy, comprised by the Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Tuscarora Nations. The sixth, the Tuscarora, left North Carolina in large numbers for New York state in the 1700s; those remaining here are among eight tribes recognized by the State of North Carolina.
The play portrays a connection between New York suffragettes Elizabeth Stanton and Matilda Gage by virtue of their physical proximity to Native women of the Upstate New York Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Plus, according to historical accounts, in 1848 a movement supporting women’s rights was born among indigenous women.
The women’s names are lost to history.
It is all the more remarkable given the sheer audacity of their hopefulness.
Not until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 were full rights of citizenship granted indigenous people — including the right to vote. Until then, all such rights were denied both men and women.
The perspective of Black American women is demonstrated when the play transitions to Akron, Ohio, in 1851, where formerly enslaved Sojourner Truth delivered the speech “I Am a Woman’s Rights” at a women’s rights convention. Soon after, in 1853, two women delegates attended the World Temperance Convention in New York City. Neither were allowed to speak. One, Susan B. Anthony, later founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, three years after co-founding the American Equal Rights Association.
The Asian American and immigrant dynamic is illustrated through national women’s advocates, such as Rosa Finocchietti Levis and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who populate the narrative.
We learn, too, that New York remained a nexus of the women’s struggle for equality. In 1917, New York became the first state to allow women to vote, before the Amendment was even enacted in 1920.
Notably, North Carolina was “slow to join the fight” for women’s right to vote.
Slow seems an understatement.
Asheville suffragist Helen Morris Lewis became the first North Carolina woman to seek municipal office in 1899 — before possessing the right to vote for herself. She sponsored the state’s first public meeting on suffrage in 1894, and began the North Carolina Equal Suffrage Organization.
Fellow North Carolinian, Goldsboro native Gertrude Weil, launched a fight against anti-Semitism and eventually became president of the North Carolina Equal Suffrage movement.
Chapel Hill poet Barbara Bynum Henderson led the Women’s Suffrage League for two years, addressing the North Carolina General Assembly in 1915 to appeal for the right to vote; bill after bill nonetheless died there. Her poem, “The March of Women,” written in 1914, was adapted by Sherri Raeford as an original song.
It was 1971 before North Carolina formally ratified the 19th Amendment, years behind our neighboring states of Virginia, in 1959, and South Carolina, in 1969.
For Further Information:
Sisters of Mine opens on Saturday, August 24, 2-4:30 p.m., at The Congregational United Church of Christ, 400 W. Radiance Ave. in Greensboro.
Refreshments served afterward.
RSVP: Jane Terwillegar, 336-782-5327
Free admission with reservations.
Sisters of Mine will be performed on Thursday, August 29, 5:30-7:30 p.m., at the High Point Country Club, 8000 Country Club Drive in High Point.
Refreshments served afterward.
RSVP: WIM by calling 336-899-0887 or online at www. womeninmotionhp.org
Free admission with reservations.
Ruan Walker, Jamila Curry
Out of the Blue
A former neighborhood show house shines again
By Cassie Bustamante • PhotograPhs By a my Freeman
For years, Scott Bisbee had told his wife, Lindsay, about his dream of owning a grand, gray house. With the address in her GPS, Lindsay did a drive-by of a soon-to-be-listed Lake Brandt Estates home. “I got goosebumps,” she recalls. The muted gray-brick home sat far back on a large lot and, from her car window, it looked like the physical manifestation of Scott’s dream. The hidden-behind-overgrowthgem version, that is.
Over a decade ago, the Bisbees became Greensboro residents when Scott, who has been with Honda for most of his career, took over management of the Crown Honda Greensboro franchise. Previously, they’d lived in California’s Bay Area in a town called Danville.
While their Golden State home featured a zero-lot line, their first Greensboro house, a new build in Gates at Brassfield, “sat on a pie shape with the house in the middle of it,” says Scott. “Coming from California to that house? That was a huge upgrade in property.”
But as the Bisbee children grew, the family’s needs changed, too. Plus, they wanted to be on the north side of the city because Scott, too, made a big career move.
“It’s kind of hilarious,” quips Lindsay.
“It’s awesome!” adds Scott.
Years ago at a Honda meetup, before their move to North Carolina, the Bisbees spotted a man with a Danville baseball cap on and struck up conversation, asking if he was from the same East Bay town. Turns out the gentleman, Steve Padgett, was the owner of Honda of Danville in Virginia. Not California. But a friendship was forged and they stayed in touch throughout the years. “And then one day the guy calls Scott,” says Lindsay, in hopes of selling his dealership.
In 2019, Scott firmly put down East Coast roots, purchasing Honda of Danville. “We’re lifers now,” he says happily of North Carolina.
Lindsay, too, began her own business in North Carolina. Before having kids, she worked as a chemist and microbiologist and took her knowledge into cooking for her family, cutting out unnecessary chemicals. Eventually, in 2015, she launched Kyookz, an “artfully pickled” company that offers four pickle varieties in more than 450 store. Their daughter, Taylor, now 24, is currently running the company. Lindsay says that, now, her home is her “new job.”
With their wishlist in mind, the Bisbees struggled to find the fixer-upper of their dreams — a spacious home on a large lot in an established neighborhood, something Lindsay could put her own design spin on. After searching for a couple years, they all but gave up.
“We actually did give up,” says Scott.
But, “out of the blue,” Lindsay says, their friend and Realtor Frances Giaimo called. “She said, ‘Guys, I think I found the one for you.’”
The home had once been “the show house of the neighborhood, according to neighbors,” says Lindsay. It was built in 1987 for Irish-born Ingrid Dougan Hayes McMillan, a former wife of millionaire and textile giant Chuck Hayes, longtime Guilford Mills CEO. According to Lindsay, Ingrid lived there until she succumbed to brain cancer in 2011 at the age of 53. Neighbors have regaled the Bisbees with fond recollections of the beautiful woman who often hosted get-togethers. “Her hair and her makeup and her dress were just perfect and she would be riding her little lawn mower,” says Lindsay. “She took a ton of pride in it.”
Like Lindsay, Ingrid also had an eye for design that was evident throughout.
But the large, contemporary brick home had been occupied by renters for a few years and, before that, had sat vacant. The result? The former jewel of the neighborhood had become a diamond in the rough, buried in overgrowth. Frances, who lives just down the street, caught wind that it would soon be hitting the market.
The sellers’ real-estate agent allowed Frances to take the Bisbees through the home before it hit the market. “It was very
1980s,” recalls Lindsay of that first walkthrough. Plus, the renters had left behind cigarette burns and worse.
As they reached the landing at the top of the stairs that day, Scott remembers looking at his wife and saying, “Do you have any idea how much work this is going to be?!”
But Frances encouraged them to take a look at one more thing — the basement.
“It’s a huge walkout basement that goes underneath this large deck,” says Lindsay, who saw that space and imagined what it could be: an indoor-outdoor space for entertaining with a patio kitchen and views into the peaceful wooded creek behind the house.
“I just felt like it was the one we had been talking about for so long,” says Lindsay. And, having renovated homes on their own in California, a large project did not scare them.
They put in an offer, which the sellers accepted. “It was kind of win-win for everyone,” says Lindsay, since the home never even had to be listed.
Immediately, they got to work and hired architect Stephen Jobe to help them make structural changes on the main floor. Where a small dining room once sat adjacent to a guest room, the couple moved walls, creating a downstairs primary suite.
“We weren’t going to use [the dining room] anyways because we’re not fancy,” says Lindsay, whose style leans California casual. But a main-floor primary would be ideal to allow the couple to avoid stairs as they get older.
“You typically wouldn’t put a primary at the front of the house either,” says Scott, “but because we sit so far back, it’s still dark and private.” In fact, the front yard slopes downward toward the home, allowing their bedroom, decorated in soothing grays, tans and whites, to remain tranquil. Over the bed, a canvas Lindsay created using alcohol ink features soft colors and touches of metallic gold.
