Washington City Paper (June 11, 2021)

NEWS: 2022 ELECTION PLANNING STARTS NOW 4 SPORTS: THE DECLINE OF CHAMPIONS IN D.C. 8 ARTS: THEATER COMPANY PIVOTS TO VIDEO GAMES 20 THE DISTRICT’S FREE WEEKLY SINCE 1981 VOLUME 41, NO. 6 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021

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TABLE OF CONTENTS COVER STORY 10 Rolling in Dough: This year’s Food Issue dives into filled dough treats that are sold in the D.C. area but have roots around the world.

NEWS 4 Loose Lips: Will Mayor Bowser run again, what’s going on with Kenyan McDuffie and Karl Racine, and other questions emerging from the early stages of the 2022 Democratic primary

SPORTS 8 We Were the Champions: With the Wizards and Capitals out of the playoffs and the Nationals near the bottom of the baseball standings, D.C. doesn’t look like a District of Champions.

ARTS 20 Checks, Lies, and Video Games: When the pandemic paused their season, one local theater company went virtual, creating their own video game.

24 Creating Buzz: American University professor Melissa Scholes Young’s new novel is garnering acclaim from both readers and entertainment executives.

26 Galleries: Jacobson on Kaitlin Jencso’s We Miss You at Hamiltonian Artists

CITY LIGHTS 29 City Lights: Follow the Capital Pride trolley through town or check out local art installations in Foggy Bottom.

DIVERSIONS 27 Crossword 30 Savage Love 31 Classifieds On the cover: Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Darrow Montgomery | 2500 Block of Porter Street NW, May 31 Editorial Interim Editor CAROLINE JONES Arts and City Lights Editor EMMA SARAPPO Food Editor LAURA HAYES Sports Editor KELYN SOONG Multimedia Editor WILL WARREN Loose Lips Reporter MITCH RYALS City Desk Reporter AMANDA MICHELLE GOMEZ Staff Photographer DARROW MONTGOMERY Creative Director JULIA TERBROCK Design Assistant GRACE COOPER Audience Growth and Engagement Editor MICHELLE GOLDCHAIN Copy Editor GAIL O’HARA Intern JAY MATTHEWS

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NEWS LOOSE LIPS

Feeling ’22 Roughly a year out from the 2022 Democratic primary, the most interesting action hinges on the attorney general’s office and the Ward 5 Council seat.

We’re 376 days away from the 2022 primary election. A slew of local pols must reapply for their jobs including the mayor, attorney general, the chairman, and six councilmembers. Not a single challenger has officially emerged, and, reader, Loose Lips is getting impatient. Conventional wisdom says it takes about a year to build and run an effective ward-level campaign—perhaps longer for a citywide race. Factor in early voting and the clock ticks louder.

But LL’s concern could be premature. After a year of lockdown, potential challengers may be hesitant to launch a campaign while some voters are still easing back into a society where handshakes are acceptable. D.C. is also just starting the once-every-decade process of redistricting, which the pandemic significantly delayed. Under normal circumstances, the Council would have voted on new ward and Advisory Neighborhood Commission boundaries this summer, months before the primary; in deeply Democratic D.C., that contest is decisive for most races. But census numbers won’t be available until late September, so the vote on redistricting could get pushed back to December.

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and Attorney General Karl Racine are the only incumbents who’ve filed campaign paperwork (though Racine has since backed away from seeking a third term).

Councilmembers Brianne Nadeau (Ward 1), Mary Cheh (Ward 3), Charles Allen (Ward 6), Anita Bonds (At-Large), and Elissa Silverman (At-Large) confirm to LL that they’re planning to run for reelection.

Meanwhile, Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Mayor Muriel Bowser have been frustratingly silent about their election plans.

LL spent the past few weeks talking with political strategists, those currently in office, and potential challengers about who is safe, who is vulnerable, and who is whispering about making a run. The most interesting

Darrow Montgomery/File

By Mitch Ryals @MitchRyals

Attorney General Karl Racine action hinges on Racine’s plans, which could set into motion a domino effect for the Ward 5 seat—McDuffie is rumored to have his eye on the AG’s office. Add to the current uncertainty the fact that this is D.C., where multiple terms are hardly guaranteed.

“I think D.C. politics is very flat and in recent years the population has shifted tremendously,” says historian George Derek Musgrove, the co-author of Chocolate City and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Therefore I don’t think anyone is invincible.”

Bowser has attracted a nominal challenger in comedian Rodney “Red” Grant, but the smart money says she’ll coast to a third term if she wants it. Her approval rating is strong, she has avoided major scandals up to this point in

4 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

her second term, and her handling of the city’s coronavirus response, though not perfect, won praise from tough critics such as D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson.

Even Chuck Thies, a political strategist and frequent critic of the mayor, has to give her props.

“She took an approach that I respect,” Thies says. “An abundance of caution. She kept the metrics down, she kept the body count low, and when the body count was higher among African Americans, she addressed that and talked about long-standing inequalities in the healthcare system.”

Bowser also benefited politically from her acrimonious relationship with Donald Trump, according to Thies. As the District’s economy ground to a halt and protests over racial injustices and police violence persisted

throughout the summer of 2020, Trump was a perfect target.

“Any time there was a problem—not enough vaccine? Protests in the streets? Restaurants closed?—‘Donald Trump did it,’” Thies says.

Until Racine announced in March of 2020 that he planned to run for reelection, he was the odds-on favorite to challenge Bowser.

At-Large Councilmember Robert White’s name is also being tossed around. He’s shared his mayoral ambitions in the past and has strategically seized opportunities to jab at Bowser over the past few years. Plus, he just coasted to reelection in 2020 and wouldn’t need to worry about giving up his seat.

White tells LL in a text that a number of constituents have asked him to run, but he hasn’t made any official decision yet.

“I have to be sensitive to how intense a

Helping Washington, D.C. Residents Launch New Careers New Futures and Capital One are partnering to offer workshops geared to prepare students from underrepresented backgrounds for professional success Recognizing that as many students are now earning an associates degree or professional certificate as are earning a traditional bachelor’s degree, this local nonprofit is helping D.C. residents earn those credentials to set themselves up for professional success.

New Futures—a nonprofit that seeks to maximize the potential of young people from diverse backgrounds in the Greater Washington community—is leaning into data, diversity, and the power of human capital in its support of students.

Since its inception in 1999, New Futures has partnered with local community organizations to support more than 400 students—90% of whom are people of color—in their journeys to obtain certifications or associate’s degrees to develop skills and grow their networks to launch careers.

In addition to helping its students, known as New Futures Scholars, earn credentials, the nonprofit is joining forces with companies including Capital One to help its students build human capital by learning about different paths in their chosen industries and gaining the tools they need to land a job offer.

“Our goal is not only to support New Futures Scholars through gaining credentials but to help them leverage their degrees by understanding the paths that exist within their respective industries,” says Griselda Macias, Program Director at New Futures. “Our partners at Capital One offer insights to our Scholars about what skills employers are looking for and how best to navigate the process of launching a career.”

New Futures currently offers career pathway programs in six fields: IT, health sciences, hospitality, construction and trade, public service, and education.

tremendous way to immerse myself and get to know the people in our community,” says Capital One associate Sarah Kozlowski, who has led resume writing and networking workshops at New Futures.

Capital One built on its longstanding financial support of New Futures when the nonprofit began offering its Career Launch Workshops in 2018.

That support comes as part of an initial $200 million, multi-year commitment to advance socioeconomic mobility through the Capital One Impact Initiative.

Since its launch, Capital One associates have volunteered to coach more than 100 New Futures Scholars through job readiness training focused on interviewing, resume writing, networking, and personal branding. Through each workshop, New Futures Scholars have the opportunity to attend a lecture and receive one-on-one coaching from a Capital One associate.

“There’s so much synergy in our relationship with Capital One because of our shared commitment to helping communities of color—regardless of where they are in their personal journeys,” said Macias.

“Every volunteer from Capital One brings a genuine drive to serve their community and stands with our Scholars regardless of the challenges they face.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Capital One associates worked with New Futures to help translate its Career Launch Workshops to a virtual environment and incorporate interactive elements.

Volunteers also helped New Futures gain the resources to sustain that virtual content, including facilitator guidance and recorded videos.

Launched in October 2020, the Capital One Impact Initiative seeks to create a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to prosper through advocating for an inclusive society, building thriving communities, and creating financial tools that enrich lives.

For Donte Brooks, a New Futures Scholar currently studying to pursue a career in law enforcement, New Futures has not only brought him the opportunity to pursue his passions. It’s created a support system to help him grow his human capital and achieve his goals.

“The people at New Futures have helped me to always believe ‘I can do this,’” Brooks said.

“Everyone there is like a family. They are there for me every step of the way no matter what.”

“As someone who wants to build connections with the populations that we serve at Capital One, volunteering with New Futures has been a SPONSORED STORY FROM CAPITAL ONE

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 5

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campaign could be for my family coming out of over a year of living in a pandemic,” White writes in a text message.

McDuffie’s name is also on the lips of those speculating about Bowser’s potential challengers and has been for nearly a decade. McDuffie did not respond to LL’s questions about whether he’s thinking about running for an office other than Ward 5. But he says in a text that he’ll “announce his future plans soon enough.”

“The question for McDuffie is ‘How does he define himself relative to Muriel Bowser?’”

Musgrove says. “They have roughly the same politics: pro-development, while giving a nod to the progressive wing of the party but not in cahoots with it.”

As for Racine, now even his own reelection bid is in question.

At a forum at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law in March, the AG said he’s “leaning against” running for a third term, adding that he was being vetted for an appointment to chair the Federal Trade Commission, though that has yet to pan out. He declined to comment on the possible appointment during a press conference in late May about his lawsuit against Amazon.

In an emailed statement, Racine says, “I love my current job and serving D.C. residents, especially by giving a voice to those who don’t always have one. I don’t have anything to announce at this time and am keeping my options open.”

LL will note that returning to the private sector, where the salaries can dwarf those of public employees, might be attractive to a new dad who bought a $2 million home in Palisades in 2019.

If Racine were to challenge Bowser and win, as Musgrove sees it, he would have the opportunity to shape District politics for the next several years.

“The defining characteristic of D.C. politics at this moment in time is flux,” Musgrove says.

Bowser’s Green Team doesn’t have the pull it once did. Four former Racine employees are now sitting councilmembers, but as of yet, he hasn’t used those relationships to fuel a political machine.

“It will be interesting to see what becomes the dominant coalition,” Musgrove says. “Right now there isn’t one. Who wins the next mayorship will probably determine how things settle out, or it could lead to more years of stasis.”

If Racine doesn’t run for reelection as AG, McDuffie, who worked as a prosecutor in Prince George’s County and as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, is the rumored heir apparent. He would likely boast of his legislative record on racial equality and criminal justice reform. Ryan Jones, a 36-year-old lawyer in private practice, announced an official run for AG in April. Jones also serves on the Mayor’s Commission on African American Affairs.

With McDuffie potentially out of the way in Ward 5, the floodgates will fly open.

Former Ward 5 Councilmember and embezzler of taxpayer funds Harry Thomas Jr. isn’t

6 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

ruling out a run for his old seat. He told LL in March of 2020 that he would not run against McDuffie. Now he says that he’s “looking at the races,” and “keeping my options open.”

For the moment, Thomas says he’s focusing on his work helping returning citizens find jobs through his general contracting business, District GC. Former Ward 5 and At-Large Councilmember Vincent Orange is making similar sounds.

Orange tells LL via text that “a thorough analysis of all options in the Ward 5 and two at-large races will be examined.”

“By the way,” he adds. “The Independent At-Large race is very appealing and of course, I love [heart emoji] Ward 5.” Orange also texted a picture of a banner from his 2012 victory for an at-large seat. At the bottom, it says: “Never Give Up.” Orange was one of the 23 candidates who angled for former Councilmember David Grosso’s at-large seat in the 2020 election. At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson won with less than 15 percent of the vote. Orange came in behind her, garnering 12 percent of votes.

Other likely bids for the Ward 5 seat could come from Gordon-Andrew Fletcher, current chair of the Ward 5 Democrats, and Zachary Parker, the Ward 5 State Board of Education representative.

Fletcher was born in Jamaica, raised in New York, and moved to D.C. to attend law school at American University. He’s currently an adjunct instructor at AU, teaching criminal justice and public policy with a focus on D.C. legislation. Fletcher has yet to make an official announcement about a Council run and says he’s focused for the moment on keeping his chairmanship of the Ward 5 Dems. That election takes place on June 26. He’s running on a slate with John Lucio, Anthony Roberson, Hazel Thomas, Sherry Pate, Juan Torres, and Sean Sullivan.

“I think it’s really important to win reelection in current positions before you even think about anything else,” he says. “Public trust and building a record, all those things matter.”

Parker was elected to the SBOE seat in 2018, and campaigned for progressive budget wonk Ed Lazere, who came in third behind Henderson and Orange in last year’s at-large race. He was unavailable to talk before press time.

Political observers speculate whether Ward 6 Councilmember Allen has the guts to challenge Chairman Mendelson, and they wonder if he has the charisma to become D.C.’s first White mayor. In an interview, Allen says, “There may come a time when [a citywide campaign] is the right move,” but for now he’s focused on his current job and the election in front of him.

“I hate to make any other ward councilmembers feel bad, but I’ve got the best job in the world and represent the best ward in the city,” he says. “My intention is to run for reelection. I love working with my Ward 6 neighbors to keep my city moving.”

Political observers say Allen is probably wise to stay clear of the chairman’s seat while Mendelson is still in it. Mendo polls well throughout D.C., including with voters in Wards 7 and 8, where Allen may struggle.

Plus, Allen is likely looking at the beatdown Mendelson gave Lazere in the 2018 primary.

Despite Lazere’s strong support from D.C.’s progressive community, Mendelson obliterated him by 27 points.

In Ward 1, Nadeau will be running for her third term after defeating Jim Graham in the 2014 primary. LL has heard relatively little about serious potential challengers.

Ward 3’s Cheh was first elected in 2006 and is running for her fifth term, making her the second longest serving local legislator after Mendelson. LL has heard of at least two potential challengers this time around.

