At the risk of projecting purely subjective nostalgia, I posit that for a good 15 or so years, Sticky Rice was one of the greatest bars in the entire world. It’s still an incredible restaurant and a fun drinking hole – one of the best in the city. But damn, for a good stretch, it was everything. There’s lightning in a bottle and then there’s White Lightning in a mason jar. Sticky was both. It was the dive bar equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, one of the old ones where Bugs is essentially a hyperkinetic psychopath. It was simultaneously the roost of the coolest hipster socialites and an entry-level amusement park for the fashionably challenged.
The only prerequisite for entry was leaving your pretensions at the door. Once inside, you were one of the gang. Yes, celebrities would somehow find their way there when filming in town. Rock stars and TV personalities seemed to always know of the place before they even got to Richmond. Playboy’s VP of Marketing once hired Chew On This – a monthly magazine borne of Richmond (and Sticky specifically) – to host their 50th Anniversary party in Richmond after having picked up a copy at the bar. To be cool there was to be cool everywhere in the city. Not “look cool,” mind you. Be cool. There’s a difference. What that difference is, is what I’m intending to get to the bottom of.
A lot has happened since 1999. Twenty five years have passed since they first opened their doors, replacing Gumbo Ya Ya’s at the corner of Strawberry and Main streets. John Yamashita and Jason Henry opened a kinda-Japanese restaurant with its aesthetic pulled more from anime and kaiju movies than rice paper walls and haikus. They opened a Sticky Rice in DC. It’s still there. Shout out to Jason Martin, who is essentially the Yamashita of NE Washington DC, still going strong. There was once a Sticky Rice in Baltimore too. This isn’t about them though. This is about the original, the OG Fan restaurant that punched well above its weight class.
They played music videos on the big screen on the wall instead of sports. They hired bartenders deliberately for their DJ skills. They pulled pranks on their patrons. They pulled pranks on Richmond as a whole. They had anniversary parties with mud wrestling pits and mechanical bulls. There are literally dozens of people in this city and dispersed across the world with Sticky Rice logo tattoos. And they were just getting started.
For over a decade, John “Yambag” Yamashita and his circle of reckless friends swung for the funny fences and made mayhem a calling card for Richmond. He would create an annual cross-country, multinational, scavenger hunt film series called CBR that would feature teams of bar staff from competing restaurants together. He would embed challenges all over the world, to varying degrees of legality and safety, for twenty or so of these cackling twenty-somethings to race to complete. He would create an ecosystem of infectious wildness that would come to define the best of Richmond’s bar scenes across all eras. He led the overnight mission to install a giant RICHMOND sign, Hollywood-style, overlooking downtown, befuddling local media and government for days as to where it came from. He sent sushi to space.
With the help of many supporting characters behind and in front of his bar(s), he’d amplify trivia night into something you’d probably end up with bruises from. Elevating a night of playing Bingo at the local pub into a loud game show environment complete with dares was very ‘Sticky Rice’. They had their own soccer team. Sticky was the bar your favorite bartenders went to. All of them. You could regularly find Bob Talcott, Master Sommelier of Can Can and former jet fighter pilot, enjoying a bucket of tots with a PBR in a Brooks Brothers suit on a barstool. There were sad lawyers, rambunctious local news anchors, U of R grads, VCU kids. Punks. Metalheads. Normies. Hippies. Stoners. Debutantes. Bro brahs and sorostitutes. Gays, straights, and the entire rainbow color wheel between them. Everyone. This is the bar tourists would go to because some blog told them this is where Richmond kept its sense of humor. They were right.
John Yamashita is elusive these days, so I had to track down the soldiers that carried out his plans. He emerges from the woods of Maryland once in a while, and if he sees his shadow, he ignores my calls for another year. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. Jason Henry is more of a nod and lurk kind of personality, with no time for this bullshit. I don’t blame him. I got Jonathan Martin, Yam’s right hand man in designing and executing some of their most insane stunts listed above and many more I’d need to check with our lawyers about before publishing.
