ig Fun is a community that resulted essentially as an
accident. It started as a quasi-utopian idea among the Malvern Girls: Sara
Poiron, Jessika Flint and Peggy Farley, girls from the Philadelphia suburbs
who, as young adults, had decided to live in the Charlottesville, Virginia
area. They'd had the experiences necessary to know the drawbacks to living
within Charlottesville proper. People are forever coming over to visit,
bringing their friends, staying up late, making noises and messes, breaking
things, and spending the night. Such people might be wonderful and interesting,
but they distract from the important business of finally settling into
adulthood and accomplishing all the myriad goals casually set through the
years. So, after a wide search for a house, they decided upon a remote
big yellow farmhouse on the north end of Fairview Farms, a few miles north
of Scottsville, Virginia on Virginia State Route 20. Soon after arranging
the house to their liking, they chose to include Josh Smith (with whom
they'd been house guests) and Zachary Firkly as rent-paying residents living
in extra rooms in their house. This had the desired effect of lowering
rent and utility bills for everyone, but the increase in population resulted
in decreased control over the environment. Things gravitated increasingly
towards anarchy.
He viewed them rather as a gardener
regards a grapevine; it may not bear fruits for some years, and it may
need protection from the onslaught of insects, but if it is properly watered,
fertilized, and exposed to sunlight, one day it will result in everything
from raisins to vino.
|
There were those in Charlottesville who found the Malvern
Girls to be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise predictable and comfortable
social scene. So refreshing were they that they began to serve as the core
of an increasingly larger snowball of like minds. Coinciding with their
appearance in Charlottesville had been the emergence of the Gus as an artist
from a checkered past of decadence, controversy and mayhem in northern
Ohio. The Gus was given to making frequent trips to Charlottesville as
part of his responsibilities in the bozART Gallery, and whenever he was
in town, he found himself seeking the companionship of the Girls; they
were the people who reminded him most of the people with whom he had related
best in his considerable past. While distracting him from his art, they
had the positive effect of inspiring his writing, resulting in works such
as this one. Farrell, a more fixed resident of Charlottesville, viewed
the Girls as both exhilarating and oddly alluring. Their lack of restraint
seemed to awaken old creative forces. He viewed them rather as a gardener
regards a grapevine; it may not bear fruits for some years, and it may
need protection from the onslaught of insects, but if it is properly watered,
fertilized, and exposed to sunlight, one day it will result in everything
from raisins to vino. Morgan Anarchy, with his strangely inspirational
punk rock attitude, discovered that among the Malvern Girls, he could be
appreciated with greater depth and honesty than ever before. Much like
the Gus, Matthew Hart had spent his adolescence in Redneckistan. But his
attitude was thoroughly compatible with that of the Malvern Girls. In addition,
he had his own circle of interesting friends that easily adhered to the
growing mass of intimates. Rapidly, the Malvern Girls were sweeping up
and absorbing the most fascinating people in Central Virginia. Big Fun
(as it came to be called) started to emerge as every bit the very social
scene the avoidance of which had been its founding tenet!
With the emergence of Big Fun as a social scene full of
fascinating people came a casual attitude towards mundane things like bill-paying
and tidiness. What with the frozen water pipes, power and telephone disconnections,
and untimely and insufficiently delivered heat, living conditions occasionally
verged on the horrifying. Still, the community was expanded to include
Matthew Hart, Shira, and even Ray Snabley for a time.
True to their experimental natures, the people of Big
Fun moved from relatively soft drugs like vino and tussin DM to hard alcohol
and Ritalin and from no sex at all to an epidemic of pairing-off. The result
was many Melrose Place-type incidents of bruised emotions and even
violence, and this in turn led to temporary bouts of alienation for the
Gus, Matthew Hart, and others. But such things did far more damage to a
water sign such as Ray; he came to feel as though he was driven from the
scene.
Despite its nearly-unlivable conditions and constant social
tension, Big Fun is a place unlike any in the world. Big Fun people are
full of ambition and interesting ideas, but for now they are distracted
by the fragrance of life. So they stroll along for now, enjoying the considerable
fun that the greater Charlottesville area has to offer. They can always
buckle down and begin life in earnest when they have worked out whatever
it is that is joyfully blocking them. Perhaps, as is the case for this
glossary, a great creative force can be tapped from the unconventional
decadence that surrounds them.
he purpose of this glossary is to give the reader an
idea of state-of-the art youth hedonism as it exists in Central Virginia
in the late 1990s. Thrown in with all of this is a big helping of the personal
philosophy of the Gus. This document is not designed to be read as a conventional
novel is read; this is a post-modern work whose design encourages
jumping around and even accidentally missing parts. Whenever one reads
anything, one zones-out and misses parts, so missing parts of this
literature is not something to lose sleep over. For the most part, this
is a work of non-fiction. But occasionally the truth is so irritating to
tell that fiction has to be substituted in its place.