September 2012 O.Henry by O.Henry magazine

Your Golden Angel Angel`s Wings collection

M A G A Z I N E Volume 2, No. 5

“I fancy that every city has a voice.” 336.617.0090

227A North Spring Street, Greensboro, NC 27401 www.ohenrymag.com Jim Dodson, Editor jim@ohenrymag.com Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director andie@ohenrymag.com Ashley Wahl, Associate Editor 336.617.0090 • Ashley@ohenrymag.com Cassie Butler, Photographer/Graphic Designer Kira Schoenfelder, Graphic Designer Contributing Editors David C. Bailey, Maria Johnson, Jim Schlosser Photographers Sam Froelich, Cassie Butler Contributors Jane Borden, Tom Bryant, TC Frazier, Terry Kennedy, Sara King, Meridith Martens, Ruth Moose, Bill Morris, Lee Rogers, Stephen E. Smith, Mary Novitsky, Deborah Salomon, Noah Salt, Stacey Van Berkel

O.H

David Woronoff, Publisher Advertising Sales Marty Hefner, Sales & Circulation Director 336.707.6893, mhefner@ohenrymag.com Hattie Aderholdt, 336.601.1188 Kathy Murphy, 540.525.0975 Advertising Graphic Design Stacey Yongue, 910.693.2509 stacey@thepilot.com ©Copyright 2012. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

4 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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September 2012 9 Hometown Miss Emily’s Revenge By Jim Dodson 12 Short Stories Your Guide to the Good Life recipe 15 Most requested Good Methodist Cooking By David C. Bailey 17 the City Muse Julia Unshorn, Santa Incognito, and a Soapy Kiss at Summer’s End By Ashley Wahl 19 The Omnivorous Reader The American Maupassant By Stephen E. Smith

22 gate city icons Miss Martha Speaks By Maria Johnson 29 The Wine Guy Sparkling Wine, Anytime By TC Frazier

31 Serial eater As O.Henry Lives and Eats By David C. Bailey 35 Street Level Pool of Love By Jim Schlosser 39 The sporting life Fun Unlimited By Tom Bryant

41 Life of Jane I, Stalker

By Jane Borden

71 Arts Calendar 83 GreenScene 95 Life’s Funny Date Night Stooges By Maria Johnson

96 O.Henry Ending A Poet’s Life By Terry Kennedy

Features

45 Tree Poem

Poem By Ruth Moose

46 17 Ways to Do 17 Days The Resurrection of Jim Ross 52

Our take on events not to be missed

By Bill Morris

The man who invented Southern Noir, reborn

Return to Sender 56

By Jim Schlosser

Time to bring Willy home

58 A Home for the Muse

By Ashley Wahl

A peek inside Sternberger Artist Center

All Season Wonders 64 By Lee Rogers

17 plants that will delight every season

September Almanac 69 By Noah Salt

Cover image by Stacey Van Berkel Photograph this page by Cassie Butler 6 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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Miss emily’s revenge by Jim DoDSoN

month or so ago the town of Middleborough, Massachusetts, made national headlines by passing an ordinance imposing a $20 fine for public swearing. The ordinance was apparently aimed at unruly teenagers who assemble on streets at night to express their First Amendment rights by shouting obscenities at passersby. My first thought was, golly, what the bleep actually qualifies as obscene today? The other day I heard a local TV personality casually remark on air: “Well, all these storms we’re having lately really do suck out loud.” If this young lady had grown up in the house where I did, let me tell you, she’d have found herself perp-walked to a closed toilet seat with a new bar of Ivory soap stuck in her mouth and forced to contemplate her unfortunate choice of words. I had a mother from the hills of West Virginia, you see, who had a zero tolerance policy for what she called improper language. “Anyone who curses is simply showing his ignorance and a very poor vocabulary,” I must have heard her say a thousand times, usually as the bathroom door shut and I was left alone with the Ivory soap. To this day, the very smell of it makes me retch. But she wasn’t alone in her quest to clean up the casual language of my older brother and me — especially in the face of the late 1960s and early ’70s when a deluge of formerly unsuitable slang words drifted into popular usages owing to TV, popular movies, and rapidly changing societal standards. We were also handicapped by a hawk-ear Southern grandmother and an overabundance of Southern Methodist relatives living too close for teenage comfort. They tended to think of our Lutheran youth group as a breeding ground for improper behavior. In my particular case, these guardians of the tongue also had the help of one Miss Emily Dickinson, a woman who was to proper language and upright diction what an unexpected blizzard would be to Olympic beach volleyball. To be clear, I am not speaking of the famous Belle of Amherst of the same name, the brilliant Transcendental poet who rarely ventured far from her doorstep in western Massachusetts. No sir. I’m speaking of my freshman English composition teacher who may indeed have been named for the famous poet because she likewise was unmarried, wore her graying hair in a severe bun, and suffered no one fool enough to bring street slang into her classroom. But more on this Miss Emily in a Transcendental moment. As this summer waned and a new school year loomed, critics ranging from Fox News to the civil libertarians pounced on poor Middleborough, insisting their move to govern public profanity was simply another instance of the government meddling in our daily lives, the Nanny Culture run amok, an attempt to muzzle dissent and the right to free expression, a cornerstone of America’s brand of frontier democracy. One outraged commentators labeled them the “New Puritans.”

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

HomeTown

National Public Radio commentator Geoff Nunberg noted that the issue boils down to a perpetual culture clash between modernists who are forever pushing the envelope of public expression, and moralists who see public acceptance of swearing as a “clear symptom of the collapse of civility and the coarsening of American culture.” He pointed out that free thinkers and philosophers have always used certain taboo words to shock the sensibilities of the establishment and stir debate over civic values. “In the end,” he noted, “neither the modernists nor the moralists can ever win the argument. They need each other too much. You can’t have profanity if there are no prudes left to be offended by it.” How true, I suppose. Without those teenage potty mouthes gathered on the corner, we wouldn’t be talking about this, and I really wouldn’t have a bleeping column this month. At first I came down on the side of the public prudes, undoubtedly the effect of Ivory soap, Miss Emily and all those Methodist church suppers on the lawn. Spend ten minutes with MTV or just about any reality show these days and you’ll realize the busiest dude at the network is the guy who operates the bleep button. As my Southern Baptist grandmother warned, cursing is a slippery slope. What “stinks to high heaven” today invariably “sucks out loud” tomorrow. I know this for a fact because, owing to many years as a journalist, my own casual language could probably do with a good scrub-up. The other day after I discovered our year-old golden retriever Ajax had eaten the toe off my new golf shoes, I shouted at him: “Why, you sorry SOB” — technically speaking, a correct statement — “I can’t believe you ate my [insert F-bomb here] new golf shoes!” Ajax was clearly shocked by this explosion of blue words, though golden retrievers, like Fox News commentators, are fairly easily offended. Nevertheless, I vow here and now — swear a solemn oath, if you will, before God and country and the makers of Ivory soap — to clean up my casual language even when I’m venting my spleen, or at least have the decency to resort to Miss Emily’s revenge. On the first warm September afternoon I sauntered into her freshman English grammar class forty years ago wearing no socks and a goofy smile and one slim minute late from sixth period phys ed class, the woman froze me in my tracks and ordered me to leave and not return until I found “suitable clothing” — indicating that my provocatively bared ankles simply would not do. Her intolerance of those who used common slang and popular idioms was even more unforgiving. We learned — the hard way — never to say things like “Far out, man” or “What’s happenin’?” or “Can you dig it?’ without incurring a sharp Dickinsian discourse on the proper way to phrase a greeting or frame a question. Miss Emily, however, was an ardent fan of William Shakespeare — and here she surprised and delighted us with her belief that a little blue Elizabethan language was sometimes permissible and even called for in the right circumstances. September 2012

O.Henry 9

Get Your Tickets Now for the 2012

C E L E B R AT I O N LU NCH EON Monday, November 5 Joseph S. Koury Convention Center Honoring the News & Record Woman of the Year finalists and announcement of the winner

Special Guest: Erin Brockovich

the subject of a movie starring Julia Roberts that turned an unknown legal researcher into a 20th century icon by showcasing how her dogged persistence helped result in the largest medical settlement lawsuit in history.

She is a rebel. She is a fighter. She is a mother. She is you and me. Presenting sponsor:

More information and tickets:

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Women to Women, an initiative of The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, is a permanent endowment that makes high-impact grants to address the issues of women and families in our area.

10 O.Henry

September 2012

HomeTown In effect, she taught us to swear like the Montagues and the Capulets. I came to think of this as Miss Emily’s Revenge on the decline of Western civilization. “If you feel compelled to resort to common swearing,” she primly advised, “at least have the decency, intelligence and wit to do it in the beautiful invective of the Bard.” With the Middleborough debate fresh on my mind, I thought of Miss Em the other day at Harris Teeter when I saw an older chap coolly open up a package of Oreos and help himself to a handful of my favorite cookies. The cad strolled away munching. Even if Oreos weren’t celebrating their glorious centenary anniversary — all hail Oreos, may I pause and proclaim, a cookie worthy of a sonnet — I’d have been thoroughly outraged by this brazen act of casual cookie larceny. Are there no grocery aisle standards left these days? A fitting line straight from the Bard sprung instantly to mind and I fairly shouted it past the Fig Newtons: “Fie, knave! Thou are a disgusting toad and fat as butter!” I believe the expletive hails from Henry V, a particular fine reference book for budding swearers and a field manual for Miss Emily’s revenge. In summary, as you may deduce, life has taught me there is indeed a place in the world for artful cursing that actually elevates the contemporary standard. I have Miss Emily Dickinson to thank for that. A dear sweet friend recently got her heart trampled on by an unfeeling lout I wouldn’t mind seeing put into public stocks for at least a rainy fortnight. From Hamlet, I would say to this heartless beast: “If thou need marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them!” Since we’re letting things out, I’m pretty steamed at the U.S. Congress for not having the bollocks to pass Bowles-Simpson and allowing this country’s economy to drift ever closer to the abyss. All I’ve got to say to them is: “Thou art a trunk of bad humors, a bolting hutch of beastliness, a swollen parcel of dropsies, a huge bombard of sack, a stuffed cloak bag of no-guts!” And if you don’t like it, forsooth, “a curse on both your bi-cameral houses!” Could the state of amateur athletics be any worse? On the heels of Penn State’s cover-up of unspeakable crimes and countless money scandals involving NCAA football programs, not to mention the chemical adventures of former poster boy of virtue Lance Armstrong and the nine Olympic athletes who were banned for use of illegal substances even before the Summer Olympics opened, one can only sigh and note: “You foul-breathed, swamp-feted wastrels! Get thee away you skinny-legged worm-mongers and worriers of sheep!” Barclays, price-fixing of the European finance rate is simply the latest in a string of boggling banking scandals that have damaged all our lives. Just try getting a bank loan on a new ox cart these days, neighbor. “Thou art sniveling thieves of beans! What rotten fish thou hath for a heart, what usurious bread stealers, slimy as eel-skins and full of bull pizzle! May your plows seize up!” They have it coming, don’t you think? Methinks so. With all due respects to the modernists and moralists in this latest debate over public cursing, I could politely blue the air around me with various Elizabethan oaths over any number of far lesser offenses, like Donald Trump’s prematurely orange hair or the way the Weather Channel never shows weather anymore or why we have yet another Spider-man movie. But I shall I cease my thunder here. In the interest of cleaning up my own act and providing a good example, I shall therefore strive mightily to speak of higher things and calm my unruly tongue that would be sharper than a serpent tooth — unless I happen to see you stealing the noble Oreo at Harris Teeter. Then, knave, better get thee to a bleeping nunnery swiftly! OH Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@ohenrymag.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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September 2012

O.Henry 11

O.Henry

short stories Your Guide to the Good Life in the Triad

O.Goodness

If you read the artist profile on Stephen Hale in last month’s O.Henry, then you probably know why he grows a handlebar mustache about this time each year. Because William Sydney Porter wore one. See Hale as Porter (aka O.Henry) September 6–9 or 13–16 during the Greensboro Historical Museum’s annual production of 5 by O.Henry, which features five of O.Henry’s short stories — some heartfelt, some just plumb funny — adapted for the stage by playwright Joseph Hoesl and packaged together with charming musical interludes. Call the Triad Stage Box Office at (336) 272-0160 for tickets, which are $15 for general admission, $12 for members, seniors and students. But the vintage barbershop music doesn’t stop there. On September 21, Hale and the 5 by O.Henry crew will take center stage again, this time at the O.Henry Hotel, to kick off 17 Days and celebrate William Sydney Porter’s 150th birthday with a gourmet dinner from America’s Gilded Age to benefit the Greensboro Historical Museum. “Dinner with O.Henry,” co-sponsored by O.Henry magazine and the O.Henry Hotel, features an exquisite five-course menu conceptualized by Green Valley Grill executive chef Leigh Hesling, plus period music and entertainment. Seats are $150 each. For reservations and more information, call (336) 617-0090 by September 14. AW

12 O.Henry

September 2012

Beer run

Here’s an idea: Go on a run, and then reward yourself with an ice-cold beer afterward because you know you deserve it. Or, better yet, sign up for the Race the Bar beer run that starts and ends at Natty Greene’s Pub & Brewing Company (345 South Elm Street, Greensboro) on September 22. After the race — 5k and 10k — runners are invited to Natty Greene’s birthday party, where those of age get two free beers to trick them into thinking they’re dancing better than they actually are to the live music. Race gun fires at 3 p.m. For tickets and information, visit www.racethebar.com. AW

stranger to Fiction

As a rock-star writer for the News & Record during the 1970s and ’80s, Greta Tilley, now Greta Medlin, specialized in long stories that never minded deadlines. “You’re not writing a book,” editors reminded the five-foot-three fireball with a Teletype tongue and a gossamer touch. Now, 25 years later, she’s done just that. The Tender Void is available from Amazon in paperback for $18.95, $9.99 for the Kindle version. A tale of childlike love lost and found, the story is hung on the slight and sweaty frame of South Carolina newspaper columnist Cooper Barnet, a lovable, aimless soul who collects misfit friends like socks collect lint. South Carolinians and music lovers, especially, will appreciate the iconic references woven into a story that deals with weighty topics — mental deficiencies, race, parental rights — in such a natural way that you don’t realize you’re thinking about Important Stuff. At the end, the only thing that might puzzle readers is why Medlin, now 65 and winner of the Ernie Pyle Award, a National Headliner, and two American Society of News Editors prizes, took so long to write a book. The answer is life. She tended to friends, dogs, divorce, new love and her mother, who recently died in Charleston, South Carolina, where Medlin spends most of her time when she’s not speeding to Greensboro to check on her house and friends here. Her novel will make you laugh. Make you cry. Make you yearn for the next one. But you might want to pop a Tru-Ade and sit a spell. MJ

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Short Stories Finding their Way Home

As theatergoers bustle into the Community Theatre of Greensboro’s annual production of The Wizard of Oz, activity behind the curtain is reaching a fever pitch. Children in Munchkinwear try to get a peek at Toto while avoiding Miss Gulch — aka the Wicked Witch. Dorothy has donned her iconic gingham dress and Glinda takes one more sip of water before riding her bubble up into the flies. Then, all at once the curtain rises and audience members are transported to the Land of Oz, where they will follow our heroine as she braves a tornado, a witch, flying monkeys and a bumbling wizard in her quest to return home. Sitting in the audience, we wonder if Dorothy will ever get safely back to Kansas after her very long day. For the Community Theatre of Greensboro — CTG — the journey “home” has taken more than 60 years. That’s how long the nonprofit had no place to call home. Until now. CTG is on the home stretch of its first-ever capital campaign — dubbed “There’s No Place Like Home” — and is closing in on its goal of raising $2 million to purchase 520 South Elm Street to be its permanent home. CTG came to life in 1949 when a group of actors banded together. Over the years that community has grown in number and the productions staged have grown in complexity and reach, but the community in CTG has remained its core value — and strength. Which is why the theater group wants a permanent home: “We have 63 years of family,” says CTG’s Executive Director Mitchel Sommers. “Many of them are still in the area. They’ve grown up and have children in the theater. So we are your community theater and this is a once-in-alifetime opportunity.” Sommers believes a permanent space will provide some important things, including the ability to expand programs, provide stability and be a visible part of the renaissance of downtown Greensboro. It’s also an opportunity for the community of Greensboro to really own a stake in its theater, Sommers says. Foundations and corporations have thrown their support behind the theater, but it’s the support of the individuals whose lives have been directly affected by the work of CTG that speaks volumes, says Sally B. Cone, a long-time CTG supporter and co-chair, with Adrian T. Smith, of the campaign. “I think Community Theatre really does occupy a unique niche,” says Cone. “It really is a community asset and it brings people together who otherwise would not know each other. And together they create something bigger than themselves.” By Shari Masters ______________ Lovers of theater will find a delightful mix of shows in Community of Greensboro’s 2012–2013 season. The opening act will be My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, October 5–14, followed by the magical Wizard of Oz, November 10–18. The new year brings Tony Award–winning Doubt: A Parable, running February 8–17. The musical Cabaret will play March 8–24, and the season ends with My Big, Gay Italian Wedding, May 3–12. Visit ctgso. org to learn more.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

sauce of the Month

The sign says Beef Burger, but customers stubbornly call it Biff Burger. One thing’s for sure. The signature sauce in which the rotisserie-broiled, 100 percent beef burgers are dipped is the real deal. Ralph Havis, who’s flipped Biff Burgers since 1961 and owns the unit, clearly remembers the day that Earl P. Brame, Biff Burger’s founder and inventor of the RotoRed Broiler, “came by and said, ‘I’m going to give you the recipe.’” Havis wrote it down and to his knowledge, no one else has it. The label says ketchup, mustard and relish. It is, of course, the “secret” spices, 27 of them, Havis winks, that make the difference. You can pick up a bottle at the restaurant on 1040 West Lee Street or at Bessemer Curb Market. DCB

Dog-ear this Page

Tech-savvy book lovers, check your online calendars. On September 8, the BOOKMARKS 2012 Festival of Books — the only free annual book festival in North Carolina — happens in the Downtown Arts District of Winston-Salem. Consider bookmarking the following website, www.bookmarksnc.org, so you can access the complete list of over 45 authors scheduled to attend. Or, simply show up. The all-star line-up includes Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Horwitz, Emmy and Edgar Award winner Michael Malone, former North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, plus an array of New York Times bestselling authors, and performances from seven-time Grammy nominated storyteller and folk singer John McCutcheon. Book talks, book signings, workshops, panel discussions and entertainment are scheduled from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., including events for children of all ages. For more information and to learn about the nonprofit organization that makes this free book festival possible, visit the website you’ve already bookmarked, or call (336) 460-4722. And don’t forget to tweet all your friends about it. AW

September 2012

O.Henry 13

Most Requested Recipe

Good Methodist Cooking By David C. Bailey

ome years ago, Claudia Hufham had arranged for members of Christ United Methodist Church to bring covered dishes to the house of a friend who’d just had surgery. “As the parade of women came in with this and that — every one of the items looking more yummy than the one before — I kept saying, ‘I want that recipe.’” That’s when she decided to update the church’s 1960s-era community cookbook. The resulting 250-plus-page cookbook is filled with family favorites, from Bible-school bread to elephant stew, from crock-pot chicken Parisienne to calico salad, from Nanny’s mayonnaise biscuits to Martha Washington’s ginger cakes. Two of the recipes in the cookbook are presidential, both of them provided by Paula Trivette — mac and cheese and hamburger soup that were favorites of former President Ronald Reagan. Presently a nurse at Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, Trivette served as White House nurse for two-and-a-half years under Reagan and then four more years under George Herbert Walker Bush. Founded on land donated by West Market Street Methodist Church, Christ United Methodist Church’s first fellowship hall was consecrated on North Holden Road in 1959, three years after members began meeting at Sternberger School. In 2000, the church was building a new kitchen and needed to stock it with cooking utensils. Raising funds to equip the kitchen gave Hufham the impetus to publish the new cookbook. A cookbook committee was formed: “That’s how the Methodists do it. Always a committee,” Hufham says, “and I sent out the invitation to help with the book.” If they’d published every recipe that came in, she says, the book would have easily been a thousand pages long. The book’s title came to Hufham one day when she was organizing recipes by category and had hundreds of scribbled recipe cards spread all over her bed. “My son came into my room and said, ‘Holy cow! What is all this?’ And there it was, ‘Holy Chow,’” she says. One of Paula Trivette’s favorite recipes didn’t come from the Reagans. “I got it from a dear friend who made it while attending Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1970s,” Trivette says. Think of it as the ultimate coffee cake, she says, made with dates and chocolate chips. “This is one of the most moist and delicious coffee cakes to ever pass from your lips to your hips.”

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Chocolate Chip-Date Cake

1 1/2½ cups minced dates 3¾ /4 cup margarine 2 1/2½ cups flour 1 1/2½ cups sugar 2 1/4¼ cups boiling water 3 eggs 1 1/2½ teaspoons salt 1 1/2½ teaspoons soda Add dates and margarine to boiling water and cool for half an hour. Beat eggs; add sugar. Mix flour, baking soda and salt and add to egg mixture. Stir in date mixture. Pour batter into a greased 9- by 13-inch pan (batter will be thin). Sprinkle the following mixture on top of the cake: 1 cup mini chocolate chips 1/2½ cup sugar 1/2½ cup chopped nuts Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes. The most requested recipe in the book? Hard to say, but it’s September, consider cooking a batch of Samantha Hunter’s Awesome Green Beans:

4 cans cut green beans, drained, or a big mess of freshly picked green beans 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup margarine 1¼ /4 cup soy sauce 1-2 teaspoons garlic powder Lots of bacon Heat brown sugar, margarine, soy sauce and garlic powder until sugar is smooth. Put beans in Pyrex dish and cut up pieces of bacon on top (the bacon can be fried first to cut down on fat). Pour sugar sauce over top. Bake at 350 degrees until the bacon is crisp. Copies of “Holy Chow” are available at the Christ United Methodist Church office, 410 North Holden Road, for $15 or call the church at (336) 299-1571 or click on www.christgreensboro. org, selecting the contact link. September 2012

O.Henry 15

Julia unshorn, santa Incognito, and a soapy Kiss at summer’s end

The City Muse

by aShley Wahl

t’s hardly a sleepy Sunday. Vintage fixed-gear bikes are double-bunked on downtown racks. Couples share amber ale on the patio at Natty Greene’s with growlers to-go. A hippie hobbles by with crutches, one bandanna to tie back a tangled mass of wild blonde hair, another as a makeshift knee brace. Summer is still here, but that breeze — so slight it may have been imagined — brings promise of the coming autumn.

v At the South Elm Urban Market, a hunky man with suntanned skin hands out morsels of sweetgrass — not the psychoactive type. Despite the name, the grass tastes delightfully bitter. “It makes a beautiful garnish for fish,” says the vendor, who assures me they sell out of the stuff every week. In addition to sweetgrass, Robinson-Hill Farm sells green beans, red basil and yellow flowers, all from Orange County. Pick a fruit: cherry, pear or strawberry. They’ve got each variant of heirloom tomato. Across the lot, the Seersucker Chef, who looks just like the lad on the label, offers samples of Comeback Sauce and Bloody Mary mix. Unless you’re allergic, try his boiled peanut hummus and bewilder your tastebuds. One vendor makes stuffed animals from recycled fabric. Another leisurely strums his acoustic guitar, luring customers to a spread of fresh legumes. Sticky-faced children sink their teeth into fresh peaches and taste the end of summer.

