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Georgetowner • November 2, 2015

The Secret Garden

October 30th, 2015 at 08:00 PM | $19-59 | boxoffice@centerstage.org | Tel: 410.332.0033 | Event Website

Center Stage presents the lush, Tony-nominated musical based on the classic novel of the same name. The Secret Garden is an enchanting story about the pains and joys of growing up, and the beauty that often grows in the places we least expect. Special events will be offered before and after specific performances, such as family matinees with crafts, pre-show LGBTQ Night Out reception, discussions with dramaturgs, and more.

Address

700 North Calvert Street | Baltimore, Maryland 21202

Carl “EUGI” Hall at Fine Art Series

October 30th, 2015 at 08:00 PM | Event Website

Art Soiree Presents: Living Room Live Series at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

On October 30th a solo exhibition of Assorted Music Art by Carl “Eugi” Hall, fusing the worlds of art and music into one through the sound of color. Whether he is capturing a female singer pouring her heart into the microphone or a trombonist with inflated cheeks creating flawless improvisational solo, Eugi’s canvases sing with color and emotion, inviting each viewer to hear what they see.

Event is FREE must RSVP

Address

Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Georgetown; 3100 South St NW

Opening Reception of ‘Speciesism’ at P Street Gallerie

October 30th, 2015 at 06:00 PM | Tel: 202-333-4868 | Event Website

Join P Street Gallerie on Friday, October 30th from 6 – 8 p.m. for the Opening Reception of Dana Ellyn’s latest exhibition: Speciesism.

The collection features a series of Ellyn’s paintings exploring humans’ complicated and often contradictory relationship with animals. Ellyn is the artist behind some of the most popular and thought provoking paintings related to animal rights and veganism.

The exhibit runs from Friday, October 30th through Friday, December 4th.

Address

Street Gallerie; 3235 P Street NW

SPY FRIGHT

October 31st, 2015 at 11:00 AM | FREE | info@spymuseum.org | Tel: 2023937798 | Event Website

Go deep undercover this Halloween at the Spy Museum where spooks of every kind will be on the prowl. Spend the scariest night of the year at the place where disguises aren’t just for Halloween! Acclaimed professional make-up and disguise artist, Roger Riggle, will be on hand to teach the tools-of-the-trade. The Spy Store is chock full of fun and unusual Halloween Disguises including: moustaches, glasses, hats, tees & more!

Address

International Spy Museum; 800 F Street, NW

SoulCycle Georgetown Opening Party

October 31st, 2015 at 09:00 AM | Event Website

Get pumped: SoulCycle Georgetown opens its doors this Saturday and all are invited! Stop by for an all-day party from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. with dancing, DJs, a photo booth and Georgetown Cupcake treats to reward yourself post-ride!

Address

SoulCycle Georgetown; 1042 Wisconsin Avenue NW

Nick’s Annual Halloween Party

October 31st, 2015 at 09:00 PM | 10 | Tel: (202) 342-3535 | Event Website

Eat, drink, and be scary at Nick’s Riverside Grill’s Annual Halloween Party on Saturday, October 31 at 9 p.m.

$10 cash cover at the door. Best Dressed costume contest. Contest sign up at 9 p.m.

Address

Nick’s Riverside Grill; 3050 K St NW

Lululemon Athletica Shopping Event

November 1st, 2015 at 08:00 AM | Tel: (202) 333-1738 | Event Website

Elevate your style! Ground your wallet.
one day only at lululemon athletica Georgetown. This one time shopping event will be held this Sunday. Doors open at 8 AM.

Address

lululemon athletica; 3265 M St NW

Volta Park Day

November 1st, 2015 at 03:00 PM | friends@voltapark.org | Event Website

Fall is here, and what better way to celebrate that fact than enjoying some good times with your neighbors while supporting a vital neighborhood resource? Volta Park Day returns November 4th from 3-6 p.m. As always, there’ll be rides, games, drinks and plenty of food to enjoy. All proceeds go to Friends of Volta Park which supports the beautification and improvement of Volta Park

The traditional East v. West softball game will take place at 2 p.m. before the party starts.

