Fun Fridays on the Square, featuring children’s games, activities and more. 10:30 a.m. Friday at City Square Plaza, 412 N. Boundary St., Williamsburg. Free. For more information, visit wrl.org.

Thank Goodness It’s Ocean View featuring The Tiki Bar Band, community barbecue and more. 6 to 9:30 p.m. Friday at Ocean View Beach Park, Norfolk. For more info, visit oceanviewbeachpark.org.

Groovin’ by the Bay, a summer concert series, featuring J & the Band. 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday at Mill Point Park, 100 Eaton St., Hampton. Free. For more information including the series lineup, visit visithampton.com.

Train and REO Speedwagon bring their “Summer Road Trip” tour to Virginia Beach. Opening the show will be Yacht Rock Revue. 6:25 p.m. July 31 at Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, 3550 Cellar Door Way. Tickets start at $48.65. To buy online, visit livenation.com.

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] [again].” 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Sundays Aug. 9 through Aug. 25 at Little Theatre of Norfolk, 801 Claremont Ave. Tickets: $18, advance; $20 at the door. For more info, visit ltnonline.org.

Events may change. Check before attending.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.” She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.

“O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in The Guardian in 2012.

A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.” She befriended movie stars and heads of state while also writing sympathetically about Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and meeting with female farm workers in Nigeria who feared abduction by Boko Haram.

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” made her Ireland’s most notorious exile since James Joyce. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women: Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom she was already becoming estranged.

“I had left the spare copy on the hall table for my husband to read, should he wish, and one morning he surprised me by appearing quite early in the doorway of the kitchen, the manuscript in his hand,” she wrote in her memoir “Country Girl,” published in 2012. “He had read it. Yes, he had to concede that despite everything, I had done it, and then he said something that was the death knell of the already ailing marriage — ‘You can write and I will never forgive you.’”

___

She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss” and by the mid-1960s was single and enjoying the prime of “Swinging London”: whether socializing with Princess Margaret and Marianne Faithfull, or having a fling with actor Robert Mitchum (“I bet you never tasted white peaches,” he said upon meeting her). Another night, she was escorted home by Paul McCartney, who asked to see her children, picked up her son’s guitar and improvised a song that included the lines about O’Brien “She’ll have you sighing/ She’ll have you crying/ Hey/ She’ll blow your mind away.”

Enright would call O’Brien “the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex — the rest just had children.”

O’Brien was recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson, and she befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”

O’Brien related well to Kennedy’s reticence, and longing. The literary world gossiped about the author’s love life, but O’Brien’s deepest existence was on the page, from addressing a present that seemed without boundaries (“She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once,” one of her characters thinks) to sorting out a past that seemed all boundaries — “the don’ts and the don’ts and the don’ts.”

In her story “The Love Object,” the narrator confronts her lust, and love, for an adulterous family man who need only say her name to make her legs tremble. “Long Distance” arrives at the end of an affair as a man and woman struggle to recapture their feelings for each other, haunted by grudges and mistrust:

“Love, she thought, is like nature but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”

“A Scandalous Woman” follows the stifling of a lively young Irish nonconformist — part of that “small solidarity of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers” — and ends with O’Brien’s condemning her country as a “land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women.” In “My Two Mothers,” the narrator prays for the chance to “begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame.”

O’Brien’s other books included the erotic novel “August Is a Wicked Month,” which drew upon her time with Mitchum and was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father; and the autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Haram, came out in 2019.

O’Brien is among the most notable authors never to win the Nobel or even the Booker Prize. Her honors did include an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection “Saints and Sinners,” for which she was praised by poet and award judge Thomas McCarthy as “the one who kept speaking when everyone else stopped talking about being an Irish woman.”

___

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, possibly out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on her daughter’s imagination, the force of her regrets, made her a lifelong muse and a near stand-in for Ireland itself, “the cupboard with all things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”

Like Kate and Baba in “The Country Girls,” O’Brien was educated in part at a convent, “dour years” made feverish by a disorienting crush she developed on one of the nuns. Language, too, was a temptation, and signpost, like the words she came upon on the back of her prayer book: “Lord, rebuke me not in thy wraith, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.”

