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Robert Devaney • December 10, 2012

Shop close to home, and enjoy the historic neighborhood. There are more than 450 places where you can shop or eat, according to the Georgetown Business Improvement District, which has brightened up at the center of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street with an illuminated ornament with ribbons floating above the traffic. The silver Christmas trees shine at the eastern and western edges of our town. The street lamps are decks with evergreens and lights. It is a great place to shop, and stop for lunch or dinner after shopping. Some business owners have already notices an increase in gift buying this year, compared to 2011.

“Deck the Halls. Forget the Malls” is this season’s slogan by the Georgetown BID, which offers free rides for shoppers on Saturdays. “Getting around Georgetown is easy and fun this holiday season. Hop into a pedicab and cruise to your favorite Georgetown shops. Complimentary pedicab rides will be available every Saturday from Nov. 24 through Dec. 15, noon to 5 p.m.”

Take time to take it all in. We live in a special place. Walk through your town and your city, and see the world refreshed by the joys and wishes of this season. And shop in Georgetown, D.C.

Gary Tischler • December 6, 2012

If you made it to the funeral of Chuck Brown, “the Godfather of Go-Go,” last week at the Washington Convention Center, you could be forgiven for not feeling too sad.

You might instead have thought that right then and there was not a bad time to go, what with the music, the dancin’ in the aisle, the jokes, the gospel, the politicians trying to boogie, the singing, the energy and what all. The funeral—and it did have moments of quiet, moments of prayer, ministers and pastors and church people—was nothing short of a party, all of a celebration. “This ain’t no pity party,” somebody said. For sure, it wasn’t.
And in spite of all the noise, the brashness, the soul and heart-felt things going on, that electricity, and repeated reminders that “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that go-go swing,” there was also something nostalgic about the whole thing. It was something of a time machine, this partee, and it took you back to the 1970s, when Brown was in ascendancy, and the 1980s, when he was king and go-go ruled in almost all, but not all, of Washington as its rightful, homegrown music. It was a time, when Marion Barry, with both edge and arrogance, was dubbed “mayor-for-life,” and Donnie Simpson was a star deejay with his thumb on black popular music—funk, rap, hip hop and, always, go-go.

Might as well have gone back: Simpson was the moderator, your host, the emcee. “Let’s show folks how we do a homecoming,” he yelled out. The Brown family was there, there was a huge picture of Brown near his flower-smothered coffin, and dignitaries as well as politicians, some of them trailing their own troubled clouds with them. There were constant references to Washington as a hometown, the kind that had little to do with the Greco-Roman and Federal style architecture, the business of world affairs, white houses and white domes.

This was a gathering of old hometowners, of the city’s declining, but still potent, volatile black population, the kind that went to any place where Brown used to play, in the clubs, outdoors, in the neighborhoods and schools and they came to celebrate the life and mourn the passing of Chuck Brown, a hometown guy by any other name, even though he came to D.C. by way of a hard-times upbringing in North Carolina as a kid, and an eight-year stint in prison. Or, as stated in the program’s biography: “In the mid-1950s, he shot a man in self-defense and was convicted of aggravated assault which charge was bumped up to murder when the victim later died.”

It took eight years out of his life—but it also changed his life completely. In prison, he traded a five cartons of cigarettes for a guitar, a deal by any other name, and the rest is long-term, pain-staking and hard-work history when he finally broke through with his signature sound, which is like no other. It was heavy with brass, rambling guitar, drums, it had the influences of the islands and African tribal sounds. The end result was an original, rhythm stripped to its essence.

The music dominated proceedings at the Washington Convention Center May 31. It rained go-go all afternoon, soaking everything and everybody up, dried up the sadness like a super-mop, put the spring even on the legs of local politicians.

Simpson was ageless and unchanged, and moved. “Oh, man, that man, what a time,” he said. “I loved that man and I know he loved me. He loved this city. He was always for Washington, for you folks, for us, and his music was nothing like anything anywhere else, and believe me, I know. I come from Detroit, and we had a little music going there, too.”

The afternoon wasn’t so much a time-machine, it was a time-stopper. If you blinked, you could be in some of those clubs, many of them gone, you could hear the man in person, so to speak, and his generous spirit. It was a little like nothing had happened since then: there was a moment you could hear a roar from the huge crowd, maybe eight or ten thousand strong and people rushed to the pathway to the stage and all of a sudden you heard the rush and sound, crowd chants: “Barr-eee, Barr-eee.” Marion Barry was in the house.

Simpson said that Barry, like Brown, was always for the people of this city, and “you all know that, for sure.” Barry said that “Brown was about love, love of city, of his people, of music,” he said. “I keep hearing that mayor-for-life thing. I kind like that. But this is Chuck’s day. He was my friend, my good friend, and he was this city’s best friend.”

