TCB April 20, 2016 — Wrongs of Passage

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point triad-city-beat.com April 20 – 26, 2016

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Think Fink PAGE 8

Phuzz phinale PAGE 22

Theater as foster-care catharsis

by Joanna Rutter PAGE 16

4:20 facts PAGE 6

April 20 — 26, 2016

Board Game

Night Fridays 7pm — 2am

Music & Lyrics by

Stephen Sondheim Book by

James Lapine Conducted by UNCG Alumnus

Dominick Amendum Aycock Auditorium

April 29 & 30, 2016 @ 8:00pm Tickets: $10 – $20 UNCG: 336-334-4392 or Triad Stage: 336-272-0160 theatre.uncg.edu

2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro geeksboro.com •

336-355-7180

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Ribbon-cutting Grand re-opening April 29, 5:30 p.m.

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J-Roq in the city

by Brian Clarey

20 UP FRONT 3 Editor’s Notebook 4 City Life 6 Commentariat 6 The List 7 Barometer 7 Unsolicited Endorsement

NEWS 8 Fink’s gambit 10 A few voters 12 HPJ: Market down, not out

OPINION 14 Editorial: Taxholes 14 Citizen Green: District lines

challenged 15 It Just Might Work: Furniture market musical chairs 15 Fresh Eyes: Purple states are battleground states

FUN & GAMES 26 What fresh hell is this?

GAMES

COVER

27 Jonesin’ Crossword

16 W rongs of Passage: Theater as foster-care catharsis

SHOT IN THE TRIAD

CULTURE

ALL SHE WROTE

20 Food: Eating his words 21 Barstool: Downtown’s forgotten saloon 22 Music: Phuzz Phest comes together

28 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro 30 Thrillbilly

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

You’re going to bring your story not just into the light of day, but under this searing stage light. The audience is part of the process. They’re giving a gift to the people on stage. All of that shame, it just disintegrates under that light.

— Debra LeWinter, in the Cover, page 16

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Cover photography by Amanda Salter Melat Ayalew comforts D’Wayne Rodriguez after his character receives an HIV diagnosis.

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J-Roq started to show the first signs of fatigue before things even got interesting Friday evening, which is to say before the sun dropped behind the industrial spires of downtown Winston-Salem. The culprit this time was the mild slope of Patterson Avenue along Bailey Park, which we traversed three times before gaining admittance for the Phuzz Phest kickoff concert and J-Roq, Hobbit-like, took in his second of three post-afternoon meals, a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, courtesy of the Camel City Grill food truck parked on the grounds.

J-Roq, as he’s known in select parts of the Triad’s westernmost city, has been working here for months, and while he’s become astute enough to nail down the best lunch spots and major players, I realized he hasn’t spent enough time on its streets. Which is ironic for a guy called J-Roq. So when he called on Friday afternoon, I lassoed him into my plans for Winston-Salem’s best weekend, that hot moment in April when RiverRun reaches its crescendo just as Phuzz Phest tears through with an electric squeal.

Streets flow with bodies and sounds and aromas; you can hear people laughing from two blocks away; all the low-hanging parking spots are taken; and even the streetlights seem to be in overdrive, giving off a celestial glow.

Feels like a city to me.

J-Roq, still in his work clothes, wheeled the Prius from a preferential parking spot at Bailey Park to the Center for Design Innovation at Winston-Salem State University for the panel discussion about sustaining a music scene, then looped around downtown to score a wristband at Ember Gallery.

The space, reserved for hybrids, was still open.

We hit four Phuzz Phest events — my personal fave, a local product called Mama, blasted a crowd of converts at Reanimator Records — before taking in the RiverRun Spark party at the old wagon works.

Filmmakers and fans milled through the chambers of the Black Horse Studio, that brick Romanesque sentry on the southeastern corner of downtown, their quiet, reasoned tones a fine counterbalance to the crowded rock rooms across the street and down the block.

I lost J-Roq just before 11 p.m., when he hopped back in the Prius and I walked north to Test Pattern, where I saw Miami Dice fuse danceable electronica with a live horn, and the Garage where New York groove-metal trio Sunflower Bean laid the place to waste.

I hit the sweet spot for my drive back to Greensboro, an hour before the bars let out in earnest, and if I was of a mind to I could have made it to Walker Avenue a couple rounds before last call.

By then, J-Roq was all tucked up, sleeping off the proteins and the buzz of the city.

triad-city-beat.com

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

CONTENTS

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April 20 — 26, 2016

CITY LIFE April 20 – 26 ALL WEEKEND Wrongs of Passage @ Triad Stage Upstage Cabaret (GSO) Teens and young adults who have been or currently are in the foster care system in Guilford and Forsyth counties share their experiences of trauma through theater, and in doing so, creatively transcend the abuse through the power of claiming their stories together. I wrote about this play as my debut cover story for this fine publication, and spent the better part of the past month hanging out with these actors and watching them work through these tough themes, so take it from me: You do not want to miss it. Read more on page 16, and get tickets at triadstage.org.

God of Carnage @ GTCC Center for Creative and Performing Arts Theatre (HP) What happens when two families get together to discuss a fight between their sons? Dark comedy about human depravity ensues, of course! Watch this meeting between so-called civilized adults spin wildly awry. The Broadway production won the 2009 Tony for comedy, and is most successful in how it pokes at human facades and what lies underneath them, says Joshua Waterstone, who directs. Tickets can be purchased through High Point Theatre at highpointtheatre.com.

WEDNESDAY

Hispanic unity rally @ Guilford College (GSO), 1 p.m.

“We have been neglected, but now more than ever as we are facing serious issues at this institution,” said Hispanos Unidos de Guilford President Jessica Canar Quito. For example, Guilford College is only supporting one recipient of the Golden Door Scholarship, which helps undocumented high school students financially to attend the college of their choice, according to Quito. The rally will take place outside of Founder’s Hall. Contact Quito with questions at canarjv@guilford.edu.

After Hours Dance Camp @ Paz Studios (W-S), 9 p.m.

Workin’ Out Barbie reportedly got her start at these late-nite gigs. Just kidding, but she’d be super down if she wasn’t stuck in 1997 and not made of plastic. Beginners are welcome and no dance experience is necessary. Doors will lock at 9:15, so get there fashionably on time. Register at pazstudiosws.com; space will be limited. PS: Post songs you’d like to groove to in the Facebook event page and they might make it into the class playlist. I recommend “Work It” by Missy Elliot.

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by Joanna Rutter

THURSDAY

Meet the Greensboro Swarm @ Revolution Mill (GSO), 7:30 a.m.

Unless you’ve been living under a stupid rock, you’ve probably heard that Greensboro is continuing the tradition of being a basketball city and will be the new home for the Charlotte Hornets D-League team, the Greensboro Swarm, beginning this fall. Team president Steve Swetoha will present on what this new team means for Greensboro. Rumor has it there might be a few door prizes. Coffee and a catered breakfast are planned, to help you peel yourself out of bed. Register at greensboropartnership.com.

Miller Park community meeting @ Miller Park Rec Center (W-S), 6 p.m.

Feast on all the real-life citizen forum goodness your starved Parks and Recreation heart requires, but do bring a good idea, too. Southwest Ward Councilman Dan Besse along with the staff of the recreation and parks department will show plans for improving Miller Park and solicit citizen feedback. The plans include park improvements and streambank stabilization features. Light refreshments provide extra incentive. Contact Tim Grant at timag@cityofws.org with questions.

Grove Street People’s Market opening day @ Grove Street and Glenwood Avenue (GSO), 6 p.m.

This Thursday and every Thursday through the summer, buy seasonal vegetables, plant starts, eggs, handmade products and more, all from your Glenwood neighbors. Plus, Mac & Cheese Ministry will be there doing the Lord’s work, by which we mean, serving up gourmet mac. Email glenwoodpeoplesmarket@gmail.com to register as a vendor, and like the Grove Street People’s Market on Facebook for summer info.

FRIDAY Kansas Bible Company @ the Garage (W-S), 9 p.m.

Paste Magazine said they’re “damn brilliant,” and Audiotree said the 12-piece outfit of brass-anchored psychedelic rockers is “stretching the boundaries of space and time.”

Go check it out to see if the reviews stack up as they tour their forthcoming LP, Paper Moon. The album is reportedly about changes, of which one is worth noting: 11 band members moved into the same house in Nashville, only to see several leave. Apparently they made a rock album instead of a reality TV show about it. More info and tickets at the-garage.ws.

Piedmont Earth Day Fair @ Winston-Salem State Fairgrounds (W-S), 10 a.m.

Claiming to be both the largest Earth Day celebration and one-day environmental education event in the region, this event is so free that a tree will pay you to come. Not really. But there is free parking, free admission, free activities and free entertainment throughout the day. And free nature! Teach your kids about how to take care of the earth we have ruined for them. (Sorry, kiddos.) Un-fun fact: If you drink from a plastic water bottle and chuck it into the trash on Earth Day, a baby sea lion somewhere weeps. Enter the fairgrounds through Gate 5 and park in the Midway lot. Visit peanc.org for more info about why we need this festival in the first place.

T H E D R A MA C E N T E R C H I L DR EN’S T HE AT R E P R E SE N TS

Much Ado About Nothing YOUTH PRODUCTION

By William Shakespeare

NC Writer’s Network Spring Conference @ UNCG (GSO), 8:30 a.m.

The ink you smell in the air may just be all the aspiring and established writers rolling in to the Gate City for this verbal bonanza of career encouragement and spurring-on. North Carolina authors, including some from Greensboro such as Quinn Dalton, will be teaching master classes throughout the day. Register on site on the day of; some classes are still open. An open-mic event will be followed by Slush Pile Live! in which authors provide feedback on anonymous work. Go to ncwriters.org for the full lineup.

Roller derby double header @ the Greensboro Coliseum, 6 p.m.

The derby girls in town aren’t here to mess around. With strong players with equally strong names like Miss Shuggenah and Rum and Choke on Greensboro Roller Derby’s teams Roller Girls and Counterstrike are ready to pummel their challengers from Atlanta and New River in a killer double header guaranteed to give you your money’s worth of fierce decimation through whips, maneuvers and plays. It’s the second bout in what is sure to be an excellent season. Get tickets through their Facebook page.

triad-city-beat.com

SATURDAY

April 29 - May 1, 2016 at 5:30pm

Tanger Bicentennial Gardens

1105 Hobbs Road • Greensboro, NC

www.TheDramaCenter.com www.facebook.com/cityarts1

For tickets call 336-335-6426

ERIC GALES AT COMMON GROUNDS With Eric Sommer

Wednesday, April 27 • $20/adv $25/door SUNDAY

The Artist’s Studio presents: Solo Olos @ SECCA (W-S), 5 p.m.

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and UNC School of Arts are partnering for their second edition of the Artist’s Studio, a collaboration exploring and showcasing creative process in contemporary art. (Short version: required curriculum for anyone who’s ever looked at a Mondrian and said, “I could do that.”) UNCSA students of contemporary dance, working under the instruction of faculty member Abigail Yager, perform a work by world-renowned choreographer Tricia Brown entitled Solo Olos. After the live dance performance, there will be a period of discussion about the work led by Yager. For more information visit secca.org or uncsa.edu.

Tickets available at Common Grounds

TUESDAY

6th annual Passover Seder @ Elsewhere Museum (GSO), 6 p.m.

Celebrating Passover at Elsewhere means pairing traditional foods with an untraditional telling of the Passover story. The holy day will unfold across the museum’s three floors, exploring the story of Jewish liberation alongside others’ liberation. Planned excerpts include bell hooks, David Wojnarowicz, Baal Shem Tov, Malcolm X and Susannah Herschel, among others. “Like all other Seders, ours is a retelling of history, a performance of senses, and a meal made and shared with friends,” says the announcement.” Visit goelsewhere. org for more information.

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Who gets to see the footage and who doesn’t Thanks for the article in Triad City Beat [“Opponents criticize plan for police body-cam footage release”;

by Eric Ginsburg; April 13, 2016]. It was informative and helpful. I appreciate your coverage and keeping all of us informed.

Ann Shaw, Greensboro Thank you for this comprehensive article on this terribly important issue!

Things are moving very fast; there is a plan unfolding in the General Assembly to pass a statute that takes all power from city councils to release any police video and places all decision making regarding footage release with police chiefs or sheriffs!

All the more reason we must stand strong in support of open government.

Lewis Pitts, Greensboro

8 things about marijuana on 4/20

by Brian Clarey

1. It’s not for everybody

I suppose I’m the resident expert on left-handed cigarettes at the paper, due largely to my age — when I was a teenager, smoking marijuana was like using a hula hoop in the 1950s. But a lot of my old dope-smoking buddies have given up the weed as they’ve hit middle age, and a lot of them say it’s because they realized they don’t actually like the way it makes them feel.

