Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: Carrying on the Music of Woody Guthrie at the Kennedy Center, Oct. 14

Gary Tischler • October 15, 2012

---

Come Sunday evening, Oct. 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, it looks like it is going to get crowded on that stage when all the performers get together to honor America’s troubadour of the working man and Dust Bowl poet. “This Land is Your Land—The Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration Concert” is a tribute to the Oklahoma singer-songwriter, born in 1912.

It’s also probably fair to say that there is likely no performer on that stage—and it’s scheduled to include, among others, Ry Cooder, Judy Collins, Donovan, Jimmy LaFave, John Mellencamp and the Old Crow Medicine Show—who is more directly and closely connected to the spirit of Guthrie’s music and song book and to the man himself than a guy named Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. (Elliott is also appearing in a special Guthrie centennial concert at 8 p.m. and is part of a discussion and celebration with LeFave and Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary at beginning at 1 p.m. at the Library of Congress on Saturday, Oct. 13.)

The salutes include Guthrie’s son Arlo himself (who’s also scheduled to perform), who had acknowledged that he learned a lot about his father’s music mostly from Elliott, who’s described as Guthrie’s protégé by folk music chroniclers.

Elliott is 81 now, still touring a lot, still holding the Guthrie legacy up high, still singing, still wearing cowboy hats and boots, still scattering stories around like candy “I think my agent’s trying to kill me,” he said in a phone interview while he was staying with friends in an old East Coast stomping ground. “He’s scheduling me all over the place.” He’s not riding as a hobo on freight trains like Guthrie did. Elliott is flying a lot, however, which he doesn’t appreciate because it involved going through airports. “I don’t like airports,” he said. “They make me nervous. I like the window seat because I can look out and see what we’re flying over, and that makes me calm.”

“He’s out buying boots,” they told me when I first called. “Say, did you ever hear how Jack got his name?” I allowed that I hadn’t so I was told the oft-told tale of how Elliott once visited the famed folk singer Odetta at her home. Her mom said she was taking a bath and would he like to sit and chat with her on the porch while they waited. So, they did. After a considerable time, Odetta’s mom said in amazement, “Well, that Jack, he sure likes to ramble.”

He did, and he still does. I can vouch for that. A conversation with Jack Elliott is a bumpy ride, but not unpleasant, with many detours. It’s like a ride in an as-yet-uninvented but often imagined time machine, one of those modes of transportation that he’s so enamored with. “I used to be a truck driver and when I see a red light, I stop,” he often tells people.

A small confession is in order here: I used to hear Elliott sing—stuff like “If I Were a Carpenter” and “San Francisco Bay Blues” that I remember clearly—in Marin County in the San Francisco Bay area in a place called the Lion’s Share, run by the son of a well-known national conservative columnist. In the late 1960s around there, you could run into legendary musicians and legends to be legends who were every five minutes if you tried. They gathered regularly at the Lion’s Share, some of them, the folkies like Dave Von Ronck, Mississippi Blues stalwarts like the Reverend Blind Gary Davis and locals living in Marin. Of course, the locals there were Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, Steve Miller or Van Morrison and Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“I remember that place, Mike Considine and the bartender, Zane, Zane Plemmons,” he recalled. “He was a fighter pilot in Viet Nam. The place burned down in 1969, and they moved to San Anselmo.”

All of that true, and much more. It was one of the pit stops. But I remember even then he had that thin, laconic cowboy look when he was singing and walking around. You’d never have guessed that he was born and raised a nice Jewish boy in Brooklyn. “Then, I ran away with the rodeo,” he said. Literally, for a few weeks at least, long enough to get him into the cowboy music and cowboy mode, courtesy of a rodeo clown who sang.

When he took music seriously—always traveling, sometimes trucking, sometimes by plane—he had learned to fly a P41 Mustang, somehow. While going to Adelphi University in Long Island, he had heard a lot about Guthrie and was learning his music and knew a guitar player who knew Guthrie and sometimes went to Guthrie’s home in Coney Island to jam with other musicians. “About this time, he landed in the hospital (Guthrie had Parkinson’s to which he succumbed in 1967), and I met him there,” Elliott said. “He had skin gold brown from his time as a hobo riding the rails. He and his family, they kind of took me in for a time. Then, I traveled out west with him, and I sang with him sometimes.”

Elliott also picked up on trucking, sailing, cars, planes, the trains, planes and automobiles—things about which he writes and sings, and surely talks. It is the imagery of night roads and trucks, as water and flying sort of drift into his conversation and stories, and as he said, “Yeah, I got an interest in that stuff, sure.”

“Woody, he was the great American troubadour, the song man,” Elliott said. He was for the common man, the working man. He was a labor guy, the hobo and the hungry children, and he didn’t much like big business. He was a union guy, I guess. But you know what I think? I know some people wouldn’t agree with you on that: he was a great American to me and a great American patriot. He was about the American spirit. He embodied it.”

“He wasn’t necessarily an easy man, but you could love that man,” he said. “ He wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs, all kinds of songs, and he wrote about construction work, and the road, the railroads and he had a song about building a dam, the Columbia River. ”

Over the phone, he started singing to the tune of “Wabash Cannonball,” and the voice was as strong as I remembered it, rich and moving like a train whistle. “I wrote a lot of songs, but I didn’t write ‘If I Were a Carpenter,’ but I sang it a lot—and so did a lot of other people. Tim Hardin wrote it, he was a brilliant guy, but a tough guy. Don’t want to tell you how he felt about the Bobby Darin version.”

