Washington City Paper (January 25, 2019)

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In the year since we purchased Washington City Paper, you have inspired us with your encouragement and passion for the paper as we brought it under local control. Our first priority was to start building a stronger business that can better tell the local stories of this city.

With your support, we are off to a good start. You have seen us re-energized, engaging with the community like never before. We added a sports beat covering some incredible stories that moved and unified our city, hosted a panel attended by hundreds on the widely contested Initiative 77, and solidified ownership of the city’s beloved Peeps diorama competition. Our writers have led the local conversation on the battle over the tipped minimum wage, a charter school consulting company raking in millions, the reality of childbirth and pregnancy in D.C., and the reality of being a black reporter. We offered a comprehensive local election guide, and are currently making daily updates on a D.C. guide to the federal government shutdown. The past year has truly been focused on building a strong foundation for the next phase.

In looking to the future of City Paper, I knew that we needed someone in a leadership position with D.C. roots who also understands the unique challenges facing our community and the news industry. As the home of the federal government, we not only have an opportunity—but an obligation—to connect the local businesses and national brands doing business in our backyard with the people of D.C. through the paper and our signature events— Best of D.C. and Crafty Bastards. We needed someone who not only has a deep understanding of brand strategy, but who also loves the D.C. area as much as we do.

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Darrow Montgomery

By Mark Ein

She brings a dozen years of experience in the Washington, D.C. market to the role; most recently she served as advertising director at The Hill since 2014.

Katy will help us build upon our deep legacy and the past year’s successes, and will strengthen the relationships that the paper has forged throughout the city. She understands the power of media, and how digital, print, and events work together to elevate stories in a way that makes for more compelling and authentic content for both readers and newsmakers. And, most importantly, Katy shares our belief that responsible, highquality journalism—particularly at the local level—is a hallmark of thriving communities.

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COVER STORY: FALSE FRONT

12 Ward 7 and 8 businesses that received funding to work on the Entertainment and Sports Arena may not be based there.

DISTRICT LINE 4 Loose Lips: Meet the lobbyists angling to get a piece of D.C.’s sports betting action.

6 Students’ Union: Graduate students on local campuses push to unionize.

8 Back From Bribery?: Disgraced former Councilmember Michael A. Brown considers a run for an at-large seat.

SPORTS 10 Climbing the Hilltop: Howard University’s grand plans to revive its athletics department

FOOD 15 Ding Ding Ding: Breaking down Pow Pow’s Trolley Fries 15 Hangover Helper: MGM Roast Beef’s Belly Buster 15 Veg Diner Monologues: Nama’s Vegetarian Nigiri

ARTS 16 Foreign Affairs: Reviews from the 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival 18 Curtain Calls: Jones on Studio Theatre’s Admissions and Thal on Pointless Theatre’s Visions of Love 19 Galleries: Anderson on Over, Under, Forward, Back at Arlington Arts Center 20 Speed Reads: Tosiello on Talent by Juliet Lapidos

CITY LIST 21 Music 26 Theater 28 Film

DIVERSIONS 29 Savage Love 30 Classifieds 31 Crossword On the cover: Photograph by Maren Winter/ Adobe Stock

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Lob City

As D.C. councilmembers decided how to establish sports betting, connected lobbyists swarmed the Wilson Building. Here’s a look at how some of them are tied to elected officials.

By Mitch Ryals D.C. CounCil Chairman Phil Mendelson warned his fellow councilmembers.

If they didn’t pass emergency legislation, sidestepping the competitive bid process for the District’s lucrative new sports gambling contract, they should prepare for the “onslaught of lobbying” that would surely follow.

For the last few months of 2018, lobbyists with insider connections to councilmembers roamed the Wilson Building while the Council debated how to establish a sports gambling program in the District. A May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized the practice throughout the country, and by December, the D.C. Council voted to allow sports wagering. (Notably, councilmembers largely rejected lobbyists’ influence in December by giving the DC Lottery sole operating authority, rather than dividing it among licensed sports betting operators.)

Now, DC Lottery Executive Director Beth Bresnahan is advocating for the ability to award the contract to operate the District’s sports betting program to Intralot, the city’s current lottery operator, on a no-bid basis.

D.C. Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWitt has argued that the city will make more money getting to market first than it will save by possibly finding a cheaper operator.

Although Mendelson buys DeWitt’s argument, he ended up pulling the emergency bill and replaced it with one that will go through the normal legislative process. A hearing in the Committee on Finance and Revenue is scheduled for Jan. 28.

Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who sits on the Committee on Finance and Revenue, says the contract should be put up for bid.

McDuffie points to issues with the last lottery contract in 2008. Then-Council Chairman Vince Gray and then-Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham were accused of contract steering. Both denied wrongdoing, but the scandal cost the city big. D.C. paid $3.5 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit brought by Eric Payne,

a District contracting officer who refused to give into political pressure.

As for the lobbying effort, Mendelson, in a recent conversation with LL, describes what he thought was a New Year’s greeting from a lobbyist, though he declines to say who. The note started out wishing him well, and with each succeeding paragraph, lambasted the chairman for even considering a sole source contract.

“I found out later this person was looking to partner with Scientific Games,” one of the few companies that can operate a lottery, Mendelson says.

Other councilmembers, the CFO, and even LL have received dossiers likely assembled by lottery operators to spew negative information about their competition.

For At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, the whole process is rather comical.

“It’s like ‘Who’s best at taking money from our residents so we can fund these programs and make a ton of money off of it?’” she says.

Given the amount of lobbyist attention, the amount of money at stake, and the scandal surrounding the previous lottery contract, it’s time to meet the cast of characters and see how they’re connected to elected officials.

Darrow Montgomery (all photos)

DISTRICTLINE Trayon White

David Grosso

Phil Mendelson

Kevin Stogner

John Bouker

Lobbied for MLB, NBA, and PGA Tour CONNECTIONS: Stogner used to work on the Committee on Finance and Revenue under Jack Evans and donated $37 to Charles Allen in 2014.

Lobbied for FanDuel and DraftKings CONNECTIONS: Bouker is good buds with David Grosso, who has repeatedly stated his moral opposition to gambling and voted against the legislation this past December.

Has donated to David Grosso, Brianne Nadeau, Mary Cheh, Charles Allen, and Phil Mendelson for a grand total of $2,450 dating back to 2015.

4 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Mary Cheh

Kenyan McDuffie

Corey Arnez Griffin Lobbied for DC09, the joint venture that’s running the DC Lottery with Intralot, and tells LL that his contract runs through Feb. 1.

CONNECTIONS: Former chief of staff for Kenyan McDuffie; member of Vince Gray’s 2010 transition team.

Has donated to Brandon Todd, Robert White, Vince Gray, Brianne Nadeau, Charles Allen, Phil Mendelson, Mary Cheh, Kenyan McDuffie, and Anita Bonds, for a grand total of $5,500 dating back to 2015.

DISTRICTLINE Robert White

Charles Allen

Vince Gray

Jack Evans

Brandon Todd

Bill Jarvis

Anita Bonds

Elissa Silverman

Lobbied for DC09. Jarvis says he doesn’t have a role for the contract, but “in my capacity as a lobbyist, when there are government issues related to the lottery, they ask me to get involved.”

Jarvis’ involvement raises ethics concerns due to his business relationship with Councilmember Jack Evans, first reported in the District Dig. CONNECTIONS: Registered agent and “organizer” for Evans’ consulting firm.

There is a discrepancy between the Office of Campaign Finance and the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability’s records of Jarvis’ political donations for 2018: OCF says he donated to Kenyan McDuffie and Charles Allen; BEGA says he also donated to Anita Bonds, Phil Mendelson, and to constituent funds for Brandon Todd and Jack Evans.

Brianne Nadeau

Lloyd Moore Lobbied for FanDuel and DraftKings CONNECTIONS: Has donated to Brandon Todd, Jack Evans, Robert White, Trayon White, Vince Gray, Brianne Nadeau, Phil Mendelson, Kenyan McDuffie, Anita Bonds, and Charles Allen, for a grand total of $8,000 dating back to 2015.

Warren Williams

Janene Jackson Lobbied for MGM CONNECTIONS: Worked for Vince Gray when he was mayor; former committee director for the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety under Mendelson.

Has donated to Vince Gray, Robert White, David Grosso, Brianne Nadeau, Kenyan McDuffie, Phil Mendelson, Charles Allen, Anita Bonds, and Mary Cheh, for a grand total of $4,115.74 dating back to 2015.

Jon Mandel

Claude Bailey

Lobbied for MLB, NBA, PGA Tour, DraftKings, and FanDuel CONNECTIONS: Former communications director for Kenyan McDuffie; friend of Elissa Silverman.

Has donated to Brandon Todd, David Grosso, Kenyan McDuffie, and Elissa Silverman, for a grand total of $651 dating back to 2015.

Lobbied for MLB, NBA, and PGA Tour on retainer CONNECTIONS: Has donated to Brandon Todd, Jack Evans, Robert White, David Grosso, Vince Gray, Brianne Nadeau, Mary Cheh, Kenyan McDuffie, Phil Mendelson, and Anita Bonds, for a grand total of $5,425 dating back to 2015.

It’s unclear which company Williams is working for, though two councilmembers tell LL that they’ve talked with him about sports gambling. Williams hasn’t filed a registration with the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability. The last time the lottery contract was up for bid, Williams initially partnered with Intralot but was removed as part of the alleged contract steering scandal.

CONNECTIONS: Basically everyone. “I’m not sure who I don’t consider a friend on the Council,” Williams says via text.

“Some I know more than others.”

Has donated to Brandon Todd, David Grosso, Robert White, Kenyan McDuffie, and Mary Cheh, for a grand total of $4,000 dating back to 2015.

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 5

DISTRICTLINE Students’ Union

Local graduate students fight to unionize and improve their working conditions.

As the sun set on a chilly March day last year, close to 20 Georgetown University graduate students gathered on campus in Red Square.

A local artist, Adrian Parsons, fiddled with a projector as the students huddled and fidgeted, looking up expectantly at the red brick of the school’s Intercultural Center. After a moment, there were cheers, hugs, and smiles. The facade was lit up with the logo of the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees, a fist raised over Georgetown’s gates.

GAGE, as the group is known, is Georgetown’s graduate student labor union. The projection was part of a years-long and still unfinished process of organizing, agitating, and campaigning for collective bargaining rights and formal recognition from the university. Since August 2016, when the National Labor Relations Board recognized graduate students at private colleges as employees and gave them the right to unionize, students at three District universities have approached their administrations demanding a union contract with varying success.

While graduate students at the three schools—Georgetown, George Washington, and American universities—are all at different stages of the unionization process, a drive to improve working conditions, pay, and health care unites them.

Grad students get an education at their universities, but they also insist that they’re workers, as does current law. These individuals, who can be master’s students or Ph.D. candidates, work as research and teaching assistants for their academic departments, and sometimes teach their own courses independently. This can be a requirement of their degrees in many cases, but it’s also work they’re compensated for in hourly wages or an annual stipend.

Full-time grad students, who are too old or unable to join a parent’s plan, are eligible to receive insurance through the university’s health plan. Last semester, GW Graduate Students United (GW GSU), the union of students at the George Washington University, launched a campaign over their plan with Aetna, which they say is expensive and lacking in coverage.

The union released an open letter signed by 75 graduate students, and members ran a teachin on health justice on campus.

Andreas Meyris, a history Ph.D. candidate at GW, saw the plan’s flaws firsthand over the

Georgetown University past several years. “I had to be hospitalized last summer and the summer before, and I knew with my health insurance I’d have to pay a minimum of a few thousand dollars as a result of those procedures,” he said, “which is tough when the wages the university is paying us are pretty low in general.”

As part of the campaign, students at GW highlighted the cost of their plan, which they must pay in a lump sum, as well as two specific clauses. One, which says that the plan will not cover any treatment for injury due to selfharm or attempted suicide. The university abandoned that after meeting with GW GSU. The other, which says the plan will not cover cosmetic procedures, including gender-affirming ones, has not changed since the action.

“We agree with groups like the Transgender Law Center that it is up to the individual and their physician, not Aetna, to determine what is medically necessary,” GW GSU wrote on its site. “Any pre-set exclusion of ‘cosmetic’ pro-

6 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Darrow Montgomery

By Lilah Burke

cedures is an unacceptable method of providing adequate healthcare.”

Despite sit-ins and protests from grad students, in March, the GWU administration declined to recognize GW GSU, which is affiliated with SEIU Local 500. Provost Forrest Maltzman wrote that the university believes the work graduate students do is part of their education, and that collective bargaining would disrupt important mentorship connections between faculty and students. The administration, instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, suggested that students file for a union election through the National Labor Relations Board.

Though GW GSU says it’s eligible for an election and 50 percent of eligible students have signed union materials, they fear the NLRB could use the case to overturn the 2016 decision that gave grad students the right to unionize in the first place. The labor board, which Trump appointees now control, has swung to the right

since its last vote on the issue.

The George Washington University Faculty Association, a membership organization for faculty members, decried the university’s choice in a May letter to the administration. “We write as clear-eyed observers of the Trump administration and the changes it has made to the National Labor Relations Board,” the letter says. “We know that, in this political moment, asking graduate students to work through NLRB channels is tantamount to denying them the ability to vote democratically on unionization.”

At Georgetown, health care is also a priority for students. Catie Sevigny, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgetown’s tumor biology department, says that she hasn’t had vision or dental check-ups in years, in part because the health plan Georgetown offers her doesn’t cover either.

Chris DeLorenzo, who joined Georgetown’s history department as a doctoral candidate in 2011, said in a GAGE video that he found the insurance extremely lacking. DeLorenzo, who is autistic and has depression and anxiety, said that he was turned away from the student counseling and psychiatric services in pursuit of medications he had been taking.

“Anyone who’s had to look for medical services on their own can tell you it’s extraordinarily difficult,” he says in the video. “I was without a mental health specialist for a little over a year.” He said his prescription costs, when they were covered by Georgetown’s insurance, were prohibitively expensive, especially since he was making less than $30,000 per year.

“The message I’ve gotten from the Georgetown administration is that disabled grad workers just aren’t welcome here,” DeLorenzo says in the video.

Sevigny and others say they hope GAGE can bring health care to the bargaining table.

