Tea Leaf Astrologer

Aries
(March 21 – April 19)

You know those little peppers used on Thai menus to indicate the spice level of the dish? Well, it’s a three-pepper month for you, Aries. And while that may seem mild compared with the blistering, full-body high you’re accustomed to, perhaps it’s time to shift your focus toward the subtle energies in your life. Single? No need to go sending up flares. Love always finds you. But you’re not a dish for just anyone. 

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Taurus (April 20 – May 20) 

Get ready for a reality check. Or don’t. It’s coming for you either way.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

When it comes to love, you’re only fooling yourself.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Somebody’s got shiny-penny syndrome.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

The door is unlocked. 

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

You’re going to have to speak up.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Don’t think of it as backtracking. Think of it as recalibration.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Two words: healthy boundaries.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

You’ll want to change your shoes for this. 

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Does the term “energy vampire” mean anything to you?

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

You couldn’t wipe off that grin even if you tried.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

You’ve already hung the moon. Now it’s time to enjoy it.  OH

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

Home by Design

Eccentrics of
Latham Park

Public grounds along Buffalo Creek
entertain a cast of characters

By Cynthia Adams

Living in sight of Latham Park affords premium viewing (for free!) of 24-hour reality programming.

At the onset of coronavirus-fueled frustration, park going surged.

Lots of posing occurred in the park, with professional photographers forced out of studios. Women and men leaned into gnarly trees as pros and amateurs snapped away. A girls’ sports team pirouetted on a small rise, one long favored by golfers who perpetually have ignored the “No Golfing” signs. They air hugged, bumping elbows, posing while socially distanced.

Romance, too, played out on grass-stained quilts. Couples lugged cold drinks and takeout to make-out exhibitions putting Love Island to shame.

For some reason, Latham Park, among Greensboro’s first, has never been funded at the level of the city’s other parks, despite its age and popularity. No lovely plantings nor gazebos, no special features whatever except for a trail and rusting old exercise stations.

Beyond that, nothing but a few old benches.

Occasionally, gang members tag the park signs. Pranksters even lugged away two bolted-down benches. We were stunned one morning to find one abandoned near Elm Street and Buffalo Creek.

This bench had a pervy history. A flasher once stationed himself there. Now, only the concrete pads remain. Kudzu, another local pest and natural predator, further menaces the trail.

After lockdown, the surge receded as suddenly as it began. The park returned to its usual tempo and a rotating cast of walkers, joggers and occasional eccentrics.

A couple of tuba players rehearsed on a remaining bench, bleating and booming on their unwieldy instruments. Tubas are the manatees of the music world, seldom glimpsed in the wild.

An agreeable cyclist we call Beep repeatedly shouts “Beep!” as he often bikes with orange peel covering his teeth like an orthodontic retainer.

Beep began hailing us as “Sarah and Abraham!” when my husband avoided haircuts during lockdown.

Miata Man chugs cautiously around the park perimeter on area streets before securing his car in a parking lot, carefully storing the tag in the trunk.

We don’t know Miata Man, but we would like to.

Butch recently moved away. He cut through the park on forays to the service station for snacks. Like us, Butch walked in all weather — even in moonlight. He kept an eye out for suspicious behavior, frowning on drugs and littering. He regaled us with stories about the mayor, whom he phoned to keep apprised of such things. We miss Butch.

Mysterious Patchouli Girl walks past with an instrument on her back, wearing folk costumes. The scent lingers in the air, once she has passed us.

Sometimes, the truly weird happens in the park. One dawn, a yellow tent appeared near Buffalo Creek. The camper’s breakfast bacon smells drifted through the air. The park floods, mind you, and we were alarmed by their perilous campsite. It happened more recently when an orange tent pitched up.

But this year, a doozie.

As I tugged at a weed in our courtyard, hubby appeared, eyes wide, furtively motioning. He hissed, “Big, fat man in sheet!”

I could only stare back.

“Golfing! Hurry!” he urged, motioning toward the park. “You can see his skimpies!” (Skimpies are unmentionables where he grew up.)

As I crept to look, a very large man was negotiating his body into a sedan.

Was he wearing a sheet?

He sped off. Was it, perhaps, clothing? Tie-dyed? Nope, hubby said.

“Like he cut a hole in a white sheet and — wore it like a caftan!”

Had he ever seen him before from his park-facing office?

Apparently, yes, but — normally the man wore nothing.

“I mean, no shirt. He usually comes to the park with a club in hand, wearing skimpies. Undershorts.”

But golfing in a sheet? I spluttered. 

“I was on a work Zoom, or I would have been able to get your attention before he was leaving,” he retorted. “It was a sheet.”

Puzzled, I tugged at the weed, whose roots extended to Middle Earth.

What to call him? Toga Man? Sheet Man?

The root would not surrender: It whispered, “Just a park goer, you fool. A weed in the garden of life.”  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Bookshelf

April Books

Compiled by Shannon Purdy Jones

If you live in my neighborhood, I guarantee you saw me out as early as February, pacing lazy circles around my barren yard and muttering to myself. Not, as it might appear, doing anything nefarious or unhinged (at least not to date).

