This weekend I drove to Asheville for the college graduation of Thomas, one of Henry Stern's sons, on Saturday May 18. 

I arrived very late Thursday afternoon to sunny and cool weather, after having driven through that same kind of weather all the way down.

Henry took me out to the J&S Cafeteria, a Southern style cafeteria for supper and then we drove to Brevard, about 20 miles outside Asheville, to scout the location for a restaurant and an event he was taking a group of people to the next day. Brevard is a very small town with a medium sized college that is famous for its music program and for an annual summer musical festival. It's a beautiful campus with a stream running through it and buildings that are modern but traditional in style and high in quality. It's a pleasant surprise from what you see on so many campuses nowadays. We had tea at the "Essence Of Thyme Coffee Caffe".

Friday morning there was breakfast at the Atlanta Bakery Co. with Ernesto, Andrew and Andrew's fiancée, Laura. In the late morning Henry drove me around the various neighborhoods of north Asheville, looking at houses. 

The first graduation ceremony  was around 4PM Friday. It was held outdoors on the Warren Wilson campus on the outskirts of Asheville in a wooden pavilion surrounded by greenery nearby and mountains in the middle distance. We were the second group to arrive; Krysztina was there already helping the staff set up refreshments. This was not the graduation itself  but the departmental recognition / farewell ceremony for about 25 students, giving a little descriptive talk on each of the students. 

Warren Wilson is a somewhat unusual college. It has a "triad" system: 1/3 normal academics; 1/3 trade or cooperative work; 1/3 social work. The pavilion we were in, for example, had been put together by the students who also raise the vegetables, make / fix furniture, milk the cows, and - until recently - slaughtered the cows. But this "trade" part of the triad also involves the operations and planning. One of the students was noted for having organized the funding and setup of the school's black smith shop. Thomas, I think, had his academic third in education and psychology, his co-operative or trade third in mountaineering, carpentry and search and rescue and his social third in working with troubled youth and autistic children. Thomas and his friend Laura joined us after the ceremony.

Henry was taking a group out to Brevard College for a graduation show and meal.  On the ride out I was in the car with Stephen, another of Henry's sons who is also my godson and whose birthday - approximately - it was.  I keep getting his birthday mixed up, since my mother kept pointing out that his birthday and her birthday were on the same day. Actually it was his Christening which was on her birthday and for which we had visited Asheville  - with the unfortunate mugging incident. Stephen's decided on going to college at the University of North Carolina [I think biology or biology and chemistry] rather than at the University of Virginia which had offered him a substantial amount of financial support. 

We ate in downtown Brevard, about 20 miles south of Asheville, which for a town of 8,000 to 10,000 has a large and commercially active downtown section with at least 4 non-chain restaurants; we ate at The Corner Bistro - I think.  Unfortunately, Thomas and his friend Laura had obligations connected with his graduation that evening, so we were Henry, Stephen, Andrew and his fiancée, Laura, and Ernesto, a family friend of the Sterns and Spanish instructor at the university who is about to return to Colombia.  The restaurant was open in feeling and with an open door that worked since it was so pleasantly cool. I and several of the others had mushroom quiche, while others had  a brushetta [sp ??] pasta dish.

We had about a half hour before the start of the show and walked around the campus with the babbling brook at our feet and the mountains all around.

The show was a cabaret performance of songs of the WWII period by Andrea Marcovicci who usually appears at the Plush Room in San Francisco or at the Algonquin in New York; so it was surprising to have her perform here in the country. 

The Porter Center is a beautiful theater both inside and out, contemporary but classically inspired on the outside, rather simple but warm on the inside. There's a shallow balcony in the back and a very shallow side gallery on each  side. I'd guess there are around 600-700 seats. 

