News & Politics

Caitlin White • November 3, 2011

Metro rail and bus riders can expect to see changes in terms of pricing for SmarTrip cards and paper fare cards over the next few months.

The transit agency plans to decrease the price of the SmarTrip card and increase the cost of a rail trip for users of paper fare cards in order to encourage riders to use the reusable plastic cards, the Washington Examiner reports.

SmarTrip cards will drop in price from $5 to $2.50 on Aug. 29, but Metro riders may want to consider all their fare options before purchasing one. Other changes to SmarTrip are expected in the fall.

Metro decided to reduce the SmarTrip card cost to decrease the burden on riders caused by the new fare increases, the Examiner said.

Metro initiated the first phase of fare hikes on June 27 and plans to further increase them later this summer. One such increase will be an extra 25-cent charge per rail trip for users of paper fare cards, beginning Aug. 1.

Bus riders who use cash instead of a SmarTrip card already pay a 20-cent differential. They also lose the transfer discount when switching from train to bus or bus to bus.

The transit agency will lose 90 cents on each SmarTrip card sale after the cost drops to $2.50, since it costs Metro $3.40 to make each card.

Donna Evers •

As you leave the Dupont Circle Metro station’s north exit, you will see words carved into the granite walls — lines from a poem by Walt Whitman, called “The Wound Dresser.” Since it’s hard to get the whole inscription when you are riding the escalator, here it is:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand;
I sit by the restless all the dark night — some are so young,
Some suffer so much — I recall the experience sweet and sad.

This was a subject Walt Whitman knew a lot about, since he served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. Already known as a journalist and poet, he first got involved after the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where he went to take care of his brother who had been wounded in battle. There he met another impressive volunteer nurse, Clara Barton, with whom he would cross paths again in Washington. When Whitman arrived in the District to help out as a medical volunteer, the city’s public buildings were turned into crowded way stations for wounded soldiers. There were not enough doctors, and no formal nursing profession, so the military had to rely on recruits and volunteers. Even with that, doctors could not deal with the types of wounds inflicted by the advanced bullets and weapons of the war. The quickest solution to treat an infected limb — and save the soldier’s life — was to amputate. Meanwhile, the wounded were crowded into any shelters available, waiting for the meager medical help to arrive.

One of the most haunting passages in Whitman’s journal about his experiences during the war was his account of the makeshift hospital at the Old Patent Office in Washington. This building, recently restored to its original grandeur and serving as the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art, made for a bizarre hospital ward. The maze of long narrow galleries was originally created to hold glass display cases, which held wood and metal models of inventions submitted for patents. Wounded soldiers, sometimes as many as 800, were laid on cots arranged alongside the glass cases, creating a path so inspectors and inventors could still get through the maze to view and judge the models, stepping over the soldiers as they moved along. This was one of many hospitals where Whitman volunteered during the war, bringing food, paper and pens for the men and sometimes just staying on so a wounded soldier would not have to die alone.

Out of these terrible experiences came some good. The war encouraged many advances in medical science. Volunteer nurse Clara Barton went on to found the American Red Cross, an organization that we rely in times of national emergencies and disasters. Meanwhile, Walt Whitman, who continued to write poetry, supported himself with a job at the Department of the Interior. Ironically, when Secretary of the Interior James Harlan discovered that Whitman was the author of “Leaves of Grass,” he fired him, citing the poems as “damaging to the morals of men.” By that time, though, Whitman was revered as a poet and supporters rallied to his cause, soon securing him another government job.
Whitman’s war experiences earned him the title “the good gray poet,” and his poems about the Civil War are forever burned into our collective memory. There are many, among them “O Captain! My Captain!”, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, of course, “The Wound Dresser.” And while his words carved on the subway’s wall describe the horrors of war, they also tell about human compassion, which will always be our saving grace.
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Donna Evers •

Washingtonians may be surprised to know that the first computers were invented right here in Georgetown, and if you go to 1054 31st Street (now Canal Square), you will find a plaque marking the place where Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company was located at the turn of the last century.

It all started when the federal government ran into problems taking the national census in 1880. The process took too long and was full of mistakes. So in 1886, the U.S. Census Office decided to hold a contest to see who could come up with a better system.

