Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

On any given Sunday, there’s always some foot traffic on Massachusetts Avenue along Embassy Row, especially if the weather is ideal and spring-sunny as it was on May 7.

But hey, what was this: crowds pouring into the British Embassy and coming out with tote bags emblazoned with the flag of England? What were the lines of people snaking around the block, making their way to the Embassy of Greece, the Embassy of Ireland, or the Latvian Embassy? And just what was going on at the Embassy of Finland?

It was the beginning of the fourth annual Passport DC celebration, an ever-increasingly popular city-wide event produced by Cultural Tourism DC, with the participation of over 60 embassies, which fling open their doors to the general public in a wildly successful annual event that celebrates the international presence of world embassies in our city.

Looking at the crowds, you could well agree with Cultural Tourism DC Director Linda Harper, who said: “Passport DC is a chance to honor and explore the many cultures that are represented in Washington, DC. There is no better place to have this grand celebration…a truly global city.”

This all began four years ago when member embassies representing the European Union decided, without out much elaborate planning, to hold open houses for most of their embassies, allowing tourists and residents to come in and visit, meet embassy officials, and share in the cultural offerings and history of the respective countries. Some 70,000 people showed up.

The European Union folks knew they were on to something and joined up with Cultural Tourism DC to produce what is now a month-long celebration of international culture and conviviality. Last year, around 160,000 people participated in the events that make up Passport DC.

Round one was another edition spearheaded by the European Unions called Shortcut to Europe, and the British effort looked to be the splashiest affair, like a sweet hangover from the recent nuptials of Prince William and his Katherine. You could tour the English gardens, which included an impressive, essence-of-horse-nobility sculpture of a horse reputed to be a famous British racehorse whose kidnapping was never solved.

British soldiers, real ones and dressed up ones were there. There was whiskey tasting, music and a bit of English pudding, and it was all very English—proving once again that we may have rebelled against the king to form a more perfect union, but we still love our cousins across the pond.

The embassies were far flung: Ireland, the Brits, Iceland, Latvia, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Finland (all along Mass Ave.), and the Embassy of Austria and Slovakia at International Square, France and Germany on MacArthur Boulevard, and the list goes on. From the looks of it, the celebration will probably exceed last year’s crowds, the weather gods permitting.

This weekend, it’s the All Around the World Embassy Tour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. all over the city, featuring 35 embassies from six continents. Needless to say, the embassies won’t just be from all over the world, but will be located all over the city. They included the Bahamas—a very popular destination last year where the annual festivities of Juckanoo will play a key part; Australia where you can hear the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal musical instrument, among other activities; Bolivia, which is now called the Plurinational State of Bolivia; Ghana, with a splendid display of its unique arts and crafts; and the Republic of Iraq, a free democracy. In fact, you can blaze a trail through the countries most affected by recent upheavals from Egypt to Bahrain. History in this city is alive and moving full steam ahead.

There will be shuttles available and special bus stops to the various embassies and residences which are scattered throughout the city

Other upcoming events in May include the National Asian Heritage Festival and the Fiesta Asia Street Fair, May 21 at Pennsylvania Avenue between 3rd and 6th Streets, which also celebrates Asian Pacific Heritage Month. Live music, dancing, Pan-Asian Cuisine

May 21 will also feature the annual Meridian International Children’s Festival, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

There will also be special events on a daily basis at embassies, museums, and international cultural centers like the Goethe Institute and the Mexican Cultural Center, including jazz concerts, Kids World Cinema, Embassy Series concerts, the Eurovision Song Contest, workshop and classical music, film and so on.

For a complete list of all the events, times, schedules and locations for Passport DC, go to the Passport DC section of the Cultural Tourism website at www.culturaltourismdc.org

Gary Tischler •

When I was a kid I wanted to run away with the circus.

I would meet the boss clown, I would walk with the ringmaster, be buddies with the guy who trains the big cats, and I would date the girl who gets shot out of a cannon.

I became a journalist instead. Same thing, except for the cannon girl, the big cat guy, the ringmaster, and the boss clown, although I may have spent some time with a contortionist once.

These days, at my age, it’s no good trying to run away with the circus. And “walking away with the circus” doesn’t have that zip thing going for it.

But yesterday I saw pachyderms marching down Washington streets.

