Garden Tour: Just the Ticket to See Neighbors, Friends and Get Inspired
• May 10, 2012

The 84th Georgetown Garden Tour, held Saturday May 5, showed off eight gardens along with side and back yards of varying scale, cresting at the Allbrittons’ Bowie-Sevier House on Q Street. All eight home gardens were on the east side of town, as some observers noted, due to the O and P Streets reconstruction on the west side.

Anna Fuhrman’s P Street back garden, with its clever use of a small space, surprised and delighted visitors, while the mansion on Q Street is large enough to impress as well as include a garden entrance on P Street. Three homes adjacent to each other on 28th Street contain details to show off their own personalities: Boyden Gray’s old-school Georgetown feel; the Wests’ almost exclusive, energetic use of white flowers and plants; a Hugh Jacobsen addition to the Hodges house that leads to a soothing and cozy patio and garden. The Pillsburys’ sculptures from Bali complete a contemplative green space on O Street.

At Christ Church, the Georgetown Garden Club greeted those on the tour, sold items for gardeners, young and old, and had people lined up for its afternoon tea. As sponsor of the tour, the non-profit Georgetown Garden Club stated: “All proceeds from the tour are returned to Georgetown, to its parks, recreation facilities and green spaces and beautiful trees. We dedicate our efforts to a vibrant, clean environment that can be enjoyed by all who stroll the streets of our village.”

[gallery ids="100789,124146,124140,124133,124126,124160,124120,124164,124113,124170,124105,124175,124153" nav="thumbs"]

Meeting at UDC Tonight on Wisconsin Avenue Work in Glover Park
•

In response to concerns about the construction work in Glover Park along Wisconsin Avenue, Ward 3 council member Mary Cheh and Terry Bellamy, director of D.C.’s Department of Transportation, will meet with residents in Window’s Lounge at the University of the District of Columbia from 7 to 8:30 p.m., 4200 Connecticut Ave., N.W.

Among other upper northwest D.C. items to be discussed, DDOT will address the Glover Park construction on Wisconsin Avenue. The projects widens sidewalks, includes a median and turn lanes and a reduction in traffic lanes.

Residents and Georgetown’s advisory neighborhood commission contend that there is additional traffic on side streets because of Wisconsin Avenue back-ups and want a traffic study on the problem.

DDOT disagree and wrote: “The original Glover Park Transportation Study did basic modeling of future traffic conditions with the recommended improvements and did not identify any critical problems. For this reason we do not believe it necessary to halt the construction project for further study. As DDOT began construction on the Wisconsin Avenue Streetscape project, we have done some spot traffic and speed counts at Tunlaw and 37th Street. This will provide another data point in addition to the baseline data used in the planning study, and we will continue to monitor conditions both during and after construction.”

To improve information about schedules and other questions, DDOT created a website for the job: WisconsinAvenueProject.com.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo at the Washington Monument (photos)
•

On May 5, “everyone is Latino”, was the slogan of this year’s National Cinco de Mayo Festival held at the base of the Washington Monument. Cinco de Mayo is a time to commemorate the Battle of Puebla against Frech colonizers, in 1862, an important event in Mexico’s history. The free, family festival, in this 20th annual edition, was organized by the Maru Montero Dance Company and featured dance performances, live music, delicious Latin food and a Mexican market. The festival celebrated not just Mexican Americans but all Latinos in our country.

View our photos by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100787,123861,123870,123878,123887,123895,123903,123911,123920,123928,123936,123945,123855,123845,123982,123974,123785,123968,123797,123961,123804,123813,123821,123829,123837,123953" nav="thumbs"]

International Children’s Festival (photos)
•

The International Children’s Festival is an interactive, educational event that allows children of all ages to travel the world in a single day. This year’s 6th annual edition was held at the The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Sunday May 6, 2012.
The Festival is hosted by Meridian International Center and THIS for Diplomats, in partnership with Cultural Tourism DC and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.

View our photos of the event by clicking on the photo icons below.

[gallery ids="100788,124021,124029,124037,124047,124055,124064,124073,124081,124013,124005,124114,123969,124108,123978,124103,123987,124097,123996,124089" nav="thumbs"]

Facebook Initiative Encourages Organ Donation
•

Inspired by events such as last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which left countless Japanese citizens in need of unavailable medical attention, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to mobilize organ donator registration among company’s community of 900 odd million users.

Facebook is partnering with Donate Life America, a national umbrella organization for local groups working to increase the number of registered organ, eye and tissue donors, adding a new and human depth to the social network’s role in “keeping people connected.” In its announcement last Tuesday, the social networking behemoth said that it will allow its members to share their donor status with friends and family and to link to state databases where people in the United States can register online to officially become donors. And the results have already been staggering.

