POLITICS CAMPAIGN TIPS FROM BRANDON TODD 3 FOOD PATRONS' ODES TO BARS AND RESTAURANTS 13 ARTS WATCH FILMFEST DC FLICKS FOR FREE ONLINE 15 THE DISTRICT'S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 40, NO. 17 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM MAY 1 –7, 2020
Shelters In Place Five years ago, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced an ambitious plan to end homelessness. Following through is easier said than done. Page 8
By Morgan Baskin
TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY
8 Shelters in Place: Can Mayor Bowser follow through on her plan to end homelessness by 2025?
NEWS
3 Loose Lips: Brandon Todd’s bold campaign tactics enliven the Ward 4 race. 12 Occupational Hazard: Nurses treating COVID-19 patients need more gear and more money.
SPORTS
4 Mind, the Gap: Sports psychologists help their clients make the most of their time inside.
FOOD
13 Wish I Was There: Words of encouragement from patrons to their favorite bars and restaurants
ARTS
11 Liz at Large: “Accomplishment” 14 Film: Zilberman on Butt Boy 15 Home Box Office: Filmfest DC moves its offerings online.
CITY LIGHTS
16 City Lights: Read about how locals spend their money, or check out a new kind of game show.
DIVERSIONS
17 Crossword 18 Savage Love 19 Classifieds
Cover Photo: Darrow Montgomery; D.C. General
Darrow Montgomery | 400 Block of Longfellow Street NW, April 28 Editorial
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NEWS LOOSE LIPS
Four on Four
By Mitch Ryals @MitchRyals Whenever LL asks Brandon Todd about his re-election campaign, the Ward 4 councilmember is acutely aware of the exact number of days before the primary. “We have an election in 56 days,” he told LL during an interview in early April. “So I’ve spent a considerable amount of time reaching out to supporters, to voters, looking for creative ways to connect with voters, but also making sure people are getting what they need.” Early voting starts May 22, and runs through the primary election on June 2. The Board of Election is encouraging voters to request mailin ballots rather than voting in person during the pandemic. As Election Day nears, and campaigns shift their strategies due to social distancing, LL thought to check in on Todd’s operation after hearing some complaints from Ward 4 residents. Here are a few of the councilmember’s strategies. Put campaign signs in people’s yards without their permission. Sign wars are unavoidable in any election cycle, and Ward 4’s are getting good. After a Department of Public Works employee removed more than 250 of challenger Janeese Lewis George’s campaign signs, the department referred to the incident as an “honest mistake.” Todd has denied his campaign’s involvement. But LL is fairly certain the Ward 4 councilmember’s team is behind the green “Re-elect Brandon Todd” that have popped up in residents’ yards without their permission. Yaron Miller says he noticed several yards around his Fort Totten block with signs for both George and Todd. They must be split households, he thought. About a month ago, he returned from a walk to find that someone stuck a Todd sign in his yard, right next to the George sign that was already there. “It’s bizarre campaign behavior,” Miller says. “Especially during a pandemic. It’s not violating social distancing, but people are on edge when it comes to personal space.” He donated to George’s campaign that same day. Drew Mitnick, a Petworth resident, tells a similar story. Last week, he too returned from a walk to find a Todd sign stuck in his yard.
Darrow Montgomery
Four campaign tactics from incumbent Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd
Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd in 2018 Mitnick can’t recall who he voted for in the 2016 election, and before Todd’s sign appeared he hadn’t landed on a candidate. “Having a campaign that does things that are subversive to the democratic process and fairness of the election is not something I look for in a candidate,” he says, adding that he trashed the sign. Todd says his campaign has received complaints about the errantly placed signs and each time moved to correct the mistake. These things happen when you’re fielding hundreds of requests for yard signs, he insists. “I don’t put a sign in a yard until we’ve confirmed that you want one,” he says. “That’s always been my strategy, and I’ve been at this for a long time.” What about Miller, who already had a sign for George and didn’t request one? “I’ve seen people who have both signs in their yard,” Todd says.
he co-authored provides unemployment compensation and protects other safety-net benefits for residents impacted by this situation.” Before the mailers began popping up in mailboxes, LL asked Todd which of the provisions he specifically contributed to the bills. Todd highlighted the 90-day deferment on mortgage payments and the support for the Board of Elections. He did not author either provision, he clarified, but those are two that stood out. The bills were a cross-Council effort to quickly help residents. In a follow-up interview this week, Todd wouldn’t say which pieces of the bill he contributed and promised to send them in a separate email. LL is still waiting for an answer. COV I D -19 has become an inevitable part of 2020 campaigns, for better or worse. But DFER is using the work of the entire Council to boost Todd’s candidacy.
Allow a pro-charter school group to tout the work of the whole council to promote your campaign. The pro-charter school group Democrats for Education Reform recently sent out campaign mailers in support of their favorite candidates. DFER’s mailer endorsing Todd touts his role as a co-author of the D.C. Council’s two emergency bills responding to the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The mailers highlight the bills’ provisions prohibiting evictions and utility shutoffs, protecting healthcare benefits, extending family medical leave and unemployment benefits, providing support for small business owners, and extending SNAP and TANF benefits. “Brandon is working hard to help local businesses impacted by the public health emergency re-open their doors when the crisis is over,” one version of the mailer states. “Similarly, the law
Don’t show up to candidate forums, then botch the written answers. Due to a “competing commitment” Todd missed last week’s ACLU candidate forum. Todd’s campaign manager, Jackson Carnes, says the conflict was “personal.” LL asked Todd to submit written responses to the questions his fellow candidates answered during the virtual event. In his initial answers, sent via email from Carnes, Todd did not give clear positions on a hypothetical halfway house in Ward 4 or for the Second Look Amendment Act, which would provide a path for resentencing for young people who committed serious crimes. He also omitted two questions entirely on the first try. No-showing candidate forums, where his ideas and solutions to problems facing his constituents can stand alongside those of his
“It’s bizarre campaign behavior, especially during a pandemic. It’s not violating social distancing, but people are on edge when it comes to personal space.”
challengers, appears to be a pattern. Todd skipped DC for Democracy’s forum in October 2019. DC4D chair Jeremiah Lowery says Todd initially responded to the progressive group’s invitation by passing the request to Carnes. “I then got no replies after multiple follow-up emails to both him and his scheduler,” Lowery says, adding that they kept an empty chair on stage in case Todd showed up. Mark Rodeffer, the chair of the Sierra Club’s political committee, also tried wrangling Todd for a forum, but abandoned the entire event when Todd’s campaign didn’t respond. “I emailed three or four dates, and said ‘Let us know,’ and didn’t hear back,” Rodeffer says. “And I emailed once or twice more, and never heard anything from him at all. Ultimately, we decided with him not attending, we weren’t going to do it.” Both DC for Democracy and the Sierra Club endorsed George. Todd also didn’t respond to Greater Greater Washington’s candidate questionnaire before the nonprofit urbanist advocacy group published his opponents’ responses on its blog. GGW’s housing program organizer, Alex Baca (a former City Paper staffer), says their elections committee initially emailed questions to candidates on March 3 with a March 24 deadline. They published answers from George and Marlena Edwards, the third Ward 4 candidate, on April 15. The next day, Carnes asked if Todd could still submit his answers, and Baca agreed. She says she received Todd’s responses last week, but GGW hasn’t published them yet. The Ward 4 Democrats hosted a virtual candidate forum Tuesday evening, which Todd attended. Accept donations from developers, contractors, and government employees who you oversee. In the 11 months since Todd filed to run, his war chest has swelled to over $450,000, according to his March campaign finance report. His list of donors includes a who’s who of developers, contractors, and D.C. government employees, some of whom direct agencies that Todd’s Committee on Government Operations oversees. Mayor Bowser chipped in $250, and her chief of staff, John Falcicchio, contributed the maximum $500. Former Ward 4 Councilmember and Mayor Adrian Fenty also tossed Todd $500 all the way from California. At the end of 2018, the Council passed sweeping campaign finance reforms that prohibit businesses that have contracts with the District government worth $250,000 or more, or are seeking them, from contributing to local campaigns.The law doesn’t take effect until after this election cycle, though, so Todd’s in the clear. And the current law doesn’t restrict District government employees’ right to contribute to candidates. Asked whether the donations from directors of agencies he oversees and from contractors that will be prohibited next year raise any concerns, Todd says: “My campaign is in full compliance with District of Columbia law. Period.”
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SPORTS
Mind, the Gap Sports psychologists weigh in on the importance of mental fitness during the pandemic.
Not much has changed about Caroline Silby’s day-to-day routine. As a sports psychologist based in Montgomery County who counts the U.S. Figure Skating national team and elite youth athletes across the country among her clients, Silby is used to teleworking. Except that, now, it’s her only option. Instead of occasionally flying to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee is based, for a meeting, Silby relies on video conferencing apps. Her typical week involves hours of talking on FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, or whatever telehealth platform her clients use. Because the sports world has shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, athletes may not be able to physically train like they normally would. But sports psychologists like Silby believe now, perhaps more than ever, athletes can and should work on their mental fitness. “I think everyone is trying to find their way, and certainly we’re encouraging people to talk about the worries and concerns that we all have,” she says. “In doing that, we’re also trying to cultivate some hope, because hope is one of the tools that helps us manage that primary emotion of fear. So that’s what we’re doing, and we’re trying to be as creative as we can in helping athletes to kind of have some safe places to talk about these things.” In conversations with City Paper, three sports psychologists—Silby, Georgetown University’s Erica Force, and Stu Singer, the mental performance coach for the Washington Mystics— shared their thoughts on what athletes can do to stay mentally healthy and strong, lessons not only applicable to professionals and student athletes, but also to athletes of all levels. Practice your ABCs. Young athletes, particularly those in Gen Z (defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1997 and 2012), are constantly looking to other people for feedback, Silby says, meaning they need adults not for information, but for genuine and authentic connection. During the pandemic, athletic focus has shifted from results to relationships, according to Silby, and she believes it’s important for youth
Illustration by Ronan Lynam
By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong
athletes to stay connected with each other and their coaches. “One of the things that I’ve been seeing that I think is really interesting that I might not have thought about right off the bat is that these athletes are used to getting really direct feedback,” Silby says. “Because they’re able to see whether these actions and behaviors translate into performance. And they don’t have any of that kind of feedback right now.” To combat that, Silby has been using “sticky messaging” with her athletes around mental training. One of those strategies is a “daily ABC,” which can be done by yourself or with other people. Sometimes Silby pairs up athletes or puts them in small groups over video conference. The premise, Silby explains, is to identify one thing you accept about yourself, choose one thing you believe about yourself, and then challenge yourself to do something 1 percent better. “The challenge can be something in the literal outcome goal for the day, but it can also be something mental,” she says. “So attention, belief, persistence, patience, something about yourself, a quality that you could kind of work on and improve. But you can also do that for other people. So families can do it together and kind of define one thing I accept about you, one thing I believe about you, and one thing I challenge you to do.” Silby also asks her athletes to think about five things they’re grateful for every day and gives them journal prompts to write about for five minutes a day each week. “Research shows that you get about a 25 percent boost of optimism when you express five
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daily gratitudes, things that you’re grateful for on a daily basis,” she says. “So we have them kind of monitor when they wake up and before their feet hit the floor, what are a couple things I’m grateful for?”
