10.05 Indy Week

Durham

The Gun Slinger and the Judge

U.S. Senate candidates Ted Budd and Cheri Beasley are polling neck and neck, but as politicians and personalities, they’re a study in opposites. by Lena Geller, p. 8

Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill

NEWS

4 U.S. Senate candidate Ted Budd's family business has a long track record of allegedly violating workers' rights. BY JANE PORTER

6 Abortion clinic escorts say protesters at Raleigh clinics are increasingly emboldened to harass patients seeking care. The city says it's taking steps to address the issue.

BY JASMINE GALLUP

8 In North Carolina's U.S. Senate race, candidates Cheri Beasley and Ted Budd are a study in opposites. BY LENA GELLER

ARTS & CULTURE

12 With his Bull City Griot project, Paul Scott is making sure every corner of Durham has free books. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

14 Just as local performing arts companies struggle to find stages, area venues step up to the bat with new spaces.

BY BYRON WOODS

16 A deep dive on Carrboro's Orange County Social Club, on the occasion of its twenty-first birthday. BY BRIAN HOWE

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Last week, Jasmine Gallup wrote about the exodus of Black faculty members and other staff members of color from NC State University. They feel underpaid, overworked, and undervalued, Gallup reported.

Many, many faculty increasingly feel undervalued, but it's worse among non-white populations, sadly,” writes Facebook commenter JEFFREY DAVID ZACKO-SMITH. “The bloated bureaucracies of many colleges and universities have flipped the hierarchy -- administrators come first (and not secretaries and folks like that, but deans and the 4 layers of “Assistant VP”and “Associate VP” that often exist), students come second, and faculty third, as reflected by pay and increasingly adjunct (gig worker) status. It should be students, faculty and *THEN*

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administrators. Not to mention all the schools here seem to purge primarily from each other (Duke, UNC and NC State), decreasing diversity of background and ideas too, throwing in someone from Elon on occasion because it's “elite”.

Also, one correction: in our op-ed last week from Durham Farmers Market manager Kaitlyn Breedlove, we erroneously reported that the Double Bucks program is administered by the Durham Food Bank. It is in fact administered by the Durham Farmers Market.

Troupe Vertigo performs at Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, October 7 and Saturday, October 8. (See calendar, page 20.)

PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE ENERGY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

Raleigh 15 MINUTES

Eileen Butler

President of the North American Guild of Change Ringers whose members meet this week at Christ Church Raleigh.

BY CHAD KNUTH backtalk@indyweek.com

Change ringing is a style of tower bell ringing that started in England around the end of the 16th century, but the bell that you ring has been around for millennia, right?

Right, and from what I always understood, bells were rung for certain purposes. Either for church service, or to announce the time, or for deaths—nine rings for a man, six for a woman, three for a child. You can look to Fabian Stedman [the “father of change ringing,” who published the first book on change ringing, Tintinnalogia, in 1668. The “Stedman method” is still rung by ringers today].

Do you remember where/when it was that you first rang?

St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Philadelphia, which at the time was the only ringable tower in Philadelphia. My husband, Bruce, was a bell ringer—he was British. He learned back in England, in his town, when he was teenager. The bells in Philadelphia were put in around 1980. Bruce and I met in 1982, and just before we got married in 1984, I got to see him ring in England, and that’s how I was introduced. I started ringing back in Philadelphia shortly after, following a grant I had won on campanology [the scientific and musical study of bells].

How often do you get to ring today?

Here in Philadelphia I only get to ring about twice a week. We just don’t have the manpower. Bruce and I have rung in every tower in North

America. I myself have rung in over 3,500 towers—every tower in the United Kingdom, towers in Africa, all over. At some points during tours—Bruce and I used to run tours in the UK—we would ring in eight towers in one day. Here in North America you’d be lucky to be able to ring at four to five.

How many North American Guild of Change Ringers members are there and how many do you expect to join at the meeting this week?

There’s roughly 450 of us. A lot of members see ringing as a service to their church. The last in-person meeting was 2019 up in Boston. Boston has a very big base of ringers. Over 100 people attended that year. This year it’s our 50th anniversary of the North American Guild, but with COVID still lingering we’re expecting a smaller turnout of about 80 people, including a few founding members.

What would you say members of the guild are most looking forward to at next week’s meeting here in Raleigh?

That is a difficult question! There are as many answers as there are attendees. Some are looking forward to the ringing course, others the ringing peals, some are eager to ring things they can’t ring at their own towers. For myself, and probably quite a few others, just being in person again after two years and catching up with many ringing friends. W

N E W S North Carolina

Workers Wronged

U.S. Senate candidate Ted Budd’s family business has a track record of employee lawsuits and workplace violations.

BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com

Congressman Ted Budd is fond of touting his hard work for family farms and businesses on the campaign trail.

Last year, The Washington Post reported on allega tions that the Budds, including Ted, ripped off Ameri can farmers by improperly transferring millions of dol lars in assets to themselves just before an agriculture business, of which Budd patriarch Richard Budd was CEO, went bankrupt.

Now, newly surfaced court documents reviewed by the INDY show that the Budds’ family janitorial business has a track record of allegedly treating its workers as poorly as the farmers who say they lost their shirts.

As the Budd Group grew into a multistate conglomerate with thousands of employees, currently worth an estimat ed $100 million, employees at the company dating back more than 20 years complained of discriminatory work ing conditions and workplace violations including wrong ful termination, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and safety breaches.

Many of these allegations overlap with the U.S. Senate candidate’s tenure at the Budd Group as an executive and owner, including a total of 13 Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations between 1998 and 2004 that racked up thousands of dollars in fines.

Budd’s campaign did not respond to the INDY’s requests for an interview.

“I’m concerned any time I see that there’s a compa ny that has multiple lawsuits from employees claiming unsafe working conditions, harassment, discrimination, wage theft, misclassfication,” says MaryBe McMillan, the

president of the North Carolina branch of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of workers unions in the nation. “It basically covers the whole gamut of things you don’t want to see happen to workers.”

The Budd Group, according to its website, had its ori gins in 1963 when Budd’s father Richard bought “a strug gling janitorial supply company” in Winston-Salem. The company expanded to offering janitorial, maintenance, and landscaping services and began operating in new markets with a presence today in eight states across the Southeast, including South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

With a bachelor’s degree from Appalachian State and a master of theology from the Dallas Theological Seminary, Ted Budd joined the Budd Group in 1998, according to his LinkedIn page, or in 1999 as The Washington Post report ed, as “the director of employee and community relations.”

In 2000, Budd became regional vice president of the com pany and ran its operations in Charlotte. The next year, Budd and his brother, Joe Budd, purchased the business from their father, and Joe is currently the company’s CEO.

Ted Budd’s LinkedIn account states that, for seven years since he started at the company, he worked to “recruit talent” in Charlotte and lead a team in Florida that reduced “worker comp claims from over $500k to less than $10k in one year.”

In 1998, Budd’s first year with the company per Linke dIn, a former employee, Kevin Tong, who had been hired in June of the same year, alleged he was fired after he com plained of repeated incidents of racism by his supervisor.

Court documents state the Budd Group hired Tong as

a lieutenant security officer at what was then known as the Pinellas Square Mall in Pinellas Park, Florida. Tong, of Vietnamese origin, alleged in a lawsuit against the company that he endured “repeated and constant racial and national-origin based slurs” from his supervisor and branch manager, including the manager referring to Tong repeatedly as “a stupid Charlie” and making references to the Vietnam War using phrases such as “fire in the hole.”

In August of that year, Tong was fired.

Tong’s complaint initially alleged wrongful termina tion and the creation of a hostile work environment and sought $15,000 in damages. Later, after the Budd Group answered the suit and acknowledged Tong’s and his supervisor’s employment with the company but denied all of Tong’s complaints, Tong added a third count to his complaint that alleged racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, Tong was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer that caused delays in the filings while Tong sought treatment.

According to court documents, the Budd Group’s legal team moved to have the civil rights section of the lawsuit dismissed due to the delays while Tong received cancer treatment. The company was overruled. Ultimately, the case was settled in mediation in 2000; the details of the settlement are unknown. Tong died in 2001.

A decade later in 2011, employee Perry Davis, who worked as a police officer before joining the Budd Group’s Charlotte office as an operations manager, sued the com pany for wrongful termination. In court documents, Davis alleged he was praised “for doing an excellent job” and

PHOTO BY SORA SHIMAZAKI VIA PEXELS

“meeting all of the company’s expecta tions.” One morning, Davis woke up with an uncontrollably shaking right hand; at the same time, he was also dealing with short-term memory loss.

“Company management made jokes regarding his memory, sometimes stating to other employees ‘you’re playing Perry now you can’t remember,’” court docu ments state.

Davis reported the shaking to the com pany and took leave to undergo medical testing, suspecting it might be Parkinson’s disease. Davis continued to work and was reassured by company officials “not to worry about his job.”

