What's Beautiful: The Fan in Richmond, Virginia

No long explanation of urban life today... just some nice photos of a beautiful old Richmond neighborhood called The Fan, and Ten Things I Love about this place. When I grow up, I want to live here!

It appears to me that part of the video screen is chopped off of the right side. If you want to see the full screen, DOUBLE CLICK ON THE VIDEO SCREEN and it will take you to a page that doesn't chop off the side... if you have any ideas on how to fix this, will you e-mail me please?

10 Things I love about the fan are:

1. Crumbly brick and stone sidewalks
2. Stone masonry and detailing on many of the homes
3. Dappled sunlight making its way through the trees
4. Signs of life from a different time, mingled with the thoroughly modern
5. The stately old buildings, all in such close proximity to one another, which encourage a built-in sense of community
6. The delicious corner cafes and quirky little stores that have served the neighborhoods for years; I just show Kuba Kuba, but there are really so many
7. The walkability; The Fan is so conveniently situated that you can walk to take care of much of your business; it scores 86% out of 100 on the Walk Score web site
8. Its diversity... families... students... singles... couples... all ethnicities... rich... poor... in The Fan, you've got it all
9. While maintaining a general character, each home in The Fan is unique; this is very different from today's "planned communities" with three different house plans circled around a "pond" with a "fountain" and too many poopy geese that probably belong in Canada anyway.
10. The little gardens; really a postage stamp of a yard is all I really need.

Richmonders, do you have a favorite house in The Fan? Let me know!

TGIF! Have a great weekend!

Davidson Fine Arts School... beautiful crumbling pile of bricks and dust

This started out as a post about how much I love city life and urban decay. To start off, I was going to show you some photos of where I went to middle and high school. The school was very urban, very decaying. (It has since been condemed... asbestos and the like.) As I searched the net for photos to share, I came across some by JM House. The one at the top of the post is his. Please go look at them. When I saw these photos, I knew that I had to write about my alma mater: Davidson Fine Arts School.

The building in these photographs was built in the 1930s, I think. 1933 stands out in my head, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it served an elementary-aged student body until the 1970s when it was closed. I think it was 1981, when the school was re-opened as a "magnet" school, drawing artistically talented students from all over the school district. When the magnet school concept began there, the school educated 5th-8th graders, and each year grades were added until the school served 5th-12th grades. The first senior class graduated in 1986. This was around the time of the original movie Fame, and the school was a very cool concept.

Anyway, many instructors fostered an environment in which normal wasn't normal at all. The way to fit in was not to fit in... boys had earrings when people still wanted to "check which ear the earring was in, just to be safe," not that it mattered at Davidson. Students pushed the envelope in many ways, but were also expected to perform, not just in their chosen artistic endeavors but also academically. Davidson has been ranked the top public high school in the state of Georgia many times over. There were no sports - okay, there WAS Cross Country - but we did have a stellar One Act Play team and a highly competitive choral trio. Freeks and geeks were us... and we loved it.

Back to the photos... I don't know who the photographer is, but for me personally, it is uncanny how he (not a student of the school, as far as I know) captured images of so many of the things that defined the school for me:

• the beautiful art deco facade... one fall in the eighth grade, I sat and rendered every inch of that chalky, white-washed and red-bricked face for an entire six-week period... I still have that drawing.
• the crazy bathrooms... the toilet seats were raised up two-three inches higher than usual and there were no handles for flushing, so that when you stood up, the toilet flushed automatically... it nearly scared the living daylights out of me, a fresh-faced, 10-year-old fifth grader in the fall of 1983... I remember what I wore to school that day... painfully dark blue jeans and a purple polo shirt... not a real Polo shirt... I've still never had one of those to this day...
• Mrs. Walpert's class card posted in the window... I really can't believe those are still there! These were on the door of EVERY classroom, signed by our Principal, Beverly J. Barnhart... they looked JUST like that when I started in 1983, and to think, they still exist in the world... crazy. I wonder if they use these in the new building that students use now?
• The art... I remember watching the student who painted that serene landscape, afternoon after quiet afternoon... thank you Class of 1995 for rescuing it! I even painted on one, but I didn't like my painting and let someone else paint over it... those boxes covered the places where the gigantor, silver, old-school fire extinguishers once hung.
• The beautiful yet ever cold fireplace in the lunchroom... so evocative of a day when people NEED wood-burning fireplaces for warmth and not just ambience. The dance teachers kept thier splintery wooden desk in the nook of the fireplace, along with a squeaky old office chair that leaned w-a-a-a-y back.
• The auditorium/stage... how many hours did my girlfriends and I spend giggling in those chairs? If you were wearing a white shirt and were also sweaty (there was a good chance of this because there was no A/C in this part of the building), the brown varnish would come off on your clothes... how many hours spent rehearsing and performing on that stage, and, over the course of eight years, in how many capacities too? chorus... band... orchestra... drama... dance... spelling bees... Something about the light and the emptiness of the photograph reminds me again of that highly-impressionable first day: uncertainty, light, fear, hope.

If you didn't go to this school, these photos probably look like some pretty generic, peely, moldy old rooms. For me however, a proud graduate of Davidson Fine Arts , seeing these photos causes real tension right in the center of my heart that just balances on the borders of sweetness and melancholy.Perhaps this tension stems from dreams lost yet other dreams discovered. Perhaps it stems from nostalgia for old, familiar places and the carefree days of sunny, blurry teenage years. Perhaps it is just sadness that such a behemoth dowager must die so slowly... so solitary... as if all of the years of schooling Augusta's youth since 1933 never even happened... as if the rowdy spirit of all those kids, now grown, never touched the walls.