“Now is the time for practice for the mind like you never have before, so use it. It’s the one thing you do have some control over right now, because you don’t need special space. You don’t need anything to practice your mind. Everything is at your fingertips, and you have the time.” Reevaluate your goals. Collegiate athletes, Force says, are really coping with a sense of loss. Not only have schools canceled some seasons altogether, but students have also been told that they need to move off campus, away from their friends and teammates. They are suddenly without a support group. “A lot of their identity is wrapped up in being an athlete,” says Force, who joined Georgetown as the head of athletic counseling services last June. “Their schedules are packed between sport and school. And so it’s a very structured schedule, they’re very busy, a lot of time goes into their
training for their sport, and to be told all of a sudden, and in a very abrupt way, that there’s no more sports and actually, ‘Go home. You can’t go to school anymore either.’ That’s a really big change. And so I think coping with that has been one of the main areas of focus … recognizing that this is a grief process and just learning to cope with all these emotions, and all of this change.” Force, who is a registered sports psychologist with the U.S. Olympic Committee and served as the team sports psychologist for the Dallas Wings of the WNBA, recommends creating a daily routine with “purposeful activities.” That includes leaving time for fitness and taking breaks from schoolwork to do some “relaxation and mindfulness” exercises. Continue to interact with your teammates and coaches. “Things like learning mindfulness, pre-performance routines, visualization, managing self talk, staying connected with their teams [are important],” Force says. “Holding each other accountable is another great strategy that I think can help with motivation and support in general or staying connected with their coaches.” This can also be an important time for athletes to reevaluate their goals in sports by reflecting on their most recent sports season and performance, and list both what went well and what areas need improvement, Force says. As some athletes have reported, the mandatory time away has helped them better understand their relationship with their sports. “I think practicing mental skills and just the ability to cope and focus on what’s in their control right now, not only will help them stay connected to their sport and perhaps improve their
SPORTS performance when they really get back to it, but it’s also going to help them cope with the current situation going on right now,” Force says. ‘Routines are massive during this.’ Athletes’ lives revolve around seasons, especially at the professional level. “Routines and regimens really come first,” says Singer, who helped the Mystics win the 2019 WNBA championship as their mental performance coach. “I’ve been telling everyone— of course, I’m a little bit biased—there’s never been an opportunity to work on the mind like there is now. We’re always putting in so many hours physically, now at this point we [can’t].” Because of that, working on mental strength is even more essential due to uncertainties surrounding sports, he adds. Among the main challenges he sees in his athletes, regardless of the level, are sleep (Singer recommends eight to nine hours a night), maintaining a healthy routine, and staying motivated. When athletes don’t have to wake up early to be at the facility and don’t have a specific date to train toward, it can mess with their motivation. Singer recommends that athletes get things done earlier in the day to make sure important activities, like at-home training sessions, are not put off. “I had a meeting [with the Mystics] a week ago. I said look, you’re adults, grown-ups, it’s not a demand, it’s a suggestion: If I’m you, I’m putting the stuff, the job duties of all this in the first half of my day, and I’m committing to that,” he says. “Get my workout in before lunch, if we’re doing any kind of video related stuff... Later in the day, you can go out for a walk with the dog. If you want to read, want to Netflix, all the other stuff is fine and good, actually. But don’t start doing that immediately because later can happen or maybe not happen. Try to create healthy routines. Routines are massive during this.” Specific exercises that Singer has his athletes do include mindful meditation, which he does for 10 minutes daily and defines as “nonjudgemental awareness of the present moment, what’s happening now.” Find somewhere calm and quiet to sit with your own thoughts, or use a guided meditation app. “Focus on the sounds around you, focus on breathing, focus on body sensation,” he says. Singer believes that while not much separates what pro athletes like Mystics players need right now in terms of mental fitness from what other people need, professional athletes may feel more pressure to stay physically fit. Sports isn’t a hobby to them, but a job. And while the team hasn’t done regular weekly sessions with Singer, he’s been doing individual check-ins with anyone who is interested. It gives him an opportunity to remind players of the importance of mental fitness and how they don’t need equipment or a court to train it. “Now is the time for practice for the mind like you never have before, so use it,” Singer says. “It’s the one thing you do have some control over right now, because you don’t need special space. You don’t need anything to practice your mind. Everything is at your fingertips, and you have the time.”
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Important Facts About DOVATO
This is only a brief summary of important information about DOVATO and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and treatment. What is the Most Important Information I Should Know about DOVATO? If you have both human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, DOVATO can cause serious side effects, including: • Resistant HBV infection. Your healthcare provider will test you for HBV infection before you start treatment with DOVATO. If you have HIV-1 and hepatitis B, the hepatitis B virus can change (mutate) during your treatment with DOVATO and become harder to treat (resistant). It is not known if DOVATO is safe and effective in people who have HIV-1 and HBV infection. • Worsening of HBV infection. If you have HIV-1 and HBV infection, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking DOVATO. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before. Worsening liver disease can be serious and may lead to death. ° Do not run out of DOVATO. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your DOVATO is all gone. ° Do not stop DOVATO without first talking to your healthcare provider. If you stop taking DOVATO, your healthcare provider will need to check your health often and do blood tests regularly for several months to check your liver. What is DOVATO? DOVATO is a prescription medicine that is used without other antiretroviral medicines to treat HIV-1 infection in adults who have not received antiretroviral medicines in the past, and without known resistance to the medicines dolutegravir or lamivudine. HIV-1 is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It is not known if DOVATO is safe and effective in children. Who should not take DOVATO? Do Not Take DOVATO if You: • have ever had an allergic reaction to a medicine that contains dolutegravir or lamivudine. • take dofetilide. What should I tell my healthcare provider before using DOVATO? Tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you: • have or have had liver problems, including hepatitis B or C infection. • have kidney problems. • are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. One of the medicines in DOVATO (dolutegravir) may harm your unborn baby. ° Your healthcare provider may prescribe a different medicine than DOVATO if you are planning to become pregnant or if pregnancy is confirmed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. ° If you can become pregnant, your healthcare provider will perform a pregnancy test before you start treatment with DOVATO. ° If you can become pregnant, you should consistently use effective birth control (contraception) during treatment with DOVATO. ° Tell your healthcare provider right away if you are planning to become pregnant, you become pregnant, or think you may be pregnant during treatment with DOVATO.
©2020 ViiV Healthcare or licensor. DLLADVT190033 January 2020 Produced in USA.
Learn more about Alphonso and DOVATO at DOVATO.com
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Tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you: (cont’d) • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take DOVATO. ° You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. ° One of the medicines in DOVATO (lamivudine) passes into your breastmilk. ° Talk with your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Some medicines interact with DOVATO. Keep a list of your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. • You can ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for a list of medicines that interact with DOVATO. • Do not start taking a new medicine without telling your healthcare provider. Your healthcare provider can tell you if it is safe to take DOVATO with other medicines. What are Possible Side Effects of DOVATO? DOVATO can cause serious side effects, including: • Those in the “What is the Most Important Information I Should Know about DOVATO?” section. • Allergic reactions. Call your healthcare provider right away if you develop a rash with DOVATO. Stop taking DOVATO and get medical help right away if you develop a rash with any of the following signs or symptoms: fever; generally ill feeling; tiredness; muscle or joint aches; blisters or sores in mouth; blisters or peeling of the skin; redness or swelling of the eyes; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue; problems breathing. • Liver problems. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening changes in certain liver tests during treatment with DOVATO. Liver problems, including liver failure, have also happened in people without a history of liver disease or other risk factors. Your healthcare provider may do blood tests to check your liver. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following signs or symptoms of liver problems: your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice); dark or “tea-colored” urine; light-colored stools (bowel movements); nausea or vomiting; loss of appetite; and/or pain, aching, or tenderness on the right side of your stomach area. • Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis is a serious medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms that could be signs of lactic acidosis: feel very weak or tired; unusual (not normal) muscle pain; trouble breathing; stomach pain with nausea and vomiting; feel cold, especially in your arms and legs; feel dizzy or lightheaded; and/or a fast or irregular heartbeat. • Lactic acidosis can also lead to severe liver problems, which can lead to death. Your liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and you may develop fat in your liver (steatosis). Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the signs or symptoms of liver problems which are listed above under “Liver problems.” You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or severe liver problems if you are female or very overweight (obese).
SO MUCH GOES INTO WHO I AM HIV MEDICINE IS ONE PART OF IT. Reasons to ask your doctor about DOVATO: DOVATO can help you reach and then stay undetectable* with just 2 medicines in 1 pill. That means fewer medicines† in your body while taking DOVATO You can take it any time of day with or without food (around the same time each day)—giving you flexibility DOVATO is a once-a-day complete treatment for adults who are new to HIV-1 medicine. Results may vary. *Undetectable means reducing the HIV in your blood to very low levels (less than 50 copies per mL). † As compared with 3-drug regimens.
ALPHONSO‡ Living with HIV
What are Possible Side Effects of DOVATO (cont’d)? • Changes in your immune system (Immune Reconstitution Syndrome) can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having new symptoms after you start taking DOVATO. • The most common side effects of DOVATO include: headache; diarrhea; nausea; trouble sleeping; and tiredness. These are not all the possible side effects of DOVATO. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088. Where Can I Find More Information? • Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist. • Go to DOVATO.com or call 1-877-844-8872, where you can also get FDA-approved labeling. October 2019 DVT:2PI-2PIL Trademark is owned by or licensed to the ViiV Healthcare group of companies.
Compensated by ViiV Healthcare
‡
Could DOVATO be right for you? Ask your doctor today.
washingtoncitypaper.com may 1, 2020 7
D.C. General
Shelters in Place Muriel Bowser campaigned on ending homelessness, but her first term is spotted with missed deadlines and failed targets. Where did the plan go wrong? By Morgan Baskin Photographs by Darrow Montgomery In March 2015, two months after Muriel Bowser was sworn in as D.C.’s seventh mayor, she made an eyebrow-raising promise. “With the Council’s support of our homeless funding plan, we will deliver on another promise: ending family homelessness by 2018,” she said during her first State of the District address. The announcement came alongside the bigger goals of making homelessness “rare, brief, and nonrecurring” by 2020, and eliminating homelessness altogether by 2025. The commitments were a cornerstone of Homeward DC, a roadmap for navigating the District’s housing crisis with a genesis tracing back to the tail end of the previous mayoral administration. But Bowser, who ascended from the D.C. Council to the mayor’s office as the District was beginning to show signs of recovery from the 2008 recession, took “ownership” of the plan, says Laura Zeilinger, the director of D.C.’s Department of Human Services. Zeilinger says Bowser was emphatic about wanting it published during her first 90 days in office—after all, the new mayor campaigned on the promise to reform D.C.’s shelter system. Under her predecessor, Vince Gray, the number of homeless people in the D.C. region had begun to steadily
rise, from about 6,500 people when he took office in 2011 to nearly 7,800 in 2014. By the time Bowser was inaugurated, there were 7,300 homeless people in D.C. The early aughts were rocky years for the District, and for the country as a whole. Even as the American economy rebounded and some states made progress in reversing rises in homelessness, others flailed, with rates of homelessness ticking up in tandem with the District’s increase. In Massachusetts, homelessness has increased by 33 percent since 2007, and in New York, by 47 percent. In South Dakota, it has increased 100 percent. The problem is acutely felt in D.C., and the numbers have barely budged since Bowser took office. The District has spent years, if not decades, in a purgatory of “economic development,” leaving an estimated 6,500 people homeless, according to the most recently released data from D.C.’s annual count. That number, which most experts consider a conservative figure, is at best equal to what it was a decade ago, and 800 people fewer than it was the winter of Bowser’s first State of the District address, despite her administration’s efforts to reduce it. On the whole, homelessness in D.C.
