Furnishing by Sherrill Furniture, Lillian August, Allstate Floral, Port 68, Signature Pillows, Precedent and hand-knotted rug from Pakistan.
47 a red blues for alma by Alexis Pauline Gumbs art by Alma Thomas
48 Ever After
Checking in with the faces of The Connells’ iconic music video, 50 years after Broughton by David Menconi
54 High Concept
Alan and Ben King’s art-filled downtown penthouse by Ayn-Monique Klahre photography by Abigail Jackson
62 Perfect Chemistry
Cheetie Kumar and Paul Siler’s recipe for success at Ajja by Catherine Currin photography by Baxter Miller
68 The Decoder Artist Steven Cozart by Colony Little photography by Joshua Steadman
Joshua Steadman
(STEVEN COZART); Taylor McDonald (LEDA FAZAL); Alex Boerner (MATT TALIAFERRO); Gerry O’Neill (TULIP)
JOIN US FOR OUR UPCOMING EVENTS
July 16
An Evening in Paris
An immersive, French-inspired event with art, beauty, aperitifs and more in celebration of author Jennifer Dasal’s The Club.
July 25
Book Club with James Dodson
Join author and columnist James Dodson to hear about The Road That Made America, a lively book that shares untold stories in our nation’s history.
September 6
WINnovation
At this celebration of leaders and innovation, hear from four accomplished local women. Plus: enjoy networking, professional workshops and more.
October 22
Taste of the Wild
Taste an exclusive menu from Prime
BBQ’s Christopher Prieto and Native Fine Diner chef Luke Owens that celebrates North Carolina food traditions and the joy of eating local.
WINnovation
EDITOR’S LETTER
Left to right: My x-ray after breaking a bone in my foot; a selfie in my go-to accessory for spring, my walking boot; with Laura and Addie at the North Carolina Governor’s Inaugural Ball (not pictured: the boot).
About a month ago, I fell asleep in my younger daughter’s bed after tucking her in. I woke around midnight and blearily headed downstairs to turn off the lights.
And — BAM! — I missed the last step. I landed hard on the side of my right foot, and was pretty sure I heard a little “crack” punctuating the thud of my body. Man, it hurt like heck. Feeling faint, I spent a few minutes lying on the floor before hobbling over to the freezer for an ice pack, then up to bed, hoping it’d feel better in the morning.
It did not. I was able to get an appointment at the orthopedic urgent care and discovered what I’d feared: I’d broken my fifth metatarsal bone clean through. They sent me out on crutches with an Aircast walking on my foot, with instructions to wear it all day (and night), every day for the next six to eight weeks. And because it was my right foot, I was also instructed not to drive during that time.
The crutches were a real pain. Not just because they were uncomfortable on my armpits and palms, but because I couldn’t carry anything with my hands occupied. Inside our home, that meant no tidying shoes in the hallway or moving water glasses from the coffee table to the kitchen. At the office (once my chauffeur/husband Josh dropped me off), that meant
my coworkers would help me carry my lunch bag to the fridge or computer to the conference room for meetings.
Fortunately, I was off the crutches after a week, but the boot stayed on. Josh (on a trip with the girls to the mall, bless him) found me a pair of sneakers with a little platform in them to even out my stride. I leaned hard on my village for transportation, actually taking my coworkers up on rides to and from the office and triangulating an army of friends for sporting and school events. When Josh traveled out of town, my parents came down to help. I attempted to find the right balance between giving directions and backseat driving as we shuttled between practices, games, performances, carpool and all the other activities of two busy tweens.
Hopefully, by the time you read this, I’ll be footloose and fancy free, back to wearing all the lovely shoes in my closet. But I’m certain I’ll still be grateful to my village — Josh, my parents, my coworkers, my friends — for helping me navigate this unexpected, disruptive chapter.
Ayn-Monique Klahre Editor
JUNE 2025
PUBLISHER
DAVID WORONOFF
EDITORIAL
Editor
AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE ayn-monique@waltermagazine.com
Creative Director
LAURA PETRIDES WALL laura@waltermagazine.com
Associate Editor
ADDIE LADNER addie@waltermagazine.com
Contributing Poetry Editor Jaki Shelton Green
Contributing Copy Editor Finn Cohen
Contributing Writers
Catherine Currin, Jim Dodson, Mike Dunn, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Abigail Jakcons, Susanna Klingenberg, Colony Little, David Menconi, Courtney Napier, CC Parker, Liza Roberts, Rachel Simon, Helen Yoest
Contributing Photographers
Alex Boerner, Samantha Everette, Juli Leonard, Taylor McDonald, Baxter Miller, Joshua Steadman
JACK ANDREWS, FRANK DANIELS III, DAVID WORONOFF In memoriam FRANK DANIELS JR.
GENERAL Inquiries
WALTER OFFICE 984-286-0928 info@waltermagazine.com
Address all correspondence to: WALTER magazine, 421 Fayetteville Street, Suite 104 Raleigh, N.C. 27601
WALTER is available by paid subscriptions for $36 a year in the United States, as well as select rack and advertiser locations throughout the Triangle. Subscribe online at waltermagazine.com/subscribe
For subscription and customer service inquiries, please email us at customerservice@waltermagazine.com or call 984-286-0928. WALTER does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Please contact Ayn-Monique Klahre at ayn-monique@waltermagazine.com for freelance guidelines.
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Thirteen masterfully designed cottages meticulously crafted by Williams Realty & Building Company, blend classic charm with modern sophistication, offering a unique opportunity for effortless living. The Cottages at Budleigh East is a rarity in both development and locale. 13 cottages I +/- 2,000 square feet I 3
CONTRIBUTORS
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS / POET
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Black feminist writer and scholar based in Durham. Gumbs has been honored with a WindhamCampbell Prize in Poetry among other awards and most recently wrote Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Her forthcoming book, Primary, consists of poems and essays in response to the work of the late visual artist Alma Thomas. “Thomas was born in 1891 outside Columbus, Georgia, where due to segregation she could not step foot in an art museum. She went on to be the first graduate of the Howard University Art Department and the first Black woman to have a solo show in the Whitney Museum of American Art. But before all that, she was the oldest child in her family, who grieved the loss of a younger sister to diphtheria.”
DAVID MENCONI / WRITER
When David Menconi moved to Raleigh in 1991 to take the musiccritic job at The News & Observer, one of the few North Carolina records he owned was The Connells’ Boylan Heights (named after the downtown neighborhood where he lived). He’s written about them countless times since, most notably about their time-traveling “‘74-‘75” video — updated here for the 50-year anniversary of Broughton High School’s class of 1975, the stars of the video.
BAXTER MILLER / PHOTOGRAPHER
Baxter Miller is obsessed with restaurants. Lucky for her, she’s been making bold, high-key images in, around, about and involving them for a decade. That’s a good fortune for someone who learned how to cook by shooting a cookbook. She often craves a vantage point from above, which makes tabletop work especially exciting. “I could eat and shoot for the rest of my life at the delicious Wes Andersonish fever dream that Cheetie and Paul have created and never get bored. That’s a testament to the creative brilliance of two people at the top of their game and the remarkable team that surrounds them at Ajja. Raleigh is richer for their vision.”
SAMANTHA EVERETTE / PHOTOGRAPHER
Samantha Everette is an artist, designer, traveler and photographer with a passion for capturing her clients’ best light — inside and out. After a decade designing shoes across Asia, she turned her lens to people, celebrating individual beauty and helping subjects shine. Her goal? For everyone in front of her camera to leave brighter, bolder and more in love with their own light. “Photographing the Stagville plantation is always a powerful experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to help preserve its history through my lens.”
FEEDBACK
We received several comments about Jenn Hales’ cover illustration of the poem “A Song”...
“Nice design to crop the picture so the dark surprise can be discovered inside the magazine. Beautiful!”
— Paul Jones
“I love the WALTER cover for this month, and the poem. Amazing!”
— Patrick Casey
At a recent Artspace event, April cover star, visual artist Patrizia Ferreira, was asked to sign a copy of WALTER.
“Thank you so much for the incredible feature. We are delighted to showcase this beautiful relationship between farm and cuisine.”
— THe Umstead Team
“I enjoyed learning more about these beautiful places of worship that I’ve admired on my former work commute to and from downtown.”
— Caprice McNeill, on “Houses of Worship”
OUR TOWN
School’s out! Catch up on outdoor movies and music, Juneteenth celebrations, Pride month and summer sports.
JUST PEACHY Did you know that only a single gene distinguishes a peach from its fuzz-free cousin, the nectarine? “The nectarine could be viewed as a mutant of a peach,” says Dr. Mike Parker, a tree-fruit specialist and professor at North Carolina State University. Our state harvests nearly 4 million pounds of peaches a year, and NC State researchers and breeders have developed about 20 of the 40-plus varieties grown here. The Contender is one of Parker’s favorites. This sweet, tangy, yellow-fleshed fruit is one of the first peaches to mature each year. “The bright, big flavor just hits you at the first bite,” he says. Others include the China Pearl, a white-fleshed fruit with a subtle flavor owing to its high sugar content paired with a lower acid, and the Carolina Gold, a bolder, yellow-fleshed peach that is late-maturing — meaning you can enjoy it deep in the summer. (Much of NC State’s research into peaches goes toward extending the growing season, since peaches have such a short shelf life.) “The best peaches come from local growers, in the summer. Nothing compares in taste,” says Parker. Find a list of local markets and roadside stands at waltermagazine.com. — Addie Ladner
Juli Leonard
Join us all year as we crafting not just meals, our success to the unwavering our team and loyalty
Each month we will feature recipe from the Barn’s June 27 we will celebrate 60s style at the Angus
Happy 65th Anniversary to The Angus Barn!
FRIDAY, JUNE
Join us as we celebrate 65 years of crafting not just meals, but memories. We are grateful for the dedication of our team and the loyalty of our customers.
Come celebrate our anniversary 60’s style at the Angus Barn Pavilion!
FRIDAY, JUNE 27TH, 6:00-10:00PM
Limited tickets on sale , via the QR code or Angus Barn website
• 6:00pm-10:00pm
Angus Barn Anniversary at our Pavilion
Fabulous food stations serving AB Classics, both past & music with a flair from the past with Mid-Life Crisis Band
DATEBOOK
WALTER’s list of things to see, do and experience this month.
by ADDIE LADNER and EMMIE BROOKS
GIPSON PLAY PLAZA OPENING CELEBRATION
June 6 - 8 | Various times
After years of planning and construction, the Gipson Play Plaza — an exciting new part of Dorothea Dix Park — is finally open! This 18-acre recreational area offers something for everyone, including natural play spaces, a waterfall, picnic areas, terraces, a sensory maze, multiple water features and views of our city’s skyline. To celebrate, Dix Park is hosting three days of fun, including a ribbon cutting, kids activities, morning yoga sessions, lawn games, live music and more. Be among the first to experience the largest public recreational park in our region, a place that’s sure to become a Raleigh landmark. Free; 715 Biggs Drive; dorotheadixpark.org
RALEIGH GREEK FEST
May 30 - June 1 | Various times
Opa! Support the Greek Orthodox community here in the Triangle by attending the 41st annual Raleigh Greek Festival. This gathering of food, live entertainment, shopping and camaraderie is for the entire family. The Jim Graham Building on the NC State Fairgrounds will be transformed into a Mediterranean escape through the smells of homemade Greek food, colorful backdrops and music. Shoppers might enjoy the Bazaar, where you can buy Greek specialties like olive oil, textiles and art. Little ones will love the Kids Corner for games and crafts, and foodies will particularly enjoy the Baklava Ice Cream Station. Kids under 13 are free of charge. $5; 1025 Blue Ridge Road; raleighgreekfestival.com
THEATREFEST 2025
June 1 - 22 | Various times
Come June, North Carolina State University is the place to be for theater lovers! TheatreFest is a celebration of all things theater-related, from acting to scripts to props to lighting. The event includes a variety of plays, script-writing workshops and a block party at the end. Catch performances like the classic murder mystery Dial M for Murder (May 29 - June 15; Kennedy-McIlwee Studio Theatre) or the romantic thriller Blithe Spirit (June 12 - 22; Titmus Theatre), or take a stab at being a director, a writer or even an actor at QuickSCRIPTS, a fast-paced evening of 10-minute, interactive plays produced with audience participation (June 21). The fun wraps up with the Theatre FESTival, a free gathering in
Thompson Hall full of themed crafts, music and more. Various prices; 2241 Dunn Avenue; theatre.arts.ncsu.edu
MUSIC BINGO
Tuesdays | 7 p.m.
How hard are you willing to flex your brain for free beer? At Ponysaurus Brewing Co., music lovers can test their knowledge of songs they remember from the ‘70s or ‘80s during Music Bingo. The winner of each round earns a token to redeem for a pint of beer. Free to play; 2221 Iron Works Drive, Suite 100; ponysaurusbrewing.com
THE SOCCER TOURNAMENT
June 4 - 9 | Various times
Part high-stakes soccer tournament, part festival, The Soccer Tournament offers six days of intense play, with
All information is accurate as of press time, but please check waltermagazine.com and the event websites for the latest updates.
