One Hundred Degrees of Dry Heat

Ugh, not another trip to Las Vegas. Doesn’t he go anywhere else?

I’m sure it seems that way.

Consider yourself fortunate that I don’t have good friends in Duluth. (Which I am sure is lovely at this time of year...)

Yes, I abandoned Happy Valley and its 20+ inches of rain since the first of June for Las Vegas, to see my friends Tracy and The Other Rick, and enjoy a few days of sunshine and 100 degrees of dry heat. Sometimes you just need to be reassured that the sun really does exist and that you still know how to lose money in a video poker machine. This was one of those times.

Getting anywhere from State College is a two flight business for the flush and a drive to the big city and a direct flight for the thrifty traveler. I wasn’t feeling that flush, and so drove to Pittsburgh where I left my car—with the driver’s window (accidentally) all the way down—in section 17A of Extended Parking. I was fortunate my car wasn’t filled with water on my return!

As a thrifty but demanding traveler, I sprung for Early Bird Boarding on Southwest Airlines.  My $15 got me position B29, which sounded only slightly better than Boarding Group Z. After I tagged Southwest in a grumble tweet about my purchase, I was contacted by a very nice customer service representative who asked me to wait until the return leg of my trip and to let the company know how things worked out. If I wasn’t satisfied he offered a full refund. Yay Southwest!

I snagged an aisle seat next to a leathery couple--leathery as as in too much sun on the golf course rather than regulars at the San Francisco Eagle--who could not even offer up a hello. Not even one word. Perhaps I should to pay to upgrade my deodorant rather than my boarding position! 

Shortly after landing and changing out of my traveling clothes (i.e. compression socks), Tracy and I headed to the Las Vegas Premium Outlet Mall. It’s the site of one of my best Las Vegas experiences ever, buying green Ralph Lauren trousers embroidered with martini glasses and shakers for $9.95.

Like a heroin addict chasing a high, I return to the outlet mall every year looking for the perfect pair of party trousers. This year, I settled for garden variety khakis at the smaller-than-it-used-to-be Brooks Brothers. There’s nothing festive about them and they weren’t even close to $9.95. Oh well, maybe next time. 

Over at the Ralph Lauren store, party trousers were likewise nowhere to be found. However, Ralph was selling camo jeans with a matching fatigue jacket for well north of $200. Presumably they were someone’s idea of BDUs for Operation Checkbook Emptying.

Shoppers looking for a slim fit Polo shirt in size XXL were in luck—there were tons of those. I think the outlet stocked up expecting a Marfan Syndrome convention. Who else would want a slim fit shirt in a 2XL? Tracy found some things, and in a shopping first, a coupon Ralph texted me (it could have been Ricky, they're old, they might share a phone) saved Tracy actual money.

After our shopping adventure it was time for a little R&R around Tracy and The Other Rick's pool. The pool guy, an earnest fellow named Grant, came by to do whatever pool guys do—adjust the chemicals, skim out the crud, and so on. I asked if he’d ever fallen into a pool in the line of duty and he said no, but his phone had landed in the drink once. He mentioned the difficulty of finding a professional looking swimsuit with a pocket for one’s phone. (Ralph, if you're listening...can you whip up something...maybe in camo?) Grant had the good sense not to hear me when I pointed out that in porn, pool guys wear Speedos.

Saturday evening, Tracy, The Other Rick and I went to THE Steak House at Circus Circus. Yes, the THE is in caps. The (lower case) Steak House must be someplace else.

Circus Circus is a funny location for a nice restaurant because it’s a pretty darned low end place. In addition to its circus-themed casino (which smelled as if they pipe in extra cigarette smoke), there are midway games like skee-ball, throwing darts at balloons, and perhaps even a pick-a-duck stand. Except for the missing farm smells, it’s like an indoor version of the Centre County Grange Fair.

The place has its share of tacky tchotchke shops, selling every kind of Vegas branded trinket imaginable, including Las Vegas Raiders yoga pants where the logo gives gives new meaning to the term "red zone".

THE Steak House is like stepping into the wayback machine for a bit of “Old Vegas” fine dining. Don’t go there looking for any sort of nouveau nouvelle sous-vide free range non-GMO heirloom gluten-free ancient grains nonsense. It’s the sort of place where you expect to see Don Draper at the next table enjoying a Canadian Club and a Lucky Strike or three before dinner.

