Washington City Paper (September 13, 2019)

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

FREE VOLUME 39, NO. 37 WASHINGTONCITYPAPER.COM SEPT. 13-19, 2019

YOU ARE

FALL AR TS GUIDE INSIDE

SO D.C. IF...

More than 500 readers filled in the blank to complete this sentence. Your answers revealed strong feelings on scooters, old downtown stores, and the term “NoMa.” P.14

A WHITE ELEPHANT STALKS DUPONT CIRCLE Amid the Hosannas cele-

WHICH DO YOU PREFER?

control and “market rate rent-

brating the new St. Thomas

als” are an “Unholy Trinity” writ

Episcopal Church, a few reality

large in the St. Thomas devel-

checks are in order. Although a

opment, rendering it totally

brightly lit, rather garish cross

out of sync with the Saint’s

shines from its top floor, noth-

name attached to it.

ing below it resembles a church.

Greedy landlords and re-

On the other hand, odd crosses

altors would like to convert

seem to abound in the area.

the entire city into an “instant

The nearby Scientology Center,

Georgetown.”

which bills itself a church after

“market rate” overlooks the

inscribing a cross on its front

fact that the market has be-

door, resembles a church about

come a casino, and the land-

as much as a horse chestnut re-

lords are breaking the Bank at

sembles a chestnut horse.

Monte Carlo. Housing is not a

The massive St. Thomas’s Church development is overwhelming. Its size and design are

BEFORE

AFTER

ST. THOMAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH DUPONT CIRCLE

Their

tocsin

commodity, however. We are not talking about gold bullion, oil futures or pork bellies,

very disruptive, as if a large chunk of Rockefeller Center was air lifted

we are talking about the roof over people’s heads, key for urban

and dropped into to an architecturally graceful low-rise neighbor-

survival. DC’s “money market” offers a welcome mat for the rich

hood. Architectural crowding is now preeminent there. The church

and an exit sign for the poor.

inside that mass of concrete and glass is so nondescript, its mission

Looking at the St. Thomas development through a remarkable

requires an act of faith (no pun). Its genesis by church authorities is

pair of glasses, the distinguished retired Bishop of New Hampshire

a prime example of “edifice complex.”

saw an “Elysium Field” where others see only concrete and glass.

Most troubling here is its luxury housing, highlighting the grow-

There are many “Elysium Fields” in New Hampshire, of course, but

ing crisis of affordable housing in DC. This complex resembles the

few in Dupont Circle alas. The St. Thomas development offers wor-

“exclusivity” and “elitism” of high-end housing typically found in

ship, not of the Almighty but of the almighty dollar. In this city, there

Boca Raton, Southampton and Palm Springs. A new church so en-

is a constant call for affordable housing but there is no affordable

twined with such wealth is deeply compromised insofar as spiritual

housing, and certainly none here. The Episcopals have gained a

messaging is concerned. Gentrification, the tragic dilution of rent

mega building, but have suffered a significant loss of “soul.”

TENACDC@YAHOO.COM (202) 288-1921 @TENACDC

2 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Jim McGrath

INSIDE

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COVER STORY: YOU ARE SO D.C. IF...

14 Go-Go, Woodies, scooters, and other winning entries from our fill-in-the-blank contest

DISTRICT LINE 4 Loose Lips: Advisory neighborhood commissioners in Dupont Circle face off over a questionable retweet.

6 Hanging the Jury: More D.C. criminal defendants deserve the right to a jury trial, according to one powerful judge.

10 Mumble Sauce: Wigs help one local woman build different identities and layers of protection.

SPORTS 12 Punts Return: After a season without football, Bladensburg High School welcomes its return.

FOOD 24 Change Tune: Bartenders at the area’s karaoke bars spill on customers’ singing skills.

ARTS 26 Arts Education: What to expect from the Middle East Institute’s new art gallery 28 Theater: Ritzel on Studio Theatre’s Doubt: A Parable and Folger Theatre’s 1 Henry IV 29 Curtain Calls: Thal on Theater J’s Love Sick 30 Short Subjects: Zilberman on The Goldfinch

CITY LIST 33 Music 35 Theater 35 Film

DIVERSIONS 36 36 37 38

Scene and Heard Crossword Savage Love Classifieds

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by Emma Sarappo

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DISTRICTLINE LOOSE LIPS

Retweet Offender

A litigious Dupont neighborhood commissioner launches a campaign complaint over a tagged Twitter photo.

Ed Hanlon is at it again. Dupont’s litigious advisory neighborhood commissioner, deck hater, and reformed Hummer driver has filed a complaint with the Office of Campaign Finance, alleging that his own ANC’s Twitter account has violated a D.C. law against mixing government resources and campaign activity.

Specifically, Hanlon, who is the commissioner for single member district 2B09, has taken issue with a retweet of a photo of the 17th Street Festival from ANC2B’s official account. The commissioners mentioned in Hanlon’s complaint have reacted with a collective eye roll. Hanlon has previously been ordered by a judge to pay thousands after filing a frivolous lawsuit in a dispute over his neighbors’ deck. He’s appealing the decision.

The original tweet came from Hanlon’s fellow ANC Aaron Landry, who represents single member district 2B04. In the photo, Landry tagged Patrick Kennedy, one of the five candidates looking to unseat embattled Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans. Kennedy is also an ANC, representing single member district 2A01.

“I love the 17th Street Festival,” reads Landry’s caption above the photo that mostly shows the backs of festival-goers’ heads and booths lining 17th Street NW. Kennedy can be seen standing outside his campaign booth shaking hands with an attendee in a yellow shirt. Ward 2 candidate Daniel Hernandez is also in the photo, but he is not tagged.

By retweeting Landry’s photo showing a campaigning Kennedy, Hanlon argues in his complaint, ANC 2B’s official Twitter account is illegally supporting Kennedy. Hanlon also claims that tagging the Dupont Circle Main Streets’ Twitter account, causing the organization’s name to appear alongside Kennedy’s, makes it appear as if that organization supports Kennedy’s election.

Hanlon has another issue with a different photo tweeted by the ANC 2B account showing its commissioners Randy Downs, Daniel Warwick, and Landry at the ANC’s official 17th Street Festival booth.

“ANC 2B’s official government owned Twitter page should be used only for official communications, such as, posting ANC Agendas,

Photo courtesy Aaron Landry

By Mitch Ryals

“I love the 17th Street Festival,” Aaron Landry tweeted with the offensive photo. meeting notices, official government advisories to citizens on traffic, schools, weather, etc.,” Hanlon writes.

Hanlon requests that any OCF investigation “look into whether or not there may also have been any attempt at the harvesting of data from ANC 2B’s official government Twitter account.”

Landry, who unseated former commissioner and Hanlon ally Nick DelleDonne and currently serves as 2B’s secretary, says Hanlon’s complaint is politically motivated.

“It’s a stretch,” he says of the complaint. “And we’re of the position that we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Landry provided a link to a photo posted to Facebook of Hanlon and DelleDonne dining with a different Ward 2 candidate, John Fanning.

On Aug. 23, the day after the Facebook photo was posted, Hanlon posted to a Dupont listserv railing against a proposed bike lane on 17th Street NW, which Warwick, Downs, and Landry support. The three of them, along with several other Ward 2 ANCs, have endorsed Kennedy.

“Why are Kennedy’s supporters doing this?

WHAT WILL A TWO WAY PROTECTED BIKE LANE MEAN?” Hanlon asks in his listserv post. “It is the bike lobby’s dream - to create a bike thoroughfare thru the middle of our small neighborhood, not to shop in our neighborhood, not to enhance and enjoy our neigh-

4 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

borhood, but to ride as fast as possible thru our neighborhood. A highway for bikes and electric scooters. The bollards used to establish these protected bike lanes will make it impossible for this valuable space to be used for anything else, even in inclement weather when cyclists are not using the lanes.”

Hanlon writes that the bike lane “will be dangerous to pedestrians, pet owners and the elderly in our neighborhood,” and that “shopping on 17th Street will become a contact sport.”

He claims that Warwick, Downs, and Landry resurrected the bike lane debate, which was tabled during an ANC meeting last summer, shortly before the 17th Street Festival, and planned to use the debate as a tactic to “lock up the bike lobby for Patrick Kennedy.”

Warwick and Landry say they haven’t discussed the 17th Street NW bike lane in months.

And Downs’ Twitter feed is a constant stream of safe-street content.

“I think [Hanlon’s] making it up,” Landry says.

Fanning, for his part, says he talked with Hanlon about the complaint, but does not believe it was politically motivated.

“As a resident and member of the commission, whether he was supporting me or the other four [Ward 2 candidates], I think he would have filed the complaint anyway,” Fanning says. “We had a conversation about him possibly supporting me, and he said he was interested in doing

that. And of course I said ‘great,’ but he hasn’t shown up or done any work for the campaign.”

Hanlon has donated to Fanning, and says he also thinks Hernandez is an attractive candidate.

“This is about right and wrong,” Hanlon says of his motivations. “It’s not about which of the candidates it is. It’s always wrong.”

Kennedy distanced himself from the complaint and the tweet, noting that he has no control over another ANC’s social media posts.

“I think it’s clearly a bank shot at me,” Kennedy says. “It seems to be a rather frivolous complaint.”

Kerry Bedard, who says she’s lived in Dupont for the past 30 years, responded to LL’s email to a listserv to express her disgust with the potentially offensive retweet as well as the ANC’s support for bike lanes on 21st Street NW and 17th Street NW. “I think they should all be made to resign, and there should be a new ANC,” Bedard says in a phone conversation. “None of them are my commissioner. Ed Hanlon is the only one I support, the only one with any rationale.”

In an email to Hanlon, OCF General Counsel William Sanford confirms that his office will investigate.

Warwick, the ANC 2B chair, separately asked the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability for an opinion. BEGA attorney Sonya King wrote in an email that she’s reviewed the post but BEGA won’t take any action. She provided a link to BEGA’s advisory opinion on social media use for District government employees, which says “an official social media account must be used for official agency business only.”

Warwick, during a phone call with LL, also pointed to several examples of links between District government Twitter accounts and accounts for elected officials currently running for office. In one example, the District Department of Transportation retweeted a photo in mid-August that tags Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, though the photo does not show White actively campaigning.

Warwick adds that Hanlon often doesn’t play nice with other commissioners and suggests that this complaint is another example of his ineffectiveness as a commissioner.

“We have a commissioner who is constantly out to get the commission and not to make our recommendations to D.C. government agencies better,” Warwick says. “Which is the whole point of having an advisory neighborhood commission.”

Hanlon acknowledges the difficulty, but contends that most residents agree with his positions.

“I believe what I’m doing is principled and important,” he says.

CP

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washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 5

DISTRICTLINE

Hanging the Jury

Darrow Montgomery

D.C. laws strip thousands of criminal defendants of their right to a jury trial. Judge Eric Washington has suggested that should change.

By Joshua Kaplan Last June, wrestLing with one of the stranger aspects of D.C.’s criminal justice system, one of the city’s most powerful judges made an unusual move: He suggested that the D.C. Council perhaps made the wrong call. His concern was that in the vast majority of states, anyone who’s facing jail time has the right to a jury trial, in order to ensure that all convictions are as fair as possible. But thanks to a pair of largely forgotten laws the Council passed in the 1990s, most defendants in the District don’t have any right to be tried by a jury. In 2018, more than 98 percent of misdemeanor trials in the District were bench trials, meaning a judge made the decision and no jury was involved.

In his concurring opinion in the June 2018 D.C. Court of Appeals decision Bado v. U.S., Bill Clinton-appointed Judge Eric Washington bemoaned this state of affairs. Going to jail for even a few months, he explained, can be life-shattering. People lose their jobs.

They lose their apartments. They lose custody of their children. A criminal record can make future employers turn their noses up, and if someone’s already on probation, one

“short” sentence generally translates into a second, longer one. “Most states recognize that a jury trial in criminal cases is critically important because of the stigma that accompanies a criminal conviction,” Washington wrote, “and many of those states accept the fact that any period of incarceration, no matter how short, can have a devastating impact on one’s life and livelihood.”

So Washington suggested a solution: The D.C. Council could reverse its decision and extend jury rights to all criminal defendants.

And recently, the Council has actually taken steps in that direction, in small and piecemeal ways. In March 2016, for instance, the Council unanimously passed the NEAR Act, a major criminal justice bill, whose numerous reforms included guaranteeing jury trials when someone is charged with misdemeanor assault on a police officer.

Absent comprehensive reform, though, the Council has left the door open for clever prosecutors to take those jury rights back from defendants. In the past few years, the Court of Appeals greenlit a playbook of prosecutorial tactics that avoid jury trials for many charges—including assault on a police officer—

6 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

where the Council gave that right back to the people. And the frequency with which prosecutors use these tactics is startling. Reviewing more than 500 cases from 2019, City Paper found that over the course of one month, prosecutors dodged jury trials more than 24 times a week by taking a crime that is jury-demandable and charging it as another, counterintuitive crime that’s not.

Paul Zukerberg, who’s practiced criminal law in D.C. since 1985, tells City Paper that the District’s blasé attitude toward jury trials permanently transformed the face of the city, since fewer jury trials means D.C. can lock up more people, faster. “D.C. has been at the cutting edge of taking away jury trials right from the get-go,” says Christopher Warnock, who was a criminal defense attorney in D.C. for 25 years. “It’s the difference between winning and losing. They talk about a bench trial as being a slow plea.” america went to war over jury trials once.

For the founding fathers, juries were a source of passion. In 1774, John Adams wrote, “Representative government [i.e. voting] and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty.” And

when they spelled out their grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, “depriving us … of Trial by Jury” made the list. So when the nation’s founders emerged from their revolution victorious, they enshrined the right to juries in the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

But in 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Sixth Amendment a major caveat. The Court had already decided in 1968 that the right to a jury only applies to “serious” crimes, and in Baldwin v. U.S., they defined what it means for a crime to be serious: The right only applies if the maximum possible sentence is longer than six months.

“As soon as civil rights kicked in, they started taking away juries,” Warnock says. “As soon as you got women and African Americans on juries, they started taking away juries’ power.”

However, Baldwin didn’t require states to strip any defendants of their Sixth Amendment rights. It only meant states were allowed to do so. And in D.C., Baldwin didn’t become doctrine until 1993, when the Council passed the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Reform Amendment Act. That law set the threshold that remains to this day: Criminal defendants are only entitled to a jury trial if they face more than 180 days of imprisonment or a fine greater than $1,000.

Then the following year, having pushed the Sixth Amendment back on its heels, the Council landed the knockout blow. For more than 40 misdemeanor crimes, the Misdemeanor Streamlining Act (MSA) reduced the maximum penalty to 180 days of imprisonment— abolishing the right to jury trials for almost all misdemeanors in D.C., including theft, simple assault, and drug possession. The War on Drugs was in full throttle, and at the time, a spike in arrests was flooding the court system. (In 1993, the Superior Court had over 43,000 criminal cases, nearly twice as many as in 2018.) The idea behind the MSA was to “streamline” the process: Since jury trials take longer, taking away defendants’ jury rights could speed the whole system up.

