Walking on Water

I was an easy sell tonight, having been on board since the beginning.

First time I went to a talk about Bridge Park, it was July 2015 and I was taken with Ted Elmore's notion of connecting the green space of the Capital with Manchester via Ninth Street and the ridiculously under-used Manchester bridge. Since then, I've gone to several other meetings intended to get the word out and each time, it came down to ducats.

So until someone shows Ted the money, nothing can happen.

Tonight's talk at the Branch Museum had a new twist because the Bridge Park project was trotting out a show pony, namely Londoner Peter Culley who'll be the architect for the project. After admiring an enormous map of Richmond hung on the gallery wall, Mr. Wright and I found seats for the talk.

Of note was that the chairs and screen were oriented in the opposite direction of what they've been every other time I've been to the Branch, and that's been at least a decade of lectures, panels, films and plays. Very strange that only now did someone decide to change things up.

Because apparently it's what architects do, Culley spent an hour showing us projects he'd been involved with, dating back to when he'd been project architect for Rick Mather Architects when they did the VMFA renovation that changed Richmond for the better.

No one was going to complain about looking at shots of our own stylish museum as proof of Culley's (and, originally, Mather's) philosophy that buildings must have strong ties to the landscape. So much so that he referred to buildings as filters between interior and exterior spaces, albeit in a low, British accent, and insisted that landscape was every bit as key as buildings.

"Interior and exterior are the same," he announced. "They just have different functions." In architecture circles, those may be fighting words, I'm not sure. In landscape circles, he may have ruffled a few feathers when suggesting using native plants- especially culturally relevant plants like cotton - and non-native plants, although a woman wasted no time reminding him not to use non-native invasive species.

Besides the VMFA, he had multiple examples of that to show us, from the 30-acre South Bank Centre in London along the Thames to the National Botanic Garden of Wales and its Great Glasshouse Interior landscape. The latter especially tickled him because, he said with a grin, "We were asked to put the landscape in the building."

Now you know he loved that.

His talk was broken down into sections - mounds, compounds, sheds and monoliths - and he managed to have examples of each that he'd had a hand in.

Talking about compounds, he pointed out that sometimes a single building tends to dominate the landscape, so the solution is to build several buildings instead of just one. An example he showed involved a homeowner in Orange County who wanted a pavilion overlooking his lake, Instead, they designed interlocking shed-like structures that allowed you to see through parts of them, providing views in various directions.

To replace the shabby shed/guard house at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, he had to satisfy the neighborhood association, Central Park officials because they were adjacent and the Met itself in creating a shed that both complemented the venerable building and was functional.

After dazzling us with mounds in Memphis and monoliths like a former Sears distribution center re-imagined as living space, Culley finally got to the point of the evening: what is envisioned for Bridge Park.

Displaying images and drawings of the ramps leading from the bridge to the river and Brown's Island, a more landscaped Ninth Street and lots of bike and pedestrian lanes, Culley made clear that this is just the kind of project he relishes. It was only during the Q&A when asked where in the funding process they are that he admitted that a final design won't be crafted until the cash is in place.

An idea I'd heard floated 3 1/2 years ago of making the current center walkway an express cycling lane was mentioned again tonight. As someone who has walked that center stretch, it's not particularly scenic, so I say let the cyclists have it.

Looking at some of the river views from the Manchester Bridge, it wasn't hard to imagine what a fine view Bridge Park will afford once it's a reality.

Chances are I'll go to a lot more meetings and talks before anything finally happens on this, but it's hard not to be encouraged by the forward progress of the project, even if it is moving at a glacier's pace.

Mama said you can't hurry love. Or Bridge Parks, it seems.

Hard Working and Good Looking

I've always known I was a sapiosexual.

It's the reason I've never really had a "type" and why I can't just look at a group of men and say, "I'm attracted to that one." But show me your brain with a healthy glimpse of wit and I'm a sucker.

So when Mac and I were making plans for tonight, she chose one event and I chose another, secure in the knowledge that the other would enjoy our choice just as much as we did. And if we hated both, at least there were fish tacos and fried chicken thighs in between.

We met at the Branch Museum for the Design Month opening reception, where the coolest piece was in the front courtyard. Meggie Kelley's "Porch" was just that, a colorful structure with some walls and a floor, flower boxes and room for rocking chairs, just not attached to anything. When I got there, two young boys were chasing each other around it, but later the museum director said she intended to have coffee on it every chance she got.