Our waiter introduced himself as Richard. The Other Rick and I introduced ourselves as Richards as well. So, a three Dick night. Yes, I chuckled.

The food lived up to its billing. The wedge salad was the perfect old school accompaniment to a big honkin’ steak. When Richard brought my steak, I was reminded of the scene from the credits of the Flintstones where Fred Flintstone orders ribs at the drive-in restaurant and they’re so big that they tip over his car. My steak wasn’t just huge, but it was also cooked to perfection…over a wood fire, no less.

THE Steak House isn’t for the faint of wallet, but the food was fantastic.

Sunday was time for more R and R, lounging and loitering by the pool and whatnot, enjoying the 100 degrees of dry heat.

Late in the afternoon, we morphed into looky loos and visited the model homes on the other side of the wash/gulch/draw/arroyo or whatever that vacant depression of desert behind The Other Rick and Tracy's house is called.

From the backyard the site looks completely inhospitable and an utterly crappy place to build houses, but then again, from the point of view of an Easterner, the same can be said for about 99.9% of Nevada. 

We put on our moderately good bib and tucker and arrived there shortly before the end of business hours.

According to the builder’s website:

… Blackrock, is an elegant, gated community featuring Pulte Homes’ most popular collection of one- and two-story homes in the valley. Featuring a contemporary architectural style that has become native to the neighborhood, homeowners will enjoy the privacy of the rugged natural setting, next door to Green Valley’s entertainment and retail district.

I didn’t see any evidence that the development’s “contemporary architectural style” had become native to the neighborhood, and I have an actual college degree in architectural history.

We stopped at the builder’s HQ, picked up the brochure and walked next door—a distance of perhaps four feet—to see our first model home. La Vista, Tivoli, Cesena, and the Vittoria awaited our inspection. Obviously these homes were named by the Italian cousins of people who name colors for J Crew.

The model homes didn’t look a thing like my house, or even a thing like any house in State College. They looked like a Pottery Barn catalog. Or at least what a Pottery Barn catalog looked like when I used to get a Pottery Barn catalog.

Each home was decorated in in blacks, browns, and grays. Perhaps they are expecting an influx of Amish? What little color there I saw was relegated to the occasional children’s room.

The builder thoughtfully placed what museum professionals would call “didactic materials” (i.e. labels) on certain features of the houses so that you would know how special they were.

The plain, ordinary closet was Storage: Out of sight, conveniently close, immediately differentiating it from a storage unit across town.

The extra special closet was called the Life Tested--Registered Trade Mark--Dream Closet. This dream closet was not someplace where you hide your sexual orientation, that stack of romance novels featuring Fabio on their covers, or the fact that all of your relatives voted for Donald Trump.  No, the Life Tested Dream Closet is a Walk-in closet with ample shelving.

Frankly, my Life Tested--Registered Trade Mark--Dream Closet had better include a lot more than ample shelving. I’m thinking shirts with collars that never fray arranged in perfect Roy G Biv order, 32” waist trousers that still fit, and a sock drawer arranger who will come on schedule, like Grant the pool guy, to ensure that my dress socks, argyles, Smart Wools, no-shows, and miscellaneous socks stay arranged by color, length, expiration date, and so on.

Most of the houses had bathrooms as big as my bedroom and kitchens made for something other than cooking. I guess they’re designed for meetings since the kitchen island was now the Executive Kitchen Island:  Larger, for more room around the natural gathering spot.

There was the occasional agricultural-industrial complex Barn Door, which offered to Keep Your Style on Track with this Eye-Caching Space Saver, presumably saving all that space wasted by the Executive Kitchen Island.

If you have Frenchified nether regions, move elsewhere. Blackrock is not a bidet friendly development! If your daily ablutions include a Euro-wash “down there” while you watch Jerry Lewis clips on your iPhone, you are flat out of luck.

Prices at Blackrock start at $485,880 for the 2,100 stripper square foot Stella model. That means no white wall tires, no factory air, no am/fm 8-track tape deck and no Life Tested--Registered Trade Mark--Dream Closet. Your building lot, of course, is not included. Blackrock’s pricing brings to mind Captain Kangaroo’s disclaimer about Schwinn bicycles: Prices slightly higher in the west and the south.

