Tag Archives: Local News

In honor of the Spanish bacon dinner I enjoyed earlier tonight, and to make up for yesterday’s poorly written guts chronicle, I will tell the true story of a Mas evening two summers ago, witnessed pre-blog.

In summer, we sit on the patio at Mas, the trendy Spanish tapas restaurant two neighborhoods down. Everyone who first hears of Mas Tapas says, “Topless? It’s a topless bar?” It was only funny when I said it.

The restaurant was built on a run-down corner in the up-and-coming section of Charlottesville. Belmont was where the poor folks used to live before their neighborhood was gentrified. It was almost like rich folks started moving in so they could use the big city word “gentrified” without having to live in Brooklyn. Charlottesville struggles with a creative exodus to the five burroughs, but Belmont remains our haven of neighborhood stroller chic – an integrated six block radius within walking distance of downtown. Belmont is where houses climbed in worth by an average of $200,000 in two years, and where you still don’t want to get caught alone, sans pepper spray, in the middle of the night on certain streets. But Belmont is also where natives won’t bother you for hosting a keg party in the front yard of your renovated Victorian mansion.

So this Spanish tapas restaurant landed in the middle of Belmont and it was immediately hard to get a table on most weeknights. We arrived after 10 pm in the waning summer heat. The university was out on break, therefore we didn’t see the rich kids from the dormitories who had been turned onto Mas by a review in their school paper. When we arrived at the restaurant to meet our friends, recently engaged, we found out that we were celebrating the fiance’s birthday. They had already been sitting on the Mas patio for two hours, drinking sangria and eating bacon-wrapped dates.

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I am disturbed, bewildered, and perhaps a little inspired by a news item featured in this week’s C-Ville Weekly newspaper. Here’s what happened.

Best friends Jerald and Joseph were partying at Rivals Sports Bar & Grill one warm, average night last March. At Rivals they met their new buddies Sunshine, Big Mama, Candy, and “the Mexican.” The gang then caravaned downtown to visit the amply-stocked bars of the Atomic Burrito (RIP) and Miller’s. But Joe and Candy stayed in the car, presumably to hook up. When Candy passed out, Joe walked to the bar to meet Jerald, Sunshine, and the rest of his crew. But by then the crew had a new member – Joseph Ray.

As the night wore on, Joseph Ray and Joseph realized they didn’t like each other. On the crew’s walk back to the parking lot, this tension reached a violent crescendo. Despite Jerald’s best attempts to hustle his friend into a vehicle and prevent him from engaging in a drunken street brawl, Joseph Ray still managed to pull Joseph from his truck. Then “the Mexican” and Joseph Ray started “whooping” Joseph, who promptly curled up in a fetal position. Jerald saw that Joseph was being double-teamed so he ran around the truck and heroically defended his friend.

“If you know someone was a friend of yours,” Jerald said later, “you just ain’t going to let them get whooped up on without giving them some help.”

After Jerald broke up the fight by throwing Joseph Ray onto a parked car and elbowing him in the eyeball, the two best friends jumped back into the truck to make their getaway. That’s when Jerald realized that he had “a ball of guts” dangling from his body. Joseph Ray had apparently stabbed Jerald, causing his guts to dangle. Now the case is going to court.

Someone please alert John Grisham about the trial of the century.

In court, [Jerald] Gibson showed his scar. “I got stabbed right there and they had to go in and pull all my internals out and fix my insides.”

Jerald Gibson, I salute you and the lengths you go for your friends. I wish your guts a speedy recovery.

1. This is why Rosie the Wrist Twister is the natural-born leader of CLAW:

Me – I have a brilliant idea! We should get two pregnant women to arm wrestle!

RtWT – I already lined that up for our next meeting.

2. I wish all the babies I adopt from Korea could sing like this.

3. Mitch Van Yahres was a great man.

4. After I took an alcohol sabbatical two weeks ago, I realized that my sobriety coincided exactly with Lent. Now it is obvious that I am doing this for Jesus, instead of selfishly just “not being an alcoholic.”

I don’t mind not drinking as much as I thought I would. And if I am out on the town and I start getting jealous of all the people with beers in their hands, I imagine that their bottles are full of ketchup and I get grossed out.

5. My friend Tyler Magill’s poetry is published in the first issue of literary magazine Makeout Creek.

6. How adorable are Cookie and Sugar of the Acorn Sisters? It kills me when they wear matching outfits.

7. At dinner last night I found myself (yet again) in the thick of a heated conversation about fonts. The bbf has a font wishlist on Typography.com worth $800. To distinguish myself from the typeface dorks sharing my guacamole, I pointed out that I have only downloaded one font in my life, the WWE font Misproject, which I use for my personal journaling.

