does anyone know how to modify a folder on a vfat mount so that when apache looks at it they will actually see something in the "Description" column?

What description coloumn?
Apache is a web server?

are you talking about an index file?

if so you have to have a file like index.00 with the names and descriptions of the file, and enable apache to use those.

This can be solved by reading some setup and documentation about apache.

i guess i should have looked around more. i think this can only be used for server generated indexes, but could you utilize this by renaming a "movies" folder to "movies.xc568" and then
added a line to your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
AddDescription "this folder is full of movies" .xc568 ?

# AddDescription allows you to place a short description after a file in
# server-generated indexes. These are only displayed for FancyIndexed
# directories.
# Format: AddDescription "description" filename
#
#AddDescription "GZIP compressed document" .gz
#AddDescription "tar archive" .tar
#AddDescription "GZIP compressed tar archive" .tgz