OK, maybe I would like to live at Blackrock. But I’d need to have some work done—lipo, some Botox, dye job. And then I’d need new clothes (black, browns, and grays), new furniture, (black, browns, and grays) and new whatnot (guess what colors?), not to mention a new car. Nothing but a Lincoln Compensator, as big and as costly as an aircraft carrier will do. Alas, there's another Vegas dream with little chance of coming true!

After a post-tour dinner, we once again braved the 100 degrees of dry heat and went to The Neon Museum for its show Brilliant. If you have not been to The Neon Museum, the next time you’re in Vegas, go! It’s great.

The museum presents Brilliant in its North Gallery, a collection of unrestored signs that’s across the street from the main body of the museum. Though none of these 40 signs actually light up, using a technique called projection mapping, light is projected onto them so that they look as if they’re lit. It’s way cool.

The signs do their thing to a soundtrack of Vegas icons Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Liberace, and so on. And it’s great.  Except for one thing. The next to the last song is Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas! followed by some more modern, endless, instrumental crap. Perhaps if I were younger I'd know the tune. But I'm old and I didn't have a clue. Hey Neon Museum, end the show with Viva Las Vegas! Always leave them wanting more!

After the show, as audience members mill about looking for that special Instagram moment, the museum projects a short slide show about the history of Las Vegas and some of its more interesting cultural milestones. Definitely stick around for that.

The next day I rented a car and drove out of town to see some stacks of painted rocks in the desert. Yes, I paid an obscene amount of money to rent a car at the hotel so that I could go out into the desert to look at painted rocks. Guess how hot it was?

However….these weren’t just any painted rocks. This is a public art project called Seven Magic Mountains, which translates into plain English as Seven Day Glow Phallic Symbols Out in the Middle of Nowhere.  The work was created by a Swiss artist named Ugo Rondinone. The phallic symbols, I mean magic mountains, are stacks of “locally sourced” rocks painted in presumably non locally sourced dayglow paint. The stacks of rocks are roughly 30 feet tall; they’re scheduled to be on display for two years starting in 2016, so run, do not walk, to see them.

The work was funded by the Nevada Museum of Art and the Art Production Fund, though if you drill down on the website, you see that its sponsors also include Aria, a Vegas hotel/casino; Banana Republic, the clothing store in better malls everywhere; Warhol Superstar, Jane Holzer, and Nevada’s top highway builder, Las Vegas Paving Corporation. Strange bedfellows indeed.

According to the work’s website, the artist, Ugo Rondinone, was born 1964 in Switzerland but now lives in New York. (I’d like to see him get those big rocks in a New York apartment!)  He has “long embraced a fluid range of forms and media” which “creates the conditions for an expansive emotional range”.  Presumably if I were to be more fluid in my embrace I would have more than a limited emotional range. Yet another thing to work on in therapy!

The website goes on to say that Rondinone’s work is “recognized for its ability to channel both psychological expressiveness and profound insight in the human condition and the relationship between human being and nature. Referring concurrently to the natural world, romanticism and existentialism, his works encapsulate a 'mental trinity' that has underpinned his art for more than twenty years.”

That’s pretty much what I thought too.

So in my rented RAV4, a car which I’ve never liked since I didn’t know if it's pronounced RAVE 4 or RAV 4, I headed south on Las Vegas Boulevard, past Caesar’s Palace, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and even the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. I drove past an outlet mall, some locals casinos, plenty of discount liquor stops.

But I didn’t go as far as Exit 12, the home to the World’s Largest Chevron Station.

Before too long I could see some fluorescent dots in the distance. As they grew larger I could see that this was the place. There was no mistaking stacked locally sourced boulders painted in non locally sourced colors.

I pulled off into the parking area. There were about 20 cars there. There was no ticket booth or gift shop, but it was obvious where everyone was going.  What few signs there were seemed to be directed at gophers; they were smaller than license plates and at ground level. There was a dirt path that led from the parking lot to the rocks, which were about 100 yards away.

Even on a Monday morning at 11:00 am, in 100 degrees of dry heat, there were about 40 people there. They were mostly photographing each other or taking selfies. I didn’t see anything that looked like a human or animal sacrifice and if anyone was praying or taking celestial observations, I missed it.

 

I saw people jumping up and down for the camera, a few serious poses, and others trying to look alluring. I didn’t see any guys whip it out and try to add an eighth magic mountain to the tableau. Perhaps I just picked an off day. Who knows?

