Washington City Paper (April 12, 2019)

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EXIT WOUNDS Desperate to get out from three decades of court supervision, D.C.’s child welfare agency pushes social workers to the brink of their capacity, with devastating consequences for children and employees.

P. 8

By Morgan Baskin

NEWS: HEROIN TREATMENT VAN GOES MISSING 4 FOOD: ED SCARPONE FACES MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS 17 ARTS: IN GENTRIFICATION V. GO-GO, THE MUSIC WINS 20

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INSIDE

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COVER STORY: EXIT WOUNDS

8

Pushing social workers at D.C.’s child welfare agency to the brink has devastating consequences for agency employees and the children they serve.

DISTRICT LINE 4 Vanished: A District contractor abandoned a service van and lied, but maintains a six-figure contract with the city.

SPORTS 6

Holding Out for a Hero: Searching for another local sports icon in the absence of Bryce Harper

FOOD 17 Raw Nerve: A D.C. chef relied on to fix restaurants confronts chronic illness.

19 New Restaurant Math: Adding up the District’s latest restaurant and bar openings 19 The ’Wiching Hour: CHIKO’s Bulgogi Hoagie 19 Veg Diner Monologues: ELife’s Original Mac n Cheese

ARTS 20 Turn Down For What: When a neighbor’s complaint temporarily halted the go-go blasting from Central Communications, upset neighbors and councilmembers took to the streets.

22 The Scene Report: The latest releases from D.C.’s producers, MCs, and DJs 24 Short Subjects: Gittell on The Chaperone and Olszewski on Hellboy

CITY LIST 27 Music 31 Theater 32 Film

DIVERSIONS 33 Savage Love 34 Classifieds 35 Crossword On the cover: Illustration

by Stephanie Rudig

DARROW MONTGOMERY 3300 BLOCK OF MOUNT PLEASANT STREET NW, APRIL 8

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EDITOR: ALEXA MILLS MANAGING EDITOR: CAROLINE JONES ARTS EDITOR: MATT COHEN FOOD EDITOR: LAURA HAYES SPORTS EDITOR: KELYN SOONG CITY LIGHTS EDITOR: KAYLA RANDALL LOOSE LIPS REPORTER: MITCH RYALS HOUSING COMPLEX REPORTER: MORGAN BASKIN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER: DARROW MONTGOMERY MULTIMEDIA AND COPY EDITOR: WILL WARREN CREATIVE DIRECTOR: STEPHANIE RUDIG CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: MICHON BOSTON, KRISTON CAPPS, CHAD CLARK, RACHEL M. COHEN, RILEY CROGHAN, JEFFRY CUDLIN, EDDIE DEAN, ERIN DEVINE, CUNEYT DIL, TIM EBNER, CASEY EMBERT, JONATHAN L. FISCHER, NOAH GITTELL, SRIRAM GOPAL, HAMIL R. HARRIS, LAURA IRENE, LOUIS JACOBSON, CHRIS KELLY, STEVE KIVIAT, CHRIS KLIMEK, PRIYA KONINGS, JULYSSA LOPEZ, NEVIN MARTELL, KEITH MATHIAS, PABLO MAURER, BRIAN MCENTEE, BRIAN MURPHY, NENET, TRICIA OLSZEWSKI, EVE OTTENBERG, MIKE PAARLBERG, PAT PADUA, JUSTIN PETERS, REBECCA J. RITZEL, ABID SHAH, TOM SHERWOOD, MATT TERL, SIDNEY THOMAS, DAN TROMBLY, JOE WARMINSKY, ALONA WARTOFSKY, JUSTIN WEBER, MICHAEL J. WEST, DIANA MICHELE YAP, ALAN ZILBERMAN

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DISTRICTLINE Vanished

In 2014, Department of Behavioral Health employees discovered fraud in a District contract. The city still works with the contractor.

Rather than run the van themselves, DBH hired a contractor to do it. In October 2008, after years working with another provider, they gave the million dollar contract to Andromeda, a health care nonprofit headquartered on Decatur Street NW. For years, the contract went smoothly. Andromeda received their money, and each month, they sent DBH reports of all the people they talked to, tested, and referred to treatment.

Then, according to a later investigation report by one of DBH’s accountability officers, trouble began to bubble to the surface in spring 2014, when DBH employee Jennifer Mumford started asking what oversight DBH was

The pair decided to visit the van anyway, without telling Andromeda they were coming.

They had a schedule of where the van went at what time and what day, and so they just went.

No van.

That’s when the search began. At least one more DBH employee, Leon Barnes, began driving around the District every day, looking for a huge Winnebago with a One City logo printed on the side of it. He would show up everywhere the van was scheduled to be, and when it was yet again absent on the job, he would keep looking. Then, after a few weeks of this, he finally found the van. It was sitting empty in a lot near DC General.

doing for Project Orion, and how they could be sure that Andromeda was doing everything it was supposed to be doing.

So, according to emails and reports obtained

by City Paper through the Freedom of Information Act, she and her colleague Jessica Bress decided to check up on the van. At this point, they just wanted to make sure Andromeda was providing all the appropriate services. They then reached out to Andromeda to plan a site visit.

But Andromeda’s response was fishy: According to the investigation report, Andromeda said they would need more advanced notice before DBH could visit the van.

A couple weeks later, a DBH employee reached out to Andromeda, asking for a report of the van’s activity in the period the search was underway. An Andromeda employee sent over a report listing the van’s activity each day.

It said that the van had been at the locations that DBH visited, and that it had tested dozens of people for HIV on the days that the Winnebago was nowhere to be found.

A later internal investigation found that for several months, Andromeda continued to bill the city while the van was in a shop, totaled.

(Dr. Alvaro Guzman, the executive director of Andromeda since 2015, tells City Paper

Over the past few months, investigations by the Washington Post and Washington City Paper have revealed a series of failures in the Department of Behavioral Health’s response to the opioid crisis in D.C. Life-saving programs have shriveled, and according to the Post, the Department misspent millions of dollars of federal grant money that District residents and treatment providers desperately needed. But no matter how bleak the picture has been, all the revelations have appeared to be mistakes—the devastating results of bad but basically well intentioned decisions, mismanagement, and inter-departmental feuds.

However, City Paper has now uncovered a case in which multiple levels of DBH leadership made a series of deliberate decisions to avoid taking responsibility when, due to its own failures in oversight, DBH allowed fraud to happen right under its nose. In 2014, lower-level DBH employees discovered that Andromeda Transcultural Health—which still has a $250,000 contract with the District—was lying about its work on a million dollar contract it had with DBH. Andromeda was supposed to operate a van that provided mobile health care to heroin users across the city; in reality, they were sending fabricated treatment data to the Department, and the van was abandoned in a parking lot.

When top DBH officials became aware of what DBH’s employees and an internal investigation said looked like substantial fraud, rather than taking the proper steps to pursue the misspent money and notify federal authorities, they ignored the recommendations of DBH’s own Office of Accountability and repeatedly swept the incident under the rug.

DBh receives milliOns of dollars a year from the federal government to fund addiction treatment, and perhaps the most important source of its funding is the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant, which has supported much of the District’s substance

Darrow Montgomery

By Joshua Kaplan

abuse treatment system for years. As one condition of receiving the block grant, the District has to use part of the money to proactively test substance users for HIV and then connect people who are HIV-positive to treatment.

So in 2001, in order to fulfill its obligation to the federal government and to connect those in need with treatment, DBH started Project Orion.

The idea behind Project Orion was simple: A van would go around the city to places where people tend to inject heroin, offering people free blood tests. Then, while the people were getting tested, DBH would give them information about options for addiction treatment.

4 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

DISTRICTLINE that Andromeda changed its leadership soon after Project Orion fell apart, and that “as a nonprofit organization, we are struggling to continue providing comprehensive care to thousands of patients.” Dr. Ricardo Galbis, who headed Andromeda when the van disappeared, did not respond to City Paper’s request for comment.)

Emails show that by this point, top DBH officials had learned about the missing van. The District is obliged to recoup any federal grant money that is misspent, and the law also requires the District to notify the Office of the Inspector General if they have evidence of potential fraud.

But none of that happened.

Bress—one of the officials who had been involved with the Project Orion grant and helped determine that the van was missing—later told DBH’s Office of Accountability that instead, she was promptly removed from the Project Orion grant “without explanation.”

Asked to comment on why DBH did not pursue the funds or notify external authorities about Project Orion, a spokesperson for DBH tells City Paper: “After completing an investigation into services provided through Project Orion, the Department of Behavioral Health did not continue to fund the vendor to provide early intervention services relating to HIV. Recently, the Department has restructured the grants management process to ensure more responsible and accountable oversight on all grants.”

That would have been the end of the story, except that in spring 2015, one of DBH’s lawyers, Suzanne Fenzel, heard about what happened from Bress. Emails from this time give a potential explanation for why DBH turned a blind eye when they discovered evidence of fraud: DBH had failed to monitor Andromeda’s performance like they were supposed to, and the emails suggest that higher-ups were worried they would get in trouble with the federal government for their lack of oversight.

In April 2015, according to emails obtained through FOIA, Fenzel asked Bress if DBH “followed up to pursue getting some of the funds returned? It sounds like we may have fraud here, or at the least misused funds, with no idea of how long it was going on.”

“I probably shouldn’t have said anything about the van,” Bress responded. “As far as I am aware they are not pursuing return funds because, as I was told, it was our fault for failing to monitor the van.”

Fenzel replied: “Regardless of our failure to monitor they sound like they committed actual fraud in submitting reports and accepting money.”

Fenzel then asked whether several top officials, including Steve Baron—who was in charge of DBH when the van went missing and had recently retired—knew about what happened. Bress said that all of the members of leadership Fenzel mentioned, other than Baron, definitely knew about the van, and that she

was not sure if Baron was told.

So Fenzel emailed Barbara Bazron, who became Acting Director of DBH after Baron retired, telling her that DBH should kick off an investigation.

Bazron tells City Paper that “when it was brought to my attention, I directed [DBH’s] Office of Accountability to investigate this matter.

When I left the agency in November 2015, the investigation was underway.” (In an email to her cabinet members Tuesday morning, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that Bazron will return to DBH as its new director.)

Both Baron and Tanya Royster, who was director of DBH from August 2015 until last November, say that they have no memory of the missing van.

In October 2015, DBH Investigator Jamie Meikle sent the final investigative report to Atiya Frame-Shamblee, who has long been in charge of DBH’s Office of Accountability— a position she still maintains. (Frame-Shamblee did not respond to City Paper’s requests for comment).

The report is remarkably damning. After interviewing DBH employees and reviewing dozens of documents and meeting minutes related to Project Orion, Meikle wrote that while the van was “abandoned in a lot … Andromeda was still submitting reports indicating that they were providing community outreach services to District of Columbia (DC) residents.”

Furthermore, he found that the reports themselves were incoherent, with statistical inconsistencies in the numbers they gave and “no correlation between the textual data and statistical data.”

As for DBH’s culpability, he wrote that “based on a preponderance of evidence,” DBH “did not provide the appropriate oversight of Project Orion.” Meikle wrote that the grant agreement required DBH to conduct regular inspections of the van and a variety of other oversight measures, and “there is no evidence to support” that DBH ever carried out any of this oversight.

Finally, he concluded that D.C.’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) should conduct a “comprehensive audit” of the incident.

But that conclusion was not heeded. A spokesperson for the OIG says that the Office has never done an audit or investigation related to Project Orion or Andromeda, and that if DBH asked them to audit the grant, they would have done it.

Meikle’s recommendations appear to have never made it out of Frame-Shamblee’s inbox, and no one outside DBH was ever told what happened with the project. One final time, DBH’s top officials were told by their own employees that they needed to act on the failures of Project Orion. One final time, they neglected to do so.

Today, Andromeda maintains a $250,000 contract with D.C.’s Department of Health, providing outpatient treatment to residents with HIV. CP washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 5

Victoria Chamberlin

SPORTS

Twenty-seven seasons later, Bob McDonald is still the Caps’ goto anthem singer, and a celebrity among hockey fans. washingtoncitypaper.com/sports

Holding Out for a Hero

During a recent radio segment, Medhurst, who also does play-by-play work for the Naval Academy sports teams, commented on how even without Harper, the Nationals have one of the best players in the sport in pitcher Max Scherzer. While Scherzer, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, only pitches every fifth day, dedicated baseball fans tune in when he’s on the mound.

“You know he aspires to perfection every day,” says Medhurst, “and if you can’t appreciate that as a media member or fan—I mean, we simply ask athletes to give [us] what we’re paying for, and he does that and more.”

names in women’s basketball and led the Mystics to the WNBA Finals last year. For the past four seasons, Cloud has played a vocal role with the Mystics and has made it a goal this year to attend at least one game of each of D.C.’s pro teams. “I’ve been to the Wizards, Caps, and just want to be more involved,” she says.

From her vantage point, Ovechkin, Delle Donne, John Wall, and more recently, Bradley Beal, are among the most popular D.C. pro athletes. Last week Beal became the first Wizards player to finish a season with at least 2,000 points, 400 rebounds, and 400 assists.

“I think the main person, right here, right now, that I would pay a lot of money for is Brad,” Cloud says. “I think Brad has done a phenomenal job and I don’t think people give him enough credit, whether it was last year when John went out or this year when John went out … He leaves his heart out on the court, and he loves this city. I don’t think still till this day he gets enough credit.”

espn’s 2019 WOrld Fame rankings only include two D.C. pro athletes: Soccer star Wayne Rooney (No. 40) and the oft-injured Wizards center Dwight Howard (No. 84).

Harper is the only baseball player on the list at No. 99.

The 33-year-old Rooney joined D.C. United mid-way through last season and his presence pushed the middling team into the playoffs. 17 million people follow him on Twitter. For comparison’s sake, 6.71 million users follow Howard and 1.06 million follow Harper.

L i k e H a r p e r, Rooney, a former Premier League star regularly featured in British tabloids, can start a conversation by sheer force of his play and personality. His recent arrest at Dulles Airport made headlines around the globe.

“I want to go to a D.C. United game,” says Mystics guard Natasha Cloud. “Wayne Rooney was a huge pickup for us, for the city.

United has a good fan base already, but I think bringing in a high-caliber and well known player was a great move. I’m really excited to see them.”

Cloud knows what it’s like to play with a superstar. Her teammate Elena Delle Donne, a former WNBA MVP, is one of the biggest

in tOday’s digital world, a social media presence is critical to an athlete’s clout. The three measurements in ESPN’s World Fame index are “Search Score,” “Endorsements,” and “Social Following.”

To Zimmerman, that’s a young person’s game.

Some athletes, like Harper, enjoy it, while others find it too time consuming or burdensome.

Zimmmerman believes that players like 20-year-old Juan Soto and 25-year-old Trea Turner of the Nats have the talent and affinity for social media to partially fill the void that Harper leaves. Mallory Pugh, a 20-year-old soccer phenom playing for the Washington Spirit, is also an up-and-coming local athlete who has a large social media following (nearly 300,000 on Instagram, and over 70,000 on Twitter), in addition to endorsement deals with Nike and Gatorade.

Noticeably absent from people’s lists are players from the local team in the country’s most popular sports league—Dan Snyder’s football team. There isn’t one figure, like former quarterback Robert Griffin III, that serves as a lightning rod or a player fans can rally around.

“They don’t have that player that will galvanize and make someone go, ‘I have to go watch that guy,’” says Medhurst. “They have 20-to25,000 empty seats in the stadium … If they draft a quarterback that will change the nature of the franchise, that player has a chance to do it, but that player doesn’t exist right now.”

Instead, Medhurst encourages D.C. sports fans to focus on the greatness already here.

With Harper gone, it’ll be easier to appreciate those who have stayed.

CP

Bryce Harper is gone. Which big-name D.C. pro athletes fill that void?

Over the past few years, when Chase Hughes’ out-of-town friends would visit D.C., they’d ask him about attending a Nationals game. Their reason was simple. They wanted to see Bryce Harper.

“He was like a tourist attraction,” says Hughes, a sportswriter for NBC Sports Washington.

But D.C. is no longer home to that particular attraction. During the off-season, Harper signed with the Philadelphia Phillies, the Nats’ National League East rivals, and fans booed him mercilessly when he returned to Nationals Park earlier this month.

His absence leaves a void when it comes to local pro athletes with undeniable, transcendent star power. Harper’s combination of talent, bravado, and propensity to generate online content with a bat flip, hair accessory, or offhanded quip made him an athlete whose persona resonated beyond baseball and his city. In 2015, Harper won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award, cementing his stature in the sport.

Now that attention will likely spread among other D.C. stars. While these athletes might not fill the space Harper has left, D.C. is still home to several big name pro athletes, and moving forward, the spotlight on them will be even brighter.

“Bryce Harper leaving is a reminder to D.C. sports fans to look around and see what they still have,” says Hughes, who grew up in northern Virginia and has covered the Nationals, Wizards, and Capitals for NBC Sports Washington (formerly known as CSN Mid-Atlantic) since 2009. “You have these really good players [that] a lot of towns would love to see.” ryan Zimmerman remembers a vastly different sports town when he arrived in 2005 as the Nats’ first-round draft pick. Baseball had just returned to the city, and the Washington football team dominated the conversation.