Now Open
more than 60 teams playing 130-plus matches, all to win a million-dollar prize (given to both the women’s and men’s winning teams). Expect star players from major teams like European clubs Borussia Dortmund, Wrexham AFC (the team owned by actor Ryan Reynolds), AFC Bournemouth, West Ham United and more. In between all the exciting soccer matches, enjoy pop-up shops, youth soccer activations, autograph signings and international food options. From $20; 101 Soccer Park Drive, Cary; tst7v7.com
UNC HEALTH SUMMERFEST
Fridays & Saturdays | 8 p.m.
World-class symphonic sounds will be drifting through the pines at Koka Booth Amphitheatre this month when UNC Health Summerfest returns. This summertime tradition from the North Carolina Symphony offers a captivating lineup of classical favorites and contemporary music of various genres. This month’s schedule offers plenty of options to enjoy incredible music in the breezy, shaded amphitheater, including romantic French tunes (June 6), disco jams (June 7), tropical rock (June 14) and Mozart (June 21). From $33; 8003 Regency Parkway, Cary; ncsymphony.org
GAME AND GEEK EXPO
June 7 & 8 | Various times
Calling all gamers and fans of geek culture! For two days, the Raleigh Convention Center will be a gathering place to celebrate your favorite old-school video games, shop for vintage Pokémon cards or connect with fellow cosplay fans. Founded by Raleigh native Jeff Thomas, the Game and Geek Expo will feature arcade games, tournaments, pop culture exhibits, industry panel discussions and even an after-hours party with music and dancing. From $35; 500 S. Salisbury Street; raleighretrogamers.com
THE BLACK KEYS
June 12 | 7:30
The Black Keys — a band known for its gritty blend of blues, garage rock and
Drop into a Boys & Girls Club on any weeknight, and you’ll encounter a hive of activity. Sneakers squeak on the basketball court, the hum of homework and art projects fills classrooms and kids chat with mentors about everything from TV to college applications. It’s a child-centered space, a place to feel safe, seen and supported. But maintaining this atmosphere requires a robust business behind the scenes. That’s where Matt Taliaferro works his magic as the CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Wake and Johnston Counties. Taliaferro joined the nonprofit last August after 19 years in corporate roles at Johnson & Johnson and Walmart, plus five years at the Boys & Girls Clubs in Benton County, Arkansas. He brings
WHAT IF?
Local Boys & Girls Club
CEO Matt Taliaferro reflects on the organization’s impact and vision
as told to SUSANNA KLINGENBERG photography by ALEX BOERNER
not only business acumen to the job, but also well-seasoned ambition and vision. He’s got Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t on his nightstand and his favorite question (“What if?”) at the ready to spark discussion. We spoke to him about his new-ish role, the legacy he’s building on and what the future holds.
WHAT’S THE MISSION OF THE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB?
I like to say the mission’s in the name. We’re here to support the growth and development of youth in our community — especially those who need us most to achieve their full potential. We offer after-school care and programming to area families for under $10 a year.
WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE?
We have 10 clubs across Wake County and Johnston County that are open every day after school. In those places, kids from kindergarten to 18 get what they need to succeed. We help them thrive in school, take care of their physical and mental wellness, build character and leadership traits, learn life skills and plan what’s next. Then — and this is key — we provide caring adult mentors who want these kids to succeed and tell them so. One caring adult and one conversation can change the trajectory of a child’s life. Over 50% of our alumni say a Boys & Girls Club saved their life. I’m so honored to be part of that.
SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A WIDE IMPACT. We sure do. We serve about 1,000 kids
Matt Taliaferro
a day. They’re the center of our focus, but the impact reaches beyond them. Without the after-school support of the Boys & Girls Club, many of the parents of these kids couldn’t work. They need a place for their kids to play while they support their families. Those jobs, in turn, support their communities. There’s a ripple effect.
WHAT
INSPIRED THE MOVE FROM MARKETING TO NONPROFIT WORK?
I worked in the for-profit world for 19 years; 10 at Johnson & Johnson and nine at Walmart. I also spent a lot of time volunteering for the Boy Scouts — both of my boys are Eagle Scouts — so I was already passionate about supporting youth development programs.
As part of my last role at Walmart, I worked with the Walmart Foundation to run their food insecurity program and disaster relief. It opened my eyes to the nonprofit world and how much good can be done. And at some point, I felt God put me on this Earth to do something more than sell widgets! I needed a change.
After I left Walmart, a friend called and said that the Boys & Girls Club was looking for a CEO. I jumped at the chance! It was the best decision I’ve ever made.
YOU CAME IN WITH BIG SHOES TO FILL. TELL ME ABOUT THE LEGACY RALPH CAPPS LEFT YOU.
I don’t know if I can do it justice! Ralph was CEO for 50 years, nearly the entire time we’ve had Boys & Girls Clubs in Wake County. He devoted his life to this organization, growing it from one small Boys Club into what we have now and building an incredible board of directors along the way. Though I never had the chance to meet him, I’m slowly getting to know him well, because he left me all of his notebooks. Ralph wrote down everything. All his notes, all his speeches, all his stories. He knew how to tell a story!
Ralph had so much passion for this organization and he set the bar very, very high. He demanded excellence in everything the organization did. My goal is just to take this legacy he built and begin to take it to the next level.
YOU SAY RALPH WAS A STORYTELLER, BUT I BET YOU ARE TOO. WHAT’S A STORY THAT HAS STUCK WITH YOU?
My first month on the job here, I spent an hour or so helping a little girl with her homework at one of our clubs. She couldn’t read, and she was really struggling with it. Later, I asked a staff person, what’s her story? It turns out that it was her first day there. She and her mom had been living out of their car. Her mom had a job, but they were struggling to find a place to live. No kid should have to experience that kind of uncertainty.
For this child and her mother to move forward, she first needed to be safe and welcomed. She needed focused academic help. She needed a place to feel secure and seen. To go from that initial situation — homeless, scared and struggling in school — to see her thriving now, that’s what keeps me going. It’s one thing to talk about the club’s impact as a whole, but when you see it on a little child’s face, it hits differently.
HOW DOES YOUR MARKETING BACKGROUND SHAPE YOUR APPROACH?
I think marketers are innately curious, and like you said, we’re storytellers. Part of my job here is to tell the story of the Boys & Girls Club, to help folks understand the impact that we have. Those stories lead to relationships with the community, my board, my staff, elected
officials, donors and volunteers. We can’t do what we do without their support.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE CLUBS?
We’re in the middle of a new building and a new strategic plan, so we’re dreaming a bit, asking What if? There are three things we want to build up.
First, our country is in the midst of a youth mental-health crisis. We need to meet kids where they are, identify signs of trauma and get kids the help they need. But we currently only have one social worker for 10 Clubs — can we expand resources there?
Second, I’d like to build out the workforce readiness aspect of what we do. We have a great relationship with Wake Tech Community College, and now I want to connect with industry leaders. Can we create internships, or a pipeline? Our new marketing tagline is “America Needs Club Kids.” And it’s true — we’re giving these kids the skills they need to be successful.
Last thing: we want to serve as many kids as we possibly can. We currently serve 1,000 a day. Can it be 1,500? 2,000?
YOU’RE DREAMING BIG.
Of course! I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world to have this job. And I want to make it matter.
THis interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Leda Fazal
In the five years since opening Tone Hair Salon in North Raleigh, owner and lead stylist Leda Fazal had mastered numerous skills: handling curls, touching up roots, even installing hair extensions using an original method so effective it earned her a patent. But on the day in 2021 that a woman with a “helmet” of matted hair walked into the salon and requested help, Fazal found herself at a rare loss for what to do.
“It was a huge mat — I’d never seen it before,” says Fazal. “I didn’t even know that existed.”
Matting is when hair gets so tangled that it fuses together into a tight, thick mass. At the time, the condition wasn’t on most people’s radars, despite being an all-too-common occurrence. Part of the reason was stigma: the lack of brushing that causes the hair condition is often a result of disability or depression, as was the case for this woman. Fazal remembers her client crying as she explained she’d gone to seven other salons to try to fix her hair, but was told by all of them that they’d have to totally shave her head.
CUTS WITH CARE
Leda Fazal’s careful, shame-free treatment of matted hair has made her a viral sensation
by RACHEL SIMON
photography
by TAYLOR MCDONALD
Fazal and her team didn’t agree with those other assessments. “My assistant at the time was like, Leda, I think we can get this out,” she recalls. Over the course of nearly five hours, with great patience, the duo untangled the mat — without having to sacrifice any of the client’s strands.
“When I tell you she had the most beautiful hair — we were like, thank God we didn’t shave it,” Fazal says. Afterwards, the client “was in tears, she was so happy.”
That kind of moving experience now happens frequently at Tone, a salon that’s become known for its skill in dematting, in large part to Fazal’s major social media presence. Over the past several years, she has posted thousands of videos showcasing her “judgment-free” dematting (including live feeds) on TikTok and YouTube, collectively earning more than 3 million followers. Part of the videos’ popularity is their uniqueness: many viewers have never seen matted hair before, let alone the process of detangling it. But much of the reason is actually the opposite — familiarity. “People comment, this happened to me
and I had to shave it, this happened to me and I was depressed, this happened to me and I was bedridden,’” Fazal says.
Matting can happen in a matter of days or weeks. It’s often a consequence of mental illness, physical injury or (as Fazal often finds) time spent in a hospital bed. Unfortunately, the dematting process can be very slow, taking upwards of nine or 10 hours (not counting the frequent day-long wait beforehand, after oil is applied to soften the hair enough to be worked on). Depending on the case, as many as four stylists might be working on a client at once, all using specialized dematting combs with extra-sharp, serrated blades designed to get through even the toughest knots without harming skin. “It’s not a day at the spa; there is some tugging and pulling,” admits Fazal. But the relief it can bring often overshadows any pain. “Every time someone leaves,” she says, “it’s tears, from both the stylist and the client.”
Few other salons nationwide specialize in dematting like Tone does; many opt to cut large chunks of hair off rather than put the work in to detangle. “I see those and go, what are you doing?! It could’ve been saved!” Fazal says with dismay. “It just takes patience.”
Despite her aptitude for it, the salon owner never intended to end up in the dematting business, or even in hair styling at all. After moving to Raleigh from New York as a teen, she attended William Peace University (then the women-only Peace College) to study communications and computer science. Unsure of her career path, she took a bartending gig post-graduation before following in a friend’s footsteps at hair school.
“I’ve always loved art, and hair is art on a person,” Fazal recalls thinking. “I was like, this sounds good, I’m gonna try it out, and if it doesn’t work out, I have my degrees.”
After a few years assisting at a local salon, she decided to open her own shop. “I feel like I was meant to be an entrepreneur,” she says. For over a decade, she freelanced in a small North Raleigh office space, gaining enough client loyalty to make rent. In 2016, when the air conditioning went out and her landlord refused to pay, Fazal decided to take matters into her own hands by buying the bottom floor of the building just two doors down. Seven years later, she bought the top floor, too, turning Tone into the large two-level salon and office space it is today.
That’s an understatement. On a recent Monday afternoon, the salon was packed to the brim with customers, despite its remote location on Salem Woods Drive. Many clients, Fazal says, fly to Tone from other states, having heard about the salon’s reputation from social media. Fazal started posting on TikTok in the app’s early days back in 2018, and she made her first viral video — a short, silly clip featuring her and an assistant listing common things clients said in the salon — a year later.
“I had 17 followers at the time and most of them were my son’s friends,” Fazal says. “Overnight, literally, I had 10,000 followers.”
“It’s not a day at the spa; there is some tugging and pulling. But the relief it can bring often overshadows any pain.” — LEDA FAZAL
Wanting to capitalize on that success, she began posting at least five times a day, sharing videos featuring Fazal herself performing Tone’s specialty of color corrections or her patented Swan Method of installing hair extensions. When the salon briefly closed in spring 2020 due to the pandemic, Fazal pivoted to at-home clips of hair-bleaching techniques; by the time Tone reopened its doors that summer, she’d gained over 400,000 followers.
Between managing the business’ social media and working as a stylist, Fazal was already happily overscheduled when the salon’s dematting services took off a year later. But after she posted that first video of a client in need, “the floodgates opened,” she recalls. Now, “we get calls every day.”
Fazal admits that the purchase was risky for a solo businesswoman, but she had far more confidence than doubt. “I went in being like, you know, even if it’s just me, I’ll be OK,” she recalls. “But I was able to grow my team, and now we’re just killing it, honestly.”
When a potential client requests a dematting, Fazal and her team “move mountains to make it happen” due to how quickly mats can grow. “If somebody books now, we’re not gonna tell them that we have an opening in two months. We’re gonna move clients and make it work, because it’s crucial. It’s a time thing.” That sense of urgency, plus the hours needed for even several stylists to untangle one bad case, can be exhausting.
Two before and afters of Fazal’s clients.
Walking Through HISTORY
Stagville offers an immersive look into North Carolina’s complex past
In 1776, the Continental Congress declared the colonies’ independence from England, and Virginia merchant turned prominent Orange County businessman Richard Bennehan purchased 1,213 acres of land from a local widow named Judith Stag. A member of North Carolina’s political elite, Bennehan owned 24 humans by 1790, more than anyone else in Orange County. Those incredibly skilled laborers and artisans built the home that still stands in the center of what is now the Stagville Plantation Historical Site.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the home is an exceptional representation of the architecture of the time: Stagville… is a restrained late Georgian plantation house, with exterior
and interior finish combining a stylistically conservative retention of robust Georgian forms of excellent craftsmanship.