No, I was mentally mapping where in the garden the perennials would reappear and where between them the new year’s plantings might go. Next, of course, I was wandering the perimeter of the raised beds, plotting out this year’s vegetable rotation. Thankfully, after a few years now, my neighbors know the drill and are no longer worried for my sanity. As soon as the ground thaws, I’m itching for it: cutting in compost and starting seedlings and feeling the soil under my fingernails. Waiting until the correct time to plant before hitting the local nursery to browse is an exercise in self control I have yet to master.

Thankfully, the wait is over. The last frost date is just around the corner, so it’s time to dust off our rakes and hoes and fill the world with green things. Not only will you get some gorgeous blooms and delicious veggies for your efforts, but our pollinator neighbors will reap the rewards too. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener looking for some new ideas or someone who’s never grown a single tomato, we’ve got some great books to get you outside and growing. See you out in the sunshine!

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat: Grow a Bounty of Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers by Mastering the Art of Succession Planting by Meg McAndrews Cowden 

Discover how to get more out of your growing space with succession planting — carefully planned, continuous seed sowing — and provide a steady stream of fresh food from early spring through late fall.

Drawing inspiration from succession in natural landscapes, Meg McAndrews Cowden teaches you how to implement lessons from these dynamic systems in your home garden. You’ll learn how to layer succession across your perennial and annual crops; maximize the early growing season; determine the sequence to plant and replant in summer; and incorporate annual and perennial flowers to benefit wildlife and ensure efficient pollination. You’ll also find detailed, seasonal sowing charts to inform your garden planning, so you can grow more anywhere, regardless of your climate.

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat will inspire you to create an even more productive, beautiful and enjoyable garden across the seasons — every vegetable gardener’s dream.

Pollinator Gardening for the South: Creating Sustainable Habitats by Seth Danesha Carley and Anne M. Spafford 

This step-by-step guide will answer all of your questions about how to create beautiful gardens designed to welcome beneficial pollinators across the South. Combining up-to-date scientific information with artful design strategies, Danesha Seth Carley and Anne M. Spafford teach gardeners of all levels to plan, plant and maintain successful pollinator gardens at home and in shared community sites. Everyday gardeners, along with farmers, scientists and policy makers, share serious concerns about ongoing declines in bee and other pollinator populations, and here Spafford and Carley deliver great news: Every thoughtfully designed garden, no matter how small, can play a huge role in providing the habitat, nourishment and nesting places so needed by pollinators. This book explains all you need to be a pollinator champion.

• Covers USDA hardiness zones 6, 7, 8 and 9, including 12 Southern states.

• Explains what makes pollinators happy — bees, for sure, and many others, great and small.

• Brings science and art together in gardens of all types, including urban, food, container, community, school and large-scale gardens.

• Provides step-by-step instructions for choosing locations, preparing soil and garden beds, selecting the best plants, considering seasonality in your garden design, managing your garden throughout the year and much more.

• Richly illustrated with photographs, design plans, and handy charts and lists.

Grow More Food: A Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Getting the Biggest Harvest Possible from a Space of Any Size
by Colin McCrate and Brad Helm

Just how productive can one small vegetable garden be? More productive than one might think. Colin McCrate and Brad Helm, former community supported agriculture growers and current owners of the Seattle Urban Farm Company, help readers boost their garden productivity by teaching them how to plan carefully, maximize production in every bed, get the most out of every plant, scale up systems to maximize efficiency and expand the harvest season with succession planting, intercropping and season extension.

 Along with chapters devoted to the Five Tenets of a Productive Gardener (Plan Well to Get the Most from Your Garden; Maximize Production in Each Bed; Get the Most out of Every Plant; Scale up Tools and Systems for Efficiency; and Expand and Extend the Harvest), the book contains interactive tools that home gardeners can use to assist them in determining how, when, and what to plant; evaluating crop health; and planning and storing the harvest. For today’s vegetable gardeners who want to grow as much of their own food as possible, this guide offers expert advice and strategies for cultivating a garden that supplies what they need.

Grow Now: How We Can Save Our Health, Communities, and Planet — One Garden at a Time by Emily Murphy

Did you know you can have a garden that’s equal parts food source and wildlife haven? In Grow Now, Emily Murphy shares easy-to-follow principles for regenerative gardening that foster biodiversity and improve soil health. She also shows how every single yard mirrors and connects to the greater ecosystem around us.

No-dig growing, composting and mulching smartly, and planting a variety of edible perennials that attract bees and butterflies are all common-sense techniques everyone can use to grow positive change. You’ll also find detailed advice on increasing your nature quotient, choosing plants that cycle more carbon back into the soil, selecting a broader variety of vegetables and fruits to improve overall soil fertility, rethinking space devoted to lawns, and adding companion plants for pollinators to “rewild” any plot of land.

Exquisitely photographed and filled with helpful lists and sidebars, Grow Now is an actionable, hopeful and joyful roadmap for growing our way to individual climate contributions. Gardening is climate activism!  OH

Shannon Purdy Jones is store manager and children’s book buyer for Scuppernong Books.