The en suite bathroom is Lindsay’s “secondfavorite” space in the entire home. From the heated porcelain-tiled floors to the wet-room shower, “it’s just very cozy.” The soft, neutral palette of taupes and whites lends to a spa-like serenity.
In fact, the colors throughout the home remain cool and calming. In the main living area, white sofas are anchored by a beige-and-gray area rug. An ash-colored, large, square coffee table complements the light wood floors, which have been refinished throughout. But the fireplace wall provides contrast in Sherwin Williams Charcoal Blue, which helps to mask the wall-mounted television.
“It’s been really fun to play with some different colors,” says Lindsay. “I wanted it to be neutral and light, but then I had to do a pop of dark to offset it.” Textiles, such as throw pillows, play off the fireplace wall.
Sitting in this room, one could almost imagine the Pacific Ocean lapping at the shore just beyond the windows. “I think it would be very hard to shake the West Coast out of me,” quips Lindsay.
From his chair in the living room, Scott calls for the family dog, Astro, and asks him to take a selfie. Astro, you see, is not your standard pooch. He’s a Honda-made robot. A long camera extends from his head and he snaps a photo.
“He’s like our little security dog,” says Lindsay. When no one is home, Astro roams the interior with his camera. Of course, the couple’s sons — Hunter, a freshman at Providence College in Rhode Island, and Jake, a junior at Greensboro Day School — have discovered a workaround when they’re at home and their parents are not: “One time, they turned him on his side so he couldn’t roam around and find them and video them.” (Taylor lives in her own apartment locally.)
Astro rolls back over to his resting spot by the back door in the kitchen. Just beyond that door lies a large deck, a deck that Scott almost fell through. The renters had kept a fire pit on the wooden deck, which had then burned and rotted in spots. “It was probably a couple weeks away from collapsing,” says Scott. “And I am stand-
ing on top of it like, is it supposed to bounce like that?”
The couple had the deck reinforced but Scott says “Wendy” resurfaced the deck. Wendy?
“Wendy the builder from Bob the Builder,” Lindsay replies. Turns out Scott’s nicknamed his handy wife.
DIY skills seems to run in the family. Lindsay gestures to a homemade game table, complete with dice, sitting on the deck. “Oh gosh, this is part of our frat house now that our son’s home,” she quips about the makeshift piece her son crafted with his friends after a trip to Home Depot.
Of course, Scott sometimes gets in on the action, too, staying up late to be one of the boys. “Lindsay made me go to bed two weeks ago,” he says with a laugh.
“You do have to get up in the morning!” she notes.
When the boys aren’t out there playing, Lindsay notes that she and Scott enjoy closing down their nights together on the deck with a glass of wine. In fact, when the kitchen was being remodeled, the couple added a large glass wine cellar, which sits in the corner.
When the Bisbees lived in California, Napa was a short drive away. While there, a friend introduced them to Scarecrow, a
hard-to-acquire California cabernet. To even have a chance, you need to add your name to a list and hope that one day you get a call. Scott added his name and years later received the call.
“This one is in a league of its own,” Lindsay says of the wine, proudly displayed in the cellar, which stores up to 480 bottles.
“It’s like a trophy,” muses Scott of the Scarecrow bottles.
That makes the cellar itself a bit of a trophy case, tucked into the corner of their favorite renovated space — the kitchen. Lindsay had been dreaming for so long about renovating a kitchen before she even saw this house that she already knew what countertops and appliances she wanted. The Bisbees hired SR Design Group to bring their vision to life.
“It’s everything I ever wanted,” says Lindsay. Everything being double islands, two double dishwashers, white cabinetry, quartz countertops with taupe veining, a walk-in pantry.
The double islands have created conversation areas. “Everybody always congregates in the kitchen,” says Scott, recalling a party they hosted where only a couple people sat on the cushy living room sofas, but two groups were gathered around the islands talking.
And for Lindsay, who loves to cook, bake and entertain — just as Ingrid once did in this home — the storage space between all of the cabinetry and pantry closet makes a huge difference. “When we were in California we literally had our large serving dishes under beds,” she recalls.
While the kitchen was a complete transformation, Lindsay notes that they tried to keep some of the original character, such as the fireplace, which they had retiled. “It’s super random to have a fireplace in the kitchen, but I thought it was so charming,” she says. “It makes it feel old-school cozy.”
The look of that fireplace is mimicked in the fireplace of the upstairs primary, where Hunter stays during his summer break. Gesturing to the wall the headboard sits on, Lindsay notes that she’s recently wallpapered it with a large-scale palm leaf print in charcoal and tan. In fact, she says, she’s wallpapered a few more walls and nooks throughout the home. “It’s so in right now so I started and then I couldn’t stop,” she says with a laugh. “I think I should slow down.”
But her creative mind is always at work. The bedside dressers are from Ikea, but she’s painted them black and added modern gold hardware. The walls are adorned with decorative molding she installed and painted herself.
“Wendy the builder” has been at it in the spare bedroom as well, which features wall molding and a cherry ’80s dresser she’d contemplated donating. Instead, with paint and elbow grease, she gave it a fresh look.
“Where else are you going to find a green [dresser]?” Scott asks. In Jake’s bedroom, a similar charcoal palette echoes the upstairs primary. Again, Lindsay’s added molding. A large painted canvas hangs over the bed — a Lindsay Bisbee original, like much of the artwork adorning the home’s walls.
On an adjacent wall, Jake — whom Lindsay still refers to as “my little guy,” despite the fact that he’s outgrown her — has created a grid gallery of square pieces. Photos? Nope, album covers he’s had printed.
Turns out he and his brother are both into records. Down the hallway in a little — wallpapered, of course — nook sits a vintagestyle Victrola record player where Hunter plays old vinyls.
The teen boys also share their own upstairs laundry room. Lindsay peeks in and sees clothing strewn on the floor. She shuts the door. “They are working on some stuff in there — hopefully!”
But at the back corner of the house sits the boys’ well-used shared space — a lounge designed just for them.
“You can smell boys up here,” quips Scott. The back wall has been papered with a simple dash design in black and white and the furnishings are simple and comfortable. At the boys’ request, larger chairs were replaced with cost-effective beanbag chairs, perfect for video gaming.
Lacrosse helmets earned from various showcases line the walls leading to their retreat. Hunter, Scott says, earned his varsity letter in the sport during his freshman year in college. “Proud dad moment!”
Jake, it seems, is also making his mark on the sport, earning helmets and jerseys to add to the collection. In fact, for the first time in the school’s history, Greensboro Day School, the team he plays for, won the state championship this past May.
As it turns out, part of the reason the Bisbees initiated their move was that as their athletic sons grew older, their power and speed strengthened along with them. Lacrosse balls sometimes bounced off neighbor’s houses at their former Duck Club abode.
But now, in their Lake Brandt Estates home, they have the space and privacy they craved. No more errant balls make their way into neighbor’s yards or windows.
And thanks to Lindsay’s design eye and DIY skills, what was once a dream house is just that again. “The neighbors are appreciative, too,” says Lindsay. “They talk about [Ingrid] and how much she loved this house, so they’re very happy there are owners that care about it now.”
“I don’t want to say that she’s still here,” says Lindsay, “but I feel her presence is still in the bones of the house.”
And wouldn’t Ingrid herself be pleased to know that her legacy is being carried on in the home she poured so much love into?
The Bisbees continue to put their hearts into making the Lake Brandt Estates home shine again. Most recently, the couple hired Vasquez Painting Company to transform the exterior with Sherwin Williams Shoji White. So what happened to that grayhouse dream of Scott’s?
“Now my favorite house is white!” he jokes. OH
ALMANAC August
By A shley WAlshe
August is a hammock, a daydream, a nap in dappled light. These searing summer days, the trees offer respite from an unrelenting heat. There, by the water. Can you imagine two more perfectly situated trees? Two more hammock-worthy specimens?
The trees have spoken. This is the spot. You cinch one rope around the trunk of a sturdy birch, secure the hammock; repeat at the trunk of a tulip poplar.
In the shade of these nurturing giants, summer softens. Sunlight flickers through a veil of green. A welcome breeze gently rocks you.