2. Yet, it remains very popular

It’s possible that marijuana usage is not as ubiquitous today as it was when I was a teenager — Ginsburg, for example, claims never to have smoked it — but it seems to be pretty mainstream these days, so much so that a New Orleans cop friend of mine lamented on social media that we have not yet come up with a word for the weed stink he says comes off dozens of people he encounters each day on the French Quarter.

3. Because it’s legal (sort of)

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have legalized medicinal or recreational marijuana. That’s practically half the country. Twenty more have ballot issues in place for 2016. North Carolina is not one of them. Our medical marijuana bill was HB78.

It was reported unfavorably by committee in

March 2015.

4. And it’s generating a lot of revenue

According to Arcview Market Research, the pot industry saw $5.7 billion in sales in 2015 — and that’s just in the places where it’s legal. Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal, sold $996 million of it, throwing more than $135 million in taxes and fees to the state.

5. We could do it, too

There’s strong resistance to legalized cannabis in any form in the Old North State, but at this point we could probably use the money to offset major budget cuts of the last few years. Or we could even lower taxes on residents as their burden is subsidized by the industry. An agricultural state like this one could supply half the Eastern Seaboard — okay, maybe just Carrboro — and there are natural marketing opportunities in the Triad, home of Greensboro, High Point and the smoking legacy of RJ Reynolds. It couldn’t hurt our restaurants, either, which would be immediate beneficiaries of legalization.

6. But it’s not all about the money

hell, it probably already does (see No. 2).

The industry also dovetails with our state character, strongly influenced by individualism and with a healthy debt to moonshine culture.

7. And that’s not necessarily a good thing

Arguments against it are largely visceral, ranging from the psychological to the biblical, though in my opinion largely conflated and misinformed. Consider that North Carolina enacted alcohol prohibition in 1909, a decade before the rest of the country, while maintaining its status as one of the largest producers of alcohol in the nation.

8. And yet…

According to Pew Research, nearly half — 49 percent — of Americans say they’ve tried it, Ginsburg notwithstanding. More than half, 53 percent, support legalization while 44 percent feel it should remain illegal.

Among millennials, 68 percent view marijuana legalization favorably. So really, it’s only a matter of time before North Carolina gets on board… or the road to South Carolina gets a lot more well traveled.

I have no doubt that North Carolina could grow the best outdoor pot in the world —

Australian proto punk

by Jordan Green Certain bands hold an almost mystical cache, somehow falling into a crevice in collective consciousness between legend and obscurity.

The Saints, I feel confident, qualify in spades.

Thanks to musician Kyle Caudle, I made the acquaintance of Michael Slawter, owner of Heyday Guitars in Winston-Salem, as we were waiting for the final set at Test Pattern on the second night of Phuzz Phest. Slawter was wearing the band’s shirt, and I remarked, “I really like the Saints.”

The truth is that I really didn’t know the first thing about the Saints, other than having heard their impossibly frenetic rendition of the Ike & Tina Turner R&B classic “River Deep, Mountain High” on Pandora and gleaning that they blazed the punk-rock trail in Australia, tracing a path parallel to their contemporaries the Ramones in New York City.

As we were talking, a woman at the side of Tills bass player Tom Peters pointed at Slawter’s shirt, winked and gave him the A-OK hand sign. The Saints are like a secret handshake.

I haven’t succeeded in finding any corroboration on the internet, but I’ll take Slawter’s word for this. Explaining the band’s raw, loud and fast sound dating to 1975, well before punk became regimented into a uniform with mohawks and shirts held together with safety pins, he told me the Saints were influenced by Radio Birdman, another Australian band whose guitarist and principal songwriter came from Michigan and loved the MC5 and the Stooges. So the loud, angry sound of late ’60s Detroit rock was essentially transplanted to Australia and came into bloom roughly five years later.

Radio Birdman is another band that I kind of love and really don’t know much about. I don’t know where I was

when I first heard their song “Murder City Nights,” but it boasts an unforgettable lyrical exposition: “Cruising down Woodward gotta find me some action/ Looking for a lover with a power reaction.”

The chorus of the song, which came out in 1977, features a virile howl that must have provided a blueprint for Glenn Danzig and the early Misfits.

The mystery deepened when I found myself walking across Woodward Avenue during the 2012 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention in Detroit on my way to Greektown to look for a bar. “Hey, wait a minute,” I said to myself.

Thanks to the serendipity of meeting a new friend with a cool rock-and-roll T-shirt, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

triad-city-beat.com

Is Gov. McCrory’s HB2 order just window dressing?

80

70

60

50

Eric Ginsburg: You betcha. Sho nuff.

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99%

No, it’s substantial

Shot in the Triad

On May 5th, take your business to the next level!

1%

Games

Yes, it’s a weak effort to save face.

Fun & Games

New question: Which minor-league baseball team in the Triad has the best stadium? Vote at triad-city-beat. com!

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Culture

Readers: Wow, this is actually the biggest blowout in the history of Triad City Beat’s reader polls. One, lonely participant said, “No, it’s substantial” but 99 percent of you slapped it down and said, “Yes, it’s a weak effort to save face.”

That exceeds the margin of previous polls about state efforts to butcher the Greensboro City Council, but this is a first.

Cover Story

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Opinion

Jordan Green: Well, duh. But yes, McCrory’s executive order is a laughable effort to mitigate the damage in squandered goodwill and economic activity as the fallout from HB2 continues to ripples across the state, without having to humiliate himself by admitting he made a mistake. It’s part of McCrory’s playbook to cultivate an image as a political moderate for the benefit of business elites and independent voters by tweaking minor aspects of the social conservative agenda without really challenging it. Not that he’s winning on

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News

Brian Clarey: Executive order my ass. With his action last week, Gov. McCrory put a small Band-Aid over sections of HB2 that could possibly be illegal — not, I remind you, actually changing the law, because executive orders can be rescinded at any time — while not touching the more outrageous parts of the bill, and I’m not talking about the wee-wees and pee-pees. It was an inelegant attempt at damage control, as was his appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, which went over so well that Pearl Jam canceled their Raleigh appearance the next day. #thanksmccrory

that front either: The social conservative wing of the party, led by Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger Sr., doesn’t respect the governor and only tolerates him so far as they feel like they can control him. But there’s nothing substantial about the governor’s executive order. It does nothing to change the most vicious and harmful part of the law, which is at its core — denying trans people the right to use the bathroom of their preference, while barring cities from passing legislation to protect civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And that’s because the core element of the bill was custom-made for McCrory to try to box his Democratic opponent for governor, Attorney General Roy Cooper, into a no-win position. But McCrory miscalculated — he’s going to be the loser.

Up Front

After NC Gov. Pat McCrory created an executive order related to HB2, a law that he had just recently signed the same day state legislators passed it, we wanted reactions from our readers and editors. The position on this one is pretty resounding.

All She Wrote

Greensboro Coliseum Special Events Center | 9am-6pm www.greensborochamber.com

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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NEWS

Greensboro law professor challenges Republican state Senate leader

by Eric Ginsburg

A leftist Elon Law School professor challenges state Senate President Pro Temp Phil Berger Sr. in an 11th-hour bid for the local Senate seat following the passage of HB2.

Eric Fink is, at least to those involved in local social movements, a familiar face.

The Elon Law School associate professor with a history practicing employment and labor law is a fixture in certain circles, appearing regularly on panels, at public forums and protests, and serving as an active board member for the Renaissance Community Cooperative grocery store planned for northeast Greensboro. And now that he’s decided to run for office, it’s hard for some of his friends to resist comparisons to Bernie Sanders.

The 53-year old may not be quite as old as the Democratic presidential candidate, but his socialist politics, not to mention his Jewish heritage, have led some friends to make quips about “feeling the local Bern.” The slogan on his campaign website: “Solidarity. Justice. Democracy.”

He even sounded a little bit like Sanders as he commented that there’s no Art Pope figure to bankroll him, and lots of small donations from individuals will have to propel him to victory.

Fink doesn’t mind comparisons to Sanders, he said, adding that he voted for the Brooklynite in the North Carolina primary.

If anything, Fink said, Sanders’ relative success shows that the unexpected can be done against an entrenched politician and that people aren’t necessarily scared off by what some would label as Sanders’ outsider stances.

While acknowledging that state Senate District 26 — which covers all of Rockingham County and the northwestern portion of Guilford including Oak Ridge, Summerfield, Browns Summit and northern Greensboro — was drawn with Republican Sen. Berger in mind, Fink insisted that he isn’t a protest candidate; he actually intends to win.

Fink decided to run against Berger following the passage of HB2, an omnibus bill that limits local governments abilities to pass anti-discrimination ordinances or raise the minimum wage floor, among

numerous other more highly publicized provisions. Berger, a champion of the law and the current direction of the state General Assembly, was running unopposed, and Fink started talking to friends about the importance of not giving Berger a free pass in the election.

Someone needed to run against him, Fink said. It isn’t good for democracy for people to not have a choice, and the only way to change things in Raleigh is for people to run against strong incumbents, getting other ideas out there and potentially winning some upsets.

“He really represents the agenda that is taking our state in the wrong direction,” Fink said.

Eventually, one of his friends suggested that the person to challenge Berger should be him.

Fink, who was literally born on the Fourth of July, said that he’d never thought much about running for office before, though he’s been “very involved in politics” his whole life through social movements and cause-oriented campaigns, especially around labor.

“Nobody else had stepped up,” Fink said.

While important, HB2 is far from the only issue motivating Fink’s insurgent candidacy. He has an 11-year-old attending public school at Jones Elementary in Greensboro, and said the “single biggest changes” under the Republican majority in Raleigh have been the attacks on public education at all levels. When Fink moved to Greensboro in 2007 with his wife and son, the quality of the local school system and public universities in the state was an important consideration. Since then, he said the current majority has assailed the school system at every turn, calling it “one of the greatest failings of the majority Phil Berger has led,” adding that the General Assembly is “undermining” the schools.

Berger — an attorney who is in his eighth term in the Senate — could not be reached for comment despite calls to his Rockingham and Raleigh offices and emails to his office and campaign.

Because of his late decision to file for the District 26 seat, Fink will need to collect a little more than 5,000 signatures

Eric Fink, a law professor at Elon Law School with a background in labor activism, is challenging state Senate leader Phil Berger Sr.

in order to appear on the ballot, he said.

But since his announcement, people have flocked to his side to offer support in myriad ways, including with signature collection, fundraising, media strategy and voter outreach.

Fink insisted he intends to be a serious candidate, despite odds stacked against him.

“Generally, elections are not a good vehicle for protest,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t run just to be a gadfly. Berger is “probably the most powerful Republican in Raleigh,” he said, and the odds are very long, but Fink said given all the local concern about Berger’s record on economic development, education, LGBT rights, voting rights and other major issues, a win against him is possible.

Berger’s strident defense of HB2, even after the fallout including companies con-

ERIC GINSBURG

demning the law and musicians canceling performances is concerning too, Fink said, adding that at the very least Berger should be expected to reasonably explain and justify his rationale for supporting the law and its wide-reaching provisions. Berger should be embarrassed, Fink said, and either was too oblivious to see the backlash coming or did and didn’t care, which he said is worse.

Fink will need to make significant inroads in Rockingham County — Berger’s home base — to win the district, and will need to count on overwhelming Democratic turnout driven by the presidential and gubernatorial races and likely considerable crossover appeal. Fink has personal connections in the county north of Guilford, and goes fishing up there sometimes, he said, but has significant ground to cover in order to be viable. To

triad-city-beat.com

that end, he attended the Rockingham County Democratic Convention and held his first somewhat informal campaign meeting over the weekend.

Sanders received 3,029 votes in Rockingham County in the March primary contest, while Hillary Clinton pulled in 4,483.

And while Donald Trump carried the day with 4,962 — a decent margin over Sanders — even second-place Ted Cruz beat Democratic frontrunner Clinton in Rockingham by 14 votes.

Fink is confident he is assembling a strong enough team to not only get on the ballot, but mount a real opposition to the state Senate leader. More than anything though, his success will depend on his message reaching district residents who might feel the local Bern, finding enough people in the district who are disillusioned with Berger or who are drawn to campaign statements such as this one from Fink’s website: “As an activist, [Fink] has fought for civil rights, civil liberties and equal protection for all. As a state senator, he will push back against bigotry, inequity and oligarchy, and push ahead for solidarity, justice and democracy.”