The union won recognition from the university in November through an election outside the NLRB. Though the administration originally declined to voluntarily recognize the union, they acquiesced in April to an election run by a third party and agreed to not appeal the result to the NLRB. For graduate students, this meant that their election could not be used to overturn the decision their unionization rights are based on. For the university, the agreement allowed the administration to say what the union could and could not negotiate, specifically curriculum changes and other academic matters. The school’s Just Employment Policy affirms that the administration will refrain from pressuring workers during unionization or delaying legal union proceedings. The union won the election with 555 students voting in support of unionizing and 108 voting against.

In 2016, when GAGE first went public with their goals, Georgetown responded as universities across the nation have, and denied that

Injured? grad students are workers.

Ben Feldman, a 34-year-old history Ph.D. candidate at the university, thinks the school tries to have it both ways. “They want us to both be trainees who are not yet experienced enough to be treated as employees. They also want to charge people a quarter of a million dollars to get an education wherein some significant percentage of that education is directed by graduate workers,” he says. “So either they’re ripping us off, or they’re ripping off the families who are giving them a quarter of a million dollars.”

At American University, grads won recognition for the union through a traditional NLRB election and ratified their first negotiated contract in December.

Stephan Lefebvre, an economics Ph.D. candidate who sat at the bargaining table at American, says a range of structural and economic issues were important to grads in their contract. Students won the clear ability to take outside jobs and indicate preferences in their work assignments, as well as promises for further collaborations on scheduling and other issues.

Though Lefebvre thought the contract negotiations were collaborative, he says the

are going up every year,” he says. Most students aren’t able to live in Foggy Bottom, near the university, and Geiger thinks a transportation stipend would also make things easier.

Joseph McCartin, a labor historian and professor at Georgetown, says it’s not hard to understand why organized labor is gaining traction quickly in higher education. “These private institutions in many cases have the resources to do better for their grad assistants than they had been doing,” he says. “These grad assistants at these more well endowed institutions so to speak, they might naturally be the ones who would first raise the demand for unionization.”

For Feldman, the question isn’t whether a person born into means or a supportive family can pursue graduate scholarship, but whether someone less privileged has the chance to contribute, and what the answer to that question says about the research being produced.

“I drive into Annapolis every Sunday night so my mom can watch the baby while I work,” he continues. “That’s not available to everybody. So what happens to somebody who doesn’t have the ability to do that?”

“Graduate work is supposed to prepare you for an academic job,” Feldman says. “You

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“Either they’re ripping us off, or they’re ripping off the families who are giving them a quarter of a million dollars.” union did not get everything it wanted, specifically on economic issues. Soon after the union filed its petition for an election, the university announced a 10 percent increase in Ph.D. candidate stipends. The contract codified this increase, but did not augment it. “Hopefully in the future we will move closer towards what our membership wanted, which is closer to a living wage for Washington.” Lefebvre said.

Pay is, as expected, another major concern for grad students, especially in an expensive city. Most say that they can make ends meet, but emphasize that “getting by” is a low bar.

“A salary of, in our case $32,000 a year— we’re basically taking all of it and dumping it into rent,” says Louis Poon, a Ph.D. student in Georgetown’s chemistry department.

Pat Geiger, a master’s student in geography at GWU, emphasizes that master’s students at the university are sometimes paid tens of thousands of dollars less than doctoral candidates for the same work.

“Getting pay raises each year is important, particularly in D.C. where it seems like rents

don’t want graduate school to be something that just the privileged do to pursue an intellectual curiosity.”

Even for the many grads who have few to no complaints with their administration, the union is an important safeguard.

Poon notes that he thinks his department, chemistry, takes good care of grads. “We’ve had things pretty smoothly, but the more we began talking with the other departments, it sounds like they’re not getting as smooth a ride as we are,” he says. “If they can do it to that department, they can do it to our department as well and proceed with impunity.”

“It’s the most democratic and the most effective way for graduate students workers to sort of advocate to make their lives better,” says Chad Frazier, a history doctoral candidate at Georgetown. “For me the big idea is having increased transparency and accountability.”

For many, the benefits are intangible.

“Graduate students really didn’t have a unified voice before this,” says Lefebvre, who attends American. “The union gave us that.” CP

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DISTRICTLINE Back From Bribery?

Disgraced former Councilmember Michael A. Brown eyes a return to politics.

Your Energy. Your voice.

DCPSC Community Hearing on Safety & Gas Leaks

By Tom Sherwood The black and white image from the 2012 FBI sting is still stark in its simplicity.

Then-At-Large Councilmember Michael A. Brown, dressed as always in power pinstripes, holds a silver coffee mug with $5,000 in $100 bills neatly rolled up inside. He gazes at it lovingly, like a fine bottle of wine.

It was Aug. 28, 2012 and unbeknownst to Brown, federal authorities were in the midst of a bribery sting that would result in Brown’s arrest and imprisonment. In March 2013, FBI agents walked into a hotel room to arrest Brown as he accepted another $25,000 in cash, this time a fat roll of $100 bills bound by a rubber band.

Brown pleaded guilty to accepting a total of $55,000 in a series of meetings spanning eight

ommunity Hearing on Gas Leaks Reporting Requirement

ay, February 6, 2019 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2019 | 2:00 P.M. 1325 G STREET, N.W. SUITE 800 2:00 p.m.

The DCPSC is holding a Community Hearing to discuss treet, N.W. Suite 800

the community’s concerns related to natural gas leaks. The of the hearing is to provide safety information to C is holdingpurpose a Community community members and solicit comments regarding the discuss the community’s dissemination of natural gas leaks information to the public.

FBI photo

lated to natural gas leaks. of the hearing is to provide formation to community s and solicit comments he dissemination of natural information to the public.

months with FBI agents, who posed as officials ase contact the Office of the Commission Secretary by 5 p.m., 3 days before of a Maryland company looking for D.C. government contracts and Brown’s insider help, calling 202-626-5150 or by sending an email to pscDCPSC Community Hearing on Gas Leaks Reporting Requirement and was sentenced to 39 months in prison. At cretary@dc.gov by February 1, 2019.

If you're unable to attend, written sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge RichWednesday, February 6, 2019 ard (Ricky) W. Roberts denounced Brown’s 2:00 p.m. ay be dropped off to the DCPSC at 1325 G Street N.W., Suite 800,crime, saying, “The citizens of the District of 1325 G Street, N.W. Suite 800 are better than that and they de.C. 20005, or submitted through the DCPSC website, dcpsc.org byColumbia February The DCPSC is holding a Community serve better than that.”

Hearing to discuss the community’s concerns related to natural gas leaks. viduals who need special accommodations, interpretation and/or Brown was released from an Alabama prisThe purpose of the hearing is to provide on in 2017.

To testify, please contact the Offi ce of the Commission Secretary by 5 p.m., information to community ervices should informsafety the Office of the Commission Secretary at least 7 City Paper has learned Now Washington members and solicit comments 3 days before the hearing by calling 202-626-5150 or by sending an email to regarding the dissemination of natural Brown is actively considering a return to city the hearing at 202-626-5150. gas leaks information to the public. 1, 2019. If you’re unable to attend, psccommissionsecretary@dc.gov

by February

written statementsTomay be dropped off to the DCPSC at 1325 G Street N.W., testify, please contact the Office of the Commission Secretary by 5 p.m., 3 days before

the hearing by calling 202-626-5150 or by sending an email tothe psc- DCPSC website, Suite 800, Washington D.C. 20005, or submitted through

ent with thebyDCPSC dcpsc.org and onaccommodations, dcpsc.org February 13, at 2019.

Individuals who need special commissionsecretary@dc.gov by February 1, 2019. If you're unable to attend, written statements may be dropped off to the DCPSC at 1325 G Street N.W., Suite 800, Washington D.C. 20005, or submitted through the DCPSC website, dcpsc.org by February interpretation and/or informinterpretation the Office of the 13, 2019. translation Individuals who services need specialshould accommodations, and/or translation services should inform the Office of the Commission Secretary at least 7 Commission Secretary at least 7 days prior to the hearing at 202-626-5150. days prior to the hearing at 202-626-5150.

current with the DCPSC at dcpsc.org and on Keep currentKeep with the DCPSC at dcpsc.org and

8 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

politics in the upcoming 2020 council races, and is looking to challenge Independent AtLarge Councilmember David Grosso, who defeated him in 2012.

Asked this week about a rebooting of his political career, Brown “declined comment at this time.”

Neither Councilmember Grosso nor AtLarge Councilmember Robert White, who is also on the ballot next year, would publicly comment on Brown. But they and others privately

dismiss any Brown comeback, citing Brown’s record of campaign violations—the FBI sting was not the only one—and the changing nature of the District’s politics and demographics.

Brown last ran for a Council seat in 2013 but dropped out as FBI agents closed in. Since Brown was last on the 13-member Council in 2012, there has been significant turnover. Only three of the 13 current members—Chairman Phil Mendelson, Ward 2’s Jack Evans, and Ward 3’s Mary Cheh—served with Brown.

The 10 other members were elected after Brown left the Council.

Mendelson was almost expressionless Tuesday when he said of Brown’s political moves, “I’ve heard it and my understanding is he’s looking to see if it’s viable. I don’t think I’ll comment beyond that.”

Sources familiar with Brown’s thinking say he believes enough D.C. voters will give him a second chance in a highturnout presidential general election in November 2020. Brown is also pursuing a legal strategy to have his conviction nullified, saying he was convicted of the same statute the U.S. Supreme Court threw out in the case involving former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

The high court said prosecutors had not shown McDonnell had done any specific illegal act in exchange for the expensive gifts McDonnell had received.

Some lawyers familiar with the case law say Brown’s effort is a legal stretch too far.

Since returning to the District from his Alabama prison, Brown has volunteered serving Thanksgiving dinner at the DC Central Kitchen, shown up at a Christmas toy drive with Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, and, on Jan. 2, was busy glad-handing everyone at the District’s inaugural ceremonies at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Brown has also remarried and now works as a consultant for Potomac International Partners, whose website refers to his public career but not his conviction.

Brown is the son of the late Commerce Secretary and Democratic political guru Ronald Brown. The younger Brown is widely seen to have thrown away a career in search of money for his expensive lifestyle. Still today, Brown exudes a friendly demeanor and brashness that even his critics say obscures his wrongdoing.

After his 2013 sentencing, Brown’s own lawyer—white collar heavyweight Reid Weingarten—said of Brown, “Michael Brown is done in public life. That is for sure.”

We may now see if that is still true.

CP

Jazz Jason Moran

Artistic Director

Archie Shepp

The Human Journey

Discovery Artist in the KC Jazz Club

David Sánchez: CARIB

Camille Thurman with the Darrell Green Trio

Saturday, January 26 at 7 p.m.

Terrace Theater The Grammy Award®–winning Puerto Rican saxophonist’s deeply personal new project uses modern jazz to explore the kinship between the West African drum rhythms of Yuba, Calinda, and Sika and music from Haiti, Carriacou, and his native Puerto Rico.

Part of The Human Journey exploration: Kennedy-Center.org/HumanJourney

Kennedy-Center.org

Friday, February 1 at 7 & 9 p.m.

Terrace Gallery

Multi-talented saxophonist, flutist, and vocalist Camille Thurman has amazed audiences all over the world. She returns to the KC Jazz Club headlining a night dedicated to her own imaginative artistry and warm voice.

Groups call (202) 416-8400

(202) 467-4600

NEA Jazz Master

Archie Shepp’s All-Star Tribute to John Coltrane featuring Jason Moran

Sunday, February 10 at 8 p.m.

Concert Hall In this momentous concert event, Shepp celebrates the boundless impact and talent of his good friend and mentor. He’s joined by pianist and Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz Jason Moran and other contemporary greats, including Amir ElSaffar, Darryl Hall, Nasheet Waits, and Marion Rampal.

For all other ticket-related customer service inquiries, call the Advance Sales Box Office at (202) 416-8540.

Discovery Artists in the KC Jazz Club are supported by The Buffy and William Cafritz Family Foundation and The King-White Family Foundation and Dr. J. Douglas White.

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 9

Kelyn Soong

SPORTS

D.C. United fans have conflicted feelings about the team’s new broadcasting deal that would make viewers pay to watch matches online. washingtoncitypaper.com/sports

Climbing the Hilltop The Howard Bison have grand visions for their athletic department just years after an NCAA recruiting scandal.

The headlines revealed an athletic department in disarray. In 2012, Howard University announced a temporary suspension of its sports teams from any intercollegiate athletic competition while the school conducted an internal investigation on what appeared to be widespread violations of NCAA rules. A few years later, in 2014, the track and field coach resigned after an investigation showed that he had committed numerous recruiting violations.

Ultimately, the NCAA determined that Howard lacked institutional control and handed down penalties that included probation, a hefty fine, and scholarship reductions in several sports including football and basketball.

The school’s current leaders have put those incidents in the past. Today they are looking to schools like Stanford, Duke, the Ivy League institutions, and cross-town rival Georgetown as examples where athletic success can support the school’s academic mission.

President Wayne A.I. Frederick has made it clear: He wants the school to treat sports as a serious endeavor on par with the academic side of the university. Football and basketball are the teams the school is most keen to develop.

Frederick hired Kery Davis as the school’s athletic director in September 2015 to guide the program out of turmoil. The former HBO Sports executive sees the potential in what Bison athletics can offer and how it can grow.

“The goal is answering the question, ‘How do we enhance the academic reputation that Howard already has through our athletic program?’” Davis tells City Paper. “I always thought of Howard as a great academic school [but] basically their athletics was an unpolished diamond.”

Howard’s athletic department has had a history of success—especially in women’s sports, men’s soccer (winner of the 1974 national championship), and track and field—but not with any consistency. Given Howard’s academic prestige and desirable location, Davis is confident it can become a sports power in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and compete on the same level as the Patriot League and Ivy League’s finest, just years after a scan-

Courtesy Howard Athletic Department

By Aman Kidwai

dal nearly eroded the department.

Funding will always be the challenge, as it is for any school playing the high stakes game of major college athletics. Howard has historically focused on cultivating its academic reputation, as numerous iconic black leaders in business, politics, and literature have graced its halls.

Football and basketball are the most important sports for schools hoping to get serious at the Division I level because success in those programs can impact incoming donations, prospective student applications, ticket and merchandise sales, and sponsorship interest.

“Our next step is to win championships in the two major revenue sports, which are men’s basketball and football—and I think both of them are in the short horizon for us,” Davis says. “Both of those teams are very young and talented, and I really see us winning [conference] championships in one or both in the next few years, and that’s the critical next step.”

Howard men’s basketball team appears to be on the right path under Kevin Nickelberry, the Bison’s nine-year head coach. He has a model student-athlete in star guard RJ Cole, who was seventh in the country in scoring last year as a freshman, leading the way. The Bison have not reached the NCAA tournament since 1992, but the future looks promising.

