Washington City Paper (March 27, 2020)

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HOME FRONT

City Paper asked Washingtonians how they were doing in the midst of a pandemic.

They answered in words and pictures. PAGE 10

By Amanda Michelle Gomez

NEWS: DC JAIL INMATES WORRY ABOUT COVID-19 4 FOOD: IMMIGRANT STAFF NEEDS SUPPORT 14 ARTS: VENUES MOVE THEIR WORK ONLINE 16

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COVER STORY: THE HOME FRONT

10 A week of social isolation, seen through the eyes of 14 Washingtonians

DISTRICT LINE 4 Hard Cell: The Department of Corrections’ coronavirus response worries lawyers, advocates, and inmates.

6 Ready or Not: Are D.C. hospitals prepared to treat an influx of COVID-19 patients?

SPORTS 8 Olympics: Torched: Local athletes’ plans are in flux after the Summer Olympics get delayed a year.

FOOD 14 Without Resource: Undocumented restaurant workers don’t have the same safety net as other out-of-work employees.

ARTS 16 Virtual Realities: With their physical locations closed, local arts organizations move their work online.

18 Liz at Large: “Normal” 18 Speed Reads: Ottenberg on A Phoenix First Must Burn 19 Arts Club: Randall and Warren on The Day After Tomorrow

CITY LIST 20 City Lights: Request your FBI file, doodle with an illustrator, or watch cherry blossoms bloom from inside.

DIVERSIONS 19 Crossword 22 Savage Love 23 Classifieds On the cover: Clockwise from top left: Isha and Wale Jordan, Paula Stern and Paul A. London, Andre Simmons, Adam Greenberg, Clare Berke, Samantha Davis, Michael Hall, and Rajah Caruth

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DISTRICTLINE LOOSE LIPS

Hard Cell As D.C.’s court system tries to respond to a global pandemic, inmates and corrections officers agree that the Department of Corrections’ response isn’t adequate.

Larry Key is 57 years old. He has kidney failure, heart disease, diabetes, and lung cancer, according to federal court documents. He has been sitting in the DC Jail since September 2019 after being charged with drug distribution and denied bail. Key has been hospitalized three times in the six months he’s been locked up, according to court records, and recently spent two weeks at Howard University Hospital.

On March 13, his attorney asked a judge to release Key from jail due to his heightened vulnerability to the novel coronavirus while incarcerated, and this week federal prosecutors agreed. Joseph Conte, Key’s attorney, says he’s just waiting for a judge’s signature.

Omara Hussein is 27 years old, homeless, and has a lengthy record of minor arrests. She is currently charged with drug possession, disorderly conduct, simple assault, and trespassing for separate incidents at Union Station and on Q Street SE. On March 18, Hussein’s attorney asked a judge to release her from the DC Jail due to the risk of exposure to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. A judge agreed to release her this week over an objection from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which argued that she poses a greater risk to the public than the coronavirus poses to her in jail.

Eric Butler is 29 years old and works as an auto mechanic and construction contractor, according to court records. On March 16 he was arrested for illegal possession of a pistol.

Like Key and Hussein’s attorneys, Butler’s attorney cited the health risks associated with the coronavirus in a motion for his client’s release from the DC Jail. On Monday, March 23, a judge agreed to release Butler on house arrest, again over the prosecutor’s objection.

These are only three of the dozens of motions filed in federal and local courts in D.C. asking judges to let people out of jail as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread throughout the greater D.C. region and the world. Particular attention has been paid to jails and prisons, where crowded conditions can serve as potential petri dishes for the disease.

Darrow Montgomery/File

By Mitch Ryals

While inmates and defense attorneys sound the alarm about what they believe to be insufficient efforts by the D.C. Department of Corrections to prevent the potential spread of COVID-19 inside the local lockup, the U.S Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is taking a different stance. Federal prosecutors are opposing most requests for release, defense attorneys say anecdotally. In multiple court filings, prosecutors argue that the risk certain inmates pose to the public outweighs the potential risk to their health in the jail.

In at least one federal case, the USAO asked a judge to keep a man locked up before he even asked to be released.

“The government anticipates that the defendant will request release because he be-

4 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

lieves that the D.C. jail is ill-equipped to handle the pandemic,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Walters writes. “While the government appreciates that no one is immune to the growing health crisis, we seek to assure the Court that the D.C. Department of Corrections … is taking this crisis seriously, and that at the time of this filing, no inmate is testing positive nor showing COVID-19 symptoms in the jail.”

DOC has ramped up its cleaning efforts, and for a time last week quarantined at least 67 inmates who may have been exposed to the virus. But many are still concerned that those efforts will fall short.

Last week, as many as 50 or 60 inmates gathered for a religious service, according to an inmate who contacted City Paper. The in-

mate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, described seeing other inmates praying together “shoulder to shoulder” during the gathering.

“I personally feel there’s guys who shouldn’t be in here,” the inmate says. “At some point they should say ‘we should consider letting these guys go home. Put ’em on some type of home monitoring.’”

The inmate says corrections officers passed out bars of soap about two weeks ago and posted signs reminding them to wash their hands.

But, the inmate says, officers walk around the unit without masks or gloves, and during recreational time, inmates are free to go about their typical routines: taking showers, using the phone, and playing cards or dominos without following public health officials’ advice to stay six feet apart.

Laura de las Casas, a local advocate for prisoners’ rights, has had regular conversations with people locked in the DC Jail for the past couple weeks. She says inmates haven’t been given the routine instructions that are drilled into the general public’s consciousness: Wash your hands for 20 seconds, cough into your elbow, stay six feet away from each other. Even if they had, she notes, many of those measures are impossible to practice in jail, where inmates are generally housed two to a cell.

“My main problem is they just don’t share any information,” de las Casas says of the DOC. “They’re unresponsive to everyone.”

But inmates and defense attorneys aren’t the only groups upset with how DOC leadership has reacted to the global pandemic.

The D.C. corrections officers’ union is calling for the dismissal of three top DOC officials after a vote of “no confidence.”

A letter sent last week from the D.C. Department of Corrections Labor Committee and the Fraternal Order of Police to DOC Director Quincy Booth makes several demands including the removal of deputy director Wanda Patten, Warden Lennard Johnson, and deputy warden Kathleenjo Landerkin.

The letter, first reported by the Washington Times, demands that the DOC consult with medical experts for training and supervision,

provide protective clothing for officers working in the “quarantine unit,” and establish a “no contact” process for the officers.

An email to Booth from the union’s attorney, Ann-Kathryn So, says corrections officers were ordered to move 50 inmates who may have had contact with a deputy U.S. Marshal who tested positive for coronavirus, but the cellmates of those 50 inmates were allowed to stay put. The officers requested face shields and gear to protect their clothes but were denied, according to So’s email. Instead, they were ordered to move the inmates wearing only masks and gloves, and one inmate allegedly spat in an officer’s face.

“DOC management has created an unconscionable public health crisis, and almost certainly guaranteed and accelerated the rampant spread of COVID-19 within the DOC facilities and the communities in which the staff live,” So writes in her email.

DOC’s spokesperson did not respond to City Paper’s multiple requests for comment.

The 50 inmates cited in So’s email conflicts with the number given last week by Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Kevin Donahue. Last Thursday, Donahue said 65 inmates had potentially been exposed to the deputy U.S. Marshal and were quarantined.

In an update this week, Donahue said only a “handful” of inmates were potentially exposed to the deputy marshal, though he did not know on Monday morning if those inmates were still quarantined.

Donahue credited a 40 percent reduction in the number of people filtering through the DC Jail’s central cell block, where new detainees are held before their initial hearings, to steps taken by the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

MPD issued a new directive giving officers discretion to issue citations rather than arresting a person for certain minor crimes. The USAO has agreed to make formal charging decisions before an arrestee makes it to the central cell block.

Separately, one DC Jail inmate was tested for the coronavirus due to travel overseas. Donahue says the test came back negative.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the Council’s public safety committee, crafted a provision in the Council’s emergency legislation passed last week that allows DOC to issue extra “good time credits” to lowlevel offenders. Allen says some inmates have been released under the new good-time rules, though he didn’t have an exact number.

Allen shares the concern of lawyers and advocates and believes it’s only a matter of time before someone in the jail tests positive for COVID-19.

“This threat is present in every single community, and the Jail is no different,” Allen says.

“It’s simply a matter of time. I think the Jail is taking a lot of precautionary steps, but as I look at other cities and counties, I don’t know why we would be any different.”

De las Casas says the inmates that she speaks with describe frustration and confusion with the constantly changing conditions inside. During some phone calls, she can hear Fox5 News

on the TV in the common area (it’s always on Fox5, she says). A recent call with an inmate was cut short when she heard a guard announce that the jail was going on lockdown. Later that day, she was surprised to get another phone call saying the lockdown had been lifted.

“I’ve heard from others that they’ve been locked down for half a day,” she says. “So there’s lots of confusion. Especially in times like this where families are panicking and if you don’t get a call from your loved one for a day, you don’t know if they’re in quarantine or what’s happening.”

In the eyes of the law, Key, Hussein, and Butler are innocent. Each are accused of crimes, but are not yet convicted, and they rely in part on that principle—innocent until proven guilty—in their requests for release.

Hussein and Butler’s motions share some boilerplate language citing Mayor Muriel Bowser’s declaration of a public health emergency, the “20 to 60 detainees” who came into contact with the deputy U.S. Marshal (a figure that’s already outdated), the climbing number of infections and deaths around the world, and examples of how other jurisdictions have addressed their jail populations.

“As a society, we must do everything we can to reduce the transmission of the virus,” Hussein and Butler’s motions say. “Jails and prisons are super high-risk breeding grounds.”

The USAO responds with similarly formulaic language mixed with arguments specific to each case. Hussein, for example, has had 23 warrants issued between 2014 and April of 2019, the USAO says in support of its argument that she is unlikely to return for court if she’s released.

On Sunday, March 22, the D.C. Superior Court issued an order in response to the “overwhelming number of completed and anticipated filings” asking for release in light of COVID-19.

The order indicates which factors will weigh most heavily on judges’ minds and requires all future requests to include information about the defendant’s age and health—specifically whether the defendant has a condition that puts them at risk for severe illness from COVID-19. Requests must also say if the defendant is serving a sentence or is only accused of a crime, whether the alleged crimes involve violence, and if prosecutors support the defendant’s release.

Meanwhile, a day after the D.C. Superior Court’s order, Assistant U.S. Attorney Walters filed her preemptive motion in U.S. District Court in anticipation of one man’s request for release. The defendant, Timothy Taylor, hasn’t yet asked a judge to release him.

“The government appreciates the gravity of this global pandemic and is committed to ensuring the safety and health of inmates like the defendant,” Walters writes. “Should circumstances change at the DOC, to the point that the defendant’s health is actually in jeopardy, the defendant may request reconsideration. But at this stage and at this time, DOC appears dedicated and willing to address this public health crisis.”

CP

DOEE.DC.GOV/TRASHFREEDC

washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 5

DISTRICTLINE CITY DESK

Ready or Not Are D.C. hospitals prepared to treat more COVID-19 infections?

Within a Week’s time, the District’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases jumped from 31 to 183 as of Tuesday evening. As testing becomes more widely available, positive cases that already exist will begin to reveal themselves. For some, it could be deadly. The District already saw two deaths related to coronavirus disease, COVID-19. The critical question now is whether D.C. hospitals are prepared for more COVID-19 patients.

D.C. has 350 intensive care unit beds and 400 ventilators, according to DC Health. As of Wednesday, March 25, only 78 ICU beds and 260 ventilators were available. The agency could not provide a total bed count. Officials set aside $15 million to purchase more ventilators and other critical medical equipment on Wednesday.

Given that more than 705,000 individuals live in D.C., these numbers seem daunting.

To better understand what this data means— and how concerned the public should be—City Paper reached out to Dr. Thomas Tsai, a surgeon and health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Tsai is one of the researchers that estimated how many beds are available and needed to care for COVID-19 patients over the coming months in 306 hospital markets across the country, including the greater D.C. area.