A few weeks later, Davis received a phone call to tell him he was fired because the company “could not accommodate his disability,” citing his inability to do client and site visits. Davis stated he never told the company he was unable to meet cli ents or conduct site visits. Davis was later diagnosed with a permanent neurological condition. He sued the Budd Group under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the complaint was settled out of court.

It’s not clear when Ted Budd divest ed of his ownership in the Budd Group. He downplayed his involvement with the company when it was reported that, in 2020, the Budd Group received a $10 million Paycheck Protection Program loan, the maximum available. According to Budd’s LinkedIn, he was studying for an MBA at Wake Forest University in 2007 and 2008. He no longer listed himself as an owner of the company in 2015, before his initial run for Congress.

But the Budd Group’s mistreatment of workers continued during Ted Budd’s ten ure at the company and after he left.

In 2008, Jeremy Teabout, a former site supervisor who worked for the Budd Group in Hillsborough County, Florida, for four years, sued the company for non-payment of wages after working in excess of 40 hours per week “throughout his respective employment.” The Budd Group eventually settled with Teabout for $8,750.

In 2013, Julia Paige McEntire filed a federal lawsuit against the Budd Group for employment discrimination on the basis of sex under the Equal Employment Opportunity Act after she allegedly was sexually harassed by five of her male col leagues, including by a district manager. After McEntire reported the harassment, she stated, she was removed from the work schedule and ultimately fired. The Budd Group, in response, said it wasn’t aware of McEntire’s complaints, denied she faced a hostile work environment, and said she didn’t complain of harassment to

the right person. A court dismissed McEn tire’s complaint.

In a 2016 case similar to Perry Davis’s, Tammy Gates-Gean, who went on medical leave in 2014 for chronic conditions, sued the Budd Group for violating the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act for firing her after she was unable to return to work.

A supervisor had refused to give her FMLA paperwork, and Gates-Gean stated she was told her job was secure. Court documents suggest Gates-Gean reached a settlement with the Budd Group in mediation.

In 2017, Donald Jones, a landscaper with the Budd Group from 2011 to 2016, sued the company under the Civil Rights Act after he was allegedly subjected to “a racially hostile work environment” as well as “harassment based on his religion” from the supervisors of his landscaping crew.

One of the supervisors “repeatedly used the ‘N’ word to African American employ ees; said that black people were no good; that black people should go back to Africa; and that black people were stupid mother _ _ _ _ _ _ _,” court documents state. “[The supervisor] often referred to African Amer ican employees as monkeys and animals.”

The supervisors would point to ani mals—dogs or horses—as the crews were riding to work, the court documents con tinue, and compare them to the Black crew members. They chased crew mem bers with landscaping tools, according to the documents, and belittled them for believing in Jesus Christ. The crew was told if they didn’t like the jokes and harassment, they could quit.

The Budd Group acknowledged the rac ism from one of the supervisors, including use of the N-word, and that a supervisor chased a Black worker with a shovel. The company settled with Jones in mediation for an undisclosed amount.

McMillan, the AFL-CIO president, notes that Budd doesn’t have a strong record of supporting workers in Congress; he voted against bills that would specifically help working people, including the 2020 stim ulus bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Budd has said he doesn’t support raising the minimum wage.

But, McMillan says, with Budd work ing in management at the Budd Group, he “clearly should have been aware of the issues and should have rectified the issues before this [all] happened.

“This takes it to a whole new level to see that his family’s company so many times seemed to fail workers. I’m certainly con cerned to see this at a company that’s affiliated with somebody who could poten tially be a U.S. senator.”

W

N E W S Raleigh

Buffers to Care

Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Raleigh clinic escorts report escalating harassment by clinic protesters. The city says it’s working to address the issue.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

Outside a Raleigh abortion clinic, one of only 14 in the state, anti-abortion protesters are doing every thing they can to prevent patients from walking through the front doors.

Protesters preach about sin and salvation through loud speakers, photograph and videotape patients as they come in, and hand out fliers about the “dangers” of abortion.

“Abortion is murder,” reads one protester’s sign.

This mob of people is fairly typical of a Saturday morn ing at the clinic. In the past, some protesters have even disguised themselves as clinic escorts or put up misleading signs in an effort to direct patients away from the clinic. This is what patients face as they try to make their way to the clinic’s front doors, where they can no longer hear the prayer, slurs, or accusations directed their way.

Harassment of patients has escalated since Roe v. Wade was overturned three months ago, says Kelsea McLain, founder of Triangle Abortion Access Coalition, which organizes clinic escorts.

“The big shifts we’ve seen have been related to the emboldening of protesters, how they feel a little bit more entitled to do what they do, to encroach on the property lines,” McLain says.

“Most people are coming to the abortion clinic for the first time in their lives. [Protesters] know they don’t know where they’re going … and they do everything they can to confuse, overwhelm, and intimidate people away from even pulling into that parking lot.”

McLain says she’s seen protesters swarm vehicles in an effort to get patients to stop and roll their windows down. They film every vehicle that enters or leaves the clinic parking lot. This year, with many southern states having already banned abortion, protesters are especially focused on patients who appear to be coming from out side North Carolina.

That kind of surveillance could present a major problem if states start passing laws allowing people to prosecute or sue those who travel across state lines to get an abortion.

“The protesters will start shouting about how they know that [patients have] traveled if they see an out-of-state [license] plate on their car,” McLain says. “We’ve even heard of people renting cars for their appointments just so they don’t have to drive their own vehicle to the clinic.”

Another big problem is police, McLain says. Anti-abor tion protesters routinely call the police on patients, vol unteers, and clinic staff. Often, a 911 call will be placed in response to staff speeding through the clinic entrance or patients driving the wrong way on Drake Circle in an effort to avoid protesters, McLain says. Data from the Raleigh Police Department show that 11 calls to 911 were placed through August of this year to the Drake Circle clinic, while 21 security checks took place; throughout 2021, there were 24 calls to 911 and 208 security checks; for 2020, there were 17 calls to 911 and 15 security checks.

“We’ve actually seen cops pull someone over for going the wrong way and then not do anything to speak to the protesters that push that person into that position,” McLain says. “It just results in this endless cycle of cops having to come and potentially interrupt someone’s abor tion care to question them, when all these people want to do is get in and out of the clinic.”

McLain says law enforcement’s attitude toward anti-abor tion protesters is very different from their attitude toward other protesters. While police were more than willing to disperse and arrest Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, free speech in front of abortion clinics is protected even to the point of harassment and abuse, McLain says.

“It feels like everyone works together—the city, the police, and the protesters—to make things as hostile and unpleasant at the clinic as possible,” she says. “Literally no work has been put into ensuring that people can continue to access legally protected health care.”

Lt. Jason Borneo, a spokesman for the Raleigh Police Department, says the department is “committed to ensur ing that health care clinics are safe places for patients to receive care.”

He cited the officer-initiated security checks the police department conducts at Raleigh’s two abortion clinics. The checks are made “so that patients can receive care, health care providers can safely provide that care and people lawfully expressing their views can do so as the law provides,” Borneo says.

Kelsea McLain (center), founder of Triangle Abortion Access Coalition PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Raleigh mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin says the city is also taking steps to protect patients.

“We have asked the city attorney to work with the clinics, and we’ve asked our [police] chief to have officers who are spe cially trained respond,” Baldwin says. “We are currently working on buffer zones.”

A “buffer zone” around abortion clinics would prevent protesters from approaching patients within a certain radius of the clin ic. Activists have been lobbying the Raleigh City Council for years for such a measure.

McLain says the city does seem to have more interest in and energy around pro tecting abortion clinics since Roe v. Wade was overturned this summer. But there still has not been much progress.

The city council directed city attorney Robin Tatum last year to work with local abortion clinics to ensure the safety of patients, says Baldwin. Tatum says she has been in contact with local abortion clinics but couldn’t share spe cifics about their dis cussions. She says she expects the issue to come back before the council at some point in the future.

Buffer zones would be a welcome addi tion to local laws, says Amber Gavin, vice president of advocacy and operations for A Woman’s Choice. The company operates clinics in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Greensboro, plus one in Jacksonville, Florida.

“Nobody should be fearful when they’re accessing [health care],” Gavin says.

Training for local law enforcement would also be helpful in ensuring access to abor tion care, Gavin continues.

“I would love to see law enforcement actually enforcing the laws that are on the books. A lot of that is education,” Gavin says. “And when anti-abortion protesters violate these laws, it’s really important that city attorneys and DAs pick up these cases and move forward with prosecution.”

All this comes as more people than ever are seeking abortion care in North Car olina. Since Roe was overturned, clinics here have seen a huge influx of patients, says Gavin.

“We are now scheduling about 2,000 appointments a month … [about] 500 more than we were prior to the decision,” Gavin says. “More than half of the patients we’re seeing in North Carolina are from out of state.”

It’s a big change but not an unexpected one, Gavin says. Since Roe was overturned, 13 states have banned abortion, including seven in the southeast United States.

“[On September 15], our Charlotte clinic had at least 15 patients coming from out of state. That’s a huge number,”

Gavin says. “We’re talking about people from Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana. We’re also seeing patients from Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia. These folks are coming from states where they cannot access care.”

