Omnibus

By Michelle Dixon

Courtney Kohout, owner of Courtney’s Cookies, has a voice that stands with pride and confidence of who she is and what she has to offer. She knows not every customer who tastes her gluten-free organic cookies will love them, but she believes most people will.

The many days spent learning how to bake from her grandmother are evident in the soft, fluffy texture of her cookies.

But her ability to educate her customers on healthy eating comes from a different experience.

Learning from recovery

Kohout was once a teenager who ate ice cream sandwiches and cheesecakes. Out of guilt, she stuck her finger in her throat to force herself to throw up the cheesecake she ate.

“That’s twisted to say,” Kohout said. “But it tasted good after I threw it up. It was sweet and creamy.”

Kohout struggled with an eating disorder from middle school to college. But after overcoming the disorder, Kohout used her knowledge of healthy eating and baking to create Courtney’s Cookies, a business that uses organic ingredients to create vegan gluten-free cookies.

At 8 years old, Kohout was diagnosed with precocious puberty, a condition that caused her bones to overdevelop. Once a month, her dad’s mother, who was a nurse, injected her with hormones to counteract the growth of her bones.

Over time, she gained weight from the symptoms of the injections, but, at that age, she wasn’t bothered by her weight. When her attention directed to boys in middle school, her size mattered.

Like many other girls, she spent her time drawing hearts around the names of cute boys in her diary. But she believed her weight prevented any boy from noticing her.

So, she would eat one ice cream sandwich for the whole day and tell her mother she ate dinner at school. Desserts and treats replaced her meals, while her size remained the same. Kohout said she weighed 140 pounds and was overweight. Her thick curly hair was the only part of her that was thinning.

She found a new diet in high school that required her to eat 40 percent protein, 30 percent carbs and 30 percent fat. Her size went down, and boys, who once saw her as invisible, started to notice her.

But her health was still unstable. Kohout was now obsessed with memorizing nutritional facts and counting the amount of calories in her food.

“Do you know how many calories are in a cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory?” Kohout said. With her eyes widened, she said over 800 calories and 100 grams of carbs.

“Knowing what I knew about nutrition, I was just like ‘I can’t keep that inside my body,’” Kohout said.

Kohout would throw it up any junk food she ate. At one point, she didn’t need to use her fingers to vomit. “I could just make it happen,” she said.

Returning home

When Kohout attended college in Miami, her emotional health declined even more. After graduation, she returned home to Ohio and searched for a holistic way to achieve a healthy lifestyle. For an entire summer, she learned about different diets and decided her version of a healthy lifestyle would be eating what she wanted in moderation.

“I spent all of those years being restrictive, and I just couldn’t live like that anymore,” Kohout said. “I couldn’t be afraid of food anymore.”

When she moved back to Miami, she worked as a health coach for Liana Werner-Gray, author of “The Earth Diet.” Kohout said Werner-Gray asked her to promote a Spanish flour called tigernut.

Kohout used the baking skills she learned as a child to experiment with this new flour. Kohout’s mother, Susie Kohout, said Courtney spent hours cooking with her grandmother. Kohout said her grandmother lives in the house behind her parents’ home, so she would invite Kohout to make cookies with her. She said her grandmother was like Mother Teresa in the kitchen, always patient with her as a beginner.

Her grandmother passed on the knowledge of cooking to Kohout’s mom and her aunts. “I think my grandma has this idea of ‘You’re part of this family, so you’re going to cook,’” Kohout said.

A healthy twist on an old recipe

Under her grandmother’s guidance, Kohout learned how to bake chocolate chip cookies with basic ingredients: white flour, white sugar, eggs and butter. But Kohout wanted Courtney’s Cookies to be different from traditional chocolate chip cookies and the flavorless taste of gluten-free cookies. So, she used the tigernut flour as a substitute for white flour and mixed together oat flour, vanilla, chocolate chips and other ingredients to create a smooth, thick dough.

Regular dough is thinner and has no substance because of refined ingredients, but her dough retains its wholesome consistency, she said. The finished product is a nutrient-packed cookie that leaves behind sweet subtle traces of vanilla and chocolate on the tongue.

Marley Palmer, Kohout’s former roommate, said she needed only one cookie to experience full satisfaction. Palmer said the rich smell of Kohout’s cookies would infiltrate every corner of their apartment. She said her friends, who lived next door, could smell the cookies from their apartment and would ask Palmer to bring some over.

Most people who tasted her cookies urged Kohout to start a cookie business, but the intense labor of starting a business discouraged her from trying. Meanwhile, her fiance, Frank Leon, was also considering the risks of helping her develop the business, but he trusted in Kohout’s cookies and decided to go all in.

A business is born

Leon quit his job at Carnival and began filling out paperwork to start the business in May 2016.  Five months later, Courtney’s Cookies was established.