Herman Hollerith would have seemed an unlikely winner of such a contest when he was in grade school in Buffalo, NY. He had such a hard time in school that he used to hide from his teacher. His German immigrant parents took him out of school and got him a tutor, and this helped him realize his amazing potential. He entered college at the age of 15 and got a degree in mining engineering at the age of 19. Eventually, he got a doctorate from Columbia University, where he wrote his thesis about a very special invention of his, an electric tabulating machine. He got the idea from his girlfriend’s father, who told him about the French jacquard weaving machines which were set up with punch cards to automatically weave intricate repetitive patterns. Hollerith created his own punch card system of tabulation, and got a patent for the invention in 1889. When he entered the census office contest, his sample census took a fraction of the time of his nearest competitor. So instead of seven and a half years to do the U.S. census, Hollerith finished the initial count in six weeks, with the final tabulations completed in two and a half years. Better yet, he saved the government $5,000,000, which was a huge sum at that time.

In 1896, Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company. The first factory employed mostly women, who worked on their individual tabulators in a large open room. These women were called “computers,” because that was their job description. Hollerith’s business thrived, and his machines were sold to countries around the world for census taking. His fortunes grew, too, and he built a grand mansion in Georgetown at 1617 29th Street, overlooking the Potomac River. By the way, the home, which stayed in the family for 80 years, was on the market recently for $22,000,000.

While his magical machine was a big success, other innovators came up with similar inventions. He merged his company to diversify and broaden its hold on a diminishing market. When Herman retired in 1921, his successor, who happened to be a marketing ace, merged the company again and changed its name to International Business Machines. Yes, that’s IBM, otherwise known as Big Blue. And so, our own Herman Hollerith, the child who couldn’t spell in elementary school, went on to become the father of the modern computer, an invention that has made a revolutionary impact on the way we live and work.

Gary Tischler •

As February comes to a cold, long end, with it ends the annual celebration, commemoration and acknowledgement that we call Black History Month, celebrated and noted in an especially strong and defining way in Washington, D.C.

Events throughout the month noted one aspect of black history or another — Frederick Douglass’ birthday and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, because the two leaders are intertwined and wrapped up in the times of their time, the agony of the Civil War, the triumph of Emancipation. At Mount Vernon, there were commemorative services and wreath-layings for the slaves at the first president’s Virginia plantation.

The Smithsonian Black History Month Family Day Celebration will be held Feb. 27, rescheduled from an earlier day in the month and featuring the theme “Tapestry of Cultural Rhythms.” The idea of a black history month, first begun as far back as 1926 by historian Carter G. Woodson as “Negro History Week” before becoming what we know as Black History Month, remains strangely controversial. Some of this is, of course, due to the lingering feeling that the very existence of a black history month forces people to think about, and often actually talk about, race in America. In Washington, the longer you live here, the more the idea of Black History Month seems hardly novel at all, as natural as breathing. This city, in function, culture, politics, economics, identity and social structure, is so Sybil-like, schizoid, diverse, multi-faceted and multi-tasked that it resists a wholesale identity. It is the capital of the United States, politically and governmentally, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to an identity. The White House, Capitol Hill and Congress are hard-core presences of the city’s function. They are not its heart and soul.
That honor belongs to us: we the people that live here. If the city has a defining identity, in terms of history, the idea of black history has played itself out here from the beginning. How black and white residents have built, lived, worked, created a social and cultural environment here tells you an enormous amount about the history of race in America.

In this city, you don’t ask the question of whether there is a black history here, because you’re living it every day, and confront it, embrace it, see it in every neighborhood and ward of the city. One of the things you find, past the historic homes and buildings, past the large number of churches, many of them built from the ground up after emancipation by black pastors and ministers, is that black history is everybody’s history in this city, it is, as a young essay contest winner wrote, “American history.”

This is the city where in all the time of Jim Crow, local blacks, their number swollen by the great migration to northern cities in the first decades of the 20th century, created a thriving black community apart from all the places in the city where they could not shop, eat , hear music or go to school. Thus a large section of Washington, spurred by Howard University, had its own lawyers and doctors, its shops and shopkeepers and businesses, its culture.

While lots of major urban centers in America have large black populations, Washington is different because of its politics and structure. Until the 1970s, it had no self-rule of any sort, and even now has no voting rights in Congress. Its history of home rule is brief, only some 40 years or so.

