Washington City Paper (November 17, 2017)

CITYPAPER Washington

Free Volume 37, No. 46 WAshiNgtoNCityPAPer.Com NoV. 17–23, 2017

Housing: CouNCil loVes deVeloPers 7 obituary: Poet lAureAte dolores keNdriCk 8 arts: the Night NormAN mAiler deClAred WAr oN big mediA 23

Hard Line

Heat. Tempers. 13-hour days.

Line cooks function in an intense and brutal world while fueling D.C.’s restaurant boom. P. 14

By Laura Hayes Photographs by Darrow Montgomery

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14 Hard Line Heat. Tempers. 13-hour days. D.C.’s line cooks function in an intense and brutal world while fueling D.C.’s restaurant boom.

By Laura Hayes

Photographs by Darrow Montgomery

4 Chatter distriCt Line 7 Housing Complex: On the same day, the D.C. Council opts to throw money at developers and set a higher bar for access to homeless shelters.

8 Remembering Dolores Kendrick, D.C.’s Poet Laureate, 1927–2017: The “first lady of poetry” leaves behind a rich legacy of promoting poetry throughout the District.

10 Concrete Details: In the city of Pierre L’Enfant, D.C.’s redesigned wharf trades clean lines for planned clutter.

11 Unobstructed View 12 Savage Love 13 Indie in D.C.

arts 23 Norman Mailer vs. Big Media: Fifty years ago in D.C., a drunk Norman Mailer declared war on mainstream media for not taking a stand against the war in Vietnam.

25 Music: For D.C. native Kelela, musical empowerment and enlightenment come from putting all her vulnerabilities on the table.

26 Curtain Calls: Croghan on A Short Series of Disagreements... at Studio Theatre and Klimek on Mosaic Theater’s Vicuña & The American Epilogue 28 Short Subjects: Olszewski on Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Zilberman on Justice League

City List 31 City Lights: Former Vice President Joe Biden brings his American Promise Tour to the Warner Theatre this Friday.

31 Music 35 Theater 36 Film

38 CLassifieds diversions 39 Crossword

On the cover: Illustration by Stephanie Rudig

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CHATTER

In which our readers also celebrate D.C.’s coolest characters

Darrow MontgoMery

A representative selection of comments on articles in last week’s issue:

“The People Issue” My sister-love, @KathyEHollinger, shining bright again, this time in @wcp’s People Issue 2017. Why, yes, it HAS been yet another huge year for D.C.’s dining scene —Enayati on Twitter So much top-notch #D.C. here from @wcp -- including the excellent @marcellakriebel —Dustin Renwick on Twitter These interviews are so good.

—A Muhlberg on Twitter

Not enough characters to write about @AMontgomery_998’s leadership and tenacity. Congrats on being featured in @wcp’s ‘People Issue.’

—Hugo Rojo on Twitter Mixed use communities are the key to sustainable urban development. I’m not too well informed on this particular issue, but thriving communities need affordable housing (and resources) alongside traditional “for profit” development in order to succeed. Hopefully something like this is in the works or being considered.

—Farah on Instagram, in response to our interview with tenant advocate Ruth Barnwell These are nice write-ups of interesting people. But it looks like you are pandering to a certain class of people. … I mean, I’d love to see a write-up of a graffiti artist, a police officer, hell, even that Metro PCS Go-Go music store at 7th and T St NW. Their [sic] is a mix of people in DC and you are focused on your little block/world/area. —wapo_comments on washingtoncitypaper.com Cool feature of @DrIbram in the @wcp. Make sure to check it out!

—Michael T. Barry Jr. on Twitter in response to our interview with American University professor Ibram X. Kendi I know this was a week ago, but so happy to see @RReyesGavilan and @ericdshaw featured in The People Issue 2017. —Anne Phelps on Twitter Department of Corrections: Hasan A is responsible for a majority of independently booked, DIY metal shows in the District, not almost every metal show, as stated in the People Issue.

3400 Block of 16th Street NW, Nov. 11

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DistrictLine Tax Aches

By Andrew Giambrone Two recenT voTes by District lawmakers raise questions about how progressive elected officials are when it comes to development and homelessness—all in the midst of an affordability crisis.

On Nov. 7, supermajorities of the D.C. Council approved two controversial measures during a routine legislative session.

The first would provide more than $82 million in subsidies for Union Market developers through an economic incentive known as tax increment financing, or TIF. The second would demand that homeless people prove District residency to access emergency shelters, including hotels where more than 600 homeless families currently stay because traditional shelters are cramped.

Before these measures can become law, the Council must approve them again in final action sometime in the coming weeks.

Both bills sparked debate that became barbed on occasion, pitting the most left-wing members of the Council against their more centrist peers. The legislation also drew intense lobbying from developers who endorse the TIF and from advocacy organizations who object to the shelter reforms.

Observers readily pointed out an irony in pols working to ensure economic certainty for some of D.C.’s most privileged businesspeople, and doing the contrary, they say, for D.C.’s most vulnerable.

“Everyone wants to claim they’re progressive and supportive of affordable housing, but they are not supporting low-income residents when they vote,” says Amber Harding, a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. WLCH and other organizations have expressed concerns that the proposed reforms would keep families who need shelter out of the District’s system.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has pushed for the two bills since proposing them earlier this year.

But social justice activists contend that the Union Market TIF amounts to a giveaway of

housing complex

precious tax dollars to developers. They and two at-large councilmembers, Elissa Silverman and David Grosso, say growth in this neighborhood would occur without the TIF, and that public funds would be better spent on housing, transit, and other needs.

On Tuesday, the Fair Budget Coalition, which is comprised of more than 60 groups dedicated to alleviating poverty in D.C., cast the Council’s decisions as “an affront to progressive values” in a blog post published on its website. “To vote to give away that sum of money to developers while claiming there is not enough money to support homeless families was a slap in the face to every single District resident who has struggled to find affordable housing,” the coalition wrote.

Under the legislation, shelter applicants would have to present one of 12 specified documents to demonstrate residency, including Social Security paperwork, a valid driver’s permit, a recent pay stub, and an eviction notice issued within the past 60 days. (Bowser had proposed requiring two such documents.)

Current law provides exemptions for survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault, and the bill would also exempt refugees and asylum seekers. But applying for other public assistance, or submitting a statement of a family’s residency in D.C. from a third-party, would not suffice as they do now.

Due to an amendment successfully moved

by Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, the homeless reforms also presume that shelter applicants who have “ownership interest in or [are] on a lease or occupancy agreement for safe housing” do not qualify for placement, unless those applicants can offer “credible evidence” that their housing isn’t actually safe.

This standard isn’t as high as the “clear and convincing evidence” threshold in the original bill, but advocates say it’s unnecessary.

“This idea that people are faking it, that there are hoards of people in shelter who don’t need it, but are living in overcrowded, prisonlike conditions anyway, is completely ridiculous,” Harding explains.

The Bowser administration has stated that 11 percent of shelter applicants from October 2016 to April 2017 were not District residents, based

Darrow Montgomery/File

On the same day, the D.C. Council opts to throw money at developers and set a higher bar for access to homeless shelters.

on their receiving benefits in other states.

Officials counted over 7,400 homeless people in January, representing a 10.5 percent decrease from 2016. Over 5,350 of them—or more than 71 percent—were living in emergency shelter. In part, that’s because District law provides a rare legal right to shelter, which applies during severe weather.

The homeless reforms under consideration are the most sweeping ones to come up since 2005. Some advocates argue that, at best, the reforms wouldn’t help struggling families, and, at worst, would harm them. Bowser and Brianne Nadeau, chair of the D.C. Council’s human services committee, answer that shelters must serve residents in crisis and must not be used to fill gaps in affordable housing.

Advocates counter that the legislation institutionalizes problems with D.C.’s rapid rehousing program, which generally provides a oneyear rental subsidy to families leaving a shelter.

Because the subsidy is time-limited, families face a massive increase in rent payments after the subsidy expires, and many of them boomerang back to shelter or couch surf.

On a 6-7 vote, lawmakers denied an amendment by Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White that would have increased the timelimit to 18 months when homeless services providers aren’t able to show that a family could sustain housing without assistance. It’s unclear how much that amendment would have cost the District because White didn’t offer a fiscal impact statement when floating it.

Nadeau opposed White’s measure and told her colleagues, “I understand your compassion, but we have to draw the line somewhere.”

She called it “haphazard” and said investing in longer-term subsidies would be preferable.

Moments before this discussion, the Council greenlighted the $82.4 million TIF for a

core group of Union Market developers, including Gallaudet University, JBG Smith, Edens, Trammell Crow Residential, and LCOR. TIFs encourage development by allowing developers to borrow money through issuing bonds that are secured by future sales- and property-tax revenue generated by a project.

The bonds can pay for infrastructure improvements needed for a project to grow, but impose budget trade-offs.

D.C. has used TIFs for anchor projects in Columbia Heights, Shaw, the Southwest Waterfront, Chinatown, and other neighborhoods. Fiscal policy experts caution that the mechanism should be employed sparingly because it adds to the city’s debt and reduces its borrowing capacity.

A common litmus test for determining whether a TIF is apt involves examining if a project would succeed without the subsidy.

(Policy wonks casually refer to it as the “butfor test.”)

For Union Market, D.C.’s Chief Financial Officer found that the TIF was “not necessary for the redevelopment of the [45-acre] site to move forward,” adding that declining the TIF “would not unreasonably inhibit” the project.

Developers envision nearly 8 million square feet of mixed-use space and 20,000 new jobs once Union Market is fully built out, and $140 million per year in estimated tax revenue. To buttress that activity, they asked for $36 million of the total TIF to fund the creation of hundreds of parking spots. Agency officials, though, have said the project doesn’t need so much parking.

Silverman and Grosso sponsored an amendment to divert $18 million of that amount toward additional affordable housing at Union Market and the other $18 million toward a would-be pedestrian tunnel connecting it to the nearest Metro station. The measure was soundly defeated in an 11-2 vote, and the underlying TIF legislation passed.

Grosso says he supports Union Market’s development, but that such subsidies cut away at the District’s safety net for low-income residents.

He says other developers not included in the TIF area were angry they didn’t receive public support for their projects. Grosso notes he repeatedly saw representatives of the core group canvassing city hall in the month before the vote.

“I think what’s happening here is we’re stuck in this old-school way of doing things where we’re begging developers to come to D.C.,” he posits. “The fact is, now, developers want to be here.”

CP

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 7

DistrictLinE

Remembering Dolores Kendrick, D.C.’s Poet Laureate, 1927–2017

By Matt Cohen You don’t need to look far to find Dolores Kendrick’s mark on the city. Outside the NoMa-Gallaudet U Metro station, emblazoned below a sculpture by sculptor Barbara Grygutis, is “Journeys,” Kendrick’s brief yet formidable poem: Go slowly in taking the steps, and fast when counting stars.

Kendrick’s marks on the District aren’t just physical. As D.C.’s second ever poet laureate— she succeeded Sterling Allen Brown, who held the position from 1984 until his death in 1989—Dolores Kendrick tirelessly advocated for poetry in classrooms and communities, developing creative writing programs within the city, and forging initiatives to incorporate the art of poetry into public life.

Kendrick served as poet laureate from 1999 until her death, from cancer complications, on Nov. 7. She was 90 years old and known as “the first lady of poetry,” according to her friend and colleague E. Ethelbert Miller.

As a poet, Kendrick was best-known for her 1990 book The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, for which she won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Based on the accounts of various slaves—including Margaret Garner, the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Beloved—Kendrick created 34 eloquent and heart-wrenching lyrical monologues told from the perspective of slave women. It was later adapted for the theater and won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. In 1996, Kendrick collaborated with composer Wall Matthews and vocalist Aleta Greene on the album The Color of Dusk, inspired by the award-winning collection.

Kendrick’s other works includeThrough the Ceiling (1975), Now Is the Thing to Praise (1984), and Why the Woman is Singing on the Corner: A Verse Narrative (2001), a collection of poems about homeless women. At the time of her death, Miller says that Kendrick had just finished a new collection of poems entitled Rainbow on Fire, which will be published by Black Classic Press.

But for all her literary accolades, Kendrick’s passion was teaching. “She was an educator as well as a poet,” Miller says. “In terms of our friendship, whenever we were talking, that’s how she presented herself to me.”

Kendrick never married or had children.

She devoted her life to honing her craft and teaching the art of poetry. During her tenure as poet laureate, “she took a position that was created for Sterling Brown … and she brought [it] meaning and legitimacy,” Miller adds. In that time, she worked with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to establish a number of initiatives aimed at promoting poetry, including the Poetry Out Loud competition and the Poet-In-Progress program.

Born in D.C. on Sept. 7, 1927, Dolores Teresa Kendrick grew up in LeDroit Park during a period when the neighborhood was an epicenter for artists and intellectuals. Kendrick’s father, Ike, founded the weekly black newspaper Capitol Spotlight, and her mother, Josephine, was a music teacher with a fondness for jazz. “You had scholars and all kinds of professors who lived in the neighborhood,” Kendrick told City Paper in 1999. “We also had some members of a jazz quartet who lived upstairs, and a lot of times, they’d come and jam in our apartment.”

Kendrick graduated with a teaching certificate from Miner Teacher’s College, an African-American college that would later merge with the University of the District of Columbia, and earned her MA at Georgetown University. She taught in D.C. public schools for 20 years and helped found the School Without Walls in 1971. Later, she taught literature and poetry at New Hampshire’s prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy for 21 years.

During her time at Exeter, she would often invite writers, poets, and deep thinkers she was friends with—including James Baldwin and Rita Dove—to speak to her students. Kendrick told The Washington Post in 2011 that she is the only black woman to have her portrait hanging on the school’s walls.

Kendrick’s lasting legacy is as a poet who used her voice as a black woman to lift up the voices of other black women. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a poet who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, recalls how “life-altering” it was when she first read The Women of Plums, as the only black student in her MFA program in Alabama in the early 1990s.

“One of the things I was so amazed by [in The Women of Plums] was that all of the poems were gorgeous, but that she wanted to make sure she was including traditional black vernacular in this crafted space,” Jeffers says.

“That was very important to her, to set the tone with black people’s voices, and in the same way

8 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

that Zora Neale Hurston did with her fiction—with black women’s voices, that the traditional language that we use is important.”

Despite a body of work that spans from the Black Arts movement of the ’60s and ’70s, up until today, Ke n d ri ck wasn’t terribly well known outside the District or the Phillips Exeter community.

Katelynd Anderson lived next to Dolores Kendrick at the Carrollsburg Condo m i n i u m s i n Southwest D.C. for the past two years. In college, Anders on had read The Women of Plums, but hadn’t made the connection that her next-door neighbor was its author. It wasn’t until about six months after she moved in, when a friend was visiting and recognized Kendrick, that Anderson learned she was living next to D.C.’s poet laureate. “I didn’t know who she was when we met her, until a friend [of mine] came by and met her when we were walking by her door,” Anderson recalls.

As a neighbor and friend, Anderson says “[Kendrick] would always ask what I was reading. She was always interested in what other people were reading. One of the things she always said was ‘What you read defines who you are.’”

Kendrick leaves behind a large legacy of championing D.C.’s literary community. Miller says that she was “very important for this city,” adding that her work should be taught in D.C. schools .“If we have these poets laureate, if I’m a

Darrow Montgomery/File 1999

The “first lady of poetry” leaves behind a rich legacy of promoting poetry throughout the District.

D.C. public school teacher, I should be teaching their work in the classroom,” he says. “When you’re walking down the street and you see [her work], it should mean something.”

“She was very much about community and very much about giving back to younger black poets and black writers,” says Jeffers. “That’s one of the things that I have learned from her stellar example, from the stellar example of her cohort, that you have to be generous. If we have to lose her, at least what a glorious example that she has left for us.”

“I’ve been in Washington for much of my life, and I worked in the school system here,” Kendrick told City Paper in 1999, after being named poet laureate. “I want to make poetry very visible … in this city.”

CP

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DistrictLinE Changing the Channel

In the city of Pierre L’Enfant, D.C’s redesigned wharf trades clean lines for planned clutter.

Darrow Montgomery

son-capacity concert venue. Designed by the Rockwell Group, a New York firm that specializes in arts spaces, it playfully evokes the style of old opera houses with pixelated LED panels in the form of velvet stage curtains and balcony swags. At the front of The Anthem is a vast, daylit lobby topped by— wait for it—the infinity pool of the adjacent apartment complex, The Channel.