Address

Volta Park; 34th St. and Volta Place NW

Sunday Sketch with Barbara Sharp

November 1st, 2015 at 02:00 PM | Tel: (540) 687-6542 | Event Website

Each month a local art teacher or artist leads a sketching session in the art galleries, guiding participants on style, composition, or another aspect of drawing. This month, Barbara Sharp will lead the session. The program is free and open to the public of all ages. Participants will receive free admission to the Museum. Pre-registration is encouraged. Children under 10 must be accompanied by an adult. Supplies provided.

Address

National Sporting Library & Museum; 102 The Plains Road; Middleburg, VA 20117

Sparkling Holiday Champagne Tasting

November 3rd, 2015 at 06:00 PM | $59 + tax & gratuity | iricchi@aol.com | Tel: 202-835-0459 | Event Website

Taste 4 Nicolas Feuillatte champagnes (all 90 points or above) including GOLD MEDAL WINNER Palmes d’Or 2002 with food pairings at a sit-down guided tasting.

Join brand ambassador, Isabelle Bricout and learn how to drink champagne with almost everything this holiday season.

In just 35 years, Nicolas Feuillatte and his brand have climbed through the ranks to the roster of the champagne greats.

Free Valet Parking.

Address

Ristorante i Ricchi; 1220 19th Street NW

Robert Devaney • October 29, 2015

Around 1 p.m, Monday, Oct. 26, a man walked into the TD Bank at 1611 Wisconsin Ave. NW and presented a note to the teller asking for money. The bank employee complied and gave him a bag of cash. The man then left the bank and opened the bag on the sidewalk near the bank, according to eyewitnesses. Ink packs in the bag —known as “funny money” — exploded, and the man ran off.

The suspect is described by the Metropolitan Police Department as a 45-year-old bald black male, who was wearing a red shirt and black baggy pants.

MPD tweeted around 2 p.m.: “Robbery of an establishment 1600 blk of Wisconsin Ave NW. lof: b/m, 45 yoa, bald, wearing red shirt, blk baggy pants.”

Police cordoned off the area around the bank, which has a parking lot and is just north of the Georgetown Exxon.

One observer at a business across Wisconsin Avenue from the bank quipped, “We’re looking for the man with purple ink.”

Robert Devaney •

Neighbors, old and new, came together at Rose Park in Georgetown Oct. 24 to dedicate its tennis courts to two black women who used it as young girls and as tennis stars, Margaret Peters and Roumania Peters Walker. The two-hour gathering of about 200 people for the unveiling of the Peters plaque was a unique and sentimental remembrance as well as affirmation of Georgetown’s African American roots. The Peters sisters grew up during a time of segregation — yet transcended it in achievement and love of their neighborhood.

The sisters won the doubles crown of the American Tennis Association for 15 years during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Roumania Peters once bested Althea Gibson, America’s first black tennis star, and Margaret Peters played tennis with movie star Gene Kelly at Rose Park, which seemed to belong to the sisters as well as the neighborhood children, but is operated by D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Nicknamed “Pete and Repeat,” who lived at 2710 O St. NW, the dynamic duo now have supporters for their induction into the tennis hall of fame.

Among the new neighbors was Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, and his wife Susan DiMarco, who live across from the courts at 27th and O Streets NW. Among the old neighbors — those who grew up with Peters Sisters — was Daisy Peebles, who has lived her entire life in Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood —along with the mother of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who grew up nearby, played in Rose Park and was baptized at Epiphany Catholic Church on Dumbarton Street.

David Dunning, president of Friends of Rose Park, led the ceremony and introduced a long line of speakers, all of whom together told a still-continuing story of black Georgetown. Dunning acknowledged the group’s board member David Abrams and Topher Matthews, one of the first to advocate the naming of the park’s tennis courts for the Peter Sisters.

Advisory neighborhood commissioner Monica Roache, who is a fifth generation Georgetowner, was also active in getting the courts named for the Peters sisters, who taught her tennis. She remembered their tennis accomplishments and said to them and to those black Georgetowners in attendance, “Welcome home.”

Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who set up the re-naming legislation for the District government, was unable to attend because of a parents’s weekend for one of the his college-age children. At-large Councilmembers Anita Bonds and Vincent Orange were on hand to speak.

Rev. Adam Park, pastor of Epiphany Catholic Church, began with a prayer affirming the dignity of each person.

Fannie Walker Weeks and James Walker, the children of Roumania Peter Walker, spoke of their mother and aunt and how they began “to beat the boys” at the tennis courts — which used to be clay — and how they would feel “appreciated and overwhelmed today.”

Mayor Bowser took note of her family’s connection to Georgetown and also that not many streets, building or tennis courts are named after women —something she’d like to change. She saluted the Peters sisters and “this shining tennis court.”

Homeland Secretary Johnson described how he met Bowser’s mother in the White House during the visit of Pope Francis and mentioned the upcoming dedication of the tennis courts. Responding to a request for her daughter, the mayor, to attend, she succinctly responded to Johnson, “She will be there.” Johnson noted his dog uses the park, too. “Everybody knows Andy,” he said. “Andy has done more to fertilize . . . he loves to give back.” In a serious remark, Johnson said that the Walkers were married in nearby Epiphany and that Margaret Peters taught in D.C. public schools, such as Western High School, now Duke Ellington School for the Arts. The Johnson family donated the plaque.

Rose Park was one of the first integrated public parks in the city and now contains the first public tennis courts named for individuals.

Gary Tischler •

If you ever had the opportunity to sit within a couple of feet of Blaze Starr, the legendary queen of burlesque and long-time Baltimore legend, proprietor of the 2 O’Clock Club on a certain block of East Baltimore Street, you knew you were eye-to-eye with an American original.

Starr, who died Monday at her home in Wilsondale, West Virginia, was probably the last big star of what was loosely known as the world of burlesque, in which comedians told baggy-pants jokes, and young women with outsized personalities and physical attributes shed their clothes to thumping music and outrageous stage gimmicks.

Starr had the personality, and then some, and the attributes, and then some. But what she also had was a sense of humor, smarts, business acumen, a charitable streak and a propensity to get involved with major politicians, much to her own considerable pain, but also gain, in the sense of notoriety.

This from a girl who was born Fannie Belle Fleming, one of 11 children in a place that was so small that it wasn’t even a place, along Twelvepole Creek in Mingo County.

Fannie Belle ran away from home and ended up in Washington, D.C., working at the Mayflower Donut Shop. But soon enough, in spite of a lot of trepidation, she was lured into stripping for a living, and, given her genuine curvy beauty, was a major success.

Then, while working at the Sho-Bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, she met Louisiana Governor Earl Long, brother of former governor, then senator and assassination victim, Huey Long. Their affair, which lasted until his death in 1960, was chronicled in the 1989 Ron Shelton-directed movie “Blaze,” starring Lolita Davidovich as Starr and Paul Newman, no less, as Earl Long. The movie captured not only her dramatic life, but also American, and particularly Southern, attitudes about sex, sin, religion and, of course, politics.

Starr began stripping at the 2 O’Clock Club on Baltimore’s notorious “Block” in 1950, eventually buying the place and becoming a much-beloved citizen. The proof in the pudding is the mournful tone and praise in the Baltimore Sun obituary, in which Shelton, a former Baltimore mayor and another Baltimore iconoclast, John Waters, waxed nostalgic about Starr.

This writer, working on assignment for The Georgetowner, had occasion to interview her when she was still stripping in 1980 at the Silver Slipper in Washington, one of the last genuine burlesque houses in the city, famous as the joint where House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills met one Fanne Foxe, who worked there.

After watching Starr do her “Miss Spontaneous Combustion” act, in which a red bed exploded into smoke and fake flames while she writhed thereupon, we talked to her in her dressing room. Up close, Starr turned out to be funny, unassuming, a little flirty (like a guy running an engine to make sure it was still running properly), vivacious, smart and blunt. Her memoir, “Blaze Starr: My Life as Told to Huey Perry,” published in 1974, was still being peddled.

