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M A G A Z I N E Volume 4, No. 9 “I have a fancy that every city has a voice.” 336.617.0090 1848 Banking Street Greensboro, NC 27408 www.ohenrymag.com Jim Dodson, Editor jim@ohenrymag.com Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director andie@ohenrymag.com David Claude Bailey, Senior Editor dbailey@ohenrymag.com Lauren Shumaker, Graphic Designer Kira Schoenfelder, Graphic Designer Contributing Editors Cynthia Adams, Harry Blair, Maria Johnson, Jim Schlosser Contributing Photographers Lynn Donovan, Sam Froelich, Hannah Sharpe
Matthew D. Olin, MD
is a fellowship trained hip surgeon with extensive experience performing direct anterior total hip replacement surgery. To schedule an appointment with Matthew D. Olin, MD to determine if this surgery is for you. Call: 336.545.5030
Contributors Cynthia Adams, Daniel Bayer, Stephanie Berbec, Jane Borden, Grant Britt, Susan Campbell, Porter Chamblee, Kay Cheshire, Robert Demaree, Jenny Drabble, Amy Freeman, Kyra Gemberling, Stanley Gilliam, Bill Hancock, Diane Hayter, Brian Lampkin, Meridith Martens, Nancy Oakley, Ogi Overman, Sandra Redding, Jim Schlosser, Stephen E. Smith
O.H
David Woronoff, Publisher Advertising Sales Marty Hefner, Sales Director 336.707.6893, mhefner@ohenrymag.com Hattie Aderholdt, 336.601.1188 Amy Grove, 336.456.0827 Circulation Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488 Advertising Graphic Design 910.693.2469, lauren@ohenrymag.com Judi Hewett, Graphic Designer
For more information about Dr. Olin and surgery visit www.greensborohipandkneesurgeon.com
4 O.Henry
September 2014
Subscriptions Dana Martin 336.617.0090, dana@ohenrymag.com ©Copyright 2014. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC
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September 2014 Features
59 After Labor Day
Poetry by Robert Demaree
60 Wild At Heart
Our man on the ground goes in search of Greensboro’s wildest places — and finds them right before his eyes. By David C. Bailey
68 Bugs of Summer
Up close and personal with our favorite creepy crawlers By Stan Gilliam
70 Ruminations on Mortality
The Collection, a Glenwood band that’s more like a family, is shaking up the music world. By Grant Britt
74 Dreams Under Your Feet
At Triad Stage, an updated Shakespeare classic brings down the house. By Bill Hancock
82 Taking the Party Outside
High Point super host Todd Nabors shows us how. By Cynthia Adams
92 17 Ways to Do 17 Days Our Picks for the Festival
97 September Almanac By Noah Salt
Departments 9 Simple Life By Jim Dodson 14 Short Stories 17 Doodad By Ogi Overman 19 Life’s Funny By Maria Johnson 21 Omnivorous Reader By Stephen E. Smith 25 Bookshelf By Brian Lampkin 31 Artist at Work By Ogi Overman 36 Lunch with a Friend By Cynthia Adams 44 Best Reader Memoirs 2014 By Dianne Hayter 47 Birdwatch By Susan Campbell 49 Street Level By Jim Schlosser 55 Life of Jane By Jane Borden 98 Arts & Entertainment September Calendar 110 Worth the Drive 117 GreenScene 125 N.C. Writer’s Notebook By Sandra Redding 127 Accidental Astrologer By Astrid Stellanova 128 O.Henry Ending By Kay Cheshire
Cover Photograph by Stephanie Berbec Photograph this page by Hannah Sharpe
6 O.Henry
September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Celebrating 10 Years of Great Views. Join us for the party!
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Simple Life
Roads Not Taken
By Jim Dodson
Owing to heavy end-of-summer traffic,
Illustration by Kira schoenfelder
I took several back roads the other afternoon from Wilmington to Greensboro.
The drive probably took an hour longer than necessary. But more and more these days I find it’s the back roads of this state that make the journey more appealing than the prospect of a timely arrival. Besides, given a choice, part of me will always take the quieter road home or the forgotten highway wherever I’m bound because that’s where — with apologies to Chevrolet — you still see the beating heart of America. When America’s Interstate Highway System debuted with much fanfare in 1956 — authorized by an act of Congress and officially called the Dwight. D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways — it was hailed not only as the most revolutionary innovation in modern times but the most ambitious public works project in human history. The system proved to be every bit of that and more — shaping everything from the way America went on vacation to the way goods and services were delivered cheaply and in unprecedented time, a boon to big business and a nation suddenly in a hurry to get someplace else at the dawn of the modern automobile age. Today, sixty years later, now boasting more than 46,800 miles of super highway with legal speeds in places topping 80 mph, our aging Interstate system is still adding roads and often held up as a model of America’s postwar engineering ingenuity, widely credited with bringing goods and services to rural portions of the country and spreading commerce — and popular culture — into the nation’s backwaters, creating prosperous towns and cities where there was formerly only prairie or small towns adrift in time. Some historians, in fact, go so far as to credit Interstate culture with narrowing the regional differences between formerly hostile sections of the nation — easing ethnic and racial tensions along the way, the theory goes, to say nothing of homogenizing the nature of modern car travel. Maybe this is so. Maybe, on the other hand, this homogeneity and national worship of speed and efficiency explains why I’m so naturally wary of Interstates in general and addicted to back roads and forgotten highways in particular — because I’m old enough to remember when there were no Interstates, per se, at least in the parts of the rural South where my family did most of its traveling. Going somewhere in a car was still an adventure in those days, still took time to do it and almost always offered something different and often surprising — a shaded historic picnic ground by a stream? An old-fashioned tent revival in progress? An old-timer in faded overalls selling watermelons from the bed of a rusted pickup? All . . . just around the next big curve or The Art & Soul of Greensboro
over the hill. Road travel then was magic. By their very definition, Interstates don’t have much magic, big curves or even hills to speak of. By careful design, you see very little of the world at large from them. They carry travelers in starkly efficient straight lines from point A to point B, minimizing the need to toil anyplace along the way — the very reason, in fact, why every neon outpost with golden arches and motels where you briefly exit to gas up looks eerily like the ones you saw ten hours and two state lines ago. Perhaps my first and most vivid memory of life was a road trip nobody in our family wished to take. It happened on a cool November evening in 1957 after my father said goodbye to a handful of employees who worked for him at the small weekly newspaper he owned for a while in Mississippi. Owing to a partner who’d cleaned out the company accounts and vanished to parts unknown, reportedly with a cigarette girl from a Gulfport hotel, the paper had been forced to close down. My father’s dream was ashes and we were “starting over” someplace else, though I had no way of understanding where or what exactly this meant — merely that our furniture had been sent on a truck ahead of us and we were having to leave sleepy Gulfport in our family’s two-toned Pontiac Star Chief, heading east into the darkness to a place called Wilmington, where my father had a new job waiting at the newspaper. Maybe I’ve heard this story so many times I simply see all of this playing in my head like an old home movie. I was almost five years old, after all. My brother Dickie was already six. We had a Cocker Spaniel named Amber. Our mother had just suffered a miscarriage. It was twilight and we watched from the back seat of the car as our father shook hands with the five or six folks who worked for him and slipped them a small white envelope. Inside — I learned this from my mother three decades later — was the last of his own personal savings. The elderly black man who worked on the paper’s loading dock — supposedly one of the best blues rhythm guitarists between Mobile and New Orleans — gave me a harmonica for the trip. Everyone called him “Pops.” I never knew his real name. He had a glass eye and a bright gold tooth. We waved goodbye and turned on the two-lane state road leading out of town, eventually running out of street lights. Our mother, who was still pale from her stay in the hospital, leaned her head against our father’s shoulder. He tuned up a radio station out of Jackson playing Nat King Cole. “You boys get comfortable,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “It’s a long ride. Maybe we’ll have breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains.” I hated to leave Mississippi but I was eager to see mountains of any kind, especially if they were blue. The night felt oceanic, scary and thrilling. My brother had his side of the Star Chief’s big back seat and I had mine. He warned me not to play my harmonica or cross into his side of the seat. My first glimpse of the mountains came at dawn, when we stopped for panSeptember 2014
O.Henry 9
Simple Life
cakes at a crowded diner somewhere outside Chattanooga next to a stand selling “Genuine Cherokee Indian moccasins.” The placemats were a map of the entire United States you could color, and our parents let my brother and me buy a pair of those moccasins. Later, we stopped for a picnic on an overlook somewhere around Asheville. In the distance, the hills were indeed a milky blue. The air, I remember, was crisp and cold. Over the next ten or twelve hours the drive to the coast took us down a winding road from the mountains through smaller hills and on through the rolling Piedmont into much flatter country, through small towns with sleepy courthouse squares, past Esso and Sinclair stations, past harvested fields and sleeping barns and farm stands already closed up for the season, roadside churches, cemeteries, VFW halls, a drive-in theater, and a dairy bar or two, where we finally stopped in late afternoon for an ice cream cone. When I think back to that pivotal road trip in the life of my family, I realize something potent must have gotten into my bloodstream about small towns and back roads. For it’s the rarest of back roads I’ve happened upon in forty-plus years of driving that I didn’t seriously consider taking instead of the ubiquitous Interstate highways and even more ambitious super tollways that now cinch suburban America’s landscape like a corset. As urban America expands, highways and country lanes sometimes seem like an endangered species. This is why, given the choice last week to get home before dark via a mindless Interstate or meander along a quieter road at the whim of nature and pure serendipity, I chose the road not taken much anymore. And like Robert Frost in his golden wood where two roads diverged, one of the first poems I ever memorized, this once again made all the difference. Passing through a green-gold swamp, I saw a pair of snowy egrets sitting on a fallen branch over a blackwater pool, discussing world affairs while they waited
for their evening supper. Through the open window of the car I caught whiffs of summer’s last honeysuckle, just-cut hayfields, the dank smell of woods and streams, and wood smoke from a woman burning raked-up magnolia leaves and sticks in her yard. I saw the first chevron of geese heading south for the winter. A farmer waved to me from the seat of his tractor, chatting on his mobile phone. Somewhere around Spivey’s Corner I pulled off in a fierce thunderstorm to buy fresh-picked silver queen corn, vine-grown Big Boy tomatoes and a paper sack of what my late Southern grandmother called “Florida butter beans,” large creamy white affairs speckled with bits of burgundy. On I rambled past a wooden freewill Baptist church with a sign out front that read “Forbidden Fruit Makes Many Jams.” I saw a beautiful cemetery under ancient oaks, several fields of grazing cows, a spray of flowers attached to a banged-up tree, a high school athletic field where a football team was ending its first practice of the season. Somewhere around Campbell College, where the sun was out again but sinking fast, I passed four teenagers in a long line at the Dairy Queen. Two were holding hands. The other two were eating sundaes and laughing. The girls were shockingly under-dressed — or so my late Granny Taylor would have said. Date night in the slow lanes of America. “How was your drive?” my wife asked when I finally got home around nine. She was watching a movie. “Just the way I like it,” I said. “I figured that’s why you were late,” she said. “You took the back road home again.” OH Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@saltmagazinenc.com.
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8/1/14 3:33 PM The Art & Soul of Greensboro
KS MASTERWOR SERIES SPONSOR
SEPTEMBER �� � ��, ����
Mahler Symphony No. 4, Julia Sitkovetsky, soprano plus Donizetti/Verdi arias
C H AM B E R
POPS SERIES SPONSOR
MEDIA SPONSOR
OCTOBER ��, ����
The Texas Tenors
SERIES SPONSOR
SEPTEMBER ��, ����
Dima’s 60th Birthday Extravaganza! Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms & more!
part of
NOVEMBER � � �, ����
GREENSBORO SYMPHONY ����/���� SEASON DMITRY SITKOVETSKY, MUSIC DIRECTOR Subscribe Today: Call 336-335-5456 x224 Visit: GreensboroSymphony.org
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, Igor Kamenz, piano plus Britten and Beethoven DECEMBER ��, ����
Leading Men of Broadway
NOVEMBER �, ����
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, violin Igor Kamenz, Piano GSO musicians Scarlatti, Beethoven & Prokofiev
JANUARY �� � ��, ����
Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an exhibition plus Shostakovich and Ravel
JANUARY ��, ����
For a season brochure: email scauthen@greensborosymphony.org
F a m i l y
FEBRUARY �� � ��, ����
Haydn: The Creation
Andrew Bidlack, Brittany Robinson, Eric Downes, soloists Bel Canto Company
O f f i c e
FEBRUARY ��, ����
FEBRUARY ��, ����
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, violin John Fadial, viola Scott Rawls, viola, Beth Vanderborgh, cello
APRIL ��, ����
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring plus Sibelius and Debussy
Strauss, Dvorak
Classical Mystery Tour
Cirque de la Symphonie
MAY �� � ��, ����
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, violin Inara Zandmane, Piano GSO musicians
Haydn
APRIL ��, ����
Cirque de la Symphonie
Bluebell Foundation
MAY ��, ����
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, violin Inara Zandmane, piano 2014 Winner Indianapolis International Violin Competition GSO musicians Mozart, Brahms
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
SEASON SPONSORS
September 2014
O.Henry 11
BHHSYostandLittle.com
3508 �romley �ood �ane, �ree�boro $2,750,000 Web ID 689839 Tom Chitty 336—420—2836
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O.Henry 13
Short Stories
A Common Thread
Artist Leigh Suggs fabricates the designs you can see at Greenhill this month quite literally from her childhood experiences. Take her geometric explosion of luminous blue archival gel ink, cascading out over paper handmade from banana leaves. The vibrant, painstakingly crafted design is an echo of the intensely colored patterns Suggs experienced behind closed eyelids as a kid. “This work has an economy of means,” says curator Edie Carpenter, “yet is a kind of tour de force, as one slip of the pen would have ruined it.” Suggs is one of four artists, seemingly cut from the same cloth, who will weave magic at Greenhill’s Following Threads exhibit through November 9. “The labor-intensive process so evident in Suggs’ drawing is shared by all the artists and may be seen as an act of resistance to the systematic distancing of the body from contemporary life in the information age,” Carpenter says. And that meticulous labor seems to be the common thread among all of the works of art in the exhibit. Carpenter will offer her comments on the exhibit at the opening at Greenhill September 19 at 5:30 p.m. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org. JD
Sauce of the Month
Black Dog Gourmet Dog-Gone-Good Chicken & Rib BBQ Sauce is a little bit spicy and slightly smoky, with a tomato base that’s more sweet than sour — like a lot of other rib sauces, but with the addition of a certain “je ne sais quoi,” as my French teacher used to say. “Grapes,” says Paul Bennett, spooning out samples at a recent City Market in the Railyard. “It was my momma’s recipe,” he says, drawing an audience. “She won an award for it thirty years ago from the Shop’n’Save in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. No preservatives, no additives, no fillers. When you make food with food, it tastes like food.” A hand goes up and another bottle of Black Dog finds a home. Bennett says he did a lot of cooking with his mom and spent twenty-five years in food service. “Did your momma cook spicy?” someone asks. “I didn’t know what a jalapeño was until I moved to California,” he says. But it was love at first bite, and he’s been making hot sauces ever since. “It was all over from there on out.” Named after his Lab, Abby, Black Dog sauces are sold in specialty shops, among them The Extra Ingredient and Bestway Grocery. Info: www.blackdoggourmet.com. DCB
14 O.Henry
September 2014
Snapping Shots
Shutterbug alert: on September 18 at 12:01 a.m., a prompt will be posted online (and elsewhere), inviting all of you to post an absolutely stunning photo before 11:59 p.m. that day as part of 17 [photos] x 17 [days] photo scavenger hunt. The public will then view and vote on thumbnails via the web (17x17gso. com), Facebook (www.facebook. com/17x17gso), Twitter (twitter. com/17x17gso) or Tumblr (tumblr. com/17x17gso). Then, beginning October 5, a winner a day will be announced by the event’s sponsor, Geeksboro, until October 21. After all the entries have been judged, expect a grand, photo-finish party from 4–7 p.m. on Saturday, November 8, at Geeksboro Coffeehouse Cinema, 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: info@17x17gso.com. DCB
Happy Birthday, 450 Years Later
As Galileo and Shakespeare hit their 450th birthdays this year, it is Greensboro residents who will take the cake. In the year-long UNCG series The Globe and the Cosmos, the accomplishment of these two giants of Western civilization, one in literature, the other in science, will be celebrated through lectures, films, astronomical viewings, theater, dance and music. To see or not to see, that is the question. Dr. Jerry Pubantz assures us that you won’t be disappointed. “In this extraordinary set of programs, there’s something for everyone,” says Pubantz, dean of Lloyd International Honors College at UNCG. Things get under way with a lunchtime colloquium, “Sources of Authority: Galileo vs. the Church,” September 5 at 11:45 a.m. Then, in a triple treat performance, UNCG students will perform a Collage Concert featuring music, theater and dance inspired by Shakespeare and Galileo on September 6 at 7:30 p.m. Later in the month, on September 10 at 7:30 p.m., Coriolanus will be screeened, the first of seven free monthly “Shakespeare Re-imagined” films. For full schedule and more information, visit globeandcosmos.uncg. edu. JD
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Tower of Power
Imagine 343 red balloons and seventy-two blue balloons climbing into the sky to commemorate the firefighters and police officers who lost their lives at the World Trade Center in 2001. At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 13, at Bellmeade Parking Deck, hundreds of people will begin their ascent up the eight flights of stairs to kick off the Greensboro Fire Department’s Fourth Annual 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb. Participants are encouraged to make this climb nine times, representing the seventy-two flights climbed by firefighters of the New York City Fire Department. But you don’t have to do all those flights, says the department’s division chief and training supervisor, Skip Nix. “Do it two or three times or as many as you feel comfortable with, but do remember those who lost their lives,” he says. After working up a sweat, stick around for the opportunity to meet and greet our local public servants and support their work. The police department will be sending proceeds from the event to Lindy’s Kids of the Kellin Foundation, and the fire department to Ignite the Spirit. Sounds like a good excuse to skip the gym and honor our country! Info: Leslie Lippa, (336) 574-4088. PC
Wayback Book
On the opening page of the newly published Greensboro, author Kevin Reid reflects that a late 1950s’ aerial view of the city was taken at a time when the city “had more pigeons and fewer skyscrapers.” It is just one of more than 160 photos, some taken by O.Henry’s Lynn Donovan, accompanied by engaging commentary focusing on people, places and things, some gone, some still very much with us. In the bet-you-didn’t-know-this category, Reid remembers that just before the O.Henry Hotel closed in 1975, rooms went for $7 a day; that in 1953, when Moses H. Cone Hospital opened, rooms there could be had for $8 a day; that homegrown Kayser-Roth, which launched the No Nonsense hosiery brand in 1973, is now owned by Golden Lady Co., Europe’s largest manufacturer of hosiery; that Ham’s Restaurant chain was founded as Ham Drug Store in 1935 and became Ham’s Sundries Store a few years later; and that Joseph Koury was Greensboro’s most prolific developer, building 8,000 homes, seven shopping centers and nine major office buildings. Published as part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of Modern America series. Info: www.arcadiapublishing.com/series/Images-of-Modern-America DCB
Breaking Away
If you’re wondering why the TV show Breaking Bad is plastered all over the Greensboro Symphony’s promotional material, there’s a simple answer: It is Dmitry Sitovetsky’s favorite show. Besides, this year is also Dima’s 60th birthday, so be nice. For any cave dwellers out there, the highly popular TV drama is about a struggling high school chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, resorts to producing and selling methamphetamine. “It’s my favorite U.S. TV show of all time,” Greensboro Symphony’s conductor says. “Walter White is a chemist who uses his art to transform lives of his family. Chemistry is not unlike music — and nothing or no one is what they seem to be — it’s all about the subtext.” While planning the 2014–2015 season, Sitovetsky couldn’t get White out of his mind. “So in the upcoming season, I hope to inspire divine chemistry by mixing the elements of my heroes and villains to make a real transformation for our audience and put them over the edge.” The first laboratory in which the symphony will present the “Chemistry in Music” will be on September 25 at 7:30 p.m. when soprano Julia Sitkovetsy, Dmitry’s daughter, will formulate a mixture of Verdi, Rossini and Mahler. “Don’t forget, family comes first,” Sitkovetsy says. That will be especially true on September 28, when Julia will be the catalyst at “Dima’s 60th Birthday Extravaganza” featuring Bach, Chopin and Brahms. Info: (336) 335-5456, extension 224, or www.greensborocoliseum. com. DCB The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Ogi Sez Ogi Overman So, it’s September and the college kids are back in town, which means the nightlife ramps it up a notch for the big kids as well. Shall we? Yes, let’s. • September 6, White Oak Amphitheatre: We won’t let summer fade without kicking and screaming and throwing some sand in its face. And the Flip Flops Beach Music Festival will be the place to do just that. The Swingin’ Medallions, Tams, Hip Pocket, and Eric and the Chilltones bring a bit of OD to the Gate City. • September 13, Blue Bourbon Jack’s: The Deluge, already one of the Triad’s premier bands, is adding a horn section for this special High Point show. If the venue doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the erstwhile Triangle Billiards, new and improved. • September 16, White Oak Amphitheatre: Hate to double-dip, but this one’s big. This is a rescheduled show from May, and in the interim the dynamic duo got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Ladies and gentlemen, Hall and Oates. Did I say “big”? • September 19, Blind Tiger: Still crazy after all these years, Southern Culture on the Skids will bring a touch of reverse effete snobbery to town. Warning: The band is not responsible for injuries due to tossed chicken bones from the stage. • September 27, Tate Street (that Great Street): Greensboro’s longest-running street festival turns 40 this year. Our own legendary folkie Bruce Piephoff heads a power-packed, all-day lineup. Freak flags will be flown. OO
September 2014
O.Henry 15
PARKS, GARDENS, LAKES, TRAILS, SPORTS, RECREATION CENTERS & MORE! For a complete list of year-round leisure programs and activities for people of all ages and interests, visit Greensboro Parks & Recreation at:
16 O.Henry
www.greensboro-nc.gov/leisure September 2014
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Doodad
Location, Lifestyle, and the Lakes
Musician, Heal Thyself
Photograph by Daniel Bayer
G
Emily Stewart has her eyes on the road to success
reensboro, for some unknown reason, is graced with an inordinate number of female singer/songwriters who either play on the national stage or belong there. Like Aretha or Beyonce, one need only mention them by first name to produce instant recognition. Rhiannon, Laurelyn, Molly, Crystal and Martha each are established artists with proven track records whose best days may actually lie ahead of them. And now it is time to add another name to that list: Emily. At the moment, she still needs a last name — it is Stewart — but that moment may soon pass. With the release last month of her first full-length CD, Eyes on the Road, the ravenhaired beauty is poised to step out of the shadows. She is equally content being an ensemble player with Matty Sheets and the Blockheads; a duet partner with violinist and business partner Suzy McCalley; or the frontwoman of her band, The Baby Teeth. But this record may force her into the limelight, like it or not. While not specifically a concept album, Eyes on the Road does have a common thread throughout, which Emily describes as “trying to find the right path.” “I’ve realized over the years that I am writing my affirmations,” she says. “By singing about who I want to be, I feel that I’m becoming that person.” Of the eleven songs on the CD, she wrote nine and co-wrote the other two. Her voice conjures up images of Iris Dement or Natalie Merchant, while her style is pure Americana, in the vein of Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris. A 2006 graduate of Guilford College with a degree in philosophy, she did not start performing until after college, when a neck injury from an auto accident and subsequent broken ankle gave her the time and impetus to learn guitar and begin setting her tunes to music. “I needed to heal myself,” she explains, “and the way I did it was through singing. By pushing wind through the vocal cords, which is a major chakra energy center, it became a self-healing mechanism.” While music is clearly her primary focus, the Monroeville, Alabama, native wears many hats, among them Reiki master, music therapist, ordained minister, writer, organic gardener and entrepreneur. Last November, she and McCalley co-founded The Breathing Room in Winston-Salem, a center for yoga, expressive arts and holistic care. She’s also a newlywed who lives in Greensboro with her husband, Dallas Baker, who owns Great Escape Catering. “We are all about personal development,” she notes, “and music is one of the ways to do it.’” — Ogi Overman OH The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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September 2014
O.Henry 17
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September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Life’s Funny
Middle-Aged ENO philes Taking a spin in a New Age hammock
By Maria Johnson
A few weeks ago, my son Tom
showed me a picture from a recent camping trip. In the picture, three nylon hammocks stretch between two trees like rungs on a ladder. A forty-foot waterfall tumbles and crashes in the background.
