Washington City Paper (May 6, 2022)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 10 Paper Cut: City Paper alumni look back on 41 years of print editions.

NEWS 4 Loose Lips: How a quote about fellatio ended up on City Paper’s cover and other tales from the Loose Lips archive

6 Gimme the Beats: When tasked with covering the District in its entirety, City Desk reporters got creative and carved out their own niches.

SPORTS 8 Outside the Box: City Paper’s sports coverage often ventured beyond the mainstream.

FOOD 26 Writers’ Digest: Young & Hungry writers recall watching the city’s food scene mature and the weird worlds they discovered in D.C. restaurants.

ARTS 30 Art on our Sleeves: City Paper’s previous arts editors reflect on the past, while the region’s arts professionals look forward to a post-COVID world.

CITY LIGHTS 34 Dimming the City Lights: Editors of the quintessential alt-weekly section share the highs and lows of helming City Lights.

38 City Lights Shine On: Go-to venues for nearly all of your artistic needs

DIVERSIONS 29 Crossword 42 Savage Love 43 Classifieds On the cover: Man with balloons, Stanton Road SE, no date. Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Darrow Montgomery | 3400 block of 16th Street NW, April 28 Editorial

Advertising and Operations

Editor CAROLINE JONES Managing Editor MITCH RYALS Arts Editor SARAH MARLOFF Sports Editor KELYN SOONG City Lights Editor ELLA FELDMAN Loose Lips Reporter ALEX KOMA Staff Writer AMBAR CASTILLO Staff Photographer DARROW MONTGOMERY Creative Director NAYION PERKINS Designer KATY BARRETT-ALLEY Audience Growth and Engagement Editor MICHELLE GOLDCHAIN Copy Editor GAIL O’HARA

Director of Sales ALICIA MERRITT Sales Operations Manager HEATHER MCANDREWS Director of Operations JANE MARTINACHE Publisher Emeritus AMY AUSTIN

Leland Investment Corp.

Owner MARK D. EIN Director of Finance RACHEL PROCTOR

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MAY 6, 2022 3

NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Lips’ Service Darrow Montgomery/File

Past Loose Lips columnists look back on 40 years of political drama in print.

Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry at his inaugural parade in 1995.

By Alex Koma @AlexKomaWCP The Loose Lips column has existed for the vast majority of City Paper’s four decades of existence, but its impact in print can generally be summed up with 12 simple words: “You put me out in Denver ’cause I wouldn’t suck your dick.”

The infamous 2009 headline captures so much of what’s made LL and WCP unique over these past 41 years: It was provocative, brash, and funny. It also exposed some secrets that D.C.’s political elite would have rather kept hidden, particularly those involving Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry, as so many of the best LL columns did.

While a headline like that would draw eyeballs anywhere, it just wouldn’t have generated quite the same reaction had it not been

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splashed on a front page over a picture of Barry and his paramour, and dropped in newspaper boxes around the city. As City Paper ends its print run, many of the previous authors of this column identify that story as the apotheosis of LL’s print past.

“We had people picketing outside our old offices on Champlain Street. It just turned into this big thing,” says Mike DeBonis, the story’s author and LL columnist from 2007 to 2010. “It was truly the spirit of the old City Paper, the old alt-weekly. No one else is going to do this, so we’re going to do it.”

DeBonis, now at the Washington Post, remembers the process of landing such a scoop fondly.

He’d gotten a call from a man claiming that Barry had begun an affair with his ex-wife, evicting her from a hotel room in Denver while the pair attended the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. DeBonis didn’t think too much of it until the night Barry was arrested in Anacostia Park: July 4, 2009.

The U.S. Park Police charged Barry, then the Ward 8 councilmember, with stalking, and DeBonis quickly heard that the dispute involved a woman. He soon learned it was the same woman involved in the Denver kerfuffle: Donna Watts-Brighthaupt. Her ex-husband proceeded to provide DeBonis with voicemails and other recordings documenting her rocky relationship with Barry, including the quote that would become so famous. “[Then-editor] Erik [Wemple] was determined, saying we had to put the ‘suck your dick’ thing on the cover, even though people on the business side were raising concerns,” DeBonis says. “He just would not be told ‘No.’” The resulting outrage drew national attention (and briefly crashed the WCP’s nascent website). Ken Cummins, the inaugural LL columnist, remembers hearing through the grapevine that it had a distinct impact on Barry himself, too.

“Publicly, he had to make a big show about how offended he was about it, but I heard that he actually liked the headline, just found the whole thing funny,” Cummins says. If only Barry was still around to ask for comment on the incident.

For Cummins, who penned the column from 1983 through 1999, the experience of writing LL (and watching others consume it) was almost entirely tied to the print product. DeBonis had to juggle the demands of writing WCP’s first email newsletter and regular blog posts as well as writing for print (a “soul-killing amount of work,” he remembers) but Cummins had no such demands on his time.

He would spend all week gathering up the best gossip from D.C.’s political and media circles, often writing the column around 3 a.m. just before it was due. (For his first decade at WCP, he also worked a day job at other newspapers in town, so his time was limited.) None of his columns generated headlines as evocative as DeBonis’ Denver drama, but Cummins can recall at least one memorable print entry.

“I was writing a column once about how long the city was debating the renovation of Eastern Market, so I made this chart comparing it to the digging of the Panama Canal, the building of the pyramids, all those sorts of things,”

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Cummins says. “And of course the market took longer than all those. I would see that tacked up in Capitol Hill businesses for years afterward.”

But he remembers that the best part of seeing LL in print was waiting for newspapers to hit the steps of the Wilson Building, where many of his column’s subjects spent their days. He recalls then-At-Large Councilmember Bill Lightfoot telling him it looked like a mad dash to grab a copy as his colleagues hustled to see if they’d made the column each week.

“You could tell when people started reading the paper,” says At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, who wrote LL from 2002 to 2004 before pivoting to politics. “Thursday afternoons after lunch, you’d start getting calls or emails. And of course whenever I wrote about [the late Ward 1 Councilmember] Jim Graham, I’d get a call from him complaining, just like clockwork.”

Alan Suderman, who wrote LL from 2010 to 2013, says that dynamic didn’t change even by the time he took things over. Some “old-timers,” like Barry and Graham, never experienced the column without picking it up in print, he says.

DeBonis says he always made a point of bringing copies of the paper to the Wilson Building and passing them around so that he could reach such print-inclined pols, absorbing their criticisms and picking up gossip for the next week’s column in equal measure.

Even with the rise of the web and social media, the paper remained a key way that many local politicos got their news. For older Black residents, in particular, the print edition of LL was a touchstone well into the dawn of the new century.

“So much goes down on Twitter now, and it can feel very myopic,” says Will Sommer, who wrote LL from 2013 to 2016. “But I would go over to Ward 8, anywhere, all over the city, and people would say ‘Oh, you’re Loose Lips, like City Paper.’ It was this free paper that anyone could pick up at the Metro station or as they’re getting on the bus. It had a very populist thing about it …

A physical paper has a presence in the community in a way that a website just doesn’t.”

Yes, LL was important as a serious piece of print journalism. But it was just plain fun to put together, too. Just about every LL has stories about staying up late with the rest of the staff (usually on Wednesday nights) to put the print edition to bed, then sticking around the office for a few drinks to mark the occasion.

“It was always like a party,” says Jonetta Rose Barras, who wrote LL for about six months in 2001 but worked for WCP on and off for about eight years. “It could be really personal, really intense as you were working on the paper and putting it together, debating these stories. But then we would all still hang around afterward.”

The ride could be a bit wild, but the final product was always a point of pride for LL writers. Barras recalls how a key piece of art could “make or break your story,” with a striking photo of the interior of the Player’s Lounge defining her feature on the storied Ward 8 hangout. Suderman remembers feeling like he’d cleared a “rite

Darrow Montgomery/File

Darrow Montgomery/File

NEWS

Barry on election night in 1994.

of passage” upon writing his first big cover story about Barry in 2012, chronicling his final Council campaign.

“The cover was always a beautiful piece of real estate in the city,” Sommer says. “Having your first cover story as a reporter was absolutely a huge deal.”

That’s why the end of the print edition comes as regrettable news to many of LL’s former stewards, though they are hopeful this change marks

merely a slight evolution in WCP’s history and not a full-blown change. The sarcastic, rabblerousing ethos of the column is what they want to see survive, even as regular print production ends.

“There was always the sense that City Paper had this understanding of what the city really was and what made D.C., D.C.,” DeBonis says.

“This city has as vivid and important an identity as any other city and it needs to be appreciated

Barry on the campaign trail in 2004.

and interrogated and questioned and occasionally rendered bare for all to see … The classic City Paper form is taking the good and the bad and weaving it all together, and I think the city needs that.”

Even some of the Wilson Building’s current occupants want to see the publication keep going, no matter how often it may air their dirty laundry.

“Jeff Bezos is turning the Post away from its

local mission, and that gives the City Paper a real opportunity,” Silverman says. “There are still so many people who are invested in the city and want to know what’s going on. And there is still a need to put all the pieces together, with all the context and the background of what’s happening behind the scenes. That is what Loose Lips has always been good at.”

For his part, this LL will do his best not to disappoint.

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MAY 6, 2022 5

DISTRICT LINE

Gimme the Beats City Desk is not a desk job. Never mind that I never actually had a desk in City Paper offices (they’d moved out of the space on 15th Street NW at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic before I came on board in 2021).

The beat takes you from migrant safe houses and street demonstrations to CrossFit gyms and the inside of an Uber.

Talk to City Deskers from the past, and you will hear tales of a hectic, ambiguous job where you’d stay out late foraging for news of the day at community hearings. While other reporters have the luxury of chasing food scoops or political dramas, the City Desk reporter’s assignment is to cover everything and anything.

But within the broad assignment comes lots of room to carve out your own specialty.

From the jump, I gravitated toward coverage of mental health and violence prevention. As the child of Dominican immigrants and a graduate of a bilingual journalism program, I was wary of pigeonholing myself into the obvious beat: reporting on Latinx and Latin American immigrant communities. I also wanted options outside my background. But my first print feature—a story on how visual storytelling workshops helped Afghan refugees heal in the D.C. area—guided me into reporting on immigrant and refugee communities on the regular.

Former City Desk reporter Bailey Vogt found a place covering the legacy of other eccentrics, such as the iconic late barber Diego D’Ambrosio, and in detailing transit screw-ups. Vogt’s regular Metro coverage in the District Line Daily newsletter transferred well to the “Metro by the Numbers” cover story where he reveled in “terrible dad jokes.”

Andrew Giambrone found a beat of sorts in his dedicated coverage of housing and real estate development. His first cover story, “The Bard Sell”—a 2015 account of the beef between a group of Southwest residents and the Shakespeare Theatre Company—is a casserole of local voices in land use and development issues.

Giambrone leveraged that niche into becoming WCP’s Housing Complex reporter (and later Loose Lips) and, along with theneditor Alexa Mills, wrote an investigative story about a notorious slumlord that uncovered layers of mold, cockroach carcasses, and inequity within the walls of the G Street Apartments in 2017. Their reporting shed light into the unventilated units and onto Sanford Capital LLC, contributing to wins for the Office of the Attorney General against the slumlord in a 2019 settlement and its successors in 2022.

A bed at G Street Apartments

About that first cover story, Giambrone says he saw firsthand “how resistant people are or can be to change in their neighborhood, even though it may have benefits.” It helped shape his thinking about land use and new development, and “how attached people are to their sense of home and the property that they own or manage.”

Fo r h i s pie c e o n S a n fo rd C apit a l , Giambrone remembers walking through p eople’s homes — t hei r most i nt i mate spaces—to see t he condit ions t hey were liv ing in. Photographer Darrow Montgomery’s “haunting” portraits of tenants and images of mold and stray animals in the apartment buildings brought the story to life.

“Having the print issue was like a really powerful vehicle for sharing that with the rest of the city and our readers,” he says.

“For the end of my time at City Paper, I always had … the lens of power and real estate,” Giambrone says. “In covering the Wilson Building, it’s like, who are the big players in the city, or any city really? It’s real estate interests, developers, people who own land, and people who are the job creators, because they have control over how land is used. It was a real education in how power works and who gets to make decisions and

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how those conversations happen.”

Former City Desk reporter Amanda Michelle Gomez can relate. She arrived at the paper in July of 2019 and wrote about gentrifying Wawas, evictions, and labor rights. And she contributed to an all-staff race around the District using different modes of transportation, journeying across town using ride-hailing apps.

“I have this idea of journalism being investigative and hard, but … [it was] a story that was fun to write, because it could only happen with City Paper,” Gomez says.

When the pandemic hit, she quickly found her specialty as the paper’s go-to COVID reporter.

She especially takes pride in her final story for the paper—a cover story on landlords who received federal pandemic relief funds despite the unhealthy conditions at Meridian Heights apartments, where mostly Spanishspeaking tenants lived. It was the first cover story to be translated into Spanish.

For Perry Stein, City Desk reporter from 2013 to 2015, coming up with unusual angles was key to her City Paper education. She recalls robust debate at weekly staff meetings, often pooling around issue ideas.

Stein’s most memorable piece was “Gym Nauseum”—a first-person exploration of

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D.C.’s boutique fitness craze in 2014 and the sweaty business of the CrossFit dating scene. Eight years later, now the Post’s education reporter, Stein still recalls the line “But CrossFit isn’t a place where you can escape an ex.”

The newsroom’s tradition of off beat reporting pushed Stein to look for voices not captured in other media outlets. She recalls most other local newsrooms covering Marion Barry’s legacy when residents marched through Anacostia to commemorate the former D.C. mayor and councilmember. In search of a different angle, Stein landed on covering the bar that Barry visited and tracking down the last guy he spoke to before he died.

Stein also sees City Paper as visionary when it came to designing diagrams and interesting visuals in its print issues. “I feel like it was almost … ahead of its time,” she says, describing a City Desk feature she worked on that charted ridiculous condo building names and differentiated by random nouns, lyrics, and names with prepositions. Scoring a cover was worth it despite knowing you’d have to buy the staff beer: “I always remember thinking, ‘We don’t get paid enough to buy beers for everyone,’ but that’s what we did,” Stein says, chuckling.

The staff imbibing during the final steps of print production is a tradition that stayed alive up until the City Paper office closed at the start of the pandemic. It forged solidarity and bonding moments through goofiness, Gomez says.

On a more typical ride for Gomez—biking to the Washington Memorial on a Saturday afternoon, as she was wont to do during the pandemic—she saw in person the type of imagined reader that had excited her City Desk predecessors about showing up in print.

“I was biking, … I stopped … toward the end of the 15th bike path,” Gomez recalls.

“And I saw this dude, and he was … fucking reading our paper, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, this is why I do it.’”

Darrow Montgomery/File

By Ambar Castillo @AmbarCastillo

Darrow Montgomery/File

City Desk reporters covered everything on their way to finding a niche.

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MAY 6, 2022 7

SPORTS

Outside the Box Sports coverage at City Paper has always focused on underreported stories. That will continue.

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong Dave McKenna realizes now that he missed the memo. During his time at City Paper, he saw an “incredible honor roll” of people arrive, work at the paper for a few years, and then move on. McKenna stayed for 26 years.

“I never had a goal,” he says. “In my life, I’ve never had a goal and I met everyone of them ...

But having a column in City Paper seemed so far beyond and cooler than anything I ever thought I would ever get to do, so I never had a reason to leave. I could write whatever I wanted. Like, what’s better than that?”

McKenna, a former staff writer and celebrated sports columnist for the paper, often gravitated toward his obsessions and stories that other outlets weren’t covering. That’s how he approached his weekly sports column, Cheap Seats, and his feature stories. Even now, all these years later, McKenna still gets emotional when talking about the late Elgin Baylor, a D.C. native and Basketball Hall of Fame member who was the subject of many of his articles.

A self-described “Baylor obsessive,” he calls Baylor, who died at age 86 in March of 2021, one of the “most influential and most underappreciated athletes in American history.”

McKenna didn’t let the lack of zeal from other publications for these stories dissuade him.

They were important to the city’s history.

“I was always obsessed with D.C.’s sports and cultural and racial histories,” McKenna says.

“Even though I was from Falls Church, D.C. was my hometown, and when I had a sports column, I had to come up with something every week and something I realized was the most undercovered subjects in Washington sports were the incredible homegrown athletes of the 1950s who happen to be Black.”

McKenna joined City Paper on Jan. 6, 1986, as an arts intern for then-arts editor Alona Wartofsky, and wrote music listings for two years for no money. At the time, he was a substitute teacher and lived in a group house with police officers in Chevy Chase. Rent was $250 a month. McKenna immersed himself in the city, and whenever he wanted to find out which bands were playing in town, he picked up a copy of City Paper. “Everything about City Paper just seemed so ‘urbane’ and cool, and I was ‘suburbane,’ and so I wanted to be a part of it,” McKenna says.

He eventually worked up the courage to turn in some Best of D.C. and City Lights picks that appeared in print. But the story that gave McKenna confidence as a City Paper writer— and that caught the attention of then-editor Jack Shafer—was about local politician and notorious sports heckler Robin Ficker. Shafer put it on the cover, with the headline “Tell That Ficker to Shut Up.”

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By Huan Hsu Photographs by Darrow Montgomery Shafer thought very little of McKenna in the to be a part of it. You could tell he cared more beginning. He says McKenna would mostly about the story than he cared about you. But show up to the office to “hit on girls” and that he that was what young people need. I think he “seemed to be a completely frivolous person.” was fantastic.”

Eventually, Shafer asked McKenna to write The Ficker story changed his mind. “I realized with that story that I was a moron and Dave a football column called Skins Heads, which was a genius,” Shafer says. “He probably had became Cheap Seats when David Carr became all these skills all the time but because there’s editor in the mid 1990s. McKenna went from not enough time to assess everybody’s talent, I writing about 10 columns a year to writing one every week. While it started off as a footoverlooked him.”

McKenna, for his part, says Shafer, “was ball column, McKenna fondly remembers storeally intimidating, but he made you want ries he worked on outside of the scope of the

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major sports leagues. He wrote about Baylor and Gary Mays, the one-armed sports star who shut down Baylor in high school. (“That’s when Mays, playing for Armstrong Tech, temporarily reduced Elgin Baylor to mortal status,” McKenna wrote in a 2010 column.) He covered University of Maryland men’s basketball recruit Tamir Goodman, a local Orthodox Jewish high school basketball star dubbed the “Jewish Jordan” by Sports Illustrated. He reported on Ronnie Franklin, the jockey who rode the horse that won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in 1979, and Franklin’s struggles with drugs later in his career.

McKenna didn’t need a press box to find stories. Even when he covered games in person, like he did during Dan Snyder’s first season as owner of the local NFL team in 1999, he found the experience to be “antithetical to getting a good story.” (Snyder infamously sued McKenna and City Paper in 2011 over a cover story listing many of Snyder’s controversies and failures.)