Tsai and his colleagues modeled various scenarios. In a moderate scenario, where 40 percent of the D.C. population is infected over 12 months and 8 percent require hospitalization, D.C. would need to exponentially expand total bed capacity. The New York Times read of this data has the city needing to add or empty the equivalent of 127 percent of its total occupied beds, not just ICU where severe acute cases are handled. This might not actually ever happen, but it could if everyone does not take action, says Tsai.

“As a public health researcher, I don’t want to be in a situation where we find out if [350] ICU beds are adequate,” he tells City Paper.

“We don’t want to be in a situation like we are in Italy. The goal is to prevent these scenarios from happening.”

As a means of prevention, hospitals need to maximize existing bed capacity (this

Darrow Montgomery/File

By Amanda Michelle Gomez

means delaying non-urgent and non-essential surgery), and the public needs to not overwhelm the health care system (this means staying at home and engaging in social distancing). These actions will ideally buy time for the health care system to prepare for more COVID-19 patients, along with all the other patients who will require essential medical care as well.

“The important thing for hospital leaders and public health officials is that there is a current window to increase bed capacity that needs hard work,” says Tsai. “Waiting until that peak might be too little too late.”

During a press conference on Monday, Director of the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency Dr. Christopher Rodriguez said hospitals are trying to maximize bed capacity by discharging non-acute patients and canceling elective surgeries. The D.C. government is also looking to create more space for hospitals by seeking federal approval to use non-traditional spaces like hallways for medical care. In preparation for the worst, the emergency response team is already looking into using furloughed nursing homes or unused hotels.

“Our medium term plan is to shed load, which we have, and to look into expanding space in hospitals,” said Rodriguez. “So we have already taken a lot of steps to prepare for surge. And then as our modeling comes in and

6 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

if we have to scale up we will be prepared to do that as well.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser says there are two private empty facilities that her team is eyeing in the event of a surge. She wouldn’t say what those facilities are. According to the Washington Post, D.C. officials considered at one point reopening Providence Hospital in Northeast D.C., which closed in 2019. But the president and CEO of Providence Health System, Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, told the Post the facility was not suitable for inpatient care.

The fact that Providence’s parent system, Ascension, is against the idea is not deterring lawmakers. “We need to keep all options on the table,” Ward 7 Councilmember and chairman of the Committee on Health Vince Gray said in a statement to City Paper. “I have heard about the Providence proposal, and I think that needs to be on the table, even if it takes some capital upgrades. It is time for Ascension to prove they are a solution-oriented partner with the District.”

Gray is concerned about the District’s lack of hospital bed capacity. He says he was always concerned with limited resources at hospitals, particularly when Providence closed. The coronavirus just exacerbated the problem.

“The COVID-19 crisis proves yet again why the new hospital is desperately needed,” said Gray. “The partnership agreement and con-

struction of a new hospital should be accelerated once this crisis has passed.”

Gray is shepherding the proposal to open a new hospital on the St. Elizabeths Campus in Congress Heights. Before the pandemic, the new hospital was expected to open in December 2022. When it opened, United Medical Center was scheduled to close.

Even though he is concerned about past patient safety issues at UMC, Gray says he is “confident that the staff at UMC will continue to rise to the occasion” during this pandemic.

UMC, meanwhile, was cited by the mayor on Monday as an example of a hospital looking to optimize. It’s considering using a non-operational floor to expand space for a possible surge. Already, the hospital cancelled elective surgeries and instituted a number of restrictions, like no visitation to its nursing facility. A spokeswoman for the public hospital says they have seen an uptick in patients with respiratory issues, although not COVID-19 patients.

UMC has only treated one individual who tested positive for COVID-19 last week, but that person is no longer being treated there. This is separate from a UMC staff member who tested positive on March 14; that individual was tested and treated elsewhere.

“Many of the individuals reporting to the ER are actually testing positive for MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus),” says Toya Carmichael, a spokeswoman with UMC, by email.

Other hospitals in D.C. are also working to create greater efficiencies in their operations.

“We established an exterior tent to allow hospital staff to triage and assess patient needs as they arrive on campus,” writes a spokesperson with Sibley Memorial Hospital.

Children’s National Hospital, alternatively, announced Monday that it opened a drive- and walk-up location for testing. The testing site is located in the parking lot of Trinity Washington University in Edgewood. It’s the first drive-up site to open in the District. Primary care physicians can refer individuals up to age 22 for sample collection and testing. The site can test upwards of 100 young people a day but a doctor’s referral is needed. Drive-up testing reduces visits to the emergency department, thus reducing demand and exposure, and helps preserve protective equipment because less is used in this setting.

“While we wish we could provide testing for everyone who thinks they need it, we do not have that capacity—which is why getting a doctor’s referral is required,” said Dr. Joelle Simpson, the medical director of emergency preparedness at Children’s National, in a statement.

Aggressive testing has proven to be an effective way to limit the spread in other parts of the globe. But that requires protective gear and testing swabs, which Bowser says D.C. needs more federal assistance with. Testing also requires more health care workers. The District is accepting volunteers to help with medical screenings. Over 1,600 individuals have so far joined the DC Medical Reserve Corps.

CP

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Kathryn Riley

SPORTS

Sports fans are turning to esports to fill the void. washingtoncitypaper.com/sports

OLYMPICS

Olympics: Torched

Now that the Tokyo Olympic Games are postponed, local Olympic hopefuls are left to deal with an unprecedented situation. practices often have as many as 60 swimmers in the pool at a time.

“Some of the people who have still been training, nationally and around the world, they’re training in situations where it’s one athlete per lane or staggered athletes from one end of the pool to another end of the pool,” he says. “The elite or college program athletes, it may be easier to adapt to. Club settings such as ours are not financially viable to train in that environment. We may need to reinvent the whole training dynamic of how to train high school and club level swimmers.”

During spring break a couple of years ago, Erin Gemmell, a freshman at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, joked to her friend that playing the video game Just Dance on her Nintendo Wii would help them get back into shape for swimming. It was a fun way to exercise without having to go to the pool or gym, she remembers.

Now, it may be one of the only workouts Gemmell can do for the foreseeable future.

In response to the global coronavirus pandemic, scores of sports facilities around the country are closed indefinitely, and people who aren’t quarantined or self-isolating are encouraged to stay at least six feet away from other people in public. Major sporting events like the NCAA basketball tournaments have been canceled, and the NBA, MLB, and NHL seasons have all been suspended or postponed.

And on Tuesday morning, the inevitable happened. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that the Olympic Games, originally scheduled to run in Tokyo from July 24 to Aug. 9, would be postponed until 2021, just days after the International Olympic Committee insisted the event would go on as scheduled.

That leaves Olympic hopefuls like Gemmell, 15, to deal with an unprecedented scenario that continues to develop on a daily basis. Only three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940, and 1944— have been canceled, all due to wars, but this will be the first time the modern Olympics are postponed because of a global pandemic.

A lot of unanswered questions remain. By shifting the time of the Olympics, the qualification process will be modified, forcing athletes to adjust schedules that some have been planning years in advance. The chaotic past few weeks have left some athletes scrambling to figure out what’s next.

“I think it’s just hard to keep up,” Gemmell says. “You think, OK, they’ve canceled all the swim meets through April, next day, it’s through the end of April, and then, the next day, they might move the Olympics. It’s hard to keep up and adapt your training based on what’s happening.”

Illustration by Julia Terbrock

By Kelyn Soong

The closure of training facilities have impacted Olympic hopefuls around the world. In swimming, the struggles of high profile swimmers like D.C. native Katie Ledecky and Olympic gold medalist Simone Manuel to find a pool to swim in put a spotlight on the inability of Olympic athletes to find safe ways to train properly or adequately prepare for the Games in light of the growing pandemic.

That situation appeared to be a breaking point for USA Swimming. On March 20, the governing body led the way in calling for the Olympics and Paralympics to be postponed by one year. Similar announcements from USA Track & Field and USA Gymnastics followed shortly after. Two days later, Team Canada announced it would not be sending any athletes to the 2020 Games.

And after weeks of assuring people that the Games would go on as planned, Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, said early Monday it would begin simulating and examining postponement scenarios. That afternoon, Dick Pound, a longtime member of the IOC, told USA Today that the Games would be postponed, likely to 2021.

8 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Gemmell’s father, Bruce, knows and understands how important the Olympics are.

As a coach at the Nation’s Capital Swim Club (NCAP), one of the country’s top elite swim clubs, Bruce coaches a number of Olympic Trials qualifiers, including Erin, and coached Ledecky when she swam for NCAP. He is also the chair of the steering committee for USA Swimming’s national team and is on USA Swimming’s board of directors.

He believes postponing the Games was “the only choice.”

“It takes the pressure off of us in the immediate sense,” Bruce says. “But we sort of had the pressure taken off of us by default; we couldn’t get in the water anyway.”

The question of what the sport of swimming will look like going forward lingers in his mind. Even though the Olympics are postponed, athletes won’t be able to return to their routines. Restrictions are still in place for much of the world as the pandemic rages. As of Tuesday morning, the World Health Organization has reported over 334,000 cases of COVID-19 in the world, with nearly 15,000 confirmed deaths.

Bruce envisions that there may be a “new normal” in the way swimmers train. NCAP

some eliTe aThleTes like Julia Rizk made life decisions based on the timing of the Olympics. When Rizk graduated from the Ohio State University in December 2019 with a finance degree, she had plenty of options. She finished her collegiate career as an NCAA champion in the indoor mile, earning All-American and All-Academic Honors.

A consulting company in Columbus, Ohio, offered her a position before she graduated.

Rizk’s parents urged her to accept the lucrative job. But Rizk had other plans. She decided to become a professional runner with the D.C.-based and Under Armour-sponsored District Track Club. The Summer Olympics in Tokyo, she reasoned, were only seven months away, and that presented an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

“I want to make the Olympics,” Rizk says.

“I want to be an Olympian ... I’ve watched them ever since I was a kid. To be able to say I’m an Olympian would make me happy beyond belief.”

Rizk’s original plan was to run the Olympic standard in the 800 meters sometime in late April or early May—assuming there would be meets available to race. Afterward, she intended to fly to Egypt to obtain her Egyptian citizenship and hoped to eventually qualify for its Olympic team. (Rizk’s father was born in Egypt.)

Now, even though Rizk, 23, concludes that delaying the Games was the “right decision,” she says that she’ll need to reassess her long term future in the sport. Her parents did not expect her to be a professional runner, and she plans to sit down with them

and her coach, Tom Brumlik, in the coming weeks to discuss her schedule for the next year.

“Obviously as a professional runner, I am in some ways supporting myself, but I still lean on my parents a little bit, more so than I would be if I had a corporate job,” Rizk says.

“So I think it will just be a difficult conversation to have with my parents whether I want to continue on that path.”

Unlike with Rizk, the postponement of the Olympics will make life less challenging for Khaleel Asgarali. On March 5, Asgarali received an email from the Trinidad and Tobago Table Tennis Association informing him that he had been selected to play in the Latin American singles and mixed qualification tournament for the Olympics scheduled for April 15 to 19. The tournament has since been provisionally suspended.

Two days later, Asgarali, 33, celebrated taking over the Washington DC Table Tennis Center (WDCTT) with an open house attended by approximately 175 table tennis enthusiasts. On March 16, he had to close the center indefinitely.

Asgarali felt relieved when he heard about the postponement. He can now focus on the survival and success of WDCTT. “It definitely affects my plans,” he says. “For me, it’s a benefit, more time to prepare, more time to get things in order. It would’ve been way too chaotic to jump start business, at same time trying to see if I had time to train for the Olympics. Now have time to prepare, more time to get things in order.”

The U.S. Olympic Trials for swimming were scheduled to be held in Omaha, Nebraska, from June 21 to 28. A new schedule has yet to be determined. Erin Gemmell has qualified to swim the 100, 200, and 400 freestyle and 200 individual medley events at the trials.

Originally, Gemmell wanted to participate in an international exchange program at her school in the fall after the completion of the Olympic Games, regardless of whether or not she made the team. But with the Olympics delayed, those plans may be on hold.