And yesterday I talked with the ringmaster and met the boss clown.

They tell me that ladies are no longer shot out of cannons.

Two out of three isn’t bad.

The ringmaster is Jonathan Lee Iverson, and the boss clown is Sandor Eke, and they’re at the head of the pack when the circus come to town. That would be the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey’s 2011 show, “Barnum’s FUNundrum!” celebrating the life and legacy of the founder, P.T. Barnum. The circus is camped at the Verizon Center through March 27, then moves to Baltimore and Fairfax, Virginia.

As always, it’s the greatest show on earth, sparkling like a firecracker with hyperbole: come see 230 performers from six continents, watch the 100,000 pounds of elephants perform, see the cowboys, the pirates, the mermaids, the tigers, the Flying Caceres with their quadruple somersault on the flying trapeze. Watch the Puyan Troupe from China do their bouncy stuff on a two-tiered trampoline, and, there’s the body benders and the Mighty Meetal, the strongest man in the world. And don’t forget Duo Fusion, the married couple of hand balancers, in which the wife does the heavy lifting. Just like in real life.

The elephants and clowns and ponies and performers marched through parts of Washington yesterday for an annual parade that signals the arrival of the circus in town and delights hundreds of children and tourist along the road.

Leading the way was Iverson, decked out in red-white-and-blue and top hat—the man who gets to say the iconic words at the start of each show: “Welcome Children of All Ages to the Greatest Show on Earth.”

Iverson, who started out wanting to be an opera singer but sort of ran away with the circus instead, holds some firsts for the circus: he’s the first African American ringmaster and the youngest ever to hold that high-stepping, master–of-charisma, beguiling cheerleader of all cheerleader jobs.

A New Yorker now in his thirties, he’s performed (at age 11) with the Boys Choir of Harlem and got a degree in voice from Hartford’s Hart School. Shortly after graduating, he was offered a job with the circus.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I know I saw myself as a singer, but to be able to perform in the circus in that kind of role, well, who’s going to say no to something like that.” Not Iverson, that’s for sure. “They kidnapped me,” he quipped.

Watch him work the crowd, picking up little kids, posing with moms, his voice clear over the noises of the downtown city. For a while he left to broaden his horizons, performing off-Broadway and in productions of “The Magic Flute” and “Showboat,” sang with the USO and did some freelance writing as J. Frederick Baptiste.

But now he’s back, this time hitting the rails with family—wife Priscilla and children Matthew Felipe and Lila Simone—in tow.

He’s got the charisma of a ringmaster, a compelling stance and lively face. We asked him if he did anything special to create a persona for the ringmaster. “Are you kidding?” he said. “Look at me—In this outfit, folks are going to pay attention to you.”

That’s true, but he fills the outfit with his persona, as if born to the circus. “You look pretty,” a woman tells him. “I do, don’t I?” he says and preens. Welcome to the circus in Washington. “Great to be in this city,” he says. “I’m sort of like Henry Kissinger with a personality.”

Sandor Eke, on the other hand, looks a little like a crash dummy.

That’s his outfit, his persona, a puff of tomahawk hair on his head, spots of color, loose, colorful, dummy clothing and big, sometimes sad eyes. “I’m a white clown,” he says, explaining clown etiquette. “Like a black clown would be the guy that plays tricks on the white clown.”

But he’s also the circus boss clown.

“Makes me the guy who takes care of the other guys,” he says. “You know, who bunks with whom, dressing rooms, schedules, food, problems, the guy who talks to management on behalf of the other clowns…You wouldn’t believe how important dressing rooms are.”

Eke who is 35, lives in Budapest on the Danube River in Hungary, but doesn’t get to go home much. His parents, both circus folks, live there. “With this schedule, it’s a little crazy. My father was a tentmaker, my mother was a ringmaster.”

Clowns and circuses are time-honored professions and institutions in Europe. It’s where the best of them came from, and it’s why most circuses have an international flavor to them. Eke attended the Hungarian State Circus School—can you imagine that in an American state budget?—and started with a Swedish circus, but eventually made his way to the Ringling Brothers as part of a Hungarian teeterboard act

“Everything that circus performers do is difficult and takes so much practice,” he said. “But it is not very useful on the outside. Imagine explaining your job resume: I was teeterboarder.

