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Samantha Hungerford • July 26, 2011

Georgetown’s historic Evermay Estate, which was listed by Jeanne Livingston of Long and Foster, was sold this week with a final listing price of $25.9 million, making it the most expensive home sale in the D.C. area since 2007. Mark McFadden of Washington Fine Properties represented the buyers in this historic sell.

On July 8, the property held a very successful estate sale, auctioning off items such as linens, glasses and books.

Evermay has been on the market since 2008, when it was originally listed for $49 million, according to Washingtonian. Although the final listing price was $25.9 million, D.C. Urban Turf reports that its final sales price was $22 million. Washington Fine Properties cannot yet say who is the buyer of the Evermay Estate.

This will mark the first time the property is owned by a new family since 1923 when Evermay was sold to F. Lammot Belin, the heir of DuPont Chemical, who passed the estate down through three generations.

The home, which is included in the National Register of Historic Places, is 12,000 square feet sitting on 3.5 acres, and contains a ballroom, gardens, tennis court, gate house, parking for 100 cars and enough dining space for 40 dinner guests.

Under its last owner, Evermay was frequently used as an event facility. Mark McFadden of Washington Fine Properties was unable to comment about whether this service will continue under new ownership.

Gary Tischler •

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.

Samantha Hungerford •

NOW OPENED!

Georgetown will see the addition of a familiar newcomer to its home goods retail scene. West Elm, a contemporary furnishings chain, has opened its new location at 3333 M St. NW. It has been more than a year after closing its original branch in the Woodward & Lothrop Building in downtown D.C.

West Elm, a subsidiary of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., has opened a “pop-up” store in Georgetown with a seven-month lease to test the success of their new location. It seems that the area’s economic climate is ripe for such an endeavor following the success of nearby stores such as BoConcept, Contemporaria and Georgetown’s newest addition, CB2.

Abigail Jacobs, a company spokeswoman, told the Washington Post that West Elm has been looking into the Georgetown area for some time now because of the high number of Internet and catalogue sales the company has made there.

At 6,500 square feet, the new store will be tiny in comparison with its former location, which was at one time West Elm’s largest branch. “Different concept, different neighborhood,” Jacobs told the Post. “If you look at Georgetown and the size of stores there, this will be a perfect fit.”

Gary Tischler •

BETTY FORD

Most of the time First Ladies don’t get the credit they deserve. They may get the first in the designation, but history tends to judge them as second to their husbands, as if they were footnotes.

Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t a footnote. Mary Todd Lincoln wasn’t a footnote. Lady Bird Johnson wasn’t a footnote. Jacqueline Kennedy wasn’t footnote.

For sure, Betty Ford wasn’t a footnote.

Her death at 93, widow of Gerald Ford, the country’s only appointed president who died in 1996, reminds us of the idea of legacy, of her vivid personality, of her humane and human qualities. Ford, a high-ranking Republican, was picked by the embattled Richard Nixon, entangled in a Watergate scandal that would lead to his resignation, to become his vice president after Spiro Agnew left in his own scandal.

After all the Watergate turmoil, the Fords were like a breath of fresh air, real people, and solid as breakfast. Gerald Ford exuded normalcy and strength, Betty Ford seemed like a down-to-earth wife. Along with their son and daughter, they exuded a spirited confidence and a recognizable sort of family and mother who happened to now live in the White House, as opposed to a suburb, a town, a place like Alexandria where they had lived before.

Betty Ford had style, and she had substance, and she had her views and stances, and she talked about them, and she had her troubles, and she talked about those, too. She talked about her breast cancer, and later, after Ford lost the narrowest of elections to Jimmy Carter in 1976, she had a rough bout with alcohol, which she later opened about. Her honesty, her championing of treatment for alcoholism and addictions would result in the Betty Ford Center, one of the pioneering rehabilitation centers which are now so commonplace that the word rehab, sometimes linked to her name, often not, are a part of daily conversation.

She was no Jackie—although she had plenty of dazzle and style of her own as a point in fact. She had other things on her mind, since after all, she was quite a political asset to her husband who had a lengthy career in the House of Representatives going back to the 1940s. They complimented each other is what they did, and her obvious affection and enduring love for him added some allure to his persona. Ford, when he became vice president and then president, became something of an object of fun-making on the emergent Saturday Night Live where comedian Chevy Chase regularly lampooned his supposed clumsiness and his football days. He was the object of two failed and bungled assassination attempts by female would-be killers no less, one of them a former member of the Manson family.

Yet, the Fords persisted in the White House, allowed the nation to take a deep breath after the long nightmare of Watergate, and even survived Ford’s controversial pardon of Nixon. And here’s something that Betty Ford accomplished because when she talked people listened. She raised breast cancer awareness but more than that she spoke frankly, with grace and honesty about her family, about sex, about abortion and other rising issues of the time in a way that had not been heard from previous first ladies.

