Ten years ago, a tragedy struck the LGBT community and the Roanoke community at large. A man expressed his hatefulness through violence that cost the life of one man and injured many others. According to The Roanoke Times…

“On Sept. 22, 2000, a man asked a bouncer at a local restaurant where he could find a gay bar. Given directions to the Backstreet Cafe on Salem Avenue, that man — 54-year-old Ronald Gay — announced he was going to ‘waste some f*gg*ts.’ When he got to the bar, Gay ordered a beer, pulled out a 9 mm Ruger and shot seven people. Danny Lee Overstreet died.”

Each year since, the community has held a memorial at Backstreet Cafe, where the shooting occurred. Some new friends let me hang around and shoot, so here are some pictures from tonight’s memorial…

*All pictures © Copyright 2010 lauren frohne … please ask for permission to copy or use*

Being the only metropolitan city in a vast rural area in Southwest Virginia, Roanoke has a rather large LGBT community. I’m working on a side project, and I went to the annual Pride in the Park festival today to shoot around. This year is the 21st consecutive year of the Pride in the Park festival.

The march and atmosphere…

Leland Albright, 23, works for Roanoke Pride as the transgender representative…

*All pictures © Copyright 2010 lauren frohne … please ask for permission to copy or use*

My first week in Roanoke is complete. It’s a transition, I suppose, but a good one. I’m all settled in the newsroom and super anxious to start telling some gosh darn stories.

They put me to work for the first time this Friday night to shoot a high school football game. I had to shoot video, interview a player, escape from the deluge of people leaving the game, get stuck in traffic in a high school parking lot, eat Sonic tater tots and drink a Diet Dr. Pepper, capture an hour of tape, edit the game into a short video, encode in Flash, upload and post that same night.

In summation, here’s what The Roanoke Times newsroom looks like at 3:30am…

It was a long, but enthralling night. Editing video on a PC, Windows-based machine for the first time ever, using a program called Edius.

It really wasn’t bad at all, but I didn’t have enough time or sanity left to sweeten the audio and smooth out some things here and there. But overall, I’m happy with the outcome, which you can view at http://www.roanoke.com/varsitycast.

And this weekend, after I caught up on sleep, there was an adventure up to Roanoke Mountain, where I took more pictures of pretty, mountainy things.

You can actually see the back of the giant star on Mill Mountain from Roanoke Mountain!

This is basically the new Windows default desktop background… at least that’s what I was going for…

A leaf bug

This bug typically likes to hang out in my apartment, but here he is, alive and outside for once.

The valley.

Some big and sudden news has really overhauled my life in the past couple of weeks. After living in Chapel Hill/Durham for the past eight years, I moved to Roanoke, Virginia this past weekend to start an internship with The Roanoke Times. I’ll be working with the online team for Roanoke.com as a videographer through December.

!!!!

I’ve been daydreaming about working as a journalist at a newspaper since I was a little kid, so I’m excited to get started and to work with such a great team. My first assignment is Friday, so in the meanwhile, here are some pictures I took yesterday evening from the top of Mill Mountain, where Roanoke’s signature light-up star resides. (Sidenote: Roanoke vaguely reminds me of Quito, Ecuador – a beautiful city surrounded by mountains on all sides – except about a thousand times smaller. Regardless, I love all things that remind me of Ecuador and, by proxy, the Galápagos).