Live Arts Announces New Season

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 14, 2002 in General News. Closed

Live Arts has announced their final season at their current location. Running from September until June of 2003, John Gibson describes it as “an American season, with all U.S. settings and playwrights.” Best of all, the final show will be Coffeehouse 13, a throwback to the early 90s coffeehouses that made Live Arts so popular in the first place. After that show, the theater intends to move to their new location on Water Street.

Lost in Yonkers

by Neil Simon

Directed by Larry Goldstein

September 13 to October 5

1942, the world goes to war. in a Yonkers apartment above a candy store, 3 generations are thrown together: cold and sharp as steel Grandma Kurnitz; the four children who have each hardened her heart; the two teenage boys meeting this, their extended family, for the first time. America’s greatest comic playwright, his only Pulitzer Prize. A tender memory play about coming of age, laughing through tears and learning to let go.

The Wild Party

by John Michael LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe

Directed by Doug Schneider

November 15 to December 14

From epic poem to smash hit musical. The jazz-mad Manhattan of the 1920s, where anything and everything goes! Bathtub gin and bedroom eyes, bums and bon vivants, the most wild and wicked, eye-opening and jaw-dropping party of them all. Dilettantes, debutantes, has-beens, and wannabes are all clawing for an invite to this sexy singing soiree. A vaudeville with hors d’ouevres, a sloe gin fizz to a fast jazz beat, doilies but no undies- “The Wild Party” has it all.

Ah, Wilderness!

by Eugene O’Neill

Directed by William Rough

January 17 to February 8

No morphine, no tuberculosis, and no foghorns. Instead, a comedic walk down memory lane. A turn-of-the-last-century valentine to a sweeter time. A Fourth of July weekend in a placid New England town. A scrapbook of loving family portraits. A clear-eyed and unsentimental look at the inner life of 17-year old Richard Miller: the future artist as a sensitive, pompous, all-but-insufferable, young man.

Summer Evening in Des Moines

by Charles Mee

Directed by Chris Courtenay

March 14-29

One of the most exciting and wildly theatrical playwrights working today. A free-wheeling cruise through heart and head. A ship of fools looks for a way back to Civilization. (Where one can “sit at a dinner table and watch TV.”) With a stop in Teatimeland or Tuscanyworld. (“Where the fountains brim with chianti.”) The destination keeps changing – grand canyon, Dairy Queen, airport, Devonshire, New Jersey, or the Hamptons. Just don’t forget to pack your catapult for the fruitcake toss!

Buried Child

by Sam Shepard

Directed by Boomie Pedersen

April 18- May 3

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” or the double-wide set. A young man returning home to the family farm. His family: Gothic in the disheveled darkness of their lives; Baroque in the extravagance of their dysfunction; Medieval in their cruelty toward each other. Shepard: may be our greatest living playwright; this may be his masterpiece. Albee’s sense of craft, Beckett’s ear for language, and Tennessee William’s gift for venom all on display in this Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Coffeehouse 13

by the Charlottesville All-Star Writers

Directed by Fran Smith

May 30 to June 21

The thrilling days of yesteryear in C-ville. The Downtown Mall was a ghost town. Fellini’s offered all kinds of after hours treats. Live Arts meant Coffeehouse. For our final full production in our cozy home at 609 East Market Streeet, we’re going back to our roots (before we transplant them to Water Street) resurrecting the legendary performance series that put our address on the map. Big laughs, great tunes and wicked gossip: all with a local slant.

Account of CHS Attackers’ Sentencing

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 14, 2002 in Law and Justice. 4 Comments

In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence has an account of the recent sentencing of several of the CHS attackers, along with a series of interesting quotes from some of the victims. With official apologies like “I’m sorry if I hurt anybody,” some of the victims are less than pleased with the outcome. You can read the story on The Hook’s site.

