Abby the Spoon Lady to bring street performance to Asheboro’s Sunset Theatre

Abby the Spoon Lady by John Gellman

ASHEBORO – Asheville street performer Abby the Spoon Lady, and her one-man-band friend Chris Rodrigues, will bring their unique mix of music and storytelling to downtown Asheboro’s Sunset Theatre at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 17.

The performance is free and the public is invited. It is part of the Friends of the Library Sunset Signature Series, sponsored by the Heart of North Carolina Visitors Bureau, the City of Asheboro and the Friends of the Randolph County Public Library.

“I fell into both street performance and spoon playing when I started backpacking across the United States,” Abby says. “I became obsessed with folk rhythm and culture, and the stories surrounding.”

She found a rich street performance scene in Asheville and established herself there. She shares the street with Chris Rodrigues, who plays guitar and harmonica while stomping on a suitcase with one foot and tapping on a license plate with the other. The two became best friends and performing partners. They began touring more conventional venues, to often sell-out crowds.

Abby hosts the Busker Broadcast radio show on Asheville FM 101.3.  She also serves as acting president of the Asheville Buskers Collective, founded in 2014 to ensure that street performance remains legal.

The Sunset Theatre is located at 234 Sunset Avenue. For further information about Abby’s appearance, call the Heart of North Carolina Visitors Bureau, 800-626-2672.

Following Abby, the series will include two more events.

Asheboro native Holly George-Warren will take the stage at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 3. One of the country’s foremost music journalists, George-Warren is most recently author of the biographies A Man Called Destruction: The Life of Alex Chilton, from Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man, and Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry. She is currently working on a biography of Janis Joplin.

Her husband, author and musician Robert Burke Warren, will play music as a soundtrack for her talk.

Journalist Kevin Maurer, who has been embedded with various U.S. military forces since the beginning of the war in Iraq, will appear at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 13. He is author of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden, which was the top-selling hardcover book of 2012.