Dear friends,

I was honored by your attendance and polite hand clapping last night at the inaugural match of CLAW, the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers. Although I declined to advance to the final round, the small moustachio’ed gentleman in the cape was quite chivalrous to yours truly and I believe he deserved to win. In preparation for next month’s arm wrestling bout, I will continue teaching my etiquette classes at Sweet Briar College, and I will also pump some iron.

Yours sincerely,

Debbie “The Debutante” Danger

I haven’t abandoned my blog, but I have been v. b.z. and v. d.pressed. I will make a full comeback next week, but for now, here is a taste to whet your appetite.

MY DORKY DREAM

I am at the Jefferson Madison Downtown Regional Library, which will always be my favorite local library even though its employees occasionally play the game of “Lose the books Wistar returns and then hire a collection agency to send her scary invoices for $90.” I’m trying to make conversation with the librarians, but they are ignoring me. “Hey guys,” I say. “Did you see Art Garfunkel’s reading list in this week’s New Yorker? Who would have guessed?” Then I go looking for Martin Amis’s novel Money. But the fiction section isn’t where it used to be on the main floor! The fiction section is up three flights of stairs, and to get there I have to walk through a gift shop selling cheap jewelry and across a meditation area with chlorinated, 50-meter reflecting pools. And I keep cursing at all the people drinking Mocha Frappiatos and pawing through fashion magazines. “Shit,” I say. “Where are all the f-ing books?” Then a hot guy opens an unmarked door beside the coin-operated carousel and I see a sign for Fiction A-Am, and I am home.

Now who’s a bigger nerd, me or Art Garfunkel?

The BBF and I recently dropped $99.95 to sign up for homeexchange.com. Home Exchange is like Wife Swap, but with houses. Those of you who lack both wives and houses are basically nonentities in this new global economy.

The concept behind Home Exchange is brilliant. You own a house in Malibu and you have always wanted to visit Barcelona. A homeowner in Barcelona has always wanted to visit Malibu. They trade houses for a few weeks. [Wait – this sounds like a great idea for a bad romantic comedy.]

Brilliant! Except once you log into the site, you see that every other house listed is a) a mansion; b) a mansion overlooking the Cote d’Azur; or c) a mansion with a helicopter landing pad on the roof. The BBF and I are advertising our proximity to Monticello and our washer/dryer hookup, and other homeowners are advertising their yachts and heated pools. So I’m not sure this home exchange concept will work out for us. We need something in the quality of life area between Homeexchange.com and Couchsurfing.com. But I’m still hoping someone on the former site will say, “Forget Manhattan. Forget Paris. I want to wash my clothes in a modest ranch home in Charlottesville, Virginia.” And P.S., we include the use of a station wagon.

a) I spent an hour on a blog post last night, but it meandered from World War II to Britney Spears to T.C. Boyle and by the time I was done writing I realized that I had written about absolutely nothing.

b) Today I drove around town running errands with my windows open because it was so warm. Only at my third stoplight did I realize that I was blasting my audio book about porcupine sex. I’m sure it was thrilling for my fellow travelers.

c) The professor I work for reminded me today that in college I had emailed him some of my poetry. I was mortified. I recently reread these undergrad poems and they are raw, personal, and badly written – not exactly the glimpse into my subconscious that I want my employer to have taken.

d) I am afraid to post blog entries. I am afraid because I put my URL in the personal statement of my application to graduate school. What was I thinking? Now I will imagine my academic future hinging on each post. Learned professors might be sitting in front of their computers thinking, “Ew. Ballet porn? We don’t want this girl in our program.” My psychological helper person says that I’m a troublemaker. But isn’t that the kind of asshole everyone should want in a classroom?

e) I did not grow out my nails while the BBF was in Africa (I think his plane has taken off from the continent by now). But they are polished and well moisturized. My New Year’s resolution to partake in a nightly dessert of 50 sit-ups also failed, but that is nothing to be embarrassed about. I tend to lose weight while the BBF is away because when left to my own devices, I just consume red wine and chocolate for dinner. I worked at Ben & Jerry’s years ago and I lost weight then as well. All I ate was sample cups of ice cream and bananas meant for splits.

f) I’m not embarrassed about anything else. I actually feel pretty good. After two glasses of wine, I’m not even reluctant to admit that I watched Hot Rod with SNL’s Andy Samberg last night. I can’t wait for my boy to come home and return me to a healthy state of nightly vegetables, serious documentary films, and ideal companionship.