Tuesday night at the Masonic

Steve Swoope stopped by, yesterday, and asked Carolina and I to consider attending last night's meeting of the Masonic Theatre Preservation Foundation. Despite my usual and understandable reluctance to attend any evening meeting, whatever its purpose, we went and I am glad we did.

For one thing, I learned a lot. This beautiful Beaux-Arts building of ours has a usable floorspace of around 23,000 square feet, a figure I thought astonishing at the time. It includes a basement, which the design team thinks would be a perfect location for a cafe. In the lovingly-restored and fully-modernized Masonic they envision, such a cafe would be below street level, yet would feature abundant natural lighting, if I understood correctly, due to the peculiarities of the building site.

But what really came as a pleasant surprise was the project team's conceptual approach. I suggested to Steve, yesterday, that the Masonic needs to be a cultural focal point for Clifton Forge. I forget now who said it last night, but the team has come to feel this project is not so much a theater as it is a civic center that happens to include a theater.

I couldn't agree more, though I think they expressed the idea better than I did. Civic center usually implies a multi-purpose facility serving the needs of the public in many ways and at many hours and I think that is exactly what we need. Anything that draws folks to downtown Clifton Forge is good. It's good for Main Street, for our businesses, and featuring, as it does, such a wonderful venue for the performing arts a renovated Masonic Theatre will greatly enrich the cultural life of our community.

I think that's very good indeed.

Hello world!