Below the canopy, cumulus clouds float across your field of vision, inviting your inner child to play.
A carousel horse becomes a Bengal tiger. A whiskered dragon shifts into a humpback whale. A never-ending carnival drifts by in slow motion.
Before long, you’ve drifted, too. As you sleep, suspended beneath the trees at the height of summer, something else is shifting.
The change always comes about midAugust, and it always catches me by surprise. I mean the day when I know that summer is fraying at the edges, that September isn’t far off and fall is just over the hill or up the valley.
— Hal Borland
A Bat Rap
International Bat Night is observed on the last full weekend of August — and has been, annually, for nearly 30 years.
Our own state is home to 17 species of bats, creatures of the night essential to pollination, seed dispersal and pest control.
Did you know that a single bat can consume over 1,000 mosquitos in just one hour? That’s over 1,000 reasons to celebrate and protect these night-flying wonders.
The days are growing shorter. Soon, the last swallowtail will have vanished like a dream. The last dragonfly, too. Once more, the trees will prepare for their grand finale.
Through the dancing leaves, a sunbeam caresses your cheek, tenderly stirring you awake. The shade has revived you. Somehow, your nap has changed everything.
Beyond the trees, sunlight graces a lush and vibrant Earth. Subtle as it seems, the season is softening. Find the birch and the poplar and see for yourself.
Bellyful of Sweetness
Late summer means the last of the blueberries, sure. But can you say muscadines for days? And let’s hear it for those early pears!
Because pears ripen from the inside out, they go from green to mush in a sugary blink. How do you know when they’re ready for harvest?
They’ll show you.
Observe the color. Now, gently lift the fruit and give it a tender twist. If it’s ready, the pear will release itself with ease. If the pear holds tight, you’ll want to give it more time.
“There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The poet had a point.
Give the pears a week to ripen post-harvest. If you miss the window, there’s always compote. OH
LeadingWomen
Successful Women Shaping Our Local Business
Landscape
All Pets Considered | Blowouts & Bubbles | The Borough Market & Bar City of Greensboro | Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro | Core Integrity Pilates
The Curated Aesthetic | Fox Rothschild | Guilford Merchants Association Law Firm Carolinas | Multifaceted Artisan Candles | Southern Contracting Company
Stifel | Tyler Redhead & McAlister | Wilkerson Moravian Bakery
SPONSORED
SECTION | AUGUST 2024
Photographs by Bert VanderVeen & Betsy Blake Photography
City of Greensboro
(Back Row L to R): Brigitte Blanton – Greensboro Public Library & Museums, Melanie Jones – Guilford Metro 911, Marlene Druga – Financial & Administrative Services, Danielle Harrison – GuilfordWorks, Angela Lord – Greensboro City Clerk, Sue Schwartz – Planning
(Front Row L to R): Carla Banks – Communications & Marketing, Stephanie Mardis – Assistant Chief Greensboro Police, Hanna Cockburn – Transportation, Love Jones – Human Rights, (Not Pictured: Michelle Kennedy – Housing & Neighborhood Development)
The City of Greensboro is the arm of municipal government for the residents of the Gate City. Nearly half of the organization’s 25 departments are led by this group of dynamic women. Collectively, their combined years of service within the City represent close to 200 years. This impressive display of female representation is a testament to the City of Greensboro’s commitment to equality as it strives to be an employer of choice. More than 3,200 employees make up the municipal workforce. Leading in city government requires being purpose-driven and willing to collaborate by leveraging departmental resources to support the vision and mission outlined by the Greensboro City Council.
• Vision: Greensboro will be a community with endless economic opportunities and an exceptional quality of life.
• Mission: To shape an inclusive future for equitable economic opportunities and sustainable, safe neighborhoods through resident-focused services and programs.
• Leadership Beyond the Gate City: Many of these leading women have been recognized at state, national and international levels as respected leaders in their profession:
Melanie Jones – 2024 President, National Emergency Number Association
Sue Schwartz – 2024 President-Elect, American Planning Association.
Hanna Cockburn – President of the NC Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Brigitte Blanton – 2020 Library Director of the Year, NC Public Library Director’s Association.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Know your voice and your value in order to be better equipped to advocate for yourself as you maneuver through the various stages of your career.
Being people-centered is at the heart of our pledge to being public servants to the residents and visitors of Greensboro.
300 W. Washington St., Greensboro 336-373-2489 | www.greensboro-nc.gov
Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro
(L to R) Mae Douglas, Charlene Gladney, Lisa Duck, Brianca Williamson, Rachael Wright, Sadie Blue
The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro is a local, charitable-giving organization with a proven history of making a difference. Founded in 1983, the organization manages 700 charitable funds for a variety of community issues and priorities. CFGG’s team features several mighty women who walk the extra mile with their eyes on the prize — opportunity for all.
• Mission: CFGG inspires giving, maximizes opportunities and strengthens communities for present and future generations.
• Areas of Expertise: Mae Douglas pioneers the Black Investments in Greensboro (BIG) Equity Fund; Brianca Williamson leads the Future Fund of next generation donors; Sadie Blue directs the community initiative Building Stronger Neighborhoods; Charlene Gladney has helped shape the capacity-building network Guilford Nonprofit Consortium; Rachael Wright is an apprentice and college student with Guilford Apprenticeship Partners; Lisa Duck invests in nonprofits serving women and children through Women to Women’s grantmaking.
• Qualifications: In 2024, the Community Foundation was
recognized as a Family Forward Certified Employer, earned Candid’s Gold Seal of Transparency and received the Triad Business Journal’s Leaders in Diversity Award.
• On the Horizon: “August is Black Philanthropy Month; the women leading CFGG’s initiatives are making the community stronger through their volunteerism, philanthropy and leadership development.”
• Best Thing About Being Leading Women: Standing shoulder to shoulder to provide the opportunity to shape wide-ranging community initiatives.
Chelsi Wilkerson
Wilkerson Bakery
Ask Chelsi Wilkerson what the greatest honor of her life is and she’ll tell you — it’s carrying on the family legacy as president of Wilkerson Bakery. During the Great Depression, her great-grandfather opened the family’s very first bakery. Almost a century later, Chelsi and her family returned to its roots, reigniting its ovens to deliver “The Taste You Remember®.”
• Services: Retail, ecommerce and wholesale bakery specializing in thin Moravian cookies, freshly made sugar cake and Carolina cheese straws; plus, traditional bakery items and pastries available in-store.
• What Sets Us Apart: The legendary thinness and taste of the family’s Moravian cookies; sourcing the highest quality ingredients with careful attention to detail such as freshly grinding whole spices; the stories behind the family’s cookie shapes and flavors such as the Moravian star cookie and the distinctive flavor of Blackbeard’s cookie; decorative items in the bakery itself, such as a chandelier Ol’ Blue Eyes once sang beneath; every part of the process holds meaning.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: “Experiencing raw and heartfelt reactions to our products based on our quality and kindness. The bakery is built on love, sacrifice, grit, a lot of laughter and tears. It’s so much more than just cookies and cake.”
• Biggest Lesson Learned: “It’s not about why you got knocked down, it’s about how you got back up. Wear those bruises proudly, as they are what create leaders.”
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Define your why and your values; maintain clear sight of the things that are most important to you and prioritize; don’t be afraid to ask for help.
• For Fun: Part owner of historic Old Salem’s Lot 63, a bakery, coffeehouse and tavern; co-director of Miss Mermaid USA and King & Queen of the Seas as seen on Netflix.
593 S Stratford Road, Winston-Salem
336-829-0407 | WilkersonBakery.com
Carole R. Albright Law Firm Carolinas
As a board certified specialist in family law at Law Firm Carolinas, Carole R. Albright has represented countless clients for nearly three decades of custody, child support, alimony, equitable distribution and domestic violence actions. The biggest perk of the job? Bumping into clients months — or even years — after their case has been resolved and seeing them thriving and happy.