One of the funders called the work “a modern-day Stonehenge” and pointed out that it “has its own sense of purpose and spirituality”

OK, a modern day Carhenge, maybe. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Stonehenge, even the faux Stonehenge in Odessa, TX. And what’s with the “sense of purpose”? Since when do inanimate objects have any senses at all?

I enjoyed the Magic Mountains, but my enjoyment came from watching the other folks take pictures, point and yammer, and try to make sense of a bunch of locally sourced boulders painted in non locally sourced day glow colors on a you know how hot day in the desert outside of Vegas.

 

One of my favorite bits was the Seven Magic Mountains' mini me of locally sourced pebbles--in their natural hues!--that someone had created at some distance from the rock totems. 

I wondered if the form of the thing mattered at all. Would any bit of giant photogenic stuff dusted with some art history hokum drawn a crowd?  I think so.

Was it a religious experience for me? No.

Sure, I loved it, but had a driven a few miles longer, I would have loved the World’s Largest Chevron Station. I'm fickle like that.

But I'm glad I went. I needed a new selfie anyway. 

I skipped the chance to go on to the World’s Largest Chevron Station, so after my world was rocked, I headed back to the hotel pool.
 

When I went to the john instead of peeing in the pool, I learned about Russ von Hoeslcher’s Independent Crypto Currency Group. Someone thoughtfully left his already even highlighted card at each of the urinals.

When I think of the word Crypto, its surname is Commie. That’s right, I’m a child of the Cold War.  Duck and cover, y’all.  Somehow, I found the intestinal fortitude to pass on the crypto currency even though it could be so big that a modest investment might allow me to move into Blackrock, rich enough that I could demand that they install an Executive CEO King of the World Bidet.

That evening Tracy and I went to Caesar’s Palace to see Absinthe, a comedy/variety show in the Spiegeltent on the Roman Plaza.

Wiki tells me that a spiegeltent is a wooden and canvas tent, decorated with mirrors and stained glass that is used as an entertainment venue. So, it’s a little different from the less tent-ish mirrored wretched excess that makes Las Vegas fun.

According to its website the show was recently named “the #1 greatest show in Las Vegas history”. Leave no superlative unturned, it goes on to claim that the “ridiculously talented and sexy performers from across the globe mix outrageous comedy with jaw-dropping feats of virtuosity and danger.” 

This I had to see.

The Other Rick scored us VIP tickets with a complimentary bottle of bubbly. Even though I have sworn off champagne since my experiences at the Beaux Arts Balls of 1977, 1978, and 1979 (call me a slow learner!), I filled my flute right up. Repeatedly. As my mother used to say, "When in Rome shoot Roman candles!"

Absinthe is a variety show, with an emcee, his sidekick, and a bunch of brief acts by jugglers, trapeze artists and so on.

The emcee, known as the Gazillionaire, and the sidekick, aka The Green Fairy (a nickname for absinthe), have a hilarious comedy act that includes teasing every possible cultural group in the audience not to mention plenty of references to every kind of bodily function nice people don't talk about at the dinner table, not to mention, yes, circumcision. If there’s a less PC show in Las Vegas, I can’t imagine what it would be.

I laughed until my stomach hurt and then made a note that if we ever have a family reunion in Las Vegas, I’m getting everyone tickets. It’s a very Bryant kind of an evening, kind of like Cards Against Humanity with a side order of The Ed Sullivan Show, only more so.

It’s not just the comedy that’s great, but the variety acts are topnotch too. They perform on a tiny stage—it’s 10 feet in diameter—and right in front of you too—no one is more than 11 rows from the action.

There is a wacky juggling act called Life on Mars, a group of buff Slavic tumblers, and a pair of gymnasts dressed as English bankers who perform to a soundtrack of Handel. There are twins who tap dance--yes, tap dance!--unlike anyone you've ever seen.

 

Then there’s David O’mer, dressed only in a pair of jeans, whose props are a footed bathtub filled with water and rope hanging from the ceiling of the tent. He actually is all that and a bag of chips.

OK, the copywriter was correct about the ridiculously talented and sexy performers. Run, do not walk. to see Absinthe.  
 

I was still chuckling two days later when I flew back to Happy Valley, thinking about my next trip to Vegas. I don't have any plans, but Miss Diana Ross beckoned to me from a poster in the hotel elevator. She'll be performing in Vegas in a few months. She's 74...she can't possibly look like that...or can she?

If I take the plunge and book a ticket, you'll be the the first to know.

