A Neighborly Tale

February 18, 2008

As I enter Sarah Richards’s apartment she’s eats cheese off of a knife. This isn’t the only time I’ve seen her eating cheese off of a knife, she claims she’s just too lazy to cut it up and put it on a plate; that creates dishes.

Richards lives in an apartment that could have come straight out of a Martha Stewart catalogue. Everything matches with hints of character in the antique lady lamps on either side of the living room. It’s even painted to match.

Since transferring from Virginia Tech at the beginning of the year, she has striven to find a meaning in art. She is an Architectural History major, and hopes to preserve history by restoring historical buildings and houses.

“I want to do something that actually has a real world application,” Richards said.

She originally applied to the Art Foundation program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005 but took one look at Richmond and hated it.

“This is the ugliest place I’ve ever been in my entire life, I thought it was really ghetto and really scary,” Richards said.

“I had like eight majors and I originally wanted to do Interior Design but my parents said that was for stupid people, so I became an Art History major at Tech,” Richards said. “I really hated how analytical it was like I thought I was going to be looking at art but instead I was looking at people’s opinions of art.”

After being a Virginia Tech for two years, the boredom caught up with her so she gave Richmond another chance. She thrives on history, and Richmond is filled with it.

“Seriously for fun, we went to Barnes and Noble,” Richards said.

The terrifying events that happened at Virginia Tech last spring made Richards less willing to come to VCU.

“It was hard to think about leaving [Tech] after all that happened,” she said. “Nobody ever imagined something like that ever happening at Virginia Tech. When I say it was picturesque, it was like Pleasantville over there…Everything’s perfect all the time.”

Richards knew two people who died, Leslie Sherman and Jaclyn Couture’nowak, her French teacher. Her friend Kevin Sterne was shot, but survived and still has part of the bullet in his leg holding his bone together.

Even with her past experiences at Virginia Tech, Richards still plans on making Richmond her home. It’s especially hard the anniversary of the events coming up on April 16^th. She even hopes to continue her education in graduate school at VCU after graduating a semester early at the age of twenty-one in the fall.