She did something else: the obvious bond between Ford and her husband made him larger. It made the jibes nothing more than they were – jokes which he laughed at himself – even though he might not have appreciated them that much. She had, after all, picked him, a classy, smart, elegant woman of intelligence and humor. All these qualities became her and were transferred to him and gave him grace so that in the end, after their bitter and narrow defeat, they endured as a presidential couple who shared a lasting love, and left the presidency better than the way they found it.

CY TWOMBLY

Cy Twombly, who died at the age of 82 recently, was what you could honestly call an important American artist, the kind of figure that the American art world periodically produces and certainly needs. He was also controversial in that if you entered a museum showing of his works you could get an argument started about the value and merit of his work without too much effort.

He wasn’t beyond category since people, writers, admirers and non-fans often tried to bag him into an ism: neo-expressionism, abstract expressionism, even pop-ism, if you will, and he was often compared to others: De Koonig, Pollock, etc., etc. etc. One critic who was not a fan lumped him into the dada camp. He was perhaps too much written and talked about in his times, not so much over-rated as rated over and over again to the point of distraction.

I’d say he was one of a kind, mysterious, paintings full of sharp, swirly lines, and in later days after he moved to Rome, full of words, too, scribbles that seemed to require some explanation, as if they were captions written not in this century but some other times.

To many he was a titan, to others in today’s parlance, not so much. The nice thing when it comes to Twombly was that he didn’t give a hoot what they were saying in New York. He was never a fad, but his work could be maddening and moving all at once.

A major retrospective at the National Gallery of Art a number of years ago proved to this writer to be alternatingly light and sometimes, quite often in fact, haunting. I think it’s as if the lines, the mind and Twombly’s vision turned way backward, the painter getting a whiff of thousand-year-old dust and grains of sand, dried blood, and ancient stories. I could have done without the words, and because of the haunting aspects, the lightness was sometimes unbearable.

Titan? Not for me to say. We can always look again, and then again, and that’s where we’ll find him, like a fragment from “The Iliad.”

Robert Devaney •

Before her official welcome to Washington today, President Barack Obama took German Chancellor Angela Merkel to 1789 Restaurant, where they dined alone, having salad and beef tenderloin but no dessert, at the second-floor Wickets Room, June 6.

Dan Harding, general manager of 1789 and the Tombs, said that the White House gave them short notice of the special visit, calling at 4 p.m. for a reservation. Dinners for the two leaders were prepared by sous chef Erwin Rhodas, not executive chef Daniel Giusti, who was off for the day, filming a Food Network show in New York, Harding said.

The presidential motorcade rocketed along Prospect Street just after 7 p.m., as neighbors found nearby intersections closed by the Secret Service and the Metropolitan Police Department. Countersniper team moved atop Georgetown University’s Walsh Building across the street from 1789 and the Tombs, and police dogs checked the sidewalks. A crowd gathered at 36th & Prospect with phones and cameras and waited for the president to depart.

Meanwhile, patrons continued to enter 1789 and the Tombs and were wanded by the Secret Service. Georgetown University students Saum Ayria and Chris Scribner, dining at the Tombs at the same time as the president, enjoyed the surprise. “What a Washington, D.C., experience — the president just upstairs.” Scribner said. As Obama and Merkel left around 9:15 p.m., Jennyfer Sellem, a lawyer from Paris interning at the French Embassy, snapped a shot of the leaders inside the limo as it raced back to the White House. “What happened yesterday evening has added to my amazing experience here,” she said.

The big state dinner for Germany is tonight at the White House. [gallery ids="99930,99931,99932,99933,99934" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Sitting in a white bowl on the front desk of the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center, a pile of Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples were waiting to be picked up by passers-by. After listening to a lecture on complimentary and alternative medicine, the colorful fruit was an extra reminder to guests that an apple a day truly does keep the doctor away.

The latest conversation in the “Doctors Speak Out” series revolved around a growing trend in the medical industry. Three leading experts from Georgetown University discussed the integration of traditional western medicine with alternative, holistic approaches to health.

“We need to keep an open mind [to alternative medicine] and say okay, we don’t know how this works yet but we know that it’s working,” said Dr. Ladan Eshkevari, assistant professor of anesthesia at Georgetown School of Nursing and Health Studies. She noted that doctors don’t know why some traditional medicine such as Tylenol works either, yet it’s a trusted brand name.

Eshkevari, as well as her colleagues on the panel, stressed that complimentary and alternative medicine, also known as CAM, is a viable supplement to traditional practices and should be more thoroughly integrated into modern western health care. A key point reiterated during the panel was the importance of eating a nutritious, balanced diet.

“People need to consume food, not pills,” said Dr. Leena Hilakivi-Clarke, professor of oncology. Her statement was supported by Dr. Thomas G. Sherman, associate professor of pharmacology and physiology, who added that fruit lowers your blood pressure just as well as antihypertensive medication which doctors so often prescribe.

