In covering this town for 20 years, we’ve seen a lot of people go through changes. Friendships are made or restored. Folks change jobs or political persuasion. They get famous overnight. They throw surprise weddings. They die without warning. This week marks our 23rd visit to the archives, and we’re inspired by life’s markers: the recent wedding of two longstanding local musicians and the passing of a staff writer’s mother (who also happened to be a cofounder of a national law organization based in Charlottesville). Jesse Fiske of Hackensaw Boys fame wed Jen Fleisher of Jim Waive & The Young Divorcees fame late last month; well before we covered their nuptials as we do in “Making Marry” this week (p. 49), we were celebrating the other kinds of harmony they make. And the Rutherford Institute’s Carol Whitehead, loving wife and partner of John Whitehead and mother of former C-VILLE staffer Jayson Whitehead, died suddenly last week. A life begins and it’s all smiles; a life ends and it’s buckets of tears. When you’re family, you’re there for all of it. Stop by again next week to get more remembrances from what’s starting to feel like the C-VILLE kitchen table.
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Paging through the archives
“Anna Matijasic shudders, visible through a window behind Jim Waive’s recording booth; she is the farthest removed from the rest of the band, tossed into a room with a dismantled black drum kit and a set of tattered cymbals laying on a shard of carpet. The band has played ‘House Full of Ghosts’ a handful of times now, but Waive wants Charlie Bell and Matijasic to trade spots in the songs where they’re taking solos, and the band is concerned about the song’s structure.
“‘I want to make sure we don’t shift from Eastern Bloc to German schnitzelhouse on the rhythm,’ Jen Fleisher calls from her booth, nearly invisible to Matijasic from her position across the span of Coles’ dark, wooden studio. She bobs a bit behind her enormous instrument, easily the most energetic of the bunch, although nearly everyone is in a playful mood.” —Brendan Fitzgerald, February 5, 2008
Getting covered
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“My dad started to write his first of many books about America’s loss of direction when I began my formal education. It was 1975 and we were living in Los Angeles, where he had recently attended some kind of Christian seminary. My mom was working as a legal secretary and I had no idea why my unemployed dad was picking me up at noon from kindergarten—apparently, he would write in the morning—but almost every day we went out to the park and played sports: football, basketball and baseball.”
—Jayson Whitehead, in the introduction to his interview with his father, John Whitehead
September 2, 2008