If he was Guthrie’s successor, protégé, why then Elliott had a similar effect on Bob Dylan, who was also smitten with the legend and songs of Woody Guthrie and influenced by Elliott. They would kid around—Dylan inviting Elliott on his Rollling Thunder Tour, Elliott kiddingly talking about “my son Bob Dylan.”

Dylan—who started out doing talking blues—became a major genius-grade superstar, while Guthrie’s name is now iconic and historic. They even celebrated his centennial in Oklahoma along with Austria. Elliott is the living legend flying under the radar, making music and albums.

“Talking blues, man, that was around a long time,” he said, and then started telling me about a man he met in Petaluma, Calif. “ He had really interesting seafaring tattoos. So, you meet a guy like that, talking about shore leave all over the world, talking about the ships and stuff, and we’re in Petaluma.”

I wish I’d recorded that and just about everything Elliott said. He carries Guthrie’s stuff around with him—like dust that never washes off. He travels a lot, he sings strong and clear and he has a cartful of memories he draws on. “Janis,” he recalled. “Well, I spent a week with her one afternoon. She was going to be doing the “Pearl” album I think, but here we all were, Kris [Krisofferson, who had written “Me and Bobbie McGee”] on one side of her and me on the other, and she started singing the song “…busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train…”

Right there, you could see it and hear it. You could hear train whistles in the stories, you could see the gaunt face of Woodie Guthrie. On Elliott’s website, there’s a recording of Elliott, Sonny McGee and Guthrie singing about “Railroad Bill.” Woody is singing clearly and then says, “Take it, Jack.” And Jack picked up.

Come Sunday, they’ll be singing, not “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie” but “This Land is Your Land”—which I heard a few thousand people sing at a Ukelele festival on the lawns of Strathmore last year. It could stand some singing now.

One stanza goes like this: “I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps/To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts/and all around me a voice was sounding: This Land was made for you and me.”

Take it, Jack.
[gallery ids="101019,135602,135598" nav="thumbs"]

‘Punch’ Sulzberger of the New York Times: His Influence and the Press

Gary Tischler • October 11, 2012

---

Today, Oct. 1, the Times Picayune of New Orleans ceases publication as a daily newspaper and will instead publish three times during the week: Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. That makes New Orleans the largest metropolitan area in the United States without a daily newspaper.

More than that, though, the news was indicative of the precarious and fast-changing world of newspapers as a thinning force in the media world, as many dailies have gone out of business altogether, and as the Internet becomes an increasing source of news for many Americans, a fact that has also altered the way news are being presented on television.

Today’s news also comes on the heels of the announcement of the death of former New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, a reminder of a time when major newspapers were a significant force in our daily lives in terms of how we viewed and received the news, in terms of the discussion and presentation and reporting of American politics.

Sulzberger was a living symbol of the prime status that the New York Times—the paper of record—held in the publishing world when its reporters ranged the world, and its investigative pull and factual authority was rivaled only by the then rising Washington Post.

Sulzberger—a member of the powerful family which had led the Times since 1896—was the publisher for 30 years, during which the Times garnered 31 Pulitzer Prizes, led the way in publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Washington Post followed suit in that court battle and then found its own source of journalistic glory in its Watergate coverage, followed closely by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

During that time, it meant something to be a reporter in the world—American college graduates brushed off journalism schools all over the country, eager to follow in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein and legendary Times reporters like Johnny Apple or Tom Wicker. Books were written by publishers, reporters and writers that worked for national dailies, and books were written about them. “The Boys on the Boys” is as great a piece of work about election coverage of the 1960s and 1970s as you could hope to find, not to mention Gay Talese’s history of the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power.”

“Punch” became publisher at the age of 37. He not only increased circulation for the paper—when others were declining—but increased its size and its reach, making it more of a modern newspaper with a redesign that had a little something for everyone, something it still does You could make an argument that the Times cultural section, its book review, if not its sports department, were and remain second to none.

The new Times initiatives in popular culture, for instance, were not greeted with joy by some of the more hidebound members of the ruling powers at the paper, including the Sulzberger family itself, but it helped the Times become a powerful force nationally.

Sulzberger, who acquired his nickname of “Punch” by dint of his service in the United States Marines, was 86. He died after a long illness, according to news sources.

His son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., continues the tradition that a family member would always be at the helm of the paper. According to reports, he said that his father “was an absolutely fierce defender of the freedom of the press,” an accolade also deserved by his rival Katharine Graham at the Washington Post.

The Georgetowner’s 58th Anniversary

Gary Tischler • October 5, 2012

---

I wrote my first story—at the request of then publisher David Roffman—for the Georgetowner in 1980, a kind of long (what else is new), discursive piece on Ted Kennedy’s run for the presidency, a train wreck of monumental proportions, right up until the moment at the 1980 Democratic National Convention when the senator redeemed himself with a stirring speech that laid out his liberal principles like the party’s gift to the nation.

That means some 32 years have passed, and here I am, still writing, and here we are, in the middle of a particularly disheartening presidential campaign, where principles are as hard to find as a Republican moderate who admits to being one.

A lot has changed in the landscape and streetscape, the nightlife-scape, the business-scape of Georgetown, which remains what this publication is about. Needless to say, I have changed—ask my doctor or anybody who hasn’t seen me in a while. On occasions like these—anniversaries and the remembrance that goes with them—we tend to forget or note what’s going on in front of us. I don’t spend as much time in Georgetown as I might and like, but the differences are notable from my own observations, and from those that appear in our publication.