“It’s absolutely critical at this time when online communication and social media are really the way people are communicating,” said Julia Rivera, director of communications for the New York Organ Donor Network.

“This is great news,” agrees John Green, community relations director for the Gift of Life Donr Program, based in Philadelphia. “It has the potential to be one of the biggest campaigns to increase donor designation that we’ve ever seen.”

According to Donate Life America, Nearly 114,000 men, women and children are currently waiting for a lifesaving transplant, while thousands more are in need of tissue or corneal transplants to resume normal lives or restore sight. Meanwhile, less than 50% of adults in the US have signed up to be an organ donor through their state registry.

The hope is that Facebook’s initiative will bring out the conversation around organ donation and propel it into the realm of social media trends—a far and noble cry from your standard Facebook memes (God knows, I think we’ve all had enough of “FML” and “Texts from Last Night.”)

“We’re hoping people will be excited about the initiative and it will prompt them to take the next step and register to be a donor,” said Aisha Huertas Michel, who works with Donate Life America.

Sure enough, last Tuesday, the first day of the initiative, organ donation registries in 10 states reported as many new volunteer donors as they typically see in one month. According to Donate Life America’s stats, California alone witnessed a 700 percent increase over the number of new volunteers on a typical day.

By Tuesday evening, 100,000 people had declared themselves organ donors on their Facebook profiles, a critical step, physicians said, in speeding the organ donation process because it lets families know their relatives’ wishes.

Among those 100,000 users, 10,000 had linked through Facebook to sign up directly with their state organ donation registries.

Surgeons and transplant advocates have heralded the program, calling the initiative a “game changer.”

In an interview on Good Morning America on Tuesday, Zuckerberg also cited his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who is studying to become a pediatrician, in inspiring the initiative. “Our dinner conversations are often about Facebook and kids, and the kids that she’s meeting,” he said. “She’ll see them getting sicker, then, all of a sudden, an organ becomes available, and she comes home and her face is all lit up because someone’s life is going to be better because of this.”

Dr. Jeffrey Punch, director of transplant surgery at the University of Michigan, was also complimentary of Facebook’s efforts, though not without emphasizing the severe need for organ donors in the real world, not just online. “This is a huge step forward,” he said. “But nothing is going to solve donation problem overnight.”

USA Science & Engineering Festival Inspires Kids (photos)
•

What was billed as the largest celebration of science in the US, the 2nd USA Science and Engineering Festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on April 28-29 featured over 3000 interractive exhibits and 100 stage shows. Funded with money raised by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Larry Bock, a free admission was a factor in attracting an estimated crowd of over 300,000 The goal was to excite students in the US about science and technology to better enable this nation to compete internationally.

View our photographs of the event by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100773,123608,123616,123625,123633,123641,123649,123657,123665,123673,123598,123592,123584,123708,123702,123534,123696,123690,123545,123555,123565,123575,123682" nav="thumbs"]

Weekend Roundup May 3,2012
• May 7, 2012

The Virginia Gold Cup Celebrates 87 Years

May 5th, 2012 at 10:00 AM | $85 for a car pass (up to 6 passengers) | Event Website

One of the nation’s largest steeplechase races where 50,000 people will gather to see the finest horses in the world compete over the lush green course. Features six hurdle and timber horse races, Jack Russel Terrier races, tent, tailgate and hat contects and 30 vender booths for shopping

Address

Great Meadow

5089 Old Tavern Road

The Plains, VA

African Wildlife Ambassadors: Cheetah Day

May 5th, 2012 at 11:00 AM | Free | zoonj@si.edu | Tel: 202-633-3455 | Event Website

Join the African Wildlife Ambassadors as they celebrate the fastest land animal on the planet—the cheetah—with a day of fun-filled, family-friendly activities. See special animal demos and keeper talks; touch and feel cheetah objects; get a temporary tattoo; take your picture with a life-size cheetah plush or cardboard cutout; learn how cheetahs communicate and leave a message for the cats on the Scent Tree; guess the weight of the animals at the Cheetah Conservation Station and win a prize.

Address

Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park,

3001 Connecticut Ave NW,

Washington DC, 20008

Meet Author Gregory Jordan

May 5th, 2012 at 01:00 PM | jwilliams@ipgbook.com | Tel: 312.337.0747

Meet author Gregory Jordan at a book signing that he will conduct at Politics and Prose for his new book: Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home.