When the business started, it took up to 14 hours to produce 400 cookies in Kohout’s oven. Fights and emotional breakdowns erupted between Kohout and Leon during bake days, she said.

Then, a customer recommended a commercial kitchen for them to use, and they were finally able to have order during their bake days.

When Kohout arrives, Leon has an 80-quart bowl ready for her to mix ingredients. “He prepares the numbers, and I just bake,” Kohout said.  “I just honestly throw everything in the bowl and bam, they’re just good.”

Kohout said their cookies are now in five local stores in Miami, and she hopes to expand. They sell six different flavors: chocolate chip, chocolate raspberry, chocolate mint, chocolate coconut, peanut butter chocolate and sunflower seed raisin.

When she sells her cookies at events, some of her regular customers are already familiar with their favorite flavors, some ask for direction on what to choose, some ask for health advice and others seek conversation. But each customer is welcomed with a self-assured smile and a simple question by Kohout: “Would you like to try a free sample of gluten-free cookies?”

Some of her favorite customers are the ones who dislike the taste of vegan products. After they try it, she said they can’t believe her cookies are vegan and gluten-free.

“That’s like my mission with Courtney’s Cookies,” Kohout said. “To get rid of that stigma that healthy food can’t be delicious.”

Edited by Mimi Tomei

By Trent Brown

Captain Jack Sparrow from “Pirates of the Caribbean” and Negan’s baseball bat named “Lucille” from “The Walking Dead” aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. However, in the white house on the corner of Lindsay Street, they’re talked about together all the time.

Jacqueline “Jackie” Lucille, a Havanese dog, is one of the many pets owned by a UNC student that you might come across while walking through campus on a sunny afternoon, taking a trip to the outdoor patio at He’s Not Here or even in classrooms. She makes her own case for being one of the most special pets in Chapel Hill.

Physically, Jackie doesn’t hold a lot of common characteristics with her namesakes. Standing less than 1 foot tall and no more than 4 inches wide, the tiny mound of fur greets anyone who enters the door with her toothy smile and a bark (or two!). However, it only takes about 10 seconds—or even less if you pet her fast enough—for Jackie to become a friend of yours. She likes to skip the acquaintance stage.

Jackie is affectionately referred to as “little cow” by her owner’s friends, due to her white fur covered in black inkblots on both of her ears and down her back. She roams around the room like she’s on a mission to find something—probably attention—abiding by her attention-seeking namesake Jack Sparrow. It’s easy to see why Hannah Bultman, the owner of this bright little pup, keeps her around.

For the past year or so, Jackie has kept Bultman company in their crowded two-story house, after her brother bought the dog and found that he could not take care of her. Bultman decided that she would gladly take in and support the dog; but support isn’t just what Bultman does for Jackie—it’s what Jackie provides for Bultman.

Bultman registered Jackie as an emotional support dog this past year, because the puppy does exactly that for her. “I’m a very introverted person, and I like being alone,” said Bultman. “But Jackie makes it a little more possible to be alone. She’s been really good for me.”

According to the American College Health Association, nearly one in six college students struggle with anxiety. Although there are many ways to cope with anxiety, for Bultman, a chemistry and Spanish major, there is no better way than the presence of a dog, big or small, that just wants to get attention, and maybe give a little back.

And that’s Jackie. She doesn’t like to fetch balls, but instead mashed-down plastic Mountain Dew bottles, or really whatever she can fit her mouth around—even if she really can’t. Occasionally, she will take things from Bultman’s roommates’ rooms and bring it to her Butlman’s door, as a gift. She also finds herself at almost every chapter meeting at UNC’s Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity, making it more enjoyable for everyone there.

Don’t bring out a balloon though, or you’ll have to coax her out from under the bed. It won’t take too long for her to get her to bounce back to her normal exuberance—a blissful bounce at that.

 Mac, the snake charmer

“I told my mom I wanted a pony or a snake,” said Mac Harrison, now in her third year at UNC, recalling what kind of pet she wanted for her birthday five years ago.

The 4-foot long albino corn snake named Tyrell finds his home in a large tank at Harrison’s house. He’s a good boy, or girl, in Harrison’s eyes, who, due to the ambiguity and difficulty of determining a snake’s sex, has relied on a gut feeling that her pet is a Tyrell and not a Tyreisha.

Unlike a Jackie, or most any kind of furry friend for that matter, Tyrell doesn’t have a conventional personality. However, Harrison is certain that he does have one, and it’s one that loves to spend time with her.

And although you may never see Tyrell getting taken for a walk through McCorkle Place on campus, you might find Tyrell at home watching television with his owner, because that’s his personal favorite pastime. Snuggled inside her hair or arms, because snakes don’t like to sit—they like to hide.