“It is the fucking worst,” McKenna says of covering local NFL games from the press box.

“Because everything you get, 75 people or 100 or more are exposed to exactly what you’re getting. And then they’re fed the same meal, the same press releases. ... My paper wasn’t gonna come out for four more days [on Thursday], so it didn’t help me at all to go to those, and I found it gross.”

Like McKenna, Huan Hsu found sports stories outside of the mainstream lens to be more interesting. Hsu first wrote for City Paper in January of 2004—an arts feature on author Mike Tidwell—while he was studying for his MFA in creative nonfiction at George Mason University. When a staff writer position opened up, Leonard Roberge, then the arts editor, encouraged Hsu to apply for the job.

The 20-something joined City Paper halfway through the last year of his program. At City Paper, Hsu found a niche in covering sports and education.

“I played a lot of sports, and I was always kind of oriented toward sports, so it was easier for me to kind of understand local sports than, for example, local politics,” says Hsu, who is now a journalism lecturer at Amsterdam University College in the Netherlands. “There was a kind of accessibility dimension to it, and, I think, probably the journalism that I consumed most growing up was sports journalism.”

Several of Hsu’s features appeared on the cover of City Paper. Hsu, who worked briefly as a Division III collegiate tennis coach at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, after college, wrote about Trevor Spracklin and his experience competing on the lower rungs of professional tennis and at a local professional tennis tournament. He also wrote a profile on former American University cross-country and

Darrow Montgomery/File

SPORTS

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track and field coach Matt Centrowitz and another on Darren Harper, a skateboarder from Southeast D.C. Hsu left City Paper in 2007, but the brief experience left a lasting impression on him.

Every year, he orders copies of the New York Times for his students to read during the first week of class. It’s often the first time they’ve held or read an actual print copy of the newspaper, Hsu says. He still remembers his excitement in picking up multiple copies of the print edition of City Paper whenever he had a cover

Washington Commanders, and Terl later wrote a weekly sports column for City Paper called Unobstructed View.

“Print made a huge difference,” Terl says. “I did independent blogging back in the aughts, when such a thing was just sort of what everybody who was overly verbose did. And it was a way to get your words out there. But a side effect of that, for me, was that it totally devalued being published online. But being in print was something I couldn’t fake. It was something I couldn’t do on my own, and it definitely had a

“We’re not a paper of record. But what we are is a paper of vital interests.” story in the paper.

“I love the paper, paper,” Hsu says. “So to hold it, see my name in print, like so permanently—I mean, it’s also great to publish stuff online, but it’s just so ephemeral, and so it’s just like this was a document, it was so permanent.

It was a great feeling. It was super awesome.”

For McKenna, the print paper provided routine. When he lived in Mount Pleasant, he would wait every Thursday to pick up a copy in Heller’s Bakery. “It’s one of life’s little pleasures,” McKenna says. “Having something to look forward to is the key to warding off depression, even something as small as the Thursday edition of the City Paper.”

Matt Terl has similar vivid memories.

As a student at University of Maryland, he would go to the Closet of Comics comic book store in College Park and pick up a copy of City Paper every week, and that’s what he would read while eating lunch from a local Chinese restaurant. McKenna profiled Terl in 2008, when he was the official blogger for the

significant impact.”

Steve Cavendish, the City Paper editor from June 2015 to July 2016, hired Terl to bring a more regular sports presence back to the paper after McKenna left in December of 2011.

“We’re not a paper of record,” he says. “But what we are is a paper of vital interests. And that could take a lot of different directions, but our job at the City Paper was always to be vital to the people who lived in D.C. and lived for D.C.” McKenna, Hsu, and Terl all found stories that were unique to D.C. They looked in places where others neglected. They covered sports stories that otherwise would not have been told. They wrote to an audience that cared about the city.

“I tried to tell stories,” McKenna says. “It’s the same thing that City Paper was known for, whatever it was, whether it’s politics or just life in the city, the side of the city that other papers didn’t cover. Just look for the stories, and the stories are still going to be there, no matter what the medium is.”

Mitch Ryals contributed to this report.

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MAY 6, 2022 9

Paper, Cut Photographs by Darrow Montgomery One More for the Road By my count, I’ve had a hand in producing roughly 450 print issues of Washington City Paper since I joined its staff as the City Lights editor in the fall of 2012. Several stand out for reasons good and bad—massive Best of D.C. books that had us working around the clock, stories we knew we’d beaten our competitors to, an issue sent to the printer so late that we feared it might not come out. The rest ebbed back into the ocean after cresting on Wednesday nights.

From a technical standpoint, my generation of City People has a significantly easier time producing print issues than our predecessors did, assembling our issues with trackpads and keyboard commands while they used knives and paste. In the paper’s nascent days, when it was still produced in Baltimore, the staff sent pages and materials back and forth on a massive fax machine. That was an improvement, former publisher Amy Austin says, over the previous method: On Monday nights, she used to deliver the necessary files to the Greyhound bus station, where they would be ferried north.

Print issues were commodities. Readers grabbed them from delivery drivers before they could even drop off a stack at a business or a street box. The need for news, for criticism, for event listings, for classified ads, or a good story was immediate, and the internet has only expanded that pleasure center.

In my time at City Paper, the issues shrunk. Advertisers moved online and found ways to reach the specific audiences they were looking for. Competitors arrived on the scene, offering their own irreverent takes on life in the District. Still we pushed forward, filing dispatches on abandoned car parts, shameless developers, and the characters entering and exiting the Wilson Building. Newer annual issues, such as the Answers Issue and the People Issue, still demanded a place on a coffee table or in your hand at a coffee shop.

And then came a novel coronavirus, the enemy of almost everything but especially independent arts venues. We muddled through what we hoped was the worst of it, but eventually had to face a harsh reality: Our advertisers and many of our readers are elsewhere. We meet readers in their email inboxes more frequently than we meet them on the street. A bar that hosts live music is most focused on paying its staff right now.

So this is the last regular print edition of Washington City Paper you will see. In the weeks leading up to this issue, I found myself thinking about those departed characters whose shadows hang over the institution. Of Jim Graham, the AIDS advocate and former Ward 1 councilmember who would register his complaints every week without fail but still stop by a holiday party. Of Marion Barry, the main character of D.C.’s home rule era and of countless City Paper stories, who transformed the District in so many ways. Of Michael Mariotte, the punk-rock drummer who decided to kick this whole thing off. Of David Carr, the tough but transformational leader whose wisdom on craft and reporting are still being passed down to generation after generation of aspiring writers.

What would they say? (Carr, I’m guessing, would tell us to keep working.)

In the pages that follow, you’ll read stories from the extended network of people who honed their skills by covering community meetings or entering event listings and forged friendships over cheap beer and Cheez-Its. Those relationships and the respect for one another kept City Paper going through 41 years of late nights, periods of financial instability, and fears over getting everything right.

“Early on, Jack Shafer laid out the stakes: If you get it wrong and we print it, every person in this place will lose her job,” City Paper alum Katherine Boo tells me. “All the sentences I’ve written since have been informed by that terror.”

Washington City Paper will still be around, albeit in digital formats and with a smaller staff. And we will still do our damnedest to get it right.

—Caroline Jones, editor, Washington City Paper

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LEFT PAGE: LEFT: New York Avenue NE, 1992 TOP RIGHT: H Street NW, 2016 BOTTOM: Jefferson Memorial, 2012 TOP: Parade, 1990 RIGHT: Crime scene, 1989

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MAY 6, 2022 11

NEIL DRUMMING

done the same thing,” which is crazy for a grown ass man to say that.

But Carr backed me up fully on that, and I felt like the institution was behind me. It was a little thing, and of course what are you gonna do? Let one of your reporters get the shit beat out of them? But I felt supported.

Those are two of the many ridiculous things that happened to me. Now you can ask your questions and get something you can actually use.

It took Neil Drumming all of five minutes to respond to my email asking if he’d like to contribute to our final print issue. He teased “one small, telling anecdote” that illustrated his time at City Paper. We spoke on the phone the next day, and that’s where our conversation (edited slightly for length and clarity) starts. —Mitch Ryals Neil Drumming: I’ll be really honest with you, I was a kid, probably 22 or 23, just got out of college. I applied for City Paper two or three times— twice in the advertising department, and then I got the City Lights job. And then slowly I started writing about stuff I would see. I had no experience writing for a newspaper.

But the thing I remember most was the listings were done in this corner, and I split the responsibility with someone else who sat in the corner with me. Ta-Nehisi Coates was working there at the time, and we became friends and he would come and sit on my desk or hang over the cubicle wall and we would shoot the shit all the time. Just talk about stuff we cared about, mostly music, but everything really.

And one day we were having an argument about the group A Tribe Called Quest, which is seminal to both of us. I’m from Queens and I used to see Q-Tip at the bus stop. I loved Tribe.

We were arguing about whether or not they should break up. I think this was around the time their fourth album came out.

There were all these rumors and we were arguing about, ‘Is Tribe dead? Is it over? Are they gonna still be good?’ And someone came over to the desk and heard us arguing so vehemently and was like, why don’t you guys just write that for an arts feature? And we did!

Who knows what it meant to anybody, but what it meant to me was that the stuff that I cared about, which was pretty narrow when I was in my early 20s, had a place in the real world, in the bigger world, that this newspaper that to me was a big deal had sanctioned me talking shit about one of my favorite bands. And it made it feel like it was relevant, and it wasn’t just in my head—that it actually belonged in the world somehow.

And in general my experience at City Paper was that. I had not done culture criticism or arts journalism before, and I just started doing it, and they trusted me. I just had to trust my own sensibilities. That was the gift that City Paper gave me.

I’ll tell you one other stupid story. I got my nose broken for a feature story I wrote.

I found this guy, Abdul, who started a record label called the House of Abdul. And he put these ads in music magazines looking for a young rapper. And he found a young rapper, and he signed him. I remember Abdul put $60,000 of his own money into putting out his first hip-hop album.

I wanted to write about how hard it is to launch your own record label in D.C. and launch an artist.

So I followed these guys around and watched them do promotions and go to clubs and give out the white label version of the vinyl. And I remember the promotion guy, I think his name was Fahim, was like, “It’s really hard to get DJs to play this record because it’s not that great.”

Which for me, that was a great quote! He was the guy they hired. So I wrote up this feature and it had that quote in it. And I remember [theneditor David] Carr being like, “That’s a big step for you. You divorced yourself from it.” So I was really happy.

And then one night me and a bunch of my friends were standing outside the 9:30 Club.

KRS-One was performing. And I see a car pull up and the rapper from my story, Millennium, and his manager, Casino—never trust a guy named Casino—get out of the car. This is like three months after the article came out. So I know they’re gonna say something about the article, good or bad. But they didn’t say anything. The kid stood there, and the manager rushed around my friends and just punched me square in the face and knocked me out on the street in front of the 9:30 Club and broke my nose. I remember I blacked out. I think an ambulance came. And I woke up the next morning with my face black. It was like I was wearing a mask.

I remember Carr called me into his office and called the owner of the label and bitched him out on the phone. But the guy was like, “I’d have

How long were you the City Lights editor?

It was probably 1997 to 2000? I don’t remember how the rankings went. There was somebody over me, so maybe that was the City Lights editor? And I was an assistant editor?

Why did you want that job?

Because I was really into hip-hop and the culture around it and by extension arts. I think Ta-Nehisi remembers this. I think this is true. I used to read his music reviews, and I think he wrote a review of a Nas album, and I remember writing an angry letter to him about it.

But it was reading stuff like that. This is why it makes me sort of sad that, not just your paper, but papers like this are decimated. The first thing I would do in any city when I visited, and especially when I got to D.C., was to try to figure out how to have a life and what bar to go to and what music to see. It was the touchstone.

Of course I wanted to work there. They were the only people in a conservative city like D.C. talking about the things that I cared about and pointing at things that I was interested in.

So it would have been the only ideal place really for me to work.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve written for City Paper?

I wrote a review of a Maxwell concert. Maxwell had sold out seven shows in D.C. in one week— seven shows in a row. And I went to review his concert. It was crazy. It was like all the men brought dates, women as dates, and the men just disappeared. It was just so fun to be at and so weird. That’s probably my favorite because it was fun to write, and I think it was pretty funny, and I had a good time with it.

But after that I went on to write entertainment journalism stuff at Entertainment Weekly. I don’t think I wrote a single thing at Entertainment Weekly in five or six years that was anything close to what I wrote at City Paper in terms of quality and daring.

Why is that?

Because Entertainment Weekly had a magazinewide voice. The opposite was true of City Paper.

My entire worth there was my personality, my idiosyncrasies, how I thought about the world.

That was everything to them. That was what they wanted from me. There was no quota to fill, it was just, ‘“If you have something to say here, we trust you.”

That seems like an incredibly valuable experience for a 20-something to have in a professional setting.

Yeah and I didn’t even know what a professional setting was supposed to be. I mean, I was garbage. I had no discipline—I still don’t have much discipline as a writer—but all I had was a little bit of personality and flair. They gave me enough skills to get jobs. Rolling Stone and Blaze magazines called me. I remember them calling me at the City Lights desk. Like I was a peon. I was just doing listings and writing on the side, right? It wasn’t even my job. But I got enough licks in writing at City Paper doing 1,600 word reviews—1,600 word reviews, that doesn’t even exist anymore!—I got enough reps in doing that that I got a job in New York at a magazine.

TOP: Artist Manon Cleary, 2004 BOTTOM: Poolhall, 1996

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Can you describe how City Paper fit in the local media ecosystem when you were there?

Only in an anecdotal way, which is that you definitely felt the effects. When you would write something, it was like the people that you wrote about would, in the worst-case scenario, punch you in the face, but you knew that it had an effect.

Did you feel some kind of way about your work appearing in print?

Oh my god, yeah. Just seeing a big spread, broadsheet of your work and your byline. Dude, that was incredible. That shit was incredible. To just pick it up off the street. Yeah, I wrote that. Being on U Street at a bar and being like, “Yeah, I’m the person who wrote that piece that you’re reading.”

What are we losing by ceasing print production?

For me, I feel the effects of this even in my work.

When I was at This American Life especially, but any producer at This American Life, is constantly looking for stories. And for a long time, I was like, I’m just gonna see what Jason Cherkis is writing about. I just thought, this is where the best local stories are being told: at alt-weeklies across America. I’ll just find them and talk to their writers and see if they want to do radio. I just thought it would be that simple. And those papers just started drying up, literally disappearing while I was looking for them.

So for me personally, I’m like, who is telling the kind of story that I want to make as a radio producer but also that I like to read as a person?

What is going on near me? And not just what’s happening, but who’s doing it? The kind of human-driven narrative behind the things that you see in front of you. That’s what City Paper was for me.

Any words of wisdom?

Anybody who still works there and is still writing, you should be proud of that work. The aesthetic and goal of an alt-weekly, the need for that still exists in the world. I’m looking for those stories. What makes me sad is it’s fun work, and it sounds like it’s not as much fun for you guys.

With the struggles and everything, it can’t be that much fun. And that sucks because it should be. The fun of it and the excitement of it and the challenge made good work.

Before we hang up, Drumming asks if I’ll pass along his greetings to the staffers he worked alongside, including his friend Ta-Nehisi.

I haven’t talked to the dude in a while, but probably the best thing to come out of my time there is a 15-year friendship, and it was one of the best times in my life.

HOLLY BASS Fresh from completing my master’s in journalism at Columbia University, I arrived in D.C. in the summer of 1994 as a young Black woman accustomed to navigating predominantly White spaces. D.C. in the ’90s was a welcome oasis of Black excellence. The city lived up to its Chocolate City moniker. It had a southern-with-hustle vibe, rich local cultures, and warm hospitality.

That summer, I fell in with a group of talented poets and writers who frequented open mics along U Street NW. We quickly became close friends, and remain so to this day.

I don’t remember exactly when I wrote my first freelance piece for City Paper, but by 1995 David Carr had become the editor and had secured funding for a new minority fellowship that paid a modest salary. I also worked a second part-time job as a teaching artist with DC WritersCorps to supplement my income.

In 1996, I wrote what would be my biggest story for the paper, a 4,500-word cover piece titled “Why B.E.T. Sucks.” This was decades before HBO and Netflix would provide a platform for original programming written by and starring Black creators. At that time, Black Entertainment Television was the beginning and the end of Black popular representation on cable. The network, helmed by media mogul Robert Johnson, was headquartered in D.C., so the story and incendiary headline grabbed the local community.

For the story, I watched 24 hours of B.E.T., which I did with the help of a VHS recorder and alarms set to change the tapes at odd hours. I wrote from a first-person perspective about why I was dissatisfied: endless video vixens, infomercials, and lackluster original programming. In true City Paper form, the piece was irreverent and cheeky, but still made serious points. It wasn’t enough just to have Black faces in high places. I questioned how we could advance the narrative.

What does it mean when Black folks traffic in the

same tired tropes that White media have for decades? It was important to me that the criticism of the network come from the perspective of a young, Black person.

The piece was picked up on the alternative news wire and reprinted in other cities, including LA Weekly. It was one of the few times I received hate mail for a piece of writing.

Being a staff writer for Washington City Paper legitimized my identity as a young writer at a crucial stage of my creative development and gave me an education in the arts. I had the opportunity to peek behind the veil and meet and interview people I admired, such as the late local DJ Sam “the Man” Burns. As a multidisciplinary artist, those journalistic skills are a huge part of my artistic practice today. They’ve taught me how to go into a new community and understand what it means to authentically engage and connect and listen to people’s stories and to distill that into a creative experience.

For my solo dance performance, “American Woman,” currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, I used a lot of my journalistic skills to go through archival footage of speeches and interviews about the political and cultural contributions of Black women in America.

I can still recall the anticipation of picking up the latest edition of City Paper on Thursday morning: the thrill of riding the Metro and seeing dozens of people on the train holding a paper with my story on the cover, and the perk of knowing I could get a copy at the office when all of the boxes ran out of papers. But it’s been many years since I picked up a physical copy of City Paper. The same is true for the Washington Post and New York Times, for that matter. I am a part of the cohort of digital-only readers and ultimately part of the reason so many outlets have now put their last print editions to bed.

Some weeks after my story on B.E.T. ran, I received an unusual call. “Please hold for Don Cornelius,” a woman’s voice said on the other end of the line. As a longtime lover of Soul Train, the show that Cornelius founded and hosted for decades, my first thought was that this must be some elaborate hoax cooked up by a friend. But moments later, I was talking to the OG Black media innovator—he of the always-clean suits and perfectly shaped ’fro with a voice second only to Barry White in its delicious baritone.

