We Remember: A Star, A Poet and A Bruin
• July 26, 2011

Rue McClanahan of the Golden Girls
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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
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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.

A Reality Headache
•

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.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin ‘Restore Honor’ to Washington
•

 

-Glenn Beck is coming to town. So is Sarah Palin. They’re bringing about 300,000 folks with them for a major conservative rally called “Restoring Honor”, a fevered brain child of Beck’s originally meant to be about honoring American servicemen—and who can argue with that—but which has now enlarged the scope of events to Beck’s vision of America’s future. This Saturday, 10 am -1 pm, no signs or guns allowed.

Beck gave his own estimate of the number of people likely to come in requesting a permit. Which he got.

If that many show up, you can bet pretty much how most of them—including Beck and Palin—feel about the 9/11 mosque that’s supposed to be going up a shy two blocks from the hallowed ground of where the Twin Towers once stood: No. Absolutely not.

One of the rallying cries over the mosque controversy is that it’s an example of massive insensitivity on the part of the planners, and anybody who supports the idea, including President Barack Obama – who in any case said he didn’t actually give his approval for the project, but just wants to support freedom of religion. You can’t argue with that.

On the matter of insensitivity…let’s give a big raspberry for Mr. Beck. He’s holding his massive rally on the mall on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck claims he didn’t realize that it was the same date until it was too late, and the plans had already been made.

Perhaps he learned it on the nightly news.

But in any case, Beck says he has a dream, too, and that this is very much about civil rights and that he now carries the mantle of American visionary. It was not reported whether he cried or not while explaining himself. He did not mention the mosque at the time.

Here are some things about the mosque issue. New York Mayor Bloomberg supports it. So do many people who also believe in religious freedom and freedom in general, and whose beliefs are every bit as vehement as the anti-mosque crowd.

Now you can understand – if not necessarily agree with – the relatives and victims of 9/11 on their stand. They don’t’ want a mosque there in that proximity (two blocks) because it would be an insult to them and the victims. But like a lot of things tend to do, this thing has gotten a little out of hand.
Ask a basic question: how far away should this mosque (actually an Islamic Cultural Center supporting Inter-faith activities, according to its supporters) be? If not two blocks, how many? If not lower Manhattan, where? New Jersey? Florida? Well, no. They don’t want mosques there either. Or in Tennessee or in various places in the West and Midwest. These folks are saying: Be afraid. Be very afraid of the other.

Maybe they needn’t worry. Of the millions of dollars the proposed center would cost, only around $15,000 has been raised, which makes its appearance unlikely any year soon. And the Inman of the center is in any case a Sufi, the least militant, the most tolerant sect of Islam that exists.
But it’s too late for that. The anti-mosque movement — which is what it appears to be — is spreading like wildfire, which is perhaps what you might call an intended consequence of the actions of the opposition.

Strasburg Syndrome
•

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.

Evans for Chairman?
•

Well into the middle months of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s final year of his first term, there is an unsettled, faintly ominous feel to the political and economic atmosphere in the District of Columbia.

While the mayor appears to have made significant progress in many areas, large sections of voters throughout the city seem to be unhappy with Fenty, as well as his chosen Chancellor of Public Schools, Michelle Rhee. Speculations have it that some members of the city council, notably Chairman Vincent Gray, who has been visibly at odds with the mayor over a number of issues, will challenge the mayor’s re-election.

No one is exactly betting against the mayor, who has a fat war chest. But electoral politics are a background noise to the business of the council, which now has to contend with a looming budget deficit of the kind not seen by most of its members.

The man least fazed by turbulent political clouds or impending economic troubles, and who probably knows more about them than anyone on the council, is the council’s finance committee chair, Jack Evans. More telling, Evans is the longest continuously serving councilman, having won a special Ward 2 election in 1991, when he emerged the winner over a large field.

Evans has seen the mayor-council relationship ebb and flow over his nearly 20 years in office. “It’s never been ideal,” he says. “Mayor Kelly and council Chair John Wilson were at odds often. Mayor Williams at first didn’t have much to do with the council but that changed in his second term, where there was a lot more contact and cooperation. Right now, I’d say, we’re having some problems in that arena. It’s no secret that Chairman Gray and the mayor rarely communicate. There are several people on the council who’ve had no words with the mayor for months. Maybe years.”