Petar Dimtchev, a lawyer at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority who moonlights as a DJ, says he’s thinking about taking another shot. He got the Washington Post’s endorsement when he challenged Cheh as an independent in 2018 but still lost by almost 50 points.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Monika Nemeth of Single Member District 3F06 may also make a run at Cheh. Nemeth is the former president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club (now the Capital Stonewall Democrats) and the first out transgender person to hold elected office in D.C. Although Nemeth says she’s leaning toward making a run in Ward 3, she hasn’t dismissed the possibility of running for the at-large seat that Bonds holds. D.C. Democratic State Committee Chair Charles Wilson also has his eyes on higher office, but says he won’t run against Bonds.

Community and health activist Ambrose Lane Jr., however, is “seriously considering” a run for Bonds’ seat. Lane founded the D.C. Healthcare Alliance and co-founded the Black Coalition Against COVID. He says he plans to use the public campaign financing program (Bonds says she’ll raise money the traditional way because she does not believe public money should be used for political campaigns), and will focus on racial and economic equity.

Lane, who is getting advice from Lazere and will challenge Bonds from her left, isn’t willing to say where the two-and-a-halfterm incumbent is lacking. Instead he tells LL about several ideas to close the wealth gap: universal basic income, jobs for all programs, and tax increases on D.C.’s wealthiest residents. For example, the proposal to raise income taxes on residents making $250,000 that failed to pass at the Council set the bar too low, Lane says. A more appropriate figure is $400,000, he says.

“My goal is not to disparage Councilmember Bonds,” Lane says. “I have a great deal of respect for her. My campaign is going to be focused on my vision, and where I think the city needs to go.

That includes tackling big problems. Number one on that list is eradicating poverty over the course of the next decade.”

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 7

SPORTS

We Were the Champions

Darrow Montgomery/File

Is D.C. still a District of Champions? It’s complicated.

By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong During the Washington Nationals’ World Series championship rally on Nov. 2, 2019, Mayor Muriel Bowser stood on a stage on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and leaned in to the microphone with a declaration: “It is true. We are the District of Champions!” By then, that phrase had become ubiquitous. The unofficial slogan appeared on T-shirts, hats, towels, and posters. Local professional sports teams and fans used the phrase as a social media hashtag with genuine pride.

The Capitals started the streak off by winning their first Stanley Cup title on June 7, 2018. The following year, on Oct. 10, 2019, the Mystics won their first WNBA championship, and the Nats followed weeks after that, lifting a championship trophy of their own on Oct. 30. For a 17-month span, D.C. sports fans embraced being certified winners in a town that spent nearly three decades experiencing letdowns and disappointment.

“I was not cynical at all,” says Chris Williams, a 40-year-old Northern Virginia native and Navy Yard resident who describes his D.C. sports fandom as “at the very top of [the] scale as far as daily interest and

enthusiasm.” Williams is the general manager of Public Bar Live, a sports bar in Dupont Circle and attends about 40 to 50 Nationals games every season. He also owns a red T-shirt purchased in 2019 with an outline of the D.C. map with the words District of Champions in large, bold letters. “It was certainly an accurate statement,” Williams says. “D.C. was the District of Champions for a snapshot in time.”

But, he adds, it would be tough for him to wear that shirt these days—at least unironically. After the euphoria of 2018 and 2019, most professional D.C. sports teams struggled through a pandemic altered 2020 season, and both the Capitals and Wizards collapsed in the first round of the playoffs earlier this year. The Nationals are last in the National League East, and the Mystics are working through a new roster as former MVP Elena Delle Donne continues to recover from a pair of back surgeries. The Washington Football Team was pleasantly surprising last season, winning the historically bad NFC East with a 7-9 record, and could repeat the feat this season, but Dan Snyder is still the team’s owner.

“Some of the afterglow of 2018 and 2019 is beginning to fade,” Williams says. “The status

8 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

of our current teams, I gotta be honest, I feel like all the teams are trending down, except strangely, the Washington Football Team.”

D.C.’s downward trend is another reminder of how hard it is to win professional sports cha mpionsh ips . It’s a n experience that only a few cities can claim with any regularity, and dynastic teams such as the NBA’s San A ntonio Spu rs, t he WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, and the NFL’s New England Patriots, are celebrated and well known largely because those accomplishments are so rare. The last D.C. organization playing in one of the country’s big four leagues— the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL—to achieve that level of sustained success was the Washington Football Team of the first Joe Gibbs era, which won Super Bowls in 1983, 1988, and 1992. D.C. United won four Major League Soccer Cups between 1996 and 2004, when the league was in its infancy.

Mystics head coach and general manager

Mike Thibault understands how much has to go right in order for a team to consistently contend for championships. Before guiding the Mystics to the WNBA Finals in 2018 and a WNBA championship in 2019, he was a scout and assistant coach with the Los Angeles Lakers from 1980 to 1982. In the 1980s, the Lakers, led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson, won five NBA titles and reached the NBA Finals eight times.

“I think the first thing is that, at the end of every year, the simple mathematics say only one team gets to win,” Thibault says. “And in pro sports, no matter what league you’re in, there’s always multiple really good teams. So just because you win one year, you might’ve gotten the right bounce, the right break, or you stay healthy or whatever, but there’s always good teams every year.”

The health of players is a huge factor in teams being able to remain consistent title threats, according to Thibault. Winning championships, he adds, also puts a target on the team’s back; opponents will tailor their rosters to beat the defending champion. Then there’s the mental aspect.

“It’s understanding that you’re gonna get everybody’s best shot every night and there’s a mental grind that goes with that, and kind of from both a player and coaching standpoint in balancing out the emotional or mental part of being a defending champion,” Thibault says.

Thibault doesn’t remember when he first heard the phrase District of Champions, but to him it means that all the professional sports teams in D.C. push and support each other.

“I think that it helps the pride in the city,” he says. Asked if the District of Champions era is over, Thibault replies with a laugh: “I know we’re doing our best to extend it.”

The origin of District of Champions is not completely clear. The earliest Washington Post article with the phrase comes from a July 28, 2018, piece by Mark Selig with the headline “District of Champions? Ted Leonsis’s Washington Valor win ArenaBowl after 2-10 season” about the now defunct team winning the 2018 Arena Football League championship game. Selig tells City Paper t hat he “probably” wrote the headline but does not take credit for coining or popularizing the slogan. “Seems like that phrase was going around a lot at the time and I probably did tongue in cheek (as if a pretty fraudulent AFL title qualified for civic pride),” he writes in a direct message.

Search for District of Champions on Twitter and you’ll get countless results, including one from the official Washington Capitals account from June 23, 2018. City Paper reached out to the Capitals and Monumental Sports & Entertainment to ask if either organization played a role in coining or popularizing the slogan, but did not receive

“This is still the District of Champions, because those teams are still championship clubs that we’ll never forget.”

SPORTS an answer in time for publication.

Regardless of who came up with the slogan, District of Champions became a vocal statement of pride every time a D.C. sports team did well. “District of Champions to me meant an opportunity to celebrate what we’ve accomplished in sports as a city between the Capitals and the Nationals and the Mystics and the Valor,” says Grant Paulsen, the cohost of the “Grant and Danny Show” on 106.7 The Fan. “I think people were more celebrating the accomplishment than they were projecting the titles to come. Now if they do, then add them to the pile ... They don’t take those titles away. The flags still fly forever. This is still the District of Champions, because those teams are still championship clubs that we’ll never forget.”

Paulsen, a 33-year-old native of King George County, Virginia, and longtime D.C. sports fan who has worked at The Fan since 2009, feels more optimistic about the direction of local sports teams than fans like Williams do. “I feel like we’re in a healthy place,” Paulsen says. “There aren’t that many markets that can claim recent championships in multiple sports, and we’ve got a bunch of teams that are still somewhat in the honeymoon period.”

For reference, Paulsen mentions that, despite the disappointing first round playoffs exit for the Capitals, the team had another stellar regular season in which they finished atop the Metropolitan Division. The focus this off-season will be whether or not the team re-signs Alex Ovechkin and general manager Brian MacLellan has said that it is one of the team’s priorities to have Ovechkin end his Hall of Fame career with the Capitals.

Paulsen also believes that from a “big picture standpoint,” the Wizards have a nationally relevant player in Russell Westbrook and that if Bradley Beal stays on the roster, they’ll be a team “that’s on national TV a lot next year that people in the East [will] be paying close attention to.” The Nationals are the only team whose near-term future he says he worries about due to the thinning of their minor league system.

“Bottom line being I think there is plenty to be excited about in every sport for a sports fan in this town in a way that maybe hasn’t been the case for a long time,” Paulsen says.

But for fans like Williams, the honeymoon period is over. “I think that period is done now and now we’re in the throes of marriage and one partner has been asked repeatedly to clean up the dishes in the sink and that partner just keeps doing it,” he says. “Now both of them are cynical [about] each other.”

Instead of District of Champions, Williams suggests that D.C. pro sports these days should be referred to as a “district of cautious optimism.”

But the memories of those triumphant 17 months still linger. The District of Champions era may be in the past, but at least it happened.

“It was all worth it,” Williams says. “Like all the crap, all the snark, all the jokes at our expense, it’s all worth it when you win.”

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You may qualify for assistance in paying your home phone or Fios Internet bill. Discounts for basic telephone or Broadband Lifeline service are available to eligible District of Columbia low-income residents.

Verizon Washington, DC Inc. offers the following Lifeline Plans as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier: Economy II Service*: $3.00 per month for unlimited local calling. Value-added services are not included (e.g., Call Waiting, Caller ID). No connection charges apply. Also, customers will not be charged for the federal subscriber line charge. Economy II customers who are 65 years of age or older can have this service at a further reduced rate of $1.00 per month. Customers will receive a one-time discount on the cost of installing phone service and toll blocking is available at no charge.

Broadband Lifeline: Verizon Washington, DC Inc. also offers a monthly Lifeline discount to qualified customers who subscribe to Fios Internet service. Eligible customers will receive a $9.25 monthly discount. * Full terms and rates for these services, including terms of eligibility, are as set forth in federal regulations and in Verizon’s tariffs on file with the Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia. All rates, terms and conditions included in this notice are subject to change and are current at the time of printing.

Eligibility:

Restrictions:

District residents who have been certified as eligible may apply

9 No other working telephone service at the same location

for the Economy II program or Broadband Lifeline service for customers who subscribe to Fios Internet.

Households in which one or more individuals are receiving

9 No additional phone lines 9 No Foreign Exchange or Foreign Zone service

benefits from one of the following public assistance programs

9 No bundles or packages

or have an annual income that is 135% or below the Federal

9 No outstanding unpaid final bills

Poverty Guideline may be eligible.

9 Bill name must match eligible participant

9 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) 9 Medicaid 9 Supplemental Security Income (SSI)

9 No separate Lifeline discount on cellular or wireless phone service 9 Business lines are not eligible

9 Veteran’s Pension Benefit

9 Phone number must match eligible participant

9 Veteran’s Survivors Pension Benefit

9 Must be a current Verizon customer or establish new

9 Federal Public Housing Assistance (Section 8)

service with Verizon

An Application for Verizon Voice Lifeline or Broadband Lifeline service can be obtained by contacting Verizon at www.verizon.com/lifeline or by phone at 1 800 VERIZON. To find out more information, you may also call the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which administers Voice Lifeline and Broadband Lifeline for the FCC, by calling (800) 234-9473 or by accessing its website at www.LifelineSupport.org.

Economy II and Broadband Lifeline are Lifeline supported services. Voice Lifeline and Broadband Lifeline are government assistance programs. Only eligible consumers may enroll. You may qualify for Voice Lifeline or Broadband Lifeline service if you can show proof that you participate in certain government assistance programs or your annual income (gross and from all sources) is at or below 135% of the Federal Poverty Guideline. If you qualify based on income, you will be required to provide income verification. Proof of participation in a government assistance program requires your current or prior year’s statement of benefits from a qualifying state or federal program; a notice letter or other official document indicating your participation in such a program; and/ or another program participation document (for example, benefit card). Proof of income requires your prior year’s state or federal tax return; current income statement from an employer or paycheck stub; a statement of Social Security, Veterans Administration, retirement, pension, or Unemployment or Workmen’s Compensation benefits; a federal notice letter of participation in General Assistance; a divorce decree; a child support award; and/or another official document containing income information. At least three months of data is necessary when showing proof of income. In addition, the Lifeline program is limited to one discount per household, consisting of either wireline, wireless or broadband (internet) service. You are required to certify and agree that no other member of the household is receiving Voice Lifeline or Broadband Lifeline service from Verizon or another communications provider. Voice Lifeline and Broadband Lifeline services are non-transferable benefits. Voice Lifeline customers may not subscribe to certain other services, including other local telephone service. Consumers who willfully make false statements in order to obtain the Lifeline benefit can be punished by fine or imprisonment, or can be barred from the program.

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 9

Crab Rangoon at Lucky Danger

Wrapped, rolled, stuffed, and dropped: Global comfort food comes in perfect little parcels.

Story by City Paper staff and contributors • Photos by Darrow Montgomery • Design by Grace Cooper

T

he pandemic revealed just how connected we are as citizens of the world. Few corners of the earth escaped the deadly COVID-19 virus and nations worked in tandem to contain it. In many ways, it proved that we’re more similar than we are different. This got us thinking about how much we share when it comes to food.

“If you put a human in a room with some kind of substance and flour and water, eventually that human will exit with a dumpling, a ravioli, a samosa, an empanada, or a pierogi,” says Zofia’s Kitchen chef and co-owner Ed Hardy. He specializes in clever flavors of pierogi and believes you can travel anywhere and find filled dough. “Any culture that’s trying to claim that it’s theirs can’t really do that because it

10 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

was bound to happen anyway. It was inevitable. Humans love doughcovered items. It’s a primal urge.”

Thinking about people from all over indulging in bowls of dumplings or plates of pastelillos is comforting and unifying at a time when we need more togetherness. Adding to the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with eating filled dough snacks is the fact that most of these treasures are made by hand, often with a little love baked in. Thanks to the D.C. region’s extensive culinary offerings from across the globe, you can try myriad filled dough dishes. We only wish we had room for more, both in our bellies and in this issue. While the items featured aren’t the only exemplary offerings in their categories, this collection shows the breadth of options in the region.

—Laura Hayes

Crab Rangoon at Lucky Danger 455 I St. NW, luckydanger.co

Restaurateur Tim Ma had a specific goal when he was conceiving of Lucky Danger, which he runs with co-chef Andrew Chiou. “When we were putting together the menu, we wanted American Chinese classics,” he says. “We want you to be able to order Lucky Danger without looking at the menu. You know, every Chinese restaurant will have certain things.”