Every street, and maybe every street corner, and certainly every neighborhood large and small, is a part of black history. Three of the major churches in Georgetown on or near P Street are reminders of a large black population that existed early in the century and thrived for decades before dispersing into the suburbs.

Walk the African Heritage Trail, a guide to the entire city’s heritage of black history, and you’ll discovery all of our history here, along with the rich contributions of African American civil rights leaders, educators, teachers, politicians, political leaders, athletes and artists. Memories of segregation and Jim Crow live in memory here.

In almost every ward and neighborhood of this city, you’ll find the strong presence of African American men and women who made history, who helped create institutions, movements and ideas that live on, who lived here, day in and day out, who created or were leaders in their communities.

Black history resounds in the homes, buildings, institutions and churches of Washington: at Howard University, at the Lincoln Theater and the True Reformer Building in Greater U Street, where Duke Ellington lived early in his life, at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum at the old Howard Theater, the Black Fashion Museum and the Whitelaw Hotel, at the Supreme Court where Thurgood Marshall became a towering figure.

You can find it at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, the first headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women, which Bethune founded, and which is still led by the indomitable civil rights leader Dorothy Height, who in turned founded the Black Family Reunions held annually on the Mall and across the country. It lives in the Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw, in the slave cemeteries in Georgetown, at the DAR Constitution Hall, where Marian Anderson was not allowed to sing by the DAR, and at the Lincoln Memorial. It’s in the Frederick Douglass National Historic City at 14th and W Streets SE, at Fort Stevens in Brightwood and at the Summer School Museum and Archives.

And all along the Heritage Trail, you’ll find the names and homes of familiar historic figures: Willis Richardson, Paul Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, Christian Fleetwood, Ernest Everett Just, Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, Alain Locke, Mary Jane Patterson Carter G. Woodson, Anthony Bowen, Benjamin Banneker, Howard Woodson, Lois Mailou Jones and many others.

The National Mall is where the Revered Martin Luther King gave his resounding “I Have a Dream” speech, which energized the entire country and fired up the imagination of generations to come. His assassination in 1968 sparked a full-scale war and deadly, destructive riots — known simply as “the riots” — the effects of which devastated the local economy for years to come. That too is black history.

All the changes — downtown development, the decline of black population, the rise of condoland, our loyalties to schools and sports — make up the common knowledge of living here. We all see this all of the time, yet, it’s fair to say, we — black and white — don’t know as much about each other and interact as much as we should, and certainly could. Race is an integral, if not integrated, part of this city, and black history is also a history of race in America. This is a city where, in one mayoral election consisting entirely of black candidates, one of them was designated by others as the “white candidate.” Major political, emotional and cultural discussions about crime and education inevitably have components of class and race to them.

But our city’s history is a shared one. It exists for all of us in memory, if we access it. It snows on everyone, on all the neighborhoods, even though some might fare better than others when it comes to snow removal. We are a string of connected neighborhoods, with a history that we all own and share. Whatever you might say about our transit system, it moves on tracks that criss-cross every part of the city and outside of it too.

All of us lead daily lives, and in this way, we are more closely connected to each other, like a family, than to any temporary residents in the White House, in Congress and on K Street.
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Gary Tischler •

“You’re going to see a lot of uniforms tonight,” a Kennedy Center rep told us before we joined the rest of the audience for “9/11: 10 Years Later, An Evening of Remembrance and Reflection” at the Concert Hall Thursday evening.

Indeed there were. The audience and the stage were resplendent with the presence of firemen, first responders and policemen from the area, as well as military personnel from all branches of the services. We all gathered for the grandest of music, the saddest of strings, plain and simple words from poets, the words of the men and women who wrote the stories to describe that history-changing, horrible and shocking day ten years ago.

Everyone—the dignitaries, three former Secretaries of State, the horn blower, the singers, the musicians and the attendant men and women in uniform, the flag bearers among them—were in a great company of ghosts that went beyond the 2,000 or so seats in the concerts. The ghosts were the losses of 9/11 and all their loved ones and Americans the country over who witnessed their destruction in one way or another.

If the occasion and the concert did not alleviate the pain of the memories, the music, words and company were salve for the soul, and the pomp—a full orchestra amid hanging, spectacular curtains and flags —certainly suited the circumstances.