“I love this life. I am an acrobat, a clown, I am totally a circus person,” he said. “I would not do anything else. My life is here. My friends are here. They are my best friends, people you can call in the middle of the night.

“I can say I have 50 real friends in the circus. They are not on Facebook.”

Asked about his future plans, he quipped “I have no future.”

“Actually, what I want to do is teach, teach other young people how to be clowns,” he said. “That is my hope, my future.”

Gary Tischler •

Vincent Gray strode toward the microphone in front of the Washington Court Hotel Wednesday with a confident spring in his step, looking fresh and energetic.

“My God, he looks rested,” said one of the dozens of reporters, photographers, and television crewmembers who had gathered here around noon.

Amazingly, Gray looked, talked and acted sharp, like a man with eight hours of sleep under his belt. Which probably wasn’t so. He was giving his first press conference as the winner of the District of Columbia’s Democratic Primary over incumbent Adrian Fenty, getting a surprisingly solid six-point victory with 53% of the vote to Fenty’s 47%. The last count had Gray with 59,285 votes and Fenty with 50,850 votes.

Given that only four years ago Fenty swept every precinct and every ward en route to a stunning win over City Council Chairperson Linda Cropp, becoming the city’s youngest mayor in the short history of home rule, Gray’s victory, which wasn’t really nailed down until the wee hours of the morning, was an astounding and probably historic turn-around.

It was also a clear sign that Gray had been correct early in his campaign when he said that the city was never more divided. “I am humbled by the victory we won,” Gray said. “And I am thankful for all the people across the city that made this possible with their votes. But I realize that there were also many people who did not vote for me, and I want to reach out to them. I want to unite this city once again.

The victory was achieved – it’s safe to say – along racial and economic lines, with many black voters favoring Gray over Fenny. Fenty lost because many voters felt excluded from the changes that were occurring under Fenty, especially in school reform. It was a battle over style and voters apparently preferred Gray’s evident style of consensus-making, thoughtfulness and inclusion. Fenty had plenty of warning that this personality, style, and character issue was important to many people. First revealed in a Washington Pots poll in January, it was cited as the main cause for Gray’s double-digit lead in a Post poll several weeks ago.

“Now is the time to move forward,” Gray said at the press conference. “[Let] now be the time for the city to unite.”

Now was a time many reporters were prodding Gray to say what was coming next, which is to say that they found ways to ask the questions about the fate of the often-controversial school chancellor Michelle Rhee. During the campaign Gray was asked at every turn whether he would fire Rhee. He never did say. He wasn’t saying now either. “I put in a call to her,” he said. “We will be sitting down and talking. I haven’t heard back yet. I imagine she’s busy. She’s running our schools, after all.”

Other than announcing that there would be a transition team, Gray in fact would not deal with names and faces. “I’m not talking about personnel decisions right now,” he said. “There will be time enough for that. We are still facing serious problems right now, especially on budget matters. I’m still the Chairman of the City Council.”

He was asked who would head the transition team or who would be part of it. “It’s a process,” he said.

“Yes,” Tom Sherwood of NBC 4 said, “but will it move quickly?”

“I talked with Mayor Fenty today,” Gray said. “We had a great conversation. I know that he loves this city, and wants nothing but the best for the city. He assured he would do everything he could to help with the transition.”

Gray said he got no indication that Fenty might be considering a run in the general election as an independent. “I didn’t get any sense of that,” Gray said.

“I meant everything I said about transparency in my administration,” he said. “This is going to be an open government. I want people to feel empowered, not disenfranchised. My door will be open. And for the press, I’ll be having regular press conferences.”

“The onus is obviously on me now,” Gray said. “I expect to be held accountable.”
Winning the democratic primary meant that Gray is all but assured of winning the general election in November and will become Washington’s oldest elected mayor. Although, as was noted, he sure didn’t look it or act it.

Election night, in fact, was full of confusion and uncertainty until well past midnight. At the hotel where Gray held a gathering for his followers, a strange atmosphere prevailed early in the night, and lasted well until midnight. Nobody knew anything. For an event full of politicos and campaign workers, the silence was nerve-wracking. Nary a rumor or piece of gossip managed to surface. All people knew was that there were no results forthcoming from the Board of Elections, where a major case of the slows and computer glitches were occurring.