She will need those months to train for meets leading up to the 2021 Olympic Trials. Gemmell feels less pressure now that the Olympics are postponed.

“The past couple of days, before we knew what was going to happen, I kind of felt bad that I’m missing out on swimming,” she says.

“But I can do the same amount now and feel better about what I’m doing.”

No matter what happens moving forward, Gemmell is still going to work out at home to maintain fitness. In addition to playing Just Dance, she runs about three times a week and does dryland exercises. She doesn’t want to think about not being able to go back to the pool for months. But if that happens, Gemmell now has a backup plan for when she returns to school next semester.

“Maybe I’d pick up cross country,” she says, “because I’d be pretty good at running at that point.”

CP

We’re here to help.

This is a complicated and unique moment in time for all of us. When the coronavirus situation began to unfold, Sandy Spring Bank quickly implemented our business continuity plans to ensure the health and safety of our employees, clients, and business and community partners. And that remains our top priority.

We continue to encourage everyone to heed to the guidance from our state and federal health officials. As a company, we have made and will continue to make the necessary adjustments to our operations, while serving your banking needs in the most prudent way.

To that end, you can: Call us with any questions or concerns at 800.399.5919. We ask for your patience in advance if you experience longer than usual wait times.

Set up a special appointment with one of our bankers to discuss any financial need you may have.

Take advantage of our online and mobile banking so you can bank with us remotely.

Visit our website for more information. You can also open a new account online.

Visit sandyspringbank.com/update, our special website section, for all of this information and for other important coronavirus-related announcements.

Sandy Spring Bank has been part of this community for more than 150 years, and we have helped our clients through challenging times before. We are committed to using our experience to serve you in the best way we can and to continue to earn and keep your trust.

Let’s please remember that everyone in our community is grappling with this in some way.

Each personal situation is unique, so the virus—or even the potential of it—will affect everyone differently. Every day we have a choice to show empathy and an opportunity to be an encouragement to someone else—seize that moment whenever we can and be a bright spot to someone who needs it.

We are grateful for all of our employees, clients, and partners during this unprecedented time, and we thank you for your ongoing trust in Sandy Spring Bank.

We end this message with a call for grace. Together, we will get through this.

With Gratitude,

Daniel J. Schrider President & CEO Sandy Spring Bank

800.399.5919 · sandyspringbank.com/update Member FDIC

SSB-83 DanMessage_Corona_WashCityPaper_4.91x10.14-rev.indd 1

3/19/2020 3:43:21 PM

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THE

HOME FRONT An unprecedented week in the lives of 14 Washingtonians

By Amanda Michelle Gomez Photos courtesy of subjects

A Bus Driver A Metrobus operator of 14 years with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Although WMATA cleans her bus every night, the driver has to provide her own protective gear, a mask and gloves. She takes extra precautions and disinfects her bus whenever she can with a bleach spray.

She is concerned that she’ll get exposed to the virus and then spread it to her family—her 8 year-old, 16 year-old, husband, and elderly mother. Her mother’s immune system is already compromised; she has a severe respiratory illness.

“If I contract it and give it to her, I’m pretty sure she won’t be able to survive it,” she says of her mother. She asked to not be named in this article due to privacy concerns.

Before she even enters the house, she’ll strip down, put her uniform in a trash bag, immediately wash it, and spray herself with Lysol. Her family understands that she is essential personnel and has to work even when that means putting herself in harm’s way.

“I’ve been doing it for so long that my daughter, she expresses concern but she also knows that this is how Mommy helps provide for the family,” she says.

The first week things started to close, people were still out and about. She could tell by the bags people were carrying that some were leaving the house for non-essential reasons.

“I don’t think people are taking this seriously,” she says with frustration.

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To slow The spread of the novel coronavirus, Washington, D.C. has been told to slow down. Stay at home, if work allows.

Keep a safe distance from one another until it’s safe.

It’s a simple mandate, but it’s changed everyone’s way of living. Every aspect of life and every person in D.C. and its surrounding areas have been impacted. The degree of impact depends on countless factors like health status, job, and income.

How are you feeling? What are you doing? City Paper asked these questions of 14 individuals to get an idea of how people keep going during a pandemic. We also asked them to send us a few pictures of what their lives look like these days. These people are single parents, grandparents, or lovers. Some are defined by their jobs. Others are trying to remember that they are not

their jobs, especially when job security exists only for a select few in these times.

The ordinariness of everyday life, even in extraordinary times, brings comforts. A teacher will still see her students, even if it’s through FaceTime, and a family will still worship without going to church. The virus is omnipresent, but even a nervous woman can still enjoy a good panda video.

This is just the first week of many; no one knows when this crisis will end. But what’s more frightening than the virus is its lasting effects. The individuals interviewed wonder what the city will be like for workers and their families when everyone can finally leave their homes again. They are all learning to balance the reasonableness of hope and the reality of survival.

A Street Vendor’s Daughter Genesis Lemus, 15, Columbia Heights Genesis Lemus’ mother, Ana, hasn’t worked for more than a week. Ana usually sells tacos, atole de elote, mangos, and other treats from a cart in front of the Bank of America in Columbia Heights. Ana stopped selling March 11 because she worried she would get infected with COVID-19. If she gets sick, no one will be able to take care of Lemus and her 9-year-old brother.

Ana is a single mother.

“It was a hard decision,” says Lemus. “Every time we sell, we plan ahead.”

Lemus and her mom are close and she helps her mother with all aspects of the cart, from finances to food preparation. They’re a team. Since her mother stopped vending, Lemus knows it’s been difficult to budget for everyday necessities.

The family receives food and cash assistance from the government, but it is not enough. Ana can’t even apply for unemployment benefits because her cart couldn’t acquire all the right permits before COVID-19. The regulatory nightmare makes Ana part of D.C.’s informal economy. She tried to get another job but she can’t find other work when so many businesses are shutting down right now. Lemus wishes the local government would provide more aid.

“Not only for us, but a lot of people need more,” she says. Other street vendors are hurting and so are their customers. Lemus and her mother have heard from customers who they’ve gotten to know over the years that have lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

It’s been an emotional time, so the 15-year-old has begun journaling. She and her family have also found solace in their faith. The ban on mass gatherings means her church is closed, so instead the family will listen to services online on their tablet.

All she can really do right now is continue to do her homework, help her mom with her little brother, and stay healthy.

“At the end of the day, we are going to come through it. We’ve been through tough situations,” Lemus says. “If we stick together, we know it’ll pass.”

A High School Senior Rajah Caruth, 17, Takoma The pandemic got real for Rajah Caruth when his high school, School Without Walls, temporarily closed on March 9 because a staff member was exposed to the coronavirus.

“This isn’t just something overseas,” he says matter-of-factly. “It’s actually affecting our everyday lives.”

His school, like all other DC Public Schools, is closed until at least April 27. It’s unclear what happens to prom or graduation.

His future plans have also been delayed. He aspires to be a professional NASCAR racer and all his races, including his longawaited debut, have been postponed or canceled. These days, his races are strictly virtual and take place on his gaming console.

“I guess it’s a pretty bad deal but it could always be worse,” says Caruth, “so you just got to deal with it.”

He’s been heeding the advice of infectious disease experts and practicing social distancing. He’s only left his house to go to the grocery store or hang in his backyard. Caruth is living his life almost entirely online. His races, classwork, and friendships are all still continuing thanks to technology. He started remote learning March 23 and says it was “pretty chill.” He only has four classes and doesn’t need to call into any of them. The challenge will be doing this for another month or so and dealing with isolation and boredom.

When he tries to predict where this is all heading, Caruth can’t help but think about apocalyptic movies. He has nothing else to compare it to, so 2012, War of the Worlds, and I Am Legend will have to do. Even so, Caruth feels as fine as can be expected.

“To be honest, I don’t really get nervous about anything. Like I’ll get butterflies before races,” says Caruth. “To have that directly be impacted by this has opened my eyes to the fact that this is really serious. But you just got to adapt and be wary and not do anything stupid.”

A Teacher Who’s A Single Parent Isha Jordan, 26, Silver Spring Remote teaching is harder than expected. It’s not that the staff of Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy Public Charter School did not prepare. They did. It’s just been challenging for Isha Jordan to transition from face-to-face learning to online.

Now she needs to be available all day to answer administrative emails and teach individual students. All the while, Jordan is also taking care of her 1-year-old, Wale.

Jordan, who’s a single parent and teaches fifth, sixth, and seventh graders, would typically drop off her son with a babysitter.

But now that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, Jordan is choosing to have Wale stay at home. He’ll sit in a highchair next to her as she types on her laptop, or he’ll watch the “Baby Shark” dance for the umpteenth time. When the baby naps, Jordan can really focus. If all else fails, Wale will just join Jordan as she FaceTimes a student. That is, if she can get a hold of her students.

During the first week of distance education, March 16 to 20, Jordan was only able to video chat five of her 13 students. She was able to connect with all but two of them, even if it was just by text message. Jordan works with special education students and would typically pull them out of class and work with them one-on-one. She’d help these students with class assignments, their reading, and math work. Since she can’t do that anymore, she’s had to incessantly call or rely on Instagram and friends to reach them. She’ll also phone parents. Some students are having technical difficulties. Others just aren’t ready to work yet.

This is just the beginning. Class will take place remotely until at least April 27.

“It’s insane to be out of school for so long,” says Jordan. “Of course we have to be safe … if we take the proper steps and precautions, hopefully we can make things go back to normal and people can go out again and we can actually live our lives.”

Grandparents Paula Stern, 74, and Paul A. London, 84, Cleveland Park Paula Stern can’t help but compare the potential of this catastrophe to past ones like the Holocaust and the Great Depression. She has a personal connection to each event: She’s Jewish, and her parents survived the Great Depression with practically nothing. Both historical events resulted in the loss of lives and businesses, and she believes the consequences of this pandemic will be similar, if not worse.

Paul A. London doesn’t share his wife’s comparisons. He looks to other great public health crises like the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and London’s Great Plague of 1665. Given that the health system has matured a lot since then, he’s more optimistic about the outcomes of this pandemic.

Paula and Paul can’t help but worry for their children—their son and his family in New York and their daughter and her family in Maine. New York City is the epicenter for the virus in the U.S. and their son can’t leave his place in Manhattan to go to the grocery store without bumping into people. Their daughter, a pediatrician, volunteered to administer COVID-19 tests. Waiting at home for their daughter, who’s screened at least two positive cases, are their 2-year-old and 7-month-old grandchildren.

“Anybody who’s looking at the newspapers or the television or something like that is going to be nervous,” says Paul. “If you are not nervous there’s something wrong with your nervous system.”

“We have our concerns,” says Paula. “But Paul and I are comfortable.”

They are quick to recognize their privilege. They meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s at-risk category because of their ages, but they are quick to downplay that because they are otherwise healthy. Time under self-quarantine for them has meant swimming, sculpting, gardening, and writing. There have been some interruptions to daily living, but mostly they’re getting by with the help of neighbors who volunteer to get them groceries.

Their real concern is for the future and the economic devastation facing their kin and people around the globe.

A Mother of Three Young Kids Clare Berke, 36, Fort Dupont “They all could say ‘coronavirus,’” Clare Berke says of her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old twin girls. Her kids understand that this word means school is closed and that they can’t visit their grandparents in Ohio. Berke’s son knows that people can get very sick because of coronavirus so he should cover his mouth when he coughs and stay away from groups of people, even his friends. The twins don’t quite understand as much, but they know that coronavirus is why their birthday party on Friday was canceled.

The last good day was Thursday, March 19, Berke says, because it felt “normal.” She took her kids to the National Arboretum, where her son rode his scooter and they explored nature on an unseasonably warm day. For a moment, no one was thinking about the global pandemic and its consequences. Five days later, the Arboretum closed indefinitely.

“We are probably doing it all wrong,” says Berke about social distancing. “It’s too crazy to stay in the house with three children, 5 and under. It would just be impossible. I don’t know what we would do. They already almost kill each other and fight.”