“What did it mean?” she remembered thinking. “It didn’t matter what it meant. It would carry me through lessons and theorems and soggy meat and cabbage, because now, in secret, I had been drawn into the wild heart of things.”

By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy and Thackeray, among others, in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since she sneaked out to nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a Joyce anthology and learned that “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”

Such is the emcee’s favored greeting at the London drag club temporarily transplanted to the Little Theatre of Virginia Beach through Aug. 11.

It’s where the elite (and effete) meet and greet — not to proselytize audiences but to humanize us. You may already recognize this as the high-stepping musical version of “Kinky Boots” (book by Harvey Fierstein; music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper).

Based on the 2005 film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as drag queen Lola and chameleonic Joel Edgerton as the young factory owner Charlie Price, “Kinky Boots” tells the mostly true story of a Northampton, England shoe factory just a thinning sole’s breadth from closure. Charlie (played in VB by fresh-faced charmer Zack Kattwinkel) develops a purely economic fetish for kinky boots, hoping to market them to drag queens and other fearless fellows who can finally stand on stilettos reinforced with steel to bear their manly weight. (See and hear songs such as “Sex is in the Heel.”) The British setting calls for accents (uh-oh), executed only sporadically by this cast.

It’s a formulaic musical in composition and structure, including corny rhymes and forgettable tunes by Lauper, who nevertheless won a 2013 Tony for Best Original Score. This LTVB production is additionally hampered by Kattwinkel’s tendency to stray off-key. But the trite tunes and off notes matter little when the lessons are taught so sweetly and joyfully. It’s a satisfied and well-instructed audience that gleefully exits the theater at evening’s end. It helps that the last number is a showstopper set at a fashion shoe show in Milan overrun by a hoard of remarkably costumed drag queens. Costuming credits go to Pamela Jacobson-Bowhers, Connor Payne and production director Kobie Smith.

How is this degree of final audience satisfaction possible?

Step aboard the arc/ark of this life-affirming, irresistible plot steeped in the remarkable similarities between dedicated longtime factory coworkers and those dedicated volunteers who produce and act in community theaters wherever they may flourish.

The first act of soleful/soulful plotting genius was to delve briefly into the childhoods of our two protagonists: young Charlie, the ill-equipped shoe factory owner and drag queen Lola aka. Simon (here wonderfully played by lean and lanky Norfolk State University-trained Lance Hawkins). Note: Three other actors involved in the show hail from James Madison University. Younger versions of our main male characters appear briefly onstage to establish that Charlie was blessed with a father (Brian Sheridan) who adored him. At the same time, Simon (soon to be Lola) had a father horrified by his son’s early proclivities towards gender-bending. (Young Simon likes to wear women’s shoes and dance around.) Charlie’s father dies unexpectedly, leaving Charlie a factory sinking in debt. Lola’s father disowns him, but we’re later shown hope for a reconciliation.

Charlie is also blessed with women in his life: first his rising realtor girlfriend Nicola (suitably high-toned Grace Altman) and then worker Lauren (winsome and loyal Olivia Florian). Nicola proves more interested in place (London) than person (Charlie, constrained to be in Northampton). Lauren’s real talents eventually get her promoted to management. Other male factory figures prove crucial, especially peacemaking shop foreman George (Sandy Lawrence) and trouble-making Don (well acted by James Bryan). Don movingly changes from homophobe to loyal Lola supporter, partly due to Lola’s boxing skills but more due to Don’s ability to develop humanistic ones). Hawkins’ Lola, surely the longest, lankiest Lola yet to tread the boards, is 6-foot-3 in his bare feet, but 6-foot-9 once he dons stilettos and wig. And boy, can Hawkins wear a glittery red costume!

One of Lola’s “Angels” (here meaning backup dancers) also deserves special acclaim. Besides playing a backup queen of the highest order, Payne contributes hair and makeup design serving, in his term, as “Dragaturg” [sic], an apt neologism based on the fancy theatrical title of dramaturg. A dramaturg is a sort of in-house literary expert for a theater. “Dragaturg” may well be Payne’s linguistic invention since Google doesn’t yet recognize it.