Evans isn’t one of them. It is generally recognized that Evans, who supported Linda Cropp in the mayoral race, has become Fenty’s most consistent and strongest supporter on the council, as well as supporting the school reform efforts of Rhee. “That’s fair to say,” he says. “I think the mayor is a doer, he believes in action, and when something’s done or settled, he moves on.”

The electoral hubbub doesn’t really concern Evans, although if Chairman Gray should run for mayor, “I can tell you I will run for chairman,” he says. “No question.”

Right now, though, politics are not at the top of his list. The budget is. “We’ve been very lucky in terms of the economy,” he says. “We’ve done extremely well and haven’t felt the main brunt of things. That’s not true anymore. As everybody has noted, we’re facing a shortfall of nearly $500 million. It’s almost a cliché, but this requires some extremely tough, painful decisions. We’re better off than other jurisdictions, but things are not going to get better right away.

“There’s only so many places you can look, so many things you can do. Now we’re going to be perhaps talking about looking at freezes on wages, maybe even pay cuts. We are required to balance the budget.”

Evans is by far the most experienced member of the council when it comes to financial and budget manners, making him ideally positioned to be heard in his role as head of the Committee on Finance and Revenue.

Mayor Fenty is scheduled to bring the Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request Act of 2010 and the Fiscal Year of 2011 Budget Support Act of 2010 to the Council April 1.

“That’s where it starts,” Evans says. The council will hold a public briefing on the mayor’s budget plan on April 12.

History Made Daily in Washington
•

It’s springtime, and in this city, in our neighborhoods, we could be living almost anywhere, with slight differences of details because we lead daily lives as prosaic as a suburbanite filling his SUV with soccer gear. You can close your eyes and the world is not that much with you, breathing down your neck with alarming tales of celebrity or war.

But in Washington, that’s hardly ever true. In the most beautiful weekend of the year so far, the SunTrust National Marathon, thousands strong, came through our neighborhood and others, the water bearers lined up along Columbia Road as the early batch, loped through. It transformed, if not transfixed, where we lived — streets closed off, drivers grinding through the maze of Lanier Place, Ontario Road or Adams Mill Road, trying to get out to the grocery stores.

“My daughter’s in this,” a neighbor said, rushing to get to the race. “Gotta get out there.”
Elsewhere, at Lafayette Park, thousands of anti-war(s) protesters gathered, protesting not only the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Israel’s settlements. As of old, they brought masks, megaphones, coffins, the regalia and passion of the young.

They may have picked the wrong time to gather this way in front of the White House or in the city. For one thing, there was the spring fever burning bright, infectious. For another, the transient politician among us, and the occupants of the White House were pre-occupied with other things.

This was the weekend, when, in contradictory fashion, the big health care reform bill, almost in a flash, spurred by encouraging CBO statistics about its cost and by the impassioned pleadings of the president himself, suddenly was about to come to a vote.

Which meant, of course, that the Tea Party folks were in town. This may have meant little to people in Georgetown, or in my neck of the woods off Rock Creek Park in Adams Morgan, but they made their presence felt on Capitol Hill.

On the Hill, history and history-making kissed us squarely on the mouth. It was pure theater, mixed in with the regular theater, the president giving one of his classic campaign style speeches — “Don’t do it for me, don’t do it for the Democratic Party, do it for the American people” — while the GOP stalwarts, including the sour-faced House minority leader Jim Boehner, repeated his mantra: the American people don’t want this bill. Outside, the Tea party folks accused Democrats of socialism, communism, big-ism, take-over-ism, and so on, with a fury rarely seen in this city since the last Cowboys-Redskins game at RFK stadium.

Some members of the Tea Party, it should be noted, also exposed themselves, not in the usual way, but with racial and homophobic slurs directed against black and gay Democrat legislators on Saturday and again on Sunday. Mr. Boehner, when pressed, called this reprehensible, although somehow managed to say it in a way that suggested the American people were so angry about health care that they forgot themselves.