The house is situated at the end of a drive that leads from the entrance signage of the historic site on Old Oxford Highway. Across the road, down an even longer drive within the 150-acre historic area, lies the plantation area known as Horton Grove.
Here stand two similar homes. Each displays a far more modest — though no less skilled — version of the craftsmanship seen in the structure now referred to as the Bennehan House. Horton’s Grove is where the enslaved families of Stagville lived, and where the Holden slave quarters still stand over 200 years later. Unlike the cabins and
by COURTNEY NAPIER
photography by SAMANTHA EVERETTE
Exterior and interior of the Bennehan House.
shanties we often see in pictures from the era, the Holden slave quarters are two-story buildings that represent “the pinnacle of slave house development and include shuttered windows, multiple stories, brick chimneys and raised stone foundations,” according to the nomination form for the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s hard not to picture the Bennehan House when standing before the Holden slave quarters: same bones, but stripped of any adornment that might celebrate its skillful design.
What is hard is to envision that as many as four families inhabited this house at the same time, dozens of people squeezed into a space smaller than the one occupied by just one family on the same property.
This is the power of Stagville, where well-preserved structures and straightforward tours invite visitors to contemplate our area’s past as they walk through its forested grounds.
By 1860, the Bennehans’ daughter Rebecca had married Hillsborough lawyer Duncan Cameron, and their family would eventually acquire landholdings larger than the size of San Francisco. They enslaved hundreds of humans who were forced to work the land through physical violence and political disenfranchisement. According to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the Bennehan-Cameron family were unlike typical plantation owners who worked the land alongside the enslaved — they operated a massive industrial complex more like a city than a farm. “Their mutual holdings,” the NCDNCR website says, “included multiple outbuildings, stores, mills, blacksmith shops, tanneries and distilleries and approximately 900 slaves.” The Bennehan-Cameron family were politicians, university trustees and real estate magnates who used the unpaid labor of blacksmiths, farmers, brick masons, carpenters and skilled domestic workers to run their corporation and maintain their economic abundance.
In 1865, two years after the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation freed one in three North Carolinians from bondage, Union and Confederate soldiers clashed on Stagville’s grounds. Tour guides teach the details of the fall and dissolution of the Stagville Plantation, bringing to life the months following emancipation by weaving well-known historical moments into the personal stories of the laborers facing the impossible choice of remaining at the only place they’ve ever known, or building a new free life elsewhere.
While half of Stagville’s enslaved families fled after emancipation, hundreds stayed behind. Families continued to live and work as sharecroppers at Stagville into the 1970s, two decades after the Bennehan-Camerons sold their last land shares to the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company. In 1976, Liggett & Myers partnered with the newly formed Historic Stagville Preservation Society of Durham to donate the first 71 acres of land to the state, making the original buildings that remained on the site eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
There was the intention that the land would become an educational space, yet members of the Stagville Center struggled with how to tell the land’s
story, with the earliest efforts centered on the white family’s narrative.
In 1985, the Center hired historian Alice Eley Jones as its new site manager. Stepping into the role, Jones noticed that while the Center was committed to teaching visitors about the institution of slavery, Stagville presented little information about the families that labored on the land for over 100 years. During her tenure, Jones went into Durham and surrounding towns to connect with descendants of the enslaved at Stagville, learn their stories and bring them back to incorporate that research into programming and tours. One such shift was to create a guided tour of Horton Grove (previously there had only been guided tours of the Bennehan House). Another important addition was sharing the story of Mary Eliza Walker, one of only three enslaved African Americans to successfully escape from the plantation (a narrative Jones later immortalized through an American Girl book series).
In 2003, Stagville launched The Family Tree Project, a genealogy project and exhibition within the Stagville Visitors Center that helped people discover whether their ancestors were
The Holden slave quarters.
among the enslaved people who had worked there. The Family Tree database, along with a document of over 300 pages, contains the names of formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants collected through research and community engagement. Site staff assist descendants and family historians with research, coordinating visits, developing materials for family reunions and digitizing documents and photographs.
In 2019, Durham native Vera Cecelski took over the role of site manager after volunteering as a tour guide for four years. “I have deep North Carolina roots, which include being a descendant of Confederates and slaveholders,” she says. “But I learned nothing of Stagville in my childhood.” She continues Jones’ legacy of forging meaningful bonds with Stagville’s descendant community and has also focused on expanding Stagville’s programming to encompass the natural spaces surrounding the site’s historic structures. “I want everyone who lives and works in this part of North Carolina to see the history of Stagville as part of their community’s history, part of our shared past,” says Cecelski.
Cecelski has leaned into existing partnerships with local land-based organizations, such as Catawba Trail Farm and Triangle Land Conservancy, to create opportunities for descendants and residents to garden, forage and hike — to connect with the land at will and in freedom. The Horton Grove Nature Preserve, which was created in 2012 by the Triangle Land Conservancy, spans 708 acres of land that overlap with the Historic Stagville site. The two organizations have worked together to honor the families who inhabited Horton Grove by naming each of the eight hiking trails on the site after them and sharing their stories with visitors. In August 2023, TLC and Historic Stagville hosted members of the Sowell-Shaw family at Horton Grove to unveil a new bench and learning library along the Sowell Trail.
Today, Cecelski and Stagville’s staff and
volunteers continue to focus on sharing the site’s complex history, centering the narrative on the people who labored at Stagville and securing the site’s future for generations to come. The Historic Stagville Foundation, established in 1978, is now the nonprofit arm of the Historic Stagville site, organizing fundraisers, volunteer opportunities and community engagement events. Cecelski is also working to reimagine Stagville’s programming and educational offerings, incorporating the land between the historic buildings on the site. Plans include a new $4 million visitor center that will sit on Hortons Grove, a continuation of Jones’ work of centering the experience of the enslaved at Stagville. Stagville also became an official Site of Conscience in 2020, joining a global collective of historic sites dedicated to sharing and displaying complex histories for the betterment of humankind. “That coalition is an important part of how we frame the work that we do, and also how we connect with and learn from sites that hold other painful and traumatic histories,” says Cecelski.
In June, Stagville will host its 19th
annual Juneteenth celebration. Nearly 100 descendants and visitors from across the country make a pilgrimage to Stagville each year to celebrate how far we’ve come since their ancestors left their only home to build a life as free human beings. Festivities include music, storytelling, tours and connection with the Family Tree Project. “We focused this program on inviting folks to hear stories about what emancipation was like on the ground for real people who were living through these first days of freedom,” says Cecelski. In July, Stagville hosts an annual reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, a reflection of the complexities of America’s Declaration of Independence.
Cecelski says that attending events and sharing them with friends is the best way to support Historic Stagville and its work. “It means an incredible amount for our site to have folks come here and bring students from their school, their book club, their faith group — whatever it might be,” she says. “When we tell the full truth of these stories, folks listen. They connect and they engage.”
Visitors look at photos of Stagville residents and their descendants.
We’re excited to unveil The Clubhouse, the stunning centerpiece of our reimagined campus, featuring beautifully designed one-, two-, and three-bedroom penthouse residences. It’s senior living reimagined – where every detail is tailored to elevate your expectations.
Turtle-y Awesome NATURE
Eastern box turtles are a native species with shells as distinct as thumbprints
words and photographs by
MIKE DUNN
In all likelihood, you’ve been in this classic scenario: You’re driving down the road and see a turtle attempting to cross. Do you stop?
What I do is often dictated by the other circumstances: Is it a country road with little traffic or a busy highway? How far across the road is the turtle? How risky is it to try to pull over? There is not always an easy answer, but whenever it seems safe enough, I do try to stop. I’ll pull well off the side of the road, turn on my flashers and move the turtle to the side of the road in the direction it was traveling. That last part is very important — unless it’s unsafe to cross the road, place the turtle on the side of the road to which it was headed. They are determined little creatures! If you take them back to where they came from, they’ll try to cross the road again.
The most common species we “rescue” in our area is the Eastern box turtle. They can typically grow to be 4 to 8 inches in shell length as adults and have a more highly domed top of the shell (carapace)
than other species of local turtles. The bottom of the shell (plastron) is hinged and provides the box turtle with its unique form of defense from predators: it can completely close the plastron (like a tight “box”) leaving no part of its body exposed. (Unfortunately, that does not protect the turtle from threats like automobiles.)
The shell color of the Eastern box turtle is variable, but usually is mostly brown with a yellow or orange pattern. Each box turtle has a unique carapace pattern, much like our fingerprints. Over the last few years, at the suggestion of our friend Jerry, I have been photographing the shells of any box turtle we rescue or find while we are out walking. After taking several photos, I realized I should be taking a shot from directly above the turtle to make them easier to compare with one another.
Of the 14 box turtles I have photographed in the past couple of years within walking distance of our house, there have been only two repeats. That means we have had at least 12 individual turtles in the woods along our half-mile stretch of neighborhood road the past few years, which is a pretty good number considering these turtles tend to have a small home range, consisting of only a few acres.
I also record the sex of each turtle (it would be useful and fun to record their length as well, but I never have a measuring device with me). Male box turtles tend to have brighter coloration on their skin and bright red or orange eyes while females’ eyes are usually brown. Males have stout curved claws on their rear legs. The plastron of a male box turtle is concave (with a “dent” in it) that comes in handy during breeding, allowing the male to mount the carapace of the female. Females usually have a flat bottom shell. For both sexes, the shell is covered with a layer of protective plates called scutes.
The scutes show the distinctive colors and patterns of the turtle and are made of keratin, same as our fingernails and hair.
Above: A male box turtle. Below: A baby Eastern box turtle in my hand.
Unlike many aquatic turtles, box turtles do not shed their scutes as they grow. Instead, the scutes continue to grow as the turtle does and form growth rings, much like a tree. The rings are indicative of periods of growth and do not necessarily correspond to years. Unlike what I am experiencing as I get older — more and more wrinkles! — a box turtle’s shell tends to get smoother with age, as the ridges get worn. And unlike the cartoons I watched as a kid — where a turtle would crawl out of its shell— a turtle’s shell is actually part of its body; the ribs and backbone are fused to the shell as part of the turtle’s skeleton.
Box turtles are active from spring through fall in our area. In winter, they bury themselves in the soil or leaf litter and enter a period of lower metabolic rate and inactivity called brumation. Mature females excavate a nest in the spring by using their hind legs to dig a small hole in the soil. One June morning several years ago, I found a female digging a nest at the edge of our yard. I watched her for over an hour before I had to leave. When I returned a few hours later, she was gone and had camouflaged the nest site by scraping soil and leaves over it.
Females can store sperm for several years, giving them the advantage that they don’t need to mate every year to produce offspring. They usually lay two to six eggs, which hatch in a few months, although some may overwinter and hatch the next spring. Baby box turtles are a little bigger
than a quarter and are targeted by a variety of predators, from raccoons to birds and snakes. It takes a few years for the hinge on the plastron to develop, making them even more vulnerable as juveniles. Because of this, they are quite secretive and seldom seen.
Eastern box turtles have a varied diet including fruits, seeds, mushrooms (even ones poisonous to us), carrion and many small invertebrates like earthworms, snails and slugs. They are thought to be important spore and seed dispersers for fungi and certain wildflowers, especially Mayapple. Apparently, passing through the gut of a box turtle greatly enhances the germination success of Mayapple seeds!
Another amazing thing about Eastern box turtles is their longevity. It may take five to 10 years to reach sexual maturity, and they regularly live over 50 years — some have even been known to live well past 100! Unfortunately, Eastern box turtle populations are declining, due primarily to human activities including collection as pets, casualties from vehicles and lawn mowers, and habitat loss and fragmentation due to development. Though they are long-lived, the fact that they are slow to mature, lay relatively few eggs and experience high predation rates on eggs and young makes them vulnerable.
Luckily, there are a lot of organizations trying to help these charismatic reptiles. Several groups in North Carolina — including Box Turtle Connection, Herpmapper and Neighborhood Box Turtle
Watch — are doing long-term research projects monitoring box turtle populations, some involving the use of trained dogs to locate the turtles for study. And if you find an injured turtle, you can locate your nearest licensed wildlife rehabilitator for help. In the Triangle area, you can contact the Turtle Rescue Team at the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University. A good friend of mine found a turtle with a damaged shell and the team did a great job of repairing and rehabbing it for release. According to their website, they received 471 Eastern box turtles as patients in 2024 alone!
The Eastern box turtle was named our official state reptile by the N.C. General Assembly in 1979. Box turtles are the only fully terrestrial turtle found across North Carolina (except for the Outer Banks).
As I am writing this, it’s raining heavily. I’ll be especially alert for turtles this afternoon and tomorrow, as they seem to move more after rains. To help preserve this iconic species, please encourage people to slow down and be observant when driving and scan the road for turtles (and other animals). If it’s safe, give it a lift to the side of the road it was headed to, and please don’t take them home or relocate them. Turtles have relatively small home ranges where they know the food sources and good places to spend the winter, and they don’t do well in captivity.
Let’s help all our turtles live long and healthy lives in the wild.
Left to right: Photos showing various patterns on box turtles; a female box turtle laying eggs.