We talk a lot in Georgetown who was who which tends to identify the village—it’s a historic district after all, and maybe that fact alone, which makes it very difficult to dramatically change the physical look of homes and buildings and tends to make people talk a little too reverentially about his place. Let’s face it: yes, the young senator Kennedy (John Fitzgerald) lived here for a time, but he had not yet made the connection to Camelot, and the Georgetown University is a lodestone of history and training ground for diplomats and government leaders, and yes, it’s expensive to live here, in terms of real estate and a host of other things. Yes, Georgetown is a special place, it’s famous, historic, grand with some grandees who live or have lived here, but it hardly bears the stamp of elitism, as some people would still have it.

In fact, when I went to one of the CAG sponsored summer concerts at Volta Park this year, I was energized by the buzz there, the squeals of children, the bustle of young families, dogs running around, kids chasing kids, parents keeping a wary eye on them. I noticed the presence of new village leaders in the ranks of the Citizen Association, the realtors and merchants on site, people I did not know personally, but people full of enthusiasm. Gone, it seems are the rancorous old days of pitched cultural and political battles among CAG and ANC factions, and relations between commerce and residential interests seem good, although town and gown, not as much as one might like. All of this will change immediately when the Hoyas once again return to the NCAA basketball finals, as they did in the 1980s with John Thompson and Patrick Ewing.

The past is a great place to live in—the whole city is pockmarked with landmarks and statues and monuments and notes about where Abraham Lincoln walked, George Washington slept or had a beer on his way, where so and so fought duels and everyone remembers the face of Robert Frost at JFK’s inauguration. Every neighborhood in Washington has its share of historic places and moments and Georgetown has more than its share than most. In my neighborhood at Lanier Heights, long-time neighbors tell tales of the FBI running across rooftops chasing members of the SDS in the halcyon 1960s. So it goes.

Georgetown is a great place to live if you like to breathe in history deeply, if you have some means, if you appreciate the unique nature of the place. These days, it’s full of entrepreneurs and technology leaders. Mansions change hands, while history makers remain with us as ghosts or occupants of the rarefied grounds of Oak Hill Cemetery.

Our publication, which has changed hands only twice under three publishers is to me and those of us who, to put into the words of Captain Jean Luc Picard, make it so, like a tall chair, a vantage point where we watch, comment, write about, and document the village and city parades as they go by. The emphasis changes or becomes enlarged, but never diminished—the parade as always has presidents, neighbors, musicians, cultural mavens, grand dames, and plain dames, people who engineered startups with a little help and a lot of imagination. In Georgetown, you can see what small businesses are: they make things like fine clothes, leather jackets, cupcakes and pies, they sell things and they let you sit down for breakfast or dinner in a place they filled with their personalities, which is why we remember them. They are also: publishers and writers, editors, and the people who answer the phone and give you information or call you to twist your arm for advertisements. That would be us, since 1954, and we change, too but remain at your service.

In addition to our biweekly print publication, the Georgetowner has published an email newsletter every Monday and Thursday for almost two years. The newsletter has been a great source for up-to-date news and views on life in Georgetown and beyond. Sign up for the newsletter at www.georgetowner.com.

Songs of the Vilna Ghetto at the Lithuanian Embassy

Gary Tischler • October 4, 2012

---

It was a Saturday night in Washington D.C., urban living night and day, street festivals, parades, the Nationals, the Redskins, concerts and plays and symphonies and singers, and restaurants galore, the weather being fallish, all sorts of things to do everywhere.

Some things go unnoticed, too, unheralded. At the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, a group of people had gathered Sept. 22 to listen, to remember and honor another place, another time, in song and music in commemoration of the Lithuanian Holocaust Memorial Day.

At the start of the Jewish Days of Atonement, before their eyes, another city, a ghetto from a harrowing time of tragedy and loss, rose up, demanding that attention must be paid, that some things can never be forgotten and that the dead can be honored even now, when memories start to fade.

That was the lingering impression during the course of an evening when baritone Jerome Barry, the founder and director of the Embassy Series in Washington, accompanied by pianist Edvinas Minkstimas, with clear and deep emotion, and strong-voiced and passionate, gave voice to the long-ago Jewish residents of the Vilna Ghetto, with their music, their songs, their memories, almost all of them rounded up, oppressed, systematically shot and eventually transported to the death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Ambassador of Lithuania to the United States Zygimantas Pavilionis noted that in remembering the Liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, both the victims of this tragedy of the Holocaust and the whole nation of Lithuania were profoundly affected. “The pain of the Holocaust is also the pain of Lithuania because we lost Lithuanian Jews with whom we had lived together for centuries and suffered together the occupiers of our land,” Pavilionis said.

Barry sang a powerful array of songs, some of them written during the time of the ghetto by the persons who lived and died there and others by survivors as well as songs and music that are intrinsic parts of Jewish cultural and spiritual life. Taken together, the songs re-created what was the emotional, the fear-filled, the still life-filled environment of the ghetto, in which eventually families disappeared daily, in which hundreds of individuals were rounded up regularly and shot, in which people took solace in song and music.

Barry, in moving from song to song, beginning with “Geto” which was written in the Vilna Ghetto by Kasriel Broyde, who continued to direct theatre revues and concerts, to a Jewish prayer expressing longing for the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, brought different skills and feelings to bear on each song. The tone gave us the beating hearts and the pain of the Vilna Jews, suffering under a cloud of daily losses and doom.