Most patients coming from out of state are forced to take time off work to get an abortion, Gavin says. Some, who can’t afford plane tickets, drive more than 10 or 12 hours to reach North Carolina.

“A lot of our abortion funds and practical support networks are helping them with childcare, helping them with transporta tion, even helping with lodging … because you can’t just fly in for one day, get your abor tion, and get back on the plane,” Gavin says. “Everyone is work ing hard to make sure that patients are get ting care, but there obviously are going to be folks left behind. It’s heartbreaking and very frustrating.”

Gavin, like McLain and other abortion rights activists, has also seen the uptick in protests outside abortion clinics. She’s had reports of protesters writing down license plate numbers of patients and call ing them later. Last month in Jacksonville, more than 100 anti-abortion protesters stood outside the clinic in a pre-planned protest. Although the police were aware of the event, they did not notify clinic staff, Gavin says.

Even before the Roe v. Wade decision was overturned, anti-abortion protesters seemed to feel like things were swinging their way. In early June, one man hit a clin ic escort in Greensboro with his car. The man, who was known for making degrading comments to volunteers, was convicted of simple assault two weeks ago.

“Any time there is a decision that goes in favor [of anti-abortion protest ers], they do become more emboldened,” Gavin says. “They’re coming out strong in numbers, and the harassment and the vitriol that comes out of their mouths is really harmful. We have patients in Raleigh who told us they feel physically unsafe and scared.” W

“Nobody should be fearful when they’re accessing health care.”

N E W S North Carolina

The Gun Slinger and the Judge

U.S. Senate candidates Budd and Beasley are polling neck and neck, but as politicians and personalities, they’re a study in opposites.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

How do you write a profile of a man who wants to be a U.S. senator but doesn’t want to talk to you?

First, you go to his gun store.

During my hour-long drive to ProShots—a gun store and indoor shooting range in Rural Hall, North Carolina, owned by Republican U.S. congressman Ted Budd—I listen to most of the store’s short-lived 2017 podcast, a structureless jabberfest where four employees discuss their vast firearm collections and the limitations of concealed carry permits.

State law prohibits carrying concealed firearms in schools, which is a “sticky wicket” for gun owners with kids, one employee says in the second episode.

“I would be curious to know whether North Carolina defines a daycare as an educational facility,” he says.

In another episode, an employee names his prized pos session as a Cz-27 pistol used by a “German officer” in World War II, complete with “all the stamps and mark ings”; a quick Google search of the model confirms that said “markings” include a swastika.

My ears are pricked for mentions of Budd, a three-term congressman who is running against Democrat Cheri Bea sley in the race to replace retiring Republican North Caro lina senator Richard Burr, but no one says anything about him—a harbinger for the rest of my reporting.

Backed by former president Donald Trump, Budd secured a hefty 59 percent of the vote in May’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, indicating that a chunk of North Carolin ians still have a soft spot for Trump-era extremism; Budd easily triumphed over the primary’s biggest name and fund raiser, former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory, and his win cast shade on Burr, who voted to convict Trump in the former president’s second impeachment trial.

In the months since the primary, Budd, who has repre sented a congressional district in central North Carolina since riding in on the Trump wave in 2016, has been neck and neck with his opponent in the polls.

In efforts to broaden this gap and appeal to a wider base, the congressman has tried to distance himself from Trump and dilute his populist messaging. His ads, which previous ly touted Trump’s endorsement and labeled immigrants as criminals and drug smugglers, now show him sandwiched between grocery store carts, vowing to fight inflation. His

website paints him as a North Carolina–born, farm-raised, Eagle Scout–badged small business owner who loves God and hates Joe Biden.

“I pledge to you that I will work for everyday families, not the elite or political insiders,” his site reads.

But the receipts tell a different story.

In July, a day after accepting the maximum campaign contribution from big oil PAC Continental Resources, Inc., Budd voted against legislation that would lower gas prices and protect consumers from price gouging by big oil companies. Similarly, in 2019 Budd voted against low ering consumer drug prices just days after taking thou sands of dollars from two Big Pharma PACs. In perhaps the most glaring display of corruption, Budd has voted in support of corporate special interests after taking $30,000 worth of trips on their dime, traveling to places like Miami, Palm Beach, and Oslo, Norway, and staying in $900-a-night luxury resorts.

Budd’s critics accuse him of being a hypocrite. He pro motes himself as an ally to farmers but made millions off a family business scheme that bankrupted the company AgriBioTech and cost farmers $50 million in losses. He says he supports service members but has voted against expanding healthcare for veterans. Despite demanding that Gov. Roy Cooper do more to explain how “those in positions of power in North Carolina are acting proactively to protect children,” Budd has passed up opportunities to address child abuse time and again, voting against bills that would have provided a composite $890 million in funding for child abuse prevention services.

And for all his efforts to come off as a Constitution-abid ing everyman, Budd has refused to say whether he accepts the results of the 2020 presidential election, called the January 6 insurrection “just patriots standing up,” and recently cosponsored a bill that would impose a national

ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

When I pull up to ProShots, I notice the similarities between the store and its owner: like Budd, ProShots is clinical and unassuming, a multimillion-dollar operation doing its best to blend in with a Family Dollar and a tractor supply store.

Besides a large sign that says “Helping Our Community Responsibly Enjoy Firearms,” the store’s walls are mostly adorned with shotguns, assault rifles, and accessories like noise-canceling earmuffs for babies and kids. I don’t know anything about guns, so I ask a salesman named Gabriel to confirm that the weapons I see are indeed assault rifles.

“They’re totally new,” he says. “They never assaulted anybody.”

Between March 2018 and August 2020, multiple firearms, ammunition, and gun accessories were stolen from ProShots, and in January 2019, a man died by sui cide while using the store’s indoor range. I ask Gabriel whether the store has revamped its security system since these incidents.

“We put all the ammo back here,” he says, gesturing behind the register. Brightly colored boxes of bullets are stacked in neat rows, like candy at a movie theater. “That makes it so we have to get it for customers. And [we’ve added] more security.”

When I ask him what Budd is like, he says he can’t com ment and darts off. Another employee tells me that the store’s “media guy” has instructed workers not to talk about Budd with reporters.

Budd and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, and nearly all of my other attempts to interview folks who know Budd—fel low congress members, mostly—also fall flat, though I am able to reach Chris Beckman, a former ProShots marketing manager, over the phone.

ILLUSTRATION BY JON FULLER

“Working for Ted was actually a lot of fun,” says Beckman, who worked at ProShots between 2015 and 2018 and went to the same church as Budd for a number of years.

As a gun store owner, Budd emphasized education and safety and was receptive to his employees’ feedback, according to Beck man. (On the topic of safety, it’s worth not ing that the ProShots website advertises an insurance provider that supports gun own ers facing domestic violence charges.)

“He kind of surprised us when he ran for Congress,” Beckman says. “But it was great …. He saw a really great opportunity to do something beyond what he was doing, and I believe he had the right mind-set for it at the time.”

But Beckman—the one person I reached who knows Budd personally—isn’t sure whether he’s voting for him in Novem ber. He hasn’t spent time reviewing Budd’s stances on “a few key issues” that would impact his family, he says, but wouldn’t elaborate further.

According to Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican political strategist in North Carolina, the majority of voters will be thinking about national issues—primari ly abortion and inflation—when they cast their Senate ballots this fall, not the char acter of the candidates.

“This election is going to be decided by national trends,” Wrenn says. “The candi dates are not going to break through all of a sudden and make people say, ‘Yes, that’s the kind of leadership we need,’ based on their character.”

This, plus the fact that North Carolina usually elects Republican senators—and the historical pattern of the president’s party losing ground in midterm elections— means that Budd doesn’t need to worry too much about humanizing himself, says Gary Pearce, a longtime Democratic politi cal strategist in North Carolina.

“That is the Republican strategy,” Pearce says. “They don’t want to make public appearances. They don’t want [the media] to cover them. They want to do it all under the surface.”

While Budd has hosted a handful of meet-and-greets, they’ve been few and far between—and because his campaign won’t add me to their press list, I haven’t known where to show up.

So when he finally makes a well-pub licized appearance—at a Trump rally, no less—you can be sure I don’t miss it.

every farmer who showed up to her agricul ture-centered roundtable event.

Dressed in an all-denim outfit and sporting a dainty gold necklace that says “Protect Roe,” Beasley hasn’t said a word in 40 minutes, allowing as much time as possible for attendees to share their sto ries and struggles.

The farmers are diverse, with operations that range from tobacco fields to modular containers of microgreens, but they share many of the same stressors: rising fuel and fertilizer prices; dwindling yields, due to a hostile and unpredictable climate; land loss and encroaching development; and, for the table’s five Black farmers, the per sistence of systemic discrimination in the agriculture industry.