Without Stopping
Accomplished contemporary artist Juan Logan keeps creating
by LIZA ROBERTS
On a sprawling industrial site on the banks of the Catawba River, beyond a cabinet maker, a boat rental and a rum distillery, past hundreds and hundreds of pallets of overstocked, shrink-wrapped, big-box merchandise, lies a repository of an entirely different sort.
Here, in an open, 5,000-square foot space, stand sculptures and paintings, drawings, prints and multimedia creations that address, mostly through abstraction, many of the issues of our time: race and memory, history and geography, stereotype and expectation, imagination and potential. This is the studio of the artist Juan Logan, the place where he creates and stores the work from a career spanning more than 50 years. He is one of our state’s most accomplished contemporary artists, and one of its most prolific.
In May, a major exhibition of his
work, Without Stopping: Juan Logan, opened at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, where it will run until Feb. 14, 2026. Featuring 48 works from Logan’s decade-long Elegies series, including many never before seen in public, the exhibit will feature a massive new piece commissioned by the museum to commemorate the residents of Africatown, an area of Mobile founded by the descendants of enslaved people brought in 1860 to Mobile Bay aboard a wooden ship called the Clotilda. At 6 1/2 feet tall and 16 feet wide, Logan’s commissioned piece, Elegy CLXXXVI, Without Stopping, is by far the largest of this seminal series.
“I think of it as a series on memor y, but not just mine,” he says. “Collective memories.”
Though the word “elegy” often refers to a poem for the dead, “it can also mean a serious reflection,” Logan says.
With abstract shapes and symbols, Logan reflects on the fragmented, imperfect and haunting nature of memory, including cultural memories shared in various and ever-changing ways. He mentions the Japanese notion of wabisabi, which finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. “There are no perfect memories. And I don’t have any trouble portraying them that way.” Forgotten memories, too: “The absence of memory, how it depletes us… how it kills us. It leaves us very alive, but missing so much. We are so sure we hold on to things, even happy memories, but they fade away as well.”
A repeated image throughout his work over decades, beginning in the late 1970s and regularly appearing in his Elegies series, is the silhouette of a black head. The subtle shape shows up in painting, drawing, collage and sculpture (including Beacon outside Charlotte’s
courtesy Juan Logan (ART)
Elegy 186, Without Stopping
“All of our imaginings, and everything we ever were or will be, takes place in the head first. It is who we are.” JUAN LOGAN
Elegy 108
Harvey Gantt Center) as a symbol of memory, loneliness, identity and of the Black experience.
Lately, the head shape on its side may represent a boat, Logan says, a boat transporting memories, knowledge, thoughts, hopes and ideas: “Sometimes it’s completely filled, sometimes it’s empty. Such is the nature of humanity. We hold on to things, we lose things.” But always, he says, the head represents humanity: “All of our imaginings, and everything we ever were or will be, takes place in the head first. It is who we are.” The featureless cameo offers a blank-slate Rorschachian challenge to the viewer: What do you fill in here?
Other symbols that make regular appearances in Logan’s colorful, abstract work include starry skies, clouds, maps and boats. Like a poet, Logan uses these allegorical images in individual works and as leitmotifs to represent many things: the collective unconscious; the workings of the world and the role of
the individual in creating it; reserves of knowledge; the power of imagination and perception. Most important, Logan says, is not what he says these things mean, or what his own point of view might be, but what they provoke or challenge in the viewer.
Logan has been challenging viewers over the decades of a celebrated career that has seen his work shown across the country and around the world in solo and group shows. He has pieces in the permanent collections of some of the nation’s foremost museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Baltimore Museum of Art and Charlotte’s Mint Museum.
STORYTELLER
Wearing the uniform of black T-shirt and jeans that he has made his own for at least 40 years, the former Univer-
sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of studio art is a voluble host in his Belmont studio, eager to unpack the meaning and message of his work, which surrounds him in a vibrant, living archive. He does it through story.
There’s the story of a treacherous treadmill used to try to break the spirit of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1837: that inspired THe Sugar House, a 16-foot canvas of paint, glitter, lottery tickets and thousands of glued-on puzzle pieces.
There’s the story about the high school shop teacher who encouraged him to make his first work of art, an eagle carved of white birch. This is a man Logan is so determined to credit with launching his life’s trajectory that he spells his name: “Harold McLean, That’s M, C, capital L, E, A, N.” McLean told Logan that what he made didn’t have to be like anyone else’s. “It can just be yours,” the teacher said. The words unleashed something in Logan: “It changed everything.”
June at Weymouth Center
Saturday & Sunday, June 14 - 15 10:00am - 4:00pm
· Reenactor encampment · Family-friendly · · Live demonstrations · Hands-on activities · And more!
Also, this month at Weymouth Center:
June 7: Sandhills Pridefest
June 16 - 20: Kids Camp Storycraft
June 24 - 27: Kids Explorer of the World Camp
June 28: Vision 4 Moore presents Billy Joel/Elton John
Face 2 Face Tribute Show with local band Pocket Change
June 17: James Boyd Book Club
Scan the QR code for tickets and additional information! 555 East Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines, NC
There’s the tragic story of his father dying of a heart attack after a doctor didn’t believe his chest pains were real. It’s an example, Logan says, of racial bias, and one of his many inspirations for works that address injustice, oppression and alienation.
And then there are the many stories of home. The shape of a canted roofline in one of his works has him describing his own 114-year old house, which was built by his great-grandfather and grandfather. It’s a 10-minute drive from his studio in a neighborhood Logan illustrates with a quickly jotted map: “Here’s my house right here. Here’s my mom’s house over here. Here’s my aunt’s house, here. There’s another aunt here. Here’s my sister’s house, here. Here’s my uncle’s house down here. And then my grandfather’s road, that’s named after him…” The foundation of another house his great-grandfather built out of handmade bricks and lived in after slavery still stands in the woods nearby. “These things serve to anchor you in a particular way,” Logan says. “I think more than perhaps other places, the South does that for so many people.”
ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS
“For many years now,” Logan says, “I’ve tried to simply ask better questions. I think that’s the only thing that allows us to deepen our investigations about what we’re doing, regardless of discipline. If we can ask better questions, we’ll learn more, be able to do more.”
Doing more is clearly not a problem for Logan. At any given time, he’s got a dozen new projects in various stages underway. After the Mobile show opens, his work will be featured in an exhibit in Chattanooga in July and one on American and German abstractionists in Berlin in October.
“We want so much out of this,” he says. “And we are here for such a brief period of time. So we try to do as much as we can for as long as we can, with the hope that someone will take the time to preserve it and pass it on and share it with others.”
HELLO, SUMMER!
By late June, planting season is over for me, and anything I want to add to my garden can wait until fall. (Not to discourage you, though — planting warm-weather veggies or perennials is still possible, as long as you keep them watered.) Instead, I’m taste-testing, planning for next year, and trying to keep all the flora and fauna cool. Here’s what I’ll do this first official month of summer.
TASTE-TEST BLUEBERRIES
Blueberry season begins in early to mid-June, so it’s the perfect time to try the many varieties of blueberries at local markets, farm stands or green-thumbed neighbors’ yards to see which ones you’d like to grow on your own. You can plant them now through the fall for harvesting next year. Our native blueberries require a low pH, around 4 to 5.5, and Raleigh’s clay-based soil is naturally acidic, so you may want to amend it with lime, wood ash or baking soda.
CHECK YOUR WATERING SYSTEM
Now — before it really heats up — is the time to start planning for regular watering. Check to make sure your hoses are hooked up and in good condition. Pull out sprinkler attachments if you have them and consider rain gauges to track how much precipitation you’ve got. If you don’t have one already, consider setting up a rain barrel to collect rainwater from your gutters to use for watering. It’s a fun weekend project!
KEEP ‘EM COOL
While we’re talking water: consider adding a bird bath for your feathered visitors as the weather warms up. A spot in the open, away from shrubs and trees, is ideal so birds can have a clear view of possible predators (plus, it’ll help keep it debris-free). If you find you’re spending less time outside in higher temperatures, scope out a shady spot in your yard to clear so you can add a bench and get back out there. — Helen Yoest
Earth, Wind & Dad
Lessons in escorting a senior to a rock concert
by CC PARKER
What in the world does one give to their octogenarian father?
Seriously, he doesn’t want anything. Christmas after Christmas, Dad graciously accepts his gifts. And then, like clockwork, the week after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, he hands it all back — including the bags, the tissue and the ribbon. He knows that I have a week remaining to return these items for a full refund. Dad appreciates the thought, he says, but he does not need new workout clothes/a birdfeeder/dress socks/a glowin-the-dark walking safety vest.
And yet, praise God, another holiday or birthday rolls around that I am able to celebrate with him — and I do not want to show up empty-handed.
This past spring, as Dad’s 81st birthday approached, God smiled upon me doubly.
Chicago, Dad’s longtime favorite band, was coming to Raleigh. And, even better, my personal favorite, Earth, Wind & Fire, was touring with them. Hallelujah!
Dad had seen Chicago live on a business trip to Denver in 1973 and been a fan ever since. That trip had been a milestone moment in Dad’s life: he was just starting out in business, had a beautiful bride and was a new father. The tune “Saturday in the Park” became the theme song of many happy Bailey family days. Earth, Wind & Fire was an integral to my formative years. Play a few notes of “September” and I’m 15 years old in Marty Mitchell’s Five Points basement. It was the ultimate hangout spot: a basement suite consisting of a den, kitchenette, pool table, hot tub on the patio and a jukebox — all out of parental range.
The jukebox was stocked with Marty’s older brothers’ favorites. We girls weren’t particularly interested in The Who or Pink Floyd, but we rocked to Earth, Wind & Fire and Kool & the Gang. These were the Soul Train years, and line dancing was de rigueur. It was good clean fun, sometimes broken up with the mischief of a prank call or, better yet, a call-the-operator to “break in” on a call if the line was busy.
So I was pleased this concert could be a great gift for Dad. But I was concerned about logistics. Transporting my own children to concerts at Walnut Creek through the years, I remember the traffic jams, vested helpers directing our car in the wrong direction and the crushing lines to exit. Even with Uber, it’s hard to find your driver in the sea of cars.
For Dad, I wanted what I refer to as “Cinderella Experience,” which goes like this: A driver picks you up at home and in 10 minutes you’re entering Walnut Creek. There, friendly attendants use their light batons to direct us into a top-secret “back route.” At this exclusive entrance, there is no line to get in. In just a few moments I’m holding a cool pinot grigio in a private bar, having reapplied my lip gloss in a clean bathroom. We enjoy the concert in a little roped-off box. And at the end, we are whisked home in no time. Voila.
For my outing with Dad, I select seats in the middle portion of the covered area, on the aisle for easy bathroom access. I tick all the VIP options — VIP parking, VIP entrance, VIP lounge — which make our second-tier seats the same price as the very front row.
An auspicious start: our livery car glides right into Walnut Creek and the vested parking attendants wave at us. When we disembark at the VIP entrance, however, we learn that we are to go through general admission. I point out my VIP add-on and the attendant shrugs as we head towards the growing crowd. When we get to the VIP bar and bathroom, the lines are just as long as general admission. The intro music begins, and we have no time to spare, so we buy our beers at a general kiosk.
As we rush with the crowd to our seats, Dad says, nonchalantly, over his shoulder, “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of Earth, Wind & Fire.”
What?! How can a man that smart be that dumb? He loves Motown — how can he not love my favorite band? I am gobsmacked and annoyed. The Cinderella experience is a fail.
It’s a steamy August night in Raleigh, but we’re comfortable under the massive overhead fans. Dad comments that he is glad to be seated on the aisle (score!). We settle in, but I begin to worry, because Earth, Wind & Fire is playing an instrumental song — and,
basic that I am, I only want the hits. Verdine White, an original member of the group, performs a 10-minute bass solo. We clap politely.
But shame on me for losing faith. This is not the band’s first rodeo. They know their fans: they need a few extra minutes to grab their popcorn and beers, and do a last bathroom run.
When the first notes of “Boogie Wonderland” sound, the audience leaps to its feet as one, including my 81-yearold father. The band has brought its A-game; the pageantry and music are just as wonderful as I remember.
Chicago’s turn on the stage does not disappoint. They sound good! The band is well-versed and gives it their all. For one of their final numbers, Earth, Wind & Fire reenters for a horn battle.
Sitting with my father on that hot August night, with the music of my childhood playing, it is transcendental. I am so grateful to have had that moment.
At the end of the ovation, Chicago plays “Saturday in the Park” and it has never sounded better. Dad, smiling, says, “Ok, it’s time to go.” The evening is a success.
Always the gentleman, Dad has the driver drop me at home first. As the car is about to pull away, Dad, birthday cake firmly in hand, says, “Earlier today, I wasn’t feeling up to a concert, but I’m so glad I went.” And just as he’s waving goodbye, he adds: “Oh, and tonight Earth, Wind & Fire was the better band.”
Follow along and don’t miss a thing.
The Gift of Nature
And
the power of the Earth to heal
by JIM DODSON illustration by GERRY O’NEILL
One morning this past February, I stepped out to assess how my garden had fared from one of the coldest, soggiest winters in memory. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
The Asian-themed shade garden I’d spent a decade creating in our backyard under towering oaks appeared to be devastated, buried beneath drifts of sodden leaves and dozens of downed tree limbs. The only visible signs of life were weeds and grass creeping over the garden beds like an insurgent army.