On March 24, Benjamin Banneker Academic High School returned to school and Berke returned to teaching English to her 100 students. Now, however, she’ll do it online. “It’s sort of a mess,” says Berke. Every teacher is doing something different.

Some are deciding to set up virtual lessons, others aren’t. Students can submit assignments on various platforms.

Her twins went to daycare but her son stayed home while she and her husband, who’s also a teacher, figured out distance education. To give one another space, Berke worked on her laptop in the basement while her son watched TV nearby and her husband taught upstairs. When her son used Zoom for the first time to video chat with his classmates, Berke got a call. She had to tap out of motherly duties and her husband tapped in.

This period requires a lot of moving around to avoid getting in one another’s way. It also requires a lot of group chats. Too many for comfort.

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MARCH 27, 2020 11

A Restaurant Chef and Owner Adam Greenberg, 40, Dupont Circle Restaurant. Sleep. Repeat. That is Adam Greenberg’s schedule now that he’s had to rethink how his 15-month-old restaurant, Coconut Club, does business. He can pause for a moment in between and enjoy seeing his wife or walking their 9-yearold cavapoo. Mostly, he’s busy with the restaurant.

Coconut Club has had to pivot within a week’s time. The vacation-inspired restaurant closed March 15, and just started doing take-out and delivery March 20. It will continue to do so every weekend until it’s safe to eat out again.

“As long as they allow me to show up,” Greenberg says, “I’m going to keep trying.”

Soon, patrons will get a luau kit along with their order to recreate the dining experience. Coconut Club isn’t looking to turn a profit. It’s looking to survive. Its projected sales are zero for the next 10 weeks. Greenberg wrestled with the decision to even offer grab-and-go service, worrying that by doing so, he would encourage people to go outside. Takeout helps pay the two remaining salaried employees (two are already furloughed), and gratuity goes to 12 hourly employees that are stuck at home.

This past weekend, Coconut Club did $8,000 in takeout, down 400 percent from what would do in a normal week. The restaurant will certainly be relying more on grants.

Greenberg doesn’t own property. His restaurant is a commercial tenant in its building and he and his wife are residential tenants in their apartment. Coconut Club’s landlord hasn’t deferred or forgiven its rent payments like others have. The landlord is in wait-and-see mode because it has properties all over the country.

“I just don’t think that right now complaining or doing anything other than trying to work on solutions is productive,” he says.

“It’s a lot easier for me to have this attitude when I have nothing to lose,” he says. “The only thing I’d be losing is my restaurant. But even with that said, we are doing it the right way and I feel like if we lose it, we’ve done everything we can to save it.”

12 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

A Yoga Instructor Michael Hall, 37, Logan Circle You’d think a yoga instructor would have a relatively zen lifestyle, but Michael Hall is a hyper-scheduled person given that he typically teaches upward of 20 classes per week and commutes between two studios, Balance Gym and DC Ashtanga.

He owns the latter studio, so he’s busy with paperwork too. It was always challenging to practice yoga for himself.

“I feel good,” Hall says. “While I might have an extroverted personality and I like sharing, yoga is an internal practice.”

Social distancing has reduced the stressors of his own practice, but it’s complicated his business. Yoga is Hall’s source of income. After his studios closed March 13, he had a few “woe is me” days. Balance Gym has paid him to lead a couple of livestreamed classes, but he’s not earning as much as he did before.

“Once I realized ‘hey, we are all in it. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s time to change your mindset,’” says Hall, “It was like, ‘well it’s time now to start checking in on some other people.’”

When he checked in on his students, he was glad to see them continuing their practices at home. The yogic philosophy is to teach in such a way that students become the masters of their own practice. This moment tests that.

He is concerned about what happens when this is all over.

Will people stop going out for yoga? Or will his students—many of them new yoga teachers that are taking financial hits right now—be able to afford class anymore? It’s unclear. In the meantime, Hall is enjoying taking a deep breath.

A Couple That Just Moved In Together Nicole Baum, 27, and Eliot Payne, 39, Eckington Nicole Baum and Eliot Payne have been dating for more than two years, but just moved in together in July. Now they’re selfquarantining alongside one another for the foreseeable future.

Both are taking the public health emergency very seriously. Baum has only left the house to go grocery shopping, while Payne has only ventured as far as the backyard. Thinking about the pandemic makes Baum feel anxious, so she started watching live streams of zoo animals to calm down. Payne doesn’t really get anxious, but does miss socializing. “I get energy from being around people,” he says. He made a new friend by FaceTiming with someone he’s only known through social media.

A week in and the couple is off to a solid start. They negotiated space for another, along with their two other roommates, in their four-bedroom apartment. Baum, a teacher, works in the living room at a makeshift standing desk that Payne built.

Payne, a lawyer, types on his laptop at the kitchen table after realizing his bedroom wouldn’t work.

“I’m not nervous at all about spending time with Eliot,” says Baum.

“I jokingly sent Nicole tweets about a lot of divorces in China that sprung up. I can’t relate,” says Payne.

“That is very sweet,” Baum replies under her breath.

An Entrepreneur Nina Oduro, 33, Laurel “This has been the most amount of time I’ve spent in my house,” says Nina Oduro.

These past couple days have been a treat for someone who travels constantly. Despite the circumstances, she’s pleased to have been able to be still. She has a roommate but there’s plenty of space in their apartment for solitude. She’s started journaling to document how she’s felt during such an unprecedented time.

“In better times, I’d like to reflect on what the journey was,” she says.

She finds herself thinking a lot about a recent trip to the grocery store. She was very paranoid and thought twice about picking up produce with her bare hands. The part that stays with her came when she paid for the food. People were cutting one another because the line was so long, even though it was 9 a.m. When Oduro and others spoke up, those that cut either ignored them or scoffed.

“Where are we rushing to? To go back and shut our doors?” asks Oduro. “It really shut down every notion I had that we are in this together.”

Setting aside that one experience, the rest of her days have been spent brainstorming how her business, Dine Diaspora, can live strictly online. Her marketing agency does a lot of inperson events that connect people to African diaspora cuisine.

COVID-19 has meant canceling these events. It’s challenging to keep moving forward because Dine Diaspora works with a lot of people in the restaurant industry, an industry that’s collapsing.

“We are working with chefs that don’t have businesses of work to sustain them … so that impacts ours work in marketing their work and profiling their contributions,” she says.

A Grocery Store Worker Andre Simmons, 36, Landover Andre Simmons doesn’t blame the customers for hoarding.

He’s worked at the Safeway in Hechinger Mall for 20 years and has never seen anything like it. No toilet paper. No meat. Empty shelves. But he doesn’t fault the people who come in his store looking to raid the canned goods section because the city has never endured anything like this.

“I mean, they are scared,” Simmons says.

Customers do complain about the short supply though. They’ll make smart remarks. But the empty grocery shelves are the customers’ own doing for panic shopping. Safeway’s warehouse had to cut back on its orders just to spread out the inventory.

It’s been an exhausting month for Simmons. He worked eight to 10 hours every day from March 16 through March 23.

Given how many people he sees on a daily basis, he’s a bit nervous about catching coronavirus. He is worried for himself and his 12-year-old son. Simmons is a single dad. When he gets home from the store, he’ll help his son do his homework.

He’s not trying to spread anything to him in the process, so he does what he can, like washing his hands. But he can’t just not go into work.

“I know if I don’t do it, people don’t eat,” says Simmons.

“People still need to keep their immune system strong.”

A Mutual Aid Organizer Samantha Davis, 31, Brookland Samantha Davis has been spending her time traveling from store to store in search of groceries and toiletries. While others are supposed to be quarantining inside, Davis has been out, helping to create a mutual aid program.

“When there is any type of collective struggle that we are going through, in this case a pandemic, we want to make sure the community has what they need. And we know throughout history that oftentimes even if the government is doing something, it’s often not enough,” says Davis. “And it tends to reach those most marginalized—black communities, brown communities, immigrant communities, young folk, low-income communities—it attempts to reach us last or least.”

Since March 18, Davis and her nonprofit, the Black Swan Academy, along with other volunteers, have been supporting families living in Wards 7 and 8 with items they’ve purchased.

Organizers set up mutual aid stations at Anacostia High School, Ballou High School, and H.D. Woodson High School, and have helped roughly 300 households in total.

“It’s not charity. It’s solidarity,” says Davis. “Each and every one of us has a role to play. Each and every one of us can support our neighbors in one way.”

Davis and her team are taking all the precautions they can as they hand out canned goods and other aid. It’s not lost on Davis that everyone is being asked to stay inside for their own health.

Even the residents who come by to pick up items express concern for the volunteers, telling them to take care of themselves.

And Davis is. When she’s not working for the mutual aid program, she’s staying at home to limit her exposure to the virus.

When she is self-quarantining, she has her dog and regimen— meditation, a walk—to keep her grounded. She knows she needs to preserve her energy because there’s plenty of organizing that’ll be needed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

CP

washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 13

DCFEED

Many area bars and restaurants have launched online fundraisers to support their staff, even those who have been laid off. Visit washingtoncitypaper.com/food to see a regularly updated list of who is looking for financial help.

YOUNG & HUNGRY

Without Resource

Illustration by Hunter Myers

The immigrants who make D.C.’s restaurant scene vibrant don’t have the same safety net as other employees who got laid off because of COVID-19.

By Laura Hayes AnA CristinA PlAzA and her colleagues at Ayuda have been making runs to the Capital Area Food Bank and dropping groceries off at clients’ houses, along with essentials like diapers. Food runs are outside the organization’s usual scope of work. So is writing rent checks. Ayuda typically provides translation help and legal assistance to immigrants and social services for immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or human trafficking.

Seventy-five percent of the 120 families

Ayuda supports include at least one restaurant industry worker, according to Plaza, a caseworker and Ayuda’s manager of emergency assistance programs. Many have been laid off and told to apply for unemployment.

But doing so requires a Social Security number, which Plaza says 99 percent of her clients don’t have because they’re undocumented.

“One client said, ‘Ana I have to pay my rent no later than April 5. How am I going to do that with a week of no payment already?’” she recalls. “Next week we’ll see the desperation from people ... If they buy food, they can’t pay rent. If they pay rent, they can’t buy food. It’s

14 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

a complicated situation.”

Anyone who has enjoyed a meal at a D.C. restaurant has immigrants to thank. They grow the ingredients, prepare them for service, cook food, serve it, wash dishes, and clean restaurants after they close for the night.

Some eventually move into managerial positions or open restaurants of their own.

According to 2015 Census Bureau numbers, U.S. restaurants employ nearly 2.3 million foreign-born workers. That number has likely climbed over the past five years as cities experiencing restaurant booms confronted staffing shortages.

Those who are undocumented or in the U.S. on work visas don’t have the same social safety net as citizens or green card holders, even though they pay taxes using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers. According to 2018 data from the New American Economy, a research and advocacy organization focused on immigration issues, immigrants pay $458.7 billion in taxes annually, with $31.9 billion of that coming from those who are undocumented.

As restaurants and bars lay off staff in droves, newly unemployed workers are turning to community organizations, lawyers, and schools for aid and advice. Everyone has had to pivot during this public health crisis. Advocates and attorneys are helping these individuals navigate myriad risky scenarios.

Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School CEO Allison Kokkoros says they too have been getting calls about food, childcare, transportation, and employment. Carlos Rosario has a Culinary Arts Academy and offers English as a Second Language instruction.

Many of the ESL students, who come from 80 different countries, work in local restaurants.

Student services teams have been putting bags of food together to sustain some of their most vulnerable immigrant families. They have also been counseling students and helping them cope with mounting anxiety. For the city’s diverse population of immigrants, language barriers make the situation even more fraught.

“Many of our students have family responsibilities here that are pretty significant and are also doing their best to support people back home who are living in war torn countries,” Kokkoros says.

City Paper interviewed five immigrant restaurant workers in 2018 who support their families from afar in addition to paying rent here. Four were enrolled at Carlos Rosario and also worked as line or prep cooks. According to 2020 data from the job search site Indeed, line cooks in the District earn $16.22 an hour on average.