Second-leading scorer CJ Williams and third-leading scorer Chad Lott are juniors

10 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

and leading rebounder Zion Cousins is a s ophomore.

Freshmen bigs A k u wovo Ogheneyole and Andre Toure and guard Raymond Bethea Jr. have all made their presence felt in their first year and are poised to be stronger contributors down the road. If this core can remain intact, these players can accomplish something special.

“Howard is a major brand within the MEAC but their on-court performance over time hasn’t been the best,” says Stephen-Michael Thompson Jr., a journalist who covers the MEAC for SB Nation’s Mid-Major Madness.

“RJ Cole can break that trend. … [he] can truly take this team far, but he needs some help.”

Davis also acknowledges that women’s basketball is a key pursuit. That Bison squad is off to a 10-8 start this year in a season where it returns four out of five starters under fourth-year head coach Ty Grace.

“You have to win in basketball, both on the men’s and women’s side,” Davis says. “We’re doing better there … Women’s basketball is off to a terrific start this year, and it reflects the fact that Howard has 68 percent women on this campus.”

Football faces an uncertain future after a coaching change, but the coaching staff hopes to give all D.C. sports fans a team they can have pride in.

Davis invested in the sport immediately after taking over by upgrading the locker room, fully staffing the assistant coaching ranks, and offering scholarships to studentathletes that include a cost-of-attendance stipend, which schools can now offer to cover the cost of books and other school expenses. He

also hired well-known Division I coach Mike London to lead the program before the 2017 season.

In London’s first year at Howard, he and the dazzling freshman quarterback Caylin Newton guided the Bison to a 7-4 record that included a huge upset over an FBS team in UNLV. The team won three games in its previous two years combined and hadn’t had a winning season since 2012.

But they took a step back in 2018, losing four one-score games on their way to a 4-6 finish.

In the offseason, London departed for William & Mary.

Looking for a new leader to take the football program through this critical juncture, Davis tapped Ron Prince, an assistant at the University of Michigan by way of the Detroit Lions who had also spent some time as head coach at Kansas State.

The newest Bison head coach would likely have played for Howard if it weren’t for a scheduled recruiting visit to D.C. in 1988 that didn’t go as planned. Prince ended up playing at Appalachian State. Three decades later, he feels positive about the conversations he had with London, a friend of his, and the vision of Davis and Frederick.

His offensive background should mesh well with the Bison offense he inherits. Prince recruited and coached future NFL quarterback Josh Freeman while at Kansas State. Last year’s Bison squad averaged 33.6 points and 470.8 yards per game.

“I think that the wide receiver group has some college frontline players and so does the running back group,” Prince says. The group returns all-conference receiver Jequez Ezzard and a couple of talented running backs in rising sophomores Dedrick Parson and Khalid Dorsey.

Where the Bison need to improve if they’re going to be a leader in the MEAC is on defense.

They finished the season last in the conference, by a wide margin, in yards and points allowed per game.

Prince knows the expectations from the school are high. Football success can make a big difference for the university, and he has an opportunity to take Howard football, and the athletic department, to a new level. The potential is there, the investment has followed, and the visions, considering what Howard has overcome, are grand.

“It’s a high-profile game in a high-profile city,” Prince says. “I see a legitimate option to be Washington, D.C.’s team. We really want to try to fight for that space right here in the District and be that option ... We think its viable to make fans among the people that live here.”

CP

VOTING IS OPEN! Cast your vote for all your favorite local stuff by March 3.

washingtoncitypaper.com/ bestofdc2019

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 11

District officials applauded the $10 million awarded to Ward 7 and 8 businesses to work on the city’s new Entertainment and Sports Arena. But many of the companies that won those contracts are based in other wards, or even other cities.

By Morgan Baskin Photographs by Darrow Montgomery

A block AwAy from Anacostia Park, on Good Hope Road SE, rows of brick and glass storefronts glint under a thin crust of ice.

Directly across the street from a Department of Housing and Community Development field office, sandwiched between a pharmacy and hydroponics store, is a narrow white door. Taped on the glass window is a sheet of white paper, with the name “SAXON” printed squarely in the center.

The company, Saxon Collaborative Construction, LLC, is a firm whose specialties range from painting to carpentry and laying concrete. It regularly works on District-funded projects, including the redevelopment of Columbia Heights’ Hyde-Addison Elementary School and Congress Heights’ beleaguered affordable housing complex Parkway Overlook.

This Ward 8 office isn’t its headquarters.

Public business registry information from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that Saxon has registered with a Wisconsin Avenue NW address in Ward 3, and business registration documents from the state of Maryland list a principal office on Massachusetts Avenue NW, also in Ward 3. But the District has registered Saxon as a Ward 8 business.

D.C.’s Department of Small and Local Business Development is responsible for ushering businesses through the Certified Business Enterprise process, a program that awards locally operated companies with a special certification that gives them preferred status during contract procurement. The roughly 80-member Saxon Collaborative, according to public DSLBD documents, is a certified Ward 8 CBE. Most recently, Saxon Collaborative won a

12 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

$4.7 million contract to work on the Entertainment and Sports Arena, a 4,200-seat stadium in Ward 8’s Congress Heights. Building the arena, whose cost eventually ballooned to $69 million, was a coup for the District— officials estimate that the anticipated return on tax dollars invested will be 4-to-1. The 80,000-square-foot arena will serve as the Washington Mystics’ home court and practice space for the Wizards, and it’s expected to attract 350,000 unique visitors annually.

Residents of the surrounding neighborhood helped negotiate a community benefits agreement that, ostensibly, helps ensure that residents of the ward get a slice of the arena’s anticipated financial benefits.

Greg O’Dell, president of Events DC—the publicly subsidized company that manages sites like the Walter E. Washington Conven-

tion Center and RFK Stadium—has boasted about the number of Ward 7 and 8 businesses, and residents, that benefited from the project, emphasizing that Ward 7 and 8 CBEs were awarded $10 million in contracts. Events DC initially provided over $27 million in funding for the arena, with the District paying another $23 million. With the final cost rising by nearly 25 percent, the District will be on the hook for the bulk of that additional money.

But quarterly reports summarizing the payments made to subcontractors on the project, produced by DSLBD, show that Events DC and District officials publicly exaggerated the anticipated financial benefits that the construction of the Entertainment and Sports Arena would create for residents of wards 7 and 8 and the businesses they run. City Paper received these reports through the Freedom of

Information Act. City Paper identified over $6 million in contracts awarded to companies that are registered as Ward 7 or 8 CBEs, but have headquarters outside of those neighborhoods or separate offices outside of the District altogether. (A spokesperson for Events DC declined to make available the list of companies that received the $10 million. O’Dell says he would tell the companies to independently call City Paper. They did not.)

“On the CBE piece, we were at 62 or 60 percent CBEs,” O’Dell says. “I’m very happy about that number. Obviously the emphasis was on having [businesses] from wards 7 and 8. I’m pleased.”

Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, chairperson of the Council’s business and economic development committee that has oversight of DSLBD, says that his policy team “know[s] that the DSLBD has to focus on compliance more than they have. This issue about fraud companies, shell companies, out of town companies establishing CBEs to circumvent [the system] is a problem.”

Becoming certified as a community based enterprise is disarmingly easy—there are over 1,700 registered CBEs in the District, per the agency’s public database.

Business owners can log on to DSLBD’s “CBE Wizard,” a digital questionnaire that helps determine eligibility, to download a list of documents required for the application.

Eligible companies must attend a series of DSLBD-sponsored workshops over the course of several months.

Dionne Brown, a Ward 8 business owner of nearly a decade, says that she twice attempted D.C.’s CBE certification process, but eventually abandoned pursuit of it each time. She became disillusioned, she says, by the other business owners she encountered during the certification process.

Brown says that of the 10 or so business owners present for the CBE certification trainings during DSLBD workshops held in the business center of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, “very few actually lived in D.C. It was actually the exception rather than the rule.” Several of the other business owners cheaply acquired office space east of the river, Brown says, often by sharing space as small as a cubicle with a handful of other companies.

“They just change the nameplate around,” she says. “If you’re splitting the rent eight ways, it’s pretty affordable, it’s cheaper than downtown.”

The District has few local residency requirements for CBEs. In some cases, all of a company’s employees could live in Maryland or Virginia, but as long as the company does slightly more than half of its business in D.C., it’s considered local.

McDuffie tells City Paper that his office discovered last October that DSLBD has been required to complete reviews of their CBE beneficiaries since 2006. “They’ve only done it once” since then, McDuffie says. “We’re really pressuring them to do this review. We’ve asked them about it, and they have not completed it yet. That’s an accountability mech-

B&B Floor Services’ Ward 8 office

anism that they really need to do to discover these challenges.” He suggests that the department complete random spot checks on businesses after they’ve been certified to ensure that they’re complying with the law.

Shaneka Green, a spokesperson for DSLBD, declined to elaborate on the certification process beyond what the agency posts online, and declined to make the certification team or other department employees available for further comment by press time. Green did not respond to emails describing the scope of this article.

The CBE program, created during former mayor Marion Barry’s administration, launched with the goal of helping black- and minority-owned businesses compete to receive lucrative contracts with prestige firms, which are typically headquartered in wealthier D.C. neighnorhoods. Decades later, officials still throw around the term CBE with pride to describe the construction companies involved in marquee development projects, and the implication is that those companies are locallyowned and diverse. “CBE,” along the way, became a code word for racial inclusion.

But it’s long since lost its meaning. In 2012, City Paper wrote about how companies use CBE status to game the District’s “preference points” system for awarding construction contracts. “Critics say the setup gives mammoth, politically connected firms unfair advantages, invites waste and fraud, and actually hurts, rather than helps, smaller minority-owned businesses,” City Paper wrote at the time.

A former employee of a Ward 8 office space recently told City Paper that the space “would have non-Ward 8 companies, especially those in the construction industry, show up either

this was contrary to our mission, we wouldn’t lease them space. But we knew others in Ward 8 would, and they did.”

The former employee says that it was “frustrating” to see Ward 8 businesses “shut out of economic opportunities that were supposedly created for them,” particularly “knowing firsthand how hard it is for Ward 8 small businesses to survive, let alone thrive.”

Adrienne Smoot-Edwards, the president of Maryland-based historic preservation company Phoenix Restoration Group, has worked on District projects like the renovation of Cardozo Education Campus, Adams Morgan’s The Line Hotel, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Phoenix is also a registered CBE. (Smoot-Edwards is not affiliated with Smoot Construction.)

“I’d think if they set up an office and are doing paperwork, that qualifies as having a business that’s run in that ward. To the city, you’ve met the obligation. You’re running a business in the ward. If you have personnel there, and you have paperwork there, you have a CBE,” Smoot-Edwards says.

For the Entertainment and Sports Arena, Events DC’s O’Dell told WTOP last year that Smoot-Gilbane—the partnership of Smoot Construction and Gilbane Building Company, who jointly served as the arena’s general contractor—hired “a lot of CBE contractors,” about 66 percent of the businesses who JJ Prime Services’ office

shortly before an RFP’s [request for proposal’s] deadline or right after they got the contract award, looking for office space. You could tell they didn’t intend to work out of that space, they just needed to check the box to fulfill some requirement for the city. Because

worked on the Entertainment and Sports Arena. “So we’ve exceeded our goal for this project,” he said.

On paper, it’s true that Smoot-Gilbane hired dozens of CBEs to work on the arena. It’s also misleading.

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 13

A City Paper review of DSLBD’s quarterly Entertainment and Sports Arena reports identified millions of dollars’ worth of contracts that went to businesses that are local by the District’s standards, but are actually headquartered outside of wards 7 and 8. Some of their D.C. locations are sparse, if they exist at all.

One company, JJ Prime Services, received a $1.7 million contract for work on the Ward 8 arena. The business does not appear to have a website—just a Facebook page, which does not describe what kind of work the company specializes in. But a quarterly report from DSLBD shows that JJ Prime Services was hired for “excavation” at the Entertainment and Sports Arena.

Public records from D.C.’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs show that the company is a Maryland-based LLC, with headquarters in Silver Spring and a separate office in Prince George’s County. But D.C.’s DSLBD records show that it’s also registered as a Ward 7 local business. City Paper visited the company’s Ward 7 address, an office park off of Bladensburg Road NE, just shy of the Maryland border.

The squat building, home to another construction company, called Nastos Construction, is located directly across from a yard full of used dumpsters. JJ Aguirre, the president of JJ Prime, tells City Paper that “98 percent” of the scope of his work, including project management and bidding, is in D.C. He says that he worked out of his Maryland home before renting office space from Nastos five years ago.

B&B Floor Services, a “full-service flooring company,” received over $297,000 to do flooring in the arena, per DSLBD’s quarterly financial reports. Its business certification page on DSLBD’s website lists the company as operating out of a Ward 5 address on 28th Street NE, yet it’s registered as a Ward 8 business.

B&B also lists a Ward 8 address, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, on its website. City Paper drove to that location, too. It looks like a singlefamily home just a block south of the Washington Informer office. A sign out front, which listed eight business names, did not include B&B. What’s more, Maryland’s public LLC registration site shows that B&B is based in Capitol Heights, and has been since 2005. B&B’s website says its Maryland office is in Forestville.

Another company, Global Engineering Solutions, received a $146,000 contract on the Entertainment and Sports Arena for “commissioning.” Though it’s registered as a Ward 3 local business, business filings show that its principal office is in Bethesda and that its principal agent lives in Baltimore. (Neither B&B nor GES responded to multiple emails from City Paper detailing these facts.)

And Saxon Collaborative’s principal office is on Wisconsin Avenue NW, in Ward 3. Yet DSLBD has it registered as a Ward 8 business.

Adam Sacks, Saxon’s president, acknowledges that his company has a larger presence west of the Anacostia River, and that on any given day there are only three or four employees working from Saxon’s Southeast office. But that’s intentional, he says. Saxon had to move out of its first Ward 8 office, which the company opened on the intersection of Alabama

Saxon Collaborative’s Anacostia office

Ave. SE and MLK Ave. SE about six years ago, after several staffers were mugged in the parking lot. He says that employees’ cars were frequently broken into in that neighborhood.

“To be entirely frank, we opened our Wisconsin Ave. office because we are having difficult time getting accounting and HR [staff] to come to SE,” Sacks says. “It’s a much safer neighborhood.”

