After 31 years of selling wine, fresh bread, cheese and more at Market Street Wineshop from the basement level of 311 E. Market St., Robert Harllee has decided to retire. But fear not; Charlottesville is not about to lose another jewel from its quirky downtown crown: Two of Harllee’s longtime employees, Siân Richards and Thadd […]
Take a look inside a backpack and you’ll get a glimpse inside its owner’s life: perhaps notebooks and pens show evidence of his favorite color, or what he likes to do in his free time. There are folders full of assignments that indicate her potential career path, a book she reads for fun and keys […]
In April 2017, Monticello High School student Joshua St. Hill began writing a play. He had been bitten by the theater bug during the school’s production of In the Heights, and his drama teacher, Madeline Michel, asked if he’d like to write something for the stage. He did. Black men who have died as a […]
On the evening of Friday, February 5, artist Bob Anderson stands in the middle of Escafé, identifying the many people in the Escafé Opera murals that his wife, Dominique, painted for the restaurant in 1997 and added to in 2015. There’s the Andersons’ daughter, Adriana, a former server at the restaurant, and the Andersons’ two […]
A blank canvas. That’s what Marie Landragin sees in her mind’s eye when she’s about to play guitar with Free Idea. Just before the first note rings out, she sees a frame, some material, potential for the space to become anything. When the music starts, she says, it begins painting forms, “and there’s color, and very […]
In “Bosom Buddies,” the famous duet from the Broadway musical Mame, eccentric bohemian and title character Mame Dennis gives her friend, actress —and famed lush—Vera Charles a bit of advice: “I feel it’s my duty to tell you it’s time to adjust your age / You try to be Peg O’ My Heart, when you’re […]
Sitting in the living room of his mom’s house, Malcolm “Waasi” Wills, wearing a retro Looney Tunes T-shirt under a letterman sweater, leans over and lights a stick of incense. As a wisp of smoke curls into the air, Waasi waves it around, blending it into the afternoon light. “I almost cried when I got […]
On November 11 of last year, equipped with a small clipboard, some index cards and a handful of pens, Destinee Wright waited outside the Paramount Theater after a discussion with Spike Lee about race and racial injustice in America, followed by a screening of two Lee documentary films, I Can’t Breathe and 4 Little Girls. […]
When Hassan Kaisoum moved Aromas Café from its original location in the Virginia Department of Forestry building to Barracks Road Shopping Center in 2007, he returned often to Fontaine Research Park to walk the nature trails he’d come to know well since first opening the restaurant in 1998. On those walks, he thought about the […]
What was the last thing you made? Be honest with yourself. Perhaps you made dinner last night, but think hard about the last time you spent an afternoon knitting, strumming a guitar or doodling in a sketchbook. Maybe instead you’ve been reading, listening to albums, looking at paintings or watching “Stranger Things” on Netflix? Are […]