Since then, Zimmerman has provided some of the most memorable moments in the franchise’s history. His 11 walk-off home runs have earned him the nickname “Mr. Walk-Off,” and Zimmerman has seen the team go from one of the worst in the MLB to a regular postseason contender.

His first season with the Nats coincided with the arrival of another now-familiar face: a 20-year-old from Russia named Alexander Ovechkin.

“I think for the most part it used to be just kind of ... an NFL town,” says Zimmerman, a 34-year-old from Virginia Beach. “The Caps really gained a following. Ovi brought a lot of that here with him being drafted, and people like to go watch guys score goals, and that’s what he does. He’s kind of transformed that.”

Ovechkin, now 33, is a popular choice when discussing which athletes fill the Bryce canyon.

He’s spent his entire NHL career with the Capitals, is a three-time winner of the Hart Memorial Trophy (the NHL’s MVP award), and last year led the team to its first Stanley Cup title.

D.C. had not won a title in the four major professional sports since 1992.

The triumphs have overshadowed the more polarizing aspects of Ovechkin’s personality, like his embrace of Russian President Vladi-

Stephanie Rudig

By Kelyn Soong

mir Putin and excitement over visiting Donald Trump at the White House. He remains one of the few D.C. players even pro athletes like Zimmerman and sports journalists would pay to see. Ovechkin recently scored 50 goals in a season for the eighth time in his career, becoming just the fourth player to score at least 50 at his age or older.

“Ovechkin is clearly a tourist attraction,” says 106.7 The Fan on-air personality Pete Medhurst, borrowing a term used by Hughes.

“You’re going to watch that guy play still. He defies the odds.”

6 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

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EXIT WOUNDS Social workers at D.C.’s child welfare agency live and work in breathtaking fear.

By Morgan Baskin

In the second-floor cubicles and offices of D.C.’s child welfare agency, on 2nd and I streets SE, small clusters of social workers watched, mute with shock, as Christian Greene spoke.

Sneaking furtive glances at their phones, which streamed live video of the Child and Family Services Agency’s Feb. 26 performance oversight hearing before the D.C. Council, they listened to the agency’s former ombudsman talk about how she was fired for refusing to downplay the severe and troubling trends so many of them had witnessed. They listened to her berate agency leadership for gutting the ombudsman’s office of its investigatory responsibilities, and for manipulating workers’ caseload data to make the agency appear more functional than it was.

The social workers were, in a word, thrilled.

Finally, they thought, someone will know about us. Someone will have to listen to what they make us do.

“We are really in a crisis of integrity,” said

Greene, who worked for CFSA in a number of roles—including as a contractor, frontline social worker, supervisor, and ombudsman—between 2005 and 2017. Greene wore an agencyissued shirt that reads “social workers STAND UP,” her commanding voice sometimes betraying a quiver. “We are failing our children,” she said. “During my tenure I saw the agency consistently make child safety decisions based on liability rather than legal validity or the welfare of the children.”

It’s been 30 years since a New York-based civil rights organization, Children’s Rights, Inc., filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the District on behalf of the abused and neglected children in its care. The same judge, Thomas F. Hogan, has ruled over the case since its inception, when he wrote that D.C.’s child welfare system was in “shambles.” The case, LaShawn A. v. Barry—now LaShawn A. v.

Bowser, as it has been renamed for each successive mayor—has reshaped how the city identifies and responds to allegations of child

8 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

abuse. In 1993, Hogan appointed a court monitor, the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for the Study of Social Policy, to oversee reforms at the agency.

The District’s administration of its foster care system was “deficient and inept,” a federal appeals court ruled, and violated both D.C. Code and federal law, including the U.S. Constitution. And in 2001, a Washington Post investigation found that nearly 230 children whose families came to the attention of CFSA between 1993 and 2000 had died.

In the years since, CFSA has effectively become a new agency. It has met 74 standards of the 88 required for it to exit the LaShawn suit.

CSSP has noted its positive strides in providing better access to health care for foster children, fewer and shorter emergency shelter placements, and better oversight of licensed group homes and other facilities. CFSA has “seen a lot of changes, and I’m proud of having led a lot of those changes,” agency director Brenda Donald says.

In this, Donald has the support of Mayor Muriel Bowser. On May 16, 2018, City Paper attended a hearing in the LaShawn case, held biannually, where CSSP employees testify in front of Judge Hogan about CFSA’s progress in meeting LaShawn’s exit standards. Bowser attended this particular hearing with Donald.

(Rachel Joseph, a former CSSP employee, is now Brenda Donald’s chief of staff.)

“I wanted to be here with Brenda and the team to thank you for helping us improve the agency,” Bowser said, emphasizing “how involved I’ve been with Brenda to ensure she has the resources she needs. [...] With these reforms, with Brenda’s leadership, we’re confident.” She added that D.C. is “making unprecedented investments in CFSA.” (The mayor’s proposed fiscal year 2020 budget recommends cutting funds to the agency, to levels lower than it has received each of the last three years.)

“I want to thank you for your work,” said Bowser, “but say unequivocally that while

we’re appreciative, the government can move forward [without the court monitor].”

Since Hogan appointed the court monitor, the now-$220 million agency has cycled through at least four different court-sanctioned adaptations of a strategy to satisfy LaShawn. Four different directors have led CFSA since it exited receivership in 2001; Donald is currently in her third separate stint as the agency’s director. In between, she was also the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, the mayoral office with oversight of CFSA. For more than two years, City Paper has spent dozens of hours interviewing 12 current and former CFSA employees, as well as legal advocates, child welfare experts, and courtappointed guardians. In extensive interviews, CFSA staff say that the agency has exaggerated its successes, and that the biannual court monitor reports under-emphasize its failures.

This article reflects the contents of those interviews, hundreds of pages of reports produced

by CFSA’s court monitor, CSSP, and internal agency documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

These social workers describe an agency where caseloads are often so high, and the pressure to close them so immense, that both children and workers suffer devastating consequences. Despite cherishing their jobs and responsibilities, they characterize the agency culture as one of “fear.” Unsupported by a weak union and paranoid that they’ll be fired—or “walked out,” in agency parlance— social workers say they’re afraid to flag lifethreatening mistakes with supervisors and afraid to push back on decisions they don’t believe are in the best interests of children. Because of their fear of professional and personal retaliation, City Paper granted anonymity to the social workers quoted in this story.

Greene’s recent public testimony matches their accounts. In June of 2018, she filed a whistleblower suit against the District, alleging that CFSA’s upper management “white-

washed” an agency trend report her office was tasked with publishing, and terminated her without cause.

Their primary allegations revolve around the intentional manipulation of caseload data, a charge that the court monitor has substantiated in previous reports but that Donald insists the agency has resolved.

Social workers report that their higherups routinely encourage them to prematurely close referrals and investigations so that they meet the court monitor’s exit standards.

Among the statutory requirements CFSA has yet to meet are the timely initiation and completion of CPS investigations, and the quality of its investigations, according to the November 2018 CSSP report.

“When clinicians act in fear, children die,” Greene says. Another social worker tells City Paper: “This culture is going to leave a lot of kids unsafe. How can you take care of someone else when you can’t take care of yourself?”

The children CFSA serves are overwhelm-

ingly low-income black children from wards 7 and 8—three-quarters of CFSA’s clients live in these districts—nearly half of them under 6 years old.

At a Feb. 21, 2018, oversight hearing, Donald not-so-subtly threw a punch at critics of the agency. “I know it’s easy to sit outside of CFSA and point to examples and anecdotes about cases and children whose futures and situations are not that great,” she said pointedly from her seat. “I can do that every day. I can [also] do that 10-for-one on those that are doing well.”

But Judith Sandalow, executive director of Children’s Law Center—the largest pro-bono legal organization in D.C. representing low-income youth—calls the agency’s “public persona” both “Pollyannaish and not transparent.”

“Rather than acknowledging [CFSA’s] problems, there’s, ‘Oh no, we’re doing great. Oh no, we’re headed in a great direction,’” Sandalow says. “But in the past couple of years, we’ve seen things get worse, not better.”

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 9

Darrow Montgomery

I. “Double talk and misleading court numbers” To understand how quickly social workers have to act, there are a few key numbers to know: They must initiate investigations of alleged child abuse and neglect within 48 hours of the report to the hotline, or make documented “good faith efforts” to initiate the investigation. They must complete these investigations, which require contact with five designated parties but frequently include many more sources, within 30 to 45 days of the hotline report, depending on which branch of Child Protective Services they work in.

CPS-I is the department’s investigative unit, where a team of about 50 social workers substantiate serious allegations of child neglect and abuse. Case workers in Family Assessment, the second branch of CPS, don’t substantiate abuse allegations; instead, they

conduct “safety assessments,” initiating contact with families within 72 hours of the hotline call. They connect families with social, housing, health, or other necessary services, like making electricity payments or buying a crib for a new parent. Families’ engagement with FA workers is, beyond the safety assessment, voluntary.

Between January and June of 2018, the number of calls to CFSA’s hotline—the 24hour emergency phone line residents can call to report abuse or neglect—ranged from between 1,761 and 2,064 a month, according to data culled by CSSP, with a total of 11,095 calls during the six month monitoring period.

Of those, about 21 percent, or roughly 400 cases per month, were accepted for an investigation; about 20 percent of calls were accepted for a family assessment. At the time, there were fewer than 45 social workers in each department handling those cases.

The court’s “implementation and exit

10 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

plan” for CFSA requires that each caseworker have no more than 12 cases. Last June, 84 percent of Family Assessment workers carried more than 12 cases, and 13 percent of investigation workers did so, according to the court monitor’s most recent LaShawn report, which analyzed caseload data from January to June of 2018. These figures represent a mere 1 percent improvement in Child Protective Services workers’ caseload burden since June of 2016.

“The effect of caseloads on quality practice is an important factor to consider with regard to assessing for safety, connecting families with supports and services and ensuring children’s safety and well-being,” the monitor wrote in a 2017 report.

“I’ve had up to 24 referrals at one time,” says one family assessment worker, who City Paper will call Michelle. “I contacted the court monitor because I was like, ‘Hey, I have 24 referrals. I don’t know if I’m comin’,

I don’t know if I’m going, I can’t remember who I’ve talked to, can’t remember who I didn’t talk to.’ Twenty-four referrals doesn’t mean 24 children, it means 24 families. One family could have one kid, one family could have 13 kids. I had two moms who had 13 kids one time.”

And while the agency requires that supervisors skip social workers who recently connected to clients with eight or more children in the referral rotation, the dearth of trained caseworkers often leaves assigning officers to ignore that rule, social workers say. “You just keep getting them and getting them and getting them,” Michelle says.

Taylor, a former CFSA employee who worked her way up from social worker to supervisor in seven years, says that the timely completion of referral closures depends on the individual’s willingness to put in extra hours, like coming into the office three hours early and leaving four hours late, or working weekends. She calls the dynamic “overwhelming” for caseworkers, who routinely take extended medical leave (colloquially, “taking FMLA,” after the Family and Medical Leave Act), making the agency short-staffed.

She also describes an empathy gap between social workers and the supervisors managing their caseloads, sometimes slipping into the cadence of an army officer: “I do think sometimes we don’t have enough bodies to load those cases,” she says of caseworkers. Being a manager “is challenging, but it’s not as hard” as working directly with families, because some managers “have never even done the frontline work.”

One social worker is particularly blunt about the stakes of a large caseload. “If I call somebody and I’m not able to close because there’s an issue, there’s pressure for me from my supervisor, who is getting pressure from her supervisor, to close it—it might be kind of questionable, it might not be the best thing, but you need to close it. Because if you don’t close it then you’re going to get penalized and your job’s going to be on the line, and who are you going to choose? You or that client? And that’s just the realistic part of it.”

“They don’t only bully us, as workers,” she says, “but we also bully our clients.”

Donald maintains that CFSA has adequately addressed the issue, testifying during the agency’s February oversight hearing that it has “resolved issues with caseload levels.” City Paper texted one Family Assessment worker currently employed by CFSA, who we will call Maia, with this quote, and asked how she reacted to it. She sent back an emoji crying with laughter.

Greene says that caseloads are “heavy, even if on paper they’re not.” (Donald disagrees with the characterization that D.C.’s caseload numbers are high; she says that administrators in other jurisdictions are “astonished that our caseloads are so low.”)

Frontline workers say that data from FACES, the electronic system used to store social workers’ notes and case information for clients, does not reflect the full scope of their

caseloads. “The truth is being buried in double talk and misleading court numbers,” Greene wrote in written testimony submitted to the D.C. Council.

The court monitor has also acknowledged problems with CFSA’s caseload data. In its most recent LaShawn report, published last November, CSSP notes that “the Monitor’s validation identified concerns about the accuracy of caseload data” due to an unusually high number of referrals that were classified as “in transfer” from the hotline staff to frontline workers. The monitor was able to validate only two months of data reported by CFSA in this period, in May and June. It notes later that a then-newly appointed Deputy Director of Entry Services “put appropriate corrective measures in place.”

Social workers continue to allege that supervisory staff manipulate caseload data through a practice they call “hiding cases.”

CFSA supervisors, and occasionally program managers, assign case referrals to frontline social workers through FACES. As Greene explains in her written Council testimony, FACES has historically recorded the data in its system at midnight on the last day of the month. It is then sent to the court monitor.

But to avoid the inclusion of data that reflects poorly on agency performance—that is, data showing the existence of caseloads higher than the statutory maximum—social workers say that their supervisors will only distribute paper copies of some case referrals and notify social workers verbally without formally assigning the case in FACES. This practice “is 100 percent what they do,” one Family Assessment worker tells City Paper.

During the May 16, 2018, LaShawn hearing, Marcia Lowry, a child welfare attorney and the former executive director of Children’s Rights, Inc., reported that “for the second time in two years, we’ve been unable to validate caseload standards. It appears there has been an effort to keep cases unassigned, or merely assigned in the supervisor’s box. There is a problem with caseload standard in entry level services. That’s wrong, and it’s not the way things should be working at this stage in the case.”

In response, Donald says that she was “surprised” to hear City Paper ask her questions about the practice, since “it was an issue that LaShawn identified three or four years ago,” and that, to her knowledge, CSSP “no longer had any concerns about” the practice, which “is no longer occurring.” (CSSP now pulls caseload data daily instead of monthly in an effort to better track them.) “Certainly if someone believed that we’re still doing that, then we would take that very seriously, because we have to stand behind our data,” she says.

Family Assessment worker Maia tells City Paper that, within the last month, FACES reflected that she had only 15 referrals; in practice, she carried 18. She says that CFSA administrators and program managers will also encourage employees to fudge case notes, to make it appear as though social workers made contact with families earlier than they did.

“They’ll ask if that’s really the time you saw the family, and suggest that perhaps you saw them at another time instead,” she says. “Just to make the good faith efforts, so as to meet court monitor standards.”

City Paper asked a former CFSA employee who served in a supervisory role, James, about this practice, and couldn’t finish the question before he cut in with a sarcastic laugh. “‘Oh, you sure you got there at that time?’” he mimics administrators at the agency.

CSSP noted that the apparent failure to make early contact with families has affected case outcomes. The most recent monitor

cial workers say they’re in the untenable position of justifying a superior’s clinical recommendation, which they might not agree with, in front of a child custody judge. (“If you’ve never experienced [what it’s like to be a social worker], you don’t get to tell me how to do my job,” Greene says. “And when you impede on their assessment, you run the risk of a child dying.”)

CFSA staff and legal advocates worry that the confluence of these factors—limited time with children and administrators making clinical decisions—harms caseworkers’ investigations and interactions with troubled families.

“Just that volume of referrals—you can’t put out quality,” says James, the former supervisor. “We can’t think about quality. There’s very limited information because they don’t have enough time to do the work.”

James tells City Paper that he once wrote up a social worker for “verbatim, copy-past-

“This culture is going to leave a lot of kids unsafe. How can you take care of someone else when you can’t take care of yourself?” report shows that the agency has reversed its progress on meeting the good faith effort standard. Ninety percent of investigations met the monitor’s exit standard in September of 2017, but that number ticked down to 79 percent in June of 2018. The court monitor says it could not validate the documentation of good faith efforts for the January to June 2018 monitoring period.

Social workers also express concern that superiors will overrule their clinical assessments.

“When a social worker’s notations say ‘per the directive,’ this should strike fear in the reader. A directive from management is a veto of the social worker’s clinical decision, absent of the qualifications or intimate clinical knowledge of the family,” Greene wrote in her D.C. Council testimony. She tells City Paper that the practice occurs frequently.

Often, social workers say, these decisions hedge on the side of keeping a child in the home after allegations of abuse have been made against the guardian; in some cases, so-

ing” notes from an old investigation referral into a new case. When he went back and audited her body of work, he says he found six instances in the span of 12 months where the worker had done the same thing. James says he believes the worker did so to “close [the referrals] more quickly.” The agency suspended another frontline worker for 15 days for “saying she saw some kids she didn’t see,” James says.

Sandalow from the Children’s Law Center says that her organization has “had social workers express frustration that senior folks, senior agency staff, overrule them and their clinical judgment, and we’ve witnessed that in ways that raise concerns for us, that senior staff is feeling the pressure to close cases or make their statistics, and they are not listening to the line staff ... who actually know the child and are spending time with the child.”