I’m no rookie in landscape gardening. I’ve built — and restored — three major gardens in my life, including an ambitious native garden in a forest on a coastal hilltop in Maine, where we lived for two decades.
Hard weather, as they say up in Maine, makes good timber — a theory, I’ve discovered, that’s applicable to human beings as well as gardens.
I remembered this eternal truth as I took stock of my battered garden, wondering if it would ever look as glorious as it did last summer.
After a morning of clearing debris and raking out beds that showed little to no signs of life, I ruefully joked to Wendy, my wife, that our “ruined” garden was the final insult from a winter we were both eager to forget.
It started on All Saints’ Day back in November, with the death of Wendy’s mom, a lovely Irish lady who spent her career teaching children how to love art. In the end, dementia robbed “Miss Jan,”
as I called her, of her sparkling wit and even the ability to recognize those she loved. At least she spent her final days on our terrace, warming her face in the late autumn sunshine. The last thing she said to me was, “Look, isn’t the sun beautiful today?”
Then, for the first time ever, three of our four children, admittedly all grownups, failed to make it home for the holidays, which made for a too-quiet house at Thanksgiving and lots of empty stockings. Fortunately, our youngest, Liam, showed up two days before Christmas, briefly brightening the mood before I went under the knife for a full left-knee replacement that left me wondering, as the New Year dawned, what dump truck ran over me.
I skipped the prescription painkillers in favor of Tylenol, however, because I was under the intense pressure of a tight deadline to correct and return within a fortnight my editor’s marks on the most important book of my life. As a proud Luddite, I was forced to use a complex digital editing system that left me feeling like a child trying to operate a jumbo jet. Fortunately, my digitally-savvy bride stepped in to get the job done. Printed manuscripts, I learned, evidently went out of fashion with handwriting.
To make things more fun, as I wrestled with a hoisted leg and new technology, a work crew arrived to renovate our Donna Reed-era primary bathroom, knocking down walls and pulling up floors. They made such a godawful racket, it seemed they were taking out half the house.
Most disturbing of all, amid this clamor and craziness, I lost my longtime gardening pal, Boo Radley, our beloved 14-year-old cat, who suffered a sudden series of seizures that grew more horrifying as the days went along. We finally put him peacefully to sleep on his favorite blanket.
Ever y family, of course, goes through periods of stress and challenge when the chaos of life seems to pile up like snow against the door. That’s just part of making the human journey. To place our winter of discontent in proper context, as my late Scottish father-in-law liked to say, ours were “pretty high-class problems in a world that is full of sorrow and woe.”
It took an unexpected birthday card from a dear old friend, Ashley Walshe, to lift my cloud of gloom and remind me of what’s really important in the grand scheme of things.
The card depicted an old, gray rabbit nibbling something in the garden. (She knows I have a thing for woodland rabbits.)
“Another year,” read the card. “Another gray hare — Happy Birthday!”
You may know Ashley from the soulful monthly Almanac she writes for O.Henry magazine, WALTER’s sister publication.
“Helene brought me back to a higher level of consciousness... It also brought out an amazing amount of kindness and support among complete strangers who helped each other through the crisis.”
— ASHLEY WALSHE
Among other things, she is a gifted poet and a true daughter of the Earth.
Not surprisingly, it was her accompanying hand-written message that reminded me of the lessons in gratitude and joy we’ve shared over the many years of friendship. “In all seriousness,” she wrote, “thank you for showing me the joy of growing backwards… The secret, perhaps, to this wild, wonderful life on Earth.”
The idea of growing backwards is simply our way of describing a life in tune with nature, timeless values (some would call “old-fashioned”) that promote kindness and compassion to all living creatures and a deep reverence for the Earth. For me, her clever card amounted to a gentle poke from the universe. In a year that has already seen apocalyptic wildfires out West, a record number of killer tornadoes in the heartland and a hurricane that will be remembered for generations, it isn’t much of a stretch to realize Mother Earth is sending us a serious message about our behavior.
Last November, Ashley and husband Alan nearly lost everything they own — including their lives — when their first home on a pretty hillside just outside Asheville was almost washed away by Hurricane Helene.
“At the height of the storm,” she told me, “we were huddled in our house with our dog, Dirga, watching frightening
torrents of water roar down the mountainside, washing away many of the houses around us. I remember asking Mother Mary to please keep us safe.”
Moments later, the couple heard a loud crash of trees that fell directly in the path of the rampaging waters, diverting the Biblical flood away from their home. It was, she says, “a miracle. Nature saved our house.”
After escaping for a time to stay with friends outside the danger zone, the couple returned to find their home still intact, but surrounded by a world of mud and debris.
“Helene brought me back to a higher level of consciousness, a desire to let go of things that don’t really matter in the course of daily life,” she says. “It also brought out an amazing amount of kindness and support among complete strangers who helped each other through the crisis. I think it changed many lives.” The good news, she says, is that her bare yard is now a blank canvas awaiting the creation of a “wonderful new garden.”
Days after she told me this, she sent me a photograph of the lone plant that miraculously survived the Great Flood: a single, gorgeous tulip that popped up with the coming of spring. “Nature always gives us a gift,” she wrote.
That same afternoon, I noticed my own garden miraculously springing to life
Come June, it should really be something.
a red blues for alma
by ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS
after “Nature’s Red Impressions” by Alma THomas (1968)
i glue my mosaic to the world of skin all my sacred broken pieces to the smooth world of sin
blood my vitamins earth my kin fix all my sacred longings to the racist world i’m in my morning my noonday my impulse to begin every jagged inch of knowing ‘bout the place i been strawberries, peaches, cough syrup, gin i smear my liquid memories. brush and start again
my royal bloodline my exiled swim i sing a torn libretto steady in the blue-eyed din mustard seed belief red sea open and thin the songs of 7 million in a dented tin
cloudless sky and fertilizer blend i’d give all my burning memoirs for a peaceful when trafficked road open glen eventually the shattered sister wins
Checking in with the subjects of
The Connells’ cult classic, 50 years after Broughton
by DAVID MENCONI
EVER AFTER
Aunique time capsule in local music is The Connells’ video for “’74-’75,” starring the class of 1975 from Raleigh’s Broughton High School. A huge, top-10 hit across Europe, the song is a moody, pensive ballad from the Raleigh rock band’s 1993 album Ring. And a major part of the song’s history is Mark Pellington’s brilliant, high-concept timetraveling video.
Guitarist Mike Connell (whose younger brother, bassist David Connell, graduated from Broughton in 1979) didn’t have a school or year in mind when he wrote this moody song of regret, which declares, “I was your sorry ever after.” He called it “’74-’75” simply because those numbers fit the song’s meter.
Video director Pellington, however, took the title literally. Taking inspiration from the British direc-
tor Michael Apted’s Up film series (which checked in with a cast of 14 people every seven years over a 56-year period), Pellington juxtaposed Broughton graduates’ 1975 yearbook photos with 1993 video footage of each person.
Mike Connell had been skeptical about the video’s concept, until he saw the results. “I thought it was going to be the corniest thing ever,” he told me when I interviewed him for the liner notes of 2016’s Stone Cold Yesterday: Best of the Connells compilation album. “My attitude changed very quickly when I saw what he did.”
The video’s 18-year contrasts between teenagers and borderingon-middle-age adults were striking — and a perfect (and subtle) fit for the song’s melancholy tone. It became a poignant cult classic, especially overseas, where fan tribute videos have been common over the past three decades.
When the class of 1975’s 40year anniversary rolled around, I was part of a crew at THe News & Observer that updated the video, adding circa-2015 shots of each subject. More than two decades on from the original video, the subjects all had experienced major life events — children, grandchildren, disabilities and even death — and the mileage showed.
By now, at the class’s 50th anniversary, the subjects are all in their late 60s and mostly retired to varying degrees. Three of them are no longer living. A few have tangential connections to some of the biggest news events of recent years. Some are living dreams, some are just getting by. They’re all at the stage where life is mostly retrospective.
Here’s what they’ve been up to, in order of appearance in the video.
THOMAS RAY has been disabled with health problems for years, including the blood cancer myeloma. Since 2020, he has also pursued a lifelong dream of being a novelist, self-publishing half of a 10-book series, Archives of Atlanteas, an alternative science-fiction history.
“It’s about a civilization built by the survivors of Atlantis, who now have huge cities and cavern domes up and down the East Coast of North and South America,” he says. “It’s fun. Very involved, a family saga.”
The latest volume is “The Fifth Guardians,” out this summer. He also hopes to move to California to be with his partner soon.
Retired since age 62, LANGSTON CRAVEN lives in Aberdeen and has likewise had health issues. “But,” he says, “I am still living and breathing and speaking to you.” He hopes to attend Broughton’s 50-year reunion.
Fortuitously, BEVERLY CLARK FREEMAN sold her government-contracting consulting firm and retired two weeks before the Trump Administration canceled its contract. She and her husband now split time between Raleigh and “our happy place,” a townhouse near Boone.
After a career in land planning, STEVE GURGANUS says he’s spending his days “swamped with a backlog at the house, working the last remnants of a day job, paying bills, saving for college and managing kid activities.” He also volunteers at church and “loves seeing Broughton friends from years past.”
Sanderson High School graduate ANITA HIGH-SAVAGE was the video's only non-Broughton cast member. Retired on disability since 2010, she works part-time giving support to adults with developmental disabilities. She has also been involved with the Martin Luther King Jr. All Children’s Choir for 38 years.
ANDREW LEWIS BATES JR. declined to be involved in the 2015 video update. He did not return phone calls this year.
The namesake son of a legendary basketball coach at Saint Augustine’s University, HARVEY HEARTLEY JR. starred in basketball there, then worked in banking. He passed in 2016 from the autoimmune disorder sarcoidosis. Saint Augustine’s has since dedicated the entrance to its Julia Chester Emery Gymnasium as the Harvey Delafonte Heartley Jr. Lobby.
Above: A photo of The Connells from the Ring album, which contained the song “’74-’75.”
Below: The Connells performing at Raleigh Rose Garden in 2018.
DAVID HOGGARD actually graduated from Broughton in 1974, a year ahead of the others. But he made the most dramatic “’74-’75” video appearance, in a wheelchair due to aplastic anemia (possibly contracted while he was a U.S. Navy pilot). He died from blood cancer in 2013.
Appearing alongside David in the original 1993 video was his wife Susan and their daughter Alison, then 4 years old. Alison lives in Charlotte now with two children, ages 4 and 5. Retired since 2019, Susan spends much of her time painting. She never remarried but has a live-in boyfriend as well as a dog named in honor of her late husband’s favorite artist, Bob Marley.
“My husband loved reggae,” she says. “A month after David passed, I went looking for a dog. I wanted a grown female, but I came home with an 8-week-old male puppy. He’s 12 years old now and the love of my life.”
In 2021, BRYAN STATON (a former truck driver, disabled since 2009) became the third “’74-’75” cast member to pass. He died from liver cancer.
After a career in office management, JACKIE BURGESS MCLAURIN is a part-time cashier at Wegmans. She, too, has had health problems including multiple skin cancers. But she fondly remembers “’74-’75” as a lifetime highlight.
“Being in that video was fun, the only thing like that I’ve ever done,” she says. “My daughter-in-law saw it for the first time not long ago and told me, You almost look the same.”
WORTH BYRON “BUDDY” BOWMAN III appeared in the original 1993 video holding his twin sons Tim and Joe, now 36 years old. A younger son, David Worth Bowman (who turns 24 this month) was found guilty last year of felony and misdemeanor charges for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. He was facing a prison sentence before being pardoned by President Trump in January.
Buddy Bowman declined to be interviewed for this story.
MARK VALETTA is mostly retired now, but he’s been busy this year with wedding plans for his 30-year-old daughter. He’s also planning a 50-year Broughton class reunion on Oct. 4.
“This will be the fourth one I’ve headed up,” he says. “I keep hoping somebody else will take the reins. But I didn’t want to let it pass, either.”
Married 44 years now, CATHY CHAMBLEE HARTOFELIS is retired and living in the Onslow County town of Sneads Ferry.
“We enjoy life down here, it’s a much slower pace,” she says. “Our biggest outing nowadays is going into Wilmington looking to find a good place to eat.”
“Being in that video was fun, the only thing like that I’ve ever done.”
— JACKIE BURGESS MCLAURIN
Once a fixture on Triangle airwaves, former DJ FRANK KING graduated to working as a standup comic and motivational speaker about suicide prevention, with multiple TedX Talks to his credit. He used to work a lot on cruise ships until 2020, when he left a ship docked in Cambodia and flew back to America during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. He was accused of flouting quarantine rules in publications including Time magazine.
“That was an adventure,” he says. “I was world-famous for about two weeks. Others were leaving that ship, too, but I was the one who got met by the press in Seattle while coming down the escalator. My mistake was speaking to the press about it.”
King lives in Oregon with his wife and keeps busy with motivational speaking and competitive weightlifting. His appearance in “’74-’75” makes for a nice calling card, especially overseas.
“When I mentioned it to a client from the Netherlands, she started singing that song,” he says. “She knew all the lyrics because The Connells performed at her college way back when. And a friend at a hotel in Israel saw me on TV. He called me up: Dude, why are you on TV in Israel?”