O. Henry Ending

Mulch Ado

How moving a compost pile
lifts a family’s spirits

By Cassie Bustamante

“Oh, you’re a fitness trainer,” my doctor said. “This’ll be easy. Just imagine you’re doing a crunch.”

After a few more core exercises, my wriggling baby boy entered the world. We spent two glorious days in the hospital with doctors and nurses guiding our every move. Babies don’t come with user’s manuals, but bookstore shelves are lined with guides, and websites are loaded with tips for navigating those first years. We got this, my husband and I conveyed through exhausted, new-parent eyes.

Sixteen years later, our eyes are a different kind of tired and the silent glances exchanged are more anxious than adoring. There are few, if any, field guides to parenting the modern sulky teen — something that explains the array of inexplicable mood shifts or identifies the meaning behind a glare or sigh. Toss the world of social media and a pandemic into the mix and not even the so-called parenting experts are experts anymore.

Last spring, we were all feeling pandemic fatigue in our house. Missing the connections that come through sports, my son was sinking into a worrying place. I wanted to toss him a rope, but I wasn’t sure I had anything strong enough. After all, I’d never lived through the experience of being a teen boy, let alone during the time of COVID.

Each morning, I’d tote my youngest male prodigy to preschool, reflecting on the unsettling silence of his older brother during the short drive, wondering what it would take to unlock the happy kid we knew was in there. Ironically, an answer to my prayer lay closer than I knew — almost at the end of our own driveway.

A mountainous mulch pile stood at the foot of our neighbor’s yard. As I passed by the house several days in a row, I noticed the mound wasn’t shrinking. Something American politician and orator Robert Ingersoll had said back in the 1800s — as true today as ever — rang in my head: “We rise by lifting others.”

I texted my neighbor: “Let me send Sawyer down to help you with that mulch. He’s had a ton of experience hauling and spreading it and knows what he’s doing.”

When he arrived home that afternoon, I cheerfully pounced. “I volunteered you to help our neighbors spread mulch!” I exclaimed. He rolled his eyes and began muttering excuses not to go. Finally, he shrugged and agreed, if only because spending time there meant not having to deal with me. Sometimes you take a win any way you can get it.

Two days later, he made his trek down the street, garden gloves in hand. Watching him go, a tightness crept over my chest and I choked up a little, knowing this was what he needed. Call it a mother’s hunch that we sometimes rise by lifting others’ mulch. Plus, it’s a scientific fact that once a mother has a child, she can no longer keep her feelings, opinions or the occasional proud tear inside.

When Sawyer returned home, red-faced and sweaty, he was wearing something I hadn’t seen in some time — the beginnings of a smile and a glimmer of pride in his eye.

I tried to play it cool even though I could barely contain my happiness.

“Well,” I casually inquired, “how did it go?”

If we don’t have plans tomorrow,” he said, “is it OK if I go back to help again?”

I told him that would be just fine with me.

The spark was back.

And so was that proud little tear.  OH

Cassie Bustamante is the digital content manager for O.Henry. Subscribe to her witty roundup of Greensboro events in our weekly newsletter, O.Hey, at oheygreensboro.com.

Botanicus

Pick a Peck of
Peppers

From heat to sweet, there’s something for every palate

By Ross Howell Jr.

Now that the azaleas are blooming, what better way for gardeners to dream of summer’s bounty than by thumbing through seed catalogs or browsing the internet?

I was searching for hot peppers. A friend told me she loved eating ghost pepper jam — though it made her sweat.

I hadn’t thought about eating one. I just liked the name.

You know the internet. Soon, I was reading how the ghost pepper was supplanted as the world’s hottest chili pepper by the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, which was supplanted by the Carolina Reaper, a pepper grown next door in the Palmetto State.

I can’t eat hot peppers. But I like growing them. However, I grew up eating peppers my mother harvested from her garden. Sweet, elegantly green bell peppers.

Turns out I found a kindred spirit.

Julie Hale is the community garden coordinator for Greensboro Parks and Recreation.

“I can’t eat the hot ones, either,” Hale says. “But I like growing them because they’re so beautiful.”

Last summer in Keeley Park Community Garden, she ran a program called One Hot Summer.

“The idea was that we’d teach hot pepper growing and eating,” Hale says. She spent weeks researching the 13 varieties she’d try in the garden demonstration bed. She also developed a field guide for the plants.

The guide includes color pictures, growing times to maturity, what to expect in terms of size and shape, and how hot peppers can be used in food.

“It was important to select varieties that weren’t too hot,” Hale says. “Some people just don’t like much heat or can have a bad reaction.”

In addition to seeing the demonstration bed, participants also could take free plants home to try in their gardens.

“The Jaloro Jalapeño is a variety we shared with folks who signed up for our program,” Hale says. She chose the Jaloro — developed at Texas A&M University — because of its mild flavor. Its yellow color is also unusual.

“Most people think jalapeños are only green in color,” she adds. Since the Jaloro is small, it could be grown in a container if people didn’t have garden space.

Best of all?

“It’s very productive,” Hale says. “We had lots of extra peppers we donated to the food bank.”

Another big producer is the Aji Dulce Spice Pepper, an heirloom originating in Venezuela.