For Barry, it seemed that the songs—let’s say the song by the poet Abraham Sutskever, or a song by a young boy who won a composition competition in the ghetto, and the impassioned “Partizaner Lid,” which became an anthem for the underground resistance movement—inspired the best that he had to offer, with all of his gifts on display. He managed to make what was clearly personal for him, personal for everyone there, thus raising an occasion that in the hectic scheme of urban activity to the level of an important occasion both intimate and universal. The songs made you confront the lives of those that perished in terrible times.

By his performance, Barry enriched the material and gave the music the level of emotional authenticity and in the end, punctuated an evening that was more than just another Saturday night.

(Nearly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews died during the Holocaust.)

Pat McGee at Strathmore, Sept. 28: a Homecoming of Sorts

Gary Tischler • October 1, 2012

---

The Washington Post described Pat McGee this way: “looks like Brad Pitt, sings like James Taylor, sweats and struts like Springsteen. You can’t deny McGee’s charisma.”

Well, I’m gonna have to wait and see on that. But I did talk to McGee, a homegrown, in-50-different-ways guy, on the phone. He sounded to me like a guy you could sit with at a diner here, or where he lives in Rhode Island, or where he came from—Alexandria—or somewhere on the road, where he is often, performing as the Pat McGee Band with its brand of semi-country-rock-hard-driving-sound rock.

McGee will be here performing Friday, Sept. 28 (and opening the 2012 season) at the Music Center at Strathmore, something he’s been looking forwards to for a long while. (The Pat McGee Band concert will be preceded by a first-time ever tailgate party at 5:30 p.m. The concert is at 8 p.m.)

“Oh, man, yeah, I’ve been wanting to play here, because you hear about the acoustics here all the time,” McGee said. “Plus, it’s sort of a homecoming, like every time I play in the area, we play at Wolf Trap and the Barns and I’m from Alexandria. So, I think people are pretty familiar with us.”

Still, listening to McGee, who is 39 now, you hear a man with some life experience under his belt, a thoughtful guy who’s watched how the music business itself, and the world of performing has changed. “Oh sure, we all thought about being rock stars, you know playing the music the road, lots of fans,” he said. “And we’ve done that to some extent. But things change, you grow up a little. Plus, just the way music is sold and delivered—on the Internet, iTunes and on phones, downloading and everything, makes everything different. You have to keep up with that.”

McGee formed the band in the 1990s, and got it going good when the band was signed by Warner Brothers, from which emerged the album, “Shine,” in 2000 with such hit singles as “Rebecca” and “Runaway.” Another album, “Save Me,” followed in 2004 . There have been nine albums altogether, including the latest, “No Wrong Way to Make It Right,” a bitter-sweet album full of songs about youthful memories, relationships, the future, and full of guitar-driven rhythms.

There’s still a lot of youth in his songs and voice—and in photos and videos, he can play the part of a rocker, but a rocker who knows whereof he sings. He thinks about music—all kinds of music, a lot. To McGee, things have been about change, about moving forward, and still playing the music strong

“To me, performance is the most important part of music. It’s what I think we should respect the most,” he says. “I love performing on the road with other musicians.”

In that case, the Strathmore gig should be a hoot—he’s brought together a lot of people for the ride. “This is going to be like a reunion show, you know,” he said. There’ll be current and former Pat McGee Band members like John Small, Michael Ghegan, Patrick McAloon and Ira Gitlin. And there’s Eddie Hartness, the lead singer of Eddie from Ohio, and Nate Brown from Everything and John “Red” Redling from New Potato Caboose. He’s also invited former high school student musicians from his alma mater Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, Va.

That’s right. McGee is a local boy in more ways than one.

Not only is he an O’Connell grad, an Alexandria native, he started out like a lot of would-be rockers, with a band playing in the Richmond area, but later, also up here in Georgetown. “We played in a place called Dylan’s Café . . . [near] where Café Milano is, in that courtyard. And then we played the Bayou. And, man, when we did that regularly, that’s when I knew we could make it.”

“No Way to Make It Right” is kind of a reunion effort, too, with old music comrades like Jason Mraz, Emerson Hart, Stephen Kellogg, Keaton Simons and Ryan Newell of Sister Hazel, and working with producer Doug Derryberry who produced the group’s first album. Plus the sound is both fresh and familiar. It’s the sound of folk instruments like acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro, fiddle and bouzouki.

He thinks he’s mellowed, gotten a better bead on the future. He’s writing more and more, and the writing is mature. It has something to say and reacts to the things that happen in life—from “riding in my grandma’s Cadillac when I was a kid” to a song called “Elegy for Amy,” which he wrote early on his career. “See, when we were playing in clubs and bars, there’d always be this group of girls sitting up front, and then I went away for a while and when we came back, I noticed that this one girl named Amy, always a fan, always nice and enthusiastic, wasn’t with them. They told me she had died of a really fast-acting cancer. So, I wrote this song.” Then, there’s the powerful “Come Back Home,” written in 2009 and dedicated to the troops serving in the Middle East.” It was also dedicated to his drummer Christ Williams who died of a heart attack. Williams’s younger brother Blake was killed in Iraq.

McGee now lives in Barrington, R.I., a few blocks from his ex-wife with whom he shares custody of their three daughters, Juliet, 6, Elizabeth, 8, and Anna, 10. Both McGee and his ex have moved on to new marriages.

“I guess I’ve grown up some, being a parent and things that happen will do that,” he said. “I want to do more writing, writing country songs and I’ve been going back and forth to Nashville, trying to make that happen.”

