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City kicks off Friday After Five concert series
Regan Hill photo
Singer Linda Little (right) of Sammy O’Banion and Mardi Gras sings “Just My Imagination” with Howard Stewart during Friday’s Piedmont HealthCare Friday After Five Concert.
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Published: May 9, 2009
The rain-filled weather front swerved around Statesville and the light drizzle that snuck into town earlier in the day moved out in time to make the 2009 opener of the Piedmont HealthCare Friday After Five Summer Concert Series a big hit.
"This turned out so much better than I thought it would have," downtown business owner Diane Prendergast said about halfway through the three-hour event. "I wouldn't have given anything that this would have been this nice."
Prendergast probably spoke for most of the several hundred people who crowded into the last block of West Broad Street to hear the versatile sounds of Sammy O'Banion and Mardi Gras, share conversation and grab a hot dog or two.
Claudia Atkins, self-described stylist and makeup artist at a beauty salon, said events like Friday After Five were exactly the kind of thing that pushed her to move to Statesville from Charlotte two years ago.
"Statesville is the place to be," Atkins said with a genuine pride in her adopted hometown. "The people are friendly and they participate and talk to each other. And this is fantastic. You see such a sense of community here. You don't have to know someone to talk to them and just mingle."
And the band, most in attendance agreed, was pretty good.
And eclectic.
One set included a run of songs by Prince, AC/DC, The Sugar Hill Gang and Marvin Gaye.
An old standby, "The Electric Slide," brought out a dozen or so people to show they could still pull off the old 1980s line dance.
Mike Waddle was doing the heavy lifting on the makeshift dance-floor on West Broad Street.
Waddle, clad in cut-off jean shorts, a T-shirt and patriotic bandanna barely stopped cutting the rug throughout the night.
"I was born and raised to dance," Waddle said.
But during the last part of the concert, the dance-floor belonged to 6-year-old Lucas Coombes, who worked every old-school move from the Moonwalk to rope-pull, to the Robot, to a Pete Townshend-like air guitar stroke.
"He really loves this," his father, Nicholas Coomes, said from a safe distance on the sidelines.
Perhaps the night's most interesting attendee was Kimberly Dickerson, who arrived, camera crew in tow, in a full-flowing wedding gown.
Dickerson's father, Tom Dickerson, said his daughter is getting married next month and was taking her bridal photos at different locations throughout the city.
So one of the pictures that will be featured in her wedding album, no doubt, will be one in which Dickerson is stationed in front of the band with about 100 people she doesn't know waving their arms behind her.
"She thought it would be fun," Tom Dickerson said.
And most at Friday's event would say the whole night was fun.
Not least among them would be Essence Whitesides, a student at Statesville High School and a member of the school's drumline.
About an hour after performing for the crowd, Whitesides won the event's pie-eating contest.
When asked her secret to devouring the filling portion of an apple pie in a minute, she was less than philosophical.
"I was hungry," she said. "I'd been hungry all day and that pie was calling my name."
Whitesides and the rest of her bandmates will be heading to Tampa, Fla. next month to perform for the judges in Statesville's bid to be named an All-America City.
And part of Friday's event was the sale of T-shirts and bumper-magnets reflecting the city's status as a finalist for the award. The proceeds of those sales will go toward deferring the $15,000 it's going to take to get the high school band there.
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