Meggie said her point in making it was to remind us of the importance of porch culture, sitting and talking to friends, neighbors and passersby, but all I could think was that in a town like Richmond that's flush with porches, don't we already know this?

Too obvious?

Inside, it was Rafie Khoshbin's "Daughters of Shiraz" which almost made Mac and I cry as we read about the Iranian women hung in 1983 for nothing more than practicing their Baha'is faith. The sculptural figures of women and the descriptions of the women was a powerful reminder of how far a strong woman will go to defend her beliefs. The installation was truly moving.

But it was the VCU Graphic Design MFA work that elicited the most hilarious comment of the evening. When I commented to Mac that the work seemed like a hodgepodge of familiar elements, she came back with, "Yea, it looks like they can't commit to any one thing." Boom, there it was.

Let's just say we'd get a kick out of being flies on the wall watching these MFA candidates defend their theses. Good luck with that, kids.

Although the Branch opening had been my pick, I couldn't say it was all I'd hoped it would be, so we headed back to Jackson Ward to ditch the cars and walk to Tarrant's Back Door for a quick dinner before crossing the street to the Broad, a co-working and social space for women.

A month ago, Mac had suggested we get tickets for tonight's panel discussion, cleverly title "Mary/Jane: Women and Weed," and while I'd done as I was told and ordered mine, she'd apparently had a brain fart and forgotten to get hers, a fact of which she was unaware until she looked for her ticket on her phone and couldn't find it.

Luckily, the good women at The Broad let her in anyway.

I have to say, the third floor space was very cool and so obviously woman-decorated and focused, never more apparent than with a sign that read, "I'm the CEO, bitch!"

The room was full of women (and one brave man) all eager to light up a conversation about the changing cannabis landscape and this is when my sapiosexualism kicked in big time.

On the panel were three incredibly smart, informed and funny women, all passionate about the subject. Jenn Michelle Pedini is executive director of Virgiia NORML, Siobhan Dunnavant is a state senator and obstetrician and Rebecca Gwilt was a healthcare lawyer.

Together, they schooled us on the history, health aspects and future of Mary Jane in Virginia.

First info out of the gate was about how commonplace weed was until 1937 and by common, that meant it was in every doctor's bag and on every pharmacy shelf. No big deal. Then came "Reefer Madness" and a public awareness campaign to make pot seem as dangerous as opium.

"Now it's used to disenfranchise brown people," Jenn announced and Mac and I knew we'd found our people.

From there, the panel dove into how few women own cannabis businesses (less than 30% and the rest are, you guessed it, white men), what a financial windfall taxing pot is for schools and infrastructure and how many diseases - glaucoma, Parkinson's, MS, autism, Crohn's, cancer - can be treated with weed.

And here's where I really learned a lot and developed girl crushes on all three panelists for their big brains and quick wit. People don't use medical marijuana to get stoned and forget they're sick, they use it because it causes a biochemical reaction that heals and inhibits the growth of more damaged cells (as with cancer). Using a small amount of pot with a low dosage of an opioid produces the same pain relief as a large dosage without the risk of addiction or overdose.

And perhaps most interesting, the future of weed isn't smoking, it's oils, ingestibles and sprays. Why puff when you can eat a pot gummi bear?

I'm telling you, these women dazzled the audience with medical studies, legislative bills, anti-drug history and so many telling facts that I would have listened to them all night, just to admire their big brains.

During the Q & A, an older woman with glaucoma asked about getting medical Mary Jane and was told that soon she'll be able to get a prescription from her doctor now that Virginia has passed a limited weed bill (31st in the nation to do so and nobody saw it coming).

When she politely asked where she'd then get it filled, a couple people in the crowd called out, "DC!" Her response was, "Where in DC? Can I get a map?" and the room cracked up.

The discussion ended with recommendations about what we could do to further the cause, starting with thanking our legislators for what they've done so far, then telling them to take it further next year. After all, being 31st is still better than being last.

Meanwhile, Mac takes the prize for picking the best part of tonight's outing and exposing me to the wide world of weed, not to mention my newest big-brained girl crushes.

It's simple, really: I'm a sapiosexual, bitch.

Since When Do You Wear a Ring?