I told her about a 1950s rite of passage in small town America, in which I and some of my high school friends had gone to Cleveland to the Roxy Burlesque to see a show. We might even have seen her there. By present standards, this was tame but titillating stuff: baggy-pants comedian, popcorn and skin magazines, G-strings and pasties and a burning red spotlight.

“Aw, Honey, it’s gone you know,” she said. “The last time I was there, I walked in there and they had the big posters of me up there, bigger than life. Next day, they were gone and the wreckers came.”

She bemoaned the ongoing passing of her profession. “It’s the movies that’s doing it. If they’ve seen everything, they don’t want to see you peeling off a glove.”

One of her dates was Frank Rizzo, ex-mayor of Philadelphia. When we mentioned his name, she didn’t pull punches. “That S.O.B.,” she said then. He “had me thrown in jail, but he’d see me as long as nobody would see us. I never forget being treated like that. People told me I got a memory like an elephant.”

It was never serious stuff with her — “I couldn’t do it if it was” — it was a bit of a wink and a joke, with a lot of enthusiasm and energy.

“Up there, with the makeup and the lights and the dresses and wigs, that’s Blaze Starr. That’s an act. Inside, I know who I am. I’m Lora Fleming from Mingo County.

She was and remains a lot more than that.

And right now, somewhere, the big red light goes on and the drums are pounding and it’s: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Blaze Starr!”

Gary Tischler •

If you should happen to be in New York City the next two days, you might want to check out what’s happening at the United Nations. The intergovernmental organization is celebrating its 70th year in addition to United Nations Day on Oct. 24.

Tomorrow, the United Nations is celebrating UN Day with a concert performed at the iconic UN General Assembly Hall. It will be a special concert featuring the Korean Broadcasting System Traditional Orchestra and other renowned international artists.

On Saturday, there will be an unveiling of a major art installation in celebration of the organization’s 70th anniversary. The work, by artist Cristobal Gabarron, is called “Enlightened Universe,” and will make its debut in Central Park. It’s an interactive sculpture formed by a sphere and surrounded by a spiral of seventy figures—one for each of the United Nations’ seventy years.

Around the world, countries are celebrating UN Day by illuminating landmarks like the Sydney Opera House, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Empire State building with blue light.

The United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, 70 years ago, launching a remarkably enduring institution. In 1945, in the aftermath of the most disastrous war ever inflicted by mankind upon itself, the nation-states of the world, some of which lay in complete ruin, resolved to make the world a better place by preventing conflict, finding relief for millions of refugees, achieving fair dealings among states, providing disaster relief, among many other things.

In the end, it resolved to be strong and steadfast in its missions. These goals, given the background of the recent world war, seemed lofty and even unrealistic. They still often do. Many of the goals were achieved successfully, but many were often challenged but never undone by the rivalries inherent among super powers and smaller states. There was a recognition throughout its history that progress in the search for fairness and equality would always be done in the shadow of almost perpetual conflict somewhere on this earth, often addressed by the peace-keeping efforts of the United Nations, but never ended.

The UN Charter began with a pre-amble which is worth remembering—“we the peoples of the United Nations are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war..to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and the worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women of nations large and small..to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

The world, as Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, noted, is still full of strife, and more than full of major changes. “Today,” he said recently, “our world continues to be re-shaped by globalization, urbanization, migration, demographic shifts and other seismic trends. New Threats have emerged, from climate change to cyber-crime an pandemics.”

“In many respects, the world is shifting beneath our feet,” he said.

We have all seen the changes and turmoil every day, on our computer screens, tablets and iPhones, which are themselves powerful engines of change. We see the refugees, the implosion of Syria, the demonstrations, the riots and the acts of terror daily. We see disease, climate change, natural disasters, hunger and political instability. That’s why the world needs the UN.