One of them is crab rangoon. “If you think about kung pao or even fried rice, they have origins in China, but crab rangoon has no origin in China,” Ma says. “Dairy doesn’t exist in the diet there. That is for sure something that came about in Chinese restaurants here in America.”

Chinese restaurants have become such a treasured part of American culinary culture that it’s hard to fathom that their numbers boomed 100 years ago because of xenophobic immigration laws. At the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Asian sentiment was so strong that the U.S. enacted policies that barred Chinese workers from immigrating or becoming U.S. citizens unless they held a merchant visa. A court ruled in 1915 that restaurant owners qualified for such visas. Chinese restaurants proliferated as a result and restaurateurs adapted menu items for Western taste buds. Since anti-Asian hate is still a serious problem, Ma cofounded Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate earlier this year.

Lucky Danger’s crab rangoon stands out because the chefs use a spring roll wrapper instead of a wonton or egg roll wrapper that typically gets formed into a four-point fold. “We do it like a beggar’s purse,” Ma says. The result is a crispy crown. When Ma and Chiou first started selling crab rangoon, they took a cheffy approach by using real crab and crab roe instead of more traditional imitation crab meat. “But we started getting emails,” Ma says. Customers couldn’t figure out why they “tasted funny” or “smelled weird.”

“What you’re actually tasting is … crab!” Ma says. “We finally compromised though and returned it back to the original.” The filling is made from cream cheese, imitation crab, and aromatics such as garlic, ginger, and scallion.

Five come in an order ($10) from the takeoutonly restaurant in Mount Vernon Triangle.

Orders can be placed online.

—Laura Hayes

national dishes of Ukraine, but there’s some debate about that. Artemyev doesn’t want to tackle the issue. He stays out of politics.

When asked, executive chef Galina Bovtun offers a diplomatic response. Vareniki, she says, “came from grandmothers.”

Bovtun says her vareniki dough is a simple mix of flour and water, but it takes some practice to nail the consistency so the dumplings don’t disintegrate when boiled. “You need to feel it,” she says. She also squeezes juice from the cherry chunks before filling the dough for the same preventative reason. Cherries are preferable over other berries because they hold their shape, according to Bovtun, who sprinkles the finished product with just the right amount of powdered sugar to counterbalance any tartness.

—Laura Hayes

Spicy Potato Boreka at Yellow

1346 4th St. SE, (202) 921-9592, yellowthecafe.com Chef Michael Rafidi grew up eating spinach pies. That’s why the chef and owner of Albi wanted to put a savory vegetable pastry on the menu at Yellow, his daytime bakery next door.

Like its sister restaurant, Yellow is dedicated to exploring the flavors of the Levant, the region spanning Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and beyond.

One Levantine street food staple is a boreka, a savory pastry whose resemblance to an empanada belies its roots in the Sephardic Jewish communities of modern day Spain and Portugal. Typically, the pastry is made from phyllo or puff pastry dough and includes a variety of fillings ranging from potatoes and eggplant to ground meat and cheese.

Earlier this year, Rick Goldberg, Yellow’s head baker, started working on a boreka. After three weeks of research and recipe testing, a spicy potato boreka ($10) appeared on the menu, with the heat coming from harissa. Goldberg also folds in feta cheese.

“It’s a very buttery, flaky pastry,” Rafidi says.

“People love it.” While he wasn’t as familiar with borekas as other pastries, he’s now a convert thanks to Goldberg. Rafidi also says he hopes to keep expanding people’s familiarity with pastries from the Levant: “That’s always been the goal—to offer something completely different.”

—Sarah Cooke

Cherry Vareniki at Mari Vanna

Jhol MoMo at Moh Moh Licious

You can have dumplings for dessert at Mari Vanna. The downtown Russian charmer serves a mound of handmade cherry vareniki ($18) with a side of sour cream that’s large enough for two or three people to share. “We buy really expensive cherries,” says partner Boris Artemyev. “In this case, the more expensive, the more taste.” Each delicate dumpling contains two or three coarsely chopped cherries that burst in your mouth.

“Vareniki is very popular in Russia and Ukraine,” Artemyev says. He would know— he was born in Ukraine, but grew up in Russia. Many consider vareniki one of the

Shepherd Park hole-in-the-wall Moh Moh Licious has one obvious pun in its name and one that takes some digging. “When we respect someone and give something to them, we say ’licious,’” says Nepal-born chef and owner Sujil Dangol. Between six different kinds of hand rolled Nepali-style dumplings and four housemade sauces, the street food spot has the goods for any dumpling lover.

But one dish is not like the others in the District—jhol momo, or momo served in a steaming tomato and onion based stew. Each order ($16.99) comes with 10 dumplings filled

1141 Connecticut Ave. NW, (202) 783-7777, taplink.cc/marivannadc

7414 Georgia Ave. NW, (202) 817-3031, mohmohlicious.wordpress.com

Cherry Vareniki at Mari Vanna with a choice of lamb or goat. The stew calls for specific Nepali spices that Dangol goes home to collect every year. Timur, which yields a mouth-numbing effect similar to Szechuan peppercorns, combines with house dried chili peppers for a complex taste.

According to Dangol, the only outstanding differences between Moh Moh Licious’ jhol and what you might find in Kathmandu is that he’s adjusted the spice level and doesn’t use buffalo meat, the most common momo filling in Nepal. For those who don’t do spicy, any of the standard momos with housemade tamarind sauce are good options. The sauce is made from scratch using whole tamarind and brings a welcome sweetness. An order of the housemade tamarind lemonade with the jhol momo also tames the flames.

—Michael Loria

Bánh bot loc at Banh Cuon Saigon

6795 Wilson Blvd. #54, Falls Church, (703) 534-4482, edencenter.com/stores/ banh-cuon-saigon Many of the Vietnamese menus in Eden Center are encyclopedias of dishes that require several page turns. Few of them boast one of my favorite appetizers—sticky tapioca dumplings filled with savory roast pork and crunchy dried shrimp known as bánh bot loc. Banh Cuon Saigon, tucked in the back of a shopping tunnel, WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 11

Keep Track of What You’ve Tried Crab Rangoon at Lucky Danger 455 I St. NW, luckydanger.co Cherry Vareniki at Mari Vanna 1141 Connecticut Ave. NW, (202) 783-7777, taplink.cc/marivannadc Spicy Potato Boreka at Yellow 1346 4th St. SE, (202) 921-9592, yellowthecafe.com Jhol MoMo at Moh Moh Licious 7414 Georgia Ave. NW, (202) 817-3031, mohmohlicious.wordpress.com Bánh bot loc at Banh Cuon Saigon 6795 Wilson Blvd. #54, Falls Church, (703) 534-4482, edencenter.com/stores/banh-cuon-saigon Pork N’ Chives Shuijiao at Dumplings and Beyond 2400 Wisconsin Ave. NW, (202) 338-3815, dumplingsbeyond.com

does. The restaurant has been woman-owned since it opened in 1996.

Suong Nguyen says they fill the dumplings, wrap them in tapioca flour, and steam them inside banana leaves for about 15 minutes.

They’re served with a scattering of fried shallots, scallions, and fish sauce. But Nguyen says it’s not just any fish sauce—they pair extra potent fish sauce brightened by fresh lemon with the bánh bot loc. If you can’t sit for a meal, Huong Binh Bakery a few yards away also has bánh bot loc packaged in takeout containers. They’re no substitute for eating them hot and fresh.

Richard Tai Nguyen, the co-owner of NamViet Restaurant in Arlington, says the reason you don’t see bánh bot loc at more Vietnamese restaurants is because they’re labor intensive. He doesn’t serve them and was surprised anyone was making them coming out of the pandemic.

The dumplings are translucent so you get a little preview of what’s inside and the chewy texture is what keeps me coming back. —Laura Hayes

Pork N’ Chives Shuijiao at Dumplings and Beyond

2400 Wisconsin Ave. NW, (202) 338-3815, dumplingsbeyond.com

Lentil Sambusas at Mimi’s Ethiopian BBQ 2523 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, (202) 481-0414, mimisbbq.com

Dumplings are close to my heart. They remind me of weekend nights growing up when my parents and I would make boiled dumplings (shuijiao) from scratch. My dad rolled out the dough to make the wrappers and my mother and I placed the filling—usually pork with chive—in the wrapper before sealing the edges. While shuijiao are often enjoyed with family during Chinese New Year, especially in northern China, they are as much an everyday food as a special occasion treat.

When I miss home, I almost always order from Dumplings and Beyond in Glover Park. Their boiled pork and chive dumplings ($11.55 for 10) and treasure delight dumplings ($12.50 for 10)— the latter of which contains pork, shrimp, chive, and napa cabbage—are as comforting as they are filling. Co-owner Vivienne Wang explains that “dumplings represent the core of Chinese food.”

The restaurant has curated its own selection to appeal to different tastes, whether that’s veggie or beef and onion dumplings, with wrappers that are on the thicker side.

Shuijiao require skill and time to make, but “basically contain everything you need,” according to Wang. A carb, plus a protein, and “you can just order one dish and be done with lunch.” Spots such as Laoban Dumplings in Union Market are also experimenting with different shuijiao flavors such as shrimp, pastrami, and spring onion in a recent collaboration with bagel shop Call Your Mother. The creative offerings from Dumplings and Beyond and Laoban Dumplings reflect not only the durability of shuijiao but also their constant evolution through place and time.

—Katherine Zhao

Spicy Toasted Ravioli at Ledo Pizza 814 H St. NE, (202) 849-6897, ledopizza.com

Spicy Beef Salteña at Saya Salteña

Mama Alice’s Lumpia at Purple Patch 3155 Mount Pleasant St. NW, (202) 299-0022, purplepatchdc.com

When María Helena launched her Bolivian salteña business last year, she knew she’d have

Spicy Beef Salteña at Saya Salteña 1819 7th St. NW, (202) 803-7943, sayasaltena.com Mantoo Shrimp at Lapis 1847 Columbia Road NW, (202) 299-9630, lapisdc.com Pumpkin Empanada at Rice 1608 14th St. NW, (202) 234-2400, ricerestaurant.com Pork and Beef Khinkali at Tabla 3227 Georgia Ave. NW, (202) 291-3227, tabladc.com Yache Wang Mandu at Anju 1805 18th St. NW, (202) 845-8935, anjurestaurant.com Pastrami and Swiss Pierogi at Zofia’s Kitchen 4238 Wilson Blvd. #145, Ballston, (703) 550-6220, zofiaskitchen.com Ma La Wontons at Great Wall Szechuan House 1527 14th St. NW, (202) 797-8888, greatwallszechuan.com Crab Pastelillos at La Famosa 1300 4th St. SE, (202) 921-9882, eatlafamosa.com Sheng Jian Bao at Shanghai Taste 1121 Nelson St., Rockville, (301) 279-0806, shanghaitaste1121.wixsite.com/website

12 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

to educate customers so they wouldn’t stain their best shirt when biting into the snack that resembles an empanada. Hold a salteña upright and rip off a corner. From there you slurp the broth before finishing the tender pastry and savory filling. “It’s a soup dumpling,” she tells customers.

“They understand how carefully you have to eat it or you’ll get the juice all over.”

Try the spicy beef flavor ($5) filled with ground beef, potatoes, peas, Kalamata olives, and hardboiled egg. Some salteña makers add raisins, but not Helena. The pop of flavor comes from a blend of Andean spices, including aji amarillo. “You first taste the sweet and then after a couple bites you get the heat,” she says of the pepper. “I think it has to do with how it’s grown in the altitude so it has an aftertaste of heat.”

Helena moved from La Paz, Bolivia, to D.C. to study engineering at George Washington University and eventually entered the catering industry. Saya Salteña, which started out of Mess Hall, was a pandemic pivot that took off. To take her business to the next level, Helena moved into a Shaw virtual food hall

1819 7th St. NW, (202) 803-7943, sayasaltena.com

Bánh bot loc at Banh Cuon Saigon in December 2020. Customers can order salteñas for pickup and delivery. “I’m able to display my salteñas now,” she says. “People know what it is.”

Do yourself a favor and order a sweet salteña for dessert. The one filled with honey, sliced apples, and passion fruit puree ($3.75) is inspired by Betty Crocker’s apple pie recipe. It was one of the first treats Helena tried making when she moved to the U.S. —Laura Hayes

Mantoo Shrimp at Lapis 1847 Columbia Road NW, (202) 299-9630, lapisdc.com

Saffron is a magical ingredient. A small pinch of dried orange threads imparts an entire dish with floral and earthy tones, at least in theory.

Too often, this pricy spice jacks up the cost of a menu item while its flavor disappears into the background. But rest assured, dear devourer of dumplings, saffron is the shining star of the mantoo shrimp served at Adams Morgan Afghan bistro Lapis.

A note under the dumplings section of the menu reads “yes, they exist.” While some diners may not associate dumplings with Afghan food

Employee at Tabla culture, they’ve long been a part of that country’s cuisine. Shamim Popal, the executive chef at Lapis, says while the “definite origins of the dumplings remain uncertain,” they made their way to Afghanistan by way of the Silk Road.

The dough for these particular dumplings is made with flour and water, and kneaded until it becomes smooth. Popal says that they are usually filled with lamb or beef, but there’s room for chefs to be creative. Count Popal as one such innovative chef. The steamed shrimp in Lapis’ dumplings are a textural delight beneath a chewy wrapper.

But the showstopper is the saffron cream sauce, which the chef applies liberally. They come in orders of four ($12) or six ($18). Learn from my mistake and order six.

—Will Warren

Pumpkin Empanada at Rice 1608 14th St. NW, (202) 234-2400, ricerestaurant.com

Sak Pollert put his Thai restaurant’s pumpkin empanada ($7) on a fall seasonal menu about 15 years ago. When customers kept asking for it, he made it a permanent fixture.

The kitchen uses firm and flavorful kabocha squash. “The original empanada in Thailand is cooked with chicken, curry powder, and potato,” Pollert says. “I adapted the recipe, replacing the chicken with pumpkin and keeping the remaining ingredients.”

In Pollert’s homeland, it’s called a curry puff, but he thought diners would be more familiar with the term empanada. One of his former cooks developed the recipe for the slightly sweet, flakey dough that encases the filling. She used to make the pastry at the restaurant and Pollert contracted her to continue making it off-site after she left.

