FXBG Advance Sunday, June 28, 2026
A Soccer Match That Will Live in Infamy. The Family Heart. Washington's Gay General. More Virginia News.
The Ballad of Jamie Christie—And a Soccer Match That Will Live in Infamy
By Drew Gallagher, Advance Columnist
FIRST PERSON
As the U.S. men’s team continue their World Cup play like true warrior poets, clinching the top spot in Group D and qualifying for the first round of playoffs, it’s only natural that thoughts turn—my thoughts, anyway—to a historic night more than 40 years ago when two lives were forever changed during a soccer match on a repurposed football field at Exeter Township Senior High School in Reiffton, PA.
Mine was one of them. I was in goal.
My career as goalie had started in 1985 when I was a sophomore at Exeter when our starter smoked so much weed before a match that he couldn’t even see the ball, much less save it. My Wally Pipp moment came when a harmless shot bounced over his head and into the net without him ever moving.
Wally Pipp, for those who may not know, was the famously hapless New York Yankee first baseman who elected to sit out a game due to a headache and subsequently lost his starting job to his replacement—the immortal Lou Gehrig.
I was no Lou Gehrig, but by the time I was a senior I was a team captain, firmly entrenched between the pipes and all-too-accustomed to a fusillade of shots on goal, thanks to our porous defense. I once faced 51 shots by Brandywine Heights my junior year—only four found the back of the net, thank you very much—but nothing could have prepared me for what happened that autumn night against Oley Valley and a guy named Jamie Christie.
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The Family Heart, Part I: Things Fall Apart
By Steve Watkins, Advance Editor
FIRST PERSON
One day in the early fall of 2009, I went in for what was supposed to be a routine colonoscopy. I chugged all the nasty purgatives the night before, did the proper business that followed, then showed up for the procedure first thing in the morning. For the past 19 years, I’d taught Journalism, Creative Writing, Modern American Lit, and Literature of the Vietnam War at a small, provincial liberal arts college in Virginia. I may have had one of those MWF schedules that semester giving me the odd day off, or maybe I canceled a couple of classes. My wife Janet took a few hours leave from her job as a newspaper reporter and health editor to drive me over for the appointment. I was 55 and had a history of diverticulitis, but had been polyp-free the last time I did a colonoscopy, five years earlier. With no family history of colon cancer, there was no reason to expect anything different this time around. I left Janet in the waiting room, changed into an open-back gown, laid on the examination table, and conked out under the anesthesia.
Halfway through the exam my heart rate dropped into the 20s. The gastroenterologist and his staff freaked out. They administered a shot of epinephrine to stop the descent into bradycardia, then held their collective breath until my resting pulse returned to normal, somewhere in the 40s—normal for me, anyway, a lifelong distance runner, masters swimmer, and power yoga teacher. Weirdly, they continued with the procedure. I awoke a short time later with a nurse shouting down at me in the recovery room, demanding to know why I hadn’t warned them that I had a bad heart. “You could have died!” she kept saying. “You could have died!”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
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Washington’s Gay General
Nick Havey/Washington Independent Review of Books
IN REVIEW
Winston Churchill is credited with the classic quote, “History is written by the victors.” A notorious racist and proponent of empire, Churchill is nonetheless remembered as a brilliant war-time hero and a cunning tactician. Why? Because the Allies prevailed in World War II. History has been kind to Churchill in large part because, as he said, it was written by the victors.
It also tends to be written from a white, heterosexual, cisgender perspective, at least until now. Washington’s Gay General, a graphic novel chronicling the real-life exploits of queer Revolutionary War figure Friedrich von Steuben, is an open criticism and repudiation of this approach to capturing the historical record—and an incredibly successful one.
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Virginia Judge Blocks Assault Weapons Ban Six Days Before Implementation
VaNews/Virginia Public Access Project
By JOE DODSON, Courthouse News Service
From Saturday: A judge in rural Virginia sided with gun rights activists Thursday, barring state police from enforcing an assault weapons ban set to take effect July 1. Lancaster County Circuit Judge John Martin issued the preliminary injunction from his bench in favor of Gun Owners of America, the Virginia Citizens Defense League and resident John Crump, finding the commonwealth unlikely to succeed in arguing the impending law doesn’t run afoul of the state’s constitution. In the hearing, which took a little over two hours, Crump and the organizations argued that the newly passed law conflicts with a provision of the Virginia Constitution enshrining the right to keep and bear arms, added in 1971.
Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines, which, let’s be honest, are all many of us have time to read anyway
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