Tom explained that he and the guys were ENO-ing, a verb that sprouts from a popular brand of hammock that’s made in Asheville. The company has mushroomed in the last couple of years, feeding a laid-back culture of hammocking all over the country. You can see the colorful slings everywhere — in campgrounds, in parks, on campuses, on porches, at music festivals. As someone who has to remind herself to chill now and then, I was drawn to the idea of literally hanging around, so I borrowed a couple of ENOs and asked my friend Deb if she wanted to join me for a couple of hours of relaxation. “Will we have s’mores and a campfire?” she texted. “Even better,” I answered. “Red wine.” “I’m in.” And that’s how we found ourselves traipsing around my backyard one Friday afternoon, searching for suitable trees. Tom agreed to help us because, you know, there’s nothing a 17-year-old boy would rather do on a Friday afternoon than string up hammocks for two peri-menopausal moms. “I could double-stack you here,” he said, stopping between two pines. Deb and I looked up. “How high would the higher hammock be?” we asked. “About ten feet,” Tom said. “One of you would have to use the lower hammock as a stepladder.” Deb and I shot each other a look. It was the look of women who take calcium supplements to avoid osteoporosis and fractures that can result from activities like climbing into hammocks. “It’s too sunny here,” I lied. “Yeah, too hot,” Deb lied. “Let’s find some shade.” We moved on. “How about here?” he said, stopping in front of three maples. He could string the hammocks side-by-side. That would be fine, we said. While Tom was strapping up the ENOs, he asked if we were going to listen to music because that’s a big part of hammocking. Deb said she had music on her phone, but it was drying out in a bowl of rice because she’d forgotten it on her deck the night before and it had stormed. I said that I had one song on my phone, and it was a good song, but it was, you know, one song, so we maybe we should go into the house, put on a CD and open a window. Tom stared at us. I think he was impressed by our resourcefulness. A few minutes later Van Morrison was bubbling on about the bright side of the road, and Tom was coaching us on how to get in a hammock — by backing up The Art & Soul of Greensboro
to it and sitting down in the pocket. We swiveled, sank in, and began appreciating the finer points of hammocking, like how much upper body strength it takes to drink wine without spilling it. Speaking of skills, I told Deb that I had once seen Tom pull his hammock snug around him like a cocoon and spin like a rotisserie chicken. The next thing I knew, Deb was dropping her empty glass on the ground and rolling her hammock like a kayak. She stopped at 6 o’clock. Her head pointed to the ground. She flipped back up. “More hammock tricks!” she whooped. Peer pressure is a terrible thing. I tossed my glass, crossed arms, clutched the edges of the hammock, and dipped one shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I was amazed at how clearly I could see the leaves on the ground, a foot away, even without my reading glasses. I suspect this was because all of my blood was rushing to my head and changing the shape of my eyeballs. Anyway, I looked around at my upside-down house, my upside-down patio, my upside-down beagle. It was a mind-expanding experience. And, as with most mind-expanding experiences I’ve had, fifteen seconds was plenty. It was time to go topside. I pointed my shoulders back the way they came. Nothing. I wriggled and bucked. Nothing. “Uh, Deb . . .” “Yeah?” “Help.” Fortunately, Deb was nimble enough to leave her hammock, rush over to mine and right the ship. We stayed and swayed. We talked about kids, and parents, and husbands, and dogs, and trips we’d like to take. We agreed that hanging around under trees in the daytime was fine, but overnight camping was not our idea of fun because nature is way too loud at night. “Once, we went camping, and the birds were singing at 4 a.m.,” Deb said. “Four!” “Who does that?” I said sympathetically. “Birds,” Deb said. We continued bonding over our love of the 9-to-5 outdoors until it was time to go. Then we got up. You know how cartoon people get flattened by anvils and walk around like accordions? Well, it was like that. Only we were folded long ways, like those money-holding cards you give kids for graduation. Our backs stooped. Our legs wobbled. But trust me when I tell you we were totally relaxed. OH If you would like to order the DVD version of “Moms Gone Wild in Hammocks,” contact Maria Johnson at maria@ohenrymag.com September 2014
O.Henry 19
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20 O.Henry
September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Omnivorous Reader
Welcome Strangers A lavish and comprehensive work that explores this direct link between Scotland, Ireland and southern Appalachian root music
By Stephen E. Smith
The BBC Gaelic net-
work recently broadcast a pub performance by the band Uncle Earl (check it out on YouTube by entering “Uncle Earl: Oh Bunch of Keys/Wish I Had My Time Again”). The clip opens with a burst of fiddle and clawhammer banjo followed by dancer/musician Kristin Andreassen clogging her heart out. It’s three minutes and thirtynine seconds of pure joy.
The image of five American bluegrassers frailing away in a Scottish venue would make an instructive dust-jacket illustration for Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr’s Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia. The tunes Uncle Earl plays and the step dance Andreassen performs have come full circle, streaming from Scotland to Ireland into Appalachia and back to Scotland while embracing English, Welsh, German, Cherokee, African-American and French influences. Wayfaring Strangers is published by UNC Press, and the authors have strong North Carolina connections. Scottish-born Fiona Ritchie began her broadcasting career while a graduate student at UNC-Charlotte. She now hosts The Thistle & Shamrock, the Celtic music program that airs weekly on National Public Radio. Coauthor/editor Doug Orr is the president emeritus of Warren Wilson College, where he founded the Swannanoa Gathering, folk arts workshops held each summer in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
But this latest book on Celtic music and its progeny is in no way parochial. The authors have enlisted musicians of international prominence to persuade readers that music originally performed only in Gaelic has assumed worldwide currency. Doc Watson, David Holt, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Francis James Child, Bob Dylan, Jean Ritchie, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, John and Alan Lomax, Libba Cotten, the Carter family, and many other luminaries or their ghosts are enlisted to the cause. Stepping out of her glitzy pop-culture caricature, Dolly Parton has penned a thoughtful forward to this 330-page, text-heavy coffee-table tome, which contains sixty color and sixty-four black and white illustrations and photographs and a twenty-track CD that opens with Dolly and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh singing “Barbara Allen” in English and Gaelic. As a preface, Ritchie and Orr exchange letters detailing the chance encounters that brought them to Celtic music and the complex course they traveled while researching and editing the book. Ritchie writes: “Sometimes, we seemed to have stumbled upon a half-forgotten old pathway overgrown through the years yet needing just a little pruning to reveal its timeworn stepping stones.” Wayfaring Strangers disentangles that pathway while striking a balance between an agreeably informative read and a graduate-level course in folklore, an approach intended to attract both the musically uninformed and those more schooled in the Celtic tradition. Organized into “Beginnings,” “Voyage” and “Singing a New Song,” each section contains numerous sidebars, the majority of which are extended definitions, interviews or technical explanations that clarify or supplement the text. In an effort to remain topical, the authors link roots music with American folk and pop musicians. The Celtic influence on Bob Dylan’s songwriting is the subject of a lengthy sidebar. “‘Lord September 2014
O.Henry 21
Reader
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22 O.Henry
September 2014
Franklin’ is a forerunner to ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream,’ ‘Farewell to Tarwathie’ was echoed in his ‘Farewell Angelina,’ and ‘The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie’ inspired Dylan’s ‘Pretty Peggy-O’. . . Controversy surrounded Dylan’s crafting of ‘With God on Our Side,’ in which the theme and melody closely resemble ‘The Patriot Game’ by Irish writing Dominic Behan.” In “Voyages,” hauntingly sentimental songs of separation — those melodies whose tonal variations are so apparent in the tin-whistle tunes such as Titanic’s ersatz “My Heart Will Go On” — contain sad notes of longing for the people and places left behind. “The old life may have been tough and trying,” the authors write, “but their urge to explore beyond the next horizon was tempered, as ever, with nostalgia for the place left behind.” If readers find themselves entangled in particulars or weighed down with a wealth of factual data, the accompanying CD is a godsend. In addition to Dolly’s “Barbara Allen,” there are beautiful performances that enliven and illustrate the Scots-Irish musical journey. Beginning with the resettlement of Presbyterians in Ulster and “It Was A’ For Our Rightfu’King” to “Shady Grove,” which began life as “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,” and concluding with “The Parting Glass,” which was “well known in Scotland and Ireland long before Robert Burns’s farewell anthem ‘Auld Lang Syne’ came into the popular repertoire,” the CD functions as an indispensable component of the book. The authors have also included a glossary of “Less-Familiar Musical Terms,” a contextual timeline, a list of resource centers, notes on each illustration, a discography, endnotes, an excellent bibliography and an explication of each cut on the CD. Ritchie and Orr have given us a thoroughly researched, definitive study that details and analyzes the life-renewing music that Americans and much of the Western culture have come to regard as their own. Dare I suggest that Wayfaring Strangers would make a thoughtful Christmas gift for anyone who has an interest in roots music? For a sweet taste of where Celtic music has brought us, punch up YouTube and enter “‘The Last Goodbye’ Uncle Earl.” The lyric is contemporary, but the elements that enlighten the performance — the use of fiddle, guitar and banjo and the emotional and tonal intensity — hark back to those settlers who faithfully preserved their musical heritage while searching for a new life in a new land. OH Stephen E. Smith’s most recent book of poems is A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths. He can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
autumn in
old salem september 2 – november 2, 2o14
Spectacular colors. Harvest-time tastes. Hands-on activities.
Autumn in Old Salem. A season for the senses. September 21 sunday social: homowo harvest food tasting, enjoy foods from plants native to Africa and foods traditionally associated with African American cuisine
October 1 old salem presents robert edsel: the monuments men October 18 pigs & pippins! harvest day at old salem, fall foods, hands-on activities for all ages October 25 – 30 legends and lanterns tours, pumpkin carving, trick or treating!
For a full list of events, classes & concerts, visit oldsalem.org or call 336-721-735o The Artold & Soulsalem of Greensboro museums & gardens, winston-salem, north carolina
September 2014
O.Henry 23
Emergencies don’t wait, why should you?
When an emergency happens, Novant Health Kernersville Medical Center offers convenient access to care around the clock. Our physicians and nurses are specially trained in emergency medicine, which means you’ll receive the expert care you need when it matters most. And our new online check-in service saves you time when every second matters. Simply visit our website, select the time you’d like to be seen, and we’ll hold your place. When you arrive, our team will be waiting to see you. Visit NovantHealth.org/emergency to view current wait times and check-in online.
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24 O.Henry
September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Scuppernong Bookshelf
The Art of Books Pick your aesthetic By Brian Lampkin
Art books require a different level
of commitment from the book-buying public. They’re typically expensive and they often occupy a more public space than the semiprivate bookshelf in your office. Art books are haphazardly thrown upon the living room table in an attempt to suggest an absent-minded display of one’s aesthetic. Or even consciously and grandly displayed upon the mantel: This is what I love and you should too! Art books reveal you. Is it Warhol you identify with or Grandma Moses? Robert Mapplethorpe or Andrew Wyeth? These are important distinctions. This month, Scuppernong Books will try to guide you through some recent art books and a few perhaps forgotten gems. Your very reputation is at stake! Since the early ’90s, Maurizio Cattelan has been poking his finger in the eye of the art world with taxidermied animals in tableaux and life-size wax effigies of various people. For one of his most famous works, The Ninth Hour, he built a full-size effigy of Pope John Paul in full ceremonial dress being crushed by a meteorite. In 1999, for his piece Mother, he buried an image of an Indian fakir daily under sand in a small room with only his clasped hands visible. For a retrospective of his work at The Guggenheim he hung every work in the open space of the rotunda, reaching from two inches above the floor to the roof, five floors above. Toilet Paper (Damiani, 2012, $65) is a compilation of his work with Pierpaolo Ferrari, a biannual picture-based publication begun in 2010. Stuffed with alluring images both shocking and surreal, beautiful and macabre, this book reads like a catalogue of emotional and intellectual responses, each page eliciting ever more complex feelings and thoughts, but always with dark humor and a great sense of fun. The texts accompanying the photos are sometimes interesting, sometimes absurd. But one thing’s for sure. There’s no other book in our store where you’ll come across the complete U.S. Patent application for a bird diaper. — Steve Mitchell The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawing (Acquavella, 2014, $60) is a gorgeous book. It opens with an enormous and appropriate quote from Jean-Michel Basquiat himself: “Believe it or not, I can actually draw.” A friend of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Basquiat rocketed to fame as a painter in the New York City art scene of the early 1980s. His paintings and mixed-media work, typically depicting the heads of heroic figures — athletes, prophets and warriors — framed by garish colors and arresting bursts of unexpected lines, are the source of most of Basquiat’s fame. This book succeeds admirably at shedding light on his drawings, which are an often-forgotten component of his oeuvre. Bought by the Schorr family before Basquiat had made much of a name for himself, these drawings allow us an intimate, almost voyeuristic look into the ethos of the mind of Basquiat the artist. For any fan of his work, this book is an absolute must. And if you’re only just learning about him, this book is as good a place as any to start. Like many others who achieved this measure of fame so early, Jean-Michel Basquiat succumbed to the ravages of addiction and died when he was only 27 years old. It is because of books like this one that his work, characterized by its refreshing candor and sense of childlike wonder, continues to inspire and enchant. — Brian Etling For a different perspective on the art world, you might pick up Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (Thames and Hudson, 2010, $21.95), by Martin Gayford. It’s a fascinating look at the relationship between an artist and his model, as well as an insightful glimpse into how painters paint — or, at least, how Lucian Freud paints. Readable and accessible, this book also has a lot to say about modern art. In the end, though, it all rests with the model and the artist and the ways in which they might see each other. Included are a number of full color plates of Freud’s work. — Steve Mitchell Photography is arguably criticized and undervalued more than any other medium. For decades, photographers have, like their peers who work in modern, had to defend their work from detractors who pull out the all-too-common line, “Well, I could do that.” The answer over and over again is no . . . you couldn’t (and you didn’t). Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (PowerHouse Books, $39.95) assembles some of the most striking candid street photographs no one was expectSeptember 2014
O.Henry 25
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26 O.Henry
September 2014
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Bookshelf ing, least of all John Maloof, who opened the box of undeveloped film and negatives he found at auction. After careful curation of the photographs, Maloof has constructed a collection that we can only hope the solitary and guarded Maier would have assembled herself (if she had been inclined). As a live-in nanny, Maier was privy to the daily scenes of the walking world of Chicago and her photographs retain a time capsule-esque quality that appeals to many. But her work is not just sets of snapshots. The remarkable fact is that Maier, having no formal experience, was able to craft compositions using such compelling and dramatic lighting that the work of great photographers like Berenice Abbott and Ansel Adams come to mind. Not to mention the staggering volume of exposures that Maloof has been sifting through, which places her in a league apart from most novice photographers. Maier has been catapulted further into the public eye with the release of the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which came out earlier this spring. Issues of artist intent and questions of legitimacy due to her not having a hand in the final product are all valid and lend themselves to good conversation, but I, for one, am kind of glad that someone dusted off the boxes and decided to share what was inside. I assure you, the images will linger with you long after you close the covers. — Kira Larson Mona Lisa To Marge: How the World’s Greatest Artworks Entered Popular Culture, by Francesca Bonazzoli and Michele Robecchi (Prestel, 2014, $24.95), begins, coincidentally, with a quote from Maurizio Cattelan: “Perhaps not all of the artists in this book would be proud to see their work reproduced on mugs and slippers . . . .” Perhaps not, but Cattelan also knows that images “belong simultaneously to everyone and to no one,” and I’m somewhat charmed to see da Vinci’s Last Supper reinscribed as an advertisement for the leather-loving Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. And I would not have discovered Edward Hopper in my youth without Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner album cover. Mona Lisa To Marge enjoys the ways popular culture has turned and twisted great art into rank commerce. Surely we never need to see another interpretation of Klimt’s The Kiss or Munch’s Scream (Pink Floyd’s The Wall notwithstanding), but sometimes the reinventions are positively inspired: I never saw the connection between the classical sculpture Laocoön And His Sons and the iconic poster for Saturday Night Fever The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
O.Henry 27
Pink in the Park is a free event about breast cancer
so that awareness can color our futures. T h u r s d a y, Se p t e m b e r 2 5 / 1 0 : 3 0 A M t o 1 : 3 0 P M Ce n t e r C i t y Pa r k / D o w n t o w n G re e n s b o ro Pink in the Park is a free event designed to educate and support those dealing with breast cancer. We gather each year to honor, remember and celebrate those whose lives have been impacted. Not only do we offer information for those battling the disease but we bring together vendors with helpful products and services.
Create a free virtual ribbon online in honor or memory of a loved one. Pinkinthepark.com
Bookshelf
THEODORE ALEXANDER® OUTLET
with Travolta posing in his white leisure suit until this book revealed it to me. Amazing. — Brian Lampkin
When Art Is Born
September, it turns out, is lousy with artist birthdays. We’re glad all of the following artists were born. Hans (Jean) Arp’s birthday (September 16, 1886) reminded me of the joys of Dadaism (Dada, by Rudolf Kuenzli, Phaidon, $45), an art movement that erupted in Europe in the early 20th century as a negative response to the horrors of World War I. Dadaism rejected reason and logic, celebrating instead nonsense, irrationality and intuition. This book does an excellent job of tracing threads of Dadaism throughout all of 20th Century art, including abstract art, sound poetry and performance art. It also highlights a wealth of Dadaists, some famous (Duchamp, Schwitters, Arp), some less so. Dada is the antidote when you get that feeling the art world takes itself far too seriously. — Steve Mitchell The odd, delightful little book Ounce, Dice, Trice (New York Review of Books, $15.95), written by Alastair Reid, is illustrated by another September-born artist, the painter/photographer Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898). This is one for children young and old, whether you’re reading it to take in the beautiful Shahn illustrations or to learn just what exactly a “gongoozler” is. This book becomes its own little act of jiggery-pokery. — Brian Etling Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917) was at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College at a time when black artists were not especially welcome in our western mountains. But BMC provided a home and Lawrence grew into a great American artist. We love Chronicle Books’ Jacob Lawrence In The City ($7.99) for its vibrant colors, its price and its attempt to show young readers the joys of art and life in the city. — Brian Lampkin Finally, the great Louise Nevelson was a cusp Libra (September 23, 1900). The meanest cat I ever lived with was named Nevelson, in honor of Louise, but I can’t say if the cat adopted her disposition or not. Sadly, most of the books on Nevelson are out of print, save this beauty: The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing A Legend, by Brooke Kamin Rapaport (Yale University, $40). — Brian Lampkin OH The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 29
Sea Breeze Collection
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Artist at Work
The Body of Art With five world championships under their brushes, bodypainting legends Madelyn Greco and Scott Fray are bringing new respect to an ancient art form
By Ogi Overman
Photographs Courtesy of Scott Fray & Madelyn Greco
“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” — Vincent van Gogh
Madelyn Greco lives in a colorful
world. The clothes she wears are colorful, the flowers she grows are colorful, her neon-red and purple-tipped hair is colorful, the art she produces is colorful. And she splashes that world not only with color but with love — of her work, of her peers, of her life. It’s as if she took to heart the lyric from the Chicago tune and decided to color her world with love. She and her painting and life partner, Scott Fray, have taken their art from their Victorian home in Reidsville all the way to the world stage. And in the process, they have become world famous in their chosen field. Why then, you might ask, have you never heard of them? How is it that this local couple plies their craft in relative obscurity in their own backyard if they’re so famous? The answer is that their chosen field is the arcane art form known as bodypainting. Yes, your first thought was correct — they paint bodies. The human body is their canvas. And, yes again, said bodies are nude or very close
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
to it. At least they begin that way, but by the time the pair, known collectively as Livingbrush Bodypainting, are through with them, they are living, breathing works of museum-quality art. While most Americans still associate bodypainting with Mardi Gras or Key West Fantasy Fest, where the “art” is painting American flags or Budweiser cans on drunken revelers, that is anything but the case in most other parts of the world. It is an accepted, mainstream medium throughout Europe, South America, Scandinavia, Australia and the Far East. Explains Fray, a transplanted Michigan native, “Throughout the history of art, you’re going to find depictions of the human form nude as its primary subject. We’ve just done a subject switch, where we do the art on the nude body.” Greco adds that it’s been practiced by every culture, in every age, in every part of the world since the dawn of man. “It’s part of what we are and part of celebrating what it means to be human,” she says. And now Fray and Greco have made it their mission to take bodypainting from that “breasts and beer” mentality into the realm of fine art. And they are the perfect couple to do it. Among bodypainters, they are the most famous of the famous, the crème de la crème. In fact, they’ve done something unprecedented, which might never be repeated. They are holders of five world championships in five separate disciplines in the past four years. When they won their first world title in 2011 at the World Bodypainting Festival, held annually in Portschach, Austria, Fray told me, “This is something that is being appreciated in other parts of the world. It’s really exploded.” And then Greco adds, “I’m not sure it’s going to happen in America.” But now, after sweeping every major awards category — brush and sponge, September 2014
O.Henry 31
A L A G L A U N AN
, 6 2 . T P E S O SEE T 4 1 0 2 E V BELIE
Join us for an evening of creative, delicious fare, live entertainment and special sneak peeks of upcoming renovations and expansions at the Greensboro Science Center!
6:30 - 10:30pm Ages 21 and up $75 per person Casual cocktail attire
All event proceeds will help sustain and enhance GSC exhibits and operations.
greensboroscience.org/seetobelieve
Artist at Work
Scott Fray and Madelyn Greco with a “body” of their work
special effects, airbrush, ultraviolet and facepainting — as well as winning another international competition in Korea, he and Greco have changed their tune. They are sensing a paradigm shift, a tipping point. “A lot of things are coming to fruition and maturity that have been started over the last few years,” says Fray. “The level of the art itself has risen, and people are becoming aware of that.” Says Greco, “Now we are seeing it here, as well,” adding, “We just got mentioned in the Huffington Post, and that would not have happened five years ago.” Another pivotal factor in the growth and acceptance of bodypainting stateside is cable television. On August 6, the Game Show Network debuted a reality program called Skin Wars, in which ten bodypainters are competing for a $100,000 prize. In fact, the network flew Greco to Los Angeles for an audition for a slot as a judge, but she got beat out by, of all people, celebrity transvestite Ru Paul. “They could’ve gotten me a lot cheaper,” she laughs. “I guarantee you, television is going to love this and eat it up,” says Fray. “This gives them a giant permission slip to show naked women, and that permission slip is art.” Last year they became partners in the Living Art America competition, held in Atlanta the first weekend of October. This year, the weekend before Living Art America hits Atlanta, Greensboro — and Livingbrush — will host the first annual Living Art Greensboro event. It will be the centerpiece of the 17 Days Festival, sponsored by ArtsGreensboro. The painting, judging, pageant and reception will held in the Empire and Regency rooms at the Elm Street Center Sunday, September 28 — not coincidentally the weekend before Living Art America. “We are enticing all our friends from the international bodypainting community who are coming to Atlanta to fly in a week early and participate in our
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September 2014
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Artist at Work local event,” remarks Greco. “We envision this as an ongoing event, as a sort of qualifier for Atlanta. We also have an emerging artist category, and we are encouraging anyone from the area who’s given bodypainting some thought to enter and learn from — and paint alongside — these world-class artists.” “This really has the potential to make Greensboro show up on the international map,” says Fray. “As bodypainting gets bigger — and it will — the eyes of the world will be on Greensboro. In five years, I can see Greensboro becoming the Austin,
Texas, of bodypainting.” After Greensboro, the world is their oyster: “Let’s see,” says Greco, “one or both of us will be going to Korea, Uruguay, Las Vegas, Atlanta several times, New York, St. Croix, Sanibel Island and back to Austria this year. Never a dull moment.” “Our challenge is not in that community anymore, it’s the wider world,” muses Fray. “Our number one job is being gracious in each and every instance to people who look upon you or are inspired by you. That is the right response in every situation.” Adds Greco, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wake up grateful. I am completely trusting that things roll out in the time and the manner they’re supposed to. All I have to do it hold up my end.” By spreading the word, spreading the art and spreading the love. OH Ogi Overman, an editor, columnist and reporter for various Triad publications for thirty years, is putting the finishing touches on a book of his columns, A Doughnut and a Dream, due out around Thanksgiving. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 35
Lunch with a Friend
Wear and Tear
By Cynthia Adams
Superb athlete and field doc to many
a Greensboro runner (and some Olympians) who have pulled a hamstring, Dr. Karl “Bert” Fields arrives at Blu Margarita downtown wearing khakis, black golf shirt and boring, brown lace-ups. He’s just following doctor’s orders — his own — wearing Dr. Scholl’s. At 64 he has undergone four knee surgeries and knows the biomechanics of wear and tear.
Fields has covered roughly 80,000 miles during his running life. Let that sink in a moment: That’s like running from here to L.A. and back more than sixteen times. In 2010, he finished third in the Huntsman World Senior Games. When not running races, Fields directs the wildly successful Sports Medicine
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Fellowship at Cone Health System and is a professor of medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. His Greensboro patient base numbers in the thousands. “I’ve probably treated 20,000 runners in thirty-five years,” he calculates as we sit down in the Blu Margarita, a short stroll — or jog — from his office. Once upon a time, the architecturally striking environs housed Ganache, known for its pastries. Now it’s the perfect place for pre-run carb-loading on burritos, enchiladas and tacos. Testimonies about Fields’ restorative powers are legion among runners. Beth Deloria has sought Fields’ advice for seven years. “He is unusual in his understanding of athletes.” Simply put, “He gets it.” She developed a paralysis (with the unfortunate name of foot drop) after spinal trauma and surgery, but continues running with the aid of a specialized brace. Deloria credits Fields with helping her recover from various setbacks to power through a grueling schedule of forty-eight half-marathons in twenty-four months as a spokesperson for the brace manufacturer. “He’s an amazing human. Very in tune to his patients, a great sense of humor — even when delivering bad news.” What particularly impresses her is her doctor’s “incredible optimism as he approaches questions of whether or not someone should continue to do what they love. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Photographs by Hannah Sharpe
The good doctor stops running long enough to load up on delicious carbs at Blu Margarita
Lunch with a Friend
Fields — who became a Yale man thanks to a Kellogg academic scholarship — grew up in, Jenkins, Kentucky, one of Appalachia’s poorest regions. In his youth, as stars faded into morning skies, Fields carried a paper route and dreamed of becoming a high jumper as papers thwacked against stoops. But there was one hurdle even a rugged optimist couldn’t clear — Fields was small. “I couldn’t high-jump more than about four-anda-half feet,” he splutters, looking over the menu, which features creative takes on Mexican and other Hispanic dishes, elegantly prepared and presented — jicama salad with orange segments, for instance, or braised swiss chard with tomatoes and potatoes, or seasonal seafood cocktail — a ceviche of fresh fruit, fish and cilantro. Laughing hard enough that his eyes fill, Fields reflects that though he may not have been that high a jumper, boy, could he run. Only his curious mind proved faster than his feet. With Appalachia as training ground, Fields developed his most formidable strength: a funny bone. He laughs often, easily. His humor is inextricably linked to his healing skills. Fields says he learned this much early on: “One of the most important things a doctor can do is to give hope.” Hope was in shorter supply than stoicism and grit in one of America’s poorest outposts. Jenkins sits squarely within coal mining country. The isolated town, about eight miles square, is named for a mining executive of Consolidation Coal. Its history is written in black dust — Consolidation Coal purchased the lands from the Northern Coal and Coke Company. Jenkins’ current population (2,400) is in decline from its peak in 1940 of 9,428. The per capita income is $11,358. Mining, sawmill work and back-breaking labor were the chief options, with inevitable occupational hazards. Countless injuries prompted the mining company to build a hospital. But in the Fields family, medicine wasn’t a job, but a calling. Fields’ mother became a nurse. His great-grandmother, Rachel Fields, was a Choctaw Indian, a descendent of the Choctaw who settled in Appalachia after “the removal.” Fields’ grandfather, David Maggard Fields, practiced medicine in Cumberland, Kentucky. (The town of 4,000 was originally named Poor Fork.) “My grandfather was totally low-key about medicine,” says Fields. “He worked twelve hours a day when he was 80. But I asked why he worked so hard. What did he think about his job? He would say, ‘You know, this is a right good profession. I really do like helping these people out,’” a lesson Fields took to heart. Some aspects of growing up in an underfunded school system had its advantages. Young athletes in Jenkins trained by running up slate slag hills created by mining. “It was great interval training,” he says sunnily. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 37
Lunch with a Friend
“We didn’t have a track at the high school, so they lay down a 220-yard track with lime dust. When we started training, we would go to the railroad tracks, and run them.” But the steep hills created from mine slag created the ultimate challenge: “In high school I ran twenty-five 600-foot hills for repetitions; we warmed up and cooled down.” Fields also ran after his paper route before going to school. “I was almost always late for home room,” he chortles. Our attentive waitress arrives and Fields takes a break from his favorite dish at Blu Margarita, arroz con pollo — chicken breast, mushrooms, onions and green peppers, topped with cheese sauce. He orders grilled shrimp and steak with bell peppers, flanked by refried beans and rice, of course, for some carb loading. Besides being handy to his practice, Fields likes the restaurant because the food is straightforward, wellprepared and satisfying. As I tuck into a tasty seafood taco, bursting with grilled shrimp and savory sauce, Fields tells me how he wrangled to be the manager of the high school track team — when he was still in the eighth grade. It was 1962, his year of high jumping hopes. “They let me jump a few times, but it was not my sport.” The coach suggested Fields instead join a relay team. “The meet came up, he threw me in the mile race, and I’ve been running the mile since. In the first race, I came in third.” It wasn’t so much a case of Fields falling in love with running. It’s the competition that draws him. At the time, training consisted of playing basketball and running daily. “I got my mile down to 5:30 [five minutes, thirty seconds] when I was in the eighth grade,” he says. Then adds: “The little girl at Ragsdale [Sara Platek] was a lot faster than me. We just jumped in and ran.” The next year, he benefited from training with a new Jenkins coach, one who was a runner himself.