There are ways neighbors can help, Kokkoros says. “Decide to keep using servic-

es that you used before—don’t cancel the cleaning or the landscaping. Dial it up if you have the means to do it. Do carry-out and delivery from restaurants because if you do it means they’re able to give more hours to employees who desperately need those hours right now.”

Central American Resource Center Executive Director Abel Nuñez reports that the immigrants his organization supports want to know if they’ll be receiving the individual, one-time $1,200 checks that are a part of the stimulus bill the Senate voted on Wednesday afternoon. “What I keep telling them is we don’t know how they’re going to be deployed,” he says. “Methods of deploying resources will have to be pretty official.”

Since Nuñez says undocumented workers are generally barred from applying for unemployment, he worries there’s “nothing out there for them except for straight charity from churches and food banks and individuals.”

When you apply for unemployment under normal circumstances, you have to prove you are ready and able to work and that you are currently searching for work. Since undocumented immigrants don’t have the paperwork that technically makes them “able to work,” they don’t apply.

The city removed both of those provisions to accommodate more people who were laid off due to COVID-19. The Department of Employment Services did not respond to City Paper’s request for comment about whether these changes make it possible for undocumented immigrants to apply safely. Even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they would only focus on criminals during the COVID-19 outbreak, any brush with the government is a threat.

“Municipalities aren’t taking them into account,” Nuñez says. “They say we’re a sanctuary city, yet at the height of this crisis they’re forgotten even though they’re important to a lot of sectors.” He’s particularly worried about street food vendors. “The woman on the corner selling you pupusas in the informal economy, there’s no mechanism to get any money or resources.”

Even those dedicated to getting immigrants paid feel like their hands are tied.

“Before restaurants shut down, we were getting calls,” Justin Zelikovitz, the managing partner of DCWageLaw, a firm focused on supporting victims of wage theft, says. “There’s really not much they can do.

If they’re undocumented they’re not entiteld to unemployment. They’re not entitled to public assistance in the vast majority of cases. There’s not much counsel we can provide.”

At-Large D.C. Councilmember Elissa Silverman, who chairs the Committee on Labor and Workforce Development, is concerned with how best to support out-of-work undocumented immigrants. While the “feds set the rules” when it comes to who is eligible for major benefit programs, Silverman says she’s looking into how the local government can come to the rescue by setting

up a fund for those who don’t qualify for unemployment.

The emergency legislation the Council passed on March 17 left the door open. “The mayor has authorization to spend local funds for those who might not be able to apply for unemployment,” Silverman says. There’s precedent. The Council passed the “Supporting Essential Workers Unemployment Insurance Emergency Amendment Act of 2019” in February of last year and it is currently under congressional review. It enables previously ineligible furloughed federal workers to apply for unemployment benefits during government shutdowns.

“Those workers will pay the fund back when they receive their back pay,” Silverman explains. “That’s what makes this situation different. Workers unable to collect unemployment now will not get back pay and the District won’t recoup those funds. But we need to keep these workers and their families stable.”

Silverman says she’s also considering ways to direct grants to legal aid and community organizations. “It’s really about trust,” she says.

“Those groups, especially community-based

“They say we’re a sanctuary city, yet at the height of this crisis they’re forgotten even though they’re important to a lot of sectors.” organizations, have the trust of our undocumented workers so they feel comfortable coming to get help.”

While undocumented workers are the worst off, even immigrants who had lawfully been working before getting laid off face a unique set of challenging decisions.

The COVID-19 public health crisis reached America at a time when anti-immigrant action is on the rise. The recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Trump administration’s controversial new rule on public charge took effect on Feb. 24.

A public charge is someone who has accepted or is likely to accept public benefits in the future. Since 1800, there have been rules in place to make sure immigrants entering the country will be self-sufficient, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If they’re not, they can be deemed a “public charge” and denied a visa or green card.

Historically, the government has only looked to see if an immigrant had received cash assistance or long-term institutionalized care. The new rule broadens what it considers public assistance to include Medicaid, SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Section 8 Housing Assistance. Some

people, like individuals who served in the U.S. military or who were classified as a refugee, asylee, or trafficking victim, are exempt from the public charge rule.

Unemployment is not currently flagged as a benefit that could make someone a public charge, but the decision of whether or not someone is classified as such is in the hands of Department of Homeland Security adjudicators or consular officers who have wide discretion to interpret the rule however they see fit.

Should President Trump win a second term, it’s possible unemployment could be added to the list of public assistance programs that are red flags.

Becki Young, a partner at Grossman Young & Hammond, LLC, has been practicing immigration law for more than two decades and focuses on the hospitality industry. She helps employers bring workers in from overseas and keep them here legally. Many of the workers are in the U.S. on O-1 or H-1B visas, which only authorize them to work for a single, specific employer. If that employer lays them off, what happens next?

“You’re immediately ‘out of status’ if you quit or lose your job,” she explains. “Out of status” is essentially like being undocumented.

While a 60-day grace period starts at the cessation of employment for some people, Young says lawyers are divided on whether applying for unemployment or other benefits would make someone’s situation worse if they apply for a new visa.

“Everybody who applies for a temporary visa has to answer a question about if they’ve ever collected public benefits,” Young says.

“My colleagues and I are still concerned that USCIS and the federal government have a huge amount of discretion.”

The dilemma everyone is facing, according to Young, is one of risk. “If you are eligible for unemployment but know it might pose some future risk, what do you do?” she asks.

Mark, one of Young’s clients who asked to be identified by his first name only, is struggling with the uncertainty. “We all lost our jobs,” he says. “When you’re a chef, you spend most of your time in the kitchen. It’s very weird. I feel like I’m in jail because I’m not in my environment.”

Both Mark and his wife are immigrants who work in restaurants. Mark quit when the public health crisis was ramping up because he says he couldn’t bear to be the one to lay off his employees. “When you are an executive chef, they’re kind of like your kids,” he says. His wife was laid off from her restaurant job.

He’s still waiting for his last paycheck and doesn’t plan to apply for unemployment. Mark moved to the U.S. from France in 2005 and two of his kids were born here.

He was about to have his green card interview when the USCIS offices closed because of COVID-19. Since his status is in limbo, he’s afraid to ask for help and fears becoming a public charge.

“There are a lot of immigrants like me who wonder, ‘Are we ever going to get help? Yes or no?’”

CP

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washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 15

21st Century Consort: H2O

CPARTS

How a concert film saved a postponed Hirshhorn performance. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

Virtual Realities

Ksenia Grishkova

Local arts organizations meet the demands of a housebound public with digital offerings.

March Touchstone Gallery exhibitions, which can now be seen online

By Jennifer Anne Mitchell The communiTy aT U Street NW’s Smith Center for Healing and the Arts is familiar with addressing disease and death: They support approximately 800 adults living with cancer and their caregivers with programs like artmaking groups and classes that offer comic relief through stand-up. In light of the novel coronavirus and ongoing crisis, the close-knit center closed its doors on Thursday, March 12, as a precautionary measure. Many of the people they serve are in the high-risk category— with compromised immune systems, they are more susceptible to illness.

Though Smith Center’s programs are geared toward a specific group, its philosophy offers insight for anyone confronted with

sickness and mortality, like our society is experiencing with the spread of this virus. Their services are rooted in the healing power of the arts.

“There is more to you than just what’s happened to you physically,” Smith Center’s executive director Lisa Simms Booth says, noting that they emphasize a holistic approach to wellbeing that includes mental, emotional, and spiritual health. “Because all of it as a whole together is going to help you walk through whatever you’re walking through and heal. And heal doesn’t have to necessarily mean you’re cured, but heal means you can walk through it with grace.”

To continue to serve their mission, Smith Center is bringing a portion of its programming to the digital space. Its plans are still

16 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

evolving, but the center says that digital opportunities like a virtual healing circle, in which participants connect to share their experiences, and an art class called Outside the Lines will be limited to its regular participants, but the intention is to open some of these to the public as social distancing continues.

“We really do want to be responsive in this unprecedented time where you’re being asked to disconnect when I think what most of us want most is community,” says Simms Booth.

A phenomenal number of local cultural organizations are also connecting with audiences digitally. The Kennedy Center is hosting an interactive video series called “Lunchtime Doodles” with their artist-in-residence Mo Willems. Politics and Prose is streaming author talks on Crowdcast. Washington

Studio School is encouraging its students to use the hashtag #WSSstayconnected to share their art on social media. Zenith Gallery is sending out daily e-blasts with art related to themes, current events, or “just to make you laugh.” The Library of Congress points to its digital resources, like an online library featuring more than one million prints and photographs. International Arts & Artists notes its online Hechinger Collection database, where visitors can look through some of the 400 artworks, and its contemporary space IA&A at Hillyer is hosting digital artist talks. Dumbarton Oaks highlights virtual tours of its gardens.

Transformer art space is hosting a series of artist-led projects on its digital platforms and urging those with the means to buy art from its online FlatFile store, which includes more than 200 2D artworks—priced at under $500—that were made by more than 40 local emerging artists. The National Museum of Women in the Arts lists digital resources, like its arts integration curriculum Arts, Books, and Creativity, and has made the winter/spring 2020 edition of its typically members-only magazine Women in the Arts available to the public online (this current issue features a write-up about DMV Color, a recent exhibition at the museum that showcased books created by women of color who have all lived in D.C., Maryland, or Virginia).

DC Public Library started a virtual version of its DC Reads book club last week. They are providing unlimited e-book copies of local author Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel With the Fire on High and temporary library cards that are available online. Virtual storytimes led by a DCPL librarian will take place on Facebook Live with literary discussions on Twitter.

The Smithsonian is directing the public to its rich repository of online content with options such as distance learning tools, their podcast Sidedoor, and more than 2.8 million digital assets that were recently released to the public domain. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery spotlights its online exhibition of The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, and voting polls are open for the Outwin People’s Choice Award. Plus they’ll have virtual ASL tours of gallery installations on Facebook.

You can even test out flying with the Smithsonian through the National Air and Space Museum’s virtual flight simulator, part of the muse-

um’s K–12 learning resources to engage youth while they are at home.

And those are just some examples. Amid all the chaos of a global health crisis that has relegated many to staying home, these cultural institutions are seeing increased digital visitors.

The National Gallery of Art has mobilized a #MuseumFromHome initiative. The web team acted fast to redesign the website so it is geared toward people and families who are staying at home. After they announced they were closing, the museum staff reports they had a 200 percent increase in website traffic compared to the previous 10 days—about 40 percent of it was from Italy and Spain— and thousands of new social media followers.

They’ve also seen more than a 400 percent increase in the number of 45 to 54-year-old virtual visitors and more than a 370 percent increase of 55 to 64-years-olds.

The NGA’s digital offerings include using the hashtag #MuseumMomentofZen to showcase their art on social media and virtual tours of the museum with commentary from curators. Since launching these tours, the museum says its tweets have seen 2,150,357 impressions; Instagram has seen 1,825,425.

The D.C.-based organization Americans for the Arts advocates for arts across the country and is providing resources for the national arts community to come together and navigate this new reality. They are hosting virtual briefings in lieu of their 2020 National Arts Action Summit, which draws participants from around the country, and published a COVID-19 resource page on March 13. As of Tuesday morning, the organization reported that the page had nearly 15,000 unique views. One of the resources is an impact survey to assess how this situation is affecting arts and culture. Americans for the Arts’ senior director of local arts advancement Ruby Lopez Harper explains that the data gathered from this assessment will help artists and arts organizations apply for assistance.

“Nobody really knows the scope of what we’re going to be recovering from,” Harper says. “So getting that early data is really important just in giving us a snapshot of what’s happening.”

Within D.C., 33 organizations responded to the survey. Some reported financial data, adding up to an estimated total loss of $282,500 (an average of $8,561 per organization).

Disaster response is part of what Americans for the Arts does. For example, after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, they established a hotline for the arts community and collected more than a thousand art projects and creative tributes.

“The thing that has set this apart from all of our other disaster experiences is that it isn’t isolated,” says Harper. “Right now it’s just about helping people get through.”