“One of my favorites,” Hale adds. “The plants were covered with peppers all season.” She also recommends the Dulce’s small, thin-walled fruit that offers just a hint of heat. “Great to dry and grind for spice,” she concludes.

Another standout was the Czechoslovakian Black Hot Pepper, which is highly ornamental, with white-streaked, lavender flowers and purple-green leaves.

“With beautiful purple-black fruits, ripening to red,” Hale says, “it was the most commented-on variety in our demonstration.”

Another star pepper was the Mad Hatter, developed from a variety called Bishop’s Crown.

“Featuring spaceship-shaped fruit and minimal heat, this pepper also got a lot of comments,” Hale says. It was voted “very delicious” by official taste-testers at the garden.

Other hot peppers Hale grew were Sally’s Hot, Xochiteco Hot Pepper, Grenada Seasoning Spice Pepper, Carolina Cayenne, Aji Chinchi Amarillo, Baron Poblano, Jasmine Rissie, Hungarian Paprika Spice Pepper and Biquinho Yellow.

And for folks like me, who can’t abide spicy heat, Hale had the Ashe County Pimento. Cultivated in the Appalachian Mountains near Boone, it’s an heirloom sweet pepper with a flattened bell shape.

“Delicious when fully ripe,” she adds.

Hale grew most of the pepper varieties from seed. She recommends Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SouthernExposure.com) in Virginia and Johnny’s Selected Seeds (JohnnySeeds.com) in Maine.

Summer is a day nearer.  OH

Freelance writer Ross Howell Jr. asks that you put this Parks and Recreation program on your garden calendar: “Intro to Backyard Composting,” Thursday, May 12, 6–8 p.m., Keeley Park Community Garden. Call Julie Hale, 336.373.4549.

Life’s Funny

Hanging in the Balance

Notes from land, sea and air

By Maria Johnson

It was one of the all-time best Christmas presents ever: a red plastic folder from my engineer husband, Jeff.

Ah, but this wasn’t just any festive red folder lying under the tree.

The title page said: “Trip to Florida: Swimming with Manatees.”

The following pages, printed from a PowerPoint presentation he’d made (not kidding) explained how we’d get there; where we’d stay; what we’d do.

The main attraction, hanging out with manatees, was something I’d wanted to do ever since two newspaper colleagues gushed about snorkeling with sea cows 30 years ago.

But I had no clue until I started brushing up on manatees — 1,000-pound mammals that resemble a cross between a big seal and a small whale — that they’ve been very much in the news lately.

That’s because there’s a state-backed program in Florida to feed them romaine lettuce. That’s because a record number of manatees died last year. That’s because the sea grasses they eat have been choked out by algae blooms. That’s because of fertilizer runoff, sewage discharges and the like. And that’s because . . . ta-da, humans.

Merry Christmas.

Still, I was in a cheery mood as we boarded our nonstop flight to St. Petersburg. The sun was shining, the plane was on time and no one at the gate had stopped me because my suitcase was possibly — i.e. definitely — over the weight limit.

I smiled the smile of a scofflaw.

We buckled up as one of the attendants pantomimed what to do in case of an emergency. The engines revved. A couple of seats over, a white-knuckled woman squeezed her eyes shut and started her mantra: “Please Jesus, please Jesus, please Jesus.”

I decided it might be a good time to study the survival cartoons tucked into the seat-back pouch in front of me. I’d never done that. And don’t necessarily recommend it.

But just in case you’re interested, here’s the gist:

If an oxygen mask drops down in front of you, yank on it, put it on, then help the expressionless child who, according to the card, will be sitting right next to you.

If you look out the window and see you’re about to crash on land or water, put your head between your legs so the child will not be able to read your lips.

If you happen to land in one piece and leaving the plane on an inflatable slide is an option, do not jump onto the slide as if you’re having a big time inside a bouncy house. Sit down and slide gently. You won’t have to explain this to Zen-child because they’re way calmer than you are. (Who is this kid, anyway?)

And finally, don’t wear high heels as you leave the plane because if you puncture that freakin’ slide, and the people behind you can’t get off, your fashionable ass will be the last one on the life raft.

I’m just reading between the cartoon lines here.

Conclusion #1: Flying in an airplane is like riding in a bubble. A thin film of safety surrounds you.

Conclusion #2: Don’t wear heels. Ever.

I needed to get my mind on something else. I leafed through a magazine I’d brought and landed, naturally, on a story about a filmmaker and entrepreneur who has been experimenting in Arizona with an enclosed Earth-like environment — imagine a big terrarium, with people — because he’s convinced the actual Earth is going to break up with humans by saying something like:

“Listen, it’s not you; it’s me. Nah, I’m lying. It’s you.”

You might remember that someone else tried to create a sort of miniature Earth — with the idea of eventually hurling it into space — in Arizona in the late 1980s. The experiment was called Biosphere 2, and it failed, basically because the oxygen ran out and the knockoff environment was not complex enough to replace it.

The story pointed out that oxygen accounts for about one-fifth of the air we breathe, and once atmospheric oxygen drops below 19.5 percent, human cells start showing signs of distress.

Guess what the oxygen level was in the latest Arizona bubble after four hours?

