Friday Is Bike-to-Work Day
• May 21, 2015

This Friday, May 15, has been dubbed Bike-to-Work Day. Commuter Connections and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association aim to gather more than 17,000 area commuters for a celebration of bicycling as a clean, fun and healthy way to get to work.

Bike riders can stop by one of 79 pit stops throughout D.C., Maryland and Virginia to receive refreshments and enter into a raffle for a bicycle giveaway.

Each pit stop will also provide registered attendees with free t-shirts. T-shirts are available to the first 14,000 who register and attend.

Cyclists can visit as many pit stops as they would like on Bike-to-Work Day. However, the free Bike-to-Work Day t-shirt can only be picked up at the pit stop one chooses while registering.

The Georgetown Business Improvement District has invited participants to come by its pit stop, 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., at Georgetown Waterfront Park, where commuters can enjoy refreshments, snacks and bicycle-themed giveaways. Registration is free. The first 300 visitors will receive a Bike-to-Work Day water bottle.

Before the bike-themed festivities, the Georgetown Professionals, a networking group that hosts monthly happy hours, will partner up with Washington Area Bicyclists Association and the Georgetown BID on May 12 to host an afternoon bike-from-work day happy hour at Malmaison, starting 4 p.m., at 3401 K St. NW. Send RSVPs for the happy hour to erinflynn09@gmail.com.

Visit www.BikeToWorkMetroDC.org for more details.

Obama at Georgetown: ‘It’s Hard Being Poor’
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A unique panel met May 12 at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall to discuss the difficult topic of poverty in America. One of the panelists happened to be the President of the United States.

President Barack Obama sat next to discussion moderator E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist and Georgetown faculty member, along with Harvard professor Robert Putnam and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute.

The four men looked for solutions and advanced perspectives that went beyond the everyday left-right rigidity in addressing the plight of poor Americans, a widening economic gap and how to advance opportunity for all.

If the dialogue was not quite a clarion call for concerted national action, it almost did become that, as the president showed a more personal side to issues about national policy.

The president first answered the question of why this panel and this discussion: “I think that we are at a moment — in part because of what’s happened in Baltimore and Ferguson and other places, but in part because a growing awareness of inequality in our society — where it may be possible not only to refocus attention on the issue of poverty, but also maybe to bridge some of the gaps that have existed and the ideological divides that have prevented us from making progress.”

“And there are a lot of folks here who I have worked with — they disagree with me on some issues, but they have great sincerity when it comes to wanting to deal with helping the least of these.  And so this is a wonderful occasion for us to join together,” Obama continued.

“Part of the reason I thought this venue would be useful and I wanted to have a dialogue with Bob and Arthur is that we have been stuck, I think for a long time, in a debate that creates a couple of straw men.  The stereotype is that you’ve got folks on the left who just want to pour more money into social programs, and don’t care anything about culture or parenting or family structures, and that’s one stereotype.  And then you’ve got cold-hearted, free market, capitalist types who are reading Ayn Rand and think everybody are moochers.  And I think the truth is more complicated.”

Putnam, author of the recently published “Our Kids: the American Dream in Crisis,” spoke of the slowing of social and economic mobility — a given for Americans for decades.

“I think in this domain there’s good news and bad news, and it’s important to begin with the bad news because we have to understand where we are,” Putnam said. “The president is absolutely right that the War on Poverty did make a real difference, but it made a difference more for poverty among people of my age than it did for poverty among kids.” 

“And with respect to kids, I completely agree with the president that we know about some things that would work and things that would make a real difference in the lives of poor kids, but what the book that you’ve referred to, “Our Kids,” what it presents is a lot of evidence of growing gaps between rich kids and poor kids; that over the last 30 or 40 years, things have gotten better and better for kids coming from well-off homes, and worse and worse for kids coming from less well-off homes.” 

“And I don’t mean Bill Gates and some homeless person,” Putnam continued. “I mean people coming from college-educated homes — their kids are doing better and better, and people coming from high school-educated homes, they’re kids aren’t.  And it’s not just that there’s this class gap, but a class gap on our watch — I don’t mean just the president’s watch, but I mean on my generation’s watch — that gap has grown.”

“You can see it in measures of family stability. You can see it in measures of the investments that parents are able to make in their kids, the investments of money and the investments of time.  You can see it in the quality of schools kids go to.  You can see it in the character of the social and community support that kids — rich kids and poor kids are getting from their communities.  Church attendance is a good example of that, actually.  Churches are an important source of social support for kids outside their own family, but church attendance is down much more rapidly among kids coming from impoverished backgrounds than among kids coming from wealthy backgrounds.”

Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute answered the question on expanding the socio-economic safety net in a non-partisan way: “One concept that rides along with that is to point out — and this is what I do to many of my friends on Capitol Hill — I remind them that just because people are on public assistance doesn’t mean they want to be on public assistance.  And that’s the difference between people who factually are making a living and who are accepting public assistance.  It’s an important matter to remember about the motivations of people and humanizing them.  And then the question is, how can we come together?  How can we come together?”

“I have, indeed, written that it’s time to declare peace on the safety net.  And I say that as a political conservative.  Why?  Because Ronald Reagan said that; because Friedrich Hayek said that.  This is not a radical position.  In fact, the social safety net is one of the greatest achievements of free enterprise — that we could have the wealth and largesse as a society, that we can help take care of people who are poor that we’ve never even met.  It’s historic; it’s never happened before.  We should be proud of that.”

In response, Obama said: “We don’t dispute that the free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history. It has lifted billions of people out of poverty.  We believe in property rights, rule of law, so forth.  But there has always been trends in the market in which concentrations of wealth can lead to some being left behind.  And what’s happened in our economy is that those who are doing better and better — more skilled, more educated, luckier, having greater advantages — are withdrawing from sort of the commons — kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks.  An anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.  And that, in part, contributes to the fact that there’s less opportunity for our kids, all of our kids.

“Now, that’s not inevitable.  A free market is perfectly compatible with also us making investment in good public schools, public universities; investments in public parks; investments in a whole bunch — public infrastructure that grows our economy and spreads it around.  But that’s, in part, what’s been under attack for the last 30 years.  And so, in some ways, rather than soften the edges of the market, we’ve turbocharged it.  And we have not been willing, I think, to make some of those common investments so that everybody can play a part in getting opportunity.”

“Now, one other thing I’ve got to say about this is that even back in Bob’s day that was also happening.  It’s just it was happening to black people.  And so, in some ways, part of what’s changed is that those biases or those restrictions on who had access to resources that allowed them to climb out of poverty — who had access to the firefighters job, who had access to the assembly line job, the blue-collar job that paid well enough to be in the middle class and then got you to the suburbs, and then the next generation was suddenly office workers — all those things were foreclosed to a big chunk of the minority population in this country for decades.”

“And that accumulated and built up,” Obama continued. “And over time, people with less and less resources, more and more strains — because it’s hard being poor.  People don’t like being poor.  It’s time-consuming. It’s stressful.  It’s hard.  And so over time, families frayed.  Men who could not get jobs left.  Mothers who are single are not able to read as much to their kids.  So, all that was happening 40 years ago to African Americans. And now what we’re seeing is that those same trends have accelerated, and they’re spreading to the broader community. ”

The meeting was part of a three-day Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown. At the summit, put together by the university’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and the National Association of Evangelicals, attendees included leaders from various religious communities, policy makers, researchers and community organizers.
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Expanded Sidewalks Are Back for Graduation
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This Saturday and Sunday, the Georgetown Business Improvement District will widen sidewalks on the 3300 block of M Street by eight whole feet to accommodate increased foot traffic from Georgetown University and George Washington University graduations. To lessen the sidewalk expansion’s impact on drivers, the BID is offering $5 all-day parking at the PMI parking structure at 3307 M St. NW. Northbound Circulator busses, meanwhile, will offer free rides from K Street up into Georgetown.

BID put a similar plan into work earlier this year to accommodate tourists for the Cherry Blossom Festival and the Georgetown French Market. The business organization also widened the sidewalks for Georgetown University and George Washington University’s overlapping parents’ weekend in the fall.

The widening is a key part of the Georgetown 2028 15-year action plan, which aims improve the business district by modernizing aspects of the historic neighborhood and upgrading how Washingtonians access it.

Georgetown Rabbi Sentenced to 6 1/2 Years for Voyeurism
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Barry Freundel, former rabbi of Kesher Israel Congregation at 28th and N Streets NW, was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for voyeurism by Senior Judge Geoffrey Alprin of D.C. Superior Court May 15, according to media reports.

Over a period of years, Freundel secretly videotaped dozens women during a ritual bath at the Georgetown synagogue.