In times like these, we like to believe that all the people working together all over the world can hold disaster at bay, find common solutions, gather together in harmony. As a sage rock-n-roller once sang: “Imagine all the people.”

Gary Tischler •

We’re all part of one sort of community or another, and when a community suffers a loss, we share in that loss. This month, the world of entertainment and performing arts lost two members of high achievement, one who was born and Washington and, with his father, co-produced the Kennedy Center Honors since 2003 and numerous film documentaries. The other was a legendary movie star from Hollywood’s Golden Age. The world of professional sports—locally and nationally—lost one of its most respected members, too.

This month we lost Michael Stevens, part of a major film-making family which included his father, George Stevens, Jr., a Georgetown resident. We lost Maureen O’Hara, 95, a bright, shining star in Hollywood’s golden age from the 1930s, when she came to the states as a teenaged Abbey Theatre actress, onward. This past week, we lost Flip Saunders, whose loss was deeply felt here where he coached the Washington Wizards for over two years and guided its budding superstar John Wall.

MICHAEL STEVENS, 48

The life of Michael Stevens seemed to be a story of fathers and sons and fathers and sons, twice over. He seemed destined to be in the film business one way or another. His grandfather was George Stevens, one of Hollywood’s great directors, whose work began in the silent era and progressed to such hits as “Gunga Din,” in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, winning two Oscars (for “Giant” and “A Place in the Sun”) and being nominated for “Shane.”

George Stevens Jr. followed in his fathers footstep although in his own way—as a young man he worked on many of his fathers films, then founded the American Film Institute, made a documentary about his father, and directed his own films, including “The Murder of Mary Phagan.” He produced the Kennedy Center Honors since its beginning, then co-produced with his son Michael until last year, when the relationship with the Kennedy Center ended.

Michael Murrow Stevens was born in Washington, where Stevens and his wife Elizabeth had made their home in Georgetown. He attended the Landon School in Bethesda and graduated from Duke University with a degree in English literature and political science.

While Michael ventured out on his own to work on films like “The Thin Red Line” in 1998 and two tough crime thrillers, “Bad City Blues” in 1999 and “Sin” in 2003, he worked steadily as a producer, often with his father. He shared five prime-time Emmys on the KC Honors shows aired by CBS. He also helped produce the AFI lifetime salutes to film stars over the years, and directed a number of “Christmas in Washington” variety shows.

Like his father and grandfather, he ventured into documentaries and directed, co-produced and co-wrote the celebrated 2013 documentary on the much beloved and honored Washington Post political cartoonist Herblock, called “Herblock: The Black and the White.” He also directed and co-produced the 2011 film version of his father’s play “Thurgood” on the life of Thurgood Marshall.

It seems on the bright surface of their lives that here were three men, connected by a life lived not on film, but in film, in the arts, on stages and sets, bonded by respect, talent and love, often sharing their gifts and working together in ways that few fathers and sons have the opportunity to do.

MAUREEN O’HARA, 95

They don’t make them like that anymore.

They don’t make movies like the ones Hollywood made in its own-self-acknowledged golden age and they sure as all-get-out don’t make movie stars like Maureen O’Hara, who was one of the shining lights of that era that roughly spanned the beginning of talkies in the 1930s during the Depression through the 1950s, when the major studios and their heads at last began to lose their grip on power.

For an avidly movie-hungry public trying to make it through a Depression and the tensions of a World War, the studios created clowns, comedy, spectacles, epics musicals, swashbucklers, adaptations of classics, kid movies, westerns, cops and robbers and movies dealing with serious social movies, plus a fantasy or two.

They gave them movie stars as opposed to mere celebrities, and in a densely populated firmament of stars, few female stars shined brighter than the O’Hara whose Irish-lass abundant red hair just about blotted out the sun. She was made for Technicolor, which was just beginning when O’Hara arrived from Ireland as a teenaged actress straight out of the Abbey Theatre. She proceeded to star in a black and white version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” opposite Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, hopelessly smitten with O’Hara as Esmerelda, the gypsy girl. With medieval Paris as a setting and O’Hara’s drop-dead beauty, the movie looked as if it were shot in color.