• What Sets Us Apart: Experience matters. With six offices, our firm offers expertise in a full range of legal services. Our attorneys include board certified legal specialists, highly credentialed parliamentarians, and leaders in local, state, and national boards, commissions and professional organizations. A top quality legal staff assists the attorneys in providing both excellent legal representation and prompt client service.
• Areas of Expertise: As a family law attorney, I pride myself in my ability to resolve most cases out of court, saving clients a great deal of time, emotional energy and money. Although I regularly appear in court, the majority of my cases are resolved in negotiation or mediation. As a credentialed parliamentarian, I regularly advise nonprofits and associations on how to run better, more legal meetings.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: It’s all about how you treat people — treat them well and you will be treated well; the rest is just circumstantial.
• For Fun: Cheer on my two sons’ collegiate baseball teams; play tennis; read or listen to a book; grab a glass of wine or dinner with husband of 27 years, Stuart.
• Advice for Clients: Ask your friends and family to recommend an attorney who specializes and is certified in an area of law in which you’re seeking advice — and interview more than one.
3623 N. Elm St., Suite 200, Greensboro 336-378-1899 | lawfirmcarolinas.com
Michelle Bolick
Guilford Merchants Association
Born and raised at the foot of the North Carolina mountains, Michelle Bolick has a long-lasting love affair with her home state that runs deep and an adventurous spirit that has called her to mountaintops. But this Guilford Merchants Association vice president discovered she prefers shining a spotlight on others and seeing clients reach new heights.
• Services: Professional development, networking, community involvement, leadership development and social outings.
• Mission: Supporting member companies with educational programming, lead generation activities, marketing opportunities and overall enrichment, while serving as a catalyst for community growth and prosperity.
• Expertise: “As an event-driven organization, our staff is adept at event planning — from the smallest committee meeting to big banquets and a parade, we hold all types of events.”
• Qualifications: Certification of Nonprofit Organizational Management, University of Notre Dame.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: GMA’s 100 Year Anniversary Celebration in 2006; establishment of the Nathanael Greene mural, facing the parking lot at the corner of Davie Street and Friendly Ave.; musical history of the city with the Community Theatre of Greensboro for the annual dinner celebrating GMA’s 100th anniversary.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Volunteering is a great way to gain experience, network and meet people, and can help you identify your strengths.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: The inevitable failures, mishaps and non-successes are essential building blocks for growing, learning and improving.
• For Fun: Hiking and skiing N.C. mountain trails and state parks; water skiing; amateur photography; spending time with friends at the pool.
225 Commerce Place Greensboro 336-378-6350 | www.mygma.org
Fox Rothschild
(L to R): Lisa M. Williford, Susan McNear Fradenburg, Afi S. Johnson-Parris, Terri Harris, Amy Smith Klass, Laura Deddish Burton, Kimberly Bullock Gatling, Barbara C. Ruby, Carole Simms, (Not Pictured: Maureen Demarest Murray
Founded in 1907 on a culture of collaboration, Fox Rothschild builds relationships that run deeper than just “doing business.” This team is invested in your concerns and celebrates your successes. When the Greensboro office opened in 2018, it was a natural fit to combine with Smith Moore Leatherwood, a law firm founded in 1919 with deep roots in the community.
• Mission: Solving problems is our top priority. We invest the time to get to know you and understand your needs. We work hard to win every client’s loyalty by providing creative solutions and excellent client service.
• What Sets Us Apart: We provide the reach and resources of a national law firm combined with the personal touch and connections of a boutique firm; over a century of service in Greensboro.
• Areas of Expertise: Forward-looking legal advice across 70 practice areas, including litigation, mergers and acquisitions, labor and employment, taxation and wealth planning, real estate, environmental law, intellectual property, corporate, family law, health law, and immigration.
• Qualifications: The office includes attorneys who are N.C. State Bar Board Certified in trademarks, immigration and family law; members of the N.C. Pro Bono Honor Society; a winner of the N.C. Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division Charles F. Blanchard Young Lawyer of the Year Award; named to Business North Carolina’s Power List and Legal Elite Hall of Fame; listed among the Triad Business Journal’s Outstanding Women in Business; included on World Trademark Review’s global 1000 list; and recognized by the leading provider of attorney and law firm rankings, Chambers & Partners, as among the top N.C. attorneys in their fields.
230 N. Elm St., Suite 1200, Greensboro 336-378-5200 | www.foxrothschild.com
Armine Cisneros
Blowouts & Bubbles
Armine Cisneros founded Blowouts & Bubbles on a simple notion: When you look good, you feel good. Not a cosmetologist by trade, but a consumer who loves the feeling a fresh blowout can provide, she wanted to share the confidence and joy that a fresh hairdo and a little selfcare time can deliver.
• Services: Specializing in blowouts, updos, hair masks and scalp massages.
• What Sets Us Apart: Every client who walks through our door is treated like a VIP; open seven days a week with after-hours appointments available by request.
• Areas of Expertise: A true round-brush salon blowout that will last for days; salon-fresh hair without a color or cut.
• On the Horizon: Luxury-brand Oribe hair care products will be used in the salon for all services and available for purchase beginning this month.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Curating a team of stylists who are aesthetically talented and not only make their clients feel special and valued, but also bring each other up with encouragement.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Trust that small voice inside; follow your passion; put God first in all that you do.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: “The connections that I have been able to make and the fabulous women that I have been honored to meet. It has also created a platform that allows me to give back to the community and to organizations that are meaningful to me.”
• At Home: Husband, David; daughter, Nyree (4); son, Ara (2); and daughter, Nazeni (7 months).
2105 W Cornwallis Drive, Suite A, Greensboro 336-285-7642 | blowoutsandbubbles.com
Amanda Smith Core Integrity Pilates
Effective, efficient and empowering, classical Pilates meets you exactly where you are. Simply put, Pilates makes you better at life,” says Amanda Smith, owner of Core Integrity Pilates. With over 20 years of experience as a master Pilates trainer and professional dancer, plus almost 20 years in business, she and her skilled team believe in nurturing a consistent, ever-evolving practice for every body, in every season of life.
• Services: Personalized Pilates, Gyrotonic® and Gyrokinesis® training in private or semi-private settings; small group Pilates equipment (reformer/tower/chair/barrels, etc), Pilates mat classes; barre; holistic wellness services.
• What Sets Us Apart: “People come to CIP because they feel seen, heard and loved and they see results. We teach finding connection over perfection and offer a safe, inclusive, judgment-free space where all bodies are welcomed and celebrated.”
• On the Horizon: Adoption of “Joe’s Gym” style of Pilates — aka as founder Joseph Pilates intended — in autonomous workouts, where dedicated clients can come in during certain hours to practice, making it more accessible and affordable for all people.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: “Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing, charging, saying or thinking. Know the value of what you have to offer; you are the only one who can do what you do the way you do it!”
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Use what you have, start before you’re ready - even if it’s messy. Get creative and take risks. Collaborate with others; there’s room for everyone. Be present, adaptable, compassionate and communicative.”
• At Home: Long-time partner, Lucas Thomas; daughter Everly Louise (5); son, Smith Sullivan (17 months); mom, Sally Smith, and rescue dog, Annabelle Marie.
1200 Revolution Mill Drive, Greensboro 336-558-7341 | www.coreintegritypilates.com
Christina Degreaffenreidt
Multifaceted™ Artisan Candles
Christina Degreaffenreidt creates candles that go way beyond wax and wicks. Launched in 2020, just before a global pandemic, Multifaceted Artisan Candles are handcrafted, eco-friendly works of art, made from a natural coconut and soy wax blend.
• Mission: To bring luxurious beauty into homes while leaving a positive footprint on the world and humanity.
• What Sets Us Apart: Flower top candles; toxin-free product line; use of sustainable materials; vessel recycling program.
• Certifications: National Minority Supplier Development Council; N.C. Small Business Enterprise; ByBlack; N.C. Historically Underutilized Business.
• On the Horizon: Shower steamers, fall 2024.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Stay true to yourself, soak up wisdom from those ahead of you, and always keep sight of your own dreams. Your career journey is yours to shape—so make it awesome!”