Fenty did not concede until, “…we have official results from the Board of Elections.” The delays from the Board of Elections were heavily criticized by followers of both candidates and frustrated news reporters from all media. Even the bloggers and internet world couldn’t come up with a single voting result.

Gray, it’s now clear, will also be joined by Kwame Brown, who fended off challenger Vincent Orange to win the Democratic Primary for the City Council Chairman position, Gray’s old job. “I look forward to working with Kwame, who ran a fine campaign, and with whom I’ve already had a great working relationship…” said Gray.

In the other city-wide election, Phil Mendelson at last overcame the great Michael D. Brown confusion, handily winning over the shadow senator, a late entry in the race whom polls showed was leading , mostly because voters confused him with Michael A. Brown, a current member of the city council who was not running.

Gary Tischler •

That small room in the National Portrait Gallery housing “One Life”, the series of exhibitions begun since the completed renovation of the Reynolds Center, may be one of the biggest rooms in the whole building. “One Life”, after all, attempts to squeeze into a small, square room a summation of an entire American life with a minimum of artifacts, paintings and photographs. Not an easy task when you’re dealing with the previous tenants.

There was Walt Whitman, the outsized poet of the outsized American experience; Thomas Paine, the inspiring, iconoclastic political pamphleteer of inspiration for the American revolution; there was most recently Elvis Presley, king of rock and roll, an entire American cultural invention unto himself.
There was Abraham Lincoln. No one sentence would suffice.

There was the first Katharine, the grand dame and Dame of American movies, Katharine Hepburn, or Katharine the Great.

And there is today the other Katharine, Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who made the Post one of the truly great newspapers of the world in what may arguably have been the last golden age, the Indian summer of the newspaper business.

Probably no previous subject of the “One Life” series means quite so much to the current residents of this city as this one – even Lincoln or Elvis. Katharine Graham, as a prominent figure, as a publisher of a national newspaper, as a deeply powerful and influential national and international figure, rose to real prominence in 1963 when she became the publisher of the Washington Post after the shocking and tragic suicide of her husband Phil Graham. At sea in a role she never anticipated, even though she grew up in the world of the Post her father had bought in the 1930s, she learned quickly and adapted, overcame painful shyness, and in a unique partnership with Managing Editor Ben Bradlee, guided the paper in short order through the risky and courageous business of printing the Pentagon Papers (though the New York Times fell into the same category), exploding Watergate onto the front pages of a major newspaper, and afterwards, surviving an almost ruinous printers’ strike in the 1970s.

She was, as it turned out, tough.

That’s certainly the impression you get from the first photograph you see upon entering the exhibition – the famous, iconic, dramatic, almost forbidding black and white portrait taken by Richard Avedon in March of 1976.

She stares at the camera sternly, challengingly, even quizzically. Her arms are folded. Her mind appears made up about something. She has, for want of a better word, a certain gravitas there, earned honestly and with great difficulty in a world completely dominated by men, even in the ‘70s.

It’s not an entirely inviting image to an exhibition, but it takes care of summing up Graham as, by that time and certainly for the rest of her life, one of the most powerful women—people—in the world.

“It’s not something you could leave out,” says Curator Amy Henderson, who normally organizes exhibitions on popular culture icons like…say, the other Katharine, Katharine Hepburn. “The image
is iconic, and it shows that toughness, that courage which let her accomplish what she did. It’s a way in. But we wanted to do a lot more. We wanted to show a little bit of what made Katharine Graham the woman and person she became.”

The “We” Henderson refers to was a notable duo of consultants who knew Graham intimately. Pie Friendly, a researcher at the National Portrait Gallery, knew Graham socially through her husband
and father-in-law, journalist and writer Alfred Friendly Jr., and former Post Managing Editor Al Friendly, respectively. Liz Hylton, Graham’s personal assistant, provided access to photos and memorabilia and anecdotal material. “It was just us three ladies,” Henderson said. “The Washington Post and the Graham family were tremendously helpful.”

“We all knew each other,” Friendly said. “You would always cross paths through the paper, schools, parties and social occasions. I respected and admired her tremendously. She was a woman in a man’s world, truly. She was straight forward, honest. You cannot imagine what it must have been like for her, but she did more than persevere. She made the Post a great newspaper. It was just tremendous fun working on this, it really was. And mind you, she fired my father-in-law and replaced him with Ben Bradlee.”

