https://www.shopltk.com/explore/Tiramisu_For_Breakfast?tab=posts
USE THE CODE "FRANKLIN" FOR 50% OFF
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“The Christmas that changed history comes to Richmond.”
All-New Theatrical Event Churchill & Roosevelt: The Christmas That Saved the World Debuts at Dominion Energy Center, Nov. 21–23, 2025
Richmond, VA – Richmond audiences will experience a brand-new theatrical production from the creators of Churchill. Churchill & Roosevelt: The Christmas That Saved the World plays at Dominion Energy Center, November 21–23, 2025.
Written by internationally acclaimed playwright and performer David Payne, best known for his riveting stage portrayals of C.S. Lewis and his widely praised play Churchill, this new drama brings to life one of the most consequential meetings of the 20th century. In December 1941—just weeks after Pearl Harbor—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House.
Set against the urgency of a world at war, the play explores how two very different leaders forged a deep personal bond and a united vision that would not only alter the course of World War II but also shape the modern world. With tension, candor, and unexpected humanity, Payne’s script illuminates the holiday meeting that became the beginning of a partnership leading to victory—and a peace that still resonates today.
“This is an entirely new theatrical work,” said Payne. “It’s not just about politics or strategy—it’s about two men who discovered common ground in the darkest of times, and in doing so, changed history.”
Performance Dates:
November 21 7:30pm
November 22 2:00pm and 7:30pm
November 23 2:00pm
Libby S. Gottwald Playhouse – Richmond, VA
Tickets:
Tickets are available now online HERE.
About David Payne
David Payne has captivated audiences around the world with his powerful portrayals of historical figures, most notably C.S. Lewis in An Evening with C.S. Lewis, which has been performed hundreds of times across the U.S. and U.K. He is also the creator of the acclaimed stage production Churchill. Known for blending historical accuracy with theatrical storytelling, Payne’s works bring iconic leaders to life with authenticity, humor, and humanity.
About Emery Entertainment
Based in St. Louis, Emery Entertainment has produced and promoted thousands of events worldwide, from intimate theatrical performances to large-scale spectacles. Its portfolio includes blockbuster attractions such as Blue Man Group, David Copperfield, and James Taylor. Emery Entertainment is dedicated to bringing unforgettable live experiences to audiences everywhere.
Photos HERE.
Be sure to stop by Gather & Hem for a drink. It's what Winston would have wanted.
In The News
Behind the Scenes
We started working with McDonald’s in 2018, first with 70 restaurants in the Richmond market and now with more than 150 across Richmond, Hampton Roads, and Northeast North Carolina. As our partnership has grown, so has our understanding and admiration of the owner-operators. Each restaurant in our region is locally owned and operated, giving us the opportunity to collaborate with dozens of small business owners who know their neighborhoods, customers, and employees personally. Getting to know these owner/operators — their goals, priorities, and the ways they give back — has been one of the most rewarding parts of our work.
Our public relations strategy for McDonald’s focuses on two core areas: People and Community — the people within McDonald’s (crew and owner/operators) and the people in the communities the restaurants serve, along with the organizations and events that matter most to them. When we learned the City of Virginia Beach was planning a weekend celebration for Timbaland — including a visit to his alma mater, Salem High School — we knew it would be the perfect opportunity for McDonald’s of Hampton Roads and Northeast North Carolina to get involved.
Timbaland grew up in Virginia Beach, alongside Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams. (Fun fact: Pharrell created McDonald’s original “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle.) From October 17–19, 2025, the city celebrated him with a weekend of events — a parade, concert, and the unveiling of Timbaland Way, a new street named in his honor just up the road from Salem High School. The Keys to the City ceremony took place at Salem, where he was presented with the Key to the City by the Mayor of Virginia Beach.
At the national level, McDonald’s supports education and career growth through Archways to Opportunity, a program that helps employees earn high school diplomas, receive college tuition assistance, and develop English-language skills. It’s one of the most meaningful ways the brand invests in its people and their long-term success.
Locally, our region has built on that same spirit by creating a year-round program to show appreciation for teachers — offering a free drink with any purchase at any restaurant in the region. Since this celebration took place at Salem High School, we wanted to do something extra to recognize the educators there. We worked with the organizers to customize a sponsorship. In addition to providing McDonald’s breakfast for all the volunteers who helped make the event possible, we made a donation to Candace Credle, who leads Salem High School’s DECA program — a student organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management. We also distributed free meal vouchers to every teacher at the school.
From October 17–19, 2025, the city celebrated him with a weekend of events — a parade, concert, and the unveiling of Timbaland Way, a street named in his honor just up the road from Salem High School. We was also presented the Keys to the City by the Mayor of Virginia Beach.
As a special moment on stage, we discovered that two of the event organizers were part of McDonald’s “1 in 8” community — the national campaign celebrating the fact that one in every eight Americans has worked at McDonald’s. We brought out the limited-edition “1 in 8” jacket and presented it to them during the program. She put it on right there, and the crowd loved it — a moment that reflected what we aim for in every project: celebrating people, supporting communities, and connecting McDonald’s to the stories that make each market unique.
Thank you to the City of Virginia Beach and the Timbaland Way Weekend organizers for inviting us to be part of such a meaningful celebration.
Throughout the years I've collected a few online tools and apps that make my job easier. here are my favorites and how I use them:
LIPSUM: It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32. https://www.lipsum.com/
You can use this site to upload a photo of the art and turn it into an animation! https://sketch.metademolab.com/canvas
TOGGL: Productivity & time tracker.
TELEPROMPTER: The ultimate Mac teleprompter.
THE LIGHT & AIRY PHOTOGRAPHER: Eleven presets specifically formulated to enhance phone photos. I use this with the lightroom app on my phone to edit photos quickly. My friend Devin of Play at Whim turned me onto this.