But a screenplay he sent to the Purple Rose Theatre might be his lucky break. With a twinkle in his eye, he paints the scene of a play he calls Just After the Ice Cream Cone Was Invented, which is set in Paris, France, in 1905. Spoiler alert: Not about ice cream. It’s about a med student who falls hopelessly in love with a prostitute. Visions of Julia Roberts, underarms unshorn, begin to surface. “Did I mention, my leg is forty-four inches from hip to toe . . .” says la jolie femme. I can almost hear her with a French accent.

v Bubbles stream from an A-frame birdhouse at Just Be, an artisan gift shop on the corner of South Elm Street and West McGee. Inside, whimsy continues. The play list: Indie folk and electronic rock. Literary birds — painted on the backs of Reader’s Digest covers — hang, framed, on the wall. Wire wrap rings are sweet little things, but a necklace display makes me want to ferret grandma’s spoon collection. Burlington artist Christy Gunter repurposes vintage silverware, particularly spoons, to make fanciful jewelry. Bowls, hammered flat, become blank canvases — elegant pendants embellished with romantic flowers, hummingbirds, or perhaps a single feather. Back outside, bohemian women wait at the crosswalk. Boys roll down car windows, sharing their bass with the outside world. I follow a wandering bubble and watch it give the Earth a soapy kiss.

On a sunny patch of sidewalk, Alson sells postcards, three for $5. Jolly, rosy-cheeked, and with a great white beard, he looks like Santa incognito. As if that blue bucket hat were fooling anyone . . . The postcards are prints of his oil-pastel works — ethereal women in golden fields and fiery forests. When Alson isn’t making art, he says, he writes. “I’ve received lovely, hand-written rejection letters from The New Yorker.”

On bike, summer’s end is more bearable. I breeze past a twenty-something texting on a tree stump in front of Cheesecakes by Alex. Maybe she’d rather have ice cream. Or, perhaps, thinks she feels autumn’s whisper. OH

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Our muse, O.Henry associate editor Ashley Wahl, is a born wanderer.

September 2012

O.Henry 17

now playing.

THEATRE ART MUSIC

SEPT.-DEC. 2012 SCHEDULE

August 31-September 29 Opening reception Friday, Sept. 7, 5:00-7:00pm

“jetsam”

by Mark Brown, guest artist Cowan Galleries. 9am-5pm weekdays; 12-5pm Saturdays Free and open to the public

September 19-23

Carve

by Molly Smith Metzler directed by Andy Scott - senior directing major Annie Sellars Jordan Parlor Theatre, Main building Visit finearts.greensboro.edu for show times.

September 21

Jim Cole and Friends Live: Remembering Christopher Mason

7:00-9:00pm, Gail Brower Huggins Performance Center This concert will celebrate the life of Christopher Mason, a Greensboro College security guard who died while off-duty in December 2012. The event is free. A love offering will be col collected for the trust fund of Christopher’s young daughter.

September 25

Organ Concert with Susan Bates

7:30pm, Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel

September 27

UNDERWONDERING: Making art in the subterranean world of Cappadocia, Turkey Artists talk by Ted Efremoff Anne Rudd Galyon Gallery, Cowan Hall. 3:45pm-4:30pm. Free and open to the public

September 29-October 2

Children’s Theatre Production: Senõra Tortuga by Roxanne Schroeder-Arce directed by Elia Maria Lintz, senior theatre major Annie Sellars Jordan Parlor Theatre, Main building Visit finearts.greensboro.edu for show times.

October 5 - November 2

October 12

Homecoming Weekend Showcase produced by Ashley Hyers Visit finearts.greensboro.edu for show times.

October 14

Fall Choral Concert

4:00pm, Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel

October 19-20

Opera “Buffet” Performances 6:00pm, Lea Center, Main building

October 31-November 4

Chemical Imbalance, a Jekyll and Hyde Play by Lauren Wilson directed by David Schram, faculty Visit finearts.greensboro.edu for show times.

November 8

Musicians’ Honors Convocation

11:30am, Gail Brower Huggins Performance Center

November 9 - December 7 Opening reception Friday, Nov. 9, 5:00-7:00pm

Fall Senior Show & Fall Courses Show and LIFT OFF: Lift Gallery Grand Opening Cowan Galleries. 9am-5pm weekdays; 12-5pm Saturdays Free and open to the public

November 28-December 2

[title of show]

Music and lyrics by Jeff Bowen Book by Hunter Bell directed by Perry Morgan, faculty Annie Sellars Jordan Parlor Theatre, Main building Visit finearts.greensboro.edu for show times.

December 2

47th Annual Festival of Lessons and Carols 7:00pm, Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel

Alumni Show

December 5

Free and open to the public

7:30pm, Gail Brower Huggins Performance Center

Cowan Galleries. 9am-5pm weekdays; 12-5pm Saturdays

Jazz Ensemble Concert

finearts.greensboro.edu or call 336-217-7220

FOR SHOW TIMES,

visit

TICKETS

All performances and exhibits are open to the public. Unless otherwise noted, tickets for music and theatre performances are available by contacting Greensboro College or at a first come, first served basis at the door. Admission is free for Greensboro College students, faculty and staff.

DETAILS AND

The Omnivorous Reader

The American Maupassant On his 150th birthday, O.Henry’s many biographers are still searching for the essential man

By sTePhen e. sMiTh

“I

“If Henry James, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells were planning a cocktail party, O.Henry would not be on the guest list.” That’s how a brash American literature professor explained the absence of William Sydney Porter’s name from the syllabus for his graduate course in the American short story. When I heard this bit of sophistic snobbery, I wasn’t the least surprised. I didn’t think of O.Henry as an important American writer — or, for that matter, as an essential North Carolina writer. I’d read “The Ransom of Red Chief” in high school, and I’d seen O.Henry’s Full House, a film anthology of five O.Henry stories, which starred Marilyn Monroe, Charles Laughton and Richard Widmark to no good effect. Even an introduction by a chainsmoking John Steinbeck did little to enhance the Hollywoodized vignettes. When I finally got around to purchasing David Stuart’s biography of O.Henry, a dust jacket blurb from Kirkus Review only reinforced my initial opinion: “O.Henry’s actual experiences may have been more interesting than his fictions,” the reviewer wrote. So here’s the question: Is William Sydney Porter the American Maupassant or simply a trickster whose formulaic fiction has only cheapened the short story form? Whatever the answer, there’s no denying that O.Henry was a force in American popular culture during the first half of the 20th century. His stories were widely published in magazines and newspapers, and five collections of his work appeared during his lifetime. After the First World War, O.Henry’s literary reputation was commensurate with that of James, Conrad, and Wharton, and in 1919 the Society of Arts and Sciences began awarding the annual O.Henry Prize (now the PEN/O.Henry Prize) to a writer who has made a major contribution to the art of the short story. But as reading audiences grew more sophisticated, O.Henry’s stock began to plummet. He was accused of being “insincere,” a literary charlatan who manipulated his audience, a writer who cared more about money than art for art’s sake. Anyone who’s had the patience to read O.Henry’s collected stories will acknowledge that plot patterns and themes are repeated and that his characters tend to be two-dimensional. And O.Henry didn’t help his

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

case when he wrote: “Writing is my business, it is my way of getting money to pay room rent, to buy food and clothes and Pilsner. I write for no other purpose.” The key to understanding O.Henry and the stories he produced in such profusion can be found in the biographies, which focus on the negative forces at work in his life — his unhappy childhood in Greensboro, the death of his wife Athol in 1897, and especially his February 1898 conviction for embezzlement. The first published biography, O.Henry Biography, was written by Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, a literary critic and Porter’s childhood friend. Published in 1916, most of Smith’s conclusions are based on primary source material, and the majority of the later biographies draw heavily on Smith’s research. O.Henry Biography, which is available in reprint, is required reading for all O.Henry admirers. The events of O.Henry’s life are generally agreed upon in the biographies, although Gerald Langford’s Alias O.Henry and Richard O’Connor’s O.Henry are reluctant to accept Porter’s claim of innocence regarding the charges of embezzlement. Smith’s 1916 biography maintains that Porter’s conviction was partly based on an error in the dating of the indictment which “has remained to this moment unnoticed,” and the majority of later biographies repeat Smith’s assertion. Generally, the biographies present Porter as a shy, gentle, likeable fellow who surely had his vices, although embezzlement wasn’t among them, and they maintain that he would not have been convicted had he not fled to Honduras to avoid prosecution. North Carolina readers may find themselves a trifle dismayed by Langford’s assertion that the blame for Porter’s troubles, including his embezzlement, stem from his upbringing in Greensboro: “In short, Will felt himself to be an alien in Greensboro. He was the talented poor boy, pitiable on account of a family situation which deprived him of the advantages and opportunities enjoyed by his less gifted comrades.” According to Langford, young Porter retreated within himself and “This disinclination to face reality was to be intensified by several later experiences, and was to become a lifelong handicap both in his life and in his writing.” David Stuart’s O.Henry provides slightly less biographical material than the Langford volume but includes extensive endnotes and a useful selected bibliography. Stuart also acknowledges that Porter’s time in Greensboro September 2012

O.Henry 19

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20 O.Henry

September 2012

was difficult: “Long after Will Porter had cast the dust of Greensboro off his shoes and had become O.Henry, he confided to a friend that his childhood years were not very happy. . . .” For a more positive view of Porter’s Greensboro connection, Cathleen Pike’s 1957 monograph O.Henry in North Carolina presents Porter’s formative years in a more sympathetic light. She also documents O.Henry’s occasional use of North Carolina settings in his stories. Trueman O’Quinn and Jenny Porter’s A Time To Write details O.Henry’s trial and vaguely concludes that “the final judgment on Will Porter of Austin was written by O.Henry in his story ‘The Roads We Take’. . . . O’Quinn and Porter pad their cursory biography with the 12 stories O.Henry wrote during his confinement. Although most of the O.Henry biographies published after 1950 are out of print, used copies are readily available from online book dealers and by way of interlibrary loan. The Complete Works O.Henry Authorized Edition is available in 12 volumes, new and used, and O.Henry: A Study of His Fiction by Eugene Current-Garcia is useful in understanding O.Henry’s esthetic, such as it is. If the available biographies leave you dissatisfied, the Greensboro Public Library online portal directs readers to the Greensboro Historical Museum and the Greensboro News and Record. Other items such as O.Henry’s published stories, as well as finding aids and/or artifacts in collections from other institutions, including UNC, Duke and UVA, can be accessed on the website. The Portal to Texas History offers an online collection of published materials and contains digital reproductions of handwritten letters, photographs, legal documents, newspaper articles, artifacts and maps drawn and signed by Porter. North Carolinians will be amused to read in the portal’s introduction that “O.Henry was born in Greensborough, South Carolina. . . .” Although O.Henry’s writing doesn’t draw heavily on his North Carolina roots, there’s no denying that he’s a Tar Heel by birth and upbringing. His formative and most impressionable years were spent in the state, and he’s buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery. In the old State Supreme Court building in Raleigh, a bronze tablet bears a quotation from O.Henry’s story “Brickdust Row”: “He saw no longer the rabble but his brothers seeking the ideal” — a twist that Will Porter, convicted felon, would have appreciated. OH Stephen Smith’s most recent book of poetry is A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths. He can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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O.Henry 21

Gate City Icons

Miss Martha Speaks

Weaned on Nancy Drew and Journalism, Greensboro’s beloved — and politically feared — society editor would never, ever tell all By Maria Johnson

22 O.Henry

September 2012

One day, an editor asked her if she’d like a summer job. Butchie — the nickname came from a bad perm, which earned her the tag Bushy, which morphed into Butchie — jumped at the chance. “It was a long summer,” she says, her blue-green eyes twinkling behind owlish frames. “I retired 44 years later.” She covered tea parties and weddings at first. Then she told her boss, Anne White, that she’d found a good recipe and asked if she could put it in the paper. The next thing Martha knew, she was the food editor. She wrote a column called A La Carte. She went to cooking school. She attended food conferences at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Later, she was named women’s page editor, then society writer. She hated the term “society,” even though she dabbled in that world herself. She married Bradley Long, a nephew of then-Gov. William Umstead, in 1953. Their wedding announcement and her picture were on the front page. She still cringed inside when people introduced her as the society writer. It implied that she was a lightweight. She didn’t want to be lightweight. But she wanted to work. So she did her job as professionally as she could. She tried to cover events with news value. She wrote about presidents Ford and Carter when they came to Elon College, now Elon University. She wrote a news story about the engagement of District Court Judge Elreta Alexander. She was miffed when an editor rewrote her copy to point out that Alexander was black and her fiancé was white. Martha tried to see past race. It wasn’t easy, she says, for a white girl from eastern North Carolina. She worked at it, covering functions all over the city. Dinners. Dances. Luncheons. Teas. She worked day and night writing her column, teaching Sunday school, and raising three daughters — Leigh Anna, Martha Bradley, and Susan. A cloud moves across Martha’s face when she mentions Martha Bradley, who died at age 40. “There’s nothing like losing a child. And if someone says something to me about closure, I might throw a rotten tomato at them. It gets better, and you can laugh about funny things they did. But closure? I can’t stand that word.” The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photograph By Cassie Butler

elieve it or not, she was shy. Martha Long — scribe of the Greensboro society scene for more than a dozen years — never felt comfortable walking up to strangers and asking questions at parties. She waited for them to come to her. They always did. Martha would set down her punch, and pick up her pen, and jot down where they’d vacationed, and where their children went to prep school, and where they had a second home, and how much money was raised for the cause, and who wore what, and what was served, and most important of all, who else was there. Then the little lady with a smoke-cured voice and cap of white hair trotted back to the newspaper, typed up a tenth of what she knew, and slapped it on the society page, where it appeared in the Greensboro Daily News and later in the News & Record. From 1978 to 1992, people slurped it up with their morning coffee, whether they admitted it or not. “Somebody told me, ‘I want you to know a lot of companies, when they appoint a new CEO that comes from out of town, one of the first things they tell them to do is read your column,’” Martha recalls. She’s 85 now, recently retired from a second career behind the counter at Cass Jewelers. She has just enough dings to remind her that her body is older than her mind. “I think, ‘Can I be 85 years old? How are you supposed to act when you’re 85?’” She wants to get a few things done. Nothing exotic. She’d like to spend more time with her five grandsons and finish the books that line her studio apartment in Friends Homes at Guilford. Her hearing isn’t what it used to be, but she still heeds the siren’s call she heard as a child growing up in Halifax County in northeastern North Carolina. The call came from Nancy Drew mysteries, and Aesop’s fables, and a book about a little boy named Epaminondas. She followed the call to Greensboro College, then an all-girls school, where she studied English and journalism under Miss Mary L. Ginn. On Sundays, she met Miss Ginn and the other journalism students — they called themselves Ginn’s Girls — for lunch with the women who worked at the Greensboro Daily News. It was networking before networking was cool. Ginn’s Girls wrote campus doings for the newspaper. Martha took a turn her senior year. She carried her stories to Miss Ginn on Saturday afternoons, waited for her to finish listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, sat around while Miss Ginn edited her stories, then caught the trolley or walked uptown wearing a hat, as all GC girls did when they went out.

Gate City Icons Martha pressed on at home and at work. One night after a party, she hurried back to the paper to finish her column for Sunday. It was late. She was tired. She dashed out a headline about a bridal luncheon in southern Guilford County: “Bride Entertained at Climax.” She didn’t realize the double meaning until she read the headline on Sunday. She laughs at the memory. She laughs at a lot of memories. Once, she wrote in great haste that a man had attended a party with his late wife, not his current wife. Most people never complained about her reportage. But some did — in socially acceptable ways, of course. One debutante club stopped sending pictures to the newspaper after Martha mentioned another deb club’s event a few paragraphs above theirs. Another organization stopped sending her invitations after she wrote a piece pointing out that she’d been invited to lunch, then not served. “Someone called me up a couple years later and said, ‘I was cleaning out a drawer and found a clipping of that column of yours. I read it again, and I got the biggest laugh,’ ” she says. For the most part, Martha — her Tidewater accent turns it into Moth-ah — enjoyed her job. She once received a bottle of champagne with a party invitation as the label. Occasionally, society folks ferried her to their dos in a limousine. She ran into few snobs, but usually if she felt uncomfortable around rich folks it was her own doing. “When I went to those homes for a sit-down meal or lunch, I guess I was a little uptight about it. I’m sure I was. I know I was. Admit it, Martha,” she says, scolding herself. “Those weren’t people I normally went around with, and it was hard to get in on the situation unless they directed a question to me. I was always a little apprehensive about my conduct, I guess.” Turns out, her subjects were just as apprehensive around her. “Somebody once said, ‘You know, they’re scared to death of you,’” she says. She knew a lot about them. Who was late paying bills. Who slept in the nude.

Who was fooling around with whom. Who was gay. She never wrote about any of those things. If someone asked her to keep a tidbit confidential, she did. Don’t worry, dahling. She’s not going to change that now. She cracks a wry smile. Time is a scandal’s best friend. “I’ve forgotten so much, I couldn’t tell it anyway,” she says. MARTHA ON: • Whether newspapers should revive society columns: “Yes, they should in the local paper. As far as I’m concerned, they can bring back the fire calls and the police blotter, too. I love to read that stuff. And real estate transfers. I was so disappointed when they stopped running those. You could find out about divorces and all kinds of stuff you didn’t know by reading the real estate transfers.” • On men in party attire: “I’ve never seen one I didn’t think looked good in a tuxedo. In fact, I think all men look better when they’re cleaned up with a coat and tie on. Now, you tell me something. Why do men on the TV wear a suit coat or blazer with blue jeans? I’ve never thought a pair of blue jeans — even if you pay $225 for them — look good at a cocktail party.” • On what a city official once told her: “She said I had more men readers than I had women readers. Maybe I did. Men are just as curious as women. They don’t talk a big line, except to each other, but I think they want to know what’s going on as much as women do.” • On volunteering to spend nights at a homeless women’s shelter a few years ago: “I wanted to know what I was made of, if I had conquered everything I wanted to conquer. Do you know when I left there, I loved every last one of those girls? I did. If you ever heard what those girls have been through, you’d never call them ‘no good.’” OH Maria Johnson is a regular contributing editor of O.Henry.

Arts & Culture OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind A Comedy-Drama of Character by Alice Childress

Kingdom of Earth A Southern Gothic by Tennessee Williams

SEPT 2 – 23, 2012

FEB 10 – MAR 3, 2013

Shipwrecked!

My Fair Lady

An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself)

A Theatrical Escapade by Donald Margulies

A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

OCT 14 – NOV 4, 2012

APR 7 – MAY 5, 2013

A Christmas Carol*

Tennessee Playboy

A Holiday Tale

A Redneck Romance

by Preston Lane freely adapted from J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens adapted by Preston Lane

DEC 2 – 23, 2012

JUN 9 – 30, 2013

ON SALE SALE NOW! NO OW!

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Productions, P r od u c t i o n s , a artists r ti s t s a and nd d dates ates ssubject ubjec t tto o cchange. h a n g e. **A AC HR I S T M A S C AROL iiss not not part par t of of S e a son P as s p a c kage s . CHRISTMAS CAROL Season Pass packages.

September 2012

O.Henry 23

Arts & Culture OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind A Comedy-Drama of Character by Alice Childress

Arts &CULTURE Kingdom of Earth A Southern Gothic

by Tennessee Williams

SEPT 2 – 23, 2012

FEB 10 – MAR 3, 2013

Shipwrecked!

An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself)

My Fair Lady

A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

A Theatrical Escapade by Donald Margulies

OCT 14 – NOV 4, 2012

APR 7 – MAY 5, 2013

A Christmas Carol*

October Oct ober 12 & 115, 5, 2012 Tennessee Playboy

Bell C Be Canto anto A Au u Naturel Naturel

A Redneck Romance

A Holiday Tale DEC 2 – 23, 2012

JUN 9 – 30, 2013

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24 O.Henry

September 2012

‘Tis tthe he Season ason

by Preston Lane December ecemberr 1 & 33,, 2012 freely adapted from J. M.D Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens adapted by Preston Lane

Amore Amor e

February F ebruary 16,, 201 20133

Bach’s Johannes-Passion Bach Johannes-P s-P Pas ssion March M arch 10, 201 2013 3

Headed H eaded H Home ome April A pril 2277 & 29, 29, 9 2013 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Arts & Culture OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind A Comedy-Drama of Character by Alice Childress

Kingdom of Earth A Southern Gothic by Tennessee Williams

SEPT 2 – 23, 2012

FEB 10 – MAR 3, 2013

Shipwrecked!

My Fair Lady

An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself)

A Theatrical Escapade by Donald Margulies

A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

OCT 14 – NOV 4, 2012

APR 7 – MAY 5, 2013

A Christmas Carol*

Tennessee Playboy

A Holiday Tale

A Redneck Romance

by Preston Lane freely adapted from J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens adapted by Preston Lane

DEC 2 – 23, 2012

JUN 9 – 30, 2013

ON SALE SALE NOW! NO OW!

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

O.Henry 25

Arts & Culture OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind A Comedy-Drama of Character by Alice Childress

Arts &CULTURE Kingdom of Earth A Southern Gothic

by Tennessee Williams

SEPT 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 23, 2012

FEB 10 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; MAR 3, 2013

Shipwrecked!

An Entertainmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;The Amazing Adventures of Louis for de Rougemont Told by Himself) Institute Church(asLeadership

The Reynolds A Theatrical Escapade at Greensboro College presents

My Fair Lady

A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pygmalion

RELIGION AND THE ARTS by Donald Margulies

OCT 14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; NOV 4, 2012

APR 7 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; MAY 5, 2013

A Christmas Carol*

Tennessee Playboy A Redneck Romance

A Holiday Tale

by Preston Lane freely adapted from J. M. Syngeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens adapted by Preston Lane

DEC 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 23, 2012

A SERIES OF HANDS-ON WORKSHOPS AND A 3-WEEK SHORT-TERM COURSE

JUN 9 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 30, 2013

ON SALE SALE NOW! NO OW!

