News & Politics

Georgetowner •

IN:

Bonobos Guideshop, a menswear business which originally started online, is coming to Cadys Alley. Customers can stop by and check out the shop, then order online to get the clothes in a few days. It is another example of cyberbusinesses — like Tuckernuck clothing — setting up a brick-and-mortar presence, to increase their consumer base. It already has other shops in Bethesda and New York.

Alex and Ani, a small jewelry shop at 3070 M St, is ready to open for holiday shoppers. Founded by Carolyn Rafaelian in 2004, the business is named for her two children. Offering necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings, the business is also distributes licensed products, such as those for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and Major League Baseball.

Amazon Andes, a shop at 1419 Wisconsin Ave., NW, is selling cashmere products from South America, we are told.

OUT:

Streets of Georgetown, a clothing store concept by the HMX Group which sells such iconic American suits as Kickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner Marx, will close next month because of the parent company?s Chapter 11 filing. Meanwhile, check out the store for some great discounts. The swanky men?s store at 1254 Wisconsin Ave., NW, has been open for little more than a year. (Its address is a former location of the Georgetowner offices in the 1980s.)

The Watergate Exxon — that expensive gas station at the corner of Watergate West at Virginia Avenue and Rock Creek Parkway — has closed temporarily. Owner of the property, D.C. gas czar Joe Mamo had disagreements with the former operator. The tony petrol stop will be renovated. As to paying top dollar for premium gas, we shall see if that returns, too.

Businesses post-notes:

Dixie Liquor employees, Sean and Court, were photographed by Georgetown University students at their place of business and then had their images blown up into masks for students at the Georgetown-Tennessee basketball game at the Verizon Center Nov. 30. As seen on TV, the Dixie Liquor employees endured the prank at what was considered a truly terrible game for the Hoyas — even coach John Thompson III said that it was the worst basketball game he had been a part of.

Alison Schafer •

It is the nooks and crannies. The sleuthing, the surprise at the bottom of a box, learning about the hands that touched the bowl, dusted the lamp, paid the bill. The ghosts at Tudor Place have plenty of stories to tell. Like every beloved old house, Tudor Place still retains the imprint of its people, the family who built it and lived in it for six generations.

At Tudor Place, the past is not only present, it vibrates. In the bottom of an old box, Tudor Place staff found, under layers of old papers, a big piece of wallpaper. The piece is, according to Tudor Place’s executive director Leslie Buhler, probably one of the largest samples of late 18th-century wallpaper in existence. It is finds like this that make an old house come alive — the tastes and foibles of the very real people who once inhabited it. “Because the house is so intimate,” Buhler says, “people really connect with it.”

But even in a town where only the very latest polling data is news, people still care about what came before the rattle of the Metro bus and the latest scandal. Leslie Buhler looks out her window at the Tudor Place gardens below. “We did a paint analysis of the front door, and it turns out it was verdigris. The house itself was a golden color. I think about riding on a horse down here from R Street . . . it would’ve really made a wow!”

It still makes a wow. Think of seeing it through the eyes of a first grader who’s never before left her neighborhood. The house’s size, the tall old trees, the history; the place is fantastic. One of Tudor Place’s most successful programs brings about 3,000 school kids a year from all over Washington to visit. They can try on colonial costumes and learn about the past. Some classes do performances and recitals out on its South Lawn at Q and 31st Streets.

Education is one of Tudor Place’s most important tasks, Buhler says. To bring people in, the old house offers everything from Girl Scout programs to birthday parties to lectures and crafts classes for adults. Once people come inside the front gate, the sense of another era is inescapable. And, as Buhler says, “because we’re in the nation’s capital, many people here and who visit are interested in history.”

Preservation, of the house and its grounds, of the objects and artifacts, is Tudor Place’s other major goal. There are more than 15,000 objects in Tudor Place’s collection, and all of them tell a story. Two years ago, Tudor Place threw a party to welcome home an old friend: a chest-on-chest that George Washington kept in his bedroom. In 1816, it moved to Tudor Place, and, after some wanderings, in 2010 it came home again. After repair work, it now lives in the upstairs hallway. Preserving those old vases, spoons and books, and their histories, is expensive. Even the old trees need expert attention. Tudor Place spends between $25,000 and $30,000 each year maintaining its trees.

Even the ground underneath those trees is worthy of preservation. Tudor Place’s old outbuildings lie underground, waiting to be uncovered. The remains of a smokehouse are on the grounds, and the remnants of a dairy are just north of the property. Intriguingly enough, Tudor Place’s archeologists have found no trace of a freestanding kitchen building.

“The hardest challenge is grabbing peoples’ attention and helping them understand why Tudor Place is important, and why they should help fund it,” Buhler says. Tudor Place’s annual budget is more than one million dollars. Buhler says it ought to be about $1.5 million annually to run smoothly and provide enough for upkeep and conservation. But, like almost all art institutions these days, Tudor Place scrambles for every dollar.

The staff must also convince potential donors and even potential visitors that it is a worthy place for attention even if George Washington didn’t sleep there. He didn’t — the house was built in 1816 by Martha Washington’s granddaughter and her husband. But the lives they and their children led, the people they knew, the things they ate, are of great interest even if no president ever darkened the sheets.

Tudor Place, 1644 31st St., N.W. — 202-965-0400 — TudorPlace.org [gallery ids="100500,118118,118117" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

August 13 will mark the ninth anniversary of the D.C. – C.O.P.S. Classic and will be hosted at Westfields Golf Club in Clifton, Va., to support the D.C. Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors.

This year’s tournament is dedicated to the memory of Metropolitan Police Department Reserve Sergeant Joseph Pozell. On May 14, 2005, Reserve Sergeant Pozell was struck by a vehicle while directing traffic at the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue and died from his injuries on May 17, 2005. Pozell had served in the Metropolitan Police Department for three years. He is survived by his wife Ella and son.

D.C. COPS Classic Golf Tournament was started in 2003 by Metropolitan Police Department Detective Joey Crespo. Detective Crespo started this tournament to raise money for the Washington DC Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors. The tournament has grown from 75 players to last year’s biggest event with 260 golfers. Detective Crespo has been joined by Metropolitan Police Department Officer Greg Alemian in 2006 and Detective Travis Barton in 2008. 100 percent of the proceeds from the D.C. COPS Classic are given to the Washington, D.C., Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors.

Gary Tischler •

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.