Mr. Cornelius had read my article and assumed

that I was based in Los Angeles. He wanted to meet the young writer who was ballsy enough to confront the current Black media establishment.

He was looking to expand his team and invited me to interview for a job. Had I been a more savvy or ambitious person, I would have booked a flight to L.A., and crashed on a friend’s couch in order to meet one of my personal heroes. But alas, I have always been a good art nerd and a bad networker. As I stood barefoot in my living room, cradling the cordless phone to my ear, Mr.

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TOP: Boxing Match, 1999 BOTTOM: Lafayette Square, 2013

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Cornelius gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received. In his smooth-as-silk voice, he said, “You cool, Holly Bass. You cool.”

Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary artist and the national director of the Turnaround Arts program at the Kennedy Center. She wrote for City Paper from 1995 to 2001.

JASON CHERKIS When I began writing for the paper in the late ’90s, the whole office operated by the print deadline. Each new issue started with editorial meetings in the conference room on the third floor of a bland building located within sniffing distance of the puke and warm piss wafting from Adams Morgan’s main drag. The small room would fill up to the walls with writers, editors, interns, and sometimes a few freelancers.

The room overlooked the deck, where the lucky few got to park and the rest of us got to smoke Camel Lights while we waited for sources to call us back. The story meetings were brutal.

If your idea sucked or your pitch was longer than a short paragraph, you could get roughed up.

My first two years there I barely spoke during these meetings. We were all sensitive nerds with snotty exteriors in a newsroom that trained us to worry about every detail. One senior copy editor warned me early on: “It takes brass balls to work here.”

The list of never-accepted pitches ran long: no store openings, no stories that read like tourist trips through a rough part of town, no reporters going undercover, no stories involving even a whiff of a conflict of interest, no hot takes. If you had made an error the previous week, you had to explain to everyone how you screwed up. If you were late to the meeting by a minute, you didn’t even bother showing up. Unbelievably, there were always story ideas that made it through. And with those ideas came the next big nightmare: a deadline.

Sometimes you had a few days, sometimes a week, sometimes a month. But that deadline was always looming, and I sucked at deadlines. Because the paper was printed—and at the time had very little investment in a web presence—everything hinged on writers, photographers, graphic artists, editors, proofreaders, and sources cooperating enough to fill the paper each week.

In that era, the paper could be as long as an Ian McEwan novel.

As far as I remember only one full-time reporter was married with kids. When I started dating someone, an editor expressed disappointment, joking that I now wouldn’t have as much time for work. I was making $12,000 on a freelance contract. It didn’t matter, marriage or not. The cover stories that filled the paper required obsession and hustle and sometimes writing 3,000 words overnight. We didn’t deserve our editors, who had the patience of mechanics working on cars with limited Blue Book value. Some pieces took weeks and weeks to come together and just as long to fix. Editors were always looking for the one thing that would make our stories go. Some stories never got there.

The real anxiety for the entire newsroom would set in on Sunday night and be on blast by Monday afternoon. There were never enough news briefs for the City Desk feature. Tuesdays were manic: Loose Lips would need a second item, freelance critics would be late with their picks for the City Lights section, the cover story would need a better kicker. The reporter with the cover— which could run 10,000 words—inevitably kept wanting to make changes (this was mostly me).

Editors had to settle on headlines. Photographs, taken with a film camera, had to be developed, selected, and given cutlines. If a story was important enough to warrant a call with the paper’s jovial Midwest libel lawyer, you got the tiniest inkling that your work might be worthwhile.

Wednesdays were all heartache and stress, right up till the paper shipped to the printer.

Reporters and editors kept tinkering, struggling for objective accuracy and a subjective degree of polish and style. Reporters had to fact-check their own stories—relying on stacks of phone books and oversize street atlases, patient librarians, and phone call after phone call with sources. There were always a thousand other asks, a hundred pleas: I’ll die if this gets cut. Can we get that source on the record? Can we go

14 MAY 6, 2022

TOP: Firemen, 1992 BOTTOM: Fugazi at Lafayette Square, 1991 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

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Man with three watches, 2000 back to that neighborhood one more time? Can we fact-check that last bit—the part I just added without telling you? Can we bring back that section on the inmate’s backstory? This last answer was no—and nearly 15 years later, it still hurts.

Our diligent copy editor, a Deadhead with a near-perfect SAT score and our Wednesday General, read each story. Copy-editing marks were made in pencil on the page. If she had questions, she scrawled them in the margins. (The more she wrote, the higher your stress level; it meant your story was a mess. But it also meant your story was about to get a lot better.) My drafts often resembled scrapbooks, with ribbons of new text stapled to pages, names marked as fact-checked, and scribbled answers to the copy editor’s queries above the problem paragraphs. At a critical point in the process, stories made it to “greens”— galleys printed on green paper—and three more people read the piece, including the editor-inchief (again). The churn didn’t let up until you had no choice but to stop.

By 6 p.m. on Wednesday, the production team pasted corrected galleys, along with illustrations, headlines, and ads, onto camera-ready “boards” in a large, airy space on the third floor. The tension eased somewhat. The room was an oasis of X-ACTO knives and wax, with Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew spinning at low volume on the CD player.

Higher-ups hunched over the pages scanning for blemishes or fuckups that needed fixing. The reporter who had the cover story that week was given $20 for beer and snacks. In a corner of the room, they would assemble a plastic bag of baby carrots, a tub of hummus, and two six-packs.

Reporters would stand around, quietly critiquing the spread and how it lacked salty and sweet.

The $20 never went far enough. But we were underpaid journalists, and that was dinner.

When the paper was sent off to the printer, the tension transferred to the tireless circulation crew, who would be loaded up and on the road by early Thursday morning. There were no more details to cram in, no more edits to make.

Next week was tomorrow’s worry. The copy editor returned to her hot, book-lined cave with photographer Darrow Montgomery and a writer or two. Time for a smoke, the rest of the beer, or some Scotch kept in a drawer. You felt the week’s grind in your bones, and you smelled it on your skin, this up-all-night funk some of us wore like cologne.

The rest of the newsroom was still and quiet, the dog-eared reporter’s notebooks snowed under by drifts of that week’s drafts. In the worst cubicles, the books and papers looked like a heap of springtime slush in a grocery store parking lot, never thawing, growing filthier by the day.

We’d stub our cigarettes in an empty Altoids tin kept on a bookshelf. The bottom of the tin would warm as it filled with our ashes.

The next day perhaps you’d get your reward.

You’d spot someone reading the paper on the Red Line. You’d watch them skim the bold names in Loose Lips and then flip to the club listings.

You had to hope they were just saving your story for later. By Sunday morning, that week’s paper would have become litter, crab-walking down the sidewalk or wedged into the corner of a subway seat. Within a month, we would barely remember the names of the people in our stories—the exceptions would haunt us forever.

It was always on to next.

Jason Cherkis is a reporter and writer based in D.C. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and is working on a book about suicide. He wrote for City Paper from 1997 to 2011.

and Brad McKee and Jason Cherkis and Stephanie Mencimer and Erik Wemple and a bunch of other people much smarter than me. On Wednesday nights, when we closed the print issue, the cover story author would go out and fetch beer and snacks. The next morning, when the papers arrived, the office would be quiet except for the rustling pages. I thought, naively, that all journalism jobs were like this: A team of wiseasses dissecting the task of writing, working extra hard because I didn’t want to disappoint them.

At the center of it all was David Carr, the editor. I started writing for the paper not long after he showed up from Minnesota, and he hired me full-time in 1997. At first, I had a seat right by his office, where the walls were so thin that I could hear him working stories and cajoling sources and pushing back at angry callers. It was great eavesdropping: The time a community activist called to complain about being called an “asshole” (after listening to the guy for a while, Carr rang off by saying, “Ya know, Stu, you really are an asshole”). Or the time an overwrought D.C.

councilmember called to complain that no one praised all the sacrifices he made for the city (“So quit!” Carr responded). Once I made the mistake of filing a story that used the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” “I am disappointed that you think this is acceptable language for Washington City Paper,” he said, before changing it to an elaborate metaphor involving Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the Chicago Fire.

The thing is, the tough-love schtick worked: He made amazing papers. “Our job is to restore consequence,” he would say, exhorting watchdog coverage of a dysfunctional government that had just been taken over by a Congressional control board. Still, while people feel proudest of accountability coverage, the nice thing about a weekly was that the package had to include other things: Zany headline puns (“I’m OK. Eurotrash.”), goofy comics, unnecessary Shakespearean references in the Loose Lips column, and News of the Weird. Oh, and downright beautiful pieces of literary journalism: We regularly did cover stories that ran 8,000 words. We needed them to keep the ads apart.

Eventually, the staff had grown enough that we took over an extra floor of the building. I got promoted to be Carr’s deputy. Writers left, new writers came. Part of Carr’s spiel when hiring was that he couldn’t pay much, but if we were who we said we were, he eventually wouldn’t be able to afford us. That’s what happened with me. I left in 2000, and it felt like graduating.

Ten years later I came back—as editor. The return was a bit like reencountering an old friend who had aged dramatically. The personality was the same, but the body had withered. The intervening years had seen Craigslist decimate classifieds and voicey local blogs collect audiences who might once have been alt-weekly devotees.

If you showed up early to meet a friend at a bar, you could now pull out your phone to pass the time, instead of picking up the paper from one of the racks that used to be ubiquitous at restaurants. City Paper had been sold, then gone bankrupt, and was now owned by the investment fund that had fronted the money. On Champlain Street, we had long since given up that extra floor. The sex workers, if they bought ads at all, were doing so online. The staff was about half the size it had been. The book size my first week back was 72 pages, on smaller paper. It would soon dwindle further.

But that personality! Still smart-alecky and ambitious and eager to stir shit up. I found myself learning a ton from the rising stars: Alan Suderman, who wrote Loose Lips, Lydia DePillis, who covered real estate, Jon Fischer, who edited arts, and Shani Hilton, who helmed City Desk.

As editor, I tried to reestablish some of the print hallmarks, like a big weekly cover story, on the logic that we shouldn’t give up our strongest elements. And in an environment where the rest of legacy local media was also being whupped, I wanted to keep up the energy on city politics—albeit in our own way. I once trudged down to the Wilson Building to be chastised by the then-D.C. Council chairman, who didn’t like the nickname

MICHAEL SCHAFFER The thing newbies always talked about was the sex workers in the lobby. In those days, City Paper was thick with classifieds and personals and ads for “adult services.” Pre-web, buyers would purchase the ads in person, lining up in high heels and tiny skirts at the front counter on Champlain Street NW. Just another day at an alt-weekly in the time of robust staffs, big circulation, and 180-page print papers every Thursday.

In a lot of ways, the writers were the least oddball people in the place. In the ’90s, production— that’s the people who paste up the book, kids— was full of creatives and music-scene people, folks who would drop work to go off on tour. We editorial types, by contrast, were postcollegiate and conventionally ambitious and really cared about our day jobs. And most of us realized that we’d landed at a place where those ambitious could take wing. When I first started contributing to the paper, there was a murderers’ row of talent around the place: Eddie Dean and David Plotz and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Amanda Ripley

16 MAY 6, 2022

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Suderman had given him after reporting on his taxpayer-funded “fully loaded” SUV. We kept using the nickname, and not too long after that, the chairman resigned his office and pleaded guilty to (nonautomotive) federal charges. Another time, we sent Fischer and staff photographer Darrow Montgomery on a cruise featuring a bunch of D.C. music-scene types. Because the ship stopped in the Bahamas, that may have made them the first foreign correspondents in City Paper history. The piece ran with a headline nodding to David Foster Wallace: “A Supposedly Punk Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

The paper’s budget was hard to navigate—at one point, we couldn’t even replace Montgomery’s missing camera lens—but it forced us to use some magazine-style innovating. We did a lot of packages and took advantage of our great print designers. One of those got more attention than anything else that happened in my tenure, and perhaps in the history of City Paper. For years, Dave McKenna’s Cheap Seats column had chronicled the various ignominies of Daniel Snyder and his football team. I had the bright idea to pull together a guide to the lowlights, aimed at unhappy fans. For the cover, we used a picture of Snyder, but scrawled a mustache and devil horns on his face, the way a fifth grader might deface a yearbook picture of some unpopular teacher.

Snyder was not amused. He sued.

The tension of nine months of legal backand-forth stressed every existing fissure in the organization. The public response was massive; readers kicked in tens of thousands of dollars for legal defense. What the suit was really about, we figured, was getting McKenna off the beat. To their great credit, no one in ownership ever told me to do that. It would have been a betrayal, and it would have tanked the brand.

With courts likely to toss the much-ridiculed case, Snyder folded his cards right before the first game of the next season. In an interview with the New York Times, he admitted not having read the package in the first place. That made him a rarity: Thanks to the suit, it became the most-read story in City Paper history. Social media allowed it to travel, but people still came to the office to ask for hard copies for posterity.

It’s odd to think the best-remembered incident during my time as editor involved an NFL team.

Professional sports coverage is one type of journalism that isn’t disappearing. A lot of the other stuff City Paper published has a less certain future in American journalism: Coverage of rela-

TOP: 16th Street NW, 2010 BOTTOM: Downtown, 2014

editor at the time, and I did the story with a staff reporter, Andrew Giambrone.

The weekly print edition created a middle space—12 hours in which the work was done, but not published. Over many years, many City Paper staffers took this middle time as an opportunity to drink, and that’s what Andrew and I did that night. After the routine drinks with the staff in the office, we went to a bar and got one or two more.

That Wednesday night was particularly sweet.

The information in our story was devastating, but I wanted D.C. to know about it. Plus, I was sure we’d beat the Post, whose reporters were working on the same story. (We did.) I was confident in my editor, Liz Garrigan. And I was asleep by 10 that night, eager to wake up and go to work the next day.

There were worse Wednesday nights in my future. A few months later, I became the editor of City Paper, which added a layer of pressure I felt I could never quite manage. There were Wednesdays I went home and edited more stories, late into the night; Wednesdays when I didn’t know if the paper would exist in a month; Wednesdays when the after-work drinks felt like a burden, even if I didn’t partake; Wednesdays when I knew the staff was angry about their working conditions and they’d start howling as soon as I left the office.

The hard times made the wins all the more precious. I loved knowing we had a good story coming out, and I loved it when the articles and photos fit together like a onetime puzzle—like someone could read from cover to cover and enjoy something on every page.

But the best night I had at City Paper was one I didn’t see or understand. I was in my early 20s and not yet a journalist. The editor was Erik Wemple, whom I didn’t know. My picture was in the paper that Wednesday night—a cub reporter had interviewed me for his first big City Paper story. When it came out the next day, my friends and colleagues kept calling to say they’d seen me in the paper. The reporter, Justin Peters, called too. We were already friends, and he met me with a copy of the paper, and we took a long walk. Today he’s my best friend—and my husband of more than a decade.

When I worked at City Paper, the arts editor, Matt Cohen, had a quip. About once a week, he’d find a way to say: “But isn’t it really about the friends we made along the way?” His words didn’t strike me at the time. I hardly even noticed and didn’t laugh—it was just something Matt said.

But as I wrote this piece, his words are the ones I remembered most of all.

Alexa Mills was the managing editor of Washington City Paper from 2016 to 2017 and the editor from 2017 to 2020.

MISCELLANEOUS MEMORIES

tively obscure local officials, critical appraisals of lost-to-the-ages punk bands, a willingness to go big on stories about nobodies. None of that goes away with print. But the ability to put it on the cover of a stack of dead trees in a way that makes a statement is something any editor will miss. And a lot of readers will too, I suspect.

Michael Schaffer writes the Capital City column

18 MAY 6, 2022

in Politico. He was editor of City Paper from 2010 to 2012 and later editor in chief of Washingtonian.

ALEXA MILLS The second-best Wednesday I had at City Paper was the night we closed an investigation on D.C. slumlord Sanford Capital. I was the managing

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City Paper consumed me with the drama, passion, and madness of a first love. It was a yeasty place in the late ’80s, filled with astonishing writers, editors, photographers, and artists; the limitations were my own ambitions and visions.

We were a small, overworked crew led by Jack Shafer and his vacuum cleaner mind, crazy high batting average, and blunt, unsparing judgment of words, ideas, and people. The place had a sitcom vibe with a constant stream of freelancers, musicians, wacko wannabes, theater people, intellectuals, fakes, drunk illustrators, and outright scammers coming through the door. I wrote about dying broke and an old potter’s field, Marion Barry’s arrest, the Finders cult, polio and AIDS vaccines, wife beaters, my brother being run over by a truck, prison architects, drug rehab at Lorton Prison, Blacks in the USSR, taking TB meds to a TB patient handcuffed to his hospital bed, the wacky ER at DC General during crack, the making of a Smithsonian show on the Great Migration, squatters, guerrilla art, and Elvis’ FBI files. We had loud fights and louder parties, mixing with journalists from all stripes at Dan’s Cafe (airplane bottle alcohol) on Thursday nights.

I made friends for life. I cannot imagine a better way to have spent those five years. But I also was relieved to leave, first love and all that. —Jon Cohen

Playground, n.d.

“Do you look that way because everything you touch is turning to shit?”

David Carr was right. I had the forlorn look of a young man who turned everything he touched to shit. It was 1995 and I was 20 years old and had come to City Paper as part of Carr’s first batch of interns—he’d taken over the reins only a couple months before. He wanted me to take big chances. So I did. And I kept missing. Badly.

But now, Carr said, he was confident in my “dead guy.” This was a man named Jim Hill, a former typesetter and Navy veteran who sat in the D.C. morgue for nine months. From the start I had little interest in the D.C. government angle, but more interest in Hill. He had walked away from that suburban life so many people chased after, for one of desolation—dying alone, going unclaimed. I just wanted to tell his story.

In truth, I didn’t really know where it would lead. It meant hanging out with his old friends and getting yelled at by his relatives, spending nights at the racetrack and going to the room where he died. Eddie Dean at one point said, “Jesus! You’re Jim Rockford!”

When “Goner” appeared—the last week of my internship—it marked my only cover at City Paper.

Years later, when my dad and I were having dinner with the Carrs, Carr said this was possibly his favorite piece of my career.

“What a way to come out swinging,” he said, turning to me. “You haven’t come close since.”

—Sridhar Pappu The camaraderie and the cussing. The laughter and the tears. The agony and the ecstasy. The love and the hate—especially the hate mail.

The staff of Washington City Paper in the ’90s:

An odd group of contrarians and misfits, exiled from the corridors of power and shunned by polite society, who banded together despite high levels of dysfunction and low wages “to put out a goddamn paper,” in the mantra of editor David Carr.

The weekly mission: to explore the dimensions of conflict wherever it leads, from the streets and alleys of the nation’s capital to the darkest recesses of the human heart. “What all good stories have in common is conflict,” in the credo of Carr’s predecessor, Jack Shafer.