The 63-year-old Freundel received 45 days in jail for each of the 52 counts of voyeurism. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 17 years in prison. The former religious leader also received $2,000 in fines and taken into custody upon his sentencing.

Freundel once led Kesher Israel, a modern Orthodox synagogue, at 2801 N St. NW, five blocks from his former home, owned by the congregation. He was arrested at the O Street house on Oct. 14, 2014, by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Since 1987, before being fired last year, Freundel had been with the synagogue, which counts among its members former Sen. Joe Lieberman and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

Bluesman B.B. King (1925-2015): the Thrill Is Not Gone for Us
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Bluesman B.B. King, a legend in his and many people’s times, a man who personified the music he played, influenced hundreds of black and white singers and guitar players who played the blues, died in his sleep in Las Vegas May 14 at the age of 89.

He died forever famous and died rich, but he did and could and would still play the blues, especially “The Thrill is Gone,” which was the biggest hit of a storied career that probably began when he heard all those sounds swirling around him and his life, beginning in Mississippi. There was gospel, Robert Johnson at the cross roads and all those Delta blues guys, sharecroppers at some point or another, visitations to the road side boogie joints and jukebox joints and front porch guys, soon to be on the road, playing for quarters and dollars in edgy, hazy, sweaty place where the local brew could make you sick or crazy.

Listening to the blues could evoke that whole world and B.B. King evoked better than anybody ever—the blues were about remembered pain, but sometimes they could just make you get up and jump around, like kicking the demons out.

Born Riley B. King, B.B. was Blues Boy, which was pretty apt, although it is hard to think of him, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Woolf, the Reverend Blind Gary Davis or Johnson as boys of any sort.  Nothing much playful in that song, or many of his songs or any of the blues songs—they’re about loving, losing, about back-breaking and heart-breaking stuff and not ever, ever getting over it: “The thrill is gone away/you know you done me wrong baby/and you’ll be sorry someday.”

He was a sharecropper who made less than five dollars a day for a time, and he heard gospel, and blues, and country music and Count Basie, and for a time he played in places on Beale Street in Memphis.   He was married a couple of times, but everybody says the love of his life was Lucille, his guitar.  According to reports, he once ran into a burning hotel to rescue his guitar.

Once King got successful—with a hit called “Three O’Clock Blues”—he toured extensively with stops at the Howard Theatre in Washington, along with the Apollo and the Royal Theater.  He had a star on Hollywood Boulevard and was inducted double duty in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. He also received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

He influenced people—especially some of the blues rockers from England in the 1960s, especially Eric Clapton who paid him a online special tribute.  “Thank you for everything, your friendship and your inspiration” says Clapton, looking older, too.

King can be found all over YouTube—including a rendition of “The Thrill is Gone” from 1993—glitzy blue jacket, black bow tie, sweating a little, squeezing the music out of Lucille, you guess, alive as you and me and then some.
           
“You know I’m free, free now baby, free from your spell,” he sings, “and now that’s all over/all I can do is wish you well.”

You, too, Blues Boy.  Wish you well. The thrill is NOT gone. 

 

4 Restaurant Liquor Licenses in Georgetown Available 

• May 20, 2015

Four alcoholic beverage licenses will be open for application this summer for restaurants in Georgetown, according to D.C.’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration. ABRA will begin accepting applications for the limited and desired licenses 8:30 a.m., Thursday, June 25.

Because of the liquor license cap and restrictions within the Georgetown Moratorium Zone, a maximum of 68 restaurants are permitted to be licensed in the area, according to ABRA, which added, “Establishments exempt from the moratorium include all hotels and those in or to be located in Georgetown Park, Georgetown Park II, Prospect Place Mall, Georgetown Court and Washington Harbour.” Other D.C. neighborhoods with a liquor license moratorium are Adams Morgan, East Dupont and West Dupont and Glover Park.

The four licenses in Georgetown will be available because of license cancellations or expirations. The former licensees are M Cafe on Prospect Street, Puro Cafe on Wisconsin Avenue, Pizzeria Uno on M Street and Zenobia Lounge on 31st Street.

ABRA advised:
Applications for the licenses are available online but must be submitted in person. Any applicant must be the actual owner of the business. Businesses interested in applying can do so beginning at 8:30 a.m., Thursday, June 25 at ABRA’s office, which at the Reeves Municipal Center, 2000 14th St., NW, Suite 400 South, 4th Floor, Washington, D.C.

