FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010
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Chalking happiness up to one woman
by Kris Coronado
chesterfield, va. — It all started
with a soggy tumble 41
⁄2
years ago. While
preparing for a family rowboat ride, Pen- ny Proudfoot lost her footing and fell into a pond face-first. The 42-year-old chuck- les at the memory: “Don’t wear clogs around a pond!” Such a spill wouldn’t normally be that significant, but there was one unfortunate casualty: her Canon Rebel. The pricey camera, a gift from her late father, was drenched. Without the means to buy a new one
right away, the photography hobbyist be- gan to feel artistically stifled. She was still searching for a mode of creative ex- pression when she looked out a window into her front yard in August. That’s when she saw it: The chalkboard her three children used to advertise the sale of their homegrown spinach, cabbage and blueberries along busy Winterpock Road. Vegetable-selling season was winding down. But instead of putting the board away, Proudfoot decided to write a chalky message of her own: “Did you make a dif- ference today?” “I wanted to make people think,” she
said. “You wake up in the morning, and all you do is read the newspaper, and there’s nothing really good. I just wanted people to drive by and say, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s for me today.’ ” Soon Proudfoot was writing uplifting or humorous one-liners every other day. It became as routine as feeding the 11 chickens that produce the family’s eggs. The stay-at-home mom would throw on a baseball cap before sundown, walk out to the sign and write a message as quickly as possible to avoid being noticed. “Enjoy what you already have.” “Don’t
eat the yellow snow.” “Impossible is only in the dictionary.” She estimates she has written more than 200 phrases. They didn’t go unnoticed. Proudfoot’s home is on one of the busier two-lane roads in Chesterfield County, heavily fre- quented by drivers commuting from their homes along winding country roads to Winterpock’s intersection with the six- lane, traffic-light thoroughfare of Hull Street Road. It wasn’t long before those reading the board started writing back. Sitting at her kitchen table, Proudfoot leafs through the cards and notes she has received from strangers since that Au- gust day. “This is what keeps me going,” she says. “Once this started happening, that’s when I knew I wasn’t the biggest dork in the world.” There are Christmas cards and valen-
tines as well as notes. “Dear Ms. Motivator, Thank you for the daily message. I drive by every day and really enjoy your board. It makes me
CHALKBOARD WISDOM
You’re not Fading- Just Changing
*
CHALK - It Does A Body Good
THINK... What Defines You
We All Fall Down-- Get Back Up- YOU CAN DO IT !!!!!!!
Judge FIRST YOURSELF Before ANYONE Else
PHOTOS BY KRIS CORONADO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
laugh or think and appreciate the small pleasures in life. I don’t know if anyone else has written, but wanted you to know how much impact you are having.” It didn’t stop there. Chalkboard follow-
ers started leaving boxes of chalk in the mailbox. Avid reader Debbie Rosenbaum stopped by with cinnamon rolls unan- nounced on Easter morning. “It did take a little courage, but she was very sweet,” recalls the 52-year-old Rosenbaum, who often passes the sign on the way to church with her family. “She actually teared up and said, ‘Gosh, no one’s ever done anything like this for me before.’ It was very touching. I’m glad I stopped.” The chalkboard inspired emergency room crisis counselor Linda Hodges Sthreshley, 63, to start a smaller-scale version, writing on note cards, then a miniature chalkboard, at her desk at Chippenham Hospital. “People tell me they enjoy looking at it,” she says. With a real-world following, it wasn’t
long before the virtual world caught up. There’s a “Fans of the Chalkboard on Winterpock Road” page on Facebook with 815 members as of Thursday. “Amongst my friends, we had started talking on Facebook about the fact that this is their Facebook page unplugged,”
Proudfoot administers the page with
Hessler-Allen, posting her messages on- line after she has written them outside, and she cheerfully responds to com- ments from readers. It has become a ha- ven for the bashful Proudfoot to connect with those she has touched. Even with her presence on Facebook,
Proudfoot remains a mystery to her ad- mirers. “I don’t know if I’ve seen her,” says Ad-
MOTIVATOR: Penny Proudfoot, top, gets thank-yous for the uplifting one- liners she writes on her roadside board.
says Heidi Hessler-Allen, 43, who created the page in March. “I said, ‘Well, I’m go- ing to plug it in.’ ” She began writing Proudfoot’s quotes online, then stopped by Proudfoot’s home with her teenage daughter, Tori, to drop off chalk and a printout of the fan page to let Proudfoot know it existed. “That way if she wasn’t comfortable with it, she could contact me and say, ‘Hey, take this down. This is freakin’ me out,’ ” says Hessler-Allen. “I didn’t think it would get so big so fast.”
am Bracey, 42. “I’ve seen someone walk- ing out to the board. I thought maybe that’s who’s writing on the board. She was just kind of skipping out there one day.” As for the board’s future, Proudfoot
says she’ll continue to write her thoughts as they come. She hopes to keep her fel- low “Winterpockers” smiling. She’s made a believer out of the admit-
tedly cynical Bracey. “Penny is saying things to people she
doesn’t know that a lot of people don’t get to hear anywhere else,” says the retired police officer. “She’s doing what every- body should do: Be nice and encourage other people.”
style@washpost.com
Coronado is a freelance writer.