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: “One of my proudest moments was hiring my cousin, Kenya Long! It’s a dream come true to support my family and lay foundations for future generations. Hiring my own family was a tearful moment for me.”
• Biggest Lesson Learned: Always listen to yourself and your gut instinct, which is rarely wrong.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: “Spreading positivity and warmth through our candles and receiving that same light back from our wonderful customers. It’s incredibly rewarding to hear how our products brighten people’s lives and inspire them to uplift others.”
• For Fun: Exploring new places; visiting wineries and museums; spending time with loved ones.
1059 E. Lindsay St., Greensboro 336-542-0571 | www.multifacetedGSO.com
Marissa Hill Southern Contracting Company
The daughter of a land developer and contractor, Marissa Hill understood from a young age how things were put together. With an inherently creative eye that led her to establishing her own mural painting company, fine art design firm and furniture line, joining the team at Southern Contracting Company was a natural fit. Offering remodeling, design and building services for both residential and commercial properties, Marissa’s location offers a design showroom and upcoming Vibe Tray Bar where she aims to keep inspirations flowing while supporting customers and both the design community and its vendors.
• Areas of Expertise: Turn-key remodeling/restoration services delivering an impressive final product with a strong background in fine art and interior design.
• Mission: Always striving for excellence while valuing integrity with unsurpassed quality.
• What Sets Us Apart: “We apply our design and building process to even the smallest of projects. We are creating a space where you build memories, and we truly believe every detail matters — including your budget. Our design showroom allows you to see your options while keeping the bottomline in mind.”
• On the Horizon: Curated’s showroom will offer a Vibe Tray Bar for interior designers to pull samples, meet clients and create.
• Qualifications: Licensed General Contractor with over 20 years of industry experience; Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Vision and passion! Keep your vision, stay fearless and share your gifts.”
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: “I love recognizing the talents and needs of other young women and sharing in the opportunity to build them up and help them grow.”
3012 Patterson St., Greensboro
336-860-7010 | www.southerncontractingcompany.com
Jackie Wieland, AIF®
Senior Vice President/Investments
Karla Johnson, CFP®
Financial Advisor Stifel
Jackie Wieland and Karla Johnson have more than 50 combined years of financial service experience, specializing in comprehensive investment planning and wealth management for individuals, families, and business owners. Think financial planning is all about numbers? Not according to these two: It’s about building a plan, setting a course and pursuing the future their clients envision.
• Services: Comprehensive wealth management, investment planning and retirement planning.
• Mission: To offer guidance, personalized strategies and multigenerational planning and support.
• What Sets Us Apart: “We genuinely care about the people we serve, and we’re working in a historically male-dominated industry. While the number of women working in finance has grown over the years, we are inevitably outnumbered. We’ve found that women prefer working with other women, and we’ve been able to embrace that.”
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Watching clients reach — and surpass — their personal financial goals.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Work hard and continuously learn and grow by seeking out challenging opportunities; embrace new opportunities; don’t be afraid to acquire new skills.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: Be patient with the markets.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: Being able to make a tangible impact on the lives of those around you.
• For Fun: Jackie enjoys working on the boards of the Institute of World Politics and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, plus practicing Pilates and oil painting. When Karla and her husband aren’t spending time with their little ones (ages 2 and 4), she loves to sing and strum her guitar.
629 Green Valley Road, Suite 211 Greensboro, North Carolina 27408
(336) 478-3700 | www.wielandandjohnsonwealth.com Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated | Member SIPC & NYSE
Alison Schwartz
All Pets Considered
As a pup rescuer herself to two adorable doxie princesses, Alison Schwartz has spent most of her career learning about food and wellness products that improve the life and health of pets. She is dedicated to helping animals live healthier, happier lives through providing nutrition and product information to her customers.
• Areas of Expertise: Pet food and supplies for dogs, cats and small animals, specifically specializing in nutrition and wellness.
• What Sets Us Apart: An exceptionally curated selection of products; excellent customer service; a focus on the community; paid time off for staff; volunteer work.
• Awards: 2000 and 2016 Guilford Merchants Association Retailer of the Year; 2000, 2014 and 2016 Pet Product News’ Retailer Excellence award; 2024 Greensboro News and Record’s Best Pet Store Award winner; Pets+ 2024 America’s Coolest Pet Store Award winner.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Our team of passionate animal lovers who truly care about the critters they serve.
• On the Horizon: Upcoming retirement of founder Kristine Godfrey as she hands over the leash to Schwartz.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: Build a good team; a good mentor is invaluable.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: “Being able to support and grow with other women-owned businesses in the community is empowering. I love watching the success of other women in business.”
• For Fun: Doxie By Proxy, a nonprofit dachshund rescue organization.
• At Home: Married to the store’s stand-in “Mr. Fix-It;” mom to two teenage boys, one of whom is part of the All Pets Considered team. 2614 Battleground Ave. & 5004 High Point Road, Greensboro 336-540-1400 | allpetsconsidered.com
English Black, PA-C
The Curated Aesthetic
Would you believe that English Black is closing in on 50? No way! Perhaps her secret is that she practices what she preaches. As owner of The Curated Aesthetic, a boutique and facial rejuvenation clinic founded in March 2022, this certified physician assistant and curator of confidence has been helping clients feel youthful on both the inside and the outside for more than 20 years.
• Mission: We curate confidence so women can live life on their own terms: aligning the inside with the outside to look and feel their best every day, all while honoring their unique beauty.
• What Sets Us Apart: Training that ensures we bring the safest, most state-of-the-art techniques and procedures to our patients; over 100 five-star Google ratings.
• Areas of Expertise: Facial balancing and rejuvenation; laser and injectable treatments.
• Qualifications: Certified physician assistant with 21 years in medical, surgical and aesthetic dermatology; assistant faculty with Allergan Medical Institute; conducts private training for other professional injectors.
• On the Horizon: Opening a fifth treatment room.
• Biggest Lesson Learned: Always listen to the patient and give priority to their intuition, as it’s often the patient’s insight that leads to a better result.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: Seeing other women react positively wearing their confidence after receiving treatments.
• For Fun: Exercise; walking her dogs, sharing new experiences with her children; reading and sewing; skiing any nearby mountain.
• At Home: Husband, William; children, Sophie (24), Savannah (23), Rowan (14), Emerson (12) and Saylor (4).
500 E Cornwallis Drive, Suite F, Greensboro 336-676-5583 | www.thecuratedaesthetic.com
Craig McIntosh
Tyler Redhead & McAlister
The fourth Greensboro-born-and-raised generation of her family, Craig McIntosh returned home in 2003 after big-city living in Austin and Los Angeles. She joined Tyler Redhead & McAlister Real Estate as a REALTOR© in 2020 after raising her three children.
• Services: Tyler Redhead & McAlister is a boutique real estate firm that specializes in professionalism, diligence and resourcefulness, as well as unparalleled knowledge of the local market.
• What Led You to this Career: A desire to be a bigger part of our community and to share my knowledge and passion for the Triad with clients.
• What Sets Us Apart: “My three keys to real estate are relationships . . . relationships . . . relationships. That, coupled with a wealth of local knowledge, helps me provide maximum results for my clients. Also, I absolutely love what I do! I am a super positive person and try to bring that approach to buying/selling a home, because it can definitely be a stressful time for clients.”
• Areas of Expertise: Client representation of luxury residential real estate, comprehensive market tours, exceptional home staging and comparative market analysis.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: The joy on a client’s face after a successful transaction; being able to see and feel the impact on the clients.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Do something that you are truly passionate about and always strive to underpromise and overdeliver.”
• At Home: High school friend-turned-husband, Beau, who is also a commercial real estate investment sales advisor; daughter, Adelaide (16); sons, Fletcher (14) and Finn (12); and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Clover.