There are a lot of shoe/sole/soul-based remarks in the show, e.g., Charlie’s tender line to his newfound love Lauren: “I was a loose shoe but you need two to make a pair.” But is it, again, the general sense of kindness promoted by the show that impresses? Towards the finale, the musical’s creators Fierstein and Lauper come up with something they liken (a bit unwisely) to a 12-step code of conduct. They claim to “do it in six,” but their numbering trails off towards the end. Though they’re common sense, their dicta bear repeating (from the sheet music score): “Pursue the truth, Learn something new, Accept yourself and you’ll accept others too—Let love shine, Let pride be your guide, You change the world when you change your mind. Just be who you wanna be. Never let ’em tell you who you ought to be. Just be with dignity. Celebrate your life triumphantly. You’ll see it’s beautiful.”

The code’s not tight, but it’s surely right.

So, “Ladies, gentlemen, and those who have yet to make up your minds,” it turns out you can indefinitely postpone any such decision. Just be human.

Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu.

___

If you go

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 11

Where: Little Theatre of Virginia Beach, 550 Barberton Drive

Tickets: Start at $22

Details: 757-428-9233, ltvb.com

Movies in July featuring “Trolls: Band Together.” 8:30 p.m. Friday at Atlantic Union Bank Pavilion, 16 Crawford Circle, Portsmouth. Free. For more information, including inclement weather updates, visit pavilionconcerts.com.

Creed brings their “Summer of ’99” tour to Virginia Beach. 3 Doors Down, Finger Eleven to open. 7 p.m. Saturday at Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, 3550 Cellar Door Way. Tickets are limited; visit livenation.com.

Kentucky rock band Black Stone Cherry to make a stop in Norfolk. Florida metal band Nonpoint will open the show. 7:30 p.m. Sunday at The NorVa, 317 Monticello Ave. Tickets start at $40. To buy online, visit thenorva.com.

Norfolk Tides baseball takes on the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp at home in the final match-up game. 4:05 p.m. Sunday at Harbor Park, 150 Park Ave., Norfolk. Tickets start at $11. For more information, including the Princess Night promotion, visit milb.com/norfolk.

New Kids on the Block with Paula Abdul, DJ Jazzy Jeff. 7 p.m. Aug. 1 at Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater, 3550 Cellar Door Way, Virginia Beach. Tickets start at $41.75. To buy online, visit livenation.com.

Portsmouth native Missy Elliott is coming home with her “Out of this World” tour and bringing along a few friends, including Ciara, Busta Rhymes. 7 p.m. Aug. 2 at Hampton Coliseum, 1000 Coliseum Drive. For ticket availability, visit ticketmaster.com. For concert information, visit hamptoncoliseum.org.

Events may change. Check before attending.

Patty Jenkins, patty.jenkins@pilotonline.com

He showed off his singing and guitar-playing chops on the show that aired on ABC and CMT from 2012 to 2018, playing the brooding and troubled but talented central character Deacon Claybourne.

And his X (formerly Twitter) followers probably thought it was about time. Esten started a project on the platform called “#EverySingleFriday” in July 2016 that ran for 54 weeks, where he released a song he wrote or co-wrote every week.

But his debut record, a collection of 14 original songs called “Love Ain’t Pretty,” was somewhat of a late arrival for a 58-year-old actor, who’s been on the road promoting “Pretty” since its release in January.

The singer-songwriter, accompanying himself on guitar and piano, makes a stop July 26, at the Pioneer Theater in downtown Manteo, North Carolina.

Fun fact: It’s Esten’s second performance on the Outer Banks. While attending William & Mary (graduating in 1987), he was the lead singer in a band called N’est Pas, who played in 1986 at the legendary Atlantis Beach Club in Nags Head.

Making a full-length album was Esten’s life-long ambition.

“Music has always been part of my life,” he said. “But my acting career took off.”

Call him the king of the understatement.

He hit the stage running in 1991 starring in the West End production of “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story” in London.

Since then the actor has appeared in dozens of TV shows, including “Married With Children,” “The New Adventures with Old Christine,” “ER” and, of course, “Nashville.”

He recently played the role of Ward Cameron on the Netflix series “Outer Banks.”

Esten also was a regular panelist (using his nickname “Chip”) in the 1990s on the improvisational comedy show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

His resume includes three Kevin Costner movies.

But now, it’s full-speed ahead on music.