Be The LIGHT that SHINES on A SHADOW....
A little bit given--is MORE Gained
I May Not get Ahead-- But I will Always Have
Enough!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
An Honest Mind Is Full Of Beauty
Triumph is Courage Over Fear
MUSIC REVIEW
Philadelphians take a stroll through Russia
by Robert Battey
The still-fabulous Philadelphians made their first appearance at the Music Center at Strathmore on Wednesday night in a conservative, all-Russian pro- gram. The Philadelphia Orchestra is try- ing to move forward after years of un- certainty; on top of financial woes com- mon to everyone else, it is still looking for a music director since the un- planned-for early departure of Chris- toph Eschenbach a few years ago. And its CEO and board chairman have been in their jobs less than a year, before which both positions went unfilled for some time.
But the musical product is still daz-
zling. Charles Dutoit, the orchestra’s chief conductor, is handling his caretak- er role with grace and dignity and, more important, is maintaining the orches- tra’s vaunted precision and virtuosity. The lush, string-centric sound that Sto- kowski and Ormandy cultivated in Philadelphia for decades has been re-
WNO president set to serve another term
Washington National Opera presi-
dent Kenneth R. Feinberg has been ap- pointed to serve a third two-year term, the company’s board announced Thurs- day.
Since Mark Weinstein was effectively removed as executive director last year, the opera has been in the same position of lacking an in-house administrative head that it faced before Weinstein ar- rived. As a board member, Feinberg can’t quite fill the gap, but he does bring considerable knowledge of both financ- es and diplomacy to the table. (Before acting as the special master of executive compensation for TARP, a.k.a. the “pay czar,” he served in the same function with the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.) Both skills are needed at a com- pany whose last couple of seasons have seen considerable financial belt-tighten- ing, and ever fewer performances. Fein- berg also genuinely, and passionately, loves opera — he’s even been teaching an opera course at the Levine School this year.
—Anne Midgette
placed by a leaner, more protean sonor- ity. This is industry-wide — with the much greater diversity in personnel than they had a couple of generations ago, the top American orchestras are now more musically agile, but also sound more alike. As a senior statesman of the podium (but who was passed over for the orches- tra’s music directorship), Dutoit has nothing left to prove and doesn’t try to stretch the orchestra or its audiences, ei- ther in this or in previous Washington appearances. Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lud- milla” Overture, a hackneyed staple of youth orchestras everywhere, is not what a world-class ensemble should be taking on tour, no matter how good it makes it sound. The rest of the program, though, was
worth the price of admission. Pianist Ni- kolai Lugansky delivered an astonishing Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3. He nei- ther fought against nor tried to tame this fearsome beast; rather he rode it, showed it off and let it roar. There was never any banging; his fingers were steel
mallets or gossamer butterflies, as need- ed, and he clearly knew, phrase by phrase, whether he was playing solo or chamber music. Although Lugansky ar- rived too soon at the climax of the big first-movement cadenza and had no- where to go for a while, this was still a superb overall rendition of this war- horse. Some of these players had sat with players who sat with those who re- corded the concerto with Rachmaninoff himself, and the warm broth they pro- vided was positively ambrosial. Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” is right in the orchestra’s sweet spot as well, depend- ing, as it does, on high-wire solo playing. Each of the principals delivered gleam- ing perfection, while the simultaneous meters in the first and third tableaux were as child’s play to the ensemble. Du- toit presided with relaxed mastery, and the colors leapt out. The raucous ap- plause at the end, as each soloist stood, was like the intros at a Caps game.
style@washpost.com
Battey is a freelance writer.