But while the Council’s goal may have been efficiency, the effect on imprisonment rates was immediate and monumental. At the time, according to a report by the Court’s executive officer, Superior Court judges were almost twice as likely as a jury to decide that someone was guilty—so reducing jury trials made the conviction rate skyrocket. For misdemeanors, the year prior to the MSA, only 46 percent of cases ended with a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. The year after, that number jumped to 64 percent.

This wasn’t exactly an unexpected consequence. Several councilmembers were sure to clarify that despite reducing criminal penalties, the MSA was tough on crime. Even

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 7

DISTRICTLINE There are sTill very common misdemeanors like threats and weapon possession, however, where the Council didn’t strip defendants of their right to a jury trial. Nevertheless, prosecutors seem to have figured out ways to finish the job. The story behind one landmark case starts in family court on June 14, 2012.

Richard Jones was there because he wanted to be able to visit his daughter without being supervised. His daughter’s court-appointed attorney, Dennis Eshman, said he shouldn’t be

more, Eshman, Morin, and Eshman’s lawyer were all white, and Jones, Jones’ lawyer, and their witness were all black. “You can’t really be fair because you’re not a robot… I cannot believe I went through all that for a comment I made in a normal tone of voice,” Jones says. “This is no toy. This is peoples’ lives. Do you know how hard it is to get your life back together when they have you locked up for something frivolous?”

Jones appealed, with the argument that it

Darrow Montgomery

though the maximum sentence for most of these crimes used to be one year, the actual sentence was already generally less than 180 days. Thus, explained Harold Brazil—thenWard 6 councilmember and one of the Act’s co-sponsors—the MSA would mean “misdemeanants would actually do more time.”

“Crime in our society…[is] out of control,” Brazil argued at a Council hearing on April 12, 1994. “Years and years of leniency and looking the other way and letting the criminal go has gotten us into this predicament.”

His bill passed. But in the end, even Brazil didn’t escape the machine he helped set in motion. On May 1, 2009, he was convicted of assaulting the manager of Jinx Proof, a tattoo parlor in Georgetown. Brazil couldn’t have a jury trial, because of the Streamlining Act. While he didn’t respond to City Paper’s calls or emails, Brazil did talk to the Washington Post back in 2009. He maintained his innocence to them and complained about the judge who sentenced him. “I’m incredulous that she found them more credible than me,” he told the Post. He then added he wished his case had a jury trial instead.

Many in Brazil’s position have felt the same way. “The Judge may be older,” explains Arthur Spitzer, who’s been ACLU-DC’s legal director since 1980. “Come from a different race or ethnicity. Live in a different part of town. And may have less empathy, perhaps, for the situation.”

How much of a difference that makes may depend on the nature of the crime. In a city where marijuana is decriminalized and a pending bill would do the same for sex work, City Paper found that drug crimes and sex work are some of the most common offenses bringing people to Superior Court. We reviewed all misdemeanor cases filed in January 2019 (far enough back that most of the cases are already disposed), and found 56 people charged with drug possession, 29 with selling weed, and 82 with sexual solicitation (more than two sex work charges per day). None of those misdemeanors are jury-demandable in the District.

But it’s not just that a judge potentially could view those crimes differently than 12 random D.C. citizens would. A judge, for instance, might think it’s absurd to arrest teenagers for selling dime bags while marijuana dispensaries rake in millions. However, compared to a jury, there’s a lot less that judge could do about it. “If one or more members of the jury think [something] shouldn’t be a crime anymore— say, for drug possession—they may not convict,” Spitzer explains. “A judge pretty much can’t do that. A judge is supposed to follow the law. By law, a judge can’t say, ‘I think, beyond a reasonable doubt, you did this, but I’m going to let you off because I don’t think you deserve to be punished.’ And a jury can.”

“This is no toy. This is peoples’ lives. Do you know how hard it is to get your life back together when they have you locked up for something frivolous?” allowed to, and the judge sided with Eshman.

After the hearing, Jones approached the attorney in the hallway. He’d already filed two bar complaints against Eshman, and that day, he was angry. According to Eshman’s later testimony, Jones told him “in pretty close to a normal tone of voice,” “I’m going to smack the shit out of you.”

Jones was arrested and charged with making a “threat to do bodily harm,” punishable by up to six months imprisonment, and thus jury-demandable. However, moments before the trial commenced, prosecutors switched up the crime: Instead, they’d charge him with “attempted threat.” Since attempting most crimes in D.C. has a max sentence of 180 days—just a few days shorter than six months—this meant a jury was off the table.

Judge Robert Morin heard the case in February 2013, and convicted Jones.

Jones tells City Paper he thinks a jury trial might have had a different result. After all, he says, Eshman is an attorney who’d appeared before Morin in an official capacity. Further-

8 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

makes no sense to say someone “attempted” to threaten someone—it’s not as if he stuttered—and that the prosecutors did that just to deprive him of his constitutional rights. But on September 17, 2015, the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected Jones’ plea.

Today, charging jury-demandable crimes as “attempted” crimes is a well worn tool in the prosecutor’s tool belt. At least 52 people were charged with “attempted threats” in January alone. Another 17 were charged with “attempted possession of a prohibited weapon” (although in every case City Paper examined, the defendant was completely successful in “possessing” whatever weapon they were arrested for).

The Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s technically legal for prosecutors to modify charges in ways that avoid jury trials—even when for that particular offense, the Council wrote the law with the “unambiguous intent” to have those crimes tried by a jury. Perhaps the most important example is misdemeanor assault on a police officer (APO), whose sen-

tence the NEAR Act increased by a few days, from 180 days to 6 months.

Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, who wrote the NEAR Act, tells City Paper that the goal was to make the crime jury-demandable. “The data really showed that the [U.S. Attorney’s Office] was using the charge of APO almost three times as much as cities of a similar size,” he says. “And the disparity was clearly being felt in communities of color.”

But today, when someone is arrested for assaulting a police officer, prosecutors frequently end up charging them with “simple assault” instead, which has a maximum sentence of 180 days. City Paper found 29 instances of this in January alone, roughly one per day. The allegations ranged from punching an officer, to spitting on their legs, to one man who was pointing his cellphone flashlight at an officer and slapped his hand away when he reached out toward his phone.

Councilmember Charles Allen, chair of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, says he doesn’t know prosecutors’ motivations when they decide how to charge these cases.

However, “if prosecutors’ tactic is to avoid juries but get the same outcome,” he says, “then I absolutely think that defies Council’s intent.” in Bado v. U.S., the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that if a defendant faces deportation because of a crime they’re accused of, they have the right to a jury trial even if the sentence is short. But in his concurring opinion, Judge Washington wrote that this raises a problem, because even when deportation isn’t at stake, the consequences of a “short” sentence can be “devastating.” Legal precedent means it’d be difficult for the Court of Appeals to resolve this conundrum on its own, he explained, but one body could solve the problem with snap of its fingers: the D.C. Council.

“The Council could reconsider its decision to value judicial economy above the right to a jury trial,” Washington wrote. Giving all defendants the right to a jury trial, like most states do, “could have the salutary effect of elevating the public’s trust and confidence that the government is more concerned with courts protecting individual rights and freedoms than in ensuring that courts are as efficient as possible in bringing defendants to trial.”

Allen says this certainly is worth considering, but that if it slowed the courts down, it could potentially have negative consequences like increasing how long people stay in jail before their trial. “That’s a very complex issue we’d have to have deeper conversations with the courts regarding,” he explains.

Spitzer thinks that Council should make the leap. If efficiency is a concern, he says, “a better way to do it would be to hire more judges if you need them. Or stop arresting so many people for minor crimes.”

CP

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 9

DISTRICTLINE

right,” Carter says. “It’s exhausting. I know what I am.”

This is Carter’s current reality, but she dreams of a world where Black trans women can feel safe no matter how they decide to present themselves on any given day.

Carter fights to actualize these dreams as an activist and a community organizer. With the No Justice No Pride Collective, Carter works alongside other organizers to provide housing and support for trans women, decriminalize sex work, and end transphobia. Her day job is at Casa Ruby, an organization that provides shelter and resources to LGBTQIA+ youth around the D.C. area.

This work plays off of her many strengths.

Carter is known among her friends as the caregiver: big-hearted, kind, warm, and understanding. Armed with a natural curiosity for the way the Bianca Bonita Carter world works and her place in it, Carter challenges herself and the people around her to abandon mainstream ideas of what makes someone “worthy” and “deserving” of safety and support.

“I work for trans women who aren’t heard. The trans women society calls ugly. The trans women that they say look like men. The ones who aren’t ‘cunt’ or ‘undetectable,’” Carter tells me between spoonfuls of Calabash’s chickpea soup.

“Being a woman is about individuality, about being your own self. I met a woman a few days ago who had a mustache and a full beard,” Carter says. “But that’s a woman.”

Carter’s grandmother instilled in her a belief that people should be affirmed and supported in being who they are. She grew up under her grandmother’s watch in Brooklyn while her parents lived in Southeast D.C. Carter loved living with her grandma, a youthful spirit whose playfulness and generosity made her feel loved and protected.

“We’d have a challenge to see who could stay up all night into the morning to see the sun come up,” Carter says. Carter would cultivates it where she can. She loves coming always win, and later in the day, her grandmothhome after a long day and taking off her make- er would make homemade lasagna for her as up, putting on a wig, and writing poetry over her prize.

This love and support never faltered while a cup of tea.

The removal of makeup is an important Carter transitioned, and Carter wishes this part of Carter’s self-care ritual. She loves the was the norm for all trans women. Having a feeling of her bare skin, and she’d wear make- supportive guardian helped Carter survive.

“If anyone wanted to say anything about up less often if she felt she could. But experience has taught Carter to be hyper aware of me, she would say ‘fuck them,’” Carter says. how she’s perceived. She wants to fall under “Live your life and do what you wanna do.”

Transitioning isn’t easy, and it isn’t linear, the radar of people who are out to harm her, either. Carter remembers starting her transiand makeup helps.

“You have to make sure your makeup is tion when she was 12 years old, but she paused done, your highlight is right, your body is when she came to D.C. for school, unsure of

Mumble Sauce

Darrow Montgomery

She wears each of her 16 wigs as a layer of protection in a city that is violent toward Black trans women.

By Jordan N. DeLoach Mumble Sauce is a summer and fall 2019 column about how DMV Black communities uplift healing and creativity in the face of gentrification, displacement, policing, and incarceration. This is installment seven of 10.

Bianca Bonita carter has a name for each of her wigs. That’s 16 names in total.

The unit named Blue Violet is her favorite.

It’s a long bob with black roots and green and purple tips—a loose body wave with bouncy curls that Carter loves to flip.

The 22-year-old Afro-Latina poet and activ-

ist has her hair in thick dark braids flowing over her shoulders when I meet with her at Calabash, a local Black-owned-and-run tea spot, on a weekend in late August. As much as she loves her braids, she misses her wigs.

“Blue Violet’s awesome as fuck,” Carter says. A deep dimple appears on her cheek as she smiles. “I have one named Bianca, one named Bella, one named Rakim, one named Orange because she’s orange.” She describes each wig and its personality, listing them off one-by-one with her fingers.

“Wigs are like a safety net.”

Safety isn’t often accessible to Carter, so she

10 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

how accepting people would be. Wigs were an important aspect of Carter’s transition, and the memory of her first time wearing a wig in the District remains etched in her mind.

Carter wore long hair on a day she had a test in one of her classes. The teacher demanded that Carter take her wig off in the middle of the test, claiming that it was distracting other students.

Carter refused, and the teacher sent her home.

Carter’s father yanked the wig off of her head when she got there. She ended up finishing the school year with a haircut.

Poetry became a refuge from the abuse Carter survived at home and at school. She wrote poems for her friends and teachers, stanzas containing affirmations and well-wishes that she hoped would guide them through hard times.

Between doing homework and writing poetry, she barely slept.

Carter remembers the exhaustion clearly. She failed a lot of classes, but poetry made her feel good. “I loved that I could make someone else happy from what they’re going through.”

Contributing to the healing of others through poetry helped Carter find equilibrium during the turbulence of her teenage years. Bouncing between New York and D.C., she saw the size of her friend groups dwindle during each visit. She lost her best friend to suicide. Many of her friends in Brooklyn died, went to jail, or were in prison serving hard time. Carter started timing her visits back to New York to coincide with her friends’ release dates, staying with her grandmother like she did when she was a young child.

Everything changed a few years ago when

Carter’s grandmother passed away. At 18, Carter moved to D.C. for good.

“I call D.C. my home, but when I was going through all my bad shit, my trauma,” Carter says, “it was here.”

Carter started growing close with her mother in D.C., but her relationship with her father, who she lived with, remained difficult. He kicked her out not long after she moved in. “He figured out I was escorting. He said that he’d seen me in different cars, said it was disgusting.” She ended up finding shelter at Casa Ruby, the same organization she works for now.

Although she didn’t know her mother for most of her life, they grew close quickly during this time. Carter describes her as her best friend.

“If someone wanted to judge me, they’d have to go through me and her.

If someone talked shit about me, she’d fight for me,” Carter says. But her mother passed away a year ago. “She was my shield. I didn’t need wigs as much back then.”

Wigs can be a form of self-defense. In an area where trans women are routinely assaulted and murdered, one of Carter’s tactics for survival is to switch her look up to avoid recognition, exper-

imenting with different hairstyles and makeup frequently. This is the result of several traumatic experiences. Carter has been sexually assaulted multiple times. Her housemates have been jumped over the last few weeks. People have tried to break into their home, thrown rocks at their windows.

Society has directed violence toward trans women, especially Black trans women, for decades. Several Black trans organizers in the DMV, including Carter, say that this violence is on the rise. Ashanti Carmon and Zoe Spears are two Black trans women with experience in the sex trades who lost their lives to gun violence over the last few months. Carter was with Spears at a cookout the day before she was killed. Neither murder has been solved.

“Most of the things that happen in D.C. are never discovered,” Carter says. “You always have to be aware of yourself. What your surroundings are, where you’re at, who you’re with, if the person you’re with is setting you up the whole time.”

“You have to think about everything.”

Carter spends a lot of her time thinking. About her grandmother and her other grandparents, her mother, her best friend, and her relationship

She dreams of a world where Black trans women can feel safe no matter how they decide to present themselves on any given day.

with her father. When she has time, she thinks about poetry. She dreams about being a famous poet like Maya Angelou, one of her icons. Carter’s own poetry is about hope, love, joy, and freedom—ideals she hopes will be more widely reflected in the world one day.

She also thinks about her children—other LGBTQIA+ young people who she’s met in D.C. and started to mentor. Carter has three sons and a daughter, and she takes her role as a mother very seriously.