The New South: Tom Tom Founders Festival

After a detour at the Route 11 Potato Chip plant, it was time to head south to Charlottesville, where the Old South meets Berkeley, California. As such, it’s the perfect spot for a festival about innovation and named for, not just a signer, but the author of the Declaration of Independence.

I didn’t think seriously about going to the Tom Tom Founders Festival until someone in Penn State’s upper management intimated to me that the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts was lacking in a hip vibe.

Though at first I was a tad indignant—the words “hip vibe” do not appear in our mission statement anywhere. I learned, after griping incessantly to my friends, to close the gate on that. Sort of. And then I decided that checking out the Tom Tom Founders Festival was as good an excuse as any to go to Charlottesville. And if I played my cards right, I might even manage to get someone else to pay for some of the trip, since I would be doing research in how to acquire a “hip vibe”.

Alas, no OPM (other people’s money) was expended in my trip, but I managed to console myself with a bag of Route 11 Potato Chips and the thought of drinking bourbon in its natural habitat, i.e. below the Mason-Dixon Line.

According its program, the Fifth Annual Tom Tom Founders Festival takes place over Mr. Jefferson’s birthday week with “nonstop talks, workshops, panels, installations, and concerts”. Actually they do stop, but who am I to call someone out for a little hyperbole?

Tom Tom’s mission is to celebrate founding and inspire the next generation of artists and entrepreneurs. Like the founding polymath and namesake of the Festival, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Tom explores and melds diverse disciplines: scientific discovery, technology, the field to fork movement, education, and art that builds on the city’s rich history of founding and to chart a creative future. 

I wonder how many polymaths it took to write that?

Since my traveling companion Pam and I we were trying to embrace hipness on this trip, we looked for place to stay on Air BnB. What could be more hip than the gig economy? Actually, AirBnB wasn't our first choice: all of the outposts of corporate America with comfy beds, coffee makers, cable TV, free Wi-Fi, affinity points, and location location location were filled, even including UVa’s very own motel-for-executives, The Inn at Darden. Oh right…. there was a convention of polymaths in town.

In the end we didn’t do Air BnB, but rented an apartment through something called Stay Charlottesville. The apartment photos on its website included fewer bad tchotchkes and cats than those on AirBnB, and the places looked staged enough to appeal to my neat-nik sensibilities. And most importantly, we could be in a good neighborhood, not the sort of thing that the folks on Air BnB call “transitional” or “up and coming”. The apartment lived up to its billing, it was great!

The hot neighbor with the IMA NERD vanity plate was an added bonus not listed on the Stay Charlottesville website. He insisted that he had plenty of “nerd cred” though you wouldn’t know it by me, since in the few minutes of chatting he failed to mention high school band, particle physics, bagpipe lessons, or his Siamese cat named Steve Jobs.

We arrived in the late afternoon on Thursday, and after a dinner of “Asian tapas” at a place called Bang--which featured a drink reminiscent of my father's famous "Drop Your Panties Punch",  Pam and I went to the Paramount Theatre to hear that night’s speakers.

I went to see Craig Dubitsky. He’s the guy behind Hello Toothpaste (never heard of it), Eos Lip Gloss (never heard of that, either) and partly behind Method soaps and cleaning products (Bingo!) Somehow he met the guys who invented that stuff when they were less than nobodies and...actually, I’m not really sure what he did for them. The guy was totally entertaining --for two solid hours!--and at the end we got samples of toothpaste, that, although it has cute packaging, it is otherwise a solid “meh”.  Then again Crest and Colgate are a solid "meh" too. It's hard for me to get excited about toothpaste.

He put his phone number on the screen and his email and asked us to call him. Like many men, I never called.

Pam went to hear a talk on sports, and it sounded pretty neat but she didn’t get any toothpaste.

The next day, the Paramount Theatre was packed as the festival presented its "Founders Summit". There was a high concentration of blue blazers and man buns though not typically on the same person. I suppose Mr. Jefferson could have had a man bun if he’d wanted one.  What am I thinking?! He probably invented the man bun!

I had a feeling that all these folks would be on their way to Silicon Valley or Goldman just as soon as they could pull themselves away from the most hip coffee shop ever and their current project of monetizing something, anything—their social media following, unorganized sock drawers, or that cupboard filled with non-recyclable takeout Chinese food containers.

It was a day of TED-like talks. All were great with the exception of one that was too jargon-y, even down to the use of the phrases “bro drama” and “entrepreneurial ecosystem” within eye rolling distance of each other. No hyperbole here; I wrote it down.