Beyond appearing in “’74-’75,” PAUL COOPER is a key figure in The Connells’ history: he produced their first demo recordings in 1984. Music remains Cooper’s passion, with live-sound engineering and recording sessions, but a career in computers paid his bills.
His two grandchildren (ages 10 and 2) live with their mother in Montreal.
And he says he’ll “definitely” attend Broughton’s 50-year reunion this year.
“I don’t hang out with anybody from high school,” he says. “But it’s good to see people even if we don’t have anything in common anymore.”
In 2015, JONI COBURN was working for the state department of motor vehicles and trying not to be impatient while waiting for grandchildren. Now retired, she has one biological grandchild and another from a son-in-law’s previous relationship.
“My 7-year-old grandson reminds me of my son and my dad,” she says. “He’s absolutely adorable, too.”
HIGH CONCEPT
In a downtown penthouse, Alan and Ben King display their art within a unique, welcoming space
by AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE photography by ABIGAIL JACKSON
CITY VIEWS Alan and Ben King’s downtown penthouse boasts soaring ceilings and loads of light to highlight their broad collection of art from local and international makers.
High above S. West Street, a penthouse at The Fairweather offers more than a view — it offers a vision. Home to Alan and Ben King, the two-story condo is a sophisticated, art-filled sanctuary. But it didn’t start out that way. “It was a white box with not a lot of character, but room to work,” says Sally Williams of Colorful Concepts Interior Design, who was enlisted to transform the space.
The apartment already had great light, soaring ceilings and generous balconies; Williams worked with the Kings to incorporate unique textures and smart custom furnishings to highlight their contemporary art collection and make the space welcoming for guests, kids and grandkids. “We didn’t want our home to feel like a museum; we want anyone who comes in here to enjoy it fully,” says Ben.
The Kings bought their place downtown in 2023 after living in North Ridge. “We loved our house, but after buying a mountain retreat during the pandemic, it was unnecessary to have two large properties,” says Alan. “We also missed being engaged with the city — I lived downtown in the early 2000s, before Ben and I were married — and this felt like the perfect time to come back.”
The first step was to inventory the couple’s broad art collection, which includes pieces from artists as varied as Asheville-based potter Kyle Carpenter and Bahamian-American textile artist April Bey. “We started with the art — inventorying every piece,” says Williams. “Each room was then designed to complement and elevate those works.” Williams worked with the couple to photograph and measure dozens of works, including
paintings, photographs and ceramics, as well as their large collection of family photos.
Next, Williams worked with the penthouse’s existing architecture to add custom finishes that balance and complement the artwork. On a featureless wall in the living area, she added a dramatic fireplace to anchor the room and create a focal point. Its lower third is clad in black plaster, while the top is finished in slatted wood, which adds dimension and frames a black-and-white photograph by Turkish-American photographer Sarp Kerem Yavuz. “The artwork is so bold, so dynamic — it demanded a space that could stand up to it without competing,” Williams explains. “We stayed away from heavy color and focused on tonal contrast and materiality.” It also provides balance to the other side of the room, where she
IN THE BALANCE
Sally Williams designed this plaster and slatted wood fireplace to create a focal point in the double-height living room. It frames a piece by Turkish-American photographer Sarp Kerem Yavuz. A pair of curved sofas creates a comfortable conversation area. Opposite page: Across the room are the loft and dining area, with a wood accent wall in each. Three skinny shelves display the couple’s pottery collection, including pieces by Kyle Carpenter, an Asheville artist.
Williams used wood accents to unify various parts of the home. In the dining room, she ran flooring material along one wall. On it hangs a black-and-white abstract painting by Chuck Rose, who’s based in Raleigh. Since Alan uses his office for work most of the time, Williams ordered a custom Murphy bed to give the space an elegant finish while also functioning as a guest room. “It was a design puzzle,” says Williams. “We found solutions that balanced function and form.” In the kitchen area, she hung Italian glass pendants above the island. A painting with blue details pulls in the colors from the rugs in the living and dining areas.
WOOD TONES
GLAMOROUS DETAILS
In the primary bedroom, Williams ran oak flooring with marble and brass inlays behind the headboard to add drama. Italian glass pendants hang above the beveled nightstands. She installed blackout shades behind the sheer curtains, but, Alan notes, “We’ve never used them. The view at night is too good.” They made use of every space — including the hallways and bathrooms — to display art.
ROOMS WITH VIEWS
The couple uses the loft to watch television or they’ll sit on the balcony, where they can hear concerts from Red Hat Amphitheater or watch the Shimmer Wall light up. “Living downtown has reconnected us to Raleigh in ways we didn’t expect,” says Alan. “We walk to Poole’s, Barcelona Wine Bar, CAM — this is a city that has grown into itself.” The couple has recently connected with Raleigh artist Clarence Heyward and have two of his pieces, Dad on Duty and Portrait of William Paul Thomas, on display. Opposite page: The balcony off the living area; Ben and Alan King at home.
ran geometric oak and birch paneling along the wall that rises from the dining area into the loft. “I love how the fireplace becomes the nexus of the space, but those wood accents create these warm, intimate spaces without being overpowering,” says Alan.
“We didn’t want our home to feel like a museum; we want anyone who comes in here to enjoy it fully.” — Ben King
Throughout the condo, Williams created different gallery moments. The stairwell showcases several large pieces, with a portrait of Durham artist William Paul Thomas by Raleigh painter Clarence Heyward as the star, mounted on marble-patterned wallpaper. “The wallpaper gives your eye a place to rest and allows you to appreciate the piece,” says Williams. In the family area, a trio of contemporary shelves display pottery that the Kings have collected over the years.
In the entryway, a single framed painting — THey Call Her Yvette by Washington, D.C., painter J. Rodney Dennis — holds court above a console by High Point artisan Jeremy Kamiya. “You can’t stop looking at it,” Alan says. “There’s something magnetic about her expression.”
The same consideration for art and detailing is given to the home’s more intimate spaces. In the primary bedroom, Williams used another wooden wall treatment, this one with petal-shaped marble and brass accents, as a headboard.
The walls are painted a rich gray-blue to make it feel cozy. For the office, which also serves as a guest room, Williams commissioned a custom Murphy bed with brass hardware. “It makes perfect use of the space — you just push the desk aside,” says Alan. “Our granddaughter was thrilled to be the first to use it!” Another guest room features landscapes by Maine artist Jean Jack, who Alan favors since he grew up in the state.
The pièce de résistance, however, might be the view. Says Ben, who hails from Broadway, NC: “My husband and I both had such modest lifestyles, growing up in rural country towns — sometimes I look out across the city and wonder if this is really my life.”
Paul Siler and Cheetie Kumar
Two years in, Ajja is a neighborhood fixture — and owners Cheetie Kumar and Paul Siler are leaders on the food scene
CHEMISTRY PERFECT
by CATHERINE CURRIN photography by BAXTER MILLER
On a typical night, Ajja is a-twinkle. Lanterns sway gently inside the covered patio, where the walls are populated with quirky art, objects and greenery. There’s a group around the fire pit, winding down with cocktails in hand. There may be a band tuning up on the stage, regulars chatting up the bartender and longtime servers, and Raleigh fixture Paul Siler, in one of his vintage button-ups and a neckerchief, roaming from table to table, welcoming guests in his self-defined role as “director of vibes.”
When chef Cheetie Kumar, along with
her co-owner and husband Siler, opened Ajja two years ago, it was met with a mix of relief and, perhaps, skepticism. Many mourned the closing of Garland about a year prior, a critically acclaimed restaurant that ran on W. Martin Street from 2013 to 2022 and established Kumar as one one the preeminent chefs of the South. With its inventive, Indian-inspired menu and mosaic-mirror entrance, Garland somehow managed to serve both the nearby business crowd and the downtown cool kids. Sandwiched between music venue Kings above and bar Neptunes below (both of which were also owned by Kumar and Siler), Garland was part of a burgeoning downtown. The pandemic slammed the breaks on
that momentum. Garland closed, then reopened in a modified fashion, but eventually closed for good in 2022. In the meantime, Kumar was honing her voice within the industry, using her cachet to advocate for chefs and restaurant industry workers for fair pay and benefits during the pandemic — she even spoke in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business, arguing for a replenishment of the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. “The pandemic shined a light on problems everyone knew about with restaurants,” says Siler. Kumar helped form the Independent Restaurant Coalition, an organization that lobbies for small restaurants across the United States, with the hope to
sustain the current and future workforce of these unique spaces.
By early 2023, Siler and Kumar turned their focus to building a new restaurant, just a little outside downtown. “ When we acquired the space, it was coming out of the pandemic and we were a bit scarred from that,” says Kumar. “We felt this was a space where we could shift and adjust if we had to.”
The move to a smaller commercial strip in Five Points mirrored larger trends, too: with more folks working from home than commuting to an office building, diners shifted more toward patronising neighborhood establishments, even as Raleigh continued to grow. “After running a large restaurant
and venues for over a decade, it was a big shift to open such a small restaurant,” says Kumar. “Being within a neighborhood was totally different, too.”
Kumar, Siler and their team worked to create a vibrant respite in their new locale. Their space on Bickett Boulevard was originally shared with Anisette Bakery, with Ajja occupying the back of the building and patio. Soon after Ajja’s opening, Anisette closed and Ajja reconfigured their square footage to accommodate more indoor dining. “With that space coming available just after the restaurant opened, I think we ended up building the plane while we were flying it,” says Kumar.
Ajja is not a traditional restaurant,
she says. To start with, there’s no front door: a bright, 60s-style mural welcomes guests as they stroll behind the building to Ajja’s host stand. Behind it sprawls a patio with covered seating, in addition to a lawn with fire pits, a cabana and a stage. Lush, green plants line the walkway and hang happily throughout the bar. Lanterns and trinkets are scattered from the ceiling and walls. The space is open and airy, yet feels intimate — like you’re tucked away somewhere far from the hustle and bustle of Raleigh, despite the skyline view.
The indoor dining room has several tables and bar seats to peek in on the action in the kitchen, but in many ways it’s secondary to the outdoor areas.
The entrance to Ajja. Opposite page: Paul Siler serves guests; Ajja’s small plates are meant to be shared and mixed.
Scenes from the restaurant, including the view.
Throughout, Ajja takes advantage of a chopped-up floor plan to create intimate areas for dining and gathering. “I love going to places where even if you’re around a lot of people, you’re in your little nook,” says Siler.
Ajja’s menu is full of Mediterranean, Asian and Middle Eastern influences, and Kumar and her team created an eclectic spread perfect for convivial dining and sharing. “The menu is a little bit modular. There’s these very distinct sections, but it’s never about the individual course, it’s really about the waves of food that hit your table,” says Kumar. Mix and match from the Dips & Spreads section with the mezze platter, complete with homemade bread (fans of Garland will find the warm Moroccan hummus a subtle nod to the downtown favorite). The Pickles ‘n’ Snacks options allow you to incorporate a seasonal pickled veggie or marinated olives for a briny addition to your plate, while the Market section offers seasonal vegetables like charred asparagus or coffee-roasted carrots.
they have in the kitchen.
Lindsay Ogden, who worked with Kumar and Siler at Garland, is at the bar’s helm integrating distinct cocktails and a curated wine list with the food menu. “I want the vibe of the cocktail list to be as lighthearted as the space, but as seriously tasty as the food menu,” Ogden says. “We fully embrace creativity and are not afraid to add unusual ingredients or flavors.” Among them: black garlic, sweet potatoes and sunflower milk.
“Much of our inspiration comes from smelling, tasting and experimenting with the spices and ingredients in the kitchen’s pantry,” Ogden says. “It’s very common to
Opposite page: The Whooper swans are protective of their brood. This page: A Black-necked Stilt walks among the koi.
able ones,” says Ogden. “I am very proud to introduce folks to wines from places like Croatia and Cyprus, or from local producers who care as much about their employees as they do the environment.” Kumar says they also feature female winemakers as often as they can. “I think it’s super important in our industry to make sure that there’s gender, racial — all kinds of diversity,” she says.
“One of Cheetie’s goals in life is for fairness to happen,” articulates Siler. “She wants things to be as equitable and as fair as possible.” The Ajja leadership team is largely female, for example, but Kumar says that happened organically: “ I believe in having different perspectives and different strengths; it takes a lot of chemistry to make a good team.”
That chemistry seems to be working: since opening, Ajja has been nominated for a James Beard award and Kumar has twice been named a finalist for Best Chef: Southeast.
“ I believe in having different perspectives and different strengths; it takes a lot of chemistry to make a good team.”
Among the From the Grill selections are hearty dishes like a Harissa grilled shrimp with lentils and a lemon chicken cooked in a tagine, a traditional Moroccan clay pot. “There are a lot of different components of flavor that allow you to make your own experience with every bite,” says Kumar. “You can add a pickle for something crunchy and something spicy and there’s a little drizzle of honey with vegetables. It straddles so many flavor profiles and it’s fun to do that with a lot of little dishes on the table.”
Kumar notes that dining over shared dishes has become increasingly popular in the U.S. (in addition to Ajja, you can do it at other newer Raleigh spots like Madre and Figulina). But this communal menu has been a longtime tradition in many cultures, says Kumar: “A lot of the world eats that way.” Plus, the way they designed the menu — dishes coming out as they’re ready, in waves — fortuitiously lends itself to the limited space
— CHEETIE KUMAR
see myself or one of my bartenders standing in the kitchen, opening up spice jars and taking them back to the bar to experiment with.”