“A door just opened for me,” Esten said of recording the album at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville. “I was ready for it.”

He had made a lot of friends in Music City where “Nashville” was filmed. Renowned producer-songwriter Marshall Altman was one of them.

“We had an immediate connection,” Esten said during a phone interview from his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he was playing Professor Harold Hill in a summer production of the classic play “The Music Man.”

Altman rounded up some of Nashville’s top musicians and songwriters to work on the debut album, which brings to mind the confessional singer-songwriter era in the 1970s (Jackson Browne, Neil Young, etc.) filtered through modern country.

Citing influences ranging from The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello, Esten touches the head and heart equally on “Pretty.”

While certainly the songs, which he wrote or co-wrote, have a slight twang, there are elements of rock and blues.

He describes them as “postcards from paradise.”

“I want people to feel something,” Esten explained. “But I also want them to celebrate, to dance.”

Esten possesses a warm, soulful voice that feels seasoned, delivering poetic nuggets that explore a wide range of subjects, including hope, love, death, loss, grace and redemption.

He’s in touch with his inner Springsteen.

“I try to write lyrics like people actually talk,” he said. “Conversations feel a little deeper.”

Take “Somewhere in the Sunshine,” a melodic, reflective song co-written by Jon Nite, which touches on grief: “And days when you miss me/and the lonely takes place/close your eyes/lift your head/feel the sun on your face.”

Other standout tracks include the bluesy rocker “I Ain’t,” the mid-tempo, meditative “One Good Move” and the yearning, 1980s-rock-style title song written with Jimmy Yeary and Marshall Altman, which would have melted his “Nashville” on-and-off squeeze and one true love Rayna James’ heart.

He sings: “Shows up when you don’t need it/and leaves you when you do/it’ll tear you to pieces/and make ‘em all come true.”

For his performance at the Pioneer, Esten will play tunes from the debut album as well as a few cover songs (he’s been known to merge Willie Nelson’s “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” with The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”).

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “We (his wife and three children) love the Outer Banks.”

___

If you go

When: Friday, July 26, at 7 p.m., with doors opening at 6:30 p.m.

Where: The Pioneer Theater, 109 Budleigh St., Manteo

Tickets: $40 to $50

Details: ThePioneerTheater.com

“The Philadelphia Eleven” follows the story of 11 women who were ordained into the Episcopal priesthood at a church in Philadelphia in 1974, in violation of the church rules at the time.

“This film tells a story that continues to resonate today as women seeking ordination continue to face resistance, disrespect and exclusion from roles reserved by men for men,” states a press release from the Old Donation.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the milestone, but women in many faiths continue to fight for full inclusion. Last month, the Southern Baptist Convention ousted an Alexandria church for affirming that women can serve in any pastoral role. Southern Baptist doctrine states that only men can serve as pastors, though some interpret that to mean only senior pastors must be male.

The screening is free and open to the public, but registration is required; visit olddonation.org.

Nour Habib, nour.habib@virginiamedia.com

She reflexively looked for her boat and spotted it over her shoulder about 50 feet away; in the opposite direction, she saw something else. A bottle, containing something, gently bobbed in the water.

That can’t be, she thought.

On June 24, Eggar discovered a message in a bottle about five miles off the coast of Bermuda with only one clue to its origin: Its author was from Norfolk.

The message read:

This bottle is part of a marine water currents project. Please send an email with the date and location of where you found it. Send the email to: 

bottletrackrva@outlook.com 

Reference # L-232022 

Next, please put this note back in the bottle and relaunch the bottle, at outgoing tide if possible. 

Thank you. 

This bottle was launched__Dec. 23, 2022

From Norfolk, VA USA

Eggar, the other dive instructors and her boss, Chris Gauntlett, at Blue Water Divers in Bermuda, emailed the address but have not received a response.

None, including Gauntlett, who has been professionally diving for 30 years, has ever found a message in a bottle, and they want the public’s help to solve the mystery.

Gauntlett said it was blind luck that they found the bottle at all.

The day began as a routine morning. Gauntlett, Eggar and another instructor, Justin Hendrix, left the dock around 9 to take a small group of clients scuba diving near West Blue Cut. When they reached the coral reef, they anchored in a spot they never had before and descended in two groups.