Seventeen percent.

I closed the magazine. It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something. Other than don’t wear heels.

I got the message again a couple of days later, as we wriggled into wetsuits and snorkels and slipped into the 72-degree water of Kings Bay near Crystal River, Florida, a favorite manatee wintering spot because of the warm springs that feed the river.

Our guide, Rob, a former Marine who’d gotten sick of working under fluorescent lights in a warehouse, swam to a spot and pointed down.

We dipped our masks under the water just in time to see a gentle giant glide by.

Rob waved us to another spot, closer to the edge of the cove, where a manatee and her calf noshed on sea grass. The grass grew only in a narrow band, where the sunlight could reach it.

The manatees slipped away faster than we could follow. Rob had told us not to chase them. We were to disturb them as little as possible. We were in their home, he said.

The wind whipped the palm trees on shore. Our captain, Glenn, who described manatees as “the ultimate hippies,” waved us aboard. We’d try another spot. We might get lucky, he said, because a cool front was moving in, and the manatees, ever sensitive to the Earth’s whispers, would respond by eating more.

He piloted the boat to another cove, where we descended again and peered into a world vivid with darting fish and waving crabs and swaying grasses that gave off tiny bubbles.

Several yards below, on the sandy bottom, a mama manatee and her nursing calf hovered.

We hung there in a loose circle on the surface, rocked by the waves and the rhythmic rasps of our breaths moving through the snorkel tubes. With ears submerged, we could hear the squeaky patter of mom and baby.

The torpedo-shaped calf, all 7 feet of it, detached and rose to the surface, its curvy face passing a few feet in front of mine. Smoky spirals of milk streamed from its thick hound-dog upper lips.

Its eyes were round, calm, trusting.

Its blunt snout breached the surface and took in air.

I floated there, enchanted. We were to touch the manatees only with one hand — and only if they touched us first.

Mom and calf drifted away.

A few minutes later, as we paddled toward Rob, who’d made another sighting, Jeff tapped my shoulder with urgency.

I looked over. A huge manatee was moving right beside us.

Its sandpapery skin brushed Jeff’s hand as it slipped by peacefully.

We smiled around our mouthpieces.

It was their home.

And our honor.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Art of the State

Wild & Whimsical

Anne Lemanski’s fanciful patterned creatures

By Liza Roberts

If you’ve seen any of Anne Lemanski’s cosmic, colorful animal sculptures in person, you know they look as if they might twitch, or pounce, or slink on by. The skins that cover them — psychedelic prints and unexpected patterns — somehow add to this unlikely effect. Perhaps her multicolored tiger, or her ocelot, or her amazing rabbit, has emerged through a looking-glass portal from some magical realm and wound up in our own?

You’re not far off.

Lemanski’s Spruce Pine studio is, in fact, an otherworldly laboratory of creation where she doesn’t just make an animal, she learns it inside out. She studies its physicality and psychology, figures out how its haunches tense when it sits back, how they loosen in a run, how its brow might scowl at distant prey. Then she replicates all of that with copper rods she bends, cuts and welds into a three-dimensional sculpture, an armature. In an upstairs made of shipping containers, another act of creation happens, guided not by realism but by intuition. Here, she will create a skin for that armature, make it out of digital photographs or prints or collage or all three, and print it on paper. She will draw and cut a pattern as if she were making a dress or a suit and sew it all on, piece by piece, with artificial sinew. Her tools — wire cutters and an X-Acto knife — are the same, simple ones she has used for 30 years. She has no assistants.

On a warm and wet spring weekend, Lemanski is learning mink. Her giant mastiff, Dill, sits nearby. Photographs of minks in every position and resolution surround her, filling a wall and every tab on her computer. She’s learning about what minks eat, how they’re bred for coats, about the recent killing of 17 million COVID-infected mink in Denmark. “Millions! I’m not exaggerating. I was horrified,” she says, shivering. The armatures for a few minks in different positions are underway; one is complete. She holds it in her hands. “Once the armature is done, that’s the most important part of capturing the animal,” she says. “I ripped this one apart like three times. And finally, one day, it just clicked.”

With the armature complete, Lemanski moves on to the mink’s skin, leaning into the collages that form a significant counterpart to her sculpture. Comprised of illustrated images from the pages of pre-1970s textbooks, comic books, picture books and children’s encyclopedias, Lemanski uses her X-Acto knife to combine, say, giant squid with convertible cars, pigeons with mermaids, skeletons with alphabet blocks, chewing gum with polar bears. There are butcher’s maps for cuts of meat and colored-dot tests for colorblindness, and constellations and cockatoos — a century’s worth of illustrations shaken and stirred into a cocktail of nature and man, science and myth, technology, geometry, and things that are cool. A series made during COVID, Metaphysical Mineral, explores the properties of a series of eight different minerals. Quartz includes a high diver in a ’50s-era swimsuit, a white stallion and a swarm of bees. Sulphur gets a winding snake, a stick of dynamite and a cigarette.