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“I immediately started getting a lot better. By my freshman year I was running 4:49. I kept improving after that.” Ever modest, Fields won’t tell you about how he was named valedictorian at Jenkins High in 1967, but his honors are online, embedded in Jenkins’ historical records. By the end of his senior year, Fields was running flat-out toward his destiny. “Basically, I had high SAT scores. My counselor said, ‘You ought to apply to some good schools.’ I only had the money to apply to one Ivy League school. You had to write an essay to apply to Harvard and I wouldn’t do that. But Princeton was $15 to apply, and Yale was $10, so I applied to Yale — and mailed it to Hartford, Connecticut.” Fields laughs aloud about his goof, saying it is a postal miracle his application somehow ended up in New Haven. “The Yale admission counselor wrote me back. He invited me for an interview. And they gave me a full scholarship.” (Fields, of course, doesn’t mention Yale’s acceptance rate is around 7 percent.) His grades earned him a coveted Kellogg fellowship, funded by the cereal conglomerate. The Kelloggs invited him to their posh Connecticut estate — a Frank Lloyd Wright house — an eye-popping experience. But then, it was all astonishing to the wide-eyed lad from Applalachia. “I was the only kid in my high school that went out of state to college; it was a bit of a different experience,” he says. “The Kellogg family sent me Christmas cards and stayed in touch — very nice people.” At Yale, Fields was a teammate with Frank Shorter. Shorter won Olympic gold in 1972, silver in 1976, and is credited with making marathon running wildly popular. Then Fields entered teaching and coached a girls’ running team. “I thought I would be a teacher, and I did teach school the first year out of college.” After a year spent teaching in Kentucky, Fields entered medical school at the University of Kentucky. (Consider too that he had an undergraduate degree in classical civilization — not pre med — glossing over how difficult it must have been to leap from liberal arts into medical school.) Fields ran throughout medical training.
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September 2014
O.Henry 39
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Lunch with a Friend
“We had a great racing team through med school,” he remembers, gathering select runners from teams at Notre Dame, Amherst and Yale, and an NCAA running champion. “We would go to every turkey trot and win turkey after turkey at races. We would literally win first to fourth places. We’d do one or two on a Thursday, another on a Friday, and another on Saturday.” The team would donate the windfall of Thanksgiving turkeys to orphanages or charities. He also ran full tilt toward his life, choosing the path less taken. After completing his medical degree, Fields did a residency in Charlotte. From there, he spent a year in St. Croix as the district health officer, though he originally intended to work as a physician. “That wasn’t planned, but the officer had died.” The Virgin Islands may conjure images of barefoot idylls, but the post called for guts and offered little glory. Medical resources were scarce. “It was like a third world country,” Fields says. “It was hard to get things done; equipment would break down, and it ran more like a bureaucracy than a hospital.” But on review, it was useful. “To be honest, it was great preparation, because in St. Croix, I had to do everything myself.” At the age of 30, Fields had a world of options opening. He chose Appalachia. “I always wanted to try rural practice, so while in St. Croix, I was in communication with small towns. The N.C. office of rural health services said, ‘We have the place you need to go. All the doctors have left, and if you start there you can be busy from Day One.’” He was dispatched to Andrews, North Carolina, a place that unashamedly advertises itself as “two hundred miles from anywhere.” With 22 percent of the population below the poverty level, Andrews lacked adequate health care — much like Jenkins. “Sure enough, our first day of practice, we had forty-two patients.” He grins, admitting he got more than he had bargained for. His greatest passions, running and medicine, were on trajectory to merge. In Andrews, Fields laced up his running shoes and hit the hills. “We started a running group called CODGERS: Crack of Dawn Group of Elite Runners; we’d get up and meet at 6 a.m. before rounds at the hospital. It was a wonderful place to train because of mountains everywhere.” Fields delivered babies, just like his grandfather, and spent long hours putting on casts and assisting the surgeon at the local hospital. But his private practice in remote Andrews proved limiting: “I realized I enjoyed teaching.” An opportunity to go to UNC-Chapel Hill meant he could combine seeing patients and academics. Meantime, Fields competed in forty to fifty events annually over the next twenty years. Years spent criss-crossing the nation for races made him known best as a “running doctor.” As both professional and casual runners sought his opinion, Fields segued into sports medicine while still competing nationally and internationally at the senior level. He hit his stride on both fronts. He finished an 8K in Kentucky, running sub five-minute mile on average. At the age of 47, Fields went to Norway and ran a 5K in 16:37. He was in it to win it. He liked competition, he says, more than the experience of running. While vacationing on Prince Edward Island twenty years ago, Fields was in training for the world master’s mile championship. He was invited to join master runners from the Maritime Province in a 15K race. “It was about 86 degrees, which was horrific for the Canadians.” But Fields was accustomed to heat. “After three miles, I realized I was ahead of everyone, and won well ahead of everyone. I actually ran 5:20 miles [on average].” To his amazement, Fields found himself being led into town along with Miss Northumberland, who was making an appearance at a festival. He smiles broadly. What most runners dream of is an impressive medal after a win — this must have flickered through Fields’ mind as he emerged in town alongside Miss Northumberland.
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September 2014
O.Henry 41
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Lunch with a Friend “No,” he says thoughtfully. “No medal. I got a tiny little maple leaf, hand carved.” He explodes with laughter. “I don’t know where it is anymore, but they made a lot of it.” In the years since his sports medicine focus coalesced, Fields has forged a near-legendary reputation as running expert. If you search his name online, he is cited by patients and medical students as an exemplar runners’ doctor. He frequently volunteers at race events and has been known to watch patient/runners come across the finish line and check them out afterward. (I know firsthand. He helped me recover from a torn meniscus. Later, I was one of those runners wearing a massive leg brace, crossing the finish line at a 5K. And Fields was there, working the first-aid tent and smiling broadly as I finished. He has done the same for untold numbers.) Deloria says, “There’s a point when what you want to do is no longer possible — but he is willing to try everything if a patient is determined to keep going.” As the plates are cleared, Fields muses. “I’ve been in practice since 1979; so that’s thirty-five years. And I currently see right now 700 patients a year, maybe a thousand.” He concentrates. “Probably a thousand. There are a lot of runners. A lot of getting better is having hope they can get better. If you give up on people they will give up on themselves.” Fields himself was sidelined for weeks this year. And antsy. Running is now over for him, but he still plays tennis. And while recuperating, even tennis was out. But there was something else playing on his mind — a lost chord. So he took guitar lessons in earnest. “I missed Woodstock,” he mentions, “but I was in Atlanta for the Pop Festival and saw Joplin.” The festival began on June 5, 1969; Woodstock was later that year in August. Janis Joplin played the Pop Festival, along with Blood Sweat &Tears, Chicago, Joe Cocker, Dave Brubeck, Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin. Joplin’s set list included the song “As Good as You’ve Been to This World.” She belted out the first lines, “Live your loving life, Live it all the best you can,” and Fields was right there, grooving to the words. Did that somehow meld into Fields’ psyche on that sweltering day? At the Blu Margarita a tune tinkles — something unfamiliar. Fields walks away with a younger man’s step despite the sensible brown shoes. Runners are waiting over on Church Street. Dr. Bert Fields has hope enough to dispense. OH
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Although you’ll have to drag it out of Cynthia Adams, O.Henry’s contributing editor, she once outran a juvenile bear in Fisher Park.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
O.Henry 43
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Best Reader Memoirs 2014
Training Wheels By Dianne Hayter
I
turned 6 August 4, 1959, the elder child of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. I celebrated that birthday at my paternal grandmother’s farm in LaGrange, Georgia. In less than a month I would be starting elementary school and would be riding to school on my bicycle, which, as of this auspicious birthday, would no longer be encumbered by training wheels. I had a grand vision of what lay around every corner and was as eager for the freedom of a free-moving bicycle as I was the occasion of first grade. Grandma never liked Mother. She thought she was too uppity, dissatisfied as Mrs. Minister and blighted because she came from divorced parents. Mother returned the dislike, considering Grandma, with her short cropped hair, missing teeth, old-school Presbyterian staunchness and extroverted pillar-of-the-community status, a country bumpkin. Between these two women my father endeavored to straddle the middle, but never quite succeeded in performing as the dutiful son or the devoted husband. The plan was that I would take my cyclic maiden voyage without training wheels down Grandma’s driveway, cut gently around the curve that accommodated a 200-year-old oak tree, ride the one-quarter mile to turn around where the driveway met Big Springs Road and return. Late afternoon, August heat sizzling and scorching, Grandma, my parents and I assembled at the top of the driveway. My father, inept as a mechanic, made a glorious ceremony of removing the training wheels, managing in the effort to get grease on his hands, which he wiped on his old shorts, although Grandma offered him her handkerchief. I was so excited I thought I would burst. I had been watching the boys in my neighborhood ride, heads high and forward, the wind ruffling their hair like fingers, their teeth bared in ecstatic grimaces, and I was confident I could do it as well — better! — than they could. “It’s too much for her,” Mother said, crossing her arms across her breasts. “She’s not ready.” “Nonsense,” said Grandma. “She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.” My father held my bicycle at arm’s length, pretending to inspect it. He cleared his throat ceremoniously and nervously licked his lips. “You know how easily she bruises,” Mother continued to preach. “All we need to completely ruin this vacation is for her to break an arm.” “Now, we already discussed it,” my father joined the fray. I stood below the three of them, looking up at their red sweaty faces, my confidence undaunted. “I’ll run alongside, holdin’ the cycle, till she’s comfortable with me lettin’ go,” my father said. “Why does every vacation have to be the same?” Mother demanded. “Isn’t it enough that we come to this hot-as-Hades, hole-in-the-road farm
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September 2014
every year, without fail, like confused homing pigeons? All that’s missing are piles of poop, and I guess we got that, too, from the cows in the pasture.” She cast a baleful look over her shoulder and shuddered. “This here’s my home,” Grandma took the bait. “I’ll thank ya to have respect . . .” “Enough!” my father interrupted in his pulpit voice. “I’ll say when it’s enough,” Mother growled. For emphasis she seized my bicycle from my father and handed it to me. “Put it up. We’ll do this another time.” “Hold on there,” said my father, riled and purple-faced. “Lord have mercy,” Grandma intoned, throwing her hands into the air, as though she might abandon the situation, but entrenching her feet, her ample frame implacable. I don’t remember slinging my leg over the bicycle, mounting myself on its seat, and, with one foot on the right pedal, the left foot on the ground, balancing as I shoved off into the driveway. I don’t remember thinking that I would get into trouble or that I would fall and break my arm. I was on a thrilling mission. Resolution focused me. Today was the day, now was the moment. They did not even know I was gone until I got to the driveway’s curve and then, over the bickering, I heard Grandma’s whoop. “Whoo-ee!” she hollered. “Look at ’er go!” I rode like my life depended on it, for in a way it did. I kept to the plan, turning around at Big Springs Road and returning full speed to the starting place. I knew they were proud of me, and for the first time all three of them smiled. It would never happen again, but at 6 I did not think to trifle with it. I had taken a gulp of empowerment, and it was better than a hundred blue Popsicles, ice-cold watermelon or homemade ice cream. “Way to go, kiddo!” my father said as he fluffed my short pixie haircut. “Are you all right? Nothing broken?” asked my mother, smiling in spite of herself. Grandma hugged little me in her mother-bear body, but I pulled away, eager to do it again, which is how I spent the remainder of the day, gunning up and down her driveway until, amid the golden shadows of sunset, she called me for the final time to come inside. Triumph is being 6 and riding a bicycle without training wheels. What transforms triumph into confidence is doing it in spite of something. I did not know it that day, but I know it now: Life’s most poignant lessons are best learned young. Learning them under duress inspires them to stick. Dianne Hayter is a Greensboro interior designer and freelance writer whose website, www.walkingautumn.com, features her first book and a blog for people and their pets.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
O.Henry 45
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September 2014
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Birdwatch
Red-Headed Woodpeckers My favorite. And maybe yours, too
By Susan Campbell
Photograph by debra regula
As people learn
that I am a bird lover, they frequently ask, “So, what is your favorite bird?” I have to admit that red-headed woodpeckers have a special place in my heart. They are easily one of the most striking birds on the planet. In fact, they have been known as “shirttail” or “half-a-shirt” birds, as well as “flying checkerboards.” With an extensive patch of white flight feathers in the middle of each wing, their white “flash” always catches my eye as they whiz by. Then there’s that distinctive adult red head for which they are named. All of the woodpeckers found in the Piedmont (the males, at least) have at least some red on their heads. Unlike most of our familiar woodpeckers that are “ladderbacked,” a red-headed’s back is solid black, with the chest and belly white. Not surprisingly, the bill is chisel-shaped, sharply pointed and blue-gray in color. For many bird lovers, the red-headed woodpecker is the so-called spark bird, the species that initiates their interest in bird watching. That includes the famous ornithologist Alexander Wilson back in the late 1700s. Redheadeds are, without a doubt, very noticeable and handsome birds and the only woodpecker species that breeds in our midst and then migrates to states farther south for the winter months. If the acorn crop is especially good in our area, some birds hang around into the fall. They are also readily
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
attracted to feeders, especially suet. As luck would have it, an individual found my suet mix here in Whispering Pines for the very first time this summer! This species is unique among our woodpeckers given that males and females are identical. Although you’re more liked to hear a male red-headed woodpecker making its raspy, repeated “tchur” sound, the female will use a variety of chirps, rattles and cackles to communicate with her family. Male, female and their offspring will stay together until late winter/early spring of the following year so vocalization is very important for family bonding. As with all woodpeckers, red-headeds rely upon cavities, mainly in dead trees, for roosting and nesting. Females produce one and sometimes two clutches of three to ten white eggs. Hatching occurs after about two weeks. And, like many cavity nesting birds, the male shares incubation duties and even develops a brood patch, although it is not quite as noticeable as the female’s. The young will remain in the cavity for three to four weeks, being fed large insects and fruits, as well as seeds and sometimes other birds’ eggs or even nestlings. Unfortunately red-headed woodpeckers have experienced significant population declines as both their food sources and large wooded tracts have been lost to development in the eastern United States. They also depend upon abundant seed- and/or nut-producing trees, such as oaks, as well as habitat with a variety and abundance of insects. And to adequately provision their families, they require wooded areas at least a half-mile or more in size with lots of larger dead or dying trees to house their nesting cavities. Competition from other cavity dwellers and habitat alteration has affected populations across their range, including here in the Triad area. So if your neighborhood is home to this beautiful bird, consider leaving a snag or two uncut on your property. Furthermore, forego any broad scale pesticide applications. The red-headed woodpeckers will thank you! OH Susan Campbell collects wildlife sightings and photos at susan@ncaves.com or (910) 949-3207. September 2014
O.Henry 47
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Street Level
Odd Fellows
At the Buena Vista Lodge of Greensboro’s second oldest civic club, numbers dwindle but the good work goes on
By Jim Schlosser
For years the man in the towering sky-
scraper had asked himself as he looked out his window, “What is that building down there?” The one with the strange name, Odd Fellows Lodge. He wasn’t the only curious one.
Others in downtown Greensboro have passed the building for years wondering what went on inside. They never saw comings and goings. Four or five decades ago, no one would have wondered about the identity of the Odd Fellows. The Buena Vista Lodge No. 21 of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows was recognized for its civic good deeds and large membership. The local Odd Fellows still do good works, but behind the scenes. “I hear people say, ‘I didn’t even know the Odd Fellows were still operating,’” says Cynthia Scott, who despite her gender is very much an Odd Fellow. She holds the The Art & Soul of Greensboro
lodge’s highest position, Grand Noble, the first woman to do so. Buena Vista Lodge stands membership-poor these days, but financially rich from a windfall that fell its way more than forty years ago. Of the city’s fraternal and civic organizations, Buena Vista, founded in 1849, ranks second in longevity. Only the local Masons, started in 1822, are older. The Elks (1900), Knights of Columbus (1904), Rotary and Greensboro Women’s Club (both 1909), the Moose (1918), Kiwanis (1919), Civitans (1921), Lions (1922), Junior League (1926), the Exchange (1934) and Jaycees (1936) are babes compared to the Odd Fellows. As late as the 1960s, say veteran lodge members, Odd Fellows totaled 600 in Greensboro. Today, membership is about 125, not all of them active. Moreover, there may have been as many as three other Odd Fellow lodges in Greensboro 100 years ago. The 1914 City Directory lists two others in addition to Buena Vista. One was on South Elm Street across the railroad tracks, and the other was on East Market Street. The latter was for black Odd Fellows during an era of segregation. Only the Buena Vista Lodge survives today. Fritz Apple, the lodge’s publicity chairman, says, “We are the best organization in Greensboro that no one knows about.” Old age has made the Odd Fellows less robust. “I’m going to be 78 in September. I’m not considered in September 2014
O.Henry 49
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50 O.Henry
September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
the old crowd. We have so many older members,” Apple says, adding that one member is nearing 100, but still does his best to make meetings. Fewer than ten members are under 30. “We need to attract new members who will take our place when we are gone,” Scott says. “We want to get the word out that we are still here. Toward that goal, the lodge opened its doors to the public in Greensboro for a day in May to celebrate its 165th birthday. One visitor was the man who had looked at the lodge all those years from the skyscraper, the Wells Fargo Building across the street. The man said he just had to find out what the Odd Fellows are all about. Apple feared outsiders wouldn’t show up for the party, but to his surprise more than a hundred people came by to enjoy cake, receive a goody bag, register for prizes and tour the lodge. About a half dozen or so promised they would think about becoming Odd Fellows. One, Rob Mitchell, who looked to be in his 30s, explained to Apple the difficulty he was having making up his mind. Apple has heard similar stories in recent years from others. “I’m a Mason. I’m a Scout leader. I have two small kids. I have to be careful with my time,” Mitchell said. One wonders if time hasn’t passed the Odd Fellows and other local fraternal and civic organizations. Many have experienced membership declines. Younger people, Apple says, don’t want to commit what it takes for lodge and club activities. Years ago, businesses encouraged employees to join civic-minded clubs. Some gave time off for club work. That’s changed. Businesses demand more production from employees. And, Apple says, younger people today have many options for spending their meager free time, such as taking the family to a Greensboro Grasshoppers game played two blocks from the Odd Fellows Lodge. The Odd Fellows Lodge might be downtown’s most underutilized building. It features what the Odd Fellows call a “living room” with cushy
Street Level
brown sofas and a big screen TV; a game room with pool tables and another big screen TV; a large room where members gather for a monthly dinner; a spacious kitchen; and the majestic, high-ceiling meeting room that reminds an outsider of the House of Commons in England, the nation where Odd Fellows trace their roots back to the 17th century. There, a group of craftsmen began doing charity work. Such philanthropic efforts were so unusual at the time that the public viewed the craftsmen as “odd.” The workers decided to call themselves Odd Fellows. That’s one of several theories about the origin of the name. In the 1960s, when a gay bar operated not far from Odd Fellows Lodge, a few members suggested a name change might be in order. It would be considered homophobic thinking today, but those members worried people might confuse “odd” with gay. The lodge stuck to its name. In the lodge meeting room, members sit behind locked doors twice a month. Grand Noble Scout occupies a high throne-like chair at one end; the vice Grand Noble has a similar seat at the opposite end. On each side, two slightly smaller thrones stand reserved for two other high officers. Regular members occupy theater seats and cushioned benches along the walls. A Bible is open on a table in the center of the long room. The only requirement for Odd Fellows membership is a belief in a “Supreme Being.” A latearriving member must ring a bell outside the room. An officer called “the warden” peeks out the door. If the tardy member can utter the password, entry is granted. “If I’m late I usually turn around and go home because I’m always forgetting the password,” says Apple, who is retired from the old Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. (now Lincoln Financial). The Odd Fellows movement came to America in 1819, with the first lodge organized in a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland. North Carolina’s first was in Wilmington in 1842 followed by Buena Vista seven years later. The location of Buena Vista’s first meeting place has been lost to history. By
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September 2014
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Street Level
the Civil War it was meeting in a building at the northeast corner of West Market and North Greene streets. The structure gradually grew to a halfblock in length and three stories high fronting Market. The Odd Fellows occupied the top floors, with retailers below paying rent to the lodge. The lodge also owned several buildings leased to businesses around the corner on North Greene. Odd Fellows who worked downtown — and many did in those days — dropped by the lodge at lunch and at quitting time to shoot pool or play cards. Rarely do members do that anymore, despite the presence of a spacious game room in the lodge hall. Even with the drop in membership, the Odd Fellows haven’t curtailed charitable and civic work. They donate money to help the disabled and help fund the Arthritis Foundation. They provide scholarship help to deserving college students. They sponsor fundraising dinners for the Salvation Army, Urban Ministry and other groups. They send two high school students each year to the United Nations, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., for ten days. Its youth baseball team dates to 1951, the year Little League began in Greensboro. Buena Vista Lodge can afford these actions thanks to wise business dealings of local Odd Fellows of yesteryear. In 1948, the lodge reported assets of $200,000. In the the early 1970s, the lodge sold, for what Fritz Apple says was a hefty sum, its Market and Greene street buildings to its neighbor, Jefferson Standard Life. The company needed the Odd Fellows property for parking and later, in 1990, for a new 21-story building that adjoins the old Jefferson Standard Building. Buena Vista built its present lodge hall in 1973. A recent renovation brought improvements and added amenities, including five big-screen TVs, part of the strategy to attract younger members with families. The familyfriendly nature of the lodge includes a prohibition against gambling and
alcohol. Forget the old image of fraternal organizations with members who sat in smoky rooms gambling at cards while belting back bourbon. At one time in Europe, the Odd Fellows had mysterious ways and enough secrecy to cause some governments to persecute members. While rituals remain, Odd Fellows are solidly mainstream. If they weren’t, the United States government wouldn’t allow the national Odd Fellows the honor of being the only fraternal organization allowed to annually place a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt, an Odd Fellow himself, granted the privilege in 1934. Among the remaining secrecy of the Odd Fellows is the initiation of new members, a ceremony that hasn’t occurred as much as the lodge would like in recent times. The induction is done behind locked doors in the lodge meeting room. The top officers wear elegant robes. The inductee apparently wears goggle-like blinders. The reason is a secret. Two sets of blinders hang from pegs outside the meeting room next to colorful lanyards members wear during initiations and meetings. The lanyards include metal tags with the Odd Fellows triple link “F, L, T” logo, for Friendship, Love and Truth. For years, as the name implies, only men could join the Odd Fellows. A separate organization existed for women, the Rebekahs, founded in 1851 and named for the Biblical figure who was the wife of Isaac. The Rebekahs remain part of the Odd Fellows organization, with about thirty-five members locally. Here’s where it gets confusing: Rebekahs also can be Odd Fellows and vice versa. Cynthia Scott is both. She started as an Odd Fellow and became a Rebekah later. “Last year our Odd Fellow of the Year was a woman,” Fritz Apple says, with his ever -present chuckle. “The Rebekah of the Year was a man.” That’s odd, but what would you expect from such an organization. OH Jim Schlosser, O.Henry’s man of the year, can be reached at jim@ohenrymag.com.
