Category Archives: Asheville Attractions

Slow-walking eaters love their fast food.

My favorite moment from my time at the fifth-annual Ashtoberfest Zombie Walk on Saturday was when I encountered the undead hordes at the Biltmore Square Mall food court.

It’s like Chick-fil-A had brain on the menu.

Of course, the walking dead were ordering waffle fries and nuggets, just like hungry, unsuspecting mall patrons who left the mall with more than their new bedsheets from Dillard’s.

But that was what made it so funny: I caught these crazed cannibals acting like the folks cast as zombie bait in the movies.

It was the type of quiet scene that really brought the festival to life for me. I collected all these moments that if you just removed all the fake blood, it would be like any other Saturday night at the mall. Teenage girls giggling and gossiping, flirting with unsure boys. Ladies touching up their hair and makeup in the bathroom mirror.

These unplanned, very human moments, lightened the event’s dark undead theme. It’s truly just another excuse to build community and celebrate all the frivolous fun that separates life from death.

There was also a lot of joy in the planned aspects of the first-time festival — the walk has

Article source: http://blogs2.citizen-times.com/carol/2013/09/09/ashtoberfest-zombie-walk-dead-for-2013-in-asheville/ If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

The ingredients listed on the label of Cassandra’s Garden Salsa are tomatoes, onion, bell pepper, tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, banana pepper, lime juice, salt, garlic and chili powder. But Cassandra Brown knows a lot more goes into it than that.

Since she began selling her salsa at Charlotte-area Harris Teeter stores in late May, Cassandra, a 16-year-old junior at Providence Day School, has learned more about business than many people do in a lifetime. She’s also learned a lot about herself and what she can accomplish, as well as the importance of supportive family and friends.

“It’s been an amazing experience in many ways,” Cassie says. “It’s a lot of hard work, but I’ve also had fun with it. And my family has been a big help.”

Cooking up a business

Family is where it all began. Cassie’s grandfather is a farmer, which inspired her love of gardening at an early age.

“When I was 6, I made a garden with tomatoes, peppers, that kind of thing,” she says. “When I was 9, we started to make salsa and sell it to friends because we had so many tomatoes and peppers that we had to

Article source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/09/09/4300197/charlotte-teen-makes-business.html If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

The Hendersonville Children’s Choir will begin rehearsals for its fall season from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Monday at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 2101 Kanuga Road, Hendersonville.

Registration will take place from 4 to 4:30 p.m.

Rehearsals are every Monday through Dec. 16. The choir members are the guest artists for The Hendersonville Symphony’s “Carolina Christmas.”

The cost for members is $40 per semester with an $80 family cap. Scholarships are available.

Visit www.henderson villechildrenschoir.org or call 828-696-4968 to pre-register and receive more information.

BRCC auditions for ‘The Laramie Project’

Auditions for the Blue Ridge Community College Drama Department’s fall production of “The Laramie Project” are at 7 p.m. Monday and Tuesday in the Patton Auditorium.

Auditions will consist of cold readings from the script. Roles for all ages, genders and races are available. The performance dates are Nov. 20-24.

The play is based on the story of Matthew Shepard. In October 1998, the gay college student was kidnapped, severely beaten and left to die, tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo.

Five weeks later, Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, and over the course of the next year, conducted more than 200 interviews with people

Article source: http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20130908/ARTICLES/130909905/1042/NEWS?Title=Art-Notes-Sept-8 If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

Although celebrating a death seems strange, celebrating a life does not. Especially when the life in question was that of native son and local author Thomas Wolfe, who passed away at age 37 on the morning of September 15, 1938.

Wolfe was just shy of his 38th birthday — he’d turn 113 this October. Which would, of course, be nearly impossible. Then again, it would be just as unlikely for the average person to turn out the body of work that Wolfe did in his brief life. Still, even three-quarters of a century since his pasting, Wolfe is best known for Look Homeward Angel, his sprawling and barely fictional work based on his hometown.