Ogden is currently loving head bartender Maile McNaughton’s milk punches, made with North Carolinastilled Kill Devil Spiced rum and Oak City Amaretto. The boozy punch is infused with cinnamon, banana, tamarind and lime, perfect for a patio or cabana hang. (The cabana, one of Siler’s many nooks at Ajja, is “your quirky uncle’s living room,” he says. The walls are lined with astroturf, adorned with eclectic art and Siler’s grandmother’s embroidery. “On paper, it seems kind of silly. But all together it feels really cool.”)
In addition to cocktails, the wine list is intentionally sourced. “I seek out small producers and underrepresented regions, as well as native grape varieties that are often passed over for the more recogniz-
Kumar also continues to advocate for small businesses and restaurants in North Carolina and beyond. She currently serves as the vice president for the Independent Restaurant Coalition and the Southern Foodways Alliance, as well as in a board position for the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association (NCRLA).
“For a long time, places like Ajja didn’t have a voice on the big stage,” says Siler. “We should do what we can to fix that.”
That commitment to community is evident on the daily at Ajja. In addition to regular dining hours, Ajja hosts special events like a monthly makers market and live music, showcases of local talent that infuse energy into Raleigh’s creative scene. The staff welcomes regulars by name and greets newcomers with interest, drawing each of its guests into its own little orbit.
That’s part of the plan, says Siler: “We want coming here to eat to be a transportive experience — we want you to feel enveloped in Ajja.”
Artist Steven Cozart discusses the importance of context
THE DECODER
by COLONY LITTLE
by JOSHUA STEADMAN
photography
The idea that a small object can hold an abundance of information is woven into artist and educator Steven Cozart’s work. And an unlikely bit of popculture lore inspired Codecs/Context, the title of his recent solo show at Anchorlight Gallery. In the origin story of DC Comics’ Superman, the infant superhero is sent to Earth from his planet, Krypton, in a space shuttle. “He’s sent with this tiny device called a codex — in the most recent movie, it looks like a flash drive — that contains all of the information about his home planet,” Cozart says. Cozart’s narrative portraits are infused with objects and symbols that highlight issues around identity and self-representation. The image of the Superman codex came to him while taking a writing
workshop as part of a continuing education course in 2018. Cozart started researching codecs, which are programming algorithms that compress and decompress large data sets or reduce the size of audio or video files for transmission. “I began to see the parallel between this and some of the work I was doing,” he says. This helped him reframe what he had been creating over the past decade.
In THe Interview Series from 2013, for example, Cozart created charcoal and pastel portraits using brown paper bags as his canvas. Each drawing features a quote from the subject about their experiences with colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone. In some of these portraits, the subjects are also holding brown paper bags. It’s a reference to a Jim Crow-era practice called
the “brown paper bag test,” in which social institutions used the bags as a way to discriminate against individuals with darker skin. The shade of the bag represented a color line: if one’s skin was lighter than the bag, they had privilege, but if one’s tone was darker, they were denied access to resources, clubs and fraternal organizations that were signifiers of social status.
“Paper bag tests and skin tone are codecs,” Cozart says. “They’re things that carry a lot of information when they’re unpacked.” Much like the way information can be deleted, lost or misinterpreted during the compression and access of data, these codecs reduced individuals to superficial traits and allowed the interpreter to assign their own values to what they “learned.” “If I’m looking at some-
Clockwise from top left: The Pencil Test: Chelsea; The Defiant Ones: Derrick (Dame Dame); The Defiant Ones: Danny (Hye Wonhye); The Defiant Ones: Clarence (Esono Anantam); The Defiant Ones: Don (Dame Dame); Ephemera: Rae of Sunshine; Players: Luke 21:36; Players: The Knight; Ephemera: The Light
“What I admire most about Cozart as an instructor is his humility. He is someone who is confident in his ability, but is never resistant to learning from and taking feedback from students and colleagues.”
— ISABEL LU
body and I’m looking at their skin tone and automatically make these assumptions because they’re lighter or darker, I’m losing information,” Cozart says. “Context, in my opinion, will offset lost information.” But codecs can also be a way to learn information: seeing the paper bags in his series invites the viewer to learn more about the history of this discrimination and the way it’s still felt in the present day.
Growing up in Durham, Cozart had a penchant for research. “I lived three or four blocks from the main library on Roxboro Street,” he says. He became a regular, burying his head in books about the characters he saw in his older brothers’ comics collection. “They used to have this book about the origins of some of the Marvel characters, including SpiderMan and Fantastic Four,” says Cozart. “I remember checking them out, reading them and comparing those stories to my brothers’ comics.” His brother Johnnie enjoyed making up his own characters to draw his own comics. “I just kind of followed in his footsteps,” says Cozart.
That love for drawing led him to East Carolina University, where he earned a BFA in art education with a concentration in printmaking and drawing. After graduating in the mid-1990s, Cozart moved to Greensboro and started working as an art teacher at Hampton Elementary School, and since 2010 Cozart has taught at the Weaver Academy, one of the state’s top-ranked performing and visual arts schools.
Raleigh artist Isabel Lu was one of his students. “What I admire most about Cozart as an instructor is his humility,” she says. “He is someone who is confident in his ability, but is never resistant to learning from and taking feedback from students and colleagues. I feel incredibly lucky that I can have a continuing relationship with a teacher that helped shape me as a person.”
At Weaver, Cozart’s artistic influence has extended beyond his students. During his first solo show, titled THe Pass/ Fail Series at the Center for Visual Artists in Greensboro in 2014, he included work from the Interview Series. After seeing the
exhibit, students of all disciplines were moved to tell him their own experiences with colorism. “One by one, I had these kids I didn’t even teach coming to find me,” Cozart says.
One young man started coming in regularly, just to vent. “Eventually, I did pieces of him, and one afternoon after school, he dragged his mom down the hallway saying, You’ve got to meet this guy!” Cozart says. The boy’s mother was surprised to learn that her son’s experiences with his identity mirrored her own — the portrait series had created an opening for mother and son to discuss intergenerational issues with colorism and internalized racism in a way they hadn’t before. Since then, Cozart has painted several portraits of her. “I find myself doing multiples of the same person because, you know, a conversation is never a one-and-done,” says Cozart. Some of the portraits from Codecs/ Context are currently visible at Ella West Gallery in Durham (through July 19) as part of the Audacity in Motion exhibit.
After 30 years with Guilford County schools, Cozart will retire from teaching at the end of June. “It’s time to make that transition,” he says. He’s looking forward to dedicating more time to his home studio practice, to fleshing out concepts that he explored during the one-year Brightwork Fellowship at Anchorlight that led to Codecs/Context
For that exhibit, Cozart played with scale, making larger portraits and experimenting with new materials. Conceptually, he examined the negative and positive connotations of codecs by incorporating symbols as affirming gestures in his drawings. In one group of works called THe Defiant Ones Series, Cozart embellished portraits of Black men with African Adinkra symbols that characterize the subjects. In another, he explored the idea of texturism — discrimination based on hair texture — in two bodies of work. One incorporates giant yellow #2 pencils in mixed-media installations. Within them, he included portraits of Black men and women with pencils sticking out of their textured, curly or loc’d hair. Arranged as they are,
the yellow pencils evoke golden crowns. But the pencils are another codec: if you stick a pencil in straight hair, it will fall, but tightly coiled or kinky hair will hold it in place. The “pencil test” is a practice attributed to South Africa’s apartheid era, but this sort of discrimination still makes present-day headlines. In 2019 California passed the CROWN Act to protect students’ rights to wear or style their hair without the threat of reprisals, racial discrimination or loss of access to school and extracurricular activities. Since then, 25 states have passed similar laws.
The other series on texturism, called THe Divide Series, further examines the politics around straightening hair versus wearing natural hair. In one work created in charcoal, gesso and pencil, two circular portraits of women, one with straight hair and the other with natural hair, are divided by rows of pencils. Cozart’s exploration of texturism was 15 years in the making and was originally inspired by his wife Portia and daughter Rae, who found their decisions to either wear their natural hair or cut their hair short to be fraught with emotion — and the unsolicited opinions of others. “I was looking through those old sketchbooks and found a sketch of my wife from 2011 that I’d labeled, her natural crown,” he says. “The symbolism of the crown of thorns represents a burden to carry: there are people who are telling you, oh, you shouldn’t treat [straighten] your hair, but if you decide to let it grow naturally, there is another group of people who ask, why are you doing that?’”
Cozart celebrates his wife, Portia, and daughter, Rae, in two recent pieces, Ephemera: THe Light (2024) and Ephemera: Rae of Sunshine (2025), in which he depicts each wearing their natural crowns illuminated by a ray of light that resembles a halo. Included are Adinkra symbols, like a butterfly for Rae that represents gentleness and tenderness, and a wooden comb, called a duafe, in Portia’s portrait that’s a symbol of femininity and beauty. Speaking of Portia, Cozart smiles: “If anybody says I’m a good or decent person, it’s because I know her.”
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22 The Merrimon-Wynne House at 6 PM
TASTE WILD OF THE
Join us for a farm-to-table dinner honoring the outdoors. Enjoy cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and a three course dinner with wine pairings.
LUKE OWENS Native Fine Diner
CHRISTOPER PRIETO Prime Barbeque
THE SUMMER EDIT
Long days and balmy nights — this season gives us energy to enjoy each day to the fullest. Whether your idea of the perfect day includes an outdoor excursion, theater under the stars or taking in an exhibit within air-conditioned comfort, there are so many special ways to spend your time. Read on for ideas.
GREAT OUTDOOR PROVISION CO.
Equipping Life & Adventure
MONDAYS – WEDNESDAYS 10 AM – 6 PM
THURSDAYS - FRIDAYS 10 AM – 7 PM
SATURDAYS 10 AM - 6 PM
SUNDAYS 12 – 5 PM
2017 Cameron Street, Raleigh, NC, 27605
1800 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514
WALTER
With gear for everything from hiking, paddling and fishing to camping among the stars, Great Outdoor Provision Co. offers endless summer fun.
Join us on the water and take a test paddle in that boat you’ve been eyeing. Talk to one of our professional paddlesports staff or visit our Boat Demo pages at trustygopc. myeventscenter.com
Visit one of our stores to meet the friendly and professional staff who have boatloads of experience in all kinds of excursions on land and water — they’re waiting to help you kick-start your adventure.
Visit greatoutdoorprovision.com or call 919-833-1741 (Raleigh) or 919-933-6148 (Chapel Hill) for more information.
NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART
Grace Hartigan:
The Gift of Attention
THROUGH AUGUST 10, 2025
West Building
2110 Blue Ridge Road
Raleigh, NC 27607
Learn more and get your tickets at ncartmuseum.org/gracehartigan
This exhibition explores the creative exchange between Hartigan and the bold New York poets who inspired her, sharing a fresh perspective on a pioneering American artist.
Grace Hartigan (1922–2008) rapidly rose to national acclaim during the 1950s with her daring canvases that blended abstraction with elements of figuration. By Hartigan’s side were poets Daisy Aldan, Barbara Guest, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. Their bold lyricism and critical support deeply inspired Hartigan, playing a crucial role in her success. She recalled that the rebellious spirit of these poets, many of whom were gay or lesbian, fueled her independent artistic vision.
This exhibition brings together over 40 of her works created between 1952 and 1968, revealing the profound influence of mid-20th-century American poetry on this seminal artist.
NORTH CAROLINA SYMPHONY
UNC Health Summerfest
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND THROUGH MID-JULY
Koka Booth Ampitheatre
8003 Regency Parkway
Cary, NC 27518
The UNC Health Summerfest concert series offers audiences t he best in music and entertainment — from pops to classical — in a relaxed and fun outdoor setting. For 25 years, families and friends have packed their picnics and gathered under the stars for concerts at Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary.
This season features Opening Night with Gershwin Favorites, including “Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris,” Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture and more. Plus, hear classical concerts showcasing music by Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel and Tchaikovsky.
Celebrate the vibe and the tropical songs of Jimmy Buffett, Bob Marley and the Beach Boys with Tropical Rock for 5 O’Clock... Somewhere. Other pops favorites this summer include a Salute to John Williams, Disco Fever, Songs of the ‘70s and Broadway Showstoppers.
Tickets start at $35; kids 12 and under admitted free on the lawn. Visit ncsymphony.org or call 919-733-2750 for more information.
THEATRE IN THE PARK
JUNE 19-29
AUGUST 14-24
Theatre in the Park
107 Pullen Road
Raleigh, NC 27607
Theatre In The Park is proud to bring you two amazing shows for our Summer 2025 season. In June, join us for Shakespeare in the Park (indoors) as we present Hamlet. Step into the Danish court, where power, betrayal and vengeance collide as Prince Hamlet seeks to uncover the truth behind his father’s death. This timeless drama and its haunting soliloquies have captivated audiences for centuries. Directed by David Henderson and featuring Ira David Wood IV as Hamlet.