Growing up in a '60s rancher did not feel like a mid-century modern experience.

It was, of course. The house was the kind of small, easy-living dwelling devoted to a more relaxed lifestyle than the more formal houses of my grandparents who lived in a townhouse in the city.

The post-war years were a new era and people optimistically thought this is what houses could like like in the modern world. Popular thought was that the right architecture could improve people's lives, a fact lost on kids like me.

Fast forward and now I know plenty of people with a passion for mid-century modern architecture, although now that I think about it, none of them actually lived in it growing up. I still look at ranchers (or Cape Cods or split levels) and shudder, but that's not to say that I don't have an appreciation for any of the architecture of that era.

For the final event of Design Month RVA, the Branch Museum and Modern Richmond were showing a documentary, "Modern Tide: Mid-Century Architecture on Long Island," and my curiosity was piqued by the beach connection.

Here's this strip of land between the bay and the ocean and starting back in the '20s and '30s, New Yorkers decided to build getaway houses in a simple, modern style that borrowed heavily from the Europeans. The clean, geometric lines of the houses designed by a new breed of architect were, as one talking head called them, "no more than an artful form of camping."

Of course, back then people expected beach life to be simple, a completely different experience from their city lives. While some of us still subscribe to that theory of beach-living, far more expect their beach houses, whether rentals or their own, to be elaborate affairs with wet bars, billiard rooms and, perhaps worst of all, hermetically sealed to prevent the intrusion of salt air and mist.

Tragic, in my opinion.

High ceilings for maximum light, a central room for gathering and small, utilitarian bedrooms ("What are you gonna do in them but sleep?") and lots of windows for maximum water views defined most of the Long Island houses - deliberately designed for the middle class, mind you - shown in the film.

And small in scale like the rancher I grew up in.

The heartbreaking part was how many fantastical houses we saw in photographs that have long since been demolished. The land is so valuable now that nobody cares about saving these mid-century jewels when the well-off can easily raze them and throw up a McMansion in their place.

And the crime is not just the size of the replacement house (although that's plenty obnoxious) but that in most cases, neighborhood associations now require traditional architecture to replace these once-modern houses, so this style of housing stock is being lost entirely.

But not all. Architect Andrew Geller's whimsical "double diamond" house, a practically perfect beach house when it was designed in 1958 practically at the ocean's edge, was moved back a bit and faithfully restored by Geller's grandson, making for a decided high spot in an otherwise unfortunate saga of the history of mid-century modern houses on Long Island.

Not that a documentary dork like me would have missed seeing such a fascinating slice of architectural history, especially with three familiar theater buffs in the row behind me to blather with until things git started.

Having dinner with a friend before the movie, I listened as he tried to convince me to join him tonight in going to hear a group of Tibetan monks talk about the snow leopard perimeter of their monastery. I couldn't imagine what that meant and he couldn't explain.

This was after he gave me a hard time for not going with him yesterday to watch the monks create a sand mandala. Monks? Meh.

Clearly he didn't understand the depths of my mid-century modern roots.

I Do Want Change

How about Wednesday?
I can not go.
Okay, do you want to do something any other night?
Thursday or Friday?
How about Cinema Noir? 
OK, cool!
So we're on for Thursday?
Yeppers.
Okay, so I want to stop by the opening of the new exhibit at the Branch Museum before the movie. If you want to join me for that, we can go somewhere first to eat.
You are such a party animal! I'm off at 2, so sounds all good to me!

You read right, I got called a party animal for wanting to go to an architecture museum and eat dinner before a movie. Whoa, things are getting crazy here.

Say, what happened to late nights, excessive drinking and wild behavior...or is that so party animal 2015?

Doesn't matter, I suppose, since we had a fine time at dinner, seat-dancing to the '80s and stuffing our faces for the sake of my livelihood (he's good about always taking home the leftovers so I don't have to) while talking about life.

It was important to him to bring me up to speed on the hilarious SNL "The Day Beyonce Turned Black" video  - "Kerry Washington can't be black! She's on ABC!" - once we finished eating.

Apparently he worries about others mocking my lack of cultural literacy and he's here to save me from that.

Judging by the sedate-looking crowd at the Branch Museum, I certainly didn't need to be up to speed before the opening of "The Historic American Buildings Survey: Documenting Virginia's Architectural Heritage," not that I didn't find it fascinating.

