Fourté at The Griffin Bookshop

On Sunday afternoon, we went down to The Griffin Bookshop & Coffee Bar to hear Fourté perform. I found this description in the newspaper's calendar of events: "Fourté performs a fun loving concert ranging from jazz and swing to barbershop and classical. It’s a capella harmony with a twist of humor." The four women are friends of mine, so I admit I'm not even the slightest bit impartial. In fact, you could really call me a groupie. I've attended almost every public performance they've had since they started a couple of years ago. And if they make it big and go on tour, they might even promote me to roadie. Their three sets covered much of their repertoire, including my personal favorites, "Route 66," "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," and their signature song, "Java Jive," which was the first I ever heard them perform.

The Griffin is a combination new & used bookstore, coffee shop, reading room, and occasional music venue. If a dozen people were listening to the music, it would be crowded. They are the new guy in town, both bookwise and coffeewise, and don't get as much traffic as the more established Riverby Books and Hyperion Espresso, but as the ladies in Fourte say, you gotta support the businesses that support local music. So go down and check them out. I highly recommend the chocolate chip scones.

Discovery Days

On Saturday, we spent a few hours at the Discovery Days festival. Here’s the official description of the event from the local newspaper: “This festival will showcase the replica of the John Smith shallop as part of the official 400th-anniversary events of the commonwealth of Virginia. Features traditional craftsmen, living history reenactments, music, food and more.” The shallop is the tiny ship Smith captained to explore the Rappahannock River, and it was anchored at the City Dock, where most of the day's events were centered. So here’s how I want you to think about this: Imagine every community festival you’ve ever been to. Imagine rows of food vendors selling things like kettle corn and Italian ices and barbecue. Imagine more booths with vendors selling the usual T-shirts, jewelry, and crafts. Imagine demonstrations and reenactments, and a tent with a stage with performers.

Now give the whole thing a living history spin: the demonstrations were about Colonial woodworking and brick-making and silversmithing. There were Native American villagers, colonial-era sailors, and Revolutionary War reenactors.

The performers included a folk-singing troubadour, an a capella group singing spirituals and slave songs, and a theater group that put on a play about coming to Jamestown. Plus plenty of exhibits with historical information, and yes, kettle corn and Italian ices and barbecue (because I guess some things are timeless).

Luckily the weather was perfect for the event, and the crowd down at the City Dock was pretty big. The event was sponsored in part by the Fredericksburg Area Museum, located a few blocks away from the dock. Behind the museum is a large “Market Square,” perfect as a venue for performers, and at which there were acts scheduled throughout the day. I’m not sure why the City Dock got such a crowd, and Market Square attracted only a handful of people, but I couldn’t resist this photo of a pretty lonely troubadour at midday:

B I N G O !

Once every six weeks or so, I volunteer to work the Friday night, smoke-free Bingo game at the Falmouth Firehouse. There are close to 20 weekly bingo games in the Fredericksburg area, all run by civic and religious groups as fundraisers, and for my organization, it is by far our most profitable money maker. The game is a far cry from the Catholic Church bingo I played once or twice as a kid with my mom. An air blower keeps the balls moving, then the automatically selected ball is placed in front of a camera for the players to view on television monitors around the room. The number board in front of the room lights up, and computerized bingo machines are starting to replace the paper bingo sheets, allowing players to track many more cards at once. And now, a major feature of bingo is the sale of pull-tabs, essentially lottery tickets, with money prizes that can reach into the thousands.

Opponents of bingo, and pull-tabs in particular, say that the game (and all gambling, really) exploits the poor, who mistakenly believe the odds-gods will eventually shine on them and they will win big. I don’t completely disagree. As working class folks and senior citizens fork over a continuous stream of $20 bills to buy pull-tabs, I can’t help but wonder why they’re wasting so much money that could obviously be put to better use. But for most of the people at the Falmouth Firehouse, Bingo is probably their one big night out a week. They pay an average of around $40-50 for their bingo set-ups, not an unreasonable amount for a Friday night out. The group seems pretty friendly, and many people come early, bring dinner with them, and spend some time socializing with their neighbors. And as a pull-tab seller roaming through the crowd all night, I have to say that of all the places I’ve gone and events I’ve attended in the burg, this is one of the most truly diverse groups. The players are a racially and ethnically diverse mix, there are school-age kids along with seniors well into their 80’s, and people with a variety of disabilities enjoy the game without limitations. Husbands and wives play together, girlfriends get together for a night out, parents help their children with the games, grandparents show off photos of the grandkids. Clearly an evening at Bingo is not quite the same as an evening playing the slots in a casino.