But the highlights of The Wharf are the little surprises out of doors, which Eckstut and his team have managed to pull off. On Wharf Street SW, a prow-like corner of 1000 Maine aims directly at the sawtoothed bays of The Channel, a sharp detail that compelled me to venture into the alley separating them. Later, in one of the mews, I found myself in the near-dark with a stage door on one side, a brick wall on the other. For an ersatz version of a downtown alley, it felt close to the real thing.

In urban districts cut from whole cloth, architects and developers talk up the design, but you get the sense they don’t trust design alone. There are countless extras thrown in to “animate” the public realm, such as fire pits (extremely popular on both my visits), swings (ditto), water features, and rocking horses and a big Connect Four board for kids.

In aggregate, they make the place feel a bit cluttered. As for the classic rock piped from black metal “masts” on the promenade: Developers need to knock it off with this gimmick already.

These diversions can’t solve The Wharf ’s problem, which is a lack of engrossing activities that don’t require spending a lot of money.

There’s no museum or big attraction. Eckstut is adamant that he designed for locals, not tourists. Fair enough—but once you’ve strolled, swung, and stopped for coffee, there’s not a lot else to do, especially on a cold or wet day. Most of the shops and restaurants so far are upscale, and killing time here is expensive. (It should be less of a problem in warm weather.)

It’s early days, but The Wharf is shaping up to be a high-end nightlife district, an Adams Morgan for thirty-somethings with better seafood. Whether that’s what the District needs right now, as the city reaches Peak Restaurant and millennials start to leave for cheaper locales, is an open question. But whatever it evolves into, the urban design of Phase One is a promising foundation.

CP

By Amanda Kolson Hurley The quesTion ThaT anyone tries to answer when reviewing a new building or public space is: How well does it work? Often, the answer is complicated (which is why design criticism exists). But for the first phase of The Wharf, the $2 billion megadevelopment by Hoffman-Madison on the Southwest waterfront, the better question to ask is: How well does it not work? This isn’t snark: Stan Eckstut, the architect responsible for its master plan, says that was his goal.

“I really did not want symmetry and order,” Eckstut told me, sitting across a table in the still-unscuffed lobby of the Canopy by Hilton on 7th Street SW. “Where people love being are places like where I live, the West Village in New York. They don’t work, and they’re really congested, and nobody can figure out how to get from here to there.” Happy dysfunction, in his view, defines a real city.

Eckstut, a principal with the firm Perkins Eastman, and his colleagues set the parameters for the design of 2 million square feet of new construction plus some 10 acres of public space. The area includes streets, squares, piers, and a park. For the most part, they kept the parameters light. Architects who were designing individual buildings—the brain trust included Handel Architects, SmithGroupJJR, WDG Architecture, Cunningham Quill Architects, and Perkins Eastman itself—were asked to focus on the ground level and get creative with the corners, since that’s what people see.

Each building needed to have its own identity

concrete details

and simultaneously play nice with neighboring buildings, Eckstut says. “Don’t try to be like your next-door neighbor, but don’t try to outdo and outgun and dominate your neighbor,” is how he puts it.

The negative spaces between and around the buildings interested Eckstut more, and he violated a few pieties of D.C. planning in his quest for controlled chaos. Instead of putting a park next to the water, he opted for a street—with cars. That raised eyebrows at D.C.’s federal design-review boards. He was trying to avoid creating a dead zone, he explains. “If you make spaces too big, [people] won’t walk; they’re going to think everything’s far away.”

He applied the same reasoning to sight lines into and through the district. Unobstructed “view corridors” are sacrosanct in the city of Pierre L’Enfant, but Eckstut’s instinct is to fill them up. “I don’t believe in view corridors too much,” he told me. (I half-expected lightning to strike, but nothing happened.) The Wharf ’s large central square, on 9th Street SW, is anchored and partly filled by a two-story building clad in rough stone.

This love of congestion carries over to other parts of The Wharf. Mews, or secondary streets, cut vertically and horizontally through the site. An alley slices at an angle from Maine Avenue SW down to the water’s edge. While hardly as cramped as the streets of a medieval city, these narrower passages contrast with the sense of openness out on the new piers, all four of them, which reach like long fingers into the channel.

Wharf Street SW, the 60-foot-wide spine of the development along the river, is D.C.’s

10 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

first shared street, or what the Dutch call a woonerf. Rather than lanes, it has zones, indicated by subtly different patterns of gray paving: a promenade, with trees closest to the water; the street proper, mixing people and cars in the middle; and then an outdoor-seating zone for restaurants. Although bands of contrasting paving and a metal drainage grate delineate the zones, they mostly blend into each other, and pedestrians rule the whole street. The trick to taming cars in the city, Eckstut says, is not to exclude them outright, but to favor pedestrians so much in the street design that drivers proceed with caution.

So how well does The Wharf not-work, then? Pretty well, it turns out. I visited the day after it opened in mid-October and again in early November. Both times, the woonerf was behaving as hoped, with throngs of confident strollers and only the occasional car nosing its way through. The piers were busy with Washingtonians of every demographic (including canine), and people continuously flowed west down Wharf Street SW to the Maine Avenue Fish Market. If the development brings new customers to that century-old institution, all the better.

Across from the fish market, in a perfect metaphor for old vs. new D.C., stands a new office building by the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. It’s a slick-glass number edged in terra cotta called 1000 Maine, and it’s the best of a forgettable bunch. The architecture here is competent but generic, indistinguishable from NoMA or Navy Yard except for the prevalent black metal accents. An exception is The Anthem, the new 6,000 per-

Kirk Cousins Is Good, But Not Good Enough

By Matt Terl The KirK Cousins conundrum should not be as difficult as it is, nor should it have gone on for this long. Either you believe he is a top-tier starting NFL quarterback, in which case you pay him whatever the market dictates, or you believe he is not, in which case you let someone else pay him what the market dictates and allocate those funds elsewhere.

The braintrust in Ashburn has kicked the can down the road as far as they can by using franchise tags to sign Cousins to two consecutive one-year deals, but that strategy isn’t going to work anymore. The cost to franchise Cousins again would be more than $30 million, a number that would be exorbitant even if he were undoubtedly a top-five QB—an Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady-level talent. Even Cousins’ most ardent supporters don’t put him on that level, so committing that much money seems … unwise.

A quick note on the amount of money: I do not care, personally, how many dollars Kirk Cousins receives to do his job. The number, whatever it turns out to be, will look ludicrous.

It will be more money than you and I will make in our combined lifetime, almost regardless of who you are. It will be enough to fund Washington City Paper for many more years. It will be enough to have weekly family dinners at minibar until the inevitable collapse of society. As a number, that doesn’t matter to me. Daniel Snyder’s financial planner may feel differently, but that’s not my problem.

What does matter, at least to anyone concerned with fielding a winning team, is the percentage of the salary cap Cousins consumes each year. That number directly affects a team’s ability to recruit other competitive players. The team’s management needs to figure out how many other positions you can afford to skimp on to afford your QB—if you assume that he’s a guy who makes up for shortfalls elsewhere on the field.

Which is why the Cousins situation remains difficult: No one seems to be sure he’s that kind of player.

(I myself have gone back and forth on this, in conversation and in print, for well over two years. It’s a cycle whereby I declare Cousins to be overrated/terrible/done, and then he goes on an extended hot streak that makes me look exceptionally foolish. This is a totally fun,

healthy, two-way relationship, not just a coincidence that I’ve expanded in my mind.)

Cousins’ statistics—the so-called “counting stats” that excite fantasy football owners— are excellent. That’s part of the problem. Compared to the quarterbacks that Cousins might otherwise appear similar to, the Andy Daltons and Joe Flaccos and even Eli Mannings of the world, his counting stats (completion percentage, touchdowns, yards) are far better.

That should be all that matters, especially for smart, forward-thinking, analytic football fans. After all, anyone like that knows that “clutch” is an unquantifiable quality, “QB wins” are a pointless statistic, and fourthquarter comebacks are somewhat arbitrary.

But those are the areas where Cousins already seems to come up short.

To sum it up in the most gut-feel, non-scientific way possible, he plays well enough to win games in which things go well, but rarely rallies the team to the win on his own. Conversely, he makes regular boneheaded mistakes that can lose a game, or at least severely undercut his team’s chance to win. (He does have a number of successful late-game heroic drives, but his own earlier errors often force those kinds of plays.)

Despite my occasional hyperbole, Kirk Cousins is not an objectively terrible quarterback. In fact, he is abstractly a very good one.

He might, however, be a terrible value at his likely price point.

Think of it in real estate terms. If you pay $300,000 for a house in York, Pennsylvania, that’s cool. If you pay $1 million for a house in Friendship Heights, that’s also cool. But if you pay $1 million for a house in Scranton, Pennsylvania, you’d better be getting a hell of a house.

The difference is that you can appraise a house. You can thoroughly inspect it and objectively identify any cosmetic flaws or structural issues. There are things that are dealbreakers, and things that you can repair down the line. With quarterbacks—and with all living things, really— there’s never any such certainty. At some point, your level of belief dips below what the market is paying, and you back away from the deal. I’ve reached that point with Kirk Cousins, and I think the team should have as well.

Now that I’ve said that, go ahead and pencil him in for the Pro Bowl this year, just to spite me.

CP

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SAVAGELOVE

I was honored to appear with Esther Perel at the Orpheum Theater in Vancouver, British Columbia, a few weeks ago to discuss her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Questions were submitted on cards before the show—some for me, some for Esther, some for both of us—and we got to as many as we could during the event. Here are some of the questions (mostly for me) that we didn’t get to.

—Dan Savage I’ve never slept with anyone. My current boyfriend has had sex with many, many partners.

He knows I’m a virgin, but I’m worried. Any tips on how I can avoid performing like the amateur gay man that I am?

Give yourself permission to be bad at it—awful at it, inept and halting and awkward. And remind yourself going in (and out and in and out) that whatever happens, this isn’t the last time you’ll ever have sex. Some people are good at sex right out of the gate, but most people need a little practice before they catch a groove. But nothing guarantees a bad first experience (or bad millionth experience) quite as effectively as faking it. Faking is always a bad idea—faking orgasms, faking interest, faking confidence— so don’t fake. Just be.

—DS How would you help a woman who has never experienced an orgasm?

I would gift her a mild pot edible and a powerful vibrator.

—DS I’m a woman in my mid-30s. Sometimes I want to bang it out in 30 seconds but my husband wants 45 minutes. What do we do?

Your husband has a nice solo stroke session for 44 and a half minutes, and then you climb on top or slide underneath for the last 30 seconds.

—DS Have you ever thought about moving to Vancouver?

Frequently between January 20, 2001, and January 19, 2009, and constantly since January 20, 2017.

—DS I’m a 34-year-old woman. My 40-year-old boyfriend used to date his sister-in-law. One time he said he thought it would be funny if I asked her who was better in bed: him or his brother. Is this weird or is it just a man thing?

It could be both—a weird man thing—but seeing as your boyfriend asked only once, he’s clearly not obsessed. The question presumably made you uncomfortable (which is why you’re asking me about it), and here’s how you shut it down if he ever asks again: “I could ask her who’s better in bed or I could go fuck your brother myself and report back.”

—DS What do I do if my wife doesn’t want an open rela12 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

tionship and I do? We haven’t had sex in 11 years, but we are still in love and have two young children.

I don’t understand monogamous but sexless marriages. Because if your relationship is monogamously sexless… wouldn’t that mean you don’t have sex only with each other? Setting that aside aside…

Your wife probably, and perhaps reasonably, fears that opening up your marriage could result in you leaving her for some woman you’re fucking. But if you’re unwilling to go without sex for the rest of your life, you’re going to wind up leaving your wife in order to meet some woman you can fuck. So the thing she fears might happen if you open the relationship up is definitely going to happen if you don’t.

—DS I’m a 34-year-old gay man. I’ve never had a longterm relationship. Are long-term relationships even necessary nowadays?

Long-term relationships are nice—I’m happy with mine—but not strictly necessary. They’re not oxygen, iodine, or cannabinoids. The pressure to pair off can make LTRs feel not just necessary but compulsory, and the negative cultural messaging around being single and/or enjoying a series of successful short-term relationships (single people are losers, serial daters “just can’t commit” or are losers) certainly doesn’t help.

—DS

Do you believe the hype about Vancouver being a hard place to date? Any advice for a single lady searching for a long-term hetero partnership?

Everywhere I go—New York, Chicago, Toronto, Dallas, Los Angeles—I hear the same thing: [Name of city] is a uniquely hard place to date!

I also meet happily partnered people everywhere I go, which leaves me disinclined to believe the hype about Vancouver or anywhere else. “This city is a hard place to date!” is often said in frustration by people who haven’t found their .64 yet (the motherfucker they can round up to “The One”) or by people who are doing something wrong—they’re sabotaging their relationships somehow (unresolved personal issues, too many dealbreakers, irrational expectations)—and instead of working on their own shit, they’re blaming the city where they happen to live.

—DS How does someone in a straight-presenting, longterm relationship come out as being bisexual/ pansexual?

Someone opens a mouth—preferably their own—and says the words “I’m bisexual/ pansexual.”

—DS My partner and I are in a super fantastic LTR. Totally committed. But we do talk about re-opening our relationship. (It was open in the early years).

My fear is losing control of myself and falling for

someone else. How can I explore opening the relationship without detonating it?

If you define “falling for someone else” as a bomb that has to destroy your super fantastic LTR, and you inevitably catch feelings for someone you’re fucking, well, then you’ll have to either refrain from fucking other people or convince yourself that you can love more than one romantic partner at a time.

—DS Is there a way to compromise if one partner wants kids and the other does not?

There’s no such thing as half a kid—at least a live one—so there’s no room for compromise here. Someone has to give or someone has to go.

—DS

I’m in a relationship that involves BDSM and Japanese-style bondage. I often have marks left on my body: bruising, scratches, rope marks, etc.

I am afraid my children and friends will notice.

Any suggestions for how to explain this to people?

I don’t want to wear long-sleeved shirts for the rest of my life.

Wear long-sleeved shirts and lie to your kids— you’re taking a martial-arts class while they’re at school, you fell into a blackberry bramble— but tell your friends the truth, lest they think you’re in an abusive relationship.

—DS What’s the best-case scenario in the wake of an affair?

“People often see an affair as a trauma from which there is no return. And indeed, some affairs deliver a fatal blow to a relationship,” Esther Perel writes in The State of Affairs. “But others may inspire change that was sorely needed. Betrayal cuts to the bone, but the wound can be healed. Affairs can even become generative for a couple.”

So best-case scenario? Needed change and a regenerated connection. And since some relationships need to end, an affair that leads to a breakup—the affair that delivers the fatal blow—can also be regarded as a best-case outcome. Back to Esther: “Because I believe that some good may come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, ‘So would you recommend having an affair to a struggling couple?’ My response?

A lot of people have positive, life-affirming experiences that come along with terminal illness.

But I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.”

The State of Affairs is required reading for all couples, not just couples struggling with the fallout from an affair. A relationship that should survive an affair is likelier to survive—and regenerate—if you’ve given the subject some thought before it’s a crisis. Order a copy today.

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

INDIEIND.C.

Kaarin Vembar

Keeping an independent business going is a challenge in the current market. Indie in D.C. is a new monthly feature on exceptional makers and retailers throughout the District. First up is Tom McMahon, who has owned and operated Urban Dwell in Adams Morgan since 2015.

Q: Why did you open a store in D.C.?

My last assignment was in D.C., so I retired from the Air Force in D.C. My wife has a full-time defense contractor job at the Pentagon. She’s also an intelligence officer. It was my third assignment in D.C., so I had a lot of legacy friends here. I was comfortable with D.C., I liked D.C., and all of my family is on the East Coast. So we decided let’s stay in D.C. Q: What surprised you most about retail?

In a positive sense, I was surprised about how much of the skill set that I’ve acquired over my time in the Air Force was transferable to other things. Between people management, store management, money management, multitasking, damage control, project management—things like that were very transferable.

The most daunting part was the cash register! I was so worried about the cash register.

I worked for my uncle growing up as a painter, but I never did any food service so I never worked the cash register before. So, my biggest stress was working the cash register. And then the jewelry. My time in Afghanistan was less intimidating than my first jewelry show.

Q: Urban Dwell won the 2017 Outstanding Veteran-Owned Small Business Award from SCORE, an organization that pairs budding business owners with a local mentor. What did winning mean to you?

There were 11 winners around the country in different categories. They had a category for outstanding veteran-owned small business. We won that award. They base the award on level of success combined with the utility of SCORE— how you use the resources of the organization. It was a big honor. After 22 years in the Air Force the military is and always will be a part of me.

So, to win an award post-retirement that had something to do with the military was a really big honor. To get something like that within two years of being open is rewarding. We created something from scratch and being recognized feels good.