Selling Lindley Park

Frank Slate Brooks Broker/Realtor®

Up Front

336.708.0479 cell 336.274.1717 office frankslate.brooks@trm.info 1401 Sunset Dr., Suite 100 Greensboro, NC 27408 trm.info

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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One-candidate forum highlights low profile of special city council election

by Jordan Green

One candidate for Winston-Salem City Council gets the spotlight at sparsely attended forum in the run-up to a June 7 special election.

If attendance at a recent candidate forum is any indication, the June 7 special election hasn’t stirred up much interest.

Five minutes after starting time, a candidate forum at Community Mosque of Winston-Salem on April 14 had drawn exactly four people: the event organizer, a city council candidate, a campaign manager and a reporter. Later, two additional people materialized.

John Larson, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the South Ward seat on city council, and Fleming El-Amin, the event organizer, have become well acquainted over the past four weeks thanks to El-Amin’s role as the sole Democratic member of the Forsyth County Board of Elections.

The margin of difference in Larson’s race in the March 15 primary was only four votes. Larson, opponent Carolyn Highsmith and their respective supporters monitored the absentee ballot count and canvass at the board of elections with intense interest. When the margin of JORDAN GREEN Fleming El-Amin, who hosted a candidate forum at Community Mosque in Winston-Salem, reads from the North difference changed to six votes with the Carolina Constitution to Tonya McDaniel and John Larson. election’s certification, Larson announced conversation naturally turned to the finer north where we have new condos going showed a short video of prepared remarks he would request a recount and file a propoints of election administration, state up, and it runs down to the Davidson by the candidate. test, citing reports that dozens of people election law and local poll-worker training.

County line in the south,” the candidate The South Ward Democratic primary, at the Shepherd’s Center polling place After about 15 minutes, El-Amin said he said. “It may be one of the fastest growing which was overturned by the state Board were given the wrong ballot and preventwanted to be respectful of everyone’s time wards in the city.” of Elections, drew 4,052 voters, comed from voting in the South Ward race, or and start the program. A circular seating He praised the ethnic diversity of the pared to only 1,085 the last time the seat in other cases allowed to vote in the race arrangement was the one concession to ward, mentioning Greek, Latino and Asian was up for election in 2013. The June 7 when they shouldn’t have. Within a week, the limited turnout in what was otherwise residents, while expressing concerns about special election to re-do the South Ward the state Board of a fairly formal, if rePeters Creek Parkway as “a visually chalprimary is unlikely to draw anywhere near Elections in Raleigh orlaxed, format. El-Amin lenged corridor,” along with Business 40 the same number of voters as the March A candidate forum for dered a new election, opened with a Muslim and Interstate 40 which both slice through 15 election, when Democrats came out with some members Democratic candidates prayer and then the ward. in droves to express their preference in th also expressing confor the 5 Congressional offered Larson the “The connectivity is challenged,” Larson the presidential primary contest between cern about 101 absenDistrict will be held at the opportunity to make said.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. tee ballots that were Forsyth County Democratic an opening statement, El-Amin said he had extended an invitaThe June 7 special election ballot in disqualified because inviting him to take all tion to Highsmith, Larson’s opponent, but Forsyth County will also include primary Headquarters, located at they did not meet the the time he needed. she told him she was unable to commit to candidates for the 5th Congressional statutory requirement 1128 Burke St. (W-S) on May Larson talked about the engagement. The only other candiDistrict, including Republicans Virginia to be postmarked by 6 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. his background as vice date represented was Selester Stewart, a Foxx and Pattie Curran, and Democrats Election Day, although president of restoDemocrat who is running for one of the Josh Brannon, Jim Roberts and Charlie they clearly were in the ration at Old Salem Museum & Gardens, three seats in Republican-leaning Forsyth Wallin, along with state Supreme Court possession of the US Postal Service by but emphasized the breadth and diversity County Commission District B in the candidates Bob Edmunds, Mike Morgan, that time. of the South Ward.

November general election. Stewart’s Daniel Robertson and Sabra Faires. Early As El-Amin waited to see if any “It runs from the courthouse in the campaign manager, Tonya McDaniel, voting runs from May 26 through June additional candidates would show up, the

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and recreation.”

He added that outlying areas are underserved when it comes to greenways, sidewalks and bike paths.

“We’ve got to take the city to the people,” he added.

A young man who came into the forum late asked Larson to address the challenge of increasing employment opportunities, particularly for those who aren’t qualified for or interested in the biotech and information logistics jobs available at the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter.

“I have great faith in what has been done to move our economy from tobacco and textiles to advanced technology,” Larson said. “We have a lot of service industry, a lot of retail clerks and waiters.”

He added that he maintains hope that low-interest rates will spur investment in homeownership and stimulate construction jobs — a significant driver of the economy.

“We’ve got to provide a living wage,” Larson said. “I’ve got to ask: Are the people who are working for the city — do they have to work a second job to feed their family? Those are the jobs I’m responsible for and that your tax dollars pay for.”

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4 at the Forsyth County Government Center in Winston-Salem.

In Guilford County, the June 7 special election will include Republican and Democratic primaries for the new 13th Congressional District, with 17 Republican candidates and five Democratic candidates, along with the four state Supreme Court candidates. Election Direcotr Charlie Collicutt said early voting hours have not been finalized yet in Guilford County.

Following Larson’s opening statement at the April 14 forum in Winston-Salem, El-Amin asked the candidate a couple questions. In response to a question about the appropriateness of city financing of Emmanuel Retirement Village, Larson said public safety is the city’s first priority, but quality of life is also important.

“I’m not afraid of government involvement to improve the lives of people in this town,” he said.

To another question about whether he would be open to moving city services to outlying areas of the city, particularly the fast-growing southern fringe, Larson said, “Anywhere there’s some residue of annexation, it’s got to be more than water and sewage. Neighborhoods need parks

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12

HIGH POINT JOURNAL

Opposition to HB2 puts a ‘dent’ in furniture market attendance

by Jordan Green

At least one large-scale buyer pulls out as opposition to HB2 puts a “dent” in the biannual High Point furniture market, although the showrooms remain busy. Many buyers and industry representatives express revulsion to the law, while expressing optimism about the prospects for repeal.

Some weren’t familiar with the new law and others didn’t care, but most of buyers, exhibitors and other visitors on the first day of the spring furniture market in High Point expressed disappointment in HB2 while emphasizing support for the market.

Jonathan Mora, a representative of the Italian furniture manufacturer Bontempi, maintained a cautiously upbeat attitude as he surveyed the brisk foot traffic from his company’s exhibition space within the gargantuan International Home Furnishings Center on April 16, opening day of the market.

“People are upset,” he said. “It looks normal. There are a small number of people who have said they aren’t coming. There are folks who have faith it will be fixed.”

The biannual market typically attracts about 75,000 visitors from around the world, almost doubling the population of the city of 104,371.

Mora expressed faith that Gov. Pat McCrory, who signed HB2, is working on a plan to make the new law more palatable. McCrory signed HB2, which overturned Charlotte’s ordinance allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their preference while barring cities from enacting anti-discrimination ordinances and from mandating a minimum wage higher than the state standard. HB2 also establishes a statewide anti-discrimination law that does not include protections for people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, and prevents people from using the state courts to pursue discrimination claims.

A decision by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding gender identity as a protected class on Tuesday places HB on uncertain legal ground.

McCrory later issued an executive

Buyers relaxed on the fairway in front of Showplace on opening day of the spring International Home Furnishings Market in High Point on April 16.

order that includes protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity for state employees, while asking the General Assembly to overturn the ban on pursuing discrimination claims in state courts.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, McCrory refused to budge on the core provision of HB2 mandating that people must use the bathroom of the gender listed on their birth certificate in multi-occupant facilities in public schools and other public agencies.

Newell Turner, editor-in-chief of

Hearst Design Group — publisher of House Beautiful, Elle Décor, Veranda and Metropolitan Home — wore a rainbow flag pin to express his opposition to HB2 on the first day of the market. He emphasized that he was speaking only for himself and not his company.

“I think it’s a serious issue,” he said.

“It’s a North Carolina state issue. This is an international market. While I don’t believe in HB2, I can’t imagine not coming here. I don’t think that’s appropriate not to do business in North Carolina.”

JORDAN GREEN

Felipe Hernandez, a Charlotte-based buyer who was visiting the market on behalf of a retailer in Austin, remarked that foot traffic was the lowest he’s ever seen. He said he’s “completely against” HB2.

Hernandez said he understands why companies and entertainers from outside the state feel the need to take a principled stand by not doing business in North Carolina.

“I think they need to put the pressure on so they can change the law,” he said. “It’s affecting everyone. It’s major

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phone call in to his representative in the state House.

Considering that when he was growing up, he never would have imagined that he could be married to a man or that he could be open about his sexuality as a business owner, Gold remains optimistic that HB2 will eventually be overturned, just as the previous ban on same-sex marriage was. Noting that on Sunday he was talking to one of his suppliers about transgender rights, he said considers the current controversy to be a “teachable moment.”

“I think it’s important to take a stand,” he said. “I’ve put myself out there. One could say it’s risky for a businessman to be so outspoken. The silver lining is that we’ve gotten great publicity out of this. People are talking about a boycott, but you could also talk about a buy-cott. We’re a company that has in spirit and policy a stance of inclusion towards people regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. We support politicians who promote inclusion and give money to them. We’ve gotten a lot of exposure with fair-minded people.

We’re having a real good month.”

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Greensboro, Gold’s company is one of the two largest gay-owned businesses in North Carolina.

As a manufacturer whose business depends on sales, Gold said his company is likely to weather the impact of buyers choosing to not attend the market.

“We’re going to make up for it by visiting the customers and sending photos,” he said. “We’ll work it through.

But it definitely has an impact. There’s fewer people going out to eat in restaurants. It’s a dent. How embarrassing for us that people don’t want to come to our state. It’s such a dark blemish on our state and our people.”

The furniture market is the largest single economic event in the state of North Carolina every year, according to a 2013 Duke University study, and some industry leaders expressed hope that the market’s clout will eventually persuade state lawmakers to come around.

“Everybody’s crossing their fingers that the [General] Assembly will do the right thing and fix the issue,” said Jonathan Mora with Bontempi.

Gold said he has invited Gov. McCrory to visit the showroom and has a

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two big retail buyers, canceled their visits to the market in opposition to HB2, accounting for a total of 42 people.

Gold said during an interview at his High Point showroom that attendance at the market was down 25 to 30 percent. Tom Conley, president and CEO of the High Point Market Authority, confirmed the two cancellations in an email on Monday, but said only Williams Sonoma’s decision to not attend the market was linked to HB2. He said the market authority will not know how many people attended the market for another two weeks.

As an openly gay business leader, Gold has readily stepped forward as an opponent of HB2. Even before the current controversy over transgender rights, Gold took a vocal position in favor of marriage equality during the 2012 marriage referendum and has worked with pastors such as the Rev. Anthony Spearman to promote a message that homosexuality is not a sin. Gold gave a rousing speech against HB2 at an April 2 rally organized by clergy at College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro.

Along with Replacements Limited in

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income.

“It’s discrimination,” Hernandez added. “Let’s call it what it is — discrimination, plain and simple.”

In late March, the High Point Market Authority warned that dozens of customers had informed the agency that they were canceling plans to attend the market.

“As leaders and organizers of the High Point Market, we feel an obligation to inform the public and our government leaders in Raleigh of the significant economic damage that HB2 is having on the High Point Market and on the North Carolina economy,” a statement from the market authority read. “Based on the reaction in just the last few days, hundreds and perhaps thousands of our customers will not attend market this April.”

Mitchell Gold, co-owner of the Taylorsville-based furniture-maker Mitchell Gold+Bob Williams, said a regularly scheduled dinner his company hosts for independent retailers was “crowded, but not packed,” adding that there’s usually an overflow. He said that Williams Sonoma and Restoration Hardware,

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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OPINION EDITORIAL

Taxholes It’s appropriate, as the nation collectively ponies up its annual tribute to the Internal Revenue Service, to talk about the Panama Papers, which is shaping up to be one of the most potent leaks of the digital age.

The 11.5 million documents — 2.6 terabytes — compiled by a Panamanian law firm and anonymously leaked to the public by a whistleblower, is essentially a primer on how to hide money in offshore shell companies, with detailed, real-life examples that include several individuals from soccer’s governing body FIFA, the prime minister of Iceland and leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Sudan and the Ukraine. Owners of shell companies have ties to the Bill and Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Remember, this is just the client list of a single law firm in a world full of them.

The United Nations estimates that 2.5 percent of the Global Domestic Product disappears every year, between $800 billion and $2 trillion, most of it laundered and neatly folded in offshore accounts of the kind that Mossack Fonesca, the Panamanian law firm with offices in Miami and Las Vegas, specialized in setting up.

