Yes Virginia, There Is A Downtown Performing Arts Center

I take pleasure in being able to respond to our many loyal readers. Here’s another little visit to the West End’s Best Magazine mailbag:

Dear Mr. Cook:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no valid plan to have a Performing Arts Center in downtown Richmond. Papa says, "If you see it in West End’s Best Magazine, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Performing Arts Center in the city’s future?

Signed,
Virginia Richmond

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great big metropolitan region of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless multi-community initiatives about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. Or, as defined by our mayor/governor.
Yes, Virginia, there is a future Performing Arts Center.
It exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion and a love for the arts, and a misuse of funds, and an ability to demand safety inspections on a building while it is under construction exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy, and fodder for great news stories on the local six-o-clock TV newscasts. Which, by the way, Virginia, you’ll never guess what tonight’s big story is.
Alas! how dreary would be the city and its surrounding counties if there were no hope for a downtown Performing Arts Center! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias, or no downtown ballpark, or no Sixth Street Marketplace…oops forget that one. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, no piano bar, no crude drawings that are foisted on an unsuspecting public under the guise of art, to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight, and of course in a NASCAR Hall of Fame, which, I’m sure, if we can scrape together the funds to go to whatever city it will be put in, we will certainly enjoy. The external light with which Mayor Governor Wilder’s revised plans fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in a Performing Arts Center! You might as well not believe in fairies (and I won’t touch this line with a ten-foot pole). You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the vacant downtown lots over the next few months to catch Brad Armstrong, single-handedly laying the brick, that will give us hope that the Center is on its way, but even if you did not see Mr. Armstrong laying brick, what would that prove? Nobody sees downtown Richmond Performing Arts Centers, but that is no sign that there is no Performing Arts Center. Have you not seen artist renderings? Richmond is coming to be known as the “City of Artists’ Renderings. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see, except through architectural drawings. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn (outside of Carytown, that is)? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in this big beautiful city of ours.
You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen Greater Richmond Metropolitan area which not the strongest man, not even the Mayor, nor even the united strength of all the strongest city councilmen (imprisoned or not) that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, higher restaurant sales taxes, floating bonds, trans-municipality conflagrations, and effete businessmen with self-serving dreams can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this city there is nothing else real and abiding, except for toll roads, and a slave trail, which nobody seems to know just where it is.
No Performing Arts Center? Thank God it lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, the ever crumbling Thalhimers Department Store ruins will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Signed

Steve Cook (with assistance from Francis P. Church)