The Fourth Time
Part 10 of Welcome to Charlottesville, a weekly visit to a town, a failed art project, and the future of America.
Starting Over Again
The fourth time I moved to Charlottesville it was glorious. Almost an ideal mix of the other times, the sense of safety of the first, the creativity of the third, and the absence of anything like the misery of the second. It reminds me of a quip by the director Mike Nichols who once told a friend something about the best marriages being the first and the fourth.
Remember I went off to New York in 2004 to be a playwright.
I loved living in the city, long walks in the streets, not having to worry about driving or parking, seeing new neighborhoods, eating at diners. I felt happy even when I was miserable. But the being-a-playwright part wasn’t working so well. I got a decent number of productions, but the whole culture felt counterfeit. When people talked about shows it was about the acting and directing, never about the story of the characters. And playwrights were barely part of the process.1 I missed the jack-of-all-trades aspect of the Charlottesville theater scene, the creativity and ideas that came from wearing lots of different hats. And I hated trying to network with so little money and my jaggy personality.
The Other Theater
Then one of my Charlottesville friends, Janet Heath, took me to a ‘longform’ improv show around 2006 or 2007. It was a performance by a group called Upright Citizens Brigade performing in a theater off Union Square.2 The performers were very funny, but what impressed me most was how they used the energy of the house. All the best ‘legitimate theater’ I’d seen from Charlottesville to Broadway started with dampening the audience energy and then building a new energy out of the director’s vision. It felt autocratic. UCB was the first time I ever saw performers really accept the audience where they were. The performers came on, talked casually, got the audience to tell stories—by passing around a microphone—and launched scenes inspired by the audience’s truth(s). It wasn’t about showing off the wit or speed of the performers; it was about characters created from what audience members thought and felt—but often didn’t realize they thought and felt—and playing out the consequences in time and space.
So I started taking classes at the various ‘comedy schools.’ The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater was first, founded by the Upright Citizens Brigade themselves. They had moved from Chicago in 1996, landed a sketch show on then-new cable channel Comedy Central, opened their theater, offered classes, and recruited teachers like Armando Diaz from Chicago to teach them and put together house teams. Then Armando left to found the People’s Improv Theater (The Pit) with Ali Farahnakian in 2002, and left that to create his own theater, The Magnet in 2005. I loved that they had different shows every night, and that they were not 501c3s with fundraising appeals, but I especially liked The Magnet. It had the best curriculum and teachers. I became friends with Armando and in exchange for free classes I built the Magnet’s stage backdrop and helped remodel their first training center.
Jen
Meanwhile a friend from Charlottesville named Jennifer Hoffman was living off-and-on in New York, working the territory as a UVA fundraiser. She’d grown up in White Plains, a commuter city north of the city city. Jen and I started spending time together, then dating, and soon we were living together in Astoria, Queens.
I was performing in improv and storytelling groups at Magnet and around the city, getting occasional theater productions, and Jen was getting raises and new job offers. Everything was going so well that Jen and I decided we would get married and have a child. How hard could it be? And since we were both middle-aged we decided not to wait.
On a visit to Charlottesville, Christmas 2010, we got married at the City Sheriff’s office. Back in Astoria Jen was pregnant within a couple months.
Moving to Cville
The story I usually tell is that Jen and I had often talked about how great it would be to bring to Charlottesville some of the amazing classes, art forms, and organizational skills we’d learned in New York. And when our daughter was born and we decided that it was time to make the move.
That is a true story. But not a complete story. Because once Jen was pregnant things started to go wrong. She had health problems but couldn’t take some of the tests or take medications because of the pregnancy. We moved into an apartment near Columbus Circle on the West Side, but the apartment faced a business called Soul Cycle (We’d wondered why they would only show it at odd times) which from morning till night blasted loud techno music. Gradually the techno infected us, a constant throbbing pulse that made it impossible to sleep or think or breathe. We both started to have panic attacks from the endless sound.
Jen’s father-in-law Harold saved us. He had an apartment on the Upper East Side which he used when working overnight in the city, but generously gave it up for the duration of the pregnancy. It was a godsend. We felt so lucky, even with almost all our stuff put in storage. But then workers started ‘re-pointing’ the building just outside—jack-hammering the outside layer of cement between the bricks and replacing it.
In November Ellie was born healthy but Jen and I were already a wreck. We moved from Jen’s mom’s house (while Jen had to go back into the hospital) to a business hotel, to a sublet in Connecticut. By then Ellie was colicky, and we didn’t know how to help her. Jen was ill with blood-pressure problems.
Over Christmas in 2011 we came down to stay with my mom for a week, and it was my mother’s turn to save us. She was cheerful, patient, and thrilled to welcome her first grandchild. She prepared meals and helped with the baby. It was the first help we’d really gotten and it meant the world. My brothers lived nearby and my aunt Clarice too.
So we decided to move here.
Big Blue Door
We moved into my mother’s house that spring, and she made everything easy and calm. From there we sublet a place for the summer and found an apartment on Park St. I started teaching classes in June through The Bridge and Live Arts. The website bigbluedoor.org was active and I’d created an LLC. Everything in Cville at the time was acronyms and non-profits, so Big Blue Door would stake different ground. In July Jen and I put up our first show, the premiere of our monthly stories show called the Big Blue Door Jam at The Bridge PAI.