In response to criticisms that CPS investigations suffer from poor quality, Donald says the agency has “made great improvements

in the last report period,” and that “obviously we want the investigations to be high quality, we want them to be consistent, we want them to be well documented, but I think we have fail-safe measures to ensure that we’re doing proper investigations.” She adds: “No agency can pretend to get it perfectly every time.” In January of 2019, only 73 percent of CPS investigations were considered “acceptable” by LaShawn standards, up from 66 percent in January of 2018.

In 2017, the agency slashed its training timeline for new employees by nearly half.

James, who was privy to discussions about creating the new employee training manual, tells City Paper that newly hired employees would enter a training period of only seven weeks. (He compares the way D.C. has managed the agency to a foreman “running a warehouse.”) Donald acknowledges that CFSA “used to have a much longer pre-service training,” which she compared to learning in a classroom versus completing field work.

The shortage of workers is only exacerbated by employees taking medical leave. One family assessment worker, who City Paper will call Tina, says that employees “take FMLA left and right just so they can maintain their job and have some peace of mind.” Maia says that, at any given time, there could be 10 or more Child Protective Services caseworkers on medical leave.

On Aug. 15, 2018, alone, the court monitor reported, there were 22 entry services staff members absent on medical leave. One Family Assessment worker who has been at the agency for over three years says that it has “never been fully staffed in the time that I’ve been there.”

While not a silver bullet, hiring more caseworkers has already proven effective in reducing individuals’ caseloads. In September of 2018, CSSP reports, there were 50 social workers assigned to the investigations unit and 49 working in FA. Caseload data “show that the additional hiring and deployment of workers, in addition to the seasonal decline in new referrals over the summer months, have led to reductions in caseloads,” CSSP wrote.

Only two legal organizations in D.C. perform pro-bono work on behalf of D.C. Superior Court’s high-conflict branch as guardians ad litem. These guardians are appointed by judges to independently assess a child’s family and medical history and make recommendations about their placement to the court.

One of these is the Children’s Law Center, which represents the majority of these youths—about 500 foster children annually. The other is the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project, which represents about 100 D.C. children annually, about half of which have come in contact with CFSA at some point in their lives.

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 11

Sara Tennen is DCVLP’s deputy director, and oversees the legal team’s child advocacy program. “There was a time,” Tennen says, “where we were keeping a documented list of all the cases where CFSA was not doing what they were supposed to be doing then.”

And over the years, though the type and severity of cases referred to DCVLP has changed, one thing hasn’t. It is “still seeing the same problems in them, which is CFSA is closing the cases prematurely without doing a thorough investigation,” Tennen says.

Tennen emphasizes that her job is “to make recommendations to a court on what is a safe and appropriate place for my child client to live.” In doing so, she says, she has to rely on experts like mental health professionals and teachers who are familiar with her client’s behavior. The other expert Tennen relies on, she says, is the CFSA social worker involved in the case.

But doing that “is hard,” Tennen adds, because she has to “rely on this information that I don’t have a great level of confidence in.” Part of Tennen’s concern stems from the belief that frontline workers don’t have the time to interrogate the claims of a guardian who has been accused of violence––that they “take what the alleged abuser said just at face value.” And while she doesn’t believe it’s malicious, “the information, the level of investigation is not done to a degree that ensures the kid’s safety. I have yet to see a case where CFSA has investigated it and I have felt really, really confident in the investigation as a guardian ad litem.”

“When there are reports on the news like, you know, a child was found murdered, a child was found dead, believed to have been murdered by a parent, mom’s boyfriend, whoever it is,” Tennen says, “Every single time I hear it on the news or I see it on WTOP on the internet, I brace myself and I’m like, ‘Please don’t be one of our kids.’”

II. “Who are you going to choose? You or that client?”

It was in late 2016 that Michelle had 24 cases at one time. She was, in her words, “struggling.”

She decided to email the court monitor and report her caseload after her supervisor proved unwilling to reduce it. (The supervisor’s response was “‘figure it out,’” Michelle says.)

Social workers say that their often-limited time with clients disproportionately affects the health of children with chronic medical conditions. One of Michelle’s 24 cases involved a young mother who had recently given birth to a child with a heart defect. As the hospital prepared to discharge the baby, Michelle was bogged down with other cases and knew she couldn’t transport the baby

home herself. So she requested the help of a family support worker—agency employees who provide administrative case assistance, but are not required to have a license in social work.

Under even the best circumstances, it is difficult to care for a newborn with a persistent medical issue. But the difficulty of Michelle’s case was compounded by the youth and inexperience of the mother, who didn’t completely understand the baby’s discharge paperwork.

er, tells City Paper about a particularly busy stretch in the spring of 2017, when she received 18 referrals in just two weeks. In two days, she received six. “Within [that time], a child dies,” the worker says. “Even within [the child’s] medical issues, it was still like, ‘Hurry up and close.’ … Of course I didn’t get any help.

There’s no support.”

Rumors about Michelle’s involvement in the baby’s death began circulating around the office. Social workers are not permitted to sit in

“I have yet to see a case where CFSA has investigated it and I have felt really, really confident in the investigation.”

“Driving home from the hospital doesn’t sound bad, but if the parent is young, the parent doesn’t understand all of the instructions the doctor is telling them, you know, it’s a lot[.]

Learning how to read a machine that’s going to help your child’s heart, there’s a lot that goes along with it,” she says.

Eleven days after the baby assigned to Michelle came home from the hospital, the baby died at home.

“I feel like, if there would have been someone else, if I would have had more time to be like, ‘Hey Mom, I’m going to come with you to discharge the child [and] sit with you,’ or, if that family support worker would’ve had more time to be like, ‘Hey, let me make sure I understand this so I can show her and not be ‘Hurry up and get this done,’ it could have saved a life in my opinion,” Michelle says. “It also could have been [that] nothing could have saved this child. But I really don’t know, because I wasn’t able to do it myself. Because I had too many cases. … I bawled, I cried. I have no other words to describe it. And it took me some time to even get over that, and I remember that situation because it was around the holidays. I’m trying to get my own self together to go home for the holidays, and this family isn’t going to have part of their family for the holidays.”

Three or four hours after she got the news, she says, a case manager called her into their office. They asked her why she wasn’t closing her cases faster.

Alicia, another Family Assessment work-

12 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

on the fatality review unit’s assessment of the case, so it began to “trickle down” from upper management that “it could have been a preventable death.”

“We hear stuff about ourselves,” she says.

D.C. has historically had one of the country’s highest child fatality rates. In 2008, 182 children died in the District; by 2013, it dropped to 91. Child fatality statistics show that total deaths have increased steadily again since 2013, rising to 100 in 2014 and 124 in 2015, though the city’s overall rate of child deaths decreased from 2008 to 2015.

Brenda Donald has testified repeatedly, including during the agency’s most recent February performance oversight hearing, that there were “no deaths due to child abuse or neglect” in calendar and fiscal year 2018. (She tells City Paper that there were two such fatalities in 2017.)

It’s thus unclear how she’s classifying, say, Aceyson Aizim Ahmad, a 2-year-old Southeast D.C. boy. He died from blunt force injuries last April; his mother’s 24-year-old boyfriend was charged with beating him to death. And how do city records classify Carter Sanders, a 1-year-old boy killed last May in a Benning Road SE apartment? His mother’s then-28-year-old boyfriend, who watched Carter the day he died after attending a domestic violence training session, was charged with first-degree murder. “An incredible amount of force was used against this infant,” the medical examiner wrote of Carter, who suffered skull fractures, brain

hemorrhages, and damage to his colon, liver, and kidneys. And what of Brooklynn Zakiyaa Hill-Davis, a 6-month-old girl from Valley Terrace SE, who was murdered last September by a 21-year-old D.C. man? The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled all of the deaths as homicides.

Donald tells City Paper she would not have included cases like these in her count because they were not known to CFSA before their deaths. City Paper attempted to confirm this statement by submitting a FOIA request for records of any first responders dispatched to their addresses in the months before they died; the Office of United Communications, which handled this request, denied it in full, arguing that it constituted an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

It is close to impossible for the public to assess the veracity of Donald’s claims—there are no independent investigatory agencies in D.C. with unfettered access to FACES case data—but current and former CFSA staff say her statement is misleading at best.

“I can say that, with the cases I’ve reviewed within my tenure, there were clear times children experienced harm that could have been prevented by the agency taking action,” Greene says. Maia, the family assessment worker, says that CPS gets fatality reports “all the time,” and that it is not uncommon to link those reports to closed CFSA referrals.

When a child in D.C. dies, two different groups review the case. The first is D.C.’s Child Fatality Review Committee, a group of about two dozen District employees and community representatives who meet monthly to discuss the circumstances leading to deaths of minors in D.C., a practice authorized by a 2001 law. More often than not, Greene says, these children have come in contact with CFSA. The second is CFSA’s own Child Fatality Review Unit.

In her two-year tenure as the agency’s ombudsman, Greene sat on both the Child Fatality Review Committee, which Greene says would review an average of three to four cases per month, and CFSA’s Child Fatality Review Unit. (A 2017 report from the office of Kathy Patterson, the D.C. Auditor, shows that the number of cases analyzed by the CFRC dropped from 122 in 2010 to 35 in 2015. This change “partly reflects budget and staff cuts, and must be reversed for the CFRC to fulfill its duty to review all child deaths in D.C.,” the report says.) Between 2011 and 2015, only 17 of the child fatalities it reviewed were the result of abuse or neglect.

The CFRU’s case studies, meanwhile, don’t include a determination about the agency’s culpability in the death of children in its care. The final pages of their cases contain lists with the diplomatically titled subheads “strengths of case practice” and “findings and issues.” The committee did not issue

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any recommendations during a review of 21 fatalities in the first half of 2018, CSSP notes in its November 2018 report. Greene tells City Paper that the committees are “hesitant to issue recommendations” and “don’t want to be held to something they already do” because there’s “a fear of getting deeper into LaShawn.”

City Paper obtained a copy of one of the CFRU’s case studies, which are typically confidential; frontline workers whose clients die are not privy to the review.

The report details eight incidents of abuse or neglect that CFSA was able to substantiate, all perpetrated by a mother of seven between 2003 and 2011. The woman, who City Paper will call Cynthia, was a chronic user of PCP and gave birth to three children who tested positive for that drug, or for marijuana. CFSA was also able to confirm that the mother gave her then-4-year-old daughter, who City Paper will call Denise, a black eye. Among other instances of abuse or neglect, CFSA also recorded instances of Cynthia’s infants sleeping in unsafe environments. By 2009, the agency received a call that Cynthia was high on PCP and wandering around naked outside. The home, according to CFSA’s report, “was in deplorable condition with minimal food,” and had 11 cats.

It wasn’t until three days after this incident, the seventh substantiated case of abuse, that her children were removed from her care. Denise eventually went to live with her aunt, and later her maternal grandmother in a home her social worker described to a court as infested with pests.

Just over two years later, she began living with her paternal grandparents. In March of 2012, Denise reported that her cousin raped her in her paternal grandparents’ home. She was 13 years old at the time.

It was not, according to Denise, their only sexual encounter. Her cousin would later be charged with firstdegree sex abuse.

Despite this history, Denise’s supervisory social worker “reported that [her cousin’s] behavior was not deemed abuse, but rather inappropriate,” according to the CFRU report. Denise would be placed with at least seven different foster parents over the next two years, before being “reunified” with her mother, who had beaten Denise upon learning of the assault.

It was not the only flagrant error Denise’s social workers would make. “The ongoing social worker reported that her client, [Denise], a teen mother, had given birth to [a baby] on

Aug. 14, 2014, at Howard University Hospital. The ongoing social worker reported that [the baby] was transferred to Children’s Hospital due to his medical issues where he expired on September 14, 2014. The ongoing social worker reported that at the time that [the baby] died, [Denise] was in foster care,” the CFRU report says.

But Denise never gave birth to a child. The baby referenced in this report was Denise’s little brother. “It should be noted that [the baby] was the child of [Denise’s mother] and not [Denise],” the report says.

The “issues” with CFSA’s management of Denise’s case, the Child Fatality Review Unit concluded, were numerous: At multiple points, social workers misidentified basic family relationships; ignored reports from Denise’s siblings that they felt unsafe around their mother’s sexual partners; did not provide evidence that they addressed the infants’ dangerous sleeping environments; and mischaracterized Denise’s rape as “inappropriate rather than seen as a more serious crime.”

Denise’s case highlights the consequences of a failure to connect abused or neglected children with support services. For years,

outstanding failures.

Sandalow refers to the shortage of foster parents trained to manage children’s health and behavioral concerns as “a placement crisis.” The organization represented a 4-yearold, for example, who has been moved to at least four different foster homes. “Let me be really clear that the most devastating thing you can do to a child is have them move from home to home,” Sandalow says, with that harm exacerbated the younger the child is.

In written testimony she submitted to the D.C. Council’s Committee on Human Services, Greene wrote that half of the families “at the attention” of her office complained “that their children were being abused and neglected while in the care of CFSA.” WAMU reported this month that the agency is looking to add 40 beds to its foster system. Ten children slept overnight in CFSA headquarters between January and June of 2018 because of the lack of foster beds, up from two children who did so in the prior reporting period, CSSP noted in its most recent report.

Sandalow says that Children’s Law Center attorneys routinely encounter children placed in foster care whose foster parent was

for example, Denise’s social worker reported that she maintained a solid academic performance and did not exhibit significant behavioral issues. That would change as she grew up and bounced from home to home.

Advocates emphasize that CFSA’s poor record of placing minors in stable foster homes with prepared guardians is one of its greatest

“not told about the child’s medical needs.”

Other times, prescription medication is missing, and CLC’s lawyers “pick up the medication and bring it to them,” she says. “We’ve repeatedly had children released from psychiatric hospitalization without adequate medication, that’s an ongoing problem.

That’s not just in the foster system, but that

14 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

generally is an issue in the city.” (CLC also reports issues connecting trauma survivors to support services, with some who have suffered serial sexual abuse waiting three to six months for services, Sandalow says.)

The most recent CSSP report reflects these concerns. “CFSA leaders had identified resource parent support as an area for improvement, determining that its current Resource Parent Support unit provided inconsistent and frequently inadequate support to foster parents,” the report says.

III. “I’m just so relieved he’s out of this.”

Orlando Marshall turned down a promotion multiple times before he agreed to be a supervisor.

Ask any social worker at the agency whether they want the upward mobility, and they’ll likely say “no.” If there are few legal protections for frontline workers, there are none for those in management positions, who are all employed at-will.

One Family Assessment worker tells City Paper that she personally cycled through seven different supervisors in a span of three years.

Marshall, then 45 years old, worked at CFSA for years. Beloved by his wards, some took to calling him “Uncle O.” Colleagues like Maia remember him as a kind, whip-smart, passionate music lover who would blast the speakers in his cubicle.

City Paper spoke with Marshall’s mother, Justine Marshall. “He didn’t like the supervisor position because he said that they wanted him to write people up for every little thing, things that were not important. And before he would do that, he stepped down,” she says. Orlando only filled the post for three months before he returned to serving as a frontline worker.

He saw some of the worst years in the agency’s history. Orlando was one of the first social workers to respond to the home of Banita Jacks, a D.C. woman convicted in 2009 of killing her four daughters and leaving their bodies in her home for months to decompose. (“I said, ‘How do you live with that?’ He goes, ‘You just see that all the time, and it doesn’t bother you anymore,’” Justine says. “I said, ‘You need to go talk to someone. How do you [see] dead children, the skeletons of children—and it not bother you?’”)

“He was al-ways working. And somebody was al-ways calling,” Justine says. She knew not to expect him home on Christmas Eve un-

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til 10 p.m. or later—“He’d always let the ones who had children go home, and he would stay there so they could get their holiday going”— and when he did show up, he’d be there with his laptop and three cell phones.

Justine says that Orlando suffered from a pinched nerve in his back, and wouldn’t take the time to see a primary care physician or “go through no hassle to properly take care of himself.” In October of 2015, months shy of two decades at the agency, Orlando’s back gave out on him when he was at work, and he fell to the ground. His colleague called an ambulance.

“They took him from his job to the emergency room,” Justine says. “His back just totally gave out on him.” He was discharged with pain medication. Days later, Justine says, he began to complain of shortness of breath and leg pain. And less than two weeks after being discharged from the hospital, Orlando died.

A blood clot formed in his leg and traveled to his lung.

Justine still thinks about how her son couldn’t stop himself from working. She tells everybody that “the job wore him out.”

“So that I can be at peace, I say, ‘That’s why God took him home.’ Because he didn’t know how to stop himself, on his own.

So God gave him rest. So he’s at rest now. That’s how I look at it,” she says. “I miss him with every breath I take, but I’m just so relieved he’s out of this. He’s out of it. It was his calling because he has helped many a people. So he did what he was supposed to do.

But he still didn’t have to be treated like he was. It didn’t have to be like it was.”

Social workers compare their jobs at CFSA to wearing “golden handcuffs,” Greene says: D.C. pays its social workers some of the highest salaries of any major metropolitan area, and recruits many of its frontline workers straight from graduate school, many of them from Howard University’s prestigious social work master’s programs.