First was Bill Crutchfied who told the story of his rise from selling car stereos from his mother’s basement shortly after he finished at UVa 50 odd years ago to heading a firm with $250 million in annual sales today. Amazon's Jeff Bezos even comes to him for advice. He was very impressive and told his story with a refreshing lack of self-aggrandizement.
 

Then toothpaste guy was back, with the Reader’s Digest version of the story I’d heard the night before. He was paired with a woman in killer high heels and what looked like a neoprene dress. She’d been something big at Google before founding something else and no doubt has Larry and Sergey and Mark and Sheryl in her phone.

During the breaks there was semi-tasty starfruit juice (emphasis on the "semi") and there was a man bun dense sea of earnest young people to chat up.

If you wanted coffee it wasn’t Maxwell House, or even Starbucks, but some ethically gown non-GMO fair trade heirloom low acid brew with notes of dark chocolate, cinnamon, and linty Hall’s Mentho-lyptus found in the bottom of a computer bag. There were sponsor tables too, but it was too crowded to get to any of those, so my guess that there were handing out some pretty decent stuff or else there was some bro drama going on in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and everyone was trying to get a good look.

The hit of the afternoon was Jason Flom, the founder of Lava Records. He was hellaciously entertaining telling the story of his career that included discovering many huge acts that are household names to those younger and hipper than me. According  to the Tom Tom website, he dropped the F bomb 24 times in his talk. I didn't notice the F bombs, I just noticed what an enthralling storyteller he was.

Things calmed down a bit when we got to Becca McCharen--a fellow grad of the UVa Architecture School--who's making a splash in New York designing clothes that look like exoskeletons and have biometric features, whatever those are. She was joined onstage by Doug Stoup, who takes rich people to the North and South Poles but is scared when his wife drives him to the supermarket. Then came Rodney Mullen, who won the Skateboarding World Championship 35 times. I didn't even know that skateboarding had a World Championship.

There were kids—as in under thirty—with great ideas that had attracted investors who were helping make those great ideas into viable businesses.  One of them went to UVa and he seems to have maxed out his credit card in the men’s department at the Urban Gay Store, which, even today, makes a guy stand out in Charlottesville.

We stayed there until the end of the day and then we met a friend (and reader…yay!) from S.C. and her husband who’d moved to C-ville not too long ago. They had friends in tow and so we had a beer off the beaten path before heading down the beaten path to the festival for a drink and dinner.

In the evening TomTom shed its TED Talk-ish demeanor and became a hipster city event. Lee Park (as in Robert E. Lee, who keeps watch over the park from the vantage point of a large equestrian statue in the middle of the joint) was a happening scene. There was a stage, with a band, with 32 video monitors as a backdrop. There were several beer trucks, so waiting in line was no problem. That's my idea of Southern Hospitality.

And there were food trucks where you could get Asian dumplings, Australian meat pies, Mexican stuff, and German things, too. We listened to the music, had dinner, and some beers, and had lots of laughs. Pam danced with someone in a Gumby costume: I embraced the hipster vibe as colored lights washed over Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler.  It was a delightful evening. Did I mention that there were cinnamon sugar donuts, still warm from the fryer?

Saturday we were up early and walked a mile or so across town to pick up baseball tickets for the afternoon’s game against UNC--we were not only embracing innovation, we were embracing Virginia baseball, too. Pam couldn’t believe that West Main Street, now hip and upscale, used to be the kind of place University students of my day were told not to venture.

Even I have a hard time believing it. It’s all so…. hip and upscale.

We had a tasty breakfast bagel at a C-ville institution, Bodo’s Bagels. One of our fellow diners was a rather disheveled looking young man, still in last night’s suit, dress shirt, and untied bow tie. His gf was in gym shorts, tee shirt, and hair hidden under a baseball cap. Pam and I agreed that it was nice that she was talking him out to breakfast during his Walk of Shame.

Since it was a beautiful day for a walk, we did a jiffy tour of the UVa grounds.  I checked out the new capitals on the Rotunda columns.