But this Friday, he’s here. It will be, for the Pat McGee Band, like old times, from the beginning, the journey until now.

Fall Whisks Its Frisky Optimism, Despite Distractions

Gary Tischler • September 27, 2012

---

Fall, brisk, as normal as average but a little bit better, came to town, getting weather folks to shut up about storm fronts and severe weather warnings. The weather was acting like autumn weather does, full of change, a frisky optimism. That’s what it felt like in Washington: it was a fall signal without the dying leaves doing their much-heralded twirls to the ground. It was more like a beginning or, at least, a respite.

Because in Washington in the Year of Our Great Divide, 2012, it remains an election year marching irresolutely toward a resolution in November, a spell of good weather like this seemed over a weekend like a return to normalcy where we bless the average, everyday offerings of urban living. After all, there was baseball, the Nationals, and a star quarterback on the Washington Redskins who seemed to be fulfilling his promise right before our eyes.

And, as one local writer somewhat irreligiously put it to us, a panda cub had been born onto us. This event which had occurred the previous weekend put a certain buoyancy in the air, because we vividly remembered the female panda’s last cub, the remarkable Tai Shan who had left us for a preserve in China not that long ago, and who was still tremendously missed. With the announcement of the unexpected birth, instant memories of Tai Shan and his star power, and the thousands of stuffed panda toys that were sold upon his arrival came to mind. The newcomer, who appeared to be healthy, had no name yet, per Chinese tradition. Everyone referred to him as butter stick, which was about the size and description that fit the tiny cub, often referred to, rarely seen.

All this non-political news made the fall weekend special, the kind where you could start your Friday sitting at a Starbucks, or your local café, drink latte or regular, and watch the family of man drive by, run by and bike by, more often than not. You took a taste of normal into your life—the yard sale signs, the sales at Safeway—not so much at Whole Foods. On the other hand, it was between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So, Jewish food with its potato latkes, dumplings and soups appeared in the delis to our delight.

In the neighborhoods of our cities, there was no lacking for things to do: in Dupont Circle, they held a street fair on 17th Street which meant traffic troubles but brought out man and beast and fried chicken smells and local artisans and artists, a pause in the day of running from dry cleaner, to hardware store to grocery store. The new performance arts season with concerts, and plays and operas and dancing in abundance. Our park, by Adams Mill Road, along with the dog park, the soccer field and the basketball courts were busy.

Elsewhere, you could go to the National Mall and get your fill of books and writers, authors and bloggers and poets in the willing flesh for the annual National Book Festival. You could come to city’s annual Latino festival, with a festive parade of nations which opened your eyes wide to the diversity of the Hispanic world. This city, in weather like this, revealed itself in the way a body does to singer John Mayer — as a wonderland.

On Sunday, we bought sweet nothings at Heller’s Bakery and exercised our walking feet all over Mount Pleasant. I spent some time on the phone later with my son, who lives in Las Vegas, and we talked about things and memories we hadn’t talked of in some time, for no reason except that it seemed right. I think the weather made you feel safe to do things like that. And yet, sunlight, and a breezy wind which might incline you to dance or sing can be deceiving.

If you turned on your television, computer or whatever screen which feeds you like a succubus with information, those uninvited guests in your living room, your house or your phone were never far away. I mean, of course, those fine ladies and gentlemen running for elected office, who approved those ads not done by SuperPACs or other interests groups. I especially mean Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama, who drop by with the regularly of an uncle looking for a free meal. On NBC News’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, something of a food fight threatened to break out among the round table participants as Republican strategist Bay Buchanan got into an argument with Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough, a conservative himself.

Later in the evening, CBS News’s “60 Minutes” had lengthy interviews with Romney and Obama (separately), which were revealing for not really revealing anything. Have to wait for the debates.

By then, the balloon of optimism in the air had burst. The Redskins, on a track to give up, oh, I don’t know, one thousand points this year, gave up another 30-plus and lost again to Cincinnati 38-31, and the Nationals, although still with a magic number of six, and owning a clinched playoff sport, managed to lose two of three to Milwaukee.

And the panda cub died. I was following scores on the net when I saw it, short and terse: “Panda Cub at the National Zoo Dies.”

“Oh, no,” I yelled aloud, and I’m sure it was part of a collective sigh. No one knows exactly what happened. Today, it was learned that the cub had a liver problem. The mother behaved perfectly as she is wont to do as a mother. The cub with no name was gone. “It was devastating,” the director of the National Zoo said.

It was the week of anticipation, free and clear, that made this news so hard to bear. It’s not that we knew the little cub intimately or had even had a glimpse of him. We knew it already. He would have been the second coming of Tai Shan, the panda rock star spreading magnetism and stardust around like he had done with such ease.

It’s hard because pandas are endangered, because the mother had a number of failed pregnancies and because Pandas have difficulty breeding and reproducing. It’s hard because they are also, no other word for it, enchanting. We all remember the triumphant Tai Shan making his debut in front of a hardened press corps at the National Zoo, a group of journalists who were turned into instant blubber. He was a performer whether trying to navigate a tree branch in front of a crowd or diving into his birthday cake. He was a boost, a gift, a boon for the National Zoo in monetary ways, but also a boost for all of us in this city, and everyone who visited the city. The last time I saw him, he was clambering up a hill, his bottom fur sporting pink frosting after he sat in his birthday cake.

That’s what was dancing before our eyes when the announcement of the new cub came. And that’s what disappeared like a stone when the news of his passing came.