They depart school for a notoriously challenging profession.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks social work as one of the 20 most fatal jobs in the country, with roughly one death per 100,000 workers. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees found that 70 percent of frontline child welfare workers have been victims of violence or threats of violence in the line of duty.

Greene and another social worker independently tell City Paper that merely walking into the CFSA office would cause them to break out into hives; one worker took medical leave for this reason. Another social worker who gave birth to a premature baby had a supervisor call after the birth to berate her for not closing her existing cases

on time. There is the social worker who contracted scabies from a baby while removing it from its home. There is the social worker who fell down a flight of stairs, dislocating her shoulder, after an angry father threw PCP at her during a removal. There is the social worker who got into a car accident while on duty and needed months of physical therapy—and who continues to live with chronic pain.

“You have an institutionally traumatized workforce,” Greene says.

One social worker filed a complaint against CFSA in August of 2016 with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after the agency declined to immediately make a handicapped parking space available. The agency’s position was that it “maintained that her reasonable accommodation will be provided once it becomes available,” according to a partially redacted copy of the complaint obtained by City Paper through FOIA. The employee waited at least 10 weeks for the accommodation, according to the documents.

an “employee feedback committee,” so that “all team members could voice their opinions, concerns, suggestions … [with] our pledge that their feedback will remain confidential and will not be used against them in any way.”

Yet the social workers City Paper spoke with say they know of few ways to receive material support from the agency. The city’s Employee Assistance Program provides counseling, but social workers say they don’t trust its confidentiality and are encouraged, regardless, to take medical leave to cope with stress.

They are not entitled to paid time off to attend funerals.

Richard, a former CFSA employee who worked at the agency for two years, says that he missed “a lot of big things in my life at that time,” including his grandmother’s 80th birthday. “I was very depressed,” he says. “It was just toxic. The environment was toxic.

I didn’t like myself. I didn’t feel good about who I was as an individual. I used to see people and how it would literally drain the life

“The environment was toxic.

I didn’t like myself. I didn’t feel good about who I was as an individual. I used to see people and how it would literally drain the life out of them. And I couldn’t stand that to happen to me.”

Donald says that, recognizing how stressful the job can be, employee “health, financial well-being and physical well-being” have been among her priorities. She says that CFSA headquarters boast a “serenity room, for employees who have been exposed to trauma on the job.” An agency slide presentation says that it offers “meetingfree middays” on Wednesday afternoons, when workers are encouraged to participate in activities like meditation, line-dancing, and Spanish classes.

In April of 2018, according to internal agency emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency launched

16 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

out of them. And I couldn’t stand that to happen to me.”

He notes that when he first started working at the agency, “people were dropping like flies.

Back to back to back to back.” Richard and other frontline workers, including Michelle and Maia, express sadness that supervisors dissuaded them from taking time off to attend coworkers’ funerals.

“You try to process [the deaths] by yourself, but then if you miss a day of work, your work doesn’t stop,” Michelle says. Referring to supervisors’ attitudes toward former colleagues who died, she says, “They were like, ‘If you want to go to the funeral, you have to use your

personal leave. We’re not going to let you go to the funeral to honor your fallen comrade because you need to get these referrals closed.’”

In February, DonalD told the D.C. Council’s human services committee that CFSA “is increasingly being recognized around the country as a high-performing agency that other states want to emulate.” (Of this claim, Sandalow says: “If that’s true, I think it’s sad.”)

In the two weeks since March 30, three children went missing on the 200 block of I Street SE, where CFSA is headquartered. In 2018 alone, according to a review of the Metropolitan Police Department’s missing persons bulletins, at least 12 missing children were last seen at that address, outside CFSA. Two weeks before the publication of this article, CFSA dissolved the Family Assessment and Investigation units, removing the distinction between clients whose families need more thorough investigating and those who need support services.

By the time this article publishes, CFSA will have also disbanded the special abuse unit, which was staffed with experts trained in sexual assault trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and victims services. Frontline workers will receive only one four-hour training session to fill this gap in expertise.

The agency is also creating a new unit of social workers who will specialize in educational neglect, and who CFSA will station at schools around the city. Caseworkers already employed by the agency will fill these positions.

“There’s a problem when you’re chasing the cutting edge and you never implement anything fully, so you don’t see the rewards of it,” Greene tells City Paper. “Child welfare, just like being a parent, is about consistency. If you establish a core set of ethics and standards for all your social workers, you don’t have to keep on chasing the new thing.”

For Donald, the “innovative practices” are a sign that the agency is on the up. “At this point, we know what we’re doing. We monitor ourselves, we have strong quality assurance practices. We have a data system we can rely on.” She tells City Paper that it is the agency’s position that there is “no value added” by the court monitor. She notes that the agency is in conversation with the plaintiff to exit the LaShawn lawsuit.

Creating, breaking, building up again— from the perch where Brenda Donald sits, it feels like movement. It could even be mistaken for progress.

CP City Paper produced this article with support from the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Farrah Skeiky

DCFEED

Gravitas is getting a rooftop cocktail bar from Matt Baker called The Conservatory this spring. It will have a giant glass greenhouse and a fully functioning garden.

Raw Nerve

Chef Ed Scarpone can fix what’s wrong in any kitchen. What happens when he’s diagnosed with a disease with no real cure?

By Laura Hayes “It felt lIke there was a rubber band around my arm,” Ed Scarpone remembers.

The 32-year-old culinary director of Schlow Restaurant Group was back at the doctor’s office in March 2018 following a harrowing episode the month before when he had trouble walking. He couldn’t get up the stairs or put on socks. His left foot started to drag. An aggressive course of steroids helped, but then his arm went numb.

A neurologist examined him. “He’s like, ‘Look up,’” Scarpone recalls. “I’m staring at the ceiling. Then he’s like, ‘Look down.’

There was a needle stuck in my leg. I hadn’t felt it. He had a pin and was dragging it up my leg and the bottom of my foot. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I couldn’t feel my leg at all. I was also having trouble speaking. My tongue was asleep. The doctor said, ‘We’re going to bring you in for an MRI now.’”

Scarpone’S culInary career started in Connecticut, when he chose an after school job at a bakery over one at Circuit City. “My dad kept telling me if you work at the bakery you’re going to wash dishes and clean pans,” Scarpone says. “I ended up baking, decorating cakes, waiting on customers, filling cannolis, the whole nine yards. I loved it.”

His parents had a difficult marriage and Scarpone eventually moved in with his Italian grandmother at age 16. She helped solidify his love of cooking.

After high school, he didn’t know if he could afford to attend culinary school and questioned whether it was the right path. “I always wanted to be a doctor or a social worker— something where I’d be helping people,” he says. “But my dad always told me you should do what you love and anything you do, you can find something that makes people happy. That stuck with me.”

Scarpone graduated from Johnson & Wales’ College of Culinary Arts. After a short stint cooking abroad, he moved to New

Darrow Montgomery

YOUNG & HUNGRY

York to work for restaurateur Daniel Boulud. Scarpone had interned with the French chef at DB Bistro during school and landed a full-time sous chef gig at another one of his restaurants, Café Boulud. That’s where he first met Alex Levin, a pastry cook who would eventually become his best friend. The two spent five intense months in the kitchen together.

“When I first met Ed, he was super talented and a little aggressive,” Levin says. “He was studious and at the same time, very much the teacher. It was clear he was a star in a way because he was so young and had so much responsibility.”

After five months at Cafe Boulud, Boulud promoted Scarpone into an executive sous chef position at DB Bistro, where the kitchen had lost its head chef. “I was the pinchhitter,” Scarpone explains. “That’s always been my specialty—being able to fix problems very quickly.”

Any time a big job opened up in Boulud’s company, Scarpone sought it out, including when Boulud opened a restaurant in D.C. In 2014, the restaurateur named Scarpone, then 26, executive chef of DBGB Kitchen + Bar in CityCenterDC. “I had only been to D.C. for an

eighth grade field trip,” he says. “All I remember is sneaking out of our hotel room and eating at the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Scarpone quickly gained the respect of other D.C. chefs while working at DBGB. But something was missing. “I always wanted a Michelin star,” he says. “That was a dream.

That’s something that can drive you to do just about anything crazy.” Boulud’s company didn’t have any open positions with starearning potential, so after almost a decade of working for the company, Scarpone gave six months notice and left DBGB in January 2017.

Scarpone then spent a year as executive chef of Fiola, Fabio Trabocchi’s Italian fine dining restaurant that earned its first Michelin star in 2016. It wasn’t the right fit, but it did lead to a fortuitous meeting.

Before Scarpone left, restaurateur Michael Schlow dined at Fiola at a time when Scarpone wasn’t in the kitchen. “The first thing I came away with was this team has a very good chef,” Schlow says. “The food was executed at a super high level without him being present.

That’s always impressive to me.”

Schlow hired Scarpone in January 2018.

“They were having issues at The Riggs-

by and wanted that restaurant to be reinvigorated and come back to where it was,” Scarpone explains. He successfully played the role of fixer again. The Riggsby landed the 56th spot on Washingtonian’s 2019 “100 Very Best Restaurants” list. Schlow also deployed Scarpone to up the quality at Tico and tapped him to open sushi restaurant Nama.

“He’s the guy that you want to send into battle, whether it’s a restaurant opening or ongoing operations,” Schlow says. “He’ll jump into whatever it is, head first, and won’t come up for air until it’s fixed.”

Scarpone likes rotating through restaurants. “You get to see a lot more people learn things and that’s always been my favorite part of the job,” he says. “Watching someone learn something whether with you or on their own is a pretty good feeling. In cooking, you get to do that every day.”

When the doctor returned with his MRI results, Scarpone learned he would face a challenge he’d never be able to fully conquer. He has multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease of the central nervous system that impacts the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves. It can be unpredictable and debilitating. “I wanted to throw up,” he says. “I sat in this room with a doctor I didn’t know telling me this diagnosis I didn’t want to hear.”

The news came on the heels of several heartbreaking years for Scarpone. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she’s still fighting; the grandmother who taught him how to cook died; and a close friend suffered a fatal heroin overdose.

According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the disease impacts about a million Americans. There are four different types of MS. Scarpone has the most common version, relapsing-remitting, which is characterized by episodic attacks followed by remissions. “Every time it comes it takes a little piece of you away that you can never get back,” he explains.

Scarpone’s doctors told him to avoid the internet. “The first thing I did was Google ‘Chefs with MS,’” he says. “I started reading about ev-

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DCFEED erybody and anybody that had this problem because I wanted to know if it’s possible to still be ‘regular.’”

He also turned to online support groups, where he says he encountered some strange people. “People will reach out to you and say, ‘I cured my MS by eating vegan,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘That’s not going to happen. Even if that’s the cure, I’m not eating vegan. Next.’”

Despite the pain, Scarpone hardly missed work. “When my right leg started to heal, the nerves started to fix themselves a little bit and it felt like my leg was in a pot of boiling water,” he says. “You can’t think, you can’t have a conversation, because all you’re thinking about is how much it hurts.”

Scarpone says his team at The Riggsby picked up whatever slack they needed to as the symptoms from his first major attack subsided. “Mollie was there every step of it,” Scarpone says. Mollie Moore, who’s now employed at Little Pearl, was the chef de cuisine at The Riggsby. She was one of the first to notice that Scarpone was frequently fatigued in February 2018 and seemed to have near constant doctor’s appointments.

Eventually Scarpone told Moore he had MS. Moore could empathize; she has an aunt with the disease. “There were some days that were harder than others,” she says. “I’d look at him at 9 p.m. and say, ‘You can go home. You don’t need to be here suffering in silence.’”

She remembers one particularly difficult day, when Scarpone was on the computer, hitting the refresh button waiting to hear back about lab results. He was hoping he didn’t have a specific type of bacteria present in his brain that would preclude him from taking a medication for MS that many patients find helpful.

The drug safeguards myelin sheaths, sleeves of fatty tissue that protect nerve cells. A friend of Scarpone’s with MS called it a miracle drug.

The results came back. He wasn’t eligible to take it.

“I put my arms around him and hugged him,” Moore says. “He started to tear up and I did too.” She tried to offer words of encouragement. “He is probably the strongest chef mentally and physically that I have ever met,” Moore says. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to persevere. I’m going to beat this. I am a chef. I use my hands. I use my feet. This disease isn’t going to take away who I am.’ He refuses to let it.”

While Scarpone busied himself in the kitchen, he couldn’t quiet his mind: “Could you be in a wheelchair in a kitchen? What if you needed crutches or a cane? Could you expedite without being able to hold a marker? You go deep down the rabbit hole.”

Two-thirds of people with MS can walk, though some need a cane or crutches. Others use a scooter or wheelchair. Possible symp-

toms, according to the NMSS, include fatigue, numbness, blurred vision, weakness, poor coordination, pain, depression, memory problems, tremors, paralysis, and blindness. “I remember having a conversation with Michael,” Scarpone says. “I was like, ‘How do you be a chef with no hands?’ He was like, ‘You could be a chef with no hands.’”

“There’s an intensity and a fire to be successful and that goes for anything Ed touches, including his illness,” Schlow says. “When I first found out it was devastating, but his tenacity, his positive approach, he was like ‘I’m going to be fine.’”

At Scarpone’s lowest moment, his emotions shifted from panic to jealousy. “You start looking at people asking, ‘Why is that guy normal?’ Then I have to remember that I look normal. No one can tell. Why am I jealous of everyone in the world because they’re normal? Everyone’s got something they’re fighting.”

Within a matter of months, Scarpone’s confidants began to notice a change. He and Levin were working at Tico during the 2018 Pride Parade when Levin started seeing shades of his old friend instead of the person he sat next to in the hospital. When they were back in New York in the fall, the pair traversed the city like old times.

“As fearful as he ever was, I never saw him feeling like this was going to be the end of him,” Levin says. “I see a lot of very tender moments, but I never saw a moment of true desperation save for a few in the initial moments.”

For a year, only Schlow, Levin, a handful of coworkers, Scarpone’s family, and his then-girlfriend knew he had MS. “I didn’t want to be looked at differently,” Scarpone explains. “What if in 10 years I go to get a job and someone digs up some article that was written about this and they say, ‘I’m not investing in him?’”

But he had a change of heart last month.

Scarpone posted the image from his MRI on Facebook that showed large brain lesions, along with a raw account of what had transpired. “Take a moment to realize that tomorrow is not promised,” he wrote in conclusion. “Spend time with the people you love.

Call your friends and catch up. Eat good food and drink good wine. Smile at the red light. Go out of your way to do something nice for someone.”

Now Scarpone cooks and waits, hoping the next attack doesn’t come at an inopportune time and doesn’t cause lasting damage. He celebrates the days that pass where he doesn’t even consider his disease.

CP Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to lhayes@washingtoncitypaper.com.

DCFEED

what we ate this week: Fried octopus, burrata, escarole, black olives, and chickpea purée panini, $14, Stellina Pizzeria. Satisfaction level: 3 out of 5.

GRAZER

what we’ll eat next week: Braised beef cheeks with peanut and fermented shrimp, $28, Kaliwa.

Excitement level: 4 out of 5.

NEW RESTAURANT MA+H

’WichingHour

Fried Italian food “Piccante” pies + — table service + paninis on pizza dough + Union Market

= Stellina Pizzeria, 399 Morse St. NE Capital Centre tributes + beachy cocktails — food + 365-degree views of Logan Circle

= Skybox, 1400 14th St. NW (opening April 15)

Indian fine dining + glitz + vegan “goat” biryani + masala chai-infused Scotch + Penn Quarter

A Baked Joint x corn dogs — a complicated drink “program” + art featuring famous Bettys + Mount Vernon Triangle

+ New York restaurateur Michael White + waterfront view + frozen Negronis

= La Betty, 420 K St. NW

= Nicoletta Pizzeria, 301 Water St. SE

Shaw — Smoked & Stacked + (grilled cheese sandwiches x wings x Schlitz) + So Others Might Eat fundraiser

= TallBoy, 1239 9th St. NW

= Punjab Grill, 427 11th St. NW

Veg Diner Monologues

Where to Get It: ELife inside Anacostia Arts Center, 1231 Good Hope Road SE; (301) 324-6900; eliferestaurant.com Price: $4.50 for an entrée-sized portion

The Story: ELife restaurant founder Dr.

Priya Konings

The Dish: Original Mac n Cheese

Mumbo chicken pizza

The Sandwich: The Bulgogi Hoagie Where: CHIKO, 2029 P St. NW Price: $14 Bread: White sandwich roll Stuffings: Bulgogi marinated beef, kim cheese whiz Thickness: 2.5 inches Pros: The CHIKO team has finally figured out a way to turn up the flavor of a cheesesteak, which can get quite boring after a few bites. A salty-sour combination of melted cheese and fermented cabbage cuts through the rich beef and makes your mouth pucker while you chew. Fortunately, the beef is tender enough that you won’t have to exhaust your masticating muscles.

Four-course tasting menu — huge price tag + barbecued carrots and cornbread ice cream + 14th Street NW + husband and wife team

= Rooster & Owl, 2436 14th St. NW What It Is: Elbow macaroni tossed in a smooth sauce made of chickpea milk, garlic, nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, and other seasonings, then baked and finished with paprika and fragrant dried herbs. Nutritional yeast is a magic ingredient that can infuse anything with the distinctive earthy flavor of cheese, while also supplying a host of minerals, vitamins, and amino acids. Enveloping the pasta in the nutritional yeast and creamy, protein-packed chickpea milk results in a baked pasta dish that is rich, velvety, and “cheesy.”