“They’re all trying to do something big with their lives,” Carter says, her eyes sparkling with excitement and pride. “One of them just got an apartment. One of them has a girlfriend. It makes me feel like a champion.”

Carter would love to have her own apartment one day. There isn’t much left in her paycheck after helping out her kids and other LGBTQIA+ organizers, so she’s raising money on PayPal with the hope of filling in the gaps. By following her duty to fight for safer communities for trans women, Carter feels that a breakthrough will come.

The 22-year-old poet knows she’s experienced more than many have in a lifetime. But she chooses to believe in the good in the world, bringing it to life with the glide of her pen.

“My grandmother taught me what I believe in. And what I believe in is right.” Carter nods her head and presses her lips together, signaling there was nothing more to say on the matter. Her braids fall along her face as she turns back to her tea, holding her lost loved ones close in her heart.

They’re safe there.

CP

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washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 11

FOOTBALL

By Kelyn Soong

Punts Return

Bladensburg High School hopes its football team’s future is brighter than its past.

Kelyn Soong

Around 2 p.m. on a recent Saturday, Antonio Williams leaned into a microphone inside the press box at Bladensburg High School and bellowed to the crowd of several dozen fans below.

“It’s a good day for football,” Williams said, pausing for effect. “Varsity football that is!”

A few yards away, Renee Bangura and Tracy Mathis stood along a railing and cheered for the players in maroon and white.

“We Blade, baby!” Mathis screamed repeatedly while waving her pom-pom. Her son, Sean, is a junior left guard for the Mustangs.

Bangura’s son, David, also played for Bladensburg and graduated in 2018.

Varsity football has officially returned to the Prince George’s County high school. The school canceled its varsity program last season due to low participation during summer workouts and a lack of experienced players. Only about 30 players showed up for practices, and school officials elected to just field a junior varsity team.

This year, coaches decided to only have a varsity team, which consists of about 50 players.

Two other area high schools, Park View and Manassas Park in northern Virginia, also dropped varsity football last year before bringing it back this season.

For Williams, who is the school’s varsity boys’ basketball head coach and moonlights as the DJ and announcer during football games, the return of the varsity program impacts more than just the athletic department. He graduated from the school in 1997. This is his home.

“It means a lot,” Williams says. “Not only for our kids, our student athletes, and our coaches, but for our community as well. For the kids to not have football to play, that’s one less sport for them to [stay] off the streets ... For the kids, you’re known around school as a varsity football player. There’s nothing wrong with JV, but we all know it’s a highlight on varsity sports here.”

Depending on whom you ask, the cancelation of the varsity football program last year stemmed from different problems.

The school recently hired Bryan Trueblood as its athletic director, the third person in that position in three years. In 2017, Bladensburg hired former NFL player Byron Westbook, a Fort Washington native and DeMatha Catholic High School alum, to replace Lester Overton as its football coach. Participation grew under Overton, but the team went 9-21 during his three-season tenure.

Bangura says that “a lot of players and a lot of the parents” disagreed with the coaching change because of their close connection with Overton, a long-time coach in Prince George’s County who graduated from Oxon Hill High School.

“We have consistent coaching [now],” she adds,

Courtesy Maryland Athletic Department

SPORTS

Bladensburg varsity football team “[but] when the AD changes a lot, where is the stability? I think that’s the key to our sports program as a whole.”

Trueblood previously served as the athletic director at Central High School. The size of Bladensburg’s student body appealed to him.

“It gives you an opportunity to work with more kids in the building and really develop some of the programs,” he says. “Because if they’re not doing well, at least you got the people capacity, the people capital to really try to tap into that.”

Both Trueblood and Bladensburg principal Aisha Mahoney have made installing turf fields and lights at the school a major goal. The school plays its home games on Saturday afternoons instead of Friday nights due to the lack of lights on the field. Trueblood, who joined the staff earlier this month, says he hopes to see it happen “within the next year.”

“Definitely a big vision is to play under the lights,” says Trueblood, who hails from Florida. “Have the town kinda shut down, everyone pack the stadium … Right now, on Saturdays, we’re sharing with college football, but on Friday nights, that can be ours.”

Trueblood believes the turf upgrade will at-

12 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

tract more potential players. Several other Prince George’s County schools have added turf fields in recent years. “That’s a huge recruiting tool to get [students] excited,” he says. “Like, oh, we got a new field. We wanna go out there.”

Some Bladensburg supporters have pointed out that parents may be concerned about letting their children play football as the links between the sport and head injuries have continued to strengthen. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) announced earlier this month that participation in high school football across the country dropped for the fifth consecutive year.

“I think it’s good paying more attention to safety concerns,” says Kimberly MeyerChambers, whose son, Isaiah Chambers Jr., is a senior offensive lineman on the team.

“Now it’s more on parents’ radar. But I don’t have a lot of concern for him … He’s one that is a self-advocate in a way. If he was hurt, he would definitely make it known.”

But more than anything, Westbrook, the coach, believes that it’s the lack of youth sports in the Bladensburg community that prevents the school from fielding a larger, more experi-

With stability at key positions, University of Maryland football is off to a historic start. washingtoncitypaper.com/sports

enced team. While the Bladensburg Community Center allows local kids to participate in a variety of activities, the town does not have a Boys & Girls Club, which Westbrook sees as a problem.

“You gotta bring back youth sports,” Westbrook says. “It’s kinda hard to have kids in Bladensburg wanting to play football in high school, but at the same time, they don’t start until high school … We have a lot of parents, a lot of adults, always complaining about these kids being out in the streets and stuff like that.

Well, give us something constructive to do.

We don’t have anything constructive for the kids in this community to do. Yeah, we have a community center, but we have nothing structured as far as a football team, basketball team, whatever sport it is from a youth sports standpoint.”

“Once we have that, maybe we can get some feeder programs into Bladensburg with kids that have experience,” he continues. “We don’t have that right now, but the county has to support us to get that. We can’t do everything on our own. We need help. We need money.

We need assistance, but where’s that going to come? We need it. We’re looking for it still.”

Earl Hawkins, the coordinating supervisor of athletics for Prince George’s County Public Schools, praises how the Bladensburg program has grown in the last year. “I think the coaches have definitely shown great deal of interest in the community,” he says.

When asked about Westbrook’s comments, Hawkins pointed out that youth sports come through the Department of Parks and Recreation, and that he deals with high school sports.

According to Kira Calm Lewis, the spokesperson for the Department of Parks and Recreation in Prince George’s County, most of the football programs are organized by Boys & Girls Clubs and recreational leagues. “We support them by either providing space, field, [or] time,” she says, adding that the Bladensburg Community Center has hosted football camps before.

In its first varsity game in over a year, Bladensburg lost to Northwestern High School, 46-0. Two years ago, Northwestern received a $300,000 donation from the Washington football team’s charitable foundation to build a synthetic turf field.

But for Bladensburg, it’s one step at a time.

The junior varsity team finished last season with a 7-2 record.

“I’m glad through all of that adversity, we see the numbers here and we see a bright future for Bladensburg football,” says Bangura.

“So we don’t want to dwell on the past. We’re going to push forward.”

CP

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YOU ARE

SO D.C. IF...

Illustrations by Emma Sarappo

You would vote for Chuck Brown for President. You have noticed that many of your fellow Washingtonians live their lives in a state of cognitive dissonance. You think the term “NoMa” is dumb—and it’s a fair point. Say “NoMa” a few times. It sounds stupid in your mouth. One entrant “personally loathe[s]” the recently invented neighborhood name.

When City Paper first held this contest back in 2017, a few of you wrote full-on love poems about what it means to be “so D.C.” This year most of you were quick, to the point, and often pissed.

One person says you’re so D.C. if you’re “a self involved douche.” Another writes that you’re so D.C. if you’re “a loser. D.C. sucks and it’s boring.” (The person who submitted that entry goes by the pen name “Fuck DC” and entered the address “ihatedc@cantwaitomove.com,” which, we confirmed, is not a real email address.)

But the silver lining is thick. You identified the little quirks that have long been at the backs of our D.C. minds, like the mystery of why you have an actual collection of Miss Pixie’s pens, and how to deal with the fact that our downtown sports arena, and its basketball team, undergo repeated name changes.

You have lovely memories of a different era of retail—getting new Easter outfits and backto-school clothes downtown, seeing the enchanting department store displays at Christmas, 14 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

eating out after a day of shopping with family.

The City Paper newsroom was unabashed about its favorite entry: “You are so D.C. if you intuitively know that Darrow Montgomery is the best damn photographer in the city.” A reader who goes by Ron wrote that entry. Thank you, Ron. We agree!

We set aside the navel-gazing for the final vote, sorting through hundreds of name-blind entries to find the most pithy, honest answers to the question of what makes a person so D.C. in 2019. We also read the whole collection for themes. Almost all of the obvious ones came up— you really love mumbo sauce and go-go; you call the local airport National or DCA; you know how to walk on the Metro escalators—but we can’t print the same thing every time we run this contest, so we left out the escalators, the sauce, and the airport, and kept a collection about gogo, which had a big year.

This year, many of you have memories of New York Avenue on your mind, and of the old hospitals. Your feelings on the present—the scooters, and navigating a city with a few more Republicans—are far less warm. We wonder what today’s D.C. will look like to contest entrants in 2040 or 2050.

—Alexa Mills

FIRST PLACE The line for lunch is longer than your lunch break.

—Annie

THIRD PLACE

SECOND PLACE You notice that pink Miss Pixie’s pens are literally everywhere and you wonder how that is even possible. —Josh Gibson

FOURTH PLACE You not only refer to Councilmembers by their first names, but do the same with your local ANCs.

You’ve thrown an electric scooter into the Tidal Basin.

—Thomas Philibin

—Nechama Masliansky

FIFTH PLACE

You think international travel is a normal hobby— and a personality. —Anonymous

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 15

NINTH PLACE

SIXTH PLACE

You don’t know how to handle driving/walking/existing in

The fact that none of the Golden

the snow because the city would be completely shut down

Triangle haikus follow the 5-7-5

after 1-2 inches of snow.

—Ryan Laychak

format makes you want to scream.

—Nicole Siegel

SEVENTH PLACE You can respect the genius of Marion Barry and gloss over the crazy.

—Kathy Haines

EIGHTH PLACE

TENTH PLACE You take the treadmill in front of the television playing Fox News, because it’s always available. —Anonymous

You complain about the new condos going up across the street from the condo you just bought.

—Sean

RUNNERS UP

Your opening line on OKCupid is: “Would you hold it against me if I told you I work at the Heritage Foundation?” (True story.)

—Anonymous

You think this list is some corny bs to make new white residents feel cool about living in D.C.

—Two Gram Greg

You’re wondering if the reporters who are judging this are old enough and “worthy enough” to judge the authenticity of D.C.-ness. —Anonymous

You remember how nice it was before Homeland Security.

—Christine Saunderson You sit on your porch or stoop and speak to people walking by. —Biscuit

16 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

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GEOGRAPHY LESSONS

You grew up on K Street, but don’t know where or what the fuck is a NoMa.

—Stephanie

You would never live near the old Greyhound station, but you still don’t understand what a NoMa is.

You hate the label “AdMo” for Adams Morgan. LOL. You know how to navigate Rock Creek Park without Google Maps.

—Adar

—Stephen McKevitt —Tracey Williams Barnett, Realtor

You are familiar with two of the city’s iconic landmarks, the Shrimp Boat in Northeast and the Big Chair in Anacostia.

—James Kennedy You rode the 32 bus on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House before they closed it off from traffic.

—Bruce Holliday You hate when people from Maryland or Virginia say they’re from D.C., especially when they actively complain about the city.

—Anonymous

A DISTRICT OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

THE SCOOTERS OLD NEW YORK AVE 18 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

You’re a registered Democrat who hopes for a public health care option, yet you happily work for a company that lobbies against it.

—Anonymous You live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance as a result of your email marketing job at a defense contractor responsible for blowing up schoolchildren in the Middle East.

—Rob You say things like, “This neighborhood looked very different 10 years ago,” even if you never saw it 10 years ago.

—Anonymous You have chicken and waffles for brunch immediately after taking your Sunday morning yoga class. —Katie Crowe You hate Bird scooters, yet own an electric bike. You love U Street, but don’t know where the Shaw neighborhood is located. You tweet about your excitement for Trader’s opening in AdMo, while you’ve eaten out every night this week.

—Amanda Farnan You complain about e-scooters while riding an e-scooter.

—Adam Taylor

You complain about the scooters being left haphazardly on the sidewalk at happy hour and then grip those Lime handlebars on the way home, blazer flapping in the wind.

—Shannon You’re tired of trippin’ over unattended scooters.

—SoSEDC

You refuse to use any motorized shared transportation options (scooters, jump bikes and mopeds).

—Julie Karant You own your bike but still use an electric scooter or have a shared bike membership.

You secretly love to ride the scooters.

You ride doubled up on a scooter.

—Etta Klosi —Steven Rigaux —Calder Stembel

You remember how exciting it used to be to drive down New York Ave. and see the parade of pimps and hoes.

—Tracey Williams Barnett, Realtor You remember when U Street didn’t go all the way to New York Ave. It was blocked at 7th with big concrete barriers.

—Wanda You took a Greyhound bus from New York Ave. You were frightened seeing white folk jogging on New York Ave. You can’t believe they’re (probably) closing the Wendy’s on New York Ave.

—Mike Rhode —Rob Evans —SoSEDC

You remember the Black Hole, the original location of the Convention Center, and can recall how the old New York Ave. was and the original Mass Ave. before it was renamed “NoMa” (which I personally loathe). —Anonymous

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Important Facts About DOVATO

This is only a brief summary of important information about DOVATO and does not replace talking to your healthcare provider about your condition and treatment.

What is the Most Important Information I Should Know about DOVATO? If you have both human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, DOVATO can cause serious side effects, including: • Resistant HBV infection. Your healthcare provider will test you for HBV infection before you start treatment with DOVATO. If you have HIV-1 and hepatitis B, the hepatitis B virus can change (mutate) during your treatment with DOVATO and become harder to treat (resistant). It is not known if DOVATO is safe and effective in people who have HIV-1 and HBV infection.

• Worsening of HBV infection. If you have HIV-1 and HBV infection, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking DOVATO. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before. Worsening liver disease can be serious and may lead to death. ° Do not run out of DOVATO. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your DOVATO is all gone. ° Do not stop DOVATO without first talking to your healthcare provider. If you stop taking DOVATO, your healthcare provider will need to check your health often and do blood tests regularly for several months to check your liver.

What is DOVATO? DOVATO is a prescription medicine that is used without other antiretroviral medicines to treat HIV-1 infection in adults: who have not received antiretroviral medicines in the past, and without known resistance to the medicines dolutegravir or lamivudine. HIV-1 is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It is not known if DOVATO is safe and effective in children.

Who should not take DOVATO? Do Not Take DOVATO if You: • have ever had an allergic reaction to a medicine that contains dolutegravir or lamivudine.