3601 Lawndale Ave., Greensboro 336-210-5337 | Craig.McIntosh@trmhomes.com
Kam Hardy Culler
The Borough Market & Bar
The Borough Market + Bar all started over a glass of bourbon and a cocktail napkin during the 2020 global pandemic. Kam Hardy Culler’s grandfather asked her, “If you could create something and own your own business, what would it be?” This creative, think-outsideof-the-box Elon grad with 10 years of retail experience knew her answer: a unique, innovative shopping experience in Greensboro.
• What Sets Us Apart: The dynamics of being a bar, store and event space; a nonalcoholic menu, as well as creative, one-of-a-kind cocktails and high-end, limited edition tequilas and bourbons; exclusive alcohol brands; ability to host private and public events; unique clothing not available elsewhere within 60–100 miles; support of local food, music and floral vendors.
• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Bringing her vision to life while pregnant, under 30 and right after a global pandemic; making an impact in the community that her children see.
• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Know that owning a business is not for the fragile; there will be days you want to throw up your hands and walk away, but one customer can make all the difference and remind you why you’ve worked so hard.
• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: Providing a space for the community that has housed precious moments in people’s lives and the privilege of being a part of those memories; learning to fearlessly trust your instinct and lead from a place of authenticity.
• At Home: Husband Kyle, a Smith & Jennings project manager; two daughters, Charlee Kennedy (7), Wrennlee Banks (2) and a third baby on the way!
• For Fun: Spending time with family outside; cooking; any water activities.
600 Battleground Ave., Suite A+B, Greensboro theboroughmarket.com
Please verify times, costs, status and location before attending an event. Although conscientious efforts are made to provide accurate and up-to-date information, the world is subject to change and errors can occur!
To submit an event for consideration, email us at ohenrymagcalendar@gmail.com by 5 p.m. the first of the month one month prior to the event.
Weekly Events
SUNDAYS
BARRE CLASS. 10 a.m. Strengthen, tone and stretch your way into the week. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.
SIT, SPEAK. 4:30–5:15 p.m. Megan Blake, The Pet Lifestyle Coach, provides free group training and real time practice as you learn to connect more deeply with your four-legged, best friend. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
KARAOKE & LINE DANCING. 4–7 p.m. Two of your fav activities merge for one evening of fun with DJ Energizer. Free. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
TUESDAYS
PELVIC HEALTH YOGA. 8:30–9:30 a.m. This Vinyasa-style flow class works toward lengthening and strengthening the pelvic floor and surrounding muscles. Free, registration required and donations accepted. Triad Pelvic Health, 5574 Garden Village Way, Greensboro. Info: triadpelvichealth.com/classes.
TRAILHEAD SWEAT SESH. 6–7 p.m. Throughout the month, sweat and flow to a variety of YMCA-led fitness classes, spaced out along various spots of the Downtown Greenway. Free. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.
YOGA IN THE PARK. Noon–12:45. Take your lunch break with a power flow led by Greensboro Power Yoga. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
WEDNESDAYS
LIVE MUSIC. 6–9 p.m. Evan Olson and Jessica Mashburn of AM rOdeO play covers and original music. Free. Print Works Bistro. 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: printworksbistro.com/gallery/music.
ZUMBA. 5:30–6:15 p.m. Shake off the day with a spicy dance-inspired workout led by
August 2024
Family Fun Day
08.24.2024
Velmy Liz Trinidad. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
FAMILY NIGHT. 5–7 p.m. Enjoy an art-driven evening with family and friends in the studios. Free. Art Quest at GreenHill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.
MUSIC IN THE PARK. 6–8 p.m. Sip and snack at LeBauer Park while grooving to local and regional artists. Free. Lawn Service, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
THURSDAYS
JAZZ AT THE O.HENRY. 6–9 p.m. Sip vintage craft cocktails and snack on tapas while the O.Henry Trio performs with a different jazz vocalist each week. Free. O.Henry Hotel Social Lobby, 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: ohenryhotel.com/o-henry-jazz.
WALK THIS WAY. 6 p.m. Put on your sneakers for a 2–4 mile social stroll or jog with the Downtown Greenway Run & Walk Club, which is open to all ages and abilities. Free. LoFi Park, 500 N. Eugene St., Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.
EASY RIDERS. 6–8:30 p.m. All levels of cyclists are welcome to ride along on a guided 4-mile cruise around downtown. Free. Lawn Service, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
YOGA IN THE PARK. 6–7 p.m. Unwind your mind and body with a flow led by Embodhi Yoga. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
KIDS’ KLUB STORYTIME. 10:30–11 a.m. The Greensboro Public Library librarians entertain little ones with stories and singalongs. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
THURSDAYS & SATURDAYS
KARAOKE & COCKTAILS. 8 p.m. until midnight, Thursdays; 9 p.m. until midnight, Saturdays. Courtney Chandler hosts a night of sipping and singing. Free. 19 & Timber Bar at Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.
FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS
LIVE MUSIC. 7–10 p.m. Enjoy drinks in the 1808 Lobby Bar while soaking up live music
provided by local artists. Free. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.
SATURDAYS
YOGA. 9:30 a.m. Don’t stay in bed when you could namaste in the spa studio. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.
WATER AEROBICS. 10:30 a.m. Make a splash while getting a heart-pumping workout at an indoor pool. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.
BLACKSMITH DEMONSTRATION. 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Watch a costumed blacksmith in action as he crafts various iron pieces. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.
CITY SUNSETS. 7 p.m. Bring your besties and your lawn chairs and soak in an evening of live music, featuring a diverse lineup of local performers each week. Free. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
August Events
August 01–31
ARTISTS AT EDGEWOOD. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Meet the 30 artists-in-residence at Elliott Daingerfield’s restored historic cottage in Blowing Rock. Featured artists change weekly. Free. Edgewood Cottage, Main Street and Ginny Stevens Lane, Blowing Rock. Info: artistsatedgewood.org.
THE ART OF INCLUSION. “Indelible”presents four artists who create works that embrace melancholy and offer the possibility of transcendence. Free. GreenHill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.
SCULPTED GLASS. Delve into a thoughtprovoking exploration of American history, politics and contemporary culture through an exhibit of glass artist John Moran’s work, titled American Idols. Opening reception from 4–6 p.m., July 13. Free. Starworks Exhibition Gallery, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.
August 01–15
SUMMER FILM FEST. 7 p.m. Munch on movie theater popcorn while catching the season’s popular classics. Tickets: $8+, Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.
August 02 & 03
CABELL WILKINSON. 8 p.m. The WinstonSalem native will have you in stitches with
her comedy routine that will remind you of a dysfunctional advice column. Tickets: $7.50+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.
August 02
FIRST FRIDAY. 6–9 p.m. Head downtown for a night of live music and happenings stretching all the way from LeBauer Park and the Greensboro Cultural Center to the South End. Free. Downtown Greensboro. Info: downtowngreensboro.org/first-friday.
STORY TIME. 10–11 a.m. A member of the youth librarians team from the Greensboro Public Library engages young children through playful storytelling. Free. Woven Works Park, East Lindsay Street and North Murrow Boulevard, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.
CHILDREN’S CONCERT. 10–10:30 a.m. Jump into a jazzy interactive concert and groove to the music in a New Orleans fashion. Free. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: musicacademync.org.
FUERZA REGIDA. 8 p.m. One of the most popular regional Mexican musical acts of recent times hits the stage with its lively sounds. Tickets: $57.50+. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.
COLBY T. HELMS. 8:30 p.m. Enjoy an evening of banjo and mandolin as the Appalachia-style artist performs with The Virginia Creepers. Tickets: $15. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
JAZZ MUSIC. 7–9 p.m. Bassist Matt Reid and pianist Matt Rybicki deliver an evening of smooth tunes. Free. Grapes and Grains Tavern, 2001 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: grapesandgrainstavern.com.
TONY LOW. 6:30 p.m. The local singersongwriter strums while you sip and snack. Free. Starworks Cafe & Taproom, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.
August 03 & 04
HEATHERS. Times vary. The dark comedy cult classic comes to stage as a teen musical in this camp production. Tickets: $15. Community Theatre of Greensboro, 520 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: ctgso.org.