Hendrix’s group resurfaced first and reported to Gauntlett that they’d spotted an uncharted wreck in the water, which was about 50 feet deep. Gauntlett, the captain, wanted to take a look himself and left the boat just as Eggar was surfacing.

“I didn’t have enough air in my tank to go down with him,” she said. “So, I decided that I would watch from the surface … and I look to my right and see something behind me.”

She swam toward it thinking it might be trash, “a beer can or something.”

But as she neared, her excitement grew. She fought through a strong current and seized the bottle. She felt an immediate urge to shout to the others about what she’d found but first focused on making it to a dragline, a rope about 35 feet long towed behind the boat for returning and tired divers to grab.

As soon as she grabbed the line, she screamed to Hendrix:

“I’ve got a message in a bottle!”

Hoping it was a treasure map, she opened the bottle as soon as Gauntlett returned from exploring the wreck. Although the message didn’t contain an X marking a spot, its description of an oceanic research project was, to Eggar, like gold of a different sort.

“I’m an ocean lover. I love other people who are as intrigued as I am in the ocean.”

Anyone with information about the message in the bottle can contact Blue Water Divers Bermuda through WhatsApp at +1 441 234-1034.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

PARIS (AP) — Sure, they call it the City of Light. But Paris is also the City of Fashion, one of most influential fashion capitals of the world for decades, no, centuries (remember Louis XIV?)

So it’s no surprise that fashion designers across the globe are busy getting their national team uniforms ready for their unique spotlight. When it comes to high-end Olympic fashion — be it for festive opening ceremonies, or for competition — all runways lead to Paris.

Stella Jean will be there, styling each of Haiti’s dozen or so athletes herself. Jean, an Italian-Haitian designer based in Rome, figures she has exactly two seconds, on opening ceremony night, to make an impression on the world — an impression that may reverberate for years. “For these athletes, it’s a victory just to be here,” says Jean, whose vivid, colorful design is intended to highlight the cultural vitality of the Caribbean nation.

On the other end of the size (and budget) spectrum is Ralph Lauren, who will outfit hundreds of athletes of the US team at opening and closing ceremonies, for the ninth time. Lauren, who’s presenting a casual look of blue jeans and blazers, is of course one of the world’s richest designers, along with Giorgio Armani, who has been designing Italy’s uniforms since 2012.

Countless other designers have gotten involved — including, this year, more young, “indie” labels eager to make a splash. It’s also a chance to emphasize qualities such as sustainability in fashion and adaptability, too, as in designs for the Paralympics.

“Designers and manufacturers now realize this can be a huge platform for them, for many things,” says Alison Brown, who co-hosts a podcast on all things Olympics, “Keep the Flame Alive.” For example: “Sustainability is a huge buzzword now for this whole Olympics,” she says.

And so is style — because, well, Paris.

“You always want to represent your country, and you want to represent the athletes. But it seems like this time, the pressure to do it well has been turned up a notch,” Brown says.

Some emerging details on various uniform designs:

Canada: A focus on inclusivity, adaptability

During the design process, the team from Lululemon, outfitting Canada’s athletes for the second time, says they listened carefully to the athletes, and how they felt in the clothes. “When you feel your best, you perform your best,” says Audrey Reilly, creative director for Team Canada at the athletic apparel company.

She recalls listening to Alison Levine, a Paralympian who uses a wheelchair, and learning the athlete had nothing suitable to train in — so she wore medical scrubs.

“I was shocked that a professional athlete had to do that,” Reilly said in an interview. So we said, “Let’s investigate.” One result was a “seated carpenter pant,” part of a collection intended to be inclusive and adaptable. Other features include special closures to facilitate putting on and taking off garments, and pockets at the knees so an athlete like Levine can access her phone when training.

The collection covers all aspects of Team Canada’s journey, from travel to the games, to opening and medal ceremonies, to training — everything except competition. To combat the expected searing Paris heat, Lululemon, which has a four-Games deal with the team, paid special attention to ventilation and wicking.

And for opening ceremonies, designers created what they call a “tapestry of pride.” Hand-drawn and engineered into the fabric, it includes 10 animals — nine representing the provinces of Canada and one representing France. “We wanted to evoke all of Canada, coast to coast and north to south,” Reilly says.