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is 30 percent higher than it was in 2007, giving the District the dubious distinction of joining 14 states that have seen their homelessness figures go up since 2007. Our city-state has identified more people without housing in it than West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and North Dakota combined. Homelessness is higher here, where there is one of the greatest wealth gaps of any major city in America, than it is in 31 states. The national rate of homelessness—the number of homeless people out of every 10,000 residents—is 17. In D.C., it is 99. U.S. Census Bureau data indicate that the bottom 20 percent of earners in D.C. take in a paltry two percent of the city’s annual income. The top fifth make more than half of it. Homelessness is a racial justice issue, too: African Americans comprise only 46 percent of D.C. residents, but 86 percent of homeless single adults and 97 percent of families experiencing homelessness. To be sure, the Bowser administration has logged some successes. It shuttered the noxious and degraded D.C. General homeless shelter and, with the D.C. Council’s help, executed a plan to open smaller shelters in most wards,
despite many of those projects being mired in petty, if not outright racist, lawsuits. Bowser’s human services agency opened a long soughtafter day services center for homeless adults, and has plans to update a handful of low-barrier homeless shelters for single people. Despite those wins, Bowser’s government has not met any of the major homeless population targets outlined in Homeward DC. By City Paper’s calculation, the total rate of homelessness has decreased by just over 10 percent since 2015 Far from fulfilling her campaign promise to eliminate homelessness for good, some populations have actually seen a rise. The District’s education system has reported an increase in student homelessness nearly every year since 2016, with homeless youths outnumbering the entire homeless population reported by DHS. Veteran homelessness, which Bowser promised to snuff out by the end of 2015, actually increased from 2017 to 2018. Homelessness among single adults continues to increase, too, and dozens of unsheltered people die on the streets every year. Despite pledges to reduce D.C.’s reliance on motel rooms as emergency overflow shelter, DHS continues to pay for hundreds of rooms. Family homelessness, perhaps the Bowser administration’s greatest initial focus, has fared relatively better, but still hasn’t seen anywhere near the progress needed to end it soon. By the most optimistic math, it has decreased about 24 percent from 2015 to 2019. Simultaneously, the number of families who receive temporary subsidized housing vouchers through rapid rehousing has doubled since Bowser took office—these families are not counted as homeless—and they often live in some of the city’s most deplorably maintained apartments. This comes even as the Bowser administration spends generously on social services:
Zeilinger pegs the city’s total investments in its homeless services system alone at $170 million, a figure she calls historic, while Bowser has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to affordable housing production—at least $100 million every year since she took office. But for all the administration’s nimble deal-making, legal service providers and advocates for the homeless say critical large-scale problems remain. Chief among them: a stubborn refusal to fully acknowledge the scale of the problem. “There is this incredible disparity between what we see is the real experience of families and, on paper, the imagined reality,” says Judith Sandalow, the executive director of Children’s Law Center, a decades-old legal services center that assists more than 5,000 kids and families a year who disproportionately live in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods. “The city seems to be putting in place policies that don't acknowledge the reality of the individual children and families that we see our residents experience.” The reality of those choices, including a near single-minded fixation on decreasing family homelessness at the expense of homeless single adults, is now catching up with her administration. The spread of COVID-19, particularly in at-capacity homeless shelters, has potentially exposed hundreds, if not thousands, of vulnerable people to the virus. At one point in late April, positive cases among the unhoused were 2.5 times higher than they were among the general population. To date, nine people experiencing homelessness in D.C. have lost their lives to COVID-19. Five years after Bowser’s promise to end family homelessness, and five years away from her goal of eradicating it completely, the District is still, at best, treading water. The Bowser administration made waves when it published Homeward DC. The 95-page plan had three major goals: to end homelessness among veterans by the end of 2015; end chronic homelessness among single adults and families by the end of 2017; and reduce overall homelessness by 65 percent by the end of 2020. It generated a genuine thrill among the people working in D.C.’s legal services and advocacy community, who were ready to see a mayor get serious about tackling homelessness. “It was a good plan, and it had a lot of support. It was concrete in the way that sometimes plans aren't,” says Amber Harding, a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless who has worked on housing issues in D.C. since 2003. It also had buy-in from the Council. Her first summer in office, Bowser and the Council passed a budget that virtually fully-funded the proposals in Homeward DC, including permanent supportive housing for 363 chronically homeless single people and 110 families, as well as tripling the number of people receiving short-term rental subsidies. Part of Homeward DC’s strategy involved redesigning the District’s emergency shelter system, along with its alphabet soup of transitional housing programs. One of the Bowser administration’s first acts in that vein was to expand the District’s right to shelter law. Up through Gray’s administration, D.C. was only obligated to provide emergency shelter to families during hypothermia events, when the temperature dropped below freezing. “It was awful,” Harding says, adding that the restriction “[put] families in really terrible situations.” D.C. is still only one of three jurisdictions
to boast a right to shelter law, and the effect of expanding placements was immediate and dramatic. Aside from humanely providing shelter to families who needed it, the change allowed shelter providers to avoid a huge spike in services in winter months when hundreds of families would simultaneously seek relief. It made both moral and logistical sense. “My first few days here, there were days that more than 100 to 200 families were entering shelter [in] one week,” Zeilinger says. “Now we have between 20 and 30 families who enter in that same time, and that’s a lot.” But one big thing Homeward DC failed to do, in Harding’s eyes, was account for the need to approach homelessness holistically. To provide more people with more stable housing options,
more units of housing across the city by 2025, with one-third of them considered “affordable.” But D.C.’s need goes far beyond that commitment: A recent Urban Institute study pegs the immediate regional need at 264,000 units. After the first year of Homeward DC, efforts to fully fund the plan—both on the Council and in the mayor’s office—petered out. Neither body proposed budgets that fully met the plan’s financial need in any of Bowser’s subsequent years in office; at times, proposed spending met the stated need of sheer units by only half or less. By fiscal year 2019, according to budget priorities outlined by a coalition of advocates for the homeless, Bowser and the Council funded only 43 percent of the known need for permanent supportive housing, a long-term housing
The Brooks is the final D.C. General replacement shelter to open. there needs to be more affordable housing. Beyond a mere dearth in the District’s housing supply, the private market in D.C. does not naturally produce enough of the kind of units that voucher-holders need, including apartments with more than two bedrooms or units that are wheelchair accessible. It also became clear that, while the Department of Human Services would administer the bulk of the District’s homeless services, the District needed more buy-in from other housing agencies. The city’s interagency homelessness council—a group of cabinet members from several local agencies who help guide the city’s response to homelessness—exists in part for this reason. “The reason that the Interagency Council on Homelessness was developed to begin with was to say, homelessness is a citywide issue that every agency has a role in solving,” Harding says. “And I don't think there's been political will to control or guide development more.” It wasn’t until May 2019, about four years after the publication of Homeward DC, that Bowser announced an effort to produce 36,000
voucher program that includes extensive counseling services. The same year, funding for targeted affordable housing, a permanent rental voucher program, decreased from the previous year to meet just 28 percent of the need. In fiscal year 2020, while the budget funded the need for family permanent supportive housing units, it met only a fraction of the need for singles and for targeted affordable housing. All that comes despite the fact that the sheer number of dollars invested in homeless services actually grew year over year, according to DHS. “When that happens, you know, you lose ground really quickly,” Harding says. “Because the plan always [said], basically: this is the minimum that you need to do.” In January 2016, around the first anniversary of Bowser’s inauguration, the number of homeless D.C. residents ticked up to 8,350, according to data from D.C.’s annual count of its homeless population. It is against this number that her administration compares subsequent declines in family homelessness—one statistic it touts in particular is that, under Bowser,
family homelessness has declined by more than 40 percent. That is technically true if you use the 2016 data as a baseline, but highly misleading since, as even D.C. government employees would later argue, that data was anomalously high. “The increase is primarily due to housing affordability challenges in the District, and increased demand for stable housing assistance that is brought to bear on the homelessness system,” said a report compiled by The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, which has long contracted with D.C. to oversee homeless services in shelters and motels. The group also wrote that it could attribute part of that increase to D.C.’s right to shelter law, essentially arguing that D.C.’s numbers were higher that year simply because more people had access to emergency shelter. Zeilinger and Kristy Greenwalt, the director of D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness and the director of the federal ICH’s housing policy during the Obama administration, agreed. Both subsequently began to call for stronger reform in the shelter’s intake system. But the problem with that line of thinking, advocates say, was simple: D.C.’s right to shelter law has been in effect since the 1980s, and even though the Bowser administration had recently widened eligibility, the District has always conducted its homelessness count in the winter, when people have always had the right to emergency shelter. (To that, Zeilinger says, “we had a lot of entry into the system. … You had both the phenomenon of an increase in entries, because that's the expectation of the community—that you can get in during hypothermia season—[plus] everybody who needed shelter who came in before then.”) In May of 2017, Bowser introduced legislation to the D.C. Council that would amend D.C.’s Homeless Services Reform Act, a 2005 law that guided homeless services in D.C. and was updated twice by the mayoral administrations of Gray, in 2013, and Adrian Fenty, in 2010. Bowser’s iteration was ostensibly designed to bring D.C. closer to meeting the goals outlined in her Homeward DC plan, but it received almost universal condemnation from legal services and advocacy organizations, including a coalition of 46 groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Aid Society, and DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence. They argued that her desired reforms seemed to get there not by expanding services to people who need it, but by restricting who could access services in the first place. The final version of the bill, passed 10-2 by the D.C. Council in December 2017, redefined who is considered homeless and, therefore, who could access services. It also introduced a stringent local residency requirement to the shelter system, requiring families seeking shelter in D.C. to supply proof of local residency—a necessary change, the Bowser administration said, because too many homeless people from outside D.C. were trying to access services here. Though that ostensibly included exemptions for vulnerable populations like refugees, asylees, and survivors of domestic violence and assault, service providers argue that the HSRA updates muddle their legal status more than they clarify it. All of that had a cascading effect on the homeless services system, beginning with the number of people who qualified for emergency shelter. At hearing after hearing before the D.C. Council, legal service providers recounted cases
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of clients being turned away from the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, in many cases during the middle of the night. Diversion away from shelter, far from a statistic the administration tries to hide, is actually baked into the Homeward DC plan. DHS anticipated needing to direct hundreds of families away from the shelter system each year to meet their own benchmarks on ending homelessness, though advocates say that number has, in reality, reached the thousands. (This work often includes temporary case services, with Virginia Williams staff trying to place potential clients with friends or family instead of in the shelter system.) Though many of the HSRA changes were geared toward narrowing D.C.’s intake system, demand has persisted, in some years rising: 3 percent more families sought housing services from Virginia Williams during the winter of 2019 than they did the previous year, DHS data show. “Once I think they realized they weren’t meeting those metrics anymore, and the numbers were going to look bad, they turned to those other strategies of sort of masking the true need by changing the definition of homelessness,” Harding says. “In fact, I think there's an argument that some of those numbers have increased or some of those things have been hidden … They turned their focus to only who lives in shelter [or] on the street, without considering other metrics of homelessness.” One example, to start, is homeless students. D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education reports that there are about 7,400 homeless students in D.C. alone, far above the 6,500 people counted by DHS as homeless in D.C., and more than double the roughly 3,080 students reported as homeless in 2014. That discrepancy exists in large part because D.C.’s human services agency, like others across the U.S., does not consider children who are couch-surfing—people who are “doubled up”—homeless. Other surveys indicate there are many more children facing housing instability in D.C. than even Office of the State Superintendent of Education data indicate. Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation show that, as of 2018, there were an estimated 22,000 children in D.C. living in “crowded housing,” or children sharing a room with at least one other person. “The number one issue, to start, [is] how do we count?” says Children’s Law Center’s Judith Sandalow. “We're missing lots and lots of kids.” “I think one of the reasons why we want the mayor to think bigger than just children in shelters or on the street is because the harm of homelessness, which is obviously what we're all trying to ameliorate, is a harm that we think is also true for children who are living in incredibly crowded, doubled up situations,” Sandalow says. Both conditions—sleeping in a shelter and hopping from house to house—result in uncertainty about where you’re going to sleep next. “The incredible instability, the moving from place to place and having to change schools, the uncertainties of parental stress, [the] violence, all of those things exist for children who are doubled up,” she says. Zeilinger notes that DHS follows the federal housing department’s definition of homeless for the purpose of conducting its annual count “because those are the numbers we have to report to [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development],” she says. “It doesn't mean that we're trying to define it differently.” She adds: “We consider, what is the best way to meet the needs of somebody, and the range
of programs [they] qualify for? So someone who's at risk of homelessness, who may not be counted by HUD, but may be counted by [the U.S. Department of] Education, that isn't what's relevant. What's relevant is: Can we help them stabilize without having to come into shelter?” Service providers say D.C. has also failed to meet the needs of homeless teens who are close to aging out of the system. The problem is particularly acute for queer and transgender people in D.C. Ruby Corado, the founder of Casa Ruby— one of the few shelters in the District dedicated to serving LGBTQ youth—says that while the Bowser administration has been responsive to funding beds in her Ward 4 shelter for young people, it has patently refused to fund beds for adults. Last year, Corado met with Bowser and other
She adds: “Housing services is like a mafia, with the same providers getting the same dollars.” Corado’s difficulty finding funds to support homeless single adults tracks with how the District has prioritized tackling homelessness. More broadly, homelessness among single adults has risen slightly, by about 3 percent across the board, from 3,770 people in 2018 to 3,875 in 2019. That figure is in fact marginally higher than it was in 2015, when Bowser came into office. The ICH has since said that, when it drafted Homeward DC, it assumed that 30 percent of single adults in shelter would be able to “self resolve” every year. Data show that figure is closer to 12 percent. And though Casa Ruby has a mandate not to turn anyone away, Corado’s resources are starting
D.C. General human services officials to discuss funding for the next fiscal year. She requested funding for beds that could serve 50 adults; on her own, she can only finance 20. In March alone, for example, those 20 beds provided 496 nights of shelter for adults. What she heard from the administration was that human services officials held a focus group with stakeholders in the LGBTQ services community, and that the response was essentially, “gay people told them that they don’t want a gay shelter,” Corado says with a dubious laugh. That meant the administration would not finance the adult beds she needs. (Zeilinger says she was not present at the focus group meeting and cannot comment on its recommendations, but says, “we're really committed to making sure that all members of our community have a safe place where they can come at the time that they need it.”) “At this point, it becomes my data versus yours,” Corado says. “It was the perfect excuse. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a person who does scientific research, but [we] have more than 46 percent of homeless youths that are LGBTQ—you don’t think there’s adults that are [in need]?”