In August, we’ll bring you Stew by Zora Howard. In this compelling comedy-drama, three generations of Black women banter and bicker as they prepare for a feast. Mama is up early to prepare an important meal — but even with her family on hand to help, time is running short. Tensions simmer, then come to a boil as the violence that hovers around the periphery of their lives begins to intrude upon the sanctity of the kitchen. Directed by Yamila Monge.
Tickets start at $23. Visit theatreinthepark.com or call 919-831-6058 for more information.
HENDERSONVILLE
Raise a Glass in the Blue Ridge Mountains
VISIT HENDERSONVILLE & HENDERSONVILLE WELCOME CENTER
201 S. Main Street
Hendersonville, NC 28792
828-693-9708
visithendersonvillenc.org
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and the hillsides of Europe are separated by thousands of miles. But spend a few days in Hendersonville visiting wineries and you might think you’re on the other side of the Atlantic.
Hendersonville’s Crest of the Blue Ridge wine region received federal designation in 2019. Warm days and cool nights during the growing season, along with the right soil composition and humidity, create favorable conditions for cultivating grapes. As Western North Carolina’s premier wine country, Crest of the Blue Ridge is home to eight vineyards producing wines of distinction from European vinifera and French-American hybrid grapes. Visit this summer to sample Chardonnay, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Vidal Blanc and more. One of the newest wineries, Souther Williams Vineyard, reaches even deeper into the European continent with varieties such as Blaufränkisch and Grüner Veltliner.
Away from the vineyards, enjoy a robust culinary scene, performances at Flat Rock Playhouse and a Main Street that’s been described as “one of the nation’s most attractive smalltown shopping districts.”
THE LOST COLONY
1409 National Park Drive
Manteo, NC 27954
thelostcolony.org
Now in its 88th anniversary season, The Lost Colony is one of the most exciting nights of theater on the East Coast. An Outer Banks tradition, recently updated to appeal to modern audiences, The Lost Colony is an important part of any trip to the beach. History comes alive. The Lost Colony tells the true story of the first attempt at English colonization in America and the Colony’s encounters with the Algonquin Native Americans who lived there. In 1587, 117 men, women and children set sail from Devon, England to establish a permanent colony in the New World and eventually landed on Roanoke Island. Shortly after arriving, the leader of the Colony, Governor John White, returned to England to gather more supplies. War with Spain delayed his return to Roanoke Island for three years, and when he eventually made it back to the island, he found that the Colony had vanished, leaving only the letters “CRO” carved into a tree. Where did the Colony go? Thus one of history’s most endearing mysteries was born.
Fun for the whole family. Featuring spectacular dances, fantastical puppetry, breathtaking costumes, harrowing fights, jaw-dropping special effects and a timeless story, The Lost Colony has something for everyone in the family. Theater lovers, history enthusiasts and everyone in between will leave the show trying to solve the mystery.
LIBERTY & PLENTY DISTILLERY
Liberty & Plenty Distillery, a woman-owned distillery based in Durham and Wilson, North Carolina, is redefining what it means to craft world-class spirits. Known for precision, creativity and an unwavering commitment to quality, the distillery produces an exceptional range of bourbon, whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, liqueurs and cordials through a blend of copper pot, column and cold distillation, masterful blending and unique barrel finishing techniques.
Home to four acclaimed spirit brands — Cap & Cane Spirits Artisanal Rums, Slate Belt Spirits Premium Vodkas, Bronze Bull Spirits Whiskies & Bourbons and Whirligarden Spirits Gin — Liberty & Plenty has earned Double Gold, Gold and Silver Medals at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and Best North Carolina Vodka Distillery at the New York International Spirits Competition.
Ex plore the distillery through guided tasting tours and by sipping still-to-glass cocktails at the bar. Whether you’re a seasoned enthusiast or a curious newcomer, you’ll be immersed in a world of craft, character and Carolina hospitality.
Visit libertyandplenty.com or call 919-381-4100 for more information. Must be 21+ years of age. Please drink responsibly.
WALTER EVENTS
JULY 16 An Evening in Paris
JULY 23
Book Club with James Dodson
At An Evening in Paris, enjoy an immersive, Frencht hemed night featuring art historian, curator and podcaster Jennifer Dasal. Dasal’s latest book, THe Club, explores the experiences of women who studied art while living together in Belle Époque Paris. Your ticket includes a book talk, live art sessions and French makeup consultations, as well as heavy hors d’oeuvres and unlimited aperitifs.
The following week, join WALTER for Book Club with James Dodson. We’ll be hosting the best-selling author and columnist to celebrate his new book, THe Road TH at Made America: A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road
This lively tome shares untold stories in our nation’s history of the 800-mile route that American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia. The evening includes a book talk, wine, hors d’oeuvres and a signing opportunity.
Visit waltermagazine.com/savethedate for tickets and more information.
Ben Lindemann
THE WHIRL
WALTER’s roundup of gatherings, celebrations, fundraisers and more around Raleigh.
NC AQUARIUM CAMPAIGN LAUNCH CELEBRATION
On Apr. 11, the board of the North Carolina Aquarium Society hosted a party at the Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus to launch their fundraising campaign for the renovation of the NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Supporters who share a passion for education and conservation gathered for cocktails and conversation as they honored the generosity of early investors and previewed the renovation plans.
Johnny Tillett, Drew Covert
Charles Winston, Jenny Winston, shark, Harry Archer, Sally Archer
Roy Cooper, Caitlin Duke, Sara Trexler
Scottie Bryan, Kaye Bryan, Wes Ragland
Cristina Baker, Addie Ladner
Carrol Mattocks, Bob Mattocks, Pamela B. Cashwell
THE WHIRL
FIRST-YEAR WRITING SHOWCASE
The First-Year Writing Showcase was an inaugural event for North Carolina State University. This event welcomed faculty, students and community supporters to celebrate the research and writing of NC State’s first-year writing students. Students presented on a range research topics from various disciplines at the Innovation Studio at Hill Library, highlighting the interdisciplinary approach of the writing program.
MISSION TRIANGLE’S SHARK TANK
On Mar. 26 Mission Triangle hosted its annual event highlighting and celebrating what God is doing in the Triangle Christian Community by connecting nonprofits with audiences that can meet those needs. This year’s featured nonprofits were Academy31, CORRAL Riding Academy and Safe Families for Children. That night, the community showed up and raised $110,000 and activated over 187 volunteer opportunities to support their good work.
Grayson Boodee, Bethany Steen
Navya Tyagi, Alexa Hadley
Settle Monroe, Dallas Chew
Maddie Roberts, Derren Lee, Tim Currington
Monica Hopkins
April Rice, Kimberly Wilson, Sherry Fowler, Blair Graham
KO Grissett
Shelby Edmond, Theresa Garrett
David Pruitt
Ashli-Cole Barclay
THE WHIRL
BLACK & WHITE BALL
The Black & White Ball, hosted by The Reese Ward Foundation on Mar. 31, was a night of purpose, elegance and heartfelt community. Held in honor of the late Reese Ward, the event brought together over 300 guests to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Melanoma Research Foundation. The evening raised an incredible $311,000 to support the fight against cancer.
Our patients receive state-of-the-art care in a warm, professional, safe and friendly environment. We welcome new patients!
Ailene Thompson, Tate Russell, Carol Ward, Ward Russell, Molly Russell, Lane Russell, Zachary Chapman
THE WHIRL
FREDDIE LEE HEATH AUDITORIUM DEDICATION
The Wake County School Board of Education voted to name the auditorium at Enloe Magnet High School for Freddie Lee Heath, a longtime public school arts educator. On Apr. 4, a celebration and unveiling was held at Enloe. It was a delightful evening of dance and vocal performances, as well as guest speakers including emcee Amber Rupinta.
Michael Gillman
Chris Inhulsen, Hannah Ackerman, Heidi Johnston, Brooke Miller, Freddie Lee Heath,
Jeremy Tucker, Michele Weathers, Freddie Heath
Nikki Yarborough, Andrea Gardner, Judy Wright, Linda McKinney, Joyce Rothchild, Bob Bilbro, Harry Bowles
Bob Bilbro, Carol Bilbro, Freddie Lee Heath, June Williams, Terree Montgomery
September 5
SIGHTS & SOUNDS ON SUNDAYS @ NCMA
On Apr. 27, Chamber Music Raleigh presented 8-time Grammy-winning trumpeter and 2-time Oscar-winning composer Terence Blanchard for two sold out concerts at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
THE MAKERY: GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION
The team behind Kidzu Children’s Museum has a new name — and a new home. The organization unveiled its new name, the North Carolina Children’s Museum, at the grand opening celebration of its new maker space at Boxyard RTP on Apr. 11. Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony, guests unleashed their inner makers and built confidence in STEAM through hands-on activities, including 3D printing, robotics and more.
Andrew Holton, Jamie DeMent Holcomb, Kelly Propst
Mary J.C. Cresimore, Terence Blanchard, Stephen Reynolds, Susan Osborne
Playing It Forward
Marbles is on a campaign to offer more opportunities for fun and learning
by EMMIE BROOKS
If you build it, they will play — and if it’s Marbles Kids Museum, they’ll learn a little something, too. Since its debut in 2007, this well-loved institution has been a community hub, early education ecosystem and a go-to spot for celebrations, from birthday parties to weddings. In an age of screen time and schedule overload, it’s a place to practice hands-on, hearts-open learning. But with its popularity comes a challenge: there just isn’t enough space.
“We are at capacity on a lot of the days when families want and need us the most,” says CEO Jonathan Frederick. “Almost all of our big programs and special events, from our summer camp programs to our Kooky Spooky Halloween Party, sell out like that.”
That’s why Marbles is gearing up for the largest expansion in its history. The Bigger Play, Brighter Futures campaign will add 3,000 square feet of wildly imaginative space, including a city of the future, a rooftop racetrack and a classroom called the Think Tank.
One of the most anticipated additions is Futuropolis, a one-of-a-kind exhibit designed to spark curiosity about the world ahead. Here, kids will step into the shoes of builders, engineers, inventors and other problem-solvers shaping tomorrow’s cities, exploring the building blocks of real careers in the Triangle’s growing industries.
“There’s going to be construction play, biotechnology play, transportation play and building play,” says Frederick. “Most people, when they think about career exploration, think about high school students, but a lot of research shows that even elementary schoolers can think about their possibilities and get inspired.”
One of the most anticipated additions is Futuropolis, a one-ofa-kind exhibit designed to spark curiosity about the world ahead.
After zooming through the city of tomorrow, young visitors and their caregivers will be able to get their heads in the clouds… sort of. The Marbles Skyway will be a rooftop play zone with a racetrack and downtown
views. “We are creating a spot for families to go outside and get a breath of fresh air,” says Frederick. “It’s going to be a nice touchpoint as folks are visiting the museum.”
Meanwhile, a new Think Tank classroom will expand the museum’s educational programs, offering new opportunities for summer camps, field trips and family activities. The campaign also supports the Marbles Impact Fund, an initiative aimed at ensuring long-term play affordability and access.
“It’ll be a great chance for us to expand our educational access for the audiences who need us the most,” says Frederick. “Children in Raleigh need more spaces for play, and Marbles is the best at it.”
Courtesy Marbles Kids Museum
Futuropolis
Stronger Together.
Stronger Together.
Stronger Together.
Your Family. Our Team.
Your Family. Our Team.
Your Family. Our Team.
Stronger Together.
Your Family. Our Team.
The diagnosis is cancer. You’re scared. You feel alone. But you’re not. You have your family. Your friends. Their love. Their support. And, along with each other, you have us. An experienced, talented, multidisciplinary team armed with highly advanced treatment options and a “your cancer is our cancer” confidence that says we’ve got this. Instead of alone, you feel stronger than ever. To learn more, visit us online. We believe you’ll agree, together, we make a great team.
The diagnosis is cancer. You’re scared. You feel alone. But you’re not. You have your family. Your friends. Their love. Their support. And, along with each other, you have us. An experienced, talented, multidisciplinary team armed with highly advanced treatment options and a “your cancer is our cancer” confidence that says we’ve got this. Instead of alone, you feel stronger than ever. To learn more, visit us online. We believe you’ll agree, together, we make a great team.
The diagnosis is cancer. You’re scared. You feel alone. But you’re not. You have your family. Your friends. Their love. Their support. And, along with each other, you have us. An experienced, talented, multidisciplinary team armed with highly advanced treatment options and a “your cancer is our cancer” confidence that says we’ve got this. Instead of alone, you feel stronger than ever. To learn more, visit us online. We believe you’ll agree, together, we make a great team.
Stronger Together.
The diagnosis is cancer. You’re scared. You feel alone. But you’re not. You have your family. Your friends. Their love. Their support. And, along with each other, you have us. An experienced, talented, multidisciplinary team armed with highly advanced treatment options and a “your cancer is our cancer” confidence that says we’ve got this. Instead of alone, you feel stronger than ever. To learn more, visit us online. We believe you’ll agree, together, we make a great team.
Your Family. Our Team.
The diagnosis is cancer. You’re scared. You feel alone. But you’re not. You have your family. Your friends. Their love. Their support. And, along with each other, you have us. An experienced, talented, multidisciplinary team armed with highly advanced treatment options and a “your cancer is our cancer” confidence that says we’ve got this. Instead of alone, you feel stronger than ever. To learn more, visit us online. We believe you’ll agree, together, we make a great team.