Mossack Fonseca’s relatively meager contribution to the grift, estimated at $2 trillion going back to the 1970s, barely makes a dent in the fortunes that have been hidden away, considering their actions covered more than 40 years.

Offshore shell corporations like these allow a very small group of very wealthy humans to participate in a shadow economy where sanctions don’t exist, nothing is regulated and nobody pays taxes.

What some might find interesting is that, among the law firm’s clients outed in the leak, very few were from the United States.

But that’s because it’s not illegal for Americans to hold offshore accounts — or, at least, there is no significant downside. And because corporations are people, they get to do it too.

Somewhat less sensational than the Panama Papers was the release last week of the Oxfam Report, a compiling of the assets that US corporations have parked offshore. The Top 50 US corporations have removed nearly $1 trillion from the US economy and placed it out of the tax collector’s reach — and where none of the rest of us have a chance at getting to it, locked away like a Renoir in the attic with a sheet thrown over it.

Oxfam estimates that about $100 billion a year goes uncollected, shifting the burden to small businesses and individuals, which some would have you believe is the American way.

But in truth, real patriots pay taxes. Only bad guys take the money and run.

CITIZEN GREEN

Are we going to get new NCGA maps, too?

Thanks to a federal court ruling finding that our congressional districts were drawn as an illegal racial gerrymander, North Carolinians will be going back the polls on June 7 to elect candidates in a special

by Jordan Green primary election.

It’s tempting to say that another shoe may drop, but as my colleague Brian Clarey has pointed out, the Republican-controlled General Assembly has passed so many laws based on faulty legal analysis and lack of foresight that it seems every day there’s an ongoing stampede of unintended consequences. That said, the heaviest boot ready to land may be a parallel challenge to the redistricting plan for the state General Assembly.

It bears noting that the handiwork was completed at the bidding of the same state lawmakers, Sen. Bob Rucho and Rep. David Lewis, in the early summer of 2011. And not least of all, the congressional and state legislative maps were drawn for the same purposes — namely, to pack as many black voters as possible into a handful of districts, and in doing so to pull black voters out of neighboring districts where their support had previously helped elect white Democrats. The name of the Republican game was tipping about four congressional seats into the Republican column and expanding the GOP’s majorities in the two houses of the state legislature.

The ironies of the two sides’ arguments are inescapable. Lawyers for the state defended the maps in federal court in Greensboro last week by arguing that Republican lawmakers wanted to create as many districts with black voting age population above 50 percent as possible out of concern that black voters’ ability to elect candidates of choice was jeopardized by racially polarized voting patterns. This level of concern is strange, to say the least, coming from the party that so clearly would rather isolate black voters than compete for their support, while enacting voter ID and curtailing early voting and other measures that disproportionately burden black voters.

Lawyers from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, representing the plaintiff, argued on the other hand that the maps amount to racial segregation because they needlessly pack black voters into a limited number of districts and dilute their ability to influence the outcome of elections in adjacent districts. Their factual argument essentially comes down to the contention that voting in North Carolina is not as racially polarized as the Republicans say it is.

Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, attempted to discredit one of the state’s

expert witnesses, University of Texas at Dallas political scientist Thomas Brunell, by getting him to repeat a statement he made during depositions.

“I said I wasn’t aware of any opportunity for African Americans to win except in majority black or coalition districts,” Brunell said, later clarifying that by “coalition” he meant other racial minorities such as Latinos, as opposed to a political alliance between blacks and white progressives.

Under cross-examination, Riggs confronted Brunell with the fact that Thomas Wright and Sandra Spaulding Hughes, two black candidates, won election in House District 18, a district straddling New Hanover and Pender counties that was 57.7 percent white. She also cited Ty Harrell, a black candidate who won election to a majority white House district in suburban Wake County, and Larry Shaw, a black Muslim candidate who represented a Senate district in Cumberland County with a population almost evenly split between whites and blacks from 1997 to 2011.

A second expert witness called by the defense, University of Georgia political scientist Trey Hood, indicated he was unimpressed with the plaintiffs’ evidence of black candidates winning elections in districts with percent black voting age populations in the range of 40 to 49 percent.

“The most probative elections are ones with a black candidate and a white candidate,” he remarked drily.

There are few examples of Democratic primaries for state legislative seats with both black and white candidates on the ballot.

The 2010 Senate District 32 primary — with 42.5 percent black voting age population — in Forsyth County stands out as a rare exception. Challenger Ed Hanes, who is black, lost to white incumbent Linda Garrou by a margin of more than 60 percentage points, but Garrou’s influential position as a Democratic budget writer likely enhanced her popularity. When the Republicans took charge, they drew Garrou out of the district, and Earline Parmon, a black candidate, carried it in the next election.

But in neighboring Guilford County, Katie Dorsett, a black candidate, handily won Senate District 28, with 47.2 percent black voting age population, year after year with no difficulty. When Gladys Robinson, a black Democrat ran to replace Dorsett in 2010, she easily prevailed over a white Republican, Trudy Wade, even with another black Democrat, Bruce Davis, siphoning off votes after he got on the ballot as an independent.

It goes to show that there are facts to support virtually any argument.

Furniture Market musical chairs

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leaders cause fervent partisan gridlock both in state legislatures and in Congress.

As a former resident of Reidsville, one other factor about the community sticks with me. Even though Greensboro is a mere half-hour drive away, it feels as remote as Princeton, W.Va., a full hour and a half west of Roanoke, Va. As I imagine is the case in Princeton, many Reidsville residents are fearful of change and the outside world as a whole.

There are impressive aspects of the town; many long-standing establishments, such as Short Sugar’s Bar B Que, which has been open since 1949, have impressively withstood competition from major commercial restaurants on the other side of town.

But, on the ugly side, there were also major protests when a Confederate monument in downtown Reidsville had been knocked over by a freak vehicle accident and was not returned to its foundry. Dozens of residents waved rebel flags and dressed like Confederate soldiers with the least bit of respect or concern for how uncomfortable those protests might make the town’s many African Americans feel.

Similarly, Berger Sr., has been vocal in his stern support of HB2 even as major industries, Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr have each decided not to come to North Carolina. He seems more entrenched than Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, which may help Berger become more popular with smalltown conservatives across the state. But McCrory seems to be more aware of the stark reality that the law could help swing voters in suburbs to vote not only for likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but also for his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Roy Cooper for governor in November.

We are a divided nation; no two places reflect that more than North Carolina and Virginia. In your state, it can be seen in Madison or Asheville. In my state, it can be seen in Martinsville and Harrisonburg. HB2 and its aftermath will likely continue to remind us of that political divide and of that old Carpenters’ song “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

Tilly Gokbudak is a former newspaper reporter who won six Virginia Press Association Awards in his career. His Twitter handle is @Tilly70.

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Since leaving Reidsville, a small city in Rockingham County where I resided because of a job as a reporter at the Reidsville Review in April 2006 (that gig lasted a mere seven weeks), I have returned to my hometown of Roanoke, Va. It is a city of 100,000 people in

by Tilly Gokbudak close proximity to Virginia Tech.

After voting Republican for every presidential election since 1964, Virginia voted for Obama in both of the last presidential elections. Some Virginia cities like Danville and Harrisonburg leaned blue even though the rural areas around them went vastly red.

North Carolina voted for Romney after going blue for Obama against John McCain in 2008. Caswell County, a racially divided rural area that includes Yanceyville, was among the jurisdictions that switched from Obama to Romney.

Similarly, the geopolitics of our two states are also strikingly similar. Most small towns in rural areas like Mocksville in your state and Galax, Va., (due north of Mount Airy), go red.

Most college towns like Durham and Charlottesville, Va., go blue as is the case with major cities. Thus, in many instances suburbs like Cary and Arlington, Va., as well as turnout, become crucial factors for the campaigns of both political parties.

During the nationally covered upheaval over the North Carolina Senate’s passage of the HB2, I was never surprised by how contentious the issue became.

The state Senate in Virginia, which narrowly leans Republican, also had a similar bill due to a court case filed by Gavin Grimm, 16, born female, who wants to use the boys’ bathroom at his school in Gloucester County in rural eastern Virginia near Williamsburg. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that Grimm has the right to use the bathroom of his choice.

To me, Reidsville was always a microcosm of small towns not just in North Carolina, but also Virginia. This is reflected

by Rockingham County’s most recognized public official, state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger Sr., who leads the chamber.

Berger, a resident of Eden, which is similar to nearby Reidsville, seems like an exceptionally unlikeable person unless you fully agree with his views.

In my opinion, Berger Sr., represents everything that is wrong with today’s political climate in that it often rewards those who are most uncompromising.

They rise to power for their stubbornness, but those same traits in party

Up Front

I see no reason that the so-called furniture capital of the world shouldn’t also be home to the world’s largest game of musical

by Eric Ginsburg chairs.

It’s a dumb game, really, one that I never liked playing. It’s totally cheesy and admittedly boring, wholesome “fun,” which is exactly why it’s well suited for High Point.

I kid. But in reality, if the city government is going to get on board, any idea probably does need to be watered down to child’s play, making this proposal a great fit for High Peezy.

So how about this — the people of Furniture Market, with the help of local Pointers, hold the world’s largest game of musical chairs, giving the Third City something to celebrate, a way into the Guinness Book of World Records and some good, clean press for a city that could sorely use some positive energy.

What takes this beyond the dopey childhood game is the abundance of high-quality furniture. Picture a chaise lounge next to an artisan wooden stool. Will all of the seats hold up through the hundreds of rounds required to make this the world’s largest game? At what point do participants begin to collapse?

How many people will quit to use the bathroom? By the final rounds, it would be more of a spectator sport than anything, giving the proposition added appeal.

It’s admittedly a stupid, simple idea, and one that I most certainly will not participate in — which should probably bar me from putting it forward. But the concept is actually basic enough to execute and it’s a way for people to try tons of chairs, to convince people to stare at your product for an extended period of time, and after a couple free drinks at Furniture Market parties, it just might be fun.

The Furniture Market game of musical chairs could be a biannual recreational event, or it could function as a one-off, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. First we need to find some people — kids, maybe? — who will participate.

Purple states truly are battleground states

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IT JUST MIGHT WORK

FRESH EYES

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April 20 — 26, 2016

Theater as foster-care catharsis

Cover Story

by Joanna Rutter

The high squeak of marker on the red balloon ruptures a weighty silence hanging in the theater. A child writes out “help,” speaking each letter of the word out loud as he does, mostly to himself, clearly distraught as his stepfather looks on. Extending the balloon out to his mother, her back turned, the scribbled cry visible, he waits for her response, in a pause pregnant with the possibility of rescue.

Then, with one swift and unexpected motion, the stepfather pops the balloon with a pin.

The resulting bang makes the audience gasp, some jerking back in their chairs from the shock of the noise mixed with the realization of what is being abstractly demonstrated: Victims of abuse are sharing their stories of trauma from foster care, publicly, for the first time.

‘I think I want to tell y’all something I never told you or really anybody before.’ — Malik

16

Weeks before the show’s opening night on April 14, blocking the balloon scene, less tension filled the room. In the basement of College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, the cast of the Foster Care Chronicles project’s debut production, Wrongs of Passage, munched on room-temperature pizza and flipped through their scripts in respectful silence while the actors in the scene worked out balloon logistics.

Getting to this point in the production has been a long process — nine months from recruitment, to collecting actors’ stories, to compiling them into a script, to opening night, to be precise — and it’s taken several group retreats and a significant amount of team-building exercises to achieve the level of trust among the cast necessary to craft a play out of their own experiences of trauma, some

of which had never been spoken aloud.

At rehearsal, in somewhat stereotypical high school drama-teacher fashion, writer and director Debra LeWinter kicked her boots to the side under her desk; every minute or so, she couldn’t help but jump up in her socks to move a set piece or demonstrate a movement to her actors, all while giving encouraging constructive feedback as the actors tackle the rough subject material of their own stories.

Working with two moving screens to represent a rape scene that takes place in a corner of a room, she paused, looking at actor Malik Worthy square on.

“You have the acting chops to really hit this,” she said.

It’s one of innumerable instances throughout the play’s lifespan in which having social workers handy for these types of scenes was crucial for both the cast and crew.

The sponsorship of the joint Master’s of Social Work program at UNCG and NC A&T University is mutually beneficial; social work interns in the program clock in hours while LeWinter has the clinical backup required for the subject matter being performed.

The three interns — Anna Black, Rissa Tuttle and Melissa Williams, supervised by clinical director and producer Alicia Kaplan — not only provided appropriate care during harder moments and helped to conduct interviews with actors, but also run sound, help actors practice lines and drive them to rehearsals. LeWinter said the production would’ve been incredibly different without their presence.