—Kaarin Vembar

Love & Lust Classifieds Are Back Remember these?

Kaarin Vembar

Q: You’re an Air Force veteran. How did you get from the military to retail?

I had top secret clearance, so it would have been easy to jump right into another government job. But I wanted a means to an end. I got married and had kids late, so I wanted to be able to spend time with them. We were looking at things where I could maximize my time with my kids and still do something to make money. My wife’s two sisters have retail stores, so it’s family mentorship. Having the leverage of gaining experience from people who have done it for 12 to 15 years, that was the smart move.

Urban Dwell, 1837 Columbia Road NW. (202) 558-9087. urbandwelldc.com.

If you’re tired of Tinder, bummed out by Bumble, or lost in Match malaise, City Paper is here for you. We’re planning a limited edition, print-only, love and lust classified ads section in late November, just in time for the holidays. Go to washingtoncitypaper.com/love to find true love or an A+ tryst. It costs you $5 for a two-week ad run.

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 13

Hard Line Heat. Tempers. 13-hour days. Line cooks function in an intense and brutal world while fueling D.C.’s restaurant boom.

By Laura Hayes 14 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

Photographs by Darrow Montgomery

“To be a line cook you have to be a certain kind of crazy.”

“You get your ass handed to you. It’s hot as hell back there.

You’re running around. The chef is barking orders at you and you’re not getting a lot of help. It’s stressful.”

“This is the only profession where the only thing you get out of it is that you’re passionate and you love it—there’s no money; it’s tiring as hell; and you get sweaty and gross.”

D.c.’s thriving restAurAnt industry employs thousands of line cooks. They’re the ones folding ravioli, sautéeing fish, and grilling meat. Yet there’s a disconnect. Despite being on display in the city’s many open kitchens, they still work in the shadows where a “thank you” from a diner is rare, and a living wage that comes with employment benefits is a unicorn.

Glassdoor, a popular website where current and former employees anonymously disclose salary information, puts the average annual line cook pay at $27,752 in D.C. That’s less than half of the median household income for the District, which is $70,848 according to 2011– 2015 Census data.

With Washingtonians’ insatiable thirst for craft cocktails and knowledgeable service, certain positions within the restaurant industry are becoming more legitimate. The stereotype that servers and bartenders are simply biding their time before starting or resuming more serious careers is lifting. Restaurant owners are investing in these employees by providing them with educational experiences, giving them ownership shares, and expediting paths to leadership.

The same does not hold true for cooks, who are often stuck receiving apprentice pay after years on the line. They work intense hours in front of hot grills radiating suffocating heat.

They recoil following insults from shouting chefs. And when their bodies suffer—whether a knife wound on the job, an injury outside of work, or an illness—they are often asked to work through it.

Most of these warriors wielding whisks and wooden spoons in D.C. are originally from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, according to Bar Pilar executive chef Jesse Miller. “Mine are 100 percent El Salvadorian,” he says. “You’ll find some younger AfricanAmericans and Caucasians back there, but not so much in this city.” Capturing Latinos’ stories can be a challenge, according to Miller. “They don’t want [their] name attached to anything,” he says. “All of our guys have documents, but they still get freaked out about it.

It’s hard not to with Trump sitting in office.”

City Paper sat down with six D.C. line cooks who were willing to speak anonymously or go on the record with their names. What are their lives like? Why do they stick with it? What builds them up and what brings them down?

The line cook job description is fairly con-

and $16. “To be competitive, $16 is the highest I pay anyone,” he says. “With minimum wage increasing to $15 next year, that’s going to be the going rate, but a few years back $16 would be your number one guy.”

Cory and the other line cooks in the kitchen are young. “Kinship all happens to be under 30, but that’s the way he runs his kitchen,” explains Cory. “We get paid less than the normal rate for the city because it’s a French concept where you work for free so you can learn from the best.”

Their paid vacation policy, under Ziebold, also comes with an asterisk. “Once you’ve stayed for a year, you have one week paid va-

“It’s not like you work two years and you’re booted out of the door,” Ziebold says. “I have someone who worked for me for two years right now.” He’s already made good on one promise to plant a cook in a job at a highly lauded kitchen, according to several employees.

There’s a fair share of needling and bullying in Ziebold’s kitchen. Cory calls it emotionally draining. “No one has been fired but people have been forced out based on Eric’s treatment of them. He will demean you, belittle you in front of the whole kitchen during service, and just scream at you all day.” Cory says Ziebold forced out two co-workers, calling one of them pathetic.

cation, only to be paid out if you give 90 days termination notice,” Cory says. “Which is literally impossible because this industry has such high turnover.”

D.C. is currently experiencing a line cook staffing crisis. According to 2016 National Restaurant Association data, 63,400 people work in the District’s restaurant industry. That’s not enough. Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington CEO Kathy Hollinger says the worker shortage has been the trade association’s biggest issue for the past five years, and that it has really come to a head this year.

Chefs say cooks will take a new job for as little as fifty more cents per hour.

Ziebold asks his line cooks to commit to two years when they sign on. “The way he wants you to leave is also through him,” Cory says “That’s why he’s like, ‘Give me 90 days and tell me what you’re looking for. I have all of these connections.’” Cory predicts only one person will hit the two-year mark. “That shows no one is willing to stay.”

Sometimes, Ziebold says, he has to instill a sense of urgency in his cooks, but insists it isn’t personal. “There’s a difference between saying someone is pathetic and something is pathetic.”

He doesn’t deny raising his voice but says there’s a time and place for it. “We try not to revert to yelling as a knee-jerk reaction to every situation,” he says. “There’s a time for coaching, for having a conversation, and there’s a time for, ‘Do what I said.’”

This volatile environment is not unique to Ziebold’s kitchen. “There’s a lot of machismo and stuff back there,” Miller says, speaking about restaurant kitchens in a broad sense.

“There’s a lot of attitude. You have to find ways to work together instead of going against each other.” That’s why he says, “If you don’t love it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Another line cook at Kinship and Métier looks at the fiery kitchen environment in a different way. We’ll call this cook Jordan because they also spoke to City Paper on the condition

sistent from restaurant to restaurant. Those working dinner typically arrive in the early afternoon to tackle a prep list until the restaurant opens for service. Sometimes they pause to have “family meal” that cooks often prepare on top of their regular duties. Then it’s an all out blitz until the last orders leave the kitchen. Finally, it’s time to clean up for the next day. The clock can strike midnight before the workday ends.

If a restaurant follows the French brigade system, line cooks will work the same “station” every night whether that’s garde manger (salads and other cold food), saucier (sauces), poissonnier (fish), and so on. As they build skills, line cooks can graduate to more advanced stations, ideally working their way up to becoming a sous chef.

A line cook we’ll call Cory, who spoke to City Paper under the condition of anonymity, works at Kinship and Métier—the doubledecker, Michelin-starred restaurants in Shaw that share a kitchen. Chef and co-owner Eric Ziebold runs both.

Cory works five days a week doing everything from cooking ravioli and cutting vegetables for soup to making dressing for the salads. Cory also builds a roasted banana bavarois (custard) with California sea urchin and Australian black truffles at Métier.

For a long time, Cory wasn’t invited to sample the dish. “A month ago we didn’t taste our composed dishes at all. That’s hard for us as cooks because we don’t know the level of salt, the balance of ingredients.” Ziebold only recently changed this policy, according to Cory, who then learned that the sea urchin needed more salt, and the truffle broth needed more truffle.

Cory likely wouldn’t be able to afford to try it as a customer. The tasting menu at Métier costs $200 per person, the same amount of money Cory has to pay for health insurance each month since Ziebold’s restaurants cover only half. “When we opened we covered 100 percent,” Ziebold says. “That changed because some people were more interested in having a higher wage rate and not insurance.”

When the restaurant opened, Cory says line cooks started at $11 per hour. Six months in they were bumped to $12. Now most make $13 or $13.50. Cory estimates the going wage for line cooks in D.C. is $16 because that’s what various area apprenticeships offered.

Miller says he pays his cooks between $12.50

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 15

of anonymity. “We get so excited and passionate about what we’re doing,” says Jordan. “If you’re not drinking the Kool-Aid, it’s hard to keep up.” Jordan describes working in a part of the kitchen that’s especially hot and highpaced. “You run in circles like a mosquito preparing sauces and garnishes.”

Jordan dislikes plenty about the way the restaurant industry functions, but pushes through the tension. “That’s how I’ve survived so long in the kitchen. I think, ‘I deserved to get yelled at,’ instead of, ‘My boss is an asshole.’ That’s the difference between people that stay and people that don’t,” says Jordan.

“I think, ‘How can today make tomorrow better?’”

After corroborating the wages Cory shared, Jordan says the benefits of working at Ziebold’s restaurants outweigh temporary financial strain. “A lot of people chase money too soon,” says Jordan. “It looks amazing on my resume and my boss is breaking all of my bad habits one by one. So we accept the terrible wages in exchange for future success.”

Jordan doesn’t see the point in asking for better pay. “If you ask for more money and storm out, you just lost your job to someone else who is willing to work for that shitty money in exchange for a good future,” says Jordan.

“I tell myself, ‘You have to win the game to fix the game.’ I want to play the game and do the best I can and be successful one day so I can make changes for the next generation. I think that’s what my boss is doing.”

Both Jordan and Cory have college degrees, as does Liesbeth Workman. She’s been a line cook at RIS, Birch & Barley, Tail Up Goat, and The Salt Line. She wants people to know that “not all line cooks are ex-cons and do drugs.” She says, “A lot of us are just normal human beings.”

Her first gig after college and culinary school was at RIS in West End. She describes a nurturing environment at the eight-yearold restaurant. “Ris Lacoste is a matriarch in terms of how she runs her kitchen,” she says.

But there were challenges, including a tight financial situation.

“When you’re working hourly and it’s slow, to save on labor costs they’ll cut people,” she explains. “To survive, I needed that eight hours of overtime. Just that small bump in pay was enough to make sure I could pay all of the bills.” She continues, “For most people it’s just $50, but for me, it’s food.”

At the time Workman was employed at RIS, she says she wasn’t offered health insurance.

“That’s important,” she says. “I know two people who put off taking care of themselves because they couldn’t afford it.”

Like athletes, line cooks need to be in good health to stand for 10-12 hours at a time performing physically demanding tasks under pressure. And chefs sometimes ask cooks to work through injuries, even serious ones.

For example, a line cook at a local fine dining restaurant injured their leg and required surgery.

The executive chef asked this cook, who wants to remain anonymous, to postpone surgery and work for a month until a replacement could be found, putting the cook at risk for secondary injuries that could stymie their career. “I did that for

Laura Pohanka at Tail Up Goat

him and he waited for me,” the line cook says. “I guess that was the exchange there.”

Workman finds the physicality of the job the most challenging, especially the heat. “Salt Line is a very hot line,” she says. “Getting used to that in the summer was nuts. I’d say it was peaking at 110 degrees.” Drinking enough water is critical. “Even though I worked for chefs who want me to push myself, they also emphasize taking care of yourself.”

Her executive chef at The Salt Line—Kyle Bailey—is the same executive chef she had at Birch & Barley. She says Birch & Barley was a lot different from RIS because the restaurant was slammed. “It was hellish at times,” Workman says. “I was averaging 13-hour days. But it was the first time I’ve ever been accountable for my work and given the opportunity to improve.” The kitchen needed her overtime hours, and she put them in.

Workman highlights yet another stressor of being a line cook—the discord between kitchen workers (back of house) and dining room and bar workers (front of house) that goes beyond pay disparity. Employees who interact with guests make significantly more money because of tips.

“It’s more of a misunderstanding of what makes their jobs hard, what makes our jobs hard,” Workman theorizes. Misfiring an order, for example, has consequences. “If you have a line cook training on a new station and you throw a curveball, you can derail their whole night if they’re not capable of recovering. That can be frustrating if the empathy from the front of house isn’t there.”

To address the difference in pay, some restaurants are doing away with tips altogeth-

16 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

er, but that too comes with a helping of consequences, including driving off customers due to perceived higher prices. Sally’s Middle Name tried it on H Street NE, but quickly reverted back to using the tip system.

Ziebold explains why he hasn’t made a leap

to level the playing field. While he states that the line cook job is physically more demanding than what servers go through, he feels servers have the more challenging job.

“A server probably has the hardest job in the restaurant because they’re the ones that

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have to deal most closely with the largest variable—the guests,” he explains. “Being able to understand and guide somebody is an amazing skillset.” He continues, “There are fewer great servers than there are line cooks and the law of supply and demand is going to dictate that a great server is going to get paid a higher salary than a great cook.”

Plus, it’s not like the restaurant industry has high profit margins. Most restaurants are operating on a shoestring. “Every day guys are asking for more money,” Miller says, while also noting that minimum wage will soon jump from $12.50 to $15. “It’s getting tougher and tougher.”

Tail Up Goat is experimenting with a new model that closes the gap between both sides of the house and prevents burnout. Workman was a fan when she worked at the Michelinstarred restaurant in Adams Morgan.

Every line cook at Tail Up Goat works in the dining room once a week as a food runner or back server. They complete easy tasks like folding napkins and filling waters. It’s a much shorter shift, and the line cook gets a share of the pooled tips from the evening. Laura Pohanka, who has been a line cook at Tail Up Goat since July 2016, says the boost brings line cooks’ pay closer to a living wage.

Pohanka moved to D.C. in 2014 to cook at Marcel’s after working restaurant and catering jobs in California. At Marcel’s, Chef Robert Wiedmaier employs the French brigade sys-

“I knew from the minute I started doing things, that’s where I wanted to be,” she says of Tail Up Goat. “Something cool and different is happening here.”

Pohanka has taken vacation with ease, including a two-week trip to Japan. Though a small business, Tail Up Goat offers some insurance coverage, as Ziebold does. “All employees part-time or full-time are eligible for health care through the restaurant [within] the first month after they are hired,” says Tail Up Goat co-owner Jill Tyler. “We cover 50 percent of the bronze level plan through BlueCross BlueChoice.”

Line cooks there are also able to taste composed dishes on a daily basis to gauge improvement, and Pohanka shares in the restaurants’ victories. Workman agrees. “When we made the Bon Appetit list and Jon [Sybert] got ‘Best Pasta of the Year,’ that was like, ‘Yes, we did this together!’ I felt like I helped this man achieve his vision, and that’s how I’ve looked at a line cook’s job.”

By contrast, Cory says that when Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema elevated Métier’s rating from 3.5 to 4 stars this fall and Ziebold poured cooks a glass of Champagne before service, Cory felt far removed from the accolades.

Tail Up Goat proved itself a good employer when Workman had a family emergency, too. While working the line, she found out her father died. “They paid me for the time I missed,” she says. “I was blessed that I was at

restaurant when she needed time to grieve her grandfather’s passing. She’s also cooked at Jaleo, The Reef (now closed), food truck Cirque Cuisine, DC Reynolds, and Ripple. Now she’s a part of a pop-up, Vic’s Homegrown, which sets up shop at 3 Stars Brewing Company.

Harris’ cooking career started in the Navy.

She was a culinary specialist at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton where she cooked for a unit of about 300 people. “It’s more of a family in the Navy,” she says. “In D.C. everything is impersonal. I feel like everyone is so transient, it’s hard to find a family environment, and maybe that’s why I’ve struggled.” She’s found that whenever she gels with a boss, the boss inevitably leaves for another job.

The lack of work-life balance is the hardest part of being a line cook for Harris. She says you don’t get to see your family or friends, even during holidays. “So you blow off steam, you drink, you smoke cigarettes,” she says. “At The Reef we’d drink all day. Everybody would stay after last call at 2 a.m. and sit at the bar until 8 a.m.”

Addiction continues to be the restaurant industry’s Achilles’ heel. Pair the ease of access to alcohol with late nights and the fact that many line cooks can’t take time off, and you have a deadly combination. Harris describes line cooks as a vulnerable population. “Similar to veterans, we’re fragile,” she says. “Generally we can come with baggage.”

Some line cooks work not one but two jobs, like José Nava. Find him at Cafe Berlin from

tem just like Kinship and Métier. She learned to work all of the stations, eventually becoming the tournant—the cook that can pinch-hit at any station. But then she sought out Tail Up Goat to explore new cuisines.

that restaurant.”

“People should be able to mourn their family members—a restaurant isn’t that important,” says Rachael Harris, a line cook who says she was replaced at a closed Capitol Hill

9 a.m. to 4 p.m., then Montmarte from 5 to 10 p.m. His line cook résumé includes stops at Duke’s Grocery, Alfie’s, Et Voila, and Belga Cafe. The Mexico native who came to the U.S. when he was 18 has learned to cook Belgian,

18 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

German, French, and Thai and retains a somewhat rosy outlook on his profession.

