Somewhere in the Twilight, a Community Forms

Or Try Rockville's Concerts on the Square Thursdays from 6 to 8 p.m. Rockville Town Square, 21 Maryland Ave. 240-314-8620. www.rockvilletownsquare.com. Free.

It's a lawn chair occasion. Lawn chairs and sundresses and plastic baggies full of goldfish for bebopping little ones who will finish the night in need of a bath and a straight shot to bed.

Every Sunday evening from mid-June through August, a legion of lawn chairs rolls up to the edge of the historic courthouse in Leesburg. Spots are staked out as the featured band does mike checks ("one, two, three, check, check, check"), but there's no hurry. The catching up before and between numbers is almost as big a draw as the music.

It's a summertime community concert -- emphasis on community.

"It's in the center of the community when you're doing it on the courthouse lawn," says Peter H. Dunning, founder and president of Bluemont, a nonprofit group that organizes summer concerts in more than a dozen Virginia locales. "It's giving people the opportunity to come together, to meet their neighbors and their friends."

The group hosted its first concert in 1976 and has been steadily expanding ever since. Summer concerts are its most public events, but Bluemont's primary mission is to provide cultural programming in places it might not otherwise be found, including 40 Virginia school districts. And every act that performs in concert first performs at a local nursing home, hospital or assisted living facility.

"It changes the whole thing," Dunning says of the outreach program. "It changes the way the performers relate to the community itself. I think it improves the performances we get in the evening."

Bluemont brings in only family-friendly acts (jazz, zydeco, folk and the like), music that appeals to grandparents and parents and can play soundtrack to the happy dancing of kids with skinned knees and freckled noses.

Volunteers run the welcome tables, pass out programs and sell raffle tickets. Community groups and local sports teams set up concession stands with homemade treats. Hugging and handshaking fills the time between twilight sets.

"On a particular night, it's one group and one concert, and 2, 3, 400 people," Dunning says. "But over a summer or 10 summers, it's creating that sense of community that I think is really important."

Bluemont Summer Concerts Sundays at 7 p.m. Old Loudoun County Courthouse, 18 E. Market St., Leesburg. 540-338-4640. For other locations and a full schedule, visithttp://www.bluemont.org. $5, members and seniors $4, children younger than 12 $2.