UVa Rejects Garage Arbitration

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 14, 2002 in UVa. 8 Comments

The University of Virginia has rejected the city’s request for non-binding arbitration over the planned Ivy Road parking garage. The city believes that UVa has violated the Three Party Agreement in their handling of the garage. In the response letter by John Casteen, he dismisses the concerns, neatly summarizing UVa’s perspective in saying that “the Code [of Virginia] does not provide for localities to pass judgment on state agency projects.” In related news, an attorney for the area residents opposed to the project is claiming that UVa does not own a 32’x32′ portion of the planned garage site, as per an 1895 deed. Eric Swensen has stories on each subject in today’s Progress.

cvillenews.com is Back Up

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 14, 2002 in Politics. 4 Comments

cvillenews.com is, after a ghastly week of fighting with Network Solutions, back up again. For those that care about geeky whining and pathetic excuse-making, continue reading. For those that don’t care, have a little patience and I’ll get some real news up here.

On Thursday the 6th, in mid-afternoon, I moved the server that cvillenews.com resides on, Tux. Tux is my main server — it hosts most of my websites, my DNS (think of DNS as a sort of an Internet phone book — it matches cvillenews.com to 216.12.86.3), a bunch of e-mail addresses, etc. I was moving out of my office to set up a home office, so the server had to go. I hauled everything into a car and drove it to my apartment, where I set everything back up again.

A consequence of moving the server is that Ntelos — from whom I get my connectivity via DSL — had to assign me a new IP address. So cvillenews.com went from being 216.12.15.168 to being 216.12.86.3. This is sort of like changing your phone number, to use a simplified analogy. I’d notified the proper authorities, notably Network Solutions, the registrar for the domain. Late Thursday afternoon, I left for a business trip, figuring that everything would be updated and ticking along happily by Friday.

It wasn’t. When I came back Saturday evening, nothing worked. That’s when I began a series of attempted updates to the domain name records on Network Solutions site, via e-mail, via fax, and via phone. They simply weren’t updating the DNS — their phone book — to reflect cvillenews.com’s new location. Thus, people typing the address into their browser got nothing, because 216.12.15.168 had been reduced to a bare ethernet cable hanging out of the wall in an empty office.

Yesterday’s telephone call with Network Solutions was particularly exciting. Ruth, with whom I spoke, explained to me that if the e-mail based update forms didn’t work, there was absolutely nothing they could do. She couldn’t help me on the phone. She couldn’t help me via fax. I couldn’t pay them to fix it. I simply had to keep resubmitting the change request until it worked.

Somehow, magically, it worked yesterday. Perhaps it was something that I did differently, perhaps it was something that Ruth did, perhaps it was the goat that I sacrificed to the gods of Media General. I’m not sure. As of today, the updated DNS entry is slowly filtering into DNSs around the world, and the site is gradually becoming accessible to more and more people. Ironically, it’s still not accessible to me via my Ntelos DSL, but I’m hoping that will iron itself out, too.

In any case, this sucked. I’m really sorry that the site was down for so long. (Though it was a nice little vacation.) The moral of the story for me is to never, ever, ever work with Network Solutions. I’ll be transferring all of my domains over to DirectNIC, with whom I’ve had far more luck. Oh, and there is a silver lining to all of this: moving the server was the first step in the Impending Upgrade(tm), which will involve some software upgrades to the site that will allow multiple moderators, discussion boards outside of news responses and a bunch of other fun stuff. God help us all if any other steps in this upgrade suck as much as this one did.

Finally, my thanks to all of the folks from the Neon Guild and Ntelos that were so helpful. I appreciate it.

Louisa Man Guilty of Murder

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 11, 2002 in Law and Justice. Closed

Rapping murderer Russell Pelletier has been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison, WINA reports. Pelletier attempted to shake the charge by claiming that he had not actually confessed to the murder, but merely invented a freestyle rap that happened to be about shooting and killing a girl, and throwing her body into a lake. Pelletier intends to appeal the conviction.

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