A highlight/job perk, among many: Cigarette breaks on the parking deck with film and music critic/iconoclast Joel E. Siegel as he exhaled clouds of mentholated wisdom, riffing on his favorite culture warriors (Val Lewton, Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Jean Vigo, Shirley Horn, et al.) and castigating slick frauds like Michael Feinstein.

The sheer pulpy heft of a 144-page, everyThursday edition of Washington City Paper from its print-only heyday could make for sustaining, if unwieldy, reading fodder on a crowded Metro.

That heft, as well as its status as a free weekly in the service of Free Speech and including an f-bomb when somebody in a story said one, was made possible by display ads from the likes of Atlantic Futons, Bigg Wolf Movie Discounters, and Royce’s Video Outlet, among many now-defunct advertisers and defenders of the First Amendment in the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar.

We will miss the once-ubiquitous, often obnoxious rustle of CP’s unruly, ink-bleeding pages getting pawed and read to tatters in public places. It has been replaced with the quiet antiseptic scrolling and pervasive “mechanized hum of another world,” first described by the doomed

protagonist of Steely Dan’s “Don’t Take Me Alive” from The Royal Scam, which featured the lyrics— of course—printed on the inner sleeve.

Good night, sweet print. You were a blast while it lasted. —Eddie Dean The only meetings I never hated were led by Erik Wemple. I especially loved Fitness Tips and Food Talk for five minutes before the one-hour story meetings commenced (and loved how they never went longer. And also that he’d lock out latecomers [Jason Cherkis]). My favorite meetings were for the cover heds, where anyone in the building with a pulse was welcome. Darrow Montgomery often came up with the winner because he’s really a word guy disguised as one of the world’s best photographers. I don’t know if he came up with “Hot for Creature” for a story about a teacher obsessed with sasquatch. But he could have. —Jule Gardner Banville In September 2012, I was a week or two into my new job as the Housing Complex reporter, and I went to a community meeting in Anacostia or Congress Heights. I can’t even remember what the meeting was about, but I distinctly remember that just a few minutes in, an elderly man stood up and started waving the latest issue of Washington City Paper, which had Alan Suderman’s story about the broken Certified Business Enterprise program on the cover. He railed about the corruption in city government and shouted, “You have to read the City Paper!”

That’s when it kind of hit me that the work we were doing really mattered. There’s sometimes a sense—inside City Paper and outside—that it’s a bunch of overeducated, underpaid nerds riffing on basement bands from the ’90s and $15 cock-

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tails. But in the paper’s best days, which spanned decades, politicians feared us, community members needed us, and no one could beat us on the kinds of stories we pursued. I always got a little thrill on Thursdays when I’d watch people reach into our black-and-orange boxes to see what was on the cover. I’ll miss that terribly. —Aaron Wiener I worked at City Paper during the height of Black Bart mania (IYKYK) on F St. NW. I took over the receptionist position, later passing it to Nicole Arthur before it was passed like a torch to members of Unrest, Velocity Girl, and Black Tambourine.

I met pimps and hos face to face (the term sex worker wasn’t around yet) while taking adult services ads at reception and over the phone.

At one point there were four office couples and you would often trip over them canoodling in the stairwell! Next stop was the scintillating world of classified advertising, doing data entry and seeing responses and photographs for personal ads. Amy Austin, the greatest boss ever, valued my work ethic so she helped me move into production, where Mark Jenkins tried to teach me to do text wraps on ancient (pre-Mac) computers. I eventually learned how to use a Mac and QuarkXpress, and I already knew how to cut galleys with an X-ACTO knife, wax them and paste them to the blue lines with a roller. Tuesdays were frantic in production: We put on the Shaft soundtrack while we prepared the display ads and the issue for press. (My proofreading skills and Mac savvy were enough to get me design jobs and eventually jobs in NYC at SPIN, Time Out NY, and Entertainment Weekly.) Alona Wartofsky and Jack Shafer helped me become a better writer with tough love and opportunities to write Clubland,

MAY 6, 2022 19

Artifacts, and local news. We once scooped Sassy magazine by outing Ian Svenonius as the “Sassiest Boy in America” before they announced it. I’ll never forget writing about the Arlington couple who got divorced and she got the tiki bar so he opened a competing tiki bar across the road; I felt like Geraldo! But it was a good learning experience for real life. Writing about local music was challenging because you often ran into the people you wrote about later, and they never forgot what you wrote. In addition to many magical memories and great people I met there, I met my BFF, legendary indie-pop singer Pam Berry, at City Paper, and all our skills helped us do a print zine together, chickfactor. It’s currently printing its 30th-anniversary issue. —Gail O’Hara

NH: I haven’t read it in a while, but I just cringe at it a bit because it feels like one way you can read it is us throwing cold water on interracial relationships. But what I think is true about the impulse is this whole kumbaya thing around “love is blind.” That’s nonsense. Race is a thing. There’s no such thing as being blind to race. But where it got perceived as an attack on interracial couples, I don’t like that. If I were writing it now, I would be more careful. We got a lot of angry letters.

RR: For weeks, maybe months.

NH: It was good training for the rest of my career.

You just get used to people yelling at you and having to defend yourself. David Carr, he was just a shit-starter.

MIKE MADDEN

RR: Provocateur.

NH: The newspaper shouldn’t just lay there. It needs to jump up and want to be read and talked to and yelled at. That was one of the things I learned from working with him.

Considering how many Wednesday afternoons I spent worrying about City Paper’s print edition, I am a little surprised to realize that my fondest memories of the paper have nothing to do with the painstaking hours of proofing, the drinks and snacks after we were done, or even the supreme delight of finally settling on the perfect cover line (usually thanks to a last-minute bit of brilliance from Darrow Montgomery).

Sure, all of that was a lot of fun—well, OK, the proofing wasn’t always fun, but the rest of it was.

No, when I think about the end of City Paper as a print product, I mostly think of the time long before I worked there. In high school in Rockville, in the early 1990s, my friends and I would stop at Tower Records every week to pick up a copy.

When I moved back to D.C. in 2000, I grabbed one on the way to the Metro after leaving work on Thursdays. If I was out meeting friends somewhere back in the pre-smartphone days, I’d read and reread the week’s paper before they got there, the way you’d scroll Twitter or Instagram now to kill time and/or learn something. I used to keep Best of D.C. issues around for months in my living room; I don’t know how often I ever bothered to refer back to them, necessarily, but I liked having the option. I picked the paper up for the carefully reported, artfully written cover stories, but also for the columns, and the Straight Dope and Savage Love, and to laugh or gawk at the missed connections classified ads. It was always more than a week’s worth of entertainment, and there it was, week in, week out, free for whoever wanted one.

I hope City Paper finds nothing but success in its new online-only mode, and I realize the print edition probably hasn’t made much business sense for years. Clicking “publish” on a great story when I worked there was a thrill, too. But I’ll still miss the paper as I first knew and loved it.

RR: He wasn’t easy either, he was a pretty rough editor to work under. I think rough is a generous word. And we took that energy back to the student newspaper, the Hilltop. We were already trying to be rabble-rousers at the Hilltop, and having interned at City Paper unleashed us to be totally irreverent but also to be good storytelling reporters.

Why did you want to work here?

NH: I think Ta-Nehisi was there, and he connected us. You didn’t learn about literary journalism [in school]. Like, there were no classes on that.

So how else would you learn that? And there was always a sharp angle, there was always a take, there was an opinion, there was an attitude. You were supposed to have a point of view, which wasn’t allowed in the daily newspaper journalism with the sort of B.S. objectivity that they still try to pretend like they have. There was none of that with City Paper.

It was a place where you learned the takedown. Sometimes you just need to take people down. That’s the kind of thing you learn at City Paper: Some people become so powerful and have abused their power in such a way that you really do have to just …

RR: Slap ’em with the facts.

NH: Yes! And there is an art to that. You can’t just say, “I don’t like her haircut.”

RR: One of my favorite images from City Paper was this graphic that ran while I was there. They had the diamond of D.C. and it was one color and there was this little sliver around Capitol Hill all the way to Georgetown. That graphic said, “This is D.C.” And then there was an arrow to the sliver: “This is what the Washington interns see.” That’s what the City Paper seemed like before us. They weren’t covering Black D.C. in any sort of depth. It was all about Northwest, and Capitol Hill intrigue.

It was about roasting the mayor. And we brought in young Black voices.

Mike Madden was the managing editor of Washington City Paper from 2010 to 2012 and the editor from 2012 to 2015.

NATALIE HOPKINSON AND REGINOLD ROYSTON

NH: Yeah, Black people were sort of like punching bags. The local power was Black and so City Paper saw it as a need to take down the local power, but you couldn’t avoid the racial connotations given the writing staff, so it was kind of this weird space that the City Paper was in.

I’m so fond of our time at City Paper and the lessons I learned there and writing about politics, culture, and everything. I wonder, Reggie, what’s your take on where the alt-weeklies go?

Natalie Hopkinson and Reginold Royston worked as interns at City Paper in the mid-’90s. They became good friends and now both work in academia: Hopkinson as a professor at Howard University, and Royston as a professor of African studies and information studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The two asked to be interviewed together, and shared a byline on a story about interracial relationships, “Love Knows Color,” in 1997. That’s where our conversation starts. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

—Mitch Ryals NH: So embarrassing. Maybe you’re still proud of it, Reggie.

RR: Oh you know, I’m proud of what we did when we were 19 or whatever. It’s less so these days, but it was very taboo to be in an interracial relationship at the time, especially if you were at Howard, and I know we were both coming from our segregated cities. So we had something to say on it.

TOP: Downtown, 2013 BOTTOM: Real estate balloon, 2013

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RR: It’s a good question. Those weeklies are important, and they were important for me as a musician, as a music critic, as a reader. Before the internet took over listings … they were really places to hear about what’s gonna happen, to plan your week. Then the story sits around. You hold it. Right now I’m getting back into ordering magazines to my house because I want things to see. I want to be like, “Oh you need to read this thing.” My children need to see what’s in Essence regularly.

NH: I think also journalism as a whole is becoming sort of like being an artist. It’s only for the

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elite because only the elite can afford it. I think we were only paid 10 cents a word. Something crazy.

Most people can’t afford to do that, but if you were of a certain social class—Reggie and I, middle class; Ta-Nehisi middle class—you have a certain kind of access that comes with being in a certain social class.

Where do you see City Paper going, Natalie?

NH: Things move on, so you just have to evolve and find relevance. I’m hoping that’s what happens with City Paper: that it takes the niche that it filled and continues to serve that but also evolve and figure out a way to stay relevant.

There is a place for that voice and that perspective.

Reggie, what did it mean to work for City Paper when you did as a young person?

RR: I’m not involved directly in journalism anymore, but I took the idea of grit, being unafraid and someone who’s gonna slap people with facts, with a lot of opinion and flair, having that freedom and license. You don’t get that working at a daily paper.

What’s lost with the death of the printed paper?

RR: With everything being so digital and competing for your attention through streams of data or media, you lose something that is tangible, static, and that cements the conversation, if only for a week.

I suppose you can get that by the immediacy of commenting and blogs, but our attention span moves way too quickly now. And we move through news way too quickly. And with something that sits around and demands your attention with something that’s tangible, with these great images, photographs, that’s what we’ve lost. We’ve lost the ability to have a common conversation in one space and there being an object of that conversation. Now, we are in a conversation, which is probably more interesting because of the diversity of voices, but everything is overwhelming us.

JACK SHAFER Jack Shafer was the editor of Washington City Paper from 1985 until 1995. He asked that I include a preemptive apology to those former staffers he neglects to mention but who were integral to the paper’s success. Our hour-long conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —Mitch Ryals Why did you want the job?

Jack Shafer: I was a longtime enthusiast for long-form journalism and had spent a lot of time reading alt-weeklies, both the Chicago Reader and LA Weekly and LA Reader. And at the same time I was enamored with the kind of journalism you’d see in Rolling Stone and Esquire and in the mid ’70s, a slick magazine called New Times, which nobody remembers but should.

I thought there was an opportunity at City Paper to shape a publication that was about the city in which we lived. There really wasn’t anything that reported consistently, peer to peer, about what it was like to live in this city. We gave primacy to covering the D.C. Council, which the Post didn’t spend as much resources on as it should. Ken Cummins was very strong in covering the circus that was the D.C. Council then and Mayor Barry of course.

And I’ve always been interested in culture and was lucky enough to inherit Joel Siegel as a film critic and then bring Mark Jenkins in as the resident polymath. And if I’m tossing out credit, I could have never made it through those early years without Jon Cohen. He was essentially my copilot. Alona Wartofsky was there before I was there. She knew the city really well and gave the paper its broad stance in the arts. And I really owe a great debt of gratitude to Mike Dolan. As a freelancer, he contributed more cover stories than anybody.

TOP: H.R., Baltimore, 2012 BOTTOM: Skate Palace, 2011

Why did you leave?

At a certain point, I think at 10 years, you’ve basically done every story you set out to do. Staffers started to propose stories and I’d say, “Oh we did

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that in ’91.” That was fine for me. I didn’t want to repeat myself, but I began to think it was a little unfair of people who didn’t know the city, hadn’t had the benefit of editing the paper for 10 years.

And it was a wise decision because David Carr came in and to my surprise ran lots of the stories that I had bounced. And they really did quite well.

That speaks to the value of the paper as an institution.

Right, right. There were never political litmus tests for a City Paper story. I ran a lot of stories whose premises I didn’t agree with, but I thought they were argued and reported really well. So the key was that the paper was really writer driven.

What was your vision for the paper? How did you shape it? Could you talk about how it changed over those 10 years?

My vision was to get the paper pasted up and straight and out the door by Wednesday at 6 o’clock so it could be printed. In the early days we were producing the paper out of Baltimore, so I would drive up there on Wednesday and supervise the layout and proofreading and the final touches. Very time consuming and awkward not having production in your back room.

So in the beginning the vision might have been to create a paper that was about the city, but fuck vision, I had to get the paper out the door, and that was the most pressing thing. When the paper goes out the door, the clock starts again, and you have another seven days, not so much to fulfill the vision but to get another paper out the door.

What did the paper mean to its readers and how did you know?

I think it depends from reader to reader. The very first piece of mail I got after my first issue was an anonymous letter that I pinned up over my desk and kept for years. It said, “Your paper sucks shit out of a dead dog’s asshole.” And I thought that’s the reader that I’m looking for. A reader who’s discerning, who has a way with words, who isn’t afraid to be vulgar to make their point.

And I think the goal every week was to make the paper a little less shitty. I never heard back from that gentleman or gentlelady. But it would really depend on who you saw.

I never fooled myself that Washington was waiting with baited breath to read our cover story or reading Joel Siegel on film. I think that a lot of people picked up the paper for the listings, for the advertisements, the classifieds, and in the long tradition of newspapering, to kill time. This was before you could carry around a super computer in the palm of your hand where you can dial up great works of literature, the latest news, pornography. You don’t even have to get your fingers dirty paging through the newspaper.

I heard a story that you once found a terrified reporter sleeping under their desk.

It was probably me. I slept a lot of times at the paper. I’m sure that it happened. A nap at the paper is a long wonderful tradition.

TOP LEFT: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2013 TOP RIGHT: Voting, 2012 MIDDLE: Taxi and pedestrian, 1994 BOTTOM: H Street NW, 2016

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You’re a media columnist now. If you were to write something about the print death of this newspaper, what would you write?

I guess I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a long time because so many of the other papers in the country have fallen. Mortality seems to have been built into these papers, and they have expired as both a cultural and as a business force. You have to be careful about not being too overly sentimental about preserving the things that shaped you. I’m sure that people were really upset when horse and buggies departed, and I think this was an inevitable end.

What are we losing with the death of the printed paper?

I remember when City Paper was doing matches ads long before the Washington Post got there, and we were doing same sex matching ads, and the Post would do only opposite sex ads. I don’t know when it was, but it was cultural breakthrough when Post started running same sex ads. The paper benefited by how conventional and straitlaced and out of the loop of city life that the Post was. I don’t think you get a reflection of the flavor and variety and the conflict that’s going on in the city and we were able to do that.

For me, not being able to pick up a City Paper

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PREVIOUS

TOP LEFT: Kennedy Street NW, 2016 TOP RIGHT: Rock Creek Park, 2016 BOTTOM: Highwire, 1994

ABOVE TOP LEFT: Metro, 2012 TOP RIGHT: 7th Street NE, 2015 BOTTOM LEFT: Metro, 2015 BOTTOM RIGHT: Franklin Square, 2014

24 MAY 6, 2022

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is like coming home after a hard day of work and you go to your refrigerator because you know you have one beer left, and it’s gone. That feeling of loss and depression that you’re not going to have the comfort of the bottle and the cold brew going down your throat.

Any words of wisdom?

I think it’s going to be really hard. The unique thing about City Paper was that it stood out. It was visible everywhere, and people referred to it, and people kept it in their houses to figure out where to go at night, what shows to go see. I think the problem with an online publication is it’s hard to maintain that good visibility. The paper has an uphill climb and has had an uphill climb as circulation has fallen and there are fewer distribution points. And I think COVID kicked the shit out of it too.

After our interview, Shafer messaged to give his version of a common theme running through some of our conversations with former staffers.

While the work is about telling human-centered stories, at least some of the reward is the humans we meet along the way.

“I forgot to say that I eventually got a wife out of City Paper,” Shafer said. “I married my last arts editor, Nicole Arthur, six years after I left the paper.”

JELANI COBB I have no recall of the first time a copy of the Washington City Paper found its way into my hands, just as I no longer remember when I first became aware of the ubiquitous street boxes that served as its chief distribution point, but I am almost certain that I read that issue from back to front. At least half of the pages in those days were crammed with a seemingly inexhaustible bounty of classified ads, the sustenance that made the paper’s mission of chronicling the people, the personalities, the cumulative eccentricities of the nation’s capital possible. Drum instruction, guitar lessons, model/actress wanted, redecorate your home, hypnosis, and spiritualist healing. Find what you need or simply find out what others have needed. In the years before algorithms came to catalog our every curiosity, those pages were a micro-font index of human need: the commercial, “DON’T LEASE ANOTHER BEEPER UNTIL YOU CALL MESSAGE WORLD,” the personal, “Clayton, be nicer to your chimp or I’ll report you to the ASPCA,” the transactional, “Uncontested Divorce $175” the mad volume of sexual miscellany, “Miss those spankings your dad used to deliver? Trim, attractive WM will fulfill your needs. No strings” or “Ladies, double your pleasure, two SWMs seeking 1-2 s/mwf for fun and games.”