Haiti: “They know their bodies are a flag”

Stella Jean is used to designing beautiful clothes. But beauty for beauty’s sake was not a consideration in her designs for Haiti’s team. It was all about the message.

“This will be the first good news coming out of Haiti in at least the last three years,” she says, the athletes’ appearance a counter-message to news about political turmoil, poverty or natural disasters. “So, I felt the responsibility to say as much as I can about the country.”

For that, Jean is collaborating with Haitian artist Philippe Dodard, whose vibrant painting will be incorporated into the ceremonial uniforms — a brightly hued skirt for women and pants for men, paired with traditional items like a chambray shirt. The designs have been constructed from “leftover” fabric — sustainability, yes, but not because it is trendy, says Jean, but because in Haiti it’s both a tradition and a necessity.

Jean calls the Haitian athletes “ambassadors.”

“These ambassadors will be there, in Paris,” she says, “and they all know, even if they are very, very young, how important their presence is — and that it’s not just about performance. They know their bodies are a flag.”

USA: “Nothing says America like blue jeans”

For the last summer games in steamy Tokyo, Ralph Lauren outfitted athletes with something cool — literally — a technology that directed heat away through a fan device at the back of the neck.

For steamy Paris, he’s introducing another type of cool: good old American jeans.

“Nothing says America like blue jeans, especially when we’re in Paris,” said David Lauren, the label’s chief branding and innovation officer and the founder’s son, upon revealing the design in June.

For its ninth turn dressing Team USA for opening and closing ceremonies, Ralph Lauren says it will be fitting each athlete personally. For the opening ceremony they’ll be wearing tailored navy blazers with blue-and-white striped Oxford shirts — and those blue jeans.

For the closing ceremony, the team will wear white jeans with matching jackets in red, white and blue. Lauren called the closing ceremony looks “more graphic, more fun, a little more exciting.”

India: Mixing old and new

Indian designer Tarun Tahiliani is known for his ability to meld traditional elements with a modern sensibility. And that’s what he and his menswear brand Tasva has tried to do for his country’s Olympic team.

Tahiliani told GQ India that when he began doing research for India’s opening ceremony uniform, he noted a trend of countries incorporating their national flags into the design. So he began working on a design featuring the tricolor hues of saffron, white and green.

For men, Tahiliani began with a kurta, the typical Asian long and loose shirt. He paired that with a bundi, or traditional sleeveless jacket. He told the magazine he wears a bundi every day, inspired by his father, who was an admiral in the Indian navy.

After feedback from the Olympic committee, the designer moved away from a uniform-like look for women, opting for a sari, which he says “can flatter any body type, and that’s exactly what we want for our female athletes.”

All the designs incorporate embroidery of saffron and green. “The goal is to create outfits that empower our athletes to represent India with pride and confidence,” Tahiliani said.

Italy: A mix of elegance and tradition

Italian athletes will be elegantly attired in Emporio Armani uniforms, as they have for every Olympics since 2012.

The podium tracksuit is emblazoned with “W Italia,” shorthand for “Eviva Italia,” or, “Long live Italy.” The motto could extend to designer Giorgio Armani himself, who turned 90 on July 11.

“Seeking new solutions for the athlete’s kit, which must blend elegance with practicality, is always an exciting challenge for me,″ Armani said last year when the national kit was presented at the Spring-Summer 2024 runway show for the youthful and sporty Emporio Armani brand.

The athletes’ tracksuits are in Armani blue, which has long been the color of the designer’s daily uniform, either as a T-shirt or fine pullover.

Athletes will have no excuse for not knowing the national anthem: the beginning is printed inside the collar of the polo shirts, and the entire first verse is inside the jackets.

Britain: Four nations, not one

The 60-year old British clothing brand Ben Sherman, known for its menswear, is creating Britain’s Olympic uniforms for the third time, and this year wants to remind the world that Britain is four nations, not one.

Its design for the opening and closing ceremonies “represents the unity and diversity of the UK, reflecting the rich tapestry of our nation’s identity.” says the label’s creative director, Mark Williams.

Williams described in an email his new four-nation floral motif, featuring a rose, thistle, daffodil and shamrock, serving as “a nod to the unique identities and histories of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.”