Some arts organizations are already making drastic changes. The D.C. Environmental Film Festival moved its annual, multi-venue festival—now in its 13th year—to a virtual festival that began last Tuesday and will run to the end of March. It features more than 60 films from this year’s official selections.

“There is a lot of hope present in the films

that we’re screening,” DCEFF’s director of online communications Jacob Crawford says, putting the festival in context with the current state of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. “[It’s] a lot of people working together to find solutions to complicated problems, and I think that’s something that could help people be hopeful.”

When the virtual fest launched, DCEFF’s website experienced the largest single-day traffic in its history. By mid-afternoon, that morning’s announcement about its start had been shared on Facebook nearly 200 times. By evening, the webpage hosting the virtual festival had 5,630 visitors, most of which came from North America, along with some from every continent aside from Antarctica. By this Monday afternoon, the online environmental film fest had more than 58,000 visitors, with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday drawing more than 10,000 each.

About 80 percent of the films are free to view, Crawford explains, with others on platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu requiring that audience members have an account or pay for streaming.

DCEFF has seen a rise of a few hundred followers across their social media accounts since they announced the cancelation of the festival and the move to digital.

The National Academy of Sciences, a venue partner for DCEFF, is on board with creating a virtual experience—it hosted an online discussion on March 22 following a digital watch party featuring the film The Plastic Problem: PBS Newshour Presents, which they had planned to screen at their site.

DCEFF is planning to have an abridged version of its typical festival in the fall.

Touchstone Gallery also made an aboutface. The staff usually conducts business downtown on New York Ave. NW, but has managed to sell nine pieces of art since closing their doors on March 12 in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. They experienced a rise in website traffic after announcing the closure, and the number of views on their Instagram stories doubled.

“I find that in times of stress and distress, and when you feel like you need to calm down and feel better, art spaces are the ones you go to,” says Touchstone’s director Ksenia Grishkova.

Within a day and a half of closing, she and her staff took pictures of their current exhibitions and put them online. Grishkova recounts the passersby who visited during those final days of operations. “We kept the door open and people would come in one after another,” she says. “All these people kept walking in. And you could tell there was such a relief that we were still open.”

Grishkova is trying to recreate that experience of visiting the gallery digitally. A videographer came by to shoot video of the space. But Grishkova notes that the videos are still shots for viewers to see at home, not interactive virtual reality tours where visitors can move through the space. “We’re really not prepared for a complete virtual reality here,” she says.

“Hopefully we’ll get back to normal.”

CP

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washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 17

LIZ AT LARGE

BOOKSSPEED READS TRAILBLAZERS A Phoenix First Must Burn Edited by Patrice Caldwell Viking, 343 pages

“Normal” by Liz Montague Liz Montague is a D.C.-based cartoonist and cat mom. You can find her work in The New Yorker and City Paper.

18 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Fantasy, sci-Fi, and horror have much in common. This is lucidly obvious in a new young adult story collection, A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope. These tales from different authors, edited by Patrice Caldwell, all feature black heroines. And there is lots of magic.

Two local authors, Elizabeth Acevedo and Justina Ireland, focus on that magic. In Acevedo’s “Gilded,” a girl enslaved on a Spanish plantation meets a recently captured boy, different from those born into slavery: They “came here with their feral hearts and unbent spines.” The heroine has negotiated her manumission with her captor; she also has supernatural powers concealed from her white oppressors; she was “born with the ability to bend copper and bronze to my will.” She also communes with metal a n d k n o ws t h at the machete in the young man’s hand “murmurs blood, blood, blood.” “Gilded” lyrically conveys the tenor of enslaved life with its reliance on indigenous medicine. Despite much magic, the realism remains believable.

Ireland’s story, “Melie,” recounts a sorcerer’s apprentice’s attempt to secure a vial of mermaids’ tears for a spell. The treacherous high-sorcerer, Hansen, is white, while most of the inhabitants of Melie’s city are black. “It wasn’t until Hansen came to our land, that people began to speak of some folks being better than others.” Hansen disdains Melie and assigns her drudgery rather than teaching her spells. She longs to perform magic to “prove that I should be taken seriously,” as a sorceress and more than “a mere hedgewitch.” So she searches for a dragon, defends her city from an invasion, and unleashes a herd of homicidal unicorns. “Melie,” unlike “Gilded,” leaves realism to the realists. It is pure fantasy.

One sci-fi story’s narrator, in “When Life Hands You a Lemon Fruit Bomb,” undertakes a military mission through a wormhole to bring humanity’s fight against an alien race

to its home planet: “What I do out here in the boonies of space means the difference of life and death for my uncle.” As in most of these stories, family figures prominently. In “The Witch’s Skin,” a fantasy about islanders in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world, family drives the young, pregnant heroine to revenge on a murderous witch. Similarly, the fantasy, “The Rules of the Land,” presents a girl whose father is a fisherman and whose mother is the daughter of a sea goddess. The girl is haunted by family memories. “The Curse of Love,” a magic story about a family of beautiful, eternally young women, centers on a niece and her aunt.

One story, about an antisocial teenager who meets a vampire, “Letting the Right One In,” suggests the intersection of race and family psychology.

“My therapist, Dr. Freeman, once told me that some people are just sadder than others…that it’s okay…but try telling that to middleclass Black parents, who were one generation away from segregation. One heartbeat, one connected thread, to sharecropping and slavery.” Other stories approach this topic much more obliquely.

“Kiss the Sun,” also about islanders, recounts how an island’s witches shed their human skin nightly to become fireballs that roam the town, devouring souls. These antiheroes allow a new witch, whom they at first consider too light-skinned, to join them, and though they prey on locals, they are admired.

“To the island people we are the sounds of the warrior ancestors who succumbed to the great big revolution that drove out the colonizers centuries ago.” In another touch of magic, these witches love the sun and race to kiss it at every dawn, an activity that darkens their skin.

In this, as in many of the other magic stories, traditional horror monsters—vampires, witches—are heroines. The stories flip the horror story structure on its head, by making the monsters heroic outsiders who find hopeful ways to deal with their social exclusion. Here, vampires and witches are the characters with whom the reader is meant to identify, for whom the reader is meant to cheer, and who, in the end, are the saviors and avengers of their communities, lives, and families.

—Eve Ottenberg

PUZZLE

ARTS CLUB THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

AHH

By Brendan Emmett Quigley

1 The top (appropriately) 5 Who said "Hell is full of musical amateurs" 9 Spam's content 13 Steal 14 Two-time Grammywinning gospel singer ___ Kelly 15 V's meaning 16 Too big for a small cast 17 Scissors beater 18 Gets paid 19 Spot to put your sword away?

22 Poem that says how awesome you are 24 It makes you you 25 Band from Kyoto 26 Quieted police officers?

32 Suit maker Dupetit 33 Holly plant 34 "I can't believe you typed that!!!"

36 Dominate 37 The Hate U Give author ___ Thomas 39 French pen pal 40 Eisenhower's bailiwick: Abbr.

41 "Have you considered?," initially 42 Team building?

43 Representative who goes, "wha?"?

47 Portal owned

by Verizon 48 Org. collecting money for schools 49 Many moons: Abbr.

50 Slobbish Ledger?

56 Green thumb's brand 57 ___ HalfBlood (setting for the Percy Jackson series) 58 Medium essay, e.g.

61 Prophet of the Old Testament 62 Test that will have a little back and forth 63 Boxer's meal 64 Elasticity-ofdemand subj.

65 Abstainer's intake 66 Time to start acting

1 Fluid in a yard 2 Steal

3 Six-time baseball All-Star whose uncles also played 4 Decorate, as glass 5 Leave someone hanging 6 Holler to from afar 7 Decorative entrance 8 Page in an edit war 9 Lungful by the shore 10 QB Derek 11 It can make your cheeks redder 12 Flat land 15 Where violin strings are attached 20 Garden for two

21 Like some credit cards 22 Airport 17 miles from the Loop 23 Minnesota city on Lake Superior 27 Waste no time 28 Upper limit for some tenors 29 Biblical judge 30 Instant classic joke 31 Key with one sharp 35 What a derailleur interacts with 37 Ever 38 Cartoon munching sound 39 Astral altar 41 "Pick me!

Pick me!"

42 "Stop what you're doing" letters 44 TV actor Fillion 45 The Missing Link, e.g.

46 Swingline wire 50 Landing page 51 NCIS: LA star ___ Christian Olsen 52 Old Bee Gees label 53 Legendary sort 54 Starch brand 55 Tablet that can use a Magic Mouse 59 Aromatherapy room 60 Child's thing

LAST WEEK: I NEED MY SPACE 5 2 * ( 7

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City PaPer, like so much of the world, is practicing social distancing to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re able, we hope you are too. But we want to make social distancing a little more social, a little less distant, and a lot more enjoyable and thoughtprovoking. So, welcome to the City Paper (virtual) Arts Club. Over the coming weeks, arts editor Kayla Randall and multimedia editor Will Warren will be watching movies and TV and reading books and discussing them (from home over $ the & phone) 0 (on our pod6 cast, with brief highlights collected in print. / us2in reading 2 7 and watch7 We want you to join ing and participate in the conversation using ( 3 , &on Twitter, 5 the hashtag #CityPaperArtsClub Facebook, and Instagram,6 so we+ can ( incorpo$ rate your thoughts into the discussion. This week, we watched 2 the '2004 ( abrupt'climate 1 change-based disaster film The Day After To+ be8reading 6 The + Plateau ( 'by morrow. Next, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll Maggie Paxson.

able that people were talking about climate change kind of in the way we still are now, and this is 16 years ago. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the big difference between why people are taking the pandemic so seriously, and rightfully so, but not necessarily climate change. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the immediacy itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happening in. In the movie, climate change is happening with immense immediacy.

KR: Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been really interested in the last few years about scholars writing books about the death of expertiseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that people have been throwing expertise out the window and thinking that because they have a phone that makes them an expert as well. Yes, we can all Google, but that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that we are climatologists, that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that we are These6 are people +epidemiologists. $ : & $who0have dedicated their entire lives to documenting 2whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 5 happening , 3 (planet $ and & listening ( on our to them is so important â&#x20AC;Ś Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting how 2rapidly & things . can ( $ when 5 they 1 need 6 to. change Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re getting relief in a matter of days, 7 + , 1 * $ 5 ( $or at least the plans for relief, we will wait and see $if that relief can 2 actually % , come and be effective for a large number of Americans. But 7when + things ( ) 2 5 we & get(told â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oh, are â&#x20AC;&#x153;normalâ&#x20AC;? we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the funds, and we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do this, $ / $ , 1 , / ( ; 2 0 * and we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do that.â&#x20AC;? We have this huge inThese arts club chat , (really 5 highlights 8 / have ( been edited $ 1equality. * ,I feel(like after$this,0you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t and condensed for clarity. For the full chat, sub- make the excuse that we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do something. ( City 7 Podcast.

2 2 7 2It seems + like we can $do5 ( 1 $if we anything, really, scribe to Washington need to do it. + 8 1 + $ 0 % $ 6 6 $ ' 2 5 Kayla Randall: So, The Day After Tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; WW: That my big this experiI guess you would call it sci-fi? $ 2 / 3 is 7 $ takeaway < of5 6 ence. We, not just politicians, have changed + (is both $ sci 7 and + fi, /for , our.lives(pretty $ dramatically, 3 , *pretty quickly.

Will Warren: There sure â&#x20AC;Ś All kinds of survival and disaster mov- And it seems like we could do that for other 6 is7what 2 So,5what7was+your2experi- &things, $ namely 0 3climate 3 2 which change, ie motifs play out. movie ence watching this 0 while , weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re & going $ +through 2the5 $is about / â&#x20AC;Ś Whether $ /or not3weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll 2have something thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s both completely similar and the energy or desire to do that is another questhat immecompletely dissimilar?

1tion.

2And1I think ( it comes 'down ' to$ < ( & 2 1 diacy thing.