Marcovicci performed the show straight through with no intermission, which I heartily approve of.  I have three or four CDs by her and enjoy how she sings the songs. But I get messages from a Yahoo group called Songbirds devoted to cabaret singers. There are a few performers, the mention of whose name starts a flurry of attack letters. One of those singers is Marcovicci. The two "charges" against her are [1]  she's married to a rich man who subsidizes her so she hasn't suffered or paid her dues; therefore, she's not a true artist; [2] she consistently sings off pitch.  I don't know any details of her personal life [although she was throwing kisses to and speaking to someone in  the side gallery] and I don't think you have to suffer to be a good performer. On the CDs I've never heard the off-pitchness nor did I hear it at the show. But maybe I'm not as musically sensitive as the Songbirders are.

The numbers were chosen not so much for their musical or textual quality but for their emotional and nostalgic pull for people who had lived through World War II. [The audience, basically sold out, was overwhelmingly old, even older than I.] There was no printed program of numbers but one was The White Cliffs of Dover and another was As Time Goes By. She introduced that one by making fun of the composer whose only other song, she claimed, was When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on his Tuba Down in Cuba  --- of course she really meant Mein Onkel Bumba aus Kalumba tanzt nur Rumba which was one of the world-wide mega-hits of the Comedian Harmonists in the 1920s. [I might bring this up with Songbirds.]

Every day, driving down, driving up, in Asheville was perfect: temperature in the 50s and 60s, sunny, dry, light breeze  -- except the 3 hours of the graduation. Saturday morning was  cool but not cold, maybe 60 degrees; it was also, however,  damp and humid. This ceremony was also held outside: in a meadow, again surrounded by the mountains in the middle distance. 

The procession was led by a bag piper and wound its way in a large arc from the edge of the meadow in an S curve through the crowd. I was surprised when i saw Thomas' friend Laura moving at the head of the graduating procession, because she had said the day before that she wasn't graduating until next year. I learned later that she was the main "mistress of ceremonies". organizing the graduates into what and when they should do during the ceremony.  

I did have a down vest in my car back at the motel but had thought it would be inappropriate to wear it at a graduation so I hadn't brought it. I should have realized from the ceremony on Friday that Warren Wilson is an unusually informal school. After a while I was making frequent trips to the lobby of a dormitory near the ceremony to warm up, joining many others doing the same including two of Thomas' grandparents.  Others, like Laura, Andrew, Stephen and Krysztina to the right used blankets to keep warm.

There were about 100-120 students individually announced and this is a fragment of the list; Thomas is highlighted in yellow. [In case you're wondering why there's also  a list of Masters recipients in the image below: Besides the undergraduate "triad" school, Warren  Wilson also has a very famed creative writing program; there was, in fact, a note made that two of the participants of that program have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes this year. ] The full program of the ceremony is here and also here.

Henry planned to take the group, now including Andrea and Lee Rushlow, to lunch  at a restaurant in downtown Asheville called Souper Sandwich. When we got there, we found it closed for Saturday; but it's located in an indoor atrium of the Hayward Park Hotel, which had been THE hotel during Asheville's real estate bubble days.  The hotel's lobby has been expanded into an atrium containing several stores and restaurants and we decided upon The Bier Garden.

I had  chicken soup, tea and a Pilsener Urquell; the others had things like blackened salmon and blackened chicken, and various vegetarian dinners. 

Andrew had told me both directly and indirectly in the past about his strong feelings for Asheville; by chance and on a different topic, Stephen had mentioned this same feeling the night before; and now talking to Thomas, who's going in a few weeks to meet Laura in Thailand and then on to Nice, he noted that likes to go away but really enjoys returning to the greenery and outdoors-ness of Asheville.

For supper Stephen, who was working at his restaurant Asheville Pizza Company, made me a calzone that I ate at Henry's house. While waiting, I noticed that Stephen's restaurant, definitely NOT an elegant or chic place, was selling the same Belgian ale that had been on the menu at The Biergarten downtown for $8 a bottle; Stephen's restaurant, however, was selling that same ale for either $7 or $8 for a 4 ounce wine glass. [In general, restaurant prices in Asheville are the same, sometimes they seem even slightly higher, than parallel restaurants in the Washington area. I'm sure there are far fewer super expensive restaurants in Asheville than here, but the middle-priced restaurants seem to offer little or no price advantage over those in this area. Also on the drive back I stopped at a chain restaurant that Andrew and Henry had recommended, Cracker Barrel. For what you got it was not inexpensive; there even are several local Old Town restaurants have equal or better quality at a lower price.]