These individual component images are one of a kind and cannot be replicated; to do so would be to lose the unmistakable texture and character of the Ben-Day dots used in printing from the 1950s to the 1970s (made particularly recognizable by the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein). “I’ve tried [copying them], and it just doesn’t work,” she says. So when she uses these images in a collage, Lemanski tacks them down lightly with a little loop of tape so she can take them off and use them again. This technique also adds to the three-dimensional look of the collages once they’re printed.

She credits a residency at Charlotte’s McColl Center with launching this kind of work. Inspired by the possibilities of the center’s large-format digital printer, she made 12 small collages and printed them in huge dimensions. These prints ended up forming the basis of a solo exhibition at the center that also included sculpture, in this instance a “three-dimensional collage” that incorporated some of the printed collage animals themselves. A 4-inch image of an impala in one print, for instance, became a life-sized impala sculpture in the center of the room that she “skinned,” in a meta twist, in digital prints of the tiny image’s own fur. “That was a challenging piece to make,” she says.

So was the Tigris T-1, a freestanding, life-size sculpture of a tiger balancing on a ball, that was acquired by noted collector Fleur Bresler for donation to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., a career-catapulting moment Lemanski is still pinching herself about. Her work is also in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Asheville Art Museum and in many private collections. It’s even found its way into wallpaper as part of a fanciful line of sly, butterfly-and-bird-bedecked prints made in Schumacher’s Peg Norris collection, a collaboration between Charlotte gallerist Chandra Johnson and interior designer Barrie Benson.

What’s next is what excites Lemanski most. Lately, she’s been working on an animal that’s captured her imagination for a while: a horse — a life-sized Appaloosa. “Who doesn’t love a horse?” she asks, as she works out the intricacies. “The hooves and ankles of a horse are extremely complex; they’re bulbous, they’re angular, and that’s where all the business happens.” Also in the hopper: her first piece of public, outdoor art — another large animal — to be cast in aluminum. It could mark the beginning of a whole new oeuvre.

“I really am looking forward to the work I’m going to make in the future,” Lemanski says. “I think it’s going to be on a large scale, and I just want to keep pushing the work forward… It’s the unknown of the future that keeps me going.”  OH

This is an excerpt from Liza Roberts’ forthcoming book Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, to be published by UNC Press this fall.

Wandering Billy

The Prez of Jazz Night

Getting into the groove
on Sunday evenings

By Billy Eye

It’s too exciting for words … so they had to set it to music!
— movie trailer for Blues in the Night (1941)

I’ve been carping for a decade that this town needs a groovy, early-evening Sunday hangout. Jazz Night at Cafe Europa fits the bill perfectly, especially now that the weather is turning milder and the patio is open. (Let’s hope. I’m writing this in February.) This swinging soiree from 6–9 p.m. is presided over by Prez, spinmeister supreme who also hosts a Wednesday night jam at Flat Iron, broadcast live over WUAG.

As someone who frequented the 1980s and early ’90s Los Angeles underground dance clubs, mid-’90s’ Club Babylon raves here, and, in the early 2000s, footloosing in massive discotheques across London’s underbelly, I’ve had the privilege of grinding behind grooves laid down by the top DJs in the world. <name drop> Keoki, Paul van Dyk, Sasha & John Digweed, plus PeteTong, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold.

Having been present for a number of Prez’s performances in a dimly lit Greensboro nightclub over the last year or so, I’d rank him with the best on that list, possessing a prodigious talent for transforming the most quotidian room into bouncy blissfulness, drawing on an all-too-rare musical intelligence unleashing a barrage of mind-blowing beats veering wildly but seamlessly from one genre to the next.

“I could be at a bar, for example, and everybody’s got their back to me,” Prez tells me. “But something they hear they register with, either their head nods, their foot taps, fingers clicking, and you know that, ‘Oh, wow. They recognize what they’re listening to.’”

For Sunday Jazz at Cafe Europa, Prez spins a mellower tone, with a softer but no less sharpened edge. It is anchored in part by modern jazz-inspired pioneers like DJ Can and Amerigo Gazaway, echoing with the vocals of Aretha Franklin, The Chi-lites, Nina Simone and other seminal 20th-century soul sensations. Who is this guy?

“My parents were into music and they’re from the South,” Prez says. “So, there were cross-cultural dynamics for me, like them growing up in a Southern culture, then my father joining the military, traveling around the world while raising kids along the way. Then I came to UNCG as a freshman, where I honed my skills.”

Residing in various countries, like Germany and Thailand, as a child before settling in Massachusetts had to have influenced his musical preferences. “I think it gave me a taste of what the culture of a certain environment sounded like,” Prez says. “Finding different dynamics in soul music but with kind of an African flavor or a Polynesian flavor or Latin rhythms.”

This DJ paints with a broader brush than one would expect, which makes sense because jazz underpins so many contrasting styles. “You get a different flavor that’s not just classical jazz,” Prez says about his style. “It’s not just big band; you get a little hip-hop flavor, some soul, house, electronic and funk music that stems from jazz.”

Cafe Europa attracts an eclectic clientele on a regular basis, that’s part of the appeal of the place. “We started Jazz Night back in May 2021,” Prez says. Just took a chance. My man [bartender] Jonny Alright and [owner] Jacob Pucilowski over at Europa said, ‘Hey, let’s do something kind of cool, something different.’” When Jazz Night first got underway it was just the lone DJ flying solo alongside crates of his albums. “It was not what the crowd expected jazz to be,” Prez recalls. “That’s why we kept doing it and why we’re still doing it now.”