Everyone wore some form black or gray, even actress Melissa Leo who recited two touching and plain-spoken poems, although she was all in satin and sparkles befitting an Oscar winner. Former Secretary of States Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice all read from news reports of the time. A trio of first responders recalled in halting and vivid words their own experiences in the midst of soot and calamity.

On the tenth anniversary, those things deserved and needed to be remembered. The Kennedy Center had put on two previous such concerts, one in the immediate aftermath to soothe a shocked nation, another a year later. The homegrown, superstar soprano Denyce Graves, who sang at the second concert, appeared again in regal style, singing an old spiritual, “City Called Heaven.”
The National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of John Mauceri, performed “Adagio for Strings,” the most stirring, powerfully sad funeral and grieving music of the day.

Emmylou Harris, her hair as white as prophet now, sang a work by Stephen Foster, the 19th Century’s musical pop poet of America, a work with the ironic (for an audience keenly aware that President Barack Obama had just given a jobs speech in hard times in front of a Joint Session of Congress only moments ago) title of “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

Then it was Leonard Cohen, another American songwriter-poet, whose “Hallelujah” could be called a triumphant lament, a song which got an impassioned workout by Raul Esperanza who went searching for every feverish emotion in the lyrics and found them, and perhaps a few more.

But it was jazz trumpeter and jazz icon Wynton Marsalis who struck a balance, remembering and looking ahead, then and now with a muted horn and trumpet. He walked on stage early in the proceedings, but it was the archangel like blast of the trumpet that you heard first, and he moved across the stage like a wounded older man, the trumpet emitting at times shrieking anguish before settling for calls to heaven and the community. Returning near evening’s end, the tone was jauntier, the trumpet fairly bounded with sounds that encouraged hopeful dancing, high-stepping, looking back a little, but insisting there was a dance to be danced and songs to be sung yet.

It was the tone that was perfect for now: honor the memory each and every one of the lost ones honor the bravery of that day that erupted spontaneously out of character, but look ahead, for these are times in need of a hopeful future.

Georgetowner •

Obituary by Gary Tischler, article by Zachariah Weaver and Kyle Lundberg

If there are a billion iPads in the world, then they all must have lit up Wednesday evening with the news, spread through social media wildfire, that Steve Jobs, the great guru of all things tech, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56.

They say that the news was not unexpected. Everyone knew that Steve Jobs, the man of Apple, the man of Pixar, the iFather, was dying for some time now. We knew it was a real possibility three months ago when Jobs, looking gaunt with his rich hair long gone, announced his resignation as CEO of Apple, the company he had co-founded, the company that had fired him, the company he had brought back from economic disaster.

Jobs had been suffering from pancreatic cancer and other diseases for years and yet, during the hardest, most difficult times of his illnesses, he threw out to the world like a painter dashing off masterpieces, the iPhone and the iPad, both revolutionary little computers that contained the world.

Expected or not, his death still came as a shock to the world of Apple, Windows, and Microsoft, which is full of people who had drunk deeply from Job’s vision. They weren’t just users, they were passionate adherents, and in that world, he was not just a rock star; he was Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones rolled into one. The Apple people carried the tools of a new world with a half-eaten logo on them, identifiers like a priest’s white collar. Not since Eve had words with Adam has an apple been so important in the world.

President Barack Obama placed Jobs among “the greatest American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder, and Jobs’ chief rival in terms of fame, money and impact, said that “The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.”

The playwright Mike Daisey, an admitted Mac fanatic and author of “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a conflicted and critical take on Jobs and his use of China labor, said “I think it is heartbreaking today. I think we’ll never know how much we have lost.”

There was a dark side to Jobs that is historical—the battles within the company, labor issues, his need to control, his fanatic attention to detail, the way some Jobs inventions tended to make previous versions obsolete to the point where they didn’t work. But in the 20th and 21st century, he was a lot like other American inventive geniuses—Edison, for instance, and Henry Ford, and probably Walt Disney, with all three blessed with brilliant marketing skills. They understood the American desire for stuff, for new things, for the shiny as well as the pragmatic and the creative. Jobs, with his creations, made us want things we didn’t know we needed.