All the folks there were going to keep go-go alive. For elected officials, it was an opportunity to kick back and forget little things like ongoing investigations, and instead celebrate the moment. Mayor Vincent Gray, who could count himself as one of Brown’s friends, said he would send legislation to the council to create a park in Brown’s honor, then busted a few moves on the podium. District Council chairman Kwame Brown wanted to start a “Go-Go Hall of Fame.” D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said she was going to go to Congress with legislation to create a Chuck Brown Day for his birthday.

During the course of the afternoon, amid all the speeches, and folks running into each other from back in the day, it was easy to see that Brown and his music, would outlast the occasion of his passing. It was true—with some exception—that go-go never spread like wildfire across the country, that he had indeed invented, created an anthem disguised as a genre for the city’s neighborhood, hometown identity from back in the day. Even in the city, go-go was not a fixture everywhere but was saturated in the sidewalk, and Sunday-in-the-morning after Saturday night of the city’s black neighborhoods. But it’s also true that it continues to grow, that it’s recognizable by more and more people these days.

At the Chuck Brown memorial service—that flight homeward-bound—it was recognized by everyone, people swayed, people danced and they heard inspirational speaker Willie Jolley rhyme in time, they heard the Chuck Brown Band, they heard his children, they heard Huggy Lowdown, they heard Big G, Nekos and Wiley Brown, Nat “the bush doctor” Mathis, they heard the rangy Y’Anna Crawley sing “Thank You,” they heard Isaiah sing “Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus,” Ty Tribbett move across the stage like a dynamo singing “Victory,” both gospel songs dipped in the speed of go-go, and Cliff Jones sing the moving “Steal Away To Jesus.”

They heard everything, even the rustle of a big soul like Chuck Brown’s stealing away.

Robert Devaney •

Georgetown University has invited its neighbors to two Planning 101 Sessions on Nov. 27 and Nov. 28, which will provide an overview of the university’s master planning efforts — that is, the master plan for 2017-2037. Residents will have the opportunity to meet the university’s team, including developers Forest City Washington, and to hear about the planning process.

The two sessions are Tuesday, Nov. 27, 6:30 p.m., McShain Lounge, McCarthy Hall (on the Main Campus, down toward the Jesuit Residence and McDonough Gym) and Wednesday, Nov. 28, 9:30 a.m., Leavey Program Room, Leavey Center (on the Main Campus past the Intercultural Center toward the medical center).

For more information, e-mail Neighborhood@Georgetown.edu.

Gary Tischler •

The trouble with the Arena Stage production of “My Fair Lady” is that it’s “My Fair Lady.”

That being said—and more will be said—I thought and more importantly felt that this production of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe stage (and movie) classic musical was fresh. It belongs to the audience of these our times as much as it did for previous generations without neglecting any of the great score and work of L&L. While long at nearly three hours, this production also had something that energized the evening. Being a musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” it had pungent, prickly Shavian smarts in the script on the subject of gender and class, emotionally and intellectually executed, sung and acted.

What did it not have? It did not have Rex Harrison inimitably speaking his songs. It did not have a dubbed Audrey Hepburn. It did not have Stanley Holloway’s English vaudevillian turn as Eliza Doolittle’s dad, getting to the church on time.

I mention these things because the film version of “My Fair Lady” is so much in the mind of theater audiences or new audiences, not to mention critics, that it’s hard to shake, especially when confronted with stage productions that cannot hope to or want to reproduce the effects and affectations of the film version.

“My Fair Lady” has its own, original charms, virtues and passions.

What I saw and felt was a successful and fully loaded attempt to offer up the rich musical, dramatic gifts that “My Fair Lady” has to offer through inventive staging, casting and costuming and sets. In this, casting Shaw Festival and Canadian veteran Benedict Campbell as Henry Higgins (he comes from Smith’s original SF production staged earlier this year), and relative newcomer Manna Nichols as Eliza Doolittle was critical, leading a standout cast up and down the line. Campbell is an excellent and experienced actor who can sing while Nichols is a wonderful singer who can act. In this production, something happens that I’ve rarely if ever seen in the show—film and two other productions—I was moved by where the relationship between Eliza and Henry was heading and ended up, an ending that’s often mystifying to lovers of romantic endings in musicals.

“My Fair Lady” remains the same story—Shavian in its intellectual content, so very L&L in its musical themes. The noted linguist Henry Higgins, bets his old friend Colonel Pickering that he can turn Eliza Doolittle, a dirty, near unintelligible Cockney flower girl (he calls her than once a “guttersnipe”) into a countess by teaching her—in a rigid, slave-driving regimen—how to speak the King’s English. In England, class was defined by how you spoke the language (and dressed, and went to school and so on). Bloody hell, you might say, and she probably did, but agrees to participate. Using repetition, sometimes Pavlovian starvation, and sleep deprivation, Higgins slowly turns the scruffy but moral (“I’m a good girl, I am) working-class girl into someone lady-like, mannered and well-mannered and powerfully and fashionably attractive, at that.