Warding off any remaining chill in the air with more chill on the patio at Europa, surrounded by our downtown parks? For a serene Sunday twilight, nothing could be finer in Carolina when you consider this is a casual bistro offering affordable cocktails and slightly Southern comfort cuisine. Its French dip sandwich, steak & frites, and the cafe burger come highly recommended. I’ve never ordered anything that didn’t satisfy.

“Of course, you go with the classics,” Prez explains about his choice of needle drops. “Coltrane, Miles, Max Roach, Dizzy, then venturing into Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper, Ali Shaheed Muhammad.” As word spread and the audience expanded, people started bringing their own records. “I was like, ‘Cool.’ Then people started turning up with turntables, keyboards, a guitar now and then, and it became a kind of a jazz jam formulated around the records.”

Kinda reminds me of a smoky little joint (back when smoky was okie) called Sammy’s in the Plaza Shopping Center where, a few decades ago, a combo on Friday nights drew legions of jazz enthusiasts.

Moving a crowd with your rhythmic repertoire begins with an understanding of the basics. “I tell people,” Prez says, “if they want to collect records, if they want to become a successful DJ, you listen first. You don’t go out and buy gear or buy records; it’s about listening and then you can curate. Then you can turn that into a three-hour mix where people are entertained.”

In an atmosphere infused with melodic precision, a totality of tonality presented in a way that Greensboro hasn’t heard or seen before, somehow every week Prez manages to discover another fresh take on what jazz can be, constantly experimenting with syncopated juxtapositions.

Arrive alone or with a coterie, and should winter’s icy fingers linger the proceedings will be relocated indoors.

Wheels of steel are largely digital now, but they still spin. Prez has been honing his craft for two decades. “I don’t really know what keeps me going, to be real. I think it’s the joy that I see on younger people’s faces that are new to this, are fresh into music. Seeing their energy, feeding off of their energy. How do you capture that moment?” Prez asks, knowing full well the answer. “That’s what being a DJ is.”  OH

Next month marks exactly six years since Billy Eye started writing “Wandering Billy,” which is why the schools and liquor stores will be closed during April to honor that landmark occasion.

Tea Leaf Astrologer

Pisces
(February 19 – March 20)

The only difference between a mythical creature and a Pisces is that a mythical creature believes in itself. Pisceans are magical by nature and naturally psychic. That’s because those born under this mutable water sign are masters of subtle emotion. This month, the cosmos is dealing you a planetary royal flush. In other words, you don’t have to keep swimming upstream. But will you?

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Don’t forget to stretch.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

There’s a whole world outside of the box. Think about it.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Less talking. More dancing.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Slow down. Proceed with caution. Be prepared to pivot.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

You’re back in the spotlight. Breathe easy.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

A little salt goes a long way.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Someone’s got color in their cheeks again.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Try zooming out.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

When one door closes, best not to set up camp on the front porch.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Three words: Don’t look back.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Timing is everything. Read that again.   OH

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla. 

The Creators of N.C.

The Lost Treasure of Home

Jonas Pate and
his runaway hit
Outer Banks

By Wiley Cash 

While there is plenty of mystery in the breakout Netflix smash hit Outer Banks — everything from a father lost at sea to a legendary treasure — the mystery that director and co-creator Jonas Pate seems most intent on exploring is the age-old mystery of what divides people along class lines. It worked for Shakespeare with his Montagues and Capulets, and 370 or so years later it worked again for Bernstein’s and Sondheim’s Jets and Sharks. Pate’s rival groups are similarly aged, sun-kissed teenagers living and partying along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where a group of working class kids known as the “Pogues” continually find themselves marginalized and dismissed by the “Kooks,” who are the children of wealthy residents and seasonal tourists. Fists and hearts certainly fly, but despite the show’s use of cliffhangers and action-packed sequences, at its core Outer Banks investigates the emotional and experiential threads that pull some of us together across class lines while invisible barriers push others of us apart.

According to Pate, the divide between the haves and the have nots is “the oldest story in the world. It cuts across everything,” which he believes explains the show’s broad appeal.

Broad indeed. In the late spring of 2020, just as the people of the world were settling into the pandemic and the realization that they did not want to see or hear another word about Tiger King and Joe Exotic, Outer Banks debuted in mid-April and quickly became one of Netflix’s most watched shows of the year. The following summer, the show’s second season hit No. 1 on the Nielsen report. The success seemed immediate, and the show’s slick production quality made it all appear as easy and relaxed as a day on the water, but Jonas Pate and his twin brother, Josh, with whom he created Outer Banks along with Shannon Burke, had spent their whole lives preparing for this moment.

The Pate brothers grew up in Raeford, North Carolina, where their father served as a judge and their grandfather owned a local pharmacy. “It was amazing,” Jonas says. “It was like Mayberry. I’d ride my bike to the pharmacy and get a Cherry Coke and a slaw dog, and then I’d visit my dad at the courthouse. My stepmom was head of parks and recreation, so I’d go over there and help ref T-ball games.”