In celebration of Wolfe’s life and writing, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site holds a special reception as part of its second-Saturday programming. Visit the memorial (located at Old Kentucky Home, the former boarding house run by Wolfe’s mother, Julia) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tours will focus specifically on death in the Wolfe family and Victorian death traditions and will leave every hour on

Article source: http://www.mountainx.com/article/52519/By-the-wind-grieved-ghost If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

LEXINGTON, Va. – Freshman Kristen Whitehurst scored two goals, one in each half, to propel the VMI Keydets past the Delaware State Hornets, 2-0, in women’s soccer action Sunday afternoon at Patchin Field in Lexington. The win gave the Keydets their first two-match win streak since 2009 and their first clean sheet against a Division I opponent since Sept. 16, 2011.

The eventual game-winner came in the 37th minute, when Nicole Blixt sent a low, arching pass into the box from the left flank. Myranda Emery quickly found Whitehurst, cutting in from the right of DSU (0-4) goalkeeper Katelyn Koslosky, and the freshman tipped it home to give the Keydets a 1-0 advantage. The Keydets added on in the 86th minute, when Meredith Baldasare made a perfect pass from 20 yards out, finding Whitehurst cutting into space on Koslosky’s right once again. The freshman took three dribbles and drilled it by Koslosky, icing the second straight VMI (2-3) win.

On the defensive end, Emily Marbury pitched the shutout for the Keydets as, for the first time this season, VMI used just one goalkeeper in a game. Marbury moved to 2-2 with the win, as she was credited with four saves. Koslosky also

Article source: http://www.vmikeydets.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_LANG=C&ATCLID=209254988&DB_OEM_ID=9800 If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

For two centuries or so, the Uwharrie River dam backed up water to power a grist mill, continuing to wall off the river even after the mill ceased operating in the 1970s.

Last month, a dam-busting coalition that seeks to restore naturally flowing waterways demolished the 12-foot-high Lassiter Mill Dam.

The dam’s removal opened 15 miles of the upper Uwharrie, northeast of Albemarle. It now connects 40 free-flowing river miles that one day will welcome the return of a saltwater fish – in the eastern Piedmont, surrounded by the Uwharrie Mountains, nearly 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

The fish is the American shad, a regular visitor to Piedmont rivers more than 100 years ago. In spring, shad for eons made their way from the Atlantic Ocean via the Great Pee Dee River in South Carolina, into North Carolina’s Pee Dee River. From the Pee Dee, schools of shad peeled off and swam up the Uwharrie (pronounced yuu-WAHR-ee) to spawn in the river and its tributaries.

The silvery, hard-fighting, 2-to-6-pound fish could return by the thousands beginning in five years. They’ll hitch a ride around the Blewett Falls and Tillery dams,

Article source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/09/07/4294561/dams-destruction-will-help-bring.html If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com

NEW ORLEANS — NFL’s schedulers always find a way to send the Atlanta Falcons to the Superdome for landmark games.

In 2006, for the first one played in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the visitors were flattened by an emotional freight train.

Now comes Sean Payton’s return from his bounty ban before a fan base that has eagerly awaited the chance to cheer for the club’s only championship-winning coach in a meaningful game.

And by regular-season standards, a game with the Falcons is as meaningful as it gets for the Saints.

“The city is very excited. We’re very excited and it’s going to be a special game,” Saints tight end Jimmy Graham said. “I would say definitely it’s one of the most significant games we’ve started with.”

Saints players are careful not to make direct comparisons between the first game after Katrina with Payton’s first game back. Of course they are different. Still, there is a convergence of factors that spike the level of excitement for Sunday’s regular-season opener between a proud Saints team trying to bounce back from the 7-9 season they endured while Payton was away, and a rival

Article source: http://www.citizen-times.com/viewart/20130908/SPORTS/309080082/Falcons-brace-Payton-s-return If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com