While the panel fully advocated CAMs, they also pointed out that the holistic medicine industry lacks the funding, research and regulation that traditional modern medicine frequently receives. Audience and panel members alike raised concerns that this lack of regulations could lead to the widespread use of either ineffective or harmful medicines.

Eshkevari reminded the audience of the Hollywood scandal following Jeremy Piven, the Entourage actor, who contracted mercury poisoning after consuming too much fish and unregulated supplements on a raw food diet. She continued to emphasize the fact that it is important to know exactly what is in foods and medications to ensure the safety of the public.

Sherman discussed how regulation is key in ensuring that the label matches the pill. Although some would say that the bureaucratic systems necessary for regulation might distance the holistic medicine from the consumer, he assured that it wouldn’t bog down the industry. In other words, it wouldn’t take a prescription to participate in a yoga class.

The panel also maintained that it is important for people to use holistic medicine to treat the source of the condition, not just the symptoms as traditional medicine typically does. “People who take multivitamins aren’t healthy only because they take multivitamins, but because they’re the kind of people who think to take them,” Sherman commented when discussing that holistic medications are not quick-fix pills. Supplements, healthy eating and daily activities such as yoga and meditation are long-term practices that affect the brain and the body which, in total, supports a healthy lifestyle.

The three professors agreed that young students of medicine are receiving an education that integrates CAMs and traditional medicine more than ever before. And more importantly, they are open to practicing and prescribing it to others.

“I predict that [in the future] the emphasis is going to be on the whole body. If you come in with a headache, I don’t just come up with something that treats the pain in your head, I come up with an explanation for why you’re having pain in your head and treat that,” Sherman said. “Don’t just treat the symptoms like they do now but treat the internal cause.”

Marilyn Lane, a petit woman overpowered by her dramatic glasses sat in the back of the room at the conference. While she is not a doctor, she chooses holistic medicine because of the results she sees from personal use. She turned to acupuncture to manage her chronic pain, does yoga multiple times a week, and meditates every morning and evening. She said simply with a smile and a shrug, “It works!” [gallery ids="99935,99936" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

“Innocent Spouse- A Memoir”
—
May 22nd, 5-7PM

You’re invited to an evening with Carol Ross Joynt on the publication of her new book, “Innocent Spouse- A Memoir” Enjoy a reading, discussion/Q&A and a meeting with the author and have your booked signed! Music and Refreshments will provided. All proceeds from the sale and signing will benefit the new Georgetown Public Library under the direction of the D.C. Public Library Foundation. There is no charge for this event but seating is limited. To R.S.V.P call Anna 202 727 4943
Black Hall
At Potomac and O Streets in Georgetown
(Adjacent to St. John’s Church)

Venus in Fur
—
May 25th, 2011 at 08:00 PM

A comedy-drama that explores the complex relationship between sex and power. Reality and fantasy, strength and weakness, pleasure and pain all blend together in one of the smartest and funniest plays in recent years.

The Milton Theatre
1501 14th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005

National Sporting Library & Museum Book Fair
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May 28th, 2011 at 10:00 AM

Saturday, May 28, 2011, 10 am – 5 pm, the Library will host the NSLM Book Fair. Six authors are scheduled to talk for 20 minutes then sign books, beginning at 11:00. The authors are: Rita Mae Brown, Kate Chenery Tweedy and Leeanne Ladin, Tim Rice, Bill Woods, and Norman Fine. Booksellers will be on hand and the authors’ books will be available for purchase. Check www.nsl.org for details in early May.

The National Sporting Library and Museum
102 The Plains Road
P.O. Box 1335
Middleburg, Virginia 20118-1335
Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday 1 p.m. to 4 p.m

Free Memorial Day Weekend Events at the Navy Memorial
—
May 30th, 2011 at 10:00 AM | Free and open to the public

Memorial Day Weekend Events featuring Rolling Thunder, a performance by the Rock Band Fourmanchu, commemorative wreathlayings and a traditional Navajo dance
Address

United States Navy Memorial
Naval Heritage Center
701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20004

Nico Dodd •

After seemingly perpetual delays and endless speculation, it can officially (hopefully) be said: Serendipity 3 will finally be opening its doors next week, according to a press release from the New York City eatery. Its location, on the corner of M St. and Wisconsin Ave., has had its windows boarded up since Nathan’s closed in July 2009.

In addition to Serendipity 3’s patently whimsical décor, the restaurant will feature an 8-foot+ Abe Lincoln statue and a clock from the historic Galt & Bros Jewelers.

The menu, which includes the famous Frrrozen Hot Chocolate and Foot-Long Hot Dog, will also offer dishes exclusive to the District, such as the President’s Lobster Pasta, Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes, Pan Seared Virginia Striped Bass and the Red Velvet Sundae.

Temperatures are predicted to go back into the 80s next week. We can hardly wait to see one of these sundaes in action.