That idea of the future, and what the new KR: Kind of like you said, it is removed from whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happening now, but also very close. normal is, is the other big thing that jumped Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a scene in the movie where the clima- out at me from the film. But I find it really intertologistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son is in the public library with a crowd esting thinking about what the future for this of people and heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got this scientific information group of people is going to be like, in the same from his dad that nobody should go outside, ev- way that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m thinking about what May or April erybody needs to stay inside, just shelter where or whenever weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re returning to a state of northey are and hopefully wait the blizzard out. But mal from this pandemic will be like. people donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t listen. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s screaming â&#x20AC;&#x153;youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not prepared for whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happening outside.â&#x20AC;? And KR: It just makes you realize how trivial evpeople go outside anyway. That definitely was erything is. When everything is good, we have triggering [laughs]. Basically, people are giv- the luxury of thinking about the most trivial, en the information that staying inside will help meaningless things. Like I worry about â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oh, save their lives, and then some people blatant- I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a designated spot to put my mail ly disregard that because they think they know when I come into my apartment.â&#x20AC;? And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like, who cares? At a time like this, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m just really how best to survive. It really hit me. grateful for loved ones, having the ability to WW: And also, just like, listen to scien- call my mom and dad, just hear their voices tists â&#x20AC;Ś This is something I was really struck and have them tell me they love me, and tell by watching this movie. One of our read- them I love them. In the meantime being able ers, Eric, was saying you know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s remark- to do that is a real gift, and a luxury.

CP

AHH ANSWER

washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 19

CITYLIST CITY LIGHTS

CITY LIGHTS

BLOOM CAM

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7

It’s hard to picture spring in Washington without thinking of the city’s (now in-)famous collection of pink and white cherry trees. Images from peak bloom—the period when 70% of the blossoms are open—are quintessential postcard material, and over 1.5 million people trek to the Tidal Basin to see these trees each year. Unfortunately for tourists and locals alike, the peak bloom window, which is expected to end March 24, has been hit hard by coronavirus concerns. City officials and the National Park Service are urging people to practice social distancing and stay away from the basin; WMATA shut down the two metro stations closest to the trees to emphasize that point. Thankfully, the Trust for the National Mall, along with the National Park Service and the National Cherry Blossom Festival, is here to save the day with Bloom Cam. You can tune into a live, 24/7 feed of the trees to enjoy what the Trust sees as Washington’s symbol of “hope, renewal, and friendship.”

And in case you’re worried about missing out on any specific one of the 3,700 trees along the Tidal Basin, the feed changes its view about every five minutes. Now you have no excuse not to stay inside. The live footage is available at nationalmall.org/bloomcam. Free.

—Sarah Smith

CITY LIGHTS

EMERGENCY & I

Ah, the late 1990s: the last time, geopolitically speaking, that most of us truly felt safe. Back in 1999, you could still bring jugs of iced tea through airport security, and the Y2K bug was the only epidemic that anyone had reason to fear. The world is, um, different now, but we can still hearken back to those happier days by revisiting the best album by one of the best indie-rock bands to ever come out of Washington, D.C. Released in October 1999, Emergency & I was The Dismemberment Plan’s third album, and the first in which the D.C.-based quartet honed their spastic, exhilarating sound into a cohesive whole. In songs such as “A Life of Possibilities,” “You Are Invited,” and “The City,” lead singer Travis Morrison spins oblique tales of post-collegiate ennui, loneliness, and displacement, while bassist Eric Axelson, guitarist Jason Caddell, and drummer Joe Easley sound simultaneously tighter and more volatile than ever. The album is a pristine sonic artifact of an era when the biggest question for many in their mid-20s was “what am I going to do with my life?” rather than “will I die if I touch this doorknob?” There is no better time than now to listen to it again. Stream it, buy it online, or dust off your CD player and really commit to the whole late-’90s nostalgia thing. The album is streaming on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, and YouTube Music or available to purchase in the iTunes Store. Free–$9.99. —Justin Peters

20 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

In one of the only color-sequences of a black-andwhite film, a tarot card reader draws the hanged man. It’s an ill omen, the last thing Cléo Victoire needs. The rest of Cléo from 5 to 7 consists of Cléo’s odyssey through Paris as she grapples with a sudden, unwelcome awareness of her own mortality. Days before, she lived a charmed life as a semisuccessful musician with a well-off boyfriend and an apartment full of frolicking kittens. Now, she’s awaiting the results of a biopsy that will tell her whether or not she has terminal cancer. Her senses are sharpened by anxiety, and through her point of view, we encounter a Paris that is less a character than an ecosystem, teeming with life and activity, a cruel contrast with the spectre looming over Cléo. Director Agnes Varda originally trained as a photographer and it shows. Every shot in Cléo from 5 to 7 is exquisite (see especially: the tracking POV shot of Cléo walking through an art class as the students sculpt a nude model). Varda is considered a peer to French New Wave icons Jean-Luc Godard (who cameos in Cléo as a silent film star) and François Truffaut. The film was to screen at AFI Silver from March 20 to 26, but thanks to the pandemic, the theater’s temporarily closed. However, it’s available on Kanopy, which is a relief, since discussions of auteur theory disproportionately focus on the same dozen white males (your Hitchcocks, Hawks, and, later, Scorseses and Tarantinos), and Varda is a welcome exception, with a rich portfolio that ranges from La Pointe Courte (1955) to Faces Places (2017). The film is available to stream on Kanopy. Free.

—Will Lennon

CITY LIGHTS

LUNCH DOODLES WITH MO WILLEMS

Mo Willems, author of the children’s classics Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus, the Knuffle Bunny series, and the Elephant and Piggie series, is swooping in to save weary parents from their new homeschooling responsibilities. Willems, whose Pigeon was the star of a wildly popular Kennedy Center musical adaptation this winter, is the Center’s education artist-in-residence (from the inside of his pleasingly primary-colored Massachusetts studio). He’s been keeping himself—and the nation’s kids— busy with a daily 1 p.m. “lunch doodle” via the Kennedy Center’s YouTube channel. Last week, Willems announced the series by talking directly to his audience. “I know a lot of you guys are not in school. You’re at home right now, because of all the things that are going on,” he said.

“Well, guess what? I’m at home too.” Willems is showing children and adults alike the inside of his notebooks, answering fan mail (unfortunately for one young fan, he does not like cake), and leading fans in drawing colorful creatures with a lot of legs, big bad wolves, and, of course, misbehaving pigeons. Write in to Willems at lunchdoodles@kennedy-center.org to ask questions about what else urban birds shouldn’t be allowed to do. The videos are available daily on the Kennedy Center’s website and YouTube channel. Free.

—Emma Sarappo

CITY LIGHTS

CITY LIGHTS

SOUL51

REQUEST YOUR FBI FILE

D.C. soul musician Marvin Gaye achieved fame after he moved to Detroit, where he joined Motown, but many others stayed here or moved elsewhere and received little acclaim. From 2012 to 2014, photographer and soul music fan Eli Kaplan, who moved to the District in 2009, began to give some old-school D.C. soul artists attention via his new photos of the performers and biographies that he placed on his Soul51 website (tagline: “Taxation without representation. At least we got soul”). After getting leads from Kevin Coombe’s then-website DC Soul Recordings (now on Instagram) and the Facebook group DC Funk and Harmony, Kaplan began seeking out the likes of the El Corols Band and Show, Al Johnson, and The Jewels. Kaplan says some of the individuals had not appeared together for a photo in 40 years, and now some have since passed away. The photos, at locations including the Panorama Room in Southeast D.C., are all expertly shot. From the site, you can click on links and hear the acts as well as learn how the Jewels toured with James Brown, and what some D.C. soul artists did after the genre receded from the spotlight.

Learn how Herb Feemster of Peaches & Herb had a top 40 disco hit, “Shake Your Groove Thing,” and later became a security officer. All the posts are available at soul51.com. Free. —Steve Kiviat

CITY LIGHTS

BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY’S WOMEN IN NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTION

Need a dose of nature, but unable to visit your local park (or keep your houseplants alive)? The Biodiversity Heritage Library is here to help. Created with support from the Smithsonian Libraries in 2006, the Biodiversity Heritage Library strives to improve access to natural history literature.

The archive offers digital access to millions of pages of scientific literature—including a vast collection of gorgeous botanical illustrations. In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Biodiversity Heritage Library curated a Flickr collection titled “Women Illustrators In Natural History.” The images span more than 300 years of botanical illustrations, plus sketches of birds, insects, shells, and more. You can participate in the project by helping to tag the nearly 10,000 images with their scientific names. Or you can simply scroll through the images, as a temporary replacement for Instagram or Twitter. Once you’ve soaked up inspiration from colorful cacti, dandelions, and butterflies, you can test your own artistic skills. Break out your stash of markers, crayons, and colored pencils, then download one (or all!) of the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s free coloring books. (Google “Color Our Collections + BHL.”) The page links to four different printable coloring books, plus an additional Flickr collection chock full of black and white illustrations. Artists of all ages can simply print them out and color to their heart’s content. The illustrations are available at biodiversitylibrary.org and flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary. Free.

—Michelle Delgado

You knew it was a bad idea to order The Anarchist Cookbook and a copy of Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary off Amazon Prime, but you did it anyway, and now you’ve got a file. (This is what you get for putting ’shrooms in your coffee and getting all class-conscious.) Ah well—you’re not alone. Tens of millions of Americans have FBI files, and every one is entitled to request their own. You might as well take a peek while the virus rages outside. The good news is that it’s not terribly difficult to do.

Under the Privacy Act, you can get your file by filling out a certification of identity form and sending it via email to foiparequest@ic.fbi.gov with the subject line “Privacy Act Request.” You have to include the amount you’re willing to pay for your file, but unless you’re a cartel enforcer or Paul Manafort, your file will almost certainly be short enough to process free of charge. You can also request FBI files for dead people (assuming you can prove they’re dead) and browse declassified files on the likes of Carlo Gambino, Charles Manson, Fred Trump, Malcolm X, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Burt Reynolds via the FBI Vault. Files are available to request by emailing foiparequest@ic.fbi.gov; declassified files are available at vault.fbi.gov. Fees determined by file size.

—Will Lennon

CITY LIGHTS

OUT OF THE PARK BASEBALL 21

The start of the MLB season has officially been delayed, and a 162-game schedule seems unlikely. If you’re depressed about the postponement of the Washington Nationals’ title defense, look no further than buying Out of the Park Baseball 21. The Out of the Park Baseball series is the best baseball management simulator ever made. Players can roleplay as Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo or head coach Dave Martinez as they take control of every aspect of baseball management, from in-game tactics to the trade deadline and the MLB Draft. OOTP 21 has a full simulation of baseball’s complex financial system and uses the latest player ratings from Baseball Prospectus. Added features for this installment include a 3D Ballpark Designer, a simulated All-Star Weekend, and a new scouting system. All the latest rule changes are also in the game, but they can be modified at the player’s request, of course. The detail is unmatched by any baseball game—there are full rosters and player ratings from every level of American baseball and several international leagues. For those looking to relive the Nats’ win in 2019 or the Washington Senators’ win in 1924, the game has fully accurate historical seasons going back to 1871. OOTP 21 is also suitable for casual play through Perfect Team (similar to the card-based “Ultimate Team” mode in FIFA and Madden), but we recommend going for the most in-depth experience imaginable. With so much real baseball going away, filling it with an endless array of virtual baseball is probably the next best option. OOTP 21 is available for purchase on Steam. Last year’s game, OOTP 20, is also selling on Steam. $19.99–$35.99.

—Tristan Jung

CITY LIGHTS CITY LIGHTS

ONLINE CLASSES FROM LOCAL COLLEGES

Try this for a silver lining: For the next couple of weeks, you don’t have to lose hours of productivity sitting on the train, stuck in traffic, or listening to your co-worker chattering on about their Riverdale fanfic. Now you can put that time to good use and stave off cabin fever with an online class that will spruce up your resume and enrich your mind. Several D.C.-area universities, including Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, and the George Washington University offer fully online classes that you can enroll in for free. Today, you can start classes on marketing management, cybersecurity, and genes and the human condition at UMD, global business in practice, how the U.S. government works, biomedical data, and bioethics at Georgetown, health care quality and safety at GWU, or data science, health through primary care, and disease clusters at Johns Hopkins. You can also browse hundreds of free classes from Ivy League universities through Class Central. You may not live on the Hill, but channel your inner lanyardwearer, especially since we won’t have many interns swarming the city this summer. The courses are available at edx.org/school/georgetownx, coursera.org/jhu, tltc.umd.edu/umd-moocs, and online.gwu.edu/moocs. Free.