A few hours after the event, Beasley sends out an email with a detailed list of agricul ture-related legislative goals that she will fight for if elected to U.S. Senate—expand ing access to capital and crop insurance and helping farmers adopt climate-smart

NC Supreme Court justice who worked alongside Beasley for nearly the entirety of Beasley’s career, shared similar senti ments with the INDY

Timmons-Goodson recalled a 2009 case, heard by Beasley in the appellate court, which asked whether the age and mental status of a juvenile suspect is relevant when deciding whether the suspect has been held in police custody—and thus when deciding whether the suspect was entitled to their Miranda rights. (The case centered around a 13-year-old special education student who had been held and interrogated by police— who did not read him his Miranda rights—in a school conference room.)

Beasley was the lone dissenter, argu ing that it was “absurd” to employ the same definition of custody “regardless of whether the individual was eight or thir ty-eight years old.” The case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which concurred with Beasley’s ruling.

“That’s a example of how well she knows

that portray Beasley as soft on crime and bereft of the support of law enforcement.

As a refute, and as an appeal to moder ate voters, Beasley has touted the sup port of current and retired law enforce ment officers and voiced opposition to the “Defund the Police” movement at multiple campaign events.

Timmons-Goodson says she always observed Beasley to be “tough in the courtroom” and sees Beasley as an ally to police, provided that police are on the right side of the law.

“If law enforcement is in the right and they’ve done their job as they’re called to do it, she’s right there with them,” Tim mons-Goodson says. “At the same time, if the government has not dotted its i’s and crossed its t’s, she’s going to be strong enough and bold enough to say, ‘Ooh, didn’t quite get here on this one.’”

A few weeks after the farmer roundtable, I catch Beasley at a recreation center in Fayetteville, where she’s speaking to com munity members about the fundamental freedoms at stake in the upcoming election.

In an empty conference room, Beas ley tells me about her faith, which she calls “the foundation of her service,” and shares memories of her mother, an activ ist and educator who served as the first Black dean at Austin Peay State Univer sity in Tennessee.

techniques, to name a few—but while she’s there, excepting the two minutes where she repeats back a summary of everything she’s heard, she stays quiet.

She nods, holds eye contact, and files each attendee’s words into her mental Rolodex, later using their perspectives to formulate a course of action.

It’s a master class in judicial tempera ment—which makes sense, because Beas ley is a judge.

A 1991 graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law, Beasley spent several years as a public defender in Cum berland County before rising through the ranks of the state’s judicial system, serv ing first as a state district court judge and later on the bench of the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court.

and understands the Constitution,” Tim mons-Goodson says. “She is independent and bold, even in the face of colleagues who say, ‘That’s not the way I see it.’”

Beasley’s decades of experience and proven ability to win statewide elections made her a popular pick in the May prima ry, where she trounced her 10 opponents with 81 percent of the vote.

Since then, Beasley has upheld her pledge to not accept any corporate PAC money, relying on a record-setting surge of second-quarter donations—likely driven, in part, by the overturn of Roe v. Wade to fund her campaign. Her ads emphasize that she is not a Washington insider but an impartial judge who has held dangerous offenders accountable in North Carolina and will do the same in Congress.

“We were all told that the 2020 elec tion was the most important election of our lifetimes,” she says. “But if my late mother were here, she would tell us that every election is the most important elec tion of our lifetimes.”

In our one-on-one conversation, Beasley is as warm and attentive as she was with the farmers in Durham, and when she takes the podium at the recreation center, she has the ability to command a room.

Bearing no script, she delivers a fiery, well-structured monologue about the importance of expanding access to health care, allocating resources to educators, combating the climate crisis, and protect ing reproductive freedoms.

“We have to feel a sense of urgency in this election,” she says. “We must.”

I

t’s a warm September morning and Cheri Beasley is perched on a picnic table bench at Durham’s largest open-air produce market, seated within arm’s reach of nearly

In May, after reviewing dozens of cases Beasley heard in the appellate court, The Assembly esteemed her to be “a judge who was independent and hard to label,” adding that “lawyers who’ve appeared before her, as well as some former colleagues, describe her as thorough, fair, and even-handed.”

Patricia Timmons-Goodson, a retired

Wrenn, the Republican strategist, views Beasley’s advertising campaign as more effective than her opponent’s.

“I don’t agree with Beasley, but she comes across to me as a person,” Wrenn says. “Budd talks like a politician, and I think that’s not good.”

Along with his grocery store promos, Budd has launched a slew of attack ads

The crowd of residents and elected offi cials—many of whom know her personally— is exhilarated and responsive, offering Beas ley a near-constant smattering of applause and punctuating most of her statements with a “that’s right” or an “amen.” Every time she says her opponent’s name, the elderly woman next to me giggles and whis pers, “Ted Butt. B-U-T-T, Butt.”

“Ted Budd has been in Congress for six years,” Beasley concludes. “So we don’t have to wonder what he will do. When people

“It’s all about race. One word. It’s about race. And Trump has made it even more about race.”

show you who they are—”

In unison, the crowd finishes the sentence for her: “We believe them.”

“T he N-word! You know what the N-word is?”

My partner, Aaron, and I stare at the TV in our Wilmington hotel room, horrified but relieved that we left the Trump rally before its headliner took the stage. We’re at a Comfort Inn—a few miles away from the Aero Center, where Trump is speaking—watching his address on C-Span.

“No, no, no,” Trump says quickly, likely to quell folks in the crowd yelling the slur. “It’s the ‘nuclear’ word.” (He was lamenting Vladimir Putin’s recent threat to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine, a war that “wouldn’t have happened” had Trump remained president.)

After spewing his usual lies and racist remarks for more than 40 minutes, Trump finally mentions Budd, calling the congressman “rock solid on defending our borders” and vowing that he will “represent you long and hard.”

“Ted is running against a weak-on-crime, left-wing extremist named Cheri Beasley,” Trump says. “She was a judge, Cheri Beasley was. She was a Marxist radical.”

Pearce, the Democratic strategist, tells me that North Carolina elections are always about race. Racist rhetoric is the easiest way to scare swing voters, he says.

In this year’s senate contest, Republicans are center ing their fear tactics around “weak on crime” Beasley— who, if elected, would become North Carolina’s first Black senator—as well as “the migrant invasion” and the non-issue of public schools teaching critical race theory, according to Pearce.

In past elections, the state GOP has launched similar cam paigns about affirmative action and voter ID laws, he says.

Shortly after North Carolina’s 1984 senate race—the one where Republican candidate Jesse Helms famously triumphed after using images of white hands to argue that white people were losing job opportunities to “racial quotas”—Pearce says he conducted a poll to reveal which issue had most accurately predicted the way that voters

cast their ballots.

When he looked at whether or not voters supported making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a federal holiday, Pearce says he was able to predict their senate votes with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

“It’s all about race,” Pearce says. “One word. It’s about race. And Trump has made it even more about race.”

Indeed, when my partner and I arrive at the procession of vendor and volunteer booths stationed outside the Aero Center, we see ralliers dressed in shirts that say things like “Civil War-ning” and “White Privilege: A False Political Ideol ogy Created to Cultivate Division.” It doesn’t take long for someone to say the N-word within earshot.

Aaron, who is Black, describes his rally experience as a strange combination of invisibility and tokenism, where the dozen volunteers who approach me act like he’s not there (the one time someone does talk to him, it’s to explain that critical race theory is a form of racism)—but, a few seconds after walking away, volunteers surreptitiously try to catch him in the backgrounds of their photos, to store in their arsenal, we surmise, in case someone accuses them of being racist.

After waiting in line for four hours, we finally pass through the white, high-peaked security tents (a proverbi al hood-and-cloaking, if you will), and in another case of probable tokenism, someone from Trump’s security team hastily pulls us out of the crowd and seats us on the bleach ers behind the speaker’s podium.

Before Budd speaks, we hear from a handful of other state GOP incumbents and hopefuls, like Bo Hines, who riles up the crowd by condemning “men competing in wom en’s athletics,” and U.S. Rep. David Rouzer, who underscores the need for voter ID laws and a Parents’ Bill of Rights.

“Education should be about learning,” Rouzer says. “Not liberal indoctrination and sexual perversion designed to destroy the family structure so crucial to a civil society.”

When Budd takes the stand, clad in a navy suit and an American flag pin, he quickly proves to be less charismatic than each of the previous speakers, including 27-year-old Hines, who has zero political experience.

With frequent glances at his script, Budd delivers a halt

ing, watered-down version of the speeches we’ve already heard, talking mostly about inflation, Biden’s incompe tence, and Beasley’s judicial record.

Every time he says Beasley’s name, the crowd chants, “Lock her up.”

The woman sitting next to me is Debbie Love, the second vice chair of the New Hanover County GOP. She only has good things to say about Budd; Budd’s son used to go to her church, and she occasionally saw Budd when he joined his son for services.

“He comes into the back of the church,” Love says about Budd. “He doesn’t want anybody to know who he is—he just wants to come and worship.”

She calls Budd an “honorable man” but later clarifies that she “doesn’t have a personal relationship” with him.

“It’s an observational relationship,” Love says.

This seems to be the case with everyone. A few hours later, even Trump admits that Budd is an enigma.

