Music in the Time of the Coronavirus: Bellevue Porchella with Brooke Ullman

 By Charles McGuigan 11.2020

There was a day unlike any other day of this peculiar year in a neighborhood unlike any other neighborhood anywhere, a day when things began making sense again, when for a brief five hours there was a welcome return to life as it once was before the twin viruses infected the heart and the soul of our country.

And on that mid-October day, it was as if Nature herself bestowed on us a silken blue sky, and temperatures that hovered at a constant between warm and cool, and leaves that had just begun to show their fall colors.

The cicadas had quieted, and from virtually every street corner in Bellevue you could hear music playing throughout the afternoon and into the twilight—live music of every genre. Hundreds walked the streets, some for the first time in seven months. They would gather in small clusters—socially distanced and face mask-clad—standing on the sidewalks and along the gutters, spilling into the streets, with eyes smiling and ears cocked toward porches where musicians played and sang. It was called Bellevue Porchella, an event that may be played out quarterly, or, at the very least. once a year.

“I had some adults that said that this was like trick or treating for them,” Brooke Ullman tells me. “I had other adults who said that they needed something like this, that they hadn’t been out since March and that it was just wonderful to see folks that they hadn’t seen since the spring.”

We’re sitting near a fire pit on the patio in the backyard of the arts-and-crafts style cottage Brooke shares with her husband, two children, and their pets.  Their son rockets by on a flying saucer swing that’s tethered to the thick and lofty bough a giant willow oak. He carves figure eights on the air above us.

Brooke Ullman was the progenitor of Bellevue Porchella. She tells me how the event was conceived, what inspired it. Turns out it was something my son Charles and I would stop and listen to on many balmy summer nights as we made our way down MacArthur Avenue from the block-long commercial strip back to our home on Greycourt Avenue. No matter how often we heard it on those lightning bug rich nights, it always caught us by surprise, and we felt inexpressible gratitude for where we were fortunate enough to live. So we would ascend the curb, move up to the sidewalk and nestle against the picket fence and peer through a lattice of boxwood at men and women sitting on folding chairs with their instruments poised. And the music would begin.

“When this all started happening this year, people going into quarantine, there was an evening around April or May and The Bellevue Bon Temps were out there on their fiddles playing on their side porch,” Brooke remembers. “I actually recorded it and did a little video of it and posted it and I tagged the Bellevue Civic Association on Facebook and said, ‘This is so great.’ I love this about my neighborhood that we have these pockets of talent.”

So the seed was planted, and a few months later, on a stifling midsummer afternoon, the seed cracked open and a pale green shoot shot forth.

In July, Brooke watched from her front yard as a family with three kids strolled along the sidewalk across the street. They briefly stopped in front of the home of Haze and Dacey, two local musicians who were playing on their front stoop.

As Haze played on his upright bass, Dacey improvised a song for the kids. When the family moved on, Brooke crossed the street and told her neighbors how much she enjoyed listening to them play. And then she said this: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had an outdoor walk-around little music thing.”

They both nodded. “Yeah, it’d be great,” said Dacey. “Will you do it? Will you organize it?”

“That is where the germ originated,” Brooke tells me now.

But it was out of the question for Brooke to put this together, juggling yet another project. As hectic as her life had been before the pandemic, it was now a high-speed roller coaster ride. She’s a full-time manager, who’s been working remotely during the pandemic. She has two school age children who have been at home since March. And to top it off she’s in graduate school. “I said. ‘There’s no way, I don’t have time to plan this.’”

Brooke wasn’t going to let it die on the vine, though. So she reached out, and the response frankly blew her away.

“I ended up mentioning it to Summer Gentry and she said, ‘You absolutely have to do this. This is a great idea. We absolutely have to do this. Get on the call and you have to mention it,’” Brooke says. “And so I joined the Bellevue Civic phone call in mid-August. And I threw it out there and tons of people were texting and writing, ‘This is a great idea, I want to be involved. This is wonderful.’

Bellevue had already lost a few of its signature annual festivals because of the virus. National Night Out had been cancelled, as had Christmas on MacArthur. And then there was the Spring Garden Walk.

“The Garden Walk had already been bumped the second time and they were gonna cancel it,” says Brooke. “That’s when Don Glazer stepped up. Don was super. He was very involved, very helpful, wanted to know what it was I needed, what my thoughts were. I said, ‘I would love it to be a civic association event.  And we could do it annually. I think it’s got legs.’”

At about that time, Brooke connected with three people who would become instrumental in making Porchella a reality. There was of course Summer Gentry, who was joined by Rob McAdams and Jami Bricker.