All the familiar strains are here—the test run at the races where Eliza relapses in high and low fashion—a meeting with Higgins’s mum, and the ball where she conquers all, especially poor Freddy, the handsome scion of an artistocratic family. That would be Nicholas Rodriguez, who gets to sing the achingly yearning “On the Street Where You Live” and turns it into a show stopper, just as he turned “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” into a roaring show starter in “Oklahoma.”

Nichols, elfin and shining, puts a swirling, dreamy, sweeping quality in her voice singing the songs that wish like “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” Campbell actually sings and moves with power through the thoroughly misogynist “Hymn To Him.” “The Rain In Spain” number, sung by Eliza, Higgins and Pickering, is high-spirited and fun.

The folks on the poor side of town—the bartenders, the chimney sweeps, the flowers girls, the cabbies, including Eliza’s father Alfred Doolittle are a different sort, and so is Doolittle himself. Their clothing in brash steampunk style—it sometimes harks back to the 1960s hippie style as well—and their diversity speak to a multi-ethnic (The Doolittles are part Asian here) world that existed in London then and does so now as well as here. Daddy Doolittle’s “Get Me to the Church” is no longer specifically London cockney or vaudeville, it’s a paean to the group, into which James Saito often disappears in the role.

What’s clear in this show is how through their battling, Henry and Eliza find not only each other but themselves. While Eliza hardly lacks passion, in the end she’s not interested in a future with the smitten Freddie. She wants something more substantive, and that would be Henry Higgins. The more she knows about herself and her own gifts, the more she’s a match for Henry. And the more Higgins—the confirmed old bachelor type who prefers solitude and subsists on arrogant intellectual superiority—is around Eliza, the more he realizes she completes him—that missing human part that includes longing.

This “My Fair Lady” is what it is: something pretty special. It delivers the old goods and the new.

Robert Devaney • December 3, 2012

Here is your chance to play Kris Kringle for Duke Ellington students and help them get a huge Christmas present of computers — just be using your mobile phone or computer.

Students at Duke Ellington School of the Arts on 35th Street have recently been nominated for a $50,000 grant from the Clorox Company. Clorox’s Grants for Schools Program is called “Power A Bright Future” and is now in its fourth year. If the students are awarded the grant, they will gain much needed access to a mobile laptop cart with 50 new Apple computers.

To get the grant, Duke Ellington School must win the contest, which is determined by those voting (at no cost) via text message and online.

“We are the only D.C. public school that’s been nominated for this national grant contest,” says Seth Brecher of D.C. Public Schools. “The good news is that we are currently ranked 30 out of nearly 1,700 schools in our category. There will be multiple grants distributed, and we’re right in the hunt to win. It’s very exciting, and it’s a very important opportunity for Ellington’s scholar-artists.”

Here is how you, the reader, can help Ellington students win right now:

Those in Georgetown, Burleith and all of D.C. can support Ellington’s grant efforts by voting:

Via text: Text text 2258pbf to 95248 every 24-hours until Dec. 19.

Online: Visitpowerabrightfuture.clorox.com every 24 hours until Dec. 19 (keyword search: “Duke Ellington School of the Arts”).

Georgetowner •

Downtown Holiday Market

November 30th, 2012 at 12:00 PM | Event Website

Downtown Holiday Market will create a cozy, winter wonderland in front of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Wear your walking shoes. There will be lots of art work, crafts, and goodies to satisfy everyone on your shopping list. Catch the celebratory, outdoor spirit when the Market returns for 24 glorious days, Friday, November 30th to Sunday, December 23rd, noon to 8:00 pm.

Address

American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery

Glen Echo Potters 25th Annual Show and Sale

December 1st, 2012 at 09:00 AM | Free | glenechopottery@verizon.net | Tel: 301-229-5585 | Event Website

Show and sale by more than 50 local potters, including several featured in local and national juried shows. Saturday, December 1, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, December 2, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Free parking

Address

The Lab School of Washington; 4759 Reservoir Road, N. W.

Duke Ellington School of the Arts Holiday Bazaar & Art Show

December 1st, 2012 at 10:00 AM | FREE | shade4desa@gmail.com | Event Website

Holiday Shopping doesn’t have to be hard. Find something for everyone at Duke Ellington’s Annual Holiday Gift Bazaar & Art Show at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC!

This year’s Bazaar hosts fine art and artists ? silver & gold jewelry ? unique home decor ? natural bath and body products ? local food vendors ? books and authors – and so much more!