Full disclosure, Jon is one of my oldest friends and collaborators – including a lot of these Sticky Rice projects that I had my grubby hands in. Here he is:
Christian Detres: Why would I be speaking to you? What’s been your interaction, good, bad, or otherwise, with Sticky Rice?
Jonathan Martin: I was an event promoter at Mayo Island before Sticky opened, and Yambag was the owner of Area 51, a nightclub operating in Shockoe Bottom. John was always plotting something wild, because that’s just who he is. We were very similar in that way. We craved absurdity. We shared – like you, Lander, Will Carsola, Dave Stewart, all of the media-centric people we came up with – a devilish sense of humor that lent itself to the ridiculous. There was always a sneaky smile just about to land on Yambag’s face at any moment. The weirder and the crazier the idea that I would bring up, the more he’d be into it. The end goal in anything we ever did together was fun. All other considerations were thrown out the window.
John had a food cart at the Mayo Island concerts where I was working as a promoter when we met. One day Yamashita put up a poster for System of a Down, who was supposed to play his new location – the much bigger Area 51 space a block away on Main from their original location. Only problem was, the band on the poster was NOT System of a Down. It was some random hillbilly band leaning on a truck. I saw past that and looked at the graphic design of the ad. It was incredible. So I asked him who did the design? And he said, “Well, I did. I went to school for graphic design.” I was like, “that’s my kind of shit, man.” I told him we should hang out more and do stuff, and so we did.
CD: So it was an aesthetic connection.
JM: Yeah, I found the System of a Down poster fucking hilarious. The newer Area 51 wasn’t working out and we lost touch for awhile. He was opening Sticky Rice with Jason. They got that up and running. It took them three weeks from closing the old restaurant at the corner of Strawberry and Main, Gumbo Ya Ya’s to opening Sticky. At that point, it was just another Fan bar in what was one of the very few barhoppable neighborhoods in the city. You had that whole Robinson / Main “L” of bars from Robin Inn to Star-Lite / Helen’s and then down to Sidewalk, many of which have changed names three of four times in the last 25 years.
We got back to talking when I watching MTV at home and saw Cole Bucholtz and Randy O’Dell, these local Richmond regular dudes on MTV talking to Carson Daly on Total Request Live (TRL – an old MTV show for the kiddies), on live TV, name-checking Sticky. I immediately called John and asked “What did you do? How did you make this happen?” And he’s like, I just gave everyone a couple sheets of to-do lists, like a scavenger hunt, and set them free.” At the time, they were video editing all the teams footage into a movie by splicing VHS tape together. So we started working together for the first time on the 2nd Cannonball Run production then. My personal favs were CBR2, 4, 6 & 7 haha. And somehow, the movie premieres we put together were even bigger than the actual events. Shit got really crazy.
One of those to-do’s was to somehow, by any means necessary, wind up on TV. I talked to Randy O’Dell about that. Here’s what he had to say:
CD: First of all the TRL trip, Could you give me a just like a personal recollection of how you even why on earth you were there in the first place and what that experience was? How did the scavenger hunt even happen?
Randy O’Dell: Because John felt like it I guess. He set up this adventure trip thing where we had to be in a certain amount of states and knock out a certain list of things in order to get a certain amount of points, but it was just a promotion for the bar. John, in his genius way of promoting his bar, set up this Cannonball Run, as this epic tale to bring back to Richmond.
On the trip itself though, it was a 20+ person interstate party. At the top of the list was to be seen on TV in New York or in LA. We just happened to get interviewed and then brought up into the studio with Carson Daly. Also, the guest that day was, what was… fuck, what’s her name? She’s crazy now. The girl dancing with knives. Britney Spears.
CD: Oh, that’s right. She did dance with knives.
RO: Yes, she was in the studio. Standing right next to me. Like, you know, I don’t know how old she was. 15? 16?