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

Caroline Jones

It’s hard to keep track of all the new restaurants opening in D.C. We’ve done the math so you know what to expect when you next head out to eat and drink.

—Laura Hayes

Baruch Ben-Yehudah grew concerned in the 1990s when he saw that families living in impoverished neighborhoods in the D.C. area lacked access to healthy dining options. Over the years he has opened three vegan restaurants, the most recent of which is in Anacostia. He serves vegan soul food to demonstrate that vegan fare can be hearty and satisfying. His original mac n cheese is a family recipe developed more than 20 years ago. It is, and always has been, the most popular dish at all of his restaurants.

Why Even Meat Eaters Will Like It: This mac n cheese tastes even better than the classic dairy version, and allows you to indulge without loading up on dairy.

The ingredients are flavorful and the dish is decadent, while still managing to be full of vital nutrients. —Priya Konings

Cons: Though it does come toasted, the sandwich roll is too soft for these ingredients. Within a few bites, the wet beef softens the hinge of the roll and the whole thing starts to disintegrate.

To make eating easier, these ingredients demand thicker bread or a roll that gets another trip through the toaster.

Sloppiness level (1 to 5): 5. The sandwich only contains two ingredients, but they’re wet ones, and a mushy roll won’t contain their mess very well. Prepare to lick melted cheese sauce off your fingers as soon as you dig in and keep a large stack of napkins handy.

Overall score (1 to 5): 4. D.C. is awash in fancy cheesesteaks right now, so the addition of kimchi makes CHIKO’s interpretation stand out in a sea of offerings.

The mess detracts from its quality, but maybe that’s part of its charm. Enjoy it late after a night of drinking or roll in early and use it as a hangover cure.

—Caroline Jones

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 19

CPARTS

D.C. is hiring an arts planner and other takeaways from the Cultural Plan. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

Turn Down For What The go-go community weighs in on the Metro PCS controversy.

By all accounts, Saturday was a near-perfect day in D.C.— warm and sunny, the cherry blossoms in peak bloom, and folks from every corner of the city emerging from their winter dormancy to welcome the start of spring. But at 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, something was missing: the sound of go-go cranking from the front of Central Communications (which is better known as Metro PCS because, as a licensed vendor of the wireless carrier, that’s what its storefront reads).

Julien Aisha was the first one to disseminate it: “I’m not a fan of gogo but the dudes down at Metro PCS on Georgia have stopped playing their music. Apparently, the new yt neighbors were complaining about the ‘noise’. Simply saying gentrification is sickening is an understatement,” she tweeted on Saturday night.

The tweet went viral, and the next morning she followed it up with another one asking people to use the hashtag “#DontMuteDC” to comment on the situation. By Monday morning, #DontMuteDC was trending on Twitter for the Washington, D.C. region, and Central Communications was at the center of a full-blown gentrification controversy: A resident at The Shay, the luxury apartment complex located across the street, complained about the go-go played on speakers just outside the store.

After unsuccessful efforts to shut down the music through local sound ordinances, the resident came at it through T-Mobile, which owns Metro PCS; TMobile then ordered shop owner Donald Campbell to bring the go-go inside.

Not surprisingly, the story has garnered tons of attention. It’s been covered by nearly every local outlet, including the Washington Post and DCist, which broke the story. Even national outlets are picking it up, like The Root, which ran a withering and hilarious piece headlined, “D.C. Fights Back Against Colonizers Who Want to Ban Go-Go Music from an Iconic City Corner.” Mayor Muriel Bowser chimed in, tweeting “I’m with you #DontMuteDC,” and encouraging people to sign a petition demanding that T-Mobile let the go-go play. Further complicating matters is the possibility that the music may create accessibility issues for the visually impaired at a nearby intersection.

But by Wednesday afternoon, the outrage reached its conclusion: T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted, “I’ve looked into this issue myself and the music should NOT stop in D.C.! @TMobile and @MetroByTMobile are proud to be part of the Shaw community - the music will go on and our dealer will work with the neighbors to compromise volume.” A 20 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

spokesperson for T-Mobile followed up with City Paper to confirm that their dealer “will work closely with the neighborhood to find a middle ground on volume.”

Central Communications is located in an area that has long been a center of D.C. culture. The nearby Howard Theatre was a popular go-go venue during the ’80s, as was the Masonic Temple on U Street, which hosted weekly performances by go-go founder Chuck Brown. Ben’s Chili Bowl situated up the street and the Florida Avenue Grill around the corner, another go-go venue, the Black Hole, was not far up Georgia Avenue NW. In the early ’90s, Rare Essence drummer Quentin “Footz” Davidson opened the Mack Attack Arcade, selling PA tapes on Florida Avenue NW. “I don’t know that there’s an area that has more D.C. flavor

“It’s very ironic that this particular dilemma happens to be taking place at a location that’s just steps away from the street named after Chuck Brown, and just blocks away from the street named after Little Benny,” notes TMOTTGOGO’s Kato Hammond.

This is, of course, hardly the first time the go-go community has felt violated by the conceits of developers and gentrifiers.

“It’s just draining at this point,” says D.C. native and go-go artist Michelle Blackwell. “The hue and cry about musicians playing downtown has been going on … with this noise ordinance that’s the excuse people have been using to get rid of our music. People playing instruments outside downtown and people playing our music on U Street, both have been going on for decades with no problems whatsoever.

“This particular issue is about people who are not familiar with our culture coming into a neighborhood that has been a certain way for decades and trying to shift our paradigm,” adds Blackwell.

“These people are not familiar with our culture and have no respect for it.”

Community organizer Ron Moten, who has been at the forefront of such high-profile battles as the Reeves Center’s Club U and PG County’s CB-18 Dance Hall Law, led efforts to help Campell, the owner of Central Communications, work out a solution amenable to T-Mobile.

(Campbell declined to comment for this story.)

“If he loses his contract with T-Mobile, he loses his livelihood,” notes Moten. “There’s been an attack on D.C. culture for some time now, and I guess some people are trying to take it to the finish line. But they need to understand that this is a marathon, and we’re not giving up.”

Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, whose book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City laid out the staggering effects of gentrification on the AfricanAmerican community, also helped Campbell to facilitate a solution with T-Mobile.

“This is a raw exercise in economic power and privilege that’s disgusting,” says Hopkinson. “This story’s been repeated over and over again in go-go with this intolerance towards the music, and you really can look at it as a metaphor for the black experience in D.C.” A resident of Bloomingdale, Hopkinson says she passes the shop daily. “I feel like I’ve been living this story for 20 years, and it keeps getting nasty. Right now, we’re seeing a nasty cold blast of intolerance and ignorance. It’s really a kind of violence because you start talking about black people in past tense,” she says.

By Tuesday afternoon, a petition to return go-go to Central Darrow Montgomery

By Alona Wartofsky and Matt Cohen

than that particular corridor,” says Team Familiar bandleader Donnell Floyd. “That corridor is running over with what I consider the soul of D.C.” That the Central Communications controversy unfolded in a historic go-go hub is painfully clear to the go-go community.

CPARTS Communications had more than 40,000 signatures, and Moten helped organized a rally in front of The Shay on Monday evening, drawing more than 100 people in support of Central Communications—including At-Large Councilmember Robert White and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau.

(Prior to the rally, Nadeau sent a letter to T-Mobile asking them to allow Campbell to continue playing go-go outside of the store).

On Tuesday evening, another go-go rally broke out on the northwest corner of 14th and U streets NW, drawing hundreds of people, including hometown hero Wale.

“To me, this is about preserving our culture,” says Moten.

“Everything we had has been taken away—the Unifest, the Caribbean Fest, and they’ve been trying to take go-go for the past 20 years. My thing is, this culture was here before you moved in. You all come to a vibrant city and expect it to be crickets.”

There is little doubt that the Central Communications altercation serves to clarify gentrification’s ugly cohort, racism.

“Gentrification has been going on for a while, but over the past few years, because of the new administration in the White House, there are a lot more less-than-progressive new people in our city than would be normally be here,” says Blackwell. “Not just the White House, both houses have been mainly Republican-controlled since 2009. We’ve got a lot of people in this area who are not progressive, and that sometimes translates to a racist attitude or they’re not known to be open to other cultures, especially African-American culture, and go-go is an AfricanAmerican centered culture.”

While intolerance for black culture may have increased

thanks to an influx of conservative federal employees, racist attitudes toward go-go are not new. “This culture has been targeted for quite a while, and that did not just come from whites,” notes Blackwell.

During the late ’80s, when the crack cocaine epidemic destroyed so many young lives, go-go was scapegoated by the media, politicians, and police unwilling or unable to explore the true causes of street violence. But in recent years, go-go has experienced a kind of renaissance, and now the music is frequently included in official events around town, from the 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the city’s annual Emancipation Day celebrations.

Which makes skirmishes such as this one particularly frustrating.

Lovail Long, whose play The Giz—a go-go adaptation of The Wizard of Oz—addressed gentrification head-on, is not surprised by the latest go-go vs. gentrification flare-up.

“These people complaining? That’s like going to New Orleans and telling them to stop performing jazz in the streets,” he says. “I think it’s people who don’t understand our culture, and it’s irritating them. I would tell them to come out and get to know some Washingtonians and learn what the music means to us. The new Washingtonians need to be ready to share the city.”

Local comedy improv group Da Partycrasherz appeared in The Giz; they also perform occasionally in front of Central Communications wearing comical outfits—complete with oversized pot bellies and splayed buck teeth—while flexing some very funny dance moves. Their viral videos have drawn tourists from as far afield as the U.K. “Go-Go is just a feel-good

entertainment that doesn’t have any negative impact on anybody,” says head ’crasher Terrell Brown. “If they were playing classical music, would these people take exception to it?”

Crank LuKongo’s Swamp Guinee, whose song “The Ghosts of Anacostia” describes historical displacement, compares the Central Communications controversy to new residents griping about the Sunday drumming in Malcolm X Park.

“It’s really about a sense of entitlement,” he says. “These drummers have been playing in Malcolm X Park for 50 some years … and now you have new people moving here, and they’re like ‘Nah, we don’t want this shit here.’ It’s like, ‘OK Christopher Columbus, you just gonna come and stick your flag in the ground and tell the natives that now you gotta take your culture elsewhere.’”

For Kwame Stoute, who took over Mack Attack Arcade from Footz, it’s important to remember that many D.C. residents value the joy of hearing go-go on city sidewalks.

“So many people come through that area, and that’s what they look forward to, listening to the music, and they stop by the store just to hear the music. It’s a neighborhood tradition that’s our culture,” he says. “I understand the area is changing, but there are certain things that you have to preserve.”

Others point out that not all transplants are dismissive of local culture. “I’m from Philadelphia where street performers, food trucks, and loud noises are appreciated,” says Ayanna Smith, who actually moved here for the culture. Now she works to promote local music.

“I just don’t know why anyone would move into an area or open a business in a location that doesn’t suit their needs, then complain,” she says. “For the life of me, I’ll never understand it.” CP

“Nothing less than extraordinary” Broadway World

“An understated protest play working hard to keep hope alive” Washington Post

“A blend of infectious humor, audiovisual spectacle, and stunning statistics” DC Theatre Scene

WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY LIZA JESSIE PETERSON DIRECTED BY TALVIN WILKS

NOW PLAYING THRU APRIL 20

WOOLLY MAMMOTH THEATRE COMPANY WOOLLYMAMMOTH.NET // 202-393-3939

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washingtoncitypaper.com april4/9/19 12, 2019 21 5:30 PM

ARTS DESK

THE SCENE REPORT For one ecosystem of D.C. producers, DJs, and MCs, the connections continue to multiply. —Joe Warminsky

Max D, Many Any 1432 R

As D.C.’s underground dance, noise, hip-hop, and R&B scenes continue to overlap and blur, one of the pivotal people is Max D, the producer/DJ with many other aliases and one given name, Andrew Field-Pickering. His Future Times label has branched out to include singles by young D.C. vocalists—Nappy Nappa, Dreamcast, and Sir E.U—over the past year or so, and his semi-secret pop-up record store in Mount Pleasant is a good place to bump into various characters. He’s still cranking out high-quality solo records regularly, too, of course. Many Any, his latest, also happens to be the first full-length LP on 1432 R, another D.C. label that serves as a node for beat-driven artistry. On this one, Max is all about getting from a busy-busy point A (the rugged album-opener “I Think Our Souls Are Other People”) to a cooled-out point B (the new-jack “Cuz Its The Way”). Even the field recordings (“Boo Sneeze,” “Snow Melting”) have rhythm. And don’t forget about Beautiful Swimmers, Field-Pickering’s DJ duo with Ari Goldman (who runs his own label, World Building). They’ll be spinning April 13 at U Street Music Hall as part of the DMV Deep party.

RIYL: Bobbing your head on multiple planes.

Model Home, model home 6 Self-Released

Similarly prolific is Nappy Nappa, the D.C. rapper/vocalist who inspires the occasional mosh pit and has no fear of an experimental music venue like Rhizome. He and digital-fuzzbomb wizard Pat Cain started their wild-and-wool-

ly Model Home project in the middle of 2018, and they’ve now self-released a half dozen albums on Bandcamp. The latest, model home 6, is almost sweet, if that adjective even applies to collaborations that fuse loudly decaying beats with off-the-cuff verbalizations. Nappa sounds fearless here, as if whatever monster awaits around the corner is just another potential listener. Cain, meanwhile, keeps the pot ever-bubbling.

RIYL: MCs at the edge of panic.

Jeremy Hyman, FT048A Future Times

If you’re new to the Future Times catalog, the latest 12-inch single from Jeremy Hyman is as good an entry point as any. There are 4/4 dance rhythms, but the real joy is in the accents; Hyman is a percussionist at heart, and he also pulls a weird warmth from synths.

The record is titled FT048A, and a B companion is on the way soon, Future Times says.

RIYL: Polyrhythms and dub echoes.

22 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Abby Cruz

CPARTS

Hundreds gathered at Malcolm X Park last week to honor slain rapper Nipsey Hussle. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

2019 NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert

Hosted by Jason Moran, Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz

Take Metrobus and Metrorail to the...

Tickets at dcjazzfest.org | @dcjazzfest

Stanley Crouch

Bob Dorough

Abdullah Ibrahim

Maria Schneider

JUNE 14 – 16, 2019

DC JAZZFEST AT THE WHARF 901 WHARF ST., SW at The Wharf

SNARKY PUPPY

JON BAPTISTE

Monday, April 15 at 8 p.m. | Concert Hall The National Endowment for the Arts honors the 2019 NEA Jazz Masters—Stanley Crouch, Bob Dorough, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Maria Schneider—with a free concert by leading jazz artists.

JOSÉ JAMES

BRASS-A-HOLICS

FOR ARTISTS AND COMPLETE SCHEDULE, VISIT DCJAZZFEST.ORG PRESENTING SPONSOR

PLATINUM SPONSORS

GOLD SPONSORS

SILVER SPONSORS

The Washington Post is the official media sponsor of DC JazzFest at The Wharf

The DC Jazz Festival®, a 501(c)(3) non-profit service organization, and its 2019 programs are made possible, in part, with major grants from the Government of the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, Mayor; with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; the Office of Cable Television, Film, Music & Entertainment; the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development; and, in part, by major grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Galena-Yorktown Foundation, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, Wells Fargo Foundation, Gillon Family Charitable Fund, the NEA Foundation, Venable Foundation, The Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts, The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, and the Reva & David Logan Foundation. ©2019 DC Jazz Festival. All rights reserved.

Reservations for this event are filled and have closed. Tickets will be available the night of the concert on a first-come, first-served basis to those in a giveaway line. Patrons are encouraged to arrive from 5:30–7:45 p.m. to receive tickets that become available.

Kennedy-Center.org (202) 467-4600

Groups call (202) 416-8400 For all other ticket-related customer service inquiries, call the Advance Sales Box Office at (202) 416-8540

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 23

FILMSHORT SUBJECTS

WHAT THE HELL? Hellboy

Directed by Neil Marshall

DOWNGRADE FOR TV The Chaperone

Directed by Michael Engler With 20 years of prestige television now in our rear view mirror, the line between the silver screen and the small screen may be larger than it appears. Sure, TV shows are routinely described as “cinematic,” and the biggest blockbusters are just episodes in long-running franchises. But there is one surefire way to remind yourself of the difference: Watch a TV show in a movie theater and see how tiny it looks.

That’s what you’ll get if you pony up to see The Chaperone, a scrawny PBS Masterpiece film that would likely be far more grand were it viewed in your living room. Shot on cheap digital video that makes 1920s New York look like a reality show, its only value as a cinematic experience is as a test balloon for the Downton Abbey movie to be released later this year. The Chaperone was adapted by Julian Fellowes, who created the BBC series, from a bestselling book; directed by Michael Engler, a veteran TV director who helmed five episodes; and stars Elizabeth McGovern, better known Abbey’s Cora Crawley, as the title character.

