Wendy Marsters during her 12-hour wait to get in to the DMB show at JPJ.
PHOTO COURTESY WENDY MARSTERS

It was only a poster, but it meant everything to Wendy Marsters.

The Northern California high school teacher has been listening to Dave Matthews Band since 1995, and she catches the band’s show every time they happen near her home. But for the final show on the final tour before a fan-freaking hiatus, she decided to cross the continent.

“I knew it would be epic— ” she says in a phone call from Chico, “epic in Dave Matthews Band-ness.”

And she even found an epic seat in Charlottesville. As the 20th person in line for the November 20 show at John Paul Jones Arena, the 41-year-old parlayed her 12-hour wait into primo, second-row seats.

“I had the best seat in the house,” says Marsters “And I wanted a poster as a symbol of this trip.”

Every DMB show has a different, limited edition poster, and Marsters paid $40 for one of the 650 Methane Studios posters printed just for the Saturday event.

“There’s key shows that sell out and are important and people collect the posters,” explains Marsters. And because the Charlottesville show was the last one until 2012, there’s one offered on eBay for $400.

After the three-and-a-half hour concert, Marsters went to the nearby McDonald’s restaurant while the Arena traffic cleared. She started talking to a young man from Richmond who’d also been at the show, and who asked how much she wanted for the poster and offered her $250, she says. No way, responded Marsters.

“It’s priceless to me,” she says she (more)

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A rendering of UVA’s new Ruth Caplin Theatre.
Willam Rawn Associates

Last month, UVA held a ceremonial ground-breaking at the future site of the Ruth Caplin Theatre, a three hundred-seat, 20,500 square-foot “thrust stage” theater that will rise beside the Culbreth Theater on Culbreth Road— courtesy of Ruth Caplin, 89, and husband, Mortimer Caplin, 94, who donated $4 million for the $13.5 million addition to the Drama Building and whose lives have been as drama-filled as the plays and films they hope to nurture.

UVA alum and former law school prof Mortimer Caplin is a legend in legal circles, a still-practicing tax lawyer who served as IRS Commissioner during the Kennedy Administration and briefly into the Johnson White House, during which time he made the cover of Time magazine. As a law prof at UVA, he taught future U.S. Senators Ted and Robert Kennedy. And he’s a lover of the arts, it seems.

Indeed, back in his UVA student days in the 1930s Caplin was president of the Virginia Players, and appeared in a number of UVA productions, including the title role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

“The theater will clearly advance artistic values cherished by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson— music, dance, architecture, painting,” said Caplin in remarks prepared for the October 21 event, which he attended with his wife. “It’s our hope that it will enrich the studies of all University students, making the arts not only a part of their course work, but a part of their lives.”

So what’s a thrust theater? It has a stage that opens and extends into the audience, which allows theater-goers to watch the performance from three sides, allowing for more intimacy. In addition to theater productions, the facility will be used (more)

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Kathy Erskine before the National Book Award seal went on her book, Mockingbird.
PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Charlottesville writer Kathryn Erskine now possesses one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country: the 2010 National Book Award in young people’s literature for her book, Mockingbird.

Erskine was one of 20 finalists at the awards dinner at Cipriani Wall Street last night in New York. Also in the winners’ circle was singer Patti Smith in nonfiction for her memoir, Just Kids, about her youth in New York in the ’60s with her buddy, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; Jaimy Gordon in fiction for Lord of Misrule, and Terrance Hayes in poetry for Lighthead.

Richmond native Tom Wolfe (more)

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Deuces Lounge owner Jerome Cherry, right, runs the new club with his son, Jerome Cherry Jr., left, and Jatavious Calloway.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Before the Outback Lodge on Preston Avenue closed last year, it wasn’t unheard of to find it in the news when fights broke out and gunshots fired. The new owner of what’s now called Deuces Lounge is trying to turn that image around.

“We want to let people see the Outback is dead,” says Jerome Cherry. “They don’t have to be afraid.”

Cherry opened Deuces Lounge in September to handle a variety of musical genres— except hip hop. “We want hip hop,” he says, “but we don’t want the violence.”

Instead, the club has jazz night, metal, salsa, and a different take on karaoke that Cherry calls “Be Seen, Be Heard” on Wednesdays. “It can be karaoke, it can be poetry, it can be stand-up comedy,” says Cherry.

Another legacy of the Outback affects Cherry’s ABC permit. He only serves beer and wine, and the ABC stipulated that the club stop serving alcohol at midnight. Cherry, who doesn’t drink, believes the lack of hard liquor will draw a crowd more interested in music than drinking.

The interior has been spruced up, booths added, and the stage enlarged.

“This is the biggest stage outside the Jefferson and Southern,” says Cherry, who sees the upstairs of the two-level venue as a lounge, with the downstairs as a club.