CD: It worked. Jon Martin would take all the footage the teams recorded on shitty camcorders into a broadcast-worthy comedy film. Points didn’t count unless you filmed yourself completing the task. All that media aside, the conversation about the whole project each year turned Sticky Rice into this inscrutable force of silliness in Richmond. The parties that he would throw when everyone came back to Richmond from these trips were epic in and of themselves. The teams wouldn’t even know who won the scavenger hunt until they tallied the points that night at the welcome home event. He really had a lot of the showman in him. It was inspiring to watch.
RO: It was the first destination bar in the heart of the Fan. The Fan was still kind of sleepy. Pubs, like Sidewalk and Curbside were there, but they were watering holes for the neighborhood. Which is fine, but that is the extent of what they were. John just kind of raised the bar for what a watering hole could be. He was ahead of that ship before MTV. Cannonball Run was basically the precursor to Road Rules.
CD: I remember when I had my ‘gap year’ from all this nonsense when I went to work for Vice magazine in Brooklyn. Cannonball Run 10 was filming in New York and Jon Martin had the entire cast staying in tents on my rooftop in Bushwick. I made Brandon Peck eat a sloppy bag of ghost pepper shrimp (shell on) mixed with cottage cheese and cigarette butts as part of one of the challenges. The next day, I get a call from the front desk of my office saying there were a bunch of people in weird costumes here to see me. I was horrified. Shane Smith, Publisher of VICE, is ringing me up from the next room (VICE was like 40 people in a couple tiny suites on N. 10th Street in Williamsburg at the time) going “Hey, Christian, you have a crowd of people waiting for you in the lobby and you gotta get them out of here.” I was furious and shooed them out of the building. Jon filmed the whole thing.
RO: That’s hilarious.
CD: I was all “Get the fuck out of my office. What do you think you’re doing? I’m at work goddammit, you’re making me look like an asshole!”
RO: Hahaha, was Shane pissed?
CD: Not really, he laughed at it later. After I shooed them into the street and closed the door behind them, I came back upstairs and he was laughing, asking “What the hell was that?” I told them it was a production company that I used to make this TV show with, and that they thought it would be funny to make Christian Detres angry. They were right. It was funny (in hindsight.)
CD: Coming back around to Jon Martin here… What’s your impression of the recipe that got Sticky Rice its traction in the scene back then?
JM: It was just I mean, that was it. John had collected a bunch of regulars at the bar. There were collectively a bunch of punks, surfers, skaters, artists, weirdos and all of the people that like hanging out with these types. Everyone came with a sense of “what nonsense are we getting into tonight?” There was an expectation of mayhem every single night there. Before there was even sushi at that place.
CD: What was Sticky serving before sushi?
JM: Fraud? Hahaha. Back then, and today, Virginia law states you have to sell a certain amount of food compared to drinks. Sticky was the go-to spot for bands to go to after their shows at other venues, in addition to just generally encouraging mischief amongst the locals. It was a mosh pit in there some nights. Packed, full of laughter, and more like a clubhouse than a restaurant. It was easy to meet people. All you had to do is show up twice within the span of a week before the bartenders knew your name, and maybe a few more times before they’d mercilessly tease you, slide you a free PBR, do a shot with you in the kitchen, introduce you to your next friend with benefits, and let you sleep it off on their couch because somehow, you wound up still in the bar at 4AM.
All the metal bands, touring artists, etc would come to Sticky Rice and then all their fans would follow. Its reputation grew fast as “the” place to hang out with your favorite musicians. Bands would pass it down the line to their contemporaries, “when in Richmond, you go to Sticky”. People were not coming there to eat, so they needed a menu to stay within the law. That’s how you get the focus on sushi. They needed to keep up with the boatloads of booze they were selling.