“The congressmen, they all called [and said], ‘Can you do us a favor, can you endorse Ted Budd?’” Trump says. “I said, ‘I hear he’s good, tell me about him.’ But a lot of people didn’t know him.”

In Love’s telling, it seems like Budd doesn’t want anybody to know who he is.

This, I think, is because Budd is uncomfortable with himself.

After months spent distancing himself from Trump, Budd took the stage with the former president and shouted “Make America Great Again.” After proclaiming his support for farmers, veterans, and child abuse victims, he votes and behaves in ways that work against them. And after more than a decade of selling firearms, he says that Beasley is the one abetting criminals.

To close his speech at the Trump rally, Budd touts his adherence to his family’s motto, “Just do what you say you’re gonna do.”

“That’s how I’ve operated throughout my life,” Budd says. “That’s how I’ve served in the U.S. Congress, and that’s the kind of U.S. senator that I’m gonna be.”

After he says it, he inhales, holds his breath, and frowns, like maybe he knows it’s not true. W

Congressional candidate Bo Hines onstage in Wilmington

PHOTO BY LENA GELLER

Cheri Beasley at a farmers roundtable in Durham

PHOTO BY LENA GELLER

ka e up with

PAG E

Hit the Books

For nearly two decades, Paul Scott has posted up in Durham’s West End, giving away books about Black American and African history.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

I

n 1969, my parents purchased a set of World Book encyclopedias that included a dictionary and “year in review.”

It wasn’t just like the world wide web, it was the world wide web, and for a little Black boy growing up in a work ing-class home, it revealed a world I didn’t even know existed. I spent hours poring over subjects—sports mostly, at first, especially entries about the Black athletes who boycotted the 1968 Olym pics. Some days one of my buddies would come over and we would spend the after noon looking at the colorful pictures of snakes in the S encyclopedia.

My buddy should have become a herpe tologist, someone whose discoveries led to a scientific breakthrough. Instead, he went to prison before we graduated high school.

I thought again about how a young per son can travel the world by opening a book and reading—and about my buddy, whose life was destroyed by prison—after speaking with Paul Scott last month.

For nearly two decades Scott has post ed up on Sunday afternoons along a side walk in Durham’s West End and given away books about Black American and African history. Books are a hopeful anti dote to the deadly youth gun tragedies in the community that have shattered the lives of countless families.

“Instead of doing drive-bys with guns, we’re doing drive-bys with books,” says Scott. “Instead of flooding our streets with drugs, we want to flood the streets with knowledge.”

Late September marked the annual Banned Book Week in America, and undue criticism of critical race theory notwithstanding, Scott says most books dealing with the Black expe rience have always been banned. But Scott began another chapter this summer: he start ed the Bull City Griot, a mobile bookstore that travels all over the city giving away books to young people and adults.

“I turned my car into a virtual library,” Scott told the INDY. “I go to parking lots, stores. Last weekend I was at Centerfest and the Beats n Bars hip-hop festival at Ameri can Tobacco. Sometimes I go to Northgate Park and various places all over Durham.”

One of Scott’s main posts is at Durham Marble Works in the 1500 block of More head Avenue in Durham’s West End; to track him down for donation or visiting purposes, his Facebook and Twitter are the best bets.

During a time when way too many young Black men are both the victims and perpe trators of gun violence, Scott says he wants to help create a culture shift.

“We want to make Black men reading books the narrative the same way that pop culture has made a Black man with a gun and his pants sagging the narrative,” he says. Recalling the era when rappers carried backpacks, Scott says he’s ready to implement “the next phase of the move ment: backpack griots.”

“Let’s make it cool again to carry a back pack full of books,” he says.

Scott grew up in Halifax County and enrolled at NC Central University in 1985. After graduating, he briefly left the Bull City before returning in 1990; later, he turned to activism, thanks in no small part to fre quent visits to the former Know Book Store on Fayetteville Street. It was while patroniz ing the Know that he found out that it had been against the law for enslaved people to learn how to read.

“You could get killed for knowing how to read,” he says. “I wanted to give Black people in my community the confidence to pick up a book. It’s like George Clinton said, ‘Think. It’s not illegal yet.’”

In 1998, Scott became an ordained Bap tist minister while a member of the Geth semane Baptist Church on South Roxboro Street. In 2002, he left the church, later founding the Black Messiah Movement,

which combines Black liberation theology with community activism.

“I hit the streets and never looked back,” he says. “I always wanted to put knowledge in the streets.”

Operating a bookstore, even a mobile one that gives literature away, is a challenge.

Moreover, during a period when Amazon and retail giants like Barnes & Noble are pre dominant across the bookselling landscape, independently owned bookstores are work ing extra hard just to keep the doors open.

The pandemic didn’t help. It’s doubly challenging for Black-owned bookstores.

Last year, writer Alaina Lavoie, with the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, reported that there are about 10,800 independently owned bookstores in the United States— and only 6 percent are Black owned.

One of those outlets is the Rofhiwa Book Café in East Durham. Co-owners Naledi Yaziyo and Bev Makhubele first opened Rofhiwa’s doors on May 15 of last year.

Yaziyo told the INDY that the bookstore focuses on many of the same elements that Scott advocates for in the streets: curating local authors and Black authors, promoting other Black-owned businesses, and foster ing a sense of community.

Part of how Yaziyo defines “curating” is “being active and responsive, in real time.”

Following the excitement of pop singer Halle Bailey’s lead casting in the remake

of The Little Mermaid, for example, the bookstore introduced its young patrons to images of a Black mermaid featured in Tracey Baptiste’s Rise of the Jumbies

Soon after Scott announced his plans to start a mobile bookstore, the book dona tions began pouring in.

“A sister donated two large boxes of classic Black books,” he says. “More people started donating books after cleaning out their garage or cleaning out their office.”

Those classic titles include The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, and The 1619 Project. Scott says that a retired col lege professor donated four bags of books, including three early editions of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

Scott says he’s even receiving donations from out of state, including “Black baby dolls to give to the little girls” and children’s books like An African American Coloring Book for Boys: With Positive Affirmations and Nina: Jazz Legend and Civil-Rights Activ ist Nina Simone by Alice Brière-Haquet.

Scott says he’s always loved reading but used to be ashamed of it.

“I hid it for a lot of years,” he says, “until I came to the Know Book Store. I vowed to never let that happen to another kid, where they feel like they have to dumb down. That’s been my mantra, and I’ll live and die for that.”

W

Paul Scott and his Bull City Griot project in Northgate Park, Durham

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

BULL CITY GRIOT FB: facebook.com/bullcitygriot | Twitter: @bullcitygriot

STAG E

New Room

Amid a shortage of spaces for performing arts companies, new venues are stepping up to bat.

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

Any stage manager will tell you: the real drama’s always offstage.

Such was the case at the start of a roar ing fall season here, when 39 separate pro ductions over its first three weeks pushed local venues to their capacity.

But that triumph came just as the area’s itinerant theater and dance companies—the groups with no rehearsal or performance space of their own, which constitute more than two-thirds of the region’s performing arts community—got a nasty shock. As the INDY reported last week, three prominent venues either closed or signaled that they were cutting back, a move that left the largest demographic group in live arts here with even fewer places and opportunities to show their works.

Then, in a Shakesperean plot twist, four venues across the area began stepping up to give stage artists a place where they can be seen and audiences a place to come for live theater and dance.

As we talk, Jack Reitz surveys his surround ings with a bemused eye: a 1,600-squarefoot cube inside the Warehouse building at Golden Belt, nestled between Hi-Wire Brewing, Urban Tails Veterinary Hospital, and Cugino Forno.

At the moment, the decor around a midroom cherry picker poised to hang theatri cal light and sound rigging is nothing if not industrial: Sheetrock and construction dust coat the floor, a table filled with blueprints, pizza boxes and coffee cups, and stacks of carpet squares and uninstalled bathroom fixtures off to one side.

Still, Reitz is confident that by late October, the 60-seat theater will be ready

for a soft opening as the new space for the award-winning improvisational come dy collective Mettlesome. That in itself is a welcome change of fortune for a group including founder Ashley Melzer and come dians April Dudash, Lauren Foster-Lee, Jon athan Yeomans, and Hillary Yonce, who’d schlepped a truckful of chairs to venues across the region before a yearlong residen cy at the late, great Geer Street coworking space, The Mothership.

“Programming that space for a full year taught us that we were able to do this,” Reitz recalls. “Then, when we went dark for the pandemic, there was not a doubt that we would be back.” Over 200 patrons con tributed $41,500 to a Kickstarter fundrais er to build a theater for Mettlesome, which the group supplemented with savings it had accrued since its start. Golden Belt prop erty management also chipped in on the upfitting necessary to make the new digs a functional performance space.

When it opens, Mettlesome will present signature company acts including Hush Hush and Golden Years, as well as a selec tion of local improv comedy troupes on Fri day and Saturday nights. It will also host regional theater and dance groups; after opening, the company is installing a sprung floor to accommodate dancemakers as well as other stage artists.