Was it even real? Did it all happen? Some say so... But what do you see? Is there evidence of the our laughter? our pain? our learning? our friendships? Does the sound of our music echo in the halls for old ghosts to hear? I say so.

Favorite Things I Did This Summer

Click here to see a video of pictures of my favorite frames from this beautifully wonderful, never-long-enough summer!

I'm still here...

...but just having too much end of summer fun to blog! More when things settle down!

Fun and Photos in VA

Just a quick post between vacations (lucky me... lush and spongy mountains one week, hot, sandy beaches the next!) to let you know that I am still alive and well! I spent last week in the beautiful Allegheny Mountains of the western part of Virginia. My family and I were staying at Shrine Mont, the mountain camp of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia located in Orkney Springs, Virginia. Orkney Springs is an itty-bitty "township" at the end of a steep and windy road that is happily dotted with lavender and white wildeflowers. Because of all of the youthful campers, there is almost always song, literally, echoing off the mountains, just like in The Sound of Music.

Hearing that joyful music from afar, and knowing the youth and joy and love in the voices that was behind it, counts as one of the most extraordinarily uplifting, inspirational sounds I've ever heard. Wish you could experience it. Goose bumps... I'm telling you.

I took so many pictures that I don't even know where to start! It'll take a while to compile things into a format that is (pleasantly) viewable for you... so to tide you over, I'll share a little bit about my journey with you.

We were at Shrine Mont for a whole week. When we left there, instead of going straight home, my kids and I headed to Lake Anna. This lead us down, potentially, the most beautiful rode I've ever driven (VA HWY 522)... mountains looming before and behind you... the road ascending and descending with curvature almost alpine in nature... along the way, we stopped for lunch in the chic-ly quaint Culpepper, Virginia. Here is what we saw!

For my Deutsch-o-phile friends...

Kiss Me I'm Irish... well, not really...

Now my friends all know that I'm not Irish. While I'm sure it's back in my roots somewhere (I am from Georgia after all, and I do have a child with gorgeous hair the exact color of the morning sun), being Irish is something that never identified my family. As a teenager, I used to envy my "Irish" friends who played hookie, sanctioned by their parents, just to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and, how? Well, I never knew.

Now I know because this year, I finally got to be Irish.

You see, I'm play the fiddle in this Irish band called The Donnybrooks. As husbands and wives (well, wife), parents, teachers, workers and all mild-mannered around normal people, playing in a band together is our chance to let loose and act like the heathens we really are! Singing about whiskey before breakfast, drunken sailors and good old-fashioned Irish revenge is just fun! And we love it! And this week, we did lots of it too! Nine gigs in eight days!

Being the silly Protestant that I am, I never knew what fun all of those Irish Catholics were having on St. Paddy's Day, nor did I realize how much they enjoyed sharing in the fun! With St. Patrick's Day falling on a Tuesday, the band was called celebrate this special saint's day for longer than one solid week. We've played and sung and driven and tuned and loaded and unloaded and set up and torn down, and it has been about the most fun I've had in sense I realized just why having so much fun is usually reserved for the young-uns, under 25.

So to end up this post, I'm going to leave you with a list of the Top Ten Things I Learned About the Irish and St. Patrick's Day. After you read it, go on over to http://www.blogger.com/www.thedonnybrooks.com where you can hear some of our music and see a (teeny-weeny)clip of us on the news.

10) People celebrating St. Patrick's Day (March 17, the anniversary of dear old St. Pat's death) don't really care if it is the actual Saint's day at all, as long as they're within a week of the actual day, or really just some time in March... no need to be gettin all picky about the details.

9) While I never saw a pot 'o gold, four leaf clover or a banshee, I did see several leprechauns: mostly those giant inflatable kinds that people sit in their yards. But they were leprechauns none the less.

8) The Irish love their music, especially songs about whiskey before breakfast, ye olden days, people dying in the steerage section of great ships a 'sinking, making whiskey in the hills, fighting the English for their dear land and drinking whiskey in the evening.

7) Those beautiful folks who do Irish dancing are straight-up, hard core athletes. The only people stronger and tougher are the Irish rugby players... and the dancers are much prettier!

6) St. Patrick's Day is the one, church-sponsored chance celebrators get all year to imbibe before lunchtime without incurring hot wrath, gloomy judgment and loud condemnation of their mild-mannered spouse, who is for once, likely joining them!

5) Irish folk, in general, do not like American lite beer any better just because it has been dyed green. This is something gimmick-y created by slick marketeers to help the "Irish for a Day" types feel more comfortable about consuming beer before lunchtime. The hard-core Irish-types only want the black stuff.

4) I don't know if it's true what they say about what men wear under their kilts or not, but when you're faced with so many, singing, piping, drumming and drinking all day long, it is certainly an entertaining thought to consider. And the flesh of their knees look cute too, just sitting their mindlessly between the hem of their tartans and the wool of their knee socks, just barely concealing the dagger.

3) While I did enjoy some truly delicious traditional Irish food this week, the Church Hill Irish Festival management isn't scared to have more traditional fare, including a Dublin Dog, Irish Burger, Mac 'o Cheese and Ital- oops, I mean Irish sausage... and of course Miller Lite.

2) The Irish people must be the happiest, music-lovingest bunch of people I've ever met. There were so many fantastic musicians at each venue we visited this week that my head is spinning! Inspiration for a new fiddler!

1)Last but not least, no one can resist the surly charm a a sweet little red-haired girl!

See more fun photos of the week here!