• take dofetilide.

What should I tell my healthcare provider before using DOVATO? Tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you: • have or have had liver problems, including hepatitis B or C infection.

• have kidney problems.

• are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. One of the medicines in DOVATO (dolutegravir) may harm your unborn baby. ° You should not take DOVATO if you are planning to become pregnant or during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Your healthcare provider may prescribe a different medicine if you are planning to become pregnant or become pregnant during treatment with DOVATO. ° If you can become pregnant, your healthcare provider will perform a pregnancy test before you start treatment with DOVATO. ° If you can become pregnant, you should consistently use effective birth control (contraception) during treatment with DOVATO. ° Tell your healthcare provider right away if you are planning to become pregnant, you become pregnant, or think you may be pregnant during treatment with DOVATO.

©2019 ViiV Healthcare or licensor.

DLLADVT190009 June 2019 Produced in USA.

Learn more about Leo and DOVATO at DOVATO.com

20 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you: (cont’d) • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take DOVATO. ° You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. ° One of the medicines in DOVATO (lamivudine) passes into your breastmilk. ° Talk with your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby.

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements.

Some medicines interact with DOVATO. Keep a list of your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine.

• You can ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for a list of medicines that interact with DOVATO. • Do not start taking a new medicine without telling your healthcare provider.

Your healthcare provider can tell you if it is safe to take DOVATO with other medicines.

What are Possible Side Effects of DOVATO? DOVATO can cause serious side effects, including: • Those in the “What is the Most Important Information I Should Know about DOVATO?” section.

• Allergic reactions. Call your healthcare provider right away if you develop a rash with DOVATO. Stop taking DOVATO and get medical help right away if you develop a rash with any of the following signs or symptoms: fever; generally ill feeling; tiredness; muscle or joint aches; blisters or sores in mouth; blisters or peeling of the skin; redness or swelling of the eyes; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue; problems breathing.

• Liver problems. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening changes in certain liver tests during treatment with DOVATO. Liver problems, including liver failure, have also happened in people without a history of liver disease or other risk factors. Your healthcare provider may do blood tests to check your liver.

Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following signs or symptoms of liver problems: your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice); dark or “tea-colored” urine; light-colored stools (bowel movements); nausea or vomiting; loss of appetite; and/or pain, aching, or tenderness on the right side of your stomach area.

• Too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis is a serious medical emergency that can lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms that could be signs of lactic acidosis: feel very weak or tired; unusual (not normal) muscle pain; trouble breathing; stomach pain with nausea and vomiting; feel cold, especially in your arms and legs; feel dizzy or lightheaded; and/or a fast or irregular heartbeat.

• Lactic acidosis can also lead to severe liver problems, which can lead to death. Your liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and you may develop fat in your liver (steatosis). Tell your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the signs or symptoms of liver problems which are listed above under “Liver problems.” You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or severe liver problems if you are female or very overweight (obese).

SO MUCH GOES INTO WHO I AM HIV MEDICINE IS ONE PART OF IT. Reasons to ask your doctor about DOVATO: DOVATO can help you reach and then stay undetectable* with just 2 medicines in 1 pill.

That means fewer medicines† in your body while taking DOVATO

You can take it any time of day with or without food (around the same time each day)—giving you flexibility

DOVATO is a once-a-day complete treatment for adults who are new to HIV-1 medicine.

Results may vary. *Undetectable means reducing the HIV in your blood to very low levels (less than 50 copies per mL). † As compared with 3-drug regimens.

LEO‡ Living with HIV

What are Possible Side Effects of DOVATO (cont’d)?

• Changes in your immune system (Immune Reconstitution Syndrome) can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having new symptoms after you start taking DOVATO. • The most common side effects of DOVATO include: headache; diarrhea; nausea; trouble sleeping; and tiredness.

These are not all the possible side effects of DOVATO. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Where Can I Find More Information?

• Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist.

• Go to DOVATO.com or call 1-877-844-8872, where you can also get FDA-approved labeling.

Trademark is owned by or licensed to the ViiV Healthcare group of companies.

Compensated by ViiV Healthcare

‡

Could DOVATO be right for you? Ask your doctor today.

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 21

THE OLD STORES

When you were growing up, your parents bought you clothes and other essentials at Woolworths, Morton’s, Hecht’s, Woodies, Garfinckel’s, Hahn’s Shoes, and Peoples Drug Stores.

—Doxie McCoy You remember Peoples and Dart Drug stores.

—Maria

You still call it Peoples Drug Store.

—Kate

You still call Macy’s Hecht’s.

—Doxie McCoy

You remember when Macy’s downtown was a Hecht’s.

—Corina Garay

You know that The Hamilton was Garfinckel’s long before it was Borders Books.

—Mary Knieser

You still say Fresh Fields when you mean Whole Foods and Peoples when you mean CVS.

—Rick Chessen

You sat on Santa’s lap in Hecht’s, your first shoes came from Hahn’s, you know who Pick Temple is, and you had a strawberry shortcake from the Blue Mirror while wearing your new suit from Morton’s. —Ernest Earl Wood You got your back-to-school clothes at Morton’s, bought a 10-cent hot dog at Ann’s Hot Dog or a steak and cheese sub at Miles’-long, and rode the B2 bus to Barney Circle. And don’t forget that 45 record you bought at Waxie Maxie’s.

—Earl Wood You shopped at Waxie Maxie’s.

—Eric Rogers

You remember having your medications delivered to you from Morgan Pharmacy.

—Anonymous

You remember having milkshakes at the fountain at Morgan Pharmacy.

—Anonymous

You used to go Easter suit shopping at Cavalier’s, Mortons, or Woodies.

—Eric R.

Christmas meant watching the moving displays in the department stores, and some smaller shops downtown.

Beautiful, fun, and serene scenes. I wish they could bring those back.

—Waldon Adams You fondly remember the downtown Garfinckel’s and Woodies department stores and really miss the golden years of WHFS. —Lawrence Impett You remember Woodward & Lothrop department store downtown—both buildings.

GO-GO CITY NAME GAME

—Waldon Adams

You went to the go-go at the Cherry’s skating rink.

—Anonymous

Your body subconsciously starts moving the moment you hear the beginning of some go-go music.

—Anonymous You play old-school go-go music on Chuck Brown’s birthday.

—Andrew Webster

You would vote for Chuck Brown as President of the United States.

—Kareem

You go to go-go night at Lucky Strike.

—Tamara Chin

You were pissed when they tried to mute go-go at MetroPCS.

—Matt G

D.C. made you proud when the Moechella protest shut down 14th and U streets, and peacefully. #DontMuteDC —Tracey Williams Barnett, Realtor You attended all #DontMuteDC events proudly, and know and feel the effects and appreciate the true meaning behind it.

—Sisco You still refer to the Capital One Arena as the MCI Center.

—Corina Garay

You call the Capital One Arena the Verizon Center, the MCI Center, or even better, use two or three of these labels in one sentence because you can’t actually remember what it’s called.

—Gwen Dobbs You’ve realized we can go back to calling it the Cap Center.

—Michael Robbins

You remember that the basketball team was named the Bullets but renamed to the Wizards because we were the murder capital of the country.

—Gwen Dobbs You attend a Wizards game every season to see your old hometown team as the away team.

22 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

—Jesse Rifkin

“MOE”

You forgot a person’s name so you use the substitute or place holder: Moe. For example: Crap I forgot his name … What’s up, Moe? —Eric Mullins “Aye Moe” were your first words.

—Nathan Jarvis

You say, “Kill, Moe!”

—Clyde Ensslin

You call everyone “Moe” and don’t realize it .

You call your friends “Moe.”

—Mysiki Valentine —Tamara Chin

You know the phrase “Kill, Moe” actually isn’t an order to murder someone named Moe. —Mikala

STREET SENSE LOVE

Now thru September 22, 2019 Join us for full days and nights of creativity in action—ALL FREE!

The Kennedy Center is celebrating the opening of the REACH, its first-ever expansion. This brand-new campus of innovative indoor and outdoor spaces puts YOU at the center of the art—where you can chart your own course and connect what moves you to creative experiences beyond imagination.

FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

With nearly 500 events planned, there’s something for everyone!

You make sure to have some cash on hand if you’re downtown so you can support the Street Sense writers. What better way to support those that need some assistance and journalism all at the same time? —Whitney Stringer Renée Fleming

You recognize the call of the spiffy Street Sense salesman always around Metro Center.

—Matt G You buy a Street Sense from the Cat in the Hat every time, even if you already have the issue he’s selling.

—Anonymous

You were born in DC General Hospital.

Encore broadcast of WNO’s Show Boat

Renée Fleming with Angélique Kidjo and Jason Moran in Concert

Saturday, September 14

J.PERIOD presents The Live Mixtape [The Healing Edition] feat. Maimouna Youssef aka Mumu Fresh FAMILY DAY

—Jordan —Maria —A

Your children were born at Columbia Hospital for Women, and you and your siblings were born there too. And both of your parents were born in the District and went to DC Public Schools.

—Anonymous

Thursday, September 19 Show Boat is sponsored by Mars, Incorporated.

SPOTLIGHT ON COMEDY

Friday, September 20

HIP HOP BLOCK PARTY

Someone says they’re from D.C., and you asked them what neighborhood they are from. In addition, you ask them at which hospital they were born.

—Eric Mullins

You were born in Garfield Memorial Hospital.

Thursday, September 12

Sound Health is supported by the Music Man Foundation.

Beatmaking Workshops, TT the Artist, and More

Your 8-year-old child was born at Sibley Hospital but you haven’t lived in the District since 2001.

—Anonymous

Judah Friedlander

SPOTLIGHT ON WASHINGTON NATIONAL OPERA

Friday, September 13

The hospital where you were born is now a condo building. —Drew Richard

Thievery Corporation

SPOTLIGHT ON RENÉE FLEMING VOICES AND SOUND HEALTH

SPOTLIGHT ON ELECTRONICA/DJ CULTURE

HOSPITAL DRAMAS

You were born in Columbia Hospital for Women.

Angélique Kidjo

Family Day is supported by the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.

Sunday, September 15

Mo Willems hosts MO-a-PALOOZA LIVE! OUTDOOR FILM SCREENING

Tuesday, September 17 Black Panther

Black Panther is sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

District of Comedy Stand-Up Showcases with Judah Friedlander, Rachel Feinstein, and More NATIONAL DANCE DAY

National Dance Day is presented as part of the Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives.

Saturday, September 21 Fela! The Concert CLOSING DAY

Sunday, September 22

Howard University “Showtime” Marching Band and Netflix: HOMECOMING: A Film by Beyoncé Plus check out drop-in spaces for hands-on discovery like the Moonshot Studio, the Virtual Reality Lounge, and Skylight Soundscapes!

All events are free; timed-entry passes required for entry.

Free passes and a complete day-by-day schedule of events at Kennedy-Center.org/REACH Patrons without passes may be admitted on a space-available basis.

Programs, artists, and schedule subject to change.

Additional support is provided by Ford Foundation, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Prufrock Foundation, as well as anonymous supporters.

David M. Rubenstein Cornerstone of the REACH

Download the REACH Fest app!

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 23

Courtesy of Emmy Squared

DCFEED

D.C. is getting an outpost of New York’s Emmy Squared. The restaurant specializing in Detroit-style pizza with cheesy, crispy crust should open in late fall. Get first taste at New Kitchens on the Block on Oct. 20.

YOUNG & HUNGRY

Change Tune

What do D.C. area bartenders really think of your karaoke skills?

By Laura Hayes Whether you’re imitating Eddie Money or daring to try a Whitney Houston song, karaoke is one of D.C.’s favorite pastimes. The act of singing in front of strangers holds unparalleled power in this town: It can convert coworkers into friends, make a bridal party get along, and unite a whole room of overworked Washingtonians in belting out an anthem.

But have you ever stopped to consider what it’s like to work a shift at a bar with karaoke? The bartenders who sling sake bombs to schizophrenic soundtracks endure our screeches, unoriginal song choices, and tone-deaf notes. Some can’t get enough of our antics. Others yearn for a mute button.

“I often drive in a car with no music on,” says Ellis Lane, who mixed drinks at Little Miss Whiskey’s during the bar’s eight-year karaoke run. “Silence is golden.”

City Paper turned the tables to give these bartenders the mic so they can sound off on what they really think about our karaoke skills. Spoiler alert: You’re slaughtering Frank Sinatra.

“We have a regular who comes in and just screams, but it’s so funny and he loves it,” says Madam’s Organ General Manager Camille Boyette. “He does it in his biker speedos and bike shoes. He’s a character.

If you’re here and you see him you’re like, ‘Score! Bob’s here.’”

“He reminds me of the guy on American Idol who really sucked and ended up making a career out of sucking,” Boyette continues. Remember William Hung? He auditioned with a cringeworthy rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs.” Hung recently gave a TEDx Talk on “Turning Failure Into Success.”

Have confidence like Hung, but don’t go overboard.

“We had a girl sing ‘Fancy’ by Iggy Azalea,” recounts Zeppelin bartender Made-

Emma Sarappo

What’s the most memorable performance you’ve ever observed— good or bad?

24 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

line Avillion. Karaoke takes place in Zeppelin’s upstairs dining room, which has a long communal table stretching down its center.

“I went to talk to a manager really quickly about a keg. We turn around and the girl is laying backwards on the table trying to do a somersault. On a Wednesday.”

Sometimes songs are forever changed for karaoke bartenders. “There was someone in the Kostume Karaoke group where whenever they sang that ‘walk 500 miles’ song, instead of singing ‘da da da da’ they sang ‘shot of vodka,’” Lane says. She’s referring to The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).”

“Now I always say that when the song comes on.”

Sometimes a touching moment breaks through the haze of shots and Long Island Iced Teas. “One Sunday night there was a blind gentleman who came into the bar,” says Ugly Mug bartender Matt “Montana” Gordon. “When karaoke came on they handed him the mic. The guy he was with would lean over and tell him the words in his ear and then he would sing them. It was incredible. Someone live-streamed it and put it on social media. All these other people showed up just to see him perform.”

Few bars take karaoke more seriously than Dupont Italian Kitchen, better known as DIK Bar. After neighboring gay bar Colbalt closed in March, DIK Bar picked up one of its annual traditions—Pride Idol.

The six-week competition advances contestants to a final few days of singing leading up D.C.’s Pride Parade in June, where the Pride Idol winner takes the stage.

“That was the best because you got to see the best singers and there was crowd participation because everyone got to vote,” says DIK Bar bartender Brett Johnson. She says Robbie Bise won the competition by singing “Walking in Memphis.” It was particularly meaningful for Bise because he used to be a karaoke jockey at Cobalt. “It was truly an emotional moment,” Bise says. “I’d sent so many other singers to that stage. It was an honor to become one of them.”

What song do you know you’re going to hear every single shift?