LeWinter’s scriptwriting methodology aimed to guard the actors’ emotional well-being as well. Instead of having actors perform their own traumatic experiences, LeWinter consciously traded out most narrators, and the end result is a musical-chairs kind of casting that protects the actors while preserving the intent of the play.

Performing from another person’s life proved to be a meaningful part of the process for many of the actors.

“I feel like I’m living through that person,”

In the final scene of Wrongs of Passage, Rose Tucker (left) adjusts Melat Ayalew’s gradu playing her foster mom. “You’re smart,” Tucker says. “I believe in you. I love you.”

change things.’ — Constance

AMANDA SALTER

To fully understand the emotional significance and magnitude of what Wrongs of Passage successfully attempts to accomplish as art and catharsis, it’s necessary to flash back 15 years to 2001. Alicia Kaplan, now the co-field director of the joint Master’s of Social Work program at UNCG and NC A&T University, first applied to that program fresh out of her undergrad at Brandeis University and a tenure running the Phantom Manor ride at Disneyland Paris.

In her application essays for various grad schools, she cast a vision for using theater to creatively marry the arts with social work.

“I really enjoyed the idea of combining those two loves,” she said.

After earning her degree, she started work at the Forsyth County Department of Social Services, later moving to the Guilford County DSS, where she was able to partially realize that dream.

In 2009, one her supervisors wrote a play called Chronicles of a Foster Child centered on recurring

‘Do you promise to listen and try to imagine what it’s like to be us, in foster care?’ — Maya Though writing and staging Wrongs of Passage has ultimately been a healing process, the trauma caused by the ugly underbelly of the foster-care system is just as much a character in the play as the actors themselves.

Statistics compiled by the Jordan Institute for Families at UNC-Chapel Hill shows that of 5,212 children in child-welfare custody in North Carolina between 2014 and 2015, 162 lived in Guilford County and 68 lived in Forsyth County. The percentage of kids in Guilford County experiencing four or more placements within their first year of custody was 23 percent, exceeding the state average by five points, signifying instability.

Kaplan said that Guilford County in particular has investigated systemic racism in the foster-care system. According to her stats,

black children comprise 80 percent of youth in foster care in Guilford county, though they only comprise 40 percent of the county’s total youth population.

Another issue Kaplan pointed to was the shrinking budget for the Child Welfare Education Collaborative, a state program offering free tuition to students agreeing to placement at social service offices, making social work more competitive by stocking state offices with dedicated, debt-free staff.

“There was money then,” Kaplan said of the program in the early 2000s, when she was first starting out as a social worker. “The program was growing. But the state legislature continued to chop the budget. The program’s now at bare bones.”

“It is one of the most challenging jobs quite possibly in the world,” she later added. “I’m hoping the play can be used for social workers to remember why they got into this field to begin with, especially on those stressful days.”

Oftentimes group-home staff members are not formally trained to interact with youth, sometimes posturing in situations a trained social worker would know to de-escalate, Kaplan said.

During a game-show bit in the play, one actor asks of a group home staff character, “What qualifies you to be in this role?” The response: “Because I have a pulse and a high school diploma, smartass!”

Another troubling factor called out in Wrongs of Passage is that once a child is placed in foster care, supposedly to be protected from a neglectful or abusive environment, they are not necessarily guaranteed safety: one 2005 NYU study found that over 28% of children in state care are abused while in the foster care system, and that’s a modest estimate. Some of the more horrifying moments in the play are not pre-care stories, but those from foster families, such as a pastor’s wife who makes her foster daughter pretend to be “a good husband” and then threatens to kill her if she tells anyone what happened.

Despite a common perception that most children in foster care are young children, the average age of the children in foster care is older than 9 years old. Teens are often moved to group homes not because of behavioral problems, but simply because of their age.

“Not a lot of foster homes are willing to take teens,” Kaplan said.

The trend of adults aging out of foster care only to “enter the system” is a huge social concern, said Greensboro City Councilwoman Sharon Hightower of District 1, who made a point to attend the opening night of the play. Statistics overwhelmingly point to high percentages of homelessness, PTSD, and low employment rates in adults exiting care.

Part of the reason why LeWinter loves working with young adults in or recently out of foster care

triad-city-beat.com

uation cap,

themes seen by social workers. Neffy Baldwin, one of the contributors to the Wrongs of Passage script, stepped in as the understudy for the main character. Ever since then, Baldwin urged Kaplan to put together another play.

“When we did that production, I remember thinking I wanted to do it again, but use their real-life stories, woven together,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan had the clinical know-how and the love for theater; she just needed the right partner in crime and the grant money to execute it successfully.

Enter Debra LeWinter, who Kaplan met through the Piedmont Swing Dance Society six years ago. LeWinter, a drama teacher at Greensboro’s American Hebrew Academy in Wrongs of Passage plays at the Greensboro, had been directUpstage Cabaret at Triad Stage in ing trauma-based theater projects at the school; she was the Greensboro from Thursday through first person Kaplan thought of Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday, April when the joint MSW program won a grant with funds allotted 24 at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for a theater production. at triadstage.org and are free for “We’d been dreaming about individuals in foster care and their this for years, ever since we met, all the time we’d known chaperones. Find the Foster Care each other,” LeWinter said.

Chronicles on Facebook for more inAfter six years of friendship and their artistic partnership formation about the ongoing project. through this play, they share an almost psychic connection, trailing off at the end of their sentences during rehearsals, finishing them proved indispensable. telepathically.

“It’s a giant therapy session for everyone,” “Alicia and I have many things in common,” Ayalew said.

LeWinter said. “Neither of us have had profound experiences of trauma in our own lives, and yet ‘They’re here because they want both of us seek to give people access to healing to hear us tell the truth and try to who have suffered.”

D’Wayne Rodriguez, a 17-year-old from Winston-Salem, said.

“It’s a real eye-opener,” he continued. “You think your situation is bad; you’re in your situation, thinking through your eyes. Then you realize people have situations as bad as yours, or worse.

It teaches me not to judge. It brings me into that a little more, more humility.”

Actor Melat Ayalew, a UNCG acting student subbing in for an original cast member no longer able to participate, recalls her first rehearsal after auditioning, in which a fellow actor broke down, unable to cope with a particular scene. Having the interns on hand for moments like those

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Cover Story

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is their resilience.

“Everything that they feel and all of their struggles are so... I don’t mean excused, but justified, by their experience,” LeWinter said. “Memories of these traumas are so vivid, they are burned into these kids...The hope of this project, and the work of social worker, is to help them put those toys away and grow up.”

The bright-red set — a “dystopian preschool” symbolizing those burned memories — plays a part in the overall emphasis on showing instead of telling, somewhat a thesis of the whole play, which the actors have had to grapple with as they not only share their stories with each other, but act them out.

“You’re going to bring your story not just into the light of day, but under this searing stage light,” LeWinter said.

“The audience is part of the process. They’re giving a gift to the people on stage. All of that shame, it just disintegrates under that light.”

LeWinter recalls working through a particularly hard interview with an actor, who for the first time in her life Iacknowledged that her abuse wasn’t her fault and broke down in tears.

“That’s her getting it,” LeWinter said, her own voice cracking.

“I think the whole play was worth it for that moment.”

‘Come live my story with me.’ — Neffy Despite the strong foundation of trust and healing built throughout the past year, chaos reigned during tech week rehearsals; in perhaps only this way, Wrongs of Passage is just like any other theater production.

On April 12, the cast and crew seemed to buzz with a panicked energy, in retrospect, throwing the relatively smooth opening night performance on April 14 in sharp relief. In the fifth official draft of the script (though it’s a living text with pieces that move every rehearsal), a new final scene had been written; the disgruntled tech crew tinkered with sound cues and mic-pack logistics, bearing the furrowed brows of people who have dealt with actors for too long.

Halfway through the stop-and-go rehearsal, Rodriguez hit his shin on the set door, and after collecting himself outside the theater with Kaplan, he re-entered wheeling himself in on a chair. Cast members immediately swarmed him, concerned about his leg. Kaplan wrapped ice from the Triad Stage bar onto his leg using gaff tape while Worthy held the improvised ice pack to his friend’s leg.

The cast became, in their own words during opening night’s talkback, a supportive family, relying on each other through the ups and downs.

That kind of community didn’t happen overnight.

At first, Worthy, Rodriguez and Monique Hall didn’t know how to feel about acting in the Foster Care Chronicles project. The longtime friends know each other primarily from participating in Forsyth County’s foster care teen support program. On a group outing to a trampoline park in August, LeWinter came to speak about the show and recruit cast members.

“I was like, ‘Eh, she’s coming up to me,’” Rodriguez grimaced, recalling his initial feelings in an interview.

“But then she says food, so I’m interested,” he said. “I

decided to give it a chance.

We’ve been committed to it ever since.”

It’s a good thing the project brought the trio together; they essentially function as the cast’s peanut gallery, Worthy regularly hamming with ridiculous dance moves and Rodriguez goofing in improvised bits with the audience, both to Hall’s giggling.

Rodriguez hopes to continue acting and perhaps pursue it as a career; he says it’s an opportunity to “release” emotions he couldn’t otherwise express.

“In my game-show host character, I get to be a smart... person,” Rodriguez said, skating around a more foul word. “A smart aleck.”

Rodriguez said he was always the kind of person whose trust was earned, not given, and didn’t think he was going to get as close to everyone as he did. He recalled a powerful moment with cast member Constance Carroll on one retreat, where they had to guide each other through a series of obstacles.

“It brought us closer together,” he said.

Rose Tucker, a 17-yearold from Greensboro, also deviated from her status quo during the fall.

AMANDA SALTER “I didn’t think I was going Playwright and director Debra LeWinter (left) and producer Alicia Kaplan have dreamed of putting on this play for six years. to open up as much as I did,” Tucker said. “That manage coming frequently and opening up this deeply,” really shocked me… Miss Deb just has a way of bringing LeWinter said. it out.

Onboarding new actors proved to be a lot smoother “You just end up telling everything,” she said, smiling. than would be expected. Ayalew jumped right in and “You’re like, ‘wait, what?’” brought an electric physicality with her; she said she LeWinter confessed her own set of fears as she preenjoyed the collaborative nature of the play. pared to recruit her actors.

“Usually with acting, you discover or create a character’s “I was terrified that I wouldn’t know how to connect, or backstory,” she said. “Our characters are real people.” that I wouldn’t do their stories justice,” she said. “Or that Fellow recent addition Maya Hamer studies acting with nobody would show up.”

Ayalew, and carries a surprisingly powerful stage presThe cast shrank from an initial 13 members to seven of ence, considering her quiet demeanor between scenes the original story contributors, supplemented by outside at rehearsal. Her deadly serious portrayal of some of the actors. The most recent and painfully felt loss was Neffy darker characters in the play, such as an abusive foster Baldwin, a core member who had to step down to take mom, inspires chills. care of her son. Kaplan said it’s an inevitability they had Alysa Rambo, subbing for Baldwin, acts professionally prepared for, and LeWinter supplied rationale.

— local theater aficionados may recall her stellar perfor“We’re working a bunch of people who are struggling, mance as Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun last year with and these are the resilient ones, who have enough skills to Community Theatre of Greensboro. Rambo’s bright-eyed

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Through group interviews and team-building retreats, the cast grew to be more of a supportive family. Their unity is necessary for tackling the tough material at hand. From left: Alysa Rambo, Rose Tucker, Monique Hall, Constance Carroll, D’Wayne Rodriguez and Maya Hamer. Seated: Melat Ayalew.

energy and crisp delivery elevates the power of the entire play, especially when script gaps require ad-libbing.

The three “outsiders” fit seamlessly into the cast.

“It’s more their story than ours,” Ayalew conceded.

“We’re learning from them as they’re learning from us as professional actors. But they have the truth of the story.”

‘Do you really think telling my story could change anything?’ -Malik With a finished manuscript brimming with intimate and powerful stories, and a year of unpacking trauma and growing closer together as a team, “What happens next?” has been a natural question asked by the cast, crew and directors as they look beyond the April 24 final curtain.

For starters, Kaplan and LeWinter plan for Foster Care Chronicles to be an annual project, with new stories each year. For the members of this year’s cast, however, moving

forward still looks hazy.

“To some extent, the big struggle for me is, how, in the future, do we connect this project to other things that are really going to produce results in the world for them?”

LeWinter wondered aloud in an interview.

“I would love to have them mentor [next year],” she said. “But the bigger thing is, I want their lives to work.”