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52 O.Henry
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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54 O.Henry
September 2014
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Life of Jane
Lost in the Jungle At an eco-lodge in the Amazon, Moises was the man
By Jane Borden
Illustration by Meridith Martens
“Tah-rahn-TOO-la,” he said,
pointing his flashlight at a section of tree just above our heads, barely pausing his beam on the furry ur-creature before continuing into the dank Amazonian growth. No big deal: only a tarantula, the poster child for terror, whose image has waked humans from slumber for millennia, and which, no longer illuminated by your light, could at the moment be moving toward me. Moises was unconcerned. “BOOL-frog,” he said, now fastening his beam on an amphibian the size of a soccer ball, sitting inches from my foot. During the three days my new husband and I spent at an eco-lodge in the Amazonian jungle of eastern Peru, Moises was our guide: five-foot-five, slight but strong, few words, intimidating stare. His previous career was in military
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
training. He taught Peruvian soldiers how to survive in the jungle. We never saw him without a bandanna around his head and a machete on his hip. We never saw him coming. Sitting with other guests for a lively communal breakfast or lunch, laughing and sharing stories, I’d feel a quick stillness, a thickening of air and think: He is here; it is time. Then, I’d look up from my fish and potatoes to see him there, hands clasped across his belly and staring beyond us. “We go now.” No one ever said, “Just a minute,” in reply. Nathan and I weren’t alone with him on the jungle hike that night. We shared all of our excursions with a nerdy, mild and skittish couple from Canada, who, in spite of being in medical school where they presumably dissected cadavers, shrank into their boots at every rustle in the leaves. They walked ahead of us, as close to Moises as possible, peering erratically here and there, bumping into one another again and again. Nathan and I paused once or twice in silent laughter at the live-action Scooby Doo episode before us. But Moises never mocked them. He saved that for me. Moises is a man of few words and had likely grown tired of my endless questions. “What’s this? What’s that? What’s it do? Why? What’s it eat? What eats it? Whywhywhywhywhy?” That night, hiking through the jungle, I spotted a curious creature, a large spider who’d spun a protective September 2014
O.Henry 55
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56 O.Henry
September 2014
Life of Jane web above him, across the opening of a hole in the ground, which struck me as odd, so I paused, shined my light on it, and asked, “What’s that?” Moises stopped, looked at the illuminated spot, and said, “Hole.” Then, he turned and continued on, as if he’d answered the question. I don’t think he even giggled. It’s hard to be sure on account of the muffling symphony of insects and of Nathan, Shaggy and Scooby laughing, but still, I’m pretty sure we witnessed deadpan in its purest form. That morning, during a day hike, Moises demonstrated a hunting technique. He banged a bulbous ant colony that hung from a tree in order to call the insects. He placed both hands on the structure, allowing the frenzied ants to crawl into and completely cover his hands and forearms. Then he pulled away and rubbed his hands up and down his arms, briskly killing them, and spreading their insides into his skin like lotion, while explaining that the action neutralized his scent, thereby allowing him to sneak up on larger animals, potentially while they enjoyed fish and potatoes. I was impressed. So when he mocked my question about the hole, I bit my typically brassy tongue lest he reward the insolence by turning himself into a tree and abandoning us in the jungle forever. During our stay, Moises pointed out more than a hundred species. From the bow of a motor boat, the seat of a canoe or the loam of the jungle soil, he quietly gazed, looking for what we never knew, until the moment he whispered, “CAN-mer-ah,” a call to prep our Nikons, and pointed at the hawk, iguana, parrot, sloth, monkey, dolphin he’d found. We never saw anything alone. He said he looked two or three layers deep into the jungle instead of just one. He found bats camouflaged onto the bark of the tree on which they slept. I stared for minutes before the bats appeared to me, like the scene in a magic-eye picture. He lured night monkeys from their daytime slumber in tree hollows, their big eyes, poorly suited for daylight, staring at us without seeing. He gunned the engine just before turning down a tributary so that the hundreds of white egrets resting there took flight in a cascading formation, filling the path before us as we approached. We never beat Moises at his own game, but we did see him lose his cool, which may be the rarest sight in the Amazon. We’d tied our motorboat to a mangrove in the river, boarded a canoe and were hacking our way through the marsh, via machete, when he plunged his oar into the river and struck an electric eel, which whipped its tail out of the water, and smacked Moises in the forearm, shocking him both literally and figuratively. He yelped, contorted his face and flailed against the water and air before collecting himself and pretending it hadn’t happened. “What was that?” I asked. He avoided eye contact, used his hand and forearm to make the gesture of a swimming snake, and continued rowing as if he hadn’t behaved like a 7-year-old in a slap fight. Too late, Moises; I got your number. After that, he overcompensated by spearing several fish from the canoe, and then showing them off to us, as if to say, Look kids — I still got it. As it turns out, we’d been lost almost the entire time we were in the mangrove marsh, which we deduced when the eco-lodge’s staff explained that the other guests had already eaten dinner. So it appears as if he was still teaching folks to survive in the jungle. Although, to be fair, it’s difficult to die in such fecundity. To get to the lodge, we flew in and out of Iquitos, the largest city in the world approachable only by air or river. Decades ago, industrialists did try to build a road to Iquitos, but eventually gave up because every morning workers arrived to find that the jungle they’d cut down had grown back overnight. OH Greensboro native Jane Borden, author of the highly-acclaimed I Totally Meant To Do That, lives in L.A., but can be found at JaneBorden.com or twitter.com/JaneBorden The Art & Soul of Greensboro
ALIGHT AT TYLER WHITE ANNUAL FUNDRAISING EVENT Thursday, September 25th • 5:30 - 8:30 p.m. Tyler White O’Brien Gallery • 307 State Street
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FOLLOWING THREADS at Greenhill Investigation of the drawn and stitched line in figurative and abstract works
LINE, TOUCH, TRACE at the North Carolina Museum of Art The exploration of drawing in its intimate relationship to thought processes
Matthew Micca, The Return 5, 2010, ball point pen, colored pencil and white charcoal on paper, 16 x 16 inches, Collection of Rebekah Kates Š 2010 Matthew Micca
Leigh Suggs, Untitled, 2012, ink on handmade abaca, 11 x 8.5 inches Š 2012 Leigh Suggs
OR
HAND-DRAWN E
W The North Carolina Museum of Art and Greenhill emphasize drawing in two fall exhibitions. Take a trip east or west on Interstate 40 to see Following Threads at Greenhill and Line, Touch, Trace at the North Carolina Museum of Art
58
200 North Davie Street Greensboro, NC O.Henry September 2014 greenhillnc.org
2110 Blue Ridge Road Raleigh, NC n c a r t m u s e uThe m Art . o r&gSoul of Greensboro
After Labor Day
September 2014
One by one along the pond Cottages take on that look Of grandchildren gone. The meadow is empty, Where last week Lawn chairs lounged cordially Around the grill. Quiet, cobalt-blue days Wait for the town truck, The man with the wrench, To turn the season’s valve, Then drive off, Dust caught in the late afternoon light, Past the cellar hole, Other lives vanished from the pond. — Robert Demaree
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Wild at Heart Is there truly any place wild left in Guilford County? As our man on the ground discovered, nature is all around us — and thriving By David Claude Bailey Photographs by Sam Froelich and Hannah Sharpe
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Moni Bates, Ken Bridle
I
crave wilderness and, over the years, have learned that it has amazing restorative powers. When I’m wound tight with the complexities of work and home, I seek the deep woods. Within minutes of hearing the breeze teasing the uppermost branches and being surrounded by lush boughs, I feel the tension leaving my body, drawn from me by the fullness of the all-encompassing emptiness that surrounds me. Soon, I find that peace that passeth all understanding. So when O.Henry’s editor Jim Dodson suggested one snowy day last winter that someone find — and write about — the wildest place in Guilford County, I jumped at the assignment, cocksure that I could practically pen the story off the top of my head. I already had a host of candidates, assembled over decades of hiking — and, yes, occasional trespassing. The deep woods at Guilford Courthouse National Park. Any number of stretches along Greensboro’s fifty miles of Watershed Trails — the Palmetto Trail, West House, Laurel Bluff. Then there’s Haw River State Park, where a sidepath-more-than-a trail follows the river (maybe out of the park?) to some dramatic bluffs overlooking the Haw. But I decide I ought to start by defining the world “wild,” so I seek out two scientists, Ken Bridle, stewardship director of the Piedmont Land Conservancy, and Moni Bates, an independent field botanist who consults for the U.S. Forest Service and N.C. Zoo. Standing ankle deep in marshland at the corner of Witty and Lake Brandt roads, we’re watching “heron chicks, tall and goofy looking, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Max Carter
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sticking their heads up out of their nests like in a Dr. Seuss book,” as Bridle so vividly describes them. I ask the long-striding and intense ecologist for a definition of wild. “Wild is where people aren’t,” he says, which is not a particularly scientific take. Yes, government and private groups like the Land Conservancy have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on scientific surveys in an effort to improve water quality and to identify and save those few remaining wild areas left in the Piedmont. Large-scale surveys look at things like the loss of native species, evidence of pollutants, invasion by exotic plants from distant shores and water quality. Specific site surveys document rare plants like Schweinitz sunflowers and small-anthered bittercress. But even if someone were inclined to analyze the data and crunch all the numbers, it would be tough to quantify the wildest place in the county. Bridle, however, has concluded, “The only place you have any natural stuff left in this county is where there’s a slope too steep to do anything on — or ground that is too wet to do much with.” He says people are constantly telling him about the virgin trees on grandpa’s farm: “Well, they’re not virgin. We’ve cut the forest three, maybe four times by now in this area.” Which is why we’re on the banks of Mears Fork Creek, surrounded by stately sycamores and shaggy river birches on a conservation easement negotiated by the Piedmont Land Conservancy. Across Lake Brandt Road is an adjoining easement. “We have five easements along the Mears Fork corridor that protect a lot of urban wetlands like these,” he says. In all, the 25-year-old conservancy has 118 easements in a nine-county area surrounding Greensboro, protecting 23,000 acres of upland and wetlands. About two miles southeast in what my daddy would have called the middle of nowhere, Bates’ china-blue eyes sparkle as a red-headed woodpecker wings its way from tree to tree above a series of stepped beaver dams. Bridle and Bates are standing on a hillside overlooking what a colony of beavers has wrought. Beavers, she tells me, are a keystone species. When these so-called habitat engineers fell trees and build dams, innumerable species spring up behind them — salamanders, frogs, ducks, wading birds and otters, for instance, creating a richer biodiversity. In this semipermanent impoundment, we see mallards paddling around. A Canada goose is nesting. A beaver looks up in surprise. Turtles flop lazily off logs, and a black snake makes himself scarce. “We’re not that far from people,” says the Greensboro-based, bespectabled field botanist, “but far enough from them so wildlife isn’t disturbed. People generally stay out of places like these.” she says. To Bridle and Bates, wild means large, unfragmented areas with a rich diversity of natural communities untrammeled by man and void of invasive, exotic species. “The lack of invasive species is quite noticeable here,” Bates says. “Notice how open the understory is.” No Japanese honeysuckle or multiflora rose or privet. That pretty much means the only areas in Guilford County that quantifiably qualify as wild are swamps. Blame 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, Bridle chirps. The public stays out of swamps in droves, which means that they’re unspoiled by bulldozers, plows, chainsaws, ATVs and chemicals. I frankly love swamps and have canoed extensively in them, from the Amazon to the Lumbee, from the Great Dismal to Benaja Swamp near Haw River State Park. And though these vast and flat marshlands undoubtedly qualify as wilderness, to me, at least, they lack the majesty of an upland forest, where your eyes are inevitably drawn heavenward. There’s something spiritual
about the way that light slants down through the mighty oaks and lush poplars in mature forests like, for instance, Guilford Woods, adjacent to the Guilford College campus. If there’s an expert in Greensboro on spirituality and wilderness, it’s Max Carter, a Guilford College professor of religious studies and director of the Friends Center, the office that helps the college maintain a connection between students and the Religious Society of Friends, aka Quakers. “For millenials at Guilford, the Guilford Woods are a decompression chamber,” says Carter with a smile beaming through his halo of a white beard, making him look a tad beatific. Guilford Woods, now a 240-acre, heavily wooded plot, was once part of New Garden, which the early Quakers first described as “this majestic wilderness.” For many, the woods are anchored by a single tree, a 148-foot-tall tulip poplar that’s become known as the Underground Railroad Tree. It is the second-largest tree in North Carolina. A soil analysis showed that land around it has never been plowed. A dendroecologist from UNCG, Paul Knapp, found that the tree is at least 300 years old and might be 350 years old, which means it would have been a sapling about the time the Quaker sect got its start in Revolutionary England. Students have come to revere the tree and the woods around it, Carter says. He once approached it and found “mother” lettered on the ground in front of it in twigs. We walk down from the steep hillside where the heritage poplar towers above its neighbors near a creek bed. Carter tells me how he has seen, “herds of deer, numerous groundhogs, snakes, foxes, raptors, at least one wild turkey and the reported beaver or two, not to mention the rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, and students!” These woods are, however, not undisturbed by man. On the hillside, a beech tree with a Hobbit root system chonicles who loved whom over the decades. A folding chair sits on one side of the creek, a music stand on the other. The woods are filled with clearings where students build bonfires. “During most Guilford students’ first semester,” Carter says, “they are taken on a tour of the woods to visit the tree and hear stories about the Underground Railraod, including how Vestal Coffin, in collaboration with enslaved Africans, began the southernmost land branch of the system, which stretched from one safe haven to another all the way to free states in the North.” Levi Coffin, Vestal’s cousin, once wrote that “runaway slaves used to frequently conceal themselves in the woods and thickets in the vicinity of New Garden, waiting for opportunities to make their escape to the North.” The woods were also a sanctuary for anti-secessionists who were avoiding being drafted into the Confederate Army. Students might think they’re acting wild, smoking a little pot or engaging in underage drinking, Carter says. “But I tell students that historically the bar for illegal activities in these woods is pretty high. I doubt that yours will measure up.” Aiding a runaway slave, in fact, could lead to imprisonment and confiscation of property. “When I’m here, I feel like I’m walking in history,” Carter says. Which sets Carter off on a discourse on the historical meaning of wild. “There are some deep theological issues involved with what’s wild, and we’re still affected by them because we were settled by the Puritans,” he says. Carter points out that the Puritans saw America as New Zion, a land where they could get a fresh start untainted by the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England. But they didn’t embrace the wilderness in their new home. “They were scared to death by the wild, by the savage, by September 2014
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Greg & Germaine Yahn the chaos,” he says. “Nature was a reminder to them of what we could be if we didn’t have the scripture or laws or divines who interpreted the law and kept us civilized.” By contrast, Carter says, “The Quakers were not afraid of nature because they recognized the light of God in everyone and everything. Quakers believe that God is present in nature and within each of us. Part of what attracts our students to these woods is when they’re here, the world falls off and leaves them with God alone.” Paraphrasing a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, “To be alone in nature and to be silent draws you deep.” “To me, the forest is like one of my outdoor cathedrals,” says Germaine Yahn, a few days later on the other end of the same trail where Bates had shown me the beaver dams. Only we’re surrounded by sycamores with paper-white bark, board-straight tulip poplars and towering oaks. Light slants down through them and lights up a bank of ferns worthy of Jurassic Park. “Woods like this have a church effect,” says Germaine. We’re on a recently opened 3.8-mile stretch of the Bill Craft Trail with her husband, Greg Yahn. The two of them worked two years on the trail with a host of volunteers, many of them from the Friends of the Mountain-to-Sea Trail, aka FMST. The trailhead at Plainfield Road, one mile west of Church Street, will eventually lead all the way to Haw River State Park. “People don’t realize what they have,” says Greg, reaching into his tool apron for a pry bar to keep a beech tree from absorbing one of the plastic blazes that marks the way. Madeleine Carey obviously agrees. She is assistant trails
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director for Greensboro’s department of parks and recreation. “We have fifty miles of unpaved nature trails, plus thirty miles of paved trails.” Greensboro doesn’t have a river running through it, so, as anyone flying into the city can see, it built a winding chain of reservoirs that follow a series of creek beds, resulting in Lake Higgins, Lake Brandt, Lake Jeanette and Lake Townsend. Around these lakes there’s a buffer zone, unlike the developed lakes in, say, Charlotte, where Lake Norman or Lake Wylie are ringed with houses. As a result, Bridle says, “Greensboro has among the best greenway systems of anywhere else I know of in North Carolina.” What’s more, the city has protected the watershed from runoff from development and lawns. And on many stretches of the trail, the woods are, in fact, pretty wild by any definition of the word. “You only have to go a few steps before the sound of the road is gone and the quiet sets in,” says Carey. “You are removed from roads and noise and people’s houses.” But it’s the easy access and how the trails are interconnected that impress hikers like the Yahns, who compare the grandeur along stretches of the Bill Craft Trail to hikes they’ve enjoyed in Zion or Arches national parks, but on a smaller scale. “We’ve walked five minutes and we’re in deep woods,” says Germaine, looking toward the horizon where trees line up like columns stretching into the distance. “This is a sanctuary.” OH O.Henry senior editor David Claude Bailey’s favorite hike is along Havasu Creek.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Where the Wild Things Really Are By Cynthia Adams My South African husband, Don Adams, spent his first three decades in a house where monkeys sometimes pelted interlopers with coconuts plucked off trees in his backyard. And where his Hemingwayesque father once led safaris into what they descriptively call the bush. “When I was 5 years old, we went to see the big five,” lions, the African elephants, Cape buffalo, leopards and rhinos. The father and two sons piled into an ancient beige Peugeot 403 station wagon and motored off to Kruger, South Africa’s largest game preserve, where they economically slept in the car. Now, he is a Latham Park resident, with a home-office window overlooking a very different kind of preserve — urban Greensboro. “I have never seen as many animals as I have seen right here in Greensboro,” he says. With his big-game rep, he’s always the first guy neighbors call if there’s a snake in the yard. He is so accustomed to Africa’s abundant and deadly vipers (like Rinkhals, that spit venom into the victim’s eyes, the African python and the green and black mambas) that Carolina’s corn snakes, black snakes or garden snakes look downright pet-like. Just the other night, he eyeballed an acrobatic raccoon as it inched across a utilities line in his backyard, like a furry aerialist. “And I had watched the same guy barrel out of a downed tree when the Duke Power guys were working in the park a few weeks ago!” Our gutsy terrier was once cornered by a possum in the backyard in the daytime, and the dog did not come out well. On walks, Don and I have admired raptors, especially hawks, circle prey right above us. “I’ve also watched as other birds — crows and even Starlings — will actually gang up on the hawk,” he says. An owl nested in a paper birch tree in our yard until the tree was too rotted to stand. “That owl’s screech could raise the hair on your arms,” Don says. He has seen a group of deer once, too, early morning, as he walked his dogs towards Elm Street. “That meeting stunned me as much as the deer,” he admits. And then there was the early morning along Buffalo Creek when he noticed something odd. Turned out a squadron of beavers had gnawed and felled many of the newly planted trees along the creek banks. “Umpteen beaver dams were built before the city managed to discourage them or dis-locate them.” And as for gnawing things, brown squirrels twice chewed their way into the attic, making for costly and unwelcome guests. And, Don says the sheer number of rabbit and chipmunks in both his yard and the park would surprise only those who don’t attempt to grow a vegetable garden. He has spied box turtles on the path and snapping turtles in the water. Don says an ungainly groundhog often grumpily trundles out of his way. “It lives in the hedges and seems to go between there and a path it has worn to Buffalo Creek.” It may be one he rescued as a small pup from the creek during a raging storm. “The water had come up over its burrow and it sat shivering in shock.” But most incredible of all, Adams recalls the juvenile black bear just a few blocks away in Fisher Park. Or, he asks, was it more incredible when an exotic pet, “A civet, I believe?” escaped into the park and had all runners and walkers worried. The bear was indeed more incredible. I know, because I met it near Victoria and Eugene Street during my Sunday run.
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Bugs The
of Summer
Some of our favorite insects, up close and personal Story and Photographs by Stan Gilliam
Miniature Leaf-Footed Family Coreidae
This specimen is a “nymph” or baby bug, about a quarter-inch long. Unlike beetles and butterflies, a true bug begins life not as a larva, but as a miniature adult, albeit wingless and infertile. It sheds its skin through several “instars,” gradually assuming the size and shape of an adult. Check out this guy’s bold colors, alert eyes, long red antennae and the transparent crystalline fringe around the abdomen. The flanges on the hind legs make this a “leaffooted” bug, one of the many “true bugs” that are useful predators of plant pests. Like little vampires, such tiny bugs can find other small prey to impale on their pointed straw-like mouthparts. Some leaf-footed bugs in the eastern United States can reach almost an inch in length.
NOT a Bee, But a Flower Fly A Scarlet Plantbug at Breakfast Genus Lopidea
There are 125 species of the genus Lopidea in North America. Although quite small and inconspicuous, they are easy to find if you look for them on wildflowers and in vegetable gardens. Harder is assigning a species name. Many of these small, bright red plantbugs were feeding on a large escaped population of iris that thrive in a ditch on my property. This photo shows how “true bugs” feed. Notice the needle-like proboscis piercing the soft and succulent petal for a drink of plant juice. Unlike the predatory leaf-footed bugs, plantbugs suck liquids from the young and tender buds, flowers and fruits of many kinds of plants, often causing major crop damage.
Gymnosoma fuliginosa
Yes, this is a fly, one of a group of about 1,300 North American flies called Tachinids. Like several other flies, its resemblance to a honeybee may provide some protection from predators. Whatever we may think of flies in general, let’s show some love for this one because it keeps down the stinkbug population by parasitizing them and rendering them infertile. In this picture you can see two flat milkywhite shapes just behind the two wings. They are called halteres, and all flies have them, although in many cases they are knobby instead of flat like these. They evolved from the two hind wings and help give balance to fly flight. A little less than half an inch long, this little guy was flitting about rapidly. The thrill of the hunt kicked in, and I shot him while he stopped for a little fast food.
A Sweat Bee from the Emerald City? Family: Halictidae
This is not what we called a “sweat bee” back in my hometown of Kannapolis. However, my insect guidebooks say that the 500 species of Halictidae in North America are attracted to the salty refreshments provided by perspiring people. The metallic green one pictured here prefers nectar and pollen, some of which she takes back to her nest to nurture her young when they hatch. The nest is a subterranean tube, and if you look hard, you might see one in bald spots in your yard or garden. Sometimes many bees and other insects nest side-by-side in such places. One of the pleasures of photographing wasps and bees on flowers is that you needn’t worry about being stung. They are busy feeding themselves and their families and have no interest in you. Chiggers, ticks and mosquitoes, however, are meanwhile busily focused on your various body parts.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Wouldn’t You Name This a White-Crossed Seedbug, Too? Neacoryphus bicrucis Scientists call true bugs Hemiptera, which comes from the Greek “hemi,” meaning half, and “pteron,” meaning wing. That’s because the forewings of some of these bugs appear to be half wings. The best-known representatives of this group are probably stinkbugs and cicadas. This bug was feeding on the dusty miller plants in flowerbeds behind Kathleen Clay Edwards Library. Seedbugs are so-named because they feed on tender green seeds and other soft, moist plant tissues. Like all true bugs, they have sharp hypodermic mouthparts through which they suck liquids. No surprise that some of them are serious garden pests.
A Pair of Weevils Enjoy a Daisy. Odontocorynus salebrosus The mouth of the weevil is at the end of its snout, and it contains tiny jaws. Not only do weevils feed with this proboscis, but the female uses it to drill deep holes in which to lay eggs. The small heads of weevils are almost totally occupied by the snout and big disc- or sphere-shaped eyes. It’s almost as if the antennae were attached as an afterthought, with the middle of the snout tube the only place left for them. Weevils eat pollen and nectar as well as other tender plant tissues. The most famous example is the cotton boll weevil of Southern song and legend — the ruin of many cotton farmers a century or so ago. In this photo the smaller bug is probably a male with something on his mind besides pollen.
Behold the Moonseed Moth Plusiodonta compressipalpis Almost all moths are nocturnal and most are drably marked, so they don’t get as much attention as their cousins the butterflies. However, moth species outnumber butterfly species by more than ten to one. The markings on this specimen remind me of melting fudge ripple ice cream with a little blueberry syrup running through it. You have to look closely to see the crests and tufts of scales along its back and the feather- or comb-like antennae to identify this guy as a male. This moth is named after the primary food source of its caterpillar phase, the moonseed, a vine whose seed resembles a fat crescent moon. Because the caterpillar’s body makes a looping shape as it inches along (having legs near only its front and back end) and appears to be measuring its path, it is sometimes called a geometer. Also a looper, or inchworm.
What a Mustache! Phengodes plumosa
Ever hear of glowworms? This is a male version, which obviously isn’t a true worm and doesn’t glow. (Note the tiny wing covers that look like coattails.) Females, however, do glow and look much more worm-like. So what’s with the mustache? Though often called “feelers,” these antennae are actually “smellers.” Think of these plumes as nostrils turned inside out, and, if you were a male glowworm, you’d definitely want a set. Like many other insects, male glowworms find their mates by sniffing out the chemical pheromones emitted by the females. In this dating game, the female also helps by blinking her tail lights. OH With photos of bugs published on www.bugguide.org and in several books, Stan Gilliam teaches English as a Second Language at GTCC and has exhibited his photos and paintings in a number of galleries, ranging from Greenhill to the Durham Arts Guild.