“Being on the line working hard with all that pressure means that after the shift is over you feel relaxed and happy that you accomplished it,” Nava says. He most enjoys the creativity the job can offer. “You can invent and create something out of nothing. I love that—especially if your boss supports you. I have worked with good bosses and bad bosses.”

He counts Alex McCoy of Alfie’s and the forthcoming Lucky Buns as a good boss because he empowers line cooks to create and “be themselves” in the kitchen. The same goes for Rico Glage at Cafe Berlin. “He’s teaching me how to profit, how much we can charge for a certain dish, how much he can pay employees.”

Nava says pay at the German restaurant is OK, but the positive atmosphere counts. “If I go to other places that pay me higher and I’m mad all of the time, it’s not worth it … I can’t stand when people are yelling at somebody for no reason.” Line cooks often report being reprimanded if they don’t execute a special order from a customer in the dining room.

“Sometimes we make mistakes on the line because we already know how the plate is on the menu,” he explains. “We won’t look at the ticket and will set it up as is. The server goes away and they bring back the plate and say, ‘Remake it’.

And we get in trouble with the chef.”

Asked what they would do differently if they ran a kitchen as an executive chef, line cooks had a variety of suggestions. “A lot of Michelin places are closed one day of the week,” Cory says. “With the restaurant being closed Sunday or Monday, everyone is guaranteed a day off.”

Cory and Harris would both introduce group activities. “Us all going to dinner together. Masseria has had a dinner at Métier with all of their cooks. Why don’t we do that?” Cory asks. Workman says she’d aim for health coverage for all of her employees. Others are curious about models that split the service charge between front of house and back of house employees.

But advancing to the next level can take time. Pohanka says you have to have patience.

“Since it is so demanding, a lot of people don’t want to do it for the long haul,” she says. “They want to be the next Food Network star, but it doesn’t really work like that—you have to get your butt kicked to get anywhere.”

Some face additional challenges to becoming a sous chef or chef de cuisine. “In order to move up in this industry, you have to be able to speak some English,” Miller says. “You have to communicate with the whole staff.”

Workman was recently promoted to sous chef at The Salt Line, meaning she now leads a team of line cooks at the new Navy Yard restaurant. “I feel like the struggle has made me a better person and a better cook,” she says.

“It’s supposed to be hard.”

She’s already found herself asking her line cooks to work through emotional pain. “Everything else in your life doesn’t matter because you have to get this food out,” she says. “Telling someone, ‘Don’t worry about your [sick] kid, I need you to cook hamburgers right now,’ is jarring. But it has to get done.”

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The National Mall’s newest museum, The Museum of the Bible, anticipates a big opening weekend. washingtoncitypaper.com/arts

Norman Mailer vs. Big Media Fifty years ago in D.C., a drunk Norman Mailer declared war on mainstream media for not taking a stand against the war in Vietnam.

“The whole affair, billed as a reading by ‘artists of conscience’ to support the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam at the Ambassador Theater, was like the boozy finale of a cocktail party to which no one in the audience had been invited.”

And an Oct. 27, 1967 Time magazine article titled “A Shaky Start,” which Mailer reprinted it in full in The Armies of the Night, gave this account: “Washington’s scruffy Ambassador Theater, normally a pad for psychedelic frolics, was the scene of an unscheduled scatological solo last week in support of the peace demonstrations. Its anti-star was author Norman Mailer, who proved even less prepared to explain Why Are We In Vietnam? than his current novel bearing that title.

“Slurping liquor from a coffee mug, Mailer faced an audience of 600, most of them students, who had kicked in $1,900 for a bail fund against Saturday’s capers. ‘I don’t want to grandstand unduly,’ he said, grandly but barely standing.

“It was one of his few coherent sentences. Mumbling and spewing obscenities as he staggered about the stage— which he had commandeered by threatening to beat up the previous M.C.—Mailer described in detail his search for a usable privy on the premises. Excretion, in fact, was his preoccupation of the night.”

By Eddie Dean

Carl Van Vechten

Back in the days when famous writers were rock stars, nobody rocked harder than Norman Mailer. From the 1960s on, he was a familiar figure on TV talk shows, from high-brow (William F. Buckley) to middle-brow (Dick Cavett) to low-middle-brow (Merv Griffin). He could be a charming raconteur or a petulant crank depending on his mood and who was in the room. “Norman Mailer is one of the leading spectator sports in America,” said Merv, introducing the author on a 1968 show that included a ventriloquist.

Mailer’s TV appearances were sparring matches where he settled scores with old enemies like Gore Vidal. He was as unpredictable as the exotic animals clawing Johnny Carson’s suit, and just as prickly. He mixed brilliant insights and petty insults. He reveled in controversy.

It’s fitting that what may have been Mailer’s greatest writer-as-rock-star performance happened live onstage in October 1967 at a D.C. rock ’n’ roll venue, the Ambassador Theater. The concert hall in Adams Morgan was a short-lived beacon of District counterculture, known for its psychedelic light shows and the Washington debut of Jimi Hendrix, who set his guitar on fire for an audience that included Pete Townshend.

Mailer put on a display no less electrifying. The first mass protest against the war in Vietnam was what brought the reluctant 44-year-old novelist to the Ambassador stage. At the Saturday demonstration, marked by a violent military crackdown on protesters, Mailer was arrested along with hundreds.

He appeared at the Ambassador on the Thursday prior for a pre-march fundraising benefit sponsored by the march’s organizer, the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The headliners were Mailer and poet Robert Lowell and other “Artists of Conscience,” in D.C. to rally supporters of the cause, along with an opening rock act. Tickets were $5, and for students, $2.50.

Mailer walked to the theater from a cocktail party a few blocks away, where he had filled a to-go mug with bourbon as a lubricant for his first stint as MC. Onstage, standing in front of the guitars and amps from the opening act, he made for an incongruous host for the crowd of 600. He was a World War II vet who never claimed to be a pacifist. He wore a three-piece pinstripe suit and sported a middle-aged paunch. The father of six, including a Barnard College freshman, he was the same age as the parents of the flower children in the audience.

The appearance has become legendary, mostly through Mailer’s own account, which makes up the opening chapters of his 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Armies of the Night. In

the book, he measures his own recall against what he deems the distortions of the mainstream press.

Big media—namely Time magazine and The Washington Post—framed the evening as a sloppy mess featuring a sloppier Mailer.

An Oct. 20, 1967 Washington Post article, “Mailer Tells ‘em Like It Is in Fervent Profanity,” offered this recap: “Author Norman Mailer stuck out his belly … and delivered an obscenity-by-obscenity indictment of the war in Vietnam, the Washington press corps, the public address system and his hecklers in the audience.

“In the audience yesterday were the tousled hippies, the demure peace ladies and a contingent from the local chapter of The Beautiful People set—some laughing at Mailer’s profane buffoonery and some clucking at the public disgrace of it all. …

these contrast with Mailer’s recollection. And now City Paper has unearthed two additional accounts that reveal how sharp and credible Mailer’s memory of the event was. Behind the barrage of f-bombs was a clear-cut strategy to exhort his troops and engage his enemy—the representatives of mainstream media—on the big stage.

The most striking evidence is from a little-seen, rarely screened 1968 documentary, Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?, a staple on public TV in the ’70s. Directed by British filmmaker Dick Fontaine, the cinema verite film follows Mailer in various public roles (novelist, citizen, actor, celebrity) before, during, and after the march. The second source is an article about the evening from an underground newspaper, Washington Free Press.

Footage from the documentary shows a clearly inebriated Mailer, but in far more control of the proceedings than what the mainstream press reports allowed.

He was there to rouse the protesters. “I volunteered to be the master of ceremonies tonight because I’ve never done it before. On Saturday, we’re gonna go in there and do something no one has ever done before. C’mon kids! I’m gonna warm you up!”

The film’s close-ups and reaction shots show the range of Mailer’s angry and often bemused expressions as he gauged washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 23

CPArts the crowd’s response, which was animated and mostly supportive, and chiefly aimed at egging him on. According to reporter Ellis Pines of the Free Press, Mailer “hustled the collective consciousness of the audience.”

Introducing Lowell, Mailer told the crowd how the poet had more integrity than most artists—including Mailer himself— can muster. Lowell was notorious for turning down an invitation from Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson to attend a reception at the White House two years earlier, well before the tide of anti-war sentiment had swelled to mass proportions.

In a brief snippet, Lowell appears on camera and he expresses his bewilderment with both the event and the venue.

“It’s a queer occasion when you see there are too many red lights in front of you,” he said before reading from his poems.

“It’s glaringly formal and sort of disturbingly informal. And what’s it mean? Who the hell are we talking to?”

Back on stage, Mailer had an answer. He zeroed in on the main targets of his wrath, mainstream journalists, who he considered the enablers of LBJ’s war machine.

Mailer’s account of what happened next, which he rendered in the third-person in The Armies of the Night, goes like this: “‘You just know all those reporters are going to say it was sh*t tomorrow. F*ck them. F*ck all of them. Reporters, will you stand up and be counted?’

“A wail of delight from the students in the audience. What would the reporters do? Would they stand? One lone figure arose. “‘Where are you from?’ asked Mailer. “‘Washington Free Press.’

“A roar of delight from the crowd. It was obviously some student or hippie paper. “‘Ah want The Washington Post,’ said Mailer in his best Texas tones, ‘and the Star. Ah know there’s a Time magazine man here for one, and twenty more like him no doubt.’

“But no one stood. So Mailer went into a diatribe. “‘Yeah, people,’ he said, ‘watch the reporting which follows. Yeah, these reporters will kiss Lyndon Johnson’s *ss and Dean Rusk’s *ss and Man Mountain McNamara’s *ss, they will rush to kiss it, but will they stand up in public? No! Because they are the silent assassins of the Republic. They alone have done more to destroy this nation than any force in it.’”

Fontaine, the filmmaker who captured the evening and later read Mailer’s account, wrote this: “One aspect of that experience which still gives me chills: having spent endless hours with the filmed record of the events Norman describes in the book before it was written made the reading of it quite uncanny. It’s a long book, right? I was present at most of the events he describes so brilliantly but also reports verbatim in page after page of dialogue. I don’t remember one inaccurate line in the whole book! I know he didn’t take a note. How did he manage that? It’s miraculous.”

It turns out that Mailer did have help to jog his prodigious memory and it came from the “hippie paper.” Soon after the March, he phoned the office of the Washington Free Press at Thomas Circle. He asked permission to use material of the coverage from the Pentagon issue, which helped him lay the groundwork for his epic of New Journalism, The Armies of

the Night. The article by Pines in Free Press bolsters Mailer’s telling and shares verbatim dialogue and scene details with what was later published in Armies.

On Nov. 2, 1967, two weeks after the march, Mailer made another appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. The clip for this is shown in its entirety at the end of the documentary, Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? When Merv asked Mailer what he was doing in Washington, Mailer replied, “I was trying to help the American Revolution.” As he went on to explain his rationale, the studio audience hissed.

“I was drunk when I appeared at the theater, but I was drunk in my own way, which meant that I was highly sober and more intelligent than usual. I used a great many fourletter words.”

Merv: “I read that!”

Mailer: “And I did it for a good reason. I wanted to make a point. We get terribly agitated about entertainers and authors being obscene in public, but we’re engaged in a war which is so obscene that one minute in the life of General Westmoreland is more obscene than all the dirty words and dirty books that American authors have ever put together. Think about it, dear American people out there.”

CP Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? is part of the National Education Television Collection at the Library of Congress, and the Washington Free Press is being digitized as part of the DC Public Library’s archival project, DIG DC.

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MUSIC

Take Her Apart

For D.C. native Kelela, musical empowerment and enlightenment come from putting all her vulnerabilities on the table.

There’s a momenT during Kelela’s new single “Waitin” where she sings, “It’s all I dreamed of, it can’t get started.” It’s a lyric heavy with yearning and anticipation, but if it sounds familiar, that’s because it is: she also sang it on “Bank Head,” her first single, which was released back in 2013. Plenty has happened to the 34-year-old singer-songwriter in the intervening years, and with the recent release of her debut album, Take Me Apart, all that she’s dreamed of is finally getting started in earnest.

Since debuting in 2013, Kelela has quickly become a key figure in R&B, pairing the genre’s sensuality with the future-is-now sounds of club music from around the globe.

With her versatile voice and confessional lyrics, she’s found power in vulnerable places and examined the prismatic angles of relationships, from the promise of giddy infatuation to the aftermath of painful breakups. Take Me Apart is her most expressive and expansive work yet, and is the culmination of years of musical growth that began in the DMV. Kelela was born in D.C., the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, and grew up in Gaithersburg, listening to and learning from singers like Mariah Carey, Cheryl “Coko” Clemons of SWV, and Amel Larrieux of Groove Theory. She graduated from Magruder High School and studied at Montgomery College and American University, singing jazz standards at venues around D.C. Singing in jazz cafes soon gave way to singing in a progressive metal band, but Kelela wouldn’t find the perfect fit until moving to Los Angeles in 2010. There, through mutual friends, she connected with Fade To Mind, a collective of DJ-producers at the center of the underground club music world. Her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me was a stunning debut from a seemingly fully-formed artist who seductively sang about love, sex, and heartbreak over pneumatic, elastic beats constructed by some of the most innovative producers in the scene, like Los Angeles talents Kingdom and Nguzunguzu.

The juxtaposition of Kelela’s warm, organic vocals and the cold, mechanical productions was by design. “I’m trying to show you how tender I can be in what comes off as such an unkind surrounding,” she says. “The bed I’m sleeping in for all my music is what people wouldn’t expect you to be so soft and tender on.”

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By Chris Kelly

That contrast also drove 2015’s Hallucinogen, a six-song EP that explored the life cycle of a relationship. On it, she stepped up her songwriting game and added new contrasts to the mix, teaming with Björk-collaborator Arca for a pair of off-kilter experiments but also delivering radio-ready R&B jams reminiscent of ’90s hit-making label So So Def Recordings.

“She wants to have shock elements in her music,” adds Bok Bok, a London-based producer who has worked with her since her first release. “I don’t know why it works so well with her, but I think she finds it to be challenging in the context of R&B and pop songwriting.”

On Take Me Apart, Kelela is unafraid of challenges, in her songwriting or otherwise. The album tells the story of an “It’s Complicated” relationship, full of almost-reconciliations and late night realizations, of pain and healing, of growth and learning. It’s also her richest, fullest offering yet, bounding from club-ready jams like “Waitin” and “Truth or Dare” to melancholic ballads like “Better” and “Turn to Dust.”

In making the album, she collaborated with old friends like Bok Bok, Arca, and Jam City, as well as Romy Madley Croft of The xx, London upstart Kwes, and industry heavyweight Ariel Rechtshaid, forging an album that is part Janet Jackson, part Björk, and all Kelela.

“The sentiment behind Take Me Apart is putting your shit out there,” Kelela says. “It’s an empowering thing to tell somebody to take me apart. If you’re inviting somebody inside in that way, then you are clearly in an empowered position, you are comfortable enough to do that.” To embody that theme in the album art, she quickly realized that she’d have to be naked (“probably the hardest thing to do”) and take photos of the “full-spectrum” of her selfperceived strengths and flaws. “It had to be scary for me or it’s not going to be real.”

Vulnerability, empowerment, and general realness are certainly present in her lyrics, which delve into relationship issues and bedroom politics with equal frankness. Like posing nude, Kelela goes all the way with her pen, often in a way that implicates the people in her life. “It’s something that everybody that wants to be in a relationship with me is signing up for, but when it comes down to it, it can be difficult, like ‘damn, you feel like that’ or ‘I didn’t know it’s like that,’” she laughs. “I’ve gotten direct feedback that it is daunting, and I have a lot of compassion for that, but I gotta keep it real.”

Kelela certainly keeps it real, in her music and outside of it. Last month, she wrote an eye-opening op-ed for Resident Advisor entitled “Being a visible black woman in the music

industry” that explored a wide range of issues surrounding how her music is created, funded, released, and consumed. “There’s a way that I’m always challenged when I collaborate,” she wrote. “It happens less and less the more I’ve expressed this dynamic, but it’s a lot.”

“Every single peer of mine that is a woman has had to go through that,” she says of being challenged by male collaborators. Despite speaking out, Kelela believes this type of behavior “will never stop happening” because “boys are socialized to be that way.” She points to the studio experience, where female artists are likely to be paired with men who have technical know-how, and the power dynamic that creates. “My experience is always going to be intersectional,” she explains.