Completed license applications will be reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis and are subject to the consideration of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Members of the public that have questions can contact ABRA by emailing abra@DC.gov or calling 202-442-4423. 

The Latest Issue of The Georgetowner
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Weekend Round Up May 14, 2015
• May 18, 2015

Stories of Art & Money at the Freer Gallery of Art

May 16th, 2015, AT 3:30PM | Event Website

Moderated by NPR’s Scott Simon, this moderated panel discussion focuses on the complex relationship between art, money and patronage. To collect art is a pursuit of passion, but it is also a pursuit of status, wealth and cultural influence. What is art worth? Who determines its value? Find out at the Freer! Free and open to the public.

Address

Freer Gallery of Art, 1050 Independence Ave SW

Jackson Art Center Spring 2015 Open Studios

May 17th, 2015 at 12:00 PM | free | jacksonartcenter@gmail.com | Tel: (202) 342-9778 | Event Website

Jackson Art Center Spring Open Studios, Sunday, May 17, 2015, from 12pm to 5pm.

Jackson artists host their semi-annual event on Sun., May 17 from 12 to 5pm. Visit the studios of 30+ artists while enjoying complimentary refreshments and live music. Free and open to the public.

We will also include a children’s workshop — “Marvelous Murals” — from 3 to 4pm that afternoon, in our outdoor courtyard. If there is bad weather, we’ll postpone the workshop until Sun., May 24 from 3-4 pm.

Address

3050 R Street NW, in Georgetown, across from Montrose Park

Cathedral Choral Society: Great Opera Choruses

May 17th, 2015 at 04:00 PM | $15-75 | lsheridan@cathedral.org | Tel: 202-537-2228 | Event Website

Magnificent opera music, sacred and profane, perfect for a cathedral. Stirring choruses and heartbreaking arias tell great stories of love, revenge, passion, greed, and glory. Selections from Wagner, “Die Meistersinger;” Bellini, “Norma;” Gounod, “Faust;” Verdi, “Nabucco;” Puccini, “Tosca;” Mascagni, “Cavalleria Rusticana;” Puccini, “Manon Lescaut;” and Boito, “Mefistofele.”

J. Reilly Lewis, conductor. Jessica Julin, soprano. Ben Wager, bass.

Address

Washington National Cathedral; 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW

Life in Luon

May 18th, 2015 at 06:30 PM | lhumphrey@lululemon.com | Event Website

Join us for an evening of sweat, stories and salads. Hear how we live the luon lives we love and how you can create your next #dreamjob! Enjoy a complimentary Barre Class from 6:30 to 7:30PM (please arrive by 6:15PM with mat) and then enjoy a Q&A with a Lululemon employee panel.

For your spot on the guest list, email lhumphrey@lululemon.com

Address

lululemon athletica, 3265 M St. NW

Spanish Conversation Club

May 19th, 2015 at 11:00 AM | Free | julia.strusienski@dc.gov | Tel: 202-727-0232 | Event Website

Looking to grow, revive, or begin to develop your Spanish skills?

Join the Georgetown Neighborhood Library this May for weekly casual conversation hours, led by instructor Luz Verost.

Address

Georgetown Neighborhood Library; 3260 R St. NW

Free Chamber Concert

May 19th, 2015 at 12:00 PM | Free | info@dumbartonhouse.org | Tel: 2023372288 | Event Website

A community of music lovers and musicians, the Friday Morning Music Club, Inc., has promoted classical music in the Washington area for over 120 years. Join us for a delightful Spring concert in the Belle Vue Room of Dumbarton House.

Address

Dumbarton House, 2715 Q Street, NW

“Get Out & Play” Clinic

May 20th, 2015 at 04:30 PM | $0.00 | Tel: 888-747-5361 | Event Website

Giant Food, LLC and Ripken Baseball are again collaborating to host a series of health and fitness clinics throughout the Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. regions. The Second Annual “Get Out and Play” clinics will combine baseball instruction with nutritional programming to create a fun and informative program for youth and their families.

Address

Dwight Moseley Field Complex; 20th and Perry St NE

Fire Shutters Good Stuff Eatery
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A kitchen fire at 8 a.m. Saturday, May 2, shut down Good Stuff Eatery at 3291 M St. NW. The hamburger restaurant will be closed for several days. The fire was quickly contained. There were no injuries and minimal damage. During the fire, traffic in the 3100 and 3300 block of M Street NW was diverted.