The Chaperone seems designed to appeal only to PBS’ regular audience. The logline will tell you it’s about the early days of silent film star Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson), who first came to New York from her home in Kansas in the early 1920s to attend dancing school. I’d like to see that movie. This one bizarrely focuses on Norma, her unremarkable middle-aged chaperone who takes the thankless job of supervising Louise to escape a bad marriage and find some answers about her

family history while in New York.

As played by McGovern, Norma comes off as cartoonishly prudish. Her voice quavers with timidity, and her wide eyes seem to be constantly on the verge of tears. It is a stark contrast to Louise, brimming with sexuality and youthful confidence. As Louise seeks to get to know the young men they encounter on their travels, Norma scowls like Miss Daisy on her way to the Piggly Wiggly and utters risible dialogue such as “Nobody wants a candy that is already unwrapped.”

The script by Fellowes aims for a character study of Norma, but its approach is too scattershot to be effective. We learn about the troubles in her marriage through a series of contrived flashbacks featuring an illicit affair of her husband’s (a wasted Campbell Scott). Meanwhile, her attempts to discover her birth parents—she was adopted from a New York orphanage—features a revelation that arrives without warning and departs just as quickly. You never quite know what Norma’s story is about, and McGovern’s performance is hardly compelling enough for that not to matter.

There are a few moments of real emotion in The Chaperone—her reunion with a family member is affecting as a standalone scene— but the film pays such little attention to its relationships that they never achieve any cumulative power. Norma’s romance with a German janitor is laughably underwritten, and even her relationship with Louise, purportedly the central and most important one in the film, never rises above that indicated in the title.

They never become friends or sisters. To the end, she remains only the fussy chaperone to a wild child, a relationship so impersonal it hardly deserves its own movie. A TV show, maybe.

—Noah Gittell The Chaperone opens Friday at Landmark’s E Street Cinema.

24 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

H e l l b oy opens on a broody, slate-tinged scene. A voiceover tells us that it’s “517 AD, known as the Dark Ages— and for fucking good reason.”

There’s a conflict involving one Blood Queen and King Arthur.

He not only decapitates her but chops her into pieces and buries each piece in a separate casket. Considering the Blood Queen is immortal, this seems only a minor inconvenience. Why Arthur has a beef with her is anyone’s guess.

Cut to present-day Tijuana, and the story doesn’t get much clearer. Our antihero, Hellboy (David Harbour), is driving a beatup pickup truck on his way to a lucha libre match to try to find an old friend of his. He’s on the phone with Dad, or “Da-had,” who urges him to forget about the guy. After accidentally smashing his phone in an attempt to hang up—the downside of having a Right Hand of Doom—Hellboy finds his friend,

who turns out to be a winged beast of some sort, and kills him. But first a warning: “The end is coming.”

It can’t come soon enough. Neil Marshall’s Hellboy reboot is dumber, muddier, and exceedingly duller than Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 original, crippled by a juvenile, curseladen script by first-time screenwriter Andrew Cosby (based on the graphic novels of

Mike Mignola) as well as a miscast leading demon. There’s no other way of saying this: Harbour, an Emmy-nominated actor, looks and sounds like a meathead with long, greasy hair half-tied into a man bun, eyes “yellow as piss,” and a propensity to whine, mostly to his father, Professor Broom (Ian McShane).

He can’t get past the idea that Dad didn’t kill him when Hellboy first arrived in this realm, considering his destiny as the king of hell.

And he goes on and on about it throughout the film.

Hellboy fights his fair share of adversaries throughout, with Marshall (The Descent) attempting to inject some life into the battles with hair-metal songs such as Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” and a Spanish version of “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” But minus a strong storyline, the villains seem random, from giants to talking pig-men to a grotesque, skull-y witch named Baba Yaga. (“You’ve been eating children!” Hellboy says to her, apropos of nothing.)

But Hellboy’s main rival is Nimue (Milla Jovovich), the Blood Queen. She’s upset about having been dissected and buried and wants revenge on… someone, or many someones. The more the better? Contrary to Hellboy’s feelings about her, she insists that they belong together. He tells her, “It’s not going to work, because I’m a Capricorn and you’re fucking nuts!” (Also not working: The script’s humor.) Suddenly there’s a plague in Great Britain, which continues the film’s propensity for bloody carnage at the expense of storytelling. It seems Nimue is behind it, but you

never can tell.

Hellboy is ultimately little more than a string of brawls and bad jokes, a far cry from del Toro’s charming, witty take on the boy from hell. It ends with the threat of a sequel, an idea that’s as evil as the devil himself.

—Tricia Olszewski Hellboy opens Friday at theaters everywhere.

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE

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Experience the animated French movie accompanied by the Oscarnominated score performed live!

riamsporchfest2019.eventbrite.com

STRATHMORE.ORG |

On the Red Line

the cato institute presents its inaugural art exhibition

Freedom Art as the Messenger

Curated by Harriet Lesser and June Linowitz • Art exhibition free and open to the public April 11, 2019–June 14, 2019 • Monday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m Freedom means something different to every person, yet its value is a common bond between Americans.

In these polarized times, Freedom: Art as the Messenger aims to provide a unifying platform of civility and creativity. Artists from across the country—in a wide range of media—share innovative and thoughtprovoking perspectives on freedom and the enduring need for its protection.

For a preview of artworks and related events visit cato.org/artmessenger Pictured: Liberty III (Nothing Is Inevitable) by Diana Zipeto for private tours and questions: exhibition@cato.org # artmessenger • cato.org/artmessenger 1 0 0 0

massachusetts avenue, nw

•

washington,

dc

2 0 0 0 1

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 25

CITYLIST

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

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

Tix @ Ticketmaster.com 800-745-3000

Apr 11

Music 27 Theater 31 Film 32

Music

14 18

CITY LIGHTS: FRIDAY

19

FRIDAY CLASSICAL

MARTIN BARRE Celebrates 50 Years Of JETHRO TULL feat. Dee Palmer, Martin Barre, Clive Bunker

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Average White Band. 7:30 p.m. $55. birchmere.com.

HIP-HOP

27

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Robert Glasper Trio featuring Chris Dave & Derrick Hodge with DJ Jahi Sundance. 7:30 p.m. $55–$70. citywinery.com.

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

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

Yacht Rock Revue. 8 p.m. $20.50–$25.50. thehamiltondc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Hand Habits. 9 p.m. $5–$7. songbyrddc.com.

WORLD

MILKBOY ARTHOUSE 7416 Baltimore Ave, College Park. DakhaBrakha. 8 p.m. $10–$30. milkboyarthouse.com.

SATURDAY FUNK & R&B

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Average White Band. 7:30 p.m. $55. birchmere.com.

JAZZ

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Monty Alexander. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $40–$45. bluesalley.com.

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Steve Tyrell. 8 p.m. $28–$40. citywinery.com.

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

Maysa. 8 p.m. $49.50–$85. thehowardtheatre.com.

POP

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487. Olivia O’Brien. 6:30 p.m. $20–$25. unionstage.com.

ROCK

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Lifehouse. 8 p.m. $38. fillmoresilverspring.com.

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

Moonshine Society. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc.com.

Comedy!

22

FUNK & R&B

ROCK

THEfeaturing DRAMATICS L.J. Reynolds

"Deuce Bigalow", "SNL"!

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COOLIDGE AUDITORIUM First Street and Independence Avenue SE. (202) 7075507. Jerusalem Quartet. 8 p.m. Free. loc.gov.

MONTPELIER ARTS CENTER 9652 Muirkirk Road, Laurel. (301) 377-7800. Cyrille Aimée. 8 p.m. $25. arts. pgparks.com.

THE CHURCH

"Starfish" 30th Anniversary Tour

ROB SCHNEIDER

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

Swampcandy. 10:30 p.m. Free. thehamiltondc.com.

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Monty Alexander. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $40–$45. bluesalley.com.

SGGL & THE SHERPAS

20

BLUES

JAZZ

LIZZ WRIGHT

CLEVE FRANCIS

29&30

DANCE FOR ALL

May 1

The Washington Ballet’s mainstage season may have ended in early April, but the dancers aren’t on summer break just yet. For the first time in the company’s 40-year history, the dancers will spend the last four weeks of their contracts getting paid to put on a series of free performances, classes, and demos across the District. Dance for All, an attempt to make the local troupe more visible in the community, kicks off Friday with performances at The Plaza at CityCenterDC called District of Joy. Grab some gelato and follow the dancers through D.C.’s shiniest shopping and dining playground. The company will do an hour’s worth of choreography, created by company members and teachers, in short spurts from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and repeat the spectacle every Friday through May 3. Other highlights of Dance for All include free classes for ages 3 through adult at The Washington Ballet’s Northwest and Southeast campuses, shows and storytimes at the Hirshhorn Museum, and barre classes at City Winery. Work those abs for free, then buy your own booze! The show begins at 6 p.m. at CityCenterDC, 10th and H streets NW. Free.

(202) 362-3606. washingtonballet.org/dance-for-all.

—Rebecca J. Ritzel

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

(703) 237-0300. Todd Rundgren. 8 p.m. $55–$60. thestatetheatre.com.

SUNDAY CLASSICAL

KENNEDY CENTER TERRACE THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. The Kennedy Center Chamber Players. 2 p.m. $36. kennedy-center.org.

PHILLIPS COLLECTION 1600 21st St. NW. (202) 3872151. Daniel Hope and Vanessa Perez. 4 p.m. $5–$45. phillipscollection.org.

HIP-HOP

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Queen Latifah. 8 p.m. $59–$199. kennedy-center.org.

JAZZ

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Monty Alexander. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $40–$45. bluesalley.com.

KENNEDY CENTER EISENHOWER THEATER 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Jason Moran and Alicia Hall

8 Five City Live East Coast Tour 2019

BEAR BROOK PODCAST A PODCAST ABOUT A COLD CASE THAT MAY JUST CHANGE HOW MURDERS ARE INVESTIGATED...FOREVER

FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE PUBLIC RADIO

10

13

ROCK BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. SGGL and The Sherpas. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com.

An Evening with

ZOE KEATING 2 DELBERT McCLINTON 3 NAJEE 6 TERRY REID & The Cosmic American Derelicts

Sam MAC McANALLY Morrow

GARY TAYLOR

11

Moran: Two Wings. 8 p.m. $29–$69. kennedy-center.org.

INCOGNITO with special guest MAYSA

An Evening with

GORDON LIGHTFOOT '80 Years Strong Tour'

14&15

DAMIEN ESCOBAR 'Elements of Love Tour'

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Los Lonely Boys with The Gary Douglas Band. 8 p.m. $40–$55. citywinery.com.

16

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

(703) 237-0300. Todd Rundgren. 6 p.m. $55–$60. thestatetheatre.com.

17

NRBQ & SKIP CASTRO BAND

MONDAY

18

MACEO PARKER

19

JONATHAN BUTLER

20

STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES

CLASSICAL CLARICE SMITH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER Stadium Drive and Route 193, College Park. (301) 405-2787.

Chamber Music Showcase. 7 p.m. Free. theclarice.umd.edu.

WHINE DOWN

with Jana

Kramer & Mike Caussin

Desperado’s/Wax Museum Reunion

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 27

CITY LIGHTS: SATURDAY

THE TEXAN AND THE BORDER LEGION

TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

DIANA ROSS JUN 27

LIONEL RICHIE ALL THE HITS

JUL 15

Before Fay Wray became the iconic beauty who killed the beast in King Kong, she faced a more human-sized beau in the form of Gary Cooper.

In the 1930 Western The Texan, Wray stars as Consuelo, who falls for an outlaw they call The Llano Kid (Cooper), who pretends to be an elderly woman’s long-lost son in order to collect an inheritance. In the heart of the Great Depression, the movie’s moral dilemma played like a fantasy: What would you do for bread?

Just six years later Cooper would play the flipside of this role in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in which he legitimately inherits a fortune but doesn’t really want it. The film screens with The Border Legion, another Fay Wray Western from 1930. These movies aren’t streaming anywhere, so go support your local repertory theater, especially when they program a 35mm double bill like this. The screenings begin at 11 a.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. $8–$10. (301) 495-6700. afi.com/silver.

—Pat Padua

CITY LIGHTS: SUNDAY HERBIE HANCOCK KAMASI WASHINGTON

STING

AUG 26–28

JUL 30

BOBBY BROWN & BELL BIV DeVOE

RINGO STARR & HIS ALL-STARR BAND

SWV

JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA WITH WYNTON MARSALIS

RBRM - 4 THE LOVE OF IT TOUR JUN 2

LAKE STREET DIVE THE WOOD BROTHERS JUN 8

BIG HEAD TODD AND THE MONSTERS TOAD THE WET SPROCKET THE POSIES JUN 30

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE SWAN LAKE

AUG 10 + 11

AUG 16

TONY BENNETT AUG 17

UB40

FEATURING ALI CAMPBELL & ASTRO

SHAGGY SEP 1

JUL 11–13

Now in its seventh year, Damaged City Fest is an opportunity to catch some of the best punk and hardcore bands in the world but not always the most broadly recognizable.

And yet if the D.C. scene is good for anything, it’s the fullthroated embrace of the niche and esoteric. Of all the excellent options to choose from, I’m most excited about Philadelphia’s Devil Master. Similar to Lodi, New Jersey’s famous sons the Misfits, the band’s aesthetic is Transylvania by way of I-95, with its pancake makeup feeling like it was applied in a Wawa bathroom. Musically, Devil Master are an unholy marriage of black metal a la early Bathory and the dour spookiness of Christian Death-like punk. The melodic guitar tones on their first proper full length, Satan Spits on Children of Light, recently released on Relapse Records, has just enough acidic melody to provide a lasting impression. Devil Master perform at 4 p.m. at Hole in the Sky, 2110 5th St. NE. $10. holeintheskydc.com.

—Matt Siblo

JAZZ

BRUCE HORNSBY & THE NOISEMAKERS AMOS LEE JUL 24

DEVIL MASTER

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. 2019 NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert. 8 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

Premier Sponsor 2019 Summer Season

ROCK

WARNER THEATRE 513 13th St. NW. (202) 783-4000.

Dream Theater. 8 p.m. $47.50. warnertheatredc.com.

WORLD

MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Caetano, Moreno, Zeca and Tom Veloso. 8 p.m. $45–$85. strathmore.org.

28 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

TUESDAY FUNK & R&B

ROCK & ROLL HOTEL 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-7625.

Durand Jones & The Indications. 8 p.m. $15. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487. The Dip. 8 p.m. $15–$30. unionstage.com.

GO-GO CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. EU (Experience Unlimited) featuring Sugar Bear. 8 p.m. $25. citywinery.com.

Merriweather Post Pavilion • Columbia, MD JUST ANNOUNCED!

PITBULL

................................................................................. JULY 11

MORRISSEY

On Sale Friday, April 12 at 10am

Ella Vos w/ Clara Mae ............................................................................ Th APR 11 ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Turkuaz w/ Aqueous ...................................................................................... F 12

M3 ROCK FESTIVAL FEATURING

AEG PRESENTS

Adam Conover- Mind Parasite LIVE Early Show! 6pm Doors .......................... Sa 13 U STREET MUSIC HALL PRESENTS

Droeloe w/ FYTCH • DUSKUS • TAILS Late Show! 10pm Doors ......................... Sa 13 ALL GOOD PRESENTS

The Claypool Lennon Delirium w/ Uni .................................................. W 17 APRIL

MAY (cont.)

Ex Hex w/ The Messthetics & Clear Channel ...........................F 10

ALL GOOD PRESENTS AN EVENING WITH

Lotus .............................F 19 & Sa 20 Tom Odell w/ Lucie Silvas Early Show! 6pm Doors ....................Sa 20 Ryan Bingham w/ Americans .Su 21 Rival Sons w/ The Sheepdogs ... M 22 Jon Hopkins .............................W 24 Blue October w/ Mona ............Th 25 Hot In Herre: 2000s Dance Party

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

The Devil Makes Three w/ DiTrani Brothers ..................Sa 11 Bear’s Den w/ Vera Sola .........Su 12 Architects w/ Thy Art is Murder

& While She Sleeps ....................Tu 14

Jim James (of My Morning Jacket) w/ Amo Amo

with DJs Will Eastman and Ozker, Visuals by Kylos .......................Sa 27

Two-Night Pass available ......F 17 & Sa 18

STEEZ PROMO PRESENTS

Andrea Gibson w/ Megan Falley .........................Tu 30

Parachute w/ Billy Raffoul .........W 1 MISSIO w/ Blackillac & Swells ...Th 2 The Strumbellas w/ The Moth & The Flame ..............F 3 Delta Rae Early Show! 6pm Doors ..Sa 4 Higher Brothers Late Show! 10:30pm Doors..................Sa 4 Son Volt w/ Ian Noe ...................Su 5 The Dandy Warhols w/ Cosmonauts & The Vacant Lots . M 6

9:30 CUPCAKES

and Mick Brown • Extreme • Warrant • Skid Row and more! ..MAY 3-5 For a full lineup and more info, visit M3rockfest.com

Slayer w/ Lamb of God • Amon Amarth • Cannibal Corpse ................................... MAY 14 DC101 KERFUFFLE FEATURING

Greta Van Fleet • Young The Giant • The Revivalists • Tom Morello • SHAED • THE Blue Stones ................................................. MAY 19

Florence + The Machine * w/ Blood Orange ................................. JUNE 3 CAPITAL JAZZ FEST FEATURING

Gladys Knight • BabyFace • Gregory Porter • Kem and more! ..... JUNE 7-9 For a full lineup, visit capitaljazz.com.