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Ruminations on Mortality Vowing to “sow the earth wtith diligence and love,” The Collection — a remarkable Glenwood band that’s more like an ever-growing family — is shaking up the music world By Grant Britt • Photographs by Stephanie Berbec
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here’s a didgeridoo in the living room. It’s not doing much of anything at the moment, just leaning against the wall, waiting for someone to come along and unleash its unearthly thrum. But it’s not lonely. It has plenty of company, sharing a corner with a sousaphone, a lute, a couple of guitars, an autoharp, a mini xylophone in a box and a big one with tubes like a pipe organ. They’re all quiet, but that’s about to change momentarily. The door keeps banging open, people piling in until it’s like being inside a clown car. It’s controlled chaos, an orchestra consisting of fourteen members of a local musicians collective calling themselves The Collection packed wall-to-wall into the living room in a modest house on Glenwood Avenue, rehearsing for a nationwide tour. The band put out a seven-song extended play, The Collection EP, two years ago, but it’s their latest, Ars Moriendi, that’s gotten them nationwide notice when NPR chose their “The Gown Of Green” for airplay. The big band sound of the youthful group members, ranging in age from 19–29, mixes classical and Celtic for an upbeat, world music mix, combining African and European influences in a smooth blend that’s invigorating and fresh. Twenty-four-year-old David Wimbish is the band’s director, and it’s his house, shared with wife Mira-Joy and a few other band members. He’s the band’s creator and chief composer. He’s also responsible for recruiting: “We actually just passed out fliers on our street,” he jibes, before cracking up. Composing himself, he gets on with the real backstory. “No, I started playing by myself, recording strings and brass and all this stuff, but it just gets kind of boring playing by yourself,” he says. “I felt like what I was recording by myself — and played live — just didn’t echo, so, over time, you end up bringing people to you who are similar to you in some ways.” Wimbish took a somewhat circuitous route to becoming The Collection’s headmaster. He comes from a musical family that traveled worldwide with an organization that translated the Bible into various languages. Although the family’s home base was Dallas and later Waxhaw near Charlotte, the family lived in Australia for a while and made treks to Indonesia, Spain, France, New Zealand and India. Wimdbish started out studying ethnomusicology at N.C. Central University before transferring to UNCG for business. His idea was that he might want a background in finance in case he started a business like, say, a recording studio: “But I got married, started working, was writing more and trying to teach myself theory,” Wimbish says today. Each semester, his grades got worse, and eventually he realized his heart wasn’t in it: “I wanted to be creating music, not a business plan. I’m a very driven person in many areas, in work and business and
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music and community, but school didn’t allow me to be driven in things I was passionate about.” Wimbish’s next academic adventure was a year of music production classes at Full Sail University, a school in Winter Haven, Florida, that offers degrees for those interested in the entertainment world. But, he says, “Mostly I’m selftaught.” Knowing he needed to know how to score, “I just taught myself over the last few years through necessity.” He has used that scoring knowledge to compose for businesses and short films. “I did some recording for a feature-length film, Just Tom, for a Greensboro guy named Payton Weed, just some films around the area just to try to figure out how . . . to bring into some of these smaller films a more classical string and brass and wood kind of arrangement.” He also did a short film of his own last year, O Crappy Day. “I kind of just fell into doing this, so a lot of it’s been in the last year that I really started working hard on it,” Wimbish says. He was living in Durham and wife Mira was in Asheville when they decided to relocate here. “We had friends, some of whom play in The Collection now, that had moved to Greensboro, and it felt like a good middle point.” The Collection, it seems, lives up to its name by collecting people. “Oh, you play this kind of instrument? Why don’t you come in? OOH! I haven’t thought about that instrument. Let’s write some parts for it and bring that in,” Wimbish says of his recruiting strategy. The group is like a collective, just not quite as compact all the time. “It’s more like a neighborhood,” he says. “It’s real important to be in a family with the people you play with. Musically and conceptually, that’s been on our minds, being in a community with each other, all living in the same area, in the same houses and just trying to do life together and kinda having a big old school sound to some degree.” Three or four of the band members live in his house, and then there’s another house two houses down that several people live in. “There are so many of us I don’t know if there’s any houses big enough in Glenwood for all of us to fit in.” There’s barely enough room in Wimbish’s house for the rehearsal. Members keep trooping in until I count fourteen. “But that’s not all,” trumpeter Steven Berbec says, stepping around players to find a place to honk in. “There’ll be eighteen people playing the show.” That’ll require some work on logistics. “I might have to yell out the count,” Wimbish tells drummer Tim Austin, after informing him he wants him in front on stage, and is not sure Austin can see him from where he’ll be positioned. He also wants to put Meghan Crawford, who is signing on all the band’s songs, where she can be seen. “Give her respect,” Wimbish says. “We don’t want people saying ‘I see hand movement over bows, but I’m not sure what’s going on.’” To combat the chaos, the band has been doing two-a-day rehearsals all week,
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
and it shows. The Collection is tight, the fourteen members hitting their marks perfectly, no unwanted tweets, honks or thumps marring the complicated arrangements. They also may be the politest band ever to share a stage. Band members actually raise their hands to get permission to speak. Nobody’s fighting, and Wimbish is the only one criticizing anybody. When he does, he’s very polite, at one point saying that the whole crew is coming in a bit flat on one tune, the title cut from the band’s opus, The Art of Dying. “Wanna watch that,” he cautions. Raising her hand and waiting to be called on by Wimbish, keyboard player Christina Goss suggests that they run through the practice session with no joking or interruptions, just like at their upcoming gig at the Blind Tiger two days from now. The band got a terrific boost when NPR picked up the video for the band’s first single,” The Gown Of Green” (www.npr.org/event/music/310783241/ the-collection-the-gown-of-green). Like a lot of The Collection’s music, it has a Celtic flavor. “Some of my blood roots are probably Irish cause I’m covered in freckles,” Wimbish confesses. The music he heard while traveling with his parent made the typical bass, drums and guitar bands his American counterparts worshipped seem boring. “I started this thing because I was interested in music from other cultures and instruments from around the world and textures I never heard,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to create in a way that instead of taking a song and saying, ‘What does this song sound like with only bass drums and guitar?’ I’ve wanted to take a song and say, ‘What does this song need? Does it need to have some kind of Irish influence or some kind of Kenyan influence? What does this song need to make it the best it could be?’” And while “Gown” has an upbeat tone, the band vowing to “sow the earth The Art & Soul of Greensboro
with diligence and love,” the theme of the band’s first full length release is a bit darker. Ars Moriendi translates as “The Art of Dying.” “I was writing a song about the death of my grandpa, who died of a brain tumor,” Wimbish says. “Then, a few months before we started recording, a friend of a lot of people in the band who had played in other bands with him committed suicide.” That was the big spark for the album’s concept, causing Wimbish to ditch some of the tunes he was planning and write new ones. He had just completed a Kickstarter campaign for the album when he got even more tragic news. “A couple of hours later, we found out my wife’s dad had died. So throughout this whole process it just seemed like it kept popping up, and the songs became more and more about that.” Once again, “The Art Of Dying” has a Celtic feel, sounding like a blend of U2 and the Chieftans, Wimbish roaring like Bono over a lush arrangement featuring silky strings and a “We Are the World” style vocal chorus interrupted by soul-shaking percussive thumps, Tom Troyer’s didgeridoo thrumming eerily underneath. Despite the grim topic, the overall feel is upbeat, the music uplifting, the big band buoying your spirits as it swells to a crescendo. Wimbish says the message he hopes to pass on is one of hope. “I think through experiencing the deaths of our friends, it’s been easy to see what it’s like to not hope. Whatever that hope may be, I hope that people just walk away feeling like there is some hope in just loving other people, and just living.” OH From his memorabilia-stuffed shack in Greensboro, Grant Britt has shared his views on local and national bands for American Songwriter, No Depression and Blues Music Magazine. September 2014
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Dreams Under Your Feet
H
How Triad Stage’s cleverly - updated adaptation of a Shakespearean classic came together — and ended quite well By Bill Hancock • Photographs by Lynn Donovan
ere’s the situation. I’m in the third floor corridor of dressing rooms at Triad Stage downtown, where actors are changing for opening night of the play All’s Well That Ends Well. They are stepping into costumes, putting on makeup and wigs. And I’ve just caught on that one never bothers professional actors in the final thirty minutes before they take the stage. Never. I am here because of Preston Lane and Rich Whittington, co-founders and the brain trust of Triad Stage. They agreed to let me follow this play — embed myself in it, if you will — from casting calls, through production meetings, rehearsals, all the way to the final bow to the audience. There are fifteen actors and forty or so others who would, over the course of three months, bring All’s Well to life with eighteen performances. I wanted to know how they do it. This, then, is a look at their journey, and in a way, mine too. Wednesday, May 7 Hopefully, your high school English teacher won’t be reading this because, as Preston Lane is warning us, this is Shakespeare’s play, but it will resemble nothing that you’ve been taught. It’s 10 a.m. and Preston, who will direct the play, is giving us his opening thoughts for the first day of rehearsals. We are in a room, two flights up from the main stage, that seems large enough to play full-
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court basketball. Preston sits with his staff and the actors at long folding tables. Beyond are rows of chairs with about twenty of the behind-the-scenes staffers. All introduce themselves and tells what they do. Preston is telling us that All’s Well is not one of the bard’s greatest hits. Think what you will of Shakespeare. Preston is not a huge fan himself. And he can’t resist tweaking the sensitivities of those bedrock loyalists, the ones who do Shakespeare by the book. “People treat him like he’s on a pedestal,” Preston says. “But the genius of Shakespeare is that he was a kind of rough-and-tumble playwright. And when I’ve seen his plays work well, it’s because they are rough and tumble.” But Preston loves this play and is determined to make it lively and likable. So, no men in tights, no flourish of horns to announce the arrival of royalty. Here, Shakespeare’s vanished world of the 17th century is transfigured into the Downton Abbey-like environs of the 1920s. There’s war, trending fashions, encroaching modern times and still enough unrequited young love to weave a delicious plot. And the plot goes like this: In France, young Helena loves Bertram. But he’s nobility, she a commoner. Hers is an unrequited love, until she cures the ailing king and asks in return to marry Bertram. The king agrees. Bertram doesn’t. She’s beneath him. The king forces the wedding. Afterward, Bertram flees to the Tuscan wars without consummating the marriage. He The Art & Soul of Greensboro
leaves her a letter declaring he will truly be her husband only when she gets the ancestral ring from his finger and has a child by him, neither of which he will ever let happen. For Helena, it’s a challenge accepted. The play becomes her journey to accomplish the goal. To further move from the traditional, set designer Robin Vest, on the faculty at Guilford College, has created a blueprint for a twenty-foot-wide circular stage, with a silver sheen to it under the spotlights. For some of the parts, Preston held auditions in New York, casting Kim Wong, 26, as Helena, whose journey we will follow as she tries to win over Bertram, played by fellow New York actor Anthony Michael Martinez, 29. The king of France will be John Herrera, 58, a longtime New York actor and Tony nominee. David Ryan Smith, an on-and-off Broadway actor, will be Bertram’s rascally friend, Parolles. Three local professional actors have been added. Bertram’s mother will be played by Beth Ritson, who teaches theater at Bennett College and has been in more than a half-dozen Triad Stage productions. The king’s close friend, Lafew, is Jeff West, an adjunct assistant professor of theater at UNCG and Elon University; and Cinny Strickland plays the Widow Capilet. She’s a longtime actor at Triad Stage. The remaining eight are Tyler Barnhardt, Alex Cioffi, DeAndre Hicks, Chloe Oliver, Madelynn Poulson, Sibel Turkdamar, Brady Wease and Lee Wilson, all from UNCG’s theater department and part of the THTR 232 program to give student actors summer work. Preston excuses the staff and begins “table work.” Stage manager Emily Mails announces “Act 1, Scene 1,” and the actors, still seated, begin reading through the script, each delivering their lines. It takes two hours. Afterward, there is polite applause. We are thirty-seven days from opening night, June 13. Wednesday, May 14 I am at the scene shop, a warehouse on Holbrook Street, within the shadows of the Greensboro Coliseum. It’s where some of Triad Stage’s unsung heroes work, ones who don’t get standing ovations after the play is done. And right now construction is under way on the circular stage. But I’m taking the stairs to the second-floor costume shop. This week begins costume fittings. I find Cinny Strickland, who plays the Widow Capilet, in a side room trying on a dress. The main room is crowded with sewing machines, a sea of wall-mounted spools of thread, two large cutting tables, mannequins and twenty-one photos posted on a bulletin board, pictures of outfits the cast will wear. “That was some very smart pulling,” Bill Brewer, the costume designer, says of his assistant who found Cinny’s dress. It’s Edwardian-era, cream-gold and sable-brown with delicate lace on the front. By “pulling,” he means they found it downstairs in the warehouse racks. Some costumes will be bought, others handmade by the costume shop, but most will be pulled from the thousands of rack clothes downstairs. Beth Ritson (the Countess) arrives and tries on her floor-length, black mourning dress for the first scene. She lets me see. I can tell she likes it. “There
Preston Lane are thirty-seven roles I’d like to do in this dress,” she says. Sunday, May 18 After four days of table work, the actors have for a week been on their feet in the rehearsal hall, playbooks in hand, going through scenes, determining where they will stand and step. On this early evening, they are in the final, climactic scene of the play, with Bertram declaring his love for Helena and the two on their knees in a poignant kiss. Beth (the Countess) interrupts it with deliberately loud, comedic, over-the-top crying. Everyone laughs. Preston stops the scene, and quickly steps into what he later tells me is his “transatlantic” accent, which is half-American, half-British and heavily exaggerated. “Kiss, kiss,” he says to everyone. “This is lovely, lovely. So many people on stage. It’s like a Shakespeare comedy.” More laughter since, of course, it is a Shakespeare comedy. It would be hard to find a more animated director than Preston. Black curly hair, black glasses. Day’s beard growth sometimes. Sometimes not. He’s funny, stand-up comic funny, rapid-fire one-liners, tossed off with seemingly no effort. And a raconteur, with an endless bag of stories, most about the theater. This guy was born to be in front of an audience.
Set Design
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He can hardly sit still. Roaming the room, moving actors and props around, like knights and rooks on a chess board. And looking for different positions to watch a scene, sitting cross-legged on the floor, lying down on the floor (pretending to fall asleep if a scene is even slightly uninteresting to him). And when he is sitting still, you can look at his face and think he’s ahead of us all, to another problem looming in another scene. One he likely will get to tomorrow. Sunday, May 25 The seventeenth day of rehearsals. Kim Wong (Helena) is knitting, sitting in a chair at one end of the room, legs folded up under her, when she realizes the ongoing scene is just seconds from her anticipated entrance, which she has forgotten. She drops the yarn, darts to the other end of the room, designated as the stage entrance, and starts to walk into the scene. Only, in her rush the top of her strapless dress has slipped down into a major wardrobe malfunction. The room applauds. For once, Preston Lane is almost speechless. No clever comebacks. He merely says, “My word.” After lunch Preston departs, leaving it to Bryan Conger, Triad Stage’s artistic associate who has directed more than half a dozen Triad Stage plays, to help teach the play’s only dance scene. Four of the King’s lords — UNCG students Alex Cioffi, Lee Wilson, DeAndre Hicks and Brady Wease — each take a turn dancing the waltz with Kim. She’s had a decade of heavy dance experience. They haven’t. It’s Bryan’s job to help this scene along. They stop after an hour. There will be more such lessons ahead. We are eighteen days from opening night. Thursday, May 29 For any actor, I’m learning, there are days of doubt. This is one of them. It’s 2 p.m. and Kim Wong (Helena) is scheduled for an hour of work on three major monologues she will say to the audience while alone on stage. “I’m second-guessing myself,” she tells Preston. With no other actors there, Kim sits barefooted and alone in the circle that represents the stage. Preston steps down from his chair, walks into the circle, standing less than five feet from her. “Use the words to get us on your side,” he tells her. “Trust the audience as your closest friend.” He talks specifics to her about the speeches, then says, “Let’s do it again. Let’s rip out your heart. Come on. It’ll be fun.” She laughs. And she nails all three monologues. Meanwhile, John Herrera (the King) sits on a sofa in the hallway, working on his lines. No one else is around. He’s frustrated, tells me he has “hit the wall.” What does that mean, I ask. He’s “flattened out,” he says, “unable to take the part forward. I’m starting to forget my lines. It happens all the time. There’s nothing I can do about it except keep working through it. It’ll come.” And it does. Tuesday, June 3 Loosen your seat belt. Tech Week is a long slow ride — Advice to me in an email from an actor at Triad Stage. It is officially Tech Week, when actors finally try out the specially built circular stage. But it’s much more. In Tech Week, acting is merged with lighting, sound, props and costumes. This is where it all comes together to make the magic. And it is, by all accounts, painfully slow. It’s 2:43 p.m. and we are ready for the first scene of the play. Solo piano music begins. The actors, all wearing dark formal clothes and carrying black umbrellas, come through the double
Costuming
Readings
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Staging
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doors of the stage’s backdrop wall, but before the first line is said, we hear from Emily, the stage manager . . . Hold please. Everyone stops. Stands still. They bring up the lights, then dark again. They try the scene again. And again. It will be a day, and a night, of endless stop-starts like this, most scenes running only a minute or two before we hear . . . Hold please. The lighting and sound directors have to make the stars align for every scene, which takes time. It goes on until 10:30 p.m. And for four more days beyond. Friday, June 6 Nick Rutz and I are climbing the stairs to “The Three Cat,” which is the third catwalk, the one that hovers about twenty feet directly over center stage. Nick, who is 25, is Triad Stage’s technical director. He’s showing me a conveyor belt he built to drop artificial leaves onto the stage in the first part of the show and fake flower petals at show’s end. His crew of seven full-time and several part-time people also built Robin Vest’s circular stage. From the bottom up it is steel, with a plywood flooring and Masonite on top of that. To give it its silvery look they used aluminum foil that was antiqued. It weighs at least a thousand pounds and was constructed in sections, so it could be dismantled and moved from the warehouse to the theater. Construction took about two weeks. Six days and counting. Sunday, June 8 Tonight is the first of four previews, which means a live, paying audience will watch. It lets Preston and the crew look for problems. Some playgoers like previews best — for the excitement of a first performance. We, too, can feel the buzz a good six hours before the 7:30 p.m. show. Preston is still making changes, moving the actors around as he sits on the front row. He
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walks back and forth, stepping off the stage, then back on, sitting again on the front row, then up again. Changing his vantage point. He stays still for no more than a minute or two in any one place. You can tell, everyone is in a good mood. And the preview runs with no major mishaps. Afterward, most of the actors and some of the crew head to M’Coul’s pub a few blocks south. The actors tell me they are tired. The next day, Monday, is a day off. Most plan to clean house, do laundry, lay out by the pool — and sleep. Most of all, sleep. Friday, June 13 It all comes down to this — opening night. Kim Wong (Helena) visits the crew, giving each a single rose. At 7:30 p.m., a half hour before the show begins, I climb the back stairs to the dressing rooms, a place I have stayed away from. On the way up, I run into Beth Ritson (the Countess), who is holding her dress above her ankles, so as not to trip as she carefully comes down the stairs in her all-black, floor-length mourning dress for the opening scene. She wants to find a quiet spot backstage to meditate. I keep going. There are four dressing rooms on the second floor. David Ryan Smith (Parolles) and Jeff West (Lafew) share one. Jeff is combing his hair into a 1920s style. David is checking his tie in the mirror. We chat briefly. David opens his playbook and begins reading his lines. At that, Jeff ushers me gently out the door and closes it behind me. I step across the hall to see John Herrera (the King) in his room leaning into a mirror, trimming his mustache. We chat but then hear Emily’s voice over the intercom telling actors that it’s ten-minutes until show time. He asks me to leave, closes his door. I stand in the hall a few minutes, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Rehearsals
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watching several wardrobe assistants who are themselves standing around to see if anyone needs help. Anthony Martinez (Bertram) walks by, smiles, grabs my hand in his for a second, says nothing but stares ahead and keeps walking. It’s obvious. He is mentally turning himself into his character. Laurence Olivier, who himself once played Parolles in All’s Well, called it “the old self-hypnotic act to transform ourselves completely before we step on stage.” It’s a lesson for me. This is not the time to be approaching actors. Wednesday, June 18 Ladies and gentlemen, we are at places. Places for top of the show. Places for top of the show. Thank you. Stage manager Emily Mails is talking to the actors via her headset connected to the intercom in the dressing rooms and backstage. On this night, I’m sitting with her in the control booth, long narrow, windowed room, flush against the back of the last row of seats in the theater. Inside it is dark. This is command central. Emily, sitting a few feet behind the windows, studies the stage as well as the thick spiral playbook in front of her that is illuminated by a small reading light. She’ll follow it for lines, as well as an abundance of side notes about light and sound cues. To her left is Liz Stewart, with a console of lights and switches in front of her. As Triad Stage’s master electrician, she controls l96 lights. To Emily’s right is sound operator Matt Hirst with a separate mixing console. Emily talks to them through the headsets, as well as to assistant stage managers Phillip Wright and Ben Apple, who are backstage. The play is about to begin. Emily: “Standby lights and sound (long pause). Lights 30 go. Lights 35 go. Lights 40 and doors, go.” For the two-hour play there will be about 120 light cues, dozens of sound cues and cues to open or close the stage doors as actors enter or leave. Thursday, June 19 On opening night and beyond, Andy Cutler — bearded, bespectacled, quiet, unassuming — emerges as one of the theater’s most important people: the wardrobe supervisor. With fifteen actors, most of them changing clothes from scene to scene, there are more than sixty “looks” that Andy takes care of — 300 individual pieces of costume, from dresses and suits, to belts, shoes, jewelry, wigs and hairpieces. We are five hours before this night’s performance as we move from one dressing room to another, where he uses a portable steamer to freshen costumes on their hangers. There is no one else here yet, except for little Abigail, his Chinese crested and Chihuahua mix. “She’s more of a therapy dog for the actors,” he says. “They’re little Zen creatures. The actors like having her around.”
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He helps actors dress, double checking that their accoutrements are in place. “You have to have a lot of tact,” he says, “because you’re like a valet to these people. You have a very intimate relationship with them for about a month and a half. You have to have as little ego as possible because it’s not about you. It’s about the actors feeling like they can trust you. And knowing when to keep your mouth shut.” Sunday, June 29 Below me — I am sitting in the gallery above the stage — the actors are taking their final bows to the audience. It is the seventeenth performance and the final one at Triad Stage. After this, the cast will have a week off — “dark week” — then travel to Boone for a final performance during the Appalachian Summer Festival. But on this night the actors go upstairs, change out of their costumes and come back to the lobby after the audience has left. Champagne bottles are opened and a toast given. There is quiet small talk, kisses, embraces, then the actors and crew leave one by one. The doors are locked. In all about 5,000 people have seen All’s Well That Ends Well. Postscript “I’m really glad we did it because that’s what Triad Stage does,” says Bryan Conger. “We take plays and reinvent them. All’s Well did that.” He, Preston Lane and I are at a back table at The Green Bean coffeehouse downtown, a few blocks from Triad Stage. We are engaging in a post mortem on All’s Well, four days after the final performance. I ask Preston, did it end up as he envisioned it? He quotes the poet W.B. Yeats and lines from “He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven.” But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; “Every play starts out as a dream of a director,” he says. “I feel like you can say those words to every cast. I’ve spread the dreams out and you’re going to walk on them. You never see your dreams realized because ultimately you bring a whole lot of people into your dream who have their own dreams and their own ideas. You learn to be a dictator. Or you can be collaborative, which allows for even better things to happen. I loved working on it.” As we talk, they are already moving on to their next dream, The 39 Steps, a fast-paced spy thriller farce. Design meetings, rehearsals and tech week lie ahead. On this afternoon, they are forty-eight days from opening night. (The 39 Steps opened August 31 and runs through September 28.) OH Veteran Greensboro writer Bill Hancock invites you to read a day-by-day, extended version of his story at wwwohenrymag.com. Luckily for us, he’s already off on his next assignment for O.Henry magazine. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Kim Wong
John Herrera
David Ryan Smith
Jeff West
Anthony Michael Martinez
Beth Ritson
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Story of a House
Taking the Party Outside With a clever absence of boundaries between
outdoors and indoors, High Point host Todd Nabors uses nature and an ever-changing terrace space for memorable entertaining By Cynthia Adams Photographs by Amy Freeman and Hannah Sharpe
T
he prospect of entertaining a large crowd of party guests, minus a retinue of servants, makes most of us enter a tripolar state of manic preparation, anticipation and terror. But for some, with a penchant for al fresco entertaining, a gaggle of guests is like catnip to a Persian cat. Enter High Point resident Todd Nabors, who lives in a 1920s-era storybook cottage. It’s a pale stucco charmer, with verdigris-colored shutters and artful coppery window boxes. Although Nabors says the house “was never intended to be the venue for large dinner or cocktail parties,” he can handily host swelling crowds without breaking into a flop sweat like yours truly. His signature al fresco parties take advantage of every available square inch indoors and out in the yard. As my trusty Pottery Barn book on outdoor entertaining suggests, “Outdoor spaces for entertaining and dining are a warm-weather institution . . . There’s something spectacular about dining outdoors.” Even Nabors’ garage has been transformed into a chic dining room, open to the twilight. A series of exterior garden alcoves adjacent to the garage and behind the house invite guests to mingle in outdoor “living rooms” beneath a ceiling of twinkling stars. Nabors designs spaces where the only rules are creativity and comfort. Although he acknowledges there is a “fine line between what your tastes dictate and what people enjoy,” Nabors knows how to find the sweet spot. And he has done this despite a surprising admission: He’s no Iron Chef. No big deal, he insists. “While I don’t cook, I’ve always entertained,” Nabors confides, with a sunny smile. Rather than slaving in a hot kitchen, he serves easy hors d’oeuvres and special drinks, making a beautiful setting and the comfort of his guests the dominant focus. When Nabors invites friends over, he usually purchases most of what he serves (one of his favorite suggestions for entertaining with low stress). He always stocks a variety of olives, almonds and other assorted gourmet items, ready to pull out for guests. He provides a memorable cocktail to make things less predictable. On a recent evening, Nabors served prosecco with Pellegrino and a splash of St. Germain, an elderflower liqueur, finished off with a colorful twist of lemon. Nabors presented the drink in fine Juliska highball glasses. Nabors’ picture-perfect house sits on a shady lot in Emerywood, a neighborhood, where larger homes were conceived for entertaining on a grand scale. When he found his cottage in 2008, he learned about its provenance, and a missing element. “An early owner of my house did reciprocate by entertaining large groups in a greenhouse which stood behind my dining room,” he explains. However, by the time Nabors bought the house, the The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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greenhouse had been removed in anticipation of a future expansion. The remaining footprint wound up being an inspiration point, as the area gave way to a terrace. Nabors kept the imprint and used it (and its neat backstory) to his advantage, with an eye to adapting the property for outdoor entertaining. “When I became steward of the property, I quickly set a plan in motion to recreate a little bit of the south of France with a ligustrum hedge and a surface of white pea gravel where the greenhouse had once stood,” he says. Over time, he set into motion a plan that showcased white flowers and greenery, which tended to give the property a Euro-garden look. He used plantings to form living walls for his new rooms. “Just beyond the terrace, I planted a semicircle of arborvitae, boxwood, spirea and viburnum around a field stone surface centered by a water basin that I found on the property. This was the beginning of two outdoors rooms,” Nabors explains. Defining the lawn into compartments broke up the space and drew him and his many guests outdoors without sacrificing privacy. As the plantings matured, the rooms took on a more defined shape. Nabors made them functional by furnishing these naturally developing “living” rooms with benches, tables and seating. Time spent adapting his property returned big dividends. As a banker spending his days indoors, Nabors found himself increasingly drawn to enjoy a wine or aperitif with friends enclosed by the garden’s dense surrounds. And he found time outdoors was restorative. Little by little he began placing furniture here and there. “In the garden, my favorite experience is from the Lutyens bench, where I can see walls of green,
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blooms and birds in the warm sun,” he says, a sense of tranquility drifting into his voice. Nabors says the garage at the back of the property was in reasonable condition but needed attention. While investing a lot of elbow grease, he retained the garage’s character. It still houses garden paraphernalia, and occasionally, a car. But today, it has all the right elements for shabby chic entertaining that extends his house and makes it possible for him to stylishly host larger crowds. Rain never dampens Nabors’ party planning — in foul weather, there’s ample room in the party-ready garage. If he needs even more covered space, he pitches a party tent. The lack of boundaries between indoors and outdoors is relaxing and sets a different mood. But the garage was far from party-ready six years ago. A transformation from dreary to charming began with whitewashing the walls and acid washing the garage floor, ideas inspired by design magazines. Today, a round table is decked out with an on-trend burlap-fringed cloth, a white 1960s chandelier glows overheard, and a painted Chippendale mirror bounces light. Here, Nabors uses less important finds, occasionally even curbside rescued ones, which are pressed into service as sideboards and servers inside his garage party room. Exterior shutters painted a French green became a casual screen and lend a punch of color while concealing a mower and gardening equipment. Boston ivy (which he admires because it morphs from beautifully golden to red in the autumn) was planted to climb the side of the garage, echoing trained and clipped vines climbing the rear of the house. The vines are another European touch and a sympathetic use of Mother Nature’s best accents. Colors and objects are used to reflect the colors found in nature — restful and clean.