It was the headquarters for unhinged debauchery. It was the sleaze Mecca. This is again pre social media, pre smartphones, and everyone taking pictures. Before everything in that area became a bar. I’m sure Sticky had a lot to do with the reputation of the corridor actually. It’s driven new establishments to plant their flags there since it opened.
I think we lost count of how many restaurants occupied the space across the street. It started off with Southern Comfort, which is where we started hanging out.
CD: I have to say, you couldn’t talk about the Sticky Rice experience fully without mentioning Southern Comfort, which is where Barrio Taqueria is now. Back then, the trick was to have a tab open at Sticky and at Southern Comfort. When Sticky became too much, like sensory overload – between the movie screen blaring music videos, customers sloshing beer out of their cans while dancing on tables, the line going up the stairs from the bathrooms in the basement – you’d hustle across the street and get a drink there. Recharge, use a clean toilet, straighten your outfit, and head back into the “ring” for round 10. This obviously would end up in many unpaid, forgotten tabs.
If you didn’t pay your tab, they knew you were coming back, but that wouldn’t stop the bartenders from ridiculing you mercilessly afterwards. Austin Fitch would let you hear it, and would probably out you to whomever was listening as a deadbeat. You just had to make up for it with a triple tip the next time you saw the specific bartender that had to eat your bill the last time.
JM: I remember Yamashita got pissed at me for not paying my tab once. He waited until I was really good and drunk and he charged my card $99,999.99. He slid it to me and said “I can’t believe that went through.” And of course, I just mean, I’m thinking of my life like “what have you done to me?!” Crying in the back alley…
CD: That’s another thing. The sibling-style cruelty that went down over there at all times was hilarious. It’s just one of the things that made the place special. It wasn’t all nice hugs and smiles. That hug would turn into back-planted kick me signs. There were many sincere pats on the back and, you know, singalongs. We treated each other like family in the best ways, but damn, if you weren’t coming in with a prank or some chicanery, it was being done to you.
You went there to feel like a part of, not like in the banal sense of the word, but for real, community. Being ribbingly shitty at each other was a hobby we all joined in on, and became tight through. It did start feeling like a little bit of a clubhouse, which also meant that people were trying to get into the club all the time. And when I say club, I mean, like a social club. I don’t mean like a dance club. The type of experience that you and John were creating for people went far beyond just getting blitzed with your friends. The weekly events like Trivia Night with Aldo were just a little safer than a bar fight, what with all the dares and feats of “strength” one had to perform to win. So many clamped nipples and spanked ass cheeks. So many lines of wasabi snorted. Somehow something as benign as Bingo could be turned into a cause for bodily concern.
I had to call Al Copeland about all of this as he was the host for these nights, and eventually a business partner in other Yamashita-related shenanigans.
Okay, so Al Copeland, what’s your specific history with Sticky? How did you get there? What role do you feel you had there?
Al Copeland: I guess, bar game show host, slash bartender, slash bar manager, slash circus director, slash vibe control. I was more in the entertainment realm than anything else. I mean, I think I would probably put it more as, game show host. No matter what you were doing there, it was essentially an informal game show sort of thing. The studio audience was everybody that came and participated.
I think Yamashita and I were cut from the same cloth in that aspect. When we discussed anything, it was, how can we make it better, more crazy, more memorable, just more entertaining than anything else you could do in Richmond that night. Make it as insane as we could within the legal realm.
CD: Within the legal realm is the operative phrase, because I don’t think you did that good a job of coloring within those lines. No one ever got in trouble for anything though. We always got away with everything. We were soooo lucky no one got seriously hurt.
ALDO: Every weird, crazy thing that happened, there was another weirder and crazy thing that would happen the next week, because we got away with the stuff we did the previous week. We got away with it because everyone had a flip phone back then. The only people filming were Jon Martin and his people.