I was staying at the Wingate Inn, even though the location is out of the way from the section of Asheville that I usually go to, only because it had an office center where you could go on the internet to check e-mail.  Unfortunately this weekend the internet connection was on and off, mostly off wherever I was back at the hotel.  So if some of you haven't gotten answers to any e-mail you sent, I'm slowly working on it now.

Asheville lies at a high elevation, about 2,300  in the downtown section and going up to 3,000 or 3,500 feet in the outlying parts of the city. But the city is still lower than the 7,000 foot mountains around it, lying in a depression surrounded by high mountains. So unless you make a crazy and long detour through the Piedmont and South Carolina to enter the city from the south,  you enter the city  over higher elevations that you drive up and then down over, steep on the east entrance from North Carolina and steeper [but compressed and shorter] on the north entrance from Tennessee, the route I usually take. 

It seems that any time I've driven into or out of the city there's  been - depending on the season - fog, mist, ice, black ice, high winds, and/or rain, especially bad in the morning, when you're usually beginning a trip out. This time I was very lucky: there was nothing in either direction except fog that was patchy and on the Tennessee side when you're going downhill. In fact I was getting worried about the car at that point. Although I had been driving for over an hour, I noticed that my temperature gauge showed "cool" and was getting colder, actually dropping as I kept glancing at it. I then realized it was around 40 degrees outside and I was going down the Tennessee side in overdrive, basically coasting for 7 or eight miles down hill. So the engine was basically in Leerlauf, not working and just cooling off to cold.

Except crossing the mountains from Tennessee to North Carolina [which has several runaway truck ramps  leading up the sides of mountains] and crossing the Appalachians west of Washington into the Valley, the route is theoretically level. I-81, at least the 300 miles which make up the middle of the route to Asheville, is probably the most attractive interstate highway in the East and Midwest, with mountain and country views all the way down. The only elevation difficulty is near Christiansburg where you cross a serious of mountain ridges going, I think, from the Shenandoah Valley to the New River Valley. Although there are steepish elevations on the rest of the I-81 route, it's only tractor trailers unable to get up the grades and blocking the road that make you aware of them.

For several reasons I had decided not to sight see or  stop at places on this trip  but just to drive straight down and back. [A non-advanced purchase airplane ticket was over $800.] It was about 1,045 miles round trip, 36 miles per gallon,  with gas starting at $1.48 in Alexandria, $1.20 in the Shenandoah Valley and $1.34 in Asheville.

Driving up and down the Virginia Valley I usually like listening to local AM stations to hear the local accents which I find pleasant. The broadcasts are usually dull swap programs and funeral notices but the accents are interesting to hear. This time it was bland American English on syndicated talk shows and financial news programs. When you're actually "among the folk" it is surprising, even in a case like urban Asheville, to hear local dialects spoken so long after television and radio have penetrated the entire country. There is, however, an obvious class divide in who uses standard and who uses Southern English.

[Since John and Dorthe may not be totally familiar with American customs, below is an explanation of graduation regalia from the Warren Wilson program.]

Manhattan January 2002	Exchange Place June 2003	Asheville House Sep 2002	Manhattan April 2003	Graduation Birthday May 2003	Hoboken October 2003	Operetta and Amish 2005	Jersey City / Manhattan  September 2004	Operetta 2006	Hoboken and Harrison Fall 2005	Operetta and Amish 2006
Manhattan December 2001	Manhattan March 2002	Manhattan April 2002	Andrew/Laura Wedding Oct 2002	Wedding Pictures Oct 2002	Ashland King's Dominion	Cumberland and Western Maryland RR 2005	Jersey City and Three Broadway Revivals April 2004	Exchange Place June 2003	Jersey City and Manhattan Trolley Tour  November 2004	Hoboken and Harrison Fall 2005	Comments? Corrections? Broken Links?

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