DC9 does karaoke a little differently by zeroing in on indie rock. “Lots of regulars come in and sing The Strokes or Robyn,” says bar manager Jenai Master. But they also get a unique set of performers. “Show kids. People who were musical theater nerds. We’ve had a lot of Hamilton songs.

Songs from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And that fucking Lady Gaga duet, ‘Shallow.’” The latter usually prompts theatrics.

“There’s lots of sitting and standing. It’s usually two men at DC9, which is really lovely.”

DIK Bar sees its share of Disney tunes, especially anything sung by Ursula from The Little Mermaid. But the sea witch’s lyrics make the bartenders the poor unfortunate souls in the room. “Someone always sings the Queen Latifah version of ‘When You’re Good to Mama’ from Chicago,” John-

son says. “People have tried Billie Eilish and Lizzo recently. Tried.”

Jaquan Mussington is what’s known as a KJ, or karaoke DJ. He runs the show backed by black lights and a smoke machine most nights at DIK Bar. He has better data on the most played songs. He says they’re “Friends in Low Places,” “Take Me Home Country Roads,” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is almost always a given, though it’s a commitment at five minutes and 55 seconds long.

“The mics go around the room, it becomes a community thing,” Avillion says. “People really enjoy it.”

Master agrees. “Queen has such badass power ballads,” she says. “Anytime something like Queen comes on, everyone is on their feet screaming and singing along. It could be ‘We Are The Champions.’ Everyone wants to sing it. No one is pissed it’s not their turn when Queen’s being sung. Everyone’s happy.”

Except for Solly’s bartender Kyle Fiske.

“I know it’s coming on and I bear down for the next eight minutes.”

Which song do you hope to never hear performed again?

“How many times can I hear someone’s personal version of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’?’” asks Lane. “We should all be more supportive of each other. I believe in the ‘dance like no one’s watching’ idea, but your friends are lying to you. You can’t sing.” Master is also sick of Journey. “It’s one of those songs people think they can sing well,” she concurs.

For Boyette it’s Sinatra. “I love Frank, but I don’t love when people sing it,” she says.

“When ‘New York, New York’ comes on, you get the can-can going on stage. Especially if it’s a group of guys and girls together. They can’t help but be cheesy about it. It hurts when I see him slaughtered.”

No one should cry at karaoke, according to Lisa, a bartender at Rock It Grill. “For some reason, people try to sing ‘Angel’ by Sarah McLachlan.

That’s the one in the commercials. All you can think about is puppies in cages. It’s very much a buzzkill,” says Lisa, declining to put her last name on that take.

Like “Bohemian R hapsody,” D o n McLean’s “American Pie,” is too long, according to Mussington. “If you want to kill a karaoke host’s spirit, you do ‘American Pie,’ he says. “It’s the repetition and how long it is. It’s almost a 10 minute song.” It’s eight minutes and 35 seconds. “Everyone comes up to me like, ‘Why are they doing this song?’ I’m like, ‘Listen you guys, it’s almost over. I’m kind of on your side, but we’re almost there.’”

Other songs that make karaoke bartenders’ ears bleed include anything from Evanescence, “Freebird,” “Wagon Wheel,” and “Coming to America.”

What advice do you have for karaoke singers?

There are definite dos and don’ts. “We had someone right when we opened pick an R. Kelly song,” Avillion says. “He got two lines into it and the whole room booed him.

No, you can’t sing that song. It’s too soon.”

The singer was arrested in July and faces 18 federal counts, including child pornography and kidnapping.

DIK Bar has an actual policy in place, according to Mussington. “I typically don’t have any songs that are off limits, but there’s an artist I won’t let anybody sing,” he says.

“That’s none other than R. Kelly. It would cause too much controversy. Everyone is booing. There are arguments. I can’t handle that stress.” He asked his boss if he could turn down requests by citing an official policy.

“If you’re white, don’t rap the N-word,” Avillion says, ticking off another major don’t. “We will turn off the sound and you will stop singing karaoke. Some people will skip it when they’re singing, or they’ll say a friend’s name instead. 99 percent of people know, but every once in a while someone will do it.” That said, she’s OK with white people rapping. “They usually suck, but as long as they’re not offensive. A lot of people right now think they can sing Cardi B.” Fiske is fed up with amateur singers dropping the mic. “It’s sort of disrespectful,” he says. “Jeez, you just went up there and sang for a few minutes and now you’re going to smash this expensive mic and the whole place will go silent? You’re like, ‘I killed this Bon Jovi song and now I want to make everyone super uncomfortable.’ No one is getting a signed deal from Kostume Karaoke at Solly’s.”

Don’t monopolize the mic either. “You’re a special individual, but I have to take care of everyone in the bar,” says Mussington.

“Don’t expect me to put you up there every five seconds.”

Margaux Donati, the beverage director for Chaplin’s and Zeppelin, agrees. “Remember that everyone is dying to sing, and remain patient,” she implores. “We can’t do two songs at once. People often times, with a little alcohol in them, will get a little aggressive. Just remember to be there to have fun and not take it too seriously. People treat it like try-outs for American Idol.” For real.

“We have people that come in and warm up,” Lisa adds. “They do jumping jacks and ask for lemon and honey from the bar to

“The more nailbiting it is, the better it is for the most part.

There’s no wrong you can do during karaoke.”

Want to sing at these bars?

Here are their hours.

Zeppelin 1544 9th St. NW Nightly from 10:30 p.m. until close.

Minimum $20 spend per person on food and drink.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW The last Sunday of the month from 8 p.m. to close Ugly Mug 723 8th St. SE District Karaoke on Thursday nights starting at 7 p.m. and Ebony Pyramid Entertainment karaoke on Sunday nights starting at 9 p.m.

Madam’s Organ 2461 18th St. NW Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 p.m. to close Dupont Italian Kitchen 1637 17th St NW Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 9 p.m. to close and Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 p.m. to close Solly’s 1942 11th St NW Thursday nights from 8 p.m. to close upstairs Rock It Grill 1319 King St., Alexandria Nightly from 9:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m

warm up their throat.”

And yet, karaoke bartenders encourage singers to abandon conventional wisdom.

Unlike your job, the gym, or the bedroom, the worse you perform, the better. “The more nail-biting it is, the better it is for the most part,” says Boyette. “There’s no wrong you can do during karaoke.”

Boyette particularly likes seeing groups gel over the course of an evening. “It’s good for co-workers getting to know each other because you have to let your guard down,” she says. “The worse you sound, the better off you’re going to be. You can’t fail at karaoke. You’re also not going to be discovered.”

Find a Spotify playlist of D.C.’s favorite karaoke tunes at washingtoncitypaper.com/food.

CP

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 25

CPARTS

Arts Education

The Middle East Institute’s new gallery wants art to inform Americans about life in the region.

“Saida in Blue” by Hassan Hajjaj, 2000 26 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Check out reviews from the 2019 Latin American Film Festival. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

By Emma Sarappo On Saturday, Sept. 14, the Middle East Institute will open its own art gallery with a show, Arabicity | Ourouba, featuring a diverse group of contemporary works from 17 Middle Eastern artists which examine what it means to be Arab today.

The nonpartisan Dupont Circle think tank, founded in 1946, focuses on providing analysis and expertise on the region for U.S. policymakers and encourages greater understanding of the Middle East among Americans. It offers the public language classes, regional studies courses, and a robust library. Now, it’s adding an art gallery to its public offerings.

“We felt we couldn’t talk about the region here in Washington without acknowledging the important role that culture is playing in today’s societies in the region,” says Kate Seelye, MEI’s vice president, who focuses on communications, outreach, and arts and culture. Making thought-provoking contemporary art available to the public underscores MEI’s belief that creative work can challenge stereotypes and reductive thinking—especially because art is a universal language, Seelye says. “This really is a unique platform for us to engage with new audiences who have never been exposed to the voices of Arab artists, or never been interested in the Middle East, or just simply don’t know anything about it, or if they do, they have a negative perception of the Middle East,” she says.

The new gallery, which takes up much of the main floor in the recently renovated MEI headquarters, has been in the works for a long time. Before welcoming its own gallery space, MEI was organizing and curating shows across D.C. in venues like the National Building Museum and American University’s Katzen Arts Center. Recent renovations to MEI’s headquarters, a historic Dupont building, made space for the organization to host its own shows.

The gallery will focus on contemporary art in the Middle East, which the institute defines as the region stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, including North Africa, the Gulf states, and Asia, and hopes to show four to five exhibitions per year featuring artists from across the whole region.

Its inaugural exhibition evolved from Ourouba, a show that celebrated London-based curator Rose Issa, known for championing Arab and Iranian art and film, put on two years ago at the Beirut Art Fair. The name is an Arabic word—translated by Issa as “Arabicity”—that describes “the state of being Arab,” according to Seelye. Issa is “a star” in the curatorial world, Seelye says, who had been on her radar for a while. After seeing her work on Ourouba, MEI reached out to gauge her interest in curating a similar show for their new gallery space.

“We are a think tank working on Middle East issues, issues of history, memory, identity, loss, injustice, oppression,” Seelye says. Ourouba was concerned with those same issues, “so we thought, ‘What a perfect fit,’” she says.

Issa decided to specifically focus Arabicity | Ourouba on work by artists from territories experiencing violence and turmoil, not just artists from the Gulf states. “What we notice is that there are fantastic Palestinian artists, fantastic Iranian artists, excellent Iraqi or Syrian or Lebanese artists because they have been through wars, loss—they have something to say,” Issa explains. Anas Albraehe, for example, was born in Syria and relocated to Lebanon when war broke out. Albraehe’s oil paint-

CPARTS ing of a sleeping man, “Untitled,” is featured in the exhibition. It comes from the series Dream Catcher, in which Albraehe depicts laborers and those displaced by war in the escape of sleep.

She also wanted to focus specifically on contemporary art that could speak to the last decade. “The last 10 years have been what some people call the Arab Spring. In reality, it’s just sort of upheaval,” Issa says. “People were thinking they were doing a revolution.

In fact, many things were destroyed, wars continue, Syria was invaded. So I wanted to know: What do collectors in Arab countries like Lebanon buy during troubled times?

What are the concerns, whether conceptually, aesthetically, or sociopolitically, of artists from our parts of the world?”

But Arabicity | Ourouba’s themes aren’t just death and destruction. Instead, it’s a meditation on the kind of work that’s made during periods of violence and unrest, including the joy and the resilience found in the middle of it. Too often, the story of life in the Middle East is told and controlled by outsiders, she says.

“I want the vision of the Arabs by Arabs,” Issa says. “Maybe there is war, but there is also resilience. There is life. There are weddings, there is joy.”

And the works incorporate a lot of humor: Palestinian artist Sharif Waked’s “Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints”

Blue.” The piece says, in Issa’s words, “They too can afford fashion. And they too can be laughing and having fun and living their life even though they’re poor. It’s not the privilege of the rich to be fashionable or to have labels.”

In addition to stretching across nations, the exhibition spans genres: The artists use installation, video, and other media. There are paintings, photographs, and selections of sculpture on display. “They do everything,” Issa says.

To help explain why she’s so interested in art made during times of conflict, Issa quotes a scene from the 1949 film The Third Man. In its famous monologue, Orson Welles’ character says “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of de“Untitled” by Anas Albraehe, 2018 mocracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

War suppresses art, she acknowledges, and it makes all asis a video work depicting a mock fashion show that features models in clothing designed to suit Israeli checkpoints—Issa pects of life harder, but it can’t repress creativity. “We lose a calls it “fantastically funny.” Moroccan-born, UK-based art- lot of monuments, it’s true,” she says. “They get ripped off, ist Hassan Hajjaj photographs people in Marrakech, Moroc- and they end up in some collections. But you cannot kill the co, (often friends or longtime acquaintances) wearing West- artist. You cannot kill poetry. You cannot kill the urge of peoern logos, like the knock-off Louis Vuitton in his piece “Saida in ple to want to say something.”

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THEATER

Questioning Authority Season-opening plays at Studio Theatre and Folger Theatre focus on two signature institutions: the Catholic Church and the English monarchy.

By Rebecca J. Ritzel

1 Henry IV

Doubt: A Parable

By John Patrick Shanley Directed by Matt Torney At Studio Theatre to October 6

1 Henry IV

By William Shakespeare Directed by Rosa Joshi At Folger Theatre to October 13 At A pAnel discussion on the future of D.C. theater this past weekend, an older woman in the audience stood up and asked three artistic directors why Washington theaters don’t “balance their programming” with more revivals.

“Not a classic,” she said, “But a revival.

Something that was big in New York or London once, but I didn’t get to see it because I’m just an ordinary person, I can’t go to London.”

She made an astute point. In recent years, it’s felt like classics (usually reimagined in some way) and new plays (world premieres! regional premieres! D.C. premieres!) have overwhelmed local stages.

Fortunately for this concerned theatergoer— and for all of us, really—Studio Theatre has taken the bold step of opening its 2019-2020 season with a revival, and done a phenomenal job.

Folger Theatre, meanwhile, has opened its season with a classic we should all skip.

John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play Doubt: A Parable won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Actress Cherry Jones took home a Tony for her portrayal of a nun running a Bronx Catholic school in the 1960s and led the national tour, which stopped at the National Theatre, and Meryl Streep led the all-star cast of the 2008 film adaptation. Yet there are still people, me among them, who haven’t seen Doubt.

No offense to Cherry and Meryl Streep, but I’m so glad I held out for this suspenseful revival, and entered Studio Theatre not knowing more than the bones of a plot: A conflict between nuns and a priest who may or may not have had an inappropriate relationship with the school’s lone black student.

Belfast native (and former Catholic schoolboy) Matt Torney directs an impeccable production that doesn’t feel dated, despite all the grim news about priest abuse that has come out since this play made headlines. What’s different now is that Doubt feels more like an ex-

plainer, offering one plausible reason for how priests got away with molesting children for so many years: The nuns who knew were unable to stop them. It also smartly examines the racial dynamics between the white nuns and priests and the victim’s black mother, who sees her son’s potential and enrolled him in this school in the hopes it would offer him future educational opportunities.

Doubt presents the habit-wearing teachers of St. Nicholas School as cogs in a patriarchal bureaucracy. To complain via the proper chain of command would mean going to the monsignor, the priest in question’s septuagenarian roommate, and accomplish nothing.

That’s obvious. What’s unclear is whether Sister Aloysius (Sarah Marshall)—an sharp-witted widow who took vows after losing her husband in World War II—is too quick to believe the worst of mankind.

Marshall stars as the nun crusading against Father Flynn (Christian Conn), a priest who doubles as the gym teacher and religion instructor and occasionally serves the boys Kool-Aid and cookies in the rectory. Suspicious circumstances and “past experiences” fuel her concern, as does paranoia. Marshall has appeared in more Studio productions than any other actor in the theater’s 40-year history. Perhaps I’m biased by her past performances, but she seems too chipper for a Mother Superior-type in a play set 55 years ago. Her speech is clipped, ready

28 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

with one-liners. When the younger nun, Sister James (an excellent Amelia Pedlow,) bemoans her superior for being “too formal,” we don’t agree. Aloysius is a total Scrooge—a highlight of Marshall’s performance is her rant against “secular” Christmas songs—but Marshall’s representation of her does not seem too formal.