What was certain was that if the GOP party itself had previously tried to keep a thin distance between itself and the Tea Party, it disappeared entirely on Sunday. Faced with a vote that would pass a historic bill they had fought so bitterly, GOP legislators moved out to a balcony and egged the crowd on with “Kill the Bill” signs.

Eventually, history was made: the bill, by a 219-212 margin, had passed.

We were asleep by then. Many of us had also missed the sunny Sunday afternoon on the mall where still another group in the thousands had gathered to ask for immigration justice.

The very fact that history looms over our shoulders daily in this city is what makes the things we do from day to day so precious here, because we hear the hollering of the Tea Party, the banging of the drums of the protesters, the epic words of political opposites. We have our own little political struggles to overcome: the murmurs of discontent about our mayor pop up in the neighborhoods, there and there. Overnight, history sweeps through our sleep, through our locked doors.

We wake up, like everyone else and pick up the morning paper on the third day of spring, awaiting rain.

The Chief in Spring
•

On Easter weekend in Washington, the president became an avatar of spring, a burdened man who still led the way, like a pied piper, to greet spring with joy and a burst of activity.

In Washington, the tourists, too, are our avatars of spring, dropping out of the sky as the cherry blossoms did their magnificent thing.

But President Barack Obama showed the way, taking himself and his family not across the traditional way to St. John’s Episcopal in Lafayette Park but out to Southeast and Allen Chapel AME Church for an Easter service.

The visitation at a church, very much like the one he used to attend in Chicago, moved the congregation, the ministers, deacons, women, men and children there to the core. This is an area of the city where shootings are a regular part of the daily diet of woes that includes astronomic unemployment and a feeling that political leaders, from the mayor on down, had forgotten them.

But the president had not, and by attending and interacting, although not speaking, he brought with him — besides the circus of Secret Service and gawkers that go with him everywhere — some measure of renewed hope and energy. “This is a monumental moment for us as a community,” Church pastor Rev. Michael E. Bell Sr., said, as reported in the Washington Post. Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry, a frequent visitor, and Mayor Adrian Fenty, not so much, sat quietly.

The president, like us, like the tulips, like the tourists, embraced spring, and dove into its duties with gusto — jump-starting egg hunt races at the White House were thousands of guests brightened up the lawn and the day afternoon on Sunday. No doubt, he forgave the children for getting a bigger kick out of teen rock star Justin Bieber, who sang and performed.

Later, he headed to the Nationals Ball Park, donned a red suit, and threw out the first pitch, a lob to the left, proving again that basketball was his game. On YouTube, you could hear a lone boo somewhere, but this was no tea party. This was baseball, the season initiated by the president, and the fans, who bring hope and begin their spring-summer-early-fall-to-October daily ritual of perusing the box scores as if they contained the baseball equivalent of Bible verses.

And that was spring in Washington, where the president lives by our leave, as do we. The Nationals, by the way, lost the opener 11-1, which does in no way diminish the fact that many, many games remain.

Media Scandals Stir Up a Stagnant World
•

In Washington, D.C., national politics is always the talk of the town, until the NFL season and babble-babble about the Redskins starts. But this may not happen this year, due to the deadlock between players and owners over how to divide up billions in revenue, an unseemly labor quarrel in the summer of our economic discontent. If there’s no football, folks may finally realize that Owner Dan Snyder really is not only the face of the Redskins organization, but its heart and soul, which is to say it, has neither.

Locally, the mayor’s woes and that of sundry council men stuck with unseemly problems seems to have brought local politics to a serious case of the slows, nearing stagnation.

On the national front, on the other hand, some odd, weird, media-pushed and otherwise scandals, mishaps and downright strangeness are about the only things that are keeping at bay the creeping stagnation that now exists.