Rice serves the empanada with a dipping sauce made from rice vinegar, sugar, and salt because it needs a hit of acid.

—Laura Hayes

and Italian dishes are plentiful throughout the U.S. While neither of them was an expert on Georgian cuisine before they opened their first restaurant, Supra in Shaw, Jonathan spent a week in the Caucasus with internationally renowned chef Tekuna Gachechiladze, which helped set the couple on their journey.

At Tabla, the couple’s newer, more casual restaurant in Park View, khinkali are a focus. The wall and menu are even adorned with depictions of the D.C. flag on which three boiled dumplings replace the iconic stars. You can order three varieties in sets of three ($8) or six ($15). “Sometimes we’ll get Georgians who come in and they’ll be ordering like 18 or 24,” Laura says. “If you’re Georgian and you like these dumplings, you normally eat a lot.”

The intricately folded dumplings wrapped in thin, chewy dough arrive at the table sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper and herbs.

The traditional pork and beef mixture, as well as the lamb seasoned with tarragon, come with a light, flavorful broth inside. Both meat mixtures take on an almost greenish hue due to the fresh herbs in the ground mixture.

Whatever you do, don’t cut a khinkali in half or take a huge bite or the liquid will wind up in your lap. Instead, employ the eating process for xiao long bao by making a small hole in the dough, sipping out the soup, and then chowing down.

—Emma Sarappo

them in the 14th century. Then there’s the theory that they’re a Korean original. Either way, mandu became a beloved dish in the royal court during the Goryeo dynasty, which lasted from 918 to 1392. Ultimately, the plebes got a taste and the regal favorite became a popular street food snack.

One famous iteration is kimchi wang mandu, king-size dumplings stuffed with japchae noodles, beef, and kimchi. Anju executive chef Angel Barreto wanted to do “something a little different, but still in the Korean wheelhouse.” His plant-based version is packed with Impossible meat marinated in garlic, ginger, and soy. This hearty core is enveloped in wang mandu wrappers special ordered from H Mart. “It’s a good option for someone who wants something vegetarian, substantial, and sustainable,” Barreto says.

Barreto serves the mandu in orders of three ($12) and crowns the hefty appetizer with pickled long chilies and chili crunch powered by gochugaru (Korean red pepper flakes). There’s a sweet soy sauce on the side for dunking the palm-size crowd favorites. On a busy night, the restaurant sells 250 of them. —Nevin Martell

Yache Wang Mandu at Anju

Zofia’s Kitchen specializes in pierogi, but diners should come to the table with an open mind.

Chef Ed Hardy strays from sauerkraut and potatoes and fills his dough bundles with quirky abandon. One mimics a crab rangoon, another stars gravlax, cream cheese, and everything seasoning. Hardy was inspired to “bring comfort food to a populace that needed comforting” during the pandemic and began researching one

1805 18th St. NW, (202) 845-8935, anjurestaurant.com

Food historians are torn about the origins of Korean mandu. Some believe the dumplings, derived from manti, came to the country through travelers and tradesmen on the Silk Road. Others believe Yuan Mongols brought

Pastrami and Swiss Pierogi at Zofia’s Kitchen 4238 Wilson Blvd. #145, Ballston, (703) 550-6220, zofiaskitchen.com

Pastrami and Swiss Pierogi at Zofia’s Kitchen

Pork and Beef Khinkali at Tabla 3227 Georgia Ave. NW, (202) 291-3227, tabladc.com

When Jonathan and Laura Nelms moved back to D.C. after living in Moscow from 2010 to 2012, they say they couldn’t believe there wasn’t a single Georgian restaurant here. “There just ought to be a Georgian restaurant in a city like Washington, D.C.,” Jonathan says. The pair says Georgian food was a staple in Russia, much like how Mexican WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 13

Jessica van Dop DeJesus

of Eastern Europe’s greatest contributions to the food world. The most surprising thing he found in his research was “the sour cream fight.” Some dough recipes call for it, others don’t.

Zofia’s Kitchen fully launched in December 2020 inside the Ballston Quarter food hall.

“Zofia is a made-up paternal grandmother,” Hardy says. “Your Polish grandmother you didn’t know you wanted or needed.”

If you have to pick one flavor to try first, make it pastrami and Swiss cheese ($12.99) matched with a creamy mustard sauce.

Hardy cures and smokes the brisket in house.

All pierogi come eight to an order. You select whether you want them sautéed, steamed, or fried to a golden crisp. Sautéed is the answer for the pastrami variety.

You may find the look of them a bit surprising. Because Zofia’s Kitchen cranks out as many as 800 pierogi per day, Hardy can’t roll out the sour cream-free dough by hand.

In order for it to cooperate with the pastry extruder, the chef says he had to switch to a thinner, tighter dumpling dough. As Hardy

Crab Pastelillos at La Famosa

looks to expand Zofia’s Kitchen in the region, he says he’s hoping to acquire 3-D printed equipment that churns out more traditional looking pierogi “without the frilly edges.”

—Laura Hayes

Ma La Wontons at Great Wall Szechuan House 1527 14th St. NW, (202) 797-8888, greatwallszechuan.com

It’s hard to pass up a chance to try chili wontons. Hailing from the Sichuan province in China, there are several variations of this traditional breakfast and street food. Hong you chao shou are wontons wrapped like a person with “folded arms” served in a chili oil sauce. (Some say chao shou better translates to “home-folded.”) Then there’s zhong shui jiao, named after the street vendor who created the dish, in which boiled dumplings are steeped in sweetened soy sauce and chili oil and topped with garlic. There’s also suanla chao shou, or hot-and-sour “folded arm” wontons bathed in a spicy vinegar sauce.

The ma la version at Great Wall Szechuan House in Logan Circle is a perennial favorite, consisting of chicken-filled wontons in a chili oil sauce with hot and numbing Sichuan peppercorns. Chef and owner Yuan Chen says he uses chicken to please local palates instead of the more common pork filling in China.

“Everybody likes chicken,” he says. Each order ($9.45) comes with six pieces.

Chen makes the sauce in house, with a spiciness level that can be customized to each diner’s preference. “We have a customer who started at 20 percent spicy but now, whenever he travels to D.C., he calls from the airport and always asks for 100 percent spicy,” says May Kuang, Chen’s wife. When eating ma la wontons, May

cautions against drinking cold water because doing so only heightens the hot and numbing sensation. “Try hot tea instead.” Chen can also make suanla chao shou, previously not on the menu, for those who are interested.

—Katherine Zhao The interview with Chen and Kuang was conducted in Mandarin, and translated into English.

Crab Pastelillos at La Famosa

1300 4th St. SE, (202) 921-9882, eatlafamosa.com Empanadas, pastelillos, empanadillas— the addictive filled dough turnovers found throughout Latin America and the Caribbean— go by several names. Even on an island as small as Puerto Rico, the term can vary from town to town. Empanadas are thought to have originated in Galicia, Spain, and have evolved throughout the New World. The methods and fillings vary from country to country. Chile and Argentina enjoy baked empanadas. Other places, such as Puerto Rico and Cuba, prefer them fried. For many locals who grew up in Latin America, biting into a crunchy, stuffed pastry takes them back home.

Chef Joancarlo Parkhurst, who owns La Famosa in Navy Yard, calls them pastelillos.

He’s currently serving a crab variety ($10).

“This pastelillo is special to me because it brings back memories of Puerto Rico,” he says.

“Biting into a crab pastelillo takes me back to Gripiñas, a place our family used to go on holidays.” For the filling, he uses crab prepared in a tomato based criollo sauce seasoned with sofrito and sazón. The latter is a spice mix that’s omnipresent in Puerto Rican cuisine.

“We try to use Maryland crab when possible to bring that connection between Puerto Rico and the region,” Parkhurst says. The contrast between the crispy fried dough, filled with savory lump crab with hints of garlic, annatto, and onion will send you on a virtual trip to the Caribbean. Those who aren’t into crab can try two other flavors—beef picadillo ($7) and vegetarian picadillo ($8).

—Jessica van Dop DeJesus

Sheng Jian Bao at Shanghai Taste

1121 Nelson St., Rockville, (301) 279-0806, shanghaitaste1121.wixsite.com/website

Ma La Wontons at Great Wall Szechuan House 14 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

Less ubiquitous than their more popular steamed cousin xiao long bao, sheng jian bao—pan fried soup dumplings—are just as deserving of hype. Shanghai Taste is one of the few restaurants in the D.C. area serving this iteration of the dumpling alongside an epic menu of other Shanghainese dishes.

Emily Zhu, the owner’s daughter, manages the Rockville restaurant that opened in 2012.

She says their goal is to make their “Shanghai friends feel that they are back at home.” On a May morning, repeat customers cycle through, picking up regular brunch orders and exchanging greetings with Zhu. Although sheng jian bao has gained some traction through word of mouth, it’s still a

lesser known dish. Made with a thicker wrapper than xiao long bao and pan fried instead of steamed, sheng jian bao are chewier and meatier and can be trickier to manage due to the heartier skin holding the hot broth inside.

These dumplings are served with a soy, black vinegar, and ginger dipping sauce that complements the savory pork with its acidity and brightness, and come in an order of six ($7.25). Shanghai Taste is currently offering takeout only, but tables and chairs are available in the shopping center, making Shanghai Taste a viable outdoor dumpling brunch solution. Sheng jian bao are available only on Saturdays and Sundays.

—Brian Oh

Lentil Sambusas at Mimi’s Ethiopian BBQ

2523 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, (202) 481-0414, mimisbbq.com

Spicy Toasted Ravioli at Ledo Pizza

814 H St. NE, (202) 849-6897, ledopizza.com No self-respecting St. Louisan turns their back on the original toasted ravioli, but goddammit if D.C’s version isn’t a close comparison. Ledo Pizza’s spicy toasted ravioli has been on the menu since the mid 1980s, says CEO Jamie Beall. Ledo’s take on the handheld pasta is stuffed with ricotta, mozzarella, and jalapeños. Beall says the kick from the pepper plays well with Ledo’s sweet marinara sauce. The tomato based sauces in St. Louis tend to be more savory.

Spicy Toasted Ravioli at Ledo Pizza Ledo’s “t-ravs” are also a bit softer around the edges than the version Midwesterners are used to, but Ledo’s are deep fried like their St. Louis counterparts. Beall explains that Ledo experimented with meat filling, which is more common in Missouri, but opted to stick with cheese. An especially fatty piece of beef could “eat through” the dough, he says.

Dueling origin stories for the toasted ravioli date back to the 1940s, when they were served in Italian restaurants on the Hill, an Italian American neighborhood in St. Louis. Both versions say the tasty pillows of meat-filled dough are the result of an accident, when chefs mistakenly dropped ravioli in hot oil instead of boiling water. The restaurants tested out the dishes on their staff, and they’ve been a staple on St. Louis menus ever since. A third story says the recipe came to the United States from Sicily by way of a St. Louis area chain of restaurants called Lombardo’s in the 1930s. They filled the pasta with beef, spinach, cheese, and eggs.

Beall, the third generation owner of the pizza chain that first opened in 1955, can’t recall how the toasted ravioli landed on Ledo’s menu. But he confirms that his restaurant’s take is absolutely based on the St. Louis delicacy.

—Mitch Ryals

Mama Alice’s Lumpia at Purple Patch

3155 Mount Pleasant St. NW, (202) 299-0022, purplepatchdc.com For the first six months after Purple Patch opened in 2015, owner Patrice Cleary’s mother made the restaurant’s signature dish—lumpia.

But “Mama Alice,” as she’s known, wasn’t in D.C. She was overnighting the Filipino staple to the District from Texas on dry ice. “We went from going through a few hundred a week to a few thousand,” Cleary says. Shipping no longer

Brian Oh

Mimi’s Ethiopian BBQ may be named after Siham “Mimi” Mohammed, a small business owner and single mom, but her business partner and sister, Hikmah Tasew, is the chef behind this Ethiopian restaurant, which opened in Randle Highlands in October 2020. “The intention was helping the neighborhood,” Mohammed says. “We see a lot of fast food settings. We tried to bring in healthy food.”

While they’re not the healthiest pick on the menu, start every meal at Mimi’s with an order of sambusas—an East African cousin of South Asian samosas that are deep fried until they’re golden brown. They offer four flavors: lentil, potato, chicken, and beef. The lentil sambusa has the advantage of being both vegan and packed with protein. Mohammed says her sister boils the lentils and seasons them with onion, green pepper, and cilantro. The sambusas come in orders of three ($3.99) with a side of “Mimi’s special sauce,” which Mohammed says is a secret recipe.

Mohammed and Tasew are from Gondar in northern Ethiopia. They’re Muslim and explain that sambusas are a common sunset snack for breaking fast during Ramadan. Ethiopians eat sambusas all year round as an afternoon snack with tea or coffee. “My sister makes the best sambusas,” Mohammed says. “With everything, she puts her heart out there to cook.” The restaurant is closed Mondays and is looking to add seating in the coming months.

—Laura Hayes

Sheng Jian Bao at Shanghai Taste made sense. Now they make them on site using Alice’s recipe that calls for precise portions of beef, pork, carrots, and scallions bound with egg inside a paper-thin wrapper. Use too much meat, Cleary cautions, and the wrapper will burn before the meat cooks through.

“Growing up, everybody used to love my mom’s lumpia,” Cleary says. Her secret ingredient? Jimmy Dean pork sausage roll. “We do something similar to that now,” Cleary says.

“We use ground pork and have our own seasoning to achieve that same flavor.”

Cleary says Filipinos consume lumpia throughout the day as a “merienda” or snack, as well as with meals. She sells orders of five ($8) paired with spicy vinegar and banana ketchup dipping sauces at brunch and dinner.

Cleary brings in the banana ketchup from the Philippines and doctors it with a few spices.

Tables can tack on single lumpia to an order for $1.60. Some people don’t stop at five. “We get orders of 1,000 pieces of lumpia for catered events,” Cleary says. “They’re the best thing to bring to a party.”

—Laura Hayes WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 15

Summer Entertai

Beat the heat with DC Brau, Visit

BY SARAH MARLOFF

Pre-pandemic, summer in the city meant getting outside whil poolside, day-trips to the country, beach vacations, and visits summer 2019, but as the region continues to lift pandemic pro while enjoying the area’s newly reopened offerings.