Bulldog Ensemble Players, an edgy group with a taste for present-day scripts, will stage an urban comedy called The Garbol ogists at Mettlesome November 3–13. And choreographers Alyssa Noble and Chris Strauss from Barriskill Dance Theatre will produce Recital, an odd, original variety

show of embodied performances, the week end of November 18-19.

“So many of the Triangle’s art worlds are siloed,” Reitz says. “We’re really hoping we have a space where artists of different disci plines can come and show each other their work in a way that’s inspiring for everybody. We’re hungry to host other artists.”

While putting the finishing touches on the main stage at Theatre Raleigh, produc ing artistic director Lauren Kennedy Brady has been quietly adding to what she now calls the company’s “campus” on Old Wake Forest Road. A studio space one block away has hosted children’s theater groups, a five-star late summer production of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, and readings by the North Carolina Playwrights Lab.

The company is now gearing up to pres ent a lot more local groups. It’s hired rent al manager Allison Dellinger Hopfer to administrate not only the studio but two new spaces it’s bringing online in January 2023: a 99-seat studio theater adjacent to its main stage and a cabaret-style theater at the end of its present lobby.

“In essence, we’ll have four performance spaces in the footprint we have right now,” Brady says.

The drive to open up new spaces is more artistic than it is economic, Brady adds. “I love a creative space where different artists from different companies and backgrounds are working. You feed off each other’s cre

ativity and the enthusiasm and excitement of what’s happening.”

In the fall and spring seasons, Theatre Raleigh will host companies including Hon est Pint Theatre and Pure Life Theatre, groups that were both unhoused during the space squeeze this year. “We’re extreme ly excited to be there,” says Honest Pint cofounder David Henderson. “We have a good feeling for what we’re getting.”

The demand for the new spaces has taken Brady by surprise; at this point, only a handful of weeks remain available for the four rooms through 2023. “It’s taken off faster than I expected,” she says.

Memorable theater can happen in non traditional spaces. In August, a cast of local independent stage royalty including Mar cia Edmundson, Lenore Field, and Thadde us Edwards staged a production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s dark comedy Ripcord at Lanza’s Cafe, a cozy neighborhood coffee house in Carrboro.

When producer Edith Snow had gone looking for a place to break the pandem ic’s long theatrical fast, Catherine Coley and Christina Vad, co-owners of Lanza’s Cafe, said yes.

“They were fantastic from the start,” Snow says. “They made it very clear they wanted to be the hosts of an artistic community.”

The town has been all but a theatrical desert in recent years, but during Ripcord’s one-weekend run, crowds filled a hodge

April Dudash, Ashley Melzer, Jack Reitz, Jonathan Yeomans, Lauren Foster-Lee, and Hillary Yonce of Mettlesome Theater PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

METTLESOME (Opening late October) thisismettlesome.com

THEATRE RALEIGH ARTS CENTER theatreraleigh.com

BACK-TO-ONE ACTING STUDIO backtooneactingstudio.com LANZA’S CAFE facebook.com/Lanzascafe

podge of vintage love seats, couches, and upholstered chairs at the café.

Such settings are no problem when the acting, directing, and script are all top-rate. At night’s end, enthusiastic applause—and queries about future shows—arose from the audience. In addition to coffee, tea, and baked goods, Coley and Vad’s funky venue also offers a robust menu of weekly events across the arts, including open mic nights, monthly poetry jams, and an independent short film series for regional filmmakers to show their works.

They’re also accepting proposals for fur ther theatrical productions.

First through the doors this fall will be theatrical gadflies Ian Bowater and Paul Deblinger, who bring their unique version of the improvised two-person drama, Ian and Paul’s One-Man Show, to the café in free performances and workshop sessions on their techniques on October 8, Novem ber 11, and December 10.

“I never knew that space was that much of a challenge for local artists,” Vad notes. “But the arts need to be more expressed in community spaces that are free and acces sible.” Co-owner Coley concurs: “It’s part of our mission to provide a safe space for peo ple to gather and express creativity, collab oration, communication, and community.”

Most recently, Back-to-One Acting Stu dio hosted Scrap Paper Shakespeare’s debut production of Julius Caesar last weekend in its dance and acting studio classroom space on Capital Boulevard.

A room-length mirrored wall was draped, as were skylight windows on the oppo site wall for the Sunday matinee; a mod est array of general theatrical lights hung from the room’s suspended ceiling. Even if the sight lines in the narrow 75-seat room weren’t the greatest, the venue was available and affordable—the two things a starting company needs the most.

“We’d love to be able to help produce maybe four shows a year,” co-owner Daryl Ray Carliles says. “You’ve got to start somewhere; we just want to give compa nies that want that beginning step a work ing performance or rehearsal space before they go to bigger places.”

So do these developments solve the space squeeze for local performing arts groups? Hardly, says longtime arts admin istrator Devra Thomas.

“Because just so many amazing artists want to do their work here, even if you added five more venues, there will still be more work than available space,” Thom as says. “The question is, How do we as a community try to accommodate that? How do we make sure people are able to get their work seen?” W

WED 10.5 7PM

Raleigh's Community Bookstore

EVENTS

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll

THUR 10.6 7PM

SAT 10.8 2PM

Kristina Gaddy, Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History

Patti Meredith, South of Heaven

Georgann Eubanks, Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction

Martha Ann Toll, Three Muses

WED 10.12 7PM

Gavin Larsen, Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life

Barbara Quick, What Disappears

for

E

PHOTO BY RYAN JONES

Many Happy Returns

We raise a toast to 21 years of the Orange County Social Club, a living room for the indie scene and Carrboro’s definitive townie bar.

BY BRIAN HOWE arts@indyweek.com

A bout a century ago, Carrboro’s commercial center shift ed from Weaver Street to East Main Street, according to an architectural inventory the town published in 1983. By the 1920s, the booming district had all kinds of stores, including a pool parlor, a candy kitchen, and J. C. Merritt’s first hot dog stand. Some of the buildings were new and others had been moved. Almost all were made of wood.

In 1924, a fire sparked in a boarding house at 102 East Main, where the shell of Tyler’s Taproom is now, and burned down most of the block—except for R. H. Marks’s dry goods store, which still stands as Bank of America. Marks had built in brick, and after the fire, the other store owners followed his lead, mortaring up the durable, weathering street we stroll today.

Merritt did business in an annex on Marks’s store for a time, which was then rented by the druggist P. L. Sent er. Circa 1950, he moved into a larger building next door,

hanging a Rexall sign above the inviting metal canopy at 108 East Main, where Senter Drug, alongside the immortal Friendly Barber Shop, would anchor the block for decades. It had a sandwich counter and great orangeade, according to Richard Ellington, the Carrboro historian who helped me clear up a tricky point in this account.

The Rexall sign finally came down in the mid-1980s, and the left side of 108 East Main harbored a series of relatively fleeting concerns (a telemarketing office, a screen printer, a web hosting company) until the day in 2001 when the Orange County Social Club, a local landmark for a new century, opened for the first time.

Matt Neal, a founding employee, who now owns Neal’s Deli around the corner, was sweeping up the last drywall dust. The purple paint was fresh on the wavy cubbyholes above the bar. The same music scenesters who had ham mered the dimples into its copper top were now the first customers, and many of those scensters are still installed at what they call “the deep end” of the bar (nearest the back patio, where you can smoke), growing mossier and more iconic by the year.

The first bartender was Tricia Mesigian. She was 29 years old and, in the past year, had quit her job at Merge Records, toured Europe with David Byrne, and then hauled him back to play at Cat’s Cradle—the music-scene nucleus whose crowd, she was certain, would swarm to the bar she was about to open, strategically located two blocks away.

From the rhythm of her own nightlife, she’d identified a need for a “middle-night” place that welcomed younger patrons but catered to slightly older ones. No shows, no food, no frills—just cheap beer, stiff highballs, and a clean, cozy place to meet and talk; to celebrate or grieve; to waste a few hours or unwind a few years. She thought the mot ley mansion of the indie scene needed a living room, and it didn’t take long for time to prove her right.

“People would be like, ‘Oh my god, opening a business, you’re rolling the dice, what a gamble!’” Mesigian said one recent morning at OCSC. “I just didn’t feel that way. I’m not really a risk-taker.”

At 50, she is tall and impervious, with a mass of dark, steely curls and the calm, steady demeanor it takes to tend the wildlife of a bar. She gave up her last shifts in 2016 when she had a child with her husband, the musi cian and artist Charles Chace, whose abstract paintings shine like flaking yellow mirrors in the morning light. She just subs, now, but also runs every aspect of the business, and she’s always around.

Mesigian had envisioned a big party for OCSC’s 20th anniversary last year, but the pandemic held things up— and anyway, what better birthday for a bar to celebrate than 21? October 7 and 8 will find music-scene friends and deep-end vets deejaying and performing from four p.m. until last call.

Friday features DJ No. 6 and DJ Bugspray, aka Mac McCaughan, Mesigian’s former employer when she worked at Merge. Saturday brings live music by local stalwarts Pipe and Lud, followed by DJ sets from some visiting royals, Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, in a quiet flaunt ing of the bar’s cred far beyond North Carolina.