After picking up the tickets, we stopped at the City Market, which I’ve written about before. It seems to have grown since my last visit and was filled with organic, free-range, heritage, and non-GMO fill in the blank, plus chiropractors, DIYers, ROLFers, and a model UN worth of ethnic food.  Mongolian lunch? Philippine snacks? Something Ecuadorian? It’s readily available. I’m sure if I’d paid more attention, I would have found specialties of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

We had a great chat with Bo from Bo’s Bodacious Brownies. She had an amusing life story and a big personality. If her brownies were half as bodacious as the fudge sauce we sampled, then they are brobdingnagianly bodacious. I’m not sure why we didn’t buy any brownies since we both like them. Perhaps we were still stuff with another multiple B food, Bodo’s Bagels.

The woman selling scratch and dent orchids was there as were oodles of cute farmers from farms with cute names selling grass-fed hormone-free beef/pork/lamb/and so on. The cute guys with the sausage stand are now selling shirts that say “Bacon gives me a lardon”, which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I found quite amusing. The shirts are a better deal than the meat, which seemed to be priced according to J P Morgan’s dictum about the cost of a yacht— “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

We arrived at the end of the Festival’s Iron Chef competition, where local chefs had a limited time and budget to cook up some tasty fare with food bought at the market. After the too hip MC announced the winner, he invited the audience to come to the stage to taste the entries. The crowd of frothing-at-the-mouth foodies rushed the stage in something that made a Black Friday doorbuster crush at Walmart look like a Mennonite church bazaar. I didn’t stick around for the EMT calls, but I had visions of grievous bodily harm inflicted by compostable forks.

I had a brief chat w one exhibitor who thought I might be an FBI agent. Seriously.  And this was after I asked if I could photograph her booth. She didn’t look as if she used lot of expensive beauty products; or inexpensive ones for that matter. She was an herbalist, acupuncturist, health educator, and then some, with what I think was the Visible Man of the acupuncture world in her booth. She wanted you to know where she’d stick a needle to jump start your chi or wangdoodle, or both, if you had good insurance or ready cash, as the case may be.

But if you rented one of her four tiny houses, yurt, or apartment on her farm and enjoyed a full farm breakfast of non-GMO pastured pork or non-GMO pastured goose and duck eggs, you would probably understand, unlike me, that true free-range non-GMO grass-fed probiotic heirloom beauty comes from within.

After the city market, we ducked in to the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, something that might be seen as a strange choice since we were at a Festival that was all about innovation.  At the very least I wanted to have a brief, as they say in L.A. real estate circles, lookie loo.  The building is a handsome Beaux Arts thing with neo-Jeffersonian touches, and I wanted to see if the interior lived up to the exterior.

Though the society is right next to Lee Park it’s not part of the Tom Tom tomfoolery. Presumably the society’s managers didn’t want to disturb the hushed aura of the place with an invasion of hipsters looking for the john and complaining—once they found it—that it wasn’t stocked with locally sourced lightly exfoliating toilet paper and Dyson Air-Blade hand dryers.

Except for the gracious and welcoming staffer, we were the only people there.

I know you’re shocked.

Fortunately, the building’s interior is as handsome as the exterior and was quite well preserved, right down to the oil portrait of Charlottesville’s early 20th century big kahuna, Paul Goodloe McIntire, over the fireplace in the library.

The building was designed as the public library, but it’s been the historical society for some time—the library moved next door to newer, bigger, better quarters.  Some of the exhibits were about what you might expect—on Charlottesville’s namesake, Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, on Charlottesville in the Civil War, and a real barnburner on the County Clerks of Albemarle County.

I didn’t peruse the County Clerks exhibit (though I do love the movie Clerks), but I did learn more than I thought possible about the former Princess Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. It’s a good thing that Princesses of low-end German principalities didn’t have to take the SAT in the 18th Century since her name would never have fit in the blocks the College Board allotted to that purpose. That wouldn’t have mattered to George III since he didn’t even have time to evaluate which high school clique she was in (cheerleaders/brainiacs/hippies/goths/Jesus freaks) since he married her the day he met her, something they don’t even do on American reality shows. The King, who really knew how to turn a phrase, said she was “eminently distinguished by every amiable endowment”. They had fifteen children together, so I would say that she apparently found the king’s endowment amiable as well.

Another exhibit was on the now mostly forgotten writer, Julia Magruder. Magruder (1854-1907) was a Charlottesville native who authored sixteen books, some of which had illustrations by artists people actually remember including Howard Chandler Christy and Charles Dana Gibson.  The exhibit rather breathlessly informed us that "Magruder's life and writings offer a view of the complex world of the post-Civil War South from the vantage point of a New Woman of the New South."