Turns out that HABS was yet another brilliant New Deal initiative in 1933, implemented to begin the important preservation process as it pertains to the built environment, engineering technologies and landscape design.

An architecture nerd's wet dream, in other words.

Using large-format black and white photographs and detailed architectural renderings, the exhibit displayed the work of countless people who painstakingly recorded specifics about important buildings, such as the Rising Sun Tavern on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg (a street I know well), erected before 1781, and Bacon's Castle in Surry County, built before 1676.

Equally familiar to me were Menokin on the Northern Neck, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and Monticello, although the specificity of details was far greater than any average Joe would know, or even any art history fanatic.

When we left there, it was for me to get a hot fudge sundae at Bev's - where we were alone since ice cream is not the most popular sweet in February - while my friend explained his lactose intolerance and sipped a cup of coffee, his drug of choice.

In no hurry, we took the alley on our way out, resulting in a couple of fun discoveries. The first was a mural on a garage door of the "Spy versus Spy" characters expertly rendered and the other was a discarded mattress on which someone had spray-painted, "Nothing else mattress."

Dyslexia humor is a wonderful thing.

Eventually, we made our way over to Manchester's Browne Gallery on Hull Street for Cinema Noir where I found myself back on the same stretch I'd walked a few weeks ago, discovering Croaker's Spot and Sweet Fix Bakery in the process.

The gallery was filling up quickly, so we nabbed seats in the second row and another friend showed up to sit just in front of us. One of the great things about this event is the pre-film music and tonight's was especially good, all Earth, Wind and Fire in tribute to Maurice White's recent earthly exit.

Several EWF album covers were placed around the gallery as visual reminders, a couple next to a classic classroom turntable, inspiring my friend to ask, "Where's the slide projector?" like the AV Club geek he probably was.

Tonight's short film was director Pete Chaimon's "Blackcard," a subtly scathing look at a world where a group called The Commission makes it their job to check on infractions by African Americans of the "black code."

The audience was cracking up within the first two minutes of the film.

It began with Commission staff raiding a woman's refrigerator, nodding in approval at malt liquor, sniffing a pitcher of ice tea to determine if it was sweetened and ultimately discovering unacceptable items such as kale and, later, a book by Malcolm Gladwell.

"Malcolm Galdwell?" the agent asks. You'd have thought he found "Mein Kampf."

It's these kinds of things that cause our heroine Lona to lose her black card, a fact that doesn't bother her boyfriend because he thinks self trumps race. She's not so sure.

Interrogating another man about his blackness, the guy admits to voting for Romney. Incredulous, the Commission investigator, asks, "You didn't want change?"

The films' leitmotif - whether to chose oneself over one's race - provided much of the post-film discussion with director Pete, looking very hip perched in a director's chair at the front of the room.

"Black is not a genre," he said, explaining why he thought of the term as pejorative. A film made by and/or with blacks can be any genre a white film can: romance, sci-fi, western, comedy or drama, a fact which should be obvious to anyone.

Although his film contained much to laugh at, he saw the comedy as being in service of the dramatic element, namely Lona trying to get her black card back and, ultimately, Leonard laying his on the ground and opting to follow his own path rather than the prescribed racial one.

Pete pulled out metaphors galore and a recent eating example -questioning his own meal of quinoa in Los Angeles as "un-black" - to explain the importance of making individual calls about what kind of black you choose to be.

Many of his tight, slightly awkward camera angles owed a debt to Terry Gilliams' "Brazil," he explained, saying, "You're going to turn me into a film nerd now."

Truth be told, that's the absolute beauty of these Cinema Nouir evenings. As intriguing as it is to get to see a contemporary black film short, it's always the discussion afterwards that makes them such compelling evenings.

I'm far more interested in the day Richmond becomes successfully multi-racial than I am the day Beyonce became black. What's cool is that Cinema Noir and the Afrikanna Film Fest are chipping away at that every single month.

And if I have to be a party animal to be a part of that, well, that's the way of the world.

What Lovely Fervor

A good daughter cooks and bakes for her mother and answers her father's questions before going out to play.

"What band sang 'Highway to Hell'?" he asks from the family room. AC/DC, I tell him

"Who was the 'Originator'?" When I say Bo Diddly, he fills in the crossword blanks with a satisfied smile. "Ah, yes!"