I

t was September 26, barely two weeks after 9/11. That weekend, the mayor would come to cut a ribbon, but this was a quiet Wednesday.

“One of my harebrained ideas was for the performers to all be in bands that were older than the bar,” Mesigian says. “I also wanted people my age to look at it and say, ‘I could do that!’ We’re gonna have dinner breaks, get some soup in between.”

Bartender Lee Waters serving drinks at OCSC in 2009

OCSC’S

Beyond being a haven for local and touring musicians, OCSC has thrived by providing constancy to its regulars, exceptional care to its staff, and an affordable, welcoming bar to the neighborhood—especially since a law change eliminated the need for $5 memberships this year, though seasoned townies still cherish their faded orange cards.

Mine (number 1,432) is stamped June 21, 2002, nine months after OCSC opened, though I remember being there earlier. I think I was just too lazy to join at first, too 22, with friends to sign me in. But I know it became the default place to go before and after a Cradle show, where you might lure the band and the scene back to your North Greensboro Street rental for an impromptu after party—a role that had previously been shared by Hell, that vanished basement legend of Rosemary Street, and Henry’s Bistro, which is more or less intact as Northside District.

As you got older, perhaps OCSC became the place you went for a drink after work or to meet a visiting friend. And if you drifted away—after all, people get married, have kids, move to Durham—it became the place where you could return and find things basically as you left them, so rare in our chaotic urban environment. The faces lining the bar, floating in the shadows of the parlors, and flapping at the forum-like tables outside are always changing, but Mesigian, her staff, and their extended family of lifers always make these aging bricks feel like home.

Mesigian comes from a suburb of Philadelphia called Media, “Everybody’s Hometown.” In the early nineties, she studied business and got into indie rock at Virginia Tech.

“What I really thank Virginia Tech for is that it got me here,” she says. One of her college roommates moved to Durham, and Mesigian liked Archers of Loaf and Small 23, so she and the other roommate moved to Chapel Hill.

Her first job here was at Skylight Exchange, the sandwich shop and bookstore that evolved into Nightlight, where she first met some of OCSC’s long-term bartenders, including Jamie McPhail and Jenny Waters. In 1995, she had a brief internship at Mammoth Records before she met the Merge folks and hopped over there. Superchunk was touring Here’s Where the Strings Come In, which almost halved the label’s staff, so Mesigian soon became a full-time employee.

“Mac and Laura [Ballance] were great bosses, great mentors,” she says. “They were inspiring, and I was getting older and realizing I wanted to have my own thing. At Merge, what I liked doing best was hospitality when bands came to town. Showing them around, everybody staying at my house, making them breakfast—socializing.”

“We didn’t hire very many people, so when we did, it had to be someone that really cared about what we were doing and could kind of create their own position,” McCaughan says. “We were still learning to have a record label as we went.” He remembers thinking that Mesigian was the most motivated, energetic person he had ever met.

“She still has that energy,” he says. “College towns are full of bars, but it’s rare to find a place that has so much character and care put into it. I remember thinking, ‘If we found this place on tour, it would be one of our fondest destinations.’ Luckily, we didn’t have to go on tour to find it.”

The idea of a bar took hold in 1997 when Pipe singer and visual artist Ron Liberti started hosting a Friday happy hour at the Cradle.

“Pipe went on tour, and Ron was like, ‘Trish, you do it,’” Mesigian says in the goofy voice she uses to quote herself and her friends. “Then he came back and started a happy hour at the [Local] 506. I was like, ‘Um, you’re competing with the happy hour you made me do while you were out of town?’”

Except for those Fridays, after the workday at Merge and dinner at Carrburritos, she would find herself marooned until late-night. “I wanted a place where, say, you wanted to have one drink after dinner but not stay out,” she says. “There was Hell and Henry’s. I guess Dead Mule opened around then, and Sticks & Stones was where Tyler’s is. But it was all 11 o’clock–y.”

As she worked on her business plan, she called Mark Dorosin, a civil rights lawyer who was the owner of Hell and a Carrboro alderman. He helped her enroll in a small-business training class and Carrboro’s revolving loan fund, which matched business owners’ investments.

“Mark was a tremendous mentor of mine,” Mesigian says. “He, as a Carrboro citizen, understood what I was going for, even though it was going to carve into his clientele. That’s why I went to him first. But we both knew that Carrboro could use places.”

“To be honest, I was humbled that she asked me for guidance,” Dorosin says. “I don’t believe in the scarcity model of anything, and OCSC was more intimate than Hell, which was loud and sprawling. It was a complementary vision, and I wanted to do anything I could to help.”

Dorosin also became a devoted customer, and “many years of High Life and Jameson later,” he’s impressed by how much the bar resembles Mesigian’s original vision.

“She really has built a community place,” he says. “She’s done fundraisers, been involved in local politics.”

Mesigian was also working at the Cradle in those days. She remembers calling up its owner, Frank Heath, as she pored over cash-flow analyses—but not so much to ask for advice as to share her brainstorms, she says.

“Now I look back and think if someone was calling me with the comments I was giving Frank,” she says, laughing. “‘Frank, I’m just here, and, like, I’m thinking keg beer is not the profit margin people say it is,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh my god, shut up!’”

When looking for locations, she prioritized proximity to the Cradle and a Carrboro zip code.

“If you went to the Cradle, you didn’t want to go backwards,” she says. “You wanted to start going home. So the flow was a part of it, being this way, in Carrboro.”

Mesigian makes opening a bar sound easy. She staked just $1,000 of her own money and a ton of time and labor and says she was able to repay loans from the town and her deeply encouraging parents within a year.

But then, this wasn’t a lavish endeavor from the very beginning. No architects or designers were hired. A friend named Andy McMillan did the plumbing; two others, Bart Moyers and Rob Young, built the bar. Most of the decor was purely sourced from the nearby PTA Thrift Shop. “That was in style,” Mesigian says. “Think about Friends Coffee shops were new, mix-match furniture, different color paint on the walls.”

The name Orange County Social Club was fated to be shortened, and it’s just as common to hear the bar called OCSC. Those two hissing trochees are fun to pronounce, like you’re about to start reciting “The Raven,” and they add a secret personal flourish to a sturdy, functional name.

Top: A colorful OCSC bar wall PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA, Middle: Ron Liberti’s portrait of Dean Smith PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA, Bottom: OCSC’s back patio in 2009 PHOTO BY RYAN JONES

Generally, the Ron Liberti painting of Dean Smith that covers the TV at OCSC comes off only when UNC basketball comes on. The picture has the word “consistency” written on it, a quiet motto.

“Dean Smith is known as one of the greatest all-time college basketball coaches, and his percentage was like 77 percent,” Mesigian says. “That’s a C. So that’s been our focus: do your thing, keep your head down, and not be flashy. We’ve got great rock clubs. We’ve got great restaurants. My niche is not being either but sitting in the cut and being a part of it.”

As the years roll by with lulling consistency, changes pass like wrinkles on a deep, heavy sea. Raising Pabst Blue Ribbon to $2, ten years ago, tormented Mesigian, though anything less, in the days of paper money, would have hurt tips. It remains $2 today. As the seasons turned, seasonal cocktails inevitably came to a place that once ran on bourbon and Coke, vodka and tonic. And the world briefly rocked on its axis when OCSC went nonsmoking in 2009, almost six months before the state smoking ban came down. Mesigian closed the bar, cleaned out the tar, and reopened just in time for Merge’s 20th-anniversary festival. The shock passed and the world went on, the smoke thickening on the patio.

A subtler change occurred about ten years ago, when the Cradle opened a second bar and stage in the back, where the main entrance had been moved. It became less of a straight shot to OCSC, and people often congregated in the back, after a show. There were also more options by that point, from Bowbarr to Belltree.

“Maybe it’s not the automatic place anymore,” Mesigian says. “People who weren’t in Carrboro then can’t picture what it was like. If you lived in Chapel Hill, it was Nowheresville. I’m also older, so I’m not at every Cradle show like, ‘Come down to my bar!’”

Jamie McPhail noticed the shift—and she would know, as she’s been tending bar at OCSC from the start. A former Hardback Cafe manager and Henry’s bartender, she was just back from maternity leave when Mesigian hired her 21 years ago.

To McPhail, the change that seemed most momentous was the elimination of the $5 memberships, last summer, with the passage of House Bill 768, which eliminated the membership fee requirement for bars making less than 30 percent of revenue from food and nonalcoholic beverages. So far, though, that hasn’t changed too much.

“There was accountability in being a member,” she said in a phone interview. “But it has been no problem. We’ve had lots of new people come in, and all of them have been awesome.”

Sure, there have been a few high jinks over the years. There was the morning Mesigian found a customer sleeping on the couch after passing out undetected in the bathroom the night before. There was the Halloween party where someone “put the poo in spooky” in the middle of the dance floor, as bartender Mac Welliver once quipped. But no one can remember there ever being a fight, and very few people have ever been ejected or banned.

