Sterling Column

If you’ve ever been in Sterling, you’ve been on Sterling Boulevard. This 3.3-mile stretch of road connects Route 7 to Route 28, brings you past Sterling Middle School, the library, and the golf course—as well as many stores and restaurants.

This past week, high school seniors across the county became high school graduates. For many, the obvious question is “what next?” For some, the answer is closer than they might think.

This weekend, over 40 boys and girls from our area will travel to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to swim, throw a ball around, and score goals—in other words, they are on this state's only 18 and under water polo team. This tournament is the qualifier meet for the USA Water Polo Junior Olympics to be held in Northern California at the end of July.

In 2000, the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” brought bluegrass into the mainstream—and the genre has been riding a wave of popularity ever since. Locally, there’s no better place to find bluegrass than at the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum in Claude Moore. This Sunday, May 24, at 2:30 p.m., local musicians will gather on the porch of the Waxpool General Store to play this regional music that had its birth in the Appalachian Mountains.

 

Bluegrass music derives from a variety of sources including Scot-Irish ballads, jazz and the blues. Like jazz, each instrument takes turns with the melody, creating endless variations and interpretations. Bluegrass is typically played with stringed instruments—and many would say it’s incomplete without a banjo. Again, similar to jazz, it is open to jamming and musicians gathering on the spur of the moment to play.

 

Is a two hour movie just one hour and fifty minutes too long for you? Do you wish sitcoms were just a little shorter? The Sterling Playmakers have you in mind this weekend with the Ten Minute One Act Festival.

For many around this area, Memorial Day meant summer is finally on its way—but for 148 kids around the Sterling area, it meant back to practice. On Tuesday, the Sterling Park Seahawks swim team held their first practice of the year in prep for their first meet on June 20.

On Saturday, May 16, at 2 p.m., The Funny Guy, aka Paul Hadfield, will be performing his one man show “General Foolishness” at the Sterling Library on Enterprise Street Paul Hadfield trained as a tight-wire artist before a fall into mud made him realize that oooh’s and ahh’s weren’t as rewarding as the hee’s and ha’s. Since 1985, he’s been performing as General Foolishness—a madcap general who usually gets into trouble—throughout the region.

And the zig, for that matter. If you've been driving down Sterling Boulevard in the last couple weeks, you've might have noticed some unusual street markings—the zigzag. Now, I know the dashed and the solid...but the zigzag?