Brandi Carlile w/ Lucius ........................................................................ JUNE 14 Willie Nelson & Family and Alison Krauss w/ Lukas Nelson (A Star is Born) ............................................................... JUNE 19 Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit & Father John Misty w/ Jade Bird ............................................................................................................ JUNE 21

Phish ........................................................................................................ JUNE 22 & 23 Thomas Rhett w/ Dustin Lynch • Russell Dickerson • Rhett Akins ............. JULY 18 Third Eye Blind & Jimmy Eat World * w/ Ra Ra Riot ..... JULY 19 CHRYSALIS AT MERRIWEATHER PARK

LORD HURON w/ Bully ....................................................................JULY 23

Superorganism w/ Simpson ..Tu 21 Chromatics w/ Desire • In Mirrors •

311 & Dirty Heads w/ The Interrupters • Dreamers • Bikini Trill .......... JULY 27 Train/Goo Goo Dolls * w/ Allen Stone ...........................................AUGUST 9

Tess Roby .....................................W 22

No Scrubs: ‘90s Dance Party

with DJs Will Eastman & Ozker, Visuals by Kylos .........................F 24 U STREET MUSIC HALL PRESENTS

CloZee w/ Bluetech & Choppy Oppy (live) .Sa 25 & FINAL NIGHT ADDED! FIRST TWO NIGHTS SOLD OUT! THIRD

Betty Who w/ Loote .................Th 30 The Distillers w/ Starcrawler ..F 31

MANY MORE SHOWS ON SALE!

Whitesnake • Dokken with original members Don Dokken, George Lynch,

Late Show! 10:30pm Doors ..............Sa 18

The Floozies

MAY

Interpol ...................................... SEPTEMBER 5

w/

THIS WEEK’S SHOWS

930.com

The best thing you could possibly put in your mouth Cupcakes by BUZZ... your neighborhood bakery in Alexandria, VA. | www.buzzonslaters.com

Ticketmaster • For full lineup & more info, visit merriweathermusic.com • impconcerts.com *Presented by Live Nation

Lincoln Theatre • 1215 U Street, NW Washington, D.C. JUST ANNOUNCED!

WASHINGTON, DC INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Echo in the Valley Film and Concert

A film about the birth/influence of the Laurel Canyon music scene followed by a live performance featuring Jakob Dylan, Cat Power, and Jade Castrinos ........................................ SAT APRIL 27 On Sale Now! THIS TUESDAY!

Spiritualized ............................APR 16 Yann Tiersen (Solo In Concert) .........................MAY 24

THIS WEDNESDAY!

Citizen Cope .............................APR 17 D NIGHT ADDED!

9:30 CLUB PRESENTS AT U STREET MUSIC HALL

Strand of Oaks w/ Tyler Ramsey .................. Th APR 11 Foreign Air w/ Honors ..................F 12 Terror Jr w/ Kossisko .................. M 15 The Wild Reeds w/ Valley Queen ...Tu 16

Telekinesis w/ SONTALK ..............W 17 Escort w/ Del Florida ...................Th 18 Tennyson w/ Sam Bekt ..................F 19 Against The Current w/ Chapel & GucciHighWaters ...........Sa 20

FIRST NIGHT SOLD OUT! SECON

Imogen Heap with special guest

AN EVENING WITH

Apocalyptica Plays Metallica By Four Cellos Tour .MAY 28

AN EVENING WITH

Glen Hansard ...........................JUN 3 Corinne Bailey Rae .............. JUL 30 Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band w/ Penny & Sparrow ............MAY 17 Joey Coco Diaz ..........................AUG 9 Chromeo (Live Band) .............MAY 19 Tinariwen ................................... SEP 19 Guy Sigsworth of Frou Frou ............... MAY 4

• thelincolndc.com • U Street (Green/Yellow) stop across the street!

• Buy advance tickets at the 9:30 Club box office • 930.com

TICKETS for 9:30 Club shows are available through TicketFly.com, by phone at 1-877-4FLY-TIX, and at the 9:30 Club box office.

9:30 CLUB BOX OFFICE HOURS are 12-7pm on weekdays & until 11pm on show nights, 6-11pm on Sat, and 6-10:30pm on Sun on show nights.

HAPPY HOUR DRINK PRICES impconcerts.com AFTER THE SHOW AT THE BACK BAR!

PARKING: THE OFFICIAL 9:30 parking lot entrance is on 9th Street, directly behind the 9:30 Club. Buy your advance parking tickets at the same time as your concert tickets!

930.com washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 29

THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE BAND WA S H I N G T O N , D . C .

CITY LIGHTS: MONDAY

Colonel Don Schofield, Commander and Conductor

2019 ConcertBand F R E E CO N C E R T!

Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria Campus internationally-acclaimed saxophonist

Joe Lulloff

APRIL 18 AT 8 P.M.

for FREE tickets, please visit: www.usafband.eventbrite.com VALET & SECURE PARKING aVAILABLE

* BECOME A CITY WINERY VINOFILE MEMBER *

EXCLUSIVE PRESALE ACCESS, WAIVED SERVICE FEES, complimentary valet & MORE! APR 13

APR 14

APR 16

EU

APR 17

briclyn Ent. Presents

Jimmy Webb

Steve Tyrell

Los Lonely Boys w/ The Gary Douglas Band

(Experience Unlimited) featuring Sugar Bear

ft. Maimouna Youssef, Muhsinah & Carvin Higgins

APR 18

APR 18

APR 19

APR 20

APR 20

in the wine garden

Over The Rhine

Donna The Buffalo

Tracy Hamlin

black alley

w/ leigh nash

APR 21

APR 22

APR 22

APR 23

APR 25

CeCe Peniston

Luke James Shaffer

Just Jokes & Notes

Jane Monheit

Zepparella

w/ Robin Spielberg

Crush Your Craft

LOW TICKET ALERT!

Bhi Bhiman

For more than 250 years, China’s last dynasty remained sequestered away within the Forbidden City of Beijing, the daily lives of its inhabitants unknown to those outside the palace walls.

Almost a century after the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum opened to the public in 1925, the Sackler Gallery is displaying the art and objects of the Qing empresses in Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912. Official royal portraits, gorgeous robes, and Buddhist sutras tell not only a story of privilege and excess, but also one of agency––these five women were much more than the “primary wives” of the emperor and imperial princes. Although their gender restricted access to power, these empresses still enjoyed the honorary title of “Mother of the State,” and often played politically savvy roles in court. Through the empresses’ embroidered garments, jewelry, and other symbols, Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912 offers us the chance to understand the opulent intricacies of their world. The exhibition is on view to June 23 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. Free. (202) 633-1000. freersackler.si.edu.

—Amy Guay

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

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

APR 11

EMPRESSES OF CHINA’S FORBIDDEN CITY, 1644–1912

an evening with

w/ sydney franklin in the wine garden

A Musical Monday

in the wine garden

IN AN EFFORT TO SHOW APPRECIATION TO OUR READERS, WE ARE OFFERING

15% OFF TICKETS WITH THE CODE ‘cpcwdc’

EXCLUSIVELY FOR WASHINGTON CITY PAPER READERS. OFFER VALID 4.11.19 - 4.18.19.

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

30 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

CITY LIGHTS: TUESDAY

TOMMY GENESIS

At first glance, the cover of Tommy Genesis’ self-titled debut album—a cool-toned Photoshop of the singersongwriter about to kiss her doppelgänger—is a Gen Z, male gazey vision of sapphic lust, like Tanya Chalkin’s “The Kiss” or that scene in Cruel Intentions before it. But like most things with the Canadian artist, there’s more below the surface. In this case, the photo is a nod to a scene from ’90s cult classic Aeon Flux, and represents the dualities of Genesis’ persona and art. “I would say the more rap, faster, darker stuff is Tommy. And where the more vulnerable, poppy stuff is more Genesis,” she told Uproxx last year. There are plenty of both on her album, a melange of pop, hiphop, R&B, dancehall, and club music in which she half-raps, half-sings her lyrics. Her songs are brimming with sensuality and sexuality, but duality is at play here, too, whether she’s embracing it (with the breathy, ragged moans of “Daddy”) or turning it on its head (the xylophone lullaby of “Naughty”). And like the rap weirdos of Awful Records with whom she cut her teeth, or collaborators Charli XCX and Empress Of, Tommy Genesis is remaking pop in her own image. Tommy Genesis performs at 8 p.m. at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. $15. (202) 483-5000. dc9.club. —Chris Kelly

STUDENT SHOWCASE:

My aMeriCa

CITY LIGHTS: WEDNESDAY

STRIKING IRON: THE ART OF AFRICAN BLACKSMITHS

HIP-HOP DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Tommy Genesis. 8 p.m. $15. dcnine.com.

POP SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. MorMor. 8 p.m. $20–$22. songbyrddc.com.

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

Spiritualized. 8 p.m. $35. thelincolndc.com.

WEDNESDAY HIP-HOP

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Briclyn Ent. Presents Crush Your Craft feat. Maimouna Youssef, Muhsinah & Carvin Higgins. 7:30 p.m. $20. citywinery.com.

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

Citizen Cope. 8 p.m. $45. thelincolndc.com.

Fri & Sat, Apr 12 & 13 at Midnight!

555 11th Street NW Washington, DC 20004 • (202) 783-9494

FEATURING LIVE SHADOW CAST SONIC TRANSDUCERS!

!

MAY 19 H G U O ED THR EXTEND

ELECTRONIC

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

CharlestheFirst. 10:30 p.m. $17–$20. ustreetmusichall.com.

FOLK

BARNS AT WOLF TRAP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. Stephen Kellogg. 8 p.m. $25–$35. wolftrap.org.

Grand

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Bhi Bhiman. 8 p.m. $15. citywinery.com.

Hotel The Musical

JAZZ

BLUES ALLEY 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Arturo Sandoval. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $55–$70. bluesalley.com.

ROCK

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Hatebreed. 6:30 p.m. $25. fillmoresilverspring.com.

A non-stop toast to the style, decadence and intrigue of the 1920s

WORLD BOSSA BISTRO 2463 18th St NW. 202-667-0088.

Kaleta & Super Yamba Band. 8:30 p.m. $10. bossadc.com.

THURSDAY COUNTRY

THE ANTHEM 901 Wharf St. SW. (202) 888-0020.

Kenny Chesney. 7 p.m. $125–$499. theanthemdc.com.

Theater

THE BECKETT TRIO, PART 2 From Beckett’s “ghost period” comes Ohio Impromptu, the first Beckett drama to showcase a Doppelgänger. Come and Go focuses on a reunion between three childhood friends and the secrets they reveal to one another.

An allegory for the resistance, Catastrophe features a director and his assistant wrestling for control over the direction of one lone actor. Atlas Performing Arts Center. 1333 H St. NE. To May 5. $45. (202) 399-7993. atlasarts.org.

CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL Tennessee Williams’ last play to debut on Broadway, Clothes for a Summer Hotel interprets the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald over the course of several flashbacks to their heyday in the twenties. Presented by the Rainbow Theatre Project. DC Arts Center.

Tickets are $10 Regular, $8 Seniors, & $5 Students w/ID

FOLLOW

Photo of Bobby Smith by Christopher Mueller

ROCK

April 17–April 19, 2019, 8 p.m.

April 20, 2019, 2 p.m.

MONTGOMERY COLLEGE 51 Mannakee Street • Rockville, MD 20850 www.montgomerycollege.edu/pac Box Office: 240-567-5301

JAZZ HILL CENTER AT THE OLD NAVAL HOSPITAL 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. (202) 549-4172. Street Scenes Concert Series: Kris Funn’s “Cornerstore”. 7 p.m. $18– $20. hillcenterdc.org.

2018-2019 College Performing Arts Series

Montgomery College studentoriginal artists will file: come Adobe together to display their tremendous talent during our second annual student showcase. We’ll have artists of all stripes performing music, dance, and theatre presentations.

Washington City Paper Wed, Apr 10, 2019 1/12 H (4.666” x 1.603”) Non-SAU CMYK Landmark Theatres/EP

In the Iron Age, civilizations immortalized themselves by mastering one single element.

Their legacy remains in Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths, exhibited at the National Museum of African Art. Organized by UCLA’s Fowler Museum and curated by sculptor Tom Joyce, this traveling showcase reveals the African ironwork history of two millennia, when iron transcended its role as material and was reinvented as a cultural signifier. Striking Iron is more than 225 pieces, some from the earliest known period of iron metallurgy. Centered on the sub-Saharan region, the exhibition pulls from both public and private collections. Joyce, a MacArthur Fellow, chose the works among professors in art and African studies. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter called it the “most beautiful sculpture show in recent memory.” Come learn the stories of the African blacksmiths who transformed a basic element into its own magnetic world. The exhibition is on view to Oct. 20 at the National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Ave. SW. Free. (202) 633-1000. africa.si.edu.

—Tori Nagudi

ROBERT E. PARILLA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

Now through May 19 SigTheatre.org 703 820 9771

washingtoncitypaper.com april 12, 2019 31

In

CITY LIGHTS: THURSDAY

E’S DAN SAVAG

BILL MCKIBBEN

IVAL FILM FEST

BLACK CAT THEATER

April 25-27 WASHINGTON DC T I C K E T S AT H U M P FI L M FE S T.C O M

Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for three decades. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Deep Economy, a guide to remaking global markets, Radio Free Vermont, a novel about locally minded Vermonters who secede from the United States, and The End of Nature, an environmentalist’s manifesto. Falter, McKibben’s latest book, dips into everything from the climate crisis, worsened by an American presidential administration that expects cataclysmic warming but remains uninterested in addressing it, to the changes that artificial intelligence could bring upon society. A keen understanding of politics complements McKibben’s expertise in science and environmentalism. For instance, McKibben has tied colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon which causes bee colonies to spontaneously disappear, to the ills of American agriculture, and connected droughts in Central America to the migrant “crisis” at the U.S.-Mexico border. McKibben’s most haunting warning is that we may fail to solve our political puzzles before reaching tipping points at which the problems of climate change cease to be solvable. He writes of a future in which these problems are irreversibly woven into the planet, embedded in the fabric of a strange new Earth. Bill McKibben speaks at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. politics-prose.com.

—Will Lennon

2438 18th St. NW. To April 28. $35. (202) 462-7833. dcartscenter.org.

GHOST-WRITER Known for intimate stagings, Quotidian Theatre Company presents a 1919 New York love story about novelist Franklin Woolsey and his typist Myra. When Woolsey dies mid-sentence, Myra continues to tell his story despite attacks from skeptics and his grieving widow. Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center. 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. To April 28. $15–$50. (301) 816-1023. quotidiantheatre.org.

GRAND HOTEL Berlin’s Grand Hotel is the locus of a lavish world in 1928. This lively musical follows the hotel’s collection of guests and staff—including a fading prima ballerina, a fatally ill bookkeeper, a handsome but poor baron, and a typist with dreams of Hollywood fame—as they move through the high life.

Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To May 12. $40–$99. (703) 820-9771. sigtheatre.org.

Results coming May 9 To place an ad contact your Account Executive or call 202-650-6937

INTO THE WOODS Stephen Sondheim’s beloved, Tony-winning musical is a blackly comic medley of well-known fairy tale characters like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack (of the Beanstalk). At the heart of the story is The Baker and his Wife, their quest to reverse a witch’s curse and have a child of their own the driving force behind this twisted tale of wish fulfillment and the relationship between parents and children. Ford’s Theatre. 511 10th St. NW. To May 22. $27–$81. (202) 347-4833. fords.org.

JUNK The slick and scheming Robert Merkin prepares to seize power over a manufacturing company in Pulitzer Prize-winning Ayad Akhtar’s latest play inspired by the financial world and junk bond dealings of the 1980s. How far are you willing to go under the pretense of “saving America”? Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To May 5. $56–$72. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org.

THE PECULIAR PATRIOT Highlighting the institutionalized injustice of America’s criminal justice system, this funny and sharp one-person show starring playwright Liza Jessie Peterson is inspired by her decades-long work with prison populations. Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Melton Rehearsal Hall. 641 D St. NW. To April 20. $20–$69. (202) 393-3939. woollymammoth.net.

P.Y.G. OR THE MIS-EDUMACATION OF DORIAN BELLE White Canadian pop heartthrob Dorian Belle hires black Chicagoan hip-hop artists Black and Alex-

32 april 12, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

and to lend him clout on reality TV. Inspired by the culture clash of Shaw’s Pygmalion. Studio Theatre.

1501 14th St. NW. To April 28. $20–$55. (202) 3323300. studiotheatre.org.

Film

AFTER A young, dedicated student enters into a rocky relationship with a brooding man who has dark secrets. Starring Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Selma Blair, and Josephine Langford. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) THE BEST OF ENEMIES A civil rights activist goes head-to-head with a Klan member over school integration in 1970s North Carolina. Starring Taraji P. Henson, Sam Rockwell, and Babou Ceesay. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) HELLBOY A half-demon creature of both the human and supernatural worlds, Hellboy battles an ancient, evil sorceress who wants to destroy the world. Starring David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, and Ian McShane.