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to strain. For the first time in eight years, Corado says, she has had to deny beds to potential clients, most recently a 29-year-old trans woman experiencing homelessness. The population she serves is uniquely vulnerable: In 2019, of the 81 homeless people who died in D.C., at least 14 were trans. “I allow a lot of bureaucrats to spit on my pride and my dreams of giving homeless people a better life. And some of them have treated me like dirt,” Corado says. “Some of her bureaucrats have spit on my pride. And guess what? I took it. [People have] told me, if I speak, if I push more, I’m going to lose what I’ve got. Most of the time I stay quiet so I get the little bones they throw at me.” That’s the thing that infuriates Corado the most, she says: the attitude that service providers should be grateful that they’re getting any money at all. “They make people feel like they’re doing them a favor,” she says. “It’s crazy.” Aubrey Taylor was living with his 5-yearold son at D.C. General in the final months of the shelter’s life when he received a rapid rehousing subsidy.
The program, born out of the Obama administration in the wake of the 2008 recession, is essentially a short-term housing subsidy that, in D.C., ends after one year. It allows recipients to pay a maximum of thirty percent of their income, whether that’s $20 a year or $20,000, toward their rent. Though Taylor works a part-time job, his wage isn’t high enough to afford market-rate rent in D.C., where the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment is $3,100 per month. His rapid rehousing subsidy allowed him to move into a one-bedroom apartment on Edgewood St. NE with his son. He quickly encountered problems with the unit, including a rat and bedbug infestation that became so severe he would wake up to find bite marks on his son’s arms and legs. The landlord, unresponsive to Taylor’s maintenance requests, never paid for an exterminator to come to the property, Taylor says. That financial responsibility fell to Taylor, despite the fact that landlords in D.C. are legally required to maintain safe and clean housing, and conduct all necessary repairs. But Kathy Zeisel, a staff attorney at the Children’s Law Center, says it’s often rapid rehousing clients who struggle with the worst housing code violations. Central to a robust, progressive housing services system is the concept of “housing first,” which holds simply that the single most grounding force in a family’s life is a safe and stable place to live—that when families facing financial, professional, or medical difficulty have a home, it’s much more likely that they can get job training, go back to school, care for their children, and safely store medication. Housing services providers developed this principle in the late 1980s, and current national experts in housing policy champion it; it now also guides publicly run services for the homeless in dozens of major cities across the country. D.C. leaders have embraced it, too, and the concept is mentioned early and often in Bowser’s Homeward DC plan. A “housing first” approach to solving homelessness is often touted as justification for the Bowser administration’s increasing reliance on rapid rehousing, which it now considers the “primary housing intervention for families who are transitioning from the emergency shelter system.” Primary intervention, indeed. In February of 2016, a year into Bowser’s first term, just over 1,080 families had rapid rehousing vouchers, at a cost of roughly $26 million annually to the city. It would continue to grow in 2017, to 1,358 families, and again in 2018, to 1,434 families. When, in a brief and unceremonious announcement, Bowser permanently closed the doors on D.C. General, it accelerated the District’s reliance on the rapid rehousing program even further, giving DHS a way to quickly re-home families who were living at the facility. There are now more than 2,300 families in possession of rapid rehousing vouchers, at a cost of nearly $52 million a year to the city, according to recent DHS data. (For context, the District forecast that it would spend $37.3 million total in fiscal year 2020 on Homeward DC investments, which includes spending on other housing and homeless prevention programs.) Rapid rehousing is also newly defined in the HSRA as a form of permanent housing, and program participants aren’t considered homeless. A side effect of the Bowser administration’s reliance on the program, intentional or not, is that it allows officials to tout a decrease in family homelessness even as more families than ever are seeking and receiving housing assistance.
The best available data, including data collected by DHS, also shows that rapid rehousing is falling short in key metrics year to year, presumably because, over time, an increasing number of people are being shuffled into a program that might not meet their needs. Take personal income, arguably the most important metric to consider when it comes to determining who rapid rehousing might best serve. Over the last four years, the average monthly income of rapid rehousing recipients has actually decreased, dropping from about $1,860 per month in 2016 to $1,600 in 2019, according to DHS data. It follows, then, that rapid rehousing voucher holders are less likely to be able to afford rent on their own when the program ends, and early data seem to bear that out. In a sample of 882 families who received rapid rehousing vouchers, nearly half—46 percent— had eviction cases filed against them. And a whopping 42 percent of the families who sought and received services from D.C.’s emergency shelter system last year had previously received rapid rehousing subsidies. “We know that our data isn't perfect,” Zeilinger says of the income data. “When we have a growing number of people in the program that are entering at all different times, and then average it all together, [the] earnings are variable.” She adds that, particularly in the rapid rehousing program, participants experience “disincentives to earning, and to showing earnings” in “profound ways”—“people understand that the point [where] they start to rebuild their income is the point at which they are exited [from the program]. And so we need to be able to allow people to build their earnings without facing a penalty for that,” she says. The District’s response has been to weigh tweaks to the program that make it more difficult for people who already receive benefits to maintain them: Six months into the program, voucher holders who don’t receive services would go from paying 30 percent of their income toward rent to 30 percent of the total rent. The amount would then increase each month until the 12-month mark, when participants are expected to take over the full amount of their rent. If recipients aren’t in compliance with paying a portion of the rent, they would not be eligible for an extension at the end of the program. “I'd say that those recommendations actually move it completely away from being a housing first model, because they make any extension or continued services contingent upon being compliant with program rules,” says Zeisel, who is on the task force whose members suggested the change. “It moves the District away from national best practices, which say that your housing is not contingent upon you agreeing to [certain rules].” But Zeilinger is not persuaded by the argument that D.C. should curb its use of the program, even if not all participants can make payments in the long run. “Some people would say, [if] it’s not clear how, when a family is in shelter, or an individual is in shelter, they will in the long run or in a year be able to fully pay their rent on their own, you should not exit them from shelter with anything other than a voucher or a permanent subsidy. While I understand that in theory, we would not be able to offer shelter to people who need it,” Zeilinger says, “because we would not, we do not, have long term housing subsidies for every single person in this city experiencing a housing crisis.” Taylor is now worried he’ll become just another
person for whom rapid rehousing didn’t work. In August 2019, when Taylor’s caseworker notified him that his voucher subsidy would end in two months, Taylor scrambled to write a letter requesting an extension. But Taylor, who is dyslexic, asked his caseworker to review the note before sending it. After confirming he would, the caseworker notified Taylor just weeks before the subsidy termination that he sent the request without editing it, and that Taylor had been denied an extension. (Local nonprofit Bread for the City is representing Taylor in an Office of Administrative Hearings case challenging that verdict.) “I was explaining to my caseworker, I need a tutor. I need one-on-one help,” he says. “I didn’t get the extra hand that I wanted, that I really needed.” The experience capped off a maddening year of case services, Taylor said, that included his caseworker showing up to meetings up to two hours late—at times making Taylor late to pick up his son from school. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the help,” says Taylor, who is now worried he’ll have to turn back to the emergency shelter system. “But when they help, it’s a month later, weeks later. I need help now.”