And to further nourish a more family friendly atmosphere, Saturday afternoons are for teen bands to rock out in a place where parents can come see them play in an alcohol-free zone. Cherry is a bass player, and this is his first go at running a night club.

“This is my dream,” he says.

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Stanley Nelson discusses his documentary after the screening of Freedom Riders.
PHOTO BY DEBRA COHEN

At 10am on Saturday, with a day of screenings left to go, the Virginia Film Festival broke its all-time box office record, Festival director Jody Kielbasa announced before The Last Picture Show.

Bigger and better was the unofficial theme at this year’s fest, Kielbasa’s second but the first on which he really could impose his vision. (Last year, he inherited the “Funny Business” theme, a festival tradition that had pretty much run its course, and which he immediately ditched.)

Attendance jumped 25 percent over last year to 23,750, as did ticket sales, ringing up at $90,158.

Kielbasa also unveiled a new logo that says both Virginia and Blue Ridge Mountains, although one wiseacre we know sees a bondage theme in the celluloid wrapped around the state.

And Kielbasa did make us suffer, with more movies— 132— than ever before, making it even harder to choose what films to cram into the November 4-7 fest.

Innovations we liked a lot: The emphasis on contemporary foreign films and the “Six from ‘60,” a way to screen classic movies from 50 years ago. We’re hoping next year has “Six from ‘61.”

Adding a box office at the Main Street Arena on the Downtown Mall made it really convenient for us at the Hook a block away.

And Culbreth Theatre used to be a wasteland for food options. This year, the upgraded Fine Arts Café made it possible for famished filmgoers to find the sustenance to carry on.

Attracting star power has always been one of the toughest lots of (more)

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Laura Mulligan Thomas.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

The director of the Charlottesville High School Orchestra, a group whose students have been launched into Taylor Swift’s and other internationally acclaimed bands, will find herself performing cello onstage with a popular singer-songwriter headlining a show at Old Cabell Hall: A Fine Frenzy.

“I’m so excited,” says Laura Mulligan Thomas. “I’ve wanted to do this all my life.”

Normally confining herself to the classical arena, Thomas leaves the world of note-by-note work tonight as she joins an act known for heartbroken love songs— and the possibility of improvisation.

Thomas says she received MP4s of the six songs which she’ll accompany, including “The Minnow and the Trout” and”Almost Lover,” the latter an indie radio hit, just four days ago.

“It sounds like we’ll be winging it,” says Thomas, while driving over to the same-day rehearsal, “so that’s half the fun.”

~
A Fine Frenzy performs Tuesday, November 2 in UVA’s Old Cabell Hall at 8pm. Tickets cost $12-$24.

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Carter Mountain a week before the frenzy.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Cars backed up for miles on Saturday, October 9, snaking from Route 53 onto Route 20 South and then even further— onto Interstate 64 at exit 121. It prompted the temporary closure of  Route 53. But those who assumed an accident was to blame for the traffic-stopping snarl were wrong: it was the allure of apples and the call of Carter Mountain, where the annual Apple Festival was taking place.

“It probably was one of our best attended festivals,” says Cynthia Chiles, whose family owns both Carter Mountain Orchard and Chiles Peach Orchard in Crozet.

The mountain-top business doesn’t keep attendance records, says Chiles, but she believes the possibly record-breaking turnout was thanks to a confluence of events: a perfect fall day, the ripening of popular varieties Fujis and Granny Smiths, and the fact that there was no home UVA football game to distract families looking for some bonding time at a mountain that stands 1278 feet above sea level and over 400 feet above nearby Monticello. (more)

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Zombies race past City Hall and MORE PHOTOS.
PHOTO BY JEANNE NICHOLSON SILER

When director Brian Wimer first conceived of the zombie-laden running race as a guerrilla marketing tool for his new film, Danger. Zombies. Run., he figured he might get a hundred people or so willing to don deathly makeup to run after willing victims through the streets of downtown Charlottesville.

Apparently, the director of the award-winning Mantra and other horror fare tapped an unrecognized demand for zombie-related athletic events, as approximately 500 runners, some who traveled from out-of-state, participated in the inaugural “Zombie 5K” on Sunday, October 17. They filled the streets with staggering— or sprinting— undead hot on the trail of human runners.

“Everybody had a good time,” says Wimer, who expressed relief that his biggest fear was not realized. “No one got hurt!” he exclaimed.

—-

While some might have believed that Wimer sponsored another zombie-related event the night before the race– the decidedly adult-themed “Sexy Zombie Jello Wrestling” at R2 nightclub– Wimer says he did not, but he did film it as a possible DVD extra for his film. He does hope to hold a family-friendly zombie bake sale at the City Market before the Saturday, October 30 premiere of the new film at the Paramount. (It will screen again on Friday, November 5 during the Virginia Film Festival.) (more)

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