She proceeded to star in a number of grade A films, in the 1940s—“How Green Was My Valley,” set in a Welsh mining town and directed by John Ford, the anti-Nazi “This Land Is Mine,” again with Laughton and other Ford films, in which she was sometimes paired with John Wayne, the greatest man’s man star outside of Clark Gable. All the Irish got together in Ford’s irascibly Irish cliché and fantasy, “The Quiet Man,” in which O’Hara and Wayne were a battling—literally—couple—Barry Fitzgerald was a tipsy matchmaker, Victor McLaglen played O’Hara’s brother, Ward Bond played a priest, and Ireland played Ireland, only more so, with the countryside intensely green and her hair intensely red.

O’Hara also starred in numerous films in a genre of film hardly, if ever, made anymore: the swashbuckler—especially those involving pirates and musketeers, in which she resisted and dueled with swains played by Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Cornel Wilde. The lass could handle a sword and wear a corset properly.

O’Hara hadn’t made a film in quite a while—her last was in 1991 playing John Candy’s mother and courted by Anthony Quinn.
O’Hara died on October 24, at her home in Boise, Idaho. She lives on and on, incandescent, on Turner Classic Movies.

FLIP SAUNDERS, 60

Flip Saunders, who was coach of the Washington Wizards for a short time, made it to several playoffs with other teams including the Minnesota Timberwolves.

He never won an NBA championship. All he ever won was the respect, affection, love of the players he coached, his fellow professionals in the coaching world, and the world of hoops, and his family. He won a host of friends.

Not everybody—even title winners—can say that.

The basketball world responded yesterday and today with an outpouring of tributes from players, coaches and probably basketball scribes after it was learned that Saunders had lost his fight with Hodgkins Lymphona at the age of 60. He had been coaching in a return gig with the Timberwolves, where he was director of basketball operations.

Randy Whitman, the Wizards’ current coach, said, according to reports, that Saunders should be celebrated as a great man who was able to do much for the game he loved and the people and players he worked with. Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner, said that Saunders’ death had “left a gaping hole in the fabric of our league.” And John Wall, who was coached by Saunders when he began his career as a number one pick said that Saunders “taught me what it takes to be a good player and a better man.”

Robert Devaney •

Perhaps the most famous movie about Georgetown will be commemorated Oct. 30 by a special plaque at the so-called Exorcist Steps at 36th and M Streets. The steps down to M Street from Prospect Street figured in the climatic scene of the 1973 film “The Exorcist,” when the priest sacrificed himself for the girl possessed by the devil, leaping from a window in a Prospect Street home and tumbling down the steps to his death.

Andrew Huff is coordinating the event in collaboration with the D.C. Office of Motion Picture and Television Development, the Executive Office of the Mayor, the Dupont Festival and Councilmember Jack Evans, at whose office he worked. On hand at the event, he says, will be the film’s director William Friedkin for a meet and greet (4 p.m.; top of the steps). The plaque dedication ceremony (6 p.m.; bottom of the steps) and a screening of “The Exorcist” (7:30 p.m., Georgetown AMC) will follow.

In addition, after the plaque dedication ceremony, the Georgetown Business Association will hold its monthly networking reception, this time Halloween-themed, at Malmaison starting at 6:30 p.m.

Georgetowner • October 28, 2015

Following the dustup after announcing that one of Georgetown University’s two Jesuit residences, Mulledy Hall, will continue honoring former university president, Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J., current president John DeGioia charged a group of faculty, students and alumni with addressing the university’s slaveholding history. Mulledy infamously sold 272 slaves owned by the Society of Jesus in Maryland to plantations in Louisiana in order to maximize their value to the university, rather than free them as abolition expanded in the North.

“I have asked this working group to provide advice and recommendations to me on how best to acknowledge and recognize Georgetown’s historical relationship with the institution of slavery, examine and interpret the history of certain sites on our campus, to include Mulledy Hall, and convene events and opportunities for dialogue,” DeGioia wrote.