And Brandon Skall, for one, is excited. The CEO and co-found starting with the tap room’s long-awaited reopening on Frida

Though the inside space will have limited tables, DC Brau is no After years of hearing customers lament the brewery’s lack of a thought out outdoor area. The beer garden, which will be s feature bright umbrellas and floral arrangements to give visito

But that’s not the only thing making DC Brau a perfect place while. Alongside its reopening, DC Brau’s latest brewed creat soda and beer. According to Skall, most available radlers are can experience what Skall calls “a great beer garden bevera new and pa “De the

Las kee trea

Ou offe

Bet rem run and gra cre righ inc

At cup “It ser and 16 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

inment Spotlight

t Loudoun, Wolf Trap and more!

le trying to avoid the heat and humidity: weekends lounging s to movie theaters. This June might not look exactly like otocols, locals are once again finding refuge from the heat

der of DC Brau Brewing has big plans for summer 2021, ay, June 11.

ow home to an outside beer garden for weekend visitors. f patio space, DC Brau is now excited and ready to deliver set up Fridays and broken down for Monday deliveries, will ors a welcoming, shaded vibe that’s perfect for day-drinking.

to catch up with friends and family you haven’t seen in a tion will debut: a fresh, locally made radler blending lemon e imported from Germany. For the first time ever, Brau drinkers age for the summer,” in all its fresh-made glory. Despite the w beer garden, DC Brau will continue curbside pick up d delivery, which the brewery began offering during the andemic. Skall believes that trend isn’t going anywhere. elivery really became a large part of everybody’s life during e pandemic so we plan to continue,” he confirms.

st but not least, the hard seltzers that played a big role in eping the business afloat over the past year are getting VIP atment with several flavors on draft at the taproom.

utside city limits, Loudoun County beckons with an array of erings that’ll make you forget you’re hot and sticky.

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th Erickson, president and CEO of Visit Loudoun, says summer minds her of biking the Washington & Old Dominion Trail that ns from Arlington to Purcellville, Virginia. “The trail is shaded d will take you through some fabulous towns to stop and ab a bite or a cold drink.” And what could be better than ice eam after a long trek? Purcellville’s Tipped Cow Creamery is ht off the trail, featuring classic flavors and rotating specials cluding lemon meringue (Erickson’s favorite).

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Leesburg’s new dessert café, Mocatinas, you can enjoy a p of ice cream with a homemade macaroon or iced coffee. really hits the spot,” says Erickson. If you’d rather, there’s softrve aplenty in Loudoun County, including Grutos in Leesburg d Purcellville and Scruffy’s Ice Cream Parlor in Middleburg.

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East Of The River, Distinguished Artist Award Honoree: Jay Coleman PRESENTATION JUNE 12 @ 6 PM Jay Coleman, a world class painter and mural artist, will receive the 2021 East Of The River Distinguished Artist Award. This award is a celebration of the contributions being made by dynamic artists East of the River.

14th Annual East of the River Show and Auction Curated in partnership with the BADC

OPENS JUNE 12 @ 6:00 PM - JULY 24TH Dedicated to showcasing the creative brilliance East of the River, this year’s exhibit will feature thirteen unique creatives with dynamic stories to tell through visual arts. Bids for artwork can be placed both online and in person. We will be adhering to social distancing procedures provided by the Mayor’s office. Don’t forget to bring your mask! The exhibition will run from June 11, 2021 through July 24, 2021.

outterman -vs- innerMAN Honfleur Gallery

JUNE 12 @ 7 PM - JULY 24 BK Adams is a visual artist and sculptor from Washington DC. In the early days of his career, Adams focused on monumental sculptures for alternative art spaces. Nearly all of Adams’ work implores a visual movement of avant-garde expressionist abstract. His colorful, expressive workmanship reflects a life’s journey with a specialty collection that embodies Washington DC’s rich history and culture.

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LEARN MORE: ANACOSTIAARTSCENTER.COM/EVENTS/ | @ANACOSTIAARTS Anacostia Arts Center, Honfleur Gallery & Vivid Gallery are all projects of ARCH, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the economic vitality of Historic Anacostia.

18 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

If you’re looking for breweries, wineries, and cideries (oh my!), Loudoun has much to offer. Erickson recommends Bluemont Vineyards’ sangria, 868 Estate Vineyards’ slushies (made with peach wine), and Flying Ace Farm’s “incredible” pineapple mojito. In addition to the refreshing cocktails, each space offers seating indoors and outdoors for whatever you and your friends’ fancy.

Of course it wouldn’t be summer without water play. After a long closure, Sterling’s Volcano Island Waterpark reopens this year with slides, fountains, and a splash pad for quality family fun. The more adventurous should visit Harpers Ferry Adventure Center for kayaking, tubing, and white-water rafting.

‘Tis also the season for amazing produce. Loudoun County is home to numerous farm stands and stores and, according to Erickson, local farmers are “having a great growing season.” She recommends visiting Loudounfarms.org to find what foods are in season and where to find them. Feeling spontaneous? Pull over at one of—or all!—the farm stands you pass on your way back to the city and pick up whatever looks best.

For many, a year without live music has been devastatingly quiet. That’s about to change. “It will be incredible to hear music in the air again,” says Erickson, promising performances at concerts, festivals, town centers, and even tasting rooms throughout the county. One event she’s excited for is Leesburg’s inaugural Juneteenth Celebration—a day-long event at Ida Lee Park with the Chuck Brown Band, speakers, food, drinks, and more.

For something just a little closer to home, Wolf Trap resumes live, outdoor shows in July. Tickets are on sale at wolftrap.org.

The excitement for summer is palpable, and nothing, not even high humidity, can dim that shine after a hard year. “We’re really looking forward to this summer and Loudoun is ready,” says Erickson. The county was actually a popular road trip destination throughout the pandemic and that’s not changing anytime soon. In fact, there’s a Spotify playlist, dubbed “The Songs of Loudoun,” that’s perfect for the drive.

As for DC Brau, Skall concludes: “We are really, really excited to welcome folks back.”

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ARTS

Checks, Lies, and Video Games

By Ian Thal Contributing Writer Late at night in Aeolus City, Paaya Gaiason (Yesenia Iglesias) stands on a public terrace. Long staircases lead to the lit city streets below. Paaya waits for an unnamed contact. He arrives; there is a scuffle. She plummets to her death.

Days later, there are eulogies from Mayor Sirmon and Antonin Leap, managing director of the Aeolus Investment Organization, the sovereign wealth fund that had employed her as a translator. A month after the public memorial, Chief of Police Herresford announces that her death has been ruled a suicide. Many, including Paaya’s brother, Juda (Niusha Nawab), are convinced she was murdered. The motive is unclear, but Paaya was a talented ethnic Edda in a field dominated by the elite Vassari ethnic group. Albert Bridges, a Vassari nationalist demagogue, is calling for law and order as he decries riots and burning buildings.

That’s how things unfold in the beginning of the first episode of Dark City. It’s a visual novel, a style of video game especially popular in Japan that resembles old choose-your-own-adventure books, coupled with art, sound, and limited animation. But it didn’t come from a studio or developer known for making video games. It’s the newest offering from D.C.’s 4615 Theatre Company, which has focused on offering audiences innovative remote storytelling experiences instead of live theater for the past year.

“I’ve heard a video game writer refer to his work as ‘making theater,’ which really excited me,” says Gregory Keng Strasser, the main writer and director of Dark City. “Video game writers want the same thing playwrights do: authentic, organic interactions.” But in some respects, “the playwright has it much easier,” he says. “They know what makes their character exceptional. But for the game writer, they don’t know much about the player at all, other than that this person is playing the game. The

Art by Sara Eskandari

With live shows on hold, 4615 Theatre Company developed Dark City, a video game, to give its patrons an “irreplicable” remote experience.

Screenshot from the Dark City video game

writer has to anticipate what may be the next step the player will take and devise all of the reasonable possibilities that may be a result of those decisions.”

This notion was on his mind when Strasser, who is also producing director for 4615 Theatre Company, met with 4615’s artistic director, Jordan Friend, to discuss projects the company could produce in a season when theater spaces—including Dance Loft on 14 in the Sixteenth Street Heights neighborhood, where they had been in residence during the 20192020 season—were closed.

Since its founding in 2013, 4615 has been dedicated to presenting new work by local playwrights along with both contemporary and Elizabethan repertoire. So they were already positioned to focus the season-long remote project, dubbed 4615 Go, on locally grown theater. It would also be based on three principles: Every experience had to be “irreplicable” and driven by the audience. “The spirit of theatricality” had to be present in each chosen medium. And every project had to be “a passion project,” says Friend.

“Greg showed me a game he designed based on The Odyssey,” says Friend. While that particular game, The Telemachy, is still in development, Friend found the idea of storytelling through video games intriguing. When they spoke again, Strasser proposed a story set in an imaginary city called Aeolus.

Aeolus City is a solarpunk world: While cyberpunk imagines how information technology could dangerously transform society, as in The Matrix franchise, and steampunk imagines alternative, imperial pasts defined

by Victorian technologies like airships and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s analytical engine, solarpunk imagines societies based on clean, sustainable technologies, in which there is, at least on the surface, a balance between society and nature. Many of Aeolus City’s structures are built into gigantic trees the size of mountains and a canopy where the elites live and conduct business.

But the noirish narrative of a murder that political and corporate elites are eager to cover up reveals that Aeolus City is not so utopian. It still has an elite who don’t always operate in

20 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

the light.

Dark City has been Strasser’s passion project: He could write the story, and he had started learning to write code while working on The Telemachy, but as a theater artist branching into the world of video games, he knew he would need a team. He recruited Friend as a composer, Sara Eskandari to create the visual design of Aeolus City and the characters that inhabit it, and Aria Velz to serve as dramaturg.

Early in development, the team decided to serialize Dark City in four episodes released on different dates instead of as one long narrative game, and the entire series is now available for purchase as a bundle. The game runs on the Ren’Py Visual Novel Engine. The name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word ren’ai for “romantic love”—romance centered visual novels are especially popular in Japan—and Python, the programming language used to construct it.

In this instance, the engine is applied to a science fiction noir. Ren’Py let Strasser plot out a story that allows for branching paths as the player makes choices, while also being customizable: Episode one includes minigames in which Paaya’s younger brother, Juda, interrogates or is interrogated by other characters or searches a room for clues. Strasser also developed a mechanic in which one’s interactions with other characters can affect relationships in later scenes. “Diplomacy is key, and keeping track of the information will be crucial to arguing a successful persuasion,” says Strasser.

In episode one, the narrative picks up a year after Paaya’s death in the city of Chang Doras, where Juda lives in a depressive squalor. He’s been trying to write a book about his sister, but is too overcome with grief to get past the first page, let alone investigate his hunch that she was murdered, and he seems to be haunted by Paaya’s voice and occasional nostalgic reveries. He is jolted out of his funk when he is contacted by Liki Mongada (Raven Lorraine), a woman who claims to be a former colleague of Paaya’s, seeking information that she believes may have been left with Juda.

“I am always intrigued by white-collar crimes,” Strasser states in an email, asking rhetorically, “How [is it] possible to do something

so sinister and leave everyone puzzled as to what precisely occurred?”

For the crime at the center of Dark City, Strasser drew inspiration from the ongoing scandal around the sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad, which he had considered adapting for the stage at one point. Sovereign wealth funds are state-owned investment funds that invest in a wide array of assets ranging from real estate and infrastructure to stocks and bonds. They are often used for economic development, providing pensions, or hedging against an economic crisis.

However, in the case of 1MDB, funds equivalent to more than $4.5 billion were diverted through front companies based in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates into private, offshore bank accounts, including more than $1 billion to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, according to prosecutors. Funds that were meant to be invested in Malaysian society were instead used to acquire private real estate in London, Manhattan, and Beverly Hills.

It does not take much effort for Juda to realize Liki is not who she claims to be. Liki confesses to being an investigative journalist; her interest in Paaya stems from her work as a top translator for the Aeolus Investment Organization—a fund like 1MDB. Liki is pursuing evidence of corruption at AIO and believes that, because contracts and sensitive correspondence went through Paaya, she could have been in a position to know enough that her death would become convenient. As with 1MDB, the mystery at the center of Dark City is how money that is earmarked for the general public ends up in the pockets of those who already have more than anyone else. Juda and Liki quickly form a partnership, and soon Juda is accompanying Liki back to Aeolus City, slowly drawing connections between Liki’s suspicions and some of his more puzzling memories.

Aeolus City society is complicated by the sometimes tense relationship between its two main ethnic groups: As rendered by Eskandari’s illustrations, the Edda, to whom Juda, Liki, and Paaya belong, are visually identifiable by thick swirling two-tone stripe patterns on their skin and often dress to show their stripes. Meanwhile, the Vassari have lines on their faces that resemble the branching capillaries on the back of leaves, and dress formally in layers, often incorporating blossoms into their wardrobes. Many of the elites are Vassari, and a once fringe Vassari nationalist party hostile to the city’s multicultural history is increasingly moving toward the political mainstream. Meanwhile, if Liki’s suspicions are correct, then AIO is using development projects to push Edda not just out of certain neighborhoods in the city but also off traditional lands beyond the city limits.

Although Friend has composed for the stage, the experience of composing music for a game was very different. “The music is written to be looped endlessly rather than as a contained song,” he says. “It’s the first time I’ve gone into Vangelis territory,” he adds,

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ARTS citing the Greek electronic musician and composer perhaps best known for scoring films like Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner.

Friend’s score was an extreme departure from his own 4615 Go passion project, Old Soul, a cabaret-style home concert of original songs and personal anecdotes about his own experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression presented over Zoom.

“It’s in an alternate world, but because it’s still grounded in our world, I had one foot in quotidian sounds and one foot in more surreal sounds,” Friend says. So in Aeolus City, in the lower levels of the night markets and the “Dark City” close to the Mother Trees’ roots where Liki lives, the sounds might be based on woodwinds or vocals that have been tweaked to sustain a note beyond what is humanly possible. “[Aeolus’] lower levels have more identifiable melodies, with reverb for sounds meant to naturally occur in a physical space, and [there is] a pristine ugly to the upper levels with more processed aristocratic music,” he says. Music indicates more than just place, as there are “more artificial sounds as we get closer to the villains,” Friend says with a chuckle.