The play’s purpose extends far beyond its run at the Upstage Cabaret: It will be taped and used as training and recruitment material for potential foster parents in Guilford and Forsyth counties. Kaplan and LeWinter also hope that audiences will be motivated to fund the project so new plays can be written and performed annually. Likewise, they hope kids placed foster care will come see the play and want to be part of the project next year. Some surrounding counties’ DSS offices are planning to bring groups to the production.

Fortunately, the play ends on a positive and light-

AMANDA SALTER

hearted note, promises Kaplan. With the subject matter at hand, not doing so could potentially be too much for some audience members to process.

“Deb [LeWinter] has brilliantly worked in how to move forward,” Kaplan said. “You leave the play with a sense of hope that’s instilled.”

In one of the closing scenes of Wrongs of Passage, appropriately titled “A Moment of Justice,” Ayalew’s character testified in court against her father for raping her as a child while other cast members surrounded her protectively.

“Relatives, foster parents, group home staff, they knew wrong from right,” Tucker said.

“They violated moments both big and small in our journey to adulthood,” agreed Carroll.

“Now we are here, telling you our stories,” the whole cast said together. “Creating a new rite of passage.”

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE A culinary rockstar takes center stage

by Eric Ginsburg

G

nerally when a movie makes you want to stop watching and hurry out to do something else, it’s a bad sign.

But that isn’t so with City of Gold, a documentary about renowned food writer Jonathan Gold (which opens this week at A/perture and RED Cinemas) — the film incited a burning urge to run out the door, speed to one of the Triad’s immigrant-dominated commercial strips and eat everything in sight.

If you’ve ever enjoyed reading our food section, City of Gold is for you. Gold is one of the forebearers of the modern era of American food writing, careening through outposts of the Los Angeles area on a decades-long hunt for the best dishes around and the human stories behind the people making them.

Beginning at LA Weekly — an alternative paper like the one you hold, just a helluva lot bigger — Gold explored the fault lines between cultures in LA, exploring the mosaic of the city through the lens of food on someone else’s dime, as he puts it in the film.

My style of food writing owes a great deal to Gold, and a handful of trailblazers like him, although indirectly — I actually hadn’t heard of him until recently, ironically while out on assignment at a Thai restaurant in Winston-Salem with a friend who enlightened me about the documentary on the man. But Gold, an evocative writer who eschewed the white-linen establishments in favor of hot-dog vendors, Iranian restauJonathan Gold (right) won a Pullitzer for his food writing. rants and more recently, Korean food, inspired counttions under fake names and use constantly changing less other food writers to break the buttoned-up mold numbers as he pursues the everyman experience and explore the nooks and crannies of their cities. at a restaurant. I generally don’t tell venues that a A food writer for the people, rather than the elite. reporter is on the way for the same reasons, but I’m I don’t mean to compare myself too directly to Gold; too small-time to need to conceal my identity around listening to readings of his columns in the film made here. (Friends often expect that I’ll be recognized when me realize just how inadequate my writing is. Unlike I’m out working on a story, but nobody’s ever raised him, I’m usually only able to hit a place once before it an eyebrow until I pulled out a camera when the food appears here, and with no budget to speak of, I try and arrived.) rope friends into joining me so I can sample from their Oh, and dude has a Pullitzer for food writing, too. plates and we can compare informal notes.

But there are several crossGold says at one point in City overs between Gold’s style and of Gold that he usually visits a City of Gold opens at A/permy own, enough that while joint four or five times before ture Cinema (W-S) on Friday. watching the film I aspired to penning a review — the number grow into shoes like his with time The same night, it screens at is higher if the cuisine is more and enough that I know readers unfamiliar — though his record is RED Cinemas (GSO) as part like you will appreciate the film.

17. And he doesn’t usually write of the theater’s Supper Club Gold uses food as a form of social anything down while he’s there, Film Series. commentary, as a way to try and preferring to absorb it like a piece help people understand geograof spongy naan mopping up phy and place as well as culture curry. and history. His wife explains in City of Gold that his “I rarely take notes when I’m having a meal,” he says, punk phase probably had a profound influence on his adding, “I mean, you could take notes while you were methodology and style of food writing, compelling having sex too, but you’d sort of be missing out on him to push boundaries, reject the norm and embrace something.” dissonance. Listening to her, I realized that my punk It’s not just the investment of time and quality of days likely did the same for me. writing that differentiates us; Gold is enough of a F*** your snobby, overpriced restaurant, teenage punk culinary rock star now that he has to call in reserva-

COURTESY PHOTO

me would say. Where’s the best burrito around here?

But Gold does much more than pursue the most satisfying and memorable meals he can find; he illuminates huge swaths of a city that would likely go unnoticed beyond their own insular communities, sometimes to the extent of saving a restaurant from the brink of extinction as his readers flock to a place, drawn in by his descriptive reviews.

I’ve never really wanted to go to LA, but now I have a list of restaurants I want to hit. And you don’t have to be a food writer to be moved by this documentary — you just need to like to eat.

Pick of the Week Prep for Rio, pint in both hands Beer Olympics @ Mac’s Speed Shop (GSO), Thursday, 6 p.m.

Mother Earth Brewing hosts this delightful sounding evening of revelry, which includes “olympic” events cornhole, beer pong, jumbo Jenga, and jumbo connect 4. Raffle prizes and free swag provided by the benevolent Mother Earth. Look forward to a collaboration keg with Nantahala Brewing Co. featuring Downstairs Mix-Up (a nectarine IPA), which we hope to God is an Old Gregg reference, and enjoy $1 off all Mother Earth pints.

May the best beer lover win. Get directions and details from macspeedshop.com.

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Downtown’s forgotten saloon

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

You can still see “dry goods” written on the outside of the Cascade Saloon, but few people know about the building’s totally badass history.

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Thanks to Preservation Greensboro and its executive director Benjamin Briggs for help with the history of the Cascade Saloon.

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But in a strange way, I’m more nostalgic for the Cascade Saloon and the attendant businesses around it than any of these.

I’m likely romanticizing what the Cascade embodied and meant to its patrons (aligning it too much with the working-class romanticism of shows like “Peaky Blinders” or characters like Common’s Elam Ferguson in “Hell on Wheels” in my mind). Maybe it was always unremarkable, a sort of dive that nobody truly loved, but some tolerated as good enough on occasion. But it represents, at least in my head, an unparalleled outlet for culture, a refuge for the persecuted in the eye of a storm, a place for working people looking to unwind and connect, to revel in each other.

When the new tenant moves in, we’ll probably stop calling the structure the Cascade Saloon. And that means we lose something. Then again, the only way to meaningfully preserve any vestige of what the drink house used to be is to restore and reoccupy the building, one way or another, to maintain the shell.

Otherwise the bricks will crumble and the building will descend to dust just like more recent examples of black nightlife downtown, lost to the annals of history.

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The former Cascade Saloon has been vacant since before my parents started dating, sitting there and rotting on downtown’s doorstep since 1980. Now, the Cascade is destined to become the headquarters of a construction company.

That’s a lot less exciting than the Cascade’s former lives. Downtown residents are pining for a grocery store, one of the building’s longest uses. I wish it would continue its legacy as a home for those who are excluded from the rest of downtown, but when I picture a black-owned and -oriented bar, restaurant or pool hall in the prominent structure, I immediately imagine the campaign to close it as soon as the smallest scuffle spilled into the street.

Today there are a couple black-owned businesses downtown, and certainly black nightlife venues in the city as a whole. But as the city’s core changes, black-oriented spaces where people can relax and knock a few back are mostly missing from the map.

The closest we come is Churchill’s on Elm. I miss Minj Grille, and the more recent Harlem Express, two black restaurants that should’ve been able to stick around a few blocks north of the Cascade.

I only went to Lotus nightclub once, and while I dislike clubs, I kinda loved this one. I never went inside the N Club (unless you count my shifts as a valet out front), back before the biz purposefully started catering to white people, but it represented something, too.

ERIC GINSBURG

Culture

You don’t know what the Cascade Saloon is unless you follow Greensboro city politics or you’re a centenarian.

The empty, sort of disheveled building wedged between two train tracks in downtown hasn’t been

by Eric Ginsburg home to the Cascade Saloon for almost 100 years, but the building fronting South Elm Street still bears the name of the long-gone black business.

The city’s been trying to figure something out for the property for a long time now, and even after finally taking it over and then handing it off to Preservation Greensboro, progress on the building is moving about as painfully slowly as a call to your health insurance provider.

Earlier this month the Greensboro City Council approved a $300,000 urban-development investment grant for the Cascade, contingent on an investment of almost $3 million and six jobs created. But the most interesting aspects of the Cascade are still historical.

This might be the most badass building in Greensboro.

Constructed around 1893, it started out as a liquor store and a grocery, though this is back before supermarkets so picture something more akin to Oregon Trail than Harris Teeter. By 1902, a dry-goods store and a milliner (someone who makes or sells hats) moved in. Then about five years later, a black-owned “eating house” operated out of the space, and there may have been a roller rink on the second floor (records conflict a little on this point, just adding to the lore).

The Cascade played host to several other businesses, including a cigar company, and Wiley Weaver’s eatery turned into Cascade Billiard Parlor. It changed hands to a white owner but still served black clientele — remember, this is during the height of Jim Crow around 1920 — as the Cascade Pool Room, and was apparently the only black-oriented business on downtown’s main street at the time.

The building could accommodate five storefronts, and one of the business’ general manager’s in 1908 was named Zebulon. (Coming soon to a list of trending baby names near you!)

Besides, of course, the segregation aspect, a modern version of the Cascade Saloon would be a damn hipster haven. A liquor store, boutique cigar and hat companies, a grocery, a friggin’ roller rink and a black bar/ restaurant/pool hall? Sign me the F up.

For a while around the 1940s, a few Greeks ran a café there. Later the building housed furniture companies, salvage businesses and “rail-based businesses,” but in the late ’70s, a guy whose last name is literally “Strange” ran a newspaper out of it for a brief time.

So damn cool.

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE Phuzz Phest comes together

by Jordan Green

T

A rock festival can sometimes feel like a fractured collection of disparate experiences, especially one like Phuzz Phest with multiple venues and overlapping schedules — a brilliant performance by a performer here, a mind-melt between band and audience there, all in all a matter of subjectivity depending where you were and what you heard.

The streamlined Phuzz Phest 2016, with about 50 bands packed into two evenings, was something else — a come-together moment for a local scene with strong ties to the state’s flagship music scenes in the Triangle and Asheville, with tentacles reaching out to metropoles as distant as London and Los Angeles. This is a scene that still has a lot of room for growth, but one that is bound by a sense of possibility for artists and entrepreneurs who don’t mind scrapping who are united by a sense that there’s more to be gained from working together than competing head to head.

The question of how to build and sustain a music community was framed during a panel discussion at the Center for Design Innovation early on April 15, the first night of the festival. Corbie Hill, a freelance music writer, made one of the most revealing remarks by illuminating the contrast between Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Carrboro on one hand and Winston-Salem and Greensboro on the other. Hill said he moved to the Triangle anticipating that he would be exposed to a lot of music, adding, “Having moved there, there’s so much freaking music.

“This is gonna sound awful, but there’s too many venues,” he continued. “If I leave the house at night, there’s five great bands to see. I know that’s a great problem to have.”

Craig Reed, a promoter in Raleigh who also participated in the panel discussion, would remark later during a huddle outside Krankies Coffee in the middle of Lera Lynn’s set that he found it refreshing that every show wasn’t completely packed in Winston-Salem.

While Winston-Salem benefits from abundant creativity and a supportive infrastructure, Devon Mackay, director of major gifts at the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County, noted that anemic population growth is the main thing holding the Camel City back. The city doesn’t “have the population growth of Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham,” she said.

“We have to focus on building audience. It’s kind of a different problem.”

As the owner of the Garage, Tucker Tharpe operates the only stand-alone live-music venue in downtown Winston-Salem since the closing of Ziggy’s in February, notwithstanding “bars with stages,” as he put it. He said he’s happy to carry the banner alone for the time being, but would be just as glad to have company.

“If you want to start a venue, go for it,” he said.

“Winston-Salem is the kind of place that doesn’t tell you not to do it; they say, ‘You’ve got an idea? Okay, let’s give it a shot and see what happens.’”

The Oh Sees played to a full contingent at Bailey Park on Phuzz Phest’s opening night.

As a venue committed to original music that pays homage to the city’s industrial past, the Garage has flourished by joining forces with Phuzz Phest, which in turn has magnified the status of indie rock while expanding the tent to include hip-hop, garage-psych, country and folk. As proof of the venue and festival hitting their marks, the Brooklyn dream-psych-pop trio Sunflower Bean would fill the Garage to capacity for the final set on Friday, while festivalgoers lined Seventh Street in anticipation of Raleigh funkmaster Boulevards on the following evening.

