Soul


Giving Charlotte


LESA KASTANAS ’84 AND HER HUSBAND, ANDY, HAVE HELPED GIVE CHARLOTTE THE NIGHTLIFE (AND GASTRONOMY) IT NEEDED


BY PAGE LEGGETT


you lived in Charlotte before, say, the early 1990s, you may have lamented the lack of nightlife in and around uptown. Te old, not-so-funny joke was that they rolled up the sidewalks at 5 p.m. Several factors led to uptown becoming the nighttime hub it is today, and Lesa (Christmas) ’84 and Andy Kastanas are two of them.


While Lesa was a student at Queens,


her then-boyfriend worked as a DJ and bar manager. Tey met the summer before Lesa started at Queens. She was 18; he was 19. “He was on campus all the time,”


she said. “It was a women’s college then. I don’t think any other guy was connected to the university, at that time, like he was. Te local chapter of my sorority made an exception for Andy; he was the only guy allowed to wear the Phi Mu letters.”


28 MAGAZINE


Lesa built a career first in banking and later in technology, working for several of Charlotte’s major employers, including First Union (now Wells Fargo) and Microsoft. “Tech was blowing up,” she recalled of the early ’90s. It was the right place to be, but it was never her passion. Te English major’s real love was writing. But the timing never seemed right to pursue it. “Being raised by parents who grew


up in the Depression means that stability, security and insurance were poured into my head,” she said. She’s written for WFAE (Charlotte’s NPR station) and the Charlotte Observer over the years. One of her WFAE essays—a tribute to North Carolina’s own Krispy Kreme she wrote when the company went public—went national on “Marketplace.”


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