Henderson was obviously limited in terms of space, so there’s a lot more that could have found its way into a larger exhibition. But what resides tells her story, fleshes her out, and portrays Graham
in full.

“It’s interesting going through these photographs—of which there were a lot,” Henderson said. “You get a sense of a woman, a girl, who was raised in a privileged world, was raised in her father’s newspaper business [working as a reporter]…who met and married a man she absolutely adored, and wanted nothing more than to be a wife, a mother, raise her children and do good deeds, and perhaps be a social leader. She never expected to be what she became. It required reinvention of the most difficult sort.”

When Henderson talks about Graham—whom she never met, she will tell you—certain words recur with regularity, as they do when you talk with Pie Friendly: “forthrightness, honesty, integrity, courage, resilience.” These are, of course, all qualities that elicit great admiration, without necessarily revealin a human being so much as a statue.

The pictures and artifacts, carefully selected by the trio of women, accomplish that job, even if the two videos (for the NPG’s Living History series by former director Mark Pachter) in which Graham talks about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers don’t entirely do so. There are many pictures, for instance, in which some form of the Graham sternness of the Avedon image are repeated: Graham with her editors, Graham at a meeting of the Associated Press National Board, Graham unsmiling in lots of photos.

But there are also a lot of portraits of Graham smiling, laughing with her head thrown back, and the smile and laugh show a woman transformed: a fun loving person in the moment. It’s a pretty dazzling smile she’s got there. And not one easy to acquire given the charismatic but self-absorbed nature of the dazzling Agnes Ernst Meyer, her mother, shown in a haunting photograph taken by no less a photographer than Edward Steichen. Her father, Eugene Meyer, while he encouraged and obviously loved his daughter, was rarely accessible and often distant. And there was the kinetic, hypnotic Phil Graham, who became publisher of the Post and absolutely swept Katharine away, until his instability began to overtake him.

What did she achieve? Take a look at the AP meeting portrait: a semi-circular made up entirely
of men who look somewhat like the cast of “Mad Men” in late middle age, minus cocktail
and cigarettes. And there is Graham, alone as a woman, but uncommonly self-assured. In her memoir, she wrote that she accepted life in a man’s world but then ended up leading a change in that world.

Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and the Post’s growing reputation as a writer and reporter’s paper under Graham’s leadership, steered the paper into a stratosphere occupied by few publications.

Both the Pentagon Paper publication and, even more so Watergate, were dangerous times for the Post, but also thrilling and memorable times. In a way, the Post helped bring down a president, and the movie version of the Woodward-Bernstein saga “All The President’s Men” did not change that perception. Graham herself began to become an influential social lioness, and you can see her light up like a Christmas tree with Jacqueline Kennedy in New York, and at the black and white ball thrown by Truman Capote in her honor.

The infamous—therefore treasured—showdown with then-Attorney General John Mitchell, in which he blustered that Kate had gotten her tit in a wringer, resulted in a gift of a miniature wringer and small jeweled replicas of a wringer and a breast, which she wore proudly and with grand humor. They are among the artifacts on view, which also include the first hand-written page of her Pulitzer Prize-winning
memoir and the mask she wore to Truman Capote’s black and white ball.

The strike was difficult for Graham and in squashing the union she acquired, unfairly said a Post reporter, a reputation for ruthlessness. “Not so, not so,” said Robert Kaiser, who wrote the official story on the strike for the Post, “without any interference from her.”

“That was undeserved. She was the ideal publisher if you were a reporter.”

For most of us who were not Posties, the paper nevertheless was a daily presence in its headiest period, and Graham, for Georgetowners, living in her mansion, was an uncrowned queen. When she passed away, the funeral at the National Cathedral and subsequent wake at her home seemed like one last gathering for which she had called upon the world to come. And the world came.

The exhibition, which gets all the right things in that small room, seems particularly poignant in a time when the idea of great newspapers seems more memory, and a memory without a future at that. You feel almost glad that she’s not here to see the confusion and decline and predicted disappearance of newspapers in the 21st Century.

On the other hand, she might have found a way to prevent all that, to persevere. That Avedon picture, that look, those crossed arms seem to indicate that she just might have done it. [gallery ids="99247,104180,104159,104176,104172,104168,104164" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

I came to Washington in the mid 1970s, after living ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area, during a turbulent, heady period working on two different daily newspapers. I’ve never quite been able to satisfactorily explain to myself, or people who know me, why I came. Usually, I make a joke about it.