If the unruly threads, themes, local variations and debates among the panelists early on Friday only seemed to raise more questions about what a music community is, how it can be built, what it should be striving for and what kind of support it needs, the music provided a resounding answer.

Drag Sounds, a partnership between Mike Wallace and Trevor Reece with Greensboro roots and a new base of operations in Baltimore, proved to be the perfect signal for the starting slot at Bailey Park. Although the lawn was only partially filled, the band’s tuneful, Stonesy romp provided the aural equivalent of a rock-

RYAN SNYDER

and-roll picnic on a perfect spring evening. In contrast to the indie-rock norm of understatement to the point of non-communication, Wallace offered a refreshingly inspirational message.

“It’s good to come together for a summit and for art,” he said. “It’s a lot of hard work. The music scene is coming up. We’re gonna win.”

Later, before the band closed out their set, Wallace

Pick of the Week A stamp of Avettproval Third Thursdays @ Centennial Station Arts Center (HP), 7 p.m.

Singer-songwriter David Childers from Mount Holly, also frontman of the Overmountain Men, is considered to be “the most prolific North Carolina songwriter alive” by Bob Crawford of the Avett Brothers, which is credibility enough to turn out in Hype Point this Thursday to hear him lay it down.

Pub mix snack fare is promised. For more information, contact Clint Bowman at 336-889-2787 ext. 26 or programs@highpointarts.org.

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keyboards, twisting knobs and dancing, Quilla, aka Anna Luisa Daigneault, took the audience on a tour of sadness, determination, romantic devotion and defiance, the latter through “The House That We Built,” to which she dedicated “to our terrible governor who needs to repeal HB2.”

It would be difficult to imagine a more severe turn from the shamanic, future-forward sound of Quilla than the whiskey-and-regret cast of Chapel Hillian Sarah Shook’s hard-edged honky tonk. John Howie Jr., a honky-tonk singer and songwriter who fronts Rosewood Bluff, serves as drummer in Shook’s band the Disarmers. His hard beat, more at home in the New York Dolls than the Buckaroos, throttled the music up to a level of brutal honesty beyond anything in the country canon short of GG Allin or maybe Shooter Jennings.

Two songs from Shook’s set at Krankies Coffee — “F*** Up” (“I can’t cry myself to sleep, so I drink myself to death/ I’ve got cocaine in my bloodstream and whiskey on my breath”) and “Nothin’ Feels Right But Doing Wrong” (“One more dance with the devil, one more shot of whiskey/ One more heapin’ dose of trouble, one more sad, sad song”)

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channeled a late-’60s style holy-roller-cum-orgasmic, political agit-prop rhetorical style.

“We need Phuzz Phest,” he said.

“Let’s get together. We’re gonna do it now. I’m talking about coming on!”

Later, as dusk gave way to darkness during the Los Angeles-based band Thee Oh Sees’ set at Bailey Park, jetlagged singer John Dwyer displayed a remarkable grasp of local scene politics and a fine sense of humor when he said, “I was going to talk a lot of s*** about Greensboro, but I really think it’s time to unite.”

With two drummers powering the band with taiko-like intensity and a bass player laying down a relentless groove, Thee Oh Sees were not only sonically adventurous, but also aggressive and psychically warped. Dwyer’s vocals vacillated between demonic clown barking and gentle balladeering. His guitar playing swung from the hard, acid-tinged sound of Big Brother & the Holding Company to the sonic reduction of the Dead Boys, and the thronging crowd went nuts, with the occasional mosh pit and audience members near the front laying hands on monitors for salvation.

It was one of those rare moments that rock fans wait for — when people who scarcely know each other or have only recently met spot each other in the crowd and share a huge smile because they’re experiencing something magical together.

You could string together one epiphany after another at this year’s Phuzz Phest, and any sequence would likely be just as good as the next. As an example, I missed Cashavelly Morrison, Skylar Gudasz, Neon Indian, Sunflower Bean, the Tills, White Denim, Scrub Pine, Yuck and Boulevards. They’re acts that I found intriguing, already love or would later receive rave reviews from other Phuzzers, but I missed them because I’d already seen them and wanted to expose myself to something new, or their slot simply conflicted with someone else who was higher on my list.

Electronic dance artist Quilla cultivated a different kind of communal experience from Thee Oh Sees during her 8:15 p.m. set at the Millennium Center — affirmative and uplifting. The Greensboro artist, a native of Montreal from French Canadian and Peruvian parentage, possesses a soaring and anthemic voice that gives her music an accessibility eluding much of the EDM genre.

Equally immersed in singing, playing

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April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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provides a pretty sure reflection of the singer’s outlook. Add the stinging leads of Eric Peterson’s guitar playing and the effect is something like Crazy Horse backing Hank Williams Sr. Shook announced on her website that she was “super stoked” to have a slot opening for Lera Lynn, a polished singer-songwriter who’s worked with producer T Bone Burnett on music for the TV series “True Detective” and who is based in Nashville, where Shook’s music would be anathema. With an ace band dressed in matching black, it would be easy to dismiss Lynn as an outlier for a festival as scrappy as Phuzz, but she turned out to be surprisingly disarming, cutting the trance-like effect of her atmospheric vocals with joking banter between songs about topics like her disdain for the Bulldogs at the University of Georgia, related to her upbringing in Athens. Her set became increasingly rocking and esoteric, concluding with a rousing finale.

On Saturday, High Point rapper Tange Lomax had the challenge of opening a run at the Garage. Using a cell phone to cue up tracks on a laptop, she backed herself up as her own DJ, running through a series of songs for a handful of people who mercifully multiplied into dozens of energized listeners by the time she concluded around 8:30 p.m.

She threw caution to the wind by performing a capella for the first time in her career — a risky move that won over the initially tentative audience. “Yours,” a reflection on romantic anxiety showed off her skills to the best effect, pairing her gutsy vocal delivery with warm, organic sounding beats. The inspirational message of Lomax’s closer, “Anthems Only,” wove seamlessly into the spirit of the festival.

“Whatever you do in life, make sure you make an anthem of it,” Lomax told the audience. “Go hard.”

Lomax delivered a fitting prologue for Shirlette Ammons, who ruled the second slot at the Millennium Center. The genre-leveling Durham hip-hop artist’s recent solo album Language Barrier promised a cerebral and interesting experience, but she rocked it from start to finish. With the backing of a traditional rock combo, Ammons’ lyrics landed body blows over a swirling maelstrom that placed an unstoppable drumbeat front and center, with Tom Morello-like squibs of guitar accenting the groove. Ammons’ presence and stance — pro-queer, feminist and unabashedly black — broadened the space of community that Phuzz Phest implicitly promised.

“Any sex-positive people in the house?” she asked.

“Two? I guess it’s still early. Any f***able feminists?”

Ammons ended her set with another cut off the same album.

“This is called “Dandelion (Eatin Out),” she said.

“It’s off my first album, Twilight for Gladys Bentley. She was a 1920s blues singer who was called a ‘bulldagger,’ which is what I am today. We’re cool, right? It’s called ‘Eatin Out.’ I know what you think it is. It’s about eating a meal in a place that is not your home.”

The maturation of the Winston-Salem creative community was on full display with Must Be The Holy Ghost, who followed Ammons at the Millennium Center.

Helmed by guitarist and singer Jared Draughon,

Greensboro’s Quilla demonstrated melodic electronica at the MIllennium Center.

MBTHG has attracted a growing legion of devoted followers in Winston-Salem. The music is built around a drum track and Draughon’s guitar loops, along with his vocals ranging from an ethereal falsetto to a Bono-like earnestness. A liquid psychedelic lightshow by Evan Hawkins, now based in Los Angeles, has always been integral to the project. What made this set special was the participation of the Helen Simoneau Danse company, adding a third creative component. The dancers uncannily reflected Draughon and Hawkins’ contributions, rotating in a circular formation that imitated the radiant pattern of the lightshow, and then seeming to dissolve into the floor during “Melt Down,” a song with a corrosive, oppressive feel like nicotine addiction.

New York City’s Chairlift was one of the festival’s most obvious concessions to popular tastes and effort to broaden the audience. The crowd composition became noticeably younger and didn’t seem to mind a wait that exceeded changeovers for acts with smaller profiles. Patrick Wimberly’s flawless percussion work set a sinuous groove that provided a platform for Carolina Polachek’s sleek, R&B-inflected vocals, reminiscent of Sade.

While Chairlift’s streamlined pop and star power entertained the masses at the Millennium Center, Zack Mexico was melting a capacity crowd two blocks to the north at the Garage down into a collective out-of-body experience. One-upping Thee Oh Sees, Zack Mexico

RYAN SNYDER

played with three drummers, including Josh Martier, also a member of the Tills. Repping coastal North Carolina with a home base in Kill Devil Hills, the band built congenitally weird guitar reverberations over trance-inducing syncopated percussion.

“Holy s***, that was amazing!” one audience member enthused.

As fans lined Seventh Street for Boulevards’ headline set at the Garage, Durham power-pop songwriter Brett Harris set up his gear across the street at Test Pattern (formerly Luna Lounge & Tiki Bar/ Lucky Strike Vintage Boutique/ Elliott’s Revue). The intimate bar, which through its various incarnations has always felt like a Japanese tea garden through its ability to somehow project the illusion of space, seemed an appropriate setting to end the festival. Swooning pop music — Harris has performed as a touring member of the legendary band Big Star and the dBs — with literary references to Flannery O’Connor that might seem an odd choice for a debauched midnight finale. But Harris’ smart lyricism, hooky melodies and satisfyingly sexy grooves had a way of drawing listeners into orbit until they were dancing in the front of the small stage, almost nose to nose with the singer.

“This is my first Phuzz Phest,” Harris said. “I picked up a fuzz pedal in honor of it. It’s never too late to trying something new and step on the wrong pedal.”

Earth Daily: 5 Tips for Green Living

by Alex Klein

Spring weather has finally arrived just in time for the 46th annual Earth Day celebration and all of the outdoor festivities that go along with it (Piedmont Environmental Alliance Earth Day Fair on April 23!). And while fairs and rallies are a great way to educate the general populace about climate change, debate the benefits of slow food vs. large-scale agriculture and hoard free samples of sustainably produced chocolate, the monumental task of “going green” often feels beyond an average person’s reach and budget.

Fortunately, there is much to be done in the microcosm of the home with minimal investment that can positively impact the environment at large. Below are 10 take-and-bake ideas for daily green living. Samples not included.

L

1. Precycle Never heard of it? The idea is simply to buy products with less packaging so there will be less to recycle after you take them home. For instance, buying fresh food from farmers markets or co-ops allows you to skip the packaging associated with grocery-store buys. It’s also an investment in your longevity since local food is often fresher and chock-full of vitamins and minerals essential for optimal health. Stuck in a store? Buying larger containers of your favorite packaged goods and portioning them out into reusable containers can help cut waste from individually wrapped products. String cheese isn’t really food anyway. Instead, buy a block of the good stuff and cut slices for an on-the-go dairy fix.

2. Ban bottles and cans. Along the same lines as precycling, banning bottled water and beverage cans will definitely up your eco-ante. A plastic water bottle takes between 400-1,000 years to decompose. Cans average 350. Yes, they can be recycled, but avoid bringing them home to begin with and do your budget and the environment a solid. Grab a reusable water bottle and if you’re a soda drinker, maybe it’s time to quit. (That stuff is recycling your insides!) But, if you can’t imagine happiness without a Sprite, or you’ve placed a photo of Dr. Pepper next to your kids on the mantle, invest in a SodaStream and reuse your bottles. Beer cans follow suit.

Simply purchase a growler and refill as needed.

3. Buy used, and borrow often. There is plenty of stuff floating around out there for cheap and sometimes free.

Facebook has tons of “for-sale” and “friends-swapping-stuff”

pages, yard-sales aplenty, books and DVDs can be rented at your local library, consignment furniture is the new black and there are endless opportunities to find useful and surprising things on Craigslist’s “free-stuff” listings. Tonight’s search yielded two pianos, several couches, a 1986 Winner motorboat and even a “Free Possum,” with a fairly terrifying photo.

I’ve included the link just in case you think I’m making this up. winstonsalem.craigslist.org/grd/5542852407.html.

4. Expend less energy to use less energy. Every one knows that you are supposed to power-down and unplug appliances when they aren’t in use. But how many people actually do it? It’s annoying, inconvenient, and easily forgettable. Enter the Smart Strip LCG-3M energy-saving surge protector with auto-switching technology. It senses when things aren’t being used and turns off the power source. And compared to other surge-protectors it uses very little energy itself. Helping lazy people be lazier, for less.