Beginning next year, Harrison will have her snake with her in Chapel Hill at her apartment, because her current dorm does not allow tanks like Tyrell’s, and she cannot wait. The slithery not-so-little guy with orange skin, who only requires food once per month in the shape of a frozen mouse, and shows his affection by simply laying on you, will surely be treated like a king during his time in Chapel Hill.

“I wrap him around my neck like a little scarf and he just hangs out,” said Harrison, as her eyes glistened, longing to be back with her boy.

Capturing cuteness

It started with a fun idea between two friends.

Alex Kormann and Isabel Donnolo asked each other: “Why don’t we start one of those dog Instagram accounts?” The @DogsOfUNC Instagram account began during FallFest in 2016, and now has over 1,700 followers, mostly comprised of UNC students.

The Instagram account’s process is fairly simple. Kormann or Donnolo will notice a dog in the quad, or somewhere else on campus, and they’ll ask the owner: “Hi, can I take a picture of your dog?” Recently they have even begun taking requests for short photo shoots on campus with dogs.

Kormann noted that, interestingly enough, he has yet to be turned down after asking to photograph someone’s dog. He always gets an excited “yes.”

Each dog portrait is then posted to the Instagram account, usually with a short caption of their name and their age, and accumulates over 400 likes at a time. It’s not about the internet fame for the photographers, but more so the catharsis of the process.

In the mix of being a photography major and doing other work, Kormann said that taking pictures of dogs is a “therapeutic way to keep on keeping on.”

The photos come with a bit of fun, too. The picture of Simba, one of the account’s most “liked” puppy, was likely the most memorable photoshoot for Kormann. The little 8-week-old golden retriever ran around for over 20 minutes in the campus’ lower quad, with Kormann trailing behind, never stopping to offer a still shot for a picture. Finally, the puppy stopped, squatted and peed, before finally laying down and submitting to all photography needs.

“The memorability is definitely in the cuteness,” Kormann said, with a laugh.

Edited by Liz Chen

By Lauren Moody

“As a child, my dad let me drop the beans in the rows,” Catherine Green said with a soft and sweet Southern twang as she recalled memories of growing up on a tobacco farm in Alamance County during the 1930s and ‘40s. “I got the privilege of dropping a bean every couple inches and covering it up, and that was just fun for me.”

Alamance County was a small farming community where families worked in the fields under the sun during the day and enjoyed one another’s presence on their porches during the cooler evenings. There was a main street where teenagers could be found sipping Coca-Colas at the soda fountain, but what sticks out to Catherine — at 91 years old — is the time spent with her family on the farm.

She is the youngest of six brothers and sisters, and from a young age, she helped her mother in the garden or the kitchen cooking and canning the foods their farm produced.

A little hobby sparks a big tradition

For Catherine or “Cacci,” pronounced like khaki, as family and close friends call her, her passion for gardening turned into a lifelong hobby. It’s a passion that passed to her granddaughter Catie, and also unites Cacci’s retirement community with an annual tomato sandwich party for which Cacci grows tomatoes and hosts each year.

Cacci is the oldest person in her retirement community with a garden plot. She plants 11 different types of tomatoes each year with a plan to share them with her 35 neighbors. The tomato sandwich party is the annual event that they plan their vacations around, and it has become a tradition that began 10 years ago and won’t stop as long as the tomatoes keep growing.

“A tomato that you’ve grown yourself has more flavor,” she said. “I don’t buy tomatoes in the winter. To me they taste like cardboard. But it’s just the sweetness—the longer you leave them on the vine to turn and ripen, the sweeter they are.”

The idea for the party came to be when Cacci’s dining room table, which seats 12, was overflowing with containers of ripened tomatoes because, as Cacci says, “You never put a tomato in the refrigerator.” One day, a neighbor came over and said, “Make me a tomato sandwich,” to which Cacci responded, “We’ll just have tomato sandwiches for everyone.”

To please the abundance of opinions at the party every July, Cacci ensures there’s lettuce and an array of breads, although her classic sandwich is composed of white bread and Duke’s mayonnaise. Due to the debate over mayonnaise between her neighbors, she also buys Hellmann’s and a gluten free brand. Another neighbor argued you can’t have a tomato sandwich without bacon, so they provide the bacon and someone else brings a dessert.

“I didn’t realize it would amount to anything,” she said. “It was just something that I enjoyed doing for the court and they all pitch in and help, and they look forward to it every year.”

Cacci’s love of hard work and busy days

Doing something for others isn’t a once-a-year event for Cacci. Her entire life has been devoted to helping and serving others.

“Her nature is one to always work,” her son Rick said. “We visited Catie, and she stayed in the kitchen the whole time. Her personality is ‘I’m going to contribute via my work effort.’”