My story with Sticky began when I started going to karaoke occasionally. I lived down the street. I was out with Hunter Gibson one night at Ipanema. It was a slow Sunday. I was all “All right, we need something a little more exciting.” Hunter said, “you know, they have trivia at Sticky Rice.” I was like, “no shit, I love trivia. Let’s go.” So we biked up there. We played. I made it to the final round. I went against Freeman Martin in the final round.
CD: He used to win all of the time.
ALDO: The Goochers, they crushed it. Yamashita asked me if I wanted to host it the next week. I said, fuck yeah. I found a co-host and got sample sound effects queued up, songs for intros etc, and tried to make it like the Game Show Channel. It was clear that John and Jason were designing a place that was welcoming to all but made into a spectacle; it was intended to be shockingly fun. There was nothing else like it at that time at all, not at all. I’ve only seen a few places that, I won’t say, mimic it, but have similar feel and similar intentions.
There’s another part of this people forget to consider. Sticky Rice was packed seven nights a week. When John and Jason wanted to put on an event or host a thing, they’d often just put on their parties at another bar. Like, think about that. Sticky Rice is throwing a party, but they’re gonna do it at Bandito’s.
CD: That is a flex. I’m sure not a mean-spirited one, but damn.
ALDO: I remember talking to John when I started getting more involved with events and such. He and Jason always wanted to share the love. They knew they could always do things at Sticky but they wanted to bring other places business, and do things off site. They were so into community outreach. They fucking love Richmond, and they were so down with cross promotional activities.
CD: I never really thought about it from that angle, but that’s definitely true. There were at least 5, 6, 8, other sister bars that were willing to take part or host events for another bar in that group. Especially because of CBR. in the way that they were like, Okay, this is the team from Bandidos. This is the team from Mojos. This is the team from whatever place, the other place, and but it made for the fact that the staff of those bars were regulars at sticky. If one of them came in, six of them came in, like, you know, everybody from, everybody from Bandidos would come through. It was everybody from this place. It was, such a weird kind of magnet. All the potent and influential forces in Richmond nightlife could be found there.
ALDO: The staff of Baja Bean probably kept the lights on for a year.
CD: Something else I wanted to bring up; the music was always eclectic at Sticky. Punks and metalheads or whatever were getting down to a Britney Spears song one minute. And then you had a bunch of, you know, normies, I guess, I don’t know what you call them… there’s probably a more dignified word for them, but they’d be rocking out to Reigning Blood for the first time the next minute.
ALDO: That sounds, yeah, that sounds right. Musically speaking, there was no such thing as a guilty pleasure in those walls. You would catch some dude with a throat tattoo that has like four teeth, smells like shit, talking to what Vogue magazine would say is the hottest blonde maiden. And they’re like talking to each other. They’re both spitting on each other’s faces, screaming so they can hear each other. And then “I Want to Dance with Somebody” comes on, and they both start fucking dancing. In normal everyday life, those two would probably cross the street to avoid each other.
CD: That’s exactly what I’m getting at it really. There’s a part of that vibe that I was looking back on when I was going through the stacks of photos for this article. I was expecting to see a whole lot more of the indie sleaze, mid 2000s, asymmetrical bangs and heavy eyeliner, white belts over black skinny jeans etc. They exist, but for the most part, most of these fucks look like they came straight out of U of R.
CD: In more metaphysical terms, what is your general impression of what the Sticky Rice experience was, where it’s legend really resides?
ALDO: I think it’s fairly simple. The thing that made Sticky Rice was the staff and the spectacle. Personality is way more important than professionalism in that setting. They’re professional too, but people came there for who was working there that night. You can get a PBR and a shot of Jåeger anywhere, but you wanted to go there and be one of the 10 girls or guys waiting in line to have Johnny Mac say what’s up to you.
CD: I’m glad you said that, because the personalities, though many of them were also very conventionally attractive people, were the draw. Johnny Mac was fucking hilarious. Jon-Jon Hirsch was fucking hilarious. Brandon Peck was a riot. You know, Justin, Partin and Mary and Sarah – all of these people, yourself obviously, Yamashita, of course. All of these people were characters, every last one of them. It’s not only going to your favorite bar, it’s going to the live taping of the comedy TV show based on your idea of your favorite bar.