Productions, P r od u c t i o n s , a artists r ti s t s a and nd d dates ates ssubject ubjec t tto o cchange. h a n g e. HANDS-ON WORKSHOPS Free, open to the public **A AC HR I S T M A S C AROL iiss not not part par t of of S e a son P as s p a c kage s . CHRISTMAS CAROL Season Pass packages. Workshops are held at Christ United Methodist Church. Space is limited. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged.

Pottery as a Spiritual Practice with Professor Janet Gaddy Wednesday, September 19 and 26 (6:30-7:30 p.m.)

23(1 -8/< 7+58 '(&(0%(5

Video Art with Professor Ted Efremoff Wednesday, October 3 and 10 (6:30-7:30 p.m.) Drawing Me Out with Professor Jim Langer Wednesday, October 17 (6:30-7:30 p.m.) Staging a Nativity with Professor John Saari Wednesday, October 24 (6:30-7:30 p.m.) SHORT-TERM COURSE $30 fee for 3-week course Course sessions are held Tuesday evenings at Christ United Methodist Church. Advance registration is encouraged. Handelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Messiah Up Close with Professor Jon Brotherton November 27, December 4, and December 11 (7:00-8:30 p.m.) FOR DETAILS AND TO REGISTER, VISIT www.greensboro.edu/community/reynoldsicl

QUESTIONS? Contact Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch by email at bletschr@greensboro.edu or by phone at 336-272-7102, ext. 304

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26 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Arts & Culture OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind A Comedy-Drama of Character by Alice Childress

Kingdom of Earth A Southern Gothic by Tennessee Williams

SEPT 2 – 23, 2012

FEB 10 – MAR 3, 2013

Shipwrecked!

My Fair Lady

An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself)

A Theatrical Escapade by Donald Margulies

A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

OCT 14 – NOV 4, 2012

APR 7 – MAY 5, 2013

A Christmas Carol*

Tennessee Playboy

A Holiday Tale

A Redneck Romance

by Preston Lane freely adapted from J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens adapted by Preston Lane

DEC 2 – 23, 2012

JUN 9 – 30, 2013

ON SALE SALE NOW! NO OW!

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

O.Henry 27

Arts & Culture

ȽȞǸȞȐѮ ȊɤȃǸɜȐѮ $ȽɕɌȨɑȐѱ

OUR O U R 12 12 TTHH SEASON S E A S O N 22012 0 12 - 2013 2 0 13

Trouble in Mind

A Comedy-Drama of Character

by Alice Childress V  P A | F S

SEPT 2 – 23, 2012

The Robert E. Elberson Fine Arts Center ANNE KESLER SHIELDS

Shipwrecked!

60 Years: Portraits and An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures Appropriated Images (as Told by Himself) of Louis de Rougemont August 27 through December 15

A Theatrical An exhibit of portraitsEscapade and large-scale collage by Donald Margulies installations by Anne Kesler Shields, WinstonSalem’sOCT most accomplished artist. Reception— 14 – NOV living 4, 2012 Friday, September 7, 6–8 p.m. Mary Davis Holt Gallery

A Christmas Carol*

SANDRESKY ARTIST FACULTY SERIES A Holiday Tale

A Southern Gothic by Tennessee Williams

FEB 10 – MAR 3, 2013

My Fair Lady A Broadway Legend

book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner music by Frederick Loewe adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

APR 7 – MAY 5, 2013

Tennessee Playboy A Redneck Romance

by Preston Lane freely adapted from J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World

by Charles Dickens Celebrating Salem Colleges’s adapted by Preston Lane Organ Legacy—Instruments, DEC 2 – 23, 2012 Teachers and Students

September 15

Kingdom of Earth

JUN 9 – 30, 2013

Honoring legendary teachers John and Margaret Mueller and their influence in the Baroque organ movement in America through a symposium and performances on the historic Flentrop organ. r od u c t i o n s , a artists r ti s t s a and nd d dates ates ssubject ubjec t tto o cchange. h a n g e. Featuring: Barbara Lister-Sink, Susan Perkins,PProductions, **A AC HR I S T M A S C AROL iiss not not part par t of of S e a son P as s p a c kage s . CHRISTMAS CAROL Season Pass packages. and a gala recital with world-renowned organist and scholar Kimberly Marshall and Salem organ professor Timothy Olsen. Free event. Schedule: www.salem.edu/culturalevents. Shirley Recital Hall

ON SALE SALE NOW! NO OW!

ACCLAIMED SPANISH “POET OF THE GUITAR”

Maestro Soler September 19 7:30 p.m.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with critically acclaimed Maestro Soler, hailed as one of the most notable artists of the guitar world. Free event. Reception follows performance. Shirley Recital Hall

SALEM COLLEGE PIERRETTES PRESENT

“A Piece of My Heart” September 27-29 8 p.m. September 30 3 p.m.

The odyssey of six women—five nurses and one USO entertainer—during the Vietnam War, written by Shirley Lauro. Drama Workshop Admission: $9 general admission, $7 for students Tickets may be purchased at the door. Advance tickets: 336/917-5493 or culturalevents@salem.edu.

www.salem.edu/culturalevents | 336/917-5313

601 South Church Street Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27101

28 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Wine Guy

Sparkling Wine, Anytime

French Champagne inspired a world of delicious sparkling wines ﬁt for any occasion By TC FraZier

op! Fizz . . . the sound alone can be intoxicating. It makes the ears perk up and the tastebuds salivate. No, I’m not talking about a can of soda — or pop for you Northern transplants. I’m talking about the bubbles, the fizz, the bubbly, sparkling wine. Whether you drink it every week or only once a year, consuming this awe-inspiring beverage is truly an event. At some point in your life, you have inevitably heard the phrase, “break out the Champagne.” Whether it was during a wedding, graduating from college or ringing in the New Year, “bubbles” have always been associated with positive things. Lets face it; it’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re drinking a tall flute of the delicious nectar. According to legend, Marilyn Monroe once took a bath in 350 bottles of champagne. Why not? I can think of worse ways to relax! Almost every major wine-producing country in the world makes some form of sparkling wine. The Italians have their version called prosecco. The Spanish also make a fascinating sparkling wine called cava. However the real McCoy is about 90 miles northeast of Paris, France. Of course I’m talking about the holy grail of bottled fermented goodies, Champagne. Although wine has been made in the Champagne region since Roman times, the bubbly wine we call Champagne was not made until the end of the seventeenth century. Champagne has one of the coolest climates of any wine-producing area in the world. The cold temperatures halt fermentation before all of the sugar can turn into alcohol. As a result, when the spring comes, the warm weather wakes up the yeast and fermentation begins all over again. For years this frightened winemakers in the area. Wines made in Burgundy (Champagne’s arch rival) never bubbled. It would take years of painstaking trial and error from numerous individuals, including many French Benedictine monks, most notably Dom Pérignon, to convince the world they were onto something genuinely unique. Let’s face it, Champagne is not easy to make. The steps are involved and demanding, and the winemaking itself requires a special type of intellectual dexterity that can be daunting. It did not take long for winemakers all over Europe to bring the méthode Champenoise back to their respective countries and apply it to their vineyards. While the process to make sparkling wine is virtually identical,

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

especially for the top producers, the end result can be quite different. Climate, grape variety and winemaker preference are just a few variables. Some sparkling wines can be sweet and have almost no fizz, but more of an effervescence like a moscato d’Asti from Italy. Some can be very citrusy with almost a hint of the Mediterranean coast such as wines made south of Barcelona, Spain. Believe it or not, a few can be as good as some of the Champagne’s best, grown in, of all places . . . New Mexico?! I once had someone tell me that drinking bubbles does not give you a hangover. While I cannot attest to that, it sure does have a tendency to go faster than other bottles. Just invite some friends over and give them the option of red, white or sparkling. I’ll bet when you offer the latter, they will sit straight up and say, “Oh . . . bubbles.” And it can be mixed with other beverages to form French martinis, mimosas and kir royals, to name a few. You can drink it in a tuxedo riding in a limo, or with shorts walking barefoot on the beach. All are appropriate and enjoyable. So while sparking wines seem to be the obvious choice when celebrating special occasions, I say there is no better time than the present. Cheers! SUGGESTED WINES Tiamo-Prosecco, Veneto, Italy Tiamo, which simply means “I love you” in Italian, is a line of wines, made with organic grapes. Fresh and rich, this prosecco has aromas of apple, pear and a hint of citrus, fading into the floral bouquet. Casteller-Cava, Penedes, Spain Top 100 values of 2010 by Wine Enthusiast Sparkling wine and bubbly lovers in the United States have discovered what an incredible value cava is, made exactly the same way as Champagne, with a second fermentation in the bottle. If you like bright, zesty citrus flavors and the fine bubbles of Champagne, try Casteller cava. Casteller means ”tower” in Spanish, a reference to a local Catalonian summer game where different clans compete to create the tallest human tower. Casteller cava exhibits green apple and citrus aromas. In the mouth, it has clean, crisp, fresh flavors with citruslime notes. Bessart de Bellafon Rosé Brut, Champagne, France Wine Spectator: 91 points Among wine drinkers who know their Champagne, rosé Champagnes are considered the crème de la crème. They are more expensive than golden Champanges because they are more difficult to produce and are rarer, accounting for less then 10 percent of all Champagnes exported. Besserat de Bellefon’s Cuvée de Moines line of Champagnes exhibits tiny bubbles, lighter pressure, finer mousse and a creamier texture, with crisp acidity and a more fruit-forward profile. OH TC Frazier lives in Greensboro and has been in the hospitality business since he was 14. He currently is employed with Dionysus Wine Distributors. September 2012

O.Henry 29

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September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Serial Eater

As O.Henry Lives and Eats

At the popular neighborhood eatery, good honest food and old friends shape the day

By David C. Bailey

Photograph By Cassie Butler

ost every afternoon at 4, Ed Holbrook grabs his spatula, gives the grill at O.Henry BBQ a good, hard scraping and completely forgets that he’s 75 years old. “Short-order cooking is nerve-racking,” says the lanky, long-limbed restaurateur. “They say, ‘You got to like it or it will kill you . . . and you’ve got to be crazy to like it.’” Most people burn out from the intense heat, the sheer hard work and the unrelenting pressure. Granted, Holbrook has had open-heart surgery, half a lung removed, pneumonia twice and congestive heart failure. “But I’m not in a nursing home or a wheelchair. That’s what I’m proud of,” he says with a wink and a smile. “I ain’t burnt out yet. I’m still burning.” And that’s after 58 years in the restaurant business and 46 years after he opened O.Henry Restaurant. Still, for some loyal regulars the name of the restaurant has always been — and always will be — the Rankin Grill: “It got its name from Rankin School because all of us went to school down there,” explains Mike Kivett, pointing down Summit Avenue toward downtown. “This right here, we grew up with it, and it grew up with us,” he says, making a sweeping gesture that takes in a dining room locked in time with its tufted naugahyde booths and swiveling, chrome stools. “I been coming here all my life. I know everyone here. I know all these young ’uns, and I know their mommas and daddies.” Kivett, who’s 64, grew up in nearby Koontztown. Turning the tabletop into a map, he explains, “Past the light was White Oak mill village, back this way was Koontztown,” pointing out a salt shaker. “That’s Lee Chapel Road. That’s where I lived at,” he says, motioning to a squeeze bottle of Texas Pete. “You go out to the second stoplight, that was Hamtown. Keep going and you’ll come into Rudd, North Carolina. The only thing there was a little bitty old store and a post office. They called it Rudd Station. If you coughed or sneezed you missed it.” Back then, the Rankin Grill was ground zero for cruising teenagers. “They had it going on here,” he recalls, his eyes sparkling. “It jumped all the time.” That and Gregory’s Drive Inn. “If you had a ride you went to Monroe’s Drive Inn.” Or Knuckle’s or, better yet, Bob Petty’s, “where you got two or three beers and then you were ready to go to Ruby’s Dance Land.” Barry Perdue is tucking into a plate of O.Henry’s country ham, hash browns and three eggs over easy with a biscuit, hand-rolled and baked that very morning. “I been coming here since I was 10 or 11 years old,” he says. “My grandmomma always said to eat a good breakfast, and I wasn’t going to wake my wife up at 5 o’clock to make me a good breakfast.” Perdue drives a van for C & J The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Ed Holbrook, 75, owns the O.Henry BBQ building and serves as the evening cook. Medical Transportation and starts work as early as 5 a.m. “They open up here at 5:30 or 6, but if they know you, they’ll let you in early,” he says — a courtesy unavailable at McDonald’s or Bojangles’ — but a long tradition at O.Henry. “We used to open between 3:30 and 4,” says Charles “Shorty” Holbrook, 69, the man who’s worn the head-cook-and-bottle-washing apron at O.Henry since 1993. He recalls how policemen and sheriff’s deputies used to get hungry and couldn’t wait until 4: “They’d come to the back door and bang on it to get in.” That was in the mid-1960s, after Ed Holbrook left the TV Grill across from the studios of WFMY-TV, to start his own restaurant. Earlier he’d worked in the Donut Dinette on Summit — and before that in a drive-in restaurant in Elkin (he’s originally from Traphill). At the time, the Rankin Grill was shuttered and he says he had to beg the owner to let him run it. Ed Holbrook remodeled and renamed it the O.Henry Restaurant, a tribute, he says, to the original 1919 O.Henry Hotel before it was imploded in 1971. For a few years Holbrook tried leasing the restaurant out to others, but then in 1993 he asked his brother-in-law, Shorty, who was working at the time at Bernie’s Barbecue on Bessemer, if he wanted to try running the restaurant. (The two men — despite having the same last name — are only related through Edward’s marriage to Shorty’s sister, the late Rosita Holbrook. Still, says Edward Holbrook, “Everybody is kin somewhere along the way. Think about it.”) With Edward’s help, Shorty reopened the restaurant as O.Henry BBQ, serving home-cooked meals, plus barbecue and slaw imported from Burlington’s Hursey’s Bar-B-Q. From the beginning, the food has been as familiar to people in the neighborhood as their momma’s voice: “country steak, fried chicken, meat loaf, flounder, beef tips in wine, salmon patties, chicken and tuna salad, chopped steak, that’s the main ones,” Shorty says. And lots of vegetables: pinto beans, corn, green beans, fried okra, squash, turnip greens and steamed cabbage. For dessert, there’s banana pudding, lemon meringue pie and, a favorite, peanut butter cake. “This here’s a country kitchen,” Shorty says. Breakfast, though, is where O.Henry really shines — doing what Biscuitville and Hardee’s can’t. Like making real gravy. Why not serve sausage gravy out of September 2012

O.Henry 31

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Serial Eater a can, as most restaurants do? “I can’t,” says Shorty. “I mean I ain’t. Everybody is used to our gravy and that’s what they want.” And then there are the biscuits: “He hand-makes them every morning,” says breakfast regular Connie Rumley. “That’s one of the reasons I come here.” The pork tenderloin is to die for, and the grits are cooked until they’re creamy and smooth. And how many restaurants today still serve brains and eggs? But O.Henry has something else other restaurants can’t offer: “It’s a home away from home,” Shorty says. Again and again, customers will tell you the real reason they come to the Rankin Grill, aka O.Henry BBQ, is to see neighbors and old friends and hang out with family — and joke with the wait staff. “I come up here to see these lovely waitresses every now and then,” Perdue says with a grin as his cup is being filled. His server rolls her eyes and moves on to her next customer. In a few moments, she can be overheard telling another customer, “If you drink any more coffee, you’re going to wee, wee, wee, all the way home.” Perdue continues: “My twin brother comes in here every Monday. He’s been coming in here since he was knee high to a grasshopper.” Sometimes, he says, the staff can’t tell one of them from the other. “Shorty’s always getting us confused,” he says mischievously. Sit down in a booth on a Saturday morning, and you’ll see, not just families but entire family trees — men and women all around you with their parents as well as grandchildren galore. “I’m here for breakfast. I’m here for lunch and I’m here for supper,” says Leroy Whitesell, who’s 64 and lives a quarter of a mile away. “We’ve got two or three grand young ’uns and they’re always calling us and wanting to come up here.” Still, says Whitesell, “This is a dying breed right here as far as I’m concerned, and I hate to see it go down because it’s been a good place for people for years and years.” “Everybody knows everybody,” says Judy Hammer, 72, who meets her sister, Jean Scott, 62, on most Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Lib Hough, 65, usually joins them and the three admit to being part of something called the breakfast club, “sorta, kinda,” says Hammer. Posted on the wall are photos of some of the 25 to 30 club members, who meet and eat and send get-well cards to anyone who’s homebound or in the hospital. And then there’s the Holbrook family: “Pretty much the whole family has worked here — sons, wives, daughters, in-laws — and outlaws — seriously,” says De Ann Stephens, one of Edward Holbrook’s two grandchildren who work in the restaurant. Shorty’s wife, Sharon, keeps the books and Shorty’s son, Seth, cooks full time. Would William Sydney Porter have frequented the Rankin Grill, I ask the members of the breakfast club. “Sure,” says Scott. “He would have liked it. He might have had his picture in the breakfast club,” she says. Then again, anyone who knows much about the hours O.Henry kept might question his making it to breakfast at 7 in the morning. But he certainly would have enjoyed bellying up to O.Henry’s lunch counter for the same thing that draws Hough, Hammer and Scott: “I like to come here and see everybody and eat and talk and cut up.” Then she adds, turning suddenly serious: “We’re afraid Shorty’s going to just shut down, and I say, ‘What will we do?’” Scott has a one-word answer: “Cry.” OH

206 Sunset • Sold

304 Irving Place • Sold

707 Sunset • Sold

725 Hood Place • Sold

2107 Carlisle • Sold

806 Nottingham • Sold

210 Country Club • Sold

615 Woodland • Sold

509 Cornwallis • Sold

1206 Hill • Sold

3904 Gaston • Contract Pending

415 Sunset • Contract Pending

1 New Bern • Contract Pendingt

1807 St. Andrew• ContractPending

David Bailey is a regular contributing editor of O.Henry magazine.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

O.Henry 33

Downtown Greensboro

34 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Street Level

Pool of Love As another swim season ends, the Frogs of Friendly Park Pool — a trailblazer among the state’s community pools — write another page of history

Friendly Park Pool synchronized swimming lessons

By Jim Schlosser

Photographs By Cassie Butler

s Labor Day draws the 2012 outdoor swim season to an end, the Frogs proved fantastic stroking toward the finish. The Friendly Park Pool Swim and Tennis Club’s swim team, nicknamed the Frogs, won this summer’s Greensboro Community Swim Association’s annual city meet — just as it did the first year the event was held in 1959. The team has won it six times since 2003. This story, though, isn’t about winning, but about longevity. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greensboro began a tradition of neighborhood, or community, swimming pools. The first, Guilford Hills, opened in early June, 1958, followed by the O.Henry Oaks neighborhood pool later that month; Lawndale Homes pool that July; and Friendly Park in August. Others emerged a few years later, including Hamilton Lakes, Hillsdale Park, Sherwood, Green Valley, Pinetop, and of more recent vintage, Adams Farms and Lake Jeannette. Before 1958, unless a family belonged to a country club, outdoor swimming options were limited pretty much to city-owned Lindley Park pool for white people, and Nocho Park pool for black people. Segregation was the rule. Not long before 1958, several black parents announced intentions to The Art & Soul of Greensboro

swim at Lindley Park. The city responded by closing the pool and selling it to a private organization formed quickly to buy and keep it segregated. Lawsuits resulted. The pool remained in private hands until 1967, when the city repurchased it and opened it as an integrated pool. People are still splashing at Lindley. Was it a coincidence that four neighborhood pools arose at the same time the newspaper headlined attempts to integrate Lindley’s? Club rules at the time limited membership to people living in the neighborhoods, which were all white, and guests were limited to out-of-town visitors. People associated with the neighborhood pools back then would have answered in the negative. They would have said community pools were a trend that flowed South from Northern cities. Real estate operators would have argued the pools were built as a neighborhood amenity and to encourage people to purchase homes near the swim and tennis club. But the Greensboro Daily News, in an otherwise flattering feature in 1962 about neighborhood pools, bluntly disagreed: “...The attempt by Negroes to integrate municipality operated pools was what really caused the trend toward community pools in Greensboro and other North Carolina cities.” When segregation ended, neighborhood pools gradually integrated as blacks began moving into the neighborhoods. Later, the pools dropped requirements that members live in the neighborhood. People could join September 2012

O.Henry 35

36 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

regardless of address. What makes Friendly Park stand out among neighborhood pools is the pack-rat habit of two of its late members, George and Ginny von Seth, who lived on Candlewood Drive, a block from the pool. They kept records and saved them. Ginny von Seth died earlier this year, the last of Friendly Park’s charter members. When her daughter and son-in-law sorted through belongings in her house they found a file folder on Friendly Park, with documents that include memos about the idea of starting a pool, rules and regulations, names of the original staff, and other material — including dues charged initial members: $30 a year. Today, the 325 members pay $500 to join, then $675 per family annually. The son-in-law and daughter walked the file across the street and gave it to Alex Stoesen, a retired history professor at Guilford College and a pool member since 1966. He had been clueless about the pool’s exact age. A document in the file informed him the pool was almost finished and would open August 6 or 7, 1958. Another item said the first manager was Bob Sawyer, just graduated from Greensboro Senior High (now Grimsley), which was across Lake Daniel Park from the pool. Sawyer was one of the school’s all-time great swimmers, and he later served for many years as the school’s athletic director. Stoesen had three children, two of whom eagerly swam for the Frogs each summer against the other neighborhood pools, country clubs and Elks Club. A third son had to be cajoled into the water. “Even though he wasn’t that interested in swimming, they would throw him into it anyway because they had to fill out a relay team,” Stoesen recalls. The pool served about four adjoining neighborhoods and was one of the smallest of the community pools. Eventually it became difficult to compete against the larger clubs such as Hamilton Lakes, which served an enormous neighborhood. The Friendly pool and tennis courts also occupied one of the

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Street Level

smaller tracts, 7.5 acres, bounded on one side by Lake Daniel Park and eventually on the other by Cone Behavioral Health Hospital (formerly Charter Behavioral Health System). Eventually, the pool and the team rebounded. For one thing, the club grew its membership by opening to non-neighborhood residents, although pool manager and swim team coach Erin Harris says many team members still live in the vicinity of the pool. But outsiders do swim for the team because, Harris says, “I think the success of the swim program makes people want to come here.” Stoesen credits manager Harris with generating enthusiasm for the successful swim program. She has been at the club for 25 years. Again, longevity is part of the Friendly Park story. He remembers a small toddler running up and down the pool’s apron. That boy is now the pool and tennis club’s president, Andy Hudnell. His mother was an outstanding diver at the pool and a former president, Stoesen recalls. Stoesen believes Friendly Park is worthy of historical attention. That 1962 Daily News feature reports that Guilford Hills was the oldest community pool in Greensboro and also the first in North Carolina. The club is now closed and demolished. The second oldest pool, O.Henry Oaks, also is no more. That leaves Lawndale and Friendly Park both opening just weeks behind Guilford and O.Henry Oaks, as the most venerable in the state. Having early records of a neighborhood pool is special, Stoesen says. He is giving the von Seth file to the Greensboro Historical Museum. He points to the file and says, “That’s history.” OH

Jim Schlosser is a regular contributing editor of O.Henry magazine.