Owner and chef Spike Mendelsohn tweeted, “#GoodStuffEatery Gtown will be closed for several days due to a small fire. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Gunter Grass (1927-2015): Re-Righting Painful German Memories
• May 11, 2015

One of the obituaries that almost immediately hit the Internet after the death, at 87, of Gunter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist,  focused strongly on his admission in the autobiographical work, “Peeling the Onion,” that he had been a draftee in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s soldiers—a fact that he had not exactly kept hidden but had not dealt with in his voluminous writings of novels, fiction, stories, autobiography and poems.

The revelation, which came seven years after he had won the Nobel Prize, caused a bit of an uproar among the literati, and Grass himself tried to explain away the omission as an outcrop of his sense of shame.

But in truth, he didn’t need to do even that. For all of his writing life, the subject was always German literary, cultural, societal and moral loss of memory or re-arranging of the same, which afflicted many adult Germans who survived the war. 

In that gigantic genius of an imaginative work, “The Tin Drum,” his main character was a boy who willed himself not to grow physically, who had a gift with playing hypnotically on a tin drum and a scream that broke glass and eardrums. The boy, Oskar Matzerath, grew up in the much fought-over city of Danzig and grew to emotional maturity throughout the war, watching betrayals, bombings, serving in the army, and generally becoming a devout cynic,  a survivor who saw the devastating, ruinous, morally decrepitude and slaughter of the war: Germans winning, then waning and Russians invading.

All of his books—“Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years,” which, with “The Tin Drum”—formed his Danzig trilogy, as well as later books, were about the effects of the rise of the Nazi state, the scalding devastation and punishment of the war, and the post-war years.  It was a German—and a Catholic at that—dealing with the moral effects of memory, of forgetting willfully or pragmatically things that should be impossible to forget.  German survivors were not crippled by the war, they were, in a way, invigorated and energized to affect a phenomenal rebuilding of the state and country. Today, Germany, pacified and pacificist, and re-unified  is the master of Europe, economically.

In one way or another, Grass, whose works in translation managed to preserve the lyricism, the wicked, metaphor-rich styles of writing,  dealt vividly with what is remembered, and what the memories mean—his characters are not about atrocities, but about moral betrayals and outrages, about sexual excess and sexual betrayal as well, and they are paradoxically rich in humor, especially books like “The Tin Drum,” the surreal “Dog Years,” which is about Hitler’s dog, and “The Flounder,” a hefty almost whimsical work of magical realism and folk tall tale.

Grass was more than a writer. He was the novelist as conscience, questioner, left-wing politician.  He was, as one person described him, a citizen-writer.  Grass said once that writers should always “keep their mouths open.” Only Heinrich Boll matched his gift for unapologetic scrutiny.

He was a teenager when he was in the Waffen-SS and died an old man, spanning war, defeat, resurgence, re-unification, deflecting controversy and creating it.   Writers like Grass are rare these days, when the Great American Novel is a little like a dream few American writers pursue.  You can find his ilk in the great Latin American writers like Marques, Allende and Fuentes, whose writing were part magic, part hidden politics and full-blooded dreams.

I read “The Tin Drum,” when I was college-age and without fully understanding the multi-ethnic—Slav, German, Polish—aspects of it, or being familiar with Danzig. I responded strongly to the book.  The book was oddly perverse and entertaining, full of violence and the kind of Grimm fairy tale—adult version—aspects that were familiar to me.

Grass’s subject—the slippery status of memory in Germany—hit home to me: I was a decade and a half behind Grass in his experience, born in Munich, with a first memory of American tanks driving over the rubble of Munich in 1945, tossing out candy bars, for which, like any hungry kid, I fought. I emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 at age 10, and that’s when I first discovered what happened in Germany, in a book about Nazi war crimes, the Holocaust, Hitler and everything else with pictures.

It’s hard to take in then, and now, still, and Grass met that subject of memory elusively, including his own. My relatives essentially claimed a kind of not-remembering.  I had three uncles which almost sum up the war—an infantry soldier killed in Russia, another an SS major and the third, an intellectual member of the German underground. That, at least, were the stories, I was told. They died so long ago.

We all do these things to move into a different life.  Somewhere, I stopped using my real name of Gerhard and went to Gary, instead. People sometimes get tired of being different, far from home. Grass gave a lot of thought to who he was and when he was:  the result are pages and pages of forever memories and their meaning.