Father Flynn, however, wants to see “one of the boys dance around” and play Frosty at the Christmas pageant. Conn successfully pulls off a young-ish priest with a genuine sense of compassion, self-assuredness, and a decent Boston accent.

D.C. audiences last saw Pedlow as the imperious Princess of France in Love’s Labors Lost. In Doubt she loses the attitude but keeps her impeccable diction. That’s crucial since Shandley’s script for Doubt is perfect, with a precise balance of humor, circular-references, foreshadowing, and surprise.

That gorgeous production of Love’s Labors Lost closed out the Folger Shakespeare Library’s theater season last spring. It was consistent with the quality Washington has come to expect from the Folger: Well done Shakespeare with a clever conceptual twist, always grounded in the text.

1 Henry IV, currently playing at the Folger, is the worst production I have seen there in 12 years of D.C. theater-going, and possibly the worst professional production of a Shakespeare play that I have ever seen. The acting is not that

bad. Some of it is good, actually. Edward Gero, another local actor of Sarah Marshall’s vintage, plays Falstaff and he’s wonderful. But the dueling aesthetic concepts, the uneven direction, the set design seemingly inspired by laser tag, and cast-off costumes from a Star Trek set, Buffalo Exchange, and Coldwater Creek are headscratchers. Everything was probably very expensive but it looks like an amateur mess.

West Coast freelance director Rosa Joshi needs an editor, and perhaps some more experience. (Besides two shows at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she’s worked mostly with small theaters in Seattle.) Her few interesting ideas are haphazardly fleshed out. Each scene feels set in a different incoherent world. There’s a prologue and some interludes with stylized fight choreography that resembles Space-Age boxing, but then literal sword fighting on the final battlefield. Yes, the pub scenes in which a young Prince Hal (Avery Whitted) carouses with Falstaff are supposed to seem like a world away from the royal court, but why use flashing neon lights and arcade music and then dress the actors like multicultural hippies? It’s hard to pay attention to the dialogue and storyline—a complicated tale of warring British factions—while you’re trying to discern why one actor is wearing a Sikh turban, a skirt, and an embroidered vest while on the other side of the stage Mistress Quickly (Kate Eastwood Norris) is pouring drinks in a medieval-looking tunic and a tam-tam. Also, if you are going to cast a woman (Jazmine Stewart) in a traditionally male role, as the prince’s buddy Poins, do not dress her like a hooker.

This won’t mean much if you’ve never been to the D.C. theater that specializes in “wordless” Shakespeare, but this Folger production is like bad Synetic. That theater always picks a consistent aesthetic and movement vocabulary for its Shakespeare adaptations, like a goth Macbeth, or their 1920s Twelfth Night where actors dress like Charlie Chaplin and do the Charleston.

I’m not saying Shakespeare can’t be set in some amorphous time or place: It can, but this is not how to do it. May the Folger have better luck in January, when they balance the season with a revival of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. It’s a revival of a 1979 play that was big in New York and London.

2001 14th St. NW. $60–$90. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

201 East Capitol St. SE. $42–$85. (202) 5447077. folger.edu.

MUSICAL OF MUSICALS Love Sick

Book and lyrics by Ofra Daniel Music by Ofra Daniel and Lior Ben-Hur Directed by Christopher Renshaw At Theater J to September 29.

The beam of a flashlight and the whirring motor of a leaf-blower break through darkness and silence as an orange-vested city worker walks down the aisle soon to awake Tel Aviv’s homeless. An old woman (Ofra Daniel) puts on a heavy cloak patched from castoffs, looking like a prophetess from an imagined antiquity, and tells the tale of a beautiful woman with long black hair, running naked through the streets of Jerusalem at night searching for her lover, blurting disconnected lines of poetry before the night watchmen catch her. She is cast out from the Old City. The Old Woman is, of course, telling the story how she came to Tel Aviv where the youth venerate her as the “Crazy Poet of Love.” But before this time, she was called Tirzah.

Growing up in a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem, Tirzah’s family marries her off to a fifthgeneration fishmonger and a widower 20 years her senior (Sasha Olinick).

They have little to say to one another, and though he had three sons with his previous wife, they have no children together and live in passionless banality. On her 30th birthday, Tirzah receives the first of many anonymous love poems whose verses many will recognize from The Song of Songs.

Whether one accepts the tradition that it was written by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE or the scholarly consensus that it was composed in the 3rd century BCE, if The Song of Songs is not the oldest sequence of erotic poetry extant, it’s probably the oldest read outside of academia. Its celebration of sexual love with no reference to God or ritual made its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible a source of controversy among rabbis of antiquity: Many sages attempted to read an esoteric theology into its verses.

Such piety holds little interest for Daniel, who also wrote the book, lyrics, and, with Lior Ben-Hur, the music of Love Sick. She draws inspiration directly from verses in which lovers describe their beloveds as smelling like fragrant spices, likening bodies to succulent fruits or graceful fawns, or to the monumental

towers that rise above the cities. As every new poem arrives at her front door, Tirzah wonders if her anonymous lover (Ali Paris, who also serves as music director and qanun player) might spy her when she ventures into the marketplace, or when and where they will finally rendezvous. Her ecstasies increasingly scandalize both her husband and the gossiping women of Jerusalem (a capable ensemble of Sarah Corey, Sarah Laughland, Kara-Tameika Watkins, and Kanysha Williams). But these erotic reveries have a tragic dimension: A community that values a happy home may be able to accept unremarkable unhappiness, but not unbridled ecstasy.

Daniel, no surprise, can sing and dance, but what sells her performance is how she embodies Tirzah, from the stooped shoulders of the crazy poet of Tel Aviv to the awkwardness of a reluctant bride and clumsy housewife, to the woman running through the streets of Jerusalem after midnight.

Daniel and Ben-Hur accompany the poetry with a vibrant tapestry of musical traditions from Israel, where they were born, and San Francisco, where they currently make their home. The sextet freely mingles with the cast and provide a wide range of rhythms, timbres, and textures with bowed, plucked, and strummed strings, percussion, and woodwinds.

Choreographer Matt Cole’s dance vocabulary draws from Israeli folk dancing for the ensemble pieces, and the sensual undulations of belly dancing, but is expansive enough to include ribald physical comedy, and in the case of such numbers as “The Fish Song,” weird surrealism.

Misha Kachman’s scenic design, while dominated by the huge leafless tree whose branches refuse to be contained by the proscenium arch, evokes the gorgeous dilapidation of parts of downtown Tel Aviv, including the bus stop on Allenby Street and the graffiti that seems to mark nearly every wall of some neighborhoods. Kelsey Hunt dresses the cast and orchestra in colorfully textured costumes.

Love Sick marks not just the opening of Theater J’s new season but their return to their theater space at the Edlavitch JCC after a year of wandering from space to space while the building was being renovated. It is fitting to test the new sound system and lighting rigs with such an extraordinary musical spectacle.

—Ian Thal

The North American Tour Company of CATS. Photo by Matthew Murphy. TM 1981 RUG LTD

THEATERCURTAIN CALLS

September 17–October 6 Opera House Groups call (202) 416-8400

Kennedy-Center.org

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

(202) 467-4600

Theater at the Kennedy Center is made possible by

Major support for Musical Theater at the Kennedy Center is provided by

Kennedy Center Theater Season Sponsor

1529 16th St. NW. $30–$69. (202) 777-3210. theaterj.org washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 29

FILMSHORT SUBJECTS

let’s get

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

CRAFTY arts & makers festival

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BYE BYE BIRDIE The Goldfinch

Directed by John Crowley Fri & Sat, Sept 13 & 14 at Midnight!

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

FEATURING LIVE SHADOW CAST SONIC TRANSDUCERS!

Chained dogs suffer day in and day out.

They endure sweltering temperatures, hunger, and thirst and are vulnerable and lonely. Keep them inside, where it’s safe and comfortable.

Photo: Don Flood (donfloodphoto.com) • Makeup: Mylah Morales, for Celestine Agency Hair: Marcia Hamilton, for Margaret Maldonado Agency • Styling: Natalie and Giolliosa Fuller (sisterstyling.com)

30 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

Ansel elgort is too dim-looking to play Theodore Decker. Theo is the hero of The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning novel, and he narrates all 800 pages. In order to play Theo, an actor must convey some sense of the character’s interiority, and Elgort fails to capture any of his intelligence or compulsive self-destruction. In fact, there are times when Elgort does not react to his fellow actors, and simply waits for his turn to speak. Shockingly, this problem does not derail director John Crowley’s film adaptation because the supporting characters are intact. Crowley has the sensitivity and care to convey the book’s emotions cinematically.

Save for a few flourishes, there is little narration in Peter Straughan’s screenplay. This makes Theo a reactive character with little agency. He rarely takes any initiative, and when he does, it is off camera. One way to foster the audience’s connection to Theo is to replay the defining event from his young life. As a boy, he and his mother visited an art museum that was attacked by a bomber.

His mother did not survive the attack, and in the immediate confusion, Theo smuggles “The Goldfinch,” a singular painting by Dutch master Carel Fabritius, in his backpack. The film is about what happens to that painting, and Theo.

Oakes Fegley plays Theo as a boy, who is more shell-shocked than grief-stricken. The early sections follow Theo as he receives temporary care from the WASP Barbour family, then moves with his alcoholic fa-

ther (Luke Wilson) to Las Vegas. Soon Theo meets Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), a man who becomes a father figure. Along with legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, Crowley recalls the soft light and shadow of Dutch painting, and leaves enough space for little details, like when Hobie reassuringly ruffles Theo’s hair—a small gesture that means a lot to a child reeling from trauma.

The best section of the film is also the best section of the book. After Theo moves to Las Vegas, he meets young Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a sullen Ukrainian who becomes his friend. In a film full of sturdy acting veterans, Wolfhard gives the film’s best performance. Boris is a bit of a jerk, one who introduces Theo to drugs, but he also understands distraction is its own form of comfort.

The film’s flaws are significant: It’s somehow too long and too short at the same time.

It rushes through Theo’s adulthood. The climax of the novel, which incorporates thriller elements, unfolds in minutes. Straughan’s script also glides through a romantic subplot with zero emotional impact. The film jumps between the past and present, robbing the audience of the curiosity that comes with familiar faces turning up in unexpected ways.

But at least The Goldfinch has the patience to let the audience focus on Theo (albeit as an empty vessel), and the events that befall him. Maybe you remember a kindness that carried you through a dark period in your life, or maybe you had a strange friend with wild dark hair that reminds you of Boris. A lengthy coming-of-age novel gives ample opportunity to create such connections, and Crowley is wise enough to understand that.

—Alan Zilberman The Goldfinch opens Friday in theaters everywhere.

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

CRAFTY arts & makers festival

Stephen Czarkowski, Music Director Jeffry Newberger, Associate Conductor

Saturday & Sunday September 28-29 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Buzzard Point DC

with

Chris Gekker trumpet

Mari Rodela is the chief community and culture officer, and co-owner, at DC Brau Brewing Co in Northeast D.C. As a longtime D.C.-area resident, Mari is proud to play a key leadership role in a business that contributes to the sustainability and growth of D.C.’s local economy and community. She is also the president and co-founder of the DC Brewers’ Guild and sits on the board of Think Local First DC. You’ll find her out and about this week at various events during the 11th annual DC Beer Week, which goes through this Sunday, Sept. 15. For more details about DC Beer Week, visit dcbeerweek.net. #StayCrafty

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@CraftyFestivalDC • CraftyFestivalDC.com

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washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 31

Merriweather Post Pavilion • Columbia, MD WPOC SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY FEATURING

Old Dominion • Michael Ray • Jordan Davis • Lauren Alaina • Dylan Scott • Jimmie Allen • Brandon Lay • Filmore .....................SEPT 29

Ticketmaster • For full lineup & more info, visit merriweathermusic.com • impconcerts.com

THIS WEEK’S SHOWS CHICKEN & MUMBO SAUCE PRESENTS

Crank Karaoke with Live Band, Go-Go Karaoke, and Jam Session feat. Walk Like Walt, Crank Karaoke Band, & DJ Money ....... F SEPT 13 Barns Courtney w/ The Hunna Early Show! 6pm Doors ................................... Sa 14 Polo & Pan w/ Mindchatter ........................................................................... Su 15 SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

Band of Skulls w/ Demob Happy ........................Th 19 grandson w/ nothing,nowhere.

Joseph w/ Deep Sea Diver ...........W 2 Caravan Palace Early Show! 6pm Doors. .....................Th 3 Luna performing Penthouse w/ Olden Yolk Early Show! 6pm Doors. ....................Sa 5 Bombay Bicycle Club w/ The Greeting Committee

Early Show! 6pm Doors. .....................Sa 21 U STREET MUSIC HALL PRESENTS

The Joe Kay Experience A Special 4 Hour Set Late Show! 10pm Doors ...................Sa 21 Ride w/ The Spirit Of The Beehive ..Su 22 Whitney w/ Hand Habits ............M 23 half•alive w/ Sure Sure Early Show! 6pm Doors. .....................F 27

Late Show! 10pm Doors .....................Sa 5

Steve Lacy .................................Su 6 Noah Kahan w/ JP Saxe ............M 7 Kero Kero Bonito w/ Negative Gemini ......................Tu 8 Shovels & Rope w/ Cedric Burnside .........................W 9 SHAED w/ Absofacto ................Th 10

BLISSPOP & U ST MUSIC HALL PRESENT

BLISSPOP DISCO FEST feat.

The Black Madonna, Josey Rebelle, Wayne Davis & Lisa Moody (Deep Sugar), Amy Douglas, and more! Late Show! 10pm Doors ...F 27 Chromeo (DJ Set), DāM-FunK (DJ

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Perpetual Groove w/ Kendall Street Company ........F 11 Mashrou’ Leila ......................Sa 12 Small Town Murder

Set), RAC (Live Remix Set), and more!

Late Show! 10pm Doors ................Sa 28

This is a seated show. ......................Su 13

Jade Bird w/ Flyte

Moonchild .................................W 16 Yungblud w/ MISSIO ................Th 17 Bishop Briggs w/ Miya Folick & Jax Anderson ..Sa 19

Early Show! 6pm Doors. ....................Sa 28

K.Flay w/ Houses & Your Smith ..Su 29 Dean Lewis w/ Scott Helman ...M 30

MANY MORE SHOWS ON SALE!

9:30 CUPCAKES

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

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

COND NIGHT ADDED!