ARTS LIZ AT LARGE
“Accomplishment” By Liz Montague @Lizatlarge
On March 11, Bowser declared a public health emergency in D.C. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Residents who could do so remained in their homes, mourning the closures of their favorite restaurants and talking wistfully about the loss of contact with friends and strangers. For the homeless in need of shelter, social distancing was not an option. DHS began isolating its highest-risk clients in hotel rooms and installing hand-washing stations across the city. Lowbarrier shelters, like Corado’s Casa Ruby, began to report increases in demand. Facing staggering losses in sales tax revenue, the District now stares down up to $770 million in cuts to the next budget, on top of what it will have to trim in the current fiscal year. Service providers for the homeless are, presumably, holding their collective breath. It is true that the homelessness crisis is vastly bigger than one District employee, one local agency, even one city. Bigger, too, than one pandemic. But for the homeless, whose lives quite literally depend on every line item in D.C.’s budget, the worst is almost certainly yet to come. As the pandemic became America’s great clarifier, it was obvious, all at once again, who the most vulnerable among us are. On March 10, the day before Bowser declared a state of emergency, D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness voted on finalizing an updated version of Homeward DC—effectively another five-year plan for ending homelessness in the city. It capped months of revisions of the plan’s first iteration, which has guided the Bowser administration these last five years. Human services officials circulated an initial draft of the plan to advocates and reporters at a meeting early this year, though they would reportedly not allow reporters to summarize or quote from its contents. Greenwalt, the director of D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, declined through a spokesperson to speak with City Paper about the plan, and a spokesperson for DHS did not respond to City Paper’s inquiry about what the plan’s major points contain. So will Bowser meet her goal of ending homelessness completely by 2025? “I don’t want to give you my prediction on a date,” Zeilinger says. Even for the head of D.C.’s homeless services system, the city’s path forward is unclear. washingtoncitypaper.com may 1, 2020 11
NEWS CITY DESK
Occupational Hazard Nurses are happy about increased testing for COVID-19, but concerns over contact tracing, personal protective equipment, and hazard pay persist. By Amanda Michelle Gomez @amanduhgomez Perina Gaines, a registered nurse, asked twice to be tested for COVID-19. A colleague of hers at the Department of Behavioral Health’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program tested positive for the coronavirus disease, and Gaines became concerned that she too might be infected. She worries not only for herself, but for family members who she comes in contact with that have compromised immune systems, like her elderly mother or her nephew with systemic lupus erythematosus. “I didn’t meet the criteria for testing,” Gaines says. She did not have any of the three commonly cited symptoms that would force a test: a fever, cough, and shortness of breath. “I am really, really concerned about becoming infected, because I see what it’s done to the other nurses that have been on the frontlines. Some of them have been able to combat it. Some of them have not.” To keep her family from getting infected, Debra Washington has sacrificed hugs from her grandchildren, who used to embrace her as soon as she got home from working a 12-hour shift. Now, the 30-year veteran nurse goes straight to the bathroom to shower because she runs the risk of carrying the coronavirus. Washington has been exposed to a colleague who tested positive for COVID-19 at United Medical Center, where she works in the telemetry unit. In a letter addressed to her the first week of April, Washington was notified that she had been exposed and should monitor herself for 14 days in case she started experiencing symptoms. “It may well have not even been given to me, because the time I would have needed to self-monitor had already come and went,” she tells City Paper. Washington says she received the letter on the 14th day after she was exposed. For more than a month, the District of Columbia Nurses Association, the union that represents Washington, Gaines, and 2,000 other nurses and health care professionals in
D.C. medical facilities, has been demanding that union members be tested for COVID-19 regardless of whether or not they show symptoms. DCNA leaders say nurses they represent work with COVID-19 patients while having to reuse personal protective equipment like masks. On April 22, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that DC Health would expand the criteria to allow some asymptomatic individuals who have a history of exposure to be prioritized for testing. This includes health care workers. “Individuals who are over 65, who have underlying health conditions, who are health care workers—those are the groups that we really want to focus on for asymptomatic testing,” DC Health Director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt said during the April 22 press conference. “We are not at a position at this time where we are asking for all asymptomatic individuals in the community to push into our system and ask to be tested.” DCNA was pleased with the change, though they were not informed. Like everyone else, the union learned of the news when it was shared publicly. This appears to be a pattern. While the union has asked to be consulted when it c o me s to m atters related to their workers and the pandemic, DCNA has only met with gover nment of f icials, i nclud i n g D eput y Mayor of Health and Hu man Ser v ices Wayne Turnage, once since the public health emergency was declared on March 11. DCNA was also not invited to be part of the ReOpen DC Advisory Group, an assembly of community leaders, medical degree holders, and CEO types personally selected by Bowser to provide guidance on when and how to lift social distancing restrictions. There is minimal labor representation on any of the 11 committees broken up by sector. “We know that it’s a busy, busy time for everybody, but we think that certainly communicating with the nurses union that represents 2,000 health care workers in the District would be advisable,” says DCNA executive director Edward J. Smith. Increased access to testing ultimately brings peace of mind. One DCNA member already died due to complications from COVID-19: Noel Sinkiat, a veteran nurse at Howard University Hospital. Countless more are infected—the union does not know the exact number of nurses who have tested positive. During an April 27 press conference, Bowser said she could not release the total number of health care workers infected with COVID-19, although Nesbitt added that between 5 and 6 percent of the confirmed cases that have undergone contact tracing are among health care workers. Only a few states, including California, track and report the number of health care
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workers who test positive for COVID-19. D.C. only publishes the number of St. Elizabeths Hospital employees who test positive or are quarantined due to possible exposure, and the reason why this is the only public medical facility D.C. reports on its COVID19 website is not exactly clear. The DCNA president for St. Elizabeths’ nurses, Susan Nelson-Pierre, told City Paper too many of her colleagues were out due to COVID-19 in mid-April, creating staffing issues at the city’s only public psychiatric hospital. As of April 28, the number is 80. Separately, a spokesperson for the mayor tells City Paper there have been four cases among health care workers at CPEP—one nurse, one manager, and two administrative staff—and seven cases among health care workers at United Medical Center. The spokesperson says the public hospital could not break up the cases by job title. Beyond testing, unionized nurses are having to advocate for other life-saving necessities like personal protective equipment. There’s still the issue of nurses having to reuse the same N95 mask during a 12-hour shift, or needing to bring a homemade mask because there just aren’t enough at work for everyone, Sm it h hea rs f rom his nurses. At CPEP, PPE is hidden in an undisclosed location because it’s such a hot commodity. At Howard University Hospital and UMC, nurses have relied on donated N95 masks from a “Masks For America” GoFundMe page. Over the course of the pandemic, DCNA has made several requests on behalf of their members to both the D.C. government and hospital administrations. In a letter addressed to Nesbitt on April 27, DCNA asked DC Health to rehire furloughed employees to help with contact tracing and to notify health care workers within 48 hours when a patient or employee tests positive. “The health care system in the District of Columbia cannot afford an overwhelming number of medical professionals to be lost to the virus. The amount of stress the health care system would face in such a situation is unimaginable,” reads a letter signed by labor groups including 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO. Unionized nurses at UMC asked management for hazard pay on April 6. In an email the DCNA staff attorney wrote to the UMC general counsel, they requested regular full- and parttime employees receive a premium pay of 35 percent of the nurses’ base rate per hour when they are working on a unit with COVID-19 patients. “Appreciation is good and we appreciate them to say ‘you’re heroes, you’re this, you’re that’,” says Washington, who serves as the vice president for unionized nurses at UMC. “I just wish that my facility ... could show appreciation in other ways as well. Monetarily? Yes, that would be great.”
“I just wish that my facility ... could show appreciation in other ways as well. Monetarily? Yes, that would be great.”
The union’s request for hazard pay has so far been rejected. “When it comes to hazard pay, UMC is evaluating the possibilities on how to recognize and support our team during these times. To date no medical facility in the District is offering hazard pay,” says UMC spokesperson Toya Carmichael in an email to City Paper. “At UMC—we are all in this together—and looking out for one another. We are proud of the team working so hard to keep our community safe and healthy.” According to Smith, the union’s input has either “fallen on deaf ears or we don’t even get access to the decision makers here.” A recent example of this came when DCNA pushed back against a decision at Children’s National Hospital to temporarily lay off school nurses who did not agree to participate in DC Health’s efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic. DCNA wanted reassurances that nurses would not have to work at testing sites and would be provided the appropriate PPE if they agreed to anything. Many of these nurses are older and medically frail, which is why they didn’t work in medical facilities to begin with. Of the 150 school nurses asked to participate, nearly 40 refused the new work assignment. They were laid off and their health insurance transitioned to COBRA. DCNA says at least one school nurse has tested positive for COVID-19. The union believes the nurse got infected during an April 2 training, where roughly 30 volunteers gathered at DC Health’s headquarters on North Capitol Street NE without masks and gloves. A few days later, the nurse started showing symptoms, the union alleges. In a statement to City Paper, a DC Health spokesperson said the agency follows guidance from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention regarding social distancing by having people remain six feet apart and providing hand sanitizer along with cleaning supplies to disinfect work spaces. “Unless a person only has been in a single place in the past 14 days, it is not possible to state that their infection is caused by a single exposure,” says the spokesperson, citing widespread community transmission in the city. This has been the hardest time in many nurses’ careers. This is true for Gaines, who’s been a nurse for 18 years. Six of those have been spent at CPEP, where she works with patients in mental health crises. Screening patients for COVID-19 is difficult when patients, many of whom are experiencing homelessness, can’t provide definitive answers because they are struggling with severe mental illness. Constantly changing guidance just adds insult to injury. Missing any bit of information could result in infection or even death. Health care workers writ large are under immense pressure, having to turn to one another for support. “It is still a fear everyday, but since I’m so committed and have a passion for health care, I overcome the fear every morning after prayer, meditation, and getting to work with my colleagues,” says Gaines. “It’s the collaboration among the nurses that kind of get us through each shift each day.”
FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY
Wish I Was There
it’s clear, in most cases, that each item represents a memory for those who have inhabited your space. You’re a bar filled with a diverse group of people who likely walked in that first time because you’re close to their house. But we come back because you’ve become an extension of home—with more beer and lots of whiskey. You’re where I went when my wife was traveling overseas, where I go after yardwork, before a fancy dinner, after an annoying day at work, after a good day at work, and even that time I had just finished shoveling out from the Snowpocalypse. I’ve brought almost every houseguest to see you, including my 70+ year-old mother and my 22-year-old niece. All are welcome. You’re where we celebrated the Nationals’ World Series win with pizza, shots, and beer showers. Seven years, a few Eurovisions, and countless Bud Lights later, you and your patrons have become our extended family. Not that you’d enjoy this sentimentality, but tough s---. Looking forward to seeing you again soon.
The Pug
Washingtonians pen love letters to the bars and restaurants they miss most. By City Paper readers
Dear Taqueria Habanero, 3710 14th St. NW Hi, it’s me—three carnitas tacos and a side of rice and beans with extra green salsa. How’ve you been? I see you’re doing take-out now— that’s great, because I’ve missed you like a second grader misses recess. When I first moved to D.C. for college, away from my Mexican American mother, my first order of business was finding a place to get Mexican food. That first year in D.C., I tried restaurant after restaurant. The food was OK, but none of it was Mexican food, not by a long shot. I gave up and spent my college career declaring that there was no authentic Mexican food to be found in the District of Columbia. It wasn’t until I moved back to D.C. in 2015 that we became acquainted. Three bites in and I was a goner. I had finally found something to numb the homesickness. Since then, your food and margaritas have been with me through breakups, hard days at work, hangovers, and too many celebrations to count. You love me for me, whether I’m in leggings or coming straight from work. The feeling is mutual. I don’t care that you’re almost always crowded and loud. I love your small outside tables; I love how the smell of the food hits you in the face the second you pull the door open; and, most of all, I love the mural that proudly announces “this food is 99 percent Mexican.” Even though I sometimes cheat on you with your sibling down the street, you will always be my favorite. So, Habanero, mi amor, sigue luchando. I need you. Please don’t leave me with Taco Bell Cantina. —Maya Burchette
Columbia Heights
—Morgan Davidson
Trinidad
Darrow Montgomery/File
Restaurants and bars are hurting. They’ve already lost months of sales, and are wondering when they’ll be able to reopen and what that will even look like. Whenever Washingtonians are coping with a bad breakup, agonizing over election results, or celebrating a job promotion, those restaurants and bars are there for them. During this tough stretch, it’s time to return the favor. City Paper asked District residents to pen letters of love and sup—Laura Hayes port to their favorite spots. Letters were edited for length and clarity.
Dear Bad Saint, 3226 11th St. NW Whether waiting in line for hours or trying to snag an online reservation for months, a meal at Bad Saint is always worth the wait. The reward is always great food with gracious service. For me, a resident since 1998, you made the District finally feel like home. Before you opened your doors in 2015, I loved living in D.C., but felt something was missing. It was a true sense of belonging to a community, and that’s what Bad Saint has do ne fo r me a nd many others. From the sabong a r t work ador n i n g the walls to the tender tinola simmering on the stove, there’s a reason why eating at your restaurant brings many Filipino Americans to tears. When we step inside and bite into your food, we not only feel the love our families have showered upon us, but also gratitude for the work you’ve done elevating Filipino food and hospitality. You put the best of Filipino culture on display, and have taught others about the complexity of who we are as a people. Your commitment to sharing the colonial past of the Philippines and showcasing the varied regional cuisines present
in our thousands of islands provides a gateway for others to learn about the place Filipinos have in American history. Let me also be honest: I am tired of cooking. I’m in desperate need of your delicious food set to Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” playing in the background. I know that Chef Tom [Cunanan’s] laptop is bursting with new recipes, including a savory, steamed murcon from Pampanga and a shredded and stewed bacalao from Cavite. You have been a good neighbor to me and to the District, a nd we need you back. I will be waiting for you.
“Seven years, a few Eurovisions, and countless Bud Lights later, you and your patrons have become our extended family. Not that you’d enjoy this sentimentality, but tough s---. Looking forward to seeing you again soon.”