Sacks says that, in his experience, it’s difficult to find CBEs based in Ward 8 that are financially stable enough to navigate the obstacles involved in working on larger D.C.-funded projects, which are often slow in reimbursing general contractors for work and stacked with burdensome hiring requirements. (“We know that’s been an issue,” McDuffie says of delayed payments.)

Sacks cites infrastructure work Saxon has completed on the St. Elizabeths East campus, and the beleaguered Parkway Overlook project (“truly a disaster,” Sacks says) as examples of poorly run D.C. projects in terms of timely repayment and subcontractor hiring. Work on the St. Elizabeths campus “required splitting contracts a million different ways, especially in light of the government’s inability to flow funding. We didn’t have a GMP [final price] executed with the D.C. government until two months before the [$80 million] project began. We don’t know a lot of CBEs that can front that money for any period of time,” Sacks says.

D.C.’s First Source hiring law requires beneficiaries of large, publicly subsidized projects to hire District residents for newly created positions. Construction company executives have long complained that these requirements are burdensome and unreasonable, given the perceived dearth of skilled laborers in the Dis-

14 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

trict. “When you go to Ward 8 and the Department of General Services comes down with a mandate and says, ‘This is what D.C. wants’ … they just don’t exist. People like me, we have a very difficult time with hiring people and doing the soft skills stuff just to get people from Ward 8. [Saxon] gives 7th and 8th and 10th chances to [workers]. We’ve been doing that for years,” Sacks says.

He adds: “I have to stress, we’re really the good guys. If someone works eight minutes of overtime, they get paid for eight minutes of overtime. They have full health benefits, and people are actively knocking on our door to work for us … we don’t take advantage of employees. Everything is above board.”

Sacks says that DSLBD is aware of Saxon’s Wisconsin Avenue office, which is also registered with the department.

Chrystal Stowe, Smoot Construction’s director of community relations, says that she is not aware of any CBE subcontractors hired for the Entertainment and Sports Arena that are based outside D.C. Asked if she is aware of the practice more generally, she says “no, it has not happened on any projects that I’ve been involved in.” Stowe says the company confirms subcontractors’ CBE status with D.C. before hiring them, but that that is the extent of their vetting process.

As Smoot-Edwards of Phoenix Restoration Group points out, there is a challenge in the construction industry, particularly for specialty companies, in setting a standard for what really constitutes an office. “The subcontractors, once they mobilize—everything they need to do is handled at the project site,” she says.

“There’s payroll, which could be done out of

that office which they set up, or when they have meetings. An electrician doesn’t need to have an office—they can call their supplier and say, ‘Deliver X number of wires to this project location.’ If they have a trailer at the site, they receive and process it there, and transit the paperwork to an office.”

And the most common place to establish these secondary offices? “Definitely wards 7 and 8,” she says, adding that the city’s drive to “generate more [workers]” from those wards further entices construction companies to establish an address there.

Sacks says he’s also familiar with the practice. He rattles off three buildings notorious for renting desk space to businesses outside of D.C., including a building next to the Anacostia Playhouse.

“There were not a lot of non-native Ward 8 companies” working on the Entertainment and Sports Arena, says Sacks, who lives in upper Northwest D.C. “Maybe you’ve tried to make the argument that we are. We’re a little bit of both.”

City Paper asked O’Dell how much interagency communication Events DC has with D.C. agencies during the construction process.

He says that the work “is driven upfront, in setting goals and parameters. Each project has to self report. DSLBD has been very supportive when we’ve needed or asked questions, and I suspect they do outreach as well. [But] the structure is really required for people to define goals clearly up front, and self report against those goals.”

Which raises the matter of hiring local. A third quarter financial report from 2018 generated by DSLBD for the Entertainment and Sports Arena—the most recent report available—shows that, of the 39 CBE subcontractors who completed work on the arena that quarter, only 10 reported employing D.C. residents.

Saxon Collaborative, which made $4.7 million from the Entertainment and Sports Arena—one of the more lucrative subcontracts—hired 49 new workers for the project, 16 of which were D.C. residents, eight of them Washingtonians from wards 7 and 8. B&B Floor Services, which made about $300,000 from its work, hired three. JJ Prime Services, the company registered as a Ward 7 CBE that made almost $2 million dollars from the arena, hired five Ward 8 residents. Global Engineering Solutions, a Ward 3 CBE, did not report hiring any D.C. residents.

The mayor’s website boasts that construction of the arena was anticipated to generate a total of 300 permanent jobs and 600 temporary construction jobs. Events DC’s O’Dell says that, so far, it has generated only 30 full time jobs on Events DC’s operations side.

About half of those, he says, are residents of wards 7 and 8.

Brown, the Ward 8 business owner, became discouraged each time she began her local certification process, in part for this reason. “They have contempt for our communities—that’s the thing that bothers me,” she says. “They want to come to Ward 8 to make money, but they wouldn’t live here and they wouldn’t want to employ us.”

CP

DCFEED Ding Ding Ding:

what we ate this week: Cambodian noodle salad with pork shoulder, cold rice noodles, herbs, peanuts, and cucumber, $12, Maketto.

Satisfaction level: 5 out of 5.

GRAZER

what we’ll eat next week: Tiki tots with pineapple, mango, green onions, cilantro, chili peppers, Pepper Jack cheese, and TNT sauce, $10, Tiki TNT. Excitement level: 4 out of 5.

Veg Diner Monologues

Nori (dried seaweed)

Breaking Down Pow Pow’s ‘Trolley Fries’

By Laura Hayes

A look at vegetarian dishes in the District that all should try

Sesame seeds

When the DC Streetcar first rolled down H Street NE, a bell would ring as the trolley reached every stop. The plant-based fast casual restaurant Pow Pow opened around the same time. “You used to be able to hear it in here,” says Chef Margaux Riccio. “We did a trolley stop deal. Every time you were in the store and heard the bell, you got a dollar off the trolley fries.”

Alex Levin

Napa cabbage kimchi

The Streetcar doesn’t ding anymore, but Pow Pow still serves the comforting pile of fries ($5). For $2 more, diners can add toppings like jackfruit or Taiwanese fried plant-based chicken. Riccio says the dish is one of the restaurant’s biggest sellers. All of the components are made in house and come together for a memorable, tangy, creamy fry experience.

Nama’s Vegetarian Nigiri Where to get it: Nama, 465 K St. NW

Laura Hayes

Price: $3 per piece

Korean ketchup utilizing gochujang that’s kosher and gluten free

Fries

Spicy Sriracha mayonnaise made using aquafaba (the viscous liquid that’s a byproduct of cooking chickpeas)

Cheese made from the milk that results from pressing cashews

Hangover Helper

How It Tastes: The Belly Buster is reminiscent of sandwiches from Pittsburgh’s legendary Primanti Brothers restaurants, which come stuffed with french fries. The spuds in the Belly Buster, along with the rye bread, absorb a mouthwatering mess of brisket, gravy, and egg yolk. A side of sweet pickles adds acidity and crunch.

The Dish: MGM Roast Beef’s Belly Buster Sandwich Where To Get It: 905 Brentwood Road NE What It Is: You’ll find an impossibly messy hangover sandwich, known as the Belly Buster behind a family-owned auto auction warehouse in Brentwood. It’s piled high with fatty brisket, two overmedium eggs, a heap of french fries,

Tim Ebner

Price: $13.99

and gravy on two slices of rye bread.

“By far, it’s our signature and most beloved breakfast sandwich,” says owner Ryan Zaritsky.

Why It Helps: “It’s great for a hangover because this sandwich is kind of like three meals in one,” Zaritsky says.

The fatty brisket soaks up any alcohol consumed from the night before, and the french fries and eggs supply the protein and starch you need for sustenance, which makes this deli order both a belly and hangover buster.

—Tim Ebner

What It Is: A selection of nigiri made with vegetables instead of the more traditional raw fish atop a brick of rice or wrapped in a seaweed basket. Options include royal trumpet mushroom with lime and truffle; spicy eggplant with curry and tempura flakes; cucumber with sesame and furikake; and spicy beet tartare with crispy quinoa, white soy, and mint.

The Story: Restaurateur Michael Schlow and Ed Scarpone, culinary director for Schlow Restaurant Group, are constantly experimenting with ingredients. “We were playing around with it and trying to make it taste good, but we realized we could actually make [vegetables] look like certain things.” They score the mushrooms, roast them in olive oil, and finish them with a little truffle oil, salt, soy, and lime zest. The result slightly resembles a cut of eel. Another variety calls for beets that are diced, marinated, and seasoned so that they have the appearance of minced tuna.

Why Even Meat Eaters Will Like It: Initially, the vegetarian nigiri was included just to give herbivores something to snack on at the seafood-heavy restaurant, but Scarpone reveals that nonvegetarians have been just as inclined to order them. That’s probably due to the unexpected and inventive ingredients and presentation. “We didn’t want the traditional, boring avocado cucumber roll that’s the staple you’d get at a sushi place if you’re vegetarian,” Scarpone explains. “We try to make them a little more exciting and fun.”

—Stephanie Rudig

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 15

CPARTS

Foreign Affairs

Despite obstacles due to the partial government shutdown, the 23rd Annual Iranian Film Festival still offers a thematically diverse glimpse of Iran’s unique film scene.

3 Faces

By Alan Zilberman Now that the partial government shutdown has passed the month mark, it is easier to take stock of its impact on our community. Obviously, the people hardest hit are the employees and contractors who are furloughed, or forced to work without a paycheck. While cultural film programming is hardly an important item—relatively speaking—the canceled screenings at our local museums offer a chance for us to reflect on what we take for granted.

Over the next month or so, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural is partnering with the Freer and Sackler Galleries for its 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival. The films are an intriguing mix, since Iran’s film exports often come from directors who are either censored or blacklisted entirely. This year’s crop includes films made in secret, with the added poignancy that it’s difficult to see them in D.C., thanks to our fearless leader’s overwhelming incompetence.

If any of the below films pique your interest, then fear not!

According to the Freer and Sackler’s film curator Tom Vick, who is currently furloughed, the galleries will reschedule the canceled screenings for later in February. The government shutdown should be over by then, right? Right?!?!

FILM

16 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Sly

Directed by Kamal Tabrizi

Some foreigN filmS translate better than others.

It is easier to grasp a foreign drama or thriller, for example, since the stakes are universal—no matter the country of origin. Comedy is trickier not only because different countries have different ideas of what’s funny, but because in-jokes may be lost on audiences who do not experience the same minutiae of everyday life. This is the case with Sly, a comedy about a populist buffoon.

Played by Hamed Behdad, the main character in Sly is clearly based on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former President (they look startlingly alike, for one thing, and have similar fashion sense). In this film, he is a yokel who would rather shame his countrymen than provide any leadership. He becomes an unlikely leader after he tries to interrupt a concert with a fake bomb threat, only to realize a real bomb was planted at the event. This propels him into the limelight, and yet he is wholly unprepared to comment on the issues of the day.

The dialogue in Sly is fast-moving, with the de facto Ahmadinejad talking over others like an entitled jerk. It can be hard to follow what everyone says, and some lines are clunky in translation. There are some inspired set-pieces and one-liners, like when the hero is called, “the candidate who will bring oil to your table.”

But by the time director Kamal Tabrizi gets to the final humiliating scenes, Sly loses its sense of propulsive comic exaggeration.

The Lemon Collective is back with a new spot and fresh ideas. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

against his work. The country imposed a 20-year ban on him working, and yet Panahi still smuggles film in secret to worldwide acclaim. After being smuggled out of Iran, This Is Not a Film and Taxi became minimalist triumphs, and it is amazing what the director can accomplish with few resources. 3 Faces continues in that tradition, mixing documentary and narrative filmmaking with powerful results.

Panahi plays himself, and his co-star Behnaz Jafari plays herself. Together, they travel from Tehran to a remote village where they worry about the fate of a young woman: Jafari was sent footage that looks like her suicide, and she needs Panahi to chaperone the investigation. The film unfolds like a travelogue, with the characters learning about the uneasy balance between modernity and provincial life.

Many scenes in 3 Faces are understated, and we get the impression Panahi filmed himself interacting with actual locals in the village. Their dialogue is refreshing precisely because no one quite knows where it will end up: There are scenes of forgiveness, anger, and even bizarre comic vignettes, like an extended chat about foreskin.

Since 3 Faces has an affable low-key quality to it, it is easy to forget Panahi is one of the few filmmakers whose efforts could be described as heroic: Even as his country spurns him, his films stubbornly offer a balanced, empathetic look at modern Iran.

Screens Monday, Feb. 11, 7:15 p.m. and Wednesday, Feb. 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.

The Graveless

Directed by Mostafa Sayari

Directed by Jafar Panahi

aSghar farhadi woN the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2017 for The Salesman, a film that includes a theater company putting on an Iranian version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It might be surprising to see Iran take Western literature seriously, at least until we pause to realize that the right work will resonate with audiences from any country. Such is the case with The Graveless, a film that’s loosely based on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

You may recall that Faulkner’s novel is an adopter of the “stream of consciousness” style, with multiple narratives and viewpoints. Director Mostafa Sayari jettisons all that, instead focusing on the basic story of four adult children transporting their deceased father to a gravesite. The estranged siblings rehash family history, unearthing some dark history about their father and the village he used to call home.

More than any other film in this festival, Sayari resembles Farhadi’s work as a dramatist. The actors and situations are understated, with the dialogue peeling away at the truth until we finally have a new understanding of what really happened. Where Farhadi’s films unfold like thrillers, The Graveless’ scope is much more traditional. All the characters are flawed, and Sayari is careful in the way he develops sympathy for them. And since Iran’s draconian laws are the center of the bitterness among the characters and their father’s death, The Graveless has a biting political dimension that has a modern resonance more than Faulkner’s original novel.

to maNy weSterN audiences, filmmaker Jafar Panahi might be better known for the Iranian government’s crackdown

Screens Tuesday, Feb. 19 at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.

Screens Tuesday, Jan. 29, 7:15 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 31, 7:15 p.m., at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.

3 Faces

GREAT PERFORMANCES AT MASON 2018/2019 SEASON

MOMIX

Enchantment Theatre Company

Opus Cactus Friday, January 25 at 8 p.m.

ff

The Phantom Tollbooth

Sunday, January 27 at 2 p.m.

Trey McLaughlin & Havana Cuba The Sounds of Zamar All-Stars Friday, February 8 at 8 p.m.