During the late 1970s — post Watergate, post Gerald Ford even, Carter in mid-malaise — I lived on Capitol Hill, where a group of friends once held an alley-stoop neighborhood party. A young go-getting politician and school board member named Marion Barry found his way to the party. He whizzed by in a frenzied, hand-shaking Afro blur but made an impression. People there, mostly white, talked about him. He was running for mayor, taking on the venerable Walter Washington, the city’s first mayor under Home Rule.

By around 1980, I started writing for The Georgetowner, and the first story I ever wrote for this publication was a detailed from-afar look at Ted Kennedy’s disaster of a challenge against President Carter, a disaster redeemed in part by a defiant, eloquent convention speech. The very next story that I recall was an interview-profile of the legendary stripper, Blaze Starr, backstage at the notorious Silver Slipper Burlesque House, in the New York Avenue area. Starr was futilely enamored of politicians — she had affairs with Earl Long, the Governor of Louisiana (captured nicely in a movie called “Blaze”), and the mayor of Philadelphia, Mr. Rizzo. It’s thirty years and hundreds and hundreds of stories later, and some things have changed…

Gary Tischler •

Rue McClanahan of the Golden Girls
—

If you’re a television star, as opposed to any other kind of star, you are who you play even unto death.

This is why A-list movie stars were and are rarely seen on television, except when promoting their latest project on late night talk shows.

In the kingdom of television, Seinfeld will always be, well, Seinfeld, Carroll O’Connor will always be remembered as Archie Bunker, Ted Danson, no matter what he does, will be Sam the bartender on “Cheers” and the late Dixie Carter will always be remembered first and foremost as Julia Sugarbaker.

And so on.

“The Golden Girls”, the mid-’80s and early ’90s sitcom about four women of a certain age, which defied the conventional wisdom that people wouldn’t watch a show about women of a certain age, is a splendid example of the adage that on TV you are and will always remain who you play.

And so on “The Golden Girls”, Bea Arthur will always be the retired school teacher Dorothy Zborniak, Estelle Getty will always be her crusty Sicilian mother, Sophia Petrillo, and Betty White will always be the dimly long-winded Rose Nyland.

And Rue McClanahan, who died recently at the age of 76, will always be Blanche Deveraux, man-hungry and slightly slutty, but with dash, a breathy languorous, dishy way about her that gave Scarlett O’Hara a run for her Confederate money.

No question it wasn’t all that McClanahan did in her showbiz life. She was a dazzling hoofer, stepping her way to stardom in numerous shows, and also criss-crossing with Arthur on “Maude” (the other role Arthur will be forever remembered for) and with White on “Mama’s Family.” She starred on stage in “The Vagina Monologues,” among other plays, and in 2008 starred in a cable series called “Texas Sordid.”

“The Golden Girls” was an anomaly among TV shows in an age where the young audience was already courted for its spending power. It was a big hit for seven years and lives on mightily in syndication on Lifetime. Shows like that become national mantras for a reason, in this case, because the women were complex, funny and struggling with life issues that were familiar to anyone getting older, or younger people with parents. And that the women were portrayed by gifted, vivid actresses who remain hard to forget.

McClanahan had a sassiness about her, a certain shamelessness that refused to bow to age. She was going to be the prom queen for as long as they had proms and young guys with eyes that roved everywhere.

They’re almost all gone now. Arthur died last year, and Getty passed away the year before. All four actresses won Emmys for their roles at one time or another.

Only one of the Golden Girls remains standing, and that’s Betty White, who defies the rule. Rose may be memorable, but White goes beyond any television role. She is television, and was television, going back to her roles on radio, game shows, daytime soaps, trashy movies (she played a monster mom who controlled a deadly alligator), memorable commercials and, most recently, an acclaimed appearance as the oldest person to ever host “Saturday Night Live,” courtesy of a wild campaign on Facebook.

Those Golden Girls, they’re golden.

___

Peter Orlovsky of the Beat Generation
—

Peter Orlovsky died May 30 of lung cancer.

If you want to find Peter, really see him in sunshine and splendor, go to the National Gallery of Art’s West Building, where he remains luminous in black and white in the exhibition of beat poet and icon Allan Ginsberg’s photographs.