N
abors styles these outdoor spaces simply and inexpensively, with an editing eye trained by his avocation. (He is an antiques dealer in his spare time and keeps a booth at the Antiques Marketplace.) His home interior style favors a calm, neutral, Frenchinspired decor. The interior features his pared-down tastes, which run to subtle Chinese Canton porcelains and figural lamps, French caned chairs, sisal rugs and rough luxe upholstery. Nabors masses white orchids in a container for greater visual impact and a touch of restful green and white — bringing the outdoors inside. “My favorite place in the house is the Dutch oak table in my living room,” he says. When the temperatures climb, Nabors likes to sit there and enjoy a bite to eat after work, soaking in the lush view of his front yard. The tones of interior furnishings and walls are also chosen to soothe; they radiate understated elegance. Nabors chose his house “for its charm and light.” When he recently renovated the house, he kept the compact kitchen largely the same apart from key changes that help when he’s entertaining. For example, he installed a pull-out trash bin beside the stove, a simple change that saves him hundreds of steps. (“It was worth the sacrifice of a lower cabi-
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net,” he says.) He added an upper cabinet above the trash bin for essentials like vinegars and oils. “This provides more counter space for pretty things, since,” Nabors laughs, “I don’t cook!” The kitchen is large enough for displaying his favorite objects, yet there are neither oversized appliances nor gauche displays. He didn’t want larger — Nabors kept the space clean but used luxurious countertops and flooring materials, and gave the kitchen greater functionality. “From a distance, my renovated kitchen actually looks similar to the one I found when I bought the house. Behind these white cabinet doors, however, I have much more efficient storage for the many bits and pieces of china, porcelain, glass, crystal and silver that I have collected and use routinely.” Given his more efficient kitchen post-renovation, Nabors takes fullest advantage of indoor/outdoor living. His dining room off the kitchen is relatively small, but large on style, featuring a framed panel of antique wallpaper he acquired years ago, flanked by antiques. For years, actually, Nabors studied how the pros did it, then made their ideas his own. He cut his eyeteeth as a younger man reading tomes on entertaining penned by style mavens Kenneth Turner and Martha Stewart. What he absorbed from Turner and Stewart was that the recipe for a good party is comfort and chic in equal portion. Although Nabors favors disposable cutlery whenever crowds swell, he says that “silver pitchers and trays are the best for use outdoors. They can be taken right out of the refrigerator or warm oven, and they are nearly indestructible!” Silver can be affordable, he says, if you scour consignment shops where great pieces are cheap. “Silver conducts heat or cold. It is great. And you cannot break it!” Plus, silver reflects light — a nice touch indoor or out. In 2011, Nabors hosted his first Dining with Friends, which supports the Triad Health Project. He entertained a group of twenty-five with drinks and heavy hors d’oeuvres. The host set up a tent on the terrace and guests moved freely from one outdoor “room” of his garden area to another. Dessert was served inside. This set-up functioned so well that Nabors signed up for a much larger, progressive event in 2013. This time, he invited fifty guests, and to make the double-sized crowd feasible, he again deployed his tent idea. The evening began at a neighbor’s house, he says, where guests enjoyed a refreshing prosecco-based Bellini and light jazz. Afterward, guests walked two doors down to Nabors’ home, for a second wave of food and drink “arranged in stations under a tent on my pea gravel terrace and in my garage-cum-party space.” With spiffed-up garage and garden rooms at the ready, Nabors could easily expand as the larger crowd dictated. Tables set upon cement or gravel meant guests were instantly at ease — a drink or food spill was inconsequential. And Mother Nature — providing moonlight, twining Boston ivy and a white-dominated, dappled flower scape of hydrangea, geranium and viburnum — really took charge of the outdoor décor.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“My favorite place in the house is the Dutch oak table in my living room,� he says. When the temperatures climb, Nabors likes to sit there and enjoy a bite to eat after work, soaking in the lush view of his front yard.
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The event culminated with dessert and liqueurs at another home just three doors down the block. “It was lots of fun, and our efforts brought a disparate group of people and their contributions together for a very worthy cause,” says Nabors.
Todd Nabors’ Al Fresco (and other) Entertaining Tips:
Nabors has discovered from direct experience a number of entertaining ideas that enable anyone to host with more aplomb, whether the crowd is small or large, indoors or out. • “Planning ahead really does help me to make a party less stressful,” he says. “If I’m busy, I often set the table, cover it with large cotton dish towels and simply uncover and add the flowers when I come in from work.” Another huge help is to plan menus around elements that can be purchased at the farmers’ market and catering kitchen. “If I had to cook a whole meal, I would rarely entertain — guests appreciate hospitality, and they will forgive less-than-homemade meals. Don’t let your quest for the perfect meal keep you from entertaining your friends!” • Great parties rely on variety, says Nabors. Make sure you have a good mix of guests, interesting food (vegetarian/ethnic) and a selection of drinks (some nonalcoholic options like pitchers of lemon water in addition to wines and beers for different tastes). “Presenting the food and drinks in stations around your house or garden also can help to keep people moving about and making conversation for a more interesting evening,” he says.
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• “Events with a theme can be great, but I don’t find a theme necessary for a successful party,” Nabor says. The most important role for a host is to warmly welcome guests and ensure that they are comfortable. “The best way to put you and yours at ease is to keep it simple,” he says. “I do spend lots of time planning and preparing to make myself more available to talk and look after the needs of my guests,” Nabors advises. • Disposable is the way to go when serving outdoors. “While I adore picking up a linen napkin and silver fork in a garden setting, I have found that it’s wiser to save the silver and breakables for the service of the food,” Nabors advises. “The overall impression is nice, but the guests and the cleanup crew (usually me) feel less stress in the end.” • Entertaining outdoors can be such a delight if the weather cooperates, but Nabors tries to plan his outdoor events in cooler seasons. “It’s important never to invite more guests than you can accommodate in some covered space in case of rain,” he says. “Most garages or carports can be easily styled into an outdoor room with lamps on fabric covered tables, dining chairs and fresh-cut flowers or plants brought into the space for the occasion. I’m always keeping my eyes open for louvered closet doors to hide a multitude of essential garden tools in the corners of my garage space,” he explains. If you don’t have an enclosed space, renting a tent provides instant peace of mind for an outdoor party with a large guest list. • “In design, I love the tension of the formal paired with the crude, and this principle applies to the table as well,” Nabors says. Mix your best pieces with those everyday elements that you enjoy. “Among my best and favorite pieces for the table would be my Herend pattern ‘Market Garden,’ which I have enjoyed using inside and out for all manner of meals.” Pair your fine china with majolica, blown glass salad plates, vintage silver, informal straw mats and washable linen napkins, he says. OH Cynthia Adams lives and writes in Greensboro. Having been a lucky guest at Nabors’ home, she says he might want to count his fabulous antique flatware. Her email is: inklyadams@aol.com.
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17 Ways to Do 17 Days Stretching over a fortnight and then some, ArtsGreensboro’s 17 Days Arts & Culture Festival serves up creativity in almost every medium you can think of. Stage. Screen. Oil. Acrylic. Fiber. Clay. Photo. Fork. Bottle. Blues. Ballads. Tango. En pointe. More than one hundred events will fly under the festival’s banner from September 19 to October 5, so you’re guaranteed something to fancy. We’ve selected seventeen ways for you to taste what’s out there. For a complete menu of what ArtsGreensboro has rounded up, go to 17daysgreensboro.org/events. Ongoing through September 28
Stepping Out Brush up on your Hitchcock trivia by taking in the play The 39 Steps at Triad Stage. Hitchcock on stage? Sort of. A comic send-up of the 1935 Hitch thriller and the straight-laced book that inspired it, the play combines murder, spies, romance and a favorite Hitchcock protagonist: an innocent man who’s forced to go on the lam. The play is billed as a farce with four actors portraying 150 characters, so the treatment is more Monty Python than Master of Suspense, but it’s still a cinch to keep your attention. Info: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
emerging artists such as Henri Matisse and Picasso. In her will, Etta left sixtyseven Matisse prints and six bronzes along with a number of other works (over 200 total) to the Weatherspoon. The prints, says curator of collection Elaine D. Gustafson, consist of seated models in quiet pensive moods and a second group of more traditional reclining nudes. “Matisse was at his height as a graphic artist when he created these prints,” she says. “Posed informally and naturalistically, the women convey the immediacy of sketches done with little study.” Thanks, Etta. Info: weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
Ongoing through October 3
Learning Tree, Part Deux
Ongoing through October 26
Barenaked Ladies! While celebrating the arts for seventeen days, Greensboro might reflect on how the Weatherspoon Art Museum has been amassing a rich collection of art for decades — with a little help from its friends. Consider Matisse and His Muses, a series of prints, lithographs and etchings on display through October 26. While Moses and Ceasar Cone were building Greensboro’s denim giant Cone Mills Corporation in early 1900, sisters Claribel and Etta Cone were in Paris buying art, most notably the work of
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September 2014
September 5, 18–20
Crochet Jam When San Francisco artist Ramekon O’Arwisters was growing up in Kernerville, he helped his mother and grandmother make quilts. “Quilting with my grandmother was inclusive, peaceful and embracing,” he says. Little did the East Forsyth High, UNC and Duke grad know that decades later he would be staging Crochet Jams across the country “to enable groups of people to collectively work on a piece of art, with a focus on relaxation and human connection.” On September 5 in the Anne Rudd Galyon and Irene Cullis Galleries at Greensboro College, the work of O’Arwisters and fellow San Francisco artist Carlo Abruzzese will complement one another. Abruzzese, with degrees from Berkeley and Harvard, takes Census data relating to religion, ethnicity, hate crimes and gender issues and creates complex, information-rich art. His works will incorporate data from Greensboro and North Carolina. The connection? “Through our art,” says O’Arwisters, “we want to bridge the arbitrary boundaries that separate all of us.” The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Photographs by VanderVeen, Lynn Donovan
See the work of some of the area’s top African-American artists and their protégés in “Celebrating Creative Teaching: The Learning Tree, Part II,” an exhibit at the African-American Atelier in the Greensboro Cultural Center. See the influence of teachers on their pupils and vice versa. Come to the closing reception from 7–9 p.m. on October 3 and meet some of the artists. That’s, by the way, October’s First Friday, a monthly arts-oriented walkabout in downtown Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-6885 africanamericanatelier.org.
Crochet Jams will begin at the gallery September 18 and continue through September 20, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Participants can bring their own fabric, though materials will be available and crocheting lessons will be offered. The community-made rag-rug tapestry will become a part of the exhibit. Info: finearts.greensboro.edu/?p=17. September 11 —14/18—21
Porter’s Plays Appreciate why so many things in Greensboro are named for O.Henry by seeing 5 by O.Henry, a sampler of five plays based on William Sydney Porter’s stories that have been snipped, tailored for stage and stitched together with segues of live, vintage music. Porter, whose pen name was O.Henry, was the most popular writer ever to hail from the Gate City, a real literary big shot in the wee hours of the 1900s. He wrote hundreds of short stories, but today most people know him only for his Christmas gem, “The Gift of the Magi.” Check out a handful of his other stories, including “Proof of the Pudding,” “Elsie in New York,” “The Guilty Party,” “The Third Ingredient,” and “The Girl and the Graft,” staged at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Info: (336) 373-2949 or greensborohistory.org.
September 19
Skid Row Yuk it up and shake a leg with Southern Culture on the Skids, the Chapel Hill band that has spent thirty years gleefully going on about life below the Mason-Dixon Line and outside the city limits beginning at 9 p.m. Sing along with classics such as “Too Much Pork for Just One Fork,” “My House Has Wheels,” “Tuna Fish Everyday” and “New Cooter Boogie.” Info: (336) 272-9888 or theblindtiger.com/events/scots.htm.
September 20 September 18 — 28
Tagtool Rules! Hang onto your eyeballs. Come nightfall, you’re not going to believe what you see crawling around on water tanks and buildings in downtown Greensboro. The colorful images will be created using Tagtool, an iPad app that allows users to create and project animation onto vast surfaces. Some of the Viennese artists who developed Tagtool will lead free how-to workshops at the Elsewhere Museum and the Greensboro Children’s Museum. Bring your own iPad or borrow one, no charge. Projections can be seen on several structures, including the side of the Guilford Building, September 18; the Bennett College water tank, September 20; and the side of the Carolina Theatre, September 26. The members of the Public Art Endowment are paying for the show. Info: www.cfgg.org and www.markusdorninger.com. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
GO to the Movies Get your popcorn ready to GO to the Movies, as in Greensboro Opera, beginning at 8 p.m. in Aycock Auditorium. “A lot of opera in movies goes unnoticed,” says David Holley, organizer of the event, “so we’re trying to call attention to it and attract a younger crowd to opera.” Leave behind the stereotypical scene of shattering crystal as a pleasantly plump diva sings an impossibly high note while you watch clips from Bizet’s Carmen sprinkled through the movie The Bad News Bears, and or see how Puccini’s La Bohéme plays such a crucial role in Moonstruck. Then sit back and enjoy a real live diva — the vocal stylings of opera superstar Victoria Livengood, a Thomasville native. Distinguished alumni and alumna from UNCG’s music program will also hit some high notes. It’ll be an “opera”-tunity you won’t want to miss. Info: (336) 978-1156 or GreensboroOpera.org. September 2014
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September 24
Then & Now September 21
Singing Songwriter Kick back and dig a songwriter’s songwriter when Steve Earle, a pillar of the alt-country scene for more than thirty years, lands at the Carolina Theatre. Famous for his 1988 hit “Copperhead Road,” Earle is noted for his vivid lyrics, as well as his anti-war and anti-death-penalty views. He has won Grammys for three albums — The Revolution Starts . . . Now, 2004; Washington Square Serenade, 2007; and Townes, 2009. His songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Travis Tritt, Joan Baez and The Pretenders. Come see why at 7 p.m. Info: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
Understand how much has changed — and how much hasn’t — for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer communities. Carousel Cinema will screen Then & Now, a documentary of interviews and exchanges between LGBTQ generations. The storytelling project is a collaboration of the Creative Aging Network-NC and Elsewhere Museum, with support from Guilford Green Foundation. The 6 p.m. screening will be followed by a discussion of issues in the South and beyond. Info: (336) 253-0856 or goelsewhere.org/thenandnow.
September 27
A Sailor, a Gangster, a Drunk and a Hayseed . . .
September 22
Never Before Seen Charlotte artist Paul Rousso has always been a bit theatrical. He revels in the moment when the curtain melts away, revealing his newly minted artwork to the world. Inevitable gasps echo across the room whenever his quirky, threedimensional masterpieces first see the light of day. It is then that the lightning strikes and Rousso ad libs a title for the art. The unveiling of his latest work at the Greensboro Children’s Museum will be no less dramatic. As the work is laid bare, those in attendance can share in the drama of seeing what almost no one else has. Rousso is known for his monumental, Pop-Art style sculptures, often modeled after, almost-billboard-sized candy wrappers and crumpled-up, larger-than-life currency. The only hint anyone has is that the unnamed art will be in remembrance of Jerry Hyman, who helped found the Children’s Museum in 1999 and recently passed away. His children commissioned the piece in memory of the longtime champion of revitalizing downtown Greensboro. The reveal will take place in the museum’s lobby, September 22, at 11 a.m. Info (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
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September 2014
Imagine a seedy nightclub during what some call the Fabulous 1940s, with a sailor, a gangster, a drunk and a hayseed partying with “dime-a-dance” girls accompanied by an all-girl band. That’s the setting for Café, a ballet choreographed by Maryhelen Mayfield, artistic director of the Greensboro Ballet. After the performance featuring music from Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera and Ragtime by Randy Newman, a three-piece live ensemble will pick up the beat in the first floor atrium of the Greensboro Cultural Center. Wine and light fare will be served in a pop-up atrium café. Info: (336) 333-7480 or www.greensboroballet.org. October 1, 2
Deployed Crawl into the hearts and minds of service men and women with Deployed, a potent piece of readers’ theater created by Greensboro’s Brenda Schleunes and state poet laureate Joseph Bathanti. The hour-long show draws on poetry and prose by veterans, who describe the challenges of going to war, then coming home. Trained actors read the works, which span seven conflicts from World War I to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be performed by the Touring Theatre of North Carolina at The Crown in the Carolina Theatre, 8 p.m., October 1; 9:30 p.m., October 2. Info: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 3
October 5
Great Space, Great Music
Singing the Blues
Clamp a rose between your teeth and savor the soul-stirring music of the
Loren Guillen Tango Ensemble. A lecturer at UNCG, Guillen is a critically acclaimed soprano and a scholar of tango music, a form that accommodates both dancing and storytelling. The ensemble’s program, “The Other Part of My Heart,” fuses new and old tango sounds with the stories of Latinas who’ve immigrated to North Carolina. The concert is part of the Music for a Great Space series and begins at 7:30 p.m. at Christ United Methodist Church. Babysitting available with 48-hour notice. Info: (336) 638-7624 or musicforagreatspace.org.
Sip, nibble and mingle with the creators of The Healing Blues Project before a concert and CD release at Greensboro College. The 4 p.m. concert will feature stories of — and performances by — local homeless, abused and traumatized people set to song. Also performing will be Lawyers, Guns and Money; the Greensboro College Gospel Choir; Big Bump and the Stun Gunz; and The Fairlanes. Proceeds will go to the Interactive Resource Center. Tickets are $15 at the door and include admission to a pre-concert reception. Find the 3 p.m. reception in the Lea Center; the 4 p.m. concert in GC’s Gail Brower Huggins Performance Center. Info: (336) 217-7398 or www.indiegogo. com/projects/v-healing-blues.
October 5
Jazz Party
October 4
In the Grove Ever seen glass-blowing? Well, here’s your chance at Grove Winery’s Arts & Craft Fair from noon until 6 p.m. A a red-hot ball of softened glass emerges from an oven of flames, and local artists will transform the glowing pretzel of material into delicate figurines and vases before your very eyes. Their tools? Nothing but gravity, sand and their lungs. Also browse hand-made jewelry, paintings and even welded wine art by local artist Terry Saunders. After the fair, stick around for some sweet beats at the familyfriendly Songbear Songwriter Music Fest, which will feature local bands like Think-N-Thin and Kris Ferris. Info: (336) 584-4060 or grovewinery.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Tune into the musical musings of New York jazz songstress Jane Monheit, whose vocals have been twice-nominated for Grammys. This summer, Birdland, the famous Manhattan jazz club, has hosted a series called “Jane Monheit’s Jazz Party,” in which Monheit invites guests to jam. She has appeared on Late Show with David Letterman, The View and the Today Show. Soon, she will add the Carolina Theatre to her list of stops. Catch her at 7 p.m. Info: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com. OH
September 2014
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The
Crooked Road Franklin County, VA Love American roots music? Tune your ears to Franklin County — the Eastern Gateway to The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. Plan your tour today! www.CrookedRoadFC.com 540-483-3040
Schools
Area Schools
Canterbury S C H O O L
Call to schedule a visit or attend an open house: October 16th - 8:00 a.m. October 28th - 8:00 a.m. November 18th - 9:30 a.m. Canterbury School is Greensboro’s only PreK-8 Episcopal day school and combines a rigorous program with a full host of athletic and extracurricular activities. Financial assistance and an extended day program are available.
Now enrolling for Fall 2014-15
(a small school with a big heart) Located at: 2100 Fernwood Drive Greensboro, NC 27408
A loving discovery and literacy enriched environment
Crib – Pre-K Monday – Friday • 9:00 am – 1:00 pm Small class sizes • Enrichment programs Summer camps • Sibling discounts Weekly Spanish classes for 2-PreK. On the web at http://www.guilfordpark.org/education/preschool.html On Facebook at Guilford Park Preschool, Education Contact us: dhuneycutt@guilfordpark.org
(336)282-6697
Prepare to be your best. 5400 Old Lake Jeannette Rd. www.canterburygso.org • 336.288.2007
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September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September By Noah Salt
“The true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.” — Truman Capote
The Garden To-Do List
Out in the garden, things are looking a bit thin on the ground. Mums are at their peak along with a few late blooming shrub roses and the black-eyed Susans go on for a spell. Still, the end is now in sight. Time to pull out the September to-do list . . . • As vegetables and flowers fade, begin raking out beds and leaves and adding them to the compost pile. • At the beginning of the month, sew seeds for early winter greens. • Start to transplant and divide perennials and shrubs. • Discontinue fertilization of most flowering shrubs. • Prepare outdoor houseplants for indoor life by making sure they are free of disease and insects. Clean with a mild diluted soap and water. • Seriously hydrate your flowering shrubs and trees, preparing them for winter. • Keep lawn mowed to two inches and water well. September is the time to apply winter fertilizer. • Purchase spring bulbs for October planting. • Plant spinach and kale for later autumn harvest. • Plant new trees and shrubs – though not too deep. • Have your soil tested and heavily mulch tender shrubs and trees.
Grover Did It
The idea for a holiday celebrating the dedication of American laborers and honoring the impact of ordinary working Americans on the economic well-being of the nation originated with a New York trade machinist in 1882 and soon spread to thirty other states before the federal government officially adopted Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894. Ironically, president Grover Cleveland signed it into law six days after a scandalous Pullman strike in which U.S. Marshalls killed several striking workers. Parades and speeches by politicians quickly became the stuff of traditional Labor Day affairs, along with civic picnics and outdoor band concerts. By the 1960s and 70s, however, as the popularity of trade unions waned, Labor Day grew to be regarded as a symbolic end of summer vacation, heralding the resumption of public schools and the start of football season. Though it lags far behind other national holidays in terms of spending, Labor Day is regarded as a major back-to-school consumer-spending holiday. A few stats from the most recent U.S. Census bear this out: • Approximately 156 million workers over the age of 16 celebrate the holiday. • Roughly $8 billion is spent on family clothing. • Bookstores consider this their peak season, racking up $2.5 billion in sales. • Largest occupation in the nation: Retail sales employ 4.34 million people.
Season of Memory
Autumn doesn’t officially arrive until the 23rd this month. Yet the coming of September speaks quietly of transitions, changes, new beginnings, perhaps even the start of transformations. Studies show dating increases and so do church attendance, restaurant business and visits to personal therapists. Life in general revs up with fresh purpose, the beach house is closed for the season, the garden grows paler as summer’s last melons and tomatoes rot underfoot. Some have called this the “Season of Memory” because families return from vacation and everything from daily routines to fashions suddenly change. The famous societal prohibition against “wearing white clothes after Labor Day” hails from an era when well-to-do families returned to the city from their country retreats and stored their “summer whites,” adopting the pragmatic wardrobes of autumn work and school.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
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" "
Life & Home
Caring for you and your investment
Circa 1927
Sunset Hills ~ College Park Home of Greensboro's poet & novelists Allen Tate & wife, Caroline Gordon
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Chairman’s Circle Gold Award 2010, 2011, 2012 Chairman’s Circle Platinum Award 2013
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Gathering of Friends Dinner featuring Legendary Hall of Fame Florida State Head Football Coach
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L E T ’ S
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Sponsorships and tickets available at
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98 O.Henry
September 2014
• homes@michelleporter.com www.michelleporter.com ©2013 An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
DLM_OHenry_3rdS_May_14_Layout 1 4/9/14 9:00 PM Page 1
Downtown Living!!!
YOU’VE SEEN WHAT WE’VE DONE FOR OTHERS.
O. Henry Magazine Feature Articles: June 2013 and March 2014
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Come visit Center United Methodist Church 6142 Lake Brandt Rd. September 2014
O.Henry 99
September 2014 Light on China
Come Blow Your Horn
1-6
12-21
9/
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EASTERN EXPOSURE. Travel to China through the lenses of five photographers in Light on China. Greenhill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc. org.
September 1–30
• JARRING. Check out architectural pottery sculptures and dioramas staged and lit inside broken pottery, courtesy of brothers Brad and Bryan Caviness. B.C. Clay Art, Ambleside Gallery, 508 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2759844 or amblesidearts.com.