The editors and journalists at the City Paper scoured D.C., crafting weekly installments covering the mundane, the absurd, the outrageous (had the paper itself been categorized as a genre it would have been a dramedy). Yet for all the work that went into creating the front of the book, all that reportage might not have been more revelatory than what was happening in the back of it. Some future anthropologist seeking to understand life in the nation’s capital during those days would comb through the sundry postings, the furtive inquiries the sum of happenings there. Not everything that appeared there was intentional. In the early ’90s, at a point at which the paper had become a staple in my life, a coworker from the old Crown Books between P Street and New Hampshire Avenue was cutting across Dupont Circle when a photographer stopped him saying he was shooting portraits of Washingtonians. This was at a point when the Circle was still overrun with rats and scams and on any given day either of the two might predominate. My friend sat for the impromptu photo shoot, signed a release, and was shocked a few weeks later when his picture showed up in a listing for vaguely worded “massage services.” Lesson learned.

The yield of those libidinous posts was WCP’s trademark long-form explorations of the D.C. life. Six-thousand words on a subject, now all

but unheard of, was the standard. A job listing for the publication back in the day listed the preferred level of experience and job requirements along with the capped declaration that applicants must be able to handle long-form. So strange then that those advertisements for the unbridled world that the District back then might dwindle and then all but disappear, taking with them a vital part of the media landscape. The logic of the alt-weeklies, dating all the way back to the founding of the Village Voice, held that a city could sustain multiples narratives—the one typically chronicled in the solemn, official prose of what we now call legacy newspapers and another, less staid, stream of observation about those same locales. These outlets were not defined simply by their relationship to the larger newspapers they existed alongside but rather by the entire style of journalism they practiced: arch, irreverent, occasionally profane. Dispatches from Washingtonians to and for Washingtonians, as local as your corner bar.

Any institution that exists for as long as WCP contains multitudes—eras so rich with anecdotes, spectacles both small and grand, foibles and fuckups that could be the basis of a book of their own. Mine was the David Carr era, when D.C. was still regaled as Chocolate City and the paper’s skeptical-to-cynical coverage of Marion Barry’s leadership was shot through with race politics of the day. Black Washington regarded the City Paper with suspicion, which was not unrelated to the fact that the mostly Black city was being covered by paper’s mostly White staff.

Carr entered this equation as editor in chief in 1995 and, with an almost stereotypically Midwestern degree of practicality set out to diversify the paper’s ranks. His initial class of recruits included Holly Bass, Neil Drumming, myself, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This was not a panacea, but it was a difference.

One time an irate Black reader called into the office screaming about a piece I’d written that touched upon several racial themes. The caller stopped his tirade mid-sentence and said, “Wait, are you Black?” When I indicated I was, he said “Oh, never mind,” and hung up.

We joined a staff that included Glenn Dixon as arts editor, Eddie Dean, Mike Schaffer, Erik Wemple, and Stephanie Mencimer as staff writers, and James Lockhart as an editor. Jake Tapper, then a frequent freelancer, wrote a stillmemorable (and in some corners infamous) firstperson piece about going on a blind date with a pre-White House Monica Lewinsky.

What I could not have known at the time was how integral City Paper would become to everything else I wanted to do later. We learned the metabolism of the weekly publication, from pitch to closing, the particulars of reporting, the imperatives of meeting deadlines, the double and triple checking of salient facts. The altweekly system served as a farm league where writers and editors could perfect their crafts, find their professional voices, and learn from the inevitable mistakes. The current struggles of local papers of all sorts but particularly the alt-weeklies has a compound effect of not only squeezing the many talented people doing this work right now, but also making it that much more difficult for tomorrow’s writers and critics to find a foothold in the arena. The Washington of that era no longer exists. In its place stands a cleaner, newer iteration of the capital city, one whose very functionality can remind you that grit makes more good news days. The city is less familiar to me these days. My mental geography of D.C. is marked as much by my recollection of what once stood at a particular corner or down a specific alley as any knowledge of what currently exists there. The disappearance of the once-ubiquitous City Paper boxes will render the city that much less familiar to the old heads of my era. A reminder of the great ambivalence of progress, a reminder to take note of what is because it invariably becomes what once was.

Lesson learned.

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He wrote for City Paper from 1995 to 2001.

TOP: Georgia Avenue NW, 2012 BOTTOM: Pharmacy, 2013

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

MAY 6, 2022 25

FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY

Writers’ Digest City Paper staffers have never been highclass gourmands. We appreciate a nice meal as much as the next person, but as most people who’ve passed through its offices will tell you, the most anticipated meal of the week was often the snacks and beers shared after an issue closed on Wednesday night. As broke alt-weekly writers and editors, we subsisted for periods on a diet of liquidy, semi-suspect Mexican layered dip from the Adams Morgan Safeway, stale office coffee, and whatever offerings PR companies or restaurants sent over. Some new brand of instant ramen? Sure. A plastic bag of sausages and sauce from a crawfish place? We’ll try anything once. To thrive, you had to be omnivorous, both in your interests and your appetite.

Those omnivorous tendencies helped Brett Anderson land a gig as City Paper’s first Young & Hungry columnist in January 1996. Known as “someone who would steal your lunch off your desk” at the office of the Twin Cities Reader, he followed former Reader editor David Carr to D.C. to write about food. As a 25-year-old “very raw” writer with a burgeoning interest in food writing, Anderson says he never expected to make a career of it, but nevertheless, he has.

After leaving City Paper in 2000, he spent nearly 20 years as a restaurant critic and writer at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans before joining the New York Times in 2019.

Eating experiences in greater D.C., especially sampling the region’s diverse global cuisines in Annandale and Rockville and its early forays into modern Southern cuisine at restaurants like Cashion’s Eat Place, prepared him for those endeavors. “As a young person who ended up kind of accidentally becoming a food writer, it was an incredibly great place to become introduced to a great variety of cuisines and restaurant styles,” he says.

For Laura Hayes, who wrote Young & Hungry from July of 2016 until earlier this year, the challenge was balancing restaurant coverage and careful reporting on the District’s booming hospitality industry. “The food beat is the best because of the people you meet and the unlimited storytelling potential. Food coverage can touch on labor, politics, race, immigration, history, culture, and the environment,” she wrote in her final column.

The Young & Hungry columnists grew up with the District’s food scene. They watched it evolve from a steakhouse town to the place Bon Appétit labeled “Best Restaurant City of the Year” in 2016. Below, three other writers who helmed the food section share their favorite moments on the beat.

—Caroline Jones Before I was hired as the Young & Hungry columnist in January 2006, I had to

Darrow Montgomery

City Paper’s food writers reflect on D.C.’s ascent to dining destination status and the memorable things they ate along the way.

try out for the gig. I still have the edit of my first dress-rehearsal column. It was a review of Miss Saigon, a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown that had seen better days. I had no idea why Erik Wemple, then the editor of the paper, wanted me to review it, but if it was a test to see if I’d lobby for a place more relevant to readers, I flunked it. I didn’t register a single protest, dutifully reviewing a restaurant that I deemed, right or wrong, a tourist trap.

You have to understand that when I started at Washington City Paper, I was not a novice. I had more than a decade of journalism experience. I had been a full-time music critic at a daily. I was part of a team that launched some of the first city guides on the web, courtesy of Bill Gates and Microsoft. I even was the managing

26 MAY 6, 2022

editor at an alt-weekly in Houston for a couple of tumultuous years. But when I got that edit from Wemple, I felt as if I were a second-year journalism student fumbling through his first sorry attempt at a review.

Wemple buttered me up with a little praise at the top, saying that I had a “point of view that remains strong from start to finish.”

(Incidentally, Wemple recently told me that he learned his velvet hammer approach from Carr, the editor who left a permanent mark on City Paper.) But two paragraphs later, as I dithered over whether to dismiss Miss Saigon or not, Wemple lost his patience and retracted the compliment. “Fuck this; I hate this equivocation,” he wrote. “Forget what I said up top about you keeping a strong POV throughout this piece.”

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The style of editing and management that Carr/Wemple developed during their time at City Paper was critical, sometimes confrontational, and always uncompromising. (Wemple told me repeatedly that only “brilliant” metaphors and analogies get published in his paper, implying that mine were a long way from making the cut.) But there was a method to this madness, and it was to produce a paper that you couldn’t wait to pull from the box each week, one that was deeply reported and more than a little edgy. (Wemple wanted me to tell you that he hired me, no matter how harsh his first edit.)

To say that I was uncomfortable with conflict at the time of my hire would be an understatement. I grew up in a family that never argued, not once that I can remember, as if an argument

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MAY 6, 2022 27

FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY were a sign of fatal flaws in the relationship. So, it took me longer than others, I’d say, to see the merit of Wemple’s management. I don’t remember when it happened, but at some point in my five-year run, I understood that there was a difference between conflict and actual offense.

I came to see that there was often affection behind the bluster.

What Wemple understood, certainly better than I did at the time, is that argumentation is a form of intimacy. When you can argue with a colleague—speak your mind, fight for your point of view, and be open to the other person’s criticism in return—you develop the kind of trust and working relationship that produces really fine journalism.

I’ve regurgitated this brief history to make a point: Yes, the culture that Carr and Wemple created may feel as dead as print newspapers.

New forms of management have emerged, just as surely as smartphones, tablets, and computers have made newsprint obsolete. Argumentation and debate can assume softer tones than the ones both editors adopted. But they were right about one thing: The best journalism is the product of a good fight/argument between reporter and editor, between reporter and source, or even between reporter and reporter as one confronts your creativity on deadline.

I became a better journalist under Wemple’s leadership. His lessons still ring in my ear more than 15 years later. I trust City Paper will carry on the good fight, even without a printing press.

—Tim Carman

We’re honored to be in the final print of the Washington City Paper.

A paper that means so much to us all, personally & as small business warriors here in DC. Thank you for being a stalwart of the community. – 3 Stars Brewing 28 MAY 6, 2022

Of my many lives at Washington City Paper over the years, Young & Hungry was the pinnacle.

When I started as an editorial intern, the paper was hefty, about 100 or so pages thick.

Even so, print space was precious. Story meetings were competitive and sometimes brutal. You had to make a very compelling case for your ideas to make it. I remember being laughed out of the room for pitching a news item about beer. A senior writer told me bluntly, “This is not Frat Boy Weekly!”

By the time I began writing Y&H, so much had changed. The physical paper was thinner, but the digital real estate was endless and insatiable. It also included a whole recurring section about beer. Refreshing!

The sensibility remained the same. We were the arbiters of cool, the chroniclers of dysfunction, the final word on all the city had to offer.

And I was the lucky SOB tasked with carrying forward one of the paper’s most vaunted franchises.

My predecessors, Todd Kliman and Tim Carman, were both friends of mine and former colleagues, not to mention award-winning writers. They were big supporters, even before I got the gig. I’ll never forget accompanying Carman to a series of Indian restaurants that oddly served beef (Hinduism’s sacred animal) and ordering nothing else despite all the hostile looks. That’s how you do it, I thought.

In that spirit, I set out to be a tough critic and angered more than a few big-name restaurateurs along the way. Perhaps none more so than James

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Beard Award-winning modernist chef R.J. Cooper. His response to my critique is probably the most unforgettable moment of my tenure.

In a column decrying the year’s most annoying food trends, I challenged Cooper to cut it out with all the “foams, gels, and anything else that sounds like a hair product” and “just make me a sandwich.”

I was pretty proud of that line, but I didn’t expect him to take me up on it!

Soon enough, I was summoned to his restaurant during a crowded event, where the chef painstakingly assembled a monstrous sandwich of corned beef, pork belly, sauerkraut, and Gruyère, all in mock tribute to yours truly. He called it “Shott in the Heart,” also a nod to his own looming open-heart surgery.

While I am hopeful the chef ultimately recovered from his condition, I’m not sure my arteries ever will.

—Chris Shott City Paper didn’t really have an owner when I was hired as food editor in 2012. The former Creative Loafing overlords had filed for bankruptcy and the paper was being run by a New York hedge fund that was trying to offload it. We weren’t even certain the publication would survive. But City Paper was known as a place with sharp editors where so many journalistic greats kick-started their careers. Of course I was in—even if it meant going down with the ship. What alt-weekly writers of recent decades haven’t encountered the brink of demise?

My tenure happened to coincide with a real renaissance in D.C.’s food and drink scene. The city got its first legal distillery since pre-Prohibition. The first food truck regulations were just being written. There were these new things called “pop-ups.” And $14 cocktails were such a high-end novelty that I started an Instagram account to document them. Still, the hot debate was whether D.C. was a “third-tier” food city, and nothing got us more riled up than a New York Times dis about our sandwiches.

The great thing about City Paper was you could get away with weird shit that you just couldn’t at other publications. Like the time my colleague Jon Fischer and I created the U Street Taco (a Ben’s Chili Bowl halfsmoke wrapped in a jumbo slice) inspired by Philadelphia’s South Street Taco (a cheesesteak wrapped in a jumbo slice). Probably my all-time favorite story, though, was an investigation into restaurant restroom sex (classic WCP pun headline: “Stall Tactics”). After publication, an anonymous tipster by the name of “Benjamin Dover” (get it?) actually sent me a sex tape from the restroom of Le Diplomate. For what it’s worth, all you could see were feet.

The food scene has come a long way over the past decade, along with those cocktail prices.

Unfortunately, another group of City Paper writers is facing the brink with the death of print and recent layoffs. This local institution has a way of surviving though, and I’m counting on future generations of up-and-coming talent to continue writing weird shit. I’ve eaten a lot of gnarly stuff on behalf of City Paper (again, see U Street Taco), but on that last point, I hope I won’t eat my words.

—Jessica Sidman

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3. “Let me see if we’re missing something” 4. Kinda sorta 5. No. for DJs 6. Shrink’s org.

7. Tuna fish container 8. Question of selfdoubt?

9. Catherine of Schitt’s Creek 10. In the Heights director Jon 11. Profane “YOLO” 12. Connected, so to speak 13. Flower part 18. Heal 22. George Gervin’s

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MAY 6, 2022 29

ARTS Darrow Montgomery

Art on Our Sleeves For decades, City Paper arts editors and Washington itself have shown their hearts through art.

By Sarah Marloff @sarahmarloff What does it mean to take your job as an arts editor at a local paper too seriously?

Well, it depends who you ask. And I’ve asked a lot of people—former editors from this very paper’s arts section to be exact. How else could I put 41 years, plus the future, into frame?

“I wanted the section to have news—hard news reporting for the arts and I wanted the section to have really good critical writing,” says Jon Fischer, Washington City Paper’s arts editor from 2010 to 2012. “I wanted us to take it seriously.”

Another former editor, Brad McKee, who ran the section from 1998 to 2000, described the act of critiquing art as “really writing about the meaning of life. This movie—or play—is just your excuse.” Another former editor said, chuckling: “Maybe [that’s] taking it too seriously.”

Christina Cauterucci, the arts editor from 2014 to 2015 (and, full disclosure, a close friend of mine), was at the paper for a short time but says it “looms large” in her career. She, too, notes that City Paper, its arts section and as a whole, took itself more seriously “than anyone else ever would.” She continues, “We expected a lot of ourselves even when, perhaps, nobody else was expecting us to write as beautifully or critique things as thoroughly or do as much reporting as we did. We wanted to do it because we thought D.C. deserved it—the arts scene in D.C. deserved it. And we had so much fun doing it.”

She’s right. Like Fischer, taking the job seriously is exactly what all of us have done since the paper first appeared in 1981. Coverage goals may have changed from editor to editor, but whether it was having the best written critiques, offering hard news reporting on the local art scene, covering the role of public art in D.C., or the impacts of gentrification, it has always been done with a commitment to excellence, integrity, and, most importantly, the readers and artists who call the city home.

But it’s not about pleasing or placating anyone. “My worry was that we would be missing something that would be happening locally,” says Leonard Roberge, arts editor from 2000 to 2006. “I wasn’t necessarily worried about making the local arts people happy.” Glenn Dixon, arts editor from October 1995 to March 1998, puts it more bluntly: “Every cultural

Local rapper Fat Trel, 2012

product is always competing with another cultural product … I didn’t want my readers to feel misled the way I sometimes had.”

Alt-weeklies are supposed to be tone setters and sources of discovery, as Mark Athitakis, arts editor from January 2007 to late 2008, sums up. And in true alt-weekly fashion, City Paper has documented the rise, fall, and rebirth of the city’s creators and art spaces as well as their fans and naysayers.

“An alt-weekly can say what’s worth paying attention to that other places are missing,” says Athitakis, who worked at the Chicago Reader and

30 MAY 6, 2022

SF Weekly before joining the WCP staff. Alona Wartofsky, who still freelances for City Paper today, agrees: “I always felt like part of the job was to fill in the gaps the Post didn’t cover.” Wartofsky joined the paper in 1981; during her 13 years on staff she held many roles, including arts editor.

Over the course of City Paper’s history, we’ve chronicled artists who would blow up— GoldLink, Logic, Wale, Fugazi, and Fat Trel are some of the names that stood out to former editors—as well as more obscure local creators such as Mark Chorvinsky and Julian Mazor.

“The things I remember most fondly about

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

the art scene are the subjects of [arts] profiles,” Roberge recalls, sharing details of Mazor, an author who didn’t release a second book for 36 years following the debut of his successful shortstory collection. When we hang up, he texts me two more stories from his tenure: one about a couple who attended art openings for the food and a profile on Taka, a 22-year-old from Japan and superfan of D.C. punk. “It’s really these fantastic local characters that I value the most,” Roberge says. “Some of them will still be completely unknown.”

For Kayla Randall, who edited the section

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MAY 6, 2022 31

ARTS from 2019 to 2020, “D.C. show[s] its heart through its art.” She points to the coverage done during her tenure, including elevating both local legends and independent artists and filling two arts guides. “We could only do all of these things because of the incredible amount of talent and creativity here, and we’ve been lucky to witness and experience it.”

But coverage has also been a place for budding writers to opine on the state of the arts.

In 1997, Jelani Cobb, now a staff writer at the New Yorker, wrote what may have been pitched as an album review meets obituary for The Notorious B.I.G. and his LP Life After Death.

Though edited by Dixon, Cobb’s writing in “Preface to a Multidisc Suicide Note” proves McKee’s point: He’s really writing about life and race—the music is just the excuse. “The truth is that to the music industry, the deaths of Biggie, Tupac, and Eazy-E mean a chance to cash in on the posthumous release market. Dead sells,” writes Cobb. “The truth is that … both Tupac’s and Biggie’s seemingly prescient knowledge of their deaths has more to do with history and the meaningless loss of black life than clairvoyance.”

No matter how many people I spoke with and articles I reread, there’s no easy or concise way to sum up four decades of coverage and its impact on a city that can easily be written off as a federal hub filled with too many government workers and khaki pants to be an arts capital. But, as we know, D.C. is more than three branches of the federal government and the Smithsonian. It’s a city with a robust musical history—from go-go and punk to hip-hop, a theater scene that often acts as a testing ground for Broadway shows, and a home for talented writers, fringe artists, multiple galleries, and local filmmakers.