—Charita Castro
Brookland
Dear The Pug, 1234 H St. NE It was May 2013 when my wife and I first visited, having just moved to the neighborhood. You were dark and comforting, even if your surly bartender side-eyed us when we erroneously inquired about food. You’re the kind of place that reminds me of my dad. He grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh—a rough one, but the kind with a lot of heart. That’s what you are: no-nonsense, sometimes gruff, but always there. You display holiday decorations year-round and random paraphernalia on the walls, but
Dear Momiji, 505 H St. NW When I first moved to Washington five years ago, there was one thing I needed to find: a local bar. I used to be a heavy drinker, so I needed to find a place where I’d be just as comfortable alone with the bartender as I would with a group. Many Hill staffers from Hawaii, where I came from, told me about Momiji. I went just a few nights after moving in, and I fell in love with your katsu curry. I remember putting on the ‘gram "Best katsu curry I’ve ever had." That sentiment stayed with me. The dish became my go-to comfort for any day too long or challenging. Once I got to know the bartender and the rest of the family-run restaurant, you became the closest thing I had to a second home outside of work. I quit drinking a year ago, but it wasn’t the good pours that kept me coming back. It was the hearty meals, sushi, and welcoming faces and voices of everyone there. I used to have anxiety over being the kind of customer to have an eating spot where the staff know my usual order. Not this time. It was like visiting family. I went back a few times when this whole thing started, determined to show my eager face. I wanted to let you know that I’ll keep coming back as long as I can. Now you’re shuttered. "Temporarily closed," your Instagram says. I truly hope this is all temporary, as all things are. But the warm welcome (and curry) I love won’t be forgotten, not as long as I’m around. —Gene Park
Downtown
Dear Georgina’s (AKA The Players Lounge), 2737 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE Thank you for the great soul food, fun, and music that you have brought to Ward 8’s Congress Heights neighborhood for decades.
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FOOD ARTS FILM REVIEW I love your friendly atmosphere. It reminds me of the television show Cheers, where you can see all of the regulars from years gone by sitting at the bar, enjoying the food and conversation, and sometimes watching daytime game shows on TV. Whether I’m there to have a sit-down lunch or take-out dinner, I’m bound to see a community leader from the neighborhood. When they see me, the waitresses know I want the barbecued ribs, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese plate. This is the place for soul food lovers. If I’m not having a plate of ribs, I sometimes will order the jerk chicken, baked chicken, curry chicken, or fried catfish with a slice of cake. I’m adventurous when it comes to eating. There have been a few times I’ve had the pig’s feet, smothered pork chops, and even the chitlins. Being from Texas, I enjoy eating authentic soul food and Georgina’s has it. At lunch I normally order the “very sweet” iced tea. In the evening, I’ll try a cocktail from the well-stocked bar while enjoying music from the DJ or live band. The place is not fancy at all. It gives you a ’60s or ’70s vibe. They even have a jukebox. If you are ever east of the river, you must check out Georgina’s. —Darrin Davis
Anacostia
Dear Nanny O’Briens, 3319 Connecticut Ave. NW Cleveland Park misses you and hopes your doors will open again soon. Sure, we miss your lip-smacking burgers, crispy tater tots, and delicious craft beers, but it’s your comfy confines we miss most of all. Every time I pass by your shuttered doors, my heart sinks a little more. For the last decade, you’ve always been there for us. My daughter was born on a cold day in January, and we weren’t as ready as we should have been. After a long day of putting the finishing touches on Lily’s room, I’ll never forget walking into Nanny’s and about 20 patrons instantly greeting me in unison with, “Hi Daddy!” About a year later, my wife, daughter, and I were the first ones in line to get in after more than 20 inches of snow fell. We all needed to get out, see some friends, and not have to cook. Naturally, you were packed with Cleveland Park residents, because you’re our second living room. Whether it is Tuesday night trivia, wings on Wednesday, live music on Saturday, football Sundays in the fall, watching the Nats and Caps make history, or tap takeover events, you are always there. We miss your welcoming wobbling chairs, perfectly poured pints of Guinness, sarcastic and hilarious staff, and carousing with friends from the neighborhood. —Jeff, Ashley, and Lilianna Lucas
Van Ness
Dear Hellbender Brewing Company, 5788 2nd St. NE When I first meandered into you last year, I knew you were a place I could call home.
The afternoon I spent solo at your bar, where locals introduced me to your beers and the area, finalized my decision to move to the neighborhood. In that year, you have shown great compassion and warmth. You have prided yourself on sustainability, including clean-ups of the neighborhood. You have promoted local businesses, bringing pizza, tacos, and barbecue to an area best known for KFC and Taco Bell. You unite the neighborhood for knitting, book clubs, Dungeons & Dragons, play dates, pro sports (except that D.C. football team), and, of course, beer. You’re a place where, as a single woman, I can go anytime and feel welcome. I can’t believe year five has brought about such changes! Just as you were popping up at Nats Park and on menus at bars with $$$ Yelp ratings, the world shut down. You have provided a beer oasis for those of us trapped in our homes, whether alone or with small children. You equipped neighbors with a rice cooker and rice, and now rice beer, with amazing foresight. While I will continue to support this longdistance relationship, I yearn for the days when I could hear a live open mic, sample beers from your tap, and plan neighborhood cornhole tournaments or progressive parties. I hope we will be reunited soon, but until then, I will be dreaming of you in my hot tub with a can of Ignite. —Therese Jones
Riggs Park
Dear Stoney’s on L: 2101 L St. NW I miss you dearly. It’s been almost two months since we last saw each other, but not a day has passed when I haven’t dreamed of wolfing down a grilled cheese and a Stoney’s Amber beer. It’s hard to imagine a world without you after we’ve spent so much time together, from random late-night happy hours and brunches when friends are in town to several birthdays and other holidays. You were often the last place I ate and drank before getting on a plane for one of my many work trips, and sometimes the first place I wanted to go when I returned. I stepped off the plane craving fish tacos, a Reuben, or a Thunderbird Benedict. We were always a strange match: you, a sports bar, and my husband and I, two quiet introverts who start paying attention to sportsball during the playoffs. But we love your late-night happy hours, which are surprisingly chill. We love that your playlists are what we’d sing at karaoke. We love when we walk in and Cara or another bartender will have our usual two pints of Amber waiting as we seat ourselves at the bar. I k now you won’t get t h rou gh t h is unscathed—none of us will. But we hope you and your staff make it through. The minute the restrictions are lifted, we’ll be there, out on the patio if need be. And the Amber will never taste as good as at that moment.
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—Nara and Louis Kwon
West End
Baby Got Back Butt Boy Directed by Tyler Cornack Butt Boy combines the scatological curiosity of The Human Centipede with the absurdism of Rubber. You may recall that The Human Centipede is about a demented surgeon who sews three people together, connecting their posteriors to their mouths, while Rubber is about a sentient car tire who murders people with its mind. Heady concepts and bad taste unite these films, except Butt Boy is somehow not gross or absurd enough to veer into “so bad it’s good” territory. It is impressive the filmmakers got this project off the ground, although there is a good chance it may ultimately embarrass everyone involved. At first, Butt Boy tells a simple story about an ordinary man who discovers a dormant kink. In addition to directing and co-writing the film, Tyler Cornack plays Chip, a mild-mannered IT guy who lives in the suburbs with his wife and son. During a routine prostate exam, Chip discovers he really likes to put things in his butt. He tries a bar of soap, then his television remote. It gets weird from there—somehow, his butt develops superhuman powers, so it can suck up living creatures, like his dog. Chip’s insatiable butt is a burden. He did not ask for this power, so its appetite is more about compulsion than gratification. He even starts attending Alcoholics Anonymous for his addiction. This is also where Butt Boy develops its plot. Years after the dog, Chip relapses and sucks up a child. This triggers a police investigation, and Chip is the AA sponsor for the
case’s lead detective (Tyler Rice). The two men begin an uneasy friendship, at least until the detective has his suspicions. This film had its premiere at last year’s Fantastic Fest, a festival where audiences are often more receptive to such material. Once getting past the title and concept, however, even cult cinema fans may find the filmmaking and performances a touch too amateurish. As Chip, Cornack’s performance is so deadpan that sympathy or disgust barely register as appropriate responses to him. Rice is a bit more successful—he plays the detective as an intense obsessive with an inexplicable accent— and while his hard-boiled concept is out of place, at least it is a recognizable archetype. There are long stretches where Chip’s resignation veers into disinterest, so the monster living inside him inspires little curiosity or suspense. In the final act, we see what happens to the detective when Chip’s butt sucks him up and, needless to say, it looks unpleasant up there. Many of the film’s mysteries are solved, although the horror and gross-out humor are not a great fit. Jokes are superfluous when the concept is already this bizarre. In a period when no one is going to movie theaters anymore, smaller indie films have unparalleled opportunities to reach audiences stuck at home. Swallow and Sea Fever rise to the occasion, and even serve as unintended metaphors for these strange times. Butt Boy hopes for similar success, as if cabin fever is enough to get people interested in a movie about a demented butthole and its hapless victims. No one should be that desperate, so if your evening comes down to choosing between another film and this one, you should probably avoid this number two option. —Alan Zilberman Butt Boy is available to rent and stream on Amazon Prime.
ARTS
Home Box Office To make up for its postponed spring event, Filmfest DC is offering at-home viewers a free movie festival. There’s an absolute glut of high-quality online film available right now, from the giants like Netf lix and Hulu to the traditional networks’ ever-expanding bevy of on-demand streaming services to cinephile organizations across the globe. What makes Filmfest DC’s at-home programming most obviously different is one thing: price. For the next month, the organization is offering feature-length and short films on its website for free, with titles changing each week. But the festival’s curation will help push District residents outside of their comfort zones. Many films are international; half of them are shorts; they focus on diverse topics and include documentaries, animation, dramas, and comedies. City Paper previewed some of the titles that will be available to stream over the coming month. —Emma Sarappo DC Noir Washington native George Pelecanos is a prolific author of crime novels depicting an old D.C. that can seem almost unrecognizable after gentrification. But while the University of Maryland graduate has worked on a number of high-profile TV series that capture gritty urban environments, like The Wire and The Deuce, this four-story film anthology marks the first time Pelecanos has put D.C. on screen. The area’s richness comes through in Pelecanos’ directorial debut, a tale of marital infidelity in Petworth called “The Lovers,” while his son Nick makes his directorial debut with “Miss Mary’s Room,” the affecting tale of youths involved in the drug game. Keeping it real D.C., Fugazi’s Brendan Canty contributes an atmospheric score, and Backyard Band’s Anwan Glover plays himself in a segment that echoes the go-go culture wars of 2019, which seems so very long ago. DC Noir reminds you what it was like to live outside in the sometimes volatile world of the nation’s capital. April 23–April 30. 93 minutes. —Pat Padua Once Upon a Line This animated short by Alicja Jasina is charming, innovative, and unexpectedly tragic in the age of COVID-19: A man (really
Tango Glories just a set of lines hinting at the shape of a man, both metaphorically and literally) wakes up each day, wears the same clothes, drinks the same coffee, and heads out on the same commute to a pencil-pushing job. Oh, were it so for the rest of us today! He lives this monotonous life until he literally bumps into a beautiful stranger. They fall in love and cohabitate; life together turns out to not be all that great. In the end, what saves our main character isn’t another lady off the sidewalk: It’s the restorative power of the outdoors, where other citizens bike and bounce around joyfully. Certainly, those of us currently cooped up in our houses and apartments can testify to that fact. Once Upon a Line’s biggest strength, though, comes from its ambitious animation, using just a few lines to suggest the contours of much bigger places, faces, and lives. May —ES 1–7. 7 minutes. Sweetheart Dancers The subjects of Ben-Alex Dupris’ documentary short Sweetheart Dancers, Sean Snyder and Adrian Stevens, look happiest when they’re dancing. Together, they seem to forget everyone else, in keeping with the philosophy Adrian espouses at the beginning: “You’re not dancing against dancers. You’re dancing against the drum.” The pair hope to compete in the sweetheart dance, an event for long-term couples, in New Mexico, where they’ll be representing not just their own love but their family and tribal legacies. In the compact short, Dupris, an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, doesn’t take time to
define terms, events, or cultural references for outsiders. He doesn’t need to, since the expert cinematography and editing make Adrian and Sean’s relationship and emotion immediately legible. When they’re first turned away from competition by organizers who insist that “a couple must consist of two people. One man. One woman,” you feel their devastation intimately. A year later, when they win third place at a sweetheart dance open to all partners, you feel their elation and their love just as keenly. —ES May 15–21. 13 minutes. Tango Glories The 2014 Argentinian feature film Tango Glories centers around what seems, at first blush, to be a mawkish Glee-style premise: An old man, institutionalized and incoherent, can only communicate with his determined psychiatrist by quoting the titles and lyrics of tango songs. But what unfolds is an affecting look at how music manages to define and connect people. Viewers watch elderly Fermín’s life in f lashbacks as his doctor, Ezequiel Kaufman, begins to understand his life—and fall in love with Fermín’s granddaughter, a talented and acclaimed tango dancer herself. Fittingly for a movie built around tango, the dance scenes are electric and some of the film’s highlights. Director Oliver Kolker is a longtime tango enthusiast and performer, and his love for the art comes through. Hundreds of others pledged their loyalty to the art form and project via a Kickstarter that raised more than $50,000 for post-production and distribution. Any
D.C.-based tango lovers should thank them. —ES May 15–21. 117 minutes. NO, A Flamenco Tale This 2016 film from director José Luis Tirado shapes the bustling world of Seville, Spain, into an inventively choreographed tone poem. From a straightforward concert performance that looks much like a livestream from an intimate nightclub, the claustrophobic confines open up to a world in which everybody has a passionate song or dance to offer, from one woman bicycling up a busy street to cyclists pedaling in synchronized patterns. For anyone looking for a reminder of the world outside, in dance form, this is a welcome distraction. At one point, we get a view down a spiraling marble staircase as a solo dancer makes her way slowly into view, rising from several flights below. Curiously, this introduces a restriction that throws the art into a different light: Since we can only see the dancer from above, her expression is largely left to the rhythms she sounds out as hard shoes reverberate in space; when she has nearly completed her performance, we can hear her catch her breath. For a few moments, the movie plays as if Jacques Tati directed a Step Up movie, and when an elderly woman singer belts out, “It’s a mad, mad, mad world,” you’ll nod, sadly. There’s no conventional narrative, but in the varied images and musical approaches, there is structure. This is what I wish La La Land had been like. May 15–May 21. 75 minutes. —PP
All films are available to stream at filmfestdc.org.
