Description
This week on Tidewater Talk, we sit down with our neighbor Mollie Alaire of Choose Joy Farm in Lanexa, out by the Chickahominy. Mollie was born at the old Williamsburg hospital, and her great-grandpa bought the family's 68 acres in 1901. The family grew watermelons and corn until 2008, when Mollie got a goat to make goat milk soap for her brothers' eczema.
Now the farm keeps pygmy goats, Nigerian dwarfs, LaManchas, pigs, silkie chickens, and 15 year old ducks, and Mollie teaches soap making, milking, and goat care to students from 3 to 89. We hear about goat snuggling, piglet yoga, goats launching off a chicken tractor onto the barn roof, and Damiana, the 14 year old LaMancha who runs the whole yard circus.
Co tells us what the nor'easter did to the Boardwalk, and we look at a warm week before weekend showers.
Plus Mollie's picks: mango cheesecake at Colattao on Independence Boulevard and a pistachio cream latte at Elite Coffee in Norge. Also the free U.S. Marine Band concert at the Sandler Center, Zoovies at the Virginia Zoo, the last weekend of Ghent Restaurant Week, and the Tour de ORF bike ride.
We reveal last week's Where in Tidewater, the Old Cape Henry Lighthouse, and give you three new clues for a historic stage on Church Street in Norfolk. Send your guess to
If you're in Coastal Virginia, this is your weekly mix of neighbors, local lore, weather, and where to go next.
Where in Tidewater
- This week's place is a working stage, and it's named for a man who was killed in Boston in 1770.
- When it opened in 1919, it was the only theater in the country financed, designed, built, and run entirely by African Americans. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong all played it. People called it the Apollo of the South.
- It's on Church Street in Norfolk. It went dark in 1953, sat mostly empty for fifty years, and reopened after a big restoration in 2004. Above the stage hangs a three-story fire curtain, painted in 1919, showing the Boston Massacre.