Orlovsky’s prominent presence in this exhibition — along with Ginsberg himself, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso — can be accounted for by the fact that he was, off and on, through thick and thin and other relationships, Ginsberg’s great love and companion for over 40 years.

In the exhibition, Ginsberg, in front of the camera and behind it, reigns supreme, as guru, jester, enthusiast supreme. Orlovsky, supine, up front with his stunning face, seems bemused, a kind of passive Pan to all the other great writers and cavorters. He was one of the true boys, like Neil Cassady or the often sullen Kerouac.

Orlovsky was, of course, more than Ginsberg’s muse and companion, even inspiration. He was a poet himself, and became quite a fine one, though never quite attained the quality or style that could blot out the literary sky like Ginsberg with his “Howl.” He published several books of poetry, including one with Ginsberg, “Straight Hearts Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters.”

Ginsberg died in 1997. Orlovsky continued to write. Both appear very much alive in Ginsberg’s photos, which not only resurrects their life as a couple, but a whole culture that was counter to the Eisenhower’s placid small-town, suburban 1950s America long before there was a counter-culture that went by that name.
___
Coach John Wooden
—
John Wooden, who died at the fine age of 99, was the best basketball coach ever. Period.
Coaching the UCLA Bruins of the ’60s and ’70s, he won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, including seven in a row between1967 to 1973, the height of the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton eras. He won 620 games in 27 seasons. His record of NCAA titles is not likely to be topped in the men’s game any time soon, if ever, given that most college players with an aptitude for the pros are drafted before becoming upperclassmen, and the kind of consistency and solidity provided by four-year players no longer exists.

Wooden, known as the Wizard of Westwood, a nickname he apparently hated, was not much for razzle-dazzle. In fact, he was both one of a kind and a throwback, a man who was deeply devoted to his religion and to his family in a way that would brook no hint that he was anything other than what he appeared to be. He wrote love letters to his wife for years after she passed away, and, speaking of his Christian faith, was famously quoted as saying that “If I were ever prosecuted for my religion, I truly hope there would be enough evidence to convict me.”

He coached teams, not individuals, even though he had spectacular stars among his list of players. He was no overnight sensation — he didn’t win his first NCAA title until his 16th year at UCLA — but by the end he had won a record 88 games in a row, 38 straight NCAA tournament games in a row and 98 straight home games.

The record also shows that he never made more than $35,000 a year. He obviously did not have an agent, never asked for a raise and turned down an offer to coach the Los Angeles Lakers. Imagine all that.

Gary Tischler •

There is a new mental health problem out there. I call it The Real Housewives of Washington D.C. Stress Syndrome. It’s what can happen to you after watching just one episode of the much-anticipated, much-ballyhooed Bravo reality show which features not only the notorious Michaele Salahi and her husband Tareq but four other so-called D.C. women in proximity to power and status, which is all that counts in Washington, apparently.

I admit it: I watched the first episode. I don’t dare go further, because, well, God only knows what will happen. As it was, I dreamt about the episodes afterward, and they weren’t good dreams. After each commercial break I felt as if I were a runway model, needing to purge. This stuff will do things to you.

For the record, I am no longer quite so bothered about the Salahis. I see now why they wanted so desperately to appear on this show. Like needs like, and to them, the crowd on this show must have seemed like a vision of home. Problem is, the rest of the cast is not happy about being with them, as we found out, and no doubt will continue to find out. Lynda Erkiletian, founder of the T.H.E. Artist Agency, has already started a whispering campaign that Michaele is dangerously thin and an intervention might be required.

Why this show is called housewives of Washington, real or unreal, is beyond me. Much of it seems to be in Virginia, but then again, there was the 1.5 million ratings, big numbers for cable. Who knew there were that many people in McLean?

The Salahis almost feel like naifs in this group, which includes Stacie Scott Turner, a Sotheby’s realtor and the only black member of the housewives. Turner keeps looking agog at her racially insensitive friends, who say things like “I think hair salons should be integrated.” In fact, if you watch this show, you might get the impression that the most powerful people in Washington are not the president, politicians or lobbyists, but celebrity chefs and hair dressers.