But all other things aside, he was an artist and in public, Jobs, who helped create Pixar, something Disney might have been proud of, expressed himself in artistic, philosophic terms. He said he wanted “to marry technology with liberal arts and humanities to make our hearts sing.”

In the end, he had his own impending death covered: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Yesterday and today, flowers and shrines started popping up at Apple stores all over the country. In a political and economic atmosphere where CEO’s are not the most popular people in America, Jobs got this sign: “We love you Steve.”

Outside the Apple store in Georgetown, the mood is quiet, even reverent. Even the few media types, armed with their cameras and notepads, don’t seem much like talking. They act as if they are attending a funeral. In the corner of the front entrance, to the side of the wide, swinging double doors, lies a humble shrine dedicated to Steve Jobs. Jobs, who died yesterday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, leaves behind a legacy as one of the most influential people in human history.

Jobs almost single-handedly created the modern technological climate that we live in every day. As Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer once put it, he was a “once-in-a-century innovator.” Where would this generation be without their iPods, iPhones, and iPads, not to mention the internet? Some people might forget that Jobs’ computer firm, Next, created technology that was used to create the World Wide Web. And one would be remiss in remembering Jobs to forget his hand in the rise of successful computer-animation company Pixar who, under his leadership, was able to grow from a struggling company into an international media powerhouse.

But here, on the streets of Georgetown, the size of the shrine does little to match the stature of the man for whom it is built. Several ancient Macintosh Pro monitors line the makeshift monument, relics from another age, pulled from basements and attics and dusted off; their floppy drives a testament to how quickly the pace of technology marches on. There are a couple of flower bouquets, a few candles and, in the middle of it all, a bright green apple. On the silver back of an old iPod, a fan has written “Steve Jobs: RIP.” Most of the young people walking by the shop stop, just for a few moments, to take a picture of the humble little tribute with their iPhones. More than most people in history, Steve Jobs may have achieved true immortality.

Gary Tischler •

When you talk to the singer Madeleine Peyroux on the phone, her voice is low, soft, as if she were standing behind a curtain.

That seems like an apt thought—most of the things you learn about Peyroux (pronounced Peru) tend to always return home to words and music, music and words, the songs she sings, the influences, the words she writes.

Peyroux, who performed at the Music Center at Strathmore in September and has a new, highly-original album, “Standing on the Rooftop,” is hard to pigeon hole or categorize. When you tell her that, she seems pleased.

“I don’t think I’m ever any one thing, one sound, one kind of music. You evolve, you grow, you change, and you challenge yourself. At least I hope that’s what I do,” she said. Now in her thirties, the Georgia native made an early splash with her album, “Dreamland,” which was countered a few years later with “Careless Love,” a work full of contrary influences, adventuresome singing and songs you couldn’t get out of your head for the longest of times, including the title tune.

Most of the songs on that album were by others, including Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Gene Austin, Hank Williams, George Cory and William C. Handy. The album also carries a quote from poet Dylan Thomas,”but for the lovers, their arms around the griefs of the ages” and is dedicated to “poets, writers of these songs, memorable people of memorable times such as these, wherever you are.”

She’s variously described as a jazz singer, a hippie, a contemporary folk singer, a modern Billie Holliday. Inevitably, writers are left with the idea that she might not be any of these things or she’s all of these things.

“Style is not so easy to define,” she says. “When I was younger my mother and I moved to Paris, and it was very hard to adapt musically.” Peyroux started a group of her own, and often resorted to doing what’s called the “busker” scene, singers and musicians whom you can find on street corners all over Paris. Even the photographs of her in the “Careless Love” album have some of that restless, carnival quality to them, a mime’s striped slacks, derby hat, suspenders or vests, or in another, a big flowing gown, all of them have a troubadour quality to them.

Bob Dylan is a big influence with her—“You can’t help but be attracted to his work, his words, especially his song writing,” she said. “He is foremost a poet and that never changes.”

Listen to her singing, you can hear the blues, the after-hours voice, the sad epiphanies of loss and wandering, but it changes too. You know in there is a trumpet that hasn’t been exercised yet, a shout or two.

“That’s nice,” she says, then rattles off Cohen, the two Dylans (Bob and Thomas), Odetta and Bessie Smith and a host of others, including Charlie Chaplin as influences.