It was fun to figure it all out, learning to use Wordpress, which I loved, designing images on a program called Fotoflexer, which I loved, and creating posters with Microsoft Publisher, which I loved. The Door Jam jumped from The Bridge to Bluegrass Grill to Sweethaus and eventually settled into the Black Market Moto Saloon which renamed itself Woolly Mammoth.
By the second year I was teaching Big Blue Door classes alongside the others. By the third year I was only teaching Big Blue Door classes. A year or two later we moved into Studio 20 of McGuffey Art Center where we are today. The improv program grew every year, adding indy shows, sketch shows, new groups, new forms. You can read the history here.
2016
As I wrote near the beginning of Welcome to Charlottesville:
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016 I believed a lot of chaos was coming... And it would be wise to start imagining life for Charlottesville without much outside help.
If you’ve been following the other story threads you know what followed was a project to record oral histories of local law enforcement and create a play out of it, but then the funding halted, and chaos came even faster than I’d imagined with a KKK rally in July of 2017.
Big Blue Door lost a lot of momentum that year with the director (me) spending time trying fruitlessly to raise money for a program that didn’t work out, and I lost a lot of focus the following year mad at myself for my failures, but by 2019 we had more students than ever, and in the winter of 2020 we were about to expand.
2020 Covid Lockdown
Then a virus turned the world upside down. In addition to threatening to put Big Blue Door out of business, I was also on the Executive Council of McGuffey Art Center at the time, and I can tell you it threatened to put McGuffey out of business too.
Jen, Ellie (now in 2nd grade), and I hunkered down in our little house in the Belmont, and it was an incredible experience. But it took a long time to gradually put the organization back together.
Was that our 11th or 10th season? How do years taken off count toward anniversaries?
It’s Always Hard to Say Goodbye
It’s a relief to be active again, but it’s been hard to figure out where to go next. One of our original dreams was to open a performance space, but Charlottesville real estate is what it is. We’ve seen spaces sit empty for many years without the rental price going down.3 Meanwhile Wordpress changed their system making it awful to use. Fotoflexer disappeared and eventually came back as a different, photo-shop-type program, and disappeared again. A laptop died, and the replacement no longer has Publisher. I remember the 1970s when there was a similar planned obsolescence in consumer appliances that only ended with those industries going to China.4 A lot of great businesses closed, especially in Belmont.
Especially demoralizing is the homelessness on the mall. I’ve lived downtown off and on for decades and have seen it go up and down, but right now the situation is absolutely demoralizing. Jen has been spat on, I’ve been spat on, we’ve both been yelled at and cursed out and threatened. It reminds me of New York in the 80s. And it’s hard to see how it gets better soon. It’s a national problem but I can’t imagine the national Democratic Party having any realistic approach, and I can’t imagine the Republicans even wanting to. I have a lot of hope for what Charlottesville can accomplish—that’s what future chapters of this blog will take up—but it will take years and we’ll be alone.
Meanwhile my daughter is almost 13. She’s brilliant and funny and intense. She loves working with little kids, and she’s generous and responsible, but she doesn’t much like middle school, and doesn’t seem to gel with other middle school girls. Jen and I don’t know how to help her. Ellie dreams of living in New York where she was born, and with all the specialty and magnet schools maybe she could find her people. I would love to put together a middle-school improv program—We tried it last winter and it worked well—and I’m not sure Charlottesville is big enough. New York would be big enough. Jen and I would both love not to drive. Jen was taking the trolley but its so unreliable that we feel like we’re going to have to buy a second car.
Maybe we move there for Ellie to attend high school. I know as someone in the arts what a difference education in one of those city schools could make. Maybe for college. Maybe Jen and I move there when Ellie goes off to college somewhere else.
I can feel the ground shift. I can sense in two, four, or six years we’ll probably be leaving again.
I miss you all already.
Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! This has been Part 10 of Welcome to Charlottesville. Here are the sections in order: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9. Here’s the explanation. New chapters come out every Tuesday. By Friday or this weekend I hope to have a bonus post. Please subscribe and share!
The Golden Age of Television was going on then when TV writers became the showrunners of a number of new series, but I wasn’t a TV person. I’d grown up with TV being a pretty stale medium and as shows like The Soprannos changed the landscape and I felt too old to try to fake my way in.
I don’t know why the show was off Union Square when UCB I found later had their own theater in Chelsea. Maybe it had something to do with the 2007 Writer’s Strike, but I feel like I saw the show in 2006.
The week after next when we get to the next period in Charlottesville history we’ll talk about why that is.
So here I am on Substack. Hopefully, I’ve got a few years before it’s bought six times and gets crapified too.
Ha ha! Yes, the complicated relationship-naming challenges of our post-divorce society! Jen's mom is married to a man who has an apartment in New York. So Jen's step-father is my step-father-in-law.
I am getting to know you like never before. Fascinating. Park Street. Park Lane Apts by any chance? So if a father-in-law is your spouse’s father, wouldn’t Jen’s father-in-law be your father? If the man isn’t your spouse’s biological father, but married your spouse’s mother, now her Stepfather, would he be your Stepfather-in-law? Is Harold your long gone father? I’m not very good at this stuff.
https://youtu.be/T2akFlmUe3g?si=Gm5hs6fD48ii7Vfr