ZACH BRYAN. 7 p.m. The country singersongwriter who has taken the country by storm with his raspy, soulful voice takes the stage with special guests Matt Maeson and Levi Turner. Tickets: $344+. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.
August 04 & 18
BLUEGRASS & BRUNCH. 11 a.m.–1 p.m.
Family Movie Night
08.06.2024
Enjoy live bluegrass and folk music while munching tasty treats from vendors. Free. LeBauer Park, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
August 04
SMARTPHONE PHOTOGRAPHY. 4–5:30. Master the art of outdoor and nature photography shot with your smartphone. Free. Downtown Greenway, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.
TRAIL GUIDEBOOK. 2 p.m. Local authors Palmer McIntyre and Hollis Oberlies discuss their new book, Trails & Treats, which pairs their love of North Carolina running and hiking trails with their passion for good eats. Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
August 05
CRASH RADIO. 6:30–9 p.m. Rhino Leap hosts Crash Radio, where musicians and storytellers are recorded as they tell tales and perform songs for a live audience. After being edited into an episode, the show can be heard weekly on WKXR 94.9 FM.Tickets, $10. Starworks Cafe & Taproom, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.
August 06 & 20
STRENGTH & SUNSHINE. 6 p.m. Bring your buds out to get your fill of vitamin D while building your muscles. Free. The Great Lawn at LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
August 06
FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT. 7:30–10 p.m. In honor of National Night Out, enjoy a screening of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit outdoors. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.
August 07
READING THE WORLD. 7–8 p.m. Discover contemporary authors’ works in translation, such as this month’s selection, Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera . Free. Online. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
OUTDOOR ART. 11 a.m–1 p.m. ArtQuest moves outside with various crafts, exploration and creatively fun activities for kids and families. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.
CAROLINA KIDS CLUB. 9 a.m. Keep your kiddos cool while watching Soul and noshing on complimentary kids’ snack packs. Tickets: $5+, Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.
August 08
CHARLIE VERGOS. 8 p.m. This Southernbred comedian dishes out a mix of high-brow
and low-brow humor. Tickets: $7.50+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.
August 09–11
DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST JR. Times vary. Children ages 6–12 will star in this show that takes audiences along with Belle to an enchanted castle where a Beast reigns. Tickets: $12+. Centennial Station Arts Center, 121 S. Centennial St., High Point. Info: highpointtheatre.com/events.
August 09 & 10
KEVIN MCAFFREY. 8 p.m. You’ve heard him on the Sirius XM show Celebrate! as well as the podcasts Sex & the Cidiots and The Bridgerton Bros; now hear his schtick live. Tickets: $15+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.
August 09 & 23
PIANO MAN. 7–9 p.m. Mike Evans tickles the ivories for a night of pop music from throughout the decades that complements your spirits. Free. Grapes and Grains Tavern, 2001 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: grapesandgrainstavern.com.
August 09
48-HOUR FILM PROJECT. 7:30 p.m. At an
Oscars-style event, experience the movies created by local filmmakers in just 48 hours and see which ones will go on to compete globally at Filmapalooza. Tickets: $12. Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.
ELTON JOHN TRIBUTE. 8 p.m. You can tell everybody that this is “Your Song” when Rus Anderson steps into the role of Elton John at The Rocket Man Show. Tickets: $39.50+. Steven Tanger Center, 300 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: tangercenter.com/events.
JEREMY SHORT. 8:30 p.m. He’s a little blues and a little funk — come hear why his show has been called “funner than eating an ice cream cone!” Tickets: $12+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
CLIFFORD GARSTANG. 6 p.m. The former international lawyer and author of two previous novels discusses his latest novel, The Last Bird of Paradise. Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
August 10 & 24
POLLINATOR FAVOR. 8–10 a.m. Buzz on over to the bird, bee and pollinator garden on the Greenway to get your hands dirty while
keeping Earth clean. Free; registration required. Woven Works Park, East Lindsay Street and North Murrow Boulevard, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.
August 10
CHILDREN’S CONCERT. 10–10:30 a.m. Feel all the feels and explore how various emotions are tied to music. Free. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: musicacademync.org.
OPEN ART REVIEW. 11 a.m.–2 p.m. Using the Pecha Kucha format, artists will each exhibit 10 images of their will in a 3 ½ minute presentation. Deadline to apply as an artist, Aug. 3. Free. GreenHill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.
TEA & POTTERY. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Celebrate the 10th anniversary of Tea with Seagrove Potters by dropping by venues to sample Carriage House Tea, Table Farmhouse Bakery and Seagrove Cafe pastries, plus homemade treats from Blue Hen, Dean & Martin, Eck McCanless, From the Ground Up, Red Hare and Thomas potteries. Plus, enjoy door prizes and gifts with any purchase for early shoppers. Free. Seagrove. Info: teawithseagrovepotters.com.
LEE GREENWOOD. 7:30 p.m. The singersongwriter celebrates the 40th anniversary of the hit song “God Bless the U.S.A.” Tickets: $45+. High Point Theatre, 220 E. Commerce Ave., High Point. Info: highpointtheatre.com/events.
WHITSETT. 8 p.m. The Nashville-based band brings its nostalgic vibes to Greensboro. Tickets: $10+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
GROOVY GET-DOWN. 11 a.m.–noon. Enjoy an hour with Mr. Sam and friends as they play “kids’ music parents won’t hate.” Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
19TH-CENTURY MEDICINE. 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Head to Hoggatt House and learn about the 4 humors of the body, homemade remedies and popular medicines used for typical ailments. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.
LIMITED ENGAGEMENT BAND. 7–9 p.m. This incredible cover band takes you on a musical journey through the ages. Cover charge: $5. Grapes and Grains Tavern, 2001 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: grapesandgrainstavern.com.
August 11
MUSEP. 6–8 p.m. The NuBeing Collective delivers hip hop vibes while Part Time Party Band brings your ears to the Carolina coast during MUSEP, aka Music for a Sunday Evening in the Park. Savor concessions from Kibi’s Crazy Casserole and Donut NV, or BYO snacks. Free, donations accepted. Hester Park, 3615 Deutzia St., Greensboro. Info: creativegreenboro.com.
SILENT BOOK CLUB. Noon–2 p.m. BYO book or purchase a new one and settle in to read quietly alongside others. See page 23 for our columnist’s experience there. Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
August 13–31
INTERPRETING AMERICA. A collection of photos from the archives provide commentary on life in America from the late 19th century through the 21st century. Free. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: weatherspoonart.org/calendar.
August 14
ZACK BROCK. 8 p.m. The singer-songwriter is joined by Cole Brown for an evening of country, rock and bluegrass. Tickets: $10. Flat
Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
August 15
OPEN MIC. 6–7:30 p.m. Writers of all genres are invited to read from their original works for five minutes at “a very cool monthly open mic” held on the third Thursday of each month. Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
MARK FICKS. 7–9 p.m. This singer with a penchant for blues, rock, pop and country delivers a “piano-bar vibe” and happily takes requests. Free. Grapes and Grains Tavern, 2001 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: grapesandgrainstavern.com.
OPEN MIC. 7 p.m. Take the stage to sing a song, tell a joke or read a poem, or enjoy others reveling in a few minutes of fame. Starworks Cafe & Taproom, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.
August 17
KIDS’ KLUB DANCE. 11 a.m.–noon. Kids ages 3–8 are welcome to move and groove in a fun, explorative way with members of the Greensboro Ballet. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
FRANKIE VALLI AND THE FOUR SEASONS. 8 p.m. Oh, what a night as this legendary group takes the stage in its Last Encore tour. Tickets: $65.50+. Steven Tanger Center, 300 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: tangercenter.com/events.
August 17–18
GUYS & DOLLS JR. Noon & 4 p.m. both days. Summer theater campers bring the beloved Broadway musical to life. Tickets: $15. Community Theatre of Greensboro, 520 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: ctgso.org.
August 18
IDINA MENZEL. 8 p.m. From Elphaba to Elsa, this talented chanteuse performs familiar ballads as well as new tracks from her latest disco-infused album, Drama Queen. Tickets: $65.50+. Steven Tanger Center, 300 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: tangercenter.com/events.