5. Make your own cleaning products. DIY cleaning products are much less expensive than commercial ones, and making them follows the precycling rule because of the ability to reuse cleaning bottles again and again.

As an added bonus, the ingredients are far less toxic than most commercial cleaners, for less pollution inside your home and out.

For green-cleaning tips, tricks and recipes, visit wellnessmama.com.

As an alternate to homemade, try Charlie’s Soap, a locally owned and operated company. They make eco-friendly cleaning concentrates that are easy to use and effective.

Two tablespoons of their indoor/ outdoor surface cleaner diluted in a 32-ounce spray bottle of water will clean most things without fail for about 13 cents a bottle. Done, and done green.

April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

26

FUN & GAMES

A

What fresh hell is this?

young dude in Oakleys, lens approximately the size of a water cooler stopped a royal-purple polo into the press box. I caught up with him at the door, and black pants — the learning his name: Andrew Dye. Winston-Salem Dash staff “The [Winston-Salem Journal] would kill me if I took uniform — strolled up to me pics for you,” he apologized. as I waited in BB&T Ballpark’s But he gave me a name: Jody, described as “a retiree will-call line for the Dash’s wandering around looking like Santa Claus.” home opener.

I returned to the press box, tracing the first-base line

by Anthony Harrison “Can you help me out?” he for Kris Kringle. asked.

With two outs in the top of the fourth, Sox third Momentary confusion struck me, but I said, “Whatbaseman Jordan Betts and catcher Bryan Hudson batcha need?” ted in back-to-back runs. Not to be outdone, Dash des“Would you participate in the ’70s Dance-Off?” he ignated hitter Marcus Davis slammed a soaring double asked. “The shades, the hair, the jacket — man, you just — painfully close to jumping the right-center fence — got the look.” allowing first baseman Nick Basto to cross home.

Let’s pause.

I never spotted Jody.

You probably don’t know me, so you don’t know how After Dash third baseman Gerson Montilla’s RBI sinI look and dress. My hair is big — curly, thick, unruly. gle tied it 2-2 in the bottom of the fifth, Salem tore the I rock large shades almost constantly. game open in the top of the sixth, going I don blazers nearly as often in springon a four-run streak. Winston-Salem time. You could say my jeans fit well. I’m had no answer, ending the inning 6-2.

‘Would you partica fashion anachronism.

Embarrassment time. ipate in the ’70s Another, ironic thing: I hate inter-inWhen I arrived at the kiosk, a tiny Dance-Off? The ning activities. Aside from singing “Take brunette named Brooke was talking to shades, the hair, the Me Out to the Ball Game” during the my competitor, Kody. I sized him up — seventh-inning stretch, I think they’re below-average height, buzzed blond jacket — man, you sophomoric. Call me a curmudgeon. hair, a cross hanging from his neck. just got the look.’

So when this guy ran up to me unso“Aw, you can’t pick up chicks like this,” licited, asking me to partake in somehe said as Brooke handed him a poofy thing I roundly disdain, what else could black wig and purple cape.

I say?

I was confident in my ability to destroy him.

“Sure!” I replied.

After the seventh-inning stretch, Brooke and I He took my name, handed me a slip of paper stating descended to the home dugout. Davis warmed up his I should report to the customer service kiosk at Section swing nearby, massive, slow but powerful.

109 following the sixth and scurried away.

“We need a ’70s nickname for you,” Brooke chirped.

I looked at the little slip and muttered, “Oh, Jesus “Kinky Peacock,” I said.

Christ...”

“I don’t think we can do that.”

A woman behind me laughed, “What have you got “Then Wayno.” yourself into?”

After the eighth ended, I strolled to the first-base I had no idea, but the game soon started. coach’s box. The announcer called out “K-Dizzle Kody” Last year, I covered two Dash games. They flaunted — even my nickname kicked his ass — and “Big Waya roster loaded with five top White Sox prospects. But no.” Chic’s disco classic “Le Freak” burst from the PA great players don’t stick around in the low minors. system.

I watched a very different team on April 14, literally and figuratively.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’LL FIND...

It’s early yet in the season, but Winston-Salem was off to a rough start, losing four of their first seven games.

Perhaps this home stretch against the Salem Red Sox, a Boston farm team from Virginia, could pad their record.

The game started slow with three scoreless innings. I had plenty of time to formulate my approach to the dance-off.

Then it hit me: If my editors don’t get pictures of my public humiliation, they’ll never let me hear the end.

I began searching for photographers.

INCENSE • CANDLES • JEWELRY & MORE A guy carrying a camera with a zoom 336-373-0733 • 414 STATE ST. • GREENSBORO

So I freaked out.

I dramatically doffed the superfluous wig as I performed a gross approximation of the Hustle. I did the Travolta. I twisted down to the turf. I even mimed Nile Rodgers’ choppy, funky guitar, duck-walking towards the dugout. As the song faded out, I spun quickly, striking my pose, a disco finger jabbing the air.

The judging applause sounded equal. But Kody was announced the victor.

I stormed back to the grandstand, incredulous.

“Man, you got robbed, man!” a well-dressed guy told me.

“Right?” I panted. “What’d the other guy do?”

“He tried to do a split — damn-near killed himself.”

Insult to injury: I never received photos.

The Dash lost, too. Despite scoring three runs in the bottom of the eighth and silencing Salem, Sox lefty reliever Jake Drehoff smoked Winston-Salem in 17 pitches — 12 strikes — slamming the door shut on the rally, 6-5.

You can’t win ’em all, but the Dash didn’t win any of the series’ four games. They were close contests, though.

As we walked up the aisle, Brooke said, “Hey, you did great!”

“I didn’t win, though,” I replied.

“Well, you have the memory!” she peeped. “That’s all that matters, right?”

Pick of the Week Bring May flowers GRAWL Brawl I: April Showers @ Geeksboro Coffeehouse & Cinema (GSO), Saturday, 7 p.m.

Greensboro Arm Wrestling League launches its inaugural season with a charity match. Eight women compete physically for the championship as well as Audience Favorite and Best-Dressed. Proceeds benefit Interactive Resource Center’s shower and locker-room expansions. Visit geeksboro.com to buy tickets or greensboroarmwrestling.org for more info.

Eclectic

by Nature

ary’s Gourmet Diner

(336) 723-7239

breakfastofcourse.com

‘Err Guitar’ definitely not a solid instrument.

by Matt Jones Across

Down

Opinion Cover Story Culture

1 Like some mistakes 2 In the distance 3 Like some small biological projects?

4 Chum 5 Late hour, for some 6 “Caprica” star Morales 7 Light bulb unit 8 Reverb (and a cliche when a character thinks it’s someone else) 9 Ultra-wide shoe size 10 He was associated with the Jets 11 “Mr. Belvedere” actress Graff 12 Vegetable cutter 13 Fermented rice drinks 19 Recover from a setback 21 Final Jeopardy! amount 25 Not forthcoming 26 Eleventh U.S. president

27 “Shoot!”

28 It’s sold in bars and tubs 29 No later than 30 Pint-sized 31 Events at meets 34 Sweetener under recent scrutiny 35 Install in a gallery, maybe 36 Neruda works 38 Seasonal addition?

39 It usually gets rolled 41 Schroeder’s prop 42 ___-country (2010s music genre) 43 Comparatively agile 44 Opportune 45 Emmy-winning title role for Sally Field 46 All’s opposite 47 Tony-winning actress McDonald 50 Graceful swimmer 51 Xbox series since 2001 52 “Was ___ inside job?”

54 Maine’s state tree 55 Paper factory side effect 57 Ft. Lauderdale locale 58 Aries’ animal

News

49 Not mine, in bucolic comic strips 50 Carpenter’s leveler 53 Autocorrect target 56 Poopo or Titicaca, e.g.

59 Empty (of) 60 About, formally 61 “I can’t hear you!”

62 Four-color card game 63 King with three daughters 64 John Doe, e.g.

65 Part of rpm

Up Front

1 Hoover, e.g.

4 He came back for a “Big Holiday” in 2016 10 Participates in an auction 14 Roswell craft 15 ___-Lorraine (area in northeast France) 16 “A Streetcar Named Desire” director Kazan 17 ___ de mer 18 Veteran Marine, in slang 20 Cold one 22 Corleone patriarch 23 A year in Paris 24 Lawsuit 26 Pair with a lot of pull?

27 Spherical treat that comes from a toroid 32 Bowler’s place 33 Hockey Hall of Famer Cam 34 Kal Penn’s costar John 37 Hitchcock title word 38 ___ au poivre 39 “The Grapes of Wrath” family name 40 Neither’s partner 41 Graphics program included with Windows 1.0 42 Carried, as by the wind 43 Sprays some sticky stuff as a prank 45 Answer sharply 48 Plasma particles

triad-city-beat.com

GAMES

Fun & Games

Answers from previous publication.

Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

©2016 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com)

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28 All She Wrote

Shot in the Triad Games

Fun & Games

Culture

Cover Story

Opinion

News

Up Front

April 20 — 26, 2016

SHOT IN THE TRIAD

Yanceyville Street, Greensboro

Parking included.

PHOTO BY CAROLYN DE BERRY

KARMA

Salon & Gallery 336-682-2671

Up Front

206 W. 6th Street Winston-Salem, NC 27101

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Triad Businesses Against HB2 - Standing Together for Justice

News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

Contact Dick Gray at dick@triad-city-beat.com if you would like to participate with your company logo in the next two issues.

29

April 20 — 26, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

Head for the hills

(with apologies to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’)

J

ules: Are you going to Asheville this weekend?

Me: Yes. I feel the need to cleanse myself of Republican rhetoric.

Jules: So you are seeking higher ground.

by Nicole Crews Me: Less Art Pope pollen up in them thar hills.

Jules: I wonder if anyone has ever tried to legislate insect and plant sexuality.

Me: I mean there are carpenter bees — surely there is a cop bee, a cowboy bee, a biker bee and an indian bee out there.

Jules: That’s why it’s fun to stay at the YMCA. Me: Sadly North Carolina is looking a lot more hillbilly than Village People-y to the world right now. Hey — there’s gotta be a song there.

The Ballad of Pat McCrory Come listen to my story about a man named Pat A stooge of Art Pope, who keeps his coffers fat And then one day he opened the door to the loo By signing legislation called HB2.

And up through the ground came an angry brood — Of Civil Rights defenders — not just LGBTQ. (It was the icing on the cake after years of foolish moves.

Education has suffered, the film industry has tanked and we’ve lost teachers throughout his rule.)

Well the first thing you know, ol’ Pat looks like a square.

The people of the state said, “Pat move away from there!”

Lucrative industries and artists have boycotted us and thoroughly agree Said the antebellum South is the place you ought to

be.

So he loaded up his time machine and went to 1860.

Plantations! Slave labor! White males rule!

Well now it’s time to say goodbye to Pat and all his kin.

We wish we could say thank you for kindly dropping in But you’ve done too much damage to our state and you can’t win.

You’re all invited in November to your voting locality to serve a heaping helpin’ of reality.

Y’all take the state back now, ya heah?

Recycle this paper.

All She Wrote

Shot in the Triad

Games

Fun & Games

Culture

ALL SHE WROTE

30

Gate City Vineyard is a modern, Christian church that exists to serve the community around us. Our desire is to help people of all ages and backgrounds grow in their understanding of God. At the Vineyard you can come as you are and be yourself.

Whatever your thoughts about church, whatever your beliefs about God … you are welcome here.

gatecityvineyard.com

336.323.1288 204 S. Westgate Dr., Greensboro

Three friends passionate about exceptional food and entertainment.

Mary Lacklen • Allen Broach • Bob Weston

(336)210–5094

abroach@earthlink.net

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DMITRY SITKOVETSKY MUSIC DIRECTOR

s t o o b d n a s n a e Wear your j e h t h t i w k c o r d n a o t y n o h p m y S o r o Greensb

c i s u M The of the

s e l g Ea ires yrn Rose, David Blam th Ka n, to ot Sh el p VOCALS: Micha ennan, David Dunlo GUITAR: Peter Br

Saturday, April ��, ����

8:00 pm, Westover Church, Greensboro Nate Beversluis, Conductor

Don’t miss classic megahits, including “Hotel California,” “Desperado,” “Take It Easy,” and much more from this amazing group!

CONCERT SPONSORS

Blue Bell Foundation

TICKETS: $34, $40, $46; Students $12 336.335.5456 x224 | ticketmaster.com | Coliseum Box Office | greensborosymphony.org SEASON SPONSORS

POPS MEDIA SPONSOR

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Illustration by Jorge Maturino