LIGHTROOM APP: Before I got this app, I was using Instagram to edit my photos. This works if the photos are just for Instagram, but it compresses them so they are either too small or blurry when you go to use them other places. I like my photos light and bright, so I either use presets or adjust the exposure and usually the tint.
PINTEREST AND THE PINTEREST SAVE BUTTON CHROME PLUGIN: I love using Pinterest to store inspiration and ideas.
INSTA VIDEOS DOWNLOADER: Simple tool for downloading Instagram Videos, Photos, Stories and IGTV Videos to your device.
BEAVER BUILDER Easily build beautiful, responsive WordPress pages in minutes. Beaver Builder is a drag and drop WordPress Page Builder. (Beaver Builder is what I use to build this site.)
UNSPLASH The internet’s source of freely useable images. Powered by creators everywhere. The photos on this site are beautiful. I've used them for client presentations and proposals. They're completely free for personal or professional use.
STOCKSY Inspiring stock photos + videos driven by creative integrity.
PICWIZARD: High Quality, Free Stock Photos
Stunning library of over 1 million stock images and videos.
Royalty free and safe for commercial use, with no attribution required
PEXELS Free stock photos you can use everywhere. ✓ Free for commercial use ✓ No attribution required.
SHARE NOTES IN ICLOUD With the Notes app on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac, you can invite people to collaborate on your iCloud notes and folders. Then you can partner on projects, plan a trip, make a grocery list, and more.
CREATIVE MARKET Creative Market is the world’s marketplace for design. Bring your creative projects to life with ready-to-use design assets from independent creators around the world. This site is a gamechanger. If you sign up for their emails, you get free downloads in an email every Monday.
PIC SPLITTER This app allows you to split a photo and generate a grid of photo tiles which contain portions of the larger photo. Upload the generated tiles to Instagram to create the illusion of massive photos on your profile page.
YAYTEXT Super cool unicode text magic. Write 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 and/or 𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑐 updates on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.
GETMOGI: a free, handy little tool I use for posting emojis when I'm not on my phone.
JOYPIXELS EMOJI KEYBOARD: The world's leading emoji keyboard extension for Chrome.
COLORZILLA: Get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can analyze the page and inspect a palette of its colors. It includes a Color Picker, Eye Dropper, and a Gradient Generator. Get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can analyze the page and inspect a palette of its colors.
FONT FACE NINJA: a browser extension that let you inspect, try, bookmark and buy fonts on any websites.
GOOGLE CHROME KEEP Easily save the things you care about to Keep and have them synced across all of the platforms that you use — including web, Android, iOS, and Wear. Take notes for additional detail and add labels to quickly categorize your note for later retrieval.
Features:
• Save URLs, text, and images
• Take notes on saved content
• Add labels to your notes
• Automatically saves to Google Keep
SLIDES GO Free Google slides templates
LOOM Record your screen, voice, and face to create an instantly shareable video
SMALL PDF Easy-to-use PDF tools to Edit, Convert, Merge, Split and Compress PDF files.
FACEBOOK AD LIBRARY Search for any advertiser's campaigns
how to
APPLE: How to record the screen on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
BUILT VISIBLE: How To Use Talkwalker Alerts for Journalism / PR outreach
NY TIMES: How to use social media in your career.
TFB: How to Make A Shareable Custom Facebook Profile Frame
MAC OBSERVER: How to use How to Use iOS 11 Screen Recording
AMY LANDINO: The Only Video Equipment You Need: This video just might give you the push you need to start incorporating video into your content strategy and marketing. We ordered the mic she recommends.
APPLE SUPPORT How to scan using your iPhone notes app
The Colbrook motel has always embodied dignity safety, respect, and community. redevelopment with better housing coalition honors that legacy through the creation of affordable housing. The green brook built community and b/c builds community
The 9.8-acre site of Bette Housing Coalition's latest Affordable housing Project holds historical significance as the Colbrook Motel was listed in the Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans during segregation. The Colbrook motel has always embodied dignity safety, respect, and community. Better housing coalition honors that legacy through the creation of affordable housing
The parcel is now abandoned and has been a source of blight along the Route 1 corridor.
we broke ground on the site of the historic Colbrook Motel in Chesterfield County, VA—once a safe stop for Black travelers during segregation, and soon to be transformed into 144 affordable apartments.
This $60 million redevelopment honors the past with preserved signage, a history marker, and an on-site gallery, while building a future where everyone has a safe, quality home.
I'm grateful to my friend Patricia for getting me involved int his project.
As Ralph Lauren, founder of his eponymous label, said, “This collection is about more than a charming coastal town; it’s a story of the American dream.”
"What moved me most was not just the aesthetic beauty of the collection, but the integrity behind it. Polo Ralph Lauren didn’t simply borrow from Oak Bluffs’ culture — it partnered with it. It collaborated with the Cottagers, Inc., a group of Black women homeowners who have safeguarded Oak Bluffs’ legacy since 1956. It pledged support to the United Negro College Fund, and produced a companion documentary, “A Portrait of the American Dream: Oak Bluffs,” premiering at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. The collection tells a story.
The campaign imagery felt like a family reunion: Multigenerational models posed on porches, wrapped in textures that whisper history and resilience. Even the smallest details — buttons, embroidery, hemstitching — felt reverent. As a designer and a daughter of this place, it was emotional to witness.
"As retailers shrink away from diversity, the iconic American brand has taken the opposite route...Ralph Lauren has proved it pays to highlight underrepresented communities and overlooked chapters of American history. The company’s stock has soared nearly 30 percent year-to-date, vastly outpacing the broader market. The S&P 500, tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are all up less than 10 percent this year." -Inc. Magazine