September 2012

O.Henry 37

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38 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Fun Unlimited

The Sporting Life

Great food, good friends and a passion for preserving wildlife and wetlands By Tom Bryant

’ve been a great fan of Ducks Unlimited since the early seventies. DU has been around for over seventy-five years and is the largest private waterfowl and wetlands conservation organization in the world. One of the major benefits of the charity (and it is an accredited charity recognized by the Better Business Bureau) is that members not only help save habitat for waterfowl, but they also can have a good time while doing so. That was more than the case with the very active DU chapter in Alamance County during the early eighties. I can’t remember who played which role that far back, but typically the same members were responsible for pulling all the events together every year for several years. Richard Cockman, Nat Harris, Don Scott, Ernie Koury, Bennett Sapp, Ronald Copeland, Dick Coleman, the list goes on and on. People dedicated to waterfowl hunting contributed not only money but their valuable time as well. Most DU chapters operate in generally the same manner, but I’ve yet to find one that created as much interest as the Alamance County chapter, which I became a member of early in my duck hunting career. Their membership drive would usually begin with a banquet in October or November at the Alamance Country Club. Members or potential members were invited from all over the county, but it was not unusual for people to come from across the state to participate in the fun in Burlington. Normally, it would lie out something like this. The festivities would begin with a cocktail party around six o’clock that evening. Ernie Koura, who was a recent graduate in those days from Carolina at Chapel Hill, would recruit the cheerleaders from his alma mater to come to the event and sell raffle tickets. Needless to say, with a primarily male audience being set upon by pretty Carolina co-eds, tickets sold at a brisk pace. The ticket sellers were not the only draw. The prizes that were accumulated from area businesses months before the event were more than worth the price of a ticket. There would be everything from decoys to duck calls that could be won if your ticket was drawn. One year the major give-away was a car, not new, mind you, but drivable, donated by a local car dealer. After cocktail hour and raffle sales, dinner would be served, and it wasn’t the basic chicken and green peas that usually make the grade for these kinds of events. The committee pulled out all the stops and the food was top of the line, such as prime rib and chicken Cordon Bleu with all the trimmings. Raffle ticket numbers were called out during dinner, so there was constant movement to the head table to claim prizes. The activity was exciting with a festive air as winners bragged about their recent good luck. At the conclusion of dinner, the committee got down to business and the main event, the auction. A professional auctioneer handled bids on items such as a week at a Hilton Head beach house, the DU gun of the year, or even a Lab puppy. All of these items were donated, so every dollar went to DU headquarters for the support of waterfowl. One year, my good buddy, Dick Coleman, bought a Lab puppy that was the featured item of the auction. Another friend, Jim Lesley, and I drove him home after the banquet so Dick could hold the puppy in his lap. Needless to say, there

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

was an excited household when Dick came rolling in, sometime past midnight, with a little black wired-tight Lab to add to the family. He named the little duck dog Honcho, and he became a familiar addition on many a dove and duck hunt. The banquet kicked off the DU year and was followed up around Labor Day with a dove hunt to beat all dove hunts. In the South, dove hunting has become a social tradition that is celebrated in different ways across Southern states. The DU committee in Alamance County pulled out all the stops. If you were a participant, you were in for a grand time. Fun unlimited. Now this celebrated occasion wasn’t for everybody. To qualify, a DU member had to sign up to be a sponsor. I think in those days a sponsorship was $300; but remember, all this money went to the preservation of habitat for waterfowl. To a duck hunter it was a worthwhile contribution. Dove season usually comes in the Saturday before Labor Day. The festivities for the Alamance DU sponsors and their wives would begin the Friday evening before with a pig pickin’ at the country club. Now this wasn’t just any old pig pickin’ but one provided by the area’s most famous pig cooker and all around country gentleman, Junior Teague. Junior cooked his pigs on a huge portable grill with a fire pit that took coals that he had prepared by burning aged hickory wood. I’ve eaten barbecue from all over the country: East and West, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, even some mystery meat from north of the Mason-Dixon line, but I’ve yet to come across barbecue that could hold a candle to Junior’s. A brunch was held the day of the hunt, again at the country club. Then hunters convoyed to the field for the afternoon event. One year, Governor Bob Scott was gracious enough to let us hunt on one of his cut cornfields. The action was fast, and it didn’t take long for a person to get a limit. A big awning tent was set up on the perimeter of the field and people would congregate there to swap stories and to brag or commiserate about their shooting. I’m not as active as I once was in Ducks Unlimited but am pleased to see that DU is still the world’s leader in wetlands and waterfowl conservation. What is even more amazing is that a small group of determined sportsmen 75 years ago decided to do something and not sit idly by as the continent’s waterfowl dwindled almost beyond recovery. We owe those sportsmen a standing ovation. OH Tom Bryant, who graduated from Elon and lived in Alamance County for decades, is a lifelong outdoorsman and O.Henry’s Sporting Life columnist. September 2012

O.Henry 39

Life of Jane

I, Stalker Old sorority girls never grow old. They just grow up

By Jane BorDen

PhotograPh By Cassie Butler

once stalked an 18-year-old girl. Actually, several dozen of them. But it all happened in a few days. I first saw them herded together on the lawn of the Kappa Kappa Gamma House at the University of North Carolina last fall. My boyfriend and I had pulled up to a stoplight. “Rush!” I screamed abruptly into the silence. “What? Why?” he asked. “No,” I responded. “There. Look. Look! They’re in the middle of Rush.” Then I turned into a teenager with a puppy: “Aww, how cute.” The light turned green and I craned my neck backward, pushing against the glass to catch the last glimpses of their handmade nametags and painstakingly puttogether outfits. Nathan was less interested — as a grad student, he was aiming to avoid members of the Greek system, not moon over them — but he was also surprised. “I can’t believe you just did that,” he said. “Aren’t you usually making fun of sororities?” “Yeah, but these girls aren’t on the inside yet. All they know is that they’re about to go smile a lot, shake a bunch of hands, and, you know, talk about what dorm they’re in.” Admittedly, I also found my reaction strange. At first I assumed it was general nostalgia: I attended Chapel Hill and a sorority had been part of that experience. However, in the year I’d been dating Nathan, I’d logged countless hours on campus and in my old haunts. And anyway, this felt different. This was more of a pining, which — I realized with a wince — was much worse. Suddenly, I felt like a middle-aged potbellied man polishing his high-school football trophies. I understood that my desire was to relive the journey on which these girls were embarking. I saw that Rush had been my glory days. I can’t believe I just admitted that. But I was so good at it! I am a perfectly postured, firm-handshaking, smiling and “how are you” Southern-hospitality machine. First impressions, I can nail, which is also why, to this day, they’re usually all I give. The longer I engage people, the more anxious I grow of boring or disappointing them. So instead I run away. I’m that person who shows up to a party, has a two-minute conversation with everyone, and then leaves to attend another party and engage in another dozen two-minute chats. I’m a traveling circus. I will walk into your home and shout, “Look at me: I’m a bear on a unicycle!” You’ll clap and say, “How adorable! Bears don’t ride unicycles! I’m convinced she’ll never maul me, so I’ll take her home.” But you won’t be able to, because seconds later, I’m out the door and headed somewhere else, where I’ll be 11 tiny clowns crawling out of a car. And someone else will be the one exclaiming: “How did all of her fit inside that car? Especially after how much crab dip I just saw her eat at the hors d’oeuvres table?” Even though I desperately want to talk to you — and literally ran across the The Art & Soul of Greensboro

room to do so — I am already thinking of an out: “Well, my drink’s getting low . . . ” “You know, I think I’ll hit the cheese plate . . . ” “So, I’m sure you have other patients to see, Doctor . . . ” And then I run away. Which is part of why I’ve been single almost my entire life . . . which is part of why I’ve never had to change. Somewhere between a cocktail party and an interview, the performance became the only mode of engagement. I’ve been Rushing my entire life. But now I was in a relationship that, despite being long-distance, was actually working. Uh-oh, I thought, experiencing the second realization of the afternoon: If my pattern is to wow ’em and flee, then this relationship was probably working precisely because it was long-distance. As you’ve likely surmised, my cyclingbear behavior is exhausting. Eventually and inevitably, I grow grumpy, and have to hibernate till I’m ready to be fun again. So, when Nathan and I were together, I’d effervesce nonstop because I knew that soon, after he left, I’d be able to put on my sweatpants, and avoid people and baths. We were getting serious, though. And I was still harboring a dirty, unshowered secret. He needed to know that I am also enormously boring, not to mention that I occasionally wear an invisible sign reading, “Don’t poke the bear.” And I needed to know that once he found out, he wouldn’t quit the circus altogether. I decided it was time to stop trying to impress him. It was time to leave my 18-year-old self behind. But, instead, she and I kept meeting face-to-face on the September 2012

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Life of Jane streets of Chapel Hill! This may have been why I suggested we follow her. “Can we drive past Tri-Delt?” I asked as Nathan approached the intersection of Columbia Street. “You’re kidding,” he said. I wasn’t. And we did. But we were too late. “Shoot!” I exclaimed. “They’ve already gone inside.” “What about those girls in the lawn chairs?” he offered in consolation. “Enh,” I shrugged. “Those are the Rush counselors. Not as interesting. They’re older.” “You sound creepy,” he said. “And tell me: What were you planning to do if we’d caught the freshmen?” “I don’t know,” I stammered. “Watch them?” “Like I said,” he added, turning around in a driveway, “creepy.” The next day, as Nathan and I sat outside of a bakery on Franklin Street, a girl passed wearing a sundress and flip-flops and carrying high-heeled sandals. “Nathan,” I whispered, and gestured with my elbow. “Oh no,” he sighed, shaking his head, “not again.” “They must have another round today,” I said with the excitement of a Hardy boy. I watched Flip-Flops grow distant, the broken ends of her wispy blonde hair flying in all directions. When I turned my head back to our table, two more girls were approaching. “I guess they just got out,” I said sadly. “Too bad.” “What do you mean, ‘too bad’?” he asked suspiciously. It was a good question, and I knew better than to answer because the fantasy I harbored involved making a nametag of my own, sneaking into line, and entering the houses myself. I wanted to do it again: rack up a dozen or so people who like me, and then slip out the back door. I mean, obviously, I wouldn’t actually do it. As if no one would notice my crows feet. The sister who answered the door would probably assume I sold makeup for Avon, and was only wearing a nametag because I’m old enough to have become deaf and dumb. But I did have the urge — kind of how, if you’ve been struggling with a puzzle in the back of a crossword book, you’re tempted to flip back and blow through several in the front: because they’re just so easy. And I knew that my show’s-over reveal to Nathan was going to be hard. It would require a level of vulnerability I’d yet to adopt or divulge. No one wants to be publicly boring! If only I’d had more practice admitting my dull side. I imagined grabbing these girls, stopping my 18-year-old self on the street, and telling them all that, sometimes, it’s OK to turn off the charm. Outside the bakery, three more passed: one tall, one short, one chubby; all of them skit-

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Life of Jane

tish. “Check it out,” I said, with sudden realization. “Those girls are nervous.” “Yeah? So?” Nathan replied. “So they didn’t just get out,” I said, gathering my things. “They’re headed in.” “Yeah . . . ? So . . . ?” “So it’s already been five minutes! We’ll have to hurry.” Then, without giving him a chance to answer, I stood from the table shouting, “Go, go, go!” And for some reason, bless his heart, he did. “It’s 3:30 p.m.,” I said, walking east and setting a quick pace. “Today’s round must be starting now.” “Well, if you miss them this time, you could always climb a tree near a window and wait for someone to change clothes.” “Maybe,” I played along, “but it really helps to put a name with a boob.” No one was outside the Tri-Sig house, nor in front of KD. Then I spotted three blondes standing at the edge of the front walk to Chi-O — and without a counselor in sight. “Bingo,” I said. “You’re on your own from here.” I jaywalked across the street, trying to appear casual, approached them, and cheerily said, “Hey!” They returned my gaze with wide, suspicious eyes. “So,” I awkwardly began, “y’all are in the middle of Rush?” “Um, yeah,” one of them answered. “Cool. I was a Tri-Delt here.” Silence. “But that was ages ago,” I added. Silence. Enduring, I asked, “Is this the Skits round?” “No, like, this is, like, um, House Tours,” another replied and then looked away. This was my chance. I could offer my younger self some advice to save her from my current struggle; I could throw my hand on hip, wink and say, “Take it from me, honey. Getting in is easy. It’s staying in that’s hard.” Or, at the least, I could suggest a tip regarding a struggle she’d sooner meet: “If you insist on eating pizza three times a week, maybe don’t also dip it in ranch dressing.” Instead, I clammed. “Cool,” I said — again — and then they started talking amongst themselves while I stood there. “Well, good luck!,” I added clumsily. “I hope you wind up where you want to be.” I turned around, saw my future husband waiting, and felt lucky to have wound up there. “What happened?” he asked. “I bored the hell out of three students,” I replied. Apparently my plan was already working. OH

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Jane Borden is a native of Greensboro and the author of the highly-acclaimed memoir, I Totally Meant To Do That. The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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Tree Poem The yellow maple in my back yard is slowly undressing, dropping each golden garment down to her feet. She’s even tossing to the wind, her satin ribbons and the bows in her hair, stripping off her sleeves. Soon she’ll be down to bare bones. Once I saw a small red Japanese maple disrobe all at once; a single shake and every leaf she wore puddle the ground around her. The Art & Soul of Greensboro

I want to tell these irrant maples they should save their salient selves and be like the beech. Beech trees keep their leaves, hold them fast, even if they’re tan and torn, let them sing in the wind, sigh on sunny days, lick the laughing rain. Then when spring comes winging green, so green even the air stings green, then, then only then, the old leaves flying, flinging, finally let go. — Ruth Moose Ruth Moose teaches creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill and has published 6 collections of poems, including The Librarian and Other Poems, which recently went into a third printing. September 2012

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Greensboro doesn’t have a downtown equivalent of Durham’s DPAC — yet — or Charleston’s Spoleto, but for 17 Days, our cup runneth over with music, theater, dance, visual arts and, yep, even beer. From September 21 through October 7, 17 Days features over 80 arts and culture events. Here are 17 ways to explore 17 Days. That leaves 63 more for you to discover at www.17daysgreensboro.org.

Greensboro Symphony Chamber featuring Tchaikovsky Friday, September 28, 8–9:30 p.m. UNCG School of Music Recital Hall, 100 McIver Street, Greensboro Tickets: $30

Dmitry Sit-kovetsky, violinist and conductor, leads a Greensboro Symphony chamber concert featuring the Camerata Ensemble. The centerpiece is Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir D’un Lieu Cher (Memory of a Dear Place), followed by the world premier of J. Jakoulov’s Concerto for Clarinet, Harp and Strings.

17 Days Kickoff Block Party at the Weatherspoon Friday, September 21, 6–8 p.m. Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sculpture Garden, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro Tickets: Free

Kick off 17 Days with live music by House of Dues — New Orleans funk, blues and R&B — and with refreshments in the sculpture garden at Weatherspoon Art Museum, plus access to Weatherspoon’s newest gallery exhibits.

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Bidding on the Ones Friday, September 21 until Saturday, October 6 William Mangum Fine Art Gallery 2166 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro

One good deed deserves another. That’s why watercolor artist William Mangum is auctioning off thirty-five of his numberone prints and using the proceeds to establish an annual scholarship for the art department at his alma mater. When Mangum was a senior at UNCG, a dean saw him painting in a hallway and was so impressed that he offered Mangum $75 to be Artist in Residence and the opportunity to have his own exhibition. Mangum sold every painting in the exhibit. Thirty-five years — and 3,000 paintings — later he has cause to do a little celebrating. A retrospective art show and auction, Bidding on the Ones, will feature his first-edition prints, many of them iconic North Carolina scenes from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Outer Banks, architectural landmarks, plus Greensboro subjects like Fisher Park. And it’s all to help a talented young artist chase his or her dreams, and to celebrate Mangum’s dream coming true. “I’ve had the rare, good fortune to pursue my career,” says Bill Mangum. “The least I can do is give back.”

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Zoosical! A Children’s Concert Friday and Saturday, September 21 and 22 Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro Tickets: $5

This one’s for the kids — a concert presented by the Music Academy of North Carolina featuring classical and classic pops music inspired by critters —� Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk,” Rossini’s “Duet for Two Cats,” Copeland’s “I Bought Me a Cat” and more. Come in whiskers, tusks or feathers as whatever animal- best “suits” you.

Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo Duo Monday, September 24, 7–10 p.m. Triad Stage, 232 South Elm Street, Greensboro Tickets: $39; $59

In June of last year, jazz pianist Joey Calderazzo and saxophone impresario Branford Marsalis — both North Carolinians and both world-renowned jazz musicians — released their first duo album. Both of them also have classical chops. One review said they “blend their jazz and classical strains so thoroughly, you’re hard-pressed to say what kind of music they’re playing. “Ethereal” works for us.

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Home Work: Domestic Narratives in Contemporary Art

Thursday, September 13, to Saturday, November 3 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro Admission: Donation suggested “There’s no place like home” takes on a new meaning at Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art as 25 artists from all over the state look homeward via sculpture, painting, printmaking and photography — often from an unsettling perspective. Julia Clift, for instance, depicts a young man adrift in a sea of unruly bed sheets. On one side of the gallery, household items take on a life of their own. In another, furniture morphs and twists into unsettling shapes. Over here, the serene and idealized vision of domestic tranquillity portrayed in women’s magazines gets a different perspective in a delectable cake, painted by Katherine Grossfeld, concealing a hidden snake. Or her image of a children’s toy that resembles the structure of a virus. Then there are Barbara Schreiber’s portraits of a young girl heedlessly playing in front of a television set airing various world disasters. But not everything is edgy in Home Work: Domestic Narratives in Contemporary Art, curated by Edie Carpenter. Jenny ZiotPaynes’ portraits of childhood show the home as a happy family refuge, as do Kristin Gibson’s interiors. And Sarah Martin’s photographs of house pets and their owners show that home can be where the heart is.

First Friday Red Oak Beer Garden Friday, October 5, 5–9 p.m. Plaza adjacent to Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro No tickets. Free Admission. OK, Red Oak Brewery’s Bill Sherrill is fully aware that Oktoberfest gets under way in Germany in late September. And, yes, it won’t be until Friday, October 5, that you’ll be able to sit down in a makeshift Beer Garden next to the Carolina Theatre and quaff a mug of his freshly brewed, unfiltered Bavarian lager. But just for the record, on the 5th it will still officially be Oktoberfest, which lasts 16 days in Munich, where they know a thing or two about beer and how to throw a party. And how often do you get a chance to drink any of Red Oak’s three signature brews — Red Oak Amber Lager, Hummingbird Helles or Battlefield Bock — and know that you’re doing something noble and charitable? All proceeds go to the Arts Council. And in the spirit of buying and eating local, Sherrill says the grilled fresh sausage will come from Smith’s Red & White Pork Center in Dorches near Rocky Mount. Air-dried with a natural casing, Dorches Red & White sausage is iconic among Tar Heel foodies. Says Sherrill, “It’s a shame to add mustard or kraut.”

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8 Trouble in Mind

September 2–23 Triad Stage, 232 South Elm Street, Greensboro Tickets: $20–$52 Directed by Preston Lane, Wileta Mayer is a circa 1957, gifted African-American actress who finally gets her shot at playing the lead role in a Broadway show. But only if she’s willing to compromise her principles. A revealing peek into backstage egos and attitudes — and an insightful exploration of how we struggle with who we are and what we want to be. The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Joanne Shaw Taylor in Concert Wednesday, September 26, 9–11:45 p.m. Blind Tiger, 1819 Spring Garden Street, Greensboro Tickets: $8 Hear 25-year-old British blues phenom Joanne Shaw Taylor fingerpick a funky, hypnotic hook on her Butterscotch Fender and envision the ghost of Jimi Hendrix dancing on her shoulder. Seriously. As a schoolgirl in Birmingham, England, Taylor was hooked on the edgy chops and licks of Albert Collins, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix. She asked for an electric guitar one Christmas, picked a blues-laden path and never looked back. Taylor was discovered by Eurythmics frontman David Stewart when she was 16, then toured Europe with Stewart’s supergroup. Her first album, White Sugar, was released in 2009; the third, Almost Always Never, will be released September 12. Taylor writes her own songs, and, with that deep, sultry voice — think Joss Stone meets Fiona Apple — has twice been pegged Best Female Vocalist at the British Blues Awards. Catch this electric blues goddess on stage with her bass player and drummer before Britain does. She plays just days before her UK tour — September 26, 9 p.m. at the Blind Tiger. Not to be confused with Taylor Swift. For a sneak preview: www.myspace.com/joanneshawtaylor.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Harlem String Quartet Wednesday, October 3, 7–9:30 p.m. UNCG Recital Hall, 100 McIver Street, Greensboro Tickets: $10; $6; $4 Young. Hip. Innovative. Not words you’d usually use to describe chamber musicians, but they fit the New York-based Harlem Quartet, which will unleash their eclectic repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to Chick Corea. These string musicians are young — their ages range from mid-20s to mid-30s — but they’re all musical heavyweights who have played with major orchestras and become stars of the bow-tie set. Melissa White, a violinist from Michigan, debuted with the Czech National Symphony at age 14. Ilmar Gavilan, a native of Cuba, has studied with Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern, and he holds a Ph.D. in music from Rutgers University. Juan Miguel Hernandez, from Montreal, is one of the best viola players in the world. Californian Paul Wiancko has knocked around with Yo Yo Ma and Joe Cocker. Two of the group’s original members were from Harlem, which remains the group’s spiritual home as they promote diversity in classical music. Earlier this year, they toured South Africa. In February, they’ll make their Kennedy Center debut. But first, they’ll rosin up their bows at UNCG.