We are sitting on the second-story porch of the home he shares with his wife, Jennifer, and their two teenage children in Wilmington, just across the water from Wrightsville Beach. The January morning is unseasonably warm and sunny, and Jonas is dressed as if he just stepped off the set of Outer Banks, not as its director but as one of its stars. (How handsome is Jonas Pate? A few days later, our 5-year-old daughter will walk past Mallory’s computer while she is editing photos of Jonas. She will stop in her tracks and ask, “Who is that?”)

Jonas’ surfer appeal is not surprising considering that while he primarily grew up in Raeford and attended high school there, he spent his summers with his mother along the barrier islands near Charleston. “Outer Banks is an amalgam of different high school environments and things that we went through,” he says. “It helped create the mythical environment of Outer Banks where we kind of knew what it was like to live feral in a small town with haves and have-nots. Kiawah and James Island were like that. It was poor kids and rich kids, and they would get into fights. And Raeford is still very rural.”

Rural, yes, but Jonas and Josh still found plenty to keep them busy. If they were not exploring the marshes and waterways off the coast of Charleston, then they were shooting homemade movies back in Raeford, where they made films of Robin Hood and Hercules and edited them by using two VHS machines. He laughs at the memory of it. “The cuts were terrible and fuzzy,” he says, “and all the special effects and sound were awful.” But he admits that something felt and still feels magical about it. He had always loved film, especially those by Steven Spielberg and Frank Capra, saying that he has “always been drawn to filmmakers who are a little sweeter and have a little more heart.”

After college, the brothers found that they still had the desire to make films, but they did not know how to break into the industry. “We didn’t know anyone in the film business,” he says. “We didn’t know anything.”

The brothers moved to New York and worked to immerse themselves in the city’s film culture. While interning at the Angelika Film Center, Josh met Peter Glatzer, who was a fundraiser for the Independent Feature Project. They talked about screenwriting, and the Pate brothers soon had a script that Glatzer was interested in producing. Their first film, The Grave, was shot in eastern North Carolina, and while it did not receive a theatrical release and went straight to video after premiering on HBO, the Pate brothers had their collective foot in the door. In 1997, they made another North Carolina-shot film with Glatzer, The Deceiver, that starred Tim Roth and Renée Zellweger, and it found a larger audience after debuting at the Venice Film Festival and being distributed by MGM. The brothers headed for Los Angeles.

Once there, Jonas found himself “taking jobs just to pay the bills” and “getting further and further away from what I actually wanted to do.” One bright spot of his time in LA was meeting his wife, Jennifer, who also worked in the industry as a casting agent. Not long after they met, Jennifer started her own agency, and Jonas went to her for assistance in casting his first television show, Good vs. Evil, in 1999. From there he went on to direct and produce a number of television shows, including the NBC shows Deception and Prime Suspect and ABC’s Blood and Oil. In 2005, the Pate brothers partnered again and returned to North Carolina, where they filmed a single season of the television show Surface, which they co-created. After having kids, Jonas and Jennifer decided to move back to North Carolina in time for their son and daughter to attend high school. Jonas suddenly found himself on the other side of the country from the industry he had devoted his life to for the past 20 years.

But then something magical happened. Jonas understood two things: First, he needed to create something that could be shot on the coast so he could stay close to home. Second, he would draw from his own experiences to make it real. “When I pulled from my own life instead of the movies I’d seen, it all came together,” he says. “You get to the universal by being super specific.”

One big challenge that Jonas and his team encountered was casting the show’s young stars. “We auditioned maybe 500 or 600 kids, and we really had to try to find kids who’d been outside and lived in the outdoors.” Not surprisingly, given the Pate brothers’ personal ties to the show’s geography, nearly every star they cast was from the South, except for one who hailed from Alaska. “Growing up outside, being around boats,” Jonas says, “it’s hard to fake that stuff, and it’s hard to make it look real if it’s not.”

I turn off the recorder and Mallory packs up her photography gear, and we say our goodbyes to Jonas. He is leaving soon for another production set. We share a number of mutual friends in Wilmington with him and Jennifer, and we talk about getting together for dinner once he returns.

Mallory and I are alone in the driveway when I realize that I have locked the keys in our car. To say that I was embarrassed — and, let’s be honest, panicked — would be an understatement. Mallory pulled out her phone and began searching for a locksmith. I have a flip phone, so I just stood there, weighing the two most logical options: breaking the window with one of Jonas’ landscaping rocks or just leaving the car and walking home, denying it was ever ours.

I cannot help thinking that if I were John B., the star of Outer Banks and leader of the Pogues, played by Chase Stokes, I would sneak into a neighbor’s garage and hotwire their car, drive home, procure a backup set of keys, and return for Mallory while passing under the investigating deputy’s nose. Or, if I were Topper, the leader of the Kooks, played by Austin North, I would bang on Jonas’ door and use his phone to call my father’s car service. But I am neither of these characters. I’m just me, so I apologize again to Mallory, and we wait for the locksmith together.  OH

Wiley Cash is the Alumni Author-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, is available wherever books are sold.