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CITY LIGHTS City Lights
City Lights
If you find yourself missing the jittery anxiousness and excitement of meeting someone new, why not try watching strangers go on intimate first dates in front of your very eyes? Now on its third episode, “The Game (Show) of Love” is a Zoom-based gathering of six local singles who play games and answer audience questions in hopes of scoring a virtual date. With the help of a host, the contestants spill some inner secrets in “Two Truths and a Lie,” “Would You Rather,” “Never Have I Ever,” and other slumber party-esque Q&As. Periodically, audience members are asked to choose a couple to go on a virtual date. The host then eliminates the screens of everyone but those two, who have a sometimes cringe-worthy, sometimes picture-perfect first date. Audience members ask questions and make observations in the chat, and by the end, contestants anonymously message the host with who they’d pick to go on a date with. If all goes well, you’ll have the chance to see romance bloom before your very eyes. At the very least, you’ll get to feel butterflies on others’ behalf. Join the group on Facebook for the Zoom link and time. Free, donations encouraged. —David Gleisner
While pop-up retail and food attractions are rare in these socially distant days, the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ online exhibit, Wanderer/Wonderer: Pop-Ups by Colette Fu, explores pop-ups of a different sort. Wanderer/Wonderer features artist Colette Fu’s handcrafted pop-up books from two of her series, Haunted Philadelphia and We Are Tiger Dragon People. Originally displayed at the museum in 2016, Fu’s meditations on haunted spaces and lesser-known tales from around the globe are equally poignant years later. While the quiet sites in Haunted Philadelphia eerily mirror D.C. today, Fu’s work offers an escape. In “Ashima, Stone Mountain,” the blend of color prints and Sani needlepoint invites readers to look more closely, losing themselves in the folds. In “Rodin Museum: Lovers,” Fu’s intricate work illuminates a tragic love story. The mélange of Philadelphia newspaper clippings animates the whimsical scene, positioning the doomed couple on top of recycled reminders of reality. Despite the image’s high pixel count, some dimensionality is inevitably lost in the digitization process. Admiring the architectural cutouts online will never reveal the full mysteries of Fu’s works, but viewing them in person wasn’t sure to do so, either. As the exhibit says, her work embodies the words of poet Jidi Majia: “I think back, not to dwell on sad losses … To relive all beautiful bygone things.” If Fu’s reveries are not enough distraction, her commentary on loss might give you a new perspective on this moment and a gentle reminder of the beauty in sorrow. The exhibition is available online at nmwa.org. Free. —Emma Francois
City Lights
City Lights
Watch The Game (Show) of Love
Virtual tours from the National Trust for Historic Preservation In quarantine, it’s easy to get lost in a spiral of the contemporary: Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, and the coffin dance meme. But in times of crisis, reflecting upon history becomes even more important, and one of the most engaging ways to connect to history is to visit historical sites. Naturally, the D.C. area has a wealth of sites worth visiting, but most are inaccessible during the outbreak. Enter the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to saving America’s historic places. The National Trust’s website hosts a variety of “virtual tours” that offer glimpses into the most fascinating corners of American history. For instance, the Trust links you to a walk through of the Pension Building (a.k.a. the home of the National Building Museum), which has hosted upscale events—including presidential inauguration balls—for more than 100 years since its completion in 1887. You can also tour the Decatur House, the only private residence ever built in Lafayette Square, which the Trust owns. After the man who commissioned it was killed in a duel (cue coffin dance meme), Decatur House was home to Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren. Finally, you can virtually travel to Fredericksburg, Virginia, and see a museum opened by President James Monroe’s descendants. The Monroe Museum is stuffed with fascinating artifacts, including a musket that Monroe (probably) used in the Revolutionary War, a chess set gifted to Monroe by Thomas Jefferson, and the court clothes Monroe wore to the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte. You can also see the desk where Monroe wrote the 1823 message to Congress that included what would later come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. The virtual tours are available at savingplaces.org. Free. —Will Lennon 16 may 1, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com
Wanderer/Wonderer: Pop-Ups by Colette Fu
Obsess over D.C. money diaries Cabin fever keeping you down? Why not relive your pre-pandemic D.C. life with a perusal of the internet’s best money and lifestyle diaries? Refinery29’s original Money Diaries series is known to set the Twitterverse alight with yuppies hoping to unmask authors like an anonymous D.C. surgeon who spent $1,500 on lingerie or young journalists speculating about the identity of a margarita-loving local editor, but there are plenty of other options for you to pine over or tear apart from the comfort and confinement of your IKEA couch. Two D.C. media outlets have their own roundups: for a whimsical time reading about other people’s sex lives, look no further than Washingtonian’s Food, Money, Sex column, where you can question (or giggle at) the money-spending habits of a couple who bought plane tickets right before the pandemic or relate to another author’s story about wandering to McDonald’s for a hangover meal after a night of partying. For a more sobering reminder of life in the District, WAMU’s Money Talks series takes a down-to-earth tone with budgeting, retirement, and investment tips from a range of regular Joes, like a debt-free millennial who shares lessons from his immigrant family. And for a visual trip, CNBC’s Millennial Money series runs the gambit from a 26-year-old homeowner who works on the Hill to a 24-year-old former Marine who really lives in National Harbor. At this point in social distancing, why not live vicariously through these folks? The series are available at refinery29.com, washingtonian.com, wamu.org, and cnbc.com. Free. —Christian Paz
DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD
City Lights
Friday’s “Stay at Home in Style� performances
Taking the Fifth By Brendan Emmett Quigley
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Across 1. ___ Fifth Avenue 5. Mexican turniplike tuber 11. Years on the planet 14. Dust Bowl migrant 15. Despite the fact 16. Cartoon eating sound 17. Airhead 18. Staff that sells washing machines? 20. Bit in the feedbag 21. Debit card number, briefly 22. Folksy greeting 23. Turn left during complete chaos? 28. Stage after larva 29. Ireland 30. It’s at the center of the universe 33. Menial workers 35. Thin nail 36. Uno card 37. Soul singer Curtis doing a mic check? 40. Water whirled 41. Sticking points in the forest 42. Toy truck name 43. Spokane-toMissoula dir. 44. Silver fodder
The play on Colin Chambers’ last name is far too easy, but also far too apt for what he and trumpeter Joe Brotherton are currently doing on Friday nights: chamber jazz. Each week, the duo performs a livestream concert from the baby grand piano at National League of American Pen Women in Dupont Circle. (I say “from the piano,� though the two remain a scrupulous six feet apart throughout their three sets of music.) In ordinary times, both these players are on the progressive end of the spectrum: They’re two-fifths of the edgy, often hip-hop-spliced quintet that Brotherton has led on Wednesday nights at Jojo for years. (Chambers is also a member of another forward-thinking quintet with Donvonte McCoy at Eighteenth Street Lounge). Here, though—whether because of the instrumentation, the atmosphere, the audience, or just the circumstances—they have a timeless, boisterous swing in their step (even in their original tunes and bebop classics) that could as easily be found in a World War II-era radio broadcast as in a 21st century internet one. Make of that what you will. Joe Brotherton and Colin Chambers perform “Stay at Home in Style� at 7:30 p.m. Fridays on Facebook Live and Instagram Live. Free. —Michael J. West
45. Period-ending sound 46. Hellmann’s visionaries? 50. Attest to be true 53. Announce 54. Quarantine fatigue feeling 55. Fooling around with Hizzoner? 59. Band whose name is an acronym of its members’ first names 60. Squeeze (out) 61. Turn bad 62. Heat provider? 63. Marry 64. How some measuring cups are stored 65. Unwanted sights in some dating apps Down 1. City destroyed in Genesis 2. Film auteur Kurosawa 3. X-Men mutant with phasing abilities 4. Announces, with a mush mouth 5. Aunt you might have over for breakfast 6. Original “No Trump� speaker
7. Dodger Ron nicknamed “The Penguin� 8. Tiny tunnel builder 9. Unaccounted-for grunt 10. Throw blanket 11. From the top 12. Urge 13. Award with an atom in its design 19. Breakdown sufferer’s need 21. Soda originally called Brad’s Drink 24. Big name in bikes 25. Genre for MC Frontalot and MC Hawking
26. Mild cusses 27. “It’s the cops!� 30. Behaviorchanging chamber named after an American psychologist 31. Hog call? 32. Women who often get out of traps?: Abbr. 33. Peter Pan baddie 34. George of the MacGyver reboot 35. Popeye rival 36. Put into Tupperware 38. Site with a watchlist 39. Unemotional 44. Director Aronofsky 45. Peddled fake news, say 46. Chairman’s name 47. Grenoble river 48. Putin’s scratch 49. Numbers bandied about on sports talk radio 50. Diving bird 51. Boat’s trail 52. Looked up and down 56. Forest feller 57. Record Store Day releases 58. “Don’t just stand there!� 59. Best diamond?