And City Paper has thoroughly chronicled the many scenes that make up D.C.’s arts ecosystem. As we’ve helped record history, the paper—and this section—has become history itself. There was a time when print issues ran nearly 150 pages. Every movie opening and theater production had a review—coverage was bustling, but it was also only weekly. Over the years, the internet changed how every outlet reported. Print dwindled, and staffing did too.

(I can’t count how many times in the past month people have told me the end of City Paper’s print era was sad but inevitable.)

Still, certain impacts are easy to capture: “We punched above our weight, breaking stories and investigating things even as our weight dwindled,” says Emma Sarappo, who ran the section from 2020 until the fall of 2021. “But maybe more importantly for an alt, we always were free to follow our tastes and be idiosyncratic in our arts coverage … That sense of discovery mattered a lot and I hope still will.”

City Paper arts editors have been able to follow their interests and build the section in their image. “I feel like the coverage of go-go and hiphop at a time when the big paper in town, the Post, was not covering D.C. rappers in the ’90s … they just weren’t doing as robust a job as the reporters at City Paper were doing,” says Sarah Godfrey, a staff writer from 2000 to 2005 who later became arts editor. She had a particular interest in D.C.’s hip-hop and rap scenes.

In 2022, those scenes have gained national

recognition, but that wasn’t always the case, Godfrey says. “I like to think City Paper’s writers’ devotion to covering that scene so well has played a very small role in its national success.”

It’s no wonder music is what drew her to the paper in the first place. Godfrey, who is Black, recalls the piece that made her want to work for City Paper. On January 14, 2000, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ cover story “Dropping the Bomb,” an oral history of go-go, hit stands. “People still talk about that go-go cover story,” Godfrey says. “I don’t want to take anything away from publications that emerged from the go-go community, but if we’re talking about publications that are not born of the go-go community ... I remember it making a splash and being really important at the time.”

The recognition of both Coates’ and Cobb’s work may bring up the obvious, for which there is no sugarcoating: City Paper has been a largely White publication. Dixon, who is White and ran the arts section during both writers’ time at the paper, speaks highly of what he calls City Paper’s “in-groupery,” which encouraged writers to be their sharpest, to retain knowledge (in the pre-Google days), and riff off one another.

But the downside, Dixon says, was “we weren’t as diverse as we should have been.” Dixon wrote for the paper for a decade. “The overall sensibility was fairly White, straight, and male. There were women writers, Black writers, LGBT+ writers, but not nearly enough, particularly when you consider who lived in what then was a much less gentrified city.”

“That’s obviously true,” Godfrey says regarding the paper’s lack of racial diversity, “and we can acknowledge the work that Black writers have done in covering the city.” She points to several Black writers who honed their skills at City Paper, including Coates, Cobb, authors Natalie Hopkinson and Marcus J. Moore, and artist Holly Bass. “A lot of folks have done a great job amid what is traditionally a paper that has had a very White newsroom, like a lot of papers,” says Godfrey. “There has been really some excellent journalism done by writers of color.”

It seems impractical, if not impossible, to do the final print issue justice without wading into where D.C.’s art scene is today.

We’re not sure what’s left to write about the COVID-19 pandemic that hasn’t already been said. Every one of us knows exactly how the past two years have sucker-punched just about everything. The arts and culture world is far from the only realm affected by the pandemic, but the loss of artistic outings—movie- and concert-going, art openings, dance performances, live theater—left many of us feeling even more alone.

(As Sports Editor Kelyn Soong wrote last month shortly after the end of print was announced, “on this late Saturday evening, the crowd is reminded of the magic of intimate, small-venue concerts.

It’s an escape. It’s therapeutic.”)

The sudden and extended loss of audiences rocked the arts world. Two years and nearly two months since the city shut down and we told folks, “If You’re Reading This, Go Home,” the District’s art scene is in recovery and feeling hopeful, albeit cautious, for what’s to come.

Travis Hare, co-principal at Kendra Rubenfeld PR, which works with roughly a dozen

32 MAY 6, 2022

clients in the arts, is the first to say that his clients, at least, are optimistic. “People have learned to be so flexible during this time. They’ve learned how to shift and pivot and they’ve learned how to be more resilient,” Hare says. “I think people feel like they can handle what comes. It may not be over, we may have another terrible strain come around … but we know how that goes.”

That’s certainly true for some of the venues I spoke with. Joe Lapan and Alisha Edmonson, owners of Songbyrd Music House and Byrdland Records, say ticket sales and show attendance have been more consistent this spring. They use words like “blessed,” “lucky,” and “privileged” to describe how the venue managed to survive the past two years. They managed to keep staff employed by working with World Central Kitchen, opened Byrdland Records, and moved across quadrants to a street-level space near Union Market.

“To make it this far and to see Songbyrd have good programming now and into the rest of this year, of course I feel good, but any small independent business in the arts is always concerned—you just go back to the regular challenges: Is your rent going to get too high? Is your business going to be sustained?” Lapan says.

“But generally, I think we feel pretty good.”

Edmonson continues: “We feel good, I feel like we know that we can adjust, pivot.” But, she adds: “I do … I feel a little fragile.”

She recalls just five or six months ago, when the omicron variant hit D.C. and sent case numbers skyrocketing. People were catching COVID at rates not seen since the early days of the pandemic, and event producers had to pivot once again. Shows were canceled, others were rescheduled, understudies were called in, and we returned to Zoom for meetings and virtual performances. (As I planned for the February release of the Spring Arts Guide, I also wondered what shows would be going ahead by the issue’s publication date; to my relief, most of them have managed to go on as planned.)

Jen Clements, Theater Alliance’s managing director, calls last winter the organization’s pandemic low point. Now in its 19th season, Theater Alliance produces socially conscious works to start dialogues and spark community action; it’s the company in residence at the Anacostia Playhouse. After more than a year of running digital-only productions, the company resumed live performances in October 2021. But on December 28, just weeks before it was set to begin rehearsals for a modern opera celebrating activist and artist June Jordan, the company decided to nix the show completely due to the omicron variant.

“For the safety of artists [and] audiences, it just didn’t seem like the right time,” Clements writes over email. The ensemble changed course again, creating an entirely new production in Jordan’s honor. Though each pivot has been a success, Clements says making this decision was exhausting.

“After two years of commissioning and producing new work, building new plays with more than a dozen playwrights, there was a sense of, ‘I’m out of ideas.’ Everything we’d produced since 2020 had a Plan A, a Plan B, all the way through Plan F. Our contingency plans had contingency plans,” says Clements. “So by the end

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of 2021, we were feeling a combination of decision fatigue and inspiration fatigue.”

Today, Theater Alliance is back and rehearsing for its final main-stage production of the season, Do You Feel Anger?, which opens this month.

Across town, things are also looking up for Shakespeare Theatre Company. According to Neal Racioppo, STC’s senior director of marketing and communications, the company had its best overall ticket sales ever for the Britney Spears musical Once Upon a One More Time and its production of The Merchant of Venice also saw a record-breaking number of tickets sold. STC has managed what many venues are hoping to achieve “post” pandemic: reaching new audiences. And subscription sales for the 2022/2023 season are currently trending ahead of projections.

“Choosing to go to a restaurant or a baseball game or a play shouldn’t be a life-or-death decision. And, for a time, it suddenly felt like it was,” Racioppo writes via email. “Today, if someone chooses to see a play at STC, there is an intention to their choice.”

On May 12, the company’s production of Our Town opens with an all-local cast. A play about community and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, Racioppo says the pandemic will change the way audiences see Thornton Wilder’s work. “I don’t think it will feel like the same play, even though I’ve seen it before. Our lives have been changed, so our response to the arts will change.”

Our response to the arts may change, but so have the arts in general. As in the health-care industry, arts organizations had to adapt to a digital format, testing out virtual performances, events, and teaching. Graham Elliott, the executive director of American Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the country’s top orchestral trainings for musicians 21 and under, says going virtual with AYPO’s Music Buddies program allowed the nonprofit to reach more underserved kids who wouldn’t have been able to travel to and from class. And while AYPO is now back in person, Elliott says enrollment numbers have continued to climb in the past few years. This season’s class is AYPO’s largest ever, and judging by application numbers, next season is looking to be even bigger. Elliott confirms, it’s “almost certainly the case” that the influx of students are coming from the virtual classes.

“We got through it” was the resounding theme of my conversations. Though no one proclaimed the end of the pandemic, there’s a sense of relief that the worst might be over, and, if not, we know how to come together to keep going.

Matt Cohen, arts editor from September 2015 to June 2019 and a local musician, says the art scene’s resilience as well as its commitment to working together is what sticks with him today. “Diversity, resilience, supporting each other. … Whatever problems arise, we work together to address them,” he says.

And that’s just what City Paper will do too.

Like any good alt-weekly, we’ve become a close-knit group that supports a community that it both loves and pushes to be the very best. As Wartofsky told me earlier, the end of print may be jarring, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of our coverage or our commitment to keep reporting on arts news, offering thoughtful reviews, and telling stories.

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MAY 6, 2022 33

Darrow Montgomery

CITY LIGHTS

Go-Go show, 1990

Dimming the City Lights

By Ella Feldman @ellamfeld In 1981, Alona Wartosfky was restless. A freshman at George Washington University with a penchant for punk, Wartofsky spent her time outside of class attending sweaty concerts and thumbing through albums at record stores. She was in a record shop in Bethesda when she recalls spotting an alt-weekly with Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys on the cover. Advice from a high school journalism teacher rang through her head: “You have to create internships, create opportunities for yourself. Don’t just sit around

and wait for people to ask you to do stuff.”

So when Wartofsky got home, she took a deep breath, and dialed the paper’s number. ThenCity Paper editor Michael Mariotte picked up. That phone call landed Wartofsky a parttime gig at City Paper. Between 1981 and 1994, Wartofsky went from filing photos to overseeing an award-winning arts section, with a five-year run as City Lights editor from 1984 to 1989. She still freelances regularly for the paper, focusing on D.C.’s go-go culture.

In the summer of 2019, I was restless, too.

Between my sophomore and junior years of college, I’d racked up more internship rejection letters than my bruised ego could keep track of. So I cold-emailed my local alt-weekly, and attached a cheesy cover letter that boasted the D.C. outline tattoo I have on my ankle as proof of my undying love for my city. Then-editor Alexa Mills and managing editor Caroline Jones took a chance on me. Two and a half years later, I joined the

34 MAY 6, 2022

paper full-time as City Lights editor.

Decades separate Wartofsky’s stint as City Lights editor and mine. She put the section together on an electric typewriter; I type and edit picks on my MacBook Pro. But as I’ve pored over digitized City Paper archives over the past month, I’ve found consistency and commonality throughout 41 years of City Lights.

Critics’ picks on plays at Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater, previews of film festivals at the AFI Silver Theatre, listings of 9:30 Club shows, and endorsements of offbeat events like a sex toy extravaganza (1998) or an awkward sex storytelling event (2022) have always found a home in City Lights, which has been tucked into the back of the book since City Paper’s first issue.

Certainly, the section has morphed around each editor’s unique tastes—whether that’s an affinity for nonfiction book talks at Politics and Prose (looking at you, Jones) or Latin American indie-poppers (yours truly). But its beating

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heart has always been the same: a desire to enhance the lives and expand the minds of D.C. residents with an eclectic, comprehensive curation of the city’s cultural offerings.

After three months overseeing the section, my time is up. City Lights, like the rest of the paper, will no longer be in print after today, and there may not ever be another editor devoted solely to its curation. So to send us off, here’s a glimpse into what City Lights pulled off, in the words of 10 former editors and assistants.

“It Taught Me How to Write” Mike Kanin had not yet gone to college when he was hired at City Paper in 1999 as a receptionist. His first bylines in the paper were City Lights picks, and he was hired to edit the section in 2000. “It was like going to college,” he says of

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MAY 6, 2022 35

CITY LIGHTS

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his four years with the paper. “And when I did go to college, I was so prepared because of what I’d learned at City Paper.”

Early in his tenure, Kanin pitched a review of a Dirty Three record to then-arts editor Brad McKee, but his draft never saw the light of day.

“McKee sat me down in his office, closed the door, and said, ‘One day, you will thank me for this.’” Kanin recalls. “And he fucking ripped it apart. And it never ran. But I think that was probably the most instructive piece of journalism I ever did, because it helped teach me how to be a writer. To his point, I absolutely think about that all the time. And for me, in a nutshell, that’s what City Paper was. It taught me how to write, taught me how to think, taught me how to be critical.”

Before Kanin, Leonard Roberge oversaw the section. Kanin credits Roberge, along with many other City Paper staffers, with teaching him how to write. Roberge credits Dan Searing, editor before him, with loosening up his writing. “I came from this art history background. And the first few things I wrote were fairly dry,” Roberge says. “Picks were kind of like writing exercises— fun, fun writing.”

Mike Riggs oversaw City Lights from 2008 to 2010, but one of his proudest—and most unnerving—writing moments came from a food story he stumbled into. At the time, staffers were writing 50 word “capsule reviews” of restaurants. Riggs gave a shawarma place on Columbia Road NW an unflattering mini-review, alleging a “boring meal” of dry chicken. The restaurant’s owner was hurt, and insisted Riggs visit the restaurant again. Riggs ended up spending a few hours with the owner and his wife, and ate a sandwich “entirely superior” to the first. He then wrote a feature about the entire saga.

“I knew deep down, ‘This is inappropriate.

This is not how restaurant reviews work. That’s why [then-food editor] Tim Carman never posts pictures of his face online.’ And I went back anyway,” Riggs says. “I told Carman that I’d done it, and he was livid. And I was like, ‘Will you please just read it? And he was like, ‘Fine.

But I’m so upset that you did this.’ He reads it, and then he gets back to me. And I’m seriously expecting him to be like, ‘You’re trash, and shouldn’t even be a journalist.’ And he was like, ‘This is fantastic. And we have to put it in the paper.’ And he went and told [then-editor] Erik Wemple. I got my food first food feature by violating all the cardinal rules.”

Tina Plottel joined City Paper as an editorial assistant in 1993, working closely with the City Lights editor on listings for a handful of years.

“Some of the best writing, honestly, were the picks,” she says. “If you matched a writer with an event right, then it would be the best thing you’d read all week, because it would be funny, and maybe a little irreverent.”

That’s what City Paper is good at, says Kanin.

“What City Paper was able to do was get the best out of me, right? And that’s what it did. It got the best out of people.”

“A Real Resource” At some point in the ’90s, City Paper editors

36 MAY 6, 2022

started an April Fools’ City Lights pick tradition.

Plottel remembers writing one of the first—her fictitious event involved Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy reading original poetry (that part is real, the Spock actor really did pivot into poetry) at the University of Maryland’s observatory.

Roberge recalls the paper publishing a gag pick by former City Paper editor Michael Schaffer, that claimed Crocodile Dundee would be visiting the Australian Cultural Institute.

“We would create a phone number for the April Fools’ pick that was a City Paper number, but it was just a voicemail box, so people calling for information would get this April Fools’ message,” Roberge says. “Well, we got a really angry call, because a dad has taken his kids to see Crocodile Dundee. I mean, it’s funny, but I feel bad. It was a reminder that people read the picks, people took the picks seriously. No matter how ridiculous they got, they were a real resource.”

Editor after editor echoed that sentiment in interviews—the stakes were high, because the public relied on City Lights.

Riggs remembers getting a call from an older reader, demanding to know where the listings for his local movie theater had gone. Riggs had cut some movie listings for space reasons. The call surprised Riggs—he didn’t think anyone cared that much. “The worst errors I’ve ever made as a journalist were print errors at City Paper. And they still haunt me,” Riggs says in a tone that suggests he’s only half-kidding.

“That job just gave me this incredible amount of respect for newsprint. Not about it necessarily being better, or more honest. But just, once it’s out there, it cannot be changed. So you have to work so hard to get it right.”

Roberge got the haunts, too. “We finished the paper on Thursdays, and I’d sometimes sit bolt upright in the middle of night being like, ‘Oh my god, we messed up this or that.’”

The other side of that coin is immense pride in a job well done. “In the early 2000s, people still brought City Paper to the coffee shop to figure out what was going on that weekend in D.C. So being in print was a big deal, because a lot of people were going to see it,” says Shauna Miller, who edited City Lights from 2002 to 2005. “You’d find yourself at things that you assigned, and see that people were there, and feel pretty cool about the fact that you got more eyes on something that you really believed in.”

It’s also about getting eyes on something people might never even hear about otherwise, says Sarah Marloff, who ran City Lights from 2021 until I took over in January. “It’s not just about what’s happening at the Smithsonian, or at Capital One Arena,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to go to a city, and pick up their alt-weekly, and be able to be like, ‘What am I going to find out about the city that I’m not just going to find out from googling online?’”

To Emma Sarappo, who edited City Lights from 2019 to 2021, the most valuable aspect of a print alt-weekly is its accessibility. “Being in print really mattered, not just because we were hard copy, but because we were free,” she says. “You could pick us up without paying for a phone, without paying for a computer, without paying for internet access, without taking

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yourself to the library. And that’s what I think was so important for so long—it was a source of news in your community, on your newsstand, on your block.”

That accessibility has had its limits. “City Paper has always been very focused on White Washington, which I think has been one of the paper’s weaknesses,” Wartofsky says. “I don’t think the listings were quite as comprehensive as people would have liked them to be, especially for some of the arts, some of the Black cultural events that were underground.”

“A Great Fraternity” Erin Engstrom’s favorite part of the City Lights editor job, which she held from 2010 to 2011, was working with freelance writers. “I learned a lot from those writers. They had such distinct writing styles,” she says. “Being able to work with them, and learn from them, was definitely the highlight of my experience.”

It’s been mine, too. That might not be a coincidence, since in the past few months, I’ve worked with some of the same people Engstrom did over a decade ago. Take Louis Jacobson, who’s been freelancing City Lights picks—primarily photography exhibit previews—since 1996, and nabbed his first City Paper byline in 1992.

“The best thing about City Lights has been that there are writers who predated me,” says Jones, City Paper’s current editor. She oversaw City Lights between 2012 and 2017. “I inherited a list of writers who still will occasionally write a City Lights pick, but there are always people coming in and out, and trying new things.”

For Kanin, the real treasure was the friends he made along the way. “I loved being in the office, which is insane,” he says. “It all goes back to this sense of community. All of the stories that I can offer are these snapshots of moments that don’t really do justice to what it felt like to be there. The place meant so much to me. It still means so much to me.”