As I walked around, I took notice of all of the little good luck charms people were surrounded by: a small wooden angel, several ceramic elephants, a stuffed Bingo ball, twin rubber duckies, Pokemon cards and figurines, a small square of batiked cloth, a plastic tiger, a souvenir frog from Paradise Island, a surfing penguin, a colored stone, an oversized ladybug, a sheer drawstring bag filled with what I can only describe as “magic sparklies,” and of course, a red rabbit’s foot. If I weren’t trying to make money for my organization, I’d let them know that lucky charms or no, the odds are stacked against them.

Our Tennis Club

For years, the preferred exercise of my husband and me, besides walking, has been tennis. Oh, we’re pretty bad. We couldn’t actually play with real tennis players. He’s the Double Fault King (but at least, unlike me, he can usually serve it over the net) and I move like the out-of-shape middle aged woman that I am, which is to say, not very snappily. But we love to bat the ball back and forth, chasing down every ball, no matter how far out of bounds the other hits it, and at least trying to hit it on the first bounce. We play until his knees start crying out, “Replace me! Replace me!” and I’ve sweated off what feels to be a couple of pounds at least.

Opened in 2004, Riverbend High School is just down the road from us (and here is where I admit that while my mailing address is Fredericksburg, I actually live in Spotsylvania County). The school is equipped with 6 pristine tennis courts that spend the summer largely unused. Except for us. We usually play on Saturday mornings, and after work when I can muster up the energy. There’s a lot not to like about a relatively huge new school being built in the neighborhood, but in our case, it feels like our own private tennis club.

Now that it’s mid-August, we see the first signs of life at the school. The field hockey team has started practicing, and it won’t be long before the other fall high school sports follow suit. Once the kids come back, we’ll have to revert to using the old, slightly decrepit court at the Chancellor Community Center for our afternoon tennis. So for the next week or two, we’ll take advantage of the long days of August sweating it out on the Riverbend courts.

More Summer Music

Dixie Power Trio is a Fredericksburg-based band, playing New Orleans-style jazz, zydeco, Cajun, blues, and boogie woogie. The group, a quartet actually (go figure), has been playing for about 15 years, and we’ve seen them perform several times. They played a solid set at the library last night (I've spared you yet another grainy, out of focus band picture in favor of this photo of my view of the libary's fountain), putting on their usual energetic show that got the whole crowd in a good mood. And while I suspect that the accordion is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of instrument, I happen to love it. I’m a big zydeco fan. They played Iko-Iko, a Mardi Gras tune with a chorus I could never understand, so when I got home I looked up the lyrics, assuming they were in a form of French and actually meant something. Turns out some phrases are based on Mardi Gras Indian chants (Indians as in tribes of Mardi Gras revelers, not Native Americans), and there’s some Creole dialect in there, too, but the chorus isn’t really translatable, and the lyrics are just written out phonetically, like this: “Talkin' 'bout hey now! Hey now! Iko iko an nay. Jockomo feena ah na nay. Jockomo feena nay.” So now you too can sing along!

The summer concerts are winding down, with only a couple of weeks left. One of my favorites was One Horse Town, an alt-country group that played Spotsy Bluemont. With major thunderstorms moving through the area, the concert was moved indoors at the Marshall Center, into what was the former cafeteria of the old high school, then old middle school, and now old community building. The bright fluorescent lighting, the bad acoustics, the limp air conditioning system, and the miniscule and mostly geriatric crowd of about two dozen made this one of the worst venues I can imagine a band working in. Nonetheless, the concert was fantastic. I had never heard this band before, but it was one of the best Bluemont concerts I’ve ever seen. We got on their mailing list, and hopefully will catch them again sometime in a venue that does them justice. At least there was one advantage to the low turnout for the show...I won a doorprize! A Carvel ice cream cake, a traditional favorite in my family since I was a kid. Can you say “free snacks”?