During the week, Cacci volunteers her time at her church and the local hospital in Burlington. She also attends five exercise classes a week, including Zumba, core and a high intensity “workout-of-the-week” class.

Her dedication and work ethic inspires her family and everyone who knows her. Last Christmas before her 90th birthday, she held a four-minute plank in a planking contest against her grandchildren.

Cacci passed her “gardening gene” to her granddaughter 

The tomato doesn’t fall far from the vine. The work ethic and gardening gene passed to Catie, who lives on a farm in Monterey, Virginia. She and her husband, Jim, got into the chicken business and plan to have over three thousand chickens this summer. Her passion for gardening developed in college when she decided to go out and dig up the backyard to plant a garden.

“I would definitely say Cacci was my role model when I was younger,” Catie said. “We would talk about gardening and be able to connect even that much more, and I felt like I had more than just the name in connection with her—I had this passionate hobby that we both loved.”

Cacci visited Catie and Jim at their farm in Virginia this winter. She held chickens, drank raw milk, walked their property and saw how they trade with neighbors to ensure freshly sourced food.

Cacci remembers her roots by observing her granddaughter’s future

“She was connecting in all of these great ways that I know is therapy for her,” Catie said. “I know that all of that kind of stuff is therapy for somebody in an older age range to bring back those roots and childhood memories.”

Just as Cacci provides fresh tomatoes to a community who doesn’t have access to a garden or the skills to grow them, Catie and Jim provide chickens to a community that lacks in the poultry department. One day, they hope to bring their community together to host a chicken barbecue just as Cacci throws the tomato sandwich party.

“It’s amazing that she’s chosen to do this,” Catie said. “She pulls together more than just her community—she really tries to get people involved. I love that she’s not just trying to age through life, but she’s actually trying new things at a later stage in her life and she’s continuing very strong.”

The tomato party will go on this year as Cacci’s neighbor offered to help her with the garden by completing the manual labor of digging up the holes. Her strict exercise routine may be re-prioritized behind gardening, or in Cacci’s determined yet humble words, “Either that or get up early and work late.”

Edited by: Savannah Morgan

By Jackeline Lizama

The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Rubi Franco Quiroz, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, was in a class where the professor was speaking about the election. He discussed how people lashing out on Trump supporters would not help anyone.

Quiroz was in tears during the discussion. She knew that the election would affect her life negatively. The professor saw how upset Quiroz was but continued speaking on the issue and openly asked the class, “How can we move forward and do things to support students like Rubi?”

“When she said that I was completely caught off guard and I couldn’t stay in the classroom any longer, and I left.” Quiroz said. “I didn’t feel like I had a place to go.”

From embarrassment to empowerment

After this experience, Quiroz felt it was her responsibility to make sure that nobody would have to experience the embarrassment and discomfort she had felt, or that anyone, especially DACA students, have a place to go to within the university.

For many people, the day after the 2016 presidential election meant end of the talk of politics for another term, but for others it meant their life could potentially change. Less than a year after the election, the Trump administration decided to repeal the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA.

Thousands of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are called, including Quiroz have expressed fear and worry about what will happen in the upcoming months now that DACA no longer exists.

“There is just so many people, so many brilliant people, so close to the end line and I feel like it is my job to really advocate for them and for myself,” Quiroz said.

Quiroz organizes many events at UNC-CH to raise awareness about DACA, and speaks on behalf of other DACA recipients. She also serves as a mentor and family instructor for Scholar’s Latino Initiative, an organization that helps Latino and Latina high school students excel in their academic careers.

She has been working very closely with the administration at UNC-CH for nearly two years to try to implement resources for undocumented students.

“Obviously with DACA being rescinded there’s a huge urgency around gaining more support for undocumented people in general, now more than ever,” Quiroz said

Scholarly success does not always translate to security

Quiroz came to the United States from the border town Reynosa in Tamaulipas, Mexico when she was 6 years old. She grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and has lived in the town for 15 years.

During Quiroz’s senior year of high school, she was in the top five percent of her graduating class. She was active in her school and her community, and did everything she was advised to do to get into a good college.

After everything she did in high school, she felt betrayed when applying to colleges was her biggest struggle. Quiroz applied to 27 colleges out of fear she was not going to get into any of them because of her immigration status.

“I never imagined that it was going to be that difficult for me to be sure that I was going to continue my education, which is all I had ever wanted,” Quiroz said.

Even though she has lived the majority of her life in North Carolina, she is still expected to pay for out-of-state tuition at UNC-CH. DACA has allowed Quiroz to work jobs within the university and receive the tax refunds that were being withheld from her before she had a social security number. Quiroz is able to have everything she owns and that her parents own under her name, but could essentially have it all taken away now that DACA has been rescinded.