As both a black person and a woman, she always “experience[s] some sort of shit—it will never not be something.”

In that way, she’s not alone. Albums like Solange’s A Seat at the Table and TV shows like Issa Rae’s Insecure— both of which feature Kelela—addressed similar issues concerning black women in America.

Kelela notes that A Seat at the Table and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. have helped set a context for Take Me Apart, for which she’s grateful. “It’s a little bit easier to be creative, to be very sincere about what I want to say, and to say things that are vulnerable, because some door has already been kicked down.”

What Kelela is too modest to say is how she has helped kicked down that door, as well.

“Cut 4 Me” quickly became a touchstone for artists working outside of the R&B mainstream—alongside music by FKA Twigs, SZA, and others—and Take Me Apart elevates her art to an even higher level, bringing the underground and the mainstream even closer together. “She’s trying to create a bridge between those two worlds,” says Bok Bok. “In the same way Janet [Jackson] occupied that space between pop and R&B, I think Kelela could be one of the greats in the canon.” As she sings on the rainswept “Jupiter,” “I think I know me now,” and it’s only a matter of time before many more people know her, too.

CP Kelela performs Thursday, Nov. 16 at U Street Music Hall, 1115 U St. NW. $25. (202) 588-1889. ustreetmusichall.com.

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 25

TheaTerCurtain Calls Vicuña & The American Epilogue

The NoT-So SpecTacular Now Vicuña & The American Epilogue

By Jon Robin Baitz Directed by Robert Egan At Atlas Performing Arts Center to Dec. 3 Here are a few salient events that have occurred in the 13 months since Jon Robin Baitz’s nominally satirical play Vicuña debuted at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles: Donald J. Trump—a flamboyant, thricemarried, habitually bankruptcy-declaring New York real estate developer and reality TV star whose biography (though not his personality or manner of speech) closely resembles that of the main player in Baitz’s play—was elected President of the United States.

On the evening of Trump’s inauguration, Baitz, who’d come to D.C. to participate in the Women’s March the following day, was attacked outside of the Kimpton Carlyle Hotel in Dupont Circle by “this 350-pound enormous redheaded linebacker guy” (as he told Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Keegan) who’d directed an anti-semitic threat at the playwright and his companions. Baitz is pressing charges.

Finally, the playwright added a dreamlike—that is to say nightmarish— direct-address coda set 12 years in the future called The American Epilogue to what had been, in essence, a barbed drawing room comedy prior to this Mosaic Theater Company production.

This queasy addenda makes Vicuña retroactively resemble Building the Wall, the more urgent dystopian two-hander Robert Schenkkan wrote in the week prior to Trump’s election that got a bunch of simultaneous productions earlier this year. It also weirdly recalls the ghostly third act of the Thornton Wilder clas-

sic Our Town. But it doesn’t substantially bolster the emotional payload or nominal insight of the preceding two hours. It’s an extra that feels, well, extraneous.

That Vicuña’s two parts are so incongruent in tone (and length) is a fair reflection of the seismic shock of Trump’s victory, an event so grotesque that even writers as imaginative as Baitz couldn’t really imagine it. John de Lancie, who played the trickster villain Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation before going on to memorable roles on The West Wing and Breaking Bad, was not part of Vicuña’s original cast (only one member of which has returned for this production), but he’s a perfect fit for the part of a vainglorious TV demagogue.

Baitz’s premise is that Republican nominee Kurt Seaman has commissioned Anselm (Brian George), a master tailor who has prospered in New York since fleeting the Iranian Revolution decades ago, to make him a $150,000 bespoke suit for his third presidential debate. (The show’s Hillary Clinton surrogate remains unnamed, referred to only by pronouns.) Despite Anselm’s church-and-state separation of his business from his politics, the series of fittings over a period of three weeks affords the men ample opportunity for unpack whether Seaman really detests immigrants and Muslims as much as he has found it profitable to claim. Seaman says too many absurd things in these sessions to count. Anselm says only one: That his client Roger Moore was the best James Bond.

Seaman’s lengthy visits to Anselm’s shop (handsomely designed by Debra Booth) give Amir (Haaz Sleiman), Anselm’s confident, Iranian-born, Harvard-educated apprentice, time to question the candidate, and to try to persuade Seaman’s adult daughter Srilanka (Laura C. Harris, easily holding her own against the out-of-town cast) to denounce her father’s campaign. As a Republican senator tasked by a cabal of donors to bring Seaman an offer she thinks he can’t refuse, Kimberly Schraf brings her usual authority to the role. Once she shows up, the comedy get a lot funnier.

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It’s never less than absorbing, and the performances are first-rate. But it feels like an ancient artifact from a saner world than ours— as satire, it would’ve lagged badly behind real life even when it was new. The play’s surrogate Trump and Ivanka are considerably more eloquent than their real-life analogues. Anselm, meanwhile, is modeled on the late Georges de Paris, a tailor who made suits for every president from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama (and Sir Roger Moore).

The title, Vicuña, refers to the fine wool of an Andean-dwelling cousin of the llama. Here again, crude, dumb real life makes Baitz’s dramaturgy feel more precious than profound.

Though Trump’s vanity in every other respect is without limit, it does not extend to his clothing. His baggy, unflattering suits always look like he slept in them.

—Chris Klimek 1333 H St. NE. $20–$65. (202) 399-7993. mosaictheater.org.

agreeable DiSagreemeNTS A Short Series of Disagreements Presented Here in Chronological Order

Written and Performed by Daniel Kitson At Studio Theatre to Nov. 25 THe firsT clue in a detective mystery—perhaps a cryptic note found at the scene of a fatal accident—is often as opaque as it is intriguing, demanding further investigation despite, or maybe even because of, its apparent innocuousness. Such is the case with the studiously cryptic synopsis posted on Studio Theatre’s website for Daniel Kitson’s latest “story show,” A Short Series of Disagreements Presented Here in Chronological Order.

Aside from listing some praise for and a short description of the well-reviewed comedian and monologist helming the show, the webpage sums up the plot of Disagreements with only a long list of synonyms for the disagreements that are likely to be found in the show. That online synopsis amounts to the only information that’s really been made publicly available—no programs or press kits were handed out on press night.

All this amounts to a strong suggestion from Kitson and Studio that any potential theatergoers should walk into this two-hour feat of storytelling with no idea of what to expect. As is the case with a bicyclist racing down a midnight street with no headlamp, the twists and turns that lurk in the dark ahead are more surprising for those who never see them coming in the first place.

Those who can’t abide spoilers will have to stop the ride here, knowing not much more

about this premiere than the kind of generic (but true) one-word platitudes that might appear on a lazy promotional poster: Hilarious!

Surprising! Sentimental!

The biggest reveal about the show, the one that must be dispensed before even beginning to discuss what’s really going on here, is that there isn’t really such a play as A Short Series of Disagreements Presented Here in Chronological Order. From the jump, Kitson assumes the role of a perfectly unreliable narrator, claiming that he was commissioned to make this show based on little more than the strength of his “oeuvre” and the promise of that (atrocious) title, that he wasn’t able to start writing it until a month before opening night, and that once he finally started working on it, he found himself increasingly drawn into a local bicycle mystery that tore his attention away from his work—ostensibly the play he is “supposed” to be performing this month. He then also warns that everything, including that very introduction, is, to borrow a bowdlerized curse from the show, “bullsh!t.”

The real meat of the show consists of Daniel Kitson, or perhaps a character named Daniel Kitson, recounting, through a series of oldfashioned slides on a projector, how he became obsessed with the victim of a local bicycle accident, and how he, in the course of trying to figure out more about her, uncovered increasingly mysterious clues regarding a local bicycle society she seemed to belong to.

Kitson presents himself here as, in his own words, something like a TV detective—less in the sense of possessing amazing crime-solving capabilities, and more in the sense of being acerbic, impossible to work with, and not very fond of being in a room full of people. Though the show is structured like a play, Kitson leans on his experience as a comedian, and makes it clear that he is always peering through his thick-lensed glasses at his audience, ready with an improvised, dry, British-accented quip directed at any wayward yawns, or a distinctive laugh, or, notably, any furtively scribbling critics he might spot in the crowd.

For all his (or his character’s) abrasiveness, Kitson weaves an intensely affecting and sentimental story, and he’s pleasing to listen to.

Were this story told at a party rather than on a stage, Kitson, scruffy disagreeableness and all, would likely have each partygoer hanging on his every word by the end of it. It’s also a testament to his power as a storyteller that he can sternly warn at the start of his show that “none of this is true” and still leave his audience, two hours later, tempted to believe his stories.

He’s correct in his assessment that those in for the most exhilarating ride are those “poor fools” who come along to the show knowing nothing about it or his oeuvre. But even those approaching this twisty path appropriately prepared are in for a delightful ride.

—Riley Croghan 1501 14th St. NW. $20–$25. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

Mason Bates’s KC Jukebox

Ear / Eye

The intersection of music and imagery will be explored in this multimedia performance, from the beautiful textures of Timo Andres’s response to pen-and-ink abstractions to Anna Clyne’s industrial response to a film about the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW! KENNEDY-CENTER.ORG | (202) 467-4600 Tickets also available at the Box Office. Groups call (202) 416-8400.

Photo by Erik Berg

Fri., December 8 at 7:30 p.m. | Terrace Theater

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

New Artistic Initiatives are funded in honor of Linda and Kenneth Pollin.

MUST CLOSE NOV 25 A SHORT SERIES OF DISAGREEMENTS PRESENTED HERE IN CH R O N O L O G I C A L ORDER. “Monologist extraordinaire— unconditionally engaged and engaging” —The New York Times

Private Confessions Presented by National Theater of Norway Directed by Liv Ullmann

Step into a deeply personal and heartbreakingly authentic world of secrets and explore what keeping those secrets does to one’s relationships.

December 6–9 | Eisenhower Theater Performed in Norwegian with projected English titles.

Recommended for age 16 and up.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW! KENNEDY-CENTER.ORG | (202) 467-4600 NOW PLAYING

WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY DANIEL KITSON

Tickets also available at the Box Office. Groups call (202) 416-8400.

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

Theater at the Kennedy Center is made possible by

Kennedy Center Theater Season Sponsor

International Theater is underwritten

by HRH Foundation.

WORLD PREMIERE Additional support for International Theater is provided by the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater and Performing Arts Fund NL.

202.332.3300 | STUDIOTHEATRE.ORG

International Programming at the Kennedy Center is made possible through the generosity of the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 27

FilmShort SubjectS

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

No Justice, No Peace Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Directed by Martin McDonagh

It’s hardly the cheery advertising fare that billboards typically shill: “Raped While Dying/And Still No Arrests/How Come, Chief Willoughby?” But with black letters on a red background, that’s what the titular signage reads in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, writer-director Martin McDonagh’s drama that’s as deadly serious as his 2008 film, In Bruges, yet just as funny.

The billboards are the brainchild of Mildred (Frances McDormand), the mother of the slain girl who wants to call attention to the case seven months after the crime occurred. She believes that Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and his hapless crew haven’t done anything to try to catch her daughter’s killer; when a local TV news team interviews Mildred about the billboards, she claims that the police department “is too busy torturing black folks” to bother with crime.

This is a shot at Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who allegedly beat a black man in custody. Though the subject is obviously topical, McDonagh quickly drops it, using the detail to paint Dixon as a subpar cop rather than make a statement about racism among our country’s law enforcement. It’s therefore a bit of a distraction, and far less effective than the director’s more unremitting and entertaining approach of portraying Dixon as a clown, with jokes ranging from him being not too bright to living with his mama.

But this is Mildred’s story, and she’s a force.

She tears into the priest who visits her home to tell her that the town is against the billboards (she insinuates that he’s a pedophile) and objects when the dentist brings up the matter (she turns his drill on him). Mildred doesn’t soften even when Willoughby, after telling her the details of the investigation, confides that he has cancer. But McDonagh is careful not to let her

be an unrelenting hardass: She has guttural moments of grief as well as moments of goodness, from righting a bug that’s stuck on its back to getting Willoughby help when he suddenly coughs blood on her. Mildred’s anger is born of despair, not a desire to be wicked.

The film expertly gives the main characters their moments without detracting from the main story, and does so with dialogue that’s Hell or High Water-style offbeat and witty. McDormand’s performance is formidable: Her Mildred is at once steely in her resolve to see justice and amused at the bumpkins around her, a state that the actress precisely projects with subtle changes in her expressions. But Rockwell comes very close to stealing the show, with Dixon being both the butt of the jokes and the source of them. Very few of his scenes are in earnest, and Rockwell is a convincing lunkhead.

Though there are two arsons, a suicide, and a man thrown out a window during the course of the film, its through line is keeping the billboards in place despite the resistance Mildred faces. There’s a chilling scene in which she comes face to face with her daughter’s potential murderer, and by the film’s end, she and an unlikely partner figure out a way to seek a more general revenge. But even then, they’re not sure. Three Billboards ultimately demonstrates what it’s like when you’re out for blood but not soulless enough to get it.

—Tricia Olszewski Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema and Bethesda Row Cinema.

Busted League Justice League

Directed by Zack Snyder the challenge behInd reviewing a film like Justice League is that its pervasive, constant failures sound like an exaggeration. Nothing

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about the film—from its unimaginative special effects to its thin characters to its half-hearted jokes—comes close to stirring a recognizable human emotion. In fact, the film makes Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice seem better by comparison. At least Zack Snyder’s 2016 cinematic folly had genuine ideas and themes it attempted to explore. Snyder is back in the director’s chair, with an assist from Joss Whedon, and he squashed all his earlier ambitions in favor of a simple, inelegant “gang of misfits save the world” rehash. At best, this film will be forgotten, representing a minor stepping stone in the DC Extended Universe. At worst, it has singlehandedly set the superhero genre back for years.

Superman (Henry Cavill) died the end of Batman v Superman, and the mourning period has given way to a worldwide crime wave.

The busiest of the remaining superheroes is Batman (Ben Affleck), who can barely keep up with bank robbers, only to realize that mysterious flying monsters are popping up everywhere. These creatures look like a cross between The Wizard of Oz’s winged monkeys and Robocop, and they are sent by the demigod Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds). They exist, of course, so each member of Batman’s new team has something to do during the obligatory, chaotic climax. But first Batman must assemble the members: he easily recruits The Flash (Ezra Miller), an over-eager kid, while Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) only joins after she senses the existential nature of Steppenwolf’s threat. Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) are tougher recruits, but soon they’re flying through the ruddy, computer-generated night sky like video game characters without any heft.

On top of the superheroes, screenwriters Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon must juggle many supporting characters, including Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and The Flash’s father Henry Allen (Billy Crudup). This gives Justice League the feeling of an overlong trailer, with scenes scurrying from one locale to the next. The unfortunate consequence of this approach is that it robs the heroes of nuance. Wonder Woman was a terrific superhero film because Gadot had an opportunity to show her character’s strength and vulnerability, and in Justice League we have Batman telling her (and us) how she feels. Indeed, the film prefers to explain all the characters, so they never quite have a chance to develop chemistry. Whedon peppers the film with jokes, mostly from The Flash, but all the decent punchlines are derivative riffs on what you’ve seen in better superhero films.

The most glaring, egregious failure of Justice League is its villain. Steppenwolf’s backstory is a lazy Lord of the Rings riff, and he never seems like a threatening force. He is merely a placeholder, a cipher for the Justice League to showcase their powers. Also his dialogue is downright bizarre,

with him repeating the phrase “mother power” so often that he sounds like Mike Pence.

There is no force of will, or sense of heroism in Steppenwolf ’s defeat, only the default acknowledgment that the film must end. If there is anything amusing in the action—filmed so the backgrounds are incoherent as the characters careen across the frame—it is unintentional. Momoa plays Aquaman like a morose rock star, for example, and his repeated shout of “YEAH-UH” sounds like a bad impression of Metallica’s James Hetfield.

Snyder and Whedon focus their attention on Superman rising from the dead. This leads to the film’s only interesting scene, where a confused, newly resuscitated Superman fights Batman, Wonder Woman, and the others. The action has some sense of danger, although an odd detail of Cavill’s appearance undermines it. You see, Cavill was contractually obligated to keep a mustache for a new Mission: Impossible film, so animators had to take out his facial hair during the reshoots. Cavill is a handsome, charismatic actor, except his CGI upper lip is an unintentionally amusing distraction. This expensive, ludicrous solution for a simple problem—borne out of byzantine studio demands— is an apt metaphor for this film’s failures.

At just under two hours, the best thing about

Justice League Justice League is it’s mercifully short. The filmmakers seemingly learned from the critiques of their earlier films, like how Batman v Superman was too bloated, and too dark in tone.