Fall, though remained, the air still bright as the next Sunday, the next good news. In my front yard, a black squirrel who lived among the three houses around us, suddenly turned around, looked at me and stood up. Not once, but three times. I mention this because it was a rare thing. Squirrels in this neighborhood run from people unlike the squirrels on Capitol Hill, who have picked up the habit of begging for nuts and treats the way the politicians they live among troll for votes.

At a time like this, you take comfort in what presents itself, however modest.

Mayor’s Arts Awards for Williams, Stevens, Deal and Others

Gary Tischler • September 24, 2012

---

Everybody’s always giving awards. No big deal.

In the case of the 27th Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards Ceremonies at the historic Lincoln Theatre—a half-a-breath away from Ben’s Chili Bowl and its muraled side walls—that’s not true. They are and were a big deal—the breadth and depth of the Washington community’s emerging cultural world were on display and showered with accolades. In fact, the Mayor’s Arts Award is the highest honor in the arts conferred by the District of Columbia.

It’s always easy to point out the winners, the big names represented in lifetime achievement awards, but there’s something larger at work here. Elected officials and the people who run institutions, including the D.C. Commission on the Arts, headed by Judith Terra, all referred to the arts, and how important the arts were to the community, and the state goal of mayors, city councils, commissions, and boards of trustees to reach out and make Washington, D.C., a world-class city in terms of its culture and the arts.

You can get a sense of that movement toward achieving the goal by the variety of groups and individuals present as nominees, participants, achievers and honorees—plus the oft-repeated fact that the arts, like tourists, generate several billion dollars in revenue for the city and make the non-profits a profit-generating engine. Rather than being dissed and first on the list of cuts in a budget, the arts should be perceived as bottom-line enhancing.

An avid hand dance aficionado, Mayor Vincent Gray, former Mayor Anthony Williams and Councilman Jack Evans explained the economic advantages fueled by the arts and how they helped forge a cultural identity for this city that was beginning to rival the likes of New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Happy to be out of office after two successful terms by all appearances, Mayor Williams was one of the city’s great boosters and supporters in the arts. Williams received a special award for “Visionary Leadership.”

Washington is special in its arts identity in the sense that it doesn’t really have such a thing but rather offers a multi-faceted and rich face to the world. You could see it, for instance, in the variety of strong entrants in the Excellence in Artistic Discipline category, in which you had the growing and world-recognized D.C. Jazz Festival, headed by Charlie Fishman; the Embassy Series, Jerome Barry’s unique endeavor in cultural bridge building through music; Step Afrika!, the homegrown dance group that engages the bodies, minds and creativity of young people; The Phillips Collection, the city’s unique collection sparked by the interests and passions of Duncan Phillips and the Thomas Circles Singer. Here is where home-grown and international jazz meets international classical music in embassies, the choral arts, youth emerging in dance and impressionist and modern art on an inviting and original stage. Step Afrika! earned a Mayor’s Award.

Awardee Melvin Deal of African Heritage Dancers and Drummers has instructed and inspired young people in Ward 7 and 8 in African dance and music for more than 30 years and has thus become an example to the community at large, including Step Afrika! and other institutions.

Founder of the American Film Institute, George Stevens, Jr., also founded and produces the Kennedy Center Honors and is the son of the famed Oscar-winning film director George (“Shane,” “A Place in the Sun”) Stevens. A noted director and playwright himself, Stevens was a pioneering presence for the arts in many ways for the Washington community. Instead of settling in New York or Los Angeles, he decided to make his life in Georgetown and Washington and, by his presence, helped pioneer and form the institutions and atmosphere of a world-class cultural center.

Stevens and Deal received lifetime achievement awards.

Other awards included a special award for attorney Paul Jorgensen and awards for Outstanding Contribution to Arts Education (Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop); Outstanding Emerging Artists (the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra); Excellence in Service to the Arts (Atlas Performing Arts Center); Innovation in the Arts (Art Enables). The Mayor’s Arts Award for teaching went to Kenneth Dickerson, Roosevelt Senior High School, performing arts; Koye Oyediji, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, language arts and Jennifer Sonkin, Caesar Chavez Public Charter School, visual arts.

The awards were hosted by WUSA’s J.C. Hayward, herself something of a Washington institution.

D.C. Arts Preview: Fall 2012

Gary Tischler • September 21, 2012

---

Fall—inevitably, surprisingly—is coming. Do you want to know how we can tell?

No, it is not all the training camp stories about the Redskins, tres banality. It’s not all the back-to-school commercials. It’s fall preview time. As in, it’s August we’ve got to put together a fall preview issue (or two).

It’s that time of year when the media which cover such things notice that they’ve run out of comic book movies and that “The Addams Family” has left town. It’s almost September, which must mean that fall is coming, which must mean that its fall arts—performance, visual, and many other categories—preview time.

So, to that end, this is the Georgetowner fall preview issue—the first of two—which, in addition to the visual side of the arts, concerns itself with Washington area theater.

Back in the day, theaters and performing arts venues used to do what everybody else did: they closed pretty much for the whole month of August which meant the end of summer and that fall was coming. People went to the beach, or to the Hamptons or on an educational trip to the Galapagos Islands. They packed their white navy jackets and unfiltered Gitanes and went away.