Consider the economy, which is stagnant, and promises to remain that way, wiping away whatever surge in popularity President Barack Obama may have gained from the death of Osama Bin Laden. Jobs are trumping almost every other other issue, and yet, the Republicans continue to insist that the national debt trumps jobs, and anyway, that’s Obama’s job and fault. This, in a climate where the unemployment rate actually crept upward, while Wall Street, alarmed, saw the Dow Jones drop below 12,000 for the first time in quite some time. The recovery, assumed to be steadily happening, now looked as vulnerable as a rabbit running into a mongoose

State polls, where GOP governors have been trying to solve the debt problem by firing public employees show that that’s perhaps not the way to go. Almost every GOP governor elected by Tea Party support has a lower approval rating than the president, which was sinking slightly.

Stagnant—in its own way—was the Middle East where revolution and the Arab spring (although perhaps we should could it summer) were a continuing saga that refused to come to a climax. The turmoil though is now a consistent part of the landscape in the Middle East, sort of like a long overtime soccer match that just goes on forever. The results or lack of are full of dangerous portents.

It also appears that the administration, the military and the nation is now exhausted and tired of Afghanistan and all the turmoil there, where President Karzai, the Taliban, Pakistan and U.S. forces are enmeshed in some long-standing, interminable violent dance without end. But more and more the talk is of withdrawal, less so of some convincing final victory.

You can just see the national malaise creeping on.

Mother nature is no help: floods, fires, tornadoes have wreaked so much havoc here that we’ve almost forgotten how much worse things were in Japan.

Given all this gloom and doom, what are the pundits talking about? There’s Arnold. There’s the aftermath of the John Edwards meltdown. There’s the Palin express and the Palin e-mails. There’s the Newt Gingrich meltdown. There’s Weiner-Twitter (ew) and there’s Beast-Twitter, and no doubt a few twits.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminator, the governator, Conan the Barbarian and the Eraser, is about to get a new title: ex-husband. After being discovered not only having a mistress, but a love child for a number of years, Arnold is now considering reviving his movie career. Let’s see, what comic book franchise could he start: Doctor Doom?

The John Edwards sad saga rose up again like a reminder of his hubris-filled, once-promising political career and all the things you can lose in life. The Feds are now going after him on a possible indictment for using funds gifted to him by rich supporters to hide his affair and resulting offspring from the media… This while his wife, who passed away last year, was suffering from terminal cancer.

Larry King, I think got this right on the Bill Maher show, saying it was an American tragedy. But it did not prevent the town from buzzing for at least all of two or three days.

Sara Palin took off on a bus trip across the country to take the pulse of, you know, us. She also managed to mangle the Paul Revere story, and insisted that her version—Revere was warning the British—was right and anyway it was a gotcha question that got her. Meanwhile, thousands of e-mails from her abbreviated days as Alaska governor were made public, and elicited nothing much more than her consistent whines about the media.

Newt Gingrich imploded. This is perhaps the least surprising political news in the land, matching everyone’s expectations. But he outdid himself—almost all of his senior staff bolted the campaign, which has to be some kind of record.

And lets not forget the twitter saga of Anthony Weiner, (pronounced apparently wiener, to the joy of every late night talk show host), who may not be a congressman by the time you read this, who twittered pictures of his boxer briefs containing obviously himself, or at an outline of the part most men think with. Denial, backtrack, more changes of story, admission, apologies, full responsibility, and a blah and a blah, but no wife at his side and seeking treatment and so on. This may have been the first true case of the weird nether world of the internet expressing itself in a real national scandal that goes on and on and on until it too will become stagnant.

The endless chatter about this whole thing is inexplicable. It is a media malaise all of its own.

But speaking of Twitter, thank good for Beast. Dane Cook, a comedian, twittered about his missing Chihuahua named, yup, “Beast,” who was found instantly. And perhaps cast in the next “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” movie.

Now that’s news you can use.

To A Great Height
•

It was a turbulent week in the world, the country and Washington. We saw a spreading oil spill and the sight of birds covered in oil. We saw grossly wealthy bankers raising their hands to testify blankly on Capitol Hill. Grief continued for a murdered teacher, the storms of heated political battles built locally over disputed school funds and nationally over immigration and financial reform.

Through all that week, the life-affirming passage of Dr. Dorothy Height, a kind of coming-out and going-up processional celebrated all over the city, steadied this community and shone the light on the best of humankind and the best kind of human being.