9:30 CLUB SHOW SOLD OUT! SE

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS

w/ Lady Lamb .................................................................................................NOVEMBER 6

JUDGE JOHN HODGMAN Live ......NOVEMBER 10 THE BIRCHMERE PRESENTS

C OL IN HAY (Solo)

................................ SAT APRIL 4

On Sale Friday, September 13 at 10am

Tinariwen w/ Lonnie Holley ........ SEP 19 Angel Olsen w/ Vagabon ............NOV 1 U Up? Live ....................................NOV 4 The Waterboys ..................... SEP 22 Kishi Bashi ..................................NOV 8 Adam Ant: Friend or Foe w/ Glam Skanks ................................. SEP 23 Sasha Velour’s Smoke & Mirrors .................NOV 11 Cat Power w/ Arsun ................... SEP 25 Mandolin Orange D NIGHT ADDED! FIRST NIGHT SOLD OUT! SECON w/ Sunny War ....................................NOV 14 POLITICS AND PROSE PRESENTS BenDeLaCreme & Ta-Nehisi Coates Jinkx Monsoon: The Water Dancer Book Tour All I Want for Christmas is Attention .NOV 29 ....SEP 27 (Moderated by Ibram X. Kendi) Robert Earl Keen AN EVENING WITH

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Countdown to Christmas

Nahko and Medicine w/ Shinyribs........................................DEC 6 for The People w/ Ayla Nereo . SEP 29

METROPOLITAN ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS

THE BYT BENTZEN BALL

Zaz ................................................... OCT 4 Natasha Bedingfield ........... OCT 14

AN EVENING WITH

AEG PRESENTS

LOS ESPOOKYS LIVE

Bianca Del Rio -

It’s Jester Joke ........................ OCT 18

MARIA BAMFORD

Early Show! 6pm Doors ................... OCT 24

Late Show! 9:30pm Doors ................ OCT 24

PETE HOLMES w/ Jamie Lee - LIVE! Ingrid Michaelson Early Show! 5:30pm Doors ............... OCT 25 All 9/24 9:30 Club tickets will be honored. w/ Maddie Poppe ............................. OCT 23 THE NEW NEGROES FEAT. AEG PRESENTS

Jónsi & Alex Somers -

BARON VAUGHN • OPEN MIKE EAGLE • DULCE SLOAN • JABOUKIE YOUNG-WHITE • HAYWOOD TURNIPSEED JR. • VIOLET GRAY

Riceboy Sleeps with Wordless Orchestra .......... OCT 28 Late Show! 9pm Doors ................... OCT 25 9:30 CLUB PRESENTS AT U STREET MUSIC HALL

Black Pumas w/ Rudy De Anda ...................Th SEP 12 Wovenhand .............................Su 15 Bleached w/ Paranoyds ...............Tu 17 Louis Cole w/ Thumpasaurus ........Th 19

BANNERS w/ The Man Who .............F 20 Raveena w/ Dianna Lopez .............Su 22 SCARLXRD ...............................W 25 Phum Viphurit w/ ESTEF ............. M 30

ROXANE GAY: X Ambassadors w/ Bear Hands & LPX ....................... OCT 29 A S mArt , F unny , r eAl A Fternoon Puddles Pity Party w/ Dina Martina Halloween Costume Contest!

Matinee Show! 1pm Doors ............... OCT 26

TIG NOTARO: B ut e nough A Bout y ou

Early Show! 5pm Doors .................... OCT 26

Come dressed in your best! ............. OCT 31 • thelincolndc.com • U Street (Green/Yellow) stop across the street!

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

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

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

HAPPY HOUR DRINK PRICES impconcerts.com AFTER THE SHOW AT THE BACK BAR! 32 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

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

930.com

CITYLIST

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

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

Tix @ Ticketmaster.com

Music 33 Theater 35 Film 35

Marina at The Anthem, Sept. 18 presented by

Warner theatre Sat. Sept.14, 8pm Tickets at Ticketmaster.com

Sept 14 An Evening with 15

MAYSA

The Trifecta of Folk Tour:

THE KINGSTON TRIO THE BROTHERS FOUR THE LIMELITERS 18 JAKE SHIMABUKURO 19 BILLY BRAGG "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back"

22

A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO ROY BUCHANAN with Billy Price, Mike Zito & more!

25

/Fath RICK WAKEMAN Kaula

"Grumpy Old Rock Star Tour"

THE ROBERT CRAY BAND 27 THE SELDOM SCENE & JONATHAN EDWARDS Billy 30 LOS LONELY BOYS Coulter Oct 1 JOHN MORELAND 26

ROCK

Music FRIDAY

ELECTRONIC

ECHOSTAGE 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE. (202) 503-2330. Diplo. 9 p.m. $40–$50. echostage.com.

SOUNDCHECK 1420 K St. NW. (202) 789-5429. Ferry Corsten. 10 p.m. $20. soundcheckdc.com.

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

Shakey Graves and Dr. Dog. 8 p.m. $40–$75. theanthemdc.com.

ROCK

HILL COUNTRY BARBECUE 410 7th St. NW. (202) 556-2050. Joe Hertler & The Rainbow Seekers. 9 p.m. $15. hillcountry.com.

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

Andrew Bird. 8 p.m. $46–$76. theanthemdc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Acid Tongue. 8:30 p.m.

Free. songbyrddc.com.

FOLK

FUNK & R&B

SATURDAY

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531.

Latrese Bush & Anissa Hargrove. 8 p.m. $22–$32. citywinery.com.

HIP-HOP

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487.

Aries. 8 p.m. $15–$18. unionstage.com.

POP

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. The Band Camino. 6 p.m. $25–$75. 930.com.

BLACK CAT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. The Growlers. 8 p.m. $35. blackcatdc.com.

KENNEDY CENTER REACH 2700 F St. NW. (202) 4674600. Night Glitter. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

KENNEDY CENTER REACH 2700 F St. NW. (202) 4674600. J.PERIOD & The Live Mixtape ft. Mumu Fresh. 6 p.m. Free. kennedy-center.org.

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Angels & Airwaves. 8 p.m. $42.50. fillmoresilverspring.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Back to Yours and Pinewalls. 8 p.m. $12–$15. songbyrddc.com.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Becca Mancari. 7 p.m. $12–$14. dcnine.com.

HIP-HOP

CLASSICAL

LIVE! AT 10TH & G 945 G St. NW. (202) 628-4317.

Chiaroscuro by the New Orchestra of Washington. 4 p.m. $15–$45. culturecapital.com.

COUNTRY

AMP BY STRATHMORE 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Reckless Kelly. 8 p.m. $27– $43. ampbystrathmore.com.

ELECTRONIC

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Marc Rebillet. 10 p.m. $20. 930.com.

ECHOSTAGE 2135 Queens Chapel Road NE. (202) 503-2330. Diplo. 9 p.m. $40–$50. echostage.com.

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

HVOB. 7 p.m. $20–$25. ustreetmusichall.com.

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Barns Courtney. 6 p.m. $25. 930.com.

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

God Is An Astronaut. 8 p.m. $15. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Swiss Army and Dead Format. 8 p.m. $10–$12. songbyrddc.com.

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487. Boy & Bear. 7 p.m. $25–$50. unionstage.com.

VOCAL

RACHEL M. SCHLESINGER CONCERT HALL AND ARTS CENTER 4915 East Campus Drive, Alexandria.

(703) 323-3000. Alexandria Harmonizers. 4 p.m. $35– $100. nvcc.edu.

WORLD

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 4th Street and Independence Avenue SW. (202) 6331000. Hispanic Heritage Month Concert: New Inca Son. 2 p.m. Free. nmai.si.edu.

with DARRIN BRADBURY

2

JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE with special guest JESSE MALIN

TALL THE PAPER KITES HEIGHTS 4&5 KINDRED THE FAMILY SOUL 6 GARY PUCKETT AND THE UNION GAP 7 KEIKO MATSUI 9 OTTMAR LIEBERT & LUNA NEGRA

3

10

PHIL VASSAR "Hitsteria Tour!"

TOM PAXTON & THE DONJUANS 12&13 THE WHISPERS

11

SUNDAY CLASSICAL

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY KATZEN ARTS CENTER 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. (703) 270-1923. Pianist Jeffrey Swann and the Wagner Society Chamber Players. 7:30 p.m. $30–$40. wagner-dc.org.

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 33

Burna Boy at The Fillmore Silver Spring, Sept. 15

COUNTRY

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Albert Cummings. 7:30 p.m. $22–$25. citywinery.com.

ELECTRONIC

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Polo & Pan. 7 p.m. $25. 930.com.

FOLK

BIRCHMERE 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. The Kingston Trio, The Brothers Four and The Limeliters. 7:30 p.m. $69.50. birchmere.com.

HILL CENTER AT THE OLD NAVAL HOSPITAL 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. (202) 549-4172. Steve Poltz.

4:30 p.m. Free. hillcenterdc.org.

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

Wovenhand. 7 p.m. $18. ustreetmusichall.com.

HIP-HOP

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Marlon Craft. 8 p.m. $15– $50. songbyrddc.com.

POP

BLACK CAT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Forgetter. 7 p.m. $10. blackcatdc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Lukr. 8 p.m. Free. songbyrddc.com.

ROCK

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. An Evening with Lloyd Cole. 7:30 p.m. $45–$55. citywinery.com.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. The Go Rounds. 7:30 p.m. $12. dcnine.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Potty Mouth. 10 p.m.

Free. songbyrddc.com.

WORLD

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Burna Boy. 8 p.m. $35– $77. fillmoresilverspring.com.

MONDAY

ROCK

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

Los Stellarians. 7 p.m. $25–30. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Leigh Nash. 6 p.m. $17–$20. citywinery.com.

FUNK & R&B ROCK

THE ANTHEM 901 Wharf St. SW. (202) 888-0020. The B-52s. 8 p.m. $55–$95. theanthemdc.com.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Mannequin Pussy. 7:30 p.m. $12. dcnine.com.

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

Holly Bowling. 7:30 p.m. $10–$25. thehamiltondc.com.

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

Tesla. 8 p.m. $33–$248. warnertheatredc.com.

WORLD

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Live. 7 p.m. $45. 930.com.

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

Bleached. 7 p.m. $20. ustreetmusichall.com.

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

Black Uhuru. 8 p.m. $25–$59.50. thehowardtheatre.com.

THE ANTHEM 901 Wharf St. SW. (202) 888-0020. Bloc Party. 8 p.m. $45–$75. theanthemdc.com.

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487.

Native Sons feat. Steve Azar. 7:30 p.m. $25. unionstage.com.

AMP BY STRATHMORE 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Ana Popovic. 8 p.m. $28– $38. ampbystrathmore.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Bat House. 9 p.m. Free. songbyrddc.com.

UNION STAGE 740 Water St. SW. (877) 987-6487. Ezra Furman. 7:30 p.m. $16–$30. unionstage.com.

WORLD

BLUES

BLUES

COUNTRY

CLASSICAL

FILLMORE SILVER SPRING 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Burna Boy. 8 p.m. $35– $77. fillmoresilverspring.com.

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

Brent Cobb. 7 p.m. $18–$20. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Los Wemblers de Iquitos.

8 p.m. $15–$20. songbyrddc.com.

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

Gene Farris. 10 p.m. $15–$20. ustreetmusichall.com.

TUESDAY HIP-HOP

BLACK CAT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Sir E.U. 7:30 p.m. $10. blackcatdc.com.

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

The Lox. 9 p.m. $30–$69.99. thehowardtheatre.com.

JIFFY LUBE LIVE 7800 Cellar Door Drive, Bristow.

(703) 754-6400. Meek Mill and Future. 7 p.m. $35– $510. livenation.com.

POP

9:30 CLUB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Sigrid. 7 p.m. $25. 930.com.

34 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

ELECTRONIC FOLK

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Fink.

6 p.m. $20–$30. citywinery.com.

JAZZ

MANSION AT STRATHMORE 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Calidore String Quartet. 7:30 p.m. $30. strathmore.org.

MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. 8 p.m. $45–$85. strathmore.org.

COUNTRY

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Ray Wylie Hubbard. 6 p.m. $28–$40. citywinery.com.

KENNEDY CENTER CONCERT HALL 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. NSO Pops: Maxwell: A Night at the Symphony. 8 p.m. $39–$399. kennedy-center.org.

FUNK & R&B

POP

HIP-HOP

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

Marina. 7:30 p.m. $45–$75. theanthemdc.com.

SONGBYRD MUSIC HOUSE AND RECORD CAFE 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. Ritt Momney. 9 p.m. Free. songbyrddc.com.

ROCK

BLACK CAT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. The ArKaics. 7:30 p.m. $10. blackcatdc.com.

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

Louis Cole. 7 p.m. $18. ustreetmusichall.com.

DC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Ben Beal. 8 p.m. $10–$13. dcnine.com.

JAZZ

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

Billy Cobham Crosswinds Project with Randy Brecker.

8 p.m. $35–$40. thehowardtheatre.com.

The Smuggler at Eaton DC, to Oct. 6

Butterfly at Source Theatre, to Sept. 22

cessful presidential assassinations. Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To Sept. 29. $55– $93. (703) 820-9771. sigtheatre.org.

BUTTERFLY The Puccini classic Madame Butterfly is given new life in a version stripped of the artifice and exoticism of the original. Performances will be in English and in Italian, so audiences can choose how to experience the dynamic opera. Source Theatre. 1835 14th St. NW. To Sept. 22. $21–$46. (202) 204-7800. sourcedc.org.

CABARET A club in 1929 Berlin is full of decadence and dreamers—but war is on the horizon and Berlin is permeated with a sense of dread. Olney Theatre Center. 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Olney. To Oct. 6. $42–$99. (301) 924-3400. olneytheatre.org.

CATS A group of alley cats are given a chance at an extra life in this classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

Kennedy Center Opera House. 2700 F St. NW. To Oct. 6. $49–$149. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

DOUBT: A PARABLE Studio Theatre stages John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning play Doubt: A Parable, where an allegation of abuse tears apart a 1960s Catholic school. Studio Theatre. 1501 14th St. NW. To Oct. 6. $20–$80. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

FAIRVIEW This play, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for drama, follows a dysfunctional family uniting for their grandmother’s birthday—and a group of voyeurs watching them from outside, and eventually, inside. Woolly Mammoth Theatre. 641 D St. NW. To Oct. 6. $15–$68. (202) 393-3939. woollymammoth.net.

JITNEY A Pittsburgh jitney station—a symbol of community stability—is threatened on all sides by a stagnant neighborhood with no jobs and encroaching gentrification. Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To Oct. 20. $76–$95. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org.

POP

BLACK CAT 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 667-4490. Black Moth Super Rainbow. 7:30 p.m. $20. blackcatdc.com.

CITY WINERY 1350 Okie St. NE. (202) 250-2531. Talbott Brothers & Emily Scott Robinson. 8 p.m. $15–$18. citywinery.com.

WORLD

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COOLIDGE AUDITORIUM First Street and Independence Avenue SE. (202) 7075507. Les Filles de Illighadad. Noon. Free. loc.gov.