Nowadays, the performance arts and theater seasons do not fold themselves into the four seasons as neatly. Nowadays, it’s basically one long season with not much let-up. We noticed this trend, especially this year. Companies are starting their seasons earlier and earlier so that you can’t just leave town for fear of missing something. And with theater, there is no premium channel to catch up.
We’re giving you a peek on the theater head-starts. Signature Theater has already started its season with a production of “The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas,” a terrific musical that mixes sex with politics and big boots and hats, a revival of a musical that refuses to date. In addition, we’ll take a closer look at what’s becoming a godsend for Washington theatergoers and bard acolytes, the annual Shakespeare Free For All, which this year gives us a production of the ironically titled “All’s Well That Ends Well,” in which a smart, beautiful young girl is smitten with a prince who’s blind to her charms because she’s not to the manor born, among other sundry things. It’s at the Harman Theater until Sept. 2. Tickets? They’re free.

Last, but not least, we have among us the presence of two larger-than-life, by-God big personality and big gift women—the one, being the brimming with magnetism and unforgettable voice actress Kathleen Turner, and the other, being the brimming with sharp, pointed and passionate opinion and humor political columnist Molly Ivins. On stage at Arena, they are one and the same in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” a play by Margaret Engel, in which Turner manages the not inconsiderable feat of bringing Ivy, who died of cancer several years ago, back to life. “Patriot” runs through Oct. 28.

We had occasion to talk with Turner on the phone and to witness her in action at a special, full-house event at the Newseum that gave us an opportunity to give you both a preview and a flashback.
In addition, we’ve selected as many theaters—and there are many theaters here—and previewed their season-openers which occur late this month, through September.

Look carefully at this list and see what you like, choose and go. Go to all of them, if you can. Everything you will see, if you let it, will stay in your mind forever, because really, that’s the way you remember an evening or afternoon at the theater. There is no adequate video, no rerun, no recreation, and if you go back, well, it will not be the same. That’s the special part of plays in performance, it’s why they make you shut off your smart phones, and open up your heart and mind. No need to multi-task. Let the words wash over you like fresh, clean water.

Plays, it should be noted over and over again, are not movies. If you see a movie over again, it will be the same thing: blue people in “Avatar,” people who get the blues in a Woody Allen movie, the sharks in the “Deep Blue Sea.”

Looking at the plays that are being performed, we can say that we’ve seen “Whorehouse” at least once on stage with Ann Margaret in the role of a madam, and the movie version featuring—Lord, have mercy—Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. We know for darn sure that the Signature version won’t be anything like either. We’ve seen “All’s Well That Ends Well” a number of times and as happens so often with Shakespeare, each time is different, something emerges that was lost before, and someone, a Marsha Mason here, a Philip Goodwin there, brings out a different queen, a different Parolles than I saw in Teresa Wright or Floyd King.

Looking forward to things on that list, we know someone and some thing some word or whisper will surprise you, even in a familiar way. Perhaps they’ll do the Texas two-steps in three steps. Or one of playwright Annie Walker’s (she has two plays upcoming in town) characters will move in an unexpected way. Look: there’ll be a Hamlet from the Globe, wrestlers, Russians, a strangely silent Dr. Hyde, Scots in Iraq, a toilet seat made of gold, World War II, modern super heroes, a French balladeer. On and on it goes.

These are our players, and our plays, and directors and theaters and the hours we will spend with them. Get out and enjoy.

Kennedy Center—2012 Page to Stage Festival, Sept. 1-3. It’s the 11th annual such festival, in which theater artists show off their upcoming wares in various stages of development. It’s a three-day event of free readings, open rehearsals of plays and musicals developed by local, regional and national playwrights, librettists, and composers.

War Horse, Oct. 23 to Nov. 11, in the Opera House. The Broadway play about a boy and his horse and World War 1, which won the Tony Award for best play and features stirring, magical life-size puppets.

The Druid Theatre Company—Oct. 17 to 20, “Plays By Tom Murphy.” One of the most admired and critically acclaimed Irish theatre companies return with “Conversations on a Homecoming,” “A Whistle in the Dark” and “Famine” by Tom Murphy, one of today’s best playwrights.

Round House Theatre Bethesda—4545 East West Highway. Season opener: “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” Sept. 5-30. A new play by Rajiv Joseph, in what is a growing literature of our Middle Eastern wars (see “Black Watch”). It is directed by Jeremy Skidmore and involves “the intertwined lives of a quick-witted tiger, two homesick U.S. marines and a troubled Iraqi gardener as they roam the streets of war-torn Baghdad in search of meaning, redemption and a toilet seat made of gold. A Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Shakespeare Theatre Company—Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F St., NW. “Black Watch,” Sept. 19 to Oct. 7. A special event, this riveting, blood-pounding, energetically choreographed play about a group of restless, tough members of an elite Scottish unit in Iraq sold out its run at Harman last year and remains a must-see.

At the Lansburgh Theatre—450 7th St., NW. The Shakespeare Theatre Company begins its season with “The Government Inspector,” a satiric comedy by Nikolai Gogol, the first Russian play to be a part of an STC season, directed by Michael Kahn, with an all-star cast of Washington actors, including Floyd King, Nancy Robinette, David Sabin and Sarah Marshall. Sept. 13 to Oct. 28.

Forum Theatre—Roundhouse Silver Spring, 8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, Md. Season opener: “Holly Down In Heaven” by Kara Lee Corthron, a story about a 15-year-old born again Christian who becomes pregnant and banishes herself to her basement. Sept. 27 to Oct. 20.

Olney Theatre Center—2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, Olney, Md. “Over the Tavern” by Tom Dudzick, directed by John Going. The line: “Sometimes, a boy just wants to have a little fun.” Sept. 26 to Oct. 21.