Roberge has one memory that crystallizes, for him, what City Paper meant to the wider community. But first, he’ll warn you that it’s cheesy. “One day, a bunch of us were taking the Metro downtown. We were all wearing City Paper T-shirts. And I swear to you, the people in our Metro car were like, ‘City Paper! Woo! Yeah! City Paper!’ It was kind of mind-blowing. [Former City Paper editor David] Carr was very dedicated to writing about the real Washington. And he used to say, all the time, ‘Make a paper people talk about.’”

Talking to Wartofsky for a City Paper cover story on go-go in 2016, former Rare Essence member Donnell Floyd said, “Rare Essence is a great fraternity. And at the end of the day, no matter what our differences are, I am proud to have been part of that fraternity.” The quote comes to Wartofsky’s mind when she thinks of her time at City Paper.

“That’s how I look at City Paper. It’s not flawless, for sure, but it’s been amazing for me and my career. I was very lucky to have called Michael Mariotte that day.”

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ANNAPOLISSYMPHONY.ORG MAY 6, 2022 37

CITY LIGHTS SHINE ON For 41 years, City Lights has been grabbed, annotated, and bookmarked by local residents, then chucked in the recycling when the next issue of City Paper comes out. The back of the book has been a beacon for those looking for interesting, alternative ways to spend their days and nights in this city. And it wouldn’t be anything without the people who pour every ounce of their time and energy into creating those interesting, alternative ways for the rest of us to spend our days and nights. Here at City Lights, we just get to write about them.

So here’s a small sampling platter of D.C.’s arts community for you to feast on. It’s by no means comprehensive—there’s not enough space, nor time, for that. Rather, it’s a full-hearted endorsement of some of the lesser-known people and places who actively dedicate themselves to uplifting local, underrepresented artists in our city. Folks like this existed before City Lights, and they’re not going anywhere. So give them some love, some cash, and a good crowd. They’ll certainly return the favor. —Ella Feldman

Music

the Dupont Circle concert I was attending the day before it took place. On a Friday night in April, I showed up, and was charmed to find myself at a multistory, old-school house on P Street NW. My friend and I sat down on blankets and pillows in a stranger’s living room, sipped from the bottle of white wine we’d been encouraged to bring, and proceeded to receive an intimate, beautiful show from two musicians and one poet.

Progressive folker Baerd wooed the small crowd with his airy voice. Howard University junior Nyah Terrilyn, who recited emotional slam-style poems, made us teary with works about heartbreak and police brutality. Sofar may be global, but their events are designed to be hyperlocal—they make a point of hosting local artists, in intimate community spaces like small bars and backyards. I’ve since changed my mind—$20-ish is a small price to pay for that kind of experience. Sofar Sounds concerts take place multiple times every week across D.C. sofarsounds.com. $20–$25.

Courtesy of Frank O. Agbro

Frankojazz Porch Concerts

Courtesy of Pie Shop

Pie Shop

Sandra Basanti always loved going to shows on H Street NE, she tells City Paper. But many of the venues she frequented back in the day—Rock & Roll Hotel, the Red and the Black—no longer exist. Basanti is keeping the street’s indie legacy alive with Pie Shop, where she sells sweet and savory pies, and hosts an eclectic roster of musicians—many of them punk, many of them local.

But the quaint shop has got something for everyone, from folk to pop, rock, and punk, to strawberry rhubarb and mushroom Gruyère. Buy some pies, dance to some live music, and help keep H Street alive. Pie Shop has multiple shows per week at 1339 H St. NE. pieshopdc.com. $12–$15.

Sofar Sounds Photo by Cris Franco

Already missing Porchfest? Every Saturday is like a mini-Porchfest at the home of Frank O. Agbro. At the start of the pandemic, the Mount Pleasant resident (who City Paper nicknamed “the Mayor of Mount Pleasant” in our 2020 People Issue) began throwing a weekly “6 ft. Aparty” on his front porch. The event consists of two segments: At 10:30 a.m., there’s a “Children’s Hour,” which features familyfriendly entertainment. At 2 p.m., the microphones open up for musicians. When the porch concerts started, they were crucial for musicmakers and music-enjoyers alike, as traditional music venues were forced to shut their doors to the world. Two years and multiple rounds of vaccines later, venues like the 9:30 Club and Union Stage have sprung back to life.

Agbro’s porch concerts, though, haven’t gone anywhere. There’s just something that can’t be beat about lounging in a lawn chair, breathing in a little fresh air, and listening to your neighbors sing you songs. Frankojazz Porch Concerts take place on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. at 17th St. and Kilbourne Pl. NW. @frankojazz on Instagram. $10 suggested donation.

Would you pay $20-ish for a concert ticket, if the only information you had about the show was the neighborhood it would take place in? No lineup.

No address. Just “Petworth.” Or “Navy Yard.” I wasn’t sure that I would. Then I received a press invitation from Sofar Sounds, a London-based international music event organizer whose whole thing is secret shows. I got the address to

38 MAY 6, 2022

Books

Duende District

Angela María Spring spent 17 years working in bookstores around the East Coast and Southwest U.S. But the work was always a little frustrating, they tell City Paper. As a nonbinary Puerto Rican Panamanian, María Spring felt firsthand how popular bookstores overlooked booksellers and authors of color. Duende District, the book pop-up she established in 2017, does the exact opposite—their mission is to elevate and celebrate Brown and Black folks in the literary world. Duende does not have a permanent brick-and-mortar location, but for the time being, they’re curating books for sale at Shopkeepers on Florida Avenue NE (and at Red Planet Books and Comics in Albuquerque, New Mexico, if you ever make it over there). Duende District is currently selling books at Shopkeepers, 1231 Florida Ave. NE. duendedistrict.com.

MahoganyBooks

Before it was cool (before the pandemic started), family-owned MahoganyBooks was wielding the powers of the internet to host virtual literary events, with a focus on books written by, for, and about members of the African diaspora. They existed online only from 2007 until 2017, when they opened up their first shop

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at Anacostia Arts Center. In a delightful inversion of the typical COVID’s impact on a small business story, MahoganyBooks actually grew during the pandemic, opening a second location at the National Harbor in 2021. Dubbing itself “the place where Black books matter,” the bookstore sells a grand collection of books

by Black authors, and regularly hosts those authors for events, both in-person and virtual.

Treat yourself to a new read—or a “Black Books Matter” crew-neck. MahoganyBooks is located in Anacostia Arts Center, 1231 Good Hope Rd. SE. mahoganybooks.com.

Comedy

Hotbed

For most of its tenure, local comedy production company Underground Comedy existed exclusively in other people’s spaces—namely, at divey bars like Big Hunt and Wonderland Ballroom.

When Big Hunt shut its doors for good in 2020, the company was left without a home base, according to founder Sean Joyce. So he made one. Hotbed lives on 18th Street NW, in the building that Songbyrd Music House occupied before they moved to Union Market. “The big difference between Big Hunt and Hotbed is that Hotbed is set up for comedy, whereas Big Hunt was a bar,” Joyce told City Paper in February.

That distinction, he said, lends itself to the best possible environment for hilarity. Local comics are Hotbed’s bread and butter, with occasional visits from touring up-and-comers. Hotbed hosts stand-up Wednesdays through Saturdays at 2477 18th St. NW. hotbedcomedydc.com. Underground Comedy shows are free. DC’s Best Showcase is $20.

Room 808

Following the pandemic closures of comedy venues like Big Hunt and Drafthouse Comedy Theater, local comics were aching for new stages to perform at. Comedian Martin Amini, born and raised in Silver Spring, brought one to Petworth. Room 808 is a cozy comedy and jazz venue that offers stand-up, accentuated with live music, throughout the week. The BYOB shows sometimes include free food, and feature a mix of local comedians and occasional out-of-towners, like Marcella Arguello, who stops by to co-headline a show with Amini on May 19. Room 808 hosts shows throughout the week at 808 Upshur St. NW. room808dc.com. $0–$20.

3701 Mount Vernon Ave. Alexandria, VA • 703-549-7500 For entire schedule go to Birchmere.com Find us on Facebook/Twitter Tix@Ticketmaster.com

We’re back & so is Live Music!

THE NORTH STAR BAND & THE BILLY PRICE BAND

5/6

5/7

Caitlyn Smith

Katie Offerman

Lee Rogers FOY VANCE Gareth Dunlop Lilli Lewis 5/11 CARSIE BLANTON 5/12 MARCUS MILLER 5/14 NAJEE 5/15 AFTER 7 THE 5/16 JOHN 5 HAXANS 5/17 DAVID FOSTER 5/18 VICTOR WOOTEN featuring 5/10

Steve Bailey & Gregg Bissonett BASS EXTREMES

RODNEY CROWELL 5/21 KATHY MATTEA & SUZY BOGGUS 5/22 BILAL 5/25 BODEANS 5/27&28 OHIO PLAYERS 6/1 THE GILMOUR PROJECT An All-Star Band Explores the Music of 5/20

David Gilmour & Pink Floyd

PRINCE TRIBUTE EXPERIENCE featuring JUNIE HENDERSON 6/4 SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY & THE ASBURY JUKES 6/3

6/5 6/9 6/10

JOSE FELICIANO

DIXIE LONGATE “Cherry Bombs & Bottle Rockets” TUSK

The Ultimate FLEETWOOD MAC Tribute Band

6/11 6/12 6/13 6/15

FOUR BITCHIN’ BABES GAELIC STORM

WE THREE

DEBBIE GIBSON

J. BROWN 6/17 NRBQ & BILL KIRCHEN & TOO MUCH FUN 6/16

THE S.O.S. BAND 6/19 THE ZAPPA BAND 6/18

6/21

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GIRLS NIGHT: THE MUSICAL MAY 6, 2022 39

Suns Cinema

Theater Alliance’s Do You Feel Anger?, which starts a run at the theater later this month. Do You Feel Anger? runs from May 18 through June 11 at Anacostia Playhouse, 2020 Shannon Pl. SE. anacostiaplayhouse.com. $40.

Keegan Theatre

Photo by Zachary Handler

hausofbambi

The work hausofbambi does transcends categorization, but we’ll put them here for organization’s sake. In their own words, hausofbambi is “a movement-based company that produces genderless and gendermore fantasies for the stage, screen, and club.” In real life, that has meant directing experimental films, putting on dance performances at the Kennedy Center, and producing a podcast about D.C.’s sometimes cutthroat queer scene. Right now, you can find hausofbambi throwing queer dance parties in the secret bar behind Shaw’s Capo Deli, and organizing ballet class happy hours at Trade in Logan Circle. But keep an eye on the company, and its director, Robert Woofter. They’ll probably surprise you. hausofbambi hosts monthly parties at 715 Florida Ave. NW, and ballet classes at Trade, 1410 14th St NW. hausofbambi.com. $0–$10.

Honfleur Gallery

Who needs a Criterion Collection subscription when you have Suns Cinema? The quaint bar and movie theater sits in a townhouse on Mount Pleasant Street NW. Every month, its owners hand-select a lineup of films that are tied together with a theme. February was cats (Kedi, Cat People, and Cats, duh), March was martial arts (Kung Fu-Hustle, Miami Connection), and May is dedicated to celebrating Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. The same amount of thought goes into the Suns drink menu— cocktails include a “Heeere’s Johnny” (Johnny Drum bourbon and bitters), and a “Pineapple Express” (with gin, cinnamon, and, of course, pineapple). Suns is currently closed for renovations, but they’ll be back in mid-May with a Women in Film and Video D.C. showcase. Suns Cinema reopens May 17 at 3107 Mt. Pleasant St. NW. sunscinema.com. $10.

Museums and Galleries

Hamiltonian Artists You can go to a host of art galleries in D.C. to see today’s big name artists. Or, you can visit Hamiltonian Artists on U Street NW, and find the work of artists who might be big names tomorrow. Established in 2007, the gallery

40 MAY 6, 2022

Courtesy of Keegan Theatre

The primary photo on darlingdance’s website tells you everything you need to know about the company. On the home page, a saturated image shows two women smearing what appears to be frosting and sprinkles across each others’ faces, their expressions deadpan. With a roster of entirely women and nonbinary performers, the local dance company specializes in bizarre compositions, focused on “making rad feminist dance in surprising spaces,” according to their Instagram bio. The group is currently working on All My Friends, a site-specific performance that will take place at the Kennedy Center in September. On their latest Instagram post, they asked the public for donations to keep them alive. And, in adherence with everything they stand for, they went back and edited the post to ask people to take half of what they wanted to donate to darlingdance and instead give it to an abortion fund, following the leak of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal. darlingdance company performs All My Friends in September 2022 at Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. darlingdance. com. Price TBA.

When The Ethel Waters Show premiered on NBC in 1939, Ethel Waters became the first Black person to host her own television show. That event inspired the name for Baltimore native Shalom Omo-Osagie’s film production company, which she founded in May 2020. Black artists telling Black stories is at the heart of everything 1939 Studios touches. Their 2021 short film, Tale of Tarot, was selected for multiple short film festivals. This summer, the studio is going beyond just producing movies—they’re hosting a short film festival intended to uplift underrepresented local Black filmmakers. The DMV Short Film Festival runs virtually from May 11 through 14.

1939studios.com. Price TBA.

Darrow Montgomery

darlingdance company

Courtesy of Theater Alliance

1939 Studios

serves as an incubator for the next generation of visual artmakers. Five young creatives are selected annually for a two-year fellowship with the gallery, in which they receive guidance, support, and exhibition opportunities.

Creations from Baltimore-based artist Amber Eve Anderson, whose work is grounded in the concepts of home and displacement, will be on display starting on May 21. Hamiltonian Artists is open Tuesdays through Saturdays at 1353 U St. NW. hamiltonianartists.org. Free.

Courtesy of Honfleur Gallery

Film

Dance and Performance

When Honfleur Gallery opened its doors in 2007 in Anacostia, it was met with skepticism from the neighborhood. Concerned residents wondered: Was an art gallery really the best use of space and resources in Anacostia? Over the past 15 years, Honfleur has made a case for why it was, and has displayed a deep level of care for its surrounding community. Though the space welcomes artists from across the country and around the world, the gallery hosts at least one exhibit every year from an artist based in Ward 7 or 8. This month, you can find the work of Elena Volkova on display. In Anacostia Portraits, the Ukrainian-born artist captures residents of Anacostia in tintype photography.

Anacostia Portraits runs from May 6 through June 18 at Honfleur Gallery, 1241 Good Hope Rd. SE. honfleurgallery.com. Free.

Theater

Lisa Stephen Friday in Trans Am

First there was H Street Playhouse, which opened in 2002 in Northeast. In 2013, they reopened on Shannon Place SE as Anacostia Playhouse. Since then, the theater has been home to an enticing mix of plays, performances, storytelling events, and concerts.

Anacostia Playhouse collaborates with companies working across the city, with an evident dedication to putting the spotlight on local playwrights, actors, and crew members.

Stephawn Stephens was promoted to artistic executive director in April, and he said in a press release that he’s committed to making theater that is “engaging” and “transformative.” He has the chance to do that with

It’s hard not to completely lose yourself in a show at Keegan Theatre. With an intimate, 120-seat blackbox, even the nosebleed seats are pretty damn close to the stage. Since 1996, the Dupont Circle theater has brought to the city plays you know and love (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was its first show), indie plays you may not know about (Dipika Guha’s Yoga Play just finished its run), and plays making their world premiere (last winter’s Trans Am). Catch the theater’s Boiler Room Series happening this month.

The collection of events pulls the curtain back on how plays get made, with staged readings, interviews, and audience talkbacks. The Boiler Room Series takes place between May 13 and 22 at Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW. keegantheatre.com. Pay what you can.

Anacostia Playhouse

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MAY 6, 2022 41

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE Straight guy here in a one-sided open relationship. My wife and I opened our relationship just for her and to females only so she could explore her bisexual side. I’m super proud of her for coming out and wanted her to feel fulfilled.

When we agreed to this, I was naive and figured anything she experienced would be purely sexual and nothing more. She recently caught feelings and now has a girlfriend. She stays at her girlfriend’s place one to two nights a week.

I get jealous and sick to my stomach when she is over there. She has that “new relationship energy” and talks about her girlfriend all the time. Aside from the jealousy, I feel like I am not a priority. I’m hoping my feelings get better with time. Besides this, our marriage is great.

I love my wife very much and want to support her in this. Are one-sided open relationships something that can work? Are my feelings unjustified? What can I do to better deal with them? The logic used when we talked about a one-sided open relationship was that I can’t satisfy the female side she desires. But since I’m hetero, I don’t have an “unfulfilled” side.

—Home Alone Your wife isn’t the first person to come out as bisexual after making a monogamous commitment to an opposite-sex partner and then ask for permission to sleep with other people without wanting to extend the same permission to their straight spouse. Since she’s bi and can’t get pussy at home, the reasoning goes, she should be allowed to get pussy elsewhere. Since you’re straight and can get pussy at home (when that pussy is at home), you’re not entitled to the same allowance. But as your wife is demonstrating, HA, it’s not just pussy she’s getting elsewhere.

While she’s getting one very specific need met outside your relationship—admittedly a need you can’t meet—she’s getting a lot more than that. In addition to pussy, she’s getting variety, adventure, unique experiences, new relationship energy, and two overnights a week. Why shouldn’t you have some of that too? Not to even the score, but to feel like you’re an equal partner in this marriage and, as such, entitled to equal terms, equal treatment, and equal benefits.

And it doesn’t sound like you two were on the same page when it came to what opening your relationship entailed. You seem to have assumed—or figured—that your wife would be seeking sex elsewhere, sex and only sex, but your wife “caught feelings” and now she has a girlfriend. Agreeing to a one-sided open relationship is not the same thing as agreeing to one-sided polyamory. If you didn’t agree to that, HA, your wife had no right to expect that from you or impose that on you.

That said, one-sided open relationships can be great, HA, but they work best when the person who isn’t seeking sex outside the relationship either isn’t interested in having sex with other people or is turned on by the erotic power imbalance of being forbidden something their spouse is allowed—basically, this could work if you were a cuckold. Which you’re not.

—Dan Savage 42 MAY 6, 2022

I’m a straight man who has been married to a wonderful woman for 35 years. I’m the only person she has ever been with. Over the years she has evolved into a wonderful, giving partner open to things that turn me on. I take pride in being able to give her multiple orgasms although she only wants to do this about once per month.

She has been happy to give me pleasure multiple times per month even, but she talks about it like it’s a chore (“wifely duties”) and is always asking me why I want it so much. I tell her it is more normal for men to want it more, and I wish she would want it more as well! I have used porn to get off since my teens. She accepts this because it means fewer chores for her, but she doesn’t like it. Recently I started using my phone to take videos of her performing oral on me as

Dude.

If your wife had been writing to me, I would advise her to get a lawyer and divorce you.