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INSPIRATA Quartet Friday, September 21, 7:30–10 p.m. Christ United Methodist Church, 410 North Holden Road, Greensboro Tickets: $18 Cheryse McLeod Lewis got her start singing in a Greensboro church, so it’s fitting that the Seattle-based mezzo-soprano will perform in a church when she comes home for 17 Days. Her quartet, INSPIRATA, will do its most popular show, “Opera in a Box.” Condensing Carmen, Rigoletto, La Bohéme and Madama Butterfly, the singers shuck and don props without ever leaving the stage. “It’s a show that breaks all of the stereotypes about opera being boring and stuffy,” says Lewis, who started singing at St. James Baptist Church, graduated from Grimsley High School and received a master’s in voice performance from UNCG. She now travels the country appearing in opera productions, solo concerts and INSPIRATA, an arm of Florida’s Opera Jacksonville. For the Greensboro show, Triad Stage’s Rich Whittington will narrate, and INSPIRATA’s musical director Benjamin Blozan, who lives in Greensboro, will accompany on the piano. The singers include Lewis, soprano Elizabeth Claxton, tenor Duane Moody, baritone Steven Jepson. The performance is a part of the Music for a Great Space series, which will hold a fundraising dinner at the church before the performance.

Bronx Horns Thursday, September 27, 8–10 p.m. Empire Room at the Elm Street Center Tickets: $19 The late Tito Puente called the group “the future of Latin jazz.” Lucky for us, the future is here, on September 27, in Greensboro. Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with The Bronx Horns, a group of top performers from New York City’s Latin dance scene, and a spicy mix of mambo, salsa and merengue.

13 Canning and Preserving Playshop Saturday, October 6, 2–4 p.m. Elsewhere, 606 South Elm Street, Greensboro Cost: $5 Bring a Mason jar to Elsewhere’s Kitchen Commons for a canning and preserving playshop, where you can help harvest autumn’s offerings from the alleyway garden.

Jamaican Dance and Culture

Friday, September 21, 6–7:30 p.m. NC A&T State University East Market Street, Greensboro No Tickets. Free Event. Immerse yourself in Jamaican culture with an animated evening of its music, dance and art, presented by N.C. A&T dance and art programs.

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Art in the Arboretum Sunday, October 7, 12–5 p.m. Greensboro Arboretum, 401 Ashland Drive, Greensboro All kinds of regional, juried art — glass, jewelry, paintings, pottery, photography, wood, fiber and mixed media — for sale in an outdoor gallery exhibit. Plus, entertainment on three stages, children’s activities and a food court. Dogs welcome. Free admission.

Middle Passage: Traveler Part I-IV Thursday, September 27, through Saturday, September 29 UNCG Dance Theatre, 1408 Walker Avenue, Greensboro Tickets: $15; $12; $9 Led by Duane Cyrus, a UNCG dance professor who has performed with the Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham dance companies, Middle Passage is a cabaret performance inspired by the works of poet Louis Mustafa Audrey. Featuring UNCG’s dance faculty, a montage of dance, video, text and songs delves into how people of African descent have moved, migrated and mobilized throughout American history.

“My Way”: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra

Friday, October 5, through Sunday, October 14 The Broach Theatre, 520 South Elm Street, Greensboro Tickets: $10–$30

Relive the magic and mystique of Ol’ Blue Eyes in a musical revue that takes you back to the 1940s and his early beginnings in New York. Follow his career with the Rat Pack under the bright lights of Vegas to his final performances in the 1990s as Chairman of the Board.

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TheResurrectionof Jim Ross How a fine Greensboro novelist and creator of ‘Southern Noir’ — long forgotten but recently rediscovered — may finally achieve his literary due By Bill Morris

Hatcher was browsing through the second-hand bins at the White Rabbit bookshop in downtown Raleigh when the cover of a paperback novel caught his eye. It showed a bloodied man lying face-down beside a gas pump, clawing the dirt, either dead or getting there quick. In the background was the swooping, buttery fender of a 1930s luxury car, possibly a Cadillac, or maybe a Cord, or a Duesenberg. They Don’t Dance Much was the book’s intriguing title. The author was someone named James Ross. Hatcher bought the book based on its tantalizing cover and put it on a shelf in his Durham home, where it languished unread for years. Then one day Hatcher picked up the novel and, like so many before him, started reading and found that he was powerless to stop. They Don’t Dance Much is a roaring tale — a progenitor of what is now called “country noir” — a story of greed, corruption, infidelity and murder set during the Depression in a fictional North Carolina mill town called Corinth. The novel is also bitingly funny. And it’s the only one James Ross ever published. “I was really taken by it,” says Hatcher, 55, a native of tiny Kenansville, North Carolina, who now teaches journalism and media history at Elon University in Burlington. “It was all about North Carolina, and the familiarity of the setting was interesting to me. I grew up in a small town, so I knew some of these people — the moonshiner, the local sheriff, the mayor, all of that. When I finished the book I looked in the front and read that James Ross, author and newspaperman since 1954, was born and raised in North Carolina, where he attended Elon and Louisburg Colleges, and he wrote editorials for the Greensboro Daily News. That really intrigued me.” Hatcher’s intrigue sprang from the fact that he has Greensboro ties of his own. The son of a pharmacist, Hatcher grew up devouring the short stories of O.Henry, Stephen Crane, John Cheever and Ernest Hemingway. He enrolled at UNCG in 1975, planning to study pharmacy, but in his sophomore year his literary inclinations won out, and he transferred into the highly regarded English department. There he fell under the spell of such legendary teachers as William Lane and Lee Zacharias, Keith Cushman, Walter Beale and Tom Tedford. In his spare time he fed his fiction addiction by prowling the original Browsery bookshop on Mendenhall Street. Unable to find work after graduation, he enrolled in the Communications graduate school and, on the side, performed in the Community Theater of Greensboro’s production of You Can’t Take It With You, along with the journalist Mutt Burton and the photographer Jan Hensley. After earning his master’s degree, Hatcher bounced around the state as a newspaper reporter and high school teacher, eventually getting a Ph.D. in journalism at Chapel Hill that led to his current job at Elon. So once he got hooked on They Don’t Dance Much, Hatcher

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Adozen or so years ago, Anthony

did what all good newspapermen turned academic do. He started digging, trying to find out if there was something about this obscure author named James Ross that could be turned into a scholarly article, maybe a full-blown biography. Beginning in the Elon archives, Hatcher learned that Ross was born in 1911 near Norwood in rural Stanly County, by the South Carolina state line, and that he was the eldest sibling in a remarkable family of writers that included his brother Fred, a fiction writer, and sisters Eleanor, a poet, and Jean, an essayist and short story writer. The Ross sisters attended Woman’s College, now UNCG, where Jean studied under the novelist Caroline Gordon and her poet husband, Allen Tate, a leading Southern Agrarian. In time, Eleanor would marry a teacher at the college, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Peter Taylor, and Jean would marry the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Donald Justice. The family from Norwood came to be known as “the Writing Rosses.” Hatcher learned, to his dismay, that Jim Ross had died in Greensboro in 1990 at the age of 79. But his widow, Marnie, is still alive, still living in the handsome frame house in Lake Daniel that she and her husband shared in the years before his death. “I visited her there in the summer of 2010, and it was wonderful,” Hatcher recalls. “When I got to Marnie’s house she greeted me very enthusiastically — this stranger who wanted to write about her husband. She took me into the dining room and showed me boxes and stacks of folders of Jim’s work. Lots of old yellowed pages that he had typed. Some of it was written in Norwood back before he married Marnie, some of it was written at Fisher Park Circle in Greensboro, where he and Marnie lived for a while, and some at the address in Lake Daniel. Some of them are early drafts of the eight short stories he published, and some are drafts of unpublished stories. There are news clippings in there, stuff that would spark an idea. Then he would type notes to himself, saying rearrange this section or make this character stronger. It’s fascinating to see a writer at work.” Then Hatcher hit the mother lode: typescripts of two more novels, one a fragment, one a completed draft. That was when Hatcher had his epiphany. What he had stumbled onto was much more than the raw material for a biography; it was the sort of stuff that could revive a dormant literary reputation. It’s the story of a writing life that started with high hopes and great promise, then flared briefly, dazzlingly, before sliding into a long twilight and finally vanishing from sight. At first blush, the central fact of Jim Ross’ writing life is that he did something almost unheard of: He published just one novel. This is a rare thing because when someone is taken with the long-haul task of writing a novel, he or she almost always finds that once is not enough. The job requires such sustained focus, such persistence, such raw pit-bull stubbornness that any writer who does it once almost invariably does it again, and again, and again. The agony is simply too addictive, and too delicious. But as Hatcher had discovered in those musty boxes, Jim Ross’ story was not nearly as simple or one-dimensional as it appeared to be. Jim Ross was not, as some have suggested, a member of that most tortured fraternity of novelists, the one-hit wonders, a small club that includes Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, Ralph Ellison, John Kennedy Toole and a handful of others. Ross was something far more tortured — and alluring — than that. He was that nearly un-American thing: the close call, the near miss, the could’ve-been, the almost-made man. Of course America has no use for the ones who show promise but fail to make it big. Unless . . .

Hatcher began to peel the onion of Jim

Ross’ life story. He took a sabbatical from his teaching duties at Elon during the first half of 2011 to pore over everything in the boxes Marnie had loaned

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

him. He also tracked down Ross’ surviving relatives, visited the family place in Norwood, and interviewed former friends, fans and Greensboro newspaper colleagues, including Ned Cline and the Pulitzer Prize winners Ed Yoder and Jonathan Yardley. Jim Ross, it turned out, was no flash in the pan. Way back in the 1930s, Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate were among the first to recognize Ross’ literary promise and offer encouragement. When the couple left Woman’s College for Princeton in 1939, Ross, then a 28-year-old tax collector in the IRS office in Greensboro, started devoting his nights and weekends to working on his first novel. He chose “the most coarse and outrageous subject I could imagine,” as he told an interviewer years later, which happened to be the goings-on in a rowdy roadhouse near a North Carolina mill town, much like a roadhouse he’d known about in Stanly County during the Depression. “Practically all I wrote as fiction is based on people that I knew,” Ross said. Out of those people came the novel’s slyly sardonic narrator, Jack McDonald, who loses his farm because of unpaid taxes and is so broke he can’t even pay the local undertaker for his mother’s funeral. His financial straits force Jack to take a job in a filling station/roadhouse run by the cagey and violent Smut Milligan, who is having an affair with a scorcher named Lola Fisher, who happens to be married to the richest man in Corinth. Stir pot. Watch sparks fly. Here, to give you the flavor of Ross’ wry style, is Jack asking Smut about a gift he has just given the sheriff: “What was that you gave him in the paper sack?” I asked. “A quart of my own private Scotch. Confound his time, he ought to appreciate that. I paid four bucks a quart for that stuff.” “I didn’t know the sheriff drank,” I said. “He don’t drink much. Just takes a little for medicine when he has a cold.” “You think he’s got a cold now?” I asked. “I understand he keeps a little cold all the time,” Smut said. Ross was a shrewd observer of class distinctions, on a par with Balzac, Dickens and Tom Wolfe. Here is Ross’ dissection of the two classes of mill hands who frequent the roadhouse, ending with his trademark twist of the scalpel: The freest spenders out there that night were the folks who worked in the hosiery mill in Corinth. In the main they were young fellows, because only a young man can see well enough to run a knitting machine. I guess they averaged making forty dollars a week, or about as much as a cottonmill hand made in a month. Most of them could count on their eyes giving out on them about the time they got to be thirty years old, and it looked like they would be saving against that day. But none of them ever saved any. They all kept good cars, and most of them managed to find a golddigging girl. While it’s not surprising that the book’s vicious action and straightforward prose have led most critics to lump it with noir and hard-boiled fiction, Ross said he modeled the story on Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and at the time he wrote it he had not read a line by a presumed influence, James M. Cain. Rather, Ross said, he wrote the novel under the influence of Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner and Ring Lardner. They Don’t Dance Much got some September 2012

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enviable reviews when it was published in 1940. There were British, French and Italian editions. None sold well. Then the book dropped from sight.

Before he was drafted into the Army

in 1943, Ross had produced the fragment Hatcher discovered in the boxes. Called Cash and Carry, it tells the story of a poor, self-educated Southerner who falls for a woman, only to have her dump him for a rich man. The unfinished manuscript was rejected by Houghton Mifflin and Scribner’s, but it did earn Ross an audience with the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who shepherded the careers of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins wanted Ross to reshape his manuscript into a series of linked short stories. Nothing came of the meeting. In the spring of 1945, Ross’ mentor Allen Tate published his short story “The Dollar That Evaded the Gates of Hell” in the prestigious Sewanee Review. After the war, Ross won a fellowship to the Yaddo writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he met Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell and other rising literary stars. O’Connor, who was working on her first novel, Wise Blood, wrote a letter to her agent, Elizabeth McKee: “James Ross, a writer who is here, is looking for an agent. He wrote a very fine book called They Don’t Dance Much. It didn’t sell much. If you are interested in him, I daresay he would be glad enough to hear from you. Right now he wants to sell some stories he is reworking.” The leg-up helped. McKee took Ross on, and under her stewardship his career showed signs of blossoming. She sold his short stories to Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Argosy and Partisan Review. His writing appeared in an anthology, A Southern Vanguard. And both he and his brother Fred were included in a slim 1952 volume titled North Carolina Authors: A Selective Handbook. Ross persuaded Ernest Hemingway to write a letter of recommendation to accompany his application for a Guggenheim fellowship. Hemingway complied, reluctantly, but the application was rejected. In 1953 Collier’s brought out the short story “Natural Born Liar.” It would be the last piece of fiction Jim Ross published in his lifetime. He was just 42 years old.

own and would prove to be a tireless advocate of Ross’ work. Burger’s verdict on In the Red, according to Ross, was that the novel had “too many characters and the story is too complicated.” When friends asked Ross about his plans for revising the novel in the 1970s, he waved them off, saying, “It’s no damn good.” It was never published. Marnie Ross believes that the depth of her late husband’s disappointment over the novel’s rejection indicates just how much he still ached to get published. “Jim tried very hard,” she says. “He sent it to Knox Burger, but nobody wanted to publish it. Jim was kind of a pessimist, and he didn’t really expect it to sell. He hoped it would sell. Writers are always hoping their work will sell; you want it more than anything. But it doesn’t always happen.” Ross had shifted from reporting to editorial writing in 1969, which he did with distinction until his retirement in 1976. The year before he retired, he had one last hurrah. Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of the Lost American Fiction series, brought out a handsome new edition of They Don’t Dance Much. The book included a glowing afterword by George V. Higgins, a hugely successful writer of crime fiction who offered these mordant insights into Ross’ fate: “James Ross was a writer out of his season. That was too bad for him, and until this novel was retrieved from the neglect of almost thirty-five years, too bad for us, too. He wrote with a fine disregard for what was popular, courageously, and his editors printed what he wrote, with equal courage, and nobody noticed. That is what must have been hardest to bear: Nobody noticed. He advanced the craft of fiction as far as it could be advanced when he was writing, and no one was paying attention. Very few, at least. Life’s hard, life’s very hard. It’s harder without luck.” Despite its author’s spectacular lack of luck, the novel became a sort of secret handshake among a small cabal of writers and tuned-in readers, much like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road before it was turned into a major motion picture and Yates became the subject of an exhaustive and critically acclaimed biography by Blake Bailey. The kudos didn’t stop with George V. Higgins. Raymond Chandler, a major fan, said Ross’ novel told “a sleazy, corrupt but completely believable story.” Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones, a native North Carolinian and former Daily News staffer, recently included They Don’t Dance Much among his Top 10 crime novels of all time, right up there with Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Writing in The Chattahoochee Review last year, the highly regarded fiction writer William Gay praised Ross as “the man who invented Southern noir,” using “a tough, take-no-prisoners style that was surprisingly frank and ahead of its time.” Another fan is Daniel Woodrell, a writer from the Ozarks who coined the term “country noir” and wrote the brutal novel Winter’s Bone, which was made into an Oscar-nominated movie. In a 1994 New York Times review of a novel called Mucho Mojo by Joe R. Lansdale, Woodrell listed some of Lansdale’s “country noir” ancestors, including Cain, Erskine Caldwell and Jim Thompson. “James Ross is scarcely ever mentioned,” Woodrell wrote, “though his one novel, They Don’t Dance Much (1940), might be the finest of the lot. He is the forebear Mr. Lansdale most strongly brings to mind. They share a total trust in the straightforward power of a man’s voice speaking when he has a witch’s brew of a tale to tell. No tricks, no stylish ennui, no somnambulant remoteness or pointless savagery are required.” True on every count. The rococo savagery in Jim Ross’ fiction always has a point.

“James Ross was a writer out of his season...”

In dire need of money — much like the

narrator of They Don’t Dance Much — Ross made a deal with the devil. Instead of going to work in a sleazy roadhouse, though, he went to work as a newspaper reporter, first in Savannah, Georgia, then at the Greensboro Daily News, where he started out covering city government and the courts, then graduated to covering politics and the state legislature. In 1964 Ross became smitten with a writer for the paper’s women’s page, Marion Knox Polk, known as Marnie, who was also a pianist, singer and composer. Her father, William T. Polk, was a former associate editor of the paper and the author of a book of short stories and a nonfiction book about the South. A year after they met, Jim and Marnie were married. “The reason I married him,” she said recently, “was that he was so funny. I couldn’t stop laughing.” All the while, as Hatcher had discovered, Ross was toiling away on a new novel, despite grumbling to his sister Jean that “newspaper work ruins you for anything else.” Using his experiences covering the General Assembly in Raleigh, Ross completed a 315-page manuscript he called In the Red. “It’s about a reporter and his dealings with crooked politicians and lobbyists and bosses,” Hatcher says. “The reporter takes some bribes and he’s perpetually in the red, he never has any money, and he has a love affair with a woman. It’s kind of a pot-boiler about politics. It’s not nearly as good as They Don’t Dance Much, but I honestly think that if somebody went in there and took out some of the extraneous material and repetitions, it could pass.” By the time he finished the draft, Ross was being represented by Knox Burger, his former editor at Collier’s who had opened a literary agency of his

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

And now, if Anthony Hatcher has a say

in it, Jim Ross is in line for one more last hurrah. Hatcher has completed a 27-page biographical essay of Ross with the working title “It Didn’t Sell Much: The Publishing Struggles of Novelist Turned Newspaperman.” The North Carolina Literary Review, an annual publication put out by East Carolina University in Greenville, plans to publish the essay next summer. Hatcher then hopes to use the essay as an introduction to a new volume of Ross’ complete short fiction — the eight stories he published in his lifetime, plus the best of the unpublished ones Hatcher exhumed from the boxes of Ross’ papers. Meanwhile, Hatcher has filled a 6-foot-tall bookcase in his home office with volumes by writers with Greensboro ties who were part of Ross’ world — Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Donald Justice, Randall Jarrell, Fred Chappell and Bob Watson — as well as Ross’ siblings and literary relatives, including his niece Heather Ross Miller, a novelist and poet. As he continues to gather string and immerse himself in this world, Hatcher has begun writing Jim Ross’ life story. He wants to have a solid draft of a biography in hand before approaching publishers, hopefully within a couple of years. Then, if all goes well, he’ll make another push to get In the Red polished and published, and try to persuade a publisher to reissue that underappreciated classic, They Don’t Dance Much. What finally convinced Hatcher to push ahead with this daunting job of reviving a long-dormant literary reputation? “I feel Jim Ross has a fascinating story,” Hatcher says. “He is a fascinating story. Here was a guy who had such promise — he met Flannery O’Connor, he was endorsed by Hemingway, he traveled in the circles of fame — and yet he didn’t break out himself. It’s such a human-interest story. It’s not that he’s a Harper Lee, but he wrote a quality book that was admired by Raymond Chandler, by Flannery O’Connor, by top literary agents. He met with Maxwell Perkins. He’s a guy who will be of interest to writers, to people who

are aspiring writers. This is a familiar story — the guy who just didn’t make it. He tried. He had talent. But he didn’t get there.” So it’s a sad story? “When I finished the first draft of the biographical essay, I showed it to Marnie and she said, ‘You’ve done a nice job, everything is accurate, but this is so sad the way you’ve written it. Jim wasn’t a sad man.’ She said he was frustrated by the rejection, but it didn’t ruin his life.” Hatcher reworked the essay to soften the tone, reasoning that Marnie Ross should know such things. After all, she married the man because he made her laugh, and they were happy together for twenty-five years. And those who knew Jim in the last years of his life, even as he grew stooped from painful osteoarthritis and the weight of accumulated rejection, will tell you that right up to the end he had a fine head of sugar-white hair, eyes that danced with mischief, and a crackling sense of humor that nothing in the known world could extinguish. Jim Ross was the opposite of a sad man. He was a man who was elated — and endlessly amused — by life. “In some ways it’s a sad story, but I get the impression he still had a good life,” Hatcher says. “He was an excellent reporter. He wanted to be a writer, and he became a writer — not the kind of writer he thought he would be, which was a novelist, but he wrote for more than thirty years. And I think his story is worth telling. Here’s a guy who produced quality work, who made people happy. I have heard no one speak harshly of him. Everybody loved the guy. Everybody. He touched a lot of lives.” OH Bill Morris is the author of the novels Motor City and All Souls’ Day. He worked as a reporter for the Greensboro Record in the late 1970s, when he met Jim and Marnie Ross and first read They Don’t Dance Much. He returned to Greensboro as a columnist and feature writer for the News & Record from 19891996. He now lives in New York City, where he is a staff writer for the online literary magazine The Millions. He is at work on a novel about Detroit.

www.downtowngreensboro.net

It’s fun. It’s tasty. It’s creative. It’s exciting. It’s romantic. It’s right here. Find it at DowntownGreensboro.net

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Return to Sender William Sydney Porter started life in Greensboro. We say it’s time to bring him home By Jim Schlosser • Photographs By Cassie Butler

O.Henry

once said there’s no story in the obvious. He was wrong — at least when it

came to his death 102 years ago. What’s obvious — and what amounts to a compelling story — is O.Henry’s final resting place. It’s disgraceful. Greensboro’s favorite son is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, a city where he lived only briefly. And his gravesite is marked by a flat gravestone providing only the name he later chose to replace. “William Sydney Porter,” it reads, “1862–1910.” C’mon. Nothing about him being O.Henry, one of America’s greatest short-story writers. Nothing about him being the author of “The Gift of the Magi,” second only to Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” as the world’s best-loved Yule story. He seems forgotten in Asheville, while Greensboro has long celebrated her native son with plays performed based on his works, with businesses, a boulevard and the city’s finest hotel named in his honor. So here’s a bold, though not new proposal. Let’s dig up O.Henry’s bones and bring him home to Greensboro. This is where he grew up, on West Market Street downtown; where he worked in a drugstore on South Elm Street; where he attended the old Lindsay Street School; and where he watched daily goings-on. Some of the names of the people and places he observed later appeared in his short stories. O.Henry lived here nearly 20 years, longer than any other place. As to the idea of moving O.Henry here, “I think it would be perfect,” says Pam Murphy, long a leader in the production of Five by O.Henry, a festival of O.Henry plays staged annually, based on his short stories. “They don’t do anything for him up there,” she says. “Bring our hometown boy home.” Murphy says this year — the 150th anniversary of O.Henry’s birth, September 11, 1862 — would be a perfect occasion for his homecoming. Greensboro has an ideal spot for his reburial: the cemetery behind the Greensboro Historical Museum. Two of the museum’s three buildings once housed First Presbyterian Church. When the church moved in 1927 to its present sanctuary in Fisher Park, the cemetery stayed. The grounds contain the graves of O.Henry’s parents, Algernon and Mary Jane Virginia Porter. They were First Presbyterian members, as was O.Henry as a boy. Burials began in the cemetery in 1830s but one hasn’t taken place since the 1920s. An exception would surely be made for O.Henry. A tombstone worthy of America’s favorite short-story writer could be sculpted. Tourists would be drawn to the grave.