Her first bout of fame was with her street band, the Riverboat Shufflers, after which she joined (at age 16) a group called “The Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band,” and eventually she got an album in 1996 with Atlantic, no less, singing covers of Patsy Cline, Bessie Smith and Edith Piaf songs.

And then, (and now) she did something completely different: “Bare Bones” and the current “Standing on the Rooftop,” in which a goodly number of the songs have either been written solely by herself or in collaboration with others. “It was a leap but it was something I think I’ve been working towards, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

“The Kind You Can’t Afford” was co-written with Rolling Stoner Bill Wyman, “The Things I’ve Seen Today” and “Fickle Love” were written with Jenny Scheinman. Best of all is the fun, feisty “Don’t Pick a Fight with a Poet,” a lighter touch here, and perhaps most haunting is “Martha My Dear,” an old Beatles tune.

Peyroux is both a new self—daring in “Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love,” a sometimes quirky piece with difficult and original music by Marc Ribot based on a poem by W.H. Auden—with her own writing, and still in touch with her base—a Dylan (Bob) song called “I Threw It All Away.”

But she’s still just about impossible to classify.

She likes that.

But we’ll give it a shot.

She’s as close to a true poet as we have today in the music world. Her voice is a poet’s voice. And all the songs—hers and others—end up being poems that your memory will quote later as if by heart.

Georgetowner •

Dixie Liquor Beer Tasting

Dixie Liquor is hosting a tasting of New Belgium Beers on Friday and Saturday Oct. 7 and 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. Sample Fat Tire Amber Ale, perhaps one of the most anticipated beer arrivals in recent memory, Ranger IPA, Trippel, and Hoptober, a seaonal Octoberfest beer among others. For more information, visit www.dixieliquordc.com. Dixie Liquor is located at 3429 M Street, NW.

The Washington Harbour: Pet Adoption Event

The Georgetown office of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage is partnering with Operation Paws for Homes to host Pet Adoption day at the Washington Harbour outside the Coldwell Bander office Saturday, Oct. 8 from 12 to 4 p.m. Dogs of all ages and breeds will be brought out to find new homes. To see many of the dogs that are up for adoption, visit www.ophrescue.org and go to the “Adoptable Dogs” section, then request to meet it at the event. For more information, call 202-333-6100.

Downtown NY Film Series: screening of Downtown 81

On Oct. 9 at 4 p.m., the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design will be presenting a screening of Downtown 81 as part of The Downtown NY Film Series curated by local DJ Adrian Loving. The event is inspired by 30 Americans, which begins on October 1 and showcases works by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. For more information, visit www.corcoran.org 500 Seventeenth St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20006.

Harvest Celebration Weekend at Willowcroft

As the grape harvest comes to a close, the Harvest Celebration Weekend at Willowcroft is a two-day wine and dine event not to be missed. Tour the breathtaking vineyards and feast on local fare. Willowcroft Farm Vineyards will also feature complimentary wine tastings. The festivities will run Saturday, Oct. 8, and Sunday, Oct, 9 from 12 to 5 p.m. For more details, visit www.willowcroftwine.com. 38906 Mt Gilead Rd., Leesburg, Va., 20175.

Jeff Malet •

Acclaimed bassist, singer and composer Esperanza Spalding donated the dress she wore for her performance at the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for President Obama to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on Monday, October 17.

The donation continues the museum’s women in jazz initiative, which was launched in April as part of Jazz Appreciation Month. Spalding is widely acclaimed for her innovative blend of jazz, folk and world music with classical chamber music traditions, and was awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011 for her second album, Chamber Music Society. To earn the Grammy, she beat out an impressive field, including teen idol Justin Bieber.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Spalding studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass., where she went on to become one of the youngest professors in the history of the college at the age of 20.
After signing the official deed that transferred ownership of the dress to the museum, Spalding expressed her gratitude to be honored by the Smithsonian by citing her own favorite quote of Duke Ellington with the following words. “He said, ‘Tomorrow is waiting in the wings for you to sound her entrance fanfare.’ And when I hear you speak of all these individuals who were beyond category, I think of the people who were in touch with that reality, that the world is of their making. When I think of making the future, I think of the value of understanding the past. I’m just so grateful and honored to be a part now of the history that generations can continue to look to for inspiration.”

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