(See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) LITTLE An business woman gets transformed into her younger self and must deal with the adult pressures in her life as a 13-year-old. Starring Regina Hall, Issa Rae, and Marsai Martin. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) MISSING LINK In this animated adventure, a furry creature named Mr. Link journeys to find his relatives in the fabled Shangri-La. Starring Hugh Jackman, Zach Galifianakis, and Zoe Saldana. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) PET SEMATARY After a family moves to rural Maine, they discover a creepy burial ground in the woods near their home and evil is unleashed. Starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, and John Lithgow. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) SHAZAM! Teenage foster child Billy Batson becomes a powerful adult superhero by shouting one word— Shazam! Starring Zachary Levi, Michelle Borth, and Djimon Hounsou. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)

SAVAGELOVE M DOOGALS THE FAMOUS

C

I’m a heteroflexible married cis woman in my 40s. I’m also a POS cheater and a catfish. I really fucked up. One year ago, I met an older man in an online fetish forum. He sent me an unsolicited PM, and we have talked for hours every day since then. My husband, whom I’ve been married to for more than 20 years, does not know that I am having an emotional affair. I have no intention of telling my husband what I’ve done. I have been honest with my online boyfriend about everything except my name, my age, and the fact that I have a husband. (I know those are all really big things to lie about.) My boyfriend lied to me early on about his name, age, and relationship status, but came clean out of guilt. So I had the opportunity to say that I lied too, but I didn’t take it. I know what I’m doing is wrong. My husband would be very hurt if he knew. And my boyfriend, who wants to make a life together, would be very hurt as well. I’m in love with both men, but I’m not leaving my husband. I know the only right thing to do is break things off with my boyfriend.

I’ve tried multiple times: I’ve told him that he is better off without me, that I’m a bad person, and that he shouldn’t trust me. Each time, he convinces me to stay. We have not been physical. We have never even been in the same room, much to his dismay. I have thought about telling him the truth, but I am worried about my safety, and I do not want to hurt him any worse than I already have.

Plus, I’m a fucking coward. I am in treatment for PTSD. My therapist believes that my actions are a coping mechanism, i.e., it is easier to pretend to be someone else than it is to be me. I don’t think she’s wrong, but I also don’t think it excuses what I’ve done. How do I end this relationship without doing any more damage to my two partners?

—Conning And Tricking For Intensely Selfish Haven Far be it from me to question your therapist’s assessment—she’s spoken with you on multiple occasions, and her insights are doubtless more informed—but I think her framing falls short.

She describes your actions as a coping mechanism: You told a stranger lies and abused your husband’s trust to escape your miserable life. If you weren’t so fucking miserable—if other people and/or circumstances hadn’t conspired to make you so fucking miserable—you wouldn’t have done this. You wouldn’t be doing this still. But despite your therapist’s efforts to help you down off that hook, CATFISH, you seem determined to hang there. She’s offering you absolution, in whole or in part, while you stand around flagellating yourself (“POS cheater,” “fucking coward,” “bad person,” etc.).

Personally, I think you’re entitled to your feelings. Go ahead and feel terrible. You did a bad thing. It’s not the worst thing someone’s

ever done online, and most people know not to take what a stranger tells them on the internet at face value. But if feeling terrible doesn’t motivate you to make changes … well, it’s not for me to question your sincerity. But some people think it’s okay to do terrible things so long as they have the decency to feel terrible about having done them. If you’re not one of those people—if you actually feel bad—doing something about it and learning something from it will alleviate your misery.

Here’s what you need to do: End things with your boyfriend. Write him an email, tell him the truth about your age, marital status, and unavailability. Don’t share your real name with him; you’re under no obligation to do so, and if he turns out to be the vindictive type, CATFISH, you don’t want him to have your real identity. Apologize for not coming clean when he did—he lied to you too at the start— and thank him for the pleasure of his virtual company and the joy he brought to your life.

Then block him.

Most adults don’t make time for play— most of us aren’t LARPers or kinksters— but even adults need play, and some adults need play more than others.

Here’s what you need to learn: You didn’t do this because you’re miserable—or you didn’t do it just because you’re miserable. You did this because it was fun. We call it “play” when children pretend to be someone or something they’re not; child’s play is also, yes, a coping mechanism. Vulnerable children pretend to be big and powerful superheroes and/or monsters to cope with and momentarily escape their relative powerlessness. And nothing makes a child’s playful fantasy feel more real than a good friend who plays along.

Most adults don’t make time for play—most of us aren’t LARPers or kinksters—but even adults need play, and some adults need play more than others. You found a space where you could play (that online fetish forum), and you found a playmate who helped make your fantasies feel real (a guy you’ve never actually met and who could still be lying to you about all sorts of things). It got out of hand when arousal, orgasms, oxytocin, and promises you couldn’t keep got stirred into the mix. The play

made you feel better at first, but the dishonesty and stress of deceiving two people eventually wiped out the benefits you were getting.

You need to find a way to build some play into your life, sexual and/or nonsexual, that doesn’t require you to lie or hide. It would be great if you could do that with your husband, CATFISH, but if he’s not willing or able to play with you, get his okay to play on your own.

—Dan Savage I am a 70-year-old straight woman, and I haven’t been in an intimate relationship for seven years.

I feel deprived of physical contact, but I also have some obstacles to pursuing intimacy at this point in my life. My vagina is seriously out of shape. In fact, it was a challenge to have sex with my last partner because he was rather well endowed. I had to work up to it, but it finally worked. My libido is on the low side, but it still flares up now and then. I also have herpes, plus I’m taking an antidepressant that makes it hard for me to orgasm. But even with all that, I’ve enjoyed sex in the past. Would it make sense for me to look for a man who may also have some sexual issues and/ or be willing to work with/around mine? Someone who enjoys all the other aspects of sexual intimacy besides penis in vagina? How would I find such a man? I’m not necessarily just looking for sex—a compatible companion would be great.

—Need Fresh Input “NFI can have it all—sex, companionship, orgasms,” said Joan Price, author of Naked at Our Age and The Ultimate Guide to Sex After 50.

“She just needs to find someone who realizes that partnered sex does not have to mean PIV.” Your best bet for finding a man these days?

Dating apps and websites, including dating apps for seniors. And don’t be shy about taking PIV off the menu, NFI, at least at the start.

“As we age, many of us find non-penetrative sex with hands, mouth, and vibrator more comfortable, sexier, and an easier path to orgasm,” said Price. “And that includes men with erectile difficulties or decreased sensation. In her discussions with a potential new partner, NFI should explain that she’d like to get sexual in stages—and then explore and delight each other sexually, including orgasms, without PIV as the goal. But if she might enjoy PIV in the future, she should keep her vagina active with solo sex including a dildo or penetrative vibrator. Don’t wait until the right penis comes along.”

Joan Price’s new book, Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality After the Loss of Your Beloved, will be released soon. Follow her on Twitter @JoanPrice.

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

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COLUMBIA copy to the Register of PROBATE DIVISION Body & Spirit . . . . Wills . . . .or . .to . the . . .Register . . . 42 2019 ADM 000314 of Wills with a copy to . . .undersigned, . . . . . . . . .on . 42 NameHousing/Rentals of Decethe dent, James Edward or before October 11, Legal Notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Jackson-Bey. Notice of 2019, or be forever Appointment, Notice Row . barred.

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359-5773 The DC Public Charter Legals School Board (DC PCSB) notice of its NOTICE gives IS HEREBY GIVEN intent THAT: to hold a public hearing on 11 new charTRAVISA OUTSOURCING, INC. (DISTRICT COLUMBIA DEter schoolOFapplications PARTMENT byOF received the CONSUMER March AND REGULATORY 11, 2019 deadline AFFAIRS on FILE NUMBER HAS April 22, 2019271941) and April DISSOLVED EFFECTIVE NOVEM23, 2019. DC PCSB will BER 27, 2017 AND HAS FILED hold a vote on these OF ARTICLES OF DISSOLUTION applications during the DOMESTIC FOR-PROFIT CORboard meeting onDISTRICT May PORATION WITH THE 20, 2019. CORPORATIONS OF COLUMBIA DIVISION SUPERIOR COURT AOFCLAIM AGAINST TRAVISA THE DISTRICT OF OUTSOURCING, INC. MUST COLUMBIA INCLUDE THE NAME OF THE PROBATE DIVISION DISSOLVED CORPORATION, 2019 ADM INCLUDE THE000315 NAME OF THE Name of Decedent, CLAIMANT, INCLUDE A SUMMACarolyn Harrison.

RY OF THEJ. FACTS SUPPORTING Notice of Appointment, THE CLAIM, AND BE MAILED TO 1600 INTERNATIONAL DRIVE, Notice to Creditors and SUITE 600, VA 22102 Notice toMCLEAN, Unknown Heirs, Daniel A Harrison, ALL CLAIMS WILL is BE 16410 BARRED whose address UNLESS A Ct, PROCEEDING TO Edgepark Bowie, MD ENFORCE THE CLAIM IS COM20716 MENCED was WITHappointed IN 3 YEARS OF Personal Representative PUBLICATION OF THIS NOTICE of the estate of Carolyn IN ACCORDANCE WITH SECTION J. Harrison whoDISTRICT died OF 29-312.07 OF THE on 2/6/19, with a Will COLUMBIA ORGANIZATIONS ACT. and will serve without Court Supervision.

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Deadline for ance in this proceedsubmissions is December 6, 2017. ing. Objections to such appointment shall be filed with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 5th Street, N.W., Building A, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001, on or before 10/11/19. Claims against the decedent shall be presented to the undersigned with a copy to the Register of Wills or to the Register of Wills with a copy to the undersigned, on or before 10/11/19, or be

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forever barred. Persons Legals believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent DC SCHOLARS PCS REQUEST who do not receive a FOR PROPOSALS – Moducopy of this notice by lar Contractor Services - DC mail within days School of Scholars Public25Charter its publication shall so solicits proposals for a modular inform Register of contractorthe to provide professional Wills, including name, management and construction services to and construct a modular address relationbuilding to house four classrooms ship. Date of first publiand one faculty offi ce suite. The cation: 4/11/2019 Request offorNewspaper Proposals (RFP) Name specifi cations can be obtained on and/or periodical: and after Monday, November 27, Washington 2017 from EmilyCity StonePaper/ via comDaily Washington Law munityschools@dcscholars.org.

Reporter All questions should be sent in Name Personal Repwriting byofe-mail.

No phone calls regarding this RFP will beA acresentative: Daniel cepted. Bids must be received by Harrison 5:00 PMTEST on Thursday, TRUE copy December 14, 2017Meister at DC Scholars Public Anne Charter School, ATTN: Sharonda Register of Wills Mann, 5601 E. Capitol St. SE, Pub Dates: April Washington, DC 20019.11, Any bids 18,addressing 25. not all areas as outlined in the RFP specifi cations will KIPP DC PUBLIC not be considered.

CHARTER SCHOOLS REQUEST FOR PROApartments for Rent POSALS Construction Management Services KIPP DC is soliciting proposals from qualified vendors for Construction Management Services.

The RFP can be found on KIPP DC’s website at www.kippdc.org/ procurement. Proposals Must see! semi-furshould beSpacious uploaded to nished 1 BR/1noBAlater basement the website apt, Deanwood, than 5:00 PM$1200.

EST,Sep. on entrance, W/W2019. carpet,QuesW/D, kitchApril 25, en, fireplace near Blue Line/X9/ tions can be addressed V2/V4. Shawnn 240-343-7173. to kevin.mehm@kippdc. org.

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SUPERIOR COURT Holiday SpecialTwo furOF THE DISTRICT nished rooms for short orOF long COLUMBIA term rental ($900 and $800 per PROBATE month) withDIVISION access to W/D, WiFi, and Den. Utili2019 Kitchen, ADM 000283 ties included.

Best N.E. location Name of Decedent, along H St. Corridor.

Call Eddie Eddie Charles Lowery.

202-744-9811 for info. or visit Notice of Appointment, www.TheCurryEstate.com Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Cheryl A. Lowery, whose address is 5906 87th Avenue, New Carrollton, MD 20784 was appointed Personal Representative of the

estate of Eddie Charles Construction/Labor Lowery who died on June 10, 2018, with a Will and will serve without Court Supervision.

All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts unknown POWERare DESIGN NOW HIRshall their APPRENappearING enter ELECTRICAL TICESinOF ALLproceedSKILL LEVance this ELS! ing. Objections to such appointment shall be aboutwith the position… filed the Register you D.C., love working with ofDo Wills, 515 5th your hands? Are you interStreet, Building ested inN.W., construction and A,in3rd Floor,anWashingbecoming electrician? ton, D.C. 20001, on or Then the electrical apprentice before Claims position10/11/19. could be perfect for against the decedent you! Electrical apprentices are able to earn a paycheck shall be presented to andundersigned full benefi ts while learnthe with a ing the trade Register through firstcopy to the of hand or experience.

Wills to the Register of Wills with a copy to what we’re looking for… the undersigned, on who or Motivated D.C. residents before or be want to10/11/19, learn the electrical forever barred.

Persons trade and have a high school believed toGED be heirs diploma or as welloras reliable transportation. legatees of the decedent who do not receive a a littleofbitthis aboutnotice us… by copy Power Design25 is days one of of the mail within top electrical contractors in its publication shall so the U.S., committed to our inform Register values, the to training and to of givWills, including name, ing back to the communities address and in which we liverelationand work. ship. Date of first publimore details… cation: 4/11/2019 Visit of powerdesigninc.us/ Name Newspaper careers or email careers@ and/or periodical: powerdesigninc.us!

Washington City Paper/ Daily Washington Law Reporter Name Financial of Personal RepServices resentative: Cheryl A. Denied LoweryCredit?? Work to Repair YourTEST Creditcopy Report With The TRUE Trusted Leader in Credit Repair.

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LIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Home Services Computers for Student Dish Network-Satellite TeleComputer Lab & Testing vision Services. Now Over 190 Center channels for ONLY $49.99/mo!

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center. All bid proposals will be accepted Auctions until 12:00 PM on April 24, 2019. Interested vendors will respond to the advertised Notice of RFP via upload to https:// app.smartsheet.com/b/ form/eb5d6f837de143e4be1deb95b0ce56b0 Complete RFP details can be found at www. seeforever.org/requestWhole Foods Commissary Auction forproposals DC Metro Area Dec. 5 at 10:30AM Ingenuity Prep PCS 1000s S/S Tables, Carts requests proposals for & Trays, 2016 Kettles up the following: to 200 Gallons, Urschel * Cutters Academic Literacy in& Shredders Consulting Services cluding 2016 Diversacut Full RFP document avail2110 Dicer, 6 Chill/Freeze able byDouble request.

Cabs, RackProposOvens & shall Ranges, (12) Braising als be submitted Stephan noTables, later 2016 than(3+) 5:00 PM 30+ onVCMs, Tuesday, April Scales, 23, Hobart 80 qt Mixers, 2019. Contact: bids@ Complete Machine Shop, ingenuityprep.org and much more! View the catalog at NOI for Miracle www.mdavisgroup.com or Method Surface Res412-521-5751 toration One School Notice of InGarage/Yard/ tent for Miracle Method Rummage/Estate Sales Surface Restoration.

To obtain a copy Flea Market everyof the Fri-Sat notice of intent, pleaseRd. 10am-4pm.

5615 Landover visit our website: www.

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This in bulk. Contact 202-355-2068 notice of intent not or a if or 301-772-3341 for is details intrested infor being a vendor. request quotes..

SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2019 ADM 000248 Name of Decedent, Fannie Davis. Notice of Appointment, Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Ione Davis, whose address is 16004 Pennsbury Drive, Bowie, Md 20716 was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Fannie Davis who died on June 29, 2015, with a Will and will serve without Court Supervision. All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts are unknown shall enter their appear-

ance in this proceedMiscellaneous ing. Objections to such appointment shall be NEW COOPERATIVE SHOP! filed with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 5th FROM EGPYT THINGS Street, N.W., Building AND BEYOND A, 3rd Floor, Washing240-725-6025 ton, D.C. 20001, on or www.thingsfromegypt.com before 10/4/19. Claims thingsfromegypt@yahoo.com against the decedent shall presented to SOUTHbe AFRICAN BAZAAR Craft undersigned Cooperative the with a 202-341-0209 copy to the Register of www.southafricanbazaarcraftcoo Wills or to the Register perative.com of Wills with a copy to southafricanba z a ar @hotmail. the undersigned, on or com before 10/4/19, or be forever barred.

Persons WEST FARM WOODWORKS believed to be heirs or Custom Creative Furniture legatees of the decedent 202-316-3372 info@westfarmwoodworks.com who do not receive a www.westfarmwoodworks.com copy of this notice by mail within 25 days of 7002 Carroll Avenue its publication shall so Takoma Park, MD 20912 inform the Register of Mon-Sat 11am-7pm, Wills, including name, Sun 10am-6pm address and relationship.

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Reporter Call 202-417-1870 M-F between Name of Personal Rep6-9PM, or weekends. resentative: Ione Davis TRUE TEST copy Bands/DJs for Hire Anne Meister Register of Wills Pub Dates: April 4, 11, 18.

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