Kristen Gardner met Quiroz during her first year at UNC-CH as a part of the Carolina Hispanic Association, where Quiroz was director of communications.

“She is a driven individual that has fought through various personal battles, but still makes fighting for others her first priority,” Gardner said. “I deeply respect her for her work especially in advocacy concerning immigrant rights.”

Quiroz also worked on the One State, One Rate campaign with Gardner to advocate for in-state tuition rates for undocumented students. “Advocacy work is always taxing and frustrating, but Rubi has been a dedicated leader over the years, never stepping down from the challenges,” Gardner said.

Devotion to the dream

Barbara Sostaita, a second-year UNC graduate student in religious studies, hosted an event with Quiroz called “DACA in Crisis” on September 18, just a few weeks after the DACA program was rescinded. It was meant to raise awareness and provide a safe space for undocumented students. The event filled the auditorium, with over 500 people in attendance. The event hosted a panel of speakers including a current undocumented student, an undocumented alumni student, and two lawyers from two different firms in order to educate and properly support DACA students.

Quiroz is dedicated to helping her community in any way she can. What keeps her motivated to continue speaking on this issue is the hope that perhaps someday she could help her own parents.

She has seen all the hard work and sacrifices her parents have made for her and she would feel like she would be failing them if she did not speak up. “As I have always told everyone, they are truly the heroes in this story,” Quiroz said.

“I feel like it’s now my duty to protect them and make sure that their lives aren’t at risk, and I can’t do that if my own is. I can’t protect them if I have no grounds to protect myself.”

Quiroz is graduating in May of 2018, and will be working at a job she is very passionate about at the Student Success Agency. She is committed to advocating for her fellow Dreamers now more than ever.

Edited by Jack Smith

By Mimi Tomei

Anum Imran wore a scarlet hijab and a pinstripe sport coat, sleeves pushed up, with skateboard-style sneakers and high-waisted black jeans. She paced across the stage.

During her spoken word performance, she wove a narrative addressing racism, sexism and Islamophobia with images of cooking spicy dishes, juxtaposing identity and flavor.

Imran was joined by performers from cultural organizations like the UNC Arab Students Organization and performance-based groups like Blank Canvas Dance Company for Body Politics, an annual event in its fourth year that brings together performances to foster a conversation surrounding self-esteem, body image and identity.

Imran combined phrases of despair with hopeful ones, crafting metaphors that showed the conflicted relationship between parents and children through images like mangos. The snaps it elicited from the audience, responding to moving moments in the spoken word piece, roared with emotion despite their muted volume.

The event took place in the auditorium of the Sonja Hanes Stone Center for Black History and Culture. It was an evening of dance, music and discussion, but more than that, it was an evening of moving moments for people of many identities.

Imran wasn’t the only performer who addressed her many backgrounds. Harmonyx performed a set comprised entirely of covers of songs by black artists, from Michael Jackson to Andra Day. The performers, an a Capella group founded by UNC’s Black Student Movement, wore t-shirts with a black power fist grasping a microphone printed across the back.

Missing voices 

Though both of these groups were diverse in backgrounds and gender, the three panelists of the event acknowledged the importance of recognizing one major identity missing from both the panel and the conversation of body image as a whole – men.

Nicho Stevens, a member of UNC’s Student Hip Hop Organization, was a male performer in a program that featured more male performers than it drew in audience members. Stevens’ piece, interrupted only by the occasional siren-like screams of the oft-malfunctioning microphone, charted a course that included the impact of racially charged comments, identity and masculinity.

Stevens said hip-hop allows musicians to express emotions with something not found in other forms of expression such as conversation – freedom. This freedom in style, verse and rhythm lends itself to engaging conversations on emotional topics.

“It’s like reaching into your soul,” Stevens said.

Stevens discussed how challenging it can be for men to recognize and talk about vulnerability when society expects them to be strong, confident and unemotional.

Gillian Fortier, who helped organize the event, said intersectional identities can affect self-esteem and make it harder for people with mental health challenges to seek treatment. Fortier recognized that her gender makes her participation in these discussions more socially accepted.

Unpacking issues 

Attendees submitted questions throughout the performances via Poll Everywhere, an app more familiar to UNC-Chapel Hill students for its use in taking attendance at lectures than for an extracurricular event.

Caroline Holcomb, Emily Hagstrom and Marissa Butler, the three panelists, facilitated a conversation following the performances that meandered through issues, including self-care while being an effective advocate for others, as well as personal stories from both the audience and panelists.

With only one panelist of color, though, the group had to come to terms with privilege in their discussion of self-worth.