This performance is also at the Hylton Performing Arts Center on Sat., Jan. 26 at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Information at HyltonCenter.org ff

EN AR JO TS Y A AT LL CF THE A!

ff

Asere! A Fiesta Cubana Saturday, February 9 at 8 p.m.

ff

Family Friendly performances that are most suitable for families with younger children

TICKETS ON SALE NOW! 703-993-2787 OR CFA.GMU.EDU

Located on the Fairfax campus, six miles west of Beltway exit 54, at the intersection of Braddock Road and Rt. 123.

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THEATERCURTAIN CALLS

MISSION CRITICAL Admissions

By Joshua Harmon Directed by Mike Donahue At Studio Theatre to Feb. 17 By all accounts, maternal instinct can cause women to take surprising actions in order to protect or support their children—people love hearing stories about mothers who jumped in front of cars to save wandering toddlers or fought off wild animals. But when individuals use the excuse of wanting what’s best for their children to rationalize the morally objectionable behavior that comes with white privilege, maternal instinct starts to look monstrous. In Joshua Harmon’s Admissions, now running at Studio Theatre, the audience confronts this behavior and viewers must decide what to make of it on their own.

We meet our characters on the campus of Hillcrest, a New Hampshire boarding school, where Sherri (Meg Gibson) directs admissions and her husband, Bill (Kevin Kilner), is the dean. They’re stereotypical white New England liberals who talk about their efforts to increase the school’s diversity and love the Red Sox. (The subtle nods to New England sports culture, a racially fraught subject in and of itself, gives the play a firm sense of place.)

But when their son, Charlie (Ephraim Birney), is deferred from Yale and his friend Perry, whose father is black, gets in, Sherri’s prior support of academic diversity starts to crumble. If the admissions team in New Haven passes on her son but selects a classmate who may or may not have self-identified as black on his application, then race must have played a role.

Charlie, upon finding out about his deferral, launches into a hateful screed full of questions and opinions about how we determine who is or is not a person of color. It’s a caustic piece of writing crafted to reflect a 17-yearold boy’s extreme, self-centered views about the world—many of them, both real and fictional, have yet to discover this thing called nuance—and Birney executes it flawlessly.

You can see why an Ivy League college might not be interested in his world view. His parents have opposing reactions, with Sherri immediately comforting her son and Bill calling him a “racist, spoiled little shit.” Bill, another entitled white guy, has advanced professionally because of his race, but at least he acknowledges it. Sherri ignores the world as it is and keeps dreaming of the world as it should be.

Gibson’s on-stage stiffness doesn’t help this impression.

Harmon smartly contrasts Sherri’s behavior by having her interact with women whose relationships with race differ from hers. Roberta (Sarah Marshall), an older woman who works

in Hillcrest’s development office, describes herself as “not a race person” when Sherri asks her to add more photos of students of color to the school’s recruitment materials, and in doing so, shows the audience how numbers-obsessed Sherri has become. Ginnie (Marni Penning), Perry’s mother and Sherri’s close friend, is shocked to hear her brush aside Perry’s accomplishment and tells her so. Of all the play’s characters, Ginnie does the most to hold Sherri accountable, so her final about-face is particularly disappointing.

Local audiences will remember Harmon as the playwright behind Bad Jews, a zany dark comedy about religious heritage and cultural identity that ran at Studio in 2014 and 2015.

While Admissions contains moments of levity—specific pronunciations of Yale and Bucknell had the mostly white audience guffawing—its timely and discomforting themes don’t feel funny.

A play like Admissions gets produced because theaters assume that their predominantly white audiences will understand and relate to the characters and their worries. That line of thinking is likely true and feels incredibly cheap. In 2019, a cast of white actors telling a white playwright’s story about white guilt does not advance the conversation about equality, diversity, and inclusion in schools and professional settings. It merely repeats the double standards people have grown comfortable with.

—Caroline Jones 1501 14th St. NW. $20–$90. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

PUPPETS, TRAMPS, AND LEAVES Visions of Love

Adapted from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights Directed by Matt Reckeweg At Dance Loft on 14 to Feb. 9 When charlie chaplin’s film City Lights premiered in 1931, the actor was anxious that it would be seen as an anachronism: The silent film era had come to an end. But despite the seeming obsolescence of silent films, it was a commercial and critical success. There was still life in the iconic Tramp persona he had created around his virtuoso skill as a mime and an under-cranked film camera. Consequently, Chaplin resisted making a true talkie until 1940’s The Great Dictator.

In this 130th anniversary year of Chaplin’s birth, Pointless Theatre Company has adapted

18 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Visions of Love

one of his most admired films into an enchanting live performance. The plot is simple: Chaplin’s Tramp, a vagrant with gentlemanly aspirations (Kerry McGee), is smitten with a blind woman (Sharalys Silva) who sells flowers on a street corner. Despite his own precarious lot in life, he becomes determined to help her. When he saves a drunken millionaire from a suicide attempt, the Tramp gains a friend for life—at least until this friend sobers up. The plucky hero must work a series of jobs to pay for his sweetheart’s groceries, the rent for the apartment she shares with her grandmother, and an innovative medical cure for blindness, at least until the millionaire goes on another bender and becomes generous once again. All the while, the Tramp knows if the treatment is successful, his beloved will see that he is not the wealthy benefactor he has allowed her to imagine.

McGee might not closely resemble Chaplin, but her careful study of the posture, mannerisms, and facial tics with which he constructed the Tramp’s persona is the important part of her reconstruction. Silva, likewise, is no doppelgänger for Virginia Cherrill but she has recreated every gesture of the flower girl. This is not mere technical mimicry: This adaptation’s final scene has the same emotional payoff that has drawn cinephiles to the film for nearly a century.

Director Matt Reckeweg helms this affectionate homage to a classic work, but in the process of translating the story from the twodimensional screen to the three dimensions of the intimate performance space of Dance Loft on 14, he and his collaborators have avoided mere academic reconstruction. They emphasize Chaplin’s balletic choreography and his original score. The ballet influence is particularly evident in the staging of the film’s boxing match between McGee’s Tramp and Jon Reynolds’ prizefighter, with Scott Whalen as the ever-in-the-way referee joining the dance.

Pointless’ brand of physical theater also incorporates puppetry, which allows the ensem-

ble to bring an entirely new dimension of performance not present in the film. The puppets, designed and built by Alex Vernon, approach life size, consisting of heads, torsos, and arms that one or two performers manipulate. It creates a fascinating double-or-triple-image in the audience’s imagination as the actors’ faces fill in what a sculpted head cannot, and their choreographed walks and stances fill in for the lower bodies. One often wonders if they are witnessing something of these puppet characters’ inner lives.

Lee Gerstenhaber is a particularly delightful foil as the puppeteer behind the Tramp’s two main antagonists, the mischievous paperboy and the millionaire’s snobbish butler.

Whalen and Eirin Stevenson pair to physicalize the millionaire’s mood swings from suicidal despair to mania, and his varying degrees of sobriety and inebriation. Vanessa Chapoy and Reynolds, as the puppeteers behind the grandmother, have a touching chemistry with Silva. (Vernon sculpted her with Silva’s cheekbones to provide a family resemblance.) Part of the magic behind this style of puppetry is being able to see exactly how the trick is done.

Adapting the film to the stage demands imaginative methods in other places as well: Wooden models pushed with rods create the city’s traffic congestion, allowing the audience to simultaneously see both the chaos of collisions narrowly avoided and the exasperation of the motorists. The cinematic logic of the editing room did not permit Chaplin to capture these juxtapositions and moments of visual comedy, as happens when the millionaire’s drink cart careens through the intersection.

Visions of Love manages to be sufficiently reverent to the original film to both please fans and serve as an introduction to the story.

Claim a front row seat to this immersive experience to take in all its charms.

—Ian Thal 4618 14th St. NW. $15–$32. (202) 733-6321. pointlesstheatre.com.

GALLERIES

Fiber Optics

ital loom is Natalia Nakazawa, whose woven tapestries use digitally collaged cultural references from major museums. In one piece, a Dogon figure and an Aztec sculpture are visible. In another, a Hindu goddess and the carved mouth of a lion. Pattern plays heavily throughout the works; although the sources of these patterns are less apparent than the figurative sculptures, their underlying cultural significance is palpable.

The use of so many patterns highlights the global history and tradition of weaving. This concept plays most directly in “Our Stories of Migration,” which invites people who attend a workshop to outline their migration stories on a multi-patterned global map. Attendees draw a string from the beginning point of their family’s migration, to the end point. Many of the strings connect to an area around New York and New Jersey.

Stories of Ellis Island spring to mind. And, considering the context of the exhibition, so too does New York’s history of migrant sweatshop labor in the build“Like Any Other: No. 37” by Julia Kwon (2019) ings overlooking the mouth of Hudson Rivtive of the copper in the chip that transmits all er. The piece intends to spark the conversation of those ones and zeroes. But none of the works of what it means to be a global citizen, but it’s have the perfection of Silicon Valley—not that difficult not to insert some additional baggage those gadgets are perfect either. A curving line into the dialogue.

Julia Kwon’s takes a more traditional apin planned pattern, frayed threads jutting out from the woven plain: These adornments and proach with her work. Using fragments of varattachments are reminiscent of the various ious fabrics, she stitches them together like a “patches” used to fix “holes” and other vul- patchwork quilt. The process borrows from a Korean tradition of bojagi, which uses the nerabilities in our gadgets.

That meta element (with a hint of the techno- cloth to wrap food or objects. Kwon uses her logical) is also present in the work of Olivia Tripp bojagi to drape mannequins, symbolically obMorrow, one of Arlington Arts Center’s resident jectifying the “person” underneath. Oddly, artists. One particular blanket, titled “Lashes,” the figures also look like they’re in really fanis a patterned quilt that incorporates commer- tastic burqas, which are used so the weaker cially woven items onto its tiles: false eyelashes, sex (men) don’t sexually objectify the wearer. stockings, fake fur, and tassels. These are inter- Such a double read is likely unintended, but it spersed, in pattern, with custom printed blan- does make the work more challenging. Paired kets that use Morrow’s photography. The pho- with the figures are wall works: stretcher bars tos are close-ups of a nude figure that has been with their bojagi falling off. They seem like a photographed under a crocheted blanket. There quick nod to that issue of how textile work is are also tiles of felt blankets, and rhinestones. Ev- not taken as seriously as paintings, partly beery element within the work has some sugges- cause textiles are typically things we utilize. tion of sexuality or intimacy, which is certainly They’re objects. Art we hang on the wall— more subtle than the work adjacent to it, enti- paintings—are these other things; they functled “Lips.” That piece has a bunch of mouth- tion as ephemeral ideas. Here the ideas take and vaginal-shaped openings in its surface. It’s a lesson from Lucio Fontana or Sam Gilliam. reminiscent of something Jerry Saltz might find Much like the labels on the wall, these bojagi buckle, their corners lift up, and they fall from transgressive enough to post on Facebook.

Another New York-based artist using a dig- their supports.

The Arlington Arts Center’s latest exhibition explores textiles as fine art, not just some decorative patterns.

Over, Under, Forward, Back

At Arlington Arts Center to March 30

By John Anderson As A mAteriAl, fiber has as much ubiquity as paint—perhaps more given its everyday utilitarian qualities. You wear fibers, sleep between layers of fibers, dry yourself with fibers, walk on floored surfaces of fibers, even drape windows with fibers. Go to an art gallery, however, and more often than not you’ll find paint instead of fiber. But beneath the surface of all that paint: a fiber canvas.

So it’s refreshing to see fiber as the star of the show. Over, Under, Forward, Back, the Arlington Arts Center’s latest exhibition, features 10 artists working with fiber in various ways: exploring the traditional, using contemporary technological approaches, mixing it with other media, and unwinding its place through the thread of history.

Technology plays a part in the work of Brooklyn-based artist Robin Kang. Her designs, woven on a digital loom, are reminiscent of microchips: A meta structure in the content of the work, since the digital loom wouldn’t work without one. That structure is given further thought with the use of metallic yarn, sugges-

Sarah J. Hull’s “Ostinato” series takes checked patterns of black and white and inserts disruptions into the grid. For such effort, they are woefully underwhelming. The subtle and apparent variations in April Camlin’s embroidered and woven tapestries better illustrate the general concept of a disrupted grid.

The patterns are more satisfying, and the disruptions are more apparent.

Danni O’Brien’s brightly colored latch hook rugs are sculptural, playful, and quirky.

The loud colors, and willingness to incorporate alternative materials, are a thread that ties her work to that of Boulder-based Steven Frost’s pieces. So too do themes of adolescence and queer identity. Although, were it not for the titles and possibly some of the materials, either might get lost. For example, a shimmery gold-and-yellow piece, like a miniature cocktail dress on a gilded dowel, hangs in one part of the gallery. Entiteld, “I Wanted to Be a Cheerleader Like Todd and Patrick,” the amusing combination plays against concepts of heteronormativity. Then again, there are straight men on cheer squads, but probably not dressed like what’s hanging on the dowel.

As is usually the case at the Arlington Arts Center, the more experimental approaches are in the basement. In the Truland Gallery, local artist Rania Hassan installed a net whose various ends thread through the gallery and anchor to one of several painted mouths in various agape stages. It plays on the social aspect of knitting: Think sewing circles and quilting bees. Although, now such communities can also be found on the internet. But the way the net is illustrated on the wall, that idea becomes distorted: Of the 51 paintings of the same mouth, 49 are of the left side of the face, with only 17 connected to the net. It feels like a one-sided conversation.

Meanwhile, over in the Experimental Gallery, there is an installation of bird-and-deer netting by Sarah Stefana Smith. She projects similar images on the wall through the netting, which creates an abstract layering of the object, its shadow, and an image. It’s called “The Blessings of Liberty and An Expulsion Thereof,” which somehow is an exploration of the etymological difference between amend, mend, emend, and amendment. The explanation is an inarticulate snare that distracts from the visual webbing in the room.

Historically, textiles have been reduced to craft and decorative art. But the various approaches found within Over, Under, Forward, Back push against those notions while still embracing the value of technique. The stronger threads that stitch the exhibition together are connected to global heritage, social history, and personal storytelling. All three easily tie together into social practice, but even good exhibitions can have some loose ends.

CP 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. Free.

(703) 248-6800. arlingtonartscenter.org.

