From Price’s Chicken Coop to Excelsior Club, she created a ‘Love Letter to Old Charlotte’

Mia McClure has held a lot of different roles, from radio to retail and insurance. But she’s finally found something that feels right — as a storyteller and performer.

The Charlotte native goes by the stage name Mia Love Live, and she recently performed her one-woman show, “Sincerely, Charlotte: A Love Letter to Old Charlotte,” at the Charlotte International Arts Festival.

That September show marked her second production on a major Charlotte stage in just two years. But Love’s path there wasn’t a straightforward one.

The 33-year-old doesn’t come from a long line of writers or stage performers. In fact, she said, she’s the lone person in her family whom she wouldn’t describe as “shy.”

A fifth-generation Charlottean, Love grew up in the Eastfield neighborhood near Highland Creek. That sense of history and place infused her ode to old Charlotte. Love wanted to share stories she and her family knew about the way things used to be, and even interviewed non-family members for their perspective.

Such creativity has long been a part of Love’s life.

She cited J.M. Alexander Middle School teacher Peggy Jessup as someone who encouraged her at school and believed in her. “She started helping me write a book when I was in seventh grade,” Love said. “When I went to eighth grade, she had me come back to her seventh grade class and do poems for them.”

At North Mecklenburg High, Love would write poetry and read it aloud at open mic nights or at family celebrations.

She wanted to be like Oprah Winfrey and have her own talk show or be on the news some day. But while attending Appalachian State University, she felt devastated when she didn’t get in to its school of media broadcasting, and lacked a plan B.

So Love turned her attention to sociology “as the next possible best thing. Sociology gives you the answers as to why people do what they do, what makes them tick.”

In 2012, she graduated from college and made her way back home, and toward a chance meeting.

On a path to creative pursuits

At an Inspire the Fire careers panel, Terri Avery took the stage to explain her role as program director for the radio station WPEG, Power 98 in Charlotte.

“I saw her speak to the kids,” Love said, “and said to myself, If I just can just get in front of her and talk to her, that’s all I need. I just need the opportunity to talk to her.”

While on her way out, Avery almost hit Love with an auditorium door and the two started talking. “I said, ‘Will you let me work for you for free?’ ” Love said. Avery laughed and said she couldn’t do that, but Love persisted. “I told her I know how to learn, and I’m willing to be taught, and I’d love to do this.”

Avery asked Love to show up to the studio, where she started training and shadowing other personalities. Eventually that expanded to on-air duties during low-traffic hours, like 2 to 6 a.m. on Saturdays. After a couple of years on-air, and a brief stint in Internet radio, Love moved on again.

She started a podcast critiquing music, and worked insurance jobs where she said she was twice fired for not meeting quotas, leaving her drained and uninspired.

While working in the office of a logistics company, the boss gave her the book “The One Thing,” by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan. It resonated with her. “Before, I had 50 things going at one time. I was super busy. But if you put your eggs in one basket, and you focus on the one basket, then that is the thing that will grow.”

That’s when she decided she’d go all-in on her own creative pursuits.

In 2020, Love started a lighthearted YouTube mini-series, “So Anxious,” that shared her daily experiences as a Black woman navigating life with anxiety.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve always been fairly anxious, nervous, fearful of the future and things to come, or things that haven’t even come that I’ve just made up in my head,” she said. “I’ve always just had a very unsettled feeling.”

‘If you see it, you can do it.’

After two seasons of the series, one of her former ASU sociology professors, now the head of the department, saw Love’s work online and asked her to come speak to students.

She agreed, but told the professor that she wanted to create a full-scale show and perform it in Charlotte first.

Writing the show felt like therapy to her.

“I had a vision and I saw it. I could see it, taste it and smell it,” Love said “I’ve been blessed to be able to execute and really see what I wanted — to find the resources and have the resources meet me where the need was.”

In August 2021, she debuted “This is My Brain on Anxiety: The Detailed Experience of an Anxious, Black Woman,” at Duke Energy Theater. Before the show, a production manager found her crying.

Love was stressed and anxious.

“I had never put on an entire show. And this isn’t a church, where people clap for you out of sympathy,” she said. “These people pay money to see you.”

The packed show was a success and led to several other performances and opportunities. But they also took a toll on her mental health. “I mentally had to attend to myself. I got into therapy and I was really focused on getting me better,” Love said.

Finally, a ‘Love Letter’ to home

For her latest production, “Sincerely Charlotte, A Love Letter to Old Charlotte,” Love wanted to shine a light on the institutions lost due to growth and time in her hometown, from Price’s Chicken Coop to the former Excelsior nightclub.

Love dug deep with her own family members, sharing the poignant story of her grandmother leaving the Druid Hills neighborhood, a place she was born and raised, largely due to gentrification.

“She had lived nowhere else and knew nothing else,” Love said. “I think it contributed ultimately to her congestive heart failure, as a result of heartbreak.”

Love also wanted to highlight different voices across generations.

She researched and interviewed longtime Charlotteans, including Ken Koontz, the first Black reporter for WBTV, to ask them about what they missed most about old Charlotte.

Koontz reminisced about The Igloo Dairy Bar in the 1960s off of Beatties Ford Road. “He said they had the best soft serve and hot dogs,” Love said. “And it was just so funny to think that, of all the things he could have told me, as a reporter, that’s the thing that really made him feel like home.”

Stories about Eastland Mall, the Charlotte Coliseum, Good Samaritan Hospital and other former sites were supported with music and graphics.

Love also mentions culturally significant people like the Power 98 Breakfast Brothers Morning Show. And she covers a list of schools that have closed, giving the audience time to whoop and cheer if it was their alma mater.

As for what’s next, Love just started a bi-monthly themed event called “Just Tell the Damn Story, Mia!!!” which she describes as a poetry slam, but with stories. The first one took place at the Dupp & Swat studio at Camp North End.

Her website, mialovelive.com, has more information about her projects, and where people can sign up for her email list about her work. She plans to perform “This Is My Brain on Anxiety” again at Booth Playhouse on Feb. 10, followed by a multistate tour.

“Performing on stage for me is spiritual,” Love said. “Moving the words through my body... making connections with the stories and putting myself in other people’s shoes in some shows.

“I think I’m anxious leading up to it but when it’s showtime, it’s beyond anything that I deal with prior to showtime,” she said. “Nothing else matters but that moment.”

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