September 1–October 1
•
RESERVE NOW. Only 115 shopping days until Christmas! But you have just thirty to reserve a spot at Collector’s Choice on December 6. The fundraiser offers a sneak peek — and sneak purchasing opportunities — of pieces on view at
• • Art
Music/Concerts
100 O.Henry
•
Performing arts
September 2014
15
9/
September 1–September 6
Key:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
Greenhill’s Winter Show. Tickets: greenhillnc. org/ncma (space is limited).
September 1–October 12
•
O COME, ALL YE FAITHFUL. See how Judeo-Christian motifs inspire modern painters at Shouts of Joy and Victory: Jewish and Christian Imagery from the Collection. Weatherspoon Art Museum, corner of Spring Garden and Tate Streets, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
September 1–December 5
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ALUMINATI. See what Guilford grads are doing professionally by checking out the Fifth Juried Alumni Art Exhbition. Art Gallery, Hege Library, Guilford College, 5800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 316-2450 or library.guilford.edu/art-gallery/.
• • Film
Literature/Speakers
• • Fun
History
•
Sports
9/
September 1–December 31
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LIMITED SEATING. Shaker rocking chairs, Victorian armchairs and postmodern loungers are featured in The Art of Seating: Two Hundred Years of American Design. Reynolda House Museum of Art, 2250 Reynolda Road, WinstonSalem. Info: (888) 663-1149 or reynoldahouse.org.
September 4
CONTAIN YOURSELF. Noon. Or, • rather your plants. Pack a lunch and learn all
about fall container gardening, courtesy of Beckie Berlin of New Garden Landscaping & Nursery. Paul Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. To reserve by September 2: (336) 996-7888 or www.cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 8 p.m. Thanks to Friends of UNCG Libraries and the university’s MFA Writing program, you can meet poet David Roderick, who will read from his new volume, The Americans. Faculty Center, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
UNCG, 402 College Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-0112 or www.uncgfol.blogspot. com.
September 5
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HOPPERS HERE. The Greensboro Grasshoppers are home. NewBridge Bank Park, 408 Bellemeade Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 268-2255.
September 6
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FARMERS’ BREAKFAST. 8 a.m. Chow down on an $8 breakfast of eggs, sausage or ham and grits and gravy, while a live band plays. Yup. It’s Farmer Appreciation Day. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2402 or gsofarmersmarket.org.
September Arts Calendar
September 6
September 12–21
•
SHAGADELIC. 3 p.m. Be young, be foolish, be happy at the Flip Flop Beach Music Festival, featuring the Swingin’ Medallions, The Tams, Eric and the Chill Tones and Hip Pocket. White Oak Amphitheatre, Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
September 8
• AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Friends of UNCG Libraries present author and storyteller
Doug Elliott, a man who appeals to readers of all ages. Elliott University Center (EUC) Auditorium, UNCG, 507 Stirling Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-0112 or www.uncgfol.blogspot.com.
September 11
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BIGGEST, BEST & DEEP-FAT-FRIED It’s time to find out who’s got the biggest pumpkin, the cockiest Sebright banty rooster, the finest-boned Belgian hare, the most unexpected fried food and the most stomach-churning ride at the 116th annual Central Carolina Fair. Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-4386
September 12–21
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TOOT, TOOT! Two brothers gradually switch roles as ladies’ man and lonely man in Neil Simon’s first comedy, Come Blow Your Horn. Performance dates and times vary. Crown café and theater space at the Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
IRON-FISTED. 10 a.m. The fire’s in his eyes, and the words are really clear: Just beat it! Hot iron against an anvil, that is. The blacksmith is back! High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
POCKETS FULL OF POSIES. 8:30 a.m. Attend Pocket Gardens: Containers and Small Spaces and hear Michelle Wallace, N.C. Cooperative Extension Service, and Bryce Lane, of PBS’s In the Garden With Bryce Lane. Guilford County Cooperative Extension Office,3309 Burlington Road, Greensboro. To register (by September 4): guilfordextension.com.
HIBERNATION STATION. 10 a.m. Costumed interpreters demonstrate how early Americans prepared for winter. Historical Park, High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
September 6–7
September 11–12
September 13–December 7
THREESOME 7:30 p.m. Three of the state’s finest teaching artists will share the stage at the UNCG Dance Theater. Choreographers Jan Van Dyke and John Gamble and guest performer E.E. Balcos will be joined by dance students and faculty to present works both classic and newly choreographed. UNCG Dance Theater, 1408 Walker Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5789 or www.danceproject.org
DUE DILL-IGENCE. The devil is in the details and also in the work of Lesley Dill who explores evil and underlying faith in Lesley Dill: Faith & the Devil. Weatherspoon Art Museum, corner of Spring Garden and Tate Streets, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
September 6
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WORDSTRUCK. The BookMarks Festival of Books and Authors, North Carolina’s largest annual book festival, brings together readers and all manner of writers — with food, fun and a parade, to boot. Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, 251 North Spruce Street, Winston-Salem. Info: (336) 747-1471 or bookmarksnc.org.
September 5
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THEY LOVE MUSIC. 8 p.m. Any kind of music, as long as it’s groovy. Get on board the Love Train with the O’Jays. War Memorial Auditorium, Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
September 12–14
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IN THE HOUSE. Kitchens, baths, landscaping, tile, woodworking . . . conjure up your dream abode at the Greensboro Fall Home Show. Times vary. Special Events Center, Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Info: 888-560- 3976 or homeshowgreensboro.com. Key:
• • Art
Music/Concerts
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Performing arts
September 13
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September 14
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet young adult author Vicki L. Weavil, who penned Crown of Ice. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 15
BOOK BANTER. 4 p.m. Join a Friends • of UNCG Libraries book discussion about • • • • • Film
Literature/Speakers
Fun
History
Sports
SUNDAY, OCT.
5
jane monheit the jazz of judy garland
CAROLINA THEATRE • 7:00PM Carolina Theatre Box Office: 336.333.2605/CarolinaTheatre.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
O.Henry 101
September Arts Calendar
Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. Hodges Reading Room, Second Floor, Jackson Library, UNCG, 320 College Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-0112 or www.uncgfol.blogspot. com.
SHOPS AT
KIRKWOOD
•
Lawndale Drive Greensboro, NC
ROOTS. 6:30 p.m. The High Pont Museum hosts a presentation by Lamar DeLoach, founder and president of Piedmont Triad chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical society that explains how to trace the connections between freedmen and their enslaved ancestors. High Point Public Library (Morgan Room), 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
Open House Thursday, October 2 from 6-8pm art, chocolate, fine furnishings, simple pleasures
Maison ron curlee fine art
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CROWN FILM SERIES. 8 p.m. You’ll get choked up watching two students commit the “perfect” murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), part of the new Crown at the Carolina Theatre film discussion series. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
emma lee
acoustic folk americana
September 16
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YOU CAN GO FOR THAT. 7 p.m. Catch them before they’re gone, oh-uh. Blue-eyed soul duo, and ’70s and ’80s hit makers Daryl Hall & John Oates, that is. White Oak Amphiteatre, Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Nancy Stancill, author of Saving Texas. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 17
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Ann P. Saab, author of Bathsheba’s Book: A Woman’s Tale. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 17–October 5
•
SLEUTHING. A librarian turns detective in Underneath the Lintel or The Mystery of the Abandoned Trousers, by Glen Berger. Triad Stage at Hanesbrands Theatre, 209 North Spruce Street, Winston-Salem. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
September 18
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BELLA NOTTE. 6 p.m. Learn about northern Italian cuisine — and teat it — at “An Evening in Tuscany,” presented by Lee Newlin of Peaceful River Farm in Chapel Hill. Paul Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. To register: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Friends of UNCG Library and the university’s MFA Writing Program present Lee Zacharias, who will read from her book, The Only Sounds We Make. Faculty Center, UNCG, 402 College Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-0112 or uncgfol.blogspot.com.
September 19
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CRIMSON CHORONATION. 7:30 p.m. Tap your toes to the blend of jazz, classical and pop from the Three Red Crowns, a 10-piece ensemble from Baltimore. Weatherspoon Art Museum, corner of Spring Garden and Tate Streets, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
336.383.5917
102 O.Henry
September 2014
•
RHYME TIME. Step inside the Poetry Café for some live music, openmic poetry, Hip Hop, R&B, hosted by Josephus III. Khalif Event Center, Key:
• • Art
Music/Concerts
•
Performing arts
•• •• Film Fun
Literature/Speakers History Sports
•
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Game DAy Jackets Tues. - Fri. 10-5, Sat. 10-4 or by appointment 1832 Pembroke Rd. • Greensboro, North Carolina 27408 www.facebook.com/Serendipity by Celeste
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O.Henry 103
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September Arts Calendar 2000 East Wendover Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: thepoetrycafe.org.
September 19–20
•
HIGH NOTES. 6 p.m.; 11 a.m. Families can explore different types of instruments and styles of music at the interactive concert, Up, Up, and Away. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3798748 or musicacdemync.org.
September 20 TABLE THAT MOTION . . . 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. . . . with vintage dishes, fancy glasses and fine silverware from Replacements Ltd. On the 20th, stylists will conduct two workshops atop tables from the “Carolina Preserves” collection, created in a partnership between Klaussner Home Furnishing and Greensboro artist William Mangum. From then until October 5, three “reinvented” classic tabletops will be on display, set by folks from the world’s largest retailer of china, crystal and silverware. William Mangum Gallery, 2166 Lawndale Dr, Greensboro, (336) 379-9200 or www.williammangum.com
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PANDA-MONIUM. 8 a.m. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially if you take it with Taiji the red panda. Throw in crafts, games and lectures from rangers about
this unusual creature and efforts to conserve it. Greensboro Science Center, 4301 Lawndale Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 288-3769 or greensboroscience.org.
Alumni Concert, sponsored by the school’s department of Music, Dance and Theatre. UNCG Dance Theater, 1408 Walker Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5789 or dance.uncg.edu.
• PARK IT! 11 a.m. Arts and crafts, carousel rides, folk life interpretations . . . it must be the
September 20–October 6
A Day the Park. High Point City Lake Park, 602 West Main Street, Jamestown. Info: (336) 8892787 or highpointarts.org.
•
SOUL MUSIC. 6 p.m. For 40-odd years he’s been spreading the gospel — gospel music, that is. Grammy Award-winner Bill Gaither and Gaither Vocal Band bring their joyful noises to town. Special Events Center, Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
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HAPPY FEET. 7 p.m. The Greensboro New Music Festival has a new name: NM_GSO and features new music from dance collective COLLAPSE (Collective for Happy Sounds). Weatherspoon Art Museum, corner of Spring Garden and Tate Streets, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
•
PAS DE TOUS. 8 p.m. Get your kicks from kicks by UNCG grads at the UNCG Dance
•
ECLECTIC. Billed as a living museum, the Elsewhere Museum is a hodge-podge of junk, antiques and most anything that can be converted into art. This magnet for creativity will play host to artist talks, tours and dinners throughout 17 Days. 606 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: goelsewhere.org.
September 22
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CROWN FILM SERIES. 7 p.m. Teresa Wright refuses to cry “Uncle,” when her murderous Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) comes to town in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), part of the Crown at The Carolina Theatre film discussion series. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
September 23
•
L’EAU-DOWN. 3:30 p.m. Learn all about H20 at “City Growers: Wonderful Water,” an afterschool program for 5- to 9-year-olds. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North
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O.Henry 105
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106 O.Henry
September 2014
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September Arts Calendar
September 26
DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT IT. 1 p.m. Bring an object you took when you left home, or would take with you if you were to leave home and share your story with others as a part of Greensboro’s StoryCorps project. Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3732043 or greensborohistory.org.
• SCI-FÊTE. 6:30 p.m. Food, drink, live entertaining, mixing, mingling — and a sneak preview
CHOIRBOYS. 7 p.m. Nothing stirs the soul like a little Church music — as in country singer Eric Church, who teams up with Dwight Yoakam and opening acts Brothers Osborne, Brandy Clark and Halestrom. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
tortillas typical of El Salvadoran cuisine, and refrescos (natural fruit drinks) at a cooking class for 11- to 15-year-olds. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
Germinating
30
9/
Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
•
AUTHORS, AUTHORS. 7 p.m. Meet authors Eric Shonkwiler, Angie Turner Jeffreys, Anna B. Sutton & Valerie Nieman. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
•
STRONG MEN. 7 p.m. Meaning, Chef Anders Benton, who pairs his artistic culinary creations with Rodney Strong wines. GIA Drink Eat Listen, 1941 New Garden Road, No. 208, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 907-7536 or drinkeatlisten.com.
September 24
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Ashley Warner, author of The Year After: A Memoir. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 25
•
MCCRACKEN UP. 8 p.m. Keyboardist for Donna the Buffalo, Dave McCracken — and Friends, tune up to benefit the Interactive Resource Center. The Blind Tiger, 1819 Spring Garden Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 2729888 or theblindtiger.com.
September 25–28
•
CAPED CRUSADERS. Meet the X-men and -women of the stage at the Greensboro Playwrights’ Forum’s 31st Evening of Short Plays, featuring eight to ten works with a superhero theme. Times vary. Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 335-6426 or greensboro-nc.gov. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
•
• BUENO. 5 p.m. Have your kids trade potato chips and soda for papusas, stuffed corn
of renovations are all a part of the See to Believe Gala. Greensboro Science Center, 4301 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 288-3769 or greensborosciencecenter.org.
•
TEACHERS’ TURN. 7:30 p.m. Hear the mentors who teach your kids at the Faculty and Friends Showcase Recital, which raises money for student scholarships. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-8748 or musicacdemync.org.
September 26–28
•
LIP-SMACKIN’. Meet your favorite local cookbook authors, visit farmers’ markets, and eat, drink and be merry at Savor the South weekend. O. Henry Hotel, 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. To reserve packages: (336)-854-2000 or ohenryhotel.com.
September 27
•
FALL INTO FALL. 11a.m. Instead of the apples, pumpkins and scarecrows that characterize local fall festivals see how Asian cultures celebrate at the Asian Autumn Festival, featuring food, demonstrations and cultural activities of the East. Elliott University Center, UNCG, 507 Stirling Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-3510 or euc. uncg.edu.
•
FOODIES’ DELIGHT. 11 a.m. Food, music (the food of love, according to Shakespeare), lectures and discussions on food and food resources . . . it must be the FEED (Feed, Educate, Express, Design) Festival. Caldcleugh Multicultural Arts Center, 1700 Orchard Street, Geensboro. Info: feedfestival.webs.com.
•
LITERATI. 1 p.m. Book Clubs United for African American Literacy and the Greensboro Public Library team up for the African American Author Literary Festival. Writers, including Antonya Washington, Beverly Jenkins and Vanessa Miller, will be on hand to sign their books and give presentations. Greensboro Public Library, Central Branch, 219 Church Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2471 or greensboronc.gov/index.aspx?page=806.
Key:
• • Art
Music/Concerts
•
Performing arts
•
September 27–December 21
•
PAPER TRAIL. For the 43rd year, Art on Paper showcases the work of emerging and established artists, thanks to the generosity of Xpedx (formally Dillard Paper Company). Weatherspoon Art Museum, corner of Spring Garden and Tate Streets, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon. uncg.edu.
September 28
•
STRIKE UP THE BAND. 1:30 p.m. The UNCG University Band gives its all with William Lake conducting. Aycock Auditorium, UNCG, 408 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: performingarts.uncg.edu.
•
CHEERS! 5:30 p.m. Sip cocktails of the past, present and future, paired with tasty eats, of course, and learn a little cocktail trivia at one of the Designer Cocktail Series. GIA Drink Eat and Listen, 1941 New Garden Road, No. 208, Greensboro. Reservations: (336) 907-7536 or drinkeatlisten.com.
September 29
•
EASEL DOES IT! 6:30 p.m. Learn about Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol — and then try your hand at emulating their painting styles at the Great American Artists event. Greensboro Public Library, Hemphill Branch, 2301 West Vandalia Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2925 or greensboro-nc.gov/index. aspx?page=2793&recordid=111.
•
AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet children’s author and illustrator Tomie dePaola. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 30
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GERMINATING. 3:30 p.m. Learn how to save seeds, hunt for seeds, make crafts from seeds and, of course, eat seeds at “City Growers: Super
• • Film
Literature/Speakers
• • Fun
September 2014
History
•
Sports
O.Henry 107
September Arts Calendar Seeds,” another after-school program for 5- to 9-year-olds. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
•
HO-HUMMUS. 6 p.m. It’s all about chickpeas and other goodies at “Middle Eastern Flavors,” an adult cooking class led by Melissa Harrelson. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Tuesdays
Wednesdays
•
TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 8 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Get fresh with locally grown produce, cakes, pies and cut fleurs for a pretty table. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: gsofarmersmarket.org.
•
TASTY TUNES. Noon–1:30 p.m. Brown-bag it or order from a food truck to free, live music. Tunes @ Noon presents Upstart Crow (9/3); Songbear (9/10); Bruce Piephoff (9/17); Joshua West (9/24). City Center Park, 200 North Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: citycenterpark.org.
•
•
MUSSELS, WINE & MUSIC. 7–10 p.m. Mussels with house-cut fries for $15, wines from $10–15 a bottle and live music by Evan Olson and Jessica Mashburn — at Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3790699 or printworksbistro.com/live_music.htm.
•
Thursdays
NOTE-ABLE. See if your little one is a musical prodigy by signing him or her up for “ABC Music & Me,” the first session of Kindermusik instruction. tGreensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 209-1152 or gcmuseum.com. CHICKEN’N’PICKIN’ 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Y’all come for Skillet Fried Chicken & Songs from a Southern Kitchen. Live music by Laurelyn Dossett and Scott Manring on the 2nd and 23rd; Martha Bassett and friends on the 9th; Molly McGinn on the 16th and 30th;— at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32.com/fried_chicken.htm.
•
JAZZ NIGHT. 7 p.m. Fresh-ground, fresh-brewed coffee is served with a side of jazz at Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754. OPEN MIC COMEDY. 8–9:35 p.m. Local pros and amateurs take the mic at the Idiot
•
Key:
108 O.Henry
September 2014
• • Art
Music/Concerts
•
Performing arts
Box, 348 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-2699 or www.idiotboxers.com.
Fridays & Saturdays
•
NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET. 8 p.m. A 90-minute, historical, candlelit ghost walking tour of Downtown Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 905-4060 or carolinahistoryandhaunts.com/information.
Saturdays
•
TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 7 a.m.–noon. The greens are still fresh, the pies still still yummy and the fleurs still belles — and yours if you grab ’em early. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: gsofarmersmarket.org. IMPROV COMEDY. 10 p.m. on Saturday, plus an 8 p.m. show appropriate for the whole family. The Idiot Boxers create scenes on the spot and build upon the ideas of others, creating shows that are one-of-a-kind — at the Idiot Box, 348 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2742699 or www.ibcomedy.com.
•
To add an event, email us at ohenrymagcalednar@ gmail.com by the first of the month prior to the event.
• • Film
Literature/Speakers
• • Fun
History
•
Sports
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Every home is different. Every homebuyer has unique needs. This is why Cunningham & Company offers a wide variety of loan products. For over 20 years Cunningham & Company has been opening doors for thousands of home buyers. Our in-house loan processing, ability to sell directly to the agencies (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac), issue Ginnie Mae securities and maintaining loan servicing capability are all benefits to our clients. This, in combination with superior service from our great local team, gives you the benefit of Wall Street power with Main Street culture. Cunningham & Company is a trade name for CMC Funding, Inc. NMLS ID#41998
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O.Henry 109
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O.Henry 111
Worth the Drive to Winston-Salem
Wild Blue Yonder
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane — well, it’s a lot of planes, actually, and helicopters, too. That can mean only one thing: The Winston-Salem Air Show is in town (September 13–14). While Kitty Hawk can lay claim to the birthplace of flight, owing to the Wright Brothers’ successful aerial experiments in 1903, the Air Show helped establish the Triad as a center of aviation. It debuted in 1911 and featured daredevil stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey, inventor of figure eights, the vertical drop, master of the loop and in the words of Orville Wright, no less, “the most wonderful flier of all.” It’s no surprise that crowds flocked to Winston-Salem to see him. One-hundred-and-three years later, crowds are still coming to the Twin City’s Smith Reynolds Airport to see similar feats in what has become North Carolina’s largest annual civilian air show. You can watch demonstrations of microjets, a P-51 Mustang and aerial “ballet” from the precision team of Aerostars Acrobatics, who fly in formation and take passes at each other in their Soviet-designed, Romanian-built Yak 52-TWs, which despite its WWII-appearance, is a relatively young aircraft that’s only been around for twelve years). For comic relief, Greg Koontz will perform the stuff of air circuses in his bright red Super Decathalon that Lincoln Beachey would envy, and — hang on, Snoopy! — a jet-powered doghouse will set records (for doghouses, anyway). And don’t miss the Spirit of Freedom, a restored Douglas C-54E that’s been converted into a museum commemorating the
Berlin Airlift. That’s not to say the Air Show is strictly a spectators’ affair. How about a ride in a B-17 bomber or Huey helicopter? And terra firma will keep you plenty busy, too. There will be displays from the Winston Cup Racing Museum and SciWorks (the city’s science museum), and K-9 demonstrations from the Forsyth County Sherriff’s Department. Test your agility on a rock climbing wall, meet some of the show’s performers and military heroes, watch the kids take a tour on Little Pete’s Train, or heck, find a good tome from the Forsyth County Library Bookmobile. Hungry? No problem, just seek out barbecue pit masters Mark “Pig Daddy” Little and Ricky Wayne of Bib’s Downtown. There’ll be music to fill your ears and your heart, too, especially when the national anthem plays. Its bold strains, along with the roar of the engines and roar of the crowds will leave you walking on air. Info: wsairshow. com. — Nancy Oakley OH
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
October 18, 7:30 p.m.
TWYLA THARP Hanes Auditorium Elberson Fine Arts Center 500 E. Salem Avenue Free Admission www.salem.edu/culturalevents
112 O.Henry
September 2014
Made possible by a generous gift from June Porter Johnson The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Strokes of Genius Ladies and gentlemen, dip your paintbrushes! It’s time for the first-ever Piedmont Plein Air Paint Out, in High Point, on September 18–21. “I always thought it would be a cool idea,” says Julie Delgaudio, the driving force behind the event and owner of J. Gallery in the J.H. Adams Inn on North Main Street. “They’re done all over the country,” she adds. So just what does a paint out entail? Very simply, painting quickly in the open air (“en plein air,” as the French say). Outdoor painting was a hallmark of the Impressionists, who sought to reproduce natural light on canvas. For High Point, the paint out begins with arrival of thirty artists at the inn, their home away from home for the weekend. Selected earlier in the year by Scott M. Raynor, High Point University art professor and department chair, the artists specialize in outdoor subjects, such as landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes and pastoral scenes. “It’s like a network,” Delgaudio says of the painters, who attend similar events around the United States. They hail from all over, but a good many of them, such as Archdale’s Jeremy Sams, come from North Carolina. The action begins when the artists set up their easels on Main Street — from the Bienenstock Furniture Library to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church — and in three hours’ time will have to complete a “quick paint” of a subject of their choosing and frame it. For the rest of the weekend, they will scatter
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to one of five different locations — downtown High Point, the High Point Museum, HPU, City Lake Park and Piedmont Environmental Center — and paint away, come rain or come shine. “The best thing,” Delgaudio asserts, “is it’s free with the public participating.” Art lovers can watch an image emerge from a blank canvas, and engage with the artists at work. “It gives people something to look forward to,” Delgaudio notes. She has enjoyed partnering with the city’s cultural entities and organizations, such as the Inn, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater High Point, which will be the beneficiaries of any sales of artwork produced over the weekend. On the last day, Sunday, food trucks will be on hand to feed artists and art enthusiasts, who, for a small fee of $5, can peruse, and if they wish, purchase works that will be displayed on the terrace of the Inn. Competition judge Richard Oversmith, a nationally respected plein air painter, will pick the winners, who will receive cash prizes. But the real winner is the Triad and the state: “We are the largest paint out in North Carolina,” says Delgaudio. (There are two smaller, informal ones in Southport and Cashiers.) “I hope to grow this every year into something really fun.” Info: piedmontpaintout.com. OH
Where Nurturing Really Makes a
Difference
Renew your body and soul
Chanel - Clarins - Skinceuticals - Orlane - Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare - MD Formulations - Bare Minerals Ahava - Archipeligo - The Thymes - Tyler Candles - Eric Javits - Hobo - Baudelaire - Simon Sebbag
About Face Cosmetics & Day Spa 1107 N. Main Street, High Point
336.889.0400
aboutfacedayspa.com
Vintage Thrift and Antiques
Located in the Historic Sherrod Home at 1100 N. Main St., High Point 336.886.1090 | Monday - Saturday 10-6 The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
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THE 39 STEPS a fast-paced farce
Arts & Culture
adapted by PATR ICK BA RL OW, from the novel by JO HN BU CH AN , from the movie of AL FR ED HIT CH CO CK
AUGUST 31 - SEPTEMBER 28, 2014
at The Pyrle Theater in Greensboro, NC
PRESENTED BY:
TICKETS ON SALE NOW www.triadstage.org 336.272.0160 / toll-free 866.579.TIXX 232 South Elm Street, Greensboro, NC
5
100oh0914
5 short stories on stage, with live vintage music September 11 - 21
by
O. Henry To purchase tickets call:
336-373-2949 or visit
Playwright Joseph Hoesl Director Barbara Britton
114 O.Henry
September 2014
www.GreensboroHistory.org The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Live Greek Music & Dancing Live Greek Music & Dancing
Arts & Culture
Greek Market & Gifts Greek Market & Gifts
Church Tours Church Tours
GREENSBORO GREENSBORO Greek Market & Gifts Live Greek Music & Dancing Church Tours FESTIVAL FESTIVAL GREENSBORO
Greek Market Gifts& GiftsLiveLiveGreek Music & Dancing Church Tours Greek&Market Greek Music & Dancing Church Tours
FESTIVAL
GREENSBORO GREENSBORO FESTIVAL FESTIVAL
SEPTEMBER 19, 20, & 21,Sunday 2014 Saturday Friday Friday
11am - 10pm
Saturday
11am - 10pm
Sunday
12pm - 6pm
Saturday Sunday 11amFriday - Dormition 10pm of the11am - 10pm 12pm - 6pm Theotokos Greek Orthodox Church
Saturday Friday 11am - 10pm 11am - 10pm 12pmSunday - 6pm 800 Westridge Rd (Corner of Friendly Ave & Westridge Rd)
11am - 10pm 11amNORTH - 10pm 12pmChurch - 6pm GREENSBORO, CAROLINA Dormition of Greek Orthodox Dormition ofthe theTheotokos Theotokos Greek Orthodox Church
For MoreRd Information Call 292-8013 or visit www.gsogreekfest.com 800 Westridge (Corner of Friendly Ave & Westridge Rd)
800 Westridge Rd (Corner of Friendly Ave & Westridge Rd) Dormition of the Greek Orthodox Authentic Greek Theotokos Cuisine Indoor/Outdoor DiningCAROLINA Greek Pastries Church GREENSBORO, NORTH GREENSBORO, 800 Westridge Rd (Corner NORTH of FriendlyCAROLINA Ave & Westridge Rd) For More InformationCall Call 292-8013 292-8013 ororvisit For More Information visitDormition.nc.goarch.org www.gsogreekfest.com
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA Saturday Friday Sunday Authentic GreekCuisine Cuisine Indoor/Outdoor Dining Greek Pastries For More Information Call 292-8013 or visit www.gsogreekfest.com Authentic Greek Indoor/Outdoor Dining Greek Pastries
11am - 10pm 11am - 10pm 12pm - 6pm Authentic GreekGreensboro Cuisine Indoor/Outdoor Dining Greek Pastries The Art & Soul ofof Dormition the Theotokos Greek Orthodox Church 800 Westridge Rd (Corner of Friendly Ave & Westridge Rd)
September 2014
O.Henry 115
Paintings B y
We care about the
�
ART of FRAMING
C.P. Logan
• Local and
Regional Original Art & Gifts
• Conservation Framing
• Corporate Framing
• Emergency Framing Services
• Shadow Box
Arts & Culture
and Needlework Framing
2105 - A W. Cornwalls Drive Behind Finks Jewelers - Next to The Elks Club Phone : 336-274-6717 • www.IrvingParkArtandFrame.com
Dreams of Venice 30x40
original oil
OPEN STUDIO SALE OCTOBER 4th 10-5 1206 W. Cornwallis Drive, Greensboro, NC 27408 www.cplogan.com
116 O.Henry
September 2014
Veterans and their families speak through written words with the voices of skilled actors serving as the vessels by which these deeply moving and haunting stories are communicated. Oct. 1–2, 8pm • Oct. 5, 2pm The Crown at the Carolina Theatre 310 S. Greens St, Greensboro, NC General admission
20 adults $ 17 groups of 10 or more $ 15 students/Veterans $
To purchase tickets
336-644-5495 or www.ttnc.org
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Grab The Girls for a Get-Away
Happening in April 2015
Arts & Culture
A Living History Trip Commentary and escorted by Lee Kinard Steps of Americans in France: Thomas Jefferson to Private Ryan Normandy, The Loire Valley, Paris
visit the website www.livinghistorytrips.com for all the trip details.