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 19

MARYLAND LYRIC OPERA

BOOKSSPEED READS

PRESENTS

GAETANO DONIZETTI’S

Lucia di

Lammerm r January 24, 25 & 26 7:30pm (2pm on the 26th)

Kay Theatre

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center College Park, MD Conducted by Louis Salemno Directed by Nick Olcott

For tickets visit MDLO.org or call 301-405-2787 (ARTS)

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC Talent

By Juliet Lapidos Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages

Colonel Don Schofield, Commander and Conductor

9

FREE CONCERT! Schlesinger Concert Hall Alexandria, Virginia

John Fedchock FRIDAY, FEB. 1 AT 8 P.M. world-class jazz trombonist

for FREE tickets, please visit: www.usafband.eventbrite.com 20 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

As students fAce skyrocketing tuition and absorb crippling debt for increasingly questionable returns, who will mourn the quaint campus novel? In Talent, a propulsive fiction debut from local writer and Atlantic editor Juliet Lapidos, this subtext serves as a psychological battlefield. The futility of a modern academic calling is breezily lampooned through the mouths of liberal arts graduate students, Ph.D. candidates in Yale’s English department. Once the brightest young minds of a nation, Lapidos’ scholars are stunted, liminal creatures, squandering their young adulthoods in a waning port city, listening to lectures they won’t remember, and compiling arbitrary dissertations no one will read. The ideals of learning and critical thinking for their own sakes are preposterous luxuries given the scant number of tenured professorships awaiting them.

Anna Brisker, a once-promising burnout, had set out to write an ambitious thesis on the nature of artistic inspiration. Where early civilizations attributed transcendent artistry to divine provenance, subsequent cultures viewed it as a function of nose-to-the-grindstone devotion. Anna’s conviction is that great art is the result of solemn work rather than rapturous enlightenment, but floundering in her seventh year of studies, she finds herself intellectually suffocated—incentivized to condense centuries of literature into a simplistic categorical

argument. Desperately seeking a case study to fit her thesis’ pre-ordained narrative, she happens upon the niece of Frederick Langley, a Salinger-esque literary phenomenon who established a cult following as a young writer, spent decades in reclusion, and, Anna learns, briefly resumed writing fiction before his death.

Together the young women foment an expedient explanation for the late author’s irregular output, deciding that a Freudian focus dictated his productive years. But Langley’s niece Helen is herself a shadowy figure with a personal investment in Anna’s pursuit: The Yale library houses a valuable collection of Langley’s papers to which Helen believes herself the rightful heir. In the throes of academic malaise, Anna becomes sympathetic with Helen’s contention that Langley’s brilliance was not intended for critical eyes.

If a nested academic thriller weren’t heady enough on its own, Anna’s thesis is a forthright allegory of Matthew 25’s Parable of the Talents, evoked in a variegated sequence of discursive metaphors. The less resonant episodes are plagued by heavy-handed dialogue (“You presume to study writers, to use their creativity for your own ends,” Helen diagnoses Anna) and allusions stretched thin. Still, Lapidos maintains a sprightly pace and compelling atmosphere which concisely melds the charms of hallowed academe with contemporary ennui and suspenseful intrigue. While a less-than-reliable narrator, Anna’s first-person accounts thrum with kinetic wit, veering off into manic mid-conversation asides on architecture and orthography.

Anna’s downfall might be termed When Lit Crit Goes Wrong, but even that would be selling it short. In Lapidos’ hands, the act of textual analysis—not to mention the wider realms of scholarship and human interaction—becomes a parasitic perversion, a squalid deployment of creative innovation to self-promotional ends.

Talent is an appeal to approach literature on its own terms, submitting that critical values are predicated on callous vivisection and haphazard groupthink. As such, the parable is an apt figuration. Disastrously unmotivated, Anna recognizes that all the raw effort in the world won’t make for a good thesis without the spark of intuition. The concept of just desserts among competing interests—Anna versus Helen, writer versus reader, teacher versus student, art versus commerce—is the book’s chief consideration.

The abiding rationale that Anna ultimately disowns is that only an audience can bestow meaning upon literature. Talent’s logical argument—that criticism robs creatives of agency—would defang any verdict I proposed here regarding the book’s significance. So instead I’ll enjoin readers to engage directly with Lapidos’s worthwhile treatise. —Pete Tosiello Juliet Lapidos will be in conversation with author David Litt at Politics and Prose at Union Market on Jan. 27. 1270 5th St. NE. 5 p.m. Free.

CITYLIST

TIM REYNOLDS & TR3

Music 21 Theater 26 Film 28

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 30 $20/ADV $25/DOS

Music

CITY LIGHTS: FRIDAY

FRIDAY COUNTRY

THE HAMILTON 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000.

Steep Canyon Rangers. 8 p.m. $25.75–$40.75. thehamiltondc.com.

GUSTER

★ ★ THU 1/24 THE 9 SINGER SONGWRITER SHOWCASE $12/$15 FRI 1/25 THE HIGH & WIDES SAT 1/26 WYLDER THU 1/31 HANNAH JAYE & THE HIDEAWAYS FRI 2/1 MO LOWDA & THE HUMBLE W. ONA + THE DAWN DRAPES $12/$15 TUE 2/5 MEADOW MOUNTAIN THU 2/7 SAM BURCHFIELD + PIERCE EDENS $12/$15 FRI 2/8 MOOSE JAW BLUEGRASS SAT 2/9 READ SOUTHALL BAND + KODY WEST $12/$15 THU 2/14 WILD ADRIATICÍS FRIENDSHIP & HUGGING VALENTINEÍS DAY BASH $12/$15 FRI 2/15 HUMAN COUNTRY JUKEBOX

WORLD

ELECTRONIC

KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Image China: Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage. 7:30 p.m. $70–$200. kennedy-center.org.

THE ANTHEM 901 Wharf St. SW. (202) 888-0020. The Disco Biscuits. 7:30 p.m. $40–$80. theanthemdc.com.

THU 3/7 FRI 4/25 FRI 3/22

JAMMIN JAVA 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 2551566. Sarah Borges and The Broken Singles. 8 p.m. $15. jamminjava.com.

DJ NIGHTS

U STREET MUSIC HALL 1115 U St. NW. (202) 588-1889.

Orchard Lounge. 10:30 p.m. $15–$20. ustreetmusichall.com.

ELECTRONIC

ECHOSTAGE 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE. (202) 503-2330. Herobust. 9 p.m. $25. echostage.com.

LINCOLN THEATRE 1215 U St. NW. (202) 888-0050.

The Disco Biscuits. 9 p.m. $80–$95. thelincolndc.com.

FOLK

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487. The Lil Smokies. 8 p.m. $17–$25. unionstage.com.

VELVET LOUNGE 915 U St. NW. (202) 462-3213. Jesse Denaro. 8:30 p.m. $10. velvetloungedc.com.

FUNK & R&B

AMP BY STRATHMORE 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Respect the Queen: An Aretha Franklin Tribute. 8 p.m. $18–$35. ampbystrathmore.com.

BETHESDA BLUES & JAZZ 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. (240) 330-4500. The Spinners. 8 p.m. $59.50–$79.50. bethesdabluesjazz.com.

THE HAMILTON 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000.

Speakers of the House. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc.com.

HOWARD THEATRE 620 T St. NW. (202) 803-2899.

Jon B. 7:30 p.m. $26.50–$65. thehowardtheatre.com.

KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Mourning [A] BLKstar. 12 p.m.

Free. kennedy-center.org.

HIP-HOP

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Shoreline Mafia. 8 p.m. $22–$60. fillmoresilverspring.com.

JAZZ

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Roy Ayers. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $50–$55. bluesalley.com.

POP

BARNS AT WOLF TRAP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. Linda Eder. 8 p.m. $50-$55. wolftrap.org.

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. NSO Pops: An Evening with Brandy.

8 p.m. $39–$139. kennedy-center.org.

STATE THEATRE 220 N. Washington St., Falls Church.

(703) 237-0300. The Legwarmers. 9:30 p.m. $20. thestatetheatre.com.

ROCK

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Guster. 8 p.m. $37. 930.com.

U STREET MUSIC HALL 1115 U St. NW. (202) 588-1889.

The Brummies. 6:30 p.m. $15. ustreetmusichall.com.

The last time I saw Guster in concert, a photographer in search of the perfect shot kicked my gin and tonic off the bar and spilled it all over my arm. And yet in that moment of cold stickiness, I could not muster up any anger, for Guster shows are inherently happy places. For more than 25 years, original members Adam Gardner, Ryan Miller, and Brian Rosenworcel (multiinstrumentalist Luke Reynolds joined them in 2010) have performed percussive, lo-fi sing-alongs that in the late ’90s would have been called “college rock” and would now unfortunately be labeled “dad rock,” and aging audiences still scream and dance to make their affection known.

The group’s new album, Look Alive, features more synthesizers and mumbled lyrics than their mid-career stalwarts Lost and Gone Forever and Keep It Together, but the boys in the band know the key to longevity is experimenting with new sounds and still playing the hits at live shows.

During Guster’s two-night stand at 9:30 Club, expect Rosenworcel to dump his drum kit to play hand percussion solos on “Barrel of a Gun” and “Come Downstairs and Say Hello” while Miller fills the gaps between songs with self-deprecating humor and fans bathe in the warm nostalgia of familiar songs. Guster perform with Henry Jamison at 8 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $37.

(202) 265-0930. 930.com.

—Caroline Jones

SATURDAY BLUES THE HAMILTON 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000.

Johnny & The Headhunters. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc.com.

CLASSICAL MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. National Philharmonic: Infamous Brahms. 8 p.m. $34–$88. strathmore.org.

ECHOSTAGE 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE. (202) 503-2330. Gryffin. 9 p.m. $20–$30. echostage.com.

FOLK BARNS AT WOLF TRAP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna.

(703) 255-1900. Bumper Jacksons. 8 p.m. $22–$27. wolftrap.org.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Daniel Romano. 8 p.m. $15. dcnine.com.

THE SEA THE SEA $10/$13 DREW FISH $10/$15 TRAGEDY: ALL METAL TRIBUTE TO THE BEE GEES & BEYOND! $12/$15 SAT 3/23 CASEY CAVANAGH EP RELEASE + JUSTIN TRAWICK & THE COMMON GOOD $12/$15 HILL COUNTRY BARBECUE MARKET

HILL COUNTRY LIVE 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050.

Wylder. 8:30 p.m. Free. hillcountrywdc.com.

410 Seventh St, NW • 202.556.2050 HillCountry.com/DC • Twitter @hillcountrylive

KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Jonathan Acosta. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

Near Archives/Navy Memorial [G, Y] and Gallery PI/Chinatown [R] Metro

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 21

RARE ESSENCE

3701 Mount Vernon Ave. Alexandria, VA • 703-549-7500

For entire schedule go to Birchmere.com Find us on Facebook/Twitter!

Tix @ Ticketmaster.com 800-745-3000

KYLE CEASE

Jan 24

TOM PAPA

25 27

of "Baked", "Live From Here"

THE KINGSTON TRIO

29&30

GAELIC STORM

Feb 1

WILL DOWNING Carly 5 KASEY CHAMBERS Burruss 7

13

DAVID SANBORN

14

BURLESQUE-A-PADES IN LOVELAND “A Valentine's Day Spectacular”

feat. Angie

Pontani, Murray Hill, & more!

ERIC ROBERSON

16 Daryl Davis Presents: Thanks For The Memories – 2018

A tribute to the musicians we loved and lost in 2018.

Featuring DC area's finest musicians!

21

Bonnie JAMES McMURTRY Whitmore

22

10,000 MANIACS

24

JEFFREY OSBORNE

27&28 Mar 1

MARSHALL CRENSHAW & THE BOTTLE ROCKETS

Empty BOB SCHNEIDER ThePockets 3 SWEET HONEY IN THE ROCK 7 MADELEINE PEYROUX & PAULA COLE

2

THE MANHATTANS featuring Gerald

alston

SUGAR SAMMY 10 THE HIGH KINGS 9

14

W/ THE 19TH STREET BAND FRIDAY JAN

SAT, JAN 26

KINKY FRIEDMAN & DALE WATSON "Long Tales & Short Songs

22 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

18

AN EVENING WITH EARLY ELTON

RARE

THURS, JAN 31

G LOVEESSENCE SPECIAL SAUCE W/AND BE’LA DONA W/ RONSUNDAY ARTIS II & THEJAN TRUTH 20

W/ KAIA KATER

ESTELLE “Experience Lover’s Rock Live!”

JAN 20

TOWN STEEPMOUNTAIN CANYON RANGERS W/ KAIA KATER

ARLO GUTHRIE "Alice's Restaurant" Tour with Sarah Lee Guthrie

CITY LIGHTS: SATURDAY

FRI, JAN 25

FRI, 1 FRI, FEB JAN 25

10

8

SUNDAY

MUSIQ SOULCHILD

8&9

15

W/ BE’LA DONA

STEEP CANYON FLOW TRIBE W/ THERANGERS BEAT HOTEL SAT, 2 SAT, FEB JAN 26

THE WAILERS

AN EVENING WITH EARLY ELTON FEAT. JUNIOR MARVIN:

ATHURS, BOB MARLEY BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE JAN 31 G LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE W/ RON FEB ARTIS 6II & THE TRUTH WED,

GREG BROWN W/ BO RAMSEY FRI, FEB 1

FLOW TRIBE W/ THE BEAT HOTEL THURS, FEB 7

AN WITH WALTER TROUT THEEVENING WAILERS FEAT. JUNIOR MARVIN: SAT, FEB 2

AND ERIC GALES

A BOB MARLEY BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE WED, FEB 6

SAT, FEB 9

GREG W/ BO RAMSEY NEWMYERBROWN FLYER PRESENTS

KOKAYI

When the Kennedy Center launched its Hip Hop Culture Council last year, it was an overdue acknowledgment of a culture that continues to leave an indelible mark on America and the world.

Since then, the Kennedy Center has hosted hip-hop dance parties, film screenings, innovative theater works, and, of course, concerts, with a premium on performances that create “bridges between artists, audiences, and beyond.” Its latest features D.C.’s own Kokayi, a multi-talented musician who has spent years exploring the infinite permutations and possibilities of African diasporic music, be it hip-hop, jazz, soul, or go-go. Just look at three of his recent collaborations: the gospel-fueled “Moonlight” with Traci Braxton, the throwback party jam “Hands on Your Knees” from GoldLink’s D.C.-obsessed At What Cost, and Everything’s OK, an album-long jazz experiment with Atlanta outfit Whose Hat Is This? They’re only three glimpses of a deep discography, but ones that live up to the words of the council’s artistic director Q-Tip—the living legend and A Tribe Called Quest mastermind—who noted how the Kennedy Center’s effort “reflects the creative, social, and intellectual wealth of the hip-hop community.” Kokayi performs at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Gallery, 2700 F St. NW. $20–$25. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

—Chris Kelly

LOVE SONGS: AN EVENING WITH WALTER TROUT THE VOL. 6 AND BEATLES ERIC GALES THURS, FEB 7

FUNK & R&B

SAT, FEBFEB 9 14 THURS, NEWMYER FLYER PRESENTS

HOWARD THEATRE 620 T St. NW. (202) 803-2899.