I enjoy watching this and it cuts down on the porn. She checked my phone and was upset at what she saw. I told her I was sorry, but she says I should have asked for permission. I told her I would have asked for permission, but I knew the answer would be no! She said of course it would be no and she called it sick and gross! I tried to explain again that it is normal behavior for most men to want to watch and it is for my eyes only! As I said, she has evolved, as early in the marriage she would have never done some of things she has learned to do while pleasuring me! Long story short, any words of advice on this sexy-for-me, not-so-much-for-her activity?

—Sincerely Appreciate Your Advice, Sweet Savage It’s not OK to take photos or videos of someone performing a sex act without their consent, SAYASS, even if that someone happens to be your wife. Even if that someone happens to have a lower libido than you do, even if that someone would rather you not look at porn, even if that someone enjoys most of the things you want them to do—not only isn’t

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it OK, SAYASS, it’s a crime. It’s not normal behavior, it’s asshole behavior—and, again, in most places it’s literally criminal behavior.

So your wife has every right to be upset. You violated her and did so knowingly; you say you didn’t ask for permission to make those videos because you knew she would say no.

Dude. If your wife had been writing to me, SAYASS, I would advise her to get a lawyer and divorce you.

—DS We hear so much about the all-important commitment to monogamy in marriage. What about the less emphasized but clearly important commitment to a healthy sex life? I’m a straight man. I’ve been married for about 20 years. I’ve never cheated on my wife, although I’ve come close in recent years. My wife and I had a healthy sex life for the first 10 years. For the last 10 years, we haven’t had sex at all. We are both in our late 40s, athletic and attractive, and neither of us has any overwhelming physical or mental problems. My wife is just so engrossed in her work and personal identity that she has stopped caring about sex. It’s all well and good to say, “You need to talk about this with her,” but I know from years of experience that would be futile. She refuses to discuss it. And she has made it clear that if I were to do anything outside the marriage, it would amount to an unforgivable betrayal. I vacillate between acceptance, frustration, bitterness, and deep anger. Yes, I signed on for monogamy. But what did she sign on for? Can a woman or man in a monogamous marriage unilaterally cut off sex for no reason and still expect or demand monogamy, as my wife does? What do I owe her?

And what does she owe me? Despite this issue, we are good partners, good friends, and good parents to our two teenage children. Protecting them from the trauma of divorce and not hurting my wife are the reasons I stay in the marriage. But it doesn’t feel right or fair that I have to be monogamous, that I will never experience physical intimacy again, not so much as a kiss or a touch, for the rest of my life, because my wife decided she is finished with that part of her life.

What do other people think?

—Saddened Over Love’s Omissions People in the comment threads at savage.love have been taking me to task recently for being too quick to give my blessing to cheating ... so instead of answering this one myself, I’m going to open it to the commenters: What do you guys think SOLO should do? Personally, I don’t think a person can insist on monogamy while refusing to meet their partner’s reasonable sexual needs. (Well, a person can insist on it, but they shouldn’t expect it.) Please don’t tell SOLO to talk with his wife. He’s tried talking about it—he’s tried again and again for 10 years—and his wife refuses to discuss it. So, gang, what should he do? Should he do the “right thing” and get a divorce? Or should he do what he needs to do to stay married and stay sane?

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

CLASSIFIEDS Legal THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA HOUSING AUTHORITY REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS (RFP) SOLICITATION NO.: 0012-2022 FIRE ALARM PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR SERVICES The District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) requires interested District of Columbia certified firms to provide Fire Alarm Preventive Maintenance and Repair services for at various DCHA Properties.

SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS will be available beginning Monday, May 2, 2022 on DCHA’s website at www.dchousing. org under “Business” and “Solicitation”. All interested parties must attend one of the listed Site Visit dates in order to submit a proposal. Tuesday, May , 2022, Lobby of 1170 12th Street, NW, Promptly @ 10:00 am. Or Wednesday, May 4, 2022, Lobby of 1170 12th Street, NW, Promptly @ 10:00 am.

SEALED PROPOSAL RESPONSES ARE DUE ON OR BEFORE Thursday, June 2, 2022 at 11:00 AM. Email Lolita Washington, Contract Specialist at lwashing@ dchousing.org with copy to business@dchousing. org for additional information."

D.C. BILINGUAL PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE: FOR REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School in accordance with section 2204(c) of the District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 solicits proposals for vendors to provide the following services for SY22.23: * Computers Proposal Submission A Portable Document Format (pdf ) election version of your proposal must be received by the school no later than 4:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, May 17, 2022. Proposals and full RFP request should be emailed to bids@dcbilingual.org No phone call submission or late responses please.

Interviews, samples, demonstrations will be scheduled at our request after the review of the proposals only.

D.C. HOUSING AUTHORITY NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING AND COMMENT PERIOD FOR THE PROPOSED 2023 MOVING TO WORK (MTW) PLAN The District of Columbia Housing Author-

ity (DCHA) is providing notice of a Public Hearing and Comment Period to solicit comments on the agency’s proposed 2023 Moving to Work (MTW) Plan. MTW is a HUD program that allows select public housing authorities to design and implement innovative programs and policies with the intent to: 1) reduce costs and improve efficiencies; 2) encourage residents to obtain employment and become economically self-sufficient; and 3) increase housing choices for low-income families. To request a copy of the MTW plan, you can: * Call (202) 854-8660 * Email to MTW@ dchousing.org * Download from the DCHA website at www. dchousing.org/mtw2 Public Hearing The Public Hearing will take place online on Tuesday, May 10, 2022 at 4 p.m. To participate in the live event, please join at https://bit.ly/3vcWKpN. If you need assistance completing the online registration, please dial (202) 854-8660. The event will also be live streamed at https://www. facebook.com/dchousing.

Comments Written comments will be accepted through Monday, May 23, 2022.

Email your comments to MTW@dchousing.org.

Alternatively, you can mail comments to: Hanna Koerner DC Housing Authority 1133 North Capitol Street NE, Suite 200 Washington, DC 20002 Requesting a Reasonable Accommodation The District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) strives to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to fully engage. It is DCHA’s policy that all agency-sponsored public meetings and events are accessible to people with disabilities. DCHA is committed to providing equal access to this event for all participants and residents with disabilities.

If you need a reasonable accommodation or assistance participating in a meeting or event due to a disability as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act, please contact our ADA/504 Program Office’s Language Department at (202) 775-6417 or via email at ADA504@ dchousing.org with your complete request. Your request should be made at least three business

days before the scheduled meeting or event so that ADA/504 Program Coordinator can make the necessary arrangements.

Every reasonable effort will be made to meet your request.

If you need a foreign language translator or a sign language interpreter, please contact our Office of Customer Engagement via email at LA@dchousing.org. Please allow us at least five business days to make the necessary arrangements with an interpreter.

approximately $50K. Questions can be addressed to Kelly Smith, ksmith@Pspdc.org."

Eden Health Medical D.C. is opening a new facility at 1615 L St N.W. As required by law, Eden Health Medical D.C. will provide uncompensated care to all persons unable to pay for treatment who request uncompensated care consistent with our Uncompensated Care Policy. Eden Health Medical D.C. will satisfy all outstanding uncompensated care obligations.

PERRY STREET PREP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT Issued: April 25, 2022 HOOP EDUCATION LLC Perry Street Prep PCS intends to enter a sole source contract with Hoop Education LLC to offer student access and enrollment to their summer enrichment activities including their All Sports and Games curriculum, Dance in Motion Curriculum and Basketball Training Program. Hoop Education LLC is an approved nonprofit operating with 10 years of experience in DCPS, DC Public Charter Schools and the Maryland School system. The decision to sole course is based on Hoop Education LLC’s ability to provide unique programs customized for Perry Street Prep PCS students. The estimated yearly cost is approximately $120K including all summer programming.

The contract term shall be automatically renewed for the same period unless either party, 30 days before expiration, gives notice to the other of its desire to end the agreement. Questions can be addressed to Kelly Smith, ksmith@Pspdc.org .

BREAKTHROUGH MONTESSORI PCS REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Breakthrough Montessori PCS seeks bids for strategic planning, general contractor, and marketing design services. To obtain a full copy of the RFP, please contact katherine@breakthroughmontessori.org. Bids must be received no later than May 27, 2022 at 5:00PM.

APPLE, INC. FOR EDUCATION Perry Street Prep PCS intends to enter a sole source contract with Apple for Education to offer student access to apple devices managed and monitored on the central Management Apple console. The decision to sole course is based on Apple for Education’s ability to provide unique programs customized for Perry Street Prep PCS students with the highest level of monitoring and security.

The Apple Management Console is only available for devices sold directly from Apple.

The estimated cost is

ATTORNEY, PRIVATE EQUITY FINANCE (Washington, D.C.) Represent PE sponsors & corp. borrowers in transactions incl. acq. financings, first & second lien financings, asset-based lending financings, refinancings, debt restructurings, subscription lines of credit, fund-level financings. Provide lgl & strategic advice to clients considering or particip. in these transactions.

Negotiate & prepare primary transactional docs.

Req’mts: JD or foreign equiv., DC Bar, 3 yrs exp in position or 3 yrs alt occup exp in complex leveraged finance transaction legal duties. In lieu of JD or foreign equiv., an LLM or foreign equiv. is acceptable. Email resume/ref ’s to CJ.Bickley@lw.com.

Latham & Watkins LLP.

Employment SUBCONTRACTING OPPORTUNITY FOR CERTIFIED DBES, MBES, & WBES with Fort Myer Construction for DC Water Bid, No. DCW-SOL-22-10173: Sanitary Sewer Lateral Replacement Contract.

This is an emergency service IDIQ contract that may include excavation work, responding to repairs to sanitary sewer laterals, replacing, extending, and reconnecting sewer laterals.

Installing or replacing sewer cleanouts, wye or thimbles with wye saddles. Reconstructing laterals with structural injection sealant, general cleaning of

sewer laterals, external point repairs, and other activities as necessary.

Subcontracting Quotes requested by: 05/11/22.

For more info, contact Manuel Fernandes at Bids@fortmyer.com or call 202.636.9535.

EHLS - DEVELOP YOUR ENGLISH SKILLS FOR A CAREER IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT Native speakers of critical languages are in high demand in the US government. EHLS trains advanced English speakers to be effective communicators and strong candidates for federal jobs.

Full scholarships for US citizens who are native speakers of Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Bambara, Dari, Hausa, Hindi, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Mandarin, Pashto, Farsi, Punjabi, Russian, Somali, Tajik, Tamashek, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, or Vietnamese.

English for Heritage Language Speakers at Georgetown University SCS ehlsprogram.org 202687-4455 SUBCONTRACTING OPPORTUNITY FOR CERTIFIED DBES, MBES, & WBES WITH FORT MYER CONSTRUCTION for DC Water Bid, No. DCWSOL-22-10172: Small Diameter Water Main Replacement – 15D. Work includes approx.

4.81 miles of watermains, associated valves and appurtenances.

Copper water services 2” and smaller. Curb stop/ curb stop box, meter box and penetration through building wall and connection to first fitting inside the building including installation of valves.

Permanent pavement and surface restoration.

Subcontracting Quotes requested by: 05/18/22.

For more info, contact Manuel Fernandes at Bids@fortmyer.com or call 202.636.9535.

HISTORIC/HERITAGE CORE DRILLER - SKILLED LABORER We Offer Project Based work with health insurance available to eligible employees after a 3 month probationary period Applicant must have longbore core drilling experience in existing historic/ heritage cementitious construction, wet and dry.

Applicant must understand mounting core drill rigs, laying out core loca-

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tions, setting angles and other common long-bore core drilling practices MUST BE A WASHINGTON, DC RESIDENT** Applicant must be able to get to the work site by 7:00 am Applicant must be able to safely lift and move up to 80lbs OSHA 30 Certification is 100% REQUIRED** DC Flagger Certification is ideal but not a must Applicant must be willing to submit to a drug screening Applicant must be willing to submit to a full background check $29.94 per hour is the starting pay Please contact Nick Sykes with Masonry Solutions International at nsykes@ masonrysolutions.com or call him at 410-771-1922

Housing NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAIN TOP HOME, Beautiful Mountain VIEWS! 11.5 Acres, four bedroom three bathroom 4,400 +/square feet, bar, fireplaces, dining room, office, near Nantahala River, Casinos, Appalachian Trail. $679,000 Hogsed Real Estate (828) 557-0661

Services TRAIN ONLINE TO DO MEDICAL BILLING! Become a Medical Office Professional online at CTI! Get Trained, Certified & ready to work in months!

Call 866-243-5931. (M-F 8am-6pm ET) IT-SERVICES JOINTECH LLC We do smart homes, troubleshoot and fix computers , high speed internet, Wi-Fi using cell, data 4G/5G for home and business. Call or text Ahmad 804-944-4004, email: ahmad@jointechus.com. Web: www. jointech-us.com NEW FINE WINE AND SPRITS STORE @ 801 Maryland Ave NE with wide selection of craft beer, wines and spirits at very competitive price. Grand opening on December 10th between 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (202) 290 - 3008, www.exoticwinespirits.com PHOTO/VIDEO PRODUCTION STUDIO With Infiniti Wall, Book NOW! www.PhotoAndVideoHut.com DO YOU OWE OVER $10,000 TO THE IRS OR STATE IN

BACK TAXES? Our firm works to reduce the tax bill or zero it out completely FAST. Let us help!

Call 877-414-2089.

LEARN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE American Sign Language (ASL) is an invaluable skill for everyone and fun to learn. Learning this unique language brings you to a new cultural awareness about the Deaf Community. You open up a new world filled with new people to meet and to develop different types of relationships. Sign up for a online class today! Visuallyspeaking.info COMPUTER & IT TRAINING PROGRAM! Train ONLINE to get the skills to become a Computer & Help Desk Professional now! Grants and Scholarships available for certain programs for qualified applicants.

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Lifetime warranty & professional installs. Senior & Military Discounts available. Call: 1-877649-5043 Water Damage to Your Home? Call for a quote for professional cleanup & maintain the value of your home! Set an appt today! Call 833-664-1530 4G LTE HOME INTERNET NOW AVAILABLE! Get GotW3 with lightning fast speeds plus take your service with you when you travel! As low as $109.99/ mo! 1-888-519-0171 HUGHESNET SATELLITE INTERNET – Finally, no hard data limits! Call Today for speeds up to 25mbps as low as $59.99/ mo! $75 gift card, terms apply. 1-844-416-7147 BECOME A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! We edit, print and distribute your work internationally. We do the work… You reap the Rewards! Call for a FREE Author’s Submission Kit: 844-511-1836.

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MAY 6, 2022 43

ASTOUND BROADBAND EXPERIENCE BETTER UP TO

300 Mbps Internet*

19

$

99

FREE Month & Install + $100 VISA® Gift Card†† $100

/mo/1 year plus equip.

Experienced speeds may vary. Other restrictions apply.

Price includes auto-pay & e-bill $5/mo discount for 12 mos.

Switch today.

1.800.4.ASTOUND | astound.com No Contracts | No Early Termination Fees | Next Day Installation *Internet download speeds may vary and are not guaranteed. Observed speeds may vary based on device connection & other factors outside of Astound Broadband’s control. Gig Internet offers speeds up to 940 Mbps and certain equipment may be required. All advertised speeds are up to the stated speeds and are not guaranteed; speed may vary due to conditions outside of network control, including customer location, sites accessed, number of devices connected, customer usage, customer equipment and computer configuration, the level of overall traffic, and customer compliance with Astound Broadband’s usage policies set forth in the acceptable usage policy. See https://astound.com/learn/internet/optimize-wifi-speed for why speeds may vary.

Astound Broadband’s FCC Network Management Disclosure makes available information regarding our network management practices and the performance and commercial terms of our Internet access services to enable you to make informed choices regarding the purchase and use of our services, in accordance with Part 8 of the Rules of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Modem required for internet service. Advertised internet promotional prices are valid for 12 months from installation date. 300 Mbps Internet offer includes up to 300 Mbps Internet service at $19.99 per month for 12 months. Regular rates apply after promotional period ends. Offer includes an additional $5/mo discount for enrollment in both automatic payments (autopay) and paperless billing (e-bill); valid email address required. Must enroll within 30 days of placing the order. Without enrollment, the monthly service charge automatically increases by $5/mo. Discount is for 12 mos and appears on bill within 1-2 bill cycles after enrolling. If either auto-pay or e-bill is cancelled, services are changed, or account is not in good standing during the 12-mo period, the $5/mo discount will be discontinued. Offer expires June 30, 2022. Regular rates apply after promotional period ends. Monthly modem rental fee and/or wireless gateway may be additional. Unless otherwise specified, promotional offer extends defined, set pricing for the period of 12 months after installation; distinct pricing exists for months 1-12. Free month(s) applies to base Internet service and equipment only and will be applied as credit to first or second month of Astound Broadband services. ††Prepaid VISA® gift card available on 300 Mbps Internet speed and is subject to terms and conditions outlined by VISA. A customer must be in good standing for 90 days before the VISA gift card is issued. After 90 days, customers will receive an email with instructions on how to redeem the gift card online. After following the instructions, the gift card will arrive in 4-6 weeks. Offer expires June 30, 2022. Offer valid only for new residential Astound Broadband customers or previous customers with account in good standing who have not had RCN or Astound Broadband service within the last 60 days. Non-standard installation may require additional outlet and special wiring fees. Any additional services, such as equipment, premium channels and other tiers of service are subject to an additional charge and regular increases. Price does not include Network Access and Maintenance Fee/Internet Infrastructure Fee of $6.97/month, which is subject to change. Network Access and Maintenance Fee/Internet Infrastructure Fee helps defray costs associated with building and maintaining our fiber rich broadband network, as well as the costs of expanding network capacity to support the continued increase in customers’ average broadband consumption. This fee is neither government-mandated nor a tax, fee or surcharge imposed by the government; it is a fee that Astound Broadband assesses and retains. Additional fees apply for taxes, surcharges, equipment, activation and installation that are not included as part of the package and are subject to change. No contract is required to take advantage of the promotional pricing and savings. No early termination fees apply in the event service is terminated in advance of the promotional end date. Customer is responsible for any accrued service charges in the event service is canceled. Subject to credit check. Any additional services, such as equipment, add-on channels and other tiers of service are subject to an additional charge and regular increases. Other restrictions may apply. A One-Time Activation fee of $9.99 in addition to your installation charges will be applied. The activation fee offsets a portion of our cost of setting up your account, allocating and restocking equipment to our inventory, activating your devices (boxes/modems) on the network, and connecting your home to Astound Broadband services. Not all services and speeds are available in all areas. Next day installation is not guaranteed. Availability varies by market and is limited to availability of appointments during normal business hours Monday-Saturday. Other restrictions may apply. All names, logos, images and service marks are property of their respective owners. Visit https://astound.com/policies-disclaimers/ for additional terms and conditions. ©2022 Starpower Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

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