Velz, by contrast, did not find the transition from being a dramaturg who works on the development of new plays to being a dramaturg who works on a video game to be a radical shift: “In the most fundamental way it’s the same job of making sure the script

is accessible to the audience, and that the themes are clearly expressed,” she says.

Velz also wrote the third episode of Dark City. While the first episode features Juda at the beginning of his investigation into Paaya’s death, and the second episode features Liki as the protagonist, Velz says “I wrote my episode from Paaya’s point of view.” Velz adds that Paaya, as an Edda, is “from an ethnic group that does not normally have power but she does, [consequently] we explore the theme of internalized racism, and it reveals why Juda loves Paaya so much.”

Velz also touches upon the theme of internalized racism through the character of Gideon, a half-Vassari executive, who as of episode one, is only known through his emails. “Greg, Sara, and I are all biracial and we wanted to explore that theme,” Velz says. Still, “we were careful not to present a one-to-one relationship between the ethnic groups in the game and real world ethnic groups,” she adds.

Strasser also describes his collaboration with Eskandari, who has primarily worked in the media of video games and comics, as going well beyond the character designs and into the material culture of the world.

Recalling how even contemporary technologies often display their premodern ancestry, he describes how they developed the written script for the Edda: “Because we knew the environment where [the Edda] first settled

would be filled with leaves and plants and trees, we designed their language script to have been first written on soft material like banana leaves,” he says. “In that regard, we did have to look at scripts like Khmer, Thai, and others to understand that those scripts were created out of practicality, so as not allowing tear or destruction of the material.” Consequently, versions of this no longer leaf-based Edda script appear in different fonts during gameplay, whether handwritten in the margins of Vassari texts (Vassari is rendered as written English) or as stylized in-game messages when the player begins or completes a minigame.

Just as intriguingly, Strasser has decided that the two languages have different ideas of gender. Vassari is similar to English and has gendered pronouns and personal names, but Edda has a history of being more fluid; it became more restrictive under the influence of Vassari grammar. When Liki expresses an openness to using they/them in addition to she/her pronouns, it’s both an assertion of personal and cultural identity.

The differences between the Edda and the Vassari are conceived in a fantastic way in the first episode. Some of the Edda, whether by biology or culture, are capable of accessing a mycorrhizal (fungus root) network that connects the Mother Trees that dominate the cityscape, gaining energy and information,

and they’ve even developed religious views based on this symbiosis. However, mycorrhizal networks are not fantasy: Drawn from real world scientific research into forest ecologies, they are networks of subterranean fungi that facilitate the exchange of nutrients between trees of different species in return for carbohydrates produced by the trees. These networks also allow plants to communicate with one another through both info-chemicals and electrical signals, helping them to better respond to changing environmental conditions.

Indeed, it is strongly implied in the first episode that some Edda have the ability to download their consciousness into the mycorrhizal network when they die, leaving us wondering if Paaya might be trying to speak to Juda as a mycorrhizal ghost.

When asked what a playwright and theater director brings to video game design, Strasser says, “Jordan asks me the same question. The answer is ‘I don’t know,’ but I do feel that this experience will change the way I will be writing and directing plays in the future.”

But the ultimate question for players is: Must Aeolus City always be a dark city of corruption, or can the interconnectedness of the trees be a model for a brighter future?

Dark City is available for Mac and PC at $3.99 per episode or $8.99 for the four-episode bundle.

4615Theatre.com/dark-city.

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This year, we will start the voting process with an Open Nominations phase, where readers can write in their top choice. Next, we’ll conduct the Finalist Vote where readers select their top choice from the finalists. To hear more about the new changes to the voting process, as well as best practices from local businesses and organizations like yours, please join us for another edition of our Back to Business webinar series on Thursday, June 24 by registering on our website at washingtoncitypaper.com.

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ARTS

Melissa Scholes Young

Creating Buzz The American University professor and author’s new novel, The Hive, has already been optioned by Sony Entertainment.

Colleen Dolak

By Hannah Grieco Contributing Writer D.C. is waking up after a long pandemic year, cautiously but surely, and local writers are eager to connect—both with each other and with their readers, who they’ve often struggled to reach during such an isolating time.

Melissa Scholes Young, a D.C. area author and associate professor in literature at American University, has found herself facing these challenges at both ends of the COVID wave. On May 1, 2020, her Furious Gravity anthology was published—the most recent book in a series of anthologies by D.C. women writers that she edits and publishes. The timing was rough, but Young adapted and led the book tour into the virtual world, planning events everywhere Zoom allowed, from Politics and Prose to the Writer’s Center and beyond.

Now Young is preparing for another release: Her second novel, The Hive, came out on June 8, creating a buzz. It’s already been optioned by Sony Entertainment. Like in her first novel, Flood, Young revisits rural, working-class Missouri in her new book.

“I’ve always written about my working-class roots and feminism in rural communities,” Young says.

And she similarly explores identity, family, and the idea of home—this time through the lives and voices of five women grappling with the loss of the complicated, sometimes problematic patriarch of their family, along with their own evolving goals and dreams.

Never one to lecture (outside of her university classroom), Young invites us into these women’s lives with the warmth of a true storyteller. Each character’s personality shines, from fierce prepper Grace, who reels from the loss of her husband, to the various daughters, all of whom loved their dad deeply even as they fought against traditional expectations within the family and community.

The title is a fitting metaphor, combining the family-run pest control company and

“the hive” of the Fehler ladies, and the book is a fun, fast-paced read. Young is a masterful writer who keeps us hooked, delicately balancing tough dilemmas with humor and lighter family moments.

But getting The Hive to its launch date wasn’t easy. Before the pandemic, Young had hoped that Flood’s success would pave the way for this new novel. Her editor at Hachette Books was gone by early spring of 2020, when she and her agent sent the The Hive out on submission, and publishing houses were nervous about the coming year.

She knew she wanted to work with a team that focused on the new places that publishing could go. She found that opportunity with Keylight Books, a new imprint of the independent Turner Publishing Company.

Big houses were pulling back contracts, cutting publicity budgets, and delaying publication dates. But Keylight seemed different to Young. She liked how they were pivoting to reach readers and thinking creatively about marketing.

“My experience with Keylight Books at Turner has been more boutique and specialized than my first novel with Center Street at Hachette,” Young says. “I’ve felt autonomous as an author at Keylight. Every decision we’ve made from the art, cover design, editing, and publicity campaign has been cooperative.”

One interesting shift has been a new approach to getting the word out. With The Hive, Young has put out video content and an audio advance reader copy for reviewers and booksellers. ARCs help promote early sales via those reviews and bookstore advertising.

Presale figures mean everything to publishers and help them determine how much time and money they’ll continue to spend on that book as it launches. It’s been difficult to get physical review copies out to people during COVID, and many bookstores are only now beginning to open to browsing customers, so digital tools have been a way that Young’s team could keep promoting the book.

“We need to meet readers where they are,” she says. “The Hive audiobook, podcasts, craft workshops, and a postcard preorder campaign at thehivenovel.com have been essential.”

The new directions Young has taken are paying off, despite the disruptions of the pandemic. The Hive was picked up by Sony Entertainment immediately after she signed the contract to publish with Turner—Keylight specifically focuses on publishing books that have the potential for screen adaptation—and it’s now being shopped as both a series and a film.

Readers (and writers) often wonder about the mysterious page-to-screen process, which Young discusses in a recent article for Literary Hub: “When a story is authentic on the page, it translates well to screen. I write about workingclass populations, which often include a conversation about the aestheticization of poverty.”

Jacket designer: Lauren Peters-Collaer; Jacket artist: Andrea Akers

“I’m interested in truth rather than digestibility.”

24 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

ARTS That conversation with film and television professionals is ongoing.

“Poverty, for example, is sometimes portrayed in an unrealistic, stereotypical way to sanitize it for viewers with less experience with class struggle. I’m interested in truth rather than digestibility,” she says.

And while many writers dream of their book getting optioned for the screen, Young doesn’t write her novels with the screen in mind.

“I’ve never started a writing project thinking about the screen. I’m a storyteller and a novelist, so I do my work on the page,” Young says.

Despite this, her books practically demand to be made into visual form. She says she has loved working with the screenwriters, who also have Midwestern and/or rural backgrounds.

As a new challenge, Young is also writing a screenplay adaptation for Flood herself, hoping to see it join The Hive in visual form.

As her fans impatiently wait for her stories, both on screen and off, she’s also hard at work planning her summer book tour. Amy Freeman is the development director at the Writer’s Center, as well as a writer herself, and she’s excited to see and hear Young read from The Hive in person.

“I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for in-person readings! I’ve seen Melissa read on Zoom, and it’s always great, but I want to watch her sign books, including my copy, to have those little moments of warmth we just don’t get on Zoom,” she says.

Young and other local writers continue to make the most of primarily virtual book tours; on June 8, she spoke to an online crowd via Politics and Prose. Bookstores schedule authors for readings and panels well in advance, and they’re still facing the unknown with in-person gatherings. So most of The Hive’s summer PR events will continue to be online, and even if in-person events resume in the fall, Young hopes to keep those virtual options open in order to stay accessible to her readers. She’s also been able to attend more events than usual because there’s no travel involved, which is a perk.

Leslie Pietrzyk is another established area author whose new book is facing a circuitous path to its readers. Her new short story collection, Admit This to No One, comes out in October, and like Young, Pietrzyk appreciates what virtual events offer both writers and readers.

“While I’m definitely looking forward to live book events, I can’t deny that my literary world definitely widened with Zoom readings and workshops,” she says. “Everywhere we turn lately, there’s a new way of doing things, and I expect that book events are also evolving. Right now, I don’t think anyone can predict exactly how.”

Whether the venue is virtual or brick-andmortar, it seems that readers will show up.

“Fostering and helping the literary community is so important and Melissa tries to do so much to support writers,” says Morgan Bluma, a student of Young’s at AU. “Her work motivates, inspires, and improves my own work.”

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w.dchfa.org/homeownership ARTS GALLERY REVIEW

granted on a first come, first served basis until the program allocation has been exhausted. Homeowners seeking assistance through 7 to begin the process of applying. Questions regarding DC MAP COVID-19 may also be emailed to DCMAP@dchfa.org.

Home Alone DCHFA, Your Homeownership Resource in the District.

We Miss You

At Hamiltonian Artists through June 19

Like the rest of us, Kaitlin Jencso endured the coronavirus pandemic. As a photographer, The District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency is your homeownership she decided to mark time during the lost year resource in the District from buying a home to retaining your home; we through her photographs, turning them into have a homeownership program to assist you. something like tally marks scrawled on a wall to count the days as they pass.

The result is We Miss You, a site-specific collection of more than 1,000 images mounted DC Open Doors DC Open Doors is your key to DC Open Doors at Hamiltonian Artists. Jencso has painstakDCOpen Open Doors DC Doors is your key homeownership the homeownership intotothe city. Thisininprogram offers competitive DC Open Doors your competitive key homeownership the city. This programisoffers interest rates and ingly hung this mass of documentary material city.

This program offers competitive interest DCHFA, lower Your Homeownership Resource District. interest rates and lower mortgage insurance costsin on the first trust mortgage insurance costs on first trust rates and on Hamiltonian’s long, white walls—a wave of lower mortgage insurance costs on first trust DC Open Doors You are not required to be a first-time homebuyer mortgages.

DC Doors homebuyer or a D.C. DC Open Open Doors is yourresident key to homeownership in the imagery that loops around horizontally, as if the homebuyer or a D.C. resident DC Open Doors is your key to homeownership in the city. a This program offers competitive interest and , be purchasing a homerates in the or D.C. resident to qualify for DCOD. You must, however, be city.

This programinsurance offers competitive interest ratesinand gallery were one long, continuous strip of film. , be purchasing a home the lower mortgage costs on first trust District of Columbia. lower mortgage insurance costs onin firstthe trust District of Columbia.

District of Columbia. purchasing a home DC MAP (Mortgage Assistance Program) COVID-19 is here to help Poignantly for a collection of imagery that homebuyer or a D.C. resident homebuyer or a D.C., be resident purchasing a home in the documents a period of social distancing and DistrictDC homeowners inAssistance their during this(HPAP) pandemic.

Home Purchase Program , bestay purchasing a home homes in the Open of Doors District Columbia.

District of Columbia.

HPAP interest free deferredinloans DC Openprovides Doors is your key to homeownership the for down quarantine, viewers should visit in person to HPAP provides interest free deferred loans for down payment HPAP provides interest freeinterest deferred city.

This program offers competitive ratesloans and for down lower mortgage insurance serves costs on as firstatrust fully appreciate the sweep of Jencso’s documenco-administrator of$84,000 combined. DCHFA and closing cost assistance up to serves as a co-administrator HPAP provides interest free deferred loans for down of this DCprovides Department offree Housing Community homebuyer or a D.C.interest resident HPAP deferredand loans for down tation, rather than viewing the images remotely this DC Department of Housing and Community serves as ,(DHCD) a co-administrator of this DC Department of Housing Development’s first-time home buyer be purchasing aahome in the serves as co-administrator of Development’s first-time home buyer via computer—something that only became District of Columbia.(DHCD) program. serves as a co-administrator of and Development’s this DCCommunity Department of Housing and Community (DHCD) first-time home buyer program. this DC Department of Housing andhome Community Development’s (DHCD) first-time buyer DC MAP COVID-19 provides zero- interest monthly assistance loans up feasible once the coronavirus pandemic eased.

Development’s (DHCD) first-time home buyer program. program. program. to $5,000 for up six loans months The exhibit opened in May. HPAP provides interest free to deferred for downfor qualified homeowners.

Reverse Mortgage Insurance & Tax Payment Program Jencso calls the exhibit a “diary of monotony serves as a co-administrator of this DC DepartmentReMIT of Housing provides and Communityfinancial assistance to seniors 62 (ReMIT) and confinement.” A few individual images Development’s (DHCD) first-time home buyer on insurance years or older who have fallen behind years older who have fallen behind on insurance program. and taxor a result ofhave their mortgage. years or older who fallen behind on insurance and tax Borrower Qualifications: years orpayments older who as have fallen onreverse insurance explicitly communicate a sense of claustroand tax payments as afallen resultbehind of can their reverse years or older who as have onreceive insurance Qualified District homeowners upmortgage. to and tax payments a result ofbehind their reverse mortgage. and tax payments as a and result of their reverse mortgage.