Carl Thomas. 8 p.m. $39.50–$75. thehowardtheatre. com.

MY FUNNY VALENTINE: LOVE SONGS: AN EVENING OF FRANK SINATRA’S THE BEATLES VOL. 6 MUSIC STARRING TONY SANDS THURS, FEB 14

MY FUNNY VALENTINE: FRI, FEB OF 15FRANK SINATRA’S MUSIC AN EVENING AN ACOUSTIC EVENING STARRING TONYWITHSANDS

DONAVON FRANKENREITER

FRI, FEB 15 W/ BRETT BIGELOW AN ACOUSTIC EVENING WITH

DONAVON FRANKENREITER

W/ BRETT BIGELOW SAT, FEB 16

SIERRA HULL W/ ANGEL SNOW SAT, FEB 16

SIERRA HULL W/ ANGEL SNOW SAT, FEB 16

TEDESCHI TEDESCHI TRUCKS TRUCKS BAND BAND AFTERPARTY AFTERPARTY

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Atlantic Starr. 7:30 p.m. $39.50. birchmere.com.

HIP-HOP

KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE GALLERY 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Kokayi. 7 p.m.; 9 p.m. $20–$25. kennedy-center.org.

JAZZ

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Roy Ayers. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $50–$55. bluesalley.com.

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR THE ARTS 4373 Mason Pond Drive, Fairfax. (888) 9452468. Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra. 8 p.m. $28–$46. cfa.gmu.edu.

POP

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. NSO Pops: An Evening with Brandy.

8 p.m. $39–$139. kennedy-center.org.

JAMMIN JAVA 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 2551566. Bachapalooza McLean. 1 p.m. $5. jamminjava.com.

LINCOLN THEATRE 1215 U St. NW. (202) 888-0050.

Neko Case. 8 p.m. $46. thelincolndc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Huttch. 9 p.m. Free. songbyrddc.com.

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487.

Bronze Radio Return. 8 p.m. $17–$40. unionstage. com.

WORLD

KENNEDY CENTER FAMILY THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Banda Magda. 11 a.m.; 1 p.m. $20. kennedy-center.org.

KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Image China: Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage. 1:30 p.m.; 7:30 p.m. $70–$200. kennedy-center.org.

KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. David Sánchez. 7 p.m. $30–$40. kennedy-center.org.

SUNDAY

SAT, FEB 16

STATE THEATRE 220 N. Washington St., Falls Church.

(703) 237-0300. The Legwarmers. 9:30 p.m. $20. thestatetheatre.com.

FEAT. THE RON HOLLOWAY BAND

ROCK

MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. National Philharmonic: Infamous Brahms. 3 p.m. $34–$88. strathmore.org.

GYPSY SALLY’S 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700. Passafire. 8:30 p.m. $15. gypsysallys.com.

PHILLIPS COLLECTION 1600 21st St. NW. (202) 3872151. Trio Solisti. 4 p.m. $5–$45. phillipscollection.org.

THE HAMILTON 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000.

Early Elton. 8 p.m. $24.75–$54.75. thehamiltondc. com.

JAMMIN JAVA 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 2551566. Jackson Dean. 7 p.m. $15. jamminjava.com.

THEHAMILTONDC.COM

THEHAMILTONDC.COM

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Guster. 8 p.m. $37. 930.com.

CLASSICAL

COUNTRY

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 23

CITY LIGHTS: SUNDAY

MOZART’S PRAGUE SYMPHONY, BACH’S BRANDENBURG CONCERTO NO. 1, STRAVINSKY’S DUNBARTON OAKS CONCERTO & PROKOFIEV’S CLASSICAL SYMPHONY SATURDAY, FEB 9 AT 8:00 PM

Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

SUNDAY, FEB 10 AT 3:00 PM George Washington Masonic Memorial

James Ross

Photo by P.J. Barbour

7 0 3 . 5 4 8 . 0 8 8 5 www.alexsym.org VALET & SECURE PARKING aVAILABLE

take your wine to-g0 with growlers & retail wine!

RESTAURANT | BAR | MUSIC VENUE | FULLY FUNCTIONING WINERY | EVENT SPACE

* BECOME A CITY WINERY VINOFILE MEMBER *

EXCLUSIVE PRESALE ACCESS, WAIVED SERVICE FEES, complimentary valet & MORE! JAN 24

Danny Burns

“North Country” Album Release Party

JAN 27

JAN 24

lil’ mo JAN 27

JAN 25

JAN 26

JAN 26

ella nicole in the wine garden

just jokes & notes 2

Annual Winter Residency W/ Special Guest Paul Cauthen

JAN 29

JAN 29

JAN 30

steve earle’s

starring Timmy Hall, M. Lewis Music, Sylvia Traymore Morrison

January means “Janimals” at Mount Pleasant’s independent movie theater Suns Cinema, but this doesn’t just mean your beloved pets—there’s more to it than programs devoted to cats, dogs, and parrots. Director Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama Au Hasard Balthazar follows the life of Balthazar from birth to death, making it a kind of precursor to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood— except this coming-of-age story is told from the point of view of a donkey. The young animal is tenderly cared for by a farm girl (Anne Wiazemsky, who went on to star in several films directed

by Jean-Luc Godard). Yet Balthazar soon lives up to his reputation as a beast of burden, enduring a brutal workload and a succession of abusive, neglectful owners. Frequently listed among the greatest films of all time, Au Hasard Balthazar is a masterpiece that achieves an ideal in aesthetics and, perhaps more importantly, in compassion. The film screens at 7 p.m. at Suns Cinema, 3107 Mount Pleasant St. NW. $10. sunscinema.com.

—Pat Padua

FOLK

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Kingston Trio. 7:30 p.m. $45. birchmere.com.

JAZZ

BETHESDA BLUES & JAZZ 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. (240) 330-4500. Alyson Williams, Jackeim Joyner and Doc Martin. 7 p.m. $49–$69. bethesdabluesjazz.com.

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Roy Ayers. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $50–$55. bluesalley.com.

JAN 31

Richard Lloyd

jd simo

robert gordon w / Chris Spedding

(of Television) Solo in the wine garden

Album Release Show w/ Bobby Thompson Trio in the Wine Garden

vybe band

Special guest, Jumpin’ Jupiter

JAN 31

FEB 1

FEB 1

FEB 2

in the Wine Garden

Pride Reveal 2019

The Fleshtones w/ The Hall Monitors in the Wine Garden

Gordon Chambers & Eric Nolan

algebra blessett

1350 OKIE ST NE, WASHINGTON DC | CITYWINERY.COM/WASHINGTONDC | (202) 250-2531

24 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Thin Lips. 8 p.m. $10–$12. songbyrddc.com.

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487.

Jimmy Gnecco and Leeds. 7:30 p.m. $17–$20. unionstage.com.

WORLD BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Rose Moraes. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $22. bluesalley. com.

ROCK

TUESDAY

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. King Princess. 7 p.m. Sold out. 930.com.

LINCOLN THEATRE 1215 U St. NW. (202) 888-0050.

Neko Case. 8 p.m. $46. thelincolndc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Daddy Issues. 8 p.m. $12– $14. songbyrddc.com.

KENNEDY CENTER FAMILY THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Banda Magda. 1:30 p.m.; 4 p.m. $20. kennedy-center.org.

KENNEDY CENTER OPERA HOUSE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Image China: Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage. 1:30 p.m. $70–$200. kennedy-center.org.

MONDAY chi-town transit authority: the music of chicago

EAGLEBANK ARENA 4500 Patriot Circle, Fairfax.

(703) 993-3000. Bring Me The Horizon. 7 p.m. $43.50– $250. eaglebankarena.com.

POP

WORLD secret society

ROCK

CLASSICAL

KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Jeremy Denk. 7:30 p.m. $70. kennedy-center.org.

ELECTRONIC ECHOSTAGE 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE. (202) 503-2330. Lost Kings. 9 p.m. $15–$20. echostage. com.

GO-GO BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. The JoGo Project. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $22. bluesalley.com.

JAZZ

HIP-HOP

KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. José André Trio. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Young Dolph. 8 p.m. $29.50–$124. fillmoresilverspring.com.

POP

POP

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Rainbow Kitten Surprise. 7 p.m. Sold out. 930.com.

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Rainbow Kitten Surprise. 7 p.m. Sold out. 930.com.

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 25

Beethoven’s Emperor. 7 p.m. $15–$89. kennedy-center.org.

KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Country Current. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

CITY LIGHTS: MONDAY

MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. BSO: Respighi’s Pines of Rome. 8 p.m. $35–$90. strathmore.org.

ROCK

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Amen Dunes. 10 p.m. $20. 930.com.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Juan Wauters.

8 p.m. $10–$12. dcnine.com.

GYPSY SALLY’S 3401 K St. NW. (202) 333-7700.

Lunch with Bob and Off The Grid. 8 p.m. $8. gypsysallys.com.

COUNTRY

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Melissa Plett. 9 p.m. Free. songbyrddc.com.

ELECTRONIC

U STREET MUSIC HALL 1115 U St. NW. (202) 588-1889.

Danger. 7 p.m. $15–$20. ustreetmusichall.com.

FOLK

AMP BY STRATHMORE 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Cathy Fink, Marcy Marxer, and Sam Gleaves. 8 p.m. $15–$20. ampbystrathmore.com.

HILL COUNTRY LIVE 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050.

Hannah Jaye and the Hideaways. 8:30 p.m. Free. hillcountrywdc.com.

POP

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Poppy. 6 p.m. $25. 930.com.

STEPHEN A. GEPPI COLLECTION OF COMICS AND GRAPHIC ARTS

The shutdown has not closed the Library of Congress and has not stopped Captain America either. Entrepreneur Stephen A. Geppi is the founder of Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest distributor of comic books, graphic novels, and related collectables to comic book shops in North America. Fortunately for the nation’s library, Geppi donated more than 3,000 items from his personal collection, including the comics and other artifacts of pop culture history he loves, after he closed his Baltimore museum last year. The library now displays part of this collection, and prominently featured is Joe Simon’s original 1940 concept sketch of Captain America, along with notes addressed to Martin Goodman, publisher of Marvel Comics precursor Timely. The patriotic hero was famously created as an anti-Nazi statement at a time when some Americans were still demanding America sit out WWII. Another highlight: Ub Iwerks’ original storyboards for the creation of Mickey Mouse and his first produced cartoon short, Plane Crazy. The exhibition is on view to Feb. 11 at the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. SE. Free.

(202) 707-4604. loc.gov.

—Ian Thal

ROCK BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Gaelic Storm. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com.

JAMMIN JAVA 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 2551566. Hey Monea. 7:30 p.m. $10–$20. jamminjava.com.

WEDNESDAY CLASSICAL

BARNS AT WOLF TRAP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. International Guitar Night. 8 p.m. $27–$30. wolftrap.org.

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Gaelic Storm. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com.

HILL COUNTRY LIVE 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050.

Tim Reynolds and TR3 CD Release Party. 8:30 p.m. $20–$25. hillcountrywdc.com.

JAMMIN JAVA 227 Maple Ave. East, Vienna. (703) 2551566. The Beatles Get Back To Vienna. 7:30 p.m. $10– $15. jamminjava.com.

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Corey Harris. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $25–$30. bluesalley.com.

MANSION AT STRATHMORE 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Dante’ Pope. 7:30 p.m. $17. strathmore.org.

CITY LIGHTS: TUESDAY

ROCK

KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Imani Winds. 7:30 p.m. $45. kennedy-center.org.

FUNK & R&B

AMERICAN MOOR Directed by Drama Desk nominee Kim Weild and starring playwright/performer Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor tackles race in America’s theaters. A black actor (Cobb) grapples with auditioning for Othello in this 85-minute, award-winning play. Anacostia Playhouse. 2020 Shannon Place SE.

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Rob Maletick. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $22. bluesalley. com.

THURSDAY

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. George Clanton. 8 p.m. $15. songbyrddc.com.

ADMISSIONS This production, a look at privilege, power, and the perils of whiteness, is from the author of Bad Jews, the best-selling play in Studio Theatre history. Bill and Sherri are the white, progressiveand-proud headmaster and dean of admissions at Hillcrest, a mid-tier New Hampshire boarding school.

Over the last 15 years, they’ve worked to diversify the school’s mostly white population, but when their high-achieving son Charlie’s Ivy League dreams are jeopardized, the family’s reaction blasts open a deep rift between their public values and private decisions.

Studio Theatre. 1501 14th St. NW. To Feb. 17. $20–$104.

(202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

JAZZ

KENNEDY CENTER MILLENNIUM STAGE 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Renato Bellucci. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

ELECTRONIC

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Elley Duhé. 8 p.m. $10– $12. songbyrddc.com.

Theater

BLUES

THE HAMILTON 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. G. Love & Special Sauce. 7:30 p.m. $35–$40. thehamiltondc.com.

CLASSICAL

BARNS AT WOLF TRAP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. International Guitar Night. 8 p.m. $27–$30. wolftrap.org.

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. National Symphony Orchestra:

26 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

HARLEQUINADE

The penniless, motley-dressed Harlequin attempts to run off with his sweetheart Columbine over the objections of her father, Cassandre, who has another suitor in mind, and his melancholy servant Pierrot. Thankfully, Harlequin’s agility and fairy protector ensure that love conquers all and he won’t be penniless forever. Commedia dell’arte, broadly improvised masked comedy, may have originated in 16th century Italy, but like classical mythology, it continues to inspire artists no matter their medium. French choreographer Marius Petipa and Italian composer Riccardo Drigo premiered Les Millions d’Arlequin in 1900 during their long residency in Saint Petersburg with Russia’s Imperial Ballet. In subsequent decades, other choreographers, notably George Balanchine, would replace Petipa’s choreography even as they retained the story and Drigo’s music. In this American Ballet Theatre touring production, longtime artist-in-residence Alexei Ratmansky has recreated Petipa’s choreography from notations archived in Harvard University’s Sergeyev Collection. This Harlequin may be more graceful than his Italian ancestor Arlecchino, but he leaps, pirouettes, and carries a slapstick. The ballet runs to Feb. 3 at the Kennedy Center Opera House, 2700 F St. NW. $39–$199. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org. —Ian Thal

washingtoncitypaper.com january 25, 2019 27

ance. Ford’s Theatre. 511 10th St. NW. To Feb. 17. $20– $62. (202) 347-4833. fords.org.