ALDO: It was going to Dirtbag Cheers where everyone is too drunk to remember your name. Shortly after I started working there, I was opening the bar at 4PM. I showed up and Hunter Gibson and Russ Jones are sitting in the bar already. I’m pretty sure they left when I left at three, four in the morning the night previous. They hadn’t even switched stools. It was that spot.
It was a place you could go by yourself and just post up. It didn’t matter, because you’d walk in and you could either watch from behind the sushi bar and just take it all in, or within a few moments, you could be talking to a group of people, sitting at a table, at the bar, having a good time, because it was just easy.
Anybody was fair game for a conversation.There was such a diverse crowd of people. There was a very thin wall between lurking and saying hi to a rando. The staff set the tone. Some of the most welcoming and mischievous people ever.
CD: Just to kind of put it all together and close it up, how has Sticky changed you?
ALDO: Oh, dude, Sticky is life changing to me. Yeah, absolutely fucking life changing. Yeah, without question, there’s a ton of shit, a ton of things I’ve done and been able to do or can do in the future because of that place. I was hired based on having good conversations with Yamashita. Within two years, I’d be opening my own restaurant with him and Jason. I had eight years as a managing owner of another restaurant with them. The amount of stuff I’ve learned, that I can put on my resume, makes me sound like I have been managing a Ruth’s Chris. You know, legit skills. I started bartending there in ‘04. I stopped in 2020. I think I worked a shift in 2022? So 18 years, 18, 19 years of bartending there. I still pick up shifts like, service shifts and host shifts.
The amount of people I’ve seen come in there, our age a little bit younger, that would sit at the bar and say, “oh, we had to come here today. It’s our anniversary. We met here 15 years ago.” You know, the amount of people I’ve heard that say their first date or they met at Sticky is fucking crazy. People that come every year on their birthday, yeah? A bachelor party, a bachelorette party, whatever you know, just to come in to hit the gong…
CD: I haven’t done that in a while. My birthday is coming up next month…
ALDO: Man, do it. Sticky is a fucking institution. There. I can’t speak for worldwide, but in Richmond, there will never be another bar like it. Very many people hold that place dear to their hearts, much as I do. Yeah, it’s, it’s special, It’s very Dazed and Confused. I get older, they stay the same age. Every year or two, it would be like a new core group of people would roll in. They would be 22 to 25 and I just, you know, aged out. That place is always gonna have its core group and it’s always gonna have the people that will always remember ‘that time’ at Sticky.
CD: I still sidle up to Woo every time I go. I’ll have Woo talk at me, and I’ll pretend like I understand what he’s saying. I love that guy. And we just, you know, half laugh at something, and clink our beers together and watch the nonsense.
Getting back to Jon Martin again… Damn, how am I still writing this article??
I was just interviewing Al Copeland about Piko Trivia. What are your thoughts on those nights?
JM: I was always afraid to show up to those nights. Al was the best drunk game show host ever. if you showed up on a Sunday, expect something to get shaven off of you. Don’t expect to wear the clothes that you wore in. That is one place that never expected to be sued. I mean, maybe expected it but just like, really tried really hard to skate that razor edge between like, what was even remotely acceptable and what was getting someone thrown in jail. It wasn’t until much later that we conferred with lawyers around the 6th CBR about what we can do? What can we not do? And they’re like, “yeah, you guys got to stop.”
We were all creative people that could actually do the work. We had kind of the same personality, all of us, like let’s just do cool shit and see what happens.
CD: You guys supported a lot of artists. When I say support, I mean not just financially support them, though some of them did get some great commissions out of the place. You incorporated a lot of local artists into the Sticky ecosystem that have gone on to do incredible shit. Dave and Will from daybyday, Barf Callahan, Mickael Broth, Oura Sinakone, Caitlin Webster, Brandon Peck, Jon Jon, Tony Harris, me. Shit, I just had a film I produced in the Whitney Biennial. My film career started making stupid sketch comedy videos with you and daybyday.