Meanwhile, newly arrived Brit Catherine Ommanney (Cat for short, and appropriately so) is vying for the role of queen of mean and making her way in what she sees as the top social circles in Washington. Why anyone would talk to a woman who wrote a self-described “racy” tell-all memoir about living in London called “Inbox Full” is beyond me, but this a world full of “beyond me” moments.

It does make you think about the end of civilization as we know it, as do many things today. Sometimes it seems as if the only American contributions to world popular culture in the 21st century have been zombie movies and reality shows, and often its hard to tell the differences between “28 Days Later” and “The Rachel Zoe Project.”

Michaele complains on this episode that people don’t think she and her husband are people of substance and insists that they are. She feels, after all, that if people hugged more, the world would be a better place, which is hard to argue with since it’s such a jaw dropper. And she has, after all, gone toe to toe with Whoopee Goldberg.

In the world of reality shows, you don’t have to pick on one person, there’s so much to choose from, and that doesn’t even include Billy Bush. What we have here is the physical manifestation of absolute weightlessness, if such a thing is possible.

Remember, this report was written while under the influences of TRHOWDC Syndrome. I cannot be held responsible for my words.

Gary Tischler •

Baseball will always be the same, no matter how much it isn’t the same.

You can dress it up all you want with mascot races, raffle drawings, over-priced hot dogs, home-run explosions and astronomical salaries, but there will always be small boys down by the dugout, staring longingly at the kid pitcher, seeing their someday selves. There will always be older people sitting in the shady seats under bleachers, taking it all in, remembering. There will always be guys in T-shirts, sons and fathers with matching mitts, suburban college kids basking in beer, guys posing with the portraits of legends like DiMaggio, Mantle and Cobb.

There will always be phenoms.

That’s what the Washington Nationals have right now: an out-and-out, genuine, dyed-in-the-fastball phenom and All-American young guy with a beard stubble and a hundred-mile-an-hour whiffer.

That would be Stephen Strasburg, the rookie sensation pitcher who, in four starts since coming up from the minors like a savior, has won two, lost one, and struck out a ton. He’s young, unassuming, professional, married and throws a ball that sinks like the Titanic on its last breath.

That’s what a group of seniors from the Georgetown Senior Center, still game in their own way, and still reeling with memories from the loss of founder Virginia Allen, got to see for a trip to the ballpark led by Jorge Bernardo, driving the van and leading the way.

They ate hot dogs, stayed out of the sun, they cheered as grandmother and grandson (Marta Mejia and Sebastian Carazo), aunt and nephew (Helen Adams and Gerard Duckett) and mother and daughter (Janice Rahimi and Jamila), or as themselves, like Gloria Jiminez, Jane Markovic, Betty Snowden, Betty Hoppel and volunteer Mary Meyer.

Some cheered as old diehard Chicago baseball fans, like Vivian Lee, who, as the presidential mascot race came up, remembered the ways of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, Jr., who was the first great baseball promoter. “People thought he was a little bit crazy,” she said. “In Chicago, you were back in the 1950s and probably now a White Sox Fan or a Cubs fan. I was a White Sox fan. We lived in Hyde Park.”

We reminisced, rattled off old names: Early Wynn, Chico Carresquel, Minnie Minoso, Rocky Colavito, Nellie Fox and so on.

Baseball lives on like that, in the reciting of names.

Down by the field, before the game, Strasburg was warming up: raised leg, follow through, intense concentration, red uniform on green field. Cameras were clicking in the sun.

The game was like a slow, teasing dance. Strasburg struck out nine, but gave up nine hits, most of them, strangely, on two-strike counts. It may be that the kid doesn’t know how to throw a bad pitch on purpose, which is a learned thing with time.

In front of us, a young man was yelling and screaming, drowning out the occasional “yikes” from our group. He could have been Strasburg — except for the tattoos, the nose piercing, the fanatic eyes. But he did sport a wobbly chin beard and he bounced up, hand held high, before I realized he was high-fiving. He ran down the row of the Georgetown ladies and high-fived them all after another Strasburg strike out.

That’s the game, folks.

It ended 1-0 for the Kansas City Royals, on dinkers and dubious hits and on nothing much for us.

But everyone will remember the afternoon, the silence on the field, the shadows, the stillness until the windup and the pitch.

That was baseball, the day the folks from the Georgetown Senior Center came to watch.