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To be fair, some visitors do make the trek to his barebones grave in Asheville, thanks to directional signs erected in the cemetery by Asheville’s Parks and Recreation Department, which has charge of Riverside. But O.Henry would surely have many more visitors in Greensboro because it’s his hometown. We honor and love him and are proud to call him our own. Besides, O.Henry’s relocation wouldn’t leave Riverside destitute of celebrity residents. Thomas Wolfe, almost as famous as O.Henry, is appropriately buried there. He was an Asheville native. When asked what he thought about representatives from Greensboro showing up with a hearse and shovel to bring our native son back home, Paul Becker, Riverside’s manager, says, “They couldn’t do that.” And it’s true that O.Henry has been resting, presumably at peace, at Riverside since his death at 47 of tuberculosis, aggravated by too much drinking and other excesses. But, in fact, it could be done — just not easily. Becker points out that an O.Henry descendant would have to request that the body be exhumed. A court in Buncombe County, of which Asheville is the county seat, would have to approve. “It’s a pretty big process, “ Becker says, adding later that “Buncombe County is one of the hardest counties to get anything done.” Getting a descendant to make the request won’t be easy. Charlotte Slice of Clinton, South Carolina — let’s call her a third cousin of the writer — says she is resigned to O.Henry being in Asheville, even though she says she found herself pulling weeds from around his modest grave marker. “Let’s let him rest in peace where he is,” she says, adding that she’s more concerned that the 150th anniversary of her famous relative’s birth be celebrated properly in Greensboro. Charlotte Barney of Greensboro, a second cousin of O.Henry, says she’s 94 and not sure she’s up to another battle over her kin’s remains. Her father and his brothers many years ago tried to bring his body back home. She says they were rudely treated by O.Henry’s widow, Sara Coleman Porter, who lived near Asheville. Barney recalls vividly how in 1945 the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution asking in the name of local citizens that O.Henry’s body and the ashes of his only child, Margaret (by his first wife, Athos, who died in 1898) be brought back to his childhood home. The plan was to rebury them in the old Presbyterian cemetery. A prominent citizen, whose name wasn’t revealed, promised to pay the expense involved in the removal and reburial. The answer was no. Hell no. “I wouldn’t think of granting the request,” Sara Porter said at the time. “I can pay no attention to any such idea.” O.Henry married Sara Coleman in late 1907, in what turned out to be a short and reportedly unhappy union. The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Mayor Robbie Perkins says another resolution might be considered if the council sensed a serious movement favoring O.Henry’s return. It would, of course, need to be backed by a descendant. No doubt, it would be nice, he says, to have O.Henry home, but without a groundswell of public support, he doesn’t see the effort high on the council’s priority list. O.Henry undoubtedly found Asheville lovely, but his muse took a hike in the hills. During his marriage, he lived in Asheville only four or five months, at the behest of his wife. She preferred her big house outside the city rather than residing in New York, where O.Henry wrote for a Sunday newspaper and other publications and where he found inspiration for many of his stories. O.Henry left Asheville to return to Manhattan, whose streets, alleys, parks and working people stoked his imagination. “I could look at these mountains a hundred years and never get an idea,” O.Henry said of Asheville, “but [in New York] just one block down and I catch a sentence, see something in a face and I’ve got my story.” Is Asheville the place where one of America’s most loved writers ought to spend eternity? Would it not be better for him to rest in a city he loved and where his imagination first began to blossom? Riverside’s Becker says Greensboro isn’t alone in wanting O.Henry’s body. He says years ago his predecessor at Riverside received a similar request from Texas. After leaving Greensboro when he was about 20, O.Henry moved to Texas, where he wrote for a newspaper and a magazine and worked at a bank. He was charged — unfairly, in the eyes of supporters — of embezzlement. When convicted, he left Texas in 1898 to spend three years in an Ohio prison. After that he lived briefly in Pittsburgh before moving to New York. The Texas request wound up as dead as O.Henry. It probably ran into The Art & Soul of Greensboro

the same obstacle as Greensboro: the Coleman family. Sara Coleman Porter died in 1959 at 91, but left elderly relatives who wanted O.Henry to remain in Asheville. It is not clear if any Coleman descendants remain, and if so, do they have any interest in O.Henry? After O.Henry died in New York, it was Coleman who brought the body to Asheville, even though she was born and grew up in Greensboro. She and Will Porter had been teenage love buds here. They lost touch until Coleman’s mother, on a visit to Greensboro in 1905, learned that her daughter’s old local beau, Will Porter, was the O.Henry who was writing such delightful stories and had become, presumably, well-to-do. Her daughter then tracked down O.Henry. A new romance bloomed, followed by marriage, but the pair apparently spent little time together. She was certainly not with him when he died a lonely death in a New York hospital room. O.Henry’s funeral was held at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York. The Asheville burial attracted esteemed literary figures Richard Harding Davis and William Dean Howells and the famous North Carolina diplomat and writer Walter Hines Page, who, surprisingly, has a school in Greensboro named for him, even though he never lived here. A William Sydney Porter Elementary School existed briefly here. It closed years ago and has since been torn down. Why Sara Coleman Porter chose such a meager stone to mark her famous husband’s grave is a mystery. She could certainly have afforded better. She would receive a hefty sum annually in royalties from her late husband’s writings. What would O.Henry make about all the fuss over his burial place? He’d probably chuckle, just as he would have done had he known that his funeral at the New York church was mistakenly scheduled at the same time as a wedding. He once commented, “Life is only a jolly good comedy.” OH September 2012

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Story of a House

A Home for the Muse A stream of talented Greensboro artists have found refuge, and inspiration, at the Sternberger Artist Center By Ashley Wahl • Photographs by Stacey Van Berkel

gun to blossom indoors, tilled by artists lured eanne Tannenbaum stands, eyes by the prospect of affordable studios and the closed, in the empty kitchen. For creative community that surrounds them. a moment, she sees the room as A prolific crop of both emerging and estabit looked when she was just a girl: lished artists has logged countless — and often fine china stacked neatly behind obscure — hours here, in upstairs bedrooms, glass-paneled cabinets, bouquets of freshly closed-in porches, even tiny closets. cut flowers on the wooden countertops, the Approach the front door and pity the high ceiling fan dancing in constant, lazy milkman, who carried his clinking glasses circles. around back. Imagine the flowerbox burst“Milk and eggs were delivered to that ing with color above the limestone arcade — back door,” she says, pointing to a small conthe transom windows brilliant echoes of the necting room, also bare, that once served as arched shape. a larder. “The vegetables stored there came In the walnut paneled foyer, high ceilings straight from the garden.” are a garden of acanthus and decorative plaster Serviceable but no longer used, the crown molding. Corinthian columns are kitchen is dark and dated, the once-sparkling sturdy trellises. red tile floor dingy beneath harsh fluorescent Sparse furnishing hardly complements lighting. resplendent woodwork in the parlor. The “Funny,” says Jeanne, who remembers common space is unadorned, as are sash her great-uncle Sigmund and his sister, Rosa, windows, which, Jeanne recalls, were once perking coffee and snacking on handfuls of dressed in lavish sheer draperies. fresh figs. “After all these years, this place But those who have known the silent still smells exactly the same.” refuge of the Sternberger manse, and have In its golden day, the house that textile tyexperienced its ethereal transcendence, see it coon Sigmund Sternberger built (circa 1926) Jeanne Tannenbaum, great-niece of Sigmund and Rosa in a different light. on Summit Avenue was among the grandest Sternberger Candace Flynt (now Kime) penned two homes in the city — a two-story Italian palanovels in one of the upstairs bedrooms — Sins of Omission (1984) and zzo designed by renowned Greensboro architect Harry Barton with a Mother Love (1987). She rented the space for a decade and wrote, like brick exterior, bracketed eaves and a handsome green barrel tile roof. clockwork, every day. Cost of construction: $100,000 ($1.2 million in today’s dollars). “When you’re an artist, it’s easy to let life interfere with your work,” Jeanne remembers how her Aunt Rosa stayed home and managed she says. ‑ the household, overseeing the maids, Lizzie and Florence, who helped Sternberger became her sweet escape — a simple, spare room with prepare meals in the grand kitchen. She particularly enjoyed gardening. empty white walls and a single rug. In summer, she harvested figs, pears and peaches from the backyard She lights up with memories of the old boiler, heat lamps in the orchard. There were formal plantings, grape trellises, and kaleidoscopic bathrooms, creaky oak flooring. beds of roses, their aroma sweeter than anything man could bottle. “There were all kinds of artists there . . . painters, sculptors, photogThat garden was her Shangri-La. raphers . . . Nancy Gates wrote short stories in the little sewing closet.” When Sigmund died at home in 1964, the house became property She shared a bathroom with VanDorn Hinnant (a painter), and of the Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation, which donated it to the bought experimental mixed media artwork by Marta Tornero, an interUnited Arts Council of Greensboro in 1972. nationally renowned furniture designer who rented space downstairs. It became the Sternberger Artist Center seven years later, when the “It was a great, productive, interesting time,” says Kime. “We [artUAC relocated its administrative offices to its current space on Davie ists] enjoyed each other’s energy.” Street. Ever since then, it’s as if the spirit of Rosa’s fertile garden had be-

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Lisa Woods, visual arts teacher at Weaver Academy for the Performing and Visual Arts

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Marianne Gingher wrote her first novel here. An anecdote from her book, Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink, illustrates an artist’s need for tranquil space: “Fred Chappell once told me that when left to write at home with his young son, who was screaming to be set free from his playpen, he sprung the kid from captivity, then, lugging his typewriter, Fred crawled into the playpen himself to work. The arrangement made everyone happy.” In a later paragraph, Gingher describes her second-floor studio, a former sitting room, for which she paid $25 a month. “My room measures about seven feet by eight. It also doubles as a hall for the artist who rents the studio behind me and accesses her space through mine . . . Outside the building, I find some old bricks lying around that I haul up to use for paperweights. The office comes furnished with a clunky, old, schoolteacher’s desk and a sprung swivel chair with a lopsided seat. I build a bookcase with cinderblocks and boards. There’s no air conditioning, and this is North Carolina in July, when humidity is as thick as jam and sometimes breathing feels the same as drowning. Some days it’s so hot that my typewriter cassette ribbons start melting. No joke, first thing I do when the writing’s going well is strip down to my underwear and bra and type barefooted, in the seminude. . .” Gingher’s room sounds no different than most of the rooms here — plain, devoid of all but the bare essentials. White walls pleading for a splash of color. But, like many others, she deemed it “pure sanctuary” — a perfect backdrop on which an artist’s world comes alive on paper, canvas or otherwise. “I once spent a happy afternoon photographing all manner of vegetables The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Lee Zacharias, writer and photographer

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Jane Ann Kepley, potter

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in the great old sink,” says Lee Zacharias, who has rented various spaces here for fifteen years, including the dining room, butler’s pantry, and, now, an upstairs bedroom. “It’s a great, quiet place to work, away from the distractions of home. There’s no Wi-Fi, no TV, you can’t weed the garden, walk the dog or clean your stove when you feel stuck on a difficult chapter,” says Zacharias. Bill Brooks’ paintings are piled high in the dining room, the marble fireplace and ornate mantel buried behind a mountain of colorful canvas. Floyd Newkirk painted jazz musicians in the large, closed-in portico, where the Writers’ Group of the Triad now holds their monthly meetings. Laurelyn Dossett wrote folk songs here for a spell last summer. Jane Ann Kepley throws clay inside the old potting shed. Henry Sumpter often paints for fifteen hours straight, working in the studio where the late, renowned New York sculptor Peter Agostini did bronze and plaster castings. Each artist has stories. Last year, the Arts Council restored the old membrane beneath the green barrel tile roof. “It was tremendous work to take the tiles off carefully,” says Alec Wrenn, who keeps the books at Sternberger gratis. Call it a labor of love. The solarium, no longer filled with the ornamental ferns that Jeanne remembers from her girlhood visits, looks out to the ghost of the grand orchard. But the magic of Sternberger continues. Feel it pulsing through the walls — an awakened energy that lends itself to sprightly musings and gardens of fancy. “Along with all the other writers and artists who have passed through Sternberger, I’m grateful to the United Arts Council for maintaining this lovely house and providing us with an affordable place to work,” says Zacharias. OH The Art & Soul of Greensboro

State Street Shops

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

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A l l S e aso n

Wonders Seventeen ways to make your garden glorious — and last almost all year By Lee Rogers

I’m

all about Greensboro’s 17 Days festival, but if I had a garden that only performed for seventeen days I would rip it right out of the ground! Let’s face it. Anyone can make a garden look pretty in the spring. But to plan a flowering border that will peak in autumn is a much bigger challenge. When I design gardens for people, I always include some fabulous fall bloomers. They look healthy and green all summer as they grow and put on weight. Meanwhile, other plants are beginning to sag with fatigue. Blooms burst forth just when gardeners think they cannot stand one more day of 100-degree heat combined with 10,000 percent humidity. Plus, by then the weather begins to cool and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Which gives us the strength to carry on and order several thousand bulbs for fall planting. However, in keeping with the seventeen theme, here are just that many candidates for outstanding fall performance in the garden. First on my list and coming into bloom right now in my garden are (1) Japanese anemones. I never met a cultivar I didn’t like. They come in pinks and whites, and their flowers wave around on tall stalks above a soft mound of foliage that looks delightfully fresh all summer. They can tolerate sun or part shade but like a moist soil. Combine them with (2) perennial Begonia grandis. These have glorious sprays of pink blossoms and large luxuriant foliage — and look nothing like those tight squatty annual begonias that must have been hybridized by trolls. Sure, they can be invasive but they’re easy to pull out or give away to friends. If you can get them, adding some (3) blue salvias in there makes a gorgeous complement. I’d decided not to count the many plants that start blooming in early summer and continue into the fall. But I have to make an exception for the salvias. One of my current favorites is Salvia uliginosa, sometimes called bog sage. It makes a nice sturdy clump about five feet tall with heavenly blue flower spikes. It looks great at the back of the sunny border behind something with a more solid texture like a phlox or peony. My other favorite is the Salvia guaranitica “Black and Blue,” which produces a mass of flowers resembling cobalt blue lobster claws. It’s supposed to be an annual here but often winters over. An extra advantage is that hummingbirds love all salvias, not just the red ones. Next come the Big Three for the sunny garden: (4) Lespedeza thunbergii, (5) Eupatorium fistulosum, and (6) Helianthus angustifolius. They are great both in stature and dramatic impact. Every winter after the hard freeze I whack them to the ground, and by midsummer they are as big as I am. You can cut them back hard mid-summer, and they will still attain heroic proportions by fall. All three are related

Japanese Anemone

Blue Salvia

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September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

to native American wildflowers (as are so many of our cultivated garden plants). Lespedeza produces cascades of white flowers that spring from its fountain of bluegreen foliage. Next the Eupatorium or joe pye weed, as we commonly call it, brings out huge wads of dusky mauve flower heads. And just when you think it’s all over for the season, the helianthus (swamp sunflower) produces this eight-foot haystack of pure gold. It is a glorious show! If you can plant a group of (7) ginger lilies in front of it all, you will add their fragile moth-like flowers to the picture and have the bonus gift of sweet fragrance. I got mine from a neighbor who was throwing hers away because she didn’t like the way the foliage just looked like real short corn for a long time. Well, that’s sort of true, but if you can wait for the surprise, they are well worth the investment. Although they resemble the culinary ginger plant, their real genus is Hedychium, and I see that Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh offers 88 varieties. So they are definitely available. You can get a similar effect with a mass planting of Acidanthera murielae (Abyssinian gladioli) bulbs, which are tiny, like crocus, each one sprouting a single, thin dark green leaf. This is why they can look weedy if scattered around. So for good dramatic impact, you really have to do the mass planting thing and prop them up both in front and behind with sturdier plants or stake them. They will reward you with many lovely star-shaped white flowers bearing a mahogany blotch in the throat and, like the ginger lilies, they give off a very delicate fragrance. Nothing like those gaudy florist gladioli that we see in funeral homes. Then if you have a moist shady spot in your border, you must include a patch of (8) Tricyrtis. Toad lily is an ugly name for a most beautiful flower. There are many different colors and sizes of them, but they all produce the most amazing sprays of orchid type flowers starting in late summer. They look incredibly exotic even though they are easy as pie to grow in our climate. In the same moist area you could grow a clump of our state wildflower (9) Lobelia cardinalis, which produces dramatic stalks of scarlet flowers. I grow the red/maroon cultivar Victoria and pair it with (10) Boltonia “Snowbank.” Its long-blooming bouquet of tiny daisy flowers looks so appealing after a hot, dusty summer and makes a nice foil for any strong color. Lycoris radiata (11) is another easy fall-blooming bulb that I love to plant in big clumps in the shade garden. All the Lycoris put up their flowers first on bare stalks, and the red fall-blooming ones really can brighten up a woodland border at a sparse time. The liriope-like foliage that follows is not terribly exciting, but it holds its own through the winter and goes dormant in spring. These flowers would make an enchanting picture if paired with our native woodland shrub, the (12) Euonymus americanus (aka hearts a’busting or strawberry bush). The shrub itself is sort of loose and airy, maybe not so interesting per se, but producing the most amazing fruit capsules. They are prickly like little pink hedgehogs and bust open to reveal large orange berries. Very showy! I cannot go a step further without mentioning the (13) asters, of which there are many beautiful cultivars. They all produce clusters of small daisy-like flowers on foliage clumps of differing heights. My favorites are the New England asters, purple “Hella Lacy” and shocking pink “Alma Potschke.” They can both get up in the three-foot range, and so should be cut back hard by mid July. This also forces them to bloom a little later when you need them. You can use the same treatment on the (14) Solidagos (goldenrods,) both to delay bloom time and keep them nice and bushy. An outstanding selection for smaller gardens is “Fireworks” with arching sprays of tiny gold flowers, really like gold sparklers. Keep it under four feet tall and you will be so happy with this tenacious plant. It could also be useful for covering a sunny bank because the basal foliage is virtually evergreen and forms such a dense mat that weeds cannot germinate. Well, maybe Bermuda grass sometimes, but where is the challenge of gardening without a little Bermuda grass, I say! The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Begonia Grandis

Lespedeza thunbergii Helianthus angustifolius

Eupatorium ﬁstulosum

Lobelia cardinalis Boltonia “Snowbank”

Ginger Lily

Tricyrtis (Toad Lily)

September 2012

O.Henry 65

Life and Home Style

66 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

My first encounter with a (15) beautyberry Lycoris radiata bush in full fruit rendered me speechless with delight. Fantastic arching branches absolutely loaded with magenta berries transform it into a magenta fountain. If you haven’t ever seen one, rush to your computer and bring up an image of Callicarpa. If you have limited space, you can grow a smallish one called “Issai.” But be aware that the berries will drop eventually and produce lots of seedlings all around. I have planted a sunny bank with masses of them and paired them with the late blooming (16) Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora (aka peegee) cultivars “Limelight,” “Unique” and “Tardiva.” They are truly spectacular in the fall. The hydrangeas actually start blooming a lot earlier in the summer, but I still include them in the fall show because the blossoms just keep going, and many of them deepen to a rose red color as the season progresses. I reduce mine to about two feet tall every year just to keep them off the sidewalk. They still perform beautifully and, in full sun, I might add. You get a lot of bang for the buck with the hydrangeas. I cannot close without reminding everyone of the fall blooming (17) Camellia sasanqua. It is one of the most regal of Southern evergreen shrubs and is widely available in nurseries in a huge range of sizes and flower colors. In designing gardens I try to use plants that display more than one talent in more than one season, and they must be reliable performers. A case can sometimes be made for including something temperamental, like that it comes from your great great grandmother. Or maybe you just simply must have a classic lilac bush the likes of which only bloom successfully in New England. When a client makes this kind of request, I try to accommodate by tucking the diva candidate into a remote corner of the garden. That way, if it croaks (and I know it will), then it won’t ruin the whole design. The show must go on!!! OH

Euonymus americanus

Asters

Solidagos (goldenrods)

Beautyberry bush

Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora (aka peegee)

Camellia sasanqua

Lee Rogers, a landscape designer in Greensboro, last wrote about “a little wilderness” in Fisher Park for O.Henry magazine. Contact her at lee@leerogersdesign.com.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

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68 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

“By all these lovely tokens, September days are here. With Summer’s best of Weather. And Autumn’s best of cheer.” �

— Helen Hunt Jackson

By noah salt

Meanwhile, Out In The Garden

As September’s air cools and days shorten, it’s time to get a jump on your autumn cleanup, trimming off dead foliage and raking the refuse of summer into piles for bonfires or to use in compost piles. Apples ripen and reach their peak. Russian sage and chrysanthemums are often at peak of flower in early September, and many forms of roses enjoy a lush second bloom. One of our perennial favorites is hyssop, particular anise hyssop, a great medium border plant that produces rich brush-like flowers on woody stalks well into the new season, an ancient star of the autumn garden mentioned in the Book of Exodus for its purgative and cleansing properties. We also love Centaurea atropurpurea or “knapweed,” which features bright ruby red thistle-like flowers that often endure till first frost. Ditto Japanese anemone. Beyond the omnipresent mums, container gardens thrive come Indian summer with mounds of verbena (another plant long associated with the divine, supposedly used to staunch Jesus’ wounds from the cross), Heuchera (coral bells) and various ornamental grasses that will produce vibrant color and texture until the coming of cold weather.