The bar’s culture is like a self-cleaning fish tank. OCSC is not a secret, as Mesigian says, but it’s a secret until you know it.

“We have a lot of regulars, and they have our backs,” McPhail says. “I always feel safe and that somebody would alert me if anything bad was happening. But we really, really, really do not have problems, because we have customers here who wouldn’t let it happen.”

For the party, Mesigian is making T-shirts with the names of every staff member since the beginning listed on the back in a festival font that descends by length of tenure. There are only 33 names on the shirt, and the three names at the top of the shirt still work there.

“Everybody that has worked here would joke that I want, in the legend of their brain, to be the best boss they’ve ever had. I always want to win that award,” Mesi-

gian says. She laughs, then grows frank. “Having this space is super important and something I’m so proud of, but being a good boss brings me so much more pride. For real. I’m not bullshitting.”

A

dozen OCSC workers and patrons—the line blurs— recently met at the bar on a Sunday afternoon to reminisce and sing Mesigian’s praises. One of them, Tracy Swain, has a tattoo based on the coral honeysuckle vines that form part of the graceful canopy over the patio. Swain worked Saturday nights with Rebecca Mormino and Matt Neal in the bar’s first decade.

“When I think of that era, the difference between Friday and Saturday night makes me laugh,” Mormino says. “Friday was Lee [Waters], Jenny, and Jeff Clarke, and they were tight and on their shit, slinging drinks and doing crazy numbers. We were like the Bad News Bears. It took us three hours to close, with Matt counting the money 30 times.”

“Before we opened, I was convinced Trish was going to open an adult-themed place, like a topless bar,” Neal adds to general laughter, turning to Mesigian, who rolls her eyes. “I know you were joking, but you had me convinced.”

Bartenders Laura King and Mallory Carl are here, as is Kirk Ross, a longtime local newshound who plays in Lud. He was one of the first people Mesigian told about her vision, at one of those Liberti happy hours, where he told her he

“It had this beautiful graphic ring to me because I grew up going to Ocean City, New Jersey, and the lifeguards would wear OCBP for Ocean City Beach Patrol,” Mesigian says. “I was like, ‘I see it in lights!’”

Top: OCSC owner Trish Mesigian PHOTO BRETT VILLENA, Middle: The bar’s iconic membership cards PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA, Bottom: East Main Street before OCSC PHOTO BY MACK WATTS/COURTESY OF RICHARD ELLINGTON

Dean Smith is known as one of the greatest all-time college basketball coaches, and his percentage was like, 77 percent. That’s a C. So that’s been our focus: Do your thing, keep your head down, and not be flashy.

wanted membership number three.

“Asking for number one or two felt a lit tle greedy,” he says, deadpan as always. “I figured three was as far up as I could go.”

Years later, without further mention, Mesi gian handed him the card. He assembled his own barstool the first time he came, and he never really left after that.

Membership number one went to Sher wood Ward, Mesigian’s first landlord, whose wife, Jean Ward, fills the role now. Number two was Colin Dodd, who also worked here in the early years.

“I loved helping bands,” Dodd says to Mesigian, “and you opening this bar, ham mering the copper and all that, it felt like going on a band tour—a creative act we were all involved in.”

They all recall the relief of the smoking ban, even though most of them smoked.

“I was jealous because I had just quit,” Neal says. “‘Wait a minute, they’re all going to work in clean air?’”

“Glorious,” McPhail says.

“We did a big clean after, and it was, like, smoke running down the walls,” Swain adds.

“I replaced the light fixtures—oh god,” says George Nicholas, who never even worked there. “It’s hard for me to imagine this town without the bar. I don’t know if I would still be here without it.”

The only person who doesn’t remember this is Dylan Traister, who has spent six of their 27 years of life at the bar and one behind it.

“I really recognize the significance of this bar, and all these people are special to me because I was a regular before,” Traister says. “My dad frequented it when I was a kid, so I was really excited when I turned 21 and could become a part of it.”

Richard Stilwell and Billy Buckley—num bers two and three on the T-shirt—want ed to underscore that the pandemic had amplified exactly why people work here for so long.

“Trish, as a person and boss, really stepped up and took care of all the employ ees,” Buckley says. “She figured out all the unemployment stuff and put her time and energy into helping us navigate through that weirdness.”

“Most decisions are a forum,” McPhail says. “It’s not like Trish at the top tell ing us what to do. With the pandemic, we decided as a group when and how we wanted to reopen. We’re all very aware of working here and living in the com munity we live in. We know it’s not like this everywhere.”

And should this bar ever leave these old bricks, it won’t ever be like this again, so we take time to appreciate what we have and drink while we can. Cheers, OCSC. W

CULTURE CALENDAR

music

Blends With

Friends Wed, Oct. 5, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Snapback $5+. Wed, Oct. 5, 5:45 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

Alex G SOLD OUT. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

The Cactus Blossoms $17. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

The Ellipses $8. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

¡Fiesta en La Granja! Thurs, Oct. 6, 4 p.m. Old Mill Farm, Durham.

Mellow Swells Thurs, Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Nikki Lane $25+. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Shell of a Shell $10. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

3am Sound $10. Fri, Oct. 7, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Brandi Carlile: A Special Solo Performance $465+. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Brother Ali $20+. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Chainletter

Fri, Oct. 7, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Katt Williams: World War III Tour $90+. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Kirsten Lambert $10+. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Maxwell: The Night Tour $49+. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

The Mersiv: Experience Tour $20. Fri, Oct. 7, 9:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Steve Kimock & Friends $27. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Tyrone Wells $22. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Clem Snide / Jill Andrews $17. Sat, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

The Districts $15. Sat, Oct. 8, 9 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Father John Misty $30+. Sat, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Judah & the Lion: Happy Again Tour $38. Sat, Oct. 8, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Music at the Museum Festival Sat, Oct. 8, 4:30 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

The Petty Thieves: Tom Petty Tribute

$12. Sat, Oct. 8, 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Project X $10. Sat, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Red Nucleus Sat, Oct. 8, 5 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

Wild Rivers $26. Sat, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Caroline Rose

$20. Sun, Oct. 9, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

EddieFest $10. Sun, Oct. 9, 1:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

SayWeCanFly $15. Sun, Oct. 9, 7 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Tauren Wells $19+. Sun, Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

AJ Lee and Blue Summit $15. Tues, Oct. 11, 7:30 p.m. The Eno House, Hillsborough.

screen

art

Expresiones: El Futuro’s Fall Fundraiser and Art Auction

$75+. Sat, Oct.8, 6:30 p.m. The Rickhouse, Durham.

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris $8. Wed, Oct. 5, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

SplatterFlix Film Series $10+. Oct. 7-9, various times. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences with Live Q&A $13. Sat, Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Raleigh.

Gallery Talk: Allison

Zuckerman Thurs, Oct. 6, 6 p.m. The Nasher, Durham.

First Fridays Gallery

Premier Fri, Oct. 7, 6 p.m. Orange County Arts Commission, Hillsborough.

NCMA ReMixed Block Party

Sat, Oct. 8, 10 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

The Aftermath: Elizabeth Alexander Art Performance Sun, Oct. 9, 12 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Department of Humanity R&D: Stacey L. Kirby Art Performance

Sun, Oct. 9, 10 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Meet JP Jermaine Powell, NCMA Artist in Residence Sun, Oct. 9, 11 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Gov’t Mule $35+. Tues, Oct. 11, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Lucero $25. Tues, Oct. 11, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Mysti Mayhem Tues, Oct. 11, 7 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

Nunslaughter $10. Tues, Oct. 11, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Robert Finley $22. Tues, Oct. 11, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Sammy Rae & The Friends $25. Tues, Oct. 11, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Stan Comer Tues, Oct. 11, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

page Mary Llewellyn

McNeil: Century’s Witness Wed, Oct. 5, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Frances Mayes: A Place in the World Thurs, Oct. 6, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Kristina R. Gaddy: Well of Soul Thurs, Oct. 6, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Patti Meredith and Georgann Eubanks: Set in the South Sat, Oct. 8, 2 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Purified: Live Stories of Living through Purity Culture Sat, Oct. 8, 7 p.m. Hayti Heritage Center, Durham.

Ken Wetherington: Short Story Reading Artist in Residence Sun, Oct. 9, 2 p.m. Lilly Library, Durham.

Silas House: Lark Ascending Tues, Oct. 11, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

stage

ALL THE WAY $23. Oct. 7-23, various times. The Justice Theater Project, Raleigh.

Sunset Boulevard $55+. Oct. 10-15, various times. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

A Great Big Woolly Mammoth Thawing from the Ice $20. Sept. 29–Oct. 16, various times. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

Wanda Sykes $50+. Thurs, Oct. 6, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony Pops: Cirque Dances with Troupe Vertigo

$53+. Oct. 7-8, 8 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Why Not Theatre:

Prince Hamlet

$25. Fri, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill.

Trash Taste $43. Mon, Oct. 10, 8 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Sister Act $57+. Oct. 11-16, various times. Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh.

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

Robert Finley performs at Motorco Music Hall, Durham, October 11. PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO

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