“I feel it is particularly important to consider identity and privilege when it comes to exploring body image because we all have different bodies, receive different messages from society, culture, etc. and have different experiences in childhood and in relationships that may affect how we see our bodies,” said Holcomb, a social worker with UNC’s Counseling and Psychological Services. “And we must consider the unique intersection of all of these influences in order to reach a healthier, more accepting place within ourselves when it comes to body image.”

Remember to marvel

The evening started out with a Spotify playlist of empowering songs like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star,” Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” and Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.” But these messages of self-love can fall on deaf ears when people don’t feel they can love themselves. Panelists, event organizers and audience members noted that body positivity can often involve telling people to be proud of their bodies and not take any grief from anyone who says otherwise – even if that person is themselves.

“Something in particular that struck me was the concept that you don’t always have to love your body,” Alexandra Smith, who attended the event, said. “You can just be content with it and that’s perfectly fine.”

Regardless of your identities, it’s important to marvel at the human body at a most basic, anatomical level, said Fortier, who is photo editor for Embody Carolina, an organization that trains students to support those with eating disorders.

Sometimes in the wave of body positivity, this appreciation for the innumerable chemical reactions, neural connections and cardiovascular processes it takes doctors four years of medical school to understand gets left behind – but Fortier summed it up in three one-syllable words.

“It does stuff.”

Edited by Janna Childers. 

By Rachel Jones

It’s hard to make out either side of the chalkboard around the crowd.

Facing away from Cat’s Cradle, it reads “DRAG QUEENS ARE COMING!” in big, angular letters, traced in bright blue and retraced in even brighter red.

The side facing Cat’s Cradle reads “LIQUOR,” in just one set of bold white letters with an arrow pointing to the bouncer in the doorway.

Denim and leather and lace sneak around the concrete back porch, squeezing past the rusty green rails that the chalkboard rests on. Everyone looks like they’re wearing highlighter; it lights up under the continuous camera flashes in front of the door.

Nobody is moving — the line is too congested. Boys in makeup and baseball hats laugh at each other. The girls around them wear the same, their pastels muted and dark under the evening sky.

Suddenly, a glimmer of beige cuts through the crowd. Naomi Dix is here.

Short and glamorous, the queen’s shiny latex dress clings to her frame. Her ombre wig flows to her shoulders, making her brown skin glow. Her makeup is traditionally feminine, but with a distinct drag edge; her cheeks are carved out in a bright contour, and her eyelids are swimming in stacks of fake lashes. She’s wearing a massive necklace and an even bigger smile as she greets a gaggle of barely-legal-looking students.

“Oh my god, people showed up,” she said, exclaiming in a feminine, nasally voice. She hugs tightly to fans with the bejeweled hand that’s not clutching a cocktail.

In an hour, she’ll be on stage, announcing Cat’s Cradle’s very first drag show, and one of the only ones in Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s recent memory.

The show is sold-out.

Drag queens have arrived.

Coming up in drag

A sold-out venue was never a guarantee. The night before, Dix sighed into the phone when asked about her turnout expectations.

“I’m not expecting a lot of people to show up,” she said. “Because after all, it is the first show at Cat’s Cradle that they’ve ever had when it comes to drag.”

Dix connected with Cat’s Cradle through a link between her drag family and the bar manager. The reference was bolstered by her recent win at Miss Hispanidad Gay 2017, a drag pageant run by Durham Latino advocacy organization El Centro Hispano.

Friday was her first Carrboro show, but it’s far from her first performance in drag. For her, drag is an outlet, a welcome escape from her day job.

“I have to be a little more kept to myself as Carlos because I work a full-time job. I can’t act like that every single day. So, to be able to work a full-time job from 8 to 5 and then get off, go home and put on makeup for two hours… and look outstandingly gorgeous for the next eight hours,” Dix said. “Who in their right mind wouldn’t mind wouldn’t want to do that?”

Dix is ingrained in Durham’s drag scene, performing and hosting regularly at the Pinhook. It’s normally a concert and event venue, featuring indie bands like Girlpool and Screaming Females alongside activist talks like the Bible Belt Abortion Storytelling Tour.

While drag has entered the mainstream with VH1’s hit show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” that hasn’t necessarily translated to great financial and social success for local drag queens. Like 26-year-old Dix, many of these queens keep a normal day job and set ambitions for a statewide tour, not a national one. This holds especially true in North Carolina, a state better known for basketball and barbecue than its thriving LGBTQ community.

Dix grew up around Raleigh, arguably the hub of drag in the state. It’s home to Legends, a sprawling gay club with drag nights that once hosted Porkchop, North Carolina’s first and only contribution to “Drag Race.”

But Dix didn’t pursue the Raleigh scene, which she perceived as closer to an old-school, man-to-woman form of drag. Instead, she chose Durham.

“What was alluring to me about Durham drag was the free spirit,” she said. “When I started drag, I definitely had this feeling of acceptance and this feeling that I wasn’t being judged as harshly as I may be judged if I’d been doing drag in Raleigh.”