Writer In The Garden

“But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head. . . the harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense Midsummer relationships that brought it on.” Robert Finch, nature writer and essayist

Green Man Rules September’s Sky

In the afterglow of a summer sky teeming with exciting activity — lunar eclipses and the historic Transit of Venus — the night sky settles into a comfortable pattern of change as the sun tracks southward toward the celestial equinox on the 22nd, heralding the official arrival of autumn. As the pace of shortening days accelerates, the Milky Way arches high overhead, offering a celestial zoo of animals. One effect of this change is to produce longer sunsets and a vibrant early night sky where the Summer Triangle of constellations and several bright planets still dominate. Jupiter, rising in the east, is the dominant player in the early autumn sky, but Saturn eases away as the fall shifts into gear. For early risers, September offers prime time for telescoping planets. Views of Jupiter and Venus are particularly striking.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

With the stubble of threshed grain, cooler evenings and tang of fallen apples in the air, ancient Druids — those wily keepers of the forest — annually mounted a late harvest celebration called Maybon to honor the mystical Green Man, the god of the forest, offering homemade spirits, wine and beer to the trees as a form of liquid fertilizer as the dark season looms. (We’ve seen the same bizarre behavior at UNC keg parties on the lawn.) The 14th marks the beginning of Nutting Season, an excellent time for making medicines, when, according to the English Husbandman, 1635, fallen hazelnuts contain magical properties and are ideal for fattening fowls for the coming Michaelmas observance. The man or woman born under the House of Libra — entering September 24 — will be praised for his service though inclined to wander and poor at keeping his marriage vows, whereas woman under this sign is amiable and rejoiced by her husband. (Kalendar of Shepherds, 1604.) The summer’s last blackberries must be picked by the 25th to prevent the devil from fouling them. September 2012

O.Henry 69

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70 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

WATERCOLOR BY KIRA SCHOENFELDER

Arts Calendar

September 1

September 6

JOHN COLTRANE INTERNATIONAL JAZZ & BLUES FEST. 1 – 10 p.m. Featuring Stanley Clarke, George Duke, Poncho Sanchez and Shemekia Copeland. Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 884-5255.

ARTIST TALK. 5 – 6 p.m. Curtis Mann shares insights into his process of physically transforming photos of the Middle East and North Africa into fluid re-imaginings of perception and place. Weatherspoon Art Museum, Dillard Room, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

• •

ELSEWHERE ADVENTURE TOUR. 4 – 4:30 p.m. Join Elsewherians on a tour through the living museum. Cost: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

September 2–6

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TRIAD STAGE MAINSTAGE PREVIEW. 7:30 p.m. Trouble in Mind. Tickets: $24. Triad Stage, 232 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.

September 3–9

•

SPLURGES ANNIVERSARY SALE & CELEBRATION. Splurges Boutique, 1564-B Highwoods Blvd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 706-7701 or www. splurgesboutique.com.

September 4

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CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS IN CONCERT. 8 – 10 p.m. North Carolina’s own folk sensation. Part of the University Performing Arts Series. Aycock Auditorium, 408 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5789. Tickets: upas.uncg.edu.

September 5

•

TUNES AT NOON. 12 – 1:30 p.m. Live music from Rob Blackwell. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www. centercitypark.org. Key: The Art & Soul of Greensboro

• • Art

•

Greensboro. Info: (336) 260-7999 or www.facebook.com/ DoodadFarm.

•

ART EXHIBIT & OPENING RECEPTION. 6 – 7:30 p.m. Stephen Hayes: Cash Crop. On display through December 16. Hege Library, Guilford College, 5800 W. Friendly Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 316-2450.

• • EXHIBIT & OPENING RECEPTION. 6 – 9 p.m. OPEN MIC. 7 – 9 p.m. Hosted by the Writers • ART • WGOT Latin Roots. Presented by Casa Azul. Earthworks Gallery, 500 Group of the Triad. Readers sign up at 6:45 p.m. The Creative S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: casaazulgreensboro.org. Center, 900 Sixteenth St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 617-3328 or www.triadwriters.org. ART EXHIBIT & OPENING RECEPTION. 6 – 9 • p.m. OH SNAP! a cellphone photography show & contest. Center ELSEWHERE ARTISTS TALK. 8 – 9 p.m. • SUSTAINABILITY FILM. 6:30 – 8 p.m. Chasing Ice. Free. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

SOLO SHOW & ARTIST RECEPTION. 6 – 8 p.m. Jane Filer, painter. Tyler White Gallery, 307 State St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 279-1124 or www.tylerwhitegallery.com.

Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

for Visual Artists, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7485 or www.greensboroart.org.

September 6–9 & 13–16

•

ART EXHIBIT & OPENING RECEPTION. 6 – 10 p.m. The Orient Express. On display through September 29. The Studio & Gallery, 109 N. Cedar St. Suite No. 3, Greensboro. Info: (336) 420-4810 or thestudioandgallery.vpweb.com.

5 BY O.HENRY PLAYS. 7:30 – 9 p.m. (Thurs. – Sat.); 3 – 4:30 p.m. (Sat. & Sun.) Show by playwright Joe Hoesl featuring five O.Henry short stories, vintage music and surprise endings. Tickets: $15/general admission; $12/museum members, seniors and students. Uncle Lucius Tickets available in Museum Shop or through Triad Stage Box Office at (336) 272-0160. Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2043.

•

GREENSBORO OPERA GARDEN PARTY. 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Celebrate 31 years of Greensboro Opera with food and cocktails, entertainment, and a silent auction. Cost: $35. Elizabeth Herring Gardens, UNCG Music School, 100 McIver St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 273-9472.

September 7

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LUNCH & LEARN. 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. Enjoy a light lunch while artist Jane Filer demonstrates her style of painting. Cost: $20. Tyler White Gallery, 307 State St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 279-1124 or www.tylerwhitegallery. com.

•

ART EXHIBIT & OPENING RECEPTION. 5 – 7 p.m. Jetsam by Mark Brown. Sculptures and constructions that illustrate connection. On display through September 29. Anne Rudd Galyon and Irene Cullis Galleries, Cowan Humanities Building, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St., Greensboro. Info: www.greensboro.edu.

• •

DOODAD FARM CONCERT. 7 p.m. Innovative folk duo Friction Farm. Doodad Farm, 4701 Land Road,

Music/Concerts

Performing arts

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE. 7 – 10 p.m. Live music from Soulstice (7 p.m.) and Uncle Lucius (8:45 p.m.) Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org.

September 7–23

•

TRIAD STAGE MAINSTAGE THEATER. Trouble in Mind. A comedy-drama of character by Alice Childress; directed by Preston Lane. Triad Stage, 232 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Tickets/Info: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.

• • Fun

History

•

Sports September 2012

O.Henry 71

September Arts Calendar September 8

September 9–30

CREATION CELEBRATION. 12 – 4 p.m. Open house showcasing City Arts programs. Featuring performances, dance and fitness classes, pottery demonstrations, and raffle. Free. City Arts, 200 N. Davie St., Suite 101, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2974 or www.city-arts.org.

NORTH CAROLINA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL. Romeo and Juliet. A new spin on one of the world’s best-known stories, using Shakespeare’s original text in a contemporary setting. High Point Theatre, 220 E. Commerce Ave., High Point. Tickets/Info: (336) 841-2273 or ncshakes.org.

•

ELSEWHERE PLAYSHOP. 2 p.m. Sewing and Mending. Meet in the fabric workshop for lessons on sewing, mending and repairing your own clothing, or items from Elsewhere’s wardrobe collection. Suggested donation: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. RSVP: education@goelsewhere.org. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

September 10

••

PERFORMANCE BY JOHN MCCUTCHEON. 7 – 8:30 p.m. Author, folklorist and musical artist. Free and open to the public. UNCG Elliott University Center, 507 Stirling St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-0112.

•

ELSEWHERE ADVENTURE TOUR. 4 – 4:30 p.m. Join Elsewherians on a tour through the living museum. Cost: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www. goelsewhere.org.

•

O.HENRY LECTURE. 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. Dr. Elliot Engel offers the life story of Will Porter, who wrote under the pen name O.Henry. Free. Reservations required. Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 3732043 or www.greensborohistory.org.

•

72 O.Henry

September 2012

Music/Concerts

Performing arts

•

ELSEWHERE ARTISTS TALK. 8 – 9 p.m. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www. goelsewhere.org.

•

SWING DANCE. 7:30 – 11:30 p.m. Introductory jitterbug lesson starts at 7:30 p.m., followed by live swing music. Members: $8; Non-members: $10. Vintage Theatre, 7 Vintage Ave., Winston-Salem. Info: (336) 508-9998 or www.piedmontswingdance.org. Art

•

WAM JAM. 7 – 8 p.m. A capella, jazz and new world music by UNCG students. Free. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

NOON AT THE SPOON. 12 p.m. A 20-minute docent-led tour of new exhibit, On the Path to Abstraction. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

•

• •

September 13

September 11

PROJECT SHIMMY. 7 – 9:30 p.m. World dance show to benefit Triad Health Project. Tickets: $10/advance; $15. Huggins Auditorium, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 303-8792; www.twisteddance.com/shimmy.html; www. triadhealthproject.com.

Key:

Joshua West. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org.

September 12

• TUNES AT NOON. 12 – 1:30 p.m. Live music from • • • • • Film

Literature/Speakers

Fun

History

Sports

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Sept. Arts Calendar

September 14

•

ART EXHIBIT OPENING. Home Work: Domestic Narratives in Contemporary Art. Twenty-seven artists interpret contemporary domestic life through sculpture, installations, painting, photography and video. On display through November 3. Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or www. greenhillcenter.org.

September 14–15

LIVE-ACTION U.S. ARMY SHOW. Spirit of America. • Soldiers in historical uniforms re-enact key moments in U.S. Army and American history. Free admission; ticket required. Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 W. Lee St., Greensboro. Info: www.soa.mdw.army.mil/ticketing.

September 15

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TRIAD PRIDE FESTIVAL. 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. Annual festival for the LGBT community, produced by Alternative Resources in the Triad. Festival Park, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 856-7397 or www.triadpride.org.

•

ART EXHIBIT. 1 – 5 p.m. Catherine Murphy: Falk Visiting Artist. On display through December 9. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

•

ELSEWHERE ADVENTURE TOUR. 4 – 4:30 p.m. Join Elsewherians on a tour through the living museum. Cost: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

•

RUN 4 THE GREENWAY. One-mile walk/run begins at 4:45 p.m.; 8k begins at 5:15 p.m. Post race: enjoy live music, food, beverages and entertainment. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Register: precisiontimingsystems.com. Info: (336) 314-0605 or www.downtowngreenway.org.

•

URBAN THEATRE PRODUCTION. 7 – 9:30 p.m. Mama’s Girls. Tickets: $17.50; $15.50; $12.50. Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-2605 or www.carolinatheatre.com.

September 16

•

CHARLIE DANIELS BAND & LITTLE RIVER BAND. 6 p.m. White Oak Amphitheatre, 1921 W. Lee St., Greensboro. Tickets: $20 (lawn); $29.50 & $34.50 (reserved). Info: www.greensborocoliseum.com.

September 19

•

TUNES AT NOON. 12 – 1:30 p.m. Live music from Andrea Reese. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org.

September 19–23

•

THEATER PREMIER. 7:30 p.m. (weekdays); 2 p.m. (Sat. & Sun.) The North Carolina premiere of Carve, a play by Molly Smith Metzler that explores the question of who really owns a work of art, along with issues of creativity and originality. Annie Sellars Jordan Parlor Theatre, Greensboro College. Tickets/ Info: (336) 217-7220 or www. greensboro.edu.

September 20

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GARDENING GALA & SEMINAR. Annual event hosted by Guilford County Extension Master Gardener Volunteers. Cost: $35 (lunch

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports The Art & Soul of Greensboro

• • •

Performing arts Fun History September 2012

O.Henry 73

September Arts Calendar included). Guilford County Agricultural Center, 3309 Burlington Rd., Greensboro. Info: Rose Chamblee at (336) 275-6562 or chambleer@bellsouth.net.

2605 or www.musicforagreatspace.org.

• WITH O.HENRY. 6:30 p.m. Celebrate •• DINNER William Sydney Porter’s 150 birthday with an elegant

EXPERIENCE JAMAICA. 6 – 7:30 p.m. Presented by NCA&T Dance and Art Programs. Free. NCA&T State University, E. Market St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 256-2137.

•

TRIAD STORYTELLING EXCHANGE. 6:30 – 8 p.m. Share stories with ironic endings. CityArts Conference Room, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-3617.

evening from America’s gilded age. Proceeds benefit the Greensboro Historical Museum. Tickets: $150. Reservations required. O.Henry Hotel, 624 Green Valley Rd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 617-0090.

•

MEMORIAL CONCERT. 7 – 9 p.m. A celebration of the life of Christopher Mason, featuring Christian recording artist Jim Cole. Gail Brower Huggins Performance Center, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 272-7102, ext. 597 or www.greensboro.edu.

•

MUSIC FOR A GREAT SPACE CONCERT. 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. Inspirata Vocal Ensemble. Tickets: $18/adults; $15/ seniors; $5/students (ages 17-24). Christ United Methodist Church, 410 Holden Rd., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 3332605. Info: (336) 638-7624 or www.musicforagreatspace.org.

“Tyler”

• EMF JAZZ & BLUES CONCERT. 9 – 11:30 p.m. •music Live by Freeport Jazz. Free. Print Works Bistro, 702

Yellow Lab

CENTER CITY CINEMA. 8:30 p.m. We Are Marshall. Free. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org.

graphite on Canson paper

Pamela Powers January

Green Valley Rd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7450 or www. easternmusicfestival.org. FINE

ART

PORTRAITS

September 21–22

•

PETS

CHILDREN’S CONCERT. 6 p.m. (Friday); 11 a.m. (Saturday) Zoosical! Tickets: $5. Music Academy of NC, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-8748 or www. MusicAcademyNC.org.

www.pamelapowersjanuary.com

910.692.0505

New York New York Shopping and Theater

October 29 – November 1, 2012 Land only: $950 per person double occupancy – hotel, theater ticket, transfers

Christmas in New York December 6-9, 2012

Land only: hotel, theater tickets and Christmas Show at Radio City $1198 double - $979 triple and $869 quad occupancy Call for Details

September 21–22 & 28

•

ELSEWHERE ARTISTS TALK. 8 – 9 p.m. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

September 20–23

UNCG THEATRE. Reasons to Be Pretty. Four close • friends are forced to confront a sea of deceit, infidelity and betrayed trust. Brown Building Theatre, 402 Tate St., Greensboro. Tickets: $5. Info: (336) 334-4601 or performingarts.uncg.edu.

Associate: A Way To Go Travel

74 O.Henry

September 2012

September 22

•

ART EXHIBIT. 1 – 5 p.m. Juan Logan: Without Stopping. On display through December 16. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

••

September 20–30

TATE STREET FESTIVAL. 1 – 8 p.m. Street festival featuring live bands and art & craft vendors. Corner of Tate St. & Walker Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 337-5410 or www. liveoriginallocoal.com.

•

OPEN SPACE CAFÉ THEATRE. Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show. Two actresses play men and women struggling through the common rituals of modern life. Open Space Café Theatre, 4094 Battleground Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 292-2285 or www. osctheatre.com.

September 21 – October 7

••

17 DAYS ARTS & CULTURE FESTIVAL. Over 100 events and performances, featuring music, visual arts, theatre, dance and more. Info: 17DaysGreensboro.org.

•

ART AUCTION & EXHIBIT. A retrospective art show and auction to establish a scholarship for the Art Department at UNCG. William Mangum Fine Art Gallery, 2166 Lawndale Dr., Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-9200 or williammangum.com.

September 21 336-275-1010 / fax 336-271-8383 weezieglascock@gmail.com weezieglasco

•

YOUTH THEATRE. 7:30 p.m. (Fri.); 3:30 p.m. (Sat.) Rivalry. Written and performed by youth living in the Greensboro/High Point region in response to a recent tragedy. Tickets: $5. Caldcleugh Multicultural Arts Center, 1700 Orchard St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-5881.

•

17 DAYS DINNER. 5:30 p.m. Join Music for a Great Space (MGS) for a benefit dinner before the Inspirata Vocal Ensemble concert. Tickets: $18.50. Christ United Methodist Church, 410 N. Holden Rd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Performing arts

••

RACE THE BAR. 3 – 6 p.m. 5k and 10k races followed by the bar. USA Track and Field sanctioned event. Natty Greene’s Pub & Brewing Co., 345 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-8042 or www.racethebar.com.

•

ELSEWHERE ADVENTURE TOUR. 4 – 4:30 p.m. Join Elsewherians on a tour through the living museum. Cost: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

•

SWING DANCE. 7:30 – 11:30 p.m. Introductory jitterbug lesson starts at 7:30 p.m., followed by live swing music. Members: $8; Non-members: $10. Oriental Shrine Club, 5010 High Point Rd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 508-9998 or www.piedmontswingdance.org.

•

LISTEN LOCAL. 8 – 10:30 p.m. A showcase of local musicians. Admission: $15. Mack and Mack, 220 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 292-2325. Tickets: www.triadacousticstage.com.

September 23

•

FILM. 3 – 5 p.m. O.Henry’s Full House. Dramatization of five stories by O.Henry. Central Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-3636.

September 24

•

BRANFORD MARSALIS & JOEY CALDERAZZO DUO. 7 – 10 p.m. An inspired and intimate evening of jazz. Triad Stage, 232 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-7523. Tickets: www.triadstage.org.

September Arts Calendar

September 25

JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR IN CONCERT. 9 – 11:45 • CHORAL CONCERT. 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Schola p.m. The Blind Tiger, 1819 Spring Garden St., Greensboro. • Cantorum. Music Building Organ Hall, UNCG, 100 McIver Info: (336) 272-9888 or www.theblindtiger.com. St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-4849 or performingarts. uncg.edu.

September 27

•

O.HENRY BOOKUP. 6 – 8 p.m. Celebrate the 150th birthday of Greensboro native William Sydney Porter. Bring your own short story. Bin 33, 324 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: jomaeder.com/read/bookup.

PINK IN THE PARK. 10:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Celebrate survivors of breast cancer; honor the victims. Free. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org.

•

ORGAN RECITAL. 7:30 – 9 p.m. Featuring Susan Bates, adjunct music faculty member and organist at Greensboro College and Wake Forest University. Free. Hannah Brown Finch Memorial Chapel, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 217-7220.

LUNCH & LEARN. 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. Enjoy a light lunch while artist Susan Hecht demonstrates her style of painting. Cost: $20. Tyler White Gallery, 307 State St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 2791124 or www.tylerwhitegallery. com.

September 26

ART IMAGININGS. • 3 – 4 p.m. For school-age

AT NOON. 12 – 1:30 • TUNES p.m. Live music from Holt Gwyn &

children. Greensboro Public Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 3732471 or www.greensborolibrary.org.

David Niblock. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: www. centercitypark.org.

•

NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL. 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. Featuring the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet and Present Continuous, plus music by Liviu Marinesco, Sebastian Zubieta, and Conlon Nancarrow. Recital Hall, Music Building at UNCG, 1 McIver St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5421 or performingarts.uncg.edu. Key:

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Performing arts

•

BREAST CANCER AWARENESS FUNDRAISER. 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. Annual fundraiser, “Alight at Tyler White.” A raffle of a 36 inch square original oil painting by Susan B Hecht, titled “Violet Horizons.” Do not need to be present to win. Info/purchase tickets: www.AlightFoundation.org.

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

September 2012

•

Sports

O.Henry 75

Sept. Arts Calendar •

MUSICAL REVUE OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE. 6 – 10 p.m. A Place for Us. Featuring songs from well-known Broadway musicals such as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof and Ragtime performed by professional local and visiting talents. The Broach Theatre, 520 S. Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets/Info: (336) 379-0037 or www. faihouse.org.

•

SHOW OF HANDS. 6 – 11 p.m. Collaborative live music event to engage young people in the November 2012 elections. Downtown Greenway Morehead Park Trailhead, Spring Garden St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 402-0061 or www.facebook.com/ShowOfHands2012.

•

NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL. 7 – 8:30 p.m. Free performance by Sinister Resonance. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.

•

ELSEWHERE ARTISTS TALK. 8 – 9 p.m. Artists Irwan Ahmett, Tita Salina and Naeun Jeon share concepts, culture and art through this salon style presentation and discussion. Elsewhere, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 303-1596 or www.goelsewhere.org.

•

THE BRONX HORNS. 8 – 10 p.m. An evening of mambo, salsa, meringue and Latin favorites. The Empire Room, 203 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-7523 or 17DAYSGreensboro.org.

September 27 & 29

•

GREENSBORO SYMPHONY MASTERWORKS CONCERT. 7:30 p.m. (Thurs.); 8 p.m. (Sat.) Dima’s Birthday at the Viennese Ball. War Memorial Auditorium, 1921 W. Lee St., Greensboro. Tickets/Info: (336) 335-5456 x 224 or www.greensborosymphony.org.

September 27–30

So Many Reasons

to love Salem

•

AN EVENING OF SHORT PLAYS. 8 – 10 p.m. (Thurs., Fri., Sun.); 2 – 4 p.m. (Sun.) Eight eclectic plays that take place in front of a wall of graffiti with one door. City Arts, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2026 or www. thedramacenter.com.

•

NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL. 9:30 – 11 p.m. A celebration of John Cage’s 100th anniversary, featuring Sopranos Stacey Mastrian and Lorena Guillén and pianist Cicilia Yuddha. Mack and Mack, 220 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-6225.

September 28

Reason No. 171

“Salem Academy prepared me for

success”

•

COMEDIAN RON WHITE. 7 p.m. Blue Collar Comedy funnyman with his new stand-up show, “Moral Compass.” War Memorial Auditorium, 1921 W. Lee St., Greensboro. Tickets/Info: www.greensborocoliseum.com.

•

GREENSBORO SYMPHONY CHAMBER CONCERT. 8 p.m. Featuring Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir D’un Lieu Cher, plus the world premier of J. Jakoulov’s Concerto for Clarinet, Harp and Strings. Tickets: $30. UNCG School of Music Recital Hall, 100 McIver St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 335-5456 x 224 or www. greensborosymphony.org.

There are so many reasons to consider the Southeast’s premier day and boarding school for girls, grades 9-12. Visit our campus, and find out why our rigorous education and inspiring environment offer a clear advantage in preparing girls for success.