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washingtoncitypaper.com may 1, 2020 17
DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE
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I’m a 31-year-old female. Last week I suddenly started to experience an overwhelming, compulsive, and near-constant state of physical arousal. I’ve masturbated so much looking for relief that my entire lower region is super sore and swollen and still, it’s like my whole body is pulsating with this electric arousal telling me to ignore the pain and do it again. I have no idea if it’s normal to suddenly have such a spike in my libido. I know a lot of people will say they wish they had this problem, but it’s interfering with my daily activities because I can’t focus on anything else. My college classes are suffering because of it. I’ve even had to remove my clitoral hood piercing, which I’ve had for over 10 years! I feel like I have all of the reasons—high anxiety related to the pandemic, being stuck with an alcoholic boyfriend in the house, tons of homework, low finances—to warrant a lack of arousal. So why am I drowning in it? Everything I’m learning in class says that sexual desire lowers over time. So why am I literally pulsating with it? I really don’t want to call my doctor if I don’t have to. Any insight would be appreciated.
bringing printouts of information pages and research papers about the condition to your appointment and sharing them with your physician. And if your doc doesn’t take your distress seriously, or refuses to refer you to the specialists you need to see, CA, then you’ll have to get yourself a new doctor. (You can find those information pages and research papers at sexlab.ca/pgad, where you can also learn about currently available treatments and join support groups for sufferers.) “More awareness of PGAD and research on this condition is needed to help understand the symptoms and develop effective treatments,” Jackowich says. “If you experience these symptoms and would like to contribute to ongoing research efforts, the Queen’s University Sexual Health Research Lab is seeking participants for an online study.” To take part in that online survey, go to sexlab. ca/pgad, click on “participate,” and scroll down to the “OLIVE Study.” —Dan Savage
—Chronically Aroused
“There’s a general belief that sexual arousal is always wanted—and the more the better,” Robyn Jackowich says. “But in reality, persistent and unwanted sexual arousal can be very distressing.” Jackowich is a Ph.D. candidate at Queen’s University at Kingston, where she works under the super vision of Dr. Caroline Pukall in the Sexual Health Research Lab. Jackowich has published numerous studies on Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder, a condition characterized by a constant or frequently recurring state of genital arousal— sensations, sensitivity, swelling—in the absence of sexual desire. “In other words, there is a disconnect between what is happening in one’s body and mind,” Jackowich says, “and this can be both distressing and distracting.” And while you would think stress would tank your libido—and preliminary research shows that the pandemic is tanking more libidos than it’s not—stress and anxiety can actually be triggers for PGAD. As you’ve learned, CA, you can’t masturbate your way out of this. So what do you do? Unfortunately, it’s the thing you’d really rather not do: Call your doctor. “It’s important to meet with a knowledgeable healthcare provider to ensure there is not another concern present that may be responsible for the symptoms and to access treatment,” Jackowich says. “Research on treatments for PGAD is relatively new, so it can be helpful to meet with a team of different healthcare providers to find what treatments would be most effective for you specifically. This could include a gynecologist, urologist, pelvic f loor physical therapist, neurologist, and/or psychologist with expertise in sex therapy.” Talking with your doctor about this may be embarrassing, I realize, and it doesn’t help that many doctors are unfamiliar with PGAD. Jackowich actually recommends
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“Irrationally jealous people are by definition incapable of seeing reason, UGHS, which is why they must be shown doors.” I’ve rekindled a romance with an ex from a decade ago. We are long distance right now but getting very close. We have one recurring problem though. She does not like that I am friends with another ex. That ex has actually been a close friend for a very long time and our friendship means a lot to me. Our romantic relationship only lasted a few months. But since we did have a romantic relationship once, my current girlfriend sees my ex as a threat. I have reassured her several times that the relationship is in the past and we are now only friends. But my girlfriend doesn’t want me to communicate with her at all. She wants me to un-friend her on Facebook and un-follow her Instagram, and at least once a week she asks if we have been in contact. It is hard for me to throw a friend away in order to be in a relationship. Even though I don’t talk to my ex/friend all that regularly, I would like the option to at least check in every once in a while. Cutting her out of my life completely feels like a kind of death. I wish there was some way I could find a compromise, but this seems to be
one of those “all or nothing” things. I also don’t like this feeling of not being trusted and fear it could lead to other problems down the line. —Unhappy Girlfriend Has Sensitivities
I can see why your current girlfriend might feel threatened by your relationship with an ex, UGHS, seeing as she—your current girlfriend—was until very recently just another one of your exes. Since you got back together with her, the green-eyed monster whispers in her ear, what’s to stop you from getting back together with your other ex? What the green-eyed monster doesn’t say, of course, is that you had every opportunity to get back together with your ex and didn’t. And cutting off your ex now doesn’t mean you can’t get back together with her later. And what’s to stop you from getting together with one of the 3.5 billion women you haven’t already dated? You have to take a hard line on this. Tell your current partner you’re happy to provide her with a little reassurance when she’s feeling insecure about your ex, but that you’re not going to unfriend or unfollow her or anyone else. You can make an appeal to reason— you wouldn’t be with your current girlfriend if you were the sort of person who cut off contact with his exes—but if your current girlfriend is the irrationally jealous type … well, an appeal to reason won’t help. Irrationally jealous people are by definition incapable of seeing reason, UGHS, which is why they must be shown doors. —DS This isn’t a sexy question, but you are wise and I am confused. I have been friends with a woman for about 16 years. She’s very funny, creative, loves to have a good time. She’s also intense, not very bright, and my family and friends do not like her being around. Now that we’re grown older we do not see each other often, but I’ve been glad to maintain a friendship with her and get together now and again. Enter: my wedding. At the reception she made a fool of herself (and me) by going on some strange, racist rant. The racist thing really surprised and disappointed me, and when I asked her about it, she shrugged it off, saying, “Oh, just add that to the list of dumb things I do when I’m drunk.” Other things she’d done when she’s drunk: two DUIs, waking up in jail with an assault charge, having sex with strangers, etc. It’s been about seven months since my wedding and I’ve basically been ignoring her while trying to decide what to do. I love my friend, but I do not want her hurting anyone else on my watch. Do I call her up and end it? See her once a year when no one’s around? Ignore her until she dies? —Loyal To A Fault Tell your racist friend to give you a call after she gets sober and confront her about her racism then—you know, when she’s actually capable of remembering the conversation, reflecting on what you had to say, and perhaps changing for the better. If she can’t get both sober and better, LTAF, make sure she isn’t registered to vote and then ignore her until she dies. —DS Email your Savage Love questions to mail@savagelove.net
CLASSIFIEDS Legal KIPP DC PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOLS REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS End-to-End Accounts Payable Automation Software KIPP DC is soliciting proposals from qualified vendors for End-to-End Accounts Payable Automation Software. The RFP can be found on KIPP DC’s website at www. kippdc.org/procurement. Proposals should be uploaded to the website no later than 5:00 PM ET on May 15, 2020. Questions can be addressed to kate. williams@kippdc.org. DC SCHOLARS PCS INTENT TO ENTER INTO SOLE SOURCE CONTRACTS – DC Scholars Public Charter School intends to enter into the following Sole Source contracts for SY20-21: EdOps for Human Resource Analytics Services, EdOps for Finance and Accounting Services, Jessica Turnquest for Human Resources and Recruitment Services, and KayTwelve for Office and Classroom Furniture. The contracts will be awarded at close of business on May 21, 2020. If you have questions, contact Emily Stone at estone@dcscholars.org no later than 5:00 pm on May 11, 2020. NOTICE OF PROTEST PROTESTED PROTESTED NOTICE PUBLISHED IN THURSTON COUNTY RECORDS, STATE OF WASHINGTON, NO. 3843008 ON 6/26/06 AD finds the following government agents trespassing on Jeffrey McMeel’s, status as a peaceful, non combatant in relation to TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT of 1917-40 Stat. 411. McMeel is neither a private nor a public enemy of governments. Trespassers: Thurston county court No. 13DV0310,10-M00941, UHS15167, 7Z1085643, 17-206110-34, 17-2-03433-34, 13-2-30176-5, 17-4-0009134. Pierce county court No. 9Z625080A. Western Washington District court No. 3:12-cv-06067, 2:16-po-00278-MAT, 2:20-cv-00079-MJP. Western Washington Bankruptcy court No. 16-11767-CMA. US court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit No. 16-1145, 20-1003, 14-35813. WASHINGTON LATIN PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Issued: 04/24/2020 The Washington Latin Public Charter School solicits expressions of interest in the form of proposals with references
from a qualified vendor for: * Tutoring Servicesoffered for some or all the following during and/or after school hours: general instructional support in all subjects for grades 5-12, test prep and classwork review. This would be for approximately 30 students with individualized educational plans. Tutoring could be one-on-one or in small groups. * Faculty Staffing Services- identify qualified teachers/administrators for hire * HVAC Services- provide routine HVAC maintenance and repairs as needed. * Curriculum Consultants- provide expertise in building strong math and literacy curriculum * International Educational Travel Servicesexpertise in student travel to Rome or Morocco * School Payment Portallooking for software to streamline processing/ recording all student billing needs. Questions and proposals may be e-mailed to eabdurrahman@latinpcs.org with the type of service in the subject line. Deadline for submissions is COB May 8, 2020. No phone calls please. Due to current school closure, e-mail is the only method for responding with proposal and supporting documentation. GLOBAL CITIZENS PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Finance and Facilities Start-Up Consulting Services Global Citizens Public Charter School solicits proposals for the following: Start-up consulting services around finance, accounting, and facilities, as well as ongoing reporting throughout its planning year. Information available by request. Proposals shall be submitted as PDF documents no later than 5:00 PM on Friday, May 8, 2020. Contact: Natalie Smith at info@globalcitizensschool.org WASHINGTON LEADERSHIP ACADEMY PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS School Furniture Washington Leadership Academy Public Charter School, an approved 501(c)3 organization, requests proposals for the following furniture: Item HON SmartLink Seating 18’ 4L Chair without Wheels Quantity 80 Item
HON Student Desk Top/SecurEdge Adj Leg Assembled-set (Triangle) Quantity 50 Item White, locking, classroom storage options, preferably on wheels (roughly 30W x 60H) Quantity 10 Freight and installation Installation should occur no later than August 1, 2020. Please email proposals to Mandy Leiter at mleiter@ wlapcs.org. We request proposals by May 12, 2020. SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2020 ADM 000191 Name of Decedent, Alaaeldin Abdelmegid Saleh. Name and Address of Attorney Abigail Scott, Esq Regan Associates, Chtd, 1003 K Street, NW, Third Floor, Washington, DC 20001. Notice of Appointment, Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Mervat Mahgoub, whose address is 1906 Jackson Street, NE, Washington, DC 20018, was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Alaaeldin Abdelmegid Saleh who died on December 28, 2019, without a Will and will serve without Court Supervision. All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts are unknown shall enter their appearance in this proceeding. 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 10/9/2020. 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 10/9/2020, or be forever barred. Persons believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent who do not receive a copy of this notice by mail within 25 days of its publication shall so inform the Register of Wills, including name, address and relationship. Date of first publication: 4/9/2020 Name of Newspaper and/or periodical: Washington City Paper/ Daily Washington Law Reporter. Name of Personal Representative: Mervat Mahgoub TRUE TEST copy Nicole Stevens Acting Register of Wills Pub Dates: April 9, 16, 23. SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2020 ADM 000277 Name of Decedent, Deborah D. Hollingsworth-Edmonds. Notice of Appointment,
Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Paul D. Edmonds Jr., Vincent C. Hollingsworth, whose addresses are 1018 Southern Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20032, was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Deborah D. Hollingsworth-Edmonds who died on 8/9/18, with a Will and will serve without Court Supervision. All unknown heirs and heirs whose whereabouts are unknown shall enter their appearance in this proceeding. 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 October 23, 2020. 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 October 23, 2020, or be forever barred. Persons believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent who do not receive a copy of this notice by mail within 25 days of its publication shall so inform the Register of Wills, including name, address and relationship. Date of first publication: 4/9/2020 Name of Newspaper and/or periodical: Washington City Paper/ Daily Washington Law Reporter. Name of Personal Representative: Paul D. Edmonds Jr., Vincent C. Hollingsworth TRUE TEST copy Nicole Stevens Acting Register of Wills Pub Dates: April 23, 30, May 7.
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Classified Ads Print & Web Classified Packages may be placed on our website, mail, or phone. 734 15th Street NW, Suite 400 Washington, D.C. 20005 Commercial Ads rates start at $25 for up to 6 lines in print and online; additional print lines start at $2.50/ line [vary by section]. Your print ad placement plus up to 10 photos online. Premium options available for both print and web may vary. Print Deadline The deadline for submission and payment of classified ads for print is each Monday at 5 p.m. To contact the classifieds rep, send an email to classifieds@washingtoncitypaper.com or call (202)-650-6941. For more information please visit washingtoncitypaper.com.
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