We do Europe your way.
336.275.1010
weezieglascock@gmail.com • www.livinghistorytrips.com
Be part of it. Only at Greensboro Ballet. Catch Studio 360 • Sundays @ 3pm It’s public radio’s smart and surprising guide to what’s happening in pop culture and the arts.
Each week, host Kurt Andersen introduces you to the people who are creating and shaping our culture. Life is busy - so let Studio 360 steer you to the must-see movie this weekend, the next book for your nightstand, or the song that will change your life.
From our Children’s Dance Program for ages 3-6, to our Ballet, Pointe, Modern and Jazz curriculum for students of all ages, Greensboro Ballet has been teaching the art and discipline of ballet for over 30 years.
Now enrolling for the 2014-15 school year. Go to www.greensboroballet.org or call 336.333.7480 for more information.
P. O. Box 8850 • Winston-Salem, NC 27109 • wfdd.org
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2014
O.Henry 117
the city market: Exquisite Frames Museum Quality Framing Photo Framing
vinyl.
Featuring Artist
music by gate city getdown
Bill Walsh
251 N. Greene Street 336.274.2426 MartinsFrameandArt.com
@ The Railyard
106 barnhardt street
9.18.14 5:30-9pm
www.GSOCityMarket.com
Come. Sit. Heal.
Pet of the Month
Dr. John Wehe 120 W. Smith Street
336-338-1840
Lady
• Preventative and Wellness Care • Hospitalization • Medicine/Surgery • Dentistry • And more...
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First time visitors receive first day FREE!
336.272.1620
705 Battleground Ave.
www.DogDaysGreensboro.com
118 O.Henry
September 2014
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Trip & Nancy Brown
GreenScene ArtsGreensboro ArtsFund Donor Reception William Mangum Fine Art Gallery Tuesday, July 15, 2014 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Addy Jeffrey, Lisa Bowman, Joyce Staley
Jo Slane, Jo McKinnon, Kaitlin Smith, Louise Boothby
Lauren Schaefer, Ehren Nagel Beatrice Schall, Bill Porter
Gary & Jean Goodman
Carl & Linda Yontz
Carrie Hamrick, Ana Seabolt, Kristi Cooke, David Spencer
Joy Ross, Johnny & Karen Tart
Bob & Donna Newton
Louis Bouvier, Bob Gatten Stephanie Justice, Stephanie Mabe
Eleanor Schaffner-Mosh, Bill Mangum, Florence Gatten
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Anne & Parker Huitt
September 2014
O.Henry 119
Wine and More!
C CHATEAU MORRISETTE Winery and Restaurant
Sun. 9/7 Music in the Vines Featuring Kristina Kidd, 2:00 pm - 5:30pm - No Cover
A rich tradition of
Rustic, Southern Elegance on the Blue Ridge Parkway
UPCOMING EVENTS
Sat. 9/20 Autumn Creek Vineyards and WMAG’s 2nd Annual Summer Wine Down Featuring Part Time Party Time Band, 1:30 pm - 5:30 pm - Tickets $10 thru 8/30, $15 9/1 thru event, Tickets available in Autumn Creek Tasting Room or online at Etix Sun. 9/28 Music in the Vines Featuring Lauren Light, 2:00 pm - 5:30 pm - No Cover
www.autumncreekvineyards.com
Lunch Daily in October Fine dining in a casual setting • Renowned Sunday Brunch
Vineyards • Tasting Room • Getaway Cabins • Retreats Special Events • Weddings • Corporate Outings
Less than 2 hours from Greensboro • Reservations recommended
MP 171.5 Blue Ridge Parkway • Floyd, Virginia
THEDOGS.COM • (540) 593-2865
120 O.Henry
September 2014
364 Means Creek Road • Mayodan, NC 27027 • 336.548.WINE (9463) The Art & Soul of Greensboro
GreenScene Bill Morris Book Signing Scuppernong Books Thursday, July 25, 2014
Photographs by Lynn Donovan Lacy Ward Jr, Curtis Ingram, Jeff Morgan
Judy & Carlos Yanez
Bill Morris Eric Ginsburg, Erick Ambrust
Beth Sheffield, Lynne Brandon
Joan Kramer, Donnie Kennedy, Timothy Carroll
Brian Clarey, Brian Lampkin
Harmony Hall, Nonnie Penland
Dick & Jane Potter
GroveWinery.com 7360 Brooks Bridge Road Guilford County NC 27249 336.584.4060 Upcoming Events Sept. 6 Grove 10 Year Anniversary 6 pm Sept. 14 NC Food Rodeo noon-4 pm Sept. 17 Painting Class 7pm Sept. 19 Wine & Song w/Radials 6 pm
Visit Grove website for more information
Grove’s Tasting Room Open Daily from Noon until 6pm The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Located at the Shops at Friendly Center 3326 W. Friendly Ave, Ste 141 | Greensboro Phone: 336.299.4505
Baskets | Corporate Events Grand Reopening Celebr Saturday, September 20th 11am-11pm September 2014
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GreenScene
Jennifer Bedrosian
Adult Cooking Class-Grilling in the Garden with Jay Greensboro Children’s Museum Thursday, August 14, 2014 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Rod & Linda Mortenson
Rena Watson, Mebane Ham
Mandy Clift, Barbara Head
Jim & Theresa Spencer Ashley & Robert Long
Jonathan & Anne Smith Chef Jay Pierce
Brian Bartlett, Matt Applebaum Donna & Chris Schumann
122 O.Henry
September 2014
Mark Watson, Kate Black
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Now Open
We Make Greensboro Home Old Irving Park
623 Woodland Drive
Classic Old Irving Park home that has been updated and renovated throughout. Hardwood floors on both levels. Master Bath with separate shower and pedestal tub, large closet. Bedrooms with built-ins. Screened porch overlooks gardens & play area. 2-car garage with workshop. Lots of storage & much more! Price upon request.
Irving Park
204 Elmwood Drive
Classic Irving Park brick home in prime location near park and within walking distance to GCC. 9 foot ceilings on main level, hardwood floors, custom moldings. Many updates (kitchen), den with new wet bar. 2-car garage. Master bedroom has separate shower & jetted tub plus a really “roomy” master closet! Price upon request.
Antiques at the
Irving Park
101 Wentworth Home with a view perched on a hill overlooking the park! Charming home in Irving Park offers so much for family and entertaining! Updated kitchen, new roof, freshly painted inside, hardwoods & tile accent most of this home. Lovely terraced back yard for gardening and relaxation. Price upon request.
Carriage House Old Irving Park 2214 Golden Gate Drive Greensboro, NC Carriage_House@att.net
336.373.6200
206 Sunset Drive Designed by Raleigh Hughes, this Villa style home has been magnificently restored and updated – new kitchen and Master Bath. Study with pecky cypress walls, Sunroom with surround views. Overlooking the GCC Golf Course, this home lives and entertains well inside and out. Truly one-of-a-kind, magnificent Old Irving Park home.
Irving Park
1810 Huntington Road
Golf course lot with best backyard view. 3 bedrooms and 3 and one half baths. Updated Kitchen, hardwood, cork and tile floors throughout. Patio with fireplace overlooking golf course. Room to expand to second level. Price upon request.
Irving Park
MERIDITH MARTENS, artist An
Fine Art Animal Portraits
3805 Meredith
Irving Park 2-story brick home on spacious lot. Open floor plan. Updated & renovated throughout. New state-of-the-art gourmet Kitchen w/ solid maple cabinets and granite. Fenced back yard. 2-car attached garage. Price upon request
Irving Park
2411 Kivett Dr
Great Ranch on approximately 10 acres! 3 Bedrooms, 2 Baths - 1 totally updated. In great shape with 2 storage/workshop buildings and mobile homes - rental property. Call agent for more info.
Irving Park
1811 Tiffany Pl
Totally updated Irving Park brick home with up to 6 Bedrooms. 3.5 Baths. Spacious rooms, hardwood floors - main level., custom moldings, 3 fireplaces. Finished Bonus Room. Great yard and street. Immaculate! Ready to move into!
Henson Farms
5805 Mashoes Ct Lake view home has it all! Quality construction and handicap accessible with elevator. Master Suite on main. Open floor plan, hardwoods, high ceilings. 5 BR/5.5 BAs, workout room & sauna. Home theater, game area, BR & BA. Outdoor recreation and entertaining center on water.
meridithmartens@nc.rr.com 910 692-9448 www.meridithmartens.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Xan Tisdale
336-601-2337
Kay ChesnuTT
336-202-9687
Xan.Tisdale@bhhsyostandlittle.com Kay.Chesnutt@bhhsyostandlittle.com
©2014 BHH Affi liates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.
September 2014
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
conjunction with a community reading of Wolfe’s novel The Right Stuff. There will be other gatherings honoring Wolfe all month at Penick, The Country Bookshop and Weymouth. The Sunrise Theater will show the movie based on Wolfe’s novel. Info: thecountrybookshop.biz
By Sandra Redding
September: it was the most beautiful of words . . . evoking orange flowers, swallows and regret. — Alexander Theroux
September Book Events
2014–2015 Visiting Writers Series, Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory. • September 4 (Thursday, 7 p.m.) George Saunders “pictured”, popular author of short-story anthologies and recipient of a Guggenheim grant and a MacArthur Genius grant. • September 25 (Thursday, 7 p.m.) Joshua Bennett, an award-winning spoken word poet with performances at the Kennedy Center and the White House. • October 23 (Thursday, 7 p.m.) Rebecca Skloot. Her novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a best-seller for four years, is being made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey. • November 13 (Thursday, 7 p.m.) Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award. His novel, Let the Great World Spin, is a best-seller on four continents. Info: visitingwriters.lr.edu • September 16–20 (Tuesday–Saturday) On the Same Page: Ashe County’s Literary Festival, West Jefferson. Sponsored by Ashe County Arts Council and Ashe County Library. Inspired readers rub elbows and learn with authors that include Wilton Barnhardt, Georgia Bonesteel, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Donna Campbell, Wiley Cash, Elliot Engel, Georgann Eubanks, Philip Gerard, Alan Hodge, Robert Inman, Daniel Wallace and Allan Wolf. Info: onthesamepagefestival.org • September 20 (Saturday, 10 a.m.) North Carolina Poetry Society Annual Fall Meeting, Weymouth Center, Southern Pines. Morning program features readings by winners of the Brockman-Campbell Book Award and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. After lunch, celebrate the poetry and life of A. R. Ammons. Info: ncpoetrysociety.org • September 26–27 (Friday–Saturday) Tom Wolfe, Southern Pines. The Country Bookshop has partnered with Penick Village, a retirement community where Wolfe’s mother stayed. Wolfe will speak for their fiftieth anniversary in
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
• October 7 (Tuesday) Frank Amoroso, author of Behind Every Great Fortune, will talk about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the focus of his next book, in the Paynter Room, Northeast Library, Wilmington. simplyfrancispublishing.com
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. — Don Marquis Recently, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance honored two North Carolina authors. Former Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers of Charlotte won top honors in the Poetry category for The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers, published by Press 53 of Winston-Salem. Chapel Hill’s Sarah Dessen, author of eleven novels, won the Young Adult category for The Moon and More. “Reading was my passion” are the words Nicholas Sparks, popular New Bern author, wants carved on his tombstone. Last year, his passionate fans eagerly endorsed his latest best-seller, The Longest Ride. Now this romance novel is being adapted by Fox for a motion picture in Wilmington. Some scenes will be shot in Winston-Salem and Greensboro. Warning: Stock up on tissues before beginning the book or attending the movie.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, then I wait to see who walks into it. —Tom Wolfe Billy Bowater, the first book published by E. C. Hanes of Winston-Salem, is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the connection between art and soul, comprehending the back room strategy of politics, or simply wishing to locate and strengthen their own moral compass. Though a novel, this book is loosely based on Hanes’ own experiences as a politician, businessman and defender of the arts. By page eleven, you will be hooked by the charm of Billy and the observations of Lucy Lou, his outspoken gal-pal. blairpub.com Thanks for sending your literary news. Keep me updated at sanredd@earthlink.com. OH Greensboro writer Sandra Redding’s novel, Naomi Wise: A Cautionary Tale, is a riveting story about heartbreak and hope in a Quaker community. Email her at sanredd@earthlink.net. September 2014
O.Henry 125
2014-2015 SEASON The Piedmont’s Premier Chorus
Gift of the Magi
December 12, 13 & 15, 2014
The Creation Exceptional, Innovative, and Engaging
Franz Joseph Haydn
February 26 & 28, 2015
Presented by the Greensboro Symphony
Season Tickets On Sale Now
Group Tickets, Student Discounts and More:
(336) 333-2220 www.belcantocompany.com
From Darkness to Light April 18 & 20, 2015
North Elm Animal Hospital
C
October 11 & 13, 2014
China, Crystal & Silver
Bach Magnificat J. S.Dan Forrest Requiem for the Living
Old & New
BusinessBusiness & Services & Services
Shop our Retail Store I85/40 Exit 132
Farm to Fork
O'Henry Salt Pinestraw Sept 2014 final.indd 1
7/29/14 3:00 PM
Medical | Surgical Dental Laser Therapy for pain
The Great American Steakhouse 3626 North Elm Street
336-545-3400
www.northelmanimalhospital.com
Mon-Sat Dinner 5-10pm Bar 5-2am
201 N. Elm St. Greensboro 336.274.5900
Treasures • Antiques • Consignments
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18,000 sq. feet of Memories & Treasures, Visit the General Store for Goodies 106 E. Railroad Ave. Gibsonville, NC Downtown Gibsonville behind the Red Caboose Just minutes from Greensboro
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336-446-0234 Mon-Sat 10-6, Sun 1-5
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The Treasure House Consignment • Antiques Art • Furniture • Gifts Home Decor • Garden MORE Arriving Daily
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336.228.1691 | Mon-Sat 11-6 Downtown Burlington, across from Zack’s Hotdogs
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126 O.Henry
September 2014
Call 336-617-0900 OR . . .
mail payment to: P.O. Box 58, Southern Pines, NC 28388
delivered to your home! $45 in-state • $55 out-of-state The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Accidental Astrologer
September Songs The thrill ain’t gone yet, Baby!
By Astrid Stellanova September facts: Birthstone is sapphire, and flowers are asters, morning glory and forget-me-nots — but that last flower is a stumper. How on Earth could we forget our unforgettable September children? Raquel Welch, Adam Sandler, B.B. King — sex appeal, laughter and song just ooze out of you!
Virgo (August 23—September 22) Birthday Baby, pucker on up! Before you blow out the candles on the cake, you are set free from the wackadoodles who have sucked the air out of the room. “You know I’m free, free now baby/I’m free from your spell” will be your new anthem, just like ole Virgo B.B. King sang it. You are living it, Child. September is the month of your liberation. There’s a full moon in your solar seventh house, and that’s good for romance, with you solidly in control. Venus moves through your sign this month and you are free to be whatever the heck you are (hmmm). With the spell broken, you are back in motion! By the 24th—29th, there’s change in your pockets, too — and you won’t just have return on your money, but some return of money you never thought you’d see again, too. Libra (September 23—October 22) Good Lord, Sugar, your feet look fuzzier than the dice on my rearview mirror. Did you need that second pair of Uggs? With Mercury turning retro in Scorpio it has impact on your personal life and your financial life. Watch the dollars because the unexpected happens, and if you’re wise, you’ll have unexpected money to cover it. By the 23rd, a solar eclipse will mean activity and you’ll also be better off financially. Scorpio (October 23—November 21) You got some big power, and you can use it to better understand your confused self right now. Take a little time during the 2nd–27th to do some inner reflection, versus staring at the mirror. With Mercury in your twelfth house, you have a chance to dig up some self-knowledge you’ve buried deep down inside. And seriously: Did you mean it when you said the only time you were really happy was at the hairdresser? I mean, I know my fingers work magic, but that’s kinda sad, Cupcake. Sagittarius (November 22—December 21) You’ve been on a wonky emotional seesaw. And honey, looks to me like you’ve been up and down more than a stripper’s undies. You’ve got a lot of wishful thinking going on; now you get the focus to make some things happen. Keep at least one eye open until the 12th. On the 13th, Mars enters your sun sign. That spells “jackpot” and you will have more traction than a John Deere with a set of new Michelins at a tractor pull. Capricorn (December 22—January 19) This is an exciting time that could launch your deepest dreams, when Mercury enters your tenth house. But it also may mean travel, or the unexpected. Like my mechanic boyfriend Beau says, sometimes the journey of a thousand miles begins with a bad battery, a leaky radiator, and no wrench or jumper cables. By the 29th, everything seems to turn in your favor. Aquarius (January 20—February 18) Blow up your inner tube and keep treading water! You have more than the average amount of optimism. You are above average, and at least half of the world is below average, and possibly, underwater. You are nearing rough water by the 2nd when Mercury is in your ninth house. It’s a trippy time, so stay afloat, wear those water wings, and be patient. By the 29th you can relax and enjoy calmer waters. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Pisces (February 19—March 20) Red alert! Grandpa Hornblower once had a run of bad luck in September, and he said inside every small problem there was a bigger one about to get out. But then, he was a teensiest bit paranoid. (He also thought that when the realtor showed him a house with the street number 668 it was the Devil’s next door neighbor.) Sometimes you pay to play and this month you will find the energy to keep up with the big dogs. Aries (March 21—April 19) You know money isn’t everything, but your friends and family don’t. Wallet needs to go back into pocket. Or purse. And stay off eBay at least until the taxes are paid and your credit cards are in the black. Something unusual is keeping your nerves on edge, which is so unlike you. You’re usually the one who sets everybody else off. Take a lot of walks and avoid situations that will break your budget — and heart. Taurus (April 20—May 20) Guilty? No need. Somebody had to eat the last bite of pie. (Eata Bita Pi was my great grandaddy’s fraternity.) Lick your fingers and get back to feeling fat and sassy and just an itty-bitty bit entitled. If you don’t convince everybody else you are worth it, try confusing them. It comes so naturally to you. The 5th–29th are a bonanza in the love and fun department. It’s also a good time to be artistic — you may not be Van Gogh, but when you get going you can go-go with the best of them. Gemini (May 21—June 20) Darling, if it is true that money talks, yours just said bye-bye last month. The fact that you don’t yet know is that it may help numb the pain until the 4th. But here’s the skinny on money: It’s going to walk back. This is a Vegas month for you, and by the 5th you will find everything comes easier. Not only greenbacks come your way, but you get some good lovin’, too. Cancer (June 21—July 22) You’re in high cotton now. But just wait until the truck gets to the gin mill. It ain’t always true that the best things come in small packages — because a big package can hold a whole lot more. A full moon on the 8th will have you sitting in the catbird’s seat, as it is in Pisces, your fellow water sign. It is almost as good when a new moon on the 24th brings very nice possibilities. I’m serious, Sugar. Leo (July 23—August 22) You call whatever you hit the target, just like my friend Marvella Truvo. It’s good to be optimistic, but the target seems to move twice as fast when you chase it this hard. You get a break with some tough financial things later in the month. So rather than obsess, get involved with new friends or a new hobby. And cool your heels, because as Venus moves through, your financial picture gets much brighter. You won’t be Atlantic City rich, but you will definitely be able to afford a ticket to a NASCAR race. OH For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path. September 2014
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O.Henry Ending
My Mother’s Secret
By K ay Cheshire
The cedar chest ar-
rived when I was 12 years old. With its distinctive smell, the Lane chest had been my mother’s since she was 16 and for some long-forgotten reason, she wanted it sent to her that summer. So my grandmother shipped it from her house in Florida to our house in Memphis, Tennessee. The day after it arrived, I found my mother sitting cross-legged on the floor going through the contents. Items were scattered on the dark green carpet, and I was fascinated. Kneeling next to her, I picked up a tattered blue book.
“Leave it alone,” she said. I watched as she gathered black-and-white photographs, yellowed papers and a small wooden box. Then I spied a white scarf with a red, white and blue emblem. The silk was soft to the touch, so I picked it up and placed it around my neck. “Take it off.” “Where did it come from?” “Someone gave it to me,” she said, her voice rising. “Who gave it to you?” “A pilot I was going to marry who died in the war.” “What was his name?” “Ralph DuPont. Now take it off,” the warning voice again. Ignoring her, I announced, “Wow, if you had married Ralph, my name would be Kay DuPont.” At first, I thought her silence meant she hadn’t heard me until I turned in her direction. It was “the look,” the one I had become accustomed to. Eyes bugged out, the snarl forming on her lips, the flush of her face, and I knew, without really knowing what, that I had just said something terrible. She yanked the scarf from my neck and, in a voice that would have peeled paint, she screamed, “If I had married Ralph DuPont I would’ve had different children. You would not be here. None of you would be here.” It was as though she’d spit bitterness through the air and it was falling down around the two of us like a cold rain. I waited, expecting her to say how glad she was that I was here, but she just ignored me. I realized then why my mother beat my older sister, younger brother
128 O.Henry
September 2014
and me with the white leather belt. We were not the children she had wanted, and she wished none of us were here. I used to think the muddy Mississippi River had washed over our house with such anger and sadness that it stained everything we were as a family. She never said another word to me that afternoon. Part of me was hurt, and part of me was horrified that she wasn’t excited about the children she did have. It was like a doll I once received for Christmas. I was disappointed because I’d wanted the blond-haired doll. Instead I got the brunette one. The doll stayed on my shelf and occasionally I’d pick her up, but I never really got over the disappointment. I told myself I was like that doll. I would never be the child she had wanted. The next day, I found her punishing my 6-year-old brother. He was cowering in the corner of his room as she raised the white leather belt, slapping it hard against his bare legs. By the fourth time she raised it I was behind her and grabbed the belt, yelling at her to stop. Then she slapped me, knocking the barrettes out of my hair. She chased me through the house to the front yard, where she finally caught me by my ponytail. “How dare you try to stop me? You have been a brat since the day you were born and I’m going to beat the devil out of you.” I had stubbornly refused to cry while she hit me, not wanting her to have the satisfaction she was hurting me. By the time she finished, my legs were raw with large red welts and I could barely walk. She finally dragged me into my room telling me to stay there until my father came home. When my father arrived, he said, “If you had cried she would have stopped hitting you.” “I didn’t want to cry,” I told him. “I just want you to beat the devil out of her.” But I knew he couldn’t, any more than I could tell him why she hated her own children. My father’s response was one I had heard many times. “You know how your mother is, just do what she wants and we’ll all be better for it.” But what I wanted was for someone to be happy that I had been born. For some reason on that July day, I vowed to keep my mother’s secret from my siblings and especially from my father. Why I wanted to keep this information from everyone is still not clear to me. I just remember thinking how hurt the family would be to learn the source of her unhappiness, and it would be my job to guard that fact. At 12 years old, I didn’t really understand the significance of what my mother had said; I only knew she would always be disappointed that we had not been born DuPonts. I had no idea how that decision would define the rest of my life. OH Kay Nelson Cheshire has a collection of poetry, Beyond the Window, from St. Andrews Press. She lives in Greensboro. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Illustration by Harry Blair
Inside a simple cedar chest was a life she never had
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