Bluemont

For many years, the Bluemont concert series has been bringing an eclectic mix of performers to smallish cities and towns in central and northwestern Virginia for weekly summer concerts. We’ve been going to the Saturday night concerts at Maury Stadium in the burg since they started 11 years ago, and have added Spotsylvania’s Sunday night Bluemont concert to our schedule for the past couple of years. Maury Stadium is a big venue, relatively speaking, and although attendance this year seems to be a bit off, the concerts still get a pretty decent turnout. A lot of our friends are Bluemont regulars, so there is always a good group of people to hang out with, our chairs and blankets covering a sizable portion of the grass, stage-left. Some of my favorite performers have been the off-beat ones, including The Bobs and Da Vinci’s Notebook, two funny, funky a capella groups, as well as a name-forgotten klezmer band that was my first introduction to the genre. Occasionally, you get a relatively big name act, like Eddie from Ohio or the Dry Branch Fire Squad, but more often than not, it’s musicians you’ve never heard of. But I don’t really care who's playing—I love sitting out on the grass on a summer evening, relaxing with friends, watching the kiddies dance (and sometimes the grownups, too), and if the music is great, that’s a bonus.

Tonight’s performers were John Roberts and Tony Barrand, who play old English folksongs—ballads and sea chanteys and bawdy songs--the kind that definitely would have gone nicely with a pint of ale or two, if we had been in a pub instead of in public.

Friday Night Garden Tour

Last night’s walk took us to the neighborhood around Kenmore, which as everyone in the burg knows, is the home of George Washington’s sister Betty, and her husband, Fielding Lewis. The grounds and gardens are free and open to the public, and from time to time, we duck inside the brick wall that surrounds the estate, walk the shaded trail to the back of the house (or is it the front?), and check up on the garden.

The streets in this neighborhood are lined with particularly lovely and beautifully landscaped historic homes. The gardens are suffering lately, with the super hot weather and lack of rain. But everyone’s lawn is perfectly tended, the shrubs are neatly trimmed, white picket fences abound, and you can smell the boxwood which, after spending four years in college in Williamsburg, smells like old Virginia to me.

Hyperion Espresso

My husband and I are creatures of habit, and our Friday night habit doesn’t vary much. It starts with a stop (say what?) at Kybecca for their Friday night wine tasting. Next, we walk around one of the residential neighborhoods downtown for about an hour, the pace varying with our mood, from a brisk walk to a leisurely stroll to a lethargic shuffle. Occasionally, and if the night is warm and the walk has been energetic enough that we feel we’ve earned it, we might stop for ice cream at Lee’s (excuse me, Wally’s) on Caroline Street. But usually, our last stop is Hyperion, the local coffee shop where we sit and chat for an hour or so over a cup of decaf, and see if anyone we know stops by. Hyperion is a prime spot for impromptu meetings and study groups, there’s a rotating display of local artists’ work in the “upstairs” room, and the outside tables accommodate smokers and dog-owners. The coffee shop in America has become our equivalent of the Italian piazza, where you can hang out for hours, watch the world go by, and always run into a few familiar faces. Always a relaxing way to kick off the weekend.

Here's the original part of the shop, where the baristas toil.



And here's the newer room, up a few steps, with the current display of artwork by local watercolorist Jim Ellis.

Waiting for the Train

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to sit for over two hours in a train station waiting for Amtrak to come. Amtrak has a lousy track record (HA!), and I have waited up to three hours for a scheduled train. I've waited longer for the train than the whole trip should have taken.

The plus side of this weekend's wait was that it was in a train station with a lobby, complete with air conditioning, comfy chairs, TV, vending machines, a play area for kids, an actual human being who can tell you in person how screwed the train's schedule is, and most importantly for me, bathrooms. The same wait at Fredericksburg's station (well, just a platform, really) means sitting on a hard bench (or a concrete ledge if it's crowded) in the heat (or cold, but it's 105 today in the burg, so it's hard to remember what it was like to wait in the cold), and not a creature comfort in sight, even after an extensive renovation. The city's original train station was built in 1910 by the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, but at renovation time, the original brick structure was sold and turned into an upscale restaurant, Claiborne's. Now Claiborne's is a very nice restaurant, but after a couple of hours on a concrete perch, I kinda wish at least part of the building had been left for the train passengers.

And now for your viewing pleasure, here are a few photos from a recent walk around the train station.

This is a railroad bridge over Princess Anne St. (colorized...yes, I do love my Photoshop).

