A student with a 15-year history of incarceration set a goal of getting a job in restaurant management during a cooking class conducted by Culinary Concepts AB at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. Within two years of graduating Antwon Brinson’s training program, the student was a manager at a restaurant, where she hired another former inmate. “I’ve […]
The stone walls looming over the deep water of The Quarry Gardens in Schuyler do more than provide a scenic picnic destination 40 minutes south of downtown Charlottesville. They also form a natural stage, where the Victory Hall Opera troupe performed everything from Mozart to Carly Simon last June in what Artistic Director Miriam Gordon-Stewart […]
Half an hour before taking the stage in No Fear and Blues Long Gone: Nina Simone, actress and lawyer Yolanda Rabun sits in her dressing room listening to Bach. The room is filled with the music Nina Simone’s grandfather played for her as a young girl, which later inspired the compositions on Rabun’s desk. Even […]
In the winter of 2019, Dr. Caroline Worra was in Hong Kong playing the role of wealthy widow Hanna Glawari, opposite Richard Troxell as her ex-lover Count Danilo, in a performance of Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow. Three years and 8,000 miles later, Worra and Troxell are preparing to reprise their roles with […]
When Carla Williams took charge of University of Virginia athletics in 2017, she was the only African American woman directing sports at a Power Five school. Now, she is one of three. But Vanderbilt’s hiring of Candice Storey Lee, and Duke’s of Nina King, is not the only way Williams has helped shape sports during […]
The Charlottesville Players Guild will perform its 2022-23 season entirely in the round, with the stage completely surrounded by audience members who are not considered observers, but rather part of the production. That’s the aesthetic Leslie M. Scott-Jones, associate curator of education and public programs at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and artistic […]
In the early 1960s, African American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks walked past seven boys at a pool hall, an experience she commemorated in the poem “We Real Cool”: We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz […]
By Julia Stumbaugh As any parent knows, kids share more than just toys when they play—so it’s no surprise that a pandemic spells disaster for children’s museums. A century after the 1918 Spanish flu caused health boards to shutter kids’ museums across the United States, the 2020 coronavirus again made touch-heavy exhibits impossible. Satellite branches […]
Liz Miele, author of the book Why Cats Are Assholes, describes herself as a “cat comedian.” That’s why her favorite Charlottesville place to visit was The Cat House, the Downtown Mall’s most reliable home decor source for a self-professed crazy cat lady. “I just feel like someday, someone will discover my body, because, you know, […]
It was 1996, and inside Charlottesville’s Outback Lodge, Howard Herz was preparing for one of the hundreds of shows booked and mixed there by the late, beloved sound engineer Terry Martin. Herz went to bouncer Bill Tyler and told him that Martin’s new guitar act, a guy named Derek Trucks, was here. He was Butch […]