Theater Alliance—H Street Playhouse, 1635 H St., NE—opener: “Reals,” a hip, tough new play about superhero wannabes in a world premiere by Gwydion Suilebhan, directed by Shirley Serotsky, Aug. 27 to Sept. 16. (Watch also for Christmas co-production with Hub Theatre “Wonderful Life” and Alliance’s own “Black Nativity.”)

Spooky Action Theater—1810 16th St., NW. Season opener: “Reckless” by noted playwright Craig Lucas involving Christmas Eve, “a cheery suburban mom thrust into a a looking glass journey to a place where it is always Christmas Eve.” Oct. 4 to 28.

Woolly Mammoth—641 D St., NW. “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” by Krisoffer Diaz, directed by John Vreek, kicks off Woolly’s Season 33, “My Roots, My Revolution.” Diaz’s play explores the volatile, testosterone world of professional wrestling with a fall guy named Macedonio “Mace” Guerra and the charismatic champ Chad Deity. Sept. 3 to 30.

Keegan Theatre—1742 Church St., NW. “Osage County” through Sept. 2. Traci Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and quite savage family saga. Beginning Sept. 21: “A Couple of Blaguards,” the McCourt (Frank and Malachy) brothers’ entry into wonderful Irish blarney and remembering.

Metro Stage—1201 North Royal St., Alexandria, Va. “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” directed by Serge Seiden, Aug. 30 to Oct. 21. The area’s liveliest cabaret and musical stage company does the Frenchman who embodied the spirit of cabaret.

Synetic Theatre at Crystal City, 1800 S. Bell St., Arlington, Va. Opener: “Jekyll and Hyde,” Sept. 20 to Oct. 21. The gifted, mostly silent movement theater group, headed by Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, takes on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic horror story of conflicted identity in its own inimitable fashion. Look also for Jules Verne’s “A Trip to the Moon” on Dec. 6.

Signature Theatre—4200 Campbell Avenue, Arlington, Va. “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” is a tried and true musical about social shenanigans and political bull in a Texas town where politics and sex get together in a little house but not on the prairie. Directed with new verve by Eric Schaeffer, based on a true story, a Broadway hit musical and a movie, it runs through Oct. 7. “Dying City,” a contemporary new drama about Americans and Iraq, by Christopher Shinn; Oct. 2 to Nov. 25.

Theater J—at the Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St., NW. Opener: “Body Awareness” by the rising young playwright Annie Baker, whose “Circle Mirror Transformation” was a big hit at the Studio Theater two seasons ago. It is part of Theater J’s “Beginnings, Belonging, Becoming and Breaking Through” season and is directed by Eleanor Holdridge; Aug. 25 to Sept. 23. Arriving on Nov. 8 is “Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie.”

Ford’s Theatre—514 10th St., NW. Season opener, “Fly” by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan and directed by Ricardo Kahn, is the story of four African American officers and fighter pilots in World War II, based on the experience of the famed Tuskeege Airmen; Sept. 21 to Oct. 21. The season also includes the traditional “A Christmas Carol,” “Our Town” and a co-production with Signature Theater, “Hello Dolly.”

Folger Theatre—in the Folger Elizabethan Theatre at 201 East Capitol St., SE Its opener is direct from London and a stripped down, mean and lean version of “Hamlet” from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, directed by Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Buckhurst; Sept. 8 to 22.

The Studio Theatre—1501 14th St., NW. Opener: “Invisible Man” (begins Sept. 5), adapted by Oren Jacoby, based on the landmark, lyrical novel of identity in America by the great African American novelist Ralph Ellison (“Juneteenth”), co-produced with the Huntington Theatre Company. An upcoming highlight: “The Aliens” by Annie Baker (See “Body Awareness” at Theater J), Nov. 14.

Arena Stage—1101 6th St., SW. “One Night With Janis Joplin”, written and directed by Randy Johnson, starring Mary Bridget Davies; Sept. 28 to Nov. 4. Upcomer to watch: “My Fair Lady,” directed by artistic director Molly Smith; Nov. 2.

Gala Hispanic—3333 14th St., NW—“In Spite of Love” from Spain’s Golden Age, a romantic comedy about reluctant lovers by Agustin Moreto, directed by Hugo Medrano; Sept. 13 to Oct. 7.

Teatro de la Luna—Gunston Arts Center, 2700 South Lang Street, Arlington, Va.—The 15th International Festival of Hispanic Theater, the best of the Americas and Spain; Oct. 9 to Nov. 17.

CHILDREN’S THEATER

Adventure Theater—7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo, Md.—“If You Give a Moose a Muffin,” based on the popular series of books by Laura Numeroff, starring Michael Russotto; through Sept. 2. Beginning Sept. 21, “Big”, the much-anticipated Theater for Young People-Adventure Theater musical production of the popular Tom Hanks comedy, with a book by John Weidman, music by David Shire and lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr., and directed by artistic director Michael Bobbitt; through Oct. 28.

Imagination Stage, 4908 Auburn Avenue, Bethesda, Md. “P. Nokio: A Hip-Hop Musical” marks the return of a hugely popular musical, written by hip-hop theatre artist and playwright Psalmayene 24, a show that updates the Pinocchio story with a brand new and flamboyant beat; Sept. 29 to Oct. 18. It was a world premiere at Imagination Stage and was recommended by the Helen Hayes Award. Upcoming on Nov. 14: “Seussical.”

[gallery ids="100951,130413,130405,130397,130432,130440,130388,130447,130454,130421" nav="thumbs"]