Here is an old warehouse next to the station (a bit of Photoshopping here, too)

Here is an abandoned car in a yard near the station.

This is a closeup of a retaining wall next to the tracks. Too artsy for you?

Saratoga Weekend

This past weekend, we were out of town at a family reunion just outside Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. Saratoga has a lot in common with Fredericksburg. Both have historic downtowns, a quaint main street shopping district, nice city parks, and even trolleys and horse-drawn carriages for sightseeing visitors. We have the University of Mary Washington, they have Skidmore College. This year, we have painted fish, they have painted horses. The main difference is that Saratoga has the racetrack (the oldest continuously-operating thoroughbred track in the country), which brings wealthy visitors to the area every summer, plus lots of residents from the horsey set, and more than its fair share of moneyed socialites. When the track is open during the summer, the town is loaded with people and money. People and money mean a livelier downtown with lots of upscale shops and restaurants open late every night. We took a late night stroll, and there were crowds on the streets, in the restaurants and sidewalk cafes, and many shops were open until 10 or 11 pm. There is a thriving bar scene, quite a few street entertainers, and the whole place makes Fredericksburg on a Friday night look downright sleepy. Saratoga also has a much larger arts community, including the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Yaddo (a large estate used as an artists’retreat), and lots of galleries. Our parks have benches and brickwork, theirs have fountains and marble statues. Fredericksburg needs a lot more than one rich socialite if it expects to keep up (although one is better than none, so thank you, Doris Buffett).

Other peculiarities of Saratoga Springs include the springs the city is named for, whose water you can sample from dozens of drinking fountains around town that are tapped into underground springs that, for the most part, smell and taste pretty bad, despite allegedly having curative properties.

The city has also carried the horse theme a little too far, including way too many galleries devoted to “equine art” (isn’t that an oxymoron?). On the plus side of the horsey theme, they have a beautifully restored carousel in the middle of town, which you can ride for 50 cents. We all took a spin, although as usual, I prefer the old-lady benches to the moving horses.

Friday's first stop

On weekends when we don’t have anything particular to do, my husband and I head downtown after work. Our first stop is always Kybecca, our favorite wine shop, where we taste some wine and I try to act like I’m actually learning something. All I know is I should swirl the wine, stick my nose in the glass and inhale deeply, take a swig, and say something non-committal, like “Smooth!” or “Clean!” or “Great depth of character!”

Our latest purchase, two wines from southern Italy, are heading to upstate New York for a family reunion this weekend.

Take Me Out Of The Ballgame

Once or twice a summer, my husband and I head up to Pfitzner Stadium in Prince William County to check out a minor league baseball game. Last night’s game pitted the home team Potomac Nationals, the farm team for the Washington Nationals, against the Wilmington Blue Rocks. Personally, I’m not a big sports fan, but I am a reasonable fan of the sports event. So while my husband watches the game, I amuse myself by watching the crowd, eating stadium food and drinking beer, enjoying the goofy between-innings entertainment (The Dizzy Bat Race! The Hooters Chicken Leg Toss!), and keeping tabs on Uncle Slam, the team’s mascot.

Uncle Slam is what my kids called a “people puppet” when they were little—people who dress up in costumes with giant heads. They never talk—I guess that would destroy the mystique. Uncle Slam is a particularly good example. He (or she?) works the crowd, hugging and high-fiving the kids, and dancing to the snippets of rock music playing between batters and innings. Why do I find him so mesmerizing? Is it the funky dance moves? The way he manages to express himself so well with just a nod of his giant head or wave of his furry, um...paws? The way he tries to engage the adults in the crowd, usually without success? I could watch him all night, and last night, I did, because the game wasn’t too exciting (we lost, 7-3), the turnout was slim (I'm being kind), and I should have brought a book.

One more thing—what kind of a team name is the Blue Rocks? Apparently, it was the winning entry in a name-the-team contest, and was taken from the blue granite found along the Brandywine River. Their mascots are Rocky Bluewinkle (cheating! that has nothing to do with a rock, regardless of what the moose's name is!), and Rubble (much better). Now if only Rubble had been there last night, and had taken on Uncle Slam. Hmm, who would win in that battle, an uncle or a rock? That could go either way.

As it turns out, a blue rock makes for some pretty decent merch. Cool hat, no?