CITY LIGHTS: WEDNESDAY

Film

CAPERNAUM In Lebanon, a hardened 12-year-old boy sues his abusive parents for their negligence.

Starring Zain Al Rafeea, Yordanos Shiferaw, and Boluwatife Treasure Bankole. (See washingtoncitypaper. com for venue information) COLD WAR A man and a woman, who are very different from one another, have a passionate love affair in post-war Poland. Starring Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, and Borys Szyc. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) DESTROYER Nicole Kidman stars as a police detective on an obsessive quest to reconnect with people from an undercover assignment, bring a gang leader to justice, and ultimately make peace with her past.

Co-starring Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, and Tatiana Maslany. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) A DOG’S WAY HOME Searching for her owner, a dog named Bella traverses more than 400 miles. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Ashley Judd, and Alexandra Shipp. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)

NEDERLANDS DANS THEATER 2

For nearly a decade, one of the world’s best modern dance troupes never came to Washington, frequently performing in New York but somehow skipping D.C. in favor of university arts hubs like Chapel Hill. If you missed Nederlands Dans Theater’s long-awaited performance at the Kennedy Center last year, pile on the Green Line this Wednesday and get yourself to College Park to catch NDT 2, the junior dance troupe of the famed Dutch company. The Hague-based company is known not only for attracting top dancers, but for developing and commissioning the best choreographers on the planet. Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián led the troupes for decades, and now NDT is run by choreographic duo Paul Lightfoot and Sol León, who have been creating works since their days as dancers in the late 1980s. NDT 2’s University of Maryland performance features pieces from Edward Clug and Marco Goecke, as well as León and Lightfoot.

The closer is “SH-BOOM!,” a high-energy quirkfest that subverts any expectations audiences may have for a dance set to a 1950s bop. Will Nederlands Dans Theater’s senior company come through D.C. again soon? I don’t know, but life could be a dream, sweetheart. The show begins at 8 p.m. at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, 8270 Alumni Drive, College Park. $10–40. (301) 405-2787. theclarice.umd.edu.

—Rebecca J. Ritzel To Feb. 3. $30–$40. (202) 290-2328. anacostiaplayhouse.com.

THE BALTIMORE WALTZ In this 1992 Obie Awardwinner from Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, Anna contracts ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease), a fictitious fatal affliction common among elementary school teachers who share bathrooms with young children, and flies to Europe with her brother Carl for one last pleasure-seeking extravaganza. Dedicated to Vogel’s brother Carl (who died of AIDS-related complications in the 1980s), The Baltimore Waltz is a tragic farce in honor of the ties that bind. Keegan Theatre. 1742 Church St. NW. To Feb. 19. $40–$50. (202) 265-3767. keegantheatre.com.

THE BROTHERS SIZE Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney (an Academy Award winner for the 2016 Best Picture Moonlight), The Brothers Size follows the reunion of two estranged brothers in the Louisiana bayou. The Chicago Tribune calls it “the greatest piece of writing by an American playwright under 30 in a generation or more.” 1st Stage. 1524 Spring Hill Road, McLean. To Feb. 24. $15–$39. (703) 854-1856.

1ststagetysons.org.

JUDY GARLAND: A STAR IS BORN A cast of Signature favorites sings some of iconic actress and singer Judy Garland’s most famous songs, including “Over the Rainbow,” “Get Happy,” and “The Man That Got Away” along with lesser known gems in a tribute to one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. Awa Sal Secka (Signature’s Jesus Christ Superstar) and Katie Mariko Murray (Signature’s Passion) are joined by pianist Chris Urquiaga (Signature’s Entirely Elvis cabaret) to

GLASS In this entry into M. Night Shyamalan’s cinematic universe, Unbreakable’s Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role as Mr. Glass and Bruce Willis reprises his role as David Dunn, who tracks a disturbed man with multiple identities, Kevin Wendell Crumb from Split. Co-starring James McAvoy and Sarah Paulson. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING When a young boy named Alex stumbles upon the mythical sword Excalibur, he joins forces with a band of fellow youngins and the great wizard Merlin to defeat the medieval menace Morgana. Starring Rebecca Ferguson, Tom Taylor, and Patrick Stewart. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) SERENITY When his ex-wife tracks him down begging for his help, a fishing boat captain’s mysterious past comes back to haunt him—but everything is not as it seems. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Diane Lane. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) STAN & OLLIE John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan star as legendary comedy duo Laurel and Hardy as they attempt to reignite their film careers on a grueling tour of post-war Britain. Co-starring Shirley Henderson and Danny Huston. (See washingtoncitypaper. com for venue information) THE UPSIDE A wealthy man with quadriplegia develops a relationship with the person hired to help him— an unemployed man, with a criminal past. Starring Bryan Cranston, Kevin Hart, and Nicole Kidman. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)

CITY LIGHTS: THURSDAY

pay tribute. Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To Jan. 26. $38. (703) 820-9771. sigtheatre.org.

KLEPTOCRACY From director Jackson Gay comes this fictional play inspired by historic events, a worldpremiere drama by Kenneth Lin (House of Cards) which turns the spotlight on U.S.-Russia relations. In the ensuing rampage of hyper-capitalism after the pivotal moment of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Oligarchs, a new class of robber barons, plunge Russia into a terrifying dark age of chaos and corruption. When the richest and most ruthless Oligarch attempts to reform and open Russian markets to the world, he’s confronted by a young Vladimir Putin who is charting his own path to power. Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To Feb. 24. $56–$115. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org.

NELL GWYNN Former Drury Lane orange seller Eleanor Gwynn was a prolific comic celebrity figure of the Restoration period, King Charles II’s favorite mistress, and one of the first actresses on the English stage.

Much lauded for its London run, Nell Gwynn, a portrait of this amazing woman, premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe and won the 2016 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Folger Shakespeare Library. 201 E. Capitol St. SE. To March 10. $42–$79. (202) 544-7077. folger.edu.

TWELVE ANGRY MEN After hearing what all but one deem damning testimony, twelve jurors—all with their own biases and perspectives—comb over evidence and debate the concept of reasonable doubt as the life of a teenager accused of murder hangs in the bal-

28 january 25, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

THE BROTHERS SIZE

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s stories about black relationships ooze a rare and raw sincerity. He was born and raised in Liberty City, Florida, and his experiences growing up there as a black gay man shaped what would become Moonlight, the 2016 film he co-wrote that won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and is based on his own play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. But before Moonlight, there was The Brothers Size, a 2007 gem of a play. It’s a story about family, the tested bond between two black brothers in the Louisiana bayou, the older brother hardworking and stable, the younger brother aimless and recently released from prison. (GaryKayi Fletcher, who stars as the older brother, is pictured.) McCraney’s story unfolds like poetry as the odd pair connect through West African mythology and music. As the world awaits McCraney’s next projects, whether on the big screen, Broadway, or Netflix, The Brothers Size is a special ode to the idea of freedom and the complexities of both blackness and brotherhood that begs to be revisited. The show runs to Feb. 24 at 1st Stage, 1524 Spring Hill Road, Tysons. $15–$39.

(703) 854-1856. 1ststagetysons.org.

—Kayla Randall

SAVAGELOVE I’m an early-30s hetero woman in a monogamous relationship with my mid-30s hetero guy. We’ve been together 10 years, married seven, no kids. We have a lot of fun—traveling, shared hobbies, mutual friends, etc. We have sex fairly regularly, and it’s not bad. However, his primary sexual fetish and main turn-on is furry porn—namely, cartoon images. He doesn’t self-identify as a furry; he doesn’t have a fursuit or fursona. To his credit, he was up front about this with me once we started getting serious. However, I think at that younger age, I conflated the emotional openness and acceptance of his sexuality with actually being satisfied with the sexual component of our relationship. He seems only marginally attracted to me, and it bums me out that his more intense sexual drives are funneled into furry porn. I feel somewhat helpless, as his fetish doesn’t allow me to meet him halfway. Real-life furry action (fursuits and the like) does not interest him (I’ve offered). We have sex regularly, but I always initiate, and his enthusiasm is middling until we get going, at which point I think we both enjoy ourselves. But I’ve found that this turns into a negative feedback loop, where his lack of initial interest leads to me being less attracted to him, and so on. I consider myself a fairly sexual person and I get a lot of pleasure out of being desired. We’re talking about starting a family, and I’m scared that the pressures that come with parenthood would only make this worse.

—Fretting Under Relationship Shortcomings

his sexuality before you got married. Everyone should be, of course, but so few people are— particularly people who have been made to feel ashamed of their sexuality or their fetishes or both—that we’re inclined to heap praise on people who manage to clear what should be a low bar. At the time, you mistook “emotional openness” and your willingness to accept his sexuality for both sexual compatibility and sexual satisfaction. I think you owe it to yourself to be upfront with your husband before you have kids. He’s getting a good deal here—decent sex with the wife and the freedom to take care of needs his wife can’t meet.

And you’re free to ask for a similar deal—decent sex with your husband and the freedom to take care of needs your husband can’t meet.

There’s a far greater degree of risk involved in you going outside the relationship to feel desired, of course; you seeing another man or men comes bundled with emotional and physical risks that wanking to furry porn does not. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. But if your shared goal as a couple is mutual sexual fulfillment— and that should be every couple’s goal—and if you want to avoid becoming so frustrated that you make a conscious decision to end your marriage (or a subconscious decision to sabotage it), FURS, then opening up the relationship needs to be a part of the discussion.

—Dan Savage

Nothing I write is going to fix this—and nothing I write is going to fix him, FURS, not that your husband is broken. He is who he is, and he had the decency to let you know who he was before you married him. But nothing I write is going to put you at the center of your husband’s erotic inner life. Nothing I write is going to inspire him to initiate more (or at all) or cause him to be more enthusiastic about sex.

Nothing I write is going to make your husband want you the way you want to be wanted, desire you the way you want to be desired, and fuck you the way you want to be fucked.

So the question you need to ask yourself before you make babies with this man—the question I would have urged you to ask yourself before you married this man—is whether you can live without the pleasure you get from being desired. Is that the price of admission you’re willing to pay to be with this man? Maybe it once was, but is it still? Because if monogamy is what you want or what he wants or what you both want, FURS, then choosing to be with this man— choosing to be with someone you enjoy spending time with, who’s “not bad” at sex, whose most passionate erotic interests direct him away from you—means going without the pleasure of being wanted the way you want to be wanted, desired the way you want to be desired, and fucked the way you want to be fucked.

Your husband was up front with you about

It would take two years’ worth of columns—even more— to discuss cuckolding in all its forms, unpack all the risks, and game out all the potential rewards.

Please discuss cuckolding in all its forms. Also all of the emotional risks and potential sexual rewards.

—A Potential Cuckoldress It would take two years’ worth of columns— even more—to discuss cuckolding in all its forms, unpack all the risks, and game out all the potential rewards. Since I can’t possibly do that, APC, I’m going to send you to Keys and Anklets (keysandanklets.com), a terrific podcast dedicated to “the cuckold and hotwife lifestyle.” The host, Michael C., is engaging, funny, and wise, and his interviews with cuck couples and bulls are incredibly illuminating.

If you’re considering entering into a cuckold

relationship, you’ll definitely want to start listening to Keys and Anklets.

—DS I’m a twentysomething woman engaged to a wonderful twentysomething man. I’m the kinky one. I’ve dabbled in BDSM and definitely have a taste for pain and degradation. My boyfriend, meanwhile, considers himself a feminist and struggles with degrading me. I’ve been very patient and settled for very vanilla sex for a couple of years now. However, every now and then, he’ll joke about peeing on me when we shower together. I’m curious about watersports and would totally give it a try! I’ve tried to get more information from him on where these jokes are coming from, but he always changes the subject. And recently when I tried to make a joke back, I said the absolute wrong thing: “Okay, R. Kelly, settle down.” This was right before we watched Surviving R. Kelly. I’m afraid that joke may have sent any potential watersports play down the toilet.

(Pun intended!) Any advice on how to get him to open up next time he makes one of these jokes?

—Wants A Totally Exciting Relationship You might want to reread the first letter in this week’s column, WATER, and then dig into the Savage Love archives and check out the thousands of letters I’ve responded to from people who failed to establish basic sexual compatibility before marrying their partners. Settling down requires some settling for, of course, and everyone winds up paying the price of admission. But sexual compatibility is something you want to establish before the wedding, not after.

At the very least, WATER, don’t marry a man to whom you can’t make simple observations about sex and ask simple questions about sex.

Like this statement/question/statement combo: “You joke about peeing on me, and I want to know if you would actually like to pee on me, because I would like to be peed on.” Pissing on you doesn’t make him R. Kelly, a man who has been credibly accused of raping underage girls and sexually and emotionally abusing—even imprisoning—adult women. If R. Kelly had raped numerous women and girls in the missionary position, WATER, all the other men out there who enjoy sex in the missionary position don’t become rapists by default. Where there is consent—enthusiastic consent—then it, whatever it is (missionary position sex, peeing on a partner), isn’t abusive. Sex play involving pain or degradation often requires more detailed conversations about consent, of course, but jokes and hints are a shitty way to negotiate consent for any kind of sex. Always go with unambiguous statements (“I would like to be peed on”) and direct questions (“Would you like to pee on me?”).

—DS Email your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net.

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Software Test EngiMiscellaneous neer (Fairfax Station, VA): NEW COOPERATIVE SHOP! Understand the scope of projects, gather FROM EGPYT THINGS business requirements, AND BEYOND develop specifications, 240-725-6025 define testing requirewww.thingsfromegypt.com ments, and ensure thingsfromegypt@yahoo.com all testing is done in accordance to the apSOUTH AFRICAN BAZAAR Craft Cooperative proved test plans and 202-341-0209 testing standards. Maswww.southafricanbazaarcraftcoo ter’s degree in Applied perative.com Computer Science/Comsouthafricanba z a ar @hotmail. puter Engineering or com foreign equivalent. Mail resumes toWOODWORKS HR, Vertex WEST FARM Information Custom Creative Systems, Furniture LLC 8720 Mountain Val202-316-3372 info@westfarmwoodworks.com ley Rd. Fairfax Station, www.westfarmwoodworks.com VA 22039 7002 Carroll Avenue HEALTHCARE CAREER Takoma Park, MD 20912 TRAINING ONLINE. Mon-Sat 11am-7pm, Start a New Career in Sun 10am-6pm Medical Billing & Coding.

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Fellow proggersIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been giving this project serious thought since the summer.

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