As a beginning queen, she was taken under the wing of Vivica Coxx, one of the pioneers of the Durham scene as a refreshing and more genderqueer alternative to Raleigh drag. Dix’s surname alludes to her drag “family,” the House of Coxx. Led by Vivica, the group often takes gigs together and holds a weekly home-cooked dinner for its members. Now, Dix has drag children of her own, two of whom performed with her Friday night.

One of those queens was Margaret Snatcher, a big queen with even bigger hair. She’s an undergraduate at Duke University, where Dix frequently plans student events and performs.

“Having fun, Chapel Hill-Carrboro?” Snatcher said, hearing screams from the crowd in response.

She had just finished a number to Adele’s “Water Under the Bridge.” During the lip-sync, she reached out to the crowd for volunteers. These brave souls were then gently pointed to motorboat Snatcher’s fake breasts, which were made out of a half-gallon of cooked rice.

“And it’s a snack after the show because it is already cooked,” Snatcher said to loud applause.

Every time a head went under, the crowd roared.

“This is a sold-out drag show,” she said, still out of breath from the song. “You’re in the right place if you’re here right now and nowhere else tonight.”

First-year Nick Tapp-Hughes, who came with his boyfriend, was in the right place. It was his first drag show and his first time at Cat’s Cradle.

“I didn’t think it would be that fun to watch someone lip-sync, but it was really fun,” he said. “I hope that more drag shows happen. Hopefully.”

On stage, Snatcher is still heaving.

“You are lucky, you are lucky, and I want to get lucky tonight! Let me ask — Naomi, are you ready? Now, the queen of the night, Miss Naomi Dix.”

Looking ahead

Dix has been doing drag for four years, and for the past year, her schedule’s only gotten busier. She’s begun thinking about a long-term strategy and vision for her drag career.

She knows she’s popular with students and young crowds, something that Chapel Hill and Carrboro have in droves. Now she’s choosing these towns, the same way she chose Durham.

“I mean, this actually might be something that I can go ahead and take under my wing,” Dix said. “As of a month ago, Chapel Hill and Carrboro have become my new baby, and everyone that lives in Chapel Hill and lives in Carrboro now knows that they are a part of my family, and they are now my children.”

Edited by Megan Cain

By Jessica Abel

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Gina Likins, 49, has an email saved from 1996, written by the man she was dating at the time. It’s the most important email she’s ever received. In fact, she still keeps it printed in her office. It marked the beginning of a great love. But it wasn’t between her and her boyfriend.

The email marked the start of her career in technology.

“He wrote, ‘I heard a story on NPR this morning about a new way of accessing the internet,’” Likins said. “It’s supposed to be easier and more graphical. It’s called the World Wide Web.”

Likins sits in the Great Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill, her alma mater, as she tells this story. It’s just past 9 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 10, but the hall is already buzzing with energy from over 650 young women who are preparing to pull a tech-inspired all-nighter. They’re here for Pearl Hacks, a two-day, all-female hack-a-thon where women can code and create with other women. This is a rare occurrence in the tech industry.

Inception and evolution

Since its first event in 2014, Pearl Hacks has worked to fight gender imbalance and sexism in the tech world — a male-dominated, tough-guy culture known as brogramming — by providing a female-friendly space to collaborate.

And it’s working; Pearl Hacks has tripled in size over the last five years and welcomed women from across the country.

This year, women journeyed from schools like Emory, Georgia Tech and the University of Virginia. There’s a group from New York, too, and someone said she met a few Canadians in the parking lot.

They’ve taken over the entire Student Union this weekend to code projects, present their work, compete for prizes and explore careers in tech.

Empty boxes of catered coffee litter the Union breakfast area. Sponsors such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have set up tables like one might see at a middle school science fair. Here, though, there are better prizes. Google brought blankets, YouTube earbuds and laptop stickers. Red Hat, where Likins works, brought ponytail holders and — a classic — branded pens.

Participants run from table to table, trading their resumes with recruiters and planning which tech talks they’ll be attending throughout the weekend.

The event is a scene Likins couldn’t have imagined as a young girl because nothing like it existed. It took dating an engineer while in college for her to discover the major she’d missed. Because she was a woman, it was as though everyone assumed she’d be uninterested something like computer science.

“I grew up in my grandfather’s shop building things with hammers and nails and saws,” Likins said. “My dad showed me how an old school stereo works, circuit breakers and everything, when I was, like, 10. I had all of the right mindset to do it. I just didn’t know it was a thing.”

Linkins finished her degree in public relations and got a job at a law firm in Raleigh.

