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
WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM
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