The life of Dr. Height, the renowned leader and champion of civil and women’s rights who passed away the previous week at the age of 98, was remembered, memorialized, and finally enshrined all week, not with great grief and sorrow, but with stories, music and warm, fond memories.

The passage took place among the gatherings of her Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters at Howard University. It took place on a day full of people who stood in long lines for a long time at the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women on Pennsylvania Avenue, the organization which Height had led with ever-increasing effectiveness and influence for decades.

The journey continued at Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw of a Wednesday evening, where over a thousand people gathered, many of them aging figures from the civil rights movement of which Height was a critical, if often unacknowledged, member.

That night, the spirit was as big as the sound made by a huge choir, and it was proud with memories and with the presence dignitaries, from the Clintons to the King family, to local luminaries.

And finally, people filled the pillared depths of the National Cathedral for her funeral, with President Barack Obama, the brisk-walking, living fulfillment of her dreams, the first black president of the United States, delivering a eulogy, calling her “Queen Esther to this Moses generation.”

All these places comprised the world she lived in, prodded with her insistent courage, made better for African Americans, for women, for all of us, with a dignified, moving-forward persistence of will, and unchallengeable moral vision and embracing, graceful warmth. These places were signifiers of sisterhood, of calling and profession, of duty and accomplishment, and, here in Washington, of community and the home that she made here.

If the Shaw church celebration rocked with music the final stop had a more stately cadence.

The National Cathedral is the church of the nation, where, by ceremony, service and prayer, a person is certified as belonging to the ages. Not that Dorothy Height needed verification. If many Americans did not know her fully or enough, every one in the pews, front back and center, knew her, many with real memories of her.

Reverend Willie T. Barrow, chairman of the Board of the Rainbow Push Coalition in Chicago, called her “my mentor, a pioneer, she led the way for all of us. She led the way for civil rights, and women’s rights, our rights. All of us are forever in her debt, because she was there long before there was such a thing as a civil rights movement. Yes, she was.”

Virginia Williams, herself something of a pioneer in many fields, including music and being an unofficial mother for the District while her son Anthony Williams served two terms as mayor, said “she towered over everybody. She was the guiding spirit of the fight for justice.”

A woman at least two or three generations removed from Height who had worked with her said that “we all learned from her: never stop, keep on moving forward, fight hard, don’t quit. She had that fighting spirit and she had grace.”

President Obama said she was always welcome at the White House. “And she would come over. She came over twenty times.” “She was born when slavery was a living memory, and she fought for justice when nobody else did. She was humble. She didn’t care about credit. She belonged in the pantheon. ”

“She was a righteous woman,” he said.

Poet Maya Angelou recited a psalm, opera great Denyce Graves sang and the Clintons were there, as were the Cosbys, boxing promoter Don King, a portrait in flags and bling, senators, congressmen, mayors and movie stars. Her nephew, Dr. Bernard Randolph, remembered meeting her in New York where she had come to stay with their family. He recalled a stirringly gifted young girl and was admonished to be “at our best behavior” for Miss Dorothy.

It was a bright sunlight, stately morning, and it was as if Dorothy Height, with all her long life done, had come into the light of glory for all of us, revealed for all the things she had done in her life, for all to see. The moment might have been when gospel legend BeBe Winans moved through “Jacob’s Ladder” as if it was lament and salve, all at once:
“After you’ve done all you can … you plant your feet, and square your shoulders, hold your head up and wait on him,” he sang. “After you’ve done all you can, you just stand.”

It’s what Dorothy Height did all her life, squared her shoulders, stood up.

At the end, everybody stood, and there was this sea of hats. Glorious hats.

Dorothy’s hats.

Purple, black, large and round, imposing or flirtatious. There was a movement of sisters in hats of all colors, feathery and strong all the same at once, exiting down the stairs, some to touch the funeral car, walking past a prophetlike Dick Gregory, out into the sunlight. You could hear women’s voices, girl’s voices and hats, standing on the street corner and at bus stops, young and old, talking about Dorothy Height come to glory, looking forward.
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Vancouver 2010
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So, how do you like the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver so far?

If you’re an American, quite a bit, thank you very much.

