Around Town

Shannon McAnally, who lives in Courthouse, is the reigning Miss Virginia USA and will compete for the national title live on NBC on Sunday, June 16.

Though she will be representing Virginia, McAnnally is actually a native Texan. She moved to Arlington just over a year ago to help her family expand its construction business to Virginia.


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MacDonald, who is playing IOTA Club (2832 Wilson Blvd) tonight with two fellow Strathmore Artists in Residence, seems destined for bigger things. A five-time Washington Area Music Award winner, MacDonald received “a little bit” of national recognition in the past year, when her self-funded album, Walls, made a list of possible GRAMMY nominees for Best Album of the Year.

Walls was actually the teen’s third album. Her first came out when she was 12, about three years after she started classic opera training. During her young career, MacDonald has veered from very folk-oriented to “completely hard rock” to what she now describes as “pop acoustic rock with a bit of a world influence.”


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But Clarendon resident H. Paul Moon is not your average government lawyer. He’s a composer, playwright and blogger who only recently added filmmaking to his list of side-projects. Earlier this month, he became an “award-winning” filmmaker at Arlington’s Rosebud Film and Video Festival.

Moon won the festival’s “Best of Show” award for El Toro, a short experimental film that seeks to make a visual connection between Spanish bullfighting and the passion of the Christ.


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Korean Burger Joint Looks To Arlington — Kraze Burger is coming to the D.C. area, and the Korean company has its sights set on Arlington. So far, though, no leases have been signed in the county. More from the Washington Business Journal.

BBC Visits Ray’s Hell Burger — President Obama’s burger summit with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev continues to pay publicity dividends for Ray’s Hell Burger. BBC News recently came calling and got a tour of the über-busy burger joint from owner Michael Landrum.


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Around 12:30 this afternoon, outside the Courthouse Metro, it was a springtime scene to delight the senses.

The warmth of the sun reflecting off the sidewalk. The smell of Cubano sandwiches wafting over from the Rebel Heroes truck. The sight of smiling, sunglasses-clad people, taking in the perfect weather after an extra-dreary start to the week.


Around Town

The following is excerpted from the blog Every Food Fits.

Five years ago he was living in Georgia, working as a chef and teaching cooking classes at a cookware shop, a job that he loved. Then, when his wife’s career moved them to Washington, D.C., Kiss took it as an opportunity to change his career.