I have to admit; I’d forgotten that in the post bellum period Random capitalization became More Common.

Magruder’s sixteen books included such soft porn worthy titles as Across the Chasm and The Magnificent Plebian.

Heaving bosoms aside, the exhibit left unanswered my obvious question. “Was she related to Jeb Stuart Magruder, the Watergate conspirator?

For my money (ok, the admission was free) the best exhibit, by was one on Kathleen Clifford, another Charlottesville local whose work has been lost in the mists of time. (I’m sounding a bit like Julia Magruder, no?)  At age 15 she met a theatrical producer at a dinner party, and even though she had trouble even recognizing a script—she threw the first one that arrived in the mail away, thinking it was a catalog—and memorizing lines, but in no time flat she was getting top billing in a revue called Top O’ the World.

After her success in that production, her career took off as a “male impersonator”, which, I suppose we would call a drag king. She wrote her own material (sadly, none of it was in the exhibit) and performed on stage in the “smartest” clothes: top hat, tails, and even a monocle.  (Note to self: perhaps I would do better on Grindr if my profile picture included a monocle?)

She was “America’s answer to Vesta Tilley”, a famous English male impersonator, and sometimes performed on stage with a female impersonator, Bothwell Brown. (Who?) Ms. Clifford moved on to silent films, performing as a woman, and even did one talkie.  The last text panel noted that we really don’t much about her, and essentially said don’t believe anything you read.

A drag performer with the "smartest" clothes and a monocle. Who says that local history is boring?

I asked the staffer—a charming woman of the age you’d expect to find in the historical society—about Kathleen Clifford and she said that it has been the intern’s project. We agreed that the exhibit was “quite something”, one of those expressions that means whatever you want it to mean.  After a little bit of small talk (she had a sweet Virginia accent) I learned that she used to go to church with my old neighbor from University Circle, the putative Grand Duchess Anastasia.

In the 1970s before DNA testing was possible, a number of thoughtful people thought this crazy woman had somehow escaped being murdered by Soviet secret police with the rest of her family in 1918 only to turn up in a canal in Berlin the 1920s. Anastasia ended up in Charlottesville, married to a kooky retired professor whom my friends and I called Mr. Anastasia. They lived in the Charlottesville version of “Grey Gardens”, with a light up plastic crèche (Santa included!) in the front yard instead of a cameo appearance by Jackie Kennedy as at the Hamptons Grey Gardens. They were Charlottesville's dyed-in-the-wool local color.

With our fill of hipsters and history (at least for the time being), that afternoon we went to a UVa baseball game. We did a bit of tailgating with acquaintances from State College whose son--no, not Connor Jones--plays for UVa. It was a welcome change from the hipster-dense atmosphere of the festival.

It was a beautiful day for baseball, but unfortunately the Tar Heels spanked the Wahoos, 8-1.

After the game, we had Festival food for dinner, and listened to some of the bands at the Festival and watched that night’s closing act, a documentary film on CLAW, the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers.

My words won’t do it justice, but if it’s on Netflix, or whatever, watch it. The gist of the story was this vaguely Jennifer Garner looking woman who sounded like my former pastor’s wife was mourning the death of her husband and started to arm wrestle as a way to work through her grief.

Happens all the time, right?

And taking a leaf out of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s book (“We can put a show on in the barn!”) soon enough she’d founded an entire arm wrestling league.

Women who wrestle in the league have comic personas and wear costumes, like in professional wrestling. Except these Lady Arm Wrestlers perform as characters with a definite feminist slant: Pain Fonda, Darth Mater, Laura Ingalls go-Wilder, Homewrecker, C-ville Knievel. They all seemed like they could live next door to you, but once they were in character, look out!  They really arm wrestle, too—the film shows two of the women breaking their arms wrestling—one break was so severe that the woman was hospitalized. The film covered the league expanding into several other cities as it gave women an outlet to perform and raise money for charity. It was hilarious.

It was hard to top the Lady Arm Wrestlers, but we gave it a go with a nightcap or two. There was a lot of the festival we missed, the craft cocktail competition, some public art projects, networking out the ying yang, but in the end, our minds were broadened as the Founding Polymath would have wanted. I’m not entirely sure that saw anything that would translate directly to our non-hip, north of the Mason-Dixon festival, but we agreed that we’d come back…just as soon as I finished growing my man bun.