Qualified District homeowners can receive up to payments as a result of their reverse mortgage. Qualified • Must be borrower’s primary residence must located phobia—a male figure captured in the bathQualified District homeowners canbe receive up toin Qualified District homeowners can receive up to the District of Columbia District homeowners can receive up to $25,000 in assistance. room, for instance, or a woman photographed • Must have been current asolder of the 1st payment (prior to years or who March have fallen behind on insurance while hemmed in tightly by house siding. But and tax payments as a result of their reverse mortgage.

DC4ME DC4ME provides mortgage assistance with optional being affected by COVID-19) DC4ME provides mortgage assistance optional Qualified District homeowners canassistance receive upwith to with DC4ME provides mortgage optional others show the open (if desolate) spaces of DC4ME provides mortgage assistance with optional DC4ME provides mortgage assistance with optional down assistance to D.C. government down payment assistance to D.C. government employees. downpayment payment assistance D.C. government • Must be able to document income affected to COVID-19 down payment assistance totoD.C. government down payment assistance totodue D.C. government employees.

DC4ME offered to current full-time employees.DC4ME DC4MEisisis offered current full-time the Chesapeake Bay region; Jensco is from employees. offered to current full-time employees.

DC4ME is offered to current full-time DC4ME is offered to current full-time District government District government employees, including employees • Borrower must be the borrower on theemployees, home loan, not just aemployees District government employees, including District government including employees government employees, including employees Southern Maryland and made many of the ofDistrict District government-based instrumentalities, ofDistrict government-based instrumentalities, of District government-based instrumentalities, member of the household DC4ME provides mortgage assistance with optional employees, including employees of District government-based of District government-based instrumentalities, independent agencies,to D.C. Public Charter Schools, independent agencies, D.C. Public Charter Schools, independent agencies, D.C. Public Charter Schools, down payment assistance D.C. government images outside of locked down, urban D.C. and organizations, provided the applicant/borrower's independent agencies, D.C. Public Charter Schools, • Must show proof that theorganizations, borrower not eligible for employees.

DC4ME isisprovided offered to current full-time and organizations, the applicant/borrower's and provided the applicant/borrower's instrumentalities, independent employer fallsunder under theoversight oversight theCouncil Councilofofagencies, D.C. Public Charter and organizations, provided the government employees, including employees employer falls the ofofapplicant/borrower's the Jencso’s works traverse a variety of genres— employer falls under the oversight of the Council of forbearance or otherDistrict types of relief offered through the the District of Columbia. ofemployer District government-based instrumentalities, falls underorganizations, the oversight of the Council of the applicant/borrower’s the District of Schools, and provided the District ofColumbia.

Columbia. independent agencies, D.C. Public Charter Schools, portraiture, still life, landscape, abstraction— servicer and/or Hardest Hit Funds theorganizations, District of provided Columbia. and the applicant/borrower's employer falls under the oversight of the Council of the District employerafter falls under oversight of the Council of • If borrower is still affected the the CARES Act ends, then but a few visual themes recur through her theof District of Columbia.

COVID-19 Columbia. relief may be offered COVID-19 at that time (See additional terms) installation, including lampposts and fences DC MAP COVID-19 provides financial assistance to COVID-19 DC MAP COVID-19 provides financial assistance to COVID-19 thoseaffected affected by(Mortgage theimpacts impactsofofthe theCOVID-19 COVID-19 those by the at night, Terri Weifenbach-style close-ups DC MAP Assistance DC MAP COVID-19 providescan financial assistance toProgram) COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualified borrowers receive a loan of COVID-19 DC MAP COVID-19 provides financial assistance to pandemic.

Qualified can receive a loan of those bymonth theborrowers impacts of assistance the COVID-19 upMAP toaffected $5,000 per toput puttoward toward their mortgage of hedges, and lots and lots of moody water DC COVID-19 provides financial to financial assistance to those DC MAP COVID-19 provides up to $5,000 per month to their mortgage those affected by the impacts of the COVID-19 For a full borrower qualifications and pandemic.

Qualified borrowers can receive a loan of loan terms, visit forlist upto toof six months. those affected by the impacts of the COVID-19 for up six months. pandemic.

Qualified borrowers can receive a loan of imagery, sometimes sun dappled, sometimes up to $5,000 per month to put toward their mortgage pandemic.

Qualified borrowers can receive a loan ofthe affected by the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualified uptoup to $5,000 per month to puttheir toward their mortgage up $5,000 permonths. month to put toward mortgage for to six misty, sometimes pastel hued, and sometimes for to months. six months. for upup to six borrowers can receive a loan of up to $5,000 per month to put adorned by moonbeams. toward their mortgage for up to six months.

At times, Jencso leverages bold geometry in Visit www.DCHFA.org www.DCHFA.org Visit her creations. She skillfully pairs a dock and water how to to apply apply to to any any of ofDCHFA’s DCHFA’shomeownership homeownershipprograms. programs. how Visit www.DCHFA.org Visit www.DCHFA.org for full qualification guidelines and information Visit diagonally in one image, and captures a vertical Visit www.DCHFA.org www.DCHFA.org how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs. WWW.DCHFA.ORG FLORIDA AVENUE, NW, WASHINGTON, DC20001 20001••202.777.1600 202.777.1600 815 FLORIDA AVENUE, NW, DC zip of light splitting a red wall in two in another. on how to apply to any ofWASHINGTON, DCHFA’s homeownership programs.••WWW.DCHFA.ORG how to apply to any of DCHFA’s homeownership programs. how toNW, apply to any ofDCDCHFA’s homeownership programs.

815 FLORIDA AVENUE, WASHINGTON, 20001 • 202.777.1600 • WWW.DCHFA.ORG (Cleverly, it is mounted directly opposite a rhym815 FLORIDA AVENUE, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20001 • 202.777.1600 • WWW.DCHFA.ORG ing image that depicts a blurry column of orange 815 FLORIDA AVENUE, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20001 • 202.777.1600 • WWW.DCHFA.ORG DC MAP MAP COVID-19 financial willassistance be granted on a first first served the program allocation hasuntil been exhausted.

Homeowners seeking assistance through DC COVID-19 andassistance financial will become, granted on a basis firstuntil come, first served basis the program allocation has been exhaustlights separating two sides of a window curtain).

DC MAP COVID-19 should call 1-833-429-0537 to begin the process of applying.

Questions regarding DC MAP COVID-19 may also be emailed to DCMAP@dchfa.org. ed. Homeowners seeking assistance through DC MAP COVID-19 should call 1-833-429-0537 or DCMAP@dchfa.org to begin the process of Elsewhere, Jencso channels early Harry Callahan applying. HomeSaver has been reopened temporarily and will be accepting requests through May 14, 2021. Visit HomeSaverdc.org to apply.

DCHFA, DCHFA, Your Your Homeownership Homeownership Resource Resource in in the the District.

District.

DCHFA, Your Your Homeownership Homeownership Resource Resource in inthe theDistrict.

District.

DCHFA,

Do you need mortgage assistance due to the effects of COVID-19?

www.dchfa.org/homeownership

26 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

by pairing wispy, squiggly helices against a deep blue sky with a cluster of robust, orange leaves, put together in a satisfying triptych.

The images vary widely in size. Many are snapshot size, while others are 24 by 36 inches or larger, including the thematically appropriate image of a glitchy electronic sign for a middle school; its barely spelled out message lends the exhibit its title, “We miss you.” In one impressive arrangement, Jencso offers three similar but distinct images of a female figure in a clearing in the distance, gently lit in an Edenic garden.

Ultimately, though, despite such finely crafted individual images, We Miss You is best understood in its whole, as a near stream-ofconsciousness tide of imagery, rather than seen as individual parts.

The pacing of the exhibit is improvisational, with elliptical gaps, rather than regimented and regular. Doing it this way was smart: The weakest portions of the exhibit are the ones in which Jencso mushed a lot of similar images into closely packed grids, without breathing space.

These may have been intended to elucidate the psychic suffocation of quarantine, but they end up suggesting a kind of sensory overload that comes from being too close to other people, rather than being socially distanced. (Another nitpick: Jencso has mounted some of her images too high on the wall to see clearly, especially for those of us with aging eyesight.)

It’s also surprising and worth noting that, while the flow of images roughly documents a chronological year, the changing seasons play a minimal role as the works proceed from the start of the pandemic to the end. This only bolsters the notion of a messed up flow of time during the pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, and perhaps understandably, Jencso’s images become somewhat less absorbing as the pandemic year crawls to its end, and many become moodier and darker. But her final images include a series of seven photographs hung vertically in a row, each offering a black-and-white variation of dancing points of light on water.

Together, these seven at once communicate a sense of calm—and a dash of hope—that suggest that the lost year is finally morphing into something new, and more familiar. —Louis Jacobson 1353 U St. NW, Suite 101. (202) 332-1116. More information, including coronavirus safety measures, at hamiltonianartists.org. An artists’ talk (in person and streamed virtually) is scheduled for 7 p.m. on June 16.

DIVERSIONS CROSSWORD

Repeatedly

By Brendan Emmett Quigley

Across 1. Poking gadget 4. Most followed rapper on Instagram 9. Resolved to do 14. French royal 15. BP subsidiary 16. Audience participation moment 17. Host of the BBC’s World’s Craziest Fools 18. Weight around the middle 19. Highway through Fargo 20. “Sorry for hurting your feelings” 23. Lady’s name that means “wisdom” 24. English city where Olivia Colman was born 28. With 7-Down, musical intermission 29. Freedom of speech protector 32. New beginning 33. Maker of J’Adore perfume 34. Put out 35. Struck it rich 38. “Gee whillikers” 41. Grab the mic, say 42. Mic attachments, for short 45. Spam, e.g., to a Brit

48. It’s just a suggestion 49. Rat, to the heat 50. See 4-Down 51. Repeatedly, or if read a different way, a cryptic way of signaling a letter bank for the other theme answers 55. Action star Statham 58. Run-D.M.C. and Migos, e.g.

59. World’s wealthiest sports org. in terms of revenue 60. Protection in the sky 61. Cry for help 62. Interior designer’s selection 63. Dice 64. Big can 65. “Where ___ my glasses?”

Down 1. Fred who is the music director on Late Night with Seth Meyers 2. The absolute beginning 3. Attacked 4. With 50-Across, inspiration for the U.S. Constitution 5. “This guy, right

here” 6. Standard amount?

7. See 28-Across 8. Composer Strauss 9. Visibly uncomfortable 10. How latitudes run 11. Claws channel 12. “___: Intimations of Immortality” (Wordsworth poem) 13. Gramma 21. Chloé Zhao, e.g.: Abbr.

22. “I hear you,” in a gesture 25. Election winners 26. Fictional fed. agency on 24 27. Take off in a flash

29. Financial ___ 30. Springfield recipient of prank calls 31. Wipe the whiteboard 33. News story identifiers 35. talkinglikethisforalongtimesay 36. “Paper Planes” rapper 37. Safety’s takeaway: Abbr.

38. LA and MA: Abbr.

39. Search engine result 40. “He got ___ sideboard” (“Come Together” lyrics) 42. Omnivorous swimmer 43. Siding against some coats 44. Comic book writer who had cameos in many Marvel movies 46. Kinda stupid 47. Tryst 48. Witchy woman 50. Romance novelist McQuiston 52. The Ponte Amerigo Vespucci crosses it 53. Shaving mishap 54. Pineapple name 55. Puzzle maker, for yours truly 56. ___ dye 57. Mama’s boy

LAST CROSSWORD: A SHOW OF HANDS

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WATCH WHAT YOU WANT, WHEN YOU WANT IT. Food, sports, community, music, entertainment and culture—no matter what you’re in the mood for you can find it on Gather, an all-digital platform of virtual events, venues—and the best of DC-on demand.

Virtual Events & DC On-Demand GatherByEventsDC.com #GatherUpDC

28 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

CITY LIGHTS City Lights

Pride Month in D.C. doesn’t feel complete without a raucous parade. We were sadly not graced by the Capital Pride Parade’s presence in 2020, so now’s the time to make up for it (in a slightly modified fashion). This year, the Capital Pride Alliance will send the Colorful Pridemobile trolley to lead the parade around the city for the first time instead of the traditional parade. Individuals, organizations, and businesses will follow the trolley in various vehicles decked out in a bonanza of colors and signs to celebrate the local LGBTQ+ community.

The route of the parade has not been announced, but it will likely hit major city landmarks and main streets downtown.

The event will be preceded by a Pride Walk & Rally that starts at Dupont Circle at noon. During the parade, vehicles will be blaring music, and revelers are encouraged to watch and cheer as the caravan goes past. Don’t sweat the vagueness—it’s a parade; people will figure it out and have a good time, even if some of the vehicles are basically advertisements. (On that note, the unaffiliated “anti-capitalist, anti-gentrification, and anti-police” Dyke March, typically held the day before Capital Pride, returns this year on June 11 at 5 p.m., if that’s more your speed.) The parade runs from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on June 12. Route will be posted in advance of the event at capitalpride.org. Free.

—Tristan Jung

City Lights

Arts in Foggy Bottom Lovers of public art can now add Arts in Foggy Bottom to their list. Arts in Foggy Bottom has occurred biennially since 2008, until the 2020 exhibition was postponed due to the coronavirus lockdown. After weathering that storm, it returns this year with an outdoor sculpture exhibit called HUMAN/NATURE. The show features “artists, residents, and visitors in conversation about life,” according to curator Kayleigh BryantGreenwell. She tells City Paper that she was compelled by the rollbacks of environmental regulations and a slew of natural disasters worsened by climate change to take action. Some of the artworks share that urgent tone, while others celebrate the positive connection humans have with our environment. The entire collection is incredibly diverse, from a memorial bench and solar powered lights to metalworks and a wall of sticks.

Bryant-Greenwell deliberately wanted to include works that are “unconventional” among outdoor sculpture, including 2D and text-based art. To visit all 13 artworks, visitors can follow the map on Arts in Foggy Bottom’s website, which is crucial to avoid missing the more understated pieces. Each piece has QR codes that connect visitors to a guided tour displaying the artists’ bios and statements. The sculptures are located in front of various row houses in historic Foggy Bottom, so visiting them requires a lovely walk through the charming area between the George Washington University, the Watergate building, and Georgetown. The exhibition runs to September 26 between 24th and 26th Streets NW and H and K Streets NW. Information is available at artsinfoggybottom.com. Free.