At this point, Mom gets involved. "If you need any more assistance, you'd better ask her now before she goes because I can't be of any help to you on this stuff."

I assume that she means she doesn't know anything about music history. "I blocked out that whole rock and roll period!" she says with disdain, although the truth is she's been to multiple Neil Diamond concerts and some of her favorite songs are by Stevie Wonder.

It's all rock at this point, Mom.

Today's road trip to the Northern Neck had been motivated by Mom's bridge luncheon tomorrow, so I'd spent my time helping make chicken noodle soup, chicken salad and a Viennese torte, all of which took a solid three hours and endless conversation.

Answering Dad's questions takes seconds, and that includes him asking me about my love life.

As parents go, mine are pretty cool.

After driving back through a series of rain squalls, I consider my evening's options and decide that Quill Theater's historic play reading series wins out because it's "Luminous One: An Evening with Ethel Barrymore" and I know nothing about the woman besides that she's a distant relation to Drew.

It doesn't hurt that it's being presented at the Branch House and while I've already seen the new exhibit, I certainly don't mind seeing it again. To my amazement, I overhear a woman say she's lived in Richmond for 17 years and never been in the building.

"What is this place?" she inquires of her clueless friend. Tragic.

I, on the other hand, am enchanted to find the heavy leaded windows are open on this unusually balmy, wet November evening, allowing the moist air inside. This fact alone makes the evening special.

The one-woman show, ably written and directed by Melissa Rayford and starring the reliably impressive Melissa Johnston-Price is set in Richmond and kicks off with its premise.

"I've been asked to write a memoir. Horrors!" Ethel exclaims, standing next to a typewriter. From there, she reminisces about some of what's happened in her life, never writing a word.

She talks about her grandmother who "experimented with marriage" (haven't we all?), her memories of going to the Jefferson for the wedding of Charles Dana Gibson and Irene Langhorne, saying, "By the time she married, she'd had 60 proposals," and dancing on the Jefferson's rooftop garden the night before.

And, like my Dad, Ethel's father kept his word count to strictly what was necessary. When she cabled that she was getting married ("I was constantly trying to let myself get married and it never worked"), he responded with, "Congratulations. Love, Father."

When she broke the engagement and cabled her father the change in events, he responded, "Congratulations. Love, Father."

Turns out Ethel's life involved Winston Churchill, Henry James, the Duke of Manchester, Teddy Roosevelt and Spencer Tracy while wearing black, white and gray clothing because they were cheapest.

Apparently the Barrymores are known for two things: mismanaging money and drinking excessively.

In a particularly telling moment, Ethel complained about the current generation expecting art to be an instantaneous pleasure. As if. Or, as Ethel put it, "If you don't like it, you need to figure out why!"

When the reading ended, we broke for a dessert buffet and mingling. In the course of commiserating about the evils of Verizon, I manged to devour four little sweeties, as my Scottish friend would say, followed by chatting with a handsome stranger.

My mother and her sweet tooth would be proud.

A panel discussion followed, where we gleaned obscure tidbits such as the fact that if Drew Barrymore's children become actors, they'll represent 300 years of Barrymores in the profession. And how Ethel's hair was imitated just like Jennifer Aniston's was a century later. That the Barrymores gave each other red apples on opening night.

Yet another fine Ethel-ism: "You grow up the day you have your first laugh...at yourself."

The logical place to end my evening was celebrating the third Thursday of November, also known as the day Beaujolais Nouveau is released and as good an excuse as any to visit Amour, enjoy some young wines and sample Beaujolais Nouveau sorbet (while patting myself on the back for missing last night's guests).

Not only is this years' Georges du Boeuf Beaujolais Noveau far better than the usual bubblegum-flavored sipper, but one of last year's Noveaus has aged amazingly well and how often does that happen?

My favorite French teacher and part-time model tries to convince me to consider modeling in local fashion shows and I wonder how I would like being looked at for wearing clothes not my own. The entire bar discusses the difference in "cruise people" and "boat people."

In the strictest sense, I qualify for neither. On the other hand, I've been proposed to eight times, I've experimented with marriage and I've laughed at myself for as long as I can remember.

And you know what I'd hear from the Northern Neck about that?

Congratulations. Love, Dad.