JM: Yup. Will Carsola, now of Liquid Death infamy and daybyday went on to do a wildly successful animated series with Dave Stewart – Mr. Pickles, Mama Named Me Sheriff, and a bunch of other stuff. That’s where Mickael Broth met them. Yeah, it started working with them. Tony Harris of this very magazine actually used to roll sushi there.
CD: Oooh, tell me about the Richmond sign before I close this all up.
JM: Hahaha, okay. I would drive by Radio Hill downtown, and just think, “alright, well, look, here’s this giant hill. There’s nothing on it. And all these highways are kind of wrapped around it. It overlooks the city. Let’s put something there.” For a good straight year we’re like “What about like a dinosaur?”
CD: Who in their right mind is like, “look at this giant hill that nothing’s on in the middle of the fucking city. Let’s put a dinosaur on it”?
JM: I think we because we had watched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure around then. The classics, you know?
Who knows who owns that land? Who cares? One night he was bartending at Holy Chow (another Yamashita creation that deserves its own article. If I digress about it too much here, I’ll never finish writing this article.) I walk in with a single sheet of paper. It just says “Richmond” on it. And I was like, “I got it!” He’s looking at me holding this printout of the word Richmond and he’s confused. He was like, “yeah, that’s our city. What?” I was like, we can make a big Richmond sign for Radio Hill, kind of an homage to the Hollywood sign. Lander Salzberg and I cut it out of wood. We didn’t let anyone into my apartment for a solid week. And then, you know, three o’clock in the morning, all of us – with the daybyday dudes – went up to the hill. Nobody knew what we’re doing. We’re just like, after the bars close, let’s meet up at Holy Chow. We’re all gonna get in the back of a pickup truck and erect this thing on the site. We never thought it would last the night.
It lasted for months and the local news couldn’t shut up about it. We were so confused how it had become this talking point on TV, radio…
CD: You know what? It was because it was so ballsy. Illegal, completely not zoned for that. None of you were contractors that knew how to build anything to code. But the entire city adored it. You looked at it and completely understood the difference between anarchist street art and municipal, planned out, committee-approved garbage. Richmond’s institutions that hand out permits to do this type of thing would never in a million years do something that cool. And it’s a pretty simple idea, completely derivative of something that already exists in LA, but spoke to the outsized confidence of the last sleepy, third-tier city on the East Coast. The city loved it. The media loved it. No one even bothered to take it down, reinforce it, nothing. Nobody wanted to take it down. Even the city dragged its feet in doing anything about it. And once again, we all got away with it.
JM: Even Gene Cox (contemporary local news anchor) was saying, “Well, I actually I did it.” Taking credit for it. WRVA claimed responsibility for it too. John and I actually went there to confront them and they invited us.
CD: Yeah, but you saw guys sent out the videotape to the news networks, didn’t you? Because of course you filmed yourself committing the crime.
JM: Well, Lander and I sent that out. Once other people started taking credit for it, I took it to Channel 12. By the time we got back to our apartment, we’re like, well, “let’s just see if they say anything about it. 10 minutes after we got home, they’re blasting it out like it’s international news. For weeks, local media was obsessed with it. $300 worth of wood and a silly idea got us so much press it’s ridiculous. Must have been the slowest news cycle in years for that to get that much attention for so long.
CD: There are so many more examples of this sort of thing in the legend of Sticky Rice and I have typed my fingers to the bone just to get this much of it on record. Suffice to say, there will never be another Sticky Rice, and that’s probably best for all of our health. Personally, I can’t drive by the corner of Strawberry and Main without a curious mix of nostalgia and PTSD striking me like an epiphany. Long live Sticky Rice!