“When I reached out to Summer, Rob was on the call, and Jami ended up getting pulled into the mix,” Brooke says.  “Jami used to play in a band, and was very involved in the Milwaukee summer festivals.  You’ve got Rob who’s involved in his son’s music and the music scene himself. And Summer plays music. So it worked out wonderfully; it was a great mix of people.”

Bellevue, which was one of Richmond’s first streetcar suburbs back in the 1920s and 30s, covers some 35 square blocks and encompasses 1200 single households, along with about a dozen duplexes and two apartment buildings. Bellevue Porchella handled the logistics of the event in a manner that would have pleased Disneyworld or the US Army. And it was one woman who was chiefly responsible for it. 

“Summer Gentry,” Brooke explains, “is good at coordinating things. She took a look at all the performers that had submitted to be part of this. Summer’s old school so she put it all out in color Post it notes and figured it all out.  We talked many times about set lists and how long would somebody be able to play, how many times would someone want to play. We had a lot of discussions about whether we should centralize this and have it in one area, or should we let it be spread out. Thinking the annual Garden Walk tends to be spread out and if we really want people to be spread out during COVID-19, let them be spread out.”

The original date was washed out by rain. The following Saturday though, October 17, the rain date, was spectacular. Brooke remembers the day well, and how the music swept her away.

“I walked by that one in the 1200 block of Greycourt because the band needed to get set up at our house,” she says. “And they were over there playing Eric Clapton’s Cocaine at full volume and they were awesome. They were dead on.”

That was exactly what my son Charles and I heard as we stepped off our front porch on Greycourt Avenue that Saturday afternoon. We consulted an orange flier that the promoters of Bellevue Porchella had delivered a few weeks earlier to every household in the neighborhood. The flier had a map, and a QR code you could scan to find out the exact times of performances along with short bios of the music makers. We studied it for a bit, and then decided to let our ears guide us. We walked over to MacArthur Avenue and up toward Claremont Avenue, and there was a young mother with her daughter clasped to her chest, and they waltzed in the street while a hundred people, socially distanced and wearing face masks, stood in small clusters on the sidewalks listening to The Bellevue Bon Temps.

Just to the north and west on Nottoway we heard the strains of a lone piano, somewhat muted. I’m guessing it was a baby grand, much too large to move out into the front yard, so the pianist, David Calkins, played from inside his home with all the windows open so the crowd could hear him perform.

Then, directly next door, as soon as David’s set ended, singer/songwriter Sean Balick, played an original work on acoustic guitar, a piece called “Dandelion”.

Back on Greycourt Avenue, Haze and Dacey were performing Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”.

And just across the street, on the front porch of Brooke and Rob Ullman’s home, Indira & Guppy Joe drew a large crowd.

“I never anticipated the crowds that showed up,” Brooke tells me. “Indira & Guppy Joe played out in front of our house at five and six. After two or three songs one of the ladies in the audience came up and said, ‘Can you tell them to turn it up?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, after she’s done with the song, I’ll go tell her.’ And I walked up and I said, ‘Indira, they need it louder.’ And she looked up and she realized there were people all up and down the street because they were smart about social distancing. She had no idea the crowd was so large.  It was wonderful.”

In the long calendar of the year, Richmond, Virginia has three days that stand out. Those three days in October annually attract hundreds of thousands to the waterfront along the James River. It started sixteen years ago as the American Folk Life Festival, and three years later morphed into the Richmond Folk Festival. Although they held a virtual event this year broadcast on public radio and television, the festival was cancelled due to COVID-19. Here’s what my son told me after the Bellevue Porchella.  

“It reminded me a lot of the Folk Festival,” Charles said. “It was a mini-folk festival in Bellevue in our own neighborhood. It was music to my ears. We had blue grass, acoustic, and even some classical piano music. We even heard some grunge and rock, so it was really nice to hear such a variety of music in our own neighborhood.”

Like most of us who attended the event, Charles hopes there will be more porchellas in the future.

Though it may not happen every quarter, Bellevue Porchella will definitely repeat every October. Brooke and her group are already planning what they’ll do—and not do—in the future.

Toward the end of that first Bellevue Porchella, Charles and I followed the stringy whine of blue grass over to Fauquier. Scores of people were gathered on the median strip and along the sidewalks on both sides of the street and in the neighbors’ front yards to listen to a band called Cold Harbor. It made my son think of a different time and a different place, as did the weather and the clarity and crispness of the air.

“It kind of reminded me of being in the mountains with the blue grass music and the leaves changing and the cool weather and the clear blue sky and the sun shining on everything,” he said. “It gets a good feel to it.”