If you’re one of the NBC sportcasters here, you like it even more, because now you’ve got an almost legitimate excuse to talk about practically nothing but Americans.

If you’re Canada, the host nation, probably not so much, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. If you’re from Russia, even less. You and your president are mad as hell about it all.

This has been an unexpectedly dizzying and surprising winter Olympics, at turns exposing everything that’s right and everything that’s wrong with these every-four-years efforts. If nothing else, we’ve seen a couple different sides to the host nation, for better and worse.

That image of the Canadians as bland, modest, mild-mannered folks who are patient and have things in perspective and proportion, well, that one took a small hit. They are as crazed about gold as anybody else, and carry as much bellowing national pride as the next country, which happens to be their too-good neighbor, the United States.

The Canadians, in their efforts to create a really fast luge and bobsled competition, created a course that athletes and experts complained was way too fast. It certainly proved to be too fast for a young luge competitor from Georgia who was killed when he lost control at somewhere around 90 miles an hour.

That tragedy, right before the start of the games, was a huge controversy with charges, tortured explanations, and countercharges in the midst of competition. It’s not being talked about too much any more, except perhaps in the Georgian village where they’re still mourning the loss of their hometown athlete.

The Canadians, who should be good in these events because there’s lots of ice, mountains, and snow there — as opposed to Washington — haven’t fared well. Last two times they hosted the winter Olympics they got no gold. They finally broke the spell this time, but then the United States — with most of their NHL stars playing for Russia, Sweden and Canada — managed to knock off the Sidney Crosby-led Canadian team, a huge upset.

The Russian hockey team, with Alex Ovechkin at the helm, lost to Slovakia. Russia was shut out in the medals for pairs skating, where China finished first and second, and when defending gold medalist Evgeni Plushenko, a boyish Putin look-alike in sequins, lost the gold to American Evan Lysacek in men‘s figure skating, he got peevish. He waltzed up to the gold podium at the medals ceremony then, after some comments about skaters who don’t do a quadruple jump not being manly, he walked out. Russian President Putin and his wife also complained about the loss.

And then there was our country ’tis of thee. Even if the Americans don’t win another medal, they’ve kicked butt. This would be really wonderful to behold if we didn’t have to listen to the various broadcasters point out the obvious to us, instead of letting us enjoy it.

This, in spite of the fact that this has not turned out to be the Vonncouver Olympics.

We’ve seen too much of the golden girl, in both senses of the word: her hurt shin, her pained grimaces, her bikini poses, her personal life, her long hair, all of that. She won a gold in the downhill and flashed her gutsy brilliance, fell in another race, and raced conservatively in the super-G for a bronze. Not bad at all, but just modest enough to let others shine.

Others won big also, with Shani Davis taking gold and silver in speed skating, Julia Mancuso winning two silvers and Apolo Ohno setting a record for Olympic medals with short track skating.

Then there’s Bode Miller. Remember him? Like Vonn, Miller was the hyped American athlete in Torino and crumbled like a cookie, with no medals. Here, he’s been about as good as he can get, getting a bronze, silver and gold so far, and a lot less attention, while looking like the scruffy skier Robert Redford might have played once.

Finally, there’s Shaun White, the red-headed snowboarder in a class by himself. I think I saw him working his way to the moon after one of his runs. Confident without being arrogant, articulate, shrewd and funny, he’s the coolest guy in Vancouver.

Canada has enjoyed a few victories, though. The gold medal win by dark-horse moguls skier Alex Bilodeau, the country’s first in a Winter Olympics, prompted a fire of excitement nationwide. More touching was seeing Bilodeau’s older brother Frederic, who has cerebral palsy, weep with joy when the results were announced.

One of the great things about watching ski runs is to see how the Vancouver’s mountain setting revealed itself every time. It was breath-taking. And there’s the city itself, gleamingly hip and cosmopolitan against a backdrop of fierce nature. Even if Canadian athletes aren’t sweeping the podiums, the country has the shown the world a remarkable culture full of natural beauty and modern elan. Now there’s something to be proud about.

Plus, we got to see fiddle players who could tap dance. What more could you want?