In February 1994, a coworker asked her to build a website for the business. Likins did the site architecture and design and hired someone to do the coding and graphics. It was the first law firm website created in North Carolina. The invention of the web, still in grey-scale and without icons, aligned with good timing and a lot of luck for Likins to find her way into a technological career as an open source code expert.

Likins wants other women to find the career more easily and fight its male-dominated stigma.

Inclusive, ambitious and fashion-forward

“There’s all kinds of ridiculous things about the brogrammer culture, like, ‘You must have thick skin to be here,’” Likins said. “No. I think it’s possible to say anything in a kind way.”

To combat this tough-guy tech approach, Likins runs workshops on how to be inclusive in coding culture. She gave her first talk, “Netiquette: How to avoid getting flamed online,” in 1994.

But, for these women at Pearl Hacks 2018, Likins had something special and fun planned. Her workshop, “Hack Your Hoodie,” was one of 21 workshops that participants could attend throughout the day while they worked on their final coding projects.

Likins brought LED lights while participants brought shirts, hats, tote bags and other such items to decorate. Two women, Danielle Uzor and Marisol Garcia, who became friends at a hack-a-thon in Charlotte, prepared to reengineer a black scrunchie and a brown cotton headband.

Uzor, a senior at UNC-Charlotte, attended “Hack Your Hoodie” last year and discovered her hidden talent for creating wearable technology.

She once designed a glowing white gown that looked like a Taylor Swift tour costume. It caught on fire once as Uzor was working on it, a matter of crossed wires and a shorted circuit. She put out the smolder with no problem, though.

The piece was captivating, but Uzor remained humble about her work.

“It was really fun to make,” she said, head bowed, sewing the tiny lights into her headband. “Just a little bit of coding and a little bit of hardware. It didn’t really take that long. Maybe a week? And that was because I had to do it between classes.”

Uzor helped Garcia loop the metal thread through her scrunchie before the coders switched their battery packs on with pride. The room lit up with lights and smiles. All the women were asking to take pictures of one another’s work.

“When I was in middle school and high school, I never heard of anything like this,” Uzor said. “We need to get younger girls into wearable technology. It shows girls that coding can be girly and really fun.”

Lack of information isn’t the only problem. Women in science, math and technology constantly face discrimination and harassment.

A few years ago, Likins posted a video to YouTube. She’d had an engineering epiphany while serving as general contractor for her house and wanted to share her invention. The video was dry and instructional. In it, she was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt.

“I got a comment in December,” Likins said, fixing her glasses. “The only comment: ‘Nice boobs.’”

She paused for a moment.

“I was trying to tell my husband I expect sexist comments. It’s terrible, but I expect it. That it happened on a video where I’m talking about construction? Jesus. What do I have to do?”

Stephanie Zhu, a programmer at Amazon Video and a Pearl Hacks speaker, said she started asking the same question during her undergraduate career at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When I was in college, I was in computer science and started to feel unwelcomed and didn’t know why,” Zhu said. “Some of the guys would ask, ‘Why do you feel like you’ve experienced bias here?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, but it feels different. It feels slightly more hostile.’”

Her gender studies classes at UPenn equipped her with the vocabulary to describe what she felt. When she and her female friends acted ambitiously, their classmates thought they were pushy. When her male friends did the same, they were lauded.

Now Zhu is on a mission to share her findings. She presented the information to Pearl Hacks participants and shared her tools to help dispel the bias. Striving to celebrate other women for their accomplishments and learning how to negotiate salaries were two such tools.

Challenging stereotypes, celebrating success and looking to the future

As the sun rose on Sunday, Feb. 11, sleepy coders finished their projects and returned to the Great Hall to show their hard work to the judges.

Evelyn Lockwood from George Mason University and Savannah Jones, a University of Virginia student, created an application that used a Google program to scan library barcodes to lead users to the book’s exact location.

Mary Gibeau and Haley DeZwaan, UNC-CH students, programmed a self-watering planter inspired by the time Gibeau’s parents let her flowers die over Thanksgiving break. They used UNC-CH’s woodshop to craft the planter box and grabbed some pink and purple pansies from Home Depot for the demo.

There was a website application from Georgia Tech that doubled as a feelings journal, a new chat room for women interested in pursuing tech projects with other women from around the world and at least two dozen other creations.

All in less than 24 hours.

Next year will be Likins’ sixth Pearl Hacks. The graduating seniors are planning on returning to mentor new coders. Uzor can’t wait to outdo her last gown; Zhu will continue to arm women with feminist tech defense.

For them and the 650 other women, the weekend was a break from reality, a glimpse into the industry’s future, a laptop-laden heaven. And it was definitely worth the road trip.

“I tell everyone,” Jones said, hugging her teammate before packing up, “‘If Pearl Hacks is sending a bus, you’ve got to get on.’”

Edited by MaryRachel Bulkeley