Williams stresses the motif is not purely decorative, but meant to send a message of collaboration and unity. His floral motif appears is in colors of blue and red — on polo shirts, worn with a bomber jacket, and also on colorful socks, in a collaboration with the Happy Socks brand.

South Korea: Inspiration from a national symbol

South Korea’s athletes will sport uniforms inspired by the country’s national “taegeuk” circular symbol, which occupies the center of its flag. The red-and-blue circle connotes harmony between the negative cosmic forces of the blue portion and the positive cosmic forces of the red.

The motifs on the North Face-branded uniforms also include one of the four black trigrams (groups of bars) from the flag’s corners, according to Youngone Outdoor Co., an official partner of the country’s Olympic committee which produces and distributes North Face clothing in South Korea. The trigram being used symbolizes water.

A uniform for medal ceremonies features a jacket depicting the indigo blue waters off the country’s east coast in an ink-wash painting style, a red belt and black pants, Youngone says.

Team Korea’s uniform for opening and closing ceremonies was designed by Musinsa Standard, a private-label brand run by South Korean online fashion store Musinsa. The all-light blue uniform includes a blazer, its lining engraved with traditional white and blue porcelain designs, a traditional-style belt and slacks.

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Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, Leanne Italie in New York and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.

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AP Olympic coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Hampton Roads residents can hear several great stories from professional storytellers as part of  “Everybody’s Got a Story: Hampton Storytelling Festival,” a free festival in Hampton taking place Thursday through Sunday.

Johnson and professional storyteller Sheila Arnold first organized Hampton’s Storytelling Festival last year. Johnson said she wanted to do something that “would help people talk to each other” and that she could think of no better vehicle for that than storytelling.

Johnson, 85, said she likes to mostly tell personal narratives — stories about her family and friends or key events from her generation. While she tells different stories depending on the audience, she said this year she will likely tell a story about Bay Shore Beach — a beach that was once a popular destination for Black swimmers and sunbathers and was adjacent to Buckroe Beach, which was whites-only when segregation was in effect.

“Bay Shore was the queen of beaches,” Johnson recalled. “It had everything — bumper cars and Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds, a picnic area, a dance hall. It had some of everything. I would walk from my house to Bay Shore Beach at least twice a week.”

Johnson hopes the events encourage people to be more comfortable telling stories about their families, why they came to Hampton, or stories that connect them with others.

“In today’s world, too many people are talking at each other and not to each other,” Johnson said. “So [this event] is not just a nice thing to do, it actually has purpose.”

The weekend of events will feature seven nationally recognized professional storytelling artists telling various stories — from fables and fairy tales to personal stories to historical accounts. Some stories are serious, while others are designed to make people laugh.

“There are all kinds of stories to be told, and so we think it’s pretty fascinating,” Johnson said. “We’re not reading — we are not telling stories from our notes. We are telling stories from our heads and our hearts.”

Storytellers include combat-decorated retired Army paratrooper Ray Christian, actor and playwright Valerie Davis, motivational speaker and workshop facilitator Via Goode, actress and writer Sarah Brady, humorist Andy Offutt Irwin. It will also feature Dylan Pritchett, a Williamsburg native and full-time storyteller who was president of The National Association of Black Storytellers, Inc.

Johnson wants to “get closer to the people” by holding storytelling events in numerous locations throughout the city.  This year’s storytelling venues include the Woman’s Club of Hampton, various churches and the Hampton History Museum.

“Hampton has a very rich history as a city, and I think that Hampton has such a diverse population that if people started to tell their own stories, it would really build the richness of the culture,” Johnson said. “So we would really hope that storytelling will become a part of Hampton’s culture by our efforts.”

According to Johnson, last year’s inaugural storytelling event drew a crowd of roughly 300 people, and she hopes for a significantly larger turnout this year.

The storytelling festival kicks off with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the Woman’s Club of Hampton and continues with themed performances throughout the weekend. From 1 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, attendees can try their hand and storytelling and receive feedback in a story swap at the Hampton Baptist Church Fellowship Hall.

For a full listing of the weekend’s events, visit www.hamptonstorytelling.art.