—Sarah Orozco

Darrow Montgomery/File

Colorful Pridemobile Parade

City Lights

City Lights

These days, it seems natural that D.C. is considered a cradle of hardcore punk. But in the late ’70s, the days of Jimmy Carter and the Allman Brothers, the District was the last place anyone would expect to produce a hard-edged alternative to the self-destructive punk of London and New York. James June Schneider, Paul Bishow, and Sam Lavine’s Punk the Capital aims to tell the unlikely story of how the D.C. hardcore scene came to be, with the help of standard bearers such as Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat), Henry Rollins (S.O.A.), and HR (Bad Brains). The doc is loaded with footage of half-forgotten bands such as the Enzymes and the Slickee Boys, and interviews with zine publishers and record store owners who made up the scene’s backbone. Thanks to the D.C. scene’s mania for documentation and archiving, Punk the Capital also has the means to dive into lesser-known chapters in hardcore history, including the brief punk-yippie alliance of the late ’70s and the moment D.C. hardcore nearly sputtered out of existence—surviving, in part, by finding a new haven at the original Madam’s Organ. Punk the Capital was first screened as a road show, DIY style, but now it’s coming to BluRay and DVD with hours of extra footage. Copies will be available at local record stores and online starting on June 12, Record Store Day, and a portion of the proceeds will go to We Are Family, a local charity that provides housing advocacy and grocery delivery to seniors. The Blu-Ray and DVD copies are available June 12. Information is available at punkthecapital.info. $18–$23.

—Will Lennon

Raise your hand if you’ve ever told a stranger you’re from a wellknown city rather than the suburb you actually call home. It just feels easier, right? But maybe it’s more than that. A new Art Enables exhibit, “Actually, I’m from the suburbs; I just say DC because it’s easier” by Aaron Maier-Carretero, explores what it means to be from the suburbs, the pinnacle of the “American Dream.” He asks, is it uncomfortable to be associated with a “generic” place? And how does suburban culture shape us as individuals, when the culture itself is often shaped by racism, sexism, hidden violence, and dysfunction? Maier-Carretero’s exhibit explores the love and tension found in a suburban family home. The installation combines actual pieces of furniture and other physical elements of a suburban house with illustrated flat-surfaced art. In his piece “Waltzing with Bears,” a father and son embrace each other in the child’s dark bedroom, while light illuminates where the door has been punched in. Art Enables resident artists Michael Haynes, Paul Lewis, Raymond Lewis, Max Poznerzon, and Nonja Tiller all contribute their own interpretations of what it means to be from the suburbs.

In one area of the installation, an actual kitchen table is surrounded by drawn windows by Tiller, an illustrated clock by Raymond Lewis, and paintings of families titled “breakfast” and “not in front of the kids” by Maier-Carretero. The exhibition runs through June 19 at Art Enables, 2204 Rhode Island Ave. NE. Online exhibition and coronavirus safety measures are available at art-enables.org. Free.

—Julie Gallagher

Punk the Capital: Building a Sound Movement, Washington, D.C. 1976–1983

“Actually, I’m from the suburbs; I just say DC because it’s easier”

WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 2021 29

DIVERSIONS SAVAGE LOVE

Washington City Paper Classifieds have connected Washingtonians since 1981.

Visit classifieds. washingtoncity paper.com to book your ad today.

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

I’ve been living with my boyfriend for a year. We met on FetLife and I was honest about being in an open relationship (at the time) and seeking a sexual connection over a relationship. But one nut after another and pretty soon we were professing our love for each other and he shared that he wanted to be the father of my children. However, right before he moved in, I found out he was still texting other women despite asking me not to text, sext, or have sex with any other men. He also regularly “yucks my yum,” makes fun of the types of porn I watch and calls it “gross” (my thing for cuckolding being his main target), and insists men can’t be friends with women, yet he’s still friends with women he’s had sex with. He hides the fact that he is masturbating from me but expects to participate in all my masturbation sessions. He claims we have no sexual secrets but I snooped and learned he was looking at porn with terms like TS, Sissy, Gay, and BBW Black. It makes me feel small because of the nagging feeling I may not be his cup of tea since he hides these other interests from me while not allowing me to hide anything from him.

I also worry that his “affection” for my Black BBW ass may be no different than his objectification of trans women. He says he doesn’t want to “burden” me with “rapey” sex play but I am open to sex of all kinds, not just the soft-core porn kind, so long as he doesn’t start by rubbing my boobs like they’re doorknobs. I am at my wits’ end. I already emailed an LGBTQIA+ friendly couples counselor because we are both scared the relationship will end. But I can’t keep turning a blind eye to his half-truths, double standards, and hypocrisy.

—Feeling Extremely Tense BREAK UP. This guy sounds like equal parts asshole and mess. And he needs to work on that—he needs to clean up his mess—on his own. You can’t do the work for him, FET, and I would urge you to resist the urge to use the relationship as leverage. Because by staying in this relationship despite his half-truths, his double standards, and his hypocrisies—by sticking around to be shamed and manipulated— you’re sending him a message that says, “It’s fine, you’re fine, we’re fine.” Perhaps I shouldn’t say, “You’re sending him a message,” because this shit isn’t your fault, FET. But he will self-servingly interpret your willingness to stay and work on the relationship— as if the relationship is the problem here—as proof that he doesn’t need to do something about his own shit. He will assume he can continue to get away with being a controlling, manipulative, and sex-shaming asshole because he’s getting away with it.

When your current boyfriend “yucks your yum,” when he says the porn you like is gross, he’s projecting the shame he feels about all the nonnormative (but perfectly wonderful) stuff that turns him on. When someone vomits their shame all over you, FET, getting yourself out of vomit range is your best option. And for the record, I don’t think your boyfriend is a mess because he’s interested in more kinds of sex than he admits or more types of women than just your type or dudes or power games that touch on gender roles

30 JUNE 2021 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM

and/or taboos. And the fact that he’s hiding his attraction to trans women from you isn’t by itself proof that he objectifies trans women, FET, or that he’s objectifying you. You don’t know how he would interact (or how he has interacted) with a trans partner. What you do know is he treats you like shit and makes you feel bad about yourself and demands transparency from you without being transparent in return. DTMFA. —Dan Savage P.S. Please don’t let his shitty comments about your turn-ons lead you to doubt your desirability—just the fact that you’re into cuckolding makes you something of a prize, FET, as

“Because by staying in this relationship despite his halftruths, his double standards, and his hypocrisies—by sticking around to be shamed and manipulated—you’re sending him a message that says, ‘It’s fine, you’re fine, we’re fine.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t say, ‘You’re sending him a message,’ because this shit isn’t your fault, FET.” there are easily a hundred times more men into cuckolding as there are women. It wouldn’t take you long to replace a guy who shames you for being into cuckolding with a guy who absolutely worships you for it.

P.P.S. I don’t think you had grounds to snoop, FET, or a need to snoop. You knew everything you needed to know about this guy before you found his secret undeleted browser history.

Insisting you cut your male friends and exes out of your life was reason enough to end this relationship.

I’m an out 26-year-old gay man with a 30-yearold boyfriend who is not out. That’s fine.

Everyone gets to come out at their own pace.

We have been together for three years and lived together for two, which is also fine. I like living

with him. But he “ jokingly” calls me his “ faggy roommate” and sometimes puts me down about being gay when we are around mutual friends so people won’t think he’s gay.

—Just Over Keeping Everything Secret NO. Everyone gets to come out at their own pace—sure, OK, I guess, whatever. But closeted adult gay men don’t get to heap insults on their out gay sex partners in order to throw mutuals off the scent. (The scent of cock on their breath.) Unless you get off on this treatment and wrote in to brag (not a single question mark detected in your email), JOKES, you need to DTMFCCA. (“Dump the motherfucking closet case already.”)

—DS I’m a fit and healthy 66-year-old woman. (Vegan 53 years and I’ve never been sick a day in my life!)

I’ve been told I look 40ish—so not too bad! I was married for 20 years and then sat on the bench without so much as one date for 18 years because I was a hardworking single mom of three kids.

So I meet a guy about six years ago. I was dating around a bit at the time and figured he was too. Well, I later found out he had me “checked out and followed” and even hacked my computer, where he found a couple of sexy emails to another guy. We were not exclusive at the time and years later—six years later—he throws the details of one particular email I sent to another in my face every chance he gets. He actually told me he was dating other women when we first met. Of course he was! No big deal at all but it irks me that he hired someone to follow my every move! (He even accused me of getting paid for sex and says he had proof! Totally false!) Now we are engaged and I am holding back from marrying him. Otherwise he is good to me. What’s the deal here?

—Engaged Dame Grows Edgy RUN. This is emotional abuse—hurling that none-of-his-business email in your face every chance he gets—and it’s gonna get worse if you marry him. This kind of shit always gets worse after the wedding, e.g., it gets worse once getting away from someone like this requires lawyers and court dates. DTMFA. There’s a huge difference between the kind of lapse in judgment that might prompt someone to snoop and hiring a private investigator to track someone’s movements. Someone who would do that— someone who would essentially outsource stalking you—isn’t a person you’re obligated to break up with face-to-face or sit down with to give them “closure.” Prioritize your safety, EDGE. A text message and a block are all the closure he needs and far more consideration than he deserves.

—DS P.S. Veganism is healthy and an all plant diet is good for the planet. And it’s wonderful that you haven’t been sick a day in your life! But we’re all going to die—it’s just that some of us are going to die with a slice of cheese pizza in our greasy hands.

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

CLASSIFIEDS Legal EARLY CHILDHOOD ACADEMY PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL, INC NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT AppleTree Institute Early Childhood Academy Public Charter School (ECA) intends to enter into a sole source contract with AppleTree Institute of Washington, DC. AppleTree Institute for Education Innovation (AppleTree) is a non-profit organization consisting of a research institute and a network of exemplary charter preschools in Washington, DC working at the intersection of research, policy, and practice. ECA seeks to contract with AppleTree to purchase products and services provided by AppleTree including Every Child Ready Curriculum, CLASS observations, and leader and teacher coaching services. AppleTree will provide instructional support to leaders and teachers on what to teach, how to teach and how to tell if it is being done effectively. For further information regarding this notice, please contact Wendy Edwards at wedwards@ecapcs.org.

TWO RIVERS PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS Payroll Processing and HRMS Services Two Rivers is seeking to procure a vendor to provide Payroll Processing and HRMS Services.

To request a copy of the RFP, please email Mary Gornick at procurement@ tworiverspcs.org.

INGENUITY PREP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT KIPP DC Ingenuity Prep Public Charter School intends to enter a sole source contract with KIPP DC for alumni of its Capital Residency to be placed within the school. The Residency program is committed to empowering students and increasing their access to quality education opportunities in Washington, DC by creating a talent pipeline of highly qualified teachers, retaining highly effective teachers for DC public schools and public charter schools, and shaping high-quality teacher preparation programs nationally.

* Ingenuity Prep constitutes the sole source for KIPP DC for teacher placements is intended to increase student access to quality education opportunities in Washington, DC. * For further information regarding this notice contact bids@ingenuityprep. org no later than 4:00 pm Tuesday, June 22, 2021.

BRIDGES PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT Bridges Public Charter School intends to enter into a sole source contract with Learning Sciences International for professional development training for teachers within the school. These consultants are serving as effective training assistants specifically equipped to promote educational achievement. * Bridges Public Charter School establishes the sole source with Learning Sciences intended for maximizing high student growth and teacher growth. * For further information regarding this notice, contact bids@bridgespcs. org no later than 4:00 pm Monday, June 21, 2021.

INVITATION FOR BID FOOD SERVICE MANAGEMENT SERVICES Digital Pioneer Academy Public Charter School Digital Pioneer Academy Public Charter School is advertising the opportunity to bid on the delivery of breakfast, lunch, snack and/or supper meals to children enrolled at 2 schools for the 2021-2022 school year with a possible extension of (4) one-year renewals. All meals must meet at a minimum, but are not restricted to, the USDA National School Breakfast, Lunch, Afterschool Snack and AtRisk Supper meal pattern requirements. Additional specifications outlined in the Invitation for Bid (IFB) such as; student data, days of service, meal quality, etc. may be obtained beginning on June 11, 2021 bids@digitalpioneersacademy.org Proposals will be accepted at 709 12th St SE, Washington, DC 20003, not later than 3 PM on July 1st.

All bids not addressing all areas as outlined in the IFB will not be considered.

INGENUITY PREP PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE OF INTENT TO ENTER A SOLE SOURCE CONTRACT Teach for America Ingenuity Prep Public Charter School intends to enter a sole source contract with Teach for America (TFA) for Corps members to be placed within the school. These teachers are committed to closing the achievement gap by serving as effective classrooms teachers specifically equipped to enhance student achievement. * Ingenuity Prep constitutes the sole source for Teach for America for teaching services will lead to student achievement. * For further information regarding this notice contact bids@ingenuityprep. org no later than 4:00 pm Tuesday, June 22, 2021.

DIGITAL PIONEERS ACADEMY PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE: FOR PROPOSALS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SERVICES Digital Pioneers Academy Public Charter School in accordance with section 2204(c) of the District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 solicits proposals for SY21-22 * Professional Development Services Proposals should be submitted in PDF format and for any further information regarding this notice at bids@digitalpioneersacademy.org no later than 4:00 pm Tuesday, June 21, 2021.

MUNDO VERDE PCS SEEKS BIDS FOR LEGAL SERVICES and Student Support Services: Occupational Therapy, Educational Psychologist, Behavior Support Services. Providers who can conduct comprehensive evaluation services for current special education students or students who may need special education services at Home/Hospital Teachers. The RFP with bidding requirements and supporting documentation can be obtained by contacting Rocio Yoc at ryoc@ mundoverdepcs.org or calling 202-750-7060. All bids not addressing all areas as outlined in the RFP will not be considered.

The deadline for application submission is 3 pm on Wednesday, June 25, 2021.

For further information regarding this notice contact Rocio Yoc at ryoc@ mundoverdepcs.org.

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SUBCONTRACTING OPPORTUNITY FOR CERTIFIED MBEs and WBEs with Fort Myer Construction for DC Water solicitation #DCW-SOL-21-10073 Public Space Restoration.

Work includes permanent restoration of all paved and non-paved surfaces in various locations throughout Washington, DC. Quotes due: 6/17/21. For more info, contact Estimating: estimating@fortmyer. com or call 202.636.9535 extension 2812.

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WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM JUNE 11, 2021 31

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