Snyder and Whedon eliminated those qualities, and put nothing unique in their place. In fact, this film jettisons the themes that the DC Extended Universe has developed for years.

Superman’s return lacks triumph, or an exploration for what he means to the world. If he is a messianic figure, it is only as a clumsily handled deus ex machina.

And that is not the only action trope, since Steppenwolf also needs MacGuffins that looks suspiciously like the Tesseract from The Avengers. To its detriment, Justice League constantly invites comparisons to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If Snyder’s latest inspires any passion, it will be among the tiresome, inevitable squabbling between DC vs. Marvel fanboys.

—Alan Zilberman Justice League opens Friday in theaters everywhere.

The Edge of the Universe Players 2 present

Mystery School

by Paul Selig featuring Nora Achrati FINAL WEEKEND

“. . . highly recommended . . .”

--MDTheatreGuide.com “. . . powerful performances . . .”

--DCMetroTheaterArts.com

See UniversePlayers2.org

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COMPELLING AND ORIGINAL.’’ - VARIETY

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EVENING OF INDIAN DANCE SAT, NOV 18

JOHN EATON

FOUNDING FATHERS: IRVING BERLIN & JEROME KERN a film by MARC MEYERS BASED ON THE ACCLAIMED GRAPHIC NOVEL

SPECIAL ENGAGEMENTS START FRI. 11/17

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FELIX CAVALIERE’S RASCALS 50th Anniversary Tour November 17, 2017, 8 p.m.

Mega hits include “Good Lovin,” “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long,” “Groovin’,” “How Can I Be Sure,” “A Girl Like You,” “A Beautiful Morning,” and “People Got to Be Free.”

Tickets are $60, $50 Regular; $50, $40 Faculty, Staff, & Seniors; & $45, $35 Students w/ID

Discounted tickets must be purchased in person with valid student or staff ID.

ROBERT E. PARILLA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER 2017-2018 Guest Artist Series

Montgomery College • 51 Mannakee St., Rockville, Maryland 20850 www.montgomerycollege.edu/pac • Box Office: 240-567-5301 washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 29

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CITYLIST Music 31 Theater 35 Film 36

Music

THE CURRYS SAT. DEC. 9 ~ 9:30PM TIX: $15-$18

CITY LIGHTS: FRIDAY

FRIDAY ClAssICAl

ClariCe Smith Performing artS Center Stadium Drive and Route 193, College Park. (301) 4052787. UMD Wind Ensemble. 8 p.m. Free. theclarice. umd.edu. library of CongreSS Coolidge auditorium First Street and Independence Avenue SE. (202) 7075507. Minguet Quartett. 8 p.m. Free. loc.gov.

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robert e. Parilla Performing artS Center 51 Mannakee St., Rockville. (240) 567-5301. Maryland Band Directors’ Band. 7:30 p.m. Free. montgomerycollege.edu/pac.

11.16 JAMIE MCLEAN BAND 11.17 FOLK SOUL REVIVAL

COuNtRY

barnS at Wolf traP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. The Quebe Sisters. 8 p.m. $25–$30. wolftrap.org.

11.18 THE WOODSHEDDERS 11.21 SCOTT KURT DUO

FOlk

11.25 JONNY GRAVE & THE TOMBSTONES

9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Yonder Mountain String Band. 8 p.m. $29.50. 930.com. the hamilton 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. The Dustbowl Revival. 8 p.m. $15–$20. thehamiltondc. com.

HIp-HOp

fillmore Silver SPring 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Yelawolf. 8 p.m. $25–$143.50. fillmoresilverspring.com. roCk & roll hotel 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-7625.

Felly. 8 p.m. $25. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

JAzz

birChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Walter Beasley. 7:30 p.m. $45. birchmere.com. blueS alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Robert Gambarini. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $47–$52. bluesalley.com. tWinS Jazz 1344 U St. NW. (202) 234-0072. Tim Whalen Septet. 9 p.m.; 11 p.m. $27. twinsjazz.com.

OpERA

CatholiC univerSity of ameriCa 620 Michigan Ave. NE. (202) 319-5000. The Old Maid and the Thief and Doctor Miracle. 7:30 p.m. $5–$20. cua.edu.

ROCk

robert e. Parilla Performing artS Center 51 Mannakee St., Rockville. (240) 567-5301. The Rascals.

8 p.m. $50–$60. montgomerycollege.edu/pac. velvet lounge 915 U St. NW. (202) 462-3213. Exit Vehicles. 8:30 p.m. $10. velvetloungedc.com.

VOCAl

linColn theatre 1215 U St. NW. (202) 888-0050.

Puddles Pity Party. 8 p.m. $35. thelincolndc.com.

WORlD

hylton Performing artS Center 10960 George Mason Circle, Manassas. (703) 993-7759. Nobuntu. 8 p.m. $28–$46. hyltoncenter.org. muSiC Center at Strathmore 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. DakhaBrakha.

8 p.m. $28–$58. strathmore.org.

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11.30 MARY BATTIATA & LITTLE PINK - ALBUM RELEASE SHOW

JOE BIDEN

It seems like every major political figure has a memoir coming out this holiday season, but few feel as anticipated as former Vice President Joe Biden’s book Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Biden’s political and personal journey holds a lot of interest to readers, but it may be the unknowns about his life that make this one a must read. Many readers of his book and attendees of this discussion between Biden and bestselling author and social entrepreneur Wes Moore hope to find out why he decided not to run in the 2016 presidential election, how he reconciles personal grief with his professional life, and how he really feels about his The Onion alter ego Diamond Joe. This event promises to be more than a quiet chat. How many book tours do you know that come with their own title (Biden’s is called American Promise Tour)? With that title alone, Biden seems not only ready to answer tough questions about the future but perhaps when he stops in the nation’s capital he’ll answer one of the biggest questions of them all: whether he will throw his hat (and aviator sunglasses) into the 2020 presidential race. Joe Biden speaks at 8 p.m. at The Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW. $325. (202) 783-4000. warnertheatredc.com.

—Diana Metzger

sAtuRDAY

FOlk

ClAssICAl

dC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. The Ballroom Thieves. 7 p.m. $15. dcnine.com.

kennedy Center ConCert hall 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. National Symphony Orchestra: Tastes of Italy, France & Spain. 8 p.m. $15–$89. kennedy-center.org.

inStitute of muSiCal traditionS at the takoma Park Community Center 7500 Maple Ave., Takoma Park. (301) 754-3611. Al Petteway & Amy White. 7:30 p.m. $15–$25. imtfolk.org.

muSiC Center at Strathmore 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor. 8 p.m. $35–$99. strathmore.org.

linColn theatre 1215 U St. NW. (202) 888-0050.

The Mavericks. 8 p.m. $45-55. thelincolndc.com.

FuNk & R&B

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12.1 ROCK-A-SONICS 12.2 JUMPIN’ JUPITER 12.8 HUMAN COUNTRY JUKEBOX 12.9 THE CURRYS 12.16 VINTAGE #18 12.21 KITI GARTNER 12.23 COLONEL JOSH & THE HONKY TONK HEROES 1.7

FRED EAGLESMITH TRAVELING SHOW STARRING TIF GINN

2.6

LARA HOPE & THE ARC-TONES

3.3

SUZY BOGGUSS (TWO SHOWS)

3.14 GANGSTAGRASS 3.24 CORY MORROW

HILL COUNTRY BARBECUE MARKET

COuNtRY

the anthem 901 Wharf Street SW, DC. Erykah Badu.

8 p.m. $76–$126. theanthemdc.com.

410 Seventh St, NW • 202.556.2050 Hillcountrylive.com • Twitter @hillcountrylive

birChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Paul Thorn Band. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com.

the hamilton 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. Big Sam’s Funky Nation. 8 p.m. $19.75–$25.75. thehamiltondc.com.

Near Archives/Navy Memorial [G, Y] and Gallery PI/Chinatown [R] Metro

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CITY LIGHTS: sAtuRDAY

ERYkAH BADu

Most artists tour in support of a new album or to ride the nostalgia wave of an old one. Erykah Badu does neither. Her last proper album was released in 2010, it’s been two years since an outof-nowhere mixtape, and it doesn’t look like a new album is on the horizon. Yet her concerts don’t just celebrate the old favorites, either, because Badu’s music is a timeless mix of the past, present, and future. She’s a living legend in R&B and occupies a rare space of vitality. The Afrofuturistic neo-soul that she championed in the late ’90s and early 2000s has continued to influence a new generation of artists, from Solange to The Internet’s Syd, and she still has her finger on the pulse, giving the seal of approval to artists like Chance the Rapper, Tyler, The Creator, and D.R.A.M. Perhaps the best example of Badu’s flat-circle-time is that 2015 mixtape, But You Caint Use My Phone, which managed to flip Drake’s ubiquitous “Hotline Bling,” reference Usher’s 2001 hit “U Don’t Have to Call,” and rework her own 2008 song “Telephone,” without ever losing sight of what makes Badu, Badu. Erykah Badu performs at 8 p.m. at The Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. $76–$126. (202) 888-0020. theanthemdc.com.

—Chris Kelly

Love & Lust Classifieds Are Back Remember these?

HIp-HOp

Songbyrd muSiC houSe and reCord Cafe 2477 18th St. NW. (202) 450-2917. P.O.S. 9 p.m. $15–$20. songbyrddc.com.

JAzz

blueS alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Robert Gambarini. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $47–$52. bluesalley.com. kennedy Center terraCe theater 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. Christian Sands. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $30. kennedy-center.org. tWinS Jazz 1344 U St. NW. (202) 234-0072. Tim Whalen Septet. 9 p.m.; 11 p.m. $27. twinsjazz.com.

OpERA

If you’re tired of Tinder, bummed out by Bumble, or lost in Match malaise, City Paper is here for you. We’re planning a limited edition, print-only, love and lust classified ads section in late November, just in time for the holidays. Go to washingtoncitypaper.com/love to find true love or an A+ tryst. It costs you $5 for a two-week ad run.

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u Street muSiC hall 1115 U St. NW. (202) 588-1889.

Arkells. 7 p.m. $15. ustreetmusichall.com.

VOCAl

kennedy Center ConCert hall 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. The Choral Arts Society of Washington: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. 3 p.m. $15–$69. kennedy-center.org.

suNDAY ClAssICAl

ClariCe Smith Performing artS Center Stadium Drive and Route 193, College Park. (301) 405-2787.

Rita Sloan & Friends. 3 p.m. Free. theclarice.umd.edu.

CatholiC univerSity of ameriCa 620 Michigan Ave. NE. (202) 319-5000. The Old Maid and the Thief and Doctor Miracle. 7:30 p.m. $5–$20. cua.edu.

hylton Performing artS Center 10960 George Mason Circle, Manassas. (703) 993-7759. Youth Orchestras of Prince William. 3 p.m. $12–$20. hyltoncenter.org.

ROCk

hoWard theatre 620 T St. NW. (202) 803-2899.

American Football. 8 p.m. $27.50–$50. thehowardtheatre.com.

kennedy Center ConCert hall 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. National Symphony Orchestra: Tastes of Italy, France & Spain. 3 p.m. $15–$89. kennedy-center.org.

roCk & roll hotel 1353 H St. NE. (202) 388-7625.

The Black Heart Procession. 8 p.m. $18. rockandrollhoteldc.com.

national gallery of art WeSt garden Court 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. (202) 8426941. Mantra Percussion. 3:30 p.m. Free. nga.gov.

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

Rob Bell

NOVEMBER

THE WEST WING WEEKLY

DECEMBER (cont.)

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Yonder Mountain String Band w/ The Last Revel ........................F 17 Strike Anywhere & City of Caterpillar w/ Battery • Worriers • Big Hush . Tu 21 The Pietasters w/ Bumpin’ Uglies

w/ Peter Rollins ................................................... MARCH 27

(LIVE) .... APRIL 16

On Sale Friday, November 17 at 10am

Up and Vanished Live This is a seated show. .....................M 18

THIS FRIDAY!

STEEZ PROMO PRESENTS

AN EVENING WITH

Henry Rollins Travel Slideshow .......................... JAN 15

Tony Kill • Echelon The Seeker • OG Lullabies • Dawkins •

MURRAY & PETER PRESENT

Majid Jordan w/ Stwo .................. JAN 23

& The Players Band ......................F 24

FootsXColes • Sugg Savage .Sa 23

Yann Tiersen .................................. DEC 5

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

U STREET MUSIC HALL PRESENTS

AN EVENING WITH

Keller Williams’ Thanksforgrassgiving feat.

Larry & Jenny Keel, Jeremy Garrett,

Ookay .........................................F 22 OTHERFEELS PRESENTS NEXT UP II FEAT.

DECEMBER

JANUARY

Priests w/ Blacks Myths & Mellow Diamond . F 1 Reverend Horton Heat w/ Big Sandy • Dale Watson •

The Dead Milkmen w/ Mindless Faith ...........................F 5 Boat Burning: Music for 100 Guitars w/ Visuals by DC guerrilla

projectionist Robin Bell .............Su 7

TEEV PRESENTS

The Wombats w/ Blaenavon & Courtship .............M 8 Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven ....Th 11

NEW MEDIA TOURING PRESENTS

Matt Bellassai This is a seated show. ......................Th 7 No Scrubs: ‘90s Dance Party

with DJs Will Eastman and Brian Billion .........................F 8

Dirt Monkey • Kompany Late Show! 10pm Doors.. ..................Sa 9

Mogwai w/ Xander Harris ........Su 10 AN EVENING WITH

Hiss Golden Messenger .....M 11 The White Buffalo w/ Suzanne Santo ........................W 13 D NIGHT ADDED!

FIRST NIGHT SOLD OUT! SECON

Angel Olsen w/ White Magic.....F 15 ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Victor Wooten Trio feat. Dennis Chambers &

Max Raabe & Palast Orchester ...................APR 11

Bianca Del Rio ........................... MAR 15

Shamir w/ Partner ................................ F 15 herMajesty & Honest Haloway ..................Sa JAN 13 Alex Aiono ......................................... Sa 20 Rostam w/ Joy Again .......................Th FEB 1 Flint Eastwood ......................................F 2 Mod Sun w/ Karisma ............................... M 5 Why? .......................................................F 9 Anti-Flag & Stray From The Path .. Sa 10 MAGIC GIANT w/ The Brevet ............... Su 18 Gabrielle Aplin w/ John Splithoff ......... Su 25

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

FEBRUARY STEEZ PROMO PRESENTS

Emancipator Ensemble ......... Sa 3

MANY MORE SHOWS ON SALE!

9:30 CUPCAKES

NEW YEAR’S EVE AT LINCOLN THEATRE!

Arkells w/ Irontom ...................... Sa NOV 18 Sheppard ............................................ M 20 Moonchild .......................................... Tu 21 Maximo Park w/ Active Bird Community ..................... Tu 28 Stop Light Observations w/ Little Stranger ............................... F DEC 1 Allan Rayman ..................................... Sa 2 Uno The Activist & Thouxanbanfauni w/ Warhol.ss ........................................... Tu 5 Busty and the Bass ........................... Th 7 Rico Nasty .............................................F 8

The Infamous Stringdusters ......................Sa 20 MØ & Cashmere Cat .............M 22 Tennis ........................................W 24 Big Head Todd & The Monsters ...................Th 25 Enter Shikari w/ Single Mothers & Milk Teeth ..Su 28 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club w/ Night Beats .............................M 29 Kimbra w/ Arc Iris ....................Tu 30 Typhoon ....................................W 31

Bob Franceschini ...................Sa 16

Municipal Waste w/ NAILS • Macabre • Shitfucker .Su 17

with Steve Morse, Rod Morgenstein, Allen Sloan, Andy West, and Steve Davidowski) ..................MAR 7

9:30 CLUB PRESENTS AT U STREET MUSIC HALL

1/13 The Disco Biscuits @ The Anthem..F 12

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

w/ The Stray Birds ........................... JAN 26 Dixie Dregs (Complete Original Lineup

• thelincolndc.com • U Street (Green/Yellow) stop across the street!

