Next stop: Capitol Hill

“We’re here to send a message: Stop the war. No more troops,” says Virginia Rovnyak, swaying at the front of the bus in which I’m riding. Forty-five heads nod in agreement. The bus, filled to capacity, is one of four chartered by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice (www.charlottesvillepeace.org) to carry locals to Washington, […]

Kids join pro-choice group in Richmond

On Thursday, January 26, Planned Parenthood supporters, numbering about 600, headed to Richmond for the annual Lobby Day activities. This year, the group included about 80 local high school students, who got the day off from school

Just give them a ride

Jennifer Behrens is a social worker with the Charlottesville Department of Social Services (www.charlottesville.org). One of her cases, an elementary-age boy who entered the foster system, needed a new place to live that would take him out of his home school district. Local schools are usually flexible—State legislation passed in 2005 says they can let […]

Protecting the salt of the earth

Fresh out of college, newly wed Teresa Tapscott went looking for a job in 1979. She hasn’t had to look for one since. “Sometimes I compare it to being a professional athlete, that they actually pay me to do something that I love to do so much,” says Tapscott, executive director of the Albemarle Housing […]

29N fire station breaks ground

After mutual words of thanks between some County Supervisors and the County’s Department of Fire Rescue, the group of men gathered behind the podium on Lonesome Pine Lane picked up their shovels—each labeled with a sharp “Fire Rescue” logo—and dug into the Hollymead ground. By next fall, Lonesome Pine Lane will be replaced by an […]

Flurry of activity

Dear Ace: The kids’ so-called winter break ended recently, and it got me wondering about snow days. No, not will we ever see the frosty precipitation again (I saw An Inconvenient Truth!), but, in the event that it’s coming down outside, who decides when to call a snow day and how do they make the decision?—Cab N. Fevre

Art and consomme

It is a Saturday morning in early January and Will Richey is making breakfast. He arrived at Revolutionary Soup, the restaurant he owns on the Downtown Mall, a little before 8 …

Thom Pain (based on nothing)

stage “Do you like magic?” Thom Pain asks the audience on three occasions during Will Eno’s dramatic monologue, now playing in Charlottesville one year after the close of its first New York run. The question is emblematic of the play, for Thom Pain (based on nothing) is all about magic, in the sense of a […]