About the book:
In 1980, Willie Mays Aikens became the first Major League Baseball player to hit two home runs in one game twice in a World Series and was tabbed by many as the “next Reggie Jackson.” But Aikens drove himself out of baseball and into one of the longest prison sentences ever given to a professional athlete.

Address

Politics and Prose

5015 Connecticut Ave. NW

Washington, DC 20016

Eileen Fisher Styling Event at The Phoenix

May 5th, 2012 at 10:00 AM | 202.338.4404 | Event Website

Enjoy a gift with your Eileen Fisher purchase & giveaways throughout the day! 10% of Eileen Fisher purchase of 4250 or more will be donated to Fair Chance.

Address

The Phoenix

1514 Wisconsin Ave. NW Georgetown

Washington DC 20007

The National Cinco de Mayo Festival

May 5th, 2012 at 12:00 PM | Event Website

The Maru Montero Dance Company and LULAC are celebrating 20 years of hosting the festival with a free concert by Luis Enrique, health screenings, healthy food demonstrations with celebrity chefs and important health information

Address

Sylvan Theatre on the National Mall

Will on the Hill, 10th anniversary of Political Satire

May 7th, 2012 at 07:30 PM | $50 | WillontheHill@ShakespeareTheatre.org | Tel: (202) 547-3230

About the play: Director and his stage manager must coral a group of Washington luminaries into giving a benefit performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in a short time and with an inexperienced cast .. but all turns out well in the end.

Address

Shakespeare Theatre Company

516 8th St SE

No Extending Liquor-serving hours, but yes to Sunday Store Sales
• May 4, 2012

There’s an old operetta song that basically encourages and celebrates the joy of drinking.

It’s called “Drink, Drink, Drink.”
Maybe on Sunday. But to all hours of the morning? Really?

Mayor Vincent Gray, always in search of surplus revenue, has proposed extending operating hours for bars and restaurants from two to three a.m. in the morning on weeknights, and from three to four a.m. on Friday and Saturday, easily the busiest drink, drink, drink nights of the week.

There is also a proposal that liquor stores in the District of Columbia be allowed to operate on Sundays, as they are currently in Virginia and Maryland.

To the first, we say: seriously?

To the second, we say, okay, why not, what’s good for Maryland and Virginia shouldn’t be that bad for the District of Columbia.

But more opportunities to be further inebriated into the early morning hours–is that a good idea? For Georgetown–where the restaurant and bar activity is high profile, as well as for such areas as downtown DC, Logan Circle on P Street, 14th and U, Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle, that just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

All of these neighborhoods feature a bar and restaurant scene that doesn’t always align smoothly with its residential areas. Muggings and thefts, especially at closing time, are often a feature and consequence of that scene, when customers make their way to their cars, or in the case of Georgetown University students, to their dormitories or apartments.

It hardly makes sense to us because extending hours also extends opportunities for mischief and crime and further disturbs the peace of the residential areas. The potential human costs of such an extension, it seems to us, offsets whatever increase in the coffers of restaurants and the District’s tax revenues.

The Water Street Project Kicks Off This Week
• May 3, 2012

The Water Street Project Space is a temporary art gallery located at 3401 Water Street N.W. in Georgetown that will run from April 19 to April 29 showcasing their newest creative concept by No Kings Collective and plans to be a premier cultural anchor displaying 15 featured artists. The exhibition will be open to the public daily from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The project will also host nightly events and musical acts including a few highlighted below:

Thursday, Apr. 19: PechaKucha Night- A networking event for young designers to meet and show their work in public from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. in a fast paced format to present concisely and rapidly.

Friday, Apr. 20: The Water Street Grand Opening- Free and open to the public, this night will showcase the artists, the core collaborators of the project.

Saturday, Apr. 21: Listen Local First- a local music initiative promoting local musicians and venues, will present acts from artists Les Rhinoceros, Shark Week, Akshan and Silver Liners. These concerts are free and open to the public.

Thursday, Apr. 26: The WW Club will celebrate menswear, featuring a whiskey tasting and burlesque performances.

Please visit thewaterstproject.com for more information and a full list of events.

3 Lives at Their Height in the 1970s Tell Our Contemporary Story
•

Deaths are like the things that happen in haunted houses, events when you hear of them that immediately bring back memories, stir up ironies and create flickering images or music that’s stayed in your head for decades.

At least that’s the case for three recent passings: Charles W. Colson, one of the more lively characters during the Watergate scandal, considered a deft dirty trickster who went on to jail and redemption as a born-again Christian; Jonathan Frid, the fine actor who couldn’t escape his role as vampire Barnabas Collins on the day-time soap opera, “Dark Shadows”; and Levon Helm, the heart and beat of The Band, arguably one of the best American rock bands ever.