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

STEEZ PROMO PRESENTS

The Wood Brothers

AEG PRESENTS

DC’s All 90s Band ..................... DEC 31

The Disco Biscuits Ticket included with purchase of tickets to

Collie Buddz w/ Jo Mersa Marley & The Holdup ..............................M 15

ALL GOOD PRESENTS

Kip Moore, Randy Rogers, White Ford Bronco:

AN EVENING WITH

Gary Numan w/ Me Not You Early Show! 6pm Doors ....................Sa 9 Bear Grillz w/ Phase One •

AN ACOUSTIC EVENING WITH

and Wade Bowen...................... DEC 13

Jungle ..........................................M 4 special guest Hanan Ben Ari ...W 6

Merry Christmas From The Fam-O-Lee Show .........DEC 7

SPOON w/ White Reaper

Complimentary Champagne Toast at Midnight! ............................ Su DEC 31

Hadag Nahash with

Robert Earl Keen’s

SPEND NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH

Danny Barnes, Jay Starling .....Sa 25

A Drag Queen Christmas .......NOV 26 David Rawlings ............................DEC 6

Flosstradamus .....................Th 28

Cut Copy w/ Palmbomen II ........W 29 Deer Tick w/ Nore Davis ..........Th 30

The Blasters ...................................Su 3

Puddles Pity Party ....................NOV 17

930.com

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

impconcerts.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 Weekdays & Until 11PM on show nights. 6-11PM on Sat & 6-10:30PM on Sun on show nights.

HAPPY HOUR DRINK PRICES

AFTER THE SHOW AT THE BACK BAR!

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 washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 33

NEW MUSIC VENUE

NOW OPEN

CITY LIGHTS: suNDAY

DISTRICT WHARF DINER & BAR OPEN LATE!

N OV E M B E R F 17

THE BLUES BEATLES 8 PM FIRST US TOUR!

S 18

JOE CLAIR & FRIENDS COMEDY SHOW 7/10 PM

SU 19 A’NGELA WINBUSH 7:30 PM T 21

THE CHANDLER TRAVIS PHILHARMONIC 8:00 PM

W 22 RARE ESSENCE 8 PM F 24

NOVEMBER CONCERTS TH 16 F 17 SA 18 W 22 F 24 SA 25 W 29

ROOMFUL OF BLUES w/ VINTAGE #18 JIMMY THACKERY w/ FAST EDDIE AND THE SLOWPOKES DOM FLEMONS DUO CHUCK BROWN BAND BROTHER JOSCEPHUS & THE LOVE REVOLUTION PRESENT 50th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND HUMAN COUNTRY JUKEBOX (NO COVER!) JOLIE HOLLAND AND SAMANTHA PARTON (OF THE BE GOOD TANYAS) w/ LETITIA VANSANT

F 15 SA 16 F 22 SA 23 F 29

S 25

& THE JAMES BROWN EXPERINCE 8PM S 26

WITH

A GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JAZZ CHRISTMAS TOUR (2 SHOWS) 4/8PM

ULTIMATE TINA TURNER TRIBUTE W/ VIVIAN ROSS

JUST ANNOUNCED TUE, DEC 5TH - SYDNI MARIE AND BRIAN CHRISTOPHER 8 PM

FRI, DEC 15 - MAGGIE ROSE W/ NATIVE RUN

7PM DOORS

FRI, FEB 2ND - JON B

� �RING IN 2018!�

CE PARTY!� �ACOUSTIC ‘80s DAN

TICKETS ON SALE NOW! AT PEARLSTREETWAREHOUSE.COM

8 PM

8 PM

http://igg.me/at/bethesdablues 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD

(240) 330-4500 www. BethesdaBluesJazz.com Two Blocks from Bethesda Metro/Red Line Free Parking on Weekends

34 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

If you’re looking for catchy power-pop hooks and a youthful roller coaster of emotions, few records are going to be as satisfying as Alex Lahey’s I Love You Like A Brother. The 25-year-old Australian music school dropout writes with a clarity seldom seen in someone so young. “Fuck work, you’re here, every day’s the weekend!” she sings on the album’s opener “Every Day’s the Weekend.” The sentiment is simple and charming. What’s better than a weekend? The peak of the record is the irresistible “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself,” which plays as both happy and sad. It blooms out of the constant self-criticism one undergoes after a breakup, but it can also be heard as a defiant “treat yo’ self ” anthem. Whether you’re looking forward to college, can hardly remember it, or are somewhere in between, Lahey will make you feel the rush of young love with all its gut-wrenching twists and turns. Alex Lahey performs at 9 p.m. at DC9, 1940 9th St. NW. $12–$14. (202) 483-5000. dcnine.com.

—Justin Weber

the Warne ballroom at the CoSmoS Club 2121 Massachusetts Ave NW, DC. Annie Wu & Feng Niu. 4 p.m. $20–$40. phillipscollection.org.

TH 30 SIMPLY THE BEST: THE

NEW YEAR’S EVE 2017 •

MOUSEY THOMPSON

W 29 THE RAT PACK 8 PM

SARAH SHOOK & THE DISARMERS PATTERSON HOOD HAYLEY JANE & THE PRIMATES DANNY BARNES TRIO CHOPTEETH AFROFUNK BIG BAND ROOSEVELT COLLIER TRIO HENDRIX MEETS FUNK CURLEY TAYLOR & ZYDECO TROUBLE HOLIDELIC REVELATOR HILL WITH RON HOLLOWAY w/ BRYAN ELIJAH SMITH MISS TESS AND THE TALKBACKS KING SOUL

LIVE ON STAGE

AlEX lAHEY

FAMILY SOUL 8 PM

DECEMBER CONCERTS F1 SU 3 TH 7 F8 SA 9 TH 14

KINDRED THE

State theatre 220 N. Washington St., Falls Church.

(703) 237-0300. Ace In Chains: Tribute to Alice In Chains. 8:30 p.m. $12–$15. thestatetheatre.com.

COuNtRY

VOCAl

JAzz

MONDAY

birChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Kathy Mattea. 7:30 p.m. $35. birchmere.com. barnS at Wolf traP 1635 Trap Road, Vienna. (703) 255-1900. John Eaton. 2 p.m. $25–$27. wolftrap.org. blueS alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Robert Gambarini. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $47–$52. bluesalley.com. tWinS Jazz 1344 U St. NW. (202) 234-0072. Jeff Cosgrove/Noah Preminger Quartet. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $22. twinsjazz.com.

OpERA

CatholiC univerSity of ameriCa 620 Michigan Ave. NE. (202) 319-5000. The Old Maid and the Thief and Doctor Miracle. 2 p.m. $5–$20. cua.edu.

ROCk

amP by Strathmore 11810 Grand Park Ave., North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. Dark Desert Eagles. 8 p.m. $32–$37. ampbystrathmore.com. blaCk Cat baCkStage 1811 14th St. NW. (202) 6674490. Eyelids. 7:30 p.m. $15. blackcatdc.com. dC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Alex Lahey. 9 p.m. $12–$14. dcnine.com. muSiC Center at Strathmore 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. (301) 581-5100. A Night with Janis Joplin. 8 p.m. $45–$95. strathmore.org.

the hamilton 600 14th St. NW. (202) 787-1000. Bettye LaVette. 7:30 p.m. $20–$45. thehamiltondc.com.

ClAssICAl

CatholiC univerSity of ameriCa 620 Michigan Ave. NE. (202) 319-5000. Romantic Masters: Brahms and Bruch. 7:30 p.m. Free. cua.edu. kennedy Center terraCe theater 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. The PyeongChang Music Festival. 7:30 p.m. $45–$75. kennedy-center.org.

HIp-HOp

kennedy Center ConCert hall 2700 F St. NW. (202) 467-4600. The Bridge Concert Series: Pioneering Emcees, Vol. 1. 8 p.m. $19–$69. kennedy-center.org.

JAzz

birChmere 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

(703) 549-7500. Stanley Clarke Band. 7:30 p.m. $45. birchmere.com. blueS alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Gunhild Carling. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $42. bluesalley.com.

ROCk

9:30 Club 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. Echosmith.

8 p.m. $29. 930.com. dC9 1940 9th St. NW. (202) 483-5000. Ron Gallo. 8 p.m. $12–$14. dcnine.com.

CITY LIGHTS: MONDAY

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

PIONEERING EMCEES

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

Tix @ Ticketmaster.com 800-745-3000

Finally, some of hip-hop’s founders are getting a new day in the sun. The Kennedy Center, with rapper Q-Tip as its very first director of hip-hop culture, is presenting a live show featuring a number of veteran New York rappers who changed the music world.

The Bridge Concert Series: Pioneering Emcees, Vol. 1 will include legends like Kurtis Blow, widely regarded as the first commercially successful rapper, and Kool Moe Dee, one of the first rappers to get a Grammy nod and the first rapper to perform on the Grammys stage. It’ll also feature MC Sha-Rock, one of the very first female rappers, who used fastpatter, repeated echo-like phrases, and calland-response chants, and Roxanne Shanté, who in the ’80s got heads nodding to that era’s more straightforward cadence. They’ll be joined by Kool DJ Red Alert, who helped spread that signature New York sound on his turntables at club appearances, on mixtapes, and on radio. This is a roster full of timeless flow, and these genre giants will gladly remind you how they laid the foundation to hip-hop becoming the language of popular culture. The Bridge Concert Series: Pioneering Emcees, Vol. 1 begins at 8 p.m. at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, 2700 F St. NW. $19–$69. (202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

—Steve Kiviat

TuESDAY JAzz

Blues Alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Kandace Springs. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $42. bluesalley.com.

WEDNESDAY GO-GO

BethesdA Blues & JAzz 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. (240) 330-4500. Rare Essence. 8 p.m. $25. bethesdabluesjazz.com.

HIP-HOP

9:30 CluB 815 V St. NW. (202) 265-0930. 6LACK. 8 p.m. $35. 930.com.

Fillmore silver spring 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. (301) 960-9999. Hoodie Allen. 8 p.m. $30. fillmoresilverspring.com.

JAzz

Blues Alley 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. (202) 3374141. Kia Bennett. 8 p.m.; 10 p.m. $39. bluesalley.com.

THuRSDAY HIP-HOP

eChostAge 2135 Queens Chapel Rd. NE. (202) 5032330. Young Thug. 10 p.m. $36.80–$48.40. echostage.com.

Theater

the Adventures oF peter pAn Synetic Theater takes on the story of the boy who won’t grow up and his merry company of followers in this production full of high-flying acrobatics and one very sinister pirate.

Synetic Theater at Crystal City. 1800 South Bell St.,

Arlington. To Nov. 19. $20–$60. (866) 811-4111. synetictheater.org.

Annie The family-favorite musical about a redhaired orphan and the rich businessman she charms fills Olney’s mainstage during the holiday season.

Featuring favorite songs like “Tomorrow” and “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” this production is directed by Jason King Jones. Olney Theatre Center. 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Olney. To Dec. 31. $37–$84. (301) 9243400. olneytheatre.org.

Antony And CleopAtrA Robert Richmond returns to the Folger to lead the company’s production of the Bard’s drama about the romance between a Roman ruler and an Egyptian queen. As the forces of love and politics pull the title characters apart, both must decide to put themselves or their countries first. Folger Elizabethan Theatre. 201 E. Capitol St. SE. To Nov. 19. $35–$75. (202) 544-7077. folger.edu. the Book oF mormon The long-running Broadway musical about two Mormon missionaries who wind up angering an African war lord returns to the Kennedy Center for another engagement. Featuring songs like “Hello!” and “I Believe,” this comedy currently stars Gabe Gibbs and Conor Peirson. Kennedy Center Opera House. 2700 F St. NW. To Nov. 19. $59–$199.

(202) 467-4600. kennedy-center.org.

ChristmAs At the old Bull & Bush Enjoy classic British carols and drinking songs in this holiday show set in a London pub. As the characters enjoy mince pies and sausage rolls, they perform sketches and share stories related to the Christmas season.

MetroStage. 1201 N. Royal St., Alexandria. To Dec. 24. $55–$60. (703) 548-9044. metrostage.org.

A ChristmAs CArol Veteran local actor Craig Wallace takes on the role of Scrooge in this popular musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ tale about kindness and holiday cheer. Celebrating more than 35 years as a Ford’s holiday tradition, Michael Wilson’s adaptation is directed by Michael Baron. Ford’s Theatre. 511 10th St. NW. To Dec. 31. $22–$92. (202) 3474833. fords.org.

A CoFFin in egypt As her life nears its end, a 90-year-old small town widow reflects on the events that changed its course in this drama from playwright Horton Foote. Jane Squier Bruns stars in this produc-

Nov 17

WALTER BEASLEY

Unit 3 Deep

1811 14TH ST NW

www.blackcatdc.com @blackcatdc

18 “Hammer & Nail 20th Anniversary Show!”

PAUL THORN BAND

NOV / DEC SHOWS

with Alice Drinks The Kool-Aid

KATHY MATTEA

19 feat. Bill Cooley “The Acoustic Living Room” Song & Stories

THE STANLEY CLARKE BAND

20

THE SELDOM SCENE & DRY BRANCH FIRE SQUAD

24

DAVID BROMBERG QUINTET 27 NATHAN PACHECO 30 THE MARSHALL TUCKER BAND 25

Dec 1

“Honky Tonk Holiday”

BILL KIRCHEN & TOO MUCH FUN with special guest COMMANDER CODY 2 CHERYL WHEELER & JOHN GORKA 3 BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS featuring BO

BICE

w/ Chrissi Poland

HOT TUNA (Acoustic) The 6 STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES Mastersons 7 AARON NEVILLE “Holidays & Hits” 5

DAR WILLIAMS LUTHER RE-LIVES 7th Annual Holiday Concert

8&9 10 13

THU 16

THE DRUMS

FRI 17

THE STORY SO FAR

FRI 17

EAT YOUR HART OUT BURLESQUE REVUE (21+)

SOLD OUT

SAT 18

TAKE ME OUT

SAT 18

PERFECT LIAR’S CLUB

SUN 19

TUE 21

WED 22 FRI 24 SAT 25 TUE 28

2000S INDIE DANCE PARTY

EYELIDS

JAY GONZALEZ & THE GUILTY PLEASURES HUMBLE FIRE

BRANCH MANAGER

BELLS OF RUIN BY DESIGN

MATTSON 2

FOOTS X COLES

THE 9

SONGWRITER SERIES

CHURCH NIGHT (21+)

BEACH SLANG

THU 30 POSCARDS FROM THE VAG:

GREETINGS FROM GILEAD

FRI 1 SAT 2 FRI 8

POKEY LAFARGE FIRST LADIES

DJ COLLECTIVE REUNION INTERRUPTERS & SWMRS

An Acoustic Christmas with

OVER THE RHINE

14 16

CARBON LEAF

Sawyer

SOUTHSIDE JOHNNY & The Asbury Jukes

NORMAN BROWN’S JOYOUS CHRISTMAS with BOBBY CALDWELL & MARION MEADOWS

17

TUE NOV 28

BEACH SLANG

CHAKA

KHAN IN CONCERT! Fri. Nov. 24 • 8pm

LEDISI

Tix @ Ticketmaster.com 800-745-3000 Info @ Birchmere.com 703-549-7500

KIRK FRANKLIN

w/PJ Morton

THE REBEL THE SOUL & THE SAINT TOUR

SATURDAY NOV. 25 • 7:30PM DAR CONSTITUTION HALL

TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT TICKETMASTER.COM OR CALL 800-745-3000

FRI DEC 1

POKEY LAFARGE

TAKE METRO!

WE ARE LOCATED 3 BLOCKS FROM THE U STREET/CARDOZO STATION

TO BUY TICKETS VISIT TICKETFLY.COM

washingtoncitypaper.com november 17, 2017 35

the real ameriCanS Playwright and journalist turns 100 days of traveling through America in a small van into this one-man show that shares information about the people he met along the way. As he learns about the goals and political actions of these new friends, he also learns more about the nation’s diversity. Presented in repertory with Draw the Circle. Atlas Performing Arts Center. 1333 H St. NE. To Dec. 20. $20–$65. (202) 399-7993. atlasarts.org.

CITY LIGHTS: tuEsDAY

the

a Short SerieS of diSagreementS PreSented here in ChronologiCal order English playwright Daniel Kitson comes to D.C. to create a unique, site- and time-specific piece for Studio audiences consisting of bits of conversations, squabbles, and discussions. Studio Theatre. 1501 14th St. NW. To Nov. 25. $20–$25. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

DUSTBOWL

REVIVAL W/ SAMMY MILLER &

St. niCholaS Conor McPherson’s dramatic monologue opens Quotidian Theatre’s season in repertory with A Coffin in Egypt. Steve Beall stars as the Dublin drama critic who encounters vampires when he follows an actress to London. Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center. 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. To Dec. 17. $15–$30. (301) 816-1023. quotidiantheatre.org.

THE CONGREGATION FRIDAY NOV

17

BIG SAM’S

FUNKY

toP girlS To celebrate a promotion at work, Marlene hosts a dinner party with significant women from history. Caryl Churchill’s award-winning drama looks at the roles women have played over time and how Marlene rises to the top of her field. Keegan Theatre at Church Street Theater. 1742 Church St. NW. To Dec. 2. $35–$45. (202) 265-3767. keegantheatre.com.

