Performance for Mountain
Stage; photo courtesy of Visit Charleston, WV
“Live from the Mountain State of West Virginia, it’s Mountain Stage with your host, Larry Groce…!”
It’s Sunday - 6pm exactly - because at exactly 6pm on most Sunday nights, I’m making dinner for my family while listening to the internationally broad- cast/podcasted Mountain Stage from NPR – performance programming pro- duced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting from Charleston, WV, and hosted by singer/songwriter and musical director Larry Groce, as he’s done since co-creating the show back in 1983.
During a recent airing (in which I was digging American folk vocalist/blues- man/guitarist Chris Smither), Groce orated his weekly sponsor’s shut-out: “Mountain Stage is brought to you by…the Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau. Charleston: ‘Hip, Historic…Almost Heaven.’”
“Hip, Historic…Almost Heaven” - what a cool slogan!
Those words quickly resonated in my ears - the catchy H- alliteration and its complementing insider’s nod to John Denver’s 1971 classic signature song,
66 January February 2017
Country Road (“Almost heaven, West Virginia...”) - “Hip, Historic…Almost Heaven.” I get it!
At that moment during mid-dinner preparation, I knew where I was meant to go: A place beginning and ending for me on the Mountain Stage….
Situated near the state’s western side, Charleston is a half work-day’s road trip from most of the Mid-Atlantic’s major cities, and it’s just an hour-plus flight into laid back Yeager Airport, which is looking mighty friendly this morning as Garth Brook fans con- verge from all over the country.
Yup, Brooks and his wife, musician and performer Trisha Yearwood, are in town!
By 7pm many boot-shod/ten-gallon hat-wearing fans will be pouring into the Charleston Civic Center Coliseum for the first of four nights of perform- ances – Brooks’ first appearance here in 19 years. But now at 10:30am, Civic Center general manager John Robertson is showing me what $90 million dollars-worth of expansion and renovation looks like, as his Civic
Center team readies for Charleston’s accent as a strongly-competitive 2nd- tier conventions facility here in the Mid-Atlantic region. Yes, in just over a year this city of 50,000 is about to take to the meetings market center stage.
After touring through thousands of square feet of usable meeting, con- vention, trade show, and arena space already existing on-site, John hands me a hard hat and then takes me through cavernous raw sections of the center. We end at renderings of his Civic Center come springtime, 2018, in which a newly-designed, sleekly- angled wing juts out over the Kanawha River.
“We’re taking advantage of our posi- tioning,” John proudly gestures toward the gentle Kanawha just fifty or so feet beyond us. “The addition of 140,000- square feet offering this sort of unpar- alleled perspective – basically, the event becomes an actual part of the river, and vice-versa.”
He leads me to another enormous space that’s already near-completion - The Concourse - a wall of high and wide panoramic windows peering into
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