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

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

Theater

1 HENRY IV The Folger puts on 1 Henry IV, the story of a king and his ill-suited heir, Prince Hal, in court and on the battlefield. Folger Elizabethan Theatre. 201 E. Capitol St. SE. To Oct. 12. $27–$85. (202) 544-7077. folger.edu.

ASSASSINS Assassins is a musical based on John Weidman’s book with music by Stephen Sondheim. It is the darkly comic story of nine attempted and suc-

LA VIDA ES SUEÑO La Vida es Sueño, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and directed by Hugo Medrano with adaptations by Nando J. López, is about free will, destiny, and tyranny. It will be presented in Spanish with English subtitles. GALA Hispanic Theatre.

3333 14th St. NW. To Oct. 13. (202) 234-7174. galatheatre.org.

LOVE SICK Based on The Song of Songs, Love Sick tells the story a young wife in a lifeless marriage who discovers she has a secret admirer and begins a mysterious, dizzying journey of sexual and personal empowerment. Theater J. 1529 16th St. NW. To Sept.

29. $34-64. (202) 777-3210. theaterj.org.

MARYLAND LYRIC OPERA: CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA & II TABBARO These two celebrated one acts, Cavalliera Rusticana and Il Tabbaro, are performed by the Maryland Lyric Opera and its orchestra. Music Center at Strathmore. 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. Sept. 14 to 15. $25–$75. (301) 581-5100. strathmore.org.

SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY Paulina, the queen bee of the Aburi Girls Boarding School, is desperate to be Miss Ghana—but she’s got some competition from within her school, namely from Ericka, who’s just arrived from America with a decidedly Western attitude. Round House Theatre Bethesda. 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda. To Oct. 13. $32–$73. (240) 644-1100. roundhousetheatre.org.

SHEAR MADNESS Shear Madness is an audienceinteractive crime comedy set in Georgetown about the murder of a pianist who lives in a hair salon. Each show delivers a unique performance based on the audience’s sleuthing. Kennedy Center Theater Lab. 2700 F St. NW. To Sept. 28. $56. 202-467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

THE SMUGGLER This comedy—9,000 words in rhyme—follows an Irish immigrant who meant to make it in America but ended up on the island of Amity and meets a stranger who teaches him the price of being an American. Eaton DC. 1201 K St. NW. To Oct. 6. $40. (202) 900-8414. eatonworkshop.com.

SOUVENIR Florence Foster Jenkins became a famous singer, but she couldn’t even string together two in-tune notes, though she believed herself to be a world-class soprano. Souvenir is the story of Jenkins, told through the perspective of her accompanist who is at first bemused by her but later grows to feel fondness for her. Horowitz Center at Howard Community College. 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia. To Sept. 22. $15–$40. (443) 518-1500. repstage.org.

TRYING Trying follows the true story of the author’s time working for Judge Francis Biddle, former attorney general of the United States under FDR—and a notorious taskmaster who is trying to cement his legacy. 1st Stage. 1524 Spring Hill Road, McLean. To Oct. 20. $15–$42. (703) 854-1856. 1ststagetysons.org.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME This play

by Heidi Schreck—a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize— follows Schreck’s reckoning with our founding document from the perspective of her 15-year-old and current selves. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. 2700 F St. NW. To Sept. 22. $49–$169. (202) 4674600. kennedy-center.org.

WILD PARTY Andrew Lippa’s musical Wild Party is based on the book by Joseph Moncure March in 1928.

It’s the story of two lovers in an abusive relationship who invite guests to the party of the century in a desperate attempt to salvage their relationship. Greenbelt Arts Center. 123 Centerway, Greenbelt. To Sept.

15. $12–$22. (301) 441-8770. greenbeltartscenter.org.

Film

BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON A New York woman changes her life by training for a marathon. Starring Jillian Bell, Jennifer Dundas, and Patch Darragh. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) IT CHAPTER TWO A phone call brings the Losers’ Club back to Derry 27 years after they first battled the evil creature Pennywise. Starring Bill Skarsgård, Jessica Chastain, and James McAvoy. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) DON’T LET GO A man’s family is murdered—but then he gets a call from his supposedly dead niece. Starring Byron Mann, Storm Reid, and Mykelti Williamson. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) THE GOLDFINCH Based on the novel by Donna Tartt, this film follows a boy in New York after his mother is killed by a bomb at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Starring Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, and Ansel Elgort. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) HUSTLERS A group of strip club employees team up to turn the tables on their rich clients. Starring Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, and Cardi B. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) OFFICIAL SECRETS In this adaptation of a true story, a British whistleblower leaks proof of an illegal NSA spying program. Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, and Ralph Fiennes. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)

washingtoncitypaper.com september 13, 2019 35

Scene and

Heard

@CraftyFestivalDC CraftyFestivalDC.com

events calendar.

washingtoncitypaper.com/ calendar

at

CRAFTY arts & makers festival

Saturday & Sunday September 28-29 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Buzzard Point DC

CITYPAPER WASHINGTON

washingtoncitypaper.com

36 september 13, 2019 washingtoncitypaper.com

1 Marching band instrument 5 With 44-Down, closing words 8 Big petroleum producer 14 White whale hunter 15 O'er there 16 "Like, immediately!"

17 Steelers wide receiver SmithSchuster 18 Kid's lunchbox fave, briefly 19 Traveled over 20 Lacks energy 23 Young boy 24 Candlemas mo.

25 Rocket man?

26 Cube-shaped 27 German car company 31 Sorta round 33 Realm conquered by Napoleon: Abbr.

34 Crunchy sandwich 36 ___ news 39 "I'd stay inside if I were you" 45 Kind of butter 46 Rapper in the Showtime documentary Of Mics and Men

Volunteer

Shop handmade.

Support artists.

Will Warren writes Scene and Heard. If you know of a location worthy of being seen or heard, email him at wwarren@washingtoncitypaper.com.

D.C.’s awesomest

MEALS ON WHEELS

By Brendan Emmett Quigley

Commuting September, 2019 People commute with their heads buried in their phones. They text and surf and smile as they walk, drive, and yes, bike, from one place to another. Even the ones who, at first, seem unconnected are wearing AirPods.

Earbuds and headphones provide a secret soundtrack to the morning’s monotony.

At the corner of 15th and R streets NW, where two bike lanes meet and pedestrians head downtown while cars reverse commute north, a sight wrests them from their routine, if just for a moment.

Bright white T-shirts blow in a gentle breeze. They hang on PVC pipe crosses, a clothespin holding the neck together so they don’t billow. Black text—most of it handwritten—lists a name, age, and date on each shirt. A red and black sign provides little-needed context: “Gun Deaths 2019 DC/ MD/VA.�

There’s Breon Austin, 16, who died on April 19. One shirt memorializes the life of someone a year shy of 70. Another’s age is unknown. Together they make a ghostly graveyard that fills the lawn of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.

As they pass by, some people seem not to notice the display. Their eyes stay fixed ahead, or down on their screen. Some give just a half glance of acknowledgement. Others follow that up with a second or third look.

A biker headed downtown stopped at the light catches the end of the display. He turns his neck to look back, taking in the full scene. —Will Warren

PUZZLE

47 Google Maps marking 48 German car company 51 Thought of 54 Crossword clue heading 57 Finger-licking meal that usually comes with a wetnap, for short 59 "Like, immediately!"

60 Hoppy beer selection 61 "Like, duh!"

65 Mississippi River explorer 67 Casserole morsel 68 Scene of bedlam 70 Release, as a bra 71 Corny entertainer 72 Dory's friend 73 "Hearts-andminds" military missions 74 "Yo, yo, yo" 75 Snifter part

1 Bluesman Mahal 2 "You got that right" 3 Chipotle rival 4 Bullies 5 Copywriter's catch

6 Rail rider 7 "Bon appetit" 8 Chess grandmaster Anatoly 9 Only state where every county has some national forest 10 Came out on top 11 White 12 Glacier climber's prop 13 Nightgown 21 Sunday Night Football channel 22 Chairman name 26 Ennui vibe

27 Frat letter 28 Scraps 29 Succession channel 30 Jeff Lynne's ___ (rock band) 32 Admiral's rear 35 Craggy hill 37 Didn't say anything 38 Pennsylvania city on its' namesake lake 40 Seemingforever stretch 41 Nuke quickly 42 Strong arm?

43 Smidge 44 See 5-Across 49 Project Gutenberg archives 50 Corp. acquisition 52 Prefix with "glottis" 53 Decorates 54 Decorated 55 Hits theaters 56 Wishy-___ 58 19th letters in the Hebrew alphabet 61 Convertible roof 62 Boyfriend 63 Femme fatale 64 A handful 66 "Wheels" in the theme answers that support meals 69 Holland who plays Spider-Man

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SAVAGELOVE M DOOGALS THE FAMOUS

C

My roommate is a gay man who is into getting fisted. A lot. We were FWBs until he moved into my place, at which point we agreed it would be better for us to not have sex anymore. It’s worked out fine, and he’s been here for a year. Here’s the problem: About two years ago, he got into fisting and he has someone over every night to fist him. As soon as he comes home from work, he spends a good hour in the bathroom cleaning out, and then some guy comes over to fist him. Every single day.

My roommate is a very attractive guy who doesn’t think he’s attractive at all. I’ve talked to him a few times about whether he’s being sexually compulsive, but he just laughs and says, “Well, you suck a lot of dick.” (I have a healthy but moderate sex life.) I am concerned that all this ass play is not healthy. As a friend, I want him to seek help for his sexual compulsion, his low self-esteem, and his social isolation. As a roommate, I am tired of all these strange men coming into my home and the high water bill.

—Frequent Insertions Sincerely Trouble Someone “Fisting is a healthy and safe sexual activity so long as the participants are sober,” said Dr. Peter Shalit, a physician and author who works with many gay men. “There is a misconception that fisting damages the anal sphincter, loosens it, and causes a loss of bowel control over time. This is absolutely false.”

Devin Franco, a gay porn star who’s been getting fisted on a weekly basis for many years, backs up Dr. Shalit. “People who are only used to vanilla intercourse are sometimes shocked,” said Franco. “People will leave comments on my videos asking if I was in pain, even though I’m clearly always enjoying it. Fisting is actually the most pleasurable sexual act I’ve ever experienced—and seven years in, no negative health consequences and everything down there works just fine, thanks.”

But exactly how does that work? How does someone like Franco get a fist and/or a ridiculously large sex toy in his butt?

“A skilled fisting bottom can voluntarily relax the anal sphincter in order to accommodate a hand up to the wrist or further,” explained Dr. Shalit. “A skilled fisting top knows how to insert their hand—it’s actually fingertips first, not a clenched fist— and how to do it gently, taking their time, and using lots of lube. And, again, after the session is over, the sphincter returns to its normal state.”

Which is not to say that people haven’t injured themselves or others engaging in anal play with large sex toys, fists, or even per-

fectly average cocks—people most certainly have. That’s why it’s crucial to take things slow, use lots of lube, and go at it sober.

“Fisting isn’t for everyone,” said Dr. Shalit. “In fact, most people are unable to relax their sphincter in this fashion.”

But to figure out whether fisting is for you—to determine whether you’re one of those people who can relax their sphincter—first you gotta wanna, and then you gotta try.

“It actually took about two years for me,” said Franco. “That’s from the first time I did anal play thinking, ‘Maybe I can get his whole fist in there,’ to the first time I actually got a fist in my ass. Two years.”

And while fisting isn’t for everyone, FISTS, like Dr. Shalit said, it’s very clearly for your roommate. But enjoying the hell out of a particular sexual activity—even one that seems extreme to those who don’t enjoy it—isn’t by itself evidence of low selfesteem or sexual compulsion.

“If FISTS thinks his roommate has low self-esteem,” said Dr. Shalit, “he’s done the right thing by telling him he should seek help. But that’s the end of his responsibility. Whether or not his roommate seeks help is up to his roommate. And it’s hard for me to agree that his roommate is being sexually compulsive based on what’s in the letter. Many men have sex every day, and the roommate’s sex life doesn’t seem to have any negative consequences except that FISTS doesn’t like it.”

While Franco also doesn’t think getting fisted daily is proof that your roommate is out of control, fisting isn’t something he does every day. “Doing it daily sounds exhausting,” he said. “The act requires a lot of physical exertion. I personally need a little recovery time between sessions. But I do know guys who do it every day—maybe not a fist every day, but they play with large toys every day. But I couldn’t and I don’t.”

All that said, FISTS, two of your cited reasons for not liking what your roommate is up to—strange men in and out of your apartment (and your roommate) and all that douching driving up your water bill—are legitimate complaints that you shouldn’t be shy about addressing.

“To not have a lot of strangers in and out of the apartment is a reasonable ask of a roommate,” said Dr. Shalit. “But if the roommate sees a steady stream of FISTS’s hookups coming over, it could seem like a double standard. And I suppose he could ask for extra help with the water bill, but I’m skeptical that ‘cleaning out’ for fisting would actually cause a significant increase in the bill.”

Dr. Shalit recommends Anal Pleasure & Health by Jack Morin to anyone who wants to learn more about anal intercourse, fisting, and other forms of anal play. “It’s the bible of anal sexuality,” said Dr. Shalit.

Follow Devin Franco on Twitter @devinfrancoxxx, and check out his work at justfor.fans/devinfrancoxxx. —Dan Savage My husband of nearly 20 years came out to me as bisexual about two months ago. He assured me he has no intention of looking outside our marriage for other sex partners.

We’ve always had a kind of barrier sexually, and it seemed to fall away after he came out. We’ve since done all manner of things, including my using a dildo on him. (Thanks for all the tips over the years about anal!) It has been a fun and empowering experience overall.

There is one thing I am having trouble with. He mentioned that he’d like me to peg him using a strap-on. I mean, of course he would, right?

He’d like to actually feel my body against his.

That would doubtless make the whole experience better for him. But I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Does this require me, even if temporarily, to change my body? I’m feeling really vulnerable and insecure about it, like it means there’s something wrong with my body. I get panicky just thinking about it. (My husband has not done or said anything to make me feel bad about my body.)

Using the dildo is no big thing, and I don’t understand why this feels so different and difficult.

—Pegging Feels Different You don’t have to do anything about this right now, PFD. Your husband only came out to you as bisexual two months ago! Your husband’s honesty pulled down that barrier you’d always sensed but could never name, and that’s wonderful and exciting.

And you’re already exploring anal penetration with him on the receiving end, which is something many straight men also enjoy. If covering your genitals temporarily with a strap-on makes you feel awkward or unwanted, you don’t have to do it—not now, not ever. But I can’t imagine you think there’s something wrong with the bodies of lesbians who use strap-ons with their female partners, just as you don’t seem to think holding a dildo means there’s something wrong with (or inadequate about) your hands. If covering your vulva with a strap-on makes you feel negated or undesirable, there are dildo harnesses that strap on to your thigh, not your crotch, and could provide your husband with body-to-body closeness during penetration while still leaving your vulva and clit accessible for digital stimulation.

—DS

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