Josh Janney, joshua.janney@virginiamedia.com

“Frida conveyed the power of each individual,” said art researcher and curator Ximena Jordán. “Her self-portraits are a reminder of the ways in which we can exercise the power that life — or God, so to speak — has given us.”

Born in 1907 in Mexico City — where her “Blue House” remains open for visitors — Kahlo used her own personal experiences as a source of inspiration for her art.

The bus accident that she survived in 1925, the physical pain that she endured as a consequence and the tormented relationship with her husband — Mexican muralist Diego Rivera — all nurtured her creativity.

Her take on life and spirituality sparked a connection between her paintings and her viewers, many of whom remain passionate admirers of her work on the 70th anniversary of her death.

One of the keys to understand how she achieved this, Jordán said, lies in her self-portraits.

Kahlo appears in many of her paintings, but she did not portray herself in a naturalistic way. Instead, Jordán said, she “re-created” herself through symbols that convey the profoundness of interior human life.

“Diego and I” is the perfect example. Painted by Kahlo in 1949, it sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2021, an auction record for a work by a Latin American artist.

In the painting, Kahlo’s expression is serene despite the tears falling from her eyes. Rivera’s face is on her forehead. And, in the center of his head, a third eye, which signifies the unconscious mind in Hinduism and enlightenment in Buddhism.

According to some interpretations, the painting represents the pain that Rivera inflicted on her. Jordán, though, offers another reading.

“The religiosity of the painting is not in the fact that Frida carries Diego in her thoughts,” Jordán said. “The fact that she bears him as a third eye, and Diego has a third eye of his own, reflects that his affection for her made her transcend to another dimension of existence.”

In other words, Kahlo portrayed how individuals connect to their spirituality through love.

“I connected with her heart and writings,” said Cris Melo, a 58-year-old American artist whose favorite Kahlo work is the aforementioned painting. “We had the same love language, and similar history of heartache.”

Melo, unlike Kahlo, did not go through a bus accident that punctured her pelvis and led to a life of surgeries, abortions and a leg amputation.

Still, Melo said, she experienced years of physical pain. And in the midst of that suffering, while fearing that resilience might slip away, she said to herself: “If Frida could handle this, so can I.”

Even if most of her artwork depicts her emotional and physical suffering, Kahlo’s paintings do not provoke sadness or helplessness. On the contrary, she is seen as a woman — not only an artist — strong enough to deal with a broken body that never weakened her spirit.

“Frida inspires many people to be consistent,” said Amni, a London-based Spanish artist who asked to be identified only by his artistic name and reinterprets Kahlo’s works with artificial intelligence.

“Other artists have inspired me, but Frida has been the most special because of everything she endured,” Amni said. “Despite her suffering, the heartbreak, the accident, she was always firm.”

For him, as for Melo, Kahlo’s most memorable works are those in which Rivera appears on her forehead, like a third eye.

According to Jordán, Kahlo touched a chord that most artists of her time did not. Influenced by revolutionary nationalism, muralists like Rivera or David Alfaro Siqueiros kept a distance from their viewers though intellectual works that mainly focused on their social, historic and political views.

Kahlo, on the other hand, was not shy in portraying her physical disabilities, her bisexuality and the diversity of beliefs that weigh on the human spirit.

In “The Wounded Deer,” for example, she is transformed into an animal whose body bleeds after being shot by arrows. And just like a martyr in Catholic imagery, Kahlo’s expression remains composed.

Aligned with a Marxist ideology, Kahlo thought that the Catholic Church was emasculating, meddlesome and racist. But in spite of her disdain toward the institution, she understood that devotion leads to a beneficial spiritual path.

A decade after her accident, probably overwhelmed by the fact that she survived, Kahlo started collecting votive offerings — tiny paintings that Catholics offer as gratitude for miracles. In her Blue House, the 473 votive offerings are still preserved.

Kahlo might have regarded her survival as a miracle, Jordán said. “The only difference is that she, due to her context, did not attribute that miracle to a deity of Catholic origin, but to the generosity of life.”

Perhaps that’s why, in her final days, she decided to paint a series of vibrant, colorful watermelons that would be her last work.

In that canvas, over a split watermelon lying underneath a clouded sky, she wrote: “Vida la vida,” or “Long live life.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.