August 19
FRANCES MAYES. 6 p.m. The New York Times-bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun discusses her latest novel, A Great Marriage. Free. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.
August 20
THIN LIZZY TRIBUTE. 8 p.m. Enjoy a night of the hits you know and love performed by David McLaughlin, Mike Lawrence, Jordan Powers and Joel Kiser. Tickets: $10. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
August 22
NEW TO TOWN? 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m. The Greensboro Newcomers Club will host its annual kickoff luncheon, welcoming those who are new to the area or have experienced a life change in the past two years. Union Grove Baptist Church, 5424 Union Grove Rd, Oakridge. Info: greensboronewcomersclub.com
OLD-TIME JAM. 7 p.m. Bring your own instrument and join in the harmony and fun of a pick-up jam sesh. Free. Starworks Cafe & Taproom, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.
August 23
SUMMER’S END CELEBRATION. 5:30–7 p.m. The energy and vibes of hip hop culture bring the park to life with dance cyphers, skating and visual arts.. Free, but please sign a waiver upon arrival. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.
August 24
BLUES WORKSHOP. 3–4:30 p.m. Bring your own instrument or vocal chops for an interactive learning experience focused on techniques, improvisation, styling and sounds. Free. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: musicacademync.org.
CHAD EBY & FRIENDS. 7:30 p.m. Enjoy an evening of sultry jazz music to celebrate what would have been legendary Wayne Shorter’s 91st birthday. Tickets: $17. In the Crown at the Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.
FLEETWOOD MAC EXPERIENCE. 7:30 p.m. Matt and Stacey, aka Lindsey and Stevie, ring like a bell through the night during this show that recreates the legendary sounds of Fleetwood Mac. Tickets: $29+. Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.
August 24–31
MAKING CONNECTIONS. This installation of works from the Weatherspoon’s own collection showcases the gallery as an academic museum with deep connections to its campus, Greensboro
Redhead
and broader communities. Free. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: weatherspoonart.org/calendar.
August 24 & 25
CHATHAM RABBITS. Times vary. Partners in music and life, Austin and Sarah McCombie perform an evening of roots music. Tickets: $25+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.
August 24
ULTIMATE COMIC CHALLENGE. 8–10 p.m. The top six out of almost 100 comics will perform to take home the title. Tickets: $15+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.
FAMILY FUN DAY. 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Enjoy a picnic in the park, historic games, sidewalk chalk and toys, while cooling off with delicious popsicles and treats. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.
August 25
MUSEP. 6–8 p.m. Pure Fiyah Reggae Band drops the beat while Sun Queen Kelcey and the Soular Flares rock out during MUSEP, aka Music for a Sunday Evening in the Park. Savor
concessions from Hot Diggity Dog and The Sweetz Spot, or BYO snacks. Free, donations accepted. Keeley Park, 4100 Keeley Road, Greensboro. Info: creativegreenboro.com.
August 27
GRUPO FRONTERA. 8 p.m. Hailing from Texas, this group hits the stage for an evening of regional Mexican music. Tickets: $37.50+. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.
August 28
ARTIST HAPPY HOUR. 5–7 p.m. The Arts Council of Greater Greensboro welcomes all artists, arts businesses and administrators, local college students studying art, and discipline groups to mix and mingle. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: theacgg.org/grants/artist-happy-hour.
August 29
JASON ALDEAN. 7:30 p.m. “My Kinda Party?” A night with this country crooner and several guests. Tickets: $37.75+. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.
August 30–31
CENTRAL CAROLINA FAIR. Experience thrilling rides, exciting games, and mouthwatering fair food while making memories. Greensboro Coliseum parking lot, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.
August 31
COLTRANE FEST KICKOFF. 3 p.m. The John Coltrane International Jazz and Blues Festival features a weekend lineup of artists performing in the legendary saxophonist’s hometown. Tickets: $30+. Oak Hollow Festival Park, 1841 Eastchester Drive, High Point. Info: coltranejazzfest.com.
STREET NIGHT MARKET. 5–9 p.m. Buy local, buy used and support Black-owned businesses at the new Gate City Street Night Market on the last Saturday of each month. Along the Downtown Greenway at Elm and Bragg Streets, Greensboro. Info: greensboro-nc.gov/government/city-news/city-calendar. OH
Living Information For Today (L.I.F.T.)
L.I.F.T. is a social support program that helps surviving spouses adjust to the loss of their partner. It gives participants the opportunity to socialize with others who share similar feelings and experiences. This program is both entertaining and educational, with speakers on a wide variety of topics. For more information on the L.I.F.T. program, please contact Hanes Lineberry Funeral Services at 336-272-5150.
GreenScene
Miriam P. Brenner Children’s Museum Gala
Friday, May 17, 2024
Photographs by Adams Lane Photography
Michael & Alyse Sumner Jeff & Laura Collie
Christian Wilson & Jodee Ruppel
Diane Cabbell, Doris Godette, Angela Draper Veena & Swati Argade
Matt & Chandler Norman, Elizabeth & Alex Gill
Kristin Bell, Ashley Cochrane Matt & Sarah Healy
Will & Ellie Yearns
Elliott & Stephanie Jones
Mike & Amy Mahoney
Jonathan & Ashley Bethel John & Kim Martin
Tom Guerrieri, Danielle Adams
Thomas Brown, Lia Reich
Alan & Jenny Sherouse
GreenScene
SynerG Young Professionals Educator Appreciation
First National Bank Field
Thursday, May 2, 2024
Photographs by Calissa Holder
Emily Coffey, McKenzie Highfill, Chloe Gilgannon, Alex Liddle
Ayden, Tanya, Aaron Sr., Azael & Aaron Curry
Tiara Baker, Marion Clemente, Xavier Baker
Tamaria Broadnax, Antonia Alston, Kendall Plemmer, Ava & Tyrone Alston Sr.
Greg Soukup, Jill Moore Sherman & Laurie Hawks
Charryse Jones, Jawan Burwell
Cressida Watts. Kelly Graves Tara & Shannon Peeples
Ashley Travers, Shea McMahon Carole & BT Neale
Jackson Russell, Maude Scroggins Gabriela Santos, Ashley Yoder Hilaire Baxley
Kanitra Williams, Amber Simmons
Alissa, Jenna & Debbie Lake
Ethan Andrews, Alex Wilson, Jennifer Williams, Alan Brackett
Heather Adams, Brooke Daniels
Gabrielle Brown
Triad International Ballet’s
Romeo and Juliet
Carolina Theatre
Thursday, May 23, 2024
Photographs by Jacqui van Lier
The Pets of
Aleksan Zakyan
Carol Rauch, Lisa Fullington
Kevin, Myla & Mackenzie Calhoun, Sandra Turner, John Chapman
Florence Hénon, Marine Pare, Karen Kelly
Cecelia Antatiades, Jackie Austin, Terry Kokenes
Julia Poole, Marsha Alspaugh
Heather Borso, Michelle Felt
The Batista Family Lee Howard, Sarah Paige
Vladimiz Igitkhanyan
Molly McShea, Jensen Huitsing
GreenScene
Oyster Roast
Benefitting Greensboro Foundation of Family Service of the Piedmont
Friday, April 26, 2024
Photographs by Aesthetic Images Photography
Kristin & Rich Dexter
Anne Osborne, Mandy Eaton, Rebecca Schlosser Peter & Brooke Osborne
Phyllis & Rick Lancaster
Michelle & Bill Schneider
John Chapman, Lisa Newsome
Karen Little, Nick Piornack, Kelly Bankhead, Lisa Allen
Keisha & Terence Barnes
David & Donna Griffin
Ike & Cindy Hatzisavvas
Lee & Joe Staehly
Marsha & Mike Kelly
Lydia Love, Jan Pritchett, Lex Kulman
Daniela Helms & Corey Huck
Indira Lindsay & Kevin Roberts
Leonard & LaKecia Glover, Mike & Ivan Godette, George Hoyle & Kathleen Kelly
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater.