—Will Lennon

9:30 CLUB’S QUARANTINE OFFERINGS

Chances are that your landlord—and your neighbors—won’t appreciate you turning your apartment into the next big music venue in Washington. And if you’re trying to fill the void that canceled or postponed concerts have left in your calendar, ordering professional sound equipment and belting out your favorite lyrics karaoke-style also might upset those around you. So what is a Washington music lover supposed to do? Well, until 9:30 Club can once again open its doors to artists and fans, the beloved music venue has quarantine content. You can start by testing your city music knowledge with a crossword puzzle. Solve clues like “Shaw-born ‘Let’s Get It On’ crooner (10 letters)” and “D.C. punk band infamously banned in D.C. (9 letters).” It’s a safe bet that this trivia is more interesting than the course material many local college students will be reviewing on Zoom video conferences. But what do you do if you still want to hear the music that makes the 9:30 Club a place that concert-goers flock to every week? The venue’s staff has released their personal 30-song playlist, “9 x 30: Staff Spins.” Enjoy Post Malone’s “Circles,” Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” Porridge Radio’s “Lilac,” or Grimes’ “Delete Forever” off of the recently released Miss Anthropocene. While it won’t quite make up for missing out on the bright lights, packed crowds, and live performances of the club, some string lighting and a good portable speaker can help you connect to the venue from the comfort (and safety) of your residence. The music crossword puzzle can be found at amuselabs.com and “9 x 30: Staff Spins” is on 9:30 Club’s Spotify page. Free.

—Sarah Smith washingtoncitypaper.com march 27, 2020 21

SAVAGELOVE My question is on managing “gray area” intimacies during the pandemic. I have a lover/friend that I’ve been hanging out with—fucking, drinking tea, going on hikes, eating ice cream, watching movies, and other activities—for about nine months. He’s 36 and was married for 10 years and due to that experience he’s been a bit emotionally “boundaried,” but he’s still really sweet and a good communicator. I’m in grad school doing a double masters, so the small amount of time we’ve been spending together has worked well for me. Here’s the issue: He’s also an ER doctor. Do I keep seeing him during this pandemic? I just moved to the city where we both live for my grad program and he’s my main source for connection, comfort, and support here. Every time I see him we both feel tremendously less stressed and our connection feels emotionally healthy. I just know he is bound to be at a huge risk for exposure and since he’s not a committed partner and we don’t live together, I don’t know if he falls within or outside of my physical distancing boundary. It seems like the best thing to do from a logistical perspective is hole up with my cat and not see another soul in person until a vaccine is invented or something, but I don’t know when that will happen.

—Physical Distancing Do’s And Don’ts

me o s d Nee dvice? love a Curious about kinks?

e h t t i s i V er p a P y Cit or more te f ve. i s b e w age Lo Sav washingtoncitypaper.com/ columns

“This is really a matter of a personal risk/benefit calculation,” said Dr. Daniel Summers, a pediatrician who lives and works near Boston.

“What PDDAD is willing to accept as a risk may be different from what someone else would.”

And there’s definitely a health benefit to getting together—we are social animals and isolation is bad for us—but your lover is at high risk of infection. And when front-line health care providers get infected, they tend to get sicker than the average person who gets infected, according to CNN, which is something else you need to factor into your risk/benefit calculation. Additionally, does your boyfriend’s workplace—I’m going to call him your boyfriend for clarity’s sake—have the protective gear he needs to minimize his risk of exposure?

“We’re all doing our best to take as many preventive steps to lower our risk of being exposed,” said Dr. Summers, “but there’s still a maddeningly unacceptable shortage of personal protective equipment like masks, gowns and gloves nationwide. I hope he has sufficient access to these things. But is there a risk he could get exposed to the virus at work? Definitely.”

Dr. Summers lives with his husband and four children, and in addition to the precautions he takes at work—where he may be seeing patients with coronavirus (he doesn’t know for sure because tests still aren’t available)—Dr. Summers strips down to his underwear on his front porch of his home when he gets home from work. His clothes go straight into the washing machine, he goes straight into the shower.

“I’m still afraid of bringing it home,” said

22 march 27, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com

Dr. Summers. “But with four kids home from school, my husband’s sanity depends on my being present as much as I can. So for me, staying away isn’t an option. That’s not the case for PDDAD. She has to decide whether the undefinable risk of exposure isn’t worth it. Or, alternatively, she can decide the connection she has with him is important enough to her own well being that the risk is worth it. But only she can make that decision for herself.”

If you decide the risk of infection is too great—or if your boyfriend decides the risk of infecting you is too great—you can still be there for each other. You can Skype and Zoom, you can text and sext, you can leave groceries on his porch and wave to him from the sidewalk. But if you decide to keep connecting with each other in person, PDDAD, you should minimize the amount of time you spend moving through the city to get to each other’s places. And that means—emotional boundaries be damned—picking one of your apartments to hole up in together for the duration.

You can follow Dr. Summers on Twitter @ WFKARS and you can read him at Slate’s Outward.

—Dan Savage I’m pro sex workers, and believe adults should do whatever they consent to, but I’m curious if that applies during the current pandemic. I know of a sex worker who’s still offering himself to clients, who are apparently still hiring him. (He regularly posts about his exploits on certain social media sites.) Should the authorities be made aware of this?

—Just Concerned If the authorities want to start rounding up reckless idiots who are endangering others, JC, the beaches of Florida might be a good place to start.

Or the Oval Office. And if your first impulse is to involve the authorities then you aren’t “pro sex workers,” JC, because the authorities—particularly the police—are a danger to sex workers. Instead of calling the cops, reach out to this guy on those social media sites and encourage him to see his clients virtually, i.e. instead of face-toface (or face-to-whatever) meetings, he should go full camwhore for the time being. So if you want to want to help, JC, and not just police or shame, you should hire this guy to do an online session. (And everyone should bear in mind that sex workers are suffering right now too because most are being responsible and not seeing clients. Their incomes have plummeted to zero and they aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits.)

—DS

I’m a queer poly woman and I have a two-part question about sexting/Skype sex. I didn’t used to think twice about shooting off a nude or a nasty text in my 20s and I’ve never had qualms about casual relations. But for me there has always needed to be a baseline of friendship. After

getting burned a bunch of times—especially by straight men (queers and other genders are generally way kinder)—I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. Fast forward a few years and after doing a lot of work I started feeling myself again.

I started talking with a man that I’d met through mutual friends and flirted with a little in the past. I was upfront with him and told him I would be down to get dirty again sometime but needed to build up some form of friendship first.

He enthusiastically agreed and started talking to me about this and that every other day or so. We were talking about meeting up in person when the coronavirus lockdown happened and now my libido has shot through the roof. We ended up exchanging photos and got off on FaceTime together. After that, crickets. I would send an innocuous question and get a two-word response. I feel really disrespected and used but at the same time I can see how he doesn’t owe me anything. I was in a similar situation like this before where a man told me that no matter what he wanted our friendship to be a priority and then ghosted me immediately after we slept together. My questions: What can I do in the future to avoid this sort of situation?

And, while we’re all in lockdown, do you have any advice on how to be hot over video when you’re generally a clumsy spaz? —Female Resents Insincere Efforts Necessitating Deceit Unfortunately, FRIEND, there’s no surefire way to prevent people from lying to you about being friends in order to get into your pants—virtually or eventually—or to prevent them from changing their minds about being friends once they’ve gotten into your pants. (The former is more likely, but the latter does happen.) Your only options are relying on your bullshit detectors to weed out people you think might be playing you and getting better at shrugging off, blocking, and forgetting the dishonest people who manage to get past your bullshit detectors.

As for tips about being hot on Zoom or FaceTime or Fox Nation or whatever, I’m afraid I can’t help you there, FRIEND, as I am the clumsiest spaz that ever spazzed. I hate having my photo taken and if a room is dark enough for me to feel comfortable getting naked in it, it’s usually too dark for someone else to see me— whether they’re in the same room with me or sitting in front of a computer on the other side of the world. But someone who’s more at ease in front of the camera (and with whom I’m currently quarantined) tells me that slightly dimmed lighting is better than harsh lighting, leaving something on is hotter than taking it all off, and, if you want to maintain your anonymity, keeping your face and any identifying tattoos out of the shot is a good idea.

—DS

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

Name of Decedent, Lorne Dale Maclver aka Dale Maclver.

SUPERIOR COURT Adult . . . . . . . . . . Name . . . . . and . . . Address . . . . . 42 OF THE DISTRICT of Attorney Robin C. Auto/Wheels/Boat . . . . . . . . . . . 42 OF COLUMBIA Alexander, 901 Sixth PROBATE DIVIBuy, Sell, Trade . . Street, . . . . . .SW, . . . #602A, . . . . . . .

SION 2020 ADM Washington, DC Marketplace 000209 Name of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 20024. Notice of ApDecedent, Clifford Community . . . . . pointment, . . . . . . . . .Notice . . . . 42 to Powell. Notice of ApCreditors and Notice Employment pointment, Notice to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 to Unknown Heirs, Creditors and Notice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Health/Mind Robin C. Alexanderl, to Unknown Heirs, & whose Spirit . . . . whose . . . . . address . . . . . . .is . 901 42 AdamBody Powell, Sixth Street, SW, address is 3706 CamHousing/Rentals #602A, . . . . . . Washing . . . . . . . 42 den St SE, Washington, DC 20024, was Legal Notices ton, DC 20020, was . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 appointed Personal appointed Personal Music/Music Row .Representative . . . . . . . . . . .of . 42 Representative of Pets of . .Clifford . . . . . . . . . the . . . estate . . . . . of . . Lorne . . . 42 the estate Dale Maclver aka Powell who died on Real Estate . . . . . Dale . . . .Maclver . . . . . . who . . . 42 January 28, 2018, Shared . died . . . .on . . November . . . . . . . 42 without a Will Housing and 25, 2019, with a Will will serve without Services . . . . . . . . and . . . will . . . serve . . . . .without . . 42 Court Supervision.

Court Supervision.

All unknown heirs All unknown heirs and heirs whose and heirs whose whereabouts are whereabouts are unknown shall enter unknown shall enter their appearance their appearance in this proceeding. in this proceeding.

Objections to such Objections to such appointment shall be appointment shall be filed with the Register filed with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 of Wills, D.C., 515 5th Street, N.W., 5th Street, N.W., Building A, 3rd Floor, Building A, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. 20001, on or before 20001, on or before 9/19/2020. Claims 9/19/2020. Claims against the decedent against the decedent shall be presented shall be presented to the undersigned to the undersigned with a copy to the with a copy to the Register of Wills or Register of Wills or to the Register of to the Register of Wills with a copy to Wills with a copy to the undersigned, on the undersigned, on or before 9/192020, or before 9/192020, or be forever barred. or be forever barred.

Persons believed to Persons believed to be heirs or legatees be heirs or legatees of the decedent who of the decedent who do not receive a copy do not receive a copy of this notice by mail of this notice by mail within 25 days of its within 25 days of its publication shall so publication shall so inform the Register inform the Register of Wills, including of Wills, including name, address and name, address and relationship. Date relationship. Date of first publication: of first publication: 3/19/2020 Name of 3/19/2020 Name of Newspaper and/or Newspaper and/or periodical: Washperiodical: Washington City Paper/ ington City Paper/ Daily Washington Law Daily Washington Law Reporter. Name of Reporter. Name of Personal RepresentaPersonal Representative: Adam Powell tive: Adam Powell TRUE TEST copy TRUE TEST copy Nicole Stevens Acting Nicole Stevens Acting Register of Wills Pub Register of Wills Pub Dates: March 19, 26, Dates: March 19, 26, April 2.

April 2.

Contents:

Search classifieds at washingtoncitypaper.com

SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2020 ADM 000194

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