NATION W/ PEBBLE TO PEARL SATURDAY NOV

18

SUN, NOV 19

BETTYE LAVETTE W/ JODY NARDONE

TUES, NOV 21

KRANIUM W/ KAPPA FRI, NOV 24

AN EVENING WITH SUPERFLYDISCO:

THE INAUGURAL BLACK FRIDAY DISCO-FUNK THROWDOWN SAT, NOV 25

ALL GOOD PRESENTS SCYTHIAN W/ FORLORN STRANGERS SUN, NOV 26

3:00pm & 6:30pm A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS WITH

WORRIERs

In the 33 years since 7 Seconds declared that punk and hardcore were “Not Just Boys Fun,” it’s proven to be a stubbornly difficult mantra to put into practice. So, it’s refreshing to see Worriers (and D.C. natives Big Hush) help provide some balance to a stylistically diverse evening—by punk standards, anyway—of aggressive music. Worriers is singer Lauren Denitzio’s project following The Measure [sa], a band who put out some excellent pop-punk records for people into that sort of thing. I most certainly am. If The Measure [sa] captured the sounds of youthful exuberance and exploration, Worriers wrestles with the ever-present anxieties of emerging adulthood. Survival Pop, the band’s latest and first record for SideOneDummy, is thoughtful when considering the future in both grand and personal ways. “I just want to be alone sometimes,” Denitzio sings on “Gaslighter.” Here, she’s able to articulate a universal conflict within punk: the healing nature of singing alongside others about the desire for isolation. Worriers performs with Strike Anywhere, City of Caterpillar, Battery, and Big Hush at 7 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $21. (202) 265-0930. 930.com.

—Matt Siblo

ERIC BYRD TRIO TUES, NOV 28

SLATE PRESENTS

THE GIST PODCAST LIVE: PESCA ON THE POTOMAC THURS, NOV 30

AN ACOUSTIC EVENING WITH

JOHN ANDERSON SUN, DEC 10

AN INTIMATE EVENING WITH

EMMYLOU HARRIS BENEFITING BONAPARTE’S RETREAT

W/ SPECIAL GUESTS LARRY CAMPBELL & TERESA WILLIAMS THURS, DEC 21

AN EVENING WITH

THE BSTREETBAND FRI, DEC 22

YELLOW DUBMARINE W/ THE LOVING PAUPERS

THEHAMILTONDC.COM

tion that opens Quotidian Theatre’s 20th season.

Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center.

4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. To Dec. 17. $15–$30. (301) 816-1023. quotidiantheatre.org.

Crazy for you The songs of George and Ira Gershwin are reimagined by playwright Ken Ludwig in this musical about a banker, assigned to shut down a small-town theater, who decides to revive it instead.

Featuring favorite songs like “I’ve Got Rhythm,” “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me,” this musical, arriving at Signature in time for the holidays, is directed by Matthew Gardiner. Signature Theatre. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. To Jan. 14. $40–$108. (703) 820-9771. sigtheatre.org. lady day at emerSon’S bar & grill Set in a seedy Philadelphia jazz club four months before Billie Holiday’s death, this musical revue serves as a biography of the infamous singer and a cautionary tale.

Featuring songs like “God Bless the Child”, “My Man” and “Strange Fruit,” this production is directed by Lanie Robertson. Rep Stage at Howard Community College. 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia. To Nov. 19. $10–$40. (443) 518-1500. repstage.org. mean girlS Tina Fey, Jeff Richmond, and Nell Benjamin team up to turn the classic 2004 high school comedy into a stage musical, which makes its preBroadway debut in D.C. Featuring a cast of theater veterans including Kate Rockwell, Taylor Louderman, and Kerry Butler, the show is directed by Tony winner Casey Nicholaw. National Theatre. 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. To Dec. 3. $68–$178. (202) 628-6161. nationaltheatre.org. my name iS aSher lev Based on the acclaimed novel by Chaim Potak, playwright Aaron Posner’s play tells the story of a young man coming of age in post-war Brooklyn, who is determined to become an

36 november 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

artist at any cost. Despite facing disapproval from his family, Asher finds a connection between the art world and the ultra-religious community he lives in.

1st Stage. 1524 Spring Hill Road, McLean. To Dec. 17. $15–$33. (703) 854-1856. 1ststagetysons.org. a night With JaniS JoPlin Music Center at Strathmore. 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. To Nov. 19. $45–$95. (301) 581-5100. strathmore.org. nina Simone: four Women The civil rights anthems of jazz and soul vocalist Nina Simone come to life in this play that follows the artist’s reactions to the tumultuous events of the 1960s. Through songs like “Mississippi Goddam” and “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” audiences learn about Simone and American history in the same evening. Christina Ham directs this drama starring Arena regular Harriet D. Foy. Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To Dec. 24. $56–$91.

(202) 488-3300. arenastage.org. nothing to loSe (but our ChainS) Second City performer Felonius Monk mines his own life for experience in this comedy show that chronicles his journey from incarcerated criminal to corporate drone to comedian and actor. He’s joined on stage by a company of Second City comedians. Woolly Mammoth Theatre. 641 D St. NW. To Dec. 31. $20–$69. (202) 3933939. woollymammoth.net. the PaJama game Union conflicts are never as thrilling or romantic as they are in this musical set at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory. When the superintendent falls in love with the head of the grievance committee, all sorts of drama ensues, as does plenty of dancing. Alan Paul directs Arena’s annual fall musical that features songs like “Steam Heat” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.” Arena Stage. 1101 6th St. SW. To Dec. 24. $65–$120. (202) 488-3300. arenastage.org.

tWelfth night When Viola crashes on the coast of Illyria and disguises herself as a page to Duke Orsino, she kicks off a rollicking tale of love, romance, and mistaken identity. Director Ethan McSweeny leads Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of this classic comedy which features one of the Bard’s most memorable heroines. Sidney Harman Hall. 610 F St. NW. To Dec. 20. $44–$118. (202) 547-1122. shakespearetheatre.org. viCuña & an ePilogue Originally presented in 2016, this drama follows an Iranian tailor as he makes a suit for a real estate magnate-turned-political candidate preparing for a presidential debate. This time, the play is performed with a new epilogue that chronicles events from Election Night. Atlas Performing Arts Center. 1333 H St. NE. To Nov. 26. $20–$65. (202) 399-7993. atlasarts.org.

Film

daddy’S home 2 Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell return as family-oriented father and stepfather, this time dealing with their own eccentric fathers during the holidays, in this sequel to Daddy’s Home. Co-starring John Lithgow and Mel Gibson. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) JuStiCe league Batman recruits a super-powered team featuring Wonder Woman, The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman to face a great enemy. Starring Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, and Ezra Miller. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) laSt flag flying Military veterans reunite to bury one of their sons, a Marine killed in Iraq. Starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve Carell. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) murder on the orient exPreSS A detective must solve a murder mystery on board a train before the suspect kills again. Starring Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, and Michelle Pfeiffer. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) the Star This animated comedy traces the journey of a small brave donkey who becomes a Christmas hero. Starring Steven Yeun, Kristin Chenoweth, and Zachary Levi. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) three billboardS outSide ebbing, miSSouri Frances McDormand stars as a mother out to solve her daughter’s murder, as the local authorities fail to do so. Co-starring Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information) Wonder A boy with facial differences enters fifth grade and must navigate life at a mainstream elementary school for the first time. Starring Julia Roberts, Jacob Tremblay, and Owen Wilson. (See washingtoncitypaper.com for venue information)

CITY LIGHTS: WEDNEsDAY

kAROl G

Medellín, Colombia’s Karol G is fluent in many genre tongues, from reggaeton to R&B to pop to Latin trap rap. That diversity is displayed on her recent debut album Unstoppable, where her danceable beats vary in style, but the lyrical message remains: She wants you to know she is an independent woman who is not going to be controlled by any man. Her vocal range goes mainly from a light and shiny radio-friendly croon to a less melodic rapped one, but she can also vocalize more powerfully. In “Ahora Me Llama” (“Now He Calls Me” in English), a duet with Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, Karol uses her sweet tone to assert in Spanish, “Now, I just want to go out with my own squad because the night is mine. I will enjoy it without your company.”

Also peforming is Puerto Rican rapper Noriel, who alternates between a speedy, rough-voiced flow and a slower-tempoed auto-tuned one, both with elements drawn from Atlanta and the Caribbean. Together, they’ll bring a vibrant and modern mixture of Latin music sure to make you move. Karol G performs with Noriel at 10 p.m. at Rio Cantina, 21800 Towncenter Plaza, Sterling. $30. (703) 975-1202. riocantinanightclub.com.

—Steve Kiviat

CITY LIGHTS: tHuRsDAY

tHANksGIVING

What do you have to be thankful for this holiday season? Sure, you’ve got your friends, your family, (hopefully) your health, but what else? The world is currently a bag of rotting fruit that just got out of a sour milk shower, with no towel.

And that’s on a good day. But then again, that underlying fear, anxiety, and rage that’s been festering for the past year like an open wound might make for all the more reason to gather with your family—given or chosen—and take a brief reprieve from your daily panic attack with some turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. Better yet, if you want to make just a small difference in this hellscape we call “America,” you can spend the day volunteering at a homeless shelter, feeding those who are hungry. Whatever it is you do on Thursday, just make sure it brings you even the smallest amount of comfort and happiness. Because you deserve that. So I say to you all: Happy Thanksgiving. Except for Donald Trump, the Trump administration, Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and pretty much every other white man: You can go fuck yourselves.

—Matt Cohen

Spirit of the

Season2017 D.A.R. Constitution Hall 1776 D St., N.W. Washington, D.C. Saturday, Dec. 9 at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Sunday, Dec. 10 at 3 p.m. for FREE tickets, visit: www.usafband.eventbrite.com

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Contents: Adult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Buy, Sell, Trade Marketplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Employment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Health/Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Classified Ads Print & Web Classified Packages may be placed on our Web site, by fax, mail, phone, or in person at our office: 734 15th Street, NW Suite 400 Washington, D.C. 20005 Commercial Ads rates start at $20 for up to 6 lines in print and online; additional print lines start at $2.50/ line (vary by section). Your print ad placement plus up to 10 photos online. Premium options available for both print and web may vary.

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Legals SUPERIOR COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PROBATE DIVISION 2015 ADM 1198 Name of Decedent, Colleen R. Prince, Name and Address of Attorney, Donna Clemons-Sacks, Esq. 1700 Rockville Pike, Suite 400, Rockville, MD 20852. Notice of Appointment, Notice to Creditors and Notice to Unknown Heirs, Micha S. Hayes, whose address is 13909 Manchester Road, Upper Marlboro, MD 20774 was appointed Personal Representative of the estate of Colleen R. Prince who died on August 11, 2015, with a Will and will serve without Court Supervision. All unknown heirs and heirs whose wherabouts are unknown shall enter their appearance in this proceeding. Objections to such appointment shall be filed with the Register of Wills, D.C., 515 5th Street, N.W., Building A, 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001, on or before 5/2/2018.

Claims against the decedent shall be presented to the undersigned with a copy to the Register of Wills or to the Register of Wills with a copy to the undersigned, on or before 5/2/2018, or be forever barred. Persons believed to be heirs or legatees of the decedent who do not receive a copy of this notice by mail within 25 days of its publication shall so inform the Register of Wills, including name, address and relationship.

Date of first publication: 11/2/2017 Name of Newspaper and/or periodical: Washington City Paper/ WDLR Name of Person Representative: Micha S. Hayes TRUE TEST copy Anne Meister Register of Wills Pub Dates: Nov. 2, 9, 16.

Print Deadline The deadline for submission and payment of classified ads for print is each Monday, 5 pm.

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For more information please visit www.washingtoncitypaper.com

38 November 17, 2017 washingtoncitypaper.com

Legals

Rooms for Rent

D.C. BILINGUAL PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL NOTICE: FOR REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL

Capitol Hill - H St. NE Corridor - Furnished Rooms Available: Short-term or Long-term.

The space includes: free utilities, free WiFi, W/D, and Kitchen use. Rental amount is just - $1,100/month! Near major bus lines, Trolley, and Union Station - visit my website for details and pictures www.TheCurryEstate.com and/or call Eddie @ 202-744-9811.

D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School in accordance with section 2204(c) of the District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 solicits proposals for vendors to provide the following services for SY17.18: •Maintenance/HVAC Services •Security/Traffi c Services •Fundraising/Grant Writing Services Proposal Submission A Portable Document Format (pdf) election version of your proposal must be received by the school no later than 4:00 p.m. EST on Monday, November 27, 2017.

Proposals should be emailed to bids@dcbilingual.org No phone call submission or late responses please. Interviews, samples, demonstrations will be scheduled at our request after the review of the proposals only.

Achievement Prep RFP – Organizational Assessment Support Services Seeking a consulting firm to conduct an organizational assessment and make recommendations to ensure Achievement Prep Public Charter School is designed to effectively and effi ciently meet the mission. Achievement Prep serves approximately one thousand scholars in PK3 through 8th grade in South East DC. To request the full RFP, please reach out to Nikki Diamantes at ndiamantes@achievementprep.org.

Responses are due by 5pm on 11/27/17.

Male in 50s, quiet & clean, seeks private room, bath for $400 near public transpo, walk to groceries, in DC area. Good refs, work from home. Ready Jan./Feb. Laundry, low crime, no roaches. Email Noel: dafreenoel@gmail.com

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Construction/Labor

POWER DESIGN NOW HIRING ELECTRICAL APPRENTICES OF ALL SKILL LEVELS! about the position…

Do you love working with your hands? Are you interested in construction and in becoming an electrician?

Then the electrical apprentice position could be perfect for you! Electrical apprentices are able to earn a paycheck and full benefi ts while learning the trade through firsthand experience. what we’re looking for…

Motivated D.C. residents who want to learn the electrical trade and have a high school diploma or GED as well as reliable transportation. a little bit about us…

Power Design is one of the top electrical contractors in the U.S., committed to our values, to training and to giving back to the communities in which we live and work. more details…

Visit powerdesigninc.us/ careers or email careers@ powerdesigninc.us!

Invitation for Bid Food Service Management Services Sustainable Futures Public Charter School

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Antiques & Collectibles

WE BUY VINTAGE....

Hi Fi STUFF Specializing in amplifi ers, receivers, turntables, speakers, Lp’s and related items. We come to you when possible. 50 years in this area, paying top $$$!

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Sustainable Futures Public Charter School is advertising the opportunity to bid on the delivery of breakfast, lunch, snack and/or CACFP supper meals to children enrolled at the school for the 2017-2018 school year with a possible extension of (4) one year renewals. All meals must meet at a minimum, but are not restricted to, the USDA National School Breakfast, Lunch, Afterschool Snack and At Risk Supper meal pattern requirements. Additional specifi cations outlined in the Invitation for Bid (IFB) such as; student data, days of service, meal quality, etc. may http://www.washingtoncibe obtained beginning on typaper.com/ October 27, 2017 from Lauren Bryant at lbryant@sfpcsdc or 706-825-2003.

Garage/Yard/ Rummage/Estate Sales

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Flea Market every Fri-Sat 10am-4pm. 5615 Landover Rd. Cheverly, MD. 20784. Can buy in bulk. Contact 202-355-2068 or 301-772-3341 for details or if intrested in being a vendor.

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Proposals will be accepted at 1500 Harvard Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009, ATT: Lauren Bryant on November 20 2017 not later than 2 p.m.

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SOUTH AFRICAN BAZAAR Craft Cooperative 202-341-0209 www.southafricanbazaarcraftcoo perative.com southafricanba z a ar @hotmail. com

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

Financial Services

Roommates Brookland Catholic University Area: Intern & short term housing available 6 months or more, comfortable, W/D, one person, Red Line Metro at door, walking neighborhood and close to Yes Organic Market, many new restaurants, Monroe Market, ARTS WALK, $1400 includes all utilities internet, cable Available: December 1, 2017 laviniawohlfarth@aol.com 202-297-1125 (c)

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Looking to Rent yard space for hunting dogs. Alexandria/Arlington, VA area only. Medium sized dogs will be well-maintained in temperature controled dog houses. I have advanced animal care experience and dogs will be rid free of feces, flies, urine and oder.

Dogs will be in a ventilated kennel so they will not be exposed to winter and harsh weather etc. Space will be needed as soon as possible. Yard for dogs must be Metro accessible. Serious callers only, call anytime Kevin, 415- 8465268. Price Neg.

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