Vending Opportunities are still available at EllingtonHolidayBazaar.wordpress.com or email shade4desa@gmail.com.

Address

Duke Ellington School of the Arts; 3500 R Street, NW

Jewelry Holiday Shopping Event to Benefit Smith Center for Healing and the Arts

December 1st, 2012 at 12:00 PM | info@sheilacahilldesign.com | Tel: 202-656-2415 | Event Website

Sheila Cahill Design will generously donate 25% of the profits to Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, the only stand alone cancer support organization in DC. Shop Sheila’s unique, one of a kind jewelry pieces – better known as “adornment for confident women.” Find holiday gifts that range from one of a kind jewelry pieces to fun and playful bejeweled objects. The event will take place at Sheila’s Jewelry Studio, close to the Cathedral. Open from 12 noon to 5 pm on both 12/1 and 12/2.

Address

4000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 1630, Washington DC 20016

Winter on the Water

December 1st, 2012 at 04:00 PM | Free Admission | info@thewashingtonharbour.com | Tel: 202-295-5007 | Event Website

Come celebrate the inauguration of Washington DC’s newest, largest, outdoor ice skating venue, the Washington Harbour Ice Rink, with a fete of continuous strolling entertainers, ice skating performances, choral singers, a St. Lucia parade, and artistic lighting effects, with food and beverages served outdoors by the restaurants of the Washington Harbour. Free admission.

Fees for ice skating and skate rental: Adults – $9.00; Children/Seniors/Military – $7.00; Skate Rental – $5.00
Address

The Washington Harbour; 3050 K Street NW

Washington Bach Consort presents “Great Glad Tidings”

December 1st, 2012 at 05:00 PM | Tickets $23-$65, Students 18 and younger $10, Pay Your Age 18-38 | contact@bachconsort.org | Tel: 202.429.2121 | Event Website

An all-Bach program contains cantatas composed for Advent and the Christmas season, including one of the six that make up the Christmas Oratorio. J. Reilly Lewis performs the Canonic Variations on Von Himmel hoch, one of Bach’s most famous compositions published towards the end of his life.

Note day and time

Address

National Presbyterian Church; 4101 Nebraska Avenue, NW

Jackson Art Center Winter Open Studios

December 2nd, 2012 at 12:00 PM | Free | Event Website

Join The Jackson Art Center and 44 Georgetown Artist for when the art studios will be open to the public for free with music by Robert Hanson.

Address

3050 R Street NW (on R between 30th & 31st Streets)

Football 101 Open Bar, BBQ, Seminar and Game Watch

December 2nd, 2012 at 06:30 PM | 25.00 | contactmlgf@gmail.com. | Event Website

Bobby Johnson will kick off the event by taking you through the fundamentals of the game, followed by Warren Powers who will share his insights on the NFL from his perspective as a former player.

Then watch the Philadelphia Eagles take on longtime rivals the Dallas Cowboys on the big screen at 8:20PM EST while enjoying a BBQ dinner and OPEN BAR throughout the game.

Tickets are $25 and all proceeds go to Septima Clark, a public all-boys charter school in Southeast DC. Purchase your tickets

Address

Fisher Colloquium, Rafik B. Hariri Building

McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

Embassy of Sweden Presents Norrbotten NEO

December 2nd, 2012 at 05:00 PM | Free | Event Website

Embassy of Sweden presents Norrbotten NEO; Sweden’s newest voice on the contemporary music scene. Formed in January 2007, NEO has a core ensemble of seven musicians: Flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola, and cello.

Address

Embassy of Sweden; 2900 K ST NW

Santa Claus at Volta Park

December 2nd, 2012 at 10:00 AM | Event Website](http://voltapark.org/)

Join Santa Claus, your neighbors and friends on Sunday, Dec. 2, 10 a.m. to noon at the Volta Park Playground on 34th Street for a morning of Yuletide fun.
Trim the Volta Park Christmas Tree and Playground with ornaments made at the craft table.

Santa will listen to all children’s Christmas gift requests and pose with them for photos(Pictures with Santa are $10.)

Brought to you by the Friends of Volta Park with generous support from Nancy Taylor Bubes.

Address

Volta Park Playground on 34th Street NW

Robert Devaney • November 26, 2012

Today provides a good excuse — and a good cause — to go to Sprinkles Cupcakes, the Beverly Hills’s bake shop that started the national cupcake craze. On Nov. 12, Sprinkles Cupcakes Georgetown at 3015 M St., NW, will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from its red velvet cupcakes (which will be adorned with red crosses) to the Red Cross’s Hurricane Sandy Relief Fund. Similar promotions raised $25,000 in March 2011 for the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Fund and $20,000 in January 2010 for the Haiti Relief Fund.