Discover your own reasons! Call 1-877-407-2536 to schedule a visit. Day Student Visitation Programs: Oct. 19; Nov. 12 Boarding Student Visitation Programs: Oct. 18-19; Nov. 8-9 Sisters Merit Scholarship for Boarding Students: Application deadline: January 2013 Visit salemacademy.com for online materials 76 O.Henry

September 2012

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports Winston-Salem, North Carolina

• • •

Performing arts Fun History

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

803 Hood Place Old Irving Park, Greensboro 4BR/5 Full Baths/3 Half Baths – This French Style home has been totally remodeled. It sits on a quiet street overlooking Greensboro Country Club’s Golf Course. It boasts large rooms with Master Retreat, Guest Quarters, 4 Car Garage and Spectacular Grounds. Price upon request.

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Grand living and stylish entertaining are enjoyed at this palatial home. Stunning appointments adorn this magnificent four bedroom, four and one-half bath home. Set in the heart of Old Irving Park this home comprises approximately 6950 square feet of exhilarating living space where Brazilian cherry wood and custom stone tile floors extend throughout. Price upon request.

2412 North Beech Lane North Beech, Greensboro

4BR/4.5 BA -- Full finished Basement. Move-in condition with many extras: Generator; Central Vacuum; 3 Car Garage; Ceiling Fans; Raised Deck; Garden area; Neighborhood Pool; Porch; Security features; Bonus Room, Den and lots of Storage. $499,999

300 Parkmont Drive New Irving Park, Greensboro

4BR/3.5 BA -- Classic Brick Ranch completely updated. New roof in 2009. Hardwoods, Moldings, Master Suite with Dressing Area. Gourmet Kitchen/ Breakfast Bar/Stainless Appliances. Triple Zoned HVAC. Fenced Yard/Brick Patio. $529,000

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

September 2012

O.Henry 77

September Arts Calendar

a.m. Registration opens at 8 a.m. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 455-7902 or www. centercitypark.org.

September 29–30

•

CHILDREN’S THEATRE. 10 – 11:30 a.m. (Sat.); 2 – 3:30 p.m. (Sat. & Sun.) Señora Tortuga. Annie Sellars Jordan Parlor Theatre, Greensboro College, 815 W. Market St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 217-7220 or www.greensboro.edu.

•

FREE POETRY WORKSHOP. 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Sponsored by the Writers Group of the Triad, Greensboro Public Library and the New Garden Friends Poetry Group. Greensboro Public Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2474.

OPERA. 2 & 3:30 p.m. Goldilocks •theCHILDREN’S OPEN STUDIO. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. C.P. Logan Studio, and Three Bears. A new twist on a classic story. UNCG • 1206 W. Cornwallis Dr., Greensboro. Info: (336) 282-5904 or Music Recital Hall, 100 McIver St., Greensboro. Info: www.cplogan.com. (336) 334-5126. SIDESHOW AT THE PARK. 2 – 11 p.m. Music CONCERT SERIES. 3 p.m. Violinist ••with arts and crafts, local food and beer. Festival Park, Brian • WEYMOUTH festival Reagin, concertmaster of the North Carolina 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Symphony. Tickets: free/members and people 18 and younger; $15/non-members. Weymouth Center, 555 E. ELSEWHERE ADVENTURE TOUR. 4 – 4:30 • Cost: $5. Elsewhere Collaborative, 606 S. Elm St., Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-6261 or p.m. www.weymouthcenter.org. Greensboro. Info: www.goelsewhere.org. MEET UP & POETRY. 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. Tate • TRIAD Street Coffee, 334 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754 or tatestreetcoffee.blogspot.com. MASTER IN CONCERT. 8 – 10 p.m. • KORAMamadou Featuring Diabate of the Mandinka West African

September 28–29

•

CHOCOLATE LOVER’S WEEKEND AT PROXIMITY HOTEL. Chocolate Extravaganza Wine Dinner Package, Chocolate & Champagne Brunch Cooking Class. Package, or Ultimate Chocolate Lover’s Weekend Package. Proximity Hotel, 704 Green Valley Rd., Greensboro. Info: www.proximityhotel.com. Reservations: (336) 379-8200.

September 29

jeli family. Broach Theatre, 520 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-7523.

• •• ELSEWHERE8FUNDRAISING EXTRAVAGANZA. – 11:30 p.m. Music, merriment,

LIVE MUSIC AT THE GREEN BEAN. 8 – 11 p.m. The Green Bean Coffee House, 341 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 691-9990. and magical eats by Table 16. Elsewhere, 606 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 549-5555 or www.goelsewhere.org.

• GREENSBORO WALK TO CURE DIABETES. 9 • • • • • Key:

Art

Music/Concerts

Septbember 30

Performing arts

Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

•

Sports

FREE

and open to all! October 6, 2012 10:00 am - 4:00 pm Visit our Kids Court! - Bouncy Slide • Bouncy Basketball • Bouncy Velcro Wall Basketball • Soccer • Volleyball • Dodgeball • Free Instructional Clinics • Inflatables Cornhole Competition • Exciting Giveaways • Live Music & Entertainment Parks & Rec Fall/Winter Program Showcase for more information, call:

(336) 373-3272

or visit: www.greensborosportsplex.com

We are conveniently located at 2400 16th St, just east of Hwy 29 off Cone Blvd., past Walmart.

78 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

••

SHORT STORY CONTEST WINNERS REVEALED. 3 – 5 p.m. O.Henry Magazine and Greensboro Public Library announce short story contest winners. Greensboro Public Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2471.

•

SHOWCASE PERFORMANCE. 7 – 9:30 p.m. The Music Academy of North Carolina presents Play it Forward to benefit student scholarship fund. Music Academy of NC, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-8748 or www.musicacademyofnc.org.

Featuring Chef Jay’s skillet fried chicken, select beverage specials and live music by Laurelyn Dossett and friends. Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace. Info: (336) 370-0707.

Wednesdays

•

FITNESS BY THE FOUNTAIN. 6 – 7 p.m. Free. Belly Dancing (9/5); Masala Bhangra (9/12); Yoga (9/19); African Dance (9/26). Center City Park, Downtown Greensboro. Info: www.centercitypark.org. WINE & MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Mussels •$15,MUSSELS, for wines from $10 to $15 a bottle, live acoustic mu-

•

FOLK MUSIC CONCERT. 9 – 11:45 p.m. North Carolina native Daniel Goans. Glenwood Coffee & Books, 1310 Glenwood Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 525-1646.

sice by AM rodeo. Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Rd., Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699.

Thursdays

•

TATE STREE COFFEE JAZZ JAM. 7:30 p.m. Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754.

WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Mondays

•

FITNESS BY THE FOUNTAIN. 6 – 7 p.m. Free. Boot Camp (9/3); Zumba (9/10); Cardio Dance Party (9/17); Tai Chi Ch’uan (9/24). Center City Park, Downtown Greensboro. Info: www. centercitypark.org.

Fridays & Saturdays

•

IMPROV COMEDY. 10 p.m. (Fri. and Sat.); 8 p.m. (Sat.). Actors create scenes on-the-spot and build upon the ideas of others. Performances based on suggestions given by the audience; each show is one-of-a-kind. Saturday

Tuesdays

•

LIVE MUSIC AT LUCKY 32 SOUTHERN KITCHEN. 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Skillet Fried Chicken & Songs From a Southern Kitchen. Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

•

Performing arts

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

September Arts Calendar 8 p.m. show appropriate for the whole family. Tickets: $10/$7(students). Idiot Box, 348 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info/RSVP: 336-274-BOXX.

•

NIGHTMARES AROUND ELM STREET. 8 p.m. A 90-minute historical candlelit ghost walking tour of Downtown Greensboro. Open Year-Round. Cost: $15/ adults; $13/children 8-12. Children 7 and under are free. Group rates and online discounts available. Info: www. carolinahistoryandhaunts.com/information.

Saturdays

•

JAZZ NIGHT IN THE MORNING. 11 a.m. Featuring saxophonist Alex Smith and friends. Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754.

Sundays

•

LIVE MUSIC AT TATE STREET COFFEE. Gypsy jazz music by Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grappelli (11 a.m. – 1 p.m.); Irish music (3 – 6 p.m.) Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754.

•

Sports

September 2012

O.Henry 79

Triad Local First

www.triadlocalfirst.com

Serr ving Serving Lindley Lindlley Park Park k Since ce 1947

Grocery Company Monday-Saturda Monday-Saturday: urday:: 7:00am - Midnight ht Sunday: y: 9:00am - 10:00pm Sunday: 2113 Walker Walker A Avenue ven nue | Greensboro, Greensboro, N NC C 27403

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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O.Henry

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The Red Collection Greensboro Cultural Center $PNF Shores Fine Dry Cleaners IFSF Maryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Antiques 0 )FOSZ PGUFO Brown Gardiner Drug Store .BHB[JOF Proehlific Sports Adams Inn The Club Sheraton Hotel Grandover Resort O.Henry Hotel Proximity Hotel Lucky 32 Green Valley Grill Print Works Bistro Mark Holder Jewelry Greensboro area Harris Teeters Liberty Oak Look for our O.Henry blue boxes Biltmore Hotel around town or get your copy Greensboro Chamber of Commerce at these locations: Schiffmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jewelers New Garden Nursery Iron Hen CafĂŠ Earth Fare MAGAZINE Graffiti Bistro 5IF "SU 4PVM PG (SFFOTCPSP Southern Lights Golf USA Check ww.ohenrymag.com Triad Stage / The Pyrle Theatre for additional locations as they are added. February/March 2012 O.Henry 73

Wondering where weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been all your life?

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GreenScene Gate City Rotaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Party With A Purpose Friday, August 10, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Temple & Tom Richardson Hal & Gayle Stancil

Front: Jared & Avery Lemons, Dylan Smith; Back: Casey Smith, Allison & Kevin Lemons, Jordan Smith

Fred Black, Richard Beard

David Almond, Bryan Short

Denise Cowhig, Kerri Person Kelly Harrill, Bobby Christiansen

Christina Doebler, Dana Mason

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Sussannah Washburn, Susan Hitchcock

Kelly Harrill, Carrie Ribanco

September 2012

O.Henry 83

84 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene “Fire In The Triad” Competition Dining Series at The Painted Plate Wednesday, August 15, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Nikki Miller-Ka, Jimmy Crippen, Marcheta Keefer

Terri Cothern, Dawn Terrell

Cindy Stark, Tiffany Brown, Jenni Romano, Beth Mayer, Teri Hammer

Chef Jonathan Wheeler of Southern Lights Bistro

Mike Pate Sr, Max Sullivan, Micah Sullivan

Jordan Liburdi, Amy Robertson

Alexis Dawkins, Sharon Ting

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The “Chef-Ref” Laurence Williard

September 2012

O.Henry 85

Do I look 150 years old to you? Come join me for dinner and see for yourself - WSP O.Henry Magazine invites you to...

Dinner with O.Henry Take the elevator “home” for a special rate of $199 plus tax.

A Gala Celebration of William Sydney Porter’s 150th Birthday

6:30 pm, Friday, September 21 $150 per person A Gourmet five-course Dinner from America’s Gilded Age at the O.Henry Hotel with Music and Characters from his most beloved Short Stories An unforgettable Evening to Benefit the educational programs of the Greensboro Historical Museum, Inc. For Reservations call

336.617.0090

M A G A Z I N E

86 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene Thirsty Thursday at NewBridge Bank Park Thursday, August 16th, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Gary Copenhaver

Ila Sudderth, Chris Parrish

Jennifer & Randy Hamilton

Sarah Duggins, Colleen Adams, John Mac, Megan Lay

Katy May, Bren Knox, Leigh Rush, Cathy Vernon Anna & Kim Newman

Mike Baxter, Amy Brady, Kate & Brandon Earp

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Melissa Brown, Kari Turner, Katie Gill

September 2012

O.Henry 87

AN ADVISOR WHOSE APPROACH IS

BASED ON KNOW-HOW. AND KNOW YOU. MERRILL LYNCH WELCOMES KELLI COLEY OUR NEWEST FINANCIAL ADVISOR. Kelli Coley First Vice President–Wealth Management Financial Advisor (336) 574-4648 • (888) 288-4182 Merrill Lynch 800 Green Valley Road, Suite 400 Greensboro, NC 27408 You want an advisor who can help you realize your goals. Someone with a firm grasp of the financial landscape and a deep understanding of you. Kelli can help you develop a customized strategy that considers where you want to be.

Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and The Power of the Right Advisor are trademarks or registered trademarks of Bank of America Corporation. Merrill Lynch Wealth Management makes available products and services offered by Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, a registered broker-dealer and member SIPC, and other subsidiaries of Bank of America Corporation. Investment products: Are Not FDIC Insured

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Thursday, September 27th 5:30 - 8:30 p.m. Tyler White O’Brien Gallery 307 State Street

ALIGHT AT TYLER WHITE ANNUAL FUNDRAISING EVENT

www.alightfoundation.org • 336.832.0027 www.facebook/thealightfoundation

88 O.Henry

Melissa Alight Found Ad.indd 3

September 2012

8/16/12 5:22 PM

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene Thirsty Thursday at NewBridge Bank Park Thursday, August 16th, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Derek Murzyn, Lisa Denoff

Brooke Leja, Kierstan Townsley

Paige Everhart, Patrick Barbeau Frank Brooks, Brad Newton, Cass Heaton, Jennie Grantv

Will James, Shireen Hezar, Heather Tapscott

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Jess Washburn, Henry Harwell, Terry Odom

September 2012

O.Henry 89

Recognized by Esquire MAGAZINE AS ONe OF THE

Top 100 Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Stores in America

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90 O.Henry

September 2012

1501 North Main Street High Point, North Carolina 336-885-8500

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene Wyndham Championship 2012 Sunday, August 19, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Sam & Isabel Simpson

Valerie & Vern Combrink Wesley & Stephen Picklesiemer

Nancy Walker White, McCray White

Sydney Turner, Lindsey Schaefer

Amanda Crigler, Jessica Carr, Grace Herrin

Thomas & Keith Bryant

Valeria Ford, Joseph Floyd, Stan Lewter

Jimbo Galloway, Dunlop White

Maggie Honeycutt, Ray Loughran, Ashley Hill

Steve & Brittney Shea

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Sand sculptor Larry Hudson

Fred & Kathy Black

September 2012

O.Henry 91

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92 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene ArtQuest Family Night at Greenhill Center for NC Art Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Photographs by Sam Froelich

Shira Emanuel

Cameron Johannesen, Lauren Thornton

Brayan Gabriel Mendoza & Tere Mendoza

Riley & Courtney Peters

Gregory & Judy Nikolich

Lisa Lundeen, Lydia Nagel

Hannah Meyer

Jaden Mittman

Keyli Z. Mendoza, Yoleymi Y. Mendoza

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Atiya Woodard, Kiyah Walker

Hannah & Bonnie Meyer

September 2012

O.Henry 93

Food –&– Dining

94 O.Henry

September 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Life’s Funny

Date Night Stooges And what our presidential contenders could learn from Larry, Moe, and Curly BY MARIA JOHNSON

ecently, my husband and I decided to have a date night, so we conjured up one of the most exciting evenings we could think of — dinner at a Mexican restaurant recommended by a foodie friend, followed by a movie at the dollar-fifty theater across the parking lot. This was exciting on many fronts: I love trying new restaurants, and my husband, who is of Scottish descent, loves things that cost only a dollar-fifty. The evening promised to be a sensual feast. And this was the kicker: We were going to see The Three Stooges. The subject had come up the night before, when we asked some folks if they’d seen the Farrelly brothers’ film. They hadn’t, and they didn’t seem interested. I wilted until my husband spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.” Our eyes locked. “Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk,” I said, snapping my fingers, popping my hands, and fluttering my fingers under his chin. I can be really sexy when I want to be. “Do you think it’s still on?” he said hopefully. “Oh, yeah. It’s on.” So, I got out my iPhone and searched, and there it was: The Three Stooges for a George and a half at the Sedgefield Crossing’s Cinema. Amazing. I take back everything I ever said about technology making us idiots. Well, what a great date. The chili relleno was made with a real poblano chili, not a bell pepper, and the margarita had salt lick’s worth of sodium on the rim, just like I like it, and the slapstick Stooges were, as always, beyond woids — though I worried for a minute that we might not make it past the Sno-Caps. Jeff looked nervous when we walked in, and then I realized he probably was feeling guilty because his mother had banned the Stooges from their home when he was a kid. It seems that a child who shall remain anonymous — we’ll call him Heff — whanged one of his sisters on the head with a large pan one day, an action that their mother attributed to the Stooges. Naturally, she was upset because her children were mimicking the violence they witnessed on TV and, even more so, because the lid on her best potato pan never fit right again. And so she forbade all five kids from watching the show. Wise guy, eh? I assured my husband that Heff’s mom, God rest her soul, would trust Heff to see the movie 50 years later. And I made a mental note to hide the Revere Ware when we got home. For the next 90 minutes, we cackled like first-graders on Skittles and ’Dew. The movie was true to the original series. The actors were spot on. The plot The Art & Soul of Greensboro

was good, as Stooges plots go. The cinematography was perfect. And best of all, the filmmakers had revived the best sound effects and gags. Eye pokes. Hammers to the head. Running in place. Spinning on the ground. Slapping faces in succession. Whap-whap-whap. I wondered if our delight was a generational thing, as many people my age speak fluent Stooge. For example, I recently attended a Major League — yes, Major League — Baseball game in which a first baseman, second baseman and right fielder converged on a pop fly that landed between them. Before I could catch myself, I let out a high-pitched, “Yee, bee-bee-bee-bee.” The middle-age people in our section nodded in understanding. So imagine how pleased I was to see young people in the theater laughing at innocent stupidity, too. I mean, how can you not laugh at Larry David in a nun’s wimple getting decked by a huge bell that rolls off a roof after the Stooges go up to fix it? Stooge One (looking over roof’s edge): Is that Sister Mary-Mengele? Stooge Two: I don’t know, but the face rings a bell. Humor, thy name is Curly. The only thing that could have topped our experience would have been seeing the movie in IMAX 3D. Can you imagine two giant fingers coming at you for an eye poke? The whole audience would lurch backward and put their hands, edges forward, in front of their noses. And while I’m tossing out million-dollar ideas, why not require our presidential candidates to debate a la Stooge? Put their lecterns right next to each other, supply a few hammers, anvils and chainsaws, and let the fun begin. Moderator: Is there a need to further change health care? Romney: Soytanly. We ain’t got the kinda do-rey-mi to pay for dat. Obama (wielding hammer): Whyyyyyy you! I’ll show you a need for health care! Here I should say that I don’t endorse the idea of hitting Mitt Romney with a hammer. Not a real one. As the Stooges made clear in a disclaimer at the end of the movie, the hammers in the movie were made of rubber, and eye pokes were aimed at the forehead, so kids, don’t try this at home. The footnote would have made Heff’s mother happy. And his sister, a victim of soycumstance, even happier. Editor’s note: The Three Stooges is now available on DVD. Whoop-whoop-whoop. OH September 2012

O.Henry 95

O.Henry Ending

A Poet’s Life

The art of raising dogs, becoming ourselves

BY TERRY KENNEDY

drive into the writers’ world of Carr Street on a hot and humid July afternoon. The large oaks towering over the houses form a canopy of green and yellow light. Pink blossoms from the crape myrtles litter the sidewalk. The houses vary in age, architecture and footage, but it’s the points of gathering that I will always remember best: the front porch of the white house, the picnic table, the horseshoe pit. The writers come and go with the pull of the desk, but there is always storytelling: the novelist who shimmied into the crawl space singing “Killing for Jesus” at 2 in the morning, the woman struck by lightning sitting on the front stoop, the poet who ran over his own head. Even the mail lady is unopposed to stopping for a twenty-minute chat about the possible uses for the Reverend Leroy Jenkins’ holy water. The night before classes begin the director of UNCG’s creative writing program smokes and grills twenty pounds of pork ribs. An antique white tablecloth is spread over the picnic table and the writers of College Hill (the teachers, the students, the recent alums and friends) descend to welcome the newly arrived with a feast. In our reverie, we leave the bones outside and I awake in the morning to a caravan of ants, blackbirds and dogs. One group is shouldering a rib bone off the sidewalk. Others determinedly peck and pull at the bits and pieces of debris scattered across the yard. The little black dog from across the street gnaws on an especially meaty trophy of her own. This is the heart of my new life. There are more than writers in Greensboro, of course; in fact, we constitute a minority. For sheer numbers there are administrators, marketers, teachers, groundskeepers. The restaurateurs, the baristas, the bartenders— they are all invaluable friends. They lure in the students. And the students bring the seasons with them. Families visiting for freshman orientation give way to the music-campers, who materialize with the sleepy July heat like a swarm of cicadas. Graduate students, like I was when I first arrived, come and go. The laying in of winter is a lonely time, a time when we writers keep quiet and huddle close to our desks. All the animals find some warm nook to curl up and sleep. I know, my dog found me. She moved into my apartment long before we ever met. I did not see her, but the girl from across the street insisted the spirit of a dog was wandering my rooms. Then one winter-bright afternoon, the yard next door filled with yellow puppies.

96 O.Henry

September 2012

There were puppies in and out of the ivy, under the aging iron table and chairs, trying to escape beneath the gate. There was only one girl. The vet tells me to return her because he believes she is blind in one eye. My mother thinks it’s foolish for a poet to take on the responsibility of another life, and even I begin to agree when she whimpers and howls until, exhausted, she finally falls asleep. It was maddening how she only rested when held tight to my chest, close to my heart. Eventually Hallie and I grew to love each other’s routines, and life in Greensboro became ours together. We ate when she wanted to eat. There was quiet when I wanted to write. Both of us always ready for the company of our neighbors. Warm weather brought the return to the outdoors. We took long walks at Lake Brandt — a clown-like parade of writers and dogs: the puppies racing ahead, tumbling down the steep slopes of the trails to the shore. In the afternoons we threw horseshoes in the backyard and argued over the true master of the short story (Chekhov? O’Connor?) or laughed about a friend putting a foot through the rusted floorboard of her car. A long-retired white Cadillac served as seat, table and one dog’s lookout for overly zealous neighbors irritated with the messiness of our lives. To outsiders, we probably seemed like an unruly group of kids trying to avoid the struggles of 9-to-5 jobs, the responsibilities of the adult world. But we were learning to write poems and stories, to read, to listen to the world around us. We were raising dogs. We were becoming ourselves. Summer is here again, my first without Hallie. A thunderstorm has knocked the power out and I have escaped to the porch for some cooler air. Without the lights, the night sky is as big and hopeful as I have ever seen. Each star seems a reminder of the laughter and friendship we all found on Carr Street, of the look in Hallie’s eyes when I held her to my chest and sang her to sleep. OH Terry L. Kennedy is the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro and Associate Editor of The Greensboro Review. His chapbook, Until the Clouds Shatter the Light That Plates Our Lives was released by Jeanne Duvall Editions in September 2011. Illustration By Meridith Martens The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Music Director

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Stefani Collins

Alexander Sitkovetsky

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