*
by Anne Midgette
I’ve been amused, and I’m not the only one, to read all of the critical backlash against Gustavo Dudamel on his recent American tour with the Los Angeles Phil- harmonic. In San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia, the discovery has been made that Dudamel does, in fact, have feet of clay. His conducting can be uneven, superficial, moment-to-moment. Each assessment stress-
From baritone Stephen Salters, vividly engaging poetry and soul
The eight spirituals that closed bari-
tone Stephen Salters’s Vocal Arts Soci- ety recital at the Kennedy Center Ter- race Theater on Wednesday were, no pun intended, a revelation. With most of them taken at glacially slow tempos and delivered with an inward-focused, almost whispered concentration — only occasionally punctuated by more out- size, fire-and-brimstone flourishes — they arrested attention as much for their intensely personal engagement as for their keen sense of dramatic ten- sion, stretched almost to the breaking point.
But to single out that portion of Salt-
ers’s recital risks minimizing his fine work — and the equally compelling partnering of pianist David Zobel — throughout the rest of the evening. In a cannily selected program of unexpected gems by composers well-known (John Jacob Niles, Amy Beach, William Bol-
com, Charles Ives) and lesser-known (Allie Laurie, Andy Vores, John Sacco), Salters offered a voice of vibrancy and golden color that opened out exciting- ly at climactic moments and held a pure and seamless line at hushed dy- namics. He engaged vividly with the text in each song, not least in composer Elena Ruehr’s tender, evocatively atmos- pheric song-cycle “Five Men,” set to poems by Elizabeth Alexander, which had its world premiere on Wednesday. Salters brought a mesmerizing inten- sity to Alexander’s verse in these elo- quent portraits of seminal African American figures, most memorably in the songs “Waiting for Cinque to Speak” and “Nat Turner Dreams of In- surrection.” Ruehr and Alexander could have wished no more powerful or warmly communicative advocate for their work.
—Joe Banno
es that this wouldn’t mat- ter so much were it not that Dudamel is being billed as the future of clas- sical music. Here’s the thing, though: Dudamel is not the future of classical mu- sic. He’s not even trying to be. The people who are try- ing to move classical music into the future are think- ing about alternate kinds of programming, new ven- ues, different repertory. (See, for instance, Alan Gil- bert’s series of YouTube videos in which the New York Philharmonic music director pals around with Death, a character in Lige- ti’s “Grand Macabre,” which the orchestra is per- forming.) This isn’t really Duda-
FANS OF THE CHALKBOARD ON WINTERPOCK ROAD
FROM THE FACEBOOK PAGE:
One man can’t conduct himself as field’s savior
repertory (the premise of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music-training system that spawned him and that he’s actively pro- moting in Los Angeles). Yes, he’s explor- ing new music in his programming to a certain degree, but that isn’t what has gotten people excited about him. I don’t see how Dudamel represents a
CRITICIZED:
Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel.
mel’s style. He is a hugely charismatic and hugely talented guy, and people are hoping that can be harnessed into a new energy for the field and into attracting new audiences. I hope it can, though I’m not sure how many people outside the field are actually aware of Dudamel.
But Dudamel’s whole training appears
to have been about perpetuating the sta- tus quo — about the idea that leading an orchestra in standard repertoire is the highest thing to which a musician can as- pire. I think this is one reason he’s been so exciting to many people in the field: He represents a future without radical change; a younger generation that can groove to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven; children saved from ignorance and pov- erty by the beauties of the core classical
new beginning for classical music unless we can spawn a whole crop of other simi- larly exciting 20-somethings. What he represents is a reviv- ifying jolt of energy applied to the established model — some- thing that’s sorely needed, and that’s wonderful to see. The irony in the current bout of criticism is that Dudamel has in the past seemed to me less individual, or more at risk of falling into trained-monkey syndrome (using his talent to execute what he was told others expected of him) than he did in the most recent L.A. concerts. The question has always been whether he would be able to bring his own voice and person- ality to his work: The “Pathé- tique” showed me, at least, that the answer is yes. Uneven? Of course. Dudamel’s great strengths are wild, untram- meled energy combined with visceral talent, and that’s pretty much a recipe for unevenness. Is he an orchestra builder? Not yet; the critics, including my- self, have pointed out all of the L.A. players’ technical weak-
nesses. But his “Pathétique,” in Washing- ton, sounded like the work of a conductor who has something to say, and I was will- ing to take the bumps on the way to hear- ing it. (From the reaction of my col- leagues to his “Pathétique” in other cities, I’d also say that Washington may have represented a particularly good night.) He’s a scarily talented young conduc- tor who has been thrust into the position of acting as music’s savior. Now, he’s learning the next step of his trade, in the public eye. But whether he learns to be- come a real orchestra builder with L.A. or continues to be erratic, it’s going to take more than even Dudamel at his best to keep classical music vital in the 21st cen- tury.
midgettea@washpost.com
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