CHARLES W. ‘CHUCK’ COLSON

Bob Woodward, who should know, once said the Nixon tapes were a gift that keep on giving. If the tapes are a gift, then Watergate itself was a kind of national curse that keeps rising out of the water like “Swamp Thing.” It remains one of those events–an event that ended in the only resignation of a sitting American president–that has so many dizzying side streets and layers that end up in fog-filled dead ends that it defies clarity. It’s a scandal that seems equal parts comedy and tragedy.

Colson — an owlish, stocky, genial sort was known as Nixon’s hatchet man, which may or may not be a fair judgement — had a lot more to him than the dirty tricks, although he did compile Nixon’s enemies list. He was also considered a sharp (and real) political strategist, who created Nixon’s image as a champion of the conservative working class. Colson died after a brain hemmorage at the age of 80 this month. By that time, in his mind and post-Watergate history, he was no longer Chuck Colson, hatchet man, but a born-again Christian and evangelical who had to some degree redeemed himself by founding a world prison fellowship ministry.

Press stories focused on both things, but always led with his participation in Watergate which led to his going to prison. In some ways, everyone touched by Watergate — from President Richard Nixon and Elliot Richardson to Gerald Ford — had Watergate as a lodestone in their obituary.

In the end, Watergate perhaps needs a Shakespeare. It has a Thomas Mallon, who in his very recent novel, “Watergate,” makes a fiction out of the men and women and events of the scandal, in such a way, that it becomes more real than the known facts.

Colson doesn’t figure strongly as a character in “Watergate,” but he gets talked about a lot by the characters who struggle to escape the aftershocks of every turn and twist of the scandal. Instead, Mallon, who has a gift for historical fiction — he wrote “Henry and Clara,” a moving imagining of the after-assassination life of the couple who sat in Lincoln’s box to see “Our American Cousin” — has create a fictional Watergate, one in which Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the reigning doyen of D.C. at the time and the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, tosses acerbic barbs at the likes of Joseph Alsop, Richardson and other Georgetown residents of the time, and in which Rosemary Woods and Pat Nixon share vivid and sympathetic center stage with Nixon, Fred LaRue and E. Howard Hunt.

These Nixons, Hunts and La Rues have thoughts and memories, and conversations which are all invented and imagined and thoroughly authentic. The death of Colson makes you think of the book, which makes you think of the haunted house that is Watergate, minus one less resident.

JONATHAN FRID, 87

The death of Jonathan Frid at the age of 87 happened just as trailers and ads for the huge Tim Burton-Johnny Depp movie version of “Dark Shadows” are appearing in theaters and on television, an act of serendipity that is every bit as haunting as the cobwebbed professional life of Frid.

Frid was the resurrected vampire Barnabas, a chilling, if a little schtick-like vampire revived after a 200-year-hiatus, still mourning the death of a lost love as only vampires can. Frid became a star and a kind of cult figure with his portrayal of Barnabas, gaining a kind of Star Trek-like status and after-life at “Dark Shadows” conventions and the like. But he also never escaped the cape of Barnabas into a major television or movie career. Barnabas, for Frid, it turned out was indeed deathless, like Superman was for George Reeves.

His last role was, along with other “Dark Shadows” actors, a cameo in the new “Dark Shadows.”

LEVON HELM, 71

Levon Helm was a dynamo drummer, had bearded-skinny-hippie looks, and a gravelly, gritty voice which resonated with acoustic Americana feelings.

He was in The Band.

Long after the iconic and uber-American rock band dissolved, Helm was still playing, recording, singing, to great acclaim and honors and in some ways turned out to be the Band’s most productive and enduring member. Americana indeed: Helm was still winning Grammy Awards nearly to his dying days with “Dirt Farmer,” which won a Grammy in 2007 for Best Traditional Folk Album, and “Electric Dirt,” which won the first-ever Grammy for Best Americana Album in 2009.

The music from those albums seemed resonant of the legendary Band’s high-water mark successes, first as a backup group for Bob Dylan, and then on its own, a sheer icon of excellence, all between 1968 and 1976, eight years of glory.

The Band was: Garth Hudson, on organ, Robbie Robertson, guitar; Rick Danko, bass, Richard Manuel, piano and Levon Helm, drums.

They